The Ben Shapiro Show - The Fredo Slur | Ep. 838

00:00:00.000 Is Trump pushing the culture wars or are Democrats?

00:00:03.000 Plus updates on the Jeffrey Epstein case and Chris Cuomo of CNN confronts a heckler.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:08.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:09.000 The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:17.000 We're going to get through all of it in just an hour.

00:00:20.000 I mean, we're really going to pump through this stuff in far less than an hour.

00:00:23.000 Actually, we begin today with the most important story of the day.

00:00:26.000 And that, of course, is CNN's Chris Cuomo gets into an altercation with a heckler.

00:00:31.000 As somebody who has had hecklers in public before, let me say that how you handle hecklers is kind of important part of your job as a public figure.

00:00:31.000 So.

00:00:39.000 Now, I have been rarely confronted by people while I am with my family, but there are jerks out there who will do this. 0.98

00:00:45.000 There are people who will come up to you and say something nasty when you are with your family, and generally the best tactic is to basically push them off and let them go. 0.98

00:00:53.000 I don't mean physically push them off, just kind of like back off, say what you're going to say, man, and then just take off.

00:00:57.000 And that's not a sign of weakness, that's a sign of being smart, because getting into an altercation likely ends with cell phone video of the altercation at the least, and a lawsuit at the most.

00:01:06.000 It's never a very good idea.

00:01:07.000 I mean, this happened to me, like, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago.

00:01:10.000 We were out in public somewhere, and some woman came up to me while I was with my kids, and they're five and three, and my wife was somewhere else, I think she was going to the restroom or something, and I'm holding my five-year-old in one hand, my three-year-old in the other hand, and some woman comes up to me to explain that I'm a white supremacist.

00:01:23.000 I was like, well, you know, we'll have to agree to disagree, have a nice day, and off she went.

00:01:27.000 Well, that is not exactly how things went with Chris Cuomo.

00:01:30.000 So, a bunch of things can be true. 1.00

00:01:32.000 One, hecklers are jerks. 0.99

00:01:34.000 People who come up to you in public, I don't care what your politics, they come up to you in public, they come up to Ted Cruz, they come up to me, they come to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, they come up to Chris Cuomo. 1.00

00:01:42.000 If you go up to Chris Cuomo and you start calling him names in public when he's with his family, you're a jerk. 0.99

00:01:47.000 It is one thing to make him make fun of him on a show like this because that's the nature of the game. 0.99

00:01:52.000 That's the nature of political entertainment.

00:01:54.000 That's the nature of the dialogue.

00:01:56.000 But I promise you that if I were in a room with Chris Cuomo, I wouldn't be insulting him and nor would he be insulting me.

00:02:00.000 That's not the way this works.

00:02:02.000 Now, somebody went up to Chris Cuomo in a public place and started calling him by a name that we on the right frequently use for Chris Cuomo, Fredo.

00:02:10.000 And the reason people call him Fredo is not because he's Italian. 0.88

00:02:12.000 The reason that people call him Fredo is because that's a reference to the dumb brother from The Godfather, obviously. 0.97

00:02:17.000 The implication being that his brother is the smarter brother. 0.99

00:02:20.000 I've been saying for a long time that there's an open competition between Chris Cuomo and his brother Andrew as to which is the dumber Cuomo brother. 0.99

00:02:27.000 Usually Chris tends to take the cake. 0.98

00:02:29.000 Sometimes Andrew surpasses him.

00:02:31.000 Although that's a rare occasion. 0.98

00:02:32.000 In any case, Chris Cuomo is out in public and some young dude walks up to him, kid's a jerk, and calls him Fredo. 0.97

00:02:41.000 And, again, I understand Chris Cuomo getting angry. 0.98

00:02:44.000 I really do.

00:02:45.000 I've been there myself.

00:02:46.000 I understand Chris Cuomo getting ticked off and telling the guy off.

00:02:49.000 I get that.

00:02:50.000 But where Chris Cuomo goes with the term Fredo is a very weird place.

00:02:55.000 And where the media then go with this story is an even weirder place.

00:02:57.000 So here is the altercation, if you can hear the audio.

00:03:01.000 I thought that's who you were.

00:03:02.000 I don't know who you are.

00:03:04.000 Isn't that your brother?

00:03:05.000 I'm a little Italian.

00:03:06.000 I'm an anchor on CNN.

00:03:07.000 Fredo is from the Godfather.

00:03:10.000 He was our weak brother.

00:03:11.000 Isn't that your brother?

00:03:12.000 And they use it as an Italian aspersion.

00:03:14.000 Any of you Italian?

00:03:14.000 Are you Italian?

00:03:16.000 It's a f***ing insult to your people. 1.00

00:03:18.000 It's an insult to your f***ing people. 1.00

00:03:20.000 It's like the n-word for us. 0.99

00:03:22.000 Is that a cool f***ing thing? 0.99

00:03:24.000 You're going to have a f***ing problem. 0.96

00:03:25.000 What are you going to do about it? 0.95

00:03:25.000 What? 0.95

00:03:27.000 I'll f***ing ruin you. 1.00

00:03:28.000 I'll f***ing throw you down these stairs like a f***ing punk. 1.00

00:03:30.000 Come on, come on, boy! 1.00

00:03:31.000 Come on, boy! 0.99

00:03:33.000 You want to call me s***? 0.99

00:03:34.000 Call me s*** then. 1.00

00:03:35.000 I'll f***ing wreck your s***. 1.00

00:03:36.000 I'll f***ing wreck your s***. 1.00

00:03:40.000 Okay, so you do want to ramp down the aggression just a little bit. 0.99

00:03:43.000 This is not the smart way to handle all of this.

00:03:45.000 Now, Sean Hannity came out and praised Chris Cuomo and said Cuomo did nothing wrong here.

00:03:49.000 We're getting a couple things wrong here.

00:03:50.000 Number one, let's be clear.

00:03:52.000 If this were somebody on the right shouting at a protester and threatening to throw them down the effing stairs, it would be yet another in the line of data points proposed by the media that the right is too violent.

00:04:01.000 There's just no question.

00:04:02.000 I mean, if this had been a video of me in public threatening to throw some guy down the stairs, it would be Shapiro unhinged.

00:04:08.000 Shapiro loses it.

00:04:09.000 The same thing is true of any Fox News host or any talk radio host.

00:04:12.000 That's just the way the media operate.

00:04:14.000 When it's Chris Cuomo, it's brave man stands up to young heckler, right?

00:04:18.000 That's number one.

00:04:19.000 Number two, what is he talking about when he says that Fredo is like the N-word for Italians?

00:04:26.000 No, the N-word is mostly like the N-word.

00:04:30.000 Mostly Fredo is not like the N-word for Italians because that's crazy!

00:04:34.000 I was so curious about this, like maybe I had missed it, that I actually googled Fredo and ethnic slur yesterday.

00:04:39.000 There is not a single relevant hit on Google.

00:04:41.000 Not one.

00:04:42.000 It has never been an ethnic slur. 0.95

00:04:44.000 It has always been something you say about a dummy.

00:04:46.000 If you think somebody's a dummy, then you say that they are Fredo.

00:04:49.000 If they're the weaker, younger brother. 0.98

00:04:51.000 Everyone flashes to the scene from the godfather of John Cazale saying, I'm not dumb, I'm smart! 0.98

00:04:57.000 Somebody who really has an outsized opinion of their own intelligence and is insistent that they can handle things, but they're absolutely incompetent and cannot handle things.

00:05:05.000 That is what the term Fredo has come to mean.

00:05:07.000 And to be fair, I really don't think that when it pertains to CNN, Chris Cuomo probably isn't Fredo.

00:05:13.000 Probably Jim Acosta is Fredo.

00:05:14.000 Probably Chris Cuomo is more like Sonny, right? 0.98

00:05:16.000 He's gonna beat somebody to death with the top of a trash can or something. 0.50

00:05:19.000 And that makes Jake Tapper, by default, Michael. 0.98

00:05:22.000 Probably.

00:05:23.000 We'll get to more of this in just a second.

00:05:25.000 Everything's absurd, guys.

00:05:26.000 We live in the Godfather.

00:05:27.000 Jeffrey Epstein is Frank Pantangeli, opening his veins in the bath.

00:05:31.000 And then you've got Chris Cuomo, who is very upset that somebody called him Fredo.

00:05:35.000 The whole thing is rid- I don't know what black hole we entered to end up in this parallel universe, but it was the most fun of the black holes, probably.

00:05:42.000 This is wild.

00:05:44.000 Okay, we'll get to that in a second.

00:05:45.000 First, let's talk about the fact that you probably don't get enough sleep.

00:05:48.000 I don't get enough sleep.

00:05:49.000 And very often, I have trouble falling asleep, or if I wake up in the middle of the night, I have trouble falling back to sleep.

00:05:54.000 And this is why I use the Calm app.

00:05:56.000 It's why we partner with Calm.

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00:06:11.000 If you want to seize the day, you first need to sleep the night.

00:06:13.000 So try Calm.

00:06:14.000 If you don't sleep, you're not going to be as mentally fresh.

00:06:16.000 You're not going to be as physically capable.

00:06:18.000 You might end up screaming at some heckler and threatening to throw him down the stairs or something.

00:06:22.000 You need your sleep.

00:06:23.000 And this is why you need Calm.

00:06:23.000 You need to relax.

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00:06:50.000 Go check them out.

00:06:51.000 OK, so. 0.97

00:06:53.000 If you couldn't actually hear the audio, this guy walks up to Cuomo, he calls him Fredo, and Cuomo says, no punk-ass bitches from the right call me Fredo. 0.97

00:07:03.000 My name is Chris Cuomo. 0.97

00:07:04.000 I'm an anchor on CNN.

00:07:05.000 Fredo's from the Godfather.

00:07:07.000 They're using it as an Italian aspersion. 0.77

00:07:07.000 He was that weak brother. 0.77

00:07:09.000 It's like the N-word for us. 0.98

00:07:12.000 And then he threatens to throw the guy down the stairs like a bleeping punk. 0.88

00:07:16.000 So, as I say, when it comes to people having outsized reactions to people heckling them in public, I have a lot of sympathy.

00:07:23.000 When it comes to Fredo is like the N-word, not so much.

00:07:26.000 Now, here's the hilarious part.

00:07:27.000 CNN not only defended Cuomo's behavior, which is fine, they actually came out and defended the notion that Fredo is a slur.

00:07:36.000 So all it does to turn a word into a slur is have an anchor at CNN call it a longstanding ethnic slur.

00:07:43.000 Fredo is not an ethnic slur.

00:07:46.000 You know how I know?

00:07:46.000 Because I'm saying it right now.

00:07:49.000 Fredo.

00:07:50.000 Not an ethnic slur.

00:07:51.000 When we say the N-word, we say the N-word. 0.75

00:07:53.000 When we say the F-word, the slur that's been used for gay people, we say the F-word on this program. 0.88

00:07:58.000 If I were to say, the slur used for Jews, it would be the K-word. 0.55

00:08:01.000 Right?

00:08:01.000 We all know the ethnic slurs.

00:08:03.000 But Fredo is not an ethnic slur, and I can tell because I'm using it.

00:08:06.000 Like, Fredo.

00:08:08.000 You see how I did that right there?

00:08:09.000 Not an ethnic slur.

00:08:12.000 CNN defends its anchor with this statement, quote, It's not an ethnic slur.

00:08:22.000 It isn't.

00:08:24.000 You know how I know that it's not an ethnic slur?

00:08:26.000 I have a few ways I know it's not an ethnic slur.

00:08:28.000 Way number one, I know it's not an ethnic slur.

00:08:30.000 Like, you would assume that if it were a terrible, terrible ethnic slur, Then, if somebody used it, like, in front of Chris Cuomo, probably, but not about Chris Cuomo, he would stop them, right?

00:08:38.000 If somebody used the N-word in front of you, you would stop them, you'd say, it's not appropriate, stop using that sort of language around me, right?

00:08:44.000 What if somebody used it in front of you on national TV?

00:08:47.000 Then you certainly would stop it.

00:08:48.000 You'd say, guys, we can't do this, right?

00:08:50.000 We can't use that kind of language on TV.

00:08:52.000 That's derogatory and gross.

00:08:55.000 Okay, here's Ana Navarro, like, five months ago, likening one of Trump's sons to Fredo. 0.79

00:08:59.000 Zoos maybe have fences to protect the animals from people like Donald Trump Jr. 0.77

00:09:05.000 who like to shoot them. 0.95

00:09:07.000 This is an entitled, rich, spoiled little brat whose only call to fame is being his daddy's son who hasn't built anything of his own, who hasn't done anything of his own, who is somehow trying to hang on to the fame of his father in order to have some level of relevancy. 0.97

00:09:25.000 Steve is right. 0.87

00:09:26.000 He didn't even make the cut.

00:09:28.000 Look at Chris Cuomo jump in right there and say, Anna, you really can't use that kind of language on my show.

00:09:45.000 Did you hear him say it? 0.97

00:09:46.000 I didn't either because he didn't say it because it's ridiculous. 0.97

00:09:48.000 Because who cares? 0.99

00:09:50.000 Seriously, it's ridiculous. 0.87

00:09:51.000 There are a bevy of articles online calling the Trump family members Fredo. 0.79

00:09:55.000 Again, it is not an ethnic slur.

00:09:57.000 Everyone knows it's not an ethnic slur, apparently, except for, except for Chris Cuomo.

00:10:02.000 And even then, it's only an ethnic slur when applied to Chris Cuomo.

00:10:04.000 If it were such an ethnic slur, then I don't think you'd get Chris Matthews.

00:10:08.000 Just a few months ago, calling Don Jr.

00:10:10.000 Fredo.

00:10:10.000 I come on in here, and I'll rumble, look like I slept underneath an embankment, look like I went under the freeway, and I roll on in here all looking weird, come out of the show, get in that seat, roll around, and start calling people Fredo using ethnic slurs.

00:10:25.000 Like, that one time I went to an Italian restaurant and I ordered some fettuccine alfredo.

00:10:31.000 Ha! 0.89

00:10:31.000 Go! 0.89

00:10:32.000 Like inviting the son, Fredo-like son, of the president to a meeting to give him dirt on his father's opponent in a way that a child would accept that.

00:10:42.000 Anyone else would say, wait a minute, I'm not going to a meeting with the Russians. 0.63

00:10:45.000 You only see Don Jr.

00:10:47.000 He's like Fredo.

00:10:48.000 It's not an ethnic slur.

00:10:49.000 It's just how we use language out here. 0.96

00:10:51.000 Unless I'm a vicious, brutal racist, like everyone else on the right. 0.83

00:10:55.000 Chris Matthews using the word Fredo. 0.97

00:10:57.000 No one cares.

00:10:58.000 Because it's not ethnic slur. 0.99

00:10:59.000 Because this is all ridiculous. 0.97

00:11:01.000 Okay, that part's the part. 0.95

00:11:03.000 Again, I am not on Chris Cuomo's case for getting up in somebody's face who is bothering him in public.

00:11:08.000 It's not something that I would do.

00:11:09.000 I don't think it's good practice.

00:11:11.000 But I do understand the reaction. 0.97

00:11:13.000 Because, again, when people confront other people in public and act like jerks, and people lose it, I kind of get it. 0.99

00:11:21.000 I kind of get it. 0.98

00:11:22.000 However, I would not expect the left to extend the same courtesy to anybody on the right.

00:11:27.000 I remember when Tucker Carlson was confronted at a restaurant in front of his kid and people on the left lost it.

00:11:32.000 How could Tucker Carlson be such an unhinged maniac going crazy in a restaurant?

00:11:37.000 So, I wouldn't expect the same courtesy from those on the left, mainly because people on the left very often don't see people on the right as human beings.

00:11:43.000 Like, I think Chris Cuomo is wrong about a lot of things.

00:11:45.000 I don't think he's very good at his job.

00:11:47.000 But he's a human being, and so I understand him having a human reaction.

00:11:50.000 For a lot of folks on the left, people on the right are simply not human. 0.94

00:11:52.000 And so, if Tucker Carlson gets confronted at a restaurant, and then gets in somebody's face, that's because Tucker Carlson is a monster. 0.79

00:11:59.000 Because, it doesn't matter what the beginning of the sentence is, the end is always, Tucker Carlson is a monster, if you are somebody on the left.

00:12:06.000 Nonetheless, The equation of Fredo with the N-word is quite astonishing.

00:12:12.000 And frankly, I don't know how Chris Cuomo was able to get away with comparing everything he doesn't like to the N-word.

00:12:18.000 If somebody on the right did this, you would assume that this amounted to a tremendous racial insensitivity.

00:12:22.000 If you just kept saying that X, Y, or Z was the equivalent of the N-word on the right, they would say, well, you don't understand the N-word, you don't understand the context, you don't understand its place in American life.

00:12:32.000 There's no real equivalent to the N-word.

00:12:34.000 All of that would be true.

00:12:35.000 All of that would be true.

00:12:36.000 And if somebody on the right did this, if somebody, um, if somebody came up to me and, and used the, the, the very oft-used sort of alt-right rhetoric against, somebody come up to me and they're like, oh, you're short, you're 5'4".

00:12:48.000 And I was like, you know what?

00:12:49.000 That's the equivalent of the N-word.

00:12:51.000 People are like, well, that's kind of insensitive to black folks, isn't it? 0.91

00:12:53.000 To black people.

00:12:54.000 I mean, like, that's not the N-word. 0.76

00:12:56.000 That's just somebody calling you short.

00:12:58.000 5'9", for the record.

00:12:59.000 In any case, Chris Cuomo.

00:13:02.000 That's not the first time that he has equated something with the N-word, and he's got to stop doing it, guys.

00:13:05.000 It's not good policy.

00:13:07.000 And CNN backed him on it, right?

00:13:08.000 CNN was like, yes, Fredo is an ethnic slur, not an ethnic slur.

00:13:12.000 Here is just a few months ago, Chris Cuomo declaring that if you use the term fake news, fake news is like the N-word for members of the media, which makes perfect sense because members of the media have been ganged up on, lynched, hanged for centuries in America, enslaved, treated like second-class citizens, subjected to Jim Crow.

00:13:30.000 Oh wait, none of that has happened to journalists. 0.99

00:13:32.000 So this is a bunch of crap. 1.00

00:13:33.000 Here's Chris Cuomo saying a dumb thing about the N-word. - I see being called fake news as the equivalent of the N-word for journalists, the equivalent of calling an Italian any of the ugly words that people have for that ethnicity. 1.00

00:13:50.000 That's what fake news is to a journalist.

00:13:53.000 It is an ugly insult and you better be right if you're going to charge a journalist with lying on purpose.

00:14:01.000 It's just like the N-word.

00:14:02.000 It's just like the N-word.

00:14:03.000 For Chris Cuomo, everything apparently that offends him is like the N-word.

00:14:07.000 By the way, I just wanted to put it out there.

00:14:08.000 If Fredo is an ethnic slur for Italians, a few others we should be careful of, Frodo is apparently an ethnic slur for Hobbits, and Greedo is actually an ethnic slur for Rodian bounty hunters.

00:14:21.000 So we should be very careful about the kind of verbiage that we use.

00:14:24.000 We don't want to trigger people.

00:14:25.000 We don't want them to get too upset.

00:14:28.000 Enter Donald Trump through the wall like the Kool-Aid man.

00:14:31.000 Is there a controversy?

00:14:33.000 The bat signal is up in the night sky. 0.97

00:14:35.000 The big T for Donald Trump. 0.98

00:14:37.000 Somewhere, someone has said something foolish and Donald Trump must weigh in. 1.00

00:14:42.000 So Donald Trump descends, like the caped crusader he is, into the middle of what is an irrelevant stupid fight. 1.00

00:14:48.000 And he jetpacks in there, like the rocketeer. 1.00

00:14:51.000 He says, I thought Chris was afraid of ulcer.

00:14:54.000 The truth hurts.

00:14:55.000 Totally lost it.

00:14:56.000 Low rating, CNN.

00:14:57.000 Okay, come on, guys.

00:15:05.000 That's some funny bleep.

00:15:06.000 Come on.

00:15:07.000 I mean, like, I understand.

00:15:09.000 Not Lincoln, right?

00:15:10.000 Not... We get it.

00:15:11.000 We get it.

00:15:12.000 Okay, we get all the critiques.

00:15:13.000 I get Bill Kristol ripping on him, demeaning the office of the presidency.

00:15:17.000 I get all...

00:15:18.000 Okay, I get it.

00:15:24.000 I understand.

00:15:25.000 I understand.

00:15:26.000 Okay, I'm on the same page, guys.

00:15:28.000 But come on!

00:15:29.000 Okay, this is funny. 0.99

00:15:31.000 If you can't appreciate the fact that a CNN anchor who calls Trump a white supremacist on a fairly regular basis is likening Fredo, the young, stupid brother from The Godfather, to the N-word, and that Donald Trump is then jumping in to be like, that's right, Fredo. 0.99

00:15:48.000 Get it, Fredo? 1.00

00:15:49.000 The truth hurts.

00:15:51.000 Totally lost it.

00:15:52.000 Low ratings.

00:15:54.000 It's like he's a bot programmed to watch a thousand hours of Trump.

00:15:58.000 And then this is what the tweets come up with.

00:15:59.000 At this point, I don't even know that Trump is tweeting for himself.

00:16:02.000 There's a robot Trump tweeting for Trump, just taking old phrases of Trump's and then stringing them together in tweets.

00:16:09.000 All the tweets are three word phrases.

00:16:11.000 My favorite is the tag at the end.

00:16:13.000 Low ratings at CNN.

00:16:15.000 What does that have to do with anything?

00:16:17.000 But it's the best, and also the worst, and the best also.

00:16:24.000 I thought Chris was Fredo also.

00:16:26.000 I love that movie.

00:16:27.000 That movie's great.

00:16:29.000 Didn't really understand the plot to Godfather 2.

00:16:31.000 And Godfather 3?

00:16:32.000 Why would he ditch Bridget Fonda for Sofia Coppola?

00:16:36.000 Makes no sense.

00:16:37.000 But, Chris, Fredo, on the mark.

00:16:41.000 Mr. President, you're required to the Situation Room, sir.

00:16:47.000 Well, the good news is this means that the media will now have to declare that Fredo is, in fact, an ethnic slur for Italians.

00:16:53.000 Because now Trump said it, right?

00:16:54.000 So now we're just going to rewrite the whole English language because everything Trump says is an ethnic slur.

00:17:00.000 Oh my god. 0.90

00:17:00.000 It's so absurd. 0.90

00:17:02.000 Everything is absurd.

00:17:03.000 How did we enter this reality?

00:17:05.000 How do we get back to the regular reality where Mitt Romney is president since 2012?

00:17:10.000 How do we get back there?

00:17:11.000 I don't know.

00:17:12.000 But I also know it won't be nearly as entertaining.

00:17:13.000 We'll get to more of this if there's more to get to, if I can handle my bleep here.

00:17:18.000 We'll get back to that in just...

00:17:21.000 One second.

00:17:21.000 First, we need to talk about something very serious.

00:17:23.000 I'm talking about your underwear, of course.

00:17:24.000 The fact is, the underwear that you are wearing right now, they've fallen apart because you wore them 35 times and you stuffed them in the wash and now they're falling apart because they weren't durable and they weren't nice and they weren't decent.

00:17:34.000 Instead, you just went and you got like a $10...

00:17:36.000 Yeah, a $10 pack for 12 pairs of underwear.

00:17:39.000 Now they're all falling apart on you.

00:17:40.000 The elastic's falling apart.

00:17:41.000 It's really uncomfortable.

00:17:42.000 It's riding up on you.

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00:18:34.000 All right.

00:18:34.000 So.

00:18:36.000 The fact that the president of the United States is sounding off on I thought Cuomo was Freda.

00:18:41.000 Freda's the best.

00:18:43.000 It's the fact that that he's doing that.

00:18:45.000 This means that the media naturally are going to have a 48 hour news cycle about how Trump is so unpresidential.

00:18:52.000 Yeah, we all get it.

00:18:53.000 We all know.

00:18:55.000 Whatever, man.

00:18:56.000 I mean, whatever, man, is, I think, the reaction of most Americans at this point.

00:19:00.000 Did we think that we were actually getting George Washington when you elected the guy from The Apprentice who is mostly famous for saying that he fired people? 0.95

00:19:07.000 Like, what did you think that you were getting when you elected the guy who was revealed on tape three weeks before the election talking about how often you like to grab women by the genitals?

00:19:15.000 Like, we all get it, right? 0.89

00:19:16.000 And the guy who tweets, he's a stand-up comedian, right?

00:19:19.000 The guy who tweets like this. 0.92

00:19:20.000 Now, to get serious for just a brief moment, I will note that there is something that is going on in our country that actually is Dangerous, but it's not dangerous in the sense that, like, Trump is responsible for it or Trump is responsible for all of the stupidities of people going out and confronting people in public. 0.61

00:19:38.000 In fact, I think that the left is actually more responsible than the right for stuff like this because the left cheers it on.

00:19:43.000 I mean, within the last week, the left was cheering on a sitting congressperson doxing Trump donors.

00:19:50.000 Within the last week, the left is calling for open boycotts of companies that have stockholders who donated to President Trump.

00:19:55.000 There were full editorials in the Washington Post talking about why Sarah Huckabee Sanders should be hounded out of a restaurant. 1.00

00:20:00.000 We've seen videos of Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk from TPUSA being harassed outside a restaurant, and that was not a national story.

00:20:08.000 So, this sort of stuff has been going on for quite a while.

00:20:10.000 From the left, public heckling.

00:20:12.000 Not just public heckling.

00:20:13.000 People attempting to do violence.

00:20:15.000 People mobbing folks on the right.

00:20:17.000 I mean, this obviously has happened to me several times at different universities.

00:20:21.000 So, this sort of stuff has been happening for quite a while.

00:20:23.000 But what we are seeing, and it is ugly, is the bleed over from the online sphere into the real world.

00:20:27.000 And this is a lack of social institutions on a broader level.

00:20:31.000 Online was supposed to be more fun.

00:20:34.000 Online was the place that you went.

00:20:35.000 I remember at the beginnings of the internet, the very... Let me take you in the Wayback Machine, small children, and I'll take you back to the origins of the internet.

00:20:41.000 When you sat next to your AOL dial-up and you listened to the horrible sounds, the horrible grating sounds that connected you online, and then, if you were like 12 or 13, you found chat rooms with people who went to school and who were your age, and you would chat about movies or you'd chat about sports.

00:20:57.000 And online was just kind of like a thing that you did for maybe half an hour a day.

00:21:01.000 And then you went outside and you played with your friends.

00:21:03.000 And now online has taken over everybody's life.

00:21:05.000 And so, predictably speaking, people are taking the online world, in which they are now spending more time than they are the real world, and they are taking the ethics of the online world and they are now applying it to the real world.

00:21:17.000 In the most extreme cases, you're seeing this in the most evil ways with places like 8chan, where people create an alternative reality for themselves, and then they go out into real reality and carry out their sick fantasies in public.

00:21:28.000 Well, you see this on a smaller scale when you go to a college campus and people are mobbed, or when you're out in public and people harass you and then tape it because they want to show all their friends that they are virtuous Folks who are standing up to the modern-day evil that is the right wing, or the modern-day evil that is Chris Cuomo. 0.99

00:21:47.000 I think that we're not focusing enough on the kid here who is a jerk. 0.99

00:21:50.000 We're focusing on Cuomo because Cuomo is, in fact, adult. 1.00

00:21:52.000 But the person who went up to Cuomo and called him Fredo in public is a jerk. 0.99

00:21:57.000 And I think that that is becoming more common on both right and left. 0.99

00:22:00.000 And a lot of that has to do with lack of militating social institutions.

00:22:03.000 It has to do with the fact that we are engaged too much online.

00:22:05.000 They get our validation from how many clicks and likes we get on places like Twitter and Facebook.

00:22:11.000 And what that means is also that stuff that people said 10, 15 years ago in jest because it was just a thing you did for fun online.

00:22:17.000 Now people are going back and they're applying the new Internet ethics, which is that the real world is the online world.

00:22:23.000 And they are applying it to 15-year-old statements, which is why you see people digging up old statements by comedians on Twitter and then treating it as though they said it in public in real life in front of a crowd of a thousand people. - No.

00:22:34.000 We treat online like the real world, and we treat the real world like online now.

00:22:38.000 It used to be that there was much more of a division between the two, and this is going to lead to more and more dangerous confrontations.

00:22:43.000 Now this, this confrontation with Cuomo wasn't dangerous. 0.97

00:22:46.000 This was a guy who was just being a jerk, and Cuomo backed him off, and Cuomo was really aggressive with him. 0.93

00:22:51.000 And again, not something I would do, not something I think is particularly smart, and if somebody on the right had done it, the media would be up in arms. 0.98

00:22:57.000 Plus, Chris Cuomo's adult if he thinks that Fredo is a slur on the order of the n-word, or a slur at all, frankly.

00:23:03.000 But, As far as the behavior of people in public, it is getting worse.

00:23:08.000 It is getting uglier.

00:23:10.000 Because people want to take the spoils of what they do in real life, and then they want to go back to the video game that is the online world, and brag to all their friends that they have racked up virtue coins.

00:23:19.000 It's like out there in the real world.

00:23:20.000 Remember the old Mario Brothers game where Mario is running through the landscape picking up coins?

00:23:24.000 Ba-ding!

00:23:25.000 Right?

00:23:25.000 And every time he picks up a coin, he moves closer to another life.

00:23:29.000 That is what we do in the real world now.

00:23:30.000 We rack up points in the real world by taking tape of stuff that happens and then putting it online for the likes and the clicks and the fake social acceptance that comes along with it.

00:23:39.000 And that, I do think, is actually kind of dangerous.

00:23:43.000 In one second, I want to get to some real news of the day beyond the fact that the President of the United States tweeted out that Chris Cuomo is Fredo, which is just, I got to admit, hilarious.

00:23:53.000 We'll get to more of that in just one second.

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00:25:04.000 OK, so on to the 2020 race where the Democratic Party has basically settled in.

00:25:10.000 On its narrative, its narrative is that Donald Trump is fighting terrible, terrible culture wars and that the culture wars are in fact Donald Trump's fault.

00:25:17.000 The culture wars did not predate Trump.

00:25:19.000 The culture wars came along with Trump.

00:25:21.000 The world began spinning when Donald Trump announced when he came down that escalator.

00:25:24.000 That is when the universe was formed.

00:25:26.000 It was the big bang of politics.

00:25:27.000 Trump was not a symptom of a broken political system.

00:25:30.000 Trump was not a symptom of culture civil wars that we've been fighting in this country for a decade, mainly during the Obama administration, thanks to polarization along economic and racial lines.

00:25:40.000 No, Donald Trump was the initiator of all of this.

00:25:44.000 And this is the narrative Democrats are going to run with, because they have to run with that narrative.

00:25:47.000 Remember, if they acknowledge the truth, which is that a lot of this polarization started really under George W. Bush, And then exacerbated radically under Barack Obama and now has exacerbated again under Donald Trump.

00:25:59.000 If they were to acknowledge that, then it would make them have to abandon their main point in this election cycle, which is the return to normalcy point.

00:26:08.000 Joe Biden is running as a return to normalcy candidate.

00:26:10.000 He's running as the guy who's going to restore some sense of calm and order to the United States.

00:26:14.000 But if people correctly recollect back just Four years ago, when Barack Obama was in power, and Ferguson was rioting and burning, and Baltimore was rioting and burning, and we were seeing police officers gunned down in the streets of Dallas.

00:26:27.000 If we all recollect back then, then the Return to Normalcy campaign doesn't have quite the same feel, does it?

00:26:32.000 Because things weren't normal.

00:26:34.000 Things were really messed up.

00:26:36.000 And they're messed up in different ways now, but they were messed up before Trump ever got on the scene.

00:26:39.000 So this means the Democrats and the media have to put out there the line that the culture wars we are currently experiencing are solely due to the peckish temperament and bizarre character of President Trump, as opposed to underlying issues.

00:26:53.000 That the country has been facing for quite a while here and that burst out really into the open in extraordinarily ugly ways during the Obama administration and now continuing on into the Trump administration.

00:27:03.000 Now, the reason Democrats have to run on the culture war kind of stuff is because if they run on policy, they're going to get skunked.

00:27:10.000 Most people are not interested in Kamala Harris nationalizing their health care.

00:27:15.000 Kamala Harris went to an old age home in Iowa.

00:27:17.000 One of the bizarre things about how American campaigns are run is that you end up with tape of Kamala Harris at an old age home in Iowa, at a retirement home in Iowa.

00:27:26.000 First of all, all those people were like 17 when she incarcerated them.

00:27:30.000 And now they're like 85.

00:27:32.000 But she went there and she actually played bingo with the members of the old age home.

00:27:36.000 And then a woman asked her, so you're going to take away my health care, aren't you? 1.00

00:27:40.000 And Kamala Harris is like, no, no.

00:27:42.000 She's like, yeah, you are, aren't you?

00:27:44.000 Kamala's like, no, kind of.

00:27:45.000 And the lady's like, don't do it. 1.00

00:27:47.000 Pretty amazing.

00:27:49.000 I understand that you are advocating health care for everyone.

00:27:52.000 Yes, ma'am.

00:27:53.000 Who's going to pay for it?

00:27:55.000 Well, we're going to pay for it, because right now, let me tell you something, we're all paying for health care for everyone, and it's in an emergency room.

00:28:02.000 No, ma'am, you need to leave our health care system alone. 1.00

00:28:05.000 Okay.

00:28:06.000 And we don't want to get it messed up.

00:28:08.000 Okay, I don't intend to mess... Do you have Medicare?

00:28:11.000 Yes, ma'am, I do.

00:28:14.000 Okay, well...

00:28:15.000 Lies. 0.99

00:28:16.000 Don't lie to the old lady, Kamala. 0.99

00:28:17.000 So I'll promise you that, okay?

00:28:19.000 I won't mess with the health care that you have.

00:28:21.000 Lies, lies.

00:28:23.000 Don't lie to the old lady, Kamala. 0.99

00:28:24.000 It's not nice to lie to old people. 1.00

00:28:27.000 It's not nice to jail them, and it's also not nice to lie to them.

00:28:32.000 So she gets wrecked by this old, again, Democratic policy, not popular.

00:28:36.000 Joe Biden, meanwhile, trying to trot out another creative policy, by which we mean an old policy that accomplished nothing.

00:28:42.000 He had an editorial in the Washington Post yesterday, in which, in the New York Times rather, in which he argued in favor of an assault weapons ban again.

00:28:50.000 Doesn't matter that it didn't work between 94 and 2004.

00:28:53.000 Biden wrote, many police departments have reported an increase in criminals.

00:28:56.000 But that's not really true.

00:28:57.000 weapons since 2004.

00:28:58.000 Multiple analyses of the data around mass shootings provide evidence that from 1994 to 2004, the years when assault weapons and high capacity magazines were banned, there were fewer mass shootings, fewer deaths, fewer families needlessly destroyed.

00:29:11.000 But that's not really true.

00:29:13.000 Robert Verbruggen, writing for the National Review, he points out that the studies that Biden links to really one study are very, very flawed.

00:29:22.000 He He says, first, a quick bit of history.

00:29:24.000 The US had a ban on assault weapons, semi-automatic guns with certain combinations of tactical cosmetic features, including pistol grips and folding stocks from 1994 to 2004.

00:29:32.000 The existing guns were not confiscated.

00:29:35.000 It was just illegal to sell new ones.

00:29:37.000 The same law banned high capacity magazines, setting the threshold at 10 rounds, which is actually below the standard capacity of many modern handguns.

00:29:44.000 After the ban was allowed to expire, experts were more or less unanimous that it hadn't had a strong effect on overall homicide.

00:29:50.000 Certainly, there are fewer of the banned items in circulation, but the law's definition of assault weapon focused on features that don't really affect a gun's lethality.

00:29:58.000 Few murders are committed with long guns of any kind to say nothing of assault weapons in particular.

00:30:03.000 Recently, though, some have claimed that the law reduced mass shootings in particular, which account for a tiny fraction of overall homicides, but commands an incredibly disproportionate amount of public attention.

00:30:13.000 What seems to be true is that the Banyers were relatively peaceful on this front, despite covering the rash of school shootings that included Columbine.

00:30:19.000 However, the three most important facts about mass shootings are one, they have historically been incredibly rare, with entire years passing without one sometimes.

00:30:26.000 B, they aren't contagious, with high-profile incidents inspiring copycats and competitors.

00:30:31.000 And C, they are incredibly variable in the number of fatalities, from a low bound of wherever the researcher chooses to set it.

00:30:37.000 The study Biden cites uses four, not including the perpetrator, all the way up to 58 in Las Vegas.

00:30:42.000 Trying to detect a pattern in data like this, then attributing the pattern to a single law change that covered the entire country for a 10-year period is madness.

00:30:51.000 Some charts from the study show the core problem here.

00:30:53.000 The total count of mass shooting fatalities by year shows that these things go in spurts.

00:30:59.000 And recent years in particular have been horrible, but that doesn't show that the assault weapons ban mattered.

00:31:04.000 And because the fact is that, again, what it shows is that there was a these kind of space between 1998 and 2001.

00:31:12.000 And then there was a space between 2010 that is really radically increased.

00:31:17.000 So this sort of data does not support Joe Biden's argument.

00:31:22.000 Plus, it's not going to be popular.

00:31:23.000 You tell people that they can't buy the rifle they want.

00:31:25.000 Good luck with that.

00:31:26.000 So Democrats have been relegated to going back to the drawing board.

00:31:30.000 And their drawing board is Donald Trump is the culture warrior.

00:31:33.000 As I have said, Donald Trump certainly is a culture warrior.

00:31:35.000 He was elected to be a culture warrior.

00:31:37.000 It's why his base loves the tweets about Chris Cuomo.

00:31:40.000 Loves them.

00:31:41.000 I think that they're hilarious.

00:31:43.000 I think very often those kinds of tweets damage him and not the Cuomo one.

00:31:46.000 I don't think the Cuomo one does anything to him.

00:31:47.000 But I think that when he tweets out about people going back to their home countries and they're Americans, I think that stuff damages him.

00:31:53.000 And frankly, I think it should damage him politically because it's bad.

00:31:56.000 But he was elected to be a culture warrior.

00:31:58.000 That's a feature, not a bug.

00:32:01.000 That's why he was elected.

00:32:02.000 But he was elected in response to a culture war that the right already knew was being waged by the left upon them.

00:32:07.000 The left, again, is now trying to claim that that year zero was Trump's election.

00:32:12.000 We'll get to this in just one second.

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00:33:28.000 Okay, so in just a second, we'll get to the left's case that Donald Trump is the leading cause of the culture wars.

00:33:34.000 Not true.

00:33:35.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:34:41.000 So as I say, with the Democrats failing on policy, this leaves them with their backup plan.

00:34:51.000 Their backup plan is that Donald Trump is the most divisive force in the history of the country and that Donald Trump must be stopped.

00:34:57.000 And to that end, the Democrats are ratcheting up divisive rhetoric.

00:35:01.000 They're ratcheting up the sort of rhetoric that actually does increase the chances of violence and does lead to greater opposition between Americans of different political views.

00:35:09.000 See, when you call Trump a Nazi, you are calling his supporters Nazis.

00:35:13.000 When you say that Trump is a white supremacist, you are suggesting that his supporters are racist, or at the very least, ambivalent or uncaring about racism. 0.80

00:35:20.000 Which is not true.

00:35:22.000 And yet, this has become the Democratic talking point du jour.

00:35:25.000 Here is Kamala Harris, who can't explain to an old woman why she won't steal her health insurance, but also will say that Donald Trump is responsible for the El Paso Walmart shooting.

00:35:33.000 I will tell you, this stuff is not new in our country.

00:35:37.000 It certainly predates the election of Donald Trump, but it has also increased under Donald Trump.

00:35:43.000 And, you know, he's been fueling the flames of hate.

00:35:48.000 And, you know, I've said recently, you know, on the issue of El Paso, you know, no, when people ask me, is he responsible for those killings?

00:35:57.000 Well, no, I mean, he obviously didn't pull the trigger, but he's sure been tweeting out the ammunition.

00:36:02.000 Oh, wow, he's tweeting out the ammunition.

00:36:04.000 So that's what we're going to do now.

00:36:04.000 So when Barack Obama ripped into police officers routinely across the country, suggested they were racist, and then an evil member of Black Lives Matter decided to shoot up Dallas police officers, he didn't pull the trigger.

00:36:15.000 But did he tweet out the ammunition?

00:36:17.000 Again, this is a talking point that actually is in and of itself dangerous.

00:36:22.000 Crediting your political opponents with violence is a dangerous thing to do, and yet you are seeing folks on the left do it.

00:36:28.000 And the language of the left, not the entire left, but the radical left, right, certain members of the left, the language that is accepted in high-ranking circles in the left is extraordinary.

00:36:38.000 Extraordinary.

00:36:38.000 We keep hearing about the right is so accepting of Donald Trump's rhetoric.

00:36:41.000 I think that the right has been too accepting of a lot of things that Donald Trump has said.

00:36:45.000 That's why I've tried to be a fair-minded conservative in condemning Trump when he says things that I think are morally reprehensible.

00:36:52.000 The left has had no such compunction.

00:36:54.000 Let's take an example. 0.98

00:36:55.000 So, over the weekend, there's a guest on MSNBC named Eli Mistel, who is an editor at Above the Law, and he literally said that Trump supporters who are white should be destroyed. 0.98

00:37:05.000 How is that going to make the country better? 0.87

00:37:08.000 Is that a culture war leveraged by Trump supporters, or is this a comment that contributes to the flames?

00:37:13.000 Is this throwing gasoline on the flames that already exist?

00:37:16.000 You don't communicate it to them.

00:37:17.000 You beat them.

00:37:18.000 You beat them.

00:37:19.000 They are not a majority of this country.

00:37:21.000 The majority of white people in this country are not a majority of the country.

00:37:25.000 And all the people who are not fooled by this need to come together, go to the polls, go to the protests, do whatever you have to do.

00:37:32.000 You do not negotiate with these people.

00:37:35.000 You destroy them. 0.98

00:37:36.000 You destroy them. 0.71

00:37:37.000 You destroy Trump supporters. 0.96

00:37:38.000 You destroy these people.

00:37:39.000 You don't negotiate with these people. 1.00

00:37:40.000 You destroy them because they're all racist. 0.99

00:37:42.000 No, don't worry. 0.93

00:37:43.000 It's only the right that is fighting a culture war.

00:37:46.000 And this predictably leads to the backlash.

00:37:46.000 Right here.

00:37:49.000 And there is a clip going around yesterday of an Iowa voter who was asked who he's voting for.

00:37:54.000 And he said, basically, they keep calling me a racist.

00:37:57.000 And then he described why he is not a racist.

00:37:59.000 And this led the media to, predictably enough, call him a racist.

00:38:01.000 Here's the clip.

00:38:02.000 And I'll explain why the media take away the wrong lesson.

00:38:04.000 What do they call you?

00:38:07.000 I'm a racist.

00:38:10.000 I went to school.

00:38:11.000 I shared my dorm with a colored guy.

00:38:15.000 I have nothing against him.

00:38:16.000 I grew up in the East.

00:38:18.000 We grew up with people.

00:38:20.000 Do you think the president's a racist, though?

00:38:22.000 No, I don't.

00:38:23.000 I really don't. 0.78

00:38:24.000 Okay, so the evidence here is that because he used the word colored, which is a very old-fashioned, out-of-date word for black people, then he must be a racist.

00:38:32.000 So he says, you guys keep calling me a racist, so I'm gonna vote for Trump. 0.99

00:38:35.000 And they're like, well, that's because you're a racist. 0.97

00:38:38.000 Keep going with this. 0.51

00:38:39.000 I'm sure that... Do you want to win that guy's vote or no? 0.98

00:38:41.000 So according to Eli Mistal, probably that guy has to be destroyed because he may have shared his dorm with a black guy and he may not be a racist. 0.90

00:38:48.000 And you don't know who that guy is. 0.94

00:38:49.000 You don't know his record.

00:38:50.000 Do you have any record of him being a racist other than he used an out-of-date word with regard to black people?

00:38:54.000 And did it seem like when he spit out the word colored that he was doing it because he knew it was a racial slur?

00:39:00.000 Or did it seem like he's an old dude who was using a dated term for black people that was used back in the 1960s?

00:39:06.000 But the media immediately, this is evident. 0.96

00:39:08.000 Trump voters are racist, right? 0.83

00:39:09.000 So the accusation is Trump voters are racist. 0.77

00:39:12.000 So Trump voters say, you're going to call me a racist? 1.00

00:39:15.000 Go to hell. 1.00

00:39:16.000 You know, that guy out there, you keep calling a racist. 1.00

00:39:18.000 I'm not going to trust your take on him either.

00:39:20.000 When it comes to the culture wars, there are two sides.

00:39:22.000 It is not a one sided culture war.

00:39:24.000 It is a two sided culture war.

00:39:26.000 And the media's attempts to derive a narrative from this are absurd.

00:39:30.000 There's an article in The Washington Post today.

00:39:33.000 Oh, really? 0.95

00:39:36.000 Well, I'm old enough to remember in 2012 when Barack Obama was suggesting that Mitt Romney was a racist who hated women, and Joe Biden was out there suggesting that Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast human ever to walk the earth, wanted to put black people back in chains. 0.88

00:39:55.000 But listen to the way the Washington Post handles this.

00:39:57.000 Again, it's the Washington Post's unwillingness to recognize that the left is a side in the culture war.

00:40:02.000 They're not even a side.

00:40:03.000 See, if you're on the left, you can't even acknowledge that you're a side.

00:40:06.000 And there's this weird phenomenon where you don't think you have an accent.

00:40:09.000 And there are lots of accents around America.

00:40:12.000 I don't think I have an accent, right?

00:40:13.000 I think that I sound like how people normally speak English.

00:40:17.000 If I speak to somebody from New York, they can't hear very often they have a New York accent.

00:40:21.000 Somebody from the South believes they have no accent, I have an accent.

00:40:24.000 British people speaking English don't understand they have a British accent. 0.99

00:40:27.000 When you're in the accent, you don't understand that you're speaking with an accent, typically speaking.

00:40:32.000 It's only when you start trying to speak with somebody else's accent that you realize that maybe you have an accent of your own.

00:40:37.000 Well, the same thing is true in politics right now.

00:40:40.000 People fail to recognize that they have a political bent.

00:40:43.000 And so if you're on the left, And Donald Trump is saying stuff you think I'm just a fair-minded individual who has not taken part in the culture wars. 0.94

00:40:50.000 It's just that horrible Trump.

00:40:52.000 And this is what you get from the journalists at the Washington Post. 0.84

00:40:55.000 So much journalism-ing.

00:40:57.000 I would say that this article is fake news, except I know from Chris Cuomo that's the equivalent of the N-word.

00:41:02.000 Or something.

00:41:03.000 In any case, this article says, George W. Bush had freedom fries.

00:41:06.000 Sarah Palin had the big gulp.

00:41:08.000 Dan Quayle had the Hollywood portrayal of an unwed single mother named Murphy Brown.

00:41:12.000 For President Trump, it's paper straws.

00:41:14.000 The latest addition to an ever-growing list of cultural flashpoints his campaign is seeking to highlight as part of a base-focused re-election effort.

00:41:20.000 Remember that time that Barack Obama flashed a rainbow flag on the White House after Obergefell?

00:41:25.000 Remember that?

00:41:25.000 Was that like a culture point or no?

00:41:27.000 Was that a cultural flashpoint? 0.99

00:41:28.000 Or how about that time he said that the Cambridge police acted stupidly? 0.98

00:41:31.000 Was that a cultural flashpoint or no? 0.94

00:41:34.000 Or when his campaign made a big deal out of Mitt Romney suggesting that he had binders of female candidates brought before him for hiring? 0.98

00:41:41.000 Was that a cultural flashpoint or not a cultural flashpoint?

00:41:45.000 When Barack Obama said that Trayvon Martin could have been his... Cultural flashpoint or no?

00:41:49.000 But they only exist on the right because George W. Bush said freedom fries once.

00:41:52.000 I mean, man oh man.

00:41:54.000 As cities and coffee chains across the country have adopted policies aimed at limiting environmental damage, the president's campaign has targeted what he calls liberal paper straws.

00:42:02.000 It's selling a Trump-branded plastic version as a fundraising tool.

00:42:06.000 So I love that it is not considered political to ban straws in restaurants.

00:42:09.000 It is considered political to oppose a ban on straws at restaurants.

00:42:12.000 By the way, paper straws suck radically. 0.93

00:42:14.000 They're awful. 0.95

00:42:15.000 They collapse in on themselves. 1.00

00:42:16.000 They taste like garbage. 1.00

00:42:17.000 They're terrible. 0.99

00:42:19.000 If you want to talk about banning the plastic cups at Starbucks, I promise you those cups have more plastic in them than the straws do.

00:42:27.000 The ban on straws ticks people off because it feels like virtue signaling that has no real impact on the environment.

00:42:32.000 And Trump is not wrong to pick on that because that's kind of what it is for a lot of folks.

00:42:36.000 Pointing to the runaway success of the straws, which have earned the campaign more than $670,000 in a month, Communications Director Tim Murtaugh said they represent Trump's ability to make a political point using a cultural issue everyday voters can relate to.

00:42:48.000 And it's true, Trump is good at this.

00:42:50.000 But again, Trump isn't the only one who is good at this.

00:42:54.000 The Washington Post, though, says Trump is deliberately amplifying public tensions by seizing on divisive topics to energize his base, according to campaign aides and White House advisers.

00:43:03.000 I thought this was just called politics, but listen to this take.

00:43:07.000 I mean, you want a hot take from the Washington Post?

00:43:08.000 Here it is.

00:43:09.000 As Democrats debate policy, Trump has sought to force his potential rivals to defend the most far-reaching cultural ideas circulating within their party.

00:43:18.000 Oh, is it debating policy when AOC released a frequently asked questions calling for a ban on cows and air travel?

00:43:24.000 Was that debating policy?

00:43:26.000 Is it really debating policy when Kamala Harris suggests that Trump is responsible for a mass shooting in El Paso?

00:43:31.000 Or is that more like her just actually looking for a cultural flashpoint?

00:43:34.000 The blindness of the media to their own bias is one of the reasons why people don't trust the media and why people think that Chris Cuomo is a Fredo.

00:43:43.000 This is why.

00:43:44.000 It's why people, let's be real about this.

00:43:45.000 People on the right think the entire media is Fredo.

00:43:48.000 They think the entire media is a bunch of weaklings masquerading as smart people who believe they are brilliant, brighter than you, but in fact are taking waitresses two at a time and bankrupting casinos.

00:44:00.000 That's what most Americans think of the media at this point.

00:44:04.000 Okay, meanwhile, we gotta run through some other news here.

00:44:06.000 So it turns out that Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself with a prison bedsheet.

00:44:09.000 How the dude ended up with a bedsheet after being on suicide watch is insane.

00:44:14.000 Apparently his lawyers wanted him off suicide watch, which makes it sound premeditated, the suicide.

00:44:18.000 And you take the guy off suicide, his lawyers go, you know, he's not gonna commit suicide, it'll be fine.

00:44:22.000 It'll be fine.

00:44:22.000 Just take the other guy out of the cell, take him off suicide watch, he's gone.

00:44:26.000 I mean, shocker.

00:44:29.000 According to the New York Post, Epstein was found hanging in his lower Manhattan jail cell with a bed sheet wrapped around his neck, secured to the top of a bunk bed.

00:44:35.000 How'd he end up in a bunk bed?

00:44:37.000 Because he was in a cell by himself?

00:44:39.000 Because they removed the person who was in the cell with him.

00:44:41.000 All of which is going to make people somewhat suspicious.

00:44:44.000 He apparently killed himself by kneeling toward the floor and then strangling himself with the makeshift noose, which is a pretty terrible way to go.

00:44:51.000 Stafford's attempted to revive him.

00:44:52.000 He was taken to an infirmary inside the lockup, and then he was pronounced dead.

00:44:56.000 So with him, presumably, will die some of his secrets.

00:44:59.000 There was an article, I believe it was in the New York Times yesterday, from a columnist who said he met with Epstein off the record, and then now has printed a story about how Epstein knew all these famous people and had dirt on them.

00:45:11.000 You know, off the record, I understand you want to keep your journalistic ethics, but when you're talking to a convicted pedophile, I feel like most people are going to be okay with you spilling on who he may have mentioned.

00:45:22.000 There are a bunch of security lapses at the jail, according to the Daily Mail.

00:45:26.000 The 66-year-old was found alone and unresponsive in his cell.

00:45:30.000 His defense attorney has since faulted jail officials.

00:45:33.000 Apparently, last year, a prison guard at the jail pled guilty to taking more than $25,000 in cash bribes to smuggle cell phones, alcohol, and food to a wealthy Turkish gold trader.

00:45:43.000 Between 2016 and 2017, he also received thousands of dollars in payments from another inmate, which were given to him by the prisoner's relatives and a paralegal representing him.

00:45:52.000 He was sentenced in January to three years in prison by a judge who called the crime an assault on our entire system of justice.

00:45:59.000 So, this guy was not the person who was guarding Epstein.

00:46:01.000 Suffice it to say that corruption in prisons is indeed a thing.

00:46:06.000 So, there are open questions about exactly what went wrong here.

00:46:10.000 Also, Jeffrey Epstein's Little Black Book is now in the possession of federal authorities.

00:46:15.000 He apparently listed 301 British associates, over a thousand associates generally.

00:46:19.000 Now, just because you're in somebody's phone doesn't mean that you were benefiting from their sex trafficking, but this dude did travel in powerful circles.

00:46:26.000 The FBI apparently raided so-called Pedophile Island yesterday, so we'll find out what exactly they found on Pedophile Island.

00:46:34.000 In other news, I'm going to give you the update on the situation in Hong Kong, which continues to get more and more tense.

00:46:40.000 Why President Trump has not spoken out about this, but about Chris Cuomo is beyond me.

00:46:44.000 The president of the United States ought to ignore the Fredo stuff and focus in on, you know, the millions of protesters in the streets who may be about to be mowed down by the Chinese government. 0.64

00:46:55.000 Wouldn't this be a time, as I said yesterday on my radio show, would this not be a time for the president of the United States to ratchet up the pressure on China?

00:47:01.000 He's in the middle of a trade war with them.

00:47:02.000 Wouldn't this be a great time to explain to the American people that the reason that we have to take harsh measures against China is because they are insanely aggressive with people they've already made agreements with, including the people of Hong Kong, not to violate their sovereignty.

00:47:17.000 And now they're about to run tanks in there.

00:47:20.000 Apparently, the trucks and the tanks are massing at the border.

00:47:23.000 The Hong Kong protesters completely at the mercy of the Chinese government at this point.

00:47:27.000 According to the Washington Post, anti-government protesters brought chaos to Hong Kong's airport for a second consecutive day on Tuesday.

00:47:34.000 They forced airlines to suspend check-in for departing flights as demonstrators extended their standoff with authorities who have been unable to quell months of dissent.

00:47:42.000 After mass cancellations the previous evening, flights had been gradually returning to normal throughout Tuesday, even as thousands of black-clad demonstrators returned to occupy the terminal with placards denouncing police brutality and calling for freedom for Hong Kong.

00:47:55.000 By the way, they were waving the American flag.

00:47:58.000 For all of those people in America who think that America's flag is not a symbol of freedom around the world, look at the flag that the folks in Hong Kong were waving.

00:48:05.000 They weren't waving the Turkish flag.

00:48:06.000 They weren't waving the French flag.

00:48:07.000 They were waving the American flag, and that is for a reason.

00:48:10.000 America still symbolizes freedom around the world.

00:48:12.000 It's why it behooves the president.

00:48:13.000 Donald Trump needs to speak out now about what China needs to do with these protesters, and that is leave them alone and deal with them as the sovereign people they are.

00:48:22.000 China is a tyranny. 0.86

00:48:23.000 It is a communist tyranny. 0.97

00:48:25.000 We've all blinded ourselves to that fact because they produce cheap goods for us.

00:48:30.000 But that has nothing to do with the amount of tyranny they steep on their own people.

00:48:34.000 In fact, there's a case to be made that opening China back in the 1970s, while necessary in order to counterbalance the Soviet Union, we were trying to split Mao from the Stalinists over in Russia, Well, it may have been a temporary expedient.

00:48:46.000 It has radically strengthened a Chinese communist regime that seeks to quash its own people. 0.73

00:48:54.000 If Trump wants the American people to undertake economic sacrifice in the name of fighting Chinese influence, wouldn't this be a great time to speak out?

00:49:02.000 When Barack Obama did nothing as Iranian protesters were mowed down in the streets in 2009, those of us on the right were extraordinarily critical, as we should have been.

00:49:10.000 Donald Trump needs to speak out.

00:49:11.000 He needs to speak out now about these Hong Kong protesters.

00:49:14.000 He needs to make any resources available to them available to them, short of heavy weaponry and light weaponry.

00:49:19.000 We shouldn't be providing weapons.

00:49:20.000 We don't want a war, obviously.

00:49:21.000 But we can exert an awful lot of pressure on the Chinese government to come to some sort of arrangement with the people of Hong Kong.

00:49:27.000 Because gradually, over the last Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a quick thing that I hate.

00:49:32.000 with Hong Kong that was agreed to when the British abandoned Hong Kong to its fate at the behest of the Chinese government.

00:49:39.000 Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then a quick thing that I hate.

00:49:44.000 So, thing that I like today, yesterday on the program we hosted Mohamed El-Erian.

00:49:47.000 He's an economist.

00:49:49.000 He's the former head of Allianz.

00:49:51.000 And he is also the author of the book, The Only Game in Town, Central Bank's Instability and Avoiding the Next Collapse, It's an easy to read book about economics and about why it is that so many people seem to be reliant on central banks.

00:50:03.000 His main thesis is that The American economy, the European economy, the Chinese economy, all of these economies have become more and more reliant on policymaking from institutions that were never meant to make policy.

00:50:13.000 The Fed was never meant to control American economic policy.

00:50:17.000 Now the markets respond directly to what the Fed is doing after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

00:50:24.000 The Fed exerted more and more influence and power.

00:50:26.000 The same thing happened in Europe.

00:50:27.000 It was supposed to be a temporary expedient.

00:50:29.000 Instead, it has become the new normal.

00:50:31.000 And that's dangerous, because you can't just inflate and deflate currencies, raise and lower interest rates, and hope to fix economies that way.

00:50:39.000 There are underlying structural problems with economies that have to be dealt with, including the fact, by the way, that the United States continues to run up these record deficits.

00:50:47.000 Federal spending has set a record through July.

00:50:51.000 3.7 trillion dollars have been spent in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2019.

00:50:55.000 The government is now running a yearly deficit of 867 billion dollars.

00:51:01.000 It's insane.

00:51:03.000 These are numbers that are unthinkably large.

00:51:06.000 And they are going to undermine the future of a productive American economy.

00:51:11.000 You can't rely on the Fed to bail you out of that thing simply through inflation.

00:51:14.000 The U.S.

00:51:14.000 budget deficit already exceeds last year's total figure.

00:51:18.000 And again, we are only 10 months into the fiscal year.

00:51:21.000 So, this is all bad news.

00:51:23.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.

00:51:29.000 If you're in the state of California, take your kids out of public school. 0.99

00:51:31.000 Public schools are garbage, and not only are they garbage, they are run by people who are interested in cramming down a leftward view of the world upon your children. 0.99

00:51:40.000 The latest evidence of this... 0.99

00:51:42.000 According to Adam Credo at the Washington Free Beacon, the state of California has now introduced blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel lessons into its official high school curriculum, drawing outrage and concern in the state's Jewish and pro-Israel communities, according to multiple sources involved in the controversy.

00:51:57.000 The California Department of Education is facing backlash after permitting a host of anti-Israel activists to build a statewide educational curriculum that demonizes Israel and is said to be fostering hatred of Jewish and Israeli-American students.

00:52:11.000 Apparently, there are a bunch of anti-Semitic courses that are fostering an unsafe environment for Jewish and Israeli-American students, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

00:52:19.000 A coalition of 83 pro-Israel organizations, led by the AMCHA initiative, which is a watchdog group, says we are aware that many individuals and groups affiliated with the Jewish community have already written to you about the Education Council's shocking omission of information about American Jews and anti-Semitism, its use of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, its blatant anti-Israel bias. 0.76

00:52:40.000 The proposed curriculum is ridiculous.

00:52:43.000 It portrays Jews in Israel as, quote, part of interlocking systems of oppression and privilege. 0.91

00:52:48.000 They endorse the California education system, explicitly endorsing the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that specifically seeks to destroy the state of Israel.

00:52:59.000 It was designed by its advocates to do just that. 0.70

00:53:02.000 The curriculum itself is ridiculous on nearly every level.

00:53:05.000 It is not just about antisemitism, but there are insane violations of normalcy and educational realism in this program.

00:53:18.000 Here are some of the terms that are used in this Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum now being perpetuated by the California Department of Education.

00:53:25.000 They talk about Herxtery. 0.99

00:53:26.000 Okay?

00:53:27.000 H-X-R-S-T-O-R-Y. 1.00

00:53:29.000 I mean, this is radical nonsense.

00:53:31.000 The Cisheteropatriarchy. 0.87

00:53:33.000 You're supposed to be taught grievances about capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

00:53:38.000 The Four I's of Oppression.

00:53:39.000 Ideological, Institutional, Interpersonal, and Internalized.

00:53:42.000 Internalized oppression means that you disagree with the prevailing leftist orthodoxy.

00:53:47.000 You're supposed to be taught about patriarchy, sexism, heteropatriarchy, and cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, xenophobia, and the ethnic studies course overview only singles out marginalization or discrimination against five groups.

00:54:04.000 Okay, who?

00:54:05.000 Latinas, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, and Arab Americans. 0.95

00:54:10.000 Jews notoriously left out, though they are the number one targets of hate crimes in the United States.

00:54:18.000 The particular section of the course overview talking about the oppression of Arab-Americans specifically identifies the country of Israel as, quote, Israel-Palestine.

00:54:26.000 Palestine does not exist.

00:54:28.000 It discusses the, quote-unquote, Nakba, which is the supposed dispossession and dispersal of Palestinians from the new state of Israel in the 1948 war.

00:54:38.000 The lesson plan includes hip-hop as resistance and contrast Busta Rhymes' song, Arab Money, with Narsi's song, The Real Arab Money.

00:54:46.000 And then calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

00:54:48.000 There's still time to protest this.

00:54:50.000 The department is accepting public comment through this Thursday, August 15th.

00:54:56.000 But this is all absurdity.

00:54:58.000 Of course, the absurdity of the California educational system has been known for a long time.

00:55:02.000 Kids can't read or do math, but we must teach them about the cisheteropatriarchy and herkstery. 1.00

00:55:08.000 Solid stuff.

00:55:09.000 Solid stuff.

00:55:11.000 All righty.

00:55:11.000 We'll be back here later today to additional hours of content.

00:55:14.000 Plus, we'll be back here tomorrow.

00:55:15.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:55:16.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:55:21.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.

00:55:24.000 Directed by Mike Joyner.

00:55:25.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:55:28.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:55:29.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

00:55:32.000 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:55:34.000 Edited by Adam Sajovitz.

00:55:36.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

00:55:38.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:55:40.000 Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.

00:55:41.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

00:55:44.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 13, 2019

The Fredo Slur | Ep. 838

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