Roseanne loses her sitcom after a racist tweet, Kim Kardashian heads to the White House, and we discuss the biggest news story nobody's talking about. Today's episode of The Ben Shapiro Show is hosted by Ben Shapiro, and it's all about Roseanne Barr's racist tweet and how it cost her a job and her sitcom the number one sitcom on the airwaves, Roseanne Roseanne is a crazy person, but that doesn't mean she was never an ally of conservative causes, and that doesn t mean she wasn't crazy when she was hired by ABC to do a job they knew was risky. And that's why it's so important to have a plan in place to deal with people like Roseanne, who are prone to do crazy things, especially when it comes to politics and other controversial matters. Ben Shapiro explains why you should have at least some of your finances in gold because of volatility in the market, because of the government's tendency toward inflation when things get tough, and because the stock market moving up and down yesterday, well, it's never more volatile than zero! That means that if you invest in precious metals, you are guaranteeing at least a percentage of your income against the vicissitudes of the market and government interventionism, and you are never more safe! If you haven't yet gone and bought tickets to our upcoming events in Dallas and Phoenix, go to Dailywire.com/Dailywire Events to get your tickets now! go to go to dailywire.charts.co/eventbranch/TheBenShapiroShow and get a discount code: BONUSES to get 20% off your first-day shipping on your first order purchase when you book your tickets starting next week! Click here to receive 20% OFF your first month only discount when you buy your first day of $20 or more than $50, and get an ad-free VIP rate when you get a VIP membership when you shop at Dailywire? Subscribe to the Dailywire Eventbrite.COM/theBen Shapiro Show? Get all the latest updates on the show! and more! Learn more about Ben Shapiro's upcoming events: Connect with Ben Shapiro on his new book: Ben Shapiro: Ben Shapiro s Unfiltered: Unleashamed! Subscribe To Ben Shapiro Unveils His Unrivaled? Subscribe & Subscribe to his Unclearly Unsavory? Subscribe to Uncovering the Truth About It All?
00:00:00.000Roseanne loses her sitcom after a racist tweet, Kim Kardashian heads to the White House, and we discuss the biggest news story nobody's talking about.
00:00:22.000Go to dailywire.com slash events to check it out before I jump into the news.
00:00:26.000And plenty of news there is, as always.
00:00:28.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Birchgold.
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00:02:13.000She's been a crazy person for a long time.
00:02:15.000And just because she's a crazy person who happens to like Trump a lot more than some other crazy people, that does not mean that she was ever an ally of conservatives.
00:02:22.000Well, she demonstrated why it is bad to embrace volatile celebrities who happen to be crazy just yesterday when she decided it would be a great idea to start tweeting about Valerie Jarrett in the most insane possible way.
00:02:32.000So here is what she tweeted about Valerie Jarrett.
00:02:34.000Valerie Jarrett, of course, was the kind of unsung chief of staff to Barack Obama.
00:03:00.000You shouldn't be calling black people apes.
00:03:01.000I mean, I thought there's basically one rule in the media that you cannot violate if you wish to survive.
00:03:06.000And Roseanne Barr took that landmine and jumped on it with both feet.
00:03:09.000And then just in case it didn't go off, she jumped on it again with both feet.
00:03:12.000So she says she compares Valerie Jarrett to an ape, which is just disgusting and horrifying, especially given the long history in this country of comparing black people to apes, which is just awful and horrifying in every possible way.
00:04:11.000And frankly, from my perspective, a little bit good riddance.
00:04:14.000I understand a lot of conservatives were very happy that Roseanne's show did not treat Trump supporters as evil, nasty, terrible people.
00:04:21.000The problem is that what Roseanne did just allowed the left to treat all Trump supporters as evil, nasty, terrible people.
00:04:25.000Well, Chris Hayes, for example, over on MSNBC, he tweeted this out, this 15.
00:04:30.000He tweeted out, quote, Now, he has no basis for saying this.
00:04:40.000He has no basis for saying that a significant chunk of President Trump's base thinks that black people are apes or that Valerie Jarrett is a mashup of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes.
00:05:15.000So you got Chris Hayes, right, who's the guy sitting right there who just said that Trump's base supports this kind of stuff.
00:05:22.000And then next to him you have Joy Reid.
00:05:23.000Okay, Joy Reid is a person who just a couple of weeks ago nearly lost her job because it turns out that she'd written a bunch of posts that were deemed homophobic and offensive and anti-semitic and all this stuff, and she claimed that she didn't write them, and then she claimed that she had amnesia, and she claimed that she was hacked.
00:05:41.000OK, and Joy Reid is still sitting on the set now talking about the stuff that Roseanne tweeted.
00:05:44.000So just to be straight here, Roseanne tweets something, loses her job.
00:05:47.000Joy Reid tweets stuff that's really gross, not only maintains her job, but gets to sit on set with Valerie Jarrett discussing the evils of Twitter racism.
00:05:55.000And then sitting next to Valerie Jarrett on the other side,
00:05:58.000Is Al Sharpton, Al Sharpton, the leading race baiter of the last 40 years in the United States, a man who suggested that Jews in New York City were white interlopers, a guy who suggested that they were diamond merchants, a guy who nearly initiated a riot, maybe initiated a riot in Crown Heights in 1991 that ended in the death of an Orthodox Jew.
00:06:15.000He said about Orthodox Jews, there's an Orthodox Jew who accidentally hit a black kid with his car.
00:06:19.000And Al Sharpton said, if they want to fight, why don't they pin on their yarmulkes and come on over to my house?
00:06:43.000The media, to refrain from pointing out the double standard when Joy Reid, who tweeted out a bunch of other gross stuff, and Al Sharpton, who is one of the worst race baiters in the history of the United States, at least in modern American history, to have those two people commenting on it with Valerie Jarrett, who was targeted by Roseanne, but also happened to be a member of an administration that was very happy to polarize along the basis of race, it provides a little bit of irony, sitting there alongside Chris Hayes, who says that all Trump supporters are basically Roseanne.
00:07:18.000I'm worried about all the people out there who don't have a circle of friends and followers who come right to their defense.
00:07:24.000The person who's walking down the street, minding their own business, and they see somebody cling to their purse, or want to cross the street.
00:07:30.000Or every black parent I know who has a boy who has to sit down and have a conversation.
00:07:40.000Examples of racism that happen every single day.
00:07:43.000Okay, so now we get this routine where everybody is Roseanne, where America is replete with Roseannes, where people in their back room are tweeting out crazy stuff like Roseanne.
00:07:52.000Roseanne tweeted out that she was on Ambien and that's why she tweeted this out, which prompted Ambien, in pretty hilarious fashion, to tweet back,
00:08:17.000She lost a multi-million dollar job as the top sitcom performer in the United States.
00:08:22.000And Valerie Jarrett is saying this somehow impugns the entire United States.
00:08:26.000Somehow this is everyday racism in America.
00:08:28.000It's not everyday racism in America because if it were everyday racism in America, Roseanne wouldn't have lost her job.
00:08:33.000I'm kind of getting sick of this routine where we smear the entire American public and all Trump supporters with the brush of Roseanne Barr.
00:09:10.000That's part of the problem, is that you have a certain set of people who feel that you should be able to speak this way.
00:09:14.000And unfortunately, you know, we have a president at the moment who's kind of giving a broad sense of permission to not be politically correct, to speak the way you want, to offend who you want, and that people really shouldn't have a right to say anything about it.
00:09:32.000OK, then the number of conservative commentators who said Roseanne should have kept her job, it was relegated to like Jack Posabiak and maybe like Ali, like a couple of guys who are really fringe and aren't considered mainstream right figures in any case.
00:09:43.000But they're treating it as though the entire right came out swarming in defense of Roseanne Barr.
00:09:51.000But the entire left did come out swarming for Joy Reid, right?
00:09:54.000So if you're going to tar one movement with the actions of a bad person, you might want to tar the movement with the person they actually defend.
00:10:01.000So if you want to say that Trump's base is willing to defend his excesses, that I agree with.
00:10:05.000But if you want to say that Trump's base is willing to defend Roseanne Barr, I don't see Trump's base defending Roseanne Barr today.
00:10:10.000And the same thing is not true of Joy Reid.
00:10:12.000The entire left base came out in defense of Joy Reid.
00:10:14.000Very few of them wanted Joy Reid to lose her job.
00:10:16.000The same thing is true of Louis Farrakhan, of Linda Sarsour, of a bunch of people, Keith Ellison, who have associated with the worst kinds, Al Sharpton, you know, terrible, terrible people who have been defended repeatedly by the left.
00:10:27.000Roseanne Barr lost her job after less than, like, four hours after this tweet came out.
00:10:32.000So don't tell me the entire right-wing base is supporting Roseanne Barr.
00:10:36.000And Trump isn't even supporting Roseanne Barr.
00:10:39.000So Al Sharpton, again, the idea the media is going to try Al Sharpton as some sort of great race relations expert is just beyond, it's beyond sickening.
00:10:46.000Here is Al Sharpton louding the Roseanne cancellation.
00:10:50.000Roseanne has the right to be a supporter of whatever politics she wants.
00:10:55.000But to take this kind of obvious racial rhetoric to compare a learned, respected public service like Valerie Jarrett to an ape, reminds us of all of the history of blacks being called monkeys.
00:11:11.000And I think that Disney and ABC did the right thing.
00:11:15.000And I think they've opened the door now to see other things that they're doing.
00:11:19.000OK, so there you are, Al Sharpton, leading race baiter of our time, commenting on Roseanne, also apparently a race baiter.
00:11:27.000So it does show you the double standard in the media.
00:11:30.000In just a second, I want to talk about Van Jones's response to all of this.
00:11:33.000Plus, I want to lay out some guidelines, I think, for when firing is appropriate in situations like this.
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00:13:01.000Van Jones, too, was sounding off on the Roseanne situation, and he is blaming President Trump for it, obviously, because President Trump—it's amazing.
00:13:09.000Everybody seems to think that the universe revolves around President Trump, so Roseanne does something bad, and suddenly it has to do with President Trump.
00:13:16.000I'm not sure what Roseanne has to do with Trump, other than Roseanne was a Trump supporter, but Harvey Weinstein was a Hillary Clinton supporter, and I'm not sure why—if
00:13:24.000You know, if Hillary were president right now, I do not think you'd see a lot of headlines about Hillary supporter Harvey Weinstein goes on and, you know, is tried for rape.
00:13:32.000I just don't think that would be the headline.
00:13:43.000I talked about how Trump's portrayal of Trump supporters was not helpful to Trump supporters and that when you tether your boat to crazy people, bad things happen.
00:13:51.000As I said about Kanye West, listen, I'm happy Kanye wants to do the open your mind thing.
00:13:55.000But live by the Kanye, die by the Kanye.
00:13:57.000Live by the Roseanne, die by the Roseanne.
00:13:59.000Okay, but in any case, here's Van Jones trying to tie Trump to Roseanne as though Trump was somehow using Roseanne as his meat puppet, like he had his hand in the back of her head and was actually manipulating her mouth to call Valerie Jarrett an ape.
00:14:11.000It could be that this moral collapse inside of our political system, especially inside the White House,
00:14:19.000Is being counterbalanced now by people in mainstream media, mainstream corporations who say, listen, we don't want to live in a country where, you know, indecent people can be attacked for no reason.
00:14:33.000I agree it's not a joke and I agree it's not funny.
00:14:39.000To pretend that Donald Trump is the person who has laid our rhetoric low in American public life is to ignore a lot of American public rhetoric in the last 15 years.
00:14:47.000I mean, it was Joe Biden who in 2012 was going around saying that Mitt Romney legitimately wanted to put y'all back in chains.
00:14:54.000Who within the last 10 years was producing videos of Paul Ryan throwing old women off the edge of cliffs with their wheelchairs.
00:15:00.000So before we go to the Donald Trump destroyed American rhetoric, a sentiment with which I have some agreement, you do have to actually provide the context for that destruction of American rhetoric.
00:15:09.000And nobody, including Trump, was saying that this kind of stuff was OK.
00:15:14.000Trump was not saying that any of this stuff was okay.
00:15:16.000Roseanne Barr, by the way, went back on Twitter later in the evening and started tweeting out more random crazy stuff.
00:15:21.000Again, she blamed Ambien, and then she claims that she didn't know that Valerie Jarrett was black.
00:15:25.000She said she thought that Valerie Jarrett was white and Jewish, which makes no sense since she accused her of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:15:31.000All of which demonstrates that maybe Roseanne Barr is crazy, as I said, repeatedly, over and over.
00:15:41.000OK, so the reason I say that you should listen is because I'm going to tell you about another celebrity situation inside the Republican Party in just a second.
00:15:48.000But first, I want to talk a little bit about what should the standards be when people actually get fired?
00:16:33.000And I also think that the NFL has a right to defend its product.
00:16:36.000Well, this week, the Roseanne thing happened, and ABC immediately fired Roseanne, and half the people
00:16:41.000We're very angry at the NFL for barring people from kneeling.
00:16:44.000We're very happy with ABC for firing Roseanne.
00:16:47.000Now, obviously, kneeling for the anthem and calling a black person an ape are not the same thing.
00:16:51.000Kellen Kaepernick, I will point out, didn't only kneel for the anthem.
00:16:54.000He also wore socks that had cops depicted as pigs on them.
00:16:57.000So that wasn't exactly a wonderful thing.
00:17:00.000The broader point is one that needs to be made, and that is, when should we, the American public, be interested in the political pronouncements and racist pronouncements and gross pronouncements of public figures?
00:17:25.000About the government getting involved.
00:17:26.000We're not talking about when the government should crack down on speech.
00:17:28.000The answer is the government should never crack down on speech.
00:17:30.000The government should not be arresting Roseanne Barr for saying vile things.
00:17:33.000The question is, when can a company fire Roseanne, and when is it right to boycott Roseanne's show, for example?
00:17:39.000Or when is it right to boycott the NFL, and when can the NFL institute new rules about kneeling?
00:17:43.000And it seems to me that when the product is connected with the viewpoint, then it is appropriate to initiate a boycott, and it is also appropriate for a corporation to respond in kind to that boycott.
00:17:53.000So, with regard to the NFL, the product that they produced was a product that included the national anthem on TV.
00:18:03.000When I was at the Super Bowl last year, it was fully patriotic, and the video of the Blue Angels fly over the whole thing.
00:18:09.000So, if that is threatened, and people say, listen, I don't feel the same way about that product as I used to because the product itself has changed, that's not out of the realm of reality or decency.
00:18:19.000Boycotting the NFL because you don't like people kneeling for the anthem seems to me well within the bounds of normal public discourse.
00:18:25.000The same thing holds true for Roseanne.
00:18:32.000So, if Roseanne were playing a completely different character, I think you might even have a more dicey situation.
00:18:38.000So Matt Damon says a lot of really stupid things.
00:18:39.000I don't boycott Matt Damon's movies, because in Matt Damon's movies, Matt Damon is not playing Matt Damon.
00:18:43.000Matt Damon is playing whatever character he's playing on screen.
00:18:46.000So the product on screen has nothing to do with the stupid crap Matt Damon says off screen.
00:18:50.000Now, if there are people who can't make that connection, if there are people who
00:18:57.000That's reasonable, but I think that it's a little bit over the top.
00:19:04.000The thing about Roseanne is that Roseanne played Roseanne on TV.
00:19:06.000Her character was supposed to mirror Roseanne to a certain extent in real life.
00:19:09.000So for people to say, I don't want to watch a show with a lady who calls a black lady an ape,
00:19:14.000I think that's perfectly appropriate, and it's perfectly appropriate for ABC to crack down.
00:19:17.000Now, here's where it's not appropriate.
00:19:18.000It's not appropriate when you have somebody like Brendan Eich, who is the CEO of Mozilla Firefox, and Brendan Eich was essentially thrown out of his job because someone initiated a boycott because he had once supported traditional marriage.
00:19:30.000Because he had once supported traditional marriage.
00:19:32.000The reason that is inappropriate is because Mozilla Firefox never discriminated against gay people.
00:19:36.000Mozilla Firefox took no stance on same-sex marriage.
00:19:39.000Mozilla Firefox's product had nothing to do with same-sex marriage.
00:19:42.000So it's unreasonable to boycott Mozilla Firefox based on Brendan Eich's personal political beliefs.
00:19:48.000And it is inappropriate to boycott a church for their beliefs if those beliefs don't actually affect how they treat people.
00:19:55.000And it is inappropriate to boycott a restaurant for those reasons.
00:20:00.000Dan Cathy is the head of Chick-fil-A in favor of traditional marriage.
00:20:03.000The left launches massive boycotts against Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A, saying, we don't want to shop at that company because that guy doesn't agree with us on same-sex marriage.
00:20:11.000What does same-sex marriage have to do with a chicken burger?
00:20:16.000So in those cases, you're destroying the nature of free speech, the feeling of free speech in the country, when you make everything political.
00:20:22.000Making everything political is bad for the country, but pretending that everything is not political is just unrealistic.
00:20:28.000Roseanne did something that impacted the product she was providing.
00:22:05.000Then I assume that Bob Iger might have to call him.
00:22:08.000But if they were just saying they don't like Donald Trump, or he's an idiot, or he's stupid, or he's garbage, or whatever they were calling Donald Trump, like, that's just part of the public discourse, honestly.
00:22:15.000And again, I don't know what any of this has to do with Trump.
00:22:40.000Did he ever call Alicia Machado and apologize for basically calling her a fatty in the middle of a presidential campaign and suggesting that she had a sex tape?
00:22:52.000You gotta take it if you're gonna dish it out.
00:22:54.000Like, that's just my general feeling on that particular subject.
00:22:57.000So, I wanna talk in a second about a big summit at the White House, but first, I wanna say thanks to our sponsors over at Uncharted Supply Company.
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00:23:32.000So, Jess, at our office, she is a big camper.
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00:24:09.000Or you stick it in your trunk in case, God forbid, there's some sort of emergency situation and you just carry it around in there in case something goes wrong.
00:25:03.000I do know what it is with Republicans and celebrity.
00:25:05.000What it is with Republicans and celebrity is that Republicans are so often ripped on by celebrities, you know, out here in Los Angeles, in Hollywood.
00:25:13.000They spend so much of their day being ripped on by people out here that they get sad.
00:25:19.000And then when a celebrity comes forward and says, I'm with you, everybody gets super excited.
00:25:24.000Oh my gosh, that famous person's with me.
00:25:28.000Like when I was growing up, I remember that a big hero in the Jewish community, and still is, was Sandy Koufax.
00:25:34.000Now, Sandy Koufax is not a practicing Jew.
00:25:36.000Sandy Koufax is not somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about Judaism.
00:25:39.000Sandy Koufax, I believe, is intermarried.
00:25:41.000But Sandy Koufax one time took off the day of Yom Kippur in the World Series.
00:25:46.000And this was a big move because Sandy Koufax is a celebrity.
00:25:49.000People are very, very taken in by celebrity.
00:25:51.000The problem is, a lot of celebrities are celebrities for things that have nothing to do with politics.
00:25:55.000So Rosanna was a celebrity because she's a funny lady who was on a show in the 90s that was actually quite to the left.
00:26:01.000And the same thing is true for Kanye West.
00:26:03.000As I say, live by the Kanye, die by the Kanye.
00:26:05.000I'm very glad that Kanye is saying that people ought to think for themselves, but Kanye is also Kanye, and he is apt to say things from time to time that may not be politically the wisest.
00:26:14.000You tie yourself to a celebrity, Kid Rock, who knows nothing about politics, and you shouldn't be surprised when he burns you.
00:26:20.000Hey, Republicans tied themselves to a celebrity in Donald Trump, and most of the things that have burdened them about Donald Trump have come from him being a celebrity, not from him being the president.
00:26:29.000It's been him playing celebrity apprentice at the White House, or him during the campaign saying celebrity-like things, right?
00:26:34.000That's where most of the trouble for the Trump administration has come, not in his policy.
00:26:39.000Well, now Donald Trump and Jared Kushner and the White House, they're inviting over Kim Kardashian.
00:26:45.000Now, why they would invite Kim Kardashian, I suppose it's because, yay, we have a celebrity, and Kim Kardashian is close to Kanye West, and maybe if we recruit some celebrities, then a lot of people will be warmer toward us, and we're showing that we're reaching across the aisle, and all the rest.
00:27:02.000OK, let's just say that the risk factor on Kim Kardashian is not low.
00:27:06.000Kim Kardashian is not a low risk figure.
00:27:08.000She's not a person who you have to the White House and then you assume that she's going to be a grand spokesperson for your policies.
00:27:14.000Now, I understand Democrats could do this and get away with it because they could always hide one celebrity amidst the thousands of other celebrities they had.
00:27:20.000Democrats are not tied to particular celebrities in the same way that Republicans are.
00:27:23.000So Hillary Clinton was not tied to Harvey Weinstein in the same way that Donald Trump was sort of tied to Roseanne in this particular case, because Harvey Weinstein was one among thousands of Hollywood celebrities who supported Hillary Clinton.
00:27:34.000There are like five public celebrities who supported Donald Trump, and so Trump in the public eye is very tied to each of them.
00:27:41.000Well, now he's having Kim Kardashian to the White House, and he's having Kim Kardashian to the White House to discuss prison reform.
00:27:46.000Now, I am really Luke Cold on prison reform.
00:27:50.000I am not in love with a lot of the talk about prison reform, the reason being that it seems to me that the policy has not been clarified.
00:27:58.000In many cases, the prison reform they're talking about involves letting people out of prison too early, and the recidivism rate among those prisoners is like 75% over the course of the next five years.
00:28:07.000So, letting people out of prison so they can go back in prison seems not to make a lot of sense to me.
00:28:11.000Now, what people have said is, we're taking fewer people into American prisons and the crime rates aren't rising.
00:28:16.000Right, because we still have a lot of people in prison.
00:28:18.000But if you let more people out of prison, the crime rates rise.
00:28:20.000We've seen this in the state of California.
00:28:21.000In the state of California, Jerry Brown has let thousands of prisoners out of prison early on prison furloughs, and the crime rates have gone up relatively dramatically in most urban areas in the state of California over the last several years.
00:28:32.000Instead of building new prisons, he decided to release those people back to county level, and then those county level prisoners were released into the general public, and it's been quite a disaster.
00:28:41.000Well, now the White House is going to have Kim Kardashian over there to talk about prison reform, and apparently she is interested in pushing for the release
00:29:16.000And she's being treated as though she's a wronged innocent.
00:29:18.000If you look at the left-wing press today, a lot of it is all about how Alice Johnson is a wronged innocent who ought to be released from prison because now she's older and she's wiser and she's a sweet, nice old lady and we ought to let her out.
00:29:30.000Well, I mean, she was sentenced for a reason.
00:29:43.000CNN printed a piece from her in early May, and the editor's note said this.
00:29:47.000So that makes it sound like Alice Johnson was smoking dope in her backyard, and the police came in, and they arrested her, and then they gave her 20 years in prison.
00:30:01.000According to Alice Johnson, that is what happened.
00:30:03.000And according to Alice Johnson, she says,
00:30:25.000And then she's written some plays, and she's supposedly made herself into a better human being.
00:30:32.000And all of this, she says, I'll tell you the rest of Alice Johnson's tragic saga in just one moment.
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00:31:58.000So I'm going to tell you the rest of Alice Johnson's story and why it is that all the talk about her being released from prison seems a little bit
00:33:11.000We always have great news breaking over there.
00:33:13.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:33:20.000So to return to our story, as you recall, Kim Kardashian, the Trump administration, they are all pushing for Alice Johnson to be released from prison.
00:33:54.000I made the biggest mistake of my life to make ends meet and got involved with people selling drugs.
00:33:58.000This is a road I never dreamed of entering down.
00:34:00.000I became what is known as a telephone mule, passing messages between distributors and sellers.
00:34:04.000I participated in a drug conspiracy and I was wrong.
00:34:06.000Okay, so that makes it sound like she made some phone calls, right?
00:34:09.000If you just read that story, she made a few phone calls.
00:34:11.000If you read it, the left-wing press, then that's all that she did.
00:34:14.000Here is the actual AP story from when Alice Johnson was sentenced.
00:34:18.000OK, this is from 1997, quote, A 41-year-old Memphis woman was sentenced to life in prison for leading a multi-million dollar drug ring that dealt in tons of cocaine from 1991 to 1994.
00:34:30.000Alice Marie Johnson was, quote, the quintessential entrepreneur, said U.S.
00:34:34.000District Judge Julia Gibbons as she pronounced sentence on Friday.
00:34:37.000And clearly the impact of 2000 to 3000 kilograms of cocaine in this community is very significant.
00:34:43.000Johnson was tried last year on cocaine conspiracy and money laundering charges, along with Curtis McDonald and Jerleen McNeil.
00:34:48.000During the trial, evidence showed an operation with Texas-based Colombian drug dealers and their Memphis connections trading tons of cocaine for millions of dollars in cash.
00:34:57.000McDonald was sentenced earlier this month to life in prison for his part in the cocaine conspiracy and money laundering operation.
00:35:29.000I don't know why you would do it based on Kim Kardashian's recommendation.
00:35:32.000And I don't know why you would take celebrities seriously on these issues in the first place, since they're not experts on these issues in the first place.
00:35:38.000It irritated the living hell out of me when Barack Obama had George Clooney in to talk about Middle Eastern policy, and it drives me nuts when the Trump administration has Kim Kardashian in to discuss prison reform.
00:36:57.000All of these things can be true at once.
00:36:59.000Or he can be rich, and stupid, and ugly, right?
00:37:02.000Any combination of these factors is possible.
00:37:04.000But, because human beings tend to worship at the altar of fame, they say, okay, I see that guy, I know that person, that person must know what they're talking about, so Kim Kardashian must obviously know what she is talking about.
00:37:15.000Kim Kardashian, I don't know why you would think she knows what she is, what she's talking about.
00:37:20.000Meanwhile, while we're having summits at the White House,
00:37:23.000While we're having summits at the White House on prison reform, while we're spending time on prison reform at the White House with Kim Kardashian, and spending our time talking about the situation regarding Roseanne, it turns out that 5,000 people died in Puerto Rico.
00:37:48.000According to the Washington Post, Miliana Montañez cradled her mother's head as she lay dying on the floor of her bedroom here, gasping for air and pleading for help.
00:37:55.000There was nothing her family could do.
00:37:57.000It took 20 minutes to find cellular reception to make a 911 call.
00:38:00.000Inoperative traffic signals slowed down the ambulance struggling to reach their neighborhood through crippling congestion.
00:38:05.000More than eight months after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, the island's slow recovery has been marked by a persistent lack of water, a faltering power grid, and a lack of essential services, all imperiling the lives of many residents, especially the infirm and those in remote areas hardest hit in September.
00:38:20.000The New Harvest study, published on Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, estimates that at least 4,645 deaths can be linked to the hurricane and its immediate aftermath, making the storm far deadlier than previously thought.
00:38:32.000Official estimates have placed the number of dead at 64, a count that has drawn sharp criticism from experts, so they're only off by a factor of 70.
00:38:40.000The Harvard findings indicate that healthcare disruption for the elderly and the loss of basic utility services for the chronically ill had significant impacts, and the study criticized Puerto Rico's methods for counting the dead and its lack of transparency in sharing information as detrimental to planning for future natural disasters.
00:38:54.000The authors called for patients, communities, and doctors to develop contingency plans for such disasters.
00:39:00.000More people were killed by Hurricane Maria according to this Harvard study than were killed in 9-11 by a factor of about 50%.
00:39:08.000And yet nobody is talking about that today.
00:39:10.000We are all too busy talking about Kim Kardashian at the White House and the fact that Roseanne said something racist and mean to Valerie Jarrett.
00:39:15.000Maybe our priorities in this country are a little bit screwed up.
00:39:18.000Researchers in the mainland United States and Puerto Rico, led by scientists at the Harvard T.H.
00:39:22.000Chan School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, calculated the number of deaths by surveying almost 3,300 randomly chosen households across the island and comparing the estimated post-hurricane death rate to the mortality rate for the year before.
00:39:35.000Their surveys indicated the mortality rate was 14.3 deaths per 1,000 residents from September 20th through December 31st, 2017.
00:39:43.000A lot of people have died because the government has done a terrible job of restoring what they need to in Puerto Rico.
00:39:47.000And that is both the fault of the federal government and it is also the fault of the local government
00:40:05.000Okay, well I'm sure that they do, but...
00:40:21.000Again, our priorities in this country really need to change.
00:40:25.000Celebrity attracts us to the shiny bauble.
00:40:27.000And listen, we all like discussing the cultural issues because we can all have an opinion.
00:40:31.000But these are the areas where government really needs to be good at things.
00:40:33.000And government is just not good at these things.
00:40:35.000And it seems to me we should be spending an awful lot more time talking about bipartisan failures to help alleviate the problems in Puerto Rico than we should be talking about Kim Kardashian's priorities with regard to a woman who's been in jail for 20 years for trafficking in thousands of pounds of cocaine.
00:40:51.000Or Roseanne Barr's mean comments about Valerie Jarrett.
00:40:54.000Okay, so we just won't have a revived Roseanne sitcom next year.
00:40:57.000Seems to me like that's less important as a general matter than the number of people who died in Puerto Rico because of this hurricane.
00:41:02.000Okay, well, in just a second I want to talk a little bit
00:41:06.000This ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain
00:42:10.000There's this feeling in American politics right now that the longer you hold on, the better the chance that you're going to survive, right?
00:42:15.000Al Franken announced that he was going to resign and then he had to resign very quickly.
00:42:18.000If he had held on for a few more weeks, he'd probably still be in the United States Senate.
00:42:21.000Eric Greitens felt like if he somehow was able to hold on, then he would be able to retain his job despite all of the allegations that have been made against him.
00:42:30.000The charges against him are still pending and they may be refiled.
00:42:33.000All of which is to show there was a lot of talk in the aftermath of President Trump's election about the change in the mindset of the American people.
00:42:39.000That the American people were willing to go along with anything politicians were willing to do so long as those politicians gave them what they wanted.
00:43:16.000Now, here's the way that it works in politics.
00:43:18.000The more power you have, the more you are able to get away with.
00:43:21.000This is an unfortunate truth, again, about human nature.
00:43:24.000If you are a dog catcher, you can get away with nothing because we can easily replace you.
00:43:27.000We can easily replace you with something else.
00:43:29.000Well, the truth is that you can easily replace the president with the vice president, but in terms of his cultural impact, in terms of his appeal, in terms of the damage that he can do on a cultural level, that is certainly not true for President Trump, who's a much more powerful cultural figure than Vice President Pence, for example.
00:43:44.000So as you elevate the amount of power somebody has, we are willing as human beings to allow those people to get away with more things.
00:43:53.000And so Eric Reitens, who's just a governor of Missouri and who can be easily replaced by another Republican for governor of Missouri, which is what will happen, he can go away without having a significant impact on the Republicans in the state or the conservative agenda in the state.
00:44:05.000The same is not really true for President Trump in a lot of ways, and so that's why there have been so many people who have been willing to kind of brush off President Trump's excesses in a way that they wouldn't be willing to for Eric Reitens.
00:44:19.000I mean, that's just the way that the human mind works.
00:44:21.000Now, speaking of the presidential race coming up in 2020, good news for Democrats.
00:44:25.000Bernie Sanders is there to split your party again.
00:44:27.000A former Bernie Sanders spokesperson says, don't worry, he's going to run again in 2020.
00:44:32.000Will voters get another chance to vote for Bernie Sanders in 2020?
00:44:36.000Well, voters in Vermont certainly will coming up in November.
00:44:39.000Nationally, you know, he is considering another run for the presidency and, you know, when the time comes, I think we'll have an answer to that.
00:44:47.000But right now, he's still considering it.
00:44:49.000He'd be a fool not to run in 2020, considering how splintered the Democratic Party is.
00:44:53.000He actually has a serious shot at winning the nomination in 2020.
00:44:55.000Now, it's hard to capture the magic twice, as Ross Perot learned in 1996.
00:44:59.000That said, who's going to be out there against him?
00:45:41.000So there's a book by a guy named Gary Salmorsan.
00:45:45.000Gary Salmorsan is a great favorite of my new brother-in-law.
00:45:47.000I was out of town over the weekend because my sister got married and Gary Salmorsan was at the wedding.
00:45:53.000He is a really terrific thinker and a great literary analyst.
00:45:57.000And he has a book called Anna Karenina in our time seeing more wisely.
00:45:59.000So you sort of have to have read Anna Karenina in order to get the book.
00:46:02.000So go out and buy a copy of Anna Karenina and when you're done reading it, come back in six months and then read this book.
00:46:08.000But Anna Karenina, of course, one of the great novels in the history of mankind.
00:46:12.000And this book is really about how people misread Anna Karenina.
00:46:15.000As a story of failed female empowerment, when what the story really is about is about failure to abide by commitment, attempts to hide from your true nature, attempts to find romantic love in place of affectionate love.
00:46:28.000And it's got some really deep thoughts on the human condition that are not necessarily completely apparent from reading Anna Karenina.
00:46:35.000When you read Anna Karenina, people tend to read it as sort of a bad, not a bad romance novel, but as an over,
00:46:41.000Overly long romance novel with Anna Karenina, who's having an affair, and then she kills herself at the end by throwing herself under the train.
00:48:21.000So I just wanted to give a shout out to Ambassador Haley, as well as mostly Nalen, who's a really great kid and really politically active and doing great work out there.
00:51:10.000There's Beau Bridges, and Ruby Dee, and Jack Guilford, and Ed McMahon, and Brock Peters, and Thelma Ritter, and Jan Sterling.
00:51:16.000And the basic premise of the film is that these two criminals get onto a subway car and then start harassing one by one the passengers on the car, and people are not able to stand up to them.
00:51:30.000The only person who's willing to stand up to them is Beau Bridges, who plays a soldier on the car.
00:51:34.000Okay, the same thing is happening on subways today, because again, it is human nature.
00:51:39.000I've talked a lot about human nature today, but it is indeed human nature for a lot of folks to believe that they're better off if they just sit there and allow bad things to happen in front of them.
00:51:52.000Who, as I've said, has been in a running gun battle with Samantha Bee, and Amy Schumer is on this list, and Lena Dunham is also on this list for least funny person in America.
00:52:02.000Again, amazing how CNN will give Trevor Noah all sorts of room to run with regard to his political viewpoints, even though he's just a comedian, of course.
00:52:09.000And he comes out, he says, Trump is ripe for comedy and Obama is not.
00:52:12.000That's why we make fun of Trump all the time.
00:52:36.000But if you do dig deeper, you will get more from him as well.
00:52:39.000You know, Obama was, like many politicians, a water table that is buried far beneath the surface.
00:52:47.000So to get to the right joke and the right piece of satire that would really illuminate what Obama was doing, you had to dig through so many layers and work through the weeds to get to the water table of jokes.
00:53:06.000Like, the day he was elected, the night he was elected, there's a tape of me laughing for two straight minutes when someone calls him President Donald Trump, because it's just funny.
00:54:21.000They could have been played for laughs if any of these people bothered to actually make a move in that direction.
00:54:25.000They weren't ever going to make that move.
00:54:28.000It's, you know, again, I think very silly that the comedic world has suddenly rediscovered its funny bone as soon as Trump became president.
00:54:35.000There's plenty to laugh at in the Obama administration, for sure.
00:54:38.000Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.