Media malfeasance is out of control, President Trump moves to man bump stocks, and we examine the other gun proposals on the table. We ll talk about all of it on The Ben Shapiro Show. Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator, writer, and host of the podcast "Off The Record" and is a regular contributor to CNN and other media outlets. He is the author of the book "Stop the War: Stop the War Now." He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, and other publications, and is one of the most well-known conservative voices in the country. He has been a frequent guest on conservative media outlets, including CNN, Fox News, and NPR. He has also appeared on CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC, and has been featured on the Tonight Show with Rachel Maddow, and the Daily Show with Trevor Noah, among other outlets. If you haven t checked out his work, you ll want to do so, because it's absolutely excellent and worth your time and your money! He's a prolific writer and prolific speaker, and his work has been widely well received by the American public, including by mainstream media outlets such as The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Post, among many other publications. You can find Ben Shapiro on all of the social medias, including on the internet, including The Hill, and on social media, including his personal pages, including Instapaper, Podchaser, and many other social media platforms, including LinkedIn, and at his blog, and on his podcast, . Thank you Ben Shapiro for being a friend of mine, Ben Shapiro, and I hope you enjoy this episode, Ben is a good friend of yours, and you'll listen to it, too, and share it on your local radio station, and tweet me on your own podcast, and tell me what you think of Ben's work on Instapagation, and your thoughts on it's value, and all of that's good vibes, and good vibing, and maybe you'll tell me that you're listening out of it, or you'll give him a review of Ben does that's a good thing, or he does it's good enough, etc., etc. etc. etc. Thank you, Ben, bye bye, bye, good night, good day, etc. -- bye bye! -- MAGA - THE ENCOUNTERS
00:00:13.000All righty, so we have a lot to get to today.
00:00:15.000The media have just been utterly irresponsible in their coverage of the entire Parkland situation.
00:00:20.000They are obviously pushing for gun control.
00:00:22.000They don't have any specific proposals, but they're pushing as hard as humanly possible for gun control nonetheless.
00:00:26.000I want to talk about all of that, including a smear by the Huffington Post against me personally, a bunch of other smears against people who are pro-gun rights across the board.
00:00:36.000And I want to talk a little bit about some people on the right who have made fools of themselves over the last couple of days.
00:00:40.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors.
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00:02:23.000I was going to start today by discussing all of the various gun proposals that are on the table, but instead, the media have forced me to discuss their absolute malfeasance throughout this entire debacle.
00:02:33.000After the tragedy and the evil horror of what happened at Parkland, the media's first move was to jump to the suggestion that everyone who disagreed with them on gun control was, of course, nasty and mean.
00:03:02.000But the media have been using these students in order to push their gun control agenda.
00:03:07.000I have never attempted to smear the students themselves.
00:03:10.000I have never said that the students don't have a right to speak.
00:03:13.000I have never insulted the students' pain.
00:03:15.000I've never insulted what the students went through.
00:03:18.000But because I say that you ought to have expertise on a topic if we're going to take you seriously, this is enough to get you labeled a smearer of the students.
00:03:26.000So Huffington Post led the way last night.
00:03:28.000They put up a headline that looked like this.
00:03:32.000It says, survivor smears, with a picture of me personally.
00:03:35.000And it says, some conservatives are trying to discredit outspoken Florida shooting survivors.
00:03:39.000I have not tried to discredit any shooting survivor.
00:03:41.000I have not smeared any shooting survivor.
00:03:44.000That's absurd, it's insulting, and it's disgusting.
00:03:46.000The only thing that I have said about the shooting survivors is the same thing that I said about Jimmy Kimmel when it came to him bringing his son on the show after his son went through an open heart surgery, which is, just because you went through suffering does not make you an expert on a particular topic.
00:03:58.000This has been my consistent stance on virtually every event of major consequence in the United States for my entire career, is that just because you went through something doesn't mean that you have been conferred with certain expertise.
00:04:09.000And that's what I wrote over at National Review.
00:04:12.000But the idea that that is disrespect to the students, to suggest that perhaps
00:04:16.000They don't know all the details of what they're talking about, or at the very least, they have to show expertise in the topic for me to take their opinions more seriously.
00:04:23.000I'm happy to take their opinions on what pain and suffering of people who have gone through a difficult situation looks like.
00:04:27.000They are experts in having gone through a traumatic situation, so I'm happy to hear their advice on what it's like to go through a traumatic situation.
00:04:34.000In fact, I think that's deeply important stuff for people to hear.
00:04:55.000I mean, for days and days and days, they have been doing this, promoting lies about gun control, promoting lies about people who oppose gun control.
00:05:03.000And for example, Van Jones, who I personally know and I like Van, he's an opinion host, but he retweeted a tweet from a woman named Lori Shue who tweeted,
00:05:17.000So first of all, maybe AR-15s, maybe not.
00:05:20.000There are a bunch of other weapons that have been used in these mass shootings, but there is no indicator that these mass shooters were Republicans.
00:05:26.000Even if you want to say that the Parkland shooter was a Republican because there's a picture of him wearing a MAGA hat, well earlier this year, or late last year, we had a shooting at a congressional baseball game from a Bernie Sanders supporter.
00:05:35.000That didn't mean that Bernie Sanders was responsible for the shooting of the congressional baseball players.
00:06:13.000Chris Cuomo tweeted out the lie that he was offered an AR-15 without photo ID.
00:06:33.000Now when he was called on this, Chris Cuomo over at CNN, the block of wood who attempts to resemble a human being over at CNN, Chris Cuomo actually tweeted out, isn't the point that the kid's age and lack of ID wasn't the deterrent?
00:06:56.000He didn't show ID, he didn't get a gun.
00:06:58.000I'm wondering, they ran a federal background check.
00:07:00.000If you go to a federally licensed firearms dealer in the United States, according to federal law, they must run a federal background check for criminal record, as well as mental health record, by the way.
00:07:10.000The problem is that these records are not fully transparent.
00:07:13.000Sometimes the information is not conveyed down to the federal government, to the FBI.
00:07:17.000So Charles Cook over at National Review called Cuomo on this.
00:07:20.000He said, the point is that the kid lied about buying a gun that he didn't, and now you're lying too.
00:07:24.000So Cuomo immediately misdirected to an unrelated topic.
00:07:26.000He said, Well, that's a complete misdirect.
00:07:28.000That has nothing to do with the fact that Chris Cuomo, a respected, objective news source, tweeted out something that is objectively false.
00:07:46.000Now, in a second, I'm going to talk about the stupidity of people on the right who are pushing myths about, like, people who actually are smearing the school shooting survivors by suggesting that one of them, particularly a guy named David Hogg, who's 17 years old, is some sort of crisis actor.
00:08:01.000They're putting out this video that shows that he was interviewed by, I guess, local CBS News in Los Angeles a few months back.
00:08:08.000Over some incident where he was a witness, and they're saying, well, this shows that he was a child actor because he was out in Los Angeles, and so he's acting.
00:08:44.000Dinesh D'Souza got himself in hot water yesterday because Dinesh tweeted something out about how there are a bunch of kids who are crying when a piece of gun legislation didn't pass in the Florida legislature and Dinesh
00:08:56.000Tweeted something out about how this is the worst these kids have suffered since their parents told them that they were scaling back their allowance or they couldn't get a summer job.
00:09:04.000There was literally a shooting in Florida last week.
00:09:07.000Dinesh got shellacked for that, as well he should have, and he ended up backing down and apologizing for it.
00:09:11.000But there's been inordinate media focus placed on that YouTube video, particularly, and on the comments of folks like Dinesh.
00:09:19.000Every member of the mainstream media... That's all deserved, by the way.
00:09:22.000I mean, there should be focus on lies.
00:09:24.000But the lies extend to the mainstream media itself.
00:09:26.000And it's much more prominent in the mainstream media because virtually every major host in the mainstream media is engaging in this type of lie.
00:09:34.000Virtually all of them, or at least in selective coverage that is designed to shade your emotions in a particular direction.
00:09:40.000So as an example of this, last night Anderson Cooper was talking about gun violence, about shootings involving guns, and here's what he had to say.
00:09:50.000I actually think we don't focus on the reality of what an AR-15 does to a child.
00:09:56.000I mean, if anyone has been on a battlefield and you've seen what a weapon like this does to a soldier, I mean, I think if people actually saw this and saw the reality of this, I mean, it's...
00:10:22.000And like, we're all talking about it in this antiseptic way, and we're shocked that these kids are angry when they've been hiding in closets and their friends are dead.
00:10:32.000I mean, if he wants to discuss this in graphic terms, that's fine.
00:10:35.000I'm not sure that the graphicness of the act actually changes the logic behind gun control, because the whole point here is not a lack of sympathy.
00:10:43.000See, what Cooper's trying to do, and a lot of folks in the media are trying to do, is they're trying to say, look how horrible things are.
00:10:48.000Therefore, if you don't agree with me on policy, it's because you don't think these things are horrible.
00:10:52.000That's backwards logic, and there's no real, there's no reason to it.
00:10:56.000I'm going to explain more about that, and also I have an additional note for Anderson Cooper in just a second.
00:11:00.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Dollar Shave Club.
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00:12:25.000All right, so back to Anderson Cooper.
00:12:27.000So you heard Anderson Cooper there talk about the brutality and the violence and the horrible imagery of kids being shot.
00:12:41.000I will point out the selective coverage of the media when it comes to antiseptic coverage of killings.
00:12:45.000So, one of the videos that I've done that's been seen the most is a video of me from this show talking in specific terms about what actually happens during an abortion.
00:12:54.000The dismemberment of bodies in the womb, in late-stage abortion, the cracking open of the skull of babies and sucking their brains into sinks.
00:13:01.000No one in the mainstream media will ever talk about that, ever, not in one million years.
00:13:05.000Anderson Cooper will never do a 30-second description of what an abortion actually is like.
00:13:11.000Instead, he will just use antiseptic terms to describe it.
00:13:14.000The point here being that if the media want to get graphic about how they cover crime, if the media want to get graphic about how they cover killings and violence, then that's fine with me.
00:13:22.000Get graphic about how you cover crimes and killings and violence.
00:13:24.000I have no problem with that as a general rule.
00:13:27.000I think that, in fact, that's sometimes useful if people
00:13:30.000really are unable to connect what a crime is with the nature of the crime itself.
00:13:37.000You can't just say that you're going to do it with regard to shooting victims but not with stabbing victims.
00:13:40.000You're going to do it with regard to shooting victims but not bombing victims.
00:13:44.000We didn't hear graphic descriptions of what happened to people on 9-11.
00:13:48.000The news media, and I was actually critical of this, the news media stopped showing the video of people who are hurling themselves from the top stories of buildings because they didn't want to
00:14:28.000This is what the NRA teaches in every one of its gun safety courses.
00:14:32.000But the point is that the media are only doing this with regard to shootings now because they're pushing a particular political agenda.
00:14:37.000And the problem here is that if you want to be an opinion host and do this, that's fine.
00:14:40.000If you want to say that you're an objective news host and do it, that's a completely different story.
00:14:43.000Brooke Baldwin doing the same routine over on CNN.
00:14:45.000She was lecturing the Trump administration, suggesting that the Trump administration was hiding somehow from the media on all of this stuff.
00:14:53.000Even though that was not the case, they had a press conference yesterday, but here's Brooke Baldwin when the press conference was delayed by about 15 minutes, saying that Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the White House were hiding from the media on gun control.
00:15:03.000Memo to the White House, you cannot avoid us.
00:15:10.000It was supposed to begin an hour and 15 minutes ago, and then it was supposed to begin 25 minutes ago.
00:15:17.000There was a lot to talk about, and we need to see Sarah Sanders behind that podium.
00:15:22.000Jeff Zeleny and Gloria Borger are with me, and I think it is entirely fair, Jeff Zeleny, to be tough on this White House, because there are so many things
00:15:31.000They need to answer for before the ceremony at the half hour.
00:15:35.000Okay, does that sound like objective news coverage to you or does it sound like we want you out there so we can grill you on our preferred agenda with regard to guns?
00:15:41.000And that's, of course, what the media continue to do.
00:15:43.000So, one reporter was grilling Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday, suggesting that the president wasn't doing anything.
00:15:48.000Now, as we will talk about, the president actually is looking at doing some stuff with regard to guns.
00:15:53.000It may not be all the things the left wants him to do because maybe he doesn't think those things are going to be particularly effective in stopping mass shootings.
00:15:59.000One of the big problems with a lot of the gun control proposals that are being put on the table is that there is no clear link between the gun control proposal put on the table and the actual lessening of mass shootings.
00:16:09.000The only gun control proposal that the left has really put on the table to lessen mass shootings is confiscation of all guns, which is completely unrealistic.
00:16:16.000And then if you say it's unrealistic and it's never going to happen, they accuse you of smearing shooting survivors or some such nonsense or not caring about the kids who died, which, again, is total crap.
00:16:24.000But here's what it looks like when the media grills the Trump administration on gun control.
00:16:30.000We're working hand in hand with both the federal government as well as state and local law enforcement officials on what we legally can do.
00:16:40.000Unfortunately, we can't just flip a switch, but there is a process.
00:16:44.000We are a law and order country, and the president is trying to do everything that he can under his capacity to address these concerns, and certainly when it comes to mental illness.
00:16:53.000The media wouldn't have any of that, and they were just grilling Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
00:16:57.000How dare you not have a one-size-fits-all solution to mass shootings?
00:17:04.000When he was in office and he was pushing particular gun control proposals, like banning AR-15s, for example, he would say in his speeches, this may not stop all mass shootings.
00:17:15.000And the media would just ignore that, which leads a lot of gun owners to believe, hey, well, if that's not what you're doing, then what exactly are you doing here?
00:17:22.000Now, look, the media obviously have an agenda here.
00:17:24.000They have it in how they cover these stories.
00:17:26.000They have it in the people they choose to interview.
00:17:29.000There is a Katie Turrer over at MSNBC interviewed a guy who said that he was going to become a school shooter, but he didn't become a school shooter because he didn't have access to guns.
00:17:36.000Here's what that interview looked like.
00:17:38.000Some people blame this violence on the media or video games or music.
00:18:53.000Trump was the only one who did it on a regular basis, and he tapped into something.
00:18:56.000That was a pre-existing wellspring of distrust of the media that exists specifically because it is obvious that they are pushing a political agenda.
00:19:05.000CNN's been the worst of all the networks on this.
00:19:06.000I mean, they've just been garbage on this.
00:19:08.000CNN is now pushing an agenda saying that 16-year-olds should vote.
00:19:15.000Because what it seems to me is what it shows is that you are willing to use, as the media, the most sympathetic person that you can find in order to promulgate
00:19:45.000The media will never report these polls.
00:19:47.0002015 Pew survey, that's put out by Lachlan Markey over at Daily Beast, found 18 to 29-year-olds are less likely than older Americans to support a ban on assault weapons.
00:19:55.000Just 49% of millennials were for the assault weapons ban, compared with 55% of 30 to 49-year-olds, 61% of 50 to 64-year-olds, and 63% of those 65 and older.
00:20:06.000Meanwhile, 18 to 29-year-olds lead the country in support for concealed carry, according to a 2015 Gallup poll.
00:20:11.000They're more likely to support the practice of carrying a hidden firearm in public by a full 10 points at 66%.
00:20:15.000So the idea that all these kids are sitting around looking to seize the guns?
00:20:20.000No, it's just that you want to feature certain children.
00:20:23.000It's not that you care that 16-year-olds vote.
00:20:36.000But obviously the media's agenda here, Uber Alice, that's all that matters in the end, is how the media decides to cover all of this stuff.
00:20:46.000Because it's not about providing the American public with information, it's about providing them with a fully created narrative that is going to be used to club all rivals into submission.
00:21:08.000Bump stocks are an addendum that you can put on the back, on the butt of a rifle, that essentially allows the rifle to move back and forth against your shoulder very quickly.
00:21:19.000And if you hold your finger steady, then the trigger hits your finger.
00:21:22.000In addition, after the deadly shooting in Las Vegas, I directed Attorney General
00:21:47.000To clarify whether certain bump stock devices like the one used in Las Vegas are illegal under current law.
00:21:57.000That process began in December and just a few moments ago I signed a memorandum directing the Attorney General
00:22:08.000Okay, so it is not clear, by the way, that it is actually legal for the DOJ to use existing law in order to ban bomb stocks.
00:22:16.000You might need a separate piece of legislation because the gun itself is not a machine gun.
00:22:20.000This is an addendum to a semi-automatic weapon.
00:22:23.000It's a piece that you add to a semi-automatic weapon.
00:22:25.000For those in the media who don't understand the difference between a semi-auto and an auto, a semi-auto means that every trigger pull is one round that is chambered and fired.
00:22:33.000And an automatic weapon means that as long as you're holding down the trigger,
00:22:39.000So that's the difference between the two.
00:22:42.000The White House also said that they would look into the possibility of raising the age limit for purchase of AR-15 type rifles.
00:22:49.000Again, there's a certain inconsistency here.
00:22:52.000If you're going to raise the age limit for buying a rifle, then you should also raise the age limit for presumably joining the military, maybe, or voting.
00:23:00.000The bottom line is, are 18-year-olds adults or are they not adults?
00:23:03.000Right now we have a very inconsistent view of when people become adults.
00:23:05.000You're 18 for purposes of voting, but you're 21 for purposes of drinking.
00:23:17.000Or you can be in the military at 18, but you can't leave the military and then go purchase a rifle even though you were just in the military.
00:23:24.000There's a little bit of incoherence there.
00:23:25.000I'm not completely opposed to the idea of raising the age limit on this stuff, but I'm not sure that it's going to have a tremendous effect, given the laws around the nation already with regard to buying AR-15s.
00:23:38.000There was a lot of hubbub yesterday after Florida voted down
00:23:54.000is really cold right now for no reason at all, and that means everybody's indoors, and that means that you're using your heating system in all likelihood.
00:24:01.000Well, instead of you sitting there breathing in dirty air because you haven't replaced your filters in a while,
00:25:34.000In any case, this made a lot of media, a lot of, garnered a lot of media attention because a bunch of the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School went to Florida lawmakers in Tallahassee and asked for a full ban on the R-15.
00:25:47.000The final motion vote was 36 to 71, so it was overwhelmingly voted down.
00:25:51.000The Democratic representative, Keon McGee, asked for a procedural move that would have allowed it to consider the ban.
00:25:56.000The bill to ban, quote, assault rifles in large capacity
00:26:14.000This doesn't mean the student should be mocked, as Dinesh did yesterday, obviously.
00:26:17.000I understand that kids have really strong feelings about, everyone has very strong feelings about these issues, and these kids just went through a trauma.
00:26:23.000That's why I'm not in favor of what I think is media exploitation of people who just went through a tragedy in order to gin up sympathy for a particular agenda.
00:26:30.000I think that the media only does this, again, with particular circumstances.
00:26:34.000They didn't do it after the Boston bombing.
00:26:35.000They didn't have big town halls with victims of the Boston bombing talking about immigration policy, for example.
00:26:40.000But they do do this every time there is a gun
00:26:44.000An issue of gun violence that crops up.
00:26:48.000By the way, worthwhile noting here that some of the statistics that have been going around with regard to mass shootings in the United States are just as wrong as I've explained before.
00:27:09.000It's been promoted by the media that the United States is the only advanced country in which mass violence occurs and mass shootings occur.
00:27:15.000If you actually look per capita, if you look per capita mass shootings, the United States actually comes in 11th.
00:27:21.000So the way that you calculate that, this is the Crime Prevention Research Center headed by economist John Lott, who's famously the author of More Guns, Less Crime.
00:27:27.000Which has been true in the United States for a while.
00:27:29.000The gun murder rate has been declining rapidly in the United States for the last 20 years, even though the number of guns in circulation in the United States has been rising rapidly for the last 20 years.
00:27:58.000That number is a lot higher than it actually is in the United States.
00:28:02.000That recedes into margin of error territory.
00:28:06.000But if you look at 2009 through 2015, if you look at the top death rate per million people from mass public shootings, it goes Norway, Serbia, France, Macedonia, Albania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium, Czech Republic, and then the United States.
00:28:18.000Also, as far as frequency, that is also not true.
00:28:22.000ranks 12th compared to European countries in terms of frequency per capita.
00:28:26.000Now, per capita matters because the United States is a very large country with a lot of people.
00:28:29.000And so you're going to have to measure the rate of violence in the United States as opposed to rates of violence per capita in other European countries.
00:28:37.000So, don't buy into the notion that the United States is replete with mass shootings that are happening every day on every corner.
00:28:42.000Does that mean that there's nothing we can do to stop it?
00:28:45.000I've suggested on this program multiple things we can do, ranging from better security in school situations to the gun violence restraining orders promoted by David French over at National Review, in which family members can apply to the court to have your capacity to buy a gun or own a gun temporarily removed from you if you're a danger to yourself or others.
00:29:05.000The left just wants to shout about how everybody who doesn't agree with them is a bad person, and they're not going to stop until that happens.
00:29:13.000This is a fool's errand for the White House.
00:29:53.000The aftermath probably won't be heavy gun legislation, but it's smart of him politically to get in a room with these kids because Trump, contrary to popular opinion, does have a capacity for sympathy when he is listening to people one-on-one, as virtually everyone who's dealt with him one-on-one will tell you.
00:30:06.000Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders announcing this.
00:30:08.000Tomorrow, we will be hosting parents, teachers, and students here at the White House to discuss efforts to ensure safety at our schools.
00:30:16.000Members of the Parkland community will be attending this listening session, as will individuals who were impacted by past school shootings, including the Columbine and Sandy Hook tragedies.
00:30:26.000On Thursday, we will be hosting local officials, including members of the law enforcement community, to continue that conversation.
00:30:33.000As the president has said many times, it is the right of every American child to grow up in a safe community.
00:30:38.000That begins in America's neighborhoods.
00:30:40.000Okay, so this is, I think, a smart move by the Trump administration to demonstrate that there's no lack of sympathy, even if there is a lack of agreement on public policy.
00:30:48.000Some of the agreement on public policy, the lack of agreement, is coming from the fact that folks on the left refuse to even consider possibilities that they haven't thought about, right?
00:30:55.000So Doug Jones, the senator from Alabama.
00:30:58.000He was asked about the possibility of arming teachers, and I've said that I think the teachers who are trained and qualified should be able to carry firearms.
00:31:28.000You don't need to arm America in order to stop this.
00:31:31.000Well, actually, you do need to arm Americans in order to stop mass shooters because it's always the police who stop the mass shooters.
00:31:36.000But again, this debate is so dishonest and it's so yucky and really it churns your guts because there are so many people who are not willing to lend the other side the credibility of hearing out their proposals.
00:31:48.000Okay, so, speaking of media bias, let's talk a little bit about a new poll that's out with regard to the GOP tax cut.
00:32:00.000So there's a brand new poll that's out, and it shows that the GOP tax cut is up to 51% support overall from 37% in December, 89% among Republicans, and 19% among Democrats.
00:32:11.000Okay, that is a massive growth in the level of support for the tax cuts.
00:32:15.000And one of the reasons is because people are finally starting to see the tax cuts at their paycheck.
00:32:19.000They got their February paycheck and the tax cuts were present in the paycheck.
00:33:56.000Again, it has nothing to do with actual collusion between the Trump administration and Russia.
00:34:00.000And the last few weeks have not been good for people who have been pushing the lie that the Trump administration was clearly colluding with Russia.
00:34:05.000Now, maybe there will be new evidence that emerges.
00:34:08.000Maybe we will find out later that the Trump administration was working hand-in-glove with Vladimir Putin to swivel the election in Wisconsin.
00:34:16.000But I haven't seen the evidence of that.
00:34:18.000You haven't seen the evidence of that.
00:34:19.000Because nobody's seen the evidence of that.
00:34:21.000But that is not actually stopping members of the Democratic Party and the media from pushing that lie anyway.
00:34:25.000Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic representative, he came out yesterday and said that Trump did collude to steal the election.
00:34:30.000But we also have to stay focused here on what the problem is.
00:34:34.000It seems that the Trump campaign conspired with Russian spies to sell out our democracy and now you have members closely affiliated with the Trump administration and possibly the president who are engaged in a cover-up.
00:34:47.000That's a problem and we should just allow the Mueller investigation to run its course.
00:34:51.000Okay, I'm in favor of allowing the Mueller investigation to run its course, but it seems like you're jumping to conclusions there, Hakeem.
00:34:55.000I mean, you're suggesting something that is just not in evidence.
00:34:59.000You're assuming facts not in evidence.
00:35:01.000So yesterday, President Trump tweeted out that he had been much tougher on Russia than President Obama had been.
00:35:19.000The one on the left says, Trump has been tougher on Russia than Obama was in eight.
00:35:26.000He's been tougher on Russia in one year than Obama was in eight.
00:35:30.000And then it says in parentheses, right, they're fact-checking in the chyron, in the parentheses it says, no, he hasn't.
00:35:35.000And Natasha Bertrand, who covers the media, says, CNN not pulling any punches tonight.
00:35:40.000That's not only them not pulling punches, that's them lying.
00:35:43.000Trump has been tougher on Russia in one year than the Obama administration was in eight.
00:35:46.000I love this idea that suddenly the Obama administration was tough on Russia.
00:35:49.000In 2012, President Obama, running for re-election, said directly to Dmitry Medvedev that he should tell Vladimir Putin that there would be more flexibility after the election if the Russians backed off.
00:36:02.000He said that Mitt Romney, who was calling Russia the number one geopolitical threat, in the 1980s called and wanted their foreign policy back.
00:36:09.000Then he handed over leadership of the Syrian situation to the Russians, and the Russians have continued to prop up a regime that is engaging in massive human rights violations.
00:36:17.000Human rights violations so massive that the UN literally put out a resolution, I think two days ago, saying that we have no more words to condemn what's happening in Syria.
00:36:24.000That's what the resolution actually said.
00:36:27.000And yet we're now being told that Obama was tougher on Russia than Trump was?
00:36:31.000Obama wasn't even tough on Russia interfering in the election.
00:36:36.000He does have a point when he says that if Russia was interfering in the election so much, where was Obama?
00:36:40.000Well, they were interfering in the election, and where was Obama?
00:36:43.000And the answer is that Obama didn't want to piss off the Russians because he thinks that the Russians were a valuable strategic ally on the Iran deal.
00:36:50.000That's the reality of why he didn't want to tick off the Russians.
00:36:52.000He thinks that the Russians should have a leadership role in the Middle East.
00:36:55.000So CNN is lying about that, too, when they say that Obama was tougher on Russia than Trump is.
00:37:19.000Barack Obama sold out our Eastern European allies on missile defense.
00:37:22.000He slow-walked aid to Ukraine, as opposed to Trump, who's actually provided material aid to Ukraine.
00:37:26.000He did little more than shrug when Crimea was annexed.
00:37:28.000He said never mind on his own red line in Syria, and turned a blind eye to Putin's intervention there, in large part because of his obsessions with getting the Iran deal.
00:37:35.000The Russian meddling in our elections started on Obama's watch, and not just our elections, but those of many of our allies.
00:37:40.000When Romney famously said Russia was our number one geopolitical foe, Obama mocked him for it, as did countless liberal journalists who are now converts to anti-Russia hawkery.
00:37:47.000Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made life harder for Russia, diplomatically and economically, thanks to revving up our oil and gas production.
00:37:53.000It hasn't been as tough as some, including me, would like, but it's been tougher than the Obama administration, or at least it's not unreasonable.
00:38:00.000So the reason that the media are mocking Trump on this stuff is because Trump has said so many nice things about Putin and because he seems to lend a lot of credibility to Putin.
00:38:09.000There's so many cases in the Trump administration where good policy is at odds with bad rhetoric, where Trump's policy is actually pretty good, decent, in some cases great, and then he goes down and he says something dumb and he undermines the policy.
00:38:21.000But the media are lying when they say to you that Obama was tough on Russia and Trump is not tough on Russia.
00:38:30.000Jim Sciutto over at CNN says it's delusional to say that Trump has been facing down Russia.
00:38:35.000Listen, you know, you can argue, and it's a fair criticism to say, did the Obama administration act quickly or strongly enough with Russia?
00:38:44.000And that's a criticism you've heard from both Democrats and Republicans.
00:38:47.000But when you compare the Trump administration response, particularly this president's response and the Obama administration's response, Ms.
00:38:53.000Sarah Sanders is entering really delusional territory there.
00:38:58.000Okay, so if you want to say that the Trump administration response to Russian election meddling has been lackluster at best, I agree.
00:39:04.000If you want to say the Trump administration response to Russia generally has been weaker than the Obama administration, that is just not true and it's foolish.
00:39:10.000And again, you wonder why people don't trust the media?
00:40:28.000If you ever listen to any of Billy Graham's lectures, it was deeply
00:40:31.000Not only religious stuff, but stuff about self-sacrifice and stuff about responsibility.
00:40:35.000Billy Graham had a great impact on the world.
00:40:37.000And this is why when people talk about how religion has had a nasty impact on the world, look at the followers of Billy Graham and ask how many followers of Billy Graham have made their lives better because they followed Billy Graham.
00:40:47.000In the aftermath of tragedy, there's an
00:40:49.000Easy swing toward atheism, agnosticism, the idea that you'd be better off if you didn't believe in God, better people don't believe in God, that somehow the world would be better if atheism were to rule the roost.
00:41:00.000We've heard this from thinkers I respect, including Sam Harris and Steven Pinker in the last couple of days.
00:41:05.000This is not true for the vast majority of individuals around planet Earth.
00:41:09.000People who become atheistic are less likely to engage in communal activities.
00:41:13.000People who become atheistic are less likely to give to charity.
00:41:17.000People who become atheistic are less likely to engage in the sort of social fabric building that's necessary in order for a thriving society to survive.
00:41:25.000And that's not even a case for the veracity of Christianity or Judaism that I'm making.
00:41:28.000This is a case for the social utility of Christianity or Judaism.
00:41:31.000All the folks who are living in a free and open and good country can thank people like Billy Graham for turning the lives around of people, many people, who would otherwise have led terrible lives.
00:41:42.000I mean, there are a lot of people who are hell-bent on leading bad lives, and Billy Graham was instrumental in preventing that from happening, as are so many other religious leaders.
00:41:52.000Now, that doesn't mean that religion is always a force for good.
00:41:58.000It does mean that religion, when used properly, can be a solution to a lot of people's life problems and it can be an encouragement to do better because there is someone who expects something more of you and it's not just your friends or family and it's not even just you.
00:42:11.000It's a higher power that expects you to make something of your life.
00:42:15.000I think the death of God in American society has been a contributing factor to the sort of political fractiousness that we've seen here.
00:42:20.000We used to at least hold it in common, not only that we were all made in God's image, but that if we all held common values in common, we knew our neighbors cared about the dead kids in Sandy Hook, or cared about the murdered children in Parkland.
00:42:33.000We took that for granted because these were the same people that we saw at church every week.
00:42:36.000These are the same people who are giving to the same charities that we were.
00:42:40.000But because we've lost that communal space, it's a lot easier to sit in your house and go on Twitter or Facebook and malign people who you've never met.
00:42:45.000Because you've never met your neighbors.
00:42:46.000How many of us have actually met our neighbors?
00:42:48.000Now, in California, it's become really uncommon.
00:42:49.000I know that there are still places in the country where you know your neighbors, particularly in small-town America.
00:42:55.000Knowing your neighbors was not a prereq.
00:42:57.000One of the things that you see when you drive through different areas of the country, it's really fascinating, is which areas have fences between yards and which don't.
00:43:02.000So if you go over to Dallas, for example, big city, but if you drive around suburban Dallas, there are no fences between the actual yards.
00:43:09.000All the yards are basically connected.
00:43:11.000There may be some driveways, but they're not big fences.
00:43:13.000If you drive through the valley, which is where I've lived most of my life, you drive through the San Fernando Valley, what you'll see is that most of the yards are not connected.
00:43:22.000Most of the yards are separated by walls.
00:43:25.000Most of the yards are separated by fences.
00:43:27.000There's nothing wrong with a wall, there's nothing wrong with a fence, but it is indicative of the fact that community is less common in big cities than it is in small towns, and it's less common in urban areas than it is in rural areas, and it's less common in non-religious areas than it is in religious areas.
00:43:45.000This is why you've seen in the last few years the rise in atheist get-togethers.
00:43:49.000They've been trying to create almost an atheistic religious get-together, where you have community events and all the rest of this, and it hasn't been working, because why should atheists get together?
00:43:59.000That seems like a rather uninspiring vision of the world.
00:44:02.000Why would you get together with people who also don't believe God exists?
00:44:05.000That frees you to find any purpose in life, supposedly, but you're gonna end up with a lot of different purposes, and a lot of those purposes are going to be working at cross-purposes with one another.
00:44:16.000That building the social fabric is one of the chief roles of religion, particularly American religion.
00:44:21.000Billy Graham's life is pretty amazing.
00:44:22.000Every year since 1955, Graham was on Gallup's list of most admired men and women, according to Hank Berry and Over the Daily Wire.
00:44:27.000His fierce hatred of segregation meant churches had to integrate for his revivals as far back as 1953, when at a revival in Jackson, Mississippi, ushers set up ropes to segregate the races.
00:44:37.000Graham asked for the ropes to be removed.
00:44:38.000When the usher refused, Graham took them down himself and told all the people to sit where they wanted.
00:44:43.000At a Madison Square revival in 1957, he invited Martin Luther King to preach together.
00:44:47.000As King said, quote, Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend, Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been successful as it has been.
00:44:54.000Graham often paid the bail and fines that King received when he was in jail.
00:44:59.000This is, again, one of the lies about the civil rights movement.
00:45:18.000And in 1933, his father forced him and his sister to drink beer until they got sick, which prompted both children to swallow alcohol and drugs for the rest of their lives.
00:45:26.000Children were raised differently back in 1933.
00:45:27.000The next year, having seen the evangelist Mordecai Ham,
00:45:31.000He went to Bob Jones College in Tennessee, where he was almost expelled, but Jones told him, quote, And so Graham transferred to Florida Bible Institute.
00:45:38.000He preached his first sermon at Boston Baptist Church in 1937.
00:45:49.000He became a national figure in 1949 when he held a series of revivals in LA and had circus tents erected in the parking lot, which led to national media coverage.
00:45:57.000And he hosted TV, of course, from 1947 until 2005.
00:46:00.000It's worthwhile paying honor to a man who did a lot more good than he did bad in this world, Reverend Billy Graham.
00:47:16.000So Nikki Haley gave a speech yesterday at the UN, the Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian dictator, because he is now in the, what, 17th, let's see, I think he was elected 2005.
00:47:28.000So he is now in the 13th year of a four-year tenure.
00:48:38.000Slavery, the three-fifths compromise, bloodletting, lead paint, being literally owned by your husband, cholera, smallpox, typhus, dying in childbirth, a lot, using chamber pots, unsanitary surgical procedures, traveling by horse or foot, dying at the age of 40.
00:49:02.000Also not aware that that was supremely popular in 1791.
00:49:05.000I think people saw that as bad in 1791.
00:49:08.000Even slavery, which was popular in certain parts of the United States in 1791, was certainly not popular in certain other parts of the United States in 1791.
00:49:16.000If you're going to talk about things that are in the Constitution of the United States, which seems to me closer than smallpox to resemblance to the Second Amendment, you might try the First Amendment.
00:49:24.000You know some other things that were popular in 1791?
00:49:27.000Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, no quartering of troops, no illegal search and seizures, a right to a jury trial, a right against torture.
00:49:37.000These were things that were pretty popular in 1791, it turns out, because they're in that same document, you stupid idiot.
00:49:42.000So again, there's a notion on the left that all of time began with their birth.
00:49:48.000I remember that Barack Obama said something about how Bill Ayers, what Bill Ayers did before he met Bill Ayers was irrelevant because Bill Ayers basically didn't exist as a human.
00:49:56.000Bill Ayers did all this stuff when I was a kid.
00:50:00.000The world didn't start turning when you were born.
00:50:01.000But folks on the left seem to think that all of the good things in life began just spontaneously when they were born or discovered them and that they never pre-existed that.
00:50:11.000The same ideology, the same philosophy that brought you freedom of speech and freedom of religion brought you the right to keep and bear arms.
00:50:16.000They were part and parcel of the same philosophy.
00:50:19.000As far as the notion that the Three-Fifths Compromise was some sort of ideological commitment to the non-peoplehood of black people, that's idiocy.
00:50:28.000If you look at the actual negotiations under the Three-Fifths Compromise, which is a bad provision of the Constitution, the reason that it is in the Constitution is because it was there to prevent a worse provision of the Constitution, which would have been counting black people as full people for purposes of voting, but counting them as property for purposes of not being able to actually vote or do anything.
00:50:47.000The South wanted, slave owners wanted, that if there were a bunch of black folks who were living in slavery in South Carolina, for purposes of representation in the Congress, for South Carolina, black folks would be counted as people, but they would not be able to vote and they would still be considered property.
00:51:00.000And the North said, no, we're not going to do that.
00:51:02.000You don't get to count black people as full people.
00:51:05.000Excuse me, because it skews the representative sample.
00:51:07.000If the North had caved to that and said, sure, black people are full people for purposes of representation, but not people for purposes of property, guess what?
00:51:15.000Slavery would have lasted longer because the South would have had more votes in the Congress.
00:51:19.000But again, knowledge and historical learning are apparently somehow—there are a lot of folks on the left who are allergic to them.
00:51:28.000They kill a lot of the narratives they love so much.
00:51:30.000Alrighty, so we'll be back here tomorrow from CPAC.
00:51:33.000I'm speaking at CPAC, and I will have—I promised some notes on CPAC, but I ran out of time again today.
00:51:40.000They just got rid of Jim Hoft as one of the speakers over at Gateway Pundit because Jim Hoft had been tweeting out stupidities about the school shooting victims in Parkland.
00:51:49.000I think that is perfectly appropriate.
00:51:51.000As far as Marion LePen who's been invited, I'm not sure why Marion LePen is representative of conservatism.
00:51:58.000That said, I'm more than happy to speak to the thousands of students who are going to hear about some real conservatism, and that's an opportunity I look forward to having tomorrow at CPAC.
00:52:07.000So if you're at CPAC in the Washington, D.C.
00:52:09.000area, show up, and I'll see you there.