Impeachment is back in full swing, and it's time to talk about it. Today, Democratic lawyers are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in support of a possible vote on whether to impeach President Trump. But is it really impeachment or censure that's the real issue here? And why is it so important that impeachment be used as a tool in order to protect the president from impeachment? Ben Shapiro argues that impeachment is not about protecting the president, it's about removing him from office. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to ExpressVpn.me/TheBenShannonShow and use coupon code "UPLEVEL" for 20% off "ExpressVPN" at checkout. The show is also available on most major podcast directories, including Audible, iTunes, and Podcoin. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Ben Shapiro - Ben Shapiro's latest book: "Out of the Box" is out now! If you haven't already checked out his new book "Out Of The Box" yet, you can do so here: Buy a copy of the book for only $99.99 at Amazon Prime and Kindle, or you can get a limited edition copy for free when you sign up for the paperback edition edition of the new edition of Out of the Out of The Box edition of his book, Out Of the Box edition, out soon! It's coming out in paperback! Subscribe to the Out Of The Outlaw: The Best of the Outsourcing Guide? Subscribe on Audible's newest issue will be available on Amazon Prime Video, Blu-ray and Kindle Fire HDX, Skype, Vimeo, and Vimeo is also have it on the Kindle Fire, and subscribe to the Audible Prime, and also watch the podcast on Vimeo.com? Download the entire service, coming soon, too! Download MP3 and subscribe on the Podulphia App? Subscribe to The FiveThirtyEight Podcasting Service? Learn more about your ad-free version of the show on the Four Seasons Traveler's newest episode of the Ben Shapiro Podcasts "Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, Ben's new podcast, "The Best Podcasts" Subscribe to Ben's New York Times bestselling book, "Outro Music" is available on Prime Video and much more! FREE FASTING GOING DEFINITORY: Subscribe to his new podcasting service?
00:00:00.000Democrats prepare to declare the 2020 election illegitimate, a terrorist attack strains U.S.-Saudi relations, and the media take Nikki Haley wildly out of context.
00:00:48.000Now that I know a bunch of Democratic partisan hacks like Barry Burke are speaking, this has totally changed my opinion of everything.
00:00:53.000Barry Burke is a longtime Democratic partisan.
00:00:55.000He's written a bunch for the Brookings Institute.
00:00:57.000He suggested that Trump was guilty of collusion with regard to Russia.
00:01:01.000He suggested that Trump was guilty of obstruction with regard to the Mueller investigation.
00:01:05.000He was working for the House Judiciary Committee as early as February.
00:01:08.000He actually left his law firm to work for the House Judiciary Committee in February.
00:01:11.000Now, you may be asking yourself, Well, why was he working for the House Judiciary Committee in February when the Ukraine stuff only began to happen in like May and June?
00:01:21.000And the answer is because Barry Burke has been pro-impeachment for a very long time.
00:01:25.000But now we are supposed to take it with the utmost seriousness when the Democrats call forth people who have been for impeachment for years to say that actually they discovered an impeachable offense.
00:01:36.000Unbelievably enough, Barry Burke, who really has been in favor of impeachment for years, All the constitutional experts who testified recognize that obstructing an investigation is an impeachable offense.
00:01:44.000for the House Democrats testifying what House Democrats want to hear, which is that House Democrats should impeach President Trump.
00:01:50.000All the constitutional experts who testified recognized that obstructing an investigation is an impeachable offense.
00:01:56.000But here, the offense we're talking about that's being interfered or obstructed with is interfering with this very election that's coming up.
00:02:03.000And I submit to you, given what happened with the Department of Justice investigation, given what's happening here, if in fact President Trump can get away with what he did again, our imagination is the only limit to what President Trump may do next, or what our imagination is the only limit to what President Trump may do next, or what a future president may do next, to try to abuse his or her power, to serve his own personal you're Your imagination is the only limit.
00:02:33.000Wow, I have a pretty wild imagination, as it turns out.
00:02:36.000Would it be considered abuse of power if a president, say, said directly to the Russian government that he would grant them extra flexibility on foreign policy?
00:02:42.000Should they be nice to him before the election?
00:02:43.000Would that be an abuse of power, per se?
00:02:45.000You know, like just before an election, like Barack Obama did in 2012?
00:02:48.000How about like if Bill Clinton were taking money from Chinese cutouts back in the 1996 election and simultaneously declassifying nuclear secrets.
00:03:28.000If they'd gone for censure, they probably could have peeled off a few Republicans to vote in favor of censuring Trump.
00:03:33.000But they went for impeachment, and that makes the Republican case very easy, which is you don't have the necessary goods on President Trump For impeachment, but it really isn't about that.
00:03:40.000It's about something else and something that actually is quite dangerous for the Republic.
00:03:44.000Not just misusing impeachment, which, again, I'm not super bothered by parties misusing impeachment.
00:03:50.000Impeachment was always a political power.
00:03:52.000I'm much more bothered by something else.
00:03:53.000A real danger, I think, to the Republic, and it doesn't come from presidential abusive power.
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00:05:51.000Not one of those elections have Democrats deemed legitimate.
00:05:54.000In 2004, they said it was illegitimate because Bush was not legitimately elected in 2000.
00:05:57.000They said that Al Gore was elected in 2000 because Gore won the popular vote, despite the fact that Gore did not actually win the vote in Florida, and they tried to manipulate as much as they could.
00:06:06.000They tried to count certain ballots and not count other ballots in order to achieve their desired result.
00:06:10.000The bottom line is, Bush won that election.
00:06:12.000Hey, Democrats never accepted that he won that election, which means that everything that he did, in terms of shaping the Supreme Court afterward, is illegitimate, according to Democrats.
00:06:20.0002004, because 2000, according to Democrats, was illegitimate, is also illegitimate.
00:06:25.0002016, according to Democrats, is illegitimate, not just because Trump lost the popular vote, but because of quote-unquote Russian interference.
00:06:41.000Democrats will say things like, well, the Russians were involved in the 2016 election and that shifted the election.
00:06:47.000I need the evidence that it shifted the election.
00:06:48.000I know they were trying to manipulate, but do you really believe that a few Facebook memes shifted the election in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania?
00:06:57.000Because as someone who is one of the, my personal Facebook page is one of the most highly trafficked Facebook pages on Facebook, and I can tell you the statistics that were shown by the Senate Intelligence Committee about the reach and power of Russian posts on Facebook, it was minimal.
00:07:13.000I mean, when people say, oh, this vast Russian campaign.
00:07:16.000Okay, the vast Russian... The only case that you can make that the Russians really impacted the 2016 election is that the Russians were working with Wikileaks and they were sending out those DNC emails.
00:07:25.000That at least is a fair case, because it shifted the nature of the election.
00:07:28.000But again, if that had not come from the Russians, then it would have made a difference.
00:07:32.000And also, Is that Russian manipulation or Wikileaks manipulation?
00:07:36.000Even if it's Russian manipulation, let's assume that's Russian manipulation.
00:07:39.000That's not Trump-Russia collusion, number one.
00:07:41.000And number two, the other element of the Russian manipulation that Democrats are constantly talking about is the Facebook post with all of that.
00:07:47.000So again, the best case that the Russians manipulated the 2016 election has to do with the release of those DNC emails where John Podesta was phished and then all of those emails were released.
00:07:57.000You'd have to show that in the absence of the release of those DNC emails that the Democrats still don't lose that election because it turns out that the bigger issue was not what was in those DNC emails, which again was part of the campaign but certainly not the entirety of the campaign.
00:08:09.000The biggest issue in the 2016 election was that Hillary Clinton had taken 33,000 class emails and put them on her private homebrew server in her bathroom and then they disappeared and then she bleach bit the thing.
00:08:41.000With all of that said, the Democrats refuse to accept the results of the 2016 election.
00:08:45.000They see it as completely illegitimate.
00:08:46.000They believe that Hillary Clinton was the elected president.
00:08:48.000And we've seen the Democrats extend this line of thought to the George Governor's race, for example, where Stacey Abrams lost by 50,000 votes.
00:08:55.000You can say that that's a close election.
00:09:00.000Stacey Abrams lost by a fairly large margin in the absolute vote in Georgia.
00:09:04.000Democrats still claim that Stacey Abrams was the fairly elected governor of Georgia.
00:09:08.000So now moving forward to 2020, what Democrats are attempting to do with this impeachment effort is set up an argument that if Donald Trump is elected in 2020, it's because of Ukraine manipulation.
00:09:18.000That if it were not for Trump interfering in Ukraine and trying to militarize American military aid to Ukraine in order to get dirt on Joe Biden, that Trump wouldn't have won the 2020 election.
00:09:27.000They're setting this thing up in advance.
00:09:29.000This is why they say it's urgent to get Trump out now.
00:09:31.000They say if we don't get Trump out now, then Trump will manipulate 2020 just the way he manipulated 2016.
00:09:36.000Well, you cannot have a functional republic when people do not accept the results of elections.
00:09:41.000This used to be a Democrat talking point.
00:09:42.000They said this in 2015-2016 about Trump.
00:09:44.000They said, Trump's never going to accept the results of the 2016 election.
00:09:48.000And he's just going to agitate from the outside.
00:09:50.000And then we're not going to be able to have a republic.
00:09:51.000Because the truth is, what holds a republic together... Yoni Appledam had a piece like this over at The Atlantic making this argument.
00:09:59.000What holds a republic together is your feeling that the pain that you experience staying in the republic is less egregious than the pain that you would experience leaving the republic.
00:10:12.000In other words, you have to feel as though even if you lost the election, number one, it's not a threat to your very way of life, and number two, you have to feel like the election was legitimate.
00:10:22.000Well, Democrats are tearing away at both of those factors right now.
00:10:25.000They're saying that Trump is not only a threat to your way of life, he's an incipient Hitler, right?
00:10:29.000This guy is going to vi- Your imagination is the only limit on the boundaries of what President Trump will do to violate the American compact.
00:10:35.000And number two, his election is illegitimate, right?
00:10:37.000They're setting this thing up in advance.
00:10:39.000In a second, I'm going to show you Jerry Nadler Jerry Nadler saying this openly, I mean saying openly that if Donald Trump is not impeached that he will cheat and that the election will be skewed and that nobody should accept it.
00:10:52.000We're living in a very dangerous, this is dangerous stuff.
00:10:54.000And by the way, it was dangerous if Trump had not accepted the results of the 2016 election if Hillary Clinton won.
00:10:59.000It would be dangerous if in 2020 a Democrat were to win and Donald Trump were to sit outside and say this election was not fair and I don't accept the result of the election.
00:11:09.000The one good thing that Al Gore did, in short-lived fashion, but the one good thing that Al Gore did is after he lost that election, he said, okay, George W. Bush is president of the United States now.
00:11:18.000That was a good thing that Al Gore did and a worthwhile thing that Al Gore did.
00:11:22.000If we are not coming to the point where Democrats refuse to accept the results of elections they lose, we got a problem.
00:11:28.000And if Republicans do the same thing, we don't have a Republic anymore.
00:11:31.000We just have people clubbing each other over the head.
00:11:34.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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00:13:10.000We also are faced with a very direct threat that this president put himself repeatedly above the interest of the country and poses a threat to the integrity of the next election.
00:13:20.000That's not something we were talking about 20 years ago.
00:13:24.000He poses a threat to the integrity of the next election if he's allowed to continue to do what he's doing.
00:13:29.000Okay, that right there is a pre-emptive claim by Jerry Nadler that whatever happens in the next election, if a Republican wins, it's corrupt.
00:13:57.000Since I was four years old, we have not had a legitimately elected Republican president in this country since I was a four-year-old child, according to the Democrats.
00:14:05.000And that is because, again, Bush was illegitimate, and now Trump is illegitimate.
00:14:10.000And then Democrats wonder why Republicans look at them and they say, okay, well, we don't trust you with power.
00:14:18.000You think every time people dismiss your concerns, your political concerns, every time you think that people overrule you and think that you're wrong, that that is because the American people are not actually overruling you and thinking you are wrong.
00:14:31.000According to Democrats, Democrats have never been wrong.
00:14:34.000The American people have just been screwed in some way by the electoral system.
00:14:38.000It's why you see Elizabeth Warren running around saying the Electoral College is unfair.
00:14:42.000It's why you see the Democrats running around for the past several years saying the United States Senate should be reconstituted according to population, which of course defeats the purpose of the United States Senate.
00:14:51.000The Democrats, for all the talk about Trump as a threat to the system, Trump has not actually threatened the system.
00:14:56.000Trump, like really, what is the giant threat to the system that Donald Trump has provided?
00:15:01.000So far, Donald Trump has done less with executive orders than Barack Obama did.
00:15:06.000He hasn't been droning American citizens overseas the way that Barack Obama was, so far as I'm aware.
00:15:11.000He's continued to drone more, but not nearly at the same rate that Barack Obama was.
00:15:16.000He certainly didn't militarize the IRS the way that Obama's IRS was militarized.
00:15:20.000He didn't militarize his HHS the way that Barack Obama militarized his HHS.
00:15:49.000I think Obama was just elegant and subtle in a way that Donald Trump is not.
00:15:52.000I mean, Donald Trump is a direct rebuttal to the subtlety and elegance of Barack Obama in a variety of ways for both good and bad.
00:16:00.000But with that said, if you're talking about threats to the system, Democrats are openly calling for the overthrow of the Electoral College, they want the reconstitution of the United States Senate, and they are saying that if Donald Trump wins in 2020, it is fundamentally illegitimate.
00:16:18.000Al Green, the representative from New York, who's been trying to impeach Trump since literally the first day that Trump was in office.
00:16:24.000Al Green says that Trump has to be thrown out of office, not because Donald Trump has committed some sort of impeachable crime, but because Donald Trump is a bad man who represents the history of slavery in America.
00:16:36.000If you believe that Donald Trump is a representative of slavery in the United States, and also that if he wins election, it's fundamentally illegitimate, How do you live in a country with people who believe that every election is stolen from them?
00:16:55.000The fact is that if Donald Trump loses, and if Donald Trump then goes out and he says, this election was stolen from me for whatever reason, right?
00:17:19.000You have to accept the results of elections.
00:17:21.000But Democrats never have, and this is the great hypocrisy of Democrats.
00:17:23.000They were blaming Trump for this preemptively, and they have yet to accept the result of an election since, again, for 20 years they keep saying that Republicans who are elected are not actually elected.
00:17:34.000Meanwhile, you have actual manipulated elections like Norm Coleman versus Al Franken in the state of Minnesota, where votes are magically discovered after the final count is in.
00:17:42.000Or the Dino Rossi race in Washington state, A few years back, where a Democrat suddenly discovers votes that puts the Democrat over the top.
00:17:49.000Like, those are actual questionable elections.
00:17:51.000But I'm sorry, 2016, as far as the actual vote count, was not a questionable election.
00:17:56.000And Donald Trump did not coordinate with the Russians, as the Mueller Report found.
00:18:00.000And yet we are still told he's illegitimate.
00:18:02.000And now the Democrats are playing up that Trump is illegitimate going into 2020.
00:18:05.000And no matter what happens, he will be illegitimate even if he wins.
00:18:09.000Also, he happens to be a vicious pro-slavery racist, according to Al Green.
00:18:13.000So, things are going well in the country.
00:18:16.000I do believe, ma'am, that we have to deal with the original sin.
00:18:25.000Slavery was the thing that put all of what President Trump has done lately into motion.
00:18:32.000But until we deal with the issue of invidious discrimination as it relates to LGBTQ community, the anti-Semitism, the racism, the Islamophobia, the transphobia, and also the misogyny that he has exemplified, I don't think our work is done.
00:18:51.000Okay, what the hell does that have to do with impeachment exactly?
00:18:54.000Remember, the question before that was an impeachment question.
00:18:57.000What does that have to do with impeachment?
00:18:58.000And by the way, again, Nancy Pelosi is engaged in this sort of language.
00:19:02.000So, here's what we've learned from the Democrats.
00:19:03.000If Donald Trump is re-elected, or if he is not impeached, the civilization itself is at stake.
00:20:26.000By the way, I'll just note that Nancy Pelosi, the same person who last week was suggesting that it would be ridiculous to say that she hates the president and that's why she's impeaching.
00:20:33.000Back in 1998, she said the only reason Republicans were impeaching was because they hated President Clinton.
00:20:38.000Today, the Republican majority is not judging the president with fairness, but impeaching him with a vengeance.
00:20:46.000In the investigation of the president, fundamental principles which Americans hold dear Privacy, fairness, checks and balances have been seriously violated.
00:21:18.000Okay, we'll get to more of this in just one second, and we'll get to the added incendiary factor here of media malfeasance when it comes to coverage of our politics, because the media just lied about our politics on a routine basis.
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00:25:10.000The attempt to heighten the chaos is one of the things the Democrats and the media want to do, because if you heighten the chaos, then it provides the contrast of a quote-unquote back-to-normalcy campaign for the Democrats.
00:25:20.000This is why Joe Biden is doing well in the general polling.
00:25:22.000It's also why he's doing well in the primary polling, because most Americans are tired.
00:25:54.000So we've had over the past few weeks, we've had past few years, we've had Democrats claim fundamental American institutions, like key American institutions need to go because they're not democratic.
00:26:05.000We've heard that Republicans are vicious racists.
00:26:07.000We want to put y'all back in chains in the word of Joe Biden about Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human being who has ever walked the earth.
00:26:13.000We've heard from Democrats that they want to get rid of the Electoral College, they want to rewrite the U.S.
00:26:18.000Senate, they want to stack the Supreme Court, because Republicans are a threat to everything you hold dear, and every time Republicans win a presidential election, it's illegitimate.
00:26:25.000And by the way, if Donald Trump wins in 2020, it's because he wasn't impeached and because he is And because he's militarizing American foreign policy in order to benefit himself in the 2020 election.
00:26:34.000Add on top of that the media claiming that Republicans are invariably and always crazy people and the media covering these things in incredibly false ways.
00:26:43.000So let me give you a couple of quick examples.
00:26:45.000First example is about President Trump.
00:26:47.000So President Trump over the weekend, speaks at this pro-Israel council, the Israeli-American council.
00:26:57.000And Democrats, particularly reporters from places like Vox, or activists from places like Media Matters, they immediately clip these things out of context in order to suggest that President Trump is a vicious anti-Semite while he's being cheered loudly by the Israeli-American council.
00:27:13.000A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well.
00:27:59.000There were people in the media who suggested that this was an anti-semitic line because he was saying to Jews that some of them are not nice people.
00:28:07.000He's explicitly talking about people he did real estate with.
00:28:10.000The entire clip is about how I do deals with you guys.
00:28:34.000Okay, as usual, not always in the best way, but what he says here is not actually wrong.
00:28:40.000Here's President, and again, they try to claim that this is anti-Semitic.
00:28:42.000Here's President Trump saying that he is very pro-Israel and Jews should be more pro-Israel.
00:28:47.000Now, as I've said before, if what he means by that is that people with the last name Berg and Steen ought to be more pro-Israel, then that's silly because there are a lot of people who are born Jewish who don't give a damn about Israel.
00:28:56.000But if he means people who actually care about Judaism, people who consider themselves Jews for purposes of public discussion, Then he is correct.
00:29:04.000There are many Jews who do not care enough about Israel.
00:29:06.000Many, many Jews who do not care enough about Israel, who care more about abortion until ninth month and same-sex marriage than they do about Israel.
00:29:13.000Which, if you have any semblance of understanding of Judaism, is kind of ridiculous.
00:29:17.000Trump is not wrong in what he says here.
00:29:19.000The media portrayed this as anti-Semitic.
00:29:21.000We have to get the people of our country, of this country, to love Israel more.
00:29:50.000Okay, but we're gonna pretend that that is him being virulently anti-semitic from the same party that voted in the last week.
00:29:58.000That Jews settling in historic Jewish areas is a violation of international law, and four members of the House Democratic Party decided they would not vote even for that condemnation of Trump because it would suggest a two-state solution.
00:30:11.000Rashida Tlaib, who's a blatant anti-Semite from Michigan, she suggested that when it comes to Israel, there should not be a Jewish state.
00:30:17.000She said there should not be a two-state solution, okay?
00:30:18.000Understand, a two-state solution, according to Rashida Tlaib, would be a Palestinian state and a Jewish state.
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00:33:13.000So Nikki Haley did an interview with the former ambassador to the UN, former South Carolina governor.
00:33:18.000Remember, when she was governor of South Carolina, while she was governor, there was a mass shooting at a Charleston church by a brutal terrorist racist, white supremacist racist.
00:33:28.000And then there was a picture of that guy holding a Confederate flag.
00:33:31.000And Nikki Haley, as the governor of the state, had the Confederate flag, battle flag, removed from state grounds and put in a museum.
00:33:39.000And she made a speech about it at the time talking about the the conflicted history of the confederate flag how many people saw it as a symbol of bravery and and home and hearth and how many people saw it as a symbol of racism which of course it originally was right and how that morphed over time for many people and so it didn't have its original relation to slavery but she saw how it was divisive and she saw how how it hurt people and and all of this okay so she was on Glenn Beck and she was asked about the confederate flag controversy and here is what she said
00:34:05.000And the ability of the media to take perfectly innocuous statements out of context and use it to call people like Nikki Haley racist.
00:34:12.000Remember, she's the person who took it off state grounds in South Carolina in 2015 and made a speech about the history of the Confederate flag.
00:34:20.000She made a statement about it, about how she totally understood why when black Americans looked at that flag, they saw, effectively speaking, a swastika.
00:34:29.000But she also understood that the vast majority of people who had a Confederate flag bumper sticker on the back of their car were not Nazis and were not white supremacists.
00:34:37.000All of those things can be true at the same time.
00:34:39.000They suggested, over the weekend, that Nikki Haley was actually a racist who was making excuses for the original Confederate flag and pretending that it didn't have any link to historic racism.
00:34:49.000They did it based on taking her out of context on Glenn Beck's show.
00:34:54.000Here is this guy that comes out with his manifesto holding the Confederate flag and had just hijacked everything that people thought of.
00:35:05.000We don't have hateful people in South Carolina.
00:35:07.000There's always the small minority that's always going to be there.
00:35:09.000But people saw it as service and sacrifice and heritage.
00:35:15.000But once he did that, There was no way to overcome it, and the national media came in in droves.
00:35:25.000They wanted to make this about racism.
00:35:26.000They wanted to make it about gun control.
00:35:28.000They wanted to make it about death penalty.
00:35:31.000Okay, so she says that, and they say, oh, well, that means that she thinks that the Confederate flag doesn't have any history of relation to racism.
00:35:40.000In 2015, she specifically made statements about exactly what these, what exactly the Confederate flag was, right?
00:35:48.000She gave a statement, June, 2015, right?
00:35:52.000A televised statement, and she talked about the people of South Carolina, and she talked about the, she talked about the Confederate flag, And she said in that speech on matters of race, South Carolina has a tough history.
00:36:02.000We all know that many of us have seen it in our own lives and lives of our parents and grandparents.
00:36:36.000At the same time, It is what she said in 2015, when she removed the flag from state grounds.
00:36:41.000At the same time, for many others in South Carolina, the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.
00:36:46.000As a state, we can survive, as we have done, while still being home to both of those viewpoints.
00:36:50.000We do not need to declare a winner and a loser here.
00:36:52.000We respect freedom of expression and that for those who wish to show their respect for the flag on their private property, no one will stand in your way.
00:36:59.000And events of the past week call upon us to look at this in a different way.
00:37:02.000Fifteen years ago, after much contentious debate, South Carolina came together in a bipartisan way to move the flag from atop the Capitol dome.
00:37:09.000Today, we are here in a moment of unity in our state without ill will to say it's time to move the flag from Capitol grounds.
00:37:15.000And now they're trying to paint Nikki Haley as a brutal racist.
00:37:19.000Now they're trying to paint Nikki Haley who moved the flag.
00:37:24.000Hey, this is part of a broader agenda to suggest that the Republican Party utterly and completely is radical and is trying to tear apart the country and is dangerous to the country.
00:37:32.000And also, if they win elections, the elections are illegitimate.
00:37:42.000Okay, the evidence that Republicans are attempting to quote-unquote suppress the vote and keep people from being able to vote based on voter ID laws is absurd.
00:37:50.000The idea that you want to make sure that somebody is voting, who says they're voting, by having them show an ID, that is not voter suppression.
00:37:59.000Poll tests, those are voter suppression.
00:38:02.000Constitutionally speaking, it is not voter suppression to suggest that polling places have to be open for widespread hours, not at specific hours of the day.
00:38:13.000When in Georgia, the case where Democrats keep saying there was voter suppression, black turnout has outpaced black share of the population in Georgia for years, including in the Stacey Abrams race.
00:38:23.000Hey, that's not voter suppression, but Democrats keep claiming this stuff so they can claim that every election is illegitimate.
00:38:28.000And then you get people like Charles Blow, again, awful columnist for the New York Times, with a piece called, Oh, Nikki, You're So Wrong.
00:38:35.000There is much Nikki Haley could learn from a true heroine of the South Carolina Confederate flag removal, Bree Newsom Bass.
00:38:40.000And then he has a long column about how Nikki Haley About how Nikki Haley doesn't understand the history of the Confederate flag.
00:38:49.000She gave an astonishing statement for the very brazenness of its erasure of history and its bowing to a racist narrative.
00:38:54.000Any image of morality and unity Haley had cultivated vanished when those words left her lips.
00:38:59.000She did not say, my view of the Confederate flag is that the Confederate flag only represents heroism and decency.
00:39:15.000Because five minutes ago, Democrats were saying the same thing.
00:39:20.000Joe Biden praised a group that displayed the Confederate flag as fine people, like three years ago, four years ago.
00:39:28.000Howard Dean famously invoked the Confederate flag in his 2004 race.
00:39:33.000Here is Joe Biden, this is just a few years ago, talking about the fine people who displayed the Confederate flag.
00:39:38.000A very moving and eloquent speech as a son of the Confederacy.
00:39:46.000Acknowledging that it was time to change and yield to a position that Senator Carol Moseley Braun raised on the floor of the Senate, not granting a federal charter to a organization made up of many fine people who continue to display the Confederate flag
00:40:14.000Okay, so again, many fine people who displayed the Confederate flag.
00:40:17.000Howard Dean did the same thing back in 2004, and he said that he wanted to be the candidate for Democrats who flew a Confederate flag on their bumper sticker.
00:40:27.000This was acceptable until five seconds ago.
00:40:29.000Nikki Haley says it, it's no longer acceptable because everyone apparently who has a Confederate flag on their bumper sticker is a racist, which is a hell of a way to win elections in the South if you're a Democrat, really.
00:40:37.000To call everyone who has a Confederate flag a vicious racist?
00:40:42.000Like the Dukes of Hazzard are now vicious racists?
00:40:46.000Here's Howard Dean back when the Democrats were slightly less insane.
00:40:50.000I don't want to win without the South.
00:40:52.000I'm going to go to the South and I'm going to say to white guys who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back of their car, we want your vote too because your kids don't have health insurance either!
00:41:08.000Okay, when Democrats said it, it was fine.
00:41:10.000When Republicans say it, apparently it is truly, truly awful.
00:41:13.000Meanwhile, if you're a Democrat, you can say pretty much anything and the media will let you get away with it.
00:41:16.000So, AOC, the illustrious AOC, the brilliant AOC, she tweeted out that Amazon is coming to New York.
00:41:36.000Again, she doesn't even understand Trump's food stamp policy.
00:41:39.000The food stamp policy that has work requirements does not apply to families with children.
00:41:41.00080 deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos and corporate giveaways.
00:41:44.000Maybe the Trump administration should focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families.
00:41:49.000Again, she doesn't even understand Trump's food stamp policy.
00:41:52.000The food stamp policy that has work requirements does not apply to families with children.
00:41:56.000It only applies to single people who are not working because she doesn't like a Again, she's mischaracterizing this stuff.
00:42:04.000Again, she's mischaracterizing this stuff.
00:42:05.000But also, it's worth noting that the 25,000 Amazon jobs that were supposed to come to New York, they were supposed to come to her district.
00:42:14.000Now, 1,500 jobs are coming to New York outside her district.
00:42:46.000Marion Barry absolutely said that he would create unrest in the streets unless his constituents were given what they wanted.
00:42:54.000And there's a very good book on this, and the name of it escapes me, but I've mentioned it in the past on the show.
00:43:00.000Talking about how America's major cities were riven by chaos, specifically designed to create government policy from the inside.
00:43:08.000There's sort of this inside-outside game.
00:43:09.000You see it on college campuses a lot, where there will be chaos when a speaker comes to campus, and then the administration, instead of cracking down on the people who are committing the chaos, the administration just caves to the chaos and says, okay, I guess we'll alleviate your woes.
00:43:44.000When you turn off, and by the way, it's not just left-wingers.
00:43:46.000When you turn off Fox, when you turn off my show, when you turn off any of the other, when you don't follow politics for five seconds, does it feel like chaos or does it feel like things are kind of okay?
00:43:53.000It feels like things are kind of okay.
00:43:55.000But for a lot of the members of the democratic media, the goal is to create this feeling of chaos so that you're gonna go, okay, fine, just put old Joe in there.
00:44:02.000Honestly, like old Joe, just do old Joe.
00:44:04.000Because old Joe, I mean, like, guy's not even alive.
00:44:26.000He's been saying the whole time that Hunter never did.
00:44:29.000He never did anything wrong with regard to Hunter.
00:44:30.000But now he's like, I suppose we should put some restrictions on Hunter, like not allowing him to trot around the globe, picking up bags of cash because his last name is the same as mine.
00:44:38.000Here's Joe Biden now reversing course.
00:46:21.000He's revised himself on his own positions that used to be moderate.
00:46:23.000He came out over the weekend and again suggested we have to dump the Hyde Amendment, which means federal funding for direct abortion.
00:46:30.000I came out a while ago saying we have to get rid of the Hyde Amendment because it's no longer doable and usable and no longer a serious option for anybody.
00:46:39.000All the, you have all these states going out and not only challenging whether or not there is a, they're saying that it's a criminal offense, that you're going back to the agreement.
00:46:50.000Here, let me, let me, the best way to say it.
00:46:53.000If I get elected President of the United States and the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade, I'm going to send legislation to the United States Congress to pass it and codify it.
00:47:03.000Okay, so the media's play here is put that doddering old nut in the White House.
00:47:07.000Because if you put that doddering old nut in the White House, then everyone will feel more stable.
00:47:11.000Do you feel more stable, looking at that guy?
00:47:14.000The only way they feel more stable is if Trump keeps saying crazy things.
00:47:16.000It's why Trump should stop saying crazy things, but does that seem like a beacon of stability to you?
00:47:21.000Maybe Elizabeth Warren seems like a beacon of stability to you.
00:47:24.000Again, the play of the media here is make things feel like the house is on fire and that the arsonists will come in and put out the fire if, and only if, you pay the ransom.
00:47:35.000But does Elizabeth Warren feel like a beacon of stability?
00:47:43.000I do appreciate her blue sweater today.
00:47:45.000She has this rotating, we've been noticing this, she has a rotating series of sweaters every single day, this very weird kind of 1970s teaching.
00:47:58.000Here is Elizabeth Warren in a blue sweater, which she's changing it up today, talking about how she shouldn't have called herself Native American, which is weird.
00:48:04.000She did so for decades to the cheers of the to the cheers of the academic left.
00:48:15.000And I have apologized for confusion I've caused on tribal citizenship, tribal sovereignty and for or any harm that I've caused.
00:48:27.000Weird how every Republican complaint about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden has now been half-legitimated by Joe Biden saying he's going to redo the restrictions when he becomes president.
00:48:36.000And every complaint about Elizabeth Warren being foca-hontas.
00:48:39.000Those have been legitimized by now, her backing off.
00:48:41.000But for years, we were told that you're not allowed to ask about Hunter Biden.
00:48:52.000And I trust our media to establish that baseline level of stability.
00:48:56.000By the way, these are the same Democrats who are claiming, again, that Donald Trump is responsible for every evil thing.
00:49:01.000Hillary Clinton suggesting that Trump is inciting mass shootings at synagogues and churches and Walmart.
00:49:06.000Here is Hillary Clinton, who's definitely, definitely not campaigning for president.
00:49:09.000Saying that chaos has broken out because of Trump.
00:49:12.000By the way, there were shootings at synagogues before Trump was president.
00:49:15.000There was shooting at the Charleston church shooting was in 2015.
00:49:19.000Barack Obama was president at that time.
00:49:22.000But here's Hillary Clinton suggesting that it's only all chaos is due to Trump.
00:49:25.000Clearly he just incites these deep irrational and unfortunately sometimes violent emotions.
00:49:35.000Some of the people who have gone into synagogues and churches and Walmarts and other places and shot them up and murdered people have clearly been unleashed.
00:49:47.000I don't want to say it's a direct cause.
00:50:04.000The Democratic Party has claimed for years that the Great Society helped the country in innumerable ways.
00:50:11.000Now, the Great Society, really, it was the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, right?
00:50:15.000Those were good pieces of legislation, with the exception that I've always said that the Civil Rights Act should not have been applied to private businesses, that the direct impact of the Civil Rights Act should have come down on state governments that were imposing Jim Crow from above.
00:50:27.000Now, if you have to vote for the entire thing, or not the entire thing, you vote for the entire thing, because more important to stop Jim Crow than even to protect private property rights at the time.
00:50:34.000But, with that said, The rest of the Great Society programs were a dud.
00:50:38.000Not only were they a dud, they were a deeply damaging dud that achieved precisely the opposite of what they intended to achieve in quashing poverty.
00:50:45.000The rates of poverty basically continued to decline at the same rates they were declining before the Great Society programs, except now we were spending 20 trillion dollars on it.
00:50:53.000Amity Shlaes has a great new book about this.
00:51:21.000They led to decades of economic stagnation through the Great Society programs, and we are still bearing the legacy of those in the massive national debt that we carry.
00:51:30.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:51:37.000So there's a performance artist and he taped a banana to a wall.
00:51:42.000It sold for $120,000 at Miami's Art Basel Festival this week.
00:51:47.000If you want to say that we are in the final stages of a civilization, this would probably be a good indicator.
00:51:51.000It's a contemporary art piece titled The Comedian.
00:51:54.000And again, it sold for a staggering $120,000.
00:51:58.000It is now in a different artist's stomach, according to reports.
00:52:00.000The comedian was an installation meant, ostensibly, to make fun of the art world's obsession with banal and uninspired works, according to its creator, Maurizio Catalan.
00:52:08.000But most viewers saw it as simply a rotting banana duct-taped to a wall.
00:52:11.000Daily Wire's Amanda Prestigiacomo reported earlier this week that the piece presented at Art Basel, the American version of the avant-garde Swiss art showcase, is one of three similar pieces showcased around the world, and the artist, Catalan, prides himself on mocking the rest of contemporary art with his work.
00:52:25.000The Banana is a follow-up to his 2017 installation, A Golden Toilet, that sold for $6 million, but is currently missing after a shocking art heist that took place in the UK earlier this year.
00:52:35.000Apparently, The Golden Toilet is now installed at the Pentagon.
00:52:38.000On Saturday, Another contemporary artist decided to make his own show of the duct tape banana.
00:52:42.000He peeled the fruit off the wall and consumed it in front of a crowd of horrified omelookers.
00:53:54.000Yeah, the death of art definitely has taken place in real time, which is why you go to a modern art museum and you're like, oh my kid could paint that.
00:54:08.000And once the art becomes about the message and not about the actual art, The art is supposed to be universal in the sense that it's supposed to have meaning for everyone who takes a look at this.
00:54:59.000By Wednesday, it had already won art world notoriety.
00:55:02.000On Saturday, it achieved a public visibility that any artist would envy, after a self-promoting wag tore the banana off the wall and gobbled it up.
00:55:10.000Suffice it to say that works of contemporary art rarely make the cover of the New York Post, but this is Mr. Cattelan's second recent appearance on the tabloid's front page.
00:55:19.000When it comes to the banana's ontological status as art or produce, I thought we had settled this already.
00:55:22.000If you buy a lightwork by Dan Flavin and the fluorescent bulb starts flickering, you can replace it with a new one.
00:55:27.000If you buy a Sol LeWitt wall drawing and you move a house, you can erase the old one and draw a new one.
00:55:31.000A banana, even more than a light fixture, was always going to require replacement.
00:55:35.000Catalan had already drawn up instructions for the lucky collectors to replace the fruit every day to ten days.
00:55:42.000As to why Catalan's banana has gripped the public imagination, it has something to do with the price.
00:55:46.000Something to do also with the comic potential of bananas.
00:55:52.000Let me reassure you, you are not a hopeless Philistine if you find this all a bit foolish.
00:55:55.000Foolishness and a deflating sense that a culture that once encouraged sublime beauty now only permits dopey jokes is Mr. Catalan's stock in trade.
00:56:03.000But perhaps you will find more to appreciate in Catalan's work if you take notes of two points.
00:56:07.000One formal, one social, says the New York Times art critic.
00:56:10.000First, I've been dismayed to discover that for a work that has been endlessly photographed and parodied over the course of its one week life, almost no one has discussed that it is not just a banana.
00:56:18.000It is a banana and a piece of duct tape.
00:56:24.000Comedian is not a one-note Dadaist imposture in which a commodity is proclaimed a work of art, which would be an entire century out of date now, as dated as a film director mimicking D.W.
00:56:33.000Comedian is a sculpture, one that continues Mr. Catalan's decades-long reliance on suspension to make the obvious seem ridiculous, and to deflate and defeat the pretensions of earlier.
00:56:44.000Seriously, fire the critic, fire the artist, fire everyone.
00:56:48.000The culture that produced the Sistine Chapel has now produced a man duct taping a banana to a wall.
00:56:53.000The culture that produced Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms has now produced a piece of fruit that is rotting on a wall taped there with duct tape.
00:57:00.000And we are supposed to believe that this is a deep and profound commentary On American culture.
00:57:05.000The only commentary on American culture is that anybody took this thing seriously in the first place.
00:58:01.000Politics is downstream of culture, but politics affects culture, too.
00:58:05.000As a banana duct taped to a wall sells for $120,000 at Art Basel, as Drag Queen Story Hour hits preschools, and as kids get hooked on hardcore porn before the age of 10, libertarians beware we examine whether politics can help us fix our screwed up culture.