It's a weird news cycle, and there's a lot to talk about in a variety of different topics. Will President Trump pardon Paul Managansen? Will Robert Mueller indict President Trump's buddies? Will you drive a car in 10 years? These and other questions will be answered on The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro. Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro is a writer, comedian, and podcaster. He is the host of the podcast and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, NBC, and other media outlets. His latest book, is out now, and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you don't already own an Amazon Prime membership, you can get 15% off your first month with discount code: PODCASTLEPRODUCING at checkout. The show is now available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and Hardcover. All Audible formats, including Audible, Audible and Podchaser. You can also watch the show on the Apple App Store and Google Play, and subscribe to the podcast on Audible. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcasting friends! Subscribe to the show and tell me what you're listening to on Apple Podcasts! and other podcasting services you've been listening to this past week. I'll be listening to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast on the next episode of next week! Subscribe, Subscribe, Share, and tell a friend about your thoughts on the show! or any other podcast you've listened to this podcast you're enjoying it on your favorite podcasting platform! Tweet me what's up with your thoughts, suggestions, suggestions or suggestions you'd like to hear about the latest in podcasting app? or suggestions for future episodes of the show? or other things you're looking for me to add to the next Ben Shapiro podcast? on social media? I'm listening to the latest episode of The Ben's latest podcast and other things I'm talking about? Subscribe on Insta: in that's going to be featured on the Ben Shapiro Podcast? , tweet me , and other stuff like that's cool, right in the next one? in on Instafilter? and other things like that?
00:00:25.000But first, let's talk about the coffee that you need to get yourself going in the morning.
00:00:30.000Sorry to spoil the surprise, but if you are getting a gift from me this Christmas, it would be coffee from my favorite coffee company, Black Rifle Coffee.
00:00:36.000And yes, I do indeed give Christmas gifts to people around the office.
00:00:40.000And they will be shocked when they learn that I'm giving them Black Rifle Coffee.
00:01:00.000And the coffee club makes things easy.
00:01:01.000Just pick your blend, the amount you want.
00:01:03.000Black Rifle ships your coffee right to your door every single month, hassle free.
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00:01:10.000They offer 3, 6, 12-month prepaid and pay-as-you-go subscriptions available for gifting.
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00:01:19.000Black Rifle Coffee is indeed the gift that keeps on giving.
00:01:22.000Check them out at BlackRifleCoffee.com.
00:01:24.000By the way, they share our priorities, keeping America awesome, and as veterans who founded the company, Just go and check out all their content online.
00:01:44.000By the way, as I say, I would give Black Rifle Coffee as a Christmas gift to the people who work here.
00:01:48.000Not only because it's awesome, but also because we have a bunch of it already stocked in the kitchen.
00:01:52.000So all I really have to do is, like, open it up and just Hand it off to people at the office and they don't have to pay for the gifts, which is like double whammy for me.
00:02:26.000And is Paul Manafort going to be set on fire by Robert Mueller after being dumped off the top of the Randy's Donuts sign in downtown Los Angeles?
00:02:34.000And this is why I really don't like talking about these topics so much, because I'm an evidence-based person, and that means that I like to wait for all the evidence to come out before speculating upon it.
00:02:44.000Two things drive me to talk about this.
00:02:56.000First off, yesterday we reported that there was a shock Guardian story from the UK Guardian talking about Paul Manafort meeting with Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, which is a Russian front group that hacked Hillary Clinton's emails and John Podesta's emails, and then started releasing them en masse just before the election.
00:03:15.000And the allegation has been that President Trump's campaign was working with Assange and with Wikileaks and with the Russian government in order to skew election results, specifically in order to prevent Hillary Clinton from being elected.
00:03:27.000So, The Guardian comes out with this bombshell report, and this would be a big dot to connect, right?
00:03:31.000Because now you would have the campaign chairman for President Trump meeting with Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, in advance of WikiLeaks releasing these emails.
00:03:41.000Well, as it turns out, not so fast, everyone.
00:04:01.000But Manafort himself says he is denied ever meeting Assange following a report he had met with the WikiLeaks founder at least three times in previous years.
00:04:08.000On Tuesday, The Guardian reported, this is according to CNN.com, that Manafort had secretly met several times with Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, including around the time he was made a top figure in the Trump campaign.
00:04:18.000The Guardian citing sources, just sources, right?
00:04:26.000And whenever somebody says, I cite my sources, let's just remember that President Trump said that he had very good sources suggesting that President Obama was born in Kenya.
00:04:36.000Anyway, the Guardian citing sources, which is to say, no one, said Manafort had met with Assange in 2013, 2015, spring 2016.
00:04:43.000Manafort responded to the Guardian's report.
00:04:46.000He called it totally false and deliberately libelous.
00:04:48.000And then he kind of took the lapels on his ostrich jacket and went, With them, because that's awesome.
00:04:53.000Manafort said, quote, I've never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him.
00:04:57.000I've never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly.
00:05:01.000I've never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter.
00:05:04.000We are considering all legal options against The Guardian, who proceeded with this story, even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.
00:05:10.000The newspaper said it was unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.
00:05:14.000It's not just Manafort saying that this is false.
00:05:19.000More importantly, there are a bunch of people who deal pretty regularly with Julian Assange and they say it is legitimately impossible for Manafort to have visited Assange and for it not to be recorded in the Ecuadorian embassy logs.
00:05:29.000Because this is one of the problems with the Guardian story.
00:05:31.000Nowhere in the embassy logs does Paul Manafort appear.
00:05:35.000Eva Gollinger is an author who has visited Assange several times.
00:05:38.000She says, quote, It is impossible that Manafort went into the Ecuador embassy to see Assange and was not registered or videotaped.
00:05:51.000And then she questioned the sourcing for the article.
00:05:53.000She said they cite documents from Sinayn, Ecuador's intelligence agency, currently being disbanded because of dubious activities.
00:05:59.000They've fabricated documents before to serve their agenda.
00:06:01.000And they are definitely out for Assange because he published some of their secret documents.
00:06:05.000The Daily Beast, Betsy Woodruff, noted that The Guardian then went and started stealth editing their piece.
00:06:11.000Self-editing means you go and you edit a piece without actually noting the correction.
00:06:15.000Sometimes it's innocuous, and sometimes you're actually changing the material in the piece without notifying readers, so that you're sort of hiding the boo-boo that you made before.
00:06:24.000The Guardian weakened some of its language in the Manafort-Assange story.
00:06:28.000So, originally it said, it is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.
00:06:32.000They changed it to read, it is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.
00:06:37.000Right, before the last apparent meeting, as opposed to before, but the last meeting.
00:06:41.000So, they're now weakening all the language.
00:06:43.000Manafort, as we say, is now threatening a lawsuit against the UK Guardian.
00:06:46.000So all of the hubbub yesterday over this bombshell story that Manafort had met with Assange, it turns out that that may be collapsing in on itself.
00:06:54.000Meanwhile, there's a story today about Jerome Corsi, who apparently has a deal with President Trump.
00:07:01.000Jerome Corsi is the author and conspiracy theorist who had written an entire book about why Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
00:07:12.000And he now claims in a forthcoming book that he has a joint defense agreement with President Trump and was provided limited immunity during his testimony before special counsel Robert Mueller's grand jury to discuss a cover story he claims he crafted for Trump confidant Roger Stone.
00:07:24.000This is according to the Daily Caller.
00:07:26.000Corsi has been interviewed six times in the investigation over the course of more than two months, and he writes in a new book that he entered into a defense agreement with Trump after being advised that Trump's lawyer, Jay Sekulow, was interested in the arrangement.
00:07:37.000The defense agreement would basically involve Corsi under investigation talking with Trump's team to inform them of the questions he was being asked by Mueller.
00:07:44.000This of course would make Mueller deeply upset and angry because you don't want your witnesses talking to one another and getting their story straight.
00:07:50.000Describing his interactions with the special counsel's office, Corsi claims he was granted what's known as limited use immunity.
00:07:56.000For testimony he gave during his September 21st grand jury appearance regarding conversations with Roger Stone about an August 31st, 2016 memo he wrote about former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
00:08:08.000Corsi says he received immunity for testimony that he and Stone developed a cover story to help explain Stone's now infamous August 21st, 2016 tweet that it would soon be Podesta's time in the barrel.
00:08:19.000According to Corsi, He and Stone hatched a plan in which Corsi would write a memo about the Podestas to allow Stone to cite it as the basis for his tweet retroactively.
00:08:27.000So the implication from Stone's tweet is that he knew in advance about Wikileaks releasing Podesta's emails and then Wikileaks released the emails showing that Stone had been coordinating with Wikileaks and presumably if Stone was in touch with the Trump campaign then this would be the avenue by which Russian collusion was taking place.
00:08:43.000Corsi supposedly is going to testify that He and Stone came up with an arrangement where he would sort of backfill the story.
00:08:52.000Instead of it being that Stone was working with WikiLeaks and then he sort of let the cat out of the bag saying that WikiLeaks was going to release stuff on John Podesta, now the story was going to be that Jerome Corsi had come up with a memo and that was the basis for Stone's tweet.
00:09:06.000The revelation, if accurate, would undercut Stone's testimony to the House Intelligence Committee that opposition research on the Podesta brothers' business activities was the catalyst for the tweet.
00:09:14.000Stone vehemently denied Corsi's claim about the origin of the memo to the Daily Caller on Monday.
00:09:19.000He insisted that he and Corsi discussed the Podesta brothers' activities and that his tweet was a reference to oppo research that would come out on the topic.
00:09:26.000And there are a bunch of Twitter posts on this particular subject.
00:09:29.000Of course, he announced the release of his book on Monday in an interview.
00:09:32.000He also claims that prosecutors wanted him to plead guilty to making false statements regarding WikiLeaks.
00:09:37.000He rejected the offer, saying he would not plead guilty to a crime that he did not commit.
00:09:41.000And again, he says that Jay Sekulow, Trump's lawyer, suggested a mutual defense agreement that could be verbal in nature and did not need to be put In writing, joint defense agreements are common in criminal proceedings when multiple witnesses and investigative targets are dealing with the same prosecutors.
00:09:54.000Trump has one with Paul Manafort, for example.
00:09:57.000So here's where things start to get dicey.
00:09:59.000Does it look like Paul Manafort and Jerome Corsi and President Trump are coming up with a mutual defense agreement because they are trying to get their story straight and protect themselves from the from the special investigation of Robert Mueller, or is it that Robert Mueller is actually being predacious, that he's being predatory, that he actually is trying to peel off these people one by one and hit them with false allegations, and then force them to turn on each other and testify about each other falsely, and so you need a mutual defense agreement so that people can coordinate with each other.
00:10:29.000From a defense perspective, the latter.
00:10:31.000From a prosecution perspective, the former.
00:10:33.000But does any of this look particularly good for President Trump?
00:10:37.000when you are coordinating with other witnesses in a case about you, it looks like you're trying to set up some sort of cover story.
00:10:42.000Corsi writes of one instance in which his lawyer had contact with Trump's lawyer.
00:10:47.000He says he wanted his lawyer to warn Trump.
00:10:49.000We had to assume the special counselor would have everything.
00:10:51.000All emails, text messages, written notes, phone records could be obtained by search warrants.
00:10:55.000I wanted the president, I wanted the president warned not to give in-person verbal testimony to Mueller under any circumstances, he said, expressing concern that prosecutors were moving sort of perjury trap against him for misremembering details about a July 25th, 2016 email that he received from Roger Stone.
00:11:11.000And one of those emails supposedly is an email from 2016 from Corsi to Roger Stone about the WikiLeaks email dumps.
00:11:18.000NBC News has obtained draft court papers sent to Corsi by Mueller's office in which Corsi apparently said that Roger Stone asked him in the summer of 2016 to get in touch with an organization identified by Corsi as Wikileaks about unreleased materials relevant to the presidential campaign.
00:11:38.000From Stone apparently says get to Assange at Ecuadorial Embassy in London and get the pending WikiLeaks emails.
00:11:45.000Corsi said he declined the request and made it clear to Stone that an attempt to contact WikiLeaks could put them in the investigators' crosshairs according to the draft court documents.
00:11:55.000Instead of turning down the request, Corsi in fact passed it along to a person in London according to the draft court documents.
00:12:00.000So we'll have to see how all of this shakes out.
00:12:02.000Corsi, meanwhile, says, I didn't do any of this stuff.
00:12:04.000And the Mueller investigation is simply trying to push me into making false statements about President Trump with the threat of prosecution looming over my head.
00:12:27.000First, Let's talk about your genetics.
00:12:30.000So, you know, I was a little disappointed, I have to admit.
00:12:33.000Elizabeth Warren took her genetic test.
00:12:35.000It said that she was 1,024th Native American.
00:12:38.000I figured, well, if she's that much Native American, probably sometime a thousand generations ago, somebody in my family reproduced with a person of Native American ancestry.
00:12:47.000Maybe I am more Native American than Elizabeth Warren.
00:12:55.00023andMe sent me, I mean, truth in advertising, guys, I'm not hiding anything.
00:13:00.00023andMe finds that I am 100% Ashkenazic Jewish, which means that a bunch of Lithuanian Jews married each other for about a million years, and that's how we ended up with this.
00:13:10.000But in any case, I know that only because of 23andMe, which also says, by the way, that I have Really solid muscle fiber, which I mean, honestly, I didn't need a genetic test to tell me that, but it is reassuring and also gives me a certain added confidence on the street.
00:13:25.000Now that I know that from 23andMe right now through December 25th, the 23andMe DNA kits are on sale and they make a perfect gift.
00:13:32.000You can check out information about your wellness.
00:14:01.000When you use that slash Shapiro, you get 30% off any 23andme kit.
00:14:04.000Find out if you're more Native American than Elizabeth Warren because, come on, it's impossible for you to be any more Ashkenazic Jewish than I am.
00:14:23.000Okay, so, Paul Manafort's lawyer is said to have briefed President Trump's attorneys, according to the Boston Globe.
00:14:29.000This is a report that came out yesterday.
00:14:31.000A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president's one-time campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump's lawyers on his client's discussions with federal investigators after Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Trump's lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.
00:14:45.000The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with Mueller's office when prosecutors discovered it after Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said.
00:14:53.000Some legal specialists speculated it was a bid by Manafort for a presidential pardon.
00:14:56.000And here's where we get into the diciest territory.
00:14:58.000Will President Trump simply stop this investigation by pardoning Paul Manafort?
00:15:02.000If Paul Manafort is indeed the key to this entire thing, will President Trump just say, listen, you guys have trumped up all these charges You never would have prosecuted him under any other circumstances except that he was involved with my campaign, you don't like me, so you went after him for a bunch of foreign affairs stuff that a bunch of lobbyists in Washington do all the time and get away with.
00:15:23.000But you're going after him now, so I'm just gonna pardon him, and then you got nothing.
00:15:26.000Then you can't try to leverage him into making false statements about me, or is he trying to pardon Manafort In order to obstruct justice, right?
00:15:32.000Is he trying to pardon Paul Manafort in order to prevent the investigation from going forward?
00:15:37.000Andy McCarthy has a long piece about this in National Review today.
00:15:41.000He says, Mueller's prosecutors are laying the groundwork to argue that Paul Manafort should not get any credit for pleading guilty and sparing the public the need for a second trial because, as we learned yesterday, the Mueller team now says that Paul Manafort lied to them so they want to revoke his plea agreement and that would kick back in all the possible consequences.
00:15:59.000In the submission, the special counsel points out that Manafort did not decide to plead guilty until the last minute, so prosecutors in the court had to gear up for trial.
00:16:06.000Moreover, the prosecutors emphasized the alleged breach relieves the government of any duty to support Manafort's claim that he has demonstrated acceptance of responsibility, which is a standard sentencing reduction for defendants who plead guilty.
00:16:18.000For their part, Manafort and his lawyers are clearly preparing to argue that Manafort was honest, but that Mueller's rabidly anti-Trump prosecutors did not like what he had to say, i.e.
00:16:27.000he would not implicate the president in misconduct.
00:16:29.000This would echo a theme posited by Judge T.S.
00:16:33.000Mueller aggressively pursued Manafort on charges that had nothing to do with Russia's interference in the 2016 election in order to squeeze Manafort into singing or even composing as a witness against the president.
00:16:44.000And this is where we get into the pardon issues.
00:16:48.000In just a second, I'm going to explain to you where the pardon issue comes in.
00:16:52.000So, as Andy McCarthy continues, he says, there is a highly unusual twist here.
00:16:56.000The possibility that President Trump could pardon Manafort on the theory the Justice Department would never have charged Manafort for his political consulting activities in Ukraine and the lavish income he earned and failed to report from it.
00:17:07.000And that Manafort was charged as a pressure tactic.
00:17:09.000to help Mueller try to make a collusion case against Trump under circumstances where there is no evidence of a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy.
00:17:16.000Many will thus detect a play for a pardon in Manafort's alleged breaching of the plea agreement, coupled with his public stance that far from lying, he has been resisting Mueller's heavy-handed attempt to make him lie.
00:17:25.000This take on things finds support in some of President Trump's tweets, such as this one from August 18th, quote, Justice took a 12-year-old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him.
00:17:38.000And unlike Michael Cohn, he refused to break makeup stories in order to get a deal.
00:17:44.000So McCarthy says he doesn't think that Mueller's report is forthcoming, but it is possible that President Trump could simply pardon Manafort, risk impeachment in the House, know that he's not going to get convicted in the Senate, and then see what happens right there.
00:17:58.000And this is the case that is now being made by both Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone, is that Mueller's selective prosecution of Manafort has resulted in an attempt to make him lie, and that Mueller is now trying to make Jerome Corsi lie and trying to make Roger Stone lie in order to set up a chain of events that looks like Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi acting as go-betweens for WikiLeaks with the Trump campaign.
00:18:18.000This is what Jerome Corsi was saying yesterday.
00:18:20.000Again, you gotta take everything Jerome Corsi says with a very, very large grain of salt.
00:18:24.000This is a guy who wrote an entire book about how Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
00:18:29.000Here is Tucker Carlson asking him some questions last night on Fox.
00:18:32.000I've read accounts in the press, I read one in the Washington Monthly, a liberal magazine, saying that you deserve to go to prison because you've expressed views that they don't like.
00:18:43.000Do you think that your political views are playing a role in the decision of the special counsel to charge you with a felony?
00:18:49.000Yes, I think, and also, by the way, they accused me of deleting emails and I told them to restore, they restored the emails that I supposedly deleted through the time machine.
00:19:04.000He says that Roger Stone says that Jerome Corsi's being browbeaten.
00:19:08.000Of course, they all have a stake in saying this because if they're not being browbeaten, then somebody's going to jail, probably.
00:19:13.000Here's Roger Stone trying to defend Jerome Corsi.
00:19:16.000On August 21st, I posted a tweet that said, The Podesta's time in the barrel will come.
00:19:22.000I meant that public scrutiny of the Podesta's Russian business interests, as I had been briefed about by Jerry Corsi, would be in the media.
00:19:32.000Now Jerry Corsi has been browbeat into claiming that that was some kind of a cover story.
00:19:37.000And because I was taking heat for that tweet.
00:19:40.000But that's not even logical, Laura, because my tweet wasn't controversial until six weeks later when Julian Assange published John Podesta's emails.
00:19:50.000Right, except that it would make sense for the tweet to be uncontroversial until then, because you said, cryptically, that there would be time for John Podesta in the barrel, and then later it was John Podesta's time in the barrel, which makes it seem like you had some inside information there.
00:20:12.000I think that he would be impeached automatically by the new Democratic House.
00:20:15.000I think that they would have a relatively solid basis for doing so.
00:20:18.000It would look too much like obstruction for them to avoid doing anything else.
00:20:21.000And it would put Republicans in a terrible position.
00:20:23.000Now they either have to say that it's okay for the President to pardon people who are being questioned about his campaign activities in order to avoid scrutiny, or they have to vote against the President's remaining in office.
00:20:34.000I don't think that President Trump is going in this direction.
00:20:36.000Lending credence to the idea he might go in this direction was the fact that yesterday he was in an interview with somebody, I believe from the Washington Post, and he was asked about the possibility of pardoning Manafort.
00:20:46.000He went off the record, and then the reporter said, can we put any of that on the record?
00:20:49.000And then they went back off the record.
00:20:51.000That suggests that Trump is thinking thoughts that he doesn't necessarily want people to know about.
00:21:00.000If this investigation turns out to be the sham that a lot of people think it is, if this investigation turns out to be as empty and as goal-seeking as it appears to be in many cases, then we will all be here to defend you against false charges.
00:21:14.000But if you cut this thing short, it's going to look like you're guilty.
00:21:17.000And it's going to look like you're guilty because maybe you're guilty.
00:21:29.000The Mueller witch hunt is a total disgrace.
00:21:31.000They are looking at supposedly stolen, crooked Hillary Clinton emails, even though they don't want to look at the DNC server, but have no interest in the emails that Hillary deleted and acid-washed after getting a congressional subpoena.
00:21:44.000It is also true that this does not actually mean that you are innocent of things just because somebody else is guilty of a thing.
00:21:51.000President Trump then retweeted an account called the Trump Train with a graphic of virtually every Democrat on planet Earth behind bars and it says now that Russia collusion is a proven lie, when do the trials for treason begin?
00:22:04.000So, all good times over on President Trump's Twitter account.
00:22:08.000In just a second, I want to get to President Trump, who appears to be fulminating more often than I think is useful for him.
00:25:37.000He's just going around doing what the president should be doing.
00:25:40.000Every time President Trump misdirects away from a topic of importance or gives the media a topic to focus on that is not good for him, It is a problem for him and a problem for Republicans.
00:25:51.000Well, President Trump, because he's in a bad mood, though, is now fulminating and he's doing it a lot on Twitter.
00:26:35.000The other part is based on Canadian statistics.
00:26:37.000It's not actually based on American statistics.
00:26:40.000And then he started retweeting accounts that were tweeting out old footage of Hillary Clinton talking about Eric Holder and Cory Booker as black people.
00:26:48.000Uh, and we'll get to GM in just a second.
00:26:51.000But you can tell that President Trump is bored, and when President Trump is bored and feeling bad, he tends to sound off about how great he is.
00:26:56.000I mean, because today ending in Y. So, he did an interview with, uh, he did an interview, uh, yesterday, in, or at least there was a new book out Tuesday, uh, and the president, in this book, said that, well, he said he feels that, quote, I blow Ronald Reagan away.
00:27:17.000He says, the amazing thing is that you have certain people who are conservative Republicans that if my name weren't Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I'm the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away.
00:27:27.000Hey, I've said before, I think that President Trump has governed more conservatively than Ronald Reagan.
00:28:46.000My biotech is more intelligent than any number of experts from the American Enterprise Institute.
00:28:53.000What's funny about this, now, I do have to note, and I'm making fun of President Trump over this, Barack Obama was exactly the same way.
00:28:58.000Barack Obama was exactly the same way.
00:29:00.000He famously, during the 2008 campaign, said that he was his best campaign manager, his own best speech writer, his own best policy wonk, he was his own best everything.
00:29:08.000Like, Barack Obama loved him some Barack Obama.
00:29:11.000I mean, Barack Obama, like President Trump, trusted his gut.
00:29:15.000Mainly because he got to know his gut face to face by sticking his head up his own ass so often.
00:29:19.000But, President Obama, when you talk about people who are egotistic, again, I'm making fun of President Trump simply because I think that President Trump Would be better served by simply receding into the background, letting his policies take the fore.
00:29:32.000And by the way, he's not wrong when he says he'd get more praise if he acted more presidential.
00:29:36.000What he's saying in that first quote about how he's better than Ronald Reagan.
00:29:38.000Well, then why don't you let people, I don't know, look and enjoy your policies as opposed to you fulminating online.
00:29:45.000In any case, as I say, when people say that Donald Trump is a wild departure from the president for presidential politics, Let's just remember, he's not the first guy who loves him some president.
00:29:56.000Here's President Obama yesterday, openly lying about his record on fossil fuels, for example.
00:30:02.000Barack Obama now takes credit for everything, from the economic recovery, the weakest economic recovery in American history that he presided over, and growth really began in earnest under a Republican Congress.
00:30:13.000He blames, he takes credit for that, and now he takes credit for low oil prices.
00:30:22.000Suddenly America's, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest... That was me, people?
00:30:27.000I just want you to... So... So... It's a little like, you know, sometimes you go to Wall Street and folks will be grumbling about anti-business, and I said, Have you checked where your stocks were when I came in office, where they are now?
00:30:47.000What are you talking, what are you complaining about?
00:30:50.000So he's the president for the oil companies in Wall Street now, which is really interesting, because that's not how the oil companies felt.
00:30:57.000When he takes credit for us being the world's biggest oil producer, with the leading oil producer, this is, honestly, this is sort of like the, it's sort of like, Ralph Branca taking credit for Bobby Thompson's home run.
00:31:11.000I know it's an old reference for people who aren't baseball fans, but it's like a bad pitcher saying that he takes credit for the home run that was hit off of him.
00:31:20.000The oil companies had to work around Barack Obama on a routine basis.
00:31:23.000He was constantly attempting to prevent people from drilling.
00:31:26.000It was President Obama who was trying to crack down on the fracking industry that made oil and natural gas that much cheaper.
00:31:31.000And now he's taking credit for all of this.
00:31:33.000So the reason I point this out is because it is simply not rare in presidential politics for presidents to take credit for things they have nothing to do with.
00:31:40.000But that attitude does lead to bad policy, whether you're talking Republicans or Democrats.
00:31:43.000And I'm going to get to that bad policy in just a second with regard to General Motors.
00:31:47.000But first, let's talk about what you are going to get your loved ones for this holiday year.
00:31:52.000You know what does not go out of style?
00:31:54.000Surprising a friend or loved one with a dazzling bouquet from 1800flowers.com.
00:31:58.000I have a habit that whenever I go out of town, I order my wife flowers from 1800flowers.com.
00:32:03.000What's great about that is it makes my life easy.
00:33:05.000Okay, I want to talk about General Motors and President Trump's war with General Motors in just a second, but you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and check it out.
00:33:11.000For $9.99 a month, you can get a subscription to Daily Wire.
00:33:14.000When you do, you get the rest of this show live, the rest of Michael Moll's show live, the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live.
00:33:19.000I mean, these are all great shows except for Michael Mowles.
00:33:21.000You're going to want to be part of them.
00:33:23.000And you get all sorts of great goodies.
00:33:25.000Like, you get to see all of our answers when we do the Sunday Special.
00:33:31.000The final answer we get from our guests on the Sunday Special.
00:33:32.000You don't get that unless you're a subscriber.
00:33:34.000So, for example, this week's Sunday Special features my good friend David Limbaugh, who I've known for 17 years but only met in person yesterday.
00:33:41.000David is going to be on the Sunday special talking about, as I mentioned yesterday, our upcoming pre-Christmas series, Who Can Convert Ben Shapiro?
00:33:48.000He has a new book called Jesus is Risen.
00:33:49.000We talk about religion and politics and all the rest.
00:34:50.000But you can get all of that for $99 a year.
00:34:52.000Again, we are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:35:00.000Okay, so speaking of fulmination, President Trump is very, very upset at General Motors.
00:35:03.000General Motors has just decided that they are going to outsource a bunch of jobs.
00:35:08.000They are going to cut a bunch of factories in the United States.
00:35:12.000None of this is particularly shocking, but President Trump is very, very angry at it.
00:35:15.000The reason he's angry at it is because General Motors basically signaled months ago that the steel tariffs that President Trump was now putting on were going to damage its business.
00:35:26.000So at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio last year, he talked about how we weren't going to lose any automotive jobs.
00:35:31.000Jim has estimated that the tariffs that President Trump put on steel and aluminum have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:35:38.000They said that this was not the sole reason for the cuts.
00:35:40.000Ford announced last month that it would make an unspecified number of cuts as part of a redesign of the company.
00:35:45.000They say that the tariffs have cost the company $1 billion so far.
00:35:50.000And Robert Scott, who's a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, left-leaning, said despite GM's assertions to the contrary, the company is likely to protect itself against a future economic downturn.
00:36:14.000This has caused President Trump to get very angry at GM and blast them, saying that they better put jobs back in or we're going to kill the subsidies to GM.
00:36:22.000So just to get this straight, the U.S. government never should have been subsidizing GM.
00:36:25.000We should have allowed GM to go bankrupt back in 2008.
00:36:28.000If we had allowed GM to go bankrupt back in 2008, it would have been scrapped and sold off for parts, or more likely the brand would have been maintained and bought up by other investors for pennies on the dollar, at which point they would have created new efficiencies and new cost of scale, new efficiencies of scale, It would have made the company better and stronger, and then it would have been on more competitive international footing.
00:36:46.000Instead, we subsidized it with hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States Treasury.
00:36:50.000And when we did that, We took an ownership stake in GM and then resold the ownership stake in GM and all the rest.
00:36:56.000When we did that, we put them basically on the government dole, and this caused President Trump to say, okay, well, if you ship jobs overseas, then we are going to remove your subsidies.
00:37:04.000Which, by the way, will actually involve GM losing more jobs.
00:37:09.000See, taking more money out of GM's pocket doesn't make them more likely to bring the jobs back, it makes them more likely to cut more jobs.
00:37:16.000Here's President Trump, however, saying that he wants to punish GM for making an economically feasible decision, thanks in part to his tariffs.
00:37:49.000Maybe we ought to use a different car and put it back in.
00:37:52.000That's what they're doing, but the Chevy Cruze is mainly manufactured in the United States, and a lot of their other cars, their SUVs, are manufactured overseas, or at least in part overseas.
00:38:00.000Also, it's really silly to talk about where these cars are manufactured as though the Chevy Cruze is manufactured 100% in America.
00:38:17.000This is why I don't like when presidents take sole credit for economic wins or economic losses, as though they are responsible for creating jobs.
00:38:25.000Obama was not responsible for creating jobs.
00:38:30.000You can create a business climate that is friendlier for job creation, but you, the president of the United States, are not responsible for creating jobs because you do not have the capacity to do anything other than take money that does not belong to you and spend it on people who are then going to be in your political pocket.
00:38:44.000So what exactly is President Trump doing?
00:39:18.000If we did that with cars coming in, many more cars would be built here, and GM would not be closing their plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Maryland.
00:39:39.000That will affect everyone who buys a car in the United States.
00:39:41.000It will now be more expensive to buy a car or a truck in the United States, which has downstream economic effects on other businesses, because now you're not going to be able to spend that dollar that you were going to spend on something else on that thing.
00:39:52.000You're now going to have to spend it on this car because President Trump decided to raise the tariff rates.
00:39:57.000This is the thing about policies like tariffs that have a small number of beneficiaries, but diffuse numbers of people who are hurt.
00:40:05.000If it hurts me $100 worth, but somebody gets to keep a job at GM, it's very obvious to the person who keeps the job at GM that their job is due to the tariff.
00:40:15.000It's not clear to me that my $100 increase in price outweighs that person's job.
00:40:19.000But what if it's millions of people paying $100 extra?
00:40:22.000All of this is not economically efficient.
00:40:24.000It is simple redistribution of wealth.
00:40:37.000The economy was probably artificially boosted last quarter because so many companies in the United States decided to import products now, as opposed to waiting for President Trump's tariffs to kick in.
00:40:47.000Right now, a lot of American companies that are exporters are seeing retaliatory tariffs from other countries.
00:40:52.000In particular, the soybean industry in the United States is about to collapse entirely.
00:40:56.000Soybean exports, which from the United States mainly go to China, have decreased by 98% going into January, apparently.
00:41:13.000But President Trump, again, when you think that the job of the president is to run things, to run the economy, to run things, then you get yourself into all sorts of hot water here.
00:41:22.000Also, all of this stuff is simply not feasible in the long run.
00:41:28.000All these subsidies and tariffs and trying to protect certain industries, none of it's feasible in the long run.
00:41:33.000Now, the reason that none of this stuff is feasible in the long run, the reason that tariff policy, that protectionism, That control from the top down, whether it's by Trump or whether it's Obama on oil and gas or whether it's Trump on cars.
00:41:44.000The reason none of this is feasible in the long run is that technological advances outpace the capacity of governments to control those technological advances.
00:41:52.000President Obama tried to shut down oil drilling.
00:41:55.000It artificially raised the price of oil.
00:41:57.000By doing so, it provided incentive for businesses to create fracking.
00:42:00.000Those businesses then lowered the price of gas, natural gas, undercutting the coal industry, and also ensuring a cheap supply of natural gas for the future, because President Obama was restricting oil supply.
00:42:13.000And the same thing is going to happen in the car industry.
00:42:15.000Uber's CEO says, and I think he's entirely right about this, that in 10 years, nobody is going to own a car.
00:42:21.000Here is what Uber CEO Dara Khrushchev, I think that's how it's pronounced, said that in a decade, nobody is going to own a car.
00:42:31.000You'll essentially come to us and we will give you the choice of whether you want to take a regular Uber, you want to pool with someone, but we're also going to show you this is a bus stop that's next to you and a bus is going to be coming in six minutes from now.
00:42:44.000You can take the bus today or you can take an electric bike or scooter today as well.
00:42:49.000We want to give you every single choice.
00:42:52.000Okay, so the car industry, I totally agree with this, by the way.
00:42:54.000I think the car industry in the United States is going to completely collapse in a manner of, I think 10 years is too soon.
00:43:01.000I think within 20 years, automated driving combined with Uber technology is going to allow you to not own a car.
00:43:08.000Basically, you're just going to pull up an app on your phone, if we even have apps on phones by then.
00:43:13.000We're going to be able to simply pull up an app on our phone, punch a button, and then a car with the requisite number of seats will arrive to take you to your destination.
00:43:22.000You're just going to buy a subscription from a company like Uber.
00:43:24.000You're going to pay $100 a month to buy that subscription from Uber.
00:43:28.000And you're going to pay that $100 a month instead of paying for an individual ride.
00:43:32.000And you can use as many cars as you want.
00:43:34.000And that's how the car industry is going to work.
00:43:35.000How exactly do you crack down on that?
00:43:37.000Well, people like Tucker Carlson have said on this show, actually, that they would prevent automatic driving from happening to protect jobs.
00:43:43.000But you know what's going to happen then?
00:43:45.000All that's going to happen then is other economies are going to take advantage of those technologies, and those other economies are going to grow faster than the United States economy.
00:43:52.000You want to know why America's economy is the dominant world economy?
00:43:55.000Because it does not prevent innovation.
00:43:57.000Because it does not freeze the economy and attempt redistribution.
00:44:00.000It does not see innovation as a threat.
00:44:02.000And for all those people who think, oh, well, we're going to kill too many jobs with all this stuff, we have literally said this about every technological advance of the last 200 years.
00:44:10.000For 200 years, people have been doomsaying that every technological advance was going to end with massive unemployment.
00:44:28.000That's where social institutions come in.
00:44:30.000But this idea that from the top down you're simply going to redistribute jobs to particular areas you need to win in a presidential election, this says that the federal government is simply too powerful.
00:44:38.000This says that the federal government is involved in crap that it should not be involved in, in the first place.
00:44:42.000And that is true whether you're talking about oil drilling under Barack Obama, or whether you're talking about car industry stuff under Donald Trump.
00:44:48.000This is not the business of the federal government.
00:44:50.000This is not the business of the President of the United States, absent a national security need.
00:44:56.000Meanwhile, I will say that President Trump's continued popularity has very little to do, I think.
00:45:00.000There's been an attempt to link his popularity among Republicans with GM, blue collar, Rust Belt kind of stuff.
00:45:13.000He has a gut-level patriotism for the United States.
00:45:16.000Unfortunately, his gut-level patriotism for the United States is not being reflected by millennials.
00:45:20.000There's a new study out that shows that millennials, half of them, think that America isn't great and think that Barack Obama was more important than George Washington.
00:45:30.000A new poll conducted by the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness found that a huge percentage of younger Americans are expressing their disdain for American ideals.
00:45:37.000Almost half believe America isn't great.
00:45:38.000Roughly 20% think the American flag is a sign of intolerance and hatred.
00:45:42.00029% were okay with burning the American flag.
00:45:45.000We have some serious crises of American conscience that are cropping up with younger Americans and in the near future.
00:45:52.000That's why when President Trump says he's better than Ronald Reagan, if he wants to be better than Ronald Reagan, it can't just be that he's cutting regulation.
00:45:59.000It has to be that he's making an affirmative case for America as a great free country and why you should join that adventure rather than sitting on the sidelines screaming about how America is terrible.
00:46:08.000Otherwise we will see the end of America no matter how good the economy is.
00:46:13.000People are not necessarily driven simply by their pocketbook, and that is particularly true when you're talking about young people who mainly are living off mommy and daddy's pocketbook.
00:46:21.000Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
00:46:26.000This is the second book by Jesse Norman I've recommended in a couple of months.
00:46:29.000I recommended his biography of Adam Smith.
00:46:31.000His first biography was of Edmund Burke, one of the first real conservatives.
00:46:36.000Edmund Burke's conservatism was of a brand that suggested that Basically, Western civilization had been the product of a fabric created over thousands of years and hundreds of generations, and that that fabric had to be preserved, and that if we were going to change the fabric, then we had best consider what it was we were removing before replacing it.
00:46:56.000And this is why Edmund Burke was not a fan of the French Revolution, but he was a fan of the American Revolution, which he saw as Americans simply seeking to defend their rights as Englishmen.
00:47:06.000And he saw the French Revolution as people who were seeking to overthrow the fundamental institutions of society.
00:47:13.000The book is really good by Jesse Norman.
00:47:17.000This is not the only biography of Edmund Burke that's good.
00:47:19.000Russell Kirk has one that's quite good.
00:47:21.000If you are actually interested in conservatism, the history of conservative thought, and not merely tax rates, then it's incumbent on you to read some Edmund Burke, who really is terrific and an amazing writer, by the way.
00:47:32.000Very readable, even though he was writing in the late 18th century.
00:47:53.000Science fiction author Andrew Duncan has a message for JRR Tolkien fans.
00:47:57.000He says Tolkien discriminated against orcs, and the Lord of the Rings books promote racism.
00:48:01.000Duncan was discussing Lord of the Rings as part of a wider discussion on fantasy.
00:48:05.000He says it's hard to miss the repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others, or that some people are just worse than others.
00:48:11.000And this seems to me in the long term, if you embrace this too much, it has dire consequences for yourself and for society.
00:48:35.000But again, for folks on the left who believe that everybody is of equal moral value, and that every choice is of equal moral value, this is silliness.
00:48:43.000Also, the idea that it's discriminatory because it leads to the idea that biologically there are no good orcs.
00:49:11.000But, you know, silliness in the woke sci-fi community has become a thing, which is why I think sci-fi literature is getting worse and worse.
00:49:17.000He says, we should allow the orcs to explain themselves.
00:49:45.000There's a teen who graduated from a Catholic high school, and when he spoke at this Catholic high school, he was met with a standing ovation.
00:50:33.000I mean, this is a guy who's now being featured on the news for saying he's of a particular sexual orientation in front of a crowd.
00:50:39.000Second, you know, I went to an Orthodox Jewish high school.
00:50:42.000The standard at the Orthodox Jewish high school, there are standards on a lot of things, on Sabbath observance, on kosher observance, and yes, on sexual proclivities and sexual practices.
00:50:53.000To go into a place where everyone knows the standard up front, and to enroll in that place with the agreement that you're going to abide by those rules, and then to get up and then say that the rules are bad as you graduate, is not really an act of respect.
00:51:06.000It is not really an act even of self-respect.
00:51:09.000It is an act of rebellion against the school that you basically lied to.
00:51:18.000But, if you are going to go to, take my example, a Jewish day school, and then at your graduation, you're going to announce, you know what?
00:51:36.000As I just said, if he wants to come out, let him come out.
00:51:37.000But to take the advantage of a Catholic school graduation, and then to say at the Catholic school graduation, by the way, your entire moral standard with regard to sexuality is wrong, and you should change it because I'm gay, is really not an act of humility or decency.
00:51:52.000It's really an act of self-aggrandizement that I don't think is really worthy of celebration.
00:51:58.000Again, for the 1,000th time in this segment, do whatever you want.
00:52:01.000But if the idea here is that you're doing something grand and good by challenging the status quo at a school that you apparently accepted the moral standards of when you were going there, seems to me a slap in the face to the religious upbringing from whence you came and the school to which you go.
00:52:18.000You want to leave the school and then rip the school for its policies?
00:52:30.000Now, if you want... And here's the other thing.
00:52:32.000If the school approved the speech, if the school was cool with it, then still not sure how it's brave, because at that point the school approves of it.
00:52:39.000So either this is an act of self-aggrandizement or it's not a lot of bravery.
00:52:43.000Bravery would be if you want to come out and then challenge bad policy, right?
00:52:50.000And you want to challenge a bad policy.
00:52:51.000But if you want to go to a religious school that you went to and then rip the school, I just, I think that that's...
00:52:56.000I think it's an act of true arrogance, in a certain respect.
00:53:02.000And again, I don't think this kid thinks of it like that, and I don't blame him, but I don't think the media have to celebrate this sort of stuff either.
00:53:10.000So, there's this story about this American Christian missionary who was killed when he tried to contact a hostile hunter-gatherer tribe on an isolated island in the Indian Ocean.
00:53:20.000So, some see John Chow as a symbol of Western arrogance.
00:53:22.000This is according to the Washington Post.
00:53:23.000A reckless evangelist who attempted to supplant a culture thousands of years old when he broke Indian law and set foot on the North Sentinel Island.
00:53:31.000Some Christians see him as a martyr, if perhaps a misguided one, who recognized no exceptions to the evangelist's mission when he tried to take the Bible to a people known to kill outsiders on sight.
00:53:42.000But only one person gleaned from Chow Slang a model for national immigration policy.
00:53:46.000There's a piece in Australia about how the natives had a great immigration policy.
00:53:51.000But in any case, here's where I think all of this goes wrong.
00:53:56.000So I want to talk about the perspective that the tribe was okay killing this guy.
00:54:05.000Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.
00:54:06.000So, if you come to my house with a book in a Western civilized society, missionaries come to my house all the time because people knock on your door, and they want to talk about the Book of Mormon, right?
00:54:17.000They want to talk about the Latter-day Saints, or they want to talk about Seventh-day Adventism, or something.
00:55:11.000Well, not really, when you kill somebody showing up with, again, If you're a Christian missionary showing up there with a gun to try and convert people at sword point, that's one thing.
00:55:18.000If you're somebody who's showing up to talk to somebody about God and the afterlife, I don't understand why we should celebrate a pagan tribe for doing that when we would rightly in Western civilization excoriate anybody who did something similar to anyone of any particular religious sect.
00:55:35.000Primitivism is still primitive even when practiced by primitive people.
00:55:39.000Okay, and when I say primitive, that's not meant as an insult.
00:55:42.000These are people who are literal hunter-gatherers who live in, like, loincloths.
00:56:24.000Why we need checks and balances in the government and how to achieve that.
00:56:27.000So there are several fundamental principles he talks about in Federalist 51.
00:56:30.000He says, first, every department must be separate and have little impact on appointment to other branches.
00:56:34.000So you can't have members of the executive branch appointing members of the legislative branch, or basically the legislative branch would be in control of the executive branch.
00:56:41.000You can't have members of the legislative branch appoint members of the executive branch, or The executive branch will be in the control of the legislative branch.
00:56:49.000This is one of the reasons why the idea of bureaucratic government is such a problem.
00:56:53.000Because bureaucratic government, you basically have bureaucracies that are created by the executive branch and are given tremendous leeway by the legislature to create regulations that belong inside the legislature.
00:57:03.000The founders never would have thought that there should be such a thing as a two million person executive branch.
00:57:11.000Branches must be able to avoid encroachments by other branches.
00:57:13.000So, you want the branches to fight with each other and defend their own priorities and power from one another.
00:57:19.000So, Madison says this, and this is, again, one of the most oft-cited parts of the Federalist Papers for a reason.
00:57:24.000He says, The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.
00:57:30.000It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.
00:57:35.000But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
00:57:39.000If men were angels, this is the most important single line in the Federalist Papers right here.
00:57:43.000If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
00:57:47.000If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on the government would be necessary.
00:57:52.000In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.
00:57:57.000You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.
00:58:03.000A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government, but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
00:58:09.000So what he's saying is, people aren't angels, people aren't devils.
00:58:13.000If people were devils, no government could control them.
00:58:15.000If people were angels, you wouldn't need a government to control them.
00:58:17.000So what you need is a government that can protect people from the predations of others, and at the same time, is capable of stopping its own predations.
00:58:25.000You do that by creating a multiplicity of interests and pitting them against one another, so only an overwhelming consensus on an issue allows anything to get done.
00:58:32.000This is to protect the rights of minorities.
00:58:34.000So he says, quote, it is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.
00:58:43.000Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens.
00:58:45.000If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.
00:58:49.000Therefore, what you really need, he says, is that the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens that the rights of individuals or of the minority will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. - Yeah.
00:59:03.000It is no less certain than it is important, notwithstanding the contrary opinions which have been entertained, that the larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government.
00:59:13.000And happily for the Republican cause, the practicable sphere may be carried to a very great extent by a judicious modification and mixture of the federal principle.
00:59:20.000So, we want the states to check the federal government.
00:59:22.000We want the legislature to have two branches, to have two chambers that will check each other.
00:59:27.000We want the legislature to check the executive, the executive to check the judicial, the judicial to check both.
00:59:31.000We want all of these things to happen.
00:59:33.000And we want that because we don't actually want lots of things to get done.
00:59:37.000See, this is the great lie from every president.
00:59:45.000Getting things done is a threat to your freedom.
00:59:47.000The only way things should get done is if we were to have an enormous, if we were to have an enormous consensus on an issue, an overwhelming consensus on an issue.
00:59:59.000If we were to have that overwhelming consensus on an issue, then we get things done.
01:00:02.000You make a constitutional amendment, you pass a piece of legislation.
01:00:05.000But, if not, then we should be very wary of doing things with the power of the ring.
01:00:11.000The power of government is the power of the one ring.
01:00:12.000Better that it should be wielded by no one, than that it should be wielded by one person who gets things done.
01:00:17.000This is why I don't like pragmatism politically, and this is why I'm not in favor of people who think we should just run roughshod and break all the things in order to get done what I want to get done.