The Ben Shapiro Show

00:00:00.000 It's a Monday, and here we are.

00:00:02.000 We're back.

00:00:02.000 We're one week away from the vaunted Iowa caucuses.

00:00:05.000 We'll talk about all of the latest.

00:00:07.000 I'm almost done with this cold, and the Republic is almost done with being a Republic, so there's a coincidence for you.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:13.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:23.000 So, the new poll numbers are out, and Donald Trump is up by a large margin.

00:00:28.000 According to the latest Fox News poll, Donald Trump is up by 11 points in Iowa, 37 to 26, over the guy who I want to win Iowa, Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.

00:00:37.000 And...

00:00:38.000 Trump, I think, is bouncing back in a couple of ways.

00:00:41.000 I think that he's bouncing back because, number one, he was getting smacked around by a lot of people who were conservative last week, including me, but the real hit came for Trump from National Review.

00:00:54.000 People didn't make too big a deal out of this in the media outside of a certain sector.

00:00:58.000 The conservative media made a big deal out of it.

00:01:00.000 But I think it actually had impact because it looked like the conservative intelligentsia, the elites, were ganging up on Donald Trump and Donald Trump's entire strategy.

00:01:09.000 Throughout this entire race was, I whine and I whine and I whine until I win.

00:01:13.000 He actually said that on CNN last August.

00:01:15.000 And so anytime he can play the victim, he's in an opportunistic situation.

00:01:19.000 And that's basically what has happened in the last week and a half.

00:01:22.000 He's smacking at Cruz, Cruz is smacking at him.

00:01:25.000 The Sarah Palin endorsement gave him cover to pretend to be a conservative, even though, as we discussed last week, his record is not particularly conservative.

00:01:32.000 And then National Review strikes out against him.

00:01:34.000 So National Review last Thursday night, they put out an all Trump issue.

00:01:38.000 It was called Against Trump.

00:01:40.000 And it was 22 different conservatives, some of them establishment, many of them just conservative, who came out against Trump altogether.

00:01:47.000 And I said immediately, I thought this would backfire, because I didn't think it was calibrated to actually do Trump any damage.

00:01:53.000 See, here's the thing.

00:01:54.000 Most conservatives, most people who vote in Republican primaries, read a wide variety of sources.

00:01:59.000 They read everything from National Review to Breitbart, and in looking at various sources, they sort of get a wide spectrum on how people feel about a particular candidate.

00:02:10.000 So, if there'd been sort of a grassroots feeling, like, okay, everybody is sort of picking up on the fact that Trump isn't conservative, that's one thing.

00:02:17.000 But National Review, they basically did this as a publicity stunt.

00:02:20.000 Because what it looked like now was, here is what is widely perceived to be an establishment magazine that is now hitting Trump, and it's ganging people up on Trump.

00:02:29.000 So it looks like a gang-up beatdown of Donald Trump.

00:02:32.000 And so Trump says, well, you know, they're coming after me because they're failing.

00:02:35.000 They're coming after me because they're establishment.

00:02:38.000 And this undercuts the exact case that we were making last week, which is that Donald Trump is an establishment candidate.

00:02:44.000 That when it comes to Ted Cruz versus Donald Trump, the establishment would prefer Donald Trump to Ted Cruz.

00:02:49.000 All of the GOP senators have said this is the case.

00:02:52.000 A lot of the GOP donors have said this is the case.

00:02:54.000 But Sarah Palin endorsing Trump makes it look like grassroots conservatives are okay with Trump.

00:03:00.000 And then National Review smacking Trump makes it look like there is a concerted hit by the intelligentsia, the elites, to go after Donald Trump.

00:03:08.000 And so Donald Trump over the weekend was on TV talking about National Review.

00:03:11.000 Here is Trump on National Review.

00:03:14.000 And then all of a sudden these people are writing things about me.

00:03:17.000 So I can only say this.

00:03:19.000 The National Review is a failing publication.

00:03:22.000 It's not going to be around long and they'll get some publicity.

00:03:26.000 But I actually think, you know, a lot of the writers, you've seen it where they think it's going to help me more because people are tired of the negativity from these people.

00:03:33.000 All they do is talk.

00:03:34.000 But they don't have solutions to anything.

00:03:37.000 And so, I mean, I'm fine with it.

00:03:39.000 I'm not going to be reading it because I don't read it very much anyway.

00:03:42.000 But a lot of people don't read it anymore.

00:03:45.000 And, you know, the fact that not a lot of people read it is sort of the point.

00:03:49.000 The National Review has good circulation, for sure.

00:03:51.000 And I love reading a lot of the writers in National Review, but...

00:03:55.000 The fact that they took out this concerted hit on Trump was obviously about a publicity stunt for them and obviously not about damaging Donald Trump.

00:04:02.000 Now they're out there doing the self-righteous, we tried our best to stop Donald Trump routine.

00:04:07.000 No, you played right into his hands.

00:04:09.000 There's a strategic building of the narrative and then there's a one-shot, let's try and knock off the king routine.

00:04:15.000 And if you're gonna go to knock off the king, and Trump is the poll king, if you're gonna knock off the king, you actually have to knock off the king.

00:04:20.000 You can't take a shot just so that you can pose and you can do virtue signaling to your conservative readers.

00:04:26.000 It's a waste of time.

00:04:28.000 And there are so many reasons to hit Donald Trump, too.

00:04:30.000 You know, Donald Trump is not a conservative.

00:04:33.000 I've been saying this for a week.

00:04:34.000 Take, for example, his perspective on eminent domain.

00:04:37.000 So a lot of his defenders... Trump said over the weekend that he could be on Fifth Avenue in New York and shoot somebody and his supporters would continue to support him.

00:04:44.000 And he played this as a positive.

00:04:45.000 This is a good thing.

00:04:47.000 I think he's probably right.

00:04:48.000 I think there is a significant segment of Donald Trump supporters where Donald Trump could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue in New York and they would support him.

00:04:55.000 Of course, I think the same is also true of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

00:04:58.000 I didn't think it was a right-wing phenomenon, but apparently there are people

00:05:02.000 Who consider themselves on the right who will do this too.

00:05:04.000 They'll do a hero worship routine.

00:05:05.000 One of the evidences of this is that Donald Trump, one of his main issues where he is a leftist, not just not right-wing, an actual leftist, is on eminent domain.

00:05:14.000 So Donald Trump believes that the federal government or state government should be able to come to your house today and take your property and confiscate it from you and give you some money for it and then turn it over to me because I'm richer and I'm gonna build a second story and they can get more property tax from me.

00:05:29.000 Donald Trump actually believes this and

00:05:31.000 Yeah, conservatives would say, well, this is ridiculous.

00:05:33.000 The same people who are looking at the Bureau of Land Management confiscating 80% of all land in Nevada and saying, this is bad, think it's fine for Donald Trump to do it with the help of the federal government.

00:05:44.000 Yeah, this is a problem for conservatism.

00:05:46.000 Donald Trump is a problem for conservatism.

00:05:48.000 He stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night and he talked about how it was a great place to stay.

00:05:52.000 He doesn't know much about conservatism, but he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

00:05:56.000 So Donald Trump, here's Donald Trump on eminent domain over the weekend.

00:06:00.000 No, I did it, and I didn't do it, so I didn't.

00:06:04.000 But, you know, the word eminent domain, if you didn't have eminent domain, you wouldn't have highways, you wouldn't have the Keystone Pipeline, because they need it desperately if it's ever going to get built.

00:06:13.000 You wouldn't have roads, you wouldn't have schools, hospitals.

00:06:15.000 I mean, I don't love eminent domain, but you need eminent domain or you don't have a country.

00:06:20.000 Okay, but the eminent domain that we're talking about is not seizure of private land to create a highway.

00:06:25.000 We're talking about seizure of private land to give to Donald Trump to create a limo park.

00:06:29.000 I mean, that's actually what he did.

00:06:30.000 He actually tried to take an old widow off her land.

00:06:34.000 He tried to have the government force her off her land so that he could build a limo idling station in New Jersey for his Atlantic City casino.

00:06:41.000 Yes, that's not particularly conservative stuff.

00:06:43.000 And look, the left knows Trump isn't conservative.

00:06:45.000 Bill Maher was on... I'm trying to remember what show he was on.

00:06:48.000 Bill Maher was on one of these shows and he was saying that Trump isn't conservative.

00:06:52.000 In fact, he would prefer Trump to a lot of the conservatives like Cruz.

00:06:56.000 I guess I accept the emerging conventional wisdom that Trump would probably be slightly more manageable.

00:07:05.000 I agree.

00:07:06.000 I heard him yesterday say something that you don't hear Republicans say, and that happens fairly frequently, which is, Ronald Reagan made deals, I'll make deals.

00:07:16.000 Now, they've been getting by for the longest time, as Ted Cruz does, saying,

00:07:20.000 I don't work with the Democrats.

00:07:21.000 That's why I'm great.

00:07:22.000 And they all applaud.

00:07:23.000 And Trump has this ability to come out there and tell them that they're idiots.

00:07:28.000 And no, Ronald Reagan, when he invokes, you know, peace and blessings be upon him, he made deals.

00:07:34.000 And I'm the deal maker.

00:07:35.000 Deals are great.

00:07:36.000 I make great deals.

00:07:37.000 I'm America's personal shopper.

00:07:39.000 I'm going to make it.

00:07:41.000 And this is why the establishment likes Trump and this is why the left likes Trump.

00:07:45.000 But the irony is that the concerted attack on Trump from National Review actually has allowed him to get away with being the establishment and the left's favorite candidate as against Ted Cruz.

00:07:56.000 Now on the other side of the aisle, Hillary Clinton continues to struggle and struggle deeply.

00:08:01.000 It's really quite fascinating to watch the Democratic side of the aisle.

00:08:04.000 Everybody's sort of ignoring what's happening on the Democratic side of the aisle because it's assumed that Hillary Clinton is going to win the nomination walking away, but there's no guarantee of that.

00:08:12.000 The FBI is now looking even more deeply into Hillary Clinton using her personal server for classified information, and Hillary is now relegated to her old standby, the vast right-wing conspiracy talk, right?

00:08:23.000 She says that it's the vast right-wing conspiracy.

00:08:25.000 That's gotten her into trouble over these emails.

00:08:28.000 Here's Hillary, blaming the Inspector General of the intelligence community for being corrupt, right?

00:08:32.000 She's the one who hid emails on her private server, but the people investigating her are corrupt.

00:08:36.000 That's how she's in trouble.

00:08:38.000 No, I'm not concerned because I know what the facts are.

00:08:41.000 I never sent or received any material marked classified.

00:08:45.000 I control what the Republicans leak and what they are contending.

00:08:50.000 And I think it was interesting, Chuck, you'll, as a political observer, understand why.

00:08:55.000 You know, back a couple of months ago, Kevin McCarthy spilled the beans that the Benghazi investigation was all about bringing me down.

00:09:02.000 Something that I suspected, but I went ahead, testified for 11 hours, answered all their questions, and even they admitted there was nothing new.

00:09:10.000 And now, Senator Grassley shows up at a Trump rally yesterday in Iowa.

00:09:15.000 He's the chairman of the Judiciary Committee who has and his staff have been, you know, behind and pushing a lot of these stories and announces he's there for the simple reason to defeat me.

00:09:25.000 I can't control what the Republicans are doing, but I know what the facts are and I will just keep putting them out there.

00:09:31.000 This is something that I think is very clear about what happened and I know it will be over and resolved at some point, but I can't control what the Republicans and their allies do.

00:09:42.000 But I think it's important for voters to know what they're doing.

00:09:45.000 This is the most animated Hillary Clinton ever gets, is when she's defending herself on corruption charges.

00:09:50.000 I mean, otherwise she looks like she's had a couple of doses of allium.

00:09:53.000 When she's defending herself, then all of a sudden she gets very animated and she's really into it.

00:09:58.000 That's because Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, everybody's been saying this whole time, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same person, right?

00:10:04.000 They're channeling the anger of the voter.

00:10:06.000 Okay, it's true that the reaction to Sanders and to Trump has been similar from the public.

00:10:10.000 But in terms of personality, Trump and Hillary are actually on the same page, and Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders are sort of on the same page.

00:10:17.000 What I mean by that is that Donald Trump is basically willing to say anything to become President of the United States in order to maximize his personal power, and Hillary Clinton is the same way.

00:10:26.000 By the way, what she says there is a lie, when she says that even the Republicans were admitting there was nothing new in my testimony.

00:10:31.000 In that testimony, if you recall, that's when the Republicans dropped the bombshell that Hillary had known right from the outset that Benghazi was a terrorist attack, had told her daughter and the Prime Minister of Egypt, I believe, that it was a terrorist attack and not a video.

00:10:45.000 She acts like that never happened, and now she's saying that the intelligence community is working with the Republicans to get her.

00:10:50.000 She's willing to say anything.

00:10:52.000 Trump is willing to say anything.

00:10:53.000 Bernie Sanders is much more of an ideological purist on the left, and Ted Cruz is an ideological purist on the right.

00:11:00.000 And that's why, in terms of the conservative base, I think the conservative base is actually more enthused about Cruz than about Trump, and they're certainly more enthused about Cruz than they are about somebody like Jeb Bush.

00:11:09.000 And on the left, the left base is more enthused with Bernie Sanders than they are with Hillary Clinton.

00:11:15.000 Which brings up a real issue for Hillary Clinton.

00:11:18.000 A real issue for Hillary Clinton.

00:11:21.000 And that issue for Hillary Clinton is the issue of race.

00:11:24.000 Here's the problem for Hillary.

00:11:25.000 If you look at all the polls right now, Bernie Sanders is up in Iowa and he's up in New Hampshire.

00:11:29.000 And not only that, Hillary has declined among every major demographic subgroup.

00:11:34.000 She's declined among women, she's declined among men, she's declined among the elderly, she's declined among young people, she's declined among white people.

00:11:43.000 There's only one group that Hillary has actually increased with in the last month, and that is blacks and Latinos.

00:11:48.000 So what we're watching right now in the Democratic Party, we're watching it play out, is we're about to see what's more important to the Democratic Party.

00:11:56.000 Class warfare or racism?

00:11:58.000 This is really the big question now, because on the one side you have Bernie Sanders, who's a socialist, saying that the people who we have to oppose are the rich, and on the other side you have Hillary Clinton, a rich white lady, saying the people that we have to oppose are the white people.

00:12:10.000 Right?

00:12:11.000 The white people are really the problem.

00:12:12.000 People like Bernie Sanders.

00:12:13.000 And Hillary is scurrilous.

00:12:15.000 I mean, Bernie Sanders has been consistent on this.

00:12:17.000 Hillary's just willing to say anything to get elected.

00:12:19.000 Because Hillary is declining with blacks and Latinos, she is trying to attack Bernie Sanders on his supposed racism.

00:12:26.000 Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is trying to claim that Hillary is in bed with the rich fat cats.

00:12:30.000 So basically what you have

00:12:33.000 Is the race base left?

00:12:34.000 And you have the class base left.

00:12:35.000 So you have Stalin versus Hitler on a very mini-scale here, right?

00:12:38.000 I mean, Hitler was all about race, and Stalin was all about class.

00:12:41.000 But the question is gonna be, the American left, which one is more important to them?

00:12:45.000 Racism?

00:12:46.000 You know, exploiting divisions between races?

00:12:49.000 Or classism?

00:12:50.000 Exploiting divisions between classes.

00:12:52.000 So, on the one hand, you have Bernie Sanders, and here's Bernie Sanders making his pitch as to why the rich people have to be eaten.

00:12:59.000 I think it would be very interesting if Donald Trump became the Republican candidate who was a multi-billionaire, and Michael Bloomberg became an independent candidate who was a multi-billionaire, and it will tell people what I have been saying for a long time, is that this country is moving away from democracy to oligarchy.

00:13:18.000 Okay, so Bernie Sanders is obviously making the class pitch.

00:13:21.000 He's saying that whether it's Trump...

00:13:35.000 Or whether it's presumably Hillary, who's also extraordinarily wealthy, or whether it's Bloomberg, you know, obviously the rich are running the show.

00:13:41.000 The rich are running the show, and we have to tear them down, and we have to tear them down right now.

00:13:45.000 Now let's be clear about one thing historically.

00:13:47.000 Historically, most of our great politicians have been very wealthy men.

00:13:51.000 Okay, let's just be real about this.

00:13:53.000 Abraham Lincoln was an exception.

00:13:54.000 George Washington was a very, very wealthy man.

00:13:57.000 Thomas Jefferson was a landed, very, very wealthy man.

00:14:01.000 Obviously, at the outside of the Republic, pretty much everybody who was voting and in power was a very wealthy person.

00:14:06.000 These were people who were coming from parochial backwaters, and if you had enough money to abandon your business for six months, you better have enough money.

00:14:12.000 Most of the people who were in Congress were pretty wealthy.

00:14:15.000 FDR was a scion of a very wealthy family.

00:14:18.000 All these folks were very, very wealthy.

00:14:21.000 Bill Clinton, by the time he took office, was not impoverished.

00:14:25.000 Neither was Jimmy Carter.

00:14:27.000 Most of these politicians were not from the bottom class.

00:14:30.000 The last time we had a truly blue-collar, like a really blue-collar president was probably Harry Truman, in terms of personal wealth.

00:14:37.000 It's been a long time.

00:14:38.000 Most of our politicians are very wealthy people.

00:14:41.000 Most of the people at the top of any industry

00:14:43.000 I don't know.

00:15:07.000 Who is pitching classism as his chief economic goal.

00:15:12.000 And it's having an appeal among white folks, right?

00:15:14.000 White folks are into this.

00:15:16.000 On the left, this is what they're into.

00:15:18.000 So much so that Ben and Jerry, you know, Ben and Jerry's the ice cream makers.

00:15:21.000 They've been big Bernie Sanders backers.

00:15:22.000 They're from Vermont.

00:15:23.000 They've now released a flavor of ice cream, a temporary flavor of ice cream, called Bernie's Yearning.

00:15:29.000 Really, that's what it's called.

00:15:31.000 Which just makes it real awkward because nobody really wants Bernie's yearning filling their mouth.

00:15:35.000 It's just gross.

00:15:36.000 But in any case, Bernie's yearning, the ice cream flavor has come out with Ben & Jerry's.

00:15:40.000 Which also begs the question for Bernie Sanders, why do you need so many flavors of ice cream?

00:15:44.000 I mean, he already said that about deodorant.

00:15:45.000 Why do you need so many different types of deodorant?

00:15:47.000 Why do you need so many flavors of ice cream?

00:15:49.000 So, in any case, you have the classism on one side, and then you have the race appeal on the other side.

00:15:55.000 So, Bernie Sanders got himself into trouble last week because he was asked about slavery reparations, and he said he wasn't in support of slavery reparations.

00:16:04.000 He was asked again over the weekend, and here's Bernie Sanders kind of trying to soft-pedal his answer on slavery reparations.

00:16:11.000 Well, for the same reason that Barack Obama has, and the same reason I believe that Hillary Clinton has.

00:16:17.000 And that is, it is absolutely wrong and unacceptable that we have so much poverty in this country, and it is even worse in the African-American community.

00:16:27.000 That African-American kids between 17 and 20 who graduate high school have unemployment rates and underemployment rates of 51%.

00:16:36.000 The 36% of African-American children are living in poverty.

00:16:40.000 This is an issue that we have got to address.

00:16:43.000 And my intention, as President of the United States, is to be very aggressive in dealing with those issues.

00:16:48.000 To put our kids to work, rather than see them go to jail.

00:16:52.000 To improve our schools.

00:16:54.000 That's what we have to do.

00:16:55.000 And I think that's what the American people want.

00:16:57.000 I understand that, but you didn't answer the question why you weren't in favor of reparations.

00:17:03.000 Well, again, it's the same reason that the president is not, and I think... And what is that reason?

00:17:08.000 Hillary Clinton is not.

00:17:09.000 We have got to invest in the future.

00:17:11.000 What we have got to do is address poverty in America, something that very few people talk about, and especially poverty in the African-American community and the Latino community.

00:17:21.000 And if you look at my record and if you look at my agenda, raising the minimum wage to fifteen bucks an hour, creating millions of jobs or rebuilding our infrastructure, focusing on high rates of youth unemployment, I think our candidacy is the candidacy talking to the issues of the African-American community.

00:17:38.000 There's Bernie Sanders, and instead of pandering on the race question, he goes back to his socialism, right?

00:17:43.000 He says all of the racial inequalities in the United States, all of the fact that black people tend to be poorer than white people, all of that can just be solved with a little bit of redistributionism.

00:17:52.000 My socialism solves everything.

00:17:55.000 So he's still running on class, even on the race question.

00:17:58.000 On the other side, Hillary Clinton is getting very cynical now because she knows she's losing among white voters.

00:18:03.000 So what does she have to do?

00:18:04.000 She has to double down with black voters.

00:18:05.000 And there's a reason for this, right?

00:18:07.000 Iowa and New Hampshire, Iowa is 2.9% black, the state of Iowa.

00:18:11.000 The Democratic electorate in the primary in South Carolina is 50% black.

00:18:16.000 One out of every two Democratic voters in South Carolina is black, which means that all Hillary Clinton has to do if she dominates the black vote in South Carolina, she wins the primary walking away.

00:18:25.000 That's why she still has over 50% approval.

00:18:27.000 All the white people in South Carolina can vote for Bernie Sanders, and if she gets black people to vote for her, and she picks up 10% of the white vote, she wins in a walk.

00:18:35.000 And so what she's been doing, is she's been going after Bernie Sanders, now saying that Bernie Sanders is a racist, you see?

00:18:40.000 He's a socialist.

00:18:41.000 But socialism isn't good enough for black folks.

00:18:44.000 She has to pander harder.

00:18:45.000 So, this is all coming originally from Ta-Nehisi Coates.

00:18:48.000 Ta-Nehisi Coates

00:18:50.000 He's really a disreputable human being.

00:18:52.000 Ta-Nehisi Coates is a guy who writes for the Atlantic, mainly.

00:18:56.000 He grew up in Baltimore.

00:18:57.000 His dad had, I think, seven kids by four different women.

00:19:00.000 He blamed whites for this because presumably there were white people forcing his dad to strip a bunch of single women and have babies with them.

00:19:06.000 He blamed the white community for his own inequality.

00:19:08.000 He then went to Howard University, where he did well, and then he became a writer, and now he's won a MacArthur Genius Grant for writing absolutely

00:19:16.000 Opaque prose that makes no sense, but he uses words like he uses phrases like black bodies.

00:19:21.000 He doesn't say black people He says black bodies white people are not attacking black people white people are attacking black bodies And because that's how brutal white people are.

00:19:29.000 Ta-Nehisi Coates has been a big advocate of slavery reparations

00:19:32.000 Because he makes this vague case that America's historically been racist, so white people have lived off the back of that, but black people have not benefited from America.

00:19:42.000 Which is patently insane, given the fact that black people in the United States are significantly more well-off than black people pretty much anywhere else on planet Earth.

00:19:50.000 It's also ridiculous to suggest that white people now have all benefited from slavery way back when, when literally hundreds of thousands of white people died to end slavery.

00:19:57.000 Plus, if you look at the white community, approximately 2% of white Americans are descended from slave owners.

00:20:03.000 Plus, if you look at people like me, my great-grandparents got here.

00:20:06.000 Great-great-grandparents?

00:20:07.000 Got here in 1913, 1907, and 1913, respectively.

00:20:11.000 And had nothing to do with slavery or Jim Crow, so the idea that I should deprive my own child of her educational opportunities by paying money to some black family that's been out of slavery for 200 years seems a little bit odd to me.

00:20:24.000 I don't know, at least 165 years.

00:20:25.000 That seems a little bit odd to me.

00:20:27.000 But, you know, slavery reparations make no sense in any real sense, especially given the fact that the black community was on an upward trajectory from the end of slavery all the way up through the 1950s, hampered by Jim Crow, obviously, hampered by racism.

00:20:42.000 But after the 1950s, with the advent of what were supposed to be de facto slavery reparations, according to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the black community basically collapsed in terms of its social standards and its economic

00:20:53.000 Standards of living.

00:20:54.000 Their poverty rate now is the same as it was back in the 1950s, and their single motherhood rate has more than tripled.

00:21:00.000 20% of kids in 1960 in the black community were born out of wedlock.

00:21:03.000 Today, it's upward of 70% in the black community.

00:21:06.000 That's not because of slavery.

00:21:08.000 There wasn't a re-imposition of slavery between 1960 and 2015.

00:21:11.000 So slavery reparations are an idiotic idea for a wide variety of reasons, and if you're really going to imply that all white people have lived off the backs of black people, I would ask you how I confiscated any wealth from a black person.

00:21:23.000 Particularly given the fact that black people have a disproportionate share of no wealth.

00:21:27.000 The reality is the reverse.

00:21:29.000 Black people in the United States, at least during my lifetime, have taken a lot more money from me than I've taken from them.

00:21:34.000 But that has nothing to do with racism.

00:21:36.000 That has to do with the fact that poor people take more money from rich people than rich people take from poor people.

00:21:42.000 The fact is, one of the great lies is that the rich are living off the backs of the poor.

00:21:46.000 How?

00:21:47.000 The poor have nothing.

00:21:49.000 How?

00:21:50.000 How does that work?

00:21:51.000 I've never worked for a poor person.

00:21:52.000 A lot of poor people have worked for me.

00:21:54.000 That's the way that this works.

00:21:55.000 But in any case,

00:21:57.000 So, Ta-Nehisi Coates got all over Bernie Sanders because he says Bernie Sanders' socialism isn't good enough, right?

00:22:03.000 His Stalin-esque redistribution schemes aren't good enough.

00:22:06.000 We have to campaign on the basis of racism now, right?

00:22:08.000 Anti-white racism has to be the basis.

00:22:10.000 So here's Ta-Nehisi Coates, this genius, talking about Bernie Sanders.

00:22:16.000 Well, I simply didn't understand his answer.

00:22:18.000 I mean, to be blunt, the senator, you know, whose campaign I respect, who I respect, who I've considered very, very courageous, who some people in my household that are a lot younger than me actually support and have been very vocal about supporting, I think has inspired quite a, you know, quite a number of people with his willingness to put solutions on the table that, you know, a lot of folks consider outside of the politically doable.

00:22:41.000 And so then to see him dismiss reparations simply because, you know, it...

00:22:47.000 He's not politically doable in his opinion.

00:22:50.000 It just felt completely off.

00:22:51.000 It felt out of tune with the entire spirit of his campaign.

00:22:55.000 He mentioned that the chances for getting reparations through Congress are nil.

00:22:59.000 In fact, the senator advocates several things, whose chances in Congress are also nil.

00:23:04.000 I'm not saying he shouldn't be advocating those things, by the way.

00:23:07.000 My point is that he should.

00:23:08.000 You need those ideas out into the world.

00:23:10.000 That should be part of the political debate.

00:23:12.000 I'm a fan of that, but I'm a fan of doing it across the board and not being selective about it.

00:23:16.000 Okay, so Ta-Nehisi Coates, by the way, you can see, for those who can see, Ta-Nehisi Coates has the Arc de Triomphe behind him.

00:23:22.000 He lives in France now.

00:23:23.000 He moved out of the United States because of the egregious racism of a country that made him incredibly wealthy.

00:23:28.000 He's moved to France, where he lives with his family.

00:23:30.000 By the way, in France, at soccer games, fans chant Monkey at black players sometimes, apparently.

00:23:35.000 So, the idea that racism doesn't exist in Europe is obviously asinine.

00:23:39.000 In any case, what he's saying there, to try and decode the muddy thinking, what Ta-Nehisi Coates is saying is that Hillary doesn't pretend to be a radical, so you're not surprised when she doesn't say radical things.

00:23:49.000 Bernie Sanders says he's a radical, so he should embrace radical positions.

00:23:52.000 Okay, that still doesn't explain why you would support Hillary Clinton, a non-radical, over Bernie Sanders, a radical.

00:23:58.000 It's silly.

00:23:59.000 It's like a Ted Cruz... It's like you're asked a question, who's better, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz?

00:24:04.000 And you say, I don't like Ted Cruz because he's not conservative enough.

00:24:07.000 He said, wait a second, he's way more conservative than Donald Trump.

00:24:09.000 Yeah, but he says he's a conservative, and Donald Trump doesn't really.

00:24:13.000 Okay, but he's still way more conservative than Donald Trump.

00:24:15.000 Like, it's not a really sensical answer, but his idea is that real radical, a real radical like Bernie Sanders would embrace slavery reparations.

00:24:24.000 What does the Hillary Clinton campaign do?

00:24:26.000 The Hillary campaign, cynically, they don't back slavery reparations either, by the way.

00:24:30.000 Hillary doesn't back slavery reparations.

00:24:32.000 But she wants black votes.

00:24:34.000 So what does she do?

00:24:35.000 She trots out a bunch of spokespeople, all to say that Bernie Sanders is now a racist.

00:24:40.000 Now, understand something.

00:24:41.000 I think Bernie Sanders is a scuzzbucket.

00:24:43.000 I think Bernie Sanders, beyond his personal life, where he abandoned his first wife, beyond the fact that he honeymooned in Cuba in the USSR,

00:24:51.000 I think his policies are egregious.

00:24:52.000 I think they harm people.

00:24:53.000 I think his class warfare is disgusting.

00:24:55.000 But, one thing you can't say about Bernie Sanders is that he's anti-black people, as a general rule.

00:25:00.000 Now, his policies are anti-black people, but Bernie Sanders is not someone who hates black people.

00:25:04.000 In 1963, Bernie Sanders got arrested trying to protest segregation, and in 1964, he traveled to Washington, D.C.

00:25:11.000 to watch Martin Luther King speak at the March on Washington.

00:25:14.000 So, Bernie Sanders is not somebody who hates black people.

00:25:16.000 Well, that didn't stop the Hillary campaign from trotting out a bunch of spokespeople to say Bernie hates black people, right?

00:25:23.000 So now we're gonna have a fight between the classists on the one side, in the Democratic Party, and the racists on the other side.

00:25:29.000 So David Brock, who is the... there's something about Mary-haired dude.

00:25:35.000 He's the one with the white hair that sticks straight up, and we sort of have guesses why.

00:25:40.000 David Brock, he came out and he said that Hillary Clinton, unlike Bernie Sanders, she likes black people.

00:25:46.000 Bernie Sanders doesn't care about black lives.

00:25:48.000 He actually said that.

00:25:49.000 And then they trotted out Brian Fallon, who's a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton, to say, yeah, the only reason that Bernie doesn't support slavery reparations is because he doesn't like black people.

00:25:58.000 Here's Brian Fallon.

00:26:01.000 We'll see over the coming weeks if he can explain some of these plans that he's laid out on health care.

00:26:09.000 He hasn't said how he would achieve a single-payer system when we couldn't even get a public option with an entirely Democratic Congress.

00:26:14.000 And yet when it comes to something like reparations, he says that he dismisses it as completely unfeasible.

00:26:20.000 Okay, Hillary Clinton has done the same thing.

00:26:23.000 How is Hillary Clinton's spokesperson sitting there and criticizing Sanders for that?

00:26:27.000 Because this is how cynical they are.

00:26:29.000 Remember, the Hillary Clinton campaign, they're willing to throw anything at the wall.

00:26:33.000 If they have to call someone a racist, they'll do it without evidence.

00:26:36.000 This is why I say Hillary and Trump are very similar in this way.

00:26:39.000 They'll do anything in order to win.

00:26:41.000 And you're seeing the groundswell, because they have to support Hillary, because the media need to get behind Hillary Clinton, you're starting to see now this bizarre groundswell on behalf of slavery reparations.

00:26:49.000 Here's Chris Matthews from MSNBC embracing slavery reparations.

00:26:53.000 He loves them!

00:26:54.000 They're just great!

00:26:55.000 Chris Matthews, MSNBC, let's go!

00:26:57.000 He believes in reparations now.

00:26:58.000 Why does he believe in reparations?

00:26:59.000 I believe in reparations because Hillary Clinton says she does, even though she doesn't.

00:27:02.000 And so I think reparations are... Here's the bottom line for the Democrats.

00:27:18.000 One of the problems that they have, and this is, they keep talking about the diverse coalition they're going to build.

00:27:23.000 This is actually a problem for Hillary Clinton.

00:27:25.000 They keep talking about this vast, diverse coalition they're going to build.

00:27:28.000 By diverse, Hillary means the same thing Democrats always mean when they say diverse.

00:27:33.000 She means Hispanic and black.

00:27:34.000 Right?

00:27:34.000 She doesn't mean anybody else.

00:27:35.000 Hispanics and blacks.

00:27:37.000 There's one problem.

00:27:38.000 70% of the country is still white.

00:27:40.000 So, that leaves a real opening for somebody like a Donald Trump, somebody like a Ted Cruz, who is not going to pander along racial lines.

00:27:48.000 And this stuff should come back to haunt her.

00:27:50.000 It really should come back to haunt her.

00:27:52.000 So, if Bernie Sanders runs, this is going to be a class warfare campaign.

00:27:55.000 If Hillary Clinton runs, this is going to be a race warfare campaign.

00:27:58.000 This is how the left makes America a deeply ugly place.

00:28:01.000 Because on the left, this is the battle right now.

00:28:03.000 It's between racist Bernie Sanders and tool-of-the-rich Hillary Clinton, right?

00:28:08.000 This is how they label each other.

00:28:09.000 By the way, Hillary Clinton, she apparently gave a bunch of $200,000 speeches.

00:28:14.000 Two Goldman Sachs.

00:28:16.000 And she has now refused to release any of those speeches, even as she campaigns as a class warrior like Bernie Sanders.

00:28:21.000 It really is quite incredible.

00:28:24.000 So that's the latest there.

00:28:25.000 By the way, I do want to mention real fast, when we talk about the polls from Iowa, it's important to realize that there are real flaws in the Iowa polling models this year.

00:28:33.000 And I'm not a poll doubter, I'm not a poll truther, as a general rule, so this stuff is not coming from me.

00:28:37.000 This is coming from Nate Silver.

00:28:39.000 Who's the statistician at FiveThirtyEight.com.

00:28:41.000 He's the guy who called all 50 states right.

00:28:43.000 Last time he's become something of a guru.

00:28:45.000 He's on the left.

00:28:46.000 He has two measures of who he thinks is going to win Iowa on the Republican side.

00:28:51.000 He has the poll measure and then he has what he calls the polls plus measure.

00:28:54.000 The reason he has those and they're they're widely different is because in Iowa it's a caucus state which means the way it works is that a bunch of people get together and they all go to a room together and then people make speeches on behalf of the candidates and then you actually

00:29:07.000 And then you poll the people in the room as to whom they support.

00:29:37.000 Right?

00:29:37.000 So you can have these major swings.

00:29:39.000 And one of the problems with the polls right now is that the polls are too broadly sampled.

00:29:43.000 Meaning that they are assuming that 13% of the Iowa electorate is Republican.

00:29:47.000 Typically, only about 5% of the Iowa electorate is Republican.

00:29:50.000 That means they're including an awful lot of blue-collar Democrats who like Donald Trump.

00:29:55.000 So the polls plus model suggests that Ted Cruz has a 48% chance of winning the Iowa caucus, Trump at 41.

00:30:02.000 The polls model for Nate Silver has Cruz with a 37% chance of winning.

00:30:07.000 Yeah, in the end I think ground game will matter.

00:30:11.000 I would be surprised if Trump wins.

00:30:13.000 I wouldn't be super surprised, but I'd be surprised.

00:30:15.000 If Trump wins, the Iowa caucuses.

00:30:18.000 Okay, time for some things that I like and time for some things that I hate.

00:30:22.000 As I said last week, I got a lot of letters on this.

00:30:23.000 I was shocked by the number of musical theater fans that we have in the audience, but I will talk about something that I like and also sort of hate, and that is Stephen Sondheim.

00:30:32.000 So, Stephen Sondheim.

00:30:34.000 I am a big fan of Sweeney Todd.

00:30:35.000 I love Sweeney Todd.

00:30:36.000 It's a magnificent musical.

00:30:37.000 Don't watch the movie.

00:30:38.000 It's garbage.

00:30:39.000 See if you can grab the original cast production CD with Len Carreau and not Johnny Depp, who's the most eff- He's just been playing effeminate pirates since Pirates of the Caribbean.

00:30:49.000 An effeminate Sweeney Todd doesn't work at all.

00:30:51.000 He's not scary in any sense.

00:30:53.000 Len Carreau's actually scary.

00:30:54.000 Listen to the original-

00:30:56.000 Cast recording.

00:30:57.000 It's beautifully orchestrated.

00:30:58.000 The music is glorious.

00:31:00.000 The lyrics are tremendous.

00:31:01.000 So here's what I dislike about Stephen Sondheim.

00:31:04.000 So Stephen Sondheim writes Sweeney, which is a masterpiece.

00:31:07.000 I mean, legitimately a masterpiece.

00:31:08.000 And he also wrote Pacific Overtures, which is a very, very good musical.

00:31:12.000 And he wrote most of the lyrics to—all the good lyrics in West Side Story.

00:31:16.000 Are Stephen Sondheim all the bad ones are Leonard Bernstein.

00:31:19.000 So the lyrics to tonight are Leonard Bernstein because they're stupid lyrics and stuff about Planets spinning in the sky and all this garbage.

00:31:26.000 That's Leonard Bernstein all the stuff from something's coming

00:31:30.000 Is Stephen Sondheim, and it's brilliant.

00:31:33.000 His word choice is spectacular.

00:31:35.000 For people who love words, for people who love the use of proper English, Sondheim is just a godsend.

00:31:41.000 In the song Pretty Women in Sweeney Todd, there's one point where he says, Pretty women, fascinating, sipping, coughing, glancing, stay within you, always, pretty women.

00:31:51.000 And then there's one line where he says, something in them cheers the air.

00:31:55.000 It's a beautiful use of the word.

00:31:57.000 Like, who uses cheers as a verb like that?

00:31:59.000 It's really spectacular.

00:32:00.000 His word choice is quite wonderful.

00:32:02.000 The problem with Sondheim is he's sort of like Aaron Sorkin.

00:32:05.000 At a certain point, Aaron Sorkin wrote one of the great speeches for all of film, right?

00:32:08.000 In a few good menu rights, one good speech.

00:32:10.000 That's his entire career, right?

00:32:11.000 Then, from then on, every character is Aaron Sorkin.

00:32:14.000 And that's because Aaron Sorkin deep down really doesn't like his audience very much.

00:32:17.000 He thinks that they're kind of stupid, and he thinks he's really intelligent.

00:32:20.000 Sondheim, over the course of time,

00:32:22.000 I don't know.

00:32:42.000 The second half is less good and then you get to the end and they sing the final number and the final number is garbage leftism that has nothing to do with the story and it's stupid.

00:32:51.000 And that's what Stephen Sondheim started to do.

00:32:53.000 He did Sunday in the Park with George, it was the same sort of thing.

00:32:55.000 It's this pointless score that only the elites loved.

00:32:58.000 You can't sing, and there are two tunes in the entire thing that you can sing.

00:33:02.000 There's nothing wrong with the tune.

00:33:03.000 If it was good enough for Mozart, it should be good enough for Sondheim.

00:33:05.000 But he decided to get deliberately obscure because he really dislikes his audience, and he wanted to prove to the neurocritics how brilliant he is by continuing to do things that were further and further off the beaten track.

00:33:15.000 So he ends up doing Passions, which is nonsense, and Assassins, which is garbage, and just a bunch of shows that are deliberately obscure just so he can show people how brilliant he is.

00:33:25.000 It's something that I hate in art.

00:33:27.000 I hate when people do this.

00:33:28.000 My view is that good art is art that connects with people.

00:33:32.000 It's not art that proves how smart the artist is.

00:33:34.000 The best artists are people who put their art above their own ego, and Sondheim doesn't do that.

00:33:40.000 Sondheim, I think, can be encapsulated in this one story that I heard from an actor, a relatively well-known actor, who apparently had dinner with Sondheim at one point.

00:33:48.000 So this is all alleged, this is secondhand.

00:33:50.000 But apparently, uh, they were at dinner together, and Sondheim had a long table, with a bunch of people there, and he's sitting at the head of the table, and there's a bowl of potato salad, and Sondheim, halfway through the dinner, he just reaches out with his hand, and he takes some of the potato salad, and he puts it in his mouth, and kind of slurps it off his hand, and then, he reaches back into the potato salad, and starts slurping it off his hand, just to prove to everybody I'm here, and I'm the one who kind of rules the roost, just to show no one's gonna say anything to me, because I'm Stephen Sondheim.

00:34:17.000 So, you know, that's sort of how his art is, too.

00:34:20.000 Meaning that it's a tragedy to me.

00:34:22.000 It's an artistic tragedy that he didn't make the most of his talents.

00:34:25.000 And I really don't think he did.

00:34:26.000 I don't think he's written anything very good since the 80s.

00:34:29.000 And that's sad to me, because this is a guy who truly was gifted.

00:34:32.000 I mean, really, really gifted.

00:34:34.000 Again, listen to some of the lyrics in West Side Story.

00:34:38.000 If you listen to the lyrics in America, they're amazing.

00:34:41.000 He was such a perfectionist that when he did the lyrics to I Feel Pretty in West Side Story, there's a lyric in which Maria sings,

00:34:51.000 I feel charming, oh so charming.

00:34:53.000 It's alarming how charming I feel, right?

00:34:54.000 Which is a really kind of fun rhyme.

00:34:56.000 And later he said he felt bad that he used that rhyme because he felt like a shop girl from Puerto Rico wouldn't know the words alarming and charming.

00:35:02.000 Which is exactly right.

00:35:04.000 This is how well thought out all of his stuff was and I've read pretty much, yeah, I've read a lot of what Sondheim has written.

00:35:10.000 So again, I'm a big Sondheim fan, so that's something I love and something I hate, is the perversion of art.

00:35:14.000 You see it in the movies all the time.

00:35:15.000 All these great directors, and they just get more and more deliberately obscure, and they make movies that don't connect with anybody anymore just to prove how smart they are.

00:35:22.000 And it's like, just stop being a jackass.

00:35:23.000 You know, you're allowed to give us what we want.

00:35:25.000 We like it better.

00:35:27.000 What people forget is that Shakespeare was not only able to write glorious monologues, he was also writing fart humor for people.

00:35:32.000 Right?

00:35:33.000 I mean, if you actually look at Shakespeare's comedies,

00:35:35.000 Half of it is sex humor, right, for the common man.

00:35:38.000 And even half of- in Hamlet, there's a bunch of sex humor in Hamlet.

00:35:41.000 Whenever he's doing his mad scenes, there's a bunch of sexual humor that he's doing with Ophelia that- that- for the common man to get and laugh at.

00:35:48.000 So, there's nothing wrong with making your art understandable to people.

00:35:52.000 It doesn't make you bad.

00:35:53.000 It makes you good, actually.

00:35:54.000 It makes you good at what you do.

00:35:55.000 Art is supposed to be about the connections that we feel for each other.

00:35:58.000 Okay, so there's things I like and things that I hate.

00:35:59.000 Okay, a couple of more things that I hate.

00:36:03.000 I'm supposed to speak at Cal State Los Angeles on February 25th.

00:36:08.000 And apparently, apparently, this is really frustrating to all of the lefties over at Cal State Los Angeles.

00:36:15.000 Young America's Foundation is sponsoring me, as I mentioned last week.

00:36:18.000 I've now been sponsored to do a 10 school tour, at the very least, maybe more, where I go to various campuses.

00:36:23.000 And the kids over there, the precious little snowflakes over there, are very upset about it.

00:36:27.000 So you've got students who are concerned that this is going to create stigma.

00:36:32.000 That it creates stigma around social justice issues.

00:36:36.000 Some of these students are saying that I'm a threat to safety.

00:36:39.000 I'm a threat to safety because clearly, look at me.

00:36:42.000 Thank goodness, given my vast rap sheet of physical violence, doing physical violence to my enemies, clearly that's what they should be worried about.

00:36:51.000 There are people who are threatening.

00:36:52.000 There's some student named Samaria Zomez who writes, all I'm gonna say is you chose the wrong campus.

00:36:57.000 Get ready, we don't play.

00:36:59.000 So thanks for that, appreciate it.

00:37:00.000 Don't worry, there'll be security on hand and they will have guns.

00:37:05.000 And then finally, there's a professor who actually wrote to all the students who invited me.

00:37:09.000 He wrote, So you're a white supremacist if you invited me, because clearly,

00:37:21.000 When I think of white supremacists, this is part of the uniform right here.

00:37:24.000 This yarmulke is part of the white supremacist uniform.

00:37:27.000 All the white supremacists are into it now.

00:37:29.000 It's their favorite thing.

00:37:30.000 If you look at any of the Sheeny forums, those are the ones where they really love on me.

00:37:36.000 Nothing white supremacists like better than an orthodox Jew.

00:37:39.000 As a general rule, they just love Jews.

00:37:42.000 And so, I'm glad to be part of the white supremacist movement.

00:37:44.000 Clearly, I'm part of it, obviously, since I say things like, merit before diversity.

00:37:49.000 And so, now he's threatening, he says, heads up, I lift bros.

00:37:51.000 So this professor is threatening his students to beat them up.

00:37:54.000 He's a sociology professor.

00:37:56.000 Believe me, I have plenty of friends who I could send to fight this guy.

00:37:59.000 I thought civilization meant I didn't have to fight people.

00:38:01.000 I thought that was sort of the principle of Western civilization.

00:38:04.000 I guess now it's cowardice.

00:38:05.000 I love the left, right?

00:38:06.000 It's cowardice if you don't physically fight them, but if you do physically fight them, then you're a brute.

00:38:11.000 So if I own a gun, I'm a brute.

00:38:13.000 But if I don't physically fight them, then I'm a coward.

00:38:17.000 So this is the way that it works now.

00:38:19.000 Which is just ridiculous.

00:38:21.000 Again, I don't need to physically fight you.

00:38:23.000 I'm smarter than you, I make more money than you, and you have no part of my life.

00:38:27.000 I just laugh at you, honestly.

00:38:29.000 I can't physically fight you.

00:38:31.000 Why?

00:38:32.000 I hired three people to beat you up.

00:38:34.000 We're good to go.

00:38:53.000 You know, fabled Shakespearean actor Danny DeVito has now said that Hollywood is deeply racist.

00:38:58.000 Yes, Hollywood is deeply racist according to a small, ugly man who has made millions and millions of dollars in Hollywood.

00:39:07.000 And Danny DeVito, by the way, is actually... I met him once when I was much younger because my cousin, Mara Wilson, was the star of Matilda and he was the father of Matilda and directed it.

00:39:16.000 Uh, and he and his wife, at the time, I'm not sure, is he still married to Rita Perlman?

00:39:19.000 They may have divorced.

00:39:21.000 Um, but they, I think they still live together.

00:39:23.000 In any case, they were very nice people.

00:39:24.000 I mean, they came to my aunt's funeral, and they were very nice people, but that doesn't mean that he's not a nutty leftist.

00:39:29.000 So here's Danny DeVito, suggesting that everybody is a racist.

00:39:33.000 And it's unfortunate that the entire country is a racist country.

00:39:41.000 So this is one example of the fact that even though some people have given great performances in movies, they weren't even thought about.

00:39:52.000 We are living in a country that discriminates

00:40:03.000 Yeah, generally speaking, we're a bunch of racists, according to Danny DeVito, who works, by the way, in the most leftist place on earth, Hollywood.

00:40:23.000 And this is the common perception of folks on the left.

00:40:26.000 So, Macklemore, who is a deeply untalented white rapper, I mean, when I say deeply untalented,

00:40:33.000 We're good to go.

00:40:49.000 Everything that he does that is of any quality at all is done by his partner, right?

00:40:53.000 I can't remember the guy's name, but his partner is the one who's talented.

00:40:56.000 Macklemore's just a doof.

00:40:58.000 And so Macklemore, he has now cut a new clip, a new song, called White Privilege 2, The Revenge.

00:41:06.000 The Revenge is my, just White Privilege 2.

00:41:08.000 He did White Privilege 1, I guess, back in 2005, and it's been 10 years, so he's gonna revisit his other unbelievably crappy song, and he's gone back with White Privilege 2,

00:41:17.000 So we'll play a little bit of this, because this is something that I hate, and I'll tell you why.

00:41:22.000 He's doing this, and Danny DeVito's doing this, and they're just obnoxious blowhards.

00:41:26.000 Here we go.

00:41:27.000 God, we could be here a while.

00:41:44.000 Hold on to the parking lot, parked it, zipped up my parka, joined the procession of marchers.

00:41:49.000 In my head like, is this awkward?

00:41:51.000 Should I even be here marching?

00:41:53.000 Thinking that they can't, how can I breathe?

00:41:55.000 Thinking that they chant, what do I sing?

00:41:58.000 I wanna take a stance, cause we are not free.

00:42:00.000 And then I thought about it, we are not we.

00:42:02.000 Am I on the outside looking in?

00:42:04.000 Or am I on the inside looking out?

00:42:07.000 Is it my place to get my two cents?

00:42:08.000 Or should I stand on the side and shut my mouth?

00:42:10.000 No justice, no peace.

00:42:13.000 Okay, I'm saying that.

00:42:14.000 That shitting out black lives matter.

00:42:17.000 But I don't say it back.

00:42:20.000 Is it okay for me to say?

00:42:21.000 I don't know, so I watch and stand in front of a line of police that look the same as me, only separated by a badge, a baton, a can, a mace, a mask, a shield, a gun, with gloves on hands that gives an alibi in case somebody dies behind a bullet that flies out of their nine, takes another child's life on sight.

00:42:36.000 Bam!

00:42:36.000 Not in this house, no.

00:42:40.000 Okay, so this song is absolute garbage.

00:42:42.000 I mean, just on a musical level.

00:42:44.000 We can pause it.

00:42:44.000 I mean, on a musical level, it doesn't even have a decent rhythm.

00:42:48.000 I thought that was the purpose of rap, right?

00:42:50.000 Is that there is no melody, and there is no harmony, so at least you better have a decent rhythm.

00:42:53.000 I mean, here, you don't even have a decent rhythm.

00:42:55.000 But putting aside the aesthetic abomination that this song is, the lyrics themselves are so ridiculous.

00:43:02.000 So, he says that he attended a Black Lives Matter march, and he didn't know whether to participate or not because he's a white guy.

00:43:07.000 Because that's what Martin Luther King wanted.

00:43:09.000 When Martin Luther King, what he really wanted is when you were gonna march on behalf of racial solidarity, he wanted you to think about your own skin color before you did it, because you wouldn't want to culturally appropriate.

00:43:18.000 And this idiocy goes on, and he says,

00:43:26.000 And then he does a whole routine about Miley Cyrus and Elvis Presley, I guess?

00:43:32.000 I mean, he makes a reference to an Elvis.

00:43:33.000 I assume that's Elvis Presley.

00:43:35.000 And Iggy Azalea.

00:43:37.000 By the way, Macklemore's white, okay?

00:43:39.000 So he's talking to them about cultural appropriation.

00:43:41.000 He's just as white as any of these folks.

00:43:43.000 He says, you've exploited and stolen the music, the moment, the magic, the passion, the fashion you toy with.

00:43:48.000 The culture was never yours to make better.

00:43:51.000 First of all, cultural appropriation is the stupidest crap that ever was.

00:43:54.000 Cultural appropriation is called free trade.

00:43:56.000 Cultural appropriation is where we look at stuff, think, hey, that's cool, and then engage in it.

00:44:01.000 And if people want to end cultural appropriation, I'm fine with that.

00:44:04.000 Macklemore can give back rap and never rap again, and I am perfectly fine with that.

00:44:08.000 Now, if only black people can rap, Macklemore can go back to being an unemployed, useless person.

00:44:13.000 And, by the way, black and Latino and Asian people, they can give back Western civilization and the invention of pretty much everything.

00:44:21.000 Okay, this is why cultural appropriation is stupid.

00:44:24.000 Because humans create art, humans create science, humans create all the good things we live with, not particular races.

00:44:31.000 It's not that Isaac Newton was white that made him discover the theory of gravity, right?

00:44:35.000 I mean, that's not why Isaac Newton was important.

00:44:38.000 Isaac Newton could have been black.

00:44:39.000 It doesn't matter.

00:44:40.000 But he was the product of a civilization that sprang up in white Europe.

00:44:45.000 I mean, there's no question about that.

00:44:46.000 But it doesn't have anything to do with color.

00:44:47.000 It has to do with civilization.

00:44:49.000 The left doesn't acknowledge this, which goes back to Hillary being a racist and trying to divide race from race, which is counterproductive.

00:44:56.000 Well, this begs a question.

00:44:58.000 Macklemore, at a certain point in here, he rips on all these white rappers and then he says that they use their cultural appropriation and they go buy a big-ass lawn, go with your big-ass house, you can join the march, protest, scream and shout, get on Twitter, hashtag and seem like you're down.

00:45:14.000 Okay, in case you were wondering, white rapper Macklemore owns a $2.1 million house and bought a similar, I think $2 million house for his parents.

00:45:23.000 So, he's doing all the things he accuses people of, but the idea is that he now has done something.

00:45:28.000 He's used his art to forward the cause.

00:45:31.000 And so has Danny DeVito.

00:45:32.000 They've used their platform to forward the cause.

00:45:35.000 What cause?

00:45:36.000 Was there one less single mother in the black community this morning because of Macklemore?

00:45:40.000 Was there one less black person engaging in crime because of Macklemore?

00:45:44.000 Was there one more black person who went to college because of Macklemore?

00:45:47.000 Was there one black person in America who kept a job because of Macklemore?

00:45:51.000 What did they do?

00:45:52.000 Of course not.

00:45:53.000 All this is is what we call virtue signaling, right?

00:45:56.000 This is so Macklemore can pretend that he is down with the black folks, and so he can sell CDs to the people he's down with, and so Danny DeVito can seem like he's down without actually having to do anything.

00:46:06.000 This is what Democrats are all about.

00:46:07.000 Leftists are all about the virtue signaling.

00:46:09.000 I never have to do anything for anybody or make lives better for anybody, but so long as I say all the other white people are racist, and even if I say I'm racist, right, I'm racist and so are all other white people.

00:46:19.000 What is the implication?

00:46:20.000 I'm not really racist, right?

00:46:21.000 Because I'm recognizing my own white privilege too, right?

00:46:25.000 I'm recognizing my own white privilege.

00:46:27.000 That means I'm not really a beneficiary of white privilege, or if I am, I've inoculated myself to charges that I'm somehow a beneficiary or that I'm...

00:46:39.000 Unwilling and blind to my own white privilege.

00:46:41.000 I've made myself a better person by doing absolutely nothing.

00:46:44.000 So this is a thing that I hate.

00:46:45.000 This culminated last week, the very end of last week, David Blatt, who was the Jewish coach of the of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

00:46:52.000 The Cleveland Cavaliers had a record of 30 and 11, I think, so they're one of the better teams in the NBA.

00:46:57.000 And the Cleveland Cavaliers fired their Jewish coach, the only Jewish coach in the NBA.

00:47:01.000 So I tweeted facetiously,

00:47:03.000 They just fired the only Jewish coach in the NBA.

00:47:06.000 There's only one reason for this black privilege.

00:47:08.000 Hashtag NBA So Black.

00:47:10.000 He was replaced by Tyronn Lue, who's a really not particularly great basketball player, who ended up coaching the team and is a black guy.

00:47:17.000 Of course I was joking because I don't think that David Blatt was fired because he's Jewish.

00:47:20.000 I think he was fired because he didn't do the job.

00:47:22.000 And I don't think that 77% of the NBA is black because all the people in the NBA are racist.

00:47:27.000 I think that 77% of the people in the NBA are black because disproportionately the top basketball players in America happen to be black.

00:47:36.000 I'm pretty consistent on this.

00:47:37.000 What was amazing is that people on the left actually took this seriously.

00:47:40.000 They got very, very... I got ESPN writers getting very upset with me for hashtag NBASoBlack, and they're so stupid.

00:47:46.000 They started texting and they started IMing and tweeting things like, well, yeah, but only 30% of the coaches are black.

00:47:54.000 Okay, that still doesn't undermine my point.

00:47:56.000 Only 10% of Americans are black.

00:47:58.000 So that's still three times out representing the population.

00:48:00.000 So that doesn't change anything.

00:48:02.000 So all the owners are white.

00:48:04.000 So what?

00:48:05.000 So the racist white owners hired a disproportionate number of black people because they're racist against white people?

00:48:09.000 Like, this makes no sense.

00:48:11.000 The whole point I'm making is that merit before diversity.

00:48:13.000 But all the folks on the left who were really upset about hashtag NBASoBlack are the same people who say Oscar's so white.

00:48:20.000 So apparently the NBA can't be racist in any way, but the Oscars have to be racist.

00:48:25.000 Why?

00:48:25.000 Because white people benefit in one system and black people benefit in the other.

00:48:28.000 When black people benefit, it can't be because of racism.

00:48:31.000 When white people benefit, it must be because of racism.

00:48:34.000 All these people are idiots, obviously.

00:48:36.000 The fact is, thank God we live in a free country.

00:48:39.000 Thank God, still.

00:48:40.000 Temporarily.

00:48:41.000 We live in a free market economy where people can make their own business choices.

00:48:45.000 And the reality is that no matter how much I lobby for more Jews in the NBA, five, nine Jews who can't jump and have a terrible jump shot, like me, are not going to be playing in the NBA because merit before diversity, gang.

00:48:56.000 Merit before diversity.

00:48:58.000 And I would say in the presidential race,

00:49:00.000 Merit before being a blowhard on both sides of the aisle.

00:49:04.000 And please, it's so funny, everybody keeps saying they want unity, and then they say that Ted Cruz is the least unifying candidate.

00:49:12.000 Of Bernie Sanders, who divides on the basis of class, Hillary Clinton, who divides on the basis of race, and Donald Trump, who divides on the basis of everything, of all the candidates, Ted Cruz of those four is certainly the most unifying candidate, because at least he doesn't see Americans purely in terms of rich, poor, black, and white, or Donald Trump's friends and Donald Trump's enemies.

00:49:29.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:49:30.000 We'll see you tomorrow.

00:49:30.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

Ep. 60 - Democrats Choose Between 'Eat The Rich' and 'Fight Whitey'

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