Ben Shapiro (19:12)
Okay, let me be clear about this. I like Brendan Carr. I do. The FCC should not be threatening action against ABC or its affiliates or Disney based on Jimmy Kimmel being a Jack. He's been a Jack his entire career. Social censure is perfectly appropriate. The blowback from the public, totally natural, and in fact, good, because Jimmy Kimmel is, in fact, a schmuck who should have been taken off the air 10 years ago. I do not want the FCC in the business of telling local affiliates that their licenses will be removed if they broadcast material that the FCC deems to be informationally false. Why? Because one day the shoe will be on the other foot. I know that we've gotten out of the habit of this. I know that there are a lot of people on the right who say this. You will never be on the other foot. And if it is, the left will just do it anyway. Here is the thing. Preemptively breaking things because you believe that the left is going to break the things, makes the things broken, and you can't unbreak the things. So I may. I'm an advocate of the idea that things that are not yet broken probably should not be. And if we are now in a world where we're going to preemptively break the plate because we believe that the bad guy is going to break the plate, all the plates are going to get broken. And regardless of what you do, that's going to get used against you. The shards will be used as weapons against you. I promise you, if the FCC is removing local affiliate licenses or threatening to do so based on Jimmy Kimmel being a Jack, the next time a Democrat is elected, which will happen, his country is split 50 50. Pretending that this country is split 80, 20 does no one any good. The Congress is split effectively 50 50. The Senate of the United States is split almost 50 50. It is split 53 to 47. The last presidential election which President Trump won, he did not win in a blowout. I will remind you that Kamala Harris, an awful, terrible, horrifying candidate, somehow achieved in the popular vote 48.3%. And Donald Trump won 49.8%. And so we should stop pretending that this is not a closely divided country and that Democrats will never win again. First of all, just on principle, I do not think that the FCC should be involved in this sort of stuff. I think there's a better case that the FCC should not even be involved in granting broadcast licenses to local affiliates anymore. We now live in an age of digital and cable. I don't think that we need the FCC to regulate this sort of stuff this way. In the first place. I'm for total deregulation. But if you are going to have regulations on the books, then they have to be evenly administered. And so again, I'm not saying Kimmel shouldn't be taken off the air. I'm not saying the social sanction shouldn't have forced him off the air. I'm not saying any of these local affiliates shouldn't have said they don't want to take Kimmel anymore. I'm saying they should have done all that 10 years ago. And I'm not sure what happened here. If best case scenario, the public forced the local affiliates to react and take Kimmel off the air. Totally legit. I do not like that the FCC muddied the waters here. I think it is bad politics and I think it is bad policy. The fact that the FCC is trying to use standards about broadcasting false information in this way, I think is a negative. According to FCC rules, the FCC prohibits broadcasting false information about a crime or catastrophe if the broadcaster knows the information is false and will cause substantial public harm if aired. That should be a relatively high bar. Because I'm just telling you, if Democrats win the presidency and you got a Democrat in charge of the fcc, you got Adam Schiff in charge of the fcc, you know which affiliates are going to get threatened? All of the Fox affiliates. You know that's going to happen. It will. If as, as the. If the rumors are true and CBS News is about to make a significant shift back toward the center and suddenly broadcast things conservatives are not against. If that is a true thing, you can bet dollars to donuts that under a Democrat president, suddenly CBS affiliates will come under fire. This is why we don't want the state involved in these things. And here's the problem. Brendan Carr over at the fcc, he then put out a statement, quote, I want to thank nexstar for doing the right thing. Local broadcasters have an obligation to serve the public interest. While this may be an unprecedented decision, it is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values. I hope other broadcasters follow nexstar's lead again. Shoe on the other foot. If this were a Democrat at the FCC who are saying, I want to thank nexstar for canceling all affiliates of Fox thanks to something that Sean Hannity said or that back in the day Tucker Carlson said on the air, would the right be okay with that? Or would they be claiming quite properly, that is massive regulatory overreach, unprecedented in scope already coming up, the President of the United States decides it's time to crack down on Antifa plus ta Nehisi Coates. Yes, he's back from defending Hamas. Now he's going to speak about the evils of political violence. It turns out that actually Charlie, his rhetoric, that was the big problem. First, when we started Daily Wire, it felt like we had to figure everything out with minimal help. You know, we had the editorial guidelines, studio setup, production schedule, branding. All that stuff was overwhelming. New decisions were needed daily. 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The ratings challenge Jimmy Kimmel show is canceled. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has zero talent and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that's possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers on fake news NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it. NBC President Donald J. Trump. Now again, if this is just President Trump cheering from the sidelines, agree. Agree on every part of that. Jimmy Kimmel is utterly untalented. The other hosts are terrible. They should go. They have terrible ratings. All of that's true. The federal government, the imprimatur of the federal government. Here is a problem. It is not good. Brian Stelter reached out for comment, apparently to Brendan Carr. He said. I asked FCC chair Brendan Carr if he had any new comment now that ABC has pulled Jimmy Kimmel's show and he sent a gif, and the GIF is of Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott raising the roof from the office like we did it. Why? Why? Okay, like why? Just let the public be outraged and let the public outrage organically drive the thing. Why now? You've muddied the waters in a serious way, legally. You've muddied the waters on First Amendment grounds, on fcc over regulatory grounds, in much the same way that the Biden administration was threatening Facebook with consequences if they did not remove certain material. I mean, this is an open threat. Actually, like now You've muddied the waters. And not only if you mudded the waters on Kimmel, you have now retroactively muddied the waters on Colbert. Because again, the. The claim the left was making and the reason they're valorizing, again, one of the other terrible hosts on late night tv, Stephen Colbert, the reason they valorized him is because he got fired. He got fired because his ratings sucked and he. And he was totally underwater monetarily. His show was losing tens of millions of dollars every year. That's the real reason he was fired. But the left claimed that he was fired due to pressure from the administration because they are building a narrative now. And the narrative they are trying to build is that President Trump and his team are, in authoritarian fashion, destroying things like freedom of speech. And the case they're trying to build as a comeback from the horrible story of Charlie's death, a story that is terrible for the radical left, truly terrible, because the American people have reacted with unprecedented force and fury at what happened to Charlie. What the left is now going to attempt to do is jujitsu that reaction into the belief that the Trump administration is overreacting. When you have a moment to do the right thing, you have to be, as an administration, calculated and meticulous in how you pursue this stuff. I was talking to my friend Chris Ruffo about this shortly after Charlie was shot, and we were talking about the fact that the administrative. No one is more effective at this than Chris Rufo. And Chris was saying, and he said this publicly, obviously, you cannot afford to have blunders like the Attorney General, Pam Bondi out there saying that hate speech needs to be regulated because that's uncalibrated. It doesn't get the job done. And not only that, it creates backlash. President Trump was elected in part based on the idea that he was going to maintain freedom of speech. He was elected in part based on the backlash to true cancel culture, the broadening of the Overton window, the opening of the speech aperture. That was the thing that President Trump was elected based on. And if you wish to hand power back to the Democrats, what you do here is you overreach, or at least even create the perception of overreach. So two things can be true at once. As always, I'm very, very happy. Jim. Jimmy Kimmel's off the air for the ninth time. He is a putz, a schmuck, and a schmendrick. There's a lot of Yiddish on today's show. He's the worst. Can't stand Jimmy Kimmel can't stand him going back 10 years when he was trying to use the heart surgery of his son to argue for nationalized health care, pretending that it gave him some sort of new expertise into the health care system. I made the point on my show. My daughter had had open heart surgery that same year from the same surgeon, and that had no impact on my health care views because one thing has nothing to do with the other. Jimmy Kimmel's awful happy to see him go. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. The government should not be doing this thing. They should not be muddying the waters. And if they do, then they put themselves at risk of significant overreach. Now, meanwhile, we have new details that have emerged about the shooter in this case. According to the UK Daily Mail, a sickening cachet of porn searches have been revealed about the suspect. He was involved in a furry Shades of Gay game. Well, I can't imagine why he would have shot Charlie then. One of the things that I find absolutely amusing about many of the members of the left when it comes to this is they'll say, well, you know, it wasn't a political issue, it was a personal issue. It was personal because, you see, this guy was a gay furry. He was a gay furry in love with a trans gay furry. And that means that it was about his personal proclivities. It wasn't political. It was the left that originally contended the personal is political. In this case, the personal is political. It is. Read the text, go look at what he was saying, what he was telling friends and family. He believed that his gay furry lifestyle was under threat from people like Charlie Kirk, who are intolerant of the insanity of the trans ideology. And then he shot Charlie. It is no surprise at all to find that this person was not, contrary to the popular opinion of the left, apparently a Romeo and Juliet character in a gay romance, that actually he was a sexual sicko. None of that is is particularly shocking, obviously. It is, frankly, absolutely predictable. Apparently he used a pseudo name on Steam where he played a pornographic online game called Furry Shades of Gay, according to the UK Daily Mail. Apparently he also followed artists who drew explicit cartoons associated with pedophilia. The Daily Mail cited Tyler Robinson's friends to report that he used the account name crafton247 on his gaming and online accounts. The 22 year old reportedly played Furry Shades of Gay, a game that has described itself as being about love, queer relationships, hot gay s and slapstick humor on Steam in 2020 and apparently this appeared on a furry site, furaffinity.com a website for people with a proclivity for humanoid animal illustrations and dressing up in fur suits. I can't imagine, by the way, it was the media were trying to say that his parents were intolerant and terrible. I can't imagine why they might have objected to their son becoming a weird freak. I can't imagine why. And I say that advisedly, yes, if you are visiting furry shades of gay, you are in fact a weird freak. Ain't nothing I can do about it. That's a you problem, my friend. And blaming society for your ills and then shooting people based on those ills does not make you a romantic character. It just underscores the politics associated with sick freakdom. It is, you know, insane that the left has attempted to craft these permission structures. Ta Nehisi Coates, the egregiously horrible writer. And I'm always amazed at how people can pretend that the Ta Nehisi Coates is somehow a great writer. Truly it is. It is an amazing thing. You have to be incapable of reading to believe that Ta Nehisi Coates is. Is a great writer. Ta Nehisi Coates is a joke. He doesn't know how to think. He's a. He's a purple writer who will use three adjectives where zero would do. He's overwrought, he's hysterical. And he hates the country. I mean truly hates America. Ta Nehisi codes and Western civilization more broadly has an entire piece over at Vanity Fair basically blaming Charlie for his own murder. Quote. Kirk subscribes to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known. And Charlie Kirk, about as normie a Republican as you can find. But it is still chilling to think that those beliefs would be silenced by a gunshot. The tragedy is personal. Kirk was robbed of his life. And his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an Internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war. Its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. You know, I love hearing this from Ta Nehisi Coates, who literally said that he watched 911 happen while stoned on the roof of an apartment building and didn't feel anything. A person whose last book was all about the wonders, effectively of Palestinian terrorism, he never even mentions in a book about Israel and the Palestinians terrorism, not once. Because the entire book is a tacit justification for Palestinian murder and terrorism. He's very angry at Ezra Klein of the New York Times. I did an interview with Ezra a couple of weeks ago before Charlie's shooting. It finally aired earlier this week. It was very cordial conversation. I've had many cordial conversations with Ezra as I've had cordial conversations with many people with whom I disagree on the left. And many of those people were texting me and calling me to find out not only if I was okay, obviously I am, thank God, but also to express their horror, shock, dismay at what happened to Charlie is not a complete right left thing. Meaning there are radical leftists who endorse political violence and then tacitly endorse the thought structures that lead to it. Ta Nehisi Coates does that. He is part of the permission structure for violence. Ta Nehisi codes. And then there are people who are on the rational side of the left. They disagree with me on a lot of issues, but also they understand that these permission structures for violence are bad and wrong. And I got a call from, I don't know, two dozen of them over the course of the last week, including Ezra Klein. So Ezra wrote a piece in which he lamented the death of Charlie Kirk and said basically he was engaged in normie political conversation, which is true. And normally political conversation is fraught. And one of the games we can always play when any political commentator dies or is killed, you can always play this game is go find bad old tweets, go find a statement that, if you take it out of context, looks really, really bad, and then pretend that that person is that statement. You can play that game all day long. And it's the world's dumbest game, truly the dumbest game. But Ta Nehisi Coates is angry at Ezra Klein. He's enraged at Ezra Klein for having the temerity to suggest that Charlie's murder was really, really bad and that Charlie himself was not, in fact, an extremist, because Charlie was, in fact, not an extremist. So here's what Ta Nehisi Coates writes. Political violence is a virtue. Klein noted this assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk's own words. Absolute nonsense. Charlie never called for political violence, not once. That's insane. It's not merely that Kirk, as Klein put it, defended the Second Amendment, is that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes. Okay? There is not a single time that Charlie Kirk suggested, quote, unquote, hurting people, hurting people using violence in order to achieve a political outcome. It is only Ta Nehisi Coates who in his tacit and not so tacit endorsement of terrorism has done so repeatedly. So what does he say? Quote, what are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American President and then was executed himself? What in the world, what in the world. What he said about Joe Biden is that Joe Biden was a tyrant and should be put in prison and, or given the death penalty. That is not calling for the murder of Joe Biden. I disagree with that. I think it's overwrought. But the, but the notion that that is a call for overt political violence, I mean that that's a thing that Democrats say routinely about President Trump, all the while calling him Hitler, by the way. But here's what ta Nehisi Coates, again, just one of the true garbage bags in the, in the literature industry and also given control of comic books for dc which is just shows you how far the left the culture is. What are we to make of an NFL that on one hand encourages us to end racism and on the other urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? An unreconstructed white supremacist. Charlie Kirk literally fought off the Nick Fuentes white supremacists. That's why they hated him. And what of the writers, the thinkers and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk's death from the, from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they've rushed to memorialize? I don't know. But the most telling detail in Klein's column was that for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself. Well, I mean, I could fill literally entire books with Charlie's normie political commentary. We all could because it was pretty normie again for the left, the desire to treat Charlie as an other who therefore was somehow responsible for his own death. That temptation is so strong because they have to project. They have to. With the left, every accusation is in fact an admission. Every accusation is truly an attempt to externalize a problem with themselves. Ta Nehisi Coates is a writer who has spent years, years creating permission structures for violence. But he's angry at Charlie after Charlie is, is murdered. Meanwhile, Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, he continues somehow to pretend that the burning of the gubernatorial mansion in Pennsylvania with him and his family inside, that somehow that was the result of right wing political violence. Medude you got nearly burned to death by a pro Palestine activist. And let us be clear where those reside, they reside on the political left. Here's Josh Shapiro being truly, truly unintelligent.