Did President Trump try to fire Robert Mueller, and if so, does it matter? Plus, the Trump administration rolls out its big immigration plan and people on both sides are unhappy, and we ll go to the mailbag. Ben Shapiro's Daily Consumptions: 1. Robert Mueller was appointed in June 2017 after President Trump fired James Comey. 2. Jeff Sessions did not protect Trump because he d recuse himself because of the Comey firing. 3. There are 3 types of obstruction of justice under the 18 U.S. Code 1503. 4. The Omnibus Contract Clause covers corrupt or corrupting communication influencing or impeding the due administration. 5. The clause requires a pending judicial proceeding. 6. Trump would presume that an FBI investigation isn t enough. 7. It would be him trying to bribe a prosecutor or something. 8. The Supreme Court is pretty exacting on the application of the law. 9. Even the part of the code that the prosecutor would need to prove that Trump's conduct materially impeded the investigation. 10. So if it is true that Trump tried to fire Mueller, then does it really matter? 11. If it s not true, then what does that mean? 12. Is it enough? 13. What does it mean that Trump is not trying to impede the investigation? 14. Who is really trying to get Trump? 15. What is the problem? 16. What are the real reason that Trump did not fire Mueller? 17. Does he have a case to impeach the special investigator or is he trying to obstruct the investigation, or is it trying to do so? And does he really need to be impeached or not to impeached? and so on and so forth? 18. What do we need to do with the evidence? 19. Is there a case for impeachment? 21. What kind of evidence that would be needed to impeaching Trump or anything else? 22. What would be the evidence that s being impeached of Trump or a person being tried or something like that? How would he be able to be excused for something ? And so on? In this episode we ll cover all of this in this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show? We ll cover it all in this ep? - The good news is finally a Friday, right here! - And we ll talk about it?
00:00:28.000We have now gone down to the water planet in Interstellar, where every hour is actually seven years of time, and we are stuck there because every day is at least 73 news cycles.
00:00:38.000But the good news is that gives us a lot to talk about and we'll get to all of it first.
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00:01:44.000Okay, so, the big breaking news of the day is, of course, this big New York Times report that back in June of 2017,
00:01:52.000President Trump tried to fire Robert Mueller.
00:01:58.000Okay, so Robert Mueller is, of course, the special investigator who was appointed in June 2017 after President Trump fired James Comey and then after he used Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the process of doing it, forcing Rosenstein to recuse himself in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and turn the whole thing over to a special investigator.
00:02:16.000Jeff Sessions did not protect Trump because he'd recused himself.
00:02:19.000Rosenstein didn't protect Trump because he had to recuse himself because of the Comey firing.
00:02:23.000And now it looks as though Mueller, as I've been saying for at least several weeks, is moving from collusion to obstruction.
00:02:30.000Now, the problem with the obstruction of justice case is that in order to actually say that somebody has obstructed justice, you actually need to fulfill one of three laws.
00:02:37.000And I've gone through the three laws a couple of times, explaining what exactly these three laws mean, because there are three different statutes.
00:02:46.000Let's go through them again, because I think that we need to have this clear in our mind.
00:02:49.000When people say that some sort of criminal activity went forward, or that Robert Mueller is going to get Trump, there's two ways to get Trump.
00:02:55.000One is to hit him so hard politically the Democrats have a reason to impeach.
00:02:58.000And the other is to actually suggest criminal obstruction of justice.
00:03:06.000I'm going through this background again.
00:03:08.000We did it a little earlier this week, but I think it's important.
00:03:10.000The Omnibus Clause covers corruptly or by any threatening letter or communication influencing or impeding or endeavoring to influence, obstruct or impede the due administration of justice.
00:03:20.000So the clause requires a pending judicial proceeding.
00:03:22.000So that means that Trump would presume, like, an FBI investigation isn't enough.
00:03:25.000It would be him trying to bribe a prosecutor or something.
00:03:29.000The Supreme Court is pretty exacting on the application of the law.
00:03:32.000The prosecutor would actually need to prove that Trump's conduct materially impeded the investigation.
00:03:37.000Even James Comey said when he was fired afterward that Trump did not materially impede the investigation.
00:03:41.000So if it is true that Trump tried to fire Robert Mueller, the special investigator, then that still is not materially impeding the investigation.
00:03:48.000So this part of the code is probably not being fulfilled.
00:03:50.000So there are a few questions about this.
00:03:52.000One, is an FBI investigation an official proceeding?
00:04:03.000Two, you actually have to prove criminal intent.
00:04:05.000You have to prove that Trump wanted to impede the investigation.
00:04:07.000Now, this would be the area of the code where Trump would be in the most trouble.
00:04:11.000But you also have to show that you took a substantial step toward the accomplishment of that goal, toward an accomplishment of an attempt to obstruct justice.
00:04:17.000I'm not sure that that's fulfillable because, again, even if Trump wanted to fire Mueller, and even if you think that would constitute obstruction, he withdrew that.
00:04:25.000And when he fired Comey, he had every right to do that.
00:04:27.000You can fire your FBI director for any reason whatsoever.
00:04:31.000So the idea that that is technical obstruction of justice is pretty weak.
00:04:34.000It would be very difficult to convict Trump in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion, there is a different problem, right?
00:04:39.000So here is the story from the New York Times.
00:04:41.000With all that in mind, with the fact that there is a section of the U.S.
00:04:44.000Code that theoretically might be applied against Trump, maybe, although you'd have to explain why it is that he doesn't have the executive authority just to fire
00:04:52.000Fire Mueller or fire Comey for any reason at all.
00:04:55.000Obstruction of justice, by the way, by a president would look not like him firing somebody and then letting the investigation continue.
00:05:01.000It would look more like him going to Robert Mueller and saying, you will find me innocent or I will fire you.
00:05:14.000Not quite sure that that is obstruction of justice, particularly if the investigation continues afterward.
00:05:18.000Anyway, the New York Times broke this story.
00:05:20.000So they say, back in June 2017, as it became clear that special counsel Robert Mueller was looking for a pattern of possible obstruction of justice in Trump's behavior, Trump ordered Mueller fired.
00:05:28.000He only retracted the order when White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit.
00:05:32.000So according to the Times report, Trump said that Mueller had a bunch of different conflicts of interest.
00:05:35.000And you can tell that this report is probably true because of what Trump said was the conflict of interest.
00:06:03.000If Mueller didn't work on that case, it probably wouldn't matter.
00:06:07.000Plus, if you're talking conflicts of interest, Trump was interviewing Mueller as a possible FBI director before Mueller took the special counsel job.
00:06:14.000Finally, Trump said Mueller had been up for the FBI director position before he was appointed special counsel.
00:06:19.000It's unclear why that would actually be a conflict of interest.
00:06:21.000So the Times reports, after receiving the president's order to fire Mueller, the White House counsel, Don McGahn, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead.
00:06:31.000They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified.
00:06:34.000Discussing a continued investigation, McGahn disagreed with the president's case and told senior White House officials that firing Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump's presidency.
00:06:43.000Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own.
00:07:08.000If he had fired Mueller, then we'd be talking about obstruction of justice.
00:07:11.000It would look like the Saturday Night Massacre.
00:07:13.000The Saturday Night Massacre going all the way back to 1973 with Watergate is when there was a special investigator, Archibald Cox, who was called in to look at Watergate.
00:07:20.000And Trump asked his attorney general to fire Archibald Cox.
00:07:24.000The Attorney General refused, and so Trump fired the Attorney General.
00:07:40.000But here's what Mueller is going to do.
00:07:42.000He's going to put together the following facts, and he's going to say, or he could say, that this is an attempt to obstruct justice, that Trump is attempting to skew the investigation.
00:07:50.000So, here are all the things Trump has done.
00:07:52.000And they're equally explicable by stupidity.
00:07:55.000As always, I tend to believe the Trump is being an idiot, not Trump is being nefarious story, because I think that mostly Trump is being an idiot, not nefarious.
00:08:02.000So, here are all the things Trump has done.
00:08:04.000First, he fired National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.
00:08:06.000Trump implied that that was prompted by Flynn lying to the FBI.
00:08:10.000Then, he reportedly asked FBI Director Comey to lay off of Flynn.
00:08:14.000Now, if he asked him to lay off of Flynn knowing that he had already lied to the FBI, is that obstruction of justice?
00:08:19.000Not clearly, because he obviously didn't take any measures against Comey from February all the way until May, right?
00:08:46.000The president attacked Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, attacked Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and now the president's apparent attempt to fire Mueller.
00:08:55.000Now, none of this amounts to legal obstruction, probably.
00:08:58.000As I say, and as Alan Dershowitz has said, the president is the head of the executive branch.
00:09:02.000The investigation has not been quieted in any way.
00:09:04.000So whatever attempts were happening, it's hard to prove attempt when there was no actual impeding of the investigation.
00:09:10.000So that is point number one when it comes to this Mueller stuff.
00:09:14.000But it's going to be used as the left as evidence that Trump actually wanted to shut down the investigation, and then he wasn't able to do it.
00:09:23.000But if he had had his druthers, he would have.
00:09:25.000That's going to be part of this broader suggestion by the left that Trump is trying to obstruct justice, even if there's no hard proof that Trump is trying to obstruct justice.
00:09:33.000And the more plausible case is that Trump is just pissed these people won't say he's innocent, and so he's mouthing off a lot, which I've been saying for months is my read on the situation.
00:09:41.000OK, so in just a second, I'm going to explain another scandal that is afoot.
00:09:46.000And that, of course, has to do with the FBI's treatment of Hillary Clinton.
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00:11:16.000Okay, so With all of the Mueller stuff Blowing up the internet with all the Mueller stuff blowing up the the the TV and blowing up the New York Times and blowing up all the media Oh my god, he thought about doing something.
00:11:29.000They didn't do it, which again seems not supremely scandalous to me
00:11:33.000There is something that is supremely scandalous.
00:11:35.000There are new texts between those anti-Trump FBI agents.
00:11:38.000And one of the reasons that people don't trust the FBI, they don't trust the intel community on Trump, is because of this sort of stuff.
00:11:43.000On Thursday night, Senator Chuck Grassley released seven pages of texts between FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his FBI paramour Lisa Page.
00:11:52.000Show that both Strzok and Page were interested in letting Hillary Clinton off the hook so as to earn the FBI's goodwill with the presumed next president.
00:12:29.000And someone else whose name is redacted.
00:12:31.000Another one of the texts, from Page to Strzok, suggested that then-FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki thought that the FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who is still on the job, should recuse himself from the Clinton matter because of his wife's relationship with Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.
00:12:49.000He recused himself from the Clinton stuff like a week before the election, but he should have done it months before.
00:12:53.000Apparently, Page wrote, quote, So Grassley wrote a letter to the FBI's current director, Christopher Wray, quote, So all this is really damning stuff.
00:12:59.000For all the talk about how the FBI is crystal clear, transparent, absolutely clean,
00:13:22.000For all of the talk about that, that is just not the case.
00:13:26.000Now, does that mean that there's an FBI deep state coup to take down Trump?
00:13:30.000No, the evidence isn't all there of that.
00:13:31.000Especially because there isn't a countervailing text message from Strzok to Page saying he didn't want to be staffed on the Mueller investigation because he thought there was no there there.
00:13:39.000I think that Chris Wallace is basically correct when he says that we're not there on the deep state coup.
00:13:57.000I fully agree that we need to pursue all of this.
00:14:00.000I'm not sure that talking about deep state coups against the President, or corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, I'm not quite sure we're there yet.
00:14:08.000Okay, and I think that's probably correct.
00:14:10.000That's why I've been saying, just wait.
00:14:15.000There will be evidence that comes out on some of this stuff, but every time everybody jumps ahead of the story, it comes back to bite them, right?
00:14:20.000Ron Johnson being the case in point, the senator from Wisconsin who had been talking about a secret society inside the FBI, and then yesterday he had to admit that maybe the secret society stuff was just a joke.
00:14:29.000Senator, this text message seems to be a comment about secret society was unjust.
00:14:34.000Do you agree that it appears to be it was unjust?
00:14:38.000Okay, so that seems to be a big step down from the notion that we were all going to find out that there was this big deep state coup happening against the Trump administration.
00:14:49.000And now, with all that said, there's a way to jump in the other direction too.
00:14:52.000So Shep Smith over on Fox News, who's made a bit of a cottage industry lately in quote-unquote debunking his other Fox News colleagues,
00:14:58.000He's very upset about the Devin Nunes memo.
00:15:00.000So, you remember, Devin Nunes is the head of the House Intelligence Committee, and he wrote up a four-page memo talking about improprieties inside the intelligence agencies that he thinks discredit a lot of what's happening in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
00:15:12.000Now, that memo's been made available to all the members of the House.
00:15:15.000Democrats are saying it's a politically driven memo.
00:15:17.000Republicans are saying that it's pretty damning.
00:15:21.000He hasn't even looked at the underlying classified documents, but they want to redact it before it's released.
00:15:25.000Andy McCarthy, over at National Review, has been really good on all of this scandal-driven stuff.
00:15:30.000He has a very good piece over at National Review talking about the Nunes memo and basically saying, listen, there's nothing inherently wrong with Devin Nunes writing a memo.
00:15:39.000That's why it's good for the American public to see it.
00:15:41.000And as for the notion that the DOJ hasn't gotten to review it and they're very upset about it, in order for this memo to be declassified, the President of the United States first has to sign off on it.
00:15:50.000There's like a five-day delay mechanism specifically to allow the President to allow the DOJ to take a look at it, and then Trump can veto any attempt to declassify this material.
00:16:00.000So it really isn't quite as corrupt as some people are making it out to be the memo.
00:16:03.000Now it may turn out that it's just Newton's attempt to distract from the Trump-Russia collusion
00:16:08.000This memo, from which there—if there is a basis for it to be released, the Trump administration and its people could have done that.
00:16:15.000It seems to be a classic weapon of mass distraction.
00:16:34.000Okay, and of course the left was cheering this weapon of mass distraction.
00:16:38.000His own friends are going around talking about how this is a weapon, about how the memo is, Shep Smith's own friends at Fox News are talking about how the memo is the end of the world, and here's Shep Smith debunking them.
00:17:12.000It's just Armageddon all over the place.
00:17:14.000Remember, Nancy Pelosi said all of this was crumbs.
00:17:18.000The Democrats continue to maintain that this was all the end of the world, that everyone was going to die from the tax cuts, and it turns out everything is going fine.
00:17:25.000It turns out that the economy is doing just fine, and all of this was overblown, which is not a shock anyway.
00:17:32.000None of it is really a shock, but it does demonstrate the bad faith in which so many members of Congress talk about politics.
00:17:38.000Now, this is also breaking news today.
00:17:40.000Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Democrat from California and a very motivated political actor, he said,
00:18:13.000Congress should not pass a law preventing the special counsel from being fired.
00:18:17.000The special counsel works for the executive branch.
00:18:19.000There is separations of power in our Constitution.
00:18:22.000There is a way for Congress to check the president.
00:18:24.000If the president gets rid of special counsel Mueller, and people in Congress think that's corrupt, and they think it's an attempt by Trump to get off the hook, they can impeach him.
00:18:32.000That is the prescribed constitutional remedy for all of this.
00:18:37.000There is no prescribed constitutional remedy to the notion that the Congress is going to tell the president who he can and cannot fire.
00:18:44.000If they don't like him firing Comey, they can impeach him.
00:18:46.000If they don't like him firing Mueller, they can impeach him.
00:18:48.000But this idea that Congress is going to step in and now Congress is going to dictate which executive branch officials can be fired by the president, that's foolishness because then that person is not a member of any branch.
00:18:57.000The person can't be fired by the legislative branch.
00:18:59.000The person can't be fired by the president.
00:19:01.000So the person basically is in there for
00:19:03.000Well, the Congress doesn't have the power to do that.
00:19:05.000Congress doesn't have the ability to do that under the Constitution.
00:19:07.000There is this separation of powers in the Constitution.
00:19:10.000Like it or not, the President does have the power to do this.
00:19:12.000And that's what happened with Archibald Cox.
00:19:14.000Nixon did have the ability to fire Archibald Cox, at least through the Attorney General.
00:19:19.000He had the ability to fire the Attorney General.
00:19:20.000He then put in place Robert Bork, who took over and fired Archibald Cox.
00:19:25.000And then he was going to be impeached, so he quit.
00:19:28.000Right, so there are constitutional remedies for all of this, but changing the Constitution in order to give Congress more power over the President's ability to fire a special counsel seems like a foolish thing.
00:19:38.000Now, what's funny is people are going nuts, just to return to the Mueller thing for a second, people are going much more nuts over the Mueller stuff, this new Mueller story, that Mueller was almost fired back in June, than they are over the struck page text, which clearly suggests that the FBI was thoroughly corrupt in the Hillary Clinton investigation.
00:20:09.000And the idea that this provides intent behind Trump for obstruction, you actually have to demonstrate how Trump attempted to obstruct.
00:20:16.000Again, I have a hard time believing that Trump is attempting to obstruct when literally this investigation is on the front page of the newspapers every single day and has not been obstructed in any serious way, as even James Comey recognized.
00:20:28.000So, again, I think that a lot of this is overblown, and I have a feeling a lot more information is going to come out that demonstrates that a lot of the particular
00:20:37.000Okay, so in just a second, we are going to discuss—you know what?
00:20:43.000Let's just—let's go to it right now.
00:20:44.000So let's discuss the new immigration framework.
00:20:51.000This new immigration framework is ticking people off on both sides of the aisle.
00:20:55.000So, on the one side, you have Democrats who are calling him a racist.
00:20:57.000I received an email last night from one of these leftist interest groups talking about how it was just terrible that Trump was proposing this immigration proposal.
00:21:12.000On Thursday, the White House released a rundown on its new proposal regarding the handling of illegal immigrants originally protected under President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
00:21:21.000That program mandated that illegal immigrants brought to the country as children through no fault of their own register with the government and, in return, receive papers allowing work authorization and freedom from deportation.
00:21:30.000Now, Trump, in an attempt to push forward a deal with Democrats to avoid another government shutdown or to avoid this kind of fake deadline on March 5th,
00:21:40.000So here's his framework, and it's making people on the left crazy, and it's making people on the right crazy.
00:21:44.000So it says, number one, there will be full amnesty for 1.8 million illegal immigrants.
00:21:48.000Now remember, only 700,000 illegal immigrants were actually covered by DACA.
00:21:52.000The way DACA worked is you had to register with the government.
00:21:54.000You had to come forward, say, I'm an illegal immigrant, I've been here since I was a kid, and then the government gave you essentially a green card to work in the country and not be deported.
00:22:02.000Trump is extending that out to 1.8 million illegal immigrants.
00:22:05.000So he's almost tripling that number, which is insane.
00:22:08.000Within 10 to 12 years, those illegal immigrants would become full citizens.
00:22:11.000That number includes, as I say, both the 700,000 illegal immigrants, so-called dreamers who registered, and other dreamers who did not.
00:22:17.000The White House is designing this because they say that this is a big concession to Democrats.
00:22:20.000What do they want in return for this rather generous policy?
00:22:23.000Well, they want $25 billion for a fund for the border wall, which presumably will never happen.
00:22:28.000You can put a bunch of money in a fund,
00:22:30.000If it doesn't get spent right away, then the government will just take it from there and use it somewhere else, like the Social Security Trust Fund.
00:22:35.000Republicans would also theoretically receive an end to chain migration.
00:22:38.000Now, chain migration is the leading way that new legal immigrants come into the United States.
00:22:42.000So this is a significant limitation on legal immigration to the United States.
00:23:00.000There is a caveat, and this is what a lot of immigration hawks are upset about.
00:23:03.000They're saying that the delay in the revocation of chain migration means that something like 4 million new illegal immigrants will come into the country because of chain migration.
00:23:14.000This is what Mark Krikorian points out.
00:23:16.000He says that over the course of the next 20 years, because there's going to be grandfathered in, because Trump is not just saying chain migration ends today.
00:23:24.000He's saying everybody who's on the wait list gets in.
00:23:26.000That wait list right now is something like 17 years long.
00:23:29.000The original immigration hawk proposal said that if you're on the waiting list and you're within a year of getting into the country, then you get to stay on the waiting list and you get to come into the country.
00:23:37.000But if you're not, then we will just refund your fee and that will be the end of chain migration.
00:23:41.000So no cousins, no uncles, no grandmothers, none of this stuff.
00:23:44.000We're not going to let just random relatives of yours come into the country if they're a year out from even having their application considered.
00:23:51.000This proposal says that if you're on the waitlist right now, then you are going to stay on the waitlist so another 4 million people will enter the country.
00:23:59.000That's a pretty massive swath of legal immigration coming into the country.
00:24:02.000The visa diversity lottery would also be ended.
00:24:04.000Now, Krikorian has been on Twitter encouraging people to burn their MAGA hats, and he explains why.
00:24:10.000Over at National Review, here's what he says.
00:24:17.000He says, the White House has botched the DACA issue, cutting Bob Goodlatte's House bill off at the knees.
00:24:23.000Bob Goodlatte's House bill limited legal immigration and making it more likely that there will either be no bill at all or that the final bill the president signs, which is guaranteed to be even weaker than this, will fatally demoralize Republican voters in November.
00:24:35.000If the latter happens, the president will be well on the way to joining Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in the impeached but not removed club.
00:24:42.000It's possible that Trump is preemptively surrendering.
00:24:44.000That's what a lot of people are saying on the right.
00:24:46.000That there's a betrayal, and Trump is allowing two million illegal immigrants into the country, who are in the country now to get citizenship, plus another four million legal immigrants into the country, and this is Trump caving, and why would he give away this as his opening bargaining position?
00:25:01.000The notion here is that Trump has given away that bargaining position.
00:25:03.000What he should have said is, I'm willing to deport everyone.
00:25:05.000Now Democrats come to the table so we can make a deal.
00:25:07.000That would be a stronger bargaining position.
00:25:52.000And they're calling it a white supremacist fantasy to say that you want to let 4 million additional immigrants into the country who are results of chain migration, and you want to legalize 2 million illegal immigrants who are currently here, and give them citizenship 10 to 12 years in.
00:26:04.000That does not sound particularly racist.
00:26:07.000This is why I think that people who are suggesting that Trump is negotiating badly here are actually getting it wrong.
00:26:11.000So I've said yesterday, I don't think Trump is a good negotiator.
00:26:14.000But I don't think this is a negotiation.
00:26:40.000Then not only would Democrats not negotiate with him, they would then say, well, you're a racist, and that's why you want to deport everyone.
00:26:46.000And then come March 5th, Trump would have to reinstate DACA himself, and he'd look like a weakling and a racist.
00:26:52.000Right, so Trump, or at least his team knows that.
00:26:55.000And so I think they're doing something else.
00:26:56.000I think they understand no deal is in the offing here.
00:28:33.000If you're viewing it as an opening bargaining position, it's dumb, as Krikorian and Coulter point out.
00:28:38.000And if you're viewing it as somewhere in between, it's sort of what Trump actually wants, it's not the worst proposal I've ever seen, but it is also not the Trumpian, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller immigration plan that everybody was promised back during the election cycle.
00:28:51.000Okay, so in just a second, we are going to get to some things I like and some things I hate, and then we'll also get to the mailbag.
00:28:58.000But first, you're going to have to subscribe.
00:28:59.000So for $9.99 a month, you can go over to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.
00:29:03.000When you do that, when you become a subscriber to dailywire.com, you get the rest of my show live, Clavin's show live, Noel's show live.
00:29:08.000You get to be part of our mailbag right now, like in the next two minutes.
00:29:12.000In the next five minutes, we'll be doing the mailbag.
00:29:13.000You get to ask me questions and make your life eminently better.
00:29:16.000But not only that, on Tuesday, January 30th,
00:29:18.000Our president is going to speak to the nation in his second State of the Union address.
00:29:22.000President Trump speaking in front of the entire nation as the president.
00:29:48.000And they're saying he's a rising star.
00:29:50.000What's really fantastic, I have to say, about America, one of the great things about America, is that anyone can be president if your last name is Kennedy, Clinton, Bush, or Obama.
00:30:08.000Anyway, you can catch the livestream over at dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com,
00:30:18.000Our government, we're gonna mock political leaders, we're gonna mock all of the pomp and circumstance, which I dramatically hate.
00:30:24.000And also, if you're a Daily Wire subscriber, you can ask us questions during the broadcast, and we're gonna take those live during the broadcast, which is one of the reasons you should subscribe.
00:30:34.000Follow us at Facebook and YouTube, and get notified when we go live, so we can spend every terrible moment together and get drunk, and my colleagues will smoke, and I will sit there imbibing their fumes and dying of lung cancer.
00:31:30.000We'll begin, we've been doing fantasy books, so I don't think I've recommended this before, but this is one of those, it's more along the lines of Alice in Wonderland.
00:31:41.000When I was growing up, this was sort of recommended reading for people who are in third, fourth grade, and it's pretty great, by Norman Juster.
00:31:47.000It's about a kid who has to go on a quest, but his quest takes him to all of these kind of bizarre lands.
00:31:54.000There's like a math land and there's a grammar land, but it's really fun and it's really clever.
00:32:01.000I'm a big fan of The Phantom Tollbooth.
00:32:28.000One of the things that CNN, New York Times, a lot of publications do now is they put out pieces in which they suggest that they know better about marriage than traditionalists have known forever.
00:32:38.000So now, CNN says that maybe one way to save your marriage is to get cucked.
00:32:44.000You know, to be a cuckold, to let your partner sleep with another person.
00:32:48.000The authors, David Lay, Justin Laymiller, and Savage Love, right?
00:32:53.000Savage Love, writer and activist Dan Savage, who is always a proponent of promiscuity.
00:32:58.000They want you to know that most people who try being a cuck find it a positive and rewarding experience, and that, quote, acting on cuckolding fantasies can be a largely positive experience for many couples and hardly a sign of weakness.
00:33:08.000No, it's definitely a sign of weakness.
00:33:11.000If you want to see your partner screwed by somebody else, I'm going to go with you're a weak person, and you have no idea what morality or love really are.
00:33:19.000I'm pretty stringent on the whole, don't be happy with your partner having sex with others.
00:33:25.000Leigh says, this fantasy has been around as long as marriage and sexuality.
00:33:29.000By the way, Leigh has written a book called Insatiable Wives.
00:33:32.000But we're hearing more and more about it these days, and more people are rejecting the social stigma about this fantasy.
00:33:36.000The authors didn't actually talk to any heterosexual couples.
00:33:38.000The study is titled, The Psychology of Gay Men's Cuckolding Fantasies, and the only people who were interviewed for the study were 580 men who self-identified as gay.
00:33:47.000They extrapolated the study's findings across the board.
00:33:49.000Of course they extrapolated the findings across the board, because they want to pretend that men and women are exactly the same.
00:33:54.000Anybody who believes that men and women are precisely the same when it comes to sexual fantasies?
00:33:58.000Like, you know why men don't care about being cuckolded with other men?
00:34:01.000Because men don't care about promiscuity.
00:34:03.000If the deal is I get to have sex with whomever I want, they're probably willing to let their partner have sex with whomever their partner wants.
00:34:14.000And so it's not particularly a shock that men who are involved in other relationships with other men tend to be more promiscuous than men who are involved in relationships with women, by numbers.
00:34:33.000One of the authors, Lay Miller, appears to have spoken to heterosexuals about cuckolding.
00:34:37.000He said that 58% of men and 33% of women had at least thought about the practice, but he didn't get much information on whether they had tried it, or whether they thought that it would be a good idea, or whether they were the ones being cuckolded.
00:34:48.000But because the practice isn't quite as taboo in the gay community, he says it might be a little more prevalent among gay men.
00:34:53.000Savage, of course, is enthusiastic about this.
00:34:54.000He says, it's not cuckolding if there isn't an element of humiliation, degradation, or denial.
00:34:59.000Our erotic imaginations have the ability to turn shame lemons into delicious kink lemonade.
00:35:05.000So, I'm so glad that CNN decided to cover this fringe behavior and then pretend that it applies equally to everyone, men and women, male-female relationships.
00:35:13.000Pretending that relationships between men and men are the same as relationships between men and women is patently insane.
00:35:18.000If you've never met a man, this makes perfect sense to you.
00:35:20.000If you were born on a desert island and you've never met a person of the opposite sex, maybe this makes perfect sense to you.
00:35:25.000If you have ever met another man and you're a man, you know that this, the idea that any relationship you have with another man is equivalent to a relationship that you would have with a woman is totally bizarre.
00:35:35.000But this is one of the things that the left has put upon us is this notion that all distinctions between men and women are obviously social constructs.
00:35:42.000That is obviously and eminently untrue.
00:35:58.00038-year-old Joseph Roman, charged with repeated predatory criminal sexual assault.
00:36:03.000The numerous attacks began in 2015, continued until earlier this month.
00:36:06.000Roman has reportedly confessed to some of the attacks to authorities.
00:36:10.000The victims were the daughters of his friends.
00:36:13.000So he's now identifying as a child in a man's body.
00:36:17.000Well, I don't see why he can't do that.
00:36:19.000I mean, we've been told that you can be a woman in a man's body or a man in a woman's body, so it seems to me a lot easier to get to the point that you say that I have the mentality of a nine-year-old, I have the developed brain of a nine-year-old, as opposed to I have the developed brain of a woman inside a man's body.
00:36:31.000There's just as much evidence for one as for the other, meaning none.
00:36:35.000So I don't see why everybody is anti-trans age.
00:36:38.000I sort of made this point in one of the famous YouTube videos that I did.
00:36:41.000It was based on a speech that I did where a transgender advocate got up and asked why I would not say a man was a woman, and I asked her what her age was, and she said she's 21.
00:36:53.000Well, this guy's not nine years old either, even though he says he is.
00:36:56.000One more thing that I hate, and then we'll get to the mailbag.
00:36:58.000The final thing that I hate here is that UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is now being accused of having an affair with President Trump.
00:37:04.000I'm getting really, really annoyed with the foolishness
00:37:11.000of the left that suggests that anytime, anytime a woman of power is in Republican position, it's because she slept her way to the top.
00:37:19.000And Nikki Haley is now being accused, kind of quasi, by Michael Wolff.
00:37:24.000He appeared on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, and he said he was absolutely sure that Trump is having an affair, which would not be a giant surprise.
00:37:30.000He then said that careful readers of his book could find a clue, saying, now that I've told you, when you hit that paragraph, you're going to say, bingo.
00:37:37.000Politico says readers quickly homed in on a single sentence in the runaway bestseller, which has been criticized for everything from sloppy copy editing to gross factual inaccuracies.
00:37:44.000Wolf writes, So now the entire media has jumped on this rumor, suggesting that perhaps Nikki Haley is sleeping with Trump.
00:37:48.000Again, there's no evidence to this whatsoever.
00:37:59.000Haley says that this, of course, is absolutely not true.
00:38:15.000It goes to a bigger issue we need to be conscious of.
00:38:17.000At every point in my life, I've noticed that if you speak your mind and you're strong about it and you say what you believe, there's a small percentage of people that resent it, and the way they try to deal with it is to try and throw arrows, lies or not.
00:38:30.000And the thing is, when women work, they prioritize, they focus, and they believe if they're going to do something, do it right.
00:38:34.000Others see that as too ambitious or stepping out of line.
00:38:37.000The truth is, we need to continue to do our job, and if that means they consider it stepping out of line, fine.
00:38:41.000This is why Nikki Haley is very popular, because she doesn't take this kind of crap.
00:38:45.000It is insane that the media have been running with this rumor, but the media had nothing to say for years.
00:38:50.000Apparently there's a New York Times story out today, it's a breaking story, that a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, who was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a young subordinate, was kept on the campaign at Hillary's direct request, according to four people familiar with what took place.
00:39:04.000So the left, that's happily willing to defend Me Too, is also happily willing to accuse Nikki Haley of sleeping her way to the top,
00:39:11.000And also to overlook Hillary Clinton letting a campaign aide off the hook, who is apparently sexually harassing young women.
00:39:17.000The campaign advisor was Burns Strider.
00:39:20.000Instead, Strider was docked several weeks of pay in order to undergo counseling, and the young woman was moved to a new job.
00:39:25.000So just class all the way around for the left.
00:40:03.000He says, Hey Ben, do you think the government should be allowed to force someone to buy car insurance when a car is purchased?
00:40:07.000How can the government force me to buy something I do not want?
00:40:10.000So the reason that the government is allowed to force you to buy car insurance when the car is purchased is because there's an externality.
00:40:15.000So the government is allowed to regulate
00:40:18.000Products that have an automatic externality.
00:40:20.000When you drive a car, if you get in a car accident, the insurance is not to protect you.
00:40:23.000The insurance is to protect the other drivers.
00:40:25.000If you have a bunch of drivers on the streets who don't have car insurance, and then they hit you, and they damage your car, or they kill you, then you've created a serious problem.
00:40:34.000Now, there's a possible solution to that that doesn't involve car insurance, and that is that you actually hold people accountable under tort law, and you get rid of bankruptcy law, right?
00:40:43.000But, if the idea is that there is a privilege that is driving, and that privilege
00:40:47.000Exists because their externalities to the privilege you don't have a right to drive you have a privilege to drive and That privilege comes along with externalities Then it's not wrong to have the government Make you buy car insurance if the government makes you buy health insurance is different because there it's not about externalities there it's about you are responsible for your own health and that is in that that is creating costs and
00:41:11.000So if you don't have health insurance, people theoretically could say, we don't want to cover you, which is what people do.
00:41:16.000The same is not true of car insurance.
00:41:17.000If you hit me in an accident, then I don't have a choice as to whether I wanted you to hit me in the accident.
00:41:21.000Seth says, Mr. Shapiro, I listened to your debate with Sam Harris, and I heard you repeat the question, how do you go from an is to an ought a couple of times?
00:41:26.000Would you mind elaborating on that more?
00:41:27.000Is this begging the question of how morality came into existence, and the ought is the moral implication, and the is comes from an evolutionary scientific perspective derived from observation of supposed fact?
00:41:36.000Love listening to these conversations.
00:41:38.000So, I'm glad that you enjoyed the conversation.
00:41:40.000The point that I was making was a point that was originally made by David Hume.
00:41:43.000He basically suggested that you cannot look at the universe and then just say that because things are a certain way, then you ought to act a certain way.
00:41:50.000There is no connection, for example, between the way the universe is constructed and morality.
00:41:56.000You could construct a thousand different types of morality.
00:41:59.000There's nothing that dictates they have to go from what is to what ought to be or how you ought to act.
00:42:05.000Now, this has significant ramifications for scientific materialists like Sam.
00:42:18.000One is, when he says construct a morality, he's assuming
00:42:21.000A freedom of choice that I'm not sure that his philosophy allows to exist.
00:42:24.000I mean, this is a real debate between Sam and me.
00:42:27.000And I don't want to misconstrue his position or misstate his position, so you can read his book on free will if you think I am doing so, and get his more detailed perspective.
00:42:35.000That's problem number one that I had, and I was trying to point that out to Sam, and I think we were talking past each other.
00:42:39.000And problem number two is that Sam says, well, there's really three problems.
00:42:43.000He says that if you know everything in existence, then you could be able to determine what's right and what's wrong.
00:42:47.000I don't think that's true, because people have a unique capacity to look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions.
00:42:52.000And then problem number three is, if you knew everything in the universe, you would be God, right?
00:42:56.000I mean, the premise that I use is that God does know everything in the universe, and therefore he was capable of constructing morality.
00:43:02.000So you're just assuming that eventually human beings will be able to become gods, and I'm not sure that I buy into that premise.
00:43:46.000The example that's typically used is, I'm wearing a watch, right?
00:43:49.000The watch that I'm wearing is made to tell time.
00:43:53.000It is either good at telling time or it is bad at telling time.
00:43:55.000What dictates whether the watch is virtuous is whether the watch fulfills its purpose.
00:44:00.000And you can look at the universe and say, what is man made for?
00:44:02.000Man is made to use his reason because his reason is different from what animals have.
00:44:06.000And so he should be using his reason, and whatever is in service to reason is good, and whatever is not in service to reason is immoral.
00:44:13.000This is sort of the Greek view of why reason is important and what virtue is built to do.
00:44:18.000So those are the two ways to reach purpose, to reach ought from is.
00:44:23.000The West has rejected both of those in modern times, and I think because of that, we've landed on these aimless shores with people telling you that you can construct your own purpose, and we've failed at that.
00:44:33.000Tyler says, Ben, what was the best way you studied for the LSAT?
00:44:37.000Well, actually, I use Testmasters, and I'll openly say so.
00:44:39.000Testmasters is a great program, so consider that an endorsement, Testmasters, and also advertise with us, because as long as I'm giving you plugs, you may as well pay us some money for it.
00:44:49.000I was wondering what your opinion is on making Haredim serve in the Israeli military, and if you lived in Israel, which political party would you vote for?
00:44:54.000I've said for years that Haredim should serve in the Israeli military, but if you have universal military service, you should not be able to opt out of Israeli military service simply because you say you are studying.
00:45:03.000If I were a secular Jew in Israel, and my kid were going to fight in the army, and your kid were studying in Yeshiva, and the suggestion was that your kid was doing as much for the state of Israel as my kid is doing, I would say that's ridiculous and self-serving.
00:45:16.000Now, even if you want to say that you think that there's a spiritual component to study that does not exist for fighting, and that you need a few people studying, that's one thing.
00:45:26.000But to say that everybody who wants to study gets out of military service is a cop-out, in the same way that it was a cop-out during the Vietnam War, to say that everybody in college got out of military service.
00:45:56.000Everybody's been very respectful of my time and my privacy, which is great.
00:46:00.000And in fact, I've made it a habit to ask people if they want pictures, because people are very shy, very often, about asking for pictures, so I'm not trying to be self-aggrandizing.
00:46:08.000I know that people want pictures, and they're trying not to be rude.
00:46:11.000People have been really, really good about it.
00:46:41.000It's hard to predict how it would affect turnout.
00:46:43.000Usually off your elections, the base is what has to turn out.
00:46:45.000The base may not be happy with this, and so you might see a drop in turnout.
00:46:48.000In a general election for Trump's 2020, it would probably help him.
00:46:51.000For 2020, he would look more moderate.
00:46:54.000People who are independents would probably flock to him more often.
00:46:57.000Conservatives could point to the victory.
00:46:59.000But for the midterms, I think it would probably hurt him in the short run.
00:47:01.000Also, where do you land on your rip-throws dilemma?
00:47:11.000The ethical theory that I most often hold to is the Judeo-Christian biblical ethical theory, which suggests that there is an objective good and there is an objective bad, and the notion that
00:47:27.000You can construct your own good and bad is foolish.
00:47:32.000Utilitarianism, everyone intends to be a little bit of a utilitarian, but I think that utilitarianism is open-ended and depends on what you define as your hierarchy of utility.
00:47:42.000So it's open to various different rebukes.
00:47:44.000I think Kant's categorical imperative is open to a bunch of different rebukes because
00:47:48.000There are plenty of things that I would be willing to do to other people and have them done to me that other people wouldn't be willing to have done to them.
00:47:53.000I think that the categorical imperative is a little bit weak.
00:47:59.000The Eryphthro Dilemma, which I, to be honest with you, just looked up again because I've been going through the Republic and my head is filled with things.
00:48:06.000The Eryphthro Dilemma found in Plato's Dialogue is where Socrates asks Eryphthro, So in other words, is God above morality or is morality above God?
00:48:12.000So my answer is that God is above morality, but we believe in the Judeo-Christian tradition that God
00:48:27.000has done us the great service of embedding morality in his own actions.
00:48:35.000But, Judaism says that God also acts in moral fashion.
00:48:38.000That doesn't mean we always understand the way that he is acting, but this is the entire reason that, for example, Abraham argues with God.
00:49:18.000We can see God's back, but we can't see his front, right?
00:49:19.000In the section of the Torah where Moses asked to see God's face, meaning, I want to see your logic for the universe, God says, no one can see my face and live.
00:49:28.000You can see my back, meaning you can see the shadow of my morality, but I'm never going to allow you to see my entire math of how this works.
00:49:35.000So the answer is piety is loved by God because it is piety.
00:49:43.000It is not piety just because it is loved by God.
00:49:45.000God is above morality but has bounded himself to a certain sense of morality.
00:49:51.000I recently listened to Tucker Carlson.
00:49:52.000Apparently, China has recently successfully cloned a monkey.
00:49:55.000They're heralding this is a crucial step to cloning humans.
00:49:57.000If we limited human cloning to only clone and replace damaged organs, I don't see an inherent problem with it.
00:50:01.000However, I do see an inherent problem with attempting to regulate and enforce a policy limiting cloning to only that.
00:50:06.000Well, I agree that we should limit cloning to only organ cloning for those purposes.
00:50:12.000I think trying to clone a human life, there are serious moral issues with it.
00:50:18.000Beyond the question of the selfishness of wanting to clone yourself, right?
00:50:23.000And or the or the idea that you're preserved like are you let's put it this way you have grandma grandma's about to die you decide you're gonna clone her and when you clone her she is presumably uh going to come out the the she's she's going to be birth right you take her dna
00:50:37.000You insert an egg and now you have cloned grandma.
00:50:40.000Presumably she comes out as a baby because she's not gonna be born as a 99 year old person.
00:50:44.000So if that's the case, then are you now putting on that person all of your preconceived notions about grandma?
00:50:50.000Is that person actually a fully independent person?
00:50:52.000It raises some serious ethical dilemmas.
00:50:54.000We are kind of far scientifically from cloning a human being, at least in healthy ways, even when we've cloned animals.
00:50:59.000Even when we've cloned animals, the animals
00:51:02.000My understanding is have not tended to live as long as the originals.
00:51:05.000So I think there's still some kinks to be worked out in that process.
00:51:08.000I think that the left has fallen deeper and deeper into a victim mentality that has forced them into tribalism of the highest order.
00:51:23.000That victim mentality is now manifesting really strongly.
00:51:26.000I think that Barack Obama's election was part of this.
00:51:27.000I think Obama had such an opportunity to unify the country.
00:51:30.000And when Obama decided instead to exploit political divisions between us for his own political gain, I think the people glommed on to that, and it made the country a whole hell of a lot worse.
00:51:37.000I think we were much more unified in 2007 with all that was going on then than we are today.
00:51:42.000And I think a lot of that has to do with Democrats embracing polarities not only among politics and political opinions, but polarities among tribal groups, tribal identity groups.
00:51:52.000They're using identity as a substitute for logic, reason, or even political positioning.
00:51:56.000Okay, so we will be back here tomorrow?