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Aug. 30, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:09
Crying Wolf About Dog Whistles | Ep. 614
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Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis runs up against a media eager to charge him with racism, the Democratic Socialists are on the march, and Cynthia Nixon goes mano y mano with Andrew Cuomo.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So I just want to clarify something.
The phrase mano y mano doesn't actually mean man versus man.
It means hand to hand, okay?
So that wasn't a sexist comment that they went mano y mano.
That's actually what it means.
So if you idiots start saying that was a sexist comment, it's just because you're stupid and you don't know anything about foreign languages.
So there's a lot to talk about today.
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All right.
So I do want to talk about Ron DeSantis and this insane media spin that he is an evil, vicious racist.
But I have to begin today with the pope who tweeted something crazy out this morning.
I don't know what Pope Francis thinks he is doing.
I don't know what he thinks his job is.
And listen, I'm not a Catholic.
So, there are legitimately a billion people who know more about Catholicism than I do on planet Earth.
Maybe more than a billion people who know more about Catholicism than I do, but the basic information as it has been conveyed to me is that the Pope is supposed to be communicating God's Word on Earth and he is the Vicar of Christ.
Is this correct?
I think this is the general idea.
Well, this does not sound so vicarish, shall we say.
Here's what he tweeted out today.
We Christians are not selling a product.
We are communicating a lifestyle.
I didn't realize he was actually guest starring on Mad Men this week.
But when Pope Francis says things like, we Christians are not selling a product, we are communicating a lifestyle, he might want to think a little bit about the lifestyle that he and the church have been communicating in the last few weeks.
You know, the lifestyle that says that a Catholic cardinal, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, There's an awful, awful story that was out today about how the Pope basically dealt with the McCarrick situation.
And apparently he made some sort of joke about McCarrick being in the clutches of the devil.
public importance and that when other cardinals approached the pope the pope basically chastises them for there's an awful awful story that was out today about how the pope basically dealt with the mccarrick situation apparently he made some sort of joke about mccarrick being in the in the clutches of the devil this is an article from from life site news back in july apparently mccormick gave a speech uh it was Let's see.
So the story is that Ted McCarrick was speaking in He was speaking in October 2003.
McCarrick shared a conversation he had with the newly elected Pope Francis.
McCarrick told the audience he had a very serious cardiac incident while he was at the Vatican during the 2013 conclave.
When he returned from the hospital to the seminary where he was staying, his phone rang, and it was the newly elected Pope Francis on the line inquiring about McCarrick's health.
McCarrick relayed this conversation with the Pope, quote, I told the Pope that I guess the Lord still has some work for me to do.
The Pope responded to McCarrick, but on the other hand, maybe the devil did not have your accommodations ready.
And this was retold in a Washington Post story.
Well, if it turns out that the Pope was aware of the allegations against McCarrick, and he was making jokes about the devil having his accommodation ready in 2013, that's not good.
That's pretty bad.
And the Pope has stayed silent on all of this.
As I mentioned yesterday, the media's treatment of this issue has been absolutely incredible.
Just astonishing.
Because the media was all over the Catholic sex abuse scandals of the mid-2000s, when we had the Boston Archdiocese, which was caught basically covering up an enormous number of sex crimes.
And the media rightly was after the Catholic Church for that, in a way that, by the way, have never been, over secular institutions that engage in sex abuse.
When it's a secular institution engaging in sex abuse, that's just par for the course.
When it's the Catholic Church, then it's a huger deal, according to the media.
It should be a huge deal in either case.
But at least the media was going after the right folks back in 2006.
Now, of course, the media is interested in protecting Pope Francis because they feel that he reflects their political priorities.
If you want to know what's best for the Catholic Church, never trust the New York Times.
The New York Times is a pretty good indicator of exactly what the Catholic Church should not be doing, because you know what the New York Times editorial board would love more than anything else?
For all Catholics to stop being Catholic.
They would like to see the Catholic Church utterly destroyed, just as they would like to see Protestant churches destroyed, just as they would like to see Orthodox Judaism destroyed.
The secular media has an extraordinary bias.
against religious institutions that they see as being restrictive and repressive of individual freedoms, particularly on issues of sexuality.
So if they're upholding a particular Pope, it's a fair bet that Pope is not a friend to traditional Catholic doctrine.
And it's certainly fair to say that the Pope's activities over the last several months here are creating a serious possibility of a schism within the Catholic Church.
I mean, there's a serious possibility here that you could actually see a break in the Catholic, a serious break in the Catholic Church for the first time in half a millennium.
That's not really an exaggeration.
I'm hearing from a lot of Catholic friends.
I'm not even talking about people who are politically conservative.
I have a lot of Catholic friends who are saying that this is making them seriously doubt the ability of this Pope to continue in his current job.
And there's no impeachment procedure for Popes.
He's there until he decides to step down.
So it's a real problem.
And the fact that the Pope is tweeting out these nonsensical nostrums from Cosmo magazine Just demonstrates that he never was fit for the job.
I mean, listen, there are those of us who have been very critical of Pope Francis since day one, because it's very clear that Pope Francis had a certain political spin, a Marxist spin, on his own version of Catholic doctrine.
And as somebody who doesn't have a dog in the fight, other than I think the Catholic Church is a deeply important institution to the foundations of Western civilization, and I think the Catholic Church's continued health, is absolutely vital to the continuation of central values that perpetuate the power and glory of Western civilization.
That's my stake in this.
But I don't have a stake in this as a practicing Catholic, because I'm not Christian.
That said, when I see the Catholic Church being brought low by its own leadership on the basis of political leftism, because whether Pope Francis thinks that he has to appeal to a different crowd in order to raise the rates of conversion in poorer parts of the world, or whether he's just pandering to a leftist press, or whether he actually believes this stuff, What he is doing, it's so obviously undermining the foundations of the Catholic Church that it's pretty astonishing.
Again, the New York Times is very pro-Francis because Francis was, every five minutes they would run a headline about Francis talking about homosexuality because he's much more to the left on homosexuality, even while still supposedly abiding by Catholic doctrine.
They would never run headlines about Pope Francis on abortion, of course.
Where he is traditionally well within the sort of Catholic doctrine.
It shows you where the press is in all this, and it shows you why there are so many Catholics who are really uncomfortable today about the leadership of the Catholic Church.
It's a serious problem.
OK, so meanwhile, in the United States, we are fighting over much less serious issues because the future of the Catholic Church is a lot more important than any one election that's happening in the United States.
But demonstrating more of the press's just utter incapacity to tell the truth, Yesterday, the press went absolutely insane over a comment by Ron DeSantis.
Now, full disclosure, I know Congressman DeSantis.
He's a representative in the House of Representatives.
He is the new Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate.
He's a down-the-line conservative.
I'm friendly with Congressman DeSantis, but even were I not, this is just a bunch of crap.
Basically, Ron DeSantis was on Fox News, and he was talking about his opponent, a guy named Gillum, Andrew Gillum, who's the mayor of Tallahassee, who also happens to be embroiled in an FBI investigation of the Tallahassee mayor's office.
But more importantly, Andrew Gillum is a very, very left candidate.
He's 39 years old.
He's basically a Democratic Socialist like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
We'll talk in a little bit about what his victory in Florida means and how it happened.
But Ron DeSantis was talking about his opponents in this race because it's basically a dead even race.
And here's what Ron DeSantis had to say.
But I mean, he performed better than the other people there.
So we've got to work hard to make sure that we continue Florida going in a good direction.
Let's build off the success we've had on Governor Scott.
The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state.
That is not going to work.
That's not going to be good for Florida.
Okay, so, what's amazing about this, did you hear anything in there that sounded really racist?
Did you hear anything in there that sounded deeply racist to you?
Apparently that was deeply racist.
Apparently it was incredibly racist.
Why?
Because he used the phrase, monkey this up.
Now, monkey, as used as a verb, is used routinely.
Routinely, by all sorts of people.
Here, for example, is a clip of Barack Obama using the term monkeying around.
Was Obama being racist?
No, because when you say monkey something up, or monkeying around, you're clearly using it as a verb.
Meaning like a monkey wrench, like you're tinkering with things.
It's legitimately in Dictionary.com.
The only definition of monkey as a verb is to mess around with.
That's literally the only definition.
But, we are supposed to believe that Ron DeSantis used the term monkey this up as some sort of dog whistle to a bunch of racists in the sticks who weren't aware that Andrew Gillum is a gay black man.
It's just, it's an amazing thing.
Anyway, here is Barack Obama using it in 2008.
It's not as if it's just Republicans who have monkeyed around with elections in the past.
Sometimes Democrats have too.
You know, whenever people are in power, they have this tendency to try to Yep.
Tilt things in their direction.
So monkeying around is not an overtly racist phrase.
It's not even a racist phrase.
There's nothing about that phrase that is racist, but it is racist because you cannot use monkey and apparently socialist in the same sentence.
So even in that sentence, he wasn't talking about Andrew Gillum being black, right?
Which actually would probably be racist if you use monkey and then you say like, and I don't want them monkeying it up by electing a black candidate.
That sounds racist, right?
That sounds like you're making an overtly racist comment about the guy you're running against.
He said, we don't want to monkey up the economy by electing a socialist to lead our state.
That is not a racist thing.
And honestly, I'm puzzled by the theory.
I'm very puzzled by the theory.
So apparently the theory is that Ron DeSantis was desperately trying to reach out to the Trump voters he already has in his pocket.
Remember, Ron DeSantis ran the most pro-Trump campaign in America.
He ran an actual ad in which he dressed his kid, his baby, in a Trump onesie.
And according to the media, all Trump voters are racist, which means all the racists were already voting for Ron DeSantis.
But apparently it was deeply necessary that he had to somehow dog whistle to these five people who were going to vote against Andrew Gillum because he's black by using the phrase, let me just remind you, monkey it up.
That was his actual idea.
That's what he was going for, according to the media.
It's an amazing, amazing accusation.
Again, so he was using monkey as a verb in a commonly used phrase in order to make an oblique reference to a noun in order to appeal to people who are already voting for him, thinking the media wouldn't catch on and therefore driving an entire news cycle against him.
I mean, it's the machinations that DeSantis had to go through, apparently, in order to come up with this racist dog whistle.
The genius of it, the sheer genius of it, should boggle the mind.
But of course, all this is a bunch of crap.
I'm going to talk in a second about the backlash on all of this, and it's so dishonest.
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So, the media are not satisfied with simply suggesting that Ron DeSantis is an evil Republican.
He's a racist for using a term that is commonly used politically, like, all the time.
In fact, Andrew Gillum himself, the Tallahassee Democrat, has said in the past that his opponents were like monkeys on his back.
So it turns out there are lots of ways to use the word monkey without actually making a racially charged reference designed to elicit a certain response from the evil racists who supposedly make up your base.
But that's not going to stop the Democrats from jumping on this in fully dishonest fashion.
They did the same thing, by the way, to Mitt Romney.
Back in 2006, Mitt Romney suggested that the big dig in Boston, which I was there for this, they were digging a tunnel, And the drill got stuck.
It cost him billions of dollars and he suggested the project was a tar baby, meaning that the project was costing money and you'd spend the money and then you'd have to spend more money on it.
And people pointed out that the phrase tar baby has a racist history going back to like the Br'er Rabbit tales of the 19th century.
And suddenly it was that Mitt Romney was making some sort of veiled racist reference about a tunnel project.
That's what Mitt Romney was doing.
I remember they did the same thing to George Allen in Virginia.
There was an Indian guy who was following his campaign at the behest of his senatorial opponent.
And the Indian guy following his campaign, not like Native American, like India, from India.
And George Allen said something like, oh, you see this guy following our campaign around?
I don't know, his name is like Makaka or something.
And then it turned out that Makaka was a Portuguese slur for black person.
And so people said, well, his use of the term Makaka was directed at the Indian guy.
He's making a racist reference to a random reporter in the back of the room in order to gin up the base in Virginia.
And it basically caused George Allen to lose the election.
I mean, George Allen legitimately lost a senatorial election on the basis of this.
It's why, just a couple of days ago, here on this show, when we were talking about a British story about men wearing frilly underwear, and the British word for underwear is knickers, K-N-I-C-K-E-R-S, I had to spell it out and explain exactly what word I was using, because otherwise, Media Matters would claim that I was using the N-word.
In 1999, there was a guy in the mayor's office in Washington, D.C.
who used the word niggardly.
Niggardly means stingy.
It has nothing to do with the n-word.
The guy was fired for using that word back in 1999.
So this is the part of the DeSantis thing that's so incredible.
The assumption here is that he was using the term monkey this up Yes, I'm sure that the Yale grad and the Harvard Law grad is secretly a deep racist who is attempting to use a Southern strategy in a state he is likely to win already.
Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what he was going for, but that's what the media decided to push out.
So here is Andrew Gillum's response.
He says, of course, this isn't just a racist dog whistle.
It's a bullhorn.
It's a bullhorn.
Which seems, you know, discriminatory against male cattle.
But who am I to say?
Well, in the handbook of Donald Trump, they no longer do whistle calls.
They're now using full bullhorns.
And that was a bullhorn?
And what I've got to say about that is that we've got to make sure that we stay focused, I think, on the issues that confront everyday people.
That was a bullhorn?
My goodness.
I mean, I think it'd be fair to say that the president of the United States has used more of this dog whistling than than Ron DeSantis.
Like, I think the Charlottesville thing was really egregious.
I did, I think, several full episodes on the Charlottesville incident with the president of the United States.
But to claim that the phrase monkey this up with reference to socialism destroying the economy is some sort of racist dog whistle or racist bullhorn.
You want to know how you got Trump?
I know we use this phrase too much, but it's something that the left needs to understand.
The reason that Trump is President of the United States is because you cried wolf too many times.
You keep saying that every Republican who ever makes any reference to something that has nothing to do with race is actually making a covert racist reference and using Richard Nixon's 1972 Southern strategy.
This is the case you're making.
You claimed that Mitt Romney was a racist.
Mitt Romney.
You claimed that John McCain was a racist.
John McCain.
Right?
You claimed all these people were racist.
Now you're claiming Ron DeSantis is a racist.
You cried wolf so many times over a dog whistle that it turns out that when there are actual dog whistles, no one pays attention to you anymore.
Because it basically hears what you do.
Right?
Donald Trump says something that's actually bad and you guys go, well, you know, that's a dog whistle.
And we go, you mean like Mitt Romney was a dog whistle?
You're like, well, yeah, but, but no.
It's like, well, okay, so which, were you lying then or are you lying now?
Which one is it?
And the answer, of course, is that they were lying then.
I mean, that's the real answer.
But here's an MSNBC panel slamming Ron DeSantis.
Of course, Jen Rubin.
Of course, Jen Rubin, the in-house conservative at the Washington Post.
You can't see me right now?
I'm making scare quotes with my fingers.
Yes, Jen Rubin, the in-house conservative, so conservative that she is now to the left of Bill Maher on many issues.
Here she is on MSNBC explaining that DeSantis is a vicious racist, with no evidence, of course.
DeSantis is a Trumpite.
He fans racial hatred.
He fans fear of immigrants.
And that, I think, is going to come out in the campaign because that's what these guys do and they can't help themselves.
I think that it was clearly racist.
I mean, look, the remark didn't even make any sense.
It wasn't a rational argument or response to the conversation at hand.
What?
He was literally talking about a socialist messing up the economy.
And then he used the phrase, monkey this up, as opposed to muck this up or screw this up.
Or F this up.
Right?
Like, what?
But this is how the media is going to play this.
DeSantis is obviously irritated by this.
He dismissed the racism charge.
He says, this is just ridiculous.
And of course he's right.
It has zero to do with race, Sean.
It has everything to do with whether we want Florida to continue to go in a good direction, building off the success, or do we want to turn to left-wing socialist policies, which will absolutely devastate our state.
Okay, the Washington Post, however, was not buying this.
The Washington Post suggests that it is absolutely true.
This is a racist statement.
This is legitimately written in a newspaper, right?
In a major newspaper in the United States.
Quote, comparing black people, particularly tall, athletically built black men like Gilliam to monkeys, apes or primates is one of the oldest stereotypes in history.
No one did that.
He didn't even use the word monkey as a noun like that.
What?
And then and then there is a full 400 word explanation of the history of comparing people to monkeys, which is not what he did.
Right.
Leading American scientists in the 1850s embraced scientific racism to conclude that black people's similarities to apes was so significant that it influenced laws, policies and other decisions about African-Americans.
Yes, I'm sure that Ron DeSantis is a scientific racist from 1852.
I'm sure that that's exactly what he was doing.
This idea entered American pop culture at blockbuster levels and thus became more widespread via early 20th century films like Tarzan and King Kong, and images depicting black people as apes became common in anti-black art during the Jim Crow era of government-sponsored segregation.
What in the hell are you actually accusing DeSantis of?
Are you accusing DeSantis of being an 1850s-style scientific racist?
Are you accusing him of being a Jim Crow Democrat?
Is that what you're accusing Ron DeSantis, a Florida Republican?
Of?
Is that the direction you're going?
And now I guess you're comparing him to Roseanne Barr, who compared Valerie Jarrett to an ape?
But this is, I guess, where the entire left media is going to go.
I can't imagine why people think the media lied to them.
It's unthinkable to me.
How could people think that the media lied to them?
Now, does that justify the President of the United States saying enemy of the people?
No, it doesn't.
But, does it mean that Americans are less likely to trust the media?
You bet your ass.
And meanwhile, the media won't cover the actual facts about Andrew Gillum.
So, now let's talk about Andrew Gillum in just one second, because there are some things you should know about Andrew Gillum, this beloved Democrat who they want to prop up to the Florida governorship on the basis of lies about race baiting.
We'll talk about that in just one second.
But first, let's be clear.
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Okay, so now let's talk about the real story with regard to Andrew Gillum the media doesn't want to talk about.
Andrew Gillum is a socialist.
He's a democratic socialist along the lines of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which is to say that he will conveniently praise capitalism when he must, but he will generally say that capitalism is a bad thing, and he will claim that he's not a socialist when he sort of is a socialist.
This is the new game that we play if we are Democrats.
We say we are democratic socialists, which means we don't want to nationalize all industry or abolish the profit motive.
Unless we're talking to our base, in which case we kind of want to nationalize all industry or abolish the profit motive.
But we have to do this gradually.
We want to start off like Norway.
Like Norway, where we have capitalistic principles, but lots of social programs stacked on top of those capitalist principles.
And if it costs just a crap load of money, then we'll just do it anyway.
So Gillum, Andrew Gillum, is the mayor of Tallahassee.
As I talked about yesterday on the program, the FBI is investigating the Tallahassee mayor's office for use of public-private contracts to toss money To some of Andrew Gillum's friends, it is worth noting that Andrew Gillum's rise is paid for by rich people.
So, Andrew Gillum is making hay right now, specifically because there are billionaires who are backing him.
It's also important to know that Andrew Gillum won this particular primary because he was running in a three-way primary and the votes split.
So, in much the same way that Martha McSally, who won a pretty clear-cut victory over Joe Arpaio and Kelly Ward in Arizona, she won In part, at least, because that vote was split.
I think it was 17% for Arpaio, 28% for Kelly Ward, and the right person won in Martha McSally, who's a good candidate, an Air Force colonel, I believe.
In any case, the same sort of thing happened in Florida, where Andrew Gillum won this race specifically because the vote split between two other viable candidates in the Florida race.
Both of them ignored Gillum, and he ran directly to the left.
I mean, he just ran the inside rail, basically.
But he was also backed by literally millions of dollars from liberal billionaires.
So Tom Steyer dumped millions and millions of dollars into this campaign.
George Soros dumped millions.
This is not conspiracy theory.
This is reported by The New Yorker.
Gillum had recognized that big money in the Democratic Party, Tom Steyer's money, George Soros' money, is now on the left, not the center.
Last year, Gillum watched closely as Soros' cash helped propel progressive candidates to victory in several local elections, including the Philadelphia District Attorney's race.
Gillum was familiar with Soros and his organization, the Open Society Foundation, a few years ago, He helped launch a national network for young progressive elected officials and the Open Society Foundation was the group's main donor.
So this is a Soros guy.
He'd been in the financier's New York apartment, addressed his board of directors, and this spring dined with him in San Francisco when the two men happened to be in town.
Soros committed to back Gillum's gubernatorial campaign.
He says, if I'm remembering it correctly, it was, we don't know if you can win, but we would like what it could represent.
I interpret it to mean that it would be significant to see a person of color taken seriously in a statewide race.
No, it actually means that George Soros backs a lot of socialists.
I know we're going to turn everything into a color issue, but it has very little to do with color and everything to do with Gillum's economic policies, which are indeed extraordinarily left.
And you wouldn't muck up the economy.
You would screw up the economy if you actually were to embrace all of his policies.
Even Gillum understands, by the way, that if he runs too far left, he's actually honest about his own ambitions, that he ends up undercutting the economy.
So he was asked specifically about his Medicare-for-all plan.
So Medicaid-for-all is what... Medicare-for-all is what he's pushing.
Just like Bernie Sanders, just like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.
Sure, it's going to cost a minimum of $32 trillion, tripling the federal budget over the next 10 years.
Sure, it's going to bankrupt virtually everyone in the country.
Sure, that's a minimum that it will cost because it'll actually cost a lot more than that.
That $32 trillion doesn't take into account renegotiations, doctor pay raises.
It doesn't take into account all of the additional costs that will be necessary.
Medicare can exist at its current levels because a lot of people have private insurance.
You do Medicare for all, private insurance disappears, and the costs are going to be a lot more than $32 trillion.
In any case, even Gillum understands that his agenda is too far left, so he's basically soft-pedaling it.
Here he is explaining that he won't try Medicare for All in Florida alone, because he needs a confederation of states, which is a way to say, I'm for Medicare for All, unless I actually have to bear the political brunt of Medicare for All.
If for Florida to move in that direction, we would have to do it as a confederation of states.
We could not do it by ourselves, solely here in the state of Florida, because it would collapse the system.
We would only attract the sickest of patients, and it wouldn't work.
Listen, people are terrified of getting sick.
They're terrified of getting sick because if they get sick, they can't go to work.
And if they can't go to work, they can't earn a wage.
If they cannot earn a wage, they can't pay their bills.
Okay, I love that Chris Cuomo there is actually feeding him the talking points on CNN.
Well, you know what you should say here is what you should say is you're a paycheck away from poverty if you get sick.
And Andrew Gilman's like, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly how Chris Cuomo coaches Republicans through interviews as well.
CNN, your objective news network.
I love that Andrew Gillum there basically explains the rationale for why Medicare won't work at any level.
He says all it will do is attract all the sick people who will then overtax the system and then are going to have to pay for it somehow.
So, we'll do it, just not in Florida when I'm governor.
So we should do it, but we won't do it because it'll be expensive and it'll bankrupt the system, but we should do it.
I can't imagine why folks are looking at this as a fantasy candidacy, but it's very easy to promise things that will never come to fruition.
Gillum then says, I'm not a socialist.
When he's called on all this stuff, he says, don't worry, I'm not a socialist.
I'm just a Democrat.
I'm just a Democrat.
Yeah, well, I mean, it shouldn't surprise you.
It didn't surprise me that the president is, again, creating fairy tales on his Twitter feed.
You do not describe to being a socialist.
No, I'm a Democrat.
I ran as a Democrat.
I am a Democrat.
And frankly, the values that I hold, I think, are consistent with the values of the Democratic Party.
In fact, I think they are the values shared by the majority of Floridians.
No, what I do love about this the most is that there's no follow-up question from Chuck Todd at MSNBC.
Okay, so tell me the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist.
Remember, they actually asked Nancy Pelosi that question.
She couldn't answer it.
What's the difference between a Democratic Socialist and a Socialist?
What's the difference between the Democratic platform and a Democratic Socialist platform?
And the Democrats won't answer it.
So this is just fudging their way out of the fact that their policies are completely out of left field.
Gillum is going to run a strong race now based on a media that wishes to push him to victory.
We'll see how successfully the media can do all of that.
The irony of all this, of course, is that because of this push to the left that's been happening, at least in part thanks to a left-wing media that loves this kind of stuff, Other candidates are also seeing a rise.
One of those candidates, delightfully enough, is Cynthia Nixon.
So Cynthia Nixon, the former Sex and the City star, whose political background consists entirely of being the least likable member of a cast that included Sarah Jessica Parker, she is going to actually, she's running against Chris's brother, Andrew, and they've been running gun battle, Andrew and Chris, for stupidest Cuomo brother.
Chris occasionally takes the lead, but then Andrew sort of surges, and we'll see that even on today's show.
So what you see there is that Chris Cuomo Actually made a strong showing.
He broke out of the gate real fast.
But we'll see in a second that Andrew Cuomo really makes a Secretariat like pull away at the end here of the show.
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As I predicted, Cynthia Nixon debated Chris Cuomo in Not Chris.
I keep mixing up Chris and Andrew because, again, who cares?
But Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, was debating Cynthia Nixon.
And as I predicted, you get Andrew Cuomo in a room with Cynthia Nixon, it's not going to go well for Andrew Cuomo.
And the reason it's not going to go well for Andrew Cuomo is because he actually has to govern the state.
He actually has to be governor of the state.
Whereas Cynthia Nixon can sit on the side and talk smack, basically.
She can sit there and just yell at Andrew Cuomo for governing the state.
And all he can do is complain about how her performance was sort of lackluster in the late seasons of Sex and the City.
That's basically his only pitch.
So, they have this debate, and it's just amazing to watch, because it legitimately is like watching two small children club each other with frying pans.
Neither of them have very compelling points to make, but they make them the most militant possible way.
As someone with a two-and-a-half-year-old son, I'm familiar with how two-and-a-half-year-olds argue.
Basically, they say, I want X, and you say, you can't have X, and then they lie on the floor and they scream and kick.
That's basically how this gubernatorial debate went.
But because one of them is the sitting governor of a state, he looks small compared to Cynthia Nixon, who looks like the surging candidate.
I would not be surprised to see — I'll predict it here now — I would not be surprised to see Cynthia Nixon pull out this race.
It would not surprise me in the slightest to see Cynthia Nixon surge from behind and at least make this a very competitive race.
Right now, she's about 30 points behind in the polls.
But the polls are done infrequently, and Andrew Cuomo is one of the more lackluster candidates I have ever seen.
He makes gaffes on a regular basis.
And Cynthia Nixon at least has the sincerity of her convictions.
And since we live in a political age where sincerity is prized far more than actually knowing things, when you being sincere is really, really important.
But he truly feels this.
She truly believes this.
That's much more important than, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
It appears that Cynthia Nixon, I think she won this debate.
I think she won it going away.
And it's really, really funny.
So here is Andrew Cuomo trying to critique Cynthia Nixon last night by saying that she lives in a fantasy world.
And listen to the audience's response.
This is over at Hofstra University, which would be friendly ground for Andrew Cuomo, except he's running against the gal from Sex and the City.
My opponent lives in the world of fiction.
I live in the world of fact.
Let's just do a few facts, OK?
The subway system is owned by New York City.
OK, the reason that he's saying that is because she said that Andrew Cuomo is using the MTA as an ATM, which is a clever line.
It's not exactly true.
He's actually right that the MTA is run by the city of New York and they have not been contributing their fair share.
The state has been chipping in a lot of money.
She's not wrong that he's directed money away from the MTA and toward other projects.
But the fact that he's getting openly booed in the middle of debates by people, this looks a lot like Bernie Sanders versus Hillary Clinton.
It looks like the anti-establishment candidate versus the establishment candidate.
And the establishment candidate still has to pay lip service to, you know, the things that actually make the state run, whereas Cynthia Nixon can sit there and say whatever she wants.
Also, Andrew Cuomo then participates in one of the great self-owns I have seen in recent debate history.
I mean, this is a self-own of epic proportions.
You just have to listen.
It's really incredible.
Okay, that is what we call an own goal right there.
Can you stop interrupting?
Can you stop interrupting?
Can you stop lying?
Yeah.
As soon as you do.
The...
Okay, that is what we call an own goal right there.
So he asks her to stop interrupting, and she says, as soon as you stop lying, and he says, I will when you do.
Okay, that logically, just putting on your logic hat for a minute, that means he just admitted that he lies all the time, and that he will stop lying as soon as she stops lying.
So you have two liars on the stage is what he's saying.
What he should have said is...
You're the liar, or in the famous words of President Trump, you're the puppet.
He should have said something along those lines.
Instead, he comes back with, I'll stop lying when you just, As I say, in the running gun battle for stupidest Cuomo brother, Chris had an early lead in this episode, but Andrew makes a very late comeback.
And this is the best part.
So Andrew Cuomo goes after Cynthia Nixon and he wants to accuse her of corruption.
So how in the world could he accuse her of corruption?
He suggests that she had engaged in corporate lobbying.
What was her corporate lobbying?
She had asked that the city of New York and that the city of New York Not allow helicopters to fly over Central Park during performances of Shakespeare in the Park because it was disturbing people's ability to watch the play.
That was his example of Cynthia Nixon engaging in corporate lobbying.
Good luck with that, Andrew.
You are a corporation.
When you file taxes as a corporation, you are a corporation.
I have never, nor could I, donate to anyone's political campaign.
You are a corporation.
I donate through my own personal funds.
Are you a corporation?
I am a person.
And you're a corporation.
But I do not ever make political contributions through my... Yes, but you are a corporation.
No, no.
That is categorically untrue.
Okay, so it's so funny to watch them go at this because, again, it's two small children clubbing each other with frying pans.
What he's saying is that you're legally organized as a corporation for purposes of taxes, just like half of rich people in the United States.
More than half.
Virtually everybody who has any money in the United States has an Inc., or an LLC, or an S Corp.
Right?
Yes, everyone does.
Everyone does.
Because you do this for tax purposes, because then you write off all your expenses into the corporation, then the corporation files taxes and signs you a check at the end of the day.
I know, I'm organized exactly the same way.
Anybody who, as soon as you earn a certain level of money, it becomes beneficial tax-wise to do this.
So it's true that Cynthia Nixon is a corporation.
The great irony of this particular debate is that both of them believe that corporations should be less involved in politics, But he's acknowledging, and so is she, a basic truth.
People are corporations.
He says, you're a corporation.
She goes, I'm not a corporation.
I'm a person.
He says, right, but you organize as a corporation.
And she says, right, but I'm a person.
Right, both of you are arguing that people shouldn't be able to speak politically so long as they're organized as corporations, which makes no sense at all.
But again, this is what you get when sincerity and socialist kind of talking points come to the fore.
I do love that the same people proclaiming money and politics are bad are going and hitting up George Soros and Tom Steyer for millions of dollars in campaigns.
And the two people who are running for governor in New York are a very, very wealthy actress who calls herself a socialist, and Andrew Cuomo, the son of a former governor of New York and the brother of a CNN host, who obviously, this is a guy who clearly brought himself up by the bootstraps.
I mean, this is a guy who had to work his way from the bottom of American society, really grasping that bottom rung, just pulling himself up step by step.
Okay, meanwhile, It's worthy talking about the President of the United States, who's now on a tear against Bruce Ohr.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this, because this has become a major issue.
The President of the United States is ripping into Bruce Ohr, who's the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General over at the Department of Justice.
He was deeply involved in a variety of issues.
He spent more than 25 years at the Justice Department, and he's drawn President Trump's ire.
So President Trump was going after Bruce Ohr, suggesting that Bruce Ohr, his security clearance should be revoked, that he's been involved in an attempt to basically stop President Trump from being successful.
Trump tweeted in the last couple of weeks, quote, Bruce Ohr of the Justice Department, can you believe he's still there, is accused of helping disgraced Christopher Steele find dirt on Trump.
Ohr's wife Nellie was in on the act big time, worked for Fusion GPS on fake dossier.
And then he continued, I feel like now's a good time to actually explain what's going on here, because you're seeing a lot of attention to Bruce Ohr and the conservative media.
I love that he has to add the adjective.
It was Fusion GPS that hired Steele to write the phony and discredited dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC.
I felt like now's a good time to actually explain what's going on here because you're seeing a lot of attention to Bruce Ohr and the conservative media.
So let's explain what exactly happened here.
So Bruce Ohr is a longtime DOJ official.
He was friends with Christopher Steele, and it looks like he was communicating with Christopher Steele even after Christopher Steele, the author of the Fusion GPS dossier against President Trump, was basically cut off by the FBI.
So the FBI said, we can't talk to Christopher Steele anymore because he was leaking to the media.
And then it turns out Bruce Orr was still talking with Christopher Steele and apparently taking that information and passing it on to the FBI.
So despite the FBI Deciding they would no longer work with Steele, Bruce Ohr was trying to act, it looks like, as an intermediary for Steele's information to get to the FBI.
Now all of this is in the aftermath of the election.
There are two accusations that are being made.
One of them has some evidentiary support.
One of them has not a lot of evidentiary support.
The one that has some evidentiary support is the idea that Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie does work for Fusion GPS, there's a whole nexus here.
Nellie works for Fusion GPS, and Bruce works for the DOJ, and Bruce is friends with Christopher Steele.
Nellie hired Bruce... Nellie hired Christopher Steele to, at least in part, come up with this Fusion GPS dossier.
He then met with Bruce Ohr, was funneling him information, Ohr was funneling that to the FBI.
The accusation, one, is being made that all of this information is what led to the continuation of the Mueller investigation and to the wiretap on Carter Page, that all of this led to the FISA application against Carter Page, that the Fusion GPS dossier was used as the basis for the FISA application against Carter Page, and that it never should have been, and it was being basically treated corruptly by Bruce Ohr because he wanted to get President Trump.
There is some evidence of that, although I will again note that the actual FISA application has a full footnote at the bottom of the application that specifically talks to the court about how this is an OPPO research piece of dossier that was handed by Hillary Clinton's campaign to the DOJ and the FBI.
So it's not entirely true that the court had no idea that this was a piece of OPPO research and to take it with a grain of salt.
What it really does raises the question of how easily the FISA court actually gives out warrants for wiretapping people.
I think it more goes to a systemic problem.
That's accusation number one.
Accusation number two is the one that I haven't seen the dots fully connected on, and I try to be as objective as I can in my assessment of which dots have been connected so far.
The dots that are trying to be connected is what a lot of Trump's fans are trying to do is basically get to the point where they can claim that the entire Mueller investigation and the Russia collusion investigation is fruit of the poisonous tree, meaning that it was initiated in bad faith by opponents of President Trump, specifically in order to stop Trump from being president.
And therefore, the Mueller investigation now is fruit of that poisonous tree.
It is poisonous as well.
And Trump would be well within his rights to fire Robert Mueller and therefore stop the investigation.
That's the case they're trying to make.
Now, the problem with that case is that the original investigation, according to Devin Nunes, right, who is the representative leading this particular investigation into the investigation, right?
Devin Nunes is the head of the House Intelligence Committee.
He says that the George Papadopoulos investigation, the investigation of a low-level foreign policy aide who worked for Trump and was communicating with what appeared to be a Russian cutout, that's what led to the investigation.
So it had nothing to do with Bruce Ohr, it had nothing to do with Christopher Steele.
The accusation that's being made is that Bruce Ohr and Christopher Steele, that's the real reason that the Mueller investigation was launched.
The evidence isn't there for that yet.
The best evidence they have is that Christopher Steele and Bruce Ohr met on July 30th, 2016, in the middle of the campaign.
And the next day, the investigation launched.
But it's not clear that's what launched the investigation.
Usually it takes a couple of months to actually initiate that process.
So we'll have to see if that final dot is connected.
If that final dot is connected, then you have the serious possibility that the entire thing was trumped up.
There's a difference, by the way, between the investigation not coming up with anything and the investigation originally being trumped up for political reasons.
There's a logical distinction between those two.
We need to keep that in mind.
So that's the story on Bruce Soar.
Okay, time for some things I like and then we'll get to some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
There's a series on Netflix, I think it was actually a USA series, I guess, called The Sinner with Jessica Biel.
It is Dark.
I mean, like, really, really dark.
It's pretty disturbing as well.
The basic opener is that Jessica Biel is a young mother who just randomly stabs a guy on the beach.
And we don't know why she stabbed the guy on the beach.
She doesn't remember why she stabbed the guy on the beach.
And it's really well done.
Bill Pullman gives a very good performance in it as well.
So here's a little bit of the preview.
It is sort of what... It's Sharp Objects, I guess, on HBO.
I watched the first few episodes of Sharp Objects on HBO.
It is so slow that it is almost unwatchable.
In fact, it's so slow that I actually did what I rarely do.
I went on Wikipedia, read the end of the plot, so I would be able to skip the last five episodes of that show.
But this is what Sharp Objects should have been, which is disturbing, but a well-done sort of murder mystery.
Here's a little bit of the preview. - Where did you stab him?
I stabbed him in his neck.
You had no interaction with him before today?
I've never met him before in my life.
Then why kill him?
That's an impulse killing.
It's emotional.
Okay, so it's worth watching.
It's pretty compelling stuff, and all the performances are quite good.
I will say, there's this weird thing that seems to be happening on TV a lot.
In this series, Bill Pullman plays a guy who has guilt issues, and so he likes being tortured by women sexually.
We've also seen that in Billions.
Is this a thing?
Is this a thing I'm missing?
That suddenly tons and tons of people are into this?
Because I can't think of many things less sexy than having pain inflicted upon me for sexual purposes.
That's just so weird.
Hollywood's a weird place, man.
I mean, it's now in every show.
It's like, we've tried all of the different forms of sex, and now we have to go into the fringy stuff.
So we're just gonna, like, have every show feature somebody getting hit with a toaster in the face during sex for some reason.
So it's, that's a weird, just sort of a weird side point to that show.
But the show itself is well done, and I think worth the watch.
Certainly it is rated R. It's definitely an R-rated thing.
Okay, so other things that I like.
Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, is prepping new policies on campus sexual misconduct that would bolster the rights of students accused of assault, harassment, or rape, and reduce liability for institutions of higher education and encourage schools to provide more support for victims.
All of which sounds good, except the feminists don't like it because they like this vague standard where if a girl claims that something bad happened to her of any sort, And anybody fights back against that, that person basically loses their job.
And we've actually seen that in places like Northwestern, where Laura Kipnis, who's a professor, female professor, who's a feminist, at Northwestern University protested at the standard in Northwestern, where a male professor who had sex with a female student Apparently, voluntarily.
And then later, she accused him of abuse of power or something.
And Kipnis said, well, we might want to actually see, you know, like, the evidence.
She was investigated by the university for that.
For even saying that.
Betsy DeVos is fighting back against that, as well as she should.
The supposed campus rape epidemic is a bunch of nonsense.
There is no campus rape epidemic.
The actual Bureau of Justice Department statistics show that, Christina Hoff Summers and I talked about this, about 1 in 53 Women are subjected to actual sexual assault on campus, not one in four.
That is an order of magnitude difference.
Every rape is horrible.
As I've said a thousand times on the show, rapists should be castrated or killed.
It's the worst crime you can commit against somebody and I may include murder in that.
That does not change the actual stats and the fact that so many of these universities basically run Stalinist show trials based on no evidence and then get sued on the back end, right?
We saw this with mattress girl Emma Sulkowicz over at NYU.
It's really bad stuff, so good for Betsy DeVos.
The New York Times, of course, is very skeptical.
They say, unlike the Obama administration's guidance documents, the Trump administration's new rules will have the force of law and can go into force without an act of Congress after a public comment period.
Last fall, Ms.
DeVos rescinded a 2011 letter prepared by the Obama administration that outlined the responsibilities of schools and colleges that receive federal funding to address episodes of sexual misconduct.
Victim rights groups praised the Obama-era guidelines for aggressively holding schools accountable for complaints of sexual harassment, assault, and rape that they said had been often played down or ignored.
But critics contended that they too often trampled due process rights for accused students, which is absolutely true.
If you've seen the actual process on any of these campuses, it's insane.
We have a criminal standard for a reason.
And the idea that you're going to destroy a student's life based on a lack of due process seems fundamentally un-American in virtually every way.
It's an un-American process.
Good for Betsy DeVos for doing all of this.
And again, The reason that we take rape so seriously is because the consequences for rape should be so serious.
All of these fools in the feminist media who have been claiming that one in four women on campus is sexually assaulted and then they conflate actual rape with a man going in for a kiss with a woman and a woman turns her cheek and glances off her cheek and that's sexual assault now.
That's, that's complete, it's complete insanity.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So CNN continues to push news that they can no longer back up.
President Trump has ripped into Carl Bernstein.
Now, Carl Bernstein did a report for CNN suggesting that he knew about the Trump Tower meeting in advance.
Now, do I fully trust the president that he didn't know about the Trump Tower June 2016 meeting in advance between his team and a Russian-backed lawyer?
Do I really trust the president on that?
Not really, because Trump says a lot of stuff that ain't true.
I mean, I'm not going to fib about that.
But there's been no evidence presented to actually show that he did any of that.
CNN ran this story.
It turns out the story was basically provided by Lanny Davis, who's Michael Cohen's lawyer, a former Clintonite.
And then he retracted it.
He said, well, I didn't actually have knowledge of that.
So Trump tweeted out, CNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake.
Sloppy Karl Bernstein.
A man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country.
Fake news.
This is a classic Trump tweet with all of the typical hallmarks of an authentic.
You've got the nickname, Sloppy Carl Bernstein.
What did he call Steve Bannon?
Was it Sloppy Steve also?
Yeah, so I do think that this is my only critique of President Trump's nicknames.
He needs a broader variety of nicknames.
He's actually started applying signifiers to the same people.
He should have a new one for Carl Bernstein.
There are a lot of words in the English language.
Little, sloppy.
Stupid, right?
Let's come up with some synonyms, just for the sake of variety.
He also says that he thinks that he's a degenerate fool.
I will admit, I have a certain fondness for the president using the term degenerate fool, just because, I mean, what the hell, man?
This is the world we live in now.
We're in the circus, we might as well enjoy the show.
But Carl Bernstein has indeed refused to back down from his story, but he won't exactly explain how he knows the story is true.
He's sort of betting that eventually it will come out that Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting, because he knows that he will face no consequences if that never comes out, because the media want that story to be true.
CNN fired back at President Trump.
They tweeted back, The schoolmarmish nature of CNN communications, tweeting back, CNN does not lie, we report the news.
And we report when people in power tell lies.
CNN stands by our reporting and our reporters.
There may be many fools in this story, but Carl Bernstein is not one of them.
The schoolmarmish nature of CNN communications, tweeting back, CNN does not lie, we report the news.
Again, it is this insistence that drives people up a freaking wall.
If they would just ignore the president and just let it sit, everybody would understand that, you know, it ain't great that the president always says fake news It's not that great that he calls people degenerate fools.
He's the president of the United States.
You know, Abraham Lincoln back in 1863 wasn't going around being like, my political opponents in the press are degenerate fools.
It's just not a thing.
To be fair, Lincoln was locking them up, but the President of the United States now probably should not be doing that in the modern media era.
But when CNN says stuff like that, and then you have Chris Cuomo who actively is feeding lines to Florida gubernatorial candidates who are Democrats, it's hard for you to say that all you do is report the news.
Carl Bernstein himself doubled down on this.
He responded to Trump's Twitter attacks.
He said, Real Donald Trump, I've spent my life as a journalist bringing the truth to light through administrations of both parties.
No taunt will diminish my commitment to that mission, which is the essential role of a free press.
CNN stands by its story, and I stand by my reporting.
This is why the president shouldn't really do this, because all it does is elevate the people who are attacking him.
It's the Streisand effect for people who don't follow sort of pop culture stuff.
The Streisand effect is there was a person, an environmental photographer, who took a bunch of pictures of the California coast and wanted to put a book about it.
And there was like a map from above, a helicopter shot.
It included Barbara Streisand's house.
Nobody had seen this photo ever.
And then Barbara Streisand tried to have it taken out.
She tried to sue the guy for like $10 million.
He's just a photographer.
She tried to sue him for like $10 million and suddenly the photo was downloaded one million times because people wanted to see what Barbara Streisand's house looked like.
The president has the power to make stories bigger when he really should be trying to make them smaller.
And he has a serious talent for that.
So that is not ideal.
Okay, final thing that I hate today.
So Cosmopolitan magazine in the UK has put out a cover of this person who I don't know who this is, but this is a very obese person.
Tess Holliday.
Okay, so Tess Holliday, I guess, they call her a supermodel.
And she's on the cover.
She's got to be at least 100 pounds overweight here.
I mean, this is a very obese woman.
And the idea here is that this is body positivity.
I don't know how we skipped from anorexia to obesity and missed all the women in the middle.
Like, if we're gonna do body positivity, shouldn't we start with, like, a normal-looking woman?
And I'm not saying that, you know, it's not normal for certain people who have genetic conditions to be obese.
What I'm saying is that it probably is not a good idea.
Fat shaming is not the same thing as health shaming, right?
Saying that you should be healthy?
I'm not saying that if this is this woman's healthy weight, fine, fair game, good for her.
But I highly doubt that this is a healthy weight for any person, let alone this person, and treating it as though what the world truly needs is to change its definition of sexy To include people who are dramatically overweight, I'm not sure what the positive impact of that is.
Maybe it makes people feel better, but it also is going to lead to a lot of folks not losing weight who probably should lose weight.
I mean, let's be realistic about this.
America right now is in the middle of an obesity epidemic.
We're not in the middle of an epidemic of people who are dramatically trying to be healthier.
We're in the middle of an epidemic where people are trying to, don't care about being healthy, and then they're being told that they should be fulfilled in their non-health.
If they were just to put in, like, Bridget Phetasy, who used to write for Playboy, and I'm friendly with her, and she tweeted something out that I think is exactly right.
She basically said, like, I'm a normal-looking 40-year-old woman.
Why am I not on the cover of Cosmopolitan?
Why is it that we have to go from either rail-thin supermodels, who no woman actually looks like unless she exercises three hours a day and eats kale, or we have to go with the 300-pound woman.
Why can't we just go to, like, a normal woman in the middle?
If you want to glorify what the normal woman looks like, why don't you take, like, the average?
Well, again, when I say normal, I mean like in terms of normal distribution.
In the normal distribution of weight, this is on one edge of the distribution, and then the real thin supermodels on the other edge of the distribution.
If you want to focus on like healthy body image, why not focus on the people in the middle who are actually living healthy lifestyles?
Why is that so out of the box?
But we're a stupid society where we have to take every fringe idea and then make it mainstream.
And suggest the only reason it wasn't mainstream before is because of evil, evil, evil discrimination.
Okay, time for something uplifting.
Let's do a psalm.
So every week we go through a psalm talking about some eternal values here.
We are on Psalm 7.
This one is a song of David.
And it says, Lord, my God, I take refuge in you.
Save and deliver me from all who pursue me, or they will tear me apart like a lion and rip me to pieces with no one to rescue me.
Lord, my God, if I have done this and there is guilt on my hands, if I have repaid my ally with evil or without cause have robbed my foe, then let my enemy pursue and overtake me.
Let him trample my life to the ground and make me sleep in the dust.
One of the things that's kind of telling about this psalm is how confident this psalm is.
So this psalm is very confident about the idea that there is cause and effect, and that if you do something good, God will reward you, and if you do something bad, God will punish you.
Well, as we see from everyday life, that's clearly not the case.
There are plenty of people who do bad things who are rewarded, and plenty of people who do good things who suffer.
But the idea here is that we have to accept God's justice no matter how it comes.
So David was well aware that he was a sinner.
I mean, this is one of the different... When people say Donald Trump is like King David, yeah, except for the whole repentance part.
So, you know, David was actually rather well known in the Bible for being a guy who was penitent in the face of God.
And what this psalm isn't is David saying, I'm innocent, therefore absolve me.
It's David saying, I will live with your justice no matter what it is.
I believe I'm innocent, but I'm not going to, but your justice is higher than mine.
And you may have a different standard for justice than I do.
And I think that that's why I was talking with somebody yesterday about my faith and whether my faith has ever been shaken.
And what I said is usually from what I see from other folks, faith is shaken in two particular ways.
Way number one is they see Something bad happened to someone good, right?
They're close to somebody and something bad happens to that person.
And then they say, how could a good God allow this?
And I've never really had such a problem with that.
Maybe it's because I haven't suffered enough.
And, you know, I hope that that continues, obviously.
And I can never blame somebody who's undergone tremendous suffering and then just cannot live with the faith that God knows better than they do.
Like, I understand the emotional, the emotional draw to that.
But It is true.
It's a basic fundamental of religion that God knows better than you do.
And so suffering I've never seen as a real barrier to faith.
Christianity in particular has never seen suffering as barrier of faith.
In fact, it's a tent pole of faith.
Christ literally is tortured and died for your sins if you're a Christian.
In Judaism, the idea is that, you know, even the greatest heroes in Judaism suffered.
Moses dies before he's allowed into the promised land.
Suffering is endemic to the human condition.
And that's something that God knows more about than you do.
The second way that people lose faith is they see members of their institutions do something bad.
They look at other members of the Catholic Church, if you're Catholic, or they look at other members of the Jewish community, if you're Jewish, they say, there's an Orthodox Jew who's rude and nasty.
I don't like that guy.
Therefore, how could this be a godly religion?
If you're judging a faith by the behavior of its adherents, I think that you're making a mistake because your relationship with God is between you and God, and it's you on a desert island alone with God, because in the end, that's how we all die, right?
It's us on a desert island alone, facing down our maker.
It is also true that religious people should understand that the easiest way to drive other people away is to act like a bad person.
And I think that that's particularly true in a time when we're talking about scandals inside the Catholic Church.
But as I've said before, these scandals exist in every institution, religious and non-religious.
It's incumbent on religious people to go out of their way not to have guilt on their hands.
If God judges them to be guilty, that's one thing.
But if it's clear that you're guilty to everybody else, then you are complicit in the destruction of your own religious institutions, and you are complicit in What I would say is evil work.
All right.
We will be back here tomorrow and we will have all the breakdowns on the news plus the mailbag.
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.
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Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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