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Dec. 1, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:56
A Grave Injustice In California | Ep. 428
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So much news!
Ugh!
So many things to be excited about, so many things to be depressed about.
So, here's the deal.
Mike Flynn just pled guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI.
We'll explain what that means.
The Republicans are going to pass a tax cut today.
We'll explain what that means.
And Kate Stanley's killer was just let go on charges of murder.
He will still go to jail on gun charges.
We'll explain what that means.
So lots of explaining to do, plus the mailbag!
So many things!
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, some days are like drinking from a fire hose, and this is that day.
There are just too many big news stories happening all at once, and I'm sure that by the end of the show, another big news story will have broken, destroying the rest of the structure of the show.
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So, okay, here we go.
So the breaking news from this morning just before the show is that the FBI has basically now made clear that Mike Flynn lied to them.
So, So Mike Flynn just pled guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI.
What did he lie to the FBI about?
Apparently he lied to the FBI because he had been speaking with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, In order to convince Kislyak to lay off of backlash against the United States after the Obama administration in its waning days, as retaliation for supposed Russian election interference, put new sanctions on the Russians.
And you recall that Putin didn't respond to that, and there was speculation that was because Flynn had reached out to Putin and told him, don't do it, things are going to change come January 20th.
I said at the time, I don't see what is particularly wrong with that.
He was a transition official.
It was already pretty clear he was going to be part of the administration.
There's no real violation of law there, so what's the big deal?
The fact, though, that he was allowed to plead on only the charge with regard to lying to the FBI suggests to me that he is about to flip on the Trump administration and that suspicion has now been confirmed.
The reason I say that this is pretty clearly a plea deal that minimizes what Flynn did Is because there have been reports coming out of the Mueller probe that they were investigating Flynn for having made a deal with the Turkish government to kidnap a guy who's a Turkish dissenter from the United States and send him back to Turkey.
They've been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Turkish government.
In other words, it looks like there were more serious charges on the table, and in exchange for those charges going away, Flynn took this much lesser charge in order to get this thing over with.
So according to ABC News, here's what they are saying.
They are now saying that Flynn had resisted This is one of the big problems.
of the administration for months, given his close ties with the Trump administration, but he apparently felt abandoned by the administration in recent weeks, thanks to mounting legal debts and plans to sell his house to help defray costs, according to ABC News.
This is one of the big problems, seriously, one of the big problems with special counsel investigations.
Everyone is forced to lawyer up.
Lawyers are incredibly expensive.
If you are just a normal person, you can't afford the lawyering up that it costs to fight people like Robert Mueller.
And there was no one there to pick up the cost for Mike Flynn.
So in order to defray those costs, he's apparently cutting a deal with the Mueller investigation.
Brian Ross on ABC News Special Report is reporting that Flynn has promised, quote, full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump, quote, directed him to make contact With the Russians.
Now, this, the people on the left are going nuts.
Clearly, we're almost there.
We're almost there again.
This means that Mike Flynn is going to testify that Donald Trump told him to coordinate campaign activities with the Russians, and that's why Hillary Clinton lost the election.
That is not clear by any stretch of the imagination.
There is lots of coordination between the Hillary Clinton team, for example, and we know members of the Ukrainian government.
The idea That members of campaigns don't talk to foreign officials is just not true.
So it's quite possible that Trump told Flynn, I want you to go talk to Putin, talk to him about what their priorities are, what our priorities are, if I become president of the United States.
None of that is illegal.
None of that is illegal.
The only thing that would be illegal is, presumably, if there was actually a conspiracy, an exchange of information that would be designed to subvert the United States election, and there are actual conspiracy laws, then you'd have to see if they violate them legally, and that's a little bit Difficult to prove.
Collusion is not a crime.
In other words, even if collusion occurred, that might be grounds for the political crime of impeachment, that would require impeachment, but it's not grounds for any actual crime that has been committed.
Collusion is not a crime.
There is no statute on collusion.
It's a vague term of art.
So, this does not get all the way toward proving anything about Trump.
We still have to see what Flynn has to say.
Now, there are two possibilities here.
One is that Flynn is actually going to say some stuff that's really damaging about the president, in favor of this possibility.
is the reality that Mueller cut a deal with Flynn that basically let Flynn almost entirely off the hook for all of these other charges.
So why would you cut such a deal that was generous to Flynn?
Because Flynn's about to give you a bunch of good stuff.
Think of your godfather.
Frank Pantangeli is going to get off the hook so long as he testifies against Michael Corleone.
The reason that you're going to downgrade charges is because you're trying to get Flynn to actually give you valuable information.
If you don't believe Flynn has valuable information, you don't cut a deal with him at all.
You just send him to jail.
So that's cutting in favor of that.
There's also the possibility, however, that the special counsel is charging Flynn on the lying to the FBI charge because what he's hoping is that now he's going to be able to go after other members of the Trump administration for the same thing.
There will be a sort of domino effect that he's sort of fishing.
That what he's doing here is he's going to nail Flynn on the lying to the FBI charge, get him to plead out on that, and then they're going to go back and talk to some other folks who have talked to the FBI, I think in the administration, that includes I think Kushner has talked to the FBI.
I think there are several other members of the administration who have talked to the FBI.
The possibility exists that they will try to have Flynn testify against those people and then try and get those people on charges of lying to the FBI and try and flip this upward, right?
Create a domino effect and maybe one of those people flips on the president and finally spills the beans about the president.
But...
That is not the same thing as Flynn himself is directly going to implicate the president in any sort of criminal activity.
So it's a little early for all of the speculation that's going on.
It is not clear by any stretch of the imagination that all of this is going to bring down the president of the United States.
There is a lot of, I think, un-based speculation from both sides.
People on the right going, this is a big nothing, right?
They didn't charge him with anything.
And people on the left going, they've charged him with something.
We're about to get Trump.
President Pence is coming.
I don't know that any of this is gonna be true.
So we just don't know enough yet.
We do know that something more is happening in the investigation than we thought was happening yesterday.
Reuters, by the way, ABC is saying that candidate Trump ordered him to make contact with the Russians.
That's what ABC is reporting.
Reuters is reporting that Flynn is saying that the transition team ordered him to make contact with the Russians.
If it's the transition team, that has nothing to do with the campaign.
So it's hard even to imagine what the crime would be at that point.
The transition team ordering Flynn to talk with the Russians.
Like, who cares?
Unless we're just going to round up a bunch of people unjustly.
And this is something that special counsels have done in the past.
You recall that it was special counsel, I believe it was Patrick Fitzgerald, who went after Scooter Libby.
Scooter Libby was working for the President of the United States.
He was an American lawyer, former advisor to VP Dick Cheney.
And you recall that he actually ended up in jail, and he was pardoned by President Trump, or his sentence was commuted, more specifically, by President Bush, because Scooter Libby had apparently fibbed to the FBI.
There was no underlying crimes.
They got Scooter Libby for fibbing to the FBI or obstruction of justice, but he had not actually done anything wrong.
There was no underlying crime.
Nothing criminal had taken place.
He hadn't done it.
Nobody in the administration had done it.
Basically, remember, that was about Valerie Plame.
The situation in that particular case was that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent.
She was in Washington.
She was not really, like, in the field.
And there was a leak about her identity after Joe Wilson, her husband, suggested that the Bush administration had lied about yellow cake from Niger being sold to the Iraqi regime.
And the person who actually ended up doing it, I believe, was Richard Armitage.
The person who ended up leaking it was not, in fact, Scooter Libby.
It was Richard Armitage.
But Libby had apparently fibbed to the FBI in the process of the investigation, and they decided to go after Libby instead.
It was really a bunch of nonsense.
They went after him just because they felt like going after him.
And that's why President Bush ended up commuting his sentence.
You really should have pardoned him.
In this particular case, it could be something very similar.
We just don't know at this point.
So anybody who's telling you, it's all over.
We know what the story is.
Trump is going down.
Don't believe them at this point.
There's just not enough information on that yet for that to be the case.
We don't know what Mike Flynn is going to tell the FBI or what he has told the FBI at this point.
So we're going to find out.
We're going to find out.
By the way, it is worth noting also The White House says that they have no comment on this at this point, which is the proper stance.
In the middle of a legal proceeding, the last thing you want to do is start going out and mouthing off.
Mike Flynn had made comments in 2016, it's gonna get played all over the news today, that if he did a tenth of what Hillary Clinton had done, he would be in jail today.
There's a real possibility that that is true, by the way, that he really did not do much here, and that he could end up in jail anyway, just because this is the way the political prosecutions go.
We're saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today.
So, crooked Hillary Clinton, leave this race now!
So I'm not saying it's a political prosecution.
I don't know.
You don't know.
Nobody knows.
So don't buy all the speculation that's going on today.
It's time to hold judgment and abeyance until you actually have more information.
Okay, so that is big story number one.
Big story number two is that Kate Steinle's killer was acquitted yesterday on charges of murder.
The facts of the case, I want to give you the entire facts of the case so that you know what the jury may or may not have been doing.
So let's begin with what exactly happened.
Sarah Rumpf has a very good piece over at Red State talking about what exactly happened in this case.
So you recall that during the campaign, the Kate Steinle case came up over and over.
Beautiful young woman who was killed on a San Francisco pier by an illegal immigrant.
The illegal immigrant had a gun that had been stolen from a federal agent's car, I guess, and the gun had been fired.
The guy admitted to killing the girl.
The only question was, did he do it?
Was it an accident or did he do it on purpose or was it criminal negligence?
So he was charged with second degree murder.
The jury also could have found for involuntary manslaughter that was on the table as well.
It seems to me that second degree murder was too high a charge and that involuntary manslaughter seems like the situation that best fits the evidence.
This may be a case, to give the best gloss on the jury, this may be a case where the jury was basically thrown off by the prosecutors Failing to press the charges properly.
That's a possibility here, and I'll explain why in just a second.
So here is what is undisputed.
On July 1st, 2015, Kate Steinle was fatally struck in the back by a single bullet as she walked on Pier 14 with her father to view the San Francisco Bay.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was a Mexican citizen illegally in the United States, and he fired the gun that killed Steinle.
So first of all, for political reasons, It doesn't matter whether the guy was convicted or not.
This guy should not have been in the United States.
He had been deported, I believe, six times, five times before for seven separate crimes.
If the man had been a citizen in the state of California, he probably would have already been in jail for life.
Because there's a three strikes law in the state of California.
Mostly it involves violent crime, not drug offenses.
But the idea that he would have been out on the street is absurd.
He would not have been out on the street if he'd been convicted of a bunch of different felony drug offenses.
He would be in jail right now.
He would not be out on the street if he were a citizen, so he actually had the special privilege of being deported, then recrossing the border, coming back, and then, you recall, he was picked up on a drug charge by the local authorities.
The feds found out about it.
They asked the local authorities to hold him so they could come get him, and because San Francisco is a sanctuary city, he was then released into the general population as well, where he got a hold of this gun and killed Kate Steinle.
Now, Was this a murder or was this an involuntary manslaughter?
I think is an open question.
It's pretty clear to me that this was an involuntary manslaughter.
I'll explain to you why in just a second.
I'll give you all the legal breakdown, putting on my lawyer hat.
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Alrighty, so here is the case for the defense.
So basically, What happened is that this piece of garbage illegal immigrant, and he's not a piece of garbage because he's an illegal immigrant, he's a piece of garbage who is an illegal immigrant.
He was walking around on the pier and he has the gun.
The defense says that he found the gun on the pier, okay?
This is like the lamest excuse ever.
How many times have you been walking around and you just find a gun lying around?
You're walking around and boom, look, there's a gun.
Okay, it never happens, and the idea that this happens in San Francisco on a regular basis is insane.
San Francisco has some of the tightest gun laws in the nation.
So he says that he's walking around, he finds a gun, he picks it up, he goes, hey, a gun!
He picks it up, and then magically the gun just goes off.
It is clear from the evidence that the bullet hit the cement before it hit Steinle.
So it wasn't like he picked up the gun, aimed it at Steinle, shot her in the back.
Okay, he picked up the gun, he fired it, It bounced off the concrete, it hit Kate Stanley in the back, it killed her.
And the defense was that he basically, that he's a moron.
That basically he's walking around, hey look, a gun!
He picks it up, it goes boom in his hand for no reason at all, it's just a pure accident, the bullet bounces, it skips off the concrete and hits Kate Stanley in the back and she dies.
The problem with this particular theory is several-fold.
One, the gun had been missing for four days from a federal agent's car.
Somehow it just winds up in the hands of this illegal immigrant.
Criminal.
Repeat, criminal.
It's just magic.
It was like a normal person who found it on the boardwalk over at the San Francisco Pier.
It wasn't me.
It wasn't you.
It was an illegal immigrant who's been deported five times.
Just magically.
amazing how that works he picks it up they question him and during the questioning he says that he was trying to fire it at the seals that he saw a seal out there or a sea lion and he was trying to fire it at a sea lion and then his story changed and he said that he had that it fired by accident according to according to San Francisco Chronicle defense lawyers said the shooting was an accident that happened when Garcia Zarate who had a history of drug crimes but no record of violence found the gun wrapped in a t-shirt or cloth under his seat on the pier just seconds before it discharged in his hands Because that's what I do.
When I see a bundle of cloth under my seat at a public pier, I reach down and I start investigating, and if I find a gun, I go, urgh, a gun!
Matt Gonzalez of the Public Defender's Office said his client had never handled a gun.
Yes, I'm sure.
And was scared by the noise, prompting him to fling the weapon into the bay.
Okay, so number one, if you accidentally fire a gun, so apparently he says he was scared by the noise.
It wasn't that he shot the woman and then thought that he would be convicted of it and so he threw the evidence away into the bay.
Instead, he took the gun and he threw it in the bay because he was scared by the noise.
That's what I do.
When my child scares me, when my child makes a really loud noise and we're by the ocean, I just take my kid and fling him in the ocean.
Let me just tell you, this is something that normal people do on a regular basis.
Oh, my God, a car backfired.
Let's drive it into the ocean.
That's something that you're scared of the fire.
Oh, my God, a gun made noise?
What is this boom-boom stick?
Okay, during the trial, jurors watched video from Garcia Cerati's four-hour police interrogation in which he offered varying statements about his actions on the pier.
Number one, when someone constantly changes their story, that's a pretty good indicator they're not telling the truth.
At one point, he said he had aimed at a sea animal.
At another point, he said the gun had been under a rag that lay on the ground near the waterfront and that it fired when he stepped on it.
Gonzales said it was clear in the video.
By the way, guns don't fire when you step on them.
Just a note to everybody.
There are people who are saying that it was a Sig Sauer, and this is a Sig Sauer with a quick trigger because it was basically set up for a federal agent who knows how to use it.
We only had four pounds of trigger pressure.
Okay, even if it only has four pounds of trigger pressure, you can't step on a gun and it fires.
Okay, as a typical rule.
That is, it's extraordinarily rare.
Like, something has to actually push on the trigger in order to make the gun fire.
That's not how guns fire.
Unless the hammer was already cocked or something.
Gonzales said it was clear in the video that he did not fully understand what the officers were asking through an officer's Spanish translation.
Well, That's sort of his problem.
I mean, they're speaking Spanish to him.
It's not like they're speaking English and he doesn't understand.
Yes, I'm sure that's what happened.
Six people just gathered and decided that instead of throwing the gun in the bay to discard the gun, which is five feet away, they decided what would be better.
We need to get rid of this gun.
You know what we'll do?
at the spot.
Gonzales said it was possible those people had discarded the gun that killed Steinle.
Yes, I'm sure that's what happened.
Six people just gathered and decided that instead of throwing the gun in the bay to discard the gun, which is five feet away, they decided what would be better.
We need to get rid of this gun.
You know what I'll do?
We'll just leave it lying around.
Best idea I've ever had.
We're not gonna take this gun, toss it in the bay.
No.
We're just gonna leave it right here.
For some poor, unsuspecting illegal immigrant to find and randomly shoot a lady.
Okay, so Steinle was not hit directly, but rather the bullet hit the concrete ground and ricocheted up to hit her.
The gun was a Sig Sauer, had been stolen four days prior.
The defense also presented evidence that the Sig Sauer has a propensity to accidentally fire.
So, it has a hair trigger in single action mode.
Apparently, among well-trained users, it has a lengthy history of accidental discharges.
Okay?
Accidental discharges does not mean that you have not acted with criminal negligence.
If you pick up a gun, and you point it anywhere near the vicinity of people, and your hand is anywhere near the trigger, that does not count as a pure accident.
Okay?
A gun is a dangerous weapon.
Everyone knows this.
Okay, this is why you are taught, when you buy a gun, when you train with a gun, you are taught, never point the gun anywhere you are not willing to kill somebody.
Never point the gun anywhere you're not willing to destroy.
Never have your finger anywhere near the trigger if you don't mean to fire it.
Okay, but the idea is that, again, this guy's a dunce, and he walks up, and he doesn't know what a gun is, it just looks like a fancy cheese cutter, and he picks it up, and then, boom, it goes off in his hand because he never even touched the trigger.
Okay, this is, so, they say that this is the defense presenting a reasonable doubt case, They said he's a homeless illegal immigrant, unfamiliar with the gun, and that's why.
Okay, so, I think that what happened here, if you're trying to make the best case for the jury, is that there was a prosecutorial overreach.
So they pushed hard for a first degree murder verdict, or a second degree murder verdict, which suggests that you must have intent.
They have to have intent to have killed.
Involuntary manslaughter does not require intent.
So the prosecution in this case said that he was playing like a game of Russian roulette in his head and just shot the lady.
That's weak.
What they should have charged was involuntary manslaughter.
They overcharged, which a lot of prosecutors do, they overcharged.
What they should have done is charged involuntary manslaughter.
Second-degree murder in California is willful but not deliberate.
Like, for example, you fire a gun into a crowded room.
You don't mean to kill any specific person, but you know there's a good possibility somebody is going to die.
Willful but not deliberate.
Involuntary manslaughter in California, the standard is without malice, without intent to kill, with reckless disregard for human life.
So the difference between involuntary manslaughter and excusable accident is participation in either an unlawful act not amounting to a felony, so that would be picking up an illegal gun, or a lawful act involving a high degree of risk of death or great bodily injury.
That would involve picking up a gun and pointing it anywhere in the vicinity of people.
And in fact, there's a law firm out here in California that has a defense law firm that has a very good rundown on this law, and the exact example they use of involuntary manslaughter is a woman who's in a fight with her husband, brandishing a gun at her husband, the gun accidentally goes off and kills her husband.
Right, that falls under involuntary manslaughter.
Okay, Jeff Sessions has a statement on it.
This was clearly involuntary manslaughter.
The jury could have found that.
It's possible they decided to just throw out everything because the prosecutor didn't do their job.
But whatever it is, this is an unjust verdict.
The guy should be in prison for a very long time for at least involuntary manslaughter.
And beyond that, The reason this is a political issue is because this bastard never should have been in the United States in the first place.
He should not have been here.
Now, President Trump, when he says we need a wall, the reason we need a wall is because it's not enough to just repeatedly deport people.
You actually have to have some way of preventing them from recrossing into the country because you have sanctuary cities, you have places where these people can hide.
Trump should be making hay while the sun shines out of this because he is right.
This is why Trump won.
It's because of issues like the Kate Steinle issues I said last night on Fox News.
Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, issued a statement, the feds may bring charges of their own.
Jeff Sessions said, when jurisdictions choose to return criminal aliens to the streets, rather than turning them over to federal immigration authorities, they put the public safety at risk.
San Francisco's decision to protect criminal aliens led to the preventable and heartbreaking death of Kate Steinle, while the state of California sought a murder charge for the man who caused Ms.
Steinle's death, a man who would not have been on the streets of San Francisco if the city simply honored an ICE detainer.
The people ultimately convicted him of felon in possession of a firearm.
So, again, once you're a felon in possession of a firearm, if that firearm goes off and you kill somebody, it's pretty hard to see charging and convicting someone of felony possession of a firearm without also charging them with and convicting them of involuntary manslaughter in a case like this.
The Department of Justice will continue to ensure that all jurisdictions place the safety and security of their communities above the convenience of criminal aliens.
There should be blowback on sanctuary cities, and it shouldn't have to do anything with the verdict here.
If the guy was convicted, there should still be blowback on sanctuary cities.
So that's worthwhile noting as well.
Okay, so that is big piece of news number two.
Okay, big piece of news number three is that Mitch McConnell is now saying that the Republicans have the votes in the Senate for this tax cut.
So I'll give you the latest on that in just a second.
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Okay, so, Mitch McConnell has now announced on the floor of the Senate that we are about to pass this tax reform bill.
The tax reform bill has at least 50 votes, maybe 51, it depends on what Bob Corker decides, maybe they get 52, but bottom line is that it is a good shot that this is It is a good shot that the tax bill wins.
It is unclear what exactly is in this thing now because they were futzing around with it as late as yesterday.
Right now, as of last night, the Republicans were redrawing the tax bill to reduce the size of the tax cuts because there was a report yesterday that the deficits were too high.
There are a lot of people today talking about deficits.
Deficits, oh, the tax cut's going to create deficits.
I am deeply concerned about deficits, but let's be clear about something.
It does not create deficits for me to keep more of my own money.
It creates deficits for you to spend money I did not give you.
I hate this logic that is constantly used by the left, that if I'm paying 50% taxes, and you're taking in a million dollars from me, which is not accurate, but let's say I were paying 50% tax and you're taking a million dollars from me, and you were spending two million dollars, so we have a million dollar deficit, Well, if you reduce my taxes by 50%, so now I'm only paying $500,000, then you've increased the deficit by $500,000.
Nonsense.
You should spend less.
Okay, these are two separate line items in your house.
The idea that you spending less money creates a deficit.
That you taking less of my money creates a deficit.
That's just foolishness.
Okay?
It's not a matter of you allowing me to keep more of my own money.
It's a matter of you're spending too much money.
The great driver of the debt in the United States is not, in fact, tax cuts.
It is not wars.
The great driver is what constitutes 60% of the American federal budget.
That is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare programs.
That is at least two-thirds of the American budget.
Okay?
The idea that it's all these other things, it's just not true.
And so, I hate these rules.
One thing that I would say to the Republicans is, listen, I'm really glad they're going to get these tax cuts.
I think that it is worthwhile.
I would vote for the tax cuts, even though I'm a deficit hawk, because I want them to cut crap on the other side.
I've never understood this argument that a lot of people on the right make, that government revenue will go up if we cut taxes.
I don't care whether government revenue goes up.
I don't care.
I don't want the government revenue to go up.
I want them to have less money.
I want the government not to spend as many of my dollars.
This is the sort of downside to the Laffer Curve.
So the Laffer Curve is true.
The Laffer Curve, for those who don't know, I've explained it on the program before, Art Laffer famously had what he called the Laffer Curve.
The Laffer Curve basically looks like this.
I will draw you the Laffer Curve.
The Laffer Curve says that if you have a tax rate here, on this axis, on the y-axis, and here is 100, and here is 0, and then here you have government receipts.
Government receipts.
Right.
Then, and here again you have zero, and here you have a hundred.
Then what will happen is that as the tax rate goes up, you will see the government receipts go up, but there is a law of diminishing returns.
Right?
And so the curve looks like this.
Right?
The curve looks like that.
If you tax at zero, the government receipts will be zero.
If you tax at a hundred, the government receipts will be zero.
The reason for that is because if you tax at a hundred, no one is going to bother making any money.
They're all going to sit home.
They're going to say, why would I work for the government?
You're not paying me.
Right?
So that's what the Laffer Curve says.
So what the Laffer Curve also says is that there is a point, let's say that you are here on the Laffer Curve, let's say the tax rate is where this X is, that what you would be better off doing to increase government receipts is to actually lower the tax rate.
Right?
You would actually be better off lowering the tax rate.
That would be the idea.
I don't care.
I don't care.
People say, well, you know, who says the tax rate's too high?
Maybe we're perfect right now.
I actually mixed up the axes here.
This should be the government receipts and this should be the tax rate.
So the idea there is that if you want to increase government receipts, lower the tax rate if the taxes are too high.
I don't care.
I don't care.
People say, well, you know, who says the tax rate's too high?
Maybe we're perfect right now.
Maybe it ought to be higher.
What if I don't care about the government receipts?
What if I think that the government receipts should go down so that they spend less money on stupid crap?
How about that?
In any case, the leading GOP senators are saying that Republicans redrew the tax bill last night to reduce the size of the tax cuts.
John Cornyn said the move came after the Senate parliamentarian ruled against a complex trigger mechanism that would have automatically cut back the taxes if they didn't produce economic growth and higher than expected tax revenues.
So what the Republicans were trying to do is they were trying to cut taxes in a significant way, and then they would have a trigger in the bill that said if the government revenues do not increase by a certain amount, then we will ratchet back down the tax cuts.
That seems to me a silly idea, again, because I think that the entirety of this particular regulation is silly, that we have to be deficit neutral in order to pass anything.
It's just a recipe to game the numbers.
That's all.
The Senate parliamentarian doesn't know better than you do how much revenue the government is going to take in.
The Senate parliamentarian would have ruled that Obamacare was deficit neutral, which it clearly is not.
So I don't buy any of this stuff, but this is good news for the Trump administration.
They do need a big win in terms of policy.
The tax cuts are a big win in terms of policy.
While they're unpopular now, nobody likes having less money in their pocket.
And while Democrats are busy complaining about how this is a bad bill, very few people are going to consider it a bad bill if the stock market continues to go up and if they get more back in their tax refunds.
So it's a big win for the Trump administration for certain.
Okay, so before I go any further here, there's some other news that I want to talk about.
The possibility of a government shutdown, the battle between Jimmy Kimmel and Roy Moore, and we've got to get to the mailbag.
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All righty.
So here we are, and it looks like a government shutdown may be in the works.
And this is a good government shutdown for President Trump.
I said yesterday, I think that President Trump would win on a government shutdown issue with the Democrats, particularly after Steinle.
He should be pushing for funding in the new government shutdown negotiations.
He should basically be saying, I want funding for the wall in this bill, and if you don't give it to me, then I'm just not going to sign the funding bill.
I'm not going to increase the debt ceiling.
I'm not going to sign funding, and there'll be a shutdown.
Because you guys are willing to obstruct so that we don't have any sort of physical barrier that would prevent people from entering the country, as in the Kate Stanley case.
Trump has the upper hand.
He has the bully pulpit.
He should be willing to use it.
He should at least get some concessions from Democrats.
If he does not, I will count that as a loss for the administration.
Trump says a shutdown could be good for him.
I don't think that that's wrong.
I don't think that that's wrong.
I mean, I think that everybody in the administration should stop leaking.
Like, my God, folks.
Like, just stop it.
But Trump is not wrong when he says that a government shutdown sometimes benefits the president.
That was the logic that was used for Obama when Cruz was involved in a government shutdown.
Okay, so that's what's going on with the government shutdown.
We'll bring you more on that if it actually materializes.
Meanwhile, the battle continues over Roy Moore in Alabama.
And I just want to show you the reactionary nature of American politics.
As I have said to you, I believe that Roy Moore did the things he's alleged to have done.
I think that because there's been no anywhere near convincing rebuttal of any of the testimony or evidence put forward by the accusers.
Meanwhile, Hollywood is basically willing to ignore a lot of the evils in their own midst and of course they are very upset about Roy Moore because Roy Moore is a Republican.
They were all defending Bill Clinton and they would again today if they had the choice.
As far as I know, Jimmy Kimmel has not been commenting on Al Franken.
Maybe he has.
If he has, then I miss it and I apologize, but I haven't seen that.
Jimmy Kimmel deployed a guy down to Roy Moore's church in Alabama.
And this guy went into a speech that Roy Moore was giving at the church and started berating him at the church in the middle of his speech.
He was then removed.
So this is Jimmy Kimmel's guy.
I can't remember the name of this fella because I don't watch Jimmy's show, but I believe that his name was, let's see, Rich Barbieri, who's better known as Jake Byrd.
So here is a pretend Roy Moore superfan who's actually an employee of Jimmy Kimmel's.
The entire town, all over the line.
Five statewide campaigns.
Five statewide campaigns.
Why would they lie?
And three county-wide campaigns.
We can stop it and get them out.
Hey, come on.
Get out of here, dude.
We're here for the judge.
We're here for the judge.
She's a man's man.
The judge is a man's man.
You got this.
You got this.
Don't listen to him.
Get out of here.
That's a man's man.
Does that look like the face of a molester?
Okay, so he's removed.
And then Roy Moore tweets out at Jimmy Kimmel.
They get in a big tweet fight, right?
And this is a fight that only helps Roy Moore and only helps Jimmy Kimmel and doesn't help anybody who is rational on these subjects and trying to figure out exactly how to vote or who is guilty or who is innocent.
So the tweet fight goes something like this.
So we have the tweets.
So here are the tweets.
So Roy Moore tweets out, if you want to mock our Christian values, come down here to Alabama and do it man-to-man.
And then Jimmy Kimmel, of course, jumps right on this.
And Jimmy Kimmel is better at this than Roy Moore.
And so he tweets out, sounds great, Roy.
Let me know when you get some Christian values and I'll be there.
And not unfair, considering the man's been charged of, has been, you know, accused of sexual molestation of underage women.
And then Roy Moore fires back.
And he fires, he says, despite DC and Hollywood elites' bigotry towards Southerners, Jimmy, we will save you a seat on the front pew.
Okay, so he's just going in for more, and then Jimmy Kimmel responds, okay, Roy, but I'm leaving my daughters at home.
P.S., wear that cute little leather vest.
Okay, so the only people who are benefited by this sort of stuff are Jimmy Kimmel, who looks like he gets to virtue signal to his audience, and Roy Moore, who gets to look like he's virtue signaling to his audience because Hollywood is so bad and Hollywood is so terrible and all this nonsense.
The reality is that everybody's already made up their mind on Roy Moore.
All of the virtue signaling on the back of this seems to me a little bit much.
I think that there is a complex moral calculus that is happening for people who are in Alabama.
It's a very similar moral calculus to the one that was made during the 2016 election.
I think some people of good heart are going to come down on one side.
Some people of good heart are going to come down on the other side.
I think that it is not the right moral decision to vote for Roy Moore in Alabama.
The man is a credibly alleged child molester.
But on the other hand, I think that to Do the kind of virtue signaling that Jimmy Kimmel is doing and that Roy Moore is doing off the back of Hollywood.
All this does is exacerbate the reactionary political moment that we're already in.
Okay, so I want to do some things I like and then some things I hate.
So let's do some things I like.
All righty, so the things that I like today.
I don't know the street artist.
There's a street artist who has struck again, and this is pretty spectacular.
So Sabo has now unleashed a politically charged installation making fun of Al Franken.
Here's what he did.
So there's this awful, this movie that looks just awful that's coming out, The Greatest Showman on Earth.
Is that what it's called?
About P.T.
Barnum with Hugh Jackman that basically looks like LGBT rights in 1905.
It's like there's a bearded woman.
Be yourself!
That's what the circus is all about.
No.
Not really so much.
No, but it's about enlightenment in any case.
I'll save my critique of what I think will be a garbage movie for an actual deconstruction of the culture, but what is hilarious is that I don't know how they even did this.
They apparently basically rappelled up to this billboard.
I think this is in LA.
And they took a giant photo of Al Franken from the Leigh Ann Tweeden photo where he's trying to grope her breasts while she's sleeping.
And it has Al Franken popping in from the side of the billboard to try and grope, who is this, Zendaya?
trying to grope this woman from behind.
Just spectacular work by Sabo.
I love it.
He told us over at the Daily Wire, when I heard Frank and rehash Bill Clinton's I have to get back to work for the American People speech, I knew I had to take a punch at gropey Al.
Why is it the left never steps down but always insists when Republicans are caught in scandals, they do just that.
The hypocrisy is staggering.
I hope these latest accusations cause him to step down.
Just spectacular.
It's right off the 405 Freeway near National Boulevard, which is a couple of miles away from the Fox Studios.
And he said that he made the alteration temporary because he didn't really want to be prosecuted.
So it's easily removed, but it's pretty damn funny.
That's pretty spectacular stuff.
So well done, Sabo.
Love it.
Okay.
Other things that I like.
So, President Trump, again, I say that he has the power to, the ability to use trollery for the power of good.
And he does have the ability to use trollery for the power of good.
This is one of those situations.
So, as an Orthodox Jew, I really like that the United States is a Christian nation, because I think the closer that the United States is to its Christian roots, the closer they are to their biblical roots.
And the closer they are to their biblical roots, at least in private values, the better off the country is in terms of social structure.
President Trump, was obviously out there signaling that he made a big part of his campaign that Merry Christmas will come back again.
Now, I always thought this was a little overblown.
Everybody was able to say Merry Christmas to each other.
It was never illegal.
But the President of the United States saying it obviously is attempting to make a culture statement.
A lot of people on the left are maddened by this, but I don't think that most of the people in the center either care or oppose it.
So here's President Trump overtly invoking Jesus during Christmas, which seems to me to make sense since I don't celebrate Christmas because it's about the Jesus.
So here is Donald Trump.
Finally, in 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation making Christmas a federal holiday.
And I sort of feel we're doing that again.
That's what's happening.
From the earliest days of our nation, Americans have known Christmas as a time for prayer and worship, for gratitude and goodwill, for peace and renewal.
Melania and I are full of joy at the start of this very blessed season.
We're thrilled to think of the people across the nation and all across the continent whose spirits are lifted by the miracle of Christmas.
For Christians, this is a holy season.
The celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Okay, so I'll be honest with you.
I don't think that Trump knows anything about Christmas.
Like, I don't think he's a deeply religious guy.
He's never really given the indication that he is.
But...
Am I glad that the President of the United States is even paying lip service to the Christian nature of the country and the Christian nature of Christmas itself?
Yes, I'm very glad that he's doing it.
So good for President Trump for doing that.
He's gotten a lot of flack for it.
I think that flack is stupid.
So good for President Trump on that.
Okay, things that I hate.
So first of all, the first thing that I hate is that I have to make corrections.
So I have a couple of corrections this week.
So number one, like an idiot, I suggested that the president didn't know much about the windtalkers, because he doesn't.
But then it turned out that I don't know much about the windtalkers either.
So I have to apologize for getting that wrong.
I suggested that the Navajo windtalkers had decoded German and Japanese messages.
That, of course, is untrue.
The Navajo windtalkers instead, they spoke Navajo.
And so they were used as basically message purveyors by the American government, and their language is so different from any other language on planet Earth, apparently, that the Japanese thought it was artificial, they didn't know how to decode it, and so they could convey messages that way.
So that is a correction.
I got a lot of emails on that.
Thank you for every—by the way, folks, when you see that I do something wrong on the show, I don't mean, like, politically wrong, because I'm never politically wrong, but when I'm factually incorrect, please let me know, because I'm more than happy to make the correction, because I don't want to give bad information.
Other information.
I said that Theresa May was a member of the Brexit Party.
What I meant by that was not that the Conservative Party in Britain supported Brexit.
They didn't.
David Cameron didn't.
But Theresa May was, as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, Theresa May was not opposed to Brexit, which is one of the reasons why she took the place of David Cameron when David Cameron stepped down.
Okay.
Let's just go directly to the mailbag, because that's an... I really hate corrections, and I had to do them, so... We're just going to the mailbag now.
Okay, so...
Well, you know, I think that I tend not to make the argument about abortion on the basis of God.
I tend to make it on the basis of science because I think that's more convincing.
I'm arguing extensively about abortion.
How can I help my family close and extended see the inconsistency of being pro-abortion and having a firm faith in God?
Thank you.
Well, you know, I think that I tend not to make the argument about abortion on the basis of God.
I tend to make it on the basis of science because I think that's more convincing.
If you believe in the sanctity of human life, and I assume that they do, then you have to ask all the same questions that I often ask about abortion.
What constitutes human life?
Is human life breathing?
Because there are plenty of people who are on an iron lung.
Can you just unplug it?
Is human life brain activity?
Because when you are sleeping, or when you are in a coma, your brain activity is minimal.
And when you're a fetus, then you are developing brain activity.
So you are going to come out of that.
There will be brain activity even if you believe that the initial cells don't have brain activity, which they don't.
Is your standard something else as to what constitutes humanity?
Well, you're going to have to explain why we can't kill adults.
The bottom line is that once insemination has taken place, once the egg has been fertilized, once fertilization has taken place, then you have an incipient human life.
Even if you don't wish to say that it has the same moral status as a full human being, it certainly has enough moral status that you don't get to kill it at will because that is at the very least a potential human life.
and And therefore, you know, that is not worth killing.
I think that it's difficult to make the case it's not human life, frankly.
Gregory says, Dear Ben, I hear the argument from you that private businesses should have the right to not serve whomever they please, and that the free market would discourage the use of this policy to discriminate because people don't like racism and such.
I agree.
Does this position still hold in the time period directly after the abolition of slavery, when there is very little free market provision from discrimination?
If yes, does this not prolong segregation?
The answer is that the free markets of the North were significantly better at restricting the discrimination than the very restrictive markets of the South.
Jim Crow laws came in, and they were specifically designed to prevent free market development of anti-discrimination.
So I'm not saying that everybody is grand and everybody is great.
I am saying that everybody does like money, and if they see money to be made, then they are going to appeal to populations that were otherwise marginalized.
So that doesn't mean that in every situation there won't be private discrimination.
I don't believe that.
You know, in the aftermath of slavery, of course there was going to be lots of private discrimination.
But the federal government, because of that, the federal government wasn't even going to put anti-discrimination law into policy in the first place at that point.
So the best you could do is free markets.
Usually it's the government used the other way.
Usually it's the government preventing anti-discrimination by actually forcing discrimination.
Well, number one, I think that we have to actually do something that we all, as religious people, find kind of unpalatable and not really nice.
How can conservatives combat this and be seen more as a champion for the people?
Well, number one, I think that we have to actually do something that we all as religious people find kind of unpalatable and not really nice.
Maimonides, when he talks about charity, says that the highest form of charity is giving anonymously.
Well, he says the highest form is giving somebody a job.
The second highest form is giving anonymously.
I think that that is right because you don't want to glorify yourself for doing something that you are obligated to do, right?
Give charity, religiously.
But, if conservatives don't make clear to people they're actually doing that, then people don't identify them as charitable.
So we're actually going to have to brag on ourselves a little bit.
We're actually going to have to say that we do give charity.
We give lots more charity than people on the left do.
This is a fact.
Red states give lots more charity than blue states per capita.
Religious people give lots more charity than non-religious people.
So if you want to talk about how much we care about people, why don't you look to the people who are voluntarily signing checks as opposed to doing it at the point of a gun.
Yes.
Until she was two, my daughter didn't watch television.
My son doesn't watch TV.
I limit her use of TV pretty significantly in terms of what she is allowed to watch.
And I plan on doing the same with computers.
I would want her to use computers in order to gather information, but smartphones, iPads, these have become distraction tools as opposed to learning tools, and so I think that I would much rather she read a book than be caught up in the social media on the internet.
Like, for example, I wouldn't want my daughter...
To have a Facebook account until she was in her teens.
Like, I just don't think children should have that stuff, or a Twitter account.
So I don't believe in net neutrality.
I think I explained this a few days ago on the show, didn't I?
I did a whole segment on net neutrality, I thought, where I discussed at length the idea that ISPs... Basically, net neutrality is the suggestion.
It was only put into place in the last couple of years of the Obama administration.
And before that, the internet was working just fine.
Net neutrality is basically the suggestion that internet service providers have to supply traffic, supply all use of traffic the same price.
So Netflix, which eats up an enormous amount of bandwidth, has to be charged the same as some schmo in his basement who is just loading up his blog.
And it's also, net neutrality also says that all pages have to be loaded at the same speed.
Well, the problem with that, of course, is that it benefits big corporations like Netflix over the little guy.
The reality is that if you're taking up a huge share of the bandwidth, then there might be companies that say, you know, we will provide you a faster access, but you have to pay more money.
It's not incumbent on internet service providers to be forced to be treated like public utilities.
The way to think of it is that internet service providers are like the pipes, and the content of the internet is like water.
So you can think of it in two ways.
It's a public utility.
Everybody should be able to turn on the tap at the same time and get the water.
Or that the pipe company should be able to charge you what they want or charge the water company what it wants for the water moving through the pipes.
The reason it's not quite like a pipe Is because you can have multiple pipes, right?
There are multiple internet service providers.
One of the reasons that net neutrality has become such an issue is because of special deals with local governments by a lot of the internet service providers, so they're the only providers in their region.
If there were open competition, you would actually see competition.
Like for people, for example, who only use email but don't watch streaming video, right?
Like older people who only want to watch TV but don't actually want to use Netflix or Hulu.
They should be able to get the internet cheaper than people who want to be able to get Netflix and Hulu.
Or if you only want to get Netflix and Hulu and you don't use email, you just use text messages, you should be able to have these options.
There's nothing wrong with any of this.
This is why when people say it's a corporate giveaway to get rid of net neutrality, there are major corporations like Google and Netflix who basically want to prevent smaller companies from being able to take advantage of differential pricing on ISPs to compete with them.
So it depends which corporations you're talking about.
Google's a huge corporation.
Facebook's a huge corporation.
Twitter's a huge corporation.
All of them are in favor of net neutrality because they are content providers.
All the ISPs are in favor of getting rid of net neutrality.
Bottom line is the internet was fine before anybody started messing with it.
Net neutrality, the odd passion over net neutrality has always puzzled me.
Moshe says, Hi Ben, everyone appreciated when the North Korean soldier fled the regime and made his escape to freedom.
Logistically, what is the difference between that soldier and Mexican citizens wanting to escape to a better life in America?
Love the show.
So, I don't, as I've said before, I think people who are trying to escape horrible situations to come to a better life, I don't blame somebody for trying to jump the border.
I've said this many times and I've been very clear about this and pretty consistent on it.
If I were living in Mexico, I'd also try to jump the border because America's an amazing place.
If I had no other choice, but that does not mean that the United States has an obligation to take those people in.
The U.S.
gets to pick who gets to come into the country and who does not.
The U.S.
gets to do that.
So it's not up to South Korea to say, we must take in everyone from North Korea.
South Korea can say, no, we're going to put that person in some sort of temporary internment camp until we can figure out where they ought to immigrate to, for example.
But the idea that everyone who is fleeing human rights violations has therefore a claim on your country is not true.
Also, I would say that the Mexican government is not equivalent to the North Korean government anyway.
There are lots of problems in Mexico, including drug cartels.
But Mexico is not North Korea.
North Korea is a giant prison state.
There is no wall keeping Mexicans in.
Okay, um, Damien says, I was talking about God with my friend.
He said, since God is almighty, why would he test us by giving us free will?
God is almighty, so he knows the future.
I would know the results of that free will test.
What can I answer?
God wants us to earn.
God wants us to feel fulfilled.
One of the ways, God loves us, and so he wants us to feel fulfilled.
The way that people feel fulfilled is not by being given things, and it's not even if, you know, what somebody's gonna do.
It's being given a choice, and then acting in accordance with that free will.
Free will is what makes life meaningful.
So, what I would ask your friend is how he would define the existence of free will without God or without a supernatural.
If you're a scientific materialist, there's no evidence whatsoever that free will exists.
Sean says, have you thought about your New Year's resolution yet?
Well, actually, the truth is that Jews do our New Year's resolutions around Rosh Hashanah.
During the Jewish New Year, that's why we do it in actual atonement.
I would say the Jewish New Year is a lot more meaningful than the secular New Year where we all get drunk and then pretend we're going to lose weight and then don't.
Tom says, Last week you said DC movies should have 20% added to their critical scores, Marvel movies should have 20% taken away.
Why do you think DC movies should receive affirmative action?
Shouldn't they have to stand on their own mediocrity?
I'm not saying that Rotten Tomatoes has to do that.
I'm saying if you want an accurate portrayal of how DC movies are treated, then you should add, like in your own mind, you should add 20% to the Rotten Tomatoes score because everything they say is 30 for a DC movie's a 50, and everything they say is a 90 for a Marvel movie's a 70.
That's all I'm saying.
I'm saying that the critics are biased in favor of Marvel and they are biased against DC.
But I'm not saying that the critics have to do that.
I mean, the critics can do whatever the hell they want.
That's why I don't pay attention to the critics a lot.
Luke says, No.
Hi, Ben.
I've heard you say you do not believe Jesus was the Son of God.
My question is, have you read C.S. Lewis's Trilemma, where he concedes as a Christian that if Jesus was not God, then he was a madman or something worse?
Given you don't think Jesus was divine, weren't his words or actions wickedly immoral?
Thanks, an Aussie atheist conservative fan.
No.
So one of the reasons that Jews reject Jesus is because we don't believe the authenticity of the Gospels.
Meaning that, if we actually believe the authentic- So, C.S.
Lewis' proof relies on you believing the historicity of the Gospels.
That everything the Gospels said was true, and therefore, either Jesus was crazy, or Jesus was evil, or Jesus was telling the truth, right?
That's the trilemma.
Well, I don't think that, like, as a Jew, like, the Jewish perspective on Jesus is that that's not actually the case, right?
The Jewish perspective on Jesus is that the people who wrote the Gospels were writing the Gospels decades after Jesus' death, and that Jesus was actually pretty much a normal Orthodox Jew who tried to lead a rebellion against the Romans and was killed for his trouble.
That's, that he was attempting to lead a secular messianic movement, because that's, and when I say secular, I mean a Jewish messianic movement, because the Jewish Messiah has no, there's no notion of divinity entering the world through the Jewish Messiah.
Sadly, Michael Mowles is on salary.
I have desperately been trying to pay him for word for a couple of years now.
Again, one of the great moments of my career will be firing Michael Moles.
Jonathan says, Ben, what role, if any, should opinion polls play in the decision-making process for politicians?
Well, they should be used as feedback, but they shouldn't be used as guidance.
So, what I mean by that is it's good to know what people like and what people don't, because that also allows you to tailor your message on what is good policy.
But I don't think that you should shift your policy preferences based on public opinion.
I don't think that it should be like, well, I'm for tax cuts, but now that the public hates it, I'm for tax increases.
I don't think that's right.
You should either believe that something's going to work or believe that it's not going to work, and facts are facts and feelings are feelings.
Elena says, hey, Ben, if you had to pick a single moment or period of time that profoundly impacted your life, what would it be?
Well, I honestly believe I haven't been alive very long.
I'm only 33.
So I believe that there have been several, you know, kind of key periods of my life.
I would say that one of those key periods was when I was growing up and I went to middle school, I went to public school, and I was viciously bullied there, and then I was viciously bullied in high school.
I think it's not a good thing that it happened, but it's a character-building exercise.
You have to grow a thick skin, and you have to learn that the world is not your friend, and that you're going to have to make your own way.
And so I think that was a deeply upsetting but valuable experience to me.
Harvard Law School is a great place to learn how to argue and learn how to think.
I think that the last year and a half has been a really tremendous character building experience and has changed my thought process.
It was really interesting.
The other day...
And somebody wrote a column criticizing me, and talking about a column I wrote in 2007 about dissenters from the Iraq war.
There were a bunch of Democrats at the time, like Dick Durbin, who were talking about how they were glad that America was basically losing the war in Iraq.
And I said this was traitorous, essentially, and in a column I even said that we should revivify the Alien Sedition Act, not the Alien Sedition Act, the Espionage Act from 1917 under Woodrow Wilson.
I feel—and then Barack Obama became president, and you become the dissent.
And then you realize, well, you're going to have to have a certain standard.
It's easy to be the people in power, and it's hard to be the people out of power.
And then, during this election cycle, the question was, were you going to maintain that standard now that you had the possibility of power again?
And I think the answer is that if you're not learning throughout your life and changing how you feel based on new evidence, not based on new feelings, but based on new evidence, then you're not doing the right job.
I wish I hadn't written that 2007 column because I don't think that's right.
I don't think that the Espionage Act should be revivified against people, even people who say egregious things about war and say things that harm the war effort and I think put the troops in a bad position.
Free speech is valuable because you can end up on the wrong side of it.
So there are certain areas in life where I've changed my position because new evidence has been presented to me that I had not experienced before.
The Obama administration changed my way of thought.
The Bush administration changed my way of thought.
The Trump administration changes my way of thought.
If you're not changing your way of thought based on new evidence, then you've stopped thinking and you've become rigid and sort of locked in.
So clearly Empire is the best.
I mean, that's the easiest answer ever.
The question is what comes second, right?
Because there are a couple of, like the hard choice there as to what comes second is actually in my opinion between episode four and Rogue One.
I really do like Rogue One.
Rogue One is a very good movie.
When I first watched it, I was really tired and I underestimated how good it was.
Then I watched it again on a plane actually and it's a very, very good movie.
So I would still probably put Rogue One third.
I'd probably still go Empire, Star Wars one, Rogue One, Return of the Jedi.
We were just discussing before the show, actually, how good is Return of the Jedi.
And the problem with Return of the Jedi is that it's actually two movies, right?
So there's all the stuff with Luke aboard the Death Star, which is some of the best stuff in the Star Wars series.
And then there's all of the stuff with the Ewoks.
And you're like, what?
Why?
Who?
When?
Where?
Wha?
Woo?
And it doesn't make any sense.
So all the stuff aboard the Death Star is fantastic.
If that had been the entirety of Return of the Jedi, then Return of the Jedi would be up there.
It comes in fourth for me, so those are my top four.
for.
Brendan says, Hey Ben, I've recently been growing interesting, increasingly interested in listening to some classical music.
Are there any pieces of work that you would recommend to someone that is just starting out?
Um, well, there, there, there's so many pieces that are great for people who are just starting out with classical music.
Um, a lot of them are cliched.
So you want to actually listen to some stuff that I'd have to know sort of what music you like, believe it or not, in sort of the pop arena to know what music you would like in classical, but you would have to start, anybody would have to start with some Bach, start with Takata and Fugue, which is very user friendly.
Um, When I was younger, I really liked Dvorak's New World Symphony, which is really exciting and fun to listen to.
Mozart's The Overture for Don Giovanni, and the last number for Don Giovanni, the last aria in Don Giovanni, or second-to-last aria in Don Giovanni, where Don Giovanni is dragged to hell.
Spoiler alert.
That is a fantastic, fantastic piece of classical music.
Brahms' Second Piano Concerto is just great.
Edvard Grieg is really user-friendly, and you'll recognize a lot of Grieg.
Like, Grieg is in the Hall of the Mountain King.
You'll recognize it, if you're old enough, from the Ritz Crackers commercials.
The cheese commercials, right?
That's Greek.
So is the music that you always hear.
That's also Greek.
So a lot of very colorful classical music.
Bizet.
Carmen.
There's so much great classical music.
I'd start with the colorful stuff and then make your way toward the harder stuff.
The mistake people make is they don't know anything.
So they say, I'll start off with Beethoven's First Symphony.
That's not even the good stuff.
Beethoven's good stuff starts Beethoven 3, right?
The Eroica.
Okay.
Bryce says, Hey Ben, I love everything you do.
I'm a huge supporter of capitalism, but I also don't seem to be very good at it.
Fair.
I'm still following the three rules, but I'm about to graduate college.
It's clear I have bad skills when it comes to handling my money.
Do you have any advice on how I could be better with money?
And are there any resources you could point me toward in the advancement of my wealth management skills?
I mean, first of all, I would find an actual wealth manager or somebody who can help you allocate your budget.
So number one, I think Dave Ramsey does some good work on this.
If you're really bad with handling money, you should not have a credit card.
You should only have a debit card.
And you should only be able to take money out of your account that already exists.
So all of your costs should be cash in hand, cash out of pocket.
That seems to me a very good way of preventing yourself from running into serious debt, which is where people really get into trouble.
Also, what I say is that recognize the stuff that's going to bankrupt you and the stuff that's not going to bankrupt you.
It's not going to bankrupt you to go to a movie once a week.
It will bankrupt you to get an expensive car.
So, there's sort of these big purchases that people spend a lot of money on that are worthless.
You're better off living a quote-unquote rich lifestyle by going to a movie once a week, which makes you feel rich and makes you feel involved in the world, as opposed to getting a nice car, which honestly is separated from like a mediocre car by...
.1% of enjoyment for most people.
For some people who really love cars, I guess it's a big deal.
But for me, it never was.
Like, I had a Mustang.
I had a GT Mustang that I paid like $33,000 for when I got out of law school and I was making a lot of money at a law firm.
And I didn't really enjoy that car that much, to be frank with you.
I mean, my wife didn't enjoy it.
So when we actually replaced it with the Honda Pilot, which is a family car, I like the Honda Pilot better than I enjoyed my GT Mustang.
Especially because you get a car with a really nice engine and you really want to speed in it.
And there's no place in California to speed in that car.
Right?
You're going to get arrested immediately.
Plus, because you're going to get a ticket every two seconds because the cops are looking for those cars.
Kevin says, Some time ago, a close family friend switched from being an obstetrician working at a hospital to being an obstetrician working for Planned Parenthood.
He and his family were always pro-choice, but now he is an active participant in legalized murder.
Can our relationship even continue?
I can't think of anything to say that could reach someone whose conscience is that seared.
Should I ask him what it would take to get him to quit?
I mean, if you're that close friends with him, you might say to him, listen, I'm having real moral qualms about... about...
Honestly, like, having a relationship with somebody who, in my opinion, kills babies for a living.
Like, I want to have this conversation with you, I want to be friends with you, but I understand if we can't continue that relationship.
I totally get that.
I totally get that.
I mean, if somebody is committing what you believe to be a moral atrocity on a regular basis, it's very difficult to... I was talking with a friend about this last night, and one of the things that I think is actually bad and wrong is that we, in our personal lives, will take people who we know are garbage people, and we'll say, oh, he's a nice guy.
He's a nice guy.
And then he does some bad things because we said, oh, he's a nice guy.
Garbage people.
People who do garbage things.
I'm not sure she'd be treated with kid gloves.
Tim says, finally, why do ex-husbands still have to take care of ex-wives in a divorce?
I understand the reasoning behind it back before women had rights and were able to work, but today they have rights and want even more, and they are more than capable of finding jobs to support themselves without a man.
So again, why do we still have a judicial system that favors women now?
Why would I lose my house that I pay for and she gets half of my assets on top of it if I didn't break the marriage agreement?
This seems to me a perfectly fair question on the back of feminists.
It seems to me child support is entirely appropriate.
But in a world in which men and women are equally capable of holding jobs, in a world in which women who are single, straight out of college, not married, no kids, are actually making more than men in most of America's major cities, I think that it may be a time to look back at how we arrange these things.
There are situations, by the way, in which women are paying support to men.
They're paying spousal support to men, but that's rare.
There is a bias in our judicial system against men with regard to parenting as well as marital law.
Okay, so this brings us to the end of today's program.
Just news-breaking fast and furious this week.
This was a long week.
We'll be back here on Monday, and by that point, I can only expect that the aliens will have arrived, given the quick-moving news cycle in which we are now taking part.
But try not to ruin things while I'm gone.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Cormina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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