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Nov. 30, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:04
Russian Roulette | Ep. 670
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New revelations from the Mueller investigation.
A CNN commentator says an anti-Semitic thing and gets the boot, and we check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
It's here.
It's come Friday.
That's right.
We're here.
We made it all the way through the week.
But don't worry, there's plenty of news to get you through the weekend.
We will get to all of it.
And I promise you the next few weeks leading up to Christmas are going to be insane because every day since, I don't know, like four years ago has been crazy.
So that's not going to let up.
We'll talk about all of that in one second.
But first, let's talk about the national debt.
One point two trillion dollars.
That's what was added to the national debt in fiscal year 2018.
Economists say by the end of 2019, we'll be spending more on the interest of our national debt than we spend on Medicare.
By 2023, we'll be spending more on just the interest than we spend on our military.
As balloon payments become due, you need to ask yourself what the impact of the U.S.
dollar is going to be.
What is the impact on your investments and what is your plan?
Can you afford another hit to your retirement like the last downturn when the S&P dropped 50 percent?
It's worthwhile to have some hedges in your portfolio.
Hedge against inflation, hedge against uncertainty and instability with precious metals.
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All right, so, suffice it to say that the last 72 hours have not been kind to President Trump.
There have been a number of news items, and I'm going to try and break them all down for you today in a comprehensible fashion, because there's been so much news breaking with regard to the Mueller investigation that it's hard to keep on top of it, and I know that you're hearing two competing narratives.
Two competing narratives.
Competing narrative number one is the one you're hearing from the left.
Doom is imminent for President Trump.
He will soon be impeached.
It's all over.
It turns out that Michael Cohen is going to spill the beans.
And he is going to show us that President Trump actively colluded with the Russians in the election.
It's not just that he received information from Wikileaks via Roger Stone or something.
It's going to be that he was actively working with the Russians to militarize and weaponize that information.
And that he suborned perjury to do it.
That's claim from the left.
We're this close to impeachment.
Claim from the right, from people I respect, is that this is basically Robert Mueller in over his head, that he's come up with no actual evidence of criminality, and so he is now trying to create the illusion of collusion on various other matters.
So there's no actual criminal activity that took place, and thus all of these ancillary topics really have very little to do with the central contention of the investigation, that they oversold this investigation, and now Mueller is struggling to put together two and two to make it equal five.
Well, I think there is some truth to both of these and a lot of falsehood to both of these.
My general take is that the evidence is worse for Team Trump than it was a week ago with regard to their relations with Russia.
It looks like President Trump may have lied more than he did a week ago.
It looks like more members of his orbit have been complicit in working with Russian sources.
At the same time, the idea that charges of criminality are on their way, actual criminal collusion, criminal conspiracy, that still seems incredibly far-fetched to me.
So it could be ancillary charges of suborning perjury.
It could be ancillary charges of obstruction of justice.
Those things could be on the table.
But the central contention still has been not based in reality.
And I'm just going to show you the level of enthusiasm for folks on the left for charges that have not yet been proved.
And then we'll get to the actual charges.
So you can see Rachel Maddow yesterday on MSNBC.
She called into MSNBC and she said that because Michael Cohen, the president's personal lawyer, had pled guilty to a charge of lying to Congress, that this was the beginning of the end for little Trump.
Is Robert Mueller somehow throttled compared to how he used to be able to conduct his investigation and pursue prosecutions related to this matter?
Is he unable to bring new indictments because Matt Whitaker won't approve them?
If what you're saying is true and the investigation continues to be overseen by Rosenstein, it just puts a very different cast on this and I think it makes it It actually makes me feel like this must be a much more ominous moment for the White House.
Okay, so she doesn't know anything that makes it seem like a much more ominous moment, but it's ominous.
Joy Behar, who of course is kind of the stupid version of everyone on the left, just sort of shouts at things.
So here's Joy Behar shouting that Trump should resign.
Why?
But he should resign.
Why?
Because she's Joy Behar and she says stuff and her face opens and sound comes out.
Today is a good day for Donald Trump to resign.
I really believe that.
20 years for me.
That would be my gift.
You're here for 20 years on the view.
Donald, do it for me.
Today is a good day for...
I struggled to name a day that Joy Behar doesn't think would be a good day for Donald Trump to resign.
So let's try and separate out all of the various strands here.
So over the past 72 hours, there have been a bunch of things that have happened.
The first thing that happened, Michael Cohen pled guilty to lying to Congress about a Trump Organization Russian business deal.
So on Thursday, Cohen pled guilty to lying to Congress, we talked about this yesterday, about the Russian investigation in a plea deal with Robert Mueller.
Cohen already pled guilty in a Southern District of New York case regarding alleged campaign finance violations in making payments to former Trump paramour Stormy Daniels earlier this year.
You remember that one?
The allegation is that President Trump had basically funneled personal funds via Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels, but he didn't use his own money.
He had Michael Cohen make an in-kind contribution in order to stop Stormy Daniels from coming clean, and this was somehow a campaign finance violation.
Maybe, maybe not, but that's what happened earlier this year.
Now, Cohen admitted he lied to Congress when he said that the Trump organization's attempt to set up a Trump Tower in Moscow ended in January 2016.
So he had testified that in January 2016, Trump stopped talking about the Trump Tower in Moscow before the end of the primaries.
And before the general election, Trump himself had tweeted in the middle of 2016 that he had no business relationships in Russia.
Now, the language could be true, even if he was in negotiations for those business relationships at the time, and even if he had negotiated with the Russians regarding a Trump Tower in Moscow, like, up to five minutes ago.
Ironically enough, that tweet that people are citing, the one where Trump says, I have no business relationships in Russia, that tweet could be I think escaped by President Trump in the exact same way that Bill Clinton tried to escape a perjury charge when he said that he had not had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.
If you recall, his claim was that in present tense, he was not having sex with Monica Lewinsky.
And then he was asked, well, you did in the past.
And he said, right, but it depends on the definition of is.
Right.
Well, this could be the same thing.
You could have President Trump saying, right, I don't, I said, I don't have relationships with business in Russia.
Meaning like right now, but five minutes ago, I did.
In any case, Cohen apparently lied to Congress.
He says that he made the false statements to be consistent with individual one's political messaging and to be loyal to individual one.
Now, what this, what this plea deal by Cohen does not state is that President Trump instructed him to do all of this.
President Trump could have been out there saying, listen, I have no business relationships in Russia, and Cohen, in order to cover President Trump's ass, basically took matters into his own hands, and he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, this all ended back in January, without Trump actually informing him that he should lie to Congress.
This does make a difference, because if you are suborning perjury, that was one of the charges that was brought against Richard Nixon in his impeachment case.
It was one of the charges brought against Bill Clinton in his impeachment case, is what David French and I were talking about before the show.
This morning, David, of course, writes for National Review.
Cohen also admitted that the Moscow project was discussed all the way through June 2016 and that he communicated directly with the office of Vladimir Putin in January 2016.
In September 2017, Cohen had explained that he had nothing to do with any Russian involvement in our electoral process and never saw anything, not a hint of anything, that demonstrated Trump's involvement in Russian interference in our election or any other form of Russian collusion.
Now, again, those two statements could still be true.
It could be that he was doing business with Russia.
And that that does not involve collusion.
Because I guess the theory of the case here is that somehow, if Trump was doing business in Russia, that this was a quid pro quo, and that Putin wanted to help him because he was doing business in Russia, none of that has been proved at this point, like, at all.
Trump, for his part, denies working on the Moscow deal.
He says, that was a project that we didn't do.
I didn't do.
It was a project that wasn't done for a lot of reasons.
I was focused on running for president.
I wanted that to be my primary focus, not running or building a building.
His ongoing business relationship with Russia, again, would not actively amount to criminal activity.
This is what Jake Tapper on CNN pointed out to a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jerry Nadler, yesterday on CNN, and that Democrat could not explain how the Trump Tower attempts to be built in Moscow had anything to do with electoral hacking or electioneering.
I look at these documents and I don't see any evidence of conspiracy between members of the Trump team and members of the Russian government to interfere in the election.
He's mixing his personal business profits with respect and perhaps putting them over the interest of the United States and lying to the electorate about it.
Sure, it stinks.
I'm not saying it's not, but it's not conspiracy is all I'm saying.
Okay, so what Tapper is saying is exactly right.
You can say that it stinks, right?
You can say that President Trump You know, signing business deals with Russia, or trying to do so in the middle of an election where he's praising Vladimir Putin that it smells to high heaven in the same way that it smelled to high heaven when the Clinton Foundation was taking all sorts of donations from various and sundry foreign nations who are suddenly getting special treatment from the Hillary Clinton State Department.
You can say it stinks in the same way that Barack Obama's administration stunk in terms of Joe Biden and his family making a big deal with the Chinese government while Biden was vice president, according to Peter Schweitzer.
You can say all of those things.
None of that is necessarily criminal.
Now, President Trump went on Twitter this morning and he said, Oh, I get it.
I'm a very good developer, happily living my life.
When I see our country is going in the wrong direction, to put it mildly, against all odds, I decide to run for president and continue to run my business.
Very legal and very cool.
Talked about it on the campaign trail.
Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia.
Put up zero money, zero guarantees, and didn't do the project.
Witch hunt!
And so this is the way that he is spinning this.
Again, that's a little bit different from, I didn't have any relationships in Russia, I didn't do business in Russia, nothing is happening here.
That seems to be a bit of an exaggeration, at the very least, or a lie at the very most, but that, again, is not perjury because he has not testified to any of that.
Okay, so that was story number one, the Michael Cohen pleading guilty and saying that he perjured himself in front of Congress about the involvement of the Trump family and Trump organization in a business deal in Russia.
Again, that does not amount to electoral collusion.
It does not amount to election hacking.
It doesn't amount to a quid pro quo.
It doesn't amount to any of those things.
It amounts to an ancillary crime that took place after the campaign.
When Michael Cohen was testifying before Congress and it has a lot of people on the right asking, OK, well, we know James Clapper lied in front of Congress.
We know Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress.
We know that a bunch of officials from the Obama days lied in front of Congress.
Hillary Clinton lied in front of Congress on Benghazi for that matter.
We know all of those things, but none of those people were prosecuted.
So is this just an attempt by Robert Mueller to cram down a crime on Michael Cohen to get him to flip on Trump?
The answer is maybe.
But does that mean that Trump is off the hook?
Not necessarily.
Two things can be true at once.
One, it's not fair that all those other people went unprosecuted.
Two, Michael Cohen may have lied to Congress.
Three, this actually does not mean that Trump colluded.
It does not support the central charge that Trump colluded in conspiracy to hack the election.
We'll get to some of the other news events.
I'm trying to break this down for you in as simple a fashion as possible, then we'll get to the latest updates.
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Okay.
Back to the revelations of this week.
So, revelation number one was Michael Cohen's testimony.
He pled guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump Tower in Moscow, which apparently was still being negotiated by members of Team Trump, up to and including possibly Donald Trump Jr., all the way up to June 2016.
Two, Mueller's team is now looking into President Trump's phone calls with Roger Stone, right?
This is another revelation we talked about earlier this week.
Basically, the idea is this.
There is a chain of gossip that goes from WikiLeaks to Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist, to Roger Stone, another top political operative slash conspiracy theorist, to President Trump.
And Trump is calling Stone, who's getting information from Corsi, who's getting information from WikiLeaks.
And basically, via this process, Trump is saying to Stone something like, you know, what are you hearing?
And Stone's saying, well, I'm hearing from my good friend Jerry Corsi that WikiLeaks is going to dump some stuff on Hillary's health.
Maybe she should talk about Hillary's health.
And Trump's like, OK.
And then the next day he goes out on the stump and he says, Hillary, looks like she's going to keel over.
OK, that's not collusion.
That is Trump operating off rumored information.
Not the same thing as Trump actively militarizing information with the help of the Russian government in exchange for something happening.
Is it good?
No, it's not good.
Hillary Clinton actually did do the exact same thing during the 2016 election with regard to the Ukrainian government, which was providing her dirt on Trump at the same time that was reported by Politico at the time.
Stone denies any of his email conversations with Corsi came up with Trump.
He says, I didn't actually talk with Trump about the WikiLeaks stuff at all.
Maybe, maybe not.
We'll see what Mueller has.
OK, number three, Paul Manafort had a plea deal that fell apart this week.
OK, that plea deal basically suggested he was going to turn on Trump He says he's no longer going to do that.
Mueller accused him of lying to him and voided his plea arrangement.
And Mueller found out that Manafort's lawyers have been coordinated with President Trump's lawyers.
Now that could actually be a problem for Trump because if Manafort's plea agreement voided the joint defense agreement between Trump And Manafort, then all of those negotiations, all of the information that passed hands, if Trump was telling Manafort to fib to Mueller, for example, if any of that happened, that could now be subject to Mueller scrutiny.
So that could be very bad for Trump.
In a second, I want to tell you about the consequences of this, give you the latest updates.
So here are the latest updates that we have over the last 24 hours.
According to Axios, they're reporting what they think is going to come next.
Garrett Graff writes a piece for Axios talking about what he thinks is going to happen now.
Now, he says, Michael Cohen's lies to Congress fit an odd pattern.
Multiple people in Trump's orbit have outright lied or forgotten about a whole variety of contacts with Russian officials, developers, oligarchs, and emissaries.
It's a uniquely consistent problem across many top aides that only seems to occur when the subject is Russia.
And he says, remember, Michael Cohen's two major revelations so far have come in just two fairly limited specific episodes, both of which investigative reporters have unearthed ahead of time Stormy Daniels' hushed money payments and the Moscow Trump Tower project.
Cohen worked with Trump for a decade.
What else don't we know?
Prosecutors ethically can't let a witness testify or plead if things they don't believe are true.
So everything Cohen is saying in court, for all the talk about they're making Cohen lie, Mueller would then have to be violating basic legal conduct.
Every twist of the investigation shows that Mueller knows far more than we thought he did, according to Axios.
Cohen's plea deal shows he has phone records.
The aborted Jerome Corsi plea agreement shows Mueller has emails.
The fact that Mueller knows Paul Manafort was lying to him likely indicates heretofore unseen corroborating witnesses, documents, and more.
So, you know, it's worthwhile waiting at this point.
Next in the crosshairs probably, probably, is Donald Trump Jr.
This is the latest, this is sort of the latest spin on this.
According to ABC News, The admission by President Trump's longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, that he lied to Congress about the Trump Organization's plans to build a Trump-branded skyscraper in Moscow, which, by the way, was supposed to have included, like, a $50 million penthouse for Vladimir Putin, has brought new scrutiny upon the sworn testimony of other Trump associates, including his oldest son.
Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has called on the committee's Republican leadership to accelerate the release of transcripts from interviews they conducted behind closed doors to the special counsel.
And the public so they could be analyzed for misleading statements.
So it looks now like Schiff is going to start targeting Democrats are going to start targeting everybody else in Trump's orbit, hoping that those people will eventually flip on Trump or Trump will be forced to pardon them.
Or that if Trump does pardon them, then they will charge him with obstruction for trying to prevent them from testifying about him.
Here's Adam Schiff, who, again, has a pup tent set up at both MSNBC and CNN and doesn't actually work for a living.
I should know.
He's my representative in California.
Here's Adam Schiff.
We are going through the witness transcripts right now, looking at Donald Trump Jr.' 's testimony, looking at Jared Kushner's testimony, looking at the testimony of Felix Sater and others to determine, okay, what does this tell us about their truthfulness?
What missing pieces does this fill in?
Mark Warner, who's a senator from Virginia, he says, let's face it, you've got all these close associates of the president, one after another, pleading guilty, often pleading guilty about their ties to Russia and Russians.
He said, what are they covering up for?
The reason Donald Trump Jr.
could be in the crosshairs is because during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2017, he was asked about efforts to build Trump Tower projects in Moscow.
And at that time, he was asked specifically about the deal.
Right.
Senators discussed at least two potential developments involving the Trumps.
Trump Jr.
said one involving the family's partners in this universe pageant died of deal fatigue by the end of 2014.
He said, certainly not 2016.
There was never a definitive end to it.
The proposed deal being worked by Cohen came soon after.
Trump Jr.
said he knew very little about the proposal.
Court filings, however, suggest members of Trump's family were looped into discussions about the proposed deal, referred to Trump as individual one.
But that still doesn't answer How much Trump Jr.
knew, right?
If he said he knew very little about the proposal other than he thought that Trump had signed a letter of intent to pursue it, that may not in fact be lying.
All of which is to say, we still don't know what Mueller knows.
We still don't know what is coming.
What we do know is that the original claim In all of this, the original claim, the powerful claim, from the very beginning, is that President Trump was colluding with the Russians to hack the election.
And the idea of hacking the election meant that there was an attempt by Trump to actively collude with the Russians to weaponize information Hacking Hillary Clinton's emails, that his people were working with the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails, or that there was a quid pro quo and Trump was going to give the Russians something in exchange for going after Hillary Clinton or something like that.
None of that has yet been proven.
So, there are only a couple of paths that seem quote-unquote impeachable.
Path number one, Trump suborning perjury.
He told Michael Cohen, I need you to go out, I need you to lie to the American people, I need you to lie to Congress, I need you to actually commit a crime.
That would be path number one.
Suborning perjury is in fact a federal crime.
That would probably be an impeachable offense given the precedent of Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
Precedent number two for impeachment would be if Trump actually participated in some sort of quid pro quo.
The soft and maybe most plausible scenario is that Trump had heard about all of this stuff and that he was fibbing about having heard about all of this stuff.
Is that impeachable?
Probably not.
Is it devastating for Trump 2020?
It's certainly not good for Trump 2020.
But again, We have yet to see the other shoe drop, and I'm happy to wait until the other shoe drops because all of the information will be forthcoming.
This is not me kicking the can down the road.
It's just we don't have enough information yet.
So I'm not going to jump to conclusions.
OK, in just a second, I want to talk about this horrifying report about U.S.
life expectancy plus I want to get to Mark Lamont Hill, who was fired from CNN yesterday.
First, let's talk about how you defend yourself.
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Okay, so, in media news, Marc Lamont Hill has now been fired from CNN.
He was fired for a good reason.
Because he went in front of the UN, in front of a bunch of genocidal, anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic countries, and he said, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
Okay, that is a Hamas slogan.
The slogan is that Israel will be fully destroyed and that all the Jews in the area will be killed or expelled into the sea.
Okay, that is literally what that means.
This is not a dog whistle.
This is just saying stuff out loud.
That's not a dog whistle.
That's not making a vague reference.
Now, Markleman Hill tried to claim, no, I was just saying human rights for everyone.
Really?
That's why you, in front of the UN, justified terrorism against Israelis?
I mean, he literally did this, and then he went out and spouted a slogan that received wild applause from the Iranians, from the Palestinians, from everyone who wants to see the Juden pushed into the sea.
So, Hill did all of this, and it sparked immediate backlash.
Why?
Because it is a Hamas slogan.
So CNN eventually, so Lamont Hill then tweeted out, he's not anti-semitic, he said, I do not support anti-semitism, killing Jewish people or any of the other things attributed to my speech.
We didn't attribute it to your speech.
You said it.
It is not attributed.
It's just anti-semitism.
And he said, what I meant by river to the sea was not a call to destroy anything or anyone.
It was a call for justice, both in Israel and in the West Bank, Gaza.
The speech very clearly and specifically said those things.
Actually, the speech did not clearly and specifically say any of those things.
This is just a blatant attempt to rewrite all of this stuff.
I mean, this is what he actually said at the UN.
Contrary to Western mythology, black resistance to American apartheid did not come purely through Ghandian nonviolence.
Rather, slave revolts and self-defense and tactics otherwise divergent from Dr. King or Mahatma Gandhi were equally important to preserving safety and attaining freedom.
If we are to operate in true solidarity with the Palestinian people, we must allow the Palestinian people the same range of opportunity and political possibility.
So he's talking about slave revolts and he's comparing that to Palestinians committing acts of terror and defending it.
So all of this is just a lie and so CNN fired him.
Now this raised a lot of questions from people about whether he ought to be fired.
Here is the rule on whether you ought to be fired because we've had several situations in which commentators have said things or tweeted things and then they were fired.
So I defended the Roseanne firing.
The reason I defended the Roseanne firing at the time is because I said that NBC Did not have evidence that she was a quote-unquote racist.
And then she said something about Valerie Jarrett that was on its face racist.
She is the character.
NBC does not have to take a million dollar loss in order to keep promoting a show that is going to get destroyed in the ratings.
That is not their responsibility.
It went to the core business.
She said something unacceptable and it was new material.
I said about Sarah Zhang, who's a columnist for the New York Times, that she should not, in fact, be fired.
The reason was not because she hadn't said terrible things in the past.
It was because people dug up old stuff she'd said in the past.
The New York Times had hired her knowing all that stuff was there.
And so there was no new information being presented to the New York Times.
It was just a social media mobbing.
In the same way I defended James Gunn, right, who had a bunch of old bad tweets, bad jokes about pedophilia and such.
And I said, Disney knew about this at the time.
This is just a social media mobbing.
So my basic rule is this.
Private companies, first of all, have a right to do whatever they want.
Number two, if you threaten the brand of the company, the company has a responsibility to its shareholders to take you out.
Number three, the question is whether a new piece of information has been emergent or whether this is just ginned up outrage about a piece of old Twittery.
Okay, Mark Lamont Hill did something new.
We knew that Mark Lamont Hill did all this stuff years ago.
If, for example, people said, you know, Mark Lamont Hill, back in 2008, defended Louis Farrakhan, he should be fired.
I'd be like, probably not.
Probably not.
Now, I don't like Mark Lamont Hill, I think he's terrible.
But, probably not.
But this is a new thing that he did.
A new piece of information.
So CNN, not only had every right to fire him, this was a piece of open antisemitism.
Now, I have to tell you, it's unbelievable, UNBELIEVABLE, how exactly the folks on the left have covered the Mark Lamont Hill statements.
And it just demonstrates that for the left, as long as you say anti-Semitic things about Israel, we pretend that it's not anti-Semitic.
Okay, the actual headline from the Washington Post was this, CNN fires Mark Lamont Hill in wake of remarks criticizing Israel and calling for a free Palestine.
That is not why they fired him.
They fired him because what he said was anti-Semitic.
It wasn't that he was criticizing Israel and calling for a free Palestine.
If you actually want to quote the entire phrase, quote the entire phrase.
This is just an outright lie.
There are people who are in favor of a two-state solution, who say, yeah, we want a free Palestine.
You know who would be among those people?
Members of the Israeli cabinet, who have called for a two-state solution for nigh on 30 years.
It's not going to happen, by the way, because the Palestinians don't want a two-state solution.
But that's not what Lamont Hill said.
He said, free Palestine from the river to the sea.
The river meaning the Jordan River, the sea meaning the Mediterranean Sea.
You know what's in the middle of there?
That would be Israel right there.
So he's talking about the complete destruction of the state of Israel.
That's a blatantly anti-Semitic statement.
And the Washington Post covers it as though it's just controversial.
Mostly just controversial, you know, not anti-Semitic per se, come on!
And The Hill does the exact same thing.
So The Hill's headline was suggested something like... Suggested exactly the same thing, that it was just a controversial statement that Marc Lamont Hill hadn't done anything truly terrible.
He hadn't said anything anti-Semitic.
It was just, you know, a little weird.
It was just a little weird.
Again, the willingness of so many on the left to overlook anti-Semitism coming from the left by saying, well, it's not anti-Semitic, it's just anti-Israel.
It just shows you that when people say, I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm just anti-Israel, maybe that's true.
But there has not yet been an anti-Semite who is not anti-Israel.
I mean, here's the headline from The Hill.
CNN cuts ties with Marc Lamont Hill after Israel comments.
They didn't... People make comments on Israel all the time on CNN.
That is not exactly what happened.
Now, contrast this media coverage of Marc Lamont Hill's comments with the media coverage of Tucker Carlson.
And you can see the double standard.
It's the same Washington Post that said that Marc Lamont Hill was only being criticized for being anti-Israel.
That same Washington Post claimed yesterday, the media critic Eric Wemple, that Tucker Carlson of Fox News was a neo-Nazi favorite.
What proof do they have that Tucker Carlson is a neo-Nazi?
Or is complicit with neo-Nazis?
Or is working with the neo-Nazis?
Their only proof is an article from BuzzFeed talking about how the Daily Stormer, which is a neo-Nazi website run by a piece of crap named Andrew Anglin, featured articles about Tucker Carlson like 265 times.
"265 times." Wemple said, "or as a host like Hannity, for example, "forever parrots Trump's talking points, "Carlson has consistently pursued storylines "and polemical themes that please racists." Carlson hypes alleged crimes and dislocation caused by immigration.
He demands the U.S.
elites defend the cliché that diversity is our greatest strength.
He circulates bogus material about South Africa's alleged injustices against white farmers.
And he cheers Trump's hard-line immigration policies.
Okay, how any of those things are neo-Nazi material is beyond me, but that didn't stop Eric Wemple from basically labeling Tucker Carlson complicit and working with neo-Nazis for saying things that are basically conservative slash populist, and then lumping him in with the neo-Nazis.
So let's just get this straight.
Marc Lamont Hill says the Jews should be killed between the river and the sea.
When you say pre-Palestine, from the river to the sea, you're talking about a Judenrein area called Palestine where no Jews live, and the destruction of the Jewish state as an entity.
That, according to the Washington Post, is just controversial anti-Israeli commentary.
Tucker Carlson, however, for saying that he disapproves of illegal immigration and wonders whether diversity is in fact strength or whether we have to have some common set of shared values, that makes him a neo-Nazi.
The media bias when it comes to the accounts of particular viewpoints is truly astonishing.
Truly, truly astonishing.
Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about a couple of controversies with regard to Twitter, and then the worst story of the day.
But first, let's talk about how you can save on your healthcare coverage.
Did you ever make a change and wonder to yourself, why didn't I do this a long time ago?
That's what's happening with thousands of people with regard to their healthcare.
They're joining MediShare, and they're asking themselves, why didn't I do this earlier?
MediShare is based on the biblical principles of caring for and sharing in one another's needs.
As such, MediShare is more than healthcare.
It's a community of believers who share one another's healthcare costs and even pray for each other.
MediShare is exactly what I've always talked about when you talk about the formation of community and social fabric to take care of one another.
This is what MediShare does in a way that saves you money.
It's growing like crazy.
They have 400,000 members.
To give you an idea of the savings, the typical MediShare family saves 500 bucks a month.
That's a lot of money.
What do they do?
Well, basically, they're making sure that if, God forbid, something catastrophic happens to you in terms of health, that you are now covered and that that cost is shared among this community of believers.
And again, every time you have a health care problem, you legitimately have people writing to you if you're a member of MediShare and talking about how they're praying for you.
Seeing what they can do for you on a charitable basis as well.
Since its inception in 1993, members have shared more than 1.9 billion dollars in medical expenses.
MediShare works.
And it has another bonus, which is you don't have to pay for things that you don't believe in.
So you're not buying insurance from a typical insurance company and the money is going to cover abortion coverage.
So do something you believe in and save a lot of money to boot.
This is one of those why-did-you-wait-on-it things.
Here's your chance to join in.
Call 844-61-BIBLE.
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That's metashare.com-slash-ben.
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I can't recommend Metashare highly enough to people who are Christian believers.
If you are a Christian and you are looking for healthcare coverage, and you are looking for a community and a social fabric to pick you up, And you want to save money on your health insurance?
This is the best way to do it.
Go to MediShare.com slash Ben.
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Fantastic option, particularly for young families.
It really is quite terrific.
Okay, so I want to get into...
Hey, Twitter controversy, and the worst story of the day, and the mailbag.
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So yesterday, in other news, Laura Loomer, she'd been banned from Twitter.
The reason that she'd been banned from Twitter is because she tweeted something out about the evils of radical Islam.
And she did something that I thought was actually quite good, for the most part, and then she blew it with some of her publicity ploy.
So she chained herself to the Twitter headquarters to draw publicity.
Totally fine with this.
It's a form of protest.
She's totally fine doing it.
And she pasted, above the Twitter doorway, a couple of competing tweets.
One, from Louis Farrakhan, which has not gotten Louis Farrakhan banned.
It says, I'm not an anti-Semite, I'm anti-termite from Louis Farrakhan.
And she juxtaposed that with her own tweet, which said something like, isn't it ironic how the Twitter moment used to celebrate women, LGBTQ, and minorities is a picture of Ilhan Omar.
Ilhan Omar is the Minnesota representative who is pro-BDS.
She says she is a pro-Sharia and she is pro-FGM, female genital mutilation.
The reason she says that is because Ilhan Omar is one of the four members of the Minnesota legislature who voted against a bill banning female genital mutilation in the state of Minnesota.
Under Sharia, homosexuals are oppressed and killed, women are abused and forced to wear the hijab, and Ilhan is anti-Jewish.
That is Laura Lummer's tweet.
She was banned for that tweet.
There's nothing in that tweet that is remotely bannable.
Nothing is remotely bannable about that tweet.
And she is correct to point out the hypocrisy here.
Now, she did make one crucial mistake, okay?
In terms of publicity, if she had done that, everyone is totally on her side on the right.
Instead, what she decided to do was that, and also she decided to wear a Jewish star that said Uden on it.
I'm sorry, being banned from Twitter is not the same thing as being a member of the Jewish population in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943.
Not the same thing, okay?
It's not the same thing as being crowded into a concentration camp.
Like, let's not go there.
And this is part of the problem, is that how you get out your message is just as important as the message, in many ways more important than the message.
She's totally right.
She shouldn't have been banned.
Louis Farrakhan should be banned.
And the fact that she has basically... When I say Louis Farrakhan should be banned, I'm not even sure that's the case.
Maybe Louis Farrakhan shouldn't be banned.
Maybe he should stay on Twitter.
I'm actually okay with that.
I want people to know what Louis Farrakhan thinks.
But, certainly Laura Loomer should not have been banned.
And Twitter is trying to purge people that it doesn't like.
But also, don't wear Jewish stars that are reminiscent of the Holocaust because you got banned from a social media platform.
That is not the same thing.
It just isn't.
OK, so meanwhile, the gravest piece of news this week.
Again, it gives the lie to the idea that despair and upset in America are driven by the economy.
Here's the story.
Life expectancy in the United States dropped yet again as drug overdoses continued to climb, taking more than 70,000 lives in 2017.
And suicides rose again.
A U.S.
government report said Thursday the drug overdose rate rose 9.6 percent compared to 2016.
Suicides climbed 3.7 percent, according to the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
As a result, the average lifespan in America dropped to 78.6 years, a decrease of 0.1 year from 2016.
This is the second straight year in which life expectancy in the United States has dropped after rising consistently for legitimately 100 years.
This is a serious crisis, but it is not an economic crisis.
What I'm seeing from a lot of folks is, well, this is because they're the economically dispossessed.
This does not work.
The reason this does not work is suicide rates are now higher than they were, I believe, during the Great Depression.
Certainly drug overdoses are a lot higher than they were during the Great Depression.
Things were a lot worse then.
We've had significantly worse economies.
Even... You don't have to go back to the Great Depression.
Go back to 2008, 2009.
The life expectancy did not drop in 2008, 2009.
And the fact that life expectancy has dropped yet again is an indicator that there is something missing in the American soul, that we have destroyed our own social fabric, that we have atomized ourselves into these little, not even groups.
Into basically polarized marbles walking around the world, suspicious of everybody around us.
They have no values that we hold in common, that we feel threatened, that we feel empty, that we're looking for something.
If we don't have shared values, if we don't have social fabric, if we don't have community, if we don't know what America is about or what we're doing in the world, if we don't have purpose and meaning, it makes it almost impossible to live a fulfilled life.
I say this because I have a new book that's coming out, and I'm not just pitching the book.
I have a new book coming out next year that is specifically about this.
What were the shared values of the West that built the West, and how have we lost those things?
We live in a time of unprecedented material prosperity, in a time of unprecedented personal freedom, and yet, life expectancy is dropping in the United States.
That is happening because there is a God-shaped hole in the American heart.
There is a crisis of what you're supposed to do when you get up in the morning.
You know, we've been promoting empty nostrums, like, go make the world a better place.
Okay, this presupposes a couple of things.
What?
One, what is a better place?
Two, that you have the capacity to make the world a better place.
But at the same time, we've been telling people, you don't actually have the capacity to make the world a better place.
You're nothing more than a ball of meat wandering around aimlessly in the universe without free will.
And also, social forces are organized against you.
So why in the world should you go out there and try?
And two, we've not defined what better looks like.
Okay, if better just means material prosperity, then why are the suicide rates going up?
Better always meant spiritual fulfillment, but we don't have spiritual fulfillment in a time when we have cast the spirit out.
We have no spiritual fulfillment in a time when we have decided that God, family, community, the very basics, the very basics of what it means to be a fulfilled human being over the course of human history, All those things are irrelevant.
The only thing that matters is virtue signaling, politics, rage, showing other people how much you care about things, and despair.
Despair, because obviously you're not in control of your own life.
This is why, you know, so much of my message is concentrated around what can you do in your life to make your life better.
You want to make your life better?
Go do it!
And if there's an obstacle, then let's talk about the obstacle.
But if you are spending all your life focused on everything around you and why it's bad, and you're doing that because you lack a sense of purpose, you're not going to be happy.
You're going to despair.
You're going to feel like there's no one there to pick you up.
We all have to be together to pick ourselves up.
And I don't mean through government.
I mean through shared values and shared community and a social fabric built up over the course of 3,000 years of Judeo-Christian history.
This is tragic, tragic stuff.
Okay, let's do a little bit of the mailbag.
John says, Hey Ben, I want to ask you to elaborate on why you think Marbury was wrongly decided and judicial review is not the role of the Supreme Court.
I'm not too knowledgeable in this area, but I've never heard this argument before and it seems pretty interesting.
Any thoughts would be great, thanks.
So, the basic idea here is that if you read the Federalist Papers, as we do every week, what the founders envisioned is that all of the branches would check one another.
The judiciary would check the executive, the executive would check the legislative, the legislative would check the judiciary, and all of the rest.
Making the Supreme Court the final purview of constitutional adjudication prevents a final check from taking place.
It means that only the Supreme Court has the purview of interpreting what the Constitution means.
The very oaths that people take upon taking office in the United States Congress or upon taking office in the presidency is to uphold, protect, defend the Constitution of the United States.
Their interpretations matter just as much as the judiciary's interpretation of the Constitution.
So the idea that the judiciary can say what the Constitution is, and use that to strike down laws, seems to me a wild misrepresentation of what the judiciary was meant to do.
There's nothing in the Constitution itself that says that the judiciary gets to take a law from the legislature, hold it up against the Constitution of the United States, or an action of the executives, in the case of Marbury v. Madison, and then strike down that action.
It actually takes power away from the American people, and it removes responsibility from the American people to vote for politicians who will uphold the Constitution.
Instead, we sort of outsource it to the judiciary, and then pretend that the judiciary is a non-political implement.
Now, the case against me is that in Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton talks about judicial review a little bit.
He talks about the idea that the judiciary is there to interpret the law, and should the judiciary become a political body rather than anything else, then it would stop Okay, but that's exactly what it's done.
Because the judiciary has been given the power to interpret the Constitution, it's become a political tool.
Sole power means authoritarianism from any branch.
Jacob says, "Dear future Chief Justice Shapiro, "I'm proposing to my girlfriend, "who I've known for 10 years next Saturday.
"Any words of wisdom on how not to screw it up?" How not to screw it up?
Well, first of all, when you say you're proposing to your girlfriend, we have to determine which sort of proposal we're talking about.
Do you know she's gonna say yes?
Or is this an actual proposal?
So I have this whole thing about how you see people and they're like, "Oh, you know what?
"I'm gonna set up my beautiful proposal story.
"I'm gonna go and I'm gonna rent a blimp "and it'll write across the sky.
"Will you marry me, Charlene?" And Most of the time, the answer is already yes, right?
You're just doing this for like a big show so you can tell all your friends.
I don't like those proposal stories.
I think they're BS.
I think that the thing that is important is the original time you asked the question.
And the original time you asked the question You know, the question is why she has not committed heretofore.
If the real question is how do you convince her, then the answer should be obvious, which is you commit to her.
You say, listen, I want to give you the rest of my life.
That's what I want.
I want to give you the rest of my life and I want to partner with you in this journey.
You're the person that I choose to be my partner in this journey to create a family, to create the fundamental building block of society, share values.
To be with until I die because, you know, things are going to be great and things are going to be tough.
But because we believe in the same things and we share the same soul, then we should be together.
So just transcribe that and then say it to her.
Andrew says, Hey, Ben, I used to disagree with you about my parents, about parents staying together for the sake of the children, even if they want a divorce.
My parents are still together for 33 years.
But it's clear they are deeply unhappy.
In any event, I have a friend who has had six children and eight years with his wife.
Now he's talking about leaving, even though he said he'd still take care of his kids.
I told him it was too late to back out now.
He disagreed, so we had a friendly argument.
By the end, I was fully advocating and agreeing with your position on the subject.
I was surprised to see how quickly my thoughts on the subject changed through the course of a single conversation.
Have you had an experience where your mind was rapidly and unexpectedly changed on a subject?
If not, what has been the fastest amount of time you've changed your mind on something?
Well, new evidence tends to change my mind.
And usually, changing your mind, I think that even in the course of this conversation, Andrew, it wasn't the conversation that changed your mind.
I think that you had heard this opinion Articulated many times, the one you ended up at.
Many times, and this was the final straw that broke the camel's back.
The art of persuasion is not trying to convince someone in one conversation.
It's building up a case, a case, a case, and then finally there's a piece of evidence that breaks the camel's back, and that's how you end up at that position.
That happens to me on a fairly frequent basis.
My guess is that that's what happened to you here.
Kevin says, what are we going to do about the robots?
Automation, lethal autonomous weapons, drones, machine learning, taking jobs, etc.
Well, big question.
My basic thing is, I think that we are the ones who set the parameters for the machines.
If we are not setting parameters on lethal weaponry with self-learning capacity, then we don't, we wouldn't like Skynet.
But I'm really not that worried about technology taking jobs, because every technology ever created has created more prosperity and more jobs over the course of time.
Stephen says, Hi, Ben.
I'm considering visiting Israel.
Any tips or suggestions for things to do or places to visit?
Thanks.
I love your show.
Israel's an amazing country.
You should try to see as much as you can top to bottom.
It's also an incredibly small country, so you can actually do this.
Everybody visits Jerusalem, which, of course, you should.
I'm not, like, that keen on visiting Tel Aviv.
Tel Aviv is basically just like any other American city, so I don't think that you gain all that much from Tel Aviv per se.
If you're looking for sort of the culture of Israel, I would recommend that you go to Tzfat, which is the mystical city in Israel, Safed.
The mystical city in Israel is pretty fantastic.
Akko, the Acre.
Which is a historic site in terms of Israeli history.
For the Crusades it was obviously a historic site as well.
That's well worth seeing.
You should go see Judea and Samaria if you can.
You should go out to see Ephrat which is a Jewish settlement so you can see what a settlement actually looks like.
You should go up to Rosh HaNikra, which is at the top of Israel.
Go look over the border at Lebanon.
See how close everything is.
You should go see the Golan Heights.
So you can see that when people talk about Israel giving up the Golan Heights, they're absolutely out of their damned minds.
But Israel is so fantastic because you can see all of these things in the course of just a few days.
And go see all the historic sites.
Go see the site where David fought Goliath.
Go see the valley.
It's really, it's just, it's an amazing, amazing place.
Ashley says, what is your opinion of genetic engineering from a moral and policy standpoint?
Thanks, Ashley.
Well, I think that genetic engineering is appropriate when you are attempting to avoid disease.
It is not appropriate when you are attempting to better the child more than nature would.
So, for example, if you are selecting for, let's say we have the capacity to select for higher IQ than we can normally select for.
I'm not a big fan of this idea.
I'm not a big fan of this idea because now you're getting into basic eugenics.
However, if we're talking about, if you could just tweak the genetic code and prevent Tay-Sachs, for example, to prevent suffering, then I think that that would be something worthwhile.
It's the difference between sort of optional surgery and non-optional surgery in the post-birth world.
I'm generally not a huge fan of non-optional surgery.
You know, if you're just getting a surgery because you want your tummy to look a little bit better, I don't think that it's, like, tremendously immoral, but I don't think it's good.
When you're talking about actively changing how someone's entire life will go, I think that you're looking at immorality and handing a power to a doctor that that doctor should not have.
But if you're talking about a cancer surgery, obviously that's necessary.
If you're talking about preventing cancer in a baby, that's necessary.
Getting rid of a BRCA gene or something.
If you're talking about the possibility of changing the eye color of a kid, this gets into, I think, really dangerous territory where you're genetically engineering kids to create some sort of master race.
Brad says, "Hi Ben, are Dineshra Seuss's books "like The Big Lie or Death of a Nation historically accurate?" Parts yes, part no, I would say.
I think that Dinesh... I'm trying... So, Death of a Nation, I have read.
The Big Lie, I have not.
So, Death of a Nation, there's a lot there that is historically accurate.
I think that Dinesh overshoots his case a little bit in some of these books.
I think that he uses an exaggerated form of the case, like the idea that the Nazis learned everything they needed to know about eugenics from the Democrats.
It was a worldwide eugenic movement, and the Democrats were part of it, and so were the Nazis.
I think the idea that Democrats are the greatest force against human freedom, and that all the other bad guys learn from the Democrats.
I have some problems with that.
I think you can argue that the Democrats were a force against human freedom and for eugenics and for human rights violations in the 19, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s.
I think all of that's true, but I think exaggerating the case is not.
Particularly necessary.
Casey, and by the way, I like Dinesh.
I'm friendly with Dinesh.
Casey says, Hello, Ben.
In my discussions with pro-choice individuals, the question that I always seem to get hung up on is what about the aftercare of women who no longer have abortions?
If we managed to sway the country to where abortions no longer happen, what would you recommend or what are your thoughts on how we would take care of the women that are no longer having abortions and may very well be single parents?
I really enjoy your opinions and podcasts.
OK, this is the last question.
So my so I think that we don't focus enough on the on the amazing thing that adoption is.
I think we need to focus on the courage of people who take adopted babies.
It is a courageous thing to take a baby who is not born of your genetics and to try and raise that child.
I have too many friends who have adopted and I see what they go through depending on who the kid is.
And I see that they love these children as much as their own genetic children if they have both.
These are amazing people.
Taking an adopted kid is basically the greatest thing that you can do in this life, I think.
And beyond that, I think that a mother who has the courage to see that her child needs a mother and a father, and is willing to make the emotional sacrifice of giving up her own child to a better situation, knowing that a better situation exists, that's an act of courage as well.
And women who do that, instead of killing the baby in the womb, those women should absolutely be celebrated.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
I do love this.
So, Payless.
Payless Shoes.
They opened up a pop-up store.
And they called the pop-up store Palesi.
P-A-L-E-S-S-I.
And it is spectacular.
So, here's what they did.
Payless opened a fake pop-up store called Pelesi in an LA mall and invited influencers to the grand opening.
The store was stocked with Payless shoes in disguise.
A woman in a TV ad was holding a pair of $20 sneakers and she said, I would pay $400 or $500 for these sneakers.
Another shopper called the Payless shoes elegant and sophisticated.
The stunt even included a sleek website and an Instagram account.
About 80 influencers attended over two nights, according to Payless.
They shelled out a total of $3,000.
of $3,000, one shopper spent $640 for a pair of boots, which represented an $1,800, an 1,800% markup.
Payless returned their money and let them keep the shoes, Payless said the influencers were paid a small stipend to attend.
So Payless said that this social experiment was meant to remind shoppers that Payless's affordable shoes are fashionable as well.
What it actually reminds people is there's a lot of social science research to back this up.
People don't just buy things because they think that those things are nicer so they pay a more expensive price.
People on the upper end buy things that are expensive because they think that the price itself dictates the quality of the product.
They think that a product that is identical but costs more must be nicer because we've all learned that if people are willing to pay more for something, that means that it's nicer.
So you will see retailers who will actually retail things for an extraordinary markup.
Particularly in the fashion industry, where taste is subjective.
And then, because it's really expensive, people think that it's better.
People think that it's nicer.
And so the markup in the fashion industry is really, really strong.
This is why competition is so necessary.
But, here's the thing.
Could Paylessy have gotten away with this indefinitely?
No.
Because what would have happened over time?
What would have happened over time is somebody would have bought a Payless pair of shoes for $20.
And then, Presumably, after three weeks, when the Payless pair of shoes starts to fall apart, for example, when these boots don't hold up the way an actual $640 pair of boots hold up, then the reviews start coming in on Paylessy.com and on Amazon.com, and people begin to realize that these boots are not worth it, and the place goes out of business.
This is why people misunderstand fraud in capitalism.
They're like, well, you know, capitalism, it leads to fraud.
People are going to defraud people.
Capitalism is a repeat iteration game.
There are many iterations in capitalism.
It's true, you can be defrauded if you're buying a singular thing one time.
But if you have lots of people over time buying lots of things, then eventually people start to actually critique, particularly in an area where social media is active.
People can actually critique the product over time and realize that these boots are actually not as nice as the boots that are more expensive.
And then we find out.
But this actually means we have to do our research.
It's why it's good that there are review sites.
It's why it's good that people are able to give feedback online.
And it's why people tend to trust that feedback online over time.
Okay, let's do a quick thing I hate.
I'll save the other thing that I like for next week.
So, things that I hate.
One thing that drives me absolutely up a wall is Neil deGrasse Tyson's science.
So, listen.
I love science.
Science is fantastic, right?
I'm a huge science fan.
I like evidence.
I like science.
What I don't like is when people suggest that science is a category that rules everything.
That you can determine morality from science.
You cannot.
You cannot determine morality from science.
This is Sam Harris's argument.
I think it completely fails.
Neil deGrasse Tyson does something else.
He basically says, what I believe is science.
What you believe is anti-science.
So here's what he tweeted out yesterday, and it is just dumb.
He tweeted out a picture of the new robot that has landed on Mars and is taking pictures, which is super cool, by the way.
It is pretty amazing.
We put a machine 300 million miles away on a planet and it's taking pictures and sending them back to us.
We're the first human beings in history to have ever seen pictures like this.
In any case, here's what he tweeted.
Scientists and engineers launched InSight from Earth, a moving platform, across 300 million miles to arrive where Mars, a moving target, will be seven months later, landing safely to do geophysics at the Martian equator.
And you have a problem listening to us about climate change?
Okay, two things.
One, NASA engineers are good at what they do.
Their modeling is good.
It worked.
You know, we know it's good because it worked.
When it comes to climate change, all of the modeling so far has been wrong.
So, if you were to say, like, I could apply the same exact standard to scientists created the Challenger.
It blew up on takeoff.
Should we trust those people with climate change?
Because you are competent at this thing does not mean that you are competent at this thing, particularly when they are in separate areas of science.
This, JPL, NASA, this is all physics.
It's not quite the same thing as climate physics or climatology, which has a lot of factors, the modeling has not been proper, and all the rest.
The idea that because I have a problem with your solutions on climate change, I therefore have a problem with your science on climate change is nonsense.
Everything I've ever said about climate change is cribbed from the IPCC reports.
When I talk about the range of variability of the climate over the next hundred years, when I talk about the levels of certainty of that variability, I'm quoting from the reports that Neil deGrasse Tyson likes.
I'm quoting from the federal reports.
When I talked earlier this week about the 10% reduction in GDP that's supposed to happen over the next 100 years, and I pointed out that that was double the RCP 8.5, the highest risk scenario.
When I said that, that is from the report.
I am not making that up.
I am trusting the scientists.
But Neil deGrasse Tyson basically says you should listen to me on everything because some other scientist who is not me did something that is not climate science.
Science is not fungible.
You can't actually do that.
That's not how this works.
Really, really stupid stuff from Neil deGrasse Tyson, but again, I don't, it's, stupidity, just because you're a scientist doesn't mean you don't say dumb things from time to time, and Neil deGrasse Tyson's Twitter account is filled with some dumb things.
Okay, we will be back here next week.
I'm sure there will be many more updates on everything Russia and Mueller related, so you're gonna wanna stay tuned to Trump, season four.
It's pretty spectacular.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Caramina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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