Trump prepares for the State of the Union address, Stacey Abrams prepares for her response, and Virginia Democrats continue their slow-motion implosion. Plus, a look behind the scenes of what's going on in Los Angeles as the rain begins to pour down, and Ben tells the story of what he's smelling behind the curtains as he's preparing for the big night. (It's not rain, it's moldy, and it's not a good day to be alive.) Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! You can also join our FB group and use the hashtag to interact with other on the socials and become a Friend of the Show! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about what you're listening to the podcast and we'll send you a link to the episode on iTunes and other podcasting platforms where you can be notified when a new episode is available. Thanks again for listening for supporting the podcast! Ben Shapiro is a proud supporter of The Daily Wire and The Weekly Standard in the form of PODCAST! Subscribe, rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast, and tell us what you think about the podcast. . if you like the podcast, rating, and/or have any thoughts or suggestions on what you'd like to be featured in the next episode. Thank you're a supporter of the next week's episode of the Daily Wire or other media outlet? or any other podcast you'll be getting a shoutout! - Ben Shapiro is listening to us on The DailyWire. - Thank you, Ben Shapiro, Thank you Ben Shapiro. or Insta: - thanks Ben Shapiro: The Dailywire.co Ben is a Ben Shapiro Podcast by v=a_t=1p& tag=a&_t_a&t=3d_c_t&qid=1&q&q=3s&q_c=3QQ&q = Ben & Ben is an ? And if you have a question or would like to support the podcast or tweet me , tweet so I'll get a shout out on the podcast?
00:00:00.000President Trump prepares for the State of the Union address, Stacey Abrams prepares for her response, and Virginia Democrats continue their slow-motion implosion.
00:00:25.000But I'll do it after we have our State of the Union address coverage tonight because I know that we all have to suffer through that together.
00:00:31.000I was so excited about the government shutdown.
00:00:33.000We'll get to all of this in just one second.
00:01:48.000I have to tell you, a little bit of behind the scenes here at the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:01:52.000It's not an auspicious day for the State of the Union here at the Ben Shapiro Show because it's raining in Los Angeles, first of all.
00:01:58.000And whenever it rains in Los Angeles, people around the area believe that God's wrath has fallen upon this town at long last.
00:02:04.000Second of all, our normal studios, you may have noticed that if you watch the show, that our normal studios, you know, with the bright, beautiful lights, have been replaced by this deep, dank cell.
00:02:12.000You know, this terrible, terrible place.
00:02:15.000That resembles the Pit of Despair from The Princess Bride.
00:02:18.000Well, it turns out that not only have we moved into a temporary studio while we build out our beautiful new magnificent studios, but also there are huge leaks in here that happen every time it rains.
00:02:27.000So, as we prepare for the State of the Union Address, we are also smelling the decomposing corpses of people that our producer Senya murdered.
00:02:34.000Earlier and then stacked up behind the curtains behind all the soundstage boards and everything.
00:02:39.000So, you know, it's a little depressing to be contemplating your own mortality while smelling the mold coming off the corpses as you prepare for the State of the Union address.
00:02:46.000So that's that's my mood this morning as I prepare for the State of the Union address.
00:02:51.000President Trump, of course, is supposed to give the State of the Union address tonight at long last.
00:02:55.000The government shutdown did have its good aspects.
00:02:57.000One of those aspects was no State of the Union address.
00:02:59.000Now, I know there are some people who get super pumped up about the State of the Union.
00:03:07.000They are just excited as can be about the State of the Union address.
00:03:10.000They cannot wait for President Trump to go out there and say a bunch of words that no one's going to remember five minutes after he said them.
00:03:33.000I don't remember a single thing that he said.
00:03:35.000I remember the people that he used for the props, because this is what we've been doing since Ronald Reagan, where the president points up into the rafters and he goes, and now let me tell you the story of Bob.
00:03:45.000And then everyone points to Bob and is like, yeah, Bob!
00:04:01.000So here are the people who President Trump is bringing for his guests at the State of the Union at the Capitol building tomorrow.
00:04:07.000The guests are going to include Deborah Bissell, Heather Armstrong, and Madison Armstrong.
00:04:10.000These are family members of Gerald and Sharon David who were killed by an illegal immigrant.
00:04:14.000President Trump, I'm sure, is going to talk about illegal immigrant crime and how it's linked to his need for a border wall, obviously.
00:04:19.000I have recommended that what President Trump actually should do is literally take a paragraph from Bill Clinton's State of the Union address in 1993 and just read it straight, and let the media go nuts over how extreme it is, and then release a video of him side-by-side with Bill Clinton saying the exact same words on his Twitter feed.
00:04:37.000The other folks, Matthew Charles, was released from prison under the First Step Act, that's criminal justice reform.
00:04:41.000Grace Eline, a 10-year-old cancer survivor.
00:05:23.000He said, I had to sit down with my son and hear him tell me that he hates himself and that he feels sad all the time, his mom said, on Facebook.
00:05:29.000So, a couple of things that are sort of odd about this.
00:05:32.000First of all, I'm not denying in any way that this kid got bullied, obviously.
00:05:35.000I mean, if you are bullied, I mean, I was viciously bullied in school.
00:06:01.000I had suggested earlier that it would be kind of hilarious if President Trump went, and the person who's been bullied the most, the person who's been bullied the most, is that man.
00:06:18.000You may sense that I'm making light of the State of the Union Address.
00:06:21.000That's because I think it's incredibly stupid.
00:06:22.000The State of the Union Address was meant to be a letter sent by the President to Congress saying, what's going on?
00:06:27.000And now it's this big, Monarchical display where the president comes in and we all cheer, yeah, because the executive branch is so important, even though it was supposed to be the second most important branch after the legislative branch.
00:06:39.000And then we have members of the Supreme Court who sit there and they clap and then they sit there silently while the president insults them.
00:06:44.000It's what Barack Obama did to members of the Supreme Court.
00:06:47.000So it'll just be, it'll just be a good time.
00:06:49.000So who else is President Trump bringing?
00:06:50.000He's bringing Ashley Evans, who has struggled with opioid and substance abuse for much of her life.
00:06:54.000In 2017, she was pregnant and suffered a relapse.
00:06:57.000Her recovery began with the birth of her daughter, along with the help of Bridges Path Medical Care Facility in Kettering, Ohio.
00:07:24.000It'll just be like a whole group of folks.
00:07:26.000Alice Johnson is showing up, of course.
00:07:27.000Alice Johnson was the woman who was released thanks to the intervention of Kim Kardashian, so that'll be exciting.
00:07:34.000Meanwhile, the Democrats are preparing their response to the State of the Union address, and the person who they have chosen to give this State of the Union response is Stacey Abrams.
00:07:42.000Now, Stacey Abrams, you'll recall, narrowly lost her gubernatorial race in Georgia.
00:07:46.000She did very well in the suburbs, Stacey Abrams.
00:07:48.000One of the reasons she did well in the suburbs when she ran for governor of Georgia is because her sort of radical intersectional message is not what she spat out in the Georgia suburbs.
00:07:57.000In the Georgia suburbs, she talked about sort of a moderate plan for keeping people safe and some new government programs, but she did not campaign as sort of a hardcore intersectional pander to the Democratic-based candidate.
00:08:07.000That is exactly what she has become after this race was over.
00:08:11.000She started, number one, complaining that the election was not legitimate.
00:08:14.000She still refuses to acknowledge that she lost that race.
00:08:16.000And then she started talking in pure intersectional terms about why we should divide each other by identity group.
00:08:22.000And she has a long piece in Foreign Affairs magazine, a very long piece, in Foreign Affairs magazine in which she talks about how upset she is with Francis Fukuyama.
00:08:31.000Francis Fukuyama, the end of history guy from the 1990s who suggested that liberal capitalism had won the world and therefore the end of history may have arrived.
00:08:39.000Well, he wrote a piece recently in which he decried identity politics as tribalism.
00:08:42.000And he talked about the tribal nature of our politics and why it's supremely dangerous.
00:08:46.000Well, Stacey Abrams wrote a response in which she said she's a fan of tribal politics.
00:08:49.000She thinks that intersectionality, which is basically the theory that we can all be described as human beings by the groups to which we belong.
00:08:55.000So I am not an individual human named Ben Shapiro.
00:08:58.000I am a Jewish white male who is upper income, right?
00:09:25.000It's really vile, because again, intersectionality doesn't just suggest that we can learn sort of information about you from your group.
00:09:33.000It suggests that the only information that is necessary for us to know about you is your group information, and therefore we should categorize you as a member of your group.
00:09:40.000And if you think differently than other members of your group, it's because you are not legitimately a member of your group.
00:09:44.000You have become some sort of group traitor.
00:09:47.000That's the problem with intersectionality in a nutshell.
00:10:19.000He didn't unify, like, his business offices at Trump Tower.
00:10:22.000So, I don't think he's the most unifying character, and I don't think that that's a huge shock to anybody.
00:10:28.000But, I also think that the Democrats have made an actual strategy to divide and conquer among particular groups in the United States, particularly split along racial and now class lines.
00:10:38.000Stacey Abrams is arguing in favor of that.
00:10:48.000And the reality is that intersectionality was a theory proposed by Kimberly Crenshaw a solid decade ago and has roots in the broader social justice movement that started in the 1960s that divides people from people by group.
00:11:02.000And then it was promoted by Barack Obama in a very heavy-handed way during his presidency.
00:11:08.000It led to incredible rises in the amount of discontent along racial lines in the United States.
00:11:12.000If you look at the polls, what you will see is that most Americans of every race were moving toward the idea that America was post-racial.
00:11:26.000Like, why exactly America is now more racially split than it was before Barack Obama was president.
00:11:30.000I'll get into that and then we'll get into Stacey Abrams' take on what American politics should be and why it's a problem.
00:11:35.000First, let's talk about your Second Amendment rights.
00:11:38.000When the Founders crafted the Constitution, the first thing they did was make sacred the rights of the individual to share their ideas without limitation by their government.
00:11:45.000The second right they enumerated was the right of the population to protect that speech and their own persons with force.
00:11:50.000You know, I really believe in the Second Amendment, and so do the folks over at Bravo Company Manufacturing.
00:11:54.000BCM was started in a garage by a Marine veteran more than two decades ago to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.
00:12:00.000BCM believes the same level of protection should be available to every American, regardless of whether they are a private citizen or a professional.
00:12:09.000They design, engineer, and manufacture life-saving equipment.
00:12:11.000They assume every rifle that leaves their shop will be used in a life-or-death situation.
00:12:16.000By a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, or soldier overseas.
00:12:19.000Every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard.
00:12:24.000BCM feels a moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the user when we're not just talking about a paper target, but someone coming to do you harm.
00:12:32.000This is why BCM works with leading instructors of marksmanship from top levels of America's Special Operations Forces.
00:12:37.000To learn more about BCM, check out BravoCompanyMFG.com.
00:13:07.000My overwhelming election against an American hero, John McCain, is proof that Americans want to move into a post-racial era.
00:13:14.000And that means that we are going to call out instances of racism where we see them, but we are not going to spread the label of racism To a bunch of stuff to which it doesn't apply.
00:13:23.000Instead, Barack Obama knew that his most solid political path, that would have been a politically risky path.
00:13:29.000It would have been, because it would have meant surrendering his greatest advantage in politics, his race, as a way of defending himself against political attacks.
00:13:54.000Every time there was any sort of racial incident in the United States, or incident that had nothing to do with race in the United States, but could be perceived as racial, Barack Obama stoked that flame.
00:14:03.000He used the intersectional identity politics In order to divide Americans so that he could win re-election and build an agglomeration of the aggrieved.
00:14:12.000In 2008, Barack Obama won, not because he separated Americans, but because he said, I'm here to unify.
00:14:17.000And then in 2012, running a rough re-election race against Mitt Romney, he decided more important to win re-election than to continue to run under a sort of unity ticket.
00:14:26.000Because he governed as a very divisive guy.
00:14:28.000And so because his policies divided us, he instead implied his race divided us.
00:14:32.000People bought into that, and then the Democratic Party began to say things like, well, you know what, maybe we don't need white voters anymore.
00:14:38.000Maybe what we really ought to do is go after this agglomeration of increasing minority voters, who will eventually be a majority, and those will be the people who rule the roost.
00:14:46.000And then in 2016, Trump ran on the backlash, right?
00:14:49.000Trump said, okay, well, You guys are going to do this routine where you pander to every minority group?
00:14:53.000Well, I'm going to treat a lot of white folks as though they are not, in fact, as though they are under assault from this viewpoint, which is at least half true.
00:15:17.000Stacey Abrams is about to give the State of the Union address response tonight.
00:15:20.000So, her perspective on intersectionality is actually a very damaging perspective.
00:15:25.000It is the perspective that basically suggests that intersectionality, group identity, is inherently good and useful as a political tool.
00:15:32.000And her tendency, like a lot of Democrats, is to blame President Trump for identity politics.
00:15:35.000That President Trump is basing his perspective on sort of a white identity politics that is nasty and negative and dangerous.
00:15:43.000But the reality is that that identity politics, which I agree, I think Trump engaged in 2016, is actually a response to the identity politics in which Barack Obama engaged.
00:15:52.000So to understand where we are with identity politics, we have to start from the Barack Obama administration.
00:15:56.000We have to start back in 2008, when Obama was elected.
00:16:00.000The American people were extremely optimistic about race relations in America.
00:16:03.000If you look back at the polls, they show that most Americans, black, white, brown, everyone thought that race relations were moving in the right direction.
00:16:09.000Obama was then elected on a particular basis.
00:16:12.000Barack Obama was elected on the basis of uniting Americans.
00:16:15.000He ran a campaign that said, we are all individuals, right?
00:16:24.000That's how he was elected, and he won a broad-sweeping victory on that platform.
00:16:27.000Then, when he came into office, he had the ability to say, OK, now we're going to have an honest discussion about what's racist and what's not in America, and I'm not going to pretend that every policy with which I disagree is steeped in racism.
00:16:38.000I'm not going to pretend that the Tea Party is racist.
00:16:40.000Maybe they just oppose me based on the size of government.
00:16:43.000I'm not going to pretend that Republicans who oppose me on the basis of Obamacare Do so because they are vicious racists, because there's no evidence of that.
00:16:51.000Instead, Barack Obama, particularly in 2012, decided that he was going to ramp up racial tensions in order to win re-election.
00:16:57.000He decided that he was going to use every racial flashpoint in America as a prop for his presidency.
00:17:02.000So when Trayvon Martin was shot by George Zimmerman in Florida, he was going to come out and say, Trayvon Martin could have been my son.
00:17:08.000He was going to say about Michael Brown, people in Ferguson, they're not just making things up.
00:17:14.000And by doing that routine, he helped divide Americans.
00:17:16.000The response to that was Donald Trump.
00:17:18.000So in 2012, Obama ran on this idea that there is this oppressed group of Americans who historically have been put under the thumb of the American hierarchy.
00:17:26.000We're going to sweep back to victory, and it's a proof that the minorities in America have finally achieved dominance in America.
00:17:31.000You saw this in the media a lot, the talk about the shrinking white majority and how there is going to be this durable coalition of minority groups for the future.
00:17:40.000Then in 2016, Donald Trump ran largely on the basis of, we're not going to stand for that, and he won.
00:17:46.000And the Democrats at that point had a choice.
00:17:48.000They could have said, listen, this intersectional politics stuff is dangerous.
00:17:51.000This stuff where we divide each other by group instead of appealing to each other as individuals, it's really dangerous and it's a real problem.
00:17:57.000Instead, they decided we're going to double down on that.
00:18:00.000We are going to suggest that in order to fight Donald Trump, in order to fight his preferred policies, we are going to call everything that he believes racist and all of his voters racist.
00:18:08.000And then we are going to unify as groups in order to fight the Trumpian agenda.
00:18:12.000Well, Stacey Abrams is a loud and proud progenitor of this argument.
00:18:16.000So she has a piece in Foreign Affairs magazine called Identity Politics Strengthens Democracy, which is a weird thing since identity politics from white people for most of America's existence was evil.
00:18:27.000Identity politics of white people caused slavery.
00:18:49.000She says, Francis Fukuyama, who has written an essay about why identity politics is dangerous, she says, Francis Fukuyama and other critics of identity politics contend that broad categories such as economic class contain multitudes, and that all attention should focus on wide constructs rather than the substrates of inequality.
00:19:05.000But such arguments fail to acknowledge that some members of any particular economic class have advantages not enjoyed by others in their cohort.
00:19:12.000history abounds with examples of members of dominant groups abandoning class solidarity after concluding that opportunity is a zero-sum game.
00:19:19.000The oppressed have often aimed their impotent rage at those too low on the social scale to even attempt rebellion.
00:19:24.000This is particularly true in the catch-all category known as the working class.
00:19:27.000So she's pointing at working class racism to suggest that now identity politics is more important than class solidarity.
00:19:34.000Now my view is that class solidarity is wrong and identity politics is wrong.
00:19:38.000I don't feel a solidarity with other people of my economic class.
00:19:41.000I don't feel like I have more morally in common with people who make the same amount of money that I do.
00:19:45.000I wasn't making this amount of money five years ago and I had the same values.
00:19:48.000So, this argument that some working class white people are bad to working class black people, therefore black people are a class and white people are a class, that doesn't follow.
00:19:57.000It is also possible that if we treat each other as individuals, we are best off.
00:20:02.000She's not wrong to suggest that group identity politics were originally created by a white majority intent on marginalizing particular groups.
00:20:30.000But if you're now suggesting that we are living in a system that oppresses people as groups, you're going to need to show evidence of that.
00:20:38.000It's not just enough to say that black people are generally victimized in the United States.
00:20:42.000In 1960, you could point to Jim Crow as an actual legal system that kept black people under the thumb of white people.
00:20:48.000If you can't point to a system that does that right now, then you're going to have to abandon your notion that you have to mobilize as a group to fight back against another group.
00:20:57.000Groups form in opposition to other groups.
00:20:59.000If there is no dominant group that identifies as a group and that is attempting to quash your group, your group identity is no longer threatened.
00:21:05.000So for you to use your group identity as a baton to wield against other people is actually an act of evil.
00:21:12.000She says, The facile advice to focus solely on class ignores these complex links among American notions of race, gender, and economics.
00:21:20.000She says, My campaign championed reforms to eliminate police shootings of African Americans, protect the LGBTQ community against ERISAT's religious freedom legislation, expand Medicaid to save rural hospitals, and reaffirm that undocumented immigrants deserve legal protections.
00:21:32.000I refuse to accept the notion that the voters most affected by these policies would invariably support me simply because I was a member of a minority group.
00:21:40.000My campaign built an unprecedented coalition of people of color, rural whites, suburban dwellers, etc, etc.
00:21:45.000And then she talks about how she lost because she was cheated, basically, which is not true.
00:21:49.000And then she says, to seek redress and inclusion, the first step is to identify the barriers to entry, an array of laws and informal rules to prescribe, diminish, and isolate the marginalized.
00:21:58.000And here is where she gets into her main point.
00:22:00.000Her main point is that discrimination in the United States is still done along group lines.
00:22:04.000And this is a lie that intersectional Folks are going to tell you all the time.
00:22:33.000Opening them is an experience he'll never forget because he will have to prove his manliness and strength to you by breaking into the man crate.
00:22:41.000They've got unique gifts like the personalized barware crate with personalized pint glasses and bottle opener and the pizza grilling crate with pizza stones and two-sided dough roller he'll use all the time.
00:23:34.000Go check it out and make him prove that he is indeed a man when he breaks open the man crate.
00:23:39.000Okay, so Stacey Abrams is supposed to give the response to the State of the Union tonight, and she is very much in favor of an intersectional politics she thinks will drive her to victory.
00:23:49.000In Georgia, the reason that she came close to winning is because she appealed to suburban women.
00:23:54.000White suburban women are not really turned on by the intersectional notions that are pushed by people like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
00:24:03.000This is not really what they are thinking when they're thinking, who do I want running the government?
00:24:07.000But the case for intersectionality, which again is identification with group politics, It's a dangerous case, and here she is making the case.
00:24:15.000She says, The specific methods by which the United States has excluded women, Native Americans, African Americans, and the LGBTQ community from property ownership, educational achievement, and political enfranchisement have differed.
00:24:26.000So too have the most successful methods of fighting for inclusion.
00:24:30.000Hence the need for a politics that respects and reflects the complicated nature of these identities and the ways in which they intersect.
00:24:36.000The basis for sustainable progress is legal protections grounded in awareness of how identity has been used, To deny opportunity.
00:24:43.000And so she suggests, for example, anti-abortion rules disproportionately harm women of color and low-income women of every ethnicity, affecting their economic capacity and threatening their very lives.
00:24:51.000This is a perfect example of how the intersectional identity is evil.
00:24:55.000Anti-abortion laws are not directed at minority women.
00:24:58.000They are not directed at quashing the hopes and aspirations of minority women.
00:25:01.000To mobilize minority women against a law that is not targeting them by suggesting that their identity is under threat is an appeal to tribal politics that is evil by its nature.
00:25:11.000Anti-abortion laws are directed at protecting the unborn.
00:25:16.000They're not created by white patriarchies in order to harm women of color.
00:25:21.000To mobilize qua women of color and suggest to people that their group is under threat is to constantly be pressing the red alarm button in a situation that does not call for it, and to be dividing Americans on the basis of perceived threat, where no threat exists.
00:25:35.000And when you do that, when you do that often enough, you end up in a very dangerous political environment Where every political difference is now grounds for all forms of resistance up to and including, in some cases, violence.
00:25:49.000If you feel your identity is threatened, not your politics, your identity, your identity as a woman of color is threatened by an anti-abortion law, you are likely to feel a lot more passionately about the evil of the people who are proposing that law than if you just say, well, it's a political disagreement about the nature of life and when it begins.
00:26:06.000I mean, this is why intersectional identity is dangerous, dangerous stuff.
00:26:09.000And it's funny, because people on the left used to acknowledge this.
00:26:12.000People on the left used to acknowledge that identity politics was bad when it was the identity politics of white people.
00:26:17.000But now that it's the identity politics of groups they hope to mobilize against the prevailing hierarchy, then identity politics is good.
00:26:24.000Stacey Abrams concludes, the current demographic and social evolution toward diversity in the United States has played out alongside a trend toward greater economic and social inequality.
00:26:33.000These parallel but distinct developments are inextricably bound together.
00:26:36.000The entrance of the marginalized into the workplace, the commons, and the body politic spawned reactionary limits on their legal standing and restrictions meant to block their complaints and prevent remedies.
00:26:46.000What she is suggesting is that as black people have been more accepted in American society, informal rules have come about to make them less equal.
00:27:01.000If she can point to limits and rules that actually exist, that we can all fight together, then I'm sure we'll all be on the same side.
00:27:07.000But if the suggestion is that as we have become more tolerant, we have also become more unequal because there are secret, nefarious forces at work in society to keep minority groups down, then you're spouting conspiracy theory bull.
00:27:20.000And that conspiracy theory bull is dangerous.
00:27:23.000It was dangerous when it was directed against Jews historically.
00:27:25.000It was dangerous when it was directed against blacks historically.
00:27:29.000Whenever there is a conspiracy theory about a particular group of people seeking to keep your group of people down, you can't point to any actual rule doing it.
00:27:36.000It's just out there in the miasma of politics.
00:27:41.000You're participating in an extraordinarily dangerous exercise in polarization of Americans along tribal lines, and it really destroys the nature of America.
00:27:50.000She says the natural antidote to this condition is not a retrenchment to amorphous universal descriptions devoid of context or nuance.
00:27:57.000So we can't just appeal to each other as Americans or individuals.
00:28:00.000Instead, we have to recognize that we are inevitably part of groups and that those groups are our chief mode of identification.
00:28:06.000She says, This is such absolute, sheer, unmitigated bullcrap.
00:28:08.000This is such absolute sheer unmitigated bull crap, I can't even tell you.
00:28:26.000That if you think that the way to unite Americans is to say, yeah, but you're not really an American, you're a black American, you're a Hispanic American, you're a Jewish American...
00:28:34.000And until we recognize your unique identity as these things and your unique history of victimization, we can't move forward.
00:28:41.000Listen, I can acknowledge the victimization of an enormous number of groups in American history.
00:28:47.000And if your idea is that we have to treat you as a member of a group rather than as an individual subject to a creedal identity, You're destroying the very nature of what was great about America in the first place.
00:29:52.000And now we have this situation where politicians are best off sticking it out.
00:29:56.000Because if you can stick it out, then you get to rewrite your legacy completely.
00:29:59.000Right, if Ted Kennedy had done the right thing after driving a woman into a river and leaving her to drown, if he'd done the right thing and just ended his political career, then he would have lived off his life in obscurity in the 1970s, but he stuck around.
00:30:10.000And by sticking around, he got to rewrite his legacy into Lion of the Senate.
00:30:15.000And so if you're Ralph Northam, why in the world would you leave?
00:30:18.000The answer is, there is no upside of leaving.
00:30:22.000OK, we're going to get into Ralph Northam and Justin Fairfax, where things are going wildly wrong for the lieutenant governor of Virginia as well.
00:30:28.000First, reminder, you need to subscribe.
00:30:44.000I think it's just going to be spectacular.
00:30:46.000I just, I think it's going to be amazing.
00:30:49.000OK, I just, it's going to be incredible.
00:30:51.000Well, while I suffer with it, you know, through it with you, we'll all be there celebrating it, enjoying ourselves, drinking ourselves into oblivion.
00:31:01.000With Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring and me and Andrew Clavin, the exquirable Michael Knowles and Alicia Krauss, we'll all be here discussing the important issues and, of course, answering your questions.
00:31:08.000Will we finally see Trump deliver the State of the Union address?
00:31:11.000Will he use the word big or huge more than 37 times?
00:31:14.000Will he appeal to John Miller as the most victimized man in America?
00:32:17.000So here's a childhood friend of Ralph Northam's, one of his black friends, because this is good politics, is to say, I have a black friend, and then you're like, here is my black friend.
00:32:26.000So here is one of his black friends on with block of wood Chris Cuomo on CNN.
00:32:30.000And she is explaining that she believes that he is not the man in the picture from his yearbook page.
00:32:36.000of a man in blackface and another man in a KKK outfit at a Halloween party or something.
00:32:41.000She says she believes that it's not him because she's never seen him be racist.
00:32:45.000What the governor did was took ownership of a picture that had his name as a prominent heading.
00:32:53.000He took ownership of, as the governor, he had to, he felt compelled to address that.
00:32:58.000Ralph Northam is not the person that is depicted In the photograph that's on his page.
00:33:06.000If Ralph tells me he's not in that picture, I believe him.
00:33:10.000Okay, well, you know, at this point, honestly, his best move was to basically say, I don't remember being in that picture.
00:33:15.000If I was in that picture, I apologize.
00:33:17.000It was a dumb, racist, insensitive thing to do back in 1985.
00:33:45.000Nonetheless, his lieutenant governor is now blaming the governor of Virginia for dumping oppo on him about an alleged 2004 sexual assault.
00:33:53.000Does anybody think it's any coincidence that on the eve of potentially Mai being elevated, that that's when this uncorroborated smear comes out?
00:34:03.000And yet, the post who investigated it for three months dropped the story, did not do it, and they did not do it because it was uncorroborated, and it's uncorroborated because it's not true.
00:34:11.000And so, it goes away for a year, and it crops back up right at this moment.
00:34:17.000You don't have to be Okay, so he's obviously implying that the Virginia governor dumped the apple on him.
00:34:32.000He said he had no indication that Northam was responsible late on Monday night.
00:34:35.000In the same conversation, he then hinted that LeVar Stoney, who's the mayor of Richmond and a potential rival to Fairfax for the 2021 Democratic nomination for governor, may have played a role.
00:34:45.000He praised the acumen of a reporter who inquired whether Stoney might have been responsible.
00:34:49.000And then Mr. Stoney said, the insinuation is 100% not true, and frankly, it's offensive.
00:35:18.000Well, because Fairfax has acknowledged that he knows the woman and had sex with the woman.
00:35:21.000So, right off the bat, you have at least commonality that they went back to a hotel room.
00:35:25.000What happened in the hotel room is anybody's guess.
00:35:28.000Now, there are no witnesses as to what happened in the hotel room.
00:35:30.000You have a basic he-said-she-said scenario from 2004.
00:35:33.000Does that mean that I believe the woman?
00:35:34.000No, I don't have any evidence to believe the woman at this point.
00:35:37.000Maybe she's telling the truth, maybe she's not.
00:35:38.000I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows.
00:35:41.000But I'll tell you this, there's a lot, there are a lot fewer red flags about her story than there were about Christine Blasey Ford's story as it emerged.
00:35:47.000Or she didn't know time, place, she didn't know date, she didn't know location, she didn't know any, and all the people she said were at the party said, uh, no, I don't remember any of this happening.
00:35:56.000In this particular case, the woman knows the time, she knows the date, she knows the location.
00:35:59.000He agrees with her about the time, date, and location.
00:36:02.000He just says that she consented, and she says that she did not consent.
00:36:06.000So, she has now, I mean, this is getting rich, she has now hired the law firm for Christine Blasey Ford.
00:36:13.000She has hired the exact law firm that Christine Blasey Ford used, so we'll see if the media are as eager in pressing on with the investigation into the allegations against Justin Fairfax as they were in pressing the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that ended, ironically, with another yearbook scandal in which Democrats were questioning the potential justice on the Supreme Court about the use of the word boof on a Facebook page from his high school days.
00:37:12.000So that is the latest from Virginia, where the Democratic Party is falling apart.
00:37:17.000I mean, frankly, they're just blowing each other up.
00:37:19.000It could provide an opening for Republicans if Republicans could actually take advantage.
00:37:23.000And all Republicans in Virginia have to do, honestly, all they have to do is the same thing that Democrats nationally have to do with Trump.
00:38:07.000It would simply suggest that if a baby is born alive, you have to use life-saving measures on the baby.
00:38:12.000You can't just let the baby die or kill the baby.
00:38:15.000The legislation would create criminal penalties for doctors who allow infants to die rather than providing medical care after attempting abortion procedures.
00:38:22.000It mandates that a child born alive in an abortion clinic be transported to a hospital for further care.
00:38:27.000Health care practitioners must report any violations of the law.
00:38:30.000The bill institute penalties for intentionally killing a newborn, including fines and up to five years imprisonment.
00:38:35.000It would also grant the woman on whom the abortion is performed a civil cause of action against the abortionist and protection from prosecution if her child is not cared for after birth.
00:38:47.000So in a second, I'm going to play you Senator Ben Sasse explaining exactly what happened here, and then we'll get into the increased radicalism of the Democratic Party, which just continues apace.
00:38:56.000So, here is Senator Sasse explaining that Democrats were going to block this anti-infanticide bill, which they proceeded to do.
00:39:04.000In a few minutes, the United States Senate is going to have an opportunity to condemn infanticide.
00:39:11.000100 United States senators are going to have an opportunity to unanimously say the most basic thing imaginable, and that is that it's wrong to kill a little newborn baby.
00:39:23.000Every senator will have the opportunity to stand for human dignity.
00:39:27.000To stand for the belief that, in this country, all of us are created equal.
00:39:31.000Because if that equality means anything, surely it means that infanticide is wrong.
00:39:36.000Okay, well, Democrats found that it was not wrong.
00:39:38.000They say, well, this wasn't really going to change the status of the law.
00:39:41.000Alexandra DeSantis, over at National Review, she writes, as of 2014, only 26 states had laws creating a specific affirmative duty for physicians to provide medical care to infants born in botched abortions.
00:39:51.000As of 2016, only six states required that abortion providers report instances of infants born alive under such circumstances.
00:39:58.000In New York, a born-alive protection was on the books.
00:40:00.000The recent abortion expansion from the state removed it.
00:40:04.000The new Virginia bill would have downgraded the requirement that doctors provide care to newborn infants from a must to a shall standard, which is a legally significant definition.
00:40:13.000So Democrats say that nothing was actually going to change her.
00:40:16.000They say it's part of good medicine to be able to let the baby die.
00:40:20.000Diana Green Foster, a professor of obstetrics, recently told the Judiciary Committee in the Senate that doctors and nurses and women themselves know best whether care would lead to survival.
00:40:32.000I don't know why women themselves would know whether care would lead to survival.
00:40:34.000They're not doctors, so that in and of itself is pretty insane.
00:40:37.000The extremism of the Democrats continues apace.
00:40:39.000Ilhan Omar, who is one of the fresh faces of the Democratic Party, so fresh, so face, tape has now emerged of her from 2013 blaming the United States for the rise of Al-Qaeda because she should sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
00:40:50.000I see no reason why a woman who despises Israel, who is openly anti-Semitic, who Blames the United States for the rise of Al Qaeda.
00:40:59.000I don't see any reason why she shouldn't sit on the House Foreign Affairs Committee as a Democrat.
00:41:02.000We don't hear the American apologize when their troops, when their states destroy other countries, when their state's empire misbehave overseas.
00:41:13.000Nobody wants to face how the actions of the other people that are involved in the world have contributed to the rise of the radicalization and the rise of terrorist acts.
00:41:32.000Right, so it's all the United States' fault that there's been an increase in terrorist acts.
00:41:35.000The Democratic Party doing a wonderful job of painting themselves into a national corner.
00:41:39.000My favorite instance of Democrats just destroying themselves yesterday was Nancy Pelosi.
00:41:45.000I do love when people in the Democratic Party quote the Bible.
00:42:28.000She does quote it apparently all the time, but that is not a thing.
00:42:32.000So, I don't know what she's talking about, but it is fun to be able to just pretend things are in the Bible that are not in the Bible, and then pretend that there are things in the Bible that don't belong in the Bible.
00:42:40.000It really is fun to watch Democrats selectively quote the Bible while simultaneously cracking down on religious people across the country.
00:42:48.000Meanwhile, I have to acknowledge the incredible wonder of Andrew Cuomo.
00:42:52.000Andrew Cuomo is just a fool, and it's hilarious because Democrats who keep saying that we ought to tax the rich into oblivion, why not a wealth tax?
00:43:08.000So Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday announced a dramatic drop in state income tax revenue of $2.8 billion.
00:43:13.000He says it will prompt him to revise his 2019-2020 budget and reconsider spending on schools, health care, and repairs to roads and bridges.
00:43:20.000But why not just raise taxes in New York, Governor Cuomo?
00:43:23.000I mean, aren't there rich people in New York, Governor Cuomo?
00:43:25.000I have heard there's an endless pile of money, and that all the rich people in New York have giant money bins like Scrooge McDuck, and they go swimming in them at night.
00:43:32.000Can't you just suck those money bins dry and use it to pay for all the impoverished in New York, Governor Cuomo?
00:43:37.000And here was Governor Cuomo's answer to that question.
00:44:19.000He said that he and his administration are blameless.
00:44:21.000He said the continued exodus of residents from the state and a temporary millionaire's tax created in 2009 to contend with the Great Recession, but which he has since extended, so it was not temporary, that was not a contributing factor.
00:44:32.000But he said also, God forbid that the billionaire should leave the state.
00:44:36.000I do love the odd choice that Democrats are forced to make between tax all the billionaires and we need billionaires so we can tax them.
00:44:46.000The Democrats saying, we need lots of billionaires so we can take all their money, but also there shouldn't be a system that allows billionaires.
00:45:12.000Democrats, you know, generally have to make that choice eventually, and that choice eventually is you have to let the rich people exist, is the reality.
00:45:19.000Otherwise, all the rich people leave, and you can redistribute nothing, and then you can see how well that goes for you.
00:45:24.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:46:05.000It was a football game that was played to completion, but you know things are slow when one of the most notable plays of the night was a punt.
00:46:12.000The night wasn't without a few moments that got people talking.
00:46:14.000Here are some highlights from a mostly somnolent Super Bowl The Super Bowl.
00:46:19.000Okay, they say people had opinions about Adam Levine's nipples.
00:46:22.000Maroon 5's Adam Levine slowly molted throughout the halftime show, shedding a jacket, then another jacket, and finally a tank top until he was bare-chested in front of God and Big Boy and everyone.
00:46:31.000This didn't sit well with some fans who wondered why Adam Levine's nipples were apparently fine for air, while 2004's Nipplegate made Janet Jackson a pariah for years.
00:46:40.000So the rest of the halftime show was mostly underwhelming.
00:46:43.000Okay, so a couple of notes about Adam Levine going shirtless.
00:46:46.000Number one, you have to have made some really terrible decisions in life to have a giant tattoo of the word California above your belly button.
00:47:31.000I love the fact that CNN is bewildered by why there is a difference between Janet Jackson flashing her boob during a show and Adam Levine with his shirt off.
00:47:41.000Hint, it's because apples and bananas are not the same.
00:47:45.000CNN said that they call an apple an apple.
00:48:14.000First of all, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer did a cameo on Stephen Colbert, which is basically just the weak Democratic National Committee comedy show.
00:49:36.000So, Liam Neeson is being ripped up and down for a piece of audio in which he explained that a friend of his, this must have been, what, 30, 40 years ago or something, because Liam Neeson is now 80, that some time ago, a female friend of his was raped, and he asked her, by whom, and the friend said, a black person, and then he had a tribal, vicious, evil response.
00:51:09.000When I eventually thought, Okay, so the entire moral of the story is tribal instincts take over sometimes and they're evil and they're bad and you have to fight them.
00:51:19.000So everybody immediately took away the important lesson, of course, which is Liam Neeson is a racist.
00:51:23.000So he tells a story about how he did something terrible back when he was young and now he is going to come forward and explain that those instincts are things that you have to fight because they're evil and they're bad and there's a dark side of humanity.
00:51:34.000And people are like, how dare he tell this story about a bad thing he did when he was young?
00:51:37.000He never should have done a bad thing when he was young.
00:51:40.000Okay, I think you're missing the point of redemption.
00:51:41.000I think you're missing the point of every story about where somebody did something wrong and then learned not to be that person.
00:51:46.000And maybe you ought to rethink how you think about humans if your first reaction to that story is not, I'm glad that Liam Neeson learned a lesson and can now inform people about how terrible human nature is.
00:51:56.000And instead it's, I can't believe Liam Neeson ever sinned or thought a bad thing.
00:51:59.000You know, that's... You're doing being a human wrong, honestly.
00:52:02.000Like, how about a little bit of grace, and particularly grace for people who are redeeming themselves and coming clean about some evil things that they may have thought or done in the past.
00:52:10.000If we don't have grace as a society, we're finished.
00:52:13.000Well, we will be here later today with two more hours, and then we're gonna be here covering the State of the Union Address, which, as I've told you, I'm so eager about it, I'm gonna go drink some cyanide now.
00:52:34.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
00:52:44.000Edited by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera, production assistant Nick Sheehan.
00:52:50.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.