The New York Times unleashes a doozy of a headline, CNN defends Antifa, and we review last night's election results in Florida.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, a lot to get to today as every day.
But first, let me mention to you that you need to update your resume.
Okay, let's be real about this.
Your resume, it's decent.
Yeah, it's good.
But it could always be better because you need to be adding skills all the time.
The idea that you're going to be at one company for 50 years and then retire with a gold watch, It's not true anymore.
And that's why you need to be constantly adding skills to your resume.
It gives you greater job leverage.
It gives you greater pay leverage.
And that's why you need Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 20,000 classes in business, design, technology, and more.
You can take classes in social media marketing and illustration, data science, mobile photography, creative writing.
You name it, they've got it.
I've taken classes in social media marketing myself from Skillshare.
It is fantastic.
They're 45-minute classes taught by experts.
Whether you're trying to deepen your professional skill set, start a side hustle, Or to just explore a new passion, Skillshare is there to keep you learning and thriving.
Go check it out right now and you get a special deal.
Join the millions of students already learning at Skillshare by going to Skillshare.com and you use slash Shapiro.
Skillshare.com slash Shapiro.
You get two months of Skillshare for just 99 cents.
That's right.
Again, Skillshare is offering my listeners two months of unlimited access to over 20,000 classes for just 99 cents.
Again, Skillshare.com slash Shapiro to start those two months now.
Skillshare.com slash Shapiro.
Make that resume better.
Again, Skillshare.com slash Shapiro.
Okay, so the media...
are absolutely destroying themselves on the shoals of their own political bias.
The clearest example of this doesn't even have to do with President Trump today.
The clearest example of this has to do with the scandal that is now plaguing the Catholic Church.
Now, as I have said, I think it is very important to put in context the fact that the Catholic Church, which has obviously an institutional problem with the sexual abuse of minors, is not unique in this way.
There are lots of institutions across the United States and internationally in which abusive children is looked, is sort of overlooked by people in power specifically to maintain the supposed credibility of those institutions.
The Catholic Church just happens to be the most prominent of them.
And I think for good reason, because the Catholic Church, like other religious institutions, is seen and should be seen as a higher moral arbiter.
The fact is that the Catholic Church stands at the precipice between secularism and religion and Jews, Protestants, people of all other faith persuasions should be deeply troubled by what's happening inside the Catholic Church.
Well, to recap, the Catholic Church basically was experiencing a...
A serious issue in which a cardinal named McCarrick was accused of the abuse of a bunch of minors as well as with homosexual activity with a bunch of seminarians as well.
He was accused by one of his, by an archbishop named Carlo Maria Vigano.
The accusation is that the higher ups at the church, particularly Pope Francis, basically covered all this up.
That he knew about this and that Cardinal McCarrick was Put into essentially a form of private excommunication almost.
He was basically ordered to do prayer and penance for the rest of his life by Pope Benedict and then Francis took him out of that and made him a public figure again.
That was the accusation that was made by Vigano.
And all of this matters because now the media are coming out and they are defending the Pope.
They're defending Pope Francis.
Pope Francis refuses to comment on this.
He has not confirmed or denied that he knew that this cardinal was engaged in homosexual abuses inside the church.
There are two forms of abuse, obviously.
There's homosexual abuses because it's against Catholic canon law for priests to engage in sexual activity of any sort, and then it's doubly against canon law for them to engage in homosexual activity, and then it is triply against canon law to engage in all of that, plus children.
Well, now it turns out the members of the upper echelon of the church, Pope Francis' greatest defenders, are coming out and defending Pope Francis, not by saying that Pope Francis fights this kind of stuff within the church on a regular basis.
Instead, they're fighting back by suggesting that Pope Francis should be given a pass because Pope Francis is to the left on politics.
Leading the way is Cardinal Blaise Cupich.
Blaise Cupich is one of the archbishops, I believe, over in Chicago, and he is The Pope has a bigger agenda.
He's got to get on with other things of talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the church.
We're not going to go down a rabbit hole on this.
Hey, we're not going to go down a rabbit hole on stopping child molestation inside the church.
We have to focus on greater issues like climate change and illegal immigration.
Those are the bigger issues.
Not the sexual abuse of minors by people in positions of authority supposedly representing God and Jesus.
No.
No.
What it really has to do with is protecting the Catholic Church from allegations that would stop their progressive agenda.
Now, I've been a critic, a longtime critic, of Pope Francis.
I think a lot of conservative Catholics have joined me in that criticism.
Or rather, I have joined them in that criticism.
The reality is that Pope Francis is a liberation theologist who believes that the auspices of the church ought to be used to push a sort of proto-Marxist economics as well as a social liberalism when it comes to issues various and sundry.
He has not changed church doctrine with regard to abortion, but he's been incredibly soft on LGBT issues, particularly on the social side.
He's also been extraordinarily to the left on issues of climate change, economic redistribution, and illegal immigration.
That comment by Kupic is so telling that Cardinal Kupic To say that the Pope has a bigger agenda, he's got to get on with other things like talking about the environment and protecting migrants and carrying on the work of the Church, that's an insane statement.
How insane is that statement?
The Babylon Bee.
Which is a parody website.
They printed a headline two weeks ago in which they said Pope defends himself from allegations of cover-up of child molestation by pointing to climate change work.
It was a parody headline.
And then Cupich actually said the parody headline.
And prosecutors are saying now, it's not just this one Cardinal Vagano who's accusing the church of knowing about all this.
According to a state attorney general in Pennsylvania, the Vatican knew about all of this as well.
This is according to Reuters, the Vatican knew of a cover-up of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests in Pennsylvania through secret archives that bishops in the state shared with church leaders in Rome, according to state attorney general Josh Shapiro.
No relation.
Though Catholic bishops in Pennsylvania systematically denied the sexual abuse of thousands of children over a 70-year period, they secretly documented the cases and often sent information on them to the Vatican, Shapiro told two national news shows.
Shapiro first made the allegations against the Vatican during an August 14th news conference to unveil a report on a two-year investigation into how Catholic clergymen in the state allegedly groomed and sexually abused children.
It was largely based on documents from the archives kept by the state's six diocese, he said.
He said, quote, there are specific examples where when the abuse occurred, the priests would go, the bishops would go and lie to parishioners, lie to law enforcement, lie to the public, but then document all the abuse in secret archives that they would share oftentimes with the Vatican.
Shapiro did not comment on whether Pope Francis or his predecessors knew of the information.
Again, the allegation is by Cardinal Vigano that Pope Francis knew all about them.
Vigano, over the weekend, published this 11-page public statement talking about Pope Francis and Pope Francis's willingness to overlook all of this and calling on Francis to resign on the grounds the Pope knew for years about the sexual misconduct of Cardinal McCarrick.
Vigano said he told the Pope himself five years ago, a little more than three months after Francis' election, and Francis reacted badly to that and put pressure on him in the opposite direction, was actually angry at him for having revealed any of this stuff.
George Weigel is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
He said, Now, how are the media treating all of this?
If he is making these allegations now and calling for Francis' resignation, it is for the gravest reasons.
Now, how are the media treating all of this?
You would imagine the media might be a little upset.
Like normally, the media are pretty upset when it comes to Catholic priests abusing children, right?
There was a movie that just won an Oscar based on this.
Spotlight was based on the Boston Globe uncovering hundreds of abuse cases in Massachusetts archdiocese.
So the media have been all over sexual scandals within the Catholic Church for good reasons and bad.
good reasons because all of that stuff should be uncovered and all of it should be brought to light and that stuff should be i mean it's evil and people involved should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law the bad is that it's pretty obvious there is a disparate motivation in the media for going after the catholic church as opposed to say other religious institutions that are more minority or non-religious institutions in which sexual abuse has become a serious problem like the american public schools
with all of that said the media were were certainly attentive to this problem inside the catholic church for years and years and years and And as I say, with good reason.
But in this particular case, they're not reacting.
They are not reacting with the sort of outrage you would normally see directed at the Catholic Church.
Instead, their outreach is directed at the people who are making the accusations.
They're very upset with Cardinal Vigano.
They're very upset with Catholics who are upset with Pope Francis.
Why?
Because Pope Francis must be protected at all costs because Pope Francis is a political leftist.
And this is a headline from Reuters.
Hey, here it is by Philip Pulela.
Defenders rally around the Pope, fear conservatives escalating war.
Conservatives escalating war?
Like, really?
That's the great fear here?
Not the Catholic Church covering up cases of sexual abuse of minors?
Not the violation of Catholic canon law over and over and over by top members of the church with the knowledge of the top Vatican hierarchy?
That's not the real issue here.
The only real issue here is that Pope Francis has fallen under assault.
This is why folks don't trust the media, and they shouldn't trust the media, because when it comes to protecting their favorite figures, the media will rush to their defense at the first available opportunity, whether it is Barack Obama or Pope Francis.
They like Pope Francis because they think that he is a liberal when it comes to matters of homosexuality, and when it comes to matters of climate change, and when it comes to matters of illegal immigration.
And so they are rallying around Pope Francis, even though it now appears there are significant credible allegations that Pope Francis knew of molestation of priests, that priests were engaged in homosexual activities.
Part of this is that the media are deeply uncomfortable with any attempt to correlate the problem of a homosexual subculture inside the Catholic Church and the problems of targeting abuse of minors.
So the fact is that Cardinal McCarrick, the accusations made by Vagano, don't actually even extend to the abusive minors.
They just extend to Vagano basically having a bunch of homosexual affairs with seminarians and pressuring those seminarians into sex.
The media doesn't think that's a bad thing, and so they're angry that conservatives are talking about that in the first place.
They also are refusing to acknowledge that there is, in fact, a correlation between McCarrick's activities in certain areas and McCarrick's activities in other areas.
There are certain uncomfortable truths that no one is allowed to speak about the culture of the church and the targeting particularly of young males in the church.
The reality is that a disproportionate number of the victims of sexual abuse for minors in the church have been male.
Which is something that the media don't want to talk about specifically because they think that will then be used as a way to club homosexuals and gay and lesbian folks and tar them as innate child molesters.
I don't think that has to be done.
I think that you can point out that there is a disparity in the number of boys who have been abused in the church and girls who have been abused in the church without accusing all homosexuals, for example, of wanting to prey on children, which is a bunch of nonsense.
But the attempt to defend Pope Francis is obviously very telling.
That wasn't even the worst headline of the day.
I'll give you the worst headline of the day, courtesy of the New York Times, in just a second.
But first, let's talk about managing your money.
Betterment is the best way to manage your money.
So the reality is that if you are somebody who has a full-time job and you just take your money and stick it in a bank, You're probably not managing your money the best way you could be.
You're probably just leaving it in the bank account and hoping that nothing happens to it.
But you could be taking that money and you could be allowing that money to grow.
And that's what Betterment helps you with.
They give you technology designed to help you make more from your investments.
Unlimited expert advice designed to help you make smart financial decisions.
Tax efficient investing strategies that give you an edge.
Low transparent fees as well and constant access to information and tools that allow you to track progress toward your goals.
So it's your online investment advisor You should feel like a smart, savvy investor.
I have a financial advisor.
You should too, and it shouldn't cost you an arm and a leg.
Betterment helps you outsmart average.
Now, investing does involve risk, but Ben Shapiro listeners can get up to one year managed for free.
For more information, visit betterment.com slash Shapiro.
That's betterment.com slash Shapiro.
B-E-T-T-E-R-M-E-N-T dot com slash Shapiro.
Again, this helps you manage your money in the best possible way.
It's your online financial advisor.
Betterment helps you outsmart average.
And get up to one year managed for free at Betterment.com slash Shapiro.
That lets them know that we sent you.
The worst headline of the day was not the Reuters headline, Defenders rally around the Pope, fewer conservatives escalating war.
The worst headline of the day was this from the New York Times, Vatican power struggle burst into open as conservatives pounce.
So this has become sort of a meme on the right.
Is that when you is that when the media report on issues that are harmful to the left, it's never Leftists within the church defend Pope as he covers up sexual abuse allegedly.
That's not the headline.
The headline isn't leftists in the media cover for Pope as Pope undergoes allegations of sexual abuse cover-ups.
That's not the line.
The line is conservatives pounce.
So when it is a grave sin on the part of somebody on the left, it's conservatives pounce.
When it's a grave sin on the part of somebody on the right, it's the conservative committed the sin.
That's the way the media cover these issues.
That's the way the New York Times covers these issues.
So when it's Duncan Hunter involved in a corruption scandal, then it's Representative Duncan Hunter of California, Republican, involved in corruption.
And then when it is a Democrat, when it's Senator Bob Menendez from New Jersey, when there are allegations made about him of sexual abuse, for example, or corruption, When instead of it saying allegations of corruption made about Senator Bob Menendez, it's conservatives pounce on allegations.
Like, why is that news?
I'm so confused as to why that's even news.
Why isn't news how conservatives react to an allegation of sexual abuse cover-up by the Pope?
Isn't the news the sexual abuse cover-up by the Pope?
It's such an insane statement.
You'd never see that in reverse.
You'd never see liberals pounce as allegations of Trump corruption mount.
Because then that puts the onus on liberals to explain why they are pouncing.
Instead, it's allegations of Trump corruption mount.
But this is how the New York Times covers the issue.
And here is the way that they have decided to cover this.
Quote, since the start of his papacy, Francis has infuriated Catholic traditionalists as he tries to nurture a more welcoming church and shifted away from culture war issues, whether abortion or homosexuality.
Who am I to judge?
The pope famously said when asked about gay priests.
That is the first paragraph of a story about a pope who is alleged, who is alleged to have covered up sexual abuse and molestation inside the church.
The first paragraph is about what a great guy Pope Francis is for not paying attention to social issues like abortion and homosexuality.
Is it possible that the Pope's Reason for ignoring some of those issues is specifically because he does want to focus on those quote-unquote bigger issues the left likes and he knows the media will help cover for him.
That's not even the worst of the New York Times article.
We'll get to that in just a second.
So the New York Times article continues.
It says, That's an insane statement. That's an insane statement.
The focus is on how angry they are?
Oh wow, look at these people.
You mad, bro?
That the Pope was covering for sexual abuse allegedly?
Yes, I'm angry.
Yes, Vigano was angry.
Yes, conservatives inside the church and liberals inside.
Why is this a partisan issue?
Why is the Pope covering for sexual abuse a partisan issue?
By the way, it wouldn't be a partisan issue if the Pope's name were Benedict.
If the Pope's name were John Paul II.
If it were John Paul II, there would not be any of this blowback from the New York Times, because then it would be targeting a conservative Pope.
But because we are targeting a Pope who is liberalizing on a bunch of issues the New York Times likes, then it's all about conservatives' pounce.
With the letter reports the New York Times released in the middle of the Pope's visit to Ireland, an ideologically motivated opposition has weaponized the Church's sex abuse crisis to threaten not only France's agenda, but his entire papacy.
Weaponized?
This is a word that the New York Times is using a lot lately.
So we've heard from the New York Times that conservatives are weaponizing the First Amendment.
That conservatives are, you know, using the free speech part of the First Amendment in order to push their view.
Ooh, weaponizing the First Amendment.
So the issue isn't that the left wants to shut down the First Amendment.
The issue is that the right is, quote-unquote, weaponizing the First Amendment.
Now the issue isn't that conservatives are trying to stop sexual abuse inside the Vatican.
No, now the issue is that they are weaponizing sexual abuse inside the Vatican.
It seems to me that if you were going to worry about weaponizing sexual abuse, maybe you ought to start with a Vatican hierarchy that looked the other way and put Abusive priests back in positions to abuse more children.
Would that not be weaponizing sexual assault against innocent people?
It's not weaponizing sexual assault to accuse people of covering up sexual assault.
That's not weaponizing anything.
That's called telling the truth.
But what's the New York Times' real agenda?
It's the next sentence.
At the very least, it has returned the issue of homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church, which many conservatives are convinced lies behind the abuse crisis, to the center of the debate.
Well, this is really where the New York Times gets concerned.
What the New York Times is deeply concerned about is that there's going to be a lot of talk about homosexuality within the church, and we can't allow that.
We can't allow that.
Now, what's weird about this is that homosexuality is banned by the Catholic Church.
At least homosexual activity is.
And the toleration of homosexual activity inside the Catholic Church is a violation of Catholic canon law, and has been since the inception of the Catholic Church.
There's a 3,500-year tradition in Judeo-Christian religion of banning homosexual activity, or at least opposing homosexual activity.
It's pretty clear here that what the New York Times really wants is for the Catholic Church to ignore the fact that there's a violation of Catholic canon law going on inside high levels of the priesthood.
The New York Times says Vatican intrigues and power struggles are nothing new, but they usually remain within the medieval walls or fly over the heads of the Catholic faithful around the globe.
This battle, however, is being waged in an exceptionally open and brutal manner.
This is an objective news story.
It's exceptionally open and brutal.
How about the media uncovering all these sex abuse scandals in the first place?
Was that exceptionally open and brutal?
Or was that called good reporting that they were supposed to do?
But it's exceptionally open and brutal when it turns out that this sort of thing ties into a homosexual subculture within the church.
When the two correlate, and again, that doesn't mean causation, when the two correlate, then the New York Times is more interested in protecting the homosexual subculture of the church than in protecting children.
Hey, that is what is going on here.
What is going on is that the New York Times and folks in the press are more interested in protecting their social agenda within the church than with protecting children.
Because if it comes down to a choice between targeting people like McCarrick, who apparently was having sex with seminarians, and protecting children that McCarrick was also abusing, they would prefer to preserve McCarrick at the cost of the children.
That's all I can take away from these press reports.
These accusations in the letter remain unsubstantiated, says the New York Times.
Really, would they treat them as unsubstantiated if they were against Pope Benedict?
Or would it be on the front page of every newspaper ever?
Asked Sunday night about their validity, Francis said he would not dignify them with a response, which is, of course, a non-response.
That is dignifying them with a response.
If I ask you if you sexually abuse children, and I have a credible allegation from people who know you, and you say, I'm not going to dignify that with a response, or I don't know, I'm not going to say yes, I'm not going to say no, I think it's fair to say that we should have some serious follow-up questions.
They are serious, as the New York Times, the Pope's vague answer has only heightened public interest, particularly in the core accusation that he was told about Mr. McCarrick's history of sexual relations with seminarians and did nothing about it.
But Francis' non-answer is in keeping with his reluctance to give oxygen to a small, if influential and noisy, group of conservative prelates and writers aligned with the author of the letter.
So it's all a political war.
That's all this is.
It's just a political war.
And then I'm supposed to wonder?
That people on the right don't trust the media when they're willing to cover for a Pope who may indeed be covering up for sexual abuse of children and seminarians because they like the Pope's agenda?
Fully insane.
And that's not the limit of how far the media went in the last couple of days on a variety of issues.
We'll get into their insane defense of Antifa in just a second.
But first, let's talk about your investments.
So Robinhood is an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, options, cryptocurrencies, all commission-free.
They are striving to make financial services work for everyone, not just for wealthy folks.
So if you're into trading, you ought to be looking at Robinhood because there is no commission fee.
Other brokerages charge up to $10 for every trade.
Robinhood doesn't charge commission fees.
You trade the stocks and you keep all your profits.
And it's easy to understand because they use these great charts, market data.
You can place a trade in just four taps on your smartphone.
I've looked at Robinhood.
I've seen how easy, user-friendly it is.
My assistant uses Robinhood on a regular basis.
She's into the trading.
Go check it out right now.
Robinhood's web platform also lets you view stock collections like 100 Most Popular, Entertainment, Social Media.
You can have curated categories like Female CEOs, Analyst Ratings, and Buy, Hold, Sell for every single stock.
And you can learn how to invest as you build your portfolio.
So the best way to learn to invest is to actually start investing.
Go check it out right now.
Robinhood is giving listeners a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help build that portfolio.
Sign up at Shapiro.Robinhood.com.
That's Shapiro.Robinhood.com when you use that.
Shapiro.Robinhood.com website.
Then you get a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint.
Go check it out right now.
Shapiro.Robinhood.com.
It's the best way to learn to trade and can do so without them ripping you off on the commissions.
Go check it out right now.
Shapiro.Robinhood.com.
An easier, more user-friendly way to trade.
Okay, so it wasn't just that the media are now covering for the Pope because they think that climate change is more important than the abuse of children.
Or because they think that the promotion of homosexuality within the church is more important than the abuse of children.
No.
They are now covering for the media.
Because they believe that the media are now covering not just for the Pope, they're also covering for groups like Antifa.
So the folks over at CNN seem to have some bizarre love for Antifa.
We've already seen Chris Cuomo in the past, the less smart or more smart of the Cuomo brothers, depending on which day it is.
We've already seen him defend Antifa.
Don Lemon last night on CNN defended Antifa as well.
Antifa, you will recall, is a group of people who call themselves anti-fascist, but then they dress up in masks and beat the crap out of people, which is actually fascist.
Here's Don Lemon defending them.
It says it right in the name, Antifa, anti-fascism, which is what they were there fighting.
Listen, there's, you know, no organization is perfect.
There was some violence.
No one condones the violence, but there were different reasons for Antifa and for these neo-Nazis to be there.
One, racist fascists.
The other group, fighting racist fascists.
There is a fascist, there is a distinction there.
Okay, that's insane.
I love that he says it's right there in the name.
Right, and the name Affordable Care Act is right there in the name, but it didn't make it affordable or care.
Every act is named after something.
It doesn't mean that it actually is that thing.
The People's Republic of North Korea is not actually a republic.
The USSR, the Union of Soviet Republics, it was not actually a union of Soviet republics.
It was actually a dictatorship from the top, run by a one-party state.
So, um, no.
I love that he says Antifa is anti-fascist.
Therefore, not every group is perfect.
Well, I can say this.
Groups that I belong to don't go out in masks with clubs and beat the living crap out of people, break ATMs and shatter windows.
That's actually not the groups that I'm a part of, nor the groups that I support.
And when those groups do those things, I disassociate from those groups because, as far as I'm aware, I've never been a member of any of those groups or backed any of those groups.
I love that the Tea Party were terrorists, according to the left, but Antifa, who legitimately require 600 police officers to be prevented from shutting down a speech I'm doing in Berkeley.
Those people are just a few bad apples who just always seem to come to the forefront every time Antifa does any sort of activity.
Weird how that works.
The same CNN that labels the Tea Party a bunch of terrible, awful, violent people, when it's really a bunch of 60-year-old dudes with don't-try-it-on-me flags.
Clearly, that's the threat, not Antifa.
I can't imagine why we don't trust the media.
I love this.
Allison Camerata did an interview with John Sununu, John Sununu's former governor of New Hampshire, very close friends with John McCain.
And this demonstrates, again, why folks don't trust the media.
So John Sununu doesn't trust the media, and he doesn't trust some of the headlines that come out from the Washington Post or CNN.
Which he has every right not to do.
And Alison Camerata brings him on, supposedly to talk about the death of his very close friend John McCain.
And instead she starts to grill him about President Trump, because the only thing he's allowed to say on CNN is that President Trump is garbage, even when he's there just to talk about John McCain.
And folks don't trust CNN.
Shocker, shocker.
You come on CNN, and we appreciate you coming on CNN, and we appreciate your take on it, but I don't appreciate you denigrating our reporting.
I think that you know we have excellent reporters here, but are you saying that you don't want to believe that?
You don't want to believe that President Trump would do that about John McCain?
I'm saying that I don't want to comment on a report that I haven't satisfied myself is correct.
Okay, and that's the way CNN's going to approach this.
Any questions about CNN are off the table.
By the way, CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobrin yesterday claimed that any criticism of Antifa was Donald Trump's appeal to racism.
Okay, Antifa is whiter than the local branch of the KKK.
I mean, Antifa is a bunch of white people.
Every time there are a bunch of arrested in an Antifa rally, it is always a bunch of white people.
So that's pretty astonishing stuff from the media, all of which has driven a lot of the A lot of the support for President Trump's rips on the media.
So this is actually quite funny.
Yesterday, President Trump was meeting with the head of FIFA.
In FIFA, FIFA is a soccer association.
FIFA, okay, okay, I don't really care.
Thanks for the correction, Alex, don't care.
Okay, but the president was meeting with the head of FIFA McFIFA, the head of the soccer association, and he actually turns to the press and gives them a red card.
He's actually pretty funny.
Yellow card is a warning.
And when you want to kick out someone, you should remember.
Because he took the red card and he started trying to throw them at the members of the press because he doesn't like the members of the press.
I think that Trump and the right are well justified in their dislike of a dishonest press that reports issues like Antifa and the Catholic Church the way that they do.
Also, the media's malfeasance here drives a lot of fear and that fear drives bad politics.
So yesterday, President Trump was excoriated for statements that he made to members of the evangelical community.
As per NBC News, President Trump was talking to a bunch of evangelical leaders at the White House, and he said, the level of hatred, the level of anger is unbelievable.
Part of it is because of some of the things I've done for you and for me and for my family, but I've done them.
This November 6th election is very much a referendum on not only me, it's a referendum on your religion, it's a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.
He said, if the GOP loses, they will overturn everything that we've done, and they'll do it quickly and violently and violently.
There's violence.
When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people.
Well, while I disagree that we are going to look at a violent overturning from the bottom up of the First Amendment, what I do see from the left is that level of anger and level of hatred directed at religious people, and it's very real.
Unless that religious person happens to be somebody that folks on the left believe is going to overturn the Priorities of conservatives.
If it's Pope Francis, then he has to be praised to the skies and protected even if he is covering up for sexual abuse.
If it is an actual conservative, then they will attack that conservative up and down.
So I think that the left ignores its own role in driving the polarization.
They like to pretend that Donald Trump, the universe began with Donald Trump, with the birth of Donald Trump.
The coverage of the press in other areas of human life, including the coverage of the church scandal or Antifa, demonstrates that reactionary politics is alive and well on both sides.
I think that this fight was started by the left.
I don't like how the right has responded to the left, but that doesn't mean that the left didn't start this fight and that the right doesn't have pretty good reason to worry about the excesses of the left if the left should ever take power.
Speaking of the excesses of the left, I mean, you wonder why we don't trust folks on the left to have power?
Maybe it's because they seriously write articles like this.
I love this one.
It's so astonishing.
It's from Daisy Alioto over at Vox.com.
So, full disclosure, I have a couple of people with whom I am friendly at Vox.com, but overall, Vox is a steaming pile of human debris.
It is just an awful, awful website, and they print garbage pieces on a regular basis.
And in just a second, I'm going to give you the latest of the garbage pieces, but first, Let's talk about you exercising your Second Amendment rights.
Now, I'm not just talking about you going hunting or going sport shooting or something like that.
I'm talking about the real reason that the founders wanted you to have a gun, which is to protect your family, protect your home, protect your community, and protect your country.
Well, the folks who care the most about that are the folks over at Bravo Company Manufacturing.
It was started in a garage by a marine vet more than two decades ago to build a professional-grade product that actually meets combat standards.
BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American, regardless of whether you're a private citizen or a professional.
If you have to protect yourself, you need a gun that works.
BCM is not a sporting arms company.
They design, engineer, and manufacture life-saving equipment, and they assume that each rifle leaving their shop will be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, or soldier overseas.
Every component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard.
Of course, they apply by every applicable law, and they understand that if the time comes somebody's in your house, you're gonna need a gun that works.
BCM feels a moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the user when we're not just talking about a paper target, it's somebody coming to do you harm.
To learn more about Bravo Company Manufacturing, head on over to BravoCompanyMFG.com.
You can discover more about their products, special offers, and upcoming news.
That's BravoCompanyMFG.com.
Again, go check them out.
Their videos are really astonishing and quite cool.
Go check them out at YouTube.com slash BravoCompanyUSA.
That's BravoCompanyMFG.com or YouTube.com slash BravoCompanyUSA.
These are folks who know why we need guns and put together exactly the kind of firearms that you need if you gotta protect yourself.
BravoCompanyMFG.com.
Go check them out right now.
Okay, in just a second, I get to the... I've talked a lot about media ridiculousness today, but this one takes the cake.
We'll get to that in just a second.
$9.99 a month gets you a subscription to Daily Wire.
The rest of this show live, the rest of Clavin's show live, the rest of Knowles' show live, if that's something you're into.
Plus, with the annual subscription, you get this.
The very greatest in all beverage vessels, the leftist here's hot or cold tumbler.
We're refreshing to both mind and spirit, as well as body.
You can check that out right now with your annual subscription.
It's cheaper than the monthly, so go check that out.
Also, when you subscribe over at YouTube or iTunes, you get access to our Sunday special.
This week, our Sunday special features one of my favorite authors, Professor Edward Fazer.
Professor Fazer is the author of Five Proofs of God's Existence and a variety of other philosophical books, a really good philosopher, and we talk about his logical, secularly-based proofs of God's existence and what we lack in a society that doesn't believe in God anymore.
Professor Ed Fazer, here's a little bit of what we talked about.
Hi, I'm Edward Fazer, the author of Five Proofs of the Existence of God, and this Sunday on the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, we'll be talking about the book and about the traditional arguments for the existence of God.
Okay, and it is totally worthwhile.
It is deep stuff.
I mean, get ready.
I mean, get your scuba gear ready, because we go deep on this particular topic.
It's not the easiest stuff, but it is, I think, some of the most informative stuff we've ever done on the Sunday Special, so go check that out right now.
We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
The most ridiculous story of the day comes courtesy of, as I say, Daisy Aliotta over at Vox.com.
Here is the title.
The Big Problem with the Animal Crackers Cage-Free Box Redesign.
So we covered this a little bit earlier this week.
Animal Crackers, it's Barnum's Animal Crackers, it's based on the circus.
Now Barnum and Bailey's circus is no longer operational because they no longer use elephants and people stopped going because it was supposedly cruel to animals.
So they fixed the box to get rid of the bars that were holding these animals inside a circus or a zoo or whatever.
And now the animals are sort of randomly roaming free across the savannah in what looks like a multicultural gang.
It's like a zebra, an elephant, a lion, a giraffe.
It looks like a band photo, except for wild animals from Africa.
And it's this new look, same great taste.
But it's so funny.
The folks on the left are like, people on the right are really upset about this.
I wasn't upset about it, I just thought it was hilarious and stupid that this was like a top priority for folks on the left and at PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
But, folks on the left are actually upset about the new box redesign.
This is almost, as someone said online, the platonic ideal of a Vox.com article.
The big problem with the Animal Crackers cage-free box redesign Here's what it says.
Nabisco's animal crackers are a staple of American snack food aisles, and the box, a red and yellow rectangle featuring brightly colored circus animals cavorting in cages, is instantly recognizable.
Just last week, though, Nabisco's parent company, Mandalay, announced it will change the design of the box.
Instead of depicting the animals behind the bars of a circus wagon, it will show them striding free along a savannah.
The change is the result of a recent successful lobbying effort by PETA, which said no living being exists simply to be a spectacle or perform tricks for human entertainment, yet all circuses and traveling shows that use animals treat them as mere props, denying them everything that's natural and important to them.
So they had to change the box because PETA said that no living being exists simply to be a spectacle or perform tricks for human entertainment, which ignores PETA, which exists solely to be a spectacle and provide tricks for my entertainment.
Though the change is symbolic, it stirs up some mixed feelings for me ethics-wise as well as personally, because the designer of the previous box was my great-grandfather's brother.
Box.com.
Swapping the art on the box doesn't address the real issue PETA raises, but it does do a disservice to my uncle's art and legacy.
My uncle's design was about joy.
Not cruelty.
The New York Times reports the design had been in place since 1902, but according to the paper's own records, commercial artist Sidney Stern, my great-granduncle, designed the recognizable packaging in 1923.
Uncle Sidney died in 1989 at age 99, two years before I was born, so I never got to meet him, but I believe his design wasn't about animal cruelty.
He was thinking about joy.
A vintage poster for his animal cracker design reads, A Circus for Children, and shows the animals marching out of the box.
Stern added a polar bear to the box so it would have more color variation, and a string so the box could be used as an ornament.
Much like his idea to call a new cracker Ritz, despite it being the height of the Great Depression, his art thrived on being a light in dark time.
His own life was far from easy.
He was one of six siblings raised by Hungarian immigrants in a cramped tenement in lower Manhattan.
And it goes on like this for a long... But this is the best part.
Redesigning the box doesn't remedy the inequalities in play.
The inequalities on the Animal Crackers box.
Norms like those since times have changed, including the public consensus around the prospect of animals being abused for entertainment.
Yet the symbolic significance of changing the animal cracker box does little to dismantle the elements of capitalism that exploit animals, people, and the environment.
When art and advertising bears the burden for corporate malpractice, the people involved in these changes get to feel good, but other mechanisms continue to thrive under the surface.
This is the best part.
Before she stepped down last year, Mondelez CEO Irene Rosenfeld was making 402 times more than the company's median worker, according to the Chicago Tribune.
That's $17.11 million to the median of $42,000.
In 2016, when Monsley moved some of his production to Mexico, it claimed it gave the workers' union a choice between moving and another option, to chip away at the $46 million a year they would save by moving, a chance to save their jobs.
That other option, a 60% pay cut, according to the LA Times.
This level of corporate greed cannot be fixed with a new box design!
Okay, so they removed the bars off the animals, which is dumb enough, because now the animals are going to eat each other in fake land, where people care about these bars being in place in the first place.
But now the real problem is that by removing the bars from the picture of the animal crackers box, we are underscoring the evils of capitalism.
Vox.com at its absolute finest.
I love it.
I love it so much.
When I was writing about Uncle Sidney in 2016 for Food and Wine, I was able to get in touch with a former corporate archivist at Kraft, one of the people responsible for maintaining the company's historic records.
She said after the merger there was no Nabisco archivist and possibly no archive.
As far as I know, the best archive of mid-century Nabisco box design is at Uncle Sidney's home in New Jersey, where the artwork fills multiple rooms.
Do you know who designed the Campbell Soup label?
Probably not.
But you certainly know Andy Warhol because he was a real artist.
If you've seen Mad Men, you know that in-house artists and marketers often work in teams.
Many gifted artists, without the money to pursue a career in fine arts, turned to commercial art as their day job and became nameless contributors to the brand's public face.
They are the real victims.
The real victims are all of the people who actually made the logos for these products.
Society is set up so that we have to make small ethical choices because the biggest ones are too hard to tackle.
Now my uncle's art has become a part of this cycle.
So if you see me at the grocery store buying up remains of his public legacy, it's not because I don't care about the ethical treatment of animals or people for that matter.
It's because the animal crackers box is my Balthus.
Wow.
Vox.com.
Doing the work no one cares about.
Because it's stupid.
Speaking of media bias...
There's a story that is worth noting here.
So there's a lot of talk over the last year or so about this case from April 29, 2017, in which a white Texas police officer was shot to death.
A black teenager named Jordan Edwards.
This officer and officer, Tyler Gross, had responded to a report of drunk juveniles and found teens leaving a house party on the night in question.
Oliver claimed that he saw a car moving toward fellow officer Tyler Gross, ignoring commands to stop.
Fearing for Gross' life, Oliver said he fired at the car where Edwards and other teens had been riding.
And then Oliver told the court he had heard what sounded like gunshots when he arrived to the scene and said people in the crowd were fleeing.
And then he said that he shot this kid who was in the car.
Officer Gross, however, testified that he was not in fear for his life when Oliver fired his weapon.
Additionally, there was video showing the car was really driving away from Gross, not toward him, and court records said Oliver had flipped off the car Edwards was in following the shooting.
This officer was convicted of murder and will now go to prison.
So for all the talk about how racist the criminal justice system is, this is a police officer who shot a black kid, wrongly, and will now go to prison for it.
That's why when people say that we live in a KKK system, it's like, no, this is not a KKK system.
This is a police officer in Texas, a very conservative state, who was convicted of shooting a kid because there was evidence that he'd shot the kid wrongfully.
That's how the system is supposed to work.
And yet we are treated to the spectacle of the media constantly claiming that the reality is that America is suffering from endemic racism, which can never be cured.
The latest proof of that comes courtesy of this election in Florida.
So the media is making a very big deal of this election down in Florida, where Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum shocked his Democratic rivals and won the nomination for governor.
According to the Miami Herald, Democrat Andrew Gillum wrote, a surge of liberal support from young people and African-Americans to a stunning primary victory Tuesday and the historic opportunity to be the first black governor in Florida's history.
So I have to say, I'm a little underwhelmed by the first black governor in Florida's history kind of line of narrative, given that we've had the first black president, we've had black attorney generals, black secretaries of state, black senators.
We have, I believe the only black senator from the South right now is actually a Republican, Tim Scott.
This is not a, do we have to do the first black?
Black everything?
Is this like a thing now?
I mean, I guess so.
I guess so.
But the implication seems to be that the people of Florida are racist, so it's some sort of big shock.
And then if he doesn't win, presumably we will suggest that it was because of the color of his skin, not because he's a political radical.
With 94% of the votes counted, Gillum had an unofficial 3 percentage point lead over his closest rival, former U.S.
Representative Gwen Graham.
Gwen Graham's father, of course, was a senator from the state of Florida as well.
So his program is insanely far to the left.
He's called for Medicare for All, just like Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders campaigned for him.
And what we are seeing in a lot of these primaries, the real story of Gillum's win is not racial.
The real story of Gillum's win is that Bernie Sanders in the far left in primaries do have a lot of sway, just as President Trump has a lot of sway in Republican primaries.
So the gubernatorial race is now going to feature this guy, Andrew Gillum, versus Ron DeSantis, who's a congressperson down the line conservative who happens to be very friendly with President Trump, and President Trump has been very friendly to him.
Gillum says he yearns for the chance to take on DeSantis in November.
DeSantis says, I think he is way, way too liberal for the state of Florida.
There's another problem here.
His agenda includes a $15 an hour minimum wage, staunch opposition to the stand your ground self-defense law that exists in Florida, where if somebody attacks you, you have the right to defend yourself, and Medicare for all.
So this is what he supports.
That's a pretty left agenda, but there's a bigger problem, and the media are going to downplay it because he's a Democrat.
So again, when it's a Democrat, then the story is Republicans' pounds.
When it's a Republican, then the story is Republican corruption.
So this is a Republicans' pounds story, because Andrew Gillum is actually under investigation by the FBI for corruption, or at least his city mayor's offices.
According to tampabay.com, the Tampa Bay Times, Andrew Gillum's campaign for governor hasn't been the luckiest.
Just a few months into the Tallahassee mayor's run, FBI agents delivered a subpoena to his city hall in June 2017, requesting thousands of pages of records from key players in city government.
The investigation has dogged Gillum's campaign, with new developments dripping out with unpredictable frequency.
The FBI is usually tight-lipped about pending matters.
Although Gillum has not been named in any subpoenas, it's likely the Democratic Party voters wouldn't know the case's outcome before they head to the polls on August 28th.
And they didn't.
There was no outcome before that.
Starting in 2015, FBI agents came to town posing as businessmen considering investments in the city of Tallahassee.
The three men, who reportedly identified themselves as Mike Sweets, Mike Miller, and Brian Butler, spent months cozying up to city officials and people close to them.
The FBI investigation, based in part on their undercover work, has yielded several rounds of subpoenas but no charges yet.
A slew of Tallahassee officials and insiders have been named in those subpoenas over the past year.
According to those documents, the part of the investigation that could be most relevant to Gillom centers around the city's Community Redevelopment Agency, which shares private and public money to revitalization and infrastructure projects.
One of the officials in the crosshairs of the FBI, lobbyist Adam Corey, was a longtime Gillum friend and ally until Gillum cut ties with him after all of this started to come to the fore.
In 2013, the Community Redevelopment Agency voted to give $1.3 million in taxpayer money to help a Corey-associated restaurant project, the Edison.
Gillum voted with the rest of the city commissioners to fund the project.
At the time, Gillum's vote raised eyebrows because of his close association with Corey.
So, we're going to pretend that this corruption doesn't actually exist because Gillum is a Democrat.
We're going to, meanwhile, go after President Trump on every available count that we can possibly dig up against him before the media.
But Gillum will wait for all the evidence to come in.
Now, should we wait for the evidence to come in?
Sure.
But to pretend those allegations don't exist is, I think, kind of telling about the media's agenda in all of this.
Sure.
Would it be good if the presidents of the United States were a little more popular going into the 2018 elections?
That would help as well.
Ron DeSantis would make an excellent governor of the state of Florida.
As I say, he's a down-the-line conservative.
And Gillum is a radical leftist.
So we'll see how all of this plays out.
But the only narrative the media really cares about is not the corruption narrative or the political narrative.
It's the first black governor of Florida narrative.
The implication, of course, being that America is still deeply racist.
And so it'd be a surprise if Gillum won the governorship of Florida, which, by the way, it would not be.
He has a serious shot.
It's a dead even race.
OK, let's do a couple of things that I like and then we'll do some things that I hate.
We'll do a federalist paper as well.
So things I like, we're doing some Neil Simon this week.
So Neil Simon did a play that was made into a movie called Plaza Suite with Walter Matthau playing three different parts in three different narratives.
The basic structure of the play is that there's this hotel suite and three different plots take place within it.
Walter Matthau, who's a really underrated actor, Walter Matthau.
And he's great in everything.
You want to see a great Walter Matthau performance, go see Charade, which is one of the kind of great classy movies from the 1960s.
It's Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant and James Coburn and George Kennedy.
It's a really fantastic cast.
It's really a lot of fun.
And Walter Matthau plays a great role in that one as well.
But here he is in Plaza Suite.
Walter Matthau and Maureen Stapleton have the Plaza Suite.
I brought your toothbrush.
You forgot my pajamas?
I didn't forget.
I just didn't bring it.
Why not?
Because it's suite 719 at the Plaza and I didn't think you'd want your pajamas.
You know I can't sleep without pajamas.
I took that into consideration.
I don't understand.
Your one lousy little bag is all I asked you to pack.
Walter Matthau and Barbara Harris have the Plaza suite.
I'm nervous about meeting you, Mr. Famous Hollywood Producer.
I haven't changed since I left Tenafly.
I made a couple of pictures, that's all.
Matt, that was great.
And of course, he's in a bunch of movies that were Neil Simon movies.
Basically because The Odd Couple was such a massive success.
So go check that out.
Okay, other things that I like.
There's a very good piece today.
By Bjorn Lomberg.
Bjorn Lomberg, of course, has become famous as the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
And he's famously well known as a guy who's very skeptical of a lot of the climate change claims that are made by folks on the ardent left.
And he has a piece today talking about the solution to climate change and what it would actually cost.
This is something folks on the left never want to talk about.
They want to talk about the cost of climate change, which is fine.
And then they use the most catastrophic Sort of numbers to come up with their estimates, which is not quite as fine.
You should really give a sort of range of outcomes and then talk about what's the probability of each outcome before you actually gauge what the solution is going to be, right?
This is what we have to do in policy all the time.
We gauge risk and benefit and risk and reward of every policy.
So, for example, whenever the left says, if it would just save one life, then we should do it.
That's a really dumb gauge because pretty much everything would save one life.
Virtually everything in the United States would save one life because there are 330 million people living in the United States.
You can make that case for banning automobiles.
It would save one life.
We should just ban automobiles.
Well, it would save lives.
It would also completely destroy the economy, make business wildly inconvenient, destroy a lot of people's, you know, happiness and livelihood.
But it would save one life.
Well, Lomberg makes clear there are actual costs to a lot of the solutions being proposed by climate change.
I would say alarmists in many cases.
He says, activists like Worldwatch argue a higher temperature will make more people hungry so drastic carbon cuts are needed.
But a comprehensive new study published in Nature Climate Change led by researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has found that strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.
The scientists used eight global agricultural models to analyze various scenarios between now and 2050.
These models suggest on average that climate change could put an extra 24 million people at risk of hunger.
But a global carbon tax would increase food prices and push 78 million more people into risk of hunger.
Those areas expected to be the most vulnerable are sub-Saharan Africa and India.
Shocking because those are some of the most populous places and poorest places on Earth. - Trying to help 24 million people by imperiling 78 million people is a very poor policy.
You've heard similar stories before.
In a few short decades, climate policy has often created more damage than the benefits it attempts to deliver, says Bjorn Lomberg.
Ten years ago, a biofuels craze swept rich countries with full-throated support of green activists who held any shift away from fossil fuels.
Food crops were replaced to produce ethanol, and the resulting spike in food prices forced at least 30 million people into poverty and 30 million more into hunger, according to UK charity ActionAid.
If you want to eradicate hunger, there are more effective ways.
Around 800 million people are undernourished today, mostly because of poverty.
The single most significant initiative that could be undertaken tomorrow is not a policy that slows the global economy, but one that cuts poverty, a global trade deal.
A global free trade, which of course is exactly correct.
He talks about the EU's climate policy, says that will realistically cost $600 billion every year for the rest of the century.
And at best, it delivers a trifling temperature reduction of just 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
For example, activists argue that Bangladesh should cut coal expansion.
That would deliver global climate benefits worth nearly $100 million.
But the foregone boost to the Bangladeshi economy would cost about $50 billion.
Which is why all of this talk about climate change solutions is basically a rich people problem.
You see a lot of folks in the EU and the United States talking about it.
If you're a person living in a developing country, what you're most worried about today is ensuring that you don't die and that your kids don't die.
This is not to say we shouldn't try and come up with solutions to climate change, but if those solutions involve the suffering of more people than the actual problem, then you're doing it wrong.
And you're doing it wrong.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so a couple of things that I hate.
So, there's a report today that sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise in the United States, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In fact, nearly 2.3 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis were diagnosed in the U.S.
in 2017, surpassing the record set in 2016 by more than 200,000, according to CDC scientists.
Experts say many factors have contributed to the rapid rise, though the biggest one may be less frequent condom use.
It's less clear whether dating apps like Tinder have contributed in some way to the spread of STDs than some researchers think they have.
You want to know why there are more STDs?
Because people are being more promiscuous.
Wow!
Wow, I know that was a shock to you.
I know that you just had that bluey one, that one blew you out of your seat.
I know.
When you say people are being more promiscuous and having more random sex with random strangers without protection, that that raises the rate of STDs.
I know that you've been told by feminism that this is a great enrichment to human life.
You've been told by a variety of folks on the social left that more and diverse forms of sex is not going to have any cost, it's just going to enrich human happiness.
Turns out giant fail.
In the past, the majority of syphilis infections were seen in gay men, bisexual men, and other men who have sex with men.
Boland told NBC News.
increase over the last five years.
Usually there are ebbs and flows, but the sustained increase is very concerning.
We haven't seen anything like this for two decades.
In the past, the majority of syphilis infections were seen in gay men, bisexual men, and other men who have sex with men.
Bolin told NBC News, I'm confused what that third category is.
He already said gay men and bisexual men and other men who have sex with men.
I'm not sure what that last category is right there.
is right there more recently there have been increases among heterosexual men and women including among pregnant women which means we're starting to see these infections in their babies well my guess is that if you are starting to see an increase what that means that there's an increase in as i say diverse forms of sexual activity that is leading to higher rates of transmission among quote-unquote heterosexuals it's that third category that actually matters that right
other men who have sex with men but don't consider themselves bisexual probably be that third category bolland and others suspect that newer drugs may have made hiv less lethal and that could have contributed to declines in condom use but An Australian study that followed nearly 17,000 gay and bisexual men before and after a campaign to promote pre-exposure prophylaxis, the use of drugs that protect against HIV infection, found that condom use had fallen dramatically.
Before the campaign, 46% of the men studied were using condoms, after only 31% were.
So it's more risky sexual behavior taken because the media have been pushing the idea that all sorts of sex are safe and that we have great treatments for everything now.
So, well done, media.
Well done for suggesting that the height of human happiness lies in sexual promiscuity and that we have solutions for all of the problems that you yourself create by putting your genitalia in places they ought not be, certainly not, without protection.
So, well done all around.
Okay, other things that I hate.
I'm not sure whether I hate this or I sort of think that it's hilarious.
So, U.S.
District Court Judge Gregory Woods was not having attorney Kafani Nkrumah's defense of his client, Jamal Russell, that a cooperating witness was not a reliable source of information, as per Donald Trump.
So the New York Daily News reported that Russell was being tried for conspiracy to deal crack and carrying a firearm in connection with dealing crack.
You know what's funny?
Yesterday Manafort was convicted, Nkrumah said.
He was referring to the trial of Trump's former campaign chair Paul Manafort.
And Nekrumah was immediately stopped due to an objection from the court.
At the bench, Nekrumah explained he planned to cite Trump on the matter of cooperating witnesses.
He was going to cite President Trump saying that flipping ought to be illegal.
So you remember last week, President Trump said about Michael Cohen that flipping is a bad practice and ought to be illegal?
So apparently, this criminal defense lawyer said, well, if Trump says it, I agree.
People shouldn't be allowed to flip on my client.
All of which is why what President Trump said was really, really dumb on pretty much every level.
The judge shut that down because it's a dumb argument, which is why Trump probably shouldn't try to make it in court.
Okay, time for a Federalist paper.
So back to founding principles and a little bit of uplift on this day of dark media coverage.
So Federalist 43 by James Madison.
This particular case makes, this particular Federalist paper, makes the case for federal jurisdiction over a variety of issues, including copyright, the nation's capital, and to admit new states, among others.
The feds also have the ability to guarantee a Republican form of government.
The Federalist Paper says in a confederacy founded on Republican principles and composed of Republican members, the superintending government ought clearly to possess authority to defend the system against aristocratic or monarchical innovations.
The more intimate the nature of such a union may be, the greater interest have the members in the political institutions of each other.
In other words, the United States has an interest in ensuring that Montana doesn't become a monarchy.
The feds also have the capacity to intervene and put down insurrection within a state.
Why?
Well, this is an interesting point.
The existence of a right to interpose will generally prevent the necessity of exerting it.
So this is a very early iteration of peace through strength.
If the government has the power to shut down insurrection, people are not going to actually engage in insurrection.
It's also the case that people have made in favor of the Second Amendment.
An armed population is a population safe from tyranny because the government is less likely to attempt tyranny on an armed population.
It's also why the United States should remain strong militarily.
People abroad are less likely to challenge us if we know we can curb-stomp them anytime we please.
Basically, it's Madison making that case with regard to domestic insurrection.
Madison also makes the case for being able to amend the Constitution.
He says, "The useful alterations will be suggested by experience could not but be foreseen.
It was requisite, therefore, that a mode for introducing them should be provided.
The mode preferred by the convention seems stamped with every mark of propriety.
It guards equally against that extreme flexibility, which would render the Constitution too mutable, and that extreme difficulty, which might perpetuate its discovered faults." In other words, it's hard to pass an amendment, but it's meant to be hard to pass an amendment, but we have a way to pass amendments so we can adjust the Constitution.
Madison and the founders believed in the amendment process specifically because they were not afraid of a runaway convention.
This has been one of the objections used to the so-called Convention of States, the idea that you can have basically three-fifths of the states get together and declare a convention in order to add amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
It's supported by people like me and Mark Levin.
There's a Convention of States program, an Article 5 Convention of States program.
One of the worries has been the idea of a runaway convention, but it's very hard to pass a constitutional amendment in any case, and the prospect of a runaway convention was discounted by the people who wrote the provision, and I think for good reason.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all 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 Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.