President Trump comes out strongly in favor of the Saudis after their alleged murder of a dissident.
President Trump submits his written answers in the Mueller investigation.
And Nature Magazine doesn't actually care about nature.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
It's the day before Thanksgiving, folks.
Nobody wants to be here, but we're here with you anyway because we have to guide you on the evening commute home or on the morning commute to work that you don't want to be at.
So we will be here with you as you suffer through traffic.
There is still a lot of news happening in the lead up to Thanksgiving.
We'll get to all of it in just one second.
But first, let me remind you That if you are somebody who thinks about going to restaurants a lot, and who eats too much prepared food, and instead you would like to cook at home, but you don't want all the work of having to go to the grocery store, come up with your own recipe, buy too much of various ingredients, and then cook it badly.
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Okay, well, we begin today with some excellent news.
Romaine lettuce is not edible.
Now, there are those of us who have known this for years because it tastes like garbage.
And I know, there are a bunch of people out there who say, no, I love romaine lettuce.
Stop lying to yourself.
You don't love romaine lettuce.
You love all the stuff that's on top of the romaine lettuce.
You like the ranch dressing, or you like the croutons, or you like the panini that you chopped up and put on the romaine lettuce to make it edible.
But you didn't like the romaine lettuce.
And you lying to yourself is the cause of so much grief in your life.
If you would just look into your heart, you would realize that you've never wanted to eat romaine lettuce.
And now you finally have the excuse.
According to the New York Times, the warning came just as millions of Americans were preparing for the biggest food holiday of the year.
People should not buy or eat romaine lettuce.
Restaurants should stop serving it.
Anyone who has it on hand should throw it out and clean the refrigerator immediately.
This has always been the policy at the Shapiro household.
Romaine lettuce has never entered within our doors, because this is not something that I will tolerate.
As the man of the home, I will not tolerate anything that my food eats being eaten by me.
There is a food chain for a reason, okay?
And there has to be an intermediate stop before the romaine lettuce hits my stomach.
That intermediate stop is an animal that once ate the romaine lettuce.
This stern and sweeping advisory issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday afternoon, two days before Thanksgiving, caught many people off guard, but the agency said it was acting out of an abundance of caution after 32 people in 11 states fell sick with a virulent form of E. coli, a bacteria blamed for a number of food-borne outbreaks in recent years.
If you don't know if the lettuce is romaine or whether a salad mix contains romaine, do not eat it and throw it away.
I agree, but this is the CDC saying it.
Wash and sanitize the drawers or shelves in refrigerators where romaine was stored.
Officials said such measures were necessary while they tracked down the source of the contamination.
They said a nationwide warning covering an entire food type was unusual, but not unprecedented.
In 2006, they did this with spinach.
Peter Cassell is a spokesman for the FDA.
They said officials were in this case mindful of the approach of the Thanksgiving holiday.
They were afraid that there would be some sort of giant E. coli outbreak.
Okay, when I put aside the jokes for a second, I actually do kind of think this is government overreach.
Like, the fact that there have been 13 people in a country of 340 million people who got sick from eating romaine lettuce over the course of six weeks does not seem to me like the kind of crisis where you tell everyone you cannot eat any romaine lettuce ever.
It seems a bit of overkill to me.
It also suggests that the government has the capacity to prevent all sorts of types of disease.
But listen, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
And if they tell me that I have an excuse not to eat romaine lettuce, I'm there.
So that is the big news today.
The other big news that the president of the United States has now made what can only be described as a bizarre statement about Saudi Arabia.
And President Trump has an unfortunate habit of saying the quiet parts out loud.
You know, there's something in politics where we all sort of know the truth about the U.S.' 's relationship with Saudi Arabia.
The truth is that every president of my lifetime has been too soft on the Saudis.
President Reagan was too soft on the Saudis.
George H.W.
Bush sold AWACS to the Saudis.
Bill Clinton was very soft on the Saudis.
President Bush was very soft on the Saudis.
Barack Obama was very soft on the Saudis.
And now President Trump is very soft on the Saudis.
This has been true for literally decades, because ever since basically 1973, after the OPEC oil embargo, they've been a strategic ally of the United States, and that means they've been able to get away with an awful lot of stuff that we wouldn't allow a normal ally to get away with.
Well, we all know that, but that doesn't mean you're supposed to say the quiet part out loud, which is that we overlook a lot of Saudi Arabia's human rights violations because they're strategically valuable to us.
Well, President Trump, never a fan of leaving anything unspoken.
Came out with a statement yesterday with regard to the Saudi Arabians alleged murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
Khashoggi was a longtime critic of the Saudi regime.
He was largely sympathetic to the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood, so he wasn't any sort of moderate Muslim, for example.
The Saudi government, according to the CIA, had Khashoggi murdered at the Saudi embassy in Turkey at the specific direction of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to the Washington Post.
Now, bin Salman has been the supposed reformer in Saudi Arabia who is making overtures toward the United States, overtures toward Israel, and was a strong strategic ally of the Trump administration.
So President Trump put out a statement with regard to the Khashoggi murder, based on this new report that the CIA had said that the Saudi Arabian government was responsible for it, and in particular, Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
And his statement is in equal parts true, false, And bad.
Like, really, there's a lot here.
So, the sort of framework that you should understand about this statement about Saudi Arabia is several things can be true at once.
One, Saudi Arabia is a terrible, terrible human rights violator.
They do terrible things on a regular basis.
They target dissidents.
They chop people's hands and heads off in the kingdom still.
They do not allow people of the Judaic faith to enter the country.
There are a lot of problems with Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has a lot of issues.
They treat women like garbage and have for decades.
They have funded terrorism in the past.
All of this is true.
They are not a force for good on the world stage.
That's point number one.
Point number two, Saudi Arabia is a very important counterweight to Iranian influence in the region.
Iran is significantly more dangerous worldwide and regionally than Saudi Arabia ever was.
Saudi Arabia has formed a de facto alliance with Jordan, Egypt, and Israel against the rising Iranian influence, and they are an important strategic ally and partner for the United States in the region.
So both of these things can be true.
One, Saudi Arabia violates human rights.
And two, Saudi Arabia is an important strategic ally against a much more threatening power in Iran.
And number three, you don't have to say out loud that number one is okay.
Right?
You're not supposed to say number one is okay.
They can be a strategic ally and still you can take action to punish them when they violate human rights.
And also you don't have to go out there and praise the violation of human rights or shrug at the violation of human rights because that has some pretty negative consequences such as the feeling on the part of people who are our allies or strategic partners that they can get away with pretty much anything So long as they please us economically.
That's not something the United States wants to put out there in the world.
Now, again, that is the quiet part out loud, right?
Barack Obama did the same thing.
Barack Obama was essentially the PR agency for the Iranian government.
Barack Obama did heavy work for Russia's Vladimir Putin, one of the worst dictators on the planet, brutal human rights violator, who Barack Obama handed over control of Syria to.
In the wake of saying that he had a red line with regards to use of chemical weapons in Syria, Barack Obama did the same thing with the Cuban government.
He went over there and he played kissy face with the Castros, even though the Castros are some of the worst human rights violators of the last half century.
So, he did all that, and that was real bad.
And it's not better when Trump does any of that.
Okay, so here is President Trump's statement.
You can tell that President Trump was heavily involved in writing this, because it has a lot of exclamation points, and it is phrased exactly as President Trump would phrase it.
So this one is pretty genuine.
Here's what President Trump had to say.
He said, Right, which is his way of saying, because the world is a very dangerous place, we have to look the other way when some of our allies do bad stuff.
Again, this is not untrue and we all sort of know it.
It's also not a great thing to say out loud if you're the president of the United States and you're supposed to take human rights seriously.
He then gives a paragraph of truth about Iran.
He says, All of this is true.
Iran is extraordinarily dangerous.
Despite Iran's regional ambitions, maybe because of those regional ambitions, the Obama administration went out of its way to lie on behalf of the mullahs, hand them billions of dollars, clear the pathway to a nuclear bomb for them.
Which is why it's particularly galling when you see members of the Obama administration suddenly coming out of the woodwork to condemn Trump for playing nice with the Saudis and for covering for the Saudis when the Obama administration did that after the Iranians, forget about the Saudis killing dissidents, the Iranians killed American soldiers in Iraq.
Like 500 American soldiers in Iraq are dead because of because of the Iranian government.
And the Obama administration played nice with them, which is significantly more dangerous than just on a geostrategic plane.
Much more dangerous for the Obama administration to play nice with the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism than it is for the Trump administration to play nice with the human rights violating evil dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, who also happens to strategically align with us in certain valuable ways and does not have the military capacity to extend its regional influence beyond Yemen, basically.
President Trump then continues.
He says, on the other hand, Saudi Arabia would gladly withdraw from Yemen if the Iranians would agree to leave.
They would immediately provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance.
Additionally, Saudi Arabia has agreed to spend billions of dollars in leading the fight against radical Islamic terror.
Well, maybe, right?
This is where we start to get into the president playing PR agent for the Saudis and it's a really bad look.
The fact is that in the American-Saudi strategic alliance, we are the powerful partner.
We are the 400-pound gorilla.
We're the most powerful country in the history of the world.
Saudi Arabia needs us a lot more than we need Saudi Arabia.
If we were to say to the Saudis, listen guys, you need to clean up your act or we're gonna cut off aid, Saudi Arabia doesn't have a lot of choices available to them at that point.
If we were to say to them, listen, you're gonna need to Create all these human rights reforms, or away goes your military support.
They wouldn't have a lot of choices in the matter, because again, Saudi Arabia is not militarily strong, except that the United States has troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, and it's basically been the mission of the U.S.
government to protect the strategic sovereignty of Saudi Arabia.
I'm going to get a little bit more into this in just one second.
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All right, so back to President Trump's statement.
So he's complimenting Saudi Arabia and talking about how we need them.
He says, Of the $450 billion, $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and many other great U.S.
defense contractors.
If we foolishly cancel these contracts, Russia and China would be the enormous beneficiaries and very happy to acquire all of this newfound business.
It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States.
That's not exactly a great argument.
If your argument is that we are about to make a lot of money in an economic deal, so it's okay if Saudi Arabia kills dissidents, this is patently immoral.
And if Barack Obama had said it, we would be saying exactly that at the time.
By the way, President Trump doesn't feel this way about China, right?
He said that we have to declare a trade war on China, which is going to be a lot more damaging to the United States economy than losing out on some defense contracts with Saudi Arabia.
The president says we need to declare a trade war on China for moral reasons and strategic reasons.
I think there is some truth to that, but I don't think that he can maintain those positions separately, that China bad, Saudi Arabia good.
That just, that doesn't hold.
But here's where he gets to the really bad stuff.
The president's in this statement.
He says, He says, He says, Representatives of Saudi Arabia say that Jamal Khashoggi was an enemy of the state and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
My decision is in no way based on that.
This is an unacceptable and horrible crime.
King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vigorously deny any knowledge of the planning or execution of the murder of Mr. Khashoggi.
Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event.
Maybe he did, and maybe he didn't.
Very weird statement in a presidential statement.
Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, which isn't... His CIA said he did.
So there's that.
But maybe he did, maybe he didn't.
Mm-hmm.
So that being said, we may never know all the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi.
Now, let's be straight about this.
President Trump makes these sorts of denials all the time.
You remember in Helsinki, he met with Vladimir Putin, and then Putin said, I did not hack your election!
Ha ha!
And President Trump came out and said, I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial.
So President Trump will buy denial from people who he thinks treat him nicely.
And the same thing is true from Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi crown prince.
I mean the Saudi king.
He'll buy all of that if it fits his preconceived notions.
With that said, It is not a particularly useful line.
Not only is it useful, it's not moral.
It's not moral to undercut your own CIA's finding that a specific murder was ordered at the direction of a key ally.
And then you're like, well, maybe it happened.
Maybe it didn't.
I don't know.
Rig it there.
That is not a good thing for the president of the United States to be saying.
And again, I was all up You know, on Obama, when he did very similar sort of stuff.
We'll get to Obama in just a second and the leftist blowback, but President Trump's statement continues.
He says, "In any case, "our relationship is with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
"They've been a great ally "in our very important fight against Iran.
"The United States intends to remain "a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia "to ensure the interests of our country, Israel, "and all other partners in the region.
"It is our paramount goal to fully eliminate "the threat of terrorism throughout the world.
"I understand there are members of Congress "who for political or other reasons "would like to go in a different direction "and they are free to do so.
"I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me, "but only if they are consistent "with the absolute security and safety of America.
After the United States, Saudi Arabia is the largest oil-producing nation in the world.
They've worked closely with us and have been very responsive to my request to keeping oil prices at reasonable levels, so important for the world.
As President of the United States, I intend to ensure that in a very dangerous world, America is pursuing its national interests and vigorously contesting countries that wish to do us harm.
Very simply, it is called America First.
So, America First means that we have to basically greenlight Saudi Arabia killing dissidents.
That is overstated.
And this is the point that I'm making.
You can side with Saudi Arabia against Iran.
You can suggest that we need to continue military support for Saudi Arabia.
You can say that they are a strategic ally.
But what you can't do, and what you shouldn't do as President of the United States, is pretend that murder of a dissident is not a big deal, or suggest that the murder of the dissident is not attributable to the Saudi government, Because maybe the CIA made a mistake.
Who knows?
Could be.
Whatever.
That is not a good look for any president of the United States.
And so, it is not completely out of left field or incorrect when the Washington Post criticizes the president saying that President Trump's response to the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is a betrayal of long-established American values of respect for human rights and the expectation of trust and honesty in our strategic relationships.
Now, here is where we start to get to The Dicey Territory.
So first of all, we'll finish with President Trump's commentary, and then we'll get to the Dicey Territory, which is people on the left who are going after President Trump in a way they never went after Barack Obama for his ties with Iran, with Cuba, with Vladimir Putin.
Right, I mean, that stuff is really, really hypocritical, and not only hypocritical, it sets up a standard that essentially suggests the only reason they're going after Trump is sheer partisan politics over this stuff.
That he said the quiet part out loud, and he wasn't supposed to do that for whatever reason.
Okay, with that said, here was President Trump's statement.
So President Trump, at this point, is almost trolling.
He says, the reason that we are not doing anything about Saudi Arabia is it's America first.
All I do is focus on this country and making great deals for this country.
I don't focus on making great deals for myself because I don't care anymore.
So, Saudi Arabia has nothing to do with me.
What does have to do with me is putting America first.
Okay, so, and the idea is that America's interests require us to do this.
And here's the point.
America's interests do not actually require us to greenlight the murder of dissidents by strategically partnered governments.
It doesn't actually require us to do that.
That is the point that I'm making over and over here.
And when President Trump says he's not going to destroy the economy on the basis of them murdering a citizen of their country, well, you know, again, the idea that we're going to destroy the economy if we sanction the Saudis a little bit is just absurd.
And I'm not going to tell a country that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars and has helped me do one thing very importantly, keep oil prices down so that they're not going to $100 and $150 a barrel.
Right now, we have oil prices in great shape.
I'm not going to destroy the world economy, and I'm not going to destroy the economy for our country by being foolish with Saudi Arabia.
Okay, so, you know, again, the idea that we are supposed to greenlight bad Saudi behavior because they keep the oil prices low, that's been true for decades.
But when the President of the United States says it out loud, it makes it sound as though the United States is somehow in thrall to the oil prices in Saudi Arabia, which is really bad stuff.
The President should not be saying this.
And this led to Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, being grilled.
He was being grilled at the State Department.
He was asked, you know, does America first mean putting cash ahead of human rights?
So does the America First agenda mean putting U.S.
business interests ahead of human rights concerns?
The United States took a very strong response.
We have sanctioned 17 individuals in connection with that investigation.
We are we are at the same time committed to making sure that we place America's national security interests and all the actions that take place in the context of doing the right thing to make sure that America continues to thrive and grow.
And when we do that, the world is better off for it, too.
And the Middle East is better off as well.
OK, now, as I say, I am not opposed to the Trump administration's general policy with regard to Saudi Arabia.
In fact, I think that that general policy is largely correct.
But, with all of that said, they're opening themselves up to charges that they don't care about human rights, which seems to be somewhat true, and to the idea that President Trump is putting simple trade deals above basic morality.
President Trump seems to be saying that himself.
That is a serious problem.
Now, with that said, we're going to get to the left's response, which is entirely hypocritical, completely politically driven, and not driven in any real way by serious objections to what President Trump actually did.
I'll explain that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
The left's response to President Trump is hypocritical and absurd.
Those of us who called out President Obama for his insane, his insane support for the Iranian regime have every right to now say that the President of the United States as a Republican should not be kowtowing to the Saudi government.
But the same people on the left who were, who were Paying homage to President Obama for going to the Muslim world and suggesting that America was responsible for all of the Muslim world's problems.
The entire left that was fine with President Obama bowing in front of the Saudi king, remember that picture?
The entire left that was totally fine with Barack Obama playing PR agency for the Iranians, now they're very upset that President Trump is basically doing the same thing with regard to an actual strategic partner, not the leading world sponsor of global terrorism.
So, for example, you have Samantha Power.
Samantha Power is the former UN ambassador And, uh, to, to the, to, for the Obama administration.
And Samantha Power, basically, here's what she tweeted out.
Let me, let me actually find the exact tweet, because it really is quite absurd.
Here it is.
So, the exact tweet that Samantha Power sent out was this.
It is a mean and nasty world, but Trump's siding with the meanest and nastiest out there.
Whether Duterte, Sisi, Putin, or assassin MBS, that'd be Mohammed bin Salman, will leave the world even nastier.
This statement is a green light for would-be murderers in countries that have things Trump thinks we need.
Samantha Power, you and your administration said that there was a red line in Syria with the use of chemical weapons.
Then you turned over the entire country to Bashar Assad and the Russians.
You, Samantha Power, were part of an administration that turned over half of Iraq to ISIS.
You, Samantha Power, were part of an administration that played PR agency for the Iranian regime, the leading world sponsors of terrorism.
You, Samantha Power, were responsible for an administration that kowtowed to the Cuban government, which jails dissidents for decades and tortures them.
You, Samantha Powers, were responsible for a rise of the Chinese government, a solidification of that Chinese government.
This is the part where I start to say, OK, so are they really angry at Trump because Trump did something wrong?
Like I'm angry at Trump because Trump did something wrong here?
Or are they angry at Trump just because he's Trump?
Are they angry at Trump because he said the quiet part out loud because he did exactly what the Obama administration did except against the Iranians and because they don't like Trump personally?
It seems to me a lot more of the latter.
So, for example, look at this insanity from Representative Steve Cohen.
Steve Cohen is a congressperson from Tennessee, and here he is suggesting that President Trump was paid off by the Saudis.
That's why he's doing this.
Because we need to know if foreign money being given to our president and or his family affects our foreign policy.
That's why the Emoluments Clause was put in the Constitution, to see to it that the president deals first for the benefit of the country and not for the benefit of himself.
This is absurd.
Even Brianna Keillor over at CNN was like, uh, you have no evidence of this whatsoever.
And then he tried to talk over her.
But again, the reality is that the Obama administration did this with Iran in a much more spectacular and dangerous way.
Mark Thiessen had a column back a couple of years ago specifically talking about the kinds of lies that were being promoted by the Obama administration.
Here is what he says.
He says, the Obama administration told Congress it would not allow Iran access to U.S.
financial institutions.
Issued a special license allowing Iran to do exactly that, unsuccessfully pressured U.S.
banks to help Iran, lied to Congress and the American people about what had been done, admitted in internal emails that these efforts exceeded U.S.
obligations under the nuclear deal, sent officials, including bank regulators around the world, to urge foreign financial institutions to do business with Iran, and promised that they would get nothing more than a slap on the wrist for violating U.S.
sanctions.
How bad is this, says Mark Deason?
Remove the words Obama and Iran and replace them with Trump and Russia and imagine the outrage that would ensue over the same revelations.
And of course, that's exactly right.
And the Obama administration acknowledged at the time that they were lying to the American people.
According to Paul Farhi at the Washington Post back in 2016, one of President Obama's top national security advisors led journalists to believe a misleading timeline of U.S.
negotiations with Iran over a nuclear agreement And relied on inexperienced reporters to create an echo chamber that helped sway public opinion to seal the deal, according to a lengthy magazine profile.
Ben Rhodes, the Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, told the New York Times Magazine he helped promote a narrative that the administration started negotiations with Iran after the supposedly moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected president in 2013.
In fact, the administration's negotiation actually began earlier with the country's powerful Islamic faction.
The framework for the agreement was hammered out before Rouhani was even elected.
So they were lying to the American people.
And they've been continuing to play defense for the Iranian government ever since.
John Kerry.
No, less than four months ago was in Iran, basically telling the Iranians, wait out President Trump.
Maybe after he's gone, we can come back to you.
He's going out there and performing his own foreign policy.
The Iranian backing Obama administration officials have ripped into, for example, the Israelis for pointing out that Iran has not, in fact, been compliant with the nuclear deal.
They said, no, no, Iran is compliant.
We love Iran.
Iran's doing great.
So again, the idea coming from these folks that the Trump administration is doing anything new or extraordinarily terrible here is just a lie.
The only difference is that Trump says stuff out loud that Obama did quietly.
That is the only difference here and the difference that Saudi Arabia actually is a strategic partner to the United States in a way that Iran is not.
This is not whataboutism here.
This is not me saying that it's okay for Trump to do what he did about Khashoggi because Obama did the same thing with regard to Iran.
The point that I'm making here is that Trump was wrong to say what he said about Khashoggi, but Saudi Arabia is more of a strategic ally than Iran ever was, and for all of the folks on the left to be proclaiming from the high hills the high ground on foreign policy is insane, ridiculous, and unbased in fact.
They have no capacity to do this in any honest way.
It's just absurd.
It's just absurd.
And speaking of just absurd, there's an article from the New York Times about President Trump today talking about how President Trump supposedly Wanted the DOJ to indict and prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey.
According to the New York Times, President Trump told the White House Council in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries, his 2016 challenger Hillary Clinton and the former FBI Director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
The lawyer, Donald McGahn, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution.
Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power.
To underscore his point, McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.
So the left has been going nuts over this.
How could President Trump have ever suggested prosecuting Hillary Clinton or James Comey?
The answer is the same as the answer is with regard to the Saudi thing.
President Trump says a lot of stuff out loud that a lot of other people say quietly.
President Trump says a lot of stuff and considers a lot of stuff that his job does not allow for.
President Obama did it quietly and so we pretend that meant that he was filled with dignity and honor.
President Trump says this stuff out loud and therefore this means that he is the greatest tyrant this side of Genghis Khan.
This is really how the media play it.
Remember, President Obama had his Attorney General act as his wingman.
That is the statement of his own Attorney General.
He declared executive privilege on behalf of that Attorney General when he was held in contempt by Congress.
No one at the IRS was ever prosecuted for the targeting of conservative groups.
But Obama did it quietly.
He didn't say it out loud.
And that meant that he was filled with dignity and honor.
Some folks, Conor Friedersdorf over at The Nation, no, I'm sorry, at The Atlantic, he said, well, you know, you're making excuses for President Trump on this story.
No, I'm just telling the truth on President Trump, which is President Trump says a lot of crap.
Most of it never sees the light of day.
Most of it never turns into policy because, as I say, President Trump says a lot of crap.
I'm not going to take a statement from President Trump threatening things with the same seriousness as a statement from President Obama threatening things.
Why?
Because Obama was a much more subtle politician who didn't say the quiet part out loud.
President Trump always says things out loud.
There has not yet been a thought that occurred to President Trump that did not then exit his face within a millisecond.
So when President Trump says stuff, no, I'm not going to take it as seriously as I would from President Obama, because Obama actually considered the stuff that came out of his face.
And that meant that when he issued a threat, it was actually dangerous.
When Trump issues a threat, it's mostly Trump just saying things.
And these folks who are saying that I'm supposed to treat Trump exactly like Obama, like I have a functioning prefrontal cortex.
I'm not going to.
That's silly.
It's like saying that I'm supposed to treat my two and a half year old son the same way that I treat my wife when they make pronouncements on things.
Like, no, they're different people with different capacities.
That's not a thing.
Hey, President Trump is great at a good many things.
He is not great at not saying things, right?
He says a lot of stuff and a lot of that stuff never materializes.
So the fact that he said a crazy thing that never materialized, forgive me if I'm not going to go crazy over that in the same way that I would for President Obama, because President Obama was a much more serious human being when it came to saying things that were correlated with his policy.
Go back and look at all the statements President Trump has made and see how they've correlated with his actual policy.
The answer is not very well.
The statements that President Obama made with regard to his hardcore policy, that stuff correlated pretty well with exactly what he was trying to do.
And we'll get to President Obama in just a second.
But first, let's talk about how you can relax over this long Thanksgiving weekend.
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Okay, so I want to talk about President Obama and his pronouncements on politics and why You should probably take them more seriously than whatever thing Trump said a year ago that never got implemented in policy.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so President Obama, as I say, you know, there's been a lot of talk about how seriously should we take President Trump.
And the biggest problem for President Trump generally has been that the dude says a lot of stuff, which is one of the reasons why President Trump should never testify in the Mueller investigation, because the guy, like things fall out of his face at the same rate As things fall out of a newborn babe's face after you breastfeed them.
Like, President Trump just says many, many things.
And if you are his lawyer, the last thing that you want is him spitting up all over Robert Mueller.
It's really not something they're interested in.
Robert Mueller just starts to burp and then all of a sudden Trump just vomits out a bunch of stuff.
Like, that would not be smart.
So instead, he has issued a bunch of written responses.
According to the New York Times, President Trump laid out for special counsel his defense in the investigation into possible ties between his associates and Russia's election interference, the president's lawyers said in a statement on Tuesday.
The details of Trump's responses were not immediately clear.
His lawyers said that now that he'd handed over his answers to questions from the special counsel, the time had come to end the investigation.
This seems about right.
Once he's given his answers, I'm not sure exactly what more there is to do here.
Okay, all of that said, that is smart work by us lawyers.
Of course you want written answers and not spoken answers because President Trump says a lot of stuff.
You know who else says a lot of stuff but means it seriously?
Barack Obama.
This gives Trump a bit of an advantage in the Trump versus Obama sort of sweepstakes.
That's because Selena Zito's description of Trump that you take him seriously but not literally is pretty accurate.
Because Trump says a lot of stuff, There's a lot of, we all know what he means.
There's a lot of that with President Trump.
With Obama, we know what he means because he says what he means.
And when he says what he means, we take it seriously.
Because he is a considered politician.
Very smooth.
Very rhetorically sound.
And therefore, when he attacks Americans he disagrees with morally.
Or his rubes.
Or his idiots.
Or his racists.
We ought to take that seriously because he is speaking for the Democratic Party in a way that Trump never spoke for the Republican Party.
It's really kind of fascinating.
People say that Trump is speaking for the moral heart of the Republican Party.
Listen, I was afraid of that in 2016.
I said I didn't want Trump to soul-suck the Republican Party and make it so that every one of his utterances became the new de facto conservative position.
I don't think that has happened.
I think that if you ask most Republicans what they think of President Trump, most Republicans will say, yeah, kind of like the guy.
And if you ask them about his more ridiculous statements, And you are honest about asking and you're not just, you know, a leftist trying to do a gotcha.
What they will say is, yeah, that was pretty bad.
He probably shouldn't have said that.
But you know what?
I don't look to President Trump for my moral bearings.
I look for him to get things done.
That's what most Republicans would say.
When they are looking for kind of thought leaders, President Trump is not the person they go to.
This is particularly true for young Republicans by investigative and polling data.
In any case, President Obama is different.
President Trump does represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party in a way that Trump actually doesn't.
And President Obama was asked in an interview about denial of global warming and listen to his statements about Americans generally and Americans who don't agree with him on his policy prescriptions with regard to global warming.
The reason we don't do it is because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, Mommy issues.
Okay, so he was asked specifically about global warming, and he said, the reason that we don't invest in climate change policies is because we're confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, and racism, and mommy issues.
In other words, if you don't agree with me, then it is because you are confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, and mommy issues.
He says, I mean, we are fraught with stuff.
And so if in that case, the single most important thing we have to invest in is not, oh, look, I'm a huge supporter of science and technological research and social science.
People call me Spock for a reason.
First of all, if you self-describe as Spock, you're a douchebag of epic magnitude.
My goodness.
If you go around, you're like, you know what I am?
I'm like data.
You know what I'm like?
I'm like Spock.
That's me.
Like, when I make jokes about that, they're jokes.
Okay?
Like, when I say that I'm a computer, that's because I am mocking myself.
Okay?
When Trump says that... When Obama says that he is like Spock, he actually thinks of himself... He is epically, rationally... He says, I believe in reason and logic and all these enlightenment values.
Uh-huh.
But the thing that we really have to invest in is people.
We got to figure out a way to work together.
And then he says that the people who... The people who...
Disagree with him, have all of these issues.
Unfortunately, that is an attitude that has infused the Democratic Party, and it's a very unified Democratic Party.
It's a unified, politically clever Democratic Party.
So we are looking at a real phenomenon in the Democratic Party that is dangerous to the heart and soul of the country.
Because I think that Obama's statements basically reflect the view of a lot of folks on the left, which is that if you disagree with them, you're inherently a bad, racist, stupid human being with mommy issues.
And I will say that they are effective politically in a way that Republicans have not historically been.
I'll give you the evidence of that in just one second.
So the best evidence that Democrats are politically effective is Nancy Pelosi.
So Nancy Pelosi, this is really amazing.
Nancy Pelosi, she was receiving a challenge from a woman named Marsha Fudge, who is a Democrat from the state of Ohio, a black Democrat from the state of Ohio, and she Was going to challenge Nancy Pelosi.
Then it turned out she was no longer going to challenge Nancy Pelosi.
Why?
Because Nancy Pelosi went full horsehead in the bed with Marcia Fudge.
And she chopped off that racehorse's head and shoved it in Marcia Fudge's bed.
And then Marcia Fudge started screaming that she would support Nancy Pelosi.
Why?
Because within days of Marcia Fudge announcing that she might run against Nancy Pelosi, The local media uncovered a letter written in 2015 by Marsha Fudge in support of a Cleveland judge named Lance Mason.
Okay, that specific letter was a commendation, recommending that his sentencing in a case of violently beating his wife, that the sentencing be lightened.
She said, I commend Lance for immediately recognizing that he needed help and entering counseling, which continues as of this writing.
Lance accepts full responsibility for his actions and has assured me that something like this will never happen again.
There was only one problem with the letter beyond the obvious of, you know, supporting a wife beater.
It turns out that Lance Mason has now been arrested for killing his wife.
Okay, so that was not good.
It turns out that he was convicted of beating his wife in 2015, and he was arrested on suspicion of murdering her on Saturday, and Marsha Fudge had written a letter in support of this guy.
Well, within hours, it turns out Marshall Fudge now supports Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House.
It turns out members of the Democratic Party, pretty good when it comes to politics.
If they're both good at politics and radical, this is very bad for Republicans, conservatives, and mainstream Americans across the political spectrum.
Now, speaking of radicalism, I would be remiss if I did not point out this insane story today.
Okay, Nature Magazine has now come out with an editorial.
Nature Magazine says that gender, sex, is no longer connected with genitals.
I am not kidding you.
This is Nature Magazine.
So we found out last week that the American Civil Liberties Union does not care about civil liberties.
That they want to make sure that the Title IX proposals by the Trump administration never take effect, even though those Title IX proposals protect the rights of the accused.
They said there are too many rights of the accused.
The American Civil Liberties Union.
Now, Nature Magazine, which I was led to believe by the name of their magazine, was interested in things like, say, nature.
You know, it turns out, no, not so much.
What they're really interested in is social science garbage that is promulgated by the political left because they hate President Trump.
This is pretty amazing.
Here's their editorial in Nature magazine.
According to a draft memo leaked to the New York Times, the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based solely and immutably on the genitals they are born with.
Genetic testing, it says, could be used to resolve any ambiguity about external appearances.
The move would make it easier for institutions to receive federal funds, such as university and health programs, to discriminate against people on the basis of their gender identity.
This is the best part, okay?
You ready?
This is Nature Magazine!
And the proposal from the Trump administration is, we will go with your genitals, In order to establish which sex you are, which works in 99.6% of cases.
It works probably higher than that, probably 99.9% of cases.
This is what works.
Then, if there's still ambiguity, we'll do a genetic test on you.
So let's say that you have Klinefelter syndrome.
Let's say that you have XXY.
Right, let's say that you have a non-functioning SRY gene, for example, on your Y chromosome.
Let's say that all of that happens.
We can then do a genetic test and determine whether you're male or female based on those genetics.
This is part of the actual legislation promulgated by the Trump administration, the regulation.
That is solely scientific, right?
There's a scientific, objectively verifiable test being proposed by the Trump administration.
Here is what nature says.
The proposal on which HHS officials have refused to comment is a terrible idea that should be killed off.
It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex and gender, a social construct related to biological differences, but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviors.
Biology is not as straightforward as the proposal suggests.
By some estimates, as many as 1 in 100 people have differences or disorders of sex development, such as hormonal conditions, genetic changes, or anatomical ambiguities, some of which mean that their genitalia cannot be clearly classified as male or female.
Right.
Which is why the proposal says that you can do a genetic test as well.
And then they just talk about a bunch of cases in which, like, in like 1980 where people misassigned genitalia in cases of intersex babies or something.
Even more scientifically complex is a mismatch between gender and sex on a person's birth certificate.
Some evidence suggests transgender identity has genetic or hormonal roots, but its exact biological correlates are unclear.
Whatever the cause, organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics advise physicians to treat people according to their preferred gender, regardless of appearance or genetics.
So what?
That has no basis in science.
This has no basis in science.
But nature says that we are supposed to pretend that science no longer exists because Trump did it.
So well done, nature, which no longer cares about nature.
Pretty amazing stuff.
Well, let's do some Things I Like and Things I Hate, because I could go on about this particular Nature article all day, and in fact, in Things I Hate, we're going to get back to this topic, in which science has been used as a false baton.
Bad science has been used as a false baton to club the unwilling into submission.
But first, let's do a couple of things that I like.
So, thing that I like, number one, we've been doing William Goldman stuff this week, because he died last week.
The book, Marathon Man, is better than the movie Marathon Man.
So the movie of Marathon Man is very famous.
Lawrence Olivier playing the Nazi Zell, and Dustin Hoffman playing his victim, basically.
The movie's good.
Roy Scheider is in it too.
It's a good movie.
The book is actually better.
Marathon Man by William Goldman.
Go check out the book.
Check out the movie as well if you haven't seen it.
It is quite good.
I think the end is a little bit forced.
I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't actually seen it, but both the book and the movie are good.
William Goldman, very, very talented guy.
Okay, other stuff.
That, uh, other stuff that I like.
So the Washington Post has another article today, another article today about what sex was like behind the Iron Curtain.
I am not kidding you.
This is like, this is like the fourth article that the Washington Post has written about why it was actually not bad to be in a communist country.
I remember they did one on Malice China, that sex in Malice China was awesome, you know, with all the forced abortion and the slave labor and such.
Well now they're saying that sex behind the Iron Curtain was amazing.
And they go back and they uncover a book.
There's a full article about a book published in 1969 about... It's basically a porn book from 1969 that was distributed in Bulgaria.
And this means that communism was kind of awesome.
Or something.
It is a long article in the Washington Post.
It says, it turns out there was plenty of sex happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, although the openness of the public discussion around it varied dramatically from country to country in a different period of time.
But even in the British Soviet Union, people found their own ways to have fun.
Why is this necessary?
Throughout human history, people have found a way to have sex with people.
It really hasn't been that difficult, actually.
But they now have to do revisionist history, where the Soviet Union was secretly taboo, and that made the sex even more awesome.
I mean, listen to this.
Today, historians are uncovering a wide diversity of sex educational practices across the former Eastern Bloc.
The Poles had their own popular sex manual, The Art of Loving, which sold over 7 million copies after its first publication in 1978.
The Yugoslavs actually had erotic magazines, including Chick, which targeted youth, and Start, a Yugoslav version of Playboy.
While it is true that Soviet citizens lived in a much more conservative, amorous culture, the East Germans and Czechoslovaks lived in sex-positive nations where leaders believed that improved intimacy constituted a unique benefit of life in non-capitalist societies.
Oh my god.
So, the forced repression of hundreds of millions of people was cool because they found some porn manuals in Czechoslovakia circa 1979.
Well done, Washington Post.
I put it in things I like because, once again, it demonstrates that the media are off their rocker.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so, thing that I hate, number one, there's an awful story from the Daily Mail that of course has received no mainstream coverage outside the Daily Mail because it's too politically incorrect.
According to the Daily Mail, there's a teacher who is now saying that vulnerable populations of school children, particularly kids with autism, are being convinced by teachers that they are transgender.
Here's the article from the Daily Mail.
An astonishing 17 pupils at a single British school are in the process of changing gender, the Mail can reveal.
Most of the youngsters undergoing the transformation are autistic, according to a teacher there, who said vulnerable children with mental health problems were being tricked into believing they are the wrong sex.
The whistleblower says few of the transgender children are suffering from gender dysphoria, the medical term for someone who feels they were born in the wrong body, but are just as easily influenced, latching onto the mistaken belief they are the wrong sex as a way of coping with the problems caused by autism.
Earlier this year, the Mail revealed that a third of youngsters referred to the NHS's only gender identity clinic for children showed moderate to severe autistic traits.
It means that 150 autistic teenagers were given puberty blocker drugs, which stopped the body from maturing.
The teacher says she felt compelled to speak out to protect pupils, many of whom she believes could already be taking the powerful drugs and may go on to have life-changing surgery.
She believes schools and some politicians have swallowed hook, line, and sinker, a politically correct fallacy peddled by a powerful transgender lobby.
She was advised to keep parents and other teachers in the dark if a pupil claimed to be transgender.
Older pupils at her school who changed gender groomed younger, mainly autistic, students to do the same.
One autistic teenager is soon to have a double mastectomy.
This follows hard on the heels of that insane story in which a study that was originally published by Brown talked about the possibility that kids who hung out in groups where kids were glorifying transgenderism actually turned out at a disproportionate rate to be transgender.
Shocker, shocker.
That's not biological.
That would be social environment actually contributing to how people think of themselves, which is not unusual.
Social environment contributes to how we all think of ourselves.
This would just be the most powerful outlier Okay, that's a dangerous thing when you're talking about doing permanent physical damage to your body.
This study won't be covered.
We won't hear any more about that Brown study, of course, because we are supposed to believe that transgenderism is an innate biological feature that there's no proof for, but it's an innate biological feature that we are supposed to say was born into.
Now, it may be true that for certain transgender individuals, there's a biological component to their gender identity disorder.
Why not?
That makes sense.
But the idea that everyone who believes they're transgender is basically a woman in a man's body there is no biological evidence for, and the idea that everyone who now identifies as transgender is doing so specifically because of immutable biological principles and not environmental pressure or social peer groups, is not backed by science.
It's simply not scientific.
Okay, other things that I hate today.
This is a story about Amber Tamblyn.
So Amber Tamblyn, who supposedly is a nice person, on Sunday she did a reading at Vulture Fest.
It was a feminist AF reading at Vulture Fest.
Which means it's just a delight.
I mean, that's where I would go for fun.
Wouldn't you?
The feminist AF reading at Vulture Fest?
Sounds awesome.
The only thing that sounds better is clocking yourself in the head with a mallet, repeatedly.
The Hollywood Reporter framed Tamlin's reading as an emotional story about election night.
She read from her upcoming political memoir, Era of Ignition, coming of age in a time of rage and revolution, detailing her political awakening.
Because I definitely need to hear a lot about the political awakening of an actress.
I can't believe it.
A political awakening from an actress who moved to the left?
Crazy, I know.
Never happened before in Hollywood.
A young actress moving to the left in Ho- No.
No!
Katy Perry was there, obviously.
So was America Ferreira and comedian Amy Schumer on election night.
Tamlin was pregnant with her daughter at the time, and she said, I swigged some more Zantac, and my baby shoved her foot into my ribs, as if to foreshadow the pain that was yet to come.
And it's just a dark realization swallowed me.
I was going to bring a baby into this world, and not just any baby.
A girl.
She said she imagined giving her daughter to Canadians or Swedes to protect her from whatever damage she believed President Trump would do to the country.
So, and then she apparently said she was at a subway station that after the election and started experiencing pain and shortness of breath and said she collapsed and a homeless man offered to cut the umbilical cord if she was going into labor.
Instead, she was just having a panic attack because of Trump.
Amber Tamblyn, super wealthy, doing just fine.
Has Trump come for her?
Come for her daughter?
Nope.
I have to agree.
I sort of agree with Amber Tamblyn.
If you're a person who wants to give away your child to another country because a person of the opposing party was elected, as happens pretty much every eight years in this country, then I think you should also give your child to a foreign country or to a parent who is not you because you seem like a crazy person.
This is a general rule of thumb.
When Obama was elected, I had one kid, well, I had two kids during Obama's tenure.
Neither time did I say, you know what, Barack Obama's president, I wish I could just give these kids to a poor sheep farming family in New Zealand because Obama's president.
Because that would have been crazy.
Liberals do this and they go and read at the feminist AF vulture fest.
And they are praised by the Hollywood Reporter for it.
The genius, the genius of these folks.
Okay.
Time for a quick Federalist paper, since we haven't done one in a couple of weeks.
We are now on Federalist 50, making steady progress all the way through the Federalist papers.
This one is written by James Madison, and we can sum it up pretty quickly.
This particular...
Federalist paper is about whether there ought to be periodic re-evaluations of the Constitution, like should there be a provision in the Constitution that says we'll get together here every four years and reconsider the Constitution.
His argument is that it would undermine the continuity of the Constitution and the faith that we have in the sanctity of the Constitution to be rewriting it every four years or so.
He also says that When you make it a regular thing, then there will be a partisan breakdown in terms of the Constitution itself, and it will just turn into a partisan gridlock instead of allowing organically consensus to form about what needs to change in the Constitution, and you need that sort of consensus for these amendments to actually pass in the first place.
He points to the example of the night, the 1783, 1784 Pennsylvania Constitution, which did include a provision like this.
He says, is it is it to be presumed that at any future septennial epoch, the same state will be free from parties?
Is it to be presumed that any other state at the same or any other given period will be exempt from them?
Such an event ought neither be presumed nor desired because an extinction of parties necessarily implies either a universal alarm for the public safety or an absolute extinction of liberty.
What he's saying there is that you want the existence of people who disagree with each other, but you don't want that being fought on the basis of the Constitution every four years, at least not with regard to revising the Constitution, because that will polarize us even more.
Instead, you want a Constitution that unites us and political arguments that divide us, right?
That would be the ideal.
OK, well, I hope that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and you have a lot to be thankful for in this, the greatest country in the history of the world.
There's a lot to be grateful for.
Forget about politics for just a second.
And remember, you get to practice the religion of your choice in this country.
You get to speak freely.
You get to live in prosperity.
Economically speaking, you are the richest people in the history of the world.
Everything is pretty good.
So, cool down.
Everything's fine.
Enjoy.
And thank God for all the privileges and benefits we have as citizens of the greatest country in the history of the planet.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
We'll see you here next week.
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