The Ben Shapiro Show

00:00:00.000 It's a busy weekend as high school students march, Stormy Daniels comes clean, and tariff talk dominates the economy.

00:00:05.000 We'll get to all of it.

00:00:06.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:07.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:12.000 Okay, folks, I promise, not everything I say today will be a sexual pun with regard to a scandal about a porn star.

00:00:18.000 I will attempt to make only 73% of all the things I say some sort of double entendre or pun, because we have to be serious about the news cycle.

00:00:26.000 Sorry, I can't even make it through that.

00:00:28.000 We'll get to all this stuff.

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00:01:58.000 All right.

00:02:00.000 The news cycle began over the weekend with this big March for Our Lives that happened in Washington, D.C.

00:02:05.000 Now, approximately 200,000 people showed up in the March for Our Lives.

00:02:08.000 It's a good number.

00:02:09.000 It's a solid number.

00:02:10.000 The March for Life in 2012 had 650,000 people who showed up to it.

00:02:15.000 Was the media coverage blanket the way that it was on Saturday?

00:02:18.000 Now listen, I don't think that this is about the kids at Parkland.

00:02:21.000 Kids are kids.

00:02:22.000 Some of them say smart things, some of them say dumb things.

00:02:24.000 And just because some tragedy fell upon them doesn't mean that they suddenly have expertise on guns, for example.

00:02:30.000 But the main issue here is why the media have decided to highlight and spotlight these kids.

00:02:35.000 And the reason is because the kids can say things that the media can hide behind.

00:02:38.000 The high school kids who don't really know much about guns, don't know much about gun control, but can speak with passion and verve and are attractive on camera,

00:02:47.000 They can say things that the media want to say, but know that they would be bashed about the ears for saying because they are supposed to be objective.

00:02:52.000 And so what the media do instead is they put all of these kids on camera for hours at a time, and then claim that if you criticize what these kids are saying, they're actually criticizing the experiences of these kids.

00:03:02.000 This is another form of identity politics.

00:03:04.000 So identity politics is this idiotic,

00:03:07.000 Thank you.

00:03:18.000 Well, in this particular case, the suggestion is that the opinions of these kids are sacrosanct because these kids experienced tragedy.

00:03:24.000 I'm not questioning whether these kids experienced tragedy.

00:03:27.000 They did.

00:03:28.000 But I am questioning whether their perspectives have any additional value because they experienced tragedy.

00:03:32.000 George Soros went through the Holocaust, right?

00:03:34.000 He was a guy who ended up having to help the Nazis in order to survive.

00:03:37.000 I can still say that.

00:03:38.000 I think all of his political perspectives are sheer garbage.

00:03:41.000 That doesn't mean that I'm criticizing George Soros' experiences in the Holocaust.

00:03:44.000 And the same thing is true for these kids.

00:03:47.000 And the stuff the kids were saying was just pretty egregious.

00:03:50.000 One of the things they were doing is they were carrying around these tags, these price tags that said $1.05 in order to criticize Senator Marco Rubio.

00:03:58.000 Now, Senator Rubio put himself out there in front of a town hall obeying

00:04:02.000 There are suggestions that Marco Rubio is being paid off $1.05 for every student in the state of Florida to be pro-gun.

00:04:31.000 That's disgusting.

00:04:32.000 It's not true.

00:04:33.000 It's a lie.

00:04:34.000 It's malicious.

00:04:36.000 Obviously, it's stupid.

00:04:37.000 If you think that Marco Rubio is pro-gun because the NRA gives him like $5,000, you're out of your mind.

00:04:42.000 The idea that Marco Rubio is sitting around waiting for the NRA to sign a check and then he decides to be pro-gun is insulting.

00:04:48.000 I find this whole line of argument really stupid.

00:04:51.000 I found it stupid when it was being pushed by John McEna's campaign finance reform.

00:04:54.000 I find it stupid now.

00:04:55.000 Politicians generally don't support causes because they're being bribed by constituents.

00:04:59.000 They support causes, and then the people who back those causes pay so those people can get into office.

00:05:04.000 It's not like, if you thought the NRA was just going around bribing people, why is it the Democrats aren't able to be bribed?

00:05:09.000 Why is it the NRA can't go to Democrats and bribe them?

00:05:11.000 Is it because Democrats are such upstanding characters?

00:05:14.000 Or is it because Democrats are pure gun control fanatics and the NRA doesn't want to see them elected?

00:05:19.000 But again, this is all part of the dog and pony show to suggest that people who disagree on gun control are actually bad human beings.

00:05:26.000 And so we're going to go through some of the arguments that were being made by a lot of the kids at this rally, because I think that it's important to look at the arguments, not just at the speakers.

00:05:35.000 But what the media want us to see are the still photos of David Hogg with his arm outstretched and Emma Gonzalez standing there silently, and then we're supposed to say, well, anything these people choose to say must be right.

00:05:44.000 Again, I have nothing but sympathy for what they went through.

00:05:46.000 I have sympathy for what Kyle Cashew, who's a conservative student, went through.

00:05:49.000 All these kids went through something.

00:05:51.000 It doesn't mean their experiences confer any sort of expertise upon them.

00:05:54.000 OK, so we start with David Hogg.

00:05:55.000 David Hogg has been the most ubiquitous member of the cadre of classmates.

00:06:02.000 He's been on virtually every TV show.

00:06:04.000 He's done Ellen.

00:06:05.000 He does CNN on a regular basis.

00:06:06.000 He does the Sunday shows.

00:06:08.000 He doesn't know anything about guns.

00:06:09.000 He doesn't know much about gun control.

00:06:10.000 But he certainly knows how to demagogue.

00:06:12.000 And so for four minutes, you'll hear him demagogue over and over and over in the most dramatic fashion.

00:06:19.000 It's irritating to watch, I understand.

00:06:21.000 Particularly for people who are pro-Second Amendment.

00:06:23.000 But it's important to know what the propagandists in the media are doing with this kid.

00:06:26.000 Because again, the kid can speak out.

00:06:28.000 It's his absolute right to speak out.

00:06:30.000 And obviously he can speak in front of any camera that he wants to speak in front of.

00:06:33.000 That's great.

00:06:34.000 But he can be criticized just like anyone else.

00:06:36.000 I know.

00:06:36.000 I was 17.

00:06:37.000 I wrote a syndicated column.

00:06:37.000 I got criticized just like everybody else.

00:06:39.000 That's the way free speech works in the country.

00:06:40.000 Okay, here is David Hogg.

00:06:42.000 We're going to go through his full speech or as much of it as possible.

00:06:45.000 First off, I'm going to start off by putting this price tag right here as a reminder for you guys to know how much Marco Rubio took for every student's life in Florida.

00:06:54.000 Okay, that is a lie.

00:06:56.000 Just pause it right there again.

00:06:57.000 That's a lie.

00:06:58.000 Okay?

00:06:59.000 The $1.05 thing is a slander against Marco Rubio.

00:07:02.000 It's disgusting.

00:07:02.000 And by the way, if you want to actually come to some sort of agreement about what we can do here, you might want to start by talking to the senator from Florida who's actually proposed legislation with Bill Nelson on protecting schools.

00:07:12.000 This is not designed to help anybody.

00:07:14.000 This is designed to virtue signal.

00:07:15.000 And it's designed in order so that Democrats can feel better about themselves.

00:07:18.000 Okay, Hogg continues.

00:07:19.000 The grasp of corruption shackles the District of Columbia.

00:07:24.000 The winter is over.

00:07:27.000 Change is here.

00:07:28.000 The sun shines on a new day, and the day is ours.

00:07:31.000 I don't know what that means.

00:07:32.000 For the first time, voters show up 18% of the time at midterm elections.

00:07:37.000 Not anymore.

00:07:42.000 Well, I mean, we don't know the stats yet, so there's that.

00:07:44.000 Now, who here is gonna vote in the 2018 election?

00:07:51.000 If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking.

00:07:57.000 They've gotten used to being protective of their position, chewing safety, the safety of inaction.

00:08:04.000 Inaction is no longer safe.

00:08:06.000 And to that we say, no more.

00:08:09.000 OK, pause right there for one second.

00:08:10.000 OK, I just want to point something out.

00:08:11.000 The generic ballot over the weekend closed to about five points.

00:08:14.000 It had been up to 12, I believe.

00:08:16.000 One of the reasons it's closing is because the Republicans are looking at this kind of demagoguery and they're saying, fine, I'll go out and vote.

00:08:21.000 Before, the question was, would Republicans go out and vote in any significant numbers?

00:08:24.000 And there is no reason to think Republicans would.

00:08:26.000 It's an off-year election.

00:08:27.000 There's no real galvanizing issue.

00:08:29.000 You want to galvanize Republicans.

00:08:30.000 Tell them that you're going to take away their guns, that they're evil people who want to murder children if they don't let you take away their guns.

00:08:35.000 You want to know why that ballot gap is closing?

00:08:37.000 It's because every time the media decide to go on a crusade against Second Amendment rights, their bunch of Americans say, fine, I'll finally get off my duff and go vote.

00:08:44.000 Okay, so before David Hogg declared his victory, especially on the gun control issue, he should recognize a couple of things.

00:08:48.000 One, Democrats in power have not passed any gun control.

00:08:50.000 Barack Obama passed zero gun control between 2009 and 2011 when he had full control of Congress.

00:08:56.000 And two, Republicans are actually going to show up in broader numbers thanks to this sort of demagoguery than they would otherwise.

00:09:01.000 Okay, we can continue.

00:09:01.000 96 people.

00:09:06.000 96 people die every day from guns in our country, yet most representatives have no public stance on guns.

00:09:14.000 Okay, pause it for one second.

00:09:15.000 Okay, first of all, 96 people die in our country every day.

00:09:19.000 66 of those people die from suicide.

00:09:20.000 Okay, two-thirds of all the people who are lumped into the gun violence statistics are suicides.

00:09:24.000 Second of all, the vast majority of people who are killed with guns in the United States are killed with handguns.

00:09:28.000 The proposals that have been pushed by March for Our Lives students

00:09:31.000 They have nothing to do with handguns.

00:09:32.000 They have to do with AR-15s and so-called assault rifles.

00:09:36.000 So none of this makes any sense on a policy level.

00:09:38.000 Continue.

00:09:40.000 And to that, we say, no more!

00:09:45.000 We are going to make this the voting issue.

00:09:48.000 We're going to take this to every election, to every state and every city.

00:09:53.000 We're going to make sure the best people get in our elections to run, not as politicians, but as Americans.

00:10:00.000 Because this, this is not cutting it.

00:10:08.000 When people try to suppress your vote, and there are people who stand against you because you're too young, we say no more.

00:10:18.000 When politicians say that your voice doesn't matter because the NRA owns them, we say no more!

00:10:24.000 Okay, so we can stop it there.

00:10:26.000 I don't need to listen to the rest of this.

00:10:27.000 Okay, so first of all, the yelling and the screaming, I know there are a lot of young kids who think that when they do this, that this is actually just showing passion on the podium.

00:10:34.000 It doesn't.

00:10:35.000 It's not convincing.

00:10:36.000 It doesn't make people like you.

00:10:38.000 It doesn't make people rally behind you.

00:10:39.000 In fact, calmness and reason actually make people rally behind you more than screaming from the podium.

00:10:44.000 Again, this whole thing that the NRA owns politicians, it's just not true, but I guess that that's not the point.

00:10:49.000 The point here is, of course, to demagogue the issue as much as humanly possible.

00:10:53.000 It wasn't just David Hogg who did this.

00:10:55.000 At the end of it, he gave sort of a revolution symbol.

00:10:58.000 The person who did this the best, actually, I will say Emma Gonzales is the most skilled politician of these kids.

00:11:02.000 Emma Gonzales went up there.

00:11:04.000 She's actually good at this.

00:11:04.000 That was effective theatrics.

00:11:06.000 David Hogg, not particularly good at this.

00:11:08.000 Cameron Kask is another one of the students from Parkland.

00:11:10.000 Here's what he had to say.

00:11:30.000 To the leaders, skeptics, and cynics who told us to sit down and stay silent, wait your turn.

00:11:39.000 Welcome to the revolution.

00:11:43.000 OK, if you want to scare gun owners into going out and vote, tell them it's a revolution to take their guns.

00:11:48.000 See how that's going to go.

00:11:49.000 See how it goes when you tell a bunch of gun owners that it's a revolution to take away their firearms, which is really what they're talking about here.

00:11:55.000 Again, all this stuff is great fodder for media members.

00:11:57.000 It's not great fodder for actually fostering any sort of victory on the issue of protecting schools.

00:12:02.000 By the way, the chances of being killed in a school shooting, I believe, in the United States are something like 1 in 614 million.

00:12:06.000 In any case.

00:12:09.000 Let's talk a little bit about our sponsors over at Stamps.com.

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00:13:28.000 Okay, so, back to these kids.

00:13:32.000 So, again, the reason I'm going through the litany of claims by these high school kids is because I want to show that they haven't even bothered to do the research.

00:13:40.000 And again, these kids can say whatever they want.

00:13:42.000 It's not their fault.

00:13:42.000 They're 17.

00:13:43.000 Okay?

00:13:43.000 I get it.

00:13:44.000 I was 17, too.

00:13:44.000 I was writing a syndicated column on politics.

00:13:46.000 I don't agree with everything I wrote when I was 17, because who does?

00:13:50.000 But the media is proclaiming that these are fully formed adults capable of leading the debate on gun control, when the vast majority of them obviously don't know anything about gun control.

00:13:58.000 Here's another one of these students, Alex Nguyen.

00:13:59.000 So Alex Nguyen says, you know, there are too many people here who want to arm teachers.

00:14:04.000 And then he makes what would be an incredibly dumb point.

00:14:06.000 If teachers start packing heat, are they going to arm our pastors, ministers, and rabbis?

00:14:11.000 I mean, I hope.

00:14:12.000 Are they going to arm the guys scanning tickets at the movie theater?

00:14:16.000 Are they going to arm the person wearing the Mickey Mouse costume at Disney?

00:14:20.000 This is what the National Rifle Association wants, and we will not stand for it!

00:14:25.000 I don't even know what this kid is talking about.

00:14:28.000 I love all the cheering people.

00:14:28.000 Arming Mickey Mouse?

00:14:30.000 What is he even saying?

00:14:31.000 First of all, how could Mickey Mouse even get that out of his costume?

00:14:35.000 Those pants aren't real on the Mickey Mouse costume.

00:14:36.000 He doesn't actually have pockets.

00:14:38.000 Does he have a shoulder holster, Mickey Mouse?

00:14:40.000 I've been to Disneyland recently.

00:14:41.000 Mickey Mouse has nowhere to hide that sucker.

00:14:43.000 Like, if you're going to have anybody at Disneyland packing heat, it's got to be, like, the characters from Mary Poppins.

00:14:48.000 At least they're wearing jackets or something.

00:14:49.000 But Mickey Mouse can't even get inside that costume, so there's no logic to this one.

00:14:53.000 But, again, do I want my rabbi packing heat?

00:14:56.000 You bet your ass I want my rabbi packing heat, okay?

00:14:58.000 My synagogue is one of the most likely places in America to be targeted.

00:15:01.000 Number one, because it's a synagogue.

00:15:02.000 And number two, because there are a lot of people who know I go to this synagogue.

00:15:04.000 So, you know, yes, I want everyone packing heat at my synagogue.

00:15:07.000 Yes.

00:15:08.000 Yes.

00:15:09.000 I wish my rabbi could pack heat.

00:15:10.000 I think ministers should pack heat.

00:15:12.000 Ask the minister in the Texas church shooting.

00:15:15.000 Ask the ministers in South Carolina, in Charleston during the church shooting, whether it would have been better if the minister were packing heat.

00:15:20.000 The answer is yes, that would have been much better if people were packing heat.

00:15:24.000 So I don't even understand this argument.

00:15:26.000 The argument is that fewer people should pack heat?

00:15:28.000 Okay, just to show you how dumb this is.

00:15:31.000 Do we have that video of the kids leaving the rally?

00:15:33.000 Okay, so here's some video of the kids leaving the rally.

00:15:35.000 These are the same kids who just said they don't want everybody packing heat.

00:15:38.000 A lot of these kids have said they don't want additional school security.

00:15:41.000 See if you can notice something weird about this video.

00:15:44.000 Okay, watch.

00:15:45.000 Okay, what we're watching right now is a bunch of kids who are walking by, right, these are all the high school kids, and they're being ushered out by a bunch of security members.

00:15:53.000 And, wow, look at that.

00:15:55.000 What are the security members carrying?

00:15:57.000 Why, it looks as though they are armed and carrying guns.

00:16:00.000 The high school students at a gun control march are being protected by people carrying guns?

00:16:00.000 What?

00:16:06.000 Why, that would seem ironic and crazy.

00:16:09.000 The same people claiming, how dare anyone say that we need more armed security in schools will say, we need armed security for this march.

00:16:16.000 Pretty, pretty amazing stuff.

00:16:17.000 So just brilliant to show a little more of the additional brilliance.

00:16:21.000 Here are some of the signs that were that were shown.

00:16:23.000 So let's go through these.

00:16:25.000 One is freedom more important than safety is something that legitimately one of these people was holding.

00:16:30.000 Is freedom more important than safety?

00:16:31.000 OK.

00:16:33.000 Did any of these kids have like a basic, in any sense, did these kids have any sort of basic American education?

00:16:40.000 Is freedom more important than safety?

00:16:42.000 Yes.

00:16:43.000 Yes, freedom is more important than safety.

00:16:45.000 In fact, Benjamin Franklin actually had a specific quote on this in which he said that any people who gives up safety, who gives up a little bit of freedom for safety, will end up with neither safety nor freedom.

00:16:54.000 A very, very famous quote by Benjamin Franklin.

00:16:56.000 In fact, the American Revolution was largely fought on the basis that freedom was more important than safety.

00:17:02.000 Resistance to any dictatorship is based on the idea that freedom is more important than safety.

00:17:07.000 So this sign is stupid.

00:17:08.000 Let's have another stupid sign.

00:17:09.000 Let's see.

00:17:11.000 This one is particularly great.

00:17:12.000 This one says, my uterus is more restricted than your gun.

00:17:17.000 It says something like, my uterus is more regulated than your guns, is what this entire thing says.

00:17:23.000 Okay, number one, this is untrue.

00:17:25.000 You can actually use your uterus to kill people.

00:17:27.000 You can't use your gun to kill people in the United States legally.

00:17:30.000 So there's that.

00:17:31.000 Also, I assume that most women do not actually do like a federal background check before they allow use of their uterus.

00:17:37.000 So there's that as well.

00:17:39.000 I don't think that some of these people are checking ID even before use of the uterus is allowed.

00:17:43.000 So that's a weird sign.

00:17:46.000 So well done, everybody there.

00:17:47.000 And here is a final one.

00:17:50.000 It says, F the NRA.

00:17:51.000 And so, here's a question.

00:17:53.000 Did any of the kids at this rally hold signs saying, F the shooter?

00:17:56.000 There's a point made by Cameron Gray on Twitter.

00:17:58.000 The answer, of course, is no.

00:18:01.000 The stupidity doesn't end there.

00:18:02.000 Here is Cameron Caskey again, this is one of the students you saw speaking a little bit earlier, saying that it's not shooters that make shootings happen, it's weapons that make shootings happen.

00:18:11.000 The fact that nobody is in the bill, they don't say the word gun once.

00:18:17.000 What causes all these shootings?

00:18:19.000 What's the one thing to tie everything together?

00:18:20.000 There's no specific mental health problem that makes all these shootings happen.

00:18:23.000 It's the weapon.

00:18:24.000 And the fact that they aren't taking any action towards it is proof that we need to keep on going.

00:18:28.000 Okay, when they say it's the weapon, the most deadly school shooting in the United States actually took place in Virginia Tech.

00:18:35.000 32 people were killed.

00:18:36.000 A handgun was used.

00:18:36.000 Those are not the guns that people are talking about.

00:18:39.000 And if we're going to talk about comorbidity between gun ownership and school shootings, it's actually really, really low.

00:18:45.000 100 million Americans own guns.

00:18:47.000 The number of school shootings in the United States is very low compared to the number of people who own guns, obviously.

00:18:53.000 The comorbidity is actually, I would assume, a lot higher between the number of shooters and the number of people who suffer from severe mental illness.

00:19:01.000 In any case, the statistics are really low just because the sample size is so small for school shootings.

00:19:05.000 But if we're going to use statistical analysis, and we're going to say that the common factor is the guns, I would say that more of the common factor when it comes to these issues is the mental illness, at least insofar as the percentage of the general population that owns guns or has mental illness performing these school shootings.

00:19:21.000 Well, so one of the things that's been happening is finally the media have started to pay attention to some of the other students.

00:19:26.000 Now, Kyle Kashuv, who's, I know, a listener to the program and I've advised him a little bit on the side.

00:19:31.000 Kyle?

00:19:32.000 There's a student over at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and Kyle was finally on Face the Nation.

00:19:37.000 Now, the media have been saying that, look, you guys claim that we're biased, but we're having on people like Kyle.

00:19:42.000 We're having on some people who are pro-Second Amendment.

00:19:45.000 Right, after we shamed you into it, after Twitter didn't verify Kyle for weeks, after I highlighted Kyle, after I personally started pushing for people to pay attention to Kyle, people started paying attention to Kyle.

00:19:56.000 That's great.

00:19:57.000 It's a little late.

00:19:59.000 Okay, Kyle finally has been verified, but the media have not had him on any of the shows.

00:20:02.000 He was supposed to be on CNN the other day, and CNN wouldn't have him on because he had said nasty things about one of the CNN hosts because that CNN host had been allowing bashing of Marco Rubio for no apparent reason.

00:20:14.000 And finally, Kyle was allowed on Face the Nation, and Kyle knows these issues a lot better than his peers.

00:20:18.000 He's challenged at least a couple of his peers to debate, but nobody's actually going to hold that.

00:20:21.000 CNN's not going to have a debate between Kyle Kashuv and Cameron Kasky or Kyle Kashuv and David Hogg.

00:20:25.000 It ain't going to happen.

00:20:26.000 Now here is Kyle talking on Face the Nation, making what I think is a much more intelligent case with regard to gun control.

00:20:31.000 I talked to senators and I looked at all the facts and they all point in the same direction that a ban on assault weapons will not solve this issue.

00:20:38.000 It's simply a... And restrictions on high-capacity magazines.

00:20:42.000 That won't solve the issue.

00:20:43.000 What we've seen is that there are certain things such as enforcing the regulation that's currently in law.

00:20:49.000 I mean, we've seen on so many different levels that the cowards of Broward failed, the FBI failed, Sheriff Scott Israel failed, so many different multi-layered levels failed

00:21:00.000 Okay, and of course he's exactly right.

00:21:01.000 The media have ignored all of the specific circumstances surrounding this shooting so they can talk about guns more broadly.

00:21:06.000 They do this all the time.

00:21:07.000 When JFK was shot, they suggested that the real issue was not that JFK was shot by a communist, but that it was race relations in the United States that were more broadly responsible for JFK's shooting.

00:21:16.000 The left will always swivel from the actual facts of any given scenario in order to reach out to what their agenda actually is.

00:21:22.000 And they'll ignore people who have something to say in the process.

00:21:24.000 Patrick Petty is the brother of one of the people who was shot

00:21:28.000 In the in the shooting and and he tweeted out at Emma Gonzalez, who mentioned his sister, quote, Hey, Emma, please stop using my sister's name to push your agenda.

00:21:36.000 She did not and would not support it.

00:21:38.000 That did not get any nearly the amount of media coverage as Emma Gonzalez's speech did, of course, because this is more about media bias than it is about anything else.

00:21:44.000 Well, in just a second, I'm going to talk about Stormy Daniels.

00:21:47.000 But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.

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00:23:02.000 There's been other big news over the weekend.

00:23:04.000 Bigger news, probably, than this March, which was helped out by a bunch of organizing groups, which is fine.

00:23:11.000 Stormy Daniels, obviously, is the big news of the weekend.

00:23:14.000 So, her interview on 60 Minutes was put off for a little while by the Duke-Kansas game, which Duke lost.

00:23:22.000 And Stormy Daniels finally comes on, and then there's a 60-minute interview — a very long interview, it's not all 60 minutes — with Anderson Cooper on CBS's 60 Minutes.

00:23:32.000 And things got kind of crazy.

00:23:49.000 I don't know.

00:24:08.000 She's class.

00:24:09.000 I mean, she's all class.

00:24:10.000 And one of the things about her that is worth noting is that, I will say, she has better script taste than half the stars in Hollywood, because the only two legit movies I can find her in are The 40-Year-Old Virgin and, let's see, what was the other one?

00:24:21.000 It's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.

00:24:23.000 So she's in both of those.

00:24:25.000 She plays in one, a lap dancer, and in one, a porn star.

00:24:27.000 So I guess that's typecasting a little bit.

00:24:29.000 I guess you wouldn't expect her to play like the female rocket scientist.

00:24:32.000 But in any case, maybe Stormy Daniels is secretly brilliant.

00:24:36.000 I tend to think that Stormy Daniels is a porn star and that she does things that porn stars do, like she has sex with men for transactional reasons.

00:24:43.000 Now, listen, does this make Trump less scummy?

00:24:47.000 No, the president when it comes to women is gross.

00:24:48.000 I mean, this is unquestioned.

00:24:50.000 And people who do question it are being stupid.

00:24:52.000 Donald Trump, with women, is a pig.

00:24:55.000 He's been a pig all of his life.

00:24:56.000 This is a man who said,

00:24:57.000 That avoiding STDs in the 1970s was his own personal Vietnam.

00:25:01.000 At a time when he could have been drafted and was claiming bones, burs, and his heels, he was, in fact, off of his heels for a variety of other reasons.

00:25:08.000 Donald Trump is a guy who said that nothing in life matters as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass on your arm.

00:25:13.000 This is a man who's had three wives and cheated on all of them, usually with a future wife.

00:25:16.000 I mean, I suppose that we should consider ourselves lucky that Stormy Daniels isn't the current First Lady of the United States, considering Donald Trump's actual record here.

00:25:23.000 Donald Trump is a guy who was caught on tape saying that he grabs women by the bleep.

00:25:26.000 Donald Trump is yucky with women.

00:25:28.000 This we know.

00:25:30.000 And criticizing Stormy Daniels for this public display is not exactly letting Donald Trump off the hook.

00:25:37.000 Other things that are worth noting about the situation.

00:25:39.000 So here's the situation.

00:25:40.000 Back in 2006, Stormy Daniels met Donald Trump at a golf course.

00:25:44.000 Donald Trump was doing some sort of event.

00:25:45.000 And she flirted with him, and then she went up to his room for dinner.

00:25:48.000 And then she had sex with him, I guess one time, in the hopes that he would put her on The Apprentice.

00:25:52.000 And then he did not, in fact, put her on The Apprentice, but he continued to flirt with her by phone.

00:25:55.000 I guess the second time that they met, she went up to his room and they watched Shark Week.

00:25:59.000 No joke.

00:26:00.000 Like, that's power play, Mr. President.

00:26:02.000 Bringing the woman back up to your room.

00:26:04.000 Bringing the stars of Forrest Bump up to your room.

00:26:08.000 And watching Shark Week, it's a move, I guess.

00:26:11.000 That move did not end up working.

00:26:12.000 But then, so Stormy Daniels claimed a couple of things in this interview.

00:26:15.000 She claims in 2011 that after she gave the news to InTouch magazine that she had had an affair with the president, why InTouch even thought that was newsworthy is beyond me.

00:26:23.000 Apparently they didn't think it was that newsworthy.

00:26:24.000 They offered her like 15 grand for it.

00:26:26.000 But in any case,

00:26:28.000 She says that she was approached in a parking lot by a random dude and that the random dude said to her that she had her kid with her and he said, it would be a pity if something happened to that kid's mom.

00:26:38.000 Threatened her.

00:26:39.000 About the InTouch story.

00:26:40.000 She didn't provide any substantiation.

00:26:42.000 She didn't provide a description of the guy.

00:26:45.000 We'll find out maybe more about that.

00:26:46.000 Then she claims that in 2016, she was paid off by Michael Cohen, who's the president's lawyer, for $130,000 to keep her trap shut right before the election.

00:26:55.000 She signed, she took it, and then she lied about having an affair with the president.

00:26:57.000 She said, no, I didn't have an affair with the president.

00:27:00.000 Well, she had to explain all of that to Anderson Cooper.

00:27:02.000 Now she claims, of course, she's being threatened by the president in some sort of nefarious way.

00:27:06.000 What she's really being claimed—what she's really being threatened with is violation of the nondisclosure, which is perfectly legal.

00:27:11.000 The only part here—there are two things that are legally questionable.

00:27:11.000 Right?

00:27:15.000 Well, that would be illegal if they happened.

00:27:17.000 One is Stormy Daniels being actually physically threatened by someone.

00:27:20.000 That obviously is illegal.

00:27:21.000 And the second is if Michael Cohen was giving a quote-unquote in-kind contribution to Donald Trump's campaign by paying Stormy Daniels out of his own pocket to keep her silent.

00:27:28.000 So this is a very weird interview, because Stormy Daniels starts off by talking about why exactly it is that she was—why she's doing the interview in the first place.

00:27:37.000 So he turned around and pulled his pants down a little, and, you know, he had underwear on and stuff, and I just gave him a couple swats.

00:27:43.000 You, you are special.

00:27:45.000 You remind me of my daughter.

00:27:46.000 You know, he's like, you're smart, beautiful, and a woman to be reckoned with.

00:27:51.000 I like you.

00:27:52.000 I like you.

00:27:53.000 You know, don't worry about that.

00:27:54.000 We don't even, we have separate rooms and stuff.

00:27:56.000 Did you two go out for dinner that night?

00:27:58.000 No.

00:27:59.000 You had dinner in the room?

00:28:00.000 Yes.

00:28:01.000 What happened next?

00:28:03.000 So I excused myself and I went to the restroom.

00:28:06.000 You know, I was in there for a little bit and came out and he was sitting, you know, on the edge of the bed when I walked out.

00:28:12.000 Perched.

00:28:14.000 And you had sex with him?

00:28:15.000 Yes.

00:28:16.000 I remember arriving and he was watching Shark Week.

00:28:20.000 He made me sit and watch an entire documentary about a shark attack.

00:28:25.000 It wasn't, at that point, a business meeting.

00:28:27.000 It was just watching Shark Week.

00:28:28.000 Yeah.

00:28:29.000 Did you have sex with him again?

00:28:30.000 No.

00:28:31.000 I was in a parking lot going to a fitness class with my infant daughter.

00:28:36.000 I was taking, you know, the seats facing backwards in the back seat, diaper bag, you know, getting all the stuff out.

00:28:43.000 And a guy walked up on me and said to me, leave Trump alone, forget the story.

00:28:49.000 And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, it's a beautiful little girl.

00:28:52.000 It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.

00:28:54.000 And then he was gone.

00:28:55.000 OK, so let's go through some of this stuff.

00:28:57.000 OK, so first of all, the actual interview starts with Anderson Cooper asking, why are you doing this?

00:29:02.000 He says, I guess I'm not sure 100% of why you're doing this.

00:29:04.000 And she says, because it was very important for me to be able to defend myself.

00:29:07.000 And he's leading her.

00:29:08.000 The whole interview, Anderson was really giving her leading questions like, is part of wanting to set the record straight?

00:29:12.000 Why don't you just tell her that part of it is wanting to set the record straight?

00:29:16.000 And then she says,

00:29:17.000 People are just saying that whatever they wanted to say about me, I was perfectly fine saying nothing at all, but I'm not okay with being made out to be a liar, or people thinking I did this for money.

00:29:24.000 And people are like, oh, you're an opportunist, you're taking advantage of this.

00:29:26.000 Yes, I'm getting more job offers now, but tell me one person who had turned down a job offer making more than they've been making, doing the same thing they've always done.

00:29:33.000 She's doing it for the money.

00:29:36.000 Sorry I put this out.

00:29:36.000 Again, this story is really not about Stormy Daniels.

00:29:39.000 It's about the President of the United States being disgusting.

00:29:40.000 I mean, he's the one who chose to act inappropriately with Stormy Daniels, shall we say, to put it mildly.

00:29:49.000 That's the President of the United States' fault.

00:29:50.000 He's an idiot, and he's disgusting when it comes to women.

00:29:52.000 Have I made that clear?

00:29:53.000 Have I said that enough times?

00:29:54.000 He's gross.

00:29:55.000 I don't find the President's activity here even mildly defensible.

00:29:59.000 But here's what I do object to.

00:30:01.000 The media are trying to make Stormy Daniels to be some sort of victim, unless she was actually physically threatened.

00:30:05.000 If she was physically threatened, she's a victim.

00:30:06.000 Other than that, there's no victimization story here.

00:30:08.000 She took $130,000 from a candidate for President of the United States to keep her mouth shut, and then she didn't shut up.

00:30:15.000 OK, and Stormy Daniels also said that she had consensual sex with Donald Trump.

00:30:18.000 So this is not a Me Too moment.

00:30:19.000 Now, what's really amazing is there are some people on the left who are trying to make it into a Me Too moment.

00:30:23.000 And again, I'm happy to discuss all the legal ramifications of this.

00:30:26.000 It may be a campaign finance violation.

00:30:28.000 I don't think it'll take down Trump because you really have to prove a lot to prove a campaign finance violation.

00:30:32.000 And I can talk about the legal standard and all that in just a second, but when Stormy Daniels says that when the media try to make her out to be some sort of heroic figure, it just doesn't wash.

00:30:42.000 It just doesn't wash.

00:30:43.000 Of course she came out after the election cycle, because her story was newly valuable, and it's worth more than $130,000.

00:30:48.000 So she figures, OK, fine, I'll give them back the $130,000, and I'll make $500,000 by talking about all of this stuff publicly.

00:30:55.000 But she probably isn't.

00:30:57.000 Again, she is transactional in this whole thing.

00:30:59.000 She said, in this interview, openly, that she saw her sex with Trump as a business deal.

00:31:03.000 She was asked, did you want to have sex with Trump?

00:31:04.000 She said, no.

00:31:06.000 They said, were you attracted to Trump?

00:31:07.000 She said, no.

00:31:08.000 They said, so why did you have sex with Trump?

00:31:09.000 And she said, well, I saw it as a business deal.

00:31:11.000 Meaning that it was like she wanted to get on The Apprentice, and she thought maybe this would give her the possibility of getting on The Apprentice, and sex isn't exactly something that she's stingy about.

00:31:21.000 So, all right.

00:31:22.000 But now, what's hilarious is the left is trying to make this into a Me Too moment.

00:31:25.000 I've seen a couple of articles about how Stormy Daniels was victimized by the power of Donald Trump.

00:31:31.000 No, she was not, up until the point where a threat was made.

00:31:34.000 Up until that point, she's a lady who knew that she was sleeping with a married man in order to get ahead in the business.

00:31:39.000 And this does raise some issues about the nature of the MeToo movement in Hollywood as well, because a lot of the talk in the MeToo movement in Hollywood has been about young actresses having sex with older directors in fully consensual manner, and then suggesting that the power imbalance is the real problem.

00:31:52.000 Well, is it possible that they saw the sex the same way that Stormy Daniels did?

00:31:55.000 That she didn't really want to have sex with Trump, but she also knew that if she wanted to get ahead that she would—like, Stormy Daniels herself said it was consensual.

00:32:01.000 She never accused the president of sexual assault or sexual—or sexual—or rape of any sort.

00:32:07.000 And so again, the attempt to make Stormy Daniels into the hero of this story doesn't work.

00:32:11.000 I think you can make Trump into the villain of the story.

00:32:13.000 I think that it's hard to make Stormy Daniels into the hero of a story where she's clearly not the hero.

00:32:17.000 I'll talk a little bit more about this in just a second, but first...

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00:32:57.000 So again, as I'm fond of saying, two things can be true at once in the Stormy Daniels interview.

00:33:01.000 Donald Trump can be disgusting.

00:33:02.000 Also, as I say, it is not on evidence that Donald Trump would have people threaten people.

00:33:07.000 In fact, there are a bunch of accounts that are put out there by BuzzFeed News.

00:33:09.000 BuzzFeed has a long story about how in the 1980s there were a bunch of threats surrounding Donald Trump.

00:33:16.000 They've tweeted out a series of these threats.

00:33:20.000 Including there is one that in which a guy who called him his name Carmine said, called up somebody who was going to, I guess, sue Trump over a real estate issue.

00:33:30.000 So my name is Carmine.

00:33:31.000 I don't know why you're effing with Mr. Trump, but if you keep effing with Mr. Trump, we know where you live and we're going to your house for your wife and kids.

00:33:37.000 That's according to one caller.

00:33:38.000 On April 20th, 1982, according to FBI records,

00:33:40.000 One person called the New York Police Commission reporting that he received a call threatening his life over an abatement in rent by Trump.

00:33:46.000 The caller, the FBI records state, became very abusive and profane regarding Gleadman's inability to approve Mr. Trump's request for a tax abatement.

00:33:55.000 Donald Trump's security guards once shoved, threatened, and held a 12-year-old boy and his mother against their will.

00:33:59.000 This is the allegation after her husband promised to go public with damaging allegations against the Trump Organization.

00:34:03.000 Again, is thuggish behavior foreign to Trump's organization?

00:34:07.000 No.

00:34:07.000 And that's really what this is going to come down to.

00:34:09.000 When you boil all of this down, when you boil all of this down, what it's going to come down to in the end is whether Donald Trump had his people threaten Stormy Daniels.

00:34:18.000 That's the only added element here.

00:34:19.000 The reason people are watching this story as opposed to the thousand other stories about the Trump administration is because there's sex involved with a porn star.

00:34:26.000 Obviously, that's going to be kind of titillating for the American public, and that's why they are interested on any level at all.

00:34:32.000 But the only way that this story actually gained some sort of legs beyond just the general interest is if

00:34:38.000 It turns out that Donald Trump actually sent somebody to physically threaten Stormy Daniels.

00:34:42.000 In that case, then you're talking about a real scandal.

00:34:45.000 If it just turns out that it's his lawyer paid somebody else to shut up, I'm not sure that's a big enough scandal to take out Trump.

00:34:51.000 Again, Trump abides by my strong market sufficiency theory.

00:34:54.000 Everybody already knows

00:34:56.000 You seem to be saying that she has some sort of text message or video or photographs or you could just be bluffing.

00:35:00.000 You should ask some of the other people in my career when they've been on me bluffing.

00:35:26.000 In college, in law school, you did opposition research for Democratic political operative Rahm Emanuel.

00:35:32.000 Some people looking at that will say you're politically motivated.

00:35:35.000 I haven't done anything in politics in over 20 years.

00:35:39.000 But this is not the usual case you take on.

00:35:42.000 You are a former Democratic operative, and you're talking about deposing the president.

00:35:45.000 That sounds political.

00:35:47.000 No, it sounds righteous.

00:35:49.000 Okay, it doesn't necessarily sound righteous unless something righteous is actually going on here, and avoiding an agreement that you signed isn't exactly righteous activity.

00:35:59.000 Again, I keep coming back to this.

00:36:00.000 The only thing I think that matters in this entire Storm Daniels story is if Trump sent somebody to threaten her.

00:36:04.000 Or if there's an actual campaign finance violation.

00:36:06.000 Those are the only two things.

00:36:07.000 Those could be big stories.

00:36:08.000 But we don't have the evidence that those stories are true yet.

00:36:11.000 And Stormy Daniels hasn't identified even the person who threatened her with Trump himself.

00:36:15.000 So we're going to have to find out more about that.

00:36:17.000 Listen, is it gross for the country that we're at this point?

00:36:19.000 Of course it's gross for the country that we're at this point.

00:36:23.000 I do find the lack of memory irritating on the part of some of the media who don't seem to recall all the way back to the 1990s when Bill Clinton was lying repeatedly about sex.

00:36:32.000 And the same members of the media

00:36:34.000 We're currently batting Trump around for lying about sex.

00:36:36.000 We're saying, well, everybody lies about sex, so it's no big deal.

00:36:39.000 Remember, all of the talk about perjury, all of the criminal charges that were brought against President Clinton in the impeachment hearing by the House, in which he was actually impeached, all of that was brushed off by the media as, he only lied about sex, so who cares?

00:36:52.000 Well, I guess here they're not going to argue he only threatened about sex or he only signed an NDA about sex, so who cares?

00:36:58.000 They're not going to do that because obviously it's Trump.

00:37:00.000 But is it a sad state of affairs that this is the character of our public officials?

00:37:03.000 Yes.

00:37:03.000 Is it sad that the American people accept this?

00:37:05.000 Yes.

00:37:06.000 Is it pathetic that the president of the United States engaged in this sort of behavior and may continue to engage in this sort of behavior?

00:37:11.000 Yes.

00:37:13.000 It makes you sad for the Republic.

00:37:14.000 It does.

00:37:14.000 I mean, the Oval Office was once occupied by people like Ronald Reagan.

00:37:18.000 It was once occupied by people like Calvin Coolidge.

00:37:20.000 It was once occupied by people like Abraham Lincoln.

00:37:22.000 And now, I guess it was built after Abraham Lincoln.

00:37:24.000 But in any case, the White House was occupied by Abraham Lincoln.

00:37:27.000 But, you know, bottom line is that the character of the country has declined rather markedly when it comes to these sorts of matters, and Trump is more a reflection of that than a catalyst toward it.

00:37:36.000 Okay.

00:37:37.000 Now, in other news, the Trump administration is still sticking with this whole tariff nonsense.

00:37:44.000 The stock market has been in serious trouble for a while.

00:37:47.000 If you look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it dropped 1,400 points last week.

00:37:50.000 It's up pretty significantly today.

00:37:52.000 It's up about 430 points today.

00:37:55.000 But it's been incredibly volatile.

00:37:56.000 One of the reasons for that is that the president keeps going back and forth on all this tariff talk.

00:38:00.000 Now, one of the things that's happened inside the Trump administration is that Trump seems to be gathering around him people he is more comfortable with.

00:38:06.000 So he wasn't quite as comfortable with some of the some of the people previously.

00:38:11.000 He wasn't super comfortable with H.R.

00:38:13.000 McMaster as the NSA.

00:38:14.000 He wasn't super comfortable with Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.

00:38:19.000 Now he's surrounded himself with people who are going to try and

00:38:23.000 Smooth off his round, his harsh edges by catering to his shtick.

00:38:28.000 And so, for example, John Bolton is the new NSA, or will be the new NSA, and John Bolton is now speaking on favor of China tariffs.

00:38:36.000 Now, I don't think that Bolton is in favor of tariffs, but Bolton is going to pitch the tariffs as a way of negotiation because he understands that if you go into Trump and you tell Trump no, Trump's first reaction is to immediately respond negatively to you.

00:38:48.000 Trump doesn't like no men.

00:38:50.000 Trump likes yes men.

00:38:50.000 He likes people around him who will tell him what he wants to hear.

00:38:53.000 And the key with manipulating Trump, it appears from the officials inside the administration, is to tell him yes, but.

00:38:58.000 Right?

00:38:59.000 Yes, and.

00:39:00.000 Yes, Mr. President, the tariffs are a great idea, and if you use them as leverage to get a better trade deal with China to get them to lower their trade barriers, then that would be great.

00:39:08.000 So yes and is a better strategy inside the administration than no?

00:39:12.000 No is a good strategy for all of us who have to call balls and strikes and who have to tell Trump when he's being stupid.

00:39:16.000 But if you're inside the administration and you're trying to get Trump to do the right thing, I'm not sure Bolton's tactic here is completely wrong.

00:39:20.000 So here's Bolton talking about China tariffs.

00:39:23.000 The United States lives by these agreements.

00:39:25.000 I can tell you we've got lawyers all over the government who spend a lot of time policing American conduct so that we uphold the obligations that we make when we enter into a treaty.

00:39:36.000 All we're asking for here is for the Chinese to do the same.

00:39:40.000 So I think this could be a little shock therapy, get their attention, and hopefully it'll have a good impact.

00:39:45.000 Okay, so Bolton here is trying to make the case to Trump that these tariffs should only be temporary.

00:39:49.000 And again, I'm not sure that this is the wrong strategy.

00:39:51.000 Again, yes and might be the right strategy.

00:39:53.000 Steve Mnuchin was doing the same thing over at the Treasury Department.

00:39:56.000 I assume Larry Kudlow will be doing the same thing in his new position as head of the National Economic Council, telling Trump,

00:40:01.000 Yeah, your tariffs are a great idea, but you know it'd be even better.

00:40:03.000 You know, that's a great idea.

00:40:04.000 And what'll be great is when everybody decides to come to the table and we get rid of all the tariffs altogether.

00:40:09.000 Right?

00:40:09.000 Use it as leverage as opposed to, I just don't like these countries so we're going to tariff them.

00:40:12.000 This is a significant difference in policy.

00:40:14.000 I'll explain in a second.

00:40:15.000 Here's Mnuchin talking about how tariffs really won't impact the economy in any real way.

00:40:19.000 Now this is stupid, what he's about to say.

00:40:22.000 To press my point, are the markets wrong to be afraid of the president's tariffs and the impact it'll have on the economy?

00:40:30.000 I don't expect to see a big impact on the economy.

00:40:33.000 We've been very careful in how we're doing this and what we're doing.

00:40:37.000 But again, I think what we're doing is long-term very good for the economy, which it is pressing for free and fair trade.

00:40:46.000 OK, so again, he's trying to push for the idea that this is an aspect of leverage.

00:40:51.000 Now, these are two very different views of tariffs.

00:40:53.000 Trump is suggesting one view and his people are suggesting another.

00:40:56.000 And we'll see who wins out, whether they're able to convince him.

00:40:59.000 Trump thinks that tariffs are in and of themselves good.

00:41:01.000 He believes, because he's wrong, that if we just tariff Chinese goods,

00:41:05.000 The goal is not to get them to lower their trade barriers to American goods.

00:41:08.000 The goal is to actually harm their economy, because the economy is a zero-sum game.

00:41:12.000 So if we tariff their goods and make the prices higher on their goods, this inevitably builds up an American industry that is important and valuable, and American industry will boom again, and it'll be just like the 1950s in terms of manufacturing and all this nonsense.

00:41:24.000 His people are saying something slightly different, and they're trying to kind of sneak the curve past Trump.

00:41:29.000 They're trying to move inside in that strike zone.

00:41:32.000 What they're claiming is, they're saying to Trump, look, those tariffs can be a really good way to push China around, to leverage China to lower their own trade barriers.

00:41:40.000 Then we can lower our trade barriers, China can lower their trade barriers, and then all the products will freely flow.

00:41:45.000 We're going to use this as a measure of your negotiating skill, Mr. President.

00:41:49.000 That is not the same outcome.

00:41:51.000 If Trump follows his heart, these tariffs stay.

00:41:54.000 If Trump follows his advisors, then the tariffs probably go.

00:41:57.000 And this is why it's sort of important who Trump has surrounded himself with and how cleverly they approach the issue.

00:42:02.000 Because if they're smart, they'll continue, I think, to massage the president's shoulders and suggest that this is all great genius, and then sort of push him a little bit toward the free trade side of the market.

00:42:14.000 Well, simultaneously telling them tariffs are really good ideas.

00:42:17.000 Trump wants to hear that he's a genius.

00:42:18.000 He doesn't want to hear that he's wrong.

00:42:20.000 And so I think all the people he surrounded himself with know that or at least know him well enough to know that that's how you survive inside the Trump administration.

00:42:26.000 OK, time for a couple of things I like and then some things that I hate.

00:42:30.000 So things that I like over the weekend, I've been reading David Mamet's new book, Chicago.

00:42:34.000 It is.

00:42:51.000 It's entertaining, and again, he writes really snappy dialogue.

00:42:54.000 If you like The Untouchables, then you'll like Chicago, David Mamet's new book.

00:42:57.000 Check it out.

00:42:58.000 It's well worth reading.

00:42:59.000 By the way, David Mamet is a pretty outspoken conservative in Hollywood, which is a rarity.

00:43:03.000 So he's well worth supporting for that reason alone.

00:43:05.000 Hey, other things that I like.

00:43:06.000 So Killer Mike, who's a rapper who, I guess, voted for Bernie Sanders, he is now defending the pro-gun position.

00:43:12.000 He's actually making a pretty good case for it.

00:43:14.000 I have worked as a tireless advocate on the behalf of children, disenfranchised women in my community, and I've also worked with gun groups like Georgia's Against Gun Violence that are not, you know, the most pro-secondary.

00:43:27.000 But I say if there's a table to be sat at, the gun owner needs to be there.

00:43:31.000 So I kind of try to see a problem from the whole perspective.

00:43:34.000 Like I told my kids on the school walkout, I love you.

00:43:37.000 If you walk out that school, walk out my house.

00:43:42.000 I'm laughing, but it's so serious.

00:43:44.000 That's simple.

00:43:44.000 We are a gun-owning family.

00:43:46.000 We are a family where my sister farms.

00:43:48.000 We are a family where we'll fish, we'll hunt, but we are not a family that jumps on every single thing an ally of ours does because some stuff we just don't agree with.

00:43:58.000 You know, we are raising a generation of kids where everyone gets a trophy.

00:44:02.000 But in real life, everyone don't get a trophy.

00:44:04.000 No.

00:44:05.000 You know, in real life, the cops don't come on time.

00:44:09.000 Okay, Killer Mike, making a good argument there for gun rights.

00:44:11.000 And it is particularly true, and it has always been true, that gun control in the United States, at least up until the 1960s and 70s, was used largely as a way of keeping black people unarmed in the United States.

00:44:21.000 I think one of the things that the NRA needs to do better is speak out loudly and proudly in cases like Philando Castile.

00:44:26.000 Philando Castile had a concealed carry permit, apparently, to carry in the state of Minnesota.

00:44:29.000 He was shot by police.

00:44:31.000 And that was a case where the police were dead wrong, apparently.

00:44:33.000 So Philando Castile should never have been shot.

00:44:37.000 In cases where there are black folks who are being targeted because they have guns, that needs to be a major issue for the NRA, because owning guns is in fact one of our most basic civil rights, and that holds true for people across the color spectrum.

00:44:48.000 OK, time for a quick thing that I hate, and then we'll do a Federalist paper.

00:44:56.000 Okay, time for the thing I hate.

00:44:57.000 So, the thing that I hate today.

00:44:58.000 The New York Times has a long and stupid article about boys and girls at preschools in Sweden who are being coached in traits not associated with their gender.

00:45:07.000 This article is by a woman named Ellen Berry, and the article is all about how they are trying to achieve gender parity in Sweden.

00:45:13.000 The way they're going to do it is by teaching boys to massage each other's feet and teaching girls to walk around barefoot in the snow and scream out windows, no I am not kidding.

00:45:23.000 Something was wrong with the Penguins, the incoming class of toddlers at the Seafarers Preschool in a wooded suburb south of Stockholm.

00:45:28.000 The boys were clamorous and physical.

00:45:29.000 They shouted and hit.

00:45:30.000 The girls held up their arms and whimpered to be picked up.

00:45:32.000 The group of one and two-year-olds had, in other words, split among traditional gender lines.

00:45:36.000 And at this school, that is not OK.

00:45:37.000 OK, we can stop right there.

00:45:38.000 First of all, I have a four-year-old and a two-year-old.

00:45:40.000 They split along traditional gender lines.

00:45:42.000 This is what they do.

00:45:43.000 Not because people are forcing them to, but because girls are girls and boys are boys.

00:45:47.000 And because my girl, who when she was very little, loved to play with trucks and buses, now will only wear princess dresses.

00:45:52.000 No matter what.

00:45:53.000 Every day.

00:45:54.000 She will only wear particular headbands.

00:45:55.000 She picks out her clothes and her brother's clothes every morning.

00:45:58.000 And my boy runs around beating the crap out of everything in a way that his sister never did, because boys and girls are biologically different.

00:46:04.000 But here's what they do in Sweden to try and fix what goth hath wrought.

00:46:08.000 Their teachers cleared the rooms of cars and dolls.

00:46:10.000 They put the boys in charge of the play kitchen.

00:46:12.000 They made the girls practice shouting no.

00:46:13.000 Then they decided to open a proper investigation, erecting video cameras in the classroom.

00:46:17.000 Science may still be divided over whether gender differences are rooted in biology or culture.

00:46:21.000 Science is not divided on this, okay?

00:46:22.000 Okay, this is so stupid.

00:46:24.000 Science is absolutely unanimous.

00:46:26.000 Gender differences are, in fact, rooted in both biology and culture.

00:46:30.000 Pretending that gender has nothing to do with biology is insane, okay?

00:46:33.000 No one believes this except for radical transgender advocates.

00:46:37.000 Obviously, testosterone in the brain has an impact on how men act.

00:46:41.000 Obviously, estrogen in development has an impact on how girls act.

00:46:45.000 This is so incredibly ascientific.

00:46:47.000 It is pagan crap.

00:46:49.000 It's anti-factual.

00:46:51.000 But the New York Times obviously has to obfuscate the issue.

00:46:54.000 So they say, state curriculum urges teachers and principals to embrace their role as social engineers, requiring them to counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.

00:47:01.000 In other words, we're going to indoctrinate kids into feeling uncomfortable about their own gender because we're pieces of crap human beings.

00:47:07.000 It's so funny, the same people who say empowerment, self-esteem, will say, I will train my little boy to act like a little girl, even if it makes him feel uncomfortable.

00:47:14.000 So we can't make 18-year-old snowflakes feel uncomfortable for me to come speak there, but you can make my two-year-old boy feel uncomfortable by forcing him to wear a dress, you stupid idiots.

00:47:23.000 It is normal in many Swedish preschools for teachers to avoid referring to their students' gender.

00:47:27.000 Instead of boys and girls, they say friends or call children by name.

00:47:30.000 Play is organized to prevent children from sorting themselves by gender because we have to force kids to do stuff they don't want to do.

00:47:35.000 Amazing.

00:47:36.000 A gender-neutral pronoun, hen, was introduced in 2012 and was swiftly absorbed into mainstream Swedish culture, something that linguists say has never happened in other countries.

00:47:44.000 It has never happened in any other culture or any other country because no one was stupid enough until now to try this.

00:47:48.000 Because boys are boys and girls are girls.

00:47:50.000 I love this line.

00:47:51.000 Exactly how this teaching method affects children is still unclear.

00:47:54.000 Shouldn't that be the only question that matters?

00:47:57.000 Shouldn't the only question that matters be how this affects the kids?

00:47:59.000 Well, we don't care about that.

00:48:00.000 We care about the social engineering.

00:48:02.000 And then there are a bunch of beautiful pictures of all these things happening in Sweden.

00:48:08.000 I love this.

00:48:09.000 They show a bunch of drawings by students at the preschool.

00:48:11.000 When a teacher noticed that girls were drawing eyelashes only on girls, she asked them, don't boys have eyelashes?

00:48:16.000 Yes, they do, but boys don't curl their eyelashes or put mascara in them.

00:48:20.000 As one of the few peer-reviewed efforts to examine the methods of facts published last year in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology concluded that some behaviors do go away when children attend what the study called gender-neutral preschools.

00:48:30.000 For instance, the children at these schools do not show a strong preference for playmates of the same gender and are less likely to make assumptions based on stereotypes.

00:48:36.000 Yet, the scientists found no difference at all in the children's tendency to notice gender, suggesting that may be under a genetic influence.

00:48:42.000 Ya think?

00:48:43.000 You think?

00:48:44.000 Okay, all of this makes no sense.

00:48:46.000 The transgender advocates say that kids know from the time they're two that they're transgender, but then they will also say that gender is completely a social construct.

00:48:52.000 So what the hell?

00:48:52.000 Kids at two know what a social construct is?

00:48:55.000 None of this makes any sense at all.

00:48:57.000 And then I love that they are actually gender stereotyping.

00:49:00.000 They're suggesting that boys like to walk around barefoot in the snow.

00:49:02.000 So give your kid frostbite.

00:49:03.000 Give your little girl frostbite to prove that she's just as much of a manly man as the boys.

00:49:07.000 And make the boys massage each other's feet.

00:49:08.000 First of all, foot massages should be illegal in all 50 states.

00:49:11.000 Feet are gross, objectively speaking.

00:49:13.000 And making children massage each other's feet is unsanitary and yucky.

00:49:17.000 But apparently they've been doing this for years and years and years and years.

00:49:21.000 None of this is designed to make children healthier or better or develop better.

00:49:24.000 All of it is designed to foster the virtuous feelings of leftists who don't give a damn about actual biology or science.

00:49:32.000 What stupidity.

00:49:33.000 I hate this stuff because, again, manipulating children is not my thing.

00:49:36.000 Do not manipulate children.

00:49:37.000 They are innocent.

00:49:38.000 Innocent is a code word for having no moral responsibility.

00:49:42.000 No moral responsibility is why children are innocent, right?

00:49:44.000 What makes you innocent as a person is that you are free of sin.

00:49:47.000 What makes children innocent as a person is that they are free of sin.

00:49:50.000 But children are free of sin because they have no capacity to sin because they can't make choices.

00:49:54.000 Which means that you really shouldn't be encouraging them to make choices they are not qualified to make or fostering situations where they are uncomfortable for no reason at all other than your own self-glorification, you morons.

00:50:04.000 Yuck.

00:50:05.000 Okay.

00:50:05.000 Time for a quick Federalist paper.

00:50:07.000 Back to the world of reason.

00:50:08.000 Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 21.

00:50:09.000 We are all the way up through Federalist 21, so we're making steady progress through the Federalist papers.

00:50:14.000 This, again, is a paper about more defects in the current Articles of Confederation, and he points out three specific defects in the Articles of Confederation that need to be fixed by the Constitution.

00:50:23.000 First, there's no mechanism for the feds to compel the states to do anything.

00:50:27.000 So if you're in the middle of a civil war, for example, you can't actually compel the states to do anything under the Articles of Confederation.

00:50:33.000 That's a problem if, for example, you're in the middle of a foreign war and you need the states to help out.

00:50:37.000 Two, there's no mutual guarantee between the states.

00:50:39.000 So what that means is that if the states go to war with one another, they can go to war with one another without the federal government actually stepping in, which means effectively that the continent breaks down into war.

00:50:48.000 And third,

00:50:49.000 There's inequality of taxation between the states.

00:50:51.000 If the states pay into the system directly, rather than a system of duties is placing on articles of consumption, a sales tax or a tariff.

00:50:57.000 One of the things that's interesting here is that a lot of the early Republic was founded, was funded by tariffs because they had no other option.

00:51:03.000 That's not what they actually would have preferred.

00:51:05.000 In fact, Hamilton says that he'd prefer land taxes, but still they used tariffs.

00:51:09.000 One of the things that Hamilton says in this paper advocating for tariffs is that one of the problems with tariffs is if you make them too high, people will just smuggle.

00:51:15.000 Which is a pretty honest assessment of the situation.

00:51:18.000 It's also an assessment the left refuses to make about taxation.

00:51:21.000 They raise tax rates incredibly high, and then they're shocked when people avoid those taxes.

00:51:24.000 Okay, the same is true of tariffs.

00:51:26.000 Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.

00:51:28.000 I want to do—remind me, Mathis—I want to do a breakdown of Cardi B's rant on taxes tomorrow, because it's pretty spectacular.

00:51:34.000 We'll do all that tomorrow.

00:51:35.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:51:35.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:51:41.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.

00:51:43.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:51:44.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:51:46.000 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:51:48.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:51:49.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

00:51:51.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:51:53.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:51:55.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

Children, Scandals, and Tariffs, Oh My! | Ep. 503

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