Trump attacks his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, a battle breaks out over border funding, and Obamacare takes a hit in the courts. President Trump calls Michael Cohen a "dirty rat" and suggests that the FBI should have broken into his office. Why not Hillary Clinton's office? Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro Show on the FiveThirtyEight Radio Network. He is also a regular contributor to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. His articles have been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, and USA Today Magazine, and he is one of the funniest people in the world. If you like what you hear here, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other major podcasting platforms. You can also join our FB group, and use the hashtag on the Apple App Store and other social media platforms, and join the FB group to join the conversation and become a supporter of the show! You'll get access to all the latest news and discussion on all things financial and investing related to Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Gold, and other precious metals! Subscribe, rate, and much more! Learn more about your ad choices! at the links below. The opinions stated here are our own personal recommendations. We are not affiliated with the Bitcoin and other financial news and information provided by Bitcoin. We provide independent Bitcoin and financial institutions. We do not make any responsibility for the accuracy. We make no matter what you access or review of the information provided here. We are a neutral source of that is provided by the Bitcoin or financial media. We respect your feedback. We thank you for your feedback and we do not own any responsibility to provide accurate and fair use of this information. Thank you for all your feedback, review and review of Bitcoin, credit and access to our posts, reviews and comments received by Bitcoin or any other third-party services. We appreciate your feedback is appreciated by Bitcoin, we appreciate your support is appreciated. . Bitcoin is a valuable, not less than $5,000, $5 stars, $10, $20,000 in the air or $50, $12,000 more than that is better than that, $25,000 is $16,000 gets you a cup of coffee, $15,000 a day, and so much more.
00:00:00.000President Trump attacks his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, battle breaks out over border funding, and Obamacare takes a hit in the courts.
00:00:16.000Number two, this is the last week, in fact, before we actually go on vacation.
00:00:21.000So get in all of your knowledge now, because otherwise you're just going to be out of it.
00:00:26.000But before we get to any of the news of the day, and there's a lot of news today.
00:00:30.000First, I want to mention to you the number 1.2 trillion.
00:00:33.000That's how much we owe other countries and to our own unfunded debt.
00:00:38.000This year, as of 2018, economists say that by the end of 2019, we'll be spending more on the interest on our national debt than we spend on Medicare.
00:00:46.000By 2023, we're going to be spending more than we do on our national defense.
00:00:50.000Well, if all of this makes you feel a little bit insecure, then you need to make a plan.
00:00:53.000You need to diversify because what's your plan in case, God forbid, the S&P takes a topple of 50% like it did a few years back?
00:02:08.000But when it comes to Michael Cohen, Cohen has basically made an accusation that President Trump violated campaign finance law, that he instructed him to violate disclosure law and also personal giving limits by giving a bunch of money to American Media Inc.
00:02:22.000to lock up Stormy Daniels' story, or that he intended to do that for Karen McDougal, and then he actually did it without American Media Inc.
00:02:30.000He just paid off Stormy Daniels, and that was an in-kind contribution that was illegal, and President Trump had instructed him to go ahead and do all of that.
00:02:37.000Well, President Trump responded over the weekend by calling Michael Cohen a dirty rat.
00:02:41.000So he tweeted out, remember, Michael Cohen only became a rat, in quotation marks, after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable and unheard of until the witch hunt was illegally started.
00:02:51.000They broke into an attorney's office, all caps.
00:02:53.000Why didn't they break into the DNC to get the server?
00:03:45.000And he says that they should have broken into Hillary Clinton's office.
00:03:48.000First of all, they did get a copy of the server.
00:03:50.000We've talked about this on the show before.
00:03:52.000I don't like when non-factual information is put out there.
00:03:56.000One of the pieces of non-factual information you have heard over and over and over again from people on the right side of the aisle is that the FBI did not get copies of Hillary Clinton's servers, that they should have just seized the servers.
00:04:12.000And as far as, quote-unquote, breaking into Hillary Clinton's office, they did actually dig up a lot of her old emails, they did subpoena all of these materials.
00:04:21.000By the time they got there, she'd already drilled holes in her stuff, so I'm not sure what breaking into her office would have done or anything.
00:04:26.000In any case, the big headline of this suite is him calling Michael Cohen a rat.
00:05:03.000Second, when he says that Michael Cohen only became a rat after the FBI did something, normally, if you watch mob movies, which I am fond of, if you like mob movies, then when someone is called a rat, it is not because they are lying.
00:05:16.000Usually they're called a rat because they're telling the truth.
00:05:18.000And when you have Jimmy Cagney going, oh, you dirty rat, usually what he's talking about is somebody in his orbit who's now talking to the police in order to secure a better deal for himself, but not lying.
00:05:31.000So if federal prosecutors were to put out evidence that turns out to be false, if they were to pressure people into making false statements for use in court, then they would be criminally liable for that.
00:05:42.000So Trump here, in this tweet, is doing about 10 different things, none of them good.
00:05:47.000Including calling Michael Cohen a rat, which makes him look like he's a mobster.
00:06:06.000And one of the reasons he didn't do that is because he doesn't know, I think, what evidence the FBI and the DOJ now have with regard to what Michael Cohen said to President Trump.
00:06:15.000So President Trump continues to fulminate over these investigations.
00:06:20.000He ripped into Jeff Sessions over the hoax Russia probe.
00:06:24.000He says it looks here as though General Flynn's defenses are incidental to something larger, which is for the prosecution to figure out if it can find a path to Donald Trump without quite knowing what that crime might be.
00:06:32.000It stops looking like prosecution and more looking like a persecution of the president.
00:06:37.000That's Daniel Henninger over at the Wall Street Journal, which is true.
00:06:40.000He says, thank you, people are starting to see and understand what this witch hunt is all about.
00:06:43.000Jeff Sessions should be ashamed of himself for allowing this total hoax to get started in the first place.
00:06:47.000Note, the quote-unquote hoax did not get started under Jeff Sessions.
00:06:52.000In the middle of the investigation, Sessions just recused himself because Sessions had been implicated in talking with people in Russia, right, during the transition, and he was part of the campaign itself.
00:07:03.000Rudy Giuliani is the president's personal attorney.
00:07:05.000And there are three really terrible jobs right now in America.
00:07:11.000President's personal attorney, president's press secretary, chief of staff.
00:07:16.000All jobs that no sane human being would really want.
00:07:20.000Well, Rudy Giuliani has jumped right in the middle of that.
00:07:22.000So, the former mayor of New York, former 2008 presidential candidate, He was out there defending President Trump, and he's basically skipping to the end.
00:07:31.000OK, what he's basically skipping to is that President Trump didn't do anything criminal, even if he did bad stuff, even if he talked to Michael Cohen.
00:07:39.000And so we are skipping all the way to where I am already, which is I'm assuming that President Trump probably told Michael Cohen to spend money on Stormy Daniels.
00:07:47.000I'm assuming that probably happened because I think it did.
00:07:50.000I'm assuming that President Trump talked with Michael Cohen and American Media Inc.
00:07:54.000about picking up the stories of these various women.
00:07:58.000All of that can be true, and he still didn't necessarily commit a crime.
00:08:02.000So Giuliani is skipping all of the middle steps.
00:08:04.000And frankly, I don't think that's terrible.
00:08:06.000I think there are a lot of folks in the administration who don't understand that when you're constantly moving the goalposts as to guilt and innocence, it actually looks worse.
00:08:15.000If you just say, yeah, president does a lot of stuff, not illegal.
00:08:18.000That's probably a better answer than, the president didn't do it.
00:08:21.000Well, the president might have done it, but not what you're saying he did.
00:08:25.000Well, the president might have done what you said he did, but it's not that bad.
00:08:29.000It might be kind of bad, but it's not criminal.
00:08:31.000Why don't you just go to, you know what, president does a lot of stuff, not criminal.
00:08:34.000Right, that's actually a better line, but instead we've gotten this constantly receding line of goalposts into the infinite distance, and I think that that's actually pretty bad.
00:09:20.000And that's why there's a poll today from CNN that shows about half of Americans are not interested in impeachment at this point, which is actually up a little bit over what it was a couple of weeks ago.
00:09:29.000And then Giuliani makes what is a pretty good legal point.
00:09:32.000He says, you know, when President Trump wanted to keep Stormy Daniels silent, The entire case against Michael Cohen and President Trump on this score rests on the idea that President Trump wanted to silence these women before the election.
00:09:42.000This is the case that's been made by former FEC commissioners who have said that President Trump paying off women is not a crime.
00:09:49.000Because people do this every day in public life.
00:10:08.000What if the president paid off these women, partially because of the election, but partially because he wanted to keep it secret from his wife?
00:10:15.000Because he didn't want Melania finding out all about it and then throwing lamps at him or something.
00:10:20.000He says, listen, I can produce witnesses.
00:10:23.000Who say that President Trump was just silencing these women, not because of the election only, but because these women were ready to come forward and that was going to harm his personal life.
00:10:32.000I can produce an enormous number of witnesses that say the president was very concerned about how this was going to affect his children, his marriage, not just this one but similar.
00:10:41.000All those women came forward at that point in time.
00:10:43.000That tape with Billy Bush and all of that.
00:10:56.000OK, and that's not actually implausible.
00:10:58.000You know, Stephanopoulos is kind of looking at that askance like, well, this is happening right before the end of the campaign.
00:11:03.000When do you think these women were coming forward?
00:11:05.000In other words, maybe part of the factor here is not that Trump wanted to pay these women off before the election.
00:11:09.000Maybe part of the factor here is these women knew that their payday was coming before the election.
00:11:13.000And so Trump now has a limited amount of time to silence these women before his family finds out about that, if that's something that President Trump is deeply concerned about.
00:11:20.000And by the way, the evidence is pretty good that Trump likes silencing these women regardless.
00:11:24.000of whether there's an election going on.
00:11:25.000Remember, he worked with AMI to silence Stormy Daniels back in 2011, having nothing to do with the election.
00:11:30.000So again, as I've been saying for two weeks here, the president's defense rents on a couple of points.
00:11:35.000Point number one is the idea that this had nothing to do with the election.
00:11:38.000Point number two is that even if it had something to do with the election, that's Michael Cohen's fault.
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00:12:53.000So there's one piece of evidence that is cutting against the contention of President Trump, and that is this old tape of President Trump talking with Michael Cohen.
00:13:01.000This was revealed back in July by CNN.
00:13:03.000In which President Trump is talking with Michael Cohen about paying hush money for David Pecker's stories.
00:13:08.000The reason that this cuts against the president's case that he just wants to silence these women for the sake of his family is because why is he talking about this now?
00:13:15.000In other words, what he is afraid of on this tape is that David Pecker, who is the CEO of American Media at the National Enquirer, that he has basically a safe full of scandalous material on the president.
00:13:26.000And Trump is afraid that Pecker is going to die like now because the election is coming up.
00:13:30.000Now, maybe there's an ancillary reason for that, but this cuts against the president's case that he's not worried at all about the timing.
00:13:36.000That still doesn't answer the legal question as to, could the president be worried about both?
00:13:50.000Let's say that he's concerned that Melania is going to find out and get mad at him, but he's also concerned that the election is coming up.
00:13:55.000People do lots of things for a variety of reasons.
00:14:02.000Is it that you have to do it exclusively because of the election, or could you also have done it in order to protect your family?
00:14:07.000In any case, here's, if you recall, some of the tape from President Trump talking to Michael Cohen about this, revealed back in July.
00:14:12.000I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David, you know, so that I'm going to do that right away.
00:14:22.000I've actually come up and I've spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with funding.
00:14:54.000Okay, so again, this is the president talking in detail with Cohen about all this, but there is something about this tape that people are missing, and that is that Cohen keeps saying to Trump, I'll take care of it, I'll take care of it, I'll take care of it.
00:15:11.000The reason that this stuff is important is because in the end, the calculus is going to be about whether the president is impeached or not.
00:15:17.000It's really not about whether he did anything criminal.
00:15:19.000President Clinton did criminal things.
00:15:21.000The question is whether this is impeachable.
00:15:23.000I think by the standards of 1999, the answer has to be no.
00:15:26.000And that's why we're going to run through the 2020 election with this in the back of the public's mind.
00:15:31.000But I don't think that he ends up being removed from office for any reason, nor do I think that based on the standards set by the American public, he should be.
00:15:38.000Based on what happened in the Clinton impeachment, which has lowered the bar for all impeachments for all the future.
00:15:43.000Okay, so, meanwhile, we've got Hubbub breaking out over border funding.
00:15:48.000The Democrats say that they are not interested in funding the border wall in any way, shape, or form.
00:15:53.000This should be a win for the President of the United States.
00:15:55.000Somehow the administration seems to be Seizing defeat from the draws of victory on what should be a pretty obvious PR campaign that the Democrats are willing to allow us to be insecure simply so that they can pander to a particular base.
00:16:08.000Here's Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, saying that there will be no wall in any form.
00:16:12.000We're not paying for any wall at all for no reason.
00:16:16.000President Trump should understand there are not the votes for the wall in the House or the Senate.
00:16:22.000He is not going to get the wall in any form.
00:16:26.000Okay, so when he says that, Trump's response should be, well, if you won't give me the wall, then I'm not going to sign a bill without the funding for the wall.
00:16:34.000Instead, Stephen Miller, who is one of the president's top advisors, particularly on immigration, He went on TV, and he decided to parrot what the president wants him to say.
00:16:43.000This is why personality matters in the presidency.
00:16:46.000The president of the United States would be significantly better served if he allowed PR professionals to do their job, as opposed to him watching the shows and then deciding whether he likes what people are saying and how it makes him feel on the inside of his heart.
00:16:59.000Stephen Miller says a lot of stuff President Trump wants to hear, but it's not good for the president's PR campaign.
00:17:23.000At stake is the question of whether or not the United States remains a sovereign country, whether or not we can establish and enforce rules for entrance into our country.
00:17:31.000The Democrat Party is a simple choice.
00:17:33.000They can either choose to fight for America's working class or to promote illegal immigration.
00:17:39.000Okay, so he is totally right about all of this, but when he says Trump will absolutely shut the government down over the border wall fight, when he says that, he shouldn't be owning it.
00:17:48.000Trump wants to say that because Trump likes feeling aggressive, but the point here is the Democrats are shutting down the government by not giving the funding that is necessary, and this is a winning battle for Republicans.
00:17:57.000It is a winning battle for Republicans.
00:17:59.000Again, it's being blown on the back of bad PR, but it is a winning battle.
00:18:05.000Last week, there was a case we talked about on Friday of a seven-year-old girl who died while she was in Border Patrol custody of dehydration.
00:18:12.000She was flown by helicopter to a medical center to take care of her.
00:18:15.000They didn't even know she was in dehydration until shortly before she started seizing up, basically.
00:18:20.000And that was the fault of her father, who brought her over thousands of miles without giving her any food or any water, and then she dies in American custody.
00:18:26.000And this leads the left to suggest that it is President Trump's fault.
00:18:32.000And here is Stephen Miller's response to the seven-year-old girl's death.
00:18:34.000Now, the answer is, why did the seven-year-old girl die?
00:18:37.000Well, the seven-year-old girl died because her father didn't take care of her.
00:18:41.000And he didn't take care of her because he thought he could get in illegally.
00:18:44.000Listen to Miller's answer, because it's kind of a problem.
00:18:46.000Our hearts break for the tragic death of the seven-year-old girl.
00:18:50.000The loss of that precious life is horrifying.
00:18:54.000Last year, 100,000 unaccompanied alien children or children traveling with adults showed up at our southern border.
00:19:02.000President Trump took dramatic action, issued an executive order directing illegal traffic to the ports of entry.
00:19:09.000But a left-wing activist judge issued a reckless nationwide injunction on the president's order, putting thousands of lives at risk and further enriching these grotesque, heinous, smuggling organizations.
00:19:22.000Okay, so again, this sort of charged language with regard to left-wing courts are responsible for all of this.
00:19:27.000The reality is that the person responsible for this is the girl's dad, right?
00:19:30.000The person responsible for all of this is the father who didn't feed the child.
00:19:34.000And he's not... Again, a lot of this is about tone.
00:19:38.000But the problem with this is then the president tweets out about this sort of stuff.
00:19:41.000So the president tweets out about child separations.
00:19:43.000Now, his answer on child separations Should be that child separations are bad.
00:19:47.000That child separations are being mandated by the courts of the United States, which is true.
00:19:51.000Instead, the president tweets out, the Democrats' policy of child separation on the border during the Obama administration was far worse than the way we handle it now.
00:19:58.000Remember the 2014 picture of children in cages the Obama years.
00:20:08.000It's that sentence, however, if you don't separate, far more people will come.
00:20:12.000Now the implication is that he wants to separate children from their parents when they get to the border, which he doesn't want to do.
00:20:18.000So this is where a little bit of forethought when it comes to messaging would be very, very useful.
00:20:24.000Because I think that it's quite possible for Republicans to win both this battle and win the war when it comes to immigration, but they're going to need to do a little bit better job on the PR.
00:20:32.000Now in just a second, I'm going to get to the other big story that happened over the weekend, and that was a big ruling against Obamacare, basically striking down Obamacare in its entirety from Texas.
00:20:41.000Now, this didn't end with an injunction against Obamacare, but we'll explain all the details coming up in just one second.
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00:22:19.000A court ruled that Obamacare was not constitutional.
00:22:23.000So what made Obamacare not constitutional this time, considering that it had already been held constitutional by the ridiculous decision of Chief Justice Roberts?
00:22:31.000You'll recall that back when Obamacare was passed, there was a lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court saying that it was essentially a fine on the American people for not buying something, which you can't do.
00:22:41.000There is nothing in the Constitution that gives the federal government power to do that.
00:22:45.000And Judge Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts completely rewrote Obamacare to suggest that it was merely a tax.
00:22:50.000Well, there's a problem with that now, according to a Texas judge.
00:22:55.000The problem is that when Republicans got rid of the penalty for failing to pay the tax, what they actually did was they reverted the entire quote-unquote tax back into being merely a penalty itself.
00:23:07.000And that's unconstitutional, and that makes the entire law unconstitutional.
00:23:11.000Chief Justice Roberts' rewriting of the law essentially suggested that the way that this works is that you were forced to buy Obamacare If you didn't, you paid a penalty.
00:23:44.000Judge Reed Conard, according to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, ruled for some 20 state plaintiffs that the Affordable Care Act individual mandate is no longer legal because Republicans repealed its financial penalty as part of the 2017 tax reform.
00:23:56.000Recall that Chief Justice Roberts joined four justices to say Obamacare's mandate was illegal as a command to individuals to buy insurance under the Commerce Clause.
00:24:04.000The framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it, he wrote.
00:24:08.000Yet the chief famously salvaged Obamacare by unilaterally rewriting the mandate to be a tax.
00:24:12.000Enter Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who argues in Texas vs. United States that since Congress has repealed the individual mandate, the tax is no longer a tax and Obamacare is thus illegal.
00:24:22.000Judge O'Connor agreed with that logic.
00:24:23.000He went further, in ruling that since Congress said the mandate is crucial to the structure of Obamacare, all of Obamacare must fall along with the mandate.
00:24:31.000Well, first of all, the original decision was bad, but that doesn't mean that this particular decision is legally good.
00:24:36.000There are a couple of problems with this particular legal decision.
00:24:39.000One legal complication, as the Wall Street Journal correctly points out, is that Congress in 2017 repealed the financial part of the individual mandate, but not the structure of the mandate itself.
00:24:47.000So the structure of the mandate didn't change.
00:24:51.000Just because you reduce the amount of penalty to zero doesn't mean that, legally speaking, a penalty doesn't apply.
00:24:56.000Republicans used budget rules to pass tax reform So they couldn't actually repeal the mandate to express language.
00:25:02.000Also, the Affordable Care Act has been up and running since 2014, which means so-called reliance interests come into play when considering a precedent.
00:25:08.000Millions of people now rely on Obamacare subsidies and rules, which argues against judges repealing the law by fiat.
00:25:13.000Here's where I disagree with the Wall Street Journal.
00:25:15.000If it is unconstitutional, it's unconstitutional.
00:25:18.000But the Wall Street Journal correctly says that Judge O'Connor is right.
00:25:22.000The Democrats claim the individual mandate was essential to the Affordable Care Act, but when Congress killed the financial penalty in 2017, it didn't kill Obamacare.
00:25:32.000So if you're deciding congressional intent, whether it's to kill Obamacare or not, well, the severability provision of Obamacare still applies.
00:25:39.000In other words, the decision may be psychologically satisfying, but it's not legally great.
00:25:44.000What's more important Is that the decision itself actually cuts against Republicans politically, because in the end, this decision is not going to stand.
00:25:50.000In all likelihood, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals strikes it down.
00:25:53.000If not, the Supreme Court probably strikes it down.
00:26:25.000Here's why it's not great news for America.
00:26:27.000Because there is no actual plan to replace Obamacare.
00:26:31.000There's no bipartisan plan on the table.
00:26:33.000Democrats are immediately going to say that if people lose their quote-unquote Obamacare coverage, if they lose their Medicaid coverage via Obamacare, if all the rates go up because a bunch of people withdraw from the individual mandate on the basis of Obamacare disappearing, then they're going to say, oh look, the healthcare system has failed, let's nationalize healthcare.
00:26:54.000Go back and listen to things that I said back in 2012, 2013, 2010, when they were passing this.
00:26:59.000This was always a step-by-step design-for-failure program so that Democrats could claim that when prices went up, it's because the market was not regulated enough.
00:27:07.000Because where Democrats come from, the answer is always more cowbell.
00:27:10.000If regulation fails, the answer is always more regulation.
00:27:48.000Because now he gets to try and force Republicans to expand government to cover all the gaps left by the crappy Obamacare system that was put in place back in 2010.
00:27:58.000We're gonna fight this tooth and nail.
00:28:01.000And the first thing we're gonna do when we get back there in the Senate is urge, put a vote on the floor, Urging an intervention in the case the judge a lot of this depends on congressional intent and if a majority of the house and a majority of the Senate Say that this case should be overturned.
00:28:20.000It'll have a tremendous effect on the appeal Okay, so what he's saying is that, basically, he's gonna get all of these Democrats and Republicans to stand up for Obamacare.
00:28:28.000He wants people on the record standing against this judge's decision.
00:28:33.000Because if he can get people on the record standing in favor of the judge's decision, and then it turns out that a bunch of people, quote-unquote, lose their healthcare, or their healthcare costs go up, then he can blame Republicans for this.
00:28:57.000This is the basic rule of American life.
00:28:59.000People mostly want to be left alone, and that means that once the status quo has changed, they don't actually want the status quo changed more.
00:29:05.000The problem is that President Obama and the Democrats put America on a path towards single-payer health care, and Republicans, by accepting the premises of all of the Democratic arguments, that we have to create a government-structured system where people with pre-existing conditions are covered, for example.
00:29:19.000By doing all of that, what they have actually done is placed us on the same pathway.
00:29:24.000Because now Republicans are arguing about how we get there, they're not arguing about what the end goal is.
00:29:29.000When it comes to the role of government in healthcare, the role of government in healthcare should be minimal.
00:29:33.000It should not be high levels of regulation.
00:29:36.000It should not be that we are going to quote-unquote provide healthcare to the ends of the earth for everyone because no one can do that.
00:29:43.000There's so many lies told about the healthcare system in America and abroad, it's pretty astonishing.
00:29:47.000One of the great lies told about America's healthcare system is that it is unbelievably crappy.
00:29:51.000There are problems with America's healthcare system for sure, but when you actually remove car accident deaths and suicide and gun homicide from America's national death statistics, and you look at our life expectancy under the American health system, it is number one among all industrialized countries.
00:30:06.000People don't like to point that out because it cuts against the convenient argument that America's health care system is dramatically awful and people are dying in the streets.
00:30:14.000And when it comes to the idea that we are spending inordinate sums of cash on our health care system, that is also not true in the sense that if you look at as a percentage of GDP per capita in the United States, what we spend, we are directly along the trend line of the rest of the industrialized world.
00:30:28.000That is not to say we have the ideal system.
00:30:30.000Our system can be made better with more deregulation, more capacity to sell over state lines, less Cram downs from the federal and state governments on insurance companies.
00:30:39.000More movement toward early buying of catastrophic health care insurance.
00:30:43.000But instead of focusing on actual solutions, it turns into a fight over pre-existing conditions.
00:30:48.000And that's a fight Democrats are destined to win because the reality is that no one is going to insure someone with a pre-existing condition unless somebody else is subsidizing that care.
00:30:56.000In just a second, I want to get to the media malfeasance over the weekend.
00:31:01.000Plus, I got to get to the story that is just insane and speaks to what a lot of folks on the radical green left think about humanity as a whole.
00:31:08.000We're going to get to that in just one second.
00:31:09.000First, I want to talk about how you can defend your life.
00:31:12.000When the Founders created the Constitution, they protected your rights.
00:31:15.000But when they protected your rights, one of the things that they did was make sure that you could protect your rights with another right, right?
00:31:23.000I strongly believe in that principle, as you know, and that is why I really am excited to be endorsing Bravo Company Manufacturing.
00:31:29.000They were started in a garage by a Marine vet more than two decades ago to build a professional-grade product that meets combat standards.
00:31:35.000BCM believes the same level of protection should be provided to every American regardless of whether they are a private citizen or a professional.
00:31:45.000They assume that each rifle leaving their shop will be used in a life-or-death situation By a responsible citizen, law enforcement officer, or a soldier overseas, each component of a BCM rifle is hand-assembled and tested by Americans to a life-saving standard.
00:31:57.000BCM feels a moral responsibility to know that when they provide you a tool that it is going to work when, God forbid, something real is at stake.
00:32:04.000To learn more about Bravo Company manufacturing, head on over to BravoCompanyMFG.com.
00:32:08.000You can discover more about their products, special offers, and upcoming news.
00:33:06.000We are going to be taking some questions during the breaks, so you'll be able to actually interact with me on a daily basis, which is awesome.
00:33:13.000Also, it's almost time for the next episode of The Conversation, which I could not be less excited about.
00:33:17.000I will be wasting my time taking your questions and answering them to the best of my abilities, live on air.
00:33:27.000I mean, if I'm going to be miserable here sitting with Alicia Krauss, then you may as well be here.
00:33:31.000I mean, I don't know what to expect of you.
00:33:33.000Like, look, I know that you've been forced to listen to answers from idiots like Michael Knowles in the past, but I'll be here providing real answers.
00:33:39.000So if I'm here, I expect you to be here.
00:33:40.000Once again, subscribers get to ask the questions.
00:33:56.000Go check all of that out, and subscribe over at YouTube or iTunes.
00:33:58.000Also, the iHeartRadio awards, podcast awards, are coming up, so go over to iHeartRadio.com, and then vote for us in the best news category so that we don't have to watch Pod Save America win stuff.
00:34:08.000That's just, that would be inappropriate.
00:34:43.000So, Max Boot is one of the actual Never Trumpers, meaning people who not only did not vote for President Trump in 2016, But also think that everything that President Trump does is evil.
00:34:53.000It doesn't matter that Max Boot agreed with half this stuff before President Trump was president.
00:34:57.000Now he has reversed his positions on everything.
00:34:59.000Everything that President Trump does is bad, and terrible, and no good, and garbage.
00:35:06.000And it's kind of sad to watch that, honestly, because I've read a bunch of Max Boot's books, particularly on foreign policy, and I find them really interesting.
00:35:15.000He now has a piece about the Weekly Standard.
00:35:17.000Now, as you'll recall, late last week, the Weekly Standard, which is a long-time kind of legacy conservative publication, it's been around for about a quarter century, and it was very anti-Trump during 2016 and has remained pretty anti-Trump since then, they went out of business.
00:35:30.000The Washington Examiner, which owns them, or the parent company of the Washington Examiner, shut them down.
00:35:34.000Well, President Trump celebrated that, which Frankly, was untoward.
00:35:39.000I mean, it's what we've come to expect from a president who just does not know when to keep his mouth shut.
00:35:44.000He tweeted out the pathetic and dishonest weekly standard run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol, who, like many others, never had a clue is flat broken out of business.
00:36:10.000That in the Washington Post, conservatism needs a new weekly standard, untainted by Trump.
00:36:14.000And the entire piece is about how conservatism requires a new magazine that is not going to deal with Trump, it's just going to deal with ideas.
00:36:21.000And conservatives can talk about ideas without having to deal with Trump, and yada yada yada.
00:36:25.000Now, I agree with a lot of that sentiment.
00:36:28.000I agree that the battle over conservative ideas is much more important and much more long-lasting than the battle over whatever President Trump is doing today.
00:36:48.000The problem is, writing this in the pages of the Washington Post is a lie.
00:36:54.000And the reason I say that it is a lie is because the Washington Post cannot print pieces, or should not print pieces, talking about the lack of good conservative content when it will not hire a conservative.
00:37:23.000I have never hidden it, and I think it's unethical to hide your own political proclivities when you're writing news, because people can then take what you're saying with the particular grain of salt necessary.
00:37:32.000The Washington Post, when it prints pieces in which it says things like, conservatives ought to do X, or conservatives ought to do Y, The Washington Post is a supposedly nonpartisan paper.
00:37:42.000There is not one major conservative working for the Washington Post.
00:37:46.000Not a major conservative working for the Washington Post.
00:37:50.000At least the New York Times can say that it's got people like Brett Stevens or people like Ross Douthat.
00:37:56.000Like, these are folks who actually are conservative thinkers, even if they are anti-Trump.
00:38:01.000The Washington Post can't name a conservative thinker.
00:38:04.000Because I personally know a person who was interviewed by the Washington Post, not me, and I'm only not mentioning his name because I think that he would be upset if I did, and he's asked me not to.
00:38:14.000He was interviewed by the heads of the Washington Post to join their editorial page, to be one of the columnists on the editorial page.
00:38:23.000He went through a bunch of meetings, and it was indicated to him that he was going to be hired on the editorial page as a regular columnist to sort of fill the Charles Krauthammer role after Charles Krauthammer's passing.
00:38:35.000And they went through all the interview processes.
00:38:40.000They canceled the meeting, apparently, where he was going to be offered.
00:38:43.000And he was brought into the offices of the higher-ups at the Washington Post, where he was told in no uncertain terms that staffers at the Washington Post were very upset at him.
00:38:53.000They were upset at him because of his opinions on transgenderism.
00:38:56.000Because he believes that male and female are biological categories.
00:38:59.000And so, and they asked him about it, he said, no, I'm not going to change my opinion, nor am I going to apologize for the statements I've made on this particular score, and I don't think it makes me an unsympathetic person to say that male and female are biological categories.
00:39:10.000This was too much for the Washington Post, which quickly ended any flirtation it had with him job-wise.
00:39:16.000When the mainstream media laments the death of true conservatism, but they will not hire anyone who, really, they won't, and they, listen, Ross Duhat could not get hired today by the New York Times.
00:39:26.000Bari Weiss would not be hired today by the New York Times.
00:39:28.000She's not even conservative, Bari, right?
00:40:24.000Can you name one example of a person who said something so radically, so radical politically?
00:40:28.000Not just, you know, said something gross or something, but somebody who said something so radical politically that the left went, you know what?
00:40:34.000Don't want to touch that person with a 10 foot pole.
00:41:25.000Now, as the tablet writes about, Gary Rosenberg caught it.
00:41:28.000He says this passed without comment from the New York Times interviewer and the publication passed it on to readers without qualification.
00:41:33.000This is rather remarkable because the book is an unhinged anti-Semitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain's most notorious anti-Semites.
00:41:41.000In the book, the word Jewish appears 241 times.
00:41:44.000The name Rothschild is mentioned 374 times.
00:41:49.000Indeed, the book was so obviously antisemitic that Icky's publisher refused to publish it, and he had to print it himself.
00:41:54.000In the book and elsewhere, Icky draws liberally upon the infamous antisemitic pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery about an alleged Jewish global cabal that is widely considered one of the most influential antisemitic works in history.
00:42:07.000Magnanimously, Icky calls the hate track by a different name.
00:42:10.000As he writes in the book promoted by Alice Walker, in the very late 1800s, a controversial document came to light called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
00:42:18.000I call them the Illuminati Protocols, and I quote many extracts from them in the Robot's Rebellion.
00:42:22.000Some say they were a forgery made public only to discredit Jews, and I use the term Illuminati Protocols to get away from the Jewish emphasis.
00:42:28.000If they were a forgery, something that is quite possible, what were they a forgery of and by whom?
00:42:33.000The authors of the bestselling book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, conclude that the original protocols were indeed authentic.
00:42:42.000I mean, Alice Walker is allowed to get away with this, and she is lauded as a great thinker of our times.
00:42:48.000Just the same way that James Baldwin, who was lauded as a great thinker back in the 1960s and 1970s, routinely engaged in anti-Semitic writing.
00:42:57.000There are a bunch of anti-Semitic references throughout it.
00:43:00.000He wrote an entire essay about why the Jews were part of the white supremacist movement in the United States, etc, etc.
00:43:08.000Bottom line is, again, just like the Women's March, if you are on the left and you are anti-Semitic, you can get away with it.
00:43:13.000And if you are radical, just politically radical, there is nothing too politically radical for the left.
00:43:18.000The same people who say, oh, how dare the right police the weekly standard.
00:43:22.000Listen, I disagree with how the weekly standard was treated.
00:43:25.000But I'm not going to sit here and listen to how the right should police itself from the left, which refuses to police itself and refuses to hire mainstream conservatives and ghettoizes those conservatives while simultaneously accepting the worst of the worst.
00:43:37.000There's an article today by a guy named Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University.
00:43:43.000And apparently a professional useless person.
00:43:45.000The title of his piece in the New York Times, would human extinction be a tragedy?
00:43:52.000He says, there are stirrings of discussions these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction.
00:43:58.000This should not be surprising given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change.
00:44:01.000And reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory, but is an important aspect of it.
00:44:17.000If this were, if, he says, the elimination of the human species, if all that it were were just people being mean to animals, then it would be a good thing, full stop.
00:44:24.000But, we bring things to the planet other animals can't, we bring an advanced level of reason, we engage in arts and scientists, for our species to go extinct, all of that might be lost.
00:44:34.000He says, in many dramatic tragedies, the suffering of the protagonist is brought about through his or her own actions.
00:44:39.000In Oedipus's killing of the father, it starts the train of events that leads to his tragic realization.
00:44:43.000It's Lear's high-handedness toward Cordelia that leads to his demise.
00:44:46.000It may also turn out that it is through our own actions that we human beings bring about our extinction, or at least something near it, contributing to our own practices, to our own tragic end.
00:44:54.000So he says that maybe the extinction of humanity would make the world better off, and yet would be a tragedy.
00:45:00.000Writing in the New York Times, better if humans didn't exist.
00:45:03.000Strong case to be made that if you think that, you know, you have a solution, but it's nothing too radical for the left.
00:45:11.000Nothing too radical for the left, but then they will lament the death of true conservatism.
00:47:02.000So, thank you to Ludwig van Beethoven for giving us some of the reason why human beings should continue to exist on the planet, you idiots.
00:47:24.000Because Patreon has not been clear in its standards for what allows you to keep Patreon open.
00:47:28.000He tweeted out today, and this is a personal financial sacrifice for Sam, because a lot of people give him money on Patreon.
00:47:33.000He says, Dear Patreon supporters, As many of you know, the crowdfunding site Patreon has banned several prominent content creators from its platform.
00:47:41.000While the company insists each was in violation of its terms of service, these recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias.
00:47:47.000Although I don't share the politics of the band members, I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon's Trust and Safety Committee.
00:47:55.000I will be deleting my Patreon account tomorrow.
00:47:57.000If you want to continue sponsoring my work, I encourage you to open a subscription at samharris.org slash subscribe.
00:48:02.000As always, I remain deeply grateful for your support.
00:48:04.000Wishing you all a very happy New Year, Sam.
00:48:21.000I think you're gonna see other content creators, I would assume other members of the Intellectual Dark Web, it's why I'm proud to be a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, do this sort of stuff because there has to be some stand against the arbitrary and capricious nature of social media.
00:48:36.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:48:42.000So this is a pretty amazing piece by a person named Luciano Guerra, who is a nature photographer and outreach coordinator and educator for the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas.
00:48:51.000Here is his piece in the Washington Post.
00:48:55.000Now his wall may destroy my butterfly paradise.
00:48:58.000I kid you not, that's the title of an actual piece.
00:49:01.000He talks about how he works at the National Butterfly Center, which is along the U.S.-Mexico border, documenting wildlife and leading educational tours.
00:49:07.000He says, Many of our visitors are young students from the Rio Grande Valley.
00:49:09.000When they first arrive, some of the children are scared of everything, from snakes to pill bugs.
00:49:13.000Here, we can show them animals that roam free and teach them not to be afraid.
00:49:16.000He talks about how great the butterfly paradise is.
00:49:19.000Then he says, President Trump's new border wall, which has threatened to shut down the government's fund, will teach them what it takes to destroy a home for all kinds of animals.
00:49:27.000He says it will cut through the 100-acre refuge, sealing off 70 acres bordering the banks of the Rio Grande.
00:49:32.000He says on the south side of the barrier, flooding will worsen.
00:49:35.000On the north side, animals, including threatened species like the Texas tortoise and the Texas horned lizard, will be cut off from ranging beyond the wall for feeding and breeding.
00:49:43.000He says all of this will be super terrible.
00:49:45.000He says he voted for President Trump in 2016.
00:49:47.000I want our immigration laws to be enforced, and I don't want open borders, but Mission is not a dangerous place.
00:49:53.000Here at the National Butterfly Center, 6,000 school children visit.
00:49:56.000Every year, when the president says there's a crisis at the border that requires an action as drastic as building a massive concrete wall, he either knows it's not true, or he's living an alternative reality.
00:50:05.000He says that he didn't take Trump seriously about the wall, but now that he sees that it's going to affect the butterfly paradise, now he's not going to back President Trump.
00:50:12.000Now, one thing that is obviously not seen in this piece from the Washington Post, right?
00:50:17.000By the way, again, the Washington Post's happy to print anybody who is quote-unquote conservative, as long as they're saying things that please the Washington Post.
00:50:24.000One thing it does not say is how many people crossed this area of the border illegally.
00:50:28.000There's no actual statistics on how many people crossed the border in this area or how many people would cross the border in this area if it were left unprotected while building a wall along other areas of the border.
00:50:49.000So I have been saying for years that I really, really dislike political pandering.
00:50:54.000Political pandering to me is mostly summed up in our modern day and age by politicians going to a purportedly victimized group and saying to that purportedly victimized group, you are indeed victimized and now I am here to protect you.
00:51:06.000You see it from President Trump when it comes to people who are living in dying towns.
00:51:10.000He goes there and he says, well, it's China and it's Mexico and I'm going to save your job and your town's going to bloom again.
00:51:16.000Tucker Carlson, when we had a Sunday conversation, says some of this sort of stuff as well because he's more of a protectionist on economic policy.
00:51:23.000And on the left, you see this in racial terms.
00:51:25.000So Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is just dying in the polls.
00:51:38.000In The New York Times, they report Senator Elizabeth Warren in a commencement speech Friday at historically black Morgan State University mixed her trademark language denouncing economic equality with more explicit indictments of racial discrimination, giving what could be a preview of a possible appeal to black voters should she run for president.
00:52:06.000I'm not a person of color, and I haven't lived your life or experienced anything like the subtle prejudice or moral overt harm that you may have experienced just because of the color of your skin.
00:52:14.000Rules matter, and our government has systematically discriminated against black people in this country.
00:52:19.000So, this is her way of working toward an intersectional audience by basically saying to them that you are all victims.
00:52:28.000She's telling a bunch of people who are graduating from college with degrees from an excellent university that they are victims in the freest society in world history.
00:52:35.000She says, in Morgan State on Friday, Ms.
00:52:36.000Warren revives her pitch surrounding housing, telling a story about her mother's struggles to keep her home, and contrasting that with the barriers Americans face today.
00:52:42.000She says, the rules are rigged, because the rich and powerful have bought and paid for too many politicians.
00:52:47.000And she says, there are two sets of rules.
00:52:49.000One for the wealthy and the well-connected, and one for everybody else.
00:53:01.000Because if so, I'd like for her to point to me to those rules that maintain that system so we can talk about them.
00:53:06.000Otherwise, this is just her going to particular communities and saying, you guys are victims, vote for me.
00:53:12.000I don't like it when it's done by anyone on any side of the political aisle.
00:53:15.000It is identity politics, and identity politics that is unsupportable by the evidence is just gross pandering.
00:53:21.000So, provide the evidence lady, or sit down.
00:53:24.000Because this isn't because, this is, and that holds true for everyone.
00:53:28.000It holds true for President Trump, doing the, the reason you're being victimized is because you are living in the boondocks, and because you're being victimized by foreigners, and it holds true for Elizabeth Warren, going into black communities, where people are graduating from college, and telling them that your hard work won't make a dime's bit of difference, because America's a racist country.
00:53:46.000You want to make the country worse, this is a pretty solid way of doing it.
00:53:49.000All so that she can gain power, which presumably she will then use to destroy the free system that has created the prosperity with which we live.
00:53:55.000Okay, well we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
00:53:57.000I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:54:03.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
00:54:09.000Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.