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Sept. 4, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:45
The Anti-Trump Culture War | Ep. 616
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Nike rewards Colin Kaepernick for kneeling.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh has his day before the Senate.
And, as President Trump's tweets gain volume, anti-Trump commentators use John McCain's funeral to slam the president.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, the news cycle just keeps on going.
It doesn't matter that you took the weekend off.
The news did not take the weekend off.
And so we are back here to review all of it with you.
And we'll go through all of it in just one second.
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All right.
So we begin today.
With Nike.
So actually, you know what?
Let's not begin with Nike.
Screw that.
Let's start with the judicial hearing.
So this morning, Brett Kavanaugh, who is the judge who is now being appointed by President Trump to the Supreme Court of the United States, was scheduled to have his opening hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Now, all of this is a giant waste of time.
It's a giant waste of time, and has been for 40 years, because, number one, nobody actually wants the answers to their questions.
Instead, we just go through this rigmarole to pretend that these judges don't already know what they are going to decide on certain cases, and then we ask them, and then they lie, and then they go on the court, and they do exactly what we all thought they were going to do before, unless they're a Republican appointee, in which half the cases they do exactly the opposite of what we thought they were going to do before.
In any case, Brett Kavanaugh is a textualist.
He's somebody who takes the text of the Constitution seriously, and that means that the Democrats oppose him.
How do we know they oppose him?
Well, because they've said so.
Senator Cory Booker has already come out and opposed him.
Senator Kamala Harris from California, she's already come forward and opposed him.
But that's not going to stop the Democrats from pretending that the real reason they don't want to give Brett Kavanaugh a vote is because they just don't have enough information on Brett Kavanaugh.
So they say, we need millions of pages of everything that Brett Kavanaugh has ever written in order for us to determine whether he should sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Again, this is a stupid line considering they have already come out preemptively and said that they don't support Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court of the United States.
Well, once you've said that, what's the point of these hearings?
Now they're doubly useless.
Number one, even if we were going to pretend that they were useful, You're not really seeking answers from these prospective justices.
And number two, when you've already said you're voting against the guy, are we supposed to take your protestations seriously?
That if you don't get the materials, you're not going to vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh?
So naturally, the whole thing devolved into farce.
Remember, the only reason Republicans can ram through the justice they want right now is because Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, when he was in power from 2008 till 2010, Harry Reid rammed through.
Actually, it was all the way until 2014.
Harry Reid rammed through a process by which you could, through the workings of 51 votes in the Senate, get your judicial nominee.
In 2013, he invoked the so-called nuclear option, which allowed a ruling from the Senate Rules Committee, or the Senate parliamentarian, that allowed 51 votes to elevate someone to the Supreme Court or to any federal court.
And now Republicans have just reversed that process, and now they're doing the same thing that Harry Reid sought to do.
This, of course, has the Democrats Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Chairman, I'd like to be recognized for a question before we proceed.
Like, they are actually screaming.
So this is what it sounded like inside the Senate Judiciary Committee when Orrin Hatch opened the actual process and things went wildly off the rails.
I welcome everyone to this confirmation hearing on the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to serve as Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Mr. Chairman, I'd like to be recognized for a question before we proceed.
Regular order, Chairman.
Mr. Chairman, I'd like to be recognized to ask a question before we proceed.
The committee received just last night, less than 15 hours ago, 42,000 pages of documents that we have not had an opportunity to review.
Mr. Chairman, if we cannot be recognized, I move to adjourn.
Mr. Chairman, I move to adjourn.
Mr. Chairman, I move to adjourn.
...directly from Judge Kevin Wall. I move to adjourn. Okay, so this is all a bunch of nonsense.
Chuck Grassley is the Republican senator who's in charge of that.
That was Kamala Harris that you heard there, who was saying that she received all these documents.
Except that, as I mentioned, she has already come out against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.
So, what are the documents going to do?
Change her vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh?
Of course this is a bunch of nonsense.
And then you have Ron Wyden, who's jumping in there.
And you have Senator Richard Blumenthal, who's jumping in there.
A bunch of different Democratic senators saying, well, we move to adjourn.
Guess what, buddy?
You don't have the vote.
So this is a waste of time.
What Grassley should have done is he should have said, listen, since you're making a mockery of this, we're just going to skip the hearing and vote him out of committee.
We can save everybody a month.
We'll save everybody a month of time and stupid effort, and instead we'll just vote the guy directly out of committee and down to the floor, and then we can have a vote, and this guy can be sitting on the Supreme Court by the end of the week.
Because that's where this is going.
Instead, we're gonna waste a month with all of this bureaucratic nonsense where Democrats oppose because they have to oppose, and Republicans vote for him, and that's the end of the story.
But I do enjoy I do enjoy the theatrics, the kind of kabuki theater of all this.
The real reason that all of these Democrats who are running for president want the hearings is so they can have their sort of Ronald Reagan 1980 moment.
In the 1980 primaries, I think it was the New Hampshire primary debate, there was a point where Ronald Reagan was debating George H.W.
Bush.
And he had paid for part of the sponsorship of the debate and they tried to cut off his mic and he said, I paid for this microphone, Mr. Breen.
And the crowd erupted.
And it was this big moment.
All these Democrats are looking for that, except in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
They're all looking for that moment where they get to say to Brett Kavanaugh, you, sir, are representative of the regime from the handmaid's tale.
Okay, so people were actually being dragged out, I am not kidding, kicking and screaming from the hearing room, a bunch of the folks on the left who dress up in pussy hats and Handmaid's Tale costumes.
They were actually brought out by their hands and feet, like, carried out by their hands and feet, because they were screaming about Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
Wait until President Trump gets to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court if you want to see people burn stuff down, because they're almost doing it for Brett Kavanaugh, who, it should be remembered, is replacing Antonin Scalia, another conservative on the court.
It is a replacement of an originalist by an originalist who's probably a little bit softer than Antonin Scalia.
And yet we're getting all of this hootenanny, this hot and bother from the left.
It's really insane.
I know that they think under Article 47 of the Constitution of the United States there's a whining clause that allows them to whine their way into obstructing this, but there's no way for them to actually obstruct this, so it's all a waste of time.
It's all virtue signaling nonsense.
And again, all of these judicial hearings annoy me in the first place because if somebody were to give an honest answer, they would immediately be ruled out of order by the Senate.
We know this because when Robert Bork gave honest answers back in the 1980s, he was not put on the Supreme Court for answering honestly questions about, for example, Roe vs. Wade.
And this led Democrats to quote-unquote Bork him.
It became a term of art.
And now Democrats do this with anybody who tells the actual answers to the questions.
Which we all know.
As a lawyer, as a constitutional lawyer who has spent time talking constitutional law with a wide variety of experts on the subject.
I'm not going to drop my grades.
I'm not going to drop my grades from Harvard Law like A-plus in constitutional law.
Let's just say That constitutional law is a thing I am into.
As somebody who has studied it for a very long time, to pretend that judges who sit before these committees don't have extraordinarily set views on the nature of precedent and on the nature of particular cases is just silly.
But we all sit there and we pretend anyway, because supposedly this makes our country better in some way.
It doesn't.
They should just vote them out of committee.
They should just vote them out of the Supreme Court.
We should all recognize this for what it is, a partisan exercise.
And it would be a partisan exercise if the Democrats were to do it also.
The Supreme Court has become a partisan tool because the left made it a partisan tool decades ago, and now the right is responding by simply trying to appoint originalists to the bench over the hoots and howls of insane Democrats.
Meanwhile, The culture war continues to polarize.
The big story over the weekend is that Nike, in a viral piece of marketing, decided that it was deeply necessary to reward Colin Kaepernick.
So you remember Colin Kaepernick.
He's that irrelevant backup quarterback from 2016 who made a name for himself by kneeling for the national anthem.
And let us recall that Colin Kaepernick had already been made a backup quarterback.
I think it was Blaine Gabbert in San Francisco.
In other words, he was a garbage quarterback.
He was one of the lowest rated quarterbacks in the NFL.
I think he was at the time he was benched the lowest rated quarterback in the NFL.
He got a 32 starting quarterbacks.
He was number 32.
And Colin Kaepernick was benched.
And then in the preseason of 2016, before Trump was president, he started to kneel for the national anthem.
It is also to be remembered that Colin Kaepernick Who said he was kneeling for the national anthem to protest widespread police brutality or some such nonsense.
He's the kind of person who is wearing on practice field socks with pictures of cops as pigs.
There's legitimately pictures of pigs with cop hats on them.
Because this is what he thinks of police officers.
This guy who grew up actually pretty privileged.
He was adopted and he grew up in a pretty privileged area of California.
It's all kind of ridiculous.
It's all kind of ridiculous.
But Colin Kaepernick was made into a national hero by the left, which thinks that it is a Muhammad Ali-like stance to kneel for the national anthem.
He did this in 2016.
It became a national issue.
President Trump commented on it as a candidate.
It was very polarizing.
Most Americans opposed kneeling for the anthem, but there's a heavy segment, particularly in the black community, that supported Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem.
There's a very big racial gap in the polling numbers on kneeling for the national anthem.
So Colin Kaepernick was offered in 2017, or in 2016, he was offered the chance to join the Denver Broncos.
John Elway announced this In 2018, he was asked about picking up Colin Kaepernick, and he said, I said this a while ago.
Colin had his chance to be here.
We offered him a contract, and he didn't take it.
Elway was referring to the 2016 season.
Denver tried to trade for Kaepernick, who was under contract with the 49ers at a time.
The quarterback would not agree to a restructured deal with Denver.
And then the Broncos selected a couple of backup quarterbacks, and he lost his opportunity.
And it turned out nobody really wanted the headache of Colin Kaepernick, not just because of the publicity, although publicity is something you have to take into account when you are a National Football League team, but also because he's just not a very good quarterback.
Because Colin Kaepernick, after basically one spectacular season, fell off the map.
And that's not unusual.
There are a bunch of quarterbacks in the NFL who've had one great season, then fallen off the map.
And this has nothing to do with politics.
I remember RG3, who is a quarterback in Washington for the Redskins, had one fantastic season, and then he sort of fell off the map.
And that's not unusual.
Again, once people figure out your sort of tricks as a quarterback, it's difficult to recover, and that's sort of what happened to Kaepernick overall.
But Kaepernick played his way out of a starting job, and then once he was on the bench, he started kneeling for the national anthem.
It is now two years later, and this conversation has not ceased since.
It has continued to be a thorn in the side of the NFL ever since because the NFL didn't take strict action against it.
And we'll talk about the latest iteration of this controversy in just one second.
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So the latest iteration of the Colin Kaepernick controversy, because it has continued all the way till now, President Trump I said I didn't think he should get involved in this.
He did as president because he likes this culture war.
He thinks it's a good culture war to fight.
He thinks he wins this culture war.
And he's likely right.
He does win this culture war, but at the cost of polarizing the debate a little bit more.
When President Trump took office, some 75% of Americans thought kneeling for the national anthem was bad.
Now that number is in the low 60s, last time I checked.
A lot of that has to do with President Trump's polarizing personality.
With all of that said, the media have latched on to the national anthem controversy, and they have not let go since.
The NFL has done a horrible job of killing the controversy, instead of just killing it at the outset by saying, listen, you don't get to kneel for the anthem, you're fine.
You want to protest in your off hours?
Enjoy.
But you don't get to do it on our fields.
Instead of them doing that, they allowed it to happen, they allowed it to fester, and it ended up hurting the NFL in a pretty serious way.
The ratings for the NFL have been in decline for the last two years.
It's been a serious image issue for the NFL.
Well now, Nike is jumping into the fray.
So Nike decided that they are going to Do the the this this huge ad campaign that is going to focus on Colin Kaepernick.
He is part of the 30th anniversary of Nike's Just Do It campaign.
And here's what the ad looks like.
It's a picture of Colin Kaepernick, a close-up of his face in black and white.
It says, believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.
And then there's the Nike swoosh and it says, just do it.
So there's so many elements of this that are just fabulously ironic.
First of all, this social justice warrior campaign to sell sneakers Produced by small children in Vietnam, presumably.
It's kind of hilarious watching the entire left resonate around a huge billion-dollar company, a huge corporation that allegedly exploits child labor in third-world countries because, hey, Colin Kaepernick.
That's pretty hilarious.
It is also kind of hilarious that the slogan itself, Believe in Something, even if it means sacrificing everything, it's a really dumb slogan.
In fact, It's basically Thanos' slogan from Avengers Infinity Wars.
Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing half of humanity.
What you believe is actually the key issue.
I mean, if we're actually going to take that slogan seriously, believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything, it's not about believing in something.
It's about what you believe in.
The question is, are you believing the right things?
Colin Kaepernick is not.
He's never provided a shred of data to support his assertions that black people in the United States are being disproportionately shot by police because, in fact, they are not.
And then we get to the actual issue of Colin Kaepernick being the face of this particular culture war.
We get to the bottom line here.
And there's a great irony to it, which I'll discuss in just a second.
So Colin Kaepernick, again, says, believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything over his face for the Nike Just Do It campaign.
I do love the fact that when you hashtag Just Do It with all the capitals properly utilized, it looks like just dolt.
But in any case, Using Colin Kaepernick, he's a poor example of this.
Because he didn't sacrifice anything.
Colin Kaepernick did not sacrifice a thing.
If we're going to talk about people who sacrificed in the NFL, there are legitimate former military members in the NFL.
Pat Tillman died in the line of duty, as a soldier in Afghanistan for the NFL.
Did Nike do a campaign around him?
Of course they didn't, right?
They just do it around Colin Kaepernick.
And this is for capitalistic reasons.
It is to make money.
Nike is a corporation.
They know we'll be talking about it today.
They hope that by right-wingers talking about it, they will drive more people on the left to go out and buy sneakers on the basis of, we don't like President Trump.
And let's be frank about this.
This is an anti-Trump campaign.
This rally first started in the 2016 campaign.
If Hillary Clinton were president right now, do you think that Nike would actually be running this ad campaign?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Colin Kaepernick has not sacrificed anything.
Not only did he not sacrifice nothing, he only started doing this when he became a useless backup quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.
And then, after that, he has kept his name in the headlines.
He's been on the cover of Sports Illustrated despite not playing for two years.
Tim Tebow isn't on the cover of Sports Illustrated every two weeks because Tim Tebow isn't in with the Social Justice Warrior crowd, but Tim Tebow was, in many ways, sort of the equivalent of Colin Kaepernick in that he had one kind of terrific season where he unexpectedly led the Denver Broncos to wins in the playoffs, and then he fell off the map.
But Colin Kaepernick, you know, he took over for Alex Smith halfway through a season with the San Francisco 49ers, they went to the Super Bowl, he lost, and then he was nothing.
And but still, he's on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
He's still champion as this this thought leader, even though I'm not sure Colin Kaepernick has ever had any real thought.
And the reason I say that is because Colin Kaepernick has never made an articulate defense of his own position on any of this stuff.
There are people who have made articulate defenses on his behalf, but he's never done it himself.
He has not sacrificed anything and he's slated to earn legitimately millions of dollars.
He's going to get a branded line off of not being in athletics for two years.
He's getting a branded line and he's going to make millions of dollars off of kneeling for the national anthem.
So why is Nike doing all of this?
Precisely so that we'll talk about it.
It is a troll.
It's obviously a troll.
They're hoping that the President of the United States sounds off about it.
Trump undoubtedly will sign off on it.
I mean, he will undoubtedly sound off about it on Twitter because he thinks, again, that this is a culture war worth fighting.
But there's no question that this is all designed to sell more sneakers.
And one of the reasons that Nike thinks that they can get away with this, obviously, is because disproportionate amounts of money are spent on clothing and apparel by members of the black community, many of whom are supporters of Colin Kaepernick in this particular controversy.
That is not a racial supposition.
That is an economic supposition.
Economist Kerwin Charles, Eric Hurst, Nikolai Rusinov, From University of Chicago did a study called conspicuous consumption and race.
What they found is that blacks and Hispanics spend a lot more than whites with comparable incomes on visible goods, meaning clothes, cars and jewelry up to an additional 30%.
There's been a long standing.
A longstanding sort of sociological investigation into why, for example, it seems that lower income black folks spend more on sneakers.
And some of that has to do with with pride in culture.
Some of that has to do with the fact that, you know, like Air Jordans were a massive cultural totem in the 1990s.
All that is true.
But just for capitalistic purposes, it's pretty obvious that Nike is attempting to appeal to this particular consumer base, along with a left that will resonate to the support of Colin Kaepernick.
And it's also important to note that according to Nielsen, African-Americans are more likely to interact with brands on social media or to use social networks to support companies and brands 44% more likely.
So they're hoping that this campaign goes viral, particularly among black audiences, and that people on the left will resonate to this as well.
So in the end, capitalism wins.
The great irony of this is that the social justice warriors championing this They're really championing the power of capitalism.
But is it insulting?
Of course it's insulting.
Is it designed to slap President Trump?
Of course it's designed to slap President Trump.
And honestly, I'm not sure that President Trump could ask for much more.
Nike made an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign.
Because if this battle in 2018 and 2020 is going to be about kneeling for the flag, most Americans are not on board with that.
Most Americans don't look at Colin Kaepernick and see an American hero.
They don't even see a guy who's made a lot of sacrifices.
Muhammad Ali was the champion of the world.
He was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world when he was suspended from boxing for not volunteering for the Vietnam draft, for not being drafted, and for saying things about the Viet Cong and all this kind of stuff under the influence of Elijah Muhammad and the evil nation of Islam.
But at least he sacrificed something.
The guy sacrificed years of his career.
He went to jail for this.
Colin Kaepernick has sacrificed zero things, but apparently sacrificing everything means signing contracts worth millions of dollars in order to promote a quote-unquote globalist brand that is selling sneakers made at half price off by child labor.
So that's exciting stuff.
Speaking of sort of virtue signaling and the backlash to President Trump, the other big story over the weekend It was obviously the funeral for John McCain.
We're going to talk about that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
John McCain's funeral took place over the weekend.
It was after a week of American mourning for an American patriot and hero.
But his funeral turned into a bit of a, as I've said in the past, a turd tornado.
It turned into a bit of craziness.
And that's because a bunch of speakers decided to get up and bash President Trump.
Do I think that President Trump treated John McCain well in life?
No, I don't.
I think it was ridiculous for President Trump to say that John McCain was not a war hero.
It was kind of a gross thing to say.
Do I think that John McCain didn't like President Trump?
Yes.
It seems to me that his peak and his anger at President Trump led him to make a terrible decision when it came to Obamacare and prevent the overthrowing of large portions of Obamacare simply out of a level of personal peak.
Was I a huge John McCain fan as a politician?
No, I was not a huge John McCain fan as a politician, but with that said, was it petty for the president to not lower the flag to half-staff for a week as a sort of normal procedure?
Yes, it was petty.
Did it look silly?
Yes, it looked silly.
The president shouldn't have engaged that way.
With that said, using a funeral in order to promote an anti-Trump agenda is foolish for a couple of reasons.
First of all, I think that John McCain's life was about a fair bit more than Donald Trump.
I really do.
I mean, this is a guy who had served since the late 1960s.
Boiling that down to an anti-Trump message seems to me a real non-proper evaluation of his role in American history and what he was.
And listen, Meghan McCain gets to say what she wants about her father.
It's her father.
She gets to say whatever she wants.
But we also get to criticize that once we stray into overtly political territory.
And there are a lot of commentators saying, well, there were no overt slaps at Trump.
Let's not be intellectually dishonesty.
It was very obvious that there were a bunch of overt slaps at President Trump.
And more than that, I think it was counterproductive.
Even if you don't like the way that President Trump goes about politics, even if you think that President Trump is uncivil, which I do, even if you think that President Trump It does not serve his own purpose as well when he lashes out at people, which I do.
Even if you think that President Trump says things that are cruel and vile on a fairly frequent basis, which I do, is it worthwhile?
Is it useful for a bunch of people to get up at John McCain's funeral and say all of this stuff?
And more importantly, is it useful to do that from quote unquote both sides of the aisle?
Because I think that what that's doing is promulgating a myth that Trump is actually the response to.
The myth is that there was a civil politics before Trump.
There was not.
The idea that there was a civil politics before Trump means that you were not watching.
For 20, 30, 40 years, you were not watching.
In the 1960s, there were political riots in this country.
At the 1968 Chicago Convention, there were legitimate riots in the street at the Democratic National Convention.
There were thousands of bombings, political bombings, across the United States in the 1970s.
During the Barack Obama administration, we saw riots in Baltimore.
We saw riots in Ferguson.
We saw riots in other places in the United States.
We saw at President Trump's rallies during the 2016 campaign, Trump supporters being physically beaten.
We saw President Trump have to cancel an actual rally in Chicago due to intimidation outside the events.
We've seen over the past several years before Trump was in office.
When I went to Berkeley, I required 600 police officers to protect me.
I remember there was a near-riot when I spoke at Cal State Los Angeles, and that was before Trump was president.
The idea that politics was some sort of civil game where everybody got along before President Trump is nonsense.
And more than that, to paper over these serious political divisions in this country with this veneer of civility, it makes it look like there's a professional political class invested in civility because they actually like each other, and Trump is the great outsider, and so we don't like Trump because he's the great outsider.
Again, there are legitimate reasons to criticize the President of the United States for his approach to politics.
But, when you promulgate this absolute myth, this absolute myth, that there was a civil politics between, say, Barack Obama and John McCain, or Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
I mean, Barack Obama basically called George W. Bush a war criminal.
You've got to get the job done there.
I think this is 2003.
This is Barack Obama talking about the situation in Afghanistan.
This is audio uncovered in 2007.
This is Barack Obama, I guess it was in 2007, talking about George W. Bush's troops, the service of troops under George W. Bush in Afghanistan.
You've got to get the job done there.
And that requires us to have enough troops that we're not just air raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.
Okay, Barack Obama accusing George W. Bush of presiding effectively over war crimes.
But we are supposed to believe that it was Donald Trump who broke our politics?
This is why I say all of this leads to a backlash in favor of President Trump.
Having all of these mainstream political figures from both sides of the aisle kind of unite in opposition to Trump, but not on the basis of actual sins committed by President Trump, on the basis of, he's just not nice enough and look how we get along.
Look how George W. Bush and Bill Clinton get along.
Look how George W. Bush and Barack Obama get along.
I don't like that part of politics, okay?
There's this sense.
I'm a sports fan.
So as a sports fan, there used to be something called non-fraternization rules in sports, where it was like the New York Yankees were playing the Boston Red Sox and you weren't allowed to go out to dinner with members of the opposing team after the game because you felt that that sort of sacrificed the competitive edge.
That if you were too close with your competitors, then they sacrificed the competitive edge.
And so there were all these owners who basically said you're not allowed to fraternize with members of the opposition team.
And as a fan, that makes sense to me because I don't want to see my favorite player who has to face down that batter tomorrow.
I don't want to know that they're best friends.
It doesn't help because I want to root for my team and root against the other team.
Well, in politics, that rooting actually has real stakes.
I don't want George W. Bush to be best friends with Barack Obama.
I don't want George W. Bush to be best friends with Bill Clinton.
I want them to be civil.
I want them to recognize that they shouldn't be demagoguing issues.
That's where you can criticize President Trump.
But when you act like you're best friends and you're buddy-buddy and we're all part of this big group who loves each other, and then there's that ugh, that Trump guy, all that ends up doing is driving people into President Trump.
I mean, ironically, it helps President Trump.
Because even people like me look at this and they go, I'm sorry, but if politics is how nice George W. Bush is to Michelle Obama by handing her candy, I'm not all that interested.
Because the things they do have real stakes.
The politics that they embrace have actual stakes.
And again, I'm somebody who is warm toward the argument that President Trump has not been good for American politics in a wide variety of ways.
But when you push this lie that politics is really about George W. Bush and Michelle Obama being besties, and that there are no consequences to any of this, I don't care whether George W. Bush likes Michelle Obama.
I don't care whether George H.W.
and Bill Clinton are friends.
I don't want them to be friends because I don't think that that is reflective of deep underlying political differences that exist in this country.
I want them to be battling tooth and nail.
If they can be friends and battle tooth and nail, that's one thing.
But I don't think that they were battling tooth and nail.
I think that there's a feeling in this country that the elites in both parties are actually backpatting each other and are too friendly for the good of the country.
That what we actually need, in some ways, is more political conflict.
That doesn't mean more incivility.
But again, like, people were chanting, oh, look how nice it was that George W. Bush was handing Michelle Obama candy.
Listen.
Is it fine that he's handing her candy?
Sure.
I'm not going to pretend that I think he should reject the candy.
I don't mean that he shouldn't hand Michelle Obama candy.
But, by the same token, people celebrating this say, oh, well, isn't this what American politics is really about?
George W. Bush hunting Michelle Obama candy?
No, it seems to me what American politics is really about is Barack Obama slandering George W. Bush as a war criminal for eight years, and then running on the back of that to become President of the United States and push policies, actively create policies that are targeted at people like me.
And when I say people like me, I mean particularly religious conservatives.
That's the part I care about.
I don't care about them handing candy to each other.
People feel there's a veneer to politics that is a lie, and this all was part of the veneer of politics that was a lie.
In a second, I'm going to show you the clips of these various speakers who are engaging.
I'm going to show you why people think this is a lie.
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So here are the clips of the various people at McCain's funeral bashing President Trump.
You're going to see George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Meghan McCain go after President Trump.
Again, everybody has the right to say what they want about President Trump.
But do I think that this is productive in terms of forwarding the national discourse?
I don't.
I actually don't.
I think this is counterproductive.
I think that it leads people to believe that there is this sort of The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold.
She is resourceful and confident and secure.
She meets her responsibilities.
She speaks quietly because she is strong.
the actual field of play.
So here, here are some of these clips.
The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold.
She is resourceful and confident and secure.
She meets her responsibilities.
She speaks quietly because she is strong.
America does not boast because she has no need to.
The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always Okay, so that's sort of, you know, sloganeering about the America of John McCain was always great.
Obviously, it's a direct slap at President Trump.
Again, I know Meghan McCain.
I think that Meghan McCain says a lot of smart and good things.
I think that this was a politically inept move.
I think it was a politically inept move.
And she can say what she wants.
Her dad's the one who's in the coffin.
But still, I have to analyze this politically.
Do I think it was effective or not in making the country a better place?
Bring the country around to John McCain's brand of politics?
I don't think so.
Here's George W. Bush doing some of the same.
He respected the dignity inherent in every life.
A dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators.
Perhaps above all, John detested the abuse of power.
Okay, so again, people took this as an implicit rebuke of President Trump, and then Barack Obama gets up.
And Barack Obama, of course, is somebody who abused power quite frequently, right?
You have George W. Bush critiquing abuse of power.
Here's Barack Obama, a man who basically weaponized his IRS against his political opposition, doing the same routine.
Part of what makes our country great Is that our membership is based not on our bloodline, not on what we look like, what our last names are.
It's not based on where our parents or grandparents came from or how recently they arrived, but on adherence to a common creed.
That all of us are created equal.
Again, this idea that Barack Obama and George W. Bush are on the same political side and Donald Trump is on the other political side, I think it's a big mistake because the reality is that Barack Obama was pushing things.
Barack Obama was pushing a race-based politics, particularly in 2012 and beyond, in which he was saying things like Trayvon Martin could have been my son, suggesting police departments across the country were racist.
Here's why people aren't taking this seriously.
Here's why people look at this and they get a little on the right and they feel uncomfortable.
And again, this is coming from somebody who blasted President Trump last week over his mistreatment of John McCain.
I mean, I blasted him last week, if you recall back that far.
I still think this was not only inappropriate, I think it was politically dishonest because When you move over to how the left side of the aisle treats people, the left side does not treat people with civility.
The left side treated John McCain like trash while he was alive until he turned toward their side, at which point he became a hero.
That's how the left always treats people.
How do I know this?
Because while they're calling for civility, and while people like George W. Bush are calling for civility and saying we ought to treat with the other side, and not just calling for civility, but calling for compromise and moderation, Here's what is actually happening in sort of leftist halls.
All we have to do is skip over to the Aretha Franklin funeral, which also happened over the weekend, where Al Sharpton, an actual open anti-Semite, was speaking and ripping into President Trump with Bill Clinton sitting right there in the audience.
You know, the other Sunday on my show, I misspelled respect.
And a lot of y'all, a lot of y'all corrected me.
Now I want y'all to help me correct President Trump to teach him what it means.
Okay, and there's everybody cheering, and President Clinton is sitting right there.
Here's a picture of President Clinton on stage with three great racists.
Here's President Clinton standing next to Jesse Jackson, who called New York Hymietown, Al Sharpton, who talked about diamond merchants in Crown Heights and led to the, and his language helped incite a riot, and Louis Farrakhan, who has called the Jews devils and white people devils.
And there's Bill Clinton standing there grinning alongside them.
So you're telling me that our politics is about Bill Clinton being friends with George H.W.
Bush, but in his off hours, Bill Clinton gets to hang out with people who are essentially the equivalent of David Duke.
Louis Farrakhan is the equivalent of David Duke.
And there's Bill Clinton, standing on stage with him, hanging out with him.
They're best friends.
Everything's great.
And then we're going to get lectures about civility?
This is how you got Trump because there's a hypocritical sense that all of these elites are happy to backslap each other and go to the same clubs and smoke cigars with one another.
And then they pretend for the cameras.
They play this Kabuki theater.
Again, everything's about Kabuki theater.
They're out there playing this game where they pretend to dislike each other and oppose each other on politics.
Now, I think you can oppose each other on politics and still be civil to one another.
I think that you can rip the President of the United States when he's being not only uncivil but vile in particular cases.
I've done it myself many times.
Do I think that using a funeral as the opportunity to show bipartisan support for the anti-Trump Tactics?
Is that a worthwhile thing?
No, I think it strikes people, it strikes a false note.
It strikes a false note for people.
It makes people think it's Trump versus the establishment.
Which, again, is the battle Trump actually wants.
The battle Trump wants is Trump versus the establishment.
Because people don't actually like the establishment very much.
It's that feeling of buddy-buddy chummery.
There's a difference between being civil And being best friends.
There's a difference between being civil and pretending that the other guy's political point of view is in some way the same as mine.
And that's what was happening there, right?
George W. Bush and Barack Obama were speaking of a common American vision that they do not share.
Barack Obama's vision of the United States and George W. Bush's vision of the United States are not the same.
And there are a lot of folks who are going to perceive that if George W. Bush's vision of the United States and Barack Obama's vision of the United States are more closely tied together than Donald Trump's and George W. Bush's, and yet for some odd reason Donald Trump is implementing conservative policies in the same way Bush would have done, Then something has gone wrong.
And the real gap here is a cultural gap, not really a political gap at all.
Okay, meanwhile, I do have to show you this.
This is from Aretha Franklin's funeral.
The same group of people who are ripping into Donald Trump for being, you know, uncivil and awful and terrible and garbagey with regard to women.
Again, some of which I think is justified.
These are the same people who are hanging out with Bill frickin' Clinton.
You got George H.W.
Bush, who plays buddy-buddy with Bill Clinton.
Here's Bill Clinton at Aretha Franklin's funeral, checking out Ariana Grande's butt.
Ariana Grande, first of all, looks like she's 16 years old, and there's Bill Clinton, who looks like the old child molester from Family Guy, just sitting behind Ariana Grande, and legitimately can see him stare her up and down.
And that's the kind of class that our politics is supposed to stand for.
Now, Bill Clinton, he understands the American vision, but Donald Trump doesn't understand the American vision.
What a bunch of absolute horse crap.
So much of Trump's power, so much of his persona, is driven by the fact that it feels like he is ripping away curtains.
That there's a veil of pretend that he just tears apart.
And contributing to this veil of pretend is not useful.
America is built on a creed.
America is built on the idea that we are brothers and not enemies.
All of that is true.
And when President Trump does things that are terrible, we ought to comment on it.
But to pretend that there are not serious differences between left and right in the country, that the real differences are between the civil and the uncivil, is, I think, ignorant of the reality of the situation.
Now, speaking of areas where the president deserves criticism, the president over the weekend decided to take to Twitter, as he is fond of doing, and he tweeted out a bunch of cryptic and bizarre things.
thing.
So he tweeted out, two long-running Obama-era investigations of two very popular Republican congressmen were brought to a well-publicized charge just ahead of the midterms by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department.
Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time.
Good job, Jeff.
The Democrats, none of whom voted for Jeff Sessions, must love him now.
Same thing with Lion James Comey.
The Dems all hated him.
Wanted him out until he was disgusting.
UNTIL I FIRED HIM.
All caps.
Immediately he became a wonderful man.
A saint-like figure, in fact.
Really sick.
So the part of this that's troubling is not all the stuff about James Comey, which is just dumb.
The part that's really troubling is in the first tweet here, when he says that Jeff Sessions and the DOJ should not prosecute actual corruption in government because it might endanger congressional seats.
You're not supposed to say that part out loud, Mr. President.
When you suggest that the rule of law comes secondary to the political victory of your own party, it's not a good thing.
That is a bad thing.
And it was a bad thing when Obama was doing it, and it's a bad thing when President Trump is doing it.
It's a bad thing when the Attorney General is the President's wingman and ignoring crime, and the President is using executive privilege to shield particular figures, which is what Barack Obama did.
And it's a bad thing when the President of the United States is bizarrely going on Twitter to rip the Attorney General who works for him for prosecuting actual crime in Congress.
So there was that.
And then the president also decided to tweet out about the FBI that according to the failing New York Times, the FBI started a major effort to flip Putin loyalists in 2014 to 2016.
It wasn't about Trump.
He wasn't even close to a candidate yet.
Rigged witch hunt.
I'm so confused by this tweet, I can't even express it.
Is he ripping the FBI for trying to go after Putin loyalists before he was even running for office?
Is that the point he's making here?
I mean, to be charitable, I guess maybe the point that he's making is maybe that this investigation preceded anything having to do with Donald Trump, and that he's been kind of swept up in an investigation that has nothing to do with him, but he's not making that particularly clear.
There are plenty of grounds on which to criticize the President of the United States.
Claiming that the left and the right are on the same page and Trump is not, and that Trump is something foreign to politics, when we all know that Trump was the seething underbelly of politics for at least two decades in this country, is just historically ignorant and also incredibly stupid.
Again, also that the tolerant left is so tolerant that they are now disinviting people.
So the New Yorker, I love this.
Steve Bannon is the former White House chief strategist.
I am a longtime critic of Steve Bannon, who I think is a flaming garbage heap of a human being.
The New Yorker shouldn't have invited him.
He's been irrelevant to politics since President Trump fired him and labeled him Sloppy Steve.
But they invited him, and then a bunch of lefties dropped out, and then they decided, OK, well, we'll disinvite him.
You shouldn't invite people and disinvite them.
If you don't want to invite Steve Bannon, don't invite him.
If you disinvite him because of pressure from your mail room, then I would suggest that you guys lack a little bit of courage in regard to your devotion to open conversation, obviously.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things I like today.
Last night I had the opportunity to go see Operation Finale with Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley.
Ben Kingsley is One of the best living actors, Ben Kingsley, is just tremendous in everything.
And he is predictably excellent in this.
He plays Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi mastermind of logistics during the Holocaust.
And Oscar Isaac plays an Israeli agent who is tasked with tracking him down, not only tracking him down, but also getting him to sign a document that gives permission for his trial to be held in Israel.
And the face-off between the two of them is the best part of the movie.
The movie is effective.
It's very effective.
Not only is it effective, I'm always pleased when there's no sucker punches.
So whenever I see a movie that's set up like this, I always think, okay, here comes the sucker punch.
Here comes the Steven Spielberg, Munich-like sucker punch, where we learn that the Israelis are really the Nazis, or the Israelis are really the great oppressors.
In Munich, that's what Spielberg did.
There were Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the Olympics, and somehow Steven Spielberg drew a moral equivalence between those people and Israeli agents tracking them down, which is an amazing, amazing feat of Sort of intellectual gymnastics and moral gymnastics.
In this particular movie, however, there are no sucker punches.
Israel is perceived as good because it is a good country filled with people who are trying to survive in the face of radical anti-Semitism across the world, and the Nazis are bad.
Also, the movie takes on some serious issues with regard to the banality of evil.
So Hannah Arendt, a very, very famous writer with, I would have to say, far left leanings on politics.
She wrote an entire book called Eichmann in Jerusalem about Eichmann's trial because Eichmann was in fact brought back to Israel for trial.
He was put inside a glass booth actually to prevent him from being assassinated and he was then hanged.
Hannah Arendt did an entire book on him and basically she made the claim that Eichmann was Just in effect of the banality of evil to phrase use the banality of evil.
Now I have some fondness toward the idea that human beings are programmed to look the other way when their in-group is threatened.
When your in-group is threatened that you tend to go along with evil.
But for you to be an architect of evil I think requires a little bit more.
It seems that later research has sort of shown Hannah Arendt's banality of evil point as applied to Adolf Eichmann to be kind of ridiculous.
That Adolf Eichmann was in fact a rabid anti-Semite.
You have no interest in what I have to say.
Unless it confirms what you think you already know.
kill them in large numbers.
But the movie really does cope with some of those issues.
Here is a little bit of the preview for Operation Finale. - You have no interest in what I have to say.
Unless it confirms what you think you already know.
My job was simple.
Save the country I love from being destroyed.
Is your job any different?
So the movie is quite good.
Again, I think it doesn't sucker punch anybody.
It does demonstrate the... One thing that is shocking is the virulence of antisemitism under the Peron regime in Argentina.
You have a bunch of people on the left who somehow still have fondness for the Peronists in Argentina, which is kind of shocking.
The Peron regime was indeed an evil regime, and they shielded a crapload of Nazis who were attempting to escape justice after World War II.
Go check it out.
Operation Finale.
It's in theaters right now.
It is well worth the watch.
It's definitely disturbing, but it should be disturbing.
It's a movie about the Holocaust and the aftermath of the Holocaust.
So go check it out right now.
Operation Finale.
Okay, other things that I like.
Speaking of American flag controversies, last week we talked at length about this new movie, First Man, from Damien Chazelle.
Honestly, I'm very sad that Damien Chazelle is being hit with controversy, because I think he's one of the best directors working today.
I think La La Land, for its flaws, is a very good movie, and I think The Whiplash is a terrific movie, one of the best movies of the last ten years.
Well, his new movie, First Man, about Neil Armstrong doesn't contain Americans planting the flag on the moon.
We all know why.
It's because he's afraid that it's going to kill the box office in China.
But Ryan Gosling went out there and suggested that it was because it was an international achievement, a world achievement to put a man on the moon, not an American achievement, which, of course, is a bunch of nonsense.
Buzz Aldrin, who was part of the Apollo 11 mission, he also tweeted out a picture of them putting up the flag on the moon.
And then he tweeted out, hashtag proud to be an American, hashtag freedom, hashtag honor, hashtag one nation.
Hashtag July 1969.
Hashtag Apollo 11.
Hashtag Road to Apollo 50.
Like, yes.
Okay, yes.
This is not a difficult one.
The fact that the Americans put the flag on the moon is an amazing achievement, especially given the fact they were essentially using slide rules.
It's an amazing thing and it is an American achievement because America has been the world power and the single dominant hegemony over the globe for ever since World War II and probably before World War II, although we really only began to take more of an active role in world affairs during and after World War II.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So you've heard all this stuff about how the Swedish healthcare system is just the best healthcare system, how nationalized healthcare systems, they have no cost.
Everything is fantastic in nationalized healthcare systems.
Well, Sweden is not a hugely populous country.
It is a country where people are taxed at more than half their income.
The total population of Sweden is about 9.9 million, which is about the size of Los Angeles County.
But we are told that if we just applied Swedish solutions to our healthcare, everything would be all better.
There's an article in Agence France-Presse today, all about the Swedish healthcare system, and here is what they find.
Swedes are frustrated over their universal healthcare, one of the main pillars of their cherished welfare state, with long queues due to a shortage of nurses and available doctors in some areas.
No.
You mean a non-market-based system generates shortages?
I can't believe it.
Just like in every other product in human history?
When you have a non-market-based system, then price and supply do not match?
I can't... No!
Demand and supply curves actually... What?
What?
I thought if you declared something a right, then the laws of supply and demand no longer apply.
If you're stupid...
So Swedes, who on average pay more than half of their income in tax, see access to healthcare as the most important issue in the September 9th general election poll.
Prime Minister Stefan Löfven's Social Democrats, the largest party, are on course for a record low score.
They're instead losing to the far-right Sweden Democrats, who I believe started off with actual neo-Nazi roots, if I'm not mistaken.
So the far right is gaining because Sweden has not taken immigration seriously and because all of the social welfare promises of the Swedish state are experiencing some difficulty.
Then the 2016 nationwide median wait for prostate cancer was 120 days, but 271 days in the northern county of Vasterbaten, official figures show.
Swedes complain about not being able to see their own regular general practitioner, as a growing number of doctors and nurses are temporary hires employed by staffing companies.
Some 80% of the healthcare sector is in need of nurses, according to official data, which means that's underestimating.
Online services where patients see a doctor via webcam have mushroomed as well.
So everything is going spectacularly.
And what are the Social Democrats vowing?
They're vowing to spend three billion kroner to hire more health care staff if re-elected.
So they're going to spend their way out of the crisis.
We'll see if that works.
Eventually, the bill comes due for all of this.
So it is worth noting this whenever you hear about the wonders and glories of nationalized health care systems.
Again, this is not a defense of the American health care system, which is almost the worst of both worlds.
Heavily regulated and then free market with massive subsidies.
The American healthcare system's a mess, but the solution is not a nationalized healthcare system, at least not in the way the Swedes do it.
Okay, so, meanwhile...
Pope Francis on Monday said silence and prayer were the answer to those seeking scandal and division amid a barrage of attacks from ultra-conservative Catholics.
First of all, I love how Yahoo News and the AFP call it attacks from ultra-conservative Catholics, as opposed to, you know, Catholics who don't like seeing little boys molested by priests.
Now they're ultra-conservative.
So back in 2003, when it was the Spotlight scandal, then it was every good-hearted person wanting to stop the abuse of children.
Now it's ultra-conservative Catholics.
I can't believe the press is taking this line, but this is how much they love their leftist Pope Francis.
The Pope has so far refused to respond to allegations made last month that he for years covered up sexual abuse allegations against a prominent U.S.
Cardinal.
Francis said at a prayer service at St.
Martha's, with people who lack goodwill, with people who seek only scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction, even within the family, there is nothing but silence and prayer.
Or, theoretically, you could fire everybody who was abusing a child, turn them over to civil authorities and have them prosecuted.
Or, theoretically, you could reveal all of your records to the general public so we know who exactly was covering up what.
Or I guess you could stay silent and pretend it's not a big deal when little boys get raped.
I guess you could do that.
And honest to God, it's just, it's astonishing.
It's astonishing to watch the press cover for Pope Francis.
If Benedict had done the same thing, if John Paul II had done the same thing, and this sort of scandal had broken, The press would be ripping them up and down endlessly, ceaselessly, with no break.
It is Pope Francis who is a leftist on a bunch of issues from economics to the environment, and therefore he will be defended with the hardest core defense possible by the left-wing media.
Whenever they say that they actually care about children, you should remember this particular thing because it's pretty, pretty astonishing.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
Welcome back to the Workweek, gang.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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