The Democratic Party is choosing whether to go in a radical or a moderate direction in 2020, and what that means for their chances of winning re-election in 2020. Ben Shapiro explains why the Democratic Party needs to move in a more moderate direction, and why they will not be as bad as they were in 2016 as a result of the election of a candidate who was viewed as more moderate than Hillary Clinton was viewed by the American people. The problem is, there is no evidence that this is the case, and if it is, then the party will have a much harder time re-attracting the moderate vote in 2020 than they did in 2016, and that will hurt them in the primary election, which is why they need to go all in on the radical wing of their party in order to have any chance of defeating President Trump in the 2020 primary election. Ben Shapiro also explains why holding gold and silver is a great way to hedge against inflation and uncertainty and instability, and how you should diversify your savings to make sure you are not getting screwed over by central banks, the Fed, the fed, and the stock market, and other financial institutions that could be bad for you at any given moment. Links From This Episode: Today's Episode: - Ben Shapiro's Top 10 Most Powerful People in the World: The Real World's Most Powerful 1%ers - The Real Story of the 21st Century | The New York Times' Top 3 Most Influential People of the Decade | Ben Shapiro s Top 5 Most Influencers in Business & Finance - Watch this Video on YouTube - Watch the Video on Amazon Prime Video - Subscribe to Watch the Ben Shapiro Show Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Audible Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and become a supporter of The Ben Shapiro Podcast Subscribe on SoundCloud Subscribe on Podchaser Subscribe on Spare Cash App Subscribe on PODCAST Connect with a Friend on Social Media - Rate and Share the Podcast on iTunes Subscribe on Podcasts & Shout Outro Music Download MP3 Subscribe on Itunes Learn more Like This Video on Spoken Word - Subscribe on Vimeo Learn more About Meals on the Podcasts and Shoutout to My Insta Subscribe on Websites - Share Us On Itunes Subscribe on Insta Podcasts On The Podcast - Subscribe & Share It Out? Leave Us On A Podcast - Leave Us A Review It On A Podchime - Subscribe To Our Insta Story
00:00:00.000Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib propagandize on behalf of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic BDS, the media ignore all of their priorities as per our usual arrangement, and President Trump tries to take control on the economy.
00:00:22.000Yes, really, an actual good development from Facebook.
00:00:24.000We'll get to all of that in just one second.
00:00:26.000First, geopolitical tensions are rising.
00:00:29.000You just read the news or listen to the show.
00:00:31.000Obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty at best about the economy.
00:00:34.000Gold prices are moving up again as people attempt to find shelter from the economic vicissitudes inherent in the economy, either in gold or in places like bonds.
00:00:43.000That's why you're seeing the bond curve in the yield curve invert.
00:00:46.000Because people are so worried about the future of the economy, it's also why the price of gold has been going up.
00:00:51.000Well, you should at least be diversified.
00:00:53.000Some of your savings should, in fact, be in precious metals.
00:00:56.000Can you afford another hit to your retirement like the last downturn when the S&P dropped 50%?
00:01:23.000Get a free information kit on physical precious metals.
00:01:25.000Again, you buy that gold to hold that gold.
00:01:27.000The whole point of it is to ensure that you are not screwed over by central banks, that you are not screwed over by a market that could drop at any moment or could drop sometime in the future.
00:01:50.000Okay, so, the Democratic Party is deciding right now whether they are going to move in the radical direction or whether they are going to move in the moderate direction.
00:02:01.000Now, if they wish to win elections, they should obviously move in a moderate direction because Because all they had to do was not be crazy.
00:02:08.000They're running against a president who did not win a majority of the popular vote and whose approval ratings are extraordinarily low on average.
00:02:17.000And they simply cannot do it, apparently.
00:02:19.000Instead, the Democrats have decided that the best available policy is to center all of their attention and focus on defending the most radical of their members.
00:02:27.000That's because that's where they think the passion is.
00:02:29.000Democrats now believe that they're going to win over the moderates because President Trump is so off-putting.
00:02:34.000The biggest threat to them is that a bunch of people on the woke left will not show up to vote the same way they didn't show up to vote in 2016.
00:02:40.000In the Democratic view, the reason that Hillary Clinton lost is because moderates showed up to vote for her and the base did not show up to vote for her.
00:02:54.000That means that we are going to center all of our attention on defending the most radical among us.
00:02:59.000Well, that's making an assumption that may not be in evidence, which is that moderates will certainly swing to the Democratic Party, because remember, moderates voted for Hillary Clinton because they believed, I think wrongly, that Hillary Clinton was a moderate.
00:03:10.000But if Democrats were to nominate on a presidential level somebody who is radical, Well, that changes the ballgame radically.
00:03:17.000And the same thing is true in Congress.
00:03:18.000If it turns out that the Democratic Congress cannot be trusted with power, if it looks to the American people like that Congress is going to perform in radical, polarized, partisan fashion, they will not vote for the Democrats.
00:03:29.000This is why what you saw at the end of 2018 is pretty important right before the election.
00:03:33.000About a month and a half out from the election, the Republicans had a significant Generic ballot deficit against the Democrats.
00:03:39.000They were down 8 to 10 points in the generic ballot.
00:03:41.000Then the Kavanaugh hearings happened about three weeks out from the election.
00:03:44.000And those Kavanaugh hearings closed up that gap tighter than a tick.
00:03:48.000I mean, it was extremely tight all of a sudden.
00:03:50.000And that's because the more the American people saw of Democrats acting radical, The more they saw of Democrats acting foolishly and badly, the less they wanted to vote for them.
00:04:00.000And then, of course, a couple weeks before the election, President Trump was sick of being out of the headlines, and he decided he was going to go out and campaign, and that immediately drove the gap wide again.
00:04:09.000Well, the Democrats have decided that they are going to ignore the possibility that they are alienating people, and instead they are going to focus in on Trump.
00:04:22.000And so what you're seeing right now is this divide inside the Democratic Party.
00:04:26.000Now, when I say the Democrats are doing this, I don't mean all Democrats.
00:04:29.000There is this fight going on inside the Democratic Party, and you can see it reflected in the polling in the Democratic primaries.
00:04:35.000So Joe Biden, for all of the crap that has been tossed his way, for all of the talk about Joe Biden fading and Elizabeth Warren rising, Joe Biden is basically where he was a month ago in the polls.
00:04:45.000In the overall national polls, he still has an extraordinarily wide lead.
00:04:48.000He still has a narrow lead in places like New Hampshire.
00:04:53.000He has a very wide lead in places like South Carolina.
00:04:55.000As soon as he gets to the South, where there's a heavy share of black voting, then Joe Biden suddenly jumps into this massive lead because Kamala Harris has no support in the black community and Elizabeth Warren has no support among black voters.
00:05:06.000There's a brand new poll out from CNN today, and it shows that Joe Biden has actually expanded his edge over the Democratic field.
00:05:13.000In a new CNN poll, 29% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning registered voters say they back former Vice President Biden.
00:05:20.000That is up 7% compared with the late June CNN survey.
00:05:23.000No other candidate has made meaningful gains over that time.
00:05:27.000Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are still stuck in this internecine fight for the socialist left.
00:05:32.000Bernie Sanders is at 15%, Elizabeth Warren is at 14% according to the CNN poll.
00:05:38.000The only statistically meaningful change in the candidate standings is a 12-point decline in support for Kamala Harris, who right after the first debate in June was up at 17% and now has dropped all the way back down to 5%.
00:05:56.000Turns out that Tulsi Gabbard clocking Kamala Harris into the next count, he basically may have destroyed Kamala Harris as a candidate.
00:06:04.000The original June CNN poll was conducted in the days immediately following the first round of the DNC debate.
00:06:09.000Biden's performance was panned and Harris's was praised.
00:06:13.000Well, now she has dropped all the way back down to Pete Buttigieg levels.
00:06:16.000Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are exactly where they were before.
00:06:19.000They may have flip-flopped for one point, and Joe Biden is all the way back up at 29.
00:06:24.000Biden's advantage in this poll is boosted by stronger support from self-identified Democrats, 31 percent, then from independents, 23 percent, older voters, 34 percent, then younger ones, 23 percent among those under age 45 and from moderate and conservative voters.
00:06:38.000So he's getting a lot of support among Democrats, older voters and moderate and conservative voters.
00:06:45.000So that is the fight inside the Democratic Party.
00:06:48.000Is the newly woke plurality of the Democratic Party in control?
00:06:51.000Or is it the large segment that supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, that supported Hillary Clinton probably in 2008 against Barack Obama?
00:07:00.000Those folks, combined with a serious share of the black vote, could propel Joe Biden to victory.
00:07:06.000So this is a serious infight inside the Democratic Party.
00:07:08.000And you're starting to see this have ramifications in terms of how the candidates approach policy.
00:07:13.000So for example, the Washington Post reports today that Democrats are now backing off their once fervent embrace of Medicare for all.
00:07:21.000So Kamala Harris, among other Democrats, is starting to recognize that running hard to the left, there's no room over there.
00:07:27.000Now I've been saying this since the beginning of the primaries.
00:07:29.000I've been saying that any candidate Who found the spine to run in the face of the progressive woke left in their own party would actually do pretty well, given that they got some sort of media attention.
00:07:40.000So it wasn't going to help somebody like Michael Bennett, who nobody knew who he was.
00:07:43.000But when Pete Buttigieg first announced and was acting like a moderate, he started climbing in the polls.
00:07:48.000Then he started acting like a radical and he declined again in the polls.
00:07:52.000Well, Kamala Harris is starting to recognize that playing a sort of Mini version of Elizabeth Warren isn't going to work anymore, and she is moving again.
00:08:01.000So she's moving her positions up, down, and all around.
00:08:03.000According to the Washington Post, leaning back on a black leather sofa as her campaign bus rumbled toward Fort Dodge, Kamala Harris tried to explain why she spent months defending a plan to replace private health insurance with Medicare for All, only to switch to a more modest proposal that would allow private insurance to continue after all.
00:08:20.000Harris said, I don't think it was any secret I was not entirely comfortable.
00:08:39.000And now she's bumper carring it off of that particular crash and trying to move into Joe Biden's lane.
00:08:45.000According to the Washington Post, the Democratic Senator from California is hardly alone.
00:08:49.000The idea of Medicare for All, a unified government health program that would take over the basic function of private insurance, became a liberal litmus test at the outset of the presidential campaign.
00:08:58.000But in recent months, several of the Democratic hopefuls have shifted their positions or their tone, moderating full-throated endorsement of Medicare for All, adopting ideas for allowing private insurance in some form.
00:09:08.000Worth noting, Kamala Harris was a co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill.
00:09:11.000So, for all this, oh, I was well known I was uncomfortable.
00:09:16.000I mean, about the time that you were signing right next to Bernie Sanders on the Medicare for All bill, was it well known that you were uncomfortable with Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill?
00:09:26.000Neera Tanden, who's a former top aide to Hillary Clinton and president of the Center for American Progress, she says, what I think has happened in the Democratic primary is people recognize that some of the concerns about single-payer are not coming from special interests, but the public.
00:09:39.000Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke is doing the same thing.
00:09:44.000He originally embraced Medicare for All as the best way.
00:09:46.000He now similarly supports a plan that would preserve the current employer-based insurance system.
00:09:49.000Okay, so the gap is beginning to open up wide between the progressive left and the so-called moderates in the Democratic Party.
00:09:56.000And this is being led by Elizabeth Warren, who's again trying to steal away support from Bernie Sanders and also trying to cut into the black level of support for Joe Biden.
00:10:04.000She's doing this by attacking Joe Biden's crime policies.
00:10:07.000And she's also attacking Kamala Harris's crime policies and Cory Booker's crime policies.
00:10:12.000So Elizabeth Warren trying to outflank all of them on the left by basically calling Kamala Harris and Joe Biden cops.
00:10:20.000The Washington Post reports that Elizabeth Warren said on Tuesday that his president should eliminate the death penalty, end the use of private prisons, curtail the cash bail system, and overhaul the use of presidential pardons.
00:10:31.000The announcement was Warren's entry into the volatile debate over criminal justice reform, an issue that is resonating especially in the African American community.
00:10:38.000Now again, I don't know where the Washington Post is getting these numbers that the issue is resonating especially in the black community.
00:10:44.000If that were true, you'd expect that Donald Trump would have seen a significant uptick in support from the black community, considering that the dude signed into law criminal justice reform.
00:10:53.000You would also expect that the attacks on Joe Biden by Kamala Harris would have borne some sort of serious repercussions, given her attacks on him over his 1994 crime bill.
00:11:05.000So I think that is an assumption that is being made that I'm not seeing a lot of statistical support for is that the black community is deeply enchanted and entranced with the idea of criminal justice reform.
00:11:15.000Unlike earlier policy announcements, Warren did not hesitate to take implicit but unmistakable aim at policies embraced in the past by her rivals, especially former VP Joe Biden, Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
00:11:26.000Well, actually, the system preferences criminal justice pleas over prosecution.
00:11:29.000Well, actually, the system preferences criminal justice pleas over prosecution.
00:11:42.000To be real, most people plead out their cases because they are guilty and they know it and they don't want to go to jail for longer by going through the actual burden of a trial.
00:11:58.000Wouldn't that imply that there will be more criminals on the street?
00:12:01.000I mean, simply by dint of statistical analysis?
00:12:04.000And when she says, by changing what we choose to criminalize, well, we've already decriminalized marijuana in the state of California, and we still have a lot of people in prison in the state of California.
00:12:16.000Still a lot of people in prison because it turns out that the vast, vast, vast majority of people In prison in the United States are not in prison for simple drug possession.
00:12:25.000Many of them are in prison for drug distribution and most of them are still in prison for other crimes.
00:12:30.000We broke down those statistics in a podcast maybe two weeks ago, three weeks ago.
00:12:35.000But obviously this is political pandering, and it's Warren attempting to cut into the black base of support by moving radical.
00:12:42.000And you're seeing the entire Democratic Party now playing this game.
00:12:44.000And it's not just the presidential candidates, it's the entire Democratic Party trying to have it both ways.
00:12:48.000Trying to capture the zeitgeist of the radical progressives, while at the same time trying to appeal to moderates.
00:12:56.000Now Trump could make it a lot harder for them to gap by not being so off the wall all the time.
00:13:01.000If Trump appeared to be a steady, calming influence in American politics, then that gap would open wide.
00:13:07.000We saw this just a month ago, when Nancy Pelosi and AOC looked like they were about to beat each other over the head with claw hammers.
00:13:13.000And then Trump jumped in and was like, hold up a second, LEROY JENKINS, and decided that he was just going to bigfoot that entire conversation and become the center of attention.
00:13:22.000Trump right now is papering over a lot of the internal Democratic gaps.
00:13:26.000But those gaps do exist, and they are going to widen in the near future.
00:13:31.000I'll explain how this is happening on a congressional level in just one second.
00:13:35.000First, let's talk about big tech, particularly Twitter.
00:13:39.000There are a lot of these big tech companies, we'll discuss one actually in a little while, that I think is attempting to make some good moves.
00:13:44.000But there are a lot of big tech companies that are not particularly friendly to conservatives.
00:13:50.000A company that not only is not friendly to conservatives and throws them off the platform, some of them without any actual proper explanation, but decides what trends in obviously biased ways.
00:13:59.000Well, if you can't trust certain elements in Silicon Valley to treat conservatives fairly, how can you trust them to handle your privacy and personal online data?
00:14:06.000That's why I recommend using ExpressVPN every time you go online.
00:14:10.000Big tech companies can use your IP address to match your internet activity to your identity or location.
00:14:14.000I'm not just talking about the big tech companies you know about.
00:14:17.000There are many apps that are doing this.
00:14:18.000There are many companies you don't think about that are doing this.
00:14:20.000When I use ExpressVPN, search engines and media sites can't see my IP address at all.
00:14:27.000ExpressVPN has the added benefit of encrypting 100% of your data to keep you safe from people who don't want to have your data.
00:14:33.000ExpressVPN's software takes just a minute to set up on your computer or phone.
00:14:37.000You tap one button, you are then protected.
00:14:39.000So, if you're like me, and you believe that your internet data belongs to you, and not to giant tech companies who may not be friendly to your view, then ExpressVPN is the answer.
00:14:47.000Protect your online activity today with the VPN I trust to keep my data safe.
00:14:51.000Visit expressvpn.com slash ben to claim an exclusive offer from my fans.
00:14:58.000For three months free with a one-year package, visit expressvpn.com slash ben to get started.
00:15:03.000Okay, so as I say, this battle between the woke progressives, and I keep saying woke because woke is sort of an internally used term in progressive circles to denote people who have the right views on issues and then link them with racial views.
00:15:17.000That is the idea that wokeness results from identifying race at the center of American life, intersectional politics at the center of American life.
00:15:27.000That's what I mean when I talk about the woke progressives versus sort of the moderate Democrats, so-called moderate Democrats.
00:15:33.000You're seeing this play out in real time in Congress.
00:15:35.000So, if the Democratic Party were smart, they would be featuring people like Representative Abigail Spanberger.
00:15:40.000So you've never heard of Representative Abigail Spanberger.
00:15:43.000Because she's a moderate from Virginia.
00:15:45.000And Democrats don't want to feature her, which makes very little sense considering that Representative Spanberger is exactly the sort of candidate that Democrats need in order to win a majority.
00:16:07.000But Spanberger is getting clocked on all sides for the crime of being a moderate in the Democratic Party.
00:16:13.000According to the Washington Post, at the end of another long week in Congress, Representative Abigail Spanberger poured herself a cup of coffee and waited in her D.C.
00:16:20.000apartment for her family to arrive from their home outside Richmond.
00:16:23.000She felt satisfied with the job well done.
00:16:26.000The Democrats saw liberals lashing out at moderates like herself for approving $4.6 billion in emergency aid for migrants at the southern border, a deal they said did little to rein in the Trump administration's immigration policies.
00:16:38.000Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin accused lawmakers like Spanberger of being part of a child abuse caucus.
00:16:44.000The chief of staff for AOC said their vote would enable a racist system.
00:16:49.000On Facebook, Spanberger was labeled too late and clueless.
00:16:51.000Twitter, by the way, is a massive bubble that has very little impact on real-world thinking, which is why members of the media who spend an enormous time on Twitter seem to think that that's real life.
00:17:01.000That is not how people actually think, which is why Spanberger is much more important to Democrats in real-world time than are Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, but that's not how the Democrats are treating them.
00:17:11.000Spanberger was stunned it was the first time the freshman congresswoman could not make sense of what was happening.
00:17:15.000Reflecting on the late June episode, Spanberger said she learned a hard lesson she did not anticipate in 2018 when she unseated Republican Dave Brat and helped Democrats win the House majority.
00:17:25.000Sometimes your biggest foes will be in your own party.
00:17:28.000In the eight months Spanberger has served in Congress, she's been a lawmaker in the middle.
00:17:32.000She comes from a historically Republican district that just five years ago replaced Eric Cantor with someone more conservative, but she won last year in large part thanks to left-leaning groups like the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County.
00:17:47.000She says, That week showed me that for some people, ideology matters more than putting food in the mouth of a child, and that was stunning to me.
00:17:54.000Now, if you are Donald Trump, if you are a Republican looking forward to 2020, then maybe you celebrate the fact that Spanberger is being ousted by her own party.
00:18:04.000But if you are just an American who cares less about partisan politics than you do about the future of a two-party system, you want people like Spanberger to win.
00:18:13.000Not the C, but you want her to defeat her more left-leaning colleagues in Congress.
00:18:17.000You want two viable parties that are centered around where the American people are, not a party that is running wildly to the left, far away from the American public, and simply winning on the basis of Republican unpopularity.
00:18:31.000Spanberger is somebody that I would like to see in a leadership position in the Democratic Party, and I think most reasonable people would, not Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
00:18:39.000And again, I don't even want to see her in Congress.
00:18:40.000I want to see a Republican in Congress.
00:18:42.000I'd like to see Dave Brat back in Congress.
00:18:44.000But if you are going to choose between Democrats, that choice does have ramifications.
00:18:49.000So there's a theory among Republicans that it's better for Democrats, it's good for Democrats to polarize and centralize around the Elizabeth Warrens and around the Ilhan Omars and the Rashida Tlaibs and the AOCs and the Ayanna Pressleys.
00:19:00.000And that's good because the American people look at that and then vote Republican.
00:19:05.000I would much rather have a choice between the Republican Party and a more reasonable Democratic Party, because that means that the backstop of Republicans losing isn't insanity.
00:19:15.000I don't want a choice between Republican and insane.
00:19:47.000Imagine for a second that you had two white Republican congressmen.
00:19:51.000And they planned a trip to Israel in conjunction with an organization that had run pieces quoting anti-Semitic myths about Jews imbibing Christian blood for Passover matzah, that republished a neo-Nazi article decrying the Jew-controlled entertainment media, that suggested that terrorists who murder Israeli children should be honored.
00:20:08.000Imagine they're white Republican congresspeople for a second.
00:20:13.000What if those two sitting white Republican congressmen tweeted out a cartoon from a cartoonist so anti-semitic he won second prize at Iran's Holocaust denial cartoon contest?
00:20:23.000Imagine that these two white Republican congressmen had themselves engaged in open anti-semitic slurs ranging from a suggestion that Israel supporters in America suffer from dual loyalty to the accusation that Israel hypnotizes the world to the suggestion that it's all about the Benjamins, American support for Israel.
00:20:39.000Imagine these two white Republican congressmen had expressed support for terrorists like Razmia Odeb Imagine that both congresspeople had a long history of associations with open anti-Semites who hate Jews.
00:20:50.000And finally, imagine that both white Republican members of Congress were calling for a complete cutoff of aid to Israel, as well as boycott, divestment, and sanctions from Israel, and demanded entry to Israel.
00:20:59.000Do you think the story might be the beliefs of the two white Republican congressmen, or would it be how mean Israel is to these people in not allowing them to come?
00:22:02.000So Peter Beinart writes for a bunch of publications, including the New Republic and the Nation.
00:22:08.000Peter Beinart has always been a representative of the pro-Hamas position in the Israel-Hamas, Israel-Palestinian debate.
00:22:17.000He has never seen an action by Israel that he finds appropriate.
00:22:20.000He has always justified, and he justified terrorism yesterday on CNN, I mean on national television, in order to defend Omar and Tlaib.
00:22:28.000This is how far the left is willing to go to defend these women, specifically because they're trying to, again, grab hold of the passionate base in full knowledge that they are alienating moderates in the process.
00:23:12.000And no matter what you think of the dispute between the Palestinians and Israel, that is an illegitimate tactic that no one should associate with advocates of.
00:23:22.000And this prompted Bainar to actually start justifying terrorism.
00:23:25.000He loses it and he starts justifying terrorism on national TV.
00:23:27.000Hannah Neshrawe has devoted her life as a nonviolent activist to opposing an oppression, which none of us does not accord with the values that any of us believe in as Americans.
00:23:38.000So she doesn't control her own organization and what it publishes?
00:23:41.000Rich, why don't you try spending a little bit of time focusing on the fact that almost $4 billion of U.S. aid is used to put children in detention.
00:23:48.000You're the one distracting from the issue.
00:23:51.000You're distracting from the issue because National Review just as National Review defended apartheid and just as you defended segregation, you now defend Israel's oppression of Palestinian basic rights.
00:24:03.000Then Bainar went even further and he suggested that terrorism may be justified by the fact that Israel is oppressive.
00:24:09.000And this is what, this is what Beinart has been saying for years.
00:24:12.000I mean, I've been on CNN talking with Peter Beinart and I've said openly that this guy represents the Hamas position.
00:24:18.000He's doing all of that because, and increasingly so are members of the Democratic Party, in order to try and make the case that Omar and Tlaib are not out of bounds.
00:24:26.000Beinart then tried to defend himself and he said, today I was asked if I support Palestinian suicide bombers.
00:24:31.000God forbid, a friend was killed by one, but, but, How's their butt at the end of that statement?
00:24:38.000But Palestinians don't forfeit their rights because some in their midst pursue them in an immoral way.
00:24:43.000Mandela and Malcolm X endorsed violence, didn't make their oppression okay.
00:24:47.000So we're now comparing Nelson Mandela to Mifta and Palestinian terrorists?
00:24:53.000All of this to defend the evils and the horrible viewpoints and the anti-Semitism of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
00:25:00.000In a second, we'll get to Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
00:25:05.000Well, the press conference yesterday and in this press conference, they make a bunch of anti-Semitic statements and the Democratic Party, again, backing them to the hilt because this is the game in the Democratic Party.
00:25:19.000Under nearly every circumstance, without even asking as to whether their viewpoints are radical.
00:25:23.000Here's Rashida Tlaib comparing Israel to South Africa, despite the fact that Arabs and Muslims in Israel can vote, hold positions in the Knesset, are members of the Israeli Supreme Court, that Arabic is an official language in Israel, despite the fact that Arab Muslims in Israel are treated better than they are anywhere in the Arab Muslim world.
00:25:40.000Rashida Tlaib ripping on Israel, calling it an apartheid state.
00:25:43.000History does have a habit of repeating itself.
00:25:47.000I learned this week that a former member of Congress, Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr.
00:25:55.000Was denied entry into apartheid South Africa in 1972.
00:26:01.000He was also the representative for the 13th congressional district in Michigan.
00:26:06.000I was born and raised in the beautiful Detroit where many of my African American teachers taught me about the realities of oppression and justice and the need to speak up and take action.
00:26:17.000Calling Israel an apartheid state is obviously anti-semitic because it is not an apartheid state.
00:26:22.000And it is, of course, singling out Israel in a way that Rashida Tlaib would never single out anybody else.
00:26:27.000And Ilhan Omar made this perfectly obvious.
00:26:31.000She actually called for an end to aid to Israel.
00:26:33.000I can't imagine why Israel didn't let her in.
00:26:35.000She's literally calling for an end to aid to Israel and a boycott of the state of Israel.
00:26:38.000I can't imagine why they didn't allow her in to propagandize on behalf of Israel's destruction.
00:26:42.000We give Israel more than $3 million in aid every year.
00:26:48.000This is predicated on their being an important ally in the region and the only democracy in the Middle East.
00:26:59.000We must be asking, as Israel's ally, the Netanyahu government stop the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land and ensure full rights for Palestinians if we are to give them aid.
00:27:17.000Okay, like she wants to give Israel aid, and like they're an ally.
00:27:55.000This is all about Trump trying to separate Muslims from Jews.
00:27:58.000I would go more with it is you being a radical Jew hater.
00:28:03.000I got into a little bit of a spat with Ilhan Omar on Twitter yesterday, because the folks at Media Matters doing their usual solid work took me out of context on something.
00:28:12.000Ilhan Omar then tweeted that I was both a fool and hateful, to which I tweeted back, well, you know, I must have hypnotized the world using my Benjamins.
00:28:21.000But in any case, Ilhan Omar tries this intersectional approach where she's not an anti-Semite.
00:28:25.000It's just the Trump administration trying to separate off the Jews and the Muslims.
00:29:05.000This is the myth that Ilhan Omar and the Democratic Party tell themselves.
00:29:08.000The myth they tell themselves that there is such a thing as an intersectional coalition and they're all on each other's side and they all oppose Trump.
00:29:13.000And that's what will hold them together.
00:29:15.000In the end, that coalition will fall apart.
00:29:16.000It will break apart on the shoals of its own identity politics.
00:29:20.000The fact is this, Ilhan Omar, she don't like the Jews very much.
00:29:23.000And it is obvious from all of her behavior and everything that she says that this is the case.
00:29:26.000And then she brings in token Jews from Jewish Voice for Peace, which is a pathetic anti-Israel, anti-Jewish organization.
00:29:33.000And then she talks about how pro-Jewish.
00:29:44.000And it's one of the reasons why it is incumbent on President Trump to actually, as president, try and embolden the decent people still left in the Democratic Party, and there are many of them, to stand up against the hatred inside their own party.
00:29:56.000It's funny, I hear from Democrats all the time, like, why won't Republicans denounce people inside their own party who say bad things?
00:30:01.000If you've ever listened to this show, you know that I do it on a regular basis.
00:30:05.000You know that I've denounced people up to and including President Trump repeatedly for things that they have said.
00:30:10.000You know that I maxed out to Kevin Feenstra, Steve King's opponent in Iowa, right, out of my own pocket, and I've encouraged, Kevin Feenstra's raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, in large part because I have had Kevin Feenstra on my show, because I think that Steve King needs to be ousted from Congress.
00:30:26.000People in the Republican Party are doing a much better job of standing up to people inside their own party.
00:30:30.000Democrats are rallying around Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
00:30:32.000They're not even asking the question, oh, weird that they would be rallying with groups that want the destruction of the state of Israel and openly celebrate terrorism.
00:30:41.000We mustn't pay attention to it because, after all, the heart and soul, the scheidenfreude, the zeitgeist, not scheidenfreude, the zeitgeist of the time suggests that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are in the ascendancy.
00:30:52.000And I don't think it's in the long term or even medium term interest of the country for the Democrats to rally around their worst members any more than I think any more than I think Democrats should should root for Republicans to rally around their worst members so that they can nut pick and then use the worst Republicans in order to suggest that that is the entire Republican Party.
00:31:10.000Okay, in just a second, I want to get to an actual good development from Facebook.
00:32:32.000Also, please subscribe over at Daily Wire.
00:32:33.000You may have noticed that on social media, our good friends over at Media Matter are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to target this show.
00:32:41.000That's because they know that this show is dangerous to leftist point of view.
00:32:44.000That's because they know that this show is interesting to people who disagree with us because, hell, we encourage people of all political stripes to listen and listen to other shows too.
00:32:53.000Well, what that means is that eventually they're going to come after the platforms that allow us to appear.
00:32:58.000They're going to come after our advertisers.
00:32:59.000The way you protect us, the way that you join the team, is by becoming a member over at Daily Wire.
00:33:04.000You can see how deplatforming has harmed all sorts of other shows on the right.
00:33:09.000You can see how nasty people on the left, garbage people on the left, seek to take people out of context so that they can hit them and hurt them.
00:33:51.000So let's talk about Facebook doing something right.
00:33:53.000Okay, so Facebook actually did something right.
00:33:57.000Senator John Kyle was brought in by Facebook to investigate claims that Facebook has an anti-conservative bias.
00:34:03.000And I have had suspicions over the past few years, particularly in 2018, there was a Facebook algorithmic change that really hurt conservative sites in a serious way.
00:34:12.000And it turns out that there are serious concerns.
00:34:15.000That there are serious concerns with regard to Facebook's bias.
00:34:19.000But it appears that Facebook, unlike a lot of the other big tech companies, is taking those concerns seriously.
00:34:24.000And we here on the Ben Shapiro Show like to give credit to people when they do the right things, even as we like to clock them when they do the wrong things.
00:34:30.000So Senator John Kyle, the Republican, former Republican Senator from Arizona, he was brought in with Covington and Burling to do a full-scale investigation into this.
00:34:42.000He says we cast a wide net using a broad definition of conservative in order to capture for this report the concerns raised by all types of conservatives.
00:34:51.000For our purposes, it includes political conservatives, people of Orthodox religious views, libertarians, pro-lifers, traditionalists, Republicans, and free speech advocates.
00:34:59.000As an initial step, we identified key conservative organizations, individuals, and lawmakers who either use study or have the potential to regulate Facebook.
00:35:07.000Since May 2018, we have interviewed approximately 133 of them.
00:35:10.000We presented our preliminary findings to Facebook in early August 2018, and then they conducted follow-up interviews.
00:35:36.000Okay, content distribution and algorithms.
00:35:39.000In order to sort through the thousands of posts that Facebook users could potentially encounter on a given day, Facebook deploys a variety of mechanisms to prioritize the content most relevant to each individual user.
00:35:49.000Conservatives fear that these mechanisms prioritize content in ways that suppress their viewpoints.
00:35:54.000Interviewees voiced three general concerns on this front.
00:35:56.000First, the January 2018 newsfeed algorithm change.
00:36:01.000In January 2018, Facebook changed its content ranking algorithm to favor content that a given user's friends and family comment on and share, as well as news from quote-unquote broadly trusted sources.
00:36:13.000People on the right were very concerned at Facebook's definition of broadly trusted sources, as well we should have been.
00:36:21.000Also, Facebook made a concerted effort to deprioritize clickbait and spam.
00:36:25.000Interviewees generally supported this goal, but found Facebook's policies for doing so too opaque.
00:36:29.000Again, that is a correct critique of Facebook, that Facebook was prioritizing as spam headlines that didn't read like a boring headline from the New York Times.
00:36:39.000Interviewees expressed significant concerns about Facebook's efforts to combat what the company refers to as false news.
00:36:45.000In particular, interviewees pointed to examples of instances when some of the third-party fact-checkers utilized by Facebook at various times, Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, AP, which are certified by the Poynter Institute, an entity that owns PolitiFact, have skewed to the ideological left.
00:37:00.000We note that Facebook has accepted fact-checkers affiliated with conservative publishers, including the Daily Caller's fact-checking unit, once it was approved by Poynter.
00:37:08.000Now, as I have said for a long time, using left-wing Facebook fact-checking sites as a proxy for actual fact-checks is nonsense.
00:37:17.000PolitiFact is wildly biased to the left.
00:37:19.000Snopes tries to debunk the Babylon Bee every five minutes.
00:37:22.000Using them as a proxy for fact-checking sites is nonsense, and there are no fact-checking sites on the right.
00:37:28.000The Weekly Standard used to have one, but then it stopped being operational.
00:37:32.000And so what Facebook needs to do is either form their own independent fact-checking group that includes Republicans and conservatives and libertarians, or they need to work with conservative groups to come up with alternatives to PolitiFact and Snopes and FactCheck, because otherwise, just by absence of right-wing fact-checking organizations, left-wing fact-checking organizations become a club to wield against conservative media.
00:37:52.000Okay, so those are three of the concerns.
00:37:56.000Hate speech designations, for example.
00:37:58.000Interviewees' concerns stemmed both from the notion of having a hate speech policy in the first place and from unfair labeling of certain speech as hate speech.
00:38:06.000Interviewees pointed out the highly subjective nature of determining what constitutes hate, an assessment that may be subject to the biases of content reviewers.
00:38:14.000Also, Facebook prohibits the use of the platform by terrorist groups and hate organizations, and it is unclear exactly how the hate organization designation is made, especially considering that Facebook had been perceived to rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a garbage left-wing hit group.
00:38:32.000So, same sort of issue as the fact-checking group.
00:38:34.000And then finally, there were other content policies that a lot of conservatives were worried about.
00:38:39.000They believed that Facebook's community standards were disproportionately affecting conservative content, particularly pro-life, socially conservative, religious content, because Facebook would constantly flag conservative content.
00:38:51.000So, Facebook is now responding, and they're changing some of their policies.
00:38:55.000They're changing some of their policies.
00:38:57.000So they are changing their content enforcement policies.
00:39:25.000So let's talk about some of the things that Facebook is actually going to do.
00:39:28.000So, they're going to help users understand why they do or do not see certain content in their newsfeeds.
00:39:32.000This is all you can ask from a big tech company is that they be more transparent about what they are doing.
00:39:36.000Facebook introduced Why Am I Seeing This post to help users understand why they see certain content.
00:39:42.000They are going to provide explanations of the newsfeed rankings.
00:39:46.000Facebook has really not clarified its community standards and newsfeed ranking, but now the company says that they want to do so.
00:39:53.000They also want to give people ways to control their newsfeed so that you are not going to be controlled by the great minds over at Facebook.
00:40:01.000They want to make enforcement actions against pages more transparent so people know exactly why they are being flagged, why their posts are being treated as bad policy.
00:40:10.000And they're going to share more details on exactly how they create their community standards.
00:40:16.000They're creating an oversight board for content decisions.
00:40:19.000They will issue kind of quasi-judicial decisions on how they are controlling content.
00:40:27.000And they're going to include a conservative feedback in that process as well as a public comment period.
00:40:32.000They're going to ensure that that oversight board has viewpoint diversity.
00:40:36.000They're going to create an appeals process.
00:40:37.000If you get flagged, then you can now appeal it.
00:40:40.000And they're going to increase staffing so that publications can reach out to Facebook more directly.
00:40:44.000They're also going to change their advertising policies.
00:40:46.000One of the big complaints is that Facebook had banned any ad that had pictures of fetuses or born human babies, premature, that were pro-life.
00:40:57.000And now they are changing those content policies.
00:41:00.000Facebook has historically prohibited advertisements showing medical tubes connected to the human body.
00:41:05.000That policy resulted in the rejection of pro-life ads.
00:41:18.000Conservatives should come out and they should say when Facebook does something right, when Big Tech does the right thing, they should be praised.
00:41:24.000This encourages them to do the right thing, guys.
00:41:26.000And I understand there is now sort of a cottage industry and beating up on Facebook particularly, but beating up on all of Big Tech?
00:41:33.000And I think that a lot of the time Big Tech deserves it.
00:41:37.000But it is because some of these companies are better than others at dealing with the criticism that they should be praised when they actually deal with it in the right way.
00:41:45.000Now, we'll keep an eye on Facebook and make sure that they actually implement some of these solutions, that they continue to evolve in their pursuit of solutions here, but good for them.
00:41:54.000And don't trust anybody on the left who is trying to make common cause with people on the right to regulate Facebook.
00:41:59.000I do not think Elizabeth Warren has the same priorities on Facebook as Josh Hawley.
00:42:05.000So be very careful before you call for government regulation of big tech, when as it turns out, a lot of the big tech companies are actually seeking to, not a lot, some of the big tech companies are seeking to fix some of their internal problems.
00:42:43.000He was put in a suppression hold, and then he didn't die because his windpipe was crushed or because he was choked to death.
00:42:48.000He died because the physical stress of being put in that hold Triggered his asthma.
00:42:54.000He was 395 pounds, had pre-existing conditions.
00:42:56.000He had an enlarged heart that was twice normal size, and he died effectively of asthma and heart attack on the way to the hospital.
00:43:02.000The officer in that case was targeted by the media as an example of race-based policing.
00:43:07.000Now, if you want to make the case that that law shouldn't have been on the books, I'm with you.
00:43:11.000If you want to make the case that the police have been empowered to aggressively pursue minor crimes that should not be in fact crimes, that's not the police's fault.
00:43:19.000That's the city council's fault in New York City.
00:43:22.000When you attack cigarettes at insane rates, and then people start a black market for cigarettes, and then you empower the police to go enforce that, the police are going to do what they're supposed to do.
00:43:30.000Instead, that turned into a whole racial narrative, and this particular officer got caught up in it, never mind the fact that he was ordered by his lieutenant to suppress Eric Garner, who was in fact resisting arrest, never mind there were black officers on the scene, never mind that Eric Garner The United States Department of Justice, absent and unwilling to act, even to come to any decision, for five long years.
00:44:35.000Again, I don't know that the officer acted entirely appropriately, but this is certainly not a fireable offense, okay?
00:44:42.000Using a suppression hold on a person who is resisting arrest, and the person dies because the person happens to have pre-existing medical conditions.
00:44:49.000Not because you intended to kill him, not because you acted in reckless and irresponsible fashion knowing it would kill him, but firing the guy over this?
00:44:56.000It's pretty clear that this was a political process.
00:45:41.000I can guarantee you that they do not feel comfortable that if they do their jobs, they're going to be backed up by the political forces at work in New York City.
00:45:49.000It's the same thing in most of our major cities.
00:45:50.000The political forces always have an interest in throwing officers under the bus.
00:45:55.000I mean, again, there's this revisionist history that has set in around this particular case, but it is important to recognize what exactly happened here.
00:46:02.000Barry Latzer had a piece in City Journal back in September of 2017 talking about what exactly happened.
00:46:09.000The Garner case became a cause celeb because Garner was black and Pantaleo was white, and the death fit a media narrative about interracial law enforcement confrontations.
00:46:16.000But the facts of the Garner case demonstrate the incident bears little resemblance to such characterization.
00:46:21.000An NYPD lieutenant erected Pantaleo and his partner to arrest Garner, so charges that the officer singled him out because of his race are nonsense.
00:46:28.000The arrest order was issued because that part of Staten Island near the ferry docks was the subject of repeated complaints about illegal street vendors, diverting customers from shops, and even selling drugs.
00:46:38.000Garner had had at least three previous encounters with police just that year.
00:46:41.000He'd been arrested twice and given a warning.
00:46:43.000At the time of the fatal incident, he was free on bail for offenses including selling untaxed cigarettes, driving without a license, marijuana possession, and impersonation.
00:46:51.000The case against Pantelio rests on the supposed chokehold he used to make the arrest.
00:46:55.000He never sought to choke Garner to death or even injure him.
00:46:57.000He was doing his job taking the resisting man to the ground, as NYPD regulations provide.
00:47:02.000Had Garner been cooperative, as the officers requested, the confrontation never would have happened.
00:47:07.000Garner resisted when the police tried to grab his flailing arms.
00:47:09.000He says, every time you see me, you want to mess with me.
00:47:13.000Pantaleo put his forearm around Garner's neck and twisted him to the ground, probably the simplest way of subduing a man of Garner's girth.
00:47:19.000Pantaleo then held Garner's head down to the sidewalk.
00:47:21.000The neck hold, characterized by the medical examiner's office as a choke hold, lasted 15 seconds.
00:47:26.000Pantaleo released it once Garner was down on the sidewalk.
00:47:29.000And that is when it became clear that Garner was actually having a serious problem breathing.
00:47:33.000He said, I can't breathe because he was suffering from asthma.
00:47:38.000Apparently, people didn't even think that he was being abused.
00:47:41.000There were supervising officers at the scene, including a black police sergeant.
00:47:43.000They didn't really believe even that he was in medical distress, because they didn't see how he could be, given the treatment that he just received.
00:47:49.000If Eric Garner had not had pre-existing medical conditions, not only is this not a national news story, the NYPD dismisses all charges against Pantaleo.
00:47:57.000So, again, this is an example of how politics tends to infuse situations with import that they do not carry.
00:48:05.000I don't mean that it's not important when a person dies after being put in a suppression hold by police for 15 seconds.
00:48:12.000Of course, that's important to the family.
00:48:13.000Of course, we should always try to keep a tight leash on how the police act with regard to civilians.
00:48:21.000But the question is, in this case, Did Pantelio, who was not prosecuted, who the DOJ investigated for five years, deserve to lose his job at NYPD over political posturing by Bill de Blasio and the NYPD commissioner?
00:48:34.000I don't understand how you're not going to get blowback from police officers and why you're not going to get another Ferguson effect.
00:48:39.000Police officers saying, I'm not going to go and do these things you want me to do because every time I do, you guys undercut us.
00:48:47.000When we make the Police's ability to do their job, subject to political whims.
00:48:54.000I don't mean, again, the subject to common standards of decency.
00:48:58.000I mean political whims, meaning this, again, this case would not have been a national story if Pantelio were not white, or if Eric Garner were white.
00:49:06.000It was made a national story by the media for a particular racial narrative, and now it costs Pantelio his job, and if you're a police officer in the NYPD, I'm not sure how much trust you can have in the political processes above you.
00:49:44.000He has a great book out called Thank You For My Service, obviously a play on Thank You For Your Service.
00:49:49.000Thank You For My Service, because he says that it changed his life, it made his life inestimably better.
00:49:54.000He wants to prove every day, he says, that, in the book, he wants to prove that not all members of the military are sort of these Hollywood characters who are suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, that not every member of the military is a broken man.
00:50:09.000He's leading a successful, rich life, and his book, Thank You For My Service, is well worth reading, so you can go check that out.
00:50:14.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:50:16.000Okay, so, you remember that time, like a week and a half ago, when Chris Cuomo got into an altercation with somebody in public?
00:50:25.000I said at the time, I don't blame Chris Cuomo for getting into an altercation with somebody in public.
00:50:30.000The person was harassing him in public.
00:50:32.000The online attitude has now spilled over into real life.
00:50:36.000The online attitude, which is that you dunk on people and you yell at people and you act like an ass to people, has now spilled over into real life, where people are confronting each other publicly just to show their disdain for one another.
00:50:52.000It's really inappropriate, and it's disgusting, and I don't blame Cuomo for getting kicked.
00:50:56.000I do blame Cuomo for suggesting idiotically that somebody calling him Fredo is the same thing as calling somebody the N-word, or that Fredo is, in fact, a racial slur.
00:51:04.000It is a specific reference to a movie character who is seen as a weak younger brother.
00:51:08.000Well, one of the ways that you don't actually get rid of that stereotype of you as a weak younger brother is to have your older brother come out and defend you.
00:51:15.000So, Andrew Cuomo, Chris's brother, came out yesterday on the radio, and he said, no, no, no, this was a racial slur, and I'm coming out in defense of my younger brother Fredo.