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Feb. 14, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:05:59

Donald, Barr The Door | Ep. 954

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	Attorney General Bill Barr speaks out against President Trump's Twitter lawguria.
	Trump goes after former Chief of Staff John Kelly.
	And Joe Biden turns on Michael Bloomberg.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN's Surf the web with peace of mind.
	Signed up now at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Alrighty, so the big story of the day is that President Trump now apparently, sort of, kind of, at odds with his Attorney General, Bill Barr.
	Why?
	Because Bill Barr finally had the temerity to tell Trump shut up.
	I mean, that's basically what happened here.
	President Trump has an unfortunate habit.
	The unfortunate habit is he feels the need to sound off on every single topic ever.
	Now, if you were doing a podcast, or if you were doing a radio show, or even if you were just a commenter on Daily Wire, this would all make perfect sense.
	The problem is he's the President of the United States, and when he sounds off, it sounds as though he has utilized his authority to effectuate the things that he is sounding off about.
	So the example that we must use is, of course, the case of Roger Stone.
	So, CNN reported just a couple of days ago that all four federal prosecutors who took the case against longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone to trial withdrew on Tuesday after top Justice Department officials undercut them and disavowed the government's recommended sentence against Stone.
	You'll remember that Roger Stone during the campaign was acting as sort of a go-between for various sources who claimed that they had access to WikiLeaks.
	And then he kept trying to funnel information to Trump.
	And it was pretty clear that Trump wasn't actively coordinating with Stone to actually go after Hillary Clinton's emails with WikiLeaks or anything like that.
	But Stone was basically – he kept trying to act as this go-between.
	He kept trying to get information from WikiLeaks and then pass it on to Trump.
	And Trump will be like, that's nice, Roger.
	And then Roger Stone would go and tell witnesses to shut up.
	I mean, that's what the evidence seems to show.
	So he is convicted of lying to Congress and he is convicted of a couple of other crimes.
	And he is given a recommended sentence by Justice Department lawyers of up to nine years.
	And this was considered way too much by the Attorney General and by the top of the Department of Justice because, after all, there have been a bunch of people who have lied to Congress in the recent past.
	There have been a lot of people who have lied to official government sources in the recent past, up to and including Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI for lying to the FBI.
	And yet Roger Stone was the only one who's looking at a decade in prison.
	And so the generalized perception is that the reason that Roger Stone was being hit with this is specifically because he was an ally of President Trump and specifically because there are members of the jury who are biased against Roger Stone and hated President Trump.
	So the real question here was, did these prosecutors recommend the correct sentence?
	Had they run that up the flagpole at the Department of Justice?
	Had it been approved by the top levels of the Department of Justice?
	And then, had Trump stepped in to tell his own Attorney General, I want you to lower the sentence?
	Because there are two possibilities here.
	Possibility number one, Is that these DOJ lawyers who are on this case did not, in fact, run this thing up the flagpole.
	They just decided to go rogue because they wanted to humiliate Trump, they wanted to humiliate Barr, and they wanted to humiliate Stone.
	And they recommended a sentence that was way too long, specifically so that they could then set up a walkout when the AG decided to knock it down.
	That's possibility number one, and that's basically what's been suggested by the Trump administration.
	Possibility number two is the more nefarious possibility and troubling possibility, and that is that the President of the United States personally interfered after Barr had already greenlit the sentencing recommendation of Roger Stone.
	So CNN reported that the rapid fire developments in the case of the prosecutor's withdrawal came one by one through court filings over the course of two hours on Tuesday afternoon, which certainly, by the way, looks pretty coordinated, right?
	Generally, if you're going to have like a walkout like this, I would assume that's at least somewhat coordinated.
	It spilled tensions between Justice Department brass and career prosecutors out into the open, raising questions about the Justice Department's independence from political pressure.
	In a new filing on Tuesday, the U.S.
	Attorney's Office in Washington revised the sentencing recommendation to be far less than the 79 years recommended on Monday.
	It was not signed by any of the prosecutors who worked the case.
	Ultimately, the presiding judge will have the final say on Roger Stone's sentencing.
	Trump denied any involvement in the sentencing revision, but the turnaround grew howls from congressional Democrats.
	They, of course, suggested that the DOJ inspector general needed to investigate.
	Now, first of all, it is not criminal activity, even if Trump interfered with the DOJ, because the DOJ is supposed to have A certain level of independence, but they do work for the president of the United States.
	The president does have the right to interfere in policy this way.
	And if you don't like it, we have elections for that sort of thing.
	Obviously we've had cases in the past in which the president has used his constitutional power in very questionable ways.
	Most obviously with the Mark Rich pardon under Bill Clinton, which was sort of a similar situation, right?
	Political ally of President Clinton and then non-senator, but about to be Senator Hillary Clinton, pardoned in the last days of the Clinton administration.
	And there were a lot of howls of protest.
	Calls about corruption and all the rest.
	Which is kind of fascinating, right?
	You would figure that if he is so anti the administration, he would resign from all of his federal offices.
	Mike Miranda, Zelensky and Kravis also resigned from the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office.
	Zelensky did not resign from the Baltimore U.S. Attorney's Office, where he is based, which is kind of fascinating.
	You would figure that if he is so anti the administration, he would resign from all of his federal offices.
	He did not do that.
	The mass withdrawal was set in motion on Monday when the prosecutors from the D.C.
	U.S.
	Attorney's Office, who are Justice Department employees, wrote in a filing that Stone should be sentenced seven to nine years in prison after he was convicted on seven charges last year that came out of the Mueller investigation, including lying to Congress and witness tampering.
	And then Trump waited on Twitter overnight on Tuesday.
	He called it a horrible and very unfair situation.
	And then he tweeted out, the real crimes were on the other side as nothing happens to them.
	Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice.
	By midday Tuesday, a senior Justice Department official said the original sentencing recommendation from the prosecutors, transmitted to a judge and signed off on by the office's top prosecutor, had never been communicated to leadership at the DOJ.
	So the official told CNN that the department was shocked to see the sentencing recommendation.
	The department believes the recommendation is extreme and excessive and is grossly disproportionate to Stone's Offensive.
	So the question was, was that coming courtesy of President Trump, or was that coming courtesy of Attorney General William Barr?
	In just a second, we're going to get to William Barr and we're going to get to the reaction to all of this.
	We'll get to that momentarily.
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	Okay, so there's some other questions with regard to the Roger Stone case.
	Most obviously, that the lead juror in the Roger Stone case ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012 and spent the intervening several years criticizing Trump and, yes, tweeting about Roger Stone, which is a horrible job of jury vetting.
	I mean, that is really not a great job of jury vetting by the Defense Council.
	In this particular case.
	With all of that said, the question is whether Trump himself interfered or whether Barr had made a decision and then Trump went public and was congratulating Barr on his decision, which again calls the sort of quasi-independence of the DOJ into question, makes it look like Barr is a political hack who's just doing the bidding of President Trump.
	That's of course exactly how the Democrats wished to make it look.
	So this is a giant, stupid stepping on a rake by the President of the United States, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia.
	He says, this is how democracies die because Barr was instructed by President Trump to do X, Y, and Z. Again, number one, Trump does in fact have the legal power to do that.
	But is it a bad look?
	Yeah, it's definitely a bad look.
	Here is Tim Kaine.
	The president believes he's above the law.
	This was a real concern after the impeachment was over last week, that the president would view acquittal as just a carte blanche.
	He can do anything that he wants.
	Anybody who was just trying to do their job and not fighting against the administration or being inappropriate, but were just raising questions, is now being mowed down with the sickle of this president who's out for revenge.
	Do you think this is how democracies die?
	Yes, I do.
	Unless people snap back and say that's not what we want.
	Okay, so Tim Kaine again making the case that the Republicans have perverted the Justice Department.
	They've perverted it, as opposed to Eric Holder.
	Again, every Republican right now is screaming, screaming to the wind, Eric Holder, Obama's wingman, fast and furious.
	Loretta Lynch, Mueller investigation, Hillary Clinton, Tarmac, like the politicization of the Justice Department, Janet Reno, like the politicization of the Justice Department has been ongoing.
	So for everybody to claim that Bill Barr is the first person to be hit with any sort of political pressure, obviously that's untrue.
	Nonetheless, you have Nancy Pelosi out there saying, this is clearly an abuse of power, it's an abuse of power, except that probably it wasn't.
	Again, the solution with President Trump, honestly, the most common answer to President Trump doing a wrong thing, or a thing that appears to be wrong, is he did something dumb.
	But he didn't actually do the thing that Democrats are accusing him of.
	This has been true in every situation where Democrats have accused him of a thing.
	Every situation where Democrats accuse him of a thing, it's Trump has a big mouth is the answer, not Trump did this nefarious thing.
	So Democrats always treat Trump, it's funny, Trump treats Trump as though he's playing 4D chess.
	Democrats treat Trump as though he's playing 4D chess.
	The truth is that Trump is almost never playing 40 chess, right?
	Trump doesn't play chess.
	He plays checkers.
	Okay, and checkers is good enough.
	That is not a rip on his political skill set.
	That is not a rip on his instincts.
	That's to suggest that Trump is nefariously coordinating with the Russians, as opposed to what is obvious.
	He's going out in public and he is saying what he would say as a caller to this show, Donnie from Queens.
	It's perfectly obvious.
	That's what Trump was doing, right?
	During the campaign, when Trump would go out in public and be like, Vladimir, if you got the emails, release them.
	Was that Trump coordinating with the Russians, or was that Trump being a big mouth?
	Which is what the man does.
	As I've suggested one million times on this program and counting, President Trump's epitaph is going to say, Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States, he said a lot of stuff.
	And everybody who follows Trump knows this.
	And if the media were honest, they would understand this too.
	And if Democrats were honest, they would understand this too.
	And they could criticize Trump for saying the stuff that he says.
	When they could say it's bad practice, they could say it's bad form.
	But instead, they immediately jump to the most conspiratorial version of what Trump is doing here, which is that Trump told William Barr, you need to step in in the Roger Stone case, as opposed to William Barr, who is a career professional, did his job and then Trump proceeded to step all over it.
	Like your dog having rolled around in the mud and jumping on your fresh carpet.
	But here's Nancy Pelosi suggesting this is an abuse of power.
	It's not an abuse of power.
	It's just Trump mouthing off.
	It's always Trump mouthing off.
	How many times do I have to point out that when Trump mouths off, it rarely is backed by any sort of plan?
	Trump is the joker of American politics, but like from The Dark Knight, there's no plan.
	There's no plan.
	He's a dog chasing a car.
	Sometimes he catches the car.
	There's no plan.
	But according to his biggest supporters, there's always a plan.
	According to his biggest detractors, there's always a plan.
	Okay, politics is not House of Cards, guys.
	Politics is Veep.
	Politics is a joke.
	Everybody who represents you is an idiot.
	And make this absolutely clear, the people you vote for are morons.
	They're the same morons you see in everyday life working at your office, except they decided to go into politics.
	Which is even more moronic, because they're not even producing anything useful for the world.
	This is true of everyone.
	It's true of virtually everyone, in all aspects of life, is an idiot.
	Always, always, you know, give people the credit of assuming they're dumb, not that they are nefarious or evil, because the vast majority of the time they are in fact dumb and not nefarious or evil.
	And even when they are nefarious or evil half the time, it's because they're dumb in the first place.
	Like, I think that Bernie Sanders is a dumb-dumb.
	I think he believes nefarious and or evil things.
	I think it's because he's a moron.
	I don't think that Bernie Sanders is a highly intelligent human being.
	There are people on the left who are highly intelligent and actually plan out what they're going to say, and they've thought through the theory, and then they come to exactly the wrong conclusions because they have been infused with the thought system that makes people worse.
	The notion that like everybody in politics is sitting around and planning things, it's just not real.
	But this is what politicians have an interest in, suggesting the evil nefariousness of the opposite party.
	So here's Nancy Pelosi suggesting that President Trump was abusing power by tweeting crap, which is what he does on a daily basis.
	This is, by the way, this is why the American people don't pay any attention to Nancy Pelosi when she says this stuff.
	It's why the American people didn't pay attention during impeachment.
	Because the American people were like, All right, so, like, your suggestion is that Trump coordinated an entire nefarious scheme in order to get Joe Biden in Ukraine utilizing Rudy Giuliani.
	Alternatively, Trump is thin-skinned and says a lot of stuff and says to people things like, go get him, go get him, Rudy.
	Which sounds more plausible to you?
	Hey, here's Nancy Pelosi suggesting this is an abuse of power.
	This is an abuse of power that the President is again trying to manipulate federal law enforcement to serve his political interests.
	And the President is what he is.
	He thinks he's above the law.
	He has no respect for the rule.
	But where are the Republicans to speak out on this blatant violation?
	The Attorney General has stooped to such levels.
	He's lied to Congress, for which he will be in contempt.
	Okay, so now, this brings us to Attorney General Barr finally speaking out.
	And it's about time, it's about damn time, seriously.
	Because, I'll be honest with you, I know a lot of people who work at the White House, obviously.
	I mean, like everybody in conservative politics knows somebody who works at the White House.
	I know lots of people who work at the White House.
	And a couple of days ago on the podcast, I suggested that this look really bad.
	And some of my friends at the White House were like, well, did you see the statement that a senior official DOJ gave CNN saying that the lower down DOJ officials did not run this up the flagpole before it was approved?
	They just kind of sort of went out there with the sentencing.
	And I said to some of my friends who worked at the White House, like, so why don't you just say that clearly?
	Why do you not send out Attorney General Barr to say very clearly that he was not manipulated by President Trump here and that Trump basically just decided to sound off like Donnie from Queens calling into the show about his opinion on this matter?
	Well, yesterday, that's exactly what Attorney General William Barr did.
	And good for him.
	Good for him.
	And, by the way, if you want, this is a great litmus test.
	If you want to tell who in conservative circles actually is being honest with you, at least some of the time, and who in conservative circles is being entirely dishonest with you, and is just there to act as a sycophantic Press corps for the president.
	Notice how they react to Barr.
	Okay, Barr is an excellent civil servant.
	He has done his job, in my opinion, as Attorney General of the United States.
	I don't believe the nefarious conspiracy theories about the perversion of William Barr or the perversion of Rod Rosenstein.
	I never believed that stuff.
	I never believed about the perversion of Robert Mueller.
	I didn't believe any of those things.
	I didn't like Robert Mueller's report.
	I thought that it was politically motivated, at least in how it was worded.
	I thought that he exceeded his mandate, but I never thought that Robert Mueller was the bad guy, a nefarious bad guy.
	And I don't think that William Barr is a nefarious bad guy.
	Everybody who, one second ago, was saying, William Barr is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and now that he has crossed the president, they're like, Traitor!
	Traitor!
	Understand?
	Those are people who do not have principles.
	Understand that those are people who are not honestly analyzing politics.
	They are just giving you the rah-rah Homer fanboy Trump case.
	OK, even by the way, that case is not good for Trump.
	It's not good for Trump.
	Those fanboys are doing no service to Trump because all they are doing is incentivizing him to continue saying stupid things that undermine his own administration.
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	Okay, so finally, we get to William Barr.
	So William Barr, the Attorney General, he does an interview with ABC last night.
	And in this interview, he basically says to President Trump, shut up.
	Like, just stop.
	Stop.
	I'm doing my job here, and here you are sounding off, and you're making it sound as though you pressured me into doing my job, when in reality, I'm just doing my job.
	Could you just shut up?
	Like, seriously.
	Just stop.
	Now, a lot of Trump fans are like, why would William Barr say this?
	His Twitter is the greatest thing that ever happened to mankind!
	And William Barr's like, okay, so, you already undercut your former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
	Then you brought me in.
	And I have not recused myself from cases the way that Jeff Sessions did.
	And by the way, I defended Jeff Sessions, like Ben Shapiro.
	I personally defended Jeff Sessions.
	I think he's an honest man.
	I think William Barr is an honest man.
	I think most of the people who have worked around Trump, with the exceptions of people like Michael Cohen, are honest men.
	Okay, so, or, and women.
	So William Barr, he finally goes out on ABC News and says, listen, I'm doing my job and it doesn't help when the president is out there making it appear as though I'm a corrupt politico.
	I will make those decisions based on what I think is the right thing to do, and I'm not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.
	And I said at the time, whether it's Congress, newspaper, editorial boards, or the president, I'm going to do what I think is right.
	I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.
	Tweets made about the department, Of course that's 100% true.
	our people in the department, our men and women here, about cases pending in the department, and about judges before whom we have cases, make it impossible for me to do my job.
	Of course, that's 100% true.
	100% true.
	And even close allies of the president are coming out and saying, yes, Barr is correct.
	Barr is correct.
	Because you're undercutting your own legitimacy as president of the United States when you make it appear that William Barr is like Michael Cohen.
	That William Barr It's like Roy Cohn, that he's your fixer, right?
	That is a bad look for the president.
	And by the way, it's not even true.
	Barr isn't doing that.
	So Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, he does this too.
	He backs Barr.
	He says, this is ridiculous.
	Like, of course Barr is correct.
	And of course Trump should stop tweeting about this crap.
	And everyone knows this, okay?
	This is not a secret.
	Again, for all of those in the audience who are big Trump fans and think that it's MAGA MAGA, underwater, upside down, hungry, hungry hippos, whenever the president logs onto Twitter from the bathroom on top of the golden toilet, it's not true.
	Everyone in the White House knows this.
	This is not a secret.
	I don't know who these people are who are treating President Trump's Twitter feed as though it is communi- as though it is filled with communicate from the Kremlin.
	As though they're decoding Kremlinology.
	Okay, President Trump tweets stuff that he feels like tweeting.
	Sometimes that is a good idea.
	Sometimes that is a very bad idea.
	This is a case where it was a very bad idea.
	Here's Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defending Bill Barr correctly.
	By the way, there's been no one who's gotten more of Donald Trump's agenda done than this guy right here.
	Who is really responsible.
	Like, Trump nominates the judges.
	It's McConnell's job to ram them through.
	President Trump has ideas about mitigating the effects of Obamacare.
	It's Mitch McConnell who makes that happen.
	President Trump has an impeachment that goes to the Senate.
	It's Mitch McConnell who handles that thing.
	So there's been no more beneficial politician in D.C.
	for Trump than Mitch McConnell.
	Here's McConnell saying to Trump, Dude, just stop.
	Just stop.
	Please stop.
	The President made a great choice when he picked Bill Barr to be Attorney General.
	I think the President should listen to his advice.
	So you have a problem with the President's tweeting as well?
	I think that if the Attorney General says it's getting in the way of doing his job, maybe the President should listen to the Attorney General.
	Do you think the tweet about his opinion on the Roger Stone sentencing recommendations is inappropriate political interference?
	The attorney general has said it's making it difficult for him to do his job.
	I think the president ought to listen to the attorney general.
	Of course, that's true.
	Of course, that's true.
	And politically speaking, the more that President Trump appears to be interfering in the process, the more the Democrats are going to be able to make the moral case As false as it is, that Trump is in fact a complete departure from the institution of the presidency, that Trump is a tyrant, that Trump is corrupt.
	Like why would Trump give material to the left like this?
	I don't understand.
	And he doesn't understand either because he doesn't really think about what he's doing when he's on the Twitters.
	All he would have to do is put one person between him and the enter button on Twitter.
	That's it.
	All he would have to do is have one person screen his tweets.
	Listen, we all know, if you're on Twitter, you know the draw of just being able to fire something off that gives you a momentary sense of thrill.
	And Trump obviously feels that when he's on Twitter, because that's how Twitter is built.
	It's literally built to do that.
	But that does not mean, as president, that this is the best way to do this.
	Now meanwhile, you know what's another bad look, is attacking your former chief of staff.
	Again, the best thing that the president can do when it comes to his chief of staff, when it comes to his attorney general, would be to just accept that they do what they do.
	He's the president of the United States.
	He doesn't need to respond to every single thing, particularly people he hired.
	It's not a great look when you hire somebody and then you dump all over them, which he has now done to like half of his cabinet.
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	Okay, so as I say, the president doesn't have to sound off on everything.
	Immediately after the AG rebukes him.
	What Trump should do at this point is go silent.
	Instead, he asserted on Friday that he had a legal right to intervene in federal criminal cases.
	Because it is more important for him to be right than it is for him to do something smart, apparently.
	In a morning tweet, Trump quoted Barr as saying the president has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.
	And then he said he had so far chosen not to interfere in a criminal case.
	He says, this does not mean I do not have, as president, the legal right to do so.
	I do, but I have so far chosen not to.
	Defeating the point, Mr. President.
	Obviously, you have the legal powers to do a thing.
	The President has many legal powers to do things.
	That does not mean they should be undercutting your Attorney General, who, by the way, is defending you from charges of corruption here.
	That's what Attorney General Barr is doing.
	This is just dumb.
	It's just, I'm sorry, it's just stupid.
	Stop it.
	Just stop it.
	And the reason you should stop it, by the way, we're gonna get to the Democratic race on the other side.
	It's a complete crap show.
	It's a crap fest.
	Even Bernie Sanders' own supporters are now trying to back him off of his socialism.
	We'll get to that in a minute.
	Like, that's how scared they are that Trump is gonna win re-election.
	As I have said, day in and day out for months at this point, the person who's most likely to beat Trump in an election is Trump.
	And when Trump goes off on these tangents, the American people don't care about them.
	It makes Trump appear petty.
	It makes him appear foolish.
	It's just, it's a waste of time.
	It is stupid.
	Another example of this.
	So John Kelly, the former chief of staff, he had he had done a an interview with the Atlantic and he was described as defending Alexander Vindman for his testimony against Trump.
	Saying he said that Vindman, Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, who is this guy who is working inside the White House and who reported the the sort of was involved with the whistleblower is probably the best available information that he had reported the contents of the Ukraine call to this whistleblower who then reported it up the chain.
	Kelly said we teach them don't follow any legal order and if you've ever given one, you'll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order and then tell your boss.
	So Trump fired back on Twitter Thursday morning.
	morning.
	He said, when I terminated John Kelly, which I couldn't do fast enough, he knew full well that he was way over his head.
	Being chief of staff just wasn't for him.
	He came in with a bang, went out with a whimper.
	But like so many exes, he missed the action and just can't keep his mouth shut, which he actually has military and legal obligation to do.
	His incredible wife, Karen, who I have a lot of respect for, once pulled me aside and said strongly that John respects you greatly.
	When we are no longer here, he will only speak well of you.
	Wrong.
	OK, now, is this a purposeful conversation that Trump is having here?
	Like, truly, is it purposeful?
	Doesn't he have surrogates who just say, like, John Kelly had a different perception of this issue than everybody else.
	Impeachment is over and Vindman got it wrong.
	Vindman had serious policy disagreements.
	But when you bring somebody in, and they are the person who is really sort of your main outlet to the world.
	This is true.
	When John Kelly was in the White House, he was reportedly the person who was deciding who would see Trump.
	And then Trump just craps all over him.
	He did the same thing with Bolton.
	You make enough enemies and you're just waiting to be stabbed in the back.
	It's just bad, stupid policy.
	It really is.
	And then the White House wouldn't stop.
	So a White House spokesperson came out and contradicted John Kelly, said, I was in the room.
	She says, Stephanie Grisham.
	I was in the room with Trump when he backed Trump on things he now criticizes.
	It's so great.
	Let's escalate the debate so we can turn this into a week-long story as opposed to John Kelly sounds it off to the Atlantic and no one cared.
	The Trump administration needs to start understanding the so-called Streisand effect.
	The Streisand effect is named after Barbara Streisand, the famous singer.
	There's a famous story where Barbara Streisand's estate in Santa Barbara, I believe, it was photographed in a book of sort of long-range photographs of the coast.
	And she got mad because she didn't want there to be public photographs of her house.
	And no one had seen this photograph.
	It had been viewed like four times, but she was made aware of it.
	So she actually filed a lawsuit against the photographer.
	And immediately, that photo had now been viewed millions of times, so everybody knew what her house looked like.
	You think anybody was deeply worried about what John Kelly had to say months after he left the White House?
	Seriously?
	But now we're just going to elevate the issue and turn it into a week-long story?
	Like, they have a gift for turning gold into a sow's ear.
	It's just like, what is the point of this?
	Here's Stephanie Grisham going after John Kelly.
	I was disappointed, obviously, especially I saw some of the comments that he made, and I was in the room with him when he actually backed the president on many of the things that he's now saying, you know, weren't great.
	Talking about the media especially, I have heard John Kelly say some things about the media, so I thought it was a little disingenuous.
	It's interesting that he's starting to poke his head out and speak a little bit more, just like John Bolton as we're getting close to an election, but I'll just end it with I was disappointed.
	Again, there's no point to any of this, especially because the Democrats are imploding.
	They're in the midst of a slow motion implosion that is delicious to watch.
	I've been saying, really, for years, not months, years, that all Trump has to do is point like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the Democrats and he will win re-election.
	That's all he has to do.
	Just this.
	That's all he has to do.
	No one wants to vote for Bernie Sanders.
	It's like 25% of the population that likes Bernie Sanders.
	No one wants Bernie Sanders to be president.
	Joe Biden is collapsing.
	Absolutely collapsing.
	Like the people in the death dream scene from Terminator 2.
	He is just blowing away with the wind.
	I mean, he is finished.
	The Democrats are falling apart.
	And instead we get stories about Attorney General Barr and John Kelly.
	What is the point of this?
	What could possibly be the point?
	You've got the best economy in the last 50 years.
	Why is that not the only message coming out of the White House?
	I keep saying this stuff, and I feel like it's going in one ear and out the other for a lot of folks, especially because everyone agreed that this was the real strategy after the State of the Union address.
	Everyone agreed that that Trump wins 55% of the vote.
	Instead, we don't get that Trump for two weeks.
	We get Trump fighting with his own staff and or undercutting his own attorney general, who, by the way, is again attempting to defend him.
	Just silliness.
	Silliness on every level.
	OK, in a second, we're going to get to the Democratic side of the race, where Democrats are now trying to define Bernie as a not socialist.
	So after spending years Allowing Bernie Sanders to grab the mantle of the party as the socialist candidate.
	They're trying to now claim that he is not a socialist and that he won't be a socialist as president.
	Good luck with this.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the auto parts that you need.
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	OK, in just one second, we're going to get into the Democratic side of the aisle, which, again, is just a complete mess.
	It's a complete mess.
	And Bernie is dumping out all of his oppo on Michael Bloomberg.
	I don't know that it's going to make a dent, but the oppo is out there.
	We'll get to that in one second.
	First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber today.
	It's Noah Johnson on Twitter.
	He has two dreams, one of which is about to be realized in the pick.
	Noah is holding his elite beverage vessel and having a cold, snowy winter's day in shorts and a Kansas City Chiefs t-shirt lounging back on what appears to be a plaque in front of his university.
	The caption reads, My dream is to be featured on The Ben Shapiro Show and for it to go back to being 70 degrees like it was two days ago.
	Hashtag Mizzou.
	Hashtag Leftist Tears Tumblr.
	Hashtag Ben Shapiro Show.
	Well, today is your lucky day, my friend.
	Featured, you are.
	Now, go put on some actual winter clothes before you catch something.
	Also, we, the Jews, will try and change the weather just for you, so keep a look out for your weather forecast today.
	Thanks for the pic, really appreciate it.
	Also, last week, I told you all about this new awesome podcast, The Cold War, what we saw.
	Over the weekend, the podcast was number one in history podcasts and number five on all of Apple podcasts.
	I'm not the only one saying it's great.
	It really is really good.
	By the way, stay tuned a little bit later on in the show and I'll show you a little brief interview with the guy who does this particular podcast.
	The entire podcast is about, as you would imagine, the Cold War and all the big events from the Berlin Airlift and the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Space Race.
	All of this tied together with a solid moral through-line about the differences between freedom and collectivism.
	Go check out The Cold War right now at dailywire.com slash coldwar.
	Start listening to the show, dailywire.com slash coldwar.
	Go check it out.
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	Also go get a membership, because then you get all sorts of special access to me, to two additional hours of this show every day.
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	Show someone you love them by getting them more politics.
	Go to dailywire.com and get yourself a subscription or that special someone.
	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	So Bernie Sanders, obviously the Democratic front runner, which means that President Trump has a pretty clear road right here.
	President Trump is in pretty good shape with regard to his opponent, because even Democrats, like mainstream Democrats, are going, this guy's a communist.
	When I say mainstream Democrats, I mean James Carville, like the head of President Clinton's war room.
	So Bernie Sanders slammed Carville, because a few days ago, Carville was on MSNBC, and then he did an interview with Sean Illing over at Vox, where he said, are you guys crazy?
	Why are you nominating a communist?
	So Bernie Sanders then slammed James Carville.
	He fired back at James Carville.
	And here is what Bernie Sanders had to say on CNN.
	James, in all due respect, is a political hack who said very terrible things when he was working for Clinton against Barack Obama.
	I think he said some of the same things.
	Look, we are taking on The establishment.
	This is no secret to anybody.
	We are taking on Trump, the Republican establishment, Carville, and the Democratic establishment.
	Okay, so he's terrible and he's a political hack.
	So Carville responds to Bernie in a perfectly appropriate way.
	You gotta love James Carville.
	I mean, at least the dude is honest about who he is.
	I mean, really.
	So James Carville immediately tells Peter Hamby, he says, last night on CNN, Bernie called me a political hack.
	That's exactly who the F I am.
	I am a political hack.
	I'm not an ideologue.
	I'm not a purist.
	He thinks it's a pejorative.
	I kind of like it.
	At least I'm not a communist.
	I mean.
	The man has a point.
	The man has a point.
	At least he is not a communist.
	By the way, that should be Trump 2020.
	Honest to God, that should be his slogan.
	Seriously, it should be Trump 2020.
	Not keep America great.
	It should be Trump 2020.
	At least I'm not a communist.
	I swear, the man wins 60% of the vote.
	Because Bernie can't even run away from that label.
	Bernie has been embracing that label his entire career.
	Trump 2020, at least I'm not a communist, is pretty fantastic.
	Okay?
	Suggested by James Carville right there.
	And I agree.
	Agree.
	By the way, mainstream players in the Democratic Party are realizing this.
	So the Nevada Culinary Union had basically issued a flyer saying that Bernie Sanders is the end of the world.
	Well now, they announced they would not endorse a candidate ahead of the state's Democratic presidential caucuses.
	They're considered an organizing behemoth in Democratic politics.
	They have 60,000 hotel and casino workers across Nevada under their tutelage.
	The decision came after months of aggressive courting from candidates eager to win support of the politically powerful group.
	They said, we're not going to endorse any political candidate, but we're committed to people voting.
	We're going to work really hard to defeat Trump.
	The decision came a day after the union said it had been viciously attacked by supporters of Bernie Sanders.
	For a flyer, the group issued this week that was critical of his proposed Medicare for All plan.
	The union strongly opposes Medicare for All.
	On Tuesday night, the union distributed a presidential scorecard to its members.
	The flyer said that Sanders would end culinary healthcare, which led to what union officials described as hundreds of harassing phone calls and Twitter attacks from alleged Sanders supporters, including personal threats to the heads of the union.
	So everybody started vying for their endorsement.
	But the culinary union was like, they're the worst.
	Sanders is the worst.
	Yes, we're endorsing no one, but also Bernie is absolutely the worst.
	And what you are starting to see now is even Bernie's own surrogates basically going out there and saying, he doesn't really mean it, guys.
	He doesn't really mean it.
	He's not really a socialist.
	We keep saying he's a socialist, but he's not really a socialist.
	Now, meanwhile, Bernie keeps claiming, and his surrogates are claiming at the same time, that he's going to do all of these major, ridiculous trillion-dollar plans.
	We talked about it yesterday.
	A hundred trillion dollars in new spending over the next ten years, according to Brian Riedel of the Manhattan Institute.
	He's going to do all that through budget reconciliation, which is insane.
	That he's going to do it with 51 votes and reconciliation?
	Sure.
	Sure he is.
	Axios reports even with the expanding power of the presidency, Sanders would need Congress to approve the most ambitious ideas he's known for.
	That's unlikely to happen even under the strongest election scenarios for House and Senate Democrats in November.
	Says, Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, free college, and other Sanders proposals that excite the Democratic base would likely hit a logjam in the Senate, even with his plans to make expansive use of the power of budget rules to push his ideas through with a bare majority.
	Okay, but now the Democrats are trying to soft-sell Bernie's socialism.
	So after years of Bernie saying, what distinguishes me from the rest of the Democrats is that I am a socialist.
	I think capitalism is bad.
	And then as I pointed out many times before, he's wanted to have it both ways.
	On the one hand, he will say things like, Free markets lead to very rich people and very poor people and we need less free markets.
	And then you'll say, OK, so you're talking like actual communism now.
	You're talking state owned, state ownership of the means of production.
	Nope.
	I mean, Denmark and Norway.
	But those are capitalist countries.
	No, but I'm a socialist.
	I'm not a capitalist.
	So he's just been redefining the word socialist to mean whatever he wants it to mean for a while.
	Now, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who is a, she was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, right?
	All profit margin is bad.
	The free markets are terrible.
	Now AOC is explicitly going out there and downplaying the possibility of Sanders ever effectuating his own agenda.
	So the promise is that a socialist is different from everybody else because he's going to make revolutionary change.
	But guys, don't worry.
	He's not going to make revolutionary change.
	It's not going to happen.
	Well, doesn't this undercut the authenticity of the appeal?
	If the idea is that you're a revolutionary, and then in the back room, you're like, I'm not really a revolutionary.
	I'm basically like Hillary Clinton, just less hair and technically a man.
	That's not quite the same pitch.
	So AOC, AOC, she argued that the realities of governing were an actual argument for someone like Sanders.
	She said the worst case scenario, we compromise deeply and we end up getting a public option.
	Is that a nightmare?
	I don't think so.
	So Bernie wants to outlaw private insurance, and AOC is basically saying, well, as long as we get some moderate change here.
	So she's now advocating for Pete Buttigieg's plan, or Amy Klobuchar's plan, or Joe Biden's plan, while Bernie is maintaining that those plans are insufficient and wrong.
	Which means that someone is dishonest.
	Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air correctly says, For someone who's selling the revolution on the stump for Sanders, this sounds like a mighty big retreat by AOC on the central plank in his platform, almost certainly an unauthorized walk back.
	Sanders has other issues in his platform, but Medicare for All is central to his agenda.
	His economic policies don't work without it, well they don't work at all actually, but especially not without a complete switch to socialized medicine.
	Furthermore, Sanders has had plenty of opportunities to offer compromises, like Buttigieg's Medicare for all who want it.
	Sanders has steadfastly refused to water down his vision by a single inch.
	Don't be so sure that Sanders agrees with Ocasio-Cortez he can't get his agenda through Congress either.
	But the fact that AOC is walking it back, and it's not just AOC.
	Paul Krugman is doing the same thing.
	So Krugman, over at the New York Times, he says that Republicans are constantly calling things socialists that aren't socialists.
	But then he says, the thing is, Bernie Sanders isn't actually a socialist in any normal sense of the term.
	Oh, really?
	Oh, really?
	Well, welcome to the real world, Democrats who have been claiming that socialism is... Listen to this.
	He doesn't want to nationalize our major industries and replace markets with central planning.
	He has expressed admiration not for Venezuela, but for Denmark.
	He's basically what Europeans would call a social Democrat.
	And social democracies like Denmark are, in fact, quite nice places to live with societies that are, if anything, freer than our own.
	Who has been saying this for years?
	Who?
	Can I think of someone who's been saying for years that Denmark, Norway, that these are not socialist countries.
	These are capitalist countries with heavy social welfare systems.
	And Bernie is dishonest to call himself a socialist while constantly stumping for policies that in many cases are more business friendly than the policies of the United States.
	Who's been saying that for years?
	Who gave a speech on this?
	Like, I think it was at Georgetown, like maybe three years ago.
	Who's been saying this for years?
	And then we get, no, no, no.
	Socialism really is Denmark and Norway.
	He's a socialist.
	Those are socialist countries.
	Socialism is...
	Okay, so now that the election approaches, now you're going to acknowledge that Bernie isn't actually a socialist.
	Yeah, I know.
	I know.
	Or are you just going to acknowledge that Bernie is in fact a socialist and he wants to nationalize things?
	Because here's the dirty little secret about Krugman.
	Bernie's split the baby the whole way.
	Bernie's never come out against nationalization.
	He has never come out against municipalizing industry.
	He doesn't.
	Krogman, I think, is right here.
	He says, Why does Sanders call himself a socialist?
	I say it's mainly about personal branding, with a dash of glee at shocking the bourgeois.
	His self-indulgence did no harm, as long as he was just a senator from a very liberal state.
	But if Sanders becomes the Democratic presidential nominee, his misleading self-description will be a gift to the Trump campaign.
	Okay, so basically now, you have Sanders trapped between a rock and a hard place.
	On the one hand, socialism is deeply unpopular, but socialism is also the only branding separation between Bernie and Biden.
	Really?
	Like the policies of Biden are not that far removed from policies of Bernie.
	When people talk about a moderate lane in the Democratic Party, they are talking about the difference between Trotsky and Lenin.
	There is no actual moderate lane in the Democratic Party.
	Biden and Buttigieg are not far separated in policy from Bernie Sanders.
	It's just that Bernie wants it immediately, and Biden and Buttigieg say they want it gradually.
	The difference between Elizabeth Warren's second plan, which was gradually go to Medicare for All, and her first plan, which was immediate Medicare for All, was three years.
	Biden, by the way, Biden says he's not in favor of Medicare for All.
	But as a first step, do you think Biden's in favor of a public option that morphs into Medicare for All?
	You bet your ass he is.
	Within five years, Biden will be something for Medicare for All.
	Within six months, if Bernie Sanders is the nominee.
	So the fact is that the separation between the Bernie wing of the party and the rest of the party is not obvious and never was obvious.
	So Bernie had to separate himself off by calling himself a socialist.
	But the problem is if you do that, Americans don't like socialism because at least they're not communists.
	And so now he's having to revise that.
	And now he's having to say, oh, by the way, when I say socialism, I'm not actually a socialist.
	Oh, really?
	OK.
	OK, so Democrats are trapped with this crap nominee, with this really bad nominee.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden, who has high name recognition, is well liked in the black community.
	has had until the last five minutes, high approval ratings, has completely fallen apart in the middle of this race.
	James Clyburn, representative from South Carolina, he says, listen, if Biden loses South Carolina, this is basically his last stand.
	If Biden loses South Carolina, he's toast.
	What happens if Joe Biden does not win South Carolina?
	He would be in a very precarious situation.
	in.
	He needs to win South Carolina to demonstrate that his philosophy about the campaign is correct.
	Okay, that is right.
	That is right.
	If Joe Biden loses South Carolina, he is done.
	But Biden is also correct when Biden says that Democrats don't want to campaign with a socialist.
	Biden's points about Sanders are exactly true.
	I think the next president has to beat Trump.
	They have to bring along a Democratic Senate.
	I went out into 24 states for 66 candidates.
	They're all the front-line candidates.
	They're in purple states and red states.
	We won back the House.
	We increased governorships.
	And best of my knowledge, I don't think anybody asked Bernie to come in and campaign there.
	This is exactly right.
	Bernie doesn't have it.
	So the Democrats are freaking out, and they should be freaking out.
	So who shall they turn to?
	Who shall they turn to?
	Well, as Biden fades, people are increasingly turning to Michael Bloomberg, which means that Biden is now turning on Michael Bloomberg.
	He says he wants to debate Michael Bloomberg.
	He wants to hit him on redlining and stop-and-frisk.
	There's only one problem.
	This is idiocy.
	The reason that this is idiocy is because, number one, Biden was the guy behind the 1994 criminal justice bill.
	So he was one of the people behind it, which is part of the same movement that was behind things like stop-and-frisk generally.
	And Biden's own history working with people who are in favor of actual segregation obviously has come back to bite him once in the campaign.
	But beyond that, what is the strategy here for Joe Biden?
	You take out Michael Bloomberg, in which state exactly?
	In which state?
	Because it's either make or break for Joe Biden in South Carolina.
	If Joe Biden loses South Carolina, he's out of the race.
	He's toast.
	If he loses South Carolina to Bernie Sanders, he's finished.
	And that means he has to drop out.
	Well, Bloomberg isn't technically even in the race yet.
	Bloomberg doesn't get into the race until the following week.
	Look at the calendar.
	Bloomberg is not on any ballots until after South Carolina.
	So if Biden were to fall in South Carolina and he simultaneously hurt Michael Bloomberg in this debate, how has that benefited the so-called moderate wing of the party that opposes Bernie Sanders?
	Instead, you've knocked down the guy who's spending $300 million and rising in national polls and now, according to one poll, leading in Florida.
	Leading in Florida.
	Michael Bloomberg.
	So this is, I mean, what Joe Biden is doing by going after Michael Bloomberg is basically the same thing that Chris Christie did to Marco Rubio in New Hampshire in 2016.
	It's a murder-suicide.
	It's a political murder-suicide.
	He's trying to take out Michael Bloomberg in advance of presumably him losing South Carolina, followed by Michael Bloomberg being hit on all of the things that Joe Biden is bringing up.
	So here's Joe Biden, for some reason, believing that his chief rival to the nomination is Michael Bloomberg, as opposed to Bernie Sanders.
	Which again, that's putting an awful lot of stock in South Carolina.
	Look, if Biden had any, if Biden had any wherewithal at all, he would get out of the race.
	The chances that he's going to win, I think, I think he's a heavy, I think he's a heavy loser in South Carolina.
	I'd be shocked if he wins South Carolina.
	Here's Joe Biden going after Bloomberg nonetheless.
	Well, one of the advantages and disadvantages, I've been the only guy through this process so far, a person who's been totally vetted.
	I mean, I've been a target on my back since I got in.
	I'm still standing.
	And I'm going to get a chance to debate Mayor Bloomberg.
	I'm going to get a chance to debate him on everything from redlining to stop and frisk to a whole range of other things.
	Okay, so he's gonna go after Bloomberg again.
	What is the strategy here?
	This is the big problem for the Democrats.
	If they don't mobilize their so-called moderate wing, that doesn't really exist.
	If they don't mobilize that so-called moderate wing, then Bernie's gonna take the nomination.
	So instead, you've got Joe Biden, who is strategically inept, going after Michael Bloomberg.
	Again, if he wants to win South Carolina, hitting Michael Bloomberg isn't gonna help him one iota.
	Seriously, if his strategy is to win South Carolina, he needs to knock down Bernie.
	He doesn't need to knock down Bloomberg.
	How the hell does it help him to hit Bloomberg?
	Bloomberg isn't on the ballot in South Carolina.
	It's massive, massive idiocy.
	Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is dropping every piece of oppo he can on Michael Bloomberg.
	There's only one problem.
	Some of the oppo on Michael Bloomberg actually cuts in favor of his ability to win in the middle of the country.
	The fact that Michael Bloomberg was tough on crime is not a bad pitch to people who are living outside of New York City.
	By the way, it wasn't a bad pitch for people living inside New York City.
	The man was a three-term mayor of New York City.
	So this is all amazing to watch.
	This is why I say, President Trump, Stop with the Twitter.
	Just point.
	Just keep retweeting James Carville.
	And again, take his suggestion.
	Trump 2020.
	At least I'm not a communist.
	Pretty fantastically, fantastically good slogan.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like and then we'll get to a quick thing that I hate.
	So, things that I like today.
	I promised you earlier on in the program that I was going to play you a bit of an interview that I did.
	A little bit earlier with Bill Whittle.
	Bill is the host of The Cold War, a brand new podcast that we have been working on here at Daily Wire.
	It went to number one in history on the Apple podcast.
	It went to number five overall.
	It really is fantastic.
	It's great listening.
	It's dramatic.
	I sat down with Bill.
	We talked about The Cold War and we talked about the implications for The Cold War in today's politics, particularly since we apparently are going to nominate an emissary of the USSR for the Democratic Party.
	We're joined on set by Bill Whittle.
	Bill, of course, is an author, public speaker, and he's provided political commentary for Fox News, National Review, among other things.
	He's also the writer and performer of Apollo 11, What We Saw, the podcast series, which went to number one on iTunes, and is back with season two, The Cold War, What We Saw, which couldn't be more relevant today.
	Bill, thanks for stopping by.
	Great to be here, Ben.
	So let's talk about The Cold War, What We Saw.
	What is the actual scope of the series?
	What's it about?
	Well, it's a 42-year piece of history, and that's a lot of history.
	And I wanted to tell the story from the point of view that I've never heard it told about before.
	People talk about the conflict, and there's the economic, and the military, and all the rest of it.
	But I wanted specifically to concentrate on the moral aspects, the moral differences between these two sides.
	Because the way it's taught retroactively, it's kind of, oh, it's Coke versus Pepsi, and a team blue, team red.
	More or less the same.
	Big misunderstanding.
	Two giant militaristic countries with these armies and missiles.
	And they're more or less the same.
	But they're not.
	They're not more or less the same.
	What I basically did was I decided, with all of the terms that have changed so much, liberals, conservatives, hawks, and so on, it's individualist versus collectivist.
	That's the Cold War right there.
	It's a collectivist ideology that's been here from the beginning of time, namely that the peasants are just dispensable pieces of people that you throw into the machine versus this brand new ideology of individualism.
	And when the Cold War started, this collectivist idea just kind of limped and then started to run from the East, from Stalingrad, and then this individualist philosophy came ashore at Normandy.
	And where they met at the end of World War II was what began the stage for World War III.
	So with all of that said, we're seeing the Cold War obviously has great echoes today in the United States.
	I mean, when the Soviet Union fell, there was a widespread perception that communism had been defeated.
	Right.
	And now we see Bernie Sanders, who backed literally every communist regime of the 20th century, you know, so long as he has been alive.
	And he is in all likelihood going to be the Democratic nominee.
	So what exactly has happened that Americans forgot about the moral conflict in which, by the way, the Democratic Party was on the right side of this during the Cold War?
	Oh, absolutely.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Truman and Kennedy and yeah.
	Bernie Sanders took his honeymoon, you know, if you really want to go someplace with your beloved, someplace where you can relax, kind of kick back.
	What better than Moscow in early spring?
	There's video of Bernie in a room with other Russians and he's singing, "This land is your land, this land is my land." Bernie Sanders must know that, well, Bernie Sanders supporters we saw on tape, some of his campaign organizers talking about how swell the Gulag was and how swell the White Sea Canal is.
	The worst of the places in the Gulag was a camp called Colima.
	Where the temperature in the winter, coincidentally, is the only place where Fahrenheit and centigrade match.
	It's 40 degrees below zero.
	And Bernie's position would be, well, it wasn't a death camp like the Nazis.
	It was a work camp.
	It was a work camp.
	And your life expectancy was about a year.
	And if you lived, if you were working in the gold mines, it was four months.
	We think that probably 800,000 people, maybe a few more, died in Colima.
	That's one camp in the entire 300 plus camps of the Gulag.
	That means that Colima, on the leaderboard from hell, is probably third.
	Auschwitz first, Treblinka second, Colima third, in terms of number of people who've been murdered in one particular patch of land.
	Bernie Sanders goes over to this place and sings, this land is your land, this land is my land.
	One of the guys who was in his campaign said, socialism, well, first of all, after he talked about putting political opponents in the gulags, which he then went on to defend, He also said, and they got together and built this canal.
	The people got together and just built a canal.
	Well, Genghis Khagoda, who was head of the secret police, had attempted to impress Stalin by building a canal from the Baltic to the White Sea.
	And he used 125,000 laborers from the prisons.
	25,000 of them were killed on the job.
	That's 177 individual human lives per mile.
	And when the canal was finished, it was built so quickly that they couldn't put any ships through it.
	And this is what Bernie's campaign people and Bernie himself think of as the model society.
	The reason we're even talking about having a socialist today is because we have never had a consistent, ongoing, factual, pointing out point by point of how many people have to die to make this thing work.
	And the final, final, final thing is this.
	Fidel Castro is a man of the people.
	He was a man of the people.
	When he died, he had $800 million in his personal bank account.
	Lennon didn't go back to being a failed lawyer.
	Trotsky didn't do this.
	And Bernie Sanders, who's talking about income inequality, has three houses.
	I mean... Well, Bill Whittle, the series is The Cold War, What We Saw.
	As you can tell, Bill is an expert in American history and in world history.
	His last podcast, Apollo 11, What We Saw, is fantastic.
	If you haven't listened to that, you should.
	And make sure you tune in for The Cold War, What We Saw.
	I'm sure it's going to be brilliant and well-produced, as always.
	I know, because we help.
	Pleasure, Ben.
	So go check it out right now, The Cold War, What We Saw.
	Bill, thanks so much for stopping by.
	Good to see you.
	Pleasure, Ben.
	It's always great to be here.
	So I agree with me, obviously.
	Go check out The Cold War, dailywire.com slash coldwar.
	All righty, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So there's a person named Dana Schwartz, an American journalist and author who was previously a correspondent at Entertainment Weekly.
	Yesterday, she was trending on Twitter.
	Why?
	Well, because she was attacking South Park.
	South Park is bad.
	South Park is canceled.
	South Park is mean and cruel and bad and canceled.
	She tweeted out, in retrospect, it seems impossible to overstate the cultural damage done by South Park, the show that portrayed earnestness as the only sin and taught that mockery is the ultimate inoculation against all criticism.
	Okay, couple notes on this.
	It is extraordinary, and she continues, that smugness is not the same as intelligence, provocation isn't the same as bravery, the lesser of two evils aren't the same.
	So I generally agree with the principle that mockery is not a substitute for actual values.
	But I'm not going to hear that from a bunch of people on the left who worship at the altar of Jon Stewart.
	Jon Stewart spent years just making smug faces at cameras with a live audience.
	By the way, Jon Stewart's show was so reliant on the live audience that if you actually removed the live audience, his show would lose all the laughs.
	It's like a sitcom from the 1980s.
	You remove the laugh track, and it just ain't funny anymore.
	And Jon Stewart was heavily dependent on that live audience.
	But the fact is that smugness and mockery have been the hallmark of the Comedy Central left for a very long time.
	And South Park was on Comedy Central, too.
	The real problem that Dana Schwartz has is she doesn't like the people that South Park attacks.
	She doesn't like the fact that South Park attacks quote-unquote victims, according to the left.
	Now what South Park has really done is it's focused in on the insufferable, the insufferable smugness of the left.
	So it's not smug about people on the left with values, it's smug about people on the left who are cynically attempting to use faux values in order to cram down a particular version of society.
	The most famous sort of image from South Park along these lines is a bunch of San Francisco liberals smelling their own farts, right?
	That's sort of the South Park message.
	But that is the reality of the situation.
	Trying to rip on South Park as sort of a sign of Western civilization's decline is pretty amazing.
	Again, if you want to make the case that South Park is crude and rude and lewd, all of that is true.
	But I don't remember the left ever objecting to crude, rude, and lewd, so long as it was siding with them.
	What they don't like about South Park, the reason they're angry about South Park, is because South Park dares to speak some truths about politically correct stupidity.
	And therefore, it is bad, and therefore, it is cancelled.
	So, by the way, South Park is... I never watched it as a kid, because it was too lewd, rude, and crude for me.
	As an adult, I've watched some episodes.
	It's quite brilliant.
	I mean, for adults, it's really funny.
	The writing on it is hysterically, hysterically funny because Matt Stone and Trey Parker are actually extremely talented people, much more talented than any of the comedy writers who ever worked for Jon Stewart.
	And meanwhile, quick update on coronavirus.
	Just to make your weekend brighter, I feel like we should do an update on coronavirus.
	So China has now announced 5,000 new cases and 121 new deaths.
	It's really fun to watch.
	As the Chinese government stifles all information about coronavirus and then immediately suggests that they are being transparent with the people of Earth and that everything is under control.
	They've basically turned into Kevin Bacon in Animal House, shouting that everything is under control while they're running after people in the streets, tackling them and dragging them away.
	It's pretty astonishing stuff.
	The latest from China is that their coronavirus outbreak showed no signs of peaking, with health authorities on Friday reporting more than 5,000 new cases, while passengers on a cruise ship blocked from five countries due to virus fears finally disembarked in Cambodia, which is a great place to disembark.
	Policymakers pledged to do more to stimulate Asian economies hit hard by the virus, helping Asia's stock markets edge higher, with Chinese shares headed for their first weekly gain in four.
	This is really slowing the economy.
	I know people who do business in Hong Kong, and they've just stopped doing business in Hong Kong, basically, because of all of the fears about all of this.
	The new figures gave no indication the outbreak is nearing a peak, according to Adam Kamrat-Scott, an infectious diseases expert at the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney.
	Meanwhile, the United States CDC is saying that they are trying to keep this thing under control.
	The problem, of course, is that the thing is basically silent until you obtain it.
	So it's silent even when it comes to transmission.
	When it comes to for a full on two weeks, everybody is is incredibly like the symptoms don't actually you don't have to be symptomatic to transmit the disease in other words, which means that it is very, very difficult to get people to sign on to to get people to Um, to get people to, you know, limit this thing, to limit the transmission of this thing.
	So this, the good news is that China has this under control.
	China's Hubei and Wuhan Communist Party chiefs are removed amid the epidemic.
	So they blew the whole thing because the government insisted on top-down control.
	And then they are presumably going to be sent to some sort of labor camp for having tried to shield the party from the blowback from coronavirus.
	The same thing, by the way, has happened to many of the doctors who are trying to document this stuff, according to dnyuz.com.
	The beige van squatted outside of a Wuhan hospital, its side and back doors ajar.
	Fang Bin, a local clothing salesman, peered inside as he walked past.
	He'd grown so many dead, he counted five, six, seven, eight body bags.
	This is too many.
	That moment in a 40-minute video about the coronavirus outbreak that has devastated China propelled Mr. Fang to internet fame.
	Then, less than two weeks later, he disappeared.
	China, great place to be.
	When you're not dying of coronavirus, they are arresting you for announcing that coronavirus actually exists.
	So exciting stuff, as always, from our friends in the evil Chinese Communist government.
	Truly, truly evil.
	Okay, now, quick note, since it is a Friday, I haven't done a Bible thing in a little while, so let me do a quick Bible study segment with you right now.
	I know we're running a little bit late.
	It's okay, it's okay.
	We're gonna end the week on an up note.
	So, This week's Torah portion for the Jews is the portion that contains the Ten Commandments, the Parsha of Yitro, which is kind of fascinating because the Parsha with the Ten Commandments is actually named after a non-Jew.
	Yitro is the father-in-law of Moses and was considered sort of the high priest of Midian.
	And he supposedly, he kind of supposedly, according to various commentaries, converts to Judaism after the splitting of the Red Sea.
	He approaches Moses.
	He explains to him how a hierarchical judicial system should work with a court of appeals with Moses sitting at the top.
	And all of this in the Parsha is named after him, which is a suggestion as to some of the interesting things about the Ten Commandments.
	OK, so the Ten Commandments, obviously the most important statement of morality, probably in the most impactful in the history of humanity.
	And there's always been this interesting sort of tension Between how much of the Ten Commandments is discernible by human reason and how much of the Ten Commandments needed to be handed down by God.
	How much of it needed to be handed down as revelation.
	There's even some interesting commentary in Jewish sources as to whether God actually announced all Ten Commandments or whether He only announced... So in the Torah, God only announces the first two commandments and then the people say, okay, we can't handle this.
	God is too much for us.
	We need Moses to tell us the rest of these things.
	So...
	Maimonides in Guide to the Perplexed specifically talks about what exactly it was that people were given at Sinai in terms of the Ten Commandments from God directly, right?
	Because this is the time in Jewish history when God speaks directly to the people as a corporate entity, right?
	It's 600,000 Jews supposedly standing in front of Mount Sinai.
	So what exactly did God do?
	So apparently God was so awesome, according to Maimonides, that people immediately intuited There is a God and they shan't have any other gods before him.
	So the first two commandments were even understandable simply from the mere presence of God, the mere power of standing in front of God.
	So how much of the Ten Commandments is discernible from natural law?
	And how much of the Ten Commandments is something that has to be handed down and inculcated and taught?
	How much could we just sort of discover on our own?
	Well, the first two, right, the first two commandments, I'm the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of bondage, That basic concept is of course something that has to be handed down from God, because you can logic your way to the idea of a creator of the universe, but that logic doesn't necessarily carry over into a God of history who cares about you every single day, who cares about what happens to you.
	And so God's involvement with the world is a core assumption that the Ten Commandments makes and then hands down to you.
	And then you can discern some of the other of the Ten Commandments from that, right?
	Like the obligation not to murder would be a pretty obvious one.
	Because if every human being is made in the image of God, Which is, in Genesis, and God is a God who cares about individual human beings and cares about history, then you can certainly intuit the idea that you're not supposed to kill or kidnap or steal from other people, right?
	The basic idea that you have an individual right against other individuals, that sort of stuff does spring from the Ten Commandments.
	But there are certain aspects of the Ten Commandments that are, I think, necessary to be given.
	That are necessary to be given.
	So, some of those, for example, the Sabbath, necessary to be given, right?
	There's nothing that suggests that we shouldn't be working all seven days per week.
	But what that really is, in essence, is a recognition that we are in control of our own time.
	That we are not to be slaves to the collective.
	In the end, the Ten Commandments, which are given collectively to the Jewish people, corporately, right?
	The Ten Commandments are a ringing endorsement of individual rights.
	Because when you look at the Ten Commandments, they are nearly all about individual rights that you have against other human beings.
	First, you have to acknowledge God.
	Second, you have to acknowledge that nothing else can supplant God, right?
	Government cannot take over for God.
	That is, thou shalt have no other gods before me.
	Government can't take the role of God.
	Government can't fix all cosmic injustices.
	That is not the role of any collective to do.
	And any collective that attempts to do so violates the first commandment and the second commandment.
	And then there's the third commandment that you shan't take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
	Which really is a specific demand not to pervert the words of scripture.
	My friend Dennis Prager, I think, has a really great take on this.
	He says, does God really care if you say GD?
	Does God really care if you say a bad curse word that has God's name in it?
	He says, well, you know, probably shouldn't do it, but is that really what the commandment is about?
	Is it really about cursing?
	And the answer is no.
	The answer is that what you really shouldn't do is supplant your own agenda for God's and then call it God's.
	You've got to be very careful about what you're doing, Pete Buttigieg.
	Trying to suggest that the Bible backs your particular vision of the world in contravention of God's explicit word is an attempt to take God's name in vain.
	The fourth commandment, remember the Sabbath to keep it holy, is again a statement of your individuality and your individual right to your own time.
	That the Sabbath is between you and God, but nobody else can force you to work on the Sabbath.
	You gotta have breaks, right?
	Slavery is about other people being in control of your time.
	So the fourth commandment, which is the Sabbath, the idea there is that you are now in control of your own time, honoring your father and mother, right?
	This is about understanding that your rights and duties are handed down parentally, not from a society that starts anew every single generation.
	And this is a real conflict between left and right.
	The left in the United States believes that every single generation, we have to remake our morality as brand new and reject the morality of our parents.
	Honoring your father and mother acknowledges That you have a duty to examine the past and you have a duty to examine your forefathers because your rights come, in the words of Edmund Burke, not just from these kind of new version of enlightenment rights, but also handed down via history.
	The sixth commandment, you shouldn't murder, obviously that springs from natural rights.
	You shouldn't commit adultery, that springs from natural rights.
	Because you're violating the sanctity of an oath that you took to another human being when you commit adultery.
	Contra the New York Times, which by the way has an article this week about sexually open marriages again.
	It's amazing.
	I don't know how repressed they are at the New York Times, but like every other day there's an article in the New York Times about how you should be able to cheat on your spouse and your spouse should be okay with it.
	Like a plea for something from the editors of the New York Times.
	The Eighth Commandment, you shouldn't steal.
	Obviously an acknowledgement of individual rights.
	Because if you have a right to something, people don't have a right to steal it from you.
	The ninth commandment, you shouldn't bear false witness against your neighbor.
	Again, an indication of individual rights.
	And this does come up fairly regularly.
	People who suggest that due process does not apply based on your social group, those people are violating your individual rights.
	They're bearing false witness against neighbors based specifically on their social distinctions.
	And finally, you shouldn't covet.
	That is the greatest indicator in favor of individual rights, because you don't have a right to somebody else's property or somebody else's life.
	You can hope to have a life as good as theirs, but you certainly do not get to covet other people's property, which is the basis of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the socialist left.
	Okay, so the Ten Commandments.
	I think largely discernible from the basic idea that God is present in the universe, cares about you, and believes in you as an individual.
	The single most important statement of morality, presumably in human history.
	The most impactful, certainly.
	So go check it out this week, since it is that week in the Jewish calendar.
	And we will see you here a little bit later today, or barring now, we'll see you here next week with all of the latest as we approach the Nevada caucuses.
	You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
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