The Ben Shapiro Show


Ep. 224 - Can Democrats Recover From 2016?


Summary

Sen. Harry Reid is one of the worst liars in the history of the Senate. And yet, here he is, receiving accolades for his supposedly grand tenure in the Senate, lecturing Americans about the supposed scourge of fake news in the pages of the New York Times. Ben Shapiro explains why Democrats have given up on being trusted with power, and why they should be worried about what s really going on in the White House and Congress. Plus, a listener mailbag about the future of the Democratic Party. Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire's Peter Bergen talk about Harry Reid, the man who helped destroy the filibuster, and who is now the most powerful man in the country. They also talk about why Democrats should not be trusted to hold power and why the country should not trust them with power. And they finish the show with a question from a listener about the best wine they've ever had, and which is the best bottle of wine they ve ever had. Thanks to our sponsor, Wink! If you like wine, you don't know anything about wine? Wink is the place to go to get 20 bucks off of a bottle of your favorite sparkling wine, and make sure you don t look like a fool, because that's all you need to know about wine, because they make it 20 bucks or better than you do! You don't have to be a fool to drink wine at a fancy dinner party, right? Wink is the company that makes great wine, but they also makes it affordable, and it's just as good as you can drink it in the way you like it, so you can have a nice glass of good wine, too. . it's all about 20 bucks to make you feel like you're all that you should be drinking it in a nice way, right right now, not 20 bucks, but you can be sure you're drinking it at a nice, nice, good wine that's good enough to feel good and you're not going to feel like it's going to be good, good enough, and you won't look like you'll feel good about it, you're going to have a good time drinking it, too, right, you'll get a good night out, you know what they're all right, right there, right you know you're gonna have it, right they're not gonna be there, you won t have to drink it, they're gonna be good enough? - Ben Shapiro


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Senator Harry Reid is one of the worst liars ever to grace the national stage.
00:00:04.000 He accused 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney of cheating on his taxes without any evidence, then celebrated his lie since it helped prevent Romney from becoming president.
00:00:12.000 He called George W. Bush a liar who betrayed the country.
00:00:15.000 He said paying taxes was voluntary, which is weird since it's not, attacked the Koch brothers as un-American, and admitted he'd rather let a child with cancer suffer than fund the government piecemeal.
00:00:25.000 His Senate tenure was marked by conflict and cram downs, from the Obamacare fiasco to the destruction of the filibuster, both of which, by the way, will now backfire on Democrats.
00:00:32.000 Yet, there was Reid, receiving accolades yesterday for his supposedly grand tenure in the Senate.
00:00:37.000 And there he was, in the pages of the New York Times, lecturing Americans about, of all things, the supposed scourge of fake news.
00:00:43.000 The New York Times tweeted, quote, Much of the responsibility for separating what's real and what's fake will fall on Democrats, writes Harry Reid.
00:00:51.000 Ahem.
00:00:52.000 Here are some of Reid's other sterling advice in the New York Times.
00:00:54.000 Really?
00:00:55.000 Reid spent his entire career opposing Republican policy in knee-jerk fashion.
00:00:59.000 And what accomplishments of the Obama era are worth upholding exactly?
00:01:09.000 Reid specifically cites Obamacare.
00:01:11.000 He says it's a dramatic misreading of your mandate to destroy it, even though Obama never had a clear mandate to pass Obamacare, and the public spent the next six years destroying the Democrats for misreading their mandate in passing that monstrosity.
00:01:22.000 Reid wrote to Democrats, I say it has never been more important to stand up for the things we believe in.
00:01:26.000 We are entering a new gilded age.
00:01:29.000 Nobody's gotten richer off government than Reid.
00:01:31.000 He spent his entire life in government making about $190,000 a year, and now he's worth somewhere between $3 and $10 million.
00:01:38.000 The Clintons are wealthy because of political backscratching, too.
00:01:41.000 He wrote, quote, Much of the responsibility for separating what is real and what is fake will fall on Democrats.
00:01:45.000 Again, this is nuts.
00:01:46.000 Reid is one of the worst liars in the history of the Senate.
00:01:48.000 He also wrote, quote, When Democrats pick their fights next year, they can do so knowing that win or lose, they will be debating in a Senate that we made more open and more transparent.
00:01:57.000 This is Reid defending the idiotic move of nuking the filibuster on cabinet picks.
00:02:01.000 It's crippled his party, going into an era of Republican leadership in the White House and Congress.
00:02:05.000 Reid will significantly improve America by leaving the Senate.
00:02:07.000 But recounting his legacy?
00:02:09.000 Well, that should remind Americans just why Democrats should not be trusted with power.
00:02:13.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:02:13.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:02:19.000 Oh, so much to get to today here on The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:02:21.000 Plus, we're doing the mailbag today.
00:02:23.000 We're broadcasting on Friday, obviously, because we missed a show earlier in the day, but we will be starting to do some Friday shows in the near future.
00:02:29.000 We have some surprises planned for that, which is why you need to subscribe to dailywire.com.
00:02:33.000 But first, before we get to today's show, we have to say hello to our advertisers over at Wink.
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00:02:50.000 You don't know any of this stuff.
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00:03:14.000 All my staff members have had their wine, and given the quality of the podcast, you would think they drink the wine all the time, but no, they usually have it only in their off hours, but they say that the wine is really, really good.
00:03:25.000 They even had a wine party here that was really spectacular, apparently, and they say the product's just great.
00:03:31.000 Again, if you don't know anything about wine, but you want an affordable wine to bring over your friend's house and make sure that you don't look like a fool, Wink is the place to go.
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00:03:50.000 All of my staffers swear by it, which means that either the wine's good or they're all alcoholics.
00:03:54.000 Alrighty.
00:03:55.000 So, today, we begin with the fact that Democrats have really given up the only tool they ever had.
00:04:01.000 For being able to hold Republicans in check.
00:04:05.000 And number one, their biggest tool for holding Republicans in check for a long time was the media.
00:04:10.000 They believed that the media would be able to stop Republicans from being terrible and vindictive and Republican.
00:04:16.000 And now they've blown all credibility.
00:04:19.000 And you can see how badly they've blown their credibility over this whole thing they've been discussing about fake news.
00:04:23.000 Fake news this, fake news that.
00:04:24.000 For those who have missed this controversy, Democrats have been saying now since the election that the reason Donald Trump was is because people believed fake news.
00:04:31.000 Now, Democrats haven't really distinguished between headlines that are just flat out not true and messages that they don't like.
00:04:39.000 So when Donald Trump says things like, radical Islam is something Democrats never say and it's a threat, then a lot of people will say, that's fake news.
00:04:47.000 I've heard Democrats say the word radical Islam.
00:04:49.000 Right.
00:04:49.000 The overall message is true.
00:04:50.000 And he was making an overstatement, but obviously he didn't mean for it to be taken literally.
00:04:55.000 Fake news is like Pizzagate.
00:04:56.000 Pizzagate is fake news because there's no evidence that Pizzagate is real, that there's this sex slavery ring being run out of this pizzeria in the middle of Washington, D.C.
00:05:07.000 But the Democrats don't bother to make that distinction, and they never have.
00:05:10.000 In fact, they've actually promulgated fake news at a routine rate.
00:05:15.000 So long as it helps them.
00:05:16.000 So that's actually destroyed their capacity to be fact-checkers.
00:05:19.000 Nobody trusts you to check the facts if you're the person who promulgated half the false stories in the first place.
00:05:23.000 The same people who complain about fake news are the people who are spending literally months talking about hands up, don't shoot, right?
00:05:30.000 There's that famous picture from CNN of all of their anchors doing hands up, don't shoot.
00:05:34.000 And those people on CNN, those same exact people, are now complaining about the scourge of fake news that drove Trump to the presidency.
00:05:39.000 Well, at a certain point, we stopped listening to them.
00:05:42.000 And that was real good for Donald Trump, both because it meant that we didn't listen to them when they slandered him, and it also meant that we didn't listen to them when they told the truth about him, which worked out really well for Donald Trump.
00:05:51.000 It means that we're all going to have to find new sources of information, people that you trust to bring you the news.
00:05:56.000 My general rule of thumb is, I mean aside from the basic rules, like everything has to be double sourced, my general rules of thumb on news to trust, news outlets to trust, is do they ever print stories that are not in their own economic self-interest?
00:06:07.000 Do they ever print stories that run counter to their own narrative?
00:06:11.000 Do they ever print stories that debunk things that you know that they believe?
00:06:14.000 And that's usually a pretty good indicator.
00:06:16.000 That's why I think the Washington Post is better than the New York Times.
00:06:19.000 The New York Times rarely runs stories that run counter to their leftist narrative.
00:06:23.000 The Washington Post actually does sometimes.
00:06:25.000 And so I think it's a better outlet.
00:06:27.000 I don't think so.
00:06:48.000 We're good to go.
00:07:10.000 Faked his own life story multiple times, right?
00:07:13.000 He was in a helicopter in Iraq.
00:07:14.000 He was almost shot down.
00:07:15.000 He was watching bodies float by him during Hurricane Katrina.
00:07:19.000 He was present at the storming of the beaches at Normandy.
00:07:22.000 He was actually on the original mission to the moon.
00:07:27.000 And now he's still on MSNBC, right?
00:07:28.000 They brought him back on MSNBC after he was ousted from NBC Nightly News.
00:07:32.000 And here he is decrying fake news.
00:07:35.000 As we talked about here last night, fake news played a role in this election and continues to find a wide audience.
00:07:42.000 A BuzzFeed news study of Donald Trump's own tweets, where they follow back news stories to their root source, found more of them came from Breitbart originally than from any other single source.
00:07:55.000 And of course, he's ripping on Breitbart as fake news.
00:07:57.000 Now, as a former employee of Breitbart, I can say that not everything that Breitbart prints is fake news.
00:08:02.000 The vast majority of what Breitbart does is aggregate.
00:08:04.000 They actually just rewrite other people's stories a lot.
00:08:07.000 But again, Brian Williams complaining about fake news is rather ironic.
00:08:11.000 And what he doesn't note there is look at some of the other sources that Trump was tweeting during the campaign, right?
00:08:16.000 Some of the other big sources, the Washington Post, right?
00:08:19.000 Foxnews.com, The Hill.
00:08:21.000 The New York Post, Daily Mail.
00:08:22.000 He even tweeted the Huffington Post a few times.
00:08:25.000 So the idea that a National Review, which really didn't like him very much, the idea that all of the people who are tweeting were only tweeting from Breitbart, obviously that's the biggest circle there.
00:08:34.000 And yes, I think Breitbart was a Trump-Pravda outlet.
00:08:38.000 But that doesn't mean that every headline that came from Breitbart is fake news, nor does it mean the entire outlet can simply be thrown out with the bathwater.
00:08:44.000 You actually have to evaluate each story, and there are certain reporters at Breitbart who are really quite good.
00:08:48.000 I think that Charlie Spearing is a good reporter over at Breitbart.
00:08:51.000 I think Aaron Klein over at Breitbart Jerusalem is a very good reporter.
00:08:54.000 I think Matt Boyle is not a very good reporter, but I think there are plenty of good reporters at Breitbart, even though it's an outlet that I think is overall just a shilling for Trump.
00:09:02.000 But again, the left blew all of its credibility here, and so when they call foul here,
00:09:07.000 When they scream about fake news, it just doesn't resonate.
00:09:11.000 I mean, Hillary Clinton is doing the same routine now.
00:09:13.000 Instead of just recognizing, you guys lost the election because you ran a bad candidate, and she ran an abysmal campaign, and you didn't understand what a lot of Americans were complaining about.
00:09:22.000 Instead, you were too busy cutting videos with Mary J. Blige, in which she's singing to you questions.
00:09:28.000 Instead of just recognizing that, they're trying to blame some outside source cheating, whether it's the Russians cheating, or whether it's fake news.
00:09:36.000 Here's Hillary Clinton's crying fake news.
00:09:38.000 The epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.
00:09:47.000 It's now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences.
00:09:53.000 This isn't about politics or partisanship.
00:09:57.000 Lives are at risk.
00:09:58.000 Lives of ordinary people just trying to go about their days, to do their jobs, contribute to their communities.
00:10:06.000 It's a danger that needs to be addressed, and addressed quickly.
00:10:10.000 Bipartisan legislation is making its way through Congress to boost the government's response to foreign propaganda, and Silicon Valley is starting to grapple with the challenge and threat of fake news.
00:10:22.000 Who's going to determine what's fake news and what's not fake news?
00:10:24.000 That's really the biggest question.
00:10:25.000 Now some stuff, I do want to avoid the tendency to say nothing is fake news because the media over-label things fake news.
00:10:33.000 There are things that are fake news.
00:10:34.000 There are things that are fake news.
00:10:35.000 Here she's saying Pizzagate is fake news, and that's what drove this guy over to this pizzeria to try and shoot it up.
00:10:40.000 The problem is, the problem is that if you are going to, if you are going to, you know, label everything fake news, from Pizzagate to
00:10:50.000 Benghazi, right?
00:10:52.000 And you remember how the media downplayed Benghazi.
00:10:53.000 They said there was nothing to see there.
00:10:54.000 There certainly was something to see there.
00:10:56.000 You know, the fact that they conflated all of that destroyed their own credibility.
00:11:00.000 And so when Hillary Clinton is standing there decrying fake news, it's like, wait a second, you don't get to do this.
00:11:05.000 Mika Brzezinski, who's another one of these, you know, kind of dicey reporters over on MSNBC.
00:11:11.000 She's on Morning Joe.
00:11:13.000 She says, you know, Hillary can complain about fake news.
00:11:16.000 Hillary complains about fake news.
00:11:17.000 And then Mika this morning, she says, you know, Hillary tried to get me thrown off air.
00:11:20.000 For simply saying that this was a competitive race.
00:11:23.000 I was concerned the campaign was not understanding that perhaps there was an arrogance they needed to get up their eye worse and understand that this isn't over.
00:11:33.000 I'll just say it NBC got a call from the campaign like I had had done something that was journalistically inappropriate or something and needed to be pulled off the air.
00:11:43.000 I mean think about that.
00:11:44.000 Yeah.
00:11:44.000 That's just
00:11:46.000 That's crazy.
00:11:49.000 Okay, and, you know, the fact that Hillary Clinton is saying fake news this, fake news that, and then she tried to have a reporter pulled off the arrow, supposedly, because that reporter was saying that this was a more competitive race.
00:12:00.000 It just demonstrates how silly all of this is.
00:12:02.000 Again, Hillary Clinton has no credibility to call out fake news, because Hillary Clinton is the propagator of fake news.
00:12:07.000 I mean, you remember that Hillary Clinton once claimed that her husband, all of the circumstances surrounding her husband and Lewinsky, all of it was lies.
00:12:14.000 It was all just vast right-wing
00:12:17.000 The great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.
00:12:30.000 Okay, and so she's been singing the same tune for 30 years.
00:12:33.000 Democrats always sing the same tune when they lose.
00:12:34.000 It must be that somebody lied about us.
00:12:36.000 It can't be that somebody told the truth about us.
00:12:38.000 The truth is, virtually all of the anti-Hillary stories were true.
00:12:41.000 Virtually all the anti-Trump stories were true.
00:12:43.000 Virtually none of the pro-Trump or pro-Hillary stories were true.
00:12:46.000 That was sort of the theme of the campaign as we were pointing it out.
00:12:49.000 Plus again, Hillary Clinton, I say she's the purveyor of lies.
00:12:51.000 I mean, here are just a few of her whoppers.
00:12:54.000 You can find these lies on YouTube.
00:12:56.000 They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.
00:13:06.000 In fact, checkers have said that she was wrong.
00:13:09.000 There is no video that ISIS is using.
00:13:12.000 There's a pattern now of her claiming that videos exist that do not exist.
00:13:16.000 I remember landing under sniper fire.
00:13:19.000 There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.
00:13:27.000 Her arrival in Bosnia was not quite as dramatic as Clinton put it.
00:13:31.000 Memory should always match the videotape.
00:13:35.000 And family members of the Benghazi victims are saying you lied to them in that hearing.
00:13:40.000 We've seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.
00:13:49.000 Absolutely lying!
00:13:52.000 She told me something entirely different at the casket ceremony.
00:13:56.000 She said it was the cause of the video and that she would get back to me.
00:14:01.000 Okay, so that's just an example of some of the lies that Hillary Clinton was telling and there she is decrying fake news and talking about how terrible it is.
00:14:07.000 Very difficult to take the Democrats seriously and the media seriously when they've blown their own credibility.
00:14:12.000 Which means that Trump basically has free reign.
00:14:14.000 He basically has run of the place.
00:14:16.000 He has run of the place.
00:14:17.000 And that's either a good thing or that's a bad thing.
00:14:19.000 I don't think so.
00:14:39.000 Autographed.
00:14:40.000 I'm going to go sign a bunch in the other room.
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