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July 27, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
42:31
Ep. 349 - What Do The Democrats Have To Hide?
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On Monday, two very different videos went viral.
The first featured an 11-year-old boy, Tyler, from Conyers, Georgia.
Tyler was 18 months old when his stepfather, Don Gauss, entered his life.
The video shows Tyler approaching his stepfather and reading a letter.
When I was one and a half years old, something happened to me.
God sent me a real dad.
Dad, I have been your child in love since I can remember, but I want to be your son legally.
Will you please adopt me?
Don says yes, at which point he embraces the crying boy in a bear hug.
It's nearly impossible not to have the odd speck of dust in your eye while you watch it.
Meanwhile, another heart-rending video made the rounds.
This was video of Chris Gard and Connie Yates, parents of infant Charlie Gard, announcing they would no longer attempt to remove Charlie from the UK for treatment.
Charlie suffers from a rare degenerative disease that ends in death.
The Great Ormond Street Hospital refused to release him to his parents, Juxtaposing these two videos is very awkward for the political left.
on his own dime to seek experimental treatment, instead deciding that little Charlie should die with dignity.
Chris stated, We knew our son, which is why we continued fighting.
Charlie has been left with his illness to deteriorate devastatingly to the point of no return.
Juxtaposing these two videos is very awkward for the political left.
It's awkward because while the left likes to claim that it stands with parents, it actually promulgates policies antithetical to parental control of their children.
The left will pay lip service to motherhood and apple pie, but if a mother gives her child too much apple pie, it will call the state to do something about it.
That's what happened with Charlie Gard.
The question is not whether you agree with Gard's parents or not.
Perhaps the doctors were right, and his parents were grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to ignore the agonizing reality of the situation.
The question is whether parents have the right to make such decisions to begin with.
We're not talking about abusive parents who physically harm their kids.
We're not talking about a child endangerment scenario.
We're talking about parents choosing a culture of life with which the prevailing leftist sentiment disagrees.
There is no objective standard suggesting that so-called death with dignity should overcome the value of preservation of life.
That is a subjective decision at best.
Yet the hospital, the UK government, and the EU decided they knew better than Charlie Gard's parents.
They don't.
The judges who decided Charlie Gard's fate have never met Charlie Gard.
They never spent hours crying by his bedside or rubbing the fuzz on his head.
Had Charlie been healthy, they wouldn't have been aware of him at all.
Yet they know better than Charlie's parents what ought to happen.
The devaluation of parenting on the left isn't restricted to life and death decisions.
It reaches down to the basics of parenting.
What value system should be taught to kids?
Last month, the British government threatened to shut down an Orthodox Jewish girls' school for the crime of not teaching children the prevailing LGBT agenda.
Inspectors said that the failure to teach children about leftist views of sexual orientation, quote, restricts pupils' spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development, and does not promote equality of opportunity in ways that take account of differing lifestyles, unquote.
This is despite the fact that the inspectors openly acknowledge that the school's culture is clearly focused on teaching pupils to respect everybody, regardless of beliefs and lifestyle.
In Ontario, Canada, legislators recently passed a regulation that would allow the government to remove children from the home if parents refused to accept a child's self-perception as transgender.
Their excuse?
Failure to do so might result in damage to the child.
Instead, the government could take hold of the child, place him in the system, and then promote sex transition.
Once again, this has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics.
The roots of this disdain for parenting lie in Rousseau and the Romantics, who saw parents as a burden on childhood freedom and exploration.
But the truth is far less stunning for kids who lack parental guidance.
They have higher rates of depression and suicide, higher rates of drug use, higher rates of promiscuity, higher rates of involvement in crime.
We need more Kris Gards and more Don Gausses, not more bureaucrats certain that they know what's best for a child they've never met and don't care about.
The left, however, seems determined to write parents out of the story of their own children's upbringing.
The state knows best how to care for your child, on everything from nutrition to sex ed to life itself.
If that means death for a baby, so be it.
At least the state's view of the value of life has been promulgated.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, a lot to get to today.
I did testify on the Hill, which means that we have a slightly abbreviated show today because I have to run for a plane pretty soon.
But before we get to everything that happened on the Hill, which is really fascinating, I have some thoughts on it, and everything that is happening over at the White House, which is also fascinating, and I have some thoughts.
And before I even get to the scandal that nobody is talking about inside the Democratic Party, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Wink.
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Okay, so there's a lot of stuff happening right now, all of it bizarro world.
Over on the Democratic side of the aisle, everybody's covering what's happening in the White House.
So before I even get to what is happening in the White House, I first want to discuss what is happening with the Democrats.
Because as I reported yesterday, Imran Awan was a Democratic IT consultant.
And he was apparently stealing laptops from Democratic members of Congress, and then he was selling them, and they found a bunch of smashed equipment in his house.
He had access to some of their passwords.
He had Debbie Wasserman Schultz's computer and her password that gave him access to a lot of DNC material, and he was caught trying to flee the country.
He had wired $300,000 to himself in Pakistan.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz only fired him on the day that he was captured by the police.
He was paid, he along with his family members, paid like four million dollars over the last several years to do IT for the Democrats.
And what's weird is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been trying to pressure the police to hand over her laptop.
Now that's evidence in an ongoing local case, right?
I mean, this is an actual crime.
And Debbie Wasserman Schultz apparently called up the chief of police in DC and yelled at him that she wanted her laptop back and threatened him that she wanted her laptop back.
So Ronna McDaniel, who is the chair of the RNC, she says that it's pretty clear that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has something to hide here.
...IT worker facing charges for bank fraud this morning, accused of double billing the government for computer equipment, but they caught him as he was trying to flee the country at Dulles Airport.
The authorities arrested Imran Awan at Dulles, where he had a flight booked to Pakistan through Qatar.
Several relatives of the 37-year-old were fired months ago as well, and Awan was kept on staff by Wasserman Schultz For reasons we are just, we have no idea why she waited so long to fire him.
But Ronna, I'm wondering if there's a lot more to this.
I know that he is facing charges of bank fraud, but does he have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?
Is this more about terrorism than just bank fraud?
We have to get to the bottom of this, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz has obstructed at every level on something that affects potentially our national security.
So to have this gentleman try and leave the country yesterday, and now we know there's bank fraud, and we know he destroyed these hard drives, and when you talk, when you read the story about the Marine that found them in the apartment he was trying to rent, I mean it is, it's a long story, but it's something we have to get to the bottom of.
We're not hearing the Democrats talk about it at all.
Where's Debbie Wasserman Schultz?
She's totally right.
They're not talking about it.
Imagine if Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, somebody had tried to flee the country after having stolen Ryan's hard drive and smashed a bunch of hard drives of other members of Congress, apparently.
And Paul Ryan had hired him up until the day that he fled, and then as soon as he fled, he fired him.
And also, he wouldn't let the police do their full investigation.
Imagine if that's what had happened.
It'd be insane, right?
I mean, the left would never let go of it.
It would be the end of the world.
It'd be the end of the world.
But the left is ignoring this as far as they can, and the question is why.
The question is why all of this was happening.
You know, and the only rational answer I can come up with, obviously, is that not only does Wasserman Schultz have something to hide, but it has something to do with the information on her laptop.
Now, does that tie to another story that the left is largely ignoring?
So, the Senate Democrats yesterday attempted to prevent a witness from Fusion GPS from testifying.
Fusion GPS, you'll recall, was the research firm that was commissioned by interests aligned with the Democratic Party to produce the dossier of Trump intelligence, including all the crap about the pee tape.
So that was Fusion GPS.
Well, the Senate is currently investigating this according to Weekly Standard.
The Senate is investigating allegations that elements of the Trump campaign may have been colluding with Russia, but now an interesting angle has emerged.
Fusion GPS is now accused of simultaneously being hired to work for Putin's moneyed interests in the West.
Fusion GPS was apparently representing the same Putin-connected interests when they were involved in arranging the controversial meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had with Rinat Akhmetyan, a former Russian intelligence officer, and Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Or Veselnitskaya, I think it's pronounced.
Furthermore, the firm also being accused of engaging in unethical and illegal behavior while representing Russian-connected interests.
So what it looks like is that the Russians were not intent on having Trump elected or just attacking Hillary Clinton.
The Russians were also attempting to go after President Trump, then-candidate Trump, by essentially working with and hiring Fusion GPS to build this OPPO file on Trump.
According to the Weekly Standard, Bill Browder is a financier with an extensive history of dealings in Russia.
His testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday is worth reading in full, because the machinations are complicated.
But briefly, the story is this.
After Browder exposed the corrupt financial practices of Putin's cronies, Putin came after Browder personally, deporting him in 2005 and 18 months later, seizing all the documents related to his investment in the country.
Browder, with the help of a guy named Sergei Matsnitsky, who is a Russian dissident, ...filed criminal complaints about Russian officials stealing from the country's tax coffers, rather than came to Washington, D.C., and Fusion GPS eventually ended up arranging a meeting between Don Trump Jr.
and Akhmetchin and Veselnitskaya.
It says Fusion GPS, according to Browder, was behind that meeting, which means that the Russians were hiring a Democrat-connected firm to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr.
That's basically the allegation.
So it's getting a little complicated here, but what it looks like is that it could be a setup, right?
It looks like not that Donald Trump Jr.
should have taken the meeting.
That doesn't let him off the hook.
But, like, the Democratic operatives were working with the Russians in order to try and entrap Donald Trump Jr.
I mean, that seems to be the explanation that is being given by this guy, Bill Browder, who knows a lot of the players.
I mean, this is getting into deep stuff.
According to Thor Halverson, president and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, he has alleged that Fusion GPS is operating in violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
Fusion GPS has previously been in the news for the harassment of Republican campaign donors in the 2012 presidential election.
As of yesterday, the investigative reporter, former investigative reporter Glenn Simpson, who is the founder of Fusion GPS, he refused to testify before the Senate and said that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right.
So again, this is a story that is being undercovered.
And it's being dramatically undercovered because, of course, it has to do with Trump.
And it has to do with the Russians' involvement with a Democratic-oriented firm that was attempting to gather information on Donald Trump.
And this undercuts the entire narrative of Democrats.
Of course the media are ignoring this as far as they possibly can.
It ought not be ignored.
This is important stuff.
If you are going to say that all of the... If you're going to make the case that everything ought to be investigated and that Trump ought to be investigated for his Russian connections, you have to make the same case about Fusion GPS You have to make the same case about Ukrainian interference with Hillary Clinton.
All of these things are a must.
So this is not quite as clean-cut a case as the left wants to make it, that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election.
It looks like Russia was doing what the intel agency said it was doing.
Remember, there was a disagreement even among the intel agencies who felt that Russia was involved in the election cycle.
Even among the intel agencies, there was a basic disagreement on one question, and the question was, did Russia want Trump to win?
And most of the intelligence agencies were saying no, it wasn't about Russia wanting Trump to win, it was just about them screwing with the election, which means they were screwing with the election from both sides.
They were working with Fusion GPS, allegedly, on the left, and then they were working with Don Trump Jr.
on the right.
They were just trying to get their hands muddy, and banking on everybody being dishonest in order to do that turns out that that may have been a very good bet.
Well, before we get to Before we get to the latest with Anthony Scaramucci and the battle that's now going on between Anthony Scaramucci and Reince Priebus, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at FrameBridge.com.
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The latest on Scaramucci is that there's a lot of hubbub breaking out inside the Trump White House now.
It seems like chaos because the man at the top doesn't seem like he is laying down the law.
For all the talk about Trump being a great CEO, the truth is for a very long time Trump has functioned in a world where he sort of acts like the Joker in that scene with the two leftover thugs from the other guy's gang, right?
He sort of breaks a pool cue, throws it down and says, Only one of you is going to get a job, right?
This is Trump's routine.
Right now, the two people who he's tossed a piece of pool key to are Reince Priebus and Anthony Scaramucci.
Now, he obviously loves Scaramucci because Scaramucci went on TV and was highly complimentary to him for several months and ripped on CNN and got CNN to retract a story, which is like the Holy Grail in Trump world.
So he loves Anthony Scaramucci.
He is less enamored of Reince Priebus.
I mean, there's been every two weeks talk about Reince Priebus being fired.
That is alive once again.
People are talking about that again.
And Scaramucci, this time, actually looks like he wants to make that happen.
So Scaramucci, yesterday, tweeted out that he thought, basically, that Reince Priebus was the leaker.
So, essentially, he tweeted out yesterday that there was a felony that had taken place and that Reince Priebus, this was the implication, that Reince Priebus had leaked his public disclosures.
Now, there's a couple problems with this.
Number one, you can't leak public disclosures.
They're public.
So all his financial disclosures, those became public like several days ago, and it wasn't a leak.
But he accused somebody of a felony, and then he directed the tweet at Reince.
He directed it directly at Reince Priebus.
The reason he's angry is because it appears from Politico that Scaramucci's profits from the sale of his hedge fund group are apparently, he's still receiving those profits, and he has not divested himself from his old firm.
But then Scaramucci went on CNN, he said that putting Reince's name at the end of the tweet didn't mean that he wanted Reince investigated.
He said he was going to send the FBI and the DOJ information about the leaks, and then he tagged Reince at the end.
And people were like, whoa, so you're reporting Reince Priebus to the DOJ and the FBI?
And apparently, according to multiple media reports, Ryan Lizzo was one of them at the Washington Post.
Apparently, that's exactly what happened.
Scaramucci suspected that Ryan's previous was leaking on him, and so he went outside to the DOJ and the FBI.
So Scaramucci went on national TV.
Ryan Lizzo was on CNN, and Scaramucci calls in, and it gets really, really weird.
He gets really, really weird.
So he says that he and Priebus are like brothers who fight a lot.
Some brothers are like Cain and Abel.
Others fight but get along.
The implication, of course, is that they were the latter, and maybe more like the former.
He says, now if you want to talk about the Chief of Staff, we have had odds.
We've had differences.
When I said we were brothers from the podium, that's because we're rough on one another.
Some brothers are like Cain and Abel.
Other brothers can fight each other and get along.
I don't know if this is reparable or not.
That will be up to the President.
And then he said that he was going to take down leakers.
He said the leakers are traitors.
And a century ago, if you had leaked, it would have gotten you hung, which is not really true.
And then he says that he and Trump have a very, very good idea of who the senior leakers are in the White House.
He said it's absolutely, completely, totally reprehensible.
And as you know from the Italian expression, the fish stinks from the head down, but I can tell you two fish that don't stink, and that's me and the president.
So Scaramucci doing exactly what Trump would want him to do, which is kiss Trump's ass shamelessly in public and also hit people.
Trump likes the sport of this, and so he likes that Scaramucci is really militant.
So it appears that Reince is in serious trouble, may in fact be on his way out.
Reince says that he's sticking around, of course.
Everybody says they're sticking around.
And now there's a report that the Senate is beginning to buck.
So this was always the question.
Could there be a point where people say to Trump in the Senate and in Congress, we're not going any further than this?
And it appears that the Sessions thing and maybe the Reince thing, these are a little bit of a breaking point.
The Sessions thing because if he gets rid of Sessions, the Senate has to approve a new Attorney General.
And Senators are all friends with Sessions.
Remember, Sessions was part of their caucus until five minutes ago.
And so Lindsey Graham came out and he said, listen, if you fire Attorney General Sessions, And Grassley said, this is Chuck Grassley from Iowa, he said, you're not getting new hearings.
There will be no new hearings on an attorney general.
You'll just have to serve with Rod Rosenstein as the acting attorney general.
And there's nothing you can do about it because we're not going to allow you to ask Sessions.
So there's beginning to be a bit of a spine from Congress with regard to Trump and on the right stuff.
Sessions is the right place to do all of this.
But there is a lot of chaos right now.
There's a bed, there are betting pools.
Which one is going to be the first to go?
Is it going to be Reince?
Is it going to be Session?
Is it going to be?
Tom Price?
Is it going to be Tillerson, who is now on vacay?
Is it going to be Mattis?
Mattis hasn't talked about leaving and Trump isn't talking about ousting him, but the Pentagon released a statement today saying they weren't changing their transgender policy pending more information from the President, which means they really haven't been coordinating on any of that.
All of this is just a big wake-up call to the Trump administration if Trump is capable of being awoken.
This is just the entire Republican base, well not the entire Republican base, the entire base in Congress, The people who are capable of checking Trump saying, listen, dude, get your crap together.
Please get your crap together.
And it gets worse than that.
Okay.
So in a second, I'm going to talk about what's happening with regard to Alaska, because it's getting pretty rough where Trump is actually putting pressure on Alaska from a different source.
The interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, got in the middle of it.
We'll explain what's happening there.
And we'll get to transgender policy and why everybody is wrong about everything.
We'll get to all of those things.
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Okay, so meanwhile, all this is going on inside the White House, and Anthony Scaramucci continues his defense.
He He says that people don't understand Trump, right?
I mean, Trump lives in the White House and the elites don't, so sit down and shut up.
Here's Scaramucci doing that routine last night.
You'll see that the base and the majority of the American people, and certainly all of the American people that voted for him, either don't care about the tweets, they find them funny, they find them refreshing, they don't overreact and microanalyze them the way you guys do.
It's actually not what the surveys show.
It shows most people don't think that they're appropriate.
Okay, okay, but you know what?
They're still voting for him.
He's still the president.
Well, they voted for him.
Let's see if the same style as the president works as an insurgent candidate.
Last time I checked, he's living in the residence up here and the elites aren't.
True.
Okay, so this constant refrain that Trump can do whatever he wants because he won, that doesn't mean that he's governing well and this is a problem.
Scaramucci, though, this is really more about Scaramucci auditioning for Trump.
A lot of the administration has now been about showing Trump that you're loyal, and showing him that you're a tough guy, and all this.
Scaramucci uses this kind of language, and I think Trump loves it.
Scaramucci says, I don't stab people in the back, I stab people in the front.
What I don't like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel.
They're very nice to your face, and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back.
I don't like it.
You know, Anthony, I'm a Wall Street guy, and I'm more of a front-stabbing person, and I'd rather tell people directly how I feel about that.
Okay, so this is the kind of talk that Trump likes.
The question is, is it going to be effective?
So, another example of something being ineffective.
So, Trump is trying to put pressure on Lisa Murkowski to vote for the Senate bill.
That's fine.
I mean, he should put pressure on Lisa Murkowski to vote for some form of repeal.
I mean, they just keep shrinking down what exactly it is they're going to vote for.
And I was on the Hill this morning, and I met with several Congress people.
They're deeply frustrated.
With the Republicans in the Senate who won't vote for any form of repeal at all.
So Trump is exactly right to go after Murkowski.
But apparently, last night, Trump and apparently Priebus and Scaramucci, they all sort of made threats toward the Alaskan senator.
And they said that we're going to start re-regulating, or at least not deregulating, the Alaskan energy industry unless you give us your vote.
And Murkowski immediately responded by refusing to see any of the nominees for the undersecretary positions over at the Interior Department where Ryan Zinke is working.
So it's just battle royale between Trump and everybody.
Right now it's a war of all against all.
The reason that this matters, the reason that this is bad, Because what we're watching right now is it's not just important to do the right thing in politics.
I think Trump is doing some of the right things.
You have to do the right thing in the right way.
The reason the right way matters is because what happens after you do the thing, right?
So Obama thought he did the right thing with Obamacare, but the way he did it was the wrong way, and that's what led to 70% disapproval ratings on Obamacare, even though now people, you know, by and large are largely positive about Obamacare.
The same thing is happening with regard to, and that's at least with the poll show, the same thing is happening with regard to single-payer health care.
If Trump goes too far on health care and he does it in a way that people don't appreciate, they're going to hate no matter what he proposes, how it got done, and there's going to be blowback.
And that actually ends up helping Democrats.
Because remember, if you do this wrong and people react badly, they're going to vote for Democrats in 2018 and 2020, and then the Democrats will have their shot at re-implementing The Democrats are becoming very open about their agenda here.
So if you do it wrong, and you hand the baton to the other guy, then they're not going to be shy about cramming that baton down your throat.
Here is Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois.
He says, listen, whatever happens here, we're going to move closer to single payer on the other side.
Senator Durbin, this is Eddie Glaude.
Let's pan out a little bit.
The Democratic Party just released its Better Deal to kind of offer a vision of their policy initiatives over the next few years.
There's clamoring among the base for single-payer.
How, in the course of this debate, will you respond to those of us on the left who really think that single-payer might be the answer to the health care issue?
This is the last gasp, but what we're going through now is the last gasp for private health insurance in America, as far as I'm concerned.
If we can't make this work with the private health insurance industry, we start moving closer to a Medicare model.
From my point of view, Medicare has a lot of positive things to offer the American people.
How many folks say, darn it, now I qualify for Medicare?
Most of them say, hooray!
I don't have to worry about pre-existing conditions.
I've paid into it.
I can get the best hospitals and doctors and I have peace of mind.
That's what people are looking for in health insurance.
This is the point.
The Democrats are already moving to the left.
This is the point.
The Democrats are already moving to the left.
If you do something that makes a good policy unpopular, that is almost worse than doing nothing at all.
And this is my problem with how Trump dragged out the transgender policy change that he did yesterday.
The fact that Trump did it via tweet.
Poisoned the well a little bit.
Because it made it difficult to defend.
Imagine that instead of doing that, Trump had gone to General Madison and said, I understand you have a six month study, I want you to accelerate the study, and then I want you to come out with results, and I want you to tell the world why it is that you think that transgender people serving in the military is bad for the military.
And then Mattis came forward and said, listen, as somebody who served my entire life in the military, as somebody who cares deeply about unit cohesion, it's important that we not do this.
It would be very difficult for the left to take the opposing viewpoint.
Instead, Trump tweets out something, and everybody runs for the hills.
And it looks, most of all, disrespectful to people who are transgender and currently serving in the military.
Now, listen, I am not... I mean, if you listen to the show at all, or watch the show at all, you know that I believe that transgenderism is a gender dysphoria, is a mental illness.
And that you're suffering from a severe mental disorder, and as a general rule, bringing in groups of people who have severe mental disorders to the military is not a strong move.
There's a point that David French, former military guy, that he makes over at National Review, that when you look at military policy, it's sort of like when you look at insurance policy.
We in regular life, when we deal with each other on a one-to-one basis, we expect to be treated as individuals, not as members of groups.
But when you're doing actuarial selections, When you are doing an insurance table, they don't have to get to know every aspect of you.
They look at your age, they look at your prior health, and they say, OK, based on the information we have, there's a good likelihood you'll be dead in 30 years.
So here's what we're going to charge you.
That's how they do this.
And that's not about devaluing you as a human being.
It's using probability theory to gauge what's going to happen.
The same thing happens when you decide which groups to recruit for the military and who should be allowed in.
If you had a group among which there was a significant, I'm talking 40% rate of schizophrenia, you can bet that group would have a hard time being recruited into the military because, again, it could manifest at any time, and you don't want to be in a position where this entire group of people are seeing the symptoms of schizophrenia in the battlefield when they're under pressure.
The same thing is true for gender dysphoria.
So all of the virtue signaling from the left is really ridiculous, but it was made possible in part because Trump did the right thing the wrong way.
It's important for Trump to start doing the right thing the right way.
You can see the reporter's virtue signaling.
Yesterday at the White House, every reporter felt the necessity to get up and speak openly and passionately about transgender soldiers in the military.
Apparently there are about 4,000 active-duty transgender soldiers in the military.
That seems high to me.
I'm not sure how many of those people are open about their transgenderism, but in any case, here the reporter is just virtue signaling one after another.
Is the president considering looking at any kind of policy about transgender people serving in the White House now that he's tried to make a decision on transgender people serving in the military?
No, once again this was a decision based on what was best for the military and military cohesion and on the counsel of his national security team.
So, the impression we get at the Pentagon is they were a little bit flat-footed by the President's tweets.
As I understand it, this was, and has been for the last couple of weeks of conversation here, specifically about TRICARE coverage for transgender procedures, and it suddenly evolved And for the President to then go on Twitter to announce this ban.
And as you already told us, the White House and the Pentagon are going to have to lawfully implement that.
Typically when you have an announcement of this magnitude, all of that work has been done at the procedural level between the bureaucracy of the Pentagon and the White House.
Why wasn't any of that work done?
And why was the Pentagon caught so surprised this morning by the President's tweets on that?
Okay, we can stop it there.
that the president's national security team was part of this consultation.
You mentioned yourself that there have been ongoing conversations. - When the president made the decision yesterday, the secretary of defense was immediately informed as were the rest of the national security team. - Okay, we can stop it there.
I mean, bottom line is that again, if Trump had gone to Madison, let Mattis be the tip of the spear, or if he'd laid out a long essay, or if he had laid out, if he had given Sarah Huckabee Sanders talking points, all of this could have been avoided Instead, all you're seeing all over the TV is Caitlyn Jenner angry at Trump.
Now imagine if it weren't Caitlyn Jenner versus Trump, it were Caitlyn Jenner versus Mad Dog Madness.
Who do you think wins that public relations battle?
But here's Caitlyn Jenner doing his routine and Trump does not look the better for wear on this.
Caitlyn Jenner tweeted, there are 15,000 patriotic transgender Americans in the U.S.
military fighting for all of us.
What happened to your promise to fight for them?
Now remember, again, it would be very difficult for Caitlyn Jenner to make that case if it were General Mattis who had actually laid out this policy.
So doing the right thing the wrong way is sometimes even worse than doing nothing.
And that's not, again, a rip on policy choices that Trump made with regard to transgender soldiers.
I'm fully in agreement because I think that most Military minds who put aside the political correctness understand that putting a group of people in harm's way who have a 40% lifetime suicide rate, 90% of military veterans who are transgender have been diagnosed with a mental illness after leaving the service, none of this bodes well for building the best fighting force in the world.
And again, you have small units of soldiers on the front lines day after day after day.
That's not exactly a pressure-free environment.
If transgender people have a 40% lifetime suicide rate in the United States, which is a pretty welcoming environment, try it when you're a soldier in Afghanistan.
I mean, that's just not going to go well.
So, again, I think Trump can be right, but he has to get over doing it the wrong way.
That's actually a deeply important thing.
So, before I get to some things I like and some things I hate, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Blinkist.
You have a lot of stuff going on today.
I have a lot of stuff going on today.
I testified on the Hill, and I'm doing the show, and I did a bunch of interviews.
I still had time to read a book.
How did I have time to read a book?
Because I was using my Blinkist app while I walked.
The Blinkist app allows you to essentially sample, you get a summary, Of over 2,000 of the best-selling nonfiction books transformed into these powerful packets you can listen to in 15 minutes.
It's not a full summary of the book because it doesn't go through every point of the book, but it picks the most important points from any of these books and then gives it to you so in 15 minutes you can get the main point of a book, which is great because the fact is...
Even if you were to read a 500-page book, you're probably not going to retain more than 3 or 4 minutes worth of material on it anyway.
So, having it boiled down into 15-minute forms so that you can get the main gist of it.
We do it every day in our lives.
We should be doing it with books too, and that's what Blinkist is for.
We're talking great books like Why Nations Fail.
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Everybody that I know who's used it loves it.
I was talking to Dana Perino the other day and she said she's been using Blinkist because she heard it on the show.
It's just great.
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Actually, Congressman said his wife uses Blinkist now because of listening to the show.
So, make sure that you go there, use the promo code that lets them know that we sent you.
Plus, it means that you are going to get that discount.
So, pretty awesome.
Okay, so, time for some things I like and some things that I hate.
Things that I like.
So I did testify on the Hill today.
I'll have clips of it tomorrow.
We'll play them on the show.
It was a lot of fun, something I'd never done before.
The panel was Nadine Strassen from the ADL was on my right, and then Adam Carolla was on my left, and there were two administrators, a fellow whose name I can't recall, from Evergreen State College, and on the very end, a fellow named, last name Lawrence, who was the dean at Brandeis University and now works for the Anti-Defamation League.
And I had some basic thoughts on this.
First of all, it's great that Representative Jim Jordan from the 4th District of Ohio, he put the thing together, and it was just fabulous because it's taking on a much-needed issue that has been ignored for too long, which is the threat to free speech that's happening on campus.
So good for Representative Jordan, good for the other members of the committee, including ranking Democrats for getting together on this thing and putting it together.
It was interesting because I think that some of the main issues were sort of skirted over with regard to free speech.
So the main issue, which is that people should be allowed to say what they want on campus, speakers should be allowed to speak, everyone basically agreed with that.
There are several people on the left side of the aisle who kept saying, well just leave it to administrators.
Just leave it to administrators.
And I kept saying, there has to be some sort of ramification for administrators if they do not do their job.
if they use the restrictions they have available to them to politically bias the discussion by banning certain speakers.
And I didn't really have a chance to say, but I wanted to, that if you have an administration where if I come to speak, they release a letter to the entire student body saying, this guy doesn't represent us.
But then you have Ta-Nehisi Coates come to speak, and there's no letter that goes out.
That's a chilling effect on the expression of a different point of view.
There should be a blanket rule on public university campuses that if you're going to have any speaker that the university will say this person does not represent us.
End of story.
End of story.
But there's this attempt to to promote sensitivity That is in conflict with the notion of free speech because free speech is not about sensitivity.
It's about suck it up buttercup.
And the left wants to sort of have it both ways.
So what was fascinating was to watch how the Democrats attempted to turn the hearing from one about administrative malfeasance on campus into a hearing about hate crimes on campus, about people who are – they kept bringing up this case of this young black woman who is the student body president over at American University, about people who are – they kept bringing up this case of And I think that's – I'm pronouncing her last name correctly.
And she was elected student body president.
And then apparently around campus, people were stringing up nooses with bananas in them.
And they had put on the bananas a reference to the sorority that she attended.
I don't – I'd never seen this story before.
So I really didn't know much about it.
So I'll take it at face value.
Obviously, that's horrible.
And the administration looked into it.
And the administration is going to do something about it.
And that's the point.
And I did say this to – I think it was Representative Eleanor Norton Holmes – Holmes Norton.
I believe I said to her, there is a massive difference between individuals on campus doing terrible things, which we all agree – if you commit a crime, which is not just saying something offensive, saying something offensive, but you're actively, what you're doing can be interpreted or should be interpreted by a reasonable person as an actual threat of violence, then that's crime.
But if the idea here is that that's the same thing as an administration that's attempting to crack down on free speech, it is not.
So it was fascinating to watch the Democrats try to redirect this into the alt-right is the real threat on campus.
Okay.
It's not, okay?
It's not.
The fact is that the threats of violence are in the main not coming from the right on campus because the right doesn't really exist on campus, or at least if it does, it exists in very small measure.
There's a very small group of all right people who may be terrible on campus, but that is certainly not a vast bevy of problems on campus.
And I'm speaking as someone who's Jewish, and there have been a lot of hate crimes, you know, so-called hate crimes against Jews on campus.
A lot of those, by the way, are coming from the left.
So, it was fun to watch as the Democrats tried to twist away from just saying, you should be allowed to say what you want on campus, enough of the stupid diversity training, enough of the administrative malfeasance, let's focus on letting everybody speak freely.
They were very upset, actually, about this Wisconsin bill.
That is passing, it's passed through the Assembly over there in Wisconsin, largely on the heels of my lecture at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where a bunch of people invaded the lecture, stood in front of the stage, and then insisted on not allowing me to speak.
And the administration allowed that to go forward.
The Democrats kept ripping on this.
And the problem is, the bill itself doesn't say that, the bill is meant to prevent people from preventing other people's speech.
Instead, the way they interpreted it was they were trying to shut down protest.
No one's trying to shut down protest.
Now, maybe you have problems with the wording of the bill, but the idea that allowable protest involves shutting down other people's free speech is just asinine.
I have some ideas about the workings of the committee itself and what Republicans should do better, because I think some Republicans were great and some Republicans were not as strong.
Democrats universally were on message with regard to what they were attempting to push and also how they were pursuing their question.
There are also some great moments, but we'll go through that much more in detail tomorrow when we can actually cut the audio for you, because we literally just finished that and then came over here to Heritage Foundation.
Our friends at Heritage allowed us to broadcast from there today, so that's great.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate and then we'll do the big idea and leave.
So, things I hate.
For people who say that all Muslims in the United States are moderate and that there's no such thing as a Wahhabi-funded mosque, that's scary, and that we should never worry about radical Islamic extremism inside the United States, this tape has now emerged of a California imam, he's quite prominent, who is appearing to call for the annihilation of the Juden.
And apparently there are now two of them who were doing this.
Here is tape of this California imam talking about the Jews.
Does the Prophet Muhammad have judgment day until the Muslims fight the Jews?
And the Jews hide behind stones and trees.
And the stones and trees say, O Muslim, O servant Allah.
They will not say, O Egyptian, or Palestinian, O Lord, O Syrian, or Afghan, or Pakistani.
That the time will come, the last hour would not take place till the Muslims fight the Jews.
He says to support the Allah, Allah.
He says, O Allah, Allah, count them one by one.
Destroy those who close the Allah, Allah.
Simas.
Is it the Islamic center of Davis, California?
Okay, we can stop it.
He says, O Allah, count them one by one, annihilate them down to the...
He says, This is a lot like a lot of the sermons that are out of the Middle East.
It was posted to the Islamic Center of Davis' YouTube channel on Friday.
The sermon lasted about two and a half minutes.
And remember, the Al-Aqsa Mosque is only open because the Jews allow it to be open.
And it was Palestinians who, I got this story wrong the other day slightly, it was Palestinians who decided that it would be worthwhile to stab to death two Druze Israeli police officers and then were shot for their trouble.
And one of them, one of the attackers is still alive apparently, sadly, because evil people who stab people should die.
But this is...
You know, the idea that Islamic extremism is a tiny, tiny percentage of the population worldwide is not true.
In the United States, thank God, it's still a fringe element.
But across the world, it is certainly not fringe, certainly not in the Palestinian Authority.
And when you're seeing this kind of stuff said in the United States, it should be slightly disturbing.
Okay, I want to say something on the big idea.
So on Thursdays we have the Big Idea.
The Big Idea is where we take a concept that you may have heard about but you don't know that much about in politics, and we break it down for you so that you can use it yourself.
So, one of the things that you hear a lot whenever there's a constitutional case that comes up is you'll hear that justices will say things like, this law had to be, we had to apply strict scrutiny to this law, or intermediate scrutiny to this law, or rational basis review.
These are legal tests to determine what rationale the government has to come up with in order to regulate something.
So, for example, strict scrutiny, that's invoked when there's a fundamental right at stake.
So there's a First Amendment violation through the law.
The law violates the First Amendment.
The question is, is that allowed or not?
Because the First Amendment is not unlimited, right?
I can't, like, walk into your house and just start shouting.
There's a compelling state interest in preventing me from walking into your house and shouting at you.
Strict scrutiny is invoked here.
Strict scrutiny is invoked when a fundamental right is at stake.
The government can only regulate these fundamental rights when there is a quote-unquote compelling state interest and the regulation is as narrowly tailored as possible.
One of the big questions in the upcoming Masterpiece Cakeshop case is going to be whether the discrimination law is tailored closely enough to prevent the violation of the fundamental right to practice your religion.
Intermediate scrutiny is the next level.
This is usually related to discrimination on the basis of gender or sex.
So if there's a law that says that you have to have separate bathrooms for men and women, for example, That would fall under intermediate scrutiny.
You have to show the government is allowed to show that it can discriminate on the basis of sex for an important government objective, and that the act is substantially related to achieving that objective.
And finally, there's rational basis review, where the person challenging the law has to show that the government has no real interest in law or policy, and there's no link between the interest and the challenged law.
Now, here is the problem.
You hear these kinds of terms thrown around, especially on the left.
They like to throw these terms around as if they mean something.
They don't mean anything.
The first rule of constitutional law is that it has nothing to do with the Constitution.
These are made up terms.
They're made up by judges and they are twisted to fit the facts.
You'll see cases that ought to fall under intermediate scrutiny, fall under strict scrutiny.
You'll see cases that are intermediate scrutiny cases that are treated as though they're strict scrutiny cases.
These malleable terms of art don't mean anything.
And it's dangerous, excuse me, when you see justices Attempting to apply vague standards to the law instead of just the words of the Constitution themselves.
This is why I think that Clarence Thomas is very loathe to use these sorts of terms.
He's exactly right.
As soon as you start talking about what sort of scrutiny is appropriate, you're now living in judge land, you're not living in Constitution land anymore.
So anytime you hear someone say, well that deserves strict scrutiny, just think to yourself, I have no idea what that means, and why don't you actually tell me what the Constitution has to say about this particular issue.
Don't be fooled by the legal jargon.
This is pretty much meaningless legal jargon that allows people to stretch to their perceived wanted conclusion at any point.
Okay, we'll be back tomorrow.
We'll be back in our beautiful LA studios, and I will be doing the mailbag as well, so make sure that you check that out.
Plus, we'll be playing excerpts from my testimony on Capitol Hill, which was a lot of fun.
We'll be doing all of that.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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