All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 12, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:42
The Media Love Them Some North Korea | Ep. 473
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The media fawn over an evil dictatorship.
President Trump presents a budget that has no fiscal limits whatsoever.
Plus, the worst portraits in human history are unveiled at the Smithsonian of Barack and Michelle Obama.
They're truly incredible.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
I can't wait to show you these portraits because they truly are amazing, the portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama.
Michelle's portrait looks nothing like Michelle and Barack Obama's.
It was apparently taken in the ivy at Wrigley Field.
He's legitimately sitting in the middle of like poison ivy with flowers in it in a chair.
It's so weird and I can't wait to show it to you.
But you're going to have to wait for me to show it to you because first, I want to say thank you to my sponsors over at Helix Sleep.
So when I travel, I don't tend to sleep as well.
But one of the reasons for that is because I don't have my Helix Sleep mattress.
Helix Sleep offers something that does not exist anywhere else.
A mattress personalized to your unique preferences and sleeping style that will not set you back thousands of dollars.
You know, it's worth spending a little bit of money for a nice mattress since you're going to be spending half your life on it anyway.
Go to helixsleep.com slash Ben and take their simple two to three minute sleep quiz.
They build you a custom mattress that will be the best thing you've ever slept on.
For couples, they even personalize every side of the mattress.
Well, both sides anyway.
You don't want eight sides of the mattress.
Everyone from GQ to Cosmo to the New York Times, everybody's talking about how great Helix Sleep is because it is.
We had a more expensive mattress.
We got rid of it because Helix Sleep is so good.
It comes in the mail.
It is delivered directly to your door.
You unpack the box and then just inflates right in front of you because it is foam.
You try it for 100 nights for free.
If you don't love it, they'll pick it up and refund you in full, right?
You try it.
That's what I mean by for free.
You pay for it.
But if you don't like it, you can always ship it right back to them.
If you don't love it, they will pick you up and refund it in full.
You're not going to want to do that.
You're going to want to buy it and you're going to want to keep it because it is so good.
Go to HelixSleep.com slash Ben right now and get $50 toward your custom mattress.
That's HelixSleep.com slash Ben right now.
You get $50 toward your custom mattress.
Again, HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
They also have other products that are great as well.
The Helix Mattress Protector and the Helix Foundation.
All of these great products.
Go over to HelixSleep.com slash Ben right now.
You get $50 toward that mattress and it really is a first-rate mattress.
Love sleeping on the HelixSleep mattress.
Okay, so the Olympics were happening over the weekend.
And you would think, well, this would be a good time to point out that they're happening in South Korea, the Winter Olympics.
It would be a good time to point out that South Korea is a wonderful place and North Korea is, to borrow some language from President Trump, a bleephole.
It is not a nice country.
It is the worst country maybe on the face of the earth.
Between the years 1994 and 1997, somewhere between 350,000 and 3.4 million There's about two decades ago in mass starvation.
They still have mass gulags.
They still, in the 1980s, had concentration camps where they would legitimately torture or murder people.
They still do in some places of the country.
If you do not do what the regime wants you to do, they will kill you.
They killed—the regime, Kim Jong-un recently killed his—it was brother-in-law, I think, that he murdered.
Or his uncle?
It was both, actually.
His uncle he killed by tossing him to dogs, and his brother-in-law I believe he murdered in a VX attack.
He actually used a weapon of mass destruction in a public place.
He sent an assassin to basically put a handkerchief filled with a deadly spore over the guy's face and killed him outright.
Well, that would be an example of a bad country.
What is not an example of a bad country is the United States.
And if we're going to talk about people who are forwarding the aspirations of bad countries, you don't actually start with President Trump.
So Jeff Flake, who's the senator from Arizona, has been very critical of the president of the United States because he says that President Trump has said ridiculous things about the press.
I agree.
He said that President Trump has made overtures to regimes like Vladimir Putin's, which has been true more in theory than in practice.
Here's Jeff Flake going after Trump for giving support to dictators.
Then I'm going to show you who actually gives support to dictators.
I think the president needs to stop calling Democrats or Republicans or others who don't stand or applaud at every line that he has, that they're un-American.
He also used that term.
Or treasonous.
Words matter.
And when he talks about fake news, for example, I gave another speech where I talked about how that gives aid and comfort to authoritarians around the world who are now labeling their opposition or dismissing real dissent as fake news.
So those things matter.
OK, the reason that I'm showing this is because the media—this has been the media line, right?
Chris Cuomo yesterday tweeted out that the media have been under assault from President Trump.
And the reason people don't trust the media is because the media have been ripped apart by the president of the United States.
This, of course, is the typical line, is that dictators all over the world are taking their cues from President Trump because President Trump is so unfriendly to the press.
OK, now let's talk about why people actually hate the press.
The real reason people hate the press is because the press are a bunch of sycophants when it comes to some of the worst dictators on planet Earth.
Not everyone in the press.
Jack Tapper at CNN, notably, has been ripping other members of the press for kissing up to the North Korean regime.
But the sister of Kim Jong-un arrived in South Korea for the Olympics, and she was giving some pretty spectacular side-eye to Mike Pence.
And because Mike Pence is evil, as we all know from how he hates gay people, apparently, Mike Pence has to be given side-eye.
If you don't give Mike Pence side-eye, this means that you are a bad person.
But if you do give Mike Pence side-eye, you can go back home to a regime that routinely murders thousands of people, that shoots deserters, that attempts to take everyone who tries to make trade with the outside world and kills them, and the media will just kiss her rear.
So, here's CNN's headline.
Kim Jong-un's sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.
Why?
Because she's there.
And she's smiling.
Ooh.
OK, here's another headline.
This is all from mainstream media outlets.
Let's do some more of these headlines.
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
OK, we do actually, I believe, have some actual film of the tweet squad, do we not?
So here's what the tweets of the cheer squad, rather.
Here's what the cheer squad looked like from North Korea.
And the media were just over the moon about this.
This was so glorious.
Now, I want to point something out.
We've just had two full years of the media explaining that Mike Pence and Donald Trump want to turn women in the United States into refugees from the Handmaid's Tale.
In the Handmaid's Tale, women are forced to wear red uniforms, procreate at the whim of the dictatorship, and do everything the dictators tell them to do.
Then there's the North Korean cheer squad, which wears red uniforms, gets pregnant and has abortions whenever the regime tells them to.
We shot if they don't do exactly what they are supposed to do.
And the media cheer them.
Here's what it looked like in South Korea.
Okay, so there you so there you have it.
And the media love the North Korean cheerleading squad.
Sure, if they don't cheer properly, they get shot in the head back home, so that's excellent.
But this is something the media have always loved.
They love the idea of human beings as cogs in a vast machine.
I remember back during the, what was it, the 2010 Beijing Olympics?
Was it 2010 when they did the Olympics in Beijing?
I can't remember now.
I believe it was.
And when they did that Olympics, the opening ceremonies were thousands of people marching in unison and waving their arms in unison and it truly was an amazing spectacle.
And the media was just excited about it because whenever people just become little widgets to be manipulated by the state, the media Oh my goodness, look at the coordination.
particularly in the Marxist dictatorships.
They're not so big on non-Marxist juntas in South America, for example, where they force people to goose step, but they are very big on these sorts of displays.
Oh my goodness, look at the coordination.
Look at the magical coordination of all the people.
Yeah, well, you know what?
I'd clap in time, too, if they were threatening to shoot my family back home if I didn't clap properly and smile properly for the cameras because of the Juche, which is what they call the regime in North Korea.
They have this philosophy of Juche, which suggests that there's a cult of personality worship for the great leaders in North Korea.
Here are some more headlines from the media celebrating all of this, of course.
So, we can go back to, we have the Wall Street Journal.
This one is from Reuters, I believe.
Amid Olympic detente, Pence snubs North Koreans and visits PyeongChang.
Oh, how dare Mike Pence snub the North Koreans?
Is he supposed to be nice to the lady?
He didn't stand for the North Korean national anthem.
So, according to the left media, it is good when Americans don't stand for the national anthem, but it is bad when Mike Pence doesn't stand for the North Korean national anthem.
You get that?
The American national anthem standing for the freest country in the history of the world?
Good when American citizens kneel for it.
Bad when Mike Pence doesn't stand for the anthem for a country that is oppressing millions of its own people, 20 million of its own people at current count.
More headlines from the media.
I mean, there are just tons of these.
This is from Politico.
Fred Warmbier criticizes North Korean Olympic spirit.
How dare Fred Warmbier criticize the North Korean Olympic spirit?
Oh, you mean just because his son was murdered by the North Koreans?
Remember Otto Warmbier?
He was the college student who traveled over to North Korea, idiotically, and then tried to supposedly steal a poster from a hotel room, and they literally beat him to death.
I mean, they beat him so badly that by the time he was returned to his parents at home, he died in the hospital just days later.
But how dare Fred Warmbier criticize the North Korean Olympic spirit?
Just terrible.
Just awful for him to do that.
And that wasn't the full extent of the media treatment here.
Okay, this one was This one was from BuzzFeed.
The only decent one was from BuzzFeed, which shows you how crazy things are, saying, don't be fooled by North Korea's Winter Olympics charm offensive.
When BuzzFeed is the voice of reason, you know something has gone intensely wrong with the moral fabric inside the American media.
And it gets even worse.
In just a second, I'm going to read to you some of the accounts of Kim Jong-un's sister.
The worshipful accounts of Kim Jong-un's sister, because it's pretty astonishing.
We're going to get to that in just one second.
First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at stamps.com.
So, the post office is actually great, right?
They get you all your services.
All you have to do is stand in line for a little while, but if you don't have time and you want to save a little bit of money, stamps.com is the best way to do it.
It's the easiest way to access all the amazing services of the post office.
They never close.
You can print postage for letters or packages at your convenience 24-7.
You can print postage for any mail class right from your own computer.
The exact amount of postage every time.
You never underpay or overpay.
Again, they save you time and money, which you can use to grow your business, obviously.
Create your stamps.com account in minutes online with no equipment to lease and no long-term commitments.
Print, mail, you're done.
It is convenient, it is reliable, it is efficient, and it is very easy.
They bring, again, all the amazing services of the U.S.
Postal Service directly to your fingertips.
We use it here at the Daily Wire offices routinely.
We use stamps.com because it means that we don't have to send our folks over to the post office every five minutes to send mail.
Instead, we have the scale right here in the office and Right now, you can enjoy the Stamps.com service with a special offer that includes a four-week trial, plus postage, and a digital scale.
Pretty awesome offer.
That's Stamps.com, and you use promo code Ben, you click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, and type in Shapiro, rather.
You type in Shapiro at the top of the homepage when you click on that microphone.
That's Stamps.com, and that means that you get the Stamps.com service with the special offer, including a four-week trial, plus postage, and digital scale, when you go over there and check it out.
Stamps.com, you use that promo code Shapiro as well.
So that was not the extent of the media's fawning coverage of North Korea.
So that was not the extent of the media's fawning coverage of North Korea.
So here is the lead from CNN.
Quote, "...if diplomatic dance were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong-un's younger sister would be favored to win gold." With a smile, a handshake, and a warm message in South Korea's presidential guestbook, Kim Yo-jong has strung a cord with the public just one day into the Pyeongchang Games.
I hope Pyongyang and Seoul get closer in our people's hearts and move forward the future of prosperous unification, she said in her guestbook message referring to the capitals of North and South Korea.
By the way, that's not a nice message.
If you think that's a nice message, it's because you don't know anything about North Korea.
It has been part of North Korea's regime.
It's been part of their stated goal since literally the first day it was initiated.
The stated goal of North Korea is reunification of South Korea and North Korea under the auspices of the Kim family.
This has been their goal since the foundation of the North Korean regime in 1950.
The idea that this was some sort of overture, oh yeah, let's get together and have a republic, a federated republic.
Nonsense.
Absolute sheer nonsense.
The Kim family knows.
The minute they break down that wall between North and South Korea, every person in North Korea rushes into South Korea.
But listen, I mean, listen to this coverage.
It's just insane.
Seen by some as her brother's answer to American first daughter Ivanka Trump, Kim at 30 is not only a powerful member of Kim Jong-un's kitchen cabinet, but also a foil to the perception of North Korea's antiquated militaristic.
That's not a perception.
They are antiquated and militaristic.
Have you ever seen those photos at nighttime from space of North Korea and South Korea?
South Korea completely lit up, North Korea completely dark, except for Pyongyang, the capital.
There's literally one light there, which is probably the presidential palace.
I love that they say that she's the answer to Ivanka Trump.
Last time I checked, Ivanka Trump isn't forwarding the deaths of tens of thousands of people one day at a time.
Last I checked, for all of the things people say about Ivanka Trump, she isn't standing up for her evil brother who's sitting around trying to launch nuclear weapons at people around the world.
Or planning to do so.
Just ridiculous.
They bury this.
Paragraph five is finally when CNN notes that, by the way, North Korea might be a bad place.
As North Korea's brutal dictator, Kim's brother has ruled with an iron fence since coming to power, operating Nazi style prison camps, repressing political opposition, even executing senior officers and his own family members in an effort to consolidate power.
But don't worry, CNN is there to make sure that everybody is happy about it.
Here's Reuters.
"A prim young woman with a high forehead and hair half-swept back quietly gazes as the throngs of people pushing for a glimpse of her, a faint smile on her lips and eyelids low as four bodyguards jostle around her.
In her first appearance on the global stage, Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, had her every move closely scrutinized.
Crowds applauded as she stood for the South Korean anthem during the opening ceremony for the start of the Winter Olympic Games, while her big smiles and relaxed manner left a largely positive impression on the South Korean public." My goodness.
I mean, this is Walter Duranty-quality stuff.
For folks who don't know, Walter Duranty was a reporter for The New York Times, and he famously traveled in, I think it was 1930, 31, over to Russia, where he promptly said that everyone in Russia was doing great.
There was no starvation.
Rumors of mass starvation of the Holodomor in the Ukraine were vastly overstated, and there was nothing like that happening.
That was a lie.
Tens of millions of people were dying in mass starvations, thanks to the Stalin regime.
The New York Times Covered it that way, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for it, which is demonstrative of how corrupt the media are.
The media were racing to see who could provide the most fawning coverage of the North Korean sister.
Here's the Washington Post.
Here's the Washington Post.
In looks-obsessed South Korea, many 20-something women list plastic surgery and brand-name bags as life goals.
Most of all, Kim Yo-jong was an enigma.
Just like them, but nothing like them.
A woman with a sphinx-like smile who gave nothing away during her three-day Olympic-related visit to South Korea as brother Kim Jong-un's special envoy.
Wow.
Wow.
I mean, the level of fawning from the Washington Post there is so extreme, it's crazy.
I mean, that is just—imagine they write that about Eva Braun and you're basically coming closer to what this actually is.
Eva Braun at the 1936 Olympic Games, her shockingly blonde hair, her beautiful good looks, her glamour style.
My goodness.
Again, the media have a certain love for Marxist dictatorships that they certainly do not have even for, I'd say, the American system of government in some ways.
They would never cover an emissary from America that way if they were the foreign press.
I mean, it's pretty incredible, actually.
There is something else going on here, obviously, and that is that the Trump administration is at direct odds with the North Korean regime.
And the Trump derangement syndrome that has arisen in the media is so crazy that Mike Pence being in South Korea, the Trump administration being the president, Trump being the president, And that means the enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if that means my enemy—the enemy of my enemy is actually an evil, repressive North Korean dictatorship that slaughters tens of thousands of its own people on a regular basis.
By the way, if you actually want to help, if you actually want to help and do something about this, my friend Bethany Mandel is a big fundraiser for the Free North Korean Charity.
And you can help.
It's liberty in North Korea.
This is one of the ways that you can actually help smuggle people out of North Korea.
She goes over to her Twitter account.
She offers ways for people to escape from North Korea.
You can offer money.
It's something like $400 helps one person escape from North Korea and out to the West.
That is a worthwhile cause because this is truly evil.
If you're in the media and your life has led you to the point where you are propping up some of the worst people on planet Earth because you hate Donald Trump that much, let me suggest that you go back and repent your sins.
It's one of the things I hate most about politics, This enemy of my enemy is my friend nonsense.
It's just not true.
I hated it when it was the Trump campaign doing it with the alt-right during the campaign.
I hate it when it's the American media doing it with North Korea.
It's worse when it's North Korea, because that's an actual foreign foe.
Like, the alt-right is a relatively small force in American politics.
They've been marginalized, I think, at this point, despite the original attempts by the Trump campaign to integrate them into the Trump campaign.
I think they've been marginalized by this point, thank God.
But I think North Korea, obviously, is a major foreign threat.
And what they've been doing lately—firing nuclear-tipped missiles, or at least dropping nuclear bombs in nuclear tests, firing long-range missiles—this stuff is extraordinarily destabilizing.
And when the media are cheering them on, it makes the North Korean regime feel that if they keep up the pressure on the United States, eventually the United States will grant them more concessions.
Understand, the North Korean economy is almost entirely dependent on infusions of foreign capital.
Those infusions of foreign capital happen because of blackmail.
The reason the North Koreans keep firing off long-range ballistic missiles is because they want the West to come to the table and then give them money as a payoff.
They did this in the 90s with Bill Clinton.
They did it in the 2000s with George W. Bush.
They've done it with the Chinese.
And now they're trying again with the West.
Trump so far has not been willing to do that, which is, of course, the right move.
We need to starve them out.
The sanctions we've placed on them are not nearly harsh enough.
Nicholas Eberstadt has an excellent column over at Commentary magazine, very long piece, comprehensive piece, about the situation in North Korea.
What he suggests is that we make the sanctions significantly harsher on North Korea.
That's exactly right.
But the fact that the media are granting all sorts of credibility to a regime simply because that regime is anti-Trump is both morally dubious and ethically astonishing.
It's truly amazing.
I mean, the Washington Post slogan is, democracy dies in darkness.
Perhaps the slogan for the entire media right now ought to be, North Koreans die in darkness, because while they are glowing about Kim Jong-un's little sister, they are They're ignoring the fate of the people who are being slaughtered en masse in North Korea.
It's just disgusting and horrifying.
Well, in other news, there's a situation over at the White House.
The situation over at the White House continues to be relatively serious with regard to Rob Porter.
So as you recall, Rob Porter was one of the top staffers at the White House, and Rob Porter was recently forced to resign.
Last week, he was forced to resign after allegations came out that he had beat two of his ex-wives, particularly one who released a picture of herself with a black eye.
Now, the way that a normal administration would deal with this is saying we didn't know about it.
The problem is that apparently they didn't know about it.
Apparently, Don McGahn, the White House counsel, knew about it for a year.
Apparently, John Kelly knew about the allegations but sort of believed Rob Porter.
It's unclear what sort of details John Kelly knew, the chief of staff, whether he knew full on that these were wife-beating allegations or whether it was just allegations of spousal emotional abuse, for example.
Rob Porter had told him that these women were lying, and so Kelly simply believed him rather than doing the research.
The FBI had been holding up his security clearance.
I don't know if Kelly knew that's why the security clearance had been held up.
In any case, we reached the end of last week, and President Trump comes out and he's talking about Rob Porter leaving, and here is his comment on the situation.
We wish him well. - Oh.
He worked very hard.
I found out about it recently, and I was surprised by it.
But we certainly wish him well.
It's obviously a tough time for him.
He did a very good job when he was in the White House, and we hope he has a wonderful career.
Hopefully, he will have a great career ahead of him.
It was very sad when we heard about it.
And certainly he's also very sad.
Now he also, as you probably know, he says he's innocent.
And I think you have to remember that.
He said very strongly yesterday that he's innocent.
So you'll have to talk to him about that.
But we absolutely wish him well.
Trump reiterated this in a tweet.
He tweeted out this over the weekend.
There's a serious problem with this tweet.
shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation.
Some are true and some are false.
Some are old and some are new.
There is no recovery for someone falsely accused.
Life and career are gone.
Is there no such thing any longer as due process?
There's a serious problem with this tweet.
There's a serious problem with Trump's angle, which I think has some serious moral holes in it.
I'm I'm going to discuss all of that in just a second.
First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Policy Genius.
So as you know, February is the shortest month of the year, which makes it difficult to fit in everything that you want to do, which is why right now, before you forget, you should go and you should buy yourself some life insurance.
This is one of those things where you put it off, you put it off, you put it off, and then boom, you're dead, and it's too late.
So this is why it's important for you to actually go and get the life insurance that you need.
PolicyGenius is the easiest way to compare and buy life insurance online.
They let you compare quotes in just minutes, saving you precious hours of this very short month, and they save you money as well.
In fact, PolicyGenius has helped over 4 million people shop for insurance and placed over $20 billion in coverage.
And they don't just insure life, They have health insurance, disability insurance, pet insurance, renter's insurance.
So if you are attempting to fulfill that New Year's Eve pledge that you made to make yourself more fiscally responsible to protect your family, don't waste any more time.
Don't wait for the month to end.
Go over to PolicyGenius.com right now.
No sales pressure, no hassle.
You get quotes in five minutes or less.
PolicyGenius.com.
If you need life insurance, it should not take a lifetime to get it.
PolicyGenius.com.
Go get your life insurance.
Be a responsible person.
Make sure that your family is taken care of.
Okay, so, President Trump makes these comments about Rob Porter.
Now, I know that there are a lot of people who are Republicans, who are conservatives, who are unhappy with me that I disagree with the President on this.
The reason that I disagree with the President on this is because I am not sitting in a court of law.
I am not a jury.
Neither are you.
If you think that it is your job to grant innocence until proven guilty, if that is your job just as a citizen, not as a juror, if your job as a citizen is innocence until proven guilty, I'd want to know why you were chanting, lock her up, along with Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton was not indicted or tried for any crime, nor was she convicted of any crime.
Yet most Republicans feel that Hillary Clinton committed a crime.
You know why?
Because she committed a crime.
She did commit a crime.
And I can say she committed a crime.
You know who else committed a crime?
O.J.
Simpson.
He was not convicted of any crime.
He lost his civil suit.
Not the same thing as being convicted of a crime.
There are lots of people who have committed crimes and gotten away with it.
There are lots of people who should have been indicted, who should have been tried, who should have gone to jail, and were not.
There was a restraining order taken out against Rob Porter.
Police didn't press charges because the ex-wives apparently didn't want to press charges.
But the idea that simply by declaring you're innocent, suddenly you are innocent, that obviously is not true in any real sense.
Even more than that, there's a real inconsistency to President Trump here.
President Trump says, you know, we need innocence until proven guilty.
This is the same guy who said that Barack Obama was born in Kenya without any evidence and maintained that for years.
This is the same guy who said that Ted Cruz was ineligible for the presidency and that Ted Cruz's father was complicit in the murder of JFK with no evidence.
This is the same guy who still says that the Central Park Five are guilty despite DNA evidence exonerating the Central Park Five.
President Trump is not exactly famous for not jumping to conclusions.
Every time there's a terror attack, President Trump, I think rightly, jumps to the conclusion, in many cases, that if it looks like an Islamic terror attack, it's probably an Islamic terror attack.
He doesn't say innocent until proven guilty in those cases.
President Trump is not famous for innocence until proven guilty.
You know why?
Because in real life, in the non-judicial world, innocent until proven guilty is not the standard.
The question is, how do you evaluate the evidence in front of you?
In this case, we have two ex-wives and an ex-girlfriend who all testify that Rob Porter is abusive.
We have a picture of the ex-wife with a black eye.
We have a restraining order that was taken out.
And we have divorce papers in which this stuff was alleged.
And it's not just women saying stuff.
But there's something weird about how President Trump tweets this and how he approaches this.
President Trump seems to side with everybody who's alleged to have sexually abused someone or sexually assaulted everyone.
He sides against everyone who commits any sort of crime.
There's a pattern here.
Bill Clinton, before Donald Trump, was bringing women to Bill Clinton's You know who sides with Roy Moore and does the, well he says he's innocent routine?
to do full-on press events suggesting that Bill Clinton was a rapist.
During the 1990s, you know who was defending Bill Clinton from all of these women?
You know who was insulting the women?
Donald Trump.
You know who sides with Roy Moore and does the, well, he says he's innocent routine?
It was Donald Trump.
Who was it that was siding with Roger Ailes and saying he didn't believe any of the allegations about Roger Ailes?
It was Donald Trump.
Bill O'Reilly?
It was still Donald Trump.
President Trump has a long— Mike Tyson.
Donald Trump, right?
Mike Tyson, when he was alleged to have committed rape, Donald Trump has said that he doesn't think that that actually happened.
Now, President Trump has a long history of standing by the sides of men who are accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment and sexual allegations and then saying, they say they're innocent, therefore they're innocent.
But he's never held the same standard with regard to any other crime.
Which I think betrays a hole in the man's moral character.
I think that you ought to use the same standards of evidence for any of this stuff, whether you're talking murder, or whether you're talking financial irregularities, or whether you're talking sexual assault and sexual harassment.
If someone provides a credible account with some supporting evidence, then that is enough to at least say that maybe the guy's guilty.
Proclaiming innocent?
There's not a criminal in prison who doesn't say he's innocent, right?
This is a joke in the Shawshank Redemption.
Right, that everybody says they're innocent?
The reason is because if you are convicted of a crime, of course you're going to maintain that you're innocent.
If you're brought up in front of a judge, of course you're going to say that you're innocent.
Everybody who's ever been accused of anything says that they're innocent.
Anthony Weiner says that he was hacked originally before he admits that he was sending pictures of his junk to random women on the internet.
Everyone says they're innocent.
Donald—and here's the real key.
Donald Trump says he's innocent, right?
Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment by a multiplicity of women, and he says, I'm innocent, therefore all the women are lying.
So he'd be in a hard spot if he said Rob Porter is probably guilty of something, because then people would say, well, you know, you have allegations just like Rob Porter does.
Why shouldn't we believe the women?
Trump has never really had to answer for that.
The left keeps trying to get him on that.
And this is just the latest iteration of that.
That said, the president could just say, listen, Rob Porter left.
There were serious allegations made against him.
End of story.
And if they say, what about the allegations made against you?
He says, I don't know what happened with Rob Porter.
I do know what happened with me because I was there.
I didn't do any of this stuff.
Now, did he do some of this stuff?
I'm sure Trump did some of this stuff.
OK, I said this during the campaign.
The idea that Donald Trump is a man of moral rectitude when it comes to the treatment of women, I think is belied by his history.
I just don't think that's the case.
And does that mean he's a bad president?
No.
Does that mean that he's doing a lot of stuff that I like?
I mean, he's doing a lot of stuff that I like.
Again, does that mean no one should have ever voted for him?
I'm not making that case.
I am making the case that President Trump, in defending Rob Porter here by saying he's innocent, or he says he's innocent, is making really a case for himself.
And that's not something pleasant.
And it's not really about Trump.
It's about you.
What standard do you use for evaluation of evidence?
I don't care about what Trump does, right?
Trump's the president of the United States.
He's there to do a job.
He's either doing it or he's not doing it.
I do think that it degrades the moral standard when the president of the United States makes light of serious allegations.
But you, how do you do it?
Because you can do both things.
You can say Trump's a great president.
You can love the guy.
You can say you love everything that he's doing.
I like some of the things that he's doing.
But it is still incumbent on you to make a moral decision about what behavior you're going to tolerate and what standard you hold people to.
And I'm not even talking about Trump's behavior.
I'm talking about Rob Porter's behavior.
If you like Trump, does that mean you have to defend Trump's defense of Rob Porter?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I think that you are allowed to say what is bad and what is good.
Now, instead of doing that, because people can't stand cognitive dissonance, a bunch of members of the Trump administration, or former members of the Trump administration, are blaming everybody except for John Kelly, who apparently knew about this and let it go with Rob Porter, and Don McGahn, the White House counsel.
Sebastian Gorka, the former member of the Trump administration, he came out and he blamed the CIA bureaucracy.
believe it or not.
I can tell you, I'm not going to name names, but we had some amazing candidates.
One of them was supposed to come into a senior directorship position in the National Security Council.
And the people handling the background clearances, specifically the CIA, slow rolled it.
So there's an issue of if they want to if they want to gum up the works, if they want to make the Trump administration's job harder and harder, they play bureaucratic slow rolls.
And there may be a deliberate minefield put in place where they know somebody like this has skeletons in their closet.
Okay, this is what I hate, is that now the deep state has become an excuse for everything.
So John Kelly apparently knew some stuff, so did Don McGahn, and now we're going to blame the deep state for everything.
When you are blaming something as the bogeyman for everything, that's always a dangerous business.
The reality is people are responsible for their actions.
Should John Kelly be ousted over the Rob Porter thing?
That's up to President Trump.
He didn't commit a crime here, but it's up to President Trump to figure out whether Kelly has compromised his administration to such an extent that he should go.
My guess is, I doubt it.
Is this a serious black mark on Kelly's record?
I think that it is.
But, you know, a black mark doesn't mean that you necessarily have to leave the administration.
That said, Kelly should be defending his behavior here.
There's another problem here, too.
And that other problem is that Republicans feel compelled to say nice things in front of President Trump because they're afraid of alienating the president because he is so thin-skinned.
So, for example, Rand Paul came out and he was struggling to avoid condemning President Trump.
That's no shock.
Again, I think that a lot of Republicans are struggling to do this.
That is not your job.
President Trump is a big boy.
He's a 71-year-old man.
He's fully capable of accepting a little bit of heat for this stuff.
And if he feels that you are attacking him too strenuously, that's really on him.
That's really his problem.
I don't think Republicans ought to discard their own moral standard in favor of appeasing the president's feelings.
OK, in just a second, I want to talk about some of the worst portraits in human history, plus Republicans spending like drunken sailors.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Wink.
So, January, it was time for you to wring yourself out from the holiday parties.
But guess what?
Now it's time for you to relax again because the reality is January was a tough month.
January is tough.
It's always tough at the beginning of the year.
Treat yourself.
Go over to Wink.
Okay, W-I-N-C.
It's a great resource.
It makes enjoying downtime that much easier because now the wine is delivered directly to your house and it is the best wine.
Okay, Wink makes it easy to discover great wine.
If you want to go over to somebody's house for dinner and you don't know what bottle of wine to bring because you don't know anything about wine, you don't know the difference between a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a decent wine, that's why you need Wink because they have this algorithm.
You go to their palette profile quiz and you answer simple questions.
Your average store clerk wouldn't ask or translate into a recommendation.
Questions like how do you like your coffee?
How do you feel about blueberries?
And then they send you wines curated to your taste and the more wines you rate, the more personalized your monthly selections become.
Each month there are new delicious wines.
Insanely popular summer water rosé.
It's been tried by a lot of folks around the office who really enjoy it.
Shipping is covered.
If you don't like a bottle, they send you.
They replace it with a bottle that you do love.
No questions asked.
So discover a great wine today.
Go to trywink.com slash ben.
That's trywinc.com slash ben.
You get 20 bucks off your first shipment.
It's a great Valentine's Day gift, by the way, getting a subscription to Wink.
So if you want your loved one to have a wonderful year or just enjoying a new bottle of wine, Okay, so I would break on Facebook normally, but I'm not going to because I definitely want to show you these actual graphics.
TryWink.com.
You get $20 off your first shipment.
That's T-R-Y-W-I-N-C.com for $20 off.
TryWink.com.
Go check it out.
Remember to use that slash Ben for the $20 off and also so that they know that we sent you.
Okay, so I would break on Facebook normally, but I'm not going to because I definitely want to show you these actual graphics.
It would be a pity not to do this visually.
So over at the Smithsonian, they have the National Portrait Gallery.
They're The National Portrait Gallery has pictures of all the presidents and pictures of all the first ladies.
And they have now unveiled the pictures for Barack and Michelle Obama.
So, here is the picture of Barack Obama.
You see it there on the left.
There is Barack Obama, and he is actually sitting there in a chair that's apparently covered by leaves.
He's getting poison ivy.
He's being eaten by—this is like Little Shop of Horrors.
He's actually being eaten by the foliage and looking very serious.
And of course, this immediately made me think of Homer Simpson backing into the bushes.
That is not, of course, the best version of this.
Shoshana Weissman over on Twitter had the best version of this portrait.
Here's what it looked like.
Yeah, there it is.
So there's Barack Obama just sitting there in the bush.
It makes perfect sense, because the truth is that, aside from Obama's talk, the president of the United States was not a particularly useful guy, particularly on foreign policy.
He did not forward the ball on foreign policy.
He sort of sat there while people got slaughtered in Syria, sat there while Iran developed a nuclear program, sat there while Israel was under siege, sat there during the Arab Spring, sat there as riots happened in major American cities.
So I think it's actually a pretty good likeness of President Obama.
I think that's not a bad portrait of the president.
It's so funny.
Yeah, they're always saying we have to do something creative with the portraits.
Very important we do something creative.
So the artists said something about how we wanted to show that Obama's presidency was—was he the form figure or was he just being swallowed by history?
Was he the driver of history or was he just a representative of it?
And then apparently the various flowers here signify flowers from Kenya and flowers from Hawaii and flowers from Chicago.
I don't know what the flower from Chicago is.
I assume that it's the opium poppy.
But the idea— That Barack Obama is sitting there in Wrigley's Ivy, in Wrigley Field's Ivy, is really weird.
He's a Sox fan, supposedly.
He's not really a Sox fan, by the way.
One of my pet peeves, as I've mentioned many times over, I am a true White Sox fan.
Barack Obama could not name one single player on the White Sox when he was interviewed during his 2008 presidential run.
A real fan he is.
Okay, so that was the picture of Obama.
That one was getting mocked pretty relentlessly.
That one is not the worst.
The worst one is of Michelle.
So here is the picture of Michelle Obama.
Okay, does that look anything like Michelle Obama?
Of course it doesn't look like anything like Michelle Obama.
It looks like Regina King, right?
The actress.
It doesn't look like Michelle Obama at all.
And so, people were making fun of this.
People were getting a big kick out of the fact that the portraits don't look like anything.
So naturally, all the lefties came out defending the portraits.
They're not supposed to look like the people, they said.
Really, this is one of the lines.
That these portraits are supposed to be artistic.
They're not just supposed to look like the people.
Well, then why don't you just put a Kandinsky up there?
Why don't you just put a Jackson Pollock up there?
Just be like a splash of paint and say, this represents Michelle Obama.
That doesn't look like anything like Michelle Obama.
This is one of my favorite things in the world, by the way, is when people do terrible portraits and terrible statues.
As you recall, I'm a huge fan of the Cristiano Ronaldo.
A statue, one of my favorite statues of all time, where he looks like a demented demon sent from hell to torment people.
There's a statue of Harry Carey that's just spectacular outside Wrigley Field, where it looks like there are a bunch of faces that are clawing their way out of Hades in order to be lectured about the fortunes of the Cubs by Harry Carey.
There's a great one of Walter Johnson, where they tried to make it look like his arm was in motion, and instead it just looks like hell spawn, because his arm is actually coming out of his body in five different ways.
It's pretty spectacular.
This one ranks pretty high up there.
It's like the Lucille Ball statue.
It looks nothing like Lucille Ball.
So well done, National Portrait Gallery.
And congratulations again to Regina King for her portrait being entered into the National Gallery.
It's very exciting.
Congratulations to Homer Simpson as well for being hidden in that picture of Barack Obama.
So all of that is very exciting.
So in less wonderful news, It now turns out that the Trump administration wants you to spend oodles and oodles and oodles of money.
So, today they offered their budget plan.
It is a 4.4 trillion dollar budget plan.
Yes, indeed you do.
4.4 trillion dollars.
That means it carries nearly a trillion dollar deficit each of the next few years.
Just awesome.
I remember when we were the party of fiscal responsibility.
Yeah, that lasted for five seconds.
One of the fun things about being a Republican, apparently, is you get to scream about fiscal responsibility until the point you get elected, at which point you just blow out the spending.
So according to the Washington Post, President Trump on Monday was going to offer this budget plan.
It falls far short of eliminating the government's deficit over 10 years, conceding that huge tax cuts and new spending increases make this goal unattainable.
Three people familiar with the proposal said, Eliminating the budget deficit over 10 years has been a north star for the Republican Party for several decades, and GOP lawmakers took the government to the brink of default in 2011, demanding a vote on an amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit the federal government from spending more than it takes in.
That was something the Democrats used to back, too.
Now it turns out everybody's a liar.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, who's a fiscal conservative, supposedly, when he used to chair the House Budget Committee, routinely proposed tax and spending outlines that would eliminate the deficit over 10 years, even though critics said that this would lead to a severe curtailment in government programs, because in order for you to actually fix the programs, that means that you have to restructure Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security.
Instead, we're actually expending Medicaid, we're expanding Medicare, and we're expanding Social Security, apparently, in the new budget.
In 2013, Paul Ryan proposed $4.6 trillion in cuts over 10 years, an amount he said was sufficient to eliminate the deficit.
Those changes were not adopted by Congress or supported by the Obama administration.
But now, it turns out Republicans don't care after all.
How exciting.
They've now jettisoned goals like this since Trump took office.
Trump's budget plan calls for a range of spending cuts, reducing the growth of the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years.
It would not eliminate the deficit entirely, said people familiar with the proposal.
So, what exactly does it include?
Apparently, it includes a bunch of new spending on infrastructure.
Particularly, they're now putting forth a $1.5 trillion infrastructure budget that would include $200 billion of American taxpayer money being spent on infrastructure.
One of the things that's always puzzled me about this infrastructure argument is why not just devolve it to the state?
Why not make it California's responsibility to do upkeep on its own roads?
The idea that you needed a national highway structure, that you needed Eisenhower's national highway system, is not true, and hardcore libertarians will tell you this.
The fact is that Route 66—I've said this before on the program—Route 66, which Nat King Cole used to sing about, right?
Get your kicks on Route 66?
That used to be a thing because it was a state highway connected with another state highway.
Then we built the interstate highway system.
And the interstate highway system supposedly made travel that much more convenient, but it made all of these towns ghost towns because they were no longer serving state interests.
They were now serving supposedly federal interests.
It was a boondoggle.
We spent an awful lot of money on the national highway system.
Listen, I enjoy driving on the highways as much as the next guy, but the idea that it wouldn't have existed without states is just not true.
There are state highway systems, and they just would have connected to one another.
So where are these cuts supposed to take place?
Well, the budget is expected to target spending cuts at social welfare programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.
That's SNAP.
That's food stamps.
The White House is looking at ways to curb these programs by expanding work requirements for beneficiaries.
It's unclear how much changes like this would actually spend.
And then they're spending increases as well.
$200 billion in federal funds, I mentioned, for the infrastructure plan.
$23 billion for border security and immigration enforcement.
None of that's going to happen.
$85.5 billion for veterans programs.
$13 billion over the next two years to combat the opioid epidemic.
If you want to combat the opioid epidemic, then you actually should curb Medicaid.
One of the big problems that they've had is that everywhere that Medicaid has expanded, opioid addiction has expanded, because Medicaid actually covers the ability to get cheap opioid painkillers.
There have been several studies that have been done on this particular point.
Bottom line is that Trump is blowing out the budget now.
The media's coverage of this is always really interesting, because they suggest that this is the end of the world, that he's blowing out the budget.
First of all, this budget is not going to pass.
Second of all, the Democrats used to routinely propose budgets like this, just as big, and the media never covered it this way.
The media always covered these budget-busting budgets as something fine and decent.
It's never a big deal.
They're going to spend as much as they possibly can.
No biggie at all.
It's still not good for Republicans that we are proposing this kind of spending and demonstrative of the fact that Republicans have been lying about this stuff for years.
The budget calls for $716 billion in defense spending in 2019 in order to rebuild the military.
And again, it includes that trillion-dollar infrastructure program.
The White House budget assumes economic growth will accelerate from 2.3% last year to 3% this year and 3.2% next year, spurred on by the tax cut.
We will see if that is true or not.
Even with that assumption of robust economic growth, the federal deficit is expected to hit 4.2% of GDP this year and 4.7% next year.
It's usual, as they note, for the deficit to increase during recessions.
It is not usual for the deficit to increase During peacetime, non-recessions, and that's exactly what is happening here.
So once again, this demonstrates this bizarre notion in the American public mind that we like to cut spending when we don't actually like to cut spending, right?
We don't actually like cutting spending.
We like to pretend that we like cutting spending, and then as soon as someone says, well, I guess we're going to have to cut something, then everybody protests and goes totally crazy over it.
OK, in other news, apparently the—sorry, quick note.
There are Republicans who are butting back against this.
We'll see if Paul Ryan does.
Jim Jordan, one of our favorite Congress people from Ohio, he came out and he said that the spending increases that were included in the major spending bill that was passed last week by the House, this is unsustainable.
You asked me if there's concerns with the Speaker.
I think there are big concerns because he just presided over one of the biggest spending increases in the history of this country at a time when we were elected to do just the opposite.
OK, that of course is exactly true.
true.
Okay, in other news, it looks like Israel is drawing closer to possible war with Iran over the weekend in news that has gone largely ignored, except on Drudge Report.
Israel issued stark warnings on Sunday over Iran's presence in neighboring Syria after a confrontation threatened to open a new and unpredictable period in the country's seven-year civil war.
Israel carried out major raids on Syria on Saturday, including against what it described as Iranian targets.
Iran has been using Syria as a thoroughfare to smuggle weapons over to the terrorist Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The raids came after an Israeli F-16 fighter was shot down by Syrian air defenses.
That was the first Israeli plane shot down since 1982.
The pilots were okay, they ejected safely, but they were still...
Yeah, obviously, the Syrian forces were still—they still shot down an Israeli plane, an F-16 fighter, which is scary stuff.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said, Other Israeli ministers spoke of refusing to accept Iran entrenching itself militarily in Syria.
We made it clear to everyone our rules of engagement will not change in any way.
We'll continue to harm anyone who tries to harm us.
This is our policy.
This will remain our policy.
Other Israeli ministers spoke of refusing to accept Iran, entrenching itself militarily in Syria.
As Netanyahu has said repeatedly, Tehran denies that it is doing so.
This is one of the holes in the Trump administration policies in Syria.
If Iran fills the gap in Syria, it endangers American allies, not just in Israel, but in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt.
All those countries know it.
And so, the more that Iran exercises and flexes its muscle, the more those countries are going to be forced to take military action in response.
That's not Trump's fault.
Right?
He picked up a bad situation in Syria.
That's Obama's fault.
Now, a picture of Obama receding into the bushes, even that is a little too generous for Obama's policy on Iran, which was not receding into the bushes.
It was absolutely handing Iran the pathway to a nuclear bomb, as well as regional power.
And that has serious consequences, including for our allies over in Israel, and not just in Israel, but also in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
Now, Saturday's events began with Israel shooting down what it described as an Iranian drone that had entered Israeli airspace from Syria.
Tehran denied it.
On Sunday, Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus alleged that the drone was a copy of the U.S. model captured by Iran in 2011.
He said the conclusion was made from analysis of the drone's debris.
So they were using a, the Iranians were using a drone to try and scout out Israeli airspace.
Israel responded with the F-16.
That was shot down.
So things are escalating quickly over there.
We will keep an eye on it as it develops.
Okay.
So we are now going to do some things I like and things I hate.
But first, you're going to have to go over and subscribe over at dailywire.com.
$9.99 a month gets you a subscription to dailywire.com.
When you get that, you get the rest of my show live.
You get the rest of Andrew Clavin's show live.
You get the rest of Michael Moll's awful show live.
Also, if you really love Michael Moll's that much, if you really love that guy, well Valentine's Day is coming up.
So you and Michael Moll's sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, or R-E-A-D-I-N-G, emails to one another, because this Wednesday, February 14th, 5 p.m.
Eastern, the lonely, desperate, pathetic Michael Knowles will be literally waiting for your questions in our next episode of The Conversation.
Yes, he's been thrown out of his home, and he'll have nothing to do for Valentine's Day, and that's why he will be here, streaming live on Facebook, YouTube, and The Daily Wire website.
It's free for everybody to watch.
Only subscribers can join the website and ask the questions.
To ask questions as a subscriber, log in to our website at dailywire.com, head over to The Conversation page, and watch the live stream after that.
Start typing into the Daily Wire chat box.
Michael will answer live questions as they come in for an entire hour and make inane references while smoking a cigar and hopefully wearing pants.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by Michael Molls this Valentine's Day on Wednesday, February 14th at 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific.
If you hate Valentine's Day and you find it egregious and insufferable, Make it even worse by joining Michael Mowles with The Conversation at 5 p.m.
Eastern, 2 p.m.
Pacific, and become a subscriber so you can ask some questions.
If you want the annual subscription, you get all of those things, plus this.
The leftist here is hot or cold Tumblr.
It is delightful.
It is spectacular.
It is refreshing.
Magnificent.
Magnificent.
So check that out when you get the annual subscription for $99 a year.
It is cheaper than the monthly subscription, so save yourself some money and make yourself intellectually richer by doing so.
Check us out later for free over at SoundCloud, iTunes, YouTube.
Please subscribe to our YouTube channel.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
Alrighty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
There's a group called the Network of Enlightened Women and they're doing something where they honor gentlemen.
They have a contest, they're calling it the Gentleman Showcase.
And they honored me this month, in the month of February, which is very nice of them.
They called me their honorary gentleman, which I really appreciate.
See, I don't care about the idea of being tough and rough and humble, as you may have noticed.
That's not my thing.
But I do care about being a gentleman, because I think that gentlemen are people who understand that women and children are to be protected, innocence is to be protected.
And good principles are worth fighting for.
So go over and check them out at Enlightened Women.
That's their Facebook page.
And I have an interview over there about what it means to be a man.
And what I suggest is that we should stop criticizing manliness.
We should start talking instead about what manliness actually is.
So check out the network of Enlightened Women over at their Facebook page because they were nice enough to give me an award and therefore I will pump them because I'm just that kind of person.
OK, time for a couple of things that—well, sorry, you know, one more thing that I like.
There's a good book out by a guy named David Banson.
It's called Crisis of Responsibility.
You should check that out.
David Banson is on the board over at National Review.
He's on the board of several other organizations.
The forward has been my good friend David French.
And the book is essentially a treatise on why it is that Americans are avoiding their problems by pointing at one another and trying to Cast responsibility for mistakes on one another.
If we could get rid of that capacity to blame one another and take some responsibility for ourselves, we'd do a lot better in life.
That's the theme of the book.
Check it out.
Crisis of Responsibility by David Bamson.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So Robert De Niro was over in the United Arab Emirates, and there he was ripping the United States, because this is what we do.
We praise North Korea, and we rip the United States.
Hollywood star Robert De Niro, according to Page Six, took aim at the Trump administration's stance on climate change, telling a packed audience in the Middle East that he was visiting from a backward country suffering from temporary insanity.
Which is something that I definitely want to hear from the star of Meet the Fockers.
That's clearly something that I think is deeply important.
He said in the country he's describing, and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency suggested last week, global warming may be a good thing for humanity.
He said, I'm talking about my own country, the United States of America.
We don't like to say we are a backward country, so let's just say we're suffering from a case of temporary insanity.
And he received applause and laughs when he said the U.S.
will eventually cure itself by voting our dangerous leader out of office.
He spoke Sunday at Dubai's World Government Summit.
There's a certain irony to him speaking in one of the world's leading producers of oil.
United Arab Emirates, their entire wealth base is oil.
It's why the GDP per capita in UAE is extraordinarily high, and there he is jabbering about global warming and the dangers of it, and one of the leading oil producers on planet Earth, and then ripping the United States for our supposed craziness over global warming in a country that regularly represses women, does not allow Israelis to visit, as far as I'm aware, and is a backward country in a ton of cultural respects.
Does he say any of that?
Of course not.
He goes there, and he kisses their butt, and he talks about how terrible Trump is.
Again, for the left, the enemy of their enemy is their friend, and that means that their supposed enemy in the UAE is not their enemy at all.
These people are friends because they don't like Donald Trump.
So long as they don't like Donald Trump, that means they're wonderful, wonderful human beings, which is just the worst moral code I can imagine.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, a 42-year-old man has now married his daughter, and he was arrested for it.
So, according to Frank Kemp over at Daily Wire, a Virginia man and his 20-year-old biological daughter face incest charges after having a child together.
In 1998, Stephen Walter Plattel and his then-wife gave their daughter, Katie Plattel, up for adoption.
Approximately 18 years later, Katie found her birth parents using social media.
By August 2016, she was living with the couple and their other biological children in their Virginia home.
And then, according to warrants, Stephen Plattel and his wife legally separated in November 2016, and the wife moved out.
Plato's wife claimed her husband had begun sleeping on the floor in Katie's room prior to her vacating the home.
In May 2017, the wife discovered that Stephen had impregnated Katie.
According to WNCN-TV, she then confronted Stephen and admitted that he and Katie had been involved in a sexual relationship, resulting in the conception of a child.
And on July 21st, there was an Instagram post showing a pregnant daughter with her biological father saying that they were married now, which is just horrifying.
Now, I have a question for folks on the left and cultural libertarians.
Why is it horrifying?
Really, why is it horrifying?
For advocates of same-sex marriage, for example.
Why is this particularly horrifying?
And don't give me all the stuff about two-headed babies.
It's quite possible that the baby won't be two-headed.
It's possible the baby will be healthy.
And let's suggest, for just a second, that you were infertile.
Would that make the situation any better?
See, according to the left, the only thing that matters when it comes to sexual relationships is the value of consent.
So if both parties are consenting, did something truly terrible happen here?
One of the things that's very interesting about the way human morality works, Jonathan Haidt points this out in his book The Righteous Mind, is that there are several different variables that we use to determine our morality.
One of those variables that is completely ignored by the left is the value of purity.
The idea that there is something to the human soul that is schmutzed up, right?
There's something to the human soul that is dirtied by activities like incest.
That there's just something inherently wrong with incest.
We know that it's wrong.
We can't necessarily explain why.
And that's okay.
There are certain things that are just bad.
The left refuses to abide by this.
And forget about whether it should be illegal or not on a libertarian level, think about whether it is morally wrong.
So Jonathan Haidt starts his book talking about various different kind of gross things that people could do that cultural libertarians would say was okay, like having sex with a dead body, for example.
Is that something terrible?
So you say it's terrible, I say it's terrible.
Cultural libertarians, cultural leftists, they would say, what's so terrible about it?
Body doesn't need consent, it's an inanimate object, they're materialists, so what's the big deal?
So, Jonathan Haidt suggests that there are six foundations to moral theory.
Care, which is protecting people from harm.
Fairness or proportionality, which is, you know, what it sounds like, rendering justice to people.
Both the left and right agree on these.
Then there are a bunch of things that the left and right do not necessarily agree on.
Liberty is the loathing of tyranny, which may or may not be something the left believes in.
Loyalty, in-group loyalty, that's something the left doesn't seem to care very much about.
It's something that the right cares about but should care about on an ideological level more than they care about on a biological level.
Authority or respect.
There's an inherent value to respecting your elders, for example, because they may know something that you don't.
That's something the left doesn't agree with.
And sanctity or purity abhors for disgusting things the idea that you are more than just a collection of your body parts.
This is something the left doesn't agree with either.
So before you start condemning the daughter and the father who got married and had a baby, and you on the left, you need to examine what are your moral principles and maybe you think that it's totally fine.
If you do think it's fine, then maybe you should consider whether you are fine, whether that is actually a proper moral standard to hold.
Okay.
Now, quickly, it's Monday, so we go through a Federalist paper.
We are on Federalist 15.
We are steadily making our way through the Federalist papers.
Federalist 15 is written by Alexander Hamilton.
This Federalist paper lays forth the problems with the Articles of Confederacy.
So they've already established why they think America ought to be one country.
They've already established why they believe— that America ought not be split among various different countries.
Now they have to explain why the Articles of Confederacy isn't enough.
That was the system of law that was purveyed prior to the Constitution of the United States.
It led to some serious problems like the Shays' Rebellion.
It led to some serious problems with regard to particular armed insurrections, with regard to the inability of the government to pay off its own debts.
And that's what Hamilton says.
He says, We may indeed with propriety be said to have reached almost the last stage of national humiliation.
There's scarcely anything that can wound the pride or degrade the character of an independent nation, which we do not experience.
So what's he upset about?
He's upset we haven't kept our agreements abroad.
We owe debts.
We haven't driven people off land.
They've already surrendered to us.
We don't have control of the Mississippi River.
Our public credit is dead.
He says the problem here is lack of federal capacity, right?
If you don't have any centralized power at all, and you don't have the power of enforcement, it's going to be extremely difficult for you to actually be able to enforce America's interests at the national level.
He says that what the federal government needs is the power of coercion.
He says government implies the power of making laws.
It is essential to the idea of a law that it be attended with a sanction.
Or in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.
If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will in fact amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation.
Now there's a flip side to this idea.
If government is coercion, that means that government should be used very sparingly.
And this is something the founders understood as well.
So while they're calling for more centralization of power, there is a happy medium.
The government needs the power to coerce in cases where the government is protecting life, liberty, and property.
In other cases, the government is a big gun.
It is a giant killing people machine, a giant imprisoning people machine, a giant enforcement machine.
The government is a coercion machine, and therefore it has to be used sparingly, and we have to be very careful about where we give the government the power of the sword and where we do not.
Okay, we will be back here tomorrow with all the latest news updates.
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 Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
▲
Export Selection