After the first Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders continues to dominate the polls, but the media are finally starting to question why he s running for president. Is it because he s a socialist? Or is he a communist? And if so, why is the media finally taking him seriously? And who's going to be the one to ask him some basic questions about his record and why is he running for President in 2020? Ben Shapiro breaks it all down and explains why the media is finally getting serious about Bernie Sanders and why it s finally time for them to ask some questions about him. Plus, a look at why Bloomberg is planning a full-on attack on Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night in Charleston, SC and why he thinks it s the best thing that s going to happen to him in 2020. And a look into why the stock market tanked in the aftermath of the first debate and what s going on with the Dow Jones and S&P 500 after the second debate. All that and much more on today s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our new podcast "The FiveThirtyEight Team" - use the promo code at checkout to receive 20% off your first month's mailbag! to become a supporter of the show and receive a FREE 7-day VIP discount when you shop there! and get 10% off the entire six-month VIP membership plan when you become a patron! You get 7 days early and get an ad discount, plus a FREE VIP membership offer when you sign up for VIP access to our next month, and a discount of $50 or six months get $99, VIP gets the choice of $99 or more, plus two months get VIP access gets a discount, and they get a complimentary rate, plus they get two weeks get a discount on VIP access, they also get two months to VIP access and two other places get a simpal offer, and two days get a VIP discount, they get full access to VIP pricing, and access to the VIP discount offer, plus she gets an ad on the entire course gets two weeks only she gets VIP access starts only $39/place gets a policy offer, she gets a choice of the whole place gets $19/choice, and she gets $4/choice becomes VIP access becomes $24/choice is she gets two choices, she also gets $5/choice gets all she gets three times she can choose
00:00:42.000He is trailing Joe Biden by just a few points.
00:00:44.000But Bernie Sanders has not been exposed to any real scrutiny, a point I've been making repeatedly for literally months on this show, maybe years on this show.
00:00:51.000Bernie Sanders is a full-fledged communist.
00:00:54.000Bernie Sanders has not yet met a socialist dictator he did not love or could not express love for.
00:00:59.000Bernie Sanders has been a lifelong Marxist.
00:01:03.000Go back all the way to his earliest days in Vermont when he was living as a loser in basically a rundown apartment while his not-wife had his child and was on welfare and he was making videos about Eugene Debs.
00:01:28.000Bernie Sanders has been this guy the whole time.
00:01:30.000And only now are the media seeing fit to say, hey, maybe we should ask some questions about this guy.
00:01:34.000Like, why is he running for president?
00:01:37.000And why are people taking him seriously?
00:01:39.000Well, tonight, there is a big Democratic debate.
00:01:41.000And expect for Michael Bloomberg, and presumably, if Joe Biden has any brains at all, Joe Biden, and if Elizabeth Warren has any brains at all, Elizabeth Warren, to attack Bernie.
00:01:55.000Michael Bloomberg, for one, is planning a full-on onslaught on Bernie Sanders.
00:01:59.000He's the only one who brought any game to Bernie Sanders the entire race in the last debate when he pointed out that Bernie, a lifelong communist who's been a loser, who's never earned a dollar other than writing a book in the last couple of years, and when he did earn a dollar it was off of taxpayer dollars, that that loser has a lake house.
00:02:14.000So it's easy to be a socialist with a lake house.
00:02:17.000He'd never been asked that question directly to his face.
00:02:21.000Well, Michael Bloomberg is going to really ramp it up tonight, according to Politico.
00:02:24.000Politico reports Mike Bloomberg and a handful of staffers spent Monday at the so-called happiest place on Earth, preparing for the bruising task ahead the next day.
00:02:31.000Hunkered down at the Four Seasons Hotel in Florida's Disney World, the former New York mayor prepared for a mission to salvage his half-billion-dollar investment in the presidential race with a debate performance designed to quiet the critics and stall frontrunner Bernie Sanders' momentum.
00:02:44.000After a disastrous first outing, his net favorable rating dropped 20 points in the aftermath, according to Morning Consult.
00:02:49.000Bloomberg's debate goals in the Charleston, South Carolina debate are twofold.
00:02:52.000One, persuade viewers that Sanders is too divisive to defeat President Trump in November.
00:02:56.000And two, sidestep landmines surrounding complaints from women at his private media company and his race-based policing practices as mayor.
00:03:03.000Dan Kananen is a top strategist overseeing Bloomberg's state operations.
00:03:06.000He said in a conference, call the debate tomorrow night, and the campaign in general needs to be about one candidate, and that's Bernie Sanders.
00:03:11.000We've been saying for some time that the nature of this contest means that someone with even a small plurality of delegates can come away with an outsized and disproportionate delegate lead.
00:03:20.000And this, of course, is exactly correct.
00:03:22.000They also point out, and this is also true, that Bloomberg was much better in the second half of the debate than he was in the first half.
00:03:26.000That's sort of getting obscured because his first 45 minutes was so awful and so brutal.
00:03:30.000But after that, he really started taking it to Sanders, and Sanders had no good answers.
00:03:35.000A top aide says, we've trained our eyes on him, something the rest of the field has failed to do eight debates prior in a year into the campaign.
00:03:41.000Bloomberg released an ad on on Monday, a digital ad slamming Sanders for his history on gun control and drawing a contrast to the ex-mayor's lengthy record of fighting the NRA.
00:03:52.000Ironically, one of the reasons that Bernie Sanders originally was elected to Congress is because the NRA endorsed him over his opponent.
00:04:01.000The 90-second video and an accompanying tweet from Bloomberg state Sanders was elected to the House in 1990 with support from the NRA and highlighted his opposition to a background checks bill in the 1990s.
00:04:12.000The other Democrats are apparently also considering the possibility that they may finally have to go after Bernie Sanders, which again, this feels a little bit too, little too late.
00:04:19.000It feels a lot like in 2016 when the Republicans finally decided that Donald Trump was legitimate.
00:04:23.000He was an actual nominee and they started training their fire and Marco Rubio started going out and making fun of Donald Trump and his genital size and all this sort of stuff.
00:04:30.000And it was like, this is, this is too little too late.
00:04:32.000It feels like that with the Democrats.
00:04:33.000Maybe it's not too little too late, but.
00:04:35.000If Bloomberg is going to air a campaign, meaning he's just going to saturate the airwaves with anti-Bernie ads, it could theoretically have a serious impact.
00:04:44.000Apparently, they're going to unleash hundreds of millions of dollars in ads directed against Sanders.
00:04:48.000The campaign, according to CNBC.com, plans a multi-pronged attack, including the publication of OPPO research on Sanders.
00:04:53.000It will also push out digital attack ads focused on Sanders' record.
00:04:57.000The attacks will also attempt to highlight negative aspects of his record on race relations, both as congressman and senator.
00:05:04.000People within the Bloomberg campaign are also discussing whether to have surrogates and supporters write op-eds and show up on TV to speak out against Sanders.
00:05:11.000Okay, well, I mean, again, this should have been the plan the whole time.
00:05:15.000One of the things that the Bloomberg campaign is leaking out is internal polling that shows that Bernie would absolutely destroy the party down-ballot.
00:05:21.000According to Politico, Chris Codeligo and Laura Baron Lopez reporting, Bernie Sanders' nomination could drag down vulnerable House Democrats trying to hold on to their competitive districts, according to a new poll conducted for Bloomberg's campaign.
00:05:33.000The poll of voters in more than 40 battleground House districts currently held by Democrats, conducted by Global Strategy Group for the Bloomberg campaign, and obtained by Politico from two sources, Found that Sanders is less popular than Trump and loses significant support when hit for holding socialist positions.
00:05:46.000Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist, of course.
00:05:49.000The poll found Sanders essentially running even with Trump in a head-to-head matchup across the districts, trailing the incumbent by just one point.
00:05:55.000But Trump opens up a six-point advantage after a list of negative messages about Sanders' ideology and alleged ineffectiveness in the Senate is presented to poll respondents.
00:06:04.000Sanders' potential impact extends beyond the presidential race.
00:06:07.000A plurality of voters, 39%, say they will be less likely to vote for a Democrat for Congress if Sanders is the Democratic nominee, which is double the 21% who say they would be more likely to vote for a Democrat for Congress.
00:06:17.00034% say it would not impact their vote at all.
00:06:20.000The poll found that 47% of voters in competitive Democratic-held districts felt the increased role of socialist ideas in the Democratic Party was a bad thing.
00:06:38.000Most Americans are still not into it, which may be one of the reasons why Joe Biden still holds a very, very narrow lead in the latest poll from South Carolina.
00:06:53.000The poll's margin of error is plus or minus 6%.
00:06:56.000So basically, they are running dead even.
00:06:58.000So that means that Everybody has to train their fire on Sanders tonight or he's going to run away with this race because if he wins South Carolina, this sucker is over.
00:07:06.000So that is the big question for tonight.
00:07:08.000Now, the biggest problem is that Bloomberg isn't even on the ballot in South Carolina, which means that really it's Joe Biden on the ballot versus Bernie Sanders.
00:07:17.000And the Biden campaign is going after Bernie a little bit too little too late again.
00:07:23.000And again, Joe Biden is not your best candidate for going after Bernie, mainly because Joe Biden is not a sentient creature at this point.
00:07:30.000Joe Biden is not even aware of which office he is running for at this point.
00:08:36.000You just don't have the time and money to waste.
00:08:37.000Right now, my listeners get a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a digital scale without any long-term commitment.
00:08:43.000Just head on over to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, type in Shapiro.
00:08:52.000Okay, so Joe Biden is in fact going after Bernie.
00:08:55.000The way he's going after Bernie is saying that Bernie was not sufficiently When we rallied together to defend our president and all the progress he made, they had his back.
00:09:16.000But back in Washington, there was one guy with another plan.
00:09:20.000I think it would be a good idea if President Obama faced some primary opposition.
00:09:26.000Bernie Sanders was seriously thinking about challenging our first African-American president in a primary.
00:09:32.000This ad is pointed at black voters in South Carolina, And it's an effective ad for that.
00:09:36.000I mean, Barack Obama is still incredibly popular with black voters across the country, with many voters across the country, and that is particularly true in South Carolina.
00:09:43.000Meanwhile, the Biden team is also attacking Bernie for the fact that he is a communist.
00:09:47.000So the Biden senior advisor, Alex Cristobal, slammed Sanders' comments on Fidel Castro.
00:09:53.000Because remember, yesterday on 60 Minutes, he praised Fidel Castro.
00:09:57.000He talked about Fidel Castro's literacy programs, which is pure insanity.
00:10:12.000Bernie Sanders has never had, we'll get to this in a little while, but Bernie Sanders has literally never had a serious bad word to say about any communist regime ever.
00:10:23.000What he'll do is say, well, of course I oppose the repression, but, and then he'll list off a list of wonderful glories of the Soviet Union and Nicaragua and Venezuela and Cuba and every communist regime he can possibly think of.
00:10:37.000So Bernie Sanders, so Biden's campaign put out this statement, Make no mistake, Bernie Sanders' comments on Fidel Castro are part of a larger pattern throughout his life to embrace autocratic leaders and governments across the globe.
00:10:48.000He seems to have found more inspiration in the Soviets, Sandinistas, Chavistas, and Castro than in America.
00:10:56.000His admiration for elements of Castro's dictatorship, or at least willingness to look past Cuba's human rights violations, is not just dangerous, it is deeply offensive to many people in Florida, New Jersey, and across the country that have fled political persecution and sought refuge in the United States.
00:11:08.000Bernie's comments indicate that he either fails to understand the pain and suffering that Fidel Castro, Nicolas Maduro, and Daniel Ortega have caused to so many people, including Americans now living here, or worse, that his ideology blinds him to the realities of life in these countries.
00:11:21.000We already have one president who praises dictators and their mob-like tendencies.
00:12:45.000Pete Buttigieg has been trying desperately to wrest the mantle away from Joe Biden and suggest that he is the serious alternative.
00:12:52.000So Buttigieg came out yesterday and said, we need a real Democrat.
00:12:54.000We don't need a socialist like Bernie leading the party.
00:12:57.000A revolution is not going to do it, and extreme proposals and policies are not going to do it.
00:13:03.000We need a candidate that is unified, that is going to bring Americans, especially all Americans, not just in the Democratic Party, but all Americans together.
00:13:11.000And frankly, we need a real Democrat to be the Democratic nominee.
00:13:16.000And that's why I believe a Sanders candidacy won't work.
00:13:56.000So Warren, watch for Warren to go after Bloomberg and clear the decks for Bernie, because she's basically hedging her bets.
00:14:03.000So Warren, who is an effective knife fighter, I mean, we saw that on the stage the other night, she is more likely to go after Biden and Bloomberg than she is to go after Bernie Sanders directly.
00:14:11.000So that means that Bernie, in all likelihood, continues to have this clear glide path to the nomination.
00:14:18.000This provides a series of problems for Democrats, like a series of problems.
00:14:22.000So problem number one is that Bernie's great lie is that he's going to attract this wave of new voters.
00:14:27.000So on an electoral level, I mean, Republicans should take some comfort in this.
00:14:31.000Bernie keeps saying over and over and over that he's going to drive youth votes out to magnificent rates.
00:14:36.000Megan McArdle, who's a columnist for The Washington Post.
00:14:38.000We had her on the radio show yesterday.
00:14:40.000She was talking about how she saw a lot of Hispanic voters out for Bernie.
00:14:44.000But statistically speaking, Bernie has not actually driven voting rates up in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, or Nevada thus far.
00:14:51.000The New York Times reporting Sydney Ember and Nate Cohen.
00:14:54.000It is the most politically provocative part of Senator Bernie Sanders' campaign pitch, that his progressive movement will bring millions of non-voters into the November election, driving record turnout, especially among disaffected working class Americans and young people.
00:15:05.000And yet, despite a virtual tie in Iowa, a narrow victory in New Hampshire, and a big triumph in Nevada, the first three nominating contests reveal a fundamental challenge for Sanders' political revolution.
00:15:14.000He may be winning, but not because of his long-standing pledge to expand the Democratic base.
00:15:19.000The results so far show that Mr. Sanders has prevailed by broadening his appeal among traditional Democratic voters, not by fundamentally transforming the electorate.
00:15:26.000In other words, the same people are showing up to vote, more of them are just voting for Sanders.
00:15:30.000And part of that is this bandwagoning effect that happens in the primaries.
00:15:33.000Media attention builds on media attention.
00:15:35.000And this is why, whenever you have a candidate who sets up a firewall, see Rudy Giuliani in 2008 in Florida, whenever you have a candidate who sets up a firewall, and that firewall is in state number four, it's too late by that point.
00:15:45.000Because what you have is a wall, and then, on the other end, you have a snowball that starts off rolling down the mountain.
00:15:51.000And as it starts rolling down the mountain, it starts accreting more and more snow.
00:16:06.000By the time you get to this wall right here, boom, it just runs right over the wall.
00:16:09.000And this is what you have seen in these primaries.
00:16:12.000So people who have ignored the early primaries have done so at their own peril.
00:16:15.000I'm talking to you, Mike Bloomberg, and I'm talking to you, Joe Biden.
00:16:18.000And so this is why Bernie has been able to roll over the other Democrats, not because Bernie is bringing in new audiences, but because the additional media attention makes Bernie seem inevitable, the inevitability conversation makes it so that people want to be on the side of a winner.
00:16:46.000A month ago, A bare majority of Democrats thought that Sanders was the strongest candidate to face up in a general election as he started winning primaries.
00:16:54.000And the reason for that is because people have this bizarre notion and really isn't, I don't think, a thought through process.
00:17:02.000I don't think that it's really a considered opinion.
00:17:04.000They just have this instinct that if somebody is able to win one race, they're able to win another race, even if the two skills are not transferable.
00:17:10.000In Iowa, says Nate Cohen, turnout for the caucuses was lower than expected, up 3% compared with 2016.
00:17:15.000The increase was concentrated in more well-educated areas, where Sanders struggled, according to a New York Times analysis.
00:17:20.000So in other words, Sanders actually didn't do that great in Iowa.
00:17:23.000There was no sign of a Sanders voter surge in New Hampshire either, nor on Saturday in Nevada, where the final results indicated the turnout would finish above 2016 but well short of 2008 levels, despite a decade of population growth and a new early voting option that attracted 75,000 voters.
00:17:36.000The low numbers are all the more striking, says the New York Times, given the huge turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, which was the highest in a century.
00:17:43.000There's also no evidence across the early states of much greater participation by young people, a typically low-turnout group that makes up a core part of Sanders' base and that he has long said he can motivate to get out to the polls.
00:17:53.000And Sanders has struggled to overcome his long-standing weakness in affluent, well-educated suburbs where Democrats excelled in midterm elections and where many traditionally Republican voters are skeptical about Trump's performance, meaning they could be up for grabs in November.
00:18:06.000So this means that because the field is fragmented, he could still pull off the nomination.
00:18:09.000But everybody is just lying when they suggest that he's going to be bringing in swaths of new voters into the Democratic Party.
00:18:15.000It's not a thing that he is actually doing.
00:18:18.000Another serious problem for Bernie Sanders is his campaign is filled with jerks.
00:18:23.000And this is something that his people On the Democratic side of the aisle, other candidates have been pointing out is that Bernie Sanders' campaign is filled with people who are just jackasses.
00:18:51.000Okay, well, Bernie bros are going out there and attacking people in the most vicious ways.
00:18:57.000That really cuts against the Democratic branding effort.
00:19:00.000One story that has come out in the last 24 hours by Scott Bixby over at the Daily Beast, uncovered a Bernie staffer who was mocking Elizabeth Warren's looks and Pete Buttigieg's sexuality on a private Twitter account.
00:19:13.000According to the Daily Beast, during the most recent presidential primary debate in Vegas, Senator Sanders suggested that critiques of some of his most antagonistic online supporters are largely unfounded and unfair, and he proposed that some of the worst offenders might actually be Russian trolls on a mission to sow disunity in the field.
00:19:26.000But the private Twitter account of a newly promoted campaign staffer indicates that despite his condemnation of online harassment, at least some of the Vermont senator's most toxic support is coming from inside the House.
00:19:37.000Using the account Permaben, Ben Mora, a regional field director for the Sanders campaign based in Michigan, has attacked other Democrats in the field, as well as their family members, surrogates, journalists, and politically active celebrities in deeply personal terms, mocking their physical appearance, gender, sexuality, among other things.
00:19:54.000He tweeted that Senator Amy Klobuchar looks like her name, quote, pained, chunky, and confused.
00:19:59.000Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, quote, is what happens when a therapist botches the conversion.
00:20:03.000And his husband, Chasen, Mora predicts will, quote, be busted for running a meth racket in 10 years.
00:20:07.000I mean, really nice people, really nice people in the Bernie campaign.
00:20:11.000This doesn't mean everybody who's voting for Bernie is a nasty person.
00:20:14.000It does mean that everybody who seems to be nasty in this race is a Bernie Sanders supporter.
00:20:18.000So that's a real problem for Bernie Sanders as well.
00:20:22.000The biggest problem for Bernie Sanders, of course, is Bernie Sanders.
00:20:25.000That remains the biggest problem for Bernie Sanders, that Bernie does not have wide swaths of support.
00:20:29.000People are whistling past the graveyard when they suggest he's going to bring in new audiences, because it turns out, you know what is not supremely popular?
00:20:46.000The fact that Bernie Sanders, a career loser, I mean, truly a career loser, has made it this far in American politics.
00:20:53.000It is an object lesson to people everywhere that anyone can become president of the United States, truly anyone, including a man who did not lock down a job until he was 39 years old and was not supporting his own kid financially, even though he was a college graduate because he was too busy making single film reels about Eugene Debs, the socialist.
00:21:09.000I mean, that was seriously Bernie Sanders's life.
00:21:12.000His life is that he was running as a Liberty Union candidate in Vermont and losing every election in the 1970s.
00:22:05.000Most people have a redemption story where where they started off when they were 15 is not where they end up when they are 77, 78 years old like Bernie.
00:22:11.000Bernie's exactly the same human being he was at 39 and at 78.
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00:23:48.000Okay, so last night, Bernie Sanders was on CNN, and he decided that it would be a wonderful idea to double down on his praise for Fidel Castro.
00:23:58.000And the biggest problem for Bernie Sanders in this race is that Bernie Sanders is Bernie Sanders.
00:24:02.000And the public has been hidden from the fact that Bernie Sanders is Bernie Sanders because the media refused to cover him for years.
00:24:08.000And when I say they refused to cover him, I don't mean they didn't do reporting.
00:24:10.000There was some good reporting on him in 2015, 2016.
00:24:13.000But at no point was he ever asked a tough question about his overt, lifelong support of every communist regime he could possibly find.
00:24:46.000Now, if you want to disagree with me, if somebody wants to say That, and by the way, all of those congresspeople that you mentioned just so happen to be supporting other candidates.
00:25:29.000I mean, the fact is that this has been Bernie Sanders' lifelong principle.
00:25:33.000Bernie Sanders' lifelong principle from the time that he was young to the time that he is old is that America is bad and that communist regimes are inherently good.
00:25:39.000And that their repression is sort of a nasty side effect of the fact that they have to overcome a vicious capitalist system that they are overthrowing.
00:25:45.000I mean, Bernie has overtly praised the communist revolution in Cuba.
00:26:00.000He was in his late thirties when he was talking about this stuff.
00:26:02.000He said that he had great warmth toward the communist revolution in Cuba because it was obviously poor people rising up against rich people.
00:26:09.000I mean, this is who Bernie Sanders has been his entire life.
00:26:12.000Well, CNN is finally reporting on this.
00:26:13.000So, John Avalon did a report yesterday about Bernie's history of praising dictators, and he basically only scratched the surface.
00:26:21.000Add to this Sanders' now infamous honeymoon in Moscow near the end of the Cold War, his praise for the Soviet Union's public transportation and youth programs, while somehow never finding time to meet with Nobel Prize winning Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who lived in Vermont at the time, It may speak to Sanders' general sympathies at the time.
00:26:37.000Now, I'm not even getting into Sanders' 1970s advocacy for nationalizing most major industries, or his since-renounced call to abolish the CIA, or his assertion to a Vermont high school student in 1972 that some U.S.
00:26:48.000action in Vietnam was, quote, almost as bad as what Hitler did.
00:26:51.000I'm simply pointing out that Sanders' vision of democratic socialism has extended far beyond the Danish-style welfare state, as he likes to claim.
00:28:10.000Again, he has never wavered on this sort of stuff.
00:28:13.000Last night, Bernie said, quote, We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but you know, it's unfair to simply say everything is bad.
00:28:20.000When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did?
00:28:58.000We've actually been able to do that fairly well, as it turns out.
00:29:01.000It turns out these two things have nothing to do with each other.
00:29:03.000So praising the Cubans for their literacy programs is really ridiculous.
00:29:07.000But of course, Sanders hasn't merely praised Castro's literacy programs.
00:29:11.000Back in the 1980s, Sanders explained that he was, quote, this is a direct quote, physically nauseated by John F. Kennedy's, quote, hatred for the Cuban revolution.
00:29:20.000He said that when he was watching the Nixon-Kennedy debates, because he's old enough to have been 90 when those happened, Bernie Sanders said that he was physically nauseated by John F. Kennedy's opposition to the Cuban Revolution of 1959.
00:29:32.000And then in 1989, Sanders visited Cuba, and he came back and he said, I did not see a hungry child.
00:29:57.000I mean, I have friends who have been there.
00:29:58.000It's a country that is frozen in time.
00:30:01.000And also, I mean, again, this is why it's so dishonest for the media to suggest that Bernie Sanders is just expressing love for Castro's literacy programs.
00:30:09.000He said in 1989, quote, the Cuban people had, quote, an almost religious affection for Fidel Castro, an almost religious affection for Fidel Castro.
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00:34:28.000They embraced the idea of a profit margin.
00:34:30.000They embraced the idea of a certain amount of private property ownership that would allow growth and innovation.
00:34:36.000What they've been involved in is what you would really call corporatism as opposed to a communist nationalized ownership of all means of production.
00:34:44.000This is something that China did during the 1990s when it was rising out of poverty.
00:34:48.000That had nothing to do with Chinese communism.
00:34:50.000So Bernie's suggesting that China has raised people out of poverty when it was really the United States and Europe and the free market system that raised people out of poverty?
00:34:57.000It's sort of like when Bernie suggests that the United States is responsible for income inequality without recognizing we are responsible for prosperity.
00:35:08.000What is responsible for the great healthcare system of the West is capitalism.
00:35:40.000They're a communist, and I like communism.
00:35:42.000Then there's the communist Nicaraguan regime of Daniel Ortega, which murdered thousands of people.
00:35:47.000Sanders celebrated the Sandinista revolution back in the 1980s.
00:35:49.000He even attended a rally at which protesters chanted, Yankees will die.
00:35:53.000Unclear whether he was aware of that at the time.
00:35:55.000He visited Nicaragua while he was president, while he was mayor of Burlington.
00:36:00.000And then he returned to tut-tut Ortega's human rights abuses.
00:36:03.000He actually, when somebody wrote a letter to him saying, you know, you seem to be taking the Ortega abuses rather non-seriously, he responded by saying, well, you don't understand the complexities of the situation?
00:36:14.000Here in the United States, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus.
00:36:44.000And then when asked if Juan Guaido, who is the opposition leader, is the legitimate leader of Venezuela, he said no.
00:36:49.000So Bernie has yet to to actually find a communist regime for which he does not have some warm for years, by the way.
00:36:56.000The Sanders Senate website carried an editorial from a paper called the Valley News that favorably compared the regime of Hugo Chavez and poverty reduction with the poverty record of the United States.
00:37:05.000And then, of course, there is Sanders' long record of propagandizing on behalf of the Soviet Union.
00:37:10.000It's not just that Sanders visited the Soviet Union and went shirtless to sing This Land Is Your Land in Moscow in 1988.
00:37:15.000He then returned and declared that Moscow had, quote, He then celebrated because, again, this is exactly what communists do.
00:37:24.000What communists do is they say, well, sure, we may have killed all the kulaks, but at least you know that the literacy rates are high.
00:37:44.000And so Bernie Sanders, I mean, this is such a telling quote.
00:37:48.000He celebrated that the Soviets were quote, moving forward into some of the early visions of the revolution, what the revolution was about in 1917.
00:37:55.000So Bernie Sanders is just a fan of the communist revolution of 1917.
00:38:25.000And anybody who pretends he is, is lying to you.
00:38:28.000And so it's kind of fun to watch as the media discover all of this.
00:38:30.000It's kind of fun to watch all of this.
00:38:33.000For example, Jake Tapper yesterday started reporting on the fact that Bernie Sanders, back in the 1970s, was writing weird, bizarre fiction pieces in which he talked about women wanting to be raped.
00:38:45.000I'd like to see Elizabeth Warren bring this up to Sanders, right?
00:38:48.000She has plenty of words for Michael Bloomberg about the stuff he has said to women, but Bernie Sanders writing about how women enjoy being raped and have fantasies about it back in the 1970s.
00:38:56.000Seriously, this is something Bernie Sanders wrote, because the guy's a nut.
00:39:00.000Bernie Sanders is a loser kicked out of a commune when he was in his 30s, in Burlington, didn't hold a job, and wrote bad fiction about how women like to be raped.
00:39:10.000And this guy is who the Democrats are picking.
00:39:14.000There was this essay he wrote when he was 30 years old in 1971.
00:39:18.000It's an old essay, but he writes, a man goes home and masturbates his typical fantasy, a woman on her knees, a woman tied up, a woman abused, a woman enjoys intercourse with her man as she fantasizes about being raped by three men simultaneously.
00:39:32.000It goes on to talk about gender roles.
00:39:34.000It is very strange and obviously there is a lot to object to in this.
00:39:53.000That weirdo is who you guys are going to nominate.
00:39:57.000You are literally about to nominate the old commie who hangs out at the library and creepily stares at the computers because he doesn't have a job.
00:40:06.000But he has a guitar and he loves This Land Is Your Land.
00:40:10.000That's who you guys are about to nominate.
00:40:15.000It's amazing how CNN, which is a mainstream democratic outlet, how yesterday they suddenly realized, hey, wait a second, Bernie hangs out with a lot of anti-Semites.
00:40:47.000Like, that's strange you're CNN catching on.
00:40:51.000Sanders has faced criticism from supporters of Israel on both sides of the aisle for embracing campaign surrogates with more extreme anti-Israel views than the candidate they're backing.
00:41:01.000Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in Congress, have both thrown their support behind Sanders.
00:41:08.000Sanders has also faced backlash for surrogates such as Palestinian-American activists Linda Sarsour and Amer Zar, a Palestinian-American law professor and comedian.
00:41:18.000Okay, yeah, and then they should actually quote those people, a majority of whom have talked about the destruction of the state of Israel openly.
00:41:24.000So, fun to watch the media finally fact-checking Bernie in real time.
00:41:28.000By the way, even Bernie's mainstream campaign, even his Medicare for All campaign, is built on lies.
00:41:32.000So, yesterday, Pramila Jayapal, the congresswoman, She is a Bernie supporter.
00:41:37.000I believe she's from Washington State.
00:41:39.000And she was touting Bernie and she just starts telling lies about what Americans believe about their own medical care.
00:41:44.000One of the things that's really funny about Medicare for All is if you poll Americans on Medicare for All, they don't know what it means.
00:41:49.000They actually just think that they are giving more money to Medicaid or that they are giving more money to Medicare as like a public option for people who fall out of their insurance.
00:41:58.000Most Americans don't understand that Bernie Sanders' plan literally ends the health insurance industry in the United States and you lose your health insurance plan.
00:42:04.000Most Americans don't get that 160 million health plans go away.
00:42:09.000But here is Pramila Jayapal trying to explain that Americans don't actually like their health insurance.
00:42:13.000Which is weird, because by every poll, the vast majority of Americans with private health insurance are very fond of their health insurance, as it turns out.
00:42:19.000What do you say to people who don't want to give up their private insurance plans?
00:42:23.000Well, I would just say, first of all, that nobody likes their private insurance plan.
00:42:28.000And if you look at all the polling, when people are asked if they want to give up their private insurance, the support goes down a little.
00:42:34.000If you take the next question, which is, if you could keep your doctor, but you were going to have to give up your private insurance plan, the support goes up even higher, including among Independents and Republicans.
00:42:46.000Okay, but what you're saying is insane, because if you take away their private insurance, they can't have the same doctor.
00:42:51.000Not with the same reimbursement rights.
00:42:52.000Not unless you're gonna cram something down or nationalize the industry itself.
00:42:55.000I mean, of course this is all lies, but Bernie Sanders' entire campaign is built on the lie that all he wants is tweaks around the edges of the system, meanwhile spending his entire career complaining that the system itself has to be brought down from within.
00:43:07.000So it's fun to watch people realize this one.
00:43:11.000Meanwhile, President Trump is facing the black swan threat of coronavirus.
00:43:15.000So coronavirus tanked the stock market to the tune of about a thousand points yesterday.
00:43:19.000The Dow Jones seems to have stabilized a little bit today, even though the bond yields continue to be incredibly low, which means the demand for bond is high.
00:43:26.000It means that people are very wary of where the economy is going.
00:43:30.000President Trump's aides, according to Politico, faced an increasingly urgent threat Monday with potentially monumental implications, a global outbreak knocking down the U.S.
00:43:37.000economy and walloping markets in an election year, all against accusations about whether the Trump administration had mismanaged and underfunded a critical response with American lives on the line.
00:43:45.000There really aren't a lot of cases in the United States, so it's hard to see exactly how the United States has dramatically mismanaged this thing at this point.
00:43:52.000Stephen Moore, an informal economic advisor to the Trump team, says, the view in the White House is that this is one of those classic black swan events.
00:43:58.000All we can do is control the health issues in the United States.
00:44:01.000The coronavirus has infected more than 78,000 people abroad, although only 53 people in the United States are confirmed to have contracted the virus.
00:44:11.000It is largely in countries that do not have advanced medical systems.
00:44:14.000So Iran is having serious problems with coronavirus right now.
00:44:17.000Apparently the deputy health minister over there has coronavirus at this point.
00:44:20.000And there's threat that is going to cross borders in the Middle East and start infecting a lot of people.
00:44:24.000There's a lot of talk about China being adjacent to India, that there might be an outbreak in India, which would, of course, be a disaster because India is highly populous.
00:44:31.000Of course, China is on the hot seat again as well.
00:44:34.000They should be because they simply did not handle this in an appropriate way.
00:44:50.000What it's mostly scary to in terms of sort of global health, because we don't know the death rates yet, is really the economy because supply lines are being disrupted.
00:44:57.000Tyler Cowen has a piece over at Business Insider today about the disruption of global supply lines.
00:45:02.000One of the big problems is what happens if it shuts down?
00:45:13.000You're seeing global supply lines being cut.
00:45:17.000You're starting to see the economy feel the real effect of all of this.
00:45:21.000Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to militarize this sort of thing.
00:45:23.000They're trying to weaponize it, as they are fond of saying, and suggest that this is all Trump's fault in the United States.
00:45:28.000Officials like Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Domestic Policy Chief Joe Grogan have turned their fire on HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who's leading the coronavirus response, arguing that Azar has poorly coordinated strategy, failed to escalate the potential risks to Trump, And push for a multi-billion dollar emergency funding request they initially viewed as extreme.
00:45:44.000The Trump administration announced a request for 2.5 billion in emergency coronavirus cash, which would also shift at least 535 million in previously uncommitted funds.
00:45:53.000Funding the response had apparently been a major sticking point between the White House and Azar, who lobbied to request additional funds from Congress before he makes four separate hearings on the Hill this week.
00:46:02.000The package is expected to face resistance from Democrats who have warned the Trump administration against shifting money away from existing commitments, which is a weird look.
00:46:10.000I mean, it's weird for the Democrats to be obstructing funding for the coronavirus response.
00:46:14.000At this point, the White House is saying that they are united on this thing.
00:46:19.000But the biggest problem here is, of course, nobody knows anything about coronavirus.
00:46:34.000That sort of uncertainty has significant ramifications for not only health, but for economics.
00:46:40.000Certainty and predictability is the lifeblood of successful world economies.
00:46:44.000When there's a lot of uncertainty, that leads to decoupling in global supply lines and global chains of supply.
00:46:50.000It's gonna hurt China more than it hurts us, but that doesn't really matter for President Trump's purposes.
00:46:54.000The bottom line is if the economy tanks, he's got a real problem on his hands for re-election in 2020.
00:46:58.000Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then we'll get to some things that I hate.
00:47:01.000So things that I like, again, big Ray Bradbury fan, read another Ray Bradbury book over the weekend, worth reading, A Sound of Thunder.
00:47:07.000It is sad to me that Short stories have fallen out of fashion.
00:47:10.000This one is a little bit less creepy than the one that I recommended just a couple of weeks ago.
00:47:15.000This one is more sci-fi stories, and Ray Bradbury's sci-fi is really terrific.
00:47:19.000Really an underrated, still an underrated writer because everybody remembers Fahrenheit 451, but few people remember his short stories, many of which are pretty terrific.
00:47:28.000Sound of Thunder, it was in this collection.
00:47:33.000I believe A Sound of Thunder is the story that discusses the butterfly effect.
00:47:36.000I mean, the basic premise is that somebody goes back in time, steps on a butterfly, and it has these dramatic ramifications across time, showing the ripples across time.
00:48:03.000Did anyone truly think that Chris Matthews was being anti-Semitic when he talked about, historically speaking, in 1940 people didn't realize that the war had already been lost on the continent in 1940 before most people knew it?
00:48:20.000Everybody's just incredibly dishonest.
00:48:22.000And one of the things that people like to do with anti-semitism is what I would call the flattening effect, which is every implication of anti-semitism is treated as exactly equal even when it's fairly obvious that there are tremendous gradations.
00:48:35.000That Bernie Sanders saying that he will not attend AIPAC because AIPAC is racist is significantly worse for Jews and significantly more anti-semitic than Chris Matthews talking about how in 1940, a British general said that the continent had been overrun.
00:48:52.000Nonetheless, Chris Matthews got on the air last night, come to the show, come on air, a little disappointed with himself, talking about how, Bernie, I'm just going to apologize to Bernie.
00:49:03.000I mean, seriously, it's just ridiculous.
00:49:05.000I was wrong to refer to an event from the last days or actually the first days of World War II.
00:49:11.000Senator Sanders, I'm sorry for comparing anything from that tragic era in which so many suffered, especially the Jewish people, to an electoral result in which you were the well-deserved winners.
00:49:22.000This is going to be a hard-fought, heated campaign of ideas.
00:49:27.000In the days and weeks and months ahead, I will strive to do a better job myself of elevating the political discussion.
00:50:07.000Trump starts to yell at Acosta, and it goes predictably where you would think it would.
00:50:09.000And then Jim Acosta tries to sell a few books.
00:50:11.000I haven't been given help from any country.
00:50:15.000And if you see what CNN, your wonderful network, said, I guess they apologized in a way for, didn't they apologize for the fact that they said certain things that weren't true?
00:50:28.000Tell me, what was their apology yesterday?
00:50:50.000The fact that you are, you know, talking back to the president.
00:50:53.000I do love that the media, they love themselves so much and they don't understand why their legitimacy plummets every time they do this.
00:50:59.000Instead of just sort of allowing Trump to do what he's going to do and then pointing out that Trump is wrong about something, that fighting with the president makes them look like they are participants in the drama rather than observers and coverers of the drama.
00:51:10.000This is the great rap that I've had on CNN for years.
00:51:12.000I mean, I said this to Don Lemon on CNN.
00:51:14.000I said, like, if you want people to take you more seriously, you really do need to make it clear that you are standing for the American people and not just for the people at CNN.
00:51:22.000It looks like, in these debates with Trump, that it's Trump versus the media.
00:51:25.000And that's exactly the battle that Trump wants.
00:51:27.000And it's the battle the media want to.
00:51:28.000It's not the media standing there on behalf of the American people.
00:51:31.000It's Jim Acosta standing there on behalf of Jim Acosta or Jim Acosta standing there on behalf of the CNN higher-ups and commenting on the action as a participant.
00:51:40.000Well, that's not what the media was ever supposed to be.
00:51:41.000I mean, if the idea is that you're an objective member of the media and objectivity is your business, then shouldn't you be objective rather than being there doing a presidential debate with President Trump?
00:51:56.000But I just, I think that the sort of weird celebration of Jim Acosta for this sort of stuff It doesn't do anything useful for CNN.
00:52:05.000It doesn't do anything useful for the political debate.
00:52:08.000Okay, before I leave, I just have to mention one quick thing that I like.
00:52:12.000I mentioned it on the radio show yesterday, but I would be amiss if my podcast audience were not informed of it.
00:52:17.000Cenk Aiger apparently is very, very upset at his own staff for considering unionizing.
00:52:23.000And that's pretty great because Cenk is a Bernie Sanders guy.
00:52:26.000And Cenk is one of these people who believes that American industry has been under-unionized.
00:52:30.000And so apparently there was a meeting on February 12th, because his staff was thinking of unionizing, at which Cenk went wild and started throwing papers on the ground.
00:52:37.000Cenk, for people who don't know, The Young Turks is a wild left network over on YouTube.
00:52:41.000And so Cenk said, if you unionize, you're going to hurt our profit margins, you're going to destroy the business.
00:52:45.000And I have one response, which is let me just let me get it together in my head for a second.