All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 14, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:04
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop Investigating | Ep. 680
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Democrats prepare for impeachment, new investigations are launched against President Trump, and we check the mailbag.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, we have a lot to get to today.
We will get to your questions in the mailbag a little bit later on.
It has been a jam-packed week of not very good news for the White House.
There is more not very good news for the White House on the way.
Unfortunately, today we'll talk about all of that.
But we begin today by reminding you that it is simply not responsible for you to rack up the credit card debt, And then never pay it off or have a plan for doing so, which is why you should consolidate your credit card debt and get a lower rate and make sure that you can pay it off so you're not paying it off until you're dead.
With LendingClub, you can consolidate that debt or pay off your credit cards with one fixed monthly payment.
Since 2007, LendingClub has helped millions of people regain control of their finances with affordable fixed-rate personal loans.
No trips to a bank, no high-interest credit cards.
Just go to LendingClub.com, tell them about yourself and how much you want to borrow, Pick the terms that are right for you.
If you're approved, your loan is automatically deposited into your bank account in as little as a few days.
LendingClub is the number one peer-to-peer lending platform with over $35 billion in loans issued.
All you have to do is go to LendingClub.com slash Ben.
Check your rate in minutes.
Borrow up to 40 grand.
That's LendingClub.com slash Ben.
Again, LendingClub.com slash Ben.
All loans made by WebBank.
Member FDIC.
Equal housing lender.
And if you're racking up those credit card debts for Christmas and you have no plan to pay them off, Remember that the interest rates on those credit cards can run 20, 25, 30 percent.
Instead of paying that, why don't you consolidate that debt?
Get a loan.
Make sure you do the responsible thing.
Check it out.
Lendingclub.com.
Check your rate in minutes and borrow up to 40 grand.
OK, we begin today with Michael Cohen.
So Michael Cohen is making the rounds.
He is now preparing to go to jail and also he's preparing, presumably, to sell a memoir that he will then write while he is in jail.
So when he gets out, he has some sort of revenue coming out.
It's amazing to see how the press treat Michael Cohen versus the way the press treated, for example, Linda Tripp way back when in 1998, 1999.
So Linda Tripp, if you'll recall, was the woman who recorded phone calls with Monica Lewinsky in which Lewinsky described being pressured by the Clinton administration to change her testimony regarding her affair with Bill Clinton.
And then Linda Tripp revealed these recordings and the press treated her as just a pariah.
She was a rat.
She was a terrible person.
How could she have taped these conversations?
It was just, just awful.
Well, now Michael Cohen is making the rounds.
He is on ABC News exclusively with George Stephanopoulos, the very objective news journalist, George Stephanopoulos, who once wept, who once said that he and Hillary Clinton cried and held each other after the 1992 election, and is now an objective, very objective, super objective news reporter for ABC News.
Michael Cohen appears, and everybody still sees Michael Cohen as a sleazy character, but now he's being given the Royal treatment in the sense that he's got the goods on President Trump and therefore must be treated with a certain baseline level of respect.
Amazing how that changes based on which party the president belongs to.
Well, Michael Cohen had some words to say.
Here is some of what he told George Stephanopoulos in this new interview.
country has never been more divisive and one of the hopes that I have out of the punishment that I've received as well as the cooperation that I have given, I will be remembered in history as helping to bring this country back together.
Yeah, good luck with that, Michael Cohen.
I have a serious problem with the idea that Michael Cohen, the president's fixer, who did not believe any of the polls during 2016, that that guy is going to bring the country back together.
But Democrats seem to be sort of okay with this idea because whoever takes down Trump will bring the country back together.
I have a new piece out in Newsweek today talking specifically about this giant lie that has been promulgated that President Trump is the great divider-in-chief, as though we didn't have divisions before President Trump.
Every poll shows we were divided more during the Obama administration by the end than we were at the beginning on a variety of categories including race, class, and religion.
All of that happened under President Obama.
That division was the cause of President Trump's election.
Trump is more a result of division than a cause of division.
That doesn't mean that President Trump is a unifying guy.
I don't think that he is.
But, to pretend that President Trump is the sole cause of our division, and that therefore the curative for that is Michael Cohen coming in from the wings and spouting stuff about President Trump, it's just silly, and it's the media lying to you by proxy.
That wasn't all Michael Cohen had to say.
He also explained that he never had lied, which is weird since he actually just played guilty to lying, so there's that.
What do you say to people, and you know there are a lot of people who would be watching, who are going to be thinking, but wait a second, he lied for so long, why should we believe him now?
What's the answer to that?
What do you mean lied?
Lied about what?
At the Trump Organization, it's a microcosm of even just the New York real estate market.
What do we lie about?
It's New York real estate.
Yes, it's the greatest product ever created.
Is that a lie?
Um, well, I mean, you just sort of pled guilty to the whole perjury thing, so there's that.
When people say that you're a liar, maybe it's because you pled guilty in court to lying and are now going to go to jail for three years because of it, so probably it's that.
In any case, the really material part of what Michael Cohen had to say was in the rest of the interview.
He was asked specifically whether President Trump knew that it was wrong to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, or try to pay off Karen McDougal during the campaign, as part of the campaign.
And Cohen said, of course.
According to the New York Times, the comments were Mr. Cohen's first since he was sentenced to three years in prison by a federal judge on Wednesday.
He pled guilty to helping to arrange payments to the two women, a violation of campaign finance law, and for lying to Congress about the duration of deliberations about a proposed Trump Tower meeting in Moscow.
On Thursday, President Trump and one of his personal attorneys, Rudy Giuliani, said the president was not to be blamed for the campaign finance crimes because he trusted Cohen to know the law.
Trump tweeted that out yesterday.
Trump has lashed out at Cohen.
On Thursday, President Trump accused Cohen of trying to embarrass him.
Here's what President Trump had to say about his relationship with Michael Cohen.
He says he never directed Michael Cohen to do anything wrong.
Michael Cohen says that he lied in order to protect you.
What's your response to that?
Let me tell you, I never directed him to do anything wrong.
Whatever he did, he did on his own.
He's a lawyer.
A lawyer who represents a client is supposed to do the right thing.
That's why you pay them a lot of money, etc, etc.
He is a lawyer.
He represents a client.
I never directed him to do anything incorrect or wrong.
Now, this is President Trump's chief line of defense.
So, to recap the charges that are now going to be brought against President Trump, probably by the Southern District of New York, there are three separate charges, or really two and a half, that are going to be brought against President Trump.
The first is campaign finance violation.
The case here, just to recap, because I know this stuff gets complicated, so we need to recapitulate, the case here is that President Trump worked with Cohen And pushed Cohen to pay off his former lovers in the midst of an election cycle after hearing via the National Enquirer that Stormy Daniels was looking to tell her story.
The alleged crime here would be that the Daniels hush money was supposedly a campaign expenditure given that the expenditure would not have existed irrespective of the candidate's election campaign, meaning that Trump wouldn't have paid off Stormy Daniels if it wasn't the middle of an election cycle.
So how do we know that Trump would not have just paid off Daniels anyway?
Well, American Media Incorporated, the parent company for the National Enquirer, has now admitted that it paid former Trump paramour Karen McDougal 150 grand in concert with a candidate's presidential campaign, and in order to ensure that McDougal did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election, AMI further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.
Cohen has specifically said that the payoffs were made at President Trump's direction.
President Trump's defense would be, listen, I told Michael Cohen that this thing should go away.
He's a lawyer.
It's his job to do the legal thing.
And that's what you're hearing President Trump express on Fox News right there, is that if the law was broken, that's Michael Cohen's fault.
That's not my fault.
And that's a pretty good case.
In order for you to violate campaign finance law, it's one of these weird areas of law where you have to have willfully done so, meaning that you have to know that you are actually violating the law when you violated the law.
You can't have done it by accident, negligence.
Ignorance is sort of a defense here.
Because you can just say my lawyer screwed it up.
And that's really what Trump is saying here.
Now, that brings us to the second element of purported criminality, and that would be the crime of suborning perjury.
The crime of suborning perjury requires a few elements according to the Department of Justice.
One, that perjury was committed.
Two, that the defendant procured the perjury corruptly, knowing, believing, or having reason to believe it to be false.
So Cohen is already setting up Trump for this.
Cohen is saying that Trump told him to lie in his testimony before Congress.
Now all he has to establish is that Trump instructed him to lie for him.
So these are the two main areas of disagreement between Trump and Cohen.
Cohen is claiming that Trump told him to lie.
Trump is saying, I did not.
Cohen does this sort of thing for a living.
He's a shady character.
I don't have to tell him to lie.
He knows exactly where his bread is buttered, but it's not me, right?
I mean, that's just what he does.
He goes out and he lies.
He says stuff.
That's Trump's defense number one.
Trump's defense number two on the campaign finance stuff is I don't know anything about campaign finance.
Well, look at me.
Do I look like an elections lawyer?
That's Michael Cohen's job.
If he screwed it up, he screwed it up.
Well, the problem with all of this is that President Trump, in his hatred for Michael Cohen, then stepped directly into a pile of dog dew.
Because in the middle of this Fox News interview, he drops this little doozy about the kind of work that he had Michael Cohen doing.
Why did you hire Michael Cohen?
He was known as a fixer.
That was his title, a fixer.
Why did you need him?
He did more public relations than he did law, but he did stuff.
You'd see him on television.
He was okay on television.
But years ago, many years, like 12, 13 years ago, he did me a favor.
He was on a committee, and he was so responsive and so good, and I said, he's a nice guy.
Okay, so here is the problem.
If you say that the lawyer who you say you relied on to get things done was just doing low-level work for you, mostly PR, it is very difficult to then claim that he was an expert lawyer you relied on for legal advice in ensuring that you were compliant with campaign finance law.
The president should not have said this stuff.
The president is not his own best lawyer.
It turns out that in every criminal circumstance, Your lawyer is your own best lawyer.
This is why when you see people representing themselves on TV in criminal cases, every lawyer says, that's stupid.
The key here is that you should really be quiet.
Now, it also puts President Trump's lawyers in the difficult position of then having to figure out what to say next, particularly as new information emerges.
So according to NBC News, President Trump was the third person in the room in August 2015 when his lawyer Michael Cohen and the National Enquirer publisher David Pecker discussed ways Pecker could help counter negative stories about Trump's relationships with women according to NBC News.
This undercuts the case that Trump normally would make that he would have spent money no matter what the election status.
on Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal.
As part of a non-prosecution agreement disclosed Wednesday by federal prosecutors, American Media Inc., the Inquirer's parent company admitted that Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about the presidential candidate's relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided. assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could Trump was first identified as attending the meeting by the Wall Street Journal, so this undercuts Trump's case that he was ignorant of the campaign stuff and that it had nothing to do with the campaign.
Now, in a second, we're going to get to how exactly President Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani is dealing with this.
Suffice it to say that his line of defense is not particularly good.
Now, we will get to whether any of this is really prosecutable.
We'll get to whether any of this is impeachable.
We'll get to the insane number of other investigations Democrats are leaking, which actually Which actually undercuts their message that they are deeply concerned about the law and makes it seem more like a witch hunt, as President Trump has said.
We'll get to all of that in just one second.
First, let's talk about this particular blazer.
Do you see this blazer?
Look at this magnificent blazer.
This thing, it's lightweight, it wears really easily, it's super comfortable, it's super soft, and it looks great.
And not just because I have the body of a Greek god, also because this jacket is just spectacular.
It's comfortable, it's stylish, it's Peter Millar.
My new Peter Millar excursionist blazer.
It doesn't just let me dress for success.
It means that I dress for massive success every day here on this program.
Peter Millar has great product, not just the blazers like this one.
It also has great shirts that I wear in my off hours.
They have these great khakis, like all their clothes from Peter Millar are just Top of the line.
It's not every day you buy a Blazer, and I'm telling you, this Excursionist Blazer from Peter Millar will be a great investment for you.
Head over to PeterMillar.com slash Ben.
Check out this Blazer, some of my other Peter Millar favorites.
There's a whole list of stuff that we've got in there.
Be sure to use my link, and you'll receive free shipping and a complimentary gift, which is awesome.
That's PeterMillar, M-I-L-L-A-R dot com slash Ben.
That's PeterMillar.com slash Ben.
Again, I have Peter Millar khakis, I have Peter Millar shoes, I have Peter Millar shirts.
And it all looks great.
I mean, you just look like a million bucks.
And there's a reason that my wife prefers when I wear Peter Millar.
Go check it out.
PeterMillar.com slash Ben.
M-I-L-L-A-R dot com slash Ben.
When you use that slash Ben, you get a special deal.
You get to check out my favorites and also you get free shipping and a complimentary gift.
So pretty solid deal.
OK, so Rudy Giuliani trying to come back In the wake of President Trump saying things and Michael Cohen saying things and basically everybody gearing up for the possibility of the Southern District of New York dropping an indictment on President Trump for campaign violations as well as suborning perjury.
Those would probably be the charges or obstruction of justice.
That might be on the table as well.
So here's how Rudy Giuliani is defending President Trump.
It's not good.
It's not a good line of defense.
So he says that the campaign finance violation that Michael Cohen was sentenced for is, quote, not a big crime.
Quote, nobody got killed.
Nobody got robbed.
This was not a big crime.
OK, that's not a good legal defense.
Not a big crime is actually not a standard in law.
And we are now actually, legally speaking, of the Fifth Avenue defense.
Remember that President Trump said during the campaign he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn't lose a single vote?
And now apparently the mayor who's responsible for the implementation of broken windows theory in New York, which curbed crime in New York based on prosecuting small crimes, is now saying that small crimes don't matter so long as those small crimes are small enough and they aren't murders.
So I guess the idea is that anything short of murdering somebody is really not a particularly big deal.
Now, is it true?
That campaign finance violations are not enough to take down a president?
Yes, it is true.
Campaign finance violations are not enough to take down a president.
Nobody cares about them.
Everybody assumes that campaign finance is crap anyway.
Nobody really thought any differently.
Nobody thinks that President Trump doesn't pay off women to keep them silent.
Nobody thinks that President Trump isn't who President Trump is.
See, this is the thing about being President Trump, and this is why, and this will become relevant in a second when I discuss Democrats' attempts at impeachment, which is coming next.
None of this changes your picture of President Trump.
I don't know if there's anyone in the country who thought that President Trump isn't the kind of guy who would pay off women he slept with.
Like, is there anyone who thought that?
Is there anybody in the country who thought that President Trump was deeply concerned about the intricacies of campaign violations, campaign finance violations?
That he was sitting there going, well, gotta make sure that nobody spends $2,700.
Gotta make sure that nobody violates these particular campaign promises.
President Trump has been Donald Trump his entire life, as it turns out.
And the New York real estate business is indeed very dirty, as you heard Michael Cohen say.
Because that doesn't change the image of who President Trump is, it doesn't actually change how his administration works.
And so the idea that he can't proceed as President of the United States because of these crimes, well, that's just not true.
And it's obviously not true.
And this is the point, right?
This is where the rubber really meets the road.
Because the next step here is going to be Democrats pushing for impeachment.
You can already hear them boxing themselves in.
Democrats may not want to push for impeachment.
Democrats may want to maintain this controversy up until the 2020 election, but they've basically forced themselves to move on impeachment because they're now accusing President Trump openly of criminality, which means the responsibility is on them and the House to push for impeachment.
So let's talk about that a little bit.
Eric Swalwell is a congressional Democrat, and he says that President Trump presides over a criminal presidency, right?
This is the Democrats boxing themselves in to attempting some sort of impeachment before the 2020 election.
You are now seeing more evidence than ever that Donald Trump was associated with a criminal campaign, a criminal transition, and presides today, very likely, over a criminal presidency.
And you've seen people in his orbit who are either under investigation, have pled guilty, or are serving prison time because of their association with one or all three of those different entities.
Well, if the Democrats keep screaming criminality, they're going to have to push for impeachment.
But the question is, could they credibly impeach President Trump in the House?
And Democrats today who are saying, well, let's push for impeachment now.
Are these impeachable crimes?
So here is my answer.
If this had all happened in 1995, the answer is yes.
But we live in the post Clinton era.
You can separate the question of presidential decency and presidential class into B.C.
and A.C., before Clinton and after Clinton.
Because before Clinton, there was basically a bipartisan consensus.
If you committed a crime, you were going to be ousted.
This is what happened to Richard Nixon.
Republicans supported his impeachment, even though they were members of his own party.
That's why he resigned in the first place.
But when it came to Bill Clinton, not a single Democrat, not one in the Senate, supported his impeachment on charges that look extraordinarily like the sort of allegations that are now being made by President Trump.
Clinton was impeached on obstruction and perjury based on his testimony and pressure on others regarding their testimony on Monica Lewinsky.
And the Senate then acquitted him.
The political lesson we all took from this was that impeachment was deemed inappropriate in cases where the president could still operate.
They said, oh, well, he's got a 70% approval rating.
He can still be the president.
These crimes don't really go to his efficacy.
Well, those same arguments now apply to President Trump.
And in fact, President Trump would not have been successful in his presidential primary run if it had not been for a widespread perception that morality no longer mattered in politics, a perception that springs directly from the Clinton years.
Now, we're going to hear from Democrats that this is different.
That it's not truly the same.
They're going to say the campaign finance thing is different.
Clinton didn't violate purposefully campaign finance law, except for the fact that during his actual campaign in 1996, there was solid evidence that the Chinese government was trying to funnel money into his campaign.
So there are serious campaign finance violations with regard to Clinton.
It was called Chinagate at the time.
And by the way, it's not even clear, as Rudy Giuliani sort of says here, it's not even clear that hush money payments can even fall under the rubric of campaign expenditures, particularly because President Trump could have been spending years paying off all of these women.
Clinton suborned perjury.
He obstructed justice about ancillary matters.
That's really what people are talking about with regard to President Trump.
Now, the Democrats are going to say, well, Republicans are hypocrites because Republicans voted for the impeachment of Clinton in 1998 and 1999, which, by the way, is not even completely true.
A bunch of Republicans voted against A conviction in the Senate.
It was a Republican Senate that acquitted President Clinton in 1999.
But the hue and cry by the media is going to be that Republicans are hypocrites.
They voted to impeach Clinton, and now they're not voting to impeach President Trump.
But here's the thing.
The reality on the ground has now changed.
Once one group of people violates the rules, you have obliterated the rules.
Our country exists on an unspoken set of assumptions about things that we hold in common.
As we have seen in virtually every area of American life, we no longer hold very many things in common.
One of the things that we clearly do not hold in common and did not hold in common was our perspective of what the presidency should be.
Once the Democrats violated the rules, the Republicans said, listen, we are not going to hamper ourselves by continuing to apply rules with regard to character and morality in the presidency when Democrats are pretty clearly not interested in any of that sort of stuff.
We're not going to be held to account by Democrats for doing this sort of stuff.
Now, do I think that in an ideal world, Republicans would still uphold that standard?
Yeah, I do.
But this isn't an ideal world.
And the idea that Republicans are going to unilaterally disarm in the face of Democrats who now say, oh, we want to reconstitute the standard.
Let's reconstitute the standard of class in office.
We all know you're lying.
We all know that you're not telling the truth.
That if you got rid of President Trump on suborning perjury and obstruction of justice after defending Bill Clinton, we don't actually think that next time a Democrat does this stuff, you are going to support their impeachment.
We think that you're only holding this standard for President Trump because you're a bunch of partisan hacks.
And that being the case, we're not going to help reinstitute a standard for us that does not apply to you.
There has to be a collective, mutually assured destruction that takes place.
That mutually assured destruction has not been achieved.
And that's why I think Republicans are not going to move against President Trump, nor do I think that they probably should, politically speaking, move against President Trump.
Most likely scenario here is he's impeached by a Democratic House sometime in the next two years, and then he runs for re-election because he's under threat of indictment by the Southern District of New York.
That is the most likely scenario in all of this.
Now, President Trump has complained about all of this being a witch hunt, and there's some evidence to support him, and I want to talk about that in just a second.
But first, let's talk about how you can make your watch look better.
Do you see this?
Do you see this magnificent timepiece that lies upon the wrist of yours truly?
Do you see this?
Look how classy it looks.
Look how nice.
Simple and elegant it is.
Well that is the style of movement watches.
Movement watches, they're not designed to tell you how many steps you're taking in a day or how many calories you're going to lose or anything like that.
They're designed to tell you the time in a minimalist fashion that looks expensive but doesn't cost you a ton of money.
Movement is a really amazing success story, actually.
They're a bunch of ground-up entrepreneurs who started this thing essentially from a garage, and now they've sold 2 million watches worldwide.
And Movement watches are all about looking good without spending a billion dollars.
Movement watches start at just 95 bucks.
You're looking at 400 bucks for the same quality from a traditional brand.
It's got clean design, minimalist, really quality products.
I've got a movement, two movement watches actually.
My wife has one that I got her for a gift.
My mom has one.
My father has one.
Everybody in my family has a movement watch because they really are nice.
Movement did all the hard work this holiday season.
They've made awesome gift boxes and packages as well.
If you need help giving the perfect gift this season, but you don't know where to start, the guys over at Movement have your back.
Get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns by going to MVMT.com slash Shapiro.
Again, that's MVMT.com slash Shapiro.
Movement's launching new styles on their site all the time.
MVMT.com slash Shapiro.
Go join the Movement.
Okay, so President Trump claims that this is all a big witch hunt.
And to be honest with you, it looks like a little bit of a witch hunt when every single aspect of President Trump's life is being picked apart.
We talked about the fact that the newly elected Attorney General in the state of New York has already said that she's going to go after members of Trump's family.
She's not even going to go looking for crime.
She's going to look at members of the Trump family for having committed crime, which is the definition Of selective prosecution.
If you're looking at someone and you are attempting to dig down on them just to uncover a crime they committed, as opposed to finding a crime and then linking it with the actual perpetrator, this is the definition of bad law enforcement.
And yet this is what so many people on the left are doing.
The latest example of this is apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, federal prosecutors in Manhattan are now investigating whether President Trump's 2017 inaugural committee misspent some of the record $107 million it raised from donations, people familiar with the matter said.
The criminal probe by the Manhattan U.S.
Attorney's Office, which is in its early stages, also is examining whether some of the committee's top donors gave money in exchange for access to the incoming Trump administration, policy concessions, or to influence official administration positions, some of the people said.
Giving money in exchange for political favors could run afoul of federal corruption laws.
Let's be straight about this.
President Trump came into office saying, all of Washington D.C.
is corrupt.
And he said, I myself have engaged in this corruption.
I was at- Hillary Clinton came to my wedding.
I paid the Clintons so that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton would come to my wedding.
I would get politicians in here all the time begging me, begging me to give them money.
And I'd say, okay, what can you do for me?
I mean, Bill- Donald Trump said this stuff during the campaign.
Is anyone really under the impression, the weird misimpression, that people who donate to inaugural committees don't expect anything in return?
Are we all under this weird misimpression that people just decide, oh, I like Barack Obama so much I'm going to dump a million bucks into his inauguration?
Or does it mean that you're going to get an ambassadorship to the Bahamas?
Everybody knows how this game works.
But now we're having federal prosecutors look at the inauguration committee without presumably any evidence that anything is happening so far.
It's pretty amazing.
The inaugural committee hasn't been asked for records or been contacted by prosecutors, according to a lawyer close to the matter, who said, we are not aware of any evidence the investigation the journal is reporting actually exists.
But that's not stopping, apparently, the investigation from moving forward.
Federal prosecutors have asked Rick Gates, a former campaign aide who served as the inaugural committee's deputy chairman, about the fund spending and its donors, according to people familiar with the matter.
So basically, they're going to now dig through every element of Trump's life in an attempt to get him.
It does make it seem a lot like a witch hunt when everybody is hunting for witches.
It's possible they come up with some witches in the witch hunt, but that doesn't change the motivating factors underneath all of this.
And that's why if President Trump is successfully able to convey that all of this is, in fact, a big effort to get him, even if he's guilty of some of it, then maybe it doesn't hurt him quite as much as people think come 2020.
Especially when the media continue to give credibility to just randos who make any allegation about the president under any circumstances.
Like Mediaite today has a big piece about a former staffer on The Apprentice and current stand-up comic named Noel Kassler who claims that Donald Trump was a speed freak who snorted crushed up Adderall.
That's not the most credible sourcing and it's not the most credible story considering that Donald Trump is a teetotaler because his brother was an alcoholic and apparently has gone around for years to young people and told them not to do drugs and not to do alcohol.
Nonetheless, this guy who worked on The Apprentice said that he worked on some of Trump's beauty pageants during the 1990s, in which President Trump would offer girls to come up to his hotel room again, unless there's criminal activity alleged.
I'm not sure what exactly the revelation is there, but the point is that no matter what the allegations are against President Trump, substantiated or not, they'll get heavy play from all the people who want to see him go.
And it's Democrats in the House.
Nancy Pelosi saying, we're going to go after his tax returns yesterday.
If President Trump could get Democrats somehow to convey that it doesn't matter, they can go after every aspect of his life and he's the victim in all of this, then he could successfully run for reelection, at least on the basis that this is a group of vindictive jerks who are trying to come after him.
Nancy Pelosi looking pretty vindictive right here.
Yes, there is popular demand for the Congress to request the president's tax returns.
They will have their path as we go forward.
I'm sure the White House will resist and so Question is, how do we go, where do we go from there?
So now they're going to go after his tax returns.
Okay, enough, we don't have to hear from this person.
I mean, again, this idea that tax returns are also on the table, everything's on, we all know what the real motivating factor here is.
Joy Behar, who is sort of the id of the democratic brain, she basically spills it.
She says, listen, anybody who likes Trump, anybody who supports Trump, Trump himself, family members, they should all go to jail.
It's so funny to hear all these people who are very angry at people shouting, lock her up, about Hillary Clinton, who committed federal crimes in concealing and keeping on private servers classified information.
All these same people who are livid about lock her up are saying, lock everybody up.
I don't like Joy Behar conveying the sort of emotional, emotional bursting forth that Democrats would really like to see here.
He has nothing to lose by speaking against truth to power about Trump.
Why does he say he should follow his Twitter?
Even if he commits a crime, it's okay.
I think there's more that's gone on behind the scenes.
He should follow his Twitter.
I think favors have been done and it's gone.
Maybe he needs to go to jail, too.
But he also won a Grammy, interestingly.
Okay, so Orrin Hatch needs to go to jail because he's nice to President Trump.
There are a lot of folks in this country who are fans of President Trump, and if they get the feeling that all of this is a setup, it's going to be a problem for Democrats.
And meanwhile, in other Trump world news, the ongoing search for chief of staff continues.
Apparently two of the top candidates are Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, who is responsible for a vast swath of policy inside the Trump administration, from criminal justice reform to Middle Eastern policy.
He's been under a lot of fire recently for his relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, who is the De facto king of Saudi Arabia.
Kushner, of course, is Ivanka Trump's husband and is very close with President Trump personally.
There's been talk that he might be up for chief of staff.
I think that would be a very bad move for the Trump administration.
Jared already has an enormous amount of power over the policy in the Trump administration.
Just make a note.
I'm not for nepotism.
I don't like nepotism.
I don't like the idea that you're related to the president, therefore you get a position in high politics.
But let's not pretend that this is unique to President Trump.
This isn't whataboutism, because again, I don't think it's right that this is happening on the Republican side of the aisle, but nepotism is a bipartisan feature.
Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General because his brother was President of the United States at the time, which is an insane thing that was allowed to happen.
To have your... Like, I can appoint a family member to be the person overseeing the Justice Department that's supposed to oversee me.
Pretty wild.
And then Teddy Kennedy ran for Senate on the back of his brother.
And then you have the Clintons, obviously, and Hillary Clinton running on the back of being married to the president and then running for president on the back of being married to a former president.
It turns out that nepotism is a bipartisan problem in the United States.
Should Jared be chief of staff?
No.
I think, honestly, Trump shouldn't have a chief of staff.
Trump should just do what he wants to do.
He's going to anyway.
Trump should just appoint himself chief of staff.
He should just say, no one can run this place like I can.
I'm my own Chief of Staff.
Because that's the reality anyway.
When he wanted to ignore John Kelly, he just ignored John Kelly.
When he wanted to ignore Reince Priebus, he just ignored Reince Priebus.
Like, who cares?
He should just appoint himself Chief of Staff, have a scheduler who's out front in his office, he can bring back the lady from the Trump Organization, make her the scheduler, and then just run the thing like he wants to run the thing as a family business.
The other person who they are discussing is Chris Christie, which is just beyond insane.
Bringing in Chris Christie, the corruption-ridden former New Jersey governor, who most famously was sent to go get hamburgers for President Trump on the campaign trail.
President Trump can't find anyone else in the United States who wants to go get him a Diet Coke and a burger.
He's got to bring in Chris Christie just to serially humiliate him on national television?
You remember when Chris Christie became part of the Trump campaign and every other Trump rally was Trump pointing over to Christie and going, Look at the lovable fat man over here.
Look at him.
He's so bouncy and jolly.
Chris, get out of here.
Go get me.
Go get your shine box, Chris.
And I was like, I guess it'll be entertaining for a couple of years, but how that doesn't create more turmoil in the executive branches beyond me, because Chris, he has his own priorities.
He's at odds with a lot of current members of the administration.
It's all a bit of a mess.
Trump should just appoint himself chief of staff and be done with this damn thing.
It's very silly.
OK, in a second, I want to get to The worst media story of the day.
It really is incredible.
A couple of bad media stories, actually.
But first, I want to talk to you about how you can defend yourself.
How can you defend yourself with the best possible armaments?
Well, this is where Bravo Company Manufacturing comes in.
BCM was started in a garage by a Marine vet more than two decades ago to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.
I'm a person who owns guns not because I go hunting.
I don't.
Not because I love going target shooting.
It's fine.
But the reason I own guns is to protect myself.
BCM believes the same thing.
They believe the same level of protection should be provided to every American regardless of whether they are a private citizen or a professional.
BCM is not a sporting arms company.
They design, engineer, and manufacture life-saving equipment.
They assume each rifle leaving their shop will be used in a life-or-death situation by a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, or or a soldier overseas.
Each component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard.
BCM feels a moral responsibility as Americans to provide tools that will not fail the user when it's not just a paper target, but somebody coming to do them harm.
BCM works with leading instructors of marksmanship from top levels of America's special ops forces, from Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance to U.S. Army special ops forces who can teach the skills necessary to defend yourself, your family, or others Go check them out right now at BravoCompanyMFG.com.
They are fantastic people.
I've met them.
They're great.
Go check them out.
BravoCompanyMFG.com.
Find out about their products, special offers, upcoming news.
Also, go check out their videos at YouTube.com slash BravoCompanyUSA.
Again, that's YouTube.com slash BravoCompanyUSA.
Fantastic guys.
And their product is really first rate.
OK, we're going to get to a lot more, plus the mailbag.
But first, you're going to have to go over and subscribe over at The Daily Wire.
Now, we have a quick announcement here.
It's pretty exciting stuff.
Coming up in 2019, Young America's Foundation starts up my spring speaking tour.
And we are going to be kicking it off at George Washington University on January 17th.
So make sure you have your leftist tears tumblers prepared.
If you don't have time to get your protests ready for the event, don't fret.
I'll be all over the East and West Coast.
So check out yaf.org for info on when I'll be at a campus near you.
I mean, so much goodness.
We're going to a bunch of Gonzaga.
Get ready.
The administration says I'm not coming.
Well, we will see about that because that's a thing that's going to happen.
Also, go subscribe right now over at Daily Wire.
When you do, you get the rest of this show live, plus two additional hours come January of this show live.
It's going to be awesome, and we have all sorts of special goodies coming up.
Also, don't miss Andrew Clavin's next chapter of Another Kingdom, performed by the excorable Michael Knowles.
Today, we'll be live-streaming the first 15 minutes of episode 10, titled The Last Dragon, The Ballad of Nancy Pelosi.
We hope you've enjoyed this season of Another Kingdom.
Head on over to dailywire.com, subscribe to rewatch the full first and second seasons, and receive premium access to all upcoming content.
Go check that out right now.
And you get all that stuff for $9.99 a month, and for $99 a year, which is cheaper than the $9.99 a month, you get this, the very greatest in all beverage vessels, the Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumbler.
Look at it.
Look at it.
I mean, just my goodness, the solidity of it, the magic of it, its ability to contain liquid.
I mean, you know how good this vessel is?
This vessel is so good that whatever liquid you pour into it actually takes the shape of the vessel.
It's unbelievable.
It's astonishing.
It's just an astonishing property of this particular beverage vessel.
So go check that out right now.
Also, please subscribe over YouTube and iTunes.
We have all sorts of goodies coming, Sunday specials galore, all sorts of new extras that we are creating all the time.
And what was that, Sonia?
Oh, yeah, that's true.
And we are also up for an iHeartRadio award.
This is true as well.
So you should go to iHeartRadio.com and vote for us in the best news category.
You can vote up to five times, just like you're a dead Democrat in Chicago circa 1960.
So go check that out right now.
And leave us a review over at iTunes.
That always helps us in the rankings.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
All right, so worst media story of the day.
This is just media malfeasance at an extraordinarily high level.
So the Washington Post is blasting out this headline.
Now, if I were to just read that headline, I would think that a seven-year-old girl was taken into Border Patrol custody, and she was totally fine.
Right, that she was healthy and happy and bouncing off the walls.
And then the cruel Border Patrol agents allowed her to die of dehydration and exhaustion.
That, of course, is not what happened.
When you read the article, what you see is that a seven-year-old girl from Guatemala died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the U.S.
illegally with her father and a large group of migrants.
Along a remote span of the New Mexico desert, U.S.
Customs and Border Protection said on Thursday, according to CBP reports, the girl and her father were taken into custody about 10 p.m.
December 6th, south of Lordsburg, New Mexico, as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S.
agents to turn themselves in.
More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6.25 a.m., CBP records show.
Emergency responders who arrived soon after measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she reportedly had not eaten So whose fault is it that this girl, this poor child, died of dehydration?
Probably her father, who brought her along on a thousands mile journey and didn't feed her or give her water.
And the CBB agents who took her into custody, we don't know what they did in the eight hours between when they got her and when she started having seizures.
We don't even know if they were able to review her health.
There were 163 people who they knew nothing about, who they gathered into a place and then started processing.
And eight hours later, the girl was already dying.
After a helicopter flight to Providence Children's Hospital in El Paso, the child went into cardiac arrest and was revived, according to the agency, but the child did not recover and died at the hospital less than 24 hours after being transported.
The father remains in El Paso awaiting a meeting with Guatemalan consular officials, according to the CBP.
The agency is investigating the incident to ensure appropriate policies were followed.
Food and water are typically provided to migrants in Border Patrol custody, and it wasn't immediately clear Thursday if the girl received provisions and a medical exam before the onset of seizures.
Because here's one of the things about dying of dehydration.
If you don't drink for many days, and then you're given a little bit of water, that may not help you.
You may, in fact, need IV.
It may not be enough just to give somebody a little bit of water.
This idea that if you give somebody a cup of water after they haven't had a drink for five days, suddenly they will be saved from dehydration, it is just not the case.
According to spokesman Andrew Meehan, Border Patrol agents took every possible step to save the child's life under the most trying of circumstances.
As fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, we empathize with the loss of any child.
Naturally, the ACLU blamed the CBP for all of this.
This is obviously the fault of the parents.
If you cross a giant desert without feeding your child, and then you arrive at a place, and within eight hours the kid is having seizures, You're the parent.
You're the parent.
The agency said it was expecting an autopsy on the child, but results would not be available for several weeks.
An initial diagnosis by physicians at Providence Hospital listed the cause of death as septic shock, fever, and dehydration.
Again, dehydration is not just, you didn't drink for 12 hours, or you didn't drink for 24 hours.
If you die of dehydration, you have not had a drink for a very long time, then it's quite possible that if you try to give somebody water after they are this dehydrated, they start throwing it up anyway.
So, it's just...
Bad media coverage.
Just stupid bad media coverage because this is the way the media try to push a particular narrative.
Now, speaking of bad media stories, I am sad to see that the Weekly Standard has now been shut down.
The Weekly Standard has been sort of an institutional tentpole in the conservative movement for some 23 years.
It was shut down by Clarity Media Group.
The announcement came after the magazine's editor, Stephen Hayes, met privately with Ryan McKibben, who's the chairman of the Weekly Standard's publisher, Media DC, McKibben said in a press release, There's a lot of really talented writers over at The Weekly Standard.
has provided a valued and important perspective on political, literary, and cultural issues of the day.
The magazine has been home to some of the industry's most dedicated and talented staff.
I thank them for their hardworking contributions, not just to the publication, but the field of journalism.
There's a lot of really talented writers over at The Weekly Standard.
I hope to work with some of them in the future, and I'm sad to see them go.
Employees were told they would be paid through the end of the year, and that afterward they'd receive severance, which would range in scale.
To receive severance, employees would need to sign an NDA, however.
Employees were also told to clear out their desks by the end of the day, and they said their email addresses were already being in the process of being shut off, which is pretty amazing.
The editor of the Weekly Standard basically said the reason they're being shut down is because they were anti-Trump.
It's not just that the Weekly Standard was anti-Trump.
is that the Weekly Standard started to reflect the preferences of Bill Kristol, who seems to have lost his mind a little bit over President Trump.
Bill Kristol, who I've respected as a thinker for a very long time, the fact that he decided to tell people to vote for, I believe he told people to vote for Democrats in the last election cycle, and that he's sort of taken the max boot position on Trump, which is anything Trump does is bad, that's not likely to win you a lot of friends and admirers or readers.
And that's too bad because there's so many talented writers over there.
I'm sure they will all get jobs and I will work to help them get jobs at other outlets because, again, I don't like to see talented people go without work.
Okay, so...
Time for a little bit of mailbag.
Let's do some mailbag today.
Okay, so, Stephen says, if Justice Ginsburg were to die before the midterm election at basically the same chronological time as Justice Scalia did, should the Republicans proceed with confirming a new justice before the election or not?
The answer is, of course Republicans should proceed with confirming a new justice.
They should not wait until after the presidential election.
The actual rationale for not voting on Merrick Garland was not that it was the middle of a presidential cycle.
The actual rationale for not voting on Merrick Garland is because Merrick Garland did not have the votes in the Senate to be approved.
End of story.
It was always, in my opinion, a very stupid maneuver to suggest that Merrick Garland should get a vote if Hillary Clinton had been elected.
Like, I don't think it's the responsibility of the Senate to greenlight any judge it does not want to greenlight.
That's the way that our constitutional system works.
Michael says, hey, Ben, I have two questions.
I think only you might have the answers.
Question one, is it true you said Michael Knowles is an essential employee?
Question two, could it ever be possible that he could be one day?
Thanks, Michael.
Well, Michael, I like that Michael wrote a letter about himself to us.
That's exciting.
No, I did not say Knowles was an essential employee.
I said every employee of the Daily Wire was an essential employee, but every rule has its exceptions.
And Michael, I like to think of more as an independent contractor, to be frank.
And second, could it ever be possible that he could be an essential employee one day?
Well, yeah, I mean, we could put him to work scrubbing toilets or something.
That'd make him more essential than he is now.
Yes, it is.
Carlos says, hey Ben, how do you reconcile evolution with the Bible?
More specifically, Genesis 127, God created mankind in our image and likeness.
Is that consistent with the idea that we come from monkeys?
Yes, it is.
Because the question is, what does it mean to be created in God's image or likeness?
In my opinion, and in the view of a lot of biblical commentators, what this actually means is that you are created with an independent creative capacity that does not belong to animals.
You have the ability to transform the world, to make independent, free-willed choices, and that is being made in the image of God.
It's not that God looks like a human.
It's not that God has two nostrils and two hands and two feet.
That's not what it means when it says God created mankind in our image.
And the general view of natural law scholars, ranging from Thomas Aquinas to Maimonides, is that God can use whatever natural processes he wishes in order for him to accomplish his goals.
And so when the Bible describes the creation of the universe, then that could Very easily in sort of scientific parlance, be described as the natural processes of the universe.
The question is, what stood behind that process?
What made that process happen the way that process was made to happen?
Ofer says, Hello, Ben.
Now that we know Michael Avenatti isn't going to run in 2020, will you endorse Jim Acosta for president?
No, Jim Acosta, in his own mind, is already president.
I don't want to disabuse him of that.
Kevin says, Kevin, Kevin, why did you want to be a lawyer and why did you stop?
So, OK, I have a lot of great stories about my law firm interview process.
So I had the, as far as I know, the most unsuccessful Law firm interview process for anyone who graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, maybe in their history.
So the way that it works at Harvard Law School is that when you graduate or when you're getting ready to graduate, all these law firms come and they recruit you because you're a Harvard Law graduate, which means you're special.
So they all come to the Charles Hotel and they roll out the red carpet and you interview them, basically.
They interview you and you also interview them to see what sort of firm you'd like to work for.
So I registered for some 32 interviews.
I got one offer out of 32.
Now, this was not because of my grades.
This is because, specifically on my resume, I had a bunch of my books.
And my books included titles like Brainwashed, how universities indoctrinate America's youth, and Porn Generation, how social liberalism is destroying our future.
Titles like that are not apt to win you admirers in legal circles where everybody is a far leftist.
And so I would have interview experiences where I remember I walked into one interview with a major law firm called Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which has outlets all over the country.
I believe this was the Orange County branch, maybe.
In any case, I walk into the interview, before I can even sit down, the guy doesn't even shake my hand, he doesn't even say hello, I walk into the room, before I can sit down, the partner behind the desk says, it's always been my contention that conservatives and religious people in general have a Freudian fear of sex.
And I looked at him and I thought, well, I'm not getting this job.
So I said, that is the stupidest effing thing I have ever heard in my entire life.
My prediction came true.
I did not get that job.
But there were a lot of experiences that were just like that.
I mean, I interviewed one time at Kirkland Ellis, another first-rate law firm.
I had a lot of friends who worked for Kirkland Ellis.
And they called me back for a callback in Los Angeles.
And they decided, when they do these callbacks, they're trying to recruit you.
And so what they do is they put you with people they think you'll get along with, people who will talk about how great the firm is.
So they decide, you know what would be great?
We'll put Shapiro with a couple of other Jewish Harvard Law graduates.
This is pretty much the worst thing you can do, because if you are a Jewish person who is not Orthodox, chances are that you're extraordinarily liberal.
And as it turns out, that's exactly right.
One of these people was a radical environmentalist, and another of them was a feminist lawyer.
So we're all out, and then they say, OK, well, let's all go to lunch together.
And I said, well, I can go.
I'm just not going to eat anything, right?
I'll have, like, a Coke.
And you guys can eat.
It'll be fine.
I do it all the time.
No, no, no.
You need to go to a kosher restaurant.
The only kosher restaurant in downtown LA at the time was a greasy falafel shop.
So there we are in our expensive suits at a greasy falafel shop, chowing down on falafel, and the girl, the woman, happens to be a lesbian.
And the guy who's sitting next to her, we're all talking, he reaches into his pocket and he pulls out an old column that I've written.
Because I've had a syndicated column at this point for like six years.
He pulls out a column that I've written.
He starts reading to me from my own column.
And then he says, and then he says, do you agree with this?
I said, well, yeah, I wrote it.
And it was a column about same sex marriage.
And the woman says, well, I'm a lesbian.
And I said in my typical fashion, so?
And she was very upset about this because she assumed that, I guess, because she was a lesbian, I would now change my entire worldview on same-sex marriage.
Because this is how the left thinks.
It's a personal insult to members of the left if you don't change your entire worldview based on their personal life experiences, which is a pretty shocking thing.
In any case, those interviews went poorly.
The one that went the worst, though, and this is me getting to the answer, the one that went the worst was I was specifically asked by, at one point, By one of these firms, why I wanted to work in corporate law, why I wanted to be a corporate attorney.
And I looked at the interview and I said, for the money.
Which is the obvious and honest answer to anyone who wants to practice corporate law, right?
You're not going to corporate law for the love of the law, and anybody who says they are is a liar, okay?
The reason you're going there is because the partners are making a couple million bucks a year.
The notion that you are going from Harvard Law School, where you study how to be Atticus Finch, and you say about legal theory, and you study about originalism versus legal realism, and it's all about ideas, and then you go to a law firm, where you sit in a room, And you review page numbers and commas and missing paragraph indents for 2,200 billable hours a year.
The idea that you are doing this for the pure enjoyment of Blackstone's commentaries is insane.
So anyway, he said, why are you doing this?
I said, for the money.
So that's my same answer to you.
Why did I want to be a lawyer?
For the money.
I mean, right, I finished, I went to college, I got my degree in poli-sci.
You can't get a great job with poli-sci.
My mom had always been sort of practicing kind of law.
She was in business affairs.
She said, you should get your law degree.
I was like, I'm not really sure.
I went and took the LSATs.
I did really well.
I got into Harvard.
She's like, now you have to go.
I said, okay, fine.
And then after that, it was like, what do you do now?
Well, you work in law.
So that was the idea.
Also, I wanted to learn the real estate business.
That is something that did not end up happening.
Okay.
Samuel says, Hey Ben, when do you find time in your busy schedule for writing your novels?
Do you set aside a specific time each day or do you set aside a specific time entirely to working on a novel?
I've been listening for a couple of years now and greatly appreciate the balanced approach and your honesty.
Thank you.
Samuel.
Um, I worked on my novel, True Allegiance, sort of in my spare time.
I do have to carve out times in the day.
And what I've realized is that I have to tell, I have to tell my assistants, those around me, that they need to not schedule my day.
That I need a block of like three hours.
If I actually want to get anything done, I need blocks of two or three hours.
And when somebody says to you, Can I have five minutes of your time?
The answer should usually be no.
Because five minutes of my time is not five minutes of my time.
It's the 15 minutes in preparation for the five minutes of my time and then the 15 minutes afterward getting back into my work.
There is no such thing as a five minute block of your time.
Even a person asking you a question for 30 seconds requires you to be wrenched out of your work and then it takes you another 10 minutes to get back into your work.
So you really do need to have undivided blocks of time where you simply are not bothered if you want to write.
And that's true whether you're writing nonfiction or fiction.
Obviously, I write a lot more nonfiction than fiction.
Terry says, Hey Ben, I've been living in California since the military stationed me here six years ago.
At first, I loved the state because I was young and saw myself as more of a liberal.
But as I grew older and more educated, I definitely find myself firmly on the conservative side of the fence.
I recently decided I want to move away from California to find a state with lower taxes and more job opportunities.
Do you have any recommendations for cities that are potentially worth moving to?
Thanks for the awesome content.
Well, there are a lot of fantastic cities in states that are more conservative.
Yeah.
In terms of just pure beauty of the city, Charleston, South Carolina is a gorgeous city.
I think it's the prettiest city that I've ever been to.
It's just beautiful.
But in terms of great cities that are in conservative areas, obviously Dallas is a fantastic city.
I like Oklahoma City, I'll be honest with you.
I think Oklahoma City is great.
I think Nashville is a great town.
There are a lot of really great towns that I've been to in conservative states.
And honestly, were I not wedded to being near a Jewish community, that would give me a lot more options on where to live.
Okay, one more question.
Let's see.
Cory says, my economics teacher tried to argue that America's monotheism and capitalism have failed and we should adopt some Chinese policy.
What would your argument to this be?
Thank you, Cory.
Centralized planning works in the short run in the sense that it directs capital toward a particular goal and that goal can be successful in the short run.
It does not work in the long run because the bottom line is that the collective wisdom of the crowd when it comes to the products and services to be created Much stronger, much more versatile, much more durable than anything directed top-down.
It is amazing to watch as people make the same economic errors over and over.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, there were a lot of folks in the West who said, wow, look at the growth rates in Stalin's Russia.
Look at that.
The five-year plans.
And then all of that collapsed, right?
And it turns out that all of that was fake.
When you keep your people in a state of abject misery for 30 years and then give them gradual gains and turns out they're happier because of the gradual gains, that does not mean that people in China are living a lifestyle anything comparable to the lifestyle of the United States.
The United States is still the world driver of the economy.
If the United States economy We're to go into recession, the entire world goes into recession.
The same thing is not necessarily true of the Chinese economy, which has experienced several serious economic shocks in the past several years.
And that has had some impact, but certainly not tremendous global impact in the same way that the United States economy has.
It's just monotheism and capitalism haven't worked.
Have you seen a chart of GDP per capita since the advent of free markets in the early 19th century?
It looks exponential.
This is just the stupidest crap I've ever heard.
Really, that's so dumb.
Like, read a book.
A book.
OK, so let's see.
OK, we'll do some things.
There's so many good questions today, and I'm sad we can't get to all of them.
But let's get to some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things I like.
Last night we had our Christmas party over at my business partner, Jeremy Boring's house, the God King Jeremy Boring.
And it was beautiful.
I mean, it was really well decorated and really nice.
And my and a bunch of the folks who work at the company were all singing holiday songs like Like, Wonderwall together.
It was very weird.
Everybody, and here's the thing about the Daily Wire staff.
It was a dry party, and everybody was still singing there like they were drunk together.
The estimable Mathis Glover did a rather fantastic rendition of Call Me Maybe.
With acoustic piano.
Which as it turns out, Call Me Maybe, not a good song.
And Call Me Maybe, without any production value, particularly not good.
But Mathis got very into it.
Senya's rendition of Can't Help Falling In Love With You was definitely a classic of the genre.
We had Nick, who was out there singing with the full passion that he could bring to it.
We had Alex and Dylan, the twins with the beards, and they were singing every rock song they could think of.
So that was a lot of fun!
When we walked in, when everybody walked in, I got to the party a little bit early.
And part of the joke was that I was going to pull out the violin as I was playing a set with the pianist.
And so one of the things that we played was actual good music by Bach.
This would be Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, which, by the way, is more Christmassy, it turns out, than Wonderwall.
Who would have thought?
Or the entire crowd singing Bohemian Rhapsody on Christmas, which is a weird call.
In any case, here is a little bit of Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, some of the most beautiful music ever composed by an actually talented human.
Praise to joy of man's desire.
Holy wisdom, the most wise.
Okay, so it's great music.
Okay, time for, in the wake of that, time for some stuff I hate.
Okay, so things I hate.
This one goes out to my wife.
So, last night, last night, it's like 10.30 p.m., and it's time to go to sleep.
But I need to go to the kitchen for something.
And in our house, our bedroom is on one side of the house, and our kitchen is on the other side of the house, and in between is kind of the den area where the kids like to play.
And there is.
And so usually we clear a path, you know, like good human beings would.
We usually clear a path from one to the other so that if we have to walk in the dark, we don't kill ourselves.
This had not been done.
That's not my wife's fault.
That's my kid's fault.
Anyway, they decided to leave out their little chairs and their little toys, so I'm walking blithely along, happily walking along.
I get a bottle of water from the kitchen, and boom!
I bruise the living hell out of my shin, and I go flying, head over heels, over this chair like Dick Van Dyke over the Ottoman in the original Dick Van Dyke show.
I mean, I just go flying, and I clock Living hell out of my leg.
I mean, I just destroy my knee, I destroy my shin, and fall directly from the chair onto my son's digger.
He has like a, my son has like, you know, like a digger that you would see at a construction site.
He has one that you actually sit on.
And so I fall from one object onto another object, and then onto a third object.
So, it was great physical comedy.
In the dark.
So, I'm lying on the floor, and my wife is in the bedroom, and All she can hear is, oh!
Right?
She just hears me just shout.
Right?
Just a blue streak in the middle of the night.
And I hear her from the other room, are you okay?
And I'm like, number one, no.
Right, you just heard me shout a bunch of curse words after hearing a giant clatter of me going down on the floor.
No, probably not.
Probably not okay.
And then my wife comes rushing in and she sees me on the floor clutching my leg.
And I just, I mean, this thing hurt like hell.
I mean, it wasn't just like a shin hurt.
It was like, it was bleeding.
I mean, there was actual blood.
I stepped directly on a bunch of blocks at the same time.
It was ridiculous.
And I'm lying on the floor and my wife is laughing as hard as I have ever seen her laugh in her life.
She is dying.
I mean, she is crying.
She is laughing so hard.
And she's like, honey, are you okay?
She said while laughing through her tears.
And I'm like, no, I'm not okay.
Can you get me, you know, like an ice pack because I can't move for a second.
And she's she's she's she's like, I'm so sorry that happened.
Laughing at me the entire time, like literally laughing.
I'm so sorry that happened.
And this continues for a solid, I kid you not, 15 minutes of her laughing as I hobble around the house as though I've been wounded in some sort of crucial battle.
And finally, things calm down and I put an ice pack on my leg.
And as we're about to fall asleep, I hear her giggling and laughing because my wife loves it when I get hurt.
It is her favorite thing.
And I don't know if this is I'll have to talk to some more of the women in the office.
I don't know if there's a woman thing because my mom has the same thing with my father.
Like if my dad clocks himself, my mom thinks it's the funniest thing that she's ever seen.
And, you know, if I were really, really hurt, like deeply hurt, like hospital hurt, then I assume that my wife would not be quite as pleased with the situation.
But when I clock myself and it really hurts, but I'm not dying, my wife thinks it's the funniest thing that has ever happened.
So things I hate, this one goes out to you, sweetheart.
Love you, even if you don't love me.
And that's the, I guess that's the way the cookie crumbles.
So solid stuff there.
Okay, final thing that I hate as we approach Christmas, we now get the wisdom of a bunch of people who have no relationship with religion or traditional Judeo-Christian values about whether particular Christian figures like the Pope are homophobic.
So Jenny Hagel, who is a writer for Seth Meyers, I guess, did an entire monologue the other night about how Pope Francis is a homophobe because Pope Francis believes that homosexuality is a sin, which has been part of Judeo-Christian canon for Approximately 3,000 years.
But here is Jenny Hagel finally explaining the real reason this has all been done is because the Pope, Pope Francis, is a brutal homophobe.
The press dubbed him Cool Pope.
But here's the thing.
This guy's not cool.
This guy's homophobic.
If you're not Catholic, you're probably thinking, why should I care about this?
And if you are Catholic, you're probably thinking, what's the latest I can leave my house and still get to Mass on time?
But we should all care about this because the Pope is a world leader who's giving people permission to be prejudiced.
Hey, so much humoring from the humorists.
What I love is people who are politically driven comedians who have an agenda not being funny at all and just calling the Pope a homophobe on the basis that they disagree about the status of particular behavior and whether it is, in fact, a sin or not.
She's going to have to name me the policies that the Pope has pushed that are in favor of cracking down on gay people and victimizing gay people.
In fact, most of the Pope's statements on this have been very soft.
But this is not enough.
Now we have to, in the great battle between secularism and religion, secularism must emerge victorious and label everyone who disagrees an evil human being.
Well done, Seth Meyers and his writers.
OK, well, we will be back here on Monday with all of the latest.
One more week until we go on Christmas break, and then there will be a whole new year of fun.
But we are not quite to the end of the year yet.
So get ready, buckle up, because next week I have a feeling is going to be a crazy one, just like every other week.
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.
▲
Export Selection