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Sept. 29, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:07:34
Ep. 189 - Yes, Comey's FBI Was Rigged For Hillary

Andrew Klavan stops by, FBI Director James Comey falls apart under oath, Donald Trump can't get off of the Miss Universe Fatgate, and the vaunted mailbag! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The media's wild new obsession with fat shaming and Trumpian sexism has been elevated by Hillary Clinton to her very top campaign issue.
Michelle Obama joined the Hillary campaign to explain, quote, if a candidate regularly and flippantly makes cruel and insulting comments about women, that's who that candidate really is.
Hillary herself tweeted, quote, a man who bullies and shames a woman for her weight should never become president.
Now, it's true, Trump routinely makes gross comments about women because he's a jackass, but the Democrats' high-horse attitude about sexism is a little galling.
Let's take a brief trip down memory lane.
JFK.
JFK was the ultimate Democratic hero and was a disgusting pig with women.
According to Mimi Alford, who was 19 years old when JFK went after her, quote, I doubt it.
Once we were alone in his wife's bedroom, he'd maneuvered me so swiftly and unexpectedly, and with such authority and strength that, short of screaming, I don't think anything would have thwarted his intentions.
She then told—he, by the way, told Alfred afterward to perform oral sex on his special assistant, Dave Powers.
He also told her to pleasure his brother, Teddy.
That's just the tip of the JFK iceberg.
How about LBJ?
Hillary has praised LBJ fulsomely in the past.
LBJ was not merely a disgusting racist, he commonly used the n-word, he was also a massive woman hater.
According to a Michael Sheldon review of Robert Caro's massive Johnson biography, quote, His female workers were fondled, ogled, and overworked.
Though his own figure was flabby, he was quick to berate any of his girls who put on weight.
He wanted to make sure the view was good when they walked away from his desk.
Quote, I don't want to look at an Aunt Minnie.
I want to look at a good, trim back end.
Unquote.
He boasted of his sexual prowess and had long affairs with at least two women, as well as casual flings with members of his staff.
How about Bill and, like, Hillary Clinton?
Bill Clinton allegedly raped one woman and his wife Hillary allegedly intimidate her.
Bill sexually harassed a bevy of other women and Hillary allegedly ran a war room to fight bimbo eruptions.
She referred to Jennifer Flowers as trailer trash.
She called Monica Lewinsky a narcissistic looney tune.
But hey folks, anybody who makes cruel and insulting comments about women should not be president.
By the way, the Obama White House has been rocked by chargers of sexism, too.
Christina Roemer, the former head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, she said she, quote, felt like a piece of meat while working in the Obama White House.
Anita Dunn, former White House Communications Director, she said the Obama White House, quote, actually fit all of the classical legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.
Obama spends his presidency golfing with men only, as Katie Pavlich points out in her book.
As I've pointed out before, one of the things I hate about this election is the they-did-it-to excuse.
It's not a good excuse for sexism or being a pig.
But Hillary is actually applying a standard.
If you've ever done anything sexist to a woman or said anything nasty to a woman publicly, you can't be president.
Well, if that's the standard, that goes for every Democratic president for the last 50 years outside of Jimmy Carter.
And there goes Hillary Clinton.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so much to get to here on the Ben Shapiro Show today.
We're going to be joined in just a moment by Andrew Klavan, and this will be a controversial segment.
We're going to actually battle it out.
I asked Drew earlier on if I could gradually drape him in Jewish ceremonial gear as this interview went on.
Unfortunately, he turned that down, so his soul is lost to us forever.
But we'll talk about why he turned from Judaism or from secular Judaism to Christianity.
We'll get to that in just a second.
Plus, we're going to talk about Hillary and fat people and all the things Democrats want us to talk about, like Hillary and fat people.
So we'll talk about all of that.
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We're very, very excited to welcome to the show Andrew Klavan.
He's in August Company.
I mean, yesterday we had Thomas Sowell, and then we just went down about nine levels.
That's a plunge.
Yeah, we found the person in closest proximity, basically.
I mean, literally, Drew's studio is five feet away.
I just want to see how a real podcast was done.
Yeah, no, it's very exciting.
And so, welcome to a real podcast.
And so, Drew has a new book out called The Great Good Thing that I get tons of crap for posting on my Facebook page.
Do you get attacked for that?
Oh, sure, because The Great Good Thing, which, by the way, I mean, I love Drew.
He doesn't know how to title his books.
The subtitle is more accurate.
And if you wanted it to be on the bestseller list, that's where it would have started.
A secular Jew comes to faith in Christ.
So the reason I get a lot of crap for this is because, obviously, as an Orthodox Jew, this to me is a tragic story.
I mean, as a Jew, I'm not big on people converting away from Judaism toward Christianity, obviously.
But the reason that I post it is because I've actually read the book.
And so for me, I've actually told rabbis that one of the things they should do is assign this book to parents as sort of a cautionary tale.
You know, from my angle, as an Orthodox Jew, what's fascinating about the book is that, you know, it's called The Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, but I want to ask you what you mean by secular Jew, because the truth is, That it's sort of a contradiction in terms.
For a religious Jew, just like for, you know, now you're a practicing Christian, the idea of a secular Christian doesn't make any sense.
So for me, a secular Jew is just somebody who was born into a Jewish family but had no clue about kind of what authentic Judaism is.
So, and why don't you give kind of the background as to the Jewish home that you grew up in.
Right.
Well, I mean, I use it very purposely.
I completely agree.
There's no such thing as a secular Jew.
It's a contradiction.
It's an oxymoron.
But I grew up in a home where my father was very dedicated to teaching us the tradition.
We went to Hebrew school.
I was bar mitzvahed.
The whole thing.
My parents didn't really believe in God.
My mother was the most convicted atheist I have ever met.
I mean, she died not believing.
She used to think it was all nonsense.
And whenever, you know, as kids, they would lie to us a little bit.
But my mother, whenever you got her going, she was, that's all nonsense.
Don't give me that.
And my father, as I say in the book, he didn't want to play games with a gigantic invisible Jew who could give you cancer just by thinking about it.
But he hedged his bets.
But he didn't really believe the way you and I both believe.
And so, for me, who has had this lifelong insistence that things make sense, that the words coming out of my mouth have some correlation to reality as it is, or even internal reality, I just found the entire thing absolute hypocrisy and nonsense.
So by the time I was Bar Mitzvahed, I was standing up in front of people, and I've only done this once in my life, and this is it, standing up in front of people saying words that I knew for a fact weren't true, saying I believed in things that I knew for a fact weren't true.
And I talk about how in the book, you know, you've got all this gelt in those days.
You've got a lot of jewelry and all this stuff.
And after six months, I crept out when everyone was asleep and I threw it all away, which should have gotten me thrown out of Judaism right there.
And I think that that's, this is why I say that rabbis, that Jews should read this book more to say, okay, if you're going to raise your kid as a Jew, if you're somebody like me who cares about raising your kid as a Jew, You actually have to explain why they're doing the things they're doing.
You can't just say that Judaism is a culture, it's about matzo ball soup and the Holocaust, and then expect kids to actually take anything here seriously.
Because, I mean, we're both fans of musical theater.
When you watch Fiddler on the Roof, and you get to the end, and one of the daughters marries out, and she marries somebody who's not Jewish, that's a natural consequence of the very first song in tradition where they say, tradition.
We don't know why we do it, but it's the tradition.
If you don't know why you're doing it, it's not going to be a big wonder if your kids move away from it.
It would seem to me that God would be kind of the baseline, you know?
You've got to be praying to something.
You've got to be doing it for some reason.
Because otherwise, I get the tradition.
I get some kind of idea that this is what your race comes from.
But especially in America, where you really don't feel constrained by race at all, or you shouldn't.
In the old days, you didn't at all.
I don't know what appeal that has.
Basically, it was like talking to strangers all the time.
So I want to start with sort of asking you about your transition to becoming a religious person, and then we can get into the Jew versus Christian aspect of this.
Because there's the part, just like Judaism versus Christianity, the first part I'm with you, the second part I'm not.
So when it comes to your transition to religion, because you were an atheist for a while, what was it that triggered you?
And you talk about it in The Great Good Thing, but what was it that triggered you to move from atheistic, secular humanism, essentially, to a conservative religious person?
Well, when I was coming up in college, it was when that leftist wave of relativism was first coming in.
And the idea that there was nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so, from Hamlet and all this stuff.
And multiculturalism, one culture is just as good as another.
You know, the evidence of mine eyes, you know, was enough for me to start thinking, that's not true.
And there were things that I read and thought along the way, like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
I remember sitting and reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which is basically one long argument against Nietzsche and relativism, and just thinking like, oh wait, you know, that really works.
And I can't accept that.
And as that went on, I just started to realize that you cannot have a moral universe I'm writing all these books.
I'm living in the postmodern world.
I'm living with postmodern people.
That was why I subtitled the book A Secular Jew.
I won't go into the whole philosophical idea of it, but the nature of that good struck me as a conscious good, with a will, it struck me as God.
And so after a while, that just started to become unavoidable to me.
And remember, I'm writing all these books, I'm living in the postmodern world, I'm living with postmodern people.
That was why I subtitled the book, A Secular Jew.
I wanted people to understand that I was living in New York, in Hollywood, in London, those are the places I worked, those are the people I knew, where to say anything about God was to brand yourself as a rube.
So it was just very slowly that I started to realize that I was swimming in this water, but the land was over there and I had to go.
And really what happened one night, I was reading a book in which one of the characters I admired said a prayer.
And so I said a prayer and that transformed everything.
And I realized that it had linked my rational mind to my heart and I thought like, that really changes everything.
And once I realized that the world was a much more joyous place when I was in contact with God, that just decided. - That's one of the things that's really nice about your personal experience is that you talk at length about the value for you of prayer and you had some very spiritual experiences along the way.
And so, which begs the second question.
So I think there are a lot of people who believe in God, and that brings them to the second question, which is, okay, well, why the Bible?
Why not just, okay, so there's a God who's moral in the universe, and why can't we just be like the supposedly deistic founders?
Obviously, they're much more Christian than people want to give them credit for, but the idea that, okay, God's just a giant clockmaker, and he's built into the system self-evident truths, the way that Jefferson puts it.
Why do you need the Bible?
Why is the Bible important?
Well, I came to the Bible in a completely secular way.
I wanted to be a writer.
I started reading all these books that I loved, and, you know, I loved all the detective stories, and I realized that the detective stories and Ernest Hemingway, those Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I know what you're talking about.
We just put it in the fiction section, right?
Let's put it in the non-fiction.
I understand.
So I started to read it as a purely literary exercise.
And I had to go out and buy one because we didn't have one in the house.
You just put it in the fiction section.
I understand.
So I started to read it as a purely literary exercise.
And I had to go out and buy one because we didn't have one in the house.
I got one with Jesus' words in red.
And I was lying on my bed reading the gospel according to St. Luke.
And my father walked in on me.
And he hit the roof.
I mean, he went nuts.
And it always makes me laugh because if you walk in on your teenage son.
He's reading the Bible.
He's reading the Bible.
You know, if I'd been reading absolute porn.
And at that point, it was the '60s.
We were running around with girls naked behind the curtains all the time.
So the fact that he got me reading the Gospel according to St.
Luke drove him crazy.
But it was completely secular.
But what happened was, as I started to teach myself literature, as I started to teach myself the culture, I realized that it was at the center of the entire logic of everything we are, like nobody, and this includes Jewish people, I think, too, nobody in the West speaks anything that isn't in some way tinged and connected to Christianity.
Now, if you're Jewish, I think this also goes back through Christianity to something older, I agree.
Right, which is what Maimonides says.
Right, that's right.
Maimonides' take on Christianity is that basically Christianity, and he even says this about Islam, although to a lesser extent, that these were kind of almost like the publicity wing.
- You know, that's right. - Like, this is what popularized these ideas to the rest of the world, and then made them big. - And it made them reach out, and it made them non-tribal, which is important. - Right, right. - Yeah, so the Bible was always, and the funny thing was, when I read the Bible, when I read it cover to cover, I got it as a story, purely as a story.
It made sense to me.
It made sense to me that you have this relationship, you fall out of it, a people is chosen as a doorway to let God back into the world.
It all made sense.
I got the story.
And so when I started to think about God, I think that was the God I was thinking of, even before I knew it was.
Okay, so now let's get to the places where we disagree, because we've gotten to all the places where we agree, and so we both get screamed at for not disagreeing enough.
So, you know, obviously my view as a Jew is that, my personal view of Jesus, is that Jesus was a normal Orthodox Jew who was trying to, and this is sort of what Chaim Maccoby writes in his books about, I don't know if you've ever read any of his books, sort of about the historicity of Jesus, is what he says is that basically he was an Orthodox Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans, and was undercut and was crucified, just like a thousand other people who had that, but there was a religious movement that was built up around him, essentially.
And a lot of kind of foreign ideologies were grafted onto Judaism, including some Gnostic ideas about virgin birth and various kind of other things that were happening at the time.
So, number one, how deeply were you aware of Judaism before you converted to Christianity?
And number two, why do you find the historicity of Christianity to be a fulfillment of Judaism as opposed to just we're right and Christianity is an offshoot.
Okay.
Well, the first thing is that, you know, I really take a little bit of umbrage.
The attack I get most often from Jewish people is, you know, you can't converse unless you become a Jew first.
You have to know your own religion.
And my problem with that, and I think you would probably agree, it wasn't my religion.
It's like, I don't know about Zoroastrianism that much either, you know?
And this is one of the problems with just the, I mean, Jewish religion inherently connects ethnic Judaism to religious Judaism because you have to be ethnically Jewish.
You can convert into Judaism, but if you are ethnically Jewish, and you know this obviously, is that, according to me, you're still Jewish, right?
Even after you convert to Christianity, you're still a Jew.
Now, I know that you're a practicing Christian, and that's your prerogative, obviously.
But, you know, according to my religious belief, you're still a Jew.
So it creates this...
I'm not still a religious Jew.
No, not at all.
But you're a Jew who's not fulfilling your Jewish obligations, right?
Just like any other Jew who doesn't fulfill their Jewish obligations.
So that's sort of how it works.
So that's where that's coming from, I think, when you're getting that critique.
Obviously, look, as an independent human being, you can do whatever you want.
You don't have to study Judaism and then reject that in favor of Christianity.
And then I think that's an important point, because that's not what the book is about.
The book isn't about, I deeply investigated Judaism, decided it was false, and decided Christianity was true.
No, not at all.
And I hate playing competitive religions anyway.
It's ridiculous.
But I will say this, just from my internal world, just speaking as a spiritual guy who really cares about this stuff, I never felt like a Jew until I became a Christian.
And that is absolutely true.
I mean, when I was baptized, first of all, the idea of baptism came to me as a shock.
I mean, I was praying for about five years and had developed a very deep relationship with God, but no theology.
I didn't want a theology.
I didn't want, you know, who cares?
And one day I really felt that my life had been transformed by prayer, and I said to God, what can I do for you?
And I thought, you know, like, you're God, I'm like some guy, you know?
And it came back to me immediately and powerfully, you should be baptized.
And I remember speaking out, spitting the words out loud, you gotta be kidding me.
Like, what on earth?
And it was going back then to the New Testament and reading it in belief that that's what transformed me.
And the idea, I've read a lot of historical stuff about Jesus, and I find it kind of empty.
And one of the things is, is that it is the natural inclination of historians to debunk.
It is natural to them, and the greatest story, of course, is the story of Troy, you know?
It's just a poem, it's just a myth, and all this stuff, and there's one guy who keeps saying, no, you know, I think this is true.
When I read stories like going into the empty tomb and finding this cloth was rolled up this way and this cloth... You know, I'm a guy who's read stories and studied stories all my life.
That sounds like an eyewitness account to me.
But I wouldn't even argue with it because until you believe, until you believe there's no evidence, and once you believe, the evidence is all around.
I mean, I think that that's the way it works.
It's not something you can argue with people about or convince people about.
I agree with this.
At a certain point, whatever religion you believe, there is an inherent leap of faith that takes place.
I mean, if you're a Jew, the belief that God came down on a mountaintop and spoke to 600,000 people, that's a leap of faith.
Nobody's ever seen that happen in the modern world, obviously.
And the same thing is true in Christianity.
Look, as a Jew, it's a point of sadness whenever somebody who's ethnically Jewish, you know, does not, never had the opportunity to really, you know, look at their own religion before looking at Christianity, but I'm not going to fault somebody for looking at Christianity and saying, this is the truth that I found here.
Because, you know, you're thinking adult human being.
And so, this is why, you know, I think it's important to have the conversation, not as a matter of comparative religion, because, again, we can agree to disagree, and I can be sad about your decisions, and you can be sad about mine, right?
As a Christian, presumably you'd want me to come along with you.
Yeah, I was hoping to come along and just touch your head and you'd just be a bolt of light.
Right, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
But I think that the reason that the book is important for people who are wondering whether they should buy it, the reason that it's important is because it really is a lot less about specific Christian faith.
Maybe that'll be another one of your books, but it's a lot more about, like as a Jew, I read it and I agreed with 95% of it.
You just dropped Jesus' name and I agree with 100% of it, basically.
And I think that it's more of a fascinating rebuke of secular morality than anything, maybe anything I've ever read.
I mean, it is a ringing rebuke of the idea that you can have a workable society founded on the basis of secularism.
Even to a certain extent on an individual level.
You can live that way, obviously.
We both believe that there are atheists and agnostics who are great people who do wonderful things for the world and live a moral lifestyle.
But there is, at root, everybody is living in this world of morality, whether you like it or not.
You can pretend you're not, but you're living in this world of morality.
And that's the whole thing.
It was ten years after my baptism that I wrote the book.
Who really thinks my life story is worth telling?
But it occurred to me that everybody is living in this world where the assumption is you're an idiot if you believe.
The assumption is there's something offbeat about you.
I just put it out there because I was there.
I had no reason to convert.
I had no reason to change.
I was living a good life.
I was living a good life.
When I said that prayer... It wasn't like you were in the depths of despair and suddenly, boom, you found religion.
Which is the myth about religious people.
We're bitter clingers, right?
And then we find God.
I know.
The book tells how I went into a period of despair but wouldn't accept God then because I didn't want it to seem like a crutch.
It was only when I came out of that despair, it was in joy, that I went forward.
And that's just the point I want to make.
People are stuck in this world where the default mode is atheism.
And if you start thinking for yourself, you can be freed from that.
Well, the book is really interesting.
The Great Good Thing is the name of the book.
You can go to Amazon.com or you can subscribe at Daily Wire and get a free copy of Drew's book and it'll be signed for you by Drew.
And also, apparently, you get your ticket stamped immediately to Heaven and the Pearly Gates as soon as you buy it.
So that's good news.
It is a really well written book just like everything else that Drew writes.
It's really good stuff.
Drew's a tremendous writer.
Next time we'll have Drew on and we'll actually make jokes and talk about politics as opposed to going into deep theology about God and secularism.
But that's next time he writes a funny book.
Okay, so we're going to talk a little bit about politics in just a moment.
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Okay, so I want to talk politics briefly before we have to let you go here on the Facebook Live, as well as YouTube.
Let's talk briefly about, we'll get to Hillary and fat people and all the rest of the stupidity that they want us to talk about, but first, let's talk about things that actually matter.
President Obama was on CNN last night, and a gold star mom gets up and asks him a question, and Barack Obama, because he has none of the knowledge about Western civilization and Judeo-Christian religion that anyone with open eyes has, here's Barack Obama's answer with regard to Islamic terrorism.
Do you still believe that the acts of terrorism are done With a self-proclaimed Islamic religious motives?
And if you do, why do you still refuse to use the term racially, I'm sorry, Islamic terrorist?
Well, first of all, I want to thank your son, obviously, for his service.
Where we see terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda or ISIL, they have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse for basically barbarism and death.
Okay, so he says that they're trying to claim it for barbarism and death, and therefore he won't use those terms.
He just won't do it.
And then he continued on by saying that, he said, quote, if you had an organization that was going around killing and blowing people up, and said, we're on the vanguard of Christianity, as a Christian, I'm not gonna let them claim my religion and say you're killing for Christ.
I would say that's ridiculous.
That's not what my religion stands for.
Call these folks what they are, killers and terrorists.
Okay, there are several problems with this.
First of all, Every time he mentions Islamic terrorism, he pretends that there's this giant wave of Jesus freaks who are running around blowing people up and shooting them in malls, and it isn't happening, okay?
He has to make up a Christian terrorist group in order to not talk about Islamic terrorist groups, right?
There are Islamic terrorist groups.
There are state-funded, state-backed Islamic terrorist groups.
ISIS is its own state.
Iran is the number one funder of terrorism in the entire world.
And they are a state.
They're an Islamic state.
They're the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Saudi Arabia, we just passed a bill yesterday saying that people can sue members of the government of Saudi Arabia over terrorism because of the connections between members of the Saudi government and people like the terrorists in al-Qaeda.
And he's pretending that Christianity is the same thing.
Well, if there are Christian terrorists, then I'd feel bad about that.
So I wouldn't power a Muslim, I'd feel bad.
Yeah, except that there is no such connection between Christians and so-called Christian terrorists.
There just isn't.
The numbers don't justify that.
There were a ton of suicide bombings last year.
All of them were Islamic, I think, except for one.
And that one was still by somebody who was associated with Islam, as far as I know.
So they were all basically Islamic.
The terrorism that's happening all around the world, it's happening only in the Islamic community.
And so, you know, there are exceptions, but they're rare.
That is to say that when Barack Obama tries to compare Christian terrorism and Islamic terrorism, it's idiotic.
It's just idiotic.
The question isn't.
I don't like to get into the whole, does the Koran push terrorism versus does the Bible push terrorism.
I don't care about that.
I care about the adherence.
The adherence.
Okay, the fact is, I did this video that's gotten a lot of flack from the left, where I broke down the poll numbers on how many people in various Muslim countries believe in honor killings and believe in the rule of Sharia law.
Not just they want to go to Islamic court to deal with their finances, but like actual sharia law and criminal law, hands chopped off, penalties for blasphemy, that kind of stuff.
And you're talking hundreds of millions of people who believe these kinds of things.
And if those are connected to terrorism, which a lot of those ideas seem to be, then maybe you start connecting those ideas to terrorism in order to fight them.
Equating the global Christian reaction to terrorism to global Islamic reaction is ridiculous.
He says, as a Christian, I wouldn't be happy with that.
Right.
If there were an act of Christian terrorism, every Christian in America would be out front condemning it.
All of them.
Now, there are some Muslims who condemn acts of terrorism.
There are also lots more Muslims who are openly rallying in the streets to lock up people who blaspheme the prophet if they draw a cartoon.
Right, the fact is that there are riots every time a woman exposes, you know, is in a bikini in an Islamic country.
And that happened, I think, in Nigeria about five years ago.
So this sort of equation just doesn't exist.
Finally, you know, Obama's—this is why Trump is rising on this particular issue.
Obama's failure to label terrorism what it is, Islamic terrorism, it trickles down to policy.
So it trickles down in a few ways.
One, it means that when we see a red flag like, oh, the guy visited Saudi Arabia, and he came back with his wife from Hajj, and then he's on sites that are ISIS-friendly, we go, oh, well, I don't see anything really suspicious there.
Like, the ISIS-friendly thing is weird, but I'm not going to look at the trip on Hajj to Saudi Arabia and picking up his wife there from Pakistan.
I'm not going to see that as a problem.
And that's how you end up with the killers in San Bernardino.
We treat it as though it's not a red flag.
Of course it's a red flag.
Extreme Islam is a red flag.
Extremist Islam, radical Islam is a red flag.
When connected with other red flags, it's obviously a problem.
And people in government have been punished for—I mean, there are whistleblowers who have come out and said the Department of Homeland Security has wiped databases if those databases contain information about Islamic terrorist groups that are overbroad.
More than that, Americans are intimidated into failing to report suspicious activities by Muslims.
Right.
And this is one of the ideas of the lawfare movement that's been happening over Islamophobia.
And I'm being sued.
I'm not going to talk about this for legal reasons too much.
I'm supposedly being sued.
I am being sued by a clock boy and his father over the fact that I said back in last year that I thought that the whole thing was a setup, that I thought that the entire routine was they went in there with a device that looked like a bomb.
And I'll play the tape at some point.
What I said is I thought that it was opinion, right?
Opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment.
But the idea was that if you express an opinion that this was not a case of Islamophobia, this was actually a case that was meant to generate headlines about Islamophobia, then you get sued.
And the idea is, okay, if we can shut everybody down and shut them up, then people will simply stop talking about this kind of thing.
Okay, well, it's all fun and games until somebody actually walks into a school with a device that looks like a bomb and it ain't a clock.
So, finally, if you actually want to fight radical Islam, you have to reform the ideology.
If you refuse to acknowledge a necessity to reform the ideology, you're going to fail.
General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who's the dictator of Egypt, he's talked about reforming Islam.
President Obama is completely ignoring him, pretending it's not relevant.
So that's why when Trump says it's important to mention radical Islamic terror, that's true.
I don't know if Trump knows why it's true.
But it's certainly true, and Americans are resonating to that.
Okay, so we have to cut off here.
You got plenty extra today, so you should be very grateful.
But if you want even more, you need to go to dailywire.com, $8 a month, and you can watch the rest of the show live.
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We'll read off your responses live.
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Plus, if you get the annual subscription, then you get Drew's new book that we just talked about, The Great Good Ding, signed by Drew.
And as I mentioned, an automatic pass into the pearly gates.
And St. Peter will—so if you believe in Jesus, this is a good thing to do.
If you don't, then screw it.
If you're like me, then you don't need the pass to the pearly gates because you don't believe that's how it's going to go anyway.
But if you actually believe all this stuff, then pick up Drew's book.
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I think that inside one of the copies is an actual golden ticket to heaven.
It could be you.
You could be the one.
We'll pick it up in just a minute at dailywire.com.
Go there and subscribe.
Go there.
He also says yesterday on CNN that Colin Kaepernick is wrong.
Okay, now this is weird because he actually thinks Colin Kaepernick's kind of right.
He thinks America is a deeply bigoted country, and here is his explanation for why Colin Kaepernick is wrong.
Being asked by a soldier, right?
He has no other option.
A soldier asks him, what do you think about Kaepernick?
What do you think he's going to say?
Yeah, the flag that I'm sending you to fight and maybe die under?
I'd kneel for that, too.
He can't say that, so here's his answer.
As Commander-in-Chief, how do you feel about those NFL players choosing this typically respected time to voice their opinions?
Well, as I've said before, I believe that us honoring our flag and our anthem is part of what binds us together as a nation.
And I think that for me, for my family, For those who work in the White House, we recognize what it means to us, but also what it means to the men and women who are fighting on our behalf.
But I'm also always trying to remind folks that part of what makes this country special is that we respect people's rights to have a different opinion.
And to make different decisions about how they want to express their concerns.
But here, you can see how he's struggling for words.
The reason he's struggling for words is because, look, we all agree Colin Kaepernick has a right to be a moron.
It's America.
But that wasn't the question.
The question was, how do you feel about him doing it?
And Obama's struggling here because he doesn't want to tick off his leftist base that actually agrees with Colin Kaepernick.
Polls show a huge number of leftists agree with Colin Kaepernick, and he is deathly afraid.
He's very, very scared that he's going to end up being, you know, penalized by his own base for not saying the right thing.
So that's the left.
That's the left.
And that's actual news.
That's stuff that's going on that's actual news.
In other actual news, in other actual news, James Comey, the director of the FBI, goes before Congress yesterday, and it is a disaster for him.
It's clear that this whole thing was rigged.
It's very obvious that the investigation was rigged on Hillary's behalf, and James Comey has no answers for it.
And you can see it.
I mean, it's pretty amazing.
Here's James Comey saying yesterday, you can't call us weasels.
Please, don't call us weasels.
But don't call us weasels.
We are not weasels.
We are honest people.
And we did this in that way.
Whether you disagree or agree with the result, this was done the way you would want it to be done.
Nope.
Not even close.
They granted immunity to a bunch of people who were not in danger of prosecution.
They then allowed those people to basically claim the fifth anyway.
They allowed Cheryl Mills to walk out of an interview when she was ticked off.
They allowed Cheryl Mills, who was granted immunity, to be Hillary's lawyer.
In this case, Hillary was not granted immunity.
There's so many holes in how this thing was handled.
It's really crazy.
Here's an example of the kind of rigging of the system that went on.
Hillary Clinton had her IT guy, he was on Reddit, asking how you wipe a server.
He's on Reddit asking, "How do you wipe a server?
Because we need to delete material." And James Comey says, "No, no, no.
That doesn't show that it's a cover-up." He granted, by the way, immunity to that IT guy.
He says it wasn't a cover-up and also it's not a violation of his immunity deal, even though he was asking on Reddit after he'd been granted immunity and taking further action to delete an archive of Hillary's emails.
Paul Combetta with Platte River Networks posted to Reddit Asking how to strip out a VIP's, very VIP, e-mail address from a bunch of archived e-mail, end quote.
Isn't this information evidence of obstruction of justice and a violation of Mr. Combetta's immunity deal?
Not necessarily, no.
Why not?
It depends on what his intention was, why he wanted to do it.
And I think our team concluded that what he was trying to do was, when they produced e-mails, not have the actual address, but have some Name or placeholder instead of the actual .com address in the from line.
Okay.
What?
What?
I mean, you have to come to such a tortured conclusion.
He was trying to alter the data so that it didn't have an HTML.
He just wanted to change the title.
That's why he was on Reddit doing it.
Yeah, except for the fact that you have emails, including Hillary's IT people, talking about Hillary's cover-up operation.
You know, Louie Gohmert, who's a, I'm friends with Louie, Louie's a great guy, Republican congressman from Texas.
Here's Louie Gohmert grilling Comey, saying, you gave immunity to people, you didn't have to, and Louie's a judge, I mean, actually, Louie actually knows about this stuff.
If an FBI agent came in and recommended that we give immunity to a witness to get her laptop, that we could get with a subpoena or warrant, then I would ask the FBI not to ever allow this agent on a case.
Can you explain succinctly why you chose to give immunity, without a proffer of what was on the laptop, give immunity to Cheryl Mills while she was an important witness and you could have gotten her laptop with a warrant or subpoena?
Sure, I'll give you my best shot.
The immunity we're calling about here, and the details really matter, that we're talking about is act of production immunity, which says we want you to give us a thing, We won't use anything we find on that thing directly against you.
Right?
It's a fairly... And I understand that and I understood that from reading the immunity deal and that's what's so shocking because she was working directly with Hillary Clinton and therefore it's expected since the evidence indicates she was pretty well copied on so many of the emails that Hillary Clinton was using that pretty much anything in there would have It's been usable against her.
So why would you grant immunity to her when all of it's usable?
Plus you can just use a subpoena.
Okay, there's no Fifth Amendment defense to a subpoena.
If she's subpoenaed, she has to turn over all the documents you gave her immunity based on anything that she turned over, which makes no sense.
You don't have to do that.
So why did you do that?
The only reason you did that is because you wanted to grant her immunity.
Trey Gowdy says that Cheryl Mills, the person he's talking about, Hillary's assistant, Cheryl Mills just walked out of the FBI interview when she didn't like the questions because she had immunity.
And that's the same Cheryl Mills that stormed out of the FBI interview, correct?
And was never asked those questions that got her angry enough to leave?
Right.
She stormed out because her lawyer, who used to work for the Department of Justice, by the way, and the DOJ lawyers had an agreement about what she would and would not be asked.
And the FBI apparently was not part of that deal.
So they, God forbid, asked a question that went into an area she didn't want it to go.
So that's why she left.
This whole thing would not happen to Cheryl Smith or Cheryl Jones.
But it happened to Cheryl Mills, and that is my focus.
Why are you treating this case differently than you would anyone else's?
And he's a career prosecutor.
So all of this is right.
I mean, it is a joke.
They are weasels.
They treated this differently because it was Hillary and her people.
They granted them immunity.
They granted them privileges.
They allowed them to walk out of interviews.
They didn't subpoena people.
They didn't subpoena documents.
It's an amazing botch.
And as we learn more, we learn that the botch is just that much more amazing.
Also, it was the DOJ that allowed her to walk out.
Who's DOJ again?
Oh yeah, Loretta Lynch's DOJ.
And as you recall, Loretta Lynch hanging out with Bill Clinton on the tarmac.
So, this whole thing, this is why it's horrifying when the DOJ becomes politicized, the FBI becomes politicized.
Comey, who spent his entire career building this sort of sterling character reference for himself, blows it all up over this case.
I said at the time it was a corrupt deal, and it was.
Well, that—you know, it would be awesome.
It would be really nice if we had a candidate, like a Republican candidate, who would talk about these things, who knew them, understood the email scandal, talked about the immunity deals granted by the FBI, why Barack Obama's administration is covering up for Hillary Clinton.
Unfortunately, our nominee is Donald Trump.
So that doesn't mean everything he says is bad.
So let's do some good Trump, bad Trump.
The time has come.
Good Trump, bad Trump.
Thursday edition.
Thanks to Brandon Snipes for the theme.
So catchy.
All right, so we begin with good Trump.
So, Donald Trump, after his debate, he's, we'll get to bad Trump in a second.
After his debate, he's been on the campaign trail, and here is Donald Trump saying what is true about Hillary Clinton and the police, and this is accurate.
But I thought her answer, having to do with the police, was very, very disrespectful to the police.
She was petrified to talk about them in a positive way, and I thought, frankly, that was a disgrace.
Yeah, I thought you were gonna bring that out.
I think it was a very disrespectful... Well, I thought it was a very disrespectful answer to the police.
There's no question about it.
Okay, so, and he's right.
It's disrespectful to the police.
Okay.
Other good Trump.
He attacks Hillary Clinton on the money trail.
Everything you need to know about Hillary Clinton can be understood with this simple phrase.
Follow the money.
And believe me, that's what's happened.
In her campaign for president, Hillary Clinton has received $100 million in contributions from Wall Street and the hedge funds.
She received $4.1 million in speaking fees from financial firms.
I'd like to see what she said.
Where are the papers, Bernie?
Bernie was asking for the papers, but Bernie gave up.
The same groups paying Bill and Hillary for their speeches were lobbying the federal government.
Twenty-two groups paying Bill Clinton for speeches lobbied the State Department while Hillary was Secretary of State.
Okay, all this is good.
All this is good, and this is good Trump, and he should be doing this about the email scandal.
He should be hammering her.
Nothing but hammering her.
Unfortunately, this now brings us to bad Trump.
So, bad Trump, yeah, we do have the face, okay.
Bad Trump.
Okay, so Donald Trump can't help himself.
He continues, his campaign continues to futz around over this Alicia Machado story that we talked about yesterday, this Miss Universe from 1997 who gained like 50 pounds after she was named Miss Universe and Trump allegedly called her Miss Piggy and Miss Housekeeping.
First of all, quick note, I don't understand why the Miss Piggy thing is significantly worse than the Miss Housekeeping thing.
It seems to me the reverse.
I'm calling a Latina woman Miss Housekeeping seems like much worse to me than a woman has one obligation in life, not to get fat, she gains 50 pounds, and then he calls her Miss Piggy.
Like, he's still a jackass, but Trump says this kind of stuff to everybody.
The Miss Housekeeping thing is like an actual racial slur, so that I find bizarre.
Nonetheless, Trump can't back off of it.
He's got all of his surrogates out there today talking about how Alicia Machado really deserved it.
And, of course, this plays right into the Democrat playbook.
All the Democrats had to do was chum the waters a little bit, and they knew that Shark Trump would come up and try and eat the boat.
And he's not big enough to swallow the boat.
I mean, they chummed the waters with all this Alicia Machado stuff, and they continue to do so.
So here's Michelle Obama saying, we can't have somebody like Trump.
We need an adult in the White House.
And it is the President and the President alone who always has to make the final call.
We also need someone who is steady and measured.
Because when making life or death, war or peace decisions, a President just can't pop off or lash out irrationally.
No!
We need an adult in the White House.
I guarantee you.
Okay, and then she continues along these lines by saying, he's just too mean to be president.
He's too mean to women.
If a candidate is erratic and threatening, if a candidate traffics in prejudice, fears, and lies on the campaign trail, if a candidate thinks that not paying taxes makes you smart, Or that it's good business when people lose their homes.
If a candidate regularly and flippantly makes cruel and insulting comments about women, about how we look, how we act, well sadly, that's who that candidate really is.
Okay, so she's obviously ripping into Donald Trump over the women comments.
As we mentioned at the top of the show, Hillary's made comments about women for years.
But, again, the Trump people, they've been turned into Trump's troll army.
A lot of the GOP's been turned into the Trump troll army.
And so you've got, for example, the Florida GOP tweeting out actual stories suggesting that Hillary won the debate because she was wired for sound.
She had a wire running up her back and somebody was feeding her the answers.
You have the entire apparently right-wing radio and blogosphere talking about why online polls, the unscientific online polls, why those are just as good as regular scientific polls, because we have to pretend that Trump is winning.
And so now we're going to do the other thing that we like to do, which is Trump wants to defend himself on Alicia Machado, so we're going to pretend that it's smart.
Forget true.
We're going to pretend that it's smart to continue talking about the Alicia Machado story.
So we've got Newt Gingrich, a bowling ball of a man, going after Alicia Machado for her weight.
You're not supposed to gain 60 pounds during the year if you're Miss Universe.
God!
Not fair!
Even my accent that was sexist proves I'm not being sensitive.
Okay, and he says, you're not supposed to gain 60 pounds after you become Miss Universe.
Okay, factually true.
Politically idiotic.
Politically idiotic.
Why would you do that?
Like, the whole thing the Democrats want is more clips, more clips of Republicans talking about this girl being fat and she should have lost weight and why didn't she just lose the weight.
Okay, I thought, by the way, Mika Brzezinski lost her mind over all of this.
She said that it's just, it's crazy that we're even talking about this.
There shouldn't even be beauty contests in the first place.
It's a beauty contest.
I mean, right?
Because you can't actually have any weight on your body for a beauty contest because that wouldn't be beautiful.
They had another surrogate last night saying, in fairness, you shouldn't put on 60 pounds if you want to be... Why are they still talking about it?
Newt Gingrich said that.
Did he?
Newt Gingrich is talking about that?
Really?
That's the pot.
Seriously?
Are you kidding me?
That's the pot calling the kettle black.
The proper answer to that question from O'Reilly, by the way, was no, I do not have anything more to say about it.
Is that what I mean?
No.
That's the proper answer.
So people like Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich and men can walk around just rotundas, all get out, and it's not an issue.
But women, in order to be beautiful, you have to be 117 pounds.
I'm sorry, can someone tell me what year we're in here?
Can we stop this here?
Okay, so I just want to point out what she's saying.
This is a politically effective attack that she's leveling right now, which is that Donald Trump thinks that all big women are not beautiful.
All women who are 10 pounds overweight aren't beautiful.
That's what he's saying.
Okay, let me just point out something.
Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich, yes, they're fat.
Yes, they're overweight.
And they're not in any Mr. Bodybuilding contests either.
They're not in any beauty contests.
They're not.
So it's not equivalent.
Just on a factual level, trying to equate Donald Trump being a fatso with a woman whose Miss Universe being overweight is silly.
And can we stop with this nonsense where we pretend that, you know, Meghan Trainor and Gisele Bundchen are equally models?
Like, they're not.
Gisele Bundchen's a supermodel.
Meghan Trainor's a singer.
She's talented at what she does.
But Gisele Bundchen is a more attractive woman on any objective level than Meghan Trainor, which doesn't mean Meghan Trainor's an ugly woman.
It just means that one is more attractive than another.
Okay, like, we don't have to frontally lobotomize ourselves to basic truths about human beauty in order to do this, in order to say that Donald Trump is being sexist.
But the left wants to conflate everything, and what they're doing—this is—it's such great trollery, because they know that people are going to say what I'm saying, and then they're going to say, well, that just shows you're sexist because you're defending Trump.
I think Donald Trump's a jackass.
I think that this is, like, the least of his sexism.
Donald Trump, in the 1980s, said women should be treated like bleep.
Donald Trump said in the early 1990s, I think it was, he said that nothing matters in life as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass.
Donald Trump, in this election cycle, said that Heidi Cruz was ugly.
Donald Trump, in this election cycle, said that Megyn Kelly was on her period.
Okay, like, there's plenty to go after Trump for.
This story is ginned up, and it's a ridiculous story by the media, but Trump's people can't just let it go.
They can't just say it happened 20 years ago.
He shouldn't have said it.
We're sorry.
One of the reasons, by the way, they can't do that is because then they know the next step will be what they do with the birther story.
They'll say, OK, well, if he really feels that bad about it, then why was he still saying sexist things like five minutes ago?
And there's no good answer for that.
The media is just making hay out of this all the way.
CNN, you know, they had a panel about this.
There is a Trump supporter who accused Hillary of exploiting weight issues.
And the CNN panel, of course, gets all huffy and they go crazy.
I'm a mother.
I have three daughters.
I have two granddaughters.
And we've been through the whole gamut on this issue that Hillary Clinton is now featuring.
The weight issue.
Gaining weight, or on the other hand, eating disorders.
She brought it up at the debate when she mentioned Ms.
Machado.
And of course she's running an ad that shows young girls uncomfortably, painfully uncomfortably, looking in the mirror.
This to me is very disturbing.
I have actually sat at the bedside with a child Very close to death.
And families like mine that have suffered so much on this issue are appalled that Mrs. Clinton is exploiting this into a political issue.
You can't be lower than that.
But if you are appalled by that and you still support Donald Trump, that's a fundamental issue that you have.
Madam Lieutenant Governor, I'll let you finish.
She's not just running an ad with women staring in a mirror.
She's running an ad with women staring in a mirror with the words of Donald Trump playing over them.
I'm not going to attack Ms.
Machado.
I feel sorry for her and after this is all over she's going to be the punchline in some joke just like so many women who have been scarred by the Clintons.
From Monica Lewinsky, who's now formed her own anti-bullying foundation.
So I don't want to touch Ms.
Machado.
I hope that she's not harmed by all of this.
There's no way to spin this thing in your favor.
So the best thing that you can do is just move on from it.
Say he made some bad comments back in the 1990s, and then hit back with Juanita Broderick and hit back with all the terrible things Hillary has said about Monica Lewinsky and Jennifer Flowers and all of Bill's various bimbettes, right?
That's not a hard thing to do, but they can't let go of it because the campaign reflects the man, and the Trump campaign reflects a very, very insecure man.
Again, here's another example.
Megyn Kelly's on with Kellyanne Conway.
Earlier in this campaign, Kellyanne Conway, when she was on the Cruz side of the ticket, she was saying that Donald Trump was saying sexist things.
Now here's Kellyanne Conway trying to make a very awkward defense to a woman that Donald Trump legitimately attacked for being a woman, Megyn Kelly.
At the end of the debate, after she tried to rough him up over a couple comments he's made over 25 years or so with respect to women, he said, you know, I became prepared to say some rough stuff, but I won't do it because your family's here and your daughter's here.
But it's not nice that you're running hundreds of millions of dollars in negative ads against me.
Kellyanne.
And he has a point.
Come on.
It's not nice?
They are running for president.
Of course she's going to hit him with negative ads.
But the ads should be true.
The ads should be true.
The ads that she's running about him when it comes to his comments on women use his words, Kellyanne.
Use his words.
No, but her ads... Okay, but Megan, why is she spending all this money and not talking about her vision for post-Obamacare?
Because there's two facets of a campaign.
You know that better than anybody.
You hit your opponent and try to disqualify him or her, and then you sell your own vision.
You know, you raised the question about, you know, he made a couple comments over 25 years.
You know that's not true.
You know he has repeatedly made comments about women, about their looks, about their size, their weight, even in this campaign, talking about Carly Fiorina's face, retweeting a negative picture about Heidi Cruz's face, criticizing Hillary Clinton and her look, and Kellyanne, this is an issue for him, is it not?
Well, Megan, but is that the campaign issue that Hillary Clinton is running on?
The answer seems to be yes.
Do we not deserve, as voters, for this woman to tell us whether she thinks Obamacare is a disaster or not?
Whether she'll take us to single-payer?
Good night.
I'm sorry.
Good night.
I mean, like, why isn't she talking about Obamacare?
Because this is effective.
That's why she's not talking about Obamacare.
And it's going to be effective until your candidate stops being a crap show when it comes to the comments that he's made about women.
But it's impossible to run from it, so the best you could do is swivel and hit Hillary, but she's not even doing that there.
Dana Perino is on with Megyn Kelly, and she basically says the same thing.
Like, just stop.
Just stop this.
This is stupid.
And even tonight, as the Trump campaign clearly wants to move beyond this, Newt Gingrich is out there bringing it up again, saying you can't gain a bunch of weight when you become Miss Universe.
Stop talking about women's weight altogether.
Right.
Stop.
You know what?
If you want to increase your numbers with women, yeah, just stop telling us how fat we are.
Right.
Because as it turns out, it doesn't make us feel very good.
That might help.
Especially when you have been classified as overweight.
And we don't want to hear it.
In fact, even if you're perfectly fit, and especially if you're perfectly fit, we don't want to hear it.
Because you know what?
We definitely do not want to hear it.
Anymore, bigly.
Yeah, that's all.
Okay, period, end of report.
Great to see you.
Thank you.
Okay, so that's right.
Okay, they're both women and what they're saying about how women want to hear about weight, women don't want to hear about weight.
So even if it's true that Alicia Machado should not have gained 60 pounds, even if it's unfair to compare Newt Gingrich, who's not in a beauty contest, to a woman in a beauty contest, it doesn't matter.
Even if she gains 60 pounds, does that mean it's okay for Trump to call her Miss Piggy or Miss Housekeeping?
Of course it doesn't!
Of course it doesn't.
But, again, the Trump campaign, every slight must be fought back against, every gauntlet thrown must be picked up, and so they can't just let it go, they can't just move on to other issues or move on to attack.
And this is why I think in the second debate you're going to see the same result as the first debate, because Trump has a pathological inability to let these things go.
So no matter that some of this attack is unfair, there's politically stupid and there's true, And sometimes you can say something true that is also politically, politically stupid.
Also, I mean, it's just amazing to me that the Trump campaign is going to stand on truth when so much of the campaign has been based on just utter nonsense.
Okay.
Time for some things that I like, and then some things I hate, and then the mailbag.
So, things that I like.
So, we'll start, actually, this wasn't in the things I like routine, but I think it's hilarious.
Gary Johnson, I don't know how much weed he's smoking on the campaign trail, but he was on with Chris Matthews.
All right, everybody, say, take them out.
Who are the other world leaders?
I wanna know, I wanna know.
You've been smoking a lot of pot.
Maybe you know what countries are.
I know what countries are.
I wanna know, who's your favorite world leader?
Go!
Who's your favorite foreign leader?
Who's my favorite?
Just name anywhere in the country, any one of the continents, any country.
Name one foreign leader that you respect and look up to.
Anybody.
My one's Shimon Peres.
No, I'm talking about living.
Go ahead.
You got to do this, anywhere, any continent, Canada, Mexico, Europe, over there, Asia, South America, Africa, name a foreign leader that you respect.
I guess I'm having an Aleppo moment in the former president of Mexico.
But I'm giving you the whole world.
I know, I know, I know.
Anybody in the world you like, anybody, pick any leader.
The former president of Mexico.
Which one?
I'm having a brain.
I'm having a brain.
Well, name anybody.
Fox.
Fox.
Who's your favorite foreign leader?
Get him off the hook.
Name a foreign leader you respect.
He was terrific.
Any foreign leader?
Merkel.
Okay, Merkel.
Okay, fine.
Save yourself.
Can't argue with that.
Anyway, let's go.
First of all, a couple of quick notes here, things that I think are hilarious here.
First of all, Bill Weld looks like he wants to, he's a giant man, Bill Weld.
He looks like he wants to backhand Gary Johnson in the next week here.
The guy sitting next to Gary Johnson, his VP candidate, if we can get an image of the two of them here, he looks like, he's like, I can't believe this.
He's like, I can't believe this.
I'm sitting here with this moron and I'm the VP nominee?
How is this happening?
And Gary Johnson just looking like a deer in the headlights.
I'm having an Aleppo moment.
Oh my goodness.
Second, Chris Matthews, it turns out, when you say, name a leader from any continent, continent like Canada or Mexico.
Canada and Mexico are not continents, you dolt.
Okay, so lots of stupidity happening all the way around.
Just, oh my god.
Like, the minute you start to think maybe there's a candidate who's not gonna stink, they all stink.
They're all terrible, they're all ignorant, they're all stupid.
I mean, honest to god, like, I think most, the problem is if you ask Trump, Trump also couldn't name a foreign leader that he admires except for Vladimir Putin.
Like, he'd have a tough time.
Maybe he'd mention Netanyahu because he knows his name because he just met with him, like, two days ago.
Okay.
Other things that I like.
So, since Drew was on and we were talking about religion, a great novel about religion is the novel The Chosen by Chaim Potok.
This is Potok's best book, This and the Promise, which is the sequel.
It's written by a guy, Chaim Potok, grew up in a very Orthodox home.
It's not a pro-Orthodox book.
It's got some actually very negative things to say about Orthodoxy.
But it's a fascinating book, and it's a glimpse into sort of the debate between modern Orthodoxy and Hasidim, the kind of what people call ultra-Orthodox.
And it's really, it's a beautifully written book.
Everything to prepare you for the debates, ma'am.
Just try and stay focused no matter what your opponent says.
Don't let him rattle you.
He's going to do whatever he can to try and mess with your head.
Don't buy into it.
Whatever he says, just respond with, my opponent is a liar and he cannot be trusted.
is what South Park had to say about the first presidential debate.
Everything to prepare you for the debates, ma'am.
Just try and stay focused no matter what your opponent says.
Don't let him rattle you.
He's going to do whatever he can to try and mess with your head.
Don't buy into it.
Whatever he says, just respond with, my opponent is a liar and he cannot be trusted.
Got it.
By the way, it's decision 2016.
The first presidential debate with moderator Lester Holt.
Okay, let's get right into it.
Our first question is for you, sir.
How will you deal with ground troops in Syria?
Everyone, I need to just speak from the heart here.
I don't know what the f*** I'm doing.
I've got to complain.
I had no idea I would get this far.
But the fact of the matter is, I should not be president.
Okay?
I will f*** this country up beyond repair.
I am a sick, angry little man.
Please, if you care at all about the future of our country, vote for her.
Okay?
She's the one who at least has some experience.
She's not as bad as you think.
I promise.
And unlike me, she's actually capable of running this country.
My opponent is a liar and he cannot be trusted.
No!
Oh my God, she is such a turd sandwich.
What he is saying is simply not true.
Do not believe it.
I am giving you this, lady.
I am giving you this!
What the f*** are you doing?
Okay, look, look.
Just vote for her.
She knows politics.
She really wants to put this country first.
My opponent is a liar.
Would you just please shut up?
And he cannot be... Get out of your own way!
...cannot be trusted.
Okay, okay, look.
She doesn't mean what she's saying.
She just doesn't know how to take this because it's very weird and her advisors probably- My opponent is a liar and cannot be trusted.
Oh, f**k. Why the f**k did it have to be her?
I am so f**ked.
And that's a pretty good summary of the first debate.
Okay, time for a couple of things I hate and then we'll do a little bit of mailbag.
So, let's do it.
So animal rights activists are the dumbest people on earth.
I like animals to eat.
I also think animals are cute and cuddly, although I don't want any in my home.
So there's a video that's now going around on Facebook of animal rights activists trying to show people what it's like to be a side of beef, which doesn't even make any sense because humans aren't delicious, so far as I'm aware.
But here are these animal rights activists, and watch what they do in order to demonstrate—this is in Paris—how terrible it is to be an animal.
Yes, that is a real brand.
She's being branded.
This is a woman being actively branded to demonstrate how terrible it is to be a piece of cattle.
And then being shoved around.
And then they're posing on the ground as though they're pieces of meat to show the pain animals go through.
All the women are always in bikinis, by the way.
Because it's the only way you can get people to watch these videos.
If you had a bunch of, if you had, I mean, not to be, not to fat shame, but if these women were 400 pounds doing this, nobody watches this video.
And then, my God, I mean, they're actually being branded with numbers.
Can we stop this?
- - Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Can we start off this? - Okay, let me just point something out.
Hey, animals are not the same as human beings.
They're not, okay?
A cow is not the same as a human being.
And one of the great evils of our time is the fact that we treat human babies in the womb with less respect than we treat your dog or cat.
And it ain't close.
And it ain't close.
But it's just, I mean, like, why a person would brand themselves in an attempt to make me worry about a cow, like, I don't worry more about the cow, I worry now about your mental health.
You're going to carry a brand around the rest of your life because you don't want to eat a cow?
How many cows are you going to save by being branded?
I mean, just again, the equation of human beings to animals, but I guess that's the logical end effect of a certain brand of leftist atheism that says that human beings are not more worthy of care than animals are.
The same sorts of people, and Dennis Prager has a good moral test for people.
He says, if you see in a river, just two things in a river, one is a person and one is your dog, which one do you save?
A lot of people who are sort of leftist atheists might say I would save my dog.
The mark of a good human being is I'd save the human being, because human beings are more valuable than animals.
If you don't believe human beings are more valuable than animals, then there's no basis for human rights, there's no basis for human equality, there's no basis for the idea that humans ought to be treated with care.
Okay, let's do some mailbag.
The logic works both ways.
They're trying to say human beings and animals are the same, so you should treat animals like human beings.
But by the exact same logic, there's no reason to suggest if animals and human beings are the same, you shouldn't treat human beings like animals.
Okay, let's do some mailbag.
Let's do some mailbag.
Wow, brand new graphic there, too.
Magical.
Okay, so, this is from Ethan.
What sources would you recommend to someone who wants to learn more about the political landscape of the Middle East and the relationship between Israel and the other Middle Eastern countries?
Okay, as I say, there's a book called Myths and Facts by Mitchell Bard that's a very kind of easy read.
It's got little snippets on what's true and false about the Middle East.
That's a good place to start.
Brian says, I believe it is not the government's responsibility to educate our child on religion.
That is the right of parents.
What are your thoughts on religion being taught in public schools?
So, I don't think that religion ought to be taught in public schools as a general rule, but I also don't think that secular religion ought to be taught.
So, their views of secular morality, the idea that all sexual behavior is created equal, the idea that schools are going to teach about men, marrying men, the idea that all forms of family are the same.
Like, social issues are inherently religious issues, and just because the left says, All right.
that has a religion without God doesn't mean it's not a religion.
Communism is a religion, too.
The most dynamic religion of the 20th century, as Prager likes to say, has been secular leftism.
And so teaching religion of any side seems to be wrong.
If you want to teach facts and figures, if you want to teach about history, you want to teach about English, there's plenty to cover in school.
Without getting into the teacher's political views, that's where parents come in.
This is also why I think that most parents should be able to choose the school their kid goes to, and that way you're not stuck with whatever the public school says.
All right.
Taylor writes, what are your thoughts on the controversial issue of mothers breastfeeding their newborns in Publix?
So, my wife has had two babies.
We have the two-and-a-half-year-old, who's adorable and I need to pick up and I'm late, and the four-month-old, who is just the happiest little man who ever lived.
And when it comes to breastfeeding in public, I think that women should be able to breastfeed in public.
I don't think that it is appropriate for women to pull out their boob and not have a cover.
And the reason is that the breast does not cease to be an object of sex just because it is being used for a different purpose.
Okay?
Most of the time when men whip out their genitals, they're doing it to pee.
Okay?
That does not mean that it's okay for them to do it in public because it is a normal bodily function.
Now, I'm not equating peeing and breastfeeding, obviously.
You pee to live, but you're feeding your child so that your child lives.
If you have no other choice, breastfeed in public.
But the idea that the rules of modesty go out the window because it's inconvenient for you to use a feeding cover is bizarre to me.
I'm not a big fan of the avert your eyes notion when it comes to the public space.
When it comes to the public space, you know, everybody sort of has an equal right to the public space, and that does mean that I don't have the obligation to look at your naked body.
And so I'm not a big fan of mothers.
Breastfeeding, like, without a nursing cover, and that's why they created nursing covers.
Okay, John writes, Hi Ben, do you think Trump should commit to pursuing prosecution against Hillary if he is elected?
Well, I mean, I think that, yeah, I certainly think the DOJ, a new DOJ should take a look at Hillary Clinton.
I think that she committed criminal acts.
I don't see why that should go by the wayside.
So, so sure.
Yeah, I think that that's, I think that's a worthy goal.
Jeremy says, Hi Ben, two questions.
Do you ever plan on running for political office at some point in the future?
If you were running for president, I'd support you in a heartbeat.
Two, would you ever consider leaving California for a freer state such as Texas?
Yes, I would consider leaving California for a freer state such as Texas, and if they indeed crack down on religion in the ways that I fear they will, a lot of religious people will be looking at that.
As far as running for political office at some point in the future, as I've said before, if nothing else, this election demonstrates that literally anyone in America, including my small children, are qualified for high office.
So sure, why not?
Greg writes, Why do you think people just accept the idea Republicans are responsible for racism when historically the Democrat Party sponsored Jim Crow laws?
Is it the stranglehold the left has on the media?
So yes, it is definitely the stranglehold the left has on the media.
It's also the normal human notion that the government is some sort of tool to be used for the benefit of particular people.
And if you say the government shouldn't be used for anyone, this is perceived as racist.
So if the left says, use the government to cram down benefits for a black folks, and then you say, well, affirmative action is that that's not an appropriate use of the government.
The left says, see, you're racist.
If you weren't racist, you'd be in favor of using our communal power in order to help black folks.
You don't want to do that, and therefore you're racist.
Anytime you have the government that is doing an action that specifically helps one group of people, and somebody opposes that action, they're going to say you're against the group of people, not that you're against that use of government.
That's how it works.
That's why Donald Trump right now, he's saying, you know, I want tariffs that are going to help a bunch of people in Ohio.
And I say, look, that's not the job of government.
Government doesn't get to determine which groups of people sink or swim in the economy.
And people say, well, that means that you're anti-blue collar workers.
No, it doesn't mean I'm them anti-blue-collar workers.
It means the government belongs to all of us, and you don't get to use it as a vehicle for your particular agenda.
But because if you believe the government should be very small, that means you're in this logic against all the groups of people who other people think the government should be used for.
Somebody asks about Shapiro Harambe 2020, the campaign.
Take a shot for Shapiro Harambe.
Harambe took a shot for you.
Tanner says, what is your view on Snowden?
Should Obama pardon him?
No, Snowden should not be pardon.
Snowden is—there are two things at work here, and they can both be true.
One, Snowden revealed some information that is useful for Americans to know.
Two, Snowden is a traitor that is probably in the pay of Russia.
So, No.
Both things can be true at once.
No, he should not be pardoned.
Tyler writes, "The term nationalism is being thrown around a lot this election, both positively and negatively.
For some people, it seems to mean the same thing as patriotism.
For others, they treat it as a form of racism.
What is the difference between nationalism and patriotism, dictionary definitions aside?" Okay, I think the difference between nationalism and patriotism is that nationalism means you believe in the country.
Patriotism means you believe in the founding ideals of the country or the basic idea behind the country.
So if you are a nationalist, if you're a German nationalist, you believe in the German people.
If you're an American nationalist, you believe in the American people.
If you're an American patriot, you believe in the foundational documents and ideas of the United States, and you believe that those have eternal validity and truth.
So I'm a patriot, but I'm not a nationalist.
I don't believe that being a patriot, I don't believe that not being a nationalist means you're against America's national interests.
I'm very much in favor of America's national interests, but those national interests have to be good, right?
They have to be in line with the preservation of the ideals that stand behind the country.
Hudson writes, hi Ben, love your show.
My question is who is right, the Anti-Federalists or the Federalists?
In what system is federal aggrandizement preventable?
So the answer is they were both half right.
The Federalists were correct that you need a central government that's stronger than the Articles of Confederation.
The Anti-Federalists were correct that almost inevitably, as soon as you grant a centralized power to any government, That centralized power is going to grow and grow.
So both can be true.
And that's why the proper response is you should worry about what the anti-federalists had to say so you can provide a check on the federalists.
Without a central government, there's anarchy.
With an overpowering central government, there's tyranny.
And the only time liberty is available is when you're in between.
Okay, folks, that brings us to the end of the week.
Thanks so much to the subscribers who are sending us mail, who are sending us questions in the middle of that.
Kind of a cool thing.
And we look forward to seeing you next week.
Now, warning, I'm going to be out for Rosh Hashanah, which I believe Rosh Hashanah, if I'm not mistaken, is next Monday, Tuesday, so I'll be out hanging with God, but I will be back in the middle of next week as soon as the Jewish holidays are over.
Hopefully.
That's a long break.
Try not to ruin things while I'm gone.
Well, screw that.
You already ruined things.
So try not to actually destroy the country while I'm gone.
And if everything is still here, then I'll see you next week.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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