Dems panic over independent candidates, Venezuela approaches chaos, and Virginia is now pushing hard-left abortion policy. Ben Shapiro's full take on all that and much more on this morning's episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Subscribe to the full show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. Click here to get immediate access to all of Ben's newest shows and listen on your favorite streaming platform. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. 1-800-Flowers - 18 Red Roses for $29,99 or 24 Red Roses For $10,99 for $10 more. Hurry, that offer expires today! Go check that out right now! You can get the roses I m ordering for my wife for Valentine's Day, birthdays, anniversaries, or the day after your wife stays up all night taking care of your sick kids so you can get a little bit of sleep! 1 800-FLOWERS - pick your delivery date, and you get that special deal $18.99, $2999, or 24 red roses for $99,99, and a delivery date of $99.99! When it comes to life s special occasions, don t settle for less than $18,99 - let 1800-FLowers handle all the rest. That s $18 Red Roses, that s $29.99 and $99 + $99 more than that. That's a discount code, right? That s code SHOUTOUT! Shoutout to Ben Shapiro! . . . SHOUT OUT TO: Ben Shapiro on and on . on the & in this morning s episode at from @ AND to , out of touch with the common person who is just in touch at the common American And is a by or that s just like this a little so much more! on this on that ( ) - : can do it, + ... # = ENJOYING IT! & more CHEER! (AYOY! ) (THEEEEEEEE OUT OF TOUCH!
00:00:37.000I never do that on the show, but you deserve it this morning.
00:00:39.000We'll get to all of the actual news in just one second.
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00:01:52.00018 Red Roses for $29.99 or 24 Red Roses for $10 more than that.
00:02:59.000People are so angry at him that he went on MSNBC this morning and he said, like, I've never seen the vitriol like this, which suggests that, as we in the political business like to say, you're not taking flack unless you are over the target.
00:03:11.000Well, this has led some members of the media to try to hit Shultz with gotcha questions.
00:03:15.000So the line of attack on Schultz is going to be that he is a delusional billionaire, that he happens to be extraordinarily rich, and that's the only reason he's considering running.
00:03:23.000And because he is both delusional and a billionaire, that means he is out of touch.
00:03:27.000He's out of touch with the common American person.
00:03:37.000There are no politicians in Washington, D.C.
00:03:39.000that you know or I know who are really in touch with the common man.
00:03:42.000People who, you know, actually have to scrape to save for a box of Cheerios, for example.
00:03:48.000The number of Congress people who actually know how much a box of Cheerios costs is zero because they have aides who do all their shopping for them.
00:03:54.000I mean, Hillary Clinton, as of 2016, had not driven herself anywhere in two decades.
00:04:00.000Donald Trump plasters his toilets in gold.
00:04:02.000The people in our politics who are at the top levels are not people who are scrimping and saving with the coupon saver in order to make the bills that month.
00:04:11.000And yet, Howard Schultz is the one being dragged across the room for it.
00:05:14.000And this is supposed to show that he's out of touch.
00:05:16.000This is the same routine that the media did with George H.W.
00:05:18.000Bush in 1991 when they suggested that he didn't know how a supermarket checkout scanner worked, even though he knew perfectly well how a supermarket checkout scanner worked.
00:05:26.000By the way, there's something ironic about Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski grilling Howard Schultz over his lack of being in touch with the common man.
00:05:34.000I will remind you that Joe and Mika were wed at the National Archives Which, by the way, is illegal.
00:05:54.000The people standing up for the common man.
00:05:56.000They're gonna tell you how much it costs in Podunk, Iowa, for a box of Cheerios.
00:06:01.000But Howard Schultz, that guy over there, he can't.
00:06:03.000The wedding, by the way, was kept under wraps.
00:06:05.000It was purposely held on Thanksgiving weekend when Washington movers and shakers were out of town, according to Vanity Fair, which covered the wedding.
00:06:11.000The ceremony was officiated by Representative Elijah Cummings, another person in touch with the common man, held in the rotunda in front of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights.
00:06:21.000So yes, I'm sure that these are the people who are going to be the police for the common man.
00:06:27.000I mean, people are seriously, seriously angry at Howard Schultz.
00:06:30.000And the reason that people are angry at Howard Schultz is because Howard Schultz has the temerity to believe that there may be a centrist road to the presidency, or at the very least, that Democrats have swiveled it too far to the left.
00:06:41.000Nobody on the right is angry at Howard Schultz today.
00:06:43.000Nobody on the right is upset at Howard Schultz.
00:06:44.000Now, Howard Schultz may in fact take suburban votes away from Donald Trump in the end, but There are not a lot of Republicans angry at Howard Schultz.
00:06:54.000I mean, when it comes to people who are running on non-insane platforms, I'm basically glad to see it.
00:06:59.000I'm not planning to vote for Howard Schultz in the 2020 election.
00:07:03.000But I do like the idea that there's more than one candidate standing against the idea that we should completely nationalize the healthcare industry, for goodness sake.
00:07:11.000Nonetheless, Howard Schultz being dragged around by his ear because he's rich.
00:07:15.000And we're now in a time of open class warfare.
00:07:17.000If you are rich, Howard Schultz, by the way, did not start off rich.
00:07:20.000There's a person who started off, as he says, in the projects, and now he's a very wealthy man.
00:07:25.000But we have to rip him down because he's very wealthy.
00:07:27.000People were tweeting out the percentage of money that he gave to charity this year, neglecting, of course, how much he already paid to the federal government in taxes this year.
00:07:37.000I give a fair amount of money to charity.
00:07:38.000By percentage of my income, it probably isn't high enough and I'd like to give more next year.
00:07:42.000It is also true that my effective tax rate is well over 40% because I live in California.
00:07:47.000The same thing I am sure is true of people like Howard Schultz.
00:07:50.000In any case, Whenever Howard Schultz says things that are eminently true, like, you can't buy your way to the presidency, people get very angry with him because he's rich.
00:07:58.000Now, we're going to ignore the fact that Elizabeth Warren has a net worth of somewhere between 10 and 18 million dollars.
00:08:03.000We're going to ignore the fact that Bernie Sanders is, by any global standard, extraordinarily wealthy.
00:08:07.000The man owns three homes, including two vacation homes.
00:08:09.000We're going to pretend that Kamala Harris is not a pretty wealthy woman.
00:08:18.000So here is Meghan McCain going after Howard Schultz and Howard Schultz saying, listen, you can't buy the presidency and the audience booing him.
00:08:26.000As long as you're a billionaire, you can run for anything.
00:08:27.000And my problem with politics right now is the influence of money.
00:08:31.000And no shade at you, but you do have to be a billionaire to run as an independent.
00:08:34.000That's why Michael Bloomberg's the other example you've given.
00:09:28.000If you run a good campaign, you can still win elections, even if you are not spending the most money.
00:09:32.000In fact, with the rise of social media, it is certainly true that spending great amounts of money in the wrong places are not going to help you at all.
00:09:42.000People aren't angry at Shultz because he's a billionaire.
00:09:44.000The reason people are angry at Shultz is because Shultz is saying reasonable things and Democrats aren't allowed to say reasonable things because that humiliates other Democrats who are not saying reasonable things.
00:09:53.000So yesterday, here was Howard Shultz slamming Kamala Harris over her idiotic notion that we should nationalize the entire healthcare industry.
00:10:00.000He just played Senator Harrison saying she wants to abolish the insurance industry.
00:10:52.000Again, Mayor Bloomberg, I think it was, who said, I've studied independent runs, and what an independent run would do in 2020 is simply split the anti-Trump vote and help Donald Trump get re-elected.
00:11:04.000And Howard Schultz himself said, I'm only going to run if there's a real pathway to victory, as opposed to simply being a spoiler.
00:11:11.000Okay, well, again, the Democrats are deathly afraid of this because they've tacked too far to the left.
00:11:15.000They know they've tacked too far to the left, and they're scared.
00:11:18.000So their real goal here is to have Schultz run inside the Democratic Party so that they can sideline him, right?
00:11:23.000And that's what they are doing with Michael Bloomberg.
00:11:25.000We'll get to Bloomberg in just one second.
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00:12:34.000So the Democrats want to keep the moderates who would run for independent inside the Democratic Party, not because they actually want them there, but because it gives them the ease of sidelining them.
00:12:43.000Now, Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, who was in favor of a soda tax, most famously, and he's very anti-gun, he's going to run, presumably, inside the Democratic primary.
00:12:54.000He's saying many of the same things that Schultz is saying, but he's not receiving quite the sameire.
00:12:58.000So here's Bloomberg yesterday talking about the insanity of the Green New Deal being proposed by Democrats, which would cost them $50 trillion over 10 years, outlaw cars and cut the military in half.
00:13:07.000Here's Michael Bloomberg taking that apart.
00:13:09.000I think it's time as a party that we started putting some meat on the bone and laying out exactly how a Green New Deal should, what it should include.
00:13:18.000And I believe that that plan should be bold and ambitious and most importantly achievable.
00:13:24.000I'm a little bit tired of listening to things that are pie in the sky that we never are going to pass or never going to afford.
00:13:31.000I think it's just disingenuous to promote those things.
00:13:34.000You've got to do something that's practical.
00:13:36.000So obviously what he is saying is true.
00:13:38.000Democrats are not afraid of Bloomberg.
00:13:47.000Get the moderates in the room and then push them off to the fringes, the moderates, by using identity politics.
00:13:52.000And you can see this From the most passionate of the members of the Democratic base.
00:13:56.000So there's a former campaign aide for Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.
00:14:01.000And this former campaign aide, whose name is Shaheed, he was, he came forward and he was talking about Howard Schultz.
00:14:08.000Listen to the tactics that he was using to try and marginalize Howard Schultz.
00:14:12.000Regardless of the third party thing, I think it tells you way more about what white male billionaires think about themselves, that they should be in charge.
00:14:19.000And I think in this moment in time where you have all these working class people of all backgrounds who've been hurt by the Trump administration, to put another white male billionaire who thinks the deficit is the biggest crisis in the country, that is ridiculous given where the electorate is at.
00:14:34.000I think Ocasio-Cortez, one of the reasons she's popular is because she's a working class person from the Bronx.
00:14:38.000We need to see more leaders like that.
00:14:39.000Okay, so Waleed Shaheed is making the case inside the Democratic Party, and this is precisely the reason why Howard Schultz should never run inside the Democratic Party.
00:14:46.000Because the rip on him is going to be that he's too rich and too white.
00:14:49.000Neither of which is an argument, both of which are emotional appeals to identity politics and tribal polarization.
00:14:57.000If you're Howard Schultz, you're a nut to run inside the Democratic Party.
00:15:00.000If you're Michael Bloomberg, you are crazy to run inside the Democratic Party.
00:15:03.000You will be marginalized so quickly it will make your head spin because you're rich and you're not a member of a minority group that matters.
00:15:08.000Michael Bloomberg's Jewish, but that's not a minority group that matters.
00:15:11.000You have to have a certain shade of skin, a hue of skin, in order for you to be taken seriously as a minority inside the Democratic Party these days.
00:15:19.000Now, the reason that all of this matters is because what Democrats really want to avoid is having to moderate their positions.
00:15:27.000Yesterday, Kamala Harris had to do just that.
00:15:29.000So, we talked about yesterday on the program, Kamala Harris did a CNN town hall in which she simply spit out that she wanted to get rid of all private health insurance in the country.
00:15:37.000Two-thirds of Americans are on some form of private health insurance.
00:15:40.000And virtually the entire system rests on private health insurance, employer-guaranteed health insurance, employer benefits.
00:15:47.000Kamala Harris said she just wanted to do away with all of it.
00:15:49.000Well, yesterday, she had to backtrack it.
00:15:51.000Now, this was really funny because she went out in front, right?
00:15:54.000She said, okay, let's get rid of all private health insurance.
00:15:56.000And then you saw potential contenders like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
00:16:01.000You saw him come forward and say, yeah, I agree.
00:16:06.000And then she just slowly backed away, leaving Sherrod Brown standing there, holding the bag of flaming dog poop that is nationalized healthcare.
00:16:14.000So over the last 24 hours, she has backtracked.
00:16:17.000You'll recall that she said on CNN's town hall, quote, I believe the solution, and I actually feel very strongly about this, is that we need to have Medicare for all.
00:16:25.000Now, first of all, we should note, what they're actually talking about is not Medicare for all.
00:16:29.000They're talking about Medicaid for all, which is the sort of poverty-based government program that exists for the very poor in this country, and that shows really not a lot of evidence of having any sort of serious impact on the health outcomes of Americans.
00:16:43.000Jake Tapper pointed out that if you like your insurance, you wouldn't get to keep it.
00:16:47.000And Harris said, let's eliminate all of that.
00:16:52.000CNN reports, as the furor grew, a Harris advisor on Tuesday signaled that the candidate would also be open to the more moderate health reform plans, which would preserve the industry being floated by other congressional Democrats.
00:17:03.000It represents a compromised position that risks angering Medicare for All proponents, who view eliminating private health insurance as key to enacting their comprehensive reform.
00:17:13.000Her national press secretary, Ian Sams, told CNN, Medicare for All is the plan she believes will solve the problem and get all Americans covered, period.
00:17:20.000She has co-sponsored other pieces of legislation that she sees as a path to getting us there, but this is the plan she is running on.
00:17:26.000All of this happened after a bunch of Democrats came out and said, uh, this is a bad idea.
00:17:31.000We have many people in our constituency who like their health care plans.
00:17:35.000Senator Dick Durbin, who is a pretty radical guy himself from Illinois, even this was too radical for him.
00:17:39.000He said it would take a mighty transition to move from where we are to that.
00:17:43.000What most of us said we would support is a Medicare-type plan, a not-for-profit public plan that is available for everyone.
00:17:48.000Tim Kaine of Virginia, former VP candidate under Hillary Clinton, one of the most ill-fated political decisions of all time, he said, I'm not going to say you have to give it up.
00:17:55.000I think the idea is to offer a nonprofit insurance plan as an option.
00:17:59.000Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is no moderate, she pushed back on Harris.
00:18:12.000And Bernie should come forward and he should say, Kamala Harris said she would support Medicare for all, but now she's weak-kneed and she's backing off that plan.
00:18:21.000The only true solution is to have the kind of healthcare they have in Cuba, and also for me to sit and sing Soviet anthems shirtless.
00:18:29.000Which is actually a thing that he's now on tape doing from like the 1980s during his honeymoon.
00:20:09.000But this is disqualifying, obviously, if the CDs that you could buy in Starbucks, not forced upon you, but that you had the option to buy, were by disproportionately white artists from Seattle.
00:20:19.000This means that Howard Schultz is a brutal racist.
00:20:23.000Here is what it says over at the Daily Beast.
00:20:26.000Over 21 years, Starbucks released and sold 262 records using Discogs.com.
00:20:31.000A good percentage of these were compilations like Music for Little Hipsters or British Folk.
00:20:35.000The single artist albums, though, are overwhelmingly from white musicians, according to a review by the Daily Beast.
00:20:42.000The only living black artists we could find among the 262 Starbucks releases were Herbie Hancock, Mary J. Blige, Sly and the Family Stone, Al Green, Ben and Eve singer Angelique Kidjo, and jazz trio Soul Live.
00:21:30.000That gets tired really quickly, and that's why anyone who has a moderate position would be so unbelievably stupid to run inside the Democratic Party right now.
00:21:40.000They're just gonna destroy you based not on your positions, but based on your race, based on your sex, and based on your wealth status, based on your income line.
00:21:48.000Okay, in just a second, I'm gonna talk about the increased radicalism of Democrats at the state level on the issue of Abortion Plus, a real hit job that's been put out On a black professor at Harvard University.
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00:24:04.000There's a Virginia bill that is now set to legalize abortion all the way to point of birth.
00:24:09.000It was introduced by Democratic Delegate Kathy Tran in Virginia.
00:24:12.000When questioned about the bill on Monday by a Republican delegate named Todd Gilbert, the Virginia House Majority Leader acknowledged it would allow abortion even at the very end of pregnancy when a woman was going into labor.
00:24:22.000So the woman is going into labor at 37 weeks of pregnancy, and you can plunge a knife into the back of the baby's head and kill it under this bill.
00:24:30.000Okay, here's this lady acknowledging exactly that.
00:25:15.000If you believe that the 10 centimeters between the dilation of the cervix and the exit of the separate human being from the womb is all that defines humanity, you are insane.
00:25:25.000This is full-scale support of infanticide, and it's now being backed by Virginia Democrats.
00:25:30.000Virginia Democrats, not New York Democrats, not California Democrats, not Massachusetts Democrats.
00:26:15.000If, for the mental health of the woman, you believe that you can cut a baby apart in the womb that is fully alive, This is insane.
00:26:23.000But this is how far the Democratic Party has moved.
00:26:25.000In order to fight back against Republicans who say that life should be preserved, the position Democrats have taken is that the end of life is to be celebrated.
00:26:33.000The ending of a life that is not your own, even, is to be celebrated.
00:26:39.000The Rhode Island governor has now signaled that she is willing to go forward with all of this.
00:26:44.000According to Michael Bilger over at LifeNews.com, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, who is purportedly Catholic, she is pushing a radical pro-abortion bill.
00:26:54.000The legislation would legalize abortions for basically any reason up to birth.
00:26:59.000A state house committee is expected to vote on the bill as of today.
00:27:02.000Earlier this month, Raimondo promised to support the pro-abortion bill in her State of the State address.
00:27:09.000According to NBC10, she said, This is a war on human life, and this is, in fact, a war on religious practice.
00:27:21.000Let's be clear about the next step here.
00:27:22.000It's not just about the killing of the unborn, which should be gross and horrifying enough.
00:27:27.000What this is going to result in is the states telling doctors that they must perform these abortions or lose their medical license.
00:27:35.000Obamacare contraceptive mandates were already moving in this direction.
00:27:38.000There was already, even in the state of California, you're allowed right now to refer out to other providers who provide an abortion, but I believe you must do so.
00:27:46.000I believe that you're supposed to, I want to check the law in the state of California, but last I checked, I believe that the law in the state of California is if you're a religious practitioner, if you are an OBGYN in the state of California who doesn't perform abortions, And a woman comes in and says, I want an abortion.
00:28:01.000You must, by law, refer her to somebody who will provide that abortion, I believe.
00:28:06.000If it's not that way, it soon will be, because that is what Democrats want.
00:28:09.000Democrats are radical on these issues.
00:28:11.000This is not in line with what the American people want, but the affect of American politics is now resulting in substantive change.
00:28:20.000What I mean by this is that the hatred that members of both parties feel for one another is leading to actual policy radicalization.
00:28:28.000It used to be that people in each party, even though they disagreed with each other, they didn't really hate each other on the deep root level that members of the parties now despise one another.
00:28:39.000And what that meant is that you would at least grant the basic humanity of the person with whom you were talking.
00:28:46.000Now, when you have a conversation with somebody, if you ever wish to reach any sort of agreement or even to be in the same room with them, you have to assume good intentions.
00:28:52.000It's something I've been working on in my own life and in my own career, trying to assume good intentions of people with whom I disagree.
00:28:59.000But if the other person doesn't assume good intentions on your behalf, if they assume that your positions are driven by animus, that is going to lead them to reject your positions and take the exact polar opposite position.
00:29:10.000So, for example, if the people on the left with regard to abortion assumed that people who are pro-life simply want to preserve the life of infants, even if they disagree, then maybe they would respond by saying, okay, well, what's a reasonable way to define life?
00:29:24.000And then we can have an argument over that.
00:29:26.000I would still be pro-life and I'd still think that the pro-abortion side is wrong, but at least then you can have a conversation that is steeped in science and not steeped in insulting the other side.
00:29:34.000If, however, pro-choicers believe that pro-lifers simply want to control the bodies of women and are ensconced in a fight to be tyrannical handmaid's tale purveyors, well then their reaction is going to be, well, any attempt to limit abortion access is really about controlling the body of women and we can't have that, so let's just legalize abortion all the way up till birth.
00:29:55.000In other words, when you start assuming bad faith on the part of the other side, it leads you directly away from moderation.
00:30:00.000You can see the Democrats doing this with Howard Schultz.
00:30:03.000And Howard Schultz was one of them until he wasn't.
00:30:06.000And now that he's not one of them, they're castigating him as badly motivated.
00:30:09.000Until five minutes ago, Howard Schultz was a good guy.
00:30:11.000The kind of guy who wasn't gonna put Christmas colors on Starbucks cups, and who was going to ensure that bathrooms would be available to all without purchase in Starbucks stores.
00:30:19.000Then, he walked outside the party line, and now he's an evil, rich, white billionaire.
00:30:27.000Which means all of his positions can be thrown out as well.
00:30:30.000The reliance of Democrats on the belief in the bad intent of their political opponents, that's what's driving this radicalization right now.
00:30:37.000So we may think that it's just about, you know, fraying the social fabric, but there are actual policy ramifications to all of this.
00:30:43.000If you cross the line politically for Democrats, then many folks on the left will immediately assume you are now a bad person, and that means there can be no moderation.
00:30:54.000Okay, in just a second, we're gonna talk about where the Republican Party stands in all of this.
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00:32:07.000Okay, we're going to get to more of the Republican versus Democrat battle and an astonishing story out of Harvard where a prominent black professor is now, I think, being railroaded over really skimpy Me Too charges.
00:32:20.000We'll talk about that in just a second.
00:32:40.000I'm sitting here typing out all the things I'm going to do later today, and it's going to be unreal, but you're not going to be there for it unless you're a subscriber.
00:32:46.000Also, when you subscribe for $99 a year, you get this, the very greatest in all beverage vessels, the leftist tiers, Hot or cold tumbler.
00:32:53.000Now, you may have noticed that I've been ill lately.
00:33:28.000Our next episode of Daily Wire Backstage has been rescheduled for the evening of February 5th.
00:33:32.000Nancy Pelosi cancelled our Daily Wire Backstage and then we had to reschedule it for February 5th because that's the State of the Union address.
00:33:39.000Daily Wire, Godking, Jeremy Boring, me, Andrew Clavin, the exorable Michael Knowles and his terrible bowtie, and Alicia Krauss will be here discussing all the important issues and of course answering your questions.
00:33:48.000Will we finally see President Trump deliver the State of the Union?
00:35:44.000I have to bring this up because this is legitimately breaking as we are on the air right now.
00:35:48.000So you remember yesterday, we discussed a story.
00:35:51.000This was the story of unfortunate Empire actor Jussie Smollett.
00:35:55.000Jussie Smollett is black and gay, and he alleged, according to TMZ, that he was walking along the streets of Chicago, the mean streets of Chicago, at 2 a.m.
00:36:03.000when suddenly, out of nowhere, this is according to TMZ,
00:36:07.000They say a friend of Smollett said this, or somebody close to Smollett, which probably means Smollett, that this person, Smollett reported, that he was walking down those mean streets of Chicago when suddenly two white men emerged from the shadows carrying a noose and bleach, proceeded to throw the noose around his neck, proceeded to call him the N-word and also the F-word for gay people, pour bleach all over him, and then shout at him that this was MAGA country.
00:36:36.000In Chicago, at 2am, in 60 degree below freezing weather.
00:36:43.000They were just like hanging out on the street waiting for an obscure actor from a show that is, I'm sure, highly popular among the MAGA crowd.
00:36:50.000By the way, I do love the implication that the people in MAGA country, that their favorite show is Empire.
00:36:59.000I mean, if the implication is that MAGA people are racist, I'm pretty sure they're not tuning into Empire every single week to find Jussie Smollett.
00:37:08.000And then Chicago PD says, um, okay, well, in the original report, we didn't have any evidence.
00:37:13.000And so, and then the story gets weirder.
00:37:15.000Apparently, they just sort of let him go after bringing a noose and bleach.
00:37:19.000And yelling at him that this was MAGA country.
00:37:22.000They allegedly broke a rib, and then he somehow got out of there, and he didn't call an ambulance, and he didn't call for the police to actually pursue anyone.
00:37:30.000He just sort of sauntered over to the hospital.
00:37:31.000He drove himself to the hospital, and then he reported something to police.
00:37:36.000Now, I don't know what happened, and you don't know what happened, but neither do the police know what happened.
00:37:40.000The original report from the police is that Smollett had not told them about the MAGA country comment.
00:37:47.000Then later, the Chicago PD backtracked, and they said, oh yeah, we called up Smollett, and we asked him about it, and he said, oh yeah, that happened, by the way.
00:37:54.000Which, I mean, if I had to speculate, that sounds a lot like somebody who told a story to TMZ that was a lot more sensational than the story he told the police.
00:38:02.000Because the original story he told the police did not have the race of the suspects or the MAGA country comment.
00:38:07.000Which is just, I got mugged on the streets of Chicago.
00:38:27.000Now here is what the Chicago PD are reporting.
00:38:29.000This is according to the Associated Press.
00:38:32.000Chicago police say they've reviewed hundreds of hours of footage from downtown surveillance cameras, but haven't found footage yet of the alleged attack on Empire actor Jussie Smollett.
00:38:45.000The department said in a news release late Tuesday that detectives reviewed footage from privately owned cameras near where Smollett says he was attacked and will broaden their search by reviewing footage from traffic cameras and public bus cameras.
00:38:56.000Smollett told police he was walking downtown near the Chicago River at about 2 a.m.
00:38:59.000on Tuesday when two masked men hurled racial and homophobic slurs at him, beat him, threw an unknown substance on him, and put a rope around his neck.
00:39:07.000The 36-year-old actor, who is black and gay and plays the gay character Jamal Lyon on the Fox television show, took himself to Northwestern Memorial Hospital for treatment.
00:39:15.000Empire is shot in Chicago and is currently in production.
00:39:17.000By the way, the police said that they had tape of him leaving the store where he was shopping at 2 a.m., but no tape of what happened just outside the store.
00:39:25.000So they've reviewed hundreds of hours of tape, and they come up with nothing.
00:39:35.000Or maybe this was a story that was too good to be true, and the media jumped on it, and they decided to make it a national issue without any evidence, and none supportable by the police.
00:39:44.000Now, you know what would have been good?
00:39:46.000If the journalists had simply waited for all the facts to come out.
00:39:50.000The headlines yesterday from the media were things like Empire actor beaten and victimized by slurs and by MAGA fans.
00:40:01.000That was like the TMZ headline mentioned the MAGA thing.
00:40:51.000Meanwhile, Republicans are having their own problems.
00:40:53.000So Texas Republicans are reporting that come 2020, they are afraid they're going to lose the state.
00:40:57.000They should be afraid they're going to lose the state, given Beto O'Rourke's very strong showing against Ted Cruz in the last senatorial election.
00:41:04.000Texas GOP Chairman James Dickey has delivered a message to the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, GOP donors, and activists in the state.
00:41:11.000Nationally, Republican operatives and donors have historically taken Texas for granted.
00:41:15.000They've directed their financial and organizational muscle to more competitive regions.
00:41:19.000This is according to the Washington Examiner.
00:41:22.000Separately, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who's up for re-election next year, has spoken with the new RNC co-chairman, Tommy Hicks, about concerns that Trump could actually lose the state.
00:41:34.000I mean, if Trump loses Texas, the election is over.
00:41:36.000Of course, if Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, or Michigan and Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, then he loses the election as well.
00:41:44.000The president really has a narrow path here to 270.
00:42:04.000Trump is deeply unpopular in the suburbs.
00:42:06.000Republicans are going to have to face some basic facts when it comes to Trump 2020.
00:42:09.000They're going to have to face the fact that Donald Trump does not actually have a massive group of people who are secretly hiding in the shadows and who are going to emerge to vote for him.
00:43:37.000All President Trump has to do is be the nicest version of himself.
00:43:40.000Doesn't mean change himself, but be the nicest version of himself.
00:43:43.000It's funny, when you talk to folks who know President Trump on a one-to-one level, what they will say is that in person, on a one-to-one level, he is charming, he is generous, he's very nice to people, and then you get him in a group and he changes radically.
00:43:54.000He wants to dominate, he wants to be the alpha in the room.
00:43:56.000You know, a softer side to Trump would be such a shock to the American people, I'm not sure the American psyche could stand it.
00:44:03.000If President Trump had any appeal for suburban voters, he would clean up in 2020.
00:44:06.000Instead, he's busy alienating the very voters he needs in order to win election.
00:44:12.000There's an opening for him here, but he's gonna need to take it.
00:44:16.000Now, one of the big problems here, again, as I mentioned earlier, is that people are so polarized by Trump that they're embracing positions they wouldn't otherwise embrace.
00:44:24.000And this is particularly true among young people.
00:44:25.000There's a new poll out from Axios and SurveyMonkey showing that warmth toward socialism has grown particularly amongst the young.
00:44:32.000This is largely the effect of media coverage, but it is partially the effect of a reaction to President Trump.
00:44:38.000Some 29% of Republicans aged 18 to 34 said that they are positive toward socialism, toward the word socialism.
00:44:45.000Which should scare the living daylights out of everyone.
00:44:48.000One of my concerns about President Trump in 2016 is that Trump would be so polarizing that he would end up smearing a lot of Republican causes with his unpopularity.
00:45:02.000And if he can't do it, he needs to shut up and let others do it.
00:45:06.000This same Axios SurveyMonkey poll shows that 31% of young Republicans say inequality is a bigger problem than over-regulation of the free market.
00:45:15.00039% of young Republicans want the Feds to do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor.
00:45:21.000This is not good news for Republicans.
00:45:23.000Republicans are trending toward Democratic positions.
00:45:26.000Independents are trending toward Democratic positions.
00:45:28.000Now, Democrats are trending too far left.
00:45:30.000But that doesn't mean that Republicans don't, in fact, have a problem.
00:45:40.000We can yell as much as we want about Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax and Kamala Harris's wild proposals on guns and green new deals and all the rest.
00:45:50.000If Republicans aren't making an affirmative case for their own belief system, they've got a problem.
00:45:54.000Look, President Trump is by nature a counterpuncher.
00:46:26.000One is to implement policy, and the other is to make the case to the American people about why his policies are best and why his ideology is best.
00:46:33.000This is why all the talk about having a pragmatic president, a pragmatically minded president, is so much silliness.
00:46:40.000The most influential presidents in American history have really not been chiefly about policy.
00:46:45.000They've been chiefly about shifting the way the American people thought.
00:46:47.000I'm thinking really here of three presidents in the 20th century.
00:46:51.000Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Ronald Reagan.
00:46:53.000Those were the three presidents who did the most to shift how Americans thought.
00:47:01.000Donald Trump isn't even trying to do that, and that needs to change immediately.
00:47:04.000And if he's incapable of educating the American people, he needs to point to people who are capable of educating the American people.
00:47:10.000Because if the American people aren't educated toward conservative positions, they're not going to embrace those positions.
00:47:17.000They're just going to embrace whoever is the most magnetic candidate, and then we have cult of personality politics, which is the opposite of what conservatism would recommend.
00:47:24.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:47:31.000It's going to be out by a guy named Saurabh Amari.
00:47:33.000He is the opinion editor over at the New York Post, formerly of Commentary Magazine.
00:47:37.000It's a memoir of his journey from being an Iranian Muslim to being a Catholic.
00:47:45.000The book's called From Fire by Water, My Journey to the Catholic Faith.
00:47:49.000As you know, I am not a Catholic, I'm not a Christian, I'm an Orthodox Jew.
00:47:53.000This is a moving book about why it is that Western civilization is based on certain fundamental religious principles, and more importantly, it's a great study in comparative culture.
00:48:02.000There are a lot of people in the United States who have never studied any culture other than their own, and so they believe that America is bad, because America in a vacuum, you look at all of its flaws and you think, oh, this place, it's got serious problems.
00:48:14.000And then you look at America as compared to other places on Earth, and you realize this place is pretty fantastic.
00:48:59.000There's a news story out from the Wall Street Journal today talking about how the White House may soon be making concessions to Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris about appointing leftist judges to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:49:12.000Here is what the Wall Street Journal story says.
00:49:14.000It says, So, more than a few eyes widened this month when the White House omitted three names from the list of 50 judges Mr. Trump sent back to the Senate.
00:49:20.000court nominees, he is remaking the federal courts.
00:49:23.000So, more than a few eyes widened this month when the White House omitted three names from the list of 50 judges Mr. Trump sent back to the Senate.
00:49:31.000The three missing names were Californians nominated to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Two other Ninth Circuit nominees, Eric Miller of Washington and Bridget Bate of Arizona, were re-nominated.
00:49:41.000But Daniel Collins, Kenneth Lee, and Patrick Bumate were withheld because the White House is negotiating with Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris.
00:50:18.000If the White House is doing this, they must be off their rockers.
00:50:20.000If they believe that Kamala Harris or Dianne Feinstein will hold by any deal that allows them to vote for a conservative replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, out of their mind.
00:50:27.000First of all, if Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies in the next two years, there will be riots in this country over the Supreme Court.
00:50:32.000There will be, because Democrats are not going to stand for an actual swing vote moving to the right.
00:50:37.000This is why they're already writing... They're already writing eulogies for her in movies, right?
00:50:43.000They're already doing movies, like, on the basis of sex, which looks more boring than any movie other than, like, actual drying of paint on film.
00:50:50.000They're making full hagiographies of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the notorious RBG.
00:50:54.000If she dies while Trump is in office, all hell will break loose.
00:50:57.000You really think you're gonna count on Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris to come to your aid in this, Mr. President?
00:51:24.000Now I've mentioned Professor Fryer before on the program.
00:51:28.000He did a study last year all about police violence against black folks.
00:51:32.000He came up with the conclusion that, in fact, black folks were not shot as often as white folks in similar situations by the police, which was a controversial finding.
00:51:42.000Here's what Real Clear Investigations reports.
00:51:45.000In a December 14, 2018 piece, the New York Times set the stage by noting in its opening sentences that Roland Fryer Jr.
00:51:51.000had attained tenure at Harvard, received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and won the most prestigious award for a young American economist.
00:51:57.000In the second paragraph came the takedown, but his rapid ascent has taken a troubling turn.
00:52:02.000It's Harvard officials review a university investigator's conclusion that Dr. Fryer fostered a work environment hostile to women, one filled with sexual talk and bullying.
00:52:11.000This article and Harvard's Office for Dispute Resolution have made a near pariah of the youngest black professor ever tenured at Harvard, a man born into poverty who is still much admired among many former female and male subordinates and other people who know him well and who see the attacks on him as tinged with racism and Me Too overreaction.
00:52:27.000He is also admired among experts for his pioneering scholarship on how best to educate poor and minority children and other racial and gender issues.
00:52:35.000In an article littered with sins against honest journalism, the Times vastly overstated the criticism of Fryer in a confidential 81-page November report by the Office of Dispute Resolution, which has a staff of 10, 8 women, and 2 men.
00:52:47.000The report seems subtly and skillfully biased against a man whom ODR branded a sexual harasser for, among other things, the kind of off-color jokes and teasing of both male and female subordinates that more risk-averse bosses avoid.
00:52:58.000But it at least made clear that Friar 41 has never been accused of making a pass at a subordinate or asking for sex.
00:53:07.000So this is a long report about exactly how it is that the ODR at Harvard blew it, and how they overestimated the amount of terrible, terrible things that Fryer did.
00:53:18.000He denies the most obvious accusations.
00:53:22.000And yet, that was enough for the New York Times to run this hit piece trying to destroy him.
00:53:27.000The reason that I think Fryer is being targeted, realistically speaking, is because Fryer is not a deep partisan.
00:53:33.000You know, Fryer happens to be somebody who performs research that sometimes sides with the left and sometimes sides with the right, but the process has been deeply flawed and deeply unfair because that is the way that it works at these universities.
00:53:45.000The accusation itself is tantamount to condemnation.
00:53:53.000The lawyers for Fryer say that the case has been racially biased as well as procedurally flawed.
00:53:58.000Fryer wrote to a friend and later shared a letter stating 30 years after watching my father be sentenced to eight years in prison because of a he say she say type encounter with a white woman in Texas with no physical evidence.
00:54:07.000I am fighting every day to prove I am innocent of allegations that threaten the work I have devoted my life to.
00:54:13.000Sullivan, who's the lawyer, told me that the Office of Dispute Resolution weighted the credibility of white witnesses far above minority witnesses.
00:54:21.000The main complaint is against Fryer as white, and that in the absence of real data, the process used racial stereotypes.
00:54:26.000As an example, he cited the Office of Dispute Resolution's disparagement of the credibility of Tania Devi, who was present for many of the allegedly harassing comments.
00:54:35.000Insisting she saw no harassment, she spoke very highly of Fryer.
00:54:39.000Although the investigator in ODR praised the credibility of the complainants, the white roommate, they tended to dismiss Devi's eyewitness recollections of what she saw and heard at the labs.
00:54:52.000Whatever it is, it is clear that the sort of kangaroo courts that happen at these universities have no relationship, really no relationship, with due process of law.
00:55:02.000Me too is fine, but we're actually gonna need evidence of things.
00:55:05.000So, you know, I think this deserves a full airing.
00:55:10.000And I think later on the show, when I have a little bit more time later today on the show, we're going to go through the full accusations against Fryer and the takedown because this is well worth discussing.
00:55:18.000Why it is that on today's college campuses, we are willing to run people out of business simply based on allegations alone without any serious evidence to suggest that the allegations are even damning.