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April 14, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:56

Ep. 105 - The Case For Handing Donald Trump The Nomination

Trump talks about the Bible, the latest on Corey Lewandowski, and the vaunted mailbag (with a stripper!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Folks, we finally made it to a Thursday, but well, yesterday, on Wednesday, the leftist media discovered that Ted Cruz, when he was Solicitor General of Texas, argued against the notion that there is a constitutional right to masturbation.
	Seriously.
	This troubles them greatly, because this is what they do in their spare time, but is there any substance to the actual complaint?
	Not if you know how to read, or if you've ever read the Constitution.
	In 2004, distributors of dildos in Texas attempted to challenge a state law outlawing sale and promotion of obscene devices, according to David Korn of Mother Jones.
	They had a law in the books that said you can't publicly sell sex toys.
	In my own personal view, and I would guess this is probably Cruz's view too, this is a silly law.
	Silliness, however, does not mean something is unconstitutional.
	There are lots of silly laws, including laws that say, for example, that biological men should be allowed to go to pee in women's bathrooms.
	Silliness is not a constitutional concern, it's a political one.
	In other words, you don't want a bad law, don't elect bad politicians.
	The Constitution doesn't have anything to say about stupid laws.
	Well, the plaintiffs in this particular case, they claimed that the law violated their constitutional right to privacy.
	It's a right that doesn't exist in the Constitution.
	It certainly does not govern public sale of marketable goods.
	There is no constitutional right to pleasure yourself, okay?
	It wasn't in there, and it's not there for a reason.
	A federal judge ruled for Texas, saying there was no federal constitutional right to buying products to help you pleasure yourself.
	This case was then appealed to a panel of the Fifth Circuit, the Solicitor General's office, Cruz's office, argued the state has the power, it's called police power, This is, of course, true on just a factual level, as again, we can note the Constitution.
	It's not in the Bill of Rights.
	There's nothing in the Bill of Rights that mentions touching yourself, right?
	It's not high priority for James Madison and company.
	interpersonal relationship.
	This is, of course, true on just a factual level.
	As again, we can note the Constitution.
	It's not in the Bill of Rights.
	There's nothing in the Bill of Rights that mentions touching yourself, right?
	It's not high priority for James Madison and company.
	Again, doesn't make the law right.
	Doesn't mean the law ain't stupid.
	But it certainly is not in conflict with the federal constitution of the United States.
	Not only do such laws not violate the quote-unquote substantive due process clause, substantive due process doesn't even exist.
	It's legal idiocy coined by the left to push for its favorite things.
	The left can't point to where the constitution protects sex toy sales for masturbation, but they want it to be there, so it must be.
	Dammit.
	And for freedom of association and religion and freedom of speech, that stuff's kind of bothersome, so we'll just kind of like ignore that.
	Really, the Constitution was deeply focused on whether or not somebody could sell sex toys.
	In the end, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed.
	They said that the right to privacy extended to buying products to enhance intimacy.
	Cruz's office decided not to appeal the case.
	This means that Cruz is a prude rather than a lawyer tasked with fighting on behalf of the people of the state who voted for the law.
	That's at least according to the left.
	According to noted legal scholar David Corn, this means he's a constitutional idiot to boot, which leads to a question.
	Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Cruz.
	The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld pretty much the exact same law in Alabama the year before.
	There, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals found, quote, If we were to accept the invitation to recognize a constitutional right to sexual intimacy, this right would theoretically encompass such activities as prostitution, obscenity, and adult incest, even if we were to limit the right to consenting adults.
	Right?
	The idea is that if you had a constitutional right to have sex however you please, you could never have laws against incest.
	This is true.
	This is actually the road where we find ourselves after the Obergefell decision with Justice Kennedy.
	The left believes there is a constitutional right to everything they like, and a mandate against everything they don't.
	The Constitution, however, disagrees.
	But never mind the legal niceties.
	Cruz must be a prude.
	He must be a prude because the left wants him to be a prude.
	He's just a constitutional lawyer, but he must be a prude because he's a Republican, and Republicans are prudes, and therefore any Republican who stands up for the Constitution.
	is approved.
	Or perhaps the left just doesn't care about the Constitution.
	I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	So, speaking of the Constitution, if you don't know or if you want to know why it is that Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, virtually all the candidates don't know or care about the powers of the Presidency under the Constitution, why they keep saying over and over that the President can do anything he wants, he's some sort of God-King monarch, If you want to know about that, you need to go to our friends at Hillsdale College.
	They have a new course, Presidency and the Constitution.
	It's free, and you can go there and register.
	Hillsdale.edu slash Ben.
	Hillsdale College is one of the best colleges in America.
	A great place to send your kid.
	Also a great place for you to educate yourself about the principles that matter.
	Presidency and the Constitution is the name of their new course.
	Go there.
	Hillsdale.edu slash Ben.
	You won't regret it.
	It's really terrific.
	Okay.
	A lot to get to here today on The Ben Shapiro Show.
	I mean, a lot to get to, and I know our producers are already groaning knowing how much time I'm going to exceed our mandate, but tough.
	I'm here and the camera's running, so you're screwed.
	All right, so let's start today with the fact that Donald Trump's knowledge of the Bible could fit inside a thimble.
	So Donald Trump is um he was asked you know he has said before that he doesn't know what his favorite biblical phrases or he said at least it was too private it was too private you remember he was asked his favorite biblical verse and he says you know that's that's a private thing that you tell me that you're asking me about it's a private frankly frankly it's unbelievable how private it is so yesterday so yesterday he was asked by a radio host the same question what's your favorite biblical verse what's your favorite biblical passage and donald trump proceeds to do what he does best which is
	I wrote with great documentation for the Daily Caller, which is not... Well, I think many.
	I mean, you know, when we get into the Bible, I think many.
	- No, no, we're looking at clip. - Is there a favorite Bible verse or Bible story that has informed your thinking or your character through life, sir? - Well, I think many.
	I mean, you know, when we get into the Bible, I think many, so many.
	And I tell people, "Look, an eye for an eye," That's not a particularly nice thing, but you know, if you look at what's happening to our country, I mean, when you see what's going on with our country, how people are taking advantage of us, and how they scoff at us and laugh at us, and they laugh at our face, and they're taking our jobs, they're taking our money, they're taking our, you know, they're taking the health of our country, and we have to be very firm, and we have to be very strong, and we can learn a lot from the Bible, that I can tell you.
	Frankly, you can learn a lot from the Bible, that I can tell you.
	I have never learned anything from the Bible, clearly, but you can learn so many things that frankly, I'll tell you, believe me, I know the Bible.
	Believe me, it's huge.
	I study it bigly.
	It's huge.
	Okay, so there are a couple things wrong with what Donald Trump says here.
	First of all, the dude's a pagan.
	Okay, so let's take the actual verse he's talking about.
	Let's actually look at the verse.
	So I don't put on my Orthodox Jew Bible analysis hat.
	Particularly often, because it's not usually relevant to what we're talking about.
	Here, it's highly relevant to what we're talking about because Donald Trump, biblical scholar, is on the order of OJ Simpson, marital relationship therapist.
	Okay, Donald Trump knows less about the Bible than my two-and-a-half-year-old child.
	And it is not close.
	It is not close.
	She can at least recite certain things in Hebrew.
	Okay, Donald Trump, when he says this, he says an eye for an eye, right?
	So, for people who are atheists, for people who don't know biblical scholarship, they think an eye for an eye means, literally, that if I hit you in the eye and I knock out your eye, you now have a right under biblical law to hit me in the eye and knock out my eye.
	Clearly, this is what Trump thinks, right?
	Trump says that.
	He says, if you look at what's happening to our country, if you look, they laugh at us, they laugh at us, so we should laugh at them and we should hit them.
	So, he doesn't know anything.
	First of all, his favorite part of this verse is actually not the eye for an eye.
	It's a hand for a tiny, malformed hand with sausage fingers.
	But, the eye for an eye language is mentioned twice in the Bible.
	For people who care about this sort of thing.
	And I think everyone should now care because it shows that Trump is both an ignoramus and a liar.
	And a bully, by the way, because of the way he interprets this.
	So.
	There are three major religions that use eye-for-an-eye language.
	There are three major religions that use eye-for-an-eye language.
	There's Judaism, there's Christianity, there's Islam.
	Right?
	The three of them all use eye-for-an-eye language.
	Exodus 21 says, quote, Which presumably means that Michelle Fields can go and bruise Corey Lewandowski.
	Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
	Which presumably means that Michelle Fields can go and bruise Corey Lewandowski.
	But in any case, it says all of these things.
	And then it says in Leviticus 24, if anyone injures his neighbor as he has done, it shall be done to him.
	Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him.
	So Trump takes this literally.
	No Bible-believing Jew ever has taken this literally, ever in the history of Judaism.
	The Talmud explicitly talks about this.
	This is relegated, and it appears in the section of the Bible that talks about monetary damages.
	So the idea is, when it says an eye for an eye, if I knock out your eye, you then take me to court, and you sue me for the value of my eye.
	Meaning how much that has damaged me in my life, how much it's damaged me in business, how much it's damaged me in my personal life, and you have to pay me for that.
	It's about monetary compensation.
	It has always been about monetary compensation in Judaism.
	Maimonides says this, the Talmud says this, this has been true for literally three and a half thousand years.
	Okay, there's no- just a fact.
	Okay, Christianity goes further.
	Right, Sermon on the Mount.
	Okay, this is in my religion and I know it better than Trump.
	Okay, Matthew 5 specifically says, you have heard that it was said, quote, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
	But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil, but if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
	And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.
	And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
	Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you.
	So, Trump not only rejects the basis of Judaism, right, the legal nature of Judaism, he also rejects what I understand to be, for my Christian friends, the actual ultimate basis of Christianity, which is mercy, right?
	I mean, that's the idea of Christianity.
	As a Jew reading the Christian text, I think there's a second way to read that Christian text, which is that it's actually what we would call in Judaism, Mussar.
	It's sort of a It's a buck-up message, meaning that there's a legal system that says that if you get hit in the eye, you still take the guy to court, but in your personal life, don't take revenge.
	Revenge isn't the thing to do, right?
	This is the general idea of the Christian text.
	You'll notice that in both Judaism and Christianity, nowhere does it say an eye for an eye is to be taken literally.
	There is one religion.
	There is one religion where an eye for an eye is actually taken literally.
	That religion is Islam, okay?
	In radical Islam, an eye for an eye is actually taken literally.
	And they actually implement it.
	In Iran in 2008, this is a report from the BBC, Iran 2008, a court in Iran has ruled that a man who blinded a woman with acid after she spurned his marriage proposals will also be blinded with acid.
	So, Donald Trump, you know, the guy who wants to boot all the Muslims and make sure they don't come in?
	His biblical interpretation is a lot closer to Islam's interpretation than Judaism's or Christianity's.
	This points out two things.
	One, Trump doesn't care about the Bible.
	Like, really doesn't care about the Bible.
	He has his principles, and then he fits the Bible into his principles, which is the nature of paganism.
	Paganism is, I take whatever text is available to me, I would take whatever my worship of God is, and I fit it into this box that I like to call God.
	God is supposed to comply.
	With my wishes for the universe, not the other way around.
	It's not my idea that I have to fulfill God's principles.
	God fulfills my principles.
	So Trump already feels this way.
	He already feels like, I only hit back.
	That's all I do.
	Frankly, all I do is hit back.
	All I do is hit back.
	When Trump does that routine, he then tries to fit the Bible in there because he doesn't know anything about the Bible.
	So that's point number one about Trump.
	Point number two is that he's really bad at pandering, but people are following him anyway.
	But he's not the only one.
	So today we're doing this episode is essentially biblical analysis with idiot Republicans.
	So I don't even have to get to Democrats.
	They also pretend to like the Bible, but the truth is they would rather use it as toilet paper than follow it.
	John Kasich also pretends to be a Bible lover.
	This is ridiculous.
	Okay, so here he is.
	He is in Crown Heights, New York.
	Which is a very Jewish area.
	As you can see, if you're watching the tape, everybody he is surrounded by, these are Orthodox Jews, right?
	These are people wearing black hats, with beards.
	He's in a Hasidic neighborhood.
	Obviously, you can see from the earlocks, the payas that come down around their ears.
	Everybody's wearing a yarmulke.
	Okay, these people actually spend their lives studying the Bible.
	This is what they do, right?
	In these communities, you actually spend like 10 hours a day studying the Bible and the Talmud and all the texts.
	John Kasich comes in and begins lecturing them about the Bible, and he doesn't know anything.
	It's pretty amazing.
	Here we go.
	John.
	You guys like Joseph?
	You studied Joseph?
	Yeah.
	What'd you think about Joseph?
	Did you hear what the most important thing Joseph said to his brothers?
	My brothers, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.
	Did you know that?
	Yes.
	What am I gonna have to go over?
	What is going on here?
	No, do you know this?
	Yes.
	Because his brothers, they hated him, you know, because part of it, he may have been a little bit of a bragger, you know, Joseph.
	May have been a little bit, maybe.
	But they threw him in that ditch and his brothers saved him and then they sold him into slavery.
	And that's how the Jews got to Egypt, right?
	Did you know that?
	Yes.
	Did you know that?
	Yeah, but then he was telling his brothers, you know, like, you're going to worship me, you know?
	And they're like, what?
	Right?
	So he really didn't like them.
	He didn't want to say that.
	You think Jacob knew that?
	It said that.
	Jacob really knew.
	Is that in the scripture?
	He didn't want to develop further jealousy.
	So he said, my wife and I were going to bow down to you.
	He really knew that.
	Okay, so this continues along.
	Okay, this is great.
	John Kasich, so first of all, Yeah.
	Basic biblical analysis.
	This is John Kasich.
	What he's doing right here.
	I mean, this is literally the equivalent of a third grade science student walking into Albert Einstein's office and telling him, have you ever heard of this thing called math?
	This thing where like two plus two equal four.
	Have you ever heard of that thing?
	And Albert Einstein's like, yeah, yeah, I have.
	And he's like, no, but have you ever heard of this thing called, have you ever heard of water and how, like, if you put two drops of water close to each other, they attract.
	and then they become one.
	And Albert Einstein's like, yeah, I have.
	I know about that.
	And that's what that clip is.
	He's explaining to them, like, basic biblical verse that Jews know.
	I'm sorry to break it to all you Christians.
	Orthodox Jews, we're really into the Old Testament.
	Like, we're into it in a big way.
	Like, once a year we go through the entire Bible.
	Every week at the end of the week, we go through a major portion of the Bible.
	Not only do the people he's talking to know what Joseph said, they know all the commentaries on what Joseph said, and they know it in the original Hebrew, and he's standing there in their bookstore, surrounded by books about this!
	Surrounded by books about this!
	And he's going, well, have you ever heard of this book called the Bible?
	I like it.
	It's pretty good.
	Have you ever heard of this guy called God?
	Pretty excellent.
	The level of arrogance that it takes to do this is just astounding.
	But this is the level of arrogance of some of our presidential candidates.
	And it is somewhat telling.
	John Kasich trying to browbeat people into compliance with... This is the same guy, by the way, who says that this Orthodox bookstore should have to, presumably, hand out a ketubah, hand out a marital document for two gay guys.
	They should have to do that, according to John Kasich.
	Biblical criticism with idiot Republicans.
	I was wondering how we could go downhill in this election, and we found a way.
	We did.
	You thought we couldn't surpass ourselves.
	We did it.
	Okay, so... Alright, so is it time for Reagan.com yet?
	Fine, we'll do Reagan.com.
	Okay, we'll say hello to our friends at Reagan.com really quickly.
	So, Ronald Reagan was not a complete moron, unlike some of these other folks.
	And if you like Ronald Reagan, and you think that Ronald Reagan was a good president, perhaps you'd like Reagan to be associated with your emails.
	You can get an email address that is YourNameAtReagan.com by going to ReaganPrivacy.com.
	You don't just get to use Reagan.com, of course, you also get your information protected from the government, protected from corporations.
	All this is very cool stuff.
	ReaganPrivacy.com, go there right now, you get two months for free.
	YourNameAtReagan.com, so that's neat.
	Okay, so, I say that we can't go downhill, and then we promptly go even further downhill.
	So, today, or yesterday, Donald Trump was speaking in He was speaking in Pennsylvania, and here's what he had to say to a Pittsburgh crowd about Joe Paterno, who was the, who was the, his clip won.
	Here's what he had to say to Joe Paterno, about Joe Paterno, who was the, if you recall, the football coach at Penn State for 50 years, and who was also embroiled in a sex scandal when Jerry Sandusky, who was one of his defensive coaches, was molesting little boys in the shower room.
	And Paterno heard about it and basically didn't do anything.
	Here's Donald Trump talking about it.
	How's Joe Paterno?
	Are we gonna bring that back?
	Well, he's dead.
	How about that whole deal?
	Wise words from Donald Trump.
	How about Joe Paterno?
	Are we bringing that back?
	How about that whole deal?
	He said later he meant the statue, because they took down the statue of Joe Paterno when it turned out he knew his coach was molesting little boys and didn't do enough about it.
	And here's Trump saying, put it back up, put it back up.
	Yeah, these are all solid people.
	And unfortunately, there's now a consolidated movement to start gathering around Trump.
	And you knew this was going to come.
	You knew that there was going to come a point where people suggested that it was just too dangerous to stop Trump from getting the nomination.
	Over at Fox News, this has been true for a while, there are a lot of very pro-Trump Fox News hosts ranging from Sean Hannity to Greta Van Susteren.
	They're very, very pro-Donald Trump.
	And Roger Ailes is apparently very pro-Donald Trump.
	Roger Ailes brokered a meet between Megyn Kelly and Donald Trump.
	Megyn Kelly has obviously been very hard on Donald Trump.
	She's asked him tough questions.
	Trump doesn't like it.
	She went and she visited Trump Tower.
	And I'll put this one on Ailes.
	I don't know the full story, so I'm not going to speculate as to the motives.
	But I will say that if Barack Obama hates Fox News, and he's hated Fox News for literally his entire presidency, Roger Ailes would not have sent Sean Hannity to the White House to make nice with Barack Obama because Barack Obama felt slighted.
	This is a move, a consolidated move by Republican higher ups to now start unifying behind Trump in preparation for Hillary Clinton.
	And this is not a great surprise.
	I've thought for a while that there would be this move, that as it became clearer that Trump was the frontrunner, that there would be this move.
	There's been a move simultaneously to go to Cruz to try and stop Trump, but that seems to be, at least I'm getting the feeling, that from at least the elites, it's petering out a little bit.
	And that's for a reason.
	Stephen Miller is one of the surrogates.
	We quoted him yesterday.
	Stephen Miller is one of the surrogates for Trump.
	He's on TV, and he says that the only way the Cruz can win is by cheating, essentially.
	But on the second point, which is the moral point, and I am going to make it, and I'm happy to make it, it is wrong to disenfranchise voters by going around the country, making secret deals with inside party officials, elected GOP officials, and saying, yeah, your GOP district, representing 750,000 people, supports Donald Trump.
	...and rejects Ted Cruz, but we want you to make a secret pact to nullify the vote and support Ted Cruz.
	All I'm saying is Ted Cruz has only won three primaries outside his home state.
	Ted Cruz is trailing by two million votes.
	Soon it's going to be a lot more votes than that.
	He has no Democratic path to the nomination.
	The only way Ted Cruz can win is by nullifying ballots that have already been cast.
	Okay, that's not true.
	The only way Ted Cruz can win is by going to delegates.
	The delegates are selected.
	The only way that Trump can win at this point is basically by cuddling a bunch of people who didn't vote for him into voting for him because he's gonna come up short of the delegate number.
	But there's a case to be made, I'm gonna make it in a second, that Trump should be handed the nomination anyway.
	That even if he comes up short, I've said in the past, I don't think he should.
	Now I'm going to make the opposite case and then I'm going to explain why I think it's wrong, because I think that it's important that you hear all the arguments.
	So, Trump, just to finish up what Trump says about this and then we'll get into the argument, Trump says, by the way, that his unfavorability numbers are now nearing 70% nationwide.
	By the time this election cycle is over, he will be above 100%, 197% of people.
	Children who have yet to be born three generations from now.
	Well, not like Donald Trump.
	Donald Trump says, don't worry, I'm just like Ronald Reagan.
	Reagan also had low favorability.
	Reagan ended up winning.
	The difference was, number one, it was 1980, so the polling wasn't as good.
	And number two, Ronald Reagan was actually not a huge, huge pile of dreck.
	Here is Donald Trump, though, making the I'm like Reagan case.
	Here we go.
	Now, I haven't even started on Hillary, and my numbers are better right now than Ronald Reagan's numbers were with Jimmy Carter.
	You know, Ronald Reagan, who was great, he had a 30 favorability, and he was behind Jimmy Carter by so much.
	Everybody said, oh, this is going to be a disaster.
	And Jimmy Carter, now I will say this, the last person that Hillary wants to run against is me, I will tell you that.
	And I know that for a fact.
	But Jimmy Carter wanted to run against Ronald Reagan.
	He said, oh, please let Reagan win.
	And he was so far behind Reagan.
	And by the time the election took place, it was a big victory, an easy victory for Reagan.
	That's what happens.
	That's what happens.
	Okay, so he says that he's going to be just like Ronald Reagan, and he's going to involve himself in a major comeback, and everything is going to be just hunky-dory.
	Reince Priebus at the RNC, who as I said, looks more and more like Lando Calrissian dealing with Darth Vader when it comes to Donald Trump.
	He's just looking around going, this deal gets worse all the time, and Trump looks at him and goes, pray I do not alter the deal further.
	Frankly, you're not going to like it if I alter the deal further.
	So here's Reince Priebus saying, he's not being jibbed, it's not rigged, but it doesn't matter.
	Here he says this.
	But he specifically said, you, and you're the chairman of the Republican National Committee, you should be ashamed of yourself for what's going on.
	How extraordinary is that?
	I have no idea how extraordinary that is, given the year we have it.
	I honestly don't take it all that personally.
	But I do have to respond, though, when a campaign says that the RNC is rigging the rules.
	It's just not the case.
	The rules have been set.
	They're in place.
	They're not going to change in these states.
	And they're the same, you know, for the next state, New York, they're all out there.
	Everyone knows what the rules are.
	So I have to respond, though, if the party of which I'm the chairman of is getting attacked, especially when it's not true.
	Okay, so he says all this.
	Now, here is the case.
	Here is the case for Donald Trump being given the nomination, even though he doesn't win it.
	He doesn't get to 1237, but he should be given the nomination anyway.
	So here is the case.
	Trump will be in the delegate lead going into the RNC.
	If the nomination goes instead to somebody like Cruz, Trump is going to claim that he was a victim.
	Which is what he does anyway, right?
	He whines and he whines until he wins.
	He's said this over and over and over.
	He's lying.
	Of course, he's not a victim.
	The system is the same for everybody.
	Everybody plays by the same rules and if you lose, you lose.
	But Trump doesn't like losing and he likes to whine about it.
	An eye for an eye.
	So, Trump supporters, here's the problem.
	Here's the problem.
	Trump will say that it's been rigged, and his supporters, who have now become idolaters, many of them, not all of them, but a good percentage of them, have become idolaters at the altar of Trump.
	We'll talk about that a little bit more later, when we get to Stuff I Hate.
	Those people will believe him, no matter what.
	They'll believe him.
	He'll say that it was rigged, he was stopped.
	They will believe him.
	Now, Trump's supporters are really not particularly conservative for the most part, but Any victorious politics requires a coalition.
	If Cruz had a victorious coalition, it would look like some of the Trump people and some of the Kasich people and all the Cruz people.
	Trump, if he got the nomination, he's not going to win.
	He'll get his ass kicked by Hillary Clinton.
	I mean, he will get blown out by historic proportions.
	But if Trump doesn't get the nomination, then the possibility of his supporters ever joining the coalition again to create a victorious coalition drops dramatically.
	If you prevent Trump from winning the nomination, that keeps the Trump rage alive for another election cycle.
	All these people just say, he was gypped, it just shows the establishment will do anything to stop outsiders like Donald Trump, and then we get to do this whole slow-rolling tsunami of horror again in four years.
	Right?
	This is the case, that if we stop Trump now, then if we strike him down, he shall become more powerful than we could possibly imagine, right?
	In four years, they'll come back, it'll be Mad Max beyond Thunderdome.
	It'll be Sausage Fingers beyond Thunderdome, right?
	We'll just get the sequel.
	Trump's support base isn't really just about Trump, obviously.
	It's a small but durable agglomeration of these alt-right white nationalists and disaffected white blue-collar voters who want tariffs and more government policy.
	Largely the same people who backed both Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot.
	What's made Trump a bigger candidate than Buchanan or Perot is the fact that there are all these angry conservatives, the Trump ragers, who have gotten so involved in the idea that people are being screwed, we need the guy who's gonna come in like doomsday, and he's just gonna absorb all the energy and then refract it out, or destroying everything in his path, right?
	That's the Trump guy that they want.
	They need a nasty guy like Trump.
	So that's argument number one in favor of Trump, right?
	Giving him the nomination.
	If you don't do this, they will destroy conservatism for the future, we'll do this again in four years, They'll just be so enraged that they go after whoever is the ragiest candidate in four years, and they will come back stronger than they ever were because they feel like they've been victimized in some way.
	That's argument number one.
	Argument number two is that if Cruz takes the nomination, let's say Cruz gets it, and then he loses.
	Which, I've said all along, I think Republicans have a very narrow shot in this election.
	Let's say Cruz takes the nomination, then he loses.
	This is actually worst case scenario for conservatives.
	For constitutional conservatives.
	Because, if you're a constitutional conservative, Trump takes the nomination, he loses.
	Of course he lost.
	He's not a conservative.
	Of course he lost.
	He's a guy who, he's a bad guy.
	So, it makes sense that he would lose.
	If Cruz takes the nomination and loses, You got the Trump people on the one hand saying Lyin' Ted stole the nomination and then proceeded to lose.
	You got the GOP establishment on the other hand, who hate Cruz and hate constitutional conservatives, saying all the wrong guys, the Tea Partiers, those evil constitutional conservatives, they're the ones who made us nominate a crap candidate like Cruz, and then he loses, you need to hand power back to us.
	We need more Jeb, and we need more Mitch McConnell, and we need more Paul Ryan.
	So what this means, fast forward to 2020, a revitalized Trumpster crowd waiting for their next moment, and a constitutional conservative wing scorned by the establishment, and the establishment confident that it can now retake control.
	So we get to do this whole crap show over again in 2020 if Trump is stopped.
	And then there's finally the emotional argument, and this one I'm real close on, and that is Trumpsters, you get what you deserve.
	You get what you deserve.
	I heard Clavin use the HL Mencken quote the other day, and this is right.
	Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
	If you are a Trump supporter and you've been bitching and moaning about how Trump is being screwed and you want to strike back against the man, you deserve your shot.
	This is, I think, the most telling argument.
	You deserve your shot.
	And there's a part of me that says, I agree.
	You should get your shot because I want to see you pummeled.
	I want to see your nasty, fascistic, authoritarian, God-worshipping movement pummeled to the ground, and it'll be delicious to watch.
	There's a part of me emotionally that says that, because you're filling up my Twitter timeline, and I know you are.
	But that's too personal, so I'm going to try and remove myself from that, because I don't think that my personal feelings should really impact the future of the country.
	So now, here's the counter-argument to all of that.
	First, the Trump-rage argument.
	The Trump-rage-beyond-Thunderdome-they're-going-to-come-back-better-and-stronger-than-ever argument.
	This neglects that Donald Trump will not be the candidate in four years.
	Movements need a guy to coalesce around.
	Trump is not going to be that guy in four years.
	He's already a thousand years old.
	He'll be a thousand and four by the time four years comes around.
	Trump isn't just a figurehead.
	He also happens to be a guy who's really famous with a hundred percent name recognition.
	And so who are they going to come around?
	Are they going to come around Tom Tancredo on immigration?
	Are they going to come around You know, they're going to come around Rand Paul.
	I mean, who's the next figure?
	This movement requires a figure just like all third-party type figures need a figure.
	You need a Huey Long or you need a Ross Perot or a Buchanan.
	Who's going to be that figure?
	Nobody on the horizon who's nearly as successful at consolidating support as Trump has been.
	Second, the possibility that Cruz loses after winning the nomination.
	That's just true for any candidate.
	It's just true for any candidate.
	I would rather put up the guy who I best feel represents conservatism and represents the Republican Party than the guy who does it worse.
	And, you know, then let the chips fall where they may.
	If he loses, he loses.
	If he wins, he wins.
	If the establishment says, well, you guys blew it, well, then we'll fight it out again with the establishment in four years.
	And if the Trumpsters want to walk, let them walk.
	I mean, this is what's good for the country is a constitutional conservative running from the Republican Party, not a nationalist populist running from the Republican Party.
	And hey, it's possible Cruz wins.
	If Trump wins, then You know, I don't think he'll be a good president.
	I think he'll be a quite terrible president, and I think he'll have wrecked conservatism for a generation.
	If Cruz becomes president, you could actually have a constitutional spring that would be unique, certainly in my lifetime.
	Finally, the Mencken argument.
	The idea that democracy is people getting what they need, good and hard.
	The majority of people hate Trump.
	The majority of Republicans dislike Trump.
	The majority of Republicans never voted for Donald Trump.
	So democracy is the notion that common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard, but common people have not selected Trump.
	They haven't.
	A plurality of common people have selected Trump, not a majority.
	Trump hasn't gotten majority support.
	So, I don't think that Trump should be handed the nomination.
	I don't think he's gonna get to 1237, so I guess let the fireworks begin.
	By the way, the consolidation around Trump continues apace, and the consultant class is ready to make cash off Trump.
	Karl Rove, breaking story, Karl Rove's American Crossroads is letting donors know they think they can propel Trump to victory if he's the nominee.
	So Karl Rove, who says that Trump is the worst thing since mold, he says that he can help Trump win.
	All you have to do is send him a few bucks.
	So the consultant class will continue to get rich off of Donald Trump.
	Meanwhile, the other side of the aisle, the process actually is rigged.
	The other side of the aisle, the process actually is rigged.
	Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the head of the DNC.
	She says that Hillary Clinton is going to win the nomination outright.
	We won't need the superdelegates to decide this thing.
	Here is Jar Jar Binks.
	I still think that we are likely on track as we go through the rest of the primary and caucus season to result in an election at the end that will have a presumptive nominee that becomes the presumptive nominee prior to the convention without the need for superdelegates and that will have the majority of unpledged delegates going into the convention.
	So I do not think we're going to have a contested convention.
	Okay, so she says we won't have a contested convention, and the reason she says this is because she is personally going to intervene, and she is going to ensure, using her secret dark Jedi skills, that Debbie Wasserman says that the Bernie Sanders people are stalkers.
	She's now putting her thumb on the scale in favor of Hillary Clinton.
	Mesa no like Bernie Sanders!
	Go!
	The concern is that, is this a harassment dynamic going on?
	What is your take?
	You know, It's certainly completely fine, because superdelegates are up for grabs, so to speak, all the way until we get to the convention.
	And there is always a fierce effort to make sure that candidates' supporters can win over those unpledged delegates, because they can decide all the way up until they get to the convention.
	Using tactics that border on harassment, that feel like stalking, is really something that I hope our campaigns really condemn, and that we make sure that their supporters' enthusiasm is fantastic, making sure that we have appropriate contact and outreach is just great, but intimidation is not okay, and I'm not suggesting that that's occurring right now, We are a little bit.
	I think we need to make sure that we are careful about how we persuade.
	Well, you are suggesting that just a little bit.
	Let's be real, like a little bit.
	So...
	The DNC putting its thumb on the scales in favor of Bernie Sanders, in favor of Hillary Clinton against Sanders, and you can see this playing out.
	So a Bernie Sanders supporter called Hillary a corporate whore at a Bernie Sanders rally yesterday, which is of course true.
	Hillary Clinton is the woman who was literally at the Goldman Sachs groundbreaking and was taking speeches for $200,000 in front of all of these hedge funds and Wall Street firms and then won't release any of them.
	She was on the board of Walmart.
	I mean, I don't know if people recognize this.
	The same lady who rips Walmart is this evil, horrible corporate organization that pays people too little and jacks them.
	She was on their board for several years.
	So, corporate whore?
	Yeah, I mean, if you're a lefty, you think that Hillary's a corporate whore, sure.
	A Bernie Sanders supporter says that at the rally yesterday.
	Here's what it looked like.
	Now, Secretary Clinton has said Medicare for all will never happen.
	Well, I agree with Secretary Clinton that Medicare for all will never happen if we have a president who never aspires for something greater than the status quo.
	Medicare for all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate democratic whores who are beholden to big pharma and the private insurance industry instead of us.
	Okay, so he calls Hillary a corporate democratic whore.
	Hashtag democratic whore starts trending.
	Naturally, this means that the Democratic Party must come in to defend Hillary Clinton.
	Hillary must be defended at all costs.
	So Claire McCaskill, who's a senator from Missouri, she says it's unacceptable for anybody, anybody to refer to Hillary in this form or fashion.
	I mean, the only people who we should be talking about as whores are the ones who have sex with Bill Clinton.
	Anyway, here's what she says.
	Yeah, I worry about the tone, and I worry about it on both sides.
	I think it's really important we keep the tone where it should be.
	It is unacceptable for anybody to reference Hillary Clinton as a corporate whore.
	And that's what happened in the introduction last night at that rally.
	And I have not yet heard Bernie Sanders say, totally unacceptable.
	It's totally unacceptable.
	And we should say that Bernie Sanders has just tweeted that it was inappropriate and unacceptable himself.
	Well, good for him.
	But he should have done it from the podium.
	The minute those words were issued, there was a huge cheer that went up when Hillary Clinton was called a corporate whore.
	And that's when the candidate has to step in and go, wait a minute, guys.
	Remember what the real enemy is here.
	By the way, I think this is an important point.
	For the left, the enemy is always the right.
	For the right, the enemy is sometimes ISIS, but rarely the left.
	And that's why it's an asymmetric political war.
	Until Republicans recognize that the real enemy to American freedom is the American left, They're not going to be able to actually win elections.
	Anyway, Claire McCaskill goes after Bernie Sanders, the entire Democratic Party goes after Bernie Sanders, Debbie Wasserman Schultz goes after Bernie Sanders, Jar Jar Binks, Debbie Wasserman Schultz goes after Bernie Sanders, and annoys everyone in the process.
	Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, as we mentioned yesterday, she actually went out and blamed Bernie Sanders for people getting killed in New York State.
	Jane Sanders, who is Bernie's lovely wife, she came out and she said, it sort of bothers me that Hillary blames Bernie Sanders for gun violence.
	I think everything that she's done around the gun issue bothers me because Bernie has common sense gun values.
	I mean, he's voted for all the things that are even under consideration there.
	He lost his first election because he said, I want to stop the manufacture and sale of assault weapons.
	And he lost that election by three points.
	In 1990, he had the same position.
	But people understood that he was really, even if they disagreed with him, that he was trustworthy.
	He won that by 17%.
	She's trying to make him look like he's in the NRA gun lobby when he's got a D-minus, that he doesn't care about the Sandy Hook parents.
	That really bothers me.
	It's like, come on, we just don't go there.
	We don't go and ask people for support in the worst time of their lives.
	And so that bothers me because The fact is the Democratic Party is not defending Bernie Sanders against brutal, vicious assaults by Hillary Clinton.
	But as soon as a Bernie Sanders supporter says she's a corporate whore, then the entire Democratic establishment jumps in to save their girl, Hillary Clinton.
	She must be saved at all costs.
	And this is really, you know, it's pretty amazing how rigged the system is against Bernie Sanders from the very top.
	Meanwhile, there's an attempt by Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, as we mentioned, To turn Ted Cruz into Donald Trump.
	So as I've said before, one of the dangers of Trump is that Trump smears the entire Republican Party, the entire conservative movement.
	Bernie Sanders, you'll hear him link up Trump and Cruz, and then you'll hear Hillary do the exact same thing.
	They're trying to lump them together.
	Trump and Cruz have almost nothing in common.
	Like, legitimately nothing in common.
	Here's Bernie Sanders, though, lumping them together.
	New York values are the Statue of Liberty, not a wall between us and Mexico.
	In New York, we pride ourselves on our diversity.
	We don't divide people up based on where they were born.
	I was born and raised in Brooklyn.
	BK, stand up, fight back, don't let anyone tear us down.
	Okay, so he knows New York values, Bernie Sanders, and he goes on here.
	I will never lose the values that New York and my family have given me.
	As New Yorkers, we understand what New York values really mean.
	We believe in the value of hard work.
	We believe in the value of equality.
	We believe in the value of a society where the American dream works for all, not just the 1%.
	Those are New York values.
	And the truth is, New York values are American values.
	There is no difference.
	Okay, and then Bernie Sanders does an actual mic drop.
	And here comes Larry Wilmore, the second least funny man on planet Earth, running out oddly onto stage to do things.
	But Sanders is lumping together Cruz and Trump there, and this is the danger of Trump.
	Hillary does the same thing.
	She says that Trump and Cruz have both burst open ugly currents of bigotry inside the Republican Party.
	She can't name when Cruz has done that, but you'll hear her name some things that Trump has done.
	When the frontrunner for the Republican nomination was asked in a national television interview to disavow David Duke and other white supremacists supporting his campaign, He played coy.
	This is the same Donald Trump who led the insidious birther movement to delegitimize President Obama.
	He has called Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers.
	He wants to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.
	And the list goes on.
	And not to be outdone by his primary rival, Ted Cruz would treat Muslim Americans like criminals and religiously profile their neighborhoods.
	So ugly currents that lurked just below the surface of our politics have burst into the open.
	Right, okay.
	And everyone sees.
	So she's lumping everybody together, and this is the problem with Trumpism.
	It's why, in the end, I don't buy the let Trump have it argument, because we will all be lumped in with Trump whether we like it or not.
	Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things I hate, and then the mailbag.
	And, you know, it'll only be going for another hour here or so.
	Okay, so first, things that I like.
	We're at the point in American life where I need calming music, like, every day.
	Because if there's no calming music, then we're all just effed.
	I mean, we're done.
	So here is Bach wrote a piece, which was then used by Gounod, a French composer, about 200 years later.
	And he uses the Bach piece as sort of what you would call now the baseline.
	and then he writes a theme over it, and it's Ave Maria.
	It's a beautiful piece.
	It's really, it's quite grand, so we'll listen to a little bit of it.
	Piano music
	Piano music It's just wonderful.
	So that's Ave Maria.
	This was written in 1853.
	What you're hearing underneath with the piano is actually Prelude No.
	1 in C Major by Bach from the Well-Tempered Clavier.
	Charles Gounod wrote the theme that's soaring over that, and they used the Latin text of Ave Maria.
	This is a cello recording, but it was originally written for voice.
	But it's just, it's terrific.
	It's terrific.
	And you can look it up.
	It's very spiritual.
	It's great.
	So, okay.
	That makes you feel good, and then you have to look at your Twitter mentions and you feel terrible again.
	So, time for... Well, you know what?
	One more thing I like.
	This one, at the behest of Jonathan, our producer, and Mathis is already groaning because Mathis apparently has a perverse fear of octopi.
	Which makes sense.
	These are the creepiest creatures on planet Earth.
	They're very odd-looking.
	I mean, it's like Michael Moore with suction cups.
	And apparently, an octopus escaped his captivity in Finding Nemo fashion.
	He really made a break for freedom.
	They found a poster of a sexy female octopus, half-clad, but when the other fish ripped away the poster, they found there was a tunnel to the outside.
	Here's what the story was, apparently.
	Okay, we don't have the actual video, but apparently he made it all the way to the ocean.
	Apparently octopi are really smart, which is why they're gonna take over the world, which, you know, given this election cycle, may be the only comfort we have.
	But the octopi, well, apparently this octopus crawled all the way to the ocean to go back to his home sea, homeland, home sea, and left a trail of suction cups behind him.
	So, that's a pretty awesome story.
	Sorry, math.
	I said it's a good story.
	Okay, time for things I hate.
	So really, only one thing that I hate today.
	So, the prosecutor in the Corey Lewandowski case decided not to prosecute.
	This is not a major shock.
	For anybody who knows how law works, namely not the Trumpkins, who don't care about law or words, they don't know how to spell, they don't know the difference between you, are, and you're.
	I mean, like every one of their tweets is using Y-O-U-R as opposed to Y-O-U apostrophe R-E.
	Which is not correct, but in any case, the prosecutors have what's called prosecutorial discretion.
	They look at cases, and then they decide whether they think there's a likelihood of victory at trial, and they also decide whether they think it's worthwhile expending the resources of the state in order to push forward the case.
	They decided with regard to Michelle Fields, who was grabbed, yanked, and bruised by Corey Lewandowski, and then lied about it.
	They decide that it wasn't worth pushing that case forward, They say for a couple of reasons.
	One is the resources that it would take basically to push it is not worthwhile in a district with a DA that has a backlog of literally tens of thousands of cases, many of them very serious.
	Okay.
	And the other reason is they say that there's probable cause to prosecute, but they didn't know the likelihood of rebutting Lewandowski's defense because it's based on testimony from Trump and Lewandowski.
	And so they crafted this false defense about how Michelle had a little bomb in her hand and Lewandowski was going to save Trump from Michelle and all this nonsense.
	And so what it really comes down to is number one.
	What it comes down to is this wasn't a big enough deal, criminally speaking, for them to go forward with the prosecution.
	Totally get that.
	If I were a prosecutor, totally get that decision.
	I had a very similar situation with the Zoe Tur incident where Zoe Tur grabs me on national television by the back of the neck, threatens me, threatens me afterward, threatens me on Twitter.
	Whatever.
	least recommend something.
	And then the prosecutor decides not to go forward with it because the prosecutor said this isn't politically viable.
	Okay.
	Whatever.
	What the Trumpsters do, and this is the part that ticks me off.
	There's so many people who are in love with Trump who just do not care about basic truth and standards of accuracy, like at all.
	So what they say is, this means that it was all a hoax.
	It was all just a hoax.
	He never touched her.
	Corey Lewandowski was telling the truth from the very outset.
	Now, the prosecutor, the prosecutors themselves said there was probable cause to prosecute.
	They also said that they asked Michelle if an apology would be sufficient.
	She said absolutely an apology would be sufficient.
	They then went to Corey Lewandowski, and Lewandowski said, okay, I'll draft an apology.
	He started to draft it.
	They decided to drop the charges based on that, and then he didn't send it to them.
	Really, this is what they said in the press conference today.
	I mean, come on, gang.
	I mean, talk about puerile and childish.
	I mean, this is the Trump campaign in a nutshell.
	Apparently Trump actually called up the prosecutor's office personally to tell them his story and also to encourage them to quote-unquote, do the right thing.
	This is an area where he, where Mar-a-Lago is, right?
	So he has a fair bit of sway and pull.
	But again, I don't think that this was a matter of bribery.
	I think this is a matter of the prosecutors looked at this and they said, I don't know why this is worth our effort, really.
	That doesn't mean that Michelle never should have filed a police report.
	It's the job of the police and the job of the prosecutors to weed out cases they think are worthy of prosecution from cases that aren't.
	That's why the concept of prosecutorial discretion exists.
	The reason she filed a police report in the first place, as she has said, as I have said, is because Trump and his campaign were calling her liars.
	They were suggesting she faked her own bruises.
	They were suggesting the bruises weren't even real.
	She went in to document that this actually happened.
	Michelle has said that she's going to file a civil lawsuit against Trump And against Lewandowski for defamation, Trump then threatened her and said, well, she better not do that because Indiscovery will tear her apart.
	OK, I guarantee you this, Indiscovery, Trump has a lot more to hide than Michelle Fields has Indiscovery.
	So that's just.
	So the thing I hate in the end is that this is the Trump campaign.
	The eye-for-an-eye thing from the beginning of the show, it applies to Trump, it applies to his followers, but they're blind, so they don't care if they gouge out other people's eyes.
	That's really what it comes down to.
	It's not even an eye-for-an-eye, it's they're blind, and how did they get blind?
	No one knows.
	They just decided to gouge other people's eyes out, and that's how it's going to be.
	Okay, time for a few entries from the mailbag.
	We'll start with the juiciest entry first.
	So this one comes from Gina.
	So Gina is a student, I don't want to say where, to protect her privacy, But she says, she praises me a lot.
	She says, you convinced me to wait until marriage to have sex to be pro-life, to be an entrepreneur, and have completely aided me in un-brainwashing myself, which is great.
	I get a lot of letters like this, and I'm glad that I can impact folks, and I'm glad that you listen.
	I have a morality question.
	I am in college struggling and working as a stripper in a high-end club.
	It is very strict, no contact rules, no drugs, no touching, and only topless.
	Is this wrong?
	You know, normally the answer would clearly be yes.
	Here's her argument for why it's not.
	She says, My argument why I think it is not wrong is other performers dance for money in little clothing, acrobats, Broadway.
	No one says that is wrong.
	The only difference is I am topless.
	But in Brazil, people go topless at the beach.
	American culture just as being topless is wrong for women.
	Am I being morally relative?
	Moral relativism.
	So, let's go through that argument first.
	First off, yes, it is morally wrong for actresses to get naked on screen for money.
	Yes.
	It is wrong for porn actresses to do it.
	It is wrong for regular actresses to do it.
	When people go around scantily clad, I don't like when men do it either, but let's be real about this.
	There's a difference between a woman being scantily clad and a man being scantily clad because women are generally not...
	The male response to nudity and female response to nudity are not equivalent.
	They're not equivalent.
	And look, a woman is not responsible for a man's state, obviously.
	You know, what a woman does is not responsible for a man's state.
	But, it's not exactly a moral thing to trade off your body for money.
	It's not exactly the baseline of morality where I come from.
	So, what I would say about the argument that in certain other cultures breasts are not seen as sexual objects, Number one, very, very few cultures.
	Even in Brazil, they know that boobies are a sexual object.
	And number two, they are a sexual object in the United States, so you recognize that, and that's just the truth.
	I mean, there's a reason women aren't walking around topless, and that's for good reason, because that would put society in a high state of tension, I would say.
	So, the other, she says, the other argument...
	His men are committing adultery and cheating.
	I do not see how watching a topless girl dancing or getting a lap dance is cheating.
	In addition, men are not biologically monogamous and need sexual variety.
	To be monogamous, they need to experience sexual variety of women to not feel suppressed by their wife and girlfriend.
	This is an argument that's very often made in favor of pornography.
	People say that pornography actually keeps people from cheating, right?
	If you stare at naked women online and presumably do other things, then this will keep you being monogamous.
	I wholly disagree with this proposition.
	The reason is because men tend to push boundaries.
	And so what you get is if men are looking at other women all the time, there's a certain amount of men looking at women that's natural.
	It's just natural.
	Men are married, a pretty woman walks down the street, a man looks, and then he goes right back to talking with his wife.
	Doesn't mean he loves her.
	It doesn't mean he wants to really do anything with her.
	It's just biological instinct.
	Men look at that.
	Once you get deeply ensconced in sexualizing other women, that tends to carry over to, okay, I can behave in this way.
	If I'm presented with this opportunity, is it really that different?
	And there's an article today about women saying they're accepting their husband's cheating.
	This is bound to fail.
	It's bound to fail.
	It's not going to work, because it turns out that love and sex and marriage are deeply intertwined, and the modern attempt to separate the three has destroyed marriage, has destroyed sex, and has destroyed love.
	That's actually what's happening right now.
	Pornography destroys sex in general, because the fact is that men are now looking for something that doesn't exist.
	Pornography destroys love because it disassociates sex from love, and it destroys marriage because the reality is that women want to be the object of desire for their husbands, not...
	Various other sundry goods on the shelf so that's my that's that's my response to to that is that you know I really hope that you get another job I think there are other jobs available to you sound like a nice bright gal I think that you can do better for yourself, and I think that you your future husband I would hope I think will be will be pleased to know that that is not something that you decided to keep on doing I think that I know that
	Most good men would prefer that their women reserve their sex lives, and this is part of your sex life.
	I mean, showing your breasts to men is part of your sex life.
	Would reserve that for marriage.
	I'm somebody who reserved my virginity for marriage.
	You say you want to do that as well.
	I guarantee your future husband will appreciate if you also reserve your nudity for your marriage.
	Okay, so that's one letter.
	Okay.
	Stefan writes, Sure, virtually all the European countries are republics.
	not a democracy.
	Can you name other current countries that are also republics?
	Sure, virtually all the European countries are republics.
	Anytime you have an elected body that votes on things for you, That is a republic.
	A pure democracy does not really exist.
	It doesn't really exist.
	In Athens, the idea of a pure democracy was that you would literally get a plebiscite out, everybody would come out and vote on the major issues of the day, and they would vote issue by issue.
	We're starting to move toward that in places like California, where you have referenda and people vote on specific issues.
	But most elected countries are republics instead of democracies.
	The problem is, as we have moved toward democratic values rather than republican values, small d, small r, What we've done is instead of saying to people, we're electing you for your good judgment, we say, we're electing you to do X. And then if you don't do X, we throw you out.
	And so instead of electing good people to make judgments that are independent and based on the evidence, we're electing people and then we're saying, we want you to do this stuff that we want you to do based on our 30 seconds of research.
	And the whole purpose of an elected republic is that these people spend a fair amount of time actually looking at the issues.
	You have five minutes to spend between taking your kids to school and working.
	And that's why you elect people to do the job for you.
	It's just like any other thing you contract out.
	We contract out our politics to people we trust.
	That's why trustworthiness matters.
	It's why you have to know what the ideology of the person is before you elect them.
	It's why I don't trust Trump.
	I don't think he's trustworthy.
	Okay, Justin writes, My question is about your stance on government being completely out of business.
	Do you think there's a certain point in which government should have the ability to impose regulations of safety in the workplace, or should we simply allow that to be the business of the employers?
	Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and disasters such as the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire come to mind when I think about this, and I just wonder when you think government should step in and regulate how businesses treat their employees and create their products.
	Okay, so as far as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the notion that ever there were people who were falling into meat grinders and being churned into sausage is nonsense, and Teddy Roosevelt said as much at the time.
	The Jungle is muckraking and it's not true.
	As far as the idea that employers have to have special Regulations on them and how they treat their employees, I don't generally believe that you need that.
	The reason for that is because there is such a thing as tort law.
	If I put you in a position where a beam falls on your head and I know the beam is unstable, I'm responsible for negligence.
	Your family will sue me into the ground.
	Right?
	You actually don't need a special body of law where you have an inspector come in and inspect the beams.
	You don't need that.
	And if people don't want to work in unsafe conditions, they have the ability to strike.
	They have the ability to strike.
	And I'm very much in favor of people unionizing and striking on the basis of worker safety.
	If there's a real worker safety violation, This was sort of what they said in like Norma Rae, for example.
	People working in coal mines or in sewing factories who are getting routinely hurt.
	And so they decided, look, we're not going back there until you upgrade the machinery.
	That's perfectly acceptable.
	I don't see why the government is better at regulating business than agreements between the employers and the employees, as well as basic tort law.
	Okay, Peter writes, Is it possible one of the reasons why the left seems so happy to march the Western world off the cliff when it comes to Islamic migration is because they simply don't understand religion?
	Considering the majority of the people on the left look down their noses at religious people, is it possible the left just doesn't get why inviting people of such a radically different faith might be a problem?
	This might come down to something you mentioned earlier where you mentioned no real religious person identifies as anything before they identify as a child of God.
	This is something I doubt many non-religious people wrap their heads around.
	Totally agree.
	Totally agree.
	I think the left doesn't understand and they don't respect the religious values of everybody, but particularly Muslims.
	The left actually believes that Muslims can be bought off by iPhones.
	They believe that Muslims can actually just be bought off by You know, by the nice things that we have in Western society.
	And right now, I'm looking for a piece that I think is relevant to this.
	There's a piece at BuzzFeed that was really kind of fascinating, where it was talking about... There's a kid in Islamic country.
	I want to see if I can dig it up, because there was one portion of it that was really, really telling.
	Let's see if I can find it real fast.
	It's... Let's see... Here it is.
	Okay, so...
	There's a section of this piece, it's called How to Lose Your Mind to ISIS and then Fight to Get It Back.
	It was written by a guy at BuzzFeed about a family who had a kid who was being recruited by ISIS.
	And it talks in this piece specifically about how the family of this kid, the aunt and uncle, they went to the kid and they said they took the kid to the beach in France and they showed him a bunch of Scantily clad women.
	And they said, this is what you get if you're in the West.
	Right?
	They said, this is the West.
	The West is these scantily clad women.
	And the kid's response, which is perfectly what you would think it is if you're a religious person and understands how religion works, is, I want to soak the sand with their blood.
	He's a teenage boy.
	That's what he says about these women who are in bikinis, right?
	Because he's a radical Muslim.
	He says, I want to soak the sand with their blood.
	And they said, well, you don't want to kill them.
	And he said, yeah, no, I do.
	He said, well, all of them?
	He said, yes, all of them.
	All of them.
	People are not bought off by money.
	People want to believe in something bigger than themselves.
	They'll either believe in the left, in the value of secularism, or they'll believe in Western civilization, or they'll believe in Christianity, or Judaism, or radical Islam.
	And so disrespecting Muslims enough to believe, you can buy them off with a couple of scantily clad photos from the beach, It's a bunch of hooey, and it's arrogance of the highest order.
	It's why Bono, what he was saying yesterday about, we just throw some comedy at them and that wins.
	No, that's not the case.
	Okay.
	Michael writes, my economics professor at West Alabama was going over the multiplier effect.
	The multiplier effect is the idea that if I spend a dollar on a good, you then take that dollar and you spend it on a different good, and that person takes the dollar and spends it on a different good.
	It's the multiplier effect.
	Also known as just trading with each other.
	He says, I asked him if that was similar to trickle-down economics with difference, of course, being that instead of tax breaks, the government spends money toward the business.
	He said, yes, sort of.
	And then he brought up similarities in the trickle-down effect and the fountain effect.
	Can you give your opinion on why one is better than the other?
	The phrase trickle-down effect is something coined by the left.
	The right doesn't believe that you give money to rich people and then the rich people trickle it down to the bottom.
	That's not what they believe.
	We believe that there's a common set of rules that governs all commerce.
	The set of rules is if you provide value to somebody, you get to keep the profits of providing that value.
	It's true for rich.
	It's true for poor.
	This encourages trade.
	This encourages exchange.
	The idea of a fountain effect is the idea you give money to the people at the bottom, they spend the money, and it sort of bubbles up to the top.
	That's not accurate.
	What ends up happening is the people at the bottom spend most of their money, because they're at the bottom rung of society, they tend to spend it on basic consumer goods.
	They tend to spend it on t-shirts and food.
	And so if you do that, you end up with an economy.
	And if you take it away from the innovators, the Steve Jobses, and give money Two people who spend it on burgers, you're going to get more burgers and less iPhones.
	There won't be competition.
	There won't be people competing to make the nice iPhones.
	The poor people will never get to own an iPhone.
	They will still be spending their money on ever-increasing prices of burgers, because as they spend more money on burgers, it jacks the price up.
	So the price actually goes up, because now there's competition to create more burgers, and there's undersupply and overdemand.
	Okay, Diane says, if you could experience a day in the life of somebody who has now passed on, whose shoes would you step into and why?
	Hitler and I'd kill myself.
	Alright, Niall says, this might seem like kind of a random question, but I was wondering that if you were to run for president, who would you pick as running mate?
	What are your thoughts on Bill Whittle?
	I like Bill Whittle.
	What are your thoughts on Gavin McInnes?
	Gavin's a wild man.
	Milo Yiannopoulos?
	Milo says some things that need to be said, and he flirts with some of the worst people on Earth.
	Paul Joseph Watson?
	Don't really know his stuff very much.
	Last thing, what is your opinion on Deadpool, the Marvel comic book character?
	You know, he's jokey.
	Okay.
	He ain't my favorite thing.
	He's just really dark Spider-Man.
	Spider-Man is happy Deadpool, right?
	He's not crazy like Deadpool, but if you read Deadpool comics and you read Spider-Man comics, it's basically fight quip, fight quip, fight quip.
	That's all it is, right?
	So it's just quips that are really R-rated for Deadpool and quips that are really G-rated for Peter Parker.
	That's basically the only difference.
	And finally, a question, and this allows me to promote my new book coming out in October, so I'll do it.
	Where did you get your inspiration for True Allegiance and why do I have to wait until October to read it?
	You have to wait until October to read it because my publisher says so.
	And my inspiration for True Allegiance was, I like writing fiction and I do think that, like Ayn Rand, like Tom Wolfe, Sometimes the best way to get across your point is by providing a vision of what the world looks like if all of the current day events are taken to their logical extreme.
	And so that's what true allegiance is.
	It's you take everything that's currently happening and you amp it up by a factor of two and that's what true allegiance basically is.
	Well folks, we've reached the end of the week.
	Try not to break and ruin everything while I'm gone.
	Try not to study Bible with Donald Trump because it's just a bad idea.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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