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Oct. 20, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:43
General John Kelly To The Rescue | Ep. 400
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General John Kelly emerges to save President Trump from himself.
Democrat Frederica Wilson makes a complete fool of herself.
And President George W. Bush is back.
We'll talk about all of these things.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show.
All of it kind of gross, but we'll talk about all of those things in just one second.
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Okay, so, let's set the stage, because yesterday was a pretty incredible press conference from General John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff.
So, we need to set the stage because I want to show how there are really only two innocent parties in this whole hubbub that has now lasted the entirety of the week over the treatment of Gold Star families.
Those two innocent parties are General Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, and the Johnson family in Florida.
Those are the only two innocent parties.
Democrat Frederica Wilson was clearly looking to get Trump.
It's pretty clear to me that she was looking to politicize the situation.
And President Trump is the one who led this whole thing off by going out and saying that President Obama and President Bush had somehow done something wrong in how they treated Gold Star families and they had insufficiently called all the members of Gold Star families.
So, that's how it started, okay?
Let's recall that back on Monday, I think it was Monday morning, President Trump gave a press conference in which he was asked specifically about why he had not reached out to all of the soldiers' families of the soldiers who were killed in Niger on October 4th.
And the president suggested that he had called all of the soldiers, or at least that other presidents had not called all of the soldiers, and he had, and this caused a bit of a firestorm.
And then, because as I say, the media are intent On taking everything Trump says and taking it 10 steps too far, they decide it's important to show that Trump actually is not sympathetic to the troops himself.
He, in fact, is cruel and inhumane to the troops.
And then, just coincidentally, right then, President Trump calls up Myeshia Johnson, who is the widow of La David Johnson, the sergeant who was killed in Niger.
There's still open questions to be asked if you want to know what those open questions are, listen to yesterday's show.
But he calls her up, And suddenly there's a huge firestorm because one of the people in the car when the call happens is Frederica Wilson, the Democrat congresswoman from Florida.
She is a colorful figure to say the least.
She's the woman who wears all the crazy hats.
She's the one who had suggested that George Zimmerman be put in prison for his own protection during the Trayvon Martin situation.
And she is a publicity hound, to say the very least.
But she also is close with the Johnson family, apparently.
Apparently she'd known them for quite a while.
David Johnson had at one point interned for her, I guess.
And she was in the car when Trump made this phone call.
So during the course of the phone call, one of the phrases that Trump said was something to the effect of, he knew what he signed up for.
And there were two ways to read that phrase, as I suggested at the time.
Way one was, Trump saying, he knew what he signed up for, so is it really unexpected?
Which is a terrible thing to say.
And the other is, he was a hero, and he knew what he signed up for, and he was doing what he wanted to do when he was killed.
He was with his buddies trying to defend the country, which is a very different connotation.
Now, to be completely innocent in all of this, to take the most innocent view of this, it is quite possible that when you are doing a morning phone call, people can take the same terms the wrong way.
Right?
We all know this.
We go to funerals and you don't know what to say to somebody's family.
The family of the person who died.
It's very, very difficult.
Which is why in Judaism we actually have a formula that you say because we really understand that there isn't much you can say to comfort somebody upon the death of a family member.
And so, we say in Hebrew, So the idea is that, may you be comforted among the mourners for Zion and Jerusalem.
Right?
It's the same thing we say when we hear somebody has died in Judaism.
There's also a formula for that.
We say, Meaning, blessed is the true judge.
Meaning, blessed is God.
The reason we do that is not just because we think these things are true, although we do, it's because there really aren't a lot of great things that you can say when somebody dies.
And it is very easy to step into a landmine when you're talking with somebody.
And so the most innocent take on this situation is that Trump said something that he didn't mean to be offensive, and the family felt offended by it.
Which is possible.
I mean, that's possible.
But whatever the situation, Let's take even that most innocent of scenarios.
The people who are to blame for this big controversy are, first, Trump for bringing up the controversy to begin with on Monday, and second, Frederica Wilson, who decides to go public and make a huge issue and suggest that Trump doesn't care about the families of soldiers.
So yesterday, so yesterday, Yeah, John Kelly, who had been dragged into this controversy, kicking and screaming.
Apparently at one point he had told Trump that President Obama did not call him after his son's death.
John Kelly is a gold star father.
His son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010.
He had told Trump that Obama didn't call him after his son died.
And the Trump administration immediately ran to the microphones to throw that information out there.
The suggestion being, here is some support for the idea that Obama didn't call everybody.
John Kelly must have been angry about that.
In his comments yesterday, he came out and basically what he was attempting to do, I think, was restore some dignity to this process.
Okay, the calls between the President and the family members, those are sacred.
The death of service members, that is sacred.
The politicization of these issues is really gross.
And I think that's what Kelly was trying to do with this press conference yesterday.
Here is John Kelly yesterday, the White House Chief of Staff, who took control of the press conference and really, I think, reshifted the debate.
There's no perfect way to make that phone call.
When I took this job and talked to President Trump about how to do it, my first recommendation was he not do it.
Because it's not the phone call that parents, family members are looking forward to.
It's nice to do, in my opinion, in any event.
He asked previous presidents, and I said, I can tell you that President Obama, who was my Commander-in-Chief when I was on active duty, did not call my family.
That was not a criticism.
That was just to simply say, I don't believe President Obama called.
That's not a negative thing.
I don't believe President Bush called in all cases.
I don't believe any president, particularly when the casualty rates are very, very high, that presidents call.
But I believe they all write.
Okay, so, you know, I think that this was his way of basically trying to take the sting out of the out of the allegation that he was somehow accusing Obama of some shortcoming in this respect.
He then went on and he attacked Frederica Wilson for making this into a major issue.
It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation.
Absolutely stuns me.
And I thought, at least that was sacred.
You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country.
And when I listened to this woman and what she was saying and what she was doing on TV, the only thing I could do to collect my thoughts was to go And walk among the finest men and women on this earth.
And you can always find them.
Because they're in Arlington National Cemetery.
Went over there for an hour and a half.
Walked among the stones, some of whom I put there.
Because they were doing what I told them to do when they were killed.
I mean, truly somber stuff, obviously.
And what he's saying is basically correct, that this is not the time for congresspeople to be coming out and ripping the president of the United States a new one for stuff that is, at best, a disagreement over meaning.
Kelly went further, who's very upset, obviously, with Frederica Wilson.
He feels that she was using this as a publicity stunt in order to promote her own career, and he is not shy about saying so.
And a congresswoman stood up, and in the long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise stood up there and all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building.
And how she took care of her constituents because she got the money and she just called up President Obama and on that phone call he gave the money, the twenty million dollars to build the building.
And she sat down.
And we were stunned.
Stunned that she'd done it.
Even for someone that is that empty a barrel.
We were stunned.
So he was clearly looking to go out for Frederica Wilson.
Now, there's some people who have pushed back on Kelly's factual claims here.
They have suggested that this building had already been funded, that Frederica Wilson didn't claim that she had received the funding for the building, that what she had done was sponsored the name change of the building to pay tribute to the fallen.
But it doesn't change what he's largely saying here, which is he was saying that she went there and she glorified herself for doing this thing.
James Comey was there at the time, by the way, and he thanked Frederica Wilson for this.
So I want to be fair to Frederica Wilson.
So Kelly comes out and his basic take here is, guys, this is sacred stuff.
Stop playing with fire.
Now, I do think that we have to, that that goes both ways.
Again, I think that Trump is not innocent here.
I think Frederica Wilson clearly is not innocent here.
Here's Frederica Wilson yesterday upon being informed.
I mean, this is just amazing that she's this incompetent.
And here's the colorfully beheaded Frederica Wilson talking after being informed that John Kelly had gone after her from the White House.
Threatening phone calls from white nationalists, and now, more harsh words from the White House.
You mean to tell me that I have become so important that the White House is following me?
And my word, this is amazing!
It's amazing.
That is absolutely phenomenal.
I have to tell my kids that I'm a rock star now.
Yeah, just stomach-churning stuff.
I mean, when you're talking about whether the memory of an American hero was disgraced, walking around calling yourself a rock star and laughing about it is probably not the way to do it.
By this morning, of course, she had changed her tune.
Now she's accusing John Kelly of being a racist, really.
She was on New Day this morning on CNN, this is clip 14, and she is openly accusing John Kelly of being a racist.
And though you're right, he didn't get the facts right on that, was that empty barrels make the most noise.
And he was using that, and he was likening that to you.
Basically that you're... I think that's a racist term, too.
I'm thinking about that when we looked it up in the dictionary because I had never heard of an empty barrel.
And I don't like to be dragged into something like that.
Okay, the idea that it's a racist term, again, no.
No.
I hadn't heard the term either, but I'm pretty sure that that was not a racist term.
If you had to look it up in the dictionary, good shot, it wasn't.
And then she continued along these lines.
She said that Kelly had lied about her, and that he had slandered her.
So now we're in a Frederica Wilson versus John Kelly fight.
Now what's amazing here is that Frederica Wilson is claiming that John Kelly is a racist, and that he is a bigot, and that he is a liar.
I'm old enough to remember back in 2016 when Kaiser-Kahn got up, gold star father, got up at the Democratic National Convention and attacked President Trump, and then-candidate Trump came back and attacked Kaiser-Kahn's wife, and there were two weeks of outrage over Trump's treatment of this gold star family.
Are we going to hear anything like that about Frederica Wilson's treatment of John Kelly?
He is a gold star father, after all.
Are we going to hear anything like that from the media?
Of course not.
Here's Frederica Wilson doing this routine.
I heard his remarks and I heard him say that I bragged that I secured the money for the building of the FBI building in Miramar, and that's a lie!
No, I feel sorry for General Kelly.
He has my sympathy for the loss of his son, but he can't just go on TV and lie on me.
I was not even in Congress in 2009 when the money for the building was secured.
So that's a lie.
How dare he?
However, I named the building at the behest of Director Comey, with the help of Speaker Boehner.
Working across party lines.
So he didn't tell the truth.
And he needs to stop telling lies on me.
Okay, so obviously now she's very upset.
As I say, the main claim that Kelly was making is that she went to this event and then she made it all about herself.
I don't know if that's true.
I haven't seen the tape.
But that is not the claim that she is saying that Kelly lied about.
She's saying that Kelly lied about her grabbing the money for the building or something along those lines.
In any case, the Democrats are taking precisely the wrong tack on all of this, and I'll explain in just a second.
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Okay, so the Democrats naturally felt the need to do the stupidest possible thing here, and so thus they did.
Here is Brian Fallon.
Brian Fallon is a former Hillary Clinton spokesperson, and he tweeted this out with regard to Kelly's presser yesterday.
Kelly isn't just an enabler of Trump.
He's a believer in him.
That makes him as odious as the rest.
Don't be distracted by the uniform.
Don't be distracted by the uniform.
I mean, as Eric Erickson said, I'm mostly distracted by the gold star.
The fact is that he is a gold star father, is John Kelly.
The fact is that a lot of Democrats are now attacking a gold star father.
As I said before, if the situation were reversed, which is precisely what they're accusing, they would never stop talking about it.
And he's not the only one who's doing this routine.
Joy Reid.
Tweeted a bunch of times last night, Lawrence O'Donnell, the exorable Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC.
He did an entire routine about how John Kelly was actually a racist based on the fact that John Kelly grew up in a segregated area, or a highly racially divided area, I guess in New England somewhere.
But here's Joy Reid's tweets, this is 17.
So, Joy Reid of MSNBC, she makes the same sorts of claims as Brian Fallon.
Wow!
Lawrence O'Donnell scorched General Kelly tonight, including calling out his segregated Boston upbringing and dehumanization of a black woman.
Wow, wow, wow.
Lawrence noted that General Kelly didn't even give Representative Wilson the dignity of using her name.
Kelly grew up in segregated Boston, in an Irish Catholic neighborhood where women were bullied, not honored, and blacks scorned and rejected.
And then she continued along these lines.
Again, what?
Like really, you're going after John Kelly being offended by Frederica Wilson because you say that he grew up in an area like Boston?
So everyone from Boston now cannot speak out when Frederica Wilson says something exorable about President Trump with regard to the troops?
We can't do that now.
Now, one thing I think is important to do here is actually play a phone call from President Trump to a military widow.
And I want to show you, I think this is fascinating because the line here has been that President Trump is not sympathetic enough to the military families, right?
That's how this whole controversy blew up even bigger than it was after Trump got it started.
The Washington Post has gotten ahold Natasha?
Yes, sir?
I am so sorry to hear about Donald's situation.
What a horrible thing, except that he's an unbelievable hero.
And, you know, all of the people that served with him are saying how incredible he was.
What a horrible thing, except that he's an unbelievable hero.
And you know, all of the people that served with him are saying how incredible he was.
Yes, sir.
And he's just an amazing, amazing guy.
And I think he's just a great hero.
Well, thank you, President Trump.
Those words are very kind.
He was an amazing man, an amazing husband, and an amazing soldier.
I couldn't be more proud of my husband than I am right now, sir, to be honest with you.
It's what my husband wanted to do.
Yes, he's just an all-around guy and I'm glad that you got to get to know a little bit about him.
It goes on like this for about three minutes.
just like you do.
I mean, he's just a special guy.
Go ahead, Natasha.
Yes, he's just an all-around guy, and I'm glad that you got to get to know a little bit about him.
It goes on like this for about three minutes.
Now, what's funny about this call is that at some point in here, she explains that her son is playing cornerback for the Missouri football team and apparently got in on an academic scholarship And Trump, jokingly, says something like, well, are your kids that talented, or are some less talented than others?
And she laughs, and then she says, no, all my kids are really talented.
The press, right, over at the Washington Post, one of the reporters at the Washington Post takes that one line out of context, in which Trump says, you know, are all your kids talented, or just that one?
And uses it as sort of a club, like, oh, Trump's asking her to rank her kids in order of preference.
She laughs, okay?
Everyone knows that he's kind of joking here.
But again, you're listening to the tone from President Trump.
Does this sound like somebody who's unsympathetic?
Again, I don't think Obama was unsympathetic to the troops.
I think he lied about what happened in Benghazi.
But I don't think he was unsympathetic to the troops.
I don't think he was unsympathetic to Gold Star families.
I don't think Bush was unsympathetic to Gold Star families.
I don't think Clinton was unsympathetic to Gold Star families.
I don't think Trump is unsympathetic to Gold Star families.
And the idea That we're now going to play this game where everybody is unsympathetic to gold star families because it's the ultimate insult that you can leverage against someone, I think is truly pretty gross.
Now, Trump himself should keep silent.
He is not.
He tweeted out about Congresswoman Wilson, saying he wants to get in a slap fight with her.
He tweeted, the fake news is going crazy with wacky Congresswoman Wilson, who was secretly on a very personal call and gave a total lie on content.
This is one thing that John Kelly said I just didn't get.
At one point he said, you know, Frederica Wilson shouldn't have even been listening in on that call.
Well, I mean, you can see that there are lots of people listening in on these calls, right?
Even in the phone call we just showed from the Washington Post, you can see there's a military attache there.
John Kelly said openly that he was listening in on that exact same phone call.
So if the Johnson family wanted Wilson there, they have every right to have Wilson there if they want.
The problem with Wilson is that she decided to go out and blab to the press about it and try and turn it into some sort of politicized issue.
That is the problem with what she did here, not that she was present.
In any case, should President Trump stop this?
Yes.
Should Frederica Wilson stop this?
Yes.
Okay, if this stuff is to remain sacred, I've had members of my extended family die.
Both my grandfathers passed away a while ago, my aunt passed away, and in any case where somebody who is close to you in any way dies, the tendency is to go very silent.
The tendency is to be very quiet.
It's why, again, in Judaism, I think Judaism actually does mourning exactly right.
I think Judaism is A religion that does mourning better than any other religion.
We actually take a week off of work.
It's called sitting shiva.
You're not allowed to leave the house.
You basically, you sit on a low stool to signify your mourning.
People come and visit you.
People bring meals.
They actually perform the prayer services in the morning in your house.
They actually bring Torah over and like an entire group of men come over to pray with you.
And the idea here is that it's supposed to be both private and communal.
And what's happened here is precisely the opposite.
It's public and individual.
It's not communal, and it's not private.
And that is, I think, the opposite of what should happen here.
Thanks to John Kelly for attempting to restore some dignity to this process.
I mean, I don't think that's too much to ask.
Thanks also to the family.
I will say, Myesha Johnson has been incredibly classy throughout this.
This is the widow of the sergeant who was slain in Niger.
She's been totally silent about this.
She hasn't said anything, and she's not obligated to say anything.
So, good for her.
And everyone else, I think, has been garbage.
I think the media's been awful.
I think Trump has been awful.
I think Frederica Wilson's been awful.
I think there's just a generalized lack of class that now has extended to this most sacred of spaces.
Okay, so, in other news, President Bush gave a speech yesterday, and I want to go through this speech, I think it's actually important to go through this speech, for a couple of reasons.
One, I think the speech itself is quite good.
Second, I'm seeing a lot of blowback from conservatives who are saying, well, you know, he's just being mean to Trump.
is directed against Trump, and he's impugning my honor.
You know, people I like, people who I work with who are saying this.
I want to go through Bush's speech because I think what Bush's speech was was just a reiteration of classical conservatism.
If you don't like the reiteration of classical conservatism, if you think that's somehow insulting to your point of view, then I think that you ought to look at your own point of view more closely.
And if you're on the left and you think that Bush was only slapping Trump in this speech, He wasn't.
Okay?
Bush was not just slapping Trump in this speech.
We'll go through the speech, and I will show you.
He slaps the left just as much as he slaps the nationalist, populist right, both of which I think are deserving of slaps.
It doesn't matter.
He never makes explicit reference to President Trump.
It doesn't matter.
The media have been doing this pathetic routine where it's Bush slams Trumpism.
Okay, Bush also slammed leftism, but you ignored that part, didn't you?
You pretended that never happened.
You pretended this isn't the same sort of stuff that Bush has been saying his entire career or I've been saying my entire career or Traditional conservatives, Reagan conservatives, have been saying their entire career, you pretended that this was a going-out-of-his-way-to-slap-Trump moment because he had to become part of the resistance.
That's not what this was at all.
This was Bush reiterating basic conservative principles, and somehow this is now offensive.
And by the way, I have to say, the media over the last week or so, over the last few months, They've been doing this utterly pathetic routine.
Nancy Pelosi came out two days ago and she said, I sort of wish that Romney were president.
You go to hell, lady.
You're the one who's suggesting that Romney was a brutal sexist in 2012.
I'm hearing people say, oh, you know, Bush, that was a classy guy.
You called Bush Hitler.
You suggested he was behind 9-11.
You can all go to hell.
It was your slander of good men like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney that led the Republicans to ignore character quality in nominating President Trump, because they figured at least if you're going to call us a bunch of jackasses anyway, if you're going to call us a bunch of racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes who hate the poor and secretly want to perpetrate terrorist attacks, then we'll just nominate whoever is the guy who hits the hardest regardless as to whether he's a good guy or not.
So the left has a lot to answer for here.
Anyway, here is some of Bush's speech.
I thought this was a great speech and I really want to go through it at length because I think that it speaks to a mode of conservatism that unfortunately has been lost in the modern era when conservatism is apparently, or at least right-wing thought is more about the attitude than it is about the thought.
So here is President Bush.
He starts off by saying that You know, there was a bipartisan consensus that America's freedom was tied to her security and all of those were tied to our fundamental values.
For more than 70 years, the presidents of both parties believed that American security and prosperity were directly tied to the success of freedom in the world.
They knew that the success depended in large part on U.S.
leadership.
The mission came naturally.
Because it expressed the DNA of American idealism.
Okay, so there is, he said a couple of lines in the speech, I thought it was a good line.
He said a couple of lines in the speech I disagreed with, and this is where I think Bush strays from traditional conservatism, which looks at man as inherently sinful, or at least of divided mind.
Bush had this kind of Wilsonian notion that there was a yearning in the human heart for freedom.
I don't think that's right.
I think the value of freedom does not lie in our desire for it.
The value of freedom lies in the capacity of freedom to allow us to choose to be more virtuous human beings.
Free will is an inherent part of being human.
Whatever maximizes our capacity to exercise that free will without invading the rights of others, that's what we should be striving for.
That's why freedom is good, not because lots of people like it.
Lots of people like ice cream doesn't mean if you eat only ice cream you'll be fine.
The fact is enormous swaths, enormous swaths of humanity do not believe in basic freedom.
So this is where I disagree with Bush.
This is my sole point really in this speech of disagreement with President Bush.
Here's what he had to say.
We know deep down that repression is not the wave of the future.
We know that the desire for freedom is not confined to or owned by any culture.
It is the inborn hope of our humanity.
I do not think this is true.
I think this is a myth.
That the desire for freedom is not confined to any culture or owned by any culture.
Western civilization has for a long time had a pretty solid monopoly on what we now call freedom.
This is an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian civilization.
It did not exist in the East.
It does not exist now in Islamic countries.
The idea that it's not held in by any culture is not true.
Culture does have a lot to do with freedom.
There are cultures of freedom and cultures of non-freedom.
And thankfully, freedom has spread to other cultures.
So maybe it can be grafted onto other cultures, but the idea that it wasn't an outgrowth of a particular culture, or that cultures are all equal in their desire for freedom, or that people are all equal in their desire for freedom, I don't think that's true.
People are equal in their value before God.
We are not all equal in our desire for freedom.
That hole in Bush's philosophy is large enough to drive a truck through, and that's what allowed President Trump to act as the realist answer to Bushism, and President Obama to pretend that he was a realist in sort of contravention of these freedom ideals.
But the rest of Bush's speech is a basic statement of traditional conservatism, and a bunch of people on the right were mad, and a bunch of people on the left were gleeful because they thought that Bush was attacking Trump.
Here is what President Bush had to say.
The American dream of upward mobility seems out of reach for some who feel left behind in a changing economy.
Discontent deepened and sharpened partisan conflicts.
Bigotry seems emboldened.
Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.
So people took this as a critique of Trump, specifically.
But it's not just a critique of Trump.
It's a critique also of the resistance mentality that says the Russians stole the election.
It's a critique of the idea that bigotry only exists on one side, as Bush made clear later in the speech.
What he's saying here is correct, right?
There is a discontent with our institutions, and it has led to a partisanship that is really quite vicious.
And that vicious partisanship is coming from a lack of meaning, which is something that I talked about at University of Tennessee.
He continues here, and he says that one of the big problems here is that because of that discontent, support for some of the basic ideas that founded the country have waned.
There are some signs that the intensity of support for democracy itself has waned.
Right, so what he's saying there, this is what the left ignores, right?
That's a pretty harsh attack on the left.
You guys don't remember the Cold War?
You don't remember all the evil communist nations attempting to kill us?
You don't remember any of this stuff?
Like really?
Maybe you ought to remember that socialized central planning has always been a giant fail.
They're not willing to pay attention to any of those things.
So the reason I'm pointing all this out is because the caricature of Bush's speech is that Bush was just out there attacking Trump.
That is not true.
And I'll play a little bit more of that speech, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at MVMT.
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OK.
So just to finish up President Bush's speech.
Again, I think it's ridiculous that the right was attacking him on this.
All of this is self-evident.
All of this is basic conservatism.
The fact that we think that George W. Bush's brand of being a mensch... I mean, this is just a menschy speech, okay?
Mensch is Yiddish for being a man.
It means, like, being a gentleman.
Bush, whatever I think of his policy, and I disagree with him on an innumerable number of things, right?
I disagree with him on campaign finance reform.
I disagree with him on Medicare Part D. I disagree with him on No Child Left Behind.
I disagree with him on immigration reform.
I disagree with him on the TARP bailouts.
I disagree with him on a huge bevy of issues.
But!
George W. Bush was a classy guy, and his philosophy was basically traditional conservatism, and much more reflective of traditional conservatism than the so-called brand new populist nationalism that really is not an ideology.
It's more just an attitude that we're angry at stuff.
So here is Bush going on and talking about our discourse being degraded.
Again, people are taking this as merely a referendum on Trump.
That is ignoring the destruction of our discourse by the left as well.
We've seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty.
At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together.
Argument turns too easily into animosity.
Disagreement escalates into dehumanization.
Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.
Forgetting the image of God, we should see in each other.
What he's saying right here, again, this is basic conservative thought, and he critiqued nativism and isolationism, and then he finished, this is the second to last clip of Bush in his age, he finished by talking about our identity as a nation, suggesting that it's all about these ideals.
These are the ideals that both the alt-right and the populist nationalists on the one hand, and the socialist democrat left, Ignore, right?
This idea that he's about to say is Americanism in a nutshell.
This is why I like the speech.
This is classy.
Our identity as a nation, unlike many other nations, is not determined by geography or ethnicity, by soil or blood.
Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals and civic responsibility.
We become the heirs of Thomas Jefferson.
By accepting the ideal of human dignity found in the Declaration of Independence.
We become the heirs of James Madison by understanding the genius and values of the U.S.
Constitution.
We become the heirs of Martin Luther King Jr.
by recognizing one another not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
This means that people of every race, religion, ethnicity can be fully It means that bigotry or white supremacy, in any form, is blasphemy against the American creed.
And it means the very identity of our nation depends on the passing of civic ideals to the next generation.
How can you be critical of that?
How?
If you're on the right and you feel like this speech was a critique of Trump, maybe it's because Trump deserves to be critiqued.
And if you're on the left and you feel like this is a critique of Trump, maybe it's because you're not looking deep enough into your own heart to realize this was also a critique of you.
Okay, George W. Bush's speech I thought yesterday was quite grand, and I don't miss a lot of his policies, but I miss him as a man.
He was a good man, and I miss having a good man in the office of the White House.
I think it's been a long time since we've had a good man, just a gentleman who's not interested in dividing the country along racial lines for political purposes.
It's been a long time, not just Trump, but also Obama.
It's been a long time since we've had a person who actually I felt that American unity was necessary and positive in the White House.
It's sad, the way our country has spun out of control since 2007, over the last decade or so.
Okay, so I do have some stuff that I like and some stuff that I hate, but for that, and the mailbag, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com right now and subscribe.
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All righty.
So a couple of things I like and then some things that I hate.
So. - Yeah.
Things that I like.
So on the plane yesterday, I never have a chance to watch movies because I'm busy all the time and I have children, but I was able to watch The Founder yesterday on the plane.
The Founder is starring Michael Keaton.
It's about Ray Kroc, who was sort of the founder.
That's the irony of the title, is that his name isn't McDonald's, right?
It was the McDonald's brothers who actually founded McDonald's, and then Ray Kroc came in and turned it into a national chain, and here's a little bit of the preview.
I know what you're thinking.
How the heck does a 52-year-old, over-the-hill, milkshake machine salesman build a fast food empire with 1,600 restaurants and an annual revenue of $700 million?
One word.
Persistence.
Prince Castle Sales.
Hi, Jane.
Ray, how's it going down there?
Good.
Swell.
A lot of interest.
We got an order.
Six mixers.
Joining one in particular?
McDonald's.
Care for a little tour?
We wanted something different.
And that's when my brother here comes up with one of his brilliant ideas.
Orders ready in 30 seconds, not 30 minutes.
Unique.
Original.
There's nothing like this.
It's revolutionary?
That's exactly what it is.
It's revolutionary.
What is that?
The Golden Arches.
It's a way to make the place stand out, huh?
There should be McDonald's everywhere.
Franchise the damn thing.
Mr. Krug.
Franchise.
McDonald's can be the new American church.
And it ain't just open on Sundays, boys.
How can we be almost out of capital?
Did you mortgage our home?
We could lose everything.
I want to renegotiate my lousy deal.
I can't.
Can or won't?
Ray.
What?
No!
Dammit.
What you ought to be doing is owning the land upon which that burger is cooked.
You're not in the burger business.
You're in the real estate business.
Okay, so what's interesting about the preview is it doesn't really show, at least in the beginning of the preview, that the story is really the story of Ray Kroc being a jerk, right?
That it starts off and he's just an idealistic guy who wants to make something of himself, and he's kind of a showboat and a salesman.
And as the movie goes on, you see that he becomes more of a sleazebag, that he divorces his wife.
I mean, this is all history, so it's not really spoiler alert time.
And that the brothers, the McDonald brothers, he ends up trying to cut them out of their own business and all the rest of it.
And the take of the movie is supposed to be that American capitalism, this consumerist capitalism, screws the little guy.
Really screws the little guy.
I had a couple of problems with this particular take.
So, the movie is really well done.
I had a couple of problems with this particular take.
So, the whole movie is built around the rivalry between Ray Kroc, who is a salesman, who comes to the McDonald's Brothers and says, we are going to turn this into a franchise, and the McDonald's Brothers, who are trying to maintain quality, and who don't want to compromise quality in favor of money, and all the rest of it.
Uh, and in the movie they make a point of saying McDonald's brothers were also Republicans, but they kind of jab at Ronald Reagan near the end because Michael Keaton's character, Ray Kroc, is speaking at an event for Ronald Reagan that sort of closes the movie.
Here is my problem.
My problem is twofold.
One, Ray Kroc is portrayed as the villain of the film, and he is.
But Ray Kroc's villainy, and his quote-unquote villainy of capitalism, results in legitimately tens of thousands of people becoming inordinately wealthier.
Right?
People who actually franchise this thing.
If the McDonald's Brothers had just been left to their own devices, as the movie shows, there would have been one McDonald's franchise in San Bernardino.
McDonald's would not have been a national chain.
It would have been like four stores, and that would have been it.
And Ray Kroc did take that and build it into a multinational, enormous corporation doing $700 million worth of business every year.
And that made a lot of people wealthier, and made food a lot more available, and a lot cheaper.
And you may not like the fast food, but that's none of your business, because it's a free country.
Okay, so that's number one.
Number two, there's this idea that Ray Kroc clearly is screwing the brothers.
Now, Ray Kroc, I don't know that much about him as a business person, but in the film, at least, just to take their narrative, Ray Kroc ends up dropping a million dollars into the pockets of each brother.
He's the one, again, who really takes their little store and turns it into a national franchise.
He is the driving force behind making McDonald's an actual thing.
And, you know, it's pretty clear that he's cutthroat.
They try to make him out to be cutthroat.
The brothers end up with making over a million dollars each.
One of the weird things about the film, and one of the weird claims the brothers later made, is they claimed that they had a handshake deal with Ray Kroc, that he was going to provide them 1% of all future profits, future net profits, from McDonald's, and that it was a handshake deal.
I have a problem with this just because they signed a contract with him, and one of the key components of the beginning of the movie is that they sign a contract with Ray Kroc that he continues to break, and they are very strict about enforcing that contract.
The idea that they would have done a handshake deal with Ray Kroc over 1% of the future profits of the company, I find that a little bit hard to believe.
Now, again, I don't know enough to know if that's accurate or not, but if that's the claim, Then that's just foolish business.
I mean, this is why we have lawyers, and clearly they didn't even trust Kroc at that point.
In any case, was Ray Kroc a jerk?
I don't know much about him.
In the movie, he certainly is.
Does capitalism make people better?
No.
Capitalism can give them the opportunity to be worse people as they make it out for Ray Kroc here.
At the same time, capitalism can also make a lot of people much wealthier who are good people and who are trying to do something worthwhile with their lives.
I mean, one of the things that the movie does show is a bunch of people who are sort of salt-of-the-earth types who are franchising because they're good at keeping their stores clean and they're doing what they need to do in order to make the store successful.
So, it's a really interesting film.
I just wouldn't swallow wholesale the anti-capitalist narrative of the film because I don't think it's accurate or even reflective of the material in the film.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so let's begin with Richard Spencer So Richard Spencer is a garbage human, and Richard Spencer is the leader of this white supremacist movement.
He says he's not a white supremacist because everyone should have their own ethnocentric country, but whites created civilization.
It's a dumb argument.
Whites did not create civilization.
Westerners created civilization, and Western culture created civilization.
Not every white created Western civilization, and not people from other cultures or other ethnicities.
They are capable of assimilating into that civilization.
That's just the fact of the matter.
As I've said before, people who were considered barbarians at one time are now considered stalwarts in the white supremacist notion, right?
The Irish, the Germans, the Italians.
These are now considered stalwarts in the white supremacist pantheon?
Well, white supremacists back in 1890 thought all of these groups were gross.
And they thought Jews were gross too, and a lot of them still do.
So, no.
So Richard Spencer was speaking at University of Florida.
Now, let me give a hint to people on the left.
If you really think that Richard Spencer is the most dangerous man alive, if you really think that he's egregious, go outside, protest outside his speech, and then leave the crowd completely empty.
Nothing would be as damaging to Richard Spencer as going to University of Florida and him being in an auditorium by himself twiddling his thumbs.
Here instead is some tape of what actually happened at University of Florida.
And Spencer is going to use this to say that he was basically silenced and shut down and he's a victim in the free speech wars.
Stop it.
You're going to fail.
We are stronger than you and you will know it.
That's why you're ganging up here like some kind of mob in order to prevent me from saying something.
Do you not want to hear something?
Do you not want to hear something, poor little babies, that might contradict something your professor told you?
Okay, so there is Richard Spencer doing his routine.
I spoke at University of Florida.
I don't think it was in the same auditorium.
I spoke in University of Florida a few months ago, and it went great.
It was easy.
There were a couple protesters outside.
Nothing like this.
Why?
Because I'm not Richard Spencer.
Clearly.
But also, I want you to look at that auditorium.
Can you run it back a little bit?
There's a part where it sort of scrolls, it screens through the audience, and you can see that there's a gap of seats, and then there's like two rows of white guys in white shirts.
So, you'll see it in just a second.
It was really close to the top.
So, what you're gonna see here is, there are the gap, right?
Gap of empty seats.
Lots of empty seats.
And then, you'll see that right in front, there's a group of white guys who are standing and clapping.
Right?
A group of white guys in button-up white shirts who are standing and clapping.
And when you see this, what you'll notice is that these are the only Richard Spencer fans in the entire place.
Right there.
That's it.
Right?
It's like 12 guys.
Maybe 20 guys there.
Right?
It's like a 500-person theater, minimum.
And there were like 20 guys there.
Imagine if the protesters had been smart enough to just stay outside.
And this entire thing happened, and there were like 15 guys there.
How humiliating that would be for Richard Spencer.
Richard Spencer operates off your ire.
Richard Spencer operates off your anger.
I don't feel that that's what I'm here to do, by the way.
When I speak on campuses, I say things I think are true.
The fact that they piss people off is always kind of a shock to me.
But the fact is that you're giving Spencer what he wants.
Don't be stupid.
Don't give him what he wants.
Go protest outside.
Leave the auditorium absolutely empty.
Demonstrate that, like, he has seven fans, which is the reality.
Okay, other things that I hate.
We'll do one more thing that I hate.
Al Sharpton, uh, he...
I don't even know why in the world you would consider Al Sharpton any sort of source for anything.
He is now going out there saying that President Trump is the polarizer-in-chief.
This is a guy who, as I've said before, was involved in helping incite riots in Crown Heights in 1991 that ended with the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jew.
He was involved in inciting violence at Freddy's Fashion Mart.
A guy who was a fan of his set a fire and it killed eight people.
He is routinely race-baited.
He lied about Tawana Browley openly.
He's a piece of absolute filth, Al Sharpton.
I mean, he's just a garbage person.
And yet, he's being trotted out as somebody to talk about the nature of Trump's polarization.
But he is not just Donald Trump and New York polarizer people.
He's the president of the United States.
And for the president to imply that police should defy the rights of citizens under arrest, for the president to throw out police reforms that the Justice Department investigated and found necessary, it warrants us to come out and speak loudly and clearly that he has become the polarizer-in-chief in this country.
He's so polarizing, he's so polarizing.
He may be polarizing, but Al Sharpton is not the guy you want to trot out to talk about that.
Okay.
Time for a few mailbag questions.
If you are a subscriber, now is the time to send in your live mailbag questions as well.
So, congratulations to you.
Kevin says, I was wondering why you think the LGBT community, especially the gay community, has increased over the years.
I've been wondering this for a while now.
Thanks.
I'm a big fan.
Have a good day.
So if you mean sympathy, then I think that's largely because of media attention.
If you want to say the number of people who are actually gay or bisexual or trans has increased, there is evidence to this fact.
The reason is because I do think that sexual behavior is malleable.
I think sexual desire is somewhat malleable.
I don't think it's entirely malleable.
I think it has a genetic component and an environmental component.
I think when you say to people that whatever floats your boat is what floats your boat, people are more apt to try things, right?
Just as when you say that single motherhood is no longer to be morally abhorred, you get more single motherhood, when you say that Homosexuality or bisexuality is on an equal moral plane.
With heterosexuality, you're likely to get more of that sexual activity.
People experiment with sex.
People are tempted by the forbidden.
And so you get more people identifying with these things.
And you see these numbers going up dramatically in places like Britain.
Guys saying they're now willing to experiment with other guys, etc.
So, I think a lot of it has to do with media attention and changing social mores.
I don't think that that's necessarily a good thing.
I think that people should make decisions In their sex life, based on what is best for their happiness.
And I think that promiscuity is generally not best for your happiness.
I think that heterosexual marriage is generally the best for people's happiness, but not for everyone, obviously.
Crystal says, I love you.
Crystal, I don't know who you are, but my wife I'm sure would not mind if I say I love you too, not knowing who you are and hoping that you're not a horrible person.
Ben says, hey Ben, I know quite a few liberals who have stopped being Christians because of the overwhelming support of Trump by evangelical Christians.
Well, first of all, if they were liberals and they were Christians, then they have some inherent contradictions in the first place.
Because Christianity does not tend toward liberalism on either the economic spectrum or on the social spectrum, for certain.
On the religious freedom spectrum, leftism and Christianity are pretty much incompatible as well.
If you are, this is one of my key complaints about people who don't understand religion.
If what turns you off to religion is the adherence of religion, then you're not really turned off by religion, you're turned off by people.
People suck.
Okay, people sin.
The entire basis of Christianity is that people are born into original sin.
Judaism doesn't believe that people are born into original sin, but it does believe that we have a Yetzer Hara, right, an evil desire, an evil inclination, and a Yetzer Hatov, and a good inclination, and they're constantly fighting it out.
If you believe that there are people who you disagree with on politics, who did the wrong thing because of their Christian viewpoint, and so you leave Christianity, maybe it's because you weren't a very good Christian to begin with.
Maybe you should instead try and convince them, as so many Christians I know who didn't vote for Trump do, that they were wrong to support Trump.
And if they support Trump, and they're Christian, maybe they have good reason to do so.
So I don't know enough about which exact medical eponyms would be attributable to Nazis.
So I don't know enough about which exact medical eponyms would be attributable to Nazis.
I am not in favor of wiping away things that are accomplished.
I don't like wiping away the history of things and whitewashing the history of things.
I'm generally not a big fan of that.
So as I've said about Confederate statues, I agree with Condi Rice that they should remain up and we should, every time we walk past a Confederate statue, we should remind people that the Confederates were on the wrong side of this argument and why.
And I feel the same way about a lot of the medical advances that were taken under the Nazis.
I think it's important to recognize that so that we ourselves recognize the balance between mistreatment of human beings and medical research because we're too apt to think that either history is clean or that we can have it all today, that there's no conflict between, say, human rights and science.
There very clearly is when it comes to things like fetal stem cells, right?
This is a serious issue.
Okay, Maurice says, what do you think about cultural appropriation?
If someone that is not Jewish wears a yarmulke as a fashion statement, is that offensive to you as a Jewish person?
Well, first of all, if everyone started wearing a yarmulke, it'd make me a lot happier.
Then I wouldn't stand out quite as much.
I think that'd be hilarious.
But as far as them wearing yarmulkes as a fashion statement, it'd be a weird fashion statement.
And I don't really see religious icons, per se, being used.
I think you can diminish the value of a religious icon.
I'm not sure you can diminish the value of a cultural icon.
I do think there's a difference between the two.
So, if you were to wear a yarmulke around, I would say, well, that has holy meaning to me.
And you're sort of defacing the holy meaning.
If you say, as a lot of people say, well, hoop earrings are somehow a cultural appropriation.
No, they're just a nice thing that you wear and people like how it looks.
They don't really have any holy meaning.
If they did, that's sort of a different story.
Aaron says, what are your thoughts on The Great Gatsby?
Well written, overrated.
Those are my thoughts on The Great Gatsby.
F. Scott Fitzgerald is a beautiful writer.
His word choice is phenomenal.
And he writes about some of the most boring people who ever lived.
His characters, I'm just not a huge Fitzgerald fan.
I just read a Fitzgerald book recently.
I'm trying to remember which one it was.
It was Tender is the Night.
I just read Tender is the Night.
Maybe four months ago.
And it is not a good book.
I know people praise it.
There's this whole era of literature that people really praise to the skies.
The only one from that era of literature who I really can stand is Hemingway.
I am not a huge F. Scott Fitzgerald fan, even though I think his writing is quite beautiful.
beautiful.
Uh, Brayden says, should elected representatives vote for what their constituents want when it conflicts with their faith?
Uh, so this is a big debate between sort of Burkean philosophy and, uh, and I'd say Montesquieu philosophy, maybe, uh, Burkean philosophy is you elect me to exercise my own independent judgment.
This is what the founders thought, too.
They thought that the purpose of a republic rather than a democracy is that it's not my job to enforce what you want me to do as my constituent, it is my job to do what you elected me to do, which is exercise my own independent judgment.
This is why the character of the people we elect matters.
This is why we don't just vote directly on issues.
So, no, I don't think it's wrong for you to buck your constituents if you think they're wrong.
You just may feel at the ballot box next time.
time.
Jeff says, Ben, I know many young people would say they are conservative and talk as if they are, but they do not act like they are.
In some cases, they have no work ethic or very little.
My concern is one day they will grow up and have to actually work and they won't know how to.
So my question is, do you see this with young people?
And if you do, what should be done?
I'm not saying it's every young person, but I've noticed the shift or disappearance of work ethic since I was younger.
I'm only 36.
So yes, Jeff, I tend to agree that there are a lot of people across the board who claim they're conservative or have conservative values and they don't work and they blame circumstance.
The key conservative—when people ask me why I grew up conservative, it wasn't that my parents grew up talking about George Bush Sr.
and Bill Clinton to me when I was a kid.
It's that they had one fundamental value.
Work hard, and there will be consequences.
Don't work hard, and there will be consequences.
Actions have consequences.
If you believe that, then at root, you're a conservative.
If you don't believe that, at root, you're not.
Well, honestly, I would recommend that you start by just reading the Bible.
new to the Bible, what books would you recommend I read first?
Well, honestly, I would recommend that you start by just reading the Bible.
I mean, I think that you can actually just, it was meant to be read and it was meant to be understood.
So I think that you should just read the Bible itself first.
And then there are specific books by C.S. Lewis that I think are quite good from a Christian perspective on the Bible.
There are some books from the Jewish perspective.
I think Dennis Prager actually has some good books on sort of Jewish philosophy.
It depends.
Elie Wiesel has a couple of books that are eminently readable and really terrific.
There's one called Messengers of God that's really good about the figures in Genesis that is really fascinating.
And to be honest with you, I have been writing over the past year and a half a compendium of thoughts on the Bible, and I think that we'll probably bring it out sometime next year.
So if you can wait for that, then you can have some of my thoughts.
You know, I do the Bible thoughts every Wednesday.
You can have that in more fleshed out form, at least for the Old Testament, the five books of Moses.
You can get that probably next year.
Jencene says, Hey Ben, my sisters keep talking about adopting without getting married, even though I've told them that's unwise financially and mentally for the child.
They're taught by saying, is it better for him to be an orphan forever then?
I'm not sure about this.
If marriage is out of the question, is it better to not adopt the child and leave them to be raised an orphan or adopt as a single parent?
Thanks.
Papa bless Gensine.
Okay, so Gensine, my view is that it is not typically about a choice between an orphanage and adoption.
Your sisters are probably talking about adopting newborns, and so what you're talking about is them competing with a married family.
That's usually what we're talking about here.
The biggest problem that we have in the adoption system is that there are too many barriers between families that want to adopt and kids who need to be adopted.
That is the biggest problem in the adoption system.
I do not think that they should treat it as... Listen, are there gradations of morality?
Of course.
Meaning that the worst outcome is to grow up in an orphanage.
The second worst outcome is to grow up in a home with a single mom who adopted you.
And the best outcome is for you to grow up in a home with two parents.
I think that if you're going to adopt an unadoptable child who's never been adopted by anybody else and is stuck in the system, I think it's perfectly fair to say that.
I think if you're talking about adopting a newborn, and you're up against a couple, then you're doing the wrong thing.
Brendan says, hey Ben, what's your opinion on Yankees fans?
Can we all come together in agreement that they are the absolute worst people on earth?
I'm tempted to say yes.
I know a lot of Yankees fans who are quite wonderful people, but you don't get to complain about life if you're a Yankees fan.
You just don't.
Okay, shut up.
Your life is great.
I've lived my entire life and watched my White Sox win one championship and suck the entire rest of my life.
And that is true of every other team.
You guys win championships.
You don't win a championship for seven years.
You're like, oh, my kid's never seen them win a championship.
Your kid's five.
By the time the White Sox won a championship in 2005, I was already 19 years old.
Well, I was 21 years old, rather.
I was 21 years old, and my father, by that time, was 49.
And my grandfather never saw it.
So you shut it.
You just shut it.
Oh, poor you.
You didn't win a championship for four or five years, and now you have the best player in the majors, Aaron Judge, and you have Gary Sanchez, and you have a crappy pitching staff that suddenly has decided to pitch like they're great.
You go away.
Okay, Raphael says, Hey Ben, I've been wondering if you have any methods for studying whenever you want to learn a subject or if you simply read about it and end up absorbing it.
If you do anything specific, could you share?
So, Raphael, I read so much that I tend to just sort of let it wash over me.
And then I have a really good memory.
Well, I don't necessarily have a great memory for every fact in a book, but I have a good memory for where a fact is in a book.
So if I have to answer a question, I know which book to look for and where to look it up.
And that's helpful.
And then when I write about things, I tend to remember them very well.
So I think a good study method is to write down things that you think are important from the book by hand.
This is a good way of getting it in your head.
Alexander says, is it truly possible to have a complete separation between church, religion, and state when objective values of morality are largely religiously oriented?
For example, can our government actually be separated from religion when its structure and powers are based in Judeo-Christian values of ethics and governance?
So the answer, of course, is no.
There is no idea of separation between church and state.
This comes from a letter from Thomas Jefferson.
The idea is you cannot establish a religion.
That means you cannot establish religious practice and force me to go to a particular church.
It does not mean that I cannot vote based on values that I derive from Judeo-Christian sources.
So, first of all, I don't think there's really a point to marriage if you don't want to have kids.
That's a little bit of an overstatement.
There's a point to marriage, and then it would be companionship, but that can be achieved without marriage.
Now we're both in limbo.
How do you know if and when you're ready to have children?
And honestly, what is the point of it all?
So first of all, I don't think there's really a point to marriage if you don't want to have kids.
That's a little bit of an overstatement.
There's a point to marriage, and that would be companionship, but that can be achieved without marriage.
I think the point of marriage itself, the institution, is for you to have kids and your kids to be guaranteed a stable home in it.
How do you know if and when you're ready to have children?
I don't think anyone's ever completely ready to have kids.
I mean, it's not a fully rational decision to bring someone into life who is going to be reliant on you for the rest of your days and who is going to suck money out of your wallet and be an emotional drain.
But, I mean, let's just be real about this.
It is also the most beautiful thing in life.
So the most beautiful thing in life is when I go to put my children into bed at night, not because they're going to sleep, but because there's just nothing better than holding your child and singing to them while they're going to sleep.
It's the greatest thing that anyone that God ever created, and you're missing out if you don't do this.
Also, the fact that you and the person you love get to create, you and your husband get to create a human being that is part of both of you is an unbelievable thing.
It's an unbelievable gift from God.
And your husband should love you enough to want to have a child with you that is part you, and you should love your husband enough to want to have a child that is part him.
And that's the beauty of having children.
As far as financially, just make sure that you are financially responsible and that you are not making decisions that, you know, Necessitate that your child live in poverty, but you're never going to be fully financially ready to have kids because you can't be.
It's very expensive, and you know what?
You make do.
You make do.
Okay, so we have reached the end of the week.
Congratulations to you, and congratulations to me.
We are here.
That means that we will be back on Monday.
Over the weekend, try not to ruin things more than they already have been ruined.
I know.
I'm hoping in vain, but what can I do?
We'll be back next week.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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