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Nov. 22, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:32
Chaos Across The World | Ep. 903
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is indicted, throwing the entire system into chaos.
Democrats struggle for ratings in the wake of another snooze-fest debate.
And Impeachment Gate 2019 proceeds.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, so it is a chaotic world out there, my goodness.
The level of chaos, I mean, just around the globe.
You got rolling protests in Iran.
Apparently over 100 protesters have been shot by the government.
You have the situation in Hong Kong where the Chinese government is running roughshod over protesters, solidifying its grasp on a territory that It was not supposed to be in control of until something like 2040.
You've got situations all around the world that are just a mess.
I mean, just a mess everywhere.
Well, that mess got a lot larger for Israel yesterday when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted on three separate counts on corruption and fraud and abuse of trust.
Well, what exactly were the charges?
There were three charges.
The charges were really about, effectively, bribery.
The charges were made by a man named Mandelblit, Avi Chai Mandelblit.
He's the Attorney General.
He used to work for Netanyahu.
So the idea that Mandelblit is motivated purely by a desire to, quote-unquote, get Netanyahu is likely untrue.
Now, there have been accusations of police misconduct or pressure on witnesses.
Those are the charges that Netanyahu is making.
Netanyahu called the prosecutors, he said that they were staging an attempted coup.
Mandelblit himself said, a day in which the Attorney General decides to serve an indictment against a seated Prime Minister for serious crimes of corrupt governance is a heavy and sad day for the Israeli public and for me personally.
He obviously was unhappy about having to bring the charges.
He said, this is not a matter of politics.
It's an obligation placed on us, the people of law enforcement and upon me personally as the one at its head.
Now, all of this comes in the middle of a massive political crisis inside of Israel.
The massive political crisis is that Israel has experienced two elections in the past year alone.
There's an election back near the beginning of the year in which, effectively speaking, no coalition was able to be formed.
A second election was declared, no coalition was still able to be formed.
To understand exactly what's going on in Israel, you sort of have to understand their system.
So very different than the United States.
In the United States, there are basically two parties.
One party gains a majority in the House.
One party gains a majority in the Senate.
One party becomes the President.
These elections are utterly disconnected.
You vote for the person, you don't vote for the party.
In Israel, as in Great Britain, for example, instead, you have what's called the parliamentary system.
In the parliamentary system, you don't vote for the person, you vote for the party.
That means that Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister of Israel because the Likud party His party has been able to win a plurality of the votes in these elections and then form a coalition with other right-wing parties in Israel to form a majority of the Knesset, which is the Hebrew word for parliament.
So there are 120 seats in Knesset.
You need 61 seats in your coalition in order to be able to govern.
Netanyahu has been doing that consistently since 2009.
He's the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history.
Well, he was unable to gain a governing majority at the beginning of this year for the first time in a long time.
And that was because an erstwhile party in his coalition, led by a guy named Victor Lieberman, who had once been very close to Netanyahu, decided not to form a coalition with Netanyahu and the right-wing religious parties.
He sees the religious parties as rent-seeking and basically taking welfare money, and so he didn't want to join that coalition.
And instead, he thought about joining a coalition with the left, but there weren't enough votes on the left for him to form a majority coalition.
Second election happens, same thing happens.
And that leads to this period in which Netanyahu is serving as Prime Minister, but he doesn't actually have a majority.
And that's just because no one else can form a majority.
So, I'll explain more about what exactly is happening in Israel, because it is completely chaotic and it is a complete mess.
And it's worthwhile knowing, because Israel is one of America's strongest allies.
And obviously, Netanyahu is a world historical figure.
I mean, this is a guy who has been in charge of a state for a decade.
And who stood up to Barack Obama, was a strong advocate for America's role in the world.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so the cases against Netanyahu are really threefold.
There is case 1,000, case 2,000, and case 4,000.
And again, we are now in this period where nobody's able to form a government.
Netanyahu is basically the figurehead prime minister.
He still has the powers of prime minister, because no one else can form a government, and there can't just be an absence at the top of the government in Israel.
Basically, there's two main parties in Israel right now.
There's Likud, and there's one called Kachov Levan, which in Hebrew means blue and white.
The Blue and White Party is sort of a coalition party of its own.
It is led by a man named Benny Gantz, who was the chief of the IDF.
He was the head military officer in the IDF.
It's also led by a faction led by Bogie Ayalon, who's another general in the IDF, and Yair Lapid, who was a newscaster in Israel and was the son of a very famous figure in Israeli politics named Tommy Lapid.
His main thing is that he won't sit with the religious party.
So, Benny Gantz His party and Netanyahu's party had approximately the same number of votes in the last election cycle.
Again, Avigdor Lieberman, who was that sort of middle guy, the guy who used to side with Netanyahu fairly routinely, and then broke away from Netanyahu, he said he wouldn't sit in a coalition with the religious parties, and so Netanyahu does not have a right-wing majority, even though there really has been a right-wing majority elected.
Okay, so this has led to this grave impasse in Israeli politics, where Netanyahu was given a mandate to form a government, could not, and then Benny Gantz was given a mandate to form a government by the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, and then he was not able to form a government, and now there's this 21-day period we're in the middle of right now, where literally anyone can form a government.
If you go to the president with a piece of paper with 61 signatures, of the members of Knesset, then you can form a government.
But that expires on December 11th.
On December 11th, a new election will be declared, the third election in the last year for prime minister of Israel.
Now, Benny Gantz didn't want to form a coalition with Netanyahu, specifically because he saw these indictments coming down the pipe.
And he figured, why am I forming a coalition with Netanyahu, who's going to be indicted?
He had basically said, I'm willing to work with Likud, but I'm not willing to work with Netanyahu.
Lieberman, similar sort of logic, he doesn't like Netanyahu either, he was sort of ousted from Likud by Netanyahu, so now they both have the wherewithal to basically Put Netanyahu in a box.
Now, by the same token, Netanyahu is fighting not only for his political life at this point and for leadership of the Israeli government, he's also fighting for his actual life at this point.
Because now that he's been indicted, there are basically two different places he can be tried.
If he is Prime Minister of Israel, while he is sitting, right?
If he is sitting Prime Minister of Israel, and he is indicted, and he goes through a trial, you're not automatically ousted in Israel.
It's not like America, where you can't be prosecuted if you're president.
And you have to be impeached before you can be prosecuted.
In Israel, you can be prosecuted while you are the president, or rather, while you are the prime minister.
So, if Netanyahu is indicted while he is the prime minister, then he has tried in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem happens to be a much more conservative, right-wing city.
That means that he is likely to get off with some sort of slap on the wrist, pay a fine, pay back whatever Payment for cigars he received, that sort of thing.
If, however, he is not Prime Minister, he will be tried, not in Jerusalem, but in Tel Aviv.
Tel Aviv is a very left-wing city.
This is like the difference between if Donald Trump were going to be tried in Odessa, Texas, versus if Donald Trump were going to be tried in New York.
Very, very different thing.
L.A.
versus L.A.
versus Ohio.
It's a completely different thing.
So Netanyahu really wants to be tried in Jerusalem.
And he feels if he's tried in Jerusalem and he gets slapped on the wrist, he continues his political career, right?
He continues being Prime Minister.
If, however, he is ousted and then tried in Tel Aviv, he may end up in jail for five years, right?
He could end up in jail for five to seven years on these charges of bribery.
The three charges, by the way, that he is being exposed to and he says, Netanyahu for his part, he says this is all basically a game being played by the political left in Israel that is out to get him.
He suggests correctly that the media do not like him.
That's been true for a very long time in Israel.
Israel has universally left-wing media.
The only real conservative news source in Israel is Israel Hayom, which is Sheldon Adelson's free newspaper.
Here's Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, explaining yesterday that this is basically a gotcha attempt by the left that could not defeat him in an election.
So it feels very much like what President Trump says about the impeachment attempt in the United States.
The time has come to investigate the investigators.
The time has come to investigate the Attorney General that initiates this kind of investigation.
I respect the police department and the attorney general office.
But we have to understand.
But there are people that these people in police and attorney general, they are not above the law.
So according to Netanyahu, basically, this is a railroading attempt because you could not be defeated in elections.
The three cases under which Netanyahu is indicted are Case 1000, Case 2000, and Case 4000.
is indicted, are case 1000, case 2000, case 4000.
Case 1000 is a case where he allegedly received illegal gifts.
So did members of his family, including pink champagne and jewelry and Cuban cigars and tickets to a Mariah Carey concert, which is a terrible bribe.
And apparently, he supposedly received those gifts in order to benefit political allies.
Police say that the allies, including an Israeli-born Hollywood producer named Arnon Milchan, and an Australian investor named James Packer, received Netanyahu's political backing on key issues.
For example, the Prime Minister pushed for a law the media labeled the Milchan Law, That cut taxes for Israelis returning to Israel after living abroad.
Netanyahu has denied the allegations.
He has said, like, you really think that I'm going to sacrifice my political career for some cigars?
That is case 1000.
And Mandelblit says that Netanyahu should be tried with fraud and breach of trust in connection with that case.
Case 2000 is a case in which Netanyahu is accused of using his connections to Sheldon Adelson in order to broker a deal With a newspaper publisher of Yediot Aharonot, which is an Israeli daily paper, which is sort of center-slash-center-right, maybe?
Under the alleged deal, the editor of Yediot Aharonot would have given better coverage to Netanyahu in return for Netanyahu telling Adelson to limit the circulation of Israel Hayom.
Israel Hayom is a free newspaper published by Adelson, so it's got the biggest circulation in Israel.
Adelson, for his part, says, I was never talked to about this by Netanyahu.
It was Netanyahu blowing off steam and saying things.
Apparently, this is one of the charges where he is basically being charged with breach of trust.
And then there's case 4000, which is the most severe case.
In this case, Netanyahu is alleged to have offered to help the so-called Bezek Group and its former owner, Shaul Elovich.
Elovich is a close friend of Netanyahu.
Apparently, he ordered the Walla news site to provide more favorable coverage of the Netanyahu's in return for deregulation of the communications industry.
According to the police, Netanyahu and his associates intervene in a blatant and ongoing manner, sometimes even daily, in the content published by the Wallen News website and sought to influence the appointment of senior employees.
Now, Netanyahu says that's not bribery, that's just called public relations, right?
I mean, we call up newspapers all the time and we tell them we don't like this reporter, we don't like that reporter.
Barack Obama used to do it in the United States, Donald Trump does it in the United States.
There really is no big issue of calling up newspapers and saying we don't like this or that.
The question is whether he was in fact trading regulatory gifts in favor of that sort of positive media coverage.
Okay, so those are the charges against Netanyahu.
So where does this leave Israel?
I'll explain in just one second what the various options are that are on the table because it's complex, man.
I mean, this is a decision tree that has a lot of branches.
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Okay, so what exactly are the options left to the Israeli public?
So again, December 11th, new election gets called.
And then you have a sitting prime minister under indictment and the head of the Likud party, which is the biggest party in Israel, and he is under indictment.
So there are a few different options that could happen here.
One is that Netanyahu has the support of Likud and the right-wing bloc, which appears to be the case so far, and he just brazens this out.
He just says, listen, I'm gonna keep being Prime Minister, I'm gonna keep running, and you guys are gonna have to oust me with an election, not with any sort of prosecution.
In order for that to happen, he first has to go to the Supreme Court.
So he's going to the Supreme Court right now, the Israeli Supreme Court, which is left-wing, and he is asking them whether he can continue to serve as Prime Minister while under indictment.
Now, there's a law in Israel that if you are not Prime Minister, but one of the other ministers, like Minister of Defense or Minister of Strategic Affairs or something, then you cannot sit while you are under indictment.
You are immediately Demoted right you're immediately you immediately lose your post because the idea is you can't perform your functions while you are one of these ministers if however You're a prime minister.
The math is completely different.
Why?
Well, because if you're prime minister and you step down, there literally is nobody else to fill that gap, right?
I mean, you're the leader of the government.
You're the leader of the government.
So there's no substitute for you.
So that's in the law.
So Netanyahu actually has a pretty good case that he can sit under indictment while serving as prime minister of Israel.
And as I say, he has a very strong interest in doing so because if he steps down and then is prosecuted, he ends up in Tel Aviv and then maybe in jail.
So the options are these.
He goes to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court either upholds the law and he gets to sit as prime minister until he is removed by the electorate while under indictment.
Or they change the law sort of on the fly, which would be illegal, but they could do it.
And they say that he has to step down.
If they say he has to step down, then Netanyahu is tried.
Then Netanyahu is tried.
Whatever happens to him, happens to him.
Whatever happens to him, happens to him.
And then somebody else in Likud takes over the leadership of Likud.
And then somebody else in Likud takes over the leadership of Likud.
And that's actually probably not great for the left wing.
And that's actually probably not great for the left wing.
It's probably bad for Benny Gantz, right?
It's probably bad for Benny Gantz, right?
It's probably bad for the blue and white party in Israel because their entire glue, right?
The thing that draws them together is opposition to Netanyahu.
If Netanyahu is out of the way, a lot of the voters for blue and white say, okay, well, I don't really like this party very much, but Netanyahu is gone.
So I'm going to go back over to Likud.
So it's probably not good for Benny Gantz for Netanyahu to go away is the truth.
Okay, it's probably bad politically.
It's probably good for Likud for Netanyahu to go away to a certain extent.
But by the same token, nobody wants to be seen pushing Netanyahu out of the door because you push him out the door and suddenly you're responsible for the most significant prime minister in modern Israeli history going to jail.
So nobody is going to push him out the door from the inside.
Now there are a few people inside the Likud party who have suggested, listen, it's up to us, let's have a new primary.
Because the way you decide the leadership in Likud is just like in the United States deciding a presidential nominee, you have an internal party primary.
And if there's an internal party primary and Netanyahu loses, Then, presumably, Likud moves on, Netanyahu moves on, and everything sort of works itself out.
There's also the possibility that some breakaway faction inside Likud simply leaves Likud with a bunch of members of the parliament, walks over to Blue and White, and forms a coalition without Likud properly.
So those are the various options.
Now, does this mean that Netanyahu's political career is over?
Well, he has one very narrow path to staying in power, and that basically is that he retains the prime ministership, he's indicted, the trial goes forward, And then he is acquitted or he gets a slap on the wrist.
At that point, he continues to serve.
But in all likelihood, the most likely outcome in all of this is that the Likud does not oust him, the polls start to look bad for Likud because the Israeli public don't like the idea of a prime minister under indictment, and then they are forced to a choice which is do we leave Netanyahu in power and thus lose a majority and then you have a governing coalition of Vigdor Lieberman and Blue and White and Labor?
With the Arab party sitting outside and maintaining the power of the government from the outside?
Or do you oust Netanyahu?
So it is a mess over there for sure.
It's a mess over there for sure.
And we'll continue to bring you all of the updates as that progresses.
In just a second, we're gonna get to the debate fallout in the United States from the Democratic side.
Bad news for the Democrats.
Nobody watched this thing.
Nobody.
Why?
Because it was boring as all hell.
Why would you have watched this thing?
I did because I get paid to do so.
But if you weren't paid to do so, why in the world Why in the world would you do this?
Okay, we're gonna get to all of that in just one second.
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Okay, so the Democratic debate did not go well for the Democrats.
It was not a showpiece for any of them.
It's funny.
I was looking at the New York Times ratings of how the various candidates did.
And while I thought that Pete Buttigieg actually did a fairly good job, they were less than enthused.
And that is because the New York Times is more radical than Buttigieg.
They don't want to see Buttigieg do very well.
And so they were talking about how well Bernie Sanders did.
And I thought to myself, well, Bernie Sanders was just Bernie Sanders.
I'm confused as to why Bernie Sanders did exceedingly well.
The answer is because the Democrats are basically now engaged in the same game Republicans were engaged in in 2012.
In 2012, Mitt Romney jumped into the race.
He had run in 2008 also, right?
He had run against John McCain.
He was sort of seen as, by many people, the conservative alternative to John McCain in 2008 because McCain was wishy-washy on issues like immigration, for example.
Okay, so in 2012, Romney runs again.
He's immediately the frontrunner.
And the entire Republican Party basically goes, Really?
Mitt Romney?
Like, Romneycare guy?
Are we sure about this?
Governor from Massachusetts?
Are we totally cool with this?
And so, they start searching for another candidate.
And so you get people looking at Rick Perry.
You get people looking at Herman Cain.
You get people looking Literally everyone, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman, like everybody gets a chance at the top.
For a brief moment in time, every single member of the Republican field gets a chance at the top, right?
It is the revolving carousel of Republican politics in 2012.
And finally, at the very end, everybody goes, okay, fine.
All these people, it turns out, are flawed.
Back to Romney.
It feels a lot like that for the Democrats and Joe Biden right now.
Joe Biden is old.
He is not good at his job.
He is a bad candidate.
He says silly things on a routine basis.
But he also happens to be the least nuts of these candidates and the person least likely to alienate vast swaths of voters.
And so you're seeing Biden rising in the betting odds again, right?
Just mid-October, Elizabeth Warren was a 50% odds-on favorite to be the Democratic nominee.
She is all the way down to 26.5% in the betting odds, according to RealClearPolitics right now.
Joe Biden maintains an 11-point national lead in the Democratic Party.
And part of that is because Warren's mojo is gone.
I mean completely gone.
She is collapsing in Iowa.
She is collapsing in New Hampshire.
That probably means she's collapsing in Nevada.
And for all of Buttigieg's momentum, in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, he has no national credibility because he has no ability to draw black votes.
And when you get down south, where two-thirds of the Democratic electorate in primaries like South Carolina is black, he ain't got nothing.
So who benefits from that?
Obviously Joe Biden, which is why Biden, despite the fact that he is barely alive at this point.
I mean, the man's eye explodes on national television in the middle of a debate.
Here is Joe Biden saying something that is true, which is, while the media may maintain that Elizabeth Warren is the frontrunner, she ain't.
Biden says, listen, I'm the frontrunner still.
I am the clear frontrunner of the party.
I'm ahead on the national average of all the polls by seven, eight percent.
But it's a long way to go.
A long way to go.
And the other reason is that, look, whomever is the nominee, it's not going to be enough just to beat Donald Trump.
You've got to be able to win in states like this.
You've got to be able to be value-added to make sure we pick up Senate seats and House seats.
And so, in every one of these polls in these states that I find myself in, again, I'm not counting on the polls, but the fact is that I'm ahead in every one of the toss-up states.
Okay, and he is correct about that with regard to the Democrats.
He's not correct about that with regard to the Republicans.
And this is the bad news for the Democrats.
Right now, if you look at the swing states, Trump is pretty solid there.
I'm looking at some polls of swing states right now, Trump versus the Democrats.
There's one that came out just yesterday.
From Marquette University Law School in Wisconsin.
And you would figure that Trump would be a little bit weak in Wisconsin, considering that Wisconsin has a pretty long progressive history.
Right now, he's running ahead of every major Democrat.
He's beating Joe Biden, 47-44, according to that Marquette University Law School poll.
He's beating Bernie Sanders, 48-45.
He's beating Elizabeth Warren, 48-43, because she's an awful candidate.
And he's beating Pete Buttigieg, 47-39.
Now notice those numbers.
Trump is not above 50% in any of these cases.
But the Democrat is certainly not above 50% and not even close to 50% in any of those cases.
And that is before Trump gets through running them through the mill.
It is true that Donald Trump is never going to surpass 50% approval rating in this country.
He's just not going to do that because he's not that kind of candidate.
But Donald Trump is a specialist in taking his opponents and just grinding them into dust.
It is what the man does best.
He's an attack dog and man can he attack, right?
I've been saying for years that he's a hammer in search of a nail and when he hits a nail, it is incredibly satisfying.
In politics, that is a great skill and Trump certainly has that skill.
So if you think that Pete Buttigieg looks all shiny and unvarnished at this point, Well, get—or shiny and varnished, rather.
Wait for President Trump to throw a few punches, and that reputation is going to collapse into dust very, very quickly.
After all, Pete Buttigieg, who right now is the thing of the moment, his biggest election victory was he won 11,000 votes in a small town in Indiana.
11,000 votes.
I've had speech crowds that are significantly larger than Pete Buttigieg's constituency in South Bend, Indiana.
So there's that.
Meanwhile, the Democratic moderates are attacking Elizabeth Warren and continuing to tear her down.
So Cory Booker is smacking around Elizabeth Warren's policy proposals.
I think at this point, if you had to handicap the field, you say that the most likely ticket looks something like Joe Biden, Cory Booker.
Here's Cory Booker going after Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax.
Nobody knows why he's still in this race other than to play a tack dog against people like Elizabeth Warren.
Here is Booker going after Warren.
It is hard to evaluate.
Other nations have tried this.
You literally have to assess every single year of somebody's wealth, from the paintings on their wall to the value of their farm.
People would be fighting that in court.
It would take years to figure out.
And they want to do this every single year.
There are better ways to do this to get revenue.
My plan is much, much better.
Love Elizabeth.
Love the intention behind it.
But we can find a way to do fair, just taxation.
Okay, so this is obviously, again, another attack by the moderates against Elizabeth Warren.
I don't think that Elizabeth Warren is going to last in all of this.
Meanwhile, the American people just are not interested.
The MSNBC Democratic debate readings were horrible.
Horrible.
According to Nielsen numbers, Mediaite reporting, more than 6.5 million viewers tuned in to watch the November 20th debate in Atlanta, including 1.6 million in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 demo, which is a lot of viewers, but that is a huge downturn from the 8.5 million viewers CNN earned from the October 15th debate.
With 2.4 million from the Target 25 to 54 demo.
By the way, 6.5 million viewers for a debate is a very bad number.
A very bad number.
How do you know it's a bad number?
Because during the 2016 debates, the first debate with Donald Trump in 2015 had 24 million viewers.
Four times as many people watched that debate as watched this debate.
Why?
Because nobody likes these candidates and they're incredibly, incredibly boring.
Mediaite tries to blame that on MSNBC's coverage of impeachment, but really that should jack up the ratings, not jack them down, right?
I mean, when you're trying to impeach the sitting president of the United States and then you have a Democratic primary debate, shouldn't the excitement be super high?
Well, the problem is that this debate was incredibly boring.
The other problem is that the moderators suck.
So Andrew Yang just blasted my boy, Andrew Yang.
I mean, listen, if you don't appreciate just Andrew Yang as a human being, you don't have to agree with any of his policies, right?
You don't have to think that universal basic income is a good idea, but Andrew Yang is a nice and decent human being.
I've sat with Andrew Yang.
I've met Andrew Yang.
This is a person who is trying to be reasonable in a way that I disagree with, but trying to be reasonable.
And so, Andrew Yang being shut out of these debates despite the fact that he has literally come from politically nowhere in order to be in these debates in the first place, The man has a little bit of credibility.
He says MSNBC moderators are just terrible.
He slams them on CNN and CNN of course laps it up.
You know, Wolf, all I can say is I miss CNN moderating these debates.
No, no, I mean, they saw it last night, too.
I mean, America saw it.
I went 32 minutes without a question, and I was raising my hands trying to get a word in edgewise during that time.
So when you all moderated the debate, it was straight up the middle.
It was professional.
We got real substantive topics.
Okay, this is absolutely true, and good for Yang for saying something true.
And what he's saying there is 100% true.
Meanwhile, the DNC is releasing its fundraising numbers for October, and they stink again.
The DNC reported less than $8.7 million cash on hand, over $7 million in debt, in an FEC report released on Wednesday.
These numbers are bad.
They are ugly numbers.
Those poor fundraising numbers come less than a year out from the 2020 presidential election.
The RNC is Blowing it out.
The RNC raised nearly three times as much money as the DNC last month, pulling in over $25 million in October, reporting over $60 million cash on hand.
Additionally, the joint fundraising effort between the Trump campaign and the RNC had raised over $300 million in 2019 so far, and reported $156 million cash on hand last month, according to The Daily Caller.
Tom Perez is coming under fire for his crap fundraising job.
And of course they're having a tough time fundraising.
Number one, they don't have a nominee.
Number two, none of the people who they're talking about are particularly exciting.
And when I say they're not particularly exciting, I mean they are particularly non-exciting.
And the new faces are getting slammed.
The New York Times, which is more woke than the general base of the Democratic Party.
You know, it is fascinating.
One of the... I was examining some poll numbers yesterday with regard to how members of each party see the members of the other party.
And one of the things that you see is that the parties have a very different view of their opponents than are reflected by reality.
So in other words, Republicans tend to think that people who vote Democrat are much more to the left than they are.
And Democrats tend to think that people who are Republican are much more extreme than they are.
And part of this is driven by media coverage.
And part of this is driven by the fact that social media rules the roost.
Part of this is driven by the fact that the presidential candidates on the Democratic side of the aisle are more responsible to Twitter than they are to their own actual constituents, which is why you are seeing the durability of Joe Biden.
It's why you are seeing Pete Buttigieg surge when he pretends to be a moderate.
There's a study this year from an organization called More in Common.
55% of Republicans and Democrats believed the majority of the opposing party believed extreme views.
In reality, that number was actually 30%.
So, for example, Democrats believed only half of Republicans would acknowledge that racism still exists in America.
In reality, 80% of Republicans acknowledged that racism still exists in America.
Conversely, Republicans believed that only about half of Democrats were proud to be American.
The actual number was about 80%.
In other words, most Democrats are not actually in alignment with Democrats Who are running for president.
They are not.
Which leaves a lot of room to run for President Trump.
And the media who are pushing the Democrats further to the left are doing the Democrats no favors.
In fact, they're hurting them.
But that's not going to stop the New York Times from attacking the ersatz moderate, Pete Buttigieg.
There's a big attack article in the New York Times today by Reid Epstein against Pete Buttigieg.
It's called, Pete Buttigieg is struggling with black Democrats.
Here's why.
He says, former Vice President Joe Biden has 154 endorsements from current or former black or Hispanic elected officials.
Kamala Harris has 93, which has benefited her not at all.
Bernie Sanders has 91.
Cory Booker has 50.
Elizabeth Warren has 43.
Pete Buttigieg has 6.
According to the New York Times, Buttigieg has failed to demonstrate even minimal support among African-Americans and Hispanics, critical voting blocs that will have a much larger say after Iowa and New Hampshire and their nearly all-white electorates begin the presidential nominating calendar.
And watch as the media starts to portray the Democratic nominating calendar as itself inherently racist because it starts off with some heavily white states.
On Wednesday night, debate moderators questioned Buttigieg's record on racial issues, while rivals, including Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, suggested he needed on-the-job training in talking to black audiences.
And obviously, there's some truth to this.
Van Jones said the same thing on CNN.
Pete Buttigieg's pitch to black audiences was, I'm gay, so I've been victimized too, just like you, which obviously is not true.
Again, Pete Buttigieg has really not experienced significant political discrimination against him.
He's the mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
When he came out of the closet, I believe he was 30 at the time, when he came out of the closet, Mike Pence was asked about it and he was basically like, enjoy.
This idea that he has experienced anything like the discrimination that a John Lewis experienced in the United States is just absurd.
According to the New York Times, Buttigieg's weakness with voters of color limits his potential in the 2020 campaign.
A donor class favorite who draws capacity crowds across Iowa, Buttigieg counts as his highest profile black supporter, either the man who lost a 2018 election to be Florida's Attorney General, or the former mayor of Kansas City, Missouri.
No Democrat in modern times has won the party's nomination without claiming majorities of black voters, the most crucial voting bloc in South Carolina, and in an array of delegate-rich southern states.
Buttigieg's supporters say black voters and politicians haven't gotten to know him.
They say that once they do, his fortunes will improve.
That is very likely untrue.
That is very likely untrue.
So again, this field is floundering.
Not only is it floundering, the Democrats in the media are pushing them to the left.
And the Democratic base does not even agree with those principles.
Which is why, again, Joe Biden remains your likeliest nominee.
In a second, we're going to give you all the updates on Impeachment Gate 2019.
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Okay, so, meanwhile, in impeachment gates, Adam Schiff is self-righteously declaring that Republicans must fulfill their duty despite the fact that Democrats have not yet actually proved the case for impeachment.
Again, the initial investigation was based on the idea that Donald Trump specifically militarized American foreign aid in order to get Joe Biden.
Right, that's what this whole thing was about.
Let's not forget the original accusation.
It was a quid pro quo, but it was not just a quid pro quo, it was a quid pro quo for something totally illegitimate.
He wanted Ukraine to make up information about Joe Biden or launch a false investigation into Joe Biden or an investigation based on false pretenses in order to help Trump in the 2020 election.
It wasn't about 2016.
It wasn't about Trump being vindictive.
It wasn't about Trump wanting to investigate Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections.
It was purely and solely a get Biden effort.
If you want to know what the allegation was, just go back and listen to that ridiculous phony transcript that Adam Schiff Parody.
Remember that Adam Schiff did this parody.
I'm not going to say, like so many have said, that he was being literal.
He was not.
He was parodying the transcript.
But he was sort of summing up his perception of the memo, the call memo from July 25th, in which he said, I want you to go get Joe Biden.
Go get Joe Biden and bring me his head on a platter and all of this.
OK, that was the original accusation.
Democrats have not proved that.
What Democrats have shown is that Trump withheld aid.
And that he did so in order to receive investigations, right?
But guess what?
That was pretty obvious from the July 25th phone call, right?
That he was either withholding an actual meeting or withholding aid for that purpose.
Now, I'm not going to go along with the Republican talking point that Trump was never withholding aid in exchange for anything.
Like, I don't think that that's a credible talking point.
I just don't.
I think that when Gordon Sondland says, I perceived a quid pro quo, and then everybody was like, yeah, but nobody told you straight out it's a quid pro quo.
And he's like, right, but I was talking to Rudy Giuliani, and Trump was saying, go talk to Giuliani, and Giuliani was saying, do X, and Trump was withholding the aid.
That looks a lot like a quid pro quo.
Like, that makes some sense.
It does.
But that does not answer the question as to whether the quid pro quo was completely illegitimate.
Quid pro quos do happen in American foreign policy all the time.
We are constantly conditioning American aid.
We are constantly doing that.
Nonetheless, you have Adam Schiff self-righteously declaring that Republicans must do their duty and impeach the president.
At the same time, Democrats refused to hear testimony from Hunter Biden.
Remember, this whole investigation was launched on the back of the allegation that asking Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden was completely illegitimate.
Well, I mean, come on.
I'm sorry.
I can't buy that.
There's a news story out today from the Washington Examiner.
Quote, an investment firm linked to Hunter Biden received over $130 million in federal bailout loans while his father, Joe Biden, was vice president and routed profits through a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands, according to federal banking and corporate records reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
Financial experts said the offshore corporate structure could have been used to shield earnings from U.S.
taxes.
Rosemont Capital, an investment firm at the center of Hunter Biden's much-scrutinized financial network, was one of the companies approved to participate in the 2009 federal loan program known as the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TEL.
Which is to be distinguished from the long-running and wonderful TV show ALF.
Under the program, the U.S.
Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank issued billions of dollars in highly favorable loans to select investors who agreed to buy bonds that banks were struggling to offload, including bundled college and auto loans.
Apparently, 177 firms participated in TALF, many of them well-connected in Washington or on Wall Street.
Hunter Biden, who is just a sleaze bucket.
The guy recently had to take a paternity test in Arkansas, and Joe Biden discovered he had a grandkid he didn't know he had.
I mean, Hunter Biden is just gross.
He's had a very checkered history.
And the fact that he has become extraordinarily wealthy off the back of his daddy's name, and was doing so in Ukraine, does that go to Ukrainian corruption?
Yeah, a little bit.
A little bit.
Roger L. Simon reports today.
It's obvious that Joe Biden cannot be impeached were he to win that exalted office, but the case for his immediate impeachment would dwarf Donald Trump's.
If we are to believe Interfax Ukraine, there's a report out today.
Some $16.5 million received by Hunter Biden, the son of former U.S.
Vice President Joe Biden, as payment from Burisma was stolen from Ukrainian citizens, according to a member of parliament named Andrei Derkach.
Derkach said at a press conference at the Kiev-based Interfax Ukraine news agency.
That on November 14th, the prosecutor general's office announced a new suspicion to the owner of Burisma, former ecology minister, Mykola Zlochevsky.
So, Interfax has some questions about it.
It's originally a Russian news company, so we should say that.
It was established, Roger Simon writes this, it was established during perestroika, generally took a liberal line against conservatives who wish to preserve the old USSR, but they're probably infiltrated by intelligence agencies, and so we have to view their reporting with some skepticism.
But that report obviously doesn't look great.
It doesn't look great for Hunter Biden.
Again, are there questions that are open about Hunter Biden and Ukraine?
Yeah, absolutely.
So when Schiff says fulfill your duty and then he won't let Hunter Biden testify, and we're not allowed to hear about how these complaints were elevated to the level of whistleblower complaint in the first place, the whole thing does kind of stink, does it not?
Now, again, that does not mean that there can't be legitimate questions asked about Trump's behavior here, questions that really go more to his qualifications for the presidency and his character and temperament than they do to impeachable offenses.
And you can still ask questions about, did he intend to go get Joe Biden circa 2020?
But the Democrats certainly have not proved that case.
The self-righteousness on display from Adam Schiff, who again had a pup tent set up outside the Green Room at CNN for two years to talk about why Trump was about to go down for Russian investigations and interference.
That guy is out there saying that we should really trust him when it comes to his evaluation of the evidence.
Where are the people who are willing to go beyond their party to look to their duty?
I was struck Oh, come on.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to be lectured by Adam Schiff on duty.
that he acted out of duty.
What is our duty here?
That's what we need to be asking.
Not using metaphors about balls and strikes or our team and your team.
I've heard my colleagues use those metaphors.
This should be about duty.
What is our duty?
Oh, come on.
I'm sorry.
I'm not gonna be lectured by Adam Schiff on duty.
Like really?
The man, I think it's fairly obvious that he is lying when he says he does not know who the whistleblower is.
I think that is fairly obvious.
I think that it is fairly obvious that this man is politically driven.
That's pretty clear.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, the media, they keep trying to pump up these witnesses as though the witnesses are saying anything new.
In fact, the stuff that the witnesses are saying that are new, very often, are not actually true.
So, for example, Fiona Hill, she's a deputy to John Bolton.
And John Bolton has tweeted out this morning that he's been off Twitter for two months, but that he'll have much more coming.
So is that a threat?
Who the hell knows, right?
John Bolton is one of the people who actually would know something.
As I've said from the beginning, unless you talk to President Trump, you don't know nada.
That's why Gordon Sondland's testimony mattered, but it turns out that that was a bit of a dud for Democrats in terms of a window into Donald Trump's brain.
Instead, Sondland basically underscored what all the other witnesses suggested about there being a quid pro quo.
But he did not state, and actually would not state, despite repeated prompting from Democrats, that the quid pro quo was itself illegitimate.
In fact, he said that he didn't believe that the quid pro quo was illegitimate.
In any case, Fiona Hill is a John Bolton deputy.
She was obviously very skeptical of the holdup in American aid to Ukraine.
Even Fiona Hill said, I can't blame Trump for feeling aggrieved over the 2016 election, which is probably what prompted him to be upset about Ukraine in the first place.
Many officials from many countries, including Ukraine, bet on the wrong horse.
They believed that Secretary Clinton, former Senator Clinton, former First Lady Clinton was going to win.
And many said some pretty disparaging and hurtful things about President Trump.
And I can't blame him for feeling aggrieved about them.
Okay, well, the fact is, that is probably what led Trump to do all of this.
Because that's who Trump is.
Right?
This is a man who, there, who, if you, there's a guy, I think he was writing for, for Vanity Fair magazine, back in the 1990s, and wrote about Donald Trump's small hands, called them, like, freakishly small.
Since then, since like 1991, Donald Trump has been sending this man pictures of his hands signed by Donald Trump for like 25 years.
For 25 years.
That's what you're talking about.
Not the guy who's looking forward to 2020.
The guy who sends pictures of his hands in the mail to people who disparaged his hand size 20 years ago.
That's what this whole Ukraine thing is about, and everybody who has a shred of intellectual honesty basically knows that is the case.
Okay, everybody knows that's the case.
Now, does that mean it's illegitimate?
No!
It means that Trump is thin-skinned and vindictive about stuff that's happened in the past.
That's why he's constantly fulminating about never-Trumpers who are not actually a political force in American life.
Right, but...
Does that mean that there isn't an actual American interest in investigating 2016?
No, of course there's an interest in investigating 2016.
We just spent two years doing it on the Mueller report side.
And that's why when Fiona Hill says stuff like, well, it's a fantasy that Ukraine meddled in 2016, I got some questions.
Here's Fiona Hill saying that.
I mean, despite the charming accent, what she's about to say is actually not particularly true.
Based on questions and statements I've heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country, and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did.
This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.
The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016.
Okay, so it is true that Russia was the country that attacked our system in 2016.
It is also true that there's fairly serious evidence of Ukrainian 2016 meddling.
Our friend Andy McCarthy from National Review, he has an entire column in the New York Post about this.
He says, In her testimony before the House impeachment inquiry, Fiona Hill, formerly of the National Security Council, took great pride in telling lawmakers she was a non-partisan intelligence professional.
She then labored mightily in service of a Democratic political narrative.
Specifically, Hill conflated two separate theories of Ukrainian collusion in the 2016 election.
One of these is discredited.
The other is quite viable.
Hill helped the Democrats suggest they have both been debunked.
To be sure, President Trump is largely to blame for propagating the discredited Ukraine theory it holds that somehow it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election by cyber espionage against Democratic email accounts.
This is such a loopy theory it defies clear explanation.
Suffice it to say it involves suspicions that a hacked DNC server is hidden in Ukraine.
Perhaps the speculation runs it was Ukrainian operatives, not Russian ones, who are the culprits.
This is a fringe theory.
Nobody puts a lot of stock in it.
I've said the same thing.
And Trump referred to it when he talked about CrowdStrike in his July 25th conversation with Zelensky.
And Trump has admittedly trafficked in conspiracy theories nearly his entire career.
But then there is a second theory of Ukrainian collusion that is actually backed by evidence.
This theory, according to Annie McCarthy, has nothing to do with Russia.
It is supported by significant evidence.
It includes public professions of support for Clinton and opposition to Trump by Ukrainian officials.
It includes acknowledgment by Ukrainian investigators that their Obama administration counterparts encouraged them to investigate Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
Bolstering this theory is the fact that Ukrainian officials leaked information damaging to Manafort, a ledger of payments possibly fabricated, that forced Manafort to ouster from the Trump campaign, triggering waves of negative publicity for the campaign.
And this, of course, is true.
We've talked about this repeatedly.
The weird idea that Ukraine was not involved in the election at all is not true.
And meanwhile, the other big Democratic witness yesterday was a guy named David Holmes, who's an aide to Gordon Sondland and to the State Department.
And he was apparently at some sort of phone call with Gordon Sondland where Sondland was talking to Trump.
And he said that Trump's phone call was incredibly loud.
And so he overheard it.
Here's Holmes talking about how loud Trump's phone call was and how he could actually hear Trump blaring through the mouthpiece.
You said that you were able to hear President Trump's voice through the receiver.
How were you able to hear if it was not on speakerphone?
It was several things.
It was quite loud when the president came on, quite distinctive.
I believe Ambassador Sondland also said yesterday he often speaks very loudly over the phone, and I certainly experienced that.
He, when the president came on, he sort of winced and held the phone away from his ear like this.
And he did that for the first couple exchanges.
I don't know if he then turned the volume down, if he got used to it, if the president's moderated his volume, I don't know.
But that's how I was able to hear it.
Okay, so a couple of things.
One, did he hear it?
I mean, sure, maybe.
Sure, I mean, but the phone call itself didn't actually add anything to what we already knew, which is that there was this sort of, I'm holding back the aid until I get the investigations that I want.
And then David Holmes went on to say that of course Trump was pressing for the Biden investigation.
No question Trump was pressing for the Biden investigation.
Here's Holmes, you know, going after Jim Jordan on this, but Why it would have to be the Biden investigation as opposed to the other investigations or why the Biden investigation itself is fully about 2020 and not about 2016.
Why it's not about corruption, but about getting Biden for 2020 is never made clear.
Here's Holmes.
I briefed the call in detail to the deputy chief of mission, went away for a week, come back, I refer to the call, and everyone is nodding.
Of course that's what's going on.
Of course the president is pressing for a Biden investigation before he'll do these things the Ukrainians want.
There was nodding agreement.
So did I go through every single word in the call?
No, because everyone by that point agreed.
It was obvious what the president was pressing for.
Okay, so, I mean, sure, he thinks that it's obvious what the president was pressing for, but that's, again, a perception.
So, bottom line is that none of this is going to be sufficient to drive Republicans in the Senate to impeach, and once this thing gets to the Senate level, Trump is going to get what he wants.
Trump came out today, and he said that he wants a trial.
Well, if he gets a trial in the Senate, if there's a House impeachment and there's a trial in the Senate, then President Trump is going to get his wish.
Here's President Trump saying he wants a trial.
The bottom line is all of those witnesses, they're all shifty shifts.
Don't forget, there was no due process.
You can't have lawyers.
We couldn't have any witnesses.
We want to call the whistleblower.
But you know who I want as the first witness?
Because frankly, I want a trial.
You know, I could think I could have it.
You want a trial?
Whatever I want.
Oh, I would.
Look.
Number one, they should never, ever impeach.
This is not... I watched five people on your network yesterday say, there's nothing here.
Okay, so if he gets that trial, you can expect to hear from the whistleblower.
You can expect to hear from Hunter Biden.
You can expect to hear from Joe Biden.
Republicans are not going to be kind in who they subpoena on this whole thing.
They are not going to be kind.
It's not going to be great for Democrats.
Okay, time for some things I like and then a thing that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So, Jon Voight, a man with whom I am friends and one of the great actors in modern movie history.
He's just terrific.
John Voigt got the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday, and everybody on the left went nuts.
How could John Voigt get that?
He's just a Trump sycophant.
You know how many people were given Obama Medals of Freedom just because they were celebrities who were Obama sycophants?
That's the way the Medal of Freedom works.
Let's be real about this.
And Voigt is a Hardcore Trump supporter, no question.
He also happens to be a great patriot, a man who cares about his country, a really nice guy, he's done a lot of great charity work, and Jon Voight happens to be a fantastic actor.
And if you want to see what a great actor Jon Voight is, you need to check out Ray Donovan, where he plays Mickey Donovan.
He and Liv Schreiber hold up the show.
I mean, the show is basically the two of them.
And I love Liv Schreiber as an actor.
I also love Jon Voight as an actor.
So if you like great acting and you don't mind scuzzy people doing scuzzy things, then Ray Donovan is a show for you.
here's a little bit of the trailer I just want my family back No, you don't.
You want my family.
We've done bad things, Ray.
I've asked you to fix things that should never have been fixed.
So the show is, of course, about scuzzy Hollywood people, like incredibly scuzzy Hollywood people doing incredibly scuzzy things.
Ray Donovan is basically a Hollywood fixer, and it's a bit of a fancy world where he's going around and killing people and harming people and doing all sorts of evil things, but you kind of like him because he's the anti-hero.
But, there's a charm to the show, for sure.
And John Boyd is terrific in it.
I mean, John Boyd really is first rate.
So, if you're into good acting, and you don't care particularly much, it's like the good fellas, sort of.
Like, if you don't care too much about the morality of the show, you're fine.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so there is a video that is making the rounds of a student at Cal State University of Chico holding an All Lives Matter sign and getting assaulted for his trouble.
Here's what the video looks like.
The man is literally standing there holding a sign saying, All Lives Matter, and next to a woman holding a Black Lives Matter sign and getting berated and the sign ripped away from him and quote-unquote assaulted for his trouble.
This sort of stuff does happen on college campuses all the time.
We've seen a bunch of university speech shutdowns, including for Art Laffer.
I talked about it a little bit earlier on the show.
And that is a grand and grave absurdity.
These places that are supposed to be super pro-free speech, catering to students who care very little about free speech and care much more About ensuring that their point of view is the only point of view that is heard.
It's absurdity, but that is the way that our college campuses work, obviously, right now.
Okay, time for a quick Bible note.
Okay, so quick Bible note here.
So, every week we've been doing this, we've been going through a little bit of the Bible, just like the Jews do.
Every week we read a section from the Torah.
This week happens to be the Parsha Chayei Sarah, which is the portion of the Old Testament in which the Founding mother of the Jewish people, Sarah, dies.
She is buried in Hebron, which Chevron.
We are supposed to pretend that this is actually historic Muslim territory, as opposed to historic Jewish territory, despite the fact that it is the first land ever bought in the Bible, and it's bought by Abraham for money, so that he has a legitimate claim on the land.
In any case, good for the Trump administration for declaring this week that Israeli settlements are not de facto illegal, because they are not de facto or de jure illegal.
The fact is Jews have been in Hebron, they've been living in Hebron for literally thousands of years, and this Sabbath in particular Chevron happens to be a place where literally 100,000 Jews will go and sleep in their cars in like a three-block area just to be near the burial site of Abraham and Sarah, which, by the way, is disproportionately controlled by Muslims.
I mean, the actual site, the Marat HaMachpelah, the Cave of the Patriarchs and the Matriarchs, That site, like 80% of the actual site is controlled by Muslims who will not let Jews in except on like three days of the year.
In any case, the biblical portion that talks about Sarah is really interesting.
So Sarah is sort of a fascinating character in the Bible.
She has an incredibly rough life.
An incredibly rough life.
And she's living inside what can only be described as a patriarchal system.
She gets married to Abraham.
She's sort of the first real female in the Bible, in the sense that, in my opinion, the Adam and Eve story is largely meant to be a metaphor about human nature.
But once you get to Abraham, you start with the actual history of the Jewish people.
So Sarah is the founding mother of the Jewish people, and therefore also of Islamic peoples, because she is It's her handmaid, Hagar, who has Ishmael, who's considered the progenitor of Islam, and she also is the grandmother of Esau, who is considered the progenitor of Christians and sort of Jewish tradition.
In any case, Sarah lives within the bounds of a patriarchy, right?
Throughout the Bible, she is running into rough situations, and she's forced to go to Pharaoh's palace when Abraham wants to avoid death, for example.
They go to Egypt, and Abraham is afraid that Sarah is so beautiful that he's going to be killed, and so he tells Farrow that Sarah is his sister and she goes to live in the palace.
Nothing untoward happens, the Bible assures us.
Later, Abraham does the same thing again with another king named Abimelech.
This isn't exactly female-lib kind of stuff.
And then later, she makes an offer to Abraham, which is apparently fairly common in the ancient world.
She couldn't have kids, and so she makes Abraham an offer to consort with her maidservant, Hagar, and Abraham then goes ahead and does this.
And then, finally, when she does give birth, her son is at the mercy of Ishmael, her stepson, and her husband, Abraham, refuses to do anything about this until God explicitly tells him to.
And this is the key turning point for Sarah as a character, and I think a key turning point for how women are seen in the Bible generally, and how women ought to be seen.
Because God says something pretty special.
He tells Abraham, whatever Sarah tells you, heed her voice, since through Isaac will offspring be considered yours.
Heed the Voice of Your Wife is a pretty powerful directive in ancient biblical times, right?
God's saying that you need to listen to a woman, and for all the people who say that the Bible is inherently patriarchal, ignoring the fact that the Bible itself talks about changing the laws of inheritance to allow women to inherit, for example, by the daughters of Tzlovchad, despite the fact that there are actual leaders of the Jewish people in the Tanakh, in the Old Testament, who are women, like Devorah, Deborah.
Despite that, there are people who suggest that the Bible is deeply, deeply patriarchal in every conceivable sense, that it is not a transition away from more patriarchal and more brutal societies.
That, of course, is not true.
And you can see the impact of this specific commandment.
So, God says you need to heed Sarah.
And then, in this Parsha, in this portion of the Torah, Sarah dies.
And this changes Abraham's view of women.
You can see this, right?
He sends his servant, and this is manifest in how he finds a wife for his son, Isaac.
So he sends his own servant, Eliezer, to find a wife for Isaac.
So, in that day, if women were treated as chattel, this isn't a particularly difficult process, right?
You find a woman you like, you go to her dad, you pay your dad, and then you get the woman, right?
I mean, this was actually incredibly common in the ancient world.
For example, when Abraham is posing as Sarah's brother, both Pharaoh and Abimelech, trying to buy his approval, shower him with gifts.
But now Abraham's perspective has changed on women because of Sarah.
He tells Eliezer to travel from Canaan back to his family to find a wife for Isaac.
And then he says, if the woman will not wish to follow you, you will be absolved of this oath of mine.
So suddenly the woman's consent matters in a deep and profound way.
And the test that Eliezer is given in order to find Isaac's wife is a consent-based test.
Right?
Because the test is not, I go to this place and then I say, the test that he has given is, I bring my camels here and a woman offers to bring water to the camels.
It is not, I order a woman to bring water to the camels and if she complies, then she's marriageable material.
It's she must offer voluntarily to bring the water.
And then the final evidence of the newfound status for women is the negotiation over Rebecca who ends up marrying Isaac.
Eliezer negotiates on behalf of Abraham.
He offers the family of Rebecca the customary gift, but he's already negotiated with Rebecca directly, right?
He's given her the customary wedding gifts.
A golden nose ring, two bracelets on her arm.
She accepts them, and then she accepts the marriage proposal.
And she voluntarily says that she is going to leave.
They are not willing to do so unless they receive fiscal gain, but she... It's the first woman to consent to a marriage in the Bible.
She overtly consents.
Right?
She says, she says, I'm going to, I'm going to go with you and then she goes with.
And then it says in the Torah, this is how Isaac was consoled after his mother because suddenly an independent woman who was very powerful in the Bible was replaced by another independent woman who is very powerful in the Bible.
And I don't think it's any coincidence.
That the most romantic relationship in the Bible is the relationship between Isaac and Rebecca because it is based on a certain level of mutual respect and a consent.
It's the only time in the Torah of which I'm aware that there's a description between husband and wife that he loved her, right?
That's actually explicitly said in the Bible.
It says Isaac brought her into the tents of Sarah, his mother.
He married Rebecca.
She became his wife and he loved her.
Right, because Isaac sees that women ought to be powerful and he is more than happy to marry a powerful woman.
And she ends up being incredibly powerful, right?
I mean, Rebecca ends up basically deciding the fate of the Jewish people when she helps her son, Jacob, switch the skins and the birthright and the blessings with his brother Esau.
So, whenever people say that the Bible is inherently patriarchal and horrible toward women, understand two things.
One, the Bible is an ancient document.
It's attempting to transition away from a much more patriarchal society.
Number two, there are some pretty significant messages in the Bible that really do speak to the idea that women have inherent value, ought to be seen as having inherent value.
When God says, listen to your wife, he means it.
And he means you should listen to your wife too.
I certainly do.
And it makes my life a hell of a lot better.
Okay, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional Hours of content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here on Monday for a short Thanksgiving week, but we'll bring you all the updates.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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