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Nov. 28, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:52
Mulling Over Mueller | Ep. 668
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Will President Trump pardon Paul Manafort?
Will Robert Mueller indict President Trump's buddies?
Will you drive a car in 10 years?
These and other questions will be answered.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
You know, it's kind of an oingapotch news cycle, meaning that the news cycle is sort of all over the place.
It's just, it's a weird news cycle.
And there's a lot to talk about in a variety of different topics.
We'll get to all of those things.
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All right.
So today's news.
All right, fine.
Do we have to do the news today?
Let's do the news today.
All right.
So the latest news is with regard to Paul Manafort and Donald Trump.
This is my least favorite news cycle.
Why?
Because the truth is we're not going to know anything until the Mueller report actually comes out.
So everything is speculation.
Listen to a lot of other shows and you're going to get tons of speculation about Trump.
And Mueller.
And Manafort.
And is Trump going to be impeached?
And is Trump going to go to jail?
And is Paul Manafort going to be set on fire by Robert Mueller after being dumped off the top of the Randy's Donuts sign in downtown Los Angeles?
Who knows?
No one knows, right?
And this is why I really don't like talking about these topics so much, because I'm an evidence-based person, and that means that I like to wait for all the evidence to come out before speculating upon it.
Two things drive me to talk about this.
One, it's a slow news cycle.
We've got to talk about something.
And two, the fact is that the news is now replete with speculation about Mueller.
So let us debunk some of the speculation.
A couple of things right off the top.
First off, yesterday we reported that there was a shock Guardian story from the UK Guardian talking about Paul Manafort meeting with Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, which is a Russian front group that hacked Hillary Clinton's emails and John Podesta's emails, and then started releasing them en masse just before the election.
And the allegation has been that President Trump's campaign was working with Assange and with Wikileaks and with the Russian government in order to skew election results, specifically in order to prevent Hillary Clinton from being elected.
So, The Guardian comes out with this bombshell report, and this would be a big dot to connect, right?
Because now you would have the campaign chairman for President Trump meeting with Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, in advance of WikiLeaks releasing these emails.
Well, as it turns out, not so fast, everyone.
Let's hold that back.
Paul Manafort has now denied ever meeting with Julian Assange.
Now, why should we believe Paul Manafort?
Well, maybe we shouldn't.
I mean, Robert Mueller says that Paul Manafort's a liar and lied to him.
We'll get to that in just a second.
But Manafort himself says he is denied ever meeting Assange following a report he had met with the WikiLeaks founder at least three times in previous years.
On Tuesday, The Guardian reported, this is according to CNN.com, that Manafort had secretly met several times with Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, including around the time he was made a top figure in the Trump campaign.
The Guardian citing sources, just sources, right?
Not like sources where they are.
Are they in the Ecuadorian embassy?
Are they in Mueller's camp?
Just sources.
And whenever somebody says, I cite my sources, let's just remember that President Trump said that he had very good sources suggesting that President Obama was born in Kenya.
So sources don't mean anything.
Anyway, the Guardian citing sources, which is to say, no one, said Manafort had met with Assange in 2013, 2015, spring 2016.
Manafort responded to the Guardian's report.
He called it totally false and deliberately libelous.
And then he kind of took the lapels on his ostrich jacket and went, With them, because that's awesome.
Manafort said, quote, I've never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him.
I've never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly.
I've never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter.
We are considering all legal options against The Guardian, who proceeded with this story, even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.
The newspaper said it was unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.
It's not just Manafort saying that this is false.
Assange also says that it's false.
More importantly, there are a bunch of people who deal pretty regularly with Julian Assange and they say it is legitimately impossible for Manafort to have visited Assange and for it not to be recorded in the Ecuadorian embassy logs.
Because this is one of the problems with the Guardian story.
Nowhere in the embassy logs does Paul Manafort appear.
Eva Gollinger is an author who has visited Assange several times.
She says, quote, It is impossible that Manafort went into the Ecuador embassy to see Assange and was not registered or videotaped.
Everyone was, no exceptions.
I was there many times.
The security were not friendly to Assange.
They would have not done any favors.
And then she questioned the sourcing for the article.
She said they cite documents from Sinayn, Ecuador's intelligence agency, currently being disbanded because of dubious activities.
They've fabricated documents before to serve their agenda.
And they are definitely out for Assange because he published some of their secret documents.
The Daily Beast, Betsy Woodruff, noted that The Guardian then went and started stealth editing their piece.
Self-editing means you go and you edit a piece without actually noting the correction.
Sometimes it's innocuous, and sometimes you're actually changing the material in the piece without notifying readers, so that you're sort of hiding the boo-boo that you made before.
The Guardian weakened some of its language in the Manafort-Assange story.
So, originally it said, it is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.
They changed it to read, it is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.
Right, before the last apparent meeting, as opposed to before, but the last meeting.
So, they're now weakening all the language.
Manafort, as we say, is now threatening a lawsuit against the UK Guardian.
So all of the hubbub yesterday over this bombshell story that Manafort had met with Assange, it turns out that that may be collapsing in on itself.
Meanwhile, there's a story today about Jerome Corsi, who apparently has a deal with President Trump.
Jerome Corsi is the author and conspiracy theorist who had written an entire book about why Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
He used to write for WorldNetDaily.
And he now claims in a forthcoming book that he has a joint defense agreement with President Trump and was provided limited immunity during his testimony before special counsel Robert Mueller's grand jury to discuss a cover story he claims he crafted for Trump confidant Roger Stone.
This is according to the Daily Caller.
Corsi has been interviewed six times in the investigation over the course of more than two months, and he writes in a new book that he entered into a defense agreement with Trump after being advised that Trump's lawyer, Jay Sekulow, was interested in the arrangement.
The defense agreement would basically involve Corsi under investigation talking with Trump's team to inform them of the questions he was being asked by Mueller.
This of course would make Mueller deeply upset and angry because you don't want your witnesses talking to one another and getting their story straight.
Describing his interactions with the special counsel's office, Corsi claims he was granted what's known as limited use immunity.
For testimony he gave during his September 21st grand jury appearance regarding conversations with Roger Stone about an August 31st, 2016 memo he wrote about former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
Corsi says he received immunity for testimony that he and Stone developed a cover story to help explain Stone's now infamous August 21st, 2016 tweet that it would soon be Podesta's time in the barrel.
According to Corsi, He and Stone hatched a plan in which Corsi would write a memo about the Podestas to allow Stone to cite it as the basis for his tweet retroactively.
So the implication from Stone's tweet is that he knew in advance about Wikileaks releasing Podesta's emails and then Wikileaks released the emails showing that Stone had been coordinating with Wikileaks and presumably if Stone was in touch with the Trump campaign then this would be the avenue by which Russian collusion was taking place.
Corsi supposedly is going to testify that He and Stone came up with an arrangement where he would sort of backfill the story.
Instead of it being that Stone was working with WikiLeaks and then he sort of let the cat out of the bag saying that WikiLeaks was going to release stuff on John Podesta, now the story was going to be that Jerome Corsi had come up with a memo and that was the basis for Stone's tweet.
The revelation, if accurate, would undercut Stone's testimony to the House Intelligence Committee that opposition research on the Podesta brothers' business activities was the catalyst for the tweet.
Stone vehemently denied Corsi's claim about the origin of the memo to the Daily Caller on Monday.
He insisted that he and Corsi discussed the Podesta brothers' activities and that his tweet was a reference to oppo research that would come out on the topic.
And there are a bunch of Twitter posts on this particular subject.
Of course, he announced the release of his book on Monday in an interview.
He also claims that prosecutors wanted him to plead guilty to making false statements regarding WikiLeaks.
He rejected the offer, saying he would not plead guilty to a crime that he did not commit.
And again, he says that Jay Sekulow, Trump's lawyer, suggested a mutual defense agreement that could be verbal in nature and did not need to be put In writing, joint defense agreements are common in criminal proceedings when multiple witnesses and investigative targets are dealing with the same prosecutors.
Trump has one with Paul Manafort, for example.
So here's where things start to get dicey.
Does it look like Paul Manafort and Jerome Corsi and President Trump are coming up with a mutual defense agreement because they are trying to get their story straight and protect themselves from the from the special investigation of Robert Mueller, or is it that Robert Mueller is actually being predacious, that he's being predatory, that he actually is trying to peel off these people one by one and hit them with false allegations, and then force them to turn on each other and testify about each other falsely, and so you need a mutual defense agreement so that people can coordinate with each other.
From a defense perspective, the latter.
From a prosecution perspective, the former.
But does any of this look particularly good for President Trump?
Not really.
when you are coordinating with other witnesses in a case about you, it looks like you're trying to set up some sort of cover story.
Corsi writes of one instance in which his lawyer had contact with Trump's lawyer.
He says he wanted his lawyer to warn Trump.
We had to assume the special counselor would have everything.
All emails, text messages, written notes, phone records could be obtained by search warrants.
I wanted the president, I wanted the president warned not to give in-person verbal testimony to Mueller under any circumstances, he said, expressing concern that prosecutors were moving sort of perjury trap against him for misremembering details about a July 25th, 2016 email that he received from Roger Stone.
And one of those emails supposedly is an email from 2016 from Corsi to Roger Stone about the WikiLeaks email dumps.
NBC News has obtained draft court papers sent to Corsi by Mueller's office in which Corsi apparently said that Roger Stone asked him in the summer of 2016 to get in touch with an organization identified by Corsi as Wikileaks about unreleased materials relevant to the presidential campaign.
The email to Corsi on July 25, 2016.
From Stone apparently says get to Assange at Ecuadorial Embassy in London and get the pending WikiLeaks emails.
Corsi said he declined the request and made it clear to Stone that an attempt to contact WikiLeaks could put them in the investigators' crosshairs according to the draft court documents.
Mueller's team said that was a lie.
Instead of turning down the request, Corsi in fact passed it along to a person in London according to the draft court documents.
So we'll have to see how all of this shakes out.
Corsi, meanwhile, says, I didn't do any of this stuff.
And the Mueller investigation is simply trying to push me into making false statements about President Trump with the threat of prosecution looming over my head.
All of which raises another question.
Is President Trump going to solve this sort of Gordian knot by simply cutting it and pardoning Paul Manafort?
And this is one of the pieces of speculation that is out there today.
I think this is highly, highly unlikely.
I'll explain why in just one second.
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Okay, so, Paul Manafort's lawyer is said to have briefed President Trump's attorneys, according to the Boston Globe.
This is a report that came out yesterday.
A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president's one-time campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump's lawyers on his client's discussions with federal investigators after Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Trump's lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.
The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with Mueller's office when prosecutors discovered it after Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said.
Some legal specialists speculated it was a bid by Manafort for a presidential pardon.
And here's where we get into the diciest territory.
Will President Trump simply stop this investigation by pardoning Paul Manafort?
If Paul Manafort is indeed the key to this entire thing, will President Trump just say, listen, you guys have trumped up all these charges You never would have prosecuted him under any other circumstances except that he was involved with my campaign, you don't like me, so you went after him for a bunch of foreign affairs stuff that a bunch of lobbyists in Washington do all the time and get away with.
But you're going after him now, so I'm just gonna pardon him, and then you got nothing.
Then you can't try to leverage him into making false statements about me, or is he trying to pardon Manafort In order to obstruct justice, right?
Is he trying to pardon Paul Manafort in order to prevent the investigation from going forward?
Andy McCarthy has a long piece about this in National Review today.
He says, Mueller's prosecutors are laying the groundwork to argue that Paul Manafort should not get any credit for pleading guilty and sparing the public the need for a second trial because, as we learned yesterday, the Mueller team now says that Paul Manafort lied to them so they want to revoke his plea agreement and that would kick back in all the possible consequences.
Of severe jail time.
In the submission, the special counsel points out that Manafort did not decide to plead guilty until the last minute, so prosecutors in the court had to gear up for trial.
Moreover, the prosecutors emphasized the alleged breach relieves the government of any duty to support Manafort's claim that he has demonstrated acceptance of responsibility, which is a standard sentencing reduction for defendants who plead guilty.
Here's the key.
For their part, Manafort and his lawyers are clearly preparing to argue that Manafort was honest, but that Mueller's rabidly anti-Trump prosecutors did not like what he had to say, i.e.
he would not implicate the president in misconduct.
This would echo a theme posited by Judge T.S.
Ellis in Manafort's Virginia trial.
Mueller aggressively pursued Manafort on charges that had nothing to do with Russia's interference in the 2016 election in order to squeeze Manafort into singing or even composing as a witness against the president.
And this is where we get into the pardon issues.
In just a second, I'm going to explain to you where the pardon issue comes in.
So, as Andy McCarthy continues, he says, there is a highly unusual twist here.
The possibility that President Trump could pardon Manafort on the theory the Justice Department would never have charged Manafort for his political consulting activities in Ukraine and the lavish income he earned and failed to report from it.
And that Manafort was charged as a pressure tactic.
to help Mueller try to make a collusion case against Trump under circumstances where there is no evidence of a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy.
Many will thus detect a play for a pardon in Manafort's alleged breaching of the plea agreement, coupled with his public stance that far from lying, he has been resisting Mueller's heavy-handed attempt to make him lie.
This take on things finds support in some of President Trump's tweets, such as this one from August 18th, quote, Justice took a 12-year-old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him.
And unlike Michael Cohn, he refused to break makeup stories in order to get a deal.
Such respect for a brave man.
So McCarthy says he doesn't think that Mueller's report is forthcoming, but it is possible that President Trump could simply pardon Manafort, risk impeachment in the House, know that he's not going to get convicted in the Senate, and then see what happens right there.
And this is the case that is now being made by both Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone, is that Mueller's selective prosecution of Manafort has resulted in an attempt to make him lie, and that Mueller is now trying to make Jerome Corsi lie and trying to make Roger Stone lie in order to set up a chain of events that looks like Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi acting as go-betweens for WikiLeaks with the Trump campaign.
This is what Jerome Corsi was saying yesterday.
Again, you gotta take everything Jerome Corsi says with a very, very large grain of salt.
This is a guy who wrote an entire book about how Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
This is not a reliable source.
Here is Tucker Carlson asking him some questions last night on Fox.
I've read accounts in the press, I read one in the Washington Monthly, a liberal magazine, saying that you deserve to go to prison because you've expressed views that they don't like.
Do you think that your political views are playing a role in the decision of the special counsel to charge you with a felony?
Yes, I think, and also, by the way, they accused me of deleting emails and I told them to restore, they restored the emails that I supposedly deleted through the time machine.
This is a political winch-hut.
Okay, so, you know, this is Corsi's perspective.
It also is Roger Stone's perspective.
He says that Roger Stone says that Jerome Corsi's being browbeaten.
Of course, they all have a stake in saying this because if they're not being browbeaten, then somebody's going to jail, probably.
Here's Roger Stone trying to defend Jerome Corsi.
On August 21st, I posted a tweet that said, The Podesta's time in the barrel will come.
I meant that public scrutiny of the Podesta's Russian business interests, as I had been briefed about by Jerry Corsi, would be in the media.
Now Jerry Corsi has been browbeat into claiming that that was some kind of a cover story.
And because I was taking heat for that tweet.
But that's not even logical, Laura, because my tweet wasn't controversial until six weeks later when Julian Assange published John Podesta's emails.
Right, except that it would make sense for the tweet to be uncontroversial until then, because you said, cryptically, that there would be time for John Podesta in the barrel, and then later it was John Podesta's time in the barrel, which makes it seem like you had some inside information there.
All of this is questionable.
Will this result in Manafort being pardoned simply to end this?
I really doubt that.
I think that President Trump would not do that.
I think it would be a mistake.
I think that he would be impeached automatically by the new Democratic House.
I think that they would have a relatively solid basis for doing so.
It would look too much like obstruction for them to avoid doing anything else.
And it would put Republicans in a terrible position.
Now they either have to say that it's okay for the President to pardon people who are being questioned about his campaign activities in order to avoid scrutiny, or they have to vote against the President's remaining in office.
I don't think that President Trump is going in this direction.
Lending credence to the idea he might go in this direction was the fact that yesterday he was in an interview with somebody, I believe from the Washington Post, and he was asked about the possibility of pardoning Manafort.
He went off the record, and then the reporter said, can we put any of that on the record?
And then they went back off the record.
That suggests that Trump is thinking thoughts that he doesn't necessarily want people to know about.
Again, Mr. President, don't do this.
Let it go forward.
If this investigation turns out to be the sham that a lot of people think it is, if this investigation turns out to be as empty and as goal-seeking as it appears to be in many cases, then we will all be here to defend you against false charges.
But if you cut this thing short, it's going to look like you're guilty.
And it's going to look like you're guilty because maybe you're guilty.
So don't do it.
So don't pardon Paul Manafort.
It would be a big mistake at this point.
President Trump, however, is busy fulminating on Twitter about all of this.
Again, I'm not sure how this is helpful to him.
He is saying, Again, it's true.
The Mueller witch hunt is a total disgrace.
They are looking at supposedly stolen, crooked Hillary Clinton emails, even though they don't want to look at the DNC server, but have no interest in the emails that Hillary deleted and acid-washed after getting a congressional subpoena.
Again, it's true.
Hillary should have been prosecuted.
It is also true that this does not actually mean that you are innocent of things just because somebody else is guilty of a thing.
President Trump then retweeted an account called the Trump Train with a graphic of virtually every Democrat on planet Earth behind bars and it says now that Russia collusion is a proven lie, when do the trials for treason begin?
So, all good times over on President Trump's Twitter account.
In just a second, I want to get to President Trump, who appears to be fulminating more often than I think is useful for him.
Again, the economy's good.
I don't see why we're doing this.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so President Trump...
Obviously is is in a mood.
I think he's not happy with with that with the how the midterms went.
He shouldn't be.
We lost 40 seats.
Republicans did in the House.
They only picked up two seats in the Senate.
So it's 53 seat majority for Republicans in the Senate.
That is not a supremely strong majority.
It's a little stronger than it was.
Obviously, the House was a complete wipeout.
In the end, it was a blue wave.
People who tell you differently are fibbing to you.
2006 was a blue wave.
Democrats won in the House popular vote, not the stupid Senate popular vote, which means nothing.
In the House popular vote, Democrats won in 2006 by 8 points.
They won in 2018 by 8.1 points.
So if 2016 was a wave, so was 2018.
President Trump, not happy about that.
Obviously not happy about the media treatment, justifiably.
Obviously unhappy about all the headlines being leaked from the Mueller investigation.
And this is causing him to do what he does a lot in social media and publicly, which is puff up his chest.
And right now would be a good time to go quiet.
Seriously.
What President Trump needs to understand, I think that sometimes he gets it and sometimes he doesn't.
Let's put it this way.
I think he has one half of the equation.
President Trump has the capacity to draw spotlights.
That is a wonderful capacity in a politician.
President Obama could do it, too.
It's great.
When you're a politician who is capable of drawing spotlights from every angle, it means that you can shift topics pretty easily.
President Trump likes the attention.
He's always liked attention.
There's a guy who was on the cover of Playboy magazine back in the 90s.
I mean, this is somebody who does not shun attention.
But the president, because he has such capacity to draw attention, also has the capacity to deprive the media of fodder.
Just by going silent, the media would drive themselves nuts.
Every time President Trump goes out of the country and he travels around, he's busy all the time.
His approval ratings rise five points.
Not kidding.
Go back and look at the record.
The reason for that is because the media have nothing to play with.
The president is just going around doing presidential things.
He's not tweeting.
He doesn't have access to cable TV.
He's just going around doing what the president should be doing.
Every time President Trump misdirects away from a topic of importance or gives the media a topic to focus on that is not good for him, It is a problem for him and a problem for Republicans.
Well, President Trump, because he's in a bad mood, though, is now fulminating and he's doing it a lot on Twitter.
Again, Twitter is sort of his outlet.
I got a text from somebody today on the left saying, do you think President Trump is going on Twitter strategically?
And I was like, nope, I think he's bored.
And I think that's pretty obvious from his Twitter feed this morning.
He retweeted a tweet from a fake Mike Pence account.
He retweeted a bunch from an account called The Trump Train.
A couple of those tweets are actually factually... They're factually wrong.
So he retweeted...
He retweeted the Trump train saying, illegals can get up to $4,000 a month under federal assistance program.
Our social security checks are an average $1,200 a month.
Retweet if you agree.
If you weren't born in the United States, you should receive $0 of assistance.
That last part is true.
The other part is based on Canadian statistics.
It's not actually based on American statistics.
And then he started retweeting accounts that were tweeting out old footage of Hillary Clinton talking about Eric Holder and Cory Booker as black people.
Uh, and we'll get to GM in just a second.
But you can tell that President Trump is bored, and when President Trump is bored and feeling bad, he tends to sound off about how great he is.
I mean, because today ending in Y. So, he did an interview with, uh, he did an interview, uh, yesterday, in, or at least there was a new book out Tuesday, uh, and the president, in this book, said that, well, he said he feels that, quote, I blow Ronald Reagan away.
Mm.
It's a statement.
It's a statement.
He says, the amazing thing is that you have certain people who are conservative Republicans that if my name weren't Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I'm the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away.
Hey, I've said before, I think that President Trump has governed more conservatively than Ronald Reagan.
I do.
I think that he has governed more conservatively than Ronald Reagan.
He does not have Ronald Reagan's capacity to win 49 states, or to draw the country together, or to be optimistic.
Reagan was a lot more than just his policy.
But on policy, Trump isn't wrong that he's quite good.
But that was not the best quote.
The best quote from President Trump in these various interviews, I mean, this is like full-on Yogi Berra stuff.
It's so good.
So President Trump, in this interview, He did an interview on Tuesday with the Washington Post, and he said a lot of stuff.
So he was asked about the declines on Wall Street and GM's announcement it was laying off 15% of its workforce.
President Trump responded by criticizing the Fed.
He said he's not worried about a recession.
And then he said, quote, about the Fed.
He said, they're making a mistake because I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me.
Strong stuff.
Strong stuff.
I gotta admit, that's solid stuff.
I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me.
Well, it depends if you've had, like, a burrito lately, really.
If your gut is telling you more than somebody else's brain could ever tell you.
My colon tells me more than Albert Einstein's prefrontal cortex.
Let me tell you something.
My biotech is more intelligent than any number of experts from the American Enterprise Institute.
What's funny about this, now, I do have to note, and I'm making fun of President Trump over this, Barack Obama was exactly the same way.
Barack Obama was exactly the same way.
He famously, during the 2008 campaign, said that he was his best campaign manager, his own best speech writer, his own best policy wonk, he was his own best everything.
Like, Barack Obama loved him some Barack Obama.
I mean, Barack Obama, like President Trump, trusted his gut.
Mainly because he got to know his gut face to face by sticking his head up his own ass so often.
But, President Obama, when you talk about people who are egotistic, again, I'm making fun of President Trump simply because I think that President Trump Would be better served by simply receding into the background, letting his policies take the fore.
And by the way, he's not wrong when he says he'd get more praise if he acted more presidential.
What he's saying in that first quote about how he's better than Ronald Reagan.
Well, then why don't you let people, I don't know, look and enjoy your policies as opposed to you fulminating online.
In any case, as I say, when people say that Donald Trump is a wild departure from the president for presidential politics, Let's just remember, he's not the first guy who loves him some president.
Here's President Obama yesterday, openly lying about his record on fossil fuels, for example.
Barack Obama now takes credit for everything, from the economic recovery, the weakest economic recovery in American history that he presided over, and growth really began in earnest under a Republican Congress.
He blames, he takes credit for that, and now he takes credit for low oil prices.
This is just unbelievable.
Suddenly America's, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest... That was me, people?
I just want you to... So... So... It's a little like, you know, sometimes you go to Wall Street and folks will be grumbling about anti-business, and I said, Have you checked where your stocks were when I came in office, where they are now?
What are you talking, what are you complaining about?
Just say thank you, please.
So he's the president for the oil companies in Wall Street now, which is really interesting, because that's not how the oil companies felt.
When he takes credit for us being the world's biggest oil producer, with the leading oil producer, this is, honestly, this is sort of like the, it's sort of like, Ralph Branca taking credit for Bobby Thompson's home run.
I know it's an old reference for people who aren't baseball fans, but it's like a bad pitcher saying that he takes credit for the home run that was hit off of him.
The oil companies had to work around Barack Obama on a routine basis.
He was constantly attempting to prevent people from drilling.
It was President Obama who was trying to crack down on the fracking industry that made oil and natural gas that much cheaper.
And now he's taking credit for all of this.
So the reason I point this out is because it is simply not rare in presidential politics for presidents to take credit for things they have nothing to do with.
But that attitude does lead to bad policy, whether you're talking Republicans or Democrats.
And I'm going to get to that bad policy in just a second with regard to General Motors.
But first, let's talk about what you are going to get your loved ones for this holiday year.
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Okay, I want to talk about General Motors and President Trump's war with General Motors in just a second, but you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and check it out.
For $9.99 a month, you can get a subscription to Daily Wire.
When you do, you get the rest of this show live, the rest of Michael Moll's show live, the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live.
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You don't get that unless you're a subscriber.
So, for example, this week's Sunday Special features my good friend David Limbaugh, who I've known for 17 years but only met in person yesterday.
David is going to be on the Sunday special talking about, as I mentioned yesterday, our upcoming pre-Christmas series, Who Can Convert Ben Shapiro?
He has a new book called Jesus is Risen.
We talk about religion and politics and all the rest.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
I'm David Limbaugh.
I want to encourage you to tune in this week to the Ben Shapiro show, the Sunday special.
He was gracious enough to interview me and we talked about my book, Jesus is Risen.
We talk about Trump and Christianity, church and state, the founding fathers and whether they were Christian.
I think we have a good, wholesome discussion.
At least Ben contributed very well.
I was sitting here listening.
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Now, as I say, everyone in my family has been ill.
I have not.
And I'm not going to pretend that it's because of this Tumblr.
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Do you?
I mean, who knows?
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Lots of circumstances in life.
And every point is an inflection point.
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If I had not taken a sip from this, perhaps right now I'd be deathly ill.
I can't give you any more of a guarantee than that.
I'm sorry.
But you can get all of that for $99 a year.
Again, we are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
Okay, so speaking of fulmination, President Trump is very, very upset at General Motors.
General Motors has just decided that they are going to outsource a bunch of jobs.
They are going to cut a bunch of factories in the United States.
None of this is particularly shocking, but President Trump is very, very angry at it.
The reason he's angry at it is because General Motors basically signaled months ago that the steel tariffs that President Trump was now putting on were going to damage its business.
So at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio last year, he talked about how we weren't going to lose any automotive jobs.
Jim has estimated that the tariffs that President Trump put on steel and aluminum have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
They said that this was not the sole reason for the cuts.
Ford announced last month that it would make an unspecified number of cuts as part of a redesign of the company.
They say that the tariffs have cost the company $1 billion so far.
And Robert Scott, who's a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, left-leaning, said despite GM's assertions to the contrary, the company is likely to protect itself against a future economic downturn.
Says they can read the crystal ball.
They see what's coming.
This is chickens coming home to roost on the broader Trump economic policies.
Of course, this is a leftist saying so.
But this has got President Trump very angry because President Trump likes auto jobs.
He likes manufacturing jobs.
And he's upset with GM.
This has caused President Trump to get very angry at GM and blast them, saying that they better put jobs back in or we're going to kill the subsidies to GM.
So just to get this straight, the U.S. government never should have been subsidizing GM.
We should have allowed GM to go bankrupt back in 2008.
If we had allowed GM to go bankrupt back in 2008, it would have been scrapped and sold off for parts, or more likely the brand would have been maintained and bought up by other investors for pennies on the dollar, at which point they would have created new efficiencies and new cost of scale, new efficiencies of scale, It would have made the company better and stronger, and then it would have been on more competitive international footing.
Instead, we subsidized it with hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States Treasury.
And when we did that, We took an ownership stake in GM and then resold the ownership stake in GM and all the rest.
When we did that, we put them basically on the government dole, and this caused President Trump to say, okay, well, if you ship jobs overseas, then we are going to remove your subsidies.
Which, by the way, will actually involve GM losing more jobs.
See, taking more money out of GM's pocket doesn't make them more likely to bring the jobs back, it makes them more likely to cut more jobs.
Here's President Trump, however, saying that he wants to punish GM for making an economically feasible decision, thanks in part to his tariffs.
He's done a lot for General Motors.
You better get back in there soon.
That's Ohio.
And you better get back in there soon.
So we have a lot of pressure on them.
You have senators.
You have a lot of other people.
A lot of pressure.
They say the Chevy Cruze is not selling well.
I say, well, then get a car that is selling well and put it back in.
Okay, well thank you for that information on running a car company, President Trump.
The Chevy Cruze isn't selling well.
Maybe we ought to use a different car and put it back in.
That's what they're doing, but the Chevy Cruze is mainly manufactured in the United States, and a lot of their other cars, their SUVs, are manufactured overseas, or at least in part overseas.
Also, it's really silly to talk about where these cars are manufactured as though the Chevy Cruze is manufactured 100% in America.
That's not how any of this works.
There are supply chains that extend all across the world.
When you raise tariffs on products and auto inputs, it raises the price, it makes you less competitive.
So how did President Trump respond to all of this?
By more interference in the economy.
This is why I don't like when presidents take sole credit for economic wins or economic losses, as though they are responsible for creating jobs.
Obama was not responsible for creating jobs.
Private industry.
was responsible for creating jobs.
You can create a business climate that is friendlier for job creation, but you, the president of the United States, are not responsible for creating jobs because you do not have the capacity to do anything other than take money that does not belong to you and spend it on people who are then going to be in your political pocket.
So what exactly is President Trump doing?
So he put in the steel tariffs.
This damaged the car companies.
Now, in response, he wants to get more involved in the economy.
He wants to go after GM by removing their subsidies, which we should never have given them in the first place.
And then he wants to raise tariffs on car imports to create a protectionist kind of placid swimming pool for GM.
He says, the reason that the small truck business in the U.S.
is such a go-to favorite is that for many years, tariffs of 25% have been put on small trucks coming into our country.
It is called the chicken tax.
If we did that with cars coming in, many more cars would be built here, and GM would not be closing their plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Maryland.
Get smart, Congress!
Also, the countries that send us cars have taken advantage of the U.S.
for decades.
The president has great power on this issue because of the GM event that is being studied now.
So now, he threatened, so he did steal tariffs, which hurt the car industry.
Now he says, what if I protect the car industry by putting on tariffs?
Well, what will that affect?
That will affect everyone who buys a car in the United States.
It will now be more expensive to buy a car or a truck in the United States, which has downstream economic effects on other businesses, because now you're not going to be able to spend that dollar that you were going to spend on something else on that thing.
You're now going to have to spend it on this car because President Trump decided to raise the tariff rates.
This is the thing about policies like tariffs that have a small number of beneficiaries, but diffuse numbers of people who are hurt.
If it hurts me $100 worth, but somebody gets to keep a job at GM, it's very obvious to the person who keeps the job at GM that their job is due to the tariff.
It's not clear to me that my $100 increase in price outweighs that person's job.
But what if it's millions of people paying $100 extra?
All of this is not economically efficient.
It is simple redistribution of wealth.
That's all that's happening here.
This is not for national security reasons.
President Trump has a deep and abiding love for tariffs.
His abiding love for tariffs is going to be extraordinarily economically damaging.
He has a very, very strong economy.
The economy was probably artificially boosted last quarter because so many companies in the United States decided to import products now, as opposed to waiting for President Trump's tariffs to kick in.
Right now, a lot of American companies that are exporters are seeing retaliatory tariffs from other countries.
In particular, the soybean industry in the United States is about to collapse entirely.
Soybean exports, which from the United States mainly go to China, have decreased by 98% going into January, apparently.
Is that good for the economy?
You may say that we ought to fight China.
That's fine.
But let's not pretend that it's economically beneficial for us to do so.
That's silly.
But President Trump, again, when you think that the job of the president is to run things, to run the economy, to run things, then you get yourself into all sorts of hot water here.
Also, all of this stuff is simply not feasible in the long run.
I'm going to explain why in a second.
All these subsidies and tariffs and trying to protect certain industries, none of it's feasible in the long run.
Now, the reason that none of this stuff is feasible in the long run, the reason that tariff policy, that protectionism, That control from the top down, whether it's by Trump or whether it's Obama on oil and gas or whether it's Trump on cars.
The reason none of this is feasible in the long run is that technological advances outpace the capacity of governments to control those technological advances.
President Obama tried to shut down oil drilling.
What did that do?
It artificially raised the price of oil.
By doing so, it provided incentive for businesses to create fracking.
Those businesses then lowered the price of gas, natural gas, undercutting the coal industry, and also ensuring a cheap supply of natural gas for the future, because President Obama was restricting oil supply.
And the same thing is going to happen in the car industry.
Uber's CEO says, and I think he's entirely right about this, that in 10 years, nobody is going to own a car.
Here is what Uber CEO Dara Khrushchev, I think that's how it's pronounced, said that in a decade, nobody is going to own a car.
And I think this is probably correct.
Hopefully you won't own a car.
You'll essentially come to us and we will give you the choice of whether you want to take a regular Uber, you want to pool with someone, but we're also going to show you this is a bus stop that's next to you and a bus is going to be coming in six minutes from now.
You can take the bus today or you can take an electric bike or scooter today as well.
We want to give you every single choice.
Okay, so the car industry, I totally agree with this, by the way.
I think the car industry in the United States is going to completely collapse in a manner of, I think 10 years is too soon.
I think within 20 years, automated driving combined with Uber technology is going to allow you to not own a car.
Basically, you're just going to pull up an app on your phone, if we even have apps on phones by then.
We're going to be able to simply pull up an app on our phone, punch a button, and then a car with the requisite number of seats will arrive to take you to your destination.
It won't be worth it to own a car.
You're just going to buy a subscription from a company like Uber.
You're going to pay $100 a month to buy that subscription from Uber.
And you're going to pay that $100 a month instead of paying for an individual ride.
And you can use as many cars as you want.
And that's how the car industry is going to work.
How exactly do you crack down on that?
Well, people like Tucker Carlson have said on this show, actually, that they would prevent automatic driving from happening to protect jobs.
But you know what's going to happen then?
All that's going to happen then is other economies are going to take advantage of those technologies, and those other economies are going to grow faster than the United States economy.
You want to know why America's economy is the dominant world economy?
Because it does not prevent innovation.
Because it does not freeze the economy and attempt redistribution.
It does not see innovation as a threat.
It sees it as a benefit.
And for all those people who think, oh, well, we're going to kill too many jobs with all this stuff, we have literally said this about every technological advance of the last 200 years.
For 200 years, people have been doomsaying that every technological advance was going to end with massive unemployment.
It has not happened.
There are people who will be unemployed for a short period of time.
And then they will get jobs in other industries.
There will be people who are retrained for other jobs.
Should we ease their way?
Sure.
That's what social fabric is for.
That's where social institutions come in.
But this idea that from the top down you're simply going to redistribute jobs to particular areas you need to win in a presidential election, this says that the federal government is simply too powerful.
This says that the federal government is involved in crap that it should not be involved in, in the first place.
And that is true whether you're talking about oil drilling under Barack Obama, or whether you're talking about car industry stuff under Donald Trump.
This is not the business of the federal government.
This is not the business of the President of the United States, absent a national security need.
Meanwhile, I will say that President Trump's continued popularity has very little to do, I think.
There's been an attempt to link his popularity among Republicans with GM, blue collar, Rust Belt kind of stuff.
I don't think that's reality.
I think that President Trump remains popular because he has a gut level.
His gut is right on this.
He has a gut-level patriotism for the United States.
Unfortunately, his gut-level patriotism for the United States is not being reflected by millennials.
There's a new study out that shows that millennials, half of them, think that America isn't great and think that Barack Obama was more important than George Washington.
A new poll conducted by the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness found that a huge percentage of younger Americans are expressing their disdain for American ideals.
Almost half believe America isn't great.
Roughly 20% think the American flag is a sign of intolerance and hatred.
29% were okay with burning the American flag.
We have some serious crises of American conscience that are cropping up with younger Americans and in the near future.
That's why when President Trump says he's better than Ronald Reagan, if he wants to be better than Ronald Reagan, it can't just be that he's cutting regulation.
It has to be that he's making an affirmative case for America as a great free country and why you should join that adventure rather than sitting on the sidelines screaming about how America is terrible.
Otherwise we will see the end of America no matter how good the economy is.
People are driven by ideas.
People are driven by passion.
People are not necessarily driven simply by their pocketbook, and that is particularly true when you're talking about young people who mainly are living off mommy and daddy's pocketbook.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
This is the second book by Jesse Norman I've recommended in a couple of months.
I recommended his biography of Adam Smith.
His first biography was of Edmund Burke, one of the first real conservatives.
Edmund Burke's conservatism was of a brand that suggested that Basically, Western civilization had been the product of a fabric created over thousands of years and hundreds of generations, and that that fabric had to be preserved, and that if we were going to change the fabric, then we had best consider what it was we were removing before replacing it.
And this is why Edmund Burke was not a fan of the French Revolution, but he was a fan of the American Revolution, which he saw as Americans simply seeking to defend their rights as Englishmen.
And he saw the French Revolution as people who were seeking to overthrow the fundamental institutions of society.
The book is really good by Jesse Norman.
Edmund Burke, the first conservative.
This is not the only biography of Edmund Burke that's good.
Russell Kirk has one that's quite good.
If you are actually interested in conservatism, the history of conservative thought, and not merely tax rates, then it's incumbent on you to read some Edmund Burke, who really is terrific and an amazing writer, by the way.
Very readable, even though he was writing in the late 18th century.
So go check that out right now.
Okay, other things that I like today.
Well, I have to admit, That I do actually like this story from a sci-fi writer who says that the orcs from Lord of the Ring are racist.
I am not kidding.
Science fiction author Andrew Duncan has a message for JRR Tolkien fans.
He says Tolkien discriminated against orcs, and the Lord of the Rings books promote racism.
Duncan was discussing Lord of the Rings as part of a wider discussion on fantasy.
He says it's hard to miss the repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others, or that some people are just worse than others.
And this seems to me in the long term, if you embrace this too much, it has dire consequences for yourself and for society.
Uh-huh.
A couple of things.
Lord of the Rings was written with the Nazis in mind.
Are some people worse than others?
Yes.
Yes, they are.
You know how you could tell sometimes?
When they wear a swastika on their arm.
That's a pretty good indicator that's not a good person.
So, this is insane.
But again, for folks on the left who believe that everybody is of equal moral value, and that every choice is of equal moral value, this is silliness.
Also, the idea that it's discriminatory because it leads to the idea that biologically there are no good orcs.
It's a fantasy book, you dope!
And not only is it a fantasy book, nowhere in that book is there a suggestion that hobbits themselves are genetically good, right?
I mean, spoiler alert from 80 years ago, but Smeagol was once a hobbit, right?
So the fact is that Smeagol turned bad.
He turned into Smeagol.
So, this whole thing is just silly.
But, you know, silliness in the woke sci-fi community has become a thing, which is why I think sci-fi literature is getting worse and worse.
He says, we should allow the orcs to explain themselves.
Uh-huh.
So that's, yeah.
They mainly do.
It seems like they want to eat people.
That's their thing.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so, things that I hate.
There are all these stories that often go viral, and it's really absurd why these things go viral.
Here's one example.
There's a teen who graduated from a Catholic high school, and when he spoke at this Catholic high school, he was met with a standing ovation.
Why?
Because he came out as gay in front of the high school.
And here is what he had to say.
Announcing yourself to the world is pretty terrifying because what if the world doesn't like you?
I decided that it was finally time to tell someone the truth.
It wasn't easy, but I told my mum that I thought I might be gay.
When I said it, I just felt this energy pass through me, and I felt that was the first time I'd really been proud of who I was.
Okay, so everybody is, wow, it's so brave, it's so wonderful.
First of all, bravery requires risk.
I'm not sure what the risk is here.
I mean, this is a guy who's now being featured on the news for saying he's of a particular sexual orientation in front of a crowd.
Second, you know, I went to an Orthodox Jewish high school.
The standard at the Orthodox Jewish high school, there are standards on a lot of things, on Sabbath observance, on kosher observance, and yes, on sexual proclivities and sexual practices.
To go into a place where everyone knows the standard up front, and to enroll in that place with the agreement that you're going to abide by those rules, and then to get up and then say that the rules are bad as you graduate, is not really an act of respect.
It is not really an act even of self-respect.
It is an act of rebellion against the school that you basically lied to.
If you want to come out, come out.
Do whatever you want, man.
It's a free society.
I really don't care.
But, if you are going to go to, take my example, a Jewish day school, and then at your graduation, you're going to announce, you know what?
I hate Sabbath.
Sabbath is not for me.
Sabbath is dumb.
And I think this whole thing has been a sham.
Is that bravery, or is it just you being kind of a jerk?
Now, I'm not saying that being gay is him being a jerk.
Obviously not.
As I just said, if he wants to come out, let him come out.
But to take the advantage of a Catholic school graduation, and then to say at the Catholic school graduation, by the way, your entire moral standard with regard to sexuality is wrong, and you should change it because I'm gay, is really not an act of humility or decency.
It's really an act of self-aggrandizement that I don't think is really worthy of celebration.
Again, for the 1,000th time in this segment, do whatever you want.
But if the idea here is that you're doing something grand and good by challenging the status quo at a school that you apparently accepted the moral standards of when you were going there, seems to me a slap in the face to the religious upbringing from whence you came and the school to which you go.
You want to leave the school and then rip the school for its policies?
Fine.
You want to take advantage of their platform to talk about how you hate everything they stand for on this particular issue?
Because it makes you feel good in front of 1,500 people?
Not cool.
Now, if you want... And here's the other thing.
If the school approved the speech, if the school was cool with it, then still not sure how it's brave, because at that point the school approves of it.
So either this is an act of self-aggrandizement or it's not a lot of bravery.
Bravery would be if you want to come out and then challenge bad policy, right?
And you want to challenge a bad policy.
But if you want to go to a religious school that you went to and then rip the school, I just, I think that that's...
I think it's an act of true arrogance, in a certain respect.
And again, I don't think this kid thinks of it like that, and I don't blame him, but I don't think the media have to celebrate this sort of stuff either.
Okay, other things that I hate today.
So, there's this story about this American Christian missionary who was killed when he tried to contact a hostile hunter-gatherer tribe on an isolated island in the Indian Ocean.
So, some see John Chow as a symbol of Western arrogance.
This is according to the Washington Post.
A reckless evangelist who attempted to supplant a culture thousands of years old when he broke Indian law and set foot on the North Sentinel Island.
Some Christians see him as a martyr, if perhaps a misguided one, who recognized no exceptions to the evangelist's mission when he tried to take the Bible to a people known to kill outsiders on sight.
But only one person gleaned from Chow Slang a model for national immigration policy.
There's a piece in Australia about how the natives had a great immigration policy.
But in any case, here's where I think all of this goes wrong.
So I want to talk about the perspective that the tribe was okay killing this guy.
Why?
Just why?
Like, I don't understand.
Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
So, if you come to my house with a book in a Western civilized society, missionaries come to my house all the time because people knock on your door, and they want to talk about the Book of Mormon, right?
They want to talk about the Latter-day Saints, or they want to talk about Seventh-day Adventism, or something.
Let's say they did that.
I went into my gun safe, I took out my pistol, and I shot them to death on my doorstep.
This would make me a fairly crappy human being.
And when I say fairly crappy, I mean an irredeemably crappy human being.
If somebody came to me and said, I'd like to talk to you about Jesus.
Like I did my Sunday conversation with David Limbaugh and he said, I'd like to talk to you about my book, Jesus is Risen.
And I took this Tumblr and beat him to death with it.
This would make me a very, very bad person.
It would make me guilty of murder.
I would probably be executed if I were not in the state of California.
In the state of California, if you kill a Christian, then basically, they actually make you a saint, I think, in the state of California.
But if we were in a normal state, then this would make me a bad person.
I don't understand why, if you live in a primitive tribe, it's okay to kill somebody who shows up on your island with a book.
Why?
Is it because they're more innocent?
This noble savage routine?
Well, they're just noble.
Well, not really, when you kill somebody showing up with, again, If you're a Christian missionary showing up there with a gun to try and convert people at sword point, that's one thing.
If you're somebody who's showing up to talk to somebody about God and the afterlife, I don't understand why we should celebrate a pagan tribe for doing that when we would rightly in Western civilization excoriate anybody who did something similar to anyone of any particular religious sect.
Primitivism is still primitive even when practiced by primitive people.
Okay, and when I say primitive, that's not meant as an insult.
These are people who are literal hunter-gatherers who live in, like, loincloths.
This is like an actual description.
They're not sophisticates.
They're not cultural sophisticates, okay?
They're not building cars.
Xi'an has no plants on this island.
I don't understand why it is that we in the West are so sanguine about the evil activities.
And it is evil to murder people!
This shouldn't be controversial.
Evil activities of people who are not from Western societies.
Really, like, I would expect better behavior from my four-and-a-half-year-old.
My two-and-a-half-year-old not, because he's a monster.
In any case, let's talk about a Federalist paper.
So we are all the way up to Federalist 51, one of my favorite Federalist papers.
Wow, I really like Federalist 51.
One of the more famous Federalist Papers, and one of the most often quoted for a reason, is by James Madison.
It's about checks and balances.
Why we need checks and balances in the government and how to achieve that.
So there are several fundamental principles he talks about in Federalist 51.
He says, first, every department must be separate and have little impact on appointment to other branches.
So you can't have members of the executive branch appointing members of the legislative branch, or basically the legislative branch would be in control of the executive branch.
You can't have members of the legislative branch appoint members of the executive branch, or The executive branch will be in the control of the legislative branch.
This is one of the reasons why the idea of bureaucratic government is such a problem.
Because bureaucratic government, you basically have bureaucracies that are created by the executive branch and are given tremendous leeway by the legislature to create regulations that belong inside the legislature.
The founders never would have thought that there should be such a thing as a two million person executive branch.
It's insane.
Okay, two.
Branches must be able to avoid encroachments by other branches.
So, you want the branches to fight with each other and defend their own priorities and power from one another.
So, Madison says this, and this is, again, one of the most oft-cited parts of the Federalist Papers for a reason.
He says, The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.
It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.
But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
If men were angels, this is the most important single line in the Federalist Papers right here.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on the government would be necessary.
In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.
You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.
A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government, but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
So what he's saying is, people aren't angels, people aren't devils.
If people were devils, no government could control them.
If people were angels, you wouldn't need a government to control them.
So what you need is a government that can protect people from the predations of others, and at the same time, is capable of stopping its own predations.
How do you do that?
You do that by creating a multiplicity of interests and pitting them against one another, so only an overwhelming consensus on an issue allows anything to get done.
This is to protect the rights of minorities.
So he says, quote, it is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.
Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens.
If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.
Therefore, what you really need, he says, is that the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens that the rights of individuals or of the minority will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. - Yeah.
It is no less certain than it is important, notwithstanding the contrary opinions which have been entertained, that the larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government.
And happily for the Republican cause, the practicable sphere may be carried to a very great extent by a judicious modification and mixture of the federal principle.
So, we want the states to check the federal government.
We want the legislature to have two branches, to have two chambers that will check each other.
We want the legislature to check the executive, the executive to check the judicial, the judicial to check both.
We want all of these things to happen.
And we want that because we don't actually want lots of things to get done.
See, this is the great lie from every president.
Why can't we get more done?
Politics is broken.
Why can't we get more done?
We don't want things to get done.
Getting things done is a threat to your freedom.
The only way things should get done is if we were to have an enormous, if we were to have an enormous consensus on an issue, an overwhelming consensus on an issue.
If we were to have that overwhelming consensus on an issue, then we get things done.
You make a constitutional amendment, you pass a piece of legislation.
But, if not, then we should be very wary of doing things with the power of the ring.
The power of government is the power of the one ring.
Better that it should be wielded by no one, than that it should be wielded by one person who gets things done.
This is why I don't like pragmatism politically, and this is why I'm not in favor of people who think we should just run roughshod and break all the things in order to get done what I want to get done.
Because guess what?
That sword can be turned against you tomorrow.
Alrighty, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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