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July 26, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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Begun The Sessions War Has | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 347
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Richard Dawkins is no friend to conservatives.
The atheist author spent much of his life deriding Judaism and Christianity.
He once said that an atheist is, quote, just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the Golden Calf.
Dawkins says that even moderate religious people, quote, make the world safe for extremists.
He's far to the left on politics.
He's pro-abortion, a supporter of the Labour Party and Liberal Democratic Party in Britain.
But!
He is also smart enough to recognize that radical Islam is a greater threat to human life than Christianity or Judaism.
Dawkins explains, quote, "...I have criticized the appalling misogyny and homophobia of Islam.
I have criticized the murdering of apostates for no crime other than their disbelief.
Muslims themselves are the prime victims of the oppressive cruelties of Islamism." Such language, of course, makes him a pariah among leftists.
This week, Dawkins was scheduled to speak at an event with KPFA in Berkeley, California.
All went swimmingly, until leftists realized Dawkins had said some untoward things about Islam.
Then they canceled the speech, citing his quote-unquote abusive speech.
They explained, quote, We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn't know he had offended and hurt, in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people.
KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech.
This is no shock.
The same left that barred Dawkins from his Berkeley event cheered this week, while Palestinian Arabs riot over metal detectors at the Temple Mount.
Those leftists proclaim that the true obstacle to peace in the Middle East isn't Palestinian-Arab violence, it isn't Palestinians who stab Israeli Druze police officers on the Temple Mount, or Palestinians who invade homes and slaughter old men and women, or the Palestinians in government who cheer, honor, and financially support such behavior.
Nope.
The problem is the Jews.
The same left that blames metal detectors for murderous assaults and Richard Dawkins for offending Islam makes excuses for radical Muslim and Women's March organizer Linda Sarsour, who has called for apostate Muslims to have their genitals removed, who says that Zionists cannot be feminists, and who stands up for terrorists and terrorist supporters.
So, why does the left seek to support radical Islam so ardently?
Well, because the left believes that the quickest way to destroy Western civilization is no longer class warfare, but multicultural warfare.
Simply ally with groups that hate the prevailing system and work with them to take it down.
Then, the left will build on the ashes of the old system.
In this view, Dawkins is an opponent.
How can left recruit Muslims to fight the same system if Dawkins is busy alienating them?
They support the Palestinian terror regime.
How can that colonialist outpost, Israel, be defeated without a little blood?
They applaud Sarsour.
She's an ally, so that means she must be backed.
Alliance with nefarious forces calls your own morality into question.
KPFA has a lot more to answer for than Dawkins.
But the left will never have to answer such questions so long as they focus in on their common enemy, a supposedly conservative establishment that must be fought with any tool at their disposal.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so we have a lot to talk about in Trumpville today.
So, President Trump is obviously attacking Attorney General Sessions.
Sessions is saying that he is not going to go without being pushed out the door.
We'll talk about what that means.
Plus, the Senate Republicans are finally going to vote on some form of Trumpcare.
We don't know exactly what that is yet, but it appears that the vote to proceed on some form of Obamacare change is going to happen, so we'll talk about that as well.
Democrats in confusion.
Plus, Trump talks to a bunch of children at the Boy Scouts, and it goes weird.
We'll talk about all those things, but before we do that, first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Legacy Box.
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Okay, so President Trump is very, very, very angry.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
He has decided to make Jeff Sessions the focus of his ire.
Why?
Well, not because Jeff Sessions is doing a terrible job.
In fact, by most accounts, he's doing a pretty good job, particularly on immigration.
If there's anything that can be said about Jeff Sessions is that he's too ardent with regard to the civil forfeiture, the attempt to grab property after an arrest but before a conviction.
Right?
There he's wrong.
But on everything else, Jeff Sessions has been doing a pretty good job as Attorney General.
I haven't seen any problems with Jeff Sessions.
But Trump sees one big problem.
And that is Attorney General Sessions obviously has not done enough to protect Donald Trump.
Trump has gotten to the point where he is starting to see everything in terms of how it affects him personally.
Not his presidency.
Him personally.
And so this morning he unleashed a series of nasty tweets about Jeff Sessions.
So he tweeted, Quote, Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign quietly working to boost Clinton.
So where is the investigation, AG?
And then he said, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a very weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes.
Where are emails and DNC server and Intel leakers?
And then he said, problem is that the acting head of the FBI and the person in charge of the Hillary investigation, Andrew McCabe, got $700,000 from Hillary for life.
So now he's attacking the deputy attorney general, sorry, the acting head of the FBI.
So just to put this all in perspective, in the first six months of the Trump administration, he's fired Mike Flynn supposedly for lying to Vice President Pence.
That's not really why that happened.
He's fired the FBI Director James Comey and said openly that it's because of Comey's handling of the Russian stuff.
He is now threatening Attorney General Sessions.
He has threatened his Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in that New York Times interview last week.
He has attacked the acting head of the FBI and he's attacked the special counsel.
So what do all these people have in common?
They're all involved in the Russia investigation.
All the people who he's capped or has said that he wants to cap, he is now put to the side.
They're all involved in the Russia investigation, which says one of two things.
Either that Trump is a narcissist when it comes to this Russia thing.
He's really bothered by it.
It bothers him in a significant way.
And he just wants to end it by getting rid of anyone who has failed to shut it down or who continues to pursue it.
Or he has something to hide.
Those are really the only two choices.
There is no choice three.
So either this is pathological narcissism, or this is Trump has something to hide.
Now, I tend to believe it's pathological narcissism.
And again, I've said before, my entire theory here is that Trump really hasn't done anything wrong, and he's ticked that everybody isn't just stopping this nonsense already, and so he wants to fire everyone.
Yeah, let's be straight about Jeff Sessions here, okay?
Jeff Sessions is not responsible for this.
Jeff Sessions only recused himself because in his own testimony he said that he never had a meeting with Russians.
It turned out he had a meeting with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, so he recused himself.
That happened long after he was nominated and approved For the position, the actual recusal, and there's no way for him to know that this stuff was really going to come up, so it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Plus, Jeff Sessions is the lifeline.
He is the hard wiring into the nationalist populist movement that Trump likes to talk so much about and from which he draws his support.
Sessions is the font head for the anti-immigration movement that Trump supposedly represents.
So this doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
So there are a few things that I want to say about all of this.
First of all, Scaramucci, the Anthony Scaramucci, the new chief of staff, he's not chief of staff yet, but he may well be, the head of communications for Donald Trump, he was on Hugh Hewitt's show this morning, and he basically said, yes, Trump wants Jeff Sessions to resign.
Here's what the mooch had to say.
Uh, the President's been tweeting this morning, I'm sure you're aware of that.
Yes, I am aware of it.
Why not just fire Jeff Sessions?
Well, listen, I mean, you know, I think the President has a certain style, a certain skill set.
He's obviously frustrated.
I said yesterday, I think, to Sarah Murray, maybe the two of them to get together, my guess is the President doesn't want to do that.
Um, and so I think it's gonna, I think him and Jeff, or sorry, Attorney General Sessions need to work this thing out.
It's clear the President wants him gone.
I have an enormous amount of respect for the Attorney General, uh, but I do know the President pretty well, and if there's this level of tension in the relationship that that's public, um, you're probably right, but I don't want to speak for the President on that because he's a Cabinet official, and I sort of think that has to be between the President of the United States and the Cabinet official.
So Scaramucci says, I don't know what he's going to do, but yeah, he sort of should go.
So there are a bunch of questions here.
Number one is why Trump doesn't just fire him.
There is a rumor today that Trump was doing this just because this is what Trump does, meaning that he got rid of Comey in the most humiliating way possible.
He fired him while he was on the West Coast, speaking to a bunch of FBI cadets.
And then he saw it on TV.
So now he's doing the same thing to Jeff Sessions.
Again, the problem here is that Sessions himself is pretty popular with the right wing of the Republican Party, especially because of immigration issues.
And that reputation is well-deserved.
So, let's talk about some of the problems here.
Number one, President Tough Guy McBallsy over here, if he's going to fire Sessions, he should just fire Sessions.
So he made his entire career on, I'm going to fire people, but instead he's giving Sessions the runaround.
Why?
Because he wants Sessions to resign.
He wants Sessions to do it on his own.
He doesn't want to fire Sessions because for some reason Trump thinks that if he openly pressures Sessions to quit, and then Sessions quit, the blowback won't come back to Trump.
That somehow Sessions will be blamed for that.
I don't know where he's getting that idea, but it's foolish.
If Sessions quits at this point, no one's going to blame him.
Everybody's going to blame Trump.
Second point, this is a very dangerous, it's a very dangerous precedent that's being set by the Trump White House, and that is that if you're not obsequious enough to President Trump, or if you don't spend your entire career capital trying to support President Trump in every single way, then he should throw you out.
Scaramucci said something else in this Hewitt interview.
He said, you know, Eric Holder acted as a goalie for President Obama.
We need somebody who's going to act as a goalie for President Trump.
Okay, that's really not the job of the Attorney General, and just because Eric Holder did the wrong thing doesn't mean that Jeff Sessions should either.
Scaramucci, of all people, shouldn't be talking about this, considering he tweeted just a few months ago that he was in favor of Sessions recusing himself.
But there's this kind of nasty tenor that's come to the Trump White House, which is, if you don't scrape and bow before Trump obsequiously enough, then he's going to behead you, Joffrey-style.
Really, really unpleasant, right?
Sean Spicer wasn't just ousted, he was humiliated.
Trump refused to take him on that tour of the Vatican, even though Spicer is a lifelong Catholic, a very ardent Catholic, and wanted to meet the Pope, and Trump left him behind.
Yesterday, Trump was speaking to the Boy Scouts.
He brought virtually all of the Eagle Scouts in his administration to this event.
He left Jeff Sessions at home.
Third point here.
Trump right now is supposed to be pushing healthcare.
We'll talk about Trump pushing healthcare in just a minute.
Immediately after he tweeted all this stuff about Jeff Sessions, he fired off a bunch of tweets.
He tweeted, Well, that should be the entire messaging of the day, should it not?
And that way, when the Senate votes, as it did, I believe, to proceed, on a motion to proceed on some form of Trumpcare bill, then he can claim victory.
He can say, look, it was me, right?
Instead, all the headlines today are going to be about Jeff Sessions, and that is Trump's own fault.
That is Trump's own fault, and there's no way to escape that.
Okay, another point here, and this is the big one, I think, and the reason that you're seeing a split among conservatives about Trump doing this stuff.
Like, there wasn't a big split among conservatives about Trump firing Comey.
I said that Trump should have fired Comey.
I was fine with Trump firing Comey.
I just thought that his excuse for doing so was stupid and problematic.
But firing Comey itself, I didn't see any problem with.
Firing Sessions, a lot of people, including Breitbart, which has been a cheerleader for Trump all the way through.
Brit Hume, who really likes Trump on Fox News.
All the people on the right are now saying Sessions is a bridge too far.
There's a reason for this.
And the reason for that is that Jeff Sessions is a deeply conservative guy when it comes to immigration.
So, story time.
A few years back, I think it was about three years ago, there was a Horowitz Freedom Center event.
And this Horowitz Freedom Center event essentially included a dinner.
And after the dinner, there was a late-night drinking session.
It was basically a bunch of people hanging around.
By the end of the night, the only people who were hanging around were me and Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, and Coulter.
That was the entire drinking session.
It was four of us, and we were sitting around.
The only topic that was discussed the entire evening was immigration.
And it was very clear that this was the working group for what would become the Trump administration.
In fact, later, Steve Bannon, my former boss over at Breitbart, would apparently commission a white paper in 2015 from Coulter and Miller.
And Miller at that time was an aide to Sessions, and Sessions for an immigration policy.
And so a lot of the ideas that made Trump president, a lot of the immigration ideas that made Trump president came directly from Jeff Sessions.
In fact, Jeff Sessions said to me at the time, at this dinner, he said that he was looking for a candidate to support In the Republican race who would embrace his immigration program, Trump was that man.
In fact, Sessions is one of the first people on board with this whole thing.
Sessions is one of the first people to endorse Trump, right?
Much earlier than anybody else.
And now, Trump is turning around crapping all over him because he doesn't like what he's doing on Russia.
What's happening right now is basically everybody who wants policy inside the Trump administration is being sidelined in favor of people who show personal loyalty to Trump.
So, Spicer, who wants policy, out.
Reince, who wants policy, sidelined.
Bannon, who wants policy, sidelined.
Sessions, who wants policy, sidelined.
All the people who actually want conservative policy currently are being sidelined in favor of Jared Nivanka, personal loyalty to Trump.
Scaramucci, personal loyalty to Trump.
Gary Cohn, personal loyalty to Trump.
A lot of people who are really Democrats, who have a lot of personal loyalty to Trump, and Trump is surrounding himself with those people, getting rid of Sessions would be a disaster area, because that basically means the only person he's going to appoint as Attorney General is somebody who's going to vow to fire to him, who's going to vow to fire the special counsel.
If the special counsel is fired, you're going to see all hell break loose in Washington, D.C.
It doesn't mean impeachment, at least not right now.
It does mean that you're going to see a lot of kickback from Senate Republicans, and Trump's agenda completely stalls.
Final point on the Sessions thing, and then I want to talk about some other topics.
President Trump, in this tweetstorm about Sessions, once again, he uses Hillary Clinton as his excuse.
I grow tired and weary of this routine.
Okay, Hillary Clinton was vanquished by President Trump.
Thank you, President Trump.
Thank you for that.
We don't have Hillary Clinton as our president, and for that, I am eternally grateful.
Now, she's gone.
Stop it.
Enough.
Okay, she's not important anymore.
Okay, the fact is that you're not angry with Jeff Sessions because of Hillary Clinton.
Just like you weren't angry at FBI Director Comey over Hillary Clinton.
This is all just red meat for rubes, okay?
People who believe that President Trump is actually angry at Jeff Sessions over Hillary Clinton, that's nonsense, okay?
It was President Trump who instructed Jeff Sessions and everybody who's investigating to leave the Clinton family alone back in December.
This is public.
Okay, there was no secret about this.
So this notion that he just throws out Hillary Clinton's name, and we're all supposed to just bow before his wishes, it's really silly.
Okay, Hillary has nothing to do with this.
Hillary may well deserve to be prosecuted.
I'd be fine with prosecuting Hillary Clinton, although it'd be very difficult now that Trump has basically tainted the entire jury pool of the United States.
But, you know, I'm fine with that.
But, To pretend that that's what this Sessions thing is about?
That is just an excuse.
Everybody knows that the real thing that's happening here is he's ticked that Sessions won't act as his shield on Russia, and so he's acting out against Sessions.
This is a pretty stark litmus test for a lot of conservatives.
Are you going to stand with the president getting rid of an actual conservative on his key issue, immigration, inside his cabinet for no reason other than personal pique?
There is no other reason.
It's just he's mad, okay?
Are you gonna stand with that?
Because Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump?
Or are you gonna say, Mr. President, You want to get good policy done?
We do too.
You want to see this Russia investigation thing come to a good close?
We do too.
You can't fire the Attorney General who helped get you there and who has been the stalwart on the key issue in your campaign.
Again, it's not me saying this alone.
Even his greatest allies, like Breitbart, are saying this sort of thing.
So this is not anything new, but again, I think that it goes to a character problem that Trump has, and that is that he's so ensconced in his own narcissism, he's so pathologically narcissistic, that he's willing to fire even the people who are his friends.
The only friends he has left are family at this point, and that's really not a good way to run the operation.
Sessions, for his own sake, he says, I'm not leaving.
He says, if Trump wants to fire me, he's going to have to fire me.
Which, by the way, is a good conservative move.
If Trump wants to own this, let Trump own it.
Don't let him off the hook.
Make Trump fire Jeff Sessions.
We need Jeff Sessions in place.
Not for civil asset forfeiture, but we need Jeff Sessions in place for immigration.
We need Jeff Sessions in place for application of the law.
We need him in place to strengthen the police.
There are a thousand reasons that Jeff Sessions at AG is a good thing for the conservative movement, but, you know, him being forced out by Trump is just a disaster.
Okay, so I want to talk about Trump at the Boy Scouts, which is actually more hilarious than it was upsetting.
The left is very upset about this.
I want to talk about why I was laughing at it, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Mack Weldon.
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All right, so when Trump isn't busy trying to fire his Attorney General for no apparent reason, Trump is speaking with the Boy Scouts.
But I want to get to that in just a second.
First, I want to discuss what's happening on the floor of the Senate.
So the latest on the floor of the Senate is that the Senate is going to vote on a motion to proceed We don't know what that something is.
We don't know what exactly it's supposed to be.
We do know that there's a good shot that 51 senators are going to vote in favor of some sort Of thing, right?
They're gonna vote in favor of some sort of thing.
So there's two things that have to happen.
One, 51 senators have to vote on a motion to proceed.
That means that they will take up the House version of Obamacare replacement.
And then, we actually have to pass a bill.
So, the key vote is this one.
Because once you get past that, then it's just a question of hashing out the details.
Now, it could still fall apart.
It could be the details suck.
We don't know the answer to that.
But Trump is bringing on the pressure.
And this is where Trump is doing something good, okay?
This is what Trump should be focused on.
So yesterday, Trump was out there stumping on Obamacare and he said Obamacare is death.
Okay, fair enough.
Here he is.
President Trump using the power of his presidential bully pulpit against the backdrop of the Blue Room and the faces of what the White House calls the victims of Obamacare.
It was a big, fat, ugly lie.
With doom and gloom declarations, the president railed against the law of the land, not surprisingly swiping at Democrats.
They run out, they say death, death, death.
Well, Obamacare is death.
Okay, so that's fair enough from President Trump, and he was pushing very hard.
He was complimenting Senator McCain, who he's not always been warm with.
Senator McCain just showed up on the Senate floor and gave a speech that is being hailed by a lot of people with regard to President Trump and with regard to the Republican handling of Obamacare in the House or in the Senate.
And I'm sure we'll have more clips of that tomorrow for you because it's sort of a big moment.
Trump also is attempting to push senators.
He says the senators who don't vote for whatever this is, we don't know what this is yet, but who don't vote for this own Obamacare.
Here's his push.
They want to forget about the countless Americans they've hurt and the many that they are continuing to hurt every day by refusing to help us replace Obamacare.
For the last seven years, Republicans have been united in standing up for Obamacare's victims.
Remember?
Repeal and replace.
Repeal and replace.
They kept saying it over and over again.
Every Republican running for office promised immediate relief from this disastrous law.
We as a party must fulfill that solemn promise to the voters of this country to repeal and replace what they've been saying for the last seven years.
But so far, Senate Republicans have not done their job in ending the Obamacare nightmare.
Okay, so, you know, Trump putting the Pressure on his fellow Republicans in the Senate.
McCain basically called for bipartisanship.
And we will see if he votes in favor of the motion to proceed.
So we'll give you all the updates on that as it comes in.
Trump is doing the right thing in putting pressure on the Senate to take this up.
The big question is going to be, what's in that bill?
What's in that bill?
It is not sufficient just to pass any bill.
And I know that you're going to hear a lot from Republican partisans today saying, well, they have to vote for something.
Okay, well it depends on what the something is.
Do you want to own Obamacare and put the GOP stamp of approval on it?
Right now what they're talking about is something they're calling skinny repeal.
Okay, which is again, just their branding effort is spectacular.
Skinny repeal would apparently be getting rid of the individual mandate.
I don't think it gets, I don't think it reinforces the new version of the mandate, but getting rid of the individual mandate, getting rid of some of the taxes.
We're getting rid of the employer mandate, so it gets rid of the funding mechanism for Obamacare, in other words.
That would exacerbate the death spiral, and then the Republicans would have to come up with some new legislation to deal with the fallout from that, which presumably they would do in another bill after they pass this one.
So that's not a terrible strategy, as far as it goes, but we'll talk more about that.
Plus, Trump spoke at the Boy Scouts and it was pretty hilarious.
We'll talk about that in just a second, but for that you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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Okay, so yesterday, President Trump spoke at the Boy Scouts, and he's getting all sorts of flack from the left for speaking at the Boy Scouts because Trump went there, and it was pretty ridiculous.
He was like, He treated the Boy Scouts like it was a typical political rally.
Chuck Todd was particularly sad.
Chuck Todd tweeted out, Okay, so, before I begin with the critique of Trump, let me just say this.
I have grounds to stand on in critiquing Trump with regard to the sacrosanct nature of the Boy Scouts.
What a mess.
Totally unfair to these kids.
Okay, so before I begin with the critique of Trump, let me just say this.
I have grounds to stand on in critiquing Trump with regard to the sacrosanct nature of the Boy Scouts.
That's because I haven't said that the Boy Scouts should be mandatorily forced to open to girls.
The entire left has said that the Boy Scouts should allow transgender boys, meaning girls who believe they are boys, into the Boy Scouts.
And the entire left has suggested that the Boy Scouts should be removed of their IRS 501c3 status if they do not allow gay scoutmasters and gay scouts.
So you need people talking about their sexuality in the Boy Scouts now.
So the left doesn't have any ground...
When they talk about the sacrosanct Boy Scouts, we must protect them.
Okay, I'm not gonna take that crap from a bunch of people who've been trying to destroy the Boy Scouts for nigh on two decades.
Okay, that stuff ain't gonna wash.
Anyway, so Trump does speak in front of the Boy Scouts, and it is pretty wild.
So, first of all, the Boy Scouts were chanting that they love Trump, and people in the media can't understand this.
Okay, maybe the reason for that is a lot of the people who are in the Boy Scouts have evangelical parents, come from conservative areas.
Here's some tape of the Boy Scouts chanting that they like Trump.
By the way, just a question.
Did President Obama ever come to a jamboree?
Okay, so there's Trump being Trump, doing his rally routine, going out there and politicizing.
He can't just accept the praise, he has to rip on President Obama at the same time.
Then, it is really funny, he says to Tom Price, who's Health and Human Services Secretary, this is in front of a bunch of children, okay?
There's people who are aged 12 to 18, that if Tom Price doesn't get the vote on Trumpcare, then he'll fire him.
Which is just great to threaten to fire everyone in your cabinet in the same way.
Good process here.
By the way, you gonna get the votes?
He better get him.
He better get him.
Oh, he better.
Otherwise, I'll say, Tom, you're fired!
I'll get somebody.
Okay, so he threatens to fire him, and then he threatens Jeff Sessions.
So this is really kind of garbage.
This is, you know, a garbage way to act.
So, it's a bunch of children, remember?
And President Trump just shows up, and Jeff Sessions is an Eagle Scout, by the way, right?
He's not invited to this, right?
All the other Eagle Scouts are there, not Jeff Sessions.
And he implies that Jeff Sessions is disloyal to him.
Okay, so he's reading the Boy Scout Oath.
Okay, the Boy Scout Oath is sort of the opposite of Trump's personal creed of duty.
And so he starts reading it, and he just breaks in in the middle to make a snide reference about Jeff Sessions.
Unbelievable.
Great Boy Scouts become great, great Americans.
As the Scout Law says, A scout is trustworthy, loyal.
We could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.
Okay, and then the rest of the crowd continues on with the oath, because they all know the oath.
I love that he's ripping Jeff Sessions in the middle of that.
That's pretty amazing.
So, well, well done.
Just well done.
By the way, breaking news from the Wall Street Journal.
Trump is now saying to the Wall Street Journal that Sessions, who was the only senator to endorse him in the primaries, did so because of big crowds, not loyalty.
Which is insane, okay?
I know Senator Sessions.
That's absolute garbage.
And here is Trump ripping him in front of a bunch of children.
The best moment of this was where Trump Who legitimately at this point is starting, like, in front of a bunch of kids.
If I were a kid, this would sound like my daughter and grandfather, you know, drunk around the campfire, starting to tell a story about the old days.
Here is Donald Trump telling children, remember these are kids, a story about life and developers in New York City.
What in the world?
And he said, yes, I would.
He so badly wanted — he got bored with this life of yachts and sailing and all of the things he did in the south of France and other places.
You won't get bored, right?
You know, truthfully, you're workers.
You'll get bored, too.
Believe me.
Of course, having a few good years like that isn't so bad.
But what happened is He bought back his company, and he bought back a lot of empty land.
And he worked hard on getting it zoning, and he worked hard on starting to develop.
And in the end, he failed, and he failed badly.
Lost all of his money.
He went personally bankrupt.
And he was now much older.
And I saw him at a cocktail party.
And it was very sad, because the hottest people in New York were at this party.
It was the party of Steve Ross.
Steve Ross, who was one of the great people he came up and discovered, really, founded Time Warner.
And he was a great guy.
He had a lot of successful people at the party.
What is he talking about?
And I was doing well, so I got invited to the party.
I was very young.
What in the world?
And all the kids are like, um, Grandpa, You're hearing a... What?
What?
My favorite part of this speech is where he said that we beat Hillary Clinton thanks to people getting out and voting like you.
Most of the people there are under 18.
So if we're going to investigate voter fraud and all the Boy Scouts are voting, that's a problem.
Okay, so the media is going nuts over this, of course.
The media goes nuts over everything.
So they've decided that this is the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of American politics.
Again, I'm not willing to hear that from the same media that's been ripping the Boy Scouts up and down and trying to destroy them.
Is it appropriate for Trump to do this?
Of course not.
Are we used to Trump doing inappropriate things?
Yes.
This is the least of my concerns.
It's also semi-charming and ridiculous that the President of the United States is getting up there, like my grandpa on Depends, you know, getting up there and telling stories, irrelevant stories, about his days in the schmata business.
Like, what in the world?
So, with all this craziness going on, fortunately we have a second party that's intelligent and with it and really cares about the...
No, no we don't actually.
Turns out that's the Democratic Party, so this has been a giant fail.
So I love this.
The Democrats are still trying to figure out what their message is.
They have no clue what their message is.
So Chuck Schumer, he came out yesterday and he said, you know, it seems that people don't get our message.
This is the Senate Minority Leader.
People don't get, I think the problem is people may get your message actually.
Here's Schumer on the message.
Week after week, month after month, we're going to roll out specific pieces here that are quite different than the Democratic Party you heard in the past.
We were too cautious.
We were too namby-pamby.
This is sharp, bold, and will appeal to both the old Obama coalition, let's say the young lady who's just getting out of college, and the Democratic voters who deserted us for Trump, the blue-collar workers.
Economics, George, is our strength, and we are going to go at it.
Okay, again, just amazing.
Like, they think they've really got it in control this time.
We're gonna, this time, we're really gonna push our message.
But here's the problem.
There's an inherent contradiction in the Democratic message.
As we've talked about, there are two separate wings of the Democratic Party fighting for assentence right now.
Wing number one, the intersectional wing.
Right, the idea that the Barack Obama wing of the party, we're gonna cobble together all of these various identity groups and they will come together and then once they've come together, they will form a majority and they will push legislation, right?
This is Obama's theory.
But we have to first separate them out into groups and then pander to each group as necessary and call white people racists in order to provide a common point of opposition.
That's group number one.
Group number two is the Bernie Sanders Socialists.
Okay, we're not so into the intersectionality.
We just like big government.
We need big government solutions.
Socialism works for everyone.
Socialism wipes out all of the It's a false choice.
There doesn't have to be a division.
In fact, there must not be a division.
for everybody.
These are in open conflict.
Schumer says, we don't need to choose.
We can do both.
No, not so much.
It's a false choice.
There doesn't have to be a division.
In fact, there must not be a division.
The vision we're laying out unites both coalitions and unifies the Democratic Party.
It will have a larger, stronger appeal to Americans of all economic levels and all political stripes.
It will appeal to the young woman who just graduated from college in Los Angeles, the factory worker in Akron who's now only making $11 an hour, and the single mom in Buffalo cleaning toilets on minimum wage.
Okay, so there it is.
No, actually, it's going to be very difficult for you to bridge that gap, considering that one half of your party hates the other half of your party.
You're going to lose the blue-collar voters so long as you insist on making white males the object of all of your ire in order to unify the rest of your multicultural base.
So, fortunately, we have two parties that are in full disarray, not just one.
Again, it looks like the Republicans may be able to pass something through the Senate.
Let's see what it is.
I'm optimistic that maybe it'll make some good changes.
And I will give you my evaluation of a bill once we've seen it, because this process has been hot garbage thus far.
You know, the attempt to spin out a bill without anyone having seen it...
Because it's a mystery.
I'm not a fan of this.
I'm a fan of transparency.
I'm old enough to remember when the Republicans ran on the promise that any piece of legislation be up for three full days so people could read it before there was any sort of vote on it.
Now we've put that by the wayside because hopefully if people just don't know what's in any bill we can ram it through really fast.
We'll find out what's in it tomorrow hopefully and I will have some sort of synopsis for you on that.
Okay.
Before I get to things I like, things I hate, and some deconstruction of the culture, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at My Patriot Supplies.
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So you should be safe for a while.
Okay, so, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
God forbid something happens, that's why you need to go to MyPatriotSupply and check them out, preparewithben.com.
Okay, so time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like.
So at the end of Dunkirk, one of the great choices, one of the great directorial choices that Christopher Nolan, the director, makes is that he doesn't use the music of Hans Zimmer at the very end, who's his kind of normal composer.
Instead, he uses some music by Edward Elgar.
Edward Elgar is a very famous British composer.
He's most famous for writing Pomp and Circumstance.
Everybody knows his music because you've been to a graduation.
That's Edward Elgar.
Yeah.
Very famous music.
So, I wanted to do, today, some music that's used in movies, that is not actually movie music, it's actually just classical music used in other movies.
So, this is most famous for being used, it's been used in a bunch of movies, but it's most famous for being used in Platoon, in the scene where Willem Dafoe's character is being shot.
You hear this come over the, you hear this come over the soundtrack.
It is Samuel Barber's Adagio for strings, one of the more beautiful pieces ever composed.
And here's what it sounds like.
THE END
So this piece was composed in 1936 by, again, Samuel Barber.
And it was composed of the first piece of the first piece of the first piece of the first It was played on the announcement over radio that FDR was dead.
It was played when it was announced that JFK was dead on television.
It was played.
It's appeared in just a ton of movies.
The Elephant Man, Platoon, Lorenzo's Oil.
Yeah, I thought it was in Lorenzo's Oil.
It's been played to comic effect, even in Seinfeld, actually, in episode of The Simpsons, in South Park.
It's been played so often now that people actually use it as a joke, right?
But it's a great piece, very effective and very affecting.
And Samuel Barber is one of the great modern American composers.
Died in 1981.
I think he's 1910 to 1981.
And he has a lot of terrific music that's worth listening to.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, everybody is focused in on Kid Rock running for Senate in Michigan.
That's, of course, because Kid Rock is super famous.
He sold 14 million records.
He is extraordinarily popular.
He's done this routine where he makes sure that all the tickets that are sold for his concerts have to be $20 or less, so he's a populist.
But, there's somebody who's better qualified running for that same Senate seat.
His name is John James, and here's an ad for John James running for office in Michigan.
I'm a Republican because I'm conservative.
Specifically, the exceptionalism of our country and our Constitution.
And they must be defended.
I'm pro-gun.
I understand that James Madison wrote this document and listed the number two thing behind religion, speech, and the right to assemble, the right to keep and bear arms.
It's that important.
I believe that life begins at conception.
It's a God-given miracle.
Michigan deserves a leader who's lived in the real world, who understands national security, who understands how to provide economic opportunity, because they've actually created jobs.
Michigan deserves a leader to make sure that everyone has a fair shot.
You do that by understanding economic opportunity and by understanding national security.
Because if you don't do both, then our future will not be as bright as it can be.
I'm John James, and I'm exploring a run for the U.S.
Senate.
Okay, so this guy would be a rock star in the Republican Party in the pre-celebrity era.
This guy is a former military guy.
He's a U.S.
Marine.
He's 36 years old.
He's black.
He is the CEO of Renaissance Global Logistics, which is a logistics and warehousing firm based in Detroit.
He's basically the perfect candidate, right?
I mean, he's articulate and, as Joe Biden might say, bright and articulate.
But obviously, he's a smart guy with a terrific record and just a great candidate.
I mean, we're doing an interview with him over at Daily Wire.
You should check it out.
We need more candidates like that.
We need more Congress people like that.
I understand the thrill of celebrity, and I understand why everybody's interested in celebrity.
But, I mean, come on, folks.
At some point, we're going to need to actually nominate people who have a deeply conservative streak, who know what policies they care about, and who have a history of running businesses and dealing with communities.
Celebrity politics is not my bag, and I'm getting kind of tired of it.
Okay.
Other things.
Okay, so let's do one quick thing I hate, and then we'll get to deconstructing the culture.
The thing I hate this week is that every day on Huffington Post, there is some insane thing where somebody does something crazy or insane, and then Huffington Post says, this person is crushing a stereotype by doing a crazy thing.
So, here's what it is this time.
Barcelona-based Cinta Tort-Cartro Uses paint and glitter to highlight parts and functions of the body women have been conditioned to feel ashamed of, like stretch marks and menstruation.
So now, if you have a stretch mark, she's painting it.
She uses a vibrant rainbow of colors to highlight stretch marks on the skin and to show the beauty of menstruation on underwear, sanitary pads, and tampons.
She told PopSugar it started with her own journey towards self-love.
Hey, anytime anyone has to tell you about their journey towards self-love, um, they're a jerk.
Okay, look, I don't want to hear about your journey towards self-love.
It's your business, not mine.
Not interested.
It says, I have not always felt comfortable with my period and stretch marks, she said.
TMI, gang.
Well, when did this phrase TMI go out of style?
Because I sort of like it, this TMI phrase.
It says, overall, I have not always felt secure with my body.
Over the years and after internal reflection, I saw that if I did not accept anything about my body, hair, stretch marks, I could never love or accept me.
Really?
Why?
Why can't you love or accept you with your flaws?
Or do you have to love... Why can't you love, like, certain things about your body, but not other things?
Like, if we all loved being overweight, we'd all stay overweight.
I'm not saying that you should cultivate a hatred for your own body, God forbid, but I don't know why you taking pictures of the parts of yourself that nobody really wants to see is a beneficial thing, why that is a worthwhile thing to do.
She paints underwear, and she paints stretch marks, and it says you'll never look at your body the same way again.
And there's a picture of a sanitary pad with glitter on it, and it says so beautiful.
That's also what happens when my three-year-old daughter gets a hold of the sanitary pads and takes it into her craft room.
So I'm not sure why this qualifies you to be some sort of artistic genius, but everything must be cheered now up to and including bodily functions, I'm looking forward to the male response, which is painting your poop.
That'll be really fun.
Painting your bowel movements.
Painting your beer belly.
I have never felt comfortable with my beer belly, but now I've painted it all the colors of the rainbow and given it a frog mouth.
Okay.
Okay, time to deconstruct a little bit of culture.
We need to leave that behind and move on with our lives.
Time to deconstruct the culture.
So, one of the things that's been bugging me this week is that all of these actors are now suggesting that it is very, very, very, very important that movies that are aimed at children and entertainment pieces contain all sorts of political messaging.
So, yesterday, the lead voice actor for the Emoji movie insisted that the movie is a very, very important way of fighting President Trump's administration, rather than just a film about talking faces, according to Alex Griswold over at The Free Beacon.
He was talking about The Huffington Post.
He trashed his co-workers on Silicon Valley, which is a show that I think is hilarious.
He said, right before the election, I asked, how much money did you donate, you Hollywood elites?
How much did you donate to Hillary Clinton's campaign?
And everybody in the cast said nothing.
They hadn't given a dollar.
Maybe because she's the worst candidate in American history.
Miller said, however, he's very much on board with the Emoji movie, said, how rare is it we get an opportunity to do an original property, right?
There's an opportunity to do something optimistic, positivistic, and, you know, we have very few weapons in the current administration, and one of them is to target a younger demographic and try and help them understand and adopt progressive values.
The movie has a lot to say to women, how they have limitless potential, and one of the characters literally breaks through a glass ceiling.
Okay, this is a movie I won't take my daughter to see.
I don't want to see your political messaging, T.J.
Miller.
I'm not interested in what Hollywood thinks my child ought to see.
I'm interested in what I think my child ought to see.
She's my child.
You don't know her.
You don't care about her.
I do.
So it's my job to determine what my child should see.
And you messaging in the emoji movie is not going to forward the ball at all in American politics.
You want to know what made Trump?
This is one of the things that made Trump.
Is the incessant attempts by the left to infuse every single damn thing with politics.
Everything.
Everything has to be infused with politics, up to and including a stupid movie with poop emojis played by Patrick Stewart.
You wonder why Hollywood is going to the dogs?
This is one of the reasons.
You want to know why people are seeing superhero movies right now?
Because they don't want to be hit with your stupid messaging.
You want to know why Dunkirk did great business, besides being a very good movie?
It's because there is no political messaging in Dunkirk.
And no matter how hard the left tried, they couldn't find political messaging in Dunkirk.
And so people were willing to go see it.
So we'll go see Spider-Man, or we'll go see Marvel movies, or we'll go see DC movies.
We'll go see all these superhero movies because we're not expecting to be sucker-punched.
But we know that if we go see a serious drama, there's at least a 35% chance there's going to be some backhanded slap at Trump or conservatives or Republicans in there.
I was watching a movie last night on the plane in New York.
I was watching this movie that was... What was the name of this film?
It was... It was a huge cast.
It was Amy Adams and...
Michael Shannon, and for some reason as I get older I forget the names of movies.
In any case, it was Nocturnal Animals, that's the name of the film.
So Nocturnal Animals is this film that opens with probably the worst opening I've ever seen to a pretty good movie.
The rest of the movie is fine, but halfway through the movie there's a scene where the main character, played by Amy Adams, just starts ripping on her mother and she says she's a terrible person because she's a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, and of course she's a Republican.
Of course she's a Republican.
And it's just like, okay, did we need that sucker punch right here in the middle of the film?
Like, was that necessary?
Now, it turns out that it's not as much of a sucker punch as it seems, but that sort of thing is what people attempt to avoid when they go to the movies.
If Hollywood wants to continue poisoning the popular culture to the point where we can't even share movies and entertainment with each other, then the end result is going to be a more polarized culture, not a less polarized culture.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow to talk about John McCain's apparently big speech that I'm just now seeing on Twitter, and we'll talk also about what exactly Trumpcare is going to be, plus the latest on the Jeff Sessions saga.
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