John Bolton's book excerpt upends the Trump defense team, Pam Bondi deconstructs Hunter Biden, and it's DEFCON 1 for Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders. Ben Shapiro breaks it all down and explains why Team Trump is going to have a hard time defending themselves in the face of the growing evidence that they ve been lying to the American people for years, and why it s going to be hard to impeach President Trump. Ben also points out that if John Bolton had come forward before, he would have been allowed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and that the New York Times editorial board would have called him a "liar" if he had come out and said what he actually said, which is that he's a liar. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN, Stand Up For Your Digital Rights. Visit ExpressVPN.org/TheBenShapiroShow to get 20% off your first month with discount code: "ExpressVPN" at checkout. Use the discount code "UPVPGR" to receive $5 and get 10% off "up to $100 in total when you sign up for the offer ends July 31st. You can also join the "up for your digital rights" program, and get 5% off the first month when you become a patron! at ExpressVPN too! To find a list of all-inclusive VIP memberships, go to express.vpn.me/upforyourdigitalrights and get 15% off their first month, and 5% discount when you book a VIP membership? and get an ad discount when they become a member of the Up for 5-star VIP membership starting July 1st, they get $50 or more than $99, and they get 5-of-choice, they also get VIP access to the VIP discount, they can get a complimentary rate of $99/month, and a discount of $49/month for VIP access, they'll get $5/choice, and VIP access and 2-of course they'll also get $25/place they get a VIP discount. they'll have access to VIP access. They'll also receive an ad-only deal, and all-only three-place they can access all-of the entire place they get the VIP service, plus a complimentary 3-place discount, and two-place get $4/place get the whole place they can use the VIP membership offer, and I'll get a discount on the VIP access offer, too get $24/place that starts at $99 or $5-of VIP access?
00:00:00.000John Bolton's book excerpt upends the Trump defense team, Pam Bondi deconstructs Hunter Biden, and it's DEFCON 1 for Joe Biden against Bernie Sanders.
00:00:24.000So let's begin with everything impeachment related, because let's face it, right now impeachment and 2020 are all tied together in a ball.
00:00:31.000It is very obvious at this point that the president is not going to be impeached.
00:00:34.000That does not mean that he cannot be damaged by the impeachment hearings.
00:00:37.000And this is particularly true when you keep putting forward foolish defenses.
00:00:41.000So the fact of the matter is very simple here.
00:00:43.000The Trump defense team was putting forward a defense that Trump wanted them to put forward.
00:00:47.000He was not putting forward his own best defense.
00:00:49.000This is a point that Andy McCarthy has made at National Review.
00:00:51.000It's a point that I've been making for literally months at this point, which is that President Trump's best defense from the beginning, as soon as it became clear that there was in fact a quid pro quo, was obvious.
00:01:02.000No, the quid-pro-quo is not impeachable.
00:01:04.000And even if you don't like the quid-pro-quo, even if you think the quid-pro-quo is bad, that does not make it impeachable.
00:01:09.000President Trump rightly suspected that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election, not to the same extent as the Russians, and not in replacement of the Russians, but he was right to suspect that the Ukrainians were interfering in the 2016 election because there were multiple credible media reports on that subject, and he was being fed bad information by Rudy Giuliani about everything that was going on.
00:01:27.000In Ukraine, ranging from the crowd strike, Hillary Clinton's server being buried in the woods outside of Kiev or some such nonsense, to the Hunter Biden stuff, which indeed was suspicious.
00:01:37.000And because of that, he wanted all of that investigated, and so he used military aid to Ukraine as a way to leverage investigations out of Ukraine.
00:01:47.000You may think that it's rough and tumble.
00:01:49.000You may think that he shouldn't be using foreign policy in order to push for investigations that he could have done through the FBI or the DOJ.
00:01:59.000That should have been his argument all along.
00:02:01.000But because President Trump is pathologically incapable of acknowledging that he has ever made a mistake, And because President Trump rips anybody who ever criticizes him as the worst person in the world, President Trump's defense team was then put in the position of making an argument that is not factually based, namely that Trump held up military aid for things having to do nothing with investigations.
00:02:22.000Now, the problem with that Is it sooner or later there was going to be somebody in Trump's inner circle who said something different?
00:02:27.000And in fact, we've already seen people in Trump's inner circle saying things that are different.
00:02:30.000For example, Mick Mulvaney, his office of management and budget chief, the guy who is now his chief of staff.
00:02:36.000He suggested in a press conference openly that yes, there is a quid pro quo.
00:02:39.000No, the quid pro quo is not legitimate.
00:02:42.000And now John Bolton is suggesting the same thing.
00:02:44.000And Team Trump is being sort of upended by this supposed revelation.
00:02:49.000Now again, that shouldn't have been a revelation.
00:02:51.000The normal response from Team Trump should have been, right, that's correct, he did withhold the aid, contingent on Ukraine doing investigations, but there's nothing illegal about that, nor is there anything impeachable about that.
00:03:05.000But because President Trump insists that his people always defend, they can never make a strategic retreat, because he insists that his people always line up their defenses at the first point of contact and then hold the line no matter what, this leads to untenable situations where they are flanked.
00:03:19.000And this is sort of what has happened here with Team Trump.
00:03:22.000It doesn't mean he's going to be impeached.
00:03:23.000It does mean that it is, I would say, very likely at this point that the Senate Republicans are going to allow the witness, are going to allow John Bolton's testify.
00:03:31.000Whereas before, if John Bolton had come out and said this, they would have said, we don't need the testimony.
00:03:35.000All of this was covered by Fiona Hill.
00:03:37.000Now, because Trump has come out and called his own national security advisor a liar, we got a problem on our hands.
00:03:42.000And you can see the New York Times editorial board is over the moon about this.
00:03:45.000They're extremely happy about all of this.
00:03:48.000The New York Times editorial board today says it's just possible that common sense and reality have a shot at prying open the doors to the Senate chamber after all.
00:03:55.000After Republican senators claimed it was perfectly reasonable to put a United States president on trial without hearing from any witnesses, a few of them are showing signs of recognizing that the truth matters, or at least that the American people believe it does.
00:04:06.000Shocking but not surprising revelations from John Bolton's book manuscript, which the New York Times reported over the weekend, have made impossible to ignore what everyone has known for months.
00:04:14.000President Trump withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine to benefit himself politically and against the strenuous objections of his top aides in both parties in Congress.
00:04:23.000Okay, now again, that is actually not what Bolton charges.
00:04:25.000What Bolton charges is that Trump was interested in 2016, which is exactly what some of us have been saying for months and months and months and months.
00:04:32.000And if Trump had just admitted and said, listen, again, you may not like my judgment, but tough beans.
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00:06:17.000So, as I say, the New York Times is treating Bolton's words as a revelation.
00:06:21.000And of course, you're seeing Republican senators who are now being ripped up and down by Team Trump saying that perhaps we are going to have to have witnesses.
00:06:30.000So Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, she came out yesterday.
00:06:32.000She said, yeah, probably at some point we're probably going to have to have witnesses.
00:06:36.000She said, from the beginning, I've said that in fairness to both parties, the decision on whether or not to call witnesses should be made after both the House managers and the president's attorneys have had the opportunity to present their cases.
00:06:45.000I've always said I was likely to vote to call witnesses, just as I did in the 1999 Clinton trial.
00:07:25.000But I think that there are a lot of Republicans who are in purple states and thinking, do I want to lose my seat over the image of me covering for the president when he is going up directly against his own national security advisor?
00:07:38.000I've said for some time that I hope to be able to hear from John Bolton.
00:07:42.000I think with the story that came out yesterday, it's increasingly apparent that it would be important to hear from John Bolton.
00:07:49.000I, of course, will make a final decision on witnesses after we've heard from not only the prosecution, but also the defense.
00:07:55.000But I think at this stage it's pretty fair to say that John Bolton has a relevant testimony to provide to those of us who are sitting in impartial justice.
00:08:03.000I think it's increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton.
00:08:11.000That is, again, not particularly surprising, and it's also not surprising given the fact that the people who are closest to Trump are now having to put out statements that at the very least call into question their old statements.
00:08:19.000So I point out Mick Mulvaney's statement on John Bolton.
00:08:22.000He gave a statement yesterday talking about Bolton's claims that Mulvaney had been part of conversations in which the aid was discussed.
00:08:30.000So Mulvaney did put out a statement Yesterday, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times actually tweeted out, it said, the latest story from the New York Times coordinated with a book launch has more to do with publicity than the truth.
00:08:41.000John Bolton never informed Mick Mulvaney of any concerns surrounding Bolton's purported August conversation with the president, nor did Mr. Mulvaney ever have a conversation with the president or anyone else indicating that Ukrainian military aid was withheld in exchange for a Ukrainian investigation of Burisma, the Bidens, or the 2016 election.
00:08:56.000Further, Mr. Mulvaney has no recollection of any conversation with Mr. Giuliani resembling that reportedly described in Mr. Bolton's manuscript as it was Mr. Mulvaney's practice to excuse himself from conversations between the president and his personal counsel to preserve any attorney-client privilege.
00:09:09.000Now, we haven't actually seen Bolton's manuscript, remember, so we don't actually know what Bolton is claiming, but there's one sentence of that statement that seems to contradict Mick Mulvaney, right?
00:09:17.000Mick Mulvaney said that he had never had a conversation with Trump or anyone else indicating that military aid was withheld in exchange for a Ukrainian investigation of Burisma the Biden's Or the 2016 election.
00:09:27.000And then what exactly was Mick Mulvaney talking about when he specifically held a press conference suggesting that, sure, quid pro quos happen in foreign policy all the time.
00:09:33.000The question is whether that is legit or not.
00:09:36.000And you can see the differences even within Trump's defense team in the defenses they are presenting.
00:09:40.000So on the one hand, you have members of Team Trump saying there was no quid pro quo at all, which of course is the case that Trump would prefer be put out there, but it's not the smart case.
00:09:47.000And then you have the case put out there by lawyers who actually know what the law is and know what they are doing.
00:09:54.000So Alan Dershowitz, for all of the talk about how he's been consigned to hell, SNL actually consigned him to hell over the weekend for the grave crime of defending Trump in this impeachment trial.
00:10:14.000The moment that he defended Trump, then he was consigned to hell, and then all that old stuff comes back to haunt Alan Dershowitz, supposedly.
00:10:20.000Well, anyway, Dershowitz makes the case, the Harvard Law professor, he makes the case against impeachment yesterday, and he says, listen, you guys keep saying quid pro quo.
00:10:27.000I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.
00:10:36.000Let's assume a Democratic president tells Israel that foreign aid authorized by Congress will not be sent or an Oval Office meeting will not be scheduled unless the Israelis stop building settlements.
00:11:19.000And in fact, Pam Bondi laid out a very similar defense yesterday, because she was pointing out that quid pro quo is something that people do all the time.
00:11:26.000And when Democrats do it, it's not even considered a terrible thing, right?
00:11:32.000It was another lawyer, Eric Hirschman, rather, who is a Trump defense guy.
00:11:36.000And he says, listen, if you're talking about impeaching Trump over a quid pro quo on foreign policy, remember that time that Barack Obama literally sat with Dmitry Medvedev, who is the cutout for Vladimir Putin, and said to him that I will do something on missile defense, but you're going to need to give me flexibility until after the election.
00:11:52.000That is literally what Barack Obama said.
00:11:59.000The minute you mention Obama in any context, Twitter goes nuts.
00:12:02.000Because Obama, as we all know from the media coverage, the only scandal Obama ever had is that he wore a tan suit.
00:12:07.000Nothing ever happened with the IRS, nothing ever happened with the HHS, nothing ever happened with Fast and Furious, nothing ever happened with Russia.
00:12:13.000The Obama administration was scandal-free, right?
00:12:16.000So the minute that you mention the fact that Barack Obama acted in fairly corrupt ways on foreign policy, then suddenly it's the end of the world.
00:12:23.000Okay, but let us remember, I'm going to read you the actual transcript of what Barack Obama said to Dmitry Medvedev that was caught on a hot mic.
00:12:52.000Eric Hirschman points out this is a pretty obvious quid pro quo.
00:12:55.000President Obama used the powers of the presidency in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States' democratic process.
00:13:07.000He thus ignored and injured the interests of the nation.
00:13:11.000Does it sound familiar, House managers?
00:13:14.000It should, as the case against President Obama would have been far stronger than the allegations against President Trump.
00:13:21.000President Obama's abuse of power to benefit his own political interests was there and is here now for everyone to hear.
00:13:29.000It was a direct, unquestionable, quid pro quo.
00:13:35.000Okay, so again, he is correct about all of this.
00:13:39.000And the fact is that this was always Trump's best defense, which is that you may not like what presidents do, but this is why we have elections.
00:13:45.000We don't impeach presidents who engage in foreign policy quid pro quos, even when they benefit them politically.
00:13:51.000Like the reason that he was saying he has flexibility after the election is because he is saying, back off, back off until the election.
00:13:56.000And then after the election, I have more flexibility as to pursuing missile defense.
00:14:00.000In other words, if you wait until after the election, then maybe I'll go soft on Eastern European missile defense with regard to Russia, right?
00:14:22.000But the notion that the quid pro quo that Trump was engaged in with Ukraine was fundamentally not illegitimate, or at least not impeachable.
00:14:30.000But again, the problem for Trump and Team Trump is that they didn't make that defense because Trump forbade them from making that defense because Trump is not his own best defense attorney.
00:14:37.000Trump's strategy whenever he's accused of a thing is to pretend that the thing never ever happened.
00:14:42.000And the problem is that further facts tend to corroborate the fact that it happened even if it wasn't as bad.
00:14:47.000And Trump doesn't understand that the basic political rule which is that the coverup is usually worse than the crime is absolutely true with regard to Trump.
00:14:54.000Every activity in which Trump has allegedly engaged that has caused legal trouble for him has been an activity where the coverup was worse than the actual crime.
00:15:11.000You know what turns that into a subject for criminal investigation?
00:15:15.000When you start telling your lawyer how to funnel money to Stormy Daniels to shut her up, right?
00:15:19.000At that point, that's when all of a sudden this balloons out and becomes a bigger issue.
00:15:24.000You know what is actually not that huge a deal, or at least it may be a big deal, but really it's not.
00:15:29.000It's more like you're just mouthing off.
00:15:30.000When you tell randos that you don't like the ambassador to Ukraine, when you tell randos like Lev Parnas, yeah we had a conversation, and I said I don't like that ambassador, and if you have any information on her, let me know.
00:15:40.000That's not actually anything close to impeachable.
00:15:43.000If Trump had just said that, All right.
00:16:40.000We can talk about his foreign policy accomplishments.
00:16:42.000We can talk about all of those things.
00:16:43.000But if we're talking about John Bolton, that's not great for the president.
00:16:49.000Now, one of the things that this has led to, of course, is the media to be able to try and condemn Trump supporters as utterly crazy, right?
00:16:56.000Because now you have John Bolton going up directly against the president.
00:16:59.000People who liked John Bolton five seconds ago now hate John Bolton.
00:17:01.000You're seeing people who hate John Bolton generally on foreign policy now trying to condemn him as a Democratic stooge.
00:17:08.000I think Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs both did this last night, which is of course very silly.
00:17:11.000John Bolton is not a Democratic stooge.
00:17:13.000There's only one group of people who hate John Bolton more than Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs, and that is Democrats.
00:17:19.000They despised John Bolton until today.
00:17:21.000The fact is that if you're trying to paint John Bolton as a liar, and this is now a test of credibility between Donald Trump and John Bolton.
00:17:28.000That's not going to end great for Donald Trump.
00:17:30.000Now, does that mean that this thing isn't going to blow back on Democrats?
00:17:33.000No, we're going to get to that in just one second, because here's the problem as we move into 2020.
00:17:36.000The person on the Democratic side who's most likely to be hit over all of this is Joe Biden, which means that Bernie Sanders is more likely to become the nominee, which we'll get to in a moment.
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00:19:14.000And the reason for that is because what was at the center of this whole Trump wanting to know about Ukraine stuff was his suspicion of Joe Biden.
00:19:21.000Well, yesterday, Pam Bondi, who is one of Trump's lawyers, former attorney general of the state of Florida, she came forward and she gave a case against Hunter Biden that's pretty damning because the reality is that no matter whether you think Joe Biden is pure as the driven snow or what, Hunter Biden certainly is not.
00:19:36.000Here's Pam Bondi going after Hunter Biden.
00:19:39.000Burisma was so corrupt that George Kent said he intervened to prevent USAID from co-sponsoring an event with Burisma.
00:20:37.000Beth Bauman, writing for townhall.com, talks about this today.
00:20:40.000She says, although former Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly talked about ending corruption, ABC News launched an investigation called Hunter Biden's Foreign Deals.
00:20:47.000It talked about Biden's dealings with Burisma and even in China.
00:20:50.000Less than two weeks after the VP and his son were seen in China, Hunter's firm had new business with the government-controlled bank of China.
00:20:55.000Bondi explained, in fact, every person who was asked about Hunter Biden's involvement with Burisma agreed there was a potential appearance of a conflict of interest.
00:21:02.000Multiple House Democrat witnesses, including those from the Department of State, the NSC and others, unanimously testified that there was a potential appearance of conflict of interest.
00:21:23.000On the one hand, Democrats believe that Donald Trump is having real trouble in this election.
00:21:27.000They look at the national polling and they see that Donald Trump is trailing to all of their major candidates.
00:21:31.000And they say, okay, well, Trump has a pathological inability to keep his mouth shut.
00:21:35.000Trump says wild things on a regular basis.
00:21:37.000He did not perform well for Republicans in 2018.
00:21:39.000And so he didn't win the popular vote in 2016.
00:21:42.000We don't think that we need to run somebody super electable to beat Donald Trump in 2020.
00:21:47.000So on the one hand, Democrats are overestimating the unpopularity of Donald Trump.
00:21:52.000Because they look at Trump and they say, this is a person who makes a lot of mistakes.
00:21:54.000We could run a ham sandwich against this guy and win.
00:21:56.000And then on the other hand, they're looking at Joe Biden and they're seeing somebody who is doddering, somebody who's old, and somebody who is now implicated in questions about corruption, which really hurts him when he's attempting to attack Trump on character grounds.
00:22:09.000If you're trying to attack Trump as a corrupt actor, and in the meantime, you're weathering charges that your son was cashing in on your last name, you got a problem on your hands.
00:22:18.000And so Biden's candidacy is now caught in the middle.
00:22:20.000And he has no rock core of enthusiasm.
00:22:22.000There's no enthusiasm for his candidacy.
00:22:25.000And so what you're starting to see is him fade in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, which means that right now the odds on favor for the Democratic nomination is a geriatric communist, Bernie Sanders, which is unbelievable.
00:22:37.000Good for Trump in the sense that if he had to sort of handpick a candidate Trump can run against, it would be Bernie.
00:22:41.000Horrible for the country in that half the country will now resonate to a communist message.
00:22:46.000And not only will they resonate to the messages of a com... And by the way, when he says democratic socialists, he doesn't mean democratic socialists.
00:22:50.000That is just him putting a friendly face on all of this.
00:22:53.000The heads of Norway and Denmark will talk in copious detail about the glories of capitalism.
00:23:10.000First, let's talk about that time they had to break down your car, and you had to go to the kind of generic auto parts store, and they gave you the runaround.
00:25:59.000Whenever people say, here's who I would like to run against, beware.
00:26:02.000I'm old enough to remember when a lady named Hillary Clinton was encouraging Donald Trump to run in 2016 because she would love to have run against Donald Trump.
00:26:09.000She got her wish, and now she's wandering the woods of Chappaqua while Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office laughing at her and tweeting about her on a regular basis.
00:26:48.000The best that Marxist programs can do is live off the back of capitalism like leeches and redistribute the profits and the products that are created by the free market.
00:26:56.000That is the best thing that any sort of socialistic program can do.
00:27:29.000So when Elizabeth Warren came out and she was like, let me explain to you how I'm going to pay for all of this.
00:27:34.000I'm going to find money in the anus of a unicorn, and I'm going to use that to pay for this $19 trillion healthcare program that actually costs $33 trillion, but I'm going to call it $19 trillion by double counting all this money.
00:27:47.000When people said when she did that and everybody laughed at her, it was like, oh, because suddenly the fantasy had been made reality.
00:27:53.000And it turns out that everybody had been fantasizing about the Victoria's Secret model.
00:27:58.000And what they actually got in the mail was the not online version of the Match.com profile.
00:28:04.000It turns out that communism is a Match.com profile.
00:28:07.000Communism looks real nice in the Match.com profile photo, and then they show up at the coffee bean, and it turns out they're a hideous old hag.
00:28:47.000It's not one of those things where, as one of the leaders of the effort for Medicare for All said, I don't know how much it's going to cost.
00:28:58.000Well, that's not a likely way to pass something through the Senate saying, I don't know how much it's going to cost, and the person who's offering it.
00:29:06.000So we've got to get real about what we can do to protect people's health here.
00:29:10.000Okay, but you can see the difference in the crowds.
00:29:11.000Okay, so here's Biden speaking yesterday.
00:29:13.000If you saw the tape yesterday of Bernie Sanders speaking, it's all young people.
00:29:21.000Now, Bernie Sanders is counting on all those young people to show up and vote for him in the 2020 election.
00:29:25.000I'm not sure that that's a good bet for him, but it is obvious that everybody above the age of 65 supports Joe Biden, and nobody under the age of 40 supports Joe Biden.
00:29:34.000Biden, by the way, also is saying that he can take a punch.
00:29:36.000That is quite unclear at this point, given the fact that he has not risen in the polls, he has basically stagnated in the polls, and he's run a very poorly organized campaign.
00:29:45.000Here is Joe Biden, who basically was trying to limp his way to contention here, I mean, it felt a lot like, it feels a lot like Jeb Bush in the latter days.
00:30:45.000So, the notion that that makes him broadly electable across the country is silly.
00:30:49.000On the one hand, I don't think he's super electable.
00:30:51.000On the other hand, he's got a shot, and putting a communist in a position where he might have a shot at the presidency seems like a problem.
00:30:56.000We'll get to the electability arguments with regard to Bernie Sanders in just one second.
00:31:00.000First, if you know anything about this show, you know this is an extremely pro-life show.
00:31:04.000Last year, I spoke at the March for Life, did my podcast live, and gave a speech to hundreds of thousands of people who are marching for the cause.
00:31:10.000This caused us an enormous amount of grief from our political adversaries who literally sit there trying to take words out of context on this show just to attack our advertisers.
00:31:18.000Last year, we lost a lot of revenue because of that.
00:31:41.000Well, right now we have a special deal.
00:31:42.000If you go to dailywire.com from now until January 31st, you can speak up not only on behalf of conservative positions, you can also help out the pro-life cause when you use promo code LIVEACTION.
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00:32:10.000So one of the reasons that Democrats are downplaying the electability problems of Bernie Sanders is because they are in love with the sound of their own voices.
00:32:23.000They've come to the conclusion that the people who support Donald Trump are seven, there are seven of them, and that they're all crazy.
00:32:29.000And this is the way, truly, this is the way that the media talk about supporters of Donald Trump, not just Trump himself.
00:32:35.000Ripping on Trump, look, Trump's the president, you can rip on him as much as you want.
00:32:38.000But Hillary Clinton made a bad mistake in the 2016 election when she suggested that everybody who supported Donald Trump was deplorable.
00:32:46.000Same sort of mistake that Barack Obama made in 2008.
00:32:49.000The media covered for him, but it was a mistake when he suggested that everyone who was going to vote for his opponent was a bitter clinger.
00:32:53.000Well now, members of the media are full-on endorsing this point of view.
00:32:57.000I mean, laughing at people who support Trump.
00:32:59.000They're all a bunch of toothless hicks from the South.
00:33:02.000Now, many of these people, I really doubt, have spent a lot of time in the modern South, but they have this image that the South is basically a bunch of cartoon characters from 1840.
00:33:10.000Anyway, Rick Wilson, who used to be a true never-Trump Republican, right?
00:33:15.000A guy who not only opposed Trump in 2016, but has determined that Trump is now the font of all evil and must be stopped at any cost, including voting for Democrats, which is just ridiculous in my view.
00:33:29.000And in the course of this clip, you're going to hear what Democrats actually think of Republicans.
00:33:33.000Because they think this, they think that they can actually run a geriatric socialist for the presidency of the United States and win.
00:33:39.000Because after all, the Donald Trump supporters are a bunch of toothless morons.
00:33:43.000He knows that this is, you know, an administration defined by ignorance of the world.
00:33:49.000And so, that's partly him playing to their base and playing to their audience, you know, the credulous boomer Rube demo that backs Donald Trump, that wants to think that Donald Trump's a smart one and they're all, y'all elitist.
00:34:06.000You would lead us with your geography and your maps and your spelling, even though my... Your math and your reading.
00:34:35.000Also, the notion that everybody who's voting for Donald Trump is a rube and a hick who doesn't know their geography.
00:34:42.000I mean, it's this sort of take on politics that could come back to bite Democrats directly in the ass.
00:34:48.000Because if they have decided that they're writing off half the country... They did this in 2016.
00:34:52.000Half the country are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes.
00:34:54.000They're doing the same thing now, but they've upped the ante because this is how much they hate Trump.
00:34:57.000They hate Trump so much that Trump is now a prism for how they view every other human being.
00:35:01.000It's not that there are a lot of people who vote for Trump to stop Bernie Sanders, or voted for Trump to stop Hillary Clinton, or that don't like a lot of what Trump says or does, but like a lot of his policies.
00:35:09.000No, it's that they're a bunch of hick rubes who don't understand geography and math, who don't know how to add.
00:35:15.000Which is weird, because on average, I believe in the last election cycle, on average, Republican voters averaged a higher income level than Democratic voters, I believe, in the last election cycle.
00:35:26.000If you do it on a county-by-county level, then the wealthiest counties voted for Hillary Clinton, but if you average the incomes, I believe that the Democrats were actually lower income on average than the Republicans were in the last election cycle.
00:35:37.000So this idea that they're a bunch of hick roobs voting for Donald Trump, And that sort of attitude is what's leading them to believe, OK, we can literally run this old badger communist, this old wobbly from 1918, this guy who had a picture of Eugene Debs, an actual honest to God socialist in his Senate office for years.
00:35:54.000We can run that guy and we can win because we could run anything and win.
00:35:58.000And this is again, this is the view not just of the Don Lemons of the world, who's just a clown.
00:36:35.000I mean, you can't stop yourself hysterically laughing at hackney jokes about how people in the South don't know how to do math.
00:36:42.000I think I'm going to take your high dudgeon with a grain of salt next time.
00:36:45.000But again, it's not just the folks on CNN.
00:36:46.000It's people like MSNBC's Nicole Wallace, who suggested yesterday that everybody who's defending Donald Trump in this trial is a flat earther.
00:36:53.000I've known Chris Wallace my entire career in politics.
00:36:58.000And just the, I mean, I called it the Flat Earth Society.
00:37:01.000The Republicans are clinging to this argument that the Earth is flat.
00:37:04.000Chris Wallace, obviously, they're trying to cover the same live event we're covering and saying, no, we have a first-hand witness who saw the Earth is round.
00:37:11.000And he's just trying to tell these senators before they render a judgment that the facts reveal the Earth is indeed round.
00:37:18.000Everything is about a flat earth, and everybody who opposes me is an idiot, and that's why we can run this person who lives in a world of communist fantasy, where the United States is the biggest problem on planet Earth, and we can run him, and he'll win.
00:37:38.000Meanwhile, the Democrats are strategically torn in Iowa, according to the New York Times, as they streamed out of the banquet ballroom.
00:37:44.000Following a Scott County fundraiser Saturday night, one after the other Iowa Democrats admitted they still had not decided whom to support just over a week before the state's presidential caucuses.
00:37:53.000But by not mentioning his name as they rattled off their shortlist, they made clear whom they would not support, Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist from Vermont who has taken the lead in recent polls.
00:38:01.000By the way, I love that the media have now resonated to just calling him a Democratic Socialist because he insists on it.
00:38:06.000I would like to see Bernie Sanders forcibly disavow communism.
00:38:09.000Like explain, what are the ideological problems of communism?
00:38:12.000Has anybody asked him to distinguish Democratic Socialism from Socialism?
00:38:17.000What do you favor about Democratic Socialism that you do not favor about Socialism itself?
00:38:23.000If all you mean is Socialism where people get to vote on the rules of the tyrannical government, then that's just called Socialism because they do have fake elections in one-party states.
00:38:36.000Because presumably, when he says democratic socialism, he does not mean that the people actually get to decide on their own economic fortunes.
00:38:41.000If he actually meant that, then he would not be a socialist, right?
00:38:46.000But what I mean by that is I'm a capitalist.
00:38:48.000Okay, because the reality is I believe there are certain fundamental rights that are protected by the United States Constitution, and that democracies cannot overrule those rights.
00:38:55.000There are certain rights that are sacrosanct.
00:38:57.000There are very few people on planet Earth who are pure Democrats, meaning that they think a majority should decide everything, because if you are a pure Democrat, you...
00:39:05.000That's an unsustainable moral position.
00:39:06.000There is no one on planet Earth, even the most quote-unquote populist minded people, who believe that pure majorities should simply decide everything in the world.
00:39:13.000Because if a pure majority decide to kill the minority, presumably you would not be in favor of democracy at that point.
00:39:19.000There are certain sacrosanct principles you care about.
00:39:21.000So adding the word democratic to socialist does not change the math.
00:39:24.000You have to explain what you mean by socialist.
00:39:28.000So what in Marxism does Bernie Sanders, like why has nobody ever asked him?
00:39:32.000Explain to me in pure detail why we should not nationalize this particular industry.
00:39:37.000Why should we not nationalize an industry?
00:39:40.000Explain to me why the free market is good, right?
00:39:42.000You say that you're a democratic socialist like Norway.
00:39:44.000Well, instead of just using the term democratic socialist, why don't you explain to me What about Norway is good in terms of the free market?
00:39:51.000Not the side you always talk about, like the nationalized healthcare.
00:39:53.000We get that you want to nationalize healthcare.
00:39:54.000The question is why you don't want to nationalize the oil and gas industry in the United States?
00:39:58.000Why you don't want to nationalize every other aspect of industry?
00:40:01.000Why you don't want to nationalize the stock market?
00:40:29.000I don't think you get to vote to kill your neighbor.
00:40:31.000I don't think you get to vote to steal your neighbor's property.
00:40:34.000Bernie Sanders presumably believes that no matter how many people vote in favor of private healthcare, that is still immoral.
00:40:42.000And then that should be, that should presumably be overridden by the powers of government.
00:40:45.000There are no rights that are protectable from government.
00:40:47.000So what exactly does Bernie Sanders mean by democratic socialist that is different in any way from socialist?
00:40:51.000In any case, the New York Times is reporting that there are a lot of people who are against Bernie, but are divided on how exactly to approach the situation with regard to Bernie.
00:40:59.000And the problem is that the more they're divided, the more Bernie Sanders' core base makes sense.
00:41:03.000In 2016, this is exactly what happened to Trump.
00:41:05.000There were a lot of people who were not going to vote for Trump in Iowa or New Hampshire.
00:41:10.000But Trump's base was strong enough, his core was strong enough that he was able to weather a very fractured field.
00:41:15.000Michelle Goldberg, who's been rooting for Bernie all along over at the New York Times, she says it's no longer far-fetched to think Sanders could be the Democratic nominee.
00:41:22.000And then she talks about how he's got all the buzz.
00:41:26.000Now, just understand, this is Bernie Sanders' actual candidacy, okay?
00:41:29.000This is Michelle Goldberg, a fan of Bernie Sanders, describing what happened at his rally the other night.
00:41:35.000When the band was done, three indigenous women took the stage to pay respects to the Native Americans forced off the land that became Iowa.
00:41:42.000The filmmaker Michael Moore came on and described Donald Trump as the end point of a country founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves.
00:41:49.000The next day, at a campaign stop in Perry, Moore called women's underrepresentation in Congress a form of gender apartheid.
00:41:56.000AOC spoke and said, I'm here because Senator Sanders is actually committed to breaking up ICE.
00:42:03.000Seriously, I don't care how much Americans hate Trump.
00:42:05.000You think that that's not going to be a campaign for Trump?
00:42:08.000Seriously, you think the American people are ready to declare that America should not exist because of the exploitation of lands seized from Native Americans, because America was a country built on genocide and slavery, because Congress is engaging in gender apartheid, and because it's time to break up immigration enforcement?
00:42:35.000Once there's a final two, anybody can win.
00:42:37.000And Jeremy Corbyn could have been Prime Minister of Britain, and until the very last minute, when Boris Johnson blew him out, there were people who thought he was gonna win.
00:42:56.000Meanwhile, This week marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Allied forces.
00:43:03.000And people who experienced the Holocaust are worried about the increase in antisemitism across the world as well they should be.
00:43:09.000The New York Times reports, the ceremony at Auschwitz culminated a week of events around the world, including a commemoration in Jerusalem, attended by dozens of world leaders who urged collective vigilance against the resurgence of antisemitism worldwide.
00:44:05.000They don't care about anti-Semitism unless it serves their purposes, which is why Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are on a committee holding a hearing this week in the House about Holocaust Memorial Day.
00:44:15.000Rashida Tlaib, who literally pushed a blood libel over the weekend suggesting that Jews kidnapped a Palestinian child and then drowned him in a well.
00:44:25.000I mean, that is classical anti-Semitism will be overseeing.
00:44:28.000Sitting on a committee that discusses Holocaust Memorial Day.
00:44:30.000day, Ilhan Omar, who has never missed an opportunity to be a raging anti-Jew, anti-Semite, tweeted out yesterday on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we mourn the lives of six million Jews who were systematically murdered.
00:44:41.000Today and every day, we must redouble our efforts to confront anti-Semitism and all forms of religious discrimination and say, hashtag never again, which is insane because Ilhan Omar is a supporter of terror groups.
00:44:52.000A year ago, she tried to pass a boycott law comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
00:45:00.000She's going to be at that hearing, presumably proclaiming that Donald Trump is the real anti-Semite, while she continues to support the cause of the Palestine Liberation Organization, run by an actual Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas.
00:45:26.000And no, there is no quote-unquote Palestinian right of return.
00:45:29.000There has never been in human history a quote-unquote right of return of a population that has left by a majority group that does not wish to retake those people in.
00:45:40.000Okay, the fact is that even Zionism was approved by the British mandate.
00:45:45.000People were moving in at the behest and with the willingness of the group that was there.
00:45:49.000And they were not there to quote-unquote destroy the ruling mandate.
00:45:52.000Okay, the fact is the Palestinians have openly stated that they are there in order to destroy the State of Israel.
00:45:57.000They've never accepted the existence of the State of Israel.
00:46:00.000And the idea that you're going to rectify all imbalances by destroying the state of Israel, and that's not anti-Semitic, is bizarre in the extreme.
00:46:06.000The idea that Israel has a peace partner is bizarre in the extreme.
00:46:10.000Mahmoud Abbas, right, Mahmoud Abbas is an open Holocaust denier.
00:46:14.000He literally wrote his thesis, he wrote a college thesis about, it was a doctoral thesis in 1982, questioning the extent of the Nazi genocide.
00:46:26.000So, those are the people that Israel is facing down, and we are told that if Israel does not make concessions to those people, then obviously Israel is the problem.
00:46:33.000But don't worry, we all hate anti-Semitism and we're all fighting anti-Semitism.
00:46:37.000It is anti-Semitism being accepted across the board.
00:46:41.000Watch the blowback to the Trump peace plan today, in which the soft bigotry of anti-Semitism is allowed to flourish, in which Palestinians suggest that Jews are only colonial oppressors from the West, and shouldn't be on the land in the first place, and they decide that they're going to protest the idea that there should be a Jewish state in the first place.
00:46:56.000But don't worry, it's not anti-Semitism, it's just anti-Zionism.
00:46:58.000And not only that, but Palestinians have a right to swamp the Jewish state with populations that weren't even born In those areas in the first place, not just a right of return to quote-unquote the new state of Palestine, but a right to return to their original homes, a right that has never existed in human history so far as I am aware, considering that there are borders that exist.
00:47:17.000But nonetheless, the left will continue to pretend that anti-Semitism is a figment of the right-wing imagination when it comes to the left and only exists on the right, and Muslim anti-Semitism, which is the greatest threat to the future of Jews living on planet Earth, that that is not really a problem in the first place.
00:47:33.000Alrighty, time for a quick thing I like and then a thing that I hate.
00:47:35.000So if you want to know more about the quote-unquote right of return and why the Palestinian right of return has always been a fig leaf, if you want to know, you know, the real facts about why it is that this is such a ridiculous argument that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who either voluntarily left or left in the midst of a war in 1948, that they and their descendants should be allowed to return to their original homes when Jews were forcibly expelled, like hundreds of thousands of them, and absorbed by the nascent state of Israel,
00:48:01.000If you want to understand why the right of return was always a bad faith attempt to destroy the state of Israel, all you have to do is read a book by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wolf called The War of Return, How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace.
00:48:13.000That is coming out, I believe, very shortly.
00:48:43.000Like when we talk about refugees, usually you talk about how refugees cannot be barred They cannot be barred from going somewhere else, right?
00:48:51.000But usually when you talk about refugees, there's very little talk about resettling them in the place where they originally came from against the wishes of the ruling government, right?
00:49:02.000That is not something that has historically been precedented.
00:49:09.000Right, so this is the one area where the West has kept this ridiculousness alive, and the reason for that is because this has been pushed by the Palestinian leadership, and the Palestinian leadership has pushed for it because they understand that in swamping the state of Israel with now, what would it be, four million registered Palestinians, according to the UN's RWA?
00:49:24.000Something like that, that they would be destroying the state of Israel, which of course is the ultimate goal here.
00:49:28.000Now, what's amazing about the Trump peace plan that is gonna be presented today is not only does it recognize realities on the ground, but also, there's a good shot that a lot of the Arab states are basically gonna say, of course, this should be the basis of further negotiation.
00:49:39.000Because the truth is that as states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Jordan recognize that the Palestinians just want to destroy the state of Israel, they've always understood that, but they understand that the greater threat now is not the state of Israel, never was the state of Israel, it's actually Iran.
00:49:53.000They've started to worry less about the fake claims of the Palestinians that they're going to destroy the state of Israel and wipe all the Jews into the sea.
00:50:00.000Instead, they have decided That pursuing peace is actually a possibility.
00:50:04.000If peace is to be pursued, then the right of return, which was always a talking point and always nonsense, is going to have to be dropped because it is indeed nonsense.
00:50:24.000And it explains in much fuller detail why the quote-unquote right of return is historically inaccurate, historically foolhardy, is an obstacle to any sort of peace deal in the first place.
00:50:34.000By the way, Israel is desperate to make a peace deal.
00:50:37.000They would love nothing better than to have a peace partner that they could just hand this off to and be like, okay, we don't want anything to do with this.
00:50:43.000Like, every Israeli prime minister for the last 30 years has wanted to do this.
00:50:48.000The problem is that nobody who's running the show over there in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip is trustworthy because they're all Holocaust-denying terrorists who would like to destroy every Jew living in the region, ranging from Tel Aviv to Haifa, not just worrying about, you know, Hebron or any of the other quote-unquote settlements.
00:51:04.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:51:10.000Okay, so Stephen King made a big boo-boo the other day.
00:51:29.000He always writes books that have really interesting sort of beginnings, and then mediocre middles, and then the end everything just explodes.
00:51:34.000Like that's the end of every one of his books.
00:51:36.000Every one of his books is there's a giant explosion.
00:51:39.000Really every single one like from the stand to to the shining so like all of them and with just like there's a big explosion you know okay I guess that's a way to end a book okay I suppose in any case Stephen King who is a wild leftist right he hates Trump he He hates conservatives, really hates them.
00:51:56.000And if you read any of his books, they are wildly biased against the right.
00:51:59.000Every one of his books is about some small town in Maine, where oppressive right-wingers are trying to shut down the local lesbians.
00:52:05.000Every single one of his books is like this.
00:52:06.000They're all about repressive right-wingers who study the Bible too much.
00:52:09.000I don't know what happened to him in his childhood, but clearly, he has a real problem with people who have ever read the Bible, and he believes the same things that Rick Wilson believes about ignorant people and their political beliefs.
00:52:36.000And now he has been forced to do a mea culpa struggle session in the pages of the Washington Post.
00:52:41.000So now Stephen King, the whitest person in the world, he has a piece called the Oscars are still rigged in favor of He had to have a full-on struggle session.
00:52:50.000So after acknowledging that maybe we should, you know, judge art based on its own merits, now he's like, but if it's not made by black people, that's because of racism.
00:52:59.000So Stephen King writes, discussions of arts and culture, like discussions of politics, have become increasingly acrimonious and polarized in recent years.
00:53:07.000Lines of belief are drawn with indelible ink.
00:53:09.000And if you step over them, wittingly or unwittingly, you find yourself in the social media version of the stocks and subject to a barrage of electronic turnips and cabbages.
00:53:16.000I stepped over one of those lines recently by saying on Twitter something that I thought, mistakenly, was non-controversial.
00:54:15.000I'm old enough to remember when there were only a handful of African-American directors and about the only female director in Hollywood was Ida Lupina, who made hard-edged noir B-pics in the 1950s and later worked in TV.
00:54:25.000Her directing work was never nominated for an Oscar or an Emmy.
00:54:27.000For answers as to why some talented artists are nominated in some, such as Greta Gerwig, who helmed the astoundingly good new version of Little Women or Not, you might need to look no further than the demographic makeup of those who voted for the Academy Awards.
00:54:38.000Greta Gerwig was nominated for Best Director two years ago for Lady Bird.
00:54:49.000But there were sexists today, but not two years ago.
00:54:52.000According to Stephen King, it's because there aren't enough women voting in the Academy.
00:54:55.000Or alternatively, this is just another malice struggle section from folks on the left who are forced to perform ritual breastbeating, get out the sackcloth and the ashes, and weep over their own unwokeness.
00:55:08.000Stephen King trying to earn his way back into woke circles.
00:55:11.000He says, only eight years ago, 94% of 5,700 voters were white.
00:55:15.000According to the Los Angeles Times, 77% male, 54% more than 60 years old.
00:55:19.000This year, women make up 32% of voters, and minority members equal 16% of the total.
00:55:48.000He says, Give them credit for trying to catch up, but not too much credit.
00:55:51.000Of the nine films nominated for Best Picture this year, the majority, The Irishman, Ford vs. Ferrari, 1917, Joker, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, are what my sons call man fiction.
00:56:00.000There are fights, guns, and many white faces.
00:56:04.000Okay, just like to notice, Stephen King's books, fights, guns, many white faces.
00:56:12.000Also going to point out, No one really cares about the white faces so much, but fights and guns have been historically pretty popular in movies, like Going Back, because it's fun to watch.
00:56:23.000And also, if he can name which one of those pictures he thinks is really bad, like, I think two of those movies are not very good, right?
00:56:29.000I think The Irishman is a terrible movie, by the way, and I think The Joker was wildly overrated, but 1917 is a masterpiece.
00:56:34.000Ford vs. Ferrari is a fantastic piece of American film, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Tarantino's best flick.
00:56:40.000Like, which one of those things should be thrown out for Little Women?
00:56:44.000And then he talks about how there are movies that are not in serious contention, they're not in serious competition for the Oscars, like Harriet.
00:57:18.000It says, how many people saw The Last Black Man in San Francisco?
00:57:20.000Well, not many, but that's because it wasn't in like huge wide release with huge publicity.
00:57:27.000And then he explains that he doesn't care, that in the end, even though a lot of his characters are white, he doesn't really care about race because he didn't mind when Indra's elbow was cast as Roland Deschain, the gunslinger at the center of the Dark Tower books.
00:57:38.000And that response reflects my overall attitude that, as with justice, judgments of creative excellence should be blind.
00:57:43.000But that would be the case in a perfect world, one where the game isn't rigged in favor of white folks.
00:57:47.000In the end, he's actually rejecting his own premise.
00:57:50.000Judgments of arts should not be colorblind because we don't live in a colorblind world, and therefore, we certainly should judge the art on the basis of who the artist is.
00:57:57.000So he has now performed the ritual breastfeeding, and Stephen King can be welcomed back into the halls of wokeness.
00:58:02.000Welcome back, Stephen King, and congratulations on your new conversion.
00:58:07.000Really excellent stuff from the brave Stephen King.
00:58:09.000Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
00:58:47.000If you want to cut through the madness of our politics and culture and know what's really going on, head on over to The Michael Knowles Show, where we can all bask in the simple joys of being right.