Bill Barr speaks out against President Trump's "lawguria" Trump goes after former Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Joe Biden turns on Michael Bloomberg. Also, CNN reports 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. And a new filing on Tuesday suggests that the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington has revised the sentencing recommendation to be far less than the 79 years recommended by the DOJ on Monday. And yet, the generalized perception is that the DOJ lawyers who are on this case did not, in fact, run this thing up the flagpole. 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. And then, what happened? What happened to make the DOJ recommend a sentence they had already greenlighted? And why did they do so? And was it coordinated with the DOJ? And how did they manage to do so in the face of political pressure from the President of the United States? And is there any possibility that they were working on behalf of the President and not just against him? Or was it just a rogue DOJ lawyer who was biased against Roger Stone? And did they just want to humiliate him? And if so, did they set him up for a long term prison sentence that would be less than what the DOJ recommended? And if not, what would they do that? Well, what s going to do with Roger Stone's sentence? The answer to all of course, is that they did it in order to embarrass the President Trump and get him out of the case? And not just a decade in prison, but a much longer sentence than they would like him to get a chance to serve a little more time in prison? Ben Shapiro explains it in his new book, "The Devil Next Door"? The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN? Subscribe to the show on the internet with peace of mind? Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's Surf the Web with Peace of Mind? Learn more about your ad choices and get access to all the latest updates on the best surfers on the web? and much more! on the latest episode of the Ben Shapiro show? Leave us a review on the show and other great surfers on his social media platforms?
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00:00:22.000Alrighty, 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.
00:00:30.000Because Bill Barr finally had the temerity to tell Trump shut up.
00:00:32.000I mean, that's basically what happened here.
00:00:34.000President Trump has an unfortunate habit.
00:00:36.000The unfortunate habit is he feels the need to sound off on every single topic ever.
00:00:40.000Now, 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.
00:00:45.000The 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.
00:00:54.000So the example that we must use is, of course, the case of Roger Stone.
00:00:58.000So, 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.
00:01:11.000You'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.
00:01:19.000And then he kept trying to funnel information to Trump.
00:01:21.000And 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.
00:01:31.000But Stone was basically – he kept trying to act as this go-between.
00:01:36.000He kept trying to get information from WikiLeaks and then pass it on to Trump.
00:01:39.000And Trump will be like, that's nice, Roger.
00:01:41.000And then Roger Stone would go and tell witnesses to shut up.
00:01:45.000I mean, that's what the evidence seems to show.
00:01:46.000So he is convicted of lying to Congress and he is convicted of a couple of other crimes.
00:01:53.000And he is given a recommended sentence by Justice Department lawyers of up to nine years.
00:01:58.000And 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.
00:02:07.000There 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.
00:02:14.000And yet Roger Stone was the only one who's looking at a decade in prison.
00:02:17.000And 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.
00:02:30.000So the real question here was, did these prosecutors recommend the correct sentence?
00:02:33.000Had they run that up the flagpole at the Department of Justice?
00:02:36.000Had it been approved by the top levels of the Department of Justice?
00:02:38.000And then, had Trump stepped in to tell his own Attorney General, I want you to lower the sentence?
00:02:42.000Because there are two possibilities here.
00:02:44.000Possibility number one, Is that these DOJ lawyers who are on this case did not, in fact, run this thing up the flagpole.
00:02:50.000They just decided to go rogue because they wanted to humiliate Trump, they wanted to humiliate Barr, and they wanted to humiliate Stone.
00:02:55.000And 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.
00:03:03.000That's possibility number one, and that's basically what's been suggested by the Trump administration.
00:03:06.000Possibility 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.
00:03:18.000So 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?
00:03:28.000Generally, if you're going to have like a walkout like this, I would assume that's at least somewhat coordinated.
00:03:33.000It spilled tensions between Justice Department brass and career prosecutors out into the open, raising questions about the Justice Department's independence from political pressure.
00:03:42.000Attorney's Office in Washington revised the sentencing recommendation to be far less than the 79 years recommended on Monday.
00:03:48.000It was not signed by any of the prosecutors who worked the case.
00:03:51.000Ultimately, the presiding judge will have the final say on Roger Stone's sentencing.
00:03:55.000Trump denied any involvement in the sentencing revision, but the turnaround grew howls from congressional Democrats.
00:04:00.000They, of course, suggested that the DOJ inspector general needed to investigate.
00:04:04.000Now, 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.
00:04:12.000The president does have the right to interfere in policy this way.
00:04:15.000And if you don't like it, we have elections for that sort of thing.
00:04:18.000Obviously we've had cases in the past in which the president has used his constitutional power in very questionable ways.
00:04:23.000Most obviously with the Mark Rich pardon under Bill Clinton, which was sort of a similar situation, right?
00:04:28.000Political ally of President Clinton and then non-senator, but about to be Senator Hillary Clinton, pardoned in the last days of the Clinton administration.
00:04:36.000And there were a lot of howls of protest.
00:04:39.000Calls about corruption and all the rest.
00:05:04.000Attorney'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.
00:05:15.000And then Trump waited on Twitter overnight on Tuesday.
00:05:17.000He called it a horrible and very unfair situation.
00:05:20.000And then he tweeted out, the real crimes were on the other side as nothing happens to them.
00:05:23.000Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice.
00:05:27.000By 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.
00:05:39.000So the official told CNN that the department was shocked to see the sentencing recommendation.
00:05:43.000The department believes the recommendation is extreme and excessive and is grossly disproportionate to Stone's Offensive.
00:05:48.000So the question was, was that coming courtesy of President Trump, or was that coming courtesy of Attorney General William Barr?
00:05:55.000In just a second, we're going to get to William Barr and we're going to get to the reaction to all of this.
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00:07:10.000Okay, so there's some other questions with regard to the Roger Stone case.
00:07:13.000Most 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.
00:07:25.000I mean, that is really not a great job of jury vetting by the Defense Council.
00:07:31.000With 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.
00:07:47.000That's of course exactly how the Democrats wished to make it look.
00:07:49.000So this is a giant, stupid stepping on a rake by the President of the United States, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia.
00:07:56.000He 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.
00:08:20.000Anybody 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.
00:08:33.000Do you think this is how democracies die?
00:08:39.000Unless people snap back and say that's not what we want.
00:08:42.000Okay, so Tim Kaine again making the case that the Republicans have perverted the Justice Department.
00:08:49.000They've perverted it, as opposed to Eric Holder.
00:08:51.000Again, every Republican right now is screaming, screaming to the wind, Eric Holder, Obama's wingman, fast and furious.
00:08:59.000Loretta 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.
00:09:08.000So for everybody to claim that Bill Barr is the first person to be hit with any sort of political pressure, obviously that's untrue.
00:09:14.000Nonetheless, 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.
00:09:19.000Again, 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.
00:09:28.000But he didn't actually do the thing that Democrats are accusing him of.
00:09:31.000This has been true in every situation where Democrats have accused him of a thing.
00:09:34.000Every situation where Democrats accuse him of a thing, it's Trump has a big mouth is the answer, not Trump did this nefarious thing.
00:09:40.000So Democrats always treat Trump, it's funny, Trump treats Trump as though he's playing 4D chess.
00:09:45.000Democrats treat Trump as though he's playing 4D chess.
00:09:48.000The truth is that Trump is almost never playing 40 chess, right?
00:10:21.000As 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.
00:10:30.000And everybody who follows Trump knows this.
00:10:31.000And if the media were honest, they would understand this too.
00:10:34.000And if Democrats were honest, they would understand this too.
00:10:36.000And they could criticize Trump for saying the stuff that he says.
00:10:39.000When they could say it's bad practice, they could say it's bad form.
00:10:42.000But 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.
00:10:56.000Like your dog having rolled around in the mud and jumping on your fresh carpet.
00:11:00.000But here's Nancy Pelosi suggesting this is an abuse of power.
00:11:45.000It's true of virtually everyone, in all aspects of life, is an idiot.
00:11:50.000Always, 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.
00:12:00.000And even when they are nefarious or evil half the time, it's because they're dumb in the first place.
00:12:04.000Like, I think that Bernie Sanders is a dumb-dumb.
00:12:06.000I think he believes nefarious and or evil things.
00:12:11.000I don't think that Bernie Sanders is a highly intelligent human being.
00:12:13.000There 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.
00:12:25.000The notion that like everybody in politics is sitting around and planning things, it's just not real.
00:12:30.000But this is what politicians have an interest in, suggesting the evil nefariousness of the opposite party.
00:12:34.000So here's Nancy Pelosi suggesting that President Trump was abusing power by tweeting crap, which is what he does on a daily basis.
00:12:40.000This is, by the way, this is why the American people don't pay any attention to Nancy Pelosi when she says this stuff.
00:12:45.000It's why the American people didn't pay attention during impeachment.
00:12:47.000Because 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.
00:12:59.000Alternatively, Trump is thin-skinned and says a lot of stuff and says to people things like, go get him, go get him, Rudy.
00:13:26.000But where are the Republicans to speak out on this blatant violation?
00:13:31.000The Attorney General has stooped to such levels.
00:13:33.000He's lied to Congress, for which he will be in contempt.
00:13:40.000Okay, so now, this brings us to Attorney General Barr finally speaking out.
00:13:49.000And it's about time, it's about damn time, seriously.
00:13:51.000Because, I'll be honest with you, I know a lot of people who work at the White House, obviously.
00:13:55.000I mean, like everybody in conservative politics knows somebody who works at the White House.
00:13:58.000I know lots of people who work at the White House.
00:14:00.000And a couple of days ago on the podcast, I suggested that this look really bad.
00:14:05.000And 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?
00:14:14.000They just kind of sort of went out there with the sentencing.
00:14:16.000And I said to some of my friends who worked at the White House, like, so why don't you just say that clearly?
00:14:21.000Why 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?
00:14:34.000Well, yesterday, that's exactly what Attorney General William Barr did.
00:14:39.000And, by the way, if you want, this is a great litmus test.
00:14:41.000If 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.
00:15:11.000I didn't like Robert Mueller's report.
00:15:13.000I thought that it was politically motivated, at least in how it was worded.
00:15:16.000I thought that he exceeded his mandate, but I never thought that Robert Mueller was the bad guy, a nefarious bad guy.
00:15:22.000And I don't think that William Barr is a nefarious bad guy.
00:15:24.000Everybody 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!
00:15:48.000Those 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.
00:17:26.000I'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.
00:18:03.000So 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.
00:18:11.000I 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.
00:18:20.000And 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.
00:18:26.000I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.
00:18:34.000Tweets made about the department, Of course that's 100% true.
00:18:39.000our 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.
00:19:02.000Because you're undercutting your own legitimacy as president of the United States when you make it appear that William Barr is like Michael Cohen.
00:19:07.000That William Barr It's like Roy Cohn, that he's your fixer, right?
00:19:25.000Again, 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.
00:19:36.000Everyone in the White House knows this.
00:19:39.000I 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.
00:19:49.000As though they're decoding Kremlinology.
00:19:50.000Okay, President Trump tweets stuff that he feels like tweeting.
00:20:29.000The President made a great choice when he picked Bill Barr to be Attorney General.
00:20:32.000I think the President should listen to his advice.
00:20:34.000So you have a problem with the President's tweeting as well?
00:20:36.000I 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.
00:20:43.000Do you think the tweet about his opinion on the Roger Stone sentencing recommendations is inappropriate political interference?
00:20:50.000The attorney general has said it's making it difficult for him to do his job.
00:20:54.000I think the president ought to listen to the attorney general.
00:20:59.000And 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.
00:21:14.000Like why would Trump give material to the left like this?
00:21:27.000All he would have to do is have one person screen his tweets.
00:21:29.000Listen, 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.
00:21:35.000And Trump obviously feels that when he's on Twitter, because that's how Twitter is built.
00:21:39.000But that does not mean, as president, that this is the best way to do this.
00:21:42.000Now meanwhile, you know what's another bad look, is attacking your former chief of staff.
00:21:46.000Again, 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.
00:21:54.000He's the president of the United States.
00:21:56.000He doesn't need to respond to every single thing, particularly people he hired.
00:21:59.000It'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.
00:22:03.000We'll get to more of this in a second.
00:22:05.000But first, let us talk about why you need to keep your education going even after you leave school, even after you get a job.
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00:24:43.000So 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.
00:24:54.000Saying 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.
00:25:09.000Kelly 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.
00:25:16.000So Trump fired back on Twitter Thursday morning.
00:26:28.000Let'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.
00:26:36.000The Trump administration needs to start understanding the so-called Streisand effect.
00:26:39.000The Streisand effect is named after Barbara Streisand, the famous singer.
00:26:42.000There'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.
00:26:51.000And she got mad because she didn't want there to be public photographs of her house.
00:27:11.000But now we're just going to elevate the issue and turn it into a week-long story?
00:27:13.000Like, they have a gift for turning gold into a sow's ear.
00:27:17.000It's just like, what is the point of this?
00:27:19.000Here's Stephanie Grisham going after John Kelly.
00:27:21.000I 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.
00:27:33.000Talking about the media especially, I have heard John Kelly say some things about the media, so I thought it was a little disingenuous.
00:27:40.000It'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.
00:27:49.000Again, there's no point to any of this, especially because the Democrats are imploding.
00:27:53.000They're in the midst of a slow motion implosion that is delicious to watch.
00:27:56.000I'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.
00:28:39.000You've got the best economy in the last 50 years.
00:28:41.000Why is that not the only message coming out of the White House?
00:28:45.000I 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.
00:28:56.000Everyone agreed that that Trump wins 55% of the vote.
00:28:59.000Instead, we don't get that Trump for two weeks.
00:29:00.000We get Trump fighting with his own staff and or undercutting his own attorney general, who, by the way, is again attempting to defend him.
00:29:07.000OK, 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.
00:29:14.000So after spending years Allowing Bernie Sanders to grab the mantle of the party as the socialist candidate.
00:29:19.000They're trying to now claim that he is not a socialist and that he won't be a socialist as president.
00:29:25.000First, let us talk about the auto parts that you need.
00:29:28.000So have you frequently or ever had a situation where something is broken in your car?
00:29:33.000You got to go to the local auto parts store, but you go there and they don't have the part you're looking for, or they have a generic part that is not perfect for your car.
00:30:57.000He has two dreams, one of which is about to be realized in the pick.
00:31:01.000Noah 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.
00:31:10.000The 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.
00:31:43.000By 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.
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00:32:31.000So Bernie Sanders, obviously the Democratic front runner, which means that President Trump has a pretty clear road right here.
00:32:45.000President Trump is in pretty good shape with regard to his opponent, because even Democrats, like mainstream Democrats, are going, this guy's a communist.
00:32:53.000When I say mainstream Democrats, I mean James Carville, like the head of President Clinton's war room.
00:32:57.000So 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?
00:34:41.000By the way, mainstream players in the Democratic Party are realizing this.
00:34:44.000So the Nevada Culinary Union had basically issued a flyer saying that Bernie Sanders is the end of the world.
00:34:49.000Well now, they announced they would not endorse a candidate ahead of the state's Democratic presidential caucuses.
00:34:54.000They're considered an organizing behemoth in Democratic politics.
00:34:56.000They have 60,000 hotel and casino workers across Nevada under their tutelage.
00:35:00.000The decision came after months of aggressive courting from candidates eager to win support of the politically powerful group.
00:35:06.000They said, we're not going to endorse any political candidate, but we're committed to people voting.
00:35:09.000We're going to work really hard to defeat Trump.
00:35:11.000The decision came a day after the union said it had been viciously attacked by supporters of Bernie Sanders.
00:35:16.000For a flyer, the group issued this week that was critical of his proposed Medicare for All plan.
00:35:21.000The union strongly opposes Medicare for All.
00:35:23.000On Tuesday night, the union distributed a presidential scorecard to its members.
00:35:27.000The 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.
00:35:38.000So everybody started vying for their endorsement.
00:35:41.000But the culinary union was like, they're the worst.
00:35:46.000Yes, we're endorsing no one, but also Bernie is absolutely the worst.
00:35:49.000And 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.
00:35:59.000We keep saying he's a socialist, but he's not really a socialist.
00:36:02.000Now, 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.
00:36:23.000Axios reports even with the expanding power of the presidency, Sanders would need Congress to approve the most ambitious ideas he's known for.
00:36:29.000That's unlikely to happen even under the strongest election scenarios for House and Senate Democrats in November.
00:36:36.000Says, 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.
00:36:47.000Okay, but now the Democrats are trying to soft-sell Bernie's socialism.
00:36:51.000So after years of Bernie saying, what distinguishes me from the rest of the Democrats is that I am a socialist.
00:38:18.000So Bernie wants to outlaw private insurance, and AOC is basically saying, well, as long as we get some moderate change here.
00:38:25.000So 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.
00:38:35.000Which means that someone is dishonest.
00:38:36.000Ed 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.
00:38:46.000Sanders has other issues in his platform, but Medicare for All is central to his agenda.
00:38:50.000His 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.
00:38:56.000Furthermore, Sanders has had plenty of opportunities to offer compromises, like Buttigieg's Medicare for all who want it.
00:39:02.000Sanders has steadfastly refused to water down his vision by a single inch.
00:39:06.000Don't be so sure that Sanders agrees with Ocasio-Cortez he can't get his agenda through Congress either.
00:39:10.000But the fact that AOC is walking it back, and it's not just AOC.
00:39:51.000Can I think of someone who's been saying for years that Denmark, Norway, that these are not socialist countries.
00:39:56.000These are capitalist countries with heavy social welfare systems.
00:39:58.000And 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.
00:41:09.000Like the policies of Biden are not that far removed from policies of Bernie.
00:41:12.000When people talk about a moderate lane in the Democratic Party, they are talking about the difference between Trotsky and Lenin.
00:41:17.000There is no actual moderate lane in the Democratic Party.
00:41:20.000Biden and Buttigieg are not far separated in policy from Bernie Sanders.
00:41:24.000It's just that Bernie wants it immediately, and Biden and Buttigieg say they want it gradually.
00:41:28.000The 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.
00:41:36.000Biden, by the way, Biden says he's not in favor of Medicare for All.
00:41:41.000But as a first step, do you think Biden's in favor of a public option that morphs into Medicare for All?
00:43:49.000The reason that this is idiocy is because, number one, Biden was the guy behind the 1994 criminal justice bill.
00:43:57.000So he was one of the people behind it, which is part of the same movement that was behind things like stop-and-frisk generally.
00:44:02.000And 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.
00:44:09.000But beyond that, what is the strategy here for Joe Biden?
00:44:12.000You take out Michael Bloomberg, in which state exactly?
00:44:32.000Bloomberg is not on any ballots until after South Carolina.
00:44:35.000So 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?
00:44:44.000Instead, 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.
00:44:53.000So 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.
00:45:03.000He'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.
00:45:12.000So here's Joe Biden, for some reason, believing that his chief rival to the nomination is Michael Bloomberg, as opposed to Bernie Sanders.
00:45:20.000Which again, that's putting an awful lot of stock in South Carolina.
00:45:23.000Look, if Biden had any, if Biden had any wherewithal at all, he would get out of the race.
00:45:27.000The 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.
00:45:33.000I'd be shocked if he wins South Carolina.
00:45:34.000Here's Joe Biden going after Bloomberg nonetheless.
00:45:37.000Well, one of the advantages and disadvantages, I've been the only guy through this process so far, a person who's been totally vetted.
00:45:43.000I mean, I've been a target on my back since I got in.
00:47:24.000We 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.
00:47:37.000Bill, of course, is an author, public speaker, and he's provided political commentary for Fox News, National Review, among other things.
00:47:42.000He'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.
00:48:34.000What 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.
00:48:45.000It'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.
00:48:59.000And 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.
00:49:09.000And where they met at the end of World War II was what began the stage for World War III.
00:49:15.000So with all of that said, we're seeing the Cold War obviously has great echoes today in the United States.
00:49:20.000I mean, when the Soviet Union fell, there was a widespread perception that communism had been defeated.
00:49:25.000And now we see Bernie Sanders, who backed literally every communist regime of the 20th century, you know, so long as he has been alive.
00:49:32.000And he is in all likelihood going to be the Democratic nominee.
00:49:35.000So 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?
00:49:46.000Bernie 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.
00:49:51.000What better than Moscow in early spring?
00:49:54.000There'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.
00:50:10.000The worst of the places in the Gulag was a camp called Colima.
00:50:15.000Where the temperature in the winter, coincidentally, is the only place where Fahrenheit and centigrade match.
00:50:28.000And your life expectancy was about a year.
00:50:31.000And if you lived, if you were working in the gold mines, it was four months.
00:50:35.000We think that probably 800,000 people, maybe a few more, died in Colima.
00:50:40.000That's one camp in the entire 300 plus camps of the Gulag.
00:50:45.000That means that Colima, on the leaderboard from hell, is probably third.
00:50:50.000Auschwitz first, Treblinka second, Colima third, in terms of number of people who've been murdered in one particular patch of land.
00:50:57.000Bernie Sanders goes over to this place and sings, this land is your land, this land is my land.
00:51:02.000One 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.
00:51:14.000The people got together and just built a canal.
00:51:17.000Well, 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.
00:51:26.000And he used 125,000 laborers from the prisons.
00:51:32.00025,000 of them were killed on the job.
00:51:35.000That's 177 individual human lives per mile.
00:51:39.000And when the canal was finished, it was built so quickly that they couldn't put any ships through it.
00:51:45.000And this is what Bernie's campaign people and Bernie himself think of as the model society.
00:51:51.000The 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.
00:52:09.000And the final, final, final thing is this.
00:53:14.000South Park is mean and cruel and bad and canceled.
00:53:17.000She 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.
00:53:30.000It 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.
00:53:38.000So I generally agree with the principle that mockery is not a substitute for actual values.
00:53:44.000But I'm not going to hear that from a bunch of people on the left who worship at the altar of Jon Stewart.
00:53:48.000Jon Stewart spent years just making smug faces at cameras with a live audience.
00:53:54.000By 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.
00:54:01.000You remove the laugh track, and it just ain't funny anymore.
00:54:03.000And Jon Stewart was heavily dependent on that live audience.
00:54:06.000But the fact is that smugness and mockery have been the hallmark of the Comedy Central left for a very long time.
00:54:11.000And South Park was on Comedy Central, too.
00:54:13.000The real problem that Dana Schwartz has is she doesn't like the people that South Park attacks.
00:54:17.000She doesn't like the fact that South Park attacks quote-unquote victims, according to the left.
00:54:23.000Now what South Park has really done is it's focused in on the insufferable, the insufferable smugness of the left.
00:54:29.000So 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.
00:54:41.000The most famous sort of image from South Park along these lines is a bunch of San Francisco liberals smelling their own farts, right?
00:54:47.000That's sort of the South Park message.
00:54:49.000But that is the reality of the situation.
00:54:52.000Trying to rip on South Park as sort of a sign of Western civilization's decline is pretty amazing.
00:54:58.000Again, if you want to make the case that South Park is crude and rude and lewd, all of that is true.
00:55:04.000But I don't remember the left ever objecting to crude, rude, and lewd, so long as it was siding with them.
00:55:09.000What 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.
00:55:15.000And therefore, it is bad, and therefore, it is cancelled.
00:55:17.000So, by the way, South Park is... I never watched it as a kid, because it was too lewd, rude, and crude for me.
00:55:24.000As an adult, I've watched some episodes.
00:55:27.000I mean, for adults, it's really funny.
00:55:29.000The 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.
00:55:40.000And meanwhile, quick update on coronavirus.
00:55:42.000Just to make your weekend brighter, I feel like we should do an update on coronavirus.
00:55:45.000So China has now announced 5,000 new cases and 121 new deaths.
00:55:50.000As 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.
00:56:00.000They'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.
00:56:13.000The 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.
00:56:27.000Policymakers 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.
00:56:37.000I 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.
00:56:45.000The 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.
00:56:54.000Meanwhile, the United States CDC is saying that they are trying to keep this thing under control.
00:56:57.000The problem, of course, is that the thing is basically silent until you obtain it.
00:57:02.000So it's silent even when it comes to transmission.
00:57:05.000When 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.
00:57:27.000So this, the good news is that China has this under control.
00:57:30.000China's Hubei and Wuhan Communist Party chiefs are removed amid the epidemic.
00:57:33.000So they blew the whole thing because the government insisted on top-down control.
00:57:37.000And 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.
00:57:45.000The same thing, by the way, has happened to many of the doctors who are trying to document this stuff, according to dnyuz.com.
00:57:52.000The beige van squatted outside of a Wuhan hospital, its side and back doors ajar.
00:57:55.000Fang Bin, a local clothing salesman, peered inside as he walked past.
00:57:58.000He'd grown so many dead, he counted five, six, seven, eight body bags.
00:58:23.000Okay, 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.
00:58:30.000I know we're running a little bit late.
00:58:32.000We're gonna end the week on an up note.
00:58:34.000So, 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.
00:58:45.000Yitro is the father-in-law of Moses and was considered sort of the high priest of Midian.
00:58:51.000And he supposedly, he kind of supposedly, according to various commentaries, converts to Judaism after the splitting of the Red Sea.
00:58:58.000He explains to him how a hierarchical judicial system should work with a court of appeals with Moses sitting at the top.
00:59:03.000And 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.
00:59:10.000OK, so the Ten Commandments, obviously the most important statement of morality, probably in the most impactful in the history of humanity.
00:59:17.000And 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.
00:59:27.000How much of it needed to be handed down as revelation.
00:59:31.000There'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.
00:59:47.000Maimonides 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?
00:59:57.000Because this is the time in Jewish history when God speaks directly to the people as a corporate entity, right?
01:00:03.000It's 600,000 Jews supposedly standing in front of Mount Sinai.
01:00:07.000So 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.
01:00:14.000So the first two commandments were even understandable simply from the mere presence of God, the mere power of standing in front of God.
01:00:20.000So how much of the Ten Commandments is discernible from natural law?
01:00:23.000And how much of the Ten Commandments is something that has to be handed down and inculcated and taught?
01:00:27.000How much could we just sort of discover on our own?
01:00:30.000Well, 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.
01:00:51.000And so God's involvement with the world is a core assumption that the Ten Commandments makes and then hands down to you.
01:00:55.000And then you can discern some of the other of the Ten Commandments from that, right?
01:00:58.000Like the obligation not to murder would be a pretty obvious one.
01:01:01.000Because 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?
01:01:14.000The basic idea that you have an individual right against other individuals, that sort of stuff does spring from the Ten Commandments.
01:01:20.000But there are certain aspects of the Ten Commandments that are, I think, necessary to be given.
01:02:37.000The answer is that what you really shouldn't do is supplant your own agenda for God's and then call it God's.
01:02:42.000You've got to be very careful about what you're doing, Pete Buttigieg.
01:02:45.000Trying 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.
01:02:53.000The fourth commandment, remember the Sabbath to keep it holy, is again a statement of your individuality and your individual right to your own time.
01:03:00.000That the Sabbath is between you and God, but nobody else can force you to work on the Sabbath.
01:03:06.000Slavery is about other people being in control of your time.
01:03:10.000So 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?
01:03:18.000This is about understanding that your rights and duties are handed down parentally, not from a society that starts anew every single generation.
01:03:27.000And this is a real conflict between left and right.
01:03:28.000The 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.
01:03:35.000Honoring 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.
01:03:49.000The sixth commandment, you shouldn't murder, obviously that springs from natural rights.
01:03:52.000You shouldn't commit adultery, that springs from natural rights.
01:03:54.000Because you're violating the sanctity of an oath that you took to another human being when you commit adultery.
01:04:00.000Contra the New York Times, which by the way has an article this week about sexually open marriages again.
01:04:04.000I 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.
01:04:12.000Like a plea for something from the editors of the New York Times.
01:04:15.000The Eighth Commandment, you shouldn't steal.
01:04:16.000Obviously an acknowledgement of individual rights.
01:04:19.000Because if you have a right to something, people don't have a right to steal it from you.
01:04:22.000The ninth commandment, you shouldn't bear false witness against your neighbor.
01:04:24.000Again, an indication of individual rights.
01:04:27.000And this does come up fairly regularly.
01:04:29.000People who suggest that due process does not apply based on your social group, those people are violating your individual rights.
01:04:34.000They're bearing false witness against neighbors based specifically on their social distinctions.
01:04:40.000That 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.
01:04:47.000You 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.
01:04:58.000I think largely discernible from the basic idea that God is present in the universe, cares about you, and believes in you as an individual.
01:05:04.000The single most important statement of morality, presumably in human history.
01:05:10.000So go check it out this week, since it is that week in the Jewish calendar.
01:05:13.000And 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.
01:05:20.000You're listening to The Ben Shapiro Show.
01:05:26.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.