All Episodes
Previous Next
July 11, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:25
Trump Swings At NATO | Ep. 578
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
President Trump's pick of Judge Brett Kavanaugh continues to generate enormous fallout.
President Trump goes in hard at NATO and Sacha Baron Cohen basically humiliates himself.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
As always, many things are happening in the news.
A lot of fallout from President Trump's Supreme Court pick of Brett Kavanaugh.
We'll talk all about that.
Plus, we'll get to President Trump traveling over to visit with NATO before his big meetup with Vladimir Putin, which is happening in Northern Europe somewhere that I don't really care about.
But we will get to all of that in just a second.
First, I want to mention to you that our next episode of The Conversation is coming up quickly this Tuesday, July 17th, 5.30pm Eastern, 2.30pm Pacific.
All of your questions will be answered by our own Andrew Klavan with our host, Elisha Krauss.
Our live Q&A will be available on YouTube and Facebook for everybody to watch, but only subscribers can ask Drew questions over at dailywire.com.
Check out the pinned comments on this video for more information.
Once again, subscribe to ask Drew live questions, Tuesday, July 17th at 5.30 p.m.
Eastern, 2.30 p.m.
Pacific, and join the conversation.
Learn all about the greatest, goodest, bestest of all things.
Go check it out with Andrew Klavan next week, July 17th, 5.30 p.m.
Eastern, 2.30 p.m.
Pacific.
Also, Let's say that you are a lazy bum and you don't actually want to go to the grocery and you don't know any recipes because you don't know how to cook.
Well, there's one place that can make all of this very easy for you.
That, of course, would be the folks over at Blue Apron.
So are you looking forward to honey chipotle glazed chicken with poblano and lime rice that you cooked yourself?
How about smoky depth being added to your dinner while enjoying the warm weather?
Well, Blue Apron can make all that happen for you.
You don't even have to know how to cook.
They make all of this happen very easily.
They provide you convenience and variety by delivering fresh, pre-portioned ingredients, step-by-step recipes directly to your door.
All of them can be cooked in under 45 minutes.
The menu changes every week based on what's in season.
It is designed by Blue Apron's in-house culinary team.
They also offer 12 recipes every week.
Customers can pick two, three, or four recipes based on what best fits their schedule.
And all of their products are just the finest.
They send only non-GMO ingredients, meat with no added hormones.
Everything from Blue Apron apparently is just terrific.
There are a bunch of people in the office who use Blue Apron.
It has become the hot thing around Los Angeles because who the hell wants to go over to Whole Foods and wait in line behind all the people driving the Priuses when you can just have Excellent ingredients delivered to your door with the recipe, and then you cook it with your family.
I really enjoy cooking with my kids.
You're going to enjoy cooking for yourself as well.
Check out this week's menu.
Get your first three meals for free at blueapron.com slash Shapiro.
That's blueapron.com slash Shapiro.
Again, you get your first three meals for free.
Blue Apron is indeed a better way to cook.
I'm looking at some of these recipes now, and they are just spectacular.
I mean, barbecue vegetable flatbread with Swiss cheese.
I mean, this is all gourmet stuff you're cooking.
Blueapron.com slash Shapiro.
Get your first three meals for free.
Okay, so.
The left has no idea how to deal with President Trump's pick of Brett Kavanaugh, because it turns out that Brett Kavanaugh is a pretty well-respected jurist.
He's been on the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years.
He has 300 decisions to his name, and none of them are particularly controversial.
Now, this is one of the areas where I'm not the biggest Kavanaugh fan, is that I like judges who are straightforward and open about their beliefs about precedent and how they would rule in particular cases.
Unfortunately, our system now favors judges who are not quite as open about all those things because we have to get those people through confirmation hearings.
And that is because of the Democrats' politicization of the court beginning with Justice, or should have been Justice, Robert Bork back in the 1980s when Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden decided to destroy the man's life for no reason other than he disagreed with them about constitutional interpretation.
Kavanaugh is providing all sorts of problems for Democrats who have no clue exactly how to handle him.
And naturally, this means that Democrats, folks on the left, are blaming Republicans for politicizing the court.
So the fact is that it was not Republicans who politicized the court.
It was Democrats who decided that they were going to use the court as a political tool openly.
And this begins all the way back in the 1930s when a lot of FDR's New Deal program was unconstitutional.
It violated the bounds of the Constitution.
And the court said it violated the bounds of the Constitution.
And so FDR threatened to pack the courts.
He threatened to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court from 9 to 15.
And he offered that he was going to push in a bunch of Democrats who were going to just greenlight everything he did.
And so the court, in order to protect itself, basically ruled that all of his nonsensical programs that lengthened the Great Depression by up to eight years, that all of these programs were actually constitutional.
They get a spate of horrific decisions in the 1930s and 1940s, basically sanctioning enormous government growth, up to and including the worst case maybe in constitutional history, just in pure legal terms, Wickard v. Filburn, a case in which the Supreme Court held that you could not grow grain in your backyard for your own use without the federal government intervening.
The federal government had a right to intervene in you growing stuff in your own backyard because that would affect commerce somehow in some vague way.
Well now, because President Trump has gotten two picks in the last year and a half, Democrats are now suggesting that it's Republicans who are politicizing the court, even though it was Democrats who originally politicized the court and have continued to do so by treating the court as a super legislator, a super legislature of genius, wise liberals who are going to impose their viewpoint on the rest of us.
And these are the people who worship the altar of the notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Hey, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decisions are garbage.
I've read a lot of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decisions.
None of them have anything to do with the Constitution.
All of them have everything to do with her personal politics.
But she's the notorious RBG.
Notorious.
Can you imagine if conservatives lionized anyone like that?
Notorious RBG?
The closest they came was sort of this lionization of Scalia.
Even that never approached the sort of cult hero status where you were worrying about how her workout routines went.
BuzzFeed ran an entire piece like three days ago about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's grueling workout routine.
The woman's 85.
If her routine is that grueling, then she'd be dead.
But here is what the New York Times writes today.
Or at least Lee Epstein and Eric Posner, Epstein, a political scientist and law professor at Washington University, and Posner, a professor at University of Chicago Law School, write about the move by President Trump to put originalists on the court.
Here's what they write in the New York Times.
President Trump was always going to pick a conservative for the Supreme Court.
The only question has been whether to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy with a business conservative or a religious conservative.
No one seriously thought he would consider a moderate, a liberal or an ideologically ambiguous replacement.
First of all, these categories.
You'll notice that whenever I talk about the Supreme Court, I never talk about a conservative justice.
The reason I don't talk about a conservative justice is because a judge should not let his or her political proclivities influence the decision-making.
I always talk about an originalist justice or a textualist justice, somebody who is actually going to interpret the words of the law as they were written and as they were understood at the time.
That is not the same thing as a conservative justice who would presumably just rule in favor of whichever interest he thought was most compelling politically.
So it's only the left that talks about openly political judges.
It says, well, we need a moderate or a liberal on the court.
They say, well, sure enough, Brett Kavanaugh is a conservative in good standing.
Well, Brett Kavanaugh is actually a textualist in pretty good standing.
And the New York Times continues these two professors.
They say, the next Democratic president will nominate a liberal to the court in the hope of tilting it in the other direction.
Everyone is so accustomed to this state of affairs, people have forgotten to question it.
But we wonder whether a Supreme Court that has come to be rigidly divided by both by ideology and party can sustain public confidence for much longer.
Weird how they only have this problem when it comes to Republicans replacing Republican appointees with other Republican appointees.
I don't remember them having the same problem when Elena Kagan, who is a wild leftist, and Sonia Sotomayor, who is an even wilder leftist, were appointed to the court by Barack Obama.
It's amazing, by the way.
You want to know how non-ideological Republicans have been about the court?
There's very easy proof.
Republicans have batted about 500 when it comes to good Supreme Court picks.
For every Scalia, there was an O'Connor.
For every Thomas, there was a Souter.
For every Rehnquist, there was a John Paul Stevens.
For every Alito, there was a Roberts.
There was always somebody who was being appointed who wasn't that great.
But for Democrats, they never get it wrong.
Why?
Because they actually do have ideological litmus tests.
And because when you are not tied to the words of the Constitution and the meaning of the Constitution, this leaves you free to pick among the various solutions that most appeal to you personally.
You end up very quickly picking somebody who agrees with you politically.
But according to these professors at the New York Times, it's the right that's politicized the court.
They say the court has recently entered a new era of partisan division.
If you look at close cases, five to four or five to three, going back to the 50s to illustrate this division, you'll see that the percentage of votes cast in liberal direction by justices who are appointed by Democratic presidents has skyrocketed.
And the same trajectory applies on the other side.
The percentage of votes cast in the conservative direction by justices who are appointed by Republicans has also shot up.
Now, the reason for that is because of the rise of the Federalist Societies.
The Federalist Society is a conservative-minded group, an originalist-minded group.
So they're conservative politically, but they're more originalist and textualist than anything else.
I'd say politically, they're actually closer to libertarian.
And that group has done a better job of vetting Republican candidates.
This is why I'm not concerned that Kavanaugh is going to end up like David Souter.
The reason being, when David Souter was appointed, you didn't have large groups of people who were devoted to vetting David Souter's record.
Now you have enormous groups of people who can, with the touch of a button, pull up every decision Kavanaugh has ever written on and then analyze it for signs of exactly how he will rule in the future.
It is good that we are treating the Supreme Court with this level of care.
And it is demonstrative of the fact that as soon as conservatives woke up and started realizing that the Supreme Court was being used as a tool of policy by the left, they started making sure that appointees to the Supreme Court might actually have to reflect an originalist or textualist bent.
But according to these professors at the New York Times, they say this is a bad thing.
They say this trend is extreme and alarming.
In the 1950s and 60s, the ideological biases of Republican appointees and Democratic appointees were relatively modest.
The gap between them has steadily grown, but even as late as the early 1990s, it was possible for justices to vote in ideologically unpredictable ways.
In closely divided cases in the 1991 term, for example, the single Democratic appointee on the court, Byron White, Voted more conservatively than all but two of the Republican appointees, Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist.
This was at a time when many Republican appointees like Sandra Day O'Connor, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter frequently cast liberal votes.
That's because conservatives had done a crappy job.
And that's also because Byron White was appointed way back when, right?
Byron White, the justice on the Supreme Court, He was originally appointed, if I am not mistaken, by President John F. Kennedy.
So the Democratic Party back in 1960 was not the same as the Democratic Party became in 1990, by the time Byron White was ruling on the court.
And this is a reality, is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in 1960 were much closer on policy than the Democratic Party and the Republican Party by 1990.
In the past 10 years, they've read the New York Times, justices have hardly ever voted against the ideology of the president who appointed them.
Only Justice Kennedy, named to the court by Ronald Reagan, did so with any regularity.
Now, I don't think this is actually true.
If you look at how Justice Scalia voted on some civil libertarian issues, he was constantly sort of surprising people on how he voted on a lot of those issues.
And the same thing will probably hold true of, I think, maybe Gorsuch.
Maybe.
But the fact is that Democrats never vote.
Democrat appointees now never vote against Democratic policy priorities.
Ever.
Even in the most extreme cases.
And if they do, it's only on the narrowest of grounds.
These professors say it's hard to think of any historical precursors.
The most famous period of ideological division on the court was in the 1930s when it repeatedly struck down liberal legislation.
But what is remarkable is that the division was not strongly partisan.
Among the Four Horsemen, the diehard opponents of the New Deal, one was appointed by a Democratic president, another was a Democrat appointed by a Republican president.
Among the three justices who typically voted to uphold New Deal programs, two were appointed by Republican presidents.
Again, that's because the parties themselves were much closer in ideological orientation during the FDR period.
Remember, Herbert Hoover imposed basically the same policies that FDR did, just in slightly smaller scale.
So these professors, Eric Posner, and Lee Epstein, they continue by suggesting that all of this changed in the 1950s and 60s.
They say, Again, for the 30th time, Dwight Eisenhower was a very, very moderate Republican.
two of its liberal stalwarts, William Brennan and Earl Warren, were appointed by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican.
Again, for the 30th time, Dwight Eisenhower was a very, very moderate Republican.
In fact, he was so moderate that in 1948, the Democrats seriously considered the possibility of having Dwight Eisenhower run on the Democratic ticket in 48 and 52, if I'm not mistaken.
The Warren court took a liberal stand on the most controversial issues of the day, including civil rights, sexual freedom, and the rights of criminal suspects and political dissenters, The post-Warren Court case of Roe v. Wade finally galvanized the right.
And that is correct, because Republicans basically started seeing that the court was going to be used as a club.
But only now, apparently, are they upset about this.
They say frustrated with the Supreme Court's opinion to opposition to the New Deal, President FDR tried to pack the court, that is, add more justices.
Although the plan died in Congress, the court also backed down from confrontation with the president.
Both Roosevelt and the court were badly damaged by the clash.
Today, we see similar attacks on the judiciary in Hungary, Poland, and other illiberal democracies.
Assaults on judicial independence are made easier when the public comes to view the judiciary as a political body.
This risk, and not just the identity of the next justice, should be at the center of public attention.
Well, that wouldn't be a risk if the left hadn't already politicized the court.
End of story.
That's why we are having these battles.
It's because the left decided that the court was going to be a tool of policy and it was not actually going to be a tool on behalf of the Constitution of the United States.
Okay, so I want to talk a little bit more about that and explain why the left is so exercised over Brett Kavanaugh in just a second.
First, let's talk about your hair.
So, look up top.
Dudes particularly, look up top.
You're missing some hair, aren't you?
And that's because your dad is missing some hair or your grandpa's missing some hair.
Well, there is no reason you actually have to lose all the rest of that hair.
There is a real solution.
There are two clinically proven medications that let you keep your hair, and they are now inexpensive and easy to get.
You don't need to lose that hair if you don't want to, and that's why I need to tell you about Keeps.
For five minutes now and just a buck a day, you won't have to worry about hair loss ever again.
Getting started with Keeps is really easy.
Sign up takes less than five minutes, you answer a few questions, you snap some photos, you can do it from your computer, right, just turn on Photo Booth or use your phone, and then you send those photos to a licensed doctor who remotely reviews the information and recommends the right treatment for you, all without ever leaving your couch.
Keeps offers generic versions of the only two FDA-approved hair loss products out there.
Some of you have probably tried them before.
They've never gotten them this easily for this price.
Keeps is only $10 to $35 a month.
It's a lot, a lot cheaper than getting these same drugs.
from your local pharmacy.
Now you can get that first month for free as well, which is a great deal.
Go check it out, keeps.com slash ben to receive your first month treatment for free.
Go to keeps.com slash ben.
That's K-E-E-P-S dot com slash ben.
That's a free month of treatment.
Again, keeps.com slash ben.
Use that slash ben so that they know that we sent you.
Okay, so the left is really exercised over Brett Kavanaugh because they recognize that the right, in attempting to reconstrain the judiciary to its traditional role of interpreting the constitution rather than imposing political priorities, that this threatens the left's agenda.
The left believes that its agenda can only be spread not through public legislation, not through the popularity of its agenda, but just by a bunch of people who are really, really wise and liberal and who can impose their views from above.
And so the idea of a Brett Kavanaugh who's gonna come in and help create a new majority on the court that's actually gonna stick to the judiciary's job, that scares the living hell, that scares the living daylights out of Democrats.
And so they're just lying about Brett Kavanaugh now.
So the first lie they're telling is they are suggesting that President Trump is appointing Brett Kavanaugh because Brett Kavanaugh is going to protect President Trump from impeachment.
This is legitimately what they're saying.
So Chuck Schumer is making this case.
He says this is the real reason that Trump wants Kavanaugh.
He was the judge, probably, of the 25.
They all would repeal Roe.
They all would repeal ACA.
But on this issue, the Mueller issue, which came up after the vetting by these two groups, he's probably the most extreme.
And it wouldn't surprise me if that was very important to Donald Trump.
Knowing Donald Trump, and I have no proof, do you think he didn't inquire about this?
Every word of what Chuck Schumer just said is a lie.
First of all, not every judge on that list would vote to overturn Roe.
In fact, I have serious doubts that Kavanaugh will vote to overturn Roe.
We'll get to that in just a little while.
This implication that Kavanaugh is somehow going to protect the president of the United States from criminal indictment is just not true.
Not only is it not true, even the Washington Post says it's not true.
So the accusation is that Kavanaugh, in 2009, published an article in the Minnesota Law Review in which he discussed the possibility of indicting the sitting president of the United States criminally.
And here is what he says, according to the Washington Post.
And not according to me, not according to National Review, according to the left-wing Washington Post.
Kavanaugh helped investigate President Bill Clinton as part of independent counsel Ken Starr's team in the 1990s.
Looking back, Kavanaugh wrote in his 2009 article, the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal investigation offshoots.
Which is an interesting switch by Kavanaugh, who was part of, again, the Ken Starr team.
What he says, the president should not be indicted, but he says you need an act of Congress to prevent the president from being indicted.
In other words, it's not up to the judiciary to protect the president.
The president can be indicted.
The Constitution doesn't prevent that.
You need an act of Congress.
That's not stopping the left from continuously lying about Brett Kavanaugh.
You've got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, new left-wing hero.
She tweets out, He never said that.
He never believed that.
He's never written that.
But these lies are coming fast and furious about Kavanaugh.
That's not even the stupidest one.
We'll get to a couple more that are incredibly dumb.
So let's begin.
With NARAL, Pro-Choice America.
So NARAL is, of course, an abortion rights, an abortion rights group.
And here is what they tweeted out.
There's 15.
Here's what they tweeted out.
They tweeted out, back off, Brett.
And with their, with the clappy hands.
First of all.
You who use the Clappy Hands Emoji, stop it.
You're making yourself look like a douche.
It's stupid.
Okay, the Clappy Hands Emojis are dumb, unless you're using them ironically.
It's one of those things, like using the word woke.
If you use the word woke ironically, then I'm okay with you using the word woke.
If you use the word woke without any sense of irony about your own douchiness, then I have nothing to say to you.
And the same thing is true about the Clappy Hands Emoji.
So it's like, back off, Brett.
Okay, you're an idiot.
Okay, here's what Nerrell actually tweeted.
We'll be DAMNED, DAMNED, all caps, if we're gonna let five men, including some frat boy named Brett, strip us of our hard won bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
First of all, it's not hard won bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
That's the entire point.
You couldn't pass legislation.
It was handed to you on a platter by the Supreme Court.
I'd say it wasn't hard won bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
First of all, even if you think that killing a baby in your womb is bodily autonomy, you didn't win anything near all pro-choice America.
You won nothing.
It was the Supreme Court that handed you stuff on a silver platter because the American people don't agree with your agenda.
Polls show that even pro-choice Americans are very much in favor of restrictions on second and third trimester abortions, for example.
My favorite part of this tweet, though, is where they suggest that Brett Kavanaugh is some frat boy named Brett.
Have you, like, seen Brett Kavanaugh?
Have you, like, looked at Brett Kavanaugh?
You think he's going and, like, he's doing, he's, like, chugging beer with the bros in the aftermath of his D.C.
Circuit court cases?
He goes and plays beer pong after making his decisions?
He's going, he's butt-chugging things?
Like, that's Brett Kavanaugh?
Like, really?
I'm gonna go no on that.
A frat boy named Brett.
Brett Kavanaugh has been on the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years.
Before that, he was involved in virtually every level of federal litigation.
Brett Kavanaugh is about the nerdiest guy you will ever find.
He's a hardcore Catholic who sends his daughters to Catholic school, coaches his daughter's basketball team, and volunteers at the soup kitchen.
Frat boy named Brett.
But no, we're the sexists.
We're the sexists.
All men who don't believe the same things that Nero believes.
They're frat boys.
I love that the left has been relegated to mocking Brett Kavanaugh's first name.
Like really, this is a thing now.
They've got nothing.
So they're now relegated to mocking Brett Kavanaugh's first name.
So Stephen Colbert.
He starts- he has nothing on Kavanaugh.
He's got nothing to say.
So here is what he says about Kavanaugh.
We can't have a guy in the Supreme Court named Brett.
Like, what's next?
You're gonna have a guy in the Supreme Court named Paisley?
Like, what's gonna happen?
So here is Stephen Colbert making the very solid case that you should never have someone on the Supreme Court named Brett.
Because... something.
I don't know much about Kavanaugh, but I'm skeptical because his name is Brett.
That sounds less like a Supreme Court Justice and more like a waiter at Ruby Tuesdays.
Hey everybody, I'm Brett.
I'll be your Supreme Court Justice tonight.
Before you sit down, let me just clear away these rights for you.
What?
Like, that's your case?
That's a real strong case right there, that his name is Brett.
What are we, in third grade?
Brett can't be a Supreme Court justice.
I mean, his name is Brett.
Also, like, there have been a fair number of actual prominent Bretts in American public life, including, of course, Brett Favre, who is a very manly man, and not the Brett at Ruby Tuesdays.
But in any case, Stephen Colbert.
I mean, if I will say Stephen Colbert is right.
My understanding is that Stephen Colbert actually changed the pronunciation of his name in college.
This is the rumor that was going on is that Stephen Colbert is actually pronounced Stephen Colbert.
And he actually changed it to Colbert because it sounds more sophisticated.
In any case, Brett sounds like a manager of Ruby Tuesdays, which apparently is a bad thing.
Apparently, it's terrible to work at Ruby Tuesdays.
It means that you're unqualified for anything.
So menial laborers.
You know, never aspire to go to law school.
Nobody who has ever worked at Ruby Tuesdays ever went on to go be a lawyer.
No one.
They all stayed there forever.
And they wore flair.
That's what they did.
But Stephen Colbert, going after Brett Kavanaugh's name.
Stephen Colbert, that's a name that sounds to me like a failed comedian.
Like, if I just had to pull it out of the air, I would just say, Stephen Colbert sounds like a dude who can't make a good joke.
That's what I would probably say about it.
My favorite rip on Kavanaugh, however, goes to Joy Behar.
So, Joy Behar, who legitimately has the IQ of a kumquat.
I mean, the woman is just inane.
She says this about Brett Kavanaugh.
She says that Brett Kavanaugh is basically Judge Jeanine Pirro.
Yeah.
Okay.
It is not, uh, Judge Jeanine Pirro, which I, at one point in time, thought was actually a possibility of becoming Supreme Court Justice, so... So it could have been worse.
For you, it could have been much worse.
Well, he might be just a quieter version of Judge Jeanine.
She's just out there.
He's a more, he's a more, what?
He's a better version of Judge Jeanine.
He's a quieter version of Judge Jeanine.
Yeah, if you're a nutcase, if you were dropped on your head as a baby, if you fell off the stupid tree and you hit every branch on the way down, he's just like Judge Jeanine except for nothing.
Except for, you know, his wisely considered and brilliant defenses that run like 50 pages at a time.
Yeah, listen, I know Judge Jeanine.
I like Judge Jeanine.
But Judge Jeanine gives speeches where at the end of her speeches, she literally says, I'm right.
How do you know?
Because I'm the judge.
I've literally seen her give speeches like that because she's a television performer.
It's what she does.
OK, I've never seen a Judge Kavanaugh decision where at the end he says, and I'm right.
How do you know?
Because I'm the D.C.
Circuit judge.
No, no.
But the level of stupidity to which the left is subjecting itself is truly astonishing.
We'll get to more of this in just a second, and we'll get to Roe v. Wade and President Trump going after NATO in pretty strong fashion.
But first, let's talk about movement watches.
So, movement Makes the best stuff.
I mean, it really is great.
I have two movement watches.
This right here.
This is a movement watch.
You see the clean, spare design.
All it does is tell the time in beautiful fashion.
It is magnificent.
Also, these watches are incredibly durable.
My son particularly loves these watches, which means he carries them around and bashes the living crap out of them.
And they somehow survive and look exactly the same as the day that I got them.
Movement started off from being crowdfunded kids working out of a living room, and they've grown like crazy.
They now have almost 2 million watches sold in 160-plus countries, and they continue to revolutionize fashion on the belief that style should not break the bank.
Their watches are about looking good, keeping it simple.
It ain't an iWatch.
It's not going to be telling you your texts.
It's not going to be telling you how many calories you burned today.
It's going to be telling you the time, which is what you want out of a watch, because it's a watch.
It's not a computer.
You don't want to strap a laptop to your wrist.
You want an actual watch that just looks nice for $95.
That's where their watches start.
At a department store, you're looking at $400 or $500.
MVMT figured out by selling online, they could cut out the middleman and retail markup, and they could provide the best possible price.
Classic design, quality construction, style minimalism.
A lot of my fans have MVMT watches.
That's happening for a reason.
Go check it out at MVMT.com slash Shapiro and get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns.
That's MVMT.com slash Shapiro.
Check out their expanding collection.
They also have They also have like, now I think bracelets and sunglasses and a bunch of other stuff as well.
MVMT.com slash Shapiro.
Join the movement, go check it out.
Really good stuff.
Okay, so.
The stupidity about Brett Kavanaugh does not end there.
A bunch of Yale Law students decided to write an open letter about Brett Kavanaugh.
And it's this long letter about how horrible Judge Kavanaugh is.
And they suggest that Kavanaugh is going to lead to death.
This is an open letter from Yale Law Students, Alumni, and Educators regarding Brett Kavanaugh.
It says, First of all, I'm not sure why you're writing to the Yale Dean.
Like, he's not the one who votes.
For a bunch of alumni of a law school, they probably should know how judicial confirmations work.
Here's how they don't work.
That the alumnus of the particular law school has to go and get his approval from the dean of the law school he went to 30 years ago.
That's how it doesn't work.
The way that it does work is that the Senate advises and consents.
So I love that they are writing this letter to the dean of the Yale Law School as though the dean's gonna be, you know what?
You're absolutely right.
We're done.
Kavanaugh's not in anymore.
I am using my prerogative under Article 93 of the Constitution of the United States as dean of his former law school I have now ruled that Brett Kavanaugh is no longer available for the Supreme Court.
Sure.
Good stuff, guys.
He says, we write today, as Yale Law students, alumni, and educators, ashamed of our alma mater.
Why?
Is he like Judge Justice Rajatani?
Is he going to rule on Dred Scott?
No.
He just disagrees with you.
Within an hour of Donald Trump's announcement he would nominate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the law school published a press release boasting of its alumnus' accomplishment.
Right, because he went to Yale Law School.
And wouldn't you boast if one Yale Law School alumnus was going to be on the Supreme Court?
The school's post included quotes from Yale Law School professors about Judge Kavanaugh's intellect, influence, and mentorship of their students.
Yet the press release's focus on the nominee's professionalism, pedigree, and service to Yale Law School obscures the true stakes of his nomination and raises a disturbing question.
Is there nothing more important to Yale Law School than its proximity to power and prestige?
Well, no, that's pretty much it.
I mean, like, I went to Harvard Law.
When I was at Harvard Law, the dean of our school was a woman named Elena Kagan.
You may remember Elena Kagan from such shows as I'm on the Supreme Court now.
Okay, so Elena Kagan, literally our first day at law school.
I remember this vividly.
Our first day at law school, we have an orientation, and we go into this beautiful hall.
I don't think it was Widener Hall, but we went into this beautiful hall.
I can still picture it.
It looks like something out of Hogwarts.
All mahogany, busts of people, famous judges everywhere.
And she stands up, she says, listen, You're at Harvard Law School.
The competition's over.
You know, you've seen the paper chase, and you've heard all about how it's going to be brutal competition, people fighting each other.
It's not like that at all.
Everybody here is going to do fine.
You're all going to have jobs.
You're never going to have to worry again.
Which is basically true.
You go to Harvard Law School, and law firms literally come to Harvard Law to recruit students.
Like, you get to pick your employer, not the other way around, is basically how it works at Harvard Law.
And so she's giving this speech, and then she says, Listen, we have, I think at the time, four Supreme Court justices, 30-odd senators.
We have 100 people in Congress.
You in this room, in the next 10 to 15 years, the people in this room will be ruling the world.
That is how people think, including Elena Kagan at major law schools.
You know why?
Because that's a bunch of high IQ people in that room.
And it's not the job of Yale Law School to determine how Brett Kavanaugh thinks.
It is the job of Yale Law School to determine whether they have been successful in training a lawyer prominent enough to reach the level of the Supreme Court.
It would be one thing if Brett Kavanaugh were some sort of Richard Spencer-esque neo-Nazi, but there's no evidence of any of that.
So this letter is incredibly stupid.
And then it just goes on and on and on.
They say that Yale Law School should show moral courage by withdrawing support.
Yale Law School doesn't necessarily support Kavanaugh.
They just said, by the way, guys, we have another guy who's going to be on the Supreme Court.
So just geniuses all the way around.
And the one who I'm most disappointed in is Alan Dershowitz.
So Alan Dershowitz.
Who has been complaining that he has been excised from all of the nice parties over at Martha's Vineyard.
You know, the Great Battle of Martha's Vineyard has been taking place.
It's just like the Civil War over there.
And Alan Dershowitz is on The View.
And he starts mouthing off about Merrick Garland and how the Merrick Garland seat was stolen by the Republicans.
And then he drops some bizarre language here.
I'm a little critical of President Obama for whom I voted.
He should have nominated Merrick Garland and should have sworn him in and should have dared the Republicans to say, kick him out of office.
We agree with that.
Because they have no right not to decide a case.
The Constitution says advice and consent.
It doesn't say delay and postpone.
Um, no, that's what advice and consent mean.
You could just refuse to give your consent.
I like that.
So by Alan Dershowitz's standard, let's use the word consent in a different context.
Let's use it in the context of sex, because that's where we are almost familiar with it now in the MeToo era.
So normally, when we say that you require consent, this requires, you know, consent.
And if you don't give consent, then you have not consented, because that's how consent works.
According to Alan Dershowitz, when the Constitution says advise and consent, that doesn't mean postpone.
It doesn't mean delay.
It means you have to give it an up or down vote.
In other words, there's no such thing as yes means yes.
For the for the Supreme Court, apparently, according to Alan Dershowitz.
None of this makes any sense, but at least maybe he'll get to go back to some of those cocktail parties on Martha's Vineyard.
OK, but the stupidity doesn't only emerge from the left when it comes to the Supreme Court.
Sometimes it emerges from people who are quasi on the right.
The latest evidence is Tomi Lahren.
So I don't want to rip on Tomi Lahren too much.
I think that Tomi Lahren Has her heart in the right place sometimes.
I think that she hasn't studied these issues particularly well.
I think that her ideas on abortion are inane, to put it mildly.
And she was on Fox & Friends this morning, and she was talking about Roe v. Wade and soon-to-be Justice Kavanaugh using her vast legal experience to delve into the intricacies of Supreme Court precedent.
And here was Tomi Lahren explaining why conservatives really should just let Roe v. Wade alone.
Some of my fellow conservatives who have put it out there that we are, quote, coming for Roe v. Wade.
That is a mistake, because we are putting it out there and implying that we are sending a justice to the bench to carry out religious judicial activism, which is a mistake and is unconstitutional.
And if we as conservatives are going to imply that, if that's going to be our messaging, we might as well spit on the Constitution.
That is not what we stand for.
Read a book.
A book.
A book.
Not lots of them.
One.
Okay, like, one.
Not Harry Potter.
I mean, like, a book about the... Like, read the Constitution.
We can start with that.
Read the Constitution, and you show me where in the Constitution there's a right to abortion, and then we can start talking about whether this is a religious edict trying to take down Roe v. Wade.
I mean, honestly, honestly, it's just...
Make a logical argument.
Make a good argument that's not a good argument.
I got into it a little bit with Tomi Lahren over the last couple of days because I suggested she made a similar argument on Twitter.
I said it was a dumb argument.
She said, you can't tell me what to do.
And I'm getting real sick of people on the right saying to me, you can't tell me what to do.
I'm not telling you what to do.
I'm saying what you should do if you are an intelligent person.
And that would be maybe read enough to defend your position well.
Let's be real about this.
The reason people oppose Roe v. Wade is not just because they are against abortion.
If they were just against abortion, then they would presumably be pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion across the country, or federal legislation to ban abortion across the country.
That would be their primary focus, the constitutional amendment.
The reason that there are so many people on the right who hate Roe v. Wade is not just because it is an immoral outcome, but because it has nothing to do with the Constitution.
I can't name a single person, a single legal theorist on the right who says, I oppose Roe v. Wade because I'm a religious person.
Not one.
The reason you oppose Roe v. Wade is because it has nothing to do with the Constitution.
It is a garbage legal decision.
Even people on the left who are honest will acknowledge that while they like the outcome of Roe v. Wade, it has nothing to do with the law and has nothing to do with the Constitution.
And playing into this propaganda effort by the left to suggest that it's just a bunch of religious fanatics who want to overturn Roe v. Wade is deeply irresponsible by Tomi Lahren.
Deeply irresponsible.
It's also really establishment.
I mean, that's the part of this that's so ironic, is that, you know, Tomi Lahren and some people who are fans of hers are suggesting that, you know, it's anti-establishment to suggest that Roe v. Wade should be upheld, or that we should stay away from social issues.
Donald Trump ran on social issues.
He didn't run away from them.
He ran basically on cultural, social issues, and he won.
Beyond that, it was the establishment that's been saying for most of my adult lifetime that social issues should be avoided at all costs.
Let's focus on economics.
Let's focus on foreign policy.
I've been saying for years that Republicans running away from social policy is foolish because people actually want to hear about the morality of politics.
I wish that, I'm struggling for words here, because again, I don't want to rip on Tomi Lahren, but when you say stuff this ignorantly, with this much confidence, then you need to be called out for it, because this is just not true, and it's not right, and I don't know what she thinks she's doing here.
Okay.
We're going to talk about Trump at NATO in just a second, but first, you're going to have to go over to Daily Wire and subscribe.
So for $9.99 a month, you can become a subscriber to dailywire.com.
When you do, you get the rest of this show live, you get the rest of the Andrew Klavan show live, the rest of the Michael Knowles show live.
You also get to be part of the conversation, so on Tuesday, Clavin will be here answering all of your questions and you get to ask him questions on Friday.
You get to actually listen to my show and then ask me questions live, which is pretty awesome.
So go check that out.
For the annual subscription, you also get this.
The Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr.
It has been flowing freely over the last several weeks.
So go check that out as well.
Also, please subscribe over at YouTube and at iTunes because every week we have the Sunday special.
The Sunday special features one of the nation's best thinkers.
This Sunday we are having on my good friend, Dennis Prager, and we're going to chat about his new book, The Rational Bible.
So last week we had Sam Harris.
This week we're having Dennis Prager.
Can't think of two sides of the coin better than that.
So here is Dennis Prager talking a little bit about that.
Hi, I'm Dennis Prager, and I'm the next guest on the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
I certainly hope you'll watch.
The subject is my book, my latest book, The Rational Bible.
And if you think the Bible is nonsense, in fact, especially if you think that, I invite you to watch.
So go subscribe, check it out.
I really love these hour-long conversations.
I enjoy doing them.
I think you'll really enjoy them as well, because they really are in-depth.
So subscribe at YouTube, subscribe at iTunes, leave us a review, it always helps.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
Okay, so meanwhile, President Trump has traveled over to Brussels to meet with the leaders over at NATO.
And he's throwing bricks.
I mean, he's not going in there gentle.
He is going in there in very forward fashion, shall we say.
Here's President Trump.
He tweeted this out from the White House account, this video of him slamming NATO for their levels of defense spending.
Now, I think that a lot of what President Trump is saying is true here.
I also think that there is a bit of an optical problem.
I'm going to explain why President Trump is both right and wrong here, because I think that's probably the best description.
Here he is slamming NATO for its levels of defense spending.
Many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money from many years back, where they're delinquent, as far as I'm concerned, because the United States has had to pay for them.
So if you go back 10 or 20 years, you'll just add it all up.
It's massive amounts of money is owed.
The United States has paid And stepped up like nobody.
Germany is just paying a little bit over 1%, whereas the United States in actual numbers is paying 4.2% of a much larger GDP.
So I think that's inappropriate also.
You know, we're protecting Germany, we're protecting France, we're protecting everybody, and yet we're paying a lot of money to protect.
OK, so this is Trump suggesting that back in 2014, Barack Obama signed a deal with all of these European nations.
It was basically a pledge that they would raise the percentage of their GDP that went to defense spending to 2% of GDP.
Now, what Trump is saying, which is that these countries owe us money, is not true.
They don't owe us money, OK?
It was never that they were going to sign us a check at any point.
And we're spending on our own defense because we want to spend on our own defense.
But he is not wrong when he says, you guys, You want to spend less money than you should on your own defense, and then you expect us to come save you if something goes totally wrong.
Like, that part is actually sort of true.
And Jim Garrity has a really good piece today over at National Review on exactly what it is that President Trump is talking about.
He says that, because President Trump continued along these lines.
Let's play a little more President Trump here.
He went after Germany because he says, listen, Germany, you're spending 1% of your GDP on defense.
And then you're complaining that Russia is being really aggressive.
Well, then why are you signing massive natural gas deals with Russia at the same time that you're spending 1% of your GDP, not 2% of your GDP on national defense and then expecting the United States to rush in and save you from Russia?
Trump is not totally wrong here.
Here he is explaining.
Germany is totally controlled by Russia, because they will be getting from 60 to 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline.
And you tell me if that's appropriate, because I think it's not.
And I think it's a very bad thing for NATO, and I don't think it should have happened.
OK, so the idea that Germany is totally controlled by Russia is, of course, a Trumpian overstatement, but he's not totally wrong here.
So here's what Jim Garrity writes.
As usual, Trump is down the street and around the corner from a legitimate point.
Well, actually, he's a little bit closer this time.
If you think Trump's past business connections to Russian figures are troubling, you probably ought to be livid about how former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has decided to become the chief lobbyist for Vladimir Putin in Europe.
One of Schroeder's last acts in office in 2005 was authorizing Nord Stream, a pipeline bypassing key territories and controlled by Russia's Gazprom energy company.
Shortly after leaving office, Vladimir Putin arranged for Schroeder to chair the project.
And then he started pushing for a second pipeline, Nord Stream 2.
Instead of diversifying Europe's energy supply, Schroeder pushed policies that make the continent more dependent on Russia, not less.
In September 2017, Putin arranged for Schroeder to become a chairman of Rosneft, the state-owned Russian oil giant.
The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins wrote earlier this year, Schroeder's exactly the kind of wealthy, well-connected, influential figure acting on behalf of Russia the US sanctions are supposed to target.
And Schroeder's been hanging out with Putin at the World Cup.
How is it in an era when U.S.
politics is suddenly deeply concerned, some would say paranoid about Russian influence, that Schroeder's cheerful embrace of lobbying for Russia has barely made a ripple on this side of the pond?
The cynical answer is that most of those screaming the loudest about Russia today don't think of Putin as sinister because of his lack of criticism of Trump.
They think of Trump as sinister because of his lack of criticism of Putin.
Indeed, Russia shot down a passenger airliner over Ukraine in 2014.
It was out of the news within a week.
But their cynicism doesn't change the fact that Russia is generally hostile to American policies under presidents of either party, and Vladimir Putin would love to see NATO alliances collapse.
In that light, the reluctance of some NATO members to honor their agreements and spend the required 2% of GDP on military spending is baffling.
In 2017, just four member states hit that 2% threshold, the US, Greece, the UK, and Estonia, and will give Poland the benefit of the doubt because it was barely under 2%.
Luxembourg ranked last.
They spent less than one half of one percent on their military.
Perhaps Luxembourg's leaders figured that they're nestled between France, Germany and Belgium, so they can count on their neighbors to slow down any invading Russians.
But NATO members in Eastern Europe have no excuse.
Hungary is only spending one percent.
So the point here is that Trump isn't totally wrong about all of this.
Now, there's an upside to Trump pushing this, which is that he's correct.
The downside is that it makes it look like NATO is a fracturing, fragmenting alliance.
In a second, I'm going to talk about Angela Merkel's response to all this and why this isn't an unmitigated good what President Trump is saying here.
So, President Trump trying to get the Europeans to spend what they should on their national defense?
I don't think that's the world's most terrible thing.
I think, in fact, that that's basically fine.
I think the president of the United States ripping into Germany for its hypocrisy and talking about the Russian threat while bringing in 70% of all of its natural gas through a pipeline negotiated by its former prime minister into Germany.
I don't think that that's wrong either.
However, I think that Vladimir Putin is sitting there and he is wondering to himself whether President Trump is really signaling that if he were to make a move against Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania, that President Trump would not actually back a NATO action against such a move.
Because the reality on the ground is that the United States is in fact the largest sponsor behind NATO.
We spend an enormous amount of money on NATO every year.
And that is for a reason.
America's own benefit.
Remember, NATO was built in the aftermath of World War II in order to curb German ambition and in order to aim this alliance against Russia.
That was in America's national interest.
It created a more hegemonic, a more understandable and consistent social order.
It prevented European wars that had been plaguing the continent for literally a thousand years.
It prevented those European wars from happening since 1945.
There hasn't been an intra-European war except for Depends on whether you consider Yugoslavia a European country or not.
But if you do, that was the only European war.
There hasn't been an internecine European war since 1945.
That is because of NATO.
That is because of the United States' commitment to this world order.
And yes, we were the chief sponsors of it, but we were also the chief beneficiaries of it.
The United States is the largest, most powerful economy on Earth, and having a more orderly world order, of which we are the head, is a good thing for the United States.
What you don't want is all of these countries fragmenting and building up new alliances.
You don't want Germany, for example, breaking away from the EU, rearming, and then siding with Russia again.
We've had enough of that.
That didn't work out great the first time.
So the idea that we are going to cast aspersions at NATO generally, I think, is a huge mistake.
That said, the president's critique of members of NATO for not doing enough, and the fact that they are free-riding, he is not wrong about any of that.
Now, Angela Merkel is fighting back.
She has responded to President Trump, noting that she grew up under a Soviet-controlled regime in East Germany.
She says, Trump had earlier said exactly the opposite.
a part of Germany that was controlled by the Soviet Union.
I'm very happy today.
We are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany.
We decide our own policies and make our own decisions.
Trump had earlier said exactly the opposite.
He said Germany is totally controlled by Russia.
A lot of people in Germany very upset about that.
Well, if you're that upset about it, perhaps the best thing that you could do is to actually stop importing enormous amounts of natural gas from Russia.
I remember in the aftermath of September 11th, there was a lot of talk about the United States needing to get off of Saudi oil because there was fear that we were generating policy based on our dependence on OPEC nations.
I didn't think that was completely out of the realm of possibility.
Well, the same thing is true here with regard to Germany.
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are being cynical right now.
They put out a joint statement on the Trump-Putin summit, which is coming up.
And here's what they say.
They say, President Trump's brazen insults and denigration of one of America's most steadfast allies, Germany, is an embarrassment.
His behavior this morning is another profoundly disturbing signal that the president is more loyal to President Putin than to our NATO allies.
That's a weird critique, considering that Trump is ripping Germany for working too closely with Putin.
Right, so even if you think that Trump is working closely with Putin or that he's friendly to Putin, you might want to wait until Trump actually has his meeting with Putin, his face-to-face, in which Trump will likely be very, very kind to Putin, just as he was very kind to Kim Jong-un.
Then I think the critique is fair.
But if Trump's critique of Germany is they're too close to Putin, and your critique of Trump is he's too close to Putin because of what he just said about Germany, I'm not sure how you logically get from point A to point B.
Pelosi and Schumer say, if the president leaves the Putin meeting without ironclad assurances and concrete steps toward a full cessation of Russian attacks on our democracy, the meeting will not only be a failure, it will be a grave step backward for the future of the international order and global security.
Allow me to say that this is cynical hypocrisy by the Democrats, considering they were perfectly fine with Barack Obama sitting there in 2012 and openly telling Dmitry Medvedev, then the president of Russia, that he wanted to offer the Russian government flexibility.
He needed flexibility from them.
And then maybe he would be kinder to them during his next election cycle.
During his during his next presidential cycle, you know, all of this is is deeply stupid.
With that said, do I want the president of the United States to be harsher on Russia?
You bet I do.
But I don't think that this is good evidence that the president is being weak on Russia.
It seems to me the president is actually pushing all of these European nations to be harsher on Russia by spending more on their own defense.
Maybe that's driven by Trump's weird zero-sum game belief that the United States is picking up the defense spending for all of Europe.
Maybe it's driven by that.
Regardless of what it's driven by, the outcome would be a good outcome, which would be a more robust NATO, not a less robust NATO, if they would spend more on their own defense and then have the capacity to defend themselves over time.
Okay, so.
We're going to do a couple of things I like and then some things I hate.
And then we will do a quick psalm because it is Wednesday.
So I've decided we're going to go through the Book of Psalms.
So let's do a little bit of stuff that I like and then we'll do some stuff I hate.
So the first thing that I like today is the movie Lincoln.
So I'd never actually seen this.
I didn't watch it when it came out in the theater.
I was mostly concerned that Tony Kushner, who I think is one of the world's most overrated writers, the creator of Angels in America, who wrote the script for Lincoln, was going to turn this into Sort of an anti-Bushian routine, considering this came out in 2012, I believe.
It's been a while since Lincoln came out.
But it was available on Netflix for free, and so I finally started watching it.
The great thing about the movie is Daniel Day-Lewis's performance.
So first of all, it's a star-studded cast.
Daniel Day-Lewis is the best thing in it.
Sally Field is terrific as Lincoln's wife, as Mary Todd.
The I think Tommy Lee Jones choose the scenery a fair bit in this in this film.
But Daniel Day-Lewis is spot on because he is the great actor of our generation.
Without a doubt, we can only hope that he reverses his decision to leave acting after Phantom Thread.
My my criticism of the movie is that the movie is overwritten because that is Tony Kushner, right?
Everything Tony Kushner writes is a lot like Aaron Sorkin, where you just feel the writing.
You feel the writing like the best writers.
I don't think you actually feel the writing.
You just feel the characters in this particular movie.
You feel a lot of Tony Kushner there.
It's good, Tony Kushner, meaning that it's the best of what Tony Kushner has to offer.
But it's like watching an Aaron Sorkin film.
When you watch an Aaron Sorkin film, it's like when you watch A Few Good Men, it's like, hey, look, there's Jack Nicholson playing Aaron Sorkin.
And oh, my gosh, look at that.
There's Tom Cruise playing Aaron Sorkin.
And look, there's a female playing Aaron Sorkin.
Like that's with all of his films.
The same thing is sort of true when it comes to Tony Kushner.
But here's here's some of the preview for Lincoln.
If you haven't seen it, it's now available to watch free streaming on Netflix.
We can't tell our people they can vote yes on abolishing slavery unless at the same time we can tell them that you're seeking a negotiated peace.
It's either the amendment or this confederate peace.
You cannot have both.
How many hundreds of thousands have died during your administration?
Congress must never declare equal those who got created unequal!
Leave the constitution alone!
We're stepped out upon the world stage now, with the fate of human dignity in our hands.
Blood's been spilled to afford us this moment now, now, now!
Abraham Lincoln has asked us to work with him to accomplish the death of slavery.
No one's ever been loved so much by the people.
Don't waste that power.
This fight is for the United States.
Okay, so what I like about it is that obviously it's a very, very pro-America film.
It's very Spielbergian in the sense that everything that Spielberg does sort of has a gloss of, like, yellow sunshine over it.
Like, everything that he does is almost through a yellow filter.
That's not meant literally.
It just means that everything is done with the upshot.
Everything is very obvious in Steven Spielberg's direction.
Like, he directs E.T.
the same way he directs Lincoln, basically.
And that means that it's a real hagiography of Lincoln.
What it does convey is some of the complexities that Lincoln had to face.
And the political manipulation that Lincoln was happy to be involved in, or was willing to be involved in, in the face of all of this, it takes on some serious racial issues.
It's definitely worth watching.
It's definitely worth watching.
I think it's a very good movie.
I think it avoids being a great movie by about this much.
But the performances, particularly Daniel Day-Lewis, are just spectacular.
So go check that out.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
Okay, so the first thing that I hate, Sacha Baron Cohen, I find very funny.
I think the Sacha Baron Cohen stuff is really funny, although I could use a little less of the bizarre nudity in some of his films, but Sacha Baron Cohen is doing a new series, apparently, and he went after Sarah Palin, because we have to go over people who are largely irrelevant in American politics, or at least have been for, what, 10 years now?
I mean, she ran for vice president in 2008.
In any case, Sarah Palin was apparently She was essentially catfished by Sacha Baron Cohen.
So Sarah Palin says that she and one of her daughters were duped into apparently appearing on his new TV series.
She says, you got me, Sacha.
Feel better now.
What exactly happened?
She said she was invited to appear on a legit Showtime historical documentary.
She was interviewed by what appeared to be a disabled veteran in a wheelchair.
She assumes that that was Sacha Baron Cohen in disguise.
He peppered her with questions she added, adding that were full of Hollywoodism, disrespect, and sarcasm.
She said she finally had enough and literally physically removed her mic and walked out.
She said the disrespect of our U.S.
military and middle class Americans via Cohen's foreign commentaries under the guise of interview questions was perverse.
She said before she was purposefully taken to the wrong airport after the interview and missed her flight home.
So, normally, when people get pranked, I don't really care.
Like, when people get pranked, that's sort of part of the game.
But, if Sacha Baron Cohen dressed up as disabled veteran in order to prank Sarah Palin, that truly is disgusting.
Like, taking on the aspect of somebody who'd been disabled in an American foreign war to prank somebody, is really pretty vile.
There's nothing more sacred in America than our veterans, and that's particularly true for veterans who have taken damage in the line of duty.
And to operate off a good faith move by Sarah Palin to talk with a wounded veteran in order to prank her is just gross.
And I'm surprised if the left is willing to stick with that, but I guess maybe they're willing to stick with anything.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So there's this video that's going around that's really annoying and irritating, and pretty bad, of a young black kid who is selling candy bars outside of a store, and a random old lady comes up and demands to see a business license.
So here is the video.
How much candy is that there?
How much is all that?
I'm buying it all.
I'm buying it all.
I am going to buy it all.
I'm going to give it away to all these people.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
I am not ashamed of myself.
I'm standing up for this young person.
Yeah, you're really standing up for them and yelling at them.
Oh, and they take it all around the country and you should see how they live.
Okay, who is this random old lady and her fervor to stop young people from selling things next to a grocery store?
First of all, if the grocery store or the CVS or whatever this place is wants to call the cops and say, listen, this guy's undercutting our price by selling directly outside and he doesn't have a business license, that's fair.
But for the random old lady to try to shut down somebody's business, I find really gross.
Like in Los Angeles, we have a lot of people who sell fruit on street corners, right?
You see these people and they have these carts and they're selling fruit on street corners.
What's the problem?
There are a bunch of people who are really angry about this.
And I understand if you don't want somebody who's selling it like right in front of your house because they're not in a business district or something.
But the idea that we have to have all these licensing requirements for somebody to run a food truck or for somebody to have an ice cream truck or for somebody to sell candy on a street corner without doing any sort of damage to the city.
I just I find that really off putting.
And this is where the libertarian in me comes out and I say that people should really get off their high horse and recognize that one of the things that built this country was the fact that young people were allowed to go out there and make money for themselves by engaging in commerce.
We want more people engaging in commerce.
This kid right here is trying to sell a product.
He is not trying to mooch.
Okay, he could be out there with a cup.
And he couldn't be out there with a hat doing nothing.
Instead, he's actually trying to sell a product to people.
I don't see any problem with that as a general rule, and I find this really off-putting.
Now, of course, the left only cares about this because the lady is white and the kid's black.
It's the implication that this is a racist thing.
Maybe it is a racist thing, but I would care about it whether it was white or black.
You see this a lot happening to white kids where you'll see some little girl who's running a lemonade stand and some idiot decides they're going to report her to the local government because she's operating a lemonade stand without a license.
This is basically that.
Just the kid is black and selling candy bars instead of lemonade.
It's just as stupid.
It's just as gross.
OK, other things that I hate.
Final thing that I hate.
So Trevor Noah, who, again, is being treated as a political commentator.
The conflation between comedians and political commentators is highly irritating.
Because it would be fine if we could actually treat these people as political commentators and just say, listen, your political commentary is stupid.
But instead, what happens?
You say that political commentary was really numb.
And then the comedian says, well, I'm Trevor Noah and I don't really I don't really care, you know, because I'm a comedian.
And you do the same thing with Stephen Colbert.
Every time you say Colbert is saying something dumb, he goes, well, I'm a comedian.
It's the clown nose on, clown nose off routine.
When they don't want to be criticized, I'm a clown.
Ah, ha, ha.
Look at my funny nose.
And then the minute that they want to say something serious, off comes the clown nose.
I am a statesman.
Jon Stewart used to do this better than anybody.
Trevor Noah is doing it now.
He's got a serious face on.
That's how you know he's not in joking mode.
And his serious face says that Trump is just like African dictators.
Donald Trump reminds me, in many ways, of many African dictators.
You know, his demeanor, his style, who he presents himself as and how he processes his power is something that's all too familiar.
He's just like an African dictator, except for the non-forced land redistributions, the non-genocides that are happening in the streets, and the non-ability to take over the entire government, make it a tool of his will, and then line his own pockets dramatically.
See, here's the thing.
You know, I don't care about Trump's aspect.
It's so fascinating to me.
Everybody seems to deeply, deeply care about President Trump as a human being.
Trump is a different in kind.
He's a different kind of person.
We have to get inside his head.
We have to figure out what he's thinking.
What is his aspect?
What is his attitude?
What is he trying to do?
I don't care about him.
Okay?
Like, as a person.
I don't know him.
I don't care about him very much.
That doesn't mean that I wouldn't help him if I saw him, like, you know, hit by a car or something.
I'd help anybody hit by a car.
But the problem is that everybody is treating the President of the United States personally as though he matters.
He does not.
He's an institutional cog.
This is why we have a constitutional system.
I don't believe that people are just sort of born better in the United States and born worse in Africa, for example.
I don't think African dictators are African dictators because people in Africa are naturally worse, because that's stupid and there's no evidence to back that.
I think that America has a long cultural history of checks and balances.
And so it doesn't matter what Trump's attitude is.
It matters whether the checks and balances actually operate.
And they do.
I think if you took that same African dictator that Trevor Noah is talking about and you plunked him down in the Oval Office, guess what?
He wouldn't be able to do any of the stuff he does in Africa because the system is not built for it in Africa.
The system is built for it here.
That's the genius of the system.
It's one of the reasons why I believe the Supreme Court matters and why I believe the Constitution matters.
It is the most durable document in human history with regard to the creation of government.
I mean, democracies tend to collapse in on themselves relatively quickly.
The American Republic has not only not collapsed in on itself, it's grown better over time.
At least not with regards to the administrative state, but everything else in terms of the inclusion, in terms of its capacity, in terms of the power of the American economy.
All of these things have grown over time because of the durability of the Constitution, not in spite of them.
The same Trevor Noah, who will sit there and whine about Trump being like an African dictator, will sit there and whine about the shortcomings of the U.S.
Constitution and why he wants one branch, the judiciary, to have absolute power over exactly how everything ought to work in the country.
It's pretty astonishing.
Okay.
Let's go through a quick psalm here because it is Wednesday.
So we are on Psalm 2.
We have begun our journey through the book of Psalms.
So in Hebrew, for those who care, it is called Tihilim, which means Psalms.
And this one is one of the most frequently cited among New Testament scholars because it makes Oblique reference, believe New Testament scholars, to Jesus.
As a Jew, I don't believe that's what the psalm is saying.
I will explain why.
So the psalm says, Why have nations gathered and why do kingdoms think vain things?
Kings of the land stand up.
Nobles take counsel together against the Lord and his anointed.
Let us break their bands and cast off their cords from us.
He who dwells in heaven laughs.
The Lord mocks them.
Then he speaks to them in his wrath and he frightens them with his sore displeasure.
But I have enthroned my king on Zion, my holy mount.
I will tell of his decree.
The Lord said to me, You are my son.
This day I have begotten you.
Request of me and I will make nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with an iron rod like a potter's vessel.
You shall shatter them.
And now, you kings, be wise, be admonished, you judges of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with quaking.
Arm yourselves with purity lest you become angry and you perish in the way.
So, the section of this that people like to cite in the New Testament context is, of course, the part where it talks about, you are my son this day, I have begotten you, and people who believe in the New Testament, Christians, take that extremely literally.
In Judaism, Jews are frequently referred to as God's children.
The people of Israel are frequently referred to in psalms as God's son.
It's not unusual.
It's not an unusual language with regard to Jews.
It's not the idea that it's like literally God's son as Christians interpret it.
So I just want to make that clear.
But the interesting part of this psalm is there's this very sort of Hegelian notion that if God doesn't like somebody, they are going to lose and that if you disobey God, then you're going to lose.
Then you look at the world and you see a lot of evil people really thrive.
So how do you reconcile those two things?
And I think the answer lies in this particular verse from the psalm.
It says, request of me and I will make nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession.
And the word request is in Hebrew, Sha'al, which means ask of me.
It means really kind of plead with me, sort of.
And the idea here is that God's justice is only going to occur when those of us who believe in God and believe in the Judeo-Christian system actually repent of our sins and lean on God for our moral system.
When that happens, there'll be a natural outgrowth of that and that will allow us to gain a certain amount of power In the world order.
And I think that's been true.
I think the reason Judeo-Christian civilization has been so powerful is specifically because we have clung to particular values that inherently make nations more powerful and wiser and better.
I am not a multiculturalist in the sense that I don't believe that all cultures are created equal.
I believe that Judeo-Christian culture, Judeo-Christian civilization is the best civilization ever put on earth at any time.
The more pride we take in it, and the more we request that God bring us close within that context, the better we will do in the real world as well.
I think this holds true for individuals who try to hold by a certain level of biblical morality in their own lives, too.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest updates.
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.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
▲
Export Selection