A soap opera breaks out at the White House, the Republicans decide that it s time to spend all the monies, and we check the mailbag. All that and more on this week s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Featuring: - Rob Porter's Ex-Wife - Hope Hicks - Corey Lewandowski's New York Post Ex-Boyfriend - And much, much more! Thanks to Indochino for the discount code SHAPIRO. That s 50% off the regular price for a premium made-to-measure suit, and you will look like a million bucks. You don t want to spend thousands of dollars on a tailored suit? You want to look like James Bond? Well, you ll want to make that happen by spending $359 on a perfectly tailored suit, with just $359, plus free shipping. And this week, my listeners get any premium, made to measure suit for $359 at indochino.com when you enter promo code SHARPIOLE at checkout, and get 50% discount when you checkout. It s the Gaudiest and flashiest suit I own that I ve ever owned, and the shipping is FREE! You ll get the best deal you can find for a perfectly made tomeized suit you ll look like you re looking like a James Bond. . And you ll be the perfect James Bond! - Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro is the host of the show! Subscribe to my new show on Podchaser and get 10% off your first purchase when you shop online. If you like the show, I ll be giving you $5 or more when you re in the ad-free version of the show becomes $5, and I ll get 20% off $50 or more, plus I ll give you a FREE shipping on my next week s VIP membership when you sign up for the VIP discount when I get my ad-only offer starts in two weeks. I ll also get a discount of $50 and get $25, plus a discount on my first month only get $99, and a free shipping starts starts starting at $50, and they get my VIP discount starts starts at $99 and I get a VIP discount, I get an additional $49 and a 2-month VIP discount. Thanks, Ben Shapiro will also get $5 and a FREE PROMO code SHIPPED.
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00:01:42.000Okay, so, the continuing controversy that follows the White House today is, of course, the controversy over Rob Porter.
00:01:56.000When did the White House know that top Trump aide Rob Porter had allegedly beaten not one, but two of his ex-wives, and when did they know about it?
00:02:05.000What did they know about it, and when did they know about it, right?
00:02:42.000She started off, I believe, as a PR flack for Ivanka's fashion line, and then moved into the Trump campaign, and now is at the top levels of the White House.
00:02:49.000Apparently, very nice person, but has terrible taste in men.
00:02:52.000And she is now dating Rob Porter, and Rob Porter's ex-wife says, listen, Hope, if Rob hasn't been abusive with you yet, don't worry, he will.
00:03:01.000Rob Porter's now in a relationship with the White House Press Secretary, Hope Hicks.
00:03:48.000Hope Hicks, a young woman looking for love in all the wrong places.
00:03:52.000She dated Corey Lewandowski, the Trump campaign manager who was married at the time.
00:03:57.000During the campaign, was spotted yelling at him on the street by the New York Post.
00:04:02.000Corey Lewandowski, of course, had a penchant for grabbing women and bruising them and then lying about it for three weeks.
00:04:08.000Hope Hicks then moved on from Corey Lewandowski to Rob Porter, who it turns out has a penchant for allegedly punching women in the face.
00:04:15.000Hope Hicks then helped co-write the memo, and that memo that would exonerate Rob Porter, that memo basically was written for Kelly and said that Rob Porter was a wonderful man.
00:04:25.000So not only does Hope Hicks have some problems in choosing dudes, Hope Hicks has some problems in defending bad dudes.
00:04:31.000And President Trump is rightly angry, saying, why in the world are you defending a staffer over me?
00:04:37.000Your job is to protect me from bad staffers.
00:04:40.000Trump apparently didn't know about the statement that had been drafted in order to help exonerate Rob Porter.
00:04:45.000He didn't know about any of that stuff until it came out and it was too late for him to do anything.
00:04:48.000So he's spitting mad at Hope Hicks as well he should be.
00:04:51.000So that is the soap opera portion of what's going on at the White House.
00:04:54.000We also have the John Kelly portion of what's going on at the White House.
00:04:58.000It now turns out, testified in 2016 on behalf of a Marine who is alleged to have committed some sort of sexual abuse or sexual assault, and then he went on to go—according to The New York Times, this Marine went on to abuse a child sexually.
00:05:09.000So, there are a lot of problems inside the Trump administration with defending some pretty bad folks.
00:05:14.000Raj Shah was out there defending the White House response yesterday.
00:05:17.000Why was he out there as opposed to Hope Hicks?
00:05:19.000Well, because Hope is at the center of the soap opera.
00:05:22.000Is any of this good for the White House?
00:05:46.000So Raj Shah was out there trying to explain this yesterday because Hope Hicks couldn't come front and center and defend what she'd done because she's involved with the man.
00:05:53.000By the way, Lewandowski, the other element to the soap opera that I forgot, the other element is that Corey Lewandowski allegedly is the one who leaked to the media all of the information about Rob Porter.
00:06:05.000The allegations made against Rob Porter, as we understand them, involve incidents long before he joined the White House.
00:06:35.000Therefore, they are best evaluated through the background check process.
00:06:39.000It's important to remember that Rob Porter has repeatedly denied these allegations and done so publicly.
00:06:46.000That doesn't change how serious and disturbing these allegations are.
00:06:50.000Okay, the problem is that a lot of people knew about this at the time.
00:06:53.000The Washington Post reporting today, quote, in January 2017, right, this is a year ago, White House counsel Don McGahn learned of the allegations and he wanted Porter to stay put because he saw the Harvard Law Train Capitol Hill veteran as a steadying professional voice in the White House, according to people familiar with the matter.
00:07:07.000His view didn't change in June when the FBI flagged some of its findings to the White House, nor did he act in September.
00:08:47.000Okay, so how did the White House respond to that?
00:08:49.000The White House ripped the crap out of Omarosa.
00:08:51.000So, you have a guy in the White House who's credibly accused by two ex-wives of beating them, and the White House quasi-defends until the last minute.
00:08:59.000Omarosa says, I won't vote for the guy again.
00:09:04.000And here's the White House ripping Omarosa.
00:09:06.000What is the White House's reaction to comments made by former White House aide Omarosa on Celebrity Big Brother, where she said, quote, she is haunted by the president's tweets.
00:09:14.000She described the situation inside the White House as bad and said it is not going to be okay.
00:09:39.000You know what they're really dicey about, which demonstrates that when it comes to the Trump administration, loyalty matters a lot more than competence, and that's a serious problem.
00:09:45.000That should not be the case at any business.
00:09:48.000Competence matters more, particularly at the level of the White House, right?
00:09:51.000People who made one anti-Trump remark during the campaign have been banned, essentially, from the White House, or at least were when they originally staffed it up.
00:09:58.000And that rules out a lot of pretty competent people, because they weren't quote-unquote loyal, and so you end up with loyalists who may not, in fact, be particularly competent.
00:10:05.000There's a bunker mentality at the White House, and it came to bear here, and it's really nasty, and there is no excuse for it.
00:10:10.000It is disgusting that anyone was defending Rob Porter after these allegations were known.
00:10:14.000It is particularly disgusting that people were defending Rob Porter after, you know, after there were reports on Tuesday.
00:10:22.000Again, all of that, there's just no excuse for it, and you have to wonder whether the people in charge who knew about it ought to be fired.
00:10:30.000If John Kelly knew and he was defending this guy for a year, if McGahn knew for a year, they've misserved the president of the United States.
00:10:37.000OK, so I do want to talk about a piece of even bigger news.
00:10:40.000That is the Republicans deciding that fiscal conservatism is no longer a thing.
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00:12:03.000In the early wee morning hours on the East Coast, the Republican Congress, along with a bunch of Democrats, voted in favor of a two-year funding bill.
00:13:05.000Rand Paul wanted to stand up and say something about it.
00:13:08.000You know, Rand has a knack for standing and talking at these times, and that's something you've got to appreciate about the senator from Kentucky.
00:13:15.000Here is Rand Paul saying, listen, you know, we campaign on fiscal responsibility, and then we lie about it.
00:13:20.000And, you know, the thing is, is we think when Democrats are in charge that the Republicans are the conservative party.
00:13:25.000The problem is when the Republicans are in charge, there's no conservative party.
00:13:37.000And that used to be what it meant to be conservative.
00:13:39.000But a lot of so-called conservatives lose their mind.
00:13:43.000Once it becomes a partisan thing, and they say, oh, we must govern now.
00:13:46.000So they govern by giving us massive new debt.
00:13:50.000And I don't think that's good for the country.
00:13:51.000I think ultimately it threatens our security, not only our external security, but also the internal foundation of the country is threatened by so large a debt.
00:16:17.000You realize that this is the secret of Washington.
00:16:19.000The dirty little secret is the Republicans are loudly clamoring for more military spending, but they can't get it unless they give the Democrats welfare spending.
00:16:36.000He is wrong, by the way, about military spending as a general matter.
00:16:40.000This is one of the problems with Rand Paul is that Rand is very anti-military spending.
00:16:43.000I'm fine with the idea that we don't have to radically revamp our military spending and jigger it upward in any tremendous way.
00:16:51.000Rand actually wants to cut it tremendously because he thinks that we should just bring our troops home from Afghanistan, for example, which is quasi-delusional.
00:16:57.000But when he talks about the fact that Republicans have ceased to care about the budget, he's 100% correct.
00:17:23.000Is college going to get more affordable?
00:17:25.000No, it's not going to get more affordable.
00:17:26.000The measure would extend government funding at current levels until March 23rd to allow lawmakers to finalize details on the spending in a separate measure.
00:17:33.000Lawmakers would also raise the nation's debt limit into 2019 so we'll have no more government shutdowns until past the congressional elections, which was part of the goal here.
00:17:41.000Jazz Shaw at Hot Air is fulminating over this.
00:17:44.000He says, listen, everyone who's fighting for conservative principles, this means that you no longer get to talk about fiscal conservatism in the future.
00:17:51.000You can't talk about fiscal conservatism, about fiscal responsibility, when you're blowing out budgets to the tune of trillion-dollar deficits.
00:17:57.000With an entirely Republican Congress, by the way.
00:17:59.000They told me if I didn't vote for Trump, we'd get trillion-dollar deficits and DACA.
00:18:35.000There are 16 Republicans who didn't vote for it, including Rand Paul and Mike Lee.
00:18:39.000Mike Lee was really angry because he said this process is completely corrupt, which it is.
00:18:43.000The way appropriations are supposed to be done are not in these 700-page omnibus packages that are rolled out at midnight and no one reads.
00:18:50.000That's not the way this is supposed to be done.
00:18:51.000Appropriations packages are supposed to be done by apartment and by department.
00:18:54.000The way it was supposed to work is that if you have a Department of Defense bill, you have a Defense Spending Bill, a Defense Authorization Bill, then you have a Health and Human Services Authorization Bill, then you have a Commerce Authorization Bill, then you have a Department of Education Authorization Bill, and then we can debate what should be in and what should be out of each one of those bills.
00:19:09.000The House, by the way, 100 days ago passed 12 authorization bills for each of the departments.
00:19:14.000The Senate didn't move on any of them.
00:19:15.000Instead, the Senate moved into the back room and they negotiated an omnibus package and they said you get to vote up or down.
00:19:22.000That is not a way to be fiscally responsible.
00:19:25.000But Republicans don't care about that anymore.
00:19:28.000The dirty little secret is that Trump's populism works because, politically speaking, Trump is recognizing a truth that fiscal conservatives are going to have to come to grips with.
00:19:49.000In other words, we like to pretend that we're the child who's capable of delayed gratification.
00:19:54.000There's a very famous delayed gratification experiment where you can actually tell IQ of children in a very basic way through this experiment.
00:20:00.000If you take a four-year-old and you say to them, I'm going to put this cookie in front of you right now.
00:20:04.000You can either eat that cookie right now, or if you wait three minutes, you will get a second cookie.
00:20:22.000We like to think of ourselves as smart, but we're dumb.
00:20:24.000So when it comes to actual, like, we say, yeah, let's cut the spending, but the minute that it comes to something we want, then all of a sudden we don't care about the spending anymore.
00:20:31.000And we're always saying it's an emergency situation.
00:20:33.000John Cornyn yesterday, he ripped into policy.
00:20:41.000When's the last time we weren't in an emergency situation?
00:20:44.000When's the last time we actually had a full-throated debate about government spending and we weren't in a quote-unquote emergency situation?
00:21:09.000If you're never willing to shut down the government, if you're never willing to actually have these hard-headed contacts, if you're never willing to actually have conversations about what needs to stay and what needs to go, you're never going to get to anything remotely approaching fiscal responsibility.
00:21:24.000And the fact that so many supposed fiscal conservatives are looking the other way on this demonstrates that some of the Tea Party was a lie.
00:21:31.000There are a lot of people who are Tea Partiers who are saying they wanted lower government spending, but they only wanted lower government spending when they thought Democrats were doing it.
00:21:37.000The minute it's Trump in charge and the Republicans in charge, they're willing to look the other way because, after all, tax cuts and defense spending.
00:21:44.000And if we have to get those things, then I guess we can blow out spending like it's 2009.
00:21:51.000There is no reason that Republicans should have signed off on it.
00:21:53.000And it is a disgrace to a Republican Party that does—it no longer represents anything.
00:21:58.000It no longer represents anything that means anything when it comes to government, when it comes to smaller governments or government limitations.
00:22:07.000I'm going to give you the latest update on MemoFight 2018.
00:22:12.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Dollar Shave Club.
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00:23:49.000OK, so Devin Nunes has essentially uncovered—the new memo that's going to come out is going to cover the fact that apparently Hillary's State Department was funneling information to Christopher Steele via a few of Hillary Clinton's special allies.
00:24:04.000Basically, Christopher Steele was making a Trump dossier based on Hillary sources, providing the information to the John Kerry State Department, which was staffed by Hillary holdovers and Hillary friends, and they were passing that information on to the spy, Christopher Steele, to pass it on to the FBI.
00:24:19.000Well, now the guy who was in the middle of that, the guy at the State Department, a guy named Jonathan Weiner, he is writing about this in the pages of The Washington Post.
00:24:26.000He writes, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes announced last week that the next phase of his investigation of the events that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller will focus on the State Department.
00:24:35.000His apparent area of interest is my relationship with former British intelligence professional Christopher Steele and my role in materials Steele ultimately shared with the FBI.
00:25:17.000In the summer of 2016, Steele told me he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign, and senior Russian officials.
00:25:23.000He did not provide details but made clear the information involved active measures
00:25:42.000A Soviet intelligence turned for propaganda and related activities to influence events in other countries.
00:25:46.000In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the dossier.
00:25:51.000Steele's sources suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, but had also compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign.
00:25:59.000So now Steele wasn't just blabbing to the FBI, he was blabbing to the State Department, which has no power to really do anything in this matter.
00:26:06.000The FBI, presumably, should be the one telling the State Department what it needs to know.
00:26:11.000It's not Christopher Steele's job to do that.
00:26:13.000He says he was allowed to review but not to keep a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department.
00:26:17.000I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Newland, who indicated that she felt the Secretary of State needed to be made aware of the material.
00:26:49.000They got to talking about the hacking, and Blumenthal discussed Steele's report.
00:26:53.000He showed whiner notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, another Blumenthal-Hillary hack, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.
00:27:02.000What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele's but appeared to involve different sources.
00:27:06.000On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele to ask for his professional reaction.
00:27:10.000He told me it was potentially collateral information.
00:27:28.000Why didn't Jonathan Weiner just take the information he was receiving from Hillary's flax and forwarding that on to the FBI, as opposed to funneling it through Steele?
00:27:35.000The answer is that he sent it to Steele, because if he had sent it directly from the State Department to the FBI, the FBI would have said, where did you get it, Jonathan?
00:27:42.000And he would have had to say, Sidney Blumenthal, and the FBI would have gone, you've got to be kidding me.
00:27:47.000Whereas if he funneled it to Christopher Steele, Steele could obscure the source of the information, and then the FBI would take that for a FISA warrant.
00:27:53.000That's the most plausible possible explanation here.
00:28:17.000And that's not the only serious problem.
00:28:18.000Apparently, there's a story out today.
00:28:21.000People, I think, are taking this a little bit too much.
00:28:24.000I think they're reading too much into this.
00:28:26.000There's a story today out from Ed Henry at Fox News.
00:28:29.000He says that Senator Mark Warner, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who'd been leading a congressional investigation into President Trump's alleged ties to Russia, had extensive contact last year with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch who was offering Warner access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele,
00:28:45.000According to text messages obtained exclusively by Fox News.
00:28:47.000So Warner texted this lobbyist who was in the pocket of the Russians.
00:28:51.000We have so much to discuss, you need to be careful, but we can help our country.
00:28:55.000He had ties to Hillary Clinton as well as to Russia.
00:28:57.000So that was not the extent of the text.
00:29:00.000According to the text exchanges, Warner seemed particularly intent on connecting directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop, at least initially.
00:29:08.000In one text to the lobbyist, Warner wrote he would rather not have a paper trail of his messages.
00:29:12.000An aide to Warner confirmed to Fox News that the messages were authentic.
00:29:15.000The messages were obtained by a Republican source, marked confidential, and are not classified.
00:29:20.000They were turned over to the Senate panel by Waldman last September.
00:29:24.000Waldman is best known for signing a $40,000 monthly retainer in 2008 and 2009 to lobby the U.S.
00:29:29.000government on behalf of a controversial Russian billionaire who's connected with the Russian government.
00:29:34.000So, in aid to Richard Burr, who's the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he told Fox News that Burr was aware of the contact Warner had made with Steele's representatives.
00:29:50.000So, the way they could read too much into this is by ignoring the fact that Richard Burr says this isn't a big deal.
00:29:54.000So, Warner's text messages were quietly given to the Intelligence Committee after he and Burr signed a joint request for the messages last June.
00:30:00.000Warner and Burr privately informed the rest of the Democratic and Republican senators on a panel of Warner's text messages in a meeting last October.
00:30:22.000You know, if they didn't—and this is where I say you can read too much into this—if they didn't, then that would be troublesome.
00:30:27.000Marco Rubio is suggesting that it's not a big deal.
00:30:29.000He tweeted out today, Senator Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago, has had zero impact on our work.
00:30:35.000The real question is whether the Republicans were being kept contemporaneously advised of Mark Warner reaching out via Russian sources to Christopher Steele.
00:30:43.000If the answer is yes, if the Republicans were aware, then it's not a big deal.
00:30:46.000If, however, they were not aware, then it could theoretically be a big deal.
00:30:49.000It looked like the Democrats were fishing for information from Christopher Steele without knowledge of the Republicans, which is not a particularly great thing.
00:31:33.000This Valentine's Day, Wednesday, February 14th at 5 p.m.
00:31:36.000Eastern, the lonely and desperate, pathetic Michael Mowles will literally be waiting for your questions in his smoking jacket in our next episode of The Conversation.
00:31:43.000Michael's pathetic pleas for attention will stream live on Facebook, YouTube, and The Daily Wire website.
00:31:47.000Everybody can watch for free and watch him just make a fool of himself, but only subscribers can join the website and help torture him.
00:31:52.000To ask questions as a subscriber, log into our website at dailywire.com, head over to the conversation page, and that's where you can watch the live stream.
00:31:58.000After that, you start typing into the Daily Wire chat box, and Michael will answer live questions as they come in for an entire hour, while presumably looking completely pretentious and making references to obscure Italian novels.
00:32:08.000Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by Knowles this Valentine's Day, Wednesday, February 14th at 5 p.m.
00:32:16.000By the way, please do not watch, for the sake of your own eyeballs, do not watch our promo for this on Facebook.
00:32:21.000Our promo for the Michael Noll's Valentine's Day episode on Facebook is supremely disturbing, and I'm very disappointed in Alicia Krauss for doing the 900 number voice for that voiceover.
00:32:31.000You can go check that out on our Facebook page.
00:32:33.000If you just want to watch the show later—by the way, sorry, if you want the annual subscription, then you get this, the Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr.
00:32:38.000I don't have to talk to you about how great it is.
00:32:51.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:32:59.000All right, so here is this final story that you need to know about today in the news roundup of scandal.
00:33:04.000So, an FBI informant, according to The Hill, connected to the Uranium One controversy, told three congressional committees in a written statement that Russia routed millions of dollars to America with the expectation it would be used to benefit Bill Clinton's charitable efforts while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quarterbacked a reset in U.S.-Russian relations.
00:33:21.000The informant's name is Douglas Campbell.
00:33:22.000He said in a statement obtained by The Hill that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO worldwide, specifically because it was in position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically, Hillary Clinton.
00:33:35.000Democrats have cast doubt on Campbell's credibility, so they're going to have a big battle over all of this.
00:33:40.000So, again, it sounds like there is more to the Uranium One scandal than the media were willing to cover or let on early on.
00:33:52.000So today, there's a good book out by Douglas Murray.
00:33:55.000It's called The Strange Death of Europe.
00:33:56.000It talks all about, in a not-unsympathetic way, the problems with mass migration into Europe, particularly Islamic mass migration into Europe, failures of assimilation inside Europe, and how this is posing threats to the future of the continent and Western civilization as a whole.
00:34:31.000Because this Nazi won a GOP primary in Illinois.
00:34:33.000Now, this schmuck wins a primary in Illinois every couple of years.
00:34:36.000The Republicans will refuse to sponsor him and throw him off the ballot.
00:34:39.000That's going to happen again this year.
00:34:40.000But since the media are fully informed that they are
00:34:45.000Since the media are fully cognizant that they are trying to turn Republicans into Nazis, it behooves them to find any Nazi who calls himself a Republican and put him on TV.
00:34:51.000They would never put Louis Farrakhan on TV or any member of the Congressional Black Caucus and ask them about Louis Farrakhan, but they will do this with this obscure moron from Illinois.
00:35:00.000That said, it does demonstrate the stupidity of Nazis.
00:35:03.000She does a good job of grilling him, for what that's worth.
00:36:07.000Apparently, an employee for Spirit Airlines allegedly demanded a young woman either let her pet hamster free outside the airport or flush it down the toilet, leading her to choose the latter.
00:37:31.000The publisher is pretty good about letting opposing views appear there, but there's no question that it is a far left publication.
00:37:39.000Well, they have a piece out today from a woman named Tamara Colton.
00:37:44.000She's a female rabbi and psychologist in Birmingham, Michigan.
00:37:47.000Now, number one, when most people say female rabbis, there are some female rabbis who are knowledgeable.
00:37:52.000But most female rabbis are in the Reconstructionist or Reform movement, and they're not very knowledgeable.
00:37:56.000Like, I, as a lay Orthodox Jew, not a member of the priestly caste, not a rabbi, know a lot more than somebody like Tamara Colton just because I read the Bible on a regular basis.
00:38:05.000How do I know I know more than she does?
00:38:39.000As a 47-year-old woman rabbi, I've become emboldened by these brave young women to speak a truth that I've known in my heart for a long time but have been hesitant to share.
00:38:46.000The time has come for me to step forward, too.
00:38:48.000It's time we all acknowledge an overwhelmingly powerful source of shame and silence in the Bible.
00:38:53.000Okay, now, you'd expect her to go from here to, like, the stuff in Leviticus about virginity until marriage, or, like, the stuff in Leviticus about homosexuality, or the stuff in Leviticus about forbidden sexual relationships.
00:39:05.000Or the stuff in Jewish tradition about modesty, right?
00:39:06.000That's where you would expect her to go.
00:39:08.000It would be stupid, but that's where you would expect her to go.
00:39:20.000Quote, The story that begins the Bible, the first one that we learn in Sunday school, the founding story of man and woman, upheld for thousands of years by Judeo-Christian religion, is actually the story of the first sexual assault of a woman.
00:39:30.000The woman's name is Eve, and the perpetrator is God.
00:40:15.000To paraphrase Shakespeare, what the F?
00:40:38.000There is no way to read that story and come away with that.
00:40:40.000Here is the relevant verbiage from the book of Genesis.
00:41:04.000You notice anything there about, like, horrific pains of hunger that she had to be sated with only this fruit?
00:41:09.000As opposed to all the other trees in the garden, which God has said she can eat from?
00:41:12.000Is there anything there about God shaming her for her nakedness?
00:41:14.000Or is it that she eats a piece of fruit, realizes she's naked, and then feels ashamed because she feels that she has misused her purpose in the world, which is what the story is really about?
00:42:27.000OK, Lowell says, I feel modern libertarianism is gaining popularity after seeing Gary Johnson's gain from the 2012 to 2016 elections, and what I feel is a growing popularity for Rand Paul libertarian leanings.
00:42:36.000Why, in your opinion, is the Libertarian Party not prominent in the government today?
00:42:39.000Because they suck at everything, is the answer.
00:42:41.000OK, the Libertarian Party convention was a crap show.
00:42:44.000It was a guy running out naked with an iron cross.
00:42:46.000There's a bunch of people, like John McAfee, talking about legalizing acid.
00:42:50.000Okay, that's not what you'll lead with if you're the libertarians.
00:42:52.000If you're the libertarians, why don't you go get some decent candidates who can talk in conservative-slash-libertarian tones about the necessity for small government and how that leads to freedom?
00:43:01.000Why is it that I'm a better representative of the libertarian than Gary Johnson?
00:43:04.000Why is it that I'm a better representative of libertarianism than anyone who's on the stage at the Libertarian Party Convention?
00:43:09.000It makes you think that the Libertarian Party is actually a giant scam to get you to give them lots of money and then not earn enough of the vote to actually be put under severe government scrutiny.
00:43:18.000Because, my goodness, how else could you explain the supreme incompetence at every level of the Libertarian Party?
00:43:23.000Plus, again, they've elevated members of the Libertarian Party who are soft defense libertarians, which is not smart.
00:43:28.000People who say that they're sort of almost anarcho-capitalists to the top levels of the Libertarian Party.
00:43:34.000That is not an electoral position for victory.
00:43:36.000So the Jewish view is that original sin is not about you have a sin that must be relieved by God's grace that is imbued in you because of original sin.
00:43:42.000There is no concept of original sin in Judaism in that sense.
00:43:55.000What original sin is, is that Adam committed the sin of disobeying God, and this led us to, I think, there are a few interpretations, obviously, of this story, but I think the one that I like the best is the interpretation that essentially says that before man ate from the tree of knowledge, there was a full identity between what things were for and what they were.
00:44:12.000Meaning that, just as in the Aristotelian notion,
00:44:16.000If a watch is made for telling time, then man was made to do certain things, and fruit was made to fulfill certain needs, and animals were made to fulfill certain tasks.
00:44:25.000Everything was made for its purpose, and we could see that, but we didn't necessarily have our own logic as to morality.
00:44:55.000Judaism thinks that human beings are human beings and that the capacity for sin comes along with the capacity for free will and that that cannot be expiated by the sacrifice of another person or a person in the form of God.
00:45:10.000Sacrifices that you bring in Jewish tradition are to expiate your own personal sin, not to expiate sins of the past.
00:45:15.000Kevin says, with all of the bombshells about the FBI and Obama's DOJ coming about, will Hillary Clinton finally be indicted, or has the time passed?
00:45:24.000I seriously doubt she'll be indicted, as well.
00:45:26.000Number one, you'd have to have such strong evidence to indict her at this point, after the FBI basically cleared her last year, that I think that the impetus for indicting her would be pretty weak.
00:45:37.000I also think that even if there's a political argument and an argument from a country basis, that indicting her might not be the smartest move, just because I could see this really quickly leading to a situation where whoever runs in an election and loses gets indicted by the other side.
00:45:51.000It's sort of banana republic stuff, even though everyone should be held accountable to the law, and I think Hillary should have been indicted last year.
00:45:57.000I think that now it looks more to the public like a revenge play by Trump's DOJ or FBI than it would look like a real investigation.
00:46:04.000I mean, nobody trusts the DOJ and the FBI on the right.
00:46:06.000Nobody trusts the DOJ and the FBI on the left.
00:46:07.000I'm not sure this would restore that trust.
00:46:09.000You don't agree it necessarily shows that.
00:46:11.000Well, we haven't actually seen the FISA application.
00:46:27.000According to the reports of the FISA application, they're not really about Trump.
00:46:30.000The stuff about Papadopoulos might be, so it's possible that some of it involves Trump-Russia collusion, and they think Carter Page is a part of that because he was part of the Trump campaign.
00:46:37.000But the stuff in the Steele dossier is not just about Trump, right?
00:46:42.000I mean, it is about Trump-Russia campaign collusion, but the stuff that was specifically referencing Carter Page also had to do with Carter Page making specific outreach moves toward the Russian government.
00:46:55.000If it was entirely about Trump, then you could say that the Pfizer warrant was, I guess, targeting Trump in ancillary fashion.
00:47:09.000If the question is, was the FBI only targeting Trump with the Carter Page warrant, the answer is maybe, but the investigation started before Carter Page.
00:47:18.000So it's actually two separate questions.
00:47:19.000You can believe that the FBI was targeting Trump with the Carter Page warrant.
00:47:23.000The question is, was that legit or not?
00:47:24.000Or was the Carter Page warrant trumped up in order to get Trump?
00:47:27.000And the answer is not supremely clear.
00:47:29.000If there was independent evidence to go after Trump,
00:47:32.000Anyway, and this was just part of that general investigation, as opposed to Carter Page initiated the investigation, and that's the only evidence that we have that Trump did anything wrong.
00:47:40.000So, if I made the implication that the FBI was, quote-unquote, not out to get Trump at all, or that they thought Trump was not involved at all, I don't think that the FBI thought Trump was not out—that Trump was not involved at all.
00:47:51.000The FBI probably did think that Trump was involved in some way, but out to get Trump and thinks Trump is involved in some way are two separate contentions.
00:48:41.000Then there is the version of free will that is essentially passive free will, suggesting that random chance governs human behavior and that there's no way to fully predictably
00:48:50.000Say what exactly you're going to do next, right?
00:48:52.000I think that's Sam Harris's version of free will, which isn't really free will at all, as he correctly points out.
00:48:58.000It's just suggesting that random chance has a role in what we say and what we do.
00:49:03.000But if you can't control that random chance, then it's not free will, right?
00:49:07.000The words free and will, neither of them apply.
00:49:09.000You're talking about random chance governing.
00:49:13.000And so the question for me is, how can you propose that human beings be active in the universe when activity is formally banned by your definition of free will?
00:49:20.000Isaac says, In the Christian viewpoint, you'd have to ask Drew and Michael, because they're Christian, what they think of the house of Israel and where it stands in the covenant.
00:49:26.000But from the Jewish perspective, we are still the covenant.
00:50:28.000Now Patrick says, Hey Ben, I recently went to a facility to give plasma and was able to get paid for my contribution, if you can call it that.
00:50:34.000That got me thinking, what would be the ethical implications of offering to sell parts of our own bodies?
00:50:38.000Should an organ be able to be sold if the owner is willing to take money for it?
00:50:41.000What would be the impact on the organ donation system?
00:50:43.000So I have always been in favor of an organ market.
00:50:46.000I'm in favor of the idea that you should be able to sell your kidney or sell a lobe of your liver if they can do a liver transplant.
00:50:53.000There would have to be some stringent regulations about, like, you're not allowed to kill yourself for the money.
00:50:58.000You're not allowed to kill a family member for the money.
00:51:00.000There would have to be some actual stringent regulations with regard to this.
00:51:04.000But it seems to me that this is a much better solution to the organ shortage than attempting to determine if somebody is dead or not and then harvesting their organs.
00:51:13.000Ido says, you spoke of your favorite sci-fi books.
00:51:15.000What are your top three sci-fi movies?
00:51:18.000So I actually named these the other day.
00:51:19.000I'm trying to remember what I said about it.
00:51:22.000So I'm not going to count fantasy in my sci-fi rankings here.
00:52:35.000And please, if you want to solve the question as to whether the FBI was explicitly targeting Trump with the Carter Page FISA warrant, again, by the way, quick note on what I said before about the page warrant, I think it is worthwhile noting
00:52:48.000That none of that stuff leaked until after the election.
00:52:51.000And also, it is worth noting that when it comes to the Carter-Page-Pfizer warrant, that the application for the warrant still has not been made public by President Trump, who can do it right now.
00:53:08.000I would say to people, it's your money.
00:53:09.000Maybe have them make an opt-out system where
00:53:16.000Default is that a certain amount of your money goes into a social security trust fund just for you But you actually get to opt out now what I would do to finance the remaining social security that's on the books is you would have to Presumably sell bonds and borrow to finance social security But you're gonna have to cut off a cutoff point now or there's not gonna be any cutoff point later Basically everyone who's already on social security gets paid what they're owed on social security when I say what they're owed I mean what they've been promised and people who are maybe five ten years away from social security get to opt into
00:53:44.000It's a meaningless term at this point.
00:53:46.000It means anything that they don't like.
00:53:48.000There are a couple things here that are problematic.
00:53:50.000George Papadopoulos going to London and soliciting information from a Russian source about Hillary Clinton emails and the Donald Trump Jr.
00:54:13.000I see no evidence of Russian collusion whatsoever at this point.
00:54:17.000Well, the real answer is Russia sometimes wants to take out Islamic regimes that threaten them.
00:54:21.000Sometimes Russia wants to crack down on Islamic radicals in Chechnya, for example.
00:54:37.000But aside from that, we do not have a lot of coinciding interests with the Russian regime.
00:54:42.000It is an incredibly self-interested regime.
00:54:45.000It is a regime that is interested in maximization of Vladimir Putin's personal power.
00:54:48.000So, there's not a lot of crossover there, other than maintaining a status of non-nuclear war, I would think.
00:54:54.000Gabe says, Ben, I'm in law school and leave every class in despair because the Supreme Court seems to have trampled the Constitution at every available opportunity, at least since the 1930s.
00:55:01.000Should we, as conservatives and originalists, be worried that we are past the point of no return?
00:55:05.000I mean, we should have been worried about that back in the 1930s, which is why, as I've stated repeatedly, I've been trying to get a hold of this paper for years.
00:55:17.000I wrote my third-year law paper on why judicial review should essentially be undone.
00:55:21.000The idea that judiciary gets to overrule the legislature on behalf of an oligarchy of those chosen not elected seems supremely anti-Republican to me.
00:55:35.000I tend to lean toward theism on this topic.
00:55:37.000I think God can be the creator and evolution can still exist.
00:55:40.000Of course I think that that's the case.
00:55:42.000I think that God can use whatever natural mechanism he chooses and God tries to, in order for God to assume your faith, he's not going to show you miracles every day unless you're looking for them or unless you see miracles in the natural world and in the system of God's laws.
00:55:55.000In fact, Newton was more likely to see miracles in the systematization of the universe than he was to see miracles in, you know, the splitting of the Red Sea.
00:56:02.000I think that God can use whatever mechanism he chooses in order to forward the possibilities of humanity.
00:56:08.000And that's what he did with evolution, in my opinion.
00:56:11.000There's a great book called God and the Big Bang by Gerald Schroeder.