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May 30, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
19:34
Ep. 310 - Can Everybody Stop Panicking For Five Minutes?
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This weekend, NPR interviewed Representative Adrian Smith, Republican of Nebraska, and asked him a gotcha question.
Is every American entitled to eat?
The segment was about cutting food stamps, and NPR's agenda was clear.
Show that Republicans don't care if Americans starve, which is why they want to cut food stamps.
Smith answered, well, they—nutrition, obviously, we know is very important, and I would hope that we can look to—it is essential.
It is essential.
This was not enough for the media who declared Smith at underhead.
After all, doesn't everyone have the right to food?
Now, imagine a land where there's a right to food, housing, and health care.
Imagine that such rights were enshrined in the Constitution of that land.
That would mean that everyone in the land could live free without the burden of worry over such basic resources, right?
No.
The South African constitution guarantees a right to all of these commodities.
In fact, the constitution even creates a legal duty for the government to help secure such commodities.
Yet there are some 11 million food insecure people in the country, including 1.5 million children with chronic malnutrition and growth stunting.
Life expectancy in South Africa is 57 years.
There are currently 12 million people in the country without adequate housing.
The population of South Africa is about 55 million people.
Declaring a commodity a right, it is obvious, does not make that commodity materialize.
And it certainly doesn't make it materialize in the most efficient fashion.
Markets make commodities materialize in the most efficient fashion.
In the United States, 9 out of 10 Americans live above the global poverty standard.
96% of poor parents say their children were never hungry in the past year, according to scholars at the Heritage Foundation.
And a poor child is more likely to have a cable TV, a computer, a widescreen plasma TV, an Xbox, or a TiVo in the home than to be hungry.
Even the Department of Agriculture, the government agency responsible for administration of food stamps, upon which approximately 15% of Americans now rely, admit that well under 6% of Americans' households have to worry even about decreased calorie consumption.
Want to know what fills the gap for Americans when they're poor?
Feeding America, a private charity that receives $900 million per year in food donations, the vast bulk from private companies.
In fact, there's a strong link between food stamps and obesity.
So, is America worse off than South Africa despite our constitution not mandating food as a right?
Of course not!
We're significantly better off because it turns out that using government to confiscate wealth from the very people who produce cheaper and more plentiful products ends up exacerbating scarcity.
Declaring things rights feels good, but when those rights come with forced redistributionism, the things become less available.
So no, you don't have a right from the government to food.
You have the freedom from government to live in a country where food is available in plenty and where your fellow Americans help pick you up when you are down.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, I hope everybody had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.
I hope that you took a few minutes to pay honor and tribute to the men and women who have sacrificed their lives, laid down their lives for the freedoms that we now enjoy.
Obviously, that's a sacrifice we can never live up to, but that doesn't stunt our ability to try or relieve us of our ability to try.
I want to talk a little bit about President Trump on Memorial Day, which I thought was actually quite wonderful.
And I also want to talk about the breaking scandal, non-scandal of Jared Kushner and all of that.
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So President Trump spent Memorial Day the way that the president is supposed to spend Memorial Day, honoring the Fallens.
So he went over to Arlington National Cemetery, and there he gave what I thought was quite a wonderful speech.
And it is a marked difference.
When Trump talks about the military, and I think this is why so many people resonate to Trump and resonated to him during the general election, when Trump talks about the military, There's a marked warmth there.
This is a guy who likes the military.
This is a guy who has respect for the military.
It's somebody who sees the military as the leading edge of American power and American goodness and decency.
As opposed to President Obama, who always seemed a bit discomfited with the American military.
He always seemed like somebody who's uncomfortable with American military power, somebody who's uncomfortable around soldiers and other members of the military.
The same thing with Hillary Clinton, who reportedly back in the 90s actually asked if there was a way that she could prevent people from wearing the uniform in the White House.
That was according to a couple of people who worked in the White House at the time.
Trump obviously has a lot of warmth toward the military and that showed on Memorial Day, which is quite wonderful.
Here was President Trump speaking yesterday about the sacrifice made by the fallen.
Let us also pledge to tell the stories of Robert, Chris, Andrew, and all of America's fallen warriors today and for the next 1,000 years.
And he spoke, I thought, in really glowing terms about the military.
It was really quite wonderful.
He also marked his first Memorial Day as Commander-in-Chief by heading through the throngs of motorcycles participating in Rolling Thunder.
The Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, also was part of Rolling Thunder.
He, uh, he delivered a tribute.
He called service members, angels sent to us by God.
He said, to every Gold Star family, God is with you and your loved ones are with him.
They died in war so that we could live in peace.
Every time you see the sunrise over this blessed land, please know that your brave sons and daughters pushed away the night and delivered for us, for all of us, that great and glorious dawn.
Pretty good stuff.
And again, this is one of the reasons, I think, why President Trump is... I think this is why President Trump is... There's a certain gut-level Americanism that people resonate to in Trump.
There are things about America that I think Trump doesn't understand, but I think he does understand gut-level patriotism.
There's a great picture of Trump hugging a six-year-old boy named Christian Jacobs who's dressed like a Marine because his father, who's a Marine Sergeant Christopher Jacobs, was killed during a training accident in California in 2011.
And you won't see any of this on the news, by the way.
The media refused to cover anything that Trump does that's unifying or nice, and this was unifying and nice, and good for President Trump for doing it.
The other, I thought, great tribute to the military came from an active, or a former active-duty military guy, was active-duty until five minutes ago, General James Mattis, who of course is the Secretary of Defense.
He was asked over the weekend on one of the news shows about what keeps him awake at night.
What keeps you awake at night?
Nothing.
you know obama trump anybody else when they're asked what keeps them awake at night they talk about russia they talk about isis they talk about all the various threats in the world this is a stellar answer what keeps you awake at night nothing i keep other people awake at night pretty amazing Pretty amazing.
I love that.
Basically, it was him channeling Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad.
He is the one who knocks.
Pretty spectacular stuff.
Well, here's the thing.
Trump has the capacity to unify.
He does.
If he would just You know, pay attention to, pay attention to policy.
If you just buckle down, do patriotic rallies, go out there.
This is why I think on his foreign trip, he gained some points in the estimation of the American public, because he didn't represent America badly.
He went out there and he was fine.
He was fine.
I mean, there were a lot of people in the media who were very upset about him, like pushing the president of Estonia, I guess, out of the way, or doing this kind of weird handshake with Emmanuel Macron, who's the president of France.
But in essence, Trump was fine abroad.
And despite the media's best efforts to paint him as some sort of idiot who's going to make America look boorish and terrible on the world stage, we'll talk about Europe's reaction to Trump in just a second because it's actually Europe that's being really stupid.
And we'll talk about that in a second.
But the point I'm making here is that Trump is still a president with potential.
At this point in time, Bill Clinton had a lower approval rating than Donald Trump does.
So Trump still has the potential to turn this thing around.
In order for him to turn this thing around though, he's going to need to start acting in ways that aren't vague.
What I mean by that is that the big controversy over the weekend was this controversy over Jared Kushner.
Jared Kushner is of course Trump's son-in-law.
Jared Kushner really has no business being part of the government.
I mean, I'm sorry to break it to folks, but Jared Kushner is not qualified to be in government.
He spent no time at all in his life thinking about government, thinking about governance.
He is a stock guy.
He's a stock market Wall Street guy who happens to be married to the president's daughter, and suddenly he's in charge of Middle East peace, the opioid crisis, the infrastructure plan, and all these other things Trump doesn't want to deal with.
Again, if Hillary Clinton had done the same thing with Chelsea's husband, we'd all be saying this is ridiculous in every sense of the word.
Trump has given all this power to Jared, and now Jared got Trump sort of in trouble because there are all these stories breaking over the weekend.
I want to deconstruct them and break them down because the media is making more of them than they are, but Trump should still move on beyond Jared Kushner, who is a New York leftist who has no business in government.
So here's what broke over the weekend.
On Thursday, NBC News reported that Jared Kushner was subject of scrutiny in the FBI's ongoing Russia probe.
We talked about this on Thursday.
It makes no difference because, again, there's no element that says that he's actually guilty of anything at this point.
So, so what?
Okay, so they're looking at him.
Not a big deal.
Then on Friday, the Washington Post drops a bombshell, right?
They report that Kushner and the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and Slate has a good rundown of this.
They're real leftists, but this is basically just straight reporting.
They reported that Kushner and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak discussed setting up A secret communications back channel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin in December.
In March, the White House said the two had met, but the Post sources say the FBI took an interest in what was discussed.
And then, apparently, right after that, Kushner had a meeting with the head of a Russian Putin-run bank, basically, right about the same time.
The detail in the Washington Post report that's damning is not that they were setting up back channels.
Lots of presidents set up back channels.
With other countries for negotiation purposes because they don't want every negotiation to be out in the open.
It's important you be able to pick up the phone and have talks with people.
The one of the more nefarious ones that should have drawn more scrutiny was in 2008 Barack Obama set up a back channel with the Iranian government which really should have drawn scrutiny should have prevented him from being elected if we didn't have our heads up our butts but You know, the back channels are certainly common in American politics.
The problem with this back channel is that according to the Washington Post, and this is under dispute now, Fox News said that it didn't really go down this way.
The New York Times said it couldn't confirm.
The Washington Post sticks by its reporting.
The White House has not denied this.
Kushner apparently asked the Russian ambassador, Kislyak, if the back channel could involve him walking over to the Russian embassy And speaking in person to Kislyak and using basically methods of communication from the Russian embassy back to Vladimir Putin.
Now that is actually suspicious.
So if that's true, that's a problem.
Why would you want to set up what is basically what they call a SCIF, which is a secure A secure compartmentalized area where intelligence can't get in.
Why would you do that from the Russian embassy?
Why would you want it so that the Russian KGB, the FSB, why would you want it so that the FSB could monitor your communications but the NSA could not?
That is suspicious and that's a problem.
But again, that has not been confirmed and there's suspicion that maybe the Russians are leaking that out there just to make trouble.
So we don't have confirmation on that.
It is notable the White House has not formally denied that yet.
Then, on Saturday, Reuters reported Kushner had made undisclosed contacts with Kislyak between April and November of last year.
Its sources said the two discussed terrorism and economic relations between the US and Russia.
On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Kushner was among the voices pushing Trump to fire James Comey.
And Monday, the New York Times reported that Kushner That's a weird report also because Gorkov is not a political actor, he's actually just a financial actor, so that's a very weird way of setting up a back channel.
So it's the way the back channel was set up that's a little bit suspicious, and the fact that they didn't report any of these contacts in the first place, which they could have done in confidential classified settings, Now, the answer to this is basically one of two things.
One is, they were setting up some sort of back channel because they don't trust American intelligence not to leak.
That's quasi-fair, considering that American intelligence has been unbelievably leaky ever since Trump took office.
It's also a little bit suspicious, again, because the people in intelligence, whatever else you say about them, David French makes this point, at least they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, you can't say the same about the FSB.
And if you're talking about people with nefarious beliefs and nefarious intent, I'd go FSB before CIA.
But defense number one is that defense number two is just ignorance that Jared didn't know what he was doing.
He wanted to set up a secure back channel where he couldn't be monitored.
And so he walked into the Russian embassy and wanted something done there.
And he proposed this kind of off the top of his head because he's a dum-dum.
That is possibility number two.
And possibility number three is that there's actual corruption going on.
So here's the way this played out over the weekend.
James Clapper, the former head of the CIA under President Obama, he He has said over and over and over, he has no evidence of collusion between the Trump team and the Russians, but he says a warning light was on regarding Russian collusion.
But just from a theoretical standpoint, I will tell you that my dashboard warning light was clearly on, and I think that was the case with all of us in the intelligence community, very concerned about the nature of these approaches to the Russians.
Okay, so that's the one that the left is leaning on.
The right is leaning on the fact he says he has no evidence of collusion.
Both can be true.
You can be suspicious, and you can also say there's no evidence as of yet.
General John Kelly is the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and he said that no one should be worried about setting up these back channels.
Everybody has back channels.
What's the big deal?
Any way that you can communicate with people, particularly organizations that are maybe not particularly friendly to us, is a good thing.
And again, it comes back to whatever the communication is, comes back into the government and share it across the government.
So it's not a bad thing to have multiple communication lines to any government.
Okay, but then he was asked, well, how about using the Russian embassy?
And he didn't really have a great answer to that.
We'll get to some more reactions to the Kushner story and what I really think is going on in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Legacy Box.
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Well, I'm with Lindsey here.
I don't trust the story.
It's a fantastic product.
Okay, so, meanwhile, so basically the left is saying that Kushner is obviously colluding, and the right is saying, well, no, channels of communication have been a way of doing business for a long time.
Charles Krauthammer has a different take.
He says there's no reason to trust the story in the first place.
I mean, what if it's the Russians who are leaking it just to make trouble?
Well, I'm with Lindsay here.
I don't trust the story.
The Russians are leaking it clearly on a channel they know we're going to pick up.
The Russians are masters of disinformation.
They already have Washington with its knickers in a twist over the Russia conspiracy.
This is an added twist.
Somebody's going to get a hernia here.
I think I'll stop the metaphor.
If you would.
But we have no idea if it's true.
Let's say it is true.
Isn't the problem here, the accusation here, that there was some collusion during the campaign with the Russians?
Well, everyone agrees, if the story is true, it occurred after the campaign, during the transition.
So, unless there's some nefarious connection here, there's no connection to what was alleged to have happened during the campaign.
And lastly, we've had back-channel connections with adversaries for generations.
Henry Kissinger had them with the Russians and the Chinese.
Hillary had a back-channel to establish the opening of negotiations with the Iranians in what ended up as the Iranian nuclear deal.
And Barack Obama with Cuba.
It's absolutely, yeah, and the negotiations with Canada occurred in secret, occurred in Canada in secret, our negotiations with the Cubans.
This happens all the time.
I don't quite understand where's the crime, other than it's another piece that has Russia in the headline, Trump people in the headline, and thus it's supposed to be scandalous.
Show me.
Okay, and I agree with Krauthammer.
I don't see what's scandalous about the story.
It's not really standing up to scrutiny over time.
However, I do want to talk about why it is that Americans are drawing such divergent conclusions from the behavior of the Trump administration, and how Trump can help cure that.
Some of this is the media, and the media are never going to let go of it, but I want to talk about what Trump can do to get past this, because it will dog him regardless of who you blame.
It's going to continue to dog him until we come to some sort of Realistic conclusion on all of this so in order for you to hear about that though You're gonna have to go to dailywire.com right now and become a subscriber so for $8 a month You can go over to dailywire.com And you become a subscriber if you're a daily subs if you're already a normal subscriber you get an annual subscription Then not only will you still have access to the rest of the live show and be part of the mailbag and be part of Andrew Clavin's mailbag see the rest of his live show we're gonna be adding new material and In the coming months, that's going to be really stellar.
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