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July 14, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

55:18

Does Any Of This Stuff Matter? | Ep. 340

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	On Friday, three Palestinian terrorists opened fire on the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount.
	They were shot dead by police, but not before murdering two Druze police officers, one of whom has a three-week-old child.
	One of the terrorists reportedly played dead as an emergency medic tried to help him, then tried to stab the medic before he was shot.
	Naturally, the media's headlines were insanely vague.
	Here's the AP, quote, Two Israeli policemen killed in shooting near Jerusalem Shrine.
	The BBC, quote, Israelis injured in gun attack near Jerusalem Holy Site.
	Al Jazeera, breaking, at least three Palestinians killed in shooting in Jerusalem's Old City.
	Getty Images, Israeli policemen killed three Palestinians in Al-Aqsa Mosque.
	All of this is in keeping with the mainstream media's dedication to imposing moral equivalence where none exists.
	Holy sites in Israel are routinely under assault, not from Jews, but from Palestinians.
	Palestinians have burned Joseph's tomb multiple times.
	They've spent years destroying archaeological evidence of Jewish presence on the Temple Mount itself.
	Whenever Palestinians attack Jews, the official response from the supposedly peaceful Palestinian Authority is to continue funding terrorism, then offer a vague statement about stopping violence on all sides.
	Meanwhile, the Israeli government has already announced it will maintain current policy on the Temple Mount, which favors Muslims to such an extent that Jews are not even allowed to mouth silent prayers on the Temple Mount.
	Again, the holiest site in Judaism.
	In cities like Bethlehem, the number of Christians has dropped from 50% of the population to 12%, and terrorism is still a serious threat.
	In 2002, Palestinian terrorists actually used the Church of the Nativity as a safe haven.
	All of this is demonstrative of the fact that Israeli control of holy sites is the only way to preserve their free and open access.
	Yet the United Nations continues to rip away Jewish history piece by piece, claiming that the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron are not Jewish, but Palestinians' historical site.
	Don't expect the truth to emerge anytime soon.
	The media are dedicated to perpetuating this conflict.
	They see Israel as a colonialist aggressor, No, it's all just a cycle of violence, as always.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	committing themselves to broadly obliterating Judaism's millennia-long pre-existence of Islam.
	No, it's all just a cycle of violence, as always.
	I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	All right, many a thing to get to.
	We have a very busy show today, so we'll give you the latest on all of the Trump-Russia stuff.
	Then we're going to be talking with Mark Levin in just about 15 minutes here.
	He will be stopping by, and that'll be awesome.
	And then, after that, we are going to do the mailbag, so lots to get to on today's show.
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	Okay, so.
	Last night, after all of the Trump-Russia, Don Jr.
	stuff seems to have boiled down a little bit, and everybody seems to have retreated to their respective corners in this fight, a new article from the Associated Press breaks.
	And here's what this article says, quote, A Russian-American lobbyist says he attended a June 2016 meeting with President Donald Trump's son, marking another shift in the account of a discussion that was billed as part of a Russian government effort to help the Republicans' White House campaign.
	Rinat Akhmetshin, Hmm.
	Confirmed his participation to the Associated Press on Friday.
	Akhmetchin has been reported to have ties to Russian intelligence agencies, though he denies ever working as an intelligence agent, which is what you do if you're an intelligence agent.
	He told the AP he served in the Soviet military in a unit that was part of counterintelligence, but was never formally trained as a spy.
	So we just keep learning that more and more people were at this meeting.
	So originally, the meeting never happened.
	Then the meeting happened, but it was just with this crazy lady who wanted to talk about adoption.
	Then it turned out that the crazy lady who wanted to talk about adoption was billed as a Russian government lawyer, Who's going to spill information about Hillary Clinton in order to help Russia's pro-Trump campaign.
	And now it turns out there was a second Russian there with apparent intelligence ties.
	So, just awesome.
	Guys.
	Trump administration, if you want us to believe you on these things, you are going to need to stop omitting details that are not details, right?
	You're going to actually have to come clean about this, and then we'll all let it go.
	Because as I have said a million times, there's no evidence of law violation.
	There's no evidence that actual active collusion took place even beyond this.
	I've been saying this for a while, but I'm still confused by the Democrats' theory of what collusion would constitute.
	Do they think that the Russians went with WikiLeaks and hacked the DNC?
	And then they were giving hints to Trump about what would come.
	I didn't see that at all during the campaign, did you?
	I didn't see any speeches where Trump was like, there's something unbelievable it's gonna drop tomorrow.
	At ten people.
	Get ready.
	And then the next day, WikiLeaks dropped something.
	I didn't see any of that.
	And I didn't even see that the Trump campaign was on top of the content of the WikiLeaks.
	Like they'd been pre-warned and all of a sudden an hour later they'd militarized it and they exploited it.
	What I saw was WikiLeaks was releasing a lot of stuff, and then people like me were group sourcing it, crowd sourcing it, so that we could see what exactly was in there.
	So a lot of this is, again, I still don't see what exactly they're saying the strategy was here.
	That said, Trump is going to have to do a better job of telling the truth on this, and so is Trump Jr., if they want this whole thing to go away.
	So yesterday, President Trump is in France, and it's been a week since he's answered any questions from the press.
	As far as my son is concerned, my son is a wonderful young man.
	He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer.
	Not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer.
	It was a short meeting.
	As far as my son is concerned, my son is a wonderful young man.
	He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer, not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer.
	It was a short meeting.
	It was a meeting that went very, very quickly, very fast.
	Two other people in the room, I guess one of them left almost immediately and the other one was not really focused on the meeting.
	I do think this, I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting.
	It's called opposition research or even research into your opponent.
	Okay, and he continues along these lines.
	He said, you know, it's called opposite research.
	I've had many people, I've only been in politics for two years, I've had many people call up and say, oh gee, we have information on this factor or this person or, frankly, Hillary.
	That's very standard in politics.
	Politics isn't the nicest business in the world, but it's very standard where they have information and you take the information.
	In the case of Don, he listened.
	I guess they talked about, as I see it, they talked about adoption and some things, and then he goes on and he says that it's really Obama's fault because Attorney General Lynch brought in this Natalia Veselnitskaya character, this Russian lawyer, in January.
	As I said yesterday, I think that's a bunch of crap.
	I think the idea that she was brought in as some sort of attempt to Get the Trump team is just silly.
	There's a little bit of an inherent contradiction there.
	Yesterday, Trump did a White House, it wasn't really a press conference, but he did kind of a White House press pool.
	I'm not coming from a place where I want to see all of this blow up on Trump.
	I'm not interested in that.
	said to the press pool, well, I may have known about the meeting at some point, but I didn't know they were going to talk about Hillary.
	Well, that is a difference from what your own people said like two days ago, where they said you had no idea that the meeting was happening.
	So again, if the story keeps changing, I want to believe the Trump administration because I don't actually think anything nefarious happened here.
	I'm not coming from a place where I want to see all of this blow up on Trump.
	I'm not interested in that.
	I think it would endanger any sort of Republican agenda that we have left if Trump were to completely fold and collapse and this whole thing were to end up being a giant scam.
	But he's going to have to do better than this, just from any objective point of view.
	He needs to tell the truth and come clean.
	I was on Steven Crowder's show yesterday and we were agreeing that one of the things you do in politics is when there's something that's quasi-scandalous, you get out in front of it by explaining it before anyone else has a chance to.
	So Barack Obama did this wonderfully in Dreams for My Father.
	There was all sorts of oppo material in there.
	That really could have damaged him, particularly the idea that when he was in college and high school, he did a little blow.
	You remember, he said this in his, uh, I did a little blow.
	Did a little drugs.
	Wasn't a big deal.
	And everybody sort of went, oh, well, you know, what an honest guy.
	As opposed to in 2000, George W. Bush didn't reveal that he'd had a DWI.
	When that came out, then that actually ended up hurting his, his, or DUI.
	That ended up hurting his, um, his credibility right before the election.
	it ended up probably losing him the popular vote, that DUI.
	So the fact is, you have a chance here, if you're the Trump team, to get out in front of this thing and explain what exactly you were doing.
	They're not doing that very well so far.
	Meanwhile, you have the people of the Trump administration trying to say to the media, you need to pay attention to real issues.
	Well, it's hard for people in the media to pay attention to real issues when, again, you keep not telling the truth.
	So Sebastian Gorka, who I think actually usually does a very good job on the media, he's on with Jake Tapper, and he says, listen, why aren't we paying attention to the fact that people are dying in Syria?
	People are dying in Syria, that's why, Jake.
	Why do you have to move on?
	Do you not care about the devastation, the half a million people killed?
	Of course I do.
	Well, we've got life and death issues.
	Russia is killing some of those people.
	We've got life and death issues, and if we can create a ceasefire, which we did, with Israel, with Jordan involved, that's what we have to do.
	We have to move on.
	Okay, so Gorka is trying to say, let's get back to the issues.
	Again, the best way to get back to the issues is to actually bring focus back to the issues as opposed to having all of these silly scandals running around.
	As Charles Krauthammer says, this really is Keystone Cops kind of stuff.
	Well, I'm not impressed by the story about the lawyer.
	I think it's a red herring the size of a whale.
	She was a pawn.
	It doesn't change the central fact in the scandal.
	The scandal is that the email received from an intermediary by Donald Trump Jr.
	said that a Russian government lawyer, the president is wrong, it was not a lawyer, a Russian government lawyer, Would be coming with dirt on Hillary, and that the Kremlin was supporting his campaign, and that the Crown Prosecutor, that's a misnomer, the State Prosecutor in the Kremlin had a trove of documents that they would offer.
	That's the story.
	I don't think it's illegal.
	I don't think anybody is claiming that it's illegal, but it does.
	The one thing it does that would totally undermine is a six-month story from the White House to which I was sympathetic.
	That there wasn't any collusion.
	This was a bungled collusion?
	Okay, when you've lost Krauthammer, Krauthammer has been very skeptical of the Trump-Russia stuff for months at this point, and the White House needs to do a better job of explaining itself.
	Now, meanwhile, one of the great ironies in all of this is that the Democrats are now super, super pissed at Russia.
	So yesterday, Brian Fallon, who's a Hillary spokesperson, he comes out and he says, Mitt Romney was right, we never should have mocked him over the Russia stuff.
	Yeah, well, thank you.
	I appreciate it.
	Five years too late.
	Thanks for all of that, you jerk.
	But this is what's happened, is that politics has become so gross that everyone has now switched positions.
	So you got Paul Begala out there, as Rush Limbaugh used to call him, the forehead out there, saying we should blow up Russia, that we should bomb Russia over this.
	We were and are under attack by a hostile foreign power and they seem to be abetting that hostile foreign power.
	We should be debating how many sanctions we should place on Russia or whether we should blow up the KGB or GSU, GRU.
	I mean, we should be retaliating massively.
	Because, by the way, if I were a Trump supporter, I would want to retaliate massively because it has tainted, it has tainted his victory.
	Okay, and so now all of a sudden we should blow up Russia, right?
	So these are the same people who said it was no big deal in 2012 when Barack Obama wanted to offer flexibility to the Kremlin.
	Now he says we have to blow up Russia, right?
	Nancy Pelosi is saying Russia has desecrated our democracy.
	They've desecrated our democracy.
	Gummy or dentures all moving around all weird and such.
	In the month, again, as we celebrate the courage of our founders, Republicans in Congress have become enablers.
	Okay, we can stop it right there.
	Okay, and then on the right, so now all of a sudden the Democrats are really anti-Russia.
	And on the right, you have people like Tucker Carlson, whose show I enjoy.
	I think Tucker's a really talented guy.
	But Tucker, yesterday, a couple nights ago, he did a debate with Max Boot that I thought was really not intellectually honest in some ways from Tucker, in which Tucker actually says that Russia is not a top five threat to the United States or her interests.
	And then he actually ended up defending Iran.
	He ended up saying, well, when's the last time Iran killed Americans after 9-11?
	And Max Butz said, well, they killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq.
	What we have here is IowaHawk, who's hilarious, IowaHawk on Twitter.
	He says, basically, we're no longer playing in a game with rules.
	We're playing Calvin Ball.
	Like from Calvin and Hobbes, where the rules just shift randomly and suddenly you switch sides.
	And it turns out that you hated Russia five minutes ago, but now you love Russia.
	Or you loved Russia five minutes ago, but now you hated Russia.
	Now, the Republican defense to all of this has been the one that I think Richard Grinnell pointed out.
	Richard Grinnell is a former, I believe he was a former advisor to the UN ambassador.
	And he says, look, everybody outside of Washington, D.C.
	doesn't care about this Russia stuff.
	This is, I think, the bottom line defense being used by a lot of Trump defenders today.
	I'm not sure it washes.
	I think I'm the only one that doesn't live in Washington, D.C.
	here, and people don't care about this.
	There's such a difference between listening and acting.
	I think Donald Trump Jr.
	listened to something that was brought to him.
	Okay, we can stop it there.
	Here's I think the point.
	People on the right want to do this routine where we say, well, if you look at Trump's base, he's not being abandoned by his base.
	He will never be abandoned by his base.
	That's why they're called his base.
	He has like 30% of the population.
	That's great!
	Okay, it's great that Trump has a base of 30% of the population.
	That's good for any Republican president.
	Fantastic.
	Okay, the fact is that when you say that the common man doesn't pay attention to the Russia stuff...
	That's like saying the common person doesn't pay attention to the Hillary Clinton email stuff.
	Democrats said that for an entire election cycle, and it turns out that two things can happen to cause you to lose elections.
	One is you lose your base, but the second is that your base decides that they're not that enthused and they're going to stay home.
	Okay, that's what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
	It wasn't that her base didn't exist.
	It existed and it was larger than Trump's.
	It was that people decided they didn't care enough about her that they were going to go out there and fight for her.
	Sapping the energy from your base is a problem.
	And right now, all of this energy and focus being spent on Russia does sap the base.
	It would be one thing if Trump were pushing some sort of world-shaking policy, and then his people would have something to be enthusiastic about.
	But right now, there's no world-shaking policy.
	The only thing that seems to jazz up the base in the absence of policy is Trump tweeting out stuff about Mika Brzezinski's face.
	Which, maybe that's the strategy.
	Maybe the idea is that if Trump tweets things out about people we don't like, then we get all excited about it.
	But I'm not sure that's enough to win over the people who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump, or to get a lot of people out to vote in 2018.
	You have to motivate your voters somehow.
	And one way you motivate your voters is by saying, here's all the things I've done.
	And the other way to motivate your voters is by saying, I'm a better person than the people who oppose me.
	And when you're in a situation where every day is a new scandal and you can't clearly explain what exactly you're doing, it causes problems for you.
	And again, I don't even think that this is not coming from a place that I think Trump is guilty of anything.
	I don't think there's any evidence of that.
	What I'm saying is, come out, explain what your position is, and you'll save everybody a lot of grief.
	I mean, listen, I would prefer to spend the day talking about the stupidities of Amanda Marcotte and her idiotic feminism, okay?
	But I can't do that because of all this stuff, okay?
	I mean, I can, but I'll have to spend less time on it than I normally would.
	Okay, before we go any further, before we have on Mark Levin in just a second, first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
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	Okay.
	So, uh, we had the opportunity to speak with Mark Levin, the great one, uh, We spoke with him, I guess this would have been yesterday, and so now I want to play the interview.
	It's a brand new book out, and Mark is just terrific.
	I'm a huge fan, so here we go.
	We are so pleased and honored to welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show one of my ideological mentors and a guy who I think brought a lot of people into the conservative movement, Mark Levin, nationally syndicated talk show host, host of Levin TV, chairman of the Landmark Legal Foundation, and of course author of a thousand best-selling books including Liberty and Tyranny.
	His new book is Rediscovering Americanism and the Tyranny of Progressivism.
	I have read it.
	It is, like all of his other books, a treatise on conservatism that everybody needs to read.
	Mark, thanks so much for joining the show.
	Ben, it's a great honor, and let me just say this.
	I get no more joy than when I watch you on TV kicking some liberal around.
	I really do enjoy it.
	Well, I appreciate it.
	Well, I mean, I have to say that I still recommend many of your older books.
	Men in Black is still the go-to book for me to recommend when it comes to judicial activism.
	So I want to talk about your new book, because it really does something that I think we need to do as conservatives right now, which is re-educate Our own side and other people about what our fundamental principles are, because we've gotten so caught up in the partisan bashing, which is fun and necessary, but we've got so caught up in it that sometimes we forget our own central principles.
	What exactly are we fighting for other than mean tweets about the other side?
	And so in Rediscovering Americanism, you talk about what the founders would have thought about today's America, and you basically say that they would have thought that the government is unrecognizable.
	Why do you think that?
	Well, I do believe that.
	And so what I do is I go back to the beginning, the Declaration of Independence, and I look at the principles there.
	Laws of nature.
	When's the last time we talked about the laws of nature?
	I was never taught about the laws of nature.
	I took advanced philosophy and political science and history and all the rest of it.
	Yet this is the core of our founding.
	So where do these principles and ideas come from in the Declaration?
	The founders didn't invent them.
	What they did invent, though, is a country that was based on them, that had never been done before in world history, and hasn't been done since.
	So, when I started thinking about what I was going to write, I just started writing.
	And I didn't have chapters, I wrote the entire book, and then I went back and broke it into chapters as best I could.
	It's really two forces, and that is this force of the enlightenment of individualism, of freedom, of unalienable rights.
	What Aristotle talked about, these universal law and truths, these eternal truths, where did the Founders get this from?
	Well, they tell us.
	Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, and a whole bunch of others.
	And so I went back.
	I've read them before.
	I went back and read them again.
	And I tried to pull information from them to inform people who are interested in what the founders were reading.
	And why is that important?
	Because when you start to read this material, Even though you and I, we love our country, you really even love it more, because you realize, wow, these ideas are absolutely incredible, and they predate this country, and they go back thousands and thousands of years.
	And so I felt if more and more people fully understood what we mean, rather than the surface level, you know, I believe in liberty, and I believe what that means, then more and more people can spread the word.
	Conversely, there's a dark side, and a bleak side, and a miserable side.
	And that's what we call progressivism.
	I don't like the word.
	I wrote a whole book called Emeritopia condemning the word.
	But to be historically accurate, that's their nomenclature.
	So I talk about progressivism and the progressive era.
	And where does that idea come from?
	And who are their philosophers?
	And you have to look at people like Rousseau and Hegel and Marx, among others, and you realize how completely contrary that is to our founding principles.
	And then you look at the so-called intellectuals who advanced those principles in what I call this counter-revolution to the American Revolution, people like Woodrow Wilson and Crowley and Weill and Dewey and so forth and so on.
	And I explain who they are.
	I explain what their ideas are.
	And I quote them.
	And I quote them a lot.
	So people don't think I'm making this stuff up.
	And they attack the Declaration.
	And they attack these principles.
	Even the word liberty.
	The word liberty.
	Folks need to understand that there's some controversy around this word liberty.
	You and I, we mean, you know, the circle of liberty that surrounds each individual human being.
	God-given liberty.
	God-given unalienable rights, like it says in the Declaration.
	Again, they talk about laws of nature.
	Nature is God.
	What does that mean?
	Does that mean you have to be religious?
	No.
	What it means is, though, that there are things bigger than man.
	There are ideas, truths, bigger than man.
	Eternal, universal truths.
	So if you're born in Washington, D.C., or you're born in Paris, France, you know right from wrong.
	You know the golden rule.
	You know you're not supposed to kill people or rob people.
	That's not because they're laws made by man.
	It's because these are things we know and we reason through them.
	And that's what the framers believed when they wrote the Constitution, too.
	The progressives, however, by name, that's why I quote them, attack these principles.
	They attack the Declaration.
	They say the Declaration was a revolutionary document for a revolutionary period, pioneers, throwbacks, but today is today.
	We can't worry about all these mystical ideas, these eternal truths.
	We've got to look at the world as it is today.
	We have to intuit and rationalize and figure out what the truths are and create this society where the experts are trained and professionals are trained to try and address the problems we have today.
	Which leads us to this massive administrative state that's not in the Constitution that passes 4,000 laws a year without our consent.
	They don't care what we think about them.
	They go on whether we have elections or not.
	And this is what I try and get across in the book.
	And also I interlink the principles because they are, which is individualism, freedom, private property rights, and constitutional republicanism.
	You need every one of those elements to be a fulsome human being in order to pursue your interests and so forth.
	When one is under attack, they're all under attack.
	And today they're all under attack.
	Well, Mark, one of the things that is fascinating in your book, and you talk about this with regard to the progressive era, the book, again, is Rediscovering Americanism.
	One of the things that's fascinating is that the progressives, when they first came around, they were actually very open about the fact that they were attacking the founding, that they thought the Declaration of Independence was passe.
	Woodrow Wilson did a whole speech in which he talked about how the Constitution of the United States needed to be put aside and shelved because it was just hampering our ability to get things done.
	Today's left seems to have understood that it is a mistake to attack those terms, and so they're a lot more insidious.
	You see Barack Obama, I thought his second inaugural address was perfect proof of this, where he started actually quoting the founders to justify precisely the opposite of what the founders would have wanted, and that's why I think it's so important that you distinguish what they would have wanted.
	But did the founders' language, I mean I love the founders as much as you do, did the founders' language leave the opening For the left to take it and run with it.
	In other words, when they say things like, we hold these truths to be self-evident, and the left says, well, it's not self-evident to me, but here is a self-evident truth.
	A self-evident truth is that poor people can't take care of themselves, and so we need a welfare state.
	Or, it's a universal law of nature, there will be poor people.
	In other words, did natural law, I know this is a big, kind of abstruse debate between West Coast Straussians and East Coast Straussians, but is there a, didn't the doctrine of natural law that the founders all believed universally, Did that open the door to the possibility of a progressive twisting of that terminology, do you think?
	Well, you know, they put in place this Constitution, which was the governing manifestation of these principles in the Declaration.
	So they thought they did the very best they could to put these checks and balances in place with direct election of the House, the state legislatures electing the Senate, an electoral college process for the president of the United States, judges who would be immune from elections and so forth, and they explained what they did. judges who would be immune from elections and so forth, But to answer that question, there's a letter in the book from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams.
	And these are two old men at this point, and Jefferson is just ruminating about Rome, a little bit about Athens and Rome.
	And he says, you know, obviously I'm paraphrasing, he says, you know, John, I've been thinking about Rome.
	And he said, they had Cicero, great man.
	They had Cato, great man.
	They had Brutus, great, great man.
	These are men who were small R Republicans and who put their lives on the line, challenging the emperor and the system that was in place and the corruption and so forth.
	And he said, if all those men together were able to fashion a government, a Republican government, it would have failed.
	And he said, and the reason is I've been thinking about this because the people lacked virtue.
	There was nothing that could be done to save that society.
	Even if Caesar had been gone, and those three men ruled, and put in place the Republican form of government, it wouldn't have worked.
	It was too late.
	So to answer your question, I don't point to the founders and the language of natural law as the reason why we are where we are.
	We are where we are because of this invidious ideology that has taken place.
	And they have their Alinsky tactics and their Marxist tactics and all these other tactics and so forth and so on.
	But as a people, either we believe in liberty, regardless of what the media say and the demagogues say, either we in our hearts and our soul and our minds want to be a free people or we don't.
	And I would suggest to you that about a third of us want to be a free people.
	About a third of us don't, and about a third of us don't give a damn.
	And so that's about where we are today, I think.
	Which, I mean, the good news is that was exactly the breakdown during the American Revolution and the right guys ended up winning.
	The bad news is that we could certainly lose.
	So with that in mind, Mark, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you if you had to give some advice to President Trump right now on what he could be due to further the cause of the causes you're talking about.
	I'm not sure that President Trump thinks a lot about ideas like natural law or constitutionalism, but He's still, he could be an effective tool for these things if he would do some of the right things.
	So what do you think, you know, President Trump ought to do at this point to promulgate the sorts of values you talk about in rediscovering Americanism?
	And on the same page, you know, is there anyone in Congress that can be trusted to forward these values at all?
	Because obviously Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are doing a pretty shoddy job of it thus far.
	You know, Paul Ryan called me many months ago when he was pushing his nonsense with this Obamacare.
	And I had told his people, I don't want to talk to him.
	Why waste his time?
	But he insisted.
	So I spoke to him.
	First thing he says to me is, I read all your books.
	And I said, but do you digest them?
	Because obviously, you read all the books.
	Do you digest them?
	And I said, and why are you wasting your time calling me?
	And for 45 minutes, we had this chat last time.
	Look, the problem right now with the administration is it's under a full-bore attack, and they're trying to dislodge this president.
	I don't agree with this president on everything, as you well know, and I backed Ted Cruz in the Republican primary.
	There are things I do agree with this president on, including his selection of judges, his attack on the regulatory state, and certain other things.
	But what I cannot accept is the effort by the left to continue to try and destroy this republic and the election results.
	And that's what I see going on with a lot of this Russia stuff.
	Mistakes or no mistakes.
	The left was going to find something and will continue to look for something in order to overturn this election.
	The way they attack the Electoral College, the way they attack all elements of our constitutional system.
	If I were advising the president, I would say, take a closer look at the judiciary, because 40% of these judges were appointed by Barack Obama.
	We have many vacancies, and Schumer is slow-walking them, and he's slowing them down.
	I would pull Mitch McConnell in my office, and I would say, all right, dammit, get rid of that filibuster rule.
	If that's what we have to do, that's what we have to do.
	We're up against this entrenched, radical, leftist, Mob.
	And if they're prepared to burn the place down, I'm not prepared to burn the place down, but the filibuster rule is the filibuster rule, and you're going to have to suspend it if we're going to get anywhere.
	I mean, the Senate, quite frankly, is this absurd entity now, since the 17th Amendment, where we have two people elected directly from the people of each state.
	Why do we need the Senate?
	You know, as a side point, I start to ramble.
	As a side point, I love it when the left says, let's get rid of the Electoral College.
	We don't need any.
	Well, let's get rid of the Senate.
	I mean, the Senate was supposed to represent the state legislatures.
	Why do we have two senators from every state if they don't represent the state legislatures?
	But I think he should focus on that.
	I also think if they don't drop that filibuster, well, he's not going to get much done, and Mitch McConnell's not going to get much done.
	You know, I've been saying we ought to repeal and replace McConnell.
	Because he is going to kill the Republican majority in that Senate.
	So there's no easy answer to that question.
	As to who we can rely on, I can tell you Mike Lee is a very earnest and studious constitutional conservative.
	I think Ted Cruz is the same.
	I think Rand Paul, in most instances, I don't always agree with him.
	is similar, and there's a handful of others.
	The problem is the overwhelming majority are not.
	And the reason is the Republican Party, I think, is largely a progressive party.
	They have never eliminated any departments or any agencies.
	They've never seriously curbed their power or cut their budgets.
	They don't attack the debt when they're in office.
	Look at this Obamacare debate.
	This is a perfect example that I would relate to the book.
	It's not in the book, but we relate to the principles in the book.
	The entire debate is on the progressive field.
	You know, we gotta save Medicaid.
	Well, who's killing Medicaid?
	They mean to expand.
	We've gone from repeal Obamacare to expand Medicaid.
	But most of us aren't on Medicaid.
	That's a welfare program.
	What about the rest of us?
	And so Ted Cruz offers this incredibly radical amendment, which says, OK, look, offer your damn Obamacare policy to insurance companies, but let them offer whatever they want to the rest of us.
	Oh, my God, you can't do that.
	Why?
	Well, it might hurt Frank and Sally and Damien and this one and that one.
	In other words, it's a complete abandonment of liberty of market capitalism and competition that has created this magnificent society, industrial revolution.
	You know, this is the only place where three in the morning you could walk down the street to a 7-Eleven and buy darn near anything you want.
	Or, at ten in the morning, go into a grocery store.
	You've got stuff from all over the country, all over the world.
	Almost everyone can afford it.
	We live like kings and queens could never live two hundred years ago.
	We can get on a jet and fly from one part of the country to another part, really for a fairly inexpensive amount.
	An air-conditioned luxury at six hundred A mile's an hour, 40,000 feet off the ground, and if you want, they'll serve you peanuts while you're doing it.
	I mean, think about what the principles of the founding created, right?
	And think about what they're doing to it, and they attack it all the time.
	So, I gotta tell you, Ben, my perspective on this is, Washington is lost.
	We vote, we do the very best we can.
	This is the design they have created, which is a perversion of what the founders intended.
	We've got to convince each other as citizens, the way the columnist did, of the greatness of this country, of the disaster of the other side, and if we can't win minds and hearts, then we can't win.
	The book is Rediscovering Americanism and the Tyranny of Progressivism, another number one New York Times bestseller from Marklevin, who is the author of just a bevy of them at this point.
	Mark, thanks so much for everything that you do, and thanks so much for joining the show, I always appreciate it.
	It's a great honor.
	I love when you fill in for us.
	My audience loves it, too, and God bless.
	Thanks so much.
	Okay, so there it is, the great one, Mark Levin.
	Now, before we go any further, and I do want to talk about things I like, and I have some pretty epic things I hate, as always today, plus the mailbag, so lots more to get to.
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	They are a great company and Honestly, I think I had a little bit of people.
	Okay, so, uh, as I say, before we go any further, I now have to let you go on Facebook.
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	Okay, since it's such a busy day, I'm going to go straight to things I like and things I hate at this point.
	Okay, so, time for a thing I like.
	So this entire week, thanks to Donald Jr., we have been doing movies and books about fathers who are disappointed in their sons.
	And today we have a classic of the genre.
	I'm speaking, of course, of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
	Uh, this movie is really underrated because Raiders is so good, so people tend to underestimate how good Last Crusade is.
	Temple of Doom is an awful film.
	Like, it's a legitimately bad film.
	Um, and, uh, I mean, Cape Capshaw, man, whew.
	But, but, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a truly wonderful film.
	It's fun, it moves quickly.
	Uh, I know that, uh, The Daily Wire is on Jeremy Boring.
	Prefers it to Raiders.
	I don't think that's allowed.
	I think that you're not allowed to prefer it to Raiders.
	The reason being that the entire predicate for Last Crusade is the presence of Indiana Jones before.
	It stands alone as a film, but you have to know who Indiana Jones is in order for it to work, because the whole premise is that Indiana Jones, as Mathis and I were discussing earlier, the whole premise is that Indiana Jones is the coolest person on the planet, and his father thinks that he's a giant loser nerd.
	That's the entire premise of the film.
	It's really fun.
	Sean Connery, they search for the Holy Grail.
	And I won't give away spoilers like the spelling of particular versions of God's name.
	In any case, here it is.
	Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
	A little bit of the preview.
	We're about to complete a great quest.
	The Holy Grail, Dr. Jones.
	Oh, rats.
	This is it.
	Look.
	The shield is the second marker.
	We found it.
	Indiana Jones is on the quest of a lifetime.
	But for some adventures, one Jones is not enough.
	Dad?
	Junior?
	Don't call me that, please.
	Follow me!
	I know the way!
	A race across three continents.
	And in this sort of race, there's no silver medal for finishing second.
	Hang on, Dad!
	We're going in!
	Into the homeland of the enemy.
	Nazis.
	I hate these guys.
	Our situation has not improved.
	It's awesome, Sean Connery.
	It's really, really fun.
	It's also good to do this because I believe yesterday was Harrison Ford's 75th birthday.
	You're looking pretty good for 75, Harrison.
	I mean, I hope I look as good as Harrison Ford at any point in his life.
	I hope I look as good now as Harrison Ford looks at 75.
	So, well done, Harrison Ford.
	Great movie.
	A lot of fun.
	Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
	And of course it is hilarious that Sean Connery thinks that Indiana Jones is this giant disappointment.
	Okay, time for some things that I hate.
	So the first thing that I hate today is this insane piece by some crazy person named Jodi Allard.
	She's apparently a feminist blogger.
	First of all, all feminist bloggers are, I don't mean to generalize, but they're all crazy.
	So, she actually has a piece today called, the title of it is, I'm done pretending men are safe, even my sons.
	Really.
	And the entire thing is about how her sons are potential rapists.
	She says, I have two sons.
	They're strong and compassionate.
	The kind of boys other parents are glad to meet when their daughters bring them home for dinner.
	They're good boys in the ways good boys are, but they are not safe boys.
	I'm starting to believe there's no such thing.
	She is talking about her own children being potential rapists because of rape culture.
	I wrote an essay in the Washington Post last year, during the height of the Brock Turner case, about my sons and rape culture.
	I didn't think it would be controversial when I wrote it.
	I was sure most parents grappled with raising sons in the midst of rape culture.
	Well, no, actually.
	It turns out that the vast majority of us who grow up as boys in households that have good parents, we're not part of a rape culture because we are taught at a very early age that you're not supposed to rape people.
	Right, that rape is a bad thing.
	I thought this was pretty clear rule of Western civilization for the past thousand years or so.
	Because I didn't think it would be controversial when I wrote it.
	The struggle I wrote about was universal, I thought, but I was wrong.
	My essay went semi-viral, and for the first time, my sons encountered my words about them on their friends' phones, their teachers' computers, and even overheard them discussed by strangers on a crowded metro bus.
	Right, because when you say your sons are potential rapists, that might have some bad ramifications.
	They're your kids, you stupid idiot.
	And then she says it was one thing to agree to be written about in relative obscurity, and quite another to have my words intrude on their daily lives.
	By the way, this is the same lady who wrote a column about how one of her sons was apparently suicidal, with a mother like this.
	And she says, one of my sons is suicidal, so we sat down and watched 13 Reasons Why.
	Are you the stupidest person on planet Earth?
	Okay, have you ever seen 13 Reasons Why?
	Like, half the show is dedicated to why suicide is a choice that is driven by outside forces.
	It's not really in your hands.
	In any case, she says, One of my sons was hurt by my words, although he's never told me so.
	He doesn't understand why I lumped him and his brother together in my essay.
	He sees himself as the good one, the one who is sensitive and thoughtful and who listens instead of reacts.
	He doesn't understand that even quiet misogyny is misogyny and not all sexes sound like Twitter trolls.
	So he seems like a nice kid, but she's calling him a sexist and a rapist.
	He's angry at me now, although he won't admit that either, and his anger led him to conservative websites and YouTube channels.
	Okay, if the son of Jodi Allard is watching this right now, please write me an email.
	I would be happy to have you intern with us here over at The Daily Wire.
	I think that you deserve better than what your mother has provided to you.
	A label as a potential rapist.
	I don't think you're a rapist.
	I don't think you're a potential rapist.
	You seem like a nice person.
	Your mother, however, seems like she is a heritan.
	She says, I teeter frequently between supporting my son and educating him.
	Is it my job as his mother to ensure he feels safe emotionally, no matter what violence he spews?
	Can she give an example of, like, the violence that her son is spewing?
	Is he coming home and going, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape?
	Like, what exactly is he doing?
	Is he coming home?
	And he's just saying, I saw a girl on the bus today.
	You know what I thought?
	I thought, rape!
	I'm pretty sure that's not what happened, but when you're a crazy person, then this is what happens.
	And then she starts talking about her dating life.
	Okay, why do feminists always feel the need to talk about their dating life like anybody cares?
	She says, I joined Bumble recently after a six plus year break from dating.
	I'm not overly interested in dating in the first place, but I'm starved for adult conversation.
	So dating feels like a necessary evil.
	Well, no, there's some of us who have friends.
	I mean, you could do that.
	It's just Bumble, as I explained to my married friends, is like feminist Tinder.
	Women have to initiate contact with men, so there's no inbox full of bleep pics every day.
	But feminist or not, the men are no different from the men anywhere else, and I felt- I quickly felt deflated.
	All men are- Okay.
	I have a general recommendation.
	If you believe that all men or all women are crazy, that everybody's terrible, maybe it's just you.
	Maybe it's just you.
	If every relationship you've ever had has gone bad, maybe it's not because all the people you know are terrible.
	Maybe you suck as a human.
	Okay, and I'm gonna go with that on this one.
	She says, My sons won't rape unconscious women behind a dumpster, and neither will most of the progressive men I know.
	But what all of these men share in common, even my sons, is a relentless questioning and disbelief of the female experience.
	I didn't realize the common female experience was to be raped while unconscious behind a dumpster.
	I know a few females, and I don't know any of them who've been raped while unconscious behind a dumpster, at least none who have told me about it, and if they did tell me about that, I would say, can we find the person and hunt them down?
	Like, that would be my first reaction.
	Can we tell the police?
	And if not, is there a way that we can kill this person and get away with it?
	Like, that seems like the best possi- Like, is that not feminist enough?
	Do I have to do more than that?
	I do not want to prove my pain or provide enough evidence to convince anyone that my trauma is merited.
	Okay, if you accuse someone of rape, you might have to provide evidence of actual rape, You shouldn't just be able to accuse anyone of any crime.
	Totally insane.
	Totally insane.
	Um... Child Protective Services needs to show up, like, right now at this lady's door.
	Uh, thank God.
	It sounds like her sons are getting old enough that they get to leave home.
	Leave now!
	Leave now, okay?
	I will try to find a way to put you up in your own apartment.
	Seriously.
	Okay?
	You deserve to get out of there right now, Jodi Allard's children.
	My God.
	Okay.
	Uh, other thing that I hate.
	So, uh, Conor McGregor is the, uh, he's Irish, correct?
	He's the Irish, uh, MMA star, uh, who is, uh, going to fight Floyd Mayweather.
	And what I mean by fight Floyd Mayweather is get knocked out in all likelihood by Floyd Mayweather because it's not, it's not his sport.
	I mean, he, he's not a boxer, right?
	He's an MMA fighter.
	I've been saying for a couple of weeks that I think the best outcome here is that Conor McGregor sticks around for like eight rounds.
	And then at the very end, when it's clear he's going to lose, he just does a roundhouse kick and to, to Mayweather's face.
	He just violates all the rules.
	It would be the greatest thing in boxing history.
	Roundhouse kick to Floyd Mayweather.
	In any case, apparently, everybody was very angry because Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor were, like, verbally sparring with each other, which is what people do at these events.
	That's the whole reason they have these events.
	They flew in on the same jet, okay, folks?
	It's a show.
	And Conor McGregor said this.
	Floyd is an old, weak bitch.
	Sing it to me.
	I want you to sing it to me!
	And I want you to dance for me!
	You sing it, you dance!
	Dance for me, boy!
	Okay, so this is basically WWE kind of stuff.
	And Fox Sports win Rob Parker, he says, you know what this is?
	This just shows that Conor McGregor is racist.
	Can we call that an international incident?
	I mean, I gotta admit, and I know that's Conor's M.O.
	and how he operates and all that, but it just doesn't feel good to me.
	I have a hard time listening to it.
	I'm not even talking about the curse words.
	Just the tone of it.
	And I'm gonna say this, Skip.
	It comes off as racist to me.
	OK.
	Or may-- come on.
	Come on.
	Does everything have to be racist, or can it just be a couple of buffoons who are yelling at each other?
	I mean, like, really?
	Really?
	Does everything have to be racist?
	Yeah, you're right.
	It's white supremacist Conor McGregor going after Floyd Mayweather in a bout they're going to hold that's kind of a quasi-joke already for $100 million.
	Like, really?
	Really?
	Again, my recommendation is that this fight ends with Conor McGregor actually using MMA rules in violation of the rules, and I think it would just be hilarious if he roundhouse kicks Floyd Mayweather, Mayweather goes down and is knocked out, and then as he's unconscious on the floor, the ref picks up his hand and declares him the victor.
	The greatest specter in boxing history.
	Okay, time for some mailbags, so let us do this.
	Okay.
	So, Jennifer says, Hey Ben, I'm a big fan of your work.
	I wanted to get your opinion and insight on the topic of homeschooling.
	I plan on being a stay-at-home mom and a teacher to my children anyway, so homeschooling is a doable option.
	Do you think it's the best choice when it comes to different schooling options to pick from?
	Options such as homeschool, private school, and public school.
	Um, well, I do not like most public schools.
	There are some good public schools.
	Um, I generally prefer private school to homeschool.
	The only reason being, I think it is important for kids to spend time away from the house.
	But homeschooling is a wonderful option.
	My sister was homeschooled for at least a year.
	I have friends who have been... Alicia Krauss is a friend of mine.
	She's a homeschool kid, a wonderful gal.
	So homeschooling seems to work very well, and it's a better option.
	You have to assess this for your own kids.
	Some kids don't need the interactive time with other kids.
	If you are going to homeschool, obviously you have to take an extra measure to make sure that your kids socialize with other kids.
	But I don't think the chief purpose of school is socialization, as so many people think.
	I think it's education.
	Casey says, I was recently arguing rights don't require the labor of others when someone brought up juries.
	Don't we require the labor of people to be on a jury to fulfill the right to a jury?
	So, yes, the right to a jury is basically an imposed right.
	It's not a natural right.
	I think there are plenty of justice systems that the founders would have embraced.
	I don't think they believe that there is a quote-unquote natural God-given right to a jury.
	They believe there's a right to due process of law.
	In other words, when you have a state that is established for the purpose of protecting rights, there has to be some sort of process of law by which they can convict you.
	You know, the same question can be asked about court-appointed attorneys.
	The idea of these kind of rights, this is a sort of positive right, the right to have a jury because you are imposing on others.
	But as I say, that is only because the state is now invading your normal rights and so we have to protect those rights with some sort of system.
	So it's not the same as say a right to somebody else's labor for Well, I mean, I think that's a pretty good juxtaposition.
	I think that if you teach your kids how ridiculous that is, that's a good way to do it.
	But we have to laugh at this.
	We have to mock this.
	Because it is insane.
	that teaches kids they can't pick their nose, but they can pick their gender or punch anyone who disagrees with them.
	Well, I mean, I think that's a pretty good juxtaposition.
	I think that if you teach your kids how ridiculous that is, that's a good way to do it.
	But we have to laugh at this.
	We have to mock this because it is insane.
	And we tend on the right to do this routine where we don't want to offend people because we on the right tend to be more polite than our counterparts on the left.
	And so we don't want to offend.
	We don't want to be the jerks.
	But I'm sorry, it is absurd that you are suggesting that people can pick their gender, but they can't pick their nose.
	I'm Vashti, which is, that's a cool name, I haven't heard that, I mean, really, the only time I've seen that is in the Book of Esther.
	As a conservative college student, I don't think that you're violating your principles.
	I mean, you're going to pay those loans back.
	I think that the federal government is violating its principle for being by offering the loans.
	I'm not sure that you're violating it by taking the loans when you are repaying your loans, meaning that you are doing what you are supposed to do.
	Now, if you vote in favor of the loans, that's a different thing.
	If you vote because of the loans, that's a different thing.
	But no, I mean, I took federal loans.
	It would make me a hypocrite to say that other people can't take federal loans.
	I think the entire concept of federal loans shouldn't exist.
	But that's sort of like saying, I don't think that I should have to pay $800 to the city.
	I don't think that in order to start a business in the state of California, I should have to pay an $800 licensing fee.
	But I do it because I have to start a business.
	Okay, well, when they remove the law, then I'll do that, and I'll fight to remove the law.
	I'll fight to remove the federal student loans.
	Gio says, "Hey Ben, do you believe the secret to success and happiness is doing what you love for a living?
	Thank you." I think that there is a difference between doing what you love for a living and doing what you are capable of doing for a living.
	So, I do think that one of the secrets to happiness is doing something that you love, but I think that you should try and define what you love by something you're good at.
	Like, in other words, if what you love to do for a living is play basketball and you're really bad at basketball, I don't think that's a recipe for happiness.
	I think that you should be, you should be, in order to determine Do something that you love and are good at.
	You love many things.
	Find something that you love and are good at, because then you will be happy.
	If you pick something you love and are bad at, you will be upset, because you'll feel the world is screwing you.
	Asa writes, Dear Ben, Why is climate change such a lefty issue?
	I've heard you explain the primary principle undergirding the left's policies is equality of outcome, not equal opportunity.
	Does this principle undergird the policies the left pursues on climate change, and if yes, how so?
	Okay, so Asa, the answer is yes.
	It is the remedies for climate change that are a problem for the right.
	So there are a lot of people on the right Including, there's a guy named Omri, I'm forgetting his last name now, Omri Kass?
	Anyway, he has a very good piece about what climate change is, if it exists.
	My own opinion on climate change, by the way, is that climate change does exist, that global warming is happening.
	We don't know to what extent it's happening, but even if we accept the general IPCC, which is flawed, but we accept the general intergovernmental panel commission on climate change, even if we accept their estimates, that does not mandate that we should all basically shut down our cars, and it certainly doesn't mandate a great wealth redistribution.
	My feeling is the best answer for climate change is the same answer that we've given to virtually all other environmental issues, which is you regulate where there are emissions that cannot be prevented any other way, but mostly the market solves this kind of stuff.
	I mean, the fact is that your car has gotten more efficient.
	It hasn't gotten more efficient because of CAFE standards, it's gotten more efficient because it's cheaper for people to drive more efficient cars, and because those cars are better.
	People are buying Teslas right now because they're cool.
	So I think that market forces can be used In order to push toward a more environmentally friendly world.
	I don't think that, the same thing is true of nuclear power.
	I don't think that you need governmental regulation.
	The left seems to start from the premise that they want governmental regulation and then they reason their way backward.
	Dylan says, Dear Ben, what is your stance on people who burn election posters from parties they disagree with?
	Not sure if this occurs in the US, but here in Northern Ireland around 12th of July there are bonfires burned with nationalist party election posters featured prominently on the scrap to be burned.
	I don't think it should be considered a crime to burn any sort of message.
	I don't think it should be a crime to burn the flag.
	I think flag burning is evil, but I don't think that it should be a crime to burn it.
	I think lots of things are evil, but I'm not enough of a governmental advocate to suggest that we should make everything I don't like illegal.
	Capitalism involves voluntary exchanges between employer and employee.
	Yeah, I notice how when I try to get a raise, the employer typically asks, what do you think you're worth?
	While you have little to no background of what the average performer receives in the company.
	Do companies or individuals have the means to mitigate this so that employee can get paid what they're worth?
	Well, you decide what you're worth, right?
	I mean, this is the market assumes better flow of information.
	But if there's worse flow of information, you still have the capacity to bargain.
	Right, so yes, would your life be better?
	Would your life be easier if you could determine what the other people in your company are being paid?
	Sure, your life would be better and easier, but it is not the obligation of the company to give you that information.
	This is why you should go talk to your friends and get a general idea, and why people should refuse to sign contracts that say this.
	I mean, as a worker, you can say, listen, if there's a confidentiality provision about my pay, I don't want to sign that.
	I think most companies are probably not thinking that's a huge deal.
	The fact is that you can get a pretty good metric of what you ought to be paid by just doing a little simple research online, I think, as a general rule.
	Ryan says, what would Trump have to do during the next three-ish years to get your vote for him in 2020?
	Well, he'd need to actually promulgate some policy.
	So my standard for Trump has always been that I need him to actually promulgate conservative policy, and I need him not to wreck the conservative brand.
	Those are my two big things.
	I think that he has done some heavy work in hurting the conservative brand.
	He's pushed Judge Gorsuch, which is a good policy, but Yeah, let's put it this way.
	It's a shorter putt for him to win my vote in 2020 than it was for him to win my vote in 2016.
	The reason being that in 2016, I still thought that a lot of the damage that would be done by the Republican Party by him being president would be short-term damage and long-term damage.
	He's already the president now, so a lot of that damage has already been done.
	It's already in the past, right?
	A lot of the things that he's done to the conservative brand have already been done, so now we are working from a reality where the conservative brand is what the conservative brand is.
	What that means is that, is he going to damage things much further, or is he going to make things better?
	And that's the question when it comes to 2020.
	Okay, so we will be back here next Monday.
	We have a surprise for you from Daily Wire that should be coming on Sunday.
	So keep an eye out for it.
	It is going to be fully awesome and ridiculous and crazy, as everyone at the office can attest.
	It is an insane thing that we are going to put out on Sunday.
	I think you will enjoy it.
	So check that out.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

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