Ben Shapiro: Michael Jackson's legacy crumbles as charges of pedophilia, illegal immigration surges, and Democrats ignore anti-Semitism once again to cover for the fresh faces. Ben Shapiro: Why Michael Jackson was an evil, depraved human being who preyed upon children. Leaving Neverland, a new documentary by Dan Reed, examines how depraved Michael Jackson really was, and how people are having a hard time connecting the two, because of the halo effect and the "halo effect" that surrounds people who are good at one thing and good at all things, and why they tend to think that rich people know what they're doing when it comes to everything. And why it's a wonder there's any brand left to defend, given that four men have now made detailed, credible claims that Jackson sexually abused them as minors over a period of time. The Ben Shapiro Show is on all of the social medias, if you search for it, you'll find it. Go check out the folks making the best rifles on the market. That's Bravo Company Manufacturing. If you need more convincing, check out Bravo Co.MFG on YouTube, also at BravoCoFoundationMFG. You can't ask for much more than that, right? Check out the Bravo Co Foundation on YouTube at BravocoFoundationUSA at YouTube at YouTube: BravoCoMFG at YouTube. To learn more about Bravo Co Manufacturing, head on over to BravoCoFMG at YouTube and check out their website at Bravo CoFGM at YouTube, that is a company that makes the best assault rifles in the market in the world, check it out! That is Bravo CoGMFG at That's website at YouTube : Bravo CoMGF at YouTube . That s Bravo CoFoundation LLC at YouTube that is BravoCoMGF @ YouTube: That s The Best Rifles on the Market? Go Check Out The Best Pistols on The Market by Bravo Co Founder: Bravo Co Foundations at YouTube @ Bravo Cofounders LLC at That s Best Ropes at That Is Bravo CoFG @ That s Covers the Market at the Same Time: That Is My Name: That is Covers The Most Beautiful People Are Good at All Things Good At All Things I'm Good At That Is Good at One Thing by Kyle Smith on National Review on National Rants on the Podcasts on the Internet at National Review: This Is My First Take on Michael Jackson s Sexual Orientation
00:00:00.000Michael Jackson's legacy crumbles under charges of pedophilia, illegal immigration surges, and Democrats ignore anti-Semitism once again to cover for the fresh faces.
00:00:20.000When the founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing they did was make sacred the rights of the individual to share ideas without limitation by government.
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00:01:38.000Alrighty, well we have a lot to get to today in terms of the news, but there's been a cultural shift that's been happening, a cultural moment that's been happening surrounding Michael Jackson.
00:01:47.000It's way past due, and it is testament to the innate ability of human beings to cover for people that they consider talented.
00:01:53.000There's something in psychology called the halo effect.
00:01:56.000The halo effect essentially suggests that if you think somebody is good at one thing, it means you think they are good at all things.
00:02:01.000So you tend to think that beautiful people are smart.
00:02:04.000You tend to think that people who are smart at one thing are smart at all the things.
00:02:07.000You tend to think that rich people know what they're doing when it comes to everything.
00:02:13.000We tend to make snap judgments about people, and then we take those judgments too far, and we generalize more broadly.
00:02:19.000Well, two things are true of Michael Jackson.
00:02:21.000Immensely talented human being, evil pedophile, right?
00:02:25.000Those two things are true of Michael Jackson, at least if the allegations are to be believed, which all evidence suggests they should be.
00:02:31.000And people are having a really tough time connecting those two.
00:02:35.000They're having a really tough time overcoming the cognitive dissonance of, I like Michael Jackson's music, and I was a big fan of his when I was 10, with Michael Jackson was an evil human being who preyed upon children.
00:02:46.000Now, both of those things can be true.
00:02:48.000And this new documentary, Leaving Neverland on HBO, which I've been watching, is indeed extraordinarily upsetting.
00:02:56.000It demonstrates how depraved Michael Jackson was.
00:02:59.000There's a piece in National Review by Kyle Smith talking about this.
00:03:04.000He says, debuting on March 3rd and 4th after a previous series of screening at the Sundance Film Festival, this enraging film by Dan Reed inspired a lawsuit against the Pay Cable channel from Jackson's estate, which desperately wants people not to see a story that may significantly diminish the value of his brand.
00:03:18.000It's a wonder there's any brand left to defend, given that four men have now made detailed, credible claims that Jackson sexually abused them as minors over extended periods of time.
00:03:27.000James Safechuck, a child actor, first met Jackson at nine while filming a famous 1988 Pepsi commercial in which he's excitedly examining Jackson's dressing room when the singer pops in.
00:03:36.000The commercial, Safechuck says, genuinely captured his first glimpse of the celebrity.
00:03:40.000Around the same time, Wade Robeson, then five, met Jackson after putting on a dazzling performance in a dance contest In Australia, causing the singer to bring the boy on stage for concerts and invite him to show his moves in front of a huge crowd.
00:03:51.000When the Australian tour wound down, Jackson invited the boy to look him up in LA sometime.
00:03:55.000Driven by his mother, Joy, the family managed to make contact with Jackson on vacation when the boy was seven.
00:04:00.000Jackson immediately invited the Robeson family to stay at his huge ranch at Neverland.
00:04:04.000Wade and his 10-year-old sister were allowed to sleep in Jackson's room.
00:04:07.000Days later, Jackson talked the family into allowing Wade to stay behind with him while the rest of the family went to the Grand Canyon.
00:04:12.000You and I were brought together by God, Robeson recalls Jackson, saying we were meant to be together.
00:04:17.000And this is us showing each other that we love each other.
00:04:31.000If they ever found out what we were doing, we'd be pulled apart.
00:04:34.000He and I would go to jail for the rest of our lives.
00:04:37.000Later, at Jackson's coaxing, after Jackson called Wade every day for two years and kept him on the phone for up to seven hours at a time, Joyce simply moved with Wade and her daughter from Australia to SoCal, leaving her husband and other son behind, a move that ultimately destroyed the family.
00:04:51.000Wade's father would later commit suicide.
00:04:53.000Safechuck's story follows a similar pattern.
00:04:55.000He recalls being lured quickly into Jackson's bed at age 10.
00:04:58.000His starstruck mother Stephanie was disarmed by Jackson's childlike demeanor and began thinking of the pop star as her own son.
00:05:04.000Save Chuck's memories of Jackson's sexual abuse are familiar to Robeson's.
00:05:07.000Jackson staged a mock wedding ceremony, Robeson recalls, in which the singer presented the boy with a ring lined with diamonds.
00:05:13.000He would reward me with jewelry for doing sexual acts for him.
00:05:17.000You'll remember that in 1995, he settled a civil suit for a reported $23 million after being accused of sexual abuse by Jordan Chandler, who was arrested in 2003, again, on charges of serially molesting a 13-year-old named Gavin Arvizo, a cancer-stricken boy he had met through a charity.
00:05:34.000During his criminal trial, Jackson urged both Safechuck and Robeson, now adults, to testify he had done nothing inappropriate with them.
00:05:39.000Safechuck simply declined, and in his silence, he incurred Jackson's wrath.
00:05:42.000He threatened me with his lawyers and said I had perjured myself years ago, he recalls.
00:05:46.000The lawyers would get me, he says Jackson told him.
00:05:49.000At the same time, Robeson recalls he was still somewhat attached to Jackson.
00:05:53.000He panicked at the thought of the singer in prison and what might happen to him there.
00:05:56.000Perhaps Jackson would even be murdered behind bars, he thought.
00:05:58.000So he lied, offering false testimony that Jackson had not done anything sexual to him.
00:06:03.000For Gavin, I wish I was a place where I could tell the truth and be a comrade with him, Robeson says now.
00:06:09.000His testimony and that of actor Macaulay Culkin, another man who'd spent a lot of time with Jackson as a boy, probably swayed the jury.
00:06:15.000He was acquitted on all counts with Jackson in 2005 and died, of course, in 2009.
00:06:20.000The final 45 minutes or so of the documentary does delve into the depression and torment as well as that of their mothers, each of whom searches her soul at excruciating length.
00:06:29.000Well, there are a bunch of lessons to be learned here.
00:06:31.000Well, some of those lessons include, again, our capacity for cognitive dissonance, blinding us to the reality about human beings.
00:06:37.000Second, the worship of celebrity that we have in our society.
00:06:41.000The rise of a television and movie culture, the rise of an entertainment culture that puts celebrities before our faces all the time makes us think that we know celebrities.
00:06:50.000It used to be that people who were very famous felt distant and far off.
00:06:53.000Now people who are very famous feel very close to us.
00:06:55.000And so it's very difficult for us to believe that those people could actually be evil and participating in acts of evil.
00:07:01.000That sort of stuff is something that we all ought to keep in mind, whether we are talking politics or entertainment.
00:07:07.000When we're engaging with the public world, it is deeply important for us to recognize that human beings are still human beings, even if they are rich, powerful, and famous.
00:07:14.000And maybe even more so then, because fame and wealth And power.
00:07:19.000These things allow people to gratify their worst urges and lead other people to basically give them the okay to do so.
00:07:27.000Thinking, of course, that the person wouldn't be rich, powerful, and famous unless they were also morally good.
00:07:30.000Now, this also has raised some serious issues about pedophilia itself.
00:07:35.000And it demonstrates what we have lost as a society when we decided that biological urges on any level are incentive to, are basically an excuse to do what we want.
00:07:46.000We have a very weird divide in the Western psyche right now when it comes to biological urges.
00:07:52.000On the one hand, we believe that biological urges give us moral impetus to do the things that we want to do.
00:07:57.000So if you want to have sex before marriage, you have a biological impetus to have sex before marriage.
00:08:00.000That means it's okay to have sex before marriage.
00:08:02.000At the same time, there are obvious biological urges that people don't want to give the go-ahead to because they're in fact evil.
00:08:10.000So if a man has a biological urge to rape a woman, Then we say, no, you're not allowed to do that.
00:08:31.000Now again, I'm not comparing homosexuality to pedophilia because they are completely not the same thing.
00:08:35.000One is a consenting relationship between two adults and another is the exploitation of a child.
00:08:40.000The point that I'm making Is that as a general rule, a society that fails to draw moral lines around things like consent, and instead draws moral lines around things like biological drive or biological urge, is a society that is going to fall apart at the seams.
00:08:54.000And it seems that we are moving in that direction.
00:08:56.000That we have failed to allow morality to guide our views of personal behavior.
00:09:03.000And once we don't start setting human limits to the biological urges that we have, we get ourselves in some very serious trouble.
00:09:11.000The reason I'm bringing this up is there's a column from Dahlia Lithwick, who is a legal analyst, very famous legal analyst actually, writing over at Slate.com, in which she has a piece called, Is Pedophilia a Crime or an Illness?
00:09:22.000We've Never Quite Known Whether Child Molesters Should Be Treated as Sick People or Punished as Criminals.
00:09:31.000Again, and for all the wrong reasons, we can't take our eyes off Michael Jackson.
00:09:34.000Whether or not the allegations are substantiated, the question is in the air.
00:09:37.000Is pedophilia a disease to be treated or a crime to be punished?
00:09:40.000Are people who seduce minors sick or evil?
00:09:42.000Our current legal and medical systems blur both views.
00:09:45.000We call for the most draconian punishments, life imprisonment, castration, permanent exile, precisely because we view these acts as morally heinous, yet also driven by uncontrollable biological urges." If sex with children is truly the product of freely made moral decisions, then we should deal with it through the criminal justice system.
00:10:01.000But if it is a genetically overdetermined impulse, an uncontrollable urge nestled in our DNA, then punishing pedophiles must be morally wrong, is what Dahlia Lithwick writes.
00:10:08.000As science and culture increasingly medicalizes bad behavior, finding a neurological component to everything from alcoholism to youth violence, we run the parallel risks of either absolving everyone for everything or punishing criminals who are no guiltier than cancer patients.
00:10:22.000What science has revealed, says Lithwick, about the moral medical roots of pedophiles is, of course, ambiguous.
00:10:27.000What is clear is that the binary choice laid out above is an oversimplification.
00:10:30.000The medical community, which started to view pedophilia as a disease rather than a crime in the 19th century, has amassed evidence that at least some violent and antisocial behaviors have genetic links and signposts.
00:10:40.000Researchers have been unable to isolate a biological cause for pedophilia or even to agree on a personality profile, not to mention the terrific confusion within the medical community in defining what this disease really involves.
00:10:52.000Until a few years ago, for example, the DSM-IV, the Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, defined pedophilia as a disease only if the sufferer's fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
00:11:10.000In other words, a non-impaired remorseless pedophile is apparently perfectly healthy.
00:11:13.000By the way, it is worth noting that that is exactly the same language that the DSM-5 now uses with regard to transgenderism.
00:11:19.000They suggest that transgenderism is not, in fact, a mental disorder unless it causes clinically significant distress or impairment.
00:11:26.000So what we have been doing is medicalizing.
00:11:29.000And again, transgenderism is not the same as pedophilia.
00:11:32.000Transgenderism is an adult making a decision, presumably, to behave in a certain way that does not impact other people in violation of their consent.
00:11:40.000Pedophilia is, of course, the exploitation of children.
00:11:42.000I keep repeating this because there are going to be people who don't understand the argument that I'm making and seek to conflate all of these things.
00:11:57.000But the point that I'm making is that when we medicalize evil, then we also run into the danger of suggesting that human behavior is not controllable and that we are not responsible for our actions.
00:12:09.000And that is the death of a civilization.
00:12:11.000I'll talk about that in just a second.
00:12:13.000But first, folks, I've had it with Congress.
00:12:14.000The folks in Congress right now, they are lunatics.
00:12:17.000Plus, the executive branch is growing out of control.
00:12:19.000You know, the Constitution was designed to prevent the federal government from taking all of our freedom and from using that freedom against us.
00:12:26.000Well, the federal government has overgrown all of its boundaries, which is why we need to restore the original bargain of the Constitution, the checks and balances that were originally established to prevent this sort of domination of our freedom.
00:12:36.000This is why I'm a big believer in calling a convention of states where we the people can propose amendments.
00:13:26.000She suggests that if sex with children is truly the product of freely made moral choices, We should deal with it through the criminal justice system.
00:13:33.000If it is genetically over-determined impulse and uncontrollable urge, then we can't punish pedophiles.
00:13:40.000The belief in a free-functioning, free society has to be that reasonable human beings have the capacity to overcome their biological instincts.
00:13:48.000That human beings have the capacity to overcome their tribal affinities.
00:13:52.000That human beings have the capacity to overcome their urges.
00:13:55.000If we don't believe that, we cannot have a republic.
00:13:57.000And here is where psychology shades into politics.
00:14:00.000We are now living in a world in which we are told that we don't control our own behavior.
00:14:05.000That our behavior is controlled by impersonal forces far beyond us.
00:14:09.000That there is institutional racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia.
00:14:23.000That your tribal affinity, that your membership in a particular racial clan, that that determines how you will be treated and how the rest of your life is laid out for you.
00:14:34.000Once you believe your choices are not your own, you end up justifying all sorts of evil behavior.
00:14:38.000Once you believe that choices cannot be freely made in contravention of biology and tribal affinity, it's very difficult to have a functioning republic.
00:14:48.000And this is why, in the end, I have an entire book coming out about the subject.
00:14:53.000The bargain between Jerusalem and Athens, between religion and reason, is deeply necessary.
00:14:59.000We'll talk about more of this in just a second.
00:15:03.000And the central contention that the book makes is that all of human life is based on a certain number of premises that we have to assume.
00:15:11.000That all of Western civilization is based on certain things that we take for granted.
00:15:15.000And many of those things that we take for granted are things that we actually get from religious premises.
00:15:20.000So we all take for granted Greek reason, right?
00:15:22.000The idea that we can reason our way in and out of problems.
00:15:25.000Science is an outgrowth of this belief in human reason and our capacity to reason.
00:15:30.000But even that capacity for reason is based on even deeper roots.
00:15:34.000That capacity for reason is based on the idea that you are a free individual capable of exercising a logic that exists outside of you.
00:15:42.000That you are a free individual, not completely bound down by biology, capable of making choices.
00:15:48.000That you are not just a cluster of meat wandering through the universe, reacting to the environment around you.
00:15:52.000You know, there's a famous philosopher named Baruch Spinoza, and Spinoza, Benedict Spinoza, he suggested that basically human beings were a stone that had been cast by fate, and that we thought that we had willed our own motion, but basically we didn't.
00:16:10.000All of Western civilization is based on the opposite of that.
00:16:12.000The idea that you do will your own action, that you have the capacity to will your own action.
00:16:16.000And in politics, that you are in control of the decisions that you make.
00:16:20.000And that in your personal life, you are in control of the decisions that you make.
00:16:22.000That responsibility is the key to a fruitful exchange.
00:16:26.000That you can't reason with people who don't believe they're responsible for their own actions.
00:16:29.000That reason itself is undermined by the belief that human beings are not freely capable of making choices.
00:16:36.000That is the conundrum we find ourselves in.
00:16:39.000We've made excuses for ourselves as a society, blaming all of our activities on outside forces or internal forces.
00:16:46.000But the freer you think of yourself, the more you think of yourself as a free actor, acting in a free country, the more responsible you're going to be, the better you're going to be, because the more responsible you are for your own actions.
00:16:56.000Right now, we have a society that is dedicated to removing responsibility from people, and then, simultaneously, in fits and starts, we will try to restore responsibility for certain people.
00:17:06.000We'll try to go back and fill in the gaps and explain why Michael Jackson should be abhorred, even though we've undercut a lot of the rationale for abhorring Michael Jackson.
00:17:28.000And his biological urge was not enough to excuse that.
00:17:32.000And the same thing is true for all of us living in the freest country in the history of the world.
00:17:36.000Now, I'm not talking that we're all pedophiles, but we all make decisions on a daily basis for which we are responsible.
00:17:41.000And looking to society, or looking to biological urges, or looking to anything else to blame for our own behavior is a deep problem for a civilization that hopes to continue functioning.
00:17:53.000If you want a democracy, if you want a republic, you have to believe that you are a free actor capable of acting morally.
00:18:00.000You are free, you are capable of making decisions, and you are capable of acting in a moral fashion.
00:18:05.000Now again, I am not saying that... I'm not even talking about which behavior is moral and which behavior is immoral from a generic secular sense.
00:18:14.000Because I think that we can obviously make distinctions between pedophilia and all other sorts of crime.
00:18:21.000With that said, the generalized point, which is that we're going to have to stop pathologizing evil, that it can be true that you have a pathology toward doing something bad, but that you still have the capacity to overcome, that is the essence of Western civilization.
00:18:34.000And that is being ripped away from us.
00:18:37.000The only reason we're even having this conversation about whether Michael Jackson should have been basically treated as an ill person or as an evil person is because we have lost the capacity to see evil for what it is.
00:18:48.000Choices freely made by human beings capable of making those choices in contravention of their own biology.
00:18:55.000It used to be that you'd be able to say, yes, both.
00:18:58.000He's a sick person with a drive toward doing sick things.
00:19:01.000And also, he's an adult capable of overcoming that.
00:19:05.000But once we decide that we're not in control of our own actions, it's very difficult to make the case for Western civilization, for individualism.
00:19:11.000It's very difficult to make the case for human rights, frankly, because human rights, again, are based on this idea that we are each individuals created in the image of God, and that we have the capacity to make decisions freely and of our own will.
00:19:24.000You want to restore a system where people believe in right and wrong?
00:19:28.000And where we are responsible for one another?
00:19:32.000We're gonna have to go back to a system where we assume that your decisions are your own, and not the product of some other evolutionary force, or some product of some other environmental force beyond your control.
00:19:43.000Now, again, that's not to say there aren't biological forces driving us.
00:19:51.000The question is how we shape those environmental forces to get them off our back.
00:19:55.000But the goal has to be shaping those environmental forces to get them off our back, to maximize human freedom, to maximize the human capacity, because the rights, the freedom, they come with duties.
00:20:06.000You cannot have duties without rights, and you cannot have rights without duties.
00:20:09.000And we as a society have decided to bifurcate the two.
00:20:12.000We want the rights without the duties, or we want the duties without the rights.
00:20:22.000Not because we want you to be responsible, but because it simply does.
00:20:27.000You cannot be a free person if you are incapable of making choices.
00:20:30.000Freedom comes with your capacity and responsibility to choose.
00:20:34.000All righty, meanwhile, on a more sort of political note, the illegal immigration surge at the border is continuing.
00:20:41.000Now the media have finally decided to report on it.
00:20:43.000Amazing how for two months they said nothing about illegal immigration surging at the border during the government shutdown and while President Trump was pushing Democrats to compromise over immigration.
00:20:53.000But now they're reporting on it, so better late than never, I suppose.
00:20:55.000The New York Times has a big piece today called Border Patrol Facilities Put Detainees With Medical Conditions At Risk, talking about the underfunding of Border Patrol.
00:21:04.000They point out that Border Patrol simply does not have the resources to deal with this massive influx of migrants.
00:21:10.000They say an average of 2,200 migrants a day are now crossing the nation's 1,900-mile border with Mexico, many after grueling journeys that leave them injured, sick, or badly dehydrated.
00:21:20.000Yet most of the nation's customs and border protection facilities along the border lack sufficient accommodations, staffing, or procedures to thoroughly assess health needs or provide more than basic emergency care, a situation that has led to dangerous medical oversights.
00:21:33.000I don't remember the New York Times reporting this while the entire Democratic Party talked about disbanding ICE and underfunding CBD.
00:21:59.000Weird that they didn't report any of this stuff until, you know, after the government shutdown ends and Trump declares a national emergency.
00:22:07.000Once again showing that the media's coverage of these issues tends to have a rather large impact on our public discourse.
00:22:13.000Okay, coming up in just a second, I want to talk about the Democrats and intersectionality and their continued push to avoid the consequences of their own willingness to support anti-Semitism.
00:22:22.000We'll get into that in just one second.
00:22:24.000First, let's talk about life insurance.
00:22:26.000Getting life insurance can feel like assembling the world's worst jigsaw puzzle.
00:22:29.000It is confusing, it takes forever, and when you're finally done, it doesn't even look cool.
00:22:32.000But if you have a mortgage, kids, or anyone who depends on your income, it's a puzzle you need to solve.
00:23:31.000Okay, meanwhile, The Democrats are struggling again with their anti-Semitism, their willingness to okay anti-Semitism so long as it comes from the intersectional faces.
00:23:41.000The real reason they're okay with this anti-Semitic nonsense, the real reason that they are now backing out on condemning anti-Semitism is because they feel that the people who are pushing the anti-Semitism are the most important members of their party.
00:23:55.000Nancy Pelosi just went up against Ilhan Omar and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib and Nancy Pelosi came up on the losing end.
00:24:07.000Now, the reason for that is that Nancy Pelosi was only Speaker of the House by a couple of votes in the last in the last Speaker vote.
00:24:13.000All it would take is for a couple of these Democrats to drop out and suddenly she wouldn't be Speaker of the House anymore.
00:24:17.000So she knows where her bread is buttered.
00:24:19.000She can't afford to alienate the radical wing of the Democratic Party, which now effectively controls the Democratic Party.
00:24:25.000Also, the Democratic Party believes that their pathway to victory lies not in pure socialism, but in a socialistic, a democratic socialistic Governmental policy combined with racial appeals, overtly racial appeals.
00:24:38.000Who better to push that than fresh face of the Democratic Congress, AOC.
00:24:42.000So Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, for example, she did an interview with Spectrum News in New York and she talked about the Green New Deal.
00:24:48.000This is the kind of intersectional socialism that Democrats are looking for.
00:24:52.000One of the things that some folks give pushback is they're saying, why are you talking about racism when it comes to the environment?
00:24:59.000And they said racism has nothing to do with environmentalism.
00:25:02.000And my immediate retort is look at Flint, look at Katrina, look at Hurricane Maria.
00:25:09.000It's not as though income inequality or social injustice or racism are these separated out issues that you just legislate to address those things and fix.
00:25:19.000You can't pass a law to just end income inequality.
00:25:23.000You address it in every issue, every major systemic issue.
00:25:27.000Okay, so the basic appeal here is that socialism may not be all that appealing for minorities, but if you overtly appeal to minorities with socialism, then maybe you'll be okay.
00:25:36.000The Democratic Party wants to embrace this.
00:25:40.000One of the people who is pushing that idea is a center-left Democratic economist named Brad DeLong.
00:25:46.000He gave an interview to Vox in which DeLong argues, this is according to Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, that it's time for centrists like him to make peace with the left.
00:25:53.000The idea is that he has to make peace with the open socialists like AOC because they're going to be the winning coalition that allow the neoliberals to sort of drive the boat.
00:26:02.000That if Nancy Pelosi can make peace with AOC, if Nancy Pelosi can make peace with Ilhan Omar, then they can create a coalition that is durable and allows them to get done what they need to get done.
00:26:14.000It's easier, in other words, to sort of hold back AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar than it is to make peace with people on the right.
00:26:22.000And so, you make peace with the people on the left, including the open anti-Semites and the people who cover for them.
00:26:28.000This is the basic notion that many on the left have been embracing.
00:26:32.000DeLong notes that on one issue from another, from health care to climate change, centrist-minded Democrats have modulated the party's priorities in hopes of striking a political deal with the center-right.
00:26:41.000But that deal has never been forthcoming because there's no functional center-right in U.S.
00:26:50.000Now, Republicans and conservatives would see this in the opposite way.
00:26:53.000They would say, listen, you guys on the left, you moved radically left in the last 10 years.
00:26:58.000And we can't make a deal with you because you moved radically left in the last 10 years, and then castigated us as racist bigots, sexists, and homophobes.
00:27:06.000But according to the left, they now have to make, according to sort of the mainstream Democratic Party, easier for Nancy Pelosi to kowtow, to bow down, to bow the knee before AOC, than for Nancy Pelosi to create some sort of centrist coalition.
00:27:19.000Now, the problem for Democrats is going to come when it turns out that AOC is driving the boat into an iceberg, when it turns out that the American people are not all that fond of AOC's agenda.
00:27:27.000Nancy Pelosi is sort of hoping to have it both ways.
00:27:30.000You use AOC to gin up the base, and then when it comes time for a national election, then you appeal to the center of the country.
00:27:35.000But the base is out of her control, and that is what the last week and a half have proved.
00:27:38.000The last week and a half have proved that the base is not in Nancy Pelosi's control, and that even the most vile elements of the Democratic base will be bowed to by Nancy Pelosi.
00:27:50.000So, for example, you'll recall that Ilhan Omar is a vicious anti-Semite who's been using anti-Semitic language for years on end.
00:27:56.000She has anti-Semitic views about Israel.
00:27:58.000She really doesn't believe that Israel ought to exist.
00:28:00.000She doesn't, which, by the way, is an anti-Semitic view.
00:28:03.000If you disagree with policies of Israel, then that is one thing.
00:28:06.000I disagree with many policies of Israel.
00:28:08.000I've discussed some of them on the program.
00:28:10.000But, if you believe that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state, But every Muslim country has a right to exist as a Muslim state.
00:28:18.000If you believe that the only Jewish state on planet Earth does not have a right to exist, then you are, in fact, engaging in anti-Semitism.
00:28:25.000And the State Department even says as much.
00:28:29.000This is the perspective of Rashida Tlaib.
00:28:33.000And it is probably the perspective of AOC, who makes overtures to Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
00:28:39.000And by the way, makes overtures also to people who are apparently open terror supporters, not just Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party, who AOC paid homage to just a couple of weeks ago.
00:28:49.000But also, she just retweeted Yousef Muneir, who's the head of a Palestinian rights organization, Who also happens to be a terror organization sympathizer, is according to the Jerusalem Post.
00:29:00.000In a tweet first discovered by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Ocasio-Cortez wrote, quote, She did that in retweeting and responding to a tweet by Yusuf Muneer, the executive director of the U.S.
00:29:08.000hubbub over an untrue mischaracterization that i was threatening primaries based on pro-ice votes yet there seems to be no problem at all with a zero tolerance stance for simply asking about u.s foreign policy she did that in retweeting and responding to a tweet by yusuf munair the executive director of the u.s center for palestinian rights in his tweet he wrote a pack activist tells new york times the lobby is coming for congresswomen aoc rashida talib and ilhan omar okay And she is retweeting this guy.
00:29:34.000Well, Munayer has condoned the efforts of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an actual terror group, on his Twitter feed before, including retweeting a PFLP announcement of a terror attack in Jerusalem on June 16, 2017.
00:29:48.000In another tweet from July 2014, Munaya reminded his followers that the military wings of PFLP and other terrorist organizations, not just Hamas, are all fighting against Israel in this war.
00:30:00.000The AOC has no problem tweeting that out.
00:30:01.000Now, it is hilarious to watch as everybody on the left points out every time Steve King retweets a white nationalist, which he does far too often, and it's gross.
00:30:10.000You know what happened to Steve King for doing all that stuff?
00:30:51.000Later today, you know, among the among the many glories of our additional two hours, we're having on Zuby, who is a rapper and destroyer of the British women's deadlift record while identifying as a woman.
00:31:01.000We'll have him on to discuss his massive his massive show of strength as a powerful, proud woman.
00:31:23.000I'm president of the American Enterprise Institute, and I have the great pleasure of being on Ben Shapiro's Sunday special, where we talk about politics, and we talk about love, and we talk about happiness, and we talk about his new book, which is coming out March 19th, and we talk about my book, Love Your Enemies, which comes out on March 12th.
00:32:36.000The Democrats are doing the exact same thing right now.
00:32:38.000The Democrats are bringing into their coalition and championing and putting them on the cover of Rolling Stone people who are in favor of terrorist groups or at least have spoken out in defense of terrorist groups.
00:32:48.000Remember, Ilhan Omar actually voted against, she voted against a proposal that would have punished ISIS members more harshly.
00:32:56.000She has encouraged ISIS members in Minnesota not to be treated with great harshness by the law.
00:33:00.000She actually wrote an appeal on behalf of, I believe, a former ISIS member to a Minnesota judge.
00:33:04.000She has laughed and joked about Hamas and Hezbollah.
00:33:07.000They've hobnobbed with Linda Sarsour, who's an active terrorist supporter.
00:33:10.000I mean, she's an actual supporter of terrorists before, or at least prior terrorists.
00:33:16.000Linda Sarsour, speaking out, by the way, against Nancy Pelosi.
00:33:20.000She's a noted anti-Semite with strong ties to the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan.
00:33:24.000Sarsour posted comments in a Facebook missive against Nancy Pelosi.
00:33:28.000She said, So Linda Sarsour and AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, these are the new leaders of the Democratic Party.
00:35:11.000And then presumably some people react to Ilhan Omar with Islamophobia, not members of Congress, because you can't name any who have done that.
00:37:29.000And yet the Democrats, because they don't want to acknowledge that they are okaying antisemitism in their own ranks, have decided basically, you know what, it turns out that she's just a, she's a poor, ignorant woman who doesn't know anything.
00:37:39.000If anybody ever said that about Ilhan Omar on the other side, that she is, she's just ignorant of basic things about, about life and about antisemitism and about religious bigotry, you know, because she's an ignoramus.
00:37:52.000Then they'd immediately be accused of not taking her seriously enough.
00:37:57.000I think she's ignorant because I think that she's ignorant about Venezuela.
00:37:59.000Like, I don't think she knows things about Venezuela, but she's certainly not ignorant about anti-Semitism.
00:38:03.000For years, members of the Minnesota Jewish community have been approaching Ilhan Omar, reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and talking to her about anti-Semitism, and she has not cared one iota.
00:38:56.000Do you think the Democrats are holding her to a higher standard than Republicans have been holding themselves?
00:39:03.000I think that's probably also true on Me Too and other things.
00:39:06.000The question is, should Democrats do the same thing Republicans have been doing, sort of circle the wagons and basically look the other way because they're a member of the tribe?
00:39:16.000And I think that it's probably worthwhile to hold yourself to a higher standard.
00:39:22.000Again, they took an original resolution that would have included a condemnation of Ilhan Omar, they stripped out her name, and then they added anti-Islam sentiment to an actual resolution about anti-Semitism.
00:39:48.000Okay, meanwhile, One of the great irritants for Republicans at this point has to be the fact that while Democrats are running as far as they can to the left, Republicans seem to be following them to the left.
00:40:02.000Apparently, Republicans are now advancing paid leave.
00:40:04.000Now, I understand that there are some lawmakers on the right who are big fans of paid parental leave, and that includes senators with whom I am very friendly.
00:40:15.000The bills would supposedly provide a government-backed paid parental leave Spurred in part by activism from Ivanka Trump, according to Roll Call, a growing number of Republicans have embraced arguments that it would improve maternal and fetal health, provide income stability for families, and strengthen caregivers' connection to the workforce.
00:40:34.000Paid family leave would allow the GOP to showcase its claim to uphold family values while still appealing to working-class voters whose sense of economic instability helped propel Trump to victory in 2016.
00:40:44.000Now forcing businesses to either pay for paid family leave or forcing taxpayers to take on the burden of paid family leave is obviously a new government entitlement.
00:40:52.000Republicans are pushing this at the same time that the debt is being blown out.
00:40:56.000I'm old enough to remember when Republicans pretended to care about the debt.
00:40:59.000I'm old enough to remember when conservatives pretended to care about the deficit.
00:41:03.000budget deficit, according to Bloomberg, has now widened to $310 billion in the first four months of the fiscal year, underscoring, according to Bloomberg, the revenue hit from Republican tax cuts and an increase in government spending.
00:41:57.000Because by pushing the idea that tariffs were going to clamp in at the beginning of 2019, he forced a bunch of businesses to buy products early from foreign countries.
00:42:08.000So it actually accelerated the trade deficit.
00:42:11.000With all of that said, it would be really nice if Republicans would not be Democrats.
00:42:54.000And I think what I'm trying to say is that it's not that you can't have those viewpoints.
00:42:59.000It's that if you're taking those viewpoints and you're targeting them at a specific person in a way that reflects your intent to abuse and harass What if it's in the context of the conversation?
00:43:08.000What if she's saying that, I don't think that trans women should be allowed in these female spaces to make decisions for women?
00:43:14.000And then this person's arguing and she says, a woman is biologically female.
00:43:32.000Okay, the woman who's speaking is Vijaya Gaddy, who is the company's global lead for legal policy and trust and safety.
00:43:39.000And that's Joe Rogan asking specifically about Megan Murphy, who's been a guest on our show.
00:43:43.000Megan Murphy, of course, is a feminist.
00:43:45.000She's a left-wing feminist who was banned from Twitter for making the absolutely obvious contention that men are not women and women are not men.
00:43:52.000Twitter claimed that this was targeting of particularly transgender people.
00:43:55.000And Joe Rogan and Tim Pool are pointing out how dumb this is.
00:43:59.000That Twitter has no consistent standard.
00:44:01.000But again, Twitter doesn't have to have a consistent standard.
00:44:05.000It's pretty astonishing how the left will continue to shut down debate with no good excuse for doing so, simply because their confirmation bias is so incredibly strong.
00:44:14.000When you have an agenda, it really does allow you to run roughshod over your own supposed central principles.
00:44:20.000You can tell where people's real principles lie by which principles people are willing to violate in pursuit of those primary principles.
00:44:27.000So, Twitter says it's a free speech platform, a place for people to speak out and debate.
00:44:33.000Their real priority is social leftism, and when the two come into conflict, social leftism overrules anything having to do with free speech.
00:44:40.000Good on Joe Rogan and Tim Pool for exposing the insane hypocrisy and stupidity of the Twitter The Twitter leadership.
00:44:54.000There is a movie that is now available on Amazon Prime.
00:44:56.000It's called You Were Never Really Here.
00:44:58.000It's sort of a newfangled take on Taxi Driver.
00:45:00.000Frankly, I think it's a better movie than Taxi Driver.
00:45:03.000It's with Joaquin Phoenix, who is in fact our finest living actor.
00:45:06.000The only other competitor would probably be Daniel Day-Lewis, but he is retired.
00:45:11.000Joaquin Phoenix turns in another fantastic performance.
00:45:14.000When you talk about people who just inhabit a role, where you don't even think of them as an actor, they're just the role, Joaquin Phoenix is the guy.
00:45:20.000The basic plot is essentially a taxi driver.
00:45:25.000He is basically a veteran who has had some bad experiences, a suicidal veteran, and he is hired by a middleman to go save this state legislator's daughter from sex slavery.
00:46:56.0001 is the Nancy Pelosi-led House's first priority, and basically it restructures voting and voter ID all across the country in violation of federalism.
00:47:05.000States are generally supposed to set the standards, and state redistricting is supposed to set the standards for how voting is done on the state level.
00:47:12.000HR1, according to the Heritage Foundation, seizes the authority of states to regulate voter registration and the voting process by forcing states to implement early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, online voter registration, and no-fault absentee balloting, all of which are the devil's playground for voter fraud.
00:47:30.000Early voting, first of all, should not be allowed except in Really bad circumstances.
00:47:36.000Or unless you're a member of the military or something.
00:47:38.000Early voting is bad because a lot of news breaks right before an election.
00:47:56.000Again, that's a problem because people vote absentee instead of simply going down to their polling place.
00:48:01.000Makes it more difficult to verify their vote.
00:48:04.000This creates a lot more chaos at the polls, which is exactly the opposite of what we need.
00:48:09.000It will hurt voter turnout because everybody will early vote.
00:48:12.000It will degrade the accuracy of registration lists by automatically registering individuals from state databases, such as DMV and welfare offices.
00:48:19.000In California, you can have a driver's license if you're an illegal immigrant.
00:48:22.000So if you automatically are registered from the state database, well, that's going to be a problem, isn't it?
00:48:27.000It constitutes a recipe, according to Heritage, correctly, for massive voter registration fraud by hackers and cyber criminals.
00:49:04.000Because they were afraid that fanboys were going to crap all over Captain Marvel and lower the viewer rating, the generalized viewer rating.
00:49:12.000And so they've decided they're essentially going to use a form of voter ID.
00:49:17.000So yes to voter ID for seeing a movie and reviewing it on Rotten Tomatoes.
00:49:20.000No to voter ID for, you know, actually voting.
00:49:23.000This will cripple the effectiveness of state voter ID laws by allowing individuals to vote without an ID and sign a statement in which they claim they are who they say they are, but you can just forge the signature, obviously.
00:49:33.000It will reduce the number of federal election commission members from six to five, allowing the political party with three commission seats to control the commission.
00:49:40.000Which of course means that if Democrats take control of the FEC, then they will control the entire FEC.
00:49:45.000It would require states to restore the ability of felons to vote the moment they are out of prison, which is a state issue, not a federal issue.
00:49:55.000It would violate the separation of powers.