Ben Shapiro explains why the right has forgotten why they fight and why they need to get over their supposed moral cowardice and get into the trenches. He also explains why some on the right just don't have the balls to fight for their principles and why it's time for them to go all in on winning, even if it means they have no idea what winning looks like. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" and co-host of "Save America" on the conservative network The Weekly Standard. He's also a regular contributor to CNN and the New York Times and a frequent contributor to The Daily Wire. His new book, "Bullies," is out now and available for pre-order now. It's available for purchase on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. See linktr.ee/TheBenShapiroShow and use the promo code "UPLEVEL" for 20% off your first month with discount code "SAVEAVERAGE" at checkout. You can also get a free copy of his new book "Bullying: How to Fight Like A Conservative" out now, which is out in paperback! Learn more about his upcoming book, Bullies: A Handbook of Character Assassinations, which will be out soon. Watch the video series on his new show on the new book on the subject, "How to Fight in the trenches: What's Winning, Even if You Don't Have the Words to Win at the Same Time as the Other Guy? on HBO's "Saturday Nightly on HBO. and CBS Radio's "Good Morning Joe" on October 31st, Nov. 9th, 7/10th, 9/11th, 8th, 11/18, 8/11/19th, and 11/27, 7th/18th, 6/19, 8/27th, 2019, 9/28, 11/30, 8th/8th, 7/9th, 2020, The Other Guy's new book and 8/9, 10/9/18/8/18 9th/9 All Rights Is Winning? 13/10, 14/9ths, 15/8, 16/7, 17/8 6/9rd, 18/8 , 15, 19/9 , 16
00:00:00.000It's a phrase we hear over and over on Twitter whenever someone criticizes morally troubling anti-leftist tactics used by members of the right.
00:00:10.000The phrase is meant to deride the supposed moral preening of those who criticize.
00:00:14.000They must think themselves high and mighty, whining about virtue where some good hard-nosed old-fashioned get-in-the-dirt-and-fight-em tactics would do.
00:00:20.000These worries about the right and wrong just hamstring the right.
00:00:25.000Why can't those weaklings just get over their supposed moral purity and fight in the trenches?
00:00:29.000Now, I am no fan of political cowardice.
00:00:32.000I wrote an entire book called Bullies, in which I blasted the left's character assassination techniques.
00:00:36.000I routinely speak on college campuses in conditions that are less than physically secure.
00:00:40.000I am more than happy to tell people things they don't want to hear in political debate, and I've been threatened more than once on national television, by the way, for my trouble.
00:01:02.000If you stick with your wishy-washy principles about civility, you'll lose.
00:01:05.000And if you lose, my principles will be destroyed.
00:01:07.000But, as it turns out, many of the people who mock ma-principles have no actual principles other than empty tribal victory.
00:01:13.000Never was that clearer than this week, when several members of the self-appointed Trump Ardent Defense Squad went full social justice warrior, invading a Shakespeare in the Park performance of Julius Caesar that depicts President Trump as Caesar.
00:01:25.000Screaming liberal hate kills, they stormed the stage, called the audience member Joseph Goebbels, and held up the production.
00:01:31.000Those who objected to this obtuse behavior were simply being hamstrung by my principles, they then proclaimed.
00:01:36.000Except that there were no principles at stake here.
00:01:40.000Perhaps the principle was that artists shouldn't make art that invokes images of violence inflicted on a president.
00:01:45.000Then why weren't they upset about a rodeo clown dressed up as President Obama in 2013?
00:01:50.000Maybe the principle was that radical rhetoric leads to violence.
00:01:52.000Then why weren't they upset when candidate Trump urged his followers to clock protesters?
00:01:56.000Maybe the principle was that shutting down others' free speech is bad, a sort of ironic lesson for the left.
00:02:01.000Then why didn't they say so, rather than claiming that the content of the play justified their shutdown?
00:02:06.000And why would this be a good strategy, given that the self-immolating hard left's free speech shutdowns have backfired so dramatically that even Obama and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been forced to condemn them?
00:02:17.000No, there were no principles here other than tribalistic anti-left foolishness.
00:02:22.000That seems to be the order of the day for a few select on the right.
00:02:25.000I'm old enough to remember when the pro-Trump right justified Trump's behavior on the grounds that he had to build a wall and rescind Obama's executive amnesty.
00:02:32.000Now only Ann Coulter has the guts to point out that Trump hasn't done either of those things and that he just enshrined for all time Obama's executive amnesty.
00:02:39.000I'm old enough to remember when the pro-Trump right assured conservatives that it would hold Trump to account if he were to fail to repeal Obamacare.
00:02:45.000Now it's ignoring the fact that he called watered-down Obamacare too mean and pushed for broader funding.
00:02:52.000I thought my principles had to go so that they could achieve their principles, but they seem rather blithe about the collapse of some of their supposed core precepts, which suggests that maybe there are some on the right who just want to fight, and they've forgotten why they fight, and even how to fight.
00:03:05.000All that matters now is winning, even if they have no idea what winning looks like other than the other guy losing.
00:03:27.000The good news is that he will at least have a soft landing.
00:03:30.000He's probably going to end up, I think, as a rotating co-host on Pod Save America, because that's probably the only place he can go from here.
00:03:36.000But before we get to any of that, and there's a lot to talk about, it is a vindication for President Trump, just because the left turned it into a referendum on Trump, when it really did not have to be.
00:03:45.000But, before we get to any of that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.
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00:05:03.000Last night, John Ossoff loses by five points to Karen Handel in the Georgia 6th.
00:05:07.000The Democrats had poured thirty million dollars, thirty m-m-m-million dollars into this ridiculous race.
00:05:15.000Now, it is important to note, the reason that they thought they were going to win this race is because Hillary Clinton only lost to Donald Trump in this district by one point in 2016.
00:05:23.000The reason that this was somewhat delusional is because Tom Price, who is the congressperson who just left to join the Trump administration as Secretary of Health and Human Services,
00:05:32.000He had won the district in the same election cycle by 23 points.
00:05:35.000In other words, there are a lot of Republicans in the district who aren't fond of President Trump, but who also aren't going to vote for a Democrat just because they don't like President Trump.
00:05:43.000Trump wasn't on the ballot last night.
00:05:49.000A lot more than they like John Ossoff.
00:05:51.000And the Democrats' attempts to turn everything into a referendum on Trump really backfired against them in a significant way last night.
00:05:59.000Again, they dumped tons of outside-the-district money in.
00:06:02.000John Ossoff looks like—they found the one man in America who's nerdier than I am, and they ran him for Congress.
00:06:09.000And then they ran him from a district that wasn't even the Georgia 6th.
00:06:13.000But I think it's important to look at how the media played this race because it really played into why the Democrats lost here.
00:06:18.000The reason the Democrats lost is because the media ran a race that the voters in the districts were not interested in running.
00:06:24.000They were all jazzed because back in April, Ossoff won 48% of the vote, 49% of the vote.
00:06:29.000That's because 1,000 Republicans were running and so Democrats were able to consolidate their vote and nobody paid attention to the special election because it was assumed that Republicans were going to win it until Ossoff came very close to winning in the first round.
00:07:02.000This is right after the original round in which Ossoff missed winning 50%.
00:07:08.000Ossoff will face off against Republican Karen Handel in June for the seat formerly held by Trump's health secretary, Tom Price, in a contest seen as a referendum on Trump's presidency and a preview of next year's midterm elections.
00:07:23.000President Trump taking credit for the results, hailing the runoff as a win despite Ossoff's strong showing, tweeting, despite major outside money,
00:07:32.000Fake media support and 11 Republican candidates.
00:07:40.000The president was personally invested in the election, bashing the Democratic contender in a barrage of tweets and even recording a robocall to urge Republicans to get out and vote.
00:07:52.000Ossoff will raise your taxes, destroy your healthcare, and flood our country with illegal immigrants.
00:07:59.000President Trump beat Hillary Clinton in this Republican stronghold by just 1% last November.
00:08:03.000Okay, so you can see that CNN and the rest of the media, they wanted to play this as it's all about Trump.
00:08:09.000Now, the reality is in the district, Trump is not particularly popular.
00:08:12.000Mitt Romney won this district in 2012 by 23 points, the same margin of victory for Tom Price in that same election cycle.
00:08:19.000So Trump is not that popular, and so the Democrats thought, okay, Trump is investing himself here, and that's why it's very, very important that he's going to lose.
00:08:28.000And you can see that the fallout from that was really funny last night, because CNN, which had played this whole thing up as it's going to be a referendum on Trump, Trump's going to lose this, and then everyone's going to realize how toxic he is, and then he's going to lose 100 seats in the House in 2018.
00:08:42.000You know, last night on CNN, this is going around because it's very, very funny.
00:08:46.000You can see the media reactions on CNN.
00:08:48.000This is the actual footage last night on CNN.
00:08:51.000All the Democrats looking like they want to die.
00:08:53.000This is the second funniest thing I've seen in the last year.
00:08:55.000The first funniest thing, of course, is election night, when it looked like the entire Democratic Party was going to reenact the last scene from Reservoir Dogs.
00:09:03.000Anyway, here it was on CNN last night.
00:09:06.000To David's point earlier about Democrats, and Gloria, about looking inward and trying to figure out how to run in the Trump era, this was supposed to be the district that they could have done that.
00:09:17.000Because it is wealthy, it is educated, and the kind of voters who are in this district were supposed to be the kind that Democrats could pick off from the Republicans.
00:09:27.000If the Republican ends up winning, it throws the whole Democratic strategy up in the air and they have to
00:09:36.000And this picture was the one that was making the rounds last night because you can see all of the Democrats on set looking like they're just contemplating life's meaninglessness, that life doesn't mean anything and then you die and spend all eternity just moldering in the ground, not a thought in your head because you're dead.
00:09:58.000It's like they just realized about nihilism.
00:10:09.000So, the Democrats made a bunch of mistakes here.
00:10:12.000I'm going to talk about all the Democratic mistakes here because we've talked a lot about the failings of the Republican Party because the Republican Party is the governing party right now.
00:10:19.000They have a majority in the House, they have a majority in the Senate, they have the presidency, and they're not getting a lot done.
00:10:24.000The nice thing for Republicans is that Democrats are awful at everything.
00:10:28.000And so, there are a bunch of sort of hot takes from the left that are worth discussing, plus the real reasons why they actually lost this election.
00:10:37.000So, before we get to anything else with regard to why they lost this election, I think that it is important to state that the real reason that the Democrats lost this election is because they have a perverse notion of how these elections work.
00:10:47.000They do not work because they're going to somehow convince Trump-unfriendly Republicans to flip and vote Democrat.
00:10:54.000That's not even what happened in 2016.
00:10:55.000It wasn't a bunch of Democrats who were unhappy with Barack Obama who flipped to Trump, so much as it was a turnout game.
00:11:03.000The fact is the entire margin of victory in a lot of the swing states was lower turnout by Democrats in those swing states by percentages, particularly in the black community.
00:11:11.000And what happened in Georgia 6th is Democrats really needed high Democratic turnout and low Republican turnout by nationalizing the race, by giving it tons of publicity.
00:11:19.000Instead, what they ended up doing was driving Republican turnout up.
00:11:27.000A bunch of people who reluctantly voted for Trump, which he won the district by one, a bunch of people who reluctantly voted for Trump are not going to start voting for people who back Nancy Pelosi.
00:11:36.000Just because you went in and you voted for Tom Price but not Trump does not mean now you're going to flip and vote for John Ossoff.
00:11:43.000And for Democrats to think that is really stupid.
00:11:45.000This is why to make the whole thing about Trump is really, really dumb.
00:11:48.000For a marginal vote, maybe that matters, but what this is really about is motivating your base.
00:11:52.000The Democrats made the mistake of using Trump to motivate their base, but at the same time, they castigated Republican voters who voted for Trump by talking about Trump-Russia and Trump's corrupt and Trump's evil.
00:12:03.000Well, let's say that you're a voter in Georgia 6th.
00:12:05.000Or in Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, or Michigan.
00:12:08.000And let's say that you voted for Trump.
00:12:42.000So, again, the Democrats made a very large boo-boo when they started targeting these what they called Republican swing voters instead of trying to drive out their own base.
00:12:51.000It's exactly the same mistake, actually, that they made
00:12:55.000In 2016, when they started targeting Republican swing voters in Michigan, as opposed to trying to drive out their own base.
00:13:59.000South Carolina 5 should scare Republicans.
00:14:01.000What Republicans should hope is that Democrats continue to nationalize every race, continue to elevate every race, because that is polarizing to Republicans, and Republicans will then turn out.
00:14:10.000In South Carolina 5, nobody even knew it was happening, and Democrats almost were able to sneak in and steal a victory in South Carolina 5, a district where Trump was, again, won by an enormous margin.
00:14:21.000So, if Democrats hadn't nationalized this race with outside money and made it look like Ossoff was basically a carpetbagger coming in with California values, they would have done a lot better here.
00:14:30.000The third thing the Democrats did wrong is they got Hollywood involved.
00:14:32.000So, Hollywood was deeply involved in this race.
00:16:07.000This is like telling somebody that their girlfriend is kind of a jerk.
00:16:10.000You tell someone their girlfriend is kind of a jerk, even if they know deep down their girlfriend is kind of a jerk, they're not going to respond well to that.
00:16:27.000When you combine the fact he was getting all sorts of California money, when you combine that with the Hollywood support, when you combine that with the nationalization of the race and making it about Trump, what you end up with is this image of a guy who's carpetbagging it in from another district, he's a documentary filmmaker with California support, and here he is trying to steal a district in good old Georgia.
00:16:46.000Again, Karen Handel hammered Ossoff on this during the debate and it really hurt him.
00:16:49.000So John, I guess what I would like to know is exactly who are you going to vote for in this election?
00:17:01.000Well, I think Secretary Handel's referring to my residence, which is a matter that I've addressed transparently throughout this campaign.
00:17:08.000I grew up in the 6th Congressional District.
00:17:11.000I was born and raised in Georgia, unlike Secretary Handel, who was born and raised in Washington, D.C.
00:17:17.000Actually, it is of concern to the people of the 6th District that you do not live in our community.
00:17:22.000And while I was born in Washington, D.C., I didn't get to pick where I was born.
00:17:26.000But the fact is, I've been in Georgia for almost as long as you've even been alive.
00:17:31.000You might live just five minutes outside of the District, but your values are nearly 3,000 miles away in San Francisco.
00:17:38.000Again, her hitting him again about the California values, and that was the telling point.
00:17:42.000Now what's funny is the Democrat responses to this, and I want to get to the hot takes from Democrats over this whole thing and why exactly it's indicative of why they're going to continue losing if they keep this up.
00:17:54.000But before I do that, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
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00:18:17.000Not only do they provide training, they also provide you the defense resources you need
00:18:20.000In case you're in a situation where you do have to shoot someone in self-defense.
00:18:24.000That's what USCCA is for, to protect you before, during, and after a self-defense incident.
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00:18:46.000It's a really, really cool thing they're doing right before July 4th, 1776.
00:19:11.000We are so pleased to be working with the USCCA doing tremendous work on behalf of gun owners across the United States and prospective gun owners who just want to win $1,776 to buy a new gun.
00:19:51.000And last night was a good indicator of that.
00:19:54.000This is the crowd at Asaf's party, you know, his defeat party.
00:19:58.000This is what the crowd was chanting over at his defeat party.
00:20:16.000Okay, so they're chanting, this is what democracy looks like, tell me what democracy looks like, as opposed to Karen Handel's crowd, who apparently are fascists of some sort.
00:20:24.000And whenever Democrats say, this is what democracy looks like, what they really mean is, look at all the funny-looking people around here.
00:20:29.000Look at how we're all diverse and such.
00:20:31.000Look at, look at, there's so many different colors and so many different races and so many different genders and so many different everything.
00:20:38.000The implication, of course, being that people on the other side are homogenous white people, straight white males who hate America and hate
00:20:46.000People of diverse colors and orientations and such.
00:20:49.000This is such a mistake by Democrats, but this is what they continue to promulgate, because when you lose, you have two choices.
00:20:54.000You can either determine why you lost and try to fight against that, or you can blame everybody else on Earth.
00:20:59.000You can blame everyone on the planet except for yourself, and that's what the Democrats have done.
00:21:33.000I really like Karen Handel, personally, a lot.
00:21:36.000And the idea that she is a hateful bigot, and that everyone who's voting for Democrats is just wonderful, but everybody voting for Republicans is evil, is really despicable.
00:21:45.000First of all, Karen Handel did not really utilize Trump's support in this election cycle.
00:21:48.000It was Paul Ryan and the NRCC that came in and saved Karen Handel's bacon.
00:21:50.000The NRCC put tremendous resources on the ground.
00:21:52.000They put like $18 million on the ground.
00:22:26.000There's no winning if Democrats keep their soul.
00:22:29.000Maybe we should instead try to convince all of the people of color and women to turn out instead of trying to convince hateful white people, etc.
00:23:17.000And then finally, over at the Washington Post, there's a reporter named Paul Kane, who theorizes that Ossoff lost because he was too genteel.
00:23:25.000He says, well, if he'd just been more passionate, that would've been better.
00:23:27.000Ossoff chose the high priest route instead of the fierce warrior.
00:23:31.000It was civil disobedience rather than civil unrest, and he still lost by an even wider margin than the almost-forgotten Parnell.
00:23:36.000This would be the candidate in the South Carolina 5th.
00:23:39.000So the idea is we all have to act like Trump now.
00:23:40.000We have to yell and scream and be brutal and all this, and then we'll win.
00:23:47.000Trump did not win because he was all of those things.
00:23:49.000He won because Hillary Clinton was the worst candidate in the history of American politics, and Trump's aggressiveness was an asset even if his brutality was a drawback.
00:23:57.000You can be aggressive without being brutal, and Democrats seem to fail to acknowledge all that.
00:24:03.000But please, Democrats, keep those hot takes coming.
00:24:06.000Now, I do want to discuss what this means for 2018 and how Republicans
00:24:10.000Have to be a little bit careful in their interpretation of these results.
00:24:14.000They may be getting over their skis in terms of the triumphalism a little bit early, but for that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com right now and become a subscriber.
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