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May 2, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:24

Wrecking Barr | Ep. 772

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	Democrats attack Attorney General Bill Barr.
	Ilhan Omar blames Venezuela's crisis on America.
	And hey, I saw Avengers Endgame and I have thoughts.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Oh yeah, there are going to be spoilers.
	So I'm just going to warn you, late in the show when we do Avengers Endgame, if you haven't seen the movie yet, I would recommend that you either fast forward or that you pause it.
	We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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	Okay, so we begin with the Democrats who are very, very angry at Attorney General William Barr.
	Today, the big story is that William Barr has said that he would not testify before a House panel.
	The Justice Department issued a double-barreled rebuff to Democrats on Wednesday, informing the House Judiciary Committee that Attorney General William Barr would not show up for his scheduled testimony before the panel, and that the Department would not comply with the subpoena for Special Counsel Robert Mueller's full report.
	The administration has the nerve to dictate our procedures.
	It's simply part of the administration's complete stonewalling of Congress, period.
	Okay, so a couple of things.
	It's not a complete stonewalling of Congress to turn over Mueller's entire report to Congress.
	That is not a stonewalling of Congress.
	And by the way, certain Congress people have seen the unredacted material.
	So the notion that Congress has not seen the unredacted material, even that is not particularly true.
	Also, It is not the job of the Justice Department to be the investigators on behalf of Congress.
	There is a separation of powers in the Constitution.
	A separation of powers, which means Congress has investigative power, and they can subpoena things, and the Justice Department, which works for the executive branch, is not mandated to turn over those things.
	This is why the President can declare executive privilege.
	It's why the Justice Department can point out that it does not have to, under regulations, turn over underlying materials and investigations.
	Can you imagine if the power of Congress extended to the ability to go to the DOJ and then ask for all underlying confidential grand jury testimony?
	I mean, if it extended to that, you know that Congress would immediately leak that stuff into the public sphere.
	You know that Congress would immediately take that stuff and blow it up.
	The reason that William Barr is not turning over the unredacted materials in the grand jury testimony is, number one, some of that stuff is classified, and number two, It is not the job of Congress to be able to grab grand jury testimony that is being attained and obtained by the Justice Department under threat of criminal prosecution.
	That's not Congress's power.
	Congress has its own investigative power.
	They've got subpoena power.
	They've got the ability to hold people in contempt.
	But they do not have law enforcement power.
	There is a difference between Congress and the law enforcement arm of the government, which is the executive branch.
	I think Bill Barr is completely right to say I'm not turning over unverified grand jury gossip that was not included in the final Mueller report to you.
	That is well within his purview.
	The Thursday hearing, which was set to examine Barr's handling of the Mueller report, would have included an extra hour to allow committee lawyers to question the Attorney General.
	The Justice Department had argued it would be inappropriate for staffers to question a cabinet member, and as a result, Barr backed out.
	This, of course, is indeed the prerogative of the executive branch.
	They don't have to agree to any of the conditions that Congress sets on them.
	And then, if it ends up in court, it ends up in court.
	If Congress chooses to hold somebody in contempt or impeach, they can hold somebody in contempt or impeach.
	There is a solution to this.
	If they want to impeach Barr, they can go for it.
	And they are talking about impeaching Barr, but again, they're doing so not even on the basis that he is now being obstructive, they're doing so on the basis that he's been obstructive in the past.
	Which is weird, because the conversation has gone something like this.
	Democrats to Barr.
	Why are you obstructing this investigation?
	Where is the Mueller report?
	Barr.
	It's in front of you, on the table, printed out, and in public view for everyone to see.
	Democrats.
	Obstruction, though!
	That's how this conversation has gone.
	It's a cover-up!
	This is this is wild stuff.
	So Democrats, of course, are trying to play politics with a Mueller report that did not give them what they wanted, namely a clear cause of action for impeachment or or certainly a criminal prosecution of the president of the United States.
	Jerry Nadler, who is deeply dishonest about all this stuff, the representative from New York, Who once used to believe that the executive branch didn't have the necessity to turn over these sorts of reports during the Clinton era.
	He says, given his lack of candor in describing the work of the special counsel, our members were right to insist that staff counsel be permitted to question the attorney general.
	I understand why he wants to avoid that kind of scrutiny, Nadler added.
	He is terrified of having to face a skilled attorney.
	Well, last I checked, these Congress people are supposed to be skilled attorneys.
	I mean, I'm glad they're acknowledging that they're idiots now, but it is not.
	It is not William Barr's decision to have to sit.
	He doesn't have to sit in front of a bunch of lawyers who are unelected bureaucrats to grill him so they can catch him in some sort of perjury trap.
	Justice Department spokeswoman Kerry Kupec countered that Nadler had established, quote, unprecedented and unnecessary conditions for the hearing, adding, quote, Congress and the executive branch are co-equal branches of government, each have a constitutional obligation to respect and accommodate one another's legitimate interests.
	In a separate letter, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told Nadler that his subpoena for the full unredacted Mueller report, plus the underlying evidence and grand jury information, was not legitimate oversight.
	The department has long resisted congressional attempts to rummage through its files, Boyd wrote.
	He added that Nadler had issued the subpoena knowing the department could not lawfully provide the unredacted report, that the committee lacks any legislative purpose for seeking the complete investigative files, and that processing a request would impose a significant burden on the department.
	Nadler says he'll hold Barr in contempt of Congress if the department doesn't turn over the unredacted Mueller report and all of the underlying evidence in the next day or two.
	For notes on how effective it is to hold an attorney general in contempt, he should turn to his Republican colleagues who once held Eric Holder in contempt and then did nothing about it.
	And Eric Holder is now sitting out there proclaiming from his perch on moral high how terrible William Barr is.
	The chairman also said he could issue a subpoena to compel Barr's attendance at a future hearing.
	The committee had teed up the clash earlier Wednesday after a tense party-line vote on establishing the ground rules.
	Under the motion adopted by the Democrats on the committee, the attorneys for the Democratic and Republican sides of the panel would have had an hour equally divided to question Barr, who had threatened to back out of the hearing if that was the arrangement.
	Democrats said that despite DOJ claims, there is ample precedent to use staff attorneys, Republicans have jumped to Barr's defense, asserting it would be disrespectful to have anyone but lawmakers question the Attorney General.
	Now again, I don't see the purpose.
	If I'm Barr, I don't do that.
	Because then I'm basically testifying in the open without the help of my own legal counsel in danger of perjury from lawyers whose job it is to create what we call perjury traps.
	Now, there are people out there who say, there's no such thing as a perjury trap, just tell the truth.
	Well, sometimes you can tell a version of the truth and people will not believe you and they will still prosecute you for perjury.
	This is, for example, when Bill Clinton said he didn't know what the meaning of is is.
	That is a very lawyerly answer, for example.
	Well, Barr could give a lawyerly answer and still be accused of lying.
	In fact, there are members of Democratic Congress who have suggested that he's lying right now, and he has not yet lied.
	It's pretty amazing.
	Well, the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are very upset about this.
	So upset that they brought a bucket of fried chicken to the House Judiciary Committee.
	It's pretty incredible.
	So, Steve Cohen, who's another one of the geniuses in the Democratic House, he showed up to the hearing with a ceramic chicken and a bucket of fried chicken, which he proceeded to chomp, and then talk about how Barr was a chicken.
	You guys get the- you get it?
	Like he's a chicken?
	Like he's scared?
	Basically, Steve Cohen is needles from Back to the Future 2.
	Pretty- What are you, Chicken McFly?
	Here's Steve Cohen being a full-fledged silly person.
	A chicken bar should have shown up today and answered questions.
	He was afraid of Barry Burke.
	He was afraid of Norm Eisen.
	An attorney general who was picked for his legal acumen and his abilities would not be fearful of any other attorneys questioning him for 30 minutes.
	This man was picked to be Roy Cohn and to be Donald Trump's fixer.
	The Black Sox look clean compared to this team.
	It's a sad day in America.
	A sad day in America.
	Here's my ceramic chicken, guys.
	Take me seriously.
	Chicken Bar.
	By the way, I'm really considering opening now, in discussion with my producers, opening a restaurant called Chicken Bar.
	It sounds delicious.
	There'd be many types of chicken.
	There'd be teriyaki chicken, there'd be fried chicken, there'd be chicken a la king.
	Like, all sorts of chicken.
	It sounds great.
	And William Barr's picture would grace the entrance.
	Because Chicken Bar.
	Yeah, I'm taking you super seriously when you say it's a sad day in America as you wield a ceramic chicken at me.
	Steve Cohen.
	Don't worry guys, this is super serious stuff.
	Democrats are taking this really seriously.
	They've uncovered wrongdoing, so much wrongdoing, that the entire report is sitting on a desk in front of them.
	Like right there.
	Then James Comey sounds off, so that's always exciting.
	James Comey, who has spent the last year and a half, couple of years, wandering the woods, staring at the sights of nature.
	Sort of like Thanos after the snap fingers.
	He's just become a farmer.
	He's just out there staring at the trees and being all weird.
	Well, now James Comey is back to write an op-ed for the New York Times in which he attacks all of his former colleagues as deeply corrupt.
	He says, people have been asking me hard questions.
	People are not you, dude.
	Like, you standing in the mirror asking yourself hard questions, James Comey, those aren't people.
	That's just you.
	It's okay.
	This is what happened to the leaders in the Trump administration, especially the Attorney General, Bill Barr, who I have said was due the benefit of the doubt.
	How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president and using words like no collusion and FBI spying?
	Well, first of all, he used the words no collusion because the report found no collusion and FBI spying because spying means surveillance and surveillance was taking place.
	So there's that.
	How could he downplay acts of obstruction of justice as products of the president's being frustrated and angry?
	Something he would never say to justify the thousands of crimes prosecuted every day that are the product of frustration and anger.
	Well, actually, James Comey, since you were incompetent at your job, you tried to rewrite the classification statutes to include intent as an element of the crime.
	You said Hillary Clinton didn't intend to expose classified material to public scrutiny, and therefore she was not guilty of the crime.
	Intent was not an element of the crime, you just rewrote the law to include it.
	You know where intent is an element of the crime?
	Obstruction of justice.
	So when William Barr goes to the president's state of mind, that's because intent is an element of the crime.
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	Okay, so James Comey writing in the pages of the prestigious New York Times.
	He says, How could William Barr write and say things about the report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, that were apparently so misleading they prompted written protest from the special counsel himself?
	Note, as we mentioned yesterday on the show, the letter did not actually accuse William Barr of misstating the conclusions of the Mueller report.
	Basically, what Mueller wanted is for Barr to include all of the color commentary provided by Tom Musburger or whatever.
	You want all the color commentary.
	That was going to show how mean and cruel and nasty Trump was without being criminal.
	And Barr kept saying, um, guys, that's not my job.
	I'm not the nasty, mean, cruel police.
	I'm the police police.
	It's my job to prosecute crimes.
	And if no crime takes place, not my job to talk about my feelings about all of that.
	Nonetheless, James Comey, I mean, a guy who actually did go out and talk about all of the bad things Hillary Clinton had done and then exonerate her, now he's ripping on Barr.
	He says, how could Barr go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and downplay President Trump's attempts to fire Mr. Mueller before he completed his work?
	Well, he didn't downplay that.
	He didn't downplay that.
	The one thing that he certainly did do was mention that this was not a crime, which is his job.
	He says, what happened to these people?
	I don't know for sure, said James Comey.
	People are complicated.
	So the answer is most likely complicated.
	OK, thanks.
	Thanks, psychologist.
	Dr. Comey, we really appreciate your take on people are complicated.
	How could people be like this?
	I don't know.
	People are complicated.
	But I have some idea.
	From four months of working close to Mr. Trump and many more months of watching him shape others, amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them.
	Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring.
	For example, James Mattis resigned over a principal.
	A concept so alien to Mr. Trump, it took days for the president to realize what had happened.
	You know who didn't resign over principal, as I recall?
	A tall gentleman.
	Six foot nine.
	Kind of weird.
	Gawky, gangly.
	Tried to hide in the curtains one time when Trump was talking to him.
	Yet didn't quit.
	Was fired?
	I see.
	His name rhymes with shmames momy.
	I remember.
	I remember that guy.
	You remember that guy?
	I remember that guy.
	He says that William Barr and Rod Rosenstein, they've gone along with President Trump because he, because President Trump just pressures people and they fall prey to the pressure.
	He tried it with me.
	I didn't go along with it, but these people will.
	These people will.
	You can't say this out loud, but in a time of emergency with the nation led by a deeply unethical person, this will be your contribution, your personal sacrifice for America.
	You're smarter than Donald Trump.
	You're playing a long game for your country.
	You can pull it off where lesser leaders have failed and gotten fired by tweet.
	Of course, to stay, you must be seen as on his team, so you promise further compromises.
	Compromise, compromise.
	Remember, James Comey did not quit.
	He was fired.
	So, now we get to what the Democrats have actually been accusing Barr of.
	And this is bewildering, because what exactly are they accusing Barr of doing?
	They're mad at him that he won't talk with the lawyers.
	You know, maybe Barr should show up and talk with the lawyers just to show them that he can run circles around them, but there's no necessity for him to put his life in danger, the possibility of being imprisoned for a perjury trap set by Democrats, for example, or an attempt to subpoena him in violation of, for example, executive privilege.
	There are a lot of legal issues that arise whenever the Attorney General testifies before Congress, which is why they do have a negotiation about setting the ground rules in the first place.
	But what exactly is Barr accused of doing?
	No one knows.
	He issued a four-page letter.
	It accurately summarized the findings of the Mueller report.
	Even Mueller acknowledged that it accurately summarized the findings of the Mueller report.
	So here was William Barr testifying yesterday and from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
	Suggesting, correctly, that focusing on his four-page synopsis when the entire report is available is really, really weird.
	I understood you to say, and these are my words, not yours, the first concern that Mr. Mueller had, he felt like your letter wasn't nuanced enough.
	Correct.
	Okay.
	That problem's been solved, has it not?
	Well, it was sort of solved by putting out the whole report.
	Exactly.
	Which was the, that's why I think this whole thing is sort of mind-bendingly bizarre, because I made clear from the beginning that I was putting out the report, as much of the report as I could, OK, so this, of course, is true.
	He put out as much of the report as he could.
	So what exactly?
	Why are they focusing on a synopsis that is obviated by the actual report?
	This is like William Barr writes a summary of a book.
	The book is publicly available and you're mad at his summary, even though you could just buy the book.
	Barr also mentioned, hey guys, like the Mueller team didn't recommend charges.
	I hate to break it to you, but the Mueller team had the ability to recommend charges to me and they did not do so.
	They declined to do so.
	Here's Barr reminding Democrats of this fact.
	Has the Mueller team changed its mind on its conclusions?
	Its conclusions as to what?
	As to collusion, conspiracy, and conspiracy.
	Not that I'm aware of.
	So, the decision not to bring an indictment against the president No, it hasn't.
	conclusion conspiracy with Russia has not changed.
	- No, it hasn't. - And the conclusion not to bring an indictment against the president for obstruction of justice has not changed.
	- No. - Okay.
	None of that has changed.
	And then people on the left were saying, well, maybe the reason that Mueller didn't prosecute is because of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that suggested that the president could not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice.
	And Barr said, nope.
	I talked to Mueller.
	Remember, Barr's under oath here.
	He said, I talked to Mueller three separate times.
	And Mueller said he didn't decline to prosecute because of the LLC opinion.
	He declined to prosecute because the evidence was not clear one way or the other.
	Special counsel Mueller stated three times to us in that meeting In response to our questioning, that he emphatically was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found obstruction.
	He said that in the future, the facts of a case against the president might be such that a special counsel would recommend abandoning the OLC opinion, but this is not such a case.
	We did not understand exactly why the special counsel was not reaching a decision.
	And when we pressed him on it, he said that his team was still formulating the explanation.
	Okay, so in other words, Mueller explicitly said to Barr, there's an OLC opinion.
	If we thought the fact pattern overcame the OLC opinion, we would just recommend the overthrowing of the OLC opinion.
	We don't think that happened here.
	So Barr asked Mueller, so why don't you just recommend a charge or not recommend a charge?
	And Mueller demurred.
	He said, oh, we're coming up with an explanation.
	The real explanation is that Mueller knew he didn't have enough to charge here.
	He didn't want to exonerate President Trump.
	So instead, he wanted to dump out into public life all of the bad stuff about Trump.
	Well, sort of washing his hands of the whole thing.
	As I said yesterday, Mueller did not have the intestinal fortitude to simply pull the trigger on an obstruction of justice charge, nor did he have the legal backing.
	So instead, he took what I think is a pretty cheap way out by dumping all of the material in public and then suggesting, well, not up to me, up to William Barr.
	Kick it over there.
	Even though it is his, really, responsibility to give a determination as to whether he thinks this thing is prosecutable or not.
	And then Bart points out, by the way, I didn't even exonerate Trump.
	I just said we didn't have enough material to prosecute, but I'm not exonerating the guy on all of the stuff that he did with regard to pressuring his underlings on the Mueller report.
	You, in effect, exonerated or cleared the president.
	No, I didn't exonerate.
	I said that we did not believe that there was sufficient evidence to establish an obstruction offense, which is the job of the Justice Department.
	And the job of the Justice Department is now over.
	That determines whether or not there's a crime.
	The report is now in the hands of the American people.
	Everyone can decide for themselves.
	There's an election in 18 months.
	That's a very democratic process.
	But we're out of it.
	We have to stop using the criminal justice process as a political weapon.
	I love William Barr having to educate sitting senators in how law works.
	It is not my job to come up with stuff that's mean or bad.
	It's my job to determine whether the law has been broken.
	All the bad stuff is out there.
	You want to vote against him, vote against him.
	This is correct.
	William Barr is getting a lot of flack for suggesting that Mueller's letter to him was snitty.
	It is, in fact, a snitty letter, as I mentioned yesterday.
	It was Mueller not protesting that Barr had been dishonest in his letter, but protesting that Barr hadn't sufficiently captured his mood when he wrote the Mueller report.
	So Barr is correct in this characterization.
	This letter was an extraordinary act.
	A career prosecutor rebuking the Attorney General of the United States Memorializing in writing.
	I don't consider Bob, at this stage, a career prosecutor.
	He's had a career as a prosecutor.
	Well, he was a very eminent... He was the head of the FBI for 12 years.
	I know of no other instance of... But he was also a political appointee, and he was a political appointee with me at the Department of Justice.
	I don't... You know, the letter's a bit snitty, and I think it was probably written by one of his staff people.
	OK, pretty hilarious.
	So, you know, Barr is correct about all of this.
	Obviously, you know, he knows Mueller.
	He had conversations with Mueller.
	And so he feels like Mueller's people were probably ticked at Mueller that Barr's letter came out.
	And that's probably why this whole thing happened.
	Now, in a second, we're going to get to the Democrat attempts to take down Barr directly.
	Suffice it to say, they fail because they don't understand basic law and because this whole thing is a railroading of the highest order.
	We'll also get to the situation over in Venezuela where Ilhan Omar has some words.
	We'll get to all that in just one second.
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	Okay, so Democrats have decided that Barr is, nonetheless, despite the fact that Barr has not actually violated the law, that he is not obstructing anything, they have decided that he is obstructing something and that secretly, deep down in the cockles of his heart, Mueller was ready to prosecute Trump and Mueller just decided not to prosecute Trump because, Mueller was ready to prosecute Trump and Mueller just decided not to prosecute Trump because, what, William He said the magic words and then Mueller turned into a pumpkin?
	Or what?
	The funniest thing here was Democrats trying to push Barr to say that Donald Trump should be prosecuted for non-criminal behavior.
	So the report, which I have read the entirety of, summarized twice on the show, the report does not include evidence of criminal conduct by the President of the United States, at least criminally prosecutable conduct by the President of the United States.
	It includes a lot of bad behavior, a lot of immoral behavior.
	A lot of behavior that is not appropriate for the president of the United States to engage in.
	That is not criminal.
	As William Barr, the attorney general whose job it is to prosecute criminal violations, told Dianne Feinstein, who certainly knows better, the senator from California.
	You still have a situation where a president essentially tries to change the lawyer's account in order to prevent further criticism of himself.
	Well, that's not a crime.
	So you can, in this situation, instruct someone to lie?
	No, it has to be, well, to be obstruction of justice, the lie has to be tied to impairing the evidence in a particular proceeding.
	Okay, that is called the law.
	His job is to enforce the law.
	Dianne Feinstein's job is to yell at him for enforcing the law.
	Kamala Harris tried the same tactic.
	This was pretty amazing.
	So Kamala Harris is now proclaiming that Robert Mueller did a bad job.
	So we were told for years that Robert Mueller did a great job.
	I mean, they were buying votive candles.
	They had shirts with his face on it.
	Chelsea Handler said she wanted to sleep with Robert Mueller.
	Like, the left was, Robert Mueller was going to save them all.
	And then Robert Mueller didn't save them.
	He looked down at them and said, no.
	And Senator Kamala Harris got very, very angry at this.
	And so her suggestion is that Robert Mueller, in fact, did a very bad job and that William Barr, the Attorney General, should have gone around Mueller, looked at all the underlying evidence and then prosecuted, and then prosecuted President Trump based on evidence not synopsized, not summarized by Robert Mueller.
	Kamala Harris was the Attorney General of California.
	I promise you, if one of her lower level prosecutors came to her and say, you know, Attorney General, I've got this case.
	I'm not going to tell you whether you should prosecute it or not.
	Here's the evidence.
	You think that Kamala Harris is going to read the synopsis and say, you know what, this doesn't look like it rises to the level of a crime for me?
	Or is she going to go back through the hundreds of thousands of pages of grand jury testimony?
	The 25 million dollars already spent on the investigation.
	She's going to go around that and come to her own magical determination, ignoring Mueller.
	So the Democrats kept saying that Barr is going to ignore Mueller.
	Then Barr doesn't ignore Mueller and they're mad at him.
	Here's Senator Kamala Harris being deeply disingenuous.
	The special counsel's investigation produced a great deal of evidence.
	I'm led to believe it included witnesses' notes and emails, witnesses' congressional testimony, witnesses' interviews, which were summarized in the FBI 302 forms.
	Former FBI Director Comey's memos and the President's public statements.
	In reaching your conclusion, did you personally review all of the underlying evidence?
	No, we accepted the statements in the report as the factual record.
	We did not go underneath it to see whether or not they were accurate.
	We accepted it as accurate.
	So, in other words, Kamala Harris is like, why did you trust Mueller?
	So after years of, you must trust Mueller, now it's, why did you trust him?
	What, you weren't going to look at it yourself?
	Why not?
	And I love Cory Booker in the background there, kind of smirking along.
	Cory, let me just remind you, you're running for president against Kamala Harris and she's drinking your milkshake right now.
	Here's Kamala Harris afterwards saying Barr should resign.
	Based on what?
	Based on nothing.
	He made a decision and didn't review the evidence.
	No prosecutor worth her salt.
	Would make a decision about whether the President of the United States was involved in an obstruction of justice without reviewing the evidence.
	This Attorney General lacks all credibility and has, I think, compromised the American public's ability to believe that he is a purveyor of justice.
	Oh, is that what happened here?
	I remember when Kamala Harris was fighting mad, fighting mad at Attorney General Loretta Lynch for not ignoring the recommendation of James Comey and looking at the underlying evidence to bring a prosecution against Hillary Clinton.
	I remember when Kamala Harris and the Democrats were fighting mad.
	Oh, wait, no, that never happened because it's too much bullcrap that she's spewing right there.
	It's just nonsense.
	OK, then you've got and then you've got Richard Blumenthal, the senator from Delaware, who lied for a very, very long time about his involvement in the Vietnam War, calling Barr a liar and saying the Barr should resign.
	So he has got a lot of credibility to stand right here.
	I think that Attorney General William Barr ought to recognize that he has an obligation to resign here.
	I have called at the very least for him to recuse himself from those 12 to 14 ongoing investigations into the President of the United States in other jurisdictions.
	He declined.
	In fact, he ducked the question entirely as to whether He has had any conversations with the White House about them, said he couldn't recall a response that is very difficult to believe.
	So I think he should resign.
	Okay, so he should resign.
	By the way, he's the senator from Connecticut, not Delaware.
	And then Maisie Hirono, who's the worst of all.
	So she says, you're a liar.
	This is before she asked him a question, by the way.
	She didn't ask him a question and then accuse him of lying to her.
	She just said, you're a liar and a mean man and I hate you and I don't like your hair and you're ugly and you have bad glasses and you smell.
	Senator Maisie Hirono from the great state of Hawaii.
	Well done, Hawaii.
	Now the American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once Decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office.
	You once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney.
	At your confirmation hearing, you told Senator Feinstein that, quote, the job of Attorney General is not the same as representing, end quote, the President.
	So you know the difference, but you've chosen to be the President's lawyer and side with him over the interests of the American people.
	Okay, so well done, Mazie Hirono.
	I mean, that's some hard-hitting questioning right there.
	Ted Cruz, senator from Texas, was a guest on our program yesterday, sitting through all of this nonsense.
	Senator Cruz has a rough job.
	He actually has to sit in these committees while these Democrats say this stuff and then be polite to them.
	That's a very difficult job, and the man does have a lot of forbearance.
	But you would have to, to be the Zodiac Killer, obviously.
	So Senator Ted Cruz, he just rips on the Democrats, and you can see William Barr trying not to laugh as Senator Cruz does so.
	The principal attack that Democratic senators have marshaled upon you, it's an attack that I want people to understand just how revealing it is.
	If this is their whole argument, they ain't got nothing.
	So their entire argument is, General Barr, you suppressed the 19 pages that are entirely public, that we have, that we can read, that they know every word of it.
	And their complaint is it was delayed a few weeks.
	If that is their argument, I have to say that is an exceptionally weak argument.
	Even Barr can't hold himself back at this point.
	The best reaction in all of this, by the way, as always, belongs to Chris Matthews over at MSNBC.
	Come in the morning, come in the show.
	Maybe watch a little pornography last night.
	I have a few metaphors for what happened to William Barr last night.
	I was watching some... It was weird.
	Pizza guy showed up.
	Knocked the door.
	Lady answered the door.
	Said, I want a pizza.
	He said, here's your pizza.
	And then things get all weird.
	Strange.
	I watched that last night.
	Made me think of the Mueller report.
	Made me think of William Barr.
	I don't know why.
	Because that's just how things go in this crazy head of mine.
	Go, Chris Matthews, go!
	Once he's testified before Mr. Mueller's special counsel investigation, how can he now say, I won't make the same testimony in public claiming executive privilege?
	I think it is sort of like virginity kind of thing.
	Once you start talking about a matter in your jurisdiction, and then you say, oh, I'm not doing it anymore.
	You can't do it once you've started.
	I understand that's how executive privilege works.
	Once you've given it up, you can't grab it back.
	I'm not going to go with you on that metaphor, Chris.
	I'm sorry about that metaphor I used before.
	I've been admonished already about it, so I really should have used it.
	It's not talking about virginity.
	That's really awkward.
	Kamala, this is the only time I've ever liked Kamala Harris.
	Kamala Harris is trying not to burst out laughing at Chris Matthews.
	William Barr is like, you know, he didn't assert executive privilege, and he wants to assert executive privilege.
	Like a lady trying to hide her virginity.
	I mean, what are they going to do?
	Carry it out?
	Carry it around the town?
	Try to show everybody she's a virgin?
	Like what?
	What?
	What?
	Is it like biblical law?
	Ah!
	Kathleen didn't do that!
	I don't know about Kathleen!
	I don't know about me!
	I don't know anything!
	Just come over here?
	Come out of the show?
	Getting this chair swiveled around all weird like?
	Chris Matthews, MSNBC report.
	Michael Isikoff, what do you say?
	Ah, I love our media.
	They're just great at their jobs.
	All right.
	In a second, we're going to get to the latest developments from Venezuela.
	Suffice it to say, things are not great.
	But first, It can be a little frustrating, especially if you're in a hurry or running late, to find yourself at a railway crossing waiting for a train.
	You're sitting there, and nothing's happening, and you're thinking, okay, I could probably make it around these little barriers here.
	Well, if the signals are going and the train is not even there yet, you might feel a little tempted to try to gun it and get across the tracks.
	Don't do this.
	Ever.
	This is a stupid, stupid idea.
	Trains are often going a lot faster than you expect them to be going, and they cannot stop.
	It's not like they can hit the brakes or blast the horn at you or something, and then stop the train.
	That's not how it works.
	Even if the engineer hits the brakes right away, it can take a train over a mile to stop.
	By that time, what used to be your car is just a crushed hunk of metal, and what used to be you is a crushed hunk of human flesh.
	It's good times.
	The point is, you don't know how quickly the train is going to arrive, and the train can't stop even if it sees you, and sometimes you can't see the train properly, and it can't see you properly, and even if it can, it's gonna run you over.
	The result?
	Disaster.
	So, if the signals are on, assume the train is on its way.
	Please do not be a stupido, and you just need to remember, you should stop, because the train cannot.
	Okay, so, in a second, we are going to get to the situation in Venezuela, and our moral light in the U.S.
	Congress is speaking out about Venezuela.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
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	Meanwhile, here is the update from Venezuela.
	So, the dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is still in power.
	The protests continue apace in Venezuela.
	Venezuela's Juan Guaido is remaining defiant after a failed attempt to oust Maduro.
	Maduro has now appeared in public with soldiers.
	These soldiers, some of them are Venezuelan soldiers and some of them apparently are from Cuba.
	According to the BBC, in a show of defiance against his opponents, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro appeared flanked by soldiers at an army base in Caracas on Thursday.
	Maduro called on the armed forces to oppose any coup plotter.
	As clashes between opposition supporters and pro-government forces continued, opposition leader Juan Guaido tried on Wednesday to spark a military defection and force Maduro from office.
	Guaido has urged public employees to strike to undermine the government.
	Maduro praised the army's loyalty on Thursday, since he's paying them off and they're running over civilians in trucks, calling on the military to unite in defense of the constitution, a constitution that he has overridden personally.
	He says, no one dare touch our sacred ground or bring war to Venezuela.
	What he's trying to do is draw the West into actual military conflict so that he can then claim imperialism is what is causing this, as opposed to an uprising by the Venezuelan people, who it turns out are not all that fond of eating dog.
	In January, Guaido declared himself Venezuela's interim leader.
	He has the support of more than 50 countries, including the United States, the UK, and most of Latin America.
	The reason that people are unhappy with Maduro is because they were unhappy with Chavez, increasingly, because socialism is a giant fail.
	Venezuela is one of the most oil-rich nations on earth.
	The average Venezuelan adult has lost 24 pounds over the course of the Chavista regime.
	On Wednesday, both pro- and anti-government supporters held demonstrations in Caracas that were initially peaceful.
	There were reports of gunfire in the city.
	A local NGO said that one 27-year-old had been shot dead during a rally in the opposition stronghold of Altamira.
	At least 46 people were injured in clashes between opposition supporters and the security forces.
	Guaido posted a video on Tuesday showing him with a number of men in military uniforms saying that he had the support of the military.
	That obviously has not materialized as of yet, and thus we have what is effectively a stalemate.
	According to the Washington Post, the United States was presented a plan by Guaido as to what exactly was going to happen here.
	There was a strong suggestion that Nicolas Maduro might peacefully fly to Havana.
	On Monday, the plan started to fall apart because Maduro had gotten wind of it, and Juan Guaido responded by rushing ahead with his plan anyway.
	At dawn, he released that video.
	After a day of bloody protests, the government was still intact.
	The Trump administration blamed Russia and Cuba for keeping him in place and in discouraging high-level defections.
	The White House has held an emergency meeting of top national security aides to mull next steps.
	They say significant progress on defense matters was made.
	Throughout the day, there were mixed messages about what exactly the United States military would do.
	Obviously, there aren't really mixed messages.
	They're saying that we're not interested in getting involved, but all options are on the table.
	Obama used to use that language all the time because, as president, you constantly use that sort of language.
	Well, there's one group to blame, according to Ilhan Omar, you know, our moral leader.
	She says that the U.S.
	is responsible for what's been happening in Venezuela.
	The United States, like us, Now, it should be noted, the sanctions that were placed in Venezuela were not placed on Venezuela as a country.
	They were not placed on Venezuela's oil exports.
	They were placed specifically, and for years, on specific leaders and business figures inside Venezuela.
	So this is just not true.
	Venezuela was destroyed from within.
	Ilhan Omar has never found a socialist dictator that she couldn't cozy up to.
	Here is another one.
	So she's cozying up to Nicolas Maduro.
	Worth noting here.
	Ilhan Omar thinks that you should sanction Israel The only democracy in the Middle East in a place where Muslims are treated better than any place in the Middle East.
	She thinks that that country should be sanctioned.
	Venezuela, no sanctions.
	She's not anti-Semitic though, guys.
	She's just a human rights advocate.
	A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela and we've sort of set the stage for where we are arriving today.
	Particular bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela and it certainly does not help and it's not in the interest of the United States.
	It's not in the interest of the people of Venezuela not to eat dogs.
	Dogs are delicious, apparently.
	And it's really in their interest to continue under the auspices of an illegitimate government.
	That's in their interest.
	And if you don't agree, that's because you are an Islamophobe or something.
	That's the direction this is going.
	Meanwhile...
	The President of the United States was honoring Yom HaShoah today.
	Yom HaShoah, of course, is the International Day for the Remembrance of the Holocaust.
	And that is perfectly appropriate at a time when anti-Semitism is spiking.
	Anti-Semitic attacks have indeed spiked to the highest level in decades.
	According to the Associated Press, Israeli researchers reported on Wednesday that violent attacks against Jews spiked significantly last year, with the largest reported number of Jews killed in anti-Semitic acts in decades, leading to an increased sense of emergency among Jewish communities worldwide.
	Capped by the deadly shooting that killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27th, assaults targeting Jews rose 13% in 2018, according to Tel Aviv University researchers.
	They recorded nearly 400 cases worldwide, with more than a quarter of the major violent cases taking place in the United States.
	That spike was most dramatic in Western Europe, where Jews have faced even greater danger and threats.
	In Germany, for example, there was a 70% increase in anti-Semitic violence.
	And this is because there are three types of anti-Semitism that are at work in today's world.
	There is left-wing anti-Semitism, right-wing anti-Semitism, and radical Muslim anti-Semitism.
	And each one of them poses a different sort of threat.
	So, let's start with right-wing white supremacist antisemitism.
	Right-wing white supremacist antisemitism, not only does it exist, it is the most individually dangerous form of antisemitism to specific Jews.
	Meaning that if I see that a shul was shot up in the United States, I will almost immediately assume that it is a white supremacist, because statistically speaking, it usually is.
	And that is because there are these marginalized, as they should be, marginalized evil people who find communities online, self-radicalize, almost like adjunct members of ISIS, and then go and shoot Jews at places like synagogues.
	These same people will go and try to burn down mosques or shoot Muslims in mosques in many cases.
	So that's right-wing extremist white supremacist antisemitism.
	That is one ideology.
	And the type of danger that it poses is not a political danger.
	It is a safety danger.
	Then there's left-wing anti-semitism.
	Left-wing anti-semitism is the belief that the Jews are in control of the world because the Jews are disproportionately wealthy and successful and don't agree with the anti-biblical notions of the secular left and thus they ought to be quashed.
	This would be Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, it would be Ilhan Omar in the United States.
	Now left-wing anti-semitism is not quite as likely to lead to specific violence.
	It is much more likely to lead to widespread anti-semitic Act against the state of Israel collectively, for example, or to legislation that targets Jews in places like Belgium.
	It's much more likely to lead to government action because left-wing anti-Semitism has been mainstreamed.
	So right-wing anti-Semitism has not been mainstreamed.
	It's basically been cast out.
	It's a small group of people who are exceedingly dangerous in how they interact with other people, but it's a small group.
	Left-wing anti-Semitism is less specifically dangerous, but more broadly dangerous in the sense that it leads to broad political changes that target Jews.
	This would be people like Ilhan Omar, who has made anti-semitic references repeatedly, and then is given the green light by the Democratic Party, celebrated, put on the cover of Rolling Stone, they raise money for her.
	So it's a different type of anti-semitism, and it is a type of anti-semitism that is more viral.
	It's more easy to spread among large groups of people.
	Now, Ilhan Omar tries to cover for all of this.
	I mean, it's amazing.
	Ilhan Omar yesterday was at some rally and she said she can't fight Islamophobia if she won't fight anti-Semitism.
	Well, then I guess she's not fighting Islamophobia because she has not fought anti-Semitism.
	She is engaged in anti-Semitism.
	When we are talking about anti-Semitism, we must also talk about Islamophobia. - Yeah.
	It's two sides of the same coin of bigotry.
	So I can't ever speak of Islamophobia and fight for Muslims if I am not willing to fight against anti-Semitism.
	Okay, but she's not been willing to fight against anti-Semitism.
	Now, what she says there about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism being two sides of the same coin, there's truth to that when she's speaking about right-wing anti-Semitism.
	They are not two sides of the same coin when it comes to left-wing anti-Semitism, because left-wing anti-Semitism is based on the hierarchy of intersectional grievances.
	In which case, Muslims are victimized and Jews are victimizers, according to left-wing extremists.
	And this has become a mainstream view inside the Democratic Party, which is why Ilhan Omar is still praised.
	It's also why the New York Times will print openly anti-Semitic cartoons and then pretend they don't know what they are doing.
	The cartoonist who drew that anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times earlier this week, by the way, he said that it was not an anti-Semitic cartoon.
	It was just an anti-Israel cartoon.
	It was just an anti-Zionist cartoon.
	Well, this is the convenient cover of the left for their hatred of Jews collectively.
	Anytime Jews get together in one place, it's obviously seen as a bad thing by anti-semitic members of the left.
	This guy, it's a perfect example.
	This guy is on the left.
	He hates Israel, and he really dislikes Jews.
	How can you tell he dislikes Jews?
	Because he says this cartoon is not anti-semitic.
	He claimed that the anti-semitism charges are a misunderstanding, quote, made through the Jewish propaganda machine, which is anytime there's criticism because there's someone anti-semitic on the other side, and that's not the case.
	He says the Jewish right doesn't want to be criticized and therefore when criticized they say we are a persecuted people, we suffered a lot, this is anti-Semitism.
	So it's the Jewish propaganda machine, but he's not an anti-Semite, guys.
	So that's left-wing anti-Semitism.
	Not quite as specifically dangerous to individual Jews, deeply dangerous to Jews across the world who are then...
	Put at risk by both government policies on a broad scale and also by left-wing antisemitism's tolerance for the third type of antisemitism, which is radical Islamic antisemitism.
	Now that is widespread across the Muslim world, unfortunately.
	By polling data, antisemitism in the Muslim world is certainly not uncommon.
	There are moderate and reformed Muslims who do not believe this stuff, but there are many Muslims who do believe this stuff.
	And that does manifest not only in government policies in Muslim countries that crack down on Jews or bar Jews from even entering, but also it is manifest in specific acts of terrorism that have taken place across Europe.
	So in Europe, a lot of the attacks that are taking place against Jews are Muslim in orientation, and they are made room for by the left wing that has suggested that anti-Semitism is really just anti-Zionism, the apex case of this being the burning of a synagogue in Germany that was ruled to be an anti-Zionist the apex case of this being the burning of a synagogue in Germany that was ruled to be an So those are the three types of anti-Semitism.
	And as we remember the Holocaust today and the murder of six million Jews, it is worthwhile to remember that any form of anti-Semitism that collectively seeks to destroy the Jews as a people and target them as a people, those forms of anti-Semitism are not far from what happened in the Holocaust, nor are they dead.
	They're very much alive, and they are thriving in certain fringe areas of the right, in certain mainstream areas of the left, and in certain mainstream areas of the radical Muslim world.
	We have to keep our eye on that, or we fall prey to the possibility of greater evil in the future.
	Okay, time for some things that I like, and then some things that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	Today is Yom HaShoah.
	And Yom HaShoah is the memorial day for the Holocaust.
	For folks who have never actually seen any of the footage from the Holocaust, it is worthwhile to do so.
	There are fictional films about the Holocaust that are worth seeing.
	Obviously, there is a miniseries called Shoah that is very good.
	Schindler's List is a very good film.
	If you haven't seen, there's a miniseries called Uprising about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that I think is well worth watching.
	And then there's entire documentary series.
	I would watch the documentaries because the fictionalized film accounts don't do justice to what exactly happened in the camps and what exactly was the movement to put Jews, particularly specifically target Jews.
	This was not just a question of the Nazis killing millions of people.
	This was the specific targeting of Jews for their Jewish ancestry.
	Anybody who was at least one quarter Jewish was considered capable of being slaughtered by the Nazis.
	Six million Jews go to the gas chambers or are shot in mass shootings.
	Everyone focuses on the gas chambers.
	People forget that mass graves were dug and Jews were shot en masse above the mass graves.
	Millions of Jews died that way as well.
	And the brutal nature of humanity is worthy of note.
	If you actually want to prevent brutality in the future, we have to realize that there is a true dark side to human nature.
	There's also great heroism to human nature.
	If you read Viktor Frankl, you see how people found purpose and kindness and generosity, even in the midst of the greatest act of collective victimization in the history of humankind by numbers.
	Victor Frankl, his book Man's Search for Meaning, or Elie Wiesel's Night.
	I was privileged to be able to help ghostwrite the autobiography of Jack Slomovic.
	Jack Slomovic was Elie Wiesel's cousin.
	He was with him in Auschwitz, and Jack Slomovic then came to the United States.
	He became an immigrant to the United States.
	His story is really pretty amazing.
	I was privileged because I know his son.
	I'm friends with his son.
	As he was dying, he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer.
	I had the privilege of sitting with him for hours and hours as he told me stories of what exactly had happened during the Holocaust.
	Slomovic's story is pretty amazing, and I want to tell it to you now.
	He passed away in 2011.
	He was born in 1925 in a little town in Czechoslovakia called Salatvina.
	With the outbreak of World War II, the Hungarians took over the town.
	They implemented anti-Jewish laws at the behest of the Nazis.
	In 1944, the Germans themselves then came and occupied Salatvina, and they moved all the Jews into a ghetto, and from there, the Jews were shipped directly to Auschwitz.
	Slomovic was shipped with his father, his two uncles, and his cousin Elie Wiesel to Buna, which was a labor camp near Auschwitz.
	His mother, five of his siblings, were immediately separated from them and then sent to be gassed to death in the chambers.
	Over the next year, Slomovic was shuttled to several concentration camps.
	He was forced on death marches.
	He was able to steal small bits of food to keep his family alive.
	He tried to protect his father all the way through the Holocaust.
	He somehow kept his father, who was ailing, alive all the way to the end of the Holocaust.
	But literally the day before liberation at Theresienstadt, his father had already become deadly ill with typhus and died in his arms days after the liberation in Theresienstadt.
	Slomovic's story, though, is an amazing story of how human beings are able to rise from the ashes.
	He wandered the streets of Prague.
	People don't know this, but in the aftermath of World War II, after the liberation, Jews went back, in many cases, to their homes in some of these Eastern European countries, and those homes had been occupied by non-Jews.
	Something like 10,000 Jews were murdered in the aftermath of World War II simply for going back to their homes and saying they wanted their homes back, and then the people who were living there would kill them.
	In any case, Slomovic wandered the streets of Prague.
	Eventually, he found his way to the Sudetenland and sought an American visa.
	By the time he got his visa, war had broken out in the nascent state of Israel.
	And instead of using that visa to travel to the United States, instead, Slomovic volunteered to be smuggled into Israel to fight on behalf of the Jewish state.
	They took him off the boat, they gave him two hours of training, they handed him a rifle, and then they sent him to the front lines of Latrun, which was the bloodiest battle of the independence war.
	Now when folks talk about Israel being unnecessary, the fact that millions of Jews have been slaughtered throughout history, the fact that the population of Jews in today's world is still lower than the population of Jews in 1940.
	That is why the state of Israel exists to protect Jews all over the world and to give Jews a place to go when things go bad.
	That is one of the reasons for the Jewish state to exist on just a practical root level.
	And it's funny, the same people who say Israel is unnecessary are the same people who are making room for anti-Semitic attacks on Jews.
	They say Israel is unnecessary, Israel's bad, and also anti-Jewish acts in the West are just anti-Israel acts.
	Do you think we believe you?
	Really, do you think we believe you?
	That when you say you're just anti-Zionist, and therefore it's okay for people to be anti-Semitic against Jews, you think that we believe that if you got rid of the State of Israel, suddenly you'd be nice to the Jews?
	I have my doubts.
	In any case, Slomovic was shipped over to the front lines of Latrun.
	150 people went into battle along with Slomovic, and only 15 came out in one piece.
	Slomovic actually became a guy who served behind enemy lines.
	He was good at it.
	He met Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who gave him a bottle of vodka before one particularly dangerous mission.
	And Slomovic was part of all of these secret missions.
	So at the end of the war, Slomovic felt that his role was done.
	He moved to the United States.
	He had a sixth grade education.
	He worked as a day laborer and a night watchman to make ends meet.
	And then he began working as an apprentice to an electrician.
	And then finally, he went out on his own.
	He literally walked the streets looking for jobs on which he could bid.
	Within a few years, he was running a full electricity store with a bunch of employees.
	And then he eventually became a millionaire, became a pillar of the L.A.
	Jewish community.
	Supporting local schools and synagogues, became trustee of the Jim Joseph Foundation, which is a billion-dollar endowment focused on Jewish education.
	The Holocaust is a grave act of evil.
	The anti-Semitism that supported the Holocaust still lives in many human hearts, and the possibility of that darkness still exists.
	Please go watch the footage today in honor of the people who died, and remember that evil is never truly gone, unfortunately.
	But neither is good.
	Neither is good, and that good is there.
	That's why we have to stand between the evil and those it would victimize.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So I lied, this isn't gonna be quick.
	So, I saw Avengers Endgame last night with my wife.
	Now, I didn't hate it, okay?
	It's a little strong to say that I hated Avengers Endgame, but, and I don't really like throwing cold water on people's favorite movies and the things that they love a lot.
	Well, I won't say I don't like doing it.
	I don't enjoy it more than I should.
	In any case, Avengers Endgame, it is one million hours long, it is the Wagnerian Ring Cycle, and it has moments, but There are a bunch of spoilers coming, guys.
	It does not work as a film.
	It does not work as a film.
	It basically destroys all of the main characters that you actually care about in favor of a bunch of characters you don't.
	It's got the Star Wars problem.
	So the new Star Wars basically took all the characters you like and killed them off to make room for characters that you don't actually care about.
	It relies on the nostalgia that you have for the last 16 films, and it is a cool thing that they were somehow able to put together 16 films that led all the way up to this final film.
	Like, that's really a neat achievement on a cinematic level.
	The problem is that none of this works, and they destroy all of your favorite characters, with probably the exception of Black Widow, Scarlett Johansson, who finally gets a character arc that is worthy of her acting skills.
	So, here are all the spoilers.
	So, Iron Man obviously plots this, right?
	At the end, Iron Man dies.
	Iron Man's character arc is the only interesting thing in this movie, but they totally botch it.
	The reason that they botch it is because Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr.' 's character, for all of his movies, the struggle for Iron Man has been not, do I go save the world or am I selfish?
	That's solved in movie one, right?
	The rest of the movies are all about, will he settle down with POTS?
	Will he settle down?
	Will he build a family?
	Can he contain himself?
	Will he become a solid citizen?
	That was the struggle of Robert Downey Jr.
	When was he going to grow up and be an adult?
	That was the question of Robert Downey Jr.
	And after Thanos snaps his fingers in the first 45 minutes of the movie, you find out that Robert Downey Jr. has gotten married to Pepper Potts and that he has actually had a kid with her.
	And this is good, right?
	This is a good setup.
	And then it arises through really dumb coincidence – Hey guys, have you ever had the idea of time travel?
	Have you thought about it?
	Like, seriously?
	And then Robert Downey Jr.' 's like, oh man, well, I guess, I haven't thought about it, it's impossible.
	Well, I have five minutes here.
	So in five minutes he comes up with a time travel plan.
	So forget about how silly that is, that he comes up with a time travel plan in the next five minutes.
	It's an Avengers film, you can't look for him to spend four years trying to figure out how time travel works or anything like that.
	But here's the problem.
	Now, Tony Stark has stakes.
	The stakes are, and they present this choice, it's ready to be made.
	The stakes are, do you go back and change the past, and thus lose what you have built for yourself in the aftermath of you becoming a mature human being?
	Lose a daughter?
	Do you sacrifice your own daughter to save the world?
	Right?
	That's a real moral choice.
	But then they obviate that choice in the next 30 seconds of the film, where they explain that if they go back and change the past, it won't actually change this timeline, and therefore Tony Stark's kid will still be alive, and his wife will still be alive, and everything will be hunky-dory.
	So now this just becomes another Iron Man film, where it's about Tony Stark risking himself to go save the world, but there are no heightened stakes at all.
	So you've built up to his final character transformation into a responsible human being, and the question is going to be, now is he even more responsible than the responsible human being?
	He's built a family, now is he willing to sacrifice his own family and his own happiness in order to save the world?
	And the answer is, we're not going to make him answer the question.
	Because we don't have the guts to actually pose that choice.
	So that's the problem with Iron Man's character.
	Captain America's character... The problem with Captain America's character is they've always gotten it wrong.
	So Captain America is basically John McCain.
	He's supposed to be this crotchety old guy in a young guy's body.
	A man out of time.
	Captain America has never felt like a man out of time to me.
	He's just felt like generic superhero who's kind of dopey and a good guy.
	That's the way Chris Evans has played him.
	And this isn't just because Chris Evans dislikes me.
	Chris Evans apparently...
	Like, the people who write the script basically felt that he would just be like any normal guy.
	Like, if you saw Captain America without the uniform, you wouldn't know he's Captain America.
	He's just a guy.
	Well, that's not how the character is in the comics, and that's not how the character should be here.
	So, the stakes for Captain America aren't extraordinarily high.
	Now, Captain America's ending, where they have him basically go back in time, and then he is able to... and then he basically just stays back in time with the love of his life, I was fine with that.
	I really didn't have a huge problem with his ending.
	I thought his ending was the most appropriate.
	I thought Iron Man dying, even that would have been appropriate if they had set it up properly.
	That was okay.
	The person who I really couldn't stand what they did with him was Thor.
	So what they did with Thor makes no sense on a character level.
	So I understand you guys wanted the joke.
	You wanted Thor with the dad bod.
	Got it.
	Okay, you want him to be fat and burp a lot and be Big Lebowski.
	Okay, it's funny.
	For the first five minutes.
	And then it's, this is not Thor.
	Right, we've had several Thor movies at this point.
	Thor's problem has never been lack of courage.
	It's always been that he is afraid, that he does not have the moral fiber to be the leader.
	It's been that he's afraid of leadership.
	That's been his moral conflict, is that he's been afraid of leadership the whole time, and leadership has to be thrust upon him, and then he realizes he's a leader.
	But instead they decided to go the direction of, not that he doesn't want to take leadership, but that he's afraid to participate himself.
	That he won't even participate.
	And so they make him basically a drunk weakling.
	And it's silly.
	And you never actually get to see Thor really in action, because they've decided to saddle him with a fat suit for the joke.
	Which is, again, not in character, and also very silly.
	Like, I was waiting for the point where Thor would just kind of take the hammer, or the axe, and slam it on the ground, the lightning comes, and he's back to being old Thor, right?
	I was waiting for that sort of transformation.
	That never really happens.
	And in fact, the best thing about Thor is in the first five minutes of the film, when he kills Thanos, right?
	The first five minutes of the film, where he chops Thanos' head off, that's the best thing that he's got in the entire film.
	The rest of the time, he's basically wasted, which is a pity, because Chris Hemsworth can actually hold his own on screen.
	I don't think Chris Evans can.
	I think Chris Hemsworth can with Robert Downey Jr., but they don't give him anything to do except be funny, which he is.
	I mean, in that there's a final kind of thing with Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth that's very funny.
	Okay, but he was supposed to be more than a funny character.
	If you watched the first Thor film directed by Kenneth Branagh, it was supposed to be far more serious.
	Also, as my business partner, Jeremy Boring, has pointed out, that it's pretty obvious from the film that they wanted Anthony Hopkins to come back and do a scene with Chris Hemsworth, and they weren't able to get Hemsworth to do it, so instead they brought back Rene Russo for a conversation, and it really doesn't work fantastically well.
	Thanos is built up in the first Avengers film as this guy with an interesting backstory and with an actual With an actual rationale, right?
	He feels that balance has to be brought back because he lived on a planet where overpopulation was a problem, so he snaps his fingers, half the people are gone, balance is restored.
	Okay, now they bring us back to old Thanos, who still has that same mission.
	And they basically just turned him into Big Daddy, right?
	Now he doesn't have an interesting backstory.
	Now he's just a sadist.
	And there's a line near the end of the film.
	Where he turns to Robert Downey Jr.
	or Captain America, I think it's maybe Captain America, and he says, you know, your little planet, I'm going to enjoy destroying it.
	Okay, come on.
	Come on.
	Like, if you want to draw a good villain, then you can't just make them a sadist.
	Every bad villain, like Steppenwolf from Justice League, is just a sadist who wants to do bad stuff.
	But Thanos had an interesting backstory, and the thing about Thanos is that Thanos was willing to sacrifice his own daughter for what he believed in.
	Right, Danos, he's immoral, he's a bad person, but he's willing to make a sacrifice they don't even ask Robert Downey Jr.
	to make in the second Avengers film.
	So that is a problem as well.
	Now, there are two characters who I do think are treated well by the script.
	Black Widow is treated well by the script.
	Hawkeye, Jeremy Renner, is treated well by the script.
	Carol Danvers, the Captain Marvel character, I just have to say that she's insanely boring.
	So I didn't actually see the Captain Marvel film.
	I'm intending on going and seeing it at some point.
	I didn't really feel the compunction to see it, but I suppose that I will see it.
	In any case, she's in the film, but she's basically a block of wood that breaks things.
	That's what Carol Danvers does.
	She doesn't have any character.
	You don't know why she's there.
	You don't know her motivations.
	She just flies around and she smashes things.
	Alright.
	And she's, and she's... Dave Sexmackina.
	Another point made by my business partner, we had a conversation about this this morning, is that one of the problems with this film is that you also don't know the comparative power of the characters.
	So it's like every character has a power that is equally powerful, despite the fact that they don't.
	There's a scene near the end where the Avengers headquarters is hit by one million missiles, and somehow Ant-Man, who is a human, and Jeremy Renner, who is a human, are fine.
	They're at the bottom of twenty stories.
	They're fine.
	Totally cool.
	That makes no sense.
	And there's a scene where Thanos, who does not have the Infinity Gauntlet at this point, is fighting off Captain America and Thor and Iron Man.
	He's fighting off all three of them.
	Well, if you remember back to the first Avengers film, He barely holds off Thor alone, right?
	Thor shows up and Thor nearly takes him out while he has the Infinity Stone.
	So if he doesn't have the Infinity Stone, he's basically just a big bad guy.
	So why are all three of them unable to take him out?
	And then there was the NFL ad recapitulation where they're trying to run the gauntlet between players and it's like, oh, okay, I understand you're doing fan service.
	Look, there's Black Panther.
	Ooh, there's Spider-Man.
	Oh, look, they're handing it to this other character who we don't care about.
	Yay!
	And then they're just kind of throwing in the gauntlet just to remind you that all these characters exist.
	The center of this universe was always supposed to be Iron Man, Captain America, Thor.
	They turned Thor into a loser, Captain America is boring, and Iron Man, they don't give a full motivation and prohibit him from making a proper choice.
	Now, there are, again, scenes in this movie that are quite good.
	The scene between the Hulk, for example, the Mark Ruffalo character, And Tilda Swinton, the character from Doctor Strange, that's actually a good scene.
	The scene with Robert Downey Jr.
	and his dad, that's a good scene too.
	But overall, I felt like it was a mishmash, I felt like it didn't really work.
	I understand that for uber-fans of Marvel, I'm not speaking as an uber-fan of Marvel, I've seen virtually all of these films, I think that Captain Marvel is the only one that I have not seen.
	There are uberfans who are sitting there, like, just picking out the Easter eggs.
	Oh, remember when they did that in this movie?
	And then we're flashing back to that movie now.
	Isn't that cool?
	Isn't that funny?
	And there's a lot of stuff there.
	But that's fan service.
	It's not filmmaking.
	And it doesn't give an emotional resonance.
	The only emotional resonance, really, is Iron Man's death, which I guess is what it was supposed to be.
	And even there, I felt like it was diminished somewhat by the fact that he basically just dies in a normal adventure story that could have taken place in any of the other Iron Mans.
	Also, final critique.
	I don't feel the necessity to have a giant battle with all of the people in the universe at the end of every movie.
	I didn't like it at the end of Aquaman.
	I don't like it here.
	In fact, the battle was much more interesting when it was just a couple of people fighting before all of these things show up, before Doctor Strange unleashes the beast and all these people come walking through back from the dead.
	It felt throughout the movie like there were no stakes.
	And this is my big problem.
	I didn't get anything that I thought was really unexpected.
	I felt like they deliberately lowered the stakes, not heightened the stakes, with that decision that I referred to about Iron Man.
	I felt like it was blase and bland.
	I didn't feel like anyone was really in any danger, and even Iron Man's death is sort of inevitably foreshadowed by what happens to the Hulk when he puts on the gauntlet.
	I wish I had liked the movie more, since I spent three hours of my life on it and fifty bucks.
	The tickets for IMAX were expensive, man.
	But I will say that I understand why people enjoyed it, if you're a superfan.
	But I am not up with the, this is great.
	Now, where is the future of Marvel?
	This is a serious question.
	Because when you look at the second ranks of characters, they've now gotten rid of all their big stars, right?
	Chris Hemsworth, I guess, might appear in the future, but not in a Thor movie.
	He'll probably do a cameo in a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, which is a Chris Pratt property.
	So Guardians of the Galaxy will continue to be a functioning series, because all those characters are still there.
	But who's going to be the new Iron Man?
	Can they replace Robert Downey Jr.?
	I don't think so.
	I really don't think so.
	He's too iconic.
	And especially if they decide to make it Gwyneth Paltrow or something.
	She's been in all the movies.
	She's not the reason people see movies.
	Do they really think that... What's the name of the character who replaced... The Eagle?
	Who's gonna replace Captain America?
	That's not gonna play.
	There are great black superheroes, right?
	Black Panther is one of them.
	That's a viable property.
	I don't think that just sliding the Eagle into Captain America's suit... By the way, does he have any superpowers at all?
	Like, Captain America took the serum.
	Is the guy who's becoming the new Captain America, does he have the serum, or is he just a human with a shield?
	As for Thor, they really think they can replace Chris Hemsworth with Valkyrie.
	And again, the character arc for Thor doesn't exist.
	So his whole character arc is he refuses to take leadership, but he's the best among us, and thus he will receive the hammer.
	That is Thor's character arc.
	And at the end, not only does he not receive the hammer, but also he then hands off the mantle of leadership, which he has been attempting to avoid his entire life.
	So it's never thrust upon him, and he never takes it.
	So in the last Thor movie, he actually does take it.
	Right?
	In the last Thor movie, he is forced to take it, right?
	He loses his eye, he becomes weathered, he loses the long hair, he loses the beard, right?
	Suddenly, he is, you know, the king that his father was.
	And by the end of this movie, he's back to being the loser he was at the beginning of movie number one.
	So, lots of problems with the movie.
	Paul Rudd did a good job as Ant-Man.
	Okay, we're done.
	We'll be back here later with a couple more hours.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	I'm Michael Knowles, host of The Michael Knowles Show,
	Students at Hofstra University are demanding the school tear down a statue of Thomas Jefferson.
	Meanwhile, a Northern California public school district wants to remove a mural of George Washington.
	We will analyze the end of history.

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