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May 4, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

58:41

The Media’s Big Boo Boo | Ep. 532

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Time	Text
	NBC screws up on a major claim about Michael Cohen.
	The Huffington Post is pushing fish sex.
	I am not joking.
	And we get into the mailbag.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Yep, things are real weird.
	We'll get to all of the news in just one second.
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	Alrighty, so.
	Yesterday, the big news was that NBC reported that the FBI had actually been wiretapping Michael Cohen.
	Michael Cohen is, of course, President Trump's personal lawyer.
	And the idea here was that when they raided Michael Cohen's office, that it had come after weeks of them tapping Michael Cohen's phone.
	This would have been huge news, considering that Michael Cohen, as Trump's personal lawyer, presumably was talking with President Trump.
	There was also a rumor that they had, well, NBC News reported it, just as fact.
	Well, then that sort of fell apart.
	which would have meant that the FBI was essentially wiretapping calls on which the President of the United States was present, which would be an amazing, amazing claim.
	Well, then that sort of fell apart.
	So NBC News had to retract all of that.
	They had to issue a correction...
	They said earlier today, NBC News reported there was a wiretap on the phone of Michael Cohen, President Trump's longtime personal attorney, citing two separate sources with knowledge of the legal proceedings involving Cohen.
	But three senior U.S.
	officials now dispute that, saying the monitoring of Cohen's phones was limited to a log of phone calls known as a pen register, not a wiretap where investigators can actually listen to calls.
	Okay, well, that's not the same thing at all, okay?
	I worked in a prosecutor's office for a summer out here in Los Angeles, and we were able to obtain call records for virtually anybody by subpoenaing the phone company.
	So, all that is, is just a list of phone numbers.
	And then you cross-check the phone numbers against the person who has the phone number.
	That is not the same thing as listening to the contents of the phone call.
	It's a pretty massive retraction.
	And again, this is just the latest crazy retraction from the media in a long line of them over the past few weeks.
	The media have been going so insane over Trump.
	They've been trying their best to take down Trump.
	Every story is going to be the tick tick tick boom that takes down Trump.
	Benjamin Wittes, who is a legal reporter, he's constantly using that sort of framework on Twitter.
	He's constantly saying, tick tock, tick tock, as though it's just a matter of time until the bomb goes off and Trump's presidency is destroyed.
	And you can see this is how the media cover these issues.
	I mean, yesterday there was another story that was just like this.
	There was a story that was passed around the media, a huge story, that Bob Mueller had requested 70 blank subpoenas in the case against Paul Manafort.
	The supposed idea here is that he was going to subpoena President Trump, that these blank subpoenas show that he was going hard after Paul Manafort.
	Not really.
	A blank subpoena is just something that you get drawn up.
	It's the same thing as ordering blue pens.
	Okay, it's literally a form.
	So ordering blank subpoenas in a major case is not a shock at all.
	But the media treated this as though this were a major development.
	Wow, he ordered a blank subpoena.
	Under Title IV, Rule 17 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the clerk must issue a blank subpoena signed and sealed to the party requesting it, and that party must fill in the blanks before the subpoena is served.
	So that, of course, does not actually say anything about who's going to be served or the relevance of what is going to be served.
	But the media went nuts over it anyway.
	You remember a few weeks ago, McClatchy reported that Michael Cohen, the president's personal lawyer, had in fact visited Prague.
	The reason that that would make a difference is because there were accusations, as you recall, in the BuzzFeed dossier, in the crazy dossier filled with allegations about Trump shtipping Russian prostitutes and such, there are allegations in there that Michael Cohen had visited Prague to coordinate with Russian agents during the election cycle.
	McClatchy had written an entire story about how, after Michael Cohen had denied this and shown his passport, that it was not true that Michael Cohen, in fact, was in Prague.
	Well, they reported that Michael Cohen was in Prague and that he was lying.
	And then they provided no substantiating evidence.
	There's not been a second report that confirms that.
	So there's no more evidence of that than there was when McClatchy claimed it.
	And yet that story is just sort of sitting out there.
	This sort of error has become supremely common in the media.
	ABC News, if you recall, a few months back had to correct a bombshell story in which they suggested that Michael Flynn had been instructed by Donald Trump to coordinate with the Russians during the campaign.
	During World News Tonight, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross had said the source had provided the initial information for his story and that that initial story prompted the Dow to fall 350 points because there was a suggestion that suddenly the Trump administration was in serious trouble because Of the report that said that Flynn was prepared to testify that Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians, which would have been the Trump-Russia collusion case proven to a T. It turns out that Trump instructed Flynn, if anything, to talk to the Russians after Trump had already been elected in December of 2016.
	Right?
	ABC News had to retract that report.
	And you'll recall that CNN had to retract a similar report.
	CNN had to correct a report about Donald Jr.
	connecting with WikiLeaks.
	And the New York Times reported this back in December of 2017.
	CNN on Friday corrected an erroneous report that Donald Trump Jr. had received advance notice from the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks about a trove of hack documents that it planned to release during last year's presidential campaign.
	In fact, the email to Mr. Trump was sent a day after the documents stolen from the DNC were made available to the general public.
	The point that I'm making here is that you can tell the agenda of the media by the errors that the media makes.
	The media never make errors in the other direction.
	The media never make errors about Obama to this extent.
	They never did well.
	He was president.
	They never make errors about Nancy Pelosi to this extent.
	They certainly never make errors about Debbie Wasserman Schultz to this extent.
	And it's a really incredible thing That the media continue to trot out stories without fully vetting them.
	Now look, everybody makes mistakes, right?
	I've made mistakes in my reporting.
	We've apologized for mistakes at Daily Wire.
	Way back when, when I wrote for Breitbart News, I ran a report that specifically said that we were reporting a rumor, and the rumor could be not true.
	It had been sourced highly by a member of the Senate, in which it accused Chuck Hagel of having, who's then the nominee for Secretary of Defense under President Obama, of having coordinated with a group called Friends of Hamas.
	The group turned out not to exist.
	It was a bad story.
	We shouldn't have run it.
	It was a mistake, right?
	People make mistakes.
	I get that people make mistakes.
	That particular story we had said at the beginning was a rumor anyway, so it wasn't like we were hiding the ball there, but it was still a mistake.
	We shouldn't have run it in the first place.
	Okay, that said, the question of which direction to make mistakes reveals your bias.
	Now, I was biased against Chuck Hagel, so I was probably more likely to believe a bad story about Chuck Hagel.
	The media proclaim that they are objective.
	The media proclaim that they are fully just trying to report the news, right?
	It's not biased.
	There's no favor for any candidate or any president.
	That obviously is untrue.
	When every single error is in one specific direction, you have to acknowledge that something is happening there.
	And every error with regard to Trump has been against Trump.
	Every error with regard to President Obama seemed to be in favor of President Obama.
	The erroneous reporting by the media about President Trump is astonishing and stunning.
	It does make a certain amount of sense, considering the quickness of the news cycle, but all of these big screw-ups are directly playing into President Trump's campaign to suggest that everything is fake news.
	I'll tell you something I don't like.
	What I've seen from the right is MSNBC is fake news.
	CNN is fake news.
	New York Times is fake news.
	No.
	A news story is fake news.
	If the news story is wrong, then it is fake news.
	To suggest that the entire outlet is fake news throws out the baby with the bathwater.
	Now, you can say that some publications are more trustworthy than others.
	I've been ripping on InfoWars.
	I don't think InfoWars is a trustworthy source of information, by and large.
	OK, and you can you can take that down the line.
	You know, I think that CNN is less trustworthy than The Wall Street Journal.
	I think that, you know, I would not put InfoWars and CNN in the same category when it comes to reporting standards.
	But obviously you can have gradations of how much you trust a particular outlet.
	But to suggest an entire outlet is fake news and everything they do is fake news, I think is a large scale mistake.
	But.
	All you're doing, media, you're playing into President Trump's hands.
	You're playing directly into President Trump's hands when you jumped the gun and you report things that have not been verified.
	It's a huge mistake, and I'm shocked that the media continues to make these sorts of mistakes.
	Meanwhile, President Trump continues...
	It's a struggle for a legal strategy on Michael Cohen.
	So Rudy Giuliani is still out there trying to play sort of offense for President Trump in the Michael Cohen investigation.
	He came out and he said that Jeff Sessions should end the Mueller investigation.
	He should end the — he should presumably also end the Michael Cohen investigation.
	He says that all of this has gone too far.
	Giuliani is, of course, Trump's new lawyer.
	And here's what he had to say about the Mueller investigation, which he feels is a witch hunt.
	Kim Jong-un impressed enough to be releasing three prisoners today, and I've got to go there and Jay Sekulow and the Rassners, we have to go there and prepare them for this silly deposition about a case in which he supposedly colluded with the Russians, but there's no evidence of that?
	I mean, everybody forgets the basis of the case is dead.
	Sessions should step in and close it.
	OK, now, here's the real problem.
	If Sessions, of course, steps in and closes the investigation, he's already recused himself from all the Trump-Russia stuff, so he'd have to end that recusal, step back in, and finish the investigation.
	Or Fire Rod Rosenstein, or he should go, presumably, and Rosenstein and Mueller.
	All of this is not going to benefit President Trump.
	The only thing that can hurt President Trump about the Mueller investigation in any serious way is if Trump were to step in and fire Robert Mueller.
	Now, there are people who are proclaiming that Rudy Giuliani is just promoting a rip-off-the-Band-Aid strategy, that this thing can drag on for another year and a half, all the way through the 2020 election.
	So, let's just rip off the Band-Aid, fire Mueller, there will be a blowback for two months, and then everybody will be over it.
	Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.
	I happen to think it's probably not true, because the James Comey thing is still haunting President Trump, and it's a year and a half after he fired James Comey.
	Well, it's about a year after he fired James Comey.
	So, I just don't think that's going to go the way that Giuliani thinks that it's going to go.
	And Giuliani, it seems, has been speaking a little bit out of turn.
	So, one of the big questions about Giuliani on Hannity the other night, so you recall Rudy Giuliani suggested on the Sean Hannity show that Trump knew about the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels.
	And he suggested that Trump had done so in the run-up to the election, and Cohen had done so in the run-up to the election, which could create legal peril for President Trump.
	Well, President Trump has now responded to Rudy Giuliani's comments.
	In a second, I'm going to show you what President Trump had to say about those comments, because it's pretty funny.
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	OK, so President Trump has now responded to Rudy Giuliani's odd statement.
	And he says that Rudy is just sort of saying things.
	Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago.
	So Rudy knows it's a witch hunt.
	He started yesterday.
	He'll get his facts straight.
	He's a great guy.
	But what he does is he feels it's a very bad thing for our country, and he happens to be right.
	Okay, so Trump is throwing a little bit more chum in the water there by saying, Rudy may not know what he's talking about, he may know what he's talking about, but the question is, why Trump likes what Rudy is doing?
	And the answer might be that what Trump really likes from Rudy is he likes a guy on TV who's saying witch hunt over and over and over again.
	It is my belief that this may, in fact, end up being a witch hunt.
	That this may, in fact, end up being nothing.
	There's new information out today that the prosecution of Paul Manafort may actually be falling apart.
	Which is amazing.
	Like, if you can't prosecute Manafort for collusion, then I'm not sure how exactly you're going to prosecute anybody else.
	I mean, it's really amazing.
	So, according to the Washington Post, a federal judge in Virginia on Friday grilled lawyers from the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller about the motivations for bringing a bank and tax fraud case against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
	You don't really care about Mr. Manafort's bank fraud, Judge T.S.
	Ellis said during a morning hearing.
	You really care about getting information Mr. Manafort can give you that will reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment.
	I mean, boom!
	Ouch.
	Manafort was seeking to have the bank and tax fraud charges against him dismissed in federal court in Alexandria, with his lawyers alleging that the crimes have nothing to do with the election or with President Trump.
	Ellis agreed.
	He made no immediate decision on the defense motion.
	He said even without such a connection, the special counsel may well have the authority to bring the charges.
	He's saying, I'm not saying it's illegitimate, but Manafort has also filed similar motions in the D.C.
	federal court He's pleading not guilty to all of these counts, stemming from his work for a pro-Russian political boss in Ukraine.
	The longtime lobbyist has argued that Rod Rosenstein overstepped, giving the special counsel's office a blank check to go after Manafort in the first place.
	And it appears that the federal judge feels the same way.
	Again, we have seen very little evidence coming out from Robert Mueller about what exactly he has here, and the indictments that have come down do not lead me to believe that he's got a lot on President Trump, which is one of the reasons he wants to get President Trump in front of him to testify.
	Now, that is a separate question from whether Trump should fire Mueller.
	Listen, I know that the popular talk radio position is that Trump should fire Mueller and we should just, you know, Throw four sheets to the wind, everything will be fine.
	Fire Mueller, it'll all be fine.
	I don't think that's right.
	I think that the president should let this play out.
	I think the president would be making a very large mistake if he were not to let this play out.
	Because again, what the left wants is for President Trump to step on his own toes.
	They want President Trump to make a big boo-boo here by firing Mueller so that they can turn around and say the reason he fired Mueller is not because the investigation was going nowhere, it's because it was going somewhere.
	Instead, why doesn't Trump just let the investigation go nowhere?
	It's not damaging him.
	The polls right now have Trump at about 50%, according to Rasmussen.
	That's as high as he has ever been, and the economy continues to do well.
	I do not think all this stuff is really a threat to the Trump administration or to his viability as a 2020 candidate.
	Okay, so, meanwhile, President Trump continues to be in hot water.
	Over the Michael Cohen Stormy Daniels payment, right?
	That's a separate case from the case regarding Robert Mueller.
	That case, again, I don't think it's going to do Trump a lot of damage, but it continues to kind of nibble at his credibility.
	Trump didn't have a lot of credibility to begin with when it came to matters sexual, but the media have been all over it.
	One of the things I find so amusing is the media are so confused why people on the right continue to support Trump's agenda when Trump obviously was lying about Stormy Daniels and paying her off.
	And the answer is, because we knew all of that, are we supposed to pretend that we are surprised in any serious way here?
	Are we really supposed to pretend that we are shocked and appalled by Trump's behavior?
	We've known about Trump the whole time, okay?
	You knew about Trump, too.
	The media knew about Trump when they were making him the apprentice guy on NBC.
	But they've decided this is their time to really undermine the credibility of President Trump, as though he had tons of credibility to begin with.
	So, for example, a bunch of reporters went after Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday, asking, how can you expect anyone to believe President Trump?
	But can I ask you, when the President so often says things that turn out not to be true, when the President and the White House show what appears to be a blatant disregard for the truth, how are the American people to trust or believe what is said here or what is said by the President?
	We give the very best information that we have at the time.
	I do that every single day, and we'll continue to do that every day I'm in this position.
	I don't know what that question's even supposed to mean.
	I mean, honestly, like, what is she supposed to say to that?
	Of course she was not informed the proper truth about Stormy Daniels, because Trump was fibbing to her, too.
	And that's not a shock.
	No one believes her when she was saying that Trump didn't know about Stormy Daniels.
	But the media think they've really got Sarah Huckabee Sanders now.
	Ooh, we've caught Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a lie, again.
	No.
	No one cares.
	Here's Jim Acosta posturing on this issue as well.
	You said on March 7th there was no knowledge of any payments from the president and he's denied all of these allegations.
	Were you lying to us at the time, or were you in the dark?
	The President has denied and continues to deny the underlying claim.
	And again, I've given the best information I had at the time.
	Why can't you just answer yes or no whether you were in the dark?
	I think it's a fairly simple question whether you just didn't have the information at the time.
	I think it's a fairly simple answer that I've given you actually several times now.
	I gave you the best information that I had, and I'm going to continue to do my best to do that every single day.
	Okay, again, they're just going to keep asking her the same question over and over and over, and then, when she kicks back, then they're going to suggest that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a thug.
	Again, her job is to go out and dissemble on behalf of the president.
	Okay, that was also Jake Harney's job.
	That was the job of Robert Gibbs.
	Guess what being a press secretary is?
	Very often, it is you going out there and lying on behalf of the president.
	Okay, let's not be naive, okay, about how politics works.
	Let's not be naive about how all of this operates.
	Okay, there are just Everyone knows when the president tells a fib, his press secretary is going to go out there and defend the fib.
	That is literally what they are paid to do.
	But again, the media have decided that they are hands clean in all of this.
	They can print as much nonsense and fake news as they want, and nobody is allowed to call their general credibility into question.
	But Sarah Huckabee Sanders, we're supposed to believe that she is totally undermining the credibility of a president who had very little to begin with.
	Here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders going after April Ryan.
	So April Ryan suggests that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was blindsided.
	Sanders kicks back and then Ryan goes crazy.
	Why didn't you talk to the White House press office about his impacting stellar statements about what was happening?
	The White House press office wouldn't coordinate with the president's outside legal team on legal strategy.
	You said yourself you were blindsided.
	I actually didn't use that term.
	Well, I said it, but you were blindsided from what you said.
	Well, with all due respect, you actually don't know much about me in terms of what I feel and what I don't.
	Okay, so, you know, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not being rude, but April Ryan thought she was being rude because, again, the only thing anyone in the media care about is how they look on camera.
	They should stop televising the press briefings.
	They really should.
	Because all it turns into is a bunch of grandstanding political theater on behalf of these reporters.
	And April Ryan was happy to do that, right?
	She went on TV later and she talked about Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
	She said, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was very street with me.
	I don't even know what that means.
	So she was blindsided.
	This was not a personal attack on her.
	And for her to say something like, you don't know me, That was very, um, street.
	I know there's street politics here, but that was very street.
	To say you don't know me is very street.
	Well, you don't know Sarah Huckabee Sanders all that well.
	Like, what?
	But, again, it just demonstrates that what the media love best of all about President Trump is the constant controversy.
	While they proclaim that they don't like any of this and they just want to cover the news straight, they really don't.
	They want to report what they want to report about the Trump administration, and when Trump makes a boo-boo, they want to jump all over it, and then they want to make themselves the story.
	Because now the story is April Ryan and Jim Acosta.
	The story is not really the president lying to the American people, and the American people not really caring, because we knew all of that.
	Okay.
	So, before I go any further, and I have a lot to say about some weird sex stuff in just a second.
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	Okay, so there's a very weird thing that people are now talking about online.
	It's something that they call incels.
	What in the world are incels and why do they matter?
	Incels are involuntary celibates.
	Okay, in other words, people who want to have sex but are not.
	Right, which is to say most of the population, I assume.
	Incels are involuntary celibates.
	The reason that they have become a thing is because last week, a couple of weeks ago, there was a 25-year-old Canadian killer who rammed his van into a crowd of people, killing 10 and injuring 15.
	And the killer had written a Facebook post stating that the incel rebellion has already begun and all the Chads and Stacys, which I guess is some sort of slang for attractive people, would pay the price.
	So there have been a bunch of think pieces about how to solve the problem of involuntary celibacy.
	Point number one, I don't understand why involuntary celibacy is a problem.
	If you haven't earned somebody's love and affection enough for them to have sex with you, I don't understand why this is society's problem.
	But it just demonstrates that the victimhood mentality has taken over everyone in our society.
	You're a loser and you can't find somebody to marry you?
	Maybe it's because you ought to get your act together.
	Maybe the reason you're involuntarily celibate is because you have not made enough of yourself to earn somebody else's love and affection.
	But when you live in a society where sex is believed to be owed, when you live in a society that's constantly promising that sex is right around the corner, casual sex is easy to get, it's not a problem, no one's ever going to require anything of you, When you watch TV and everybody is jumping in and out of the sack with everybody else, it does lead to a mentality that suggests, I am owed this thing.
	I am owed sex.
	Everyone's getting it except for me.
	Involuntary celibacy is obviously a societal problem.
	This is a very perverse view of sexuality.
	Ross Douthat at the New York Times has pointed out that for purposes of discussion, there are two types of incels.
	Men who can't get sex as a general rule.
	It's usually men who are worried about involuntary celibacy.
	And people perceived by the left wing to be victimized by a society that has unfair standards of sexiness.
	So, this would be people who are trans, who say that they can't have sex with the kind of people that they want to have sex with, because as trans people, society has set up rigid standards of sexuality, and people are falling prey to all of that.
	Well, Douthat suggests that the solution posed by those who see involuntary celibacy as a problem to be solved will be the redistribution of sex.
	That in the end, what we will end up doing is sponsoring people so they can hire prostitutes, or we can develop new technology like sex robots so we can have equality of sex.
	In the Bernie Sanders model, the top 1% of the 1% are having 99% of the sex, and we must redistribute the sex as well as the pudding.
	This is the sort of move that Doubt Hat sees coming with regard to involuntary celibacy.
	Now, we all rightly rebel at this idea because this idea is gross and stupid.
	It's not your responsibility to make sure that anybody else has sex, obviously, nor is it your responsibility to have sex with somebody just because they would like to have sex with you.
	It's idiotic.
	But the reason this has even become an issue, the reason there are now all these think pieces, a lot of think pieces in the last week, about involuntary celibates and how we solve their problems, is because of this stupid victimization mentality with regard to sex.
	So I was what you would call a voluntary celibate until I was married.
	I was somebody who did not have sex until I was married.
	My wife had the same standard.
	The reason for that is because I felt that sex was an adjunct to commitment.
	Sex was something that you earned as an element of commitment.
	I earned the love of my wife.
	I earned the commitment of my wife.
	She earned my commitment.
	And then we are willing and happy to have lots of fantastic sex, right?
	That is the way that society used to work, is that celibacy was not considered some sort of terrible thing to be experiencing.
	It was something that was supposed to encourage you to better yourself and make yourself worthy of marriage.
	Right?
	Conservatives have had the solution for a long time.
	A sexual morality that takes into account commitment.
	If we measure happiness by commitment, rather than by amount and variety of sex, then the onus placed on us is to get someone else to commit to us.
	And we have a society right now that values sex above commitment.
	That says that the happiest possible life is the one where you're having the sex with the most people, in the most positions, and that's what's going to make you the happiest.
	That's a lie, number one.
	Social science demonstrates that this is a lie.
	Promiscuity does not lead to happiness, it turns out.
	Sexual variety does not lead to happiness.
	Commitment tends to lead to happiness.
	But we're a commitment-phobic society and a sex-centric society, and that leads to an unhealthy focus on sex, and it leads to us seeing people who are not receiving this free and plentiful sex as victims of the society, as opposed to people who need to better themselves and therefore to earn commitment.
	Again, virginity should not be seen as something to be condemned.
	It's seen as a norm, not as a shortcoming, until you have earned somebody else's commitment.
	But that's not the way our society has viewed it.
	If sex is the goal of life, then we're going to fall directly into this trap about redistribution of sex and voluntary celibates being victims.
	Again, the reality is nobody owes you sex.
	Nobody owes you anything.
	You need to earn.
	And when I say you need to earn, I don't mean you gotta be a guy who plays the game.
	You gotta be a stud.
	That's not what I mean.
	What I mean is that if you actually want to have a happy life, what you need to do is make yourself worthy of the person with whom you would like to have sex, and that person needs to make themselves worthy of you as well.
	It means bettering yourself.
	Every way.
	Physically, emotionally, spiritually.
	Become a better person.
	It's really interesting.
	You rarely see... The guys who are complaining right now about involuntary celibacy, they're never complaining about involuntary lack of commitment.
	You never see... The same guys who are talking about how they're not getting enough sex, just random sex, you never see them talking about, you know, I've really been trying to get married for a really long time, and I've been unable to find women who are willing to marry me.
	That number is much, much smaller than the number of guys who are out there complaining about not getting the supposedly free and plentiful sex offered by society.
	Well, we're making a generation of pathetic men.
	That's all that's happening here.
	We're creating a generation of pathetic humans, men in particular, who think that they are owed things instead of having to actually be gentlemen, be strong defenders of family, be prepared to sustain a household in order to participate in lovemaking activity.
	Meanwhile, speaking of people who are being made pathetic, it's not just exclusive to men.
	It's also happening to women.
	The lead at the Huffington Post right now, literally the lead, okay, the top of their enormous website is Wet Dreams, the age of fish sex.
	I am not kidding you.
	And then there's a picture of a woman's feet and a fish.
	Okay, and here is the story, okay?
	Time for the easiest game.
	This is by Claire Fallon, who I have no clue who she is.
	All I know is she has the lead at Huffington Post and she's crazy.
	So here is what she writes.
	She writes, Time for the easiest game of if you love this movie, read this book ever.
	If you love The Shape of Water, a movie about fish sex, you should definitely read The Pisces by Melissa Broder, a book about fish sex.
	The cover literally shows a woman in an amorous clench with a fish.
	The novel actually tells the story of a woman who has a torrid love affair with a merman.
	And then she says, both the Pisces and Guillermo del Toro's Oscar-winning Shape of Water seem to have arrived at an inflection point for heterosexual relations, as some straight women have thrown up their hands in despair at the prospect of dealing with straight men.
	These men who grope us and talk down to us and consistently fail to clean the bathroom.
	We're supposed to make lives with them?
	Let them touch us?
	No, you're not.
	You're supposed to find a good man and settle down with him.
	That was the idea.
	You shouldn't be having sex with fish, ladies.
	Okay, it turns out that going after the bass, right, nailing the salmon, that's not actually a good solution to you lacking the ability to find a man who is willing to commit.
	Again, how about women focus on bettering themselves and men focus on bettering themselves and both of these things lead toward commitment.
	Women woke up one day, says the Huffington Post, to find that their husbands voted for Donald Trump and their sons have been bleep-posting on incel boards.
	Just because your husband voted for Donald Trump doesn't mean that he's a bad human being.
	This is so insane.
	So basically, you're going to opt to go after the whitefish instead of sleeping with your husband because he voted for Trump?
	Even before we heard the claims about Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual harassment and assault, and the ensuing avalanche of horrifying MeToo allegations, we heard about our president grabbing women by the bleep, Bill Cosby feeding women roofies, and R. Kelly allegedly sexually exploiting young girls.
	So many straight men we have been forced to accept are bad to us and for us.
	Why would we take the enormous risk of loving one of them?
	And yet straight women do have desires.
	Cutting men out of our lives isn't a simple proposition.
	And as satisfying as the concept of going lissastratus until men get their house in order might be, that strategy also requires straight women to deny their sexual urges.
	The handsome prince of our imagination has been exposed as a dangerous fraud, but we still need some form of romantic hope and sexual release.
	One seductive yet impossible fantasy might be the romantic attention of a man who lacks the exhausting baggage of male entitlement.
	To find such fantastical being women, at least in fiction, have turned to the sea." Okay, maybe the emasculation of men is leading men to become pathetic, and maybe men's expectation of sex without relation to commitment is making men pathetic, and it's making women pathetic, and it's making everybody pathetic.
	Maybe instead of turning men into something they are not, which both men and women are doing, we should acknowledge that masculine behavior is a useful and necessary component of life.
	Instead of emasculating men, you should expect men to be better, and men should expect themselves to be better.
	Women set the standard for men, and men set the standard for women.
	Okay?
	This is just the reality in human relations.
	Maybe that's not the way it should be.
	That's the way it is.
	When it comes to sexual relations, if you want to have sex with somebody of the opposite sex, you are setting your standards.
	That's just the way that it works.
	What that means is that women should expect men to be better.
	They should expect men to be better, but they should not expect men not to be men.
	Men are creatures who are going to want sex.
	But you can also dictate to a man, ladies, what kind of man you would like to have sex with.
	It's up to you to determine what type of person you think is going to make a good husband.
	And suggesting that all men are R. Kelly or Donald Trump, or that if they voted for Donald Trump, they are Donald Trump, or that if they disagree with you about feminization of boys, that somehow they're going to be bad husbands, We're leading generations of men and women to be unhappy.
	That's all that's happening here.
	You have unhappy men who believe that the expectation of life is that they're going to have as much sex as they want, and unhappy women who are living in the expectation that men are going to be under their boot heel and not act like men at any point in real life.
	And it's just stupid.
	It's just stupid.
	And that's how you end up with fish sacks on the front page of the Huffington Post and incels killing people in Canada.
	Just ridiculous.
	OK, we're going to get to the mailbag in just one second, but for that you have to go over to dailywire.com.
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	All righty, it's mailbag time.
	So let's do this thing.
	So, let's just jump right in.
	Hugh, which specific Senate and House seats should the Republicans try to flip in the midterms?
	Well, there is a list today of Senate seats, particularly, that are up for re-election.
	Democrats could lose, seriously, up to nine seats.
	Okay, they could lose up to nine seats in the next Senate election.
	So I will give you the answers here.
	So, okay, Joe Manchin right now is trailing by 14 points to any generic Republican in West Virginia.
	North Dakota, Heidi Heitkamp is trailing by eight.
	She's a Democrat.
	Incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly in Indiana is trailing by five.
	Claire McCaskill trails by five in Missouri.
	Montana, Jon Tester trails by five.
	Florida, Bill Nelson is locked into a deadlock with Rick Scott.
	He probably will lose that seat.
	Pennsylvania and Ohio.
	Democrats Bill Casey and Sherrod Brown are leading by less than two points each.
	Virginia Tim Kaine is within three.
	So there are a bunch of Democratic seats that are up in the Senate.
	In the House, it's very difficult to name Republicans who are capable of flipping a blue seat.
	It looks a lot more like Democrats are going to flip some red seats.
	So I'd put most of, if I were investing money right now, I'd invest most of my money in Senate races.
	I would not invest, by the way, In one particular candidate, I'd be remiss if I did not play this just because it's so amazing.
	There's a guy who is running for the nomination in Virginia, I believe.
	Is it West Virginia?
	Don Blankenship.
	Okay, Don, it's West Virginia?
	Don Blankenship in West Virginia trying to run against Joe Manchin.
	And he's an insane person, okay?
	Here's the ad that he's currently running in the primaries in this West Virginia primary.
	Again, if you blow this seat, Again, Joe Manchin has a 14 point deficit against generic Republican.
	Unfortunately, Don Blankenship is certainly not generic Republican.
	Here is the ad that he released legitimately this week.
	Oh no.
	Swamp Captain Mitch McConnell has created millions of jobs for China people.
	While doing so, Mitch has gotten rich.
	In fact, his China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.
	Mitch's swamp people are now running false negative ads against me.
	They are also childishly calling me despicable and mentally ill.
	The war to drain the swamp and create jobs for West Virginia people has begun.
	I will beat Joe Manchin and ditch Cocaine Mitch for the sake of the kids.
	Cocaine Mitch?
	And then I love the kids who are just like, why am I even here, man?
	What is even going on?
	Yeah, that may be the greatest dad of all time.
	The Swamp People, China People, Cocaine Mitch.
	Yeah, by the way, the only field poll of the race, it's a three-way race between a guy named Jenkins, a guy named Morrissey, and Blankenship.
	Apparently Blankenship is getting 16% of the vote in the primary right now.
	No!
	Just stop!
	If we lose any more Senate seats because we run crappy candidates, I'm gonna be like, seriously, enough guys, enough.
	We just, we just can't.
	Okay, Matthew writes, Hi Ben.
	With Mother's Day coming up, I found myself in a moral bind.
	My mother's an alcoholic.
	Most of my childhood, she would leave us as a family and disappear for a few months until she and my father finally got a divorce.
	She caused our whole family a lot of emotional and even physical pain, particularly myself, when in a drunken rage, she told me she wished she would have had an abortion.
	This pain was a lot for a young teenager to handle, so I spent most of my time locked away in my room by myself, trying to mentally disassociate myself from her.
	I rarely see her because when I do, I involuntarily become enraged because of the memories of what she did to us.
	Now it turns out her liver is failing from the years of drinking and the doctor said she will die soon if she doesn't stop drinking.
	As a somewhat newfound Christian, I believe in forgiveness, but I tried so hard to disassociate from my own mother.
	Okay, so Matthew, obviously, all my sympathies to you.
	And then to a broader question, what do you do with a parent who's just a bad parent?
	What do you do with a bad parent?
	to save her own life.
	I know it's my mother, but she never acted as one, so it's very difficult to see her as such.
	I understand it's a very unique situation, but what would your advice for someone like me be?
	I really could use it." Okay, so Matthew, obviously, all my sympathies to you.
	And it's a broader question.
	What do you do with a parent who's just a bad parent?
	What do you do with a bad parent?
	Obviously, there are biblical injunctions to respect your parents, to honor your parents.
	And it says, really, that you're supposed to honor your parents so your own life is long, so your life is long in the land.
	The reason that it says that is because honoring your parents is not just about what you're doing for your parents, it's about what you're doing for you.
	Whatever you have to do to come to peace with the situation with your mother is something that you ought to do.
	If your mother dies, if your mother passes away, You're going to want to be able to look back and say to yourself, I was the good person here.
	I was the person who did everything that I could.
	And that's how I would see this.
	Yes, you're the one making the sacrifice.
	Yes, you're the person putting yourself in a rough position.
	And when it comes to forgiveness, I'm not going to stand in your shoes and say that you ought to forgive your mother for making your childhood miserable.
	I'm not sure that that's something that anyone should be pushed to forgive.
	But I do think that the best thing for you would be to come to some sort of satisfaction with your own behavior.
	Some sort of standard for your own behavior that you can live with.
	Where you're not going to beat yourself up later about the action that you took right now.
	So maybe that means driving your mom to the doctor.
	Maybe it means trying to be nice to your mom.
	you know, still protecting yourself, still being emotionally wary because volatile people remain volatile.
	I don't think that in a lot of circumstances they tend to stop being volatile.
	So again, you're not doing anything wrong if you're having a tough time in your heart forgiving your mom, but try to investigate what is going to allow you to sleep at night, and then I would act in accordance with that.
	Max says, "All wise and knowing, Ben, "I find myself consistently tired and procrastinating.
	"How do you wake up so early and stay on task?
	"I'm a huge fan of you and the shows." So I try to go to bed early, Like, last night I went to bed at like 10, 15, like an old person.
	So, I would, you know, if I were you, I would try to keep by the Benjamin Franklin admonition, right?
	Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
	So far, it's worked out well.
	So, that's my rule there.
	Austin says, Well, Austin, I have to say, I think that there is a good case to be made for private parks in many cases.
	and an overbearing land grabbing big government action.
	How do I reconcile my love for the national parks and my dislike for big government in general?
	Thanks." Well, Austin, I have to say, I think that there is a good case to be made for private parks in many cases.
	I do not know that Yosemite would have turned into a bunch of gas stations if it had not been for the national government siphoning it off.
	Now, I believe in environmental regulations.
	I believe that there are certain externalities that we have to protect against.
	But the national park system I find kind of controversial in the sense that most of the things that we find beautiful in life we are willing to pay for.
	And there are plenty of private parks across the United States that are quite beautiful and quite magnificent.
	I think that there would be plenty of people who would be willing to give money.
	I'm sure that there are private, you know, I know several billionaires who would probably be willing to purchase Yosemite just to protect it.
	So if it's just about people would have come in and exploited the land, I'm not fully sure that that's true actually.
	I'm rather libertarian to the extent it's possible to be here.
	Sure.
	Overregulation means you have to fill out a lot of paperwork.
	It means that insurance rates have gone up.
	It means that doctors are being prevented from entering practice.
	It means that they are forced to do a lot of things that nurses should be doing.
	It means they have more work and less pay.
	In short, when you have more work and less pay, that limits the number of people who want to go into a particular profession.
	That is the very short answer.
	Brandon says, "Hey Ben, how do young men such as myself "convince our more adolescent peers to start growing up "as opposed to the wild party hookup culture "that has completely encapsulated our youth?" Well, I mean, what I've always said to people who are my own age, it's, okay, so let's be frank about this.
	Trying to reason with adolescents is always a problem.
	The reason for this is because the adolescents have overdeveloped amygdalas and underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, meaning that their emotional centers are extraordinarily responsive and their logic centers are extraordinarily underdeveloped.
	So trying to logic them out of all of this is very difficult.
	What you can say is, you're going to make decisions now that you regret later, and if you're not getting ahead now, then you are falling behind.
	The people who are most successful are going to be the people around you who are buckling down and doing their work, not the people who are partying and wasting their lives and putting themselves at risk.
	Now, I understand that our culture has basically said that all fun is good, that 17 is the time to find yourself, that whatever fun you engage in at 17, you get past the rest of your life.
	Maybe this is true for some people.
	It's certainly not true for all people.
	I think probably as a general rule, it is less true for girls than it is for boys because girls take particularly sexual activity a lot more seriously than boys do, just by virtually every psychological study that I've ever seen.
	And so, yeah, I think that The acting like a jerk is something that gets ingrained in your character.
	If you're doing it when you're 17, my guess is that it's going to be harder to remove that from your character later than it otherwise would be.
	So Gramsci, for those who don't know, was an Italian proto-fascist thinker.
	I think the works of neo-Marxist thinkers like Gramsci play a similar role.
	So Gramsci, for those who don't know, was an Italian proto-fascist thinker.
	He was a Marxist who was actually much in vogue with Mussolini for a little while.
	And his basic theory is that Marxism had failed, and what you needed instead was cultural Marxism.
	Marxism had suggested that there was an inevitable slide from capitalism and towards Marxism, and that eventually capitalism would degrade into Marxism over time.
	It was a historical prediction.
	Gramsci said, look, that's not what happened in World War I.
	In World War I, there wasn't this great class uprising to stop the war, and so what we really need is we need to look at the culture.
	We need to take over cultural institutions, and then we need to use those cultural institutions to re-inculcate a new sort of human being in the human heart.
	I think that Gramsci's philosophy has been a lot more successful than the philosophy of Marx himself.
	Cultural Marxism has been a lot more successful in damaging the West than the economic theories of Karl Marx.
	Okay, Susan says, Hey Ben, how do we avoid whataboutism?
	Trump is in the office and therefore the leader of the GOP.
	Most of the leftists want to paint the entire GOP with one brush.
	How do we discuss ideas, not people?
	What we say is, when Trump does something wrong, it's bad.
	End of story.
	And when Trump does something good, it's good.
	End of story.
	And the only way whataboutism applies is not with regard to whataboutism, but you can say to the left, you're pretending to care about X, but you didn't care about Y. That's not whataboutism.
	I care about both.
	I think when Trump is being garbage, he's being garbage.
	And when Clinton was being garbage, he was being garbage.
	And that's consistent.
	But you're not consistent.
	So that's not whataboutism.
	That's just saying to somebody that everybody should have an even standard across the playing field for everyone.
	So that's how you avoid whataboutism in these conversations.
	Alfredo says, Hi Ben.
	I'm a current PhD student in philosophy, and I enjoy watching your show every day.
	As a person in academia, it is one of the few things that keeps me from going insane.
	Something I especially enjoy is when you relate the topic you're discussing to broader intellectual themes from the great philosophers of the past.
	I'm excited to see prominent conservatives thinking seriously about philosophical questions.
	I have two questions.
	First, when did you start investigating philosophy more seriously?
	Second, do you think more conservatives should study philosophy?
	Also, what are some philosophy books you'd recommend to your viewers?
	So, when did I first start reading philosophy?
	Probably in college?
	Maybe late high school?
	Do I think more conservatives should study philosophy?
	Absolutely.
	I mean, I think the entire Straussian school, Leo Strauss, who's been sort of an Ideological godfather to a lot of conservatives.
	He obviously was very much engaged in the process of teaching Plato and Aristotle and the ancients.
	I think that a lot of conservative thinkers, Mark Levin I know is very big on John Locke.
	There's something worthwhile to studying philosophy.
	In fact, my entire next book is probably going to be, I mean, I'm almost done with it.
	The entire next book is basically a philosophy book.
	And just check the bibliography for a list of books.
	I recommended a bunch on the show.
	I think some of the summaries of philosophy are really good.
	There's one that's called A History of Political Philosophy with Essays on Various Philosophers, edited by Strauss.
	His Natural Right in History, obviously, is a very good book.
	The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant is a good user-friendly guide to a lot of philosophers.
	I'm really fond of the writing of Walter Kaufman, who was an existentialist philosopher.
	Well, he's actually, he's quasi-anti-existentialist, kind of.
	But his books are really good.
	William Barrett has a really good book on existentialism.
	I love philosophy.
	I think it's really interesting to read.
	Try to read the primary sources first.
	Try to read Nicomachean ethics.
	Try to read Plato's Republic.
	Try to read all of those things.
	But I think that a lot of the summaries of philosophy are just as useful sometimes as reading, like trying to bully your way through 800 pages of Critique of Pure Reason.
	It's probably not as user-friendly as simply reading a user-friendly summary from a reliable source like, for example, Durant.
	Okay, let's see.
	A couple more questions, then we'll do things I like and things I hate.
	So, Nicholas says, Well, no, that number one, year one is the hard one.
	Years two and three are not so bad.
	advice on how to mentally or physically prepare for the grueling journey ahead?
	Well, know that number one, year one is the hard one.
	Years two and three are not so bad.
	Second, I would say that whatever reading you are assigned, you should see if there's reading on the other side that has not I had a great time in law school because I did a lot of outside reading.
	Also, get into a system early.
	Get into a system early where you're summarizing cases and you have an outline and you take good notes because that's the only way you're going to be able to stay on top of the material.
	She recently said that she finds the account of Noah and the flood hard to believe.
	Her reasoning goes like this.
	Flood never happened, along with many other arguments.
	Bible unbelievable, thus no God.
	I've always enjoyed your talks on the Old Testament.
	Looking for your help on Noah and the flood from the wise one.
	Okay, so it is really unclear whether Noah was a metaphorical character in the same way that Adam is a metaphorical character.
	Okay, really, this is sort of unclear in the Bible.
	You know, there's a lot of argument over when the sort of historicity of the Bible begins.
	And I think that the most common belief among a lot of religious people is probably it begins with Abraham.
	That once you get to Abraham, now you're talking about real people.
	As opposed to Noah, who could have been a more metaphorical creation.
	The Tower of Babel is more of a metaphorical story than it is a story about something where people actually built a physical tower to heaven and then suddenly were struck with a bunch of different languages.
	It's really a tale about fascism and about communitarianism trying to challenge God and breaking down.
	So the story of Noah, I would say from a metaphorical perspective, and this is why I think it's important, is a story about the triumph of family over the sort of So the story of Noah is a guy protecting his family from an inundation, a cultural inundation, Now, it is true that there was some sort of flood, by the way, in Mesopotamia.
	It wasn't a global flood.
	It was probably a local flood.
	And the story is wrapped into this, right?
	If you actually read more ancient documents than the Bible, there are flood stories in those documents, right?
	Ancient Mesopotamian myth has talk about giant floods happening in the Middle East.
	So there probably was a flood of some sort that was happening in the Middle East at that time.
	But the actual psychological impact of Noah I would say that it's really more about that entire portion of the Bible is contrasting various types of civilization.
	So you have the Tower of Babel, which is a civilization built on the idea that if we get everybody together and we build toward a common purpose, but we ignore the individual, then we'll be able to build something great and holy.
	So basically, the communist empires of the USSR, and that breaks down into a bunch of squabbling, because it turns out that people are individuals, and they are tribal, and they're not going to bow to a giant, human-created tower.
	Okay, so that's the story of the Tower of Babel.
	That is juxtaposed to the story of the people who are surrounding Noah, who are sort of these libertines, who suggest that they have access to everybody else's property and can engage in any sexual immorality they want.
	It's the libertine society, right?
	The ultimate individualistic society that says, we can do whatever we want even if it damages other people and we don't care about the community, externalities, be damned, doesn't matter.
	And then there's NOAA.
	And NOAA's model is what survives, right?
	That in a survival situation, the only thing that survives is the core family who get on an ark and protect themselves from the inundation and then are able to spread out based on that family.
	That's, I think, the metaphorical value of Noah.
	Again, people who say that they don't take the literal truth of the beginning of Genesis as a guide.
	Welcome to the religious world, where a lot of people have been talking about how the beginning of Genesis is a metaphor for a very long time.
	And I've recommended books on this program about how to rectify breaches between science and the Bible.
	I talk about this stuff all the time.
	This is, I'm sorry, It sounds like your daughter is a very simplistic atheistic thinker, and that's a problem.
	I think a lot of the people who are the biggest proponents of atheism are people who have never spent five minutes with the Bible.
	They're people who just look at the Bible, they find a couple of verses they think are awful, and then they don't bother trying to understand how that fit into context, why that was written at the time that it was written, whether it was a progressive thing when it was written, what the relationship is of revelation and reason, why it is that God gave a document to human beings as opposed to just changing human beings into angels.
	Why would God give a written document to human beings and then say, live by this document?
	Especially knowing that human beings are bound by their time and fallible.
	What I believe is that God gave the Bible as the enzyme that catalyzed the progress of humanity.
	Basically, what God said is, here is a moral guide for you, here, right now.
	There are certain immutable principles in it.
	There are certain basic principles, like the Ten Commandments.
	There are certain basic moral principles about sexuality, because human nature doesn't change.
	But, there are certain other elements of the Bible that are clearly dictated to time and place, because if I were to give an order of living to Mathis right now, Math is in the room now to give an order of living to him.
	It would include a bunch of things that were time dependent.
	Don't spend too much time on the internet would be one of those things.
	Okay, well, what if the nature of the internet changes?
	Or what if the internet doesn't exist in 20 years?
	So then the question is, how do we adapt those general principles to living a daily life?
	And what God is doing when he gives the Bible in my belief system is God is saying to a specific set of people, Here's how you ought to live.
	And now it is your job to use reason to interpret what I am saying in conjunction with new evidence and new evidence as it arises.
	Now, the reason that some of the Bible, so people will say, OK, well, the Bible means nothing because if everything can evolve, then why doesn't the Bible evolve?
	And the answer there is that there are certain things that do not change.
	And the things that do not change are the things that go to human nature itself.
	They go to human nature itself.
	That's why I say sexual sins, God knew full well what human nature was, and human nature has not changed in the past three and a half thousand years.
	And it's not going to change anytime soon because human beings are human beings.
	So all I would say to your daughter is if she's going to reject Christianity on the basis of she doesn't believe the just-so stories of the Bible, Maybe she ought to do a little deeper reading into it before she rejects it.
	Otherwise, she's doing herself a certain level of disrespect.
	Also, if she believes that she's... I don't know why she would believe, by the way, that she doesn't believe everything in the Bible and therefore she's an atheist.
	That doesn't follow.
	There are plenty of other religions, there are plenty of other takes on God.
	Just because you don't believe the words of the Bible doesn't mean that there isn't a supreme being that guides all of us and has set the universe on a certain course.
	Okay, that was a pretty long answer so we'll have to cut the mailbag there and then we'll do some things that I like and some things that I hate.
	So, speaking of, you know, we were talking a little bit about all these people on the left who cannot believe that people on the right would support Donald Trump despite his moral failings.
	It's amazing how short people's memory is.
	This is not whataboutism, okay?
	People on the right should condemn President Trump's moral failings.
	But it is worthwhile noting that people on the left, who are whining about why people on the right would still support Trump's tax cuts and support his administration, his continued presidency, despite the fact that he's garbage with women, Right.
	They seem to forget there was a guy named Bill Clinton.
	So, if you've never seen the movie Primary Colors with John Travolta, it is a pretty good movie.
	With Emma Thompson and John Travolta, it's a little too warm and fuzzy on the Clintons, but it is obviously an adaptation of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.
	Emma Thompson is Hillary Clinton here.
	And it is pretty good.
	It's a pretty good movie.
	Governor Stanton, this is Henry Perkins.
	I met your grandfather once when I was a boy.
	He was a great man.
	Thank you, sir.
	These people don't know you.
	They probably don't even remember your state.
	They're waiting to be swept off their feet.
	Just wanted to say welcome aboard.
	Let's go.
	I said I'd meet with him.
	Did you tell him I was coming on board?
	No, no, no, no.
	You call in sick.
	I'm sure the kids want that.
	I'm just delighted that you're on board.
	Mrs. Stanton, I'm not sure.
	I've never helped run a presidential campaign before.
	Neither have we.
	But that's how history is made, Henry.
	If you had to swallow another word, Garbage.
	You can say it.
	We're X-rated.
	Yeah, me too, if you believe what you read in the paper.
	It's gonna be the war thing, the drug thing, and the woman thing.
	We're in trouble.
	What are you suggesting we do?
	Might be a good idea to get on some TV shows.
	I'm not gonna go negative.
	Any jackass can burn down a bar.
	Not negative, it's self-assertive.
	I'm not gonna do it!
	Okay, so the entire movie is, I think, too glowing about Bill Clinton, but it does suggest that Bill Clinton has been involved in a lot of terrible, terrible things.
	Which obviously is true.
	And the reality is that Bill Clinton was involved in a lot of very, very bad things.
	And the left was fine with all of it.
	So, now when they're complaining about immorality in politics, it's a little bit galling.
	It's a little bit galling to people.
	Okay, other things that I like.
	So, as we have heard from the left incessantly, Mike Pence obviously is a deep homophobe who hates gay people.
	How do I know he's a deep homophobe who hates gay people?
	Well, because yesterday he swore in Richard Grinnell, the first openly gay ambassador in U.S.
	history, as the ambassador to Germany.
	And Grinnell's husband is the guy holding the giant Bible there, on which Grinnell is swearing in.
	So obviously, Mike Pence could barely stand this.
	He had to run screaming from the room.
	He actually tried to use electroshock therapy on Richard Grinnell to turn him straight again.
	But when that failed, he had to swear him in as ambassador to Germany.
	I, Richard Grinnell, do solemnly swear I, Richard Bernal, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
	That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.
	Against all enemies foreign and domestic.
	Against all enemies foreign and domestic.
	Okay, so obviously, so much hate for the gay guy there.
	Wow.
	Just everybody losing their mind.
	You can see Mike Pence is so unhappy about all of this.
	What ridiculous crap.
	I mean, again, this is one of the things that people should understand about religious believers.
	Religious believers can believe that you are participating in sin and still think that you are a good person.
	Religious believers can believe that what you are doing is something that they do not agree with, but it's a free country.
	It's so demeaning to religious people to suggest that because we think something that you're doing is a sin, therefore we think that you should be imprisoned or locked up.
	Only lefties think this way, really.
	Honestly, only people on the hard left who don't believe in a limited government believe that they ought to be imposing the morality from above.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So Bill Ayers is a terrorist.
	Bill Ayers is a guy who started the weather underground.
	And he tweeted out yesterday, there's a guy who tweeted at him, I served honorably as an infantry officer overseas.
	How about you?
	Bill Ayers tweeted back, I served honorably in the struggle against war for peace and justice.
	This guy, it is an amazing thing.
	When we talk about media bias, the fact that Bill Ayers was not a major campaign issue in 2008 is an incredible thing.
	Can you imagine if Donald Trump had hobnobbed with a guy who legitimately bombed the Pentagon in the 1970s?
	Okay, Bill Ayers built bombs that were set off at the Pentagon, at the New York City Police Department, or set off at the U.S.
	Capitol.
	A bomb that he designed went off in an apartment and killed three people, including his then-girlfriend.
	And Bill Ayers was a guy who worked relatively closely with Barack Obama.
	Barack Obama called him a guy from the neighborhood.
	He lied about it.
	Did you see any of the sort of hysterical media coverage over that that you've seen over Stormy Daniels?
	Of course not.
	It was considered gauche to mention Bill Ayers.
	It was considered gauche to mention Jeremiah Wright.
	Bill Ayers is a bad human, okay?
	And Bill Ayers, I can say, and this is a guy who still has not apologized for having set bombs in the 1970s because obviously it's okay to try and bomb places and kill people so that you are making a change in favor of peace and justice.
	Again, just demonstrating once again the bias in the media.
	It's pretty, pretty amazing.
	All right.
	So we'll be back here on Monday.
	Make sure that you subscribe because on Sunday, actually, we have our first special, our first Sunday special.
	Please check it out.
	I really think you're going to enjoy it.
	It's me and Jordan Peterson for the full hour, as Larry King would say.
	So go check it out right now.
	And we'll be back here on Monday Live.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
	Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Alex Zingaro, assistant to the editor Julia Whittle.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

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