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Dec. 17, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:21
Down The Rat Hole | Ep. 681
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President Trump attacks his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, battle breaks out over border funding, and Obamacare takes a hit in the courts.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
OK, so many exciting things happening today.
Number one, we started on time.
Unbelievable.
Number two, this is the last week, in fact, before we actually go on vacation.
So get in all of your knowledge now, because otherwise you're just going to be out of it.
But before we get to any of the news of the day, and there's a lot of news today.
First, I want to mention to you the number 1.2 trillion.
That's how much we owe other countries and to our own unfunded debt.
This year, as of 2018, economists say that by the end of 2019, we'll be spending more on the interest on our national debt than we spend on Medicare.
By 2023, we're going to be spending more than we do on our national defense.
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Alrighty, so we begin today with all of the continuing hubbub surrounding Michael Cohen.
So as we mentioned last week, the president is in a bit of a legal trouble.
He's got a bit of he's got a bit of legal trouble here.
His legal trouble Basically consists of Michael Cohen.
I don't think the Russia investigation, as I've said for a while, is going to come up with anything major on the president.
Maybe I'm wrong.
We'll find out.
But when it comes to Michael Cohen, Cohen has basically made an accusation that President Trump violated campaign finance law, that he instructed him to violate disclosure law and also personal giving limits by giving a bunch of money to American Media Inc.
to lock up Stormy Daniels' story, or that he intended to do that for Karen McDougal, and then he actually did it without American Media Inc.
He just paid off Stormy Daniels, and that was an in-kind contribution that was illegal, and President Trump had instructed him to go ahead and do all of that.
Well, President Trump responded over the weekend by calling Michael Cohen a dirty rat.
So he tweeted out, remember, Michael Cohen only became a rat, in quotation marks, after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable and unheard of until the witch hunt was illegally started.
They broke into an attorney's office, all caps.
Why didn't they break into the DNC to get the server?
Or Crooked's office?
Well, a couple of things.
First of all, I do love that Crooked Hillary has now just become crooked.
So we all know what that means, which is the man's an expert at branding.
I mean, you got to give that to him.
Right.
He just says crook and we're like, oh, yeah, he's talking about Clinton.
But the but when it comes to this tweet.
A couple of problems.
Number one, it is not illegal to get a warrant to search a lawyer's office.
They went through the DOJ.
They went through procedures.
They didn't break into Michael Cohen's office.
It wasn't like they went in there with a pry bar, like this is Watergate, and then just broke into Michael Cohen's office.
Also, if he thinks that's bad, then why is he recommending that they should have broken into the DNC?
If it's bad to break into Michael Cohen's office, it's like, it's so bad they did that.
It's criminal.
Why didn't they do it to the DNC?
Okay.
Some Galaxy Brain stuff right there.
And he says that they should have broken into Hillary Clinton's office.
First of all, they did get a copy of the server.
We've talked about this on the show before.
I don't like when non-factual information is put out there.
One of the pieces of non-factual information you have heard over and over and over again from people on the right side of the aisle is that the FBI did not get copies of Hillary Clinton's servers, that they should have just seized the servers.
That's not how any of this works.
They made a copy of the server.
That's normal procedure.
And as far as, quote-unquote, breaking into Hillary Clinton's office, they did actually dig up a lot of her old emails, they did subpoena all of these materials.
By the time they got there, she'd already drilled holes in her stuff, so I'm not sure what breaking into her office would have done or anything.
In any case, the big headline of this suite is him calling Michael Cohen a rat.
You dirty rat!
Note to the President of the United States.
A couple notes.
Number one.
Listen to your attorneys.
Stop it.
Please stop it.
Just as a lawyer, it is painful to watch his clients like, I'm gonna defend myself.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
You're not a good lawyer.
If you're a good lawyer, then you wouldn't have needed Michael Cohen, because Michael Cohen's not even a good lawyer.
No, just stop.
I feel like Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Stop.
Wait.
Come back.
Don't.
I mean, what is he doing?
Second, when he says that Michael Cohen only became a rat after the FBI did something, normally, if you watch mob movies, which I am fond of, if you like mob movies, then when someone is called a rat, it is not because they are lying.
Usually they're called a rat because they're telling the truth.
And when you have Jimmy Cagney going, oh, you dirty rat, usually what he's talking about is somebody in his orbit who's now talking to the police in order to secure a better deal for himself, but not lying.
And in fact, it is in fact a crime.
So if federal prosecutors were to put out evidence that turns out to be false, if they were to pressure people into making false statements for use in court, then they would be criminally liable for that.
So Trump here, in this tweet, is doing about 10 different things, none of them good.
Including calling Michael Cohen a rat, which makes him look like he's a mobster.
It's just dumb.
His basic case is very simple.
He should have just said, Michael Cohen is my lawyer.
Michael Cohen's job is to make sure that everything we did was according to the law.
End of story.
Now we're done.
Instead, he didn't do that.
And one of the reasons he didn't do that is because he doesn't know, I think, what evidence the FBI and the DOJ now have with regard to what Michael Cohen said to President Trump.
So President Trump continues to fulminate over these investigations.
He ripped into Jeff Sessions over the hoax Russia probe.
So there's that.
He says it looks here as though General Flynn's defenses are incidental to something larger, which is for the prosecution to figure out if it can find a path to Donald Trump without quite knowing what that crime might be.
It stops looking like prosecution and more looking like a persecution of the president.
That's Daniel Henninger over at the Wall Street Journal, which is true.
He says, thank you, people are starting to see and understand what this witch hunt is all about.
Jeff Sessions should be ashamed of himself for allowing this total hoax to get started in the first place.
Note, the quote-unquote hoax did not get started under Jeff Sessions.
This investigation began in 2016.
In the middle of the investigation, Sessions just recused himself because Sessions had been implicated in talking with people in Russia, right, during the transition, and he was part of the campaign itself.
Rudy Giuliani is the president's personal attorney.
And there are three really terrible jobs right now in America.
I mean, worse than any septic worker.
There are three really awful jobs.
President's personal attorney, president's press secretary, chief of staff.
All jobs that no sane human being would really want.
Well, Rudy Giuliani has jumped right in the middle of that.
So, the former mayor of New York, former 2008 presidential candidate, He was out there defending President Trump, and he's basically skipping to the end.
OK, what he's basically skipping to is that President Trump didn't do anything criminal, even if he did bad stuff, even if he talked to Michael Cohen.
It's not really a big deal.
And so we are skipping all the way to where I am already, which is I'm assuming that President Trump probably told Michael Cohen to spend money on Stormy Daniels.
I'm assuming that probably happened because I think it did.
I'm assuming that President Trump talked with Michael Cohen and American Media Inc.
about picking up the stories of these various women.
All of that can be true, and he still didn't necessarily commit a crime.
And that's what Giuliani is saying.
So Giuliani is skipping all of the middle steps.
And frankly, I don't think that's terrible.
I think there are a lot of folks in the administration who don't understand that when you're constantly moving the goalposts as to guilt and innocence, it actually looks worse.
If you just say, yeah, president does a lot of stuff, not illegal.
That's probably a better answer than, the president didn't do it.
Well, the president might have done it, but not what you're saying he did.
Well, the president might have done what you said he did, but it's not that bad.
Well, it might not be that bad.
It might be kind of bad, but it's not criminal.
Why don't you just go to, you know what, president does a lot of stuff, not criminal.
Right, that's actually a better line, but instead we've gotten this constantly receding line of goalposts into the infinite distance, and I think that that's actually pretty bad.
P.R.
Giuliani's cutting through all that to his credit.
He's saying, with regard to the Russia stuff, that collusion is not a crime, which is true.
He's saying that nothing the president did, maybe it looks bad to you, but it's not actually criminal.
True.
And then he adds, it was over by election time, which is a weird kind of qualifier.
I know.
That collusion is not a crime.
It was over with by the time of the election.
OK, well, the it, it depends what the it is, right?
If he was colluding with Russia to affect the outcome of the election, then that would be a crime.
Collusion itself is not a crime.
Conspiracy is a crime.
So it depends on what activity we are talking about here.
But he's not wrong.
He's not wrong.
And that's why there's a poll today from CNN that shows about half of Americans are not interested in impeachment at this point, which is actually up a little bit over what it was a couple of weeks ago.
And then Giuliani makes what is a pretty good legal point.
He says, you know, when President Trump wanted to keep Stormy Daniels silent, The entire case against Michael Cohen and President Trump on this score rests on the idea that President Trump wanted to silence these women before the election.
This is the case that's been made by former FEC commissioners who have said that President Trump paying off women is not a crime.
Because people do this every day in public life.
They pay off women all the time.
That doesn't make it criminal.
Signing hush agreements is a well-accepted part of the legal profession.
The only question is whether this particular hush money was paid off with an eye toward the election.
And this raises a legal question.
What if it's both?
What if the president paid off these women, partially because of the election, but partially because he wanted to keep it secret from his wife?
Because he didn't want Melania finding out all about it and then throwing lamps at him or something.
What if it's both?
And that's the case Giuliani makes.
He says, listen, I can produce witnesses.
Who say that President Trump was just silencing these women, not because of the election only, but because these women were ready to come forward and that was going to harm his personal life.
Here's Giuliani saying that.
I can produce an enormous number of witnesses that say the president was very concerned about how this was going to affect his children, his marriage, not just this one but similar.
All those women came forward at that point in time.
That tape with Billy Bush and all of that.
It's all part of the same thing.
And I know what he was concerned about and I can produce 20 witnesses to tell you what he was concerned about.
Two weeks before the campaign.
You're damn right.
And he was concerned about all of it.
OK, and that's not actually implausible.
You know, Stephanopoulos is kind of looking at that askance like, well, this is happening right before the end of the campaign.
When do you think these women were coming forward?
In other words, maybe part of the factor here is not that Trump wanted to pay these women off before the election.
Maybe part of the factor here is these women knew that their payday was coming before the election.
And so Trump now has a limited amount of time to silence these women before his family finds out about that, if that's something that President Trump is deeply concerned about.
And by the way, the evidence is pretty good that Trump likes silencing these women regardless.
of whether there's an election going on.
Remember, he worked with AMI to silence Stormy Daniels back in 2011, having nothing to do with the election.
So again, as I've been saying for two weeks here, the president's defense rents on a couple of points.
Point number one is the idea that this had nothing to do with the election.
Point number two is that even if it had something to do with the election, that's Michael Cohen's fault.
That's his lawyer's fault.
I don't think that case is particularly bad, but the evidence is going to have to emerge.
There's one piece of evidence we're going to talk about in a second that sort of cuts against the president on that first score.
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So there's one piece of evidence that is cutting against the contention of President Trump, and that is this old tape of President Trump talking with Michael Cohen.
This was revealed back in July by CNN.
In which President Trump is talking with Michael Cohen about paying hush money for David Pecker's stories.
The reason that this cuts against the president's case that he just wants to silence these women for the sake of his family is because why is he talking about this now?
In other words, what he is afraid of on this tape is that David Pecker, who is the CEO of American Media at the National Enquirer, that he has basically a safe full of scandalous material on the president.
And Trump is afraid that Pecker is going to die like now because the election is coming up.
Now, maybe there's an ancillary reason for that, but this cuts against the president's case that he's not worried at all about the timing.
That still doesn't answer the legal question as to, could the president be worried about both?
Could he be worried about the timing?
And also, could he be worried about the impact on his family?
And if it is both, does it have to be exclusively one or the other?
That's really not clear from the law.
Let's say that he's concerned that Melania is going to find out and get mad at him, but he's also concerned that the election is coming up.
People do lots of things for a variety of reasons.
You may do something for two reasons.
Is it that you have to do it exclusively because of the election, or could you also have done it in order to protect your family?
In any case, here's, if you recall, some of the tape from President Trump talking to Michael Cohen about this, revealed back in July.
I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David, you know, so that I'm going to do that right away.
I've actually come up and I've spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with funding.
Yes.
Um, and it's all the stuff.
All the stuff.
Because, you know, you never know where that company, you never know where he's going to be.
Correct.
So, I'm all over that.
And I spoke to Alan about it.
When it comes time for the financing, which will be... Listen.
We're financing.
We'll have to pay you, so... No, no, no, no, no.
I got...
Okay, so again, this is the president talking in detail with Cohen about all this, but there is something about this tape that people are missing, and that is that Cohen keeps saying to Trump, I'll take care of it, I'll take care of it, I'll take care of it.
That's Trump's best defense.
And Trump's best defense is Michael Cohen said he'd take care of it.
He's my lawyer.
The reason I keep discussing all this stuff.
And this is important.
The reason that this stuff is important is because in the end, the calculus is going to be about whether the president is impeached or not.
It's really not about whether he did anything criminal.
President Clinton did criminal things.
The question is whether this is impeachable.
I think by the standards of 1999, the answer has to be no.
And that's why we're going to run through the 2020 election with this in the back of the public's mind.
But I don't think that he ends up being removed from office for any reason, nor do I think that based on the standards set by the American public, he should be.
Based on what happened in the Clinton impeachment, which has lowered the bar for all impeachments for all the future.
Okay, so, meanwhile, we've got Hubbub breaking out over border funding.
The Democrats say that they are not interested in funding the border wall in any way, shape, or form.
This should be a win for the President of the United States.
Somehow the administration seems to be Seizing defeat from the draws of victory on what should be a pretty obvious PR campaign that the Democrats are willing to allow us to be insecure simply so that they can pander to a particular base.
Here's Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, saying that there will be no wall in any form.
We're not paying for any wall at all for no reason.
No, not happening.
President Trump should understand there are not the votes for the wall in the House or the Senate.
He is not going to get the wall in any form.
Okay, so when he says that, Trump's response should be, well, if you won't give me the wall, then I'm not going to sign a bill without the funding for the wall.
Instead, Stephen Miller, who is one of the president's top advisors, particularly on immigration, He went on TV, and he decided to parrot what the president wants him to say.
This is why personality matters in the presidency.
The president of the United States would be significantly better served if he allowed PR professionals to do their job, as opposed to him watching the shows and then deciding whether he likes what people are saying and how it makes him feel on the inside of his heart.
Stephen Miller says a lot of stuff President Trump wants to hear, but it's not good for the president's PR campaign.
I'll explain why in a second.
Here's Miller explaining that Trump will, in fact, shut down the government.
What is the president's plan and will he shut it down to get this $5 billion in border wall funding?
We're going to do whatever is necessary to build the border wall to stop this ongoing crisis of illegal immigration.
And that means shutdown?
This is a very, if it comes to it, absolutely.
This is a very fundamental issue.
At stake is the question of whether or not the United States remains a sovereign country, whether or not we can establish and enforce rules for entrance into our country.
The Democrat Party is a simple choice.
They can either choose to fight for America's working class or to promote illegal immigration.
You can't do both.
Okay, so he is totally right about all of this, but when he says Trump will absolutely shut the government down over the border wall fight, when he says that, he shouldn't be owning it.
Trump wants to say that because Trump likes feeling aggressive, but the point here is the Democrats are shutting down the government by not giving the funding that is necessary, and this is a winning battle for Republicans.
It is a winning battle for Republicans.
Again, it's being blown on the back of bad PR, but it is a winning battle.
I'll give you another example.
Last week, there was a case we talked about on Friday of a seven-year-old girl who died while she was in Border Patrol custody of dehydration.
She was flown by helicopter to a medical center to take care of her.
They didn't even know she was in dehydration until shortly before she started seizing up, basically.
And that was the fault of her father, who brought her over thousands of miles without giving her any food or any water, and then she dies in American custody.
And this leads the left to suggest that it is President Trump's fault.
Stephen Miller is asked about this.
And here is Stephen Miller's response to the seven-year-old girl's death.
Now, the answer is, why did the seven-year-old girl die?
Well, the seven-year-old girl died because her father didn't take care of her.
And he didn't take care of her because he thought he could get in illegally.
Listen to Miller's answer, because it's kind of a problem.
Our hearts break for the tragic death of the seven-year-old girl.
The loss of that precious life is horrifying.
Last year, 100,000 unaccompanied alien children or children traveling with adults showed up at our southern border.
President Trump took dramatic action, issued an executive order directing illegal traffic to the ports of entry.
But a left-wing activist judge issued a reckless nationwide injunction on the president's order, putting thousands of lives at risk and further enriching these grotesque, heinous, smuggling organizations.
Okay, so again, this sort of charged language with regard to left-wing courts are responsible for all of this.
The reality is that the person responsible for this is the girl's dad, right?
The person responsible for all of this is the father who didn't feed the child.
And he's not... Again, a lot of this is about tone.
A lot of this is about presentation.
But the problem with this is then the president tweets out about this sort of stuff.
So the president tweets out about child separations.
Now, his answer on child separations Should be that child separations are bad.
That child separations are being mandated by the courts of the United States, which is true.
Instead, the president tweets out, the Democrats' policy of child separation on the border during the Obama administration was far worse than the way we handle it now.
Remember the 2014 picture of children in cages the Obama years.
So far so good.
But then, he says this, however, if you don't separate, far more people will come.
Smugglers use the kids.
It's that sentence, however, if you don't separate, far more people will come.
Now the implication is that he wants to separate children from their parents when they get to the border, which he doesn't want to do.
So this is where a little bit of forethought when it comes to messaging would be very, very useful.
Because I think that it's quite possible for Republicans to win both this battle and win the war when it comes to immigration, but they're going to need to do a little bit better job on the PR.
Now in just a second, I'm going to get to the other big story that happened over the weekend, and that was a big ruling against Obamacare, basically striking down Obamacare in its entirety from Texas.
Now, this didn't end with an injunction against Obamacare, but we'll explain all the details coming up in just one second.
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Okay, over the weekend, big news.
A court ruled that Obamacare was not constitutional.
So what made Obamacare not constitutional this time, considering that it had already been held constitutional by the ridiculous decision of Chief Justice Roberts?
You'll recall that back when Obamacare was passed, there was a lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court saying that it was essentially a fine on the American people for not buying something, which you can't do.
There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the federal government power to do that.
And Judge Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts completely rewrote Obamacare to suggest that it was merely a tax.
Well, there's a problem with that now, according to a Texas judge.
The problem is that when Republicans got rid of the penalty for failing to pay the tax, what they actually did was they reverted the entire quote-unquote tax back into being merely a penalty itself.
And that's unconstitutional, and that makes the entire law unconstitutional.
So here's the way this works.
Chief Justice Roberts' rewriting of the law essentially suggested that the way that this works is that you were forced to buy Obamacare If you didn't, you paid a penalty.
We said, right, that's a penalty.
That's not a tax.
Robert said, no, it's a tax.
It's just like any other tax.
And if you don't pay a tax, then you are penalized because you violated the law.
Well, what happens when you get rid of the penalty?
If you get rid of the penalty, then it's no longer a tax because there's no penalty attached to it.
So that means that it's just a rule that you must buy something, and that is in and of itself unconstitutional.
That is what this Texas judge found.
Judge Reed Conard, according to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, ruled for some 20 state plaintiffs that the Affordable Care Act individual mandate is no longer legal because Republicans repealed its financial penalty as part of the 2017 tax reform.
Recall that Chief Justice Roberts joined four justices to say Obamacare's mandate was illegal as a command to individuals to buy insurance under the Commerce Clause.
The framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it, he wrote.
Yet the chief famously salvaged Obamacare by unilaterally rewriting the mandate to be a tax.
Enter Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who argues in Texas vs. United States that since Congress has repealed the individual mandate, the tax is no longer a tax and Obamacare is thus illegal.
Judge O'Connor agreed with that logic.
He went further, in ruling that since Congress said the mandate is crucial to the structure of Obamacare, all of Obamacare must fall along with the mandate.
Well, first of all, the original decision was bad, but that doesn't mean that this particular decision is legally good.
There are a couple of problems with this particular legal decision.
One legal complication, as the Wall Street Journal correctly points out, is that Congress in 2017 repealed the financial part of the individual mandate, but not the structure of the mandate itself.
So the structure of the mandate didn't change.
If it was a tax, it's still a tax.
Just because you reduce the amount of penalty to zero doesn't mean that, legally speaking, a penalty doesn't apply.
Republicans used budget rules to pass tax reform So they couldn't actually repeal the mandate to express language.
Also, the Affordable Care Act has been up and running since 2014, which means so-called reliance interests come into play when considering a precedent.
Millions of people now rely on Obamacare subsidies and rules, which argues against judges repealing the law by fiat.
Here's where I disagree with the Wall Street Journal.
If it is unconstitutional, it's unconstitutional.
But the Wall Street Journal correctly says that Judge O'Connor is right.
The Democrats claim the individual mandate was essential to the Affordable Care Act, but when Congress killed the financial penalty in 2017, it didn't kill Obamacare.
It left Obamacare intact.
So if you're deciding congressional intent, whether it's to kill Obamacare or not, well, the severability provision of Obamacare still applies.
In other words, the decision may be psychologically satisfying, but it's not legally great.
What's more important Is that the decision itself actually cuts against Republicans politically, because in the end, this decision is not going to stand.
In all likelihood, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals strikes it down.
If not, the Supreme Court probably strikes it down.
And here's the problem.
President Trump tweeted out, very excited, that Obamacare had been struck down by this court.
He tweeted up, As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an unconstitutional disaster.
Now Congress must pass a strong law that provides great health care and protects pre-existing conditions.
Mitch and Nancy, get it done!
Okay, this is not great.
I will explain in a second.
And then he continues along these lines.
He says, Wow, but not surprisingly, Obamacare was just ruled unconstitutional by a highly respected judge in Texas.
Great news for America.
Here's why it's not great news for America.
Because there is no actual plan to replace Obamacare.
There's no bipartisan plan on the table.
Democrats are immediately going to say that if people lose their quote-unquote Obamacare coverage, if they lose their Medicaid coverage via Obamacare, if all the rates go up because a bunch of people withdraw from the individual mandate on the basis of Obamacare disappearing, then they're going to say, oh look, the healthcare system has failed, let's nationalize healthcare.
This was always the plan.
From day one, this was the plan.
Go back and listen to things that I said back in 2012, 2013, 2010, when they were passing this.
This was always a step-by-step design-for-failure program so that Democrats could claim that when prices went up, it's because the market was not regulated enough.
Because where Democrats come from, the answer is always more cowbell.
If regulation fails, the answer is always more regulation.
Always.
And so if Obamacare fails, even though they say it was going to cure the system, Obama in 2010.
This is going to make things more affordable.
You like your doctor?
You get to keep your doctor.
You like your medicine?
You get to keep your medicine.
You like your insurance?
You get to keep your insurance.
None of it was true.
None of it was true.
But when it failed, the plan was for him to say, well, didn't see that one coming.
Guess we got to nationalize health care now.
And that was always the plan for Democrats.
It's why they are now pushing single payer health care.
It's why they've embraced the full Bernie Sanders Strategy when it comes to healthcare.
This is why Chuck Schumer is gleeful about this decision.
Chuck Schumer is happy about the decision.
Why?
Because now he gets to try and force Republicans to expand government to cover all the gaps left by the crappy Obamacare system that was put in place back in 2010.
Here is Schumer.
You can hear the glee in his voice.
We're gonna fight this tooth and nail.
And the first thing we're gonna do when we get back there in the Senate is urge, put a vote on the floor, Urging an intervention in the case the judge a lot of this depends on congressional intent and if a majority of the house and a majority of the Senate Say that this case should be overturned.
It'll have a tremendous effect on the appeal Okay, so what he's saying is that, basically, he's gonna get all of these Democrats and Republicans to stand up for Obamacare.
He wants people on the record standing against this judge's decision.
Why?
Because if he can get people on the record standing in favor of the judge's decision, and then it turns out that a bunch of people, quote-unquote, lose their healthcare, or their healthcare costs go up, then he can blame Republicans for this.
It's fascinating.
When you look at Americans' opinions on healthcare, basically, Americans are always in favor of the status quo.
Before Obamacare, they hated Obamacare.
Now that Obamacare is in place, whenever there are major changes made to Obamacare, people say they don't want it.
People just want to be left alone.
This is the basic rule of American life.
People mostly want to be left alone, and that means that once the status quo has changed, they don't actually want the status quo changed more.
The problem is that President Obama and the Democrats put America on a path towards single-payer health care, and Republicans, by accepting the premises of all of the Democratic arguments, that we have to create a government-structured system where people with pre-existing conditions are covered, for example.
By doing all of that, what they have actually done is placed us on the same pathway.
Because now Republicans are arguing about how we get there, they're not arguing about what the end goal is.
When it comes to the role of government in healthcare, the role of government in healthcare should be minimal.
It should not be high levels of regulation.
It should not be that we are going to quote-unquote provide healthcare to the ends of the earth for everyone because no one can do that.
There's so many lies told about the healthcare system in America and abroad, it's pretty astonishing.
One of the great lies told about America's healthcare system is that it is unbelievably crappy.
There are problems with America's healthcare system for sure, but when you actually remove car accident deaths and suicide and gun homicide from America's national death statistics, and you look at our life expectancy under the American health system, it is number one among all industrialized countries.
People don't like to point that out because it cuts against the convenient argument that America's health care system is dramatically awful and people are dying in the streets.
That's not true.
And when it comes to the idea that we are spending inordinate sums of cash on our health care system, that is also not true in the sense that if you look at as a percentage of GDP per capita in the United States, what we spend, we are directly along the trend line of the rest of the industrialized world.
That is not to say we have the ideal system.
We don't.
Our system can be made better with more deregulation, more capacity to sell over state lines, less Cram downs from the federal and state governments on insurance companies.
More movement toward early buying of catastrophic health care insurance.
But instead of focusing on actual solutions, it turns into a fight over pre-existing conditions.
And that's a fight Democrats are destined to win because the reality is that no one is going to insure someone with a pre-existing condition unless somebody else is subsidizing that care.
In just a second, I want to get to the media malfeasance over the weekend.
Plus, I got to get to the story that is just insane and speaks to what a lot of folks on the radical green left think about humanity as a whole.
We're going to get to that in just one second.
First, I want to talk about how you can defend your life.
When the Founders created the Constitution, they protected your rights.
But when they protected your rights, one of the things that they did was make sure that you could protect your rights with another right, right?
The right to Keep and bear arms.
I strongly believe in that principle, as you know, and that is why I really am excited to be endorsing Bravo Company Manufacturing.
They were started in a garage by a Marine vet more than two decades ago to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.
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They design, engineer, manufacture life-saving equipment.
They assume that each rifle leaving their shop will be used in a life-or-death situation By a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, 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 to know that when they provide you a tool that it is going to work when, God forbid, something real is at stake.
To learn more about Bravo Company manufacturing, head on over to BravoCompanyMFG.com.
You can discover more about their products, special offers, and upcoming news.
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Find out even more about BCM and the awesome people who make their products.
They really are great.
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Check them out again at Bravo Company MFG.com.
Okay.
Well, I want to get to the craziest editorial of the day in just one second.
Plus, an insane story about antisemitism openly being endorsed by the New York Times.
We'll get to that.
In just one second.
But first, you're going to have to go over to Daily Wire and subscribe because we have so much good stuff coming up.
Coming up in 2019, the Ben Shapiro radio show will be extending to three hours.
That is right.
That's right.
The Ben Shapiro radio show will be now adding a full two hours with all of the great content that you have come to enjoy and expect.
Well, unless you listen to it live on radio, you're not gonna be able to hear it.
Unless you subscribe.
If you subscribe, then you get it, right?
You get the rest of it.
We are going to be taking some questions during the breaks, so you'll be able to actually interact with me on a daily basis, which is awesome.
Also, it's almost time for the next episode of The Conversation, which I could not be less excited about.
I will be wasting my time taking your questions and answering them to the best of my abilities, live on air.
So make them good.
Make the questions good.
Make sure that you show up.
I mean, if I'm going to be miserable here sitting with Alicia Krauss, then you may as well be here.
I mean, I don't know what to expect of you.
Like, look, I know that you've been forced to listen to answers from idiots like Michael Knowles in the past, but I'll be here providing real answers.
So if I'm here, I expect you to be here.
Once again, subscribers get to ask the questions.
Everybody gets to watch.
Also, that's all the subscribership, $9.99 a month.
For $99 a year, you get this as, you know, a whole routine.
Greatest in beverage vessels.
It's awesome.
You'll love it.
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Drinks hot, and cold drinks cold.
How do it know?
It's spectacular.
Go check all of that out, and subscribe over at YouTube or iTunes.
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Go check that out right now.
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We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
So whenever we talk about politics, one of the issues that comes up is the fact that the media are wildly biased against the right.
The latest example comes courtesy of the Washington Post.
It's an opinion piece by Max Boot.
So, Max Boot is one of the actual Never Trumpers, meaning people who not only did not vote for President Trump in 2016, But also think that everything that President Trump does is evil.
It doesn't matter that Max Boot agreed with half this stuff before President Trump was president.
Now he has reversed his positions on everything.
Everything that President Trump does is bad, and terrible, and no good, and garbage.
This is Max Boot's perspective.
And it's kind of sad to watch that, honestly, because I've read a bunch of Max Boot's books, particularly on foreign policy, and I find them really interesting.
I think he's a good historian.
He now has a piece about the Weekly Standard.
Now, as you'll recall, late last week, the Weekly Standard, which is a long-time kind of legacy conservative publication, it's been around for about a quarter century, and it was very anti-Trump during 2016 and has remained pretty anti-Trump since then, they went out of business.
The Washington Examiner, which owns them, or the parent company of the Washington Examiner, shut them down.
Well, President Trump celebrated that, which Frankly, was untoward.
I mean, it's what we've come to expect from a president who just does not know when to keep his mouth shut.
He tweeted out the pathetic and dishonest weekly standard run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol, who, like many others, never had a clue is flat broken out of business.
Too bad.
May it rest in peace.
You may agree with him about Bill Kristol.
You may agree with him about the weekly standard.
But celebrating a bunch of people getting thrown out of their jobs two weeks before Christmas is probably not a great strategy.
In any case, that's not what I'm commenting on right now.
What I'm commenting on right now is this piece by Max Boot.
Max Boot says...
That in the Washington Post, conservatism needs a new weekly standard, untainted by Trump.
And the entire piece is about how conservatism requires a new magazine that is not going to deal with Trump, it's just going to deal with ideas.
And conservatives can talk about ideas without having to deal with Trump, and yada yada yada.
Now, I agree with a lot of that sentiment.
I agree that the battle over conservative ideas is much more important and much more long-lasting than the battle over whatever President Trump is doing today.
I think it's important.
It's why we talk about ideas on the show on a regular basis.
Why we do the Sunday special.
It's why I write books on Plato and Aristotle and Judeo-Christian values.
It's why I talk about the social fabric.
I agree with all of this.
The problem is, writing this in the pages of the Washington Post is a lie.
And the reason I say that it is a lie is because the Washington Post cannot print pieces, or should not print pieces, talking about the lack of good conservative content when it will not hire a conservative.
Will not hire a conservative.
Now, there are people who say, well, you at Daily Wire, you're not hiring people who are on the left.
Number one, I'm sure that we have employees here who don't agree with my politics.
But second of all, We are open about our political biases.
This is a right-wing site.
Daily Wire is a right-wing site.
I am a conservative.
I'm very open about this.
I have never hidden it, and I think it's unethical to hide your own political proclivities when you're writing news, because people can then take what you're saying with the particular grain of salt necessary.
The Washington Post, when it prints pieces in which it says things like, conservatives ought to do X, or conservatives ought to do Y, The Washington Post is a supposedly nonpartisan paper.
There is not one major conservative working for the Washington Post.
Not a major conservative working for the Washington Post.
At least the New York Times can say that it's got people like Brett Stevens or people like Ross Douthat.
Like, these are folks who actually are conservative thinkers, even if they are anti-Trump.
The Washington Post can't name a conservative thinker.
How do I know this?
Because I personally know a person who was interviewed by the Washington Post, not me, and I'm only not mentioning his name because I think that he would be upset if I did, and he's asked me not to.
He was interviewed by the heads of the Washington Post to join their editorial page, to be one of the columnists on the editorial page.
He went through the entire process.
He went through a bunch of meetings, and it was indicated to him that he was going to be hired on the editorial page as a regular columnist to sort of fill the Charles Krauthammer role after Charles Krauthammer's passing.
And they went through all the interview processes.
He got to the final interview.
They were basically ready to offer him the job.
And then he was called in.
They canceled the meeting, apparently, where he was going to be offered.
And he was brought into the offices of the higher-ups at the Washington Post, where he was told in no uncertain terms that staffers at the Washington Post were very upset at him.
Why were they upset at him?
They were upset at him because of his opinions on transgenderism.
Because he believes that male and female are biological categories.
And so, and they asked him about it, he said, no, I'm not going to change my opinion, nor am I going to apologize for the statements I've made on this particular score, and I don't think it makes me an unsympathetic person to say that male and female are biological categories.
This was too much for the Washington Post, which quickly ended any flirtation it had with him job-wise.
When the mainstream media laments the death of true conservatism, but they will not hire anyone who, really, they won't, and they, listen, Ross Duhat could not get hired today by the New York Times.
Bari Weiss would not be hired today by the New York Times.
She's not even conservative, Bari, right?
I mean, I know Bari.
Bari is, if she's conservative, she's at the far left of conservatism, right?
And Bari would say that.
She's more of a centrist.
They would not hire these people.
And then they complain that there's not a real conservatism?
Right, because you ghettoize the conservative movement, and then you're surprised when it acts like a ghetto.
All of that is just plain garbage.
But, you know who does get space?
On the editorial pages of these various publications are the most radical leftists.
This is something that is shocking to me.
I've said before, I think the conservative movement is significantly better at policing itself than the people on the left.
And I've had long drawn out arguments with folks with whom I'm friends on the left.
You say, no, no, no.
The right is constantly having to throw people out.
And my answer is right.
But the right does constantly throw people out.
When is the last time you saw someone on the left say something so radical that the left said, you know what?
Can't be associated with that person.
When is the last time that happened?
Has it ever happened?
I cannot name a example, like one.
Can you name one example of a person who said something so radically, so radical politically?
Not just, you know, said something gross or something, but somebody who said something so radical politically that the left went, you know what?
Don't want to touch that person with a 10 foot pole.
We're done here.
We can't have this person associated with us.
I've never heard that happen to anyone.
And that's why the right looks at the left and they say, you guys have no standards.
You're going to police us?
You're going to tell us how to police?
And then you're going to tell us what we should tolerate and what we shouldn't tolerate?
You guys won't police yourselves.
How do we know this?
Because if you're on the left, you can get away with just about any freaking thing.
There's an amazing story from Tablet today about the author of The Color of Purple, Alice Walker.
So she was asked in his New York Times book review, which published a full length interview with her.
She was asked a question.
What books are on your nightstand?
She replied with four.
The second book was And the Truth Shall Set You Free by David Icke.
In Icke's book, she says, there is the whole of existence on this planet and several others to think about.
A curious person's dream come true.
Now, as the tablet writes about, Gary Rosenberg caught it.
He says this passed without comment from the New York Times interviewer and the publication passed it on to readers without qualification.
This is rather remarkable because the book is an unhinged anti-Semitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain's most notorious anti-Semites.
In the book, the word Jewish appears 241 times.
The name Rothschild is mentioned 374 times.
These references are not compliments.
Indeed, the book was so obviously antisemitic that Icky's publisher refused to publish it, and he had to print it himself.
In the book and elsewhere, Icky draws liberally upon the infamous antisemitic pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery about an alleged Jewish global cabal that is widely considered one of the most influential antisemitic works in history.
Magnanimously, Icky calls the hate track by a different name.
As he writes in the book promoted by Alice Walker, in the very late 1800s, a controversial document came to light called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I call them the Illuminati Protocols, and I quote many extracts from them in the Robot's Rebellion.
Some say they were a forgery made public only to discredit Jews, and I use the term Illuminati Protocols to get away from the Jewish emphasis.
If they were a forgery, something that is quite possible, what were they a forgery of and by whom?
The authors of the bestselling book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, conclude that the original protocols were indeed authentic.
So...
I mean, Alice Walker is allowed to get away with this, and she is lauded as a great thinker of our times.
Just the same way that James Baldwin, who was lauded as a great thinker back in the 1960s and 1970s, routinely engaged in anti-Semitic writing.
He actually did.
Go back and read his writing.
There are a bunch of anti-Semitic references throughout it.
He wrote an entire essay about why the Jews were part of the white supremacist movement in the United States, etc, etc.
Bottom line is, again, just like the Women's March, if you are on the left and you are anti-Semitic, you can get away with it.
And if you are radical, just politically radical, there is nothing too politically radical for the left.
The same people who say, oh, how dare the right police the weekly standard.
Listen, I disagree with how the weekly standard was treated.
But I'm not going to sit here and listen to how the right should police itself from the left, which refuses to police itself and refuses to hire mainstream conservatives and ghettoizes those conservatives while simultaneously accepting the worst of the worst.
There's an article today by a guy named Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University.
And apparently a professional useless person.
The title of his piece in the New York Times, would human extinction be a tragedy?
This is fit for print.
He says, there are stirrings of discussions these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction.
This should not be surprising given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change.
And reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory, but is an important aspect of it.
Would human extinction be a tragedy?
And he says, well, it'd be a tragedy, but it wouldn't be a bad thing.
Because we're mean to animals.
Right?
If this were, if, he says, the elimination of the human species, if all that it were were just people being mean to animals, then it would be a good thing, full stop.
But, we bring things to the planet other animals can't, we bring an advanced level of reason, we engage in arts and scientists, for our species to go extinct, all of that might be lost.
He says, in many dramatic tragedies, the suffering of the protagonist is brought about through his or her own actions.
In Oedipus's killing of the father, it starts the train of events that leads to his tragic realization.
It's Lear's high-handedness toward Cordelia that leads to his demise.
It may also turn out that it is through our own actions that we human beings bring about our extinction, or at least something near it, contributing to our own practices, to our own tragic end.
So he says that maybe the extinction of humanity would make the world better off, and yet would be a tragedy.
Writing in the New York Times, better if humans didn't exist.
Strong case to be made that if you think that, you know, you have a solution, but it's nothing too radical for the left.
Nothing too radical for the left, but then they will lament the death of true conservatism.
Pretty, pretty astonishing stuff.
Okay.
Time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
This week is Ludwig von Beethoven's birthday.
Yeah.
Love me some Beethoven?
The Beethoven Violin Concerto is a truly great work of art.
One of the great violinists of our time, Hilary Hahn, who is fantastic.
I once saw her perform live in, where was it?
It was Upper Wisconsin.
It was Door County, Wisconsin.
And she is just terrific.
Here she is playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which was not truly appreciated at the time.
It was only later that it became sort of part of the great canon.
There are a bunch of great cadenzas to this concerto.
I love playing this concerto.
One of the great cadenzas to this concerto is by Fritz Kreisler.
That's the one that I usually play.
But here is Hilary Hahn playing with... I'm trying to remember which symphony this is.
She's playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto.
We're going to do Beethoven all week, thanks to his birthday.
The End
The End It's just great music.
Go listen to the Beethoven Violin Concerto.
Beautiful music.
The second movement is incredible.
The third movement is fun.
It's just... Beethoven's fantastic.
So, thank you to Ludwig van Beethoven for giving us some of the reason why human beings should continue to exist on the planet, you idiots.
Just... Okay.
Meanwhile, other things that I like.
Good for Sam Harris.
So Sam Harris, who is... I'm friends with Sam, and Sam is a principled guy.
We disagree on religion, we disagree on some aspects of our politics, for sure.
But Sam has now closed his Patreon account.
Why?
Because Patreon has not been clear in its standards for what allows you to keep Patreon open.
He tweeted out today, and this is a personal financial sacrifice for Sam, because a lot of people give him money on Patreon.
He says, Dear Patreon supporters, As many of you know, the crowdfunding site Patreon has banned several prominent content creators from its platform.
While the company insists each was in violation of its terms of service, these recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias.
Although I don't share the politics of the band members, I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon's Trust and Safety Committee.
I will be deleting my Patreon account tomorrow.
If you want to continue sponsoring my work, I encourage you to open a subscription at samharris.org slash subscribe.
As always, I remain deeply grateful for your support.
Wishing you all a very happy New Year, Sam.
Good for Sam Harris!
And I think this is increasingly the model you're gonna be seeing used.
You know, we here at Daily Wire have subscriptions specifically for this purpose.
It's why we don't have a Patreon account.
Because we are, as Adam Carolla likes to say, a pirate ship.
And if you want to join the pirate ship, then you should join us over here.
Good for Sam.
I think you're gonna see other content creators, I would assume other members of the Intellectual Dark Web, it's why I'm proud to be a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, do this sort of stuff because there has to be some stand against the arbitrary and capricious nature of social media.
Good for Sam Harris.
Really well done.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So this is a pretty amazing piece by a person named Luciano Guerra, who is a nature photographer and outreach coordinator and educator for the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas.
Here is his piece in the Washington Post.
I voted for Trump.
Now his wall may destroy my butterfly paradise.
I kid you not, that's the title of an actual piece.
He talks about how he works at the National Butterfly Center, which is along the U.S.-Mexico border, documenting wildlife and leading educational tours.
He says, Many of our visitors are young students from the Rio Grande Valley.
When they first arrive, some of the children are scared of everything, from snakes to pill bugs.
Here, we can show them animals that roam free and teach them not to be afraid.
He talks about how great the butterfly paradise is.
Okay, into it.
Then he says, President Trump's new border wall, which has threatened to shut down the government's fund, will teach them what it takes to destroy a home for all kinds of animals.
He says it will cut through the 100-acre refuge, sealing off 70 acres bordering the banks of the Rio Grande.
He says on the south side of the barrier, flooding will worsen.
On the north side, animals, including threatened species like the Texas tortoise and the Texas horned lizard, will be cut off from ranging beyond the wall for feeding and breeding.
He says all of this will be super terrible.
He says he voted for President Trump in 2016.
I want our immigration laws to be enforced, and I don't want open borders, but Mission is not a dangerous place.
I've lived here all my life.
Here at the National Butterfly Center, 6,000 school children visit.
Every year, when the president says there's a crisis at the border that requires an action as drastic as building a massive concrete wall, he either knows it's not true, or he's living an alternative reality.
He says that he didn't take Trump seriously about the wall, but now that he sees that it's going to affect the butterfly paradise, now he's not going to back President Trump.
Now, one thing that is obviously not seen in this piece from the Washington Post, right?
By the way, again, the Washington Post's happy to print anybody who is quote-unquote conservative, as long as they're saying things that please the Washington Post.
One thing it does not say is how many people crossed this area of the border illegally.
There's no actual statistics on how many people crossed the border in this area or how many people would cross the border in this area if it were left unprotected while building a wall along other areas of the border.
So it's just more media.
But again, I think the title of the article itself sort of discredits the article.
OK, other things that I hate today.
So I have been saying for years that I really, really dislike political pandering.
Political pandering to me is mostly summed up in our modern day and age by politicians going to a purportedly victimized group and saying to that purportedly victimized group, you are indeed victimized and now I am here to protect you.
You see it from President Trump when it comes to people who are living in dying towns.
He goes there and he says, well, it's China and it's Mexico and I'm going to save your job and your town's going to bloom again.
Tucker Carlson, when we had a Sunday conversation, says some of this sort of stuff as well because he's more of a protectionist on economic policy.
And on the left, you see this in racial terms.
So Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is just dying in the polls.
I mean, she's falling apart.
There's a poll in Iowa over the weekend.
It shows her at 3% in Iowa.
She had 84% name recognition and 3% in Iowa.
Put a fork in her, she's done.
In The New York Times, they report Senator Elizabeth Warren in a commencement speech Friday at historically black Morgan State University mixed her trademark language denouncing economic equality with more explicit indictments of racial discrimination, giving what could be a preview of a possible appeal to black voters should she run for president.
She says the system is rigged.
She says, under the rules of commencement speakers, I'm required to say work hard, and you should.
But I'm here with a bolder message.
It's time to change the rules.
Let me say that again for those in the back.
Change.
The.
Rules.
I'm not a person of color, and I haven't lived your life or experienced anything like the subtle prejudice or moral overt harm that you may have experienced just because of the color of your skin.
Rules matter, and our government has systematically discriminated against black people in this country.
So, this is her way of working toward an intersectional audience by basically saying to them that you are all victims.
All these kids are graduating.
It's amazing.
She's telling a bunch of people who are graduating from college with degrees from an excellent university that they are victims in the freest society in world history.
She says, in Morgan State on Friday, Ms.
Warren revives her pitch surrounding housing, telling a story about her mother's struggles to keep her home, and contrasting that with the barriers Americans face today.
She says, the rules are rigged, because the rich and powerful have bought and paid for too many politicians.
And she says, there are two sets of rules.
One for the wealthy and the well-connected, and one for everybody else.
Two sets of rules.
One for white families, and one for everybody else.
That's how a rigged system works.
Does she really think that there's a set of rules for white families and one for everybody else?
Does she really believe that?
Because if so, I'd like for her to point to me to those rules that maintain that system so we can talk about them.
Otherwise, this is just her going to particular communities and saying, you guys are victims, vote for me.
I don't like it when it's done by anyone on any side of the political aisle.
It is identity politics, and identity politics that is unsupportable by the evidence is just gross pandering.
So, provide the evidence lady, or sit down.
Because this isn't because, this is, and that holds true for everyone.
It holds true for President Trump, doing the, the reason you're being victimized is because you are living in the boondocks, and because you're being victimized by foreigners, and it holds true for Elizabeth Warren, going into black communities, where people are graduating from college, and telling them that your hard work won't make a dime's bit of difference, because America's a racist country.
Just yuck.
Just yuck.
You want to make the country worse, this is a pretty solid way of doing it.
All so that she can gain power, which presumably she will then use to destroy the free system that has created the prosperity with which we live.
Okay, well we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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