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Oct. 30, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:39
It’s Indictment Day! | Ep. 406
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So, here we are and it's Monday.
Lots of things are happening.
George Papadopoulos Theodoropoulos Snuffleupagus has apparently cut a plea deal with the special counsel.
We'll talk all about it.
Plus, Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, is probably going to go to jail.
And Kevin Spacey gives the worst defense for allegedly attempting to rape a child anyone has ever given.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So much news, so little time.
So today, it's a fun day because I get to put on my lawyer hat.
And when I put on my lawyer hat, it means that I go through the full Paul Manafort indictment.
Plus, I go through the special plea deal that was cut by George Theodorokopoulos.
We're gonna talk all about that.
Plus, of course, we'll get to Kevin Spacey and the media being awful at everything.
But first!
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Okay, so I don't know where to start because there is so much news.
So we will start from Paul Manafort.
We'll start with Paul Manafort because this was the expectation last week.
So as you recall, on Friday, it was announced that the special counsel was going to drop indictments on Monday.
I always love when they leave cliffhangers at the end of a season.
It's really exciting that way.
So they left a cliffhanger on Friday.
Who would be indicted?
And everybody sort of assumed it'll be Manafort, right?
It's got to be Manafort, because Manafort has been known to be dirty for years and years and years.
He was very, very tied in with the Republican establishment.
He really was.
He was close to the Bushes.
He was close to the Republican National Committee.
He was very close to a lot of people in Republican halls of power.
I know because I had heard of him sort of in those circles.
But Manafort had also been widely known since really 2012 to sort of be a dirty character who was in with the Ukrainian government, who's basically doing lobbying work allegedly on behalf of the Ukrainian government, which is a Russian front puppet state basically run by a guy named Viktor Yanukovych.
So the allegations in the indictment, the left was hoping that the indictment would say Paul Manafort traded money, the Russians paid him in order so that he would set up collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
This is what the Democrats and the media wanted.
They wanted Paul Manafort to be the go-between for the supposed Russian collusion that would show that Hillary Clinton actually won the election except for those scheming evil Russians.
Okay, that's not what the indictment says.
So the indictment is 12 counts and basically the entire thing is about how Paul Manafort is a corrupt creep who was taking money from this Ukrainian party that was basically a front group for Russia and then laundering it.
That's pretty much the entire thing.
There's nothing- Trump is not mentioned once in the indictment.
The Trump campaign is not mentioned one time in the indictment.
Virtually all of the bad acts happened in 2014 and before.
In 2014 is when Yanukovych left office.
So that cut off sort of the money train for Manafort.
And then apparently he was still fibbing about it and doing some money laundering afterward.
But most of the bad activity with regard to Russia, at least as the indictment says, stopped in 2014.
So that's the good news for Trump.
Nothing in the indictment suggests collusion between Trump and the Russian government.
And that's exactly what the left wanted it to say.
Here's the bad news for Trump.
Manafort was a crappy pick.
Everyone knew it at the time.
When Manafort was picked, people were immediately saying, this guy is probably going to end up in jail.
Bad move by President Trump.
But it shows you the level of chaos that sort of predominated in the Trump campaign.
In all likelihood, somebody just went to Trump and said, listen, none of the big campaign managers will work for you.
Here's this guy who's super connected.
You know, he has good business connections.
Paul Manafort, hire him.
And so Trump went ahead and hired him.
It's probably that simple.
And that sort of chaos inside the Trump administration also, in my opinion, could easily explain the George Papadopoulos Routine that we're going to talk about in just a little while.
So to finish up with Manafort, basically the indictment alleges that Manafort and Richard Gates III, his right hand, worked as quote unregistered agents of the government of Ukraine, generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of the Ukraine work.
They then laundered the money through scores of US and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts.
Manafort and Gates allegedly did not register as foreign agents, which they apparently were, and then Manafort used his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States without paying taxes on income.
So basically they're getting him for all the financial impropriety.
Between in or around 2008 and 2017, both dates being approximate and inclusive according to the indictment, Manafort and Gates devised and intended to devise and executed and attempted to execute a scheme and artifice to defraud to obtain money and property by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises from the United States Bank and other financial institutions.
Allegedly Manafort wired millions through other companies for purposes of laundering.
So if you saw Ozark, basically he was Jason Bateman in Ozark, right?
I mean, essentially he was just cleaning money, except he was cleaning it for himself.
Apparently he cleaned about 18 million dollars and 75 million bucks passed through his bank accounts.
Now, a lot of the press is focused on this charge of conspiracy against the United States, right, and the indictment.
Conspiracy against the United States is not what it sounds like.
It's not a treason charge.
It's not that he was treasonably committing offenses against the United States to bring down the government or to skew the election or anything like that.
All conspiracy against the United States means is there was a conspiracy to break the laws of the United States.
It's a financial charge based on defrauding the U.S.
and covering it up through alleged obstruction of justice.
So, the Manafort thing is a big nothing as far as Trump is concerned.
Unless, of course, the idea here is to flip Manafort against Trump, right?
And that may be the next step here.
One of the assumptions here is that Manafort was going to be tried in a state court so that Trump couldn't pardon him.
The idea being that then you could try and leverage him to testify against President Trump.
So, before all of this comes down over the weekend, President Trump starts tweeting out.
And again, It just shows you that Trump would be better off being quiet and just letting this stuff play out, because if he's really innocent, then that will be revealed in time.
And in fact, it is largely being revealed that nothing much is happening here.
We'll get to, as I say, this other plea deal in just a second.
But Trump decides that it was absolutely necessary to go on Twitter.
And so he tweets out, never seen such Republican anger and unity as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton-made fake dossier.
Now $12 million?
Dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dot.
The uranium-to-Russian deal, the 33,000-plus deleted emails, the Comey fix, and so much more.
Instead, they look at phony Trump-Russia.
Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
Collusion, which doesn't exist.
The Dems are using this terrible and bad-for-our-country witch hunt for evil politics, but the Rs, meaning Republicans, are now fighting back like never before.
There is so much guilt by Democrats-Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out.
Do something!
Like, that's really how he ends his tweet.
Like, all caps, DO SOMETHING.
So, I could not help but immediately flash to Spaceballs.
They're getting all their air back!
DO SOMETHING!
I'm not sure what exactly DO SOMETHING is supposed to mean or why Trump is saying it.
He's the President of the United States.
If he wants to tell his DOJ to set up an investigation into Hillary Clinton and her supposed collusion with the Russians, he can full well do it.
I mean, he has the power to do that.
The DOJ works for him.
And obviously, the DOJ works hand-in-glove with Obama, so that would not be outside his purview.
Trump isn't doing that, and so this sort of, like, broad stroke, do something, I just don't know what that means, do something, in all capital letters, not useful, and makes Trump look more panicked than he ought to be, given the fact that there really is no evidence of collusion, at least from the Manafort indictment.
Susan Collins, who's no ally to Trump, right, Republican from Maine, she says she's seen no evidence of collusion.
I have not yet seen any definitive evidence of collusion.
I've seen lots of evidence that the Russians were very active in trying to influence the election.
Okay, so again, this is not really, you know, the idea that Trump should be panicked at this point seems to me a little bit ridiculous.
Okay, so that was the piece of news number one.
Piece of news number two is this guy that I have been referring to.
His name, of course, is George Papadopoulos.
George Papadopoulos.
Okay, in any case, I have too much fun with his name.
George Papadopoulos was a low-level Trump foreign policy advisor, and he cut a plea deal.
This was released at the same time as the news about Paul Manafort.
It was released by the Mueller team.
So this one is a little more troubling for President Trump.
The reason that it is more troubling for President Trump is not because it proves collusion between Trump and Russia, but because it tends toward the idea that Trump and Team Trump were willing to collude with Russia in order to do something.
Okay, we already knew that.
Donald Trump Jr., months ago now, released emails showing that he was warm toward the idea of receiving information about Hillary Clinton from the Russian government as, quote, part of their effort to aid Trump in the election.
Right, so this is nothing new, but the media are going to run with it anyway.
The media are over-reading the Papadopoulos plea agreement.
Now, number one, it's important to note, this is a plea agreement with the FBI.
The reason that the plea agreement with the FBI matters is presumably this guy is ready to testify and maybe he's going to flip on other members of the campaign.
So this one should be more troubling to Trump because it's more likely to bleed over into actual elements of the campaign.
So I want to go through this entire statement of offense, what they call statement of the offense, which is basically what Papadopoulos is admitting to in order to avoid going to jail for a long period of time.
So here is what is alleged in this statement of the offense.
Okay, so the defendant, George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy advisor for the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, made material false statements and material omissions during an interview with the FBI that took place on January 27, 2017.
At the time of the interview, the FBI had an open investigation into the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
They accused Papadopoulos of making material false statements and material omissions to the FBI.
Basically, what they accuse is that, so here's what it says.
It says, Defendant Papadopoulos claimed that his interactions with an overseas professor, who Defendant Papadopoulos understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials, occurred before Defendant Papadopoulos became a foreign policy advisor to campaign.
That is not true.
He acknowledged that the professor had told him about the Russians possessing dirt on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails, but said many times he learned the information prior to joining the campaign.
This is not true either.
He'd been told that he was going to join the campaign, and in fact had joined the campaign.
So, then they present a timeline of events, and I'm going to go through this timeline in just a second.
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Okay, so, let's go through the timeline of Papadopoulos.
And the reason we're going to go through this timeline is what we're going to show here is that something we already knew.
Basically, we knew that there was willingness from Team Trump to reach out to Russia for dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Now, on the other side, which we'll get to in a second, Hillary Clinton's team, apparently, the people who are working with Fusion GPS, were perfectly fine getting information from the Russians about Trump.
So, there's a bit of a mirror image going on here.
Here's the timeline of events.
So, Papadopoulos learns in early March 2016, when it's becoming clear that Trump is probably going to win the nomination, that he would be a foreign policy advisor for the campaign.
He was living in London at the time.
He then traveled over to Italy, and there he met a professor based in London.
I do love how all of these things are written up so that you don't actually know who these people are.
I do like that they call him the professor.
It sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story.
It's like Moriarty.
He meets a professor based in London.
Professor Moriarty seemed uninterested in the defendant, Papadopoulos, until he found out that Papadopoulos worked for the campaign, at which point suddenly he was very interested in Papadopoulos, and Papadopoulos was interested in the professor because the professor claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials, and Papadopoulos thought that this could increase his importance as a policy advisor to the campaign.
So, here is one of the defenses that Trump can use on the Papadopoulos stuff from the very beginning.
It's pretty clear that a lot of people in the Trump campaign knew that Trump wanted to be warm toward the Russians.
To be fair, Trump was very clear about this.
Trump went on the campaign trail and talked about how he liked Vladimir Putin, and Putin was a good guy, and we've killed people too, and we should have a better relationship with the Russians, would that be the end of the world?
It wasn't like Trump was hiding the ball here.
He was saying all this stuff publicly.
And so just as when President Obama said, wouldn't it be great if someone cracked down on these conservative 501c3s, and then his IRS went and cracked down on the conservative 501c3s, it is quite possible to believe that Trump was going out there saying, we should have a warm relationship with the Russians, and also Hillary Clinton is the devil, and a bunch of his lower-down people thought, hey, we can kill two birds with one stone.
If we work with the Russian government, maybe they'll provide us information on Hillary, and we'll be close with the Russians.
That'll be awesome.
That's just what the boss wants.
But it's quite possible that Trump never instructed anybody to do any of this, so even if It turns out that low-level members of the Trump campaign or high-level members of the Trump campaign were trying to collude.
It's possible that doesn't go all the way to the top.
In fact, as I've been now claiming for a year and a half, I think that's very unlikely that Trump knew about any sort of collusion, especially because if you were going to collude with Russia in an illegal fashion, would you tell the man with the biggest mouth on planet Earth?
Would that be your first choice?
Doesn't make a lot of sense.
Okay, in any case, Around March 21st, the campaign told the Washington Post that Papadopoulos was one of five named foreign policy advisors for the campaign.
He then met with the professor in London.
The professor brought with him a female Russian national.
The female Russian national, as she is known in this document, introduced defendant Papadopoulos as a relative of Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.
So, ooh-hoo-hoo, they're meeting with the Russians.
Okay, here's the thing.
A lot of people in a lot of campaigns meet with foreign policy members from other countries.
So that in and of itself is not criminal.
The question is whether the Trump campaign was working with Russia to subvert the election.
Meeting with somebody who's close to Putin does not count.
Following the meeting, Papadopoulos emailed the campaign supervisor, We don't know who this is.
This is why Papadopoulos is important, because after he flips, it's quite possible we're going to find out who campaign supervisor is, right?
Who was supervising him at the campaign, and that may take us further up the Trump chain.
And several members of the campaign's foreign policy team had said he'd met with his good friend, the professor, who had introduced him to the female Russian national, who is described as Putin's niece by Papadopoulos.
As well as the Russian ambassador in London.
Papadopoulos said the topic of their discussion was to arrange a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump.
So again, this is not necessarily illegal.
As everyone has acknowledged, campaigns meet with foreign policy advisors from other regimes all the time.
Because you do want to start figuring out what the relationship's going to be like if, in fact, your person is elected.
Later, apparently, Papadopoulos learned the female Russian national was not a relative of President Putin, and he never actually met the Russian ambassador in London.
He attended a national security meeting in Washington, D.C.
with Trump and other foreign policy advisors for the campaign.
When he introduced himself to the group, he said that he had connections that he could help arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin.
Okay, again, none of this is illegal.
After that trip, Papadopoulos worked with the professor and female Russian national to arrange a meeting between the campaign and the Russian government.
Again, none of this is illegal.
I keep saying that because people are trying to suggest that every meeting attempted to be brokered between Trump and the Russian government must have been about Hillary Clinton.
This is untrue.
There is not evidence of this.
Even if Papadopoulos was told by the Russians that they wanted to funnel information to the campaign, it is not clear from this document that the Trump campaign took him up on that or even really suggested a desire to take him up on that.
In April 2016, Papadopoulos sent multiple emails to other members of the campaign's foreign policy team regarding his contacts with the Russians and his outreach to Russia, so we'll find out who those people are, I am sure.
And then, the key provision here happens on April 24th.
It's April 26th, rather.
Okay, here it is.
On or about April 26th, Papadopoulos met the professor for breakfast at a London hotel.
Up till now, they'd only been talking about Trump meeting with the Russians or Trump people meeting with the Russians, but nothing about actually passing dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Here is the key moment.
On or about April 26th, 2016, defendant Papadopoulos met the professor for breakfast at a London hotel.
During this meeting, the professor told defendant Papadopoulos he had just returned from a trip to Moscow.
where he had met with high-level Russian government officials.
The professor told defendant Papadopoulos that on that trip, the professor learned the Russians had obtained dirt, right, in quotes, on then-candidate Clinton.
The professor told Papadopoulos, as Papadopoulos later described to the FBI, the Russians have dirt on her, the Russians had emails of Clinton, they have thousands of emails.
So, it is unclear, number one.
So people are saying, well, this happened in late April, March is when WikiLeaks or whomever attacked the DNC and got all the emails out of the DNC.
It is not clear that the emails they were describing here are those emails.
It's quite possible they're talking about the 33,000 emails that Hillary had deleted and maybe the Russian government had hacked into her server when she had a private server in her bathroom.
All of that being the case, now we know the Russian government is trying to funnel information to the Trump campaign.
So what happens after that?
Following the conversation, Papadopoulos continued to correspond with campaign officials, continued to communicate with the professor and the Russian MFA connection in an effort to arrange a meeting between the campaign and the Russian government.
Again, it is not clear, it is not clear that these meetings necessarily had to do with passing Hillary information.
And this is an important question.
If the meetings were just about Trump meeting with Russian people, big deal.
If the meetings were about Trump meeting with Russian people to coordinate election efforts, that is a big deal.
But again, that evidence is still lacking at this point and we'll have to wait for more evidence to come out.
Papadopoulos shared information from the MFA connection.
Apparently, he said that they were open for cooperation.
And again, it's not clear what cooperation means.
At one point, the government notes that the official forwarded a Papadopoulos email to another campaign official and stated, quote, let's discuss.
This is about having a meeting.
Let's discuss.
We need someone to communicate that DT, Donald Trump, is not doing these trips.
It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.
OK, so there's two ways to read that.
One is Trump wants to coordinate with the Russians and he wants to send someone low-level to do it so it doesn't reach Trump.
The other way to read that is that they're just trying to brush Papadopoulos off, right?
They're saying to Papadopoulos, you have no power, get out of here, we don't care about you.
And someone low-level in the campaign should tell him that Trump is not doing these trips so as not to send any signal that Trump himself doesn't want to do the trips to the Russians, but just, you know, basically brush Papadopoulos off.
In any case, what comes out from all of this?
What is the final statement?
The final point from all of the Papadopoulos stuff is that basically the situation shows that the Trump campaign, as we already knew, was willing to work with the Russians, or at least members of the Trump campaign were willing to work with the Russians to take down Hillary Clinton.
Did they actually do it?
Unclear.
But we already knew that from the Donald Trump Jr.
letters.
We already knew that from the Donald Trump Jr.
emails.
So nothing new under the sun.
The media are blowing this out of proportion.
We're gonna have to wait to see where this goes from here.
But there's no question that the Papadopoulos stuff is much more damaging to the Trump campaign than it is to the, than is the Manafort stuff.
Then it is to the Manafort stuff.
So I want to talk about the latest on the Clinton dossier and what that means because now we have basically two parallel stories.
We have the Trump attempting to collude with the Russian story, which may or may not be real.
And then we have the Hillary attempting to collude with the Russian story, which may or may not be real.
A lot of this seems like smoke.
A lot of it seems like not fire.
But I'm going to explain all that in just a second.
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Okay, so while all of this is happening...
The Clinton dossier stuff continues to blow up.
So, one of the sort of accusations here is that if things get too bad for Trump on the Trump-Russia stuff, that eventually he's just gonna order his DOJ to look into, investigate Hillary Clinton and the Trump-Oppo research project.
So here's what we know, again, about, to recap, about the Trump-Oppo research project from the Clinton...
So Clinton team went to Fusion GPS, a democratic firm, and they paid them apparently millions and millions of dollars.
Apparently they paid a law firm.
This law firm is a major law firm, so not every dollar spent at a law firm went to Fusion GPS.
I used to work at a major law firm called Goodwin Proctor.
It had dozens and dozens of branches all over the country.
Just because you use Goodwin Proctor doesn't mean that any specific area where Goodwin Proctor was funneling money meant that you were paying the money.
that place, right?
Goodwin-Proctor was bigger than the places that it was spending money.
But the same thing is true of the law firm that Hillary Clinton's team was paying.
In any case, they spent millions of dollars on this law firm, and then apparently some of those millions were passed on to Fusion GPS for this oppo research thing.
Okay, the oppo research thing ends up being the Steele dossier.
Christopher Steele, former MI6 spy, he goes over to Russia, he talks to a bunch of Russian officials, and he comes back with the dossier.
So, Some of the things in the dossier have been debunked, some of the things in the dossier have not been debunked.
For people who say that it's been debunked, that is not true.
Some things have been debunked, some things have not been debunked.
The big question here is, did Hillary Clinton and her team know that the Steele dossier was filled with Russian intel?
Did they know that the Steele dossier was filled with references to direct government officials in Russia?
Now, there are people on the left who say, well, there's a difference between Hillary digging up dirt on Trump's dealings with Russia and Trump digging up dirt from Russia about Hillary's dealings not with Russia.
I think there may be something to that, but I don't think that it fixes the generalized problem, which is if Hillary Clinton is complaining about Russian interference in the election and about Trump coordination with the Russians, Then, going to the Russians for help against Trump both undercuts that narrative and demonstrates that your own team was willing to work with the Russian government if they could dig something up about then-candidate Trump.
So, Jeanine Pirro is leading the charge.
A lot of Republicans are already in sort of defensive mode, despite the fact that the Mueller investigation hasn't come up with anything really serious yet.
They're already in defensive mode and they're suggesting that Trump go on offense against Hillary Clinton.
Again, I think Hillary Clinton should be fully investigated.
I think all of this should have a full investigation.
But to suggest that, you know, the main line of attack right now should be about Hillary Clinton, and when nothing really bad is happening from the Mueller investigation, seems to me like revving up the engine while you're still in neutral.
So here's Jeanine Pirro saying it's time to lock Hillary up.
It's time to shut it down, turn the tables, and lock her up.
That's what I said.
I actually said it.
Lock her up.
Well, she said it.
And since she said it, I guess we have to do it.
The Obamas and the Clintons built the Trump-Russia connection, collapsed yesterday when it was disclosed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $12 million for a dossier to connect Donald Trump to Russia. collapsed yesterday when it was disclosed that the Clinton campaign OK, we can stop that there.
So, here is the problem with this.
Again, Hillary's malfeasance doesn't justify Trump's malfeasance.
Both of them seem to have been willing to engage in something, right?
It looks like the Clinton campaign actually engaged in something, right?
The idea that the Clinton team didn't know the millions of dollars were being funneled for a dossier, and what the dossier included, I find highly suspicious.
So what we have here, I said this online and people on the right went nuts.
Okay, what I said was, basically, what we have in the last election cycle were two teams of people who were willing to collude with the other side, meaning Russia, in order to get their opponent.
Okay, that much is true.
Then people say, well, Hillary was worse because Hillary actually colluded, meaning the Steele dossier.
Okay, that may be true.
I'm not denying that.
But just because both sides were willing to conclude and only one side was capable of finishing the collusion, that does not actually mean that both sides are good or that one side is good.
Now, people can say Trump is better than Clinton.
Maybe, in the same way that I guess attempted murder is better than actual murder if we're talking about crimes here.
But I still don't think that that really meets the standard of decency.
This, I guess, goes back to the last election cycle when I said that both candidates can suck.
People have a tough time with that.
But the reality is that what we're seeing from Team Trump, while we don't see criminal activity yet from Team Trump with regard to Russia collusion, the idea that they're willing to collude with Russia has been known since the Donald Trump Jr.
emails.
And those emails were not good for Team Trump, right?
That was kind of scuzzy.
I mean, if you're willing to work with the Russians in order to dig up dirt on Hillary, that's not good.
And the fact that Hillary was willing to have somebody dig up dirt on Trump from the Russians is also not good.
It's possible that everyone sucks and that one is worse.
Both things can be true at once.
Well, the Democrats are still trying to focus in on this dossier, too, and trying to say the dossier contains damning material about Trump.
Adam Schiff, who's this representative Democrat from California, he says that the dossier has still not been debunked, and there's still crazy eyes.
Adam Schiff says that it's most important is to determine what is true in the dossier.
I certainly would have liked to know who paid for it earlier, but nonetheless, that's just one factor to be considered.
It doesn't answer the ultimate question, which is, how much of the work is accurate?
How much of it is true?
And my colleagues don't seem particularly interested in that question, but that is really the most important question for the American people, and that is, How much of this allegation that Christopher Steele makes and the reports that he hears are true about the Russian government wanting to help the Trump campaign?
Okay, so a couple of things.
One, there are two things that are worth investigating.
One, what's in the dossier is true.
And two, did Hillary Clinton work with the Russians in order to compile a dossier about her opponent, right?
I mean, that is bad stuff.
Okay, so I do want to talk about Kevin Spacey at length because this is an amazing story and it demonstrates the full-on politically correct insanity of the left.
A political correct leftism that eats its own.
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In any case, okay, let's talk about Kevin Spacey for just a second, because this is an amazing story.
So over the weekend, these allegations come out from BuzzFeed that an actor named Anthony Rapp, who was on Broadway at the time, was 14 years old.
This is 31 years ago, I guess.
And he was 14 years old, and Kevin Spacey, who has won two Oscars, was apparently at a party with this kid, a 14-year-old kid, and picked him up like Rhett Butler with Scarlett O'Hara.
Picked him up, put him on a bed, and then attempted to climb on top of him.
A 14-year-old kid.
So he's attempting to sexually assault a 14-year-old kid.
So, Kevin Spacey comes out, and here is his statement.
And when I say comes out, I mean, like, in a couple of ways.
So he comes out, and here is his statement, Kevin Spacey.
He says, quote, I have a lot of respect and admiration for Anthony Rapp as an actor.
I'm beyond horrified to hear his story.
I honestly do not remember the encounter.
It would have been over 30 years ago.
But if I did behave then as he describes, I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior, and I am sorry for the feelings he describes having carried with him all these years.
This story has encouraged me to address other things about my life.
I know there are stories out there about me, and that some have been fueled by the fact that I have been so protective of my privacy.
As those closest to me know, in my life I have had relationships with both men and women.
I have loved and had romantic encounters with men throughout my life, and I choose now to live as a gay man.
I want to deal with this honestly and openly, and that starts with examining my own behavior.
So, this is what we call the Jim McGreevy defense.
I don't know if you remember all the way back to 2004, for those who are younger in our audience, in 2004 there was a New Jersey governor, his name was Jim McGreevy.
Jim McGreevy was a Democrat, and his chief of staff, or security chief, accused Jim McGreevy of sexually harassing him.
And Jim McGreevy was married.
He had a kid, right?
He had been married twice and he actually had two kids.
And Jim McGreevy released a long, weepy statement about how he was a gay man.
I, Jim McGreevy, I am a gay man.
And the media said, oh, what a hero.
Oh, what a good guy.
You know, it doesn't matter that he cheated on his wife with men.
It doesn't matter that he was sexually harassing a guy.
The important thing is that he was gay.
He played the gay card, right?
In much the same way that the media have totally overlooked the traffic accident that killed somebody that Caitlyn Jenner was involved in, because Caitlyn Jenner is a hero, because Caitlyn Jenner is transgender.
This is the routine that we do now in America, is that if you are involved in an alleged crime, If you come out as gay, or if you show your proper lefty bona fides, then we sort of ignore it.
Right?
The only reason that Harvey—that's why Harvey Weinstein, his initial response to the sexual assault, the rape charges that were being made about him, was, I'm going to target the NRA.
He was hoping to buy off the left media.
So the question that I had last night reading this was, was this going to work?
Because there are a couple problems for Kevin Spacey here.
One is, everyone's known that he's gay for at least 20 years.
I mean, I remember growing up, there were open jokes in Hollywood about Kevin Spacey being gay.
In fact, there were open jokes about Kevin Spacey molesting children.
A family guy famously made fun of Kevin Spacey like 10 years ago, in a scene in which Stewie, the baby, is running naked through a mall and shouting, I just escaped from Kevin Spacey's basement.
So these allegations have been made about Kevin Spacey for years and years and years behind closed doors.
That's problem number one for Kevin Spacey.
Problem number two is that the gay community has tried very, very hard to separate off the allegations that homosexuality is associated with pedophilia.
And they spent years trying to say homosexuality is not pedophilia, pedophilia is unacceptable.
And molestation of children is unacceptable, and trying to suggest that being gay is associated with pedophilia is a form of homophobia, right?
This is a claim that the left has made for years, and that the LGBT community has made for years.
This pretty much undermines that case, at least from Spacey's point of view, right?
Because the shorter defense here is, sure, I may have tried to molest a 14-year-old boy, but I'm gay.
That is not a good defense.
That is not a good line of defense, either morally or for the gay community, which is attempting to say, it is not appropriate to do this, right?
The gay community was angry when Milo Yiannopoulos suggested that it was fine that he was molested as a child by a priest.
And when all of this stuff comes out in the gay community, people tend to say, well, those are isolated incidents.
That's not indicative of a trend.
Well, this does not help that particular case, right?
So Kevin Spacey undermining the legitimacy of the homosexual community that is not involved in pedophilia by basically linking what he did to Anthony Rapp with being gay.
The main part of the Anthony Rapp story that people found disturbing was not the gay stuff.
It was the fact that Kevin Spacey was attempting to molest a child.
He was 14 years old as a child.
He's a one-year pastor bar mitzvah.
I mean, really, it's amazing stuff.
So, the question is, how do the media respond?
So I asked this last night, would the media buy into the idea that Kevin Spacey was a hero and let him off easy because he now says he's gay?
So, this is the intersectional politics of the left.
If you are gay, or you are black, or you are Hispanic, or you are a woman, if you make the claim that whatever you did wrong is based on your victimization as a member of that community, can you get away with it?
This is always the intersectional question.
And so I asked this last night, and a bunch of people on the left said, no, no way he gets away with this.
No way.
The media won't fall for this.
The media won't say that the headline is that he's gay.
The media will say the headline is that he's basically quasi-acknowledging he may have tried to rape a 14-year-old.
Here's the headline from Reuters.
If I read you that statement...
Would that be your headline?
Would your headline be, I was drunk, Kevin Spacey admits to, quasi-admits to drunkenly attempting to have sex with a 14-year-old boy?
Or would the headline be, Kevin Spacey says he lives life as a gay man?
I mean, is that a cover-up of epic media proportions or what?
Here's the headline from ABC News.
I choose to live as a gay man.
Kevin Spacey comes out in emotional tweet.
Emotional tweet, for God's sake!
He came out because a guy accused him of trying to molest him when he was 14 years old.
This is insanity.
Now, there are many media outlets that are reporting both facts, right?
They're saying things like, after accusations of sexual molestation, Spacey comes out as gay, right?
But again, if the punchline is Spacey comes out as gay, you're missing the punchline.
The punchline is Spacey trying to fob off molesting a 14-year-old by saying he was drunk at the time.
I don't remember everybody being, you know, quite so accepting of Roman Polanski raping a 13-year-old girl, right?
Maybe he should have just raped a 13-year-old boy and then said that he was drunk at the time and gay.
I mean, this is insanity.
This is fully insanity.
And again, this is not good for the LGBT community, for people who are saying, well, you know, we have to be protective of his rights as a gay man.
No, you have to be protective of the rights of children, and gay people understand this.
I mean, that's been the response that I've seen from the LGBT folks that I know online.
Right, the gay people I'm seeing online are saying, this is insane.
How could Kevin Spacey say such a thing?
How could Kevin Spacey undercut our entire case like this?
The media cheering Spacey is just another indicator that the media are really disgusting and their leftism overcomes even their most basic sort of moral stances.
Okay, time for some things I like and some things I hate.
And then I've decided to initiate something new on Mondays.
On Mondays I think that we're going to start going through some founding documents because I think it's important for people to really understand founding philosophy.
So we have Big Idea Thursdays.
That's not always about the founding.
But I think what I want to do is go through one of the Federalist Papers every week.
So that by the end of a year and a half or two, we will have gone through the entirety of the Federalist Papers, and you will know what exactly our founding fathers had to say about our system of government, which I think is super important.
So, time for things I like and things I hate.
First, then we will get to that.
So, things I like.
Let's do it.
So, we begin with a... Last week, somebody asked about my favorite parenting books, books that I like about parenting.
So this is one that is really good for when you have toddlers.
So toddlers are the worst people in the world.
Okay, toddlers, listen, I love my daughter.
She is spectacular.
She is just the love of my life.
We have the best relationship.
She's sweet as honey.
She's just wonderful.
She's smart as a whip.
She's so smart.
Like, the other day, she actually defined for me onomatopoeia.
Seriously.
She's three and a half.
She's just a wonderful kid.
But, like any other toddler, toddlers are little monsters.
Okay, and toddlers do not have any prefrontal cortex development, which means anything they are thinking comes right out.
So, that doesn't just mean they say cute, innocent things.
It also means they scream like banshees when they don't get what they want.
They fuss.
They'll try to hit people.
Studies show that between two and three is the most violent time of human beings' life, as a general matter.
And so, the first thing that you have to debunk as a parent is the idea that your child is naturally good.
Your child is not naturally good.
Your child is naturally a child, and children are naturally terrible.
Right?
This is why they have to be civilized.
John Rosemond is sort of a more traditional parenting expert.
I know John a little bit.
I've known him for years.
He wrote a book called The Well-Behaved Child Discipline That Really Works.
The whole book is basically about how there must be consequences when children misbehave.
So I know it's super painful.
It really is.
As a parent, it's painful for me to punish my child.
Really painful.
Like she does something, and it's quasi-cute, but also kind of malicious.
And I don't want to punish her.
I don't like seeing her suffer.
And also, I like doing fun things with her.
Do I want to deprive myself of that pleasure?
Yes.
You do.
You want to say to her, you're not allowed to do X, right?
And if you do X, then the rule is, you're not getting Y. Right?
And you have to be very strict about it.
And you have to be very consistent about it.
And it doesn't matter if they cry.
It doesn't matter if they apologize.
Even if they apologize and they fix the behavior, whatever you said the punishment will be has to be fulfilled.
Otherwise, the child is learning to manipulate you not to actually be good.
The book is The Well-Behaved Child by John Roseman.
It's really, really useful.
For parents who are having trouble with toddlers, which is to say every parent who's ever had a toddler.
So check that out.
So last week in Congress, there was a hearing about the fact that in Europe there is so much abortion of people who are Let me say that I am not a research scientist.
in the womb or have damage in the womb.
And this was an amazing moment.
A guy named Frank Stevens, a Down syndrome guy, who was testifying on the Hill about the situation in Europe.
And here's what he had to say about abortion of the Down syndrome children.
Let me say that I am not a research scientist.
However, no one knows more about life with Down syndrome than I do.
What we're doing is we're going to do it.
Whatever you learn today, please remember this.
I am a man with Down syndrome, and my life is worth living.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, and the left doesn't seem to acknowledge this.
This is why they say things like, well, if you have a Dion's syndrome baby, wouldn't it be better for the kid not to live?
No, it would not be better for the kid not to live.
Life is always a better choice.
Okay, time for a couple of things I hate, then we'll get to Federalist number one.
So John Kasich says he wants to run for president again.
Oh, no.
God, no.
Please, no.
Sweet baby Jesus, no.
Not John Kasich.
Please, no.
God, no.
That's my basic commentary on that.
Kasich wants to run for president again after his dramatic fail of a run in 2016 when he stayed in just long enough to ensure that President Trump would actually become the nominee in the first place.
Kasich is one of the more insufferable people in the political scene.
He portrays himself as this high and mighty guy.
Basically, he just thinks the government should be used for his own personal predilections, which is quite despicable.
And Kasich running is just another vanity campaign.
No, I would not vote for John Kasich in a primary.
John Kasich is awful.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, Democrat Senator Kamala Harris.
is now accusing the Justice Department of siding with discrimination.
Why?
Because the DOJ has basically suggested that it is not going to crack down hard on private companies that discriminate against LGBT people or LGBT behavior.
So she did a dinner at the Human Rights Campaign and she said that Attorney General Sessions stands on the side of discrimination against equality.
Here's what she said.
LGBT rights are under attack.
Under attack by a Justice Department that now stands on the side of discrimination instead of equality.
Under attack by a Senate nominee who thinks homosexuality should be illegal and a judicial nominee who says transgender children are proof of Satan's plan.
And under attack Okay, so there are a few things that I hate about this.
transgender troops who are willing to sacrifice their lives to defend our country. - Okay, so there are a few things that I hate about this.
One, the implication that the DOJ has a role in policing private business as a general matter, I object to.
Okay, I object to this on every level.
I cut an entire video about it, actually, that you can view over at YouTube, about why the government needs to be involved in preventing private discrimination.
I have problems with this?
So should Kamala Harris, because if she wants any Christian to be able to go into any gay bake shop and have them make an anti-gay cake, then she should continue along these lines, because that's exactly where she is going.
Now, as far as Roy Moore, right, he's the Senate candidate from Alabama, Roy Moore says really nutty things.
There are some things about Roy Moore that I've liked.
For example, I actually don't object to Roy Moore bucking against the federal judiciary as the sort of final authority on the Constitution.
What Roy Moore has said about Muslims not being allowed to serve in Congress is absurd.
What Roy Moore has said about homosexuality being illegal is absurd.
All of that is absurd.
Basically in Alabama, you basically have the 2016 election all over again.
There are a lot of people who are voting for Roy Moore in order to stop whomever the Democrat is from taking that particular office.
But in any case, When Kamala Harris does this routine, like LGBT people are under assault from the Trump administration, that is just not true.
And when she says, you know, transgenders serving in the military, you know, there's no case for those people not being able to serve in the military.
Actually, it's a pretty strong case for people who suffer from severe mental illness not to serve in the military.
There are lots of people who don't get to serve in the military.
Serving in the military is not a right.
Serving in the military is a privilege.
And the fact that people want to, now that you can volunteer for the military and it's not a draft, The fact that, you know, people want to serve but can't is nothing new.
There are lots of people who want to serve but can't.
And again, it creates all sorts of issues.
I've been talking with people in the military who've been telling me about the education that they're being forced to go through with regard to transgender troops.
It openly says in those transgender training sessions that a man who identifies as a woman should be allowed to shower with the woman in the barracks.
I mean, this is not good or easy stuff.
Okay, other things that I hate.
Final thing I hate, and then we'll get to the Federalist Papers.
So, John Boehner did an interview with Politico in which he laid into every Republican he could think of.
He laid into George W. Bush.
He laid into Ted Cruz.
He laid into Mark Levin.
He laid into pretty much everything on the right side of the aisle.
Jim Jordan, the congressman from Ohio, he said, F Jim Jordan, F Jason Chaffetz.
He said, Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate.
A terrorist, a legislative terrorist.
Is it any wonder we got rid of Boehner?
Is it any wonder that we got Donald Trump?
That people looked at the establishment and said they are so much more willing to attack people on their own side than they are willing to attack the left?
Right?
He actually defends Obama in this, right?
Here's something John Boehner says.
Remember, this was the Speaker of the House for Republicans.
Quote, People thought in 09-10-11 the country couldn't be divided more.
And you go back to Obama's campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that.
And some would argue on the right, he did more to divide the country than to unite it.
I kind of reject that notion.
It was modern-day media and social media that kept people pushing further right and further left.
People started to figure out they could choose where to get their news.
I always liked Rush Limbaugh.
When I went to Palm Beach, I would always meet with Rush and we'd go play golf.
But you know, who was that right-wing guy, Mark Levin?
He really went crazy right and got a big audience.
And he dragged Hannity to the dark side.
He dragged Rush to the dark side.
And these guys, I used to talk to them all the time.
And suddenly they're beating the living bleep out of me.
I wasn't going to be a right-wing idiot.
Can you imagine why, perhaps, the conservative base might have been unhappy with John Boehner who repeatedly cut deals with President Obama?
Repeatedly, repeatedly?
And then he blames the right-wing base?
Maybe you should have been better at your job, dude.
Okay.
Now, I want to go very quickly through Federalist No.
1.
So the Federalist Papers are the greatest set of discussions on the foundation of a government in human history.
They are fantastic.
The first one was written by Alexander Hamilton.
So these were all written in the New York Papers by Publius.
Publius was a pen name for John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison.
So some of them were written by Jay, some were written by Madison, some were written by Hamilton.
Federalist No.
1 was written by Alexander Hamilton, who is the flavor of the month now because there's a musical about him.
So here is what he talks about.
What he says, and this is the part that I found really fascinating.
What he says is, I'm not going to impugn the intentions of people who oppose the Constitution.
It's something we should remember.
I'm not going to impugn them because that would not help me convince them.
He says, were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at times, characterized political parties.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword.
Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.
There he is making the case for religious toleration and also political toleration.
Understand that your political opponent may not have bad intent.
Kamala Harris ascribes bad intent.
Maybe your political opponent just disagrees.
And you're not going to win them over by claiming that they're a bunch of Nazis.
And when I say that the left says that they're a bunch of Nazis, I have to show you this commercial briefly.
This is from a Latino group that's now running in the Virginia governor's race.
against Ed Gillespie, the Republican.
Okay, when I say that the left assumes that the right has bad intentions, that they're all deplorable and evil, look at this commercial.
This is an insane commercial, but it does the precise opposite of what Hamilton is talking about in Federalist No.
1.
Okay, so you see all these minority children who are running around, and then there's a minority kid who's running from a truck that has a Confederate flag on the back.
Right, some white guy, some evil white guy, with a Confederate truck on the back, a Confederate flag on the back, Okay, it looks like a Hispanic kid, and then there's an Asian kid, and they both start running for their lives.
And on the back of the truck, it says Gillespie for governor.
And now there's a Muslim kid, and there's a black kid, and they all start running from this truck.
Clearly, this truck with the Ed Gillespie sticker and the Confederate flag wants to run them down and murder them because it's a white supremacist with the don't tread on me flag on the front of the car, chasing after them.
They've all run to the fence, and then the truck is going to crush them.
And all these kids wake up from the nightmare.
Is this what Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie mean by the American Dream?
Latino Victory Fund paid for this.
And then it shows the march from Charlottesville.
Just despicable.
Just despicable.
Ed Gillespie condemned that march.
Ed Gillespie opposed that march.
He opposes the white supremacists.
It's just disgusting.
You want to know why the country's coming apart?
Because of what Hamilton talks about in Federalist No.
1 being ignored.
He finishes Federalist No.
1 by saying something else that's of value.
He says, History will teach us that, he basically says, we should make the case for reasoned government based on what government will work best, rather than shouting about rights of the people, right?
We have this rights talk that now predominates in American government, where people on the right say, all of our rights are gonna be violated, we're all gonna be murdered.
And people on the left saying all of your rights are going to be violated, you're going to be starved without big government.
He says history will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, meaning broad appeals to the rights of the people, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.
They begin as demagogues, they end as tyrants.
Why?
Because they appeal to the people, right?
Like Bane in Dark Knight Rises.
They appeal to the people.
And then they're able to gather a will about them in order to go and do bad things.
So Federalist No.
1, a good introduction to how political debate should be done in America.
And Alexander Hamilton was in it with the best of them.
So check that out.
We'll be back here tomorrow for more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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