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Aug. 18, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show

57:43

Ep. 168 - No, I'm Not Going To Lie For Trump

Polls mean something, why the alt-right celebrates today, and the Vaunted Mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	So, Hillary and Obama lied again.
	Because, of course, they did.
	President Obama claimed last week $400 million sent to Iran at the exact same time Iran was releasing American hostages.
	Now, it wasn't a ransom payment.
	It was all just a big ol' big coincidence.
	Hillary Clinton said, quote, The White House has talked about this, and this is kind of old news.
	It was first reported about seven or eight months ago.
	Except it wasn't.
	And it turns out that not only was the payment a ransom, everybody saw it that way at the time.
	According to the Wall Street Journal today, quote, new details of the $400 million U.S.
	payment to Iran earlier this year depict a tightly scripted exchange specifically timed to the release of several American prisoners held in Iran.
	U.S.
	officials wouldn't let Iranians take control of the money until a Swiss Air Force plane carrying three freed Americans departed from Tehran on January 17th, unquote.
	This means that the American government has now become the PR spokes agency for the Iranian terror regime.
	The Obama administration lied about whether Iran had captured American sailors.
	You remember this.
	Secretary of State John Kerry even thanked the Iranians for their help as Americans were humiliated and disarmed and they took pictures of them and then they built statues of them being disarmed.
	The Obama administration continues to lie.
	That Iran is abiding by the nuclear deal even as reports emerge that Iran tried to buy in technology to build a military nuclear program according to Germany's intelligence services.
	The entire Iran deal was built on the back of a gigantic lie peddled by the media openly mocked inside the Obama administration.
	The lie that Obama had only opened negotiations after spotting a moderate new regime in Tehran.
	In reality, Obama always wanted to deal with the Iranians.
	The lies mean nothing, of course.
	The media have no desire to report them.
	The Obama administration has no need to answer questions that are rarely asked.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	So today's word of the day is despondency, gang.
	Despondency.
	Yes, it turns out that today I'm in a very depressed mood.
	I'm not in a depressed mood because of the whole Steve Bannon joining the Trump campaign thing.
	I'm in a depressed mood because I don't think that truth matters anymore in American politics.
	Or at least it seems not to matter as much in American politics as it once did.
	And that's a problem to me.
	Now, I'm going to preface this discussion by saying, as always, if you're voting for Donald Trump, do stop Hillary Clinton.
	I read you.
	I sympathize with you.
	I may do the same thing myself when I get into the voting booth.
	What I've said all along is I will not lie for Donald Trump.
	I will not fib.
	I will not give you information that is not true.
	I will not pretend that the government can do things that it can't do.
	I will not rip on things that I know are obviously true.
	Okay, with that in mind, let's jump right into what was, by any measure, the most viewed clip of the day yesterday from cable news.
	And I know this because I was the second most viewed clip yesterday on cable news.
	But the most viewed clip on cable news, and it's well deserving of it, was Michael Cohen.
	Michael Cohen is the lawyer for Donald Trump and Donald Trump's campaign, apparently.
	And so he's on with Breonna Keillor.
	I was on with her as well yesterday.
	We'll play that clip in a few minutes.
	But she's on with Michael Cohen.
	And I want you to watch Michael Cohen's reaction to basic facts.
	Okay, Breonna Keillor, I'm sure, is on the left.
	I don't know much about her.
	She works for CNN.
	My guess is she's on the left.
	Okay, that doesn't change the basic fact.
	The polls right now are not good for Trump.
	By the way, there's a new poll out today.
	That's not horrendous for Trump.
	It's a new poll from Pew, and I think it has Trump down by four points, 41 to 37.
	So still trailing, but at least within spitting distance.
	At least within spitting distance.
	Again, Trump cannot break with a pickaxe 43% in any poll.
	Lately, he can't even break 40% in any poll.
	But this is a better poll because Hillary continues to be the world's worst candidate, except for Donald Trump.
	Okay, all of that said, Breonna Keillor is questioning Michael Cohen, and for very good reason, this became the clip of the day.
	You say it's not a shake-up, but you guys are down.
	And it makes sense that there would... Says who?
	Polls.
	Most of them.
	All of them?
	Says who?
	Polls.
	I just told you.
	I answered your question.
	Okay.
	Which polls?
	All of them.
	Okay.
	And your question is?
	Okay, so my question is...
	And there's nowhere to go from there.
	I mean, and see, she goes on to answer the question, but yes, yes, it turns out that Donald Trump is down in all of the polls.
	Okay, I'm looking right now at the RealClearPolitics poll average.
	The last poll that Donald Trump led in, the last poll, it is now August 18th, is today's date correct?
	It is now August 18th.
	The last poll that Donald Trump led in was taken ending July 24th.
	Okay, he has not led a poll in a month.
	I'm looking at the RealClearPolitics poll average right now.
	I'm looking at the entire list of polls.
	Now, I think that the race will probably tighten because this is what races tend to do.
	They tighten and they widen and they tighten and they widen.
	But I think that right now the polls are the polls.
	And you can't argue that polls don't exist just because you don't want them to exist.
	Unfortunately, you're about to see Eric Bolling do exactly that.
	I don't know whether he huffed glue before this particular segment, but here's Eric Bolling on Fox News pretending that polls no longer exist.
	They're figments of your imagination.
	These polls, Dana.
	Honestly, we have to stop with these polls.
	They're insane with the polls.
	You look at these, just look what's going on.
	You look at a Trump rally and there's 12, 15,000, 10,000 people.
	And then you look at Hillary Clinton and you have, I don't know, 1,500, 2,000.
	And then you look at Hillary Clinton and you have, I don't know, 1,500, 2,000, but that speaks volumes to me versus a poll 82 days out.
	It's a real disservice to his supporters to lie to them that those polls don't matter.
	You cannot take 12,000 people at a rally that are your definite supporters.
	They are going to show up at the campaign and then say the polls are wrong.
	But one person sitting at home still cancels out somebody at a rally.
	It's just not fair.
	It's not fair to them.
	Here's why polls really shouldn't matter or shouldn't ever matter.
	You pick up the phone and you say, who are you going to vote for?
	That person on the other end of the phone says, well, I'm going to vote for Hillary Clinton.
	They're not out there voting.
	If people are getting out in the street and going to a rally, those are people who get up off the couch and go hear something and go say something.
	That's why I think the size of crowds is more indicative of following or even polling than actual people.
	Okay, what he is saying is, it's a lie.
	It's actually an insane lie, what he's saying.
	I remember back in 2012, right before the election, there was a very, very big rally for Mitt Romney in Pennsylvania, very well covered, huge stadium full of people, 30,000 people, and people saying the whole time, look at that, look at the size of that, shows the enthusiasm Romney's gonna win.
	I remember back in 2012, because I did some of this, We all looked at the polls and we said, we think these polls are skewed, right?
	This is where the whole mockery of un-skewing polls comes from.
	In 2012, we looked at the polls and we said, and it was at least a plausible theory that turned out not to be true.
	The plausible theory was they're looking at a model, they're looking at a model that is based on a turnout model from 2008.
	Why don't they look at a turnout model that includes 2010?
	Why don't they look at a turnout model that includes the higher Republican turnout in the midterm election?
	And it turns out the polls were not skewed.
	The polls were all exactly correct.
	And if you followed the polls, then you got it right.
	Now, even after that lesson, there are people who are Trump fans, Trump supporters, who are simply going to lie to people.
	So I was on the air this morning with a friend of mine, Jen Horn, and we were talking about the polls, and she was saying, a lot of Americans, a lot of the base, they think that polls are establishment tools.
	And I was talking to somebody else this morning who is a fan of Trump, and she was saying the same thing.
	Yeah, polls, you know, can we trust the polls?
	Are the polls just biased in favor of Hillary?
	And I said to her, let me explain something.
	The media are biased in favor of Hillary.
	This is eminently true.
	It is clearly true.
	The media hate Donald Trump.
	The media want Hillary to win.
	It wouldn't matter who the Republican is.
	The media would want Hillary to win.
	That's true.
	I'm not arguing with that because that's silly to argue with.
	It's obviously true that the media despise Trump and want Hillary to win.
	Polls don't work that way.
	You have many, many, many polling companies.
	Their entire credibility is based on their capacity to correctly measure public opinion.
	There is a methodology to making a poll.
	I don't know how to make a poll because I'm not an expert in polling.
	This is why you have poll experts.
	What poll experts do is they determine what is the breakdown racially, in terms of viewpoint, in terms of location, that best represents the electorate.
	They have to actually reconstruct a mini, a kind of microcosm of the electorate, and that's how they do these polls.
	The polls aren't done randomly in the sense that they just call people up on the phone randomly and then that's the poll.
	It's not the end of the polling data.
	There's a whole art to it.
	There's a whole science, more importantly, there's a whole science to it.
	And yet I'm hearing from people that polls are an establishment tool.
	Truth matters.
	I'm not going to lie to you that polls only matter when Donald Trump is winning in the polls.
	That's crap.
	It's nonsense.
	It's stupid.
	And you're breeding a nation of morons when you tell people that facts don't matter.
	When you tell people science doesn't matter.
	Now, the left has done this for years.
	This is what drives me absolutely up a wall.
	We're supposed to be better than they are.
	We're not supposed to have to lie to our own people.
	We're not lying to the rest of America.
	Lie to our own people about what polls say.
	Eric Bolling knows what the polls say, and he knows that Trump is down in the polls.
	Michael Cohen knows what the polls say.
	That's why he's not even able to come back when Breonna Keller says, all of the polls say he's losing.
	There's nothing he can say about that, right?
	Because there's nothing to say.
	The polls matter.
	But it's like somebody with a fever taking the thermometer, taking their temperature, and then going, screw this thermometer.
	This thing's biased.
	This is an establishment thermometer.
	This thermometer isn't science.
	Basically, there's a whole segment of Trump supporters, the most ardent Trump supporters, who have now decided to treat polls the way the insane clown posse treats magnets.
	Frickin' magnets, how do they work and don't tell me none of that science stuff?
	Okay, that's what we now have in part of the Trump train.
	What are polls?
	How do they work?
	And don't give me none of that science stuff.
	It's magic.
	It isn't magic, folks.
	There's an actual science to it.
	And you're not doing anybody any service when you do this.
	You're lying to them.
	You're telling them that they can just ignore the polls.
	You're telling Donald Trump he can ignore the polls.
	He can be as dumb as he wants to be.
	He can be as bad at campaigning as he wants to be.
	All that matters is the size of the crowd.
	Let me explain something to you.
	There are about 7,000 people who show up to every WNBA game.
	Does that mean that the polls are wrong when it comes to the unpopularity of the WNBA?
	After all, 7,000 people is not a few people, it's a lot of people showing up to every single crappy WNBA game.
	The size of the crowd is not indicative of the level of support publicly.
	I mean, Gutfeld makes that point there, and he's exactly right.
	The person who's sitting home counts just as much at the ballot box as the person who goes to the Trump rally.
	You don't get extra credit for going to a Trump rally.
	This is just, it's just dumb stuff.
	It's just dumb.
	And it has an impact.
	And the impact is that people believe lies, and they believe that they can no longer trust any information that comes forth.
	They can't trust the polls anymore.
	They can't trust the media.
	I agree that you have to take everything the media say with a grain of salt and double-check it, but pretending that everything that the media say is an outright 100% lie isn't true either.
	It's just the beginning of the conversation to ask, what are the biases of the reporter?
	It doesn't mean that what they're reporting never occurred.
	You actually have to check it out before you determine that.
	Evidence, folks.
	I require it on all sides.
	Evidence, evidence, evidence, evidence.
	And I'll give you another example.
	Today, there's a Pew poll out.
	It shows 61% of Republicans now say that they don't like free trade.
	That number was a majority that liked free trade before Donald Trump came along and started lying to people that free trade was stealing your jobs and sending them south of the border to that rich nation known as Mexico.
	Before Donald Trump started fibbing and giving the papucanin lie that Vietnam was schlonging us economically and that China was stealing all of our jobs.
	Before that, people understood, hey, the reason I have a nice cell phone here is because of outsourcing, because there is comparative advantage, because of free trade.
	The reason a lot of Americans have jobs is because of free trade.
	Millions and millions and millions of Americans have jobs thanks to free trade.
	But Donald Trump has told this lie, and people believe the lie, and so now there's a bunch of people who are expecting, and here's the thing, it sets up expectations that cannot be fulfilled.
	The expectation now is that Donald Trump is gonna bring your job back to Ohio by shutting down free trade.
	Ain't gonna happen, folks.
	Not happening.
	That job is not coming back to Ohio because Donald Trump shut down free trade.
	And if it does come back to Ohio because Donald Trump shut down free trade, you just put three other people out of work.
	Here's another lie that they've been telling.
	Okay, the Republican establishment told us the lie in 2010 that if we elect them, they would stop Obamacare.
	That's what they said.
	That was their pledge.
	If you elect us, we will stop Obamacare debt.
	They didn't do it.
	They didn't do it.
	Right?
	When Ted Cruz tried to do it with the government shut down, everybody lost their minds.
	Hey, then, in 2014, they said, if you elect us, we'll stop Obama's executive amnesty.
	They get into power, they fund Obama's executive amnesty.
	And naturally, this makes people angry.
	When you lie to people, and then you disappoint them, they get mad.
	They get mad.
	And so that's where Donald Trump comes from.
	But Donald Trump isn't honest.
	Donald Trump is lying, too.
	And so there will be disappointment.
	But the disappointment won't be blamed on Trump.
	The disappointment won't be blamed on Trump's incompetence and lies.
	The disappointment will be blamed on the people who told the truth.
	And this is the part that's super frustrating to me.
	In a binary race, everyone understands on the right side of the aisle that Hillary Clinton is a terrible, terrible person who should never be President of the United States.
	It's why despite all of the problems that I have with Donald Trump, and my God, I've spent the last few months describing them.
	Despite all the problems I have with Donald Trump, I wake up every single morning considering whether I can vote for this man.
	Every single morning, the first thought that goes through my head at this point is me personally, can I vote for Donald Trump?
	But the one thing that I've never had to reconsider is do I lie for Donald Trump?
	Because I'm not going to lie to anybody because I'll tell you what the impact of the lie is going to be.
	The next lie is going to be when Donald Trump, he's going to say the polls are wrong.
	The polls are a lie.
	The polls aren't a lie.
	And then if he loses, and he may not, but if he loses, and he loses while the polls are saying he's going to lose, he's going to say, well, the polls were wrong.
	You know, people are going to say, well, the polls said you were going to lose.
	You lost, right?
	I mean, that's how it works.
	Trump is going to say no.
	The polls were lying to you.
	They were just an establishment cuck tool.
	Right?
	And therefore, what really happened?
	Ah, we were stabbed in the back.
	That's what happened.
	We were stabbed in the back by our own people.
	That's what happened here.
	That's why we lost.
	Now you want to make the argument that the never-Trump people are the ones who are responsible for Trump losing.
	You're going to have to do better than that because there are five of us left, okay?
	If Trump loses by one vote in California, and I'm the guy who didn't vote, you're free to blame me.
	Okay, that's how this works.
	If I vote for Donald Trump right now, according to the polls, he loses by 9,999,999 votes instead of 10 million.
	Okay, but that doesn't make a difference.
	The only thing I care about, because my vote doesn't mean anything, I'm in California, the only thing I care about is no one should be lying to you, including lies you yourself want to hear.
	The pretty little lies that tell you that everything will be all better if we just pretend that polls don't exist.
	The pretty lies that say that free trade is destroying your life.
	The pretty little lies that say that free trade, if we abolish it, it won't hurt the economy.
	The lies that, if we elect a Republican Congress, they were going to stop Obama and Obamacare and executive amnesty.
	Lies don't pay off.
	They don't pay off.
	And anyone who lies to you should be blamed for lying to you.
	But I guess lies don't matter anymore because in the end, all that really matters is that we feel good about ourselves while we do what it is we're going to do.
	This is what's ticking me off today.
	This is why I'm depressed today because I think the truth no longer has a value.
	I'm sick of hearing lies.
	I'm just sick of hearing it.
	I'm sick of hearing lies about me.
	I'm sick of hearing lies about Trump from the media.
	I'm sick of hearing lies from Trump about polling data.
	I'm sick of hearing lies from Trump about policy.
	I'm sick of hearing Hillary open her mouth because every time she opens her mouth she lies.
	We now live in a world that is completely filled with lies and we just pick the lies that are most convenient for us to hear because then we feel better about our own lives.
	But guess what?
	Those lies aren't going to make you feel good in the end.
	Because it'll be proven that they were wrong and that they were false.
	And people who told the truth, you can either blame them or you can blame the people who told you lies.
	I'm increasingly fearing that in this country, the people who told the truth will be blamed because they're ruining the utopian visions of the people who lie to you and tell you things that are impossible are about to occur.
	Well, sorry for that depressing note, but as we're going to continue this, obviously, the rest of the show at DailyWire.com, a lot more to get to, including updates on Steve Bannon joining the Trump campaign, as well as what Trump's debate strategy can be.
	Can he salvage this?
	I mean, he's starting to pull up in the polls.
	He can if he has the right debate strategy.
	We'll talk about what his debate strategy ought to be.
	Plus, the vaunted Ben Shapiro show mailbag coming up.
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	Okay, so let's talk about what kind of reckoning is going to happen now that Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway have joined the campaigns.
	So yesterday, I talked about who these people are and what these people mean, and I would be remiss if I didn't play the second most played cable clip on the news yesterday because I was a part of it, and that was this amusing little tete-a-tete with Breonna Keller on CNN.
	I mean, as you probably know, I think Donald Trump's a turd tornado, but I also understand that he has no capacity whatsoever to control himself and be the sort of staid politician that so many people want him to be.
	I mean, Reince Priebus isn't going to convince him to become Mitt Romney, and Trump doesn't want to become Mitt Romney.
	I'm not sure he should want to become Mitt Romney.
	So telling him to double down is not necessarily a terrible strategy.
	If he's going to go down, he's going to go down being Trump, and I think that's probably what Steve Bannon is telling him to do.
	A what tornado?
	A turd tornado.
	What is that?
	Well, it's like a sharknado, except with poop.
	Okay.
	All right.
	And she said she wasn't expecting that.
	I'm not sure what she was expecting.
	I mean, I thought the turd tornado was rather evocative.
	And, you know, when she asked me to describe it, that was the best I could do on the spur of the moment.
	It was sort of amusing to me that she was confused by this simply because you can't say bleep storm on the air.
	I mean, I can on the podcast if I wanted people to get angry at me for cursing, but you can't say bleep storm on national TV without there being an FCC fine attached.
	So I came up with the next best alternative.
	So that's what was happening there.
	Meanwhile, Steve Bannon has joined the campaign.
	Steve, as I've said, is a highly intelligent Machiavellian character who's mainly interested in his own power and self-aggrandizement.
	I don't think that he has principle.
	I think he has interests.
	And so the Trump campaign continues to maintain—I don't know where they hired their surrogates.
	I don't know if they went down to the local homeless shelter and hired surrogates or what.
	But Katrina Pearson was on national TV, on CNN, and she was talking about the move to bring in Bannon.
	Who basically is just a Trump mirror.
	He makes Trump feel good.
	Charlie Sykes had a great tweet yesterday.
	He basically said that Bannon may be a sign that the Trump campaign is on hospice care, and he's bringing in friends and family for his dying days.
	But, you know, they say it's not a campaign shake-up.
	I don't know why they care.
	I don't know why they don't just say that it is a campaign shake-up.
	What they really should have done.
	Okay, so just to point out politically what they should have done.
	And again, I'm removing my animus for Steve Bannon from this particular conversation, even though I think he is legitimately one of the worst people in America.
	But putting that aside, what they should have done to roll this sucker out is they should have rolled it out on Sunday, right?
	Apparently, this had been in the works on Sunday.
	They should have said on Sunday, we're making a campaign shift.
	Bannon's in.
	Kellyanne Conway's in.
	Manafort's been demoted a little.
	And then have Trump come out on Monday, give his ISIS speech, which was really good.
	Come out Tuesday, give his race speech, which was actually great.
	And then they can say, look, the relaunch is going fantastic, right?
	It's new Coke, everything is great.
	We relaunched it, everything's awesome, it's going really well.
	Instead, what they did, because they're incompetent, is they waited until the day after Trump gives the best speech of his campaign, and maybe the best speech a Republican has given in several years, And then they dump this news out there so the media can latch onto that, which is just a genius move.
	So Katrina Pearson is now stuck in the unenviable position of having to explain that moving Paul Manafort down the ladder and moving Steve Bannon, who has not managed a campaign for dog catchers.
	Steve Bannon has not been anywhere near a political campaign ever.
	He has never managed a campaign.
	And he is now the CEO, which is a made-up position.
	There's no such thing as a campaign CEO.
	He's now the CEO of the campaign.
	She's in the unenviable position of having to explain that this is all planned.
	It's all 4D chess.
	Here she is.
	But that brings me to my next point.
	We have not spent nearly as much time talking about Hillary Clinton's campaign infrastructure, particularly Uma Abedin and her dual role at the State Department and the Clinton Foundation.
	Okay, I know you want to deflect, and I appreciate that because that's your job.
	John Podesta and his brother Tony and their direct ties to the Russian government.
	We spend so much time talking about Russia.
	There is no connection with Mr. Trump, but there is definitely a connection with Hillary Clinton.
	Yeah, let's talk about John Podesta.
	Let's talk about his brother, Tony.
	Let's talk about the banks that they're involved with.
	Let's talk about the boards that they sit on.
	We're not talking about that here on CNN because we just want to focus on Mr. Trump.
	That's because Donald Trump just shook up his campaign for the second time in the two-month period.
	No, he didn't.
	He added.
	Donald Trump adds people to his campaign.
	Oh, come on, Katrina.
	No one's out.
	When you shake up your campaign, that usually means someone is out, Carol.
	This was announced as an expansion.
	I can point to several messages we have sent out on the campaign website under press releases.
	We've had multiple expansions of this campaign, but for some reason, CNN is probably the only one reporting that there's some shakeup that's happened.
	I dare to suggest this.
	I dare to suggest this, that no one was ousted simply because Mr. Trump didn't want this to appear to be a shakeup.
	Carol, if I could jump in here.
	Anybody who knows anything about presidential politics and how campaigns are run, Okay, so this is true.
	It's a shake-up.
	The question is why they care.
	THE PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A PEOPLE WHO ARE GOING TO TAKE A Like, does anyone get the impression that there's great stability at Trump headquarters these days?
	Like, I'm missing that.
	Like, why not just say, yeah, we shook it up, and you know what?
	Things have been going better.
	Did you see our speeches on Monday and Tuesday?
	Why don't we talk about those things?
	If they think Bannon is all that he's cracked up to be, and I don't, I think that Steve Bannon is going to cause Donald Trump to double down on everything that Trump is.
	I think he's going to enable all of his worst instincts.
	I think Steve Bannon, personally, is very much like Donald Trump.
	And so, basically, Donald Trump should have just saved himself some money and bought a mirror, and then he could just talk to himself in the mirror, and that would basically be the same thing that Steve Bannon is going to do for him.
	You know, instead of that, they get sucked into this whole stupid conversation about whether it's a shake-up or not, because this is just wild incompetence.
	It just is.
	It's really, really incompetent.
	By the way, I will point out, I'm not the only person in America who is saying that Steve Bannon is a bad guy.
	Dana Lash, who worked at Breitbart News, she was there about the same time that I was.
	She left a little bit after I got there.
	Dana was pretty strident on Donald Trump's new campaign CEO yesterday.
	Here's what Dana had to say.
	If we knew that NBC and Jeff Zucker and everybody else, CNN and over at MSNBC and NBC, if we knew that their CEO, that their president, if we knew that they were still retaining an influential position in that company and determining programming while at the same time advising Hillary Clinton, we would be up in arms and you know damn well you would be.
	This is a different story for me, because I went through a very personal, hellacious period in my life, brought on by someone's idiocy.
	So this has taken a bit of a turn, and I'm not quite sure how to approach it, to be honest with you.
	But all I know is that one of the worst people on God's green earth was just instituted as the chairman and CEO of the Trump campaign.
	And that's exactly right.
	That's exactly right.
	So, you know, putting aside the fact that Bannon's a bad guy, and he is.
	He's a bad guy.
	He's a vicious guy.
	He's somebody who I legitimately fear that if he were the chief of staff in a Trump White House, I would have to start preparing my IRS audit annually.
	He's that sort of fellow.
	He brings along some other unpleasantness to this.
	There are multiple reports today, things in the Washington Post, in the New York Times, that Bannon feels victorious that the nationalist populist movement has now been embraced fully by Trump, and now they're going to run a full-on nationalist populist campaign.
	If that's the case, then presumably Trump, you know, you can attribute his loss to the fact that he's running a campaign that is nationalist populist and not actually conservative, at least in part.
	But I think it's important to point out that under Steve Bannon's auspices, Breitbart News moved from being what was a mainstream but edgy conservative website, a fighting website, and moved from being that to being a place that panders to the alt-right.
	Okay, and the alt-right, I mean, I've talked about this ad nauseum on this program before, the alt-right is a group of people to define them.
	They're a group of people who believe in nationalism and populism.
	Nationalism not moored to the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States.
	They don't believe that those two documents are very important.
	They just think America is great because America is great.
	When Trump says, make America great again, they think to themselves, America was great when America was great, but not because of the values that made America great.
	This is why Trump doesn't think that there are 12 articles in the Constitution.
	Alt-right people believe that what makes America great is the people in it.
	If you were born here, you're better than the people who were born elsewhere.
	The problem with this is there's a certain racial component to this for the alt-right that is unmistakable in the way that they tweet, in the way that they email, in the way that they talk.
	This sort of idea that it's not just European culture, it's not just European culture that matters, it's European ethnocentrism that matters.
	It's the ethnicity of the people from Europe.
	It's the ethnicity of the founding fathers that mattered.
	It's the ethnicity of the immigrants that mattered.
	I've never believed that for a heartbeat.
	I believe that it's the creed of the founding fathers that matters.
	We're a country that's united by creed, not by race.
	The alt-right is united by a resistance to political correctness, but their resistance to political correctness is a tribalism of their own.
	They say, well, political correctness says you can't say bad things about black people and gay people and Jews and various other subgroups and stifling.
	You can't say true things about anybody.
	And there's some truth to that, obviously.
	I hate political correctness.
	I think that it stifles actual open debate.
	What the alt-right says is, well, we should have a tribalism all our own.
	We should have a white tribalism all our own, a European tribalism all our own.
	If those people get to be tribal, why can't we be tribal?
	Instead of just saying, tribalism is bad all the way across the board.
	The nationalism of the alt-right has nothing to do with constitutional conservatism or preserving limited government values.
	It has to do with a vague concept of Western civilization that can only be prevented by limiting immigration, not just illegal immigration, legal immigration, and even legal immigration by people who may In fact, share your values.
	And that's troublesome.
	Then there's the populism aspect to the alt-right, which suggests that the best way to please the people in America is to act as though everything is a zero-sum game.
	So this is why they're anti-free trade.
	The idea is that free trade is not a zero-sum game.
	Everybody gets richer.
	When I go to the grocery store, I give them money for a loaf of bread.
	We both got richer.
	I got richer by a loaf of bread that I needed.
	They got richer by money that they needed.
	The alt-right says, if you are for you, then you lost that transaction.
	Go make your own bread.
	And you have the money and you can make your own bread.
	Even if it's more expensive for you to make your own bread, then it would be to go to the grocery store and buy the loaf of bread.
	Populism is basically, that's their sort of nationalism.
	Populism is the idea that the will of the people should always govern.
	And the will of the people can only be expressed in sort of majoritarianism or through a cult figure like Donald Trump.
	This stuff is very troubling because the alt-right has been infused with anti-Semitism, has been infused with racism, has been infused, and is in fact, I don't think, fully separable from this sort of white supremacist undertone.
	That white people are better, that Europeans are better, not because of their values, but just because of who they are.
	So Bannon is not an alt-right guy, as far as I know.
	I don't think Bannon has convictions, really, of any sort.
	I don't think he has many convictions.
	I think that he considers himself a nationalist populist, but I don't think that he's full-scale white supremacist alt-right.
	However, under his tenure, under his auspices, Breitbart News turned from an edgy anti-media website into a place that openly tolerates the alt-right.
	I mean, I wrote this for the Washington Post today.
	That Trump obviously has been flirting with the alt-right for months, everything from going soft on the KKK to refusing to disown his alt-right supporters who have made anti-Semitic threats against journalists.
	But Breitbart has embraced that.
	Milo Yiannopoulos is the leader of this alt-white friendly gang, and he declares himself an alt-right ally.
	He wrote an entire piece in which he discussed the glories of the alt-right, and there's a line from that piece in which he said, quote, That's not much of a separation.
	They separate the alt-right from old-school racist skinheads to whom they are often idiotically compared, but one thing stands out above all else, intelligence.
	That's not much of a separation.
	I mean, so if it comes down to they're smarter and how they couch their nastiness, then that's not much of a separation at all.
	I mean, Yiannopoulos has gone on interviews and he said, it's true, Jews run the banks.
	It's true, Jews run the media, as though that's relevant.
	And he's dismissed anti-Semitic memes that we've talked about on the program and shown as just mischievous and dissident and trolly, and because he's British, everybody thinks this is amusing.
	This is the cast of characters that Bannon sort of brings with him into the campaign and that is co-opting the campaign apparatus because the RNC isn't going to force Trump to disown Bannon or disown the alt-right.
	They haven't been able to do that so far.
	This is the thing that's troubling about the Trump campaign.
	It's what makes Trump more toxic than other Republican candidates have been.
	It's why Trump is getting historically beaten in the polls among young people, among minorities, among women.
	It's why This is very toxic for the next generation.
	It's a serious issue.
	It's a serious problem.
	It doesn't mean that Bannon isn't going to be able to rein Trump in a little bit.
	Maybe he will.
	Maybe he'll be able, as Trump's mirror, as his confidant, as somebody who can rub Trump's shoulders late at night and tell him he's doing a wonderful job.
	Maybe all Trump needs is just a boost of self-confidence.
	Or maybe this is just destined to fail and Bannon doesn't really care because all Bannon cares about is Bannon.
	And so if Trump fails, then great.
	He just gets to launch a new media enterprise with Trump at the center of it.
	He already has a website with 200 million page views a month that was built, a lot of that traffic was built by riding the Trump train.
	Okay, so let's ask a different question.
	What can Trump do to recover?
	What can Trump do to recover now?
	Because I don't think that Bannon is going to fix things.
	He started to recover, I thought, earlier this week.
	Again, I think he gave a very good speech on ISIS.
	I thought he gave a very solid speech—not solid, a great speech—on race and policing on Tuesday.
	I thought he was beginning to get on track, then he hired...
	A nasty, nasty human being.
	But the beginning of his campaign revival, I thought, began Monday, Tuesday.
	And the polls are beginning to narrow a little bit, right?
	Remember those polls that Trump people say don't matter?
	Those polls are beginning to narrow a little bit.
	So I'm going to read you a set of numbers, okay?
	Here's a set of numbers.
	These are all the polls since the beginning of August.
	Okay, ready?
	Clinton plus 8, Clinton plus 6, Clinton plus 13, Clinton plus 6, Clinton plus 5, plus 5, plus 3, plus 4, plus 6, plus 6, plus 4, plus 2.
	So you can see there's a gradual narrowing.
	It's slow and it's gradual, but it is a gradual narrowing because the polls before that had him down 6, 8, 14, 9.
	So there's a gradual narrowing that's happening leading into the debates.
	Now if the debates happen, I don't know that Hillary is going to do a debate because she may chicken out or she may decide that it's not worth risking anything to do this.
	If there are debates, then Trump is going to need an actual strategy.
	So Kellyanne Conway, who is the actual decent half of the team that just came into the Trump campaign, Kellyanne Conway, she was on the TVs, and she said, she said, yeah, the polls matter.
	The polls are not good for us, but that's why the debates are going to matter.
	This is an actual defensible position.
	I think my role will be TV, but also flying on the plane with Mr. Trump more, and certainly working with our many different messaging partners and our coalitions.
	She's exactly right, of course.
	What she says is that we're looking forward to the debate and we're going to be able to really change it up.
	She says there we'll never have Clinton's money, but she says in another place that we're going to look forward to the debates and we're going to do better in the debates.
	The bad polling helps us because it spurs us to do better.
	Correct answer by Kellyanne Conway there.
	If you understand that, then Trump needs to have a good debate.
	So there's been a little bit of a hubbub over whether he's hired Roger Ailes to be his debate coach.
	Hiring Roger Ailes to be his debate coach is not a terrible idea.
	I mean, put aside the fact that Ailes is now under suspicion for having sexually harassed the entire USC female cheerleading squad.
	If you look at Ailes and his history of debate tactics, he advised Reagan.
	So Ailes is very good at that stuff.
	So the better of the trainers you have, the better you're going to do in the debates.
	Trump is going to have to prep.
	The question is whether he will.
	So here is Donald Trump talking about how he likes to operate in the debates.
	He says he likes being off the cuff.
	One more month until the debates.
	What are your thoughts?
	Because you won't be using a teleprompter there.
	This will be off the cusp.
	Well, I look very much forward to it.
	I like being off the cusp.
	You know, I've been in 11 debates.
	I never debated before.
	My whole life is a debate, but I've never debated before.
	And I really enjoyed the debates.
	I guess I did well in the debates based on all of those polls that they did after the debates.
	But I look forward to it.
	I think that, you know, Hillary really has made tremendous mistakes.
	She's got terribly bad judgment.
	If you think about Bernie Sanders, what he used to say all the time is, She suffers from bad judgment, and she does.
	And I look forward to the debates.
	I think it'll be a very interesting evening.
	Okay, so what is he going to do in the debates?
	Now, everybody has been hoping and praying and waiting for the debates because they figured Trump has no rules.
	He's going to hit her every place.
	He's going to just smack her into the ground.
	And Hillary's preparing for that, apparently.
	Apparently, she's preparing for him to go after her on Lewinsky, and she's preparing for him to go after her on Vince Foster, which would be, like, there's no reason to go after her on Vince Foster.
	That's silly.
	He should go after Juanita Broderick.
	That'd be a good place to start.
	Juanita Broderick, the email scandal, Chinagate.
	I mean, the list of Hillary corruption and evil goes on forever.
	I mean, she's really a nefarious, terrible human being.
	He could hit her everywhere.
	Chris Matthews on MSNBC, who knows Trump and knows Hillary, because they all walk in the same circles.
	Chris Matthews on MSNBC, man, it comes out of the show!
	He said Donald Trump isn't even going to attack Hillary over Lewinsky.
	You know, Susan, there was a sense not too many years ago when you wouldn't talk about the dress the way he just did.
	You know, because we're really talking about DNA evidence in the whole routine.
	Hey, it's hard to believe there's a corner of the unpleasant he's not willing to go into.
	How would you play it if you were a debate challenger?
	If you had to play the sparring partner, how would you do it?
	Would you come in like that?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	What would you say?
	What about Monica?
	You knew about it, didn't you?
	You didn't know about it.
	You didn't know about it.
	I don't think she didn't know about it myself, but I know what she would say.
	Okay, so thank you Chris Matthews for that.
	The question is going to be, how hard does Trump hit?
	How hard does Trump hit?
	We had a couple indicators last night that should be troubling to people who are Trump fans, or at least people who like solid WWE entertainment.
	Okay, and that is, watch Donald Trump.
	He's on Sean Hannity last night and he's talking about the Clinton Foundation.
	The Clinton Foundation is so dirty that the Boston Globe just came out and said that if Hillary is elected, the Clinton Foundation should be actually shut down.
	They should shut down the Clinton Foundation wholesale until after she's president because there's just too much conflict of interest.
	Watch this weird, this is a weird exchange between Donald Trump and Sean Hannity over Hillary Clinton and it's, yeah, it's bizarre.
	You talked about countries that live under Sharia and about people that want to come here from countries.
	If you grow up, for example, in Saudi Arabia, which gave the Clinton Foundation up to $25 million.
	The Clinton Library, $10 million.
	And I can't find any instances where Hillary criticized them.
	Women can't drive.
	Women are told how to dress.
	Women are told if they can go to school or if they can go to work.
	We know that gays and lesbians in Saudi Arabia can get the death penalty.
	You can't build a Jewish temple.
	There's a guy over here with a sign that says Jews for Trump.
	And you can't build a Christian church.
	Would you ever take money from a country that treats gays, lesbians, Jews, and Christians that way?
	Well, you don't want to do that.
	And women?
	If they knew about it, that would be one thing, and I assume they knew about it, big league, but certainly they know about it now, so maybe they can give the money back.
	I've actually called...
	I've actually called... Wait a minute.
	They knew about it because that has been Saudi Arabia's practice for years.
	But you know what?
	Let's give them the benefit of a doubt.
	They certainly knew about it over the last little while.
	You're going to give Hillary the benefit of the doubt?
	I'm not.
	Okay, go ahead.
	You know what?
	You know what?
	They should give the money back.
	And I've been saying this for a long time.
	They should give the money back.
	Should they give the money back?
	Okay, and then he's got Sean Hannity there doing the cheerleading for him.
	Should he give the money back?
	That's not the question.
	The question is, did criminal activity occur?
	It's not about giving the money back to Saudi Arabia.
	It's about you took it in the first place.
	Look how hesitant Trump is to go hard after Hillary.
	If Trump went after Hillary as hard as he goes after the Never Trump crowd, he might be winning right now.
	Is he going to give the benefit of the doubt?
	That wasn't the only thing that he backed down off of.
	Here is Donald Trump, this is clip 18.
	This is Donald Trump talking about the wall with his good friend Sean Hannity.
	How certain does the wall get built?
	How certain does Obamacare get repealed?
	You can never say 100%, but I'm telling you pretty close to 100% the wall gets built.
	We need it.
	You know, the Border Patrol agents... The Border Patrol agents have...
	Endorse me.
	Along with Sheriff Joe and everyone else.
	But I'm running out of time.
	So when you say- It gets built.
	And you will rebuild the military.
	That's a promise.
	We have to rebuild.
	It's all depleted.
	And you will send education back to the states.
	100%.
	And you will make America energy independent.
	Can you do it in four years?
	100%.
	It could be done faster than that.
	We have regulations that are absolutely destroying our energy economy.
	And will you appoint originalist justices like Scalia?
	Yeah, I've already announced who the 11 could be.
	Okay, so we go through the whole litany here, right?
	Notice at the very beginning, I'm not 100% on the wall, but as close to 100% as I can be.
	And then as he realizes that Sean is coaching him through his list of things he's supposed to do, then he gets more and more definitive as the list goes on.
	Okay, folks, I'm gonna tell you something right now.
	Okay, I'm gonna tell you something right now that I cannot, you're just gonna have to trust me on this.
	this.
	I know, I know 100%, this is not a 90% thing, I know 100% for a fact, for a fact that if Donald Trump were to nominate a conservative justice for the Supreme Court and the Democrats were to filibuster that justice, there is no way, no way, that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans would use the nuclear option to ram that justice through.
	You're just going to have to trust me on that.
	This is not an opinion.
	Just leave it at that.
	That is a fact.
	All right.
	Now, maybe you don't trust me and you trust Trump.
	Fine.
	Your issue.
	Okay, so there it is.
	So Donald Trump, in the debate, will he hit Hillary with everything?
	I like to think maybe he will.
	I like to think maybe he will.
	But it'll have to be a concerted attack.
	And you hope that he sort of...
	There's this uncomfortable shyness when he talks about attacking her full scale on some Maybe it's because when he's ripping, when Sean Hannity asks him about taking money from Saudi Arabia, and he sits there and he goes, I would never take money from Saudi Arabia.
	There is a Trump Tower in Dubai.
	He's a Trump Tower in the United Arab Emirates, which has a bunch of anti-gay, anti-women laws on the books.
	So he wasn't averse to that, apparently.
	But in any case, it doesn't really matter.
	If he's going to recover in this election cycle, he needs to do well in the debates.
	If he's going to do well in the debates, he needs to take out the kitchen sink and he needs to hit her with it.
	And then he needs to take out the pipes underneath the kitchen sinks and hit her with those.
	Maybe Bannon will allow him to do that.
	Maybe he'll get focused.
	We'll find out.
	We'll find out.
	And we'll find out probably over the weekend because, you know, there's always news that breaks.
	Okay, time for things I like and then things I hate in the mailbag.
	Okay, things I like.
	We're doing true crime stories.
	This one is obviously a very fictionalized version of a true crime story, but it's a fun movie.
	The score to this movie is one of the worst scores of all time.
	It's a truly awful score, but I should do a list at some point of good movies, bad scores.
	Because there are a bunch of really great movies that have truly terrible scores.
	The Untouchables with Robert De Niro and Kevin Costner and Sean Connery of course.
	It's a really good movie.
	It's a fun movie.
	Not fun in the sense that you can watch with your kids but fun in the sense that it moves quickly.
	Except for a very long, drawn-out scene that's typical Brian De Palma slow motion near the end of the film.
	There's no reason why.
	You could just do it in normal time.
	I don't have to see.
	Okay, this doesn't give anything away.
	A stroller hits every stair on the way from Earth to hell.
	It goes through all seven circles of hell, this stroller, over the course of this 97-minute scene.
	But aside from that, the movie moves really fast and is really good.
	Here's the trailer.
	I grew up in a tough neighborhood.
	Sometimes reputation follows you.
	Robert De Niro is Al Capone.
	There is violence in Chicago, of course, but not by me and not by anybody I employ and I'll tell you why.
	Because it's not good business.
	Kevin Costner is Elliot Ness.
	I have sworn to put this man away with any and all legal means at my disposal and I will do so.
	Sean Connery is Jimmy Malone.
	You wanna get Capone?
	Here's how you get him.
	He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.
	He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.
	That's the Chicago way.
	You just joined the Treasury Department, son.
	Everybody knows you.
	David Mamet, I think, wrote the script to this, and it's a really great script.
	It's got a lot of iconic lines, and it's fun.
	And it is a true story, for the most part.
	I mean, there are some liberties that they take, but the sort of Elliot Ness story versus Al Capone story, that's essentially true.
	Okay, time for some things that I hate.
	So, you know, things I hate.
	Let's do it.
	Alright, so, now that we've played the brand new Things I Hate graphic that I'm still getting used to, clearly, Things I Hate, let's, let's, Jill Stein is stupid, so I'm not going to pay attention to what Jill Stein said.
	Let's skip that one.
	Let's go to South Side With You.
	So, I've begun seeing billboards for this horrific piece of crap.
	I haven't even seen this movie yet.
	This looks terrible.
	Do you remember they made that movie about the beautiful romance between Ronald and Nancy Reagan?
	Neither do I, but there's a whole book of letters that Ronald Reagan wrote a love letter to Nancy Reagan literally every day that he was healthy enough to do so, which is an amazing thing.
	As a guy who writes the occasional love letter to his wife, the idea of doing it every day is a little bit over the top for me.
	That was the kind of relationship Ronald and Nancy had.
	Was there any movie about that?
	No.
	Obviously, there was not going to be any romantic movie made about Bill and Hillary.
	I mean, that would be just... I mean, unless it's a comedy.
	Unless it's like a sex comedy.
	That would actually be really funny.
	There wasn't one about George and Laura, even though George basically said that Laura saved his life, essentially.
	But there's a new movie called South Side With You, and I've seen the billboards now all around town, because Barack Obama is an inspiring God among men.
	And he and Michelle have the most beautiful relationship that ever was.
	Never mind the rumors they were going to divorce early in the 2000s.
	No, they have the most beautiful relationship that has ever been committed to humanity.
	Now they're making a film about Barack and Michelle Obama's romance.
	- Nah, you can play it.
	- Cargo, what are you doing to keep cool? - Michelle.
	- Thought it wasn't a date.
	It isn't.
	Going to an awful lot of trouble for just another smooth-talking brother.
	He's the summer associate I told y'all about.
	The one from Harvard Law.
	He invited me to a community event.
	So what's this boy's name?
	Barack Obama.
	Barack, I wanna... I...
	Hello.
	You're late.
	I was hoping you wouldn't notice.
	I expected it.
	You were late for your first day of work.
	You noticed that, too.
	I'm your advisor.
	I'm supposed to notice.
	I love.
	Wow.
	Well, Michelle, all set.
	Hmm?
	Shouldn't we be getting to the meeting?
	We have some time.
	I thought we'd swing by the art center, see some paintings, maybe grab a bite to eat.
	This is not a date.
	How's it gonna look if I start dating the first cute black guy who walks through the firm's doors?
	It would be tacky.
	You think I'm cute?
	I didn't say that.
	From executive producer John Legend.
	Okay, fine.
	So I would rather stick my face in a cheese grater than watch this entire film.
	But this is what they do.
	They have to create a hagiography of every Democrat.
	Every Democrat.
	And don't worry, it'll be racially...
	All right.
	aware and it'll all be about how black people have it tough in America and all the rest of this.
	Even though they are both Harvard Law graduates and they were both working at one of the top law firms in Chicago.
	So, again, this is just the way that they have to operate in Hollywood, the Hollywood story of Barack and Michelle Obama.
	Yuck, yuck.
	All right, time for the mailbag.
	So, as always, folks, if you're listening, you should subscribe so that you can be part of the mailbag.
	Because if you don't subscribe, you can't be part of the mailbag and tough nuts for you.
	So, alright.
	Jacob writes, Hi Ben, I'm an atheist listener of yours and agree with you on almost everything.
	I was wondering your opinion on something.
	Why do you think a majority of atheists believe in leftist, Marxist, socialist political ideologies?
	Do you believe this is due to a lack of morals instilled by religion?
	Thanks for answering.
	Keep up the great content.
	Okay, so.
	I think the reason that a majority of atheists believe in leftism is because human beings have a need to believe that there is such a thing as cosmic justice, that in the end we all get what we deserve.
	Religion says God provides you with cosmic justice, either in the afterlife or through a complex calculation that you can't understand in this life.
	Religion says God knows better than you, right?
	Whatever happens to you is essentially what you deserve to get, including the afterlife.
	Atheists look at Earth and they see all sorts of injustice.
	And they're right.
	There is tremendous injustice on planet Earth.
	Terrible things happen to good people.
	Great things happen to horrible people.
	Some horrible people become chief of staffs to the White House or the lead people on presidential campaigns.
	You know, terrible things happen to wonderful people and vice versa.
	And so atheists look at that and they say, okay, it's our job here on Earth to do something about that.
	And the only way you can have the power to do something about that is through the power of the collective, because the government is so powerful, the collective is so powerful, the only way that you can cure the ills of social and income inequality is through a vast government infrastructure that restores cosmic justice.
	That's why atheists tend to move to the left.
	It's why religious people tend to say, okay, justice is... cosmic justice, what you deserve in the universe, that's God's job.
	Individual responsibility, that's your job.
	And you don't need a government to mandate that.
	You are the one who's responsible for your own life.
	Okay, Jordan writes, Hey Ben, in terms of morality, what do you think of Batman's no-kill rule?
	Is he putting his own ego above the lives of Gothamites, or is it what separates him from his enemies?
	So I've actually written about this, believe it or not.
	I wrote a piece a few months back about this.
	It's a stupid rule.
	And it's not an original Batman rule.
	Batman originally used to kill people.
	The idea that Batman keeps putting... It's actually irresponsible.
	Batman keeps putting the Joker in Arkham Asylum and every two days the Joker escapes and murders 10,000 people.
	Like, every two days.
	He's basically Obama with Gitmo.
	He's Batman with the Joker.
	So, you know, letting the Joker... Even putting him in Arkham in the first place is dumb.
	If you really wanted to finish this, you would just kill the Joker, because clearly, you're operating... Here's the thing.
	In a normal society, the police and the law enforcement system are supposed to keep bad people behind bars.
	Clearly, the police are corrupt in Gotham, and Arkham Asylum can't keep anybody locked up there for more than five minutes at a time.
	Harley Quinn and Joker are constantly tooling around the city, killing, murdering people.
	So, given that backdrop, it is actually immoral for Batman not to kill these people, because law enforcement is working on behalf of the bad guys, except for the Chief, and the Arkham Asylum system doesn't work at all.
	Okay.
	Nicholas writes, do you think Gary Johnson will be in the debate?
	Do you think he'll be better or worse for the conservative movement?
	No, I don't think Gary Johnson will be in the debate.
	Two, I don't think it will matter one iota because Gary Johnson is the worst libertarian ever.
	Hillary Clinton is the best democrat ever in that she's a lying leftist.
	Donald Trump is a terrible Republican in that he believes virtually none of the Republican principles and is personally dishonest.
	And Gary Johnson is the worst libertarian ever, considering, he says, he agrees with 70% of Bernie Sanders' agenda and also thinks that individual religious people should be forced to serve at same-sex weddings.
	Igor writes, Hey Ben, great show.
	Thanks for the Bible section.
	I'd like to know what your stance is on the creation story in Genesis and how Orthodox Jews interpret it.
	As an evangelical Christian, I have a lot of discussions with fellow Christians about the literacy of the text.
	And whether the Earth is indeed billions of years old.
	How do you see that?
	Okay, so my view is that science comes from God, and my view as a Jew is that the Bible comes from God, and therefore they can't be in conflict.
	And so when science says the Earth is billions of years old, I believe that the Earth is billions of years old.
	And I believe that the Bible is being metaphorical when it speaks about days.
	And the reason the Bible is being metaphorical is because it's speaking to people, and people have to understand what it means, these epics.
	If the Bible had said, you know, at the time that the Bible was committed to writing, if God had said to Moses, let me explain to you how carbon dating works.
	Moses would have looked at him and crossed his eyes.
	I mean, then that wouldn't make any sense, right?
	So you have to speak in the language that people understand.
	And so, the proof, by the way, that it's not literal, is the fact that on the first day, God says, let there be light, but He doesn't create the sun until a couple of days later.
	Right, so what does a day even mean in the absence of the sun, in the absence of the earth?
	But it still talks about the first day and the second day, right?
	So what does that even mean?
	There's a great book by a guy named Gerald Schroeder, who's a scientist, he does physics, called The Science of God, in which he specifically talks about what does it mean by day, and he talks about It's a little complex to explain, but the basic theory is that there's a certain amount of background radiation in the universe, and over the course of a 24-hour period, a certain number of wavelengths occur.
	And based on the number of wavelengths, you can sort of measure a day by that.
	And it has to do with the distance, the size of the universe, and the rapidity of the wavelength.
	And if you do that, then actually the biblical account calculates out rather well when you take into account the expansion of the universe and its impact on time.
	So I didn't explain that very well at all, but the book does a much better job of it.
	Gerald Schroeder is the author.
	Sahil writes, I've heard you say before one of the reasons you're such an adept debater is because you've learned leftist philosophy back and forth and know how to argue for it as easily as you know how to argue against it.
	What are some books containing pillars of leftist philosophy you'd recommend?
	Okay, well, the one that the left likes to use very often with regard to kind of social justice, which is their big thing, is they really like John Rawls' book.
	on social justice.
	I think that John Rawls' book on social justice is muddled thinking.
	If you read that, then you'll get a pretty good indicator of what they think about general theories of justice.
	If you read the Communist Manifesto, you get a pretty good idea of what they think about what economics is supposed to do.
	If you want to know what they think about history, Howard Zinn is a pretty typical Pablum take on what leftists think about history.
	John Dewey has a pretty good take on what he thinks the U.S.
	government is designed for and what And what communities are supposed to do.
	All of Western philosophy has a leftist strain running from Rousseau, through Marx, through Dewey, including Woodrow Wilson, all the way up to modern times with people like Thomas Piketty.
	And they're basically repeating the same message, which is the world is an unjust place.
	Social justice requires a big government that comes in and fixes everything.
	Aaron writes, love the show.
	You mentioned most riots have occurred in democratically controlled areas.
	Is this possible because most large cities, period, are democratically controlled?
	Are there even enough Republican-controlled major metropolitan areas in the U.S.
	to support your statement?
	So, yes, there are some major metropolitan areas in the U.S.
	It is true that as cities get larger, people tend to vote Democrat more often, because as cities get larger and people are crammed together more and more often, people tend to think they need more government to help kind of separate them from their neighbors, and so they vote for Democrats.
	But the question really is, are riots occurring in big cities or are they occurring in Democratic cities?
	And the answer is both.
	The answer is both.
	But the solutions the Democrats have attempted to stop the riots obviously haven't done anything to quell the riots or fix the conditions that apparently lead to the riots in the first place.
	So what I'm suggesting is, if you don't want riots, maybe you should try a different public policy and maybe that will impact.
	Maybe it won't.
	Maybe the size of the city means that there will always be riots.
	But you may as well try something different because clearly Democrats aren't doing a good job.
	Christopher writes, hey Ben, the show is awesome.
	Thanks for doing what you do.
	I want your opinion on the current questions being asked about Hillary Clinton's health.
	Infowars recently did two pieces bringing into question her health, highlighting erratic behavior, suggesting potential links between the behavior and a fall she sustained in 2012.
	Initially, it seems fairly conspiratorial, but the buildup of evidence is becoming more convincing.
	What are your thoughts?
	Is this another cover-up?
	Could this be damaging to her?
	Okay, the last question is the most important.
	No.
	No one on the Democratic side of the aisle, no Independent, is going to say, she looks too frail.
	I'm voting Trump.
	Not gonna happen.
	Not gonna happen.
	And it looks like a desperate campaign gambit at this point.
	If the best you can come up with against the most corrupt person in the modern history of American politics is, she looks like she has leprosy, then you're going to lose.
	As far as her own health condition, she should release her health record, she hasn't.
	That makes me suspicious, just like Trump not releasing his tax records makes me suspicious.
	But again, I have no hard evidence that she has serious health problems.
	If she does have serious health problems, I'm not sure how that changes the math.
	So what, you're electing Tim Kaine?
	Alright.
	Kevin writes, Mr. Shapiro, in looking at history a century ago, I see a strong correlation to the Bolshevik revolution and types of civil unrest that preceded it, specifically the animosity toward police.
	What is the endgame here for those pushing the narrative of rogue racist officers?
	Is it for a minority Democrat vote or actual anarchist style coup revolution?
	He says, as a sergeant with Phoenix police, I'd like to thank you for your understanding of how things how rough things have gotten for us.
	Kevin, I appreciate the comments, and definitely I appreciate how rough it is for cops out there.
	Thank God for you guys, because you're doing a job that nobody else really wants to do at this point.
	You know, as far as the correlation to the Bolshevik Revolution, I would say that that's what the anarchists would like to portray America as on the verge of anarchy.
	But I don't think that that is exactly where we are.
	I think this is much closer to 1960s America than it is to 1917 Russia.
	America than it is to 1917 Russia.
	Okay, Royce King says, I'm currently enrolled in a very left-leaning journalism class.
	What would be the best tactful way to express a more conservative point of view?
	They already sign unison when anything right-wing is mentioned.
	Well, I mean, don't lose sleep or your grade over it.
	Recognize that not everything you say is going to be heard, and don't waste your efforts on things that are going to be wasted.
	Ethan says, a couple of episodes back you mentioned the state of our government is like the Kobayashi Maru test.
	There's no trick Captain Kirk can pull to get us through it.
	We just have to plow through the crap as it is.
	At what point do you think a reboot would be the only solution?
	Well, I mean, I do think a reboot is the only solution, but the reboot is not going to come through violent revolution.
	The reboot is going to come when we re-jigger the test and we actually have an option that doesn't suck.
	Unfortunately, we have a couple options that really, really suck.
	Josh, okay, final one.
	Josh writes, I'm best man.
	Can you provide some thoughts on the goodness and importance of marriage that I can steal from my speech?
	Thanks, Josh.
	Okay, sure.
	So, the institution of marriage is the foundational bedrock of Western civilization.
	Marriage is the idea that you and your beloved are now a new family, and that family is a bulwark against the vicissitudes of fate and the vicissitudes of reality.
	You are a team, and your goal is to both survive and flourish as a team, and you're not going to do it separately.
	You're going to do better together, to grab a phrase from Hillary Clinton's idiotic campaign.
	She wants to do it better together as a government.
	Family exists in opposition to the forces of nature, it exists in opposition to the forces of government, it exists in opposition to communitarianism, and it exists in direct opposition to the idea that the individual on his own is enough.
	An individual on his own isn't enough.
	You need a wife or you need a husband because that person makes you a better person, completes you, and is the only person in the world who has the same agenda that you do in your life.
	Everybody needs both a cheerleader and a person for whom to cheerlead.
	That's what marriage provides.
	Aside from that, without marriage, the world simply ceases to function.
	The human world simply ceases to function because your creation of a new life is in both spiritual and physical form.
	the significant unification of humanity.
	Every time you have a child, you're recreating humanity anew, and you're expressing faith in God, faith in the future, and a belief that things will get better.
	Okay, if that's not good enough for you, then I'm sorry, your friend is too demanding.
	Okay, so, we've reached the end of the week.
	It is time for, as Claven likes to call it, the Claven-less weekend.
	I'm already depressed enough, so try not to ruin things while I'm gone any more than you already have.
	I mean, my God, you've already wiped your butt on the curtains.
	Can you people?
	Ugh, I can't.
	What?
	I just can't.
	I can't.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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