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July 12, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:19:11

The Secret Plan | Ep. 816

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	AOC's chief of staff says the quiet part out loud, Nancy Pelosi warns illegal immigrants how to avoid ICE, and we check the mailbag.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	We have a lot to get to on today's show.
	The big breaking news, of course, is that the Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, is out.
	Thanks to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he has now resigned.
	His resignation will be effective within the week.
	Basically, he has seven days to get out.
	Now, Trump is saying that this was Alex Acosta's decision.
	The truth is that it may not have been.
	Acosta was creating so much pressure for Trump that it made a lot of sense for him to go.
	There are just too many Unanswered questions about how exactly the sweetheart deal with alleged pedophile Jeffrey Epstein went down.
	He's a registered sex offender in several states Jeffrey Epstein He got this pretty sweet deal from the prosecutors in the state of Florida Alex Acosta was one of those prosecutors now the case against Acosta that he had cut some sort of sweetheart deal It wasn't quite as cut and dry as I think a lot of people would like to make it.
	There are a few contentions that Acosta made in his own defense that are relevant and may, in fact, be true.
	One is that we just haven't seen all the underlying evidence in the case.
	We don't know how strong that evidence was.
	There were a lot of witnesses who said that Acosta did things to them, but that doesn't necessarily amount to a sex trafficking charge.
	It may amount to a sexual molestation charge on the state level, but that's a state-level charge.
	The trafficking charge is the federal charge.
	And the prostitution across state lines charge, that is the federal charge and that's what Acosta was tasked with.
	The real question that I have is why the state of Florida didn't go after Epstein.
	If it was so cut and dry that there were all these women coming forward and they had the evidence that all these women were telling the truth, why was he not in jail for statutory rape at the very least for an extended period of time or child molestation for an extended period of time?
	Those are state crimes.
	In any case, Acosta made the defense that other prosecutors signed off on this, the judge signed off on this, that deals like this happen on a fairly regular basis.
	That may be true.
	I've talked to several prosecutors.
	Some say true, some say not true.
	There are a couple things that he said in his own defense that do not ring true.
	He said, for example, that he only stepped in with the federal government and the power of the DA when it became clear that the state was not going to prosecute Epstein.
	That's an odd contention because the feds and the state work on different levels.
	You don't have to wait for the state to not prosecute in order to prosecute at the federal level.
	That would actually be looking like double jeopardy if that were the case.
	But nonetheless, that particular argument by Acosta didn't hold water.
	Also, there are a lot of unanswered questions about all of this, such as, was it pressure from the defense attorneys on the prosecutors that led to this deal?
	What evidence did they actually have?
	Were they trying to shut down the FBI investigation?
	And all the rest.
	So Acosta basically had to go.
	In just a second, we'll tell you what President Trump had to say and what Alex Acosta had to say.
	Suffice it to say, once Acosta is gone, this is no longer a Trump administration scandal.
	And then the question is going to become, okay, who else was involved?
	And what exactly was Jeffrey Epstein doing?
	The going theory right now, the kind of hot theory on Wall Street right now, is that Jeffrey Epstein Who was purportedly a billionaire, and probably was not a billionaire.
	That he was actually making his money, this is the theory, from blackmailing people.
	That he was trafficking in underage girls with very famous people, and then he was blackmailing them with tape of that information.
	Which is an astonishing story, if true.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
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	Okay, so here is what President Trump Had to say, according to CNBC, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta said on Friday that he will resign amid controversy over the way he handled the sex crimes case against wealthy businessman Jeffrey Epstein a decade ago when he was U.S.
	Attorney for Southern Florida.
	Acosta made the announcement to reporters while standing next to President Trump outside the White House.
	Trump said Acosta had called him Friday morning and that it was Acosta's decision to quit, which may or may not be true.
	You know, it's quite possible that Acosta looked at the media coverage.
	He figured that Trump was going to cut his legs out from under him anyway.
	Better to quit than to get fired.
	Trump said, this was him, not me, because I'm with him.
	He then said, I said, you don't have to do this.
	Acosta told reporters he did not want his involvement in Epstein's controversy to overshadow the administration's accomplishments.
	Acosta said he will officially resign a week after his announcement.
	Deputy Labor Secretary Patrick Patrick Pazella will take his place in an acting capacity, said President Trump.
	Trump tweeted out, "Alex was a great Secretary of Labor.
	His service is truly appreciated." In his resignation letter to Trump, Acosta said, "It has meant so much to me that you have offered your steadfast support in our private discussions and in your public remarks, but your agenda, putting the American people first, must avoid any distractions." That resignation came only a couple of days after Acosta gave that press conference in which he had defended his controversial non-prosecution agreement that he cut with Epstein's lawyers in 2007 when he was the top prosecutor in Miami.
	The issue resurfaced on July 6th when the politically connected Epsteins, whose friends have included Trump and former President Bill Clinton, was arrested on sex trafficking charges by federal prosecutors in New York last week.
	By the way, speaking of Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton has gone completely silent on follow-up questions about the statement that he put out earlier this week.
	Clinton had put out a statement earlier this week saying, I was only on four trips on Epstein's airplane, Secret Service was there the whole time, and then folks at the Washington Examiner uncovered the fact that he was on at least seven trips with Epstein, and that Secret Service, in fact, probably was not present the whole time.
	They asked the Clinton camp about all of this, and Clinton went completely silent, which is suspicious and upsetting in every possible way.
	So, Alex Acosta is out.
	That's not going to stop this thing from moving forward.
	Now, here's the fascinating part.
	What'll be fascinating is to see whether now that Acosta is out, the media coverage just drops off a cliff.
	Because remember, in 2007, 2008, Epstein was a very prominent political player.
	I mean, he'd been giving money to all sorts of big-name groups, all sorts of big-name politicians.
	He was hobnobbing with the Clintons.
	He was hobnobbing with major Hollywood figures.
	And no one cared when he got prosecuted.
	Now he's getting prosecuted again.
	And because President Trump is in office, and because he was friendly with Trump, and because he had cut a deal with Trump's Secretary of Labor, this became a national story again.
	Well, now that new information is coming out that may implicate some of the Democrats' favorites, it'll be interesting to see whether the media just get off the horse completely.
	Whether they say, OK, we're not going to cover this thing anymore.
	Now it's over.
	It doesn't impact Trump.
	So therefore, it's not relevant.
	That will be fascinating to see.
	Now, again, there's all sorts of mystery that surrounds all of this.
	There's gonna be a lot of other ugly material that comes out, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
	And Bloomberg.
	The mystery surrounding Jeffrey Epstein's private island continues.
	Quote, from the harbor on St.
	Thomas, the boat skims eastward across the crystalline Caribbean, takes a turn, and there it is, the palm-fringed paradise that was the private redoubt of Jeffrey Epstein.
	An American flag on a towering pole flutters in the breeze.
	A blue and white building that resembles a temple sits atop one of the hills.
	The pool and cabanas are visible in the difference.
	No traffic on the winding dirt roads.
	It's quiet now on the island of Little St.
	James.
	Epstein dubbed it Little St.
	Jeff's.
	Locals have other names for it.
	Pedophile Island and Orgy Island.
	This is where Epstein, convicted of sex crimes a decade ago in Florida, now charged in New York with trafficking girls as young as 14, repaired his escape from the toil of cultivating the rich and powerful.
	San Francisco Chronicle and Bloomberg report, few here doubt that Epstein is wealthy.
	He routinely touched down on St.
	Thomas aboard his private jet before being whisked by helicopter to his 72-acre retreat.
	He spent many millions after buying it for about $8 million in 1998, carving roads, planting scores of 40-foot palms, building several vias and temple structure, which was topped by a gold-colored dome until Hurricane Irma blew it off, according to locals.
	Yet the size and source of Epstein's fortune are as much a source of speculation here as they are on Wall Street.
	There's no question that he has assets that are worth an awful lot of money.
	He has companies that hold his Gulfstream jets.
	He obviously owns a townhouse in New York that's worth more than a hundred million dollars.
	currencies.
	Reid Weingarten, a lawyer for Epstein, didn't immediately return a voicemail message seeking comment for the story.
	There's no question that he has assets that are worth an awful lot of money.
	He has companies that hold his Gulfstream jets.
	He obviously owns a townhouse in New York that's worth more than $100 million.
	But it is unclear where exactly he was getting that money in the first place.
	The only unusual aspect of the main residence a former worker said he was aware of because they've interviewed people who worked on Epstein's estate here were the security boxes in The level of secrecy around a steel safe in Epstein's office in particular suggested it contained much more than just money.
	Outside of an occasional visit by a housekeeper, no one was allowed in these rooms.
	So obviously everybody wondering what's in that safe will have to deploy Geraldo Rivera to go find out what exactly is in the safe.
	All of this is deeply suspicious, of course.
	New victims are coming forward on a near-daily basis with regard to Epstein.
	The fact that this guy escaped prosecution for so long is truly astonishing.
	According to the Miami Herald, at least a dozen new victims have come forward to claim they were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, even as the multi-millionaire money manager tries to convince a federal judge to allow him to await a sex trafficking trial from the comfort of the same $77 million Manhattan mansion where he's accused of luring teenage girls into unwanted sex acts, apparently, since Saturday.
	Four separate women have reached out to New York lawyer David Boies, and at least ten other women have approached other lawyers who have represented dozens of Epstein's alleged victims in the past.
	Jack Scarola, a Palm Beach attorney, said that at least five women, all of whom were minors at the time of their alleged encounters with Epstein, have reached out either to him or Fort Lauderdale lawyer Brad Edwards.
	Skarola said, the people we are speaking to are underage in Florida and in New York.
	They are not individuals whose claims have previously been part of any law enforcement investigation.
	All of this could get quite ugly.
	But will the media's interest wane now that the Trump administration is really no longer involved?
	We will find out.
	Come Monday, if Epstein is out of the headlines, you'll know that a lot of the coverage here was driven by something a little bit different than what people said it was driven by, namely outrage over the treatment of underage women.
	It should be driven by that.
	I don't think the media's coverage was really, really driven by it.
	We'll find out, though.
	Maybe I'm wrong.
	Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to The big political story of the day, which is the Democrats really veering hard to the left.
	I know this has been the story of the last few years, but they're doing it on a daily basis, and it's getting more and more extreme.
	We'll get to that in just a second.
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	OK, so the Democrats are now saying the quiet part out loud increasingly, and it's it's amazing.
	All they had to do was not be crazy.
	It's all they had to do, and they were completely incapable of doing it.
	And so they continue to be utterly and And completely insane.
	So, here is a story from the Washington Post about Saikat Chakrabarty, who is the supposed genius behind AOC.
	According to the Washington Post magazine, I mean, the kind of glowing coverage that radical leftists receive from the mainstream media is truly incredible.
	It's a long piece titled, AOC's Chief of Change.
	Saikat Chakrabarty isn't just running her office, he's guiding a movement.
	Ooh!
	I remember when they used to say this sort of stuff about staffers from Paul Ryan.
	There'd be a staffer from Paul Ryan putting out a big plan on how to reform entitlements, and the Washington Post would run huge stories about how this nearly anonymous staffer was actually supremely powerful, a genius, wonderful, lovely.
	The media's love affair with the radical left is the great undercover story in American politics, except by folks on talk radio, people in the podcast world.
	Here's the story.
	On a Wednesday morning in late May, emissaries of two of the strongest political voices on climate change convened at a coffee shop a few blocks from the U.S.
	Capitol.
	Saikhat Chakrabarty, chief of staff to Representative Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, was there to meet Sam Ricketts, climate director for Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who is running for president almost exclusively on a platform of combating global warming.
	A newly released plank of Inslee's climate change agenda had caught the attention of Chakrabarty and his boss, who had tweeted that Inslee's, quote, climate plan is the most serious and comprehensive one to address our crisis in the 2020 field.
	Pleased by the positive reception from the demands and Green New Deal wing of the climate struggle, Ricketts had set up this meeting with Chakrabarty to establish a personal connection and share approaches to climate advocacy.
	Now, there's a punchline to this story.
	Here's the punchline.
	Just wait for it.
	You ready?
	Here's the punchline for the story.
	So Chakrabarti is meeting with the climate director for Washington, Governor Jay Inslee, one of the million anonymous people running for president on the Democratic side of the aisle.
	Inslee's big spiel is that he only cares about climate change.
	Chakrabarti told this staffer, Sam Ricketts, quote, congrats on the rollout.
	That was pretty great.
	Ricketts said, thank you again for the kudos you guys offered.
	We wanted to be a pace setter in the field.
	I think we're there now.
	I wanted to ask you for input in addition to hearing what you guys are working on.
	Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure.
	He said the interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all.
	Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an intensive poker face, reports the Washington Post.
	Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?
	Chakrabarti continued.
	Because we really think of it as a how do you change the entire economy thing.
	So that's saying the quiet part out loud right there.
	One of the suspicions of people on the right for a long time has been the global warming movement.
	This entire, we have to restructure the entire global economy in order to bring down the climate.
	And then people on the right point out, well, even if you did all the things you are talking about, that would not actually lower climate change in any marked degree.
	You could completely devastate the economy of the United States.
	China and India would still be providing a huge bulk of the carbon emissions that are allegedly leading to global warming and are leading global warming by International Panel on Climate Change Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Estimates The suspicion has been that it really isn't about lowering the climate.
	That it really has been about a Marxist redistributionist scheme whereby you take down the American economy and then you redistribute those resources to quote-unquote poorer countries.
	Or you undercut capitalism in favor of a global redistributionist system.
	That's really what this is about.
	And Chakrabarty is saying this out loud.
	Chakrabarty is saying what we are doing is we are using global warming as basically the opening for us to restructure the entire American economy.
	Now, Ricketts, who's the staffer for Inslee, I love this.
	He responds, yeah.
	Then he said, no.
	Then he said, I think it's a duel.
	It's both rising to the challenge that is existential around climate, and it is building an economy that contains more prosperity, more sustainability in that prosperity, more broadly shared prosperity, equitability, and justice throughout.
	Chakrabarti liked the answer.
	He said, There's more to come on this front and other key components.
	We're going to be rolling forward.
	Speak to some of the key justice elements of this, ensuring every community has got a part of this.
	So notice how that conversation goes.
	Now, this is all taking place in front of a Washington Post reporter.
	So they are being a lot more open than you would think they would be talking in front of a Washington Post reporter, except that the Washington Post reporter is busy drooling into a cup, apparently.
	As all of this happens.
	So Chakrabarty says, we're going to restructure the entire American economy and climate change is basically just a lever, a public relations lever for us to do exactly that.
	And then Inslee's guy's like, well, no, but yeah.
	And then Chakrabarty is saying, well, you know what?
	Let's go even further.
	And then Ricketts gets excited.
	He's like, yeah, let's do that, man.
	Let's restructure the American economy.
	Nationwide economic mobilization, justice, community.
	The Washington Post says Ricketts kept laying down cords in Chakrabarty's key.
	It was an acknowledgment of just how far inside establishment Washington the progressive movement has reached.
	Everything is intersectional now, including decarbonization.
	Chakrabarty told the Washington Post reporter, I like to show my cards and see people's reactions.
	I just wanted to get a sense of where they're coming from.
	They seem open and hungry and want to do stuff.
	In my mind, an ideal situation is we have a president surrounded by a bunch of people who are constantly thinking, how could we go bigger, bolder, faster, better on everything?
	I don't know if Inslee's going to be president, but if he runs a really good campaign, maybe he ends up running a big agency.
	What's the mindset he's going to bring to that agency?
	Amazing.
	Wow.
	And then, of course, we get 4,000 words of absolute drool with regard to Chakrabarty from the Washington Post.
	Now, the hilarious thing is that Nancy Pelosi and the other members of the Democratic Party want Chakrabarty out.
	They want him out because he is promoting AOC's notion that Nancy Pelosi and the moderate Democrats are a bunch of racists.
	He's the one tweeting out that they're a bunch of Jim Crow racists.
	So a bunch of black Democrats today were ripping on the Justice Democrats, who are largely led by Chakrabarty.
	And saying, why are you guys all only attacking black Democrats from the South?
	You know, you called Nancy Pelosi a racist for opposing you.
	You seem kind of racist for opposing us.
	So it's an intersectional crap fight over in the Democratic Party.
	Totally what they deserve.
	But this is what happens when you spin down that wild left rabbit hole.
	We'll get to more of the wild left rabbit hole in just one second.
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	The left has moved so far to the left now, the Chakrabarty being posited as a hero, openly saying that the Green New Deal is not about being green, it is much more about the New Deal.
	That all this really is, is about restructuring the entirety of the American economy.
	You think that's a strong pitch to the vast majority of Americans who are looking at rising wages, who are looking at a Dow Jones Industrial Average above 27,000, who are looking at an unemployment rate of 3.7%, and saying to themselves, what we really need is a radical restructuring of this economy.
	You think this is a strong pitch?
	But this is where Democrats are going.
	This is where they're going.
	They're going with, we want to restructure the entire American economy and also we're going to call each other and you racist.
	No, I have to say, I am really enjoying the spectacle of AOC going after Pelosi and calling Pelosi racist because Pelosi, as we pointed out on yesterday's show, has been downplaying AOC's impact inside the caucus and telling AOC to stop attacking fellow Democrats.
	That's been delicious.
	So AOC has been attacking Pelosi.
	She said yesterday that not only is Nancy Pelosi a racist, basically, she said that she's attacking women of color.
	And I'm not saying you're a racist.
	I'm just saying you're attacking women of color.
	Which means you're a racist.
	And then she followed that one up by saying, her attacking us at a time when we're receiving death threats.
	AOC is using the exact same tactics on Nancy Pelosi that she has used on people like me, on people on Fox News, on anyone who has ever said anything negative about AOC.
	She's using the exact same tactics on Nancy Pelosi.
	What's hilarious is that Democrats are now coming out and saying, this is really disingenuous for doing this to Nancy Pelosi.
	Right.
	It was disingenuous the whole time, you rubes.
	It was disingenuous.
	It was a lie the entire time.
	You were happy when it was knocking on people you don't like.
	But as soon as she's knocking on Nancy Pelosi, then it's, God, this lady's out of control.
	What's she doing?
	Why is she playing the race card on Nancy Pelosi?
	That seems dishonest.
	Yes, that's right.
	It is dishonest.
	It was dishonest the entire time.
	It was dishonest the entire time.
	But you're only allowed to say it, I guess, when it targets Nancy Pelosi.
	Now, speaking of AOC and Nancy Pelosi, the truth is that the only thing that Nancy Pelosi really dislikes about AOC is exactly what you see in that article from her chief of staff, which is that AOC keeps saying all the quiet parts out loud.
	When it comes to policy, Nancy Pelosi doesn't radically disagree with AOC on any of this stuff.
	She just thinks that AOC is pie in the sky and doesn't have any way of achieving what AOC is going for.
	But on policy, there are not a lot of disagreements.
	Let's take an example.
	So AOC now says that she wants to axe the entire Department of Homeland Security.
	Now, I am fine with the idea of devolving a lot of the services of Homeland Security back to the Secretary of Defense.
	I thought the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the first place was just the creation of another giant federal bureaucracy that would grow and grow because every department does.
	But when AOC says she wants to axe the Department of Homeland Security, she doesn't mean she then wants to re-delegate all of the parts back to their original departments.
	According to the San Francisco Chronicle, although some activists have urged the government to abolish its immigration enforcement arm, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out in favor of eradicating the entire Department of Homeland Security.
	Not replacing it, just eradicating it.
	The department's creation after the terrorist attack of September 11th significantly threatened American civil liberties, Ocasio-Cortez said.
	She said she wanted to get rid of Homeland Security.
	She said people sounded the alarm back then that these agencies are extrajudicial, that they lack effective oversight.
	It is baked into the core foundational structure of these agencies.
	So she's not talking about how she would replace their services.
	She just wants it gone.
	Okay, so who exactly is then going to protect the homeland?
	When I say I don't want extra bureaucracy, it's because I think we don't need an extra department to do the same work.
	When she says she wants to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, she means she wants to disband ICE.
	She wants to get rid of all of the enforcement agencies.
	Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove said that this was, quote, moronic, stupid, naive, and dumb.
	Went direct to the thesaurus and came up with that, which is exactly true.
	Some members of Congress worried that the White House originally was concealing the department's true costs.
	That's true.
	Some conservative Republicans were opposed to it.
	I was not in favor of setting up a DHS at the time, if I recall correctly.
	Still, that is not what Ocasio-Cortez is talking about.
	She's talking about getting rid of the services of the DHS, not re-delegating them.
	Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, is just as radical, or more radical, than AOC.
	Not on DHS, but on ICE.
	How do we know this?
	Because yesterday, Nancy Pelosi released a statement in which she suggested that illegal immigrants basically hide from ICE.
	It's amazing.
	She warned her caucus on Thursday about President Trump's planned immigration raids this weekend.
	She urged members to spread information about undocumented immigrants' legal rights.
	Speaking to closed-door whips, Pelosi urged members to spread the party's Know Your Rights campaign, according to two people in the room.
	Democrats took the same approach earlier this year, Pelosi told members she plans to reach out to religious leaders to encourage them to oppose the efforts, as she did last month.
	Pelosi even issued a statement trying to explain to people that they did not have to allow ICE agents into their homes.
	And she said that if somebody shows up at your house and they ask if there's an illegal immigrant there, you just say you don't have a warrant to come into my house and the illegal immigrant hides upstairs, there's nothing they can do about it.
	There are warrants out against these illegal immigrants.
	The vast majority of people Trump is talking about raiding and arresting are people with outstanding warrants.
	In many of these cases, not merely people who have overstayed their visas, but people who have committed separate crimes and for whom there are outstanding warrants.
	It's an amazing thing to watch Democrats who are now openly stumping for people to escape the hand of the law.
	Pelosi came out in a press conference yesterday and she said that President Trump is quote-unquote terrorizing families.
	It's about values that the president does not seem to share.
	And we saw this morning when he announced his heartless raids on families this coming Sunday.
	And as they prepare to go to church, they feel very threatened and scared by these raids.
	So hopefully the president will think again about it.
	Families belong together.
	Every person in America has rights.
	These families are hardworking members of our communities and our country.
	This brutal action will terrorize children and tear families apart.
	Pelosi is talking about a blanket amnesty right here.
	She's talking about a blanket amnesty.
	Everybody who is in the country illegally now effectively becomes an American citizen who gets to live here forever.
	That is what she is talking about.
	Even people against whom there is an outstanding warrant, because that's who we're talking about here.
	And as I say, most of the people who are going to be targeted are people who have committed Other crimes other than just being in the country illegally.
	So here's what Pelosi did.
	She apparently read from a card at her weekly press conference.
	She said, quote, An ICE deportation warrant is not the same as a search warrant.
	If that is the only document ICE brings to a home raid, agents do not have the legal right to enter a home.
	If ICE agents don't have a warrant signed by a judge, a person may refuse to open the door and let them in.
	So she's trying to tell people exactly how to avoid ICE's legal enforcement actions.
	It's unbelievable.
	Kamala Harris is doing the same thing, of course.
	She appeared on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow, and she made the argument that what President Trump was doing with immigration raids, which, by the way, have taken place under every single president, including under President Obama, she called them a crime against humanity.
	It's a crime against humanity now to arrest people upon whom there is an outstanding warrant, which does raise the question as to what the hell she was doing as Attorney General of California when, presumably, she was authorizing people to be arrested.
	She said, the guy has now got to start distracting people from the fact that he made all these promises that I believe he had no intention of fulfilling.
	He has failed to perform on every level by which we should measure a president.
	And so he's going to create, as he often does, this distraction and do these raids, which is a crime against humanity, I believe, in the way he is coming about this and the way he has been handling the issue when you have babies in cages.
	That's not what this raid is.
	It's not about babies in cages.
	It's about people who have outstanding warrants against them.
	I mean, this is radical, radical stuff.
	In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is doing the same thing.
	She says we'll never tolerate ICE tearing our families apart.
	Lightfoot said the threat of raids has forced illegal immigrants to hide in fear.
	She said the Chicago PD will not cooperate with ICE in detaining residents, nor will ICE have access to any Chicago police databases.
	So just to get this straight, according to the Supreme Court and the Obama administration, if a state decides that they are going to help arrest illegal immigrants, as they did in Arizona, that is illegal under the Supremacy Clause.
	If, however, a locality decides to defy ICE and apparently create objective barriers to them arresting people, that's just good policy.
	Harris said I assume that what Mayor Lightfoot is doing in Chicago is similar to what Mayor Breed will do in San Francisco, what Mayor Garcetti will do in Los Angeles, which is to say we don't want the limited resources of local law enforcement to go into the job that the federal government has got to do.
	We want our local law enforcement to be trusted by our community and not be feared by our community.
	She said, I don't want a victim of crime to be afraid to wave down that patrol car when she has been hurt for fear that if she stops, that police officer, she's going to be deported.
	OK, that's a separate issue.
	We are talking about active ICE raids now.
	We're not talking about whether somebody witnesses a crime, reports it, and then we check their immigration status.
	That's a different issue.
	We are talking about active ICE raids that are being obstructed by local governments here.
	By the way, if you speak to any cop anywhere in the country, And this is particularly true in Los Angeles.
	If you want to talk about one of the problematic enforcement issues they have, it is that they cannot arrest illegal immigrants and coordinate with the federal government to do so.
	A disproportionate number of people who are in California's prisons right now are illegal immigrants.
	Are people who came here illegally and were not deported and committed crimes in the United States.
	There are a lot of illegal immigrants who are in American prisons right now and were not deported.
	In just a second, we'll get to the extreme position of the Democratic left when it comes to ICE.
	Then we'll get to why it is that Joe Biden continues to soar in polling.
	These are not unrelated questions.
	First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber.
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	who is experiencing a harsh reality in the pursuit of living a healthy life filled with vitamin LT.
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	Hashtag leftist tears, Tumblr.
	Yes, as 2020 approaches, it will probably get even saltier.
	So stay hydrated, my friend, and keep up the good work out there in Oregon.
	Really appreciate what you do, Bradley.
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	This week's Sunday special, Daniel Hannan, the UK Member of Parliament for the EU Parliament, He joins us.
	Daniel is a really tremendous scholar and a great thinker.
	Here's a little bit of what his hand's like.
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	Daniel Hannan is a brilliant guy, a really learned guy.
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	So, as I say, the Democrats becoming increasingly radical when it comes to ISIS.
	Pete Buttigieg, who, it is amazing that the gap between the amount of media coverage and money that Buttigieg has received in his polling numbers.
	So Buttigieg is solidly second tier.
	He is polling in the RealClearPolitics polling average about 5%.
	Despite all of the media coverage, which you would think would put him at like 10, 12%, he is still polling in the RealClearPolitics poll average at 5.3%, which is nowhere near the leaderboard.
	The leaderboard right now has Biden at 27, Warren, Sanders, and Harris all tied at 15, according to the polling average.
	The latest poll comes from the NBC News Wall Street Journal poll that has Biden at 26, Warren at 19, Sanders at 13, and Harris at 13.
	So Harris lagging a little bit, which is kind of surprising.
	Buttigieg at just 7.
	Buttigieg continues to say radical things with a straight face.
	Here he is saying that the ICE raids make Americans less safe.
	He'll have to explain why arresting people who are here criminally makes Americans less safe.
	I also want to get your response to the news this morning of mass immigration raids set to start in cities across the country over the weekend.
	Well, this makes America less safe.
	Look, I don't think anybody disagrees that there ought to be law enforcement protecting people from danger.
	That's not what this is about.
	This is targeting people who are caught in a broken system where there should be a pathway to citizenship.
	And again, in a community like mine, if rumors start going on about raids, let alone if it starts actually happening, it immediately makes the community less safe.
	Okay, so the argument is that if you start arresting illegal immigrants, they won't come forward to report crimes.
	Well, again, these ICE raids are, just as Obama's were, are largely going to target people who have outstanding warrants.
	Not just warrants for overstaying their visas.
	If we're just arresting everybody overstaying their visas, there are like 10 million people in the country, 11 million minimum.
	Maybe 20, according to some estimates.
	That's not what this is.
	Jared Polis is going even further.
	Jared Polis is the governor of Colorado.
	He said, Instead of working with Congress to find a real comprehensive solution to our broken immigration system, the president is unfortunately focused on creating uncertainty and fear.
	These actions make our communities less safe and increase distrust of law enforcement.
	Colorado celebrates our immigrant communities.
	We will not allow the public safety of Coloradans to be held hostage by the Trump administration.
	So, here is the Democratic position as of now.
	Get no wall on the southern border to stop illegal immigration.
	Get rid of the criminal section of the U.S.
	Code about illegal immigration that makes it a criminal offense to cross between border patrol entry points, between points of entry on the border.
	Get rid of that so it's just a civil offense.
	You basically get a ticket and then you're released into the interior of the United States.
	Also, you can't deport anyone.
	So if people overstate their visa, we should never have an immigration raid.
	You should never deport anyone.
	So what they are calling for is open borders and blanket amnesty.
	There is no other way to read the combined policy of what they're talking about.
	Have they said anything about border enforcement anywhere in here?
	Anywhere in here?
	It's unbelievable.
	All they had to do was be reasonable.
	All they had to do was say, listen, we think that President Trump Is overstating the case on the evils of illegal immigration.
	We think that it is not nearly as dangerous as he says it is, but we understand that any sovereign country has to protect our borders, and that's why we would increase funding on the border.
	That's why we would provide better resources for Border Patrol so they can take care of people in humane fashion on the border, and that's why we would create a stage-by-stage program to make all the illegal immigrants in the United States actual citizens.
	They could push A quote-unquote moderate program.
	And they could probably knock Trump for being quote-unquote too extreme.
	Instead, they've reacted to Trump's immigration position by going so far to the left.
	And this is where the Democrats are completely misreading the tea leaves here.
	It's pretty amazing.
	They have mistaken the fact that people find Trump to be an off-putting personality for the idea that everything Trump says is not only wrong but 100% wrong.
	And they have to go 180 degrees the opposite.
	So they can't just go 10 degrees the opposite and kind of deflect off some of the good points that Trump is making and then make quote unquote, better points, if that's what you think, more reasonable points.
	Instead, they've decided what we have to do is run directly the opposite direction.
	So as Trump says, protect the border, we say, open the border.
	We say, arrest no one.
	Trump says, we'll arrest everyone.
	Instead of us saying, well, no, we'll arrest some people, we'll arrest no one and we'll encourage more people to cross that border and we'll disband the Department of Homeland Security.
	And we'll make it a non-criminal offense to cross between points of entry.
	We'll encourage people to swim that Rio Grande.
	We'll encourage people to overstay their visas.
	If Democrats think this is a winning proposition, I don't know.
	They're high.
	It's unbelievable.
	I mean, they're in Colorado smoking up dope with Governor Palos.
	It's unreal.
	President Trump says, I don't believe in climate change.
	I think climate change is a hoax.
	It's a Chinese hoax, yadda yadda.
	Instead of Democrats saying, no, it's not a hoax, but we are not going to sink the United States economy.
	We're going to come up with some reasonable plans for government funding of decarbonization facilities, which is a new thing they're trying out in Britain right now.
	Instead of them saying, you know, there are certain ways that we can sort of curb our use of carbon.
	Instead of them being reasonable about any of this, they're out there saying, you know what we're going to do?
	We're going to radically restructure the entire American economy along the lines of World War II.
	So Trump says climate change doesn't exist.
	Not only does it exist, it is the greatest crisis that has ever faced humanity, and we are going to seize control of the means of production the way that we did in World War II, effectively, and then we're going to restructure the entire American economy on the back.
	You think that's a winning message, guys?
	You really think that most Americans aren't going to look down and go, whoa, this Trump guy's weird, but you guys are out of your minds.
	You really think that's the direction this is going to go?
	Thus, Joe Biden is leading the field, despite the fact that he is a lackluster candidate, a deeply lackluster candidate.
	Now, in a second, we're going to get to Joe Biden and his lacklusterness.
	So Joe Biden is, again, leading all the polling.
	He's only up by a few points.
	I don't think he ends up being the nominee.
	If he had been sticking around in the mid-30s, I think maybe he'd be the nominee.
	But he has been gradually sliding down.
	And so has Bernie Sanders.
	And this is the important thing.
	As Bernie Sanders falls, a lot of that support is going to Elizabeth Warren.
	Elizabeth Warren is, at this point, it's a three-person race.
	It's Elizabeth Warren, it's Kamala Harris, it's Joe Biden.
	And right now, you'd have to say, advantage probably Elizabeth Warren, just because it's going to be easier for Warren to wrest away control of the Sanders voters than it's going to be for Harris to wrest away total control of the Biden voters.
	Although, it's been pretty easy for her to grab a big segment of that.
	In any case, the only reason that Biden is still alive is a reason he is running away from.
	So Joe Biden is still alive in this race because he is moderate, because he is a known quantity.
	Instead, Joe Biden has been trying to head off the radicals of the past by becoming radical himself.
	And that is not going to work.
	Because the truth is that he is not passionate about the wild left nonsense of the Democratic Party.
	So he's also not a very good candidate, is the sad truth for Joe Biden.
	So yesterday, Joe Biden gave a long, meandering foreign policy speech in which he ripped into President Trump and talked about Trump.
	It was incredibly boring.
	It didn't really do anything for him.
	Not only did it not do anything for him, it sort of reminded everybody that the Obama administration's foreign policy really sucked.
	It was probably the worst aspect of the administration.
	They left the Middle East in absolute flames.
	They left Iran in control of regional power.
	But here was Joe Biden ripping into Trump.
	Donald Trump has absolutely corroded our country's credibility.
	This president has bankrupted America's word in the world at the moment.
	He's alienated us from the very democratic allies we need most.
	Trump has taken a battery ram to the NATO alliance.
	He treats us like it's some kind of American-run protection racket.
	He just doesn't get it.
	I really don't think he gets it.
	Okay, well, I'll tell you who doesn't get it.
	It was the Obama administration, which you talk about undermining our democratic allies.
	Try Israel and Britain and Poland.
	There are a lot of democratic allies that the Obama administration left out there.
	In the dust, Biden's record is not all that good.
	The only thing that's keeping him alive is that he is a known quantity.
	He feels solid.
	He feels stable.
	But lately, he's been feeling wavering.
	He's been feeling old.
	That's why he's not going to be the nominee.
	And so you're going to end up with one of these radicals.
	Now, that would theoretically lead President Trump into a pretty good position.
	Because the more radical the Democrats are, the better off for President Trump.
	So, for example, President Trump yesterday made an announcement that he would not actually force a citizenship question onto the census.
	Instead, he issued an executive order ordering his other agencies to start asking questions of local agencies about the number of illegal immigrants underneath them.
	This avoids the constitutional problem.
	That was created by the latest Supreme Court decision.
	He decided not to go up against the Supreme Court.
	He announced this executive order, no constitutional crisis or anything like that.
	And then he launched into what is his solid campaign, right?
	His solid campaign is that far-left Democrats are attempting to undermine the integrity of the United States by concealing the number of illegal immigrants in the country.
	This happens to be true.
	Here is Trump explaining.
	Today I'm here to say we are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population.
	As shocking as it may be, far-left Democrats in our country are determined to conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.
	They probably know the number is far greater, much higher, Okay, so, you know, he is not wrong about all of this.
	And so when he campaigns against the Democrats, as I've been saying all along, if he campaigns against their programs, if he campaigns against their radicalism, He'll be fine.
	If, however, he gets caught up in the fun of being a troll, then trouble awaits.
	And this is what happened yesterday at the social media get-together.
	So, the media totally botched the coverage of a lot of this.
	So, there's one particular area where the media not only botched the coverage, they just lied about it.
	So, Jim Acosta lied about an exchange that took place between a quote-unquote reporter for Playboy.
	He's not actually a reporter.
	His name is Brian Karam, a supposed journalist.
	And this reporter actually, we'll play the tape, he actually screamed at the people who were there.
	And then he was confronted by Sebastian Gorka, who's another radio host on Salem Radio Network.
	Here was the exchange as it actually happened, and then I'll show you what Jim Acosta said about it.
	Don't be sad.
	Don't be sad.
	No, I'm just standing alone.
	This is a group of people that are eager for demonic possession.
	Demonic possession?
	You're a journalist, right?
	That's right!
	Hey, come on over here and talk to me, brother.
	We can go outside and have a long conversation.
	You're surrounding me now in the White House.
	You are a punk!
	You're not a journalist, you're a punk!
	Go home!
	Go home!
	Hey, Borka, get a job!
	Hey, just for the record, he'd kick your punk ass.
	Okay, so that was the exchange.
	Now here's the way Jim Acosta actually characterized this.
	They said White House officials invited Trump's social media allies to sit in the Rose Garden.
	But after the event was over, West Wing aides did nothing when those social media figures began to verbally abuse reporters who are trying to do their jobs.
	A good snapshot of how press is treated by White House.
	You heard the exchange.
	This quote-unquote reporter, Brian Karam, said that everyone in the garden was eager for demonic possession.
	Okay, that's not journalism.
	That's some serious journalism-ing right there, Brian Karam.
	Serious journalist, Brian Karam.
	Gorka confronting him was the least of the problems.
	Gorka's an opinion host.
	And Brian Karam is supposed to be a journalist.
	He's not a journalist, he's a joke.
	And the fact that he was confronted by Gorka's... Now, does any of this sort of stuff help the Trump administration and the image of stability they need to project?
	Of course not.
	There's two separate questions here.
	One is, are people like Brian Karam terrible?
	The answer is yes.
	The second question is, why are you having a bunch of people who are at the very least deeply controversial to the White House in the first place?
	Like, there are a bunch of people who are at the White House in this particular group of folks who were basically, I mean, have been involved in conspiracy theorizing, Seth Rich conspiracy theorizing, all sorts of stuff that makes Trump vulnerable to the charge that he's bringing A bunch of people who ought not be at the White House to the White House.
	Why would Trump open himself up to that?
	What is the benefit of that?
	Now, maybe it's to motivate the base, but I promise you guys, everyone knows the base is motivated.
	It's dumb, and frankly, it's wrong.
	I mean, people who conspiracized about Seth Rich should probably not be at the White House.
	They really should not be.
	Because that was gross.
	If the president wants to win re-election, all he has to do is shut the hell up and let the Democrats be who the Democrats are, and then point at them.
	Just stare at them and point to them.
	That's it.
	That's all he has to do.
	Okay, time for some mailbag because it is a Friday.
	So, Ethan says, Hey Ben, love the show.
	With both party bases getting further from the center, do you think it could lead to a dramatic split within either party?
	I think it is unlikely that there will be a dramatic split inside the Republican Party.
	I think the Democratic Party, I think party capture is more likely than a dramatic split.
	Mainly because I don't think that the American political system allows for a powerful split the same way that it did back in the 1850s when the Republican Party split off from the Whig Party, where you had multiple parties.
	The Free Soil Party was a party.
	You had a bunch of different parties that were running in the 1850s as the parties began to crack up and fall apart.
	I don't think that you're going to see the same thing.
	It's much easier to capture a party as President Trump did the Republican Party.
	Or as AOC is currently capturing the Democratic Party, than it is to split off and do your own thing.
	And I don't think that the lines are clearly enough drawn.
	So you would need one major issue where everyone disagrees.
	Not merely a tactical question, but an actual political question.
	So the reason the Whig Party split is because some of the party wanted slavery gone, and some of the party wanted slavery maintained with a Stephen Douglas-like deal.
	In this particular case, What is the split issue?
	In the Republican Party, there's fairly unanimous support for pro-life laws, for example.
	There's not a split wedge issue inside the Republican Party.
	Inside the Democratic Party, Pelosi and AOC disagree about tactics, but not much else.
	Pelosi is happy to pat all of the intersectional allies on the head, just so long as they back her progressive agenda.
	And they agree with her progressive agenda, so why wouldn't they go along with that?
	So the sort of ugly rhetoric that you're seeing inside both parties, the infighting, I don't think that ends in a split.
	Bob says, Hey Ben, after seeing all the evidence, how can you believe the moon landing was real?
	Take, for instance, that the American flag is blowing in the wind in the famous Apollo 11 photo.
	Since there's no air in space, how can the flag ripple?
	It had to be on a soundstage.
	Well, it wasn't.
	Not only was it not on a soundstage, There is a fantastic series, I've referred to it on the show already, called Apollo 11.
	What we saw.
	It's coming out very soon.
	You should go subscribe to it and listen to every detail along the way as we were in the space race, as we landed a man on the moon.
	Bill Whittle, the host, does a great job of debunking a lot of these particular myths about the flag rippling.
	It's the momentum of the flag when you put it down on the moon and all that.
	It wasn't actual wind on the moon.
	But the fact that people are bound up in conspiracy theories about the moon landing shows that people are willing to place an interpretation of events that far exceeds the evidence for that interpretation.
	It's something we should watch out for in politics all the time, is looking at a series of events and then creating a narrative to explain the series of events.
	As opposed to what may be the more plausible narrative, which is maybe these events don't have anything to do with each other.
	Conspiracy theories are a way for us to put narrative on the world, but in this case it's a false narrative to put on the world.
	The reason that I don't believe that this was done on a soundstage is because it was not done on a soundstage.
	It is because there is solid evidence that we did in fact launch people to the moon It would have required not just a few people, it would have required tens of thousands of people to be involved in a conspiracy.
	And one of the things about conspiracies is that conspiracies that actually happen usually are fairly small because it's hard to keep a secret like that for that long.
	Samson says, Hi Ben.
	You often talk about the United States needing to become a more virtuous society again.
	How religion is a great way to do so.
	I think the case could be made that many people on the right also see their politics as their religion and source of identity.
	What is the difference between that and a leftist?
	P.S.
	I'm not talking about racism and white supremacy.
	So I agree with this.
	I think there are a lot of people on the right who see politics as religion and are willing to follow a strong leader and who are willing to substitute political principle for a feeling of religious observance, who believe that if you disagree with them politically, this means that you are evil in some way.
	Now, I'm not saying there's no such thing as an evil belief system.
	I think communism is an evil belief system.
	I think Nazism is an evil belief system.
	However, if you are saying that not based on the lack of virtue in those systems, but based on this agreement about tax rates and property distribution rights and all of that, then, and if you are linking, more than that, if you are linking somebody's identity to the political views that they hold, without saying, okay, love the sin, love the sin or hate the sin, And then you are making a very large mistake.
	I fully agree that there are people on the right who have been sucked into spending more time thinking about political issues than about their fellow man.
	And what that leads to is actually less of an open debate and less of an open conversation.
	Because if you share general moral principles with someone, you're going to have a lot easier conversation about the political ramifications of those moral principles than if you do not.
	Now, I will say that there is a reaction on the right to the religious treatment of politics on the left, and that is for the right to harden its flanks.
	So the left, I think, has gotten a lot more religious than the right because they were irreligious in the first place, typically, and much more secular.
	And so their religious principle has become, if you disagree with us about environmentalism, you are damned to hell flame forever.
	And the right has responded by saying, well, you're saying we're damned to hell flame.
	You guys believe in abortion on demand.
	I mean, we're talking about hell flame.
	That seems like a pretty good place to go.
	Listen, I don't want to downplay serious political disagreements because there are serious political disagreements.
	The difference between actual practice of actual religion and the practice of politics as religion is that politics as religion inherently involves government compulsion.
	That's what politics is all about.
	It's not merely about convincing each other with regard to arguments without regard to the government.
	Politics is about using the power of government to enforce your will.
	The problem is when politics becomes religion, Then government and religion are the same and you have what is effectively a secular theocracy.
	And there I do see some people on the right who are falling into that trap.
	The left has been in that trap for quite a while.
	Ryan says, hey, Ben, I was wondering if illegal immigrants have constitutional rights as per the text of the U.S. Constitution.
	Obviously, they have human rights, but it seems weird to me that specifically American rights apply to non-citizens just because they cross the border.
	Thanks, Ryan.
	Well, it depends on the right.
	So obviously illegal immigrants do not have the constitutional right to live where they please, right?
	They can be deported.
	There are certain rights that the Constitution applies to any person living within the borders of the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
	So, you're not allowed to just go in and beat the living hell, like the police can't go and beat the living hell out of an illegal immigrant for no reason.
	So there are certain rights that apply to anybody living within our borders, but it's not every constitutional right.
	Not every constitutional right applies to illegal immigrants.
	I mean, one of the questions is, can you tell somebody's an illegal immigrant right off the bat, or not?
	That's not clear.
	So you have to assume they're an American citizen until you have proof otherwise, presumably.
	Bryant's has been.
	Am I taking crazy pills?
	This question of citizenship has appeared on the census for more than 100 years.
	It is public record.
	Most census questionnaires ask for birthplace appearance, immigration legal status.
	Many literally have a citizenship column on the census form.
	This has been standard procedure for years.
	What am I missing?
	What are people arguing about?
	Excellent question.
	They're arguing over stupidity.
	The left doesn't want this question on the census because they believe that the Trump administration is trying to gather information about how many illegal immigrants live in districts for purposes of redistricting.
	Which, by the way, should be done.
	That we should have districts that are drawn based on the number of American citizens living in a district, not on the number of people, including folks who cannot vote or take part in American politics, living in those districts.
	Basically, I think that this is animus against Trump, frankly.
	It's animus against Republicans.
	I don't see a rational reason not to ask that question.
	Matthew says, Hey Ben, I've been listening to Milton Friedman lately.
	It's been common knowledge that FDR and his New Deal extended the Great Depression by eight years.
	Where could I find some good resources on this to read more on it?
	So there was a good study from UCLA Anderson School of Business that came out a few years ago.
	If you search Anderson School of Business study Great Depression, it'll come up.
	Talking about how the Great Depression was lengthened by eight years.
	Also, there's sort of a variation between the Vienna School of Economics and the Chicago School of Economics on what exactly led to the Great Depression.
	Hayek wrote about it, so did Milton Friedman.
	Friedman basically suggests that it was a lack of inflation in the monetary supply, it was the contraction of the monetary supply.
	Hayek suspects, and members of the Viennese School of Economics suspect, that it was government interventionism, tariffs and trade barriers, and actually, A bubble that was created by the federal government in terms of currency in the 1920s that led to an ease of credit in the 1920s that led to the crash.
	There's a very good book called Vienna or Chicago by Mark Skousen that talks specifically about that argument.
	If you want a book that talks about the failures of FDR's policy during the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes has an excellent book about this as well.
	Let's see, Rohan says, Ben, Elon Musk has said that he would like to see a permanent human presence on Mars.
	Having a self-sustaining outpost on Mars would serve as an insurance policy if something disastrous were to happen to humanity on Earth.
	What are your thoughts on this?
	Do you think space exploration has the ability to serve as a social fabric, meaning it would unite Americans, allow us to move past identity politics and leftist intersectionality?
	Best, Rohan.
	Well, yeah, I mean, I think it'd be great.
	I think that what Elon Musk is talking about by colonizing Mars, that'd be fantastic.
	I think humanity totally should do that if we can, and it would be a worthwhile mission, a useful mission.
	Now, here is the big issue.
	Is that going to solve the problems that we have here on Earth?
	No, because we're human beings, and human beings have problems.
	We can go anywhere and have problems.
	We can travel across seas and to distant lands and still have those problems.
	Within 200 years of us colonizing Mars, within 50 years of us colonizing Mars, there will be intersectional battles over land redistribution on Mars.
	Human beings are always going to be human beings.
	Human nature is always going to be human nature.
	Now, increased amounts of territory are going to presumably ease some of the problems, but it depends how hard it is to colonize Mars.
	I assume people aren't just going to be flying up there in their own personal spaceships and then planting the flag on a bit of territory where they put some rocks down, the way that we did when people crossed America, crossed the continent to lay out a homestead, for example.
	I assume that a Mars colony would be a lot more organized, top-down.
	So, human nature is always going to be human nature, is the short answer.
	Maeve says, Hey Ben, you say our healthcare system is broken and that universal healthcare as the left is promoting it is not the solution.
	I agree on both fronts.
	What do you think should be done to improve America's healthcare system from where it is now?
	I've been a listener of your podcast for a while, recently became a Dailyware subscriber.
	Well, appreciate it.
	There's a very good report by Avik Roy that I've been reading through that has some kind of temporary fixes and solutions for the healthcare system in the United States, relies a lot on health savings accounts, the transition away from employer-based healthcare, and more toward individually-based healthcare, where you are responsible for purchasing your own insurance, and thus, when you lose your job, you don't necessarily lose your insurance.
	Obviously, being able to sell insurance across state lines would help deregulation of the insurance industry, would certainly help Lowering licensing requirements in particular areas of medicine would help.
	Greater price transparency on drugs would certainly help.
	As I say, Avik Roy is, I think, probably the leading scholar in America on this, and he has about a 300-page report that is well worthwhile kind of browsing.
	I intend on going through it at some point in a future episode.
	Maybe I'll have Avik on one of our Sunday specials, and we can talk about All of the solutions.
	No.
	There is no point at which they reach the end of the radical plank.
	It is free everything all the way down.
	Now, in terms of policy, none of it will apply.
	In terms of policy, none of this stuff will be done.
	It's all nonsense.
	Angela says, So first of all, that is a very obscure question, so I would actually have to look up to remind myself what Nietzsche's four critiques on Christianity are.
	So I'm going to punt on that, because I frankly don't know those off the top of my head.
	He I know that his sort of generalized critique of Christianity, which is that it created a slave mentality where meekness was supposed to serve as a substitute for strength and that the poor would would rule the earth and the meek would rule the earth.
	And so it's an anti meritocracy.
	I think that that is a complete misread of Christianity.
	I also think it's a complete misread of Judaism.
	He sort of conflates the two.
	I don't think that that is right.
	He says that Christianity is about victimization, basically, and it's about pity.
	I don't think that that is correct.
	I think Christianity, in my read, and again, I'm not a Christian scholar, but I am, you know, more knowledgeable about Judaism, so I'll talk about Judaism.
	Judaism is not about a victim mentality, which he sort of suggests it is.
	Judaism is about the idea that you have obligations and duties to God, and you are obligated to fulfill those duties to God, regardless of whether you believe yourself to be a victim in the first place.
	It doesn't say that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, or any of that sort of stuff in a practical sense.
	What it is saying is that in a moral sense, People who are more moral in a better time will reap the benefit of their morality.
	I am not a fan of Nietzsche's morality.
	I think that Nietzsche's morality is... I think his critique of what happens when secularism takes over is exactly right.
	I think that his belief that Christianity falling away would lead to a better world is exactly wrong and was proved wrong in his own country within the next few years.
	Sarah says, Howdy Ben, what are your thoughts on robot umpires being introduced in baseball games?
	I've heard some people say it strengthens the integrity of the game.
	I am totally for robot umpires.
	I am 100% for robot umpires.
	I want more pitches called correctly.
	I don't want a changing strike zone.
	I don't want pitch framing to be the big issue at a game.
	I want to know on an objective level.
	I like data.
	I want to know on an objective level whether a pitch is a ball or a strike.
	I think hitters would like that.
	I think pitchers would like that.
	Then it's just a straight up competition between the players.
	Making the umpire the issue is really dumb.
	Paul's final question.
	Paul says, my husband and I just had our first child.
	Well, I would like to quit my job and raise for myself.
	He thinks she won't develop social skills if she doesn't go to daycare.
	Could you please share your thoughts on daycare versus raising kids at home?
	I've seen very little evidence that going to daycare actually creates more social skills than going to school when you're five years old, for example.
	I don't think that the data is there to support that idea.
	Now, with that said, my kids went to preschool.
	My kids right now are in preschool.
	So, you know, I think that there's nothing wrong with sending your kids to preschool.
	My wife works, obviously.
	But at the same time, You know, raising your kids at home and being home with your kids?
	There's nothing wrong with that either.
	You're going to make playdates.
	You're not just going to be at home with your kids all the time.
	You're going to make playdates, you're going to meet other kids, you're going to bring them to church groups.
	Kids will find a way to socialize and you will find ways for your kids to socialize.
	You don't necessarily have to send them to daycare in the care of another adult.
	It'll be one adult for 30 kids.
	Depends on the daycare.
	Honestly, it also depends on the quality of the daycare.
	Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.
	Extra long show today.
	Things that I like.
	So I've had a chance to sit down with Bill Whittle.
	I mentioned this before.
	Apollo 11, what we saw.
	Go subscribe right now.
	It's great.
	This is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
	I sat with Bill a little bit yesterday and we talked about what exactly happened with Apollo 11, why it's still important.
	Welcome to Apollo 11 Mission Control.
	What's left of it anyway.
	The Space Race.
	12 years of open warfare between two superpowers.
	The United States and the Soviet Union.
	We used our best missiles, our best pilots.
	Scientists and engineers.
	We employed aircraft carriers, radar stations, all the military hardware we had to defeat our ideological nemesis.
	When each team had over 20,000 nuclear warheads apiece.
	The space race was the defining act of the second half of the 20th century.
	Time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement.
	50 years ago, men from planet Earth first set foot upon the moon.
	You owe it to yourself and to history to experience the space age from the inside and see how it took hundreds of small steps to get to that one giant leap.
	I'm Bill Whittle, and this is what we saw.
	Well, Bill Whittle, I'm so glad that you could stop by.
	Bill, of course, is hosting a brand new podcast, Apollo 11, What We Saw.
	So Bill, tell us about what this podcast is actually going to be.
	Well, we had four segments of about an hour each.
	The final one turned into almost two.
	So the great news is, while every segment talks a bit about the Apollo 11 mission, I get to break that down into different areas.
	But the great thing is we basically cover the entire space race from Chinese rocket-assisted arrows to SpaceX landing twin boosters on the Falcon Heavy launch.
	And, you know, one of the things I realized, Ben, is that people who have so much trouble Believing that this happened.
	Have trouble believing it happened because they're told that the moon landing just kind of parachuted into the world.
	You know, we're watching, you know, all in the family.
	Hey, we cut the hold on news announcement.
	We've landed on the moon apparently.
	And what they don't see is that every single three, four weeks prior to that for four or five years, there's just another mission going a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further.
	And we get to talk about all of them.
	No, Sirius is beautiful.
	I mean, it looks beautiful, it sounds terrific.
	It really is.
	So, what do you think was the importance of the moon landing?
	I mean, we obviously all pay attention to it because it's amazing in and of itself, but what do you think was sort of the greater impact of the moon landing?
	Kennedy caught two things with that famous moon landing speech of his.
	And I don't even know if he knew that he caught him.
	But he said, we want to do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
	And what he selected was the hardest thing to do.
	It was the hardest thing to do in the world at the time.
	And so we had been so badly humiliated by the Soviets.
	We're in a war with the Soviet Union.
	We've got 20,000 nuclear weapons, so do they.
	We've got test pilots, aircraft carriers, all this stuff.
	We can't use them, because if we do, There goes all of our cities and there's two.
	So what this was, was a way for us to showcase our technology and our ability and impress third world countries and all the rest without actually killing each other.
	But it's all about missiles and pilots and radars and all that stuff.
	So Kennedy said, what is the hardest thing we can do?
	And since we've been so humiliated since Sputnik, He realized that the American people would, what they would think of themselves more than what the rest of the world would think of it.
	But the main thing he said that really got it is that opening sentence.
	He says, we choose to go to the moon.
	And that's it.
	Once you make the choice to go, it's just an engineering problem.
	That was the hard part.
	That was the hurdle to go into the moon was making the decision to go.
	I mean, one of the things that you talk about in the series is the uncertainty of the people who are involved in this project as to whether it was going to work.
	I mean, we sort of take it for granted that the thing worked, but that was a knife's edge thing, it sounds like, for the vast majority of the planning.
	Armstrong and Aldrin admitted after the mission that they figured they had a 50-50 chance of getting home, which is not the kind of thing you want to do at home.
	Flip a coin, it's heads.
	You keep on going with your day, tails, you know.
	Close the door and turn on the car in the garage.
	But that's one of the reasons why they deserve the heroism.
	The three Apollo 1 astronauts died in a fire in the capsule that was so horrific.
	And I get a chance to go a little bit into those details.
	And I go into those details not because it's gruesome, but I don't do it because it's just kind of macabre.
	I do it because people need to understand the courage it took to take the risks they took.
	The Apollo 1 crew had complained about all of this flammable material in the capsule.
	And when this capsule caught fire, and all three of them died in the fire, when they got the door open, it took over an hour to get them out of the capsule because the nylon had fused them into the side of the capsule.
	Now, that's not a pretty image, but that image is something that every single guy who flew those missions had in the back of his mind.
	And that's why...
	You need to tell that part of the story because of the heroism.
	But to be honest with you, since I was, look, I was an astronaut when I was five.
	I didn't want to be.
	I was.
	It was just a paperwork issue.
	You had to sort it out.
	So I really, growing up as an experimental test pilot and stuff, and the thing I like most about the series is we get a lot of the really strange, really odd backstage stuff that nobody really gets to talk about.
	I mean, since you get into such an inordinate level of detail with regard to what exactly happened with Apollo 11, what do you make of all the people who remain conspiracy theorists, who think that this was all shot on some backstage lot somewhere?
	Yeah.
	Well, I used to get a lot more angry at them than I do now.
	And having done... I mean, I knew the space program very well, but having done the research I did, I realized that the reason, as I said, that so many people have a hard time believing it Is analogous to the fact that you say that the Wright Brothers went down to Kitty Hawk in 1903 and built an F-22 Raptor.
	And the Wright Brothers can't build an F-22 Raptor.
	But they did.
	They built a wooden thing with canvas wings which evolved into the biplanes of World War I with canvas wings.
	Which evolved into the all-wood hurricane in World War II, which evolved into the P-51, now we get jets, we get the Sabre, we get the F-4, we're supersonic, fly-by-wire with the F-16, we get stealth with the F-117, we get radars with the F-15, better engines with the F-118, and then you can build an F-22.
	And the entire purpose of this show is to take a look at every single one of those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of small steps that got us to that giant leap.
	And now that we look back on this, and we haven't been back to the moon in a manned mission since, what's changed?
	Is it the scope of American ambition?
	Is it our belief in ourselves?
	What do you think has changed in terms of how we view space?
	I think we will go back.
	I didn't think so three years ago.
	I thought this was going to be the pinnacle of human history, July 20th, 1969.
	But I've changed my mind in the last couple years.
	What I think is going to happen is, you can measure the greatness of America by the fact that this country got bored with going to the moon.
	You know?
	I mean, you have to think really, it's really what happened.
	We went to the moon?
	Yeah, all right, I'm done.
	What's next?
	We spent two generations essentially in orbit with space shuttles and Skylab and stuff.
	We're essentially retracing John Glenn's flight from, you know, 1962.
	And so we spent two generations going nowhere.
	But with SpaceX and Blue Origin and all the rest of this stuff, we're seeing a new kind of enthusiasm.
	And as I say in the podcast, I was 10 years old at the Plaza Hotel when they actually stepped foot on the moon.
	And we had the windows open, and down in Central Park, there were probably 30,000 or 40,000 people watching these projection screen TVs.
	And when he stepped on the moon, this cheer just came up, you know?
	It's just this unbelievable sound.
	Never heard it at a football game, anything like it.
	But I did hear it from the millennials who were inside the SpaceX building when those two boosters came down and landed.
	It was that same almost unbelievable pitch of excitement.
	And I think the second time is going to be a lot looser, a lot more fun.
	Any company, Ben, any company whose recovery ship's official name is, of course I still love you, those guys are going to Mars.
	And I don't have any doubt about that at all.
	Well, Bill, the series is called Apollo 11, What We Saw.
	Everybody should go check it out.
	You can subscribe over at Apple Podcasts.
	You can get it at iTunes, anywhere you get your podcasts.
	Go subscribe right now.
	It really is terrific.
	Bill, thanks for stopping by.
	Good to see you.
	My pleasure, buddy.
	I've got to go back to the underground control chamber now, where I've been since I was 10.
	You know, we had mission control back up there in case the Soviets launched a nuclear attack, and I've basically been there since 1969.
	Well, as long as they don't have Twitter, you're better off.
	What?
	Catch you in a bit, Bill.
	You betcha, buddy.
	I agree with me.
	Go and subscribe right now.
	Apollo 11, what we saw.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	Alrighty, so here is a very stupid thing.
	There is a person named Dan Hassler Forrest, and he writes a piece for the Washington Post today.
	He's an author and public speaker on media franchises, cultural theory, and political economy.
	He works as assistant professor in the media studies department of Utrecht University.
	And he has a piece today in the Washington Post titled, The Lion King is a Fascistic Story.
	No remake can change that.
	Oh my.
	I mean, last I checked, The Lion King was actually just a story about lions.
	But apparently not.
	Apparently it's about the evils of democracy.
	Here's what this columnist writes.
	Last November, Disney broke the internet with its teaser trailer for The Lion King.
	This 93-second video gave millions of people chills by faithfully recreating key moments from the original film's beloved opening number.
	But as nostalgic as Circle of Life may make us feel, this bombastic scene is also a painful reminder of the film's ideological agenda.
	It introduces us to a society where the weak have learned to worship at the feet of the strong.
	Oh.
	My.
	God.
	Basically, the Lion King is just Hamlet, right?
	I mean, that is the basis of the Lion King.
	It is the uncle who tries to kill the father, and Mufasa dies, spoiler alert, and then the son has to do something about all of that.
	If Hamlet were a straightforward story, then it would look like the Lion King.
	It's obviously based on the Lion King with the toucan as Polonius and the whole thing.
	The whole thing.
	The fact that this is now being taken seriously as some sort of metaphor for why monarchy is good is hilarious to me.
	We may be a little bit too... We may be overanalyzing this thing a little bit too much.
	This columnist says, As we watch the herbivores congregate to bow down before their newborn ruler, the Lion King offers us a seductive worldview in which absolute power goes unquestioned, and where the weak and the vulnerable are fundamentally inferior.
	In other words, the Lion King offers us a fascist ideology writ large.
	There seems to be no way out for the forthcoming remake.
	The first thing to understand about The Lion King is that it isn't in any way about lions or any other animal species.
	No, it kind of is, and it says so in the title, The Lion King, and then also there are only animals and no humans in it.
	It's amazing how the left will struggle to say that certain things are not metaphors, and then they will immediately say that this is a metaphor for fascism on Earth.
	As in every fable, a variety of cute and cuddly figures stand in for human societal organizations.
	Mapping our internalized social hierarchies onto this pristine and neutral world of the animal kingdom renders these power dynamics natural, common sense, and desirable.
	Okay, so first of all, let's just be real about the animal kingdom.
	Lions eat zebras.
	When they are called the king of the forest, king of the jungle, this has been a thing for quite a while, and that is because the lion is the apex predator in this particular scenario.
	That's called nature.
	By using the predator-prey relationships to allegorize human power, the film almost inevitably incorporates the white supremacist worldview.
	So now, believe it or not, the argument is that The Lion King is about white supremacy.
	Now, last I checked, Mufasa, his voice in The Lion King, is James Earl Jones, who is black.
	Simba, in the remake, is played by Donald Glover, who is black.
	Nala, who is his wife, is played by Beyoncé, who is black.
	Sarabi, who is his mom, is played by Alfre Woodard, who is black.
	James Earl Jones is still Mufasa, and still black.
	But apparently, it's all white supremacy.
	It's all white supremacy.
	Wow.
	Obviously, such fables can serve politically to every sense, says this columnist for the Washington Post.
	George Orwell's Animal Farm employed a similar allegory to make class distinctions more blatantly visible and to criticize authoritarian systems of power.
	Disney's own Robin Hood adaptation similarly associated power systems with animal food chains, but used its allegory to poke fun at the obvious greed and corruption that define the predatory ruling class.
	But the sympathies of the Lion King lie elsewhere.
	Doubling down on Disney's historical obsession with patriarchal monarchies, it places the audience's point of view squarely with the autocratic lions, whose pride rock literally looks down upon all of society's weaker groups, a kind of Trump Tower of the African Savannah.
	So now Mufasa is Trump.
	Oh man, I love these lions.
	They're unbelievable.
	Simba, let's go eat a zebra.
	When Grand Patriarch Mufasa explains patiently to his son how this division of power works, he emphasizes that the king must maintain balance in their kingdom.
	This seems fine when we think about the environment where balance sounds great, because they're living in the environment and aren't animals, so yes.
	But when we consider he's really explaining to his own heir why it's perfectly fine to behave dictatorially, the lion's perspective feels a lot more unsettling.
	Bad as it is that the powerful are presented as inherently superior to all other things, things get substantially worse once the hyenas are introduced.
	With the lions standing in for the ruling class and the good, herbivores embodying society's decent law-abiding citizens, the hyenas transparently represent the black, brown, and disabled bodies that are forcefully excluded from this fascist society.
	So the hyenas are black and brown and disabled.
	Where's the disabled?
	Is there a disabled hyena?
	Like a hyena rolling around in a wheelchair?
	In Lion King?
	Did I miss that part?
	And they're black and brown as opposed to the lions, whose voices are all black folks.
	Noticeably marked by their ethnically coded street accents, the hyenas blatantly symbolize racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes of verminous groups that form an inherent threat to society.
	Oh, that's what's going on.
	It's the Jews!
	How did I miss this whole thing?
	I mean, maybe I missed it because they're obviously supposed to be Nazis.
	They have like an actual Nazi march with goose stepping in the original Lion King movie.
	When Scar sings Be Prepared, the hyenas actually march like Nazis.
	It's an obvious Nazi allegory.
	Nonetheless, this is so great.
	This fallible betrayal of tradition.
	What in the world?
	predictably orchestrated by scar the misfit lion whose opportunistic desire to advance the status of minorities echoes the way conservatives speak of liberal politicians when they act as if compassion is merely opportunism simultaneously his effeminate gestures and lack of interest in heterosexual reproduction mark him as queer like the vast majority of other villains in disney's exclusively heterosexual world what in the world what the guys did you ever did i miss this i
	Did you ever get that all the villains in Disney films are gay?
	I feel like I missed this part.
	Wow, that's amazing.
	Jafar in Aladdin literally wants to have sex with Jasmine throughout the entire film.
	And Scar is hitting on Simba's mom, if I don't misremember.
	Adding insult to injury, the social outcast rebellion against Mufasa's autocratic regime is explicitly associated with the imagery of goose-stepping Nazis.
	They're actually the good guys.
	But as so often in Hollywood films, the explicit Nazi iconography serves primarily to distract us from the hero's own fascism.
	Simba's final ascent to the throne, his masculine roar returning Scar's dystopia to its Edenic natural state, is nothing less than the Fuhrer principle at work.
	The idea that those we entrust with positions of leadership are blessed with a natural, even divine, superiority.
	Unbelievable.
	Unbelievable.
	Now that Disney has become by far the most powerful entertainment company in the world, we've seen several attempts to update and correct its ideological payload.
	Maleficent and its forthcoming sequel changed a deeply sexist fairy tale into a feminist parable about sexual abuse.
	Aladdin made at least some attempt to mitigate the original film's Islamophobia.
	Beauty and the Beast included a very minor openly gay character, the new Ariel will be a mermaid of color, and Mulan has been overhauled to become less offensive to Chinese audiences.
	But we should get rid of the Lion King, presumably.
	These people are the worst.
	Ruining everything in American life and culture, making everything worse, all in the name of wokeness.
	Well done, everyone.
	Well, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, as if we haven't already given you enough.
	And then we'll be back here on Monday.
	So if you don't see it until then, have a wonderful weekend.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
	Directed by Mike Joyner.
	Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Senior Producer, Jonathan Hay.
	Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
	And our Technical Producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Adam Sievitz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
	Hair and Makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
	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, a former Trump staffer claims that she was the victim of battery when Trump forcibly kissed her, she says.
	Well, there's video now of the incident in question, and it seems to completely vindicate Trump.
	We're going to talk about that.
	I'll play the video, and we'll talk about what we can learn from this whole case.
	Also, I want to discuss a real example of true courage and female empowerment.
	This is a teenage girl in Connecticut who is standing up against the madness of allowing biological boys into girls' sports.
	This is something.
	This, as I said, is real empowerment.
	This is courage.
	This is something feminists should be celebrating, but for the most part, they're not.

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