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Sept. 5, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:31
Twist And Shout…About Kavanaugh | Ep. 617
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Democrats lose their mind about Brett Kavanaugh's nomination, Bob Woodward's book launches, and Paul Krugman says Republicans are here to steal your health care.
Oh, happy day.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today, this very Tumblr will be filled endlessly with the tears of all of the people at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in the Senate.
It is fully insane over there where all the women have been reduced to the status of menial slaves under President Pence, and Justice Kavanaugh has forced them all into the back alleys for their abortions.
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Okay, so the second day of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings is upon us.
Brett Kavanaugh, of course, is President Trump's nominee to replace Justice Kennedy.
Yesterday I mistakenly said he was going to replace Scalia, but that, of course, was Justice Gorsuch.
He is there to replace Justice Kennedy.
And the left is going nuts over this because, oh my God, an establishment Republican with the most establishment of credentials is going to sit on the Supreme Court.
And there's nothing they can do to stop it.
And there's nothing they can do to stop it because Harry Reid, back in 2013, like an idiot, utilized the nuclear option in order to get through a bunch of judicial nominees by President Obama over the filibuster.
So now it only requires 51 votes to put somebody on a federal court.
Well, the Republicans have those 51 votes.
They will be using them for Brett Kavanaugh.
He will indeed sit on the nation's highest court.
Now what's hilarious about all of this is the levels of panic to which the left have been rising in the last couple of days, are fully crazy.
I mean, fully, fully crazy.
And we'll show you some of that panic in just a second.
But Brett Kavanaugh is sitting there answering questions like, what do you think about Roe v. Wade?
And he's saying it's precedent.
And then he's asked about Planned Parenthood versus Casey.
And he says it's precedent on a precedent.
This does not sound like a dude who is going to overturn Roe v. Wade.
This was always my criticism of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
I didn't think that he was the most right-leaning person that the Republicans could have picked, the most originalist person Republicans could have picked.
I think he'll be a pretty good judge.
I think he'll be a pretty good justice.
I don't think that he's going to be Thomas or Scalia.
I'm not sure that he's a solid vote to overrule Roe v. Wade.
But it doesn't matter what he says at this point, because the Democrats have basically already made up their mind, and judicial hearings are useless.
Because we now have something called the Ginsburg Rule, which has been in place for some 30 years.
Basically, you can't expect a judge to answer questions about how they will decide an upcoming case, or even what they really think of past precedent.
Instead, they just say it's precedent, which is a legal description of the state of the law.
Roe is precedent.
But precedent is not binding on the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court can simply overrule precedent anytime that it wants.
So, all of this is to say that these judicial hearings are a complete waste of time.
They're utter nonsense.
They're a wait for the Senators to grandstand and apparently for them to bring in all of their crazy friends to grandstand as well.
The hearings were interrupted in the first 40 minutes 44 times yesterday by various Democrats shouting out interruptions.
Also, there are a bunch of people Who decided to shout at Brett Kavanaugh in the room?
People like Piper Parabo, who's not been relevant since what, Coyote Ugly?
She got arrested yesterday in the worst performance, ironically, since Coyote Ugly.
She got arrested yesterday.
Linda Sarsour of the Women's March was also arrested in the room.
She was dragged out.
kicking and screaming.
And she's a delight in every possible way.
So all of these radicals in the room getting dragged away, it's just terrific.
It's just terrific.
Here's some video of the protesters screaming, because that was delightful.
We're not in an executive station.
And what Chairman Leahy did during Justice Kagan's, this is another example of confidential documents.
We're really interested in seeing them in the first place.
So here's the rule I think they should apply.
I think the rule they should apply here is that if you invited anybody in who disrupts the hearing, you don't get to invite anybody in anymore.
If you are one of the Democratic senators and you allowed Code Pink to come in, you allowed Linda Sarsour to come in, then she got herself arrested because she's adult, Then you don't get to invite anybody anymore because that's not what these hearings are for.
If you want to protest, there's plenty of space outside for you to protest.
Your protest will be useless because this is a democratic process, not a protesting and shouting process.
But screaming and whining are the way that the Democrats are dealing with the fact that they are not going to be able to get Merrick Garland on the court to replace a Republican appointee like Justice Kennedy.
Here is video of Linda Sarsour getting arrested yesterday.
She, again, is delight.
Catch you later, Linda.
Okay, if you can understand what they're saying, then you have better hearing than I do.
All I hear is the shrieking of some sort of primeval creature in the middle of a hearing room.
These are humans.
I'm not calling her an animal.
All I'm saying is that that shrieking is inaudible.
There is no way for you to tell what she is saying because she is shrieking like a banshee.
Look at the people in the room.
You're right.
Everybody on that panel, Orrin Hatch is going, you know what, I've changed my vote because Linda Sarsour is shrieking at me.
People in the middle of the country, they're thinking, yes, disaster, thy name be Brett Kavanaugh.
Moderates in the middle of the country, independents in the middle of the country, they are thinking the apocalypse is upon us.
So now we've been told by the Democrats that women and trans folks will die because of Brett Kavanaugh.
Everybody was going to die because of net neutrality.
Everybody already died because of the tax cuts.
I mean, how many times can people die already?
It's wild.
It's pretty amazing stuff.
All of this should also remind you, it should also remind you that when we get all of this nonsense from the left and from some members of the right about civility in our politics, Trump being the beginning and end of civility in our politics, he's the one who ruined civility.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, right.
It's all about Trump.
This is what bugged me about the McCain funeral, where he had George W. Bush and Barack Obama standing up there, kind of creating this mythologized past where everybody sort of got along.
And I was talking with a friend this morning about what bothered me about that idea so much.
And what bothered me about the idea is that there are those of us who actually believe that politics matter.
And all these politicians prey on us because what they do is they say, you're right, politics do matter.
And so you got Joe Biden on the left saying, we'll put you all back in chains and folks on the right saying, this will be the end of the country unless we do something.
It's apocalyptic rhetoric from people on both sides of the aisle because they're saying, yes, you are right.
Politics do matter.
And then as soon as somebody comes along and says, you're right, politics matters.
We're going to fight this like a war.
You've been using this apocalyptic rhetoric.
This is going to be a political war.
We're going to fight this like a war.
Then they say, well, hold on.
We don't want to do that.
So they've been basically doing this WWE routine for a very long time, where you have every major politician from both parties speaking like WWE wrestlers, but then telling people that they ought to take it seriously, that it's not fake, that in reality these issues actually matter.
And then when the people take those issues seriously, and then when they elect a guy who is not a politician who takes the thing seriously, like Trump actually takes the personal conflict seriously, regardless of what you think of the guy, Then they say, well, no, no, no.
He didn't understand that this was all part of the game.
He didn't understand.
He missed it.
He didn't understand it was all part of the game.
There's a movie with Robert De Niro called The Fan a long time ago about this kind of...
It's about a guy who is a fan of a baseball team and his baseball team is about to go to the World Series.
I think this is how the plot works.
And Robert De Niro is a fan of the baseball team and he is so enamored with his team's chances of making the World Series that he goes and he kidnaps the opposing star on the other baseball team.
And everybody in the world is like, why would you possibly do that?
And he's like, well, because I want my team to win.
Because he took the conflict too seriously.
I feel like that's sort of what we've done with our politics a little bit, which is we now root for the opposing teams, the difference being their actual consequences to which team wins or loses.
And so you got the left claiming that the end of the world is nigh, and the right claiming the end of the world is nigh, and then the minute that somebody like Trump comes along and says, okay, fine, if the end of the world is nigh, let's treat this like the brawl that it is, then all of a sudden people on both sides of the aisle, they go, whoa, wait a, wait up a second, wait up a second, we didn't really mean that stuff.
And it's like, well, if you didn't mean it, then why did you say it?
I agree the end of the world is not nigh.
I agree that we're not at the end of the country.
I agree we're not on the verge of civil war.
I think there are serious divisions about the future of the country.
But I think that most Americans are not engaged in those serious divisions.
I think that's an intellectual superstructure that really cares deeply about those divisions.
I think most Americans are just going about their daily business, making basic assumptions about American life that reflect the essential founding values of the country.
But I think there is this intellectual upper class where they have these battles and they know that it's Kabuki theater, and then in the back room they get a drink together, but they don't let anyone else in on the secret that it's Kabuki theater.
In reality, the actual Kabuki theater should be them getting along and they should be bashing each other.
Again, I find all of this really tiresome.
So what politics really does look like in the country, the way people feel right now is like Linda Sarsour.
The way people feel in the country is like Donald Trump.
They feel like the wrestling is real.
That's what they feel like.
Because you know what?
When it comes to the consequences, the wrestling actually is real.
And the fact that our politicians didn't take it as real for so long, and preyed upon that impression to create enthusiasm for their mission, while all the time knowing that they were just exaggerating the case, that's what's created.
Everybody bought into their vision.
Everybody bought into the wrestling is real meme, and now the wrestling is real.
Once everybody believes the wrestling is real, then they're gonna start brawling, and that's basically where we are right now.
Down to the point where everyone has now become delusional.
The left is fully delusional about these Kavanaugh hearings.
And when I say delusional, there were two stories that started making the rounds yesterday, both of which are completely, completely insane.
So story number one is there is a woman named Zina Bash.
Zina Bash is a half Mexican, half Jewish, White House staffer.
And she is married to a U.S.
attorney, I believe.
And Zina Bash was sitting behind Brett Kavanaugh during these hearings.
And the left began claiming that she was making a white power symbol behind Brett Kavanaugh.
I kid you not, this thing within a couple of hours, this video of Zina Bash, who is legitimately just putting her hand on her arm.
They're saying she's making a covert white power symbol for no reason!
Just because that's her sitting racism or something.
They've still not explained why exactly, even if she were a white supremacist, which she is not, she's again a half-Mexican, half-Jewish person.
Her paternal grandparents survived the Holocaust.
Why exactly she would be making a white power symbol behind Brett Kavanaugh is beyond me.
But they claim that she was legitimately making a white power symbol behind Brett Kavanaugh.
And there were a thousand tweets about this.
The left began tweeting about this incessantly.
Major blue checkmark figures on the left began tweeting about all of this.
It's just insane.
The ACLU tweeted out, spread the word.
It's hashtag not okay.
Neo-Nazis are using the okay hand gesture to communicate a hateful message.
When using the gesture, the fingers form letters WNP, which stand for white power.
Do not use this hand gesture.
It's not okay.
Okay.
Barack Obama has used this hand gesture.
You see what I'm doing right now?
This is not a white power symbol.
I've been using the hand gesture for OK for my entire life, as have you, as have your parents, because that's not a thing.
In fact, the ADL recognized this is not a thing, the Anti-Defamation League.
This is what they wrote back in September 2018.
They updated it yesterday.
Has the simple thumb and forefinger okay hand gesture become a common white supremacist hand signal?
Not quite, but it has become a popular gesture used by people across several segments of the right and far right, including some actual white supremacists who generally use it to trigger reactions or what they would describe as trolling the libs.
This is thanks to a 2017 hoax campaign started by members of the notorious website 4chan that has since taken on a life of its own.
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So the ADL continues by saying, this is all thanks to a 27 hoax campaign started by members of the notorious website 4chan that has since taken on a life of its own.
The 4chan site is an anonymous discussion board with an outsized cultural impact on the internet.
It has been responsible for everything from the I can has cheeseburger cat meme to the concept of Rickrolling.
There's little that 4channers like as much as a hoax, and in recent months, they've served up a number of fakeries with white supremacist themes to largely credulous online audiences.
The OK hand gesture originated as one of these hoaxes in February 2017, when an anonymous 4channer announced Operation OKKK, telling other members, we must flood Twitter and other social media websites, claiming the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy.
The user even provided a helpful graphic showing how the letter's white power could be traced within an OK gesture.
I believe the way that it works is you can see it here in the ACLU meme.
Supposedly, it's like if you go like this, then this is a W for like white, and then I guess the power is like that thing.
Okay, the whole thing is trollery.
The whole thing is stupidity.
It's all Reddit making fun of you.
It's all 4chan making fun of you.
And the entire left fell for it.
They said that Zina Bash was responsible for white supremacy.
Again, a half-Mexican, half-Jew.
The Jews are so clever that they activated a half-Mexican, half-Jewish person to unleash a white power symbol to hit the media and get Brett Kavanaugh nominated?
I guess?
Something like that.
But there were a bunch of people on the left who tweeted this stuff out.
Like, a lot of them.
Okay, this became an actual thing on Twitter.
Keith Dumas, or Dumbass, as the case may be.
Who is she?
What's up with the white power sign at MSNBC?
Scott Dworkin tweeted out, it's the biggest mistake I've ever made.
Real Donald Trump said after having to condemn fellow white supremacists after Charlottesville.
Just in case you were wondering what side Trump's on, it's on the side of the Nazis.
The same side Republicans in Congress are on.
And then somebody replied, so are some at the hearings.
Notice her hand, WTF.
Okay, you guys are idiots.
You guys are idiots.
This is like the left's pizza gate.
They're idiots on all sides.
They're conspiracy theorists on all sides.
This is just the latest conspiracy theory, but it is not the only conspiracy theory.
So, there's another conspiracy theory going around yesterday.
It was promoted by a guy named Fred Gutenberg.
Fred Gutenberg's daughter was killed, tragically, in the Parkland shooting, in an act of tremendous evil, obviously.
And Gutenberg is a motivated leftist.
He's been a motivated leftist for a long time.
And Gutenberg He basically went to this hearing with the sole intention of trying to get Brett Kavanaugh not nominated.
He tweeted in advance that he wants to see Brett Kavanaugh not nominated and he was going to the hearing to try and stop that.
So he tweeted out, here's what he tweeted.
He tweeted, just walked up to Judge Kavanaugh as morning session ended.
Put out my hand to introduce myself as Jamie Guttenberg's dad.
He pulled his hand back, turned his back to me and walked away.
I guess he did not want to deal with the reality of gun violence.
Okay, this flew around the internet.
I mean, flew around the internet.
Chris Cuomo claimed that this was a true story.
Chris Cuomo did a whole story about how Kavanaugh had ignored Fred Guttenberg.
All of this was just Kavanaugh being vile to the parents of a Parkland survivor.
Yeah, CNN is not fake news.
They're just, an apple is an apple and a banana is a banana and CNN is news.
Not fake news, news.
Here's Chris Cuomo.
Again, really gaining on his brother in the dumb Cuomo brothers race.
Last week, Andrew had pulled ahead like Secretaria, but now, here he comes like Man of War, up from behind.
Pretty amazing stuff.
Anyway, here's Chris Cuomo giving credence to this story, which turns out to be a full lie.
The judge should be asked why.
Well, justice is supposed to be blind, but that means I'm biased, not ignoring what is right in front of your face.
Why did you do that?
I don't mean to indict him.
He may have a good reason.
He may have no reason.
He may say, I don't even know what you're talking about.
I didn't even know what was going on.
I just wanted to get out of there.
Maybe.
But we need to hear it.
Why?
Because I hope that in Kavanaugh's mind, Gutenberg didn't represent a set of beliefs that he finds so threatening That he couldn't even make contact.
That's why the judge should explain.
Oh my god.
So Judge Kavanaugh now has to explain why a rando... I mean, let's be real.
Fred Guttenberg is not a famous person.
If you met Fred Guttenberg on the street, you would have no idea who he was.
You are more likely to know who Steve Guttenberg is than who Fred Guttenberg is.
You have no clue who Fred Guttenberg is.
You've probably never seen his face.
This is not a famous human being.
It's not like Brad Pitt walked up to him and extended his hand.
Okay, it's a guy who would have to explain who he was.
Now, here's the actual video of what happened from inside the room.
You will see that this is not what happened.
Okay, Judge Kavanaugh is excused.
What you're going to see here is Judge Kavanaugh gets up, Gutenberg approaches him from behind, extends his hand, Kavanaugh turns to look at him and see what's going on, and then security grabs him.
Okay, security is already on him, and Kavanaugh walks away.
Okay, that's what happens there.
It's not that he stands there and then refuses to shake his hand.
You can see, here comes security from behind to grab Kavanaugh.
Now, I have been in positions, many positions, in crowded areas where people are ushering me out of a room and people want to shake my hand.
This happens to me at university campuses all the time.
And if somebody extends their hand and security walks up to them, I'm not going to walk over there.
I assume that security is doing that for a reason.
Do you really think that Brett Kavanaugh is really like You know what?
I can't shake this guy's hand because I know who he is and I disdain him.
I disdain him.
Do you really think that that's credible in any way?
Again, you can see the video from behind as security runs up to grab Gutenberg because he's running up at a break to try and shake Kavanaugh's hand.
And again, this was all planted.
This is all done on purpose.
Gutenberg said in advance that he was attempting to sink Kavanaugh's nomination and then suddenly he got exactly what he wants when Kavanaugh supposedly stiffs him.
What absolute horse crap.
It's just horse crap.
Okay, the video shows that it's horse crap.
Kavanaugh had to change his story.
I mean, not Kavanaugh.
Guttenberg had to change his story.
Originally, he claimed that Kavanaugh clearly heard him, and then Kavanaugh decided to walk away.
Then he claimed that maybe Kavanaugh didn't hear him.
It didn't matter.
He was featured all over the news last night.
All of this is sheer nonsense.
It's sheer nonsense.
So, Ben Sasse apparently now has to explain to Democrats how these judicial hearings are supposed to work.
And here is Ben Sasse, Senator from Nebraska, giving a bit of an education to folks on how these hearings are supposed to work and how dumb these hearings have become.
I want to make just four brief points.
Number one, in our system, the legislative branch is supposed to be the center of our politics.
Number two, it's not.
Third consequence is that this transfer of power means the people yearn for a place where politics can actually be done.
And when we don't do a lot of big actual political debating here, we transfer it to the Supreme Court.
And fourth and finally, we badly need to restore the proper duties and the balance of power from our constitutional system.
Okay, and he's right about all these things, but we're not going to do any of that stuff.
Instead, what we're going to do is shout at each other and pretend that Fred Guttenberg got stiffed by Brett Kavanaugh, and scream until we're arrested, and all the rest of this nonsense, because the apocalyptic rhetoric is the name of the game.
It's what we are all supposed to focus in on.
And then, as soon as anyone takes the apocalyptic rhetoric seriously, and says, you know what, I don't like you anymore, because we're not going to be friends, we're not going to pretend to be friends, because, hey, the country is at stake, then it's, well, don't you get the game?
Don't you get how the game works?
You can't have it both ways.
Either you can use the apocalyptic rhetoric and take this thing seriously, or you could actually use true rhetoric, and then maybe we could be a little bit civil to one another.
And not everything is the apocalypse.
And I'm sorry, Judge Brett Kavanaugh joining the Supreme Court is far from the apocalypse.
It is really, really far from the apocalypse.
In just a second, I'm going to give you the latest on Bob Woodward, who has a new book coming out.
And this, of course, has left in a tizzy because anytime there's a gossip book about the president, they're up for it.
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Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, the media are in a tizzy about President Trump, as always, because we now suffer from wild Trump derangement syndrome in the media.
Bob Woodward has a new book, and his new book basically says that Trump is a senile, old, crazy person who doesn't know what he's doing.
Which is not much of a claim, since I think being hired a left thinks that, and I think large swaths of the right have basically priced in all of the typical Trump craziness into whatever it is that President Trump does.
Nonetheless, we're going to hear all these stories about the chaos that is President Trump.
I think the funniest part of this is that Bob Woodward said Trump is denying any of this is true.
Members of his administration are denying any of this is true.
General James Mad Dog Mattis says that Woodward's reporting on him is fiction and quote, a product of someone's rich imagination because Woodward wrote that Mattis once described Trump as having the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader.
When it comes to the Korean Peninsula, Mattis responded by saying the contemptuous words about the president attributed to me in Woodward's book were never uttered by me or in my presence.
While I generally enjoy reading fiction, this is uniquely Washington brand of literature and his anonymous sources do not lend credibility.
This is not supremely shocking stuff.
Woodward's going to claim people said stuff.
People in the administration are going to claim they didn't say stuff.
This is the problem with anonymous sourcing.
It's he said, she said.
According to the book, Mattis said after a meeting at which Trump questioned the U.S.
government spending money on the Korean Peninsula, Mattis supposedly said that he was exasperated and alarmed, and he told close associates the president acted like he had the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader.
Apparently, the defense chief said in his statement, responsible policymaking in the real world is inherently messing, messy.
Though it is also essential that we challenge every assumption to find the best option.
He says, So Mattis already throwing shade at Bob Woodward's book.
yet would show contempt for the elected commander and chief President Trump or tolerate disrespect to the office of the president from within our defense department is a product of someone's rich imagination.
So Matt is already throwing shade at Bob Woodward's book, but that's not stopping the press from having a field day with all of this.
President Trump had a conversation with Bob Woodward Woodward apparently called up Trump and wanted to know why Trump wouldn't be interviewed for the book.
And Trump basically shied it off.
He basically says, you know, you didn't go through the proper channels.
Here's Trump trying to pretend that he hadn't heard about Woodward's book and then saying that he did hear about Woodward's book, but he didn't want to talk to him.
The reality is Trump doesn't have to talk to Bob Woodward.
There's nothing there that suggests that Trump has to, for any reason, talk to Bob Woodward.
It's just another book that smacks the president.
No shock here.
How can I spend all this time talking to people like Kellyanne and Raj and Republican Senators?
Who were the Senators?
No, they never called me about it.
Senator Graham said he had talked to you about talking to me.
Now, is that not true?
Senator Graham actually mentioned it quickly on one meeting.
That is true.
That is true.
No, but that is true.
So basically, there's Trump basically saying, I was mentioned to a lot of people that I should talk to you, I've decided not to, or it's somebody else's fault.
Woodward released the tapes basically to show that his research is true and that he has tapes of a lot of these people.
Regardless, I'm not seeing anything in the book that is anything different from what people already believe about President Trump.
So for example, the Washington Post reports, a central theme of the book is the stealthy machinations used by those in Trump's inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters, both for the president personally and for the nation who's elected to lead.
Woodward describes an administrative coup d'etat and a nervous breakdown of the executive branch, with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president's desk so he couldn't see or sign them.
Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump's national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders.
In one particular situation, supposedly Gary Cohn actually took a document off of Trump's desk to prevent him from signing it, which is actually somewhat hilarious.
So there's all these stories about how his advisers are basically attempting to rein President Trump in.
Is all this believable?
Of course this stuff's believable.
I'm not going to sit here and pretend it's not believable that his advisors are all trying to rein him in and prevent him from doing dumb things.
That's not a shock in any real way.
And Woodward reports on some of these overdramatic moments of escalation when Steve Bannon, for example, started screaming at Ivanka Trump, calling her a GD staffer, and saying, you walk around this place, act like you're in charge.
You're not.
You're on staff.
And Ivanka Trump replying, I'm not a staffer.
I'll never be a staffer.
I'm the first daughter.
And Reince Priebus saying, when you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody.
I mean, all this stuff, like, frankly, who cares?
I gotta be honest with you, who cares?
Like, did you not know this was going on?
Did you not really believe this was going on?
Do you really believe that this place functions like a well-oiled machine?
Of course it doesn't function like a well-oiled machine.
It functions like the set of The Apprentice, except without all of the good editorial cuts.
It functions like what got left on the cutting room at The Apprentice.
Because that's how Trump runs things.
And so far, the economy is fine, and we're not in the middle of any foreign crisis, and things are basically okay.
I will say, the feeling of chaos from the Trump administration is really what's hurting President Trump's approval ratings.
Now, the latest revelations from Woodward's book come courtesy So this is what Woodward writes.
So here is some of the stuff that Woodward reports.
Woodward writes, the operations of the Oval Office and White House were less the art of the deal and more often the unraveling of the deal.
The unraveling was often right before your eyes, a Trump rally on continuous loop.
There was no way not to look.
So here is some of the stuff that Woodward reports.
Trump to James Clapper, then director of national intelligence, who briefed him at Trump Tower during the transition on the intelligence community's findings that Putin had interfered in the election.
Quote, I don't believe in human sources.
These are people who have sold their souls and sold out their country.
I don't trust human intelligence and these spies." So he didn't believe, but we know that.
He tweeted that stuff out already.
Like, okay.
Apparently, Secretary Mattis said, Okay, why would that be shocking?
Trump said to Tom Bossert, the president's advisor for Homeland Security, Cybersecurity, and Counterterrorism, who asked Trump if he had a minute, quote, I want to watch The Masters.
You and your cyber are going to get me into war with all your cyber bleep.
All right, I mean, like, again, baked into the cake, man.
Everybody knew all this stuff.
Trump was given a Reader's Digest version of the Hezbollah briefing.
And we knew, this has been reported for years, that Trump basically takes his security briefings in bite-sized chunks.
And apparently, Trump was editing an upcoming speech with Rob Porter, scribbling his thoughts in neat, clean penmanship the president wrote, trade is bad.
And I do love this.
Apparently the book's last paragraph is, in the man in his presidency, Trump lawyer John Dowd had seen the tragic flaw in the political back and forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying fake news, the indignation.
Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president, you're an effing liar.
I don't know.
So the media's going crazy over all this stuff.
I don't know why.
I will be frank with you, I do not understand why.
There is nothing there that is new.
If you didn't know all this stuff about President Trump before, it's because you haven't been watching or because you're willfully ignorant.
President Trump...
Does not know a lot about politics.
He just doesn't.
Okay?
That's okay!
Being ignorant about things does not mean that you're a bad president.
It really doesn't.
The great lie about being the president of the United States is you have to be an expert on things.
You really do not have to be an expert on things.
Jimmy Carter was a very smart man and a really, truly awful president of the United States.
We've had a lot of presidents who are very smart and garbage presidents.
Woodrow Wilson was the dean of Princeton University and one of the worst presidents in American history.
And you don't have to be great at organization either to be a decent president.
You know how many administrations have had chaos in their first couple of years?
Bill Clinton had chaos in his first couple of years.
None of this is a real shock.
But the media are going to seize on it and claim that this means that Trump is senile and he shouldn't be president.
None of it has any relevance.
None of it is a big deal.
There's only one way in which any of this is a big deal and that's the feeling of constant chaos emanating from the White House.
And it leads me to believe that Trump should basically fire half of the people who are in the executive branch right now Just to prevent them from leaking, so that there is some sort of semblance of normalcy, at least emanating from the halls of the White House.
So, we'll talk a little bit more about that, plus a bad poll for Republicans, a few bad polls for congressional Republicans, and a bad poll for Republicans about young Americans.
But first, let's talk about your Second Amendment rights.
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The USCCA does great work educating people on gun use.
They are there to provide legal defense services for you if, God forbid, you actually have to fire your gun at somebody because they're in your house trying to rob you or something.
Go check them out right now.
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All right.
What does any of this matter?
What does any of this matter?
We'll talk about that in just one second.
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And here's what it'll sound like.
I'm Christina Hoff Sommers, the Factual Feminist, and this Sunday I'm going to be on The Ben Shapiro Show, his Sunday special.
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And we are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
So the polls for the president have dropped in the last couple of weeks.
People trying to figure out exactly why.
He's down to about 39.6% in the average approval rating.
He's been very sticky in his approval ratings, like his high is 42.
He's down near his lows right now.
The congressional generic ballot is really bad right now.
We're talking about like an 8 to 10 point gap for Republicans on average in the real clear politics poll average.
People trying to figure out Why there are three big polls that have recently come out that are bad for the president, in which he's in the 30s in approval rating for the first time in a long time.
And the reason is because all of the good news about the economy, all of the good news about the country have been obscured by the feeling of total chaos.
And this is where the media really do play a role and where the president playing into the teeth of the media is really not useful.
It's where if the president went silent and deprived them of oxygen, he'd be much better off.
So today, for example, the president decides that it'd be wise to tweet out about all of the media members who are targeting him.
And he tweets out with regard to supposed libel on the part of the media.
He tweeted out, let's see, here it is.
Isn't it a shame, isn't it a shame, he's refining Bob Woodward, that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories, and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost.
Don't know why Washington politicians don't change libel laws.
Well, I mean, let's be honest here.
It'd be a very bad thing for the presidents of the United States if they changed the libel laws.
Ted Cruz would sue him for suggesting that his dad shot JFK.
There's that.
I mean, this is the president who said the National Enquirer should win a Pulitzer Prize.
But, with all of that said, When the president is feeding the flames here, it is not good.
It is not useful.
It gives a feeling that things are in uproar, when really, they are not.
And Trump says, almost everyone agrees that my administration has done more and less than two years than any other administration in the history of our country.
I'm tough as hell on people, and if I weren't, nothing would get done.
Also, I question everybody and everything, which is why I got elected.
So that's fine.
That's fine.
And then he said, here's what he should be tweeting, right?
The Trump economy is booming with the help of House and Senate GOP.
Farm bill with snap work requirements will bolster farmers and get America back to work.
Pass the farm bill with snap work requirements.
Now I'm going to show you.
Why it is that people... Here it is, finally.
The president is sounding off on Nike as well, because that's what we needed.
He said, "Just like the NFL, whose ratings have gone way down, Nike is getting absolutely killed with anger and boycotts.
I wonder if they had any idea it would be this way.
As far as the NFL is concerned, I just find it hard to watch and always will until they stand for the flag." This feeling of WWE incipient chaos Everybody is going nuts over each other all the time.
I will show you why it is that President Trump's approval ratings have been lowered.
The only one of those four tweets that's actually important is the one where he is calling for work requirements added to the farm bill.
That is the only one of those four tweets that means anything.
We're not changing libel laws.
The NFL can do it at once.
Nike can do it at once.
They're both corporations.
They're both going to feel the brunt of what they've done.
And President Trump suggesting that how he runs his administration, tweeting crazily with weird punctuation, that's not helpful either.
The only one of those four tweets that matters is the one where he's actually suggesting a policy fix when it comes to food stamps.
Here are the number of retweets on each of those tweets.
On the one on libel, 15,000 retweets, 35,000 comments, 59,000 likes.
On the one about how great his administration is, 48,000 likes, 13,000 retweets, 17,000 comments.
On the one about how great his administration is, 48,000 likes, 13,000 retweets, 17,000 comments.
On the farm bill, 5,000 comments, 6,000 retweets, 27,000 likes.
It's about half of all the other stuff.
No one pays attention when the president talks policy.
Everyone pays attention when he engages in the culture war kind of shtick.
Right?
46,000 likes for the anti-Nike tweet.
People are tired.
People are tired.
They really are.
And I think most Americans are just weary at this point.
And the President constantly feeding into the narrative is driving the weariness.
I'm not saying that he can't fight back.
I think that it's good that he fights back when lies are told.
I think that's fine.
But I do think that it is a mistake that the President of the United States is constantly engaging.
It's extraordinarily exhausting for the American people who mostly just want to go about their business.
I was talking to a friend of mine, Dave Rubin, yesterday.
He just took off 30 days to be off the grid.
He put his cell phone in a safe.
He didn't look at the news for 30 days.
He came back looking happier than I've seen him in quite a while.
And the reason is because in those 30 days, it has been 10 years of news.
It is wearying for the American public.
Most Americans don't want to be bothered with government.
In fact, the conservative pitch is that when government doesn't bother you, your life is happy.
One of the ways government bothers you is when it's in your face all the time.
And a 24-7 news cycle?
Where the president is feeding the flames every day and the media love it.
Let's not pretend the media don't love it.
They love it.
They're into it.
All that's doing is making people annoyed.
I think that's really what's happening here.
I think the poll numbers are dropping for Trump and the Republicans because people are just annoyed.
And I think they're also dropping because Republicans aren't talking about key issues.
They're not talking about the things that are important.
They're busy running after the headline of the day.
There's a poll from YouGov showing half of those under 35 say America is special compared to 80% of people 55 and over.
You want to know why that is?
Because Republicans don't talk about why America is special anymore.
They just talk about whatever is the latest outrage of the day.
Chasing the headlines does not win hearts and minds.
Speaking to true, eternal values that actually matters, those are the things that win hearts and minds and bring people over.
We have an inordinately large young people audience on this show.
We do.
A huge audience.
Most of our audience on this show is actually under the age of 40.
That's unusual.
The reason is because we talk about, we try to talk about these eternal values, the things that actually matter.
And when you fill all the space with chatter all the time, all you're doing is allowing the left to subsume those greater eternal values under a narrative of chaos.
That's where the president should really, really cut it out.
Now, speaking of stupid stories of the day, I gotta tell you this story from the UK Sun.
It is an amazing story.
Transgender woman in tears after bank account frozen as she sounded like a man on the phone.
Okay, this is a story from an actual newspaper.
A transgender woman was left in tears after her bank account was frozen because she sounded like a man over the phone.
Like a man is in quotation marks.
Sophia Reese, 47, said she was humiliated and embarrassed after telephone banking staff said she failed security checks because she didn't, quote, speak like a lady.
Things went from bad to worse the next day when she went to pay for items in Tesco and discovered that Santander had frozen her account.
Now she is fighting to ensure that other transgender people are not treated in the same way.
Sophia, a customer service advisor living in Nottingham, went into her local Santander branch to confront staff after the humiliating telephone ordeal.
She said the embarrassment and humiliation I felt was unbelievable.
They said my voice did not match my profile because it sounded like a man on the phone and not a woman.
The whole situation is inadmissible.
I was crying my eyes out, and I am not that type of person at all.
I'm a very courteous person.
I am outgoing, but to feel that way when all I asked for was my money to be transferred, I feel mistreated.
Sophia informed Santander last November she would no longer be named Sergio on the account, but despite changing her registered name and telling phone banking staff she was a transgender woman, they still treated her with suspicion.
Well, right, because this is what customer service is trained to do.
There's literally an entire identity theft ad campaign by Citibank that is on television, on national television, in which you see two old ladies sitting there speaking with the voice of Southern men because the idea is that Southern men have stolen their credit card.
If I were a customer service representative and somebody called in and said, Hey, this is Sophia.
Can you open up the money?
I'll be like, really, Sophia?
You sound like a dude.
Because, in fact, it turns out that Sophia is a biological man.
So we all have to be crazy now in order to make room for the feelings of various other human beings.
It's just amazing stuff.
And the madness of the left is not restricted to that sort of thing.
The left has gone so crazy that they're not just killing basic ideas of rationality, they're also killing the far left.
They're killing basic ideas of comedy.
So this is my favorite piece of the day.
This is from Vulture by a person named Jesse David Fox.
The title of the piece is, How Funny Does Comedy Need to Be?
It turns out the left is now realizing that all of their comics are no longer funny.
They're going for, as we've called it on the show, claptor.
Not a term that I coined, but a term that we have used on the show.
Claptor.
They're not going for laughter.
They just want people to cheer for them.
So here is what Vulture writes.
Why so serious to quote a famous clown is a question being asked about comedy more and more frequently by its consumers and by comedians themselves to the point where some are questioning if it can even be called comedy.
Nanette is more a TED Talk than a stand-up special, was a common refrain this summer.
Is Drew Michael even a stand-up special?
Was a question I was asked about the audience-free HBO tour.
To take it to scripted TV, I am frequently reminded of a joke from Difficult People.
When did comedies become 30-minute dramas?
Comedians and comedy writers are increasingly pushing the bounds of what it means for something to be a comedy in the most basic sense.
Rewiring the relationship between comedies and jokes.
So what is comedy without jokes?
It's post-comedy.
So, it's not that comedians are unfunny because they've decided to politically engage and be really crappy political pundits.
Like, I would be a bad comedian.
They are very bad political pundits.
I know because I'm a professional.
But they say that this is now post-comedy.
I do love this.
I'm now going to use this excuse on everything.
If I'm bad at cleaning up the house, I'm going to say to my wife, you know what?
I'm just post-cleaning the house.
I'm post-cleaning the house.
You know, we've moved on to a different level.
It's kind of meta.
You may have a tough time understanding this.
But cleaning the house doesn't actually have to be cleaning the house.
It can really be more the perception that the house ought to be clean and that I didn't really do the cleaning.
But I think there's meaning in thinking about but not cleaning the house.
It's called post-cleaning the house.
I'm going to do this with everything.
Right?
I'm not going to be entertaining.
I'm going to be incredibly boring.
We'll call it post-entertainment.
It won't because... Does entertainment really need to be entertaining?
Or is that just our subjective perception of what entertainment ought to be?
Entertaining.
Maybe what entertainment ought to be is just my dinner with Andre.
Except three hours will be eight hours of Wallace Shawn talking to some dude about weird random art.
We'll do that for like eight hours.
It'll be great.
It'll be post-entertainment.
You may know that a form of art is dead when they have declared the art post-art.
Comedy is dead because they have now declared it post-comedy.
Vulture writes, sure it sounds pretentious.
It's a pretentious shift, especially for a form that has always seemed allergic to pretension.
But it seems like the best way to describe comedy.
It's looking more like the frowning mask than the smiling one.
Or, alternatively, these people are not remotely funny because they can't be funny anymore because they've killed the joke.
The left has killed every joke because everything is offensive now.
So instead, they've decided to opt for a bunch of, of, of clapping, clap, applause generating lines that rip on President Trump.
Just amazing stuff.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
There's a good book called The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.
It has been made into a documentary by PBS.
It's about the Washington rowing team and them essentially rowing for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
It's really entertaining.
If you like Seabiscuit, the book, which is much better than the movie, by the way, by Laura Hillebrand, this isn't quite as good as that book, but it is definitely an entertaining read and a moving read.
It's pretty great.
You don't have to like rowing or know anything about rowing to enjoy the book.
I don't know anything about rowing.
I enjoyed the book.
You can go check it out right now.
The Boys in the Boat, Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold.
It's a nice kind of reminder that America used to be kind of an awesome place.
America is still an awesome place, but America at least used to be united by certain basic ideas of hard work and motivation and getting ahead.
And now it seems like America's motivated mostly by us kicking each other in the ass, which is really irritating.
Okay, time for a bunch of things that I hate.
So let's do a lot of hate today.
So Monica Lewinsky was appearing in Israel, and the interviewer asked her if she expected an apology from former President Bill Clinton.
And then she got up and walked off the stage.
So here's what that sounded like.
Recently in an interview in NBC News, former President Clinton was rather irate when he was asked if he ever apologized to you personally.
And he said, I apologize publicly.
Do you still respect that apology with a personal apology?
I'm so sorry.
I'm not going to be able to do this.
Okay, so here's what I hate about this.
Can we stop playing victim for just a second?
The only reason Monica Lewinsky is famous is because she once got on her knees for the President of the United States.
That is legitimately the only reason that she is famous.
So, I feel bad for Monica Lewinsky.
I feel like she was mistreated, particularly by the press, that claimed that she was something terrible and awful, when in fact she was just a young intern who was being put in a bad position by a man in power.
But if we're going to pretend that Monica Lewinsky gets to act offended by people asking questions about the only thing that has ever been politically relevant about her career, I can't go there with you.
I can't.
Monica Lewinsky is not a victim.
She's a victim of Bill Clinton, but she's not a victim, and she's a victim of the press.
She's not a victim of the lady asking her about whether Bill Clinton ought to apologize to her.
That's a ridiculous, insane thing.
There's no reason for that at all.
And so it's just, I find this sort of stuff where we all get to take offense at everything.
It's really dumb.
Okay, other things that I hate.
As I've been talking about all show long, The left's apocalyptic rhetoric with regard to everything happening in the country, it is more likely to lead to the actual apocalypse.
When you think everything is the apocalypse, this leads people to take up war stances on issues that really don't merit it.
Eugene Robinson is complicit in this today.
He's writing over at the Washington Post, and he has a piece called, what's at stake in November?
Democracy.
Democracy itself is at stake.
If you really believe that, if you really believe that democracy itself is at stake, that if Democrats don't win back Congress in 2018, democracy is over, you're out of your damn mind.
You're out of your mind.
If they don't win in 2018, there's a very high likelihood that they will win in 2020.
I remember Republicans were saying the same before 2010.
Democracy was over.
We were all going to die.
Can we quit with all of the, it's the last election nonsense?
Look, if the left gets elected, terrible things will happen in American politics.
Things I don't like.
And then guess what?
There will be more elections.
Because America is not on the brink of collapse as a nation.
We are on the brink of a lot of bad things.
We're on the brink of hating each other more than ever.
We're on the brink of a collapse of our social fabric.
But that is going to that is going to long predate the death of democracy.
The exaggeration in which we suggest that democracy is basically at the end of its rope if Trump is is Trump desperately wants an attorney general who will shut Mueller down.
The incumbent, Jeff Sessions, cannot do so because he is recused from the matter.
Republican senators who once warned Trump not to dare fire Sessions now seem resigned to the fact Trump will do just that.
It makes sense for Trump to make his move after the election.
If Republicans still control Congress, he'll get away with it.
If Democrats take charge, he won't.
If anyone asks you what's at stake in November, just tell them democracy and justice.
Guess what?
If Trump fires Jeff Sessions and Republicans don't do anything, and then the next Attorney General fires Robert Mueller, do you think Trump's going to win re-election in 2020?
You think there won't be any reaction to that?
How do you think Democrats are gonna do in 2020 if Trump goes forward with that stuff?
You think it'll be good?
I highly doubt it.
But we're gonna get this sort of insane rhetoric anyway from the left.
Paul Krugman doing the same thing.
He says that, again, the Republican program on healthcare is get sick, go bankrupt, and die.
So if you disagree with him and his ridiculous plans on healthcare, if you think that the ACA needs to be wildly dismembered because it is a bad bill, if you think that there are better ways to solve for market-oriented solutions in healthcare, then perhaps what you really ought to do What you really mean, according to Paul Krugman, is that you want everybody to die.
Then they wonder why you got Trump.
Again, Trump is a symptom.
The reason why people say things like why you got Trump is because people want to see Trump as a cause.
This is why this phrase really crops up, like on a deep level.
Everybody on the left doesn't like the phrase why you got Trump because it implies that Trump is a symptom rather than a cause of our civic collapse.
Trump is a symptom.
He is not a cause.
Trump is just the capstone on a couple of decades worth of really bad politics, probably at least four decades worth, going back to the excesses of the 1970s and 1960s in terms of the growth of government.
A lot of good things happened in the 1960s on civil rights and women's rights.
Not a lot of good things happened in any other area of American life in the 1960s.
The 1960s radicalized our politics in tremendously damaging ways for a variety of reasons.
The idea that Trump is the be-all end-all, though, is what the left is banked on, and this is why they can't stand why you got Trump.
But this is why you got Trump.
You used the same slurs against John McCain and Mitt Romney and George W. Bush you used against Trump, and then you got Trump.
Congratulations.
This is how you got there.
Okay, time for a quick Federalist paper.
So we're all the way on Federalist 44.
Wow, we've been doing this for a while.
James Madison wrote this one.
And in it, he discusses why states should not be able to, for example, print their own currencies.
He suggests that this is going to lead to an inflation race, states racking up debt and then being able to inflate their way out of it, as opposed to states racking up debts and then having to tax their way out of it.
This is basically correct, although I think there is a case to be made that separate currencies among the states might not be the world's worst thing, because then we would actually get to see the fiscal effect of being fiscally irresponsible, like we see in California, as opposed to simply kicking the can down the road and assuming that the federal government is going to pick up the slack Because the U.S.
dollar is going to support all of that spending.
Madison also writes about the Necessary and Proper Clause.
This is the clause of the Constitution that says that the federal government has all powers necessary and proper to the fulfillment of its specific duties under the Constitution of the United States.
The case Madison makes is that the Necessary and Proper Clause is enough of a restriction on the federal government that really we shouldn't worry about the growth of the federal government.
And Madison would have been right if all of our constitutional officers had done their job.
Instead, the Necessary and Proper Clause was expanded to include all sorts of means that were not, in fact, necessary and proper.
Here's what Madison wrote.
wrote he said few parts of the constitution have been assailed with more intemperance than this yet on a fair investigation of it no part can appear more completely invulnerable without the substance of this power the whole constitution would be a dead letter those who those who object to the article therefore as a part of the constitution can only mean that the form of the provision is improper in the first instance the success of the usurpation meaning if the government takes power will depend on the executive and judiciary departments which are to expound and
And in the last resort, a remedy must be obtained from the people who can, by the election of more faithful representatives, annul the act of the usurpers.
In the end, it's going to be up to the people to protect the Constitution.
And this is where we failed.
The American people have not protected the Constitution.
We can blame our politicians as much as we want.
The civic education in our country sucks.
We have not studied what the bounds of the government ought to be or why they ought to be there.
And thus, we have delegated all sorts of power to the feds and then we whine about it after the feds use that power against us.
That's a mistake on our part.
In the end, it all comes down to what the American people want.
I think it's an HL Mencken kind of aphorism that the American people are going to get what they want and they deserve it good and hard.
That's sort of the Madisonian view.
Well, it's time for the American people to wake up and maybe take some blame for the fact that our politics is failing.
Finally, Madison in Federalist 44 discusses the Supremacy Clause.
He says that we have to have a federal government that is supreme to the state government, otherwise the state governments are going to be supreme over the federal government and the whole thing won't work.
This obviously is fundamentally correct.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest updates from the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and everything else.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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