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Dec. 10, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:47
Lock Him Up? | Ep. 676
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The left celebrates as federal prosecutors talk about inciting President Trump.
President Trump swivels and clocks James Comey.
And the White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, is out.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So you had yourself a busy little weekend.
It may be your last.
That was the actual original lyric to to, uh, have yourself a merry little Christmas was have yourself a merry little Christmas.
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I'm not kidding.
That's the original.
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But now we are back from the weekend and we have so much news to get to.
So much news.
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So much goodness to begin your week.
OK, so, so much badness to begin the Presidents of the United States' week.
The president had a very, very rough Friday afternoon.
On Friday afternoon, there were two major legal memos regarding President Trump's former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, that dropped.
The first concerned the Mueller investigation's recommended sentencing for Michael Cohen.
I'll analyze that one in just a second.
The second is the more important one.
This one concerned the Southern District of New York's recommended sentencing for Michael Cohen in light of his testimony regarding President Trump's campaign and payoffs to women, including former paramour Stormy Daniels.
The president's bad taste in women has finally caught up with him.
Here is the problem.
The SDNY investigation is all about campaign finance reform.
The Mueller investigation is all about Trump-Russia links.
As you might guess, the campaign finance stuff has more legs than the Trump-Russia stuff, at least as this point.
So here's what we can take away from the SDNY, Southern District of New York, filing against Michael Cohen.
First, they don't like Michael Cohen very much.
This memo is written like a prosecutorial argument.
It's written like a prosecuting document.
As Andrew McCarthy points out, that is not atypical for this sort of filing.
According to the filing, Cohen committed four distinct federal crimes over a period of several years.
He was motivated to do so by personal greed and repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends.
They refused to call him a cooperating witness, meaning they didn't really want to mitigate his sentence.
They want a sentence that reflects a modest downward variance from a statutory period of between 51 and 63 months.
So that means they want to put him away for three to four years in federal prison at minimum.
They're going after Cohen for illegal campaign contributions.
Here's where things get dicey for President Trump.
The wages of Stormy Daniels for Michael Cohen are jail.
The SDNY is accusing Michael Cohen of having a campaign email address and of advising the campaigns.
They're saying that basically he worked for the campaign without formally working for the campaign.
They claim that Cohen, quote, played a central role in two similar schemes to purchase the rights to stories, each from women who claim to have had an affair with individual one, individual one would be Trump, so as to suppress the stories and thereby prevent them from influencing the election.
If you recall, what happened is that President Trump Saw that there were a couple of stories that were gonna break, one from Karen McDougal, a former paramour, and one from Stormy Daniels, a former paramour, and he then instructed, according to Michael Cohen, he instructed Michael Cohen to go pay off the National Enquirer to go buy these stories from these women and then bury them.
Now, this sort of arrangement had existed apparently for a long time between President Trump and the National Enquirer, which is something that we're gonna get back to in just a second.
The SDNY says that this was a campaign finance issue.
Why do they say this is a campaign finance issue?
Because they say basically, This was a campaign expenditure.
It was an expenditure designed to prevent these stories from coming out in the middle of the campaign and thereby impacting the campaign itself.
And so President Trump instructed Michael Cohen to make these payments and then did not report them to the Federal Elections Commission.
And this constitutes a federal crime, not only on the part of Michael Cohen, but on the part of President Trump.
Now, there are a couple of problems with this legal theory.
Problem number one with this legal theory, that would mean that President Trump had to know he was violating campaign law.
The actual standard for intent in campaign finance law that bears criminal penalties is extremely high.
And number two, it is unclear whether it is actually a campaign expenditure to pay hush money to a woman.
Because let's say that he were running a campaign, and then the campaign had actually paid hush money to a woman.
Would that be legal?
Unclear.
Unclear whether you can really claim as a campaign expenditure paying hush money to a woman in your circle, or whether that would constitute an illegal campaign donation or an illegal campaign expenditure.
Well, if it's illegal to use campaign money to pay off a woman, then the only other way to pay off a woman would be to not do it as campaign money, which is what happened here.
That's the case that's been made by many, including a former FEC commissioner.
We'll get back to that in just a second.
What does this mean?
Well, it means that they are going to go after Trump himself for campaign violations.
There's no question the SDNY is targeting President Trump for indictment.
He will find himself in a court of law if it is possible, in fact, to prosecute the President of the United States.
That is a dicey constitutional issue.
It is not clear whether the President of the United States is immune to prosecution.
Bill Clinton was not prosecuted.
He was made subject to a civil suit, which is not quite the same thing in the Paula Jones case.
A criminal indictment of a sitting president provides serious constitutional problems because you could then have a state prosecuting a president, putting the president behind bars anytime you don't like the president.
You could have a malicious prosecution for a state crime in any state in the union, and then that could be used to lock up a president.
So typically speaking, constitutional scholars have suggested that presidents are immune to criminal prosecution and that the proper measure for going after a president is impeachment.
And then there are folks who suggest that President Trump would then be prosecuted theoretically after he left office.
But all of this is speculating as to what happens as to this investigation itself.
What is not real speculation at this point is that the SDNY is gearing up for a criminal incitement of President Trump that will either be leveraged after he leaves office or they will attempt to cram down even while he's president.
The SDNY says that Cohen, quote, acted with the intent to influence the 2016 presidential election, that he coordinated with campaign members, and that he acted in coordination with and at the direction of individual one.
It's that last language that matters to President Trump.
The SDNY is claiming that Michael Cohen only acted because President Trump instructed him to break the law.
The SDNY is essentially accusing Trump of ordering a violation of campaign finance law.
Cohen also did not talk to the SDNY about ancillary matters, so this is all that they are giving him that really matters.
Now, I want to get to Andy McCarthy has a piece in National Review all about the takeaway from the sentencing memorandum.
He comes to the same conclusion I do, which that the SDNY is likely to indict President Trump.
Here is what Andy McCarthy says.
And remember, Andy McCarthy has been very pro the president in terms of his legal reasoning.
This is not coming from somebody who wants to quote unquote get the president.
He says prosecutors would not have done this if the president was not on their radar screen.
Indeed, if the president was not implicated, I suspect they would not have prosecuted Cohen for campaign finance violations at all.
Those charges had a negligible impact on the jail time Cohen faces, which is driven by the more serious offenses of tax and financial institution fraud involving millions of dollars.
Moreover, Campaign finance infractions are often settled by payment of an administrative fine, not turned into felony prosecutions.
To be sure, federal prosecutors in New York City have charged them as felonies before, most notably against Dinesh D'Souza.
In marked contrast, though, when it was discovered that Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was guilty of violations involving nearly $2 million, the Obama Justice Department decided not to prosecute and said they fined him like 400 grand.
Nevertheless, the sentencing memo in Cohen's case reads like an ode to campaign finance laws.
And here is what McCarthy says.
He says, Thus, the argument goes, even if the hush money payments vastly exceeded Cohen's legal ceiling, Trump himself could have made them legally.
But there are flaws in this theory.
To begin with, The campaign finance laws do not just prescribe limits on spending, they mandate disclosure.
And this is what I was saying earlier about the fact that President Trump, if he worked out with Michael Cohen how to pay off Stormy Daniels and then didn't inform the Federal Elections Commission, that in and of itself could have been the crime.
The sentencing memo for Cohen argues that the hush money payments were not merely unreported.
It states that Cohen and the Trump organization, the president's company, went to great lengths to conceal them by fraudulent bookkeeping.
Equally significant, Cohen was not charged with merely making illegal donations, says Andy McCarthy.
He was charged in the first campaign finance count with causing a company to make illegal donations.
This would be the offense centering not on Stormy Daniels, but on former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Prosecutors have already given immunity to a bunch of American media executives, National Enquirer executives.
Presumably they're doing that in order to get them to testify against President Trump.
So here is what McCarthy suggests.
He suggests that Trump may have a solid defense here.
He says that there are a couple of ways that the president could defend himself.
First, campaign finance violations have a high proof threshold for intent, as I was saying earlier.
President Trump could argue that because there was no spending limit on his contributions, he did not think about the campaign finance implications, much less willfully violate them.
There is, furthermore, a significant question about whether hush money payments qualify as in-kind campaign contributions.
There's nothing illegal, per se, in making a nondisclosure agreement.
They're quite common.
The criminal law comes into play only if the nondisclosure payment is deemed a donation for purposes of influencing a political campaign.
And so Trump could claim, I think rightly, that he's been making payoffs like this his entire career.
So this is not having to do with the election.
Whether or not there was an election, he was going to attempt to pay off the National Enquirer to silence Stormy Daniels and to silence Karen McDougal.
So it has nothing to do with the election.
So the payment is not a donation if it was made for an expense that was independent of the campaign.
That is money that would have had to be paid, even if there were no campaign.
There are other salient issues as well.
Justice Department guidance says a sitting president can't be indicted.
If President Trump were to be reelected in 2020, he would not be out until 2024.
And then the statute of limitations would have elapsed.
But the bottom line is that the president is now in peril of indictment.
Again, that doesn't mean that he actually will be criminally indicted.
It doesn't mean that if he's indicted, he actually has to face down a trial.
It doesn't mean any of those things.
It could provide the hook for the left to hang its hat upon when it comes to impeachment.
Adam Schiff, again, a man who puts up his pup tent outside all of the green rooms in Washington, D.C., was on Face the Nation over the weekend.
He's incoming chief, probably, of the House Intelligence and Oversight Committee.
He says that President Trump now faces the prospect of jail time.
There's a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him.
That he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time.
Okay, so he's making this case, and this is, in a way, actually cutting against Democrats' political interests, because the more they push this, the more they say that the president is facing jail time, the more it becomes incumbent on them to file impeachment charges against the president as soon as they enter office.
And as we'll see, the Democrats are already implying they're going to do so.
Now, what will be the political blowback for all of that?
Unclear.
Typical kind of conventional wisdom holds that when you try to impeach a president and fail, the president gains in strength going into his next election.
I'm not sure that's the case, but I'll explain that in just one second.
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All right, so the Democrats are painting themselves into a corner because now, if they believe President Trump has committed a criminal offense, they're almost forced to file impeachment charges in the House against President Trump.
So here is Representative Gerald Nadler.
He is making exactly that case over the weekend to Jake Tapper on CNN.
Certainly they'd be impeachable offenses because even though they were committed before the president became president, they were committed in the service of fraudulently obtaining the office.
That would be an impeachable offense.
Okay, so he's not the only one making this case.
Denny Heck, another representative from Nevada, he was on CNN as well making exactly the same case.
The president should be indicted.
Do you think there's now enough evidence to prove that President Trump committed a crime, possibly even a felony?
Yes.
Okay.
Why?
Well, because Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to it, and because they named the president individual one, which I don't think they would have done in any way, shape, or form.
They weren't required to reference the president, but they did so, and I have to assume that that is on the basis of significant and material corroborating evidence that they have collected.
OK, so suffice it to say that if these crimes had been committed by a Democrat while President Obama was in office, let's say President Obama had done all of this, would President Obama be facing jail time from his own Justice Department?
No, because President Obama's Justice Department was his wingman.
For people who are saying that this just proves how corrupt the Trump administration is, remember, Trump's DOJ has been allowed to go through with full investigations.
Obama's DOJ was basically protecting him every step of the way.
For those who say that there is no indictment possible here, remember that John Edwards was indicted.
The former presidential candidate for the Democrats was indicted on similar charges.
It's difficult to prove these charges.
It's very difficult to suggest the president is going to go to jail because he paid hush money to a woman.
Again, John Edwards, the difference in that case particularly, is that John Edwards' own people were willing to stand up for him.
In this particular case, the Mueller investigation, the SDNY, I've cracked down on Michael Cohen to the extent that he's broken.
Turning witnesses against President Trump is the key to getting President Trump indicted.
Is he protected from indictment past the election?
Yes.
I think that it's difficult to read the Justice Department guidelines and say President Trump is going to jail while still elected president of the United States.
With that said, does this provide the impetus for an impeachment?
It certainly does.
In a second, we'll discuss what that means for the Democrats.
As I say, typical conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats would be worse off if they impeach President Trump than if they just sort of sit there and fulminate about him.
It's still two years away from the election.
It's still December of 2018.
The next election only happens in November of 2020, which is a long time.
If we've learned anything during the Trump era, it's that every day lasts a thousand years.
So if the Democrats were to try and drag this out all the way through November of 2020, I'm not sure that they could keep people's enthusiasm up that long on this particular issue, especially because our perceptions of President Trump are already set.
Politically speaking, we all assume President Trump pays hush money to women.
Why?
Because he's President Trump.
As I've said for a long time, the idea that President Trump is a dirty guy when it comes to women This has been known.
There's nothing new here.
So the question really becomes, do Democrats really believe that they can make political hay out of this for a long period of time?
And I'm not sure that the answer is yes.
And it looks like they are over their skis if they start pushing for impeachment on the basis of what amounts to a campaign finance violation about him paying off women when he's been doing that for 20 years and when the criminal indictment is hanging over his head.
President Trump basically tweets that out over the weekend.
Here's what President Trump had to say.
He said, totally clears the president.
Thank you.
Well, no, not smuch.
He's tweeting that the SDNY memo cleared the president and that the Mueller investigation memo cleared the president.
We'll get to the Mueller investigation memo in just a second.
When President Trump says it clears him, that is not, in fact, totally the case.
He then continued along these lines.
He says, After two years and millions of pages of documents and a cost of over $30 million, no collusion.
We're going to get to the Mueller memo in just a second.
So here's what the Mueller memo says.
Now, remember, all of this began not with campaign finance violations, which are the more dangerous path for President Trump.
All of this began with the accusation that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in order to affect and impact the outcome of the 2016 election and was instrumental in the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta's emails.
That was the original accusation.
That still has not been proved.
Nothing in the Mueller investigation proves it.
The Mueller investigation filed a sentencing memo against Michael Cohen on Friday, and here's what you need to know about that sentencing memo, because there were two sentencing memos about Cohen, one from the SDNY, that one's damaging to Trump, one from the Mueller investigation, that one not so much.
So here's what the Mueller investigation memo, which was supposed to be the big fish, here's what they say.
They say, That Cohen's crime was serious and he withheld material information to the investigators of the Russia interference in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
They say that he lied in deliberate and premeditated fashion and all that began in a written submission.
Mueller is focusing in on Cohen's lies about business that President Trump did with Moscow.
According to the sentencing memo, Cohen quote, lied to Congress about a business project, the Moscow Project, that he worked on during the 2016 presidential campaign while working for Trump Company and for President Trump personally.
The goal of such lies was allegedly to minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual One, President Trump, and to give the false impression that the Moscow Project had ended before the Iowa caucus and the first presidential primaries in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russia investigations being conducted by Congress and the SEO.
So, Cohen's lies were obscured by the fact that the Moscow project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought and likely required the assistance of the Russian government.
If the project was completed, the company could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues.
Mellor says Cohen worked on the project and discussed it with Trump well into the campaign, and adds that Cohen, during the campaign, had a substantive telephone call about the project with an assistant to the press secretary for the president of Russia.
Now, a couple of things.
Cohen is not being charged for doing business with Russia.
He's being charged for lying to Mueller about doing business with Russia.
President Trump lied about doing business with Russia during the campaign, or at least lied about the idea that he had never done business with Russia during the campaign.
But that's not a crime.
That's not criminal.
So the real question is, what's criminal?
If Mueller's investigation were to move toward a criminal indictment of the president, it would have to be along the lines that he instructed Michael Cohen to lie to the authorities.
It would have to be that he Suborn perjury, basically.
That would have to be the argument here, because there's nothing illegal about doing business with the Russians.
There's nothing illegal about doing business with the Russians during the campaign.
There's nothing illegal about lying to the American people about doing business with the Russians during the campaign, even though it's politically terrible.
So, what would the actual crime be?
According to the sentencing memo, the only crime here would have to be President Trump telling Cohen to shut his face when he talked to Mueller or lie when he talked to Mueller.
And that's sort of what the memo is saying.
They say the defendant provided information about attempts by other Russian nationals to reach the campaign.
They said in November 2015, Cohen received the contact information for and spoke with a Russian national who claimed to be a trusted person in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign political synergy and synergy on a governmental level.
That never came to fruition.
It seems like The allegation here is going to be from Mueller that Trump suborned perjury, but there is no actual claim of that in this sentencing memo.
So bottom line, the Cohen investigation in New York, dangerous to the president.
The Mueller investigation so far, not so dangerous to the president.
Now, how has the president dealt with all this?
The president has swung and clocked James Comey, former FBI director, because we have a controversy over there.
And that controversy is justified as well.
We'll get to the Comey controversy in just one second, plus the rest of the White House chaos.
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Okay.
Meanwhile, President Trump has responded to the Cohen memos by basically swiveling and clocking James Comey, which is always humorous.
I have to say, it's always funny when the president clocks James Comey, because James Comey's the worst.
The former FBI director, He's a grandstanding schmuck of a person.
The former FBI director loves him some James Comey.
And I've always said that find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta of CNN loves Jim Acosta.
The same thing holds true of James Comey.
He found himself somebody who loves him like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
He found himself some James Comey.
James Comey loves James Comey.
He came out today and he said the proper solution to President Trump's corruption is for him to be ousted from office in 2020.
I can't imagine why so many Republicans think that maybe James Comey was politically driven in 2016 with commentary like that.
I just can't imagine.
James Comey came out over the weekend and he said if Trump weren't the president, he'd be in jeopardy of being charged.
This is what the former FBI director, so he says that.
And then it turns out that James Comey testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee and 235 pages of transcript.
It turns out he doesn't know and he doesn't remember at all anything about dozens of questions concerning key details in the Russia probe.
So the accusation made about James Comey and the FBI is that the original genesis of the Russia probe was a bunch of Obama Democrats and Hillary Clinton's campaign coordinating to launch an investigation of President Trump and his relationships with the Russians.
And then on the basis of faulty, flawed evidence that Comey knew was faulty and flawed, they decided to continue that investigation forthwith and extend it into a FISA warrant for Carter Page.
So James Comey was asked about all of this and it turns out he remembers nothing.
So after writing his book, Hired Loyalty or whatever it was, after writing that book where he remembered every detail, where he testified in open session of Congress that he remembered specifically every detail, kept contemporaneous memos, suddenly he can't remember.
At all.
Whether he knew, for example, that the Steele dossier, which was used as the basis for the FISA warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy aide, he can't remember at all whether he even knew that the Christopher Steele dossier existed.
He can't remember in the slightest whether that dossier had been investigated or whether that dossier he knew was faulty.
He just can't remember these things.
I mean, it's so confusing up there in James Comey's head, which is like eight feet from the ground.
It's so confusing.
According to Fox News, the former bureau boss frustrated GOP lawmakers during Friday's session, in large part because his lawyers urged him not to answer numerous questions.
Comey's expected to return later in the month for another round, though blasted Republicans on his way out for what he called a desperate attempt to find anything that can be used to attack the institutions of justice investigating this president.
Now, a couple of things can be true in all of this, and in fact, I think are true.
Number one, Comey is a schmuck who is politically driven.
Two, President Trump's behavior with regard to Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, Could be a campaign finance violation.
It could certainly be a campaign finance violation.
That's a possibility.
Three, the Russia investigation could come up largely empty and reach outs by the Russian government could have resulted in nothing.
I think all three of those things are likely to be true.
But the first thing is certainly true.
I mean, James Comey is a guy who is politically driven.
It's pretty obvious.
He says Comey insisted in the interview that we never investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes, but the transcript shows he claimed ignorance or memory lapses in response to questions concerning key details and events in the Russia investigation.
Which some GOP lawmakers continue to claim was improperly conducted.
The transcript reveals lawmakers frustration with his lack of specifics.
Asked if he recalled who drafted the FBI's initiation document for the July 2016 Russia investigation, Comey said, I do not.
He again claimed not to know when asked about the involvement in that initiation of Peter Strzok.
Whose anti-Trump texts later got him removed from the special counsel's probe.
When asked if the FBI had any evidence that anyone in the Trump campaign conspired to hack the DNC server, Comey gave a lengthy answer referring to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as to why he couldn't answer.
He says, I don't think that the FBI and Special Counsel want me answering that question that may relate to their investigation of Russian interference during 2016, and I worry that would cross the line.
When pressed further by Trey Gowdy, Representative Gowdy of South Carolina, about what factual predicate the Bureau had to launch a counterintelligence investigation, Comey again claimed that answering the question would be a slope that would ask him to reveal what the FBI did or didn't know about Russian activity as it relates to the 2016 election.
Gowdy asked, you can't tell us or you won't tell us?
And Comey said, probably a combination of both.
Yeah, all of this is deeply suspicious and does lend credence to the idea that James Comey and the FBI were being politically maneuvered by Democrats, by the Obama administration, in an attempt to target President Trump, or at least in an attempt to investigate President Trump.
Maybe not in an attempt to destroy his electoral prospects, because remember, none of this stuff leaked until basically after the election, but in an attempt to see if there was anything perverse about President Trump's campaign.
Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, he says Comey couldn't remember anything, which is weird.
245 times he says, don't remember, don't recall, don't know.
What I'm, what was most, I guess, the biggest takeaway for me was the don't know part.
Didn't know that Christopher Steele was terminated for talking to the press.
Didn't know he had talked to the press.
Didn't know they continued to work with Christopher Steele after he had been terminated and continued to get his information.
So I was mostly struck by that.
Here's the key player, the guy who wrote, put together the dossier that was the basis for getting the warrant.
And you didn't know anything about him?
I find that hard to believe, but those were his answers yesterday.
Okay, all of this is not great for the Trump administration, but it's also very bad for James Comey.
Basically, our faith in our institutions has been shattered at virtually every level.
Trump's election has proved that our faith in our institutions has been shattered at virtually every level.
So where does all of this end up?
Probably with the FBI having a black eye over its treatment of the Russia investigation.
They already have a black eye over their treatment of the Hillary investigation.
Probably with the Trump administration, Trump campaign, having a black eye over his hush money payoffs to women he was having adultery with.
And probably with the Mueller investigation, I think, coming up with far less than the left thinks that they are going to come up with.
Although that is still yet to be seen.
With all of that said, this is leading to a fair bit of chaos inside the White House.
Nick Ayers was Basically tapped to be the guy who's going to take over for Chief of Staff John Kelly when Kelly was ousted.
It's been rumored for a long time that John Kelly, who was the current Chief of Staff, was going to be leaving in the very near future.
He'd been at odds with the President.
He'd been at odds with other top members of the administration, particularly the Jared Kushner part of the administration.
And the fact that Kelly is out is no surprise.
Over the weekend, Kelly was ousted.
He is leaving.
And Nick Ayers, who was Vice President Mike Pence's Chief of Staff, was rumored and expected to be the new Chief of Staff, which would have at least created a certain level of solidarity in the upper levels of the administration, because Ayers is very close with all of the other teams.
He's close with the foreign policy team, he's close with Pence's team, he's close with Kushner's team, he's close with all of these various teams.
Well, Ayers had been tapped, and then over the weekend, he was untapped, which is not great news for the administration, because Ayers would have been a very solid pick.
According to Bloomberg, When the president tweets that Ayers had not been the pick, that I do not think is true.
I think that is not true.
He declared it fake news that top vice presidential aide Nick Ayers had been certain to get the job before withdrawing.
Ayers tweeted out, thank you, President Trump, vice president and my great colleagues for the honor to serve our nation at the White House.
I will be departing at the end of the year, but we'll work with the MAGA team to advance the cause.
He's supposed to take over the super PAC for President Trump's team.
When the president tweets that Ayers had not been the pick, that I do not think is true.
I think that is not true.
I think that the president is fibbing on that.
But now they are in a bit of turmoil as to who should lead up the chief of staff position, Mike.
Mark Meadows, the representative from South Carolina, has been rumored.
Meadows, maybe North Carolina.
But in any case, Meadows had been rumored to be the guy who was going to take over, maybe.
Mick Mulvaney has been rumored.
Scaramucci has been rumored, believe it or not.
Like, that rumor is still floating around.
Which, by the way, would be the greatest fourth season comeback in history.
Right?
If the Mooch were back, If the Mooch came back, wow, great TV twist.
So I'm heavily rooting for the Mooch.
I hope the Mooch comes back because entertainment value, folks, it would just be through the roof.
We'll get to the impact of all that in just a second.
First, I have to tell you, About this amazing graphic novel series.
When most people think of comic books, they think superheroes.
I'm a huge comic book fan, as people who listen to the show regularly know.
DC over Marvel every time.
But there's a whole world of comics and graphic novels that is basically popular fiction.
Dramas, thrillers, hard crime, more stories that are nuanced as a novel, but expressed with unbelievable art.
One of these is Black Powder, Red Earth Yemen.
I read this over the weekend.
It is just tremendous.
It's a graphic novel series told from the perspective of special operations soldiers hunting ISIS in Yemen.
And it's all about the political machinations that are happening in Yemen.
The art of it is just spectacular and beautiful.
It is incredibly, incredibly beautiful and brutal and brutal.
The story steps into the event horizon of a failed state ruthlessly reshaped by civil war, radical Islamic terrorists, foreign powers, and private military companies, each pushing the regional conflict to their own desired end state.
Developed in collaboration with U.S.
Army Special Ops Combat Veterans, Black Power Red Earth Yemen features scenes pulled from real life and recontextualized for fiction.
It's a fiction extrapolated from the boots-on-the-ground reality of modern warfare in places like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
Today, it is so accurate that military members actually have consulted this.
Really, in looking at how military ops are run.
You can pick up Black Powder, Red Earth, Yemen graphic novels on amazon.com or the website blackpowderredearth.com.
That's blackpowderredearth.com.
It is not for the faint of heart.
It is not for kids.
This is definitely for adults or at least Or at least late teenagers.
And it is awesome, awesome stuff.
You can learn all about other Black Powder Red Earth projects the creators are building to include a video game, an animated series, a tabletop war game.
All this stuff is great and really educational as well.
This is definitely not a book for kids.
Again, it does have graphic violence and graphic language, but...
It's awesome.
It's really good.
So for people who are comic book and graphic novels fans, you're going to love it.
Go check it out.
BlackPowderRedEarth.com.
Again, BlackPowderRedEarth.com or check out BlackPowderRedEarth Yemen, the graphic novels on Amazon.com.
Go check those out right now.
Super cool.
I mean, the art is spectacularly good.
Also, we're going to get to more of the news, and I have a lot to say about a variety of social justice warrior issues, social media insanity.
Lots to get to in just a second.
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I know what you really want is more me.
And coming up in 2019, the Ben Shapiro radio show is extending to three hours.
That is correct.
The Ben Shapiro radio show will be adding a full two more hours every day.
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That's performed by Michael Knowles today.
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He left his tears, hot or cold Tumblr.
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Look at this.
Wow.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
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Okay, so bottom line is lots of chaos over at the White House.
John Kelly is out.
Nick Ayers is not in.
Right now there are a bunch of people who have been rumored again.
Republican Representative Mark Meadows.
The U.S.
Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.
Apparently he doesn't want it.
Budget Director Mick Mulvaney apparently doesn't want it.
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker might not want it.
Nobody really wants it because there is so much chaos at the White House and all of that does go to the President's governing style.
The President does not make life easy for his staffers over at the White House.
It's a difficult life to be a staffer over at the White House.
You are on call all the time.
And let's be real about this.
There was a lot of chaos in the first couple of years of the Obama administration as well.
But suffice it to say that with the president doing what the president does, that's a very difficult and unrewarding job.
And it'll be interesting to see who he picks as his chief of staff.
I just hope whoever it is is able to bring together folks inside that administration in a way that John Kelly certainly could not.
And I think Nick Ayers was sort of poised to.
Now, meanwhile, It is worth pointing out that there is a Supreme Court ruling today.
It wasn't really a ruling.
It was a refusal to take a writ of certiorari on a on an abortion case.
According to National Review, the Supreme Court on Monday declined to review lower court rulings that prevented pro-life activists in two states from ending public financing for Planned Parenthood.
So there was a case that was going to be appealed to the Supreme Court about whether states could ban funding public funding for Planned Parenthood.
The cases pertain to whether a Medicaid recipient who relies on Planned Parenthood for health services has a right to challenge her state's decision to defund the organization.
To date, state courts in Kansas and Louisiana have found that states violate federal law by depriving Planned Parenthood affiliates of Medicaid funding solely because they provide abortion.
The idea is that all of these federal programs can fund Planned Parenthood, and because they have not prevented the funding of Planned Parenthood, states can't step in and prevent the federal government from funding Planned Parenthood on the Medicaid level, even if the state is contributing.
This would be a right political issue.
Here's the problem.
There were three justices, three, who voted in favor of hearing the case.
These would be your favorite justices.
Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito.
Who voted against hearing the case?
Well, all of the leftists on the court and John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.
Who could have foreseen that Brett Kavanaugh would not be nearly as conservative as a lot of his proponents were suggesting?
Who could have suggested that Brett Kavanaugh might not in fact be the pro-life warrior on the Supreme Court that all the people on the left thought he was to the extent that they accused him of rape?
Who could have foreseen that Brett Kavanaugh would be a moderate on the court creating a new swing bloc with John Roberts?
Who could?
Right here.
That was me.
Yeah, that's right.
Go back, listen to the shows.
I said it at the time.
So, I think this is an early indicator that, and not a good indicator, that Brett Kavanaugh is going to be another moderate on the court, which is not exactly what folks need.
We need an originalist perspective on the court.
We don't need another, let's let all the branches get along with each other by perverting the Constitution.
Clarence Thomas argued that while the cases do tangentially relate to the question of abortion, That issue is the more basic question of an individual Medicaid recipient's relationship to her state government.
He said, it is true that these particular cases arose after several states alleged that Planned Parenthood affiliates had, among other things, engaged in the illegal sale of fetal organs and fraudulent billing practices, and thus removed Planned Parenthood as a state Medicaid provider.
But these cases are not about abortion rights.
They're about private rights of action under the Medicaid Act.
Resolving the question presented here would not even affect Planned Parenthood's ability to challenge states' decisions.
This of course is correct, but that didn't stop Kavanaugh from preventing this case from being heard.
All it takes to get a Supreme Court writ of certiorari heard is four justices voting in favor of hearing the case.
Kavanaugh voted against hearing the case, not a great early indicator from new Justice Kavanaugh on how he will rule in future cases, not only concerning abortion, but considering hot-button political and federalism issues.
Okay, meanwhile, Speaking of hot button political issues, I gotta tell you this story about how out of control the media are.
So the social media networks right now are completely out of control.
I mean, insanely out of control.
How out of control are the social media networks?
On Sunday, there was a kid named Kyler Murray.
He just won the Heisman Trophy.
He's the Oklahoma quarterback.
And he became the subject of a piece from a USA Today blogger named Scott Gleason.
What did Gleason do?
Gleason wrote an article shaming Murray immediately thereafter he won the Heisman over some tweets he wrote when he was 14 years old.
I kid you not.
Gleason wrote, the Oklahoma quarterback's memorable night also helped resurface social media's memory of several homophobic tweets more than six years old.
When Murray was 15 years old, he tweeted at his friends via his since verified Twitter account using an anti-gay slur to defame them.
So Gleason later updated his piece to include Murray's apology.
Murray should not have apologized.
Gleeson should be fired.
Honestly, there is no journalist in America who should be being paid to dig up tweets from a 14-year-old right after that person wins the Heisman Trophy.
Basically, you do something prominent in American life, you do something successful in American life, and suddenly the trolls come out of the woodwork.
And what I love most about that USA Today article from the schmuck Gleeson, what I love the most about it is the way that it is phrased.
The quarterback's memorable night also helped resurface, passive tense, social media's memory, social media doesn't have a memory, of several homophobic tweets more than six years old.
Now what happened is Gleason actively went and searched out the F word with regard to gay people, and then he found some tweets from this kid when the kid was 14, and now we're going to destroy people over what they say when they are 14.
And this is the way social media works now.
Social media has no mercy.
Social media has no standards.
The standards are constantly moving.
We are not going to pretend that 14-year-olds are immune to this sort of stuff.
We're not going to allow people to repent.
We saw this last week with Kevin Hart.
We're never going to allow people to grow and repent and get better.
We're simply going to ruin them.
That's the way social media works.
And it gets even worse.
In just a second, I'm going to explain to you...
How social media have basically become the new Puritans, even while they push a new standard of radical leftism.
So social media have basically decided they are the new arbiters of morality.
The social media networks are going to decide the new morality.
Now, for those of us who are religious, the basic idea is that God sets forth a morality and then he judges us with both justice and, thank God, with mercy.
But the new God of social media has no mercy.
He is a god of justice alone or she or Z is a god of justice alone.
OK, and that god of justice alone has a set of rules that are arbitrarily applied and randomly applied and randomly changed.
And that means that Heisman winning quarterbacks can be analyzed for their tweets from four or five years ago, that Kevin Hart can be destroyed on the basis of tweets that he sent back in 2010.
Then we can now go back into anyone's social media history and, like God, look back into what you thought 10 years ago and then destroy you over it.
And we're now extending it forward where thought crimes that were committed outside the purview of particular social media companies can end with banning.
So over the weekend, Patreon, which is a major service that is designed to allow people to basically have people give them money for a particular service.
You know, we have a subscription service over at The Daily Wire, but there are lots of people who offer special services to their customers via Patreon.
Well, social media company Patreon decided they were going to ban a series of people I'm not a fan of some of these people.
So these people include Milo Yiannopoulos, who I think is a terrible human being, and James Alsup, who is a far, they call him a far-right political commentator.
He's really just an alt-right guy.
He was banned from Patreon as well.
Patreon also banned Carl Benjamin, known as Sargon of Akkad, who is not like Milo and not like James Alsup.
The bottom line is they shouldn't be banning any of these people.
If you don't like these people, then maybe you should just explain why they're wrong and tell people not to give them money for their services.
But Patreon has now banned them without any clear standard of why the ban happened in the first place.
This comes after Alex Jones was banned from Twitter forever.
After Apple and Spotify removed his podcast.
Again, I don't have to agree with any of these people to recognize that social media has no standards, and they are unevenly applying those standards as much as they could possibly want.
Because listen, there will come a point where Patreon bans me.
I'm not on Patreon, but if I were, they would ban me.
Where Patreon or Facebook or Twitter come after me, or they come after Jordan Peterson, or they come after Dave Rubin, or they come after Mark Levin, or they come after Sean Hannity, or they come after everyone who they disagree with on any level.
That's the way these social media companies are working.
Why?
Because they are radically disconnected from real life.
Now, I've recommended on the show before, the HBO show Silicon Valley.
And it's a hilarious show.
The basic premise of the show is that there's a guy who's trying to start a media company in Silicon Valley, but one of the main stars of the show is a guy who's pretty obviously based on the heads of Google, a guy named Gavin Belson.
That's the character on Silicon Valley.
And Gavin Belson is a self-aggrandizing, new-agey, Jerk who pretends that he is soft and cuddly when in reality he's the harshest, most terrible person.
And he spends all of his time trying to force his business down on everyone.
He basically says that his job is to not do evil in the same way that Google's job is not to do evil, except that all he does throughout the show is do evil.
But he pretends that he's actually spiritual and enlightened.
I need to show you this clip from Silicon Valley to explain how it is that social media works in Silicon Valley.
So this is so spot on.
Here's Gavin Belson from Silicon Valley talking to a guru who he flew in in order to talk to him about spirituality.
It's weighing on you, Gavin.
Jared Dunn quit today to join Pied Piper.
I hate Richard Hendricks, that little Pied Piper.
Is that wrong?
In the hands of a lesser person, perhaps.
But in the hands of the enlightened, hate can be a tool for great change.
You're right, once again.
Okay, the reason I bring this up is because this is exactly what- How do I know this is what Silicon Valley is?
Because over the weekend, Jack Dorsey, who's the CEO of Twitter, had a series of tweets in which he morphed into Gavin Belson.
Now, I don't know how Mike Judge, the creator of Silicon Valley, somehow got Jack Dorsey to become Gavin Belson, but he did.
Jack Dorsey tweeted this out.
Myanmar, which is a place known for, like, it's genocide right now, is an absolutely beautiful country.
The people are full of joy and the food is amazing.
I visited the cities of Yangon, Mandalay, and Bagan.
We visited and meditated at many monasteries around the country.
And then he continued.
The highlight of my trip was serving monks and nuns food and donating sandals and umbrellas.
This group of young nuns in Mandalay and their chanting was breathtaking and chilling.
And then we get to my best part.
We also meditated in a cave in Mandalay one evening.
In the first 10 minutes, I got bit 117 times by mosquitoes.
They left me alone when the light blew a fuse, which you can see in my heart rate lowering.
So good.
I also wore my Apple Watch and Aura Ring, both in airplane mode.
My best meditations always had the least variation in heart rate.
When I wasn't focused, it would jump around a lot.
Here's a night of sleep on the tenth night.
My resting heart rate was consistently below 40.
Vipassana is not for everyone, but if any of this resonates with you in even the slightest, I'd encourage you to give it a try.
Okay, so the reason that I bring this up is because this is what Silicon Valley is in the end.
It's a bunch of self-aggrandizing, radical leftist jerks who spend their days pretending to like meditation so they can virtue signal to all their friends while banning people who disagree with them politically.
That's what Silicon Valley has become.
And we're supposed to take these people seriously as our moral arbiters?
But that's exactly what they do.
They're our moral arbiters now.
Because they can mobilize the mob, or they can be mobilized by the mob to go after people on a regular basis.
It's astonishing.
It's astonishing.
So...
Before you think social media has the capacity to control decency, recognize that the people who run social media are Gavin Belsons.
They're not, in fact, saints.
OK, meanwhile, I have to talk about a couple of stories that are just insane.
You know, maybe we'll save those stories for tomorrow.
Should we save those stories for tomorrow?
Probably.
OK, so we'll do things I like and then we'll do a couple of things that I hate.
OK, so things that I like today.
There's a great book that I've been reading over the weekend called American Dialogue by Joseph Ellis, The Founders and Us.
Joseph Ellis is winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
And this book is basically about controversial issues from the founders perspective and from our own.
So he looks at issues like race.
What did the founders think on racial issues?
Where were they wrong?
Where were they right when they were talking about the Constitution?
Was that supposed to be a document that enshrined racism or one that fought it?
It's a deep and useful book.
People who who pretend that the founders were not deep thinkers on a variety of issues but were really just protecting their own sort of property and interests ought to read this book in a lot more history.
Now the fact is that the founders were in fact deep thinkers with eternal ideas and even if they were men bound by their time they were also people who are thinking beyond the bounds of their time and it's our job to determine what in their thought was eternal and what was bound by the limitations of the time in which they lived.
OK, other things that I like.
So this was just spectacular.
If you did not see the Miami Dolphins New England Patriots game last night, I'm going to show you the last seven seconds of this game because it was one of the best things I've ever seen in NFL football.
Just amazing.
Here is the Miami Dolphins who are down to their last play.
Seven seconds left.
First and 10 from their own 30 yard line.
And here's what happens.
Seven seconds left.
Tannehill will throw it.
And this will end it after the shovel.
Or will it?
Miami running around, circling.
Oh, look out!
Krakowski didn't have the ankle!
Touchdown!
Unbelievable.
So, it's also fun to see that done against the New England Patriots for everybody.
So, amazing.
So I had to show that to you because when there's a great sports play, I just can't resist.
Okay, with all of that happiness put aside, time for some things I really hate.
It's a worse story of the day, obviously.
On Sunday, seven Israelis were wounded in a drive-by shooting near the town of Ofrah, which is approximately 13 miles north of Jerusalem.
This is going to Frank Camp over at Daily Wire.
One of the critically wounded is a 21-year-old pregnant female.
Following the violent attack, the woman was taken to Shariat Zedek Hospital, where doctors successfully delivered her baby.
The baby is currently in critical condition, and the woman is also in critical but stable condition.
Her husband was lightly wounded as well.
The Times of Israel spoke with a surgeon, Dr. Alon Schwartz, who said the woman had lost a lot of blood as a result of the gunshot wound to her stomach.
According to an IDF spokesperson quoted by Aruz Sheva, which is a right-wing Israeli news outlet, following the previous report regarding the shooting attack adjacent to the Ofra Junction, shots were fired from a passing Palestinian vehicle toward Israeli civilians who were standing at the bus station.
IDF troops who were present nearby responded by firing toward the suspect vehicle, which fled.
So what did Hamas do?
Hamas has welcomed the shooting attack in which a pregnant Israeli woman and six others were wounded.
They call it a blessed demonstration of the ability of the resistance to hurt the enemy in its most sensitive places.
It is worth noting that the UN General Assembly refused to vote to condemn Hamas about three days ago.
So whenever people talk about the morality of the U.N., just remember the U.N.
is a, it is the most sizely of world politics.
The U.N.
is a hive of scum and villainy.
The U.N.
is a collection of garbage run countries.
Countries run by people who are sheer garbage.
And those people refuse to even vote to condemn an open terrorist group that celebrates when a pregnant woman is shot in the stomach and her baby is barely delivered alive.
That's what the U.N.
is.
So anytime you hear about the morality of the U.N.
Oh, the U.N.
has passed a bunch of resolutions.
Who gives a flying F?
I don't.
When the U.N.
passes a resolution, you can fairly guarantee that 95% of the time, it's a resolution predicated toward forwarding evil, not toward preventing it.
So spare me all of your nonsense about U.N.
resolutions condemning Israel, or the U.N.
doesn't like us enough, the United States.
We have to be more friendly with the U.N.
How about we look at the constituency of the UN and look at the fact that they won't condemn actual terrorists?
And then maybe we consider whether or not we ought to take our cues from countries like Syria, countries like Yemen, whether we ought to take our cues from the Russians.
It's unbelievable.
The same people who are complaining that President Trump is in league with the Russians are happy to endorse Russian foreign policy at every prospect at the United Nations.
It's truly amazing.
The same people who complain that the Trump administration is too close to the Saudis, they're happy to take the cues from the Saudis at the UN, and they complain when the United States doesn't do it enough.
The UN, as I've said before, I am not in favor of eminent domain and overuse of it.
I'm not in favor of the idea that in the United States you should be able to take private property, transfer it to another party for purposes of increasing tax revenue, as the Supreme Court decided in Kelo v. New London.
Bad ruling.
I don't even care.
If President Trump wants to raise the U.N.
building to the ground and build a Trump Tower on top of it, I am all in favor of it.
The U.N.
is gross and we should pull out of it as soon as humanly possible.
It is just an awful, awful place.
Okay, other things that I hate today.
So I have to, I just have to point this out.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
If she wouldn't say so many stupid things, I wouldn't have to talk about her saying so many stupid things.
You think I want to talk about this woman?
I don't want to talk about this woman.
And every time I talk about her, I get from the left-wing media, oh, you're obsessed with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
No, as you know from listening to the show, I'm obsessed with stupidity in all of its forms.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez showed up on Hanukkah, at a liberal synagogue, of course, because she is an advocate of boycott, divestment, and sanctions and anti-Semitic policy directed at the elimination of the Jewish state.
She showed up to explain that sure, she may be in league with anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Sure, she may be good friends with Linda Sarsour.
But at least way back when, she's part Jewish.
You know, it's not just Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who's done this.
I remember John Kerry did this.
I'm part Jewish.
If you go back far enough, I'm part Jewish.
Which part, man?
And then Hillary Clinton, I remember, at one point in the early 2000s when she was running for office in New York, she was like, I'm part Jewish, too.
It's like, OK, you know what?
I don't care.
I don't care if you're part Jewish.
I really don't.
What I care about is what you think and what you feel and what exactly you're going to implement in your daily life.
But here is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suddenly rediscovering her Jewish roots.
Generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews.
And it is...
What I love is all the old liberal Jews who are like, oh, isn't that so sweet?
Isn't that so wonderful?
It's like, no, it's not.
What is she doing?
What are her policies like?
Any Jew who's taken in by the, I have a relative who's Jewish argument, It's no better an argument than when people accuse somebody of racism and they're like, well, one time I was friends with a black guy.
Okay, this is even worse.
At least when somebody says I was friends with a black guy, that has to do with their behavior.
I had a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother who once shtooped a Jew is not exactly a great argument for why you're a pro-Jewish politician or a pro-Israel politician or anything of the like.
I hate that.
I hate that sort of politics with a burning, fiery passion.
Other things that I hate today, there's a high school teacher Who has now been fired for failing to use a transgender student's preferred pronoun.
A Virginia high school teacher was fired because he wouldn't use a preferred pronoun of a female student who claimed that she was now a male.
The unanimous decision from the five members of the West Point School Board to fire Peter Vlaming, a French teacher at the West Point High School, which has roughly 265 students, followed a four-hour hearing.
The board only discussed the case for an hour before rendering their decision.
Richmond.com reports that Vlaming, who's 47, had taught at the high school for almost seven years and had taught the student in the 2017-2018 school year when the student still identified as female.
Over the summer of 2018, the girl decided she was a boy.
This school year, Vlaming addressed the girl by the new name she had chosen, but would not use the girl's preferred new pronoun because it conflicted with Vlaming's Christian faith.
Now, He didn't go out of his way to call the girl a girl.
He didn't go out of his way to say she every time he talked about her.
Instead, he attempted to avoid using any sort of gender pronouns at all because he didn't want to use biologically incorrect pronouns.
And he was fired for this, because he was insensitive apparently.
Apparently it's insensitive if you refuse to use biologically incorrect pronouns, even if you are attempting to not use any pronouns at all.
Even if you're trying to be sensitive enough not to offend the student by using no gender pronouns at all, now, if you refuse to use the gender pronouns that somebody wants used, now you will be fired for it.
The student claimed she felt singled out.
But the only reference to Vlaming actively calling the girl by the female pronoun rather than her name, according to witnesses, came on Halloween when the student was using a VR headset.
As the student was about to bump into a wall, Vlaming told students to stop her.
That incident prompted a discussion with administrators.
So if you accidentally get it wrong while you're trying to be sensitive, you will be fired.
Okay, this is a serious First Amendment issue.
Can school districts force you to use biologically incorrect pronouns to refer to students?
Is that something that we can do in a First Amendment-loving society?
Can state schools force you to do these things under the rubric of anti-discrimination?
It's why I've always been very skeptical of a lot of the anti-discrimination laws pushed by the left.
I think that they are Trojan horses for an attempt to cram down force on people's use of free speech.
And this is just the latest example.
West Point High School Principal Jonathan Hockman testified he had instructed Vlaming to use the student's new pronoun and said, I can't think of a worse way to treat a child than what was happening.
Really, you can't think of any worse way to treat the child than using gender non-binary pronouns?
I can think of a lot of worse ways to treat a child.
I think those ways generally would include very often people humoring the mental illness of people when they are small and then encouraging them to sterilize themselves through hormone treatment.
I think that's usually a bad thing also.
West Point School Superintendent Laura Abel stated that discrimination then leads to a hostile learning environment.
The student had expressed that.
The parents had expressed that.
They felt disrespected.
Voiles countered that as a public employee, Vlaming had a right to free speech.
Adding, one of those rights that is not curtailed is to be free from being compelled to speak something that violates your conscience.
This is all ridiculous.
The teacher was going out of his way not to offend the student and accidentally used the biologically correct pronoun once and now is being fired for it.
This is where our country is going and it's going to get uglier and uglier because the left demands that you be forced to care.
You will be forced to care.
Okay, well we will be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
I'm sure there will be lots of breaking news and there are a couple stories I didn't cover today that I cannot wait to cover tomorrow.
We'll get to those in the future.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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