At the Grammys on Sunday, a great crime against humanity occurred with the entire world watching, leaving Beyonce, the greatest human being who has ever graced our planet, out in the cold again. Why? Why, God, why? RACISM! Never mind that Adele s 25 was the top selling album of the year while Beyonce s Lemonade showed up at No. 4, and then Adele had to apologize to Beyonce for winning the Album of the Year. And then she split her Grammy in half and said, I can t possibly accept this award. After all, Lemonade is groundbreaking, a work of heartbreaking genius, with which only heaven or heaven s angel could have seen fit to grace us. Who else but Queen Bee could have given us these immortal lines? Y'all haters, it's a conspiracy, y'all! Yall, haters. With that being said, Hollywood clearly has a problem, but it isn't racism. It's race-based stupidity. And that's what we're all here for, folks. Ben Shapiro's full of confusion, confusion, and confusion, as he tries to make sense of all of it. Plus, General Flynn's ouster from the National Security Adviser post, and why it's so confusing and confusing and confused and why we should boycott the awards show. And why the music industry must be boycotted until they recognize that incredibly rich, incredibly famous, world famous Black people have to win awards, otherwise they are just another repository of white racism. What's going on here? and why the social fabric is falling apart, folks? And why we can't we can t even watch music without Colin Kaepernick's lectures on slavery, right? And why Donald Trump should get a butt butt long enough to relax long enough for me to actually get the whole rest of the world to relax and actually get a little bit of rest And then relax enough to actually relax? and then relax a little? And then let me to sleep a little. -- Ben Shapiro -- - The Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro, The Ben Shapiro Show, The Weekly Standard (featuring Rachel Maddow, Rachel Goodman, The Root, The New York Times Magazine, and much, much more! -- The Root -- The Root's Peter Thiel, The Onion, and The New Yorker, The Cut, The Hollywood Reporter, and more!
00:00:18.000Never mind that Adele's 25 was the top-selling album of the year while Beyonce's Lemonade showed up at number four, Adele had to apologize to Beyonce for winning the album of the year, and then she split her Grammy in half and said, quote, I can't possibly accept this award.
00:00:31.000The Lemonade album was just so monumental.
00:00:42.000Who else but Queen Bee could have given us these immortal lines?
00:00:45.000Y'all haters corny with that Illuminati mess.
00:00:48.000Paparazzi, catch my fly and my cocky fresh.
00:00:53.000The echoes of Shakespeare ring in every romantic lyric.
00:00:56.000So, why wouldn't artists of color naturally assume that Adele's victory at the Grammys represents a new form of Jim Crow?
00:01:02.000Here's the New York Times, quote, Before the 59th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday, the music industry murmured about what it might mean for Adele to once again sweep the top awards, leaving Beyoncé snubbed in the major categories and with her third loss for Album of the Year.
00:01:16.000Having long faced accusations that the Grammys overlook young, progressive black artists, the last woman to win Album of the Year was Lauryn Hill in 1999.
00:01:23.000The Recording Academy faced a potential backlash for going all-in on a white, traditionalist choice like Adele.
00:01:28.000In the last five years especially, albums by Frank Ocean, Mr. Lamar, and Beyonce have been passed over for the top award in favor of releases by white artists Mumford & Sons, Daft Punk, Beck, Taylor Swift, and Adele.
00:01:41.000So, now the Grammys are just another repository of white racism.
00:01:44.000But, it's not enough that everyone in the music industry must pay tribute to Beyonce.
00:01:49.000It's not enough for the top-selling artists on the planet to bow before Beyonce, as required under international law.
00:01:54.000No, the Grammys must be boycotted until they recognize that incredibly rich, incredibly beautiful, world-famous black people have to win awards.
00:02:07.000We can't even listen to music or watch a silly music awards show without being hit with Colin Kaepernick lectures on the legacies of slavery, even while the whole world falls prostrate before the glories of Juju, celebrating ancient fertility rituals reenacted on stage as New Testament living tableaus.
00:02:23.000Yes, Hollywood clearly has a problem, but it isn't racism.
00:02:35.000Alrighty, so, we will get to General Flynn's ouster in just one second, and there's a lot to talk about there, because it's a very confusing and confused story.
00:02:43.000There are a lot of angles to it, so we're going to analyze it from every single available angle, as we are apt to do!
00:02:48.000But first, we have to say thank you to our friends over at ZipRecruiter.
00:02:52.000So, if you are an employer and you are looking for a solid employee, you could
00:02:57.000You could put out an ad in the classifieds or what you could do is you could post your job to 200 plus job sites using ZipRecruiter.com and that includes Facebook and Twitter all with a single click.
00:03:07.000You can find candidates in any city or industry nationwide.
00:03:10.000You post once and you watch the candidates roll on into ZipRecruiter's easy to use interface and you can quickly screen candidates and you can rate them and you can hire the right person fast using that ZipRecruiter
00:03:46.000So it's always irritating when news breaks really late at night because I'm all ready to go to bed and my kids have stopped being a pain in the butt long enough for me to actually relax a little bit.
00:03:53.000And then Donald Trump fires his national security advisor and all hell breaks loose.
00:04:13.000I love my children, but they didn't let me sleep a lot last night.
00:04:16.000Neither, it turns out, did Mike Flynn and Donald Trump.
00:04:19.000So, last night, very late, Donald Trump fires Mike Flynn.
00:04:23.000So they're saying that Mike Flynn resigned and then Trump accepted the resignation.
00:04:46.000And the reason it's a conscious choice is because there was no evidence that anything super wrong happened.
00:04:50.000There were a bunch of kind of rumors that maybe Flynn had talked to the Russians about sanctions before he was actually national security advisor while Obama was still president.
00:04:58.000And then he had denied those rumors and then the FBI had investigated and they said they found nothing untoward.
00:05:03.000And so we didn't cover any of that because it just seemed like a lot of back and forth.
00:05:06.000And frankly, even if it had come out that National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn had spoken with the Russian ambassador about sanctions, I don't think it's that big a deal.
00:05:44.000In a February 8th interview, this is according to the Washington Post.
00:05:47.000In a February 8th interview with the Washington Post, Flynn categorically denied discussing sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, repeating public assertions made in January by top Trump officials.
00:05:57.000So, Vice President Pence had said that
00:06:01.000That Flynn never talked to Kislyak about sanctions, and so did Sean Spicer.
00:06:05.000One day after the interview, Flynn revised his account.
00:06:07.000He told the Washington Post through a spokesman he couldn't be certain the topic never came up.
00:06:12.000intelligence reports during the 2016 campaign showed Kislyak was in touch with Flynn, according to officials.
00:06:18.000Communications between the two continued after Trump's victory on November 8, according to officials with access to intelligence reports on this matter.
00:06:26.000So Trump officials, including, as I say, Spicer and Vice President Pence, they had said the same thing to the media that Flynn had said, which is that he never talked sanctions.
00:06:34.000Now, would this have been a big deal even if he did talk sanctions?
00:06:37.000Again, I don't really see why it would.
00:06:44.000The reason that they're giving for him resigning is because they say that he lied to Pence, that he told Pence he didn't discuss sanctions, he actually discussed sanctions, and then Pence went on national TV, and then
00:06:54.000He was undercut by the fact that Flynn had actually talked sanctions and so he had to go.
00:07:58.000And then he goes on to talk about how he's tendering his resignation, and he's honored to serve President Trump, and he wants to thank Trump for his personal loyalty and the friendship of people he worked with throughout the hard-fought campaign, and he talks about President Trump's leadership, etc., etc., etc.
00:08:12.000So, there are a bunch of theories floating around about what actually happened here, because
00:08:43.000We'll get to the leaking in just a second.
00:08:47.000But the real question here is why Trump accepted the resignation in the first place.
00:08:50.000And there are a few theories floating around, so I'm just going to offer you the theories and you decide for yourself based on evidence as it comes in.
00:08:55.000Theory one is he lied to Pence, and presumably Trump didn't know about it either, right?
00:09:01.000And so Flynn basically went rogue and lied to everybody about having discussed sanctions on this call.
00:09:07.000Do I think that's a super plausible theory?
00:09:09.000Nah, I don't think it's a super plausible theory that he was discussing sanctions on this phone call with the Russians and he lied to everybody and that pissed off Trump so much that Trump had to let him go.
00:09:16.000That does not seem super plausible to me, specifically because Trump knew one month ago that this was the case and then he proceeded to appoint Flynn anyway.
00:09:26.000There's another theory, and I think this is the most plausible theory, which is that Trump said to Flynn, you go ahead and you talk to the Russian ambassador, say what you want to say,
00:09:34.000He didn't explicitly tell him to talk about sanctions, but Flynn talked about sanctions, and then there was blowback, and Trump didn't like the blowback, and so he threw Flynn under the bus.
00:09:42.000So Flynn offered his resignation, and there was all these leaks coming out suggesting strong ties between Flynn and the Russians, despite the fact that people have been accusing Flynn of this for literally months, and Trump had gone along with him.
00:09:53.000And so Trump said, OK, you have to go.
00:09:55.000And he used the Pence thing as sort of a pretext.
00:09:58.000Then there's theory three, which is that Pence and Reince Priebus, the RNC chair, they have enough sway within the administration to force Trump to toss Flynn out on his ear for lying to them.
00:10:10.000Trump's the president of the United States.
00:10:12.000If Pence doesn't like it, Pence can stick it.
00:10:14.000I mean, Trump's the one with the power.
00:10:16.000And then finally there's the fourth theory, and this is the one the left is glomming on to, and that's the theory that the real reason that Trump decapitated Flynn is because he thought that this was going to lead back to him.
00:10:24.000That he actually told Flynn, go make nice with the Russians, he was afraid that that was going to come out, and then it did start to come out, so he decapitated Flynn hoping that would end the story.
00:11:17.000This is like 3.20 in the afternoon Pacific time.
00:11:20.000She goes on national TV and she says that General Flynn has Trump's full trust.
00:11:24.000Yes, General Flynn does enjoy the full confidence of the President, and this is a big week for General Flynn.
00:11:29.000He's the point of contact for many of these foreign visits, if you look at the official schedule.
00:11:33.000Today we had the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, here obviously for bilateral meetings.
00:11:38.000On Wednesday we're welcoming Benjamin Netanyahu here to the White House.
00:11:42.000And behind the scenes, they're doing a number of different meetings where they're talking about trade, they're talking about terrorism, security, the fact that Canada and the U.S.
00:11:51.000are very— But the bottom line is, she says that Flynn has Trump's full trust.
00:11:55.000And then, literally within an hour—so I guess that's about 4 o'clock Eastern time—so literally within an hour, Sean Spicer comes out and issues a statement saying, we're going to be releasing a statement about this.
00:12:05.000So, clearly one hand is not talking to the other in any of this.
00:12:09.000And remember, Donald Trump said just like last Friday that he had no idea what was going on with Flynn.
00:12:14.000He hadn't been reading any of the reports.
00:12:16.000He said he didn't know what reports that people were even talking about.
00:12:43.000Except that the reports say that he was briefed on it over a month ago.
00:12:46.000Okay, so there's a lot of confusion happening and then finally Flynn is gone and Paul Ryan comes out and says that Trump made the right decision on the Flynn resignation.
00:12:55.000National security is perhaps the most important function or responsibility a president has.
00:13:02.000And I think the president made the right decision to ask for his resignation.
00:13:05.000You cannot have a national security advisor misleading the vice president and others.
00:13:10.000So I think the president was right to ask for his resignation.
00:13:13.000Okay, so even there, even there, there's a communications gap because Trump says that Flynn offered his resignation and now Ryan is saying that Trump asked for his resignation, right?
00:13:21.000So there's all sorts of communications gaps here and a lot of confusion as to what exactly is going on.
00:13:27.000One thing is clear, we're not, we don't know all the facts yet.
00:13:29.000So all we can do is wait to hear all the facts.
00:13:32.000The reason I'm, you know, talking about this and the reason I think it's interesting is because I'm puzzled as to why any of this was fireable.
00:13:38.000I just don't see, like, of all the things that people around Donald Trump have done throughout the campaign and afterward that merit firing, it seems to me that talking to the Russians about sanctions before you actually take office is, like, the last thing on the list.
00:13:57.000If so, that'd be the first time that he's really been that tight with either of those guys.
00:14:02.000And Paul Ryan, obviously, is part of the sort of Reince Priebus wing that wants to see Flynn go.
00:14:06.000So there's a lot of talk today about the conflict inside the administration between Steve Bannon and his wing of the administration, and the Reince Priebus wing of the administration, because Bannon's outlets, like Breitbart today, they're pushing Priebus.
00:14:19.000The headline at Breitbart today was that basically Priebus is responsible for Flynn's ouster, even though Trump is the one who did the firing.
00:14:27.000So the best available explanation, the easiest available explanation, and the minimum explanation is that there's a lot of amateurishness and incompetence happening at the highest levels with regard to this particular issue.
00:14:55.000There's a secondary question, and this is what Trump is focusing in on.
00:14:57.000Trump tweeted out today that the real issue here is the leaks.
00:15:01.000Why is his administration so damn leaky?
00:15:03.000He tweeted out, the real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?
00:15:07.000Will these leaks be happening as ideal on North Korea, etc.?
00:15:10.000Trump is obviously very frustrated with the intelligence community.
00:15:13.000He's been saying that they've been leaking about him for literally months, and he's not wrong.
00:15:16.000They have been leaking about him for literally months.
00:15:19.000There's a certain irony to Donald Trump being very angry at leaks, considering that for literally a year and a half, he was happy with leaks so long as they helped him.
00:15:26.000Now he's unhappy with leaks if they don't help him.
00:15:29.000But it does demonstrate that the intel community
00:15:32.000The so-called deep state is very invested in hurting Donald Trump and taking out a lot of people around him.
00:16:14.000The leaks can be really egregious and they can be really heavy.
00:16:17.000And second, there could be something nefarious going on inside the Trump administration, and we have to have an explanation as to why Trump actually fired Flynn, if nothing bad was happening here.
00:16:26.000Again, I'm looking at the scandal, and I don't see the scandal.
00:16:35.000That Trump thought it was enough of a scandal to fire somebody, so we're not getting the full story in all of that, and that's a problem.
00:16:42.000It's still raising, you know, credibility issues.
00:16:45.000Matt Lauer interviewed Kellyanne Conway about this, and you can see the confusion.
00:16:49.000You can see the fact that we now have a scandal on our hands because of what appears to be sort of a cover-up from the Trump administration.
00:16:55.000Here's Matt Lauer with Kellyanne Conway, and Kellyanne looks really bad in this exchange.
00:17:02.000But the fact is that General Flynn continued in that position and was in the presidential daily briefings, was part of the leader calls as recently as yesterday, was there for the Prime Minister's visit from Canada yesterday.
00:17:14.000And as time wore on, obviously the situation had become unsustainable and General Flynn
00:17:21.000Last month the Justice Department warned the White House that General Flynn had misled them and that as a result he was vulnerable to blackmail and at that moment he still had the complete trust of the President?
00:17:37.000Matt, I'm telling you what the President has said, which is that he's accepted General Flynn's resignation, and he wishes him well, and that we're moving on.
00:17:44.000There are at least three candidates, very strong candidates, that will be considered for a permanent position here.
00:17:50.000Obviously, General Keith Kellogg is the acting National Security Advisor starting today, and the President is moving forward.
00:17:57.000And she continues by saying, we're not gonna say what we knew and when we knew it, which is never a good sign, okay?
00:18:02.000You never want an administration saying that.
00:18:04.000We're gonna get to the hypocrisy of the Democrats in the media here in just a second, because it is rich.
00:18:29.000Because, again, I don't see what Flynn did that was so wrong here that an apology couldn't have solved.
00:18:34.000But the idea that this is unprecedented, that this is something new, that this is the worst since Iran-Contra, a bunch of crap, just absolute crap.
00:18:41.000The National Security Advisor under Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes, was literally a fiction writer who literally wrote a fictional story about how Iran had reached out to the United States, the moderates in Iran, over an Iran nuclear deal.
00:18:52.000The entire media swallowed the entire thing whole.
00:18:55.000And then, and then Rhodes came out and said, yeah, I fooled y'all and no one cared.
00:18:59.000Susan Rice, the UN ambassador, went on national television and lied, what was it, 13 times?
00:19:04.000About how a YouTube video was responsible for what happened in Benghazi.
00:19:22.000Right now, for the rest of the show, $8 a month will buy you a subscription, and if you buy the annual subscription right now, you get a free copy of The Arroyo, which is a terrific fictional film made by our very own Jeremy Boring about the southern border and the war that's happening on the southern border.
00:19:38.000It really, in some ways, presaged a lot of the immigration debate that's been happening in the country for the last two years.
00:19:43.000The Arroyo, you can get that for free when you subscribe annually at dailywire.com, plus the Shapiro store is coming, and all sorts of future goodies are coming to dailywire.com, so check that out.
00:19:53.000We are the largest conservative podcast in the nation.