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Sept. 7, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:18
American Grandstand | Ep. 619
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Cory Booker and Kamala Harris make total fools of themselves, Twitter bans Alex Jones permanently, and we check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Some days the news cycle is just so much fun.
And today is one of those days because it is full-scale insanity.
We will get to all of it.
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All righty.
So we are still in the aftermath of what was a wild and bizarre Senate Judiciary Committee hearing over President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.
This, of course, would be Brett Kavanaugh.
Brett Kavanaugh is about as mainstream establishment a textualist judge as can be.
He gave no controversial answers, but that did not stop Democrats from grandstanding because we now live in a world where signaling to your base that you are deeply Deeply upset about things is the way to win political races.
Whether you're Donald Trump in the 2016 primaries, or whether you're Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries, the way that you get your base excited is by showing them that you are very upset and you are crusading for truth!
It doesn't matter if you're actually making up the truth.
Doesn't matter if you're twisting it.
Doesn't matter if you're lying it.
The only thing that really matters in the end is whether your base believes that you're passionate about something.
Because passion has now outweighed reason as the basic standard that we should be using in any particular way.
Well, the case in point over the last couple days has been Cory Booker.
And the evolution of Cory Booker is really something to watch.
For those who didn't know anything about Cory Booker, Cory Booker used to be considered a sort of moderate politician.
He was sort of a third-way politician who was in Newark, New Jersey.
He was governing across the aisle.
He was making friends with Shmuley Boteach.
He was a guy who was going to be the new wave of politics in the country, you know, post-partisan, beyond all of this back and forth, left and right.
And then he realized that the best way to elevate himself inside the Democratic Party was to act like a loon bag.
And so he's decided to go full loony and he did that during the Senate Judiciary Committee.
So you recall a couple of days ago when he suggested that he was Spartacus, which was real weird.
It was real weird because, number one, he is not, in fact, Spartacus.
Number two, he doesn't understand the plot of Spartacus.
And number three, he didn't actually violate the law, but here was Cory Booker basically daring people on the Senate Judiciary Committee to oust him from the Senate for violation of the rules.
I saw the Washington Free Beacon did a mash-up of Cory Booker talking about how he had violated the rules with George Costanza from Seinfeld talking about how he was the bad man.
And it really does fit.
I mean, Cory Booker is a nerd pretending to be the bad guy here so that he's cool with the base.
He's going to wear a leather jacket and ride a motorcycle so that the base will love him and vote for him in 2020.
Here's Cory Booker pretending to be Spartacus.
I will say that I did willingly violate the chair's rule on the committee confidential process.
I take full responsibility for violating that, sir.
And I violate it because I sincerely believe that the public deserves to know this nominee's record.
In this particular case, his record on issues of race and the law.
And I could not understand, and I violated this rule knowingly, why these issues should be withheld from the public.
Now I appreciate the comments of my colleagues.
This is about the closest I'll probably ever have in my life to an I am Spartacus moment.
He's making two claims there.
One is that he violated the Senate rules.
Two are that the documents that he actually released were somehow damaging to Brett Kavanaugh.
Not a single thing he said there is true.
Including that this is an I am Spartacus moment.
Now, I've already said this morning on Twitter, I took a Twitter poll as to what President Trump should call him in the inevitable tweet, right?
There will be a tweet from President Trump about Cory Booker.
I am pushing all of my friends at the White House to get the President to nickname him Fartacus.
I just think that the alternatives are Crying Cory.
There's also Drama Queen Cory.
There are a few possibilities, but I think Fartacus is clearly the best, and I'll be very disappointed in the President if he goes with Crying somebody else, because he's already done Crying for, I think, a couple of other Folks, he needs to get more creative with the insults.
In any case, it turns out none of this is true.
So Cory Booker releases these documents.
Number one, he didn't actually release the documents.
They were released earlier that morning.
So he didn't violate any of Senate rule, which he knew when he said this.
That's number one.
Number two, the documents that he released about Brett Kavanaugh, the things the American public had to see, because we cannot Have this veil of ignorance placed upon our eyes so that we don't know who will enter.
We must know everything.
It turns out, what do those documents show?
It shows Brett Kavanaugh is a lawyer who knows things and also opposed racial profiling after 9-11.
The specific email chain he's talking about there, we need to know what he thinks about racial profiling.
What does Brett Kavanaugh actually say in those emails?
He says, racial profiling is probably unconstitutional so we shouldn't do it.
So well done, Cory Booker.
Just well done.
What's hilarious about this is even members of the left-wing media who are prepared to praise Cory Booker, who are prepared to treat him as Spartacus rather than Fartacus, even those members of the media, Had to actually ask him some tough questions, and Cory Booker had no answer.
So Anderson Cooper, who is predisposed to sort of like this kind of drama, he starts asking Cory Booker questions, and watch as Cory Booker's eyes roll up into the back of his head and he starts murmuring in tongues.
It's pretty astonishing.
Grassley's office also confirmed you were told that the restrictions on documents had been waived before you spoke today.
So how do you square that with the idea that, with what you've said?
Well, I square that very easily.
Number one, last night I broke the rules before they even, then they scrambled to release the document.
But I continue to release documents.
I've released 20 so far that they have not cleared.
I am breaking the rules.
I am breaking the sham rules.
20 documents.
If you check my Twitter feed, anybody in the public now can have access to the ones that they wanted to hide.
If they haven't cleared those yet, maybe they're rushing to catch up to me and clear those as well.
And then Cooper's like, yeah, but Grassley says that he already cleared it, and so did all the Democrats on the committee.
So, um, what are you talking about?
And then Booker's like, well, but no, I'm a bad man.
I broke the rules, baby.
Look at me.
Look at me, my muscle shirt.
Got a pack of cigarettes rolled up in my t-shirt sleeve.
I mean, I'm a bad boy, ladies.
Yeah, good.
Sure.
Sure, Cory.
Sure.
So that was solid stuff.
And then Kamala Harris, it turns out, is also a terrible liar.
So Kamala Harris, who's better than Cory Booker at this.
Yesterday, I compared Cory Booker to, he's like the Nicolas Cage of politics.
Every scene is just him snarling at the camera and making weird faces.
Well, Kamala Harris is actually pretty good at this, right?
She does the stayed routine pretty well.
There's only one problem.
She also doesn't know what she's talking about.
So she had an entire exchange with Judge Kavanaugh in which she accused Judge Kavanaugh of talking about the Mueller investigation with members of President Trump's law firm over at Kasowitz.
Well, a couple of facts that are worthwhile noting.
Number one, Kasowitz gave disproportionately to a particular California Senate candidate by the name of Kamala Harris in the last election cycle.
She didn't reveal that.
Number two, I do love the fact that Kamala Harris is suggesting that Kavanaugh knew somebody at Kasowitz and talked about the Mueller investigation without any evidence that ever happened.
Kasowitz then came out, the law firm came out, they said, yeah, by the way, no, that never happened.
That's not a thing that happened.
Do we actually have footage of Kamala Harris grilling Kavanaugh from yesterday?
Yeah, so here it is.
Kasowitz, Benson, and Torres, which is the law firm founded by Mark Kasowitz, who is President Trump's personal lawyer.
Have you had any conversation about Robert Mueller or his investigation with anyone at that firm?
Yes or no?
Is there a person you're talking about?
I'm asking you a very direct question.
Yes or no?
I need to know the... I'm not sure I know everyone who works at that law firm.
I don't think you need to.
I think you need to know who you talked with.
Who'd you talk to?
Okay, who'd you talk to?
And he's like, there are 266 lawyers at Cassowitz.
Like, I don't know.
I talk to lawyers all the time.
I don't know what firm they work for.
And that's true, I'm sure, for Brett Kavanaugh, too, who works in legal circles all the time.
That's not the first question you ask somebody.
You ask, like, what kind of law do you practice?
Where do you practice?
It's a dumb question, and she has no evidence of this whatsoever.
So then Manu Raju, who works for CNN, sees Kamala Harris, like, walking around the Senate building yesterday afternoon.
And here's what he tweets.
Just asked Kamala Harris about Kasowitz's denial, because Kasowitz came forward, and Mark Kasowitz, who runs the firm, he says, um, no one here talked to Kavanaugh about any of this stuff, so this is just made up.
So Manu Raju tweets, just asked Kamala Harris about Kasowitz's denial that no one at firm talked to Kavanaugh about Mueller probe.
And she says, they're not under oath.
And so Raju said, so you don't believe them?
She says, the question was asked under oath, and he didn't answer.
Okay, so basically she was lying.
She had no evidence whatsoever that Kasowitz had talked to Kavanaugh about any of this stuff.
She has no evidence that Kavanaugh has done anything inappropriate with regard to conversations about the Mueller investigation or anything like that.
She just runs around asking questions that are designed to grandstand for the public.
The funniest thing about all of this is, you know who's actually winning the battle among Democrats for 2020 based on the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing?
Michael Avenatti.
I'm telling you, he's my sleeper, man.
He is my dark horse.
Michael Avenatti, the porn lawyer for Stormy Daniels.
That guy is now my 2020 frontrunner for the Democrats.
I am not kidding.
You think I'm kidding?
Because it's ridiculous.
But guess what?
Everything's ridiculous, man!
Where have you been for the last four years?
Come on!
Michael Avenatti is a better lawyer than either Cory Booker or Kamala Harris.
Cory Booker, by the way, asked something like 56 questions, 60 questions during the course of the hearing.
He didn't ask, he didn't mention a case, not one.
Zero cases mentioned in the course of all of his questions because these people are not interested in actual answers.
Avenatti started tweeting out stuff about all of this, and he was just trolling Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and it was just delicious.
So Avenatti starts tweeting out about how Cory Booker and Kamala Harris don't know what in the world they're actually talking about.
He tweeted this out two hours ago.
When I first started trying cases, my mentor taught me two basic things.
One, never overpromise and suggest to the jury that you have evidence when you don't, i.e.
get over the tips of your skis.
And two, never get caught trying to deceive the jury.
Words to live by in life as well.
Hey, that is such a subtweet of both Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
It's delicious.
It's delicious.
So watch as porn lawyer Michael Avenatti runs circles around the sitting senators from New Jersey and California.
I got to tell you, if it's Avenatti versus Trump in 2020, I cannot wait, man.
I mean, the entertainment value of that race will be so unbelievably high.
And what's going to be great is that we will actually get questions and debates like, Which one of you had sex with Stormy Daniels first?
This will actually be a question in a debate.
It'll be unbelievable.
If we're going to go down this path, let's go all the way.
The American people ought to feel the consequences of the decisions that they've made politically for the last several years.
And I think what we really deserve, it's not what the country needs, but it's what the country deserves, is an Avenatti versus Trump 2020 race.
And I'm telling you, Avenatti will crush—he's a better debater.
He's a better debater than Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
He will crush them on stage.
It'll be fantastic.
And he'll be able to stand there and say, these characters, these clowns, they couldn't even do a Senate Judiciary hearing.
I am going after the President of the United States via my brave feminist client, Stormy Daniels, famous for her role in The Witches of Brestwick.
And everybody will be like, yeah!
America's a great country.
Okay, we're going to get to some more from the Senate Judiciary hearings, because it got even better in a couple of ways.
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Alrighty, so the hearings got even better.
You remember that earlier this week, there was a woman named Zina Bash.
Zina Bash, her father is Jewish.
Her father's parents survived the Holocaust.
Her mother is Mexican.
But you remember that Zina Bash was supposedly a white supremacist.
Why?
Because she made this symbol, the OK symbol, right?
The OK symbol is supposedly white power.
Why?
Because if you take these three fingers, that looks like W. And if you take the circle and then you add a line to the bottom, it looks like power.
Real weird stuff.
But everybody on the left decided that this was a secret white supremacist decoder ring symbol.
And that if you open a Cracker Jack box and got precisely the proper ring and you oriented it correctly, then you could read between the lines of everything Brett Kavanaugh had ever said.
So she was going like this.
She had her hand on her arm like this.
And they suggested that she was giving the white power symbol.
And everybody was like, what are you even talking about?
Are you insane?
Well, three cheers for Zina Bash.
Zina Bash, not all heroes wear capes.
Yesterday in the hearing, Zina Bash is sitting behind Brett Kavanaugh again.
And just to screw with people's heads, she just takes her hand and she gives the same symbol.
Just to mess with people.
It's really fantastic.
There it is.
It's just spectacular.
Just for the fun of it.
She just raises her hand, she goes like that, and then she kind of puts it back down.
And she knows everybody's going to go nuts.
You know, there are a bunch of people on the right who are sort of prim and proper.
Oh, why would she do that?
She's giving credibility left.
No, she's making fun of them.
And they deserve it because they're crazy.
And this is why whenever folks on the left are like, well, Trump is a three ring circus.
No, no, no.
American politics is a three-ring circus.
President Trump is the ringmaster.
He's in that center ring.
But the other two rings are filled with Democrats and Democrat protesters because everyone's crazy.
Everyone has lost their minds.
And so if you can't enjoy the circus, well, then get out of the big tent.
If you can't enjoy the freak show, why are you here?
OK, we at least should be able to enjoy the humor of the era in which we live.
Especially because, you know what, things are going pretty well.
The unemployment rate is down to 3.9%.
That's like a historic low.
It's the best unemployment rate since I think 2000 and before that since 1953.
People are re-entering the workforce.
Things are so good that you can view politics right now through one of two lenses.
It's crisis and we're all going to die or Man, this is some funny bleep.
I mean, this is... Come on.
It's really, really funny stuff.
And the funny stuff did not, in fact, end at the Senate Judiciary Committee.
President Trump did a rally last night, and President Trump's rallies are basically stand-up comedy routines.
He basically just goes out in front of a crowd, and he reacts to the crowd, and he says a bunch of stuff.
And as I have been saying, anybody who's listened to this show for the last...
Two and a half, three years, knows that there is a two-track presidency for President Trump, a two-track campaign for President Trump.
President Trump says a lot of stuff.
And then a lot of policy gets implemented.
And the two things have nothing to do with one another.
Because President Trump, he's a guy with a face.
And stuff comes out of that face.
And sometimes it's good stuff, and sometimes it's bad stuff.
But none of that stuff has anything to do with the policy.
Because when it comes to implementing, most of the people around him make the policy.
Trump reads the first sentence of the actual policy, and then he signs it.
Just like you sign the form so you can go to the trampoline park with your kids without actually reading the details that say you sold your first child into slavery.
Just like you do that.
That's how President Trump signs executive orders.
So the President of the United States, when he does these rallies, this is really what he enjoys.
And you have to see the rallies as what they are.
They're not policy speeches.
They don't have any sort of deep meaning.
The president doesn't have the power under our system to be Mussolini.
I don't think President Trump really wants to be Mussolini.
I think he just likes the kind of cheering throngs of people around him because he seeks approval.
But that means that you have to enjoy what President Trump does for what it is, which is basically a giant Gallagher routine where he takes a watermelon and smashes it on stage and hits the people in the front row.
So here was President Trump yesterday talking about the failing New York Times.
And he says that they ought to investigate themselves, which is a weird suggestion, since I don't know why they would.
They're a private company, but sure, why the hell not?
Here's President Trump.
The latest act of resistance is the op-ed published in the failing New York Times by an anonymous, really an anonymous, gutless coward.
Come on.
This is fun stuff, guys.
I mean, we gotta enjoy.
You gotta just, you gotta revel in the fact that the man mispronounced the word anonymous twice in seven seconds, and then basically just said, Anonymous.
Anonymous.
A guy.
A guy.
I don't know who it was.
A guy.
Whatever.
With a face.
A face says stuff.
A guy.
Anonymous.
Solid stuff from the president right there.
And then the president also continued, this would be clip six, talking about, he tweeted this out, he asked if the New York Times would investigate itself.
He says, are the investigative journalists of the New York Times going to investigate themselves?
Who is the anonymous letter writer?
But he spelled it correctly that time.
Who is the anonymous letter writer?
Okay, so what's so funny about this whole controversy over the anonymous op-ed that hit the pages of the New York Times a couple of days ago, and oh my goodness, the accusations that there are people who sit around President Trump, and they steer him, and they make sure he doesn't go off the rails, and they're the steady state I read that again last night because I honestly am having a tough time understanding why this is a big deal or why people didn't know this.
Of course, there are people around the President of the United States who are working to thwart his worst instincts.
Have you ever had a boss who is not a bad boss, but just kind of crazy?
Have you ever had a boss like this?
I'm sure you have.
People in my company have that boss every single day.
And what you do if you have a boss like that, is you slow walk things.
I used to have a boss who's like this.
He'd get on the phone with me and he'd have an idea.
And his idea was invariably something completely crazy.
He's always something, what if we built a rocket made of cheese?
And I'd be like, sure.
Okay.
And I'd be like, well, I'm sure that's a good idea.
And then he'd get really enthusiastic.
Like the more you push back against him, the more enthusiastic he would be about this rocket made of cheese.
You'd be like, no, that's, you know, I'm not sure how that's going to survive the orbital entrance.
I don't really understand how the cheese is going to survive the orbital entry.
I mean, put aside the actual logistics and cost of building a rocket made of cheese or why you'd want to do that.
But I don't know how, you know what?
That's something we can figure out.
It's something we can figure out.
We can figure that one out.
The important thing is that there be a rocket made of cheese.
And you realize the more I push back against this idea, the more enthusiastic this person is going to get about the idea.
So instead of pushing back, what you start to do is go, you know, You know what, boss?
It's a great idea.
I don't care whether we're talking Swiss.
I don't care whether we're talking Munster.
I don't care if we're talking Monterey Jack.
Great idea.
You know what?
Let's think about that one.
Let me think on it.
Let me mull on that one.
And then you just do nothing.
And then like a year later, the guy says, whatever happened to that rocket made it Tuesday?
You know, we checked it out.
We thought about the cost.
You remember, we had a conversation about it.
It didn't really work.
He's like, oh yeah, I do remember that.
That's how you slow walk with your boss.
If you think people around the White House don't do it with their boss, you're out of your mind.
And it's not a constitutional coup.
Look, if Trump wants to fire these people, he can fire these people.
They all work for him.
A coup is when they actively chain him in the basement and prevent him from doing things.
That's not a thing.
But, again, it's imperative that we all go crazy.
And speaking of everybody going crazy, over at the pages of the New York Times, Paul Krugman, I don't know what he's on.
I don't know what sort of coke he is smoking.
You don't smoke coke, do you?
Unless it's crack.
I don't know anything about coke.
I don't know what he's snorting.
Paul Krugman suggests that crisis is imminent.
Why?
Because Brett Kavanaugh is going to kill the Constitution.
So he moved away from voting Republican is going to kill democracy and now he's on Brett Kavanaugh is going to kill the Constitution, which is weird because it's a document and you can't kill it because it's a document.
We'll talk about Paul Krugman who has joined the ranks of the crazy in just one second.
But first, let's talk about your ability to preserve your memories.
Okay, so this may not be the world's easiest time in politics, but I'm sure that you're having fun with your family.
You got pictures and old tapes and you got all sorts of old memories with your family.
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You don't want boxes of stuff piled up in your garage.
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So, as I say, Brett Kavanaugh apparently is going to end the Constitution This coming from Paul Krugman, a guy who thinks that the Constitution is basically a defunct document we shouldn't be paying attention to anyway.
But the levels of panic that are evident in a time where there really ought not be panic.
Again, things are pretty good.
Things are pretty good.
It's just the feeling of chaos that I think is making everybody a little bit nuts.
And the president does contribute to that.
There's no question about it.
And I said a few shows ago that I get the same feeling about the president that I have about my two-and-a-half-year-old son.
And this happens a lot.
You know, my two-and-a-half-year-old son, wonderful kid, just lovely, just a really nice kid, lots of fun.
By the time I hit 730 at night, I'm like, you need to go to bed now.
You need to go to bed.
I'm tired.
Forget about you being tired.
I'm tired.
Okay, you've been running around trying to kill yourself all day.
I've been stopping you from killing yourself all day.
Now I need you to go to sleep.
I feel like the American public are sort of like that about politics now.
It's like both parties are trying constantly to stick their fingers in light sockets.
And we're constantly like, guys, don't do it.
Just don't, just don't do it!
And they're like, no, I want to I want to stick my finger in the light socket.
Don't do it.
Just stop it.
Just go to bed.
Come on, just go to bed.
It's bedtime.
Daddy needs it.
Daddy needs a drink.
Go to bed.
OK, that's how the American people feel about politics right now.
But both parties seem insistent and everybody on all sides seems insistent on sticking their finger in the light socket.
So Paul Krugman has stuck his finger In the light socket, his hair is now sticking straight up.
He has a piece in the New York Times called, How will he do this?
How will he achieve the murder of an inanimate object?
Well, let me tell you.
At a fundamental level, the attempt to jam Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court closely resembles the way Republicans passed a tax cut last year.
You mean like with a majority vote of the Senate?
Like that?
He says, true, Kavanaugh is getting a hearing, which the tax bill never did, but he's bobbing and weaving his way through, refusing to answer even straightforward questions, displaying an evasiveness utterly at odds with the probity we used to expect of Supreme Court justices.
This is fully delusional crap.
The Ginsburg rule, which was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is that judges who are being asked questions about current cases, future cases, past cases, should not give answers.
So this is just Paul Krugman being an ignoramus.
He says, if Kavanaugh is confirmed, we'll be trying to navigate a turbulent era in American politics with the Supreme Court in which two seats were effectively stolen.
Stolen?
You can't steal a seat.
Again, we're killing documents and stealing seats.
Ah, so that's where we're going.
They're still there.
It says, first, Republicans refused to even give President Barack Obama's nominee a hearing.
Then they had filled two positions with nominees chosen by a president who lost the popular vote and eked out an electoral college win only with aid from a hostile foreign power.
Ah, so that's where we're going.
That Trump is not legitimate because Russia helped him out.
I mean, it's amazing how far the Democrats will go in order to claim that Trump's victory is illegitimate.
You can hate Trump as much as you want.
His victory is legitimate.
That's the way the system works.
He didn't win because of Russian election interference.
That's not why he won the election.
He won the election because nobody voted for Hillary Clinton, and you dolts decided to nominate the least likable human being in the history of planet Earth.
A woman with the charisma of a speed bump and all of the joy of a dying squirrel.
A woman who couldn't even be bothered to get on a plane to Wisconsin because she was too busy hanging out with Lena Dunham, that potato of a human.
But no, it's all about the Russians.
Would a Justice Kavanaugh conduct himself with the caution appropriate to such a fraught situation?
Well, miracles of personal redemption do happen, writes Paul Krugman, but it's very unlikely.
You're right.
Judge Kavanaugh is, when I think of a risk-taker, I think of a Brett Kavanaugh, a Catholic, who coaches his girls' basketball team and has spent 20 years being one of the preeminent lawyers in Washington, D.C.
I think of that guy and I think, yeah, that's a risk-taker right there.
There's a guy who's going to conduct himself as a radical in every possible way.
He says, after all, what do we know about Kavanaugh?
There's a lot we don't, thanks to the unprecedented way Republicans in the Trump administration are stonewalling on thousands of pages of his record.
He has turned over more documents than any candidate in the history of the Supreme Court.
He has turned over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that Democrats don't care about at all.
But Krugman finishes, let me make a last-minute appeal to Republican senators who care about America's future if there are any left.
Don't do this.
A vote for Kavanaugh will be a vote to destroy the legitimacy of one of the last federal institutions standing.
The level of panic is just astonishing.
And then Erwin Chemerinsky, who's a First Amendment attorney, and now I guess he's dean of, is it USC Law School where he is now?
Yeah, I guess he's over at Berkeley Law School.
He used to be at USC.
He has a piece today called, Why Kavanaugh Likened the Supreme Court Justices to Umpires.
That's nonsense and he knows it.
And then he suggested, justices are not umpires at all.
Umpires apply rules and have little leeway in determining how those rules should be interpreted.
The Supreme Court creates the rules and justices have an enormous discretion in how to interpret the law.
By likening himself to an umpire, Kavanaugh is contending his views don't matter at all.
That is false.
So just to square these two editorials, you have Paul Krugman claiming that Kavanaugh is a radical who's going to use the Constitution as a baton.
And you have Erwin Chemerinsky insisting that the Constitution is a living document that can be twisted any which way by anybody who's on the court.
So which is it?
Is Kavanaugh going to kill the vital Constitution, or is Kavanaugh going to enliven it and twist it in a variety of different ways?
The left can't decide, and so they just continue to whine and complain about a done deal.
Okay, this is already a done deal.
We all know that it's a done deal, but that's not going to stop Democrats from complaining incessantly.
Speaking of Democrats complaining incessantly, Twitter has now permanently banned Alex Jones.
That was only a matter of time.
I've suggested that as much as I dislike Alex Jones, and I know, I know, there are a lot of people, you know how much email I get from folks who think that Alex Jones is on the level?
Who think that Alex Jones is actually some sort of genius who has decoded the conspiratorial nature of American life between selling male supplement ads?
In any case, Alex Jones.
Alex Jones!
Okay, he's been banned now by Twitter.
According to CNBC, the ban appears to be related to a heated exchange between Jones and CNN reporter Wednesday, which Jones live-streamed on the Twitter-owned video service Periscope.
Jones ranted at the reporter, as well as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, following back-to-back congressional hearings where Dorsey addressed online election meddling, as well as accusations of political bias and conservative censorship on the platform.
So Twitter finally banned him.
They said, we took this action based on new reports of tweets and videos posted yesterday that violate our abusive behavior policy in addition to the account's past violations.
There are only a couple of serious problems with this one.
One is that Hamas is still on there.
The other is that Louis Farrakhan is still on there.
One of the big problems with all these social media companies that are now banning people is that they still have not set an actual standard for what counts as something that is worthwhile banning.
They still have not clarified any of this stuff, and that continues to be a serious problem for social media companies.
There's a reason that the left is wildly mistrusted by the right when it comes to how they are running these social media companies.
Okay, after this, I'm going to discuss with you just a delicious story about a new socialist face for the Democrats, who it turns out is just a crazy person, but they're still pumping anyway.
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Okay, so, if you want to see the rest of the show, and we're going to get into the mailbag, go over to dailywire.com right now.
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So I have to tell you this spectacular story about a Democratic socialist candidate who is being pumped heavily by the left.
Her name is Julia Salazar.
She's a wild left candidate.
She calls herself a Democratic Socialist, just like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She's running for New York's 18th State Senate District as part of Brooklyn, containing neighborhoods ranging from Williamsburg to Cypress Hills.
She's receiving a lot of attention because she's part of this new wave of democratic socialists and all the rest.
It's just amazing.
Well, it turns out there's only one problem.
Apparently, she's a pathological liar.
So, a couple of things.
She claims that she's Jewish.
She claims she's an immigrant.
She claims she was working class.
None of those three things are true according to members of her own family.
She has no Jewish background.
What makes her have a Jewish background?
Supposedly, her dad once said that maybe he comes from a Murano family.
Her brother says, I don't know what the heck she's talking about.
She's basically making this up so that she can claim she's Jewish, which makes an excuse for her being wildly anti-Israel.
Anti-Israel Jews like to talk about their level of Judaism or their Jewish ethnicity specifically because they don't care about Judaism and it gives them cover to be as anti-Zionist and anti-Israel as they want to be.
Jews who actually care about Judaism are never anti-Israel.
I mean, this is just a rule of thumb.
There's not a single Jew who seriously cares about Judaism who is anti-Israel.
If there are, you're talking about, like, extraordinarily fringe folks.
You're talking about, like, Nitori Carto, which has eight members, and you always see them being photographed by the New York Times as though they're representatives of some sort of major Hasidic sect.
It's like nine guys.
But, in any case, Julia Salazar claims she's Jewish.
She's not.
She claims she's working class, or grew up working class.
She's not.
Her parents were upper-middle class.
She claims that she was brought to the United States as an immigrant.
That's not true.
She's an American citizen and she was born an American citizen.
She claims that she, that her parents were, that she's basically an illegal immigrant.
That's not true either.
That doesn't stop Vox.com, the repository for all stupidity on the internet, from writing a piece called, Julia Salazar, the socialist politician accused of lying about her past, explained.
And then they claim that it's basically a he said, she said situation.
The only problem being that she is a liar and the people who are actually Making the opposite claims, have no interest in lying because they're members of her own family.
So she basically makes all this stuff up.
Democrats continue to push her anyway.
I love this.
Julia was starting at Columbia University and figured New York would be a good place to get in touch with her possibly Jewish roots.
Uh-huh.
She got involved with pro-Israel activism, a cause she would later renounce.
Mm-hmm.
And became a frequent presence at Hillel, the main hub for campus Jewish life.
By early 2010, she said, I was even going to services with friends.
Except for the fact that this is not correct.
Okay, when she was 21, she had the politics and religious beliefs of a conservative Christian.
In a series of tweets preserved by Chen Mazig, Salazar quotes a pastor at Apostles Church in New York.
So she's a really bad Jew.
Okay, so not only that, the tablet has done a bunch of reporting on this, and they point to a mysterious shift in Salah's self-conception occurring in 2013, a few months after a trip to Israel.
By September of 2013, she said she kept kosher at her apartment.
She says that she formally converted to Judaism, except that she doesn't remember when.
She says she took a b'nai mitzvah course that, if completed, would amount to a conversion, which, of course, that's insane.
Okay, just as somebody who knows a little bit about the Judaism, You don't go to a bat mitzvah course and become a Jew.
That's not the way this works.
It's actually a long, arduous process to become Jewish.
Jews actually discourage conversions.
Alex in the back room is like, oh, no.
Dude, don't worry.
I mean, we're keeping you out of a pretty exclusive club of getting murdered on a regular basis for several thousand years.
That's legitimately, like, our interest in discouraging converts.
Like, you really sure you want to be part of this club?
You really sure you want to be part of this club?
It ain't that great.
So, but she is, she claims that she's Jewish anyway.
She doesn't meet any standard for Jewish identity.
She is, she's not Jewish.
It's just, it's amazing stuff, but the left is, it gets even better than that.
There's an article on the tablet.
Suggesting that she was arrested in 2011 on suspicion of criminal use of personal information.
Police reports describe Julia Salazar attempting to impersonate Kai Hernandez, a family friend and then wife of baseball star Keith Hernandez.
So now we actually get into Mets baseball to explain Julia Salazar.
Apparently, Kai Hernandez said she recognized Salazar as a voice on the phone and subsequently filed a police report because what happened is that she was attempting to access the bank account of Kai Hernandez, a family friend and then wife of baseball star Keith Hernandez.
The incident is chronicled in police reports, court records and audio files, all of which have been obtained by tablet.
After learning all this about her, actually, I think she's a pretty good candidate for Congress.
I can't, I can't.
Honestly, I've got nothing.
I got nothing.
So, alrighty.
Let's do some mailbag here, because this week has been too ridiculous.
Justin asks, I just recently started a job as a salesperson at a call center.
My dilemma is that it pays very well for the experience I currently have and where I'm at in college.
However, I do feel my supervisors want me to be as deceptive and dishonest just enough in order to legally get by in order to sell as much as possible.
I don't exactly feel comfortable with this, although I can't find another job that pays even close to it.
Any recommendations on what I should do?
Yeah, don't push stuff that you don't believe in.
I mean, we have a lot of people who want to advertise on the program.
We only have advertisers on the program that I have personally tried or that people on my staff have personally tried because I'm not going to advertise products that I think are BS.
We've turned down products before.
We'll turn down products in the future.
If you feel immoral doing what you're doing, no amount of money is going to make you feel any better about that, so I would suggest that you take a lower-paying job, take a couple of jobs.
Your ethics are worth a little more than that.
Well, the trailer looks just awful.
First of all, I think DC totally screwed up the release of these movies.
They should have done exactly what Marvel did.
They introduced every character individually, and then they had the crossover.
Instead, DC basically took The crossover from the very beginning, right?
They did Justice League from the very, very beginning.
They did Batman vs. Superman from the very beginning.
Batman vs. Superman, by the way, still an underrated movie.
I know.
I know you hate me for saying that.
It is.
The original Batman vs. Superman is not a bad movie.
It's a lot better than a lot of Marvel movies.
Yes, I know.
Stop yelling at me, okay?
I know.
But it is true.
The Aquaman movie looks just terrible.
It looks CGI-centered.
And I don't know how you mess... Honestly, the Aquaman story is pretty good.
But they're going to find a way to screw it up.
DC needs to scrap the whole thing and just start over from the beginning.
Instead, they have failed pretty dramatically to do that.
Daniel says, Well, the correct way to answer this question is, are you an idiot?
Really, because when you interpret anyone, what you should say to him is, I'm saying words to you right now.
How do you interpret those words?
How do you interpret the words that I'm saying to you right now, like right here?
When I ask you that question, how do you interpret it?
How do you know what I'm saying?
And presumably they'll say, well, you're using words, and we talk with each other, and I know what you're saying because I know what words mean.
That's how you interpret law.
It really is not that difficult.
And when you're talking about the interpretation of old texts, then you have to determine what they meant at the time they were said.
Because if I were to... Let's say that I were to utter the sentence, I want an apple.
And a hundred years in the future... Now, I write that sentence down.
And a hundred years in the future, for some odd reason, we have decided to call cows apples.
No one knows why.
That's just what happened.
And now, a hundred years from now, you're reading that sentence.
To determine the actual meaning of the sentence, I want an apple, would you just look to common meaning at the time that it was written?
Or would you say what he really meant was cow?
Because the word apple evolves over time.
That's not the way verbiage works.
Whenever we talk with each other, we are talking about the definitions at the time.
It's true for every conversation.
It's true for every law.
And it's true for constitutional interpretation as well.
They should be allowed to exist in a free market.
or should they be disbanded for hindering the progress of the market?
Thanks.
They should be allowed to exist in a free market.
I am pretty anti-antitrust law.
I think antitrust law is used far too often for companies that don't actually have a monopoly.
A natural monopoly is a monopoly that is not enforced by law.
It's a monopoly in which the government is not cramming down particular rules that favor one company.
Like, you know, the Royal Dutch Shipping Company or something.
It's not that.
It's where you have a company that's just so good at what it does that it's created a monopoly in the market.
Monopolies, natural monopolies, do not tend to last very long because usually there are competitors that find something new or there's a whole new branch of sort of invention that makes this particular company obsolete.
This idea that somebody has a monopoly now, that means they'll have a monopoly in a hundred years, that's just not the way things work and it never has been the way things work when you have a free market economy.
Diana says, what did the Dailyware crew put in your confetti this past week?
You, sir, are lit.
Well...
I think it has less to do with what was in the covfefe.
I think it has more to do with the covfefe infusing all aspects of American politics.
Clearly, everybody has been grinding up the covfefe and snorting it in lines.
Because that's big.
Cory Booker was lit.
Donald Trump was lit.
Kamala Harris was lit.
Things were lit, man.
I mean, it was just a lit week.
John says, Hi Ben, my college roommate was born and raised in China but has become more libertarian as he lived here.
He wanted to ask if communism is the result of actual needs of a working class or simply a result of wanton greed.
I know Marx and Engels were middle or upper class intellectuals, but did they have any connection with poorer people?
Has communism actually ever been effectively used in the utopia described where everyone's needs are met and everyone is truly equal?
Any response is greatly appreciated.
Thanks very much.
Your show is awesome.
Well, there's an ongoing controversy over whether Marxism, the terminology of Marxism applies to areas of Western civilization in which the basis for an economy is actually capitalist.
So the most modern examples being used now are places like Denmark or Sweden or the Nordic countries.
The left used to admire the USSR and Cuba and Venezuela, and then it turns out all those places are absolute crap holes.
So now they've decided that instead it applies to all these Nordic countries that are really capitalist with a bunch of redistributionist superstructure placed on top.
Now, I don't think that's what Marxism describes.
If you read the Communist Manifesto, it talks about full nationalization of resources.
It talks about the workers actually taking over all of the companies.
And that's not what's happening in the vast majority of these Nordic countries.
Even in places with high rates of nationalization, places like Norway, those companies are run in state-sponsored capitalist fashion.
I don't think that's sustainable, and I think that absent Norway's awesome oil wealth, they'd be experiencing significant financial difficulties right now at the moment, because that's exactly what happened to Sweden from basically 1970 to the mid-1990s.
Or mid-2000s, rather.
So, no, I do not think that Marxism works as an economic system.
I think the draw of Marxism, the idea of from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, is a draw toward... It depends who's articulating it.
If it's somebody who's at the upper end of the economic spectrum, then it's somebody who wants to consider themselves charitable without actually giving charity.
And if it's somebody at the bottom of the economic spectrum, then very often it's coming from a place of, I want what that other guy has.
I think Marxism is built on a bunch of lies about the human condition, about human nature.
I think Marxism makes promises about the transformation of human beings into better human beings.
If we just change the free market system in which we live, if we just inhibited the freedom of everybody, then we'd all become better human beings.
I think all of it is nonsense.
I think all of it is immoral.
As far as whether it works, the answer is, it depends on what the goal was.
If the goal was to level all human beings, then sure, it levels all human beings in Venezuela in poverty, except for the ruling class.
If the goal is to transform human nature, giant fail.
If the goal is a prosperous society, giant fail.
Capitalism creates prosperity.
Redistributionism just passes that stuff around and inhibits prosperity.
Alex says, to he who is rumored to be the husband of the hottest doctor.
Indeed.
How do you actually find a partner who is also dating for marriage?
It seems to be difficult in college.
So, here is the answer.
Ask a woman.
Most women are actually interested in dating for marriage.
Most women think that men are not interested in dating for marriage.
I really think that the vast majority of women who say that they're interested in dating for fun, it's because many of them have been told by the feminist movement that their lives will be richer if they date for fun.
Don't lock yourself down.
They've basically been given the same slogan that Men were given back in the 1960s and 70s, go sow your wild oats, be free, do what you want.
I don't think that deep down that's what most women actually want.
I don't think it's hard to find a woman who wants commitment.
I think most women actually want commitment out of men.
In fact, I think it's the single thing that women want most out of men is a level of commitment and a level of stability.
So, Ask.
Like, really, ask.
So, ask a woman on a date, and then on the first date, say, you know what?
I want to tell you, I take dating really seriously.
And when I date, I'm really dating with marriage in mind.
And if that scares you, that's okay.
We don't have to do this.
But, you know, I take this stuff seriously, and I want to have a good time, obviously, while we're dating.
But having a good time is not actually the chief purpose of this.
If I wanted to have a good time, I'd go golfing right now.
But, you know, if you want to do something meaningful here, let's talk about, first of all, the other answer is go to a church.
You want to find somebody who wants to date for marriage, go to a church, go to a synagogue, go someplace where people take commitment seriously, and you will find a bevy of people who are interested in dating for marriage.
Look, it's the norm in the Orthodox community.
In the Orthodox community, there's no such thing as dating for fun, because you can't have any fun until you're married anyway.
So, dating for marriage is the norm.
It used to be the norm in the religious community.
And again, I think that a lot of women might find this mildly refreshing, if not majorly refreshing.
And if they don't find it refreshing, she's not somebody you want to marry anyway.
And why?
John says, hi, Thanos.
Indeed.
What one modern political thinker today deserves far more serious attention than they currently receive and why?
Well, I think Thomas Sowell is the best political thinker on the scene.
People have asked me before if I could appoint an ideal president, who would it be?
And I've always said Thomas Sowell.
I think he is terrific.
I think of people who are of younger age, Matthew Continetti does a lot of great writing.
I think that David French over at National Review does a lot of really interesting writing.
Orrin Cass, who's over at, I believe he's at, which institute is he at?
Manhattan, thank you.
He does a lot of really interesting writing.
There are a bunch of folks.
Jonathan Haidt does a lot of interesting writing.
I've recommended a lot of these folks' books on the program before, and I think that we'll have to put up—we've been promising for a while that we'll put up a reading list on the website.
We'll actually have to do that with all of the recommendations, because it's legitimately hundreds of books at this point.
Travis.
Hi, Ben.
You and the rest of the Four Horsemen, Clavin, Knowles, and Walsh, keep me going through the work week.
With all the chaos going on with the Senate hearing on Kavanaugh, what are your thoughts on the movement in some circles of the conservative movement to repeal the 17th Amendment?
Do you think it would fix a lot of the grandstanding we see now because the Senators would be representing the state and not their constituents?
Keep up the great work.
Listen, I think that the idea of popularly elected senators is really idiotic.
I think the goal of the Senate, it's disproportionate in terms of representation, specifically because the states are supposed to be represented, not just the people of the states.
Now you have the House basically representing the same constituency as the Senate, which defeats the purpose of having a Senate in the first place.
I don't think that there's a reason why senators should be voted by the same people who vote the members of the House of Representatives.
Would it solve all of our problems?
Of course it wouldn't solve all of our problems because you have pandering state politicians who want to spend a lot of money too.
But would it be better than the current system?
Yeah, I think so.
Populism is a result in some places of not having checks and balances in the nature of the constituencies for particular politicians.
Man, there are a couple of books that come to mind immediately.
They're actually not by Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris.
about the philosophical and logical arguments for God's existence.
I've purchased his book and look forward to reading it.
I was wondering if you had any recommendations for good books in a similar vein from the atheist point of view to provide some balance to my reading.
Man, there are a couple of books that come to mind immediately.
They're actually not by Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris.
There's one book, I wish I could remember the name of this book.
It's basically trying to debunk every argument for God's existence.
And they go through the ontological argument and various other arguments that have been traditionally used.
I remember reading it and finding it interesting, but not convincing.
Honestly, I'll have to get back to you on that one, but I do have like a shelf full of atheist books that make exactly these arguments over and over again.
And there are some pretty well-written ones.
I remember this one was not in circulation a lot.
I'll really have to look it up.
I'm sorry, I don't have it at the tip of my tongue.
Let's see.
Final one.
Steven says, if you could get in a time machine and clerk for any U.S.
Supreme Court justice, who would you pick?
I would go clerk for Chief Justice John Marshall and I'd reverse Marbury versus Madison.
I'd sneak in a reversal of Marbury versus Madison, and also then I would work to reverse McCullough versus Maryland.
There are a couple of bad early decided cases.
Or, if you're gonna do that, if you're gonna be like the resistance inside the Supreme Court, then I suppose that you would go back and clerk for Justice Taney, and then somehow prevent him from writing Dred Scott.
You'd start there.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things I like.
President Trump couldn't help himself this week.
You knew it was coming.
Today, he finally decided to tweet out about Nike, which is exactly what Nike wanted, right?
Nike wanted this tweet.
So he tweeted out, what was Nike thinking?
What they were thinking, pretty much, is that you would tweet out about it.
I mean, that's really what Nike was thinking when they decided to feature Colin Kaepernick, a loser backup quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, who's not worked in a couple of years, but who knelt for the national anthem, thereby making him a national hero worth millions of dollars.
They were thinking that you would tweet about it, and then everybody who hates Trump would go out and buy Nike sneakers, thereby demonstrating once again that capitalism always wins.
But it is worth noting here that Nike's ratings have indeed plummeted.
They've been hit with sort of really bad poll numbers.
There was a report from Morning Consult, they suffered a 34 point drop in favorability overall, including dips in nearly every single demographic since announcing the Kaepernick ad campaign.
Their favorability dropped to, they were at 69%, a plus 69% favorable impression.
It has now declined 34 points to plus 35 favorable.
Among younger generations, Nike users, African-Americans, and other key demographics, Nike's favorability declined rather than improved.
Before the announcement, 49% of Americans said they were absolutely certain or very likely to buy Nike products.
That figure is down to 39% for now.
So that is a pretty astonishing drop.
And again, good evidence that when you alienate a large portion of the American population, it's a bad idea.
All of that was dependent on the president not getting involved.
Now he's gotten involved, which means that a bunch of people are going to rally to Nike's support again.
I want to correct something I said yesterday.
So yesterday I said that kneeling for the national anthem meant you didn't want to have a conversation.
I think that was true for Kaepernick.
I don't think Kaepernick wanted to have a conversation.
He would not hold the conversation.
I think Kaepernick is the worst example of this group of folks.
I think there were some members of the NFL who knelt, usually in the aftermath of the Kaepernick stuff, who then went and held meetings with various legislators.
And tried to have conversations.
I would ask that if Nike wanted to feature somebody who's trying to make a positive difference, why not feature those people?
And the answer is because it's all virtue signaling.
So I just wanted to correct that impression.
There are some people who I, who knelt, who I think probably want to have good conversations, but it's not Colin Kaepernick.
Okay, other things that I like.
So Jeffrey Owens was an actor on The Cosby Show, and you would recognize his face if you saw it.
He was essentially shamed because there was a story in some of the tabloids and then picked up by some major media outlets.
That showed that he was working as a cashier at a New Jersey Trader Joe's.
It appeared in the Daily Mail.
And the stupidity of featuring this, as though there's some sort of shame to working at a Trader Joe's in order to make ends meet because he used to be a famous actor.
It's just gross, obviously.
It's just a gross thing.
But the impact of this story is that now the guy's got a job again.
So he's about to have a 10-episode arc on a Tyler Perry show.
He's about to start getting acting jobs again.
So I'm glad to see that people resonated to Jeffrey Owens' support.
Everybody basically came out and said, this is absurd.
Anybody who is working a job ought to be praised for working that job.
There's no shame to working at a Trader Joe's just because you used to be a famous actor.
The other night, I took my daughter to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl with John Williams conducting, and it was really a lot of fun.
And they showed a clip from E.T.
with the orchestra playing in the background.
And the best thing in E.T.
is the older brother.
I can't remember the name of the guy who plays the older brother in E.T.
He's really terrific.
He never did another acting job again.
That was his last acting job.
He decided he didn't want to do it.
Last check, I think he was working as a mailman.
He has like a nice family somewhere out in the boonies and he works as a mailman.
Is there anything wrong with that?
I think not.
I think there's something really nice about that.
I think the idea that acting is only worthwhile if you never have to work at Trader Joe's and we have to shame people for working at Trader Joe's is gross.
Good for Hollywood for making room for Jeffrey Owens again on the basis of all of this.
So that's a thing that I like today.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate and then we'll get out of here for the weekend.
So today's thing I hate, this is California, which is just, this is why if you're a leftist you really should believe in federalism, because federalism allows you to try out the dumbest ideas possible.
And California is the place where we do all of this.
According to NBC News, California on August 30th voted to force publicly traded companies based in California to have at least one woman on their board by 2019.
And depending on the size of the company, one to three women by 2021.
California Senate Bill 826 is sponsored by California State Senator Hannah Beth Jackson, Democrat, now heads to Governor Jerry Brown's desk.
If it becomes law, this will be the first example of a state-mandated gender quota of its kind in the U.S.
It's just idiotic in every possible way.
First of all, you're going to have the government actually setting up quotas?
This seems to me fully unconstitutional.
It's a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
The notion that you are going to force companies to hire somebody specifically on the basis of gender is insane.
Because if you did this in reverse, you said, hey, it's an all-female company.
We need at least one male on that board.
People would say, well, what are you talking about?
Or it's a black company, right?
It's a company that has an all-black board.
You say, you know what?
We need a white person on that board.
Or why not have a transgender person on it?
You can fulfill all of the quotas at once.
You can have a black transgender person.
You can have Rachel Dolezal on that board.
And everything will be great.
Then you've fulfilled all of the various quotas all at once.
What does this have to do with making business better?
The answer is nothing, because here's the reality.
If I have a publicly traded company, and I have five members of the board, and they tell me I need to bring a woman onto the board, you know what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna bring on a woman who's either gonna vote like everybody else on the board, or I'm gonna go outnumber the woman with a bunch of other people who agree with me.
This doesn't actually have any impact on how the company is run, in other words.
There are already laws that prevent gender discrimination in hiring and firing.
The notion that you have to go out of your way to stack the boards with particular affirmative action candidates is really bad for business.
And not only that, it probably It probably encourages companies not to go public in the first place or relocate out of state.
I mean, listen, we have a board at our company and we're not a publicly traded company.
We're a private company.
If ever we decided to go public, if this is the law in the state of California, we will legitimately move the company out of state or at least we'd seriously consider it because the more restrictions you put on publicly traded companies in your state, the more they're going to look other places.
We don't have to be located here.
We can move very easily.
So, California, once again, virtue signaling instead of thinking about all of this stuff in a serious fashion.
And again, the number of women who are on corporate boards is already increasing because there are lots of qualified women to be on boards.
It's just, it's the height of stupidity, but again, California is a place that elected Kamala Harris senator.
So, what can you say for us out here?
Alrighty, we will be back here next week.
Now remember, I'm not going to be back here Monday or Tuesday because it is Rosh Hashanah.
So I'm going to be celebrating my new year and enjoying my time off, but I will be back here Wednesday, which means I am sure that all things will happen Monday and Tuesday and I'll have a lot to talk about.
I will see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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