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Sept. 14, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:35
The Dirtiest Trick In The Book | Ep. 622
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Democrats pull a horrendous last-minute dirty trick on Brett Kavanaugh.
We review the results of last night's primary elections in New York, and we'll check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, we have a lot to get to today.
A lot of breaking news happening, and we will break down everything that happened in New York last night.
But first, let's talk about your safety and security.
I am somebody obsessed with safety and security, and that is why I use Ring.com at my home.
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It turns out that she did not know Justin when he was younger.
And in fact, Justin might have just been a creepy guy trying to break in.
We don't know anything about Justin other than it's a good thing this lady had ring because if she hadn't, then she might have opened that front door and things could have gone very, very differently.
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All right, so the breaking news today is that Paul Manafort has apparently cut a deal with the federal government, with the Mueller investigation.
We don't know what that deal encompasses.
We know that Paul Manafort had already been convicted on several felony counts related to bank and tax fraud charges.
And then he was to move on to a second trial, and he pled guilty in that trial to avoid a longer sentence, apparently.
According to the New York Times, the negotiations over a plea deal related to a separate set of seven charges encompassing conspiracy, obstruction of justice, money laundering, false statements and violations of a lobbying disclosure law.
It's not clear exactly what Manafort might plead guilty to.
Apparently, he's pleading guilty to a bunch of charges having to do with failing to register as a foreign agent of the Ukrainian government back when a schmuck named Yanukovych was running the country.
In any case, Manafort's trial on the second set of charges was scheduled to get underway on Monday, but now he has pled guilty.
He's going to turn over, apparently, an enormous amount of property to the federal government.
What is more important, because who cares about Paul Manafort?
What's more important here is that Paul Manafort is apparently working under a cooperation agreement With the Mueller investigation, which means that presumably he is flipping maybe on President Trump.
And this is the part where it starts to get real dicey for the Trump administration because nobody actually knows what Manafort knows.
Nobody knows exactly what Manafort was doing.
Now again, there's no evidence that's actually been shown that Manafort was actively cooperating with the Russian government on behalf of Trump.
Trump could still say, listen, I just hired this guy Manafort because this guy Manafort has long-standing high-level RNC ties going back legitimately years.
I mean, ties to top members of RNC Finance, ties to top political members of the RNC going back election cycles.
I mean, several election cycles.
And Trump could just say, listen, I was looking for a campaign manager.
There wasn't a professional available.
The RNC suggested that I pick up Manafort because they knew him.
I picked him up.
And whatever he did on the side, that's his business.
But that doesn't mean that I personally knew anything.
The problem is that Trump has made claims that the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia.
If it turns out that Manafort, as his campaign manager, Was messing about with Russia, then that could lead to some pretty severe consequences.
According to ABC, the deal is expected to be announced in court Friday.
It remains unclear whether Manafort has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors or is simply conceding to a guilty plea.
It now appears that he is indeed cooperating with prosecutors.
We don't actually know.
Again, what's the information that he's going to turn over to prosecutors?
What exactly are they getting in return for a reduced sentence of some sort?
We don't know the answer to that, and we're gonna have to wait for the answer to that, but it's not good news for President Trump, obviously.
President Trump, you remember, was tweeting incessantly after the Paul Manafort convictions a couple of weeks ago, which came out on the same day that Michael Cohen pled guilty and said that he was cooperating with federal prosecutors.
You recall that President Trump tweeted out how much he loved Manafort for not flipping on him.
Now it's getting real ugly.
Now it's really ugly.
So Manafort has indeed agreed to cooperate with the special counsel in the Russia probe.
On July 31st, Manafort's attorney had told CBS there was no chance his client would cooperate with the special counsel to avoid his first trial, but now he is apparently going to have to cooperate to avoid the second trial.
This could be very ugly for the Trump campaign, the Trump administration.
We're going to have to see what this actually means.
Everybody's jumping to the conclusion that this is the end of Trump.
You know, again, unless there is something deeply, unless there is something, I think, deeply indicting and convicting of President Trump himself, it's going to be very difficult to make the claim that President Trump was personally approving any sort of Putin manipulation of the election.
But we'll have to see the evidence that Manafort provides, because after all, Could be.
And Manafort, again, does have an incentive, I would say, to spill as much of his guts as he possibly can on the president or to theoretically make things up in order to avoid the consequences of his own corruption apparently going back years.
But the fact that Manafort is flipping as bad news for President Trump.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are trying to play every dirty trick they can with regard to Brett Kavanaugh.
Yesterday saw the dirtiest trick of all.
This was Dianne Feinstein, who's the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
She referred information involving Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, to federal investigators on Thursday, but the senator declined to make public what exactly the matter involved.
Two officials familiar with the matter say the incident involved possible sexual misconduct between Judge Kavanaugh and a woman when they were both in high school.
So now we're going to go back 35 years to try and find something that Brett Kavanaugh allegedly did wrong.
Hey, Dianne Feinstein's announcement yesterday was just perverse because here's what she announced.
Quote, I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further.
And I have honored that decision.
I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.
So in other words, somebody came with information.
I'm not going to tell you what the information is.
I'm not going to tell you where it came from.
I've referred it to federal authorities.
So it could be anything.
It could be the worst thing you could possibly imagine, or it could be that Brett Kavanaugh was mean to someone back in high school.
But I'm not going to say so.
And this is where you start to look at this stuff and say, yeah, this is pretty dicey stuff.
If Dianne Feinstein really knew months ago that Brett Kavanaugh had raped somebody, wouldn't she have been under an obligation to tell federal law enforcement then?
Why wait until a week or two before the confirmation vote on Brett Kavanaugh except to scuttle the boat simply out of this kind of dirty tricks playbook?
This is really, really dirty stuff.
Ronan Farrow has a piece over at The New Yorker in which he's essentially accusing Brett Kavanaugh of something more dire, or at least he's substantiating the allegation.
Here's what Ronan Farrow is writing, as well as Jane Mayer, over at The New Yorker.
The woman who was asked not to be identified first approached Democratic lawmakers in July, shortly after Trump nominated Kavanaugh.
So, in other words, Democrats knew about this for months, because it is now September.
Okay, so they knew about it in July, August, and September.
They did nothing about it.
They didn't refer it to the FBI.
They waited until now to take an allegation that Kavanaugh has apparently completely denied.
and throw that into the public square as sort of a red meat thing to stop Brett Kavanaugh's nomination.
Democratic lawmakers didn't do anything about it.
The allegation dates back to the early 1980s, when Kavanaugh was a high school student at Georgetown Prep School in Bethesda, Maryland, and the woman attended a nearby high school.
In the letter, the woman alleged that during an encounter at a party, Kavanaugh held her down and that he attempted to force himself on her.
She claimed in the letter that Kavanaugh and a classmate of his, both of whom had been drinking, turned up music that was playing in the room to conceal the sound of her protests and that Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand.
She was able to free herself.
Although the alleged incident took place decades ago and the three individuals involved were minors, the woman said the memory had been a source of ongoing distress for her and that she had sought psychological treatment as a result.
In a statement, Kavanaugh said, quote, I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation.
I did not do this back in high school or at any time.
So, how exactly is Dianne Feinstein bringing this up now?
I have no recollection of that.
And the woman's inclined to request for an interview.
So how exactly is Dianne Feinstein bringing this up now?
Again, with no evidence other than this woman's allegation, which has been denied by everyone else who was there.
Now, maybe she's telling the truth.
Maybe she is.
But wouldn't it have behooved Dianne Feinstein to initiate that investigation, say, in July, when she first received the information?
I mean, this is dirty tricks at its very finest.
It's dirty tricks all the way down.
And this is not the last time.
This is not the most...
The only time the Democrats have tried this routine.
They tried the same routine with Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas' hearing, bringing up allegations that were thoroughly non-credible for a variety of reasons about Clarence Thomas supposedly sexually harassing Anita Hill, talking and making jokes about pubic hairs on Coke cans and such.
And this was supposed to sink Clarence Thomas.
They're trying the same thing here.
Republicans should ram through Brett Kavanaugh's nomination right now.
The FBI has already declined to investigate it.
They announced that yesterday.
They have referred it to the White House for a background check.
But that's all, because there's no further evidence that this actually happened.
Kavanaugh denies the allegations, and the Democrats are going to have to do better than that.
Instead, they're smearing Brett Kavanaugh with an allegation decades old.
Decades old, going back to when he was 17 years old when he was a minor.
And we are supposed to pretend that this is a legitimate effort to keep, what, a serial rapist off the Supreme Court?
That's what Democrats are really doing here?
This is the dirtiest of the dirty stuff.
It's just, it's just gross.
It's the same thing as when Harry Reid suggested that Mitt Romney had not paid his taxes.
He just went out there and said it.
And then it turned out that Mitt Romney had in fact paid his taxes.
But Harry Reid said, you know what?
We got what we needed to get done done.
He wasn't elected president of the United States.
This is gross stuff.
You wonder why people think politics is a dirty, disgusting business?
This is why people think politics is a dirty and disgusting business.
Because folks on every side of the aisle are pretty much willing to do anything to take down political opponents.
And listen, I'm on the right.
I don't think that my side is immune to this.
I don't think I'm immune to this.
But I think that this is a pretty egregious example.
I mean, over the last couple of weeks, when we've seen Cory Booker I'm doing this routine where he is Spartacus by revealing documents that were already revealed.
Or when you saw Kamala Harris implying that Brett Kavanaugh had been corruptly discussing the Mueller investigation with members of President Trump's firm, with no evidence of that whatsoever.
When you had Sheldon Whitehouse proclaiming that he didn't feel subject to the law because Merrick Garland should be on the Supreme Court.
And now when you have Dianne Feinstein dumping into the public record Unsourced allegations of an alleged sexual assault that took place 35 years ago in order to stop Brett Kavanaugh's ascension to the Supreme Court.
Really, really gross stuff.
And that's not the only dirty allegation being put out today by Democrats in an attempt to smear Republicans.
We'll get to another one, this one courtesy of the New York Times, in just a second.
But first, we're talking about a lot of dirty stuff.
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So that was not the only dirty attempt by Democrats, not just the Brett Kavanaugh thing.
The White House, by the way, has responded Immediately to this, White House spokeswoman Kerry Kupec said, throughout his confirmation process, Judge Kavanaugh has had 65 meetings with senators, including Senator Feinstein, sat through over 30 hours of testimony, addressed over 2,000 questions in a public setting, and additional questions in a confidential setting.
Not until the eve of his confirmation has Senator Feinstein or anyone raised the specter of new information about him.
Senator Schumer promised to oppose Judge Kavanaugh's nomination with everything I have.
It appears he is delivering this 11th hour attempt to delay the confirmation.
So just really gross stuff.
That's not the only gross allegation today.
There's a headline at the New York Times today going after Nikki Haley, who's the single most popular Republican in the country.
And as I said before on this show, my spirit animal, here is the headline from the New York Times.
State Department spent $52,701 on curtains for Nikki Haley's residence.
So this is an attempt to paint Nikki Haley as a sort of Scott Pruitt, casually corrupt official who's spending enormous quantities of taxpayer cash in order to pad her residence.
Here's the piece from the New York Times.
You stop me when you think you hear the problem with this New York Times piece.
The State Department Spent $52,701 last year buying customized and mechanized curtains for the picture windows in Nikki Haley's official residence as ambassador to the UN, just as the department was undergoing deep budget cuts and had frozen hiring.
The residence in a new building on First Avenue has spectacular views, and Ms.
Haley is the first ambassador to live in it.
For decades, her predecessors lived in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
But after the hotel was purchased by a Chinese insurance company with a murky ownership structure, the State Department decided in 2016 to find a new home for its top New York diplomat because of security concerns.
The government leased the apartment just blocks from the delegation's offices with an option to buy, according to Patrick Kennedy, the top management official at the State Department during the Obama administration.
The full-floor penthouse with handsome hardwood floors covering large open spaces stretching nearly 6,000 square feet was listed at $58,000 per month.
A spokesman for Ms.
Haley said plans to buy the curtains were made in 2016 during the Obama administration.
Ms.
Haley had no say in the purchase, he said.
So the headline is, Nikki Haley is responsible for spending 53 grand on curtains.
And then buried in paragraph four of this piece is the actual story, which is that the Obama administration outfitted the place for 58 grand on curtains because they were fully expecting the UN ambassador to be a Democrat.
The Obama administration was expecting the next person to occupy that penthouse to be a Democrat.
And so they decided to spend inordinate quantities of cash on curtains.
But they're trying to pin it on Nikki Haley anyway.
So instead, it's going to be that Nikki Haley is somehow responsible for all of this.
Really a tremendous smear, a really massive smear from the New York Times.
Again, in an attempt to get top Republican officials.
And then you wonder why folks don't actually trust the media.
Well, meanwhile, there were a series of elections in New York last night, and there's a bizarre split that happened in New York last night.
There were a bunch of very, very far-left candidates who won in sort of local races, the most prominent of whom is Julia Salazar, a 27-year-old Democratic Socialist.
Who is plagued by negative news coverage in the final weeks of her insurgent campaign against incumbent New York State Senator Martin Dillon for making misleading statements about her background.
She had claimed that she was the child of Colombian Jewish immigrants.
That she had immigrated, she was an illegal immigrant who was poor from Colombia and Jewish.
Not a single element of that is true.
Okay, she's not from Colombia.
She's an American citizen.
Her parents are American citizens.
She was not poor.
She grew up middle class to upper middle class.
She is not Jewish.
All of this was false.
So she's basically a sociopath, just essentially lying about key elements of her background.
That didn't stop people in this New York district from voting for her for the New York State Senate because this is a small district in the middle of North Brooklyn.
And as we know, Brooklyn is a very, very left area.
Voters in North Brooklyn, this is according to the Huffington Post, which loves Salazar.
Voters in North Brooklyn on Thursday found her preferable to Dylan's close ties to the real estate lobby, as Salazar triumphed in the Democratic primary for the New York State Senate's 18th district seat.
The voters may also have been sending a message of disgust with corruption scandals that have rocked the state Senate.
Susan Kang, a leader of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Salazar, and she's an active dues-paying member of the organization.
She said, Julia Salazar's victory is a testament to how much her policy platform resonated with the people of North Brooklyn, some of the fastest gentrifying communities in New York City.
Her bold platform of fighting for tenants' rights, immigrants, and transit riders matters more than this expensive smear campaign against her.
And that shows how important the issues really are.
So she again implied that she was an immigrant.
She is not.
That she was poor.
She is not.
That she said she graduated from Columbia University.
She does not have a degree from Columbia University.
She said that she was raised in a Jewish faith.
That is untrue.
And I love the New York, the Huffington Post coverage.
Well, these fibs made headlines.
They're just fibs.
They're just fibs.
Not real lies about her background.
They are fibs.
Salazar's policy platform earned her the enthusiastic grassroots support of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Basically, you're talking about one area of New York that is far-left socialist and keeps electing similar people from Alexandria, Ocasio-Cortez.
To Cynthia Nixon.
But here's where things get weird.
That same district last night that voted for Julia Salazar voted basically 2 to 1 for Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
So, Cynthia Nixon, who was running to the far left, she put out a series of tweets this morning talking about how she was very disappointed that so many people showed up and turned out to vote for Andrew Cuomo, which is a weird thing for a democratic socialist to say, supposedly a power to the people person.
She also talked about how true priorities like banning plastic bags were not going to be taken care of by Andrew Cuomo.
Can't imagine why she lost.
In any case, Cynthia Nixon, who did win, by the way, one third of the vote, Being her only qualification for office, being extraordinarily radical on politics, here's what she had to say in the aftermath of her defeat.
It is about offering a vision of the way things could work if only we have the leadership and the political courage to make it a reality.
This race for the Democratic nomination may be over, but the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is just beginning.
OK, now here's the part that is actually kind of true about what she's saying.
And here is where Republicans run into a bit of a pickle.
Republicans are betting on Democratic radicalism to save them.
They're betting on the fact that the Democrats have moved very, very far to the left to save them in general elections like 2020.
Because President Trump's approval ratings are low, because President Trump will be hit with another slew of negative headlines regarding Paul Manafort, for example.
And so the feeling is the only way that President Trump cruises to victory in 2020 is because the Democrats are just bad at this.
The Democrats are likely to nominate somebody who's a far left radical who's easy to pillory.
I'm not so sure that's true because where Cynthia Nixon is correct is that her agenda is in fact taking over the Democratic Party, the mainstream Democratic Party.
People on the right are counting on the Julia Salazars and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world to take over the party.
They're counting on people who are overtly nuts to take over the root of the Democratic Party.
And to a certain extent, that's worked on the grassroots level.
But I think that as we rise in Democratic politics, they're actually winnowing out the most ridiculous candidates.
So I'm a little bit concerned about the fact that Andrew Cuomo defeated Cynthia Nixon.
I was hoping Cynthia Nixon would win because then we'd actually have the specter of Cynthia Nixon as New York governor.
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Okay, so...
As I say, the problem for the Democrats is the possibility of unpalatable faces repeating a Democrat socialist platform.
People like Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and yes, Cynthia Nixon.
But instead, what has happened is mainstream members of the Democratic Party have simply moved to the left to co-opt all of the ideas of the hardcore left Democratic Party.
When Cynthia Nixon says there's a war inside the Democratic Party, the war is over and the mainstream left lost.
The mainstream liberals lost.
The people who are now in full control of the Democratic Party are in fact Democratic Socialists who are basically campaigning that way.
Even people like Elizabeth Warren who says she's pro-capitalism.
Yesterday she came out and she said we should break up Amazon and we should break up JP Morgan.
I'm not sure under what guise you would claim that Amazon is a monopoly that needs to be broken up, but all of this is sort of the populist demagogic rhetoric you hear on a regular basis from democratic socialists all across the country.
And it's folks like Beto O'Rourke, who is beloved by the Democratic base, where he's spending his time campaigning in Washington, D.C.
and New York.
He is running very close to Ted Cruz in Texas, which is an insane, insane thing.
Texas is a very, very red state.
If Beto O'Rourke were to pull out that race, there's no question he'd immediately turn around and run for president of the United States.
Here is Beto O'Rourke trying to explain on CBS, because this is what he does.
He gets all the late night slots.
Beto O'Rourke explains that DREAMers should be freed from deportation by simply granting them full amnesty and citizenship.
We don't need walls.
We can have smart security solutions, and we can free DREAMers from the fear of deportation by making them U.S.
citizens today, so they can contribute to their maximum capacity, to their full potential.
Okay, so Beto O'Rourke again adopting some of the most radical elements of the far-left platform.
He continued by saying that he would not actually trade a wall for the DREAM Act.
First of all, again, let me demonstrate how biased the left media is.
When's the last time Ted Cruz was on The Late Show?
The answer is never.
And they won't even have, apparently, people like Norm MacDonald on the late show, because Norm MacDonald is too politically incorrect.
But Beto O'Rourke, who is going to lose his race to Ted Cruz in all likelihood, that's a guy who they'll have on the late show.
Any Democrat who has higher aspirations will get a slot on the late show.
But the point here is a little bit broader, which is that Beto O'Rourke and mainstream Democrats, they have embraced the radical platform of people like Julia Salazar and Cynthia Nixon, but they put a more palatable face on it.
Beto O'Rourke is better at this.
Then Julia Salazar.
Nobody's talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president.
Even if she ran for Senate and won, nobody would be talking about her for that.
But Beto O'Rourke is a pretty smooth, polished politician.
And you can see that he's effective in pushing exactly the same message.
And again, you can see the radicalism of the Democratic Party at work among mainstream political figures who feel the need to adopt that platform.
Chelsea Clinton is doing the same thing.
So Chelsea Clinton is the child of the guy who said safe, legal, and rare should be the standard with regard to abortion.
Here she was yesterday saying it would be unchristian, unchristian to go back to a time when abortion was illegal.
You know, we just can't go back to that.
Like, that's unconscionable to me.
And also, and I'm sure that this will unleash another wave of hate in my direction, but as a deeply religious person, it's also unchristian.
Oh, it's unchristian now.
It's unchristian to prevent the abortion of the unborn.
It's unchristian.
Wow.
I mean, pretty amazing stuff there.
But again, the point here is the broader point.
What's happening is that the Democratic Socialist platform is now rising up in the Democratic Party among more palatable figures, including folks like Andrew Cuomo.
The reason that Andrew Cuomo beat Cynthia Nixon is because the difference between Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon was simply not broad enough to justify voting for an actress from Sex and the City over a sitting governor of the state of New York with a long family history in New York politics.
When that happens, then Republicans really should be worried.
Republicans should be worried that Democrats will pick somebody who's a little bit more publicly palatable, but is mimicking exactly the same messages of Bernie Sanders.
It won't be a crazy old loon bag from Vermont running this time.
It'll be somebody who's more attractive.
It'll be somebody who's better at this.
It'll be somebody who is capable of winning a national election on a far-left platform.
Now, there is some hope left, okay?
And the hope stands in the fact that a lot of the primary voters On both sides are more motivated by anger and revenge than they are by anything remotely approaching typical politics.
And this is why Michael Avenatti, I think, still provides an outsized threat on the left.
I think that basically the 2020 nomination, the Democratic Party, at this point, if you had to give odds, you'd say Elizabeth Warren is the odds-on favorite.
Elizabeth Warren is dangerous because she is picking up all of the cues from the hard left.
Elizabeth Warren used to be kind of moderate.
Back in the day, she wrote books about the two parent and the two the two-income trap, and we need to build the middle class by removing some regulation, and we need to restructure our kind of social mores to benefit marriage.
Elizabeth Warren was not a hardcore radical.
She's become a hardcore radical specifically because she knows that that is what plays with the Democratic base.
And while she is a personally unappealing candidate in some ways, she can answer the one question that probably lost Hillary Clinton the election.
Why do you want to be president?
Hillary lost in 2016 because everybody knew the answer was she just wanted it because she felt she was owed it.
Elizabeth Warren can do the populist routine far better than Hillary Clinton can.
You can see the media already starting to rally behind Elizabeth Warren.
The Harvard Law professor against the Rube from Queens.
That's the way they're going to play this thing.
So she's still the frontrunner.
And then you've got the sort of insurgent candidacy of probably Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate from California, who's a senator out here.
She's a terrible senator.
She was a terrible attorney general.
But she is black and she is female and she is radical.
She checks intersectionality boxes for a lot of folks on the left.
She can theoretically draw out the minority base in a way Elizabeth Warren may not be able to.
And she is good at playing the prosecutor.
And then you have the real dark horse of the race.
And that dark horse of the race would be Michael Avenatti.
So Michael Avenatti This is what Republicans are banking on, is that the Democratic base will be driven so nuts by Trump, they just decide to go get the angriest guy on television.
And so while the rest of the country and the elites particularly are laughing at Michael Avenatti's pretensions to glory, they also laughed at Donald Trump's pretensions to glory all the way until he was president of the United States.
Michael Avenatti was on Tucker Carlson last night.
And I have to say, you know, Tucker, I thought, did a pretty funny job handling it.
It was clearly planned that this thing was going to be just a Rock'em, sock'em robots, punching match between Tucker Carlson and Michael Avenatti.
It benefits Avenatti.
It's good for Avenatti.
It's good for Tucker, too, because the ratings are good, and because Tucker is good with interviews.
But Avenatti clearly likes these sorts of situations.
He goes into the lion's den, and that's going to be his pitch.
His pitch is going to be, I'm the guy who punches hardest.
And you can see exactly how this worked last night.
So Tucker benefited from the fact that he was smacking around Avenatti.
Avenatti benefited from the fact he was punching right back at Tucker.
This sort of oppositional politics is Republicans' best hope for somebody like Avenatti to get the nomination.
So, Tucker was trolling Avenatti with all sorts of hilarious chyrons last night.
The chyron writer over at Fox News gets a raise.
The chyron said things like, Avenatti, of course, is the lawyer for Stormy Daniels.
And Tucker takes on creepy porn lawyer.
And it was, you know, pretty glorious chyrons there from Tucker Carlson.
Avenatti did get into it with Carlson for calling him a creepy porn lawyer.
He says, why don't you call Trump the creepy porn president?
This is the kind of thing where Avenatti earns points with the base, right?
He's going to try and run a hard left, I fight President Trump campaign.
And theoretically, he could do more damage than I think people will give him credit for.
Why is it that you don't call Donald Trump the creepy porn president?
He's the one that had sex with a four-month-old son at home with my client without a condom.
But you don't want to acknowledge that.
You don't want to acknowledge that.
Acknowledge it.
Do you believe that he had sex with my client?
Yes, I do.
I've said that on the air multiple times.
So he's lied repeatedly to the American people and you're okay with that?
You think it's okay if the president lies to the American people?
Okay, so it went like this for Avenatti.
Avenatti comes out of this looking good for his base.
Tucker comes out of this looking good for his base.
I will say the funniest moment of this interview is when Avenatti asked Tucker if he watched porn.
And Tucker got off a pretty good line here.
If you've got that big a problem with porn, do you have that big a problem with porn?
I'm not making fun of porn!
When's the last time you saw porn?
Oh, you busted me.
Actually, I meant humiliation porn.
That's why I watch you on CNN.
No, but when's the last time you viewed porn?
Pretty good line there from Tucker.
But again, this sort of oppositional... It's funny.
Everybody in the elites thinks people are watching the Elizabeth Warren of it all, thinks they're watching the Kamala Harris of it all.
More people will watch the clips of Tucker versus Avenatti than will see that Elizabeth Warren has ever said anything about antitrust.
This is the best hope for Republicans.
The best hope for Republicans is that they control the Democrats into nominating somebody like a Michael Avenatti.
The worst nightmare for Republicans is that somebody who's a credible candidate comes along Who's even remotely likable and hijacks Cynthia Nixon's platform and uses that all the way to the presidency.
That is the worst nightmare for Republicans and they should take that under advisement.
We shouldn't be quite so sanguine about the possibility that the Democratic move to the left is inevitably going to lead to failure on their part.
Okay, we're gonna get to the mailbag in just a second, but first I want to talk to you about your Second Amendment rights.
Now, as you know, I'm sure that you know I'm a proud member of the USCCA, right?
I'm a big Second Amendment supporter.
They're on a mission to protect responsibly armed Americans like you and me.
And right now, they're smack dab in the middle of one of their biggest gun giveaways ever.
They want to give you 10 free chances to win the gun of your dreams.
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Again, it's that easy.
Just get your phone out right now and text WIN, that's W-I-N, to 87222.
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It's way too easy and way too valuable to pass up.
And again, they want law-abiding citizens to be armed because that's the basis of the Second Amendment and the basis of our freedom.
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Pretty awesome.
We'll get to the mailbags, I say, in just a second.
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All righty.
So, you know what?
Let's get to some mailbag here.
So, let's jump right in.
Jackson says, hey, Ben, I know there is a huge hurricane coming for me, and I still say, why should the government be compelled to help me during the storm?
Well, I mean, the answer is that the government should, you know, putting yourself in a bad situation doesn't mean that the government isn't compelled to try to help you out, right?
I mean, if you walk through a heavily crime-ridden neighborhood in the middle of the night and you get mugged, the police are still supposed to show up.
If you stay in an area where you're not supposed to be, the FEMA rescuers are still supposed to show up.
I do think that you ought to bear a higher financial cost.
For doing that.
Like, I think that you should actually have to pay more money for doing that.
The government should fine people for staying in areas where they are expected not to pick up the cost even if their house gets flooded by water.
Many years from now, how do you think this era of politics from roughly 2012 to today and on will be taught in education?
Do you think there's any chance the left-leaning education systems will fail at some point and change perspective?
Well, the Howard Zinn version of history is taught routinely in the United States.
taught in a completely wrong and twisted manner to American students.
Thanks to you and Daily Wire for continued inspiration.
Well, the Howard Zinn version of history is taught routinely in the United States.
His book, A People's History of the United States, has sold over two million copies, basically attributing every individual evil to America and every individual good to the world civilization at large.
This is something Left loves to do.
Slavery, uniquely American.
Sexism, uniquely American.
Racism, uniquely American.
Landing man on the moon, world achievement.
Ending World War II, world achievement.
Ending sexism, ending slavery, ending racism, world achievements.
All of that is absolute nonsense and there's no basis for that whatsoever.
As far as how do I think this year of politics will be taught?
Well, I think if people regain sanity, they're going to look at 2012 as the election that broke the country.
I think 2012 really made the country worse in a variety of ways.
Like, imagine right now if Mitt Romney were in his second term or he'd been running for re-election in 2020 as opposed to Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.
Do you think the country might be better in a lot of ways?
I think the country would be a lot better in a lot of ways if Obama had not won a second term in 2012 and used his Identity politics in order to seize victory.
I think that would have been very... I think that election was horrible for the country.
I think it trolled the right into near insanity.
And I think that, in turn, has trolled the left into near insanity.
It has polarized politics in dramatic ways.
2008 didn't break the country, but I think 2012 really did serious damage to the country.
I know there's a general saying about men falling in love or marrying a woman similar to their mothers and women with their fathers.
Do you think there's truth to that?
Is your wife anything like your own mother and how?
Thanks for the infinite insight.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that you are driven to imitate people that you love.
And if you are if you like your mom, then you're going to look for somebody who is like your mom in a lot of ways.
So the ways that my wife is like my mom, they have it's always funny every so often.
There will be some weird commonality between my mom and my wife and we'll all just start laughing about it.
So my wife has a tendency to mix up movies in the most bizarre ways.
My mom has the same thing.
My wife will forget about the plot of movies extraordinarily quickly in the same way that my mom will.
They have a lot of commonalities in sort of weird, quirky ways.
They're similarly practical.
My mom is a career woman.
My wife is a career woman.
And because I admire my mom a lot, I would say that my wife is similar to my mom in those ways.
But there are ways in which my wife is different.
There are things about my mom that, you know, I like less than I like about my wife.
And I looked specifically for ways in which my wife would be different from my mom.
I think that one of the things that can help you pick a good spouse is making a serious objective analysis of what you like and dislike about your parents, because that allows you to get a little bit of distance instead of sort of falling instinctually into the pattern of marrying somebody who's exactly like your parents.
Your parents are models for your life, so of course you're going to marry somebody Who seems to be like your parents in a lot of ways, but trying to analyze what it is that drives you nuts about your parents is also a good way to avoid marrying somebody who exhibits those same characteristics.
Andrew says, Hey Ben, I'm a Spanish professor and I want students to join my major, but I also want my students to make money after college.
What should the role of humanities in college be related to yesterday's comments?
Well, listen, I think that the humanities education was originally designed to inculcate things like virtue and American values and a certain level of background knowledge about your civilization.
But, since we no longer do that, obviously, things should be job-related.
Now, I think that being a Spanish major is actually pretty useful.
I live in the state of California.
Last night, my wife and I spent half an hour with Rosetta Stone, specifically because we're trying to learn Spanish.
So, yeah, I think that your major is actually a useful major.
When it comes to English majors, however, it seems to me that the only thing that trains you to be an English teacher or an English professor, because the number of successful writers in the United States is extraordinarily low as a percentage, That doesn't mean people shouldn't major in English or enjoy English.
I love English.
I took a lot of English courses in college.
I enjoyed them tremendously.
But I think that if you are looking at the job of a college, you have to determine what is the risk-reward benefit.
What is the opportunity cost?
If you could have majored in something that was going to earn you more money, would that have been the best possible use of your time as opposed to majoring in something that you maybe enjoyed more?
College has essentially become a sorting mechanism for grad school.
That's all college is at this point.
It doesn't almost matter where you went to college, it matters a lot more where you went to grad school.
It doesn't matter how much I went to UCLA, it matters a lot more I went to Harvard Law School because Harvard Law prepared me for an actual job.
Blake says, Ben, when planning for a marriage proposal, is it more important to get debt and finances in order first, or is there more or less that I should consider?
Well, I think that it is important to be able to support your family, obviously, but I think that the first thing that you should be considering is whether you are capable of living a responsible lifestyle generally and treating your wife or husband with the most appropriate level of respect and dignity necessary to do that.
Treating them as an individual human being, not as a tool for gratification of your emotional desires.
That is the biggest thing.
Constantly working on yourself is what makes marriage better.
Constantly working on your spouse is what makes marriage worse.
You want to ruin your marriage?
You want to ruin your relationship?
Nitpick your spouse.
But make sure, by the way, that you find a spouse who is capable of changing when they are called on something that is worthy of change.
Well, the reason is because the single payer is the government, but it's really just a euphemism.
It makes it sound better than nationalized healthcare, which is what single-payer is.
It was really funny.
Cynthia Nixon said earlier today that we need a Democratic Party that embraces single-payer healthcare.
It's like every major Democratic candidate has now embraced the Medicare for All plan.
Now, there's some folks who I respect in healthcare policy who say, well, embracing Medicare for All doesn't necessarily mean it's single-payer.
No, it means it's the first step towards single payer because once you have a government option, the government can simply undercut everybody else.
The government does not cost you anything.
Why would you buy private supplemental insurance if the government is going to cover it anyway?
Maybe you do that, but the government is then going to have to restrict your access to that insurance in order to prevent every doctor from simply taking that insurance and rejecting Medicare.
So, heavily regulating, creating a public option does create an enormous number of problems in the private market, and in fact does lead more toward a single-payer system, although obviously there are hybrid systems like Australia, where a huge number of people buy supplemental health insurance.
Marcel says, Thanks, love the show, fan from Hungary.
There's a great book by Gerald Schroeder called Genesis and the Big Bang that's really worth reading.
I've recommended it many times.
Basically, the idea of evolution being consonant with creationism is there is a force that stands behind evolution.
God has to use a mechanism, that mechanism is evolution.
I honestly find it puzzling that folks have a very tough time rectifying the balance between the two.
I understand why folks, by the way, would want to take the Bible literally, because they say if you're going to take this part metaphorically and you take this part literally, how do we know what's metaphorical and what's literal?
And the answer to that is sort of the Thomas Aquinas answer, which is what science tells us is also the presence of God in the universe.
So science and the Bible cannot be in conflict.
You're either misinterpreting the Bible or you're getting the science wrong.
One of the two has to be wrong if you're a true Jew or Christian.
But creationism is fully consonant with the idea of evolution because, again, the order of creation suggests that God created living material, and then he created plants, and then he created animals, and then he created human beings.
There's nothing there that says by what mechanism God actually did all of that.
You'd have to say Washington, just because he's the greatest man in American history.
Thanks, and I love the show.
You'd have to say Washington, just because he's the greatest man in American history.
This is a person who was capable of uniting a country that was divided about virtually every issue, and then ceding power as soon as he could do so legally.
It's an amazing thing.
The confidence that you have to have to say, I'm walking away from power now, I'm going to hand it to somebody who I don't necessarily even trust, like John Adams, and I'm going to hand it to that guy and just walk away.
It's pretty tremendous.
House has been what legal authority do public universities have to deny students their Second Amendment rights?
Well, public universities, from my understanding, have the same authority as local cities and localities and counties, which is, they can make regulations that prevail on their particular swath of territory, as long as those don't violate the Constitution with regard to the Second Amendment.
So, that really hasn't been litigated too much.
You haven't seen a lot of cases with regard to the Second Amendment, frankly.
Well, let's say the state of Texas were to pass a law saying that concealing carry is the law of the land, and then the University of Texas said no, it's hard to see how that could trump the state law of Texas, actually.
Let's see.
Finn says, Dear Lord Vader, how do you think we should pay for the border wall?
I think we should just take all the money we would spend on straws and use that to build the wall.
Well, I mean, frankly, I think that we have the money to pay for the border wall.
It is in pretty much every attempted defense appropriations bill.
Do I think the border wall is BLNL, by the way?
I don't.
I mean, I'm in favor of a border wall.
Do I think it's the chief mechanism for curbing illegal immigration?
I don't.
I think the chief method for curbing illegal immigration is deportation, and that needs to rise with regard specifically to people who have overstayed their visas.
But it is a serious problem that we have avoided paying our freight on a variety of issues, and the border wall included.
Mexico is not going to pay for it, by the way.
That's just, that's silly.
Jay says, Hi Ben, I'm a programmer in Seattle, Washington.
I'm growing increasingly fearful of the homeless problem.
It's gotten much worse in the past years with tents popping up all over the place.
We had multiple brush fires that have been started along I-5.
Human feces literally lining the sidewalks, trash is everywhere.
What do you think is the source of this recent uptick in homelessness?
And what do you think local governments can do to solve the issue?
Well, the long-term cause of homelessness is the dramatic rise of drug use and mental illness on our streets.
So it used to be that folks were forcibly institutionalized when they were a danger to themselves or others.
And living on the street in a mentally ill state is not actually a healthy thing.
But the left has basically decided that you have the freedom to live on the street and has promulgated the lie that most of the people living on the street are people who are simply victims of economic circumstance, which is not true.
A huge swath of the folks who are living on the streets have serious mental illness and or are drug addicts and have serious problems beyond just their poor.
There are homeless shelters available.
And a lot of these folks are not staying at homeless shelters because they want to live outdoors.
Well, you don't have a right to do that.
The way to fix the homeless problem is to jail people if they are defecating on public land.
It is to take away the stuff that they have on the street and put them in jail.
Rudy Giuliani did this with Times Square.
He cleaned up Times Square.
It is only the localities have decided that they're not going to do anything about the homeless problem.
The homeless problem remains a major problem in cities like Los Angeles, where we have 60,000 homeless people at last count, and Seattle, where the attempts to build tent cities that are reminiscent of Hoovervilles has continued unabated for the past several years, turning the Emerald City a worse shade of poor.
brown lee says ben as a former left-leaning millennial turned right-leaning do you think millennials over time will become more conservative or remain the same thanks well i think that the evidence is that they will turn more right-leaning but the question is how many and right now there's a pretty durable polarization in american politics of the myth that a bunch of people who are on the left when they're 18 are going to be on the right by the time they're 40 i don't think that's true fewer of them are getting married fewer of them are having children most of them are pretty ensconced in a media world that suggests that all conservatives are racist sexist bigot homophobes
This is why I am deeply troubled by President Trump's rhetoric a lot of the time.
I think he's driving away future generations from the Republican Party, and the polls bear out my point of view on this.
I don't think that this is as simple, this is as simple as people get older, they pay taxes, and they turn Republican.
I just, I don't think that's the case, unfortunately.
Culture wars seem to matter a lot more than economic ones.
Okay, final question here.
Let's see.
This is kind of an interesting one.
Let's see.
Hi Ben, this is from Sonia.
I love your show.
It's basically part of my lunch routine at this point.
Not really politics, but I wanted to ask for your opinion on purely cosmetic surgery.
I don't have any real convictions one way or the other, although I do lean heavily against them following the whole they're unnatural and a waste argument.
This is an issue specifically in my case, mostly because I have parents who have been hounding me for about a year to get some sort of nose job.
I know a lot of people from my ethnicity end up getting one at some point.
Thanks.
This person's Armenian, I guess.
Thanks.
Again, love the show.
They say they're Armenian.
That's not me making a racial slur.
At this point, the money isn't a factor in the decision.
The only thing keeping this from happening is me.
Thanks, man.
Again, love the show.
So, I actually like the Jewish perspective on this, which is that you should not seek optional surgery.
Optional surgery puts you at risk and seems ungrateful for what it is that God gave you, unless you can't get a shidduch.
So, in the Jewish world, that means that unless it's preventing you from getting married.
If it's actually providing you significant hardship in your life, to have your nose shaped the way it is, then it seems to me not Abnormal to go get a nose job.
I don't think that's the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination.
There are cases in which plastic surgery that is optional, I think, is still fully warranted.
So, for example, there are many women who, after they have a double mastectomy for breast cancer, will have breast reconstruction surgery.
They don't have to do it for health reasons.
They want to do it because it makes them feel better.
It makes them feel more beautiful.
I don't see any problem with that at all.
However, if you're just a dude and you want to, like, have washboard abs, you just go get liposuction because you're vain.
That seems to me like a waste and a bit of foolishness.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then we'll get to a thing that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
We are doing some more Brad Meltzer books.
So, Brad Meltzer has this great series of children's books.
They're just terrific.
My daughter loves them.
The latest in the series is I Am Neil Armstrong, in which, presumably, Neil Armstrong does indeed plant a flag on the moon, unlike in First Man.
These books are great.
They basically portray all of these characters as kind of kid versions of themselves, and they tell their whole story.
There's one about Abraham Lincoln that's great.
There's one about George Washington that's just terrific.
My daughter loves these books, loves them.
And the illustrations by Christopher Eliopoulos are really tremendous.
You wonder how to educate your kids?
This is a great way to educate your kids.
There's a lot of great stuff in these books.
And Brad, who I've interviewed on the program before, does a great job with them.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so thing number one that I hate.
So yes, last night, Fox 4 put out this tweet.
Fox in Dallas put out this tweet.
Developing search warrant.
Marijuana found in Botham Jean's apartment after deadly shooting.
And this tweet rightly got ratioed to the skies.
Botham Jean, if you missed it, I discussed it a couple of days ago.
Botham Jean is a black fellow, lived in Dallas.
I guess he was a rep for a pharmaceutical company or something.
I can't remember what his job was.
I think he was in insurance, maybe.
And he was in his own apartment.
A police officer who lived downstairs walked into his apartment.
She thought it was her own apartment.
This is her case.
And then she saw a black guy hulking around her apartment and shot him.
I mean, that's basically what she says.
Does that sound racial?
Maybe.
Does it sound really bad in any case?
Absolutely.
And there is no excuse for walking into someone else's apartment and shooting them to death.
That's what happened with this lady.
And because she's a cop, it seems like the police department is doing its damnedest to try and justify the shooting.
And so they've now issued a search warrant against his apartment and they found pot there.
If you think that being shot in your own apartment... I don't care if this guy had a hydro lab in his apartment.
I don't care if he was baking crystal meth in his apartment.
If he was in his apartment and he wasn't doing anything... And when I say he wasn't doing anything, I mean he wasn't threatening anyone else.
You cannot go into his apartment and shoot him.
Particularly if there's not a search warrant.
Like, it's one thing if the guy's baking crystal meth in his apartment, and the cops come to raid his apartment, and he resists arrest, in some way he goes for the cop's gun and gets shot.
That's one thing.
But if he's literally just in his apartment, making some tea, and in the other room he was baking crystal meth, and you made a mistake, and you wandered into his apartment and shot him, and, oh look, it just happens to be he's got crystal meth in the bathtub, what exactly does that have to do with the shooting?
And the marijuana certainly has nothing to... So what?
So the hell what?
Like, really?
Would this be the headline back in, you know, 1928 during Prohibition?
If somebody accidentally got shot in their apartment, ooh, bottle of gin found on the nightstand.
So, so what?
This idea that police officers have to be given this above and beyond level of exemption for behavior that is clearly criminal seems to me absolutely absurd and that needs to stop as soon as possible.
You want to restore trust between the police and the community.
One of the ways to do that is to actually prosecute police when they do bad things.
And not to try and obscure these facts with silliness about marijuana being found in an apartment.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So CNN's John Avalon is doing one of the things that the left loves to do, which is suggesting that presidential policy is going to lead to people dying.
So far, we haven't really had a lot of evidence that people die because of global warming.
What we have seen is evidence that global warming may be happening over a period of time, that human impact has some effect on the environment, that even if you make the case that storms are more severe because of this, that doesn't necessarily link the death toll to the severity of the storm, right?
There are a lot of intervening factors, like how well is the town built if people evacuate, right?
There are a lot of things that are linked to that, but What we are now seeing from CNN is the attempt to use this current Hurricane Florence that is threatening the East Coast as a club against Trump.
So now, you have John Avalon on CNN claiming that President Trump's policies could lead to 80,000 excess deaths per decade.
Dismantling the Clean Power Plan and opening nearly all our coastline to offshore drilling.
It's so bad that according to two Harvard scientists, Trump's environmental policies could lead to an additional 80,000 unnecessary deaths every decade.
Okay, why?
What?
I'm so glad that they have now linked policies to death.
So how many excess deaths would Affordable Care Act have led to based on shortages in doctors?
How many excess deaths have been created by the National Health Service?
All of these calculations are based on the kind of modeling that you do.
And the modeling doesn't take into account market changes, it doesn't take into account migration, it doesn't take into account future technological changes.
It's very easy to say that the policies of your opponent are going to cause death, but that seems like an extreme case.
That's pretty extreme.
If you actually want to make the case against President Trump's policies, instead of saying it's going to cause death, which is just off-putting and silly, say President Trump's policies are irresponsible with regard to the environment, and they are going to cause an upsurge in bad weather that has significant impact on the economy.
And that may result in additional danger to populations if, for example, storms get worse.
Don't try and forecast how many people are going to die because Trump didn't pick up an Obama-era regulation.
It's just, it's silly towns, and it's an exaggeration that most people can detect.
Okay, we'll be back here on Monday with all of the latest.
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.
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