The January 6th Committee rolls out its prime time special with Liz Cheney taking the starring role, and we examine what the Democratic telethon did and did not accomplish. Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on the Fox News Channel and host of the conservative podcast, "The Weekly Standard". He is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard and has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, and other publications. His work has also been featured on NPR, CBS Radio, Fox News, NPR Worldwide, and many other media outlets, including The Huffington Post, The Hill, and The Hill Online, among other publications, and he is one of the few people in the country with a degree from Harvard Law School, and a degree in political science from the Berkman Center for National Security Studies at the Fletcher School of Political Science at Tufts University, where he is a Fellow at the prestigious Fletcher Center for International Relations, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at the Kennedy School of American Studies at Harvard University, as well as a Fellow in the Program for the Program at the Center for American Political Science, and the Program Director at Harvard's Center for the Study of American Politics and Leadership at the Program, the Fletcher Center, and at the University of St. John's College. The show is sponsored by ExpressVPN, and it's time to stand up against Big Tech! ExpressVPN is helping you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address, that allows Big Tech to match your activity back to you. It s that simple, right now! Get three months of ExpressVPN for FREE! That s E-XP-R-E-S-V-P-N-N) for three months free! -Ben Shapiro Show is the show Ben Shapiro on the Ben Shapiro show on the Show on The show on The Ben Show on The Fox News Radio Show on and The New York Post on The Tonight Show on Fox News on the 21st Hour on The Hill on the 19th and 27th Street Podcast on The Five and the Other Thing on The 21st Thing on The Sixth Thing on This Afternoone on The Fifth and The Morning After on Wednesday, On The Fifth And The Other Thing On The 27th And The Third Thing on This Is It On The Third Place on The Fourth Thing on Thanksgiving Day on ,
00:00:00.000The January 6th committee rolls out its prime time special with Liz Cheney taking the starring role and we examine what the Democratic telethon did and did not accomplish.
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00:01:37.000Basically just the members of the media, because I would imagine that very few Americans actually spent a lot of time watching these hearings.
00:01:44.000That is particularly true since they began with a bunch of grandstanding by Congress people, which is not the way you program a primetime special.
00:01:52.000Far be it from me, a person who runs an actual large media outlet that programs on a consistent basis, to tell the democratic policy makers that nobody actually wants to hear them jabber at a camera, but nobody actually wants to hear them jabber at a camera.
00:02:04.000There are a bunch of sort of imagistic mistakes that were made very early on in the January 6th special that was produced last night for mass consumption via all the networks except for Fox News.
00:02:14.000The number one mistake is don't put a bunch of jabbering idiots in front of a camera and have them talk for 10 minutes before you actually start showing any footage.
00:02:22.000But before we even get to what happened last night, we have to set the table.
00:02:25.000Because we have to determine what exactly is the January 6th special attempting to do?
00:02:32.000So there are a bunch of things that we have to hold simultaneously in our minds.
00:02:35.000Because many things can be true at once.
00:02:37.000And this has been true since January 6th happened.
00:02:40.000And I said on that day, I thought it was an awful, ugly day.
00:02:43.000I thought the images of people rushing into the Capitol building with violence on their minds were the most hideous images that I had seen in my political lifetime.
00:02:52.000Also, you can say it was not a true threat to democracy because the entire place was clear within two hours and, or three hours, and everybody Just went ahead and certified an election that had already been certified at the state level in consonance with the United States Constitution and President Trump ended up leaving office on January 20th, 2021.
00:03:10.000All of those things can be true at once.
00:03:12.000It happens to be perfectly true that a bunch of people Who believed President Trump's rhetoric between November 4th and January 6th, went and protested, and didn't riot, and didn't end up in the Capitol building.
00:03:23.000And many of those who ended up in the Capitol building were ushered in by actual police officers opening doors, and many of them were not.
00:03:30.000They were there to actually commit acts of violence.
00:03:31.000All these things can be true at once because life is messy.
00:03:46.000It was a grandstanding move to do this primetime special in the first place without offering any really seriously new evidence.
00:03:52.000The January 6th committee should be dedicated to legislative purposes.
00:03:56.000I mean, typically, this is what congressional committees are designed to do.
00:03:59.000They have to, by law, either perform an oversight function or a legislative function.
00:04:04.000This investigative committee performed neither.
00:04:07.000It is there specifically as a political tool, as you can tell because Nancy Pelosi basically nixed any Republican who didn't already agree with the predetermined agenda before the January 6th committee was formed.
00:04:17.000But the January 6th Committee does not have an oversight function here in the sense that they are not really attempting to determine where federal dollars were spent and where they were not spent and what was done in consonance with legislation by Congress at the executive branch level.
00:04:30.000And it's not a legislative function because they're not actually changing any laws with regard to this sort of stuff.
00:04:34.000You know this because they're not asking questions about, like, what is the D.C.
00:04:39.000How do they deal with stuff like this?
00:04:40.000Where was the National Guard and why was Nancy Pelosi, for example, not requesting extra National Guard before this event when we know that law enforcement had been warning of the possibility of violence in advance of the event?
00:04:52.000And these are questions that wouldn't be dispositive.
00:04:55.000It wouldn't answer all the questions, but these are certainly relevant questions to ask in the context of an investigation as to what actually happened on January 6th.
00:05:01.000Because all of these questions should be on the table, right?
00:05:04.000Why were people allowed to breach the Capitol?
00:05:06.000Why wasn't there more police presence at the Capitol?
00:05:09.000Why wasn't the National Guard preemptively there?
00:05:12.000And that can all go along with, was there any coordination between political figures and people who are attempting to breach the Capitol or all the rest of this?
00:05:19.000But none of that was done because the basic goal here is to weaponize January 6th as a talking point for 2022.
00:05:25.000And unfortunately, that's what January 6th became immediately in the aftermath, like right away.
00:05:32.000Pretty much all Americans agree that January 6th was a hideous and ugly event.
00:05:36.000And when I say January 6th, I don't mean the giant protest.
00:05:38.000I mean the small number, relatively speaking, of rioters who broke into the Capitol attempting to do harm to people.
00:05:44.000I am beating police officers and all the rest.
00:05:46.000Virtually all Americans agree on this by polling data.
00:05:49.000But that is not what this narrative turned into.
00:05:51.000Immediately, it was turned into a political narrative about how if you supported Donald Trump in 2020, in the election, this means that you supported his rhetoric.
00:05:58.000If you supported his rhetoric after November 4th, this means that you supported riots.
00:06:02.000And if you vote for Republicans in 2022 who are not named Donald Trump, it's because you support Donald Trump, his rhetoric, and the riots.
00:06:08.000That is the basic chain of logic that Democrats are trying to drive here.
00:06:13.000Again, the New York Times wrote just a couple of days ago, quote, January 6th hearings give Democrats a chance to recast midterm message because they need something.
00:06:35.000And then he's asked about Donald Trump.
00:06:36.000He's like, oh man, I really want to run again.
00:06:37.000The perception by Democrats is that Donald Trump is the most beatable Republican and people who associate with Donald Trump are the most beatable Republicans, which is why Democrats spent an awful lot of money pushing, for example, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
00:06:48.000Because Dagmar Strano was in January 6th.
00:06:50.000The idea is, there are threats to democracy.
00:06:53.000Also, if you guys could nominate people like that, and if you could side with people like that, that would be really good, because then we can run against that.
00:06:59.000Which suggests Democrats really don't think that they're a threat to democracy so much, because Democrats know better than anybody that the polarization of American politics means that if Democrats attack somebody, they are likely to create an enormous amount of support for the person they are attacking.
00:07:13.000Because we live in that polarized time.
00:07:16.000So, again, the logic here for the Democrats when it comes to January 6th, and I don't think that, you know, when it comes to Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, I'm not sure that they have the same logic.
00:07:25.000I think that perhaps they're being naive, perhaps they're just being useful idiots for the Democrats at this point, or perhaps they have a principled feeling that January 6th really was a deep and abiding threat to democracy and that democracy is, whatever it is, I don't know that they have the same motivations as the partisan Democrats who are pushing this stuff, but the partisan Democrats who are pushing this stuff Again, using that logic.
00:07:49.000The logic is, if you supported Trump in 2020 against Joe Biden, you supported everything he could possibly do or say.
00:07:55.000If you support him in the election, that means that you supported everything that he did after the election.
00:07:59.000If you had doubts about the election, not with regard just to voter fraud, but for example, with regard to voter procedure, With regard to ballot harvesting, with regard to widespread absentee voting, if you had problems with the media coverage, then this all conflates together with you supported Donald Trump and his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
00:08:20.000And even if you supported that attempt, that doesn't necessarily mean you support a violent overthrow of the United States government.
00:08:24.000But the idea is that you now support the violent overthrow of the United States government.
00:08:28.000And also the idea is That the people who invaded the Capitol were engaged in an armed insurrection, which is weird because there were no actual firearms found on the people who invaded the Capitol, which is a very strange way to run an armed insurrection.
00:08:39.000Again, this is not to downplay the criminality of people who invade the Capitol building and do harm to police officers.
00:08:46.000It is to point out that if you are going to claim that something is an armed insurrection, typically you require an armed insurrection to call something an armed insurrection.
00:08:55.000For the Democrats, it's pretty obvious.
00:08:57.000The idea is you have a choice in 2022 between our garbage governance, which has brought you a 40 year high in inflation, a stagnating economy.
00:09:05.000It has brought you extreme levels of political polarization.
00:09:09.000It has brought you a radical social agenda that embraces everything from forcing your kids in school to learn that they might be a member of the opposite sex, to treating America as though it is historically not only racist, but systemically racist today.
00:09:24.000You have a choice between that And the evils of Trumpism.
00:09:27.000That is what Democrats are attempting to do here.
00:09:30.000And they want to play on that political polarization in order to get Republicans to side with things they believe the vast majority of Americans don't agree with, right?
00:09:54.000If you want to morally dissociate from January 6th, you must side with us.
00:09:58.000And there's a secondary idea, which is the more time we spend talking about January 6th, the more we can wrongfoot Republicans who are afraid of some members of their base into saying things that downplay January 6th, at which point we run against those Republicans.
00:10:10.000If you think Democrats aren't that sophisticated, you're wrong.
00:10:11.000I mean, that's not that sophisticated a point.
00:10:13.000They understand that if they make January 6th top of the news, And the media do their compliant job, which is to ask every Republican their feelings about January 6th.
00:10:22.000They will eventually stumble on a Republican who will just downplay it or dismiss it in such a way that the American public doesn't like it very much.
00:10:28.000And then Democrats can run against that.
00:10:33.000We as Americans don't have to embrace any of this.
00:10:35.000Because we can hold all of these thoughts in our mind.
00:10:38.000We can say, for example, that riots are really bad, and violent riots are really bad, and breaking into the Capitol building is really bad and criminal, and people should go to jail for doing these things.
00:10:47.000We can say that beating police officers is a really bad thing.
00:10:50.000We can also say that Donald Trump's claims between November 4th and January 6th were untrue.
00:10:54.000His claims that voter fraud specifically decided the 2020 election, that was not true.
00:11:01.000Donald Trump's claim that after the certification of state votes by state legislatures, there was still a pathway in the Electoral College to reject votes by the Vice President of the United States.
00:11:12.000You can say all those things were untrue and you can simultaneously also say that the 2020 election Was rigged in a different way, not rigged as in people were in the back room punching ballots, but rigged in terms of the voting procedures.
00:11:25.000For example, in Pennsylvania, where there was widespread mail-in balloting in spite of the state constitution requiring that such rules not be made by the state Supreme Court, for example.
00:11:34.000You can look at the vast changes to voting procedures throughout the country and the lack of voter verification in wide areas and say, listen, I have doubts about this.
00:11:45.000And also, I think this was an attempt to artificially boost the number of people who probably would have voted by getting them all to basically sit at home.
00:11:51.000Then we have people go over to their house and pick up the ballots.
00:11:56.000Spent every waking moment of the 2020 election basically lying.
00:12:01.000Lying about Black Lives Matter, pretending that that was a peaceful, wonderful movement that had something important to say about the nature of systemic American racism.
00:12:09.000That riots were not happening on wide scale.
00:12:13.000That Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were somehow both pro-police and anti-police at the same exact time.
00:12:17.000That Donald Trump was not, in fact, going to develop a vaccine under Operation Warp Speed before the election.
00:12:24.000And the media lied pretty much every day of the 2020 election.
00:12:27.000And Donald Trump also happened to run an incredibly scattered and not particularly motivated campaign.
00:12:32.000Which is unfortunate, because I think it was a very winnable election for Donald Trump.
00:12:35.000So all of those things can be true at once.
00:12:38.000We can also say, for example, that the January 6th riots were really bad.
00:12:44.000And also, this is part and parcel of a much broader political polarization in the United States that has led to an uptick in political violence across the board.
00:12:52.000That it is impossible to talk about January 6th and the climate of American politics without talking about the fact that there was wide-scale rioting and looting, the worst rioting in American history the prior summer, approved of, patted on the head, celebrated by some members of the media and some members of the Democratic Party.
00:13:09.000You can point out that there's great hypocrisy to a Democratic party claiming that the worst thing in American electoral history was Donald Trump refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election post-November 4th, while simultaneously claiming that Stacey Abrams was the legitimate governor of Georgia after losing that race by 50,000 votes.
00:13:27.000They literally had her at a Democratic governor's panel at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
00:13:33.000They treated her as a great heroine of the Republic for claiming that the election of Georgia had been stolen in her early gubernatorial election, which it was not in 2018.
00:13:45.000This Democratic Party spent four years aided and abetted by the media, claiming that Donald Trump was not the legitimately elected president of the United States in 2016.
00:13:53.000Instead, the Russians had rigged the votes.
00:13:55.000The Russians had figured out some way to jerry-rig support for Donald Trump.
00:14:01.000And somehow, the Democrats and the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign and the FBI all put together this bizarre theory that turned out to be a giant nothing burger, but held the attention of the American public for four years.
00:14:12.000You don't get to undermine all the institutions and then be surprised when someone on the other side also undermines the institutions.
00:14:18.000So if we're talking about the collapse of American institutions, a symptom of which was January 6th, then we have to look around at why all the institutions and the trust in all of our institutions has been collapsing.
00:14:32.000That doesn't relieve responsibility for Donald Trump's rhetoric between November 4th and January 6th of the false claims that he was making.
00:14:38.000And it certainly doesn't relieve the responsibility of rioters for rioting.
00:14:42.000It does suggest that if we're going to have broad-scale conversations about the wrongs and the problems of American politics, we have to have those in a way that actually makes sense.
00:14:52.000But Democrats are not interested in that, of course, because the idea is the Republicans are threatening democracy, so you have to give us the auspices to threaten democracy, right?
00:15:00.000Pack the court, have people outside justices' houses protesting.
00:15:04.000If somebody shows up and threatens to actually kill a justice of the Supreme Court, you bury that on page A20 of the New York Times, which, by the way, is exactly what happened this week.
00:15:11.000The New York Times buried on page A20 a man showing up at Justice Kavanaugh's house trying to murder him.
00:15:18.000Do you think that might be a front page story for months at a time, certainly weeks at a time, if the political orientations had been reversed in that particular story?
00:15:28.000So you can hold all of these thoughts in your head because again, reality is messy.
00:15:32.000You can think that the January 6th riots were incredibly dangerous and incredibly ugly, but also they were not a threat to the democracy of the United States, the longest standing democracy in the world.
00:15:43.000And that the United States was on the verge of a violent overthrow by a bunch of droogs who got cleared from the Capitol building within three hours because they had no weapons on them.
00:15:52.000And the only person who was actually shot that day was one of the rioters, Ashley Babbitt.
00:15:58.000That is not what an actual insurrection looks like, by the way.
00:16:00.000With no military support, no institutional support.
00:16:04.000If you look at coups in other countries, that is not what a coup looks like.
00:16:07.000A coup does not look like a bunch of idiots running into a building and then getting cleared from the building within three hours.
00:16:13.000That's typically not how that stuff goes.
00:16:15.000An actual coup would require institutional support.
00:16:17.000But if you require institutional support, you need a zip recruiter.
00:17:47.000What they found is that 64% of Americans agree that American democracy is in crisis and at risk of failing.
00:17:53.00070% feel the same about America itself.
00:17:55.000A majority, regardless of gender, racial, ethnic group, generation, or region of the country feel that America is in crisis and at risk of failing.
00:18:14.000January 6th is instead a result of much of the political polarization and institutional breakdown we have seen in our politics over the course of the last decade.
00:18:23.000By the way, 47% of Republicans strongly agree with the sentiment that our democracy is in crisis at risk of failing.
00:18:28.000Now, if you thought this was all about January 6th, what you would think is that Democrats believe that, but Democrats don't believe that.
00:18:32.000Because again, Democrats are in power right now.
00:18:36.000Americans hold mixed perceptions on the event.
00:18:38.000According to this poll from January 2022, about a year after the event, around 1 in 3, 32% believe that the January 6th assault on the Capitol building was an attempted coup or insurrection.
00:18:47.00028% say it was a riot that got out of control.
00:18:51.000So basically, Americans are evenly split on the media narrative that this was a coup or an insurrection.
00:18:56.000And about a third say the same thing, that it was a riot that got out of control.
00:18:59.000Which, by the way, it was a riot that got out of control because the definition of a coup or an insurrection is that it is organized from top down in order to replace one government with another.
00:19:07.000Democrats keep saying they're going to show a smoking gun that shows collusion and an organization between Trump and the people who are trying to storm the Capitol building.
00:19:15.000They have so far provided zero evidence of this.
00:19:20.000Apparently, Around two-thirds of Americans accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
00:19:25.000Around a third believe there is fraudulent voting in the election.
00:19:27.000Another fifth say they are unsure, meaning under half of respondents unequivocally state there was no or very little fraudulent voting in the election.
00:19:35.000Well again, one of the reasons for this is because the media said there was no fraudulent voting in the election.
00:19:41.000I would assume there was some voter fraud in the election, but you can say that there is no evidence that this election was decided by voter fraud.
00:19:49.000Not in Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump lost by 80,000 votes.
00:19:51.000Not in Georgia, where he lost by 14,000 votes.
00:19:52.000Not in Arizona, where he lost by 12,000 votes.
00:19:54.000Not in Wisconsin, where he lost by 14,000 votes.
00:19:56.000Not in Michigan, where he lost by over 100,000 votes.
00:20:09.000If you listen to what I said about January 6th, if you listen to what I said about election 2020, between the election and January 6th, I said Donald Trump should be allowed to pursue every legal path available.
00:20:21.000I said that Donald Trump should make every allegation that he had in court.
00:20:24.000He did not even allege voter fraud in nearly all of the suits that he filed all across the country.
00:20:30.000He established the possibility of voter fraud.
00:20:31.000That is not enough to establish actual voter fraud.
00:20:36.000So you can be uneasy about the election.
00:20:38.000You can think that the election was rigged in all the ways that I said before.
00:20:41.000And you can still understand that the election itself, there was no capacity to quote unquote overturn the election based on what Donald Trump presented, which again was very little, as we'll get to in just a second.
00:20:54.000As far as what Americans believe about standardizing elections, 49% say standardizing voting rules across states will make American elections more fair compared to 19% who say that it will make elections less fair.
00:21:07.000Some of the other proposals, 44% of voters believe that every eligible voter should be able to vote by mail.
00:21:19.000It means that the American people are pretty much split on this.
00:21:21.000Also, the American people have moved on.
00:21:23.000OK, so there's new polling data also from FiveThirtyEight.com suggesting that the American people are not interested in litigating January 6th as sort of the case, the single case of how American politics works.
00:21:36.000Because as it turns out, Americans are actually concerned about how governance is happening right now.
00:21:41.000Americans are very concerned about the economy.
00:21:42.000They're very concerned about our foreign policy.
00:21:44.000They disapprove of the way that Joe Biden is handling the country.
00:21:47.000And so the attempts by the Democrats to recast all of American politics in terms of January 6th are likely to fail.
00:21:54.000They're likely to fail and they should fail because again, it is a misdirection play.
00:21:58.000And this is clearly grandstanding from the Democrats because after all, inflation is at 8.6% and things really are looking the wrong way.
00:22:05.000When you look at those polls, Americans say the direction of the country is bad.
00:22:08.000Well, if you need to boost your business because now is a rough economic time, you can't afford to leave options and strategies on the table.
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00:23:45.000Because here's the thing, if the Democratic agenda is to grandstand, if it is an electoral ploy, you at least don't want to let the American public know that it's an electoral ploy.
00:23:52.000And yet they lead off with Bennie Thompson.
00:23:55.000So here's the thing about Bennie Thompson.
00:23:57.000Leading off with Bennie Thompson is a really dumb idea because Bennie Thompson happens to be one of the people who voted against certification of the 2016 election.
00:24:06.000So if you're talking about the danger to the Republic in not voting to certify legitimate elections, this seems like a bad person to lead it off.
00:24:13.000But not only did Bennie Thompson lead it off, he decided to make claims that he could not sustain.
00:24:18.000So he leads off by saying that the violence was no accident on January 6th.
00:24:22.000The implication being, of course, that it was planned top-down.
00:24:24.000Now, you can say that there was internal planning among some groups, groups of Oath Keepers, groups of Proud Boys.
00:24:39.000But the implication here is that there's going to be evidence that they show that shows a direct connection between the Trump White House and therefore you, the Trump voter, and what happened on January 6th.
00:24:47.000That's the implication he's going to attempt to draw.
00:24:49.000And then they provide no evidence to back this up.
00:24:53.000Any legal jargon you hear about seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, Conspiracy to defraud the United States boils down to this.
00:25:06.000January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup.
00:25:11.000A brazen attempt, as one rioter put it, shortly after January 6th to overthrow the government.
00:25:22.000It represents Senate Trump's last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.
00:25:32.000Okay, again, they're performing a magical conflation.
00:25:34.000Conflation number one, you're a Trump voter.
00:25:37.000Therefore, you support everything that Trump said between November 4th and January 6th.
00:25:40.000Two, even if you support what he said between November 4th and January 6th, which was based on Trump saying things that were not true, this means that you support a riot.
00:25:47.000Three, if you support people in the Capitol grounds, this means you support the overthrow of democracy.
00:25:51.000And also, if you vote against Democrats today, you support all those things.
00:25:54.000That's the conflation Benny Thompson is attempting to draw.
00:25:55.000By the way, he objected to the 2004 vote certification.
00:25:58.000It was Jamie Raskin, who is also on this committee, who attempted to overturn the 2016 election by objecting to the certification of Florida's votes.
00:26:08.000But he didn't stop there, Benny Thompson.
00:26:09.000Again, if you're grandstanding, you got to grandstand.
00:26:35.000I'm Benny Thompson, chairman of the January 6, 2021 committee.
00:26:41.000I was born, raised, and still live in Bolton, Mississippi, a town with a population of 521, which is midway between Jackson and Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the Mississippi River.
00:26:57.000I'm from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching.
00:27:06.000I'm reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021.
00:27:47.000It's a ridiculous way to leave this off.
00:27:48.000Okay, the person who actually led the effort to try and drive the narrative here was Liz Cheney.
00:27:53.000And the reason that the Democrats use Liz Cheney here, of course, is because she is a Republican.
00:27:58.000And I will say that it is quite amusing to see the strange new respect earned by the Cheney family.
00:28:03.000As Liz Cheney becomes sort of a useful pawn in the Democratic agenda.
00:28:07.000And I'm not doubting Liz Cheney's motivations here.
00:28:09.000I'm not suggesting that Liz Cheney is somehow out for her own interests because she's probably going to lose in her congressional race right now in Wyoming.
00:28:18.000Hey, well, what I am suggesting is that Liz Cheney is overdrawing conclusions because that strange new respect goes to one's head.
00:28:25.000So Liz Cheney begins by laying out what she calls Trump's seven-part plan to take over the country in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
00:28:33.000Now again, she's going to have to explain which part of this plan actually involved sending rioters into the Capitol building to run around like idiots wearing buffalo horns and then get rousted from the Capitol within three hours.
00:28:44.000Because that's the thing we're supposedly talking about here, right?
00:28:46.000We're not talking about Donald Trump promulgating untruths between November 4th and January 6th.
00:28:52.000That's not what this investigation is about.
00:28:56.000Trump wanted to overturn 2020 election.
00:28:58.000And then a bunch of legal mechanisms, and he filed a bunch of lawsuits, and he had this bizarre theory about how Mike Pence was going to throw out certified votes and all this crap.
00:29:22.000On the morning of January 6th, President Donald Trump's intention was to remain President of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election and in violation of his constitutional obligation to relinquish power.
00:29:41.000Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.
00:29:53.000In our hearings, you will see evidence of each element of this plan.
00:29:59.000Man, probably should impeach that guy and maybe he shouldn't be president anymore.
00:30:12.000The impeachment did not actually allege criminal activity by Donald Trump and it was rooted in January 6th based on incitement, which was not legally met.
00:30:21.000And also, Donald Trump isn't president.
00:30:24.000He hasn't been president since January 20th of 2021.
00:30:28.000So what exactly does this have to do with the riots, per se?
00:30:34.000And she says that Donald Trump and the White House received reports that elements were preparing for violence.
00:30:39.000Okay, and presumably so did Speaker Pelosi, who didn't request preemptive security from the Capitol Police.
00:30:47.000I mean, it seems like everyone was taken unawares.
00:30:49.000Again, none of this is to alleviate responsibility for Trump between, what, 2.26 p.m.
00:30:54.000There's like a two-and-a-half-hour period where people were breaking into the Capitol building, and it's unclear exactly what Trump was doing before he sent that little video message telling people to go home, etc.
00:31:02.000But here is Liz Cheney suggesting active coordination.
00:31:05.000Again, you have to actually show evidence of active coordination if you're going to claim active coordination.
00:31:10.000Although certain former Trump officials have argued that they did not anticipate violence on January 6th, the evidence suggests otherwise.
00:31:19.000As you will see in our hearings, the White House was receiving specific reports in the days leading up to January 6th, including during President Trump's Ellipse rally, indicating that elements in the crowd were preparing for violence at the Capitol.
00:31:37.000Okay, now, you can be given that information, that there are elements of the crowd preparing for violence at the Capitol.
00:31:44.000That does not mean that you then told them, go ahead and attack the Capitol building.
00:31:48.000This is again, the dot they refuse to draw.
00:31:50.000And again, you don't have to alleviate responsibility on Trump for not doing enough while the riots were going on.
00:31:57.000And also, you know, I don't, what's the referendum here?
00:32:27.000You will hear that President Trump was yelling and, quote, really angry at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more.
00:32:37.000And aware of the rioters' chance to hang Mike Pence, the President responded with this sentiment, quote, maybe our supporters have the right idea.
00:33:12.000Here's the thing about these hearings.
00:33:13.000If you're going to have a hearing, it's got to be about something we didn't know.
00:33:16.000It can't be about stuff that we knew because we were watching it in real time on that day.
00:33:20.000And you got every element of what Trump was thinking that day and in like the next two days that followed.
00:33:26.000I believe one of the charges in the impeachment was something about how Trump had basically been derelict in not activating the Capitol Police and not activating the National Guard in time.
00:33:37.000So what is the case that she is making here?
00:33:39.000Is the case that Donald Trump actively organized with these people, that he was derelict in not calling people off, that he was derelict in not activating the National Guard in time?
00:33:50.000Fairly well established except for the first point, which is the whole idea that this was an insurrection organized by not just Donald Trump, the entire Republican Party in coordination, the same Republican Party that's out there trying to rig elections today, vote Democrat.
00:34:02.000That's the part they never quite established.
00:34:05.000So here's Liz Cheney saying that Trump refused to do anything to call off the rioters.
00:34:08.000And again, this is not shocking to me because this was pretty clear at the time.
00:34:14.000You will hear testimony that, quote, the president did not really want to put anything out, calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave.
00:34:24.000You will hear evidence that President Trump refused for hours to do what his staff, his family, and many of his other advisors begged him to do, immediately instruct his supporters to stand down and evacuate the Capitol.
00:34:40.000Now, again, what are they trying to establish here?
00:34:44.000The goal is to suggest an ongoing threat to American democracy, not that Donald Trump acted badly.
00:34:48.000By the way, again, Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States, did contact General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and told him to activate the National Guard.
00:34:56.000That is a thing that did happen, and the Capitol building was cleared.
00:35:00.000So, what exactly is the attempt to establish here?
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00:38:35.000And then, they move on to Donald Trump is a big bad orange man who's bad and orange and bad.
00:38:40.000And then they move on from that to, you know, there are a bunch of people in Trump's orbit who are telling him that the election fraud narrative was not true.
00:38:49.000Like, at some point you have to show the meat.
00:38:50.000If the January 6th hearing is about how the Republican Party in total was complicit, not just complicit, but involved in the January 6th attack on the Capitol building, you're going to have to show the meat.
00:39:00.000Now, Bennie Thompson told Jake Tapper last night that there were going to be witnesses describing actual conversations between the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and people in Trump's orbit.
00:39:10.000Suffice it to say, if they had that evidence, why did they not show that?
00:39:14.000If you had a conversation between, say, Mark Meadows and the head of the Oath Keepers, saying, yeah, tomorrow we're going into the Capitol.
00:39:21.000Mark Meadows would be like, yeah, that's great, let's overturn them out.
00:39:48.000I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit.
00:39:57.000And, you know, I didn't want to be a part of it.
00:40:01.000And that's one of the reasons that went into me deciding to leave when I did.
00:40:05.000I Observed, I think it was on December 1st, that you can't live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence, that there was fraud in the election.
00:41:31.000Okay, and this was played up on Twitter, by the way, it's like this is a big revel- why?
00:41:36.000You mean people around Donald Trump knew that what he was saying about the election, that that wasn't true?
00:41:41.000Yeah, that's why he ended up with Sidney Powell as his lawyer talking about releasing the Kraken and Rudy Giuliani in front of Four Seasons Gardening and Lawnmowers.
00:41:58.000He came to him and he said, I don't like what's going on with this January 20th stuff and Donald Trump talking about the election, and maybe I'll quit.
00:42:06.000And Kushner said, you know, honestly, I didn't think he was going to quit.
00:43:45.000So when you have Capitol police officers testifying about violence, this is the part where not like I'm there for it.
00:43:52.000But I got to say, I wish that there was some consistency in the level of defense of the police from the Democrats that you get when it comes to January 6th.
00:43:58.000Apparently, the only good police officers on planet Earth were the ones serving at the Capitol building January 6th.
00:44:04.000Everybody who hits a police officer, including people on January 6th, should be put in jail, obviously.
00:44:49.000The Democrats, who are focused in on one specific act of violence, at the expense of a bunch of other acts of violence, they're not heroes.
00:45:41.000It is also true that the Democratic agenda here is to tie everybody who is at the protest to everybody who's at the riot and all Republican voters to the protesters, to the rioters, which is why they presented a documentarian named Nick Quested, who said a statement that honestly is unsupportable.
00:45:55.000So he said that he was following the Proud Boys and that the Proud Boys turned from protesters into rioters, into insurrectionists.
00:46:05.000You either have to claim that the Proud Boys organized this beforehand, in which case they were involved In their rioting and insurrection, supposed insurrection attempt.
00:46:36.000We arrived at the mall and observed a large contingent of proud boys marching towards the Capitol.
00:46:43.000We filmed them, and almost immediately I was separated from my colleagues.
00:46:48.000I documented the crowd turn from protesters to rioters to insurrectionists.
00:46:54.000I was surprised at the size of the group, the anger and the profanity.
00:46:59.000And for anyone who didn't understand how violent that event was, I saw it, I documented it, and I experienced it.
00:47:09.000And nobody is suggesting that that was not violent once it got to the riot, but when he says, I saw them turn from protesters to rioters into insurrectionists, which group is he talking about?
00:47:17.000The hundreds of thousands of people who showed up?
00:47:19.000Or the couple thousand who walked down to the Capitol?
00:47:21.000Or the few hundred who actually went into the Capitol?
00:47:23.000Or the sub-segment of that who actually attempted to do violence to people?
00:47:31.000Now, there's one big dot that just never got connected during this primetime special, and that's the only dot that matters.
00:47:36.000And that is, was there active coordination between Team Trump and the people who are attempting to violently stop the certification of the election?
00:48:01.000That does not mean it was active coordination between Donald Trump and the rioters.
00:48:04.000It means what we already knew, which is that Donald Trump was sitting there and not doing what he was supposed to do during the riots, which is bad enough.
00:48:11.000But that's not the claim Democrats are making here.
00:48:13.000They're making the claim this is an organized collusion effort between the Republican Party and Donald Trump to overturn the election with the help of a bunch of proud boys who stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to violently overthrow the government.
00:48:22.000That is the actual case they're making.
00:48:28.000This was like their supposed smoking gun.
00:48:31.000Bad people read a bad tweet and then went and did bad things.
00:48:35.000Which, I'm sorry, describes nearly all of our politics for the last several years.
00:48:40.000We didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify.
00:49:16.000Okay, so the Democrats, of course, are trying to play this to the hilt.
00:49:22.000I'm not doubting that the Democrats were fearful that day because I've been in situations where there are riots directly outside of where I'm speaking.
00:49:30.000But, you know, trotting out AOC to try and gin up the emotional response of the American public I think is likely to be unsuccessful.
00:49:37.000So AOC last night, she took of course to her Instagram, which is where she disseminates all of her information, and she talked emotionally about January 6th.
00:49:47.000People think that just because this man was on reality TV, that this wasn't real.
00:50:03.000There's so much frustration and failures in the present moment, but we have to keep the focus on the bigger picture, which is that legally, structurally, institutionally, very little has changed.
00:50:41.000By the way, the Democratic Party keep claiming that they actually have evidence of collusion between Republican members of Congress and the rioters.
00:50:55.000The manipulation of all of that a year and a half later for political gain.
00:50:58.000That does not look like real life to me.
00:51:00.000That looks like political manipulation.
00:51:02.000So the GOP responds as you would expect them to respond.
00:51:04.000Kevin McCarthy yesterday, he says, the reason Democrats are talking about this is because they have no agenda on inflation or crime or anything else that's happening in the country.
00:51:11.000I mean, again, all these things can be simultaneously true.
00:51:20.000Of course Democrats are bringing this up 18 months after the fact with no serious new evidence of really anything.
00:51:27.000in order to try and distract. The New York Times reported it. This isn't hiding the ball.
00:51:30.000Again, the inflation stats as of this morning for the last month were 8.6%. That is the highest rate in 40 years. We were told last month we had peaked. We did not peak. So you're wondering why Kevin McCarthy's saying this? He's saying this because this is also true. Many things can be true at once, folks. Many things. Here's Kevin McCarthy.
00:51:49.000I don't see any prime time hearings set for gas price, for battling inflation, for feeding our children, for making the streets safer.
00:52:26.000And when the Republicans say this is an entirely partisan production, that also happens to be true.
00:52:30.000Now, again, the Republicans theoretically could have cooperated with this and then maybe asked some questions, but it makes it a lot more difficult to do that when Nancy Pelosi nixes the people who are on the committee in the first place.
00:53:14.000It's also because this is not what is of concern.
00:53:16.000It is very obvious at this point that the American people are not thinking of January 6th, 2021 as the be-all and end-all of American politics, or the flashpoint that is most indicative of where we are circa June 10th, 2022.
00:53:28.000And the American public shouldn't be thinking of it that way, because that is not where we are politically, June 10th, 2022.
00:53:34.000The Democrats run all three branches of elected government in this United States, and things are falling into garbage.
00:53:40.000And by the way, again, The Democrats claiming that all the institutions of democracy are under threat solely because of one side is really off-putting, particularly, again, I'm not going to mention again, because the media won't.
00:53:51.000This week, a man tried to kill a justice of the Supreme Court after a leak, presumably from a left-wing law clerk at the Supreme Court, of a draft Supreme Court decision on Roe versus Wade.
00:54:02.000This draft decision was treated by the Democrats as an actual threat to democracy.
00:54:07.000They encouraged people to protest at justices' homes.
00:54:09.000They put out Very incendiary tweets, they said very incendiary things, and someone tried to kill a justice, and this was buried on page A20 of the New York Times.
00:54:18.000No, I don't think that you guys have credibility on these particular issues.
00:54:24.000Things are bad because no one has credibility on these issues because no one has any level of consistency.
00:54:28.000But this is particularly true for a media and democratic party that are attempting to spin it that they are the great protectors of democracy.
00:54:35.000Speaking of people I don't believe, by the way, Janet Yellen suggested yesterday, there's nothing to suggest the United States will have a recession.
00:54:43.000She suggested five minutes ago that inflation was transitory, so I don't believe her either.
00:54:51.000I know people are very upset, and rightly so, about inflation.
00:54:55.000But there's nothing to suggest that inflation, that a recession's in the works.
00:55:02.000And as the Fed tightens monetary policy to contain demand and bring inflation down, I believe there is a path through this that entails a soft landing, with the economy essentially stabilizing.
00:55:19.000Straight from Hobbiton, she's explaining that she's going to save the economy after helping to wreck the economy in a circumstance where the economy should not be wrecked.
00:55:27.000They put the strongest economy in American history into an artificial coma because of COVID, and then they ended the artificial coma, and then the economy proceeded to have a full-on heart attack.
00:55:38.000And that is because of these particular human beings.
00:55:50.000Apparently they surveyed a bunch of CFOs at major corporations.
00:55:52.000Over 40% of chief financial officers cite inflation as the number one external risk to their businesses.
00:55:57.000And going deeper into the results from the Q2 survey, the links between geopolitics and food and energy prices and inflation are clear from the C-suite ranking of the external factors that are weighing on their current outlook.
00:56:06.000Almost one quarter of CFOs cite Federal Reserve policy as the biggest risk factor.
00:56:10.000And as the Biden administration struggled for ways to increase oil supply and Russian ships sail with seized Ukrainian wheat amid concerns about a severe global food insecurity crisis, additional CFOs cite supply chain disruptions, the Russia-Ukraine war specifically, as their number one business risk.
00:56:24.000CFOs are not uniformly of the view the Fed won't ultimately be able to control inflation.
00:56:29.000Only 54 percent, however, express confidence in the central bank.
00:56:33.000According to a majority, 68% of CFOs, a recession will occur during the first half of 2023.
00:57:04.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, Executive Producer Jeremy Boren, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Production Manager Pavel Lydowsky, Associate Producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, Editor Adam Sajevitz, Audio Mixer Mike Coromina, Hair and Makeup Artist in Wardrobe Fabiola Christina, Production Coordinator Jessica Grant.
00:57:28.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.