Former President George H.W. Bush is honored with a day of national mourning in Washington, D.C., and the stock market takes a dive, and we bid a fond farewell to former National Security Adviser Michael Avenatti, who was given no jail time for his part in a cover-up of an alleged White House coverup. Ben Shapiro explains why this is not a rip on George W. Bush, and why we should honor him the way we do for other presidents, and what we should do in the future in honor of other presidents. He also talks about why it s not a good idea to honor a president who was not a great president, but who was a decent human being, not a bad one at least in many ways. And he reminds us that every president should be paid the same way Jimmy Carter was paid for his life, not just for his presidency, but for every president who passes away from now on, because he was a good human being too, and not just a good president. Go check it out at PolicyGenius to get your quotes and apply in minutes! Go check out the quote of the day: "George H. W. Bus Bush was a public employee. He did not become a king, he became a human being. He was a great human being." - Charles Cook, National Review and Ben Shapiro, The New York Times Opinion writer is a good friend of the late president George HW. Washingtons And Ben Shapiro is a great friend of George H W. W Bush s in this episode of The Weekly Standard, and in The New Yorker, The Daily Mail, the New York Post, The Atlantic, and much more. Check out Ben Shapiro's new book, The Other Way, The White House, The View From The Oval Office, on his new podcast, The Oldest House in New York, on The Hill, The Morning Aftershow, The Real Housewives of New York Magazine, The Cut, and The New Republic, The Nightlife, The Sun, The Hollywood Reporter, and on The Tonight Show. The View from the Morning Drive, The Real Life, The Weather Channel, and so much more! Get in Touch with Ben Shapiro on all things White House Correspondent s . Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro: on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Podchaser, and other social media including The Hill and The Huffington Post.
00:00:00.000Former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn receives no jail time, the stock market takes a significant dive, and we bid a fond farewell and adieu to Michael Avenatti.
00:00:20.000I mean, the rest of the country mourns, too.
00:00:22.000But I really mourn today for Michael Avenatti because I had, once again, made the mistake of betting at long odds on Michael Avenatti for the 2020 nomination.
00:00:35.000We'll get to all of the latest in news in just one second.
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00:02:03.000The stock markets are not operational today.
00:02:05.000And while I appreciate the national mourning for George H.W.
00:02:09.000Bush, I do have to note that I do agree with Charles Cook over at National Review, who suggests that as a general matter in a republic, we probably should not do the sort of royalist routine where whenever somebody dies in a non-tragic fashion, it's not JFK's assassination or Lincoln's assassination or something, that having these days where the entire country sort of stops dead because an elected president is given state honors this way, It's kind of monarchic in nature.
00:02:34.000It's not particularly democratic or democratic Republican in nature.
00:02:45.000He did not found or save or design the Republic to shut down our civil society for a day in order to mark his peaceful passing.
00:02:50.000I think that is basically right, and that is not a rip in any way on George H.W.
00:02:53.000and to take another step toward the fetishization of an executive branch whose role is supposed to be more bureaucratic than spiritual, but has come of late to resemble Caesar more than to resemble Coolidge.
00:03:02.000I think that is basically right, and that is not a rip in any way on George H.W. Bush, who I discussed at length yesterday and who I said yesterday was a very good man, if not a great president.
00:03:11.000So again, I think that it is worthwhile asking ourselves whether we have an accurate view of the presidency and of the executive branch as a whole, And that is not meant, again, to be any sort of rip against George H.W.
00:03:26.000Just remember that all of the honors that are now being paid to George H.W.
00:03:29.000Bush will in the future be paid to President Jimmy Carter, who I think is not a good human being.
00:03:33.000I think he's kind of an excrucible human being.
00:03:36.000I guess that since the precedent is that we're now going to do this with every president, then we are going to do it for every president who passes away from now on.
00:03:42.000Again, I'm with Charles Cook on this particular question.
00:03:59.000Basically, Mike Flynn has been recommended to have no jail time.
00:04:04.000Special Counsel Robert Mueller told the federal court yesterday that former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has given substantial assistance to the Russia investigation and should not get jail time.
00:04:13.000Flynn has sat for 19 interviews with the special counsel and other Justice Department offices, and his early cooperation gave prosecutors a roadmap for the Russia investigation and may have helped to encourage others to cooperate, according to the filing.
00:04:24.000The new details explaining how Flynn has helped the special counsel investigation will ratchet up the pressure on President Donald Trump, according to CNN, who has repeatedly attacked the Mueller probe as a witch hunt.
00:04:34.000So what exactly happened in the Mueller filing about Michael Flynn?
00:04:37.000Well, according to Mueller's filing, Flynn has been helping investigators longer and on more Justice Department probes than had previously been known.
00:04:43.000The sheer amount of redacted text in the filing suggests those details are not ready to be unveiled, signaling that Mueller's investigation continues Along with other investigations with which Flynn helped.
00:04:53.000And if you actually take a look at the sentencing memo that came down and the Mueller filing, an enormous amount of text is redacted, meaning that it's been blacked out so it's not visible to public scrutiny.
00:05:05.000Supposedly the rationale for this is that Mueller does not want to give clues to potential defendants as to what he is doing at this point.
00:05:12.000Flynn began cooperating with the Russia probe shortly after Mueller's team approached him, said prosecutors, and that early cooperation boosted investigators' understanding of what happened during the campaign.
00:05:20.000Flynn pled guilty to lying to federal investigators on December 1, 2017, becoming the first high-ranking Trump advisor to agree to formally cooperate with the special counsel's probe.
00:05:29.000According to the memo, his early cooperation was particularly valuable.
00:05:33.000Because he was one of the few people with long-term and first-hand insight regarding events and issues under investigation.
00:05:38.000Additionally, the defendant's decision to plead guilty and cooperate likely affected the decisions of related first-hand witnesses to be forthcoming with the special counsel's office and cooperate according to prosecutors.
00:05:49.000So basically they're saying that because they got Flynn first, other people decided that they were going to cave as well and talk to the Mueller investigation.
00:05:56.000Now, we still don't know what exactly Mike Flynn Has told the Mueller investigation and recall that the charges against Mike Flynn were at the were very weak to begin with.
00:06:09.000In fact, the way that the charges against Mike Flynn were originally put forward, the way that these charges were originally put forward on the basis of a Logan Act investigation.
00:06:19.000So, for folks who don't remember exactly why Mike Flynn was originally prosecuted, why he was originally investigated, basically the suggestion was that Mike Flynn, after being appointed National Security Advisor-elect, right, Trump had not yet taken office, he was talking with the Russian government about a variety of issues, and then he lied to the investigation, the FBI investigation, about whom he had talked to, and this became an ancillary crime.
00:06:44.000Now, it is not a crime for the incoming National Security Advisor to talk with the Russian government.
00:06:49.000And for all the talk about, well, it's a Logan Act violation.
00:06:52.000He's operating his own foreign policy.
00:06:54.000If that's the case, then we ought to prosecute John Kerry for talking with the Iranians while Trump is president and operating his own foreign policy.
00:06:59.000There has not been a Logan Act violation that has been successfully prosecuted in a century or more in the United States.
00:07:06.000This is an act that probably is unconstitutional in the first place.
00:07:10.000In any case, the attempt to get Michael Flynn from the beginning was deeply flawed.
00:07:14.000Byron York points this out today over at the Washington Examiner.
00:07:16.000He says Michael Flynn has been waiting for more than a year to be sentenced.
00:07:19.000The retired three-starred Army general, who spent 24 days as the Trump White House National Security Advisor, pled guilty on December 1st, 2017 to lying to the FBI in the Trump-Russia investigation and agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
00:07:32.000Flynn's sentencing, which has been delayed a number of times for reasons that have never been disclosed, is scheduled to finally take place on December 18th.
00:07:38.000Last Tuesday, late Tuesday rather, Mueller filed what is called a sentencing report, citing Flynn's substantial assistance to the investigation.
00:07:45.000Mueller recommended a sentence at the low end of the guideline range, including a sentence that does not impose a period of cooperation.
00:07:51.000What the sentencing recommendation did not address was the sketchy beginnings of the Flynn investigation, says Byron York, who is correct.
00:07:57.000It started with the Obama administration's unhappiness that Flynn, during the transition as the incoming National Security Advisor, had phone conversations with Russia's then-Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak.
00:08:07.000Because Kislyak was under American surveillance, U.S.
00:08:09.000intelligence and law enforcement agencies had recordings and transcripts of the calls in which Flynn and Kislyak discussed the sanctions President Obama had just imposed on Russia in retaliation for its 2016 election interference.
00:08:21.000There was nothing wrong with an incoming national security advisor talking to a foreign ambassador during a transition.
00:08:25.000There was nothing wrong with discussing the sanctions.
00:08:27.000But some officials in the Obama DOJ decided Flynn might have violated the Logan Act, under which no one has ever been prosecuted, which prohibits private citizens from acting on behalf of the United States government.
00:08:38.000The Obama officials said they were also concerned by reports that Flynn, in a conversation with Vice President Mike Pence, had denied discussing sanctions.
00:08:45.000This, they felt, Might somehow expose Flynn to Russian blackmail.
00:08:48.000So Obama appointees atop the Justice Department sent FBI agents to the White House to interview Flynn, who was ultimately charged with lying in that interview.
00:08:57.000Originally, the FBI did not think that Flynn lied.
00:09:00.000In March 2017, James Comey, then the FBI director, told the House Intelligence Committee that two FBI agents who questioned Flynn did not detect any deception during the interview and saw nothing that indicated to them that Flynn knew he was lying to them.
00:09:11.000And then Comey said the same thing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:09:14.000FBI number two, Andrew McCabe, told the House the same thing.
00:09:17.000Only later, after Comey was fired and Mueller began his investigation, was Flynn accused of lying and he ultimately pled guilty.
00:09:23.000So this does lend a lot of credence and credibility to the idea that the Mueller investigation was basically intent on flipping people, and they were going to apply pressure in whatever fashion they could in order to make that happen.
00:09:36.000The sentencing memo talks about how Flynn, his cooperation has been substantial, but again, we don't know what that cooperation looks like because the cooperation itself is underwrapped, basically.
00:09:49.000Uh, so the filing says that Flynn sat for 19 interviews with the special counsel and the DOJ during the Russia investigation.
00:09:55.000Portions of the memo were redacted, according to Ryan Saavedra over at the Daily Wire, because it contains sensitive information about ongoing investigations.
00:10:01.000The filing states that when the FBI interviewed Flynn, Now, there is part of this where Flynn is a little bit more guilty.
00:10:06.000Supposedly, that part is where Flynn was dealing with the Turkish government.
00:10:08.000He falsely stated he did not ask the Russian ambassador to refrain from escalating the situation in response to the sanctions and falsely disclaimed any memory of his subsequent conversation with the ambassador in which the ambassador said that Russia had acceded to the defendant's request.
00:10:21.000Now, there is part of this where Flynn is a little bit more guilty.
00:10:25.000Supposedly, that part is where Flynn was dealing with the Turkish government.
00:10:29.000So according to the DOJ on March 7th, 2017, the defendant made materially false statements in multiple documents that he filed pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act pertaining to a project he and his company had performed for the principal benefit of the Republic of Turkey.
00:10:44.000The FARA filings omitted the material fact that officials from the Republic of Turkey provided supervision and direction Over the Turkey Project, NBC News is all over that.
00:10:53.000They say that basically Flynn was a tool of Turkey.
00:10:55.000The documents specifically state that a key component of Flynn's work for Turkey involved the government's efforts to remove from the U.S.
00:11:01.000a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is a fascist.
00:11:06.000Accuses the cleric Fethullah Gulen of orchestrating a failed coup against him in July 2016.
00:11:12.000Flynn began working for Turkey about a month later.
00:11:14.000According to federal prosecutors, they say that Flynn's decision not to disclose he was aiding the Turkish government impeded the ability of the public to learn about the Republic of Turkey's efforts to influence public opinion about the failed coup, including its efforts to effectuate the removal of a person legally residing in the United States.
00:11:31.000Specifically based on lying to the FBI, which is, well, a crime, an ancillary crime to the underlying crime.
00:11:37.000The documents say the defendant's business relationship with the Republic of Turkey was thus exactly the type of information Farrow was designed to ensure was within the public sphere.
00:11:45.000The filing cited Flynn's false statement that he had written an op-ed on election day favorable to Erdogan's view of Gulen at his own initiative.
00:11:52.000So the idea here is that he had created a great team.
00:11:54.000But all of this is ancillary to the big question, which is what has Flynn told Mueller?
00:11:58.000And we're going to talk about that in just one second and what's ahead in the Mueller investigation.
00:12:03.000First, let's talk about how you can keep your home safe.
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00:12:20.000Ring knows that very often somebody will ring your doorbell to see whether you're home or not and then rob your house.
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00:13:28.000People are speculating because it says that he's been helping in three ongoing investigations, including one criminal investigation, that we supposedly don't know anything about yet.
00:13:36.000Maybe that has to do with Donald Trump.
00:13:38.000Maybe it doesn't have to do with Donald Trump.
00:13:39.000Suffice it to say that nothing in the Flynn sentencing recommendation points to any further evidence of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election alone.
00:13:48.000More damaging is a letter that was sent by Roger Stone to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
00:13:55.000So, Roger Stone obviously has been accused, he's a Trump Friend and kind of a dirty politics guy.
00:14:03.000Roger Stone was supposedly the cutout for WikiLeaks funneling information to the Trump campaign.
00:14:07.000Maybe back and forth is the accusation by the left.
00:14:10.000Well, his attorney, Grant Smith, sent a letter to Dianne Feinstein, the ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:14:18.000Saying that Stone is going to plead the fifth.
00:14:20.000The letter says, on the advice of counsel, Mr. Stone will not produce the documents requested by you in your capacity as ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee.
00:14:27.000The requests, as previously stated to staff, are far too overbroad, far too overreaching, far too wide-ranging, both in their all-embracing list of persons to whom the request could relate, with whom Mr. Stone has communicated over the past three years, and the documents concerning imposition of the requests.
00:14:41.000For the additional reasons set forth below, Mr. Stone respectfully declines to produce any documents and declines the invitation for an interview.
00:14:48.000And they talk about the fact that Stone had already testified before the House Intelligence Committee, and Stone had requested that if any testimony were to be given, it would be held in public session because they don't want any leaks, and that is not exactly what is happening here.
00:15:01.000The Senate Judiciary Committee wants to talk to him behind closed doors, and they say that this is This is an invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege, and it must be understood by all to be the assertion of a constitutional right by an innocent citizen who denounces secrecy.
00:15:13.000So it's not that he's trying to hide anything, according to Stone.
00:15:15.000It's that he doesn't want the Democrats selectively leaking what he tells them behind closed doors.
00:15:19.000This is still going to be painted by members of the left as Roger Stone refusing to speak on these issues at the behest of President Trump, and they're going to try to paint this as obstruction.
00:15:28.000It's hard to paint something as obstruction when you don't actually have evidence that Roger Stone did anything bad yet.
00:15:33.000So that will all determine on what Mueller comes forth with in the future.
00:15:36.000Suffice it to say that people who are jumping to conclusions at this point have no basis for those conclusions.
00:15:41.000You're seeing people on the right, like Representative Mark Meadows, who I like from South Carolina, say that the Flynn memo is good news for President Trump.
00:15:59.000And yet there's no mention of collusion.
00:16:01.000I think it's good news for President Trump tonight that this is what it's come down to, even though they said he substantially cooperated.
00:16:08.000I think he substantially cooperated to say that there was no collusion.
00:16:11.000And then meanwhile, you got Jeffrey Toobin over at CNN providing exactly the opposite analysis, which is that this is bad news for Trump, the Flynn sentencing memo.
00:16:18.000As we think about how Mueller is going to characterize what went on in the Trump White House, the fact that he is saying senior government leaders should be held to the highest standards, I would be a little nervous if I were the people involved in the obstruction of justice investigation.
00:16:35.000So bottom line is this is once again just another Rorschach test.
00:16:39.000There's no evidence either way as to whether this is going to be bad for Trump or good for Trump or whatever.
00:16:43.000People are jumping to the conclusion that best fits their preconceived notions of how this is going to go.
00:16:48.000I am perfectly happy to wait until the full Mueller report comes out and then we see what this is going to be.
00:16:53.000If I had to hazard a guess as to what this is going to be, as I have now been saying for months and months and months and months, I think what is going to come out is a lot of bad political behavior by the Trump campaign.
00:17:03.000Nothing criminal, but enough in terms of ancillary crime for the Democrats to try an impeachment proceeding against President Trump.
00:17:09.000Which, by the way, I'm not actually sure would benefit them.
00:17:13.000If you actually look at impeachment proceedings in the past, if you look at the impeachment proceedings that were about to be initiated against Richard Nixon, for example, they were happening during his second term.
00:17:22.000So he had a lame duck president, and there was no real blowback to the impeachment proceedings.
00:17:27.000He never had to worry about the actual blowback in terms of the crowd rallying around that president.
00:17:37.000But for Democrats, It's possible that the best strategy they have here is to not impeach President Trump.
00:17:43.000That instead what they do is they just fulminate for the next two years about how President Trump is deeply corrupt, but there's a Senate that won't allow an impeachment proceeding against him, and so the final revenge of the American public must be had at the ballot box.
00:17:54.000That seems to me a smarter political strategy for Democrats.
00:17:57.000Maybe the worst thing for Democrats here, actually, is just enough material that their base demands an impeachment, but not enough material to rally America around an impeachment effort on the basis of a bunch of Falsely connected dots that don't actually have enough evidentiary basis to support the idea that Trump should no longer be president of the United States.
00:18:15.000Well, meanwhile, in other news, the market just took a massive dive yesterday and ended up dumping nearly 800 points amid rising fears of an economic slowdown.
00:18:24.000According to CNBC, stocks fell sharply on Tuesday in the biggest decline since the October rout.
00:18:28.000As investors worried about a bond market phenomenon signaling a possible economic slowdown, lingering worries about U.S.-China trade also added to jitters on Wall Street.
00:18:36.000The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 799 points, or 3.1%.
00:18:38.000It closed at 25,000, posted its worst day since October 10th.
00:18:41.000At the low of the day, the Dow had fallen over 800 points.
00:18:43.000The S&P 500 also declined 3.2%, mirroring that decline.
00:18:45.000of the day, the Dow had fallen over 800 points.
00:18:47.000The S&P 500 also declined 3.2%, mirroring that decline.
00:18:51.000The NASDAQ composite dropped 3.8% to close back in correction territory at 71.50%.
00:18:57.000The yield on the three-year Treasury note surpassed its five-year counterpoint on Monday.
00:19:21.000If you're a bank and you're lending out for a longer period of time, that is a longer period of time you can't lend to somebody else.
00:19:27.000Usually, a longer-term note is going to have a higher yield, meaning that they're going to have a higher interest rate on a 30-year note than they're going to have on a short-term yield because, again, they're only foregoing the money for a certain amount of time.
00:19:39.000This is true particularly in the government bonds industry, in which the short-term bonds have a lower interest rate yield than the long-term bonds have.
00:19:48.000But if people are very uncertain that over the long term they're going to get their bonds paid back, then you have yield curve inversion.
00:19:53.000If they think the economy is going to take a dive, then they would rather invest in the short term.
00:19:58.000They'd rather invest in short term bonds that pay off in big ways in the next six months than they would invest in a long term bond that pays off In 10 years.
00:20:06.000And so that's a yield curve inversion.
00:20:08.000It's usually an indicator that people are seriously worried about an economic recession.
00:20:13.000Again, this is this is what CNBC talks about when they say the flattening yield curve caused investors to bail on bank stocks in concern that the phenomenon may hurt their lending margins, right?
00:20:22.000Because banks tend to mirror the bond rates.
00:20:24.000And so it is possible that banks are not going to be able to lend at the same rates they were able to lend at before.
00:20:53.000You are preparing for the possibility or eventuality of something bad happening to you, which all makes sense.
00:20:58.000And the same goes for building a food storage plan.
00:21:01.000The government suggests that in case of natural disaster, you're supposed to have a certain amount of food and a certain amount of water on hand.
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00:21:31.000So you buy it, you stick it in the closet, you forget about it, and then, God forbid, a disaster strikes, you're ready to go when other people aren't.
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00:21:52.000Okay, so the stock market took this major dump, and one of the reasons that it took this major dump is because President Trump was signaling yesterday that he was the tariff man.
00:22:02.000He tweeted out, The negotiations with China have already started.
00:22:05.000Unless extended, they will end 90 days from the date of our wonderful and very warm dinner with President Xi in Argentina.
00:22:10.000Bob Lighthizer will be working closely with Steve Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow, Wilbur Ross, and Peter Navarro on seeing whether or not a real deal with China is actually possible.
00:23:34.000Or you could go to a restaurant and buy one for $5.
00:23:36.000It turns out that trade and mutually beneficial trade are the basis of any functioning economy.
00:23:42.000President Trump is freaking out the market and it ain't smart.
00:23:45.000He tweeted out, He tweeted out this morning about how he's optimistic a deal will get done, but whipsawing between, I want a deal, I don't want a deal, tariffs are great, tariffs are awful.
00:23:55.000Like, none of this is good for the long-term security of the market.
00:23:59.000What people want in the market is a certain level of predictability.
00:24:03.000Unpredictability in the market is a bad thing.
00:24:05.000You actually want a consistent level of regulation.
00:24:08.000You want a consistent level of taxation.
00:24:09.000You don't want policy bouncing around like a yo-yo, because when it does, I don't know whether to put my money in the market.
00:25:14.000In any case, Maisie Hirono, who is one of the worst senators in America, she's a senator from Hawaii, she says that the real reason the Democrats lost in 2016 is because they have a hard time connecting with voters' hearts.
00:25:25.000Democrats have a really hard time is connecting to people's hearts instead of here.
00:25:31.000We're really good at shoving out all the information that touch people here but not here.
00:25:36.000And I have been saying at all of our Senate Democratic retreats that we need to speak to the heart, not in a manipulative way, not in a way that brings forth everybody's fears and resentments, but truly to speak to the heart so that people know that we're actually on their side.
00:25:51.000Okay, the truth is, the Democrats speak in much more emotional language than Republicans on a regular basis.
00:25:56.000And so the only real question is whether that is going to work or not.
00:26:01.000Now, one of the things that Democrats do in trying to speak to the heart is they pander like nobody's business.
00:26:06.000There's a study that we talked about on the show last week suggesting that for 30 years, 40 years, Democratic presidential politicians have talked down to black audiences specifically in an attempt to reach for the heart.
00:26:16.000And this is a form of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
00:26:21.000You're seeing this from the most calculated Democratic politicians.
00:26:24.000So I think the most hilarious example of this is Kirsten Gillibrand, who is the most mechanical politician since Hillary Clinton.
00:26:31.000I mean, she is just She is a robot with a face.
00:26:35.000Kirsten Gillibrand used to be, used to be somewhat pro-life.
00:26:51.000It's an amazing thing to tweet, honestly.
00:26:53.000It's like when your polling guru has not had a talk with you yet, but you decide that you have really put your finger on the pulse of America.
00:27:00.000So Senator Gillibrand tweeted out, Our future is female, intersectional, powered by our belief in one another, and we're just getting started.
00:27:12.000Do you really think that this is good politics?
00:27:14.000First of all, you think intersectionality polls great?
00:27:16.000The only people who care about intersectionality are a bunch of rich white losers who go to mainstream colleges and who are not going to vote for you anyway because you are a rich white woman.
00:27:25.000They're going to vote for somebody who is not white.
00:27:28.000They're going to vote for somebody who is a member of the intersectional coalition, who ranks higher than you.
00:27:32.000So I love that Kirsten Gillibrand is trying to pander to the intersectional coalition when she's not intersectional enough for the coalition.
00:27:38.000Also, I am so annoyed by Democrats who do this routine, our future is female.
00:29:23.000But for the Democrats, there's a marked lack of authenticity and it's going to come out in the election, which is why I've always said I think that the the best shot that Democrats have in 2020 would be somebody like Joe Biden, who's authentically stupid, who's authentically Uncle Joe.
00:29:39.000Uncle Joe, by the way, said yesterday that he may be a gaffe machine, but at least he's honest.
00:29:43.000The man Lost his 1988 presidential race because he was outed for plagiarism.
00:31:36.000Okay, before we go any further, and I have much, much more to talk about with you, Then you'll have to go and subscribe over at dailywire.com.
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00:33:29.000So let us speak of the other Democratic candidates.
00:33:36.000So the saddest story of the day is not the memorial for George H.W.
00:33:41.000Bush, because that's actually not sad.
00:33:42.000That's actually kind of, and we'll talk about it in a little while, it's kind of moving and wonderful in some way.
00:33:48.000Obviously, his death is very sad, but that we've talked about.
00:33:51.000The saddest story is that Michael Avenatti ruled out a 2020 bid.
00:33:54.000And I got to be honest with you, it's hard for me to do the show today.
00:34:39.000I love that he actually just says it out loud.
00:34:41.000If it weren't for my family, those jerks, I would definitely run.
00:34:44.000But now they're making me not run, which is why I'm a porn lawyer.
00:34:48.000He says, I will continue to represent Stormy Daniels and others against Donald Trump and his cronies and will not rest until Trump is removed from office and our republic and its values are restored.
00:34:56.000By the way, this is also called being a crappy lawyer.
00:34:59.000So when I hire a lawyer, that lawyer's job is not to turn my case into a political crusade against the person against whom I am filing a lawsuit.
00:35:08.000But according to Avenatti, he's going to get Trump tossed from office.
00:35:12.000I mean, listen, before we bid a fond adieu to Michael Avenatti, it is important to note that if not for Michael Avenatti, Brett Kavanaugh might not be on the Supreme Court.
00:35:19.000So thank you to Michael Avenatti for that.
00:35:21.000He says, I will also continue with my nearly 20 years of speaking truth to power and representing those who need an advocate against the powerful.
00:35:29.000I remain concerned that the Democratic Party will move toward nominating an individual who might make an exceptional president who has no chance of actually beating Donald Trump.
00:35:36.000The party must immediately recognize that many of the likely candidates are not battle-tested and have no real chance at winning.
00:35:41.000We will not prevail in 2020 without a fighter.
00:35:52.000Michael Avenatti out, and a moment of silence for Michael Avenatti, who will go back to representing people who are receptacles of human fluids for money.
00:36:21.000It's interesting because Patrick is close friends with Obama.
00:36:24.000And there was a lot of speculation that Deval Patrick was going to be endorsed by President Obama as sort of the Obama Nouveau.
00:36:29.000He was going to be the man of color running from a liberal state who is going to sweep the nation with a red states and blue states were the United States routine.
00:36:38.000And remember, Obama cribbed a lot of his 2008 language directly from speeches by Deval Patrick.
00:36:50.000Well, Patrick apparently was worried about being able to stand out in a crowded primary.
00:36:54.000He says, it's hard to see how you even get noticed in such a big, broad field without being shrill, sensational, or a celebrity.
00:36:59.000And I'm none of those things, and I'm never going to be any of those things.
00:37:02.000Well, the answer would be that he would get Obama's support or Michelle Obama's support, who's immensely popular.
00:37:06.000She's already sold two million copies of her memoir.
00:37:09.000Um, so he is out, which is fascinating.
00:37:12.000There's been a lot of talk over the past couple of days that one of the reasons that he is out is because Barack Obama is mobilizing his team behind, get ready for it, Beto O'Rourke.
00:37:23.000So, Beto, who lost a close Senate election to Ted Cruz in Texas.
00:37:31.000He's a talented politician, no question.
00:37:33.000It is amazing how Beto O'Rourke has been able to escape the intersectional politics of the left by paying homage to the intersectional politics of the left.
00:37:42.000Now, Beto versus Kamala Harris in Democratic primaries, how does that go?
00:37:47.000Because it is true that a disproportionate number of Democratic primary voters are black and they tend to vote disproportionately for black candidates in Democratic primaries when available.
00:37:59.000Also, who knows how this whole thing breaks down?
00:38:01.000Because remember, a lot of the Democratic Party primaries in these various states are not actually winner-take-alls.
00:38:07.000So you recall that in the Republican primaries, a lot of these states were winner-take-alls, so Trump would win like 31% of the vote.
00:38:13.000In South Carolina, and then he would take all of the delegates.
00:38:17.000And that's how he built up this whopping delegate lead that allowed him to win the nomination.
00:38:22.000Well, a lot of the Democratic primaries are not that way.
00:38:24.000A lot of those Democratic primaries are proportional representation, which means that if you have 11 candidates in a Democratic primary, and each of them are winning 9% of the vote, you could go to the convention without an obvious frontrunner and the superdelegate procedures that were just trashed in order to Sort of cater to Bernie Sanders.
00:38:42.000All of those superdelegates are no longer relevant.
00:38:44.000So you could actually see an enormous amount of chaos and infighting from the Democrats in 2020 with 1 million candidates running against each other, barring the possibility of a big name like Michelle Obama tossing her hat in the ring.
00:38:56.000And I'm not somebody who's going to completely discount the idea that Michelle runs.
00:38:59.000You know, I think that there's a solid possibility that all of this has been a head fake, and that Michelle Obama says, listen, for the good of the country, we need someone unifying.
00:39:07.000If she were to run, it would be a very, very bad thing for President Trump.
00:39:11.000She does have a lot of popularity still with the American public.
00:39:16.000Okay, meanwhile, in other news that is, you know, I think bad news, the Weekly Standard is apparently going to be shut down.
00:39:24.000That is the news from CNN and a bunch of other outlets.
00:39:26.000The Weekly Standard has been a long-time popular right-wing conservative magazine.
00:39:32.000It was largely seen as very much in sort of the George W. Bush mold on foreign policy.
00:39:38.000It was neoconservative, it was very interventionist on foreign policy.
00:39:41.000According to CNN, the fate of the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine that has staked out a position as a publication on the right, still critical of President Trump, is uncertain.
00:39:49.000Editor-in-Chief Stephen Hayes told staff in a series of phone calls on Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the matter, the magazine's precarious position comes after its leadership spent months searching for a buyer, the people told CNN.
00:40:00.000And those people explained that the Weekly Standards leadership had butted heads with Media DC, the current publisher of the magazine, and that the two parties had agreed to allow Hayes to search for a new owner.
00:40:09.000However, Media DC recently informed the Weekly Standards leadership that the company was no longer interested in a sale, those people said.
00:40:16.000Instead, the chairman of Media DC asked to meet with Hayes, and the basic assumption is that the Washington Examiner, which is owned by the same parent company, and is starting a new news magazine, which looks quite good, with Seth Mandel, my friend Seth Mandel, as the editor over there, That they are going to pick up all of these subscriptions that Weekly Standard has and Weekly Standard will shut down as a brand.
00:40:37.000So there's been a lot of talk in both right and left-wing media about whether this is reflective of the fact that the Weekly Standard has been overtly anti-Trump throughout his presidency.
00:40:46.000And I think the answer is sort of yes.
00:40:48.000Now, that's not to suggest that Seth and the new Washington Examiner magazine are going to be pro-Trump MAGA rah-rah-rah.
00:40:54.000Seth is a guy who did not vote for Trump in 2016.
00:40:58.000His wife, Bethany, did not vote for Trump in 2016.
00:41:01.000A bunch of the staffers he's bringing on did not vote for Trump in 2016.
00:41:04.000But there is a difference between the Bill Kristol brand of People who didn't vote for Trump and have spent the last several years tearing down anything Trump tries to do, no matter how good it is, and a brand of people who are very skeptical and critical of Trump, but who are also More than happy to accept the gains that President Trump has provided to conservatives.
00:41:26.000And this manifests in a couple of ways.
00:41:28.000First of all, I think that the Republican base can take, conservatives can take, criticism of President Trump so long as those folks know that the criticisms are stemming from a place of conservatism and not from mere ire that Trump is president.
00:41:42.000And the way you can tell the difference is, am I criticizing Trump on the basis of policy, on the basis of what I think is effective, or am I criticizing Trump because I think that Trump himself is a disgrace to the Republican Party and Republicanism and everything good for Trump and good for conservatism is bad for America now.
00:41:59.000That's why people like Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin and Bill Kristol have largely been criticized by folks on the right, including folks like me, who have said, you guys have forgotten the thread.
00:42:08.000You've lost the thread of the argument.
00:42:10.000You can be critical of President Trump when he does something wrong, but he is the President of the United States, and you can even be critical of whether you think he's been overall good for the Republican Party, but to ignore the benefits.
00:42:20.000And to pretend those benefits don't exist and to downplay and denigrate those benefits is not intellectually honest.
00:42:26.000I think that's been a lot of the backlash to folks like Crystal.
00:42:29.000Now, I don't think that applies, by the way, to a huge number of the staffers at the Weekly Standard.
00:42:32.000I think there are a ton of fantastic writers over at the Weekly Standard, a lot of great thinkers over at the Weekly Standard.
00:42:38.000I'm friends with a lot of those folks.
00:42:39.000I subscribed to the Weekly Standard when I was a teenager.
00:42:42.000And so I'm sad if the publication is shut down.
00:42:45.000I'd like to see someone step in and save it if that's a possibility.
00:42:48.000But this does point out some serious divisions inside the conservative movement, even in the Trump skeptical right, as to what exactly should happen with Trump.
00:42:57.000That's crystallized, too, around Bill Kristol saying that he wants to find a primary challenger for Trump.
00:43:01.000I think, by the way, that that's a terrible idea.
00:43:02.000I think trying to find a primary challenger for President Trump at this point in time, barring some sort of serious criminal activity that mandates a sort of impeachment hearing, I think it's a mistake.
00:43:11.000The reason I think it's a mistake is because then you're forcing the conservative constituency to choose between loyalty to President Trump and their vote in 2016 and to supposedly higher principles.
00:43:23.000And that's not really a real choice, because a lot of people think that Trump has actually been a pretty good vessel for a lot of those principles.
00:43:29.000But it makes for good fodder for the left, who will say, well, look, here's a true con, a true conservative running against Trump, and only won 15% of the vote, and Trump is ripping on that guy day and night, and so the Republican Party has been lost to conservatism.
00:43:41.000I don't think that's true, and I think that providing cover for that argument is an enormous, enormous mistake.
00:43:46.000Alrighty, so let's get to a couple of things that I like, and then some things that I hate.
00:44:43.000I mean, there's still solidarity behind certain principles in America, If we lose that solidarity, we lose everything.
00:45:09.000It's an amazing, amazing moment, obviously.
00:45:12.000So, there's not much more to say about it than that.
00:45:16.000Meanwhile, in other things that I like today.
00:45:18.000So, good on Young America's foundation.
00:45:21.000So, Young America's foundation won a major victory for free speech.
00:45:23.000They've now settled a lawsuit they filed against the University of California at Berkeley.
00:45:27.000The lawsuit was based on the attempt by UC Berkeley to make YAF pay for security fees when I went and I spoke there.
00:45:34.000The university will have to pay YAF 70 grand to reimburse attorney's fees, rescind the unconstitutional high-profile speaker policy, rescind the viewpoint discriminatory security fee policy, and abolish its Heckler's veto so that protesters will be barred from blocking conservatives from speaking, according to the Daily Wire.
00:45:49.000It took over a year for YAF to achieve that victory yesterday.
00:46:19.000YAF and UC Berkeley agreed to a fee schedule that treats all students equally unless students are handling money or serving alcohol at an event.
00:46:27.000This is a monster win for YAF and it should send a notice to universities across the country that have attempted to crack down on free speech by exercising the heckler's veto.
00:46:37.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:46:44.000PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, they've made a lot of media fodder in the recent past for saying some of the dumbest crap humanly possible.
00:46:53.000They compared eating chicken to a holocaust on your plate, which makes perfect sense if Humans were delicious and nutritious.
00:47:02.000And also, if the Nazis had not slaughtered six million Jews in the Holocaust, including women and children, that would make perfect sense.
00:47:09.000Their latest attempt to force us all to comply with their vegan demands.
00:47:13.000And by the way, I'm somebody who is actually pretty warm to the idea that as Nutritional advances are made that we should move toward those nutritional advances that allow us to treat animals better.
00:47:26.000But PETA annoys the living hell out of me.
00:47:28.000PETA tweeted out, words matter, and as our understanding of social justice evolves, our language evolves along with it.
00:47:34.000Here's how to remove speciesism from your daily conversations.
00:47:57.000And they say, take the bull by the horns.
00:47:59.000Instead of that, take the flower by the thorns.
00:48:02.000Yeah, that's definitely going to cure all the problems, PETA, is that we're going to start treating animals better because we say, bring home the bagels instead of bring home the bacon.
00:48:10.000Because when somebody said bring home the bacon, when I say bring home the bacon, I specifically am talking about physical bacon.
00:48:31.000Also, it is worth noting, as producer Senya noted before the program, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is sort of fond of killing animals.
00:48:39.000There's a piece in Huffington Post from 2017 by the director of the No Kill Advocacy Center talking about how many animals PETA actually kills.
00:48:49.000Apparently, in 2014, PETA killed 2,324 of the 2,626 animals it acquired.
00:49:44.000So what exactly is the proof that jury selection is racist?
00:49:47.000Well, based on statewide jury selection records, our Jury Sunshine Project discovered that prosecutors remove about 20% of African Americans available in the jury pool, compared with about 10% of whites.
00:49:57.000Defense attorneys, seemingly in response, remove more of the white jurors, 22%, than black jurors, 10%, left in the post-judge and prosecutor pool.
00:50:05.000I love how they just insert that phrase, seemingly in response.
00:50:09.000There's no evidence that it's seemingly in response.
00:50:10.000That it's like prosecutors say, you know what?
00:50:12.000We're going to remove black jurors from the pool because we're racist.
00:50:15.000And the defense jurors are like, you know what?
00:50:20.000Obviously, what's happening here is that both defense and prosecutors are using race as a proxy for political viewpoint when it comes to matters of crime.
00:50:31.000Well, it's what Thomas Sowell would call discrimination type two.
00:50:36.000So Thomas Sowell, we've talked about some program before, the economist Thomas Sowell, who is black, obviously, he has a book called Discrimination and Disparities, or Disparities and Discrimination, and he posits a sort of thought model when it comes to discrimination.
00:50:49.000There are a couple of different types of discrimination.
00:50:51.000There's discrimination type one, okay?
00:50:52.000This is like, this is open, discrimination type one is you discriminating based on what sort of Food you want for dinner tonight.
00:51:02.000That's you discriminating on the basis of who you want to marry, right?
00:51:23.000This, this jury selection stuff, would be an example of what Sowell calls Discrimination 1A.
00:51:28.000And this is using race as a proxy for other factors in the absence of other information.
00:51:34.000So, to take a perfectly valid example, People on the left use affirmative action in this way.
00:51:40.000They say that in the absence of other information, if I look at a black person and a white person, I can assume the black person is poor and had a worse educational background.
00:51:47.000Thus, we should give that person an advantage in college admissions.
00:51:50.000Now, in the absence of other information, that might not actually be a terrible argument.
00:51:55.000The problem with affirmative action is we do have that other information.
00:52:00.000And because of that, it is discriminatory to simply assume Overriding the evidence that a black person necessarily had a worse life than a white person.
00:52:08.000However, when it comes to jury selection and peremptory challenges, which are challenges that are just issued based on somebody basically not thinking that you're going to vote with them in a jury pool, This is discrimination 1A, which is the same sort of discrimination that is used by taxi drivers in New York, both black and white, who have refused to pick up passengers of different races at the same rate because they are using race as a proxy for criminal behavior.
00:52:34.000Now, is that racism or is that simply using a form of discrimination in the absence of better information?
00:52:41.000And so in the case of taxis, this is why Uber is really good because you can actually have drivers know something about the passengers before they pick them up, right?
00:52:49.000You have a passenger rating and you can tell whether they are safe or not.
00:52:52.000And as a passenger, you actually have to submit your ID to Uber when you first get an Uber account, for example.
00:52:57.000This is why we need more information, not less information, but to attribute jury selection to racism on behalf of the prosecutors, but not racism on behalf of the defense, is to ignore the real issue when it comes to jury selection, which is people using race as a proxy for political viewpoint, and instead suggest that it's just the prosecutors hate black people, which is obviously not the case.
00:53:16.000Adam Serwer has an article over at The Atlantic in which he talks about a judge named Farr, a guy named Thomas Farr, and he was nominated for the federal bench.
00:53:26.000And the Justice Department identified Farr an attorney for Jesse Helms, the senator from North Carolina who used a lot of race baiting when he ran for office in 1984 and 1990.
00:53:36.000For example, in 1984, he put out flyers saying, look how the Democrats are registering so many black voters.
00:53:42.000Pretty obvious race baiting and racist activity.
00:53:45.000The Justice Department identified Farr, an attorney for Helms, as aiding the Helms campaign effort to keep black voters from the polls, particularly in 1984.
00:53:53.000And then Farr had defended gerrymandered maps that were drawn with race as a concern.
00:54:04.000Basically, what happened with this nomination is that Senator Tim Scott was notified about all of this.
00:54:17.000Marco Rubio came forward and he said, as I study this more, I have serious questions about this.
00:54:20.000This was not good enough for Adam Serwer over at The Atlantic, who says that the problem is that Republicans are willing to overlook racism unless it's Tim Scott notifying them of such.
00:54:30.000So basically, he argues Much has been said about the diversity of the incoming class of Democratic freshman representatives and about the corresponding whiteness of the Republican delegation.
00:54:39.000Until the Republican Party is beholden to diverse constituencies, until its base properly regards a tax on the rights to vote, Except for the fact that the Republican Party was going to vote down one of President Trump's own nominees.
00:55:01.000Jeff Flake is a white guy in the Republican Party.
00:55:03.000Marco Rubio is a Hispanic guy inside the Republican Party.
00:55:06.000All it took was a couple of votes to kill Thomas Farr's nomination, and it was killed.
00:55:10.000So this argument doesn't actually follow.
00:55:13.000Attributing far-going down to Republican racism is a weird argument.
00:55:17.000When's the last time a Democratic nominee went down because somebody in the Democratic caucus objected to intersectionality language from the Democratic nominee?
00:55:24.000So, again, this is not to say that there isn't racism among certain Republicans.