Trump meets shooting victims and CNN runs one of the worst town halls on gun control I have ever seen in my life. It's a truly egregious two minutes of hate stuff. I'll go through all of it. Today's show is a mashup of my thoughts on the CNN Town Hall, the White House listening session, and a bunch of other stuff that happened yesterday. I'm sure you'll agree that it was a useful thing to have a variety of perspectives at this event. And again, it demonstrated something that the left does not want you to believe: People who own guns, people who care about Second Amendment rights, and people who want to protect their families don't care enough to care enough. If they truly care enough, then they'd agree with the gun control agenda. Well, I think that's what made the media so angry about the event. I think it was an event that had dignity. And the only way to change that is to find unpopular people who disagree with their agenda. And there are a lot of people on the anti-gun left who are trying to find an unpopular way to push their agenda because they can suggest that there is someone who disagrees with them. That's why they're trying to drive us all apart, because they are morally bereft and they can't seem to find a way to be morally morally whole. I'll explain all of that in today's show, and I'll tell you why it's a good thing, and why you should have at least part of your portfolio in a solid asset like precious metals like gold or silver or some other precious metal like that. Ben Shapiro's AMA is a must-listen to this. If you want a safe haven in your portfolio, go over to the Birchgold Group and get a comprehensive 16-page guide for your best investment guide that explains what that is going to give you the best of your best chance of getting your best information on what that's going to do in your day to help you find it. You'll get it all, right here! Links mentioned in the show: The Daily Mail: How to Find It All in the Daily Mail? Subscribe to my show: My AMA: Subscribe to My Story and Subscribe to Ben Shapiro s AMA: What I'm Gave Me a Reviewed It's Greatness, I'm Thanked For It's Amazing, I'll Be Thanked, I've Been Tweeted It, I Got It, You're Not Gave It, My Story, I Say It's Good Enough, I Get It, It's Not Gotta Say It, Thank Me, I Can Say It?
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00:01:53.000Alright, so, we begin today, now at the CNN Town Hall, we'll get to that in just a few minutes, but with an actual useful thing.
00:01:59.000Okay, this useful thing happened at the White House yesterday.
00:02:02.000So, at the White House yesterday, the President of the United States had a bunch of people in who'd been shooting victims, family of shooting victims, some people from Parkland, Florida, some people from Sandy Hook, some people from other mass shootings that have taken place around the country.
00:02:16.000And he had a listening session with them.
00:02:17.000Now, Trump was mocked by the media because he was holding a piece of paper during this with notes on it, and one of the notes said, I hear you.
00:02:23.000And so the idea was, oh, well, I guess he's being coached to hear people.
00:02:26.000But, you know, President Trump actually is quite good in these sorts of situations.
00:02:30.000And I think to everyone's surprise, they expected him to get angry or, in knee-jerk fashion, argue with folks.
00:02:38.000He took it on the chin from a lot of people who were very upset.
00:02:40.000It was a wide variety of perspectives.
00:02:42.000So the media were very upset with this because they want all town halls to basically be people who are shooting victims or shooting victims' family or friends.
00:02:51.000They want those people to all be pro-gun control fanatics who go up there and yell at politicians.
00:02:58.000So they were very upset that the White House had a variety of perspectives.
00:03:01.000So they had some people who are pro-gun control, some people who thought that school safety and armed guards were the solution.
00:03:06.000But that wide variety of perspectives was actually useful.
00:03:09.000And again, it demonstrated something that the left does not want you to believe.
00:03:11.000I've been saying this now since the Parkland shooting.
00:03:13.000I've been saying it more than that for five years.
00:03:16.000Since the Piers Morgan interview I did on CNN after the Sandy Hook shooting, the left media, so many people in the left media, wish you to believe that people who own guns, people who care about Second Amendment rights, people who want to protect their families, that these are people who don't care if children are shot.
00:03:50.000The media are trying to drive us apart.
00:03:52.000There are a bunch of folks on the anti-gun left who are trying to suggest, because this is the only way they can find to push their unpopular agenda, they're trying to suggest that anyone who disagrees with them is morally bereft.
00:05:14.000Let's get together, work with the President, and fix the schools.
00:05:18.000Okay, well, working with the President is something Democrats don't want to do, and they don't want to give him credit for moving on the issue at all, even though he tweeted out this morning that he wants better background checks, and that he wants to ban bump stocks, and that he wants to raise the age of rifle purchase until 21.
00:05:32.000That last measure is one that I can understand if you're also going to raise the age of consent to 21 in terms of joining the military or voting, but it seems to me that we can't grant rights piecemeal to people.
00:05:41.000We can't say you have the right to vote, but not the right to drink or the right to bear arms.
00:05:45.000It doesn't work like that in the United States.
00:05:46.000Rights are generally granted when you reach the point of maturity.
00:05:51.000In any case, this guy was not given, this father was not given the sort of credibility and respect that the media normally grants to shooting victims and fathers.
00:05:59.000They haven't had this fellow on CNN every single day.
00:06:02.000They have had the students on every single day because obviously there's an agenda here and the agenda is put on young people specifically so you can't argue with them.
00:06:19.000And so we all say, we grieve with you.
00:06:20.000And the student says, well, if you really grieved with me, you'd do what I wanted.
00:06:22.000And we say, well, you know, we can disagree on policy and still grieve with you.
00:06:25.000And then the media say, how dare you criticize this young person who's only showing the courage of their convictions?
00:06:31.000As I have said one million times at this point, you can always show the courage of your convictions.
00:06:35.000It doesn't demonstrate necessarily the wiseness of your convictions.
00:06:38.000Now, I was getting a little flack yesterday because I wrote a column for National Review talking about how being young does not confer evidentiary expertise on you.
00:06:47.000That being a person who's suffered doesn't
00:07:51.000Chris Cuomo put out a tweet about a story that was false, in which a guy claimed that he was able to purchase an AR-15 without showing ID, and that he was able to do so in five minutes without a federal background check.
00:08:02.000That story was not true, as we pointed out.
00:08:03.000Even in the story, the guy was turned away from the gun store when he couldn't show ID and didn't want to go through a federal background check.
00:08:09.000It shows you the impact of the media and how their coverage skews people's perspectives on how easy it is to get guns.
00:08:15.000It's an enormous number of stories about how we need to ban machine guns.
00:08:18.000Machine guns have been effectively banned in the United States since the 1980s.
00:08:22.000Machine guns have been in very small circulation in the United States for decades at this point.
00:08:28.000There are people who say that we should have mental health background checks.
00:08:30.000We do have mental health background checks in the United States.
00:08:32.000We need to make the system more transparent.
00:08:36.00038 states in the United States report less than 80% of the people who shouldn't have guns to their full federal background checklist.
00:08:43.000But that's a problem with the law enforcement structure, not a problem with the capacity of the law itself.
00:08:49.000The law itself is a lot stricter than people think it is with regard to purchasing weapons on the federal level.
00:08:53.000So Trump answers all of these survivors and friends and family, and he talks about a couple of things that he would like to do.
00:09:00.000One of his proposals is that we should arm 20% of teachers who are actually qualified to carry weapons in the classroom.
00:09:06.000So let's say you had 20% of your teaching force, because that's pretty much the number.
00:09:11.000If these cowards knew that the school was, you know, well-guarded from the standpoint of having pretty much professionals with great training, I think they wouldn't go into the school to start off with.
00:09:23.000I think it could very well solve your problem.
00:09:25.000Okay, so a lot of people were very upset about this.
00:09:27.000How dare he say that he was going to arm 20% of teachers?
00:10:08.000It's not to say that victims should not be on TV.
00:10:10.000That's fine with me, if they're on TV.
00:10:12.000What it is to say is that CNN, other outlets like CNN, only have big town halls in liberal areas with shooting victims.
00:10:20.000They would never have, for example, a full town hall with, case in point, they would never have a full town hall with people who are victims of illegal immigrant crime in Phoenix, Arizona.
00:10:30.000Sean Hannity might, but you'd never see that on CNN on their quote-unquote objective news shows.
00:10:34.000But Sean is not an objective reporter.
00:10:38.000But CNN claims to be objective, and therein lies the problem.
00:10:40.000So before I get to any of that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Blue Apron.
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00:10:51.000They make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone.
00:10:53.000People in our office, people outside our office, everybody loves Blue Apron.
00:10:56.000The way that it works is that you go online, you register with their service, and they will send you recipes and the pre-portioned ingredients, and you cook it there in your home.
00:12:31.000Last night, I get home from my long day in Washington, D.C., and I flip on CNN, because everybody on Twitter is talking about this town hall.
00:12:39.000Now, I knew that this town hall was going to go wildly wrong from the start, because CNN has an agenda here.
00:12:45.000And I know they were claiming that it's just students who are asking questions, but people at CNN are journalists.
00:12:50.000They know what a loaded question sounds like.
00:12:53.000A loaded question is, when did you stop beating your wife, Senator?
00:13:14.000Dana Lash from the NRA showed up as well.
00:13:17.000And this turned into basically a hootenanny.
00:13:20.000It was a bunch of people in the crowd, hundreds of people in the crowd from the Broward County area.
00:13:25.000And then number one, important to note, Broward County, Democratic area, very left area, voted for Hillary Clinton in a state that went red for Donald Trump.
00:13:33.000They voted, I think it was 54 to 46 for Hillary Clinton in that area.
00:13:37.000And this area of Broward County is apparently pretty left.
00:13:40.000The sheriff there, a guy named Steve Israel, has been photographed with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
00:13:48.000So the shooting took place in a Democrat area and the people there were family and friends of victims.
00:13:52.000So what you are likely to get when you set this up is obviously emotions running incredibly high and also an agenda that is obviously very clear.
00:14:00.000And this thing turned into a debacle right from the start with people asking questions that were utterly inappropriate on a moral level.
00:14:07.000Okay, just because you've suffered something doesn't mean you get to say immoral things.
00:14:11.000There were kids there who were saying some of the most immoral things that- truly immoral things.
00:14:19.000He's one of the students who's been most featured on CNN because obviously they're not going to feature a bunch of students who are right-wing.
00:14:30.000Senator Rubio, it's hard to look at you and not look down the barrel of an AR-15 and not look at Nicholas Cruz, but the point is you're here and there are some people who are not.
00:14:55.000I understand you just went through something.
00:14:57.000I understand what you went through was difficult and terrible and horrible and no person should have to go through that.
00:15:08.000Marco Rubio did not walk into a school and mow down children.
00:15:12.000And Marco Rubio's agenda is not to facilitate the mowing down of children.
00:15:15.000But again, the left's suggestion here is that everyone who is not on their side must be acting in bad faith.
00:15:20.000The only people acting in bad faith are the people who say stuff like that.
00:15:24.000Those are the only people who are acting in bad faith.
00:15:26.000I mean, the entire night was just an evening of grandstanding by political officials and an evening of throwing around the most immoral, morally charged language by some of the students.
00:15:36.000And listen, your obligation to be a moral human being and say moral things does not stop when you experience tragedy.
00:15:41.000To suggest that Marco Rubio is akin to a school shooter is disgusting.
00:17:14.000And you want to keep things the way they are and not do things differently.
00:17:19.000If you want to keep the gun laws as they are now, you will not get reelected in Broward County.
00:17:28.000Right, so that guy right there is obviously a political actor with a political agenda, but he was portrayed on CNN as just a sheriff, right?
00:18:43.000Well, I know there's one Florida statute where if he's sending messages threatening to kill people, that right there, under Florida state law.
00:18:53.000Who did he send the message to kill people to?
00:18:55.000BuzzFeed, AP, Reuters, Yahoo News, all reported that it was to other students.
00:19:41.000Okay, and of course the crowd starts turning on Dana for mentioning the fact that when you visit a home 39 times and the guy shoots up a school, maybe you missed something.
00:19:49.000How many red flags do you have to have?
00:19:51.000Okay, that seems like a better question to me than, Marco Rubio, you're obviously Satan, what are you doing here?
00:20:04.000Emma Gonzalez is another one of the students who's been featured on CNN a lot.
00:20:07.000You can always tell which are the students who are pro-gun control because those are the ones whose faces you actually recognize.
00:20:11.000So when you look at Emma Gonzalez, you'll recognize her face because you saw it on CNN a lot.
00:20:15.000When you see some of the other students who were not at the CNN town hall for reasons that we will discuss in a second, then what you will see is that you don't recognize their faces because they're not on CNN a lot.
00:20:24.000So here's Emma Gonzalez, who actually says straight out to Dana Lash that she's going to support Dana Lash's kids better than Dana Lash is.
00:20:31.000Dana Losh, I want you to know that we will support your two children in a way that we will not.
00:20:38.000The shooter at our school obtained weapons that he used on us legally.
00:20:44.000Do you believe that it should be harder to obtain these semi-automatic weapons and the modifications for these weapons to make them fully automatic like bump stocks?
00:20:54.000Well, first off, Emma, I want to applaud you for standing up and speaking out.
00:20:58.000And for anyone who has ever criticized you, or any of these students up here, including people who have been on my side of this issue.
00:21:06.000Okay, so, good for Dana for not taking the bait there.
00:21:09.000But, again, what a horrifying statement.
00:21:11.000I'm gonna defend your children away you won't.
00:21:12.000I'd like to see Emma Gonzalez name Dana Lash's kids.
00:21:29.000Do you know that it is not federally required for states to actually report people who are prohibited possessors, crazy people, people who are murderers?
00:21:48.000You can shout me down when I'm finished, but let me answer Emma's question.
00:21:52.000Okay, and you can actually hear in the background audience members shouting at Dana that she's a murderer.
00:21:56.000If you believe that Marco Rubio's the murderer, if you believe that Dana Lash is the murderer, but if you don't believe that the shooter is responsible for his own actions, and if you believe that 300 million people in the United States have to have their gun rights removed from them instead of us focusing on how to fix this issue, if you think we're all that unsympathetic,
00:22:12.000Then I would suggest you have a screw loose.
00:22:14.000Your morality is skewed beyond belief if you think Dana Lash is a murderer or Marco Rubio is equivalent to the man who shot children in the face at a Parkland High School.
00:22:34.000Some of the questions that were asked of Senator Rubio.
00:22:36.000So Senator Rubio, again, he's not the best advocate for the Second Amendment.
00:22:40.000He's a senator from Florida, which is why he was there.
00:22:42.000But Senator Rubio has a bad habit of trying to please the crowd that is in front of him.
00:22:47.000And so during the course of this debate, he kind of moved on a bunch of issues regarding raising the age of buying weapons, as well as the availability of AR-15s and all the rest of this.
00:22:59.000The questions that were being asked were truly amazing.
00:23:04.000You're going to see the father of one of the murdered students trying to push Rubio to say that guns were the sole reason for the shooting.
00:23:13.000And Rubio won't go there, and the crowd starts booing him, which again demonstrates the silliness of this.
00:23:17.000It is true, by the way, that guns were a factor here because the gun was used.
00:23:21.000Just as in any murder, the murder weapon is a factor.
00:23:23.000But does that mean it is the sole factor?
00:24:21.000This is the clip that is going to be played over and over and over by Second Amendment advocates.
00:24:26.000You understand, if you are an advocate for gun control, the worst thing you can do right now, in a time when everyone is on the same side regarding the horrors that just happened, the worst thing you can do is claim that those of us who disagree with you are evil and nasty.
00:24:42.000I mean, just a bit of political advice.
00:24:44.000You are seeing movement from people on the pro-gun side saying we'd be willing to look at certain gun control measures we may not have been willing to look at before.
00:24:52.000I may not agree with that policy decision on their part, but that is what is happening in real time.
00:24:56.000Instead of you embracing that, instead of you saying, you obviously want to come to the table, let's see if there are places where we can agree, instead of us all coming to the table on issues that may not have to do with confiscating weaponry, but instead may have to do with securing schools,
00:25:08.000On those issues, instead of you doing that, you are overtly alienating people who disagree with you.
00:25:18.000So Rubio is talking about how the—well, you know, before we get to clip 30, clip 29.
00:25:23.000Bill Nelson is the Democrat senator, and Bill Nelson mentions at the very beginning how he wants to ban what he calls assault weapons, including the AR-15.
00:25:31.000Assault weapons, again, have no legal definition.
00:25:34.000Any rifle could theoretically be an assault weapon, depending on the magazine size, or the color, or the grip, or the shape, or whether there's a sight on it, or any of the rest of this.
00:25:43.000So Bill Nelson mentions banning the AR-15, and of course there's big applause, because again, this is a stacked town hall.
00:25:47.000Consent solutions, like getting the assault rifles off the streets.
00:26:01.000I will point out that when the Democrats brought up an assault weapons ban in 2009, only 38 Democrats voted in favor of it.
00:26:07.000The entire Senate voted it down overwhelmingly.
00:26:10.000So Marco Rubio later, he says, listen, that all sounds well and good, right?
00:26:13.000Getting assault weapons off the streets and all of this.
00:26:15.000You're talking about banning every semi-automatic gun in the United States, effectively speaking.
00:26:41.000If you want to ban all semi-automatic rifles, when he says you have to ban all semi-automatic rifles, for people who don't know what a semi-automatic rifle is, a semi-automatic weapon is just a weapon where when you pull the trigger once, one shot comes out and another round is chambered.
00:26:52.000That is all a semi-automatic weapon is.
00:26:54.000It's basically everything except for like a single-action revolver, right?
00:26:59.000It's pretty much any gun in the United States is effectively a semi-automatic weapon.
00:27:05.000Right, old six-shooters are basically semi-automatic weapons.
00:27:08.000Okay, at least they function like semi-automatic weapons in the sense that one trigger pull means one bullet is fired.
00:27:13.000And they're talking now about full gun bans, right?
00:27:15.000Which would also, I assume, have to include full gun confiscation, right?
00:27:19.000They'd also have to be talking about taking away all of the guns, because it's not enough to ban people from buying new guns, there are too many guns already out there.
00:27:26.000You can get a hold of a gun if you just go to a private seller, it's not that hard.
00:27:29.000So you'd have to create a registry, and then you'd have to ban people from selling, and then you'd probably have to confiscate the weapons because you don't want them out there anyway, because how many people already own guns?
00:27:36.000Now there are 300 million guns in the United States.
00:27:41.000300 million guns in the United States and 100 million gun owners.
00:27:44.000What in the world are you talking about?
00:27:45.000I encourage Democrats to go down this path.
00:28:15.000But apparently the answer is yes, because look, the reality is there is no solution that is dependent on getting rid of the Second Amendment.
00:28:32.000But again, the media are so beside themselves, they feel like their agenda is finally being forwarded.
00:28:36.000What they don't understand is the only thing that changed today from last night because of the CNN special is a bunch of Republicans went out and bought an AR-15.
00:28:43.000Last night, I was browsing rifles online.
00:28:46.000I wasn't browsing rifles because I'm interested in more violence.
00:28:50.000I'm browsing rifles because I think the Democrats are going to move to try and make it illegal for me to own one.
00:28:54.000And if I want to protect my family, then I want the gun of my choice to protect my family.
00:28:59.000I'm not going to mow down children, and I want to be able to stop the bad guy who does want to mow down children.
00:29:04.000Democrats are shooting themselves right in the foot with this sort of stuff.
00:29:07.000And worse, they're dividing the country, and that's really what this is about.
00:29:10.000They're really about trying to get people out to the polls, trying to use this as a wedge issue.
00:29:14.000They think they can get people really excited.
00:29:16.000I promise you, all the anti-gun advocates who are so deeply excited about going to the polls, there are a lot more Americans who own guns, know people who own guns, have fired a gun, than people in the United States who have not.
00:29:36.000Not a lot of gun ownership in New York.
00:29:38.000But get out of the media centers of L.A.
00:29:40.000and New York, get into the middle of the country, and everybody owns multiple guns.
00:29:45.000You're talking about a culture war that the left has entered into in an area where it was unnecessary and directly polarizing for no reason, and the media are boosting this because the media have an agenda, and that agenda is to castigate everybody who they disagree with as deplorable.
00:29:58.000This is just another version of Hillary Clinton's shtick about how everybody on the other side is a deplorable, who's a bad human being.
00:30:04.000I hate this more than anything in politics, is the demonization of people who have just basic political disagreements with you as morally evil actors.
00:30:12.000And yet that is what they are doing day after day after day.
00:30:42.000Dionne over at the Washington Post, which we'll get to, and some things I like and things I hate.
00:30:46.000But first, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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00:31:23.000So as I say, the attempt to paint the NRA as the enemy is truly an astonishing one.
00:31:29.000The left has been trying to do this for years, the NRA as the enemy.
00:31:31.000Now, I think the NRA is making a mistake.
00:31:33.000The mistake the NRA is making, Wayne LaPierre, who's the head of the NRA, did a speech today at CPAC, where I'll be speaking a little bit later.
00:31:39.000And in that speech, he talked about, he really went hard against the Democratic Party.
00:31:43.000He really said some polarizing things about the nature of the political divide.
00:32:22.000He's taken like $9,000 in the last election cycle, like a relative nothing.
00:32:26.000But they're asking him to disassociate from a fully legal Second Amendment-pushing
00:32:32.000Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA?
00:33:03.000So, number one, the positions I hold on these issues of the Second Amendment, I've held since the day I entered office in the city of West Miami as an elected official.
00:33:11.000Number two, no, the answer to the question is that people buy into my agenda.
00:33:16.000And I do support the Second Amendment.
00:33:18.000And I also support the right of you and everyone here to be able to go to school and be safe.
00:33:21.000And I do support any law that would keep guns out of the hands of a deranged killer.
00:33:26.000And that's why I support the things that I have stood for and fought for during my time there.
00:34:15.000Look at this disgusting display, okay?
00:34:17.000Again, this is the leading questions that, like, and Tapper's just sitting there.
00:34:20.000I like Jake, but Jake is just sitting there, and he's allowing this kid to browbeat the senator with a bunch of loaded questions that have nothing, and then he's not even moving to try and quiet the crowd so that Rubio can answer the questions.
00:34:31.000If you're gonna let the kid just go off like this, which is fine, you wanna do that, that's fine.
00:36:54.000People who claim that I don't care about dead kids, those are the people who I scorn.
00:36:57.000He says, Well, the reason people think it's the first step toward confiscation is when you have large crowds of people openly cheering gun confiscation.
00:37:14.000He says our task is not to fight for laws to protect innocents, but to demonstrate that we really, honestly, truly, cross our hearts, positively love gun owners, and wouldn't for an instant think anything ill of them.
00:37:22.000What is odd is that those with extreme pro-gun views, those pushing for new laws to allow people to carry just about anytime, anywhere, are never called upon to model similar empathy toward children killed, the mourning parents left behind, people in urban neighborhoods suffering from violence, or the majority of Americans who don't own guns.
00:37:43.000The last two weeks have been everybody on the right being told to sit down and shut up because people who are survivors are speaking now.
00:37:50.000It's been identity politics of suffering.
00:37:52.000We've been told that we have to treat every, not just the people, which we should treat with respect, but that we ought to treat everything that comes out of their mouth with an unparalleled level of respect.
00:38:01.000Now, the great irony in all of this, of course, is that if there are survivors who are not pro-gun control, those people have essentially been marginalized.
00:38:08.000Now, one of the students is claiming that he was invited to the CNN debate, but then was not allowed to ask a question because he was basically being fed questions by the CNN folks.
00:38:20.000Which is a pretty astounding accusation.
00:38:23.000I expected to be able to ask my questions and give my opinion on my questions.
00:38:27.000But Colton Hobb, a member of the Junior ROTC who shielded classmates in the midst of terror, says he did not get to share his experience.
00:38:36.000CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted.
00:38:41.000Colton wrote questions about school safety, suggested using veterans as armed school security guards, but claimed CNN wanted him to ask a scripted question instead, so he decided not to go.
00:38:53.000I don't think that it's going to get anything accomplished.
00:38:56.000It's not going to ask the true questions that all the parents and teachers and students have.
00:39:01.000They said, we would never, we would never leak questions at a town hall.
00:39:06.000You did last time when Donna Brazile, who was then working for the CNN and ended up running the DNC, leaked questions from the CNN town hall to Hillary Clinton.
00:39:18.000Now, I don't know if CNN tried to script this student's question.
00:39:20.000My guess is that the CNN may have said to him, we want you to write down your question on a piece of paper so that we can sort of contain it.
00:39:53.000They've actually planted people in debates before to ask specific questions.
00:39:57.000So at a Democratic debate in Vegas in 2007, Wolf Blitzer introduced several citizen questioners as, quote, ordinary people and undecided voters.
00:40:04.000They later turned out to include a former Arkansas Democratic director of political affairs, the president of the Islamic Society of Nevada, and a far-left anti-war activist who'd been quoted in newspapers lambasting Harry Reid.
00:40:16.000So, the media have done this sort of thing before.
00:40:18.000Do I know that that's what happened here?
00:40:20.000No, I'm not suggesting that anybody was paid to be there.
00:40:22.000What I am suggesting is it was a self-selected crowd of people.
00:40:24.000If you are a right-wing, Second Amendment supporter, you did not go to that town hall last night because you knew it was run by CNN, because you know CNN is out to sandbag gun supporters, and because you know that your view is going to be atypical and you won't get to ask a question.
00:40:38.000I mean, this thing was about as rigged from the start as it possibly could be, and people there knew it.
00:40:44.000Suffice it to say, I know people at CNN who are involved in making this, and who acknowledge, freely, that this thing was rigged for emotion, and was rigged for left-wing views.
00:40:53.000In Broward County, and it was a bunch of shooting victims who've already been on CNN specifically talking about why they want gun control.
00:40:59.000This sort of, again, it is painful to me.
00:41:03.000I mean, I had trouble sleeping last night after watching this, not because I think that in all good conscience I have to support gun control, but because I think that we cannot last as a country.
00:41:13.000We cannot last as a country if we are going to continue to maintain that people who disagree with us are inherently bad human beings.
00:41:42.000And you can see the bad faith of the media.
00:41:45.000An MSNBC host, for example, yesterday went after Governor Rick Scott of Florida because Governor Rick Scott wasn't in his office, a bunch of students showed up, and they wanted to talk with him.
00:41:53.000And here's what this MSNBC host had to say.
00:41:56.000The governor is too busy to meet with them today.
00:42:01.000And as you can see, they have file boxes of paperwork that they want the government to see.
00:42:08.000They're going to try and drop it off at Hashtag HearTheBills.
00:42:45.000Again, if the media want us to actually find solutions, I have a couple of solutions I've been suggesting over the last several days, including we can call on the media, who apparently love their ratings, to stop showing the faces and names of mass shooters.
00:42:58.000They won't do that, because it might have to sacrifice some ratings and ad dollars if they do that.
00:43:02.000So instead, they'll keep putting those people on TV, even though studies say that the more you show these folks on TV, the more you're making it likely that the next mass shooter goes out and does a mass shooting.
00:45:17.000Okay, so the first thing that I hate, obviously, look, I've talked about disrespect toward people who are Second Amendment advocates.
00:45:24.000One of the stupidest, grossest things that I've seen over the last couple of days are these people who are claiming that Parkland students are crisis actors or paid advocates for a particular political position.
00:46:12.000It's unbelievable to me that these people are even saying this, and the fact that Donald Trump Jr.
00:46:16.000liked that post is disgusting to me, but it's also false.
00:46:22.000Okay, so I agree with pretty much everything this kid just said.
00:46:25.000I disagree with him on everything having to do with gun control.
00:46:27.000Again, give the kid the credit to say that he has his own viewpoint, even if his viewpoint is wrong, and don't pretend that this stuff is conspiratorial crisis acting.