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May 28, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:37
Remember Our Soldiers | Ep. 547
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Rachel Dolezal gets herself in trouble again.
Plus, we discuss President Trump's pullout from the North Korean summit, and we talk some Memorial Day.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, it is a day on which we celebrate the valor of our soldiers, of our service people all over the world.
And I want to start the show today by talking a little bit about some things you may not know about Memorial Day.
Now, this is from history.com, so this information is, I think, really useful and relevant and pretty cool, actually, because most folks don't really know all that much about Memorial Day.
I will admit that I didn't until fairly recently.
Some of the stuff is really neat.
So, did you know that Memorial Day, one of the first commemorations of a Memorial Day, was organized by recently freed slaves?
So, according to History.com, as the Civil War neared its end, thousands of Union soldiers held as prisoners of war were herded into a series of hastily assembled camps in Charleston, South Carolina.
Conditions at one camp, a former racetrack near the city's citadel, were so bad that more than 250 prisoners died from disease or exposure and were buried in a mass grave behind the tracks at Grandstand.
Actually, this is one of the great untold stories of the Civil War, is the differing prison camps that were held by the North and the South.
There's a very good book about one of those prison camps that was in the South that ended up with thousands of people dying in just horrific conditions, people being held outdoors without tents.
I mean, just horrendous stuff.
Three weeks after the Confederate surrender, an unusual procession entered the former camp.
On May 1st, 1865, more than 1,000 recently freed slaves Accompanied by regiments of U.S.
colored troops, including the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, and a handful of white Charlestonians gathered in the camp to consecrate a new proper burial site for the Union dead.
The group sang hymns, gave readings, and distributed flowers around the cemetery, which they dedicated to the martyrs of the racecourse.
The racecourse, of course, being the place where they had held This awful, awful prison camp.
The brutality of the Civil War really cannot be overstated, and this is why it's so frustrating when people overlook the legacy of the literally hundreds of thousands of American troops who gave their lives to end the evil of slavery within American borders.
It's an amazing thing, and to overlook that and to pretend that America's made no sacrifices on this score is just to be historically ignorant.
Now, it doesn't mean all the problems got solved, obviously, 1865, but America's soldiers Obviously, we thank soldiers who are stationed around the globe right now.
I'm sure listening to the sound of my voice, we have lots of members of the military who listen to the show.
And those freedoms are deeply important to the cause of freedom in the world, obviously.
Obviously, we thank soldiers who are stationed around the globe right now.
I'm sure listening to the sound of my voice, we have lots of members of the military who listen to the show.
Thank God for them and thank them for listening.
The holidays founder was a guy named General John Logan.
He was commander in chief of the Union Veterans Group known as the Grand Army of the Republic.
And he issued a decree that May 30th, 1868 should become a nationwide day of commemoration for more than 620,000 soldiers killed in the recently ended civil war.
On Decoration Day, as Logan dubbed it, Americans should lay flowers and decorate the graves of the war dead whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.
According to legend, Logan chose May 30th because it was a rare day that didn't fall on the anniversary of a Civil War battle, because there were so many Civil War battles.
Some historians think that the date was selected to ensure that flowers across the country would be in full bloom, according to History.com.
After the war, Logan, who served as U.S.
Congressman before resigning to join the Army, returned to politics, and he eventually served in both the House and the Senate.
He ran for Vice President in 1884, unsuccessfully.
And his body was laid in state at the U.S.
Capitol.
He was just one of 33 people to have received the honor.
Apparently, he adapted the idea from earlier events in the South because in April 1886, the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia resolved to commemorate the fallen once a year, which is a decision that seemed to have influenced Logan to follow suit according to his own wife.
But commemorations were rarely held on one standard day.
They were sort of held on a variety of days.
It didn't actually become a federal holiday until 1971, because Decoration Day is what it was called.
The first year, more than 27 states held some sort of ceremony, with more than 5,000 people in attendance at a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
By 1890, every former state of the Union had adopted it as an official holiday.
But for more than 50 years, the holiday was used to commemorate those killed just in the Civil War, not in any other American conflict.
And then after World War I, it was expanded out to include those killed in all wars.
Memorial Day, obviously, as opposed to Veterans Day, which is about everybody who has served.
Memorial Day is specifically about people who gave their lives in order to preserve the freedom of the Union.
So, I find this stuff fascinating.
According to History.com, Although the term Memorial Day was used beginning in the 1880s, the holiday was officially known as Decoration Day for more than a century, and then it was changed by federal law, as we mentioned.
Well, four years later, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 finally went into effect, and it moved Memorial Day from its observance on May 30th, regardless of the day of the week, to set it for the last Monday in May.
A lot of veterans groups We're concerned that a lot of people saw it as a long weekend as opposed to a day to pay tribute to our fallen soldiers.
For more than 20 years, their cause was championed by Senator Daniel Inouye who recently died in 2012.
He had reintroduced legislation to set it any day in the middle of the week.
It wouldn't have just been on a Monday.
It wouldn't have been another long weekend.
It would have been a time when we all stand I'm in favor of that.
I think that we should move it to whatever day May 30th is.
We should move it back to its original date so that it doesn't just become another day that you have off and you take it off for a long weekend.
Yes, we can enjoy Memorial Day, but obviously we should have half our brain, more than half our brain, on the reason that we are spending that day barbecuing as opposed to working.
And we should all try to do something for a soldier that day or a soldier's family that day.
In Israel, they do this right.
In Israel, they actually stop all traffic in the country at a particular time on the fallen soldiers' day in Israel, and they play air raid sirens all across the country, people People literally stop their cars on the freeway, get out of their cars, and stand there until the air raid siren is over.
We should have something like that in the United States as well.
Despite the increasing celebration of the holidays as some rite of passage, there are still some formal rituals on the books.
The American flag is supposed to be hung at half-staff until noon on Memorial Day and then raised to the top of the staff.
And since 2000, when the U.S.
Congress passed legislation, all Americans are encouraged to pause for a national moment of remembrance at 3 p.m.
local time.
So that should actually be formalized.
We should have whatever noise it is, sirens, whatever it is, to ensure that at 3 p.m.
everybody stops what they are doing.
The federal government has also used the holiday to honor non-veterans.
The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on Memorial Day in 1922.
The Indy 500 has become its own Memorial Day tradition, obviously.
The reason that I think it's important to remember all of this is because we live in a country when there are very few unifying symbols.
There are very few unifying Things that bring us together.
We fight about everything with each other all the time.
We seem to really dislike each other in a lot of ways.
But this is one where we should all come together.
And it's unfortunate that during the 1960s, a lot of the patriotism surrounding our fallen soldiers was lost.
During the 1960s, soldiers who were coming back from Vietnam were treated really terribly.
Even now, there's this weird idea on the left that soldiers are either heroes or victims.
And that if a soldier goes off to serve in a foreign land and dies heroically, That soldier was somehow a victim of the government that sent him over there in the first place.
We have a volunteer army now.
I've always found this idea really insulting.
These soldiers are making a sacrifice, and the sacrifice that they are making, they are doing with full knowledge of what it is they are getting into.
That's what makes the sacrifice worth making.
That's what makes the sacrifice so incredible.
They're making more of a sacrifice than I have.
They're making more of a sacrifice than virtually anyone in my generation has.
I mean, the number of people in my generation joining the military is still extraordinarily low.
They're doing something I did not do.
They're doing something I did not have the bravery and the courage and the decency to do.
That's an amazing thing.
And to rob them of the volition of that choice by suggesting that when American soldiers die, they die in vain.
Or that when American soldiers die, they are victims of the evil American corporate hierarchy.
and the evil American government.
These are independent-minded people who are making the most altruistic decision they can, which is to take their own lives and put them on the line for us.
To rob them of that volition is to rob them of what makes their lives meaningful in the first place.
It's also a great time to remember that for all of the leftist talk about how America has been a terrible force in the world, how America is responsible for slavery and imperialism and colonialism, wherever American troops have set their boots, the world is a better place.
Wherever American troops have kept their boots, the world is certainly a better place.
If you don't believe me, just look at Iraq.
There's a lot of talk about how Iraq is a worse place because we intervened.
No, Iraq is a worse place because we pulled out.
When American troops entered Iraq, Iraq was run by the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, where women were being forcibly imprisoned and raped and tortured by Saddam Hussein's son.
It was a hellhole.
He was gassing his own people, the Kurds.
And when we went in, we broke a lot of stuff, and a lot of people died, and that is awful.
But there is no question that the place got a lot worse when America pulled out.
Where American troops set their boots, things get better, which is why, still, the vast majority of oppressed people on planet Earth If they could, would look to the arrival of the American flag in their land as an opportunity to cut back repression and to fight repression as opposed to imperialism, colonialism, look at these evil Americans and all the rest.
Again, the reality is that America has freed Europe not once but twice.
America has freed the world of the Soviet menace.
That is due to the sacrifice of American soldiers.
Our history is long and glorious with regards to our military interventions.
And that is certainly true, including wars like Vietnam, which was not a war fought for American imperial interests.
It was a war fought to preserve South Vietnam's independence.
It was a war fought to preserve the democracy of Vietnam and to move toward a better democracy in Vietnam and save them from the repression and evil of the Viet Cong administration, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including in Cambodia, just across the border.
Domino theory was correct.
Cambodia did fall and a million people were killed by Pol Pot.
When America precipitously pulls out, things get bad.
When America stays, Germany becomes nice Germany.
And nobody thinks of Germany as a threatening country anymore.
Why?
Because America overran Germany, along with her allies, and then proceeded to turn Germany into a thriving Western democracy.
And the same thing is true in Japan, which was a complete imperialist dictatorship.
And then America came in with our troops, and we occupied the place, and there are still troops in Japan.
South Korea is only free because of American troops, because of American materiel, and American men and women willing to sacrifice their lives in order to make South Koreans free.
The reason they're not all living under the gulag conditions of Kim Jong-un is because of the strength and power of America's military might.
This is why whenever there's an attempt by folks on the left to cut back America's military, the case being that a strong, virile military scares people.
It makes the world a scarier, worse place.
The answer is every time we do that, that is immediately followed by some sort of terrorist attack or brutal attack on Americans, and then we have to build up our military again.
Bill Clinton spent years cutting back the American military, and then there was the attack of 9-11, and then we had to rebuild the American military.
The threat either is stopped there or it comes here.
The same was true in Pearl Harbor.
By 1941, by the time of America's entry into World War II and Pearl Harbor, the American military, the standing American military, was smaller than the standing military of the Philippines.
America had the 16th largest military on planet Earth in 1941.
Then we ramped back up.
If America had been a lot more muscular on the world stage and had attempted to prevent The imperialism of the Japanese and the imperialism of the Germans.
Earlier than that, working with our allies, a lot of lives would have been saved.
A lot of lives would have been saved.
There's this weird idea that's risen in both isolationist circles and leftist circles.
This is sort of where a lot of Ron Paul foreign policy fans run directly into the arms of Bernie Sanders foreign policy fans.
That America's presence on the world stage is unnecessary, that if we withdraw nothing bad happens, that it's not in America's interest to be quote-unquote global policemen.
We don't have to be global policemen.
Nobody's suggesting that America has to be the world police and save everybody from themselves.
But we do have to assess what is in America's interests.
Where do the gravest threats lie?
And then we have to be active on those threats.
Because just like with policing, if you are not proactively policing a particular area, it goes to hell in a handbasket and soon those areas spread.
Broken windows theory doesn't just apply to domestic crime, it also applies to foreign policy.
Which again, does not mean that America has to compromise our own safety and security and the use of our military force for every small humanitarian mission.
It does mean that when we can, we should, and it also means that morality has a heavy part to play in America's foreign policy.
It has always had a heavy part to play in America's foreign policy.
There's this realist idea out there that morality doesn't play any role in what we do on foreign policy.
And obviously the American people do not disagree, do not agree with that.
The American people believe that there is still room for virtue in American foreign policy, which is why we have this really divided mind about foreign policy that I think we need to figure out because otherwise we're putting our own soldiers in unwinnable situations.
The divided mind goes like this.
Something terrible happens on a foreign front.
There's a slaughter in Syria.
There's a slaughter in Sudan.
There's a slaughter in Somalia.
And the American people say, see it on TV?
They say, that looks awful.
We need to do something about that.
That looks terrible.
And then whatever American administration is in power, Republican, Democrat, doesn't matter.
They say, okay, we'll respond to that by doing something.
And then within five weeks, the American people say, we really shouldn't be in there.
You know, there's no reason for us to be in there in the first place.
Foreign policy should be conducted along the lines of a long-range attempt to figure out exactly what is in America's interest.
If we can do that, then we can ensure that we are using our military in the best possible way and that our military members signed up for the right gig.
But on this Memorial Day, it's time to stop and say thank you to all of the members of the military who laid down their lives so that we could spend today having fun, and that I could do my podcast, and that I could spend time with my family, and that you could do whatever it is that you're doing today.
This is a free and wonderful country because of the power and might of the American military, the greatest force for freedom in the history of mankind.
Okay, meanwhile, speaking of foreign policy, there's a lot of hubbub over the weekend and today about President Trump and North Korea.
Obviously, last week, President Trump pulled out of the summit with North Korea.
Now there are rumors that the summit is going to be back on with North Korea.
This is a negotiation tactic by President Trump.
I don't think that President Trump should be giving us constant updates on whether there's going to be a summit with North Korea.
I think the reason for that is that if he continues to give us these constant updates about what's going on with North Korea, it makes it seem as though he is desperate to have this meeting with North Korea.
America should never be desperate to have a meeting with anybody.
We're the most powerful country on the face of the earth and in the history of the world.
There's no reason we should be desperate to meet with a tin pot dictator.
It is his job to come to us with something to give up so that we can reinstate him in the community of nations.
President Trump is saying that North Korea blew it on the summit and basically this is right.
Based on the recent statement of North Korea, I have decided to terminate the planned summit in Singapore on June 12th.
While many things can happen and a great opportunity lies ahead, potentially, I believe that this is a tremendous setback.
For North Korea, and indeed, a setback for the world.
Okay, well, this is a negotiation tactic by President Trump.
Democrats, however, are celebrating the fact that the summit fell apart.
So it's hilarious.
The Democrats who were saying he never should have held the summit in the first place are celebrating the fact that it fell apart.
Now, basically, whatever Trump does, they proceed to do the opposite.
So Nancy Pelosi comes out, she says, Kim Jong-un must be having a giggle fit over the canceled summit.
Well, really?
He's having a giggle fit?
Like, why?
So he can go back to his crappy, his crappily run country with its exploded nuclear mountain?
I think it's a good thing for Kim Jong-un.
Here you had a thug, a person who killed his own family members, a person who runs a police state, being legitimized by the President of the United States.
They were on a par with each other.
He got global recognition and regard.
He's the big winner.
And when he got this letter from the president saying, OK, never mind, he must be having a giggle fit right there.
There's no evidence whatsoever.
Kim Jong Un is happy about any of this.
That's not going to stop Democrats from claiming that Kim Jong-un is happy about all this because their opposition to Trump is much stronger than their opposition to Kim Jong-un.
You'd figure that with a nuclear-armed evil dictator, we might all be able to get at least a little bit on the same page as far as who's the bad guy in the narrative, but apparently Democrats are unable to do that.
Speaking of which, there was a lot of talk before the election about President Trump and Russia, Russia collusion, and President Trump is going to be Giving up power over American foreign policy to the Russians and all of the rest of this.
Well, that obviously has not happened.
President Trump has been quite harsh with the Russians.
He's imposed a lot of sanctions that the Obama administration did not.
He has armed the Ukrainians.
The Ukrainian government was thanking President Trump just last week for arming them properly or more properly.
Well, now it has come up that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014, that was shot down, indeed, by a group connected with Russia.
At the time, Russia denied any involvement in the crash that killed all those aboard.
A news conference in the Netherlands last week, Wilbert Polissen of the Dutch National Police announced that after investigators had scrutinized the images, it was determined that the missile originated from Russia's 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade from the city of Kursk in Western Russia.
The missile was part of the Russian Armed Forces.
Fred Westerbeke, who's chief prosecutor of the National Prosecutor's Office of the Netherlands, according to Mediaite, also noted that at the time the plane went down, the area was controlled by Russian separatists.
He said that this raises questions such as to whether the brigade was actively involved in downing MH17.
It's an important question, which the Joint Investigation Team are still investigating.
Russia continues to deny any involvement, of course.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced, quote, both in its first hours after the tragedy, Vladimir Putin is an evil human being.
His regime is evil.
It has conducted acts of evil.
That was 300 dead for no reason other than Russian militarism.
President Trump has stood up to the Russians.
happened in the skies of Ukraine and brought the relevant evidence to the Dutch investigation team.
Vladimir Putin is an evil human being.
His regime is evil.
It has conducted acts of evil.
That was 300 dead for no reason other than Russian militarism.
Now, President Trump has stood up to the Russians.
This is the part of the quid pro quo I don't understand.
If the idea was that the Russians were going to elect Trump so that they would get back something from Trump, I'm waiting for the thing that they are getting back from Trump.
I'm just not seeing the evidence of this.
I just don't see the evidence of this.
And all the Democrats who are complaining about Russian interference in the election, I'd like to see them be half as upset when Russia actually kills journalists or when Russia invades sovereign countries as they did to Crimea and President Obama did nothing, or when they took control of Syria and President Obama facilitated all of that.
In other words, it's Democrats playing politics with foreign policy.
And I just, I find it abhorrent that they are so attached to the idea that Republicans are the bad guys.
They can't even get together on some pretty obvious matters here.
Okay.
Meanwhile, President Obama made an amazing statement at the end of last week.
And this statement is worthy of discussion.
So the statement is that he did not have scandals as president.
The coverage of scandals by the media is completely disproportionate between Republicans and Democrats.
This is the real issue here.
So President Obama, according to Newsweek, took a light swing at his successor during a tech conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.
He said his eight years in office were scandal-free.
He says, I didn't have scandals, which seems like it shouldn't be something you brag about.
And then he said, actually, if you look at the history of the modern presidency, coming out of the modern presidency without anybody going to jail is really good.
It's a big deal.
He said, no one in my White House ever got in trouble for screwing up, as long as there wasn't malicious intent behind it.
Okay, this, of course, is the point, right?
You see him elide the point right there at the very end, right?
He says, no one got in trouble because there was no malicious intent.
Does that ring a few bells?
Malicious intent?
That was the excuse used by James Comey and the FBI not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for maliciously setting up a private server to hide her emails and putting 33,000 emails on there and then destroying all of them.
And so that was not malicious intent, according to James Comey.
And so what Obama says is, maybe we had scandals.
I mean, maybe we did some scandalous stuff, but we never meant to do scandalous stuff.
Absolute hogwash, absolute nonsense.
His administration was certainly not scandal-free.
Benghazi was a major scandal, despite what Democrats would say.
Hey, this was a scandal in which the State Department repeatedly refused requests by Ambassador Chris Stevens for additional security in Benghazi.
No troops were forthcoming in the middle of a 17-hour attack.
In the middle of a huge attack in Benghazi, a 13-hour attack in Benghazi, and nothing came.
And then there was a cover-up by the Obama administration claiming it had nothing to do with lack of security or Libyan policy in the first place.
Instead, what it really had to do with was a video made by some anonymous YouTube guy nobody had ever heard of.
So that was a scandal.
There's Fast and Furious, in which the Obama administration greenlit the movement of killing weapons, as they would say, down to Mexican drug cartels, which were then used in the murder of U.S.
border agent Brian Terry.
You remember that the Obama administration was involved in the IRS scandal, in which Obama's IRS suspiciously started targeting only conservative 501c3 groups.
And they claimed, no, no, no, we never would do that.
Of course, that's exactly what happened.
The Obama administration was repeatedly involved in deep levels of corruption.
No one was prosecuted because the DOJ was run by Barack Obama's wingman, Eric Holder.
But here's the real point.
Barack Obama thinks that he was never involved in a scandal because he was not, according to the media.
According to the media, he was never involved in a scandal.
And this has been a repeat point of contention for folks on the right.
A lot of people on the left don't understand why so many folks on the right are so upset all the time about the media.
Why are we so upset about the media?
Aren't the media just trying to tell the truth?
Don't the media have a job to do?
Here's the problem.
Whenever a Democrat gets involved in a scandal, the coverage is less Blanket, shall we say, than the coverage of a Republican when a Republican is involved in a similar scandal, right?
Do you even remember the name of that New York Attorney General who had to resign because he was calling girlfriends his slaves and then sexually abusing them?
Do you remember that guy allegedly sexually abusing them?
Remember that guy?
His name was Eric Schneiderman.
That lasted for five hours, right?
I mean, that sucker was over immediately.
That was over as fast as it began.
But think of Republicans for whom this has happened.
The David Vitter scandal went on for a long time.
That was a consensual affair with a call girl.
And that went on for a lot longer.
The Donald Trump scandals obviously have continued for a lot longer.
Now you may say, well, what about Republicans who resigned?
Did the scandals continue for them?
The answer is yes, the scandals does continue for Republicans who resigned from office.
Bob Packwood obviously is still synonymous with scandal.
So, I mean, you can go all the way back with this.
And the media have guarded Democrats with their pens for years.
Here's the latest story about this.
It's not played this way by the New York Post, but this is obviously the hidden story here.
In May 1961, an elderly woman in Paris heard a knock at the door of her six-story walk-up apartment.
It was only the most powerful man in the world.
The President of the United States was going door-to-door hoping to find the call girl he had discreetly arranged to meet.
John F. Kennedy, it turned out, used a fake excuse about a doctor's visit to attend a long-arranged dalliance while in Paris for a crucial summit, only to wind up in the wrong building, knocking on the doors of random Parisians who were left with the surprise of their lives.
The tale of this ill-advised but ultimately successful liaison is recorded in Madame Cloud, Her Secret World of Pleasure, Privilege, and Power by William Stadime.
Madame Cloud, born Fernand Grudet in 1923 in Angers, France, was one of the world's most successful madams.
Starting in 1957, she ran an exclusive High class prostitution ring that offered a very specific type of woman.
Tall, supermodel, gorgeous, classy, and upscale, or at least trained to appear so, to the world's richest and most powerful men.
The young women who worked for her were known as Cloud Girls, which became a well-known and powerful brand.
She scouted them carefully, paid for plastic surgery if needed, and ultimately hoped to marry them off to aristocracy.
A date with a Cloud Girl was one of those pinnacle Paris experiences, right, Stadium?
Like staying at the Ritz, or a dinner at Maxime's, or wearing a Lanvin suit, an apotheosis of luxury that the French can do better than any other nationality.
According to Stadium, Madame Cloud's client list included the world's most successful men, Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Sammy Davis Jr., former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, three generations of Gettys, Marlon Brando, Groucho Marx.
If you're rich, famous, and male in the 20th century, Chancellor Madame Cloud knew what you liked in bed and provided exactly that for Kennedy.
His desired liaison required almost as much detailed preparation as an actual political summit.
After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, Kennedy thought a meeting in Europe with French and Soviet leaders Charles de Gaulle and Nikita Khrushchev, respectively, could serve as a reset for his presidency.
He decided that he and First Lady Jackie Kennedy would embark on their first official European tour.
This would be the trip where Jackie so entranced the French, Kennedy famously introduced himself as the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.
But while Jackie was thrilled at the prospect of meeting novelist and newly appointed French culture minister André Malraux, one of her literary idols, her husband looked to fulfill a different sort of fantasy.
If JFK had a type, it was a wholesome, snooty, proper, preppy girl whose flaunted untouchability he could violate.
Girls like Jacqueline Beauvier, writes Stadium, who notes that Kennedy learned about Madam Cloud from Sinatra.
Here was a madam who specialized in exactly what JFK was after.
The liaison was apparently arranged between Madam Cloud and Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary.
When Salinger first proposed the arrangement, Cloud turned him down, fearing the many things that could go wrong if the president's visit to a prostitute went haywire.
But Salinger convinced Cloud that any problems could work in her favor, a scandal would make her a legend to the sex-comfortable French, and that a successful dalliance would bring her to the attention of the world's most powerful men.
So Salinger, who's, again, this is JFK's private secretary, exhorted the madam, quote, rise to the occasion.
Do it for your career.
Do it for your country.
He riffed, paraphrasing JFK's inaugural address.
Think big.
Weighing risks and rewards like the shrewd banker she might have otherwise been, Cloud decided to go for it.
So, Kennedy wanted to hook up with a French actress who looked like Jackie Kennedy, and apparently that didn't work, so instead he decided to go to a whore.
Now, here is the real question.
That was 1961.
It is now 2018.
It took 57 years for this to hit the press.
57 years for this to hit the press.
Do you really think the press weren't there in Paris?
At a meeting with Charles de Gaulle and Nikita Khrushchev?
Do you think the press really weren't around for any of this?
Do you think the press really didn't know about it?
The press knew about everything.
They knew about everything that was going on with JFK.
Hey, the plan was apparently for Malroux, this French culture minister, to play tour guide to the first lady while the president visited French historical sites.
But then Kennedy begged off, claiming a flare-up of his bad back and saying he needed to visit a French pain specialist.
But instead, he had brought his Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson, for cover, and they headed off to find his mystery lover, only to wind up at the wrong apartment.
So again, is it possible the press didn't know about this?
Unlikely.
Because JFK did this kind of crap all the time.
The Kennedys did this kind of stuff all the time.
The Camelot image the press plastered across the front pages, it was all a lie.
Now you might say that these lies were done for the sake of the American public.
They did this with Hollywood stars at the time, they did it with all presidents at the time, all politicians at the time.
But, that is clearly not true, because even today, the press treat JFK with this sort of glamour and sophistication.
JFK was a significantly worse person in many ways than Bill Clinton.
Okay, and Bill Clinton is nobody's idea of a saint.
And yet, JFK is treated as this wonderful guy, right?
Nobody talks about chipping Kennedy off the Kennedy Center.
Nobody talks about taking that chisel and just chipping that right off the Kennedy Center.
Talk about removing Woodrow Wilson's name from the Woodrow Wilson School over Princeton.
But they will never talk about removing JFK's name, even though Kennedy was indeed the worst kind of sexual scumbag.
None of that matters, right?
That's totally fine, because Kennedy was Kennedy.
And then you wonder why people on the right don't respect the press?
You wonder why people on the right have no respect for how it is that the press go about their business?
It's because of stuff like this.
Now, meanwhile, in apparently the least shocking news of the day, Rachel Dolezal.
You remember her.
She's the white lady who said that she was black, and then she ended up working for the Spokane chapter of the NAACP, and then it turned out that she was actually just a white girl from Kansas.
Well, now it turns out that according to KHQ, which is a local station, Dolezal has legally changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016 because she's a screwed-up human being, is accused of first-degree theft by welfare fraud, perjury in the second degree, and false verification for public assistance.
Her potential punishment under RCW 74.08.331 could include up to 15 years in prison.
Because Dolezal changed her name, we'll be referring to her as Nkechi Diallo.
According to court documents, Diallo illegally received almost $9,000 in food assistance and illegally received $100 in child care assistance.
Total restitution, according to documentation, is nearly $9,000, allegedly stolen from August 2015 through November 2017.
So what exactly happened?
Well, The investigation into Diallo's alleged theft started in March 2017, when a DSHS Office of Fraud and Accountability investigator received information that Diallo had written a book that got published.
The investigator said he'd heard Diallo say she was getting public assistance, but also knew a typical public publishing contract included payments of $10,000 to $20,000.
The investigator conducted a review of Diallo's records and found she'd been reporting her income was usually less than $500 a month in child support payments.
At one point, when asked as to how she was paying her bills, she reported barely, with help from friends and gifts.
However, between August 2015 and September 2017, she had installed nearly $84,000 into her account, and she did not report this to the Department of Social and Health Services.
So, there's that.
Now, I feel bad for Rachel Dolezal.
She's obviously a mentally ill person, right?
That's not hard to see.
Rachel Dolezal is a mentally ill person.
She's a white girl who believes that she's black, and she has lived a really dissolute life.
I mean, her life has been just a mess.
Why is it that if I say that Rachel Dolezal is mentally ill, this is treated as common knowledge, but if I say that a man who believes he is a woman is mentally ill, this is treated as crazy?
Let me tell you something.
Believing you're a member of a different race is a lot less biologically suspect than believing that you are a member of a different sex.
Okay?
Just putting that out there.
But Rachel Dolezal, doing what everybody always knew she would, right?
It turns out that she is a fraud.
Shocking.
Who can believe it?
Who can believe it?
Now, in other news, In just a second, I want to get to a shocking story out of Parkland, Florida.
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So in other news, over in Parkland, Texas, this is an amazing story.
According to the local 10.com, several parents of victims at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre said that a former Broward Sheriff's Office Deputy Scott Peterson, who stood outside the school for several minutes while bullets rang out, had done his job.
Their children might not have lost their lives.
I think Peterson is the lowest form of life available, said Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jamie was gunned down on the third floor.
My daughter would be alive if not for him.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel publicly criticized Peterson for his inaction during the shooting.
But now is amazing.
A report that recently surfaced has some victims' families calling for a nude investigation of Peterson for a case he handled four years to the day prior to the massacre.
The case involved two 17-year-old students bullying a 14-year-old freshman, with one holding down the younger boy by his ankles, while the other kicked the victim, grabbed his genitals, and then took the victim's own baseball bat and began shoving it against his buttocks, simulating rape through the boy's clothes.
One of those assailants, the boy who allegedly held down the victim, was Scott Israel's son, the sheriff of Broward County.
Brett, defense attorney Alex Ariza, who represents shooting victim Anthony Borges, who was shot five times in the Valentine's Day massacre but survived, said the case could have led to felony charges.
He could have been charged with a lewd and lascivious.
And I'm being conservative, said Ariza.
Peterson claimed in the report it was a simple battery under the board's discipline matrix, and he decided to give both of the boys attacks a three day suspension.
What is that?
It's like an alternative universe law, Ariza said?
Because what happens?
Because you're in the school, you don't have to obey regular laws?
In fact, the disciplinary matrix includes sexual misconduct and serious battery, both of which arguably applied in this case.
Ariazza said, quote, you will never see somebody grabbing somebody's crotch and poking some kid in the butt with a bat and getting a simple battery for it.
Gutenberg said the facts of the incident infuriated him, Scott Peterson failed to do his job again.
It's just another example of a bad crime and somebody not being held accountable.
It's kind of interesting, the intersection of the same people.
Well, it's more than interesting.
Obviously, it means that there was some sort of relationship between Scott Israel, the sheriff of Broward County, and Deputy Peterson.
One of the boy's father says, listen, if Deputy Peterson had been made to answer for this, maybe he would have been replaced by a more competent deputy.
If this wouldn't have been the sheriff's son, would his sexual assaults have been reduced to a simple battery?
Apparently, Peterson noted in his report, the victim's parents were notified of the discipline and did not request additional law enforcement action.
But who cares?
It's the job of the police to enforce the law.
It's not the job of the parents to enforce the law.
Just amazing, just amazing.
And Scott Israel, remember, has been defended by a bunch of the people in Parkland who wish to put blame on the NRA for what happened in Parkland.
The reality is this is a law enforcement screw-up in every possible way, and corruption in local law enforcement is not relegated to issues of race.
Very often it is relegated also to issues, it includes issues, of personal corruption, of relationships between people who then use those relationships in order to forward their own ambitions or to protect people who they know.
What a horrifying story.
I mean, really just bad.
Okay, meanwhile, ESPN continues to lose subscribers.
The reason I bring this up is because I think so much of our sports debate now, whether it's the NFL kneeling controversy, which, you know, I don't know why you would kneel for the flag.
I think there are better ways to protest.
The entire NFL kneeling controversy has been driven by media coverage.
If players were not getting media coverage for kneeling, then they wouldn't be doing it.
And part of that is the insane politicization that has taken place over at ESPN.
Now, I used to be a huge ESPN fan.
A huge ESPN fan.
For a while, I subscribed to ESPN the magazine.
I was a probably hour daily watcher.
I would get up at six.
When I was a kid, I would get up at six o'clock in the morning because before the internet was really great with clips.
is to get up at six o'clock in the morning every morning and run into the den and turn on ESPN and watch SportsCenter hoping to catch my White Sox highlights.
And now you can watch eight hours of ESPN without ever getting a sports highlight.
Instead, ESPN has become entirely talk radio combative back and forth between liberals and leftists.
There's no one on the right ever on ESPN.
ESPN is completely to the left.
Anybody who even expresses a mildly conservative opinion is immediately thrown out.
Well, there's a great article at the Wall Street Journal about the politicization at ESPN.
Here's what they say.
John Skipper was furious.
One of his star anchors, Jemele Hill, had sent a tweet calling President Donald Trump a white supremacist.
Mr. Trump supporters called for her to be fired.
Prominent black athletes defended the anchor who's African-American.
Sitting in his office last September, Mr. Skipper, then ESPN's president, lit into Mrs.
Hill, according to people familiar with the meeting.
If I punish you, he told her, I'd open up to protest and come off as racist.
If I do nothing, that'll fuel a narrative among conservatives and a faction within ESPN that the network had become too liberal.
Mr. Skipper chose to spare Ms.
Hill.
Mr. Trump weighed in on Twitter.
ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics and bad programming.
People are dumping it in record numbers.
The president's tweet was hyperbolic, but it tapped into a real anxiety at ESPN.
What was the way forward for a company shaken to its foundations by the cord-cutting revolution?
And the answer is pretty obvious.
Cover sports, you idiots.
But they haven't covered sports.
Instead, they've decided to counter-program these discussion programs every half an hour, on the half hour, for the entire day.
Well, why would anybody subscribe to ESPN for that?
You can just listen to Bill Simmons' podcast and get better sports coverage.
And better sports... You can listen to The Ringer.
I listen to them.
They're great.
There's tons of great sports programming out there you can get on demand.
Why would you tune into sports television on ESPN to watch a couple people who don't know anything about politics jabber about politics?
Utterly useless.
So according to the Wall Street Journal, executives at the sports media giant wanted to seek out new audiences by spicing up shows with opinionated analysis and debate, including on SportsCenter, its struggling news and highlights franchise.
Except that the struggle at SportsCenter has largely been occasioned by the politics of SportsCenter.
Again, I can watch 45 minutes of SportsCenter without seeing a single baseball highlight.
They've decided which sports they want to cover, and it's usually the NFL and the NBA.
There's very little coverage of the MLB.
I've done full articles on this over at Daily Wire about the discrepancy in coverage, and that's because they're going after different demographics.
The reality is that demographically speaking, the disproportionate share of people who watch NBA and NFL are... NFL tends to be pretty proportionate across the spectrum.
NBA fans tend to be disproportionately African-American, and MLB fans tend to be disproportionately white.
ESPN has decided that because a lot of viewers of the NBA watch more sports program, it's not a stupid decision, they'll focus more on the NBA.
But in doing so, in completely cutting the MLB out and the hockey, for example, I mean, they've cut a lot of their baseball coverage.
Baseball Tonight is barely on anymore.
They've cut out a lot of the audience they used to have, legacy subscribers.
Executives of the sports, but the amount and intensity of political expression generated sharp internal disagreements over whether ESPN was appropriately taking part in the broader national conversation or whether top executives were encouraging a divisive company culture and giving too much leeway to host to promote left-leaning views, both on air and in social media. but the amount and intensity of political expression generated sharp And this, of course, is absolutely true.
Linda Cohn, who's one of the most prominent female anchors, in April 2017, she gave a radio interview and she said ESPN's politics were pushing away viewers and the network had overpaid for NBA rights.
So Skipper, of course, called her to yell at her.
Why ESPN found itself torn up by the nation's partisan politics traces back to its fundamental business challenge.
Its status as cable TV's most expensive channel had become a liability.
Consumers grew fed up with their monthly cable prices, big cable distributors began offering discounted packages that didn't include the network, and consumers started opting for these.
So there's obviously a cost-cutting problem.
A cord-cutting problem, rather.
But that doesn't answer the real question, which is, was the answer to that to completely counter-program along the lines of stuff that nobody wanted to see?
Here's the reality.
Sports is a politics-free zone for most people who watch it.
They're not interested in the politics.
And the more politics you ladle into our sports, the less we're going to watch you.
The NFL realized it, ESPN had better, or they're going to go the way of the dodo bird.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow.
First, actually, I have to do a couple of things.
So first, I want to do a couple Federalist Papers because we haven't had a chance to actually do the Federalist Papers in the recent past.
So I have to catch up on a couple of them and then we'll do some things I like and some things that I hate.
So let's begin.
With the Federalist Paper.
So, we're going to do Federalist Paper 29, which we didn't do last week, and we'll do Federalist Paper 30 for this week.
So, Federalist Paper 29 is by Alexander Hamilton, and this is the concluding Federalist Paper about whether there should be a standing army in the United States that is run by the federal government.
So, Alexander Hamilton says yes, and then he says that if the standing army starts to make trouble, the states will stand up to them.
So, for all the talk about you don't need militias, you don't need armed citizens, Hamilton repeatedly and throughout the Federalist Papers claims that the best insurance against an overreaching federal government will be states that are able to call upon their citizens to defend themselves against federal overreach.
Critics, according to Hamilton, said the federal army would be chief law enforcement mechanism, and they said that there was no provision for posse comitatus.
So there are a lot of people who said, well, instead of the federal government having its own law enforcement body, why don't they just call on the states to help them enforce the law?
Now, ironically enough, there was a push by the states against Posse Comitatus after the Civil War, because they said, we're not going to be the levers of the federal government.
But at the time, there were a lot of people saying, we don't need the federal government to be quite so overreaching.
We'll just have the state enforce some of this law.
Well, Hamilton says that Congress could create such mechanisms, but in reality, a lot of these fears were justified.
Because as the federal government grew, there was a serious move to grow the federal law enforcement bodies.
Virtually every branch of the federal executive now has some sort of law enforcement agency attached to it with guns and with bulletproof vests and the whole deal.
And that's because in the end, the government is essentially a group of people with guns, okay?
The government is a body that is made for force.
As, as Nock would say.
And so here's what Hamilton says.
Here is his guarantee against federal tyranny.
He says, What shadow of danger can there be from men who are daily mingling with the rest of their countrymen and who participate with them in the same feelings, sentiments, habits, and interests?
What reasonable cause of apprehension can be inferred from a power in the Union to prescribe regulations for the militia and to command its services when necessary, while the particular states are to have the sole and exclusive appointment of the officers?
If it were possible, seriously, to indulge a jealousy of the militia upon any conceivable establishment under the federal government, the circumstance of the officers being in the appointment of the state ought at once to extinguish it.
So the idea was that there would be the state militia that would be called up by the federal government as supplementary forces.
There'd be this corps of experts at the federal government level, and they would be the expert military, and then the states would supplement that with the National Guard, for example.
In reality, obviously, the army has grown way beyond these bounds.
The military has grown way beyond these bounds for both good and for ill in some cases.
So Alexander, mostly for good, I think.
But in terms of threats to state rights that don't involve actual horrible racism and Jim Crow and slavery, it's not great the federal government has the capacity to override everybody.
Okay, so time for Federalist Paper number 30.
So Federalist 30, now Hamilton shifts topics.
And Hamilton, instead of talking about the standing military, he's going to talk about why the federal government should be able to levy taxes directly.
So under the Articles of Confederation, which preceded the formation of the Constitution of the United States, the federal government requested money from the state government.
So they would say, we need this much money from you, Connecticut, and Connecticut would have to turn in the money.
One problem.
Connecticut wouldn't turn in the money.
So Alexander Hamilton says, listen, we can't run a federal government along these bases.
He says national credit will be destroyed if we can't levy taxes to support issuance of bonds, for example, when we are in the middle of a war.
He says money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic, as that which sustains its life in motion and enables it to perform its most essential functions.
A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution.
From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue.
Either the people must be subjected to continual plunder as a substitute for a more eligible motive supplying the public wants, or the government must sink into fatal atrophy.
So, either the government's going to come in and steal your money on an occasional basis, or they're going to collapse.
Or the federal government will collapse, as it seemed to be doing under the Articles of Confederation.
And then, he makes the argument that we need a system That allows the federal government to tax directly the citizens of the United States.
Now, the income tax was not a thing.
The income tax was not constitutional until the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which happened in the early 20th century.
Up until then, most taxes were through the form of property taxes on the state level, import taxes on the federal level, and the government was able to run on that basis.
The government was able to run on the basis of that Now, I've advocated for a national sales tax.
I think Hamilton probably would have advocated for the same.
But that is not just because I think tariffs are generally bad policy, and using them as a way to garner revenue seems like a mistake.
But here is what Hamilton says.
If we don't have the power to tax, then we're going to fall into a national debt from which we'll never be able to recover.
Embedded in this message is a simple message for us.
We now have $20 trillion in national debt.
The only reason anyone is buying our bonds is because they expect us to pay that off.
The only reason they expect us to pay it off is at some point they assume that we will massively tax our own citizenry, which means we better get our debt under control, or as Hamilton says, we're going to have to tax the living bejesus out of the entire American public.
Hey, that is what's happening next.
That's what's coming next.
So just have that in mind.
Hamilton knew it, and so should everybody else.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I like, and then we'll do a couple of things that I hate.
So here is the thing I like.
Today, Van Jones has been talking about bipartisanship with the Trump administration.
Van Jones actually is working with the Trump administration on a number of issues, including... Van Jones is a communist, okay?
Van Jones is working with them on criminal justice reform.
This idea that no one in the Trump administration is willing to reach out to the other side of the aisle is nonsense.
Trump is much more willing to reach out to the other side of the aisle than Barack Obama ever was, and that is perfectly obvious.
Here's Van Jones talking about it.
The First Step Act will actually make their lives better.
It'll let them earn their way home sooner.
It will stop women prisoners from being shackled when they're having babies.
There's a lot of horrific stuff that's been going on that this bill will eliminate.
And I just can't tell you, the entire Democratic leadership in the House, including Nancy Pelosi, voted on this bill and for this bill that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner are for.
It was a bipartisan breakthrough.
Okay, so Van Jones obviously making a good point here.
And bottom line is that this is true.
I mean, the Obama administration never reached out to Republicans.
There was no effort to reach out to Republicans.
Trump's at least trying.
He's just being refused.
It's one of the reasons his approval ratings are going up.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so, Dr. David Hansen, who's created the eerily lifelike Sophia robot, has now revealed his vision for a future of androids in a new research paper.
So here is what he says.
He says that humans are already making love to sex robots in 2018, but soon they'll be able to marry their amorous androids as well.
So androids will get the same civil rights as humans by the year 2045, which includes the right to marry, own land, and vote in general elections.
Good luck with the voting in general elections, although they can't do worse than most people are doing with their votes.
So his new paper suggests that people will be marrying robots.
Here's my problem with the whole marrying of robots idea.
Presumably these robots will be unable to procreate.
Right?
You're not gonna have robot children.
And they don't actually have uteri.
They're not capable of making babies.
It shows the tremendous selfishness that has overtaken our vision of marriage when people are talking about marrying robots.
Obviously, because this is a lifeless thing, right?
This is a programmed thing.
Now, maybe AI develops to the point where robots have lifelike intelligence, but they certainly don't have the ability to procreate, and the notion that you're going to marry a piece of machinery because it pleases you.
This is not what marriage was for.
As soon as you said that marriage was between any two individuals who loved each other, as opposed to an institution about the bearing and rearing of children, you were immediately running down the path to people marrying whatever it was that they pleased.
Also, you do have to ask the question whether you can actually get proper consent from a sex robot.
Uh, you know, if we're going to be in the area of consent, it seems to me that, you know, animals can't give consent.
I guess the idea with the robot is the robot isn't alive, so who cares?
I mean, you're just, you know, presumably having sex with a chair, essentially.
But at a certain point, there will be serious moral issues with you having sex with an android if the android achieves a certain level of intelligence.
And this is something that people who are participating in this sort of activity ought to consider.
It's funny, actually.
Silicon Valley sort of dealt with some of these issues, actually, in the last season in a very funny way.
What it really goes to is that human beings have decided that all of the universe is about fulfilling our solipsistic desires.
This seems to me utterly untrue, particularly in the realm of marriage.
Any successful marriage is based on precisely the opposite notion.
So, maybe you will be pleased to marry a robot, but if so, what you really have is not a marriage, it's you pleasing yourself.
In every sense of the world.
In every sense of the word.
Okay, so, we'll be back here tomorrow with a lot more.
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