The Trump camp decides to attack the Mueller investigation in a new way, the media continue to play into Trump s hands on MS-13, and we check the mailbag. This is a busy news week, and there s a lot to get to today. Today, we begin with the latest on the Mueller probe, including the revelation that George Papadopoulos and Donald Trump Jr. had a secret meeting with a Russian woman, and the details of that meeting were leaked to the press by the Trump Jr., who then released them to the public. Then, we get into the latest in the ongoing saga of the Trump-Russia investigation, and Ben Shapiro tries to explain why there s no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Finally, tickets finally go on sale for our upcoming live show in Dallas and Phoenix on August 1st, and they go fast! Be sure to check out Dailywire.me/Dailywire for tickets and VIP packages! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first pack! Want to sponsor the Dailywire podcast? ? Subscribe to Dailywire? Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Like, comment and subscribe to our new podcast on iTunes? Subscribe & review this podcast! If you like what you're listening to, leave us a review and share the podcast with your fellow podcast go to gimlet.fm/TheBenShawn and we'll be giving out 5 stars and a FREE gift to one lucky listeners get 20% off their first week of the latest issue of the new issue of CRITVODCAST starting July 20th July, exclusively on the next week! Thank you get 5% off the new ad-only ad-free version of The DailyWire podcast, only $5, and a discount on your first month gets 5GBARDARDON PRODUCING WEEKEND! FREE FASTEST WEEKEND OFFER! and FREE PROMO PROMOTING ONLY, 7 DAYS TO CHECK OUT THE VIP PRODCAST AND PATREON THE FIRST SUBSCRIKE AND VIP PROMETORION AND VIP PACKAGE ONLY, AND AUGMENT ONLY, FREE PROGRAM AND VIP SUPPORTED INCLUSION ONLY, PROMOTE THE FIRST CHALLENGE AND VIP TRAINING PRODONE PROMCAST?
00:00:00.000The Trump camp decides to attack the Mueller investigation in a new way, the media continue to play into Trump's hands on MS-13, and we check the mailbag.
00:00:13.000Man, this has been a busy news week, and there's a lot to get to today.
00:00:16.000I do want to remind you that we will be talking, doing this show, in August, in Dallas and Phoenix.
00:00:22.000And if you've been hearing me talk to premium subscribers all week about these two live podcasts that we're doing well today, at 10 a.m.
00:00:28.000local time, tickets finally go on sale for the general public.
00:00:31.000So you don't have to be a subscriber, now you can buy the tickets.
00:00:33.000We've sold almost half of each event just in the pre-sale, so general admission tickets and VIP packages are gonna go really, really fast.
00:00:39.000Be sure to check out dailywire.com slash events
00:00:42.000Okay, before I get into the news of the day, and there is plenty of news today, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Dollar Shave Club.
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00:02:19.000We begin today with the latest on the Mueller investigation.
00:02:22.000So, there's this theory that is going around on the right, and it's very hard to tease out exactly what people are accusing various agencies of.
00:02:30.000The story's gotten so convoluted and so confused by this point, it's kind of hard to follow the timeline as to what happened when the Mueller investigation began, when the Trump-Russia investigation began, when George Papadopoulos was meeting with whom, and when Trump Jr.
00:02:46.000So we're going to try and tease out some of that today.
00:02:49.000And I have to say, I think that there are a lot of people who are on the right who are falling for the line that the FBI was deeply corrupt before the election.
00:02:58.000And I'm not seeing the evidence that the FBI was acting in deeply corrupt fashion with regard to the Trump campaign before the election happened.
00:03:05.000I think a bunch of things can be true at once.
00:03:07.000And I think here are all the things that can be true at once.
00:03:08.000One, I don't think there was collusion between Trump and Russia.
00:03:11.000I do not think that the Trump campaign was actively working with the Russians in order to shape the election or in order to release emails from Hillary Clinton via WikiLeaks or any of that sort of thing.
00:03:19.000I don't think there's any evidence of that whatsoever, too.
00:03:22.000It is true that there is willingness to collude on the part of some members of the Trump team.
00:03:28.000had a meeting at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was a Russian cutout, who was apparently going to give him, according to Rob Goldstone, a former Trump publicist, was going to give the Trump campaign a bunch of material on Hillary Clinton.
00:03:42.000Veselnitskaya did meet at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., and then Trump Jr.
00:03:45.000released, as you recall, on Twitter, a bunch of emails saying that between him and Goldstone, talking about how he was excited that the Russians wanted to back his dad in the presidential campaign.
00:03:53.000Now, willingness to collude is not actually a crime.
00:03:57.000Being willing to do something isn't a crime.
00:03:58.000If I'm willing to rob a bank, that is not the same thing as me taking an active step toward the robbing of the bank, which is what conspiracy would actually involve.
00:04:05.000And even then, conspiracy is a little bit difficult to prove.
00:04:08.000It's a notoriously difficult crime to prove in court.
00:04:11.000Hey, that's not what was happening here.
00:04:12.000What happened here was willingness, not quite the same thing.
00:04:15.000So point number one, there's no evidence of collusion.
00:04:17.000Point number two, there's pretty good evidence of willingness to collude by Donald Trump Jr.
00:04:21.000and also by George Papadopoulos, who is this low-level foreign policy aide to the Trump campaign, who all the way back in, I believe it was April of 2016,
00:04:30.000Had a meeting with a professor in London who's actually from Malta, I guess, and was associated with the Russian government and had said to George Papadopoulos that the Russians had access to Hillary Clinton's emails.
00:04:42.000So, that doesn't mean the email's past tense, but Papadopoulos was willing to hear about it, and then he apparently bragged about it within the hearing of the Australian ambassador, who passed that information along to the FBI, which initiated part of the investigation against George Papadopoulos and attempts to get into the Trump campaign's business.
00:05:00.000Those two things, again, no collusion, willingness to collude.
00:05:03.000Point number three, if there was willingness to collude and there was good evidence that there are a bunch of people in the Trump campaign who are at the very least kind of dirty.
00:05:11.000Paul Manafort, who is the Trump campaign chair, is a dirty dude who was involved with the Ukrainian government when it was basically a Vladimir Putin
00:05:30.000It would have been remiss for the FBI not to actually check this stuff out because, again, reverse the names.
00:05:34.000If it weren't Donald Trump we were talking about here, but Hillary Clinton, everybody on the right would have said, how could the FBI not have gone further in their investigation into Hillary Clinton?
00:05:43.000If it had been Chelsea Clinton meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya to find dirt on Trump, we'd all be like, whoa, whoa, hold up, hold up now.
00:05:59.000It is also true that all of the leaks of this information post-election are scurrilous and those are corrupt.
00:06:05.000Leaking out information that does not have confirmation, leaking out information in an attempt to implicate the Trump campaign for stuff it didn't do, all of that is corrupt stuff from Obama holdovers.
00:06:14.000A lot of that started happening immediately after the election.
00:06:17.000It passed all the way through up until February and March of 2017 when Trump was forced to fire Michael Flynn.
00:06:24.000All of that stuff, I think, is corrupt.
00:06:26.000So, if there's corruption inside the FBI and the CIA, that corruption manifested itself not in the investigation itself, it manifested itself in the leaks of the investigation.
00:06:34.000Okay, so today, the big story that is being pushed by folks on the right is that it was the investigation itself, the stuff before the election, that was a real problem on the part of the FBI.
00:06:44.000So, Andy McCarthy, a friend of mine and a very good lawyer,
00:06:48.000He makes the case over at National Review, and here's what he writes.
00:07:06.000So Congress has asked for all the material as to what sort of spying activities were going on with regard to the Trump campaign, and the Justice Department has said, no, we're not going to turn all of that over because it would implicate an informant.
00:07:15.000It would put his life at risk, for example.
00:07:36.000So McCarthy's saying, well, then why are you leaking all that stuff to the press about what the informant knew and who kind of information about who he was sort of?
00:08:17.000Okay, well, first of all, it depends how they were using these counterintelligence measures.
00:08:22.000You'd have to make the case that what the FBI was doing was actually illegal unless they had, for example, a criminal warrant.
00:08:28.000And I'm not seeing any evidence of that.
00:08:30.000So, one of the accusations that the New York Times makes is that the FBI had an informant inside the Trump campaign.
00:08:35.000Well, that informant could have been somebody who was working for the Trump campaign and went to the FBI.
00:08:39.000It could have been somebody the FBI approached to go and talk to the Trump campaign.
00:08:42.000It is not illegal for the FBI to do this.
00:08:43.000This sort of stuff happens regularly in all sorts of investigations.
00:08:47.000Brad Heath, who is an investigative reporter for USA Today who covers law and justice, he says,
00:09:06.000Which don't require the factual predicate of a formal investigation.
00:09:08.000There are lots of reasons to be skeptical of how the government uses informants.
00:09:12.000One ATF informant testified that to get targets for a sting, he basically went up to people on the street and asked if they wanted to do drug robberies.
00:09:18.000There were guys in Atlanta who were paying other people for information so they could proffer it to the feds to get a sentence reduction.
00:09:23.000Courts have more or less said that none of this is a valid basis to get a case thrown out.
00:09:27.000So even when informants are super sketchy, you can't get a case thrown out.
00:09:31.000There's also not a clear line, at least not in law, according to Brad Heath, that separates what techniques are okay in investigations of politicians compared to, say, drug dealers.
00:09:38.000And you see informants in those cases, too.
00:09:40.000The Uranium One case had an informant.
00:09:42.000The Senator Menendez case had an informant.
00:09:45.000But if using an informant does taint an investigation, argues Brad Heath, to the point, as Giuliani suggested, that it might have to be shut down, that would implicate a lot of federal cases.
00:09:53.000And again, even with counterintelligence, it's not clear to me that a counterintelligence investigation can't use an informant in order to garner more information.
00:10:01.000So in other words, if this was not initiated for stupid reasons, if this was initiated because there's a piece of intelligence that went to the FBI, that George Papadopoulos had been meeting with a guy who was offering him all sorts of information from Russia,
00:10:13.000And then they initiated an investigation and there was an informant.
00:10:17.000I still am not sure why this is suddenly such a terrible thing.
00:10:20.000Now, a lot of this is being used to to say that Trump was right when he said that Trump Tower was wiretapped.
00:10:28.000But if what Trump was saying is my campaign was surveilled by the FBI, that obviously was true.
00:10:33.000But that doesn't answer the question as to whether his campaign should have been surveilled by the FBI or whether people in his campaign should have been under FBI investigation.
00:10:40.000None of that speaks to what actually happened.
00:10:43.000So I think that what we have to recognize is that there are two ways of viewing this investigation.
00:10:48.000One is as though you were in the shoes of the FBI as this evidence was coming to you.
00:10:54.000If you were viewing the evidence as it came in, it would have been perfectly reasonable, in my opinion, to say, OK, we need to get an informant on what's going on here because there's a lot of suspicious stuff going on here and we need to check it out.
00:11:05.000In retrospect, because they haven't been able to dig up anything really of substance, it looks much more unreasonable.
00:11:10.000It looks like, wow, you spent all these resources.
00:11:12.000But if we used that same logic with law enforcement investigations all the time, then law enforcement would not be able to do investigations.
00:11:19.000Because you can only assess whether to do an investigation based on the evidence that is in front of you at a given time.
00:11:24.000Listen, this is not me trying to rip on the Trump campaign.
00:11:26.000Again, I don't think any collusion happened.
00:11:28.000But I want to be as intellectually honest as possible about what's going on in this investigation so we can actually target the bad guys.
00:11:56.000And we obviously should look into the Carter Page FISA warrant and make sure that that was legit.
00:12:00.000We obviously should make sure that what the FBI did was legit, but I'm not seeing the evidence that the FBI was attempting to get Trump during the campaign.
00:12:07.000They didn't release any of this information during the campaign.
00:12:09.000They kept it on the down low all the way through the campaign.
00:12:11.000It was only after the campaign that they started leaking that stuff out, and I would imagine that was a lot of frustrated pro-Hillary people who were leaking that sort of material out in the first place.
00:12:19.000Now, I want to explain a little bit more about that in just a second.
00:12:21.000But first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
00:12:24.000So, it's nearly the end of the line for this particular deal over at the USCCA.
00:12:29.000Look, the world is a really scary, unsafe place in many ways.
00:12:33.000There are a lot of times when there are rogue shooters.
00:12:35.000Today, there's an awful, awful story about a mass shooting happening at a Texas high school, which we'll bring to you a little bit later in the show.
00:12:41.000But that just means that as a law-abiding citizen, you should own a gun.
00:12:44.000You should own a gun to defend yourself and to defend the lives of others.
00:12:47.000I've been talking about this for weeks now.
00:12:48.000You have a few days left to get your dream gun for free.
00:12:50.000Right now, the USCCA is giving five of you, my lucky listeners, $1,000 to buy your dream Kimber with extra ammo.
00:13:22.000I believe that all law-abiding people who know how to use a weapon should own one, because there are bad people out there, and the U.S.C.C.A.
00:13:28.000helps make sure that that can happen for you, not only through this special deal, where you go to defendmyfamilynow.com, and you have five chances to win a thousand bucks for a gun, but also, they bring you all the legal help that you need, all the education on gun training that you need.
00:14:04.000Unlike criminal cases, counterintelligence matters are classified.
00:14:07.000If agents had made public disclosures about them, they would have been committing crimes and violating solemn agreements with foreign intelligence services, agreements without which those services would not share information that the U.S.
00:14:16.000national security officials need in order to protect the country.
00:14:18.000In the scheme of things, the problem is not that the FBI honored its confidentiality obligations in the Trump case while violating them in the Clinton case.
00:14:26.000The scandal is that the FBI, lacking the incriminating evidence needed to justify opening a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, decided to open a counterintelligence investigation.
00:14:35.000The question is really whether you're allowed to have an informant on a case, whether or not there's a formal investigation that has been filed.
00:14:41.000And I'm not seeing the evidence that that's the case.
00:14:43.000Again, informants come in all shapes and sizes, and I think that this is a bit of an overreach by a lot of folks who are hoping to sully the original origins of the investigations, that then they can make the excuse that the investigation has to be shut down.
00:14:57.000Right now, Kimberly Strassel is doing some of the same stuff over at the Wall Street Journal.
00:15:00.000She has a piece today where she talks about House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who appeared on Fox & Friends, where he provided a potentially explosive hint at what's driving his demand to see documents related to the FBI's Trump-Russia probe.
00:15:12.000He said if the campaign was somehow set up, I think there would be a problem.
00:15:14.000So now I guess the going theory here is that Carter Page and George Papadopoulos
00:15:19.000We're not, in fact, in the thrall of Russians.
00:15:22.000Instead, it was that the FBI and the CIA set up a sting operation in order to entice them to look as though they wanted to work with the Russians.
00:15:30.000So that changes the theory of the case.
00:15:32.000Now the argument is no longer there shouldn't have been an informant after we found out that Papadopoulos and Page were doing stuff.
00:15:37.000Now the argument is that the informant himself was the person who sort of entrapped Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
00:15:45.000I'm going to need to see the evidence of that.
00:15:46.000I'm going to need to see the evidence as to what it was.
00:15:49.000Is the implication here that the London professor that George Propagopoulos met with back in 2016, that that guy was actually a FBI stooge, that he was somebody the FBI had deployed?
00:16:00.000I don't see all the evidence of this in any real way.
00:16:04.000I'm gonna wait for all the evidence to come out.
00:16:07.000But I'm gonna need to see a little bit more than has been provided to me thus far if I'm to buy that the FBI was setting Trump up in some way.
00:16:14.000And again, if they were setting Trump up in some way, wouldn't you imagine they would have leaked all this information a little bit earlier?
00:17:01.000That it was stronger prison sentences in the first place that led to the massive decline in crime that happened between 1994 and 2015.
00:17:06.000I think that releasing people back onto the streets is a bad idea.
00:17:09.000We've done it here in California, and it's been a giant fail.
00:17:12.000In California, what you've seen instead is a massive uptick in crime based on the release of criminals back into the general society.
00:17:18.000So, it depends what criminal justice reform looks like.
00:17:21.000In any case, there are a lot of people who think that the criminal justice system ought to be reformed, and the White House is among those people.
00:17:28.000So, this guy Meek Mill was supposed to visit the White House to take part in a panel that was to include, I guess, Vice President Mike Pence, and Jared Kushner, and Van Jones, who is obviously very much to the left.
00:17:40.000They're bringing people who are right and left, black and white, to talk about these issues, which is what they should do if they're going to discuss these issues.
00:17:46.000Well, Meek Mill was supposed to go, and then he bailed.
00:17:48.000He bailed because, according to TMZ, Jay-Z called him up and convinced him otherwise.
00:17:52.000So according to Bossip.com, I never heard of them, they said that reports were released that Meek agreed to travel to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to discuss prison reform because Trump is currently hosting a prison reform summit.
00:18:03.000Participants in attendance are said to include members of Congress, various activists, and people who have become victims of the system.
00:18:07.000But it looks like Meek isn't going to make it to the event, and that's all due to words of wisdom from Hove.
00:18:34.000For eight years, everybody in the Black Lives Matter movement was suggesting the law enforcement system is biased and that criminal justice reform had to be pursued.
00:18:43.000And now, Donald Trump's going to do that.
00:18:45.000And you're not going to go meet with him?
00:18:47.000Because to meet with him would undermine the cause?
00:19:06.000The only way criminal justice reform gets done with Trump as president is right now with a bunch of Republicans in the House and a bunch of Republicans in the Senate and President Trump in the White House.
00:19:13.000If you want a deal, you need to talk to the guy who's capable of making the deal.
00:19:18.000But Jay-Z doesn't want the image of a bunch of black people meeting with Trump because it might make Trump seem not as racist to the press.
00:19:28.000He said, Well, no, the whole point here was that President Trump wanted to meet with leaders in the black community, left and right, so they could have a broad ranging discussion and hopefully come to some sort of consensus on the issue.
00:19:35.000There's no way to come to consensus on the issue if you won't attend the meeting.
00:19:54.000What do you expect Trump to do at that point?
00:19:57.000Frankly, I'm confused by this, but this is why the entire Kanye West saga of the last few weeks actually matters.
00:20:03.000Because when Kanye West said, listen, I'm not going to listen to you guys.
00:20:05.000If I feel like meeting with Trump, I'll meet with Trump.
00:20:07.000If I feel like wearing a MAGA hat, I'll wear a MAGA hat.
00:20:11.000And people inside the rap community went crazy.
00:20:14.000And Kanye was tweeting out all of the various tweets he was receiving and texts he was receiving from people like John Legend.
00:20:19.000And Kanye, to his credit, said, listen, I'll say what I want.
00:20:23.000That's exactly what Milmeek should have said here.
00:20:24.000What he should have said is, listen, this is too important an issue for me to let partisanship get in the way.
00:20:28.000It's too important an issue for me to solve.
00:20:30.000I don't like stuff that Trump has said.
00:20:31.000So I'm not going to pretend that I think that Trump has been great on racial issues.
00:20:34.000But if I can get a win here, why wouldn't I go and help my fellow black folks who apparently are very much ensconced in this fight for criminal justice reform?
00:20:42.000Instead, Meek said, Now, when partisanship trumps even the best interests that you are apparently trying to pursue,
00:21:01.000I would suggest that you have allowed your partisanship to blind you to the actual facts on the ground.
00:23:15.000But not because I don't think they're animals or monsters, simply because human beings can be animals and monsters, but monsters aren't real, and treating people as animals neglects the fact that all human beings have a capacity for evil, but that's more of a deep gloss.
00:23:27.000When Trump calls them animals, I don't have any moral objection to it.
00:23:29.000It's not like I'm, oh, well, you know, that's really insulting to the MS-13 members who chopped that guy's head off.
00:25:40.000OK, and then she tweeted out, I love this, she tweeted out that anyone who uses the word animals to describe another human being is just a terrible human being.
00:26:49.000Any of these babies here could end up committing terrible crimes in the future.
00:26:53.000It's easy, once they've done so, to distance ourselves from their humanity.
00:26:56.000But it's much more honest and challenging to realize that they were all babies once, and to think about what in society their home life, etc., took for them from baby to violent gang member, and then to think about collective action we could take to mitigate those conditions.
00:27:06.000And we should particularly interrogate the role of American policy in helping to make MS-13 the organization it is now.
00:27:12.000Dehumanizing large groups of people is the demagogue's precursor to visiting violence and pain upon them.
00:27:16.000It makes it easier to destroy their families, and much worse.
00:27:19.000Hey, first of all, I'm happy to deliver violence and pain on MS-13.
00:27:21.000I think most law-abiding people are very happy to deliver violence and pain on the members of MS-13, one of the worst gangs in modern, on planet Earth today.
00:27:50.000John Legend does not explain, but John Legend's last name is Legend, and this means he knows what he is talking about.
00:27:55.000I do love the fact that, this is my favorite thing, is that he says, you know, when he looks at babies in the incubators over at the hospital, when he looks at the babies who are sleeping, right after, he says, some of those kids could turn out to be gang members, and that's why we should treat gang members with respect.
00:28:18.000When those babies, before those babies were in the nice little plastic things at the hospital and they were all sitting there in cute little rows.
00:28:36.000Five minutes before the baby's born, not a baby, and not worth preserving, and not a human, an animal, a ball of cells, a fetus, whatever, that's the Democratic Party platform.
00:28:45.000Five minutes before they are born, completely worthless, now human babies.
00:29:10.000So the separation between the baby in the womb and the baby five hours later is apparently a greater separation than the separation between the baby now and the MS-13 member 30 years later.
00:29:24.000Okay, like, Trump's magic power is very powerful.
00:29:56.000The ability of Donald Trump to troll, by the way, is so incredibly strong that he even was able to get Democrats to be very, very angry over this little joke video that he put up over Laurel and Yanni.
00:30:08.000I'm sure you saw this whole Laurel and Yanni thing where there's this piece of audio
00:31:10.000Look at the comments underneath this video from President Trump on Twitter, and it's all like, why aren't you going out there and saving babies, President Trump?
00:31:16.000Why do you hate children, President Trump?
00:31:18.000How could you possibly be spending the seven minutes it took to put together this video, President Trump, not focusing on the real issues in the world, like global war?
00:32:13.000Now the tickets are open to general admission.
00:32:15.000I guess they do in like half an hour for our events in Dallas and Phoenix.
00:32:18.000But if you've been a subscriber, you've been able to get early tickets, which would have been better for you because now it may be sold out.
00:32:42.000He's left his tears out of her cold mugs.
00:32:45.000Check them out for the annual subscriber fee of 99 bucks cheaper than the monthly subscription.
00:32:48.000Also check out Apple News where we have all of our daily wire material.
00:32:52.000Our traffic has been through the roof and really appreciate everybody checking out our news on Apple News.
00:32:56.000Also, you just want to watch later, listen later, go over to YouTube, go over to iTunes.
00:32:59.000You can check it out for free, leave us a review.
00:33:01.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:33:09.000Okay, so, meanwhile, let's go to the mailbag.
00:33:12.000Let's just jump right into the mailbag because there are a lot of good questions.
00:33:14.000All right, so, Carl says, Hey Ben, can you recommend a good book or two, not too lengthy, that serves as a good primer for the history of Israel up until at least the 2006 election in Gaza?
00:33:23.000I feel like my historical knowledge here is lacking.
00:33:25.000So the one that I always recommend is there's a great book by a guy named Mitchell Bard called Myths and Facts About Israel, and it's about 400 pages, but it's really user-friendly because it's not, you know, you trying to swallow enormous sums of information at a time.
00:33:53.000And I think when I was younger, it certainly clouded my objectivity on issues with regard to this particular issue especially.
00:34:00.000And that's why there are things that I've said about this issue that I regret, obviously.
00:34:04.000I mean, there's a column I wrote in 2002, I believe, when I was 19, 18 years old, about transferring people from
00:34:12.000From Judea and Samaria on the Gaza Strip and Israel internally, outside of Israel, and then later I came out and I said I thought that column was immoral and wrong and I shouldn't have written it.
00:34:19.000I think that objectivity, look, there's no question that confirmation bias and feelings can cloud your objectivity.
00:34:27.000And this week was not evidence of my objectivity being clouded, it was evidence of the media's objectivity being clouded because it is pretty obvious what was going on.
00:34:35.000I was just thinking of Hamas at their word.
00:34:37.000Folks in the media had decided that they were not going to take Hamas at their word.
00:34:41.000As I said yesterday, it was like watching that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where the Black Knight is standing there and King Arthur is swiping off his limbs.
00:35:18.000Me for believing Hamas, or the media for ignoring both the Israelis and Hamas, and coming up with their own narrative that makes no sense and has nothing to do with the facts on the ground?
00:35:25.000Okay, Carl says, uh, let's see, I did Carl.
00:35:27.000Stephen says, hey Ben, huge fan, when do you think the Mueller investigation will end?
00:35:31.000Also, it was great seeing your speech at Clemson back in 2016.
00:35:33.000Well, thank you for coming to the speech at Clemson.
00:36:07.000The way you should get speakers at your school is to ignore what the administration says, to put in an application the same way as everybody else, and then if they reject it on the grounds of ideological bias, then you come to Yale
00:37:36.000Now, you'll see in the Thug Life videos, there are times when people are not quite so cordial and not quite so nice.
00:37:40.000And then my obligation in debate is to destroy them in front of as many people as possible, really to destroy their arguments in front of as many human beings as possible, and to do so in as brutal a fashion as is necessary.
00:37:50.000So you have to kind of gauge what the purpose of a given conversation is in debate.
00:37:54.000Crystal says, Ben, do you ever wear yarmulkes in other colors besides black?
00:37:57.000Are there holidays that call for specific colors?
00:38:17.000Maybe the last time I wore a white kippah.
00:38:37.000Believe it or not, in the Orthodox community, you can tell somebody's philosophy by the kind of kippah they wear.
00:38:41.000So if you're a velvet kippah, this tends to mean that you are more black hat.
00:38:44.000And being black hat, wearing a black hat, another physical indicator, is an indicator that you are less ensconced with sort of the modern world and more ensconced with a more strict interpretation of Torah.
00:39:01.000I go to a black hat minion, which means I interact with people who are black hat all the time.
00:39:06.000People divide themselves in a bunch of ways depending on the kind of kippah that they wear.
00:39:10.000In Israel, if you're kippah sruga, right, which is a knitted kippah, that means that you probably served in the military and you're in favor of people serving in the military.
00:39:16.000If you are a velvet kippah, then the chances are that you're probably less in favor of people serving in the military, although even there, there are some soft boundaries.
00:39:24.000So I know you didn't want that level of specificity.
00:39:38.000My opinion on the Supreme Court decision is that states, of course, should be able to decide whatever they want on sports betting.
00:39:44.000I don't know what the hell the federal government has to do with sports betting.
00:39:47.000I don't think the federal government should have anything to do with sports betting.
00:39:49.000I don't think the federal government should have anything to do with sports.
00:39:51.000I don't think the federal government should have anything to do with nearly anything.
00:39:54.000So I'm wondering where in the Constitution it says that, where in Article 1 of the Constitution it says the legislature gets to determine the levels of betting federally within states.
00:40:12.000OK, if I bet on sports, it's not the same thing as if I'm playing in the game and betting on myself or betting on somebody else.
00:40:19.000Well, the big pro, the big con right now is that Puerto Rico has significant levels of debt that would have to be apparently assumed by the federal government if Puerto Rico were to be made into a state.
00:40:33.000I'm not averse to making Puerto Rico a state.
00:40:35.000I think there's been a lot of discussion and Marco Rubio, I think, is in favor of making Puerto Rico a state.
00:40:41.000It's always sort of a political football because there are a lot of people who think that if you make Puerto Rico a state and people can suddenly, their votes count in presidential elections, that this changes the nature of politics in the United States.
00:40:51.000I don't see a huge obstacle to making Puerto Rico
00:40:54.000A state other than the problem of they've been running not as a state for a very long time, which means they've run up a significant amount of debt and they've been pretty poorly governed.
00:41:01.000Joseph says, Hey Ben, our son just made the cutoff to enter kindergarten next year.
00:41:05.000My wife is dead set on holding him back.
00:41:06.000She's fearful we'll be putting him at a disadvantage down the line due to this being the trend in New Jersey.
00:41:10.000Assuming he's ready, do you think it could be more damaging to send him as the youngest kid in the grade or to hold him back, which could lead him not having to work as hard down the line?
00:41:37.000So by the time I was done, I was definitely the youngest kid in my class by a fair bit.
00:41:41.000I think that people seek their own level.
00:41:43.000I don't think that whether you enter fifth grade as a very old five-year-old or enter fifth grade as a very young five-year-old is going to make any significant difference in the realm of life.
00:41:53.000And if your son's a high achiever, his aging can make the difference.
00:41:56.000So I don't think it makes a huge difference.
00:41:58.000I would tend toward the idea of putting your kid in school early if it means they're more challenged.
00:42:47.000So the reason they didn't move the U.S.
00:42:48.000embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is they were ensconced in a foreign policy establishment that lied to them and that told them that if they did so, it would create a conflict, ration in the Middle East.
00:43:02.000The basis for that was that there was an intifada, meaning an uprising, a violent terrorist uprising in 2001, when Ariel Sharon, who was almost prime minister of Israel, who was elected very shortly thereafter, went up on the Temple Mount, essentially 2000, went up on the Temple Mount, and there was a riot that turned into a quasi-war in the Middle East.
00:43:22.000And so the idea was if we moved the embassy, then we'd be creating all sorts of chaos.
00:43:25.000To be fair to those other presidents, the situation on the ground is not quite the same as the situation is now.
00:43:30.000Thanks to President Obama making nice with Iran, that has pushed all of these other countries into a position where they have to ally with Israel in order to counter Iran.
00:43:37.000So is it possible that if the embassy had been moved 20 years ago, there would have been actual activity on the Arab street?
00:43:46.000But bottom line is, I think it should have been done for moral reasons regardless, because failing to recognize truth, I think, is generally a large mistake.
00:43:52.000Noah says, Hey Ben, I'm a huge fan of yours.
00:43:54.000I may disagree with you on some things, but I appreciate how intellectually honest your approach is.
00:43:58.000I also take your opinion on family values to heart.
00:43:59.000With that being said, that has been troubling me.
00:44:03.000Being troubling me, I'd love to hear your thoughts on.
00:44:05.000Now I'm more of an agnostic deist, but my values fall strongly in line with Jewish Christian teachings.
00:44:09.000This makes dating difficult since most people who are non-Christian tend to have liberal values.
00:44:13.000So naturally I am interested in dating a Christian, but few Christians want to be unevenly yoked with a non-Christian.
00:44:18.000Well, first of all, I think there are a lot of people who are like you, Noah.
00:44:20.000I think there are a fair number of people
00:44:35.000Listen to me, listen to Jordan Peterson, listen to people who believe in the value of the Judeo-Christian heritage, but aren't necessarily totally on board with the miraculous events surrounding Jesus or the miraculous events surrounding Sinai, for example.
00:44:48.000That said, I think the big question when it comes to your religious beliefs is how are you going to raise your kids?
00:44:59.000They allow your kid to believe in something that is more important and something higher, and allow your child to identify a narrative that makes that story true.
00:45:09.000This is why, if you were dating a Christian and you said,
00:45:11.000I have my personal struggles with believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ, for example.
00:45:15.000But, when it comes to our children, I want our kids to learn about the divinity of Jesus Christ because I believe that that divinity is important to understanding the development of the Western world and a set of Judeo-Christian values.
00:45:25.000And then, when they become an adult, they can make a decision about what they actually want to believe.
00:45:29.000I think there are a lot of Christians who might be interested in talking about that.
00:45:34.000You may start going to church and you may start to believe in the miraculous.
00:45:36.000You may start to believe that it is possible that God actually, whether it's Sinai or whether through Jesus, brought a certain system of morality to the world through interaction with the world.
00:45:46.000You never know how your beliefs are going to change.
00:45:47.000But being honest and open about the person you're dating, about where you stand, I think is key number one.
00:45:51.000Key number two is recognizing how you're going to raise your kids.
00:45:53.000Because when I say the values matter, it doesn't just matter between you and your wife.
00:45:56.000It matters between how you and your wife are going to deal with your child.