Starbucks is in serious trouble, and we will go through the case. Plus, President Trump reaches out to North Korea, and Democrats try to take Ted Cruz's seat in Texas. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and I have a lot to talk about, particularly with regard to the Starbucks fiasco. I just hate how the media covered these racial incidents without actually waiting to hear the facts, without waiting to see if there was any additional evidence. We ll get to all of that in just a second, but first, I want to thank Quip for sponsoring the show. Quip is the new electric toothbrush that packs just the right amount of vibration into a slimmer design at the fraction of the cost of bulkier traditional electric toothbrushes, and guiding pulses actually alert you when to switch sides, making brushing the correct amount of toothpaste absolutely effortless! Quip even comes with a mount that suctions right to your mirror and unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel anywhere, whether it s going in your gym bag, whether you re going to be going to the gym, whether in your car or in your carry-on, and because the thing that cleans your mouth should also be clean, Quip starts at just $25. And if you go to Quip, you get your first refill pack FREE with a Quip toothbrush! That s your FIRST refill pack free at Quip! at Getquip. That's your FIRST REFILLING PACK FREE at $5, including free shipping worldwide, so you re never have to worry about anything again. You re good to go again. That s all you re good, you re gonna be good, right? ! Quip - and there s a reason why you should be using Quip. And if Quip doesn t have to brush your teeth, you ll have a new brush heads every three months for just 5 bucks, and you re just pop it on your toothbrush head every 3 months for $25, including FREE shipping worldwide. - you re not gonna be better than you re-charging your toothbrushing, right now! and you ll be good for brushing your mouth, right?! And there s not gonna have to care about brushing your teeth anymore! You ll get your brush head that s 8 months old and still has your food from 4 months in it, right in the mail, right ?
00:00:14.000As always, it is a busy news day, and I have a lot to talk about, particularly with regard to the Starbucks fiasco.
00:00:19.000I just hate how the media covered these racial incidents without actually waiting to hear all the facts, without waiting to see if there's any additional evidence.
00:00:28.000The immediate jump to conclusions is pretty astonishing.
00:00:30.000We'll get to all of that in just a second.
00:00:31.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Quip.
00:00:35.000Every single day, you are brushing your teeth.
00:00:37.000I would hope, because otherwise you're a gross person.
00:00:38.000But when you brush your teeth, are you really using the best kind of toothbrush to do so?
00:00:43.000Quip is the new electric toothbrush that packs just the right amount of vibration into a slimmer design at the fraction of the cost of bulkier traditional electric brushes.
00:00:50.000And guiding pulses actually alert you when to switch sides, making brushing the right amount absolutely effortless.
00:00:55.000Quip even comes with a mount that suctions right to your mirror and unsticks to use as a cover for hygienic travel anywhere,
00:01:00.000Whether it's going in your gym bag, whether it's going in your carry-on, and because the thing that cleans your mouth should also be clean, Quip's subscription service makes sure that you get a refresh on your brush on a dentist-recommended schedule, delivering new brush heads every three months for just five bucks, including free shipping worldwide, so you're never gonna have to worry about...
00:01:16.000Using a brush head that's eight months old and still has your food from four months in it.
00:01:19.000Instead, you have a new brush head every three months, and you never have to worry about it, because as soon as it arrives in the mail, you just pop it on your toothbrush, and you're good to go.
00:01:25.000Quip is backed by a network of over 10,000 dental professionals, including dentists, hygienists, and dental students.
00:01:30.000Most toothbrushes don't get named one of Time Magazine's best inventions of the year.
00:02:07.000Because there was apparently an incident in which two black guys were at a Philadelphia Starbucks and sat down, and the manager asked them if they wanted to buy anything, and they said no.
00:02:16.000And according to them, at this point, she called the police.
00:02:18.000According to her, they continuously refused to leave.
00:02:39.000It makes me a little suspicious that Starbucks didn't just fire the lady.
00:02:42.000If they actually thought that there was a deeply racist incident that had happened, you would imagine that they would get rid of the lady for simple legal reasons.
00:02:48.000Having this woman hanging around, if she actually was participant in a racial incident, seems like really stupid, stupid policy.
00:02:56.000But Starbucks didn't get rid of her, which leads me to believe there might be a little bit more to the story.
00:02:59.000So, today I want to go through the media hubbub
00:03:02.000about all of this, and I want to ask a few simple questions that are all answerable.
00:03:07.000I'm not saying I don't believe these guys' story.
00:03:09.000I'm just saying that I want to see the evidence on all sides, and I don't think that that's unreasonable.
00:03:14.000So, for example, the guys go on Good Morning America, the two black fellows go on Good Morning America, and they are being given national coverage for an incident in which they were threatened with arrest for apparently sitting in a Starbucks for no reason.
00:03:26.000And the tape was originally taken by a couple of different people who were at the Starbucks.
00:03:32.000And who claimed that they saw this racial incident unfold when the guys asked to use the bathroom.
00:03:36.000They were told they couldn't use the bathroom because they hadn't bought anything and then they refused to buy something.
00:03:39.000And the manager, whose name is Holly, apparently called the police for loitering.
00:03:43.000So here is a little bit of the of the ABC News exclusive interview with these two guys.
00:03:56.000They're shutting down their entire company for a day to teach about implicit bias.
00:04:01.000I'll discuss implicit bias and how stupid implicit bias assessment tests are in just a second, and why implicit bias training is completely useless from a social science perspective.
00:04:09.000I'll talk about that in just a few minutes here.
00:04:11.000But important to note, Kyle Smith has a good point in National Review.
00:04:14.000There are 238,000 employees of Starbucks.
00:04:18.000Let's assume that everything that's said here is right.
00:04:20.000Let's assume that this manager, this manager at the Starbucks was a brutal, horrible, Bull Connor type racist.
00:04:27.000Would that implicate everyone who works for Starbucks?
00:04:30.000Kyle Smith points out 238,000 people is like the entire population of the city of Richmond.
00:04:35.000If someone killed somebody in the city of Richmond, would you say, listen, I'm never traveling to Richmond again, I'm gonna boycott Richmond?
00:04:40.000Would you force the entire population of Richmond to go and get implicit bias training?
00:04:44.000Or would you say, that's a bad person?
00:04:47.000So first of all, this is an individual issue at the very most.
00:04:50.000And second of all, we're not even sure if it's an individual issue yet because, as I'm going to point out, there are cameras in the store.
00:05:22.000Telling people not to use the wrong pronouns.
00:05:24.000And yet this one is supposed to be the great racist in the whole story.
00:05:27.000She still has not publicly revealed herself or told her side of the story.
00:05:30.000But in any case, I asked a couple of my listeners and one of my Twitter followers if they could go take a look at the Starbucks itself to see if there were a bunch of cameras there.
00:05:38.000It turns out that from the pictures she took, there are no less than four cameras in the establishment.
00:05:43.000And yet we have seen no camera tape from any of this.
00:05:45.000The only reason I'm breaking this down this way, folks, is because it's a national story.
00:05:49.000Otherwise, I wouldn't care because when the I'll give you an example.
00:05:58.000And just back in February, it was Missouri.
00:06:00.000Rather, Applebee's fired three employees at a Missouri mall based restaurant back in February that it determined were involved in the racial profiling of two African-American customers whom they falsely accused of skipping out without paying their bill.
00:06:11.000The restaurant chain also apologized for the February 9th incident at the Independence, Missouri eatery.
00:06:15.000The apology comes after one of the diners, Alexis Brisson, posted a video of her encounter with employees from her cell phone and commented on the incident on Facebook.
00:06:23.000The restaurant in the Independence Center Mall was temporarily closed, and the video showed a restaurant staffer, a police officer, and a security guard talking to two women, one of whom was crying uncontrollably and had been estimated viewed 3 million times.
00:06:35.000The company said that it regretted the incident, and the manager, the server, and another employee were fired.
00:06:39.000This is an incident where I'm not questioning what happened because the company fired the employees.
00:06:44.000The company not only admitted what had happened, the company then fired the employees.
00:06:47.000And apparently, this is a much more clear-cut case where the police were called on these particular women who were accused of walking out on their bill, but they did not walk out without paying their bill.
00:06:58.000They actually were trying to pay their bill.
00:07:00.000According to the Facebook post, about an hour into dinner, these two women were accused of ordering food the day before and leaving without paying their bill.
00:07:07.000And then it turns out that these were not the same two women.
00:07:43.000If you really think that Holly has not dealt for the past year with any black customers or that she's a wild racist who's discriminating against black customers, it's weird that everything was fine for a year in a 42% black city where presumably a lot of the customers are black.
00:07:55.000And again, as I say, one of my listeners, I talked about this yesterday on the program, one of my listeners knows Holly, has been there and has seen her deal with black customers and has never seen any inkling of anything like this, but
00:08:05.000All right, here's the account of the two men on Good Morning America.
00:08:08.000And I'm going to show you, this even conflicts with the police accounting of what happened.
00:08:11.000I want to show you also how the media treat this.
00:08:13.000So Robin Roberts is the one doing the interview on ABC News' Good Morning America.
00:09:40.000Now, this is one of the areas where a tape could obviously clear this up.
00:09:42.000You'd see them walk in, there'd be a timestamp on the tape, you'd know whether this is true or not.
00:09:46.000According to the police, this is not what happened, right?
00:09:48.000If you actually listen to what the police officer said, right, it's not, it doesn't match up with what these two guys are saying.
00:09:53.000So these two guys are saying that they walked in, they sat down, they asked to use the restroom, they were declined because they did not buy anything, they were asked if they wanted to buy anything, and then they refused to leave.
00:10:06.000Now here is the police officer's story.
00:10:08.000So here's the police chief in Philadelphia, who is black, and he is telling the story of what happened according to the police.
00:10:17.000When the call was initially made, the Starbucks employees had told the males that they were going to call police, and they said, go ahead and call police, we don't care.
00:10:25.000So police get there and they're confronted by the same type of attitude.
00:10:28.000And repeatedly are told that they're not leaving.
00:10:31.000In fact, there's some alleged rhetoric about, you don't know what you're doing.
00:10:35.000You're only a $45,000 a year employee or something to that regard.
00:10:39.000And so because these individuals refuse to leave, because Starbucks actually called, the police did not just happen upon this event.
00:10:48.000They did not just walk into Starbucks to get coffee.
00:11:09.000But after being transported to the police district in the area, the officers, after processing paperwork, discovered that Starbucks no longer was interested in processing.
00:11:20.000So what the police chief says is when they arrived, they asked these men, do you want to leave?
00:11:24.000And the guy said, no, we're not leaving.
00:11:25.000And apparently at one point they said, we don't care, go ahead and arrest us.
00:11:29.000This is not the same story the media are telling, right?
00:11:31.000The media are telling a story where these two guys walk in, they're in no trouble at all, they're just sitting there, and then they're arrested for no reason after being incredibly polite to the police officers.
00:11:39.000The police themselves are saying that's not what happened.
00:11:41.000We don't have the story of Holly the manager.
00:11:42.000We don't have any of the tape footage, right?
00:11:44.000Again, there are four cameras in the establishment, from what I can see from these pictures, that are being sent publicly on social media.
00:11:49.000And it's been confirmed by a couple of people.
00:11:51.000And yet, the media are running this as though this is a Bull Connor Jim Crow story.
00:11:56.000I'm going to explain in a second why this really isn't even that.
00:11:59.000But first I want to say, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Filter Buy.
00:12:03.000So, when is the last time you checked the filters in your central air system?
00:12:05.000It's one of these annoying kick-the-can-down-the-road habits.
00:12:14.000Visit my friends at Filterbuy, America's leading provider of HVAC filters for homes and small businesses.
00:12:19.000They carry over 600 different filter sizes, even custom ones, all shipped free within 24 hours.
00:12:24.000Plus, they're manufactured right here in the United States.
00:12:26.000Filterbuy offers a multitude of MERV options, all the way up to hospital grade.
00:12:30.000Check your system specifications so you can pick the right option and maximize efficiency and elevate the quality of the air that you breathe.
00:12:35.000Set up auto delivery and you're never going to need to think about air filters again.
00:12:38.000They just show up at your house and you save 5%.
00:12:40.000Save money, save time, breathe better.
00:13:31.000Like, I don't know where that's coming from.
00:13:32.000Because what you'll see is that the media will report it saying things like, these two men arrived at 435, and then by 437 the police were called.
00:13:46.000Again, I don't want to break this thing down like this is a pruder tape.
00:13:49.000I don't think it's that important an incident, but the media think it's that important an incident.
00:13:52.000We wouldn't be talking about this if the media weren't blowing this up into, all of America is implicitly racist, including Starbucks.
00:13:58.000Right, this is what this is all about.
00:14:00.000Again, I wasn't questioning the Applebee's incident that happened back in February because that was an actual racial incident and the people involved were fired by the chain, which apologized.
00:14:09.000Okay, so, obviously, and again, the reason that I asked for substantiating evidence is because we've had too many cases in the past of high-profile incidents like this where it's turned out that the whole story was not being told.
00:14:20.000I remember Michael Bennett, who's a football player, last year claimed that the Las Vegas Police Department had cracked down on him for racial reasons, and then the tape came out and it turned out the reason they cracked down on him is because he was acting in criminal fashion.
00:14:31.000So, if tape is available, I like tape.
00:14:34.000If tape is not available, we have to evaluate the evidence of the people who are talking.
00:14:37.000But, just as in a police incident, I want to see the body cam footage before I make any sort of judgment, in this particular incident, I don't think it's unreasonable for Starbucks to release footage of exactly what happened here.
00:14:47.000Now, there are a lot of people who say, well, Starbucks won't release the footage because they know that they're guilty.
00:14:52.000Okay, it's also possible Starbucks won't release the footage because they know that if they release the footage, then the entire media and the Black Lives Matter movement would suggest that they don't care enough about racism and they're fighting back against these charges because they're racist themselves.
00:15:04.000It is the way the racial game is played, unfortunately, which is if you provide countervailing evidence to the charge that you are racist, then the media will claim that you are even more of a racist because you're not acknowledging your white privilege and people's different sensory experiences.
00:15:17.000Starbucks has had this policy for a very long time.
00:15:19.000Okay, Starbucks has had this policy with regard to people not using the bathroom for a long time, and they've had controversies about this policy for a very long time.
00:15:26.000And in just a second, I'm going to bring you that controversy.
00:15:28.000I'm going to show you that controversy.
00:15:41.000This story is dated September 15, 2015.
00:15:44.000In the wake of a social media post that went viral over the weekend claiming a Starbucks barista denied a uniformed Philadelphia police sergeant access to a restroom at a downtown Philadelphia coffee shop, Starbucks has apologized to the sergeant.
00:15:56.000The spokesperson for the international coffee shop chain told NBC10 the company personally apologized to the police sergeant for the incident, which happened late last week.
00:16:04.000The sergeant, according to a Facebook post shared thousands of times, walked into the Starbucks at 13th and Chestnut Streets and asked for the key code to use the restroom.
00:16:11.000An employee, according to the post, stated in a loud voice that the bathroom is for paying customers only.
00:16:15.000The post went on to say the sergeant politely requested access again, and the Starbucks employee continued to deny it loudly as customers listened.
00:16:21.000While she continued loudly to tell me about the bathroom down the street, I was even more astonished that the many customers and other employees said nothing and seemed indifferent.
00:16:28.000This is the world cops live in anymore, wrote the sergeant, who has declined to comment, saying he didn't anticipate his post would gain such traction.
00:16:33.000Officer Joe Lightheart, a friend of the sergeant, was one of the first to share the fellow officer's post about the incident.
00:16:38.000Lightheart says he personally has been to that Starbucks location several times on calls for service, but never as a customer.
00:16:43.000I didn't intend for it to go viral, Lightheart said, adding that most people who have responded to the post have been supportive.
00:16:47.000Starbucks wrote in part, quote, This officer apparently was white.
00:16:50.000There's no indicator that the officer was actually black.
00:17:03.000And so the idea that the loitering policy is being exclusively used on black people, again, I'm not seeing all of the evidence for this.
00:17:11.000But the entire point here is to shake down Starbucks.
00:17:14.000The entire point is to make the entire chain feel that they're responsible for the actions of one employee, even without us even knowing the whole story about the employee.
00:17:20.000So now Starbucks is going to be giving implicit bias training to all of its employees.
00:17:25.000Implicit bias training is a giant, giant, giant waste of time.
00:17:28.000Hillary Clinton, back during the 2017 campaign, talked about how implicit bias was a problem for everyone, not just police.
00:17:34.000And she said that too many people jump to conclusions about each other.
00:17:38.000Of course, Senator Cory Booker has talked about implicit bias.
00:17:42.000Okay, people tend to use what they call the implicit association test as proof of implicit bias.
00:17:46.000The implicit association test is a test that you've probably had if you're on a college campus where some idiot sociology professor says, we're going to show you you're a racist.
00:17:57.000But secretly, like Freudian unconscious secretly, you're actually a racist.
00:18:00.000And the way that we can tell this is what we do.
00:18:03.000is we show you a black face with some words associated with it and a white face with some words associated with it.
00:18:09.000If you more quickly identify white faces associated with good words than black faces associated with good words, this means that implicitly you are a racist.
00:19:26.000He says that the fact that the idea that the IAT predicts behavior in any serious way is not true.
00:19:30.000He says a pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals, and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality control standards normally expected of psychological instruments.
00:19:40.000The IAT is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals' behavior.
00:19:48.000And by the way, implicit bias training does nothing either.
00:19:50.000And so we're now being told that if you train people on implicit bias, that this is going to fix things?
00:20:06.000The data is just not here, but nobody needs the data.
00:20:09.000This is all just an attempt to, again, paint the United States as broadly racist because of one incident that is still under controversy, and for which we have not seen tape.
00:20:16.000And if you ask for evidence, then people call you racist, because that's the way this works now.
00:20:31.000Okay, in just a second, I'm going to talk about President Trump's foreign policy.
00:20:34.000Some foreign policy achievements may be in the offing, despite media coverage to the contrary.
00:20:39.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Policy Genius.
00:20:42.000So, 71% of people say they need life insurance.
00:20:44.000Only 59% of people, however, have coverage.
00:20:46.000That means at least 12% of people are procrastinating.
00:20:49.000And, you know, sure, normally procrastinating is a bad thing.
00:20:52.000But if you die, it's a really bad thing if you don't have life insurance.
00:20:54.000In fact, there's a guy who a friend of mine knew online just a couple of days ago who dropped out of a heart attack, didn't have life insurance.
00:21:56.000There really is no Trump doctrine as of yet.
00:21:58.000We don't know what the Trump doctrine is.
00:21:59.000There have been a few attempts to define President Trump's foreign policy.
00:22:02.000The real truth is that President Trump's foreign policy is ad hoc.
00:22:07.000He's basically making decisions on the spot.
00:22:09.000Now, what's interesting about this is that I think that most presidents actually are doing foreign policy on the basis of ad hoc foreign policy.
00:22:15.000I don't think most of them sit there with a formula.
00:22:17.000I don't think they sit there with an abacus.
00:22:18.000I don't think they sit there with an algebraic formula with different variables, and they input different countries and different numbers in.
00:22:24.000And this concludes whether they ought to use diplomacy, whether they ought to use the CIA, or whether they ought to use military strikes.
00:22:31.000I think foreign policy is generally a matter of muddling through for the United States, and it has been since World War II.
00:22:37.000President Trump makes that obviously clear, because the muddling is so clear just in public, right?
00:22:41.000I mean, every so often the president just reverses himself on a matter of foreign policy, whereas previous administrations have tried to lay out a coherent reason why they're doing what they're doing, and sometimes that coherent reason is just not coherent.
00:22:55.000Trump is obviously just kind of lurching side to side.
00:22:56.000I don't think that that's a change in kind.
00:22:58.000I think that it's just a change in the way that that is presented to the world.
00:23:01.000Now, sometimes that ends well, and sometimes it's kind of weird, right?
00:23:04.000So in one case right now, there's obviously some controversy about what exactly President Trump is going to do with regard to North Korea.
00:23:12.000So yesterday, President Trump was doing a press conference with Japan, and he said that we've had talks with North Korea, high-level talks have been taking place with the North Koreans.
00:23:20.000Well, let's leave it a little bit short of that.
00:23:22.000But we have had talks at the highest level.
00:23:25.000And it's going very well, but we'll see what happens.
00:23:28.000Okay, so we'll have to see how this plays out.
00:23:30.000A lot of people are very skeptical of the idea that any serious negotiation can take place with the North Koreans.
00:23:35.000I'm one of those people who's skeptical, because again, I think that the North Koreans have no interest in giving up their nuclear program.
00:23:40.000I think this is another shakedown effort.
00:23:42.000The North Korean government has, for the last 35 years, been routinely firing missiles, doing nuclear tests, doing all this stuff in an effort to pry goodies out of the United States and out of our allies.
00:23:52.000They did it under Clinton, they did it under Bush, they did it under Obama, and now they are doing it under President Trump.
00:23:57.000So I think it's a little premature to celebrate the fact that we are talking with the North Koreans as some sort of grand design to change the face of North Korea.
00:24:07.000However, it is important to note that the New York Times is reporting today that North Korea is now removing a major obstacle to U.S.
00:24:12.000negotiations according to South Korea.
00:24:14.000It is important to note here also, by the way, that South Korea's government is what they call a sunshine government, meaning that they have attempted to ratchet down tensions with the North Koreans at any possible cost.
00:24:24.000According to the New York Times, Kim Jong-un, North Korea's leader, has removed a key obstacle to negotiations with Washington by no longer demanding that American troops be removed from South Korea as a condition for denuclearizing his country, according to the South's President Moon Jae-in.
00:24:37.000Okay, this is actually pretty important, because if it is true,
00:25:38.000One of the serious questions is, what are they going to ask the United States to give up?
00:25:41.000And the bigger question is, how are we going to verify that they have indeed given things up?
00:25:45.000Remember, in 1994, the United States signed onto a North Korean nuclear framework agreement that President Clinton claimed was going to end the North Korean nuclear program.
00:25:54.000It involved the United States giving the North Koreans a light water nuclear reactor so that they could have domestic nuclear energy.
00:26:01.000And also involved us signing major checks to the North Koreans.
00:26:04.000It was impossible to verify, and obviously now North Korea has nuclear weapons.
00:26:08.000It'll be interesting to see if the North Koreans think they can play the United States this way again.
00:26:13.000One of the major issues when it comes to negotiations with North Korea is whichever party is in power has an interest in claiming that their deal is going to work.
00:26:19.000We see this with the Iran deal, right?
00:26:21.000The Iran deal is a giant fail, but the Democrats still have an interest in claiming that it worked.
00:26:26.000The Syrian deal, where we were told that Russia was going to remove all chemical weapons from Syria.
00:26:30.000We were told this was a massive success by everyone on the left, including the New York Times, up until the point when Assad started gassing his citizens again, at which point everybody had to recognize that it was a failure.
00:26:40.000Every administration and all of their backers have an interest in claiming that every negotiated deal that is cut is a success.
00:26:45.000But without significant teeth to the actual verification regime, all of these promises mean very, very little.
00:26:52.000According to Moon, the North Koreans did not present any conditions that the United States could not accept, such as the withdrawal of American troops in South Korea.
00:26:58.000They only talk about an end to hostilities against their country and about getting security guarantees.
00:27:02.000It's safe to say the plans for dialogue between North and the United States could proceed because that has been made clear.
00:27:07.000So, we don't really have a clear plan from the United States as to what we are going to demand in terms of verification standards.
00:27:15.000stop deploying long-range bombers, submarines, and other nuclear strike capabilities in and around South Korea.
00:27:22.000You know, it is unclear that the United States is actually going to is actually going to do any of those things.
00:27:26.000So we will find out what happens here.
00:27:28.000But there's very little question that this is, you know, somewhat ad hoc, right?
00:27:32.000I mean, this is all ad hoc foreign policy.
00:27:33.000And again, I'm not blaming Trump for that, but it does create a certain amount of confusion in terms of world politics.
00:27:39.000Creating another amount of confusion is the Trump administration approach to Russia.
00:27:42.000So earlier this week, obviously, there were promises that Russian sanctions were on the way after Russia helped sponsor Syria's governmental chemical attacks on
00:28:05.000There's been nobody tougher on Russia than President Donald Trump.
00:28:10.000Between building up the military, between creating tremendous vast amounts of oil, we raised billions and billions of dollars extra in NATO.
00:28:21.000We had a very, very severe, we were talking about it a little while, fight in Syria recently, a month ago.
00:28:30.000Between our troops and Russian troops, and that's very sad.
00:28:35.000I mean, what Trump is saying here is true.
00:28:36.000The problem is when you have conflicting messages coming from President Trump, it obscures the fact that in some of these areas, particularly on Russia, the policy has been pretty harsh.
00:28:44.000So it is the open chaos of the administration that's a problem for the administration, not the actual policy.
00:28:51.000As Kanye West would put it, and did yesterday on Twitter, distraction is the opposite of vision.
00:28:56.000To which I responded, actually, glaucoma is the opposite of vision.
00:28:58.000But in any case, the idea that the administration is being very distracting about how it pursues its goals is certainly part of the problem.
00:29:05.000Now, a lot of that is not on the administration.
00:29:07.000Obviously, the media have an interest in providing distractions because the economy is doing quite well under President Trump, because there are no major foreign crises under President Trump.
00:29:15.000They have to make it seem as though there's a greater amount of cast in the administration, even than Trump is creating.
00:29:21.000And to that end, they've continually promoted James Comey.
00:29:32.000It's a real irritant, because every time I see him on TV, I just assume there's nothing important for him to tell us, because he doesn't have anything.
00:30:11.000I mean, this guy is the master of loyalty.
00:30:13.000We've been told that this is a duty loyalty guy.
00:30:15.000I mean, if James Comey can't be a Republican, who can be a Republican?
00:30:19.000Or maybe James Comey is angry at President Trump, doesn't like President Trump.
00:30:22.000Listen, I didn't vote for President Trump in 2016.
00:30:24.000I don't like a lot of things about President Trump.
00:30:27.000I am still a Republican, and I'm not going to give up the Republican Party to people I disagree with simply because I want to take my ball and go home.
00:30:34.000Again, they keep trying to claim that James Comey is some sort of
00:31:03.000For $99 a year, which is cheaper than your monthly subscription, you too can become a member of The Ben Shapiro Show cadre and you will enjoy every moment of it.
00:31:10.000Plus, if you just want to listen later for free, go over to iTunes, go over to YouTube.
00:31:28.000Because even James Comey is now acknowledging that he doesn't think that Donald Trump is going to fire Robert Mueller.
00:31:33.000Well, if he doesn't think that Trump is going to fire Robert Mueller—remember, the entire reason James Comey is in the news right now is because James Comey and his allies in the media have been suggesting that President Trump engaged in obstruction of justice, that he fired James Comey in order to shut down the Russia investigation.
00:31:46.000Well, if you were trying to shut down the Russia investigation, presumably, James Comey would be saying, well, you know, it's really knife's edge right now.
00:31:51.000President Trump's going to fire Mueller.
00:31:52.000It's just going to show more obstruction.
00:31:54.000But James Comey can't even say that, because at least he's honest enough to admit this.
00:31:57.000He says, I don't think Trump's going to fire Mueller.
00:31:59.000OK, so then why are we talking obstruction?
00:32:01.000If he's not firing the guy who's investigating him, that doesn't look a lot like obstruction to me.
00:32:16.000I don't, because it would make no sense for a bunch of reasons.
00:32:20.000Okay, so again, it would make no sense for a bunch of reasons.
00:32:23.000He's admitting that he has nothing newsworthy to say here.
00:32:25.000The only thing that's newsworthy about James Comey is that now he's in a fight with Andrew McCabe, right?
00:32:30.000So it turns out that Andrew McCabe, who was his former deputy,
00:32:35.000Okay, so that means that it's now a Comey-McCabe fight.
00:32:47.000All of this is making the FBI look bad.
00:32:48.000It's not making Trump look much worse than he already looked.
00:32:51.000But it is amazing the media continued to trot him out, put him on major shows like The View, and the only person on The View who asks him any tough questions is, of course, Meghan McCain.
00:32:58.000Meghan McCain did a really good job grilling him the other day.
00:33:03.000I think that maybe J. Edgar Hoover is rolling over in his grave at saying the types of things you're saying and revealing the types of things you're revealing.
00:33:10.000It doesn't seem like something that the director of the FBI... Why are you laughing?
00:33:15.000Because J. Edgar, really, he's the wrong guy to bring up.
00:34:03.000The media accused Donald Trump of distracting with one hand, you know, put the shiny object over here, and then pursuing policies they don't like over here.
00:34:43.000I mean, Michael Cohen's in legal jeopardy no matter what here.
00:34:46.000So I don't know what Sean Hannity has to do with anything, but it doesn't matter.
00:34:48.000The media are going to, particularly CNN and MSNBC, of course, are going to use this as an opportunity to club Fox News.
00:34:53.000Here's Anderson Cooper doing just that.
00:34:55.000In the two days that have elapsed since the president's lawyer, Michael Cohen, was forced to reveal in court that the mystery client he tried to keep secret was, in fact, Sean Hannity, the consequences have been swift.
00:35:04.000Hannity's employer, Fox News, did what any respectable news organization would do when faced with the knowledge that one of its anchors had gone on the air time after time after time to breathlessly report on someone without disclosing his own personal connection to the story.
00:35:42.000The Nunes memo was a huge ratings boon for Fox.
00:35:45.000What Donald Trump ended up doing to Christopher Wray, his hand-picked director of the FBI, was, among disgraces, the most disgraceful thing he has done.
00:36:09.000Sean Hannity needed that story, and I think he ran the president like an asset, the way people are wondering if the Russians are running the president.
00:36:15.000Yes, Sean Hannity is running President Trump as an asset.
00:37:03.000Thanks to Trump, even independent voters believe Democrats are using the children of illegal immigrants for political purposes rather than legitimately protecting their welfare.
00:37:10.000I think that might be too pro-Trump point for me, but let's look at the polls.
00:37:13.000In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Monday, voter preference in the November election chose a four-point lead for Democrats.
00:38:06.000Are all the polls good for Republicans?
00:38:08.000No, there's a very bad poll today for Ted Cruz.
00:38:11.000Senator Cruz, who you would think would cruise to re-election, no pun intended, in Texas, is apparently not, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.
00:38:19.000That poll shows that Cruz and Beto O'Rourke, who's a representative from Texas Democrat, it's a very competitive race now.
00:38:26.000They're saying that 47% of registered voters in Texas support Cruz, 44% back O'Rourke.
00:38:30.000That's a 3.6% margin of error for the poll.
00:38:34.000And President Trump was apparently underwater in Texas with 52% of respondents disapproving of him and 43% approving of his job performance.
00:38:41.000Cruz's favorability rating shows a pretty polarized response.
00:38:45.00046% of Texans have a favorable view of the senator.
00:38:49.000Cruz has been trying to fight the perception that he is either anti-Trump or pro-Trump from two various sides, right?
00:38:56.000The people who are pro-Trump claim that Cruz can never be forgiven for the fact that during the RNC in 2016, he didn't overtly endorse President Trump.
00:39:03.000And people who are anti-Trump claim that Ted Cruz has bent over for President Trump in a variety of ways, including today, he apparently wrote a profile of President Trump for the Time 100, the most important 100 people in the country.
00:39:14.000And Cruz wrote the profile of Trump, which is pretty glowing.
00:39:16.000A lot of people are saying, well, why would he do that?
00:39:21.000In any case, the polls are too over the place to declare exactly where this is going to end up, which is, of course, why Democrats are going to try to cheat.
00:39:29.000Or at least one Democrat is going to try and cheat.
00:39:31.000Andrew Cuomo in New York has now declared that parolees can vote.
00:39:46.000Well, the answer is yes, it would require a law.
00:39:48.000And the legislature in New York, which is still run by Republicans, says, no, you're not going to pass that law.
00:39:52.000So Andrew Cuomo just says, I'm going to make sure that 36,000 people who are on parole can now vote.
00:39:56.000The reason for this, of course, is because he figures all of those people will vote for him in primaries and in a general election.
00:40:01.000Now imagine if there were a dictator of another country who simply declared that all political prisoners who he was now releasing were going to be able to vote for him.
00:40:08.000We would say, well, that seems kind of corrupt.
00:40:10.000Andrew Cuomo went ahead and did that in New York, and no one seems to care.
00:40:26.000IDs for voting is not voter suppression.
00:40:28.000When Republicans say, however, that maybe Democrats want to let illegal immigrants into the country because they want to legalize those immigrants and then have them vote for Democrats, that looks a little better.
00:40:37.000That statement looks a little more true today, given the fact that Andrew Cuomo just unilaterally declared that 36,000 people in his state could vote who are on parole.
00:40:44.000The whole reason, by the way, you're on parole is because we don't trust you to be fully reintegrated back into society, which is the reason we don't allow you to vote generally if you're on parole.
00:40:52.000So, again, just corruption and corruption.
00:42:57.000So, Laura Ingraham's ratings actually spiked after all of the controversy over David Hogg.
00:43:01.000You remember there was a ridiculous call to boycott Laura Ingraham because she tweeted out that David Hogg was whining about his college admissions, and then David Hogg said, well, let's boycott them.
00:43:27.000But in any case, it turns out that the boycott on Ingram was also strategically foolish because all of her ratings have spiked.
00:43:33.000So according to The Hill, in the three months before the advertiser boycott frenzy, Ingram averaged 2.5 million viewers per night, consistently winning her 10 p.m.
00:43:41.000Then the advertiser controversy got going, and Ingram went on what FNC was a planned vacation.
00:43:46.000Since Ingram's return a week ago, the show's viewership has jumped to 3 million viewers per night, more than her average before the controversy erupted.
00:43:52.000Just demonstrating once again that in the real world, when you generate controversy for a show, more people tend to watch it rather than fewer people, particularly if the controversy isn't about something supremely awful that somebody said, which was the case, obviously, with Laura Ingraham.
00:44:05.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:44:11.000So, speaking of the Parkland Survivors, Time Magazine, again, in their 100 most important people, they have now put the Parkland Survivors, but not all of them.
00:44:18.000Obviously, my friend Kyle Kasher, the 16-year-old student over at Parkland, he is not included in the Time 100 of important people.
00:44:24.000It's only the ones that you've already seen.
00:44:25.000Cameron Kasky and Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg.
00:44:35.000Having the former president of the United States write a glowing profile of a bunch of 17-year-olds because he agrees with their agenda, that might be a little bit of media bias.
00:44:42.000I remember that a couple of years ago, I think it was Malala Yousafzai, whose profile was written by Hillary Clinton.
00:44:47.000Time magazine is doing that to promote democratic policies and democratic politicians.
00:44:51.000Malala Yousafzai is an amazing person.
00:44:52.000I have no idea why Hillary Clinton should have been writing her profile.
00:44:56.000Another thing that's kind of ridiculous is that apparently David and Lauren Hogg, the sister and brother, they've now signed a book deal with Random House, and that book is going to be called Hashtag Never Again.
00:45:06.000A New Generation Draws the Line, talking about all the things that they've been attempting to do.
00:45:10.000Finally, they have a book deal, right?
00:45:18.000OK, never again is about the Holocaust.
00:45:21.000OK, the phrase never again came about after the murder of six million Jews systematically by government.
00:45:27.000OK, the idea that you're going to equate an evil shooter who killed 17 people
00:45:32.000And the crisis that that presents for American society, more importantly, that that crisis is going to be equated with the Holocaust, is just insipid.
00:45:50.000So apparently, there's a new document that's been brought to light according to Breitbart by James Damore's class action lawsuit.
00:45:56.000James Damore, you'll recall, he's been on the program.
00:45:59.000He was the guy who was fired from Google for putting out a memo trying to explain a couple of reasons why there may be fewer women than male engineers over at Google.
00:46:07.000Apparently, there's a document that was brought to light that was drafted by the company's HR department instructing managers of the company on how to be inclusive, and it cautioned managers against rewarding employees for traits, quote, valued by the U.S.
00:46:20.000Okay, what exactly were they supposed to be worried about?
00:46:23.000Apparently, they were supposed to be worried about meritocracy, winning, avoiding conflict, a belief in objectivity, a colorblind racial frame, urgency, numbers driven, and perfectionism.
00:47:04.000And if Google actually ran on the principles it says it runs on, rather than the principles it says it hates, then Google would be bankrupt as well.
00:47:10.000But it just goes to show how much social justice narratives now come to dominate the way that so many of these major companies run their business.
00:47:18.000Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
00:47:20.000I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.