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Dec. 5, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:10
In Like Flynn | Ep. 673
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Former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn receives no jail time, the stock market takes a significant dive, and we bid a fond farewell and adieu to Michael Avenatti.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
I know a lot of people are, you know, mourning today for George H.W.
Bush.
I mean, the rest of the country mourns, too.
But I really mourn today for Michael Avenatti because I had, once again, made the mistake of betting at long odds on Michael Avenatti for the 2020 nomination.
And once again, I learned my lesson.
Never bet on presidential politics.
We'll get to all of the latest in news in just one second.
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Alrighty.
Well, I begin today with a quick note about the Honoring of George H.W.
Bush.
Obviously, beautiful events happening all day today in the Capitol building.
This is made a national day of mourning.
The post office stops its service, making it, I guess, the 100th day this year that the post office will not have service.
And we stopped the stock markets.
The stock markets are not operational today.
And while I appreciate the national mourning for George H.W.
Bush, I do have to note that I do agree with Charles Cook over at National Review, who suggests that as a general matter in a republic, we probably should not do the sort of royalist routine where whenever somebody dies in a non-tragic fashion, it's not JFK's assassination or Lincoln's assassination or something, that having these days where the entire country sort of stops dead because an elected president is given state honors this way, It's kind of monarchic in nature.
It's not particularly democratic or democratic Republican in nature.
Charles Cook writes that today.
He says, irrespective of whether he was a great man or a poor one, George H. W. Bush was a public employee.
He was not a king.
He was not a pope.
He did not found or save or design the Republic to shut down our civil society for a day in order to mark his peaceful passing.
I think that is basically right, and that is not a rip in any way on George H.W.
and to take another step toward the fetishization of an executive branch whose role is supposed to be more bureaucratic than spiritual, but has come of late to resemble Caesar more than to resemble Coolidge.
I think that is basically right, and that is not a rip in any way on George H.W. Bush, who I discussed at length yesterday and who I said yesterday was a very good man, if not a great president.
So again, I think that it is worthwhile asking ourselves whether we have an accurate view of the presidency and of the executive branch as a whole, And that is not meant, again, to be any sort of rip against George H.W.
Bush or anyone else.
Just remember that all of the honors that are now being paid to George H.W.
Bush will in the future be paid to President Jimmy Carter, who I think is not a good human being.
I think he's kind of an excrucible human being.
I guess that since the precedent is that we're now going to do this with every president, then we are going to do it for every president who passes away from now on.
Again, I'm with Charles Cook on this particular question.
Okay.
In real news.
And because it's not really news that there are memorial services going on.
In Washington, D.C.
today.
In real news, the big news that happened yesterday is the sentencing of Mike Flynn.
So here is how things went down.
Basically, Mike Flynn has been recommended to have no jail time.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller told the federal court yesterday that former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has given substantial assistance to the Russia investigation and should not get jail time.
Flynn has sat for 19 interviews with the special counsel and other Justice Department offices, and his early cooperation gave prosecutors a roadmap for the Russia investigation and may have helped to encourage others to cooperate, according to the filing.
The new details explaining how Flynn has helped the special counsel investigation will ratchet up the pressure on President Donald Trump, according to CNN, who has repeatedly attacked the Mueller probe as a witch hunt.
So what exactly happened in the Mueller filing about Michael Flynn?
Well, according to Mueller's filing, Flynn has been helping investigators longer and on more Justice Department probes than had previously been known.
The sheer amount of redacted text in the filing suggests those details are not ready to be unveiled, signaling that Mueller's investigation continues Along with other investigations with which Flynn helped.
And if you actually take a look at the sentencing memo that came down and the Mueller filing, an enormous amount of text is redacted, meaning that it's been blacked out so it's not visible to public scrutiny.
Supposedly the rationale for this is that Mueller does not want to give clues to potential defendants as to what he is doing at this point.
Flynn began cooperating with the Russia probe shortly after Mueller's team approached him, said prosecutors, and that early cooperation boosted investigators' understanding of what happened during the campaign.
Flynn pled guilty to lying to federal investigators on December 1, 2017, becoming the first high-ranking Trump advisor to agree to formally cooperate with the special counsel's probe.
According to the memo, his early cooperation was particularly valuable.
Because he was one of the few people with long-term and first-hand insight regarding events and issues under investigation.
Additionally, the defendant's decision to plead guilty and cooperate likely affected the decisions of related first-hand witnesses to be forthcoming with the special counsel's office and cooperate according to prosecutors.
So basically they're saying that because they got Flynn first, other people decided that they were going to cave as well and talk to the Mueller investigation.
Now, we still don't know what exactly Mike Flynn Has told the Mueller investigation and recall that the charges against Mike Flynn were at the were very weak to begin with.
They were very weak to begin with.
In fact, the way that the charges against Mike Flynn were originally put forward, the way that these charges were originally put forward on the basis of a Logan Act investigation.
So, for folks who don't remember exactly why Mike Flynn was originally prosecuted, why he was originally investigated, basically the suggestion was that Mike Flynn, after being appointed National Security Advisor-elect, right, Trump had not yet taken office, he was talking with the Russian government about a variety of issues, and then he lied to the investigation, the FBI investigation, about whom he had talked to, and this became an ancillary crime.
Now, it is not a crime for the incoming National Security Advisor to talk with the Russian government.
And for all the talk about, well, it's a Logan Act violation.
He's operating his own foreign policy.
If that's the case, then we ought to prosecute John Kerry for talking with the Iranians while Trump is president and operating his own foreign policy.
There has not been a Logan Act violation that has been successfully prosecuted in a century or more in the United States.
This is an act that probably is unconstitutional in the first place.
In any case, the attempt to get Michael Flynn from the beginning was deeply flawed.
Byron York points this out today over at the Washington Examiner.
He says Michael Flynn has been waiting for more than a year to be sentenced.
The retired three-starred Army general, who spent 24 days as the Trump White House National Security Advisor, pled guilty on December 1st, 2017 to lying to the FBI in the Trump-Russia investigation and agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Flynn's sentencing, which has been delayed a number of times for reasons that have never been disclosed, is scheduled to finally take place on December 18th.
Last Tuesday, late Tuesday rather, Mueller filed what is called a sentencing report, citing Flynn's substantial assistance to the investigation.
Mueller recommended a sentence at the low end of the guideline range, including a sentence that does not impose a period of cooperation.
What the sentencing recommendation did not address was the sketchy beginnings of the Flynn investigation, says Byron York, who is correct.
It started with the Obama administration's unhappiness that Flynn, during the transition as the incoming National Security Advisor, had phone conversations with Russia's then-Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.
Because Kislyak was under American surveillance, U.S.
intelligence and law enforcement agencies had recordings and transcripts of the calls in which Flynn and Kislyak discussed the sanctions President Obama had just imposed on Russia in retaliation for its 2016 election interference.
There was nothing wrong with an incoming national security advisor talking to a foreign ambassador during a transition.
There was nothing wrong with discussing the sanctions.
But some officials in the Obama DOJ decided Flynn might have violated the Logan Act, under which no one has ever been prosecuted, which prohibits private citizens from acting on behalf of the United States government.
The Obama officials said they were also concerned by reports that Flynn, in a conversation with Vice President Mike Pence, had denied discussing sanctions.
This, they felt, Might somehow expose Flynn to Russian blackmail.
So Obama appointees atop the Justice Department sent FBI agents to the White House to interview Flynn, who was ultimately charged with lying in that interview.
Originally, the FBI did not think that Flynn lied.
In March 2017, James Comey, then the FBI director, told the House Intelligence Committee that two FBI agents who questioned Flynn did not detect any deception during the interview and saw nothing that indicated to them that Flynn knew he was lying to them.
And then Comey said the same thing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
FBI number two, Andrew McCabe, told the House the same thing.
Only later, after Comey was fired and Mueller began his investigation, was Flynn accused of lying and he ultimately pled guilty.
So this does lend a lot of credence and credibility to the idea that the Mueller investigation was basically intent on flipping people, and they were going to apply pressure in whatever fashion they could in order to make that happen.
The sentencing memo talks about how Flynn, his cooperation has been substantial, but again, we don't know what that cooperation looks like because the cooperation itself is underwrapped, basically.
Uh, so the filing says that Flynn sat for 19 interviews with the special counsel and the DOJ during the Russia investigation.
Portions of the memo were redacted, according to Ryan Saavedra over at the Daily Wire, because it contains sensitive information about ongoing investigations.
The filing states that when the FBI interviewed Flynn, Now, there is part of this where Flynn is a little bit more guilty.
Supposedly, that part is where Flynn was dealing with the Turkish government.
He falsely stated he did not ask the Russian ambassador to refrain from escalating the situation in response to the sanctions and falsely disclaimed any memory of his subsequent conversation with the ambassador in which the ambassador said that Russia had acceded to the defendant's request.
Now, there is part of this where Flynn is a little bit more guilty.
Supposedly, that part is where Flynn was dealing with the Turkish government.
So according to the DOJ on March 7th, 2017, the defendant made materially false statements in multiple documents that he filed pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act pertaining to a project he and his company had performed for the principal benefit of the Republic of Turkey.
The FARA filings omitted the material fact that officials from the Republic of Turkey provided supervision and direction Over the Turkey Project, NBC News is all over that.
They say that basically Flynn was a tool of Turkey.
The documents specifically state that a key component of Flynn's work for Turkey involved the government's efforts to remove from the U.S.
a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is a fascist.
Accuses the cleric Fethullah Gulen of orchestrating a failed coup against him in July 2016.
Flynn began working for Turkey about a month later.
According to federal prosecutors, they say that Flynn's decision not to disclose he was aiding the Turkish government impeded the ability of the public to learn about the Republic of Turkey's efforts to influence public opinion about the failed coup, including its efforts to effectuate the removal of a person legally residing in the United States.
Again, these were very weak charges.
They were brought against Flynn.
Specifically based on lying to the FBI, which is, well, a crime, an ancillary crime to the underlying crime.
The documents say the defendant's business relationship with the Republic of Turkey was thus exactly the type of information Farrow was designed to ensure was within the public sphere.
The filing cited Flynn's false statement that he had written an op-ed on election day favorable to Erdogan's view of Gulen at his own initiative.
So the idea here is that he had created a great team.
But all of this is ancillary to the big question, which is what has Flynn told Mueller?
And we're going to talk about that in just one second and what's ahead in the Mueller investigation.
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Alright, so, what exactly has Flynn told Mueller at this point?
The answer is, we simply don't know.
And people are speculating.
People are speculating because it says that he's been helping in three ongoing investigations, including one criminal investigation, that we supposedly don't know anything about yet.
Maybe that has to do with Donald Trump.
Maybe it doesn't have to do with Donald Trump.
Suffice it to say that nothing in the Flynn sentencing recommendation points to any further evidence of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election alone.
More damaging is a letter that was sent by Roger Stone to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
So, Roger Stone obviously has been accused, he's a Trump Friend and kind of a dirty politics guy.
Roger Stone was supposedly the cutout for WikiLeaks funneling information to the Trump campaign.
Maybe back and forth is the accusation by the left.
Well, his attorney, Grant Smith, sent a letter to Dianne Feinstein, the ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Saying that Stone is going to plead the fifth.
The letter says, on the advice of counsel, Mr. Stone will not produce the documents requested by you in your capacity as ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee.
The requests, as previously stated to staff, are far too overbroad, far too overreaching, far too wide-ranging, both in their all-embracing list of persons to whom the request could relate, with whom Mr. Stone has communicated over the past three years, and the documents concerning imposition of the requests.
For the additional reasons set forth below, Mr. Stone respectfully declines to produce any documents and declines the invitation for an interview.
And they talk about the fact that Stone had already testified before the House Intelligence Committee, and Stone had requested that if any testimony were to be given, it would be held in public session because they don't want any leaks, and that is not exactly what is happening here.
The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to talk to him behind closed doors, and they say that this is This is an invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege, and it must be understood by all to be the assertion of a constitutional right by an innocent citizen who denounces secrecy.
So it's not that he's trying to hide anything, according to Stone.
It's that he doesn't want the Democrats selectively leaking what he tells them behind closed doors.
This is still going to be painted by members of the left as Roger Stone refusing to speak on these issues at the behest of President Trump, and they're going to try to paint this as obstruction.
It's hard to paint something as obstruction when you don't actually have evidence that Roger Stone did anything bad yet.
So that will all determine on what Mueller comes forth with in the future.
Suffice it to say that people who are jumping to conclusions at this point have no basis for those conclusions.
You're seeing people on the right, like Representative Mark Meadows, who I like from South Carolina, say that the Flynn memo is good news for President Trump.
Here's what he had to say.
There is no suggestion that Michael Flynn had anything to do with collusion.
He was with the transition team.
He was part of the campaign.
And yet there's no mention of collusion.
I think it's good news for President Trump tonight that this is what it's come down to, even though they said he substantially cooperated.
I think he substantially cooperated to say that there was no collusion.
And then meanwhile, you got Jeffrey Toobin over at CNN providing exactly the opposite analysis, which is that this is bad news for Trump, the Flynn sentencing memo.
As we think about how Mueller is going to characterize what went on in the Trump White House, the fact that he is saying senior government leaders should be held to the highest standards, I would be a little nervous if I were the people involved in the obstruction of justice investigation.
So bottom line is this is once again just another Rorschach test.
There's no evidence either way as to whether this is going to be bad for Trump or good for Trump or whatever.
People are jumping to the conclusion that best fits their preconceived notions of how this is going to go.
I am perfectly happy to wait until the full Mueller report comes out and then we see what this is going to be.
If I had to hazard a guess as to what this is going to be, as I have now been saying for months and months and months and months, I think what is going to come out is a lot of bad political behavior by the Trump campaign.
Nothing criminal, but enough in terms of ancillary crime for the Democrats to try an impeachment proceeding against President Trump.
Which, by the way, I'm not actually sure would benefit them.
I mean, this is what's interesting.
If you actually look at impeachment proceedings in the past, if you look at the impeachment proceedings that were about to be initiated against Richard Nixon, for example, they were happening during his second term.
So he had a lame duck president, and there was no real blowback to the impeachment proceedings.
He never had to worry about the actual blowback in terms of the crowd rallying around that president.
So it was a lot safer.
The same thing was true of Bill Clinton, right?
Bill Clinton, why not get rid of him?
He's in his second term.
But for Democrats, It's possible that the best strategy they have here is to not impeach President Trump.
That instead what they do is they just fulminate for the next two years about how President Trump is deeply corrupt, but there's a Senate that won't allow an impeachment proceeding against him, and so the final revenge of the American public must be had at the ballot box.
That seems to me a smarter political strategy for Democrats.
Maybe the worst thing for Democrats here, actually, is just enough material that their base demands an impeachment, but not enough material to rally America around an impeachment effort on the basis of a bunch of Falsely connected dots that don't actually have enough evidentiary basis to support the idea that Trump should no longer be president of the United States.
Well, meanwhile, in other news, the market just took a massive dive yesterday and ended up dumping nearly 800 points amid rising fears of an economic slowdown.
According to CNBC, stocks fell sharply on Tuesday in the biggest decline since the October rout.
As investors worried about a bond market phenomenon signaling a possible economic slowdown, lingering worries about U.S.-China trade also added to jitters on Wall Street.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 799 points, or 3.1%.
It closed at 25,000, posted its worst day since October 10th.
At the low of the day, the Dow had fallen over 800 points.
The S&P 500 also declined 3.2%, mirroring that decline.
of the day, the Dow had fallen over 800 points.
The S&P 500 also declined 3.2%, mirroring that decline.
The NASDAQ composite dropped 3.8% to close back in correction territory at 71.50%.
The yield on the three-year Treasury note surpassed its five-year counterpoint on Monday.
This is called yield curve inversion.
This is never a good sign.
Basically, there's something called the yield curve.
What the yield curve means is the interest rate yields are usually higher on long-term bonds than they are on short-term bonds.
Take it in terms of a bond buyer or a lender.
Let's take it in terms of a bank.
If you're a bank and you're lending out for a longer period of time, that is a longer period of time you can't lend to somebody else.
Usually, a longer-term note is going to have a higher yield, meaning that they're going to have a higher interest rate on a 30-year note than they're going to have on a short-term yield because, again, they're only foregoing the money for a certain amount of time.
This is true particularly in the government bonds industry, in which the short-term bonds have a lower interest rate yield than the long-term bonds have.
But if people are very uncertain that over the long term they're going to get their bonds paid back, then you have yield curve inversion.
If they think the economy is going to take a dive, then they would rather invest in the short term.
They'd rather invest in short term bonds that pay off in big ways in the next six months than they would invest in a long term bond that pays off In 10 years.
And so that's a yield curve inversion.
It's usually an indicator that people are seriously worried about an economic recession.
Again, this is this is what CNBC talks about when they say the flattening yield curve caused investors to bail on bank stocks in concern that the phenomenon may hurt their lending margins, right?
Because banks tend to mirror the bond rates.
And so it is possible that banks are not going to be able to lend at the same rates they were able to lend at before.
None of this is good for the economy.
And that is exacerbated yesterday by President Trump And his policies on trade.
We'll get to that in just one second.
And then I want to get to the Democratic 2020 candidacies, which are heating up and simultaneously cooling down.
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Okay, so the stock market took this major dump, and one of the reasons that it took this major dump is because President Trump was signaling yesterday that he was the tariff man.
He tweeted out, The negotiations with China have already started.
Unless extended, they will end 90 days from the date of our wonderful and very warm dinner with President Xi in Argentina.
Bob Lighthizer will be working closely with Steve Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow, Wilbur Ross, and Peter Navarro on seeing whether or not a real deal with China is actually possible.
If it is, we'll get it done.
China is supposed to start buying agricultural product and more immediately.
President Xi and I want this deal to happen, and it probably will.
But if not, remember, I am a tariff man, KK.
Capital T, capital M. Tariff man, tariff man, doing whatever a tariff can.
When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so.
Trade is not actually a raid on the wealth of our nation.
When I go and shop at the grocery store, the grocery store is not raiding me.
It says it will always be the best way to max out our economic power.
So tariffs are the best way of maxing out our economic power.
Has worked awesome in the past when it basically exacerbated the Great Depression and led to a global depression.
We are right now taking in billions in tariffs.
We took in 7.1 billion dollars total in tariffs.
That pays for a cup of coffee on the federal level.
We spend about 7.1 billion dollars every millisecond in Washington D.C.
Then he says, in all capital letters, Make America Rich Again.
Tariffs do not make you rich.
If you refrain from trading with people who have a comparative advantage over you, you are poorer, not richer.
Go try to grow your own materials for a sandwich.
It will cost you $1,000.
Or you could go to a restaurant and buy one for $5.
It turns out that trade and mutually beneficial trade are the basis of any functioning economy.
President Trump is freaking out the market and it ain't smart.
He tweeted out, He tweeted out this morning about how he's optimistic a deal will get done, but whipsawing between, I want a deal, I don't want a deal, tariffs are great, tariffs are awful.
Like, none of this is good for the long-term security of the market.
What people want in the market is a certain level of predictability.
Unpredictability in the market is a bad thing.
You actually want a consistent level of regulation.
You want a consistent level of taxation.
You don't want policy bouncing around like a yo-yo, because when it does, I don't know whether to put my money in the market.
Do you?
Right now, do you feel secure putting your money in the stock market?
I mean, Maybe, maybe not.
I don't know.
Nobody really has a clue at this point.
And that's because you don't know what policies are going to come down the pike any moment now.
All of this is also being exacerbated by the fact that politically speaking, we don't know what the hell is coming down the pike in 2020.
President Trump has been extraordinarily business friendly in terms of regulation and tax policy, but all of that could change in 2020.
The Democrats are obviously I'm getting ready.
And the Democrats have put their finger on what they think is the real problem.
They think that the real problem is that Democrats are too smart for the American public.
Now, I remember when they said this about Al Gore.
In 2000s, oh, he was just, he was too wonky.
That's what happened.
George W. Bush spoke to the heart of the American people.
But Al Gore, he was just too intelligent.
It's amazing.
When Republicans lose, it's because they're too mean, too vicious, too cruel, and too stupid.
When Democrats lose, it's because they're too wonky, too intelligent, too brilliant, too nuanced.
Weird how that happens.
In any case, Maisie Hirono, who is one of the worst senators in America, she's a senator from Hawaii, she says that the real reason the Democrats lost in 2016 is because they have a hard time connecting with voters' hearts.
Democrats have a really hard time is connecting to people's hearts instead of here.
We're really good at shoving out all the information that touch people here but not here.
And I have been saying at all of our Senate Democratic retreats that we need to speak to the heart, not in a manipulative way, not in a way that brings forth everybody's fears and resentments, but truly to speak to the heart so that people know that we're actually on their side.
Okay, the truth is, the Democrats speak in much more emotional language than Republicans on a regular basis.
And so the only real question is whether that is going to work or not.
Now, one of the things that Democrats do in trying to speak to the heart is they pander like nobody's business.
There's a study that we talked about on the show last week suggesting that for 30 years, 40 years, Democratic presidential politicians have talked down to black audiences specifically in an attempt to reach for the heart.
And this is a form of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
You're seeing this from the most calculated Democratic politicians.
So I think the most hilarious example of this is Kirsten Gillibrand, who is the most mechanical politician since Hillary Clinton.
I mean, she is just She is a robot with a face.
Kirsten Gillibrand used to be, used to be somewhat pro-life.
She used to be somewhat pro-gun.
Now she is running a radical campaign trying to be Hillary Clinton and trying to out-intersectionality Kamala Harris.
Good luck with that.
Here's what she tweeted yesterday.
It's an amazing thing to tweet, honestly.
It's like when your polling guru has not had a talk with you yet, but you decide that you have really put your finger on the pulse of America.
So Senator Gillibrand tweeted out, Our future is female, intersectional, powered by our belief in one another, and we're just getting started.
My God, woman.
Do you really think that this is good politics?
First of all, you think intersectionality polls great?
The only people who care about intersectionality are a bunch of rich white losers who go to mainstream colleges and who are not going to vote for you anyway because you are a rich white woman.
They're going to vote for somebody who is not white.
They're going to vote for somebody who is a member of the intersectional coalition, who ranks higher than you.
So I love that Kirsten Gillibrand is trying to pander to the intersectional coalition when she's not intersectional enough for the coalition.
Also, I am so annoyed by Democrats who do this routine, our future is female.
Like, what the hell does that mean?
I legitimately don't know what that means.
I mean, I thought our future was going to be people who are good at things.
If I said our future is male, Then everybody on the left would suggest that what I was suggesting was the Handmaid's Tale.
So when she says our future is female, is that what she's suggesting?
That men are gonna be chained up for purposes of reproduction?
First of all, sounds great.
Second of all, what?
Like, I don't know where this is going.
And then I love, can we put that tweet back up for a second?
I love her final line there.
Powered by our belief in one another.
Wow, just like windmills.
Powered by unicorn farts.
Ah, powered by our belief.
You know what it's gonna be?
The future is a go-kart.
Driven by a woman, which means it will crash more often.
Empowered by our belief in one another.
Powered by sunshine and sparkles.
Empowered by hugs.
I can't believe that I never thought that our future would be female, intersectional, and powered by hugs.
Sounds amazing.
And she says, and we're just getting started.
I don't even know what this means!
What exactly does this mean?
Also, it is mutually exclusive to suggest that our future is female, i.e.
not male, intersectional, i.e.
not white, and powered by our belief in one another.
You don't believe in males or white people, so there's that.
It's just amazing stuff.
She's so mechanical.
It's really hilarious.
And this is part of the problem for a lot of Democrats.
Authenticity is still a quality that matters in American politics.
For all of his flaws, President Trump, dude's authentic.
He can't claim that President Trump is not authentic.
And if you say he's inauthentic, he's authentically inauthentic.
And that hair authentically and authentic, like all of these things.
All right.
He's he's a real human.
That's what's so astonishing about Donald Trump is that he is such a real human.
Right.
But for the Democrats, there's a marked lack of authenticity and it's going to come out in the election, which is why I've always said I think that the the best shot that Democrats have in 2020 would be somebody like Joe Biden, who's authentically stupid, who's authentically Uncle Joe.
Uncle Joe, by the way, said yesterday that he may be a gaffe machine, but at least he's honest.
The man Lost his 1988 presidential race because he was outed for plagiarism.
Joe Biden is a congenital liar.
He lies.
This is a man in 2012 who said that Mitt Romney was going to re-enslave black people.
And he's suddenly going to be your standard for lying and truth.
I remember in 2012 when he debated Paul Ryan and he suggested that the United States had thrown the French out of Lebanon or something.
It's like, what the what?
You're just making up history now?
But yes, he is authentic.
He's authentically Joe Biden.
In any case, I want to get to some more of the Democratic candidates on the other side in just one second.
First, let's talk about those hideous window coverings that you have in your house.
I know, you're looking around your house.
You say, look, I just repainted.
I have new furniture.
Why does this place still look so dingy?
Well, it's because you went down, but the person before you, you probably didn't do it.
The person who lived there before you went down to the local trailer park and rated the trailers for the blinds.
And now, you've been living with those terrible blinds that look like you're gonna peek between them like a scene from E.T.
in 1983.
Instead, you should have window coverings that actually look nice.
And the way you can do that is by going to blinds.com.
Blinds.com makes everything really easy for you.
Not sure what you want, or even where to start?
With blinds.com, you get a free online design consultation.
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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 talked about Trump and Christianity, church and state, the founding fathers and whether they were Christian.
I think we have a good, wholesome discussion.
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So let us speak of the other Democratic candidates.
So the saddest story of the day is not the memorial for George H.W.
Bush, because that's actually not sad.
That's actually kind of, and we'll talk about it in a little while, it's kind of moving and wonderful in some way.
Obviously, his death is very sad, but that we've talked about.
The saddest story is that Michael Avenatti ruled out a 2020 bid.
And I got to be honest with you, it's hard for me to do the show today.
It's been very brutal for me.
And I appreciate your condolences.
I appreciate your thoughts and prayers.
Michael Avenatti, as you know, was my black horse pick for 2020.
He was the person who was going to shock the world by being the anti-Trump.
And then he has released a statement yesterday.
And I don't know how I'm going to go on, honestly.
He says, after consultation with my family and at their request, I've decided not to seek the presidency of the United States in 2020.
I do not make this decision lightly.
I make it out of respect for my family, but for their concerns, I would run.
So nothing really as nice as a guy saying he's not going to run for president because his children suck.
That's pretty, that's pretty great.
I love that he actually just says it out loud.
If it weren't for my family, those jerks, I would definitely run.
But now they're making me not run, which is why I'm a porn lawyer.
He says, I will continue to represent Stormy Daniels and others against Donald Trump and his cronies and will not rest until Trump is removed from office and our republic and its values are restored.
By the way, this is also called being a crappy lawyer.
So when I hire a lawyer, that lawyer's job is not to turn my case into a political crusade against the person against whom I am filing a lawsuit.
It's to win the lawsuit.
But according to Avenatti, he's going to get Trump tossed from office.
I mean, listen, before we bid a fond adieu to Michael Avenatti, it is important to note that if not for Michael Avenatti, Brett Kavanaugh might not be on the Supreme Court.
So thank you to Michael Avenatti for that.
He says, I will also continue with my nearly 20 years of speaking truth to power and representing those who need an advocate against the powerful.
I remain concerned that the Democratic Party will move toward nominating an individual who might make an exceptional president who has no chance of actually beating Donald Trump.
The party must immediately recognize that many of the likely candidates are not battle-tested and have no real chance at winning.
We will not prevail in 2020 without a fighter.
I remain hopeful the party finds one.
He didn't actually tweet the Basta part, but he should have.
So in any case, he is out.
Michael Avenatti out, and a moment of silence for Michael Avenatti, who will go back to representing people who are receptacles of human fluids for money.
Deval Patrick!
Also says that he is not going to announce for president.
So this reduces the ranks of possible Democratic candidates from 150,211 to 150,209.
So former Massachusetts Governor Patrick Duvall is set to announce he will not run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.
According to multiple reports.
Now, why is that interesting?
It's interesting because Patrick is close friends with Obama.
And there was a lot of speculation that Deval Patrick was going to be endorsed by President Obama as sort of the Obama Nouveau.
He was going to be the man of color running from a liberal state who is going to sweep the nation with a red states and blue states were the United States routine.
And remember, Obama cribbed a lot of his 2008 language directly from speeches by Deval Patrick.
So Deval Patrick is out.
Well, what this suggests is that President Obama is positioning himself behind someone else.
Why?
Well, Patrick apparently was worried about being able to stand out in a crowded primary.
He says, it's hard to see how you even get noticed in such a big, broad field without being shrill, sensational, or a celebrity.
And I'm none of those things, and I'm never going to be any of those things.
Well, the answer would be that he would get Obama's support or Michelle Obama's support, who's immensely popular.
She's already sold two million copies of her memoir.
Um, so he is out, which is fascinating.
There's been a lot of talk over the past couple of days that one of the reasons that he is out is because Barack Obama is mobilizing his team behind, get ready for it, Beto O'Rourke.
So, Beto, who lost a close Senate election to Ted Cruz in Texas.
And the media tried to prop him up.
They tried to make him the new thing.
He's a talented politician, no question.
It is amazing how Beto O'Rourke has been able to escape the intersectional politics of the left by paying homage to the intersectional politics of the left.
Now, Beto versus Kamala Harris in Democratic primaries, how does that go?
Who the hell knows?
Because it is true that a disproportionate number of Democratic primary voters are black and they tend to vote disproportionately for black candidates in Democratic primaries when available.
So can Beto O'Rourke overcome that?
Who knows?
Also, who knows how this whole thing breaks down?
Because remember, a lot of the Democratic Party primaries in these various states are not actually winner-take-alls.
So you recall that in the Republican primaries, a lot of these states were winner-take-alls, so Trump would win like 31% of the vote.
In South Carolina, and then he would take all of the delegates.
And that's how he built up this whopping delegate lead that allowed him to win the nomination.
Well, a lot of the Democratic primaries are not that way.
A lot of those Democratic primaries are proportional representation, which means that if you have 11 candidates in a Democratic primary, and each of them are winning 9% of the vote, you could go to the convention without an obvious frontrunner and the superdelegate procedures that were just trashed in order to Sort of cater to Bernie Sanders.
All of those superdelegates are no longer relevant.
So you could actually see an enormous amount of chaos and infighting from the Democrats in 2020 with 1 million candidates running against each other, barring the possibility of a big name like Michelle Obama tossing her hat in the ring.
And I'm not somebody who's going to completely discount the idea that Michelle runs.
You know, I think that there's a solid possibility that all of this has been a head fake, and that Michelle Obama says, listen, for the good of the country, we need someone unifying.
I'm in.
If she were to run, it would be a very, very bad thing for President Trump.
She does have a lot of popularity still with the American public.
Okay, meanwhile, in other news that is, you know, I think bad news, the Weekly Standard is apparently going to be shut down.
That is the news from CNN and a bunch of other outlets.
The Weekly Standard has been a long-time popular right-wing conservative magazine.
It was largely seen as very much in sort of the George W. Bush mold on foreign policy.
It was neoconservative, it was very interventionist on foreign policy.
According to CNN, the fate of the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that has staked out a position as a publication on the right, still critical of President Trump, is uncertain.
Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes told staff in a series of phone calls on Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter, the magazine's precarious position comes after its leadership spent months searching for a buyer, the people told CNN.
And those people explained that the Weekly Standards leadership had butted heads with Media DC, the current publisher of the magazine, and that the two parties had agreed to allow Hayes to search for a new owner.
However, Media DC recently informed the Weekly Standards leadership that the company was no longer interested in a sale, those people said.
Instead, the chairman of Media DC asked to meet with Hayes, and the basic assumption is that the Washington Examiner, which is owned by the same parent company, and is starting a new news magazine, which looks quite good, with Seth Mandel, my friend Seth Mandel, as the editor over there, That they are going to pick up all of these subscriptions that Weekly Standard has and Weekly Standard will shut down as a brand.
So there's been a lot of talk in both right and left-wing media about whether this is reflective of the fact that the Weekly Standard has been overtly anti-Trump throughout his presidency.
And I think the answer is sort of yes.
Now, that's not to suggest that Seth and the new Washington Examiner magazine are going to be pro-Trump MAGA rah-rah-rah.
Seth is a guy who did not vote for Trump in 2016.
His wife, Bethany, did not vote for Trump in 2016.
A bunch of the staffers he's bringing on did not vote for Trump in 2016.
But there is a difference between the Bill Kristol brand of People who didn't vote for Trump and have spent the last several years tearing down anything Trump tries to do, no matter how good it is, and a brand of people who are very skeptical and critical of Trump, but who are also More than happy to accept the gains that President Trump has provided to conservatives.
And this manifests in a couple of ways.
First of all, I think that the Republican base can take, conservatives can take, criticism of President Trump so long as those folks know that the criticisms are stemming from a place of conservatism and not from mere ire that Trump is president.
And it's not just from Animus.
And the way you can tell the difference is, am I criticizing Trump on the basis of policy, on the basis of what I think is effective, or am I criticizing Trump because I think that Trump himself is a disgrace to the Republican Party and Republicanism and everything good for Trump and good for conservatism is bad for America now.
That is a real distinction.
That's why people like Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin and Bill Kristol have largely been criticized by folks on the right, including folks like me, who have said, you guys have forgotten the thread.
You've lost the thread of the argument.
You can be critical of President Trump when he does something wrong, but he is the President of the United States, and you can even be critical of whether you think he's been overall good for the Republican Party, but to ignore the benefits.
And to pretend those benefits don't exist and to downplay and denigrate those benefits is not intellectually honest.
I think that's been a lot of the backlash to folks like Crystal.
Now, I don't think that applies, by the way, to a huge number of the staffers at the Weekly Standard.
I think there are a ton of fantastic writers over at the Weekly Standard, a lot of great thinkers over at the Weekly Standard.
I'm friends with a lot of those folks.
I subscribed to the Weekly Standard when I was a teenager.
And so I'm sad if the publication is shut down.
I'm really sad to see that go.
I'd like to see someone step in and save it if that's a possibility.
But this does point out some serious divisions inside the conservative movement, even in the Trump skeptical right, as to what exactly should happen with Trump.
That's crystallized, too, around Bill Kristol saying that he wants to find a primary challenger for Trump.
I think, by the way, that that's a terrible idea.
I think trying to find a primary challenger for President Trump at this point in time, barring some sort of serious criminal activity that mandates a sort of impeachment hearing, I think it's a mistake.
The reason I think it's a mistake is because then you're forcing the conservative constituency to choose between loyalty to President Trump and their vote in 2016 and to supposedly higher principles.
And that's not really a real choice, because a lot of people think that Trump has actually been a pretty good vessel for a lot of those principles.
But it makes for good fodder for the left, who will say, well, look, here's a true con, a true conservative running against Trump, and only won 15% of the vote, and Trump is ripping on that guy day and night, and so the Republican Party has been lost to conservatism.
I don't think that's true, and I think that providing cover for that argument is an enormous, enormous mistake.
Alrighty, so let's get to a couple of things that I like, and then some things that I hate.
Things that I like today.
This video was just moving and and heartbreaking and inspiring.
Bob Dole, World War Two hero, paying homage to another World War Two hero, George H.W.
Bush.
And it does show you the solidarity that exists in America among a particular cadre of folks.
And I'm not talking about people who ran for president.
I'm talking about people who served in the United States military.
There used to be common institutions in the United States.
Those institutions were churches and schools and the military.
These were These were places where we all shared the same mission.
Bob Dole and George H.W.
Bush really went at it during their lives.
George H.W.
Bush ran against Bob Dole in 1980 for the Republican nomination.
He was very critical of Bob Dole.
They fought throughout the 1970s.
Here is Bob Dole, who is obviously very aged, and he's being helped to his feet to salute the coffin of George H.W.
Bush.
I mean, there's still solidarity behind certain principles in America, If we lose that solidarity, we lose everything.
It's an amazing, amazing moment, obviously.
So, there's not much more to say about it than that.
Meanwhile, in other things that I like today.
So, good on Young America's foundation.
So, Young America's foundation won a major victory for free speech.
They've now settled a lawsuit they filed against the University of California at Berkeley.
The lawsuit was based on the attempt by UC Berkeley to make YAF pay for security fees when I went and I spoke there.
The university will have to pay YAF 70 grand to reimburse attorney's fees, rescind the unconstitutional high-profile speaker policy, rescind the viewpoint discriminatory security fee policy, and abolish its Heckler's veto so that protesters will be barred from blocking conservatives from speaking, according to the Daily Wire.
It took over a year for YAF to achieve that victory yesterday.
YAF noted,
YAF and UC Berkeley agreed to a fee schedule that treats all students equally unless students are handling money or serving alcohol at an event.
The security fee will be zero.
This is a monster win for YAF and it should send a notice to universities across the country that have attempted to crack down on free speech by exercising the heckler's veto.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So let's talk about PETA.
PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, they've made a lot of media fodder in the recent past for saying some of the dumbest crap humanly possible.
They compared eating chicken to a holocaust on your plate, which makes perfect sense if Humans were delicious and nutritious.
And also, if the Nazis had not slaughtered six million Jews in the Holocaust, including women and children, that would make perfect sense.
Their latest attempt to force us all to comply with their vegan demands.
And by the way, I'm somebody who is actually pretty warm to the idea that as Nutritional advances are made that we should move toward those nutritional advances that allow us to treat animals better.
But PETA annoys the living hell out of me.
PETA tweeted out, words matter, and as our understanding of social justice evolves, our language evolves along with it.
Here's how to remove speciesism from your daily conversations.
Stop using anti-animal language.
Instead of kill two birds with one stone, say feed two birds with one scone.
Yeah, that's happening.
Instead of be the guinea pig, be the test tube.
Instead of beat a dead horse, feed a fed horse.
Which also seems, by the way, like you're mistreating an animal.
Instead of bring home the bacon, bring home the bagels.
Which is pretty Jewish.
And they say, take the bull by the horns.
Instead of that, take the flower by the thorns.
Yeah, that's definitely going to cure all the problems, PETA, is that we're going to start treating animals better because we say, bring home the bagels instead of bring home the bacon.
Because when somebody said bring home the bacon, when I say bring home the bacon, I specifically am talking about physical bacon.
I, the Orthodox Jew.
But you know what?
Here's the truth.
This is basically meat and potatoes kind of stuff.
And I'm not against changing some of our euphemistic language, our idiomatic language.
After all, there's more than one way to skin a cat.
So that's possible, too.
Also, it is worth noting, as producer Senya noted before the program, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is sort of fond of killing animals.
There's a piece in Huffington Post from 2017 by the director of the No Kill Advocacy Center talking about how many animals PETA actually kills.
Apparently, in 2014, PETA killed 2,324 of the 2,626 animals it acquired.
It had a 1% adoption rate.
In 2015, it killed another 1,500.
of the 2,626 animals it acquired.
It had a 1% adoption rate.
In 2015, it killed another 1,500.
Last year, 1,442 were put to death.
The majority of the remainder were taken to local pounds where they were also killed.
So, well done PETA just doing the work that I guess none of the other animal killers will do.
Okay, other things that I hate today.
One of the things that makes conversation about difficult topics very Very rough.
Is when people attribute bad motive to certain folks without attributing similar motive to other folks.
And this is particularly true on issues of race.
Is that every issue in which race is implicated, racism is immediately called.
An example of that today.
Ronald Wright is a professor of law at Wake Forest University.
Has a piece of the New York Times called, Yes, jury selection is as racist as you think.
Now we have proof.
So what exactly is the proof that jury selection is racist?
Well, based on statewide jury selection records, our Jury Sunshine Project discovered that prosecutors remove about 20% of African Americans available in the jury pool, compared with about 10% of whites.
Defense attorneys, seemingly in response, remove more of the white jurors, 22%, than black jurors, 10%, left in the post-judge and prosecutor pool.
I love how they just insert that phrase, seemingly in response.
There's no evidence that it's seemingly in response.
That it's like prosecutors say, you know what?
We're going to remove black jurors from the pool because we're racist.
And the defense jurors are like, you know what?
Stop racism.
We're going to dismiss white jurors.
Obviously, what's happening here is that both defense and prosecutors are using race as a proxy for political viewpoint when it comes to matters of crime.
That's what's obviously happening here.
Now, is that racism?
Well, it's what Thomas Sowell would call discrimination type two.
So Thomas Sowell, we've talked about some program before, the economist Thomas Sowell, who is black, obviously, he has a book called Discrimination and Disparities, or Disparities and Discrimination, and he posits a sort of thought model when it comes to discrimination.
There are a couple of different types of discrimination.
There's discrimination type one, okay?
This is like, this is open, discrimination type one is you discriminating based on what sort of Food you want for dinner tonight.
That's you discriminating on the basis of who you want to marry, right?
Discrimination is just a choice.
Then there's discrimination type 2, which is I hate members of a particular race or think that members of a particular race are lesser.
On the basis of biology, that would be racism.
Or Jews are a member of a conspiracy because they are members of the Jewish tribe, right?
This sort of thing is discrimination type 2.
So I misspoke earlier.
This, this jury selection stuff, would be an example of what Sowell calls Discrimination 1A.
And this is using race as a proxy for other factors in the absence of other information.
So, to take a perfectly valid example, People on the left use affirmative action in this way.
They say that in the absence of other information, if I look at a black person and a white person, I can assume the black person is poor and had a worse educational background.
Thus, we should give that person an advantage in college admissions.
Now, in the absence of other information, that might not actually be a terrible argument.
The problem with affirmative action is we do have that other information.
We can gather that other information.
And because of that, it is discriminatory to simply assume Overriding the evidence that a black person necessarily had a worse life than a white person.
However, when it comes to jury selection and peremptory challenges, which are challenges that are just issued based on somebody basically not thinking that you're going to vote with them in a jury pool, This is discrimination 1A, which is the same sort of discrimination that is used by taxi drivers in New York, both black and white, who have refused to pick up passengers of different races at the same rate because they are using race as a proxy for criminal behavior.
Now, is that racism or is that simply using a form of discrimination in the absence of better information?
And so in the case of taxis, this is why Uber is really good because you can actually have drivers know something about the passengers before they pick them up, right?
You have a passenger rating and you can tell whether they are safe or not.
And as a passenger, you actually have to submit your ID to Uber when you first get an Uber account, for example.
This is why we need more information, not less information, but to attribute jury selection to racism on behalf of the prosecutors, but not racism on behalf of the defense, is to ignore the real issue when it comes to jury selection, which is people using race as a proxy for political viewpoint, and instead suggest that it's just the prosecutors hate black people, which is obviously not the case.
Another example of this.
Adam Serwer has an article over at The Atlantic in which he talks about a judge named Farr, a guy named Thomas Farr, and he was nominated for the federal bench.
And the Justice Department identified Farr an attorney for Jesse Helms, the senator from North Carolina who used a lot of race baiting when he ran for office in 1984 and 1990.
For example, in 1984, he put out flyers saying, look how the Democrats are registering so many black voters.
Pretty obvious race baiting and racist activity.
The Justice Department identified Farr, an attorney for Helms, as aiding the Helms campaign effort to keep black voters from the polls, particularly in 1984.
And then Farr had defended gerrymandered maps that were drawn with race as a concern.
Basically, what happened with this nomination is that Senator Tim Scott was notified about all of this.
And so Scott sank the nomination.
Senator Scott, in accordance with Jeff Flake, also sank the nomination.
But it wasn't just them, right?
Marco Rubio came forward and he said, as I study this more, I have serious questions about this.
This was not good enough for Adam Serwer over at The Atlantic, who says that the problem is that Republicans are willing to overlook racism unless it's Tim Scott notifying them of such.
So basically, he argues Much has been said about the diversity of the incoming class of Democratic freshman representatives and about the corresponding whiteness of the Republican delegation.
Until the Republican Party is beholden to diverse constituencies, until its base properly regards a tax on the rights to vote, Except for the fact that the Republican Party was going to vote down one of President Trump's own nominees.
Jeff Flake is a white guy in the Republican Party.
Marco Rubio is a Hispanic guy inside the Republican Party.
All it took was a couple of votes to kill Thomas Farr's nomination, and it was killed.
So this argument doesn't actually follow.
Attributing far-going down to Republican racism is a weird argument.
When's the last time a Democratic nominee went down because somebody in the Democratic caucus objected to intersectionality language from the Democratic nominee?
So, again, this is not to say that there isn't racism among certain Republicans.
I'm sure there is.
And of course, I know there is.
But that is not the same thing as suggesting that the Republican Party is overtly racist because they listened to Tim Scott.
Very, very strange argument.
OK, so we will be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
We're going to be broadcasting from Washington, D.C.
tomorrow.
So we'll see you then.
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 Carmina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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