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Feb. 9, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:57
Corruption, Chaos, and Cretinism | Ep. 472
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A soap opera breaks out at the White House, the Republicans decide that it's time to spend all the monies, and we check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So many dramatic and terrible events all in one day, and we'll discuss all of them in just a moment.
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Okay, so, the continuing controversy that follows the White House today is, of course, the controversy over Rob Porter.
When did the White House know that top Trump aide Rob Porter had allegedly beaten not one, but two of his ex-wives, and when did they know about it?
What did they know about it, and when did they know about it, right?
Those are the two questions.
John Kelly is the White House chief of staff.
He's the one who stood by Porter as late as Tuesday afternoon.
He was saying that Rob Porter was his man.
He was standing by Rob Porter.
Rob Porter was just great.
There are a bunch of defenders inside the Trump administration.
And it now turns out that Trump is angry at those defenders because there's a photo of one of this guy's ex-wives.
And one of this guy's ex-wives actually has a photo of a big shiner on her face.
We showed it to you yesterday.
Well, one of the big questions that has arisen is, there are questions now about Hope Hicks.
Hope Hicks is the beautiful young staffer who works at the White House.
She's very close to the president.
She started off, I believe, as a PR flack for Ivanka's fashion line, and then moved into the Trump campaign, and now is at the top levels of the White House.
Apparently, very nice person, but has terrible taste in men.
And she is now dating Rob Porter, and Rob Porter's ex-wife says, listen, Hope, if Rob hasn't been abusive with you yet, don't worry, he will.
Rob Porter's now in a relationship with the White House Press Secretary, Hope Hicks.
Do you think he's changed?
I don't think he's changed.
Does that worry you?
It worries me for a lot of reasons.
I mean, it definitely worries me because if I'm being frank with you, if he hasn't already been abusive with Hope, he will.
And particularly now that he's under a lot of stress and scrutiny, that's when the behaviors come out.
And if he hasn't already, he will.
So Hope Hicks is under a lot of fire from the White House.
She's under a lot of fire from outside the White House.
And for pretty good reason here, because what we have on our hands here is indeed a soap opera.
Yes.
Hope Hicks, a young woman looking for love in all the wrong places.
She dated Corey Lewandowski, the Trump campaign manager who was married at the time.
During the campaign, was spotted yelling at him on the street by the New York Post.
Corey Lewandowski, of course, had a penchant for grabbing women and bruising them and then lying about it for three weeks.
Hope Hicks then moved on from Corey Lewandowski to Rob Porter, who it turns out has a penchant for allegedly punching women in the face.
Hope Hicks then helped co-write the memo, and that memo that would exonerate Rob Porter, that memo basically was written for Kelly and said that Rob Porter was a wonderful man.
So not only does Hope Hicks have some problems in choosing dudes, Hope Hicks has some problems in defending bad dudes.
And President Trump is rightly angry, saying, why in the world are you defending a staffer over me?
Your job is to protect me from bad staffers.
Trump apparently didn't know about the statement that had been drafted in order to help exonerate Rob Porter.
He didn't know about any of that stuff until it came out and it was too late for him to do anything.
So he's spitting mad at Hope Hicks as well he should be.
So that is the soap opera portion of what's going on at the White House.
We also have the John Kelly portion of what's going on at the White House.
So Kelly...
It now turns out, testified in 2016 on behalf of a Marine who is alleged to have committed some sort of sexual abuse or sexual assault, and then he went on to go—according to The New York Times, this Marine went on to abuse a child sexually.
So, there are a lot of problems inside the Trump administration with defending some pretty bad folks.
Raj Shah was out there defending the White House response yesterday.
Why was he out there as opposed to Hope Hicks?
Well, because Hope is at the center of the soap opera.
Is any of this good for the White House?
The answer, of course, is no.
But we've had a lot of bad staffing decisions, right?
In the first year of the Trump administration, we had Steve Bannon, a piece of crap, who was in and then he was out.
We had Anthony Scaramucci, who was in for five minutes and then out.
We had Mike Flynn, who's now under indictment.
He was in and then he was out.
We've had 37 people inside the Trump administration who were in and then they were out.
Not good.
So Raj Shah was out there trying to explain this yesterday because Hope Hicks couldn't come front and center and defend what she'd done because she's involved with the man.
By the way, Lewandowski, the other element to the soap opera that I forgot, the other element is that Corey Lewandowski allegedly is the one who leaked to the media all of the information about Rob Porter.
Apparently.
Yeah, we can play the music.
That's right.
Corey Lewandowski.
The Hope Hicks' ex-boyfriend, who was married at the time, was apparently suspected by the White House of being the guy who leaked out all the information about Rob Porter in the first place.
So the ex-boyfriend going after the current boyfriend and the girlfriend of the abusive boyfriend to ex-wives defending that person instead of the president.
So, OK, enough of the soap opera.
OK, so Raj Shah defending the White House yesterday.
It was not a particularly good look.
The allegations made against Rob Porter, as we understand them, involve incidents long before he joined the White House.
Therefore, they are best evaluated through the background check process.
It's important to remember that Rob Porter has repeatedly denied these allegations and done so publicly.
That doesn't change how serious and disturbing these allegations are.
Okay, the problem is that a lot of people knew about this at the time.
The Washington Post reporting today, quote, in January 2017, right, this is a year ago, White House counsel Don McGahn learned of the allegations and he wanted Porter to stay put because he saw the Harvard Law Train Capitol Hill veteran as a steadying professional voice in the White House, according to people familiar with the matter.
His view didn't change in June when the FBI flagged some of its findings to the White House, nor did he act in September when he learned that domestic violence claims were delaying Porter's security clearance, or in November when Porter's former girlfriend contacted him about the allegations.
According to these people, that's four separate times in a year that the White House counsel was told that this guy was a real problem and had some serious issues in his past, and the White House counsel did nothing about it.
Which raises some questions.
What exactly is the White House looking for?
Are they looking for good staffers, capable staffers?
Is the White House looking for people who are good at their jobs?
Or is the White House looking for loyalty?
Because you look at Raj Shah's response yesterday saying, well, the process sort of had to play out.
And now look at the White House response to Omarosa.
OK, let's look at the White House response to Omarosa.
So Omarosa yesterday, to go back for a second, Omarosa Manigault is a person who is on Trump's reality TV show.
She was fired three times on his separate reality TV shows.
Then he hired her for the campaign.
And then she was working in the White House, basically walking around doing stuff that nobody knows what she was doing.
And then she came out yesterday on TV.
She said that everything at the White House is awful.
Here's what she had to say.
Not there.
It's not my circus, not my monkeys.
I'd like to say not my problem, but I can't say that because it's bad.
Oh, it's so bad.
Okay, so she says all this stuff and people are, oh my goodness, the crying.
Yes, Trump picked this person to be in the White House.
Solid staffing pick by the president.
She then came out and she said that she would not vote for Trump again if she were given the opportunity.
Would you vote for him again?
Never.
Not in a million years, never.
Not in a million years.
Okay, so how did the White House respond to that?
The White House ripped the crap out of Omarosa.
So, you have a guy in the White House who's credibly accused by two ex-wives of beating them, and the White House quasi-defends until the last minute.
Omarosa says, I won't vote for the guy again.
She was a reality TV star.
Was this non-predictable?
Right?
And here's the White House ripping Omarosa.
What is the White House's reaction to comments made by former White House aide Omarosa on Celebrity Big Brother, where she said, quote, she is haunted by the president's tweets.
She described the situation inside the White House as bad and said it is not going to be okay.
Not very seriously.
Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice.
And this was the fourth time we let her go.
She had limited contact with the president while here.
She has no contact now.
Okay, so I love that.
They fired her three times, but then they brought her back the fourth!
And then they fired her a fourth time.
But they're really pissed at Omarosa.
But Rob Porter...
You know what they're really dicey about, which demonstrates that when it comes to the Trump administration, loyalty matters a lot more than competence, and that's a serious problem.
That should not be the case at any business.
Loyalty matters.
Competence matters more, particularly at the level of the White House, right?
People who made one anti-Trump remark during the campaign have been banned, essentially, from the White House, or at least were when they originally staffed it up.
And that rules out a lot of pretty competent people, because they weren't quote-unquote loyal, and so you end up with loyalists who may not, in fact, be particularly competent.
There's a bunker mentality at the White House, and it came to bear here, and it's really nasty, and there is no excuse for it.
It is disgusting that anyone was defending Rob Porter after these allegations were known.
It is particularly disgusting that people were defending Rob Porter after, you know, after there were reports on Tuesday.
Again, all of that, there's just no excuse for it, and you have to wonder whether the people in charge who knew about it ought to be fired.
And I am talking about John Kelly.
If John Kelly knew and he was defending this guy for a year, if McGahn knew for a year, they've misserved the president of the United States.
OK, so I do want to talk about a piece of even bigger news.
That is the Republicans deciding that fiscal conservatism is no longer a thing.
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All right, so last night, Late in the evening, right?
In the early wee morning hours on the East Coast, the Republican Congress, along with a bunch of Democrats, voted in favor of a two-year funding bill.
This is not a budget, okay?
It's not technically a budget.
The reason that makes a difference is if you don't pass a budget, you can't use reconciliation processes to pass new bills.
I discussed this a little bit yesterday.
But in order for you to pass a bill under reconciliation, meaning with 51 votes in the Senate, in order for the filibuster not to apply, you have to pass a bill that is budget neutral.
Well, that doesn't apply if there is no budget.
You cannot have a budget neutral bill if there is no budget.
So they essentially passed a funding bill but no budget.
So that prevents them from passing any new legislation that really affects spending so they can pass something on DACA maybe.
But that's about it, right?
There'll be no further movement on Obamacare.
There'll be no further movement on taxes.
There'll be no further movement, significant movement, on regulation in all likelihood.
You know, that's a serious problem.
The bigger problem, however, is they just blew out the budget.
I mean, blew it out.
They're spending more money now than Barack Obama was spending.
They're spending about the same amount of money, actually, as Obama was spending.
They blew out a trillion-dollar debt yesterday, a trillion-dollar deficit in the budget.
They blew a hole in it.
Rand Paul wanted to stand up and say something about it.
You know, Rand has a knack for standing and talking at these times, and that's something you've got to appreciate about the senator from Kentucky.
Here is Rand Paul saying, listen, you know, we campaign on fiscal responsibility, and then we lie about it.
And, you know, the thing is, is we think when Democrats are in charge that the Republicans are the conservative party.
The problem is when the Republicans are in charge, there's no conservative party.
And that's kind of where we are now.
Someone has to stand up and say, you should spend what comes in.
We should balance our ledger.
And that used to be what it meant to be conservative.
But a lot of so-called conservatives lose their mind.
Once it becomes a partisan thing, and they say, oh, we must govern now.
So they govern by giving us massive new debt.
And I don't think that's good for the country.
I think ultimately it threatens our security, not only our external security, but also the internal foundation of the country is threatened by so large a debt.
He is exactly right here.
The real problem with the debt is not that we're going to go bankrupt immediately.
We're still the strongest economy on planet Earth.
That means people are going to continue buying our bonds.
But one of the problems you have is that over time, as you accrue more and more debt, Where are you going to keep getting people to buy into that?
Right now, the American debt-to-GDP ratio is growing and growing.
So I want to look it up right now.
The United States-American debt-to-GDP ratio, let's see, what is it here in the United States?
Is...
Let's see, it is 106.1% of the country's GDP.
We have a government debt equivalent to more than the entire country's GDP.
Okay, that is not a good thing.
That is not a good thing.
Okay, we reached a record low in that number in 1981 under Reagan when our government debt was only 32% of GDP.
But that is not a healthy number.
Okay, if you look at debt to GDP ratio by country, we are starting to climb those charts and they are not good in the slightest.
Right?
In Japan, of course, Japan is basically bankrupt.
Their public debt is now 243% of GDP.
But China's really low.
It's like 23% of GDP because they can just tax the crap out of their own citizens.
But if you look at some of the more healthy countries like Germany, they have a 70% GDP to debt ratio or debt to GDP ratio.
Even France ranks below us.
The U.K. ranks below us.
We have been selling our debt at ridiculous rates for a long time.
And eventually that's going to come around to bite you.
You can't just borrow on the credit card interminably.
In the end, somebody is going to stop lending you that line of credit.
When that happens, there are going to have to be austerity measures.
Nobody wants to look at that, however, because they're afraid of the political blowback should that happen.
Rand Paul suggests that it is hypocrisy for Republicans who talk deficit for years and years and years under Obama.
And then Trump becomes president and suddenly we stop talking deficit anymore.
Now government's taking off and this new stimulus of deficit spending will be as big as President Obama's stimulus.
Don't you remember when Republicans howled to high heaven that President Obama was spending us into the gutter, spending us into oblivion?
And now Republicans are doing the same thing!
And so I ask the question, whose fault is it?
Republicans?
Yes.
Whose fault is it?
Democrats?
Yes, it's both parties' fault.
You realize that this is the secret of Washington.
The dirty little secret is the Republicans are loudly clamoring for more military spending, but they can't get it unless they give the Democrats welfare spending.
So they raise all the spending.
It's a compromise in the wrong direction.
Okay, and he is correct about this.
He is wrong, by the way, about military spending as a general matter.
This is one of the problems with Rand Paul is that Rand is very anti-military spending.
I'm fine with the idea that we don't have to radically revamp our military spending and jigger it upward in any tremendous way.
Rand actually wants to cut it tremendously because he thinks that we should just bring our troops home from Afghanistan, for example, which is quasi-delusional.
But when he talks about the fact that Republicans have ceased to care about the budget, he's 100% correct.
Here's what is in this bill, OK?
According to ABC News, the two-year budget deal would lift caps on defense and non-defense spending by $300 billion over two years.
It includes $6 billion to fight the opioid crisis, $5.8 billion for child care development block grants, $4 billion for veterans' medical facilities.
$2 billion for medical research.
$20 billion to augment existing infrastructure programs.
$4 billion for college affordability.
Is college going to get more affordable?
No, it's not going to get more affordable.
The measure would extend government funding at current levels until March 23rd to allow lawmakers to finalize details on the spending in a separate measure.
Lawmakers would also raise the nation's debt limit into 2019 so we'll have no more government shutdowns until past the congressional elections, which was part of the goal here.
Jazz Shaw at Hot Air is fulminating over this.
He says, listen, everyone who's fighting for conservative principles, this means that you no longer get to talk about fiscal conservatism in the future.
You can't talk about fiscal conservatism, about fiscal responsibility, when you're blowing out budgets to the tune of trillion-dollar deficits.
With an entirely Republican Congress, by the way.
They told me if I didn't vote for Trump, we'd get trillion-dollar deficits and DACA.
And apparently they were right.
I mean, this is pretty amazing stuff.
And there are a bunch of fiscal conservatives of days past who voted for this thing.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
Senator Ted Cruz.
Both of these people voted for the new budget.
Cruz said he had to for the disaster funding.
Most of the disaster funding had already taken place.
It's like $51 billion of disaster funding had already been funded.
This adds a bunch of boondoggle on top of it.
Paul Ryan was interested in raising the military spending.
Okay, well then get your own people in line, sir.
Then get your Republicans in line.
There are 16 Republicans who didn't vote for it, including Rand Paul and Mike Lee.
Mike Lee was really angry because he said this process is completely corrupt, which it is.
The way appropriations are supposed to be done are not in these 700-page omnibus packages that are rolled out at midnight and no one reads.
That's not the way this is supposed to be done.
Appropriations packages are supposed to be done by apartment and by department.
The way it was supposed to work is that if you have a Department of Defense bill, you have a Defense Spending Bill, a Defense Authorization Bill, then you have a Health and Human Services Authorization Bill, then you have a Commerce Authorization Bill, then you have a Department of Education Authorization Bill, and then we can debate what should be in and what should be out of each one of those bills.
The House, by the way, 100 days ago passed 12 authorization bills for each of the departments.
The Senate didn't move on any of them.
Instead, the Senate moved into the back room and they negotiated an omnibus package and they said you get to vote up or down.
That is not a way to be fiscally responsible.
But Republicans don't care about that anymore.
You know why Republicans don't care?
Here's the dirty little secret.
The dirty little secret is that Trump's populism works because, politically speaking, Trump is recognizing a truth that fiscal conservatives are going to have to come to grips with.
That is, voters lie.
Voters say they want fiscal conservatism.
Voters say they want cuts.
Voters say they want the government to spend within its limits.
But the minute you say to voters, guys, we're going to have to restructure Social Security, voters balk.
And then they vote Democrat.
In other words, we like to pretend that we're the child who's capable of delayed gratification.
There's a very famous delayed gratification experiment where you can actually tell IQ of children in a very basic way through this experiment.
If you take a four-year-old and you say to them, I'm going to put this cookie in front of you right now.
You can either eat that cookie right now, or if you wait three minutes, you will get a second cookie.
You get two cookies.
Kids who have lower IQs tend to pick the cookie up and eat it right away.
Kids with higher IQs tend to sit there and wait for the second cookie.
Okay, well, we all like to pretend that we're the kid with the second cookie, that we're the higher IQ kids.
In reality, we are not.
We like to think of ourselves as smart, but we're dumb.
So when it comes to actual, like, we say, yeah, let's cut the spending, but the minute that it comes to something we want, then all of a sudden we don't care about the spending anymore.
And we're always saying it's an emergency situation.
John Cornyn yesterday, he ripped into policy.
I know he wants to make a point.
He has that right.
I agree with many of his concerns about deficits and debt.
But we are in an emergency situation.
When's the last time we weren't in an emergency situation?
When's the last time we actually had a full-throated debate about government spending and we weren't in a quote-unquote emergency situation?
Not as far as I can recall.
Last time I remember was when Bush was president.
When Obama was president, then, you know, we had significant debates over spending.
The budgets that the Democratic Congress passed were abysmal.
Once Republicans gained control of the Congress, it's been emergency measures all the way down.
Here's the problem.
If you're never willing to shut down the government, if you're never willing to actually have these hard-headed contacts, if you're never willing to actually have conversations about what needs to stay and what needs to go, you're never going to get to anything remotely approaching fiscal responsibility.
Just a disaster.
And the fact that so many supposed fiscal conservatives are looking the other way on this demonstrates that some of the Tea Party was a lie.
There are a lot of people who are Tea Partiers who are saying they wanted lower government spending, but they only wanted lower government spending when they thought Democrats were doing it.
The minute it's Trump in charge and the Republicans in charge, they're willing to look the other way because, after all, tax cuts and defense spending.
And if we have to get those things, then I guess we can blow out spending like it's 2009.
Just ridiculous.
A ridiculous deal.
There is no reason that Republicans should have signed off on it.
And it is a disgrace to a Republican Party that does—it no longer represents anything.
It no longer represents anything that means anything when it comes to government, when it comes to smaller governments or government limitations.
Just terrible.
Okay, so in just a second, I'm going to give you the latest update on MemoFight 2018.
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OK, so Devin Nunes has essentially uncovered—the new memo that's going to come out is going to cover the fact that apparently Hillary's State Department was funneling information to Christopher Steele via a few of Hillary Clinton's special allies.
Basically, Christopher Steele was making a Trump dossier based on Hillary sources, providing the information to the John Kerry State Department, which was staffed by Hillary holdovers and Hillary friends, and they were passing that information on to the spy, Christopher Steele, to pass it on to the FBI.
That's the chain of events.
Well, now the guy who was in the middle of that, the guy at the State Department, a guy named Jonathan Weiner, he is writing about this in the pages of The Washington Post.
Here's what he writes.
He writes, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes announced last week that the next phase of his investigation of the events that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller will focus on the State Department.
His apparent area of interest is my relationship with former British intelligence professional Christopher Steele and my role in materials Steele ultimately shared with the FBI.
So he says, here's the real story.
In the 1990s, I was a senior official at the State Department and he worked on Russian matters.
After 1999, I left the State Department, developed a legal and consulting practice that involved Russian matters.
I met and became friends with Steele after he retired from British government service focusing on Russia Steele was providing business intelligence on the same kind of issues I worked on at the time in 2013 I returned to the State Department at the request of Secretary of State John Kerry over the years Steele and I had discussed many matters relating to Russia He asked me whether the State Department would like copies of new information as he developed it.
I contacted Victoria Nuland a career diplomat and Hillary hack who was an assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs and shared with her several of Steele's reports So in other words, Steele was providing the State Department with information that had nothing to do with Trump, but did have to do with Russia.
This is the guy's contention.
In the summer of 2016, Steele told me he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign, and senior Russian officials.
He did not provide details, but made clear the information involved active measures, a Soviet intelligence term for propaganda and related activities to influence events in other countries.
In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the dossier.
Steele's sources suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, but had also compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign.
So now Steele wasn't just blabbing to the FBI, he was blabbing to the State Department, which has no power to really do anything in this matter.
The FBI, presumably, should be the one telling the State Department what it needs to know.
It's their job to do that.
It's not Christopher Steele's job to do that.
He says he was allowed to review but not to keep a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department.
I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Newland, who indicated that she felt the Secretary of State needed to be made aware of the material.
And then here's where it gets good.
In late September, says Jonathan Weiner, the State Department hack, I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal, whom I met 30 years ago when I was investing in the Iran-Contra affair.
Sidney Blumenthal is the lead Hillary Axe person in the Western world.
I mean, he was the dirty muckraker.
He went after, you'll remember, the back during the Clinton administration, Sidney Blumenthal sued Matt Drudge.
It was a big deal.
While talking about the hacking, apparently, they got to talking about the hacking, and Blumenthal discussed Steele's report.
He showed whiner notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, another Blumenthal-Hillary hack, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.
What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele's but appeared to involve different sources.
On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele to ask for his professional reaction.
He told me it was potentially collateral information.
I asked what that meant.
That meant that it was confirmatory information.
So, in other words, this guy at the State Department was funneling information to Steele.
Now, here's the question.
Let's say that he knew that there was terrible stuff going on.
Why was he funneling it to Steele and not directly to the FBI?
He works for the government.
Why didn't Jonathan Weiner just take the information he was receiving from Hillary's flax and forwarding that on to the FBI, as opposed to funneling it through Steele?
The answer is that he sent it to Steele, because if he had sent it directly from the State Department to the FBI, the FBI would have said, where did you get it, Jonathan?
And he would have had to say, Sidney Blumenthal, and the FBI would have gone, you've got to be kidding me.
We're not even taking a look at this.
Whereas if he funneled it to Christopher Steele, Steele could obscure the source of the information, and then the FBI would take that for a FISA warrant.
That's the most plausible possible explanation here.
So there is something dirty going on.
Weiner says, I'm in no position to judge the accuracy of the information generated by Steele or Scherer, but I was alarmed at Russia's role in the 2016 election.
I believe all Americans should be alarmed and united in the search for truth.
But this wasn't about the search for truth.
If it were, you would have provided it to the government, not to Christopher Steele, who was at best an ancillary spy on Russian issues.
So, yeah, and this is a serious problem.
And that's not the only serious problem.
Apparently, there's a story out today.
People, I think, are taking this a little bit too much.
I think they're reading too much into this.
There's a story today out from Ed Henry at Fox News.
He says that Senator Mark Warner, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who'd been leading a congressional investigation into President Trump's alleged ties to Russia, had extensive contact last year with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch who was offering Warner access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele, According to text messages obtained exclusively by Fox News.
So Warner texted this lobbyist who was in the pocket of the Russians.
We have so much to discuss, you need to be careful, but we can help our country.
Waldman said, I'm in.
He had ties to Hillary Clinton as well as to Russia.
So that was not the extent of the text.
According to the text exchanges, Warner seemed particularly intent on connecting directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop, at least initially.
In one text to the lobbyist, Warner wrote he would rather not have a paper trail of his messages.
An aide to Warner confirmed to Fox News that the messages were authentic.
The messages were obtained by a Republican source, marked confidential, and are not classified.
They were turned over to the Senate panel by Waldman last September.
Waldman is best known for signing a $40,000 monthly retainer in 2008 and 2009 to lobby the U.S.
government on behalf of a controversial Russian billionaire who's connected with the Russian government.
So, in aid to Richard Burr, who's the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he told Fox News that Burr was aware of the contact Warner had made with Steele's representatives.
He said, I don't believe he was aware of the content of the text messages initially.
Now, Burr is defending this.
OK, so here's the part where I say Republicans could read too much into this.
So the way they could read too much into this is by ignoring the fact that Richard Burr says this isn't a big deal.
So, Warner's text messages were quietly given to the Intelligence Committee after he and Burr signed a joint request for the messages last June.
Warner and Burr privately informed the rest of the Democratic and Republican senators on a panel of Warner's text messages in a meeting last October.
Warner aid acknowledged that Warner and Burr revealed the text to their colleagues on the panel because, quote, they realized out of context it doesn't look great.
But aides to Warner and Burr both stressed the chairman was kept apprised of Warner's efforts.
In other words, it looks like the Republicans knew about these text messages.
That said, you know, if they didn't, you know, and this is where I say you can read too much into this.
If they didn't, then that would be troublesome.
Marco Rubio is suggesting that it's not a big deal.
He tweeted out today, Senator Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago, has had zero impact on our work.
The real question is whether the Republicans were being kept contemporaneously advised of Mark Warner reaching out via Russian sources to Christopher Steele.
If the answer is yes, if the Republicans were aware, then it's not a big deal.
If, however, they were not aware, then it could theoretically be a big deal.
It looked like the Democrats were fishing for information from Christopher Steele without knowledge of the Republicans, which is not a particularly great thing.
So there's a little bit more here.
Here's another story as well that is, I think, troubling.
And this one is not really about Trump.
It's more about Hillary Clinton.
It's gotten dramatic underplay in the media.
I'm going to get to that in just a second.
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All right.
So here is this final story that you need to know about today in the news roundup of scandal.
So, an FBI informant, according to The Hill, connected to the Uranium One controversy, told three congressional committees in a written statement that Russia routed millions of dollars to America with the expectation it would be used to benefit Bill Clinton's charitable efforts while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quarterbacked a reset in U.S.-Russian relations.
The informant's name is Douglas Campbell.
He said in a statement obtained by The Hill that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO worldwide, specifically because it was in position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically, Hillary Clinton.
Democrats have cast doubt on Campbell's credibility, so they're going to have a big battle over all of this.
So, again, it sounds like there is more to the Uranium One scandal than the media were willing to cover or let on early on.
We will follow that as it continues.
Okay, so time for a couple things I like, then a couple things I hate, then we'll mailbag it up.
Things I like.
So today, there's a good book out by Douglas Murray.
It's called The Strange Death of Europe.
It talks all about, in a not-unsympathetic way, the problems with mass migration into Europe, particularly Islamic mass migration into Europe, failures of assimilation inside Europe, and how this is posing threats to the future of the continent and Western civilization as a whole.
It is well worth the read.
It is sobering, for sure.
Check it out.
Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe.
Okay, so.
A couple of things that I hate.
So, thing that I hate, number one.
Alright, thing that I hate, number one.
So, on CNN, Allison Camerota had on a Nazi.
Why did she have on a Nazi?
Because this Nazi won a GOP primary in Illinois.
Now, this schmuck wins a primary in Illinois every couple of years.
The Republicans will refuse to sponsor him and throw him off the ballot.
That's going to happen again this year.
But since the media are fully informed that they are Since the media are fully cognizant that they are trying to turn Republicans into Nazis, it behooves them to find any Nazi who calls himself a Republican and put him on TV.
They would never put Louis Farrakhan on TV or any member of the Congressional Black Caucus and ask them about Louis Farrakhan, but they will do this with this obscure moron from Illinois.
That said, it does demonstrate the stupidity of Nazis.
She does a good job of grilling him, for what that's worth.
Are you a Nazi?
Well, for the past 15, 20 years, I have not had anything to do with any national socialist organization on a formal basis.
But do you call yourself a Nazi?
I don't call myself a Nazi.
I call myself an American patriot and statesman.
Okay, well let me give our viewers some details about this just so they can decide for themselves.
You've been part of anti-Semitic groups since the 1970s.
You go to neo-Nazi rallies.
We have pictures of you there.
You were part of the White People's Party.
You dress in Nazi garb and you celebrate Hitler's birthday.
You're a Nazi.
Well, yes.
I mean, I do love the one, your first response.
I haven't been like a formal Nazi for like 15 or 20 years.
Okay, well done, dude.
So, Nazis, stupid and bad, a thing I hate.
Okay, other things that I hate.
A woman is now claiming that she was forced to flush her emotional support hamster down the toilet.
I am not kidding.
Apparently, an employee for Spirit Airlines allegedly demanded a young woman either let her pet hamster free outside the airport or flush it down the toilet, leading her to choose the latter.
Which is just yuck.
A 21-year-old college student, Florida native, Belen Aldacosia, informed the Miami Herald she had ensured the emotional support hamster would not be a problem by contacting the airline prior to coming to the airport.
However, when she tried to board the plane, an employee for Spirit allegedly told her to get rid of the animal as she could not board the flight otherwise.
With friends and family too far away and her age restricting her ability to rent a car, she opted to flush the animal down the toilet, which is like, what?
Wait, what now?
Like, if you have it in a cage, you couldn't just, like, leave it there or find a mailing depot?
You flush it—you killed the animal?
Okay, so there's that.
Number two.
An emotional support hamster?
Like, we've seen emotional support peacocks.
How about this?
You know, children, like small children, like my children, they have what they call loveys, right?
We're talking about, like, blankies or little stuffed animals.
How about that?
Do that.
What is this emotional support hamster nonsense?
I can't wait for them to have emotional support snakes just so we can have snakes on the plane!
I'm really excited about that.
I want somebody to have an emotional support cobra.
And then we can actually... There's snakes on the MFN plane.
I'm looking forward to that.
Okay, final thing that I hate.
So I have to go through this in detail because it is astonishingly stupid.
Astonishingly terrible.
So, there is a piece that is out at a publication called The Forward.
The Forward is a radical left publication.
Every so often, they ask me to write something for them.
Sometimes I do, sometimes I do not.
The publisher is pretty good about letting opposing views appear there, but there's no question that it is a far left publication.
Well, they have a piece out today from a woman named Tamara Colton.
She's a female rabbi and psychologist in Birmingham, Michigan.
Now, number one, when most people say female rabbis, there are some female rabbis who are knowledgeable.
But most female rabbis are in the Reconstructionist or Reform movement, and they're not very knowledgeable.
Like, I, as a lay Orthodox Jew, not a member of the priestly caste, not a rabbi, know a lot more than somebody like Tamara Colton just because I read the Bible on a regular basis.
How do I know I know more than she does?
Because my God, dude.
Like, here's what she wrote.
She wrote a piece basically saying that Adam and Eve is the first case of Me Too, of hashtag Me Too.
And I have to explain this because it's so insane.
This excreble journey into biblical exegesis goes so far off the rails that it actually starts running Harrison Ford down.
Harrison Ford actually has to run to avoid the engine of stupidity churning the ground up after him.
He has to dive into a ravine to avoid it.
And only later does he find out that he can get rid of his leg chains.
I mean, it's just terrible.
Anyway, here is Tamara Colton.
So she says, quote, As a 47-year-old woman rabbi, I've become emboldened by these brave young women to speak a truth that I've known in my heart for a long time but have been hesitant to share.
The time has come for me to step forward, too.
It's time we all acknowledge an overwhelmingly powerful source of shame and silence in the Bible.
Okay, now, you'd expect her to go from here to, like, the stuff in Leviticus about virginity until marriage, or, like, the stuff in Leviticus about homosexuality, or the stuff in Leviticus about forbidden sexual relationships.
Or the stuff in Jewish tradition about modesty, right?
That's where you would expect her to go.
It would be stupid, but that's where you would expect her to go.
But that's not where she goes.
Instead, she goes to Adam and Eve.
Now you ask, how does Adam and Eve have anything to do with me too?
Well, let Rabbi Colton tell you.
Quote, The story that begins the Bible, the first one that we learn in Sunday school, the founding story of man and woman, upheld for thousands of years by Judeo-Christian religion, is actually the story of the first sexual assault of a woman.
The woman's name is Eve, and the perpetrator is God.
Does she read?
Like, English?
Or Greek?
Or Hebrew?
Or any human language?
Okay, here are a few words that describe this.
Stupid, fatuous, harebrained, doltish, preposterous, asinine, ridiculous, ludicrous, imbecilic.
Those are just a few words that come to mind.
The story of Adam and Eve has literally nothing to do with sexual assault.
It has to do with Eve disobeying a direct command from God not to eat from a certain tree.
She eats from the tree at the behest of the snake who tells her that nothing bad will happen and that God has been lying to her.
It turns out God is not, in fact, lying to her.
And then he says, what did you do?
And then she makes an excuse for it.
And then he curses her with pain and childbirth and curses Adam to have to till the ground with the sweat of his brow.
Okay, that's the story.
What in the world does that have to do with sexual assault?
Nothing.
Nothing.
But here's what she says.
says, quote, I want you to think about this.
Here is a young, beautiful, intelligent, naked woman living in a state of grace.
She's hungry, so she does the most natural thing in the world and eats a piece of fruit.
For following her instincts, trusting herself, and nourishing her body, she is punished.
Her punishment, she will never again feel safe in her nakedness.
She will never again love her body.
She will never again know her body as a place of sacred sovereignty.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, what the F?
There is no way to read that story and come away with that.
Here is the relevant verbiage from the book of Genesis.
Quote, For God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be open, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
This is what the snake says.
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.
She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.
So they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
You notice anything there about, like, horrific pains of hunger that she had to be sated with only this fruit?
As opposed to all the other trees in the garden, which God has said she can eat from?
Is there anything there about God shaming her for her nakedness?
Or is it that she eats a piece of fruit, realizes she's naked, and then feels ashamed because she feels that she has misused her purpose in the world, which is what the story is really about?
None of this makes any sense.
But Colton's not done.
She says, No.
Here's the actual Bible.
Where was she silenced exactly?
She wants to defend herself, but she is too ashamed to speak.
Eve, our first mother, whose name means the mother of all living things, is silence, much the way the patients of Dr. Larry Nassar were.
No.
Here's the actual Bible.
Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done?
The woman said, the serpent deceived me and I ate.
Where was she silenced exactly?
He asked her a question and she answered the question.
But this is so, I mean, it's just so stupid.
The story is not about men violating women.
God commands Adam.
God commands Eve.
He punishes them both.
He punishes the snake.
The end.
That's the whole story.
You have to be a moron to come up with this pathetic interpretation.
But I guess when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And when you're a MeToo hammer, everything, including stories that have nothing to do with MeToo, look like a nail.
My goodness, the stupidity.
Wow.
High-level stupidity.
Okay.
Time for some mailbag.
Let's mailbag this up.
Alright, so.
If you have live questions, now is the time to ask them in the Dailyware chat box.
And no, I will not answer questions about Pudding or Michael Moulse's evening attire.
It's just horrifying.
OK, Lowell says, I feel modern libertarianism is gaining popularity after seeing Gary Johnson's gain from the 2012 to 2016 elections, and what I feel is a growing popularity for Rand Paul libertarian leanings.
Why, in your opinion, is the Libertarian Party not prominent in the government today?
Because they suck at everything, is the answer.
OK, the Libertarian Party convention was a crap show.
It was a guy running out naked with an iron cross.
There's a bunch of people, like John McAfee, talking about legalizing acid.
Okay, that's not what you'll lead with if you're the libertarians.
If you're the libertarians, why don't you go get some decent candidates who can talk in conservative-slash-libertarian tones about the necessity for small government and how that leads to freedom?
Why is it that I'm a better representative of the libertarian than Gary Johnson?
Why is it that I'm a better representative of libertarianism than anyone who's on the stage at the Libertarian Party Convention?
It makes you think that the Libertarian Party is actually a giant scam to get you to give them lots of money and then not earn enough of the vote to actually be put under severe government scrutiny.
Because, my goodness, how else could you explain the supreme incompetence at every level of the Libertarian Party?
Plus, again, they've elevated members of the Libertarian Party who are soft defense libertarians, which is not smart.
People who say that they're sort of almost anarcho-capitalists to the top levels of the Libertarian Party.
That is not an electoral position for victory.
So the Jewish view is that original sin is not about you have a sin that must be relieved by God's grace that is imbued in you because of original sin.
Jewish view is that original sin is not about you have a sin that must be relieved by God's grace that is imbued in you because of original sin.
There is no concept of original sin in Judaism in that sense.
What original sin is, is that Adam committed the sin of disobeying God.
And this led us to, I think, there are a few interpretations, obviously, of this story, but I think that the one that I like the best is the interpretation that essentially says that before man aged from the tree of knowledge, there is a full identity between what things were for and what they were.
Meaning that, just as in the Aristotelian notion, If a watch is made for telling time, then man was made to do certain things, and fruit was made to fulfill certain needs, and animals were made to fulfill certain tasks.
Everything was made for its purpose, and we could see that, but we didn't necessarily have our own logic as to morality.
God's morality was our morality.
Once we supplanted our morality for God's morality, that led us to an inordinate number of conflicts that prevented us In any real sense from seeing paradise because the world around us started to look malevolent as opposed to looking like what it was.
The world is just the world and the world fulfills a purpose that is not our own, right?
The world fulfills a purpose that is God's.
The idea of original sin that has to be expiated, I don't think that's right.
Judaism doesn't think that's right.
Judaism thinks that human beings are human beings and that the capacity for sin comes along with the capacity for free will and that that cannot be expiated by the sacrifice of another person or a person in the form of God.
That's not a thing.
Sacrifices that you bring in Jewish tradition are to expiate your own personal sin, not to expiate sins of the past.
Kevin says, with all of the bombshells about the FBI and Obama's DOJ coming about, will Hillary Clinton finally be indicted, or has the time passed?
I'm a bit jaded with our government.
I seriously doubt she'll be indicted.
I seriously doubt she'll be indicted, as well.
Number one, you'd have to have such strong evidence to indict her at this point, after the FBI basically cleared her last year, that I think that the impetus for indicting her would be pretty weak.
I also think that even if there's a political argument and an argument from a country basis, that indicting her might not be the smartest move, just because I could see this really quickly leading to a situation where whoever runs in an election and loses gets indicted by the other side.
It's sort of banana republic stuff, even though everyone should be held accountable to the law, and I think Hillary should have been indicted last year.
I think that now it looks more to the public like a revenge play by Trump's DOJ or FBI than it would look like a real investigation.
I mean, nobody trusts the DOJ and the FBI on the right.
Nobody trusts the DOJ and the FBI on the left.
I'm not sure this would restore that trust.
You don't agree it necessarily shows that.
I listened to you speak about the memo released and how your major qualm with it is the idea it shows a targeting of Donald Trump.
You don't agree it necessarily shows that.
The question I have then is this.
How does a dossier that is almost exclusively about Donald Trump justify a warrant against Carter Page unless the thing they're investigating Page for is related to Donald Trump?
Well, we haven't actually seen the FISA application.
According to the reports of the FISA application, they're not really about Trump.
The stuff about Papadopoulos might be, so it's possible that some of it involves Trump-Russia collusion, and they think Carter Page is a part of that because he was part of the Trump campaign.
But the stuff in the Steele dossier is not just about Trump, right?
I mean, it is about Trump-Russia campaign collusion, but the stuff that was specifically referencing Carter Page also had to do with Carter Page making specific outreach moves toward the Russian government.
If it was entirely about Trump, then you could say that the Pfizer warrant was, I guess, targeting Trump in ancillary fashion.
Let me backtrack for just a second.
If the question is, was the FBI only targeting Trump with the Carter Page warrant, the answer is maybe, but the investigation started before Carter Page.
So it's actually two separate questions.
You can believe that the FBI was targeting Trump with the Carter Page warrant.
The question is, was that legit or not?
Or was the Carter Page warrant trumped up in order to get Trump?
And the answer is not supremely clear.
If there was independent evidence to go after Trump, Anyway, and this was just part of that general investigation, as opposed to Carter Page initiated the investigation, and that's the only evidence that we have that Trump did anything wrong.
So, if I made the implication that the FBI was, quote-unquote, not out to get Trump at all, or that they thought Trump was not involved at all, I don't think that the FBI thought Trump was not out—that Trump was not involved at all.
The FBI probably did think that Trump was involved in some way, but out to get Trump and thinks Trump is involved in some way are two separate contentions.
It's two separate contentions.
Okay, so let's see.
Joseph says, Okay, so there's two ways to read free will.
Okay, so there's two ways to read free will.
There is the but-for choice, that you actually have the capacity to make a choice.
This is how people have traditionally thought of free will.
I can choose right now to say the next sentence.
I can choose not to say the next sentence.
It's up to me.
It's not determined by my environment.
It's not determined by my genetics.
That I do have but for free will.
We don't understand how it works, but that's the way that it works.
That you do control your own action.
You have the capacity for change.
Then there is the version of free will that is essentially passive free will, suggesting that random chance governs human behavior and that there's no way to fully predictably Say what exactly you're going to do next, right?
I think that's Sam Harris's version of free will, which isn't really free will at all, as he correctly points out.
It's just suggesting that random chance has a role in what we say and what we do.
But if you can't control that random chance, then it's not free will, right?
The words free and will, neither of them apply.
You're talking about random chance governing.
That is the significant difference.
And so the question for me is, how can you propose that human beings be active in the universe when activity is formally banned by your definition of free will?
Isaac says, In the Christian viewpoint, you'd have to ask Drew and Michael, because they're Christian, what they think of the house of Israel and where it stands in the covenant.
But from the Jewish perspective, we are still the covenant.
in the Christian viewpoint, you'd have to ask Drew and Michael, because they're Christian, what they think of the house of Israel and where it stands in the covenant.
But from the Jewish perspective, we are still the covenant.
And that covenant was never broken.
This So end of story there.
Ryan says, hey, Ben, I'm currently in grad school in New York to be a teacher.
So is there a lot of conversation about racism toward people of color?
I recall you saying on one of your shows, Jewish people became white as soon as we became successful.
Can you give me some examples of discrimination against Jewish people in American history?
Sure.
The Harvard Law School for a long time had quotas on Jewish students at the law school.
Country clubs around the country used to ban Jews.
There were restaurants that banned Jews.
There were housing projects that banned Jews.
There were stores that banned Jews.
There's an entire movie about this called Gentleman's Agreement about hotels that banned Jews with Gregory Peck.
I think it won Best Picture in 1948.
So you can check that out as well.
Hal says, Ben, who is your favorite singer of all time?
Well, opera singer Pavarotti, non-opera singer.
You have to go with Sinatra for his phrasing, although I do have a sneaking fondness for Mel Torme.
Now Patrick says, Hey Ben, I recently went to a facility to give plasma and was able to get paid for my contribution, if you can call it that.
That got me thinking, what would be the ethical implications of offering to sell parts of our own bodies?
Should an organ be able to be sold if the owner is willing to take money for it?
What would be the impact on the organ donation system?
So I have always been in favor of an organ market.
I'm in favor of the idea that you should be able to sell your kidney or sell a lobe of your liver if they can do a liver transplant.
There would have to be some stringent regulations about, like, you're not allowed to kill yourself for the money.
You're not allowed to kill a family member for the money.
There would have to be some actual stringent regulations with regard to this.
But it seems to me that this is a much better solution to the organ shortage than attempting to determine if somebody is dead or not and then harvesting their organs.
Ido says, you spoke of your favorite sci-fi books.
What are your top three sci-fi movies?
So I actually named these the other day.
I'm trying to remember what I said about it.
So I'm not going to count fantasy in my sci-fi rankings here.
And I'm not going to give you three.
I'm going to give you a bunch, OK?
Because there are a lot of sci-fi movies that I love.
So obviously, Star Wars is up there, although it's slash fantasy, probably.
And just in terms of pure sci-fi, I think Blade Runner 2049 was really good this year.
I thought that it was top-notch.
I liked Interstellar a lot.
I like... A lot of these are modern films.
Planet of the Apes is the oldest sci-fi film that's really good.
Planet of the Apes is terrific.
The original with Charlton Huston.
Let's see.
What was the one, what's the one Tom Cruise? - "Edge of Tomorrow." - "Edge of Tomorrow," thank you.
The worst title in human history, where they actually retitled it and re-released it as "Live, Repeat, Die," because that was the, "Live, Die, Repeat," is what it was.
So in any case, that's a very, very good sci-fi movie.
There have been a bunch of them recently.
I thought "Arrival" was quite good.
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "Oppercase," I'll have to make a complete list and put it up on Twitter, but there are a bunch of them.
E.T.
is a really good movie.
I love sci-fi, and I love sci-fi flicks.
Tommy says, Ben, how important do you think it is for all Americans to read the memos?
Everyone seems to have an opinion, but few seem to have read it.
Is this folly?
Yes, everyone should read the memos.
And please, if you want to solve the question as to whether the FBI was explicitly targeting Trump with the Carter Page FISA warrant, again, by the way, quick note on what I said before about the page warrant, I think it is worthwhile noting That none of that stuff leaked until after the election.
And also, it is worth noting that when it comes to the Carter-Page-Pfizer warrant, that the application for the warrant still has not been made public by President Trump, who can do it right now.
He can declassify it right now.
I wish he would, so that we can find out what exactly was in it and what exactly wasn't in it.
I would privatize the entire thing.
I would say to people, it's your money.
control of the process, how would you fix Social Security?
I would privatize the entire thing.
I would say to people, it's your money.
Maybe you haven't made an opt-out system where default is that a certain amount of your money goes into a Social Security trust fund just for you, but you actually get to opt out.
Now, what I would do to finance the remaining Social Security that's on the books is you would have to presumably sell bonds and borrow to finance Social Security, but you're going to have to have a cutoff point now or there's not going to be any cutoff point later.
Basically, everyone who's already on Social Security gets paid what they're owed on Social Social Security.
When I say what they're owed, I mean what they've been promised.
And people who are maybe five, ten years away from Social Security get to opt instantly.
It's a meaningless term at this point.
It means anything that they don't like.
There are a couple things here that are problematic.
George Papadopoulos going to London and soliciting information from a Russian source about Hillary Clinton emails and the Donald Trump Jr.
meeting at Trump Tower.
Those are the two big ones.
term at this point.
It means anything that they don't like.
There are a couple of things here that are problematic.
George Papadopoulos going to London and soliciting information from a Russian source about Hillary Clinton emails and the Donald Trump Jr. meeting at Trump Tower.
Those are the two big ones.
Other than that, I have seen no evidence of Russian collusion whatsoever at this point.
Well, the real answer is Russia sometimes wants to take out Islamic regimes that threaten them.
in which Russian interests coincide and come into conflict?
Well, the real answer is Russia sometimes wants to take out Islamic regimes that threaten them.
Sometimes Russia wants to crack down on Islamic radicals in Chechnya, for example.
But aside from that, we do not have a lot of coinciding interests with the Russian regime.
It is an incredibly self-interested regime.
It is a regime that is interested in maximization of Vladimir Putin's personal power.
So, there's not a lot of crossover there, other than maintaining a status of non-nuclear war, I would think.
Gabe says, Ben, I'm in law school and leave every class in despair because the Supreme Court seems to have trampled the Constitution at every available opportunity, at least since the 1930s.
Should we, as conservatives and originalists, be worried that we are past the point of no return?
Yes.
I mean, we should have been worried about that back in the 1930s, which is why, as I've stated repeatedly, I've been trying to get a hold of this paper for years.
I wonder if Harvard actually has it.
I'd have to call them up.
I wrote my third-year law paper on why judicial review should essentially be undone.
The idea that judiciary gets to overrule the legislature on behalf of an oligarchy of those chosen, not elected, seems supremely anti-Republican to me.
Nate says, hey, Ben, I'm a Christian.
I tend and one of the topics that the world beats Christians up on so much is evolution.
I tend to lead toward theism on this topic.
I think God can be the creator and evolution can still exist.
Where do you stand on this issue?
Of course I think that that's the case.
I think that God can use whatever natural mechanism he chooses and God tries to, in order for God to assume your faith, he's not going to show you miracles every day unless you're looking for them or unless you see miracles in the natural world and in the system of God's laws.
In fact, Newton was more likely to see miracles in the systematization of the universe than he was to see miracles in, you know, the splitting of the Red Sea.
I think that God can use whatever mechanism he chooses in order to forward the possibilities of humanity.
And that's what he did with evolution, in my opinion.
There's a great book called God and the Big Bang by Gerald Schroeder.
You can check that out.
It's all about the consonants between the Bible and evolutionary theory and the theories of the Big Bang.
Really fascinating stuff.
Okay, so we've reached the end of today's nearly endless mailbag.
We'll be back here on Monday to discuss all of the latest.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Please don't ruin things or there will be no Disneyland for you.
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 Carmina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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