Beto O'Rourke declares for the presidency, Elizabeth Warren attacks to the center, and President Trump runs up against his own party? I have many, many thoughts on Beto. Many thoughts, including: 1. Why the media love Beto 2. Why they see themselves in him 3. 4. The real reason the media like Beto is because they look in a mirror and see themselves and what they see is a white kid who grew up extraordinarily privileged, in a rich situation, who spent a few years kicking around before he found himself and settled down, who has broadly liberal views, but likes to think through the issues is really considered and temperate, but also cool, like a guy you d want to hang out with and be with And that is why they love him the same thing that Chris Hayes does over at MSNBC. And that's why all the people who went to NYU journalism school see themselves as Beto O Rourke which is why every one of these profiles of this guy is written by a white guy who is sitting in a crappy apartment in Brooklyn overlooking an alley overlooking a pissing into a trash alley can be written by someone who is a bum sitting in an alley in which is a trash so you can see yourself that s how folks in the journalistic world see themselves. Go check it out and let me know what you think of Beto, and why you re in love for Beto and why they re so enamored by him. I'm Ben Shapiro - The Ben Shapiro's thoughts on this guy. - THE PODCAST Ben Shapiro Show is a must-listen for all things Beto! The Best of Ben Shapiro. Subscribe to my new show on The FiveThirtyEight Podcast Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and become a supporter of my show on Audible Subscribe on Podchaser.me/Ben Shapiro's New York Times bestselling book, The Devil NextDoor or any other podcast on the road Subscribe and review my book recommendations on amazon Learn more at Audible Become a Friend of the Devil? Subscribe for a chance to win a FREE 7-day VIP membership Join my FB group Thanks for listening to my show? I'll be giving out 5-star reviews?
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00:02:28.000And the reason that the media love themselves some Beto, the real reason the media love Beto, is because they look at Beto and they see themselves.
00:02:36.000They look at Beto, and what they see is a white kid who grew up extraordinarily privileged, in a rich situation, who spent a few years kicking around before he found himself and settled down, who has broadly liberal views, left-leaning views, but likes to think through the issues, is really considered and temperate, but also cool, like the cool guy whose kids think he's cool.
00:02:58.000Also a little bit nerdy, but really mostly just cool, and like a guy you'd want to hang out with and be with.
00:03:03.000Basically, when the folks at CNN look in a mirror, they see Beto O'Rourke.
00:03:07.000And that is why they love Beto O'Rourke.
00:03:11.000When Chris Hayes looks in a mirror, he sees Beto O'Rourke.
00:03:14.000And that's why all of the media are in love with Beto.
00:03:16.000When they looked at Barack Obama, it was even better, because Barack Obama mirrored all of those things except for the race, so they could say they were intersectional.
00:03:23.000And also, Barack Obama mirrored who they think they are, the considered politician Who really likes to think through the issues and then comes up with sophisticated analyses.
00:03:32.000Who spent a few years kicking around until he found himself helping the downtrodden.
00:03:36.000That's how folks in the journalistic world like to see themselves.
00:03:39.000All the people who went to NYU journalism school.
00:03:41.000All those people see themselves as Beto O'Rourke.
00:03:43.000Which is why every fawning profile of Beto O'Rourke is written by the same former NYU English grad.
00:03:50.000who is sitting in a crappy apartment in Brooklyn overlooking an alleyway in which a bum is pissing into a trash can.
00:03:56.000Every one of these profiles is written with this sopping, I'm-writing-the-great-American-novel attitude.
00:04:03.000So, the Vanity Fair piece in which Beto essentially declares his presidential run is no different.
00:04:09.000The cover of the magazine, if you can't see it, is Beto standing in the only shirt he apparently owns.
00:04:14.000Every picture I've ever seen of Beto O'Rourke, he is wearing this blue kind of beat-up shirt because he's a man of the people despite the fact that he's worth nine million dollars and his wife is the daughter of a near billionaire and his father was an extraordinarily powerful county judge.
00:04:27.000There he is, man of the people, standing in jeans across a lonely road in Texas and just standing there considering his future.
00:04:36.000Maybe he'll take out a guitar, flick his bangs out of his eyes and play you a ballad, yeah?
00:04:40.000So, Vanity Fair has his profile, and the profile is just as pathetically drooling over Beto O'Rourke because all of these profiles of Beto O'Rourke are the same.
00:05:30.000So this Vanity Fair article, in which he was photographed by Annie Leibovitz, the article was written by Joe Hagan, who is just the same as every other columnist who has ever written about Beto O'Rourke.
00:05:40.000Someone put together on Twitter, of all of the physical descriptions that the media have given to Beto O'Rourke, he's sweating because of his passion.
00:05:46.000Like he's playing Great Rock in a hot stadium.
00:05:50.000And then there's talk about how he's just relaxed, leaning back, looking wistfully at the world.
00:05:56.000Every description of Beto O'Rourke is exactly the same because everybody who's writing it is exactly the same.
00:06:02.000So, this entire Vanity Fair piece, it's got pictures of Beto sitting with his dog, his dog looking forlornly at the camera like, why am I here?
00:06:11.000That's the best part of every one of these pictures, is the dog just in the background looking like, I can't believe this is my life now.
00:06:18.000Anyway, here's what Vanity Fair writes about Beto O'Rourke.
00:06:23.000Beto O'Rourke's mission-style home in the El Paso neighborhood of Sunset Heights is the site of a famous 1915 meeting between Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and U.S.
00:06:32.000While renovating it, O'Rourke had a wrought iron fence around the property removed, save for a few feet of it around a pistachio tree.
00:06:38.000In late February, he came home to find Republican protesters live-streaming video and asking why he still had a fence, mimicking Trump's remark that politicians like walls when they're around their own homes.
00:06:47.000I said, come up with me, and I'll take you to our front door, he recalls.
00:07:51.000Most of the kids in the media are actually the fat kid who is sitting with the typewriter in the AV room, but they wish they were Beto.
00:07:58.000Beto was the kid they always wished they had been.
00:08:00.000Arranged in historical order, the biography suggests there's been some reflection on the gravity of the presidency, but there's also some political poetry to it.
00:08:07.000A sense that O'Rourke might be destined for this shelf.
00:08:14.000First of all, the rigorous party of science describing politicians with an aura.
00:08:19.000Good stuff right there from Vanity Fair.
00:08:21.000It is worth noting here that the same members of the media who have spent years at this point praising Beto O'Rourke and overlooking the fact that he lives in a three-story house in El Paso and is worth nine million dollars, almost none of which came from him, presumably.
00:08:37.000Or at least was made really only through family connections.
00:08:40.000That Beto O'Rourke is somehow a man of the people, but Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks, there's a big article in the New York Times today about how Howard Schultz isn't as poor as he said he was when he was growing up.
00:08:50.000Howard Schultz has said that he grew up in the projects.
00:08:52.000There's a big article in the New York Times today, well, you know, the project he grew up in was actually kind of middle class.
00:09:04.000O'Rourke and his wife, Amy, an educator nine years his junior, both described the moment they first witnessed the power of O'Rourke's gift.
00:09:12.000It was in Houston, the third stop on O'Rourke's two-year Senate campaign against Ted Cruz.
00:09:16.000Every seat was taken, every wall, every space in the room was filled with probably a thousand people.
00:09:20.000You could feel the floor moving almost.
00:09:21.000It was not totally clear that Beto was what everyone was looking for, but just like that, people were so ready for something.
00:09:37.000I mean, this is political spinal tap, guys.
00:09:40.000It is a rock documentary in which Beto O'Rourke plays a fake political candidate on TV.
00:09:45.000I honestly don't know of it, how much was me.
00:09:48.000But there is something abnormal, super normal, or I don't know what the hell to call it, that we both experience when we're out on the campaign trail.
00:09:56.000He says, I don't ever prepare a speech.
00:10:05.000I got in there, and I don't know if it's a speech or not, but it felt amazing, because every word was pulled out of me, like by some greater force, which was the people there.
00:10:41.000One more quote from Beto O'Rourke, then we will get to Beto O'Rourke's life story.
00:10:45.000Which the media love because this is the media's life story.
00:10:49.000Most of them grew up middle class to upper class in big cities.
00:10:53.000Growing up with a lot of privilege, and then they found themselves, and now they see themselves as purveyors of the truth, who are broadly liberal-minded.
00:11:00.000And they look at Beto and they're like, yeah, that guy's me.
00:11:03.000Beto O'Rourke was a useless person for most of his life, and then he became non-useless later on in his life.
00:11:08.000And we are supposed to think of that as a spiritual journey, or in any other context, we would think of that as a person wasting opportunity.
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00:15:05.000So it is good to know That finally, for the first time in a long time, a rich, white man, growing up in a rich, powerful, white family, and marrying a very rich, white woman, and spending years playing in a punk rock band uselessly, can also be President of the United States.
00:15:40.000It's going to be fun to watch as all the intersectional Democrats in the media suddenly embrace Beto O'Rourke, who is presumably the least intersectional candidate of all time.
00:15:47.000A man who calls himself Beto, but who is whiter than I am by a long shot.
00:15:52.000So let's go through who is Beto O'Rourke.
00:16:13.000He was nicknamed Beto in infancy because he grew up in El Paso.
00:16:16.000His mother was the stepdaughter of the former secretary of the Navy under President John F. Kennedy, and his dad served as county commissioner and county judge.
00:16:25.000Paddle Rourke was also a close associate of the Texas governor, so obviously Beto grew up in very difficult circumstances.
00:16:31.000A little Beto was growing up really on the rough streets of El Paso.
00:16:35.000He began his education at the Escuela Montessori Del Valle Preschool and continued to Rivera Elementary School and Mesita Elementary School.
00:16:42.000And then he went to the Woodbury Forest School, an all-male boarding school in Madison County, Virginia, just like all the underprivileged little kids.
00:16:50.000Between graduating high school and starting college, he was a summer congressional intern in the Capitol Hill office of U.S.
00:17:09.000in English literature, which means that he was qualified to be a professional useless person, which, fortunately, is a job he has fulfilled.
00:17:17.000Well, he's also been arrested a couple of times.
00:17:19.000But he's been arrested for cool kid stuff, right?
00:17:21.000Cool kid stuff so long as you happen to be well-connected.
00:17:24.000So he was arrested back in 1995 for breaking into the University of Texas El Paso campus.
00:17:34.000And of course, as everybody knows, he was also arrested in 1998 for a misdemeanor DWI after he was driving so drunk that he actually crossed the median line and crashed into somebody apparently head-on and then fled the scene of the arrest.
00:17:48.000So Beto O'Rourke, you know, really making the most of his youthful opportunities.
00:17:54.000His dad, by the way, had his own political issues as well.
00:17:59.000His father, apparently, apparently, was, in 1983, sheriff's deputies installed a radio, installing a radio in the Jeep of Pat O'Rourke, his dad, found a condom filled with a white powder believed to be either cocaine or heroin, according to press reports at the time.
00:18:15.000A sheriff's captain then ordered the substance destroyed and was indicted by a grand jury on charges of official misconduct and tampering with evidence.
00:18:23.000That's the family in which he grew up.
00:18:25.000The kind of family where if sheriff's deputies find a full condom filled with cocaine in your truck, they destroy it for you.
00:18:32.000Clearly, Beto was on a path to self-made success.
00:18:37.000O'Rourke's public life started in 2005, according to the Houston Chronicle, when, at the age of 32, he ran for city council and became one of El Paso's youngest ever representatives.
00:18:45.000That was the same year he married Amy Hoover Sanders.
00:18:48.000Amy O'Rourke was an educator and charter school executive.
00:18:51.000She has a constant presence at his Senate campaign events.
00:18:54.000In 2006, the personal became very public for the O'Rourke family.
00:18:57.000Just a year into O'Rourke's council tenure, he became enmeshed in a controversial urban renewal plan led by the Paso del Norte group, a non-profit business organization spearheaded by his father-in-law.
00:19:07.000So you have to understand that between the time that Beto O'Rourke graduated from Columbia University and the time that he decided that he was going to be a local politician, he played for years in a punk rock band.
00:19:18.000So his great claim to fame is that he didn't need money enough that he could actually afford to blow several years running around the country playing in a crappy punk rock band.
00:19:25.000He also worked as a live-in caretaker and an art mover.
00:19:29.000You know, Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister, grew up extraordinarily privileged, extraordinarily wealthy, and then was best known for being like an elementary school P.E.
00:19:37.000teacher and then became Prime Minister because he was handsome Bernie Sanders.
00:19:42.000So O'Rourke worked as a nanny and an art mover before working for an internet service provider, and that's when he started talking about how he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, man.
00:19:54.000Remember several weeks back, there was an entire New York Times article about Beto's brooding, how he was brooding now, just like he brooded then.
00:20:05.000As opposed to people who actually have purpose in their lives, who just go out and do, Beto had the privilege of being able to sit around and brood, which in other circumstances we would call intellectual and moral laziness.
00:20:15.000In any case, Beto returns to El Paso in 1998, and then he co-founds something called Stanton Street Technology Group.
00:20:26.000His wife, Amy, operates the business now.
00:20:29.000He also published an online newspaper called Stanton Street, which he modeled on the village voice.
00:20:34.000And then he decided that he was going to run for city council.
00:20:38.000And that's where things started to get dicey for young Beto when it came to his public career.
00:20:43.000In 2006, he became enmeshed in a controversial urban renewal plan led by Paso Del Norte Group, a nonprofit business organization spearheaded by his father-in-law.
00:20:52.000As originally envisioned, the plan called for redeveloping a blighted part of downtown El Paso, including a largely Hispanic residential area called Segundo Barrio.
00:21:00.000Opponents feared gentrification and dubbed it urban removal.
00:21:03.000So this was young Beto getting involved.
00:21:09.000He was going to redevelop parts of El Paso.
00:21:11.000But there is a bigger problem for young Beto.
00:21:14.000Residents and business owners facing displacement organized and filed a pair of ethics complaints with the city, citing O'Rourke's ties with his father-in-law, William Sanders, who is a real estate executive in Texas.
00:21:24.000They complained that O'Rourke was, quote, impermissibly entangled in the Paso Del Norte group's downtown revitalization plan through both family and business ties.
00:21:33.000His critics, as according to the Houston Chronicle, honed in on past work O'Rourke's tech company had done for Paso Del Norte, as well as his vote to approve the group's downtown 2015 redevelopment plan.
00:21:43.000O'Rourke had been a dues-paying member of Paso Del Norte, though he dropped out soon after being elected to the council.
00:21:49.000Eventually, the Ethics Review Commission dismissed the complaints.
00:21:53.000And they said it because even if it was true, it wouldn't be a technical violation of ethics ordinances.
00:21:58.000But opponents argued that O'Rourke's daddy-in-law stood to make millions through a real estate investment trust called the Borderplex Community Trust, which was formed to buy real estate in downtown El Paso for redevelopment.
00:22:10.000And they would have aggressively used the city's eminent domain powers, which is hilarious because now Beto O'Rourke stands around talking about how President Trump is going to have to aggressively use eminent domain powers to build a wall.
00:24:16.000Alrighty, so back to the story of Beto O'Rourke.
00:24:20.000So, Beto O'Rourke was apparently faulted for his associations with his father-in-law and the use of eminent domain for purposes of supposedly driving up real estate prices in areas owned by his father-in-law.
00:24:35.000The New York Times reported on this back in October.
00:24:36.000They said at a special city council meeting in 2006, a billionaire real estate investor unveiled his vision for redeveloping downtown El Paso.
00:24:43.000To replace tenements and boarded up buildings, he proposed restaurants, shops, and an arts walk rivaling San Antonio's Riverwalk.
00:24:49.000Representative Beto O'Rourke, one of hundreds attending, wasn't exactly a disinterested party.
00:24:53.000Not only had he married the investor's daughter, but as a member of the city council, he represented the targeted area, including a historic Mexican-American neighborhood.
00:25:01.000Calling downtown one piece of El Paso that was missing on the road back to greatness, O'Rourke voted to take the first step forward with the plan.
00:25:08.000Over the next two years, O'Rourke would defend the plan before angry Barrio residents and vote to advance it.
00:25:14.000Business owners who opposed the plan accused O'Rourke of a conflict, citing the involvement of his father-in-law.
00:25:19.000Twelve years later, O'Rourke is championing progressive causes.
00:25:23.000But his involvement in that proposed El Paso redevelopment highlights a side of his record that seems to contradict the populist image he has cultivated in Texas and nationally.
00:25:33.000According to David Dorado-Romo, a local historian, Mr. O'Rourke was basically the pretty face of this very ugly plan against our most vulnerable neighborhood.
00:25:40.000Barrio residents feared they would lose their homes through eminent domain.
00:25:44.000And among a lot of the residents, the hurt feelings have lingered.
00:25:47.000He says that in the past he never voted for eminent domain, says O'Rourke, and no property was ever taken by the city through eminent domain, and that he had no financial interest in the project.
00:25:56.000Nonetheless, his father-in-law was deeply involved in this project.
00:26:00.000There's a lot of suspicion surrounding that.
00:26:01.000But that's not the only issue with Beto O'Rourke.
00:26:04.000According to the Houston Chronicle, O'Rourke's sunny vision of immigrant energy in many ways echoes his father-in-law's focus on cross-border business development in a region known for its young bilingual bicultural workforce.
00:26:15.000Sanders, who is his father-in-law, said the U.S.-Mexico border region is a very attractive place to be.
00:26:20.000So Sanders formed up a bunch of real estate firms.
00:26:24.000He sold a lot of them for inane, I mean, just crazy amounts of money.
00:26:28.000He sold security capital for $5.4 billion.
00:26:32.000He was considered one of the founders of real estate investment trust REIT.
00:26:36.000And Sanders and his business associates have boosted O'Rourke's political career with generous donations.
00:26:42.000O'Rourke stepped back from his family business activities since 2013.
00:26:45.000That was when he came under scrutiny for purchase of stock in several companies just going public, including Twitter.
00:26:51.000IPOs are generally reserved for heavy hitters looking for big profits.
00:26:55.000O'Rourke said the purchases were made by a financial professional who manages his investments.
00:26:59.000They were reported on his financial disclosure forms.
00:27:01.000When reporters discovered them, he reported himself to the Ethics Committee, which directed him to send the profits to the U.S.
00:27:20.000Okay, the fact again is that throughout his career, he's been involved with businesses that are deeply family-oriented and in which people in his family stand to make a lot of money based on his public connections.
00:27:31.000I mean, for example, O'Rourke went back to El Paso in 1998.
00:27:35.000He founded Stanton Street Technology Group.
00:27:56.000Since 2011, his political campaigns for the House and Senate have paid the company more than $125,000 for web hosting and other online services, according to federal campaign reports.
00:28:06.000So in other words, Beto O'Rourke raised a bunch of money for his congressional campaigns, and then paid a company that his wife was running, and she would eventually sell her shares in the company for something like half a million dollars.
00:28:21.000He's a man of the people who really understands because he travels around, you see.
00:28:25.000He travels around like a Johnny Appleseed of politics.
00:28:29.000Speaking Spanish, talking to the folks, wandering into bars, talking with the people.
00:28:34.000That he's a down-to-earth fellow who could simply afford to blow several years of his life wandering around after racking up debt at Columbia University, wandering around with a punk rock band, and then suddenly move into a historic 1915 three-story home once occupied by Pancho Villa.
00:28:49.000Pretty amazing and inspiring, uplifting story of American mobility now.
00:28:53.000Now listen, as you know, I don't tend to believe that politicians have to come from nothing in order to be something.
00:28:59.000I think that you're supposed to judge a politician on their own merits, but that's not what the media believe.
00:29:04.000The media tell you that you have to have an inspiring personal narrative, and so they've worked very, very hard to craft an inspiring personal narrative for Beto.
00:29:12.000The problem is, his actual circumstances are not in any way inspiring.
00:29:16.000He grew up privileged, he spent his teenage years privileged, he spent his young adulthood privileged, and now he's spending his adulthood privileged.
00:29:23.000That is not an inspiring story in any way.
00:29:25.000He made a bunch of silly decisions, including two arrests, and he's basically gotten away with all of that, and he's moved on with his life, and now they're abjectly falling over themselves.
00:30:32.000The grocery store is all locked up, or all the shelves are empty.
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00:32:56.000It's almost time for our next episode of The Conversation, by the way.
00:35:31.000And one of the reasons she's not really growing is because she does not have the same sort of appeal, particularly in the black community, that Barack Obama has.
00:35:39.000She was hoping that she would get that sort of boost and she'd be up around 15 to 20% right now.
00:35:43.000Beto O'Rourke was running at 7% without having declared, Elizabeth Warren at 7%, and then the also-rans, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, which I guess is pronounced Boot-Ej-Ej?
00:36:20.000One of the things that is that is fascinating, though, is that this morning consult poll shows where everybody's second preference goes, where everybody's second preference goes.
00:37:02.000He may have some suburban female appeal.
00:37:04.000But there's a heavy percentage of Biden's vote if he goes down that will move over to Sanders and may move over to Sanders more quickly if Biden begins to move toward the moderate center.
00:37:14.000Where do Bernie Sanders' supporters go?
00:37:16.000Fascinatingly enough, most Bernie Sanders, plurality of Bernie Sanders supporters, their second choice is Joe Biden.
00:37:21.00031% say they'd go to Biden, 15% to Elizabeth Warren, 9% to Kamala Harris.
00:37:28.000Kamala Harris's supporters are pretty evenly split.
00:38:27.000And the way you can tell he's crowding out everybody is Elizabeth Warren, who wanted to rival Bernie in that progressive lane, is already shifting to the right.
00:38:35.000She's now talking about capitalism in a warm and friendly light, which is pretty fascinating, since she wanted Bernie Sanders' vote.
00:38:42.000So here is Elizabeth Warren yesterday talking about how capitalism was actually a force for good.
00:38:47.000Do you believe capitalism over the course of history has been a force for good?
00:39:48.000So I'm not sure where Beto thinks that the opportunity really lies other than in overwhelming media coverage of how wonderful Beto O'Rourke is.
00:39:57.000But again, Beto O'Rourke's background is not intersectionally inspiring.
00:40:00.000He's not going to win a lot of the black vote or the Hispanic vote.
00:40:02.000He's banking on suburban women, but suburban women may not be enough of a percentage of the Democratic primary vote to get him through.
00:40:12.000What Beto really wants is that VP slot.
00:40:14.000Now that would be the smart move, by the way.
00:40:16.000If Bernie Sanders were to win the primaries, he'd be smart to pick somebody like Beto O'Rourke, even though Beto is a complete lightweight.
00:40:23.000He would be smart to pick Beto O'Rourke because he needs suburban women, and those are the people who are most likely to feel unsafe because of Bernie's socialist policies.
00:40:34.000He might pick Kamala Harris, too, just because the media would push him to pick somebody who wasn't white.
00:40:50.000I think more likely is Biden-Kamala Harris.
00:40:53.000In any case, the fact that Beto O'Rourke is even taken seriously as a national candidate after losing a Senate race to Ted Cruz is pretty well insane.
00:41:03.000There's no shot that Beto wins Texas in a presidential race.
00:41:07.000There's a very slim shot that he wins Texas in a presidential race.
00:41:10.000In a presidential race, everybody shows up and Beto's flaws are on full display.
00:41:15.000He lost to Ted Cruz, who is not the world's most popular politician.
00:41:19.000Okay, but I guess if Democrats can deceive themselves into believing that Beto is the wave of the future, then maybe he'll draw just enough support to push him into that sort of presidential territory.
00:41:31.000I think the initial push that you're seeing, I don't think it's gonna last.
00:41:34.000I don't think Beto has quite the magic that Barack Obama did.
00:41:36.000And the attempt to manufacture magic typically does not work.
00:41:40.000He feels a lot more like John Edwards circa 2008 than he feels like Barack Obama circa 2008.
00:41:45.000Okay, meanwhile, The attack on Tucker Carlson continues apace.
00:41:51.000Media Matters continues to press against Tucker Carlson, tries to get him ousted from the air.
00:41:56.000And this is obviously a concerted campaign at this point by the entire left to take away the advertising base for Fox News because the left just doesn't like Fox News.
00:42:03.000This has nothing to do with the specific opinions voiced by Tucker Carlson on the Bubba the Love Sponge show in 2007.
00:42:11.000It is obviously that there are a bunch of motivated leftists who do not like Fox News and they will use any club at At their disposal, to beat Fox News about the ears with it.
00:42:20.000That's why, if you actually look at the footage of Media Matters' protest at Fox News, nothing was about how terrible Tucker Carlson's comments was.
00:42:26.000All of it was about how Fox News should be banned.
00:43:01.000So obviously this has nothing to do with Tucker, right?
00:43:03.000Everything here has to do with they just don't like Fox News and they have pre-printed signs by Media Matters to do all of this.
00:43:09.000Well, the irony of this, of course, is that Media Matters is hanging its hat on these old comments by Fox News's Tucker Carlson back when he was working for MSNBC.
00:43:18.000But it turns out that the head of Media Matters himself has made a bunch of terrible comments about various minority groups.
00:43:23.000Now his excuse today, Angelo Carusone, who's the head of Media Matters, his excuse is that when he wrote that stuff, it was a parody.
00:43:39.000Almost every day, he issues outraged press releases accusing other people of bigotry.
00:43:45.000And yet, because everything is irony, Carusone is himself an enthusiastic bigot.
00:43:52.000We know this for sure because he has written about it extensively.
00:43:56.000It turns out that for years, Carousel maintained a racist blog.
00:44:00.000Media Matters probably ought to issue a press release about this.
00:44:03.000They've done a lot more for a lot less.
00:44:06.000But they're not going to issue a press release about that.
00:44:08.000Huffington Post last night ran with a massive headline about how everybody should boycott Fox News, how everybody should stop advertising with Fox News.
00:44:19.000This sort of wave, this sort of tsunami that has come for Tucker Carlson, once again, has nothing to do with Tucker Carlson.
00:44:42.000As we've always known, it is in bad faith.
00:44:44.000And the media covering it as though this is an actual story as opposed to a bad faith hit attempt on a fellow member of the media is pretty astonishing.
00:44:52.000Honest to goodness, it is really astonishing.
00:44:53.000Meanwhile, President Trump is fighting a power battle with the Senate.
00:44:58.000The Senate was on the cusp of passing a rebuke to President Trump on his national emergency declaration as of last night.
00:45:04.000According to the Washington Post, the Senate prepared Wednesday to rebuke President Trump over his national emergency declaration at the U.S.-Mexico border.
00:45:11.000Senator Mike Lee, who we had on our radio show yesterday, was leading compromise efforts.
00:45:14.000He wanted to pass A bill that would basically allow Congress to end any sort of funding for national emergency declarations after 30 days.
00:45:24.000And then that bill sort of fell apart.
00:45:26.000So now it's turned into a simple showdown where the Senate is voting to not basically to condemn or override Trump's national emergency declaration.
00:46:15.000Because if Lee's bill had passed, it would have let Congress override a national emergency declaration when they don't agree with the president, but it would have allowed them to quietly allow a national emergency declaration to move forward if they did agree with the Effectively, it acted like the War Powers Resolution.
00:46:34.000Congress has 30 days, basically, to withdraw funding from any sort of war in which the president is currently engaged.
00:46:41.000It is very rarely invoked by Congress.
00:46:43.000Instead, Congress usually just looks the other way and lets the executive continue spending money on foreign conflicts.
00:46:49.000In fact, actually, today was the first time in a long time that the Senate fought back against the executive's use of war powers.
00:46:55.000When it came to Saudi Arabia, for example, the Senate voted to cut funding for Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
00:47:02.000Which is kind of fascinating and has some ramifications for Middle Eastern politics, considering that Iran is the other party in Yemen fighting for control over there.
00:47:12.000Suffice it to say that President Trump is not being strategic in his approach to this thing, but I'm not sure that strategy really came into play anywhere here.
00:47:20.000Really, I don't think strategy came into play at any point along the line.
00:47:23.000Will the wall be built under these conditions?
00:47:43.000And frankly, you can see from his administration that everybody in his own administration is puzzled by it.
00:47:48.000Vice President Pence was negotiating with the Senate, came to an agreement with Senator Lee, and then Trump blew it all up.
00:47:54.000It's a problem when the greatest negotiating president of all time turns out not to be able to negotiate a simple deal with his own members in Congress.
00:48:01.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:48:06.000There is great irony to Elizabeth Warren.
00:48:09.000Just wonderful irony to Elizabeth Warren.
00:48:12.000So, Elizabeth Warren, you'll recall, wrote on official papers that she was Native American.
00:48:19.000And the speculation has long been that Elizabeth Warren used her quote-unquote Native American status to move forward in the academic world.
00:48:26.000She was asked on MSNBC about this college scandal we talked about yesterday, in which parents were paying exorbitant amounts of money to basically cheat their kids' way into top university.
00:48:36.000Here was Elizabeth Warren talking about it.
00:48:38.000As a parent, how much sympathy would you have for these parents who are embroiled in this alleged cheating scandal?
00:49:11.000So there's an article today called, How Real America Became Queer America by Samantha Allen.
00:49:16.000She's an author and reporter covering LGBT issues.
00:49:18.000And it's a big column in the New York Times.
00:49:20.000What's hilarious about this column is that it implicitly acknowledges that people across the country who disagree with her on politics still treat people well.
00:49:27.000She refuses to acknowledge this in the piece.
00:49:30.000But, like, she immediately assumes that everybody who treats gay people well, or transgender people well, must inevitably agree with her on the political issues.
00:49:39.000But the article subtly understands and accepts that there are a lot of people in the middle of the country who disagree with her on the issues, who still treat people really well who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.
00:49:50.000Her article says this may seem like a strange time to feel optimistic about the future of LGBT rights in America, but as a queer transgender woman who has spent most of her adult life in red states, hopeful is exactly how I feel.
00:50:01.000In July 2017, the same month that President Trump announced on Twitter he would ban transgender troops, I left on a six week long road trip across the red states.
00:50:09.000I wanted to understand what motivated LGBT people to stay in the heartland at a time when some progressives were still pondering escaping to Canada.
00:50:16.000What I learned on the way from Utah to Georgia only reaffirmed what I have come to believe over the past decade.
00:50:21.000Attitudes toward LGBT people are changing rapidly in conservative states, and no one inside the Beltway can stop it.
00:50:26.000This country's bright queer future is already here, hiding where too few of us care to travel.
00:50:31.000From a bird's eye perspective, this person writes, it may not seem that life has changed for LGBT Americans in so-called flyover country.
00:50:37.000State laws prohibiting discrimination against them remain elusive in red states.
00:50:41.000But in their absence, midsize cities have become pockets of LGBT acceptance.
00:50:46.000This progress includes transgender people.
00:50:48.000On my road trip through what is ostensibly Trump country, I met many LGBT people who saw no need to flee their conservative home states for the coastal safe havens of generations past, thanks to local progress.
00:50:59.000It's so much better, said one of these people.
00:51:04.000The inherent connection between the political preferences of the left and tolerance is assumed by people on the left, but it is simply not true.
00:51:13.000I spend my life working with religious people, religious Christians, religious Jews.
00:51:18.000I spend my life talking to people in the middle of the country.
00:51:21.000I spend a lot of time traveling in the middle of the country.
00:51:24.000Being a nice person can be, you can be a nice person and still disagree with the political priorities of people and still treat those people well.
00:51:34.000For example, I'm good friends with Dave Rubin.
00:51:37.000Dave Rubin is a gay, same-sex married man.
00:51:40.000Dave knows that I believe that homosexual activity is sinful because I'm a religious Jew.
00:51:53.000I still treat Dave really well and he treats me really well because we don't have to agree on political priorities to understand that each of us is made in the image of God and that it is our job to treat people with tolerance even if we don't necessarily like their behavior.
00:52:10.000On a spiritual level, I can disapprove of something, but that's God's business.
00:52:13.000It is not my job to force anybody to do anything.
00:52:17.000That is the perspective, I think, of the vast majority of Americans across the political spectrum.
00:52:20.000But folks on the left believe that in order to be tolerant toward LGBT Americans, you must therefore agree with everything that the LGBT movement has to say.
00:52:30.000That in order to be tolerant towards transgender people, for example, you have to accept that a trans woman is a woman.
00:52:45.000Folks on the left don't seem to understand that there is a difference between politics and how you treat people.
00:52:49.000That decency doesn't necessarily mean that we agree with you.
00:52:52.000It's why, for the left, that conflation between decency and we agree with you, it's why they believe that if you disagree with them, you are indecent.
00:53:07.000And we just disagree on our political priorities in many cases.
00:53:10.000That doesn't mean we can't treat each other with dignity.
00:53:12.000But for a lot of folks on the left, if I disagree with them on their political priority, it's because I have a lack of compassion, a lack of care.
00:53:18.000And therefore, I must be the kind of person who would treat people individually in a mean way.
00:53:24.000The article makes that assumption, but the article is wrong.
00:53:26.000What the article is right about is that LGBT people across the country are being treated extraordinarily well, and they are treated extraordinarily well even in deeply red areas.
00:53:35.000And that shouldn't be shocking to anybody.
00:53:37.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:53:43.000Pretty shocking story in The Week all about Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard.
00:53:48.000So you'll recall that for years, the story was basically that Johnny Depp had physically abused Amber Heard, his ex-wife.
00:54:16.000Heard also knew that her elaborate hoax worked, said the lawsuit.
00:54:19.000As a result of her false allegations against Mr. Depp, Ms.
00:54:22.000Heard became a darling of the MeToo movement, was the first actress named a human rights champion at the UN Human Rights Office, was appointed ambassador on women's rights at the ACLU, and was hired by L'Oreal Paris as its global spokesperson, the lawsuit stated.
00:54:35.000Depp's legal team have provided fresh evidence alleging Heard punched Depp in the face and chopped a part of his finger.
00:54:42.000The new video and photographic evidence submitted showed Depp's face with a huge bruise and one of his fingers severed.
00:54:48.000Depp also submitted 87 surveillance camera videos to the court and 17 depositions of witnesses, including police officers.
00:54:57.000Fans have been apologizing to the actor for accusing him of abuse.
00:55:02.000It's pretty horrendous stuff, obviously, but it just demonstrates that, once again, believe all women is just as nonsensical as believe all blank.
00:55:12.000You should check the facts and you should follow the evidence.
00:55:15.000Believe all women is just an excuse for people not doing their homework or for enshrining their confirmation bias in the public consciousness.
00:55:24.000So, and we'll wait to see the rest of the facts come out.
00:55:27.000Reporting 87 surveillance videos, and my goodness, if it turns out the entire media fell for this thing, it's once again a demonstration of where the media's sympathies actually lie on these issues, and it's not with the truth.
00:55:39.000There's an article in the New York Times all about China's declining birth rate.
00:55:44.000The title, a flurry of ideas to reverse China's declining birth rate, but will Beijing listen?
00:55:49.000Now, there's something hilarious about the New York Times complaining about China's declining birthrate.
00:55:54.000The real reason that they're worried about the declining birthrate in China, of course, is because they have a massive social welfare state infrastructure.
00:56:01.000If you don't have young people, nobody's paying the bills.
00:56:03.000And they used a one-child policy to completely destroy the future of their country.
00:56:08.000The same New York Times will call next week for people not to have kids because of global warming.
00:56:13.000Maybe the New York Times should do a little soul-searching.
00:56:15.000If it turns out that no kids in China is a bad thing, maybe no kids in America is also a bad thing.
00:56:21.000Maybe if you want your giant social welfare state, you're actually going to have to have an influx of new people who can work.
00:56:26.000Maybe you're going to have to have young people.
00:56:29.000Maybe if you want a giant social welfare state, you're going to have to do what China does and limit immigration pretty tremendously.
00:56:35.000It's hilarious that the same folks who will push for a Nordic-style social system refuse to acknowledge that a giant social welfare state relies on new populations of young people to work, and also relies on restrictive immigration policies, both of which the New York Times opposes.
00:56:49.000Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two more hours of coverage.
00:56:53.000I'm sure there will be lots of breaking Beto news, like he's probably playing a song right now, and brooding, and then brooding, and then playing a song, and then thinking, and then brooding, and being dark, and then brooding.
00:57:03.000So I'm sure we'll have every brooding update about Beto O'Rourke.
00:57:06.000If you want to check that out, go subscribe over at dailywire.com.