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July 26, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:05:32
Democrats’ Circular Firing Squad | Ep. 826
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Democrats fight over impeachment.
The squad takes the lead again.
And Joe Biden vows to reorient before next week's big debates.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, we have a lot to get to today, so let's just jump right in.
The fact is that the Democrats are divided over what to do about impeachment.
And this divide is mirroring the divide between AOC and Nancy Pelosi.
This, of course, is going to be the running gun battle that goes all the way through the 2020 election.
It's certainly going to take place in the primaries.
As we'll see, it's reflected in Joe Biden versus Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.
But it's not coming together anytime soon.
Now, a couple of weeks ago, this was breaking right out in the open.
AOC was saying that Nancy Pelosi was a vicious, brutal racist.
And Pelosi, for her part, was saying that AOC was a neophyte who really didn't know what she was doing.
And they'd been saying this about each other kind of in softer ways for months.
AOC had been saying for months that Nancy Pelosi was freezing her out, she was the teenage girl whose mom wouldn't let her use the car, and she was really mad about it.
After all, Mom, I know how to use the car.
And Pelosi was like, well, last time I drove with you, you ran into a tree, so we're not doing that again.
That was the argument.
And then it was papered over by the fact that President Trump couldn't keep his tweet shut.
And so he just decided to tweet out a bunch of stuff about how much he hates the squad and how the squad's really bad and they should go back to their home countries and all of this.
And we all remember that controversy.
Well, it turns out that controversy is not going to be papered over by unification against Trump for very long, because in the end, Democrats are going to have to settle this one way or another.
Being in the opposition papers over a lot of internal differences.
This is something that Republicans found out when they were in the opposition.
When they were in the opposition to President Obama, then it was unity, unity.
We can't stand Obama's agenda.
We're all going to unify to fight Obama's agenda in every conceivable way.
Then they went back to House and it turns out they can't get anything done because the Freedom Caucus is at war with the more moderate Members of the caucus.
And it turns out that Paul Ryan is at war with other members of the caucus.
It turns out that some members of the caucus want entitlement reform and other members of the caucus don't want entitlement reform.
It turns out there are vast divisions inside each one of the parties.
It's an additional check and balance that the founders never really thought about.
And for all the talk about unification within the parties, the truth is that there is no unification within the parties.
Now, what's interesting is that unification From the outside appears to be pretty cohesive simply because the lack of unity is not around ideological agenda.
It's around means, meaning that it used to be that inside the Republican Party, there were a lot of pro-choice people.
There were a lot of pro-life people.
Now it turns out it's mostly pro-life people almost entirely.
In the Democratic Party, there were pro-life people and pro-choice people.
Now you can number the pro-life people in the Democratic Party on one hand.
So what exactly are the battles about?
They're about means.
There are the folks who are pragmatists in the Republican Party.
This would be sort of Mitch McConnell.
Maybe Kevin McCarthy in the House.
And then there are the ideologues, the people who are sticking to principle no matter what.
And in that category in the Senate, you could probably put Rand Paul and Mike Lee.
And then in the House, you could put the members of the Freedom Caucus, right?
That would sort of be the divide.
Well, in the Democratic Party, you're seeing the same thing happen on the presidential level, and you're seeing that happen in the House.
Nancy Pelosi is the pragmatist.
She's reading the tea leaves.
She's figuring out how to get things done.
She's trying to work with the opinion of the American people and move forward with an agenda on which she largely agrees with AOC.
And then you got AOC.
And AOC has more, as we would say, about any other politician balls than brains, right?
She is running directly into the line of fire.
And she is saying, let's just do all of this at once.
We've got to do it all.
It doesn't matter what the polls say.
It doesn't matter what the American people want.
It's our time now.
It's our time.
So this is all the prelude to the discussion of impeachment.
So a wing of the Democratic Party wants to push forward with impeachment, despite the fact that the Robert Mueller hearing the other day went incredibly poorly for Democrats.
It was not good for Robert Mueller.
It did not bring to light any additional facts, which we did not know.
And I think that Democrats were they keep operating under the same assumption they've been operating in in presidential politics for a really long time, which is that if something they say is unpopular, it's because they didn't communicate it properly.
So when Al Gore was running for president, the idea was he didn't win, not because his program was unpopular, but because Al Gore was just too intellectual for the American people, which is a hell of a thing.
Al Gore is not too intellectual for anyone.
They did the same thing with John Kerry in 2004.
The reason that John Kerry lost wasn't because his message was bad.
It wasn't because he was a peacenik in a time of war.
No, it was really because John Kerry was just too smart for the average American.
We've gotten the same thing with Hillary Clinton.
She was just too smart for the average American.
The average American wants the Homer Simpson light that is Donald Trump, right?
That was the line from the Democratic Party.
And they're doing the same thing now with regard to impeachment.
And the Mueller Report.
So most Americans actually have a fairly good idea of what was in the Mueller Report.
A lot of bad behavior by the president, nothing criminal.
And that's all they're going to take away from it.
They're not going to take away from it that he was a Russian stooge, because he wasn't.
They're not going to take away from it that the president is impeachable, because he really is not.
What they're going to take away from it is that the president is exactly who they thought he was in the first place, namely a guy who mouths off a lot, makes a lot of empty threats.
The president is a dude who's willing to take help from pretty much anybody, no matter where it comes from.
And I mean, for goodness sake, the president has said all this stuff out loud.
It's not like Trump has been shy about any of this.
Are we supposed to be shocked by the fact that the Trump campaign was welcoming of Russian offers even if no collusion took place?
Why would we be?
Donald Trump got up on the stump in 2016 and called on Wikileaks to release Hillary Clinton's emails and started shouting from the stage, I love Wikileaks!
He wasn't exactly hiding the ball here, guys.
But Democrats seem to be under the impression before the Mueller hearing That all they truly had to do was re-expose Americans to the deep, dark secrets of a Mueller report that had been in public release for several months at this point, and all 448 pages available, and that Mueller would stand there and be strong and decisive, and that this would provide the impetus for impeachment.
Well, that didn't happen, but that's not stopping some members of the Democratic Party.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Okay, so how does this play out?
It plays out in that Mueller hearing doesn't go well.
Everybody basically acknowledges this.
Even the New York Times acknowledges this.
So there's a piece by Carl Hulse in the New York Times today titled Lack of Electricity in Mueller Testimony Short Circuit Impeachment says President Trump was probably never going to be impeached in the House of Representatives before the 2020 elections.
The testimony by Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, makes that a near certainty.
The absence of an electrifying Washington moment in Wednesday's two stage testimony by Mueller.
Not only deprived Democrats of the crystallizing episode they needed to drive public opinion on impeachment, but it also meant that Republicans had no reason to budge from their anti-impeachment stance.
Pressure will continue to come from the left and could become so irresistible the Judiciary Committee begins what it will call an impeachment inquiry without a formal House vote, but that is very different from a vote in the full House to formally declare that an elected president committed high crimes and misdemeanors for only the second time in history.
Andrew Johnson.
Wasn't elected, so that would be the third.
This sort of language from the New York Times is always amusing.
under the burden of Trump's iron-fisted control over his own party.
This sort of language from the New York Times is always amusing.
Barack Obama also had some fairly iron-fisted control over his own party.
Breaks in the ranks of the president's party always drove major congressional White House investigations in the past, including Watergate, the Ron Contra, and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
31 Democrats voted with Republicans in October 1998 to open an impeachment inquiry into Mr. Clinton.
But the plain fact is that nothing Mueller could have said would have been sufficient to pry the vast majority of pro-Trump Republicans from their refusal to even consider that Mr. Trump acted illegally in trying to thwart a wide-ranging investigation into his actions.
Okay, well, again, the Mueller report was supposed to provide that evidence.
If Mueller had come forth and said, listen, impeachable, There's an impeachment ready in the same way that the Star Report did.
And the Star Report's a little different because the scope of his authority under the Independent Counsel Act was broader than Mueller's was here.
But if Mueller had come forward and just said, I would recommend prosecution, but we can't under the OLC, impeachment would be moving full ahead.
Republicans probably would have peeled off.
You would have had a serious impeachment effort.
But that's not what Mueller provided.
Right now, there are only 91 representatives who support an impeachment inquiry, 106 Okay, and this is among Democrats.
106 do not support.
So that is not nearly enough to get this done.
Well, there are still Democrats who want to charge full speed ahead into the middle of this thing.
And that is not smart, but it's understandable.
After all, they've been told that Donald Trump is the most evil person who has ever lived.
And thus, Donald Trump must be impeached whether or not they have the evidence.
Now there's still people like Matt Iglesias who are who are trying to claim over and over that impeachment would not be bad for Democrats.
But that is obviously false.
Nate Silver says way too many 3D chess theories on how impeachment would benefit Democrats politically can't even grapple with the simple fact that polls show impeaching Trump as being deeply unpopular.
And no, it's not just because of Pelosi's lack of support.
Impeachment is really unpopular with independents.
And then he links to a Washington Post-ABC News poll from June 28th to July 1st, a pretty recent poll.
And it shows that among independents, fully 59% say no impeachment, only 37% say yes impeachment.
Well, there's still Democrats who say, well, that's just because we have to educate the American public.
Again, this is back to the old Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry line.
We've been too sophisticated in our approach.
I promise you guys, it's not that.
You had CNN running interference for your impeachment nonsense for literally two years.
Nonetheless, this is breaking out into the open.
And it's representative by the by the women of the view, many of the women of the view who represent the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.
They're demanding that Adam Schiff impeach President Trump.
And that includes, of course, Anna Navarro, the titular Republican, who, of course, hasn't really been a Republican for several years at this point.
What you said was, you know, the perfect case for collusion.
So if we've got those facts, if we've got that information, how do you justify to the American people not following up with an impeachment inquiry?
Well, the Constitution provides impeachment as a remedy.
It doesn't compel Congress to act and impeach whenever there are grounds for impeachment.
And I think we have to consider what will an impeachment and an acquittal in the Senate say about whether this President's conduct is compatible with office, if the President can later make the claim, having been acquitted, that this is not impeachable conduct.
So I do think about what message we are sending today, what message we're sending...
Okay, weird that Adam Schiff would suddenly back off impeachment when he's been saying for years that he has undercover information that proves that President Trump is a Russian cat's paw.
Eugene Robinson is a commentator for the Washington Post.
He's appearing on MSNBC.
He said most Democratic primary voters want impeachment, and herein lies a conundrum for a lot of Democrats.
The base wants impeachment.
The rest of the country does not want impeachment.
So what do they do?
Here's Eugene Robinson laying it out.
Most Democrats, most Democratic primary voters want impeachment, so sure.
I mean, I expect that you'll hear more from the candidates.
Could they be loud enough that it almost forces Pelosi's hand?
I don't think that's how Pelosi's hand would be forced.
I think if she saw And that of course is true.
conswell of a popular support for impeachment, say giant demonstrations or something like that.
I think that would have more impact than 2020 contenders saying impeachment.
You know, Danny, I do think sometimes.
And that, of course, is true.
I mean, when Eugene Robinson says that it would be it had to take people out in the streets to push Nancy Pelosi in this direction, it's not going to be enough for politically motivated politicians to just push it from the presidential level.
He is correct about that.
But those protests are probably in order because this is where AOC is going.
AOC has declared that President Trump is Hitlerian.
The only solution to Hitler is to depose him, and thus impeachment should be on the table.
And Nancy Pelosi is really trying to re-bridge that gap with AOC.
She didn't like that fight that happened a couple of weeks ago.
She wasn't fond of being called racist by AOC.
Now, she had the upper hand for a moment, and then Trump proceeded to give AOC the upper hand.
It is simply a fact that Pelosi was winning that fight.
Most House Democrats had turned on AOC's chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarty, who had ripped many members of the Congress, including some minority members of the Congress, as racists in the Jim Crow fashion.
And Nancy Pelosi had basically sicced her dogs on Saikat Chakrabarty.
Chakrabarty was losing.
AOC was about to be marginalized.
And then Trump stepped in and Leroy Jenkins the whole thing.
Well, now AOC is trying to make peace with AOC, at least for the foreseeable future.
AOC met with Pelosi yesterday, and AOC said, oh yeah, it's just we're making sure we're all on the same page.
The goal is just to open a line of communication and making sure that we're all on the same page on everything.
I think the objective is just that, to make sure that we're opening a line of communication, that all aspects of the party are on the same page, and to make sure that, you know, for me, as always, that working people have a seat at the table in what's happening in Congress.
Yeah, as opposed to Nancy Pelosi, who despises working people.
Now, the good news is we have a visual representation of Nancy Pelosi's reaction to her meeting with AOC.
So Pelosi tweeted out this picture.
It's a picture of them standing next to one another.
And she said, Today, Congresswoman, Representative AOC and I sat down to discuss working together to meet the needs of our district and our country, fairness in our economy and diversity in our country.
Nancy Pelosi looks like she wants to die.
AOC is perfectly comfortable.
Nancy Pelosi, who always looks as though the grin that she has is plastered onto her face, it looks as though it has been chiseled there with an actual chisel.
And she looks so deeply uncomfortable.
Somebody who's Dan Foster from National Review tweeted out that Nancy Pelosi should blink twice if she's okay.
I mean, it does look like a hostage photo.
Pelosi is deeply unhappy about this whole routine where she is supposed to pretend to be friends with AOC.
And the reason she's deeply unhappy about that is because she knows that AOC's general strategy when it comes to the public debate is really dumb.
And AOC proved that again yesterday.
So AOC suggested that the GOP is running a torture program on the border.
Not only are they running a concentration camp on the border, now it's a torture program on the border.
Pretty soon she's going to be out there declaring that President Trump is running the island of Dr. Moreau on the border, where he's creating human-animal hybrids.
You know, humans with pigs' faces and the hindquarters of a horse.
Here's AOC with her latest slur on Border Patrol.
How do you respond to Republicans who are talking about physical barriers being part of any package that deals with the actual crisis in terms of the traffic coming across the border?
If they want to do that, that's fine.
Have them negotiate an appropriation.
Have them make their case.
But they should not be using a humanitarian crisis as a bargaining chip to make sure that they pursue their little torture project.
She's so obnoxious and she's so, I mean it's just such a lie.
A torture project?
You think the Border Patrol agents are interested in torturing people on the border?
Now Democrats are pointing to this Border Patrol Facebook group and they're pointing to the fact that something like 10 Border Patrol agents posted comments in this Facebook group that are gross and nasty and those agents are under investigation.
And now they're trying to tie all 10,000 agents who are members of this Border Patrol group to those 10 commenters.
Okay, you can't label the entire group racist because there are 10 commenters who say racist things in the comment section.
That is not how Facebook works.
It's amazing how people who cover tech for a living, who write for websites, don't seem to understand the very basic things about how things like Facebook work.
Instead, they just propagate this myth that the entire Facebook group is inherently racist and everybody who joined the Facebook group is inherently racist because some of the commenters are racist.
Well, by that token, you can go to any comment section on literally any website, find the few people who are the grossest, and then slur the entire website via the comments.
That is not how any of this works.
But when you're trying to paint a narrative, then I guess that you go forward with this sort of nonsense.
And the squad, of course, is now being magnified by the media.
The media, who do not have to legislate, they do not understand the difference between Nancy Pelosi's job and their own job.
They think that they could be Nancy Pelosi if only they were given the leeway.
Just like too many people on the right think they could be Mitch McConnell under any circumstances, even if they've never been elected to a public office.
There's this weird idea that the commentariat knows better than the people who are actually legislating how to get things done.
And so they're giving all sorts of credence to the squad.
So the New York Times grants a column to Ilhan Omar, the same New York Times that said that when she said anti-Semitic things, she was just opening a conversation.
Now they've granted her some sort of op-ed in the New York Times talking about how the nation's ideals are under attack.
And of course, it is just a long screed about how terrible President Trump is and how she stands for the best Okay, so this battle is breaking out into the open, as I say, about impeachment.
Which apparently includes slandering anyone who disagrees with her on Israel as a purveyor of dual loyalty.
And of course, she moves on to suggest that every policy that Republicans have is a reflection of their underlying racism in all of this.
Okay, so this battle is breaking out into the open, as I say, about impeachment.
Nancy Pelosi is opposing the impeachment.
So according to according to Politico today, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler pushed to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump during a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, only to be rebuffed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.
At a caucus meeting that came after the hotly anticipated testimony of former special counsel Mueller, Nadler suggested that several House committee chiefs begin drafting articles of impeachment against Trump.
Pelosi called that idea premature, according to the sources.
Mueller's appearance was a disappointment.
Of course, Pelosi convened the Democratic caucus and a lengthy and animated discussion about the impeachment process followed.
Suffice it to say that the battle between Pelosi and the squad is not nearly over, that it could be fought along the lines of impeachment, and that is going to accelerate up into the presidential race.
Because now what you're going to see is the more woke members, the more Radical members of the 2020 Democratic presidential race declaring that they are in favor of impeachment.
We've already seen this from Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris.
You've seen Joe Biden be a little bit more circumspect.
So this is now the conflict inside the Democratic Party.
The folks who are radical and the folks who are more practical.
Now the entire agenda is radical, make no mistake.
And so if you're a Republican, if you're a conservative, there's part of you that is rooting for the more radical.
There's part of you that is rooting for AOC to win.
Why?
Because she'll be less effective.
In the same way that many Republicans are rooting for Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic primary because they think he's more beatable.
But as we found out from the Democrats in 2016, be careful what you wish for.
The fact is that Nancy Pelosi is still, at least in some sense, a rational human being with which some Republicans can talk.
That is not true of AOC.
And if you're rooting for a better American discourse, you want less AOC and more Pelosi.
I can't believe I'm saying this.
I can't believe these words are exiting my mouth.
But that is the reality.
If you are looking for a better American politics, you want people who at least are capable, even if they won't do it, are capable of having a conversation, as opposed to the squad, the AOC crew, the Impeach Now crew, who are not capable of having a conversation.
They're capable only of virtue signaling and declaring that their political opponents are evil for not favoring their special political means.
OK, in just a second, we're going to get to the 2020 presidential race, where it looks like the guns are about to open up and things are about to get really interesting.
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Okay, so all of this is leading up to the big Democratic debate.
All of this is leading up to the big Democratic debate where impeachment, I'm sure, will come up, where the split between the squad and Nancy Pelosi, well, it should come up and where that split is going to be reflected on the stage.
Now, the setup for the actual debates kind of fascinating.
So these are happening next.
The first group appears July 30th.
So today is the 26th.
That means what?
Tuesday night.
So Tuesday night is the first debate.
And then the second debate is Wednesday night.
The first debate features Marianne Williamson, Tim Ryan, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O'Rourke, John Hickenlooper, John Delaney, and Steve Bullock.
So it's the all-white group.
That's what the media have termed it.
It's the all-white group.
The only person who is really of color there is Marianne Williamson, and that's just because she reflects the colors of the universe inside her soul.
Everybody else is a plain old white person.
That one will be fascinating only because of the conflict between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The polls are conflicting over whether Warren has completely stolen Bernie's mojo or just partly stolen Bernie's mojo.
Watching them go at it will be amusing to say the least.
So we can all look forward to Bernie versus Warren.
It's a big opportunity for Warren because if she really pummels Sanders, if she demonstrates that she's sort of souped up Sanders, then she'll do some pretty heavy lifting there.
But everybody, the real question is what happens on night two.
Night two is where all the fisticuffs are set to happen.
So you've got the gadflies.
You've got Kirsten Gillibrand, I'm sure, who will be out there desperately seeking attention, just as she did last time.
Andrew Yang.
Who is still my favorite of all these candidates, who I'm sure will say a grand total of four words and then gain in the polls, which is exactly what happened last time.
You got Bill de Blasio, the weird groundhog killer.
Giant Frankensteinian groundhog killer.
You got Jay Inslee, who for no reason is still in this race.
Tulsi Gabbard.
Who is Matt Drudge's favorite Democratic candidate and the favorite candidate of some folks on the right, because she's sort of a gadfly as well.
You've got Michael Bennett, who's the only, when you talk about the only reasonable person in this race, Michael Bennett's the only person who looks sane.
I mean, he's the only one who looks halfway sane in any of this.
And then you have Julian Castro, who was supposed to pick up in the polls after his debate performance last time.
That really didn't happen.
But the key to that debate is going to be Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris.
Joe Biden, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.
That is the key to that debate.
Why?
Because this is all about Biden at this point.
So these debates next week are going to be about Joe Biden.
Pure and simple.
Does Biden collapse or does Biden recover?
In the last debates, you remember that Joe Biden Kind of fell apart under attack from Kamala Harris, the vice president who is leading in all the polls nationally and leading in many of the state polls.
He sort of came apart at the seams.
He didn't have great responses to Kamala Harris.
He was taken unawares.
Apparently, he thought everybody was going to treat him with kid gloves.
And why wouldn't he think that?
Just like Beto O'Rourke.
It's so funny.
Folks get lulled into a false sense of security in politics because they think that the past is prologue.
They think that whatever just happened is likely to happen to them in the future.
It's why Beto thought he was a legit presidential candidate.
He was like, Bro, everyone treated me great, you know, like way back when I was running against Cruz.
I'm sure it'll be the same now.
Just like I'll just be a bro all the way to the convention.
And then he stepped in and boom, he got clocked on the head by an Acme piano dropped from the third story.
And that's because he wasn't running against Cruz anymore.
Well, Joe Biden had the same sort of impression.
Joe Biden thought, OK, here's the deal.
I was Barack Obama's VP.
Barack Obama is the best politician of the last 30 years since Ronald Reagan.
I was his VP.
He was really popular.
Barack loves me.
Surely Barack will endorse me.
Ha ha ha.
And then I will waltz my way to the nomination.
Everyone will leave me alone because they'll be afraid to attack me because attacking me means attacking Barack.
And then he steps out in public and Kamala Harris hits him with a sledgehammer.
And he didn't see it coming.
He looked he looked befuddled.
He looked a little bit weak.
It was not a good showing for Joe Biden.
Now, it hasn't destroyed him because he did have this giant lead on the field, but it definitely took him down about 10 points, anywhere from five to 10 points in the polls, and it gave a boost to Kamala Harris.
Well now, Joe Biden says he's not going to sit by idly and let Kamala Harris do that to him again.
He says he's not going to be as polite to Kamala Harris.
This is correct.
He needs to go at her when she attacks him on race, which he surely will.
Like, he shouldn't have said this publicly.
Right?
He really shouldn't have.
This is the other problem with politicians.
They're constantly giving away their strategy in advance.
And we all know what Joe Biden has to do if we were watching.
But Joe Biden apparently feels the necessity to explain that he will go after Kamala Harris.
What he really should do is just be subtle about it.
He should just wait until Kamala Harris hits him, and then he should knock her into next week politically.
She should say something about federal busing, and he should say, listen, Kamala, Now, I agree that in certain circumstances, busing was wonderful.
It was wonderful for you.
But you don't support busing right now.
Why don't you support busing right now?
And then she'll attempt to redirect and says, no, no, I need you to answer my question that I'm happy to answer yours.
Why don't you support busing right now when de facto American schools are more segregated than they were 30 years ago?
You're ripping on me for saying that busing, federal busing, was a bad idea.
You're ripping on me for saying that opposing federal busing was in some form racist because it was imperative that blacks and whites go to school together.
Well, blacks and whites still aren't going to school together, but you don't support federal busing, so why don't you explain to the audience why exactly you don't support federal busing?
I'm not saying you're racist, I'm just wondering why it is that you think everybody else is racist if they don't support a policy prescription that you yourself will not support.
I mean, there's a lot of material to go after Kamala Harris with.
A lot of material.
And I'm sure that Joe Biden has prepped for it.
Hitting her out of the blue would have been better, but he's going to have to hit her anyway.
And as we'll see, Joe Biden is perfectly willing to do that now.
He should have been willing last time.
It may not be over for old Joe just yet, but he's going to have to get pretty feisty.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so Joe Biden, he says it straight out.
He's not going to be nearly as polite to Kamala Harris as he was the first time around.
Have you and Senator Harris talked since the last situation that she had at the debate?
I think I saw her in passing, I think, at the fish fry for Jim Clyburn and said hi to her.
No, I'm serious.
I thought we were friends and I hope we still will be.
You know, she asked me to go out and call me and asked me to go to her convention and be the guy from outside of California to nominate her at her convention for the Senate seat.
I did.
We've talked, we've worked a lot together.
She and my son Beau were attorneys general who took on the banks.
But I think the fish fry was before the debate.
Okay, so there is Biden saying, we used to be friendly, now it's all broken.
But he said at a Detroit fundraiser, quote, I'm not going to be as polite this time.
He says, this is the same person who asked me to come to California and nominate her in her convention.
He said, I did that.
So he is not going to stand by it, nor should he, nor should he.
He said he was a bit surprised by what happened in the debate.
That is the Markey matchup, of course.
He has criticized Harris for her fantasy proposals.
He said about her Medicaid for all proposal or Medicare for all proposal.
She claimed she wouldn't raise taxes on the middle class, but somehow she would achieve Medicare for all.
He said, come on.
I mean, what is this?
Is this a fantasy world here?
Also, he's not going to stand by while Cory Booker goes after him.
So the way the stage is set up, so we actually know this, according to the DNC, the way the stage will be set up, Joe Biden will be dead center.
This is so, it's so obviously stagey.
I've got Joe Biden dead center to one side will be Cory Booker to the other side will be Kamala Harris.
Right, so they get the sandwich of people trying to destroy Joe Biden.
That's what this entire debate is going to be about.
And Biden is saying, I'm not going to stand by and listen to Cory Booker malign me.
And it is true.
Cory Booker has been going around.
Mr. Potato Head going around with the angry eyes, and he's been putting on the angry eyes every day about Joe Biden, suggesting that Biden is seriously a racist, that Joe Biden is easy on segregation.
He's been suggesting all this.
Here's Biden starting to punch back at Cory Booker and folks who say that's punching down.
No, at this point, because Booker and Kamala Harris are tag teaming him, he doesn't really have a choice.
They're making the same critique, and obviously they're making the same critique for the same political reason.
Both Cory Booker and Kamala Harris are black, and they're seeking to carve into Joe Biden's massive lead among black voters in the South.
So far with only moderate success, moderate to mild success, moderate for Harris, none for Booker.
It is amazing that Booker let off the attacks on Biden and sort of like Chris Christie in 2016, just has not been able to get any traction.
He's just too fake.
He's too off-putting.
Nobody likes him.
Here's Joe Biden saying, I'll go after Booker.
I'm not going to be shy about this.
If you look at the mayor's record in Newark, one of the provisions I wrote in the crime bill, a pattern and practice of misbehavior, His police department was stopping and frisking people, mostly African American men.
We took action against them.
The Justice Department took action against them, held the police department accountable.
OK, so there he is ripping into Cory Booker and his handling of Newark.
Again, this is all fair game.
Things are starting to get interesting and kind of ugly.
Now, in a second, I'm going to explain why one other Democratic candidate is making headlines today in the lead up to the debate.
But first, this month marks the 50th anniversary since we put a man on the moon.
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Also, a reminder, next month we're taking our backstage show on the road for one night and one night only.
They're amazing.
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Go check them out right now.
Also, a reminder, next month, we're taking our backstage show on the road for one night and one night only.
We're talking about August 21st at the beautiful Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.
Me, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, Andrew Klavan, Michael Moles.
We will all be there live.
We'll be talking about politics and pop culture.
We'll be answering your questions from the audience.
Undoubtedly, Drew and I will get into a didactic argument about trade or something.
Tickets are on sale!
are on sale right now at dailywire.com slash backstage.
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I'm shopping for it right after the show.
I keep promising this, but just like gifts for my wife, I keep putting it off.
But I promise you, by the time the date arrives, there will be a gift.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash backstage.
Get your tickets today.
I'll see you there.
Go check it out.
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One other Democratic candidate is making headlines today.
That'd be Tulsi Gabbard.
So Tulsi Gabbard delivered a fairly solid debate performance.
She did not pick up a lot of ground in the polling.
She continues to pull pretty low in the RealClearPolitics poll averages.
She's not in the top 10 of the candidates in that average.
Right now, she is polling below Julian Castro, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Andrew Yang.
Yang is pulling 2% in many of these polls and running ahead of Booker, which is just wonderful.
The fact that Andrew Yang is running ahead of Cory Booker is the best.
Andrew Yang in many of these polls is running ahead of Beto O'Rourke.
And again, the great shock to me when you look at this polling data is that if there's one candidate whose media attention has wildly outpaced his actual performance in the polls, it's Pete Buttigieg.
Pete Buttigieg is averaging 5%.
He's gotten coverage that is equivalent to probably Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris.
Minimum, maybe more than many of those folks.
He's still riding at 5%.
Nonetheless, Tulsi Gabbard is interesting in a lot of weird ways.
She is certainly a gadfly.
She's a person with different views on a lot of the issues that Democrats care about.
She sort of appeals to the horseshoe theory of politics.
Her isolationism is appealing to a lot of sort of paleocon conservatives.
Well now, Representative Gabbard, the long-shot presidential candidate from Hawaii, according to the New York Times, said in a federal lawsuit that Google infringed on her free speech when it briefly suspended her campaign's advertising account after the first Democratic debate in June.
The lawsuit was filed on Thursday for $50 million against Google.
In a twist that reflects her unorthodox political views, the claim that her speech was stifled by Google is similar to complaints made over the last year in Republican circles.
Few Democrats have raised similar concerns, and it is true that there are certain Google algorithms that benefit Democrat ideas.
This has been true for a very long time, just a couple of years ago.
There was a case where Google was putting fact-check ratings on right-wing sites only, but not on left-wing sites, for example.
These big tech companies are getting a lot of scrutiny.
Is it true that they cracked down on Tulsi Gabbard or was this just a mistake?
This is one of the big questions that it's hard to get your mind around simply because the vast number of things that Facebook or Google deal with, it's so vast that an isolated incident, if it's taken for a pattern, it may not actually be a pattern.
Nonetheless, the fact that Gabbard is going after Google is a quite fascinating story.
We've reached out to Google for comments.
I'm sure that other media outlets have as well.
Tulsi Now Inc.
is the campaign committee for Gabbard.
They said that Google suspended the campaign's advertising account for six hours, June 27th and 28th, obstructing their ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters, which would have helped because she won the drudge poll.
And while that poll is not nearly representative, it is publicity.
After the first Democratic debate, Gabbard was briefly the most searched for candidate on Google.
Her campaign wanted to capitalize on the attention she was receiving by buying ads.
But apparently, Google either decided to turn her off, which I think is kind of unlikely, or they got fooled.
And when they started suddenly pumping ad money behind a particular cause, Google always sort of puts a hold on that to make sure that it's legit.
So, unclear whether that's political bias or not, but kind of fascinating that that's the direction that Tulsi Gabbard is going.
Okay, meanwhile, in other news, the House did pass a two-year budget deal to lift the debt ceiling and suspend- to lift spending and suspend the debt ceiling yesterday.
It is a very, very bad budget deal.
The House passed this budget deal that is going to spend an additional $320 billion in basically unfunded spending.
And Republicans mostly did not back this.
The vast majority of Republicans did not back it.
149 people voted against this in the House.
It passed 284 to 149.
Supporters said that the legislation was a signal product of divided government, a compromise with something for everyone to love or hate.
In reality, it's just something for everybody to love, spending, and something for everybody to hate, which is spending.
Lawmakers in both parties are happy about all of this because, after all, no one ever gets busted in American politics for standing for more spending.
Name the last candidate in American politics who really got clocked for spending too much money.
You can say the Tea Party started because of Barack Obama overspending.
There is some truth to that.
It is also true that Barack Obama was an outsized politician whose coattails did not extend as far as they were supposed to and there was a huge backlash against the audacity of his programs, not really against the spending itself.
As we find out, as soon as Republicans are in power, they are willing to spend up the wazoo.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell basically made that clear yesterday.
He came out, he said, yeah, we got to pass this budget because the budget's great.
We just got to do it.
We got the number we wanted on defense.
There will be no Democratic riders, what we call poison pills, to pursue their left-wing agenda.
All of those are walled off.
And it'll be a chaos-free government for a year and a half.
In other words, no short-term CRs, no short-term debt ceilings.
It will at least present to the American people what they would expect, which is that the government would operate in a normal fashion.
I think that's worth a lot.
We knew we'd have to give with this Democratic House more spending on the domestic side.
We knew that going in.
I think Secretary Mnuchin... Okay, so there's Mitch McConnell basically signing up to endless spending without any cutbacks at all.
And you can see how this plays out in real time because there's this 9-11 responders bill.
Everyone is in favor of supporting funding for 9-11 responders, including Rand Paul and Mike Lee.
Rand Paul and Mike Lee said, we need to find a way to fund this.
And people went down their throats.
People were enraged.
How dare Mike Lee and Rand Paul ask very simple questions about where the money is going to come from on this thing?
How dare they hold up a bill for like two days, three days, in order to find out whether this is just spending...
To infinity, because apparently it doesn't cut off funding for like a hundred years, or whether we can figure out a way to fund this thing.
No one wins points in American politics by talking about cutting spending when they're in a position to actually cut spending.
You only win points when you are not in a position to cut spending.
And that's how these sorts of budget deals get done.
No one has the political courage of their convictions.
It's why no one talks about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which represent 66% of the federal budget.
If we were to talk about that, Particularly social security, we would have to talk, if we wanted to fix it, we'd have to talk about a combination of privatization for people who are not on social security now, cutting future benefits for people not under social security right now, raising the retirement age for people not under social security right now, and or raising the social security tax rate, which is already 12%, all the way up to 15%.
So the move toward fixing that thing is not going to happen until crisis is upon us, at which point we'll say it's an emergency, old people are suffering, now sign the check.
That's always how politics goes.
And that's why we always push up to the very last day on these budget deals.
Because the crisis is the solution for the politicians.
The crisis represents the solution.
Because, oh my god, we can't have a debt ceiling shutdown again.
We can't have a government shutdown.
That would be the worst.
Okay, we've had so many government shutdowns in the last ten years.
Have any of them proved catastrophic?
Truly catastrophic?
Every time we hear the media talk about the end of the world, everyone's going to die, zombies in the streets, and then the thing goes for like four or five weeks, and some people miss their paycheck, and then they get back pay when the shutdown is over, and then we all move on with our lives.
If it was so devastating for the American economy, why have we had unallied growth for years on end at this point?
It's just a way for legislators to claim over and over and over that they have no solution except to continue spending your money.
In other news, it is worth noting that Iran continues to grow more and more militant.
Yesterday on our radio program we had on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
He continues to push forward in his quest and the Trump administration's quest for hard-hitting sanctions and it's starting to come together.
The plan is starting to come together for the United States.
He said there would be a multilateral naval force likely to form in the aftermath of the Iranians attempting to target shipping in the Straits of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman.
According to the Washington Post, the British Navy has now begun escorting vessels traveling through the Strait of Hormuz after Iranian forces seized a British flag tanker.
Now, make no mistake, the Europeans are still not on board with the United States sanctions.
They're still not interested in the U.S.' 's sanctions efforts.
However, they are not willing to violate those sanctions because the United States will punish companies that do violate those sanctions.
We have secondary sanctions that have been placed on companies that do business with Iran.
So now the British have been forced to defend their own shipping, which is the proper solution.
In a statement on Thursday, Britain's defense ministry said the Royal Navy has been tasked to accompany British flag ships through the Strait of Hormuz either individually or in groups should sufficient notice be given of their passage.
That means that you could see more naval conflict.
The HMS Montrose, a Royal Navy Type 23 frigate, became the first Navy ship to offer an escort in the narrow waterway, according to Sky News, citing shipping industry sources.
Britain made that decision after the IRGC, that's the Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, on July 19th seized the Stena Imperial, a British flag tanker, as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran claimed that the boat was using the wrong channel through the strait had turned off its signals for longer than allowed, but the seizure was widely interpreted as a response to British Marines taking part in the seizure of an Iranian flag tanker near Gibraltar, a British overseas territory.
So it's pretty obvious at this point that European shipping is under attack.
It is also obvious that the Iranians are exploiting exactly the loopholes in the Iran nuclear deal that everybody said they were going to exploit.
So the Iran nuclear deal was specifically designed in cowardly fashion by the Europeans and the Obama administration to take into account only the nuclear program.
The idea is that we would stymie their nuclear program for 10 or 15 years And meanwhile, we would grant them regional power by funding them with billions of dollars in cash and allowing them to spend that money on terrorism and ballistic missile testing the minute that the sunset period was over.
It wasn't a permanent deal to denuclearize.
You could make the argument that if it was a permanent denuclearization deal, then maybe it's worthwhile.
That if the deal wasn't a 15-year sunset a deal, that if the United States and Europe had said, listen, you dismantle all your nuclear facilities, there will be no fissile material created in your country, you don't need nuclear power, you're one of the world's leading producers of natural gas and oil, that if that had been a forever deal, then maybe it's a deal that's worth considering.
But it wasn't a forever deal.
It was like a 10, 12, 15-year deal, which means Iran becomes regionally powerful, test ballistic missiles that they will undoubtedly tip with nuclear weapons at the first available opportunity, And then you put them on the pathway to a nuclear weapon by limiting their capacity to develop a nuclear weapon only to a percentage.
So it's not a complete denuclearization.
It's not getting rid of all their nuclear facilities.
It is simply diminishing their nuclear capability such that it would take them a few months to spin the thing back up after this waiting period is over.
Well now, Iran is doing exactly what you would think they're doing.
They're pushing up against the boundaries of that deal.
They tested another ballistic missile today.
Iran has reportedly tested the Shahab-3 missile.
It traveled a thousand kilometers.
It did not pose a threat to shipping or U.S.
bases, according to a Pentagon official.
Apparently, they tested the medium-range missile on Wednesday in a bid to improve the range and accuracy of their weapons.
News of that provocation emerged, according to the UK Sun, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered the Royal Navy to accompany all British flagships through the Strait of Hormuz.
This is pretty, it's pretty obvious what is happening here.
What is happening here is that the Iranian government is feeling the sting of the sanctions.
They're feeling insecure.
And because they're feeling insecure, they are attempting to lash out at the Europeans in an attempt to bring them back to the table to re-enter the nuclear deal.
Well, if the nuclear deal is so good for Iran that they are lashing out and getting militant in order to enforce it, it's probably not a great idea, is it?
It's probably not wonderful.
So the Iran nuclear deal, which is seen by many on the left as the great solution to this problem, actually exacerbated the problem because either Iran was going to get militant in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, or Iran was going to get militant with us.
Right now they're getting militant with us because we have sanctions on them.
If we didn't have sanctions on them, they'd be taking that money and they'd be using it for terrorist activities all across the world, including in South America, in Africa, in other parts of the world where they funded terrorist entities.
So Iran continues to do what they're doing.
The good news is that the world is being forced into a position of taking protective measures against its own assets, which is a really good thing.
Okay, one more piece of news and then we'll get to the mailbag.
So AOC tweeted something out yesterday that is really, I think, foolish.
What she tweeted out was a take on unpaid internships.
She tweeted out, "Today I was asked why we should bother paying interns if they're, quote, 'getting experience for their resume.' Here's what we have to say about that." And then in this video of her and Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley all shouting at the camera, which is always a wonderful way to do things.
Experience doesn't pay the bills!
And Rashida Tlaib is laughing.
Ayanna Pressley, as befits the Ringo Starr of this particular group, joins in late on the party.
Experience doesn't pay the bills.
Okay, so what is she talking about here?
I'm all in favor of if corporations want to pay their interns, go for it.
But if what you're saying is that we need to legislate it so that corporations must pay interns, you know what corporations are going to do?
Not hire interns.
You know how I know this?
Because we do it here.
We here are in California.
In California, the rules on internship are extraordinarily strict.
You're supposed to pay your interns.
Well, if I, as an employer, have a choice between paying someone who is highly qualified and an intern, I'm gonna pay somebody who's highly qualified, am I not?
Why would I pay somebody to learn the job?
I need to pay someone to do the job.
An internship is a way for people to gain a foothold in an industry that they may not know.
And for folks who are saying, well, there are lots of people who are too poor to take internships.
That's true, which is why there are a lot of people who actually take a job on the side and work an internship.
We've had people who have done that here.
I mean, you do this when you go to college.
When you go to college, you take out student loan debt to learn a skill set.
Now, I'm not saying that it wouldn't be better if everybody had the money to pay interns to learn a job.
That'd be wonderful.
That'd be very nice.
But most small businesses particularly are not going to do that.
Instead, they're just going to hire people if they have to pay people, and they're not going to give people opportunities to sit around the office if it creates legal liability.
It's easy for AOC to say that interns should be paid when she's not paying anybody.
The taxpayers are paying everybody.
And I see people on the right who are saying, sure, interns should be paid.
OK, are you saying that as like a governmental standard or as a, I wish interns were paid standard?
I wish everybody was paid.
But the idea that the government is going to cram down internship rules on businesses, all that's going to do is end internships.
You ain't gonna see any 17-year-olds walking around the office getting paid minimum wage to learn how to carry coffee and work the Xerox machine.
That's not how any of this works, but the beautiful thing about being a Democrat is that you never actually have to operate in the world of business reality.
This isn't an anti-poverty point.
This is a pro-economics point.
This is a pro-you-get-to-consent-to-the-job-you-want-to-take point.
And, by the way, it's a pro-opportunity point, because there are a lot of folks who have gotten internships at prestigious programs and who are not wealthy, and they've used that as a foothold to get into industries that they've desperately sought to enter.
Okay, time for some mailbags.
Let's mailbag it up for a little while here.
All righty.
Troy says, hey Ben, after watching the Mueller hearing, I was surprised to see that the top trending hashtags on Twitter were impeach now and impeachment inquiry now.
Were we not watching the same hearing?
Are people just blinded by their hate for the president?
Thanks for all you do.
Okay, so a couple of things about Twitter's hashtags.
It is pretty obvious that Twitter does censor its hashtags and picks which hashtags it wishes to elevate.
It is not automated.
There are many hashtags that seem like they should be trending that simply do not trend.
And that is because in my humble opinion, Backed by some anecdotal evidence, it seems that Twitter will shadow ban particular hashtags.
Second of all, Twitter does this by velocity.
They don't do it by sheer number of tweets.
So, that means that if a thousand people tweet something in quick succession, it is likely to trend on Twitter, which is why people have hashtag campaigns.
Also, when it comes to Twitter hashtags, the fact is, it doesn't take that many people tweeting a hashtag for it to trend.
Sometimes you'll see that with a thousand or two thousand tweets, something will trend.
I've trended, what, five times in the last eight weeks?
My name?
On Twitter?
And in many of those cases, it's like 15,000 tweets total.
I have 2.2 million followers.
Who cares?
So Twitter hashtags are not a good representation of this.
Twitter is also not representative of American life, and it has really perverted how we do politics in this country.
Kevin Williamson has a really fantastic new book out about social media mobbing, and Twitter is basically that.
And politicians who take Twitter too seriously are going to lose the middle of the country because the real world is not Twitter.
I mean, we all say this on Twitter, but we don't take it seriously because we're in it.
It is true.
The real world is not Twitter.
I know this because every time I turn off Twitter, it goes away.
It's amazing.
You can't do anything else like that in your life.
There's nothing else in your life that is like this.
If, God forbid, somebody in your family has cancer, you can't turn it off and it just goes away.
If your kid has a problem at school, you can't turn it off and it just goes away.
If you've got a problem on Twitter, you have a magic solution.
It's called put your phone in your pocket.
It's pretty great.
Edward says, The weeping of pregnant representative Erica Thomas, stirred by male instinct to defend the female sex of my species, isn't this the antithesis to the female feminist creed?
And what about the representative's daughter?
What lessons did she learn?
It's not okay to follow rules and if caught to play the victim loudly and without civility?
Is our culture on the precipice of disaster?
Well, our culture is in disaster.
We don't have a common culture anymore.
Our common culture is relegated to once in a while we watch a season finale together, and the rest of the time we yell at each other.
And that's really ugly.
And that's because a lot of the aspects of common culture that we used to share, aspirational aspects of culture, those have gone away.
In the 1950s, which were great for some reasons and really bad for some other reasons, obviously, in the 1950s, more people went to symphony orchestra events than went to baseball games.
That's an amazing statement.
That is people trying to engage with their culture.
Today, nobody tries to engage with their culture.
The culture is supposed to come to you and appeal to you at lowest common denominator.
Beyond that, everything that is cultural is now political.
And so you cannot watch a movie.
You cannot go to a concert.
You cannot view a sporting event without being clubbed over the head with divisive nonsense.
It's really negative.
As far as the male instinct to defend females, yes, it seems fully foolish for feminists to claim that the best thing would be for men to stop defending them.
You know what happens in cultures where men don't defend women?
They look a lot like some of the most primitive cultures on Earth.
Women standing up for themselves is a thing.
You know what is necessary for women to stand up for themselves?
Men to stand with them.
Obviously.
The story of feminism is not just the story of women learning to stand up for themselves.
It's the story of men standing with them.
Women were only able to vote in the United States because men voted to give women the right to vote.
Women couldn't vote.
So how could they vote to change their votes?
So, good men always have to stand on the side of women.
Feminists who throw that away, who think chivalry is bad, are idiots.
And also feminists who think that the sort of woke feminist man who silences his opinion and recedes into the background and says, ladies have the first say, women have the first say, just because they happen to have different genitalia.
Those are not going to end up being your allies.
You want allies in justice and equality and freedom?
You need men who stand up for justice, equality, and freedom, not men who stand against those things when feminists tell them to stand down.
Well, obviously, look, the big problem with the military option is that there's an inordinate amount of ordnance right on the border between North Korea and South Korea.
Much of it is pointed at Seoul.
There have been a lot of estimates as to what the death toll would be if open war broke out on the Korean peninsula.
It could be 100,000 in Seoul alone.
And those are huge numbers and really terrifying numbers.
The military option obviously is the last option.
The Chinese need to continue to be pressured.
And the Chinese are not cutting off the North Koreans.
In precisely the way that they should be cutting off the North Koreans.
I'm not sure there is any easy solution to the North Korean problem, just as I'm not sure that there is any great solution to the Cuban problem.
Dictatorship is very difficult to get rid of, particularly when that dictatorship is fairly well contained in a small area.
As dictatorships grow larger, then there's always the possibility that they collapse due to their own weight.
That's what happened in the USSR.
But, when you're Cuba, and you're a tiny island, and you have only a few million citizens, it's not that hard to keep control.
The same thing is true in North Korea, particularly if you can threaten force to the outside world.
Honestly, there's a better argument for regime change in Cuba than there is for regime change in North Korea in terms of the actual risk it would entail.
See, Ashira says, in light of the release of his ninth film, are you a Quentin Tarantino fan?
Why or why not?
So, I certainly appreciate Quentin Tarantino's ability to craft a scene.
My feeling about Quentin Tarantino is that he is effectively a filmmaker who makes YouTube films that are a bunch of YouTube films that are really good pasted together for like two hours.
And that those do not actually work as a full-on movie.
Those don't actually work as a complete movie.
I've never seen one of his movies where I thought that was great all the way through.
I think his best movie is Reservoir Dogs still, because it actually is somewhat tight.
But all the rest of them are very sprawling.
He's somebody who needs an editor.
There are some artists who need editors.
Richard Wagner needed an editor.
There are certain authors who need editors.
Quentin Tarantino needs an editor.
The problem is, the bigger he gets, the less anybody is willing to edit him.
And that, of course, is a problem for him.
Hey Ben, my wife and I are going to be adopting our second son out of foster care next Monday.
We've been foster parents going on four years now.
We have seen and heard a lot of heartbreaking stories in regards to children in the system.
My belief is that even though child services is a flawed system, the real problem lies in our communities that are failing these children.
My question is what can be done?
On a local level, to help fix this, how can we get more people involved in helping these children in the meantime?
Well, honestly, most people are not up to foster parenting.
Foster parenting is much more difficult than adoption for a variety of reasons, including the fact that very often, you get a fully formed kid, right?
When you adopt, you're getting a kid, very often, who's a baby.
When you're a foster parent, sometimes the kid arrives, they're six, seven years old, they've already had tremendously terrible experiences, and you have to deal with that.
Obviously, we need more foster parents, but what we really need to do is ease in adoption.
And instead, we are making it harder to adopt.
We're getting rid of adoption agencies, Catholic adoption agencies, on the basis of social justice warrior crap.
The idea that if a Catholic church favors a traditional couple, to receive a baby, that this is a form of bigotry.
And so shut it all down.
That's what Massachusetts did.
That's not good for kids.
We need to make it easier to adopt, obviously.
That would certainly be one possible solution.
I know people right now who are planning to adopt and they have to go through this giant rigmarole.
Meanwhile, the kid is being brought up in a home by a mother who doesn't want the kid and treats the kid poorly.
Like, how is this a solution?
Jacob says, Hey Ben, I often hear you refer to Iran as the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world.
Whenever I read left-leaning sources, they use the same description with regard to Saudi Arabia.
How is this measured or estimated?
Thanks for your work, Jacob.
Well, obviously Saudi Arabia does sponsor terrorism and they have, but the amount of terrorism that is sponsored by Iran, by metrics that I have seen, world metrics, It pales in comparison from Saudi Arabia to Iran.
Iran spends an enormous amount of money on terrorist activities in Syria.
They fund Hezbollah in Lebanon.
They fund Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
They have funded terrorist activities in Europe.
They fund terrorist activities in South America.
Now, Saudi Arabia is still a serious problem.
And the Wahhabi mosque system funded by the Saudis is a lot more militant than other mosque systems that are not funded by the Saudi royal government.
And Wahhabism does carry some dangerous seeds, in my opinion.
Not all forms of Islam are equally dangerous, obviously.
There are some forms of Islam that are perfectly fine, and there are other forms of Islam that are much more radical.
The Wahhabist version of Islam is a much more radical version of Islam.
When it comes to the actual sponsoring of violent terrorism around the world, however, it seems that the groups that are sponsored by the Iranians seem to be much more deadly than the groups that are sponsored in general by the Saudi government.
Although, I'd like to see the statistical argument either way, honestly.
I'm willing to hear it.
Nadine says, Hi Ben.
Do you think that the Dems are gearing to do something big, gearing up to do something big like put Michelle Obama in the running at the last minute to surprise Republicans?
The Obamas have been awfully quiet.
Your thoughts?
Now, I think that it's Probably not going to happen.
The idea, we heard this in 2016 also, was that Michelle Obama was going to jet into the middle of the primaries.
We heard in 2020, there are still people speculating that Hillary is going to parachute into the middle of the primaries.
It's really been a long time since somebody parachuted into the middle of a hotly contested primary.
The last I can remember is Fred Thompson tried to do this, I believe, in 2008.
He tried to parachute into the middle of the primaries and it just collapsed in on itself.
Wesley Clark, I think, did so in 2004 in the Democratic primaries.
It just failed.
You have to build an infrastructure.
You have to get people excited, ready to go.
Look, Michelle Obama is a massive figure in American politics.
I do not believe her when she says she will not run for office, frankly.
I think that she is a very political person.
She's always been a very political person.
Now she's more of a cultural figure than a political one.
So that means that she'd be a particularly dangerous political figure in terms of her innate capacity to win.
So I think that she's up for 2020.
I don't get that impression from her at all.
Yocheva says, do you think the Republican Party has any women who could be strong presidential candidates in 2024?
Do I think that, I mean, my spirit animal, Nikki Haley at the UN, obviously, is one who comes to mind.
You know, Condi is still out there.
I don't think she wants to run for president, but she'd be a strong presidential candidate, obviously.
I'm trying to think.
There are some others who I know I am missing here, but the one who comes to mind most obviously is Haley.
And John says, Mr. Shapiro, I love the show, but you are falling short in one area.
I want more Chris Matthews.
Much like Cowbell, there can never be enough.
But good news for you!
Next week, a bunch of Democratic debates.
There's no question Chris Matthews is going to have some commentary on those Democrats.
Here's how we structure the show.
I roll on in here.
Harold Rumpel.
I'm kind of a mess.
Kind of roll on in here.
Maybe drunk, maybe not.
You never know.
That's half the surprise.
And then I just kind of come in here, and I see, did Chris Matthews say anything yesterday?
If he did, I grab a clip of it, and then I riff on it for a little while.
We talk about wandering around the hotel asking for Kathleen.
We talk about why Pete Buttigieg really isn't gaining momentum.
The kind of momentum you'd expect from a man named Pete Buttigieg.
But if there are no clips of Chris Matthews, I can't do anything about it.
He's not been controversial of late, so Chris, do your job and I'll do mine.
Logan says, Hey, Ben, do you enjoy the Sherlock Holmes stories?
Answer is yes.
It is.
They're great.
OK, I think maybe one or two more questions.
Lewis says, Hi, Ben.
I have been a premium subscriber since January.
I've never missed your show once.
Wow.
Can a practicing Jew become president of the United States if they observe Shabbat?
I would assume a president must be available 24-7.
Thank you for everything.
Keep up the great work.
So, the answer is yes.
An Orthodox Jew could become president of the United States because obviously there is a provision of Jewish law called pikuach nefesh.
If life is endangered, then the president is allowed to respond.
It is also true that the president doesn't necessarily have to Violate Shabbat in order to get things done meaning that let's say that you the president they asked the president for a decision on something President doesn't have to tweet about it necessarily president doesn't have pick up the phone He's got a pretty big staff so and and of course in cases where there's a national emergency Situation where Iran shoots down a drone or something you have to make a call right now Are people gonna die or are they not gonna die then?
Orthodox Judaism itself says okay, you get to make an exception now now you get to I mean my wife was a doctor and Right, she was able to do medicine on Shabbat because pikuach nefesh was at stake, because a life was at stake.
That is the one rule that you can break Shabbat anytime a life is at stake.
In presidential politics, sometimes that's going to happen.
Honestly, wouldn't it be kind of great for the country if everything sort of shut down between Friday night and Saturday night?
Wouldn't it be kind of calming?
I gotta admit, I think that it would be kind of great for- Listen, my life is great because between Friday night and Saturday night, I don't know what the hell's going on.
It's fantastic.
And can you imagine, like, just how much more popular Trump would be if he didn't tweet on Saturdays?
Just like one day a week, he should take a tweet Shabbos.
A tweet Shabbat for President Trump, that's all I'm saying.
Etai says, Hey Ben, what's a day like preparing for an episode of The Ben Shapiro Show?
It must be a lot of moving parts to get any one episode done, so I'm fascinated by the behind-the-scenes operation.
So I can tell you from my end.
So first, we take all of our producers and we lock them in a room.
And then we take a dolphin and we throw it into the middle of the room.
And whoever the dolphin slaps first is forced to cut the clips.
Whoever the dolphin slaps second is forced to quit.
And this is the way that we have a high churn level, but the show's quality is really high.
In reality, our producers are treated only in sort of moderate horrible fashion.
Mostly they're treated Horribly, but sometimes not.
Here's how it works for me.
Throughout the day, I'm watching the news, as you can tell from my Twitter feed.
And I sort of form ideas of what the narrative of the day is.
And then, when it comes time to put together a schedule, the night before I do the show, I put together a baseline schedule, because usually you kind of know what the news cycle is going to be the next day.
And then in the morning, I wake up and I bombard my producers with a bunch of clips I want them to pull.
I structure everything.
So they do a wonderful job pulling the clips, making sure everything is ready to go, making sure all the technicals are ready.
I don't have to do any of that.
That's why we have a great staff here.
What I do do is make sure that I am fully- like, I do all my own prep.
Nobody does prep for me one iota on the show other than sort of pulling the clips that I suggest that they pull.
So I can fairly say that the show is a product of whatever is going on upstairs, which may or may not be good.
Okay.
Quick thing.
You know what?
We're going to skip things I like and things I hate today because the show has run extraordinarily long.
And guess what?
It's the weekend, man.
I want to go home.
So we'll see you here for two more hours later today because it's not quite the weekend for me yet.
If you want that, go subscribe to Daily Wire.
If not, we'll see you here next Monday prepping for those Democratic debates.
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, federal executions have been reinstated, and this fact has caused quite a lot of anger and consternation, especially on the left.
One thing we keep hearing, which we hear a lot, this claim that, well, if you're pro-life, you can't be pro-death penalty.
Is that actually true?
I say no, I'll explain why.
Also, a drag queen story hour goes in an even creepier direction than usual, and that is, of course, saying quite a lot.
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