President George H.W. Bush passes away, Russiagate continues to unfold, and Paris bursts into flame. We ll get into all of it on today s show with Ben Shapiro. Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's new show, The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your shows.
00:00:15.000A lot happened over the weekend in Russiagate, and of course, President George H.W.
00:00:20.000Bush passes away, and this leads the media to discover that honor did exist in the Republican Party at one time, but no longer does.
00:00:26.000We'll get into all of that in just one second.
00:00:29.000First, let's talk about how you're going to send your mail this Christmas or this Hanukkah.
00:00:33.000With the holidays, this means that you're going to be spending a lot on postage, and that also means they're going to be schlepping a lot of boxes down to the post office.
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00:00:45.000Stamps.com brings all those great services right to your desktop.
00:01:48.000His entire life was dedicated to American public service.
00:01:52.000According to the Associated Press, the public viewing for President George H.W.
00:01:56.000Bush will kick off four days of events that will include a state funeral at Washington's National Cathedral on Wednesday and a private service at President Bush's longtime church in Houston on Thursday.
00:02:07.000His body is supposed to arrive in Washington today for public viewing in the Capitol Rotunda, which is a rare honor that is only bestowed on a few.
00:02:14.000Former Secretary of State Colin Powell called him a perfect American for how he served his country in so many capacities.
00:02:20.000He died at his Houston home at age 94 over the weekend.
00:02:24.000His crowning achievement as president was assembling the International Military Coalition, according to the Associated Press, that liberated Kuwait from invading Iraq in 1991 in a war that lasted just 100 hours.
00:02:34.000At the time, he was ripped up and down for not invading Iraq directly and going after Saddam Hussein.
00:02:40.000And obviously, later events seem to have justified that to at least a certain extent.
00:02:46.000He was a humble hero of World War Two.
00:02:47.000He was just 20 when he survived being shot down during a bombing run over Japan.
00:02:52.000He enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday.
00:02:54.000He, in fact, forewent his actual gale Scholarship to instead go into the Navy.
00:03:02.000He was shot down while he was in the Navy.
00:03:04.000In fact, they have tape that was played during the 1992 and 1988 presidential runs that showed him actually being dragged out of the ocean by fellow members of the Navy.
00:03:13.000He's the youngest Navy pilot in America at the time.
00:03:19.000September 2, 1944, USS Finback rescued Lieutenant Junior Grade George H.W.
00:03:24.000Bush, who was shot down while attacking Chichijima.
00:03:27.000During this time, Bush was attached to USS San Jacinto while serving with Torpedo Squadron 51.
00:03:33.000Bush later becomes the 41st president of the United States.
00:03:36.000Well, it's interesting because Michael Dukakis' campaign manager said in 1988 that the moment they saw that footage on television, they knew that Michael Dukakis was never going to be president because, again, the footage is pretty heroic.
00:03:49.000Shortly after he left the service, he married his 19-year-old sweetheart, Barbara Pierce, in a union that lasted until her death earlier this year.
00:03:55.000He turned his attention to politics in the 1960s.
00:03:57.000He was elected to his first two terms in Congress in 1967.
00:04:00.000He then went on to serve as ambassador to the UN and China, head of the CIA, chairman of the Republican National Committee before he was elected to two terms as vice president of the United States.
00:04:10.000And then, of course, he served one term as president of the United States before being defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992 in a hotly contested election that saw Ross Perot win 19 percent of the popular vote.
00:04:20.000Now, what's been fascinating to watch in the aftermath of George H.W.
00:04:23.000Bush's death is the sort of sepia glow that has been cast on George H.W.
00:04:28.000Bush by all of his political opponents.
00:04:30.000We saw the same thing happen to Senator John McCain after McCain's death earlier this year.
00:04:34.000Suddenly, all the people who spent their careers talking about how John McCain was a warmonger were saying that he was just the great example of American statesmanship.
00:04:42.000We saw the same thing with George H.W. Bush immediately after his death this weekend.
00:04:46.000Suddenly, he was a great American statesman.
00:05:02.000Where was that guy during the campaign?
00:05:03.000And many of us were saying, well, he was there the whole time.
00:05:06.000You were just forcibly ignoring the fact that Mitt Romney was a good man so that you could slander him and attack him so he wouldn't become president.
00:05:12.000It was the same thing with George H.W.
00:05:13.000Bush, who in 1991 was ripped by the left as a warmonger, who was ripped by the left as an incompetent, who was ripped by the left as Cold, aloof, not in touch with the American people, a racist in 1988 for running the Willie Horton ad, right?
00:05:48.000All these people would go on to become presidential candidates in their own right.
00:05:51.000And he was asked specifically about whether he was tough enough to be president, which is an amazing question to ask a guy who volunteered for the Navy and then was shot down, going on to complete his mission, by the way.
00:06:03.000Bush being asked about his toughness circa 1979.
00:06:06.000I don't equate toughness with just attacking some individual.
00:06:09.000I don't attack... I equate toughness with moral fiber, with character, with principle, with demonstrated leadership in tough jobs where you emerge, not bullying somebody, but with the respect of the people you led.
00:07:56.000Juan Williams says, you know, the transformation of H.W.
00:08:00.000Bush into the party of Donald Trump demonstrates that there was a kinder, gentler time in America.
00:08:06.000The way I think of it, Chris, is sort of optimism versus pessimism.
00:08:11.000Mourning in America, a kinder, gentler America, versus American carnage, as a message coming from the leader to the American people.
00:08:19.000So when I think of President Bush, I think of someone who crossed the aisle.
00:08:24.000You know, I was really taken by what Carl just said about his best friend being a Democrat and, well, he's served those two terms in Congress.
00:08:31.000And, of course, he followed Reagan's So I'm not a huge fan of George H.W.
00:08:40.000Bush's bipartisanship while he was in office and while he was president of the United States, but I'm getting rather tired of a bunch of folks on the left who would have ripped George H.W.
00:08:48.000Bush while he was president, now turning around saying it was a kinder, gentler America.
00:08:53.000It's just that you like every Republican once that Republican is no longer in office, and you specifically use those Republicans as clubs to hit the current Republican.
00:09:20.000Are you sensing a sort of pattern here, a pattern from the left that because Donald Trump is president, every Republican who is not Donald Trump is now seen in a kinder, gentler light.
00:09:33.000The fact is, the reason the press are paying this sort of attention to George H.W.
00:09:36.000Bush is not because they've suddenly been struck by the honor and decency of the man, George H.W.
00:10:13.000Bush is the kind of man who devoted his life to public service.
00:10:16.000Donald Trump is the kind of man who has devoted his life to, you know, to business and fame.
00:10:23.000None of that is specifically a rip on Donald Trump, but the contrast is not kind to Donald Trump between George H.W.
00:10:29.000Bush and Trump, which is, of course, exactly why the press is making that contrast in the first place.
00:10:34.000Don't trust the press when suddenly they start telling you that a Republican is wonderful, because the only Republicans that the left thinks are wonderful are ones who are out of office or dead.
00:10:43.000I mean, that's the basic rule of thumb here.
00:10:45.000And every so often, Every so often, they sort of let the mask slip.
00:10:49.000Franklin Fuller let the mask slip over at the Atlantic when he suggested that George H.W.
00:11:07.000Here's what Franklin Foer, who is disgusting, said over at The Atlantic.
00:11:10.000Obituaries present George H.W. Bush as the last of the Republican moderates.
00:11:14.000In reality, he was an archetypal representative of the modern party, a man whose sense of duty failed him when it came to resisting the rise of racially revanchist libertarian forces.
00:11:23.000He embodied an establishment that wrote a very nice thank you note.
00:11:26.000But good manners are hardly the same as moral courage.
00:11:37.000And don't let them put on the mask of mourning in order to pretend that George H.W.
00:11:41.000Bush was something different for them than Donald Trump.
00:11:44.000You and I, we can see the differences between George H.W.
00:11:46.000Bush and Donald Trump, which were many and myriad, some in favor of Bush in terms of character, some not in favor of Bush, maybe in terms of policy.
00:11:52.000But for the left, the only reason that they are now donning the mask of mourning when it comes to George H.W.
00:11:58.000Bush is that they can attempt to proclaim that Donald Trump is significantly worse by any sort of comparison.
00:12:03.000Hey, in just a second, I want to talk to you about George H.W.
00:13:36.000So the stories of President Bush's death are really moving.
00:13:40.000I mean, this is a man with it's hard to imagine a better American family.
00:13:44.000A son who is a governor, another son who is president of the United States and governor of Texas, a family and third generation of politics.
00:14:23.000Franklin Foer writes, one of the great counterfactuals of American history is pondering what would have happened if George Bush had exerted greater control over the destiny of the Republican Party.
00:14:31.000What if the moderate Republicans of the late 50s and early 60s had aggressively owned the civil rights agenda and rendered the cause of racial justice a bipartisan concern?
00:14:41.000More Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act as a percentage than Democrats did.
00:14:44.000If the old-money Republicans could have mustered that leadership, stood firm against the flow of segregationists into their club, it might have precluded the invention of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy and the generations of racialized politics that followed.
00:14:56.000Does anyone really believe, by the way, that this was all about George H.W.
00:15:01.000Bush failing to stem the flow of racists into the Republican Party?
00:15:05.000But this is how the left really thinks about all of these folks.
00:15:08.000This is how the left really thinks about all of these folks.
00:15:09.000In any case, James Baker, who was George H.W.
00:15:12.000Bush's lifelong friend and Secretary of State, he was on CNN, which actually, their coverage of H.W.
00:15:44.000You can't ask for more from a life than that.
00:15:47.000It is amazing when somebody gets to live the life that they sought to live, even when they pass away.
00:15:52.000It's obviously a credit to them as a human being.
00:15:56.000If you can live your entire life and die saying, I love you, your children, it doesn't get a lot better than that, especially when your child happens to also have been president of the United States.
00:16:07.000Meanwhile, Russiagate continues, and the left is fully invested in Russiagate, that this is what's going to take down President Trump.
00:16:17.000You can see the excitement from so many folks on the left.
00:16:19.000Now again, the evidence is not in that President Trump actively colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election or anything like that, and so the left is now shifting their argument.
00:16:28.000They've shifted their argument several times.
00:16:29.000The first was that the Trump campaign had been compromised by the Russians.
00:16:34.000The Russians basically had compromat, you remember, on President Trump, and they were going to use that compromat in order to affect his role in office.
00:16:44.000Then they shifted the argument to President Trump was coordinating with the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and the DNC, and then to militarize the release of those emails to win the election.
00:16:52.000Again, that has not been proved either.
00:16:54.000Then it turned into President Trump maybe received some of those emails.
00:16:58.000And they point out connections between Roger Stone and other members of the sort of Trump coterie.
00:17:04.000And that has not been proved yet either.
00:17:05.000So now it's moved to President Trump had business relationships in Russia at the same time that he was running for president.
00:17:31.000Jake Tapper made this point last week also.
00:17:33.000That's not stopping Democrats from now trying to say that because Trump had business contacts in Russia, that means that he was in some way compromised.
00:17:40.000So Adam Schiff The representative from California who has his pup tent set up outside the media headquarters.
00:17:51.000He's starting to hook up the plumbing, but he hasn't actually connected it to the main line yet, right outside these headquarters.
00:17:57.000He was on ABC's This Week talking, again, about Michael Cohen and Russiagate and President Trump.
00:18:03.000What Michael Cohen was saying and others were saying about when this business deal ended was not true.
00:18:10.000And what's more, the Russians knew it wasn't true.
00:18:13.000That at the same time that Donald Trump was the presumptive nominee of the GOP and arguing in favor of doing away with sanctions, he was working on a deal that would require doing away with sanctions for him to make money in Russia.
00:18:33.000We're back to the original theory, except again, the theory is not supported by any evidence.
00:18:37.000Donna Brazile, former head of the DNC, she was saying the same thing.
00:18:40.000And Michael Cohen pleading guilty to lying to the FBI that this is, in fact, a smoking gun.
00:18:45.000It is not a smoking gun of anything other than Michael Cohen lied to the FBI because he lies to a lot of people, Michael Cohen.
00:18:51.000Michael Cohen once boasted that he would take a bullet for Donald Trump, but instead this week he delivered a smoking gun.
00:18:58.000The fact that, oh yeah, that's a smoking gun.
00:19:01.000Because, once again, he said that what I provided before was consistent with what the President wanted me to say because I wanted to stay loyal to the President.
00:19:10.000Smoking gun, saying, he said essentially that the White House, the President was lying at the time that he had no business dealing with Russia when he was looking to Okay, the president has not testified.
00:19:24.000The president, you know, did say that he had no business ties with Russia.
00:19:28.000Again, it's gonna come down to what is the meaning of is, right?
00:19:31.000The president's gonna say, I didn't have business ties with Russia, right?
00:19:34.000We were in negotiations, it didn't happen.
00:19:37.000People on the left gonna say, well, you know, you're implying that there were no, at any time, business ties with Russia, and there were.
00:19:42.000In any case, none of that is criminal, as Andrea Mitchell says.
00:19:45.000And this is leading a lot of folks on the right to More and more rip into the Mueller report.
00:19:49.000Rudy Giuliani, the president's attorney on these matters, he says that Robert Mueller is acting unethically, that basically he's culling together a bunch of people he says have lied to him, but there's been no underlying crime.
00:20:00.000So at no point has anybody been actually convicted or pled guilty to collusion with Russia regarding the election, which was the original charge.
00:20:07.000Instead, everybody's being gotten on ancillary crimes of lying to the FBI about matters that really have nothing to do with the central contention.
00:20:17.000I think the special prosecutor has stepped over the line now with the way he's intimidating people in order to tell what he believes is his version of the truth.
00:20:26.000This is what's wrong with these special prosecutors and independent counsels.
00:20:50.000Trump, President Trump tweeted out this morning, a series of tweets says, Michael Cohen asked judge for no prison time.
00:20:55.000You mean he can do all the terrible, unrelated to Trump things, having to do with fraud, big loans, taxis, et cetera, and not serve a long prison term?
00:21:03.000He makes up stories to get a great and already reduced deal for himself and get his wife and father-in-law, who has the money off Scott Frey.
00:21:10.000I do like that he spelled Scott Free capital S-C-O-T-T.
00:21:21.000This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating he will not be forced by a rogue and out-of-control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about President Trump.
00:21:30.000Nice to know that some people still have quote-unquote guts.
00:21:33.000Bob Mueller, who's a much different man than people think, and his out-of-control band of angry Democrats don't want the truth.
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00:23:02.000Because the theory is that Mueller is basically getting a bunch of people to cop to things that are not major crimes in order to get them to flip on the president and say things that are untrue.
00:23:13.000Now, a couple things can be true at once.
00:23:15.000One can be that there is no underlying crime here.
00:23:18.000Two can be that the Mueller report is actually just a report and not a criminal indictment.
00:23:22.000That it turns out that what Mueller is actually attempting to do is compile a bunch of mean stuff about Trump without any sort of criminal indictment in the offing.
00:23:30.000And thing number three can also be true, which is that Mueller, in order to get that information, is going after people for Relatively minor crimes.
00:23:38.000Lying to the FBI is not a minor crime, but about issues that are not exactly criminal is not exactly a major crime either.
00:23:44.000The person making this case is, of course, Andrew McCarthy over at National Review.
00:23:49.000And it is important to note before we start into McCarthy's case that That Mueller is not allowed to suborn perjury himself.
00:23:57.000So if Mueller were to get Cohen to lie about Trump, if he knew that Cohen were lying about something, and he said, listen, I'm going to prosecute you and put you in jail unless you lie about Trump, that is in and of itself a crime.
00:24:14.000And that's McCarthy's take on all of this.
00:24:17.000He says no prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it.
00:24:21.000What prosecutor says, here's our witness lineup, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex Van Der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and what is it they have in common, ladies and gentlemen?
00:24:31.000For a prosecutor, like any trial lawyer, what the jury thinks is at least as important as what the law says.
00:24:36.000If the most memorable thing the jury takes into the deliberation room is that no one should believe a word your witnesses say, you're not going to convict a lowliest grifter, much less the President of the United States.
00:24:46.000Instead, what you have to do is build your case by having your cooperating accomplice, witnesses, plead guilty to the big scheme you're trying to pin on the main culprit.
00:24:53.000They say there was a big thing Trump was trying to do, I was a part of it, now I'm testifying about it, but no one's actually testifying to any of that stuff.
00:25:00.000He says, in short, you build a case by first establishing the foundational criminal offense.
00:25:05.000Juries do not convict people because they like or trust the prosecution's witnesses.
00:25:09.000They convict because they are persuaded that justice demands redress for a real crime.
00:25:16.000That is why from the beginning of the Trump-Russia investigation, and certainly since Mueller's appointment on May 17th, 2017, we have stressed that the probe is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation.
00:25:27.000Mueller does not have a crime he is investigating.
00:25:30.000He is investigating in hopes of finding a crime, which is a day and night different thing.
00:25:35.000So here's what McCarthy concludes, I think correctly.
00:25:38.000He says, that brings us to the where there's smoke, there must be fire talking point Mueller fans have been trying out.
00:25:42.000If all these people are lying to cover up something, that something must involve some egregious criminality.
00:25:49.000We know from our own daily lives that crimes account for only a very small percentage of the things people lie about.
00:25:53.000Indeed, throughout the 1990s, Democrats insisted that prosecutors should leave Bill Clinton alone because everybody lies about sex.
00:25:59.000People lie about things they are embarrassed or ashamed of.
00:26:02.000Politics is a seamy business, but politics is not a crime.
00:26:05.000Consequently, if you criminalize politics, if you turn a prosecutor loose to investigate political campaign activities, you are apt to find unsavory conduct that is not criminal, but that some people will lie about.
00:26:15.000So why exactly is Mueller turning lies into guilty pleas?
00:26:18.000First, he's not going to indict the president, so Mueller is not worried about the lack of credibility of these witnesses.
00:26:24.000Second, he knows the media is going to cheer everything that he does.
00:26:28.000The media reports Mueller is investigating the Trump-Russia collusion.
00:26:31.000Dozens of people have been charged or convicted, but they will not report that no one has been charged, much less convicted, of any crime involving collusion between Trump and Russia.
00:26:40.000And third, defendants convicted of making false statements are useful because Mueller is writing a report, not preparing for a jury trial.
00:26:46.000Convicted liars never get cross-examined in a report, nor do they give the bumpy, inconsistent testimony you hear in a courtroom.
00:26:53.000So this is really so Mueller is just putting together a report.
00:26:55.000He's not actually putting together a criminal indictment.
00:26:57.000And that means that he is cobbling together all of these various guilty pleas on lies that have nothing to do with the main topic to get these people to spill the beans about a non-criminal scheme that embarrasses Trump.
00:27:15.000But what is Robert Mueller doing here?
00:27:17.000And Robert Mueller's case is going to be, listen, when people lie to the FBI, that's a crime.
00:27:20.000And it is my job to prosecute people who commit crimes.
00:27:23.000This means that the real danger that President Trump is in, legally speaking, is of suborning perjury.
00:27:28.000If Trump told Michael Cohen or anybody else that they ought to lie to the FBI, that would be the only criminality that I think Mueller is going to uncover here.
00:27:39.000And after all this time, after two years, Mueller comes forward with the big reveal.
00:27:43.000And the big reveal is that Trump and Putin were in the back room hacking Hillary Clinton's emails together, like Matthew Broderick in war games.
00:27:50.000But absent that big reveal, all that's happening here is Trump is turning all the people around Trump Into criminals in order to get them to testify to material that is non-criminal, but very damaging to President Trump going into 2020.
00:28:04.000And that's why Team Trump is so upset.
00:28:06.000And that's why President Trump is so upset.
00:28:08.000And I think at least part of that seems to be justified.
00:28:11.000Now, I'm waiting to I'm going to wait until the Mueller report comes out to say whether I think that this is terrible or dishonest.
00:28:16.000And again, two things can be true at once.
00:28:19.000Mueller can be doing his job and that job Again, Bill Clinton was not impeached for committing an underlying crime.
00:28:34.000He was not impeached for committing sexual assault against Paula Jones.
00:28:37.000He was impeached for committing perjury.
00:28:40.000He was impeached because he suborned perjury.
00:28:44.000President Trump could get caught in the same trap here simply by dint of the underlying crime.
00:28:48.000So we'll see how all of this plays out.
00:28:50.000Now, meanwhile, we'd be remiss if we did not talk about the situation in France, because right now France is basically on fire.
00:28:56.000The footage from France is absolutely astonishing.
00:28:59.000Here is some footage of the police firing rubber bullets into crowds over by the Arc de Triomphe.
00:29:04.000People marching down the center of Paris.
00:29:06.000And the police, who you will see in black here behind the barricades, firing rubber bullets into the crowd of people who are wearing yellow.
00:29:18.000And so, I mean, full-scale rioting in the streets of France.
00:29:23.000You can see, I mean, it's legitimately like a pitched street battle.
00:29:25.000People throwing rocks at each other, the police officers who are ducking behind their shields and then firing rubber bullets into the crowd.
00:29:32.000The destruction is pretty astonishing as well.
00:29:35.000We have some of the pictures of the destruction.
00:29:37.000Here's what some of the destruction looks like.
00:30:09.000It turns out that reality has its day.
00:30:11.000Reality suggests that people are going to riot when they feel economically dispossessed.
00:30:18.000And they feel economically dispossessed when you decide to tax them extraordinary amounts of money to pay for your global warming agenda.
00:30:23.000That's really what's happening in France right now.
00:30:25.000I'm going to talk more about that in just one second.
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00:31:56.000Also, before we go any further, and I have a lot more to get to on today's show, trade policy and the New York Times ripping on Hanukkah because what would a day be in the New York Times without a bit of anti-Semitism or self-hating Jewry?
00:32:08.000We'll get to all that in just a second.
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00:34:16.000So over in France, Emmanuel Macron, who was the newly elected French prime minister who defeated Marine Le Pen in a runoff that was hotly contested.
00:34:40.000According to the UK Daily Mail, graffiti was removed from the Arc de Triomphe today after anti-Macron protesters stormed through Paris on Saturday.
00:34:46.000The protesters occupied the city center.
00:34:48.000They torched cars, smashed windows with clubs and axes, stole an assault rifle from riot police, firing tear gas and water cannon in France's worst urban rioting in years.
00:35:26.000Macron was jeered by lingering Yellow Vest supporters before chairing a crisis meeting with ministers amid calls to declare a state of emergency or even send in the army to quell the violence.
00:36:06.000Yeah, going great in France, isn't it?
00:36:08.000So, Macron, Held talks with his prime minister and interior minister at the Elysee Palace nearby.
00:36:13.000Images showed the inside of the Arc de Triomphe ransacked, with the statue of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic, smashed and graffiti scrawled on the exterior.
00:36:22.000The French leader spoke with police and firefighters on one of the avenues near the Champs-Elysees, with some yellow-jacketed protesters shouting, Macron, resign!
00:36:30.000A government spokesman said it was out of the question that each weekend becomes a meeting or ritual for violence because this was the second consecutive Saturday ending in violent carnage in Paris.
00:36:39.000The capital was calm on Sunday, but a motorway was blocked by yellow-vested protesters in Lyon.
00:36:56.000Why don't you spend some time over in these places and see what the civil unrest looks like in places like France before you talk about radically raising the taxes on American citizens to pay for carbon emissions.
00:37:06.000For example, protesters said the riots yesterday were the start of a revolution and violence which echoed the near revolution of 1968.
00:37:12.000Frederick Lagasche of the Alliance Police Union, he called for a state of emergency.
00:37:15.000He said we are in an insurrectional climate.
00:37:17.000Lagasche said army reinforcements should be brought in to guard public monuments, freeing up the police to deal with other trouble spots.
00:37:25.000And so things have gotten very ugly over in France.
00:37:28.000There are consequences to public policy.
00:37:31.000Euronews has a pretty good summary of what exactly is happening in France.
00:37:34.000They say discontent was triggered by the government's measures to keep increasing a direct tax on diesel, a fuel commonly used by motorists in France, as well as the carbon tax.
00:37:42.000Protesters see these as disproportionately affecting those who use their cars to get to and from their jobs every day.
00:37:47.000Their core demands are to put a freeze on fuel tax increases due in January and measures to boost spending power.
00:37:54.000The hike in fuel prices is due to three things, according to Euronews.
00:37:58.000Volatile crude oil prices, the carbon tax, and diesel and petrol taxes.
00:38:03.000And the taxes are used to help finance the general budget of the state.
00:38:06.000So it is not just that they are used for carbon taxation, they're also used to pay for the exorbitant social system in France.
00:38:14.000The riots in France over the past few years have come in part from Radical Muslim immigrants.
00:38:20.000You've seen riots in France that have been disproportionately from those folks in particular areas of the country.
00:38:26.000And you've also seen from the right in France, which is very upset with the taxation policy in France.
00:38:32.000Civil unrest tends to follow giant government and this is what's happening.
00:38:36.000In France, because again, you can't have these policies without some consequences accompanying them.
00:38:43.000Policies have consequences, sort of the theme of today's show, at least in part.
00:38:47.000And that is why President Trump is now backing off tariffs on the Chinese, because President Trump is looking at the economy and starting to realize the tariff policy Undercuts everything that he is currently trying to do.
00:38:57.000In an announcement yesterday, Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump put their bilateral trade war on pause momentarily, striking an agreement to hold off on slapping additional tariffs on each other's goods after January 1st, as talks continue between both countries.
00:39:11.000President Trump decided this was a big win for him, even though the reality is that if Trump hadn't threatened tariffs in the first place, we wouldn't be lowering tariffs in the second place.
00:39:18.000President Trump created a lot of trade Chaos.
00:39:21.000And then when the trade chaos is temporarily postponed, the stock market jumps, which is exactly what you're seeing today.
00:39:26.000In a White House readout of a dinner at the G20 summit in Argentina, Xi and Trump discussed a range of nettlesome issues, among them the trade dispute that has left over $200 billion worth of goods hanging in the balance.
00:39:36.000The statement read, President Trump has agreed that on January 1st, 2019, he will leave the tariffs on $200 billion worth of product at the 10% rate and not raise it to 25% at this time.
00:39:47.000American and Chinese officials will continue over the next three months to negotiate lingering disagreements on technology transfer, intellectual property, and agriculture.
00:39:55.000Meanwhile, China will agree to purchase a not-yet-agreed-upon but very substantial amount of agricultural, energy, industrial, and other products from the United States to reduce the trade imbalance between our two countries.
00:40:05.000China has agreed to start purchasing agricultural product from our farmers immediately.
00:40:08.000Well, it sounds like a win for us, except for the fact that they were already purchasing an enormous amount of agriculture from us before, right?
00:40:15.000They were purchasing basically our entire soybean supply, for example.
00:40:18.000And it turns out that President Trump's tariff policies, rather than lowering the trade deficit, actually increased the trade deficit in expectation of the tariffs.
00:40:27.000trade deficit widened in July by the most in three years.
00:40:29.000The gap with China hit a record as the Trump administration imposed tariffs on a range of Chinese goods, prompting retaliatory levies from Beijing.
00:40:37.000Turns out that trade policy is all fun and games until the actual consequences of the trade policy become known.
00:40:42.000I'm glad the president is backing off of all of this.
00:40:45.000It is one thing to crack down on the Chinese for fraud and intellectual property infringement.
00:40:49.000It's another thing to impose tariffs just because President Trump thinks he's protecting domestic industry.
00:40:54.000He is not, in fact, protecting the domestic economy by taxing American citizens for Cheaper goods from abroad.
00:41:01.000OK, meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has gotten herself in the headlines again, this time by tweeting something insanely stupid again.
00:41:08.000Now, I know, according to the media, we're not supposed to cover Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right?
00:41:12.000This is the way this works, is that the media say that the new congresswoman from New York is a godsend.
00:41:25.000I mean, this is just high-level media trollery.
00:41:28.000If you decide to make her a celebrity, and then we talk about the fact that she can't legitimately add numbers together, like basic numbers together, then it's our fault.
00:42:11.000The reason it is mathematically illiterate is that we have not actually spent $21 trillion in the entire history of the Republic of the United States on defense.
00:42:19.000Okay, we spent $700 billion in total last year.
00:42:23.000She also claimed at one point, I believe, that we had $700 billion in fraud that same year.
00:42:30.000That is not a correct interpretation of the numbers that she is looking at.
00:42:34.000Also, acknowledging that your program is massively expensive to own the cons.
00:42:38.000Big win for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but oh, sorry, I'm not supposed to point out when she says something really dumb because that means that we are obsessed with her here.
00:42:45.000We're supposed to just pretend that none of this is happening.
00:42:50.000So, good stuff from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
00:42:54.000Meanwhile, in other things stupid, the New York Times has a piece today about the Rockettes.
00:43:04.000Now, if you think that folks at the New York Times are race-obsessed, you would be correct, because everyone at the New York Times has lost their minds.
00:43:10.000Here is what they write over at the New York Times.
00:43:50.000Because at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the Rockettes, whose performances are taken in by almost one million people every holiday season, are themselves almost all white.
00:44:07.000The show I saw featured, as far as I could tell, only one African-American dancer in the lineup of close to 40.
00:44:12.000There were, in the end, more camels on stage than black women.
00:44:15.000By the way, if you go to a Rockettes show and your first inclination is to start counting the black women, I'd say you have a problem.
00:44:20.000Among the 80 dancers who made up the Rockettes core, 10% are women of color, a spokesperson for the company told me.
00:44:25.000You're only seeing half the cast during any given show because there are so many performances to fill, on weekends up to six a day.
00:44:30.000Regardless of that, any variance in skin tone is obscured by lighting and makeup that have the effect of creating a stultifying homogeneity.
00:44:37.000They need a New York Times columnist to tell them how to run the Rockettes, which has been a continuous show on Broadway for decades.
00:44:44.000Ancillary cast members in the pageant, non-rockettes, include a black man playing an elf and a black man playing a bell man.
00:44:51.000By the way, speaking of playing an elf, my sister, a Jewish girl, played an elf in her elementary school public school production of A Christmas Thing.
00:44:59.000I guess that was also anti-Semitic or something.
00:45:01.000The Rockettes are the creation of someone named Russell Markert, who first brought them to stage in St.
00:45:05.000Louis in 1925, oversaw their direction at the Radio City Music Hall from the 30s until the 70s.
00:45:10.000His goal had been to build the most precise and uniform dancing troupe in the world, and to that end, he imposed height requirements for the women in the line.
00:45:17.000These expectations have continued, unabated.
00:45:19.000Such a vision accommodates little tolerance for difference.
00:45:22.000I think that the Radio City Rockettes should be forced to perform with people who are paraplegic, for example.
00:45:28.000I think that the Radio City Rockettes, half of them should be in wheelchairs.
00:45:31.000I think it wouldn't change the nature of the show at all, and it would show a massive understanding of the diversity of modern America, if that were to happen.
00:45:39.000We should have a bunch of people who are short.
00:45:40.000We should have a bunch of people who are super tall.
00:45:43.000They should dance to whatever they want to dance to, actually.
00:45:44.000There shouldn't actually be any sort of attempt to make them dance in line or in lockstep.
00:46:32.000As we watch France burst into flame, and as we recognize that America still is the greatest democratic republic in the history of the planet, despite all of the problems that we experience, it is worth reviewing why.
00:46:42.000That is, the book that best describes this is Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.
00:46:46.000I know, you were recommended this in high school, and then you didn't read it.
00:46:48.000And then you were recommended it in college, and then you didn't read it.
00:46:50.000And then you were recommended it in grad school, and you still didn't read it.
00:46:53.000Well, now I'm recommending it, and you should read it.
00:46:57.000It's an edition That is edited by Harvey Mansfield, the brilliant professor over at Harvard, East Coast Straussian, as well as Delba Winthrop.
00:47:19.000He talks about the prevalence of the social fabric.
00:47:21.000He talks about the fact that a democratic republic is not quite a democracy and not quite a republic.
00:47:26.000And he talks about the foolish idea that the people will always be a cure.
00:47:31.000And then the main message of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in a nutshell is that democracy in America can only work if there's a vibrant social fabric that supports the democracy and the system of checks and balances designed to facilitate democracy not only checks the excesses of the people, but in the end does in fact rely on a good and moral people.
00:47:49.000It'll take you a long time to complete.
00:47:50.000But once you do, you'll have a better understanding of what makes America tick and why, for example, the French Republic has not worked in nearly the same way as the American Republic.
00:48:00.000So speaking of books that everyone should read yesterday.
00:48:04.000I went to Barnes & Noble with my kids, because this is one of the things we like to do.
00:48:07.000My daughter, who is a very smart human, for her age, I always add for her age, because whenever I say a child is smart, people are like, well, you should let her decide her own gender.
00:48:23.000Over at Barnes & Noble, the children's section is basically a propaganda tool.
00:48:27.000I say this only because I walk in, and the first display you see is feminism for babies.
00:48:33.000There's literally a book called Baby Feminism, and what it is is a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and then it's a board book.
00:48:39.000It's made out of thick cardboard, so if your kids chew on it, it doesn't ruin the book.
00:48:42.000And it's a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and if you flip it, if you flip the page, it's then a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a baby, because every feminist was once a baby.
00:48:51.000Now, it doesn't actually have the punchline, which is, if feminists had their way, many of these babies would never have been born.
00:48:55.000But nonetheless, that is one of the books on the shelf.
00:48:58.000Also, a Michelle Obama biography is on the shelf.
00:49:36.000And I will say this book is so informative and so great.
00:49:39.000It's by Julie Marburg, illustrated by Michelle Brumer Everett.
00:49:43.000The best page is a picture of a girl in a firefighter's uniform who is lugging a hose because she wants to be a firefighter, which is fine.
00:49:52.000Although I will say that female upper body strength is not as great as male upper body strength on average.
00:49:57.000And if you just had to pick a guy to be a firefighter or a girl to be a firefighter knowing nothing else about them, you have to pick the guy.
00:50:03.000Because, obviously, you have to go by the average.
00:50:05.000The average is that men have more upper body strength.
00:50:07.000Also, I do love the accuracy of one woman carrying a fire hose, which generates like a thousand pounds of pressure and requires at least two or three guys to carry.
00:50:16.000In any case, here is... But I'm not going to rip on the accuracy of a children's book.
00:50:21.000Find a job that you'll love heading off to each day.
00:50:24.000Know the women you work with must earn equal pay.
00:50:27.000You're supposed to read this like a two and a half year old.
00:50:29.000So I sat there and I read it to my two and a half year old and he looked at me very solemnly and he said, this claim does not adjust for job choice, time out of the workforce or hours work.
00:51:40.000I got to come out and I got to say hello and as a gesture of solidarity I brought Dave Rubin a cupcake.
00:51:46.000The reason being last time I was on Dave's show he asked me whether I would bake a cake for his same-sex wedding and I said no because I'm a religious person and I do not participate in Ceremonies that I think are a sin, even though we are friends, right?
00:51:58.000And this is true with regard to intermarriage.
00:52:00.000This is true with regard to Sabbath violation.
00:52:03.000I mean, this is true for a wide variety of things that as a religious person, I consider sinful.
00:52:06.000Now, Dave can do what he likes, right?
00:52:16.000I, as a religious person, am not going to be compelled by a government or anyone else to violate my religious scruples and celebrate something that I believe is personally a sin.
00:52:27.000So, to prove that Dave and I are friends, and that also I have no objection to actually baking a cupcake for a gay guy, I baked him a cupcake, I brought it to him on stage, and I pointed out that I'm happy to bake a small cake for a gay man.
00:52:40.000So, that is a thing that happened over the weekend.
00:52:41.000And then I also pointed out that I had, in fact, brought A cake for Jordan Peterson backstage as well, but it wasn't a physical cake.
00:52:52.000It had lots of layers and it's the layers that made it so bloody important.
00:52:56.000You see, I didn't want to bring him an actual physical cake.
00:52:59.000A physical cake connotes sweetness and life isn't sweet.
00:53:03.000Life is pain and suffering in which your journey is to make order out of chaos.
00:53:09.000And that's what you're supposed to learn from the metaphysical mythological cake that has been bubbling up in our biologies and from a deeper place for legitimately Hundreds of thousands of years.
00:53:19.000Once you understand the suffering of the mythological cake, then you understand the sweetness, which is far sweeter than any physical cake could be in the hierarchy.
00:53:28.000And that's why it's so bloody important.
00:53:30.000In any case, it was really a lot of fun.
00:53:59.000Hanukkah is also an anti-secularist holiday.
00:54:01.000So Hanukkah is all about the Jews defeating the Hellenists, a group of members of the Seleucid Empire who are attempting to take over the Jewish temple, transform it into a pagan temple.
00:54:10.000And a lot of Jews who are going along with this because better to assimilate than to be part of the Jewish people.
00:54:14.000The Maccabees rise up in a religious revolt and they say, no, we are taking back our holy places and we refuse to bow before the Hellenization of our religion.
00:54:21.000This is very uncomfortable for a lot of people.
00:54:24.000It's particularly uncomfortable for secular Jews who don't actually care all that much about Judaism and for whom Hanukkah is largely a reverse Christmas.
00:54:32.000It's basically like Christmas for our kids.
00:54:34.000So we're uncomfortable with having a Christmas tree in our house because we don't believe in the Jesus.
00:54:38.000But by the same token, it's like, let's get gifts for our kids.
00:54:41.000We have to have like Hanukkah Harry and we'll have like a Hanukkah bush and all this kind of stuff.
00:54:49.000This is precisely the opposite of what actually has been the history of celebrating the holiday.
00:54:55.000Now, what's hilarious about this is that there was a secular Jew in the New York Times who recognized the hypocrisy, his own hypocrisy in this.
00:55:06.000And he says, it's the question that Jewish parents instinctively dread.
00:55:09.000A few months ago, I was sitting on the couch with my three-year-old daughter watching YouTube videos about animals in space, when out of nowhere, she looked up at me and asked, Dada, can we celebrate Christmas?
00:55:17.000We don't celebrate Christmas, I told her, putting on my serious voice.
00:55:38.000During the rest of the year, the Jewish holidays we celebrate are like special bonus celebrations we get to have on top of everything else going on in the calendar.
00:55:44.000With Hanukkah and Christmas, however, it's a zero-sum game.
00:55:47.000Most of the year, it isn't hard for our family to feel both American and Jewish.
00:55:50.000But in December, that dual identity becomes more of a question, which is why Hanukkah is a big deal for mostly assimilated Jews like myself.
00:55:57.000The only trouble is the actual holiday, not the latkes and dreidels, but the story of Hanukkah, which at its heart is an eight-night-long celebration of religious fundamentalism and violence.
00:56:05.000I like that they just discovered that the preservation of the Jewish people is based on, you know, Judaism, and also on the preservation of Judaism.
00:56:28.000Hanukkah is just another celebration of the fact that Judaism is a deep-rooted part of our life that will not allow encroachment by Hellenizing forces.
00:56:36.000For a bunch of secular Jews who've basically been Hellenized, they suddenly realize, oh wait, we're celebrating something that we totally disagree with.
00:56:44.000He says, for most of the past 2,000 years, Hanukkah was an afterthought on the Jewish calendar, a wintertime festival of lights during which people spun tops and ate greasy food to commemorate what has to be one of God's least impressive miracles.
00:56:54.000A small container of oil lasted for eight nights.
00:56:57.000There's a big argument in even the Talmud about what exactly is being celebrated, whether what's being celebrated is the oil or whether what's actually being celebrated is the victory of the Jews over the Seleucid Empire.
00:57:09.000Suffice it to say, I think it's the latter.
00:57:11.000More recently, as Jews have become assimilated into American society, the holiday has evolved into a kind of Semitic sidekick for Christmas.
00:57:17.000And then he talks about how uncomfortable he is.
00:57:20.000He says, the more I thought about all this, the more it disturbed me.
00:57:22.000For what am I, if not a Hellenized Jew?
00:57:38.000They would have hated me because I'm assimilated and because I'm the product of intermarriage.
00:57:42.000Well, I'm not sure they would have hated you per se, but they would not have liked if you were speaking up on behalf of Judaism.
00:57:48.000And while I can't say for certain what the Maccabees would have thought about my fondness for Bernie Sanders or my practice of Reconstructionist Judaism, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have liked those things either.
00:57:58.000And then he says, so why should I do all of this?
00:57:59.000The answer, frankly, is that it's not my choice.
00:58:01.000With my daughter ready to sign up for Team Santa, we have to celebrate something and I'm not quite Hellenized enough to get a Christmas tree.
00:58:06.000And this is secular Judaism in a nutshell in the United States.
00:58:09.000Secular Judaism in a nutshell is, I don't want to be known as a Christian because it makes me culturally uncomfortable, but I don't actually give a damn about Jewish things and Jewish things make me uncomfortable.
00:58:18.000So instead, I sort of keep the hallmarks without uncomfortably recognizing what it is that Judaism has stood for for so long.
00:58:25.000When people ask me, one of the big questions I get, why are Jews so liberal?
00:58:27.000The answer is many Jews are liberal because they are this kind of Jew.
00:58:30.000They're a Jew who actually doesn't like a lot of the central tenets of Judaism and is Hellenized beyond all measure, but simply does not have the guts to simply say goodbye to the religion as a whole.
00:58:42.000Judaism is not for the faint of heart.
00:58:44.000And Judaism does have central tenets, just like Christianity is not for the faint of heart.
00:58:55.000His kids and his grandkids will not be celebrating Hanukkah anytime in the near future, as soon as they are adults, because people instinctively recognize hypocrisy.
00:59:02.000And by the way, What's what's what's sad about all of this is that all the folks who think that secularizing and hellenizing is going to protect them from anti-semitism.
00:59:12.000Historically speaking, that has certainly not been true, which is why in a new survey, 43 percent of Dutch Jews hide their Jewish identity.
00:59:19.000OK, so that's not going to work for them either.