In this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, host Ben Shapiro talks about the latest in the ongoing saga of the Trump impeachment hearings and how the media and corporate America are working together to delegitimize the Trump administration. He also discusses the growing fear of the "cancel culture" and how it affects millions of Americans, especially on the left, and how they fear that they will be targeted by it. Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and writer who has written for the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NPR, NPR and the Los Angeles Times. He is the host of the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard. He is also a frequent contributor to the Financial Times and the Weekly Standard, and is one of the most well-known conservative voices in America. Ben is an avid reader and supporter of many conservative causes, including immigration reform, and has been a long-time supporter of President Trump and other conservative causes. His work has been widely well received by the media, including his frequent appearances on CNN and NPR, and he is a frequent guest on conservative talk shows on Fox News and NPR. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and other media outlets. Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, The BenShapiro's Other Podcast, wherever you get your news and opinionated opinions are consumed, you'll get 10% off your first month! Subscribe and leave a review on iTunes! Leave us a rating and review in your thoughts on the Ben Shapiro Podcast! Subscribe! You'll get 5 stars, 5 stars and a FREE 7 days of unlimited access to all of Ben's newest book recommendations, plus I'll be giving him a shoutout in next week's next episode on the next episode of his new book out on Monday, "Ben Shapiro's new podcast, "The Real Reel" coming out on Tuesday, "Soloism: The Realist's Guide to America's Most Influenced by Ben Shapiro." Subscribe, Subscribe, review, and subscribe to his podcast, I'll get 20% off his newest book, "Noah Rothbard's New Year's Day, My Thoughts on the Realist Journalist, "Cull Culture." and much more! Learn more about him on his new novel, "Mr. Tomahawk: The Call Me Out" out in the new issue of "The Call Me Back" out next week!
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00:01:33.000Okay, so we're gonna get to everything impeachment related in just a few minutes here.
00:01:36.000But honestly, the story that I think is more indicative for more Americans today than impeachment is actually a story that seems rather minor on the surface.
00:01:45.000It seems rather minor on the surface, except that we have literally tens of millions of people in the United States who are afraid that the cancel culture is coming up for them.
00:01:53.000OK, the culture of we are going to get you fired because we don't like your social media posts, not even social media posts that are extraordinarily horrific.
00:02:00.000You know, the kind of stuff that would get you shunned in polite society, just stuff that is a little edgy, right?
00:02:23.000And then the media and Democrats pressure corporations to do their bidding in order so that they can foster that agenda.
00:02:28.000So unofficially, they're allowed to use threats in order to make clear what exactly they want to happen.
00:02:33.000Okay, so what this results in very, very often is corporations looking to cram down a particular viewpoint on you and then cancel you.
00:02:40.000Right, that is what many Americans are feeling today.
00:02:43.000There are polls out there that show that a vast majority of Americans in every single political group, including liberals, except for people on the hard left, feel like they cannot say what they want to say in public because they're afraid that they are going to be cancelled, fired.
00:03:00.000And I will say it is amusing to watch as some people on the hard left get cancelled and then they turn around and they're like, why aren't people defending me?
00:03:31.000The fact that there are people out there who want you to lose your job for the sin of saying things they don't agree with is extraordinarily real, and it is happening on a moment-by-moment basis.
00:03:40.000The latest example of this is Gina Carano.
00:03:42.000So, Gina Carano is one of the stars of the Mandalorian.
00:03:45.000She plays a character called Cara Dune.
00:03:47.000And Gina Carano was a former MMA star, and then she was in a movie called Haywire, in which she sort of made her acting debut.
00:03:53.000She's been in a bunch of stuff since then.
00:03:55.000And then her biggest role to date was as Cara Dune in the Mandalorian.
00:03:58.000So she's sort of the ally of the Mandalorian, who's played by Pedro Pascal.
00:04:02.000Now, apparently back in November, according to the Hollywood Reporter, there was talk about giving her her own spinoff show because Disney Plus has decided to move into a bunch of Star Wars spinoffs, right?
00:04:23.000And so they essentially removed that possibility.
00:04:27.000Okay, so again, this is according to The Hollywood Reporter, quote, this is not the first time Carano, who played former Rebel Alliance soldier Cara Dune on The Mandalorian, has been the focus of social media ire for her political comments.
00:04:38.000Last November, she issued contentious tweets, one in which she mocked mask wearing amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, another in which she falsely suggested that voter fraud occurred during the 2020 presidential election.
00:04:48.000A source with knowledge of Lucasfilm's thinking told The Hollywood Reporter, quote, they've been looking for a reason to fire her for two months.
00:05:40.000Okay, so they're saying that they had meant to cancel her all the way back in November for those kinds of posts, which are slightly edgy, but not frankly all that edgy.
00:05:49.000Okay, then she posted the final straw.
00:06:08.000And then it's a quote that says, because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
00:06:17.000How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?
00:06:21.000That is not her making light of the Holocaust.
00:06:23.000As your official Jewish friend, as an Orthodox Jew, let me just say, I don't like Holocaust comparisons.
00:06:29.000I think that virtually all of them are overwrought.
00:06:30.000I think that very few of them really are accurate.
00:06:35.000I think most of them ignore historical context.
00:06:37.000I think virtually all of them liken things that are not like the Holocaust to the Holocaust.
00:06:40.000I don't think that liberals in the United States are on the verge of rounding Jews up and sending them to concentration camps, for example.
00:06:46.000With that said, this post is an overwrought holocaust comparison.
00:06:51.000It is not even close to a fireable offense.
00:06:53.000Her saying that neighbors should treat people decently because if you don't treat your political neighbors decently, you can be roped into doing things that are evil, which is the general point.
00:07:03.000That happens to not be a general point that is wrong.
00:07:05.000It's just that it ought not be done in the context of a holocaust comparison.
00:07:07.000Again, I don't like holocaust comparisons.
00:07:14.000Are overwrought holocaust comparisons, comparisons that should not be made, that are inappropriately made to the holocaust, are those fireable offenses?
00:07:20.000Well, let me just mention that there's another star of the Mandalorian.
00:07:26.000Pedro Pascal has recently trended because he is a leftist on politics and because he has expressed support for transgender rights and all of this.
00:07:35.000And so this makes him very popular in the Twitterverse.
00:07:38.000Also, he's very progressive on issues like immigration.
00:07:41.000Here is a tweet that Pedro Pascal put out on June 20th, 2018.
00:07:54.000It is a picture of a bunch of kids in cages, right?
00:07:58.000So the comparison is kids in cages in Germany, 1944.
00:08:01.000You know, except for the fact that we are housing and making sure that those kids are okay, as opposed to, you know, gassing them to death, that comparison is perfectly appropriate.
00:08:11.000But was there an iota of comment about Pedro Pascal?
00:08:22.000So she didn't lose her job, they represent her, right?
00:08:24.000UTA is an agency, they represent her, and they dumped her on the side of the road.
00:08:27.000Disney Plus has decided that Gina Carano can no longer be associated with Disney Plus because she made an overwrought Holocaust comparison that happens to be of the right.
00:08:35.000If you make an overwrought Holocaust comparison, you're of the left.
00:08:37.000If you call Trump Hitler, if you suggest that kids who are being kept separate from their parents in accordance with the Flores settlement, by the way, that that is like the Holocaust, you're totally fine.
00:08:47.000We're going to get to more of this in just one second, because it is indicative of where we are in the culture, and it is a terrible moment for American culture.
00:08:55.000And yes, this is more indicative for more Americans of what is going on in their daily lives than many of the things that are being said in the Capitol building today.
00:09:04.000And that is not to make light of the impeachment and is not to make light of what happened on January 6th.
00:09:08.000It is to say that social movements have consequences and we are now in the middle of a mass social movement to expel half of the American population from the body politic.
00:09:16.000We're getting to more of this in just one second.
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00:10:38.000Mandalorian or the Star Wars galaxy after sharing a post on social media implying that being a Republican today is like being Jewish during the Holocaust.
00:10:45.000Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm. There are no plans for her to be in the future, a Lucasfilm spokesperson said in a statement. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable. I have a question. Like, really, this is a question. Who got denigrated based on cultural and religious identity? I don't understand.
00:11:05.000Is the suggestion that when you say that people should not treat other people the way that Germans treated Jews prior to the Holocaust, that that is denigrating Jews in some way?
00:11:16.000She's saying what happened to Jews is bad.
00:11:18.000I don't like the comparison because, again, I don't like overall Holocaust comparisons, but is that denigrating?
00:12:17.000That is one of the most similar things you can have to the Holocaust.
00:12:20.000What would you say if I told you that Disney Plus, in the credits to Mulan, thanked the Zhangjiang government, which is the province in China where they're currently holding Uighur Muslims in concentration camps.
00:12:31.000And they thanked, Disney Plus thanked the Chinese government.
00:12:36.000Now, which seems more cancelable to you?
00:12:38.000Working with a government that is forcibly sterilizing Muslim women on the basis of their religion, which is kind of like the Holocaust, like without the exaggeration or the overwrought of it.
00:12:47.000That's really a lot like the Holocaust, actually.
00:13:33.000This is just an excuse to beat the living hell out of you.
00:13:36.000According to sources, Lucasfilm planned to unveil Carano as a star of her own Disney Plus series during a December Investors Day presentation, but scrapped those plans following her November tweet, in which she suggested that we ought to protect against voter fraud, and also in which she suggested that the media were essentially blinding you to some things that were true.
00:13:54.000Multiple Mandalorian spinoffs are in the works from executive producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, including Rangers of the New Republic, which could have potentially starred Carano.
00:14:02.000After the latest round of social media posts, the decision to cut ties with the actor came swiftly.
00:14:36.000Because that's exactly what happened to Brandon Eich, who is the CEO of Mozilla Firefox.
00:14:40.000That happened just a few years ago when he held the exact same position on Proposition 8 that a man named Barack Obama did at the time.
00:14:48.000The attempt to cancel anyone and everyone, because the standards are constantly shifting and constantly moving, but really only people on one side of the aisle, is ongoing.
00:14:57.000Another person who is currently being canceled, and his apologies are not gonna matter, is Morgan Wallen.
00:15:02.000So Morgan Wallen is this country star, this massive country star.
00:15:05.000He shared a video on Wednesday in which he apologized for being caught on tape being a drunk, basically, and yelling at one of his friends, the N-word.
00:15:16.000Now, was he actually using the n-word as a way of denigrating black people, or was he using it the same way that rappers use the n-word?
00:15:23.000I know that we're supposed to strip intent and context from all of these conversations, but, um, he was not actually calling a black person the n-word because that is just blatant racism.
00:15:31.000Instead, he was using it the same way that rappers use the n-word.
00:16:05.000By the way, his neighbor who filmed this thing and then put it online for the lols, is a jackass.
00:16:11.000And if you're sitting around being the Stasi for the woke culture so that you can just tape people who are drunken celebrities saying things that you don't particularly like so you can get them canceled, this makes you the bad person.
00:16:23.000Doesn't mean what he said was appropriate.
00:16:25.000It does mean that you are not any arbiter of virtue if your entire life revolves around taking out your phone and taping people doing things in drunken states.
00:16:36.000Seriously, this is the culture that we have become.
00:16:39.000Okay, so Morgan Wallen issued an apology.
00:16:41.000He said, the video you saw was of me on hour 72 of a bender.
00:16:45.000Obviously, the natural thing is to apologize further and just continue to apologize, but because you got caught, and that's not what I wanted to do.
00:16:51.000And he said he was aware that he had let people down, including his parents and his son.
00:16:55.000And then he explained that he has accepted invitations from black organizations, executives, and leaders to have open and honest conversations.
00:17:24.000So the sort of The willingness to allow people a second chance again only extends to one side of the aisle, not to the other side of the aisle, because presumably, Morgan Wallen is perceived as right-wing even if he is not, because he's a country singer.
00:17:40.000That is the way that things work nowadays.
00:17:43.000This is not an argument that people aren't saying things that are wrong.
00:17:45.000It's not an argument that Gina Caron's original post was great.
00:17:48.000It's not an argument that Morgan Wallen should be using the N-word with his friends.
00:17:59.000And if you're part of the culture that suggests that people should lose their livelihood and their career over this, you are part of the problem in the United States, and you're making the country worse.
00:18:06.000You are not going to people quietly and saying, in an effort to better the conversation, you know, maybe you should take that down because that's kind of inappropriate, or maybe that's a bad idea, or maybe that's overwrought.
00:18:15.000Instead, you are trying to ruin their lives because they said something that you disagree with.
00:18:19.000This is not about bettering the culture.
00:18:21.000It is not about making the country a better place.
00:18:22.000It is about you and your unearned moral superiority.
00:18:27.000I promise you, I promise you, that if anybody spent half a moment searching the social media feeds of the bosses over at Disney Plus, or the lower downs over at The Mandalorian, or any of the actors over at The Mandalorian, they could come up with stuff that's twice as bad as anything Corona's ever said.
00:18:40.000And if they searched all of the recording industry executives' social media feeds and emails over the past few years, they could find stuff that they've said that is significantly worse and more damaging than anything Morgan Wallen said.
00:18:50.000That is the way our culture works right now.
00:18:53.000Alrighty, in just a second, we're gonna get to more of this than we'll get to everything impeachment-related.
00:18:57.000First, let us talk about the fact that one of the easiest things to do right now in our culture is to fall into credit card debt.
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00:19:43.000The only way to get this discount is to go to LightStream.com slash Shapiro.
00:19:46.000That is L-I-G-H-T-S-T-R-E-A-M dot com slash Shapiro.
00:20:37.000He trends every couple of weeks on Twitter for no reason other than so they can say that Chris Evans is kind of a jerk, but that Chris Evans is a wonderful, wonderful human being because he holds all the right left-wing views and Chris Pratt is super bad, right?
00:20:50.000Chris Pratt is the worst Chris, is the way that they put it.
00:20:57.000They would try to cancel Chris Pratt the same today as they would tomorrow.
00:21:00.000It's just a question of whether there is a hook that they can hang their hat on.
00:21:03.000They're trying to do the same thing to Tucker Carlson today.
00:21:05.000So Tucker Carlson is once again trending on Twitter.
00:21:07.000And all of the boycotters are out there trying to cudgel advertisers into dropping his show.
00:21:13.000And they're trying to do so on the basis of a monologue in which you discuss George Floyd.
00:21:16.000What he said in the monologue is that George Floyd died of a drug overdose.
00:21:21.000Now, I don't know whether George Floyd died of a drug overdose.
00:21:24.000What I do know is that the Hennepin County Medical Examiner said that he had enough fentanyl in his system to kill a horse, and that if he had died in his house, then rightly it would have been ascribed to drug overdose.
00:21:33.000Now, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner said, I'm not saying that the drug overdose killed him, but he did have an extraordinary level of fentanyl in his system.
00:21:40.000So Tucker essentially paraphrased the medical report from the Hennepin County Medical Examiner.
00:21:45.000That happens to be the same autopsy report, the official autopsy report, being used by the defense in the George Floyd case.
00:21:52.000So Tucker cited that, and now people are going nuts online.
00:21:55.000Maybe advertisers should pull because he's pushing a conspiracy theory.
00:21:58.000Okay, the autopsy is not a conspiracy theory.
00:22:04.000You should find some medical evidence that George Floyd did not die of a medical overdose, of some sort of drug overdose.
00:22:10.000And by the way, even if he died of a drug overdose, that still does not mean that the officer in that particular case would not have been guilty of use of excessive force.
00:22:21.000If you were going to go for a conviction in the George Floyd case, rather than grandstanding, the easy conviction is probably excessive force, not murder.
00:22:28.000Because it's hard to prove causation in terms of murder when the person is suffering from what is pretty clearly excited delirium, begs to be pushed out of the car by the cops, refuses to sit down, they treat him decently for a while, and then finally, when his neck is knelt upon for eight minutes, which is a terrible video.
00:22:43.000When that happens, it turns out that he doesn't have any damage to his trachea, for example.
00:22:47.000Like there's certain realities of medical science that are going to be taken into account during the trial. So you can say excessive force without having said murder.
00:22:54.000But beyond that, do you deserve to have advertisers boycott you because you cited a medical report in a contentious trial?
00:23:22.000It is not about an honest attempt to cleanse the culture.
00:23:24.000It is not about an honest attempt to have a discussion or a conversation.
00:23:27.000It is about, can we wrong-foot you so that we have an excuse to say that your entire career has been completely and utterly garbage and that you are a bad person?
00:23:36.000And so we feel good in excising you from the body politic and Twilight Zone wishing you out into the cornfield.
00:23:41.000That's all that's happening right now in the culture, and that is a big deal.
00:23:59.000This is a left-versus-everybody-else issue.
00:24:01.000This is a hard-left-versus-everybody-else issue, and the hard left is in control, and we are going to have to consolidate and fight back against it because it really is garbage.
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00:25:27.000Okay, so while all of this cultural battle is going on, Which, again, is making the country more deeply polarized.
00:25:33.000We have this impeachment trial that continues.
00:25:35.000So, the Democrats yesterday, they trotted out a bunch of tape, and the tape was essentially designed to elicit an emotional response, which, of course, it should.
00:25:42.000It should elicit an emotional response when you see Congress people having to flee for their lives while a baying mob breaks into the Capitol building.
00:25:49.000And we should look at that tape, because we should always look evil straight in the face.
00:25:52.000It is evil to invade the Capitol building baying for Nancy Pelosi's blood.
00:25:56.000It is evil to break into the Capitol building shouting, hanging Mike Pence.
00:26:00.000So it is important that Americans always look directly in the face of things that are evil.
00:26:05.000Now, of course, what the Democrats were trying to do is make everybody feel a particular way, which you should feel, but make people feel that way not about the protesters and the rioters, really the rioters, not about the people who committed criminal acts, but about everyone on the right.
00:26:20.000The goal here, because they know that they're not going to get an impeachment, the goal here is to actually smear everybody on the right with all of this.
00:26:27.000Dionne over at the Washington Post makes this absolutely clear.
00:26:29.000He said the House impeachment managers moved efficiently on Wednesday to close off the escape hatches and back doors for Senate Republicans.
00:26:35.000Quietly but passionately, they put the lie to the sham alibis that weak and cowardly members of the GOP are likely to invoke if they do decide to do Donald Trump's bidding one more time.
00:26:44.000Those who vote to acquit the former president will now own it all.
00:26:47.000The incendiary speech that made the nation's capital a killing ground, but also the months of incitement and lying that built up to the violence.
00:26:53.000They will own the threats against elected officials who refuse to cheat on Trump's behalf, the attacks on black voters in big cities, the savage mendacity of his all-caps tweets.
00:27:01.000Voting to acquit will mean joining in Trump's rejection of the democratic obligation to accept the outcome of a free election, and in his declarations, even before the voting began, that this was a rigged and stolen contest.
00:27:12.000The goal is Everybody who thinks that Trump should not be convicted, after leaving office, by the way, for speaking in inflammatory and false language, which, again, is not a standard that could be applied to anybody in Congress.
00:27:26.000People in Congress are constantly using inflammatory false language.
00:27:30.000If you believe that that standard should not be the standard for impeachment, according to EJDL, and this means you agreed with everything Trump did, and that you agreed with the riots, That's the actual goal here.
00:27:40.000Like, on a political level, that's what the goal here is.
00:27:42.000I'm not saying that for every single congressperson that that is what the goal of impeachment is.
00:27:46.000Some congresspeople legitimately feel like Trump abused his power and therefore should pay a legal price for that.
00:27:52.000But what the media would like to get out of this is smearing the entire Republican Party and anybody who even tangentially associates as a conservative.
00:28:01.000This is why you see CNN's Don Lemon suggesting that if you stand with Trump in any way, you don't get to say you stand with cops.
00:28:06.000By the way, there's great irony in hearing from CNN lecturers on who stands with cops and who does not.
00:28:11.000This is the same network that broadcasts Chris Cuomo comparing the riots to the Tea Party and asking if there was anything that suggested that protests had to be nonviolent.
00:28:20.000The same network that is constantly suggesting that cops are systemically racist is now very angry at Trump supporters who didn't support the riots and suggest that those Trump supporters who didn't support the riots also hate cops.
00:29:15.000By the way, again, him saying that he doesn't want to hear family values from you if you don't support the riots, but also you think that this impeachment is a bad idea.
00:29:35.000I'm not gonna... By the way, that is not a reference to his sexual orientation at all.
00:29:40.000Anybody who hits on people publicly in front of other reporters is doing a bad thing and is gross.
00:29:46.000So I think that Don Lemon lectures on family values and loving cops from Don Lemon.
00:29:51.000Or ABC's Terry Moran, who says that... Hey, wait a second.
00:29:55.000I heard that making Holocaust comparisons is bad.
00:29:58.000That's what I heard like five seconds ago.
00:30:00.000I heard it's a fireable offense to make Holocaust comparisons.
00:30:02.000So ABC's Terry Moran, what do you think of Trump's relationship with the GOP there?
00:30:07.000The way that Republicans just aren't going to budge, whatever the nature of this argument, whatever the nature of the facts, is because I think we heard it in these vivid videos that the Democratic House managers are playing.
00:31:16.000Why, it's almost as though there's no standard at all, except that if you're on the left, you're not canceled, and if you're not on the left, then you have to live in fear that you're gonna be canceled at any damned minute.
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00:33:01.000It's a miracle that this didn't get any worse than it actually was.
00:33:04.000So for example, there was video that emerged of Officer Eugene Goodman, who is sort of the hero of the day, leading Mitt Romney away from the rioters.
00:33:10.000So he was walking down the hall and Officer Goodman, you'll see in this video, actually comes and turns him around.
00:33:16.000passes Senator Mitt Romney and directs him to turn around in order to get to safety.
00:33:24.000Okay, and then there's video of Chuck Schumer with security avoiding the mob.
00:33:28.000That video is being shown by the Democrats as well.
00:34:27.000Now, there are two types of causation, as I've explained many times on the show.
00:34:31.000There's but-for causation, which is the weakest form of causation.
00:34:34.000But for X happening, Y would not have happened.
00:34:36.000That sort of causation is very rarely used in legal circles.
00:34:39.000It's especially not used with regard to incitement because it is simply too weak.
00:34:44.000But for Donald Trump waking up that morning, this wouldn't have happened.
00:34:49.000But for Capitol Police not being on the scene in time, this wouldn't have happened.
00:34:53.000But for Donald Trump not being elected in 2016, this wouldn't have happened.
00:34:56.000But for Barack Obama not being a polarizing president, this wouldn't have happened.
00:35:01.000But for causation doesn't mean that you have legal causation that is sufficient to suggest that Trump is responsible for what happened.
00:35:09.000So that is the kind of causation that Democrats have been relying on.
00:35:12.000Because when it comes to, did Trump actually cause this thing?
00:35:16.000In order for you to say that incitement is what caused this thing, you would have to have the normal standard is that he has to say, the normal standard is that you would have to say, go down to the Capitol building and stack it.
00:35:26.000That's the normal standard for incitement.
00:35:27.000Not, go down to the Capitol building and I will lead you in a march where we will peacefully and patriotically protest what is going on.
00:35:52.000Again, if that was foreseeable, then why exactly wasn't law enforcement on the scene beforehand?
00:35:56.000We now know that the FBI had been briefed on this.
00:35:59.000So, the unforeseeability of the event is what makes the event so shocking in the first place.
00:36:03.000Nonetheless, the idea here from Democrats is that Trump is solely responsible for what happened.
00:36:08.000Jamie Raskin, who's one of the House impeachment managers, Democrat of Maryland, who, by the way, did vote to, in 2016, challenge electors in the 2016 election.
00:36:17.000He says that Trump incited the January 6th attack.
00:36:20.000Here was Jamie Raskin making the case.
00:36:23.000This case is much worse than someone who falsely shouts fire in a crowded theater.
00:36:28.000It's more like a case where the town fire chief, who's paid to put out fires, sends a mob, not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to actually set the theater on fire.
00:36:41.000And who then, when the fire alarms go off, and the calls start flooding into the fire department, asking for help does nothing but sit back, encourage the mob to continue its rampage, and watch the fire spread on TV with glee and delight.
00:36:58.000Okay, so again, the evidence that he was watching with glee and delight comes secondhand, courtesy of some sort of kind of hearsay reporting.
00:37:06.000His argument here, which is that it's more like the case where a town fire chief paid to put out fires, sends a mob not to yell fire in a crowded theater, but to set the theater on fire.
00:37:13.000But he didn't send the mob to set the theater on fire.
00:37:45.000So really, here's how you can make this question a little more relevant.
00:37:49.000Would Trump be impeachable if the Capitol riots had not happened?
00:37:53.000Because I think the incitement charge is the weakest thing.
00:37:55.000Would Trump be impeachable if all he had done from the election day from November 4th until January 20th is say over and over and over again that the election was fraudulent?
00:38:03.000If he had just said that over and over and over again, would that have been sufficient to impeach and remove him from office and stop him from running for office again?
00:38:10.000I think it'd be very difficult to make the argument yes.
00:38:16.000So instead, what you have to do is try and say that he quote-unquote incited the mob Which is, again, a very difficult argument to make in terms of causation.
00:38:24.000So instead, what Democrats have tried to do is they try to say, oh, well, you know, the mob thought that he backed them.
00:38:29.000OK, well, we don't judge whether it was foreseeable that your words are going to cause crazy people to do crazy things based on the word of the crazy people.
00:38:36.000That is not the way that that incitement works.
00:38:39.000People who go and commit acts of violence in the name of ideologies and people who have not encouraged them to do acts of violence, we don't take their word for it.
00:38:48.000Because I promise you this, if you asked members of Black Lives Matter who were going and burning down businesses whether they believed that Democrats backed them in this pursuit, I'd guarantee you a huge number of them would say yes.
00:38:58.000Especially since people like Kamala Harris were tweeting out that you should bail them out of prison.
00:39:03.000Anyway, here's Jamie Raskin trying to quote the rioters to the effect that Trump had incited them.
00:39:08.000There were countless social media posts, news stories, and most importantly, credible reports from the FBI and Capitol Police that the thousands gathering for the President's Save America March We're violent, organized with weapons, and we're targeting the Capitol.
00:39:26.000This mob got organized so openly because, as they would later scream in these halls, and as they posted on forums before the attack, they were sent here by the President.
00:39:37.000They were invited here by the President of the United States of America.
00:39:41.000Okay, except that the FBI knew in advance that they were coming to do violence and then the FBI didn't do its damn job, which they were supposed to do in the first place.
00:39:47.000Now, if the Democrats have evidence that Trump stymied attempts to help, this is the rumor on the day, that Trump stymied attempts to help, that he actually said, do not send the National Guard, do not send the Capitol Police, let these people run rampage, that would actually be pretty damning evidence.
00:40:00.000They haven't presented any of that yet.
00:40:02.000And so far, what we have seen is they don't like what Trump said.
00:40:05.000They think that what Trump said was inflammatory.
00:40:08.000But inflammatory is not the same as incitement.
00:40:10.000And so you have people like Ted Lieu, another House impeachment manager, suggesting that essentially Trump tried to violently overthrow the government of the United States because he ran out of nonviolent options.
00:40:18.000This is so far beyond what the evidence shows that it's very difficult to credit it.
00:40:22.000There's only because all of these people stayed strong and refused President Trump that our republic held fast and the will of the electorate was seen through.
00:40:33.000And at this point, President Donald J. Trump ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power.
00:40:44.000I began today by raising the question of how we got here.
00:40:48.000What you saw was a man so desperate to cling to power that he tried everything he could to keep it.
00:40:56.000And when he ran out of non-violent measures, he turned to the violent mob that attacked your Senate chamber on January 6th.
00:41:04.000Okay, that is such a wild exaggeration of Trump's actual agenda.
00:41:07.000You know what Trump's actual agenda was?
00:41:14.000And that he would get a lot of people very riled up, and then he was going to announce, presumably on January 20th, the same day as the inauguration, that he was running for re-election.
00:41:21.000That was, in all likelihood, what his plan was.
00:41:25.000If you think that Trump unleashed a mob to go kill Mike Pence, that that was his intent, I'm gonna need some actual proof of that.
00:41:31.000Like, seriously, some actual proof of that would be good.
00:41:33.000Because here's the thing about Trump, he ain't subtle.
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00:44:14.000So the Democrats continue to make the case that President Trump left them for dead, that President Trump is solely responsible for everything that happened, that the people who invaded the Capitol have no agency, and that they, not that they took his words too far, but that they were actually doing exactly what he wanted them to do.
00:44:34.000Here's Representative Joaquin Castro saying Trump left us all for dead.
00:44:38.000They were completely and violently overwhelmed by a mob.
00:44:44.000and needed help, and our Commander-in-Chief, President Trump, refused to send it.
00:44:52.000Senators, you've seen all the evidence so far, and this is clear.
00:45:00.000On January 6th, President Trump left everyone in this Capitol For dead.
00:45:08.000So what's the actual hard evidence that he did that?
00:45:10.000I mean, really, beyond the sort of secondhand reporting that, like, what did Trump actually... I want to know, like, minute by minute, what did Trump actually do to stymie people being sent for help?
00:45:22.000Like, did he call up the Capitol Police and say, don't send any more people?
00:45:26.000Did he call up the National Guard or his Department of Defense and say, don't send anybody?
00:45:30.000We've seen some reporting on this issue, but we've seen no confirmed reporting or any testimony on this issue, so now would be a great time to call witnesses, right?
00:45:36.000I mean, if you're gonna call witnesses, those would be the witnesses that you would call.
00:45:39.000But what the presentation was about more than anything else yesterday was rehashing a terrible moment in the history of our republic, an incredibly damaging moment in the history of our republic, The most damaging moment I've seen in 20 years in the history of our Republic, like really a horrible moment for the Republic.
00:45:55.000And in doing so, to link everybody who disagrees with the Democrats impeachment agenda with this.
00:46:00.000Because again, they could have brought up censure in the House.
00:46:02.000Kevin McCarthy wanted them to, would have passed.
00:46:05.000They would have, and they would have passed in the Senate.
00:46:21.000If you think that the Democrats are in any way evidencing any sort of good intent or honest intent, or that this is about the protection of the legislature from the executive or anything like that, that's not what this is.
00:46:42.000And that is perfectly obvious at this point.
00:46:43.000Still, the media will go to people like Lisa Murkowski, who is certainly going to vote for impeachment and ask her what she thinks.
00:46:49.000I will look to the evidence that is presented.
00:46:53.000The evidence that has been presented thus far is pretty damning.
00:46:58.000But I also know that I have an obligation, a responsibility, and one that I accept to listen to what the defense will present.
00:47:10.000Okay, so we will see how this all plays out.
00:47:12.000Trump's defense begins today, so we're going to see how they fight back against this.
00:47:16.000I would assume that Trump's defense is largely going to center on the fact that Democrats are treating inflammatory rhetoric as incitement rhetoric.
00:47:23.000And so I would assume that you're going to hear a lot about Democrats' inflammatory rhetoric over the past few years, and that is a perfectly appropriate response.
00:47:29.000Because if we are going to have a consistent standard to which we hold people, then that standard ought to be consistently held.
00:47:35.000Of course it is not, and that is the entire problem right now in the United States.
00:47:42.000That is true on every single issue that I can think of right now.
00:47:46.000There's a standard to which the media would hold people on the right, but not people on the left.
00:47:49.000There's a standard by which the media would excuse violence, but only for people with whom they agree.
00:47:55.000There's a standard by which the media would champion people who use the most inflammatory rhetoric possible, but only if they happen to agree with those people.
00:48:02.000And then, they'll castigate anybody on the other side of the aisle for pointing out the double standard.
00:48:07.000So if I say, yes, it's very bad that Trump used inflammatory language.
00:48:10.000Also, it is very bad, and I've been saying this for years, for Maxine Waters to use that sort of language, or for AOC to use that sort of language, or for Kamala Harris to use that sort of language, or for Ilhan Omar and Rashid Tlaib to use that sort of language.
00:48:20.000If I say all of it's bad, somehow that's whataboutism.
00:48:23.000No, that's called holding a consistent standard.
00:48:25.000But they don't want a consistent standard.
00:48:29.000Because all I have to do to point to the hypocrisy of the left on a daily basis is simply point to the fact that they excuse their own when they do something.
00:48:37.000But if somebody who disagrees with them does the exact same thing, they look to end their career, they look to bring consequences, they look to lump you in with them, This is not the way that you build social fabric.
00:48:47.000I'm not even talking about the impeachment now.
00:48:49.000I'm just talking about the general, neutral standards that have to apply in an honest society.
00:48:52.000We are not an honest society any longer.