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Feb. 7, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:17
Who’s Endangering The Republic? | Ep. 470
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A bunch more bombshells breaking in the FBI texting scandal.
Plus, President Trump wants a military parade and Democrats are filibustering for a government shutdown again.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Yes, many things are happening.
The Democrats are claiming that the end of the Republic is upon us.
Why?
Because President Trump wants a parade, you know, with shiny things and toys and tanks and such.
It's going to be awesome.
Democrats are very upset about it.
However, they say it's the end of the Republic.
However, if we're going to talk about the end of the Republic and the destruction of governmental norms, I have a few notes on that.
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All righty.
So the Democrats are very, very upset.
Chuck Schumer, sounding off, Senate Minority Leader, he says that our government is becoming degraded.
Republicans are silent about Trump.
They won't speak up about Trump.
And it's degrading our republic.
Our republic is just falling apart at the seams.
Here is Chuck Schumer.
For partisan reasons, the president and his allies in Congress are systematically trying to weaken America's faith in the rule of law.
And to a large extent, sadly, The leaders of the Republican Party have been silent.
We desperately need more of our Republican friends to stand up and speak out, particularly the Republican leadership, because their silence is rapidly becoming complicity So, as you know from this show, one of the things I hate most in politics is the sincere voice, where everybody goes down real low, like they mean it.
And that's what you get from Chuck Schumer.
It's a pretty good indicator the person's lying to you when they go to sincere voice.
If your spouse ever was talking to you, and they said, You can be guaranteed that the garbage never was taken out.
It never happened.
So, these politicians are lying to you, but the Democrats are saying that the Republicans are destroying governmental norms.
What was the big norm that was destroyed yesterday by President Trump?
The big norm that was destroyed yesterday by President Trump is that Trump says he wants a military parade.
So, according to CNN.com, He has asked the military for a parade, and the Pentagon is reviewing potential dates.
So, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she said in a statement, Trump had asked the Defense Department to explore the idea.
She says President Trump is incredibly supportive of America's great service members who risk their lives every day to keep our country safe.
He has asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation.
And the Washington Post reported last month that Trump wanted a military parade.
Apparently, he visited France, and he really liked the Bastille Day military parade.
He said last September in a conversation with the president of France, Macron, that when he came back from France, he wanted a military parade on the 4th of July in Washington.
There are a lot of people who are looking at this and saying, well, why do we need a military parade?
I mean, number one, it costs a lot of money.
Number two, the idea of tanks rolling down American civilian streets When we haven't just won a war, we're not actually celebrating anything, or not on Memorial Day, or not on Veterans Day.
It's kind of weird.
Like, to just randomly do a military parade in the middle of Washington, D.C.
so that Trump can stand there and look over the troops that he commands seems kind of not an American thing.
Like, the last military parade we had in the United States was 1991.
That was after the Gulf War, after we won the Gulf War and George H.W.
Bush had a military parade so he could celebrate the returning service members.
We had a couple back in the 1960s.
We had one under JFK.
There's one under FDR, which is really creepy because there's actually like a giant head of FDR, like a giant bust of FDR that was in the parade.
It's all real weird.
Look, is it something that I love the idea?
I don't love the idea of this.
I love the idea of honoring the military.
That's why we have two days honoring both the fallen members of the military and the members who have served, right?
We have Veterans Day, we have Memorial Day.
We should all take time out, and we should pay homage to the military.
That's something that we should do on a regular basis.
But the idea that Trump wants his military parade so he can stand there and look over it, I find kind of weird.
Again, appreciation for the military is one thing.
Trump wanting to imitate France because, look at all the pretty jets, seems to me a little bit weird as well.
Is it, however, the end of the world?
Is it something where you look at it and you go, this is destroying the fabric of the republic?
No.
No.
Is it a waste of time and money?
I kind of think so.
Is it something where, you know, we actually need to do it?
Is it something that Trump is doing for his own personal gratification?
Kinda.
But is it the end of the republic as we know it?
No.
But it doesn't matter.
The Democrats naturally are going crazy because they'll go crazy over anything.
Representative Jackie Speier from California, she says that Donald Trump is clearly like Napoleon.
What's your reaction to that idea?
I was stunned by it to be quite honest.
I mean we have a Napoleon in the making here and I believe that we have so many issues around the world in terms of preparing for wars that are ongoing And wars that may be, you know, often because of what's happening in North Korea, that I would say that it's really a waste of money.
And I think everyone should be offended by his need to always be showing.
He's truly Napoleon-like.
OK, come on.
Come on.
Just silly talk.
OK, and then Jeff Flake gets up yesterday on the floor of the Senate.
We discussed that President Trump had said the Democrats were—he joked—the Democrats were participating in treason when they didn't clap for him in the middle of the State of the Union, which, as I said, was a dumb remark.
He was obviously joking.
Jeff Flake, who is not running for re-election in the Senate in Arizona because he would probably lose, he has now made it his mission to go on the floor of the Senate every chance he gets and say things about Trump so that he can presumably primary him in 2020.
Here is the senator from Arizona.
I wish I could stand here today and say that my words of last October have been proven wrong.
That I had been unfair to invade against the daily sundering of our country.
That I had been mistaken about the personal attacks.
That I had exaggerated the threats against principles, freedoms, and institutions.
The flagrant disregard for truth and decency.
I have seen the President's most ardent defenders use the now-weary argument that the President's comments were meant as a joke.
Just sarcasm.
Only tongue-in-cheek.
But treason is not a punchline, Mr. President.
Okay, so, again, is this over the top?
Yes.
Is it?
Listen, should Trump have said any of that stuff?
No.
But the idea that Trump is degrading the Republic beyond belief.
Okay, the election of Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton was the worst choice ever.
Remember, all the way back—forget about what Trump has done since that I like, all his policies.
The election between Donald Trump, a guy who is manifestly character-free in many ways, and Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt politician in modern American history, that was not a good election.
If we're going to talk about stuff that degrades the republic, however, stuff that has real impact on the republic, we can't start with Trump saying stuff about military parades or suggesting that Democrats are treasonous for not clapping for him.
As I mentioned yesterday, Democrats said for years that you were treasonous if you did not sufficiently support Barack Obama's agenda.
They said it over and over and over.
They suggested the Tea Party were actual terrorists for not supporting Barack Obama's big spending agenda.
All of that was stupid.
None of it made any sense.
But nobody said at the time, this is the death of the republic.
They say it because it's Trump.
And of course Democrats are going over the top about all this stuff because this is where they think they're going to win.
They think they're going to win by just crying not normal over and over and over.
Joe Biden did this as well.
Joe Biden comes out and he says that Trump is a joke doing everything that Vladimir Putin ever wanted.
This is the first president to make a full-throated, unvarnished attack on the entirety of the FBI.
What do you think they're thinking in Moscow?
This is doing everything that Putin ever wanted.
I just marvel at some of the things he says and does.
Like, what, two days ago, anybody who didn't stand up and clap for him was un-American and then maybe even treasonous?
They say it was tongue-in-cheek.
Democrats can't take a joke.
Well, I mean, he's a joke.
No, he's a joke.
So Biden obviously wants to run in 2020 as well.
Remember, Joe Biden is the guy who got up in the middle of the 2012 election cycle and said Mitt Romney wanted to put y'all back in chains.
Or if that's not the definition of treason, you know, if that wouldn't be him calling Romney a traitor, I'm not sure what would be.
That he wants to enslave his fellow American citizens.
It's an astonishing claim.
So Democrats are claiming that Trump is destroying the Republic, but who is really destroying the Republic?
Who is really making the institutions of the Republic less than credible?
Well, it really is not Trump so much.
It really was the Obama administration.
I have a lot to say on this particular subject.
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Okay, so there is a bunch of breaking news that who is really endangering the institutions of the republic.
And the answer is, it was the Obama administration.
I mean, there are a lot of problems that I've had with the Trump administration, but when we talk about destroying the institutions of the American republic, there was so much going on in the last election cycle that was troublesome.
And before that, for the last eight years before that, I mean, I wrote a full book on all of the corruption inside the Obama administration called The People vs. Barack Obama.
It's worth reading.
But in the last couple of weeks, there has been a letter from Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, a referral to the Department of Justice.
And the referral basically says a few things.
It says, according to Gabriel Mailer, his lawyer, he says, first, that the October 2016 FISA and warrants application seeking surveillance of Carter Page disclosed, did disclose, That the Steele dossier was compiled in the direction of a political client.
It did not disclose that it was compiled in the direction of the DNC.
At the time of that warrant application, the FBI thought Steele had not previously disclosed dossier information to anyone but the FBI and his client.
It turns out that he instead disclosed it to the media.
And so in the original application, They used both the Steele dossier and a media report based on a leak from Christopher Steele to the media.
The FBI believed that that was Steele's first media disclosure, but it turns out that it was not.
And so, they fired him, and they did not include that in the warrant.
Subsequent to April 2017, they did not include in warrant renewal applications The new information that Steele had previously lied to the FBI about media disclosures prior to October 2016, the referral states, quote, instead, the post-April 2017 application still relied primarily on Steele's credibility prior to the October media incident.
So, we're still figuring out exactly what was going on with the Carter Page FISA application.
We're still figuring out exactly what happened with the Carter Page FISA application, but there's some new information that is pretty damning as far as how the FISA application process works.
The most honest take here, I think, is that the FISA application process is deeply flawed.
Since the initiation of the FISA courts, which is back in, I think, 2002, 2003?
Since the initiation of the FISA courts, there have been a grand total of something like 21 FISA applications that have been turned down by the FISA courts.
So basically, the FBI brings information to the FISA court, and they rubber-stamp wiretaps.
That's a serious problem because in this particular case, the information that the wiretap of Carter Page was based on was really sketch.
Not only was it really sketchy, it may have come directly from Hillary Clinton.
So we already know the Steele dossier, this dossier that was compiled at the behest of Fusion GPS, which was being paid by the DNC.
That Steele dossier was used as the basis for the FISA warrant, or as the primary basis for the FISA warrant against Carter Page.
We already know the DNC was paying for it.
But we are now finding out that that wasn't the only way that Hillary Clinton was funneling bad information to the FBI, or may have been doing so.
According to a report from Mark Hemingway over at the Weekly Standard, the FBI is now investigating a second Trump dossier.
This one is complete with information allegedly compiled by a Clinton crony named Cody Shearer.
Natasha Bertrand of The Atlantic says she's seen the memo, and that it covers, quote, a range of allegations concerning the president's personal behavior and financial transactions.
According to Bertrand, Obama's State Department Special Envoy to Libya, a guy named Jonathan Weiner, passed information from Shurer, who is a Hillary buddy, on to British spy Christopher Steele, who is busily compiling opposition research on Trump on behalf of the DNC and Hillary Clinton via Fusion GPS.
So here's how the chain of information went.
There's a Hillary crony named Cody Shearer.
He was working with Sidney Blumenthal.
Sidney Blumenthal is Hillary's hatchet man and one of the sleaziest liars in the history of American politics.
Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer were working to compile information that may or may not have been false to hand over to Christopher Steele.
They didn't just hand it over directly to Christopher Steele, however.
Instead, they sent it to Jonathan Weiner.
Jonathan Weiner was working at the State Department.
He was working for John Kerry at the State Department.
He was a Hillary staffer who moved over to John Kerry.
And so, the State Department then funneled that information, not to the FBI, but to Christopher Steele, who included it in the Fusion GPS dossier, which eventually was forwarded to the FBI.
So, it looks like the State Department being militarized on behalf of Hillary Clinton to funnel information to Christopher Steele, who would then send it to the FBI, which would then look to target the Trump campaign, right?
That's what this chain of information looks like.
That's really, really dirty stuff.
Hemingway rightly sums up, If the Guardian report is accurate, the FBI had better have a very good answer for why it's looking at information compiled by the likes of Cody Shearer.
And if Steele otherwise incorporated Shearer's information into his own dossier, it raises even more serious questions about what the FBI knew about the reliability and provenance of Steele's information.
Which all makes the Page-FISA request look shoddier and shoddier.
If the FBI knew that Seals' information came from Hillary's buddy and was funneled through the State Department, that's damning stuff.
It looks like the militarization of the State Department and then perhaps of the FBI on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Now, that would not be a supreme shock if the FBI was biased on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Late on Tuesday evening, Fox News released a new shocking report on texts.
Between FBI agents and lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
Both of them, you recall, were fired from the Mueller investigation for bias against President Trump.
So, according to Fox News, Page, this is Lisa Page in relation to Carter, texted her lover Peter Strzok on September 2, 2016, with the news that FBI Director James Comey wanted them to prepare an update on ongoing investigations because, quote, POTUS wants to know everything we're doing.
Which sounds like Obama wanted to be updated on a routine basis on the Hillary Clinton investigation.
Fox News says that this is about the Hillary investigation, not about Trump-Russia collusion.
Now, what makes this weird is that Obama had said back in April of 2016 that he did not interfere in FBI investigations, that he didn't want to know what was going on in FBI investigations.
This is clip 16.
Here is Obama saying that he would never get involved in investigations directly.
Just to button this up.
I guarantee it.
I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case.
Full stop.
Period.
Guaranteed.
Full stop.
Period.
Nobody gets treated differently when it comes to the Justice Department, because nobody is above the law.
Even if she ends up as the Democratic nominee?
How many times do I have to say it, Chris?
Guaranteed.
But here he is saying, I want updates.
Now, listen, he's the President of the United States.
He can have updates on any case that he wants.
Obviously, Trump has the same power.
But the idea that Obama said that he was not going to get involved in any of these investigations, and then suddenly Obama was going on national TV and saying that he didn't know Hillary had a secret email server and he found out about it on the news, even though he was obviously emailing with her at her private email address.
The fact that the FBI and the DOJ deliberately overlooked that, the fact that the FBI and the DOJ were coordinating on the Hillary email campaign, the fact that they were texting—I mean, those texts show that they wanted to go easy on Hillary because they thought that she might be the next president of the United States.
All of this makes the FBI and the DOJ look incredibly dirty.
Makes it all look really dirty.
Molly Hemingway has a piece over at The Federalist talking about that grassly Lindsey Graham memo that has now been sent over to the DOJ.
And again, according to that letter, it says, "It appears the FBI relied on admittedly uncorroborated information funded by and obtained for Secretary Clinton's presidential campaign in order to conduct surveillance of an associate of the opposing presidential candidate.
It did so based on Mr. Steele's personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information, but there is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele materially misled the FBI about a key aspect of his dossier efforts, one which bears on his credibility." So, all of this is pretty damning.
All of it suggests that there is some dirtiness happening here.
All of it needs to be reviewed.
I mean, here's what we really need at this point.
If we want to actually figure out what's happening here, first we need the FISA application, OK?
Trump needs to declassify the FISA warrants application on Carter Page.
Because all we've been hearing from the Democrats is that Republicans are leaving out key components.
All we've heard from Republicans is that the FISA application shows that there was some sort of collusion going on between the FBI and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
We're not going to know the answer to any of that until that actual FISA application is released.
Now, what this seems to me is that there's two possible theories.
One is that the Trump campaign was being targeted by the FBI on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
The other is that the FISA applications that are sought by the FBI are really shoddy on a regular basis.
If it's the latter, then we have a very deep systemic problem with the process.
If it's the former, then we have a very deep systemic problem with the quote-unquote deep state and the FBI.
I always tend to attribute this sort of stuff to stupidity and incompetence rather than malice.
But I can't take malice off the table because I just don't know at this point.
Trey Gowdy was already on TV last night, essentially hinting that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign sending information to the State Department forwarded on to Steele, which was forwarded on to the FBI, in a pipeline of information.
Here is the representative from South Carolina.
So weeks before the election, somebody in the Obama State Department was feeding information from a foreign source to Christopher Steele.
When you hear who the source, one of the sources of that information is, you're going to think, oh my gosh, I've heard that name somewhere before.
Where could it possibly have been?
The foreign source?
The domestic source.
And I'm trying to think how Secretary Clinton defined him.
I think she said he was an old friend who emailed her from time to time.
Sidney Blumenthal?
That'd be really warm, if you're warm.
Yeah.
So it is Sidney Blumenthal, apparently, according to Trey Gowdy, all of which should be deeply troubling to anyone of decent mind.
Meanwhile, I mean, if you want to know, again, who's destroying institutions in the United States, it doesn't help when Trump attacks institutions wrongly.
I've attacked him when I thought that he was doing so.
But it was the Obama administration that was compromising the integrity of these institutions, and it was these institutions who are apparently compromising their own integrity with either bad intel they were funneling to the FISA courts or FISA courts who aren't willing to do the work necessary to suss out whether an American citizen ought to have a warrant put on him, despite lack of evidence, all of which is deeply troubling.
Again, the Democrats are willing to believe pretty much anything.
Adam Schiff, the Democrat, he essentially said yesterday that he was caught on tape being pranked by radio hosts who claimed they had naked pictures of Trump.
That just shows how willing the Democrats are to believe anything about President Trump.
Okay, and so Busevab met with Trump in New York at some point after the 2013 Miss Universe?
Yes, absolutely.
And she got compromising materials on Trump after their short relations.
Well, there were pictures of naked Trump.
And so Putin was made aware of the availability of the compromising material?
Yes, of course.
Buzova shares those materials with Sobchak, and Sobchak shares those materials with Putin.
Okay, so good stuff there.
Obviously, Adam Schiff getting pranked by a couple of Russians who are calling him up and saying that he is apparently going to be given pictures of naked Trump.
Whatever gets your rocks off, apparently.
So, in a second, we're going to discuss The latest episode in government shutdown, because I guess we're going to have to do this every couple of weeks here.
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OK, so with all of that said about the compromising information regarding the Carter Page FISA warrant, we need to see the actual FISA application.
And if we don't see the actual FISA application, it's just going to turn into everybody accusing everybody else of treason all the time.
And that is not going to be beneficial for the Republic in any way, shape, or form.
Meanwhile, in another development that is certainly not going to help the tenor of political conversation in the country, we are now on the verge of another government shutdown.
This is exactly the same as the last government shutdown, as I predicted, right here on this program.
No deal has been made on DACA, nor will any deal be made on DACA.
Remember, we have until, I believe, next week for them to reach some sort of continuing resolution.
Or I guess tomorrow.
for them to come up with any continuing resolution to continue to fund the government.
Republicans, of course, are fine with continuing resolutions funding the government.
I've spoken with a sitting United States senator, a Republican, who's livid over this.
He says, why is it that Republicans can never just go through regular order?
Regular order is the process whereby each department of the government is funded individually.
You don't have omnibus projects that are budget packages that are all wrapped up together.
Instead, you have each provision being debated openly and freely on the floor of the Senate.
That has not happened.
Instead, there's a continuing resolution to continue funding the government at current levels.
Essentially, as the senator put it to me, this is a pilotless plane.
It's a ghost plane.
It's essentially, the American budget is now a ghost plane.
Nobody has control over it.
It just keeps flying because nobody is willing to actually sit down and hammer out a budget.
If they do hammer out a budget, it only grows in size and scope.
Right now, the debate over the continuing resolution is whether or not the Democrats will allow the government to continue to be funded if no DACA deal is cut or no promise of a DACA deal is made.
Now, the Trump administration has already offered a deal.
That deal is extraordinarily generous.
That deal includes the legalization of 1.8 million illegal immigrants and a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants.
It also includes the possibility of the importation of another 4 million legal immigrants into the United States.
Through chain migration, which would come to an end, but only gradually over the course of the next 20 years.
All of that, the Democrats have decided, is of no merit.
Instead, they just want a full-on DACA right now.
They want a full amnesty.
They don't want to spend any money on the border wall.
They don't want to spend any money on border security.
It's really absurd.
And so, Trump is responding how you would expect Trump to respond, by saying, listen, you want to shut this down over immigration again?
Fine.
Shut it down over immigration again.
You did it like two weeks ago, and it was a complete fail on your part.
If we don't change it, let's have a shutdown.
We'll do a shutdown.
And it's worth it for our country.
I'd love to see a shutdown if we don't get this stuff taken care of.
So we have to strengthen our borders, not by a little bit, but by a lot.
We are so far behind the time.
And by the way, the world is laughing at us because they can't believe these policies.
They don't have it.
I could name 15 of them right now.
No other country in the world has what we have.
And we're going to get it stopped.
And if we have to shut it down because the Democrats don't want safety, and unrelated but still related, they don't want to take care of our military, then shut it down.
OK.
We'll go with another shutdown.
Right.
Now, Trump continuing to say shut it down, shut it down, shut it down is not good politics.
He should be blaming Democrats for the shutdown, saying, listen, I want the budget.
You want the budget.
Everybody wants the budget.
They won't give it to us because of DACA.
That would be the smarter way to do this.
But what he's saying is essentially correct, that if the Democrats decide to shut this thing down over immigration, again, I don't understand how this is any different than it's been since we did this like two weeks ago.
Remember, we did this two and a half weeks ago.
And at the time, Chuck Schumer argued that we should shut down the government over DACA.
It failed.
The shutdown started Friday.
It ended Monday.
And he got essentially nothing for his trouble, other than some bad poll numbers.
So Trump is exactly right here to hold the Democrats' feet to the fire.
And John Kelly, who is very, very hawkish on immigration, Trump's chief of staff, he spoke to the media yesterday.
He said, listen, we've offered a lot more than other people have offered.
He makes a comment in here that Democrats are seizing on and trying to claim is racist.
Of course, because that's the way this works.
The president sent over what amounts to be two and a half times that number to $1.8 million.
The difference between 690 and 1.8 million were the people that some would say were too afraid to sign up, others would say were too lazy to get off their asses, but they didn't sign up.
So the President shockingly said, okay, 1.8 million, and then probably the biggest shock was in a path to citizenship.
That's beyond what anyone could have imagined, whether you're on the right or the left.
So people on the left have gone crazy over this.
OK, maybe some of them were lazy, maybe some of them were not.
That's not the main point here.
The fact is that a lot of people didn't sign up for DACA specifically because they were concerned that if they signed up and then Trump revoked DACA, they would now be on the government's radar.
So I don't think that's quite fair of the White House Chief of Staff.
That said, this is not a winning issue for Democrats.
It doesn't matter.
They are beholden to their radical Democratic base.
And that's the one thing that Trump always can count on here, is that no matter what crazy stuff Trump does, the Democrats will do something even crazier.
So, Nancy Pelosi has decided to get up and filibuster.
She may still be filibustering this DACA—they're calling it a DACAbuster, because it's not technically a filibuster in the House.
She says she's going to get up there.
And she's going to talk and talk and talk and talk.
As of this speaking, she's still talking.
I believe she's nine hours in at this point.
And she's still jabbering on about why it is that we can't pass a budget, why we can't fund the government, because we need to instead cut a deal legalizing all illegal immigrants, not just in exchange for border security, but just plainly.
So here's Nancy Pelosi starting to jabber about this today.
The Republican moral cowardice must end.
Members of Congress are trustees of the people and of our nation.
Why are we here if not to protect the patriotic young people who are determined to contribute and to strengthen America?
So I'm going to go on as long as my leadership minute allows.
I want to speak to the Bible in Luke 10, 25-37, the parable of the Good Samaritan.
There's nothing I like better than when Nancy Pelosi, an abortion fanatic, quotes the Bible.
It's one of my favorite things.
She should definitely quote the parts of the Bible talking about God knowing you before you were born.
She should definitely quote the parts of the Bible talking about the value of life.
She should definitely talk about the parts of the Bible talking about same-sex marriage.
She should talk about all the parts of the Bible that are a little less convenient for her than these broad-based Notions that we have to take in every immigrant on earth, which of course is not true and is not necessarily mandated by the Bible.
The Bible is full of walls, right?
The Bible is full of injunctions about who can marry whom and which people are allowed to intermingle with which other people.
You know, the idea that the Bible is an open borders document is relatively belied by the text of the Bible itself.
No.
No.
And by the way, that's not a suggestion that the Bible itself is against intermarriage with regard to race, for example.
That's a suggestion that the Bible is very much in favor of boundaries that establish the sanctity of certain practices and the sanctity of certain I mean, obviously the Bible is all about the sanctity of the Jewish people, at least in the Old Testament, and it says that they are people to be kept separate in certain ways, so the Bible is not all about the idea of full-on everybody gets to come in and every person is of the same mindset.
That's just silliness.
All of this is to say that Nancy Pelosi is now willing to shut down the government again over DACA.
The Democrats are willing to shut down the government again over DACA.
This is a big mistake by them.
It is a huge mistake by them.
And in one second, I'm going to explain why it's a big mistake by them.
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So one of the reasons that it's so stupid for Democrats to claim that they want to basically shut down the government over DACA is because the Democrats are constantly wanting to cut the military budget.
And Trump sort of made reference to that a little bit earlier when he said that the Democrats are willing to let the military go unfunded in order to protect illegal immigrants.
Democrats are constantly looking to cut the military.
At the same time, they're looking to expand the budget for social services and various other spending initiatives.
And General James Mattis, former General James Mattis, Secretary of Defense, he came out and he says, listen, the worst thing that can happen right now is for us not to end sequestration.
Sequestration was a budget cap that was put in place.
The Democrats insisted that half of the budget cap come from cuts to military spending because Democrats are anti-military.
And here is what Mattis had to say about that in his testimony yesterday.
We need you to pass a budget now.
If we are to sustain our military's primacy, we need budget predictability.
Congress must take action now to ensure our military's lethality is sufficient to defend our way of life, to preserve the promise of prosperity, and to pass on the freedoms we enjoy to the next generation.
And I ask that you not let disagreements on domestic policy continue to hold our nation's defense hostage.
Now, this is always the one place where Democrats are willing to cut the budget.
They're never willing to cut the budget anywhere else.
As an example, Democrats are now calling for a new child and family leave plan, one that is more generous, supposedly, than the one that's being pushed by Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio.
So, Senator Rubio and Ivanka Trump are trying to come up with a paid family and medical leave program that would essentially allow you to take money out of your Social Security to cover your paid family and medical leave.
And the Democrats, people on the left, very upset about this.
They say instead that we should just have the government borrow from the Chinese, essentially, to pay for it.
Elizabeth Bruning writes a piece over at Washington Post suggesting that it is our obligation, all of our obligation, to pay for other people to take paid family and medical leave.
She writes, The theologian St. Augustine of Hippo noted something about families and society that in his era was simply conventional wisdom.
After the city or political community comes the world, following the convention that treats the household, city, and world as three successive levels of human society.
For the ancients, families were the first and smallest of societies, units of cooperation and order within which people learned to get along with others.
Together, families formed political communities, cities, as Augustine put it, and together, these political communities made up the world, which was a society of communities.
Peace and order in each Okay, all of that is true.
But what she's about to suggest next is that it is the job of the government to ensure that we pay you to stay home with your baby for the first six weeks.
in forming functional societies.
Okay, all of that is true.
But what she's about to suggest next is that it is the job of the government to ensure that we pay you to stay home with your baby for the first six weeks.
She says, "What sentence it all made, "and how strange it is to have completely dismissed "the idea in modern thought." Our world is one of individuals making a series of contracts and agreements with one another in hopes of getting the most one can out of the world.
The lives of the others are none of our business, and ours are none of theirs.
Nowhere is this clearer than in conservative policymaking, where family policy is absurdly individualized.
And she makes the contention, essentially, that we should turn the family into a government concern again.
Now, this is one of the dangers.
I'm writing a book on ancient thought and modern political thought as well.
And one of the dangers of a lot of ancient thought is there's the suggestion implicit in a lot of ancient thought that if the idea of the human being is that you are virtuous by exercise of the faculty of reason, if the idea is that Your virtue is tied up in being a good citizen of a community, as Plato and Aristotle both suggest.
Then why isn't it the job of the community to function in making you a good citizen?
Why isn't the job of the community to basically make you a cog in the wheel?
In Plato's Republic, he talks at length about the idea of fostering this sort of utopian vision for a society in which families are governed by the state, in which children are removed from parents and educated in a certain way, in which the wisest of the children are put in particular sorts of schools.
Right.
All of this is dangerous stuff.
Once you say that the community is responsible for the family, as opposed to the family being responsible for itself and then building a community, then you end up in some real trouble.
The basis of the liberal public order is the idea that the family, as an atomized group of people who have care for one another, Take care of one another and then they, together with other families, form a community.
Not that the community is designed to form families.
And that if you try top down to have the community form families, all you end up with is the community dictating to families what should and should not be true.
Because the same government that can provide you paid family leave is the same government that can tell you that you need to educate your child in a particular viewpoint about the world.
This is a serious danger.
It's a serious danger and it's the difference between some Enlightenment thought and some of the pre-modern thought, right?
Some of the ancient thought and even some of the high medieval thought with regard to the value of community and family and the balance between the two.
Essentially, after the high Middle Ages and after the Renaissance, there's a feeling that's beginning to grow because of the high levels of warfare, that centralized state power was a problem.
And that the best thing that you could do was devolve authority back down to the lowest level, which meant, in essence, the individual and the family.
And that authority sprang from the individual and the family.
This is the idea of John Locke, right?
That there's a social contract that is made by people who originally existed in a state of nature.
That state of nature, by the way, does not mean that there was no government and no state.
It just means a state of nature in which there were very few rules, right?
There were self-organized communities But there was no monopoly of the use of state force is the idea of the state of nature.
And the idea in Locke as as well as in other philosophers like Machiavelli actually even talks a little bit about this.
The idea in some of these ancient is some of these sort of first modern philosophers and the ones that most led to the American founding.
Right.
The idea there is that family predates society.
And so the authority that society has comes from the family.
Not that the society's job is to create the family out of whole cloth.
Because otherwise, what you're going to do is you're going to have some families using the tools of society on behalf of themselves and at the expense of other families.
But this is a little too complex for Elizabeth Brutigas' take.
She goes all the way back to Augustine and to some of the ancients who suggest that the state's job is to uphold the family.
By the way, that is unclear from Augustine anyway, right?
Augustine's correct when he says that when you look at the three levels of society, you're looking at family and then community and then society at large.
That is true.
Right, of course that's true.
But Augustine was also the same guy who proposed the complete separation of the city of God and the city of man.
The idea being there's a spiritual world and there's also a physical world.
Augustine's words were used to justify virtually every regime, ranging from republics to dictatorships.
But in any case, Elizabeth Brooding over at The Washington Post, she writes, "Considered the paid parental leave plan teased in President Trump's State of the Union address, which has now gained traction with Rubio and Ivanka Trump.
The plan, described as a budget neutral approach to parental leave by advocates, would allow parents to draw from their Social Security benefits early to fund their parental leave, then require them to delay the collection of retirement benefits by some yet to be calculated period of time.
Participation would be strictly voluntary." Hey, I don't see the problem with this proposal.
By the way, we should increase the age of Social Security benefits anyway.
It's ridiculous that it is currently where it is.
The fact is, we cannot pay for Social Security.
It's been in the red since 2010, paying out more money than it has been taking in.
Anyway, this author continues, it's a highly individualized way of dealing with the facts of family life, which by their nature are communal issues.
Sorry, the facts of family life are not by nature communal issues.
They're not, by nature, communal issues.
The facts of family life are, by nature, private issues, and communities are formed by those families.
Again, we have to figure out how the communities are formed.
Suggesting that community predates family is historically inane.
It's not true.
Families create communities.
Just look at the Western settlers in the United States.
There's a series of families who came out west, and they would settle down with other families, and then they would create a community.
It wasn't a community that pre-existed the family.
It wasn't a bunch of individuals who went out, created a society, and then families moved in.
That's not the way that this typically works.
But she says, babies and children need caregivers.
Mothers and fathers need full-time and money to give care.
Elderly grandparents and great-grandparents need companionship and assistance.
And typically speaking, historically speaking, that was not a duty of society.
That was a duty of the family.
Babies and children were given care by members of the family.
A husband and a wife decided how they were going to care for children is how it works in my family.
My wife and I decided exactly how the kids were going to get taken care of, the grandparents chip in a lot, and we help pay for a nanny, and I am home a lot, and my wife is home.
Mothers and fathers need time and money to give care.
Then they should go out and they should make money before having children.
Ideally.
It's their responsibility to do so.
Elderly grandparents and great-grandparents need companionship and assistance.
This one is particularly interesting.
Historically speaking, it was the children who took care of the parents.
One of the reasons that parents had lots of kids is the idea that when I get old, then my kids are going to take care of me.
That was always the idea.
That you hit 80, and now you need to move in with your kids.
So you move in with your kids.
That's what your kids are there for.
And then society decided the government was going to take care of the elderly folks, and the elderly folks stopped having as many kids, and so the social security pyramid scheme turned upside down, and now it's bankrupt.
But Brutig writes at the Washington Post, Babies and children learn and grow, adults work and produce, and the elderly help and rest.
There's a place for every stage of the life cycle in the grand order of things, and a just state would ideally defer to that natural rhythm.
Right, by removing itself from the rhythm.
I mean, when the state interferes in the rhythm by offering incentives or by perverting those incentives, the state ends up doing a great disservice.
But she says, instead, conservatives plan would penalize the elderly for their decision to have raised families all in the interest of making parental leave a self-contained option, no burden to anyone but the parents themselves.
It shouldn't be a burden to anyone but the parent themselves.
I know this is actually an argument inside conservative circles.
There are some people like Ross Douthat, Raihan Salaam over at National Review.
They argue that it is the government's job to help foster families.
That it's the government's job to help ensure that parents can stay home more or that parents can have more money.
That is why they believe in the child tax credit.
As I've said, I'm not a believer in the child tax credit.
I don't believe that parents are essentially having children in order to get tax credits.
I think that's a misread of why most people have kids.
And beyond that, Society obviously has an interest in the bearing and rearing of the next generation.
The easiest way to incentivize that is to incentivize communities to come together and form their own societies.
As I've said many times, I've said it in virtually every speech I've made for the past several years, the order of preference, if you need help, should go family, and then community, and then the state.
It should not be the reverse.
It should not be state, and then community, and then family, if you need help.
But the idea here is that Republicans are doing something deeply wrong in suggesting the primacy of family not only as the element of political conversation, but also as the source of help for members of the family.
Instead, it says the proposal would penalize bigger families more than smaller ones, couples with more children to face working further into old age before receiving retirement benefits.
Well, yes, because it would be their choice to have those children.
Moreover, it would mean, likely, that lower-wage workers would end up putting off retirement longer than wealthier workers with ample company benefits.
Well, yes, it's better to be rich than poor in the United States, as everywhere else in human history.
If you're not particularly well-to-do and you want a family, in other words, you'll need to be prepared to pay for it in your old age.
Your family, your choice, your problem.
Yes, except that if you're in my religious community, then we help you out informally, because that's something else that we need to build up.
The idea that government is there to fill all gaps, and that you are not there to actually help out members of your own community is another falsehood promulgated by the left.
The idea that the only source of help in times of trouble is the government is absolutely untrue.
But the piece concludes, quote, One of the things that's so fascinating about this argument, by the way, is that the same people arguing for paid parental leave are the same people who argue that same-sex marriage is a grand and great idea.
Same-sex marriage has no bearing on childbearing and rearing.
The whole reason the government used to prefer traditional marriage to same-sex marriage was because of benefits in terms of childbearing and rearing.
So it's kind of ironic to watch the left completely abandon that position, even as it embraces the position that we should have the government pay for paid family and parental leave.
Kind of fascinating.
But again, if you want liberty, you're going to have to accept that there's some responsibility that goes along with it.
And if you want a family that is free of government interference, you're going to have to understand that the government that gives with one hand also takes with the other.
Okay, in just a second, let's do some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So let's jump in.
Let's do some things that I like.
So, over on Amazon Prime, it is now available 13 hours, the Michael Bay film about Benghazi.
This thing has 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.
That's because critics are garbage.
Okay, this film is Very, very, very good.
It is a very good film.
Okay, I walked in expecting it not to be such a great film because, number one, it's obviously a very depressing subject.
You have four Americans killed at the hands of terrorists in Benghazi.
The film is not political.
It does not cover the cover-up by the Obama administration.
It does not cover the fact that the Hillary State Department refused additional security requests.
It goes very light on the behavior of the Obama administration in the middle of this crisis.
It really treads lightly on that.
It's almost a political film.
But the critics hated it anyway, because anybody who mentions Benghazi must be cast into the outer darkness.
You're not allowed to mention the fact that Hillary and the Obama administration blew it.
Like, if I had made the 13 Hours movie, it would have opened with Hillary cackling over the demise of Muammar Gaddafi, saying, we saw he died.
And then it would be Hillary talking about how grand and great Libya was, and then fast forward to what's happening in Benghazi.
That's not what this movie does.
This movie is really apolitical.
It doesn't matter.
The critics slammed it anyway, because anyone who questions the greatness of Hillary Clinton must obviously be operating in bad faith.
The movie is, I think, nearly as good as Black Hawk Down.
It's a very, very good military thriller, and it's very effective, and it's very moving.
Here's a little bit of the preview for 13 hours.
Everybody, this is Jack Silva.
Jack!
We trained seals in Coronado, so he knows the drill.
Welcome to Club Man.
We need immediate assistance.
We are overrun.
Stay under attack.
Let's go, man.
State's under attack.
Let's go!
We gotta move!
If you do not get here soon, we are all gonna die.
We have a U.S.
ambassador at risk.
The ambassador is in his safe haven.
You're not the first responders.
You're the last resort.
You will wait.
None of you have to go.
But we are the only help they have.
Okay, so the movie itself is quite good.
I think it's Michael Bay's best film, actually.
It's subtle.
It really works.
It's got a lot of momentum.
And it is pathetic that the critics decided this was only worthy of a 50% review because it was mean to Hillary Clinton, supposedly.
Just absurd.
Just an absurd Again, I've been railing against the critics all this week because I don't know whether Black Panther is good or bad.
It might be good.
It might be great.
It might be bad.
I have no clue because it has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and half of the reviews are all about how important the film is.
There's an idiotic, idiotic tweet out from Salon.com talking about how Black Panther is important because it's the first blockbuster release format featuring a black hero front and center.
Yes, except for all of the other ones.
Right?
Except for Independence Day.
Except for Blade.
Except for Hancock.
Except for every Jamie Foxx movie.
Except for Django Unchained.
Except for—except for Shaft.
Except for all of those, it's the first one.
You can't trust the critics, I think, is the bottom line here.
There are certain movies where you can trust them, maybe on some of the big-budget, some of the big-budget kind of superhero flicks that are not politically charged, you can trust them.
But you can't trust them on drama that has any sort of political orientation.
The difference between The Reception of 13 Hours and Black Panther, I think, is a good example of that.
Although, again, maybe Black Panther is the greatest movie ever made.
If you look at its reviews, apparently this suckers up with Citizen Kane.
I'm planning on seeing it this weekend so that I can actually give you an honest appraisal of the film itself.
Suffice it to say, I have my doubts that the movie is as good as the critics have said it is, simply because I don't think any movie ever has been as good as the critics say that Black Panther is.
Okay, other things that I like.
Yesterday, this is really cool.
There is a SpaceX launch.
Elon Musk launched the Falcon Heavy, which is the most powerful rocket ever sent into space by government or private individual.
And then he landed some of the portions of the launch back down on the tarmac, which is super cool.
Here's what it looked like.
like. 10, 9, 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
It's a good mission.
It's gonna get heavy!
- Okay, so pretty cool. so pretty cool.
And then you can see that two of the pods ended up landing back down on the tarmac.
Right exactly where they were supposed to go.
It looks like a ballet.
It's really cool.
Look how neat that is.
And just as they can reuse them again, as opposed to sort of being destroyed or left in the ocean.
Really, really neat.
So it's designed to deliver maximum payload to low Earth orbit of 64 tons, which is the equivalent to putting five double-decker buses in space.
Instead, they sent his old cherry red Tesla sports car.
So there is a shot of the Tesla sports car in space.
And then there's a space-suited mannequin strapped in the driver's seat.
And the radio is set to play David Bowie's soundtrack on a loop.
Apparently, the rocket was so powerful that it actually blasted them outside the elliptical orbit they were originally going for, and there's a chance that the car actually lands on Mars, which is pretty amazing.
So, it is essentially three of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 vehicles strapped together, and as the usual practice for SpaceX, all three boost stages returned to Earth to attempt controlled landings.
Two of the three came down.
The third booster was due to settle on a drone ship stationed several hundred kilometers out at sea, but it was unable to slow its descent by reigniting sufficient engines.
It missed the target and was destroyed as it hit the water at some 500 kilometers an hour.
But by then, the upper stage of the Falcon Heavy According to the BBC, was heading on a trajectory that would hopefully take it toward Mars orbit.
So pretty amazing stuff.
A lot of people are upset about this because they say that the government has sponsored Elon Musk with something like $500 million of subsidies.
I promise you that they've spent a lot more on that than that on NASA.
And now again, I'm not in favor of government subsidies.
I think that Elon Musk is a very wealthy man, and I'm not sure that the government subsidies are necessary.
But you can still recognize when a cool thing happens with government subsidies, even if you oppose the government subsidies.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Okay, so there's a gay Olympian who's now saying that Mike Pence, Vice President of the United States, who is set to lead the Olympic delegation, should not do so.
Why?
Because he says that Mike Pence backed gay conversion therapy.
We're going into the Olympics and myself and Adam Rippon are the two first openly gay males competing in the Olympics and it's just incredible to see how times have changed because of people like you and athletes in the past and so many people that have paved the way.
But then to have someone leading the delegation that's Okay, that is a lie.
Mike Pence never supported gay conversion therapy, which is the therapy where people are given electroshock and essentially tortured in an attempt to create an association between the pain and homosexual thoughts.
Right.
Pence has never supported that.
There's no evidence that Pence has ever supported that.
They've been hit with this accusation over and over and over.
It is simply not true.
It doesn't matter.
Pence tried to reach out to this guy.
This guy refused to talk to him.
And so the media covered it as Pence tried to reach out to gay Olympian after gay Olympian accuses him of homophobia.
That's not what happened here.
What happened here is that this guy lied about Mike Pence on national television, and the left has been lying about Mike Pence on national television about this stuff for quite a while.
What Pence did say is that any sort of bill that includes funding for individuals who are seeking to Have psychological therapy should include coverage for people who are seeking to change their own, their own sexual orientation, right?
Which could be talk therapy, right?
Could be anything.
The bottom line is what he's saying is that if we're going to give money to you for some sort of therapy, you get to choose the therapy that you want to choose.
That is not the same thing at all as saying that Mike Pence is in favor of trying to shock gay people into not being gay anymore.
That's absurd.
But again, lies can travel around the world faster than the truth can put its boots on.
Hey, other things that I hate.
So an NPR music critic came out yesterday and said that Justin Timberlake embodies white privilege.
Why?
No one really understands why.
Justin Timberlake's entire career and art is based on his ability to be smooth, to create music that seduces us with references to the past, with appropriations, with artful mixes, and never quite shows any struggle. and never quite shows any struggle.
We are living in a moment of struggle and we want our pop music to also reflect that struggle.
And frankly, Timberlake now embodies that phrase so often spoken today, white male privilege.
I'm so bored with her.
It's white male privilege for him to use pop icons of the past for his music?
That's white male privilege?
OK, then I think that we're going to—for the use of tonal music, we're going to have to credit every black star with using the rise of tonal music in the West, right?
It's not true that tonal music exists everywhere equally on Earth.
It's not true, right?
I mean, there are different cultures that have different types of music.
Pop music goes a lot more to the classical heritage in terms of the tones that it uses than it does, for example, Indian music, right?
I mean, like the country of India, or Chinese music.
It owes a lot to Western music, right?
The idea that cultural appropriation is not part and parcel of culture itself is absurd.
The idea that Justin Timberlake embodied white privilege by singing songs that weren't protest chants and that in order for the NFL to really have a pop star that mattered, the NFL had to have Beyonce do a Black Panthers routine again is just absurd.
Again, poisoning our culture is something the left is intent on doing and polarizing us along every possible line.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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