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July 11, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:03:50

Of Freshness and Faceness | Ep. 815

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	Nancy Pelosi and the illustrious AOC get into a catfight.
	Can we even say that?
	A Democratic Senate hopeful implodes on launch, and Trump's Labor Secretary battles allegations of a sweetheart deal with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show.
	I believe he has pled guilty to prostitution solicitation in Florida.
	It's still alleged that he's a pedophile, although the evidence is pretty solid at this point.
	We'll get to all of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so we begin today with the mother of all catfights.
	I know we're not supposed to say catfight.
	We were informed by AOC that if two women have a fight over nearly nothing, that you are supposed to not call this a catfight because it is sexist in some way.
	Sure, even though the term catfighting has been used to apply to men, even though the term catfighting has been part of the lexicon for a very long time, now it is called catfighting if two women have an incredibly petty and public feud, which is exactly what AOC and Nancy Pelosi are having right now because they don't actually disagree all that much on policy.
	Nancy Pelosi just sort of hides the ball a little bit more.
	The difference between Nancy Pelosi and AOC is that Nancy Pelosi is a smart person, and AOC is not a smart person.
	Nancy Pelosi does not have the right principles, but She is a battle-hardened veteran of the congressional wars.
	She knows how to publicly face the policies that she is putting forward.
	She's much cleverer than AOC, which is why she's the Speaker of the House.
	And AOC is the representative of one of the bluest districts in America after winning a primary against another Democrat.
	So the notion that AOC is any sort of real leadership challenger for Nancy Pelosi, at least in terms of skill set, is a complete fiction.
	And it's a fiction promoted by the media.
	And what's amazing and ironic and delicious about all of this is that Nancy Pelosi made this happen.
	So AOC started to get media attention.
	And Nancy Pelosi basically had two choices.
	Ignore it.
	Just pretend that AOC was another member of the crowd.
	And she could have done that.
	She could have just done that.
	And then the other thing she could have done is she could have promoted AOC.
	She could have said, I love the new energy that AOC is bringing to our party.
	I love the fact that AOC really is channeling the future of the Democratic Party.
	And she chose sort of both.
	And that's the worst strategy.
	Because on the one hand, she's patting AOC on the head, telling AOC that AOC is brilliant and wise and wonderful and energetic.
	And on the other hand, she was saying, quite publicly, that she thinks AOC is basically an idiot, that her policies make no sense, and that she has no constituency.
	Well, that's not going to make AOC particularly happy.
	So this is actually Nancy Pelosi's fault.
	Because what she should have been doing was downplaying these jokers from the start.
	She should have been downplaying AOC.
	She should have been downplaying Rashida Tlaib.
	She should have been downplaying Ilhan Omar.
	She should have always said that they were a very small contingent of the Democratic Party.
	And she shouldn't have been patting them on the head for their energy.
	Because you know what else has energy?
	A rabid dog.
	Lots of things have energy.
	Lots of bad things have energy.
	And Nancy Pelosi was trying to channel that energy.
	Nancy Pelosi wanted the best of both worlds.
	She wanted to be able to utilize the cocaine-like power of identity politics that is now bubbling up from the base of the Democratic Party.
	She wanted to harness it, and then she wanted to use it in her own particular way.
	But you didn't want any of the after effects of all of that.
	Well, that's not how this works.
	The Republican Party, by the way, has found out the same thing.
	In the 2016 primaries, every single candidate tried to do this with Donald Trump.
	Every single candidate tried to use Donald Trump.
	They tried to say, okay, well, Donald Trump, you know, I may disagree with Donald Trump, but his folks are really energetic, and he's bringing a new, interesting energy to the Republican Party primaries.
	And they figured, okay, eventually he would fade, and they'd pick up his support, and then they would just move on with that sort of cocaine, Energy power that Trump was bringing to the table in 2016.
	Well, by the time they realized that Trump's base was sticking with him, by the time they realized that Trump was a legitimate player, it was too late for them to do anything.
	Now, where Pelosi has an advantage is that AOC does not have a national crowd.
	For all of the talk about AOC being this tremendously powerful political player, she is not.
	But she certainly perceives herself that way, and she's utterly unhinged.
	She's utterly unhinged when it comes to her practice of politics.
	So, she is not holding back anymore.
	So, we sort of have to reverse and explain what Nancy Pelosi was doing here.
	So, again, Nancy Pelosi spent her early days posing with AOC on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
	I'm talking about how these new freshman women, they were just bringing this new wonderful zeitgeist and energy to Congress and they have such great new ideas.
	And then she'd go out publicly and she would say stuff like this.
	- When we won this election, it wasn't in districts like mine or Alexandria's, however, she's a wonderful member of Congress, I think all of our colleagues will attest, but those are districts that are solidly democratic.
	This glass of water would win with a D next to its name in those districts.
	And not to diminish the exuberance and the personality and the rest of Alexandria and the other members.
	Exuberance and personality.
	We want the exuberance.
	We want the personality.
	But let's be real about this.
	The only reason she's in Congress is because she was in the bluest district on planet Earth.
	And she made these kind of comments, Pelosi did, over and over and over again over the past six months.
	She called the Green New Deal the Green Dream or whatever.
	She sort of mocked it.
	Suggested the Green Dream or whatever they call it.
	Nobody knows what it is, but they're for it, right?
	She referred to the Green New Deal, which was AOC's chief policy priority, involving the murder of millions of farting cows and the grounding of all airplanes, as quote, one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive.
	And she sort of shuffled it off to the side, because it received zero votes in the Senate.
	And then she was asked about AOC's wing, and she got kind of upset about it, and she said, listen, AOC's wing is like five people.
	She likes to minimize the conflicts within her caucus between the moderates and the progressives.
	You have these wings, AOC and her group on one side.
	That's like five people.
	No, it's the progressive group.
	It's more than five.
	I'm a progressive.
	Okay, so there's Nancy Pelosi again dismissing AOC, and then just a few days ago, she did an interview with the New York Times with Maureen Dowd over at the New York Times, and she said, all these people have their public whatever and their Twitter world, but they don't have any following.
	They're four people.
	That's how many votes they got.
	Which is 100% accurate.
	I've been saying it since the very beginning.
	The difference is, I think that AOC is a blight on our politics.
	I think that Nancy Pelosi is similarly a blight on our politics, but a clever blight on our politics at the very least.
	The problem is, once you attack AOC, you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
	AOC is a result of identity politics.
	She's a result of unhinged progressivism.
	And that may fuel energy, but like cocaine, there is a very strong temporary high and then the long-term effects start to kick in.
	The John Belushi effect on politics is very much in evidence here.
	A lot of brilliance and crazy and wacky.
	And then comes the downside.
	It's really, it's bad for Nancy Pelosi because now AOC is upset.
	And AOC has basically suggested that Nancy Pelosi is a racist.
	So the fight is now out in the open.
	Both of these sides are going at each other, hammer and tongs, and I'm here for it, man.
	Hook it straight into my veins.
	This is my political cocaine.
	So Nancy Pelosi said on Wednesday she had, quote, no regrets about a comment published over the weekend that seemed to dismiss the influence of some of her highest profile freshmen, including AOC, and privately urged those Democrats to train their fire on Republicans, not on their own colleagues.
	Pelosi said, I have no regrets about anything.
	In fact, she got a neck tattoo that said no regerts.
	Pelosi suggested to Maureen Dowd, of course, that the so-called squad had a limited following inside the House.
	I saw somebody online referred to AOC and her followers as Sandinistas, which I kind of love.
	Pelosi said, Pelosi defended those comments after leaving a closed-door caucus meeting, according to the Washington Post, where she delivered a stern warning to her party's left to keep their criticism of fellow Democrats to themselves.
	She noted it was the party's more moderate members who delivered control of the House to Democrats.
	Accurate.
	And asked lawmakers to be respectful of that.
	She said a majority is a fragile thing.
	She said that people like AOC should show some level of respect and sensitivity to more moderate colleagues.
	She said, you make me the target, but don't make our moderates the target in all of this because we have important fish to fry.
	Well, that's not stopping AOC because she is not going to be quieted by this elder stateswoman.
	It's basically Lucille Bluth here trying to hold back the passions of Buster It's pretty fantastic.
	In other recent tweets, the legislative mastermind Saikat Chakrabarti, who may or may not be involved in some campaign finance issues with AOC, that is AOC's chief of staff, criticized Pelosi and moderate Democrats via Twitter.
	He said, all these articles want to claim what a legislative mastermind Pelosi is, but I'm seeing way more strategic smarts from the four freshman members.
	Pelosi is just mad she got outmaneuvered by the Republicans.
	But that's not really where the baseline of this is.
	The baseline of this is that AOC is now calling Pelosi a racist, and that is just phenomenal because Pelosi deserves it.
	So the new rule, as my business partner Jeremy Boring, now verified on Twitter, points out, He points out that racism is basically the all-purpose term for I disagree with somebody to my left.
	So Donald Trump is a racist because he disagrees with Nancy Pelosi, and now Nancy Pelosi is a racist because she disagrees with AOC.
	But AOC told the New Yorker Radio Hour, quote, I think sometimes people think we have a relationship.
	Not particularly.
	Ooh, cutting.
	I love this stuff.
	This is so good.
	And then she suggested to the Washington Post that Pelosi was a racist, quote, When these comments first started, I kind of thought she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm's distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood.
	But the persistent singling out, it got to the point where it was just outright disrespectful.
	The explicit singling out of a newly elected women of color.
	Boom!
	Drop the mic.
	She's played the woman of color card.
	Nancy Pelosi, down.
	Start that count.
	Oh boy.
	So now AOC is suggesting that Nancy Pelosi doesn't like AOC because AOC is brown.
	That's the actual suggestion.
	That Nancy Pelosi, who's openly explaining why she's got a problem with AOC, and she keeps telling AOC and these freshman members, stop talking about primarying our members, stop tweeting about fellow Democrats, it's obnoxious, it's bad for us, it undercuts our legislative agenda, and AOC's like, you're just saying that because you hate me because you're a racist.
	Man.
	Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats deserve every, every, every aspect of this.
	Every single grain of that identity politics cocaine they've been snorting for years.
	It's now coming back in the form of serious mental problems.
	And it is, it is delicious and it is well-deserved.
	Never get high off your own supply, says Cocaine Mitch.
	And that is exactly what happened here.
	The Democrats got high off their own supply.
	The identity politics was a weapon.
	It was supposed to be used against people on the right.
	And now, because it has infused every vein in the Democratic body politic, it's gonna be used against anyone you disagree with, including Nancy Pelosi, who's sitting there going, what the hell?
	I shepherded Obamacare and ran Congress for this?
	For this pipsqueak to come and call me a racist because I think that she's incompetent?
	Yes.
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	Alrighty, so AOC going after Pelosi, calling her a racist.
	Yes!
	Yes!
	So, the way that this has been working for Democrats for years now is that if you disagree with Democrats, you are a racist.
	Nancy Pelosi now disagrees with AOC, and that means that she is a racist, which I'm sure is, I'm sure that's where this is going.
	Hilarious.
	Hilarious.
	She posed on this cover of Rolling Stone with AOC and with Rashida Tlaib and with Ilhan Omar, and now That three-person caucus is turning on Nancy Pelosi and now categorizing her with whom?
	Tucker Carlson?
	That's the other person that Ilhan Omar is going after today.
	Ilhan Omar is suggesting that Tucker Carlson is a racist because he said our immigration system is broken if it's bringing in people like Ilhan Omar who have such a negative view of the country.
	So I guess Nancy Pelosi is now part of the Tucker Carlson crew.
	Amazing how as the Overton window shifts left, Nancy Pelosi is going to end up being like the co-host of the show by the time the left is done.
	It's insane.
	It's totally crazy.
	And AOC isn't unwinding either.
	She's feeling very sad for herself despite the fact that she's insanely prominent based on having won a primary in the bluest district in America.
	She's insanely prominent based on the fact that she's passed zero legislation or even really been involved in zero serious pieces of legislative movement.
	Yeah, she's incredibly famous and well-known because she is very good at the Twitter clapbacks, or at least her ghostwriters are.
	AOC is, and she's feeling very whiny about herself.
	So, how whiny is she?
	She's complaining now that the Democrats are keeping her too busy.
	She says, they're trying to just give me busy work so that I don't make trouble.
	She's like a third grader who's upset that the teacher has put her in the corner and given her the Bart Simpson project of writing over and over on a piece of paper, I will not criticize other moderate Democrats.
	So here's AOC complaining that she's so busy, they're keeping me busy so that I can't do the important stuff, you know, like talk about farting cows and all.
	I think that ultimately I'm fine with the decision, especially given the committee assignments that I was ultimately given, which were very intense and very rigorous.
	I was assigned to two of some of the busiest committees and four subcommittees, so my hands are full.
	And sometimes I wonder if they're trying to keep me busy.
	Yeah, that's it.
	That's it.
	They're trying to keep you busy because you are so impactful and so important.
	You know, this is what happens, Nancy, when you give small children unearned self-esteem.
	This is what happens.
	And by relative terms, AOC is the child in the Congress.
	I mean, she's the youngest person in the Congress.
	She doesn't know anything.
	And Nancy Pelosi gave her all sorts of credibility.
	She gave her all sorts of power.
	And now, she's feeling the brunt of that when she tells AOC to stop mouthing off on Twitter quite so much.
	It's pretty phenomenal.
	AOC is the teenager, Nancy Pelosi is the mom, and Nancy Pelosi keeps screaming for AOC to turn down the music, and AOC is turning up the music and doing whatever she wants in that bedroom of hers.
	And not only that, she's then coming downstairs and calling mom the B word.
	That's what is happening right here.
	And it is fantastic.
	Now, this does have some broader ramifications because AOC does actually represent the loudest wing of the party, even though that wing of the party is minority of the party.
	So AOC is not merely restricting her criticism to other congressional candidates.
	She's also going after Joe Biden.
	So she said in the last couple of days, she was slamming Joe Biden, suggesting that the debate raised questions about his capacity.
	Joe Biden, his performance on the stage kind of raised some questions with respect to that.
	But I don't want to say just because someone is 79, they can't or shouldn't run for president.
	I don't want to use those proxies, a number as a proxy for capacity.
	I think you have to assess a person's capacity kind of on a case by case basis.
	Okay, well now AOC, by the way, not only is she ripping Biden, she's back, like in the last few minutes, to ripping Pelosi.
	So, she was just asked by Manu Raju, who's a reporter over at CNN, if she stands by her comment that Pelosi singles out women of color, quote, Well, I think it's really just pointing out a pattern, right?
	We're not talking about progressives.
	It's singling out four individuals and knowing the media environment we're operating in, knowing the amount of death threats we get, knowing the amount of concentration of attention.
	I think it's worth asking why.
	Yes, yes, and yes!
	Yes!
	Okay, so, here's why this is so radically enjoyable.
	Ilhan Omar, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, they've been using this crap against everybody who disagrees with them for months at this point.
	If you disagree with them, it's because you want them to receive death threats, or you want them to, God forbid, be killed, or something terrible like that.
	It can't just be you think they're idiots who say stupid and terrible things all the time that they all It can't be that.
	Virtually all of those members have been openly associated with vicious anti-Semites, that their proposal ideas are about as relevant as an ejector seat on a helicopter.
	It can't be that.
	It has to be that you hate them because they are women of color and because you want them to receive death threats.
	And now AOC is taking that same exact charge and she is leveling it at the speaker of her house contingent.
	It is fantastic.
	And it demonstrates how empty and stupid this charge was in the first place.
	Does anybody with a shred of rationality actually believe that Nancy Pelosi wants AOC to receive death threats because AOC is a powerful woman of color?
	Does anyone really believe that?
	And if you do believe that, how gullible and dumb are you?
	If you really believe that Nancy Pelosi is now the emissary of the old white establishment because she's an old white lady, if you really believe that that's what she is, that's what she represents, man, you guys, this is crazy towns and it is wonderful.
	It is well deserved.
	Everybody on the left, You bought this ticket, you take this ride now.
	So pick sides.
	Get on board.
	Which one is it?
	This is the Iran-Iraq war from the 80s.
	Which side are you on?
	You got the Mullahs, you got Saddam here.
	Which one do you want?
	Because you're gonna have to pick either Nancy Pelosi, the old white lady who is apparently cracking down on women of color, or AOC, the brash newcomer who's labeling one of the most impactful lawmakers of the last 50 years a vicious racist for disagreeing with her dumb policies and bad ideas.
	Love it.
	Love it.
	What's amazing about this even more than just the inherent wonder of the battle between AOC and Pelosi, and AOC's playing the same game that Kamala Harris plays about Joe Biden.
	She was asked if she thinks Pelosi is a racist.
	And she said, no, no, absolutely not.
	Absolutely not.
	Well, then how do you square that with she's criticizing women of color because it's I'm just pointing out a pattern.
	Ayanna Pressley, by the way, said, quote, In my district, we have 18 shootings since July 3rd.
	I'm heading into oversight in a child trauma hearing I've been advocating for.
	I'm not giving this any more oxygen.
	Ayanna Pressley, who, as I've said, is the Ringo Starr of this this Beatles of stupidity in the House Democratic Caucus.
	She is apparently the least stupid of these folks because she says, I'm not jumping into this thing, but AOC is going to jump into it.
	This has some actual impact beyond just the congressional delegation for the Democrats.
	Namely, Democratic candidates all over the country have no idea how they are supposed to campaign.
	They have no clue how they are supposed to campaign.
	Take, for example, Democrat Amy McGrath.
	So Amy McGrath, is the brand new Senate candidate facing down cocaine Mitch.
	And she's going to take on Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.
	And she's hoping she can convince Kentuckians who voted for Trump and has pledged to drain the swamp that Republican Mitch McConnell is the biggest swamp dweller in Washington.
	This is according to the Courier-Journal in Kentucky.
	She said, I fully recognize how difficult this race will be and the history behind folks who have gone up against Senator McConnell.
	And then she said that if President Trump has good ideas, then she will back those good ideas.
	She said, a lot of Kentuckians voted for Donald Trump because he wasn't part of that political establishment on either side.
	For me, I'm a Democrat.
	My husband's Republican.
	I was an independent for 12 years.
	It's always been about my country.
	And in the middle of this interview that she was doing, she made a very interesting statement about Justice Kavanaugh.
	I'll explain in just one second what exactly she said.
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	OK, so.
	As I say, this Democratic Senate candidate is trying to read the tea leaves in Kentucky, which is a state that Donald Trump won by 30 points.
	And she's trying to figure out, how do I run?
	Can I run as a moderate and maybe win?
	Or do I have to please the AOC wing of the base?
	And this creates an enormous amount of confusion.
	So, Amy McGrath, who is this candidate running against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, she was asked about Justice Kavanaugh.
	She said, It's a good question.
	I didn't listen to all of the hearings.
	I don't think there was anything, and I'm not a lawyer or a senator on the Judiciary Committee, so I don't know the criteria, but I was very concerned about Judge Kavanaugh when I felt like there were far-right stances that he had.
	However, there was nothing in his record that I think would disqualify him in any way.
	And the fact is, when you have a president in the Senate, this is our system, and so I don't think there was anything that would have disqualified him in my mind.
	And then she was asked by the Courier-Journal, did the Democrats treat him unfairly with the accusations that were against him waiting until the last minute, as some have said, to try and delay the hearings?
	McGrath said the Supreme Court nominees are a lifetime appointment.
	I don't fault anyone for bringing up things that could give folks pause about the character of someone getting a lifetime appointment.
	And then she said that she thought that Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Justice Kavanaugh were credible.
	She said, I think it's credible, but given the amount of time that lapsed in between and from a judicial standpoint, I don't think it would really disqualify him.
	And she said, yeah, I think I probably would have voted for Brett Kavanaugh, which is the correct answer in Kentucky.
	In Kentucky, if you're a Democrat, that is the correct answer, because if you looked at the polls, you know what was wildly unpopular among Americans?
	The attempt by Democrats to deprive Kavanaugh of due process based on an evidenceless allegation by one person brought at the last minute by Democratic partisans.
	But Amy McGrath is now caught up in this maelstrom inside the Democratic Party of, are you with AOC?
	Are you with Nancy Pelosi?
	Are you with the progressive wing?
	Or are you with the people who actually want to win?
	So then Amy McGrath did what is called the rare political double flip-flop, as Comfortably Smug put it on Twitter.
	I mean, the Russian judges gave it a 10.
	Amy McGrath tweeted out, So she said, yeah, I would have voted for him.
	And then she says, no, I wouldn't have voted for him.
	So she said, Yeah, I would have voted for him.
	And then she says, No, I wouldn't have voted for him.
	And then she continues and tweets out, I know I disappointed many today with my initial answer on how I would have voted on Brett Kavanaugh.
	I will make mistakes and always own up to them.
	The priority is defeating Mitch McConnell.
	Now, she had originally before that interview in the Courier Journal said she wouldn't have voted for Kavanaugh.
	So she said, no, I won't vote for him.
	Yes, I will vote for him.
	No, I won't vote for him.
	And this is all coming because Democrats don't know how to read their own party base at this point.
	One of the things that's been happening is that the political parties in the United States, and Donald Trump is excellent proof of this, the political parties in the United States no longer know how to read their own base.
	They don't know how to read the people they represent.
	Because here's the truth about American politics.
	There are those of us who spend our days and nights thinking about this sort of stuff.
	And we try to create intellectual frameworks for how people are going to vote.
	We try to create these sort of philosophies that we believe people should vote based upon.
	And parties try to do the same thing.
	But parties do it in a dumber way.
	They don't try to create kind of general philosophies that they think people are aspiring to.
	They instead try to create party platforms that are basically an agglomeration of issues that they think are popular enough with a particular group of people that they can win a majority.
	This is what Democrats are trying to do right now by pandering to every group under the sun.
	It's what Republicans have done in the past by putting together this weird amalgamation of everything from some tariffs and no tariffs to We're kind of socially liberal.
	We're kind of socially conservative.
	It's been very unclear on what the overall philosophy actually has been.
	Now, the truth is that voters are neither of these things.
	Voters, number one, generally don't vote based on an overarching philosophy.
	And number two, don't vote based on an agglomeration of policy positions.
	Voters vote based on personality and comfort level.
	In general, sort of feeling about the country and the narrative surrounding the country.
	And that's why everything has become a culture war in politics.
	But the parties have been unable to capture the nature of those culture wars.
	It's why Donald Trump has continued to be effective.
	The reason Trump is effective is because he's a culture warrior.
	By the way, this is also why Obama was effective.
	In 2008, he ran effectively as a culture warrior against divisiveness.
	The irony, of course, is that he then reversed himself and proved to be an extraordinarily divisive president.
	Donald Trump looked at the divisions in the country and he said these divisions are very real and one side is being ignored and I'm going to tell those folks that they are being ignored and they're being left behind.
	That was Trump's pitch.
	That was not a political pitch.
	It was not a philosophical pitch.
	It was an emotional pitch and it was properly It was properly aimed and directed at the right number of voters.
	But the parties are not able to do that because the parties, of course, have candidates all over the country who have local constituencies.
	And so you end up with this weird attempt to create national parties from local constituencies that differ widely.
	Amy McGrath's state is not going to look anything like AOC's district.
	And yet, Amy McGrath requires the support of people like AOC in order to go forward.
	And this creates an unbridgeable divide.
	You're seeing this play out in the Democratic primaries right now.
	Who exactly is representative of the Democratic base?
	Is it Joe Biden, who represents a plurality of Democrats?
	Or is it Kamala Harris, who represents a smaller minority of Democrats, but a more passionate minority of Democrats, perhaps?
	All of this leads to tremendous confusion inside the party system, and it's why the party system is starting to break down.
	And that's going to be bad, particularly for the parties that are unable to hold together any semblance of unity.
	Right now, that looks a lot more like the Democrats than it does like the Republicans.
	It's also why it would really behoove President Trump to stop being so divisive inside his own caucus by saying dumb things.
	What I mean by that is that President Trump today started tweeting out dumb things again.
	It is amazing to me.
	All Donald Trump has to do is shut up and he will win re-election.
	That is literally all he has to do.
	All he has to do is shut up and point.
	And point at the Democrats.
	And instead, he's out there tweeting weird crap And giving people a level of disquiet with his presidency that is unwarranted by his record.
	Today he got on Twitter and he just started tweeting out random nonsense.
	I mean, I don't know if he was just bored today or what.
	But he started tweeting out... Here's what the president tweeted.
	He tweeted out, A big subject today at the White House Social Media Summit will be the tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination, and suppression practiced by certain companies.
	We will not let them get away with it much longer.
	The fake news media will also be there, but for a limited period.
	The fake news is not as important or as powerful as social media.
	So far, fine.
	They've lost tremendous credibility since that day in November 2016 that I came down the escalator with the person who is to become your future First Lady.
	Well, that was actually like 2015.
	Anyway, he says, when I ultimately leave office in six years or maybe 10 or 14, just kidding.
	They will quickly go out of business for lack of credibility or approval from the public.
	That's why they will all be endorsing me at some point, one way or the other.
	Could you imagine having sleepy Joe Biden or Alfred E. Newman, I assume that's Pete Buttigieg, or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas, 1,000 over 24th?
	That's not how fractions work.
	As your president, rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true stable genius, capital S, capital G, Sorry to say that even social media would be driven out of business along with, and finally, the fake news media.
	What in the actual F is that?
	What in the actual world?
	And listen, okay, I get there are people who are clapping and cheering.
	Yeah, okay.
	Here is the problem.
	The economy is really good right now.
	It continues to be really good right now.
	The economy continues to be great for job creation.
	The Dow Jones Industrial Average just hit 27,000 for the first time in history.
	Okay, so what are we doing here?
	Why?
	Why?
	When chaos is breaking out on the other side, let them have their firefight.
	Why are you doing this?
	Why?
	It's so funny.
	Trump put out a tweet with an ad created by somebody else about his leadership in his presidency.
	And the ad is well produced if the president was George W. Bush, because what the ad was, was this very soothing music talking about President Trump has stood strong and unwavering in the storm.
	President Trump is a man who has deep abiding character, And he sticks with his principles.
	And he calls all of this just a start.
	It looks like a typical presidential candidate.
	There's only one problem.
	Everybody knows that ain't Trump.
	Meaning that there's a group of people who think that that is Trump, but those people basically work for him.
	Everybody else understands that the dude's a volatile character that comes along with a lot of benefits and a lot of drawbacks.
	And really, if he would just stop, then everything would be okay.
	Why does everyone seek to draw defeat from the jaws of victory?
	How?
	I've been saying for years about the Democrats, all they had to do was not be crazy, and they literally could not do it.
	It was impossible for them.
	And then you got Trump, and he decides he wants to do the same thing.
	I'm so supremely confused about why he would do that.
	It is beyond me.
	Okay, now in just a second, I'm going to get to the latest scandal that is now surrounding the Trump administration.
	It really isn't about the Trump administration at all.
	It's really about the Criminal justice system in the United States.
	There's confusion surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
	Alex Acosta, Trump's Secretary of Labor, is under fire.
	We'll talk about that in one second.
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	OK, in just a second, we'll get to the latest on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, plus the president of the United States preparing later today.
	To announce some sort of executive action on the census.
	We'll explain whether this is a good idea or whether this is a bad idea, whether it's a constitutional crisis.
	Everybody likes that phrase.
	We'll get to that in just a few minutes.
	First, great news gang!
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	All righty, so the big story of yesterday, aside from the AOC-Nancy Pelosi smash up, which was just wonderful.
	Aside from that, it was Alex Acosta, the Secretary of Labor, defending himself from allegations that he cut a sweetheart deal with alleged pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who's apparently engaged in high level sex trafficking of minors.
	And there are all sorts of questions that are still out there about Jeffrey Epstein.
	Like, how did this guy make so much money?
	Apparently, there's no record of him being like this wonderful investment specialist.
	So how did he make his billions of dollars buying private islands and all this?
	Where did this money come from?
	How did he get away with this for so long?
	Why was it that Cyrus Vance, the DA over in Manhattan, why did he try to keep Epstein from being registered as a top-level sex offender once Epstein moved full-time to New York?
	Why exactly was he not required to check in with the NYPD every 90 days as he would be as a high-level sex offender?
	He never checked in at all over an eight-year span.
	How was he able to get away with that?
	This stuff goes beyond Alex Acosta.
	Jim Garrity over at National Review has a good rundown on some of these questions.
	He says, how did Jeffrey Epstein make that fortune?
	One claim, a massive Ponzi scheme, but wouldn't that bring the securities folks down on his head?
	Could Epstein really have been connected to some sort of intelligence service?
	There were reports yesterday that maybe the reason Epstein was left alone is because he was connected with the intelligence services and doing work for them.
	When asked about this, Alex Acosta offered a weird, vague, contradictory, meandering answer.
	If Epstein was working for some sort of spy agency, which one?
	What was the aim?
	Collecting blackmail on prominent figures?
	Who's being blackmailed?
	There's an allegation that maybe the way he made his money is from blackmail.
	Maybe the way that he made his money is he was trafficking all these underage women, underage girls as young as 14, 13 years old, having them in compromising positions with older men who are very powerful and then blackmailing those guys for cash.
	After Epstein, as I say, was handed that level three sex offender status, he was required to check in with the NYPD.
	They never required him to.
	Why did the Manhattan District Attorney try to keep Epstein from being registered as a top level sex offender?
	I mean, this is ridiculous.
	Apparently, a seasoned sex crimes prosecutor from Vance's office argued forcefully in court that Epstein should not be registered that way in New York as a sex offender in New York.
	The judge said, I have to tell you this, I'm a little overwhelmed.
	I've never seen a prosecutor's office do anything like this.
	How is it that his private island off St.
	Thomas got the nickname pedophile island?
	And how did that not exactly get the authorities snooping around?
	Bill Clinton's public statements about his interactions with Epstein, those are wildly inaccurate.
	They are contradicted by contemporaneous media accounts as well as FAA flight logs.
	Also, apparently, President Trump, it was quoted in a recent Vanity Fair article, there was an article about Trump and David Pecker of National Enquirer, in which Trump apparently told Pecker that the pictures of Clinton that Epstein had from his island were worse.
	Now, did Clinton visit the island?
	Unclear.
	Does Epstein have that sort of material?
	Why did Alex Acosta cut him such a sweetheart deal?
	There are contradictory, there are sort of contradictory accounts as to how sweetheart the deal was.
	Ken White, Pope had on Twitter, he says that this deal is the sweetest deal he's ever seen.
	He has an article over at the Atlantic saying, quote, the Jeffrey Epstein case is like nothing I've ever seen before.
	He said, great wealth insulates people from consequences, but not always, absolutely, or forever.
	He talks about the fact that this deal basically prevented further prosecution in the area.
	What in the hell was going on?
	And then on the other hand, you have a woman named Kimberly Melman Roscoe writing for USA Today, who is a an expert witness on sex trafficking.
	And she says, I've seen deals like this before.
	So how out of the ordinary is all of this?
	All of this is is deeply troubling and upsetting, of course, and the fact that And the fact that, you know, all the facts are going to come out means there will be, as I've been saying for days, a lot more shoes to drop.
	Okay, meanwhile, the other big news of the day is that President Trump is about to take executive action on a census citizenship question that is supposed to happen at like 2 o'clock today Pacific time, 5 o'clock p.m.
	Eastern.
	And according to Margaret Talev, reporting for Bloomberg, President Trump will announce executive action on the 2020 U.S.
	Census on Thursday, pursuing his fight to include a citizenship question in the decennial population count, despite being rebuffed by the Supreme Court.
	The executive action is expected to be announced at a news conference, according to three people familiar with Trump's plan.
	They declined to detail the action.
	They indicated it may not be an executive order.
	It may instead be the far vaguer executive action.
	An executive order has at least some precedent in American law.
	Typically, executive orders Trump announced that he announced the news conference in a tweet talking about the social media summit.
	In executive action, it's unclear what exactly that constitutes, and it has a far murkier status in American constitutional law because it's kind of made up is the truth.
	Trump announced that he would be previewing.
	He announced the news conference in a tweet talking about the social media summit.
	He said, at the conclusion of the social media summit, we will all go to the beautiful Rose Garden for a news conference on the census and citizenship.
	So there are a couple of theories about exactly what Trump is going to do later this afternoon.
	Obviously, the Supreme Court has denounced the census question, saying that it was pretextual, the rationale provided by the Trump administration.
	It was an absurd decision.
	We talked about it on the show.
	The idea of the Supreme Court is now going to look at the relevant and correct provided rationales for asking something as simple as, are you a citizen on the census?
	And then they're going to say, the real reason you're doing this is because you're racist.
	And so we're not going to allow you to do it.
	That is far beyond the boundaries of what the judiciary should be allowed to do or is allowed to do under their constitutionally delegated status.
	This leaves Trump with a couple of possible options.
	One of those options is more controversial and one of those options is less controversial.
	The option that is less controversial The option that is less controversial is the option that basically President Trump invokes a specific provision of the Constitution and says, I have a constitutional duty to ask this question.
	Josh Hammer, editor at large over here at Daily Wire, he points out that there is a provision of the Constitution in the 14th amendment section 2 text that says this when the right to vote is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state being 21 years of age and citizens of the united states or in any way abridged except for participation in rebellion or other crime the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens 21 years of age in such state
	So what does that mean?
	The 14th Amendment basically says that if a state abridges the right to vote, it was written to stop southern states from stopping black people from voting, that the federal government could then abridge the voting power of that state.
	Congressional reapportionment would take place wherein there would be a two variable formula and each variable would require citizenship data.
	So in other words, in order to make possible the implementation of this clause, you do have to have an accurate count of the number of people in the country legally in a particular district.
	That would be the case.
	That the White House, that the executive branch is mandated to do this by the 14th Amendment, Section 2.
	That seems fairly clear-cut, actually.
	So that is the less controversial way of doing it.
	There's a solid legal rationale.
	It seems fairly unchallengeable.
	What is the Supreme Court going to say?
	We will not allow you to ask a question that you are constitutionally mandated to ask so that you can actually fulfill the obligations of Amendment 14?
	That is the less controversial way of doing it.
	The more controversial way of doing it is Trump just says, screw you to the Supreme Court and goes ahead and puts a censorship question on there.
	Doesn't offer any rationale and says, listen, we have the power under the Census Act.
	If Congress wants to deprive us of that power, it can do so at any time, but we are not bound by extraordinary judicial decisions.
	Now, on the one hand, I like the first move because it is indeed less controversial legally and it's a pretty obvious out.
	On the other hand, I have long been an advocate of the notion of departmentalism.
	Departmentalism is the basic idea that the Supreme Court does not get to tell all of the other branches that its interpretation of the Constitution is paramount.
	There's a difference, in other words, between judicial review and judicial supremacy.
	So judicial review is the idea that the Supreme Court and the judiciary of the United States has the ability to decide whether it will apply a law that is in conflict with the Constitution of the United States.
	But that is not judicial supremacy, meaning that the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution itself is not paramount.
	They are not kings.
	They are not caddies sitting under trees deciding how the Constitution is to be applied to everyone.
	That the Supreme Court does not get to tell every other branch how to do its business, especially because they're unelected.
	How would that work in practice?
	Well, it would work like this.
	Let's say that there is a piece of legislation that the Supreme Court found to be unconstitutional.
	Well, then the judiciary of the United States would simply refuse to apply that law at all.
	It would become inoperative in the judicial system.
	And what would happen if the other branches decided that, let's say, the executive branch wanted to go ahead with something like the census question?
	Well, then it falls to Congress, doesn't it?
	Which is where it should be.
	That's where it should be.
	If Congress wants to take back power from the presidency, they can do that at any time by revising the Census Act.
	That is all they have to do.
	This is a political question.
	The Marbury v. Madison decision, which has been, there's a solid case to be made, it has been misread for years to suggest judicial supremacy rather than judicial review.
	The Marbury vs. Madison decision is a very untenable decision legally.
	That is not just my opinion, that's the opinion of folks like Alexander Bickel, former Yale law professor who wrote a very famous book called The Least Dangerous Branch.
	It's the opinion of University of Minnesota law professor Michael Stokes Paulson.
	Judge Lorne and Hand were the most famous Jurists of the 20th century made the same point.
	Marbury v. Madison is a very, very weak decision.
	And the idea that the judiciary is paramount and has the sole authority to decide the role of the Constitution in American life is obviously not supported by either law or theory.
	When you read the Federalist Papers, even folks who believe that Federalist 78 by Alexander Hamilton backs the notion of judicial supremacy ignore the part where Hamilton specifically says, if the judiciary starts to Use will instead of power, it would obviate the need for a separate branch called the judiciary.
	They would then become a dictatorship.
	So judicial review, departmentalism, in which basically each department gets to decide which, how the constitution is to be interpreted.
	And then there's interplay between the various branches of government.
	That seems more like the checks and balances the founders had in mind than the artificially created power of judicial supremacy, which really didn't come into full fledge Until, like, the Dred Scott decision, the worst decision in the history of the United States.
	So, we'll talk, I'm sure, a little bit more about this a little bit later when we find out exactly what President Trump is doing here.
	Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
	So, speaking of checks and balances, the basis for checks and balances in American legal theory comes largely courtesy of Baron de Montesquieu.
	You've all heard Montesquieu's name, if you've had any level of familiarity with founding-era ideology.
	Montesquieu was the philosopher who was cited most often in founding-era papers in founding era documents.
	Monski, of course, a French philosopher.
	He wrote a book called The Spirit of the Laws.
	It's a seven and 800 page book.
	There's a very good Cambridge edition that cleans it up just a little bit, or translates it at least in the clearest possible way.
	And Montesquieu's two basic contributions to American philosophy are the idea of political liberty, meaning that government is there to provide a sort of safe backdrop for you to exercise your liberty, but liberty is not you get to do whatever you want.
	Liberty has to be circumscribed by your ability to harm somebody else.
	And also the idea of checks and balances.
	So checks and balances come directly from Montesquieu.
	Montesquieu talks specifically about the need for power to balance power and ambition to balance ambition.
	Half of the Federalist Papers is straight Montesquieu.
	So this is, it's worth the read.
	It is not an easy read.
	There's a lot of history.
	It's sort of the first comparative political work.
	So he tries to compare the various legal systems of everything from China to India to France to Britain and tries to figure out what is the best system.
	He talks about what he terms sort of the tripartite distinction in governments between despotism monarchy and republicanism he talks about sort of the motivating factors behind each he says the monarchy is driven by a sense of honor that despotism is driven by power and that republicanism is driven by a sense of virtue uh and there's a lot there it's well it's well worth the read i'm using it heavily i'm writing another book right now all about rights and duties and uh montesquieu comes into play
	so give that a read if you're interested in founding era philosophy okay time for some things that i hate Oh.
	Okay, so, thing that I hate, number one.
	One of the things that you are starting to see in American life is the decline of religion, but religion itself is not declining.
	It is just being supplanted by either a sort of atavistic, narcissistic Weird self-focus, or it's being supplanted with political religion.
	And those are the two substitutes.
	There's the political religion of leftism, which has its own system of virtue and penalties.
	It has its own system of sin.
	Sins that can never be expiated, by the way.
	If you ever commit a sin under the system of leftism, it can never be wiped away unless you do full penance.
	And even then, we will still hold the sin over your head if you become politically unavailable or you do something that crosses the party line, then you will be, the sin will be brought back up and used against you.
	Political religion has become the way that we do our politics right now, which is why you see such near religious feeling about politics.
	You're starting to see people who don't actually have church communities and don't talk with their friends and don't talk with their neighbors.
	And they're supplanting this with a sense of religious virtue when it comes to an undoubted religious virtue when it comes to their own politics.
	So if you disagree with prevailing views about how climate change should be dealt with, namely with vast transnational regulation, if you oppose that, then you are a denier.
	I mean, this is religious type language.
	You are then a denier even if you accept that climate change is happening just like the IPCC says it is.
	If you disagree with the left's prevailing wisdom about income inequality, then you have sinned, and you are in all likelihood a plutocrat and a white supremacist.
	If you are somebody who believes that the chief method of escaping poverty in the United States is not railing against phantom institutional racism, and when I say phantom, I don't mean that racism doesn't exist in American society.
	It very clearly does.
	I'm saying that institutional racism, meaning laws on the books, Things you can point out where you say this institution is acting in this racist manner specifically designed to harm this class of people.
	You supplant that for if you say that is less effective as a strategy it is first of all not true and second of all it is less effective as a strategy than encouraging people to make proper individual decisions.
	If you say that you have violated the left's sense of political sin.
	So there is this political religion out there and leftism feels it in abundance, which is why you see from the left the sort of Megan Rapinoe attitude, which is, I'm not going to talk to anybody who disagrees with me.
	They are sinners and they must be cast into the hell flames.
	And then, there is actual paganism.
	And there is a return.
	Listen, people have religious instincts.
	The religious instinct is twofold.
	One, to put an organized principle on all of life, to look at the patterns around us in the world, and try to discern those patterns, and try to figure out what exactly is going on around us.
	This is what the human brain does.
	And that leads, in some cases, to the idea of a unifying creator who created a natural plan.
	This is how you get to the idea of natural law.
	You can also get to the idea that there is some phantom hand of economics that stands behind everything.
	So that instinct, that is a religious instinct to try and put an order on everything.
	It also happens to lead to beliefs about science.
	So it's a good instinct, but it has to be channeled in the proper direction.
	And then there is the other aspect of religious thought, which is the need for Believe in something beyond that which we can see.
	They need to believe something, because here's the problem.
	You have that religious instinct to put a pattern on everything, but there are a lot of things that don't fit the pattern.
	So where exactly do you put those things?
	Well, in the religious, kind of traditionally Judeo-Christian worldview, you say, listen, God has a plan, I have a plan, my plan is not God's plan, God's plan is beyond me.
	But then there's still the need for mysticism for people who don't believe.
	In the Judeo-Christian system or in a monotheistic system at all.
	And so they find that need for a mystical outreach to something beyond them.
	Something beyond their own flesh and bones.
	And they find this in some of the weirdest places.
	Lately, they've been seeking it in everything from kind of self-help gurus to healing crystals.
	There's an article in the LA Times today called, How Millennials Replaced Religion with Astrology and Crystals.
	This makes sense, by the way, because again, the religious instinct, in some ways, that first religious instinct to put order on chaos, It's very similar to the scientific instinct.
	And so science and religion don't have to be in conflict.
	In fact, I make the case in my book The Right Side of History that Judeo-Christian religion combined with Greek teleology actually led to the rise of Western science.
	And that, in fact, you could combine Greek teleology with other monotheistic religions and probably create Science, that would be just as good if you could maintain that balance.
	But when you get away from the idea of a god who stands behind an ordered universe, then you throw away science too.
	Once you get to the universe is chaotic and you just sort of worship at the altar of the chaos, you get back to astrology and crystals.
	So here's what the LA Times says, quote, I love myself.
	I am beautiful.
	It was an unseasonably chilly night for June in Los Angeles.
	About three dozen people, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, were spending their Friday evening lying on yoga mats on the back patio of a shop a few blocks from Hollywood Forever Cemetery and the Paramount Pictures lot.
	Attendees had been invited to bring whatever they needed to make the space cozy.
	Blankets, pillows, crystals.
	I am powerful.
	Anna Lilia was leading them in affirmations, closing out a 90-minute breathwork session celebrating the summer solstice.
	I am a bright light.
	I am ready to be seen.
	Most days, Lilia works with individual clients.
	In the evenings, she teaches classes or puts on events such as the Solstice Gathering.
	She first got into breathwork four years ago and started taking classes to become a teacher six months later.
	If you've never done it before, it's a mix of breathing exercises and guided meditations meant to relax you and help connect with your inner thoughts, a cross between the last 10 minutes of a yoga class and a therapy session that takes place entirely in your head.
	She's one of a growing number of young people, largely millennials, though the trend extends to younger Gen Xers, now cresting 40, And down to Gen Z, the oldest of whom are freshly minted college grads.
	Now, the L.A.
	Times is a journalistic outlet.
	You would think that they would say, embracing crap like tarot, astrology, energy healing, and crystals.
	like tarot, like tarot, tarot, astrology, astrology, meditation, energy healing, and crystals.
	Now, the LA Times is a journalistic outlet.
	You would think that they would say embracing crap like tarot, astrology, energy healing, and crystals.
	Meditation is an actual, like, there's some scientific proof that meditation helps relax you, but energy healing, crystals, tarot, astrology, all this is garbage.
	And no, they don't particularly care if you think it's woo-woo or weird.
	Most millennials claim not to take any of it too seriously themselves.
	They dabble.
	They find what they like.
	They take what works for them and leave the rest.
	Evoking consternation from buttoned-up outsiders is far from a drawback.
	It's a fringe benefit.
	The cause behind the spiritual shift is a combination of factors.
	In more than a dozen interviews for this story, with people ranging in age from 18 to their early 40s, a common theme emerged.
	They were raised with one set of religious beliefs, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, but as they became adults, they felt that faith didn't completely represent who they were or what they believed.
	I'll tell you what the common thread there is.
	Probably they grew up in not particularly religious households, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, for sure Jewish.
	Okay, I'll speak to Jewish.
	The vast majority of people who are doing this did not grow up in religious Jewish households.
	The Jews who are doing this.
	They grew up in reformed Jewish households, maybe conservative Jewish households, likely reconstructionist Jewish households.
	In other words, households that didn't actually explain...
	What Judaism was, what its standards were, what the spirituality of Judaism is, that had watered down religion to the point where it was basically a soft form of spirituality anyway, and then they just went and searched for another soft form of spirituality that didn't come along with the judgmentalism.
	That is really what people are going for.
	And you're seeing this is spanning the oceans as well.
	There's a report today from the UK that says that less than 1% of young people identify as Church of England in the UK, which was the official Church of England, Only 1% of people aged 18-24 identify as Church of England according to the British Social Attitude Survey for 2018.
	Even among over 75, the most religious age group, only 1 in 3 people describe themselves as Church of England.
	52% of the public now say they do not belong to any religion.
	It was 31% in 1983 when the survey began tracking religious belief.
	The number of people identifying as Christian has now fallen from 66% to 38% in Britain.
	Now there are a lot of people who say, who cares?
	What's the big deal?
	The reason that it's a big deal is because, again, there is a human instinct for religious belief, and it is going to be filled by something, whether it is a religious following of a political figure, which is what you are increasingly seeing, whether it is religious following of a political ideal, the substitution of the environment for God, for example, the substitution of particular ideas of equality for ideas of an ordered universe.
	And that's bad.
	So there was a point in human history when religion was politics.
	When rulership was done via theocracy, and when most of the wars that we had were internecine religious wars, when it was Protestant vs. Catholic, and Catholic vs. Muslim, and Muslim and Catholic vs. Jew.
	And that was very, very bad.
	Religious warfare is the worst kind of warfare because there is literally no way to have a conversation.
	You cannot have a conversation with somebody when your belief is that they are going directly to hell, and you're going directly to heaven, and that is the subject of the conversation.
	You can't have conversations that way.
	Religious conflict is religious warfare.
	But when politics falls back into the realm of religion, undoubted religious belief systems, you're going to end up with exactly that same sort of conflict again.
	So we moved away from religious conflict and toward political conflict.
	And political conflict was us having secular arguments with one another about right and wrong.
	A lot of those arguments were rooted in the Judeo-Christian value system.
	In fact, nearly all of them were.
	But those arguments taking place in that common framework of a value system rather than a specific doctrinal belief system, that led to the rise of small-r republicanism and elections and the idea that, sure, we can agree to disagree.
	And now what we are seeing is as that religious instinct wanes, as people no longer fulfill that religious instinct by going to church or by going to synagogue, instead they're fulfilling it with politics itself.
	So we took politics and we removed religion from it.
	Except for sort of the over-lasting morality of religion.
	And now, politics is becoming religion.
	It's its own religion now.
	And so you're going to return to the religious warfare of the past, where your religious belief is defined by your politics itself.
	And I don't mean like you're a member of a church that's political.
	I mean that the politics itself is the religion.
	And everyone who disagrees with you is cast into eternal hellfire.
	That is where we're going.
	It's very, very bad for a small-r republic.
	It is very bad for a democracy to turn politics into religion.
	Incredibly, incredibly dangerous because there is nothing to bind us anymore.
	And that's the other fact.
	As religion declines, religion is one of those areas where people find commonality in diversity.
	You can have a diverse group of people if they are all oriented toward the same thing.
	So Robert Putnam, sociologist over at Harvard University, he talks about the fact that ethnic diversity is not necessarily strengthening to a community.
	In fact, he uses the sort of throwaway line, but it's not really throwaway, it's sociology.
	He uses the survey line, the database line, that as ethnic diversity increases in a community, the only two things that increase are protest marches and television watching.
	But he says that what can unify a community is a central sense of identity, a sense that we are all oriented in the same direction, that we are all praying to the same God, for example, that we are all going to the same church.
	So diversity is enriching and is good when you share a set of common values.
	So in a church, in the army.
	So what is that set of common values going to be?
	We've seen a bunch of attempts to create a set of common values.
	So nationalism has been posited as a possible solution to this, a nationalistic ideal.
	But the problem is that nationalism isn't necessarily good or evil.
	There can be German nationalism circa 1930.
	There can be American nationalism circa 1941.
	These are very different nationalisms and one is good and one is really, really not.
	It depends on the nature of the nationalism.
	So can that fill the gap?
	Only if it turns out that the nationalism itself is a vessel that is filled with a philosophy, a philosophy rooted in exactly the Judeo-Christian value systems that are now being thrown away.
	So I'm not sure empty nationalism does the trick.
	How about the constitutional values?
	Now, I've said that you can believe constitutional values.
	You can believe the philosophies of the founding without being a religious human being.
	In fact, many of the founders were tended toward deism.
	You can do that.
	But they were running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian value system.
	The vast majority of our founders were, in fact, practicing Christians.
	They certainly did not disdain religion in the same way that our politicians do now and as much of our population does.
	As we throw away the fundamental bases for the philosophy that created the West, can that philosophy itself last in an era of secularism?
	I'm not sure that it can.
	I mean, this is what my book, The Right Side of History, is all about.
	So, and then finally, there's a third factor.
	As you throw away religion, as I mentioned earlier, as you throw away the idea of an ordered universe, where the human mind is capable of understanding things around it, these are religious principles.
	These are principles that you cannot suss out.
	You cannot rationality these things.
	You cannot use your rationality to get to these fundamental principles.
	You have to just assume them.
	Once you get rid of those fundamental principles, you end up back in this bizarre, paganistic world where everything is defined by you, yourself.
	The only perception that matters is your subjective perception.
	And so, if you believe in healing crystals, then healing crystals are true.
	If you believe in energy healing, then energy healing is true.
	It doesn't matter.
	Science, which is an objective standard, which puts, again, a framework of logic on the universe, that no longer matters because we've thrown away the framework of logic.
	Why should the universe operate by laws or rules?
	What suggests that it does?
	We're playing with fire here, and we are in the middle of one of the great experiments in human history, and that experiment is whether you can take the moral and philosophic basis of the richest, most powerful, most progressive system in world history, throw away the basis, and keep the rest.
	I am very doubtful that that is going to be the case as we move forward in time.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, and then we will be back here tomorrow as well.
	We'll see you then.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
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	Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Senior Producer, Jonathan Hay.
	Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
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	Edited by Adam Sievitz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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	Production Assistant, Nick Sheehan.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, Beto O'Rourke went and met with some refugees and immigrants and he proceeded to trash America, America's racist, horrible country, so on and so forth.
	What a great guy Beto O'Rourke is.
	We'll talk about that today.
	Also, AOC, speaking of great people, AOC basically implies that Nancy Pelosi is racist, which It's kind of hilarious, but also disgusting, and we'll talk about that.
	Finally, I want to discuss the very common modern practice of filming troubled people in the midst of mental breakdowns so that we can laugh at them online.

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