The National Enquirer turns on President Trump, Vox wants Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president even though she's not eligible, and the Boy Scouts verge on bankruptcy. All that and much more on today's show. Plus, you can get a free month of Keeps to help you keep your hair. Keeps is a company that makes a lot of great products, including shampoo, conditioner, and hair care products. They also have a great service called Keeps, where you can purchase your first month of treatment for free! Ben Shapiro is a writer and host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and other media outlets. He is the author of the book, "The Fix: How to Get Away with It: The Inside Story of How To Get Away With It: How To Overcome the FBI's Most Powerful Man in America's Most Secretive White House." He's also a frequent contributor to CNN and other publications, and is one of the most influential people in the conservative media outlets in the world. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Tweet me and let us know what you thought of this episode! if you liked it! and what you would like to hear more of Ben Shapiro's take on it. in the comments section below! Timestamps: 5:00 - What do you think of it? 6:30 - What would you like to see in the next episode? 7:15 - Is it better? 8:40 - What's your favorite Christmas song? 9:00 11:00 -- What are you'd like to have in the new song of the new Christmas song or movie? 12:30 -- Which one you're listening to? 15:00 | What are your favorite holiday song or TV show? 16:40 -- What kind of song do you re listening to right now? 17:20 -- what do you would you're going to be listening to in the future? 18:00-- What s your biggest takeaway from this week? 19: Is it a holiday song you re going to vote for in 2020? 21: What s the worst thing you're watching on Netflix or listening to on Christmas? 22:15 -- what s your favorite song from the new episode of your favorite podcast?
00:00:00.000The National Enquirer turns on President Trump, Vox wants Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president even though she's not eligible, and the Boy Scouts verge on bankruptcy.
00:00:27.000I know you don't want to think that you look like your father, but here's the reality.
00:00:31.000As we get older, we tend to lose our hair.
00:00:33.000I know my father has male pattern baldness, and that is why I am a big fan of keeps.
00:00:37.000Losing your hair sucks, but there is something that you can do about it.
00:00:40.000That's why you should be using Keeps, the easiest and most affordable way to keep the hair that you have.
00:00:44.000They have a couple of FDA approved products that cost a lot of money if you do not get them through Keeps, but it is much cheaper if you get them through Keeps.
00:00:50.000For five minutes now and just a buck a day, you're never going to have to worry about hair loss again.
00:00:54.000Getting started with Keeps is really easy.
00:00:57.000Just answer a few questions, snap some photos of your hair, and then a licensed physician reviews your information online and recommends the right treatment for you.
00:01:38.000So we begin today with all of the hubbub that has now broken out amidst the Michael Cohen sentencing.
00:01:44.000So as you recall from yesterday's show in the ongoing legal saga that is the Trump administration, Michael Cohen, the president's personal attorney, was sentenced to three years in jail, which was not good for President Trump.
00:01:57.000It was particularly not good for President Trump because of the ancillary details of the actual plea agreement.
00:02:02.000Judge William Pauly III said that Michael Cohen had committed a bevy of crimes with an eye toward deception.
00:02:07.000Cohen, for his part, threw himself on the mercy of the court.
00:02:10.000He said, quote, I blame myself for the conduct which has brought me here today, and it was my own weakness and blind loyalty to President Trump that led me to choose a path of darkness over light.
00:02:19.000So dude has watched a few too many mafia movies.
00:02:22.000He added, time and again, I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds rather than to listen to my own inner voice and my moral compass.
00:02:28.000And then there was this weird shot of him in an abandoned home in like Arizona suburbia looking wistfully into the camera back at the days when he was a good fella.
00:02:36.000More damaging than Cohen's open court mea culpa was that the prosecution made an announcement.
00:02:43.000They announced they'd reached a non-prosecution agreement with America Media Inc., which is the parent company of the National Enquirer.
00:02:48.000Now, you'll recall that President Trump had an arrangement with the National Enquirer in which, essentially, He was going to provide the National Enquirer for cash, the National Enquirer was going to take that cash and then pay off women to stay silent.
00:03:00.000What the National Enquirer would do is they would go to Trump paramours, they would buy their life rights, and then they would sell those life rights to President Trump for a certain amount of money.
00:03:10.000That was basically the way that this chain of custody worked when it came to these sorts of stories.
00:03:15.000Trump would use the National Enquirer basically to funnel hush money.
00:03:18.000Well, now, AMI has decided that they are going to work with the Southern District of New York and turn on President Trump.
00:03:26.000So, AMI, as I say, would purchase the stories of Trump's lovers and then bury them at Trump's behest.
00:03:30.000Cohen would then attempt to reimburse AMI, so the allegations go.
00:03:33.000So, according to prosecutors, AMI, American Media Inc., which, again, is the parent company of the National Enquirer, admitted it made a $150,000 payment in concert with a candidate's presidential campaign.
00:03:45.000And in order to ensure that former Trump paramour Karen McDougal did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before the 2016 presidential election.
00:03:53.000AMI further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman's story so as to prevent it from influencing the election.
00:04:00.000Now, the reason that this is very damaging is because the way that campaign finance law works is that if you violate campaign finance law, it must be on the basis of you having made an unreported expenditure intended to influence the campaign.
00:04:13.000On President Trump's defense, as I've been saying for a long time on this particular score, would be, yes, I paid off women, but I didn't do it to influence the campaign.
00:04:20.000I've been paying off women for years, right?
00:04:22.000Which is absolutely credible in the case of President Trump.
00:04:26.000So it wouldn't be a campaign-related expense any more than you buying a suit to wear on a campaign is a campaign-related expense.
00:04:31.000You would have bought the suit anyway.
00:04:33.000It's just that now you're doing it in the middle of a campaign.
00:04:35.000It's the reason that you can't just blame everything on campaign expenditures.
00:04:42.000You have to filter out all of the stuff that is campaign expenditure from non-campaign expenditure.
00:04:46.000So there basically been two lines of defense that President Trump has been urged to use by his defenders on this particular score.
00:04:54.000Number one, this wasn't a campaign expenditure by Michael Cohen or by America Media Inc.
00:04:59.000if he was involved in that particular path.
00:05:00.000And number two, that even if it was a payoff, he relied on the advice of his attorney, Michael Cohen, and Michael Cohen's the attorney.
00:05:07.000So it's his job to determine whether or not the law was being complied with.
00:05:10.000Well, the first prong of that attack is sort of falling apart.
00:05:13.000The idea that this was not campaign related.
00:05:15.000If AMI is going to now testify, if executives at AMI, including people like David Pecker, who is a good friend of President Trump's, are now going to testify that Trump explicitly said to them, hey guys, I've got an election coming up and I really need you to buy up all the stories of the women I screwed years ago.
00:05:29.000Like, if he said that, then it's going to be hard for him to claim That it was not campaign related, that it wasn't intended to influence the campaign.
00:05:38.000While Cohen didn't actually use AMI to silence Stormy Daniels, representatives of AMI were the first to notify Michael Cohen of Stormy Daniels' intent to go public, according to prosecutors.
00:05:48.000Again, all of this undercuts the case that President Trump could make that he paid hush money on a regular basis outside of election circumstances.
00:05:54.000So Trump is now going to have to claim, in defense, that both AMI and Cohen are lying about such expenditures, representing illegal campaign allocations, that he would have done it anyway, and that they have caved to the pressure of rogue prosecutors.
00:06:05.000Alternatively, he's going to have to blame Cohen for the violations, as I say.
00:06:08.000Now, none of this bodes particularly well for President Trump.
00:06:11.000President Trump cannot be prosecuted as president according to Justice Department guidelines, but that doesn't mean that a looming indictment wouldn't change the math for 2020.
00:06:18.000I think one of the great misnomers in presidential politics is that if you are impeached, it redounds sort of to your benefit.
00:06:25.000That if you're impeached, that it doesn't hurt you politically.
00:06:28.000And the case that people tend to make here is with regard to Bill Clinton.
00:06:31.000Because when Bill Clinton was impeached by the House, but he wasn't convicted by the Senate, his approval rating rose, people saw it as a witch hunt, and Bill Clinton was sort of exonerated by his own party and by the American people.
00:06:42.000The problem is, Bill Clinton was a lame duck.
00:06:44.000And the same thing is true of Richard Nixon.
00:06:46.000When Richard Nixon resigned in the middle of Watergate, he was, in fact, a lame duck.
00:06:49.000If Richard Nixon had been in his first term during Watergate, does anyone think he would have won a second term after that?
00:06:55.000If Bill Clinton had been hit with a perjury and obstruction charge and been impeached in, say, 1994, as opposed to 1999, does anybody actually think that he would have won re-election in 1996?
00:07:05.000The evidence that it hurts people That it hurts the party that is impeached more than it doesn't is that in 2000, if you recall, Al Gore should have won that election running away.
00:07:17.000He had a very solid economy, he had a record of Clinton's deficit reduction, he had a solid campaign apparatus behind him, and because of Bill Clinton's Turmoil.
00:07:28.000He forcibly disassociated himself from Clinton.
00:07:41.000So the idea that it doesn't have negative ramifications for you as a candidate or your party as a candidate If you are impeached, I am not sure that that is the case.
00:07:52.000Certainly, it's riskier than not impeaching Trump, but I'm not sure that if the Democrats were to impeach Trump in the House on the basis of, for example, obstruction of justice or perjury, that it would necessarily redound to President Trump's benefit.
00:08:03.000And again, those would be the actual crimes that we're talking about with regard to President Trump.
00:08:07.000So, there are three crimes that are on the table with regard to President Trump, to do the quick legal analysis here.
00:08:11.000Crime number one would be active promotion of a campaign finance violation.
00:08:15.000That would be, he went to Michael Cohen, he said, listen dude, I know this violates campaign law, but take this money and go pay off the ladies.
00:08:32.000Case number two is that Trump didn't necessarily say that, but when Michael Cohen went back to Trump and he said, listen, the FBI is looking into me and they want me to testify that you had nothing to do, that you had everything to do with the payment and that you knew all about the payments and that you were deeply involved in the payments and that they were campaign related.
00:08:49.000And then Trump said, I want you to go and I want you to lie.
00:08:51.000I want you to just tell the FBI nothing.
00:09:24.000So remember, the perjury and obstruction of justice charges with regard to Bill Clinton had nothing to do with an underlying crime.
00:09:32.000He wanted her to lie about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
00:09:35.000That was considered obstruction of justice.
00:09:37.000So remember, the perjury and obstruction of justice charges with regard to Bill Clinton had nothing to do with an underlying crime.
00:09:43.000It wasn't an actual crime for Bill Clinton to sleep with Monica Lewinsky.
00:09:46.000It was a crime for him to lie to the congressional investigators about it.
00:09:50.000And it was a crime for him to tell other people to lie to congressional investigators or the FBI about it.
00:09:55.000You can have a very similar circumstance here, where Michael Cohen didn't actually even commit a campaign finance violation, and Trump didn't commit a campaign finance violation, but Trump told Michael Cohen to lie to people.
00:10:05.000In positions of legal authority about this, and then you get obstruction of justice and perhaps perjury depending on what Trump actually said in his deposition by the FBI.
00:10:16.000Remember, he has turned in written answers to Robert Mueller.
00:10:20.000Presumably, the perjury charge from there would arise in the context of Trump saying, for example, that he didn't know about the Trump Tower meeting.
00:10:27.000And then you have a bunch of people who say, no, he absolutely knew about the Trump Tower meeting.
00:10:41.000But crimes can arise from non-illegal activity if you end up telling people to fib to legal authorities like the FBI or the DOJ.
00:10:50.000And that is where the peril lies for President Trump.
00:10:52.000Now, a competent lawyer will say at this point that President Trump should shut his face, right?
00:10:56.000I mean, this is, as I've said many times on the program, the first thing to know about when the FBI comes calling is get a lawyer and shut up.
00:11:12.000As a general matter, I would like for people to talk with the FBI and the DOJ and the police and law enforcement authorities so that we can track down crime and solve those crimes.
00:11:19.000I'm saying that if I were the defense counsel for somebody, if it were my job to defend you, any lawyer worth his salt will tell you, first rule of order, get a lawyer in the room and then don't answer questions unless your lawyer says that it's okay to answer the questions.
00:11:33.000Certainly don't go on Twitter and start tweeting about your legal strategy.
00:11:36.000And yet, as we shall see, being President Trump's lawyer is a barrel of laughs.
00:11:41.000So here, we'll talk about what President Trump had to tweet about.
00:11:44.000He started tweeting out his legal strategy this morning, which is always... Honestly, if you're his lawyer, you just want to stick your head in an oven.
00:11:55.000There are three really bad jobs in Washington- There are many bad jobs in Washington, D.C.
00:11:59.000Among these bad jobs, being the president's personal attorney, being the press secretary for the White House, and being the chief of staff, which is why they're now going to- I think maybe they should just conflate all of these into one.
00:12:08.000The president's personal attorney should become the press secretary and the chief of staff.
00:12:10.000We can kill three birds with one stone, or as PETA would have it, we can feed three birds with one scone.
00:12:16.000We'll get to all of that in just a second, but first, let's talk about your ancestry.
00:12:22.000Are you more Native American than Elizabeth Warren?
00:12:26.000So Elizabeth Warren may have blown up her presidential campaign because she decided to release a genetic ancestry test showing that she may have been one 1,024th Native American.
00:12:36.000I decided that I would take a genetic test from 23andMe because I wanted to find out more about my ancestry.
00:12:41.000As it turns out, truth in advertising, I was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish.
00:12:46.000I mean, that is some pure blood right there.
00:12:49.000People worry about whether they are of mixed heritage.
00:12:52.000I mean, this is like Lithuanian Jews marrying each other for a thousand years, and this results in this.
00:13:10.000It gives you information about whether you have a taste aversion to cilantro, an ability to match musical pitch, misophonia, which is everyday noises like sounds of chewing can cause a reaction of rage or panic.
00:14:04.000So congratulations to Jess on her upgrade to the nation.
00:14:07.000But it's really, it's really fun stuff.
00:14:10.000And again, find out whether you're more Native American than Elizabeth Warren, which is really the only thing anybody cares about at this point.
00:14:17.000Because everyone, except for me, is more Native American than Elizabeth Warren.
00:14:31.000President Trump, the first rule of lawyering is shut your head.
00:14:36.000President Trump does not abide by that rule.
00:14:37.000So President Trump decided this morning to tweet out his entire legal strategy because when you have 50 million Twitter followers, why not lay out your entire legal strategy in the middle of an FBI investigation?
00:15:02.000Despite that, many campaign finance lawyers have strongly stated, I did nothing wrong with respect to campaign finance laws.
00:15:09.000If they even apply, because this was not campaign finance.
00:15:13.000Cohen was guilty on many charges unrelated to me.
00:15:16.000But he pled to two criminal charges, campaign charges, which were not criminal and of which he probably was not guilty, even on a civil basis.
00:15:25.000Those charges were just agreed to by him in order to embarrass the president and get a much reduced prison sentence, which he did, including the fact that his family was temporarily let off the hook.
00:15:35.000As a lawyer, Michael has great liability to me.
00:15:38.000So, I will admit that the best tweet Trump has ever sent was specifically about Michael Cohen.
00:15:43.000He sent a tweet several months ago in which he said, Well, you know, he should have thought of that before he did it, but what he is saying here is exactly the legal strategy that I've drawn up for him.
00:15:54.000Now, the problem with him saying this sort of thing out loud is it shows sort of a motive for him to say it, meaning that he's now contradicted himself on Twitter itself.
00:16:02.000Remember, he says he didn't pay off Stormy Daniels, that he never had an affair with Stormy Daniels on Twitter.
00:16:06.000It turns out that all of that is false.
00:16:10.000But he's basically making the case that Michael Cohen was supposed to protect him.
00:16:15.000That's what a lawyer is supposed to do.
00:16:16.000And that is the defense that he's going to have to rely on in the end, is that Michael Cohen should have known all this stuff, and Michael Cohen blew it anyway.
00:16:26.000Questionable, but it does set up a really difficult 2020 run for the president for a couple of reasons, which I'll explain in just a second.
00:16:34.000So the president looking forward to 2021, a couple of things can happen.
00:16:38.000Either the Democrats can impeach the president on the basis of obstruction of justice and perjury, Or the president is not impeached and we just jabber about this and investigate it for the next two years and we run into 2020 under the looming threat of indictment for President Trump.
00:16:52.000And so it becomes President Trump trying to escape jail by running for president because when you're president you have immunity from being imprisoned by law enforcement authorities unless you're impeached and you're out of office.
00:17:04.000If the if the president is able to survive impeachment, which I think he will up till 2020, but the indictment is still on the table, then basically he's going to be running under the threat of indictments that if you let him not be president anymore, he will immediately be sent to prison by the Southern District of New York.
00:17:20.000That obviously is a different color for an election that we have ever seen in American politics before.
00:17:26.000Now, it does set up a conundrum for the Democrats, which is, is it better to impeach him now, and move toward impeachment now, or is it better to run under those circumstances?
00:17:33.000I think everyone sort of agrees it's better that if you can, you run under those circumstances in 2020.
00:17:38.000You just keep jabbering and yelling about how Trump is an obstructor of justice, and a liar, and a perjurer, and then you run against him.
00:17:45.000It's better to do that than to impeach him, and then the Senate acquits him, and then the story's basically over.
00:17:50.000Alan Dershowitz, who's been a big defender of the President in a lot of this, and of course is a defense lawyer, was a defense lawyer for a living, He says that it's ridiculous to talk about impeaching Trump over this sort of stuff anyway.
00:18:00.000I don't think he's going to come up with an impeachable offense.
00:18:03.000Remember, the Constitution requires treason, bribery, other high crimes and misdemeanors.
00:18:07.000The most they've come up with is a very, very questionable campaign contribution issue, which failed when they tried it against Edward some years ago.
00:18:16.000So I don't think we're in impeachment land.
00:18:19.000Okay, so I think that he is probably right, but only because of Bill Clinton.
00:18:22.000So what's really amazing is watching all the people who thought that Bill Clinton should not be impeached turn around and now say that Donald Trump should be impeached on the same basis.
00:18:29.000Now, here is my general take on whether Trump should be impeached if all of this stuff happens to be true.
00:18:38.000If we were talking about we're now living in 1994, 1993, 1996, and we're trying to uphold a certain standard of what the presidency is, then any president who is credibly accused of obstruction of justice or perjury or be indicted on that basis should be impeached, which is why I was in favor of the Bill Clinton impeachment.
00:18:57.000The math changed and it was changed by Bill Clinton.
00:18:59.000It's not just that the Democrats held Bill Clinton to no standard.
00:19:02.000It's that the realities on the ground changed themselves.
00:19:05.000It's that the realities on the ground changed.
00:19:08.000Donald Trump is not president if Bill Clinton Is not impeached, right?
00:19:13.000If Bill Clinton is impeached, rather Bill Clinton had been impeached in 1999, Donald Trump is not president today.
00:19:17.000Bill Clinton lowered the standard for what a president could be so much that by the time we got to Donald Trump in 2016, everybody just went, listen, we know that a president doesn't have to have high moral fiber.
00:19:42.000I'm not going to go back to the old standard.
00:19:43.000I don't think it's it's even credible to go back to the old standard of what the presidency was before Bill Clinton, because let's be let's be frank about this.
00:19:51.000There hasn't been no moral change of mind on the part of Democrats.
00:19:54.000Now, what you're going to see over the next two years, here's the prediction now.
00:19:57.000Over the next two years, what you're going to begin to see is a bunch of Democrats coming out and saying, you know what?
00:20:02.000Thinking about it now, we should have gotten rid of Bill Clinton.
00:20:13.000And I don't trust that you would if it happened again today.
00:20:16.000If we were talking about a Democrat in office having committed the same sort of quasi-crimes or accused crimes as President Trump, Democrats would not be talking about impeaching, they would be talking about defending.
00:20:26.000The standard that was used in 1999 for Bill Clinton retaining office.
00:20:29.000By the way, he retained office under a Republican Senate.
00:20:32.000A Republican Senate voted not to convict him in the impeachment case.
00:20:36.000The standard that was used was, could Bill Clinton credibly continue to carry out his job, or had he lost the faith of the American people because of the charges upon him?
00:20:43.000And the answer that the Senate gave was, no, he can still credibly perform his job, so we can't throw him out of office for high crimes and misdemeanors even though he was impeached in the House.
00:20:51.000That standard still applies to President Trump.
00:20:53.000Republicans would, I think, there's a case that people are making that Republicans would be smart to convict President Trump in the Senate.
00:22:44.000And again, when you use that promo code Shapiro, Shapiro.Robinhood.com, you get a free stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help build that portfolio.
00:22:57.000Okay, meanwhile, the President of the United States has been caught up in this talk of a government shutdown with the Democrats.
00:23:04.000And the Democrats are saying, we are not going to fund this border wall no matter what.
00:23:07.000This is a winning campaign issue for the President.
00:23:10.000If Democrats refuse to give the President his funding for a border wall, And the president says, listen, I'm not signing anything without that funding in it because they will not provide you the necessary security, the necessary prevention against dangerous people getting into the country.
00:23:24.000That's a winning issue for the president.
00:23:26.000And the Democrats are proving themselves intransigent.
00:23:28.000It's amazing to me that the Democrats don't just give him the funding.
00:23:32.000I understand that they want the political win of being able to say that they prevented Trump from getting the funding, but it doesn't seem worth it to me.
00:23:43.000We need to be stronger on border security.
00:23:45.000So we're giving him the funding for border security and we're doing so in order to make the country safer.
00:23:50.000Is that a huge win for Trump that's going to win him vast swaths of voters across the country?
00:23:55.000I don't think so, especially if Democrats tried to show themselves as partners in all of this, as opposed to obstructors in all of this.
00:24:01.000Instead, they've decided that this is a hill they are willing to die on.
00:24:04.000President Trump should make them stand on that hill over and over and over again.
00:24:09.000So Bernie Sanders is one of the folks who's pushing this.
00:24:11.000Bernie Sanders is so wild, and the Democrats are so wild, that Bernie Sanders says he would not even trade citizenship for the Dreamers, meaning people who arrived here below the age of majority as children or young teenagers.
00:24:25.000He wouldn't trade citizenship for them for a wall.
00:24:28.000So he would leave, he'd rather leave legitimately hundreds of thousands or millions of illegal immigrants who could get citizenship in a deal Off the table, just so that President Trump can't build a border wall.
00:24:38.000It's an insane position, but it is the mainstream democratic position.
00:24:41.000Here's Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who's fading in the polls, but not fading in our hearts.
00:24:48.000What's wrong with the move of saying what the Democrats say quietly, which is, we're in favor of border security, we're funding the stuff that they're doing on the border right now.
00:24:56.000Give them the wall and get back what you want for the Dreamers.
00:24:59.000My understanding is he does not have the votes in the House.
00:25:02.000And I think there are a lot of folks here in the Senate, Republicans, who are also not supportive of building the wall.
00:25:09.000All right, so wall for dreamers, not on the table for Bernie Sanders.
00:25:12.000And then Chuck Schumer comes out and he says, President Trump is going to hold the government hostage for a campaign pledge?
00:25:18.000Well, first of all, that is what every president has done.
00:25:47.000OK, that is absurd and it is not true.
00:25:50.000You know, the president's pledge is a matter of border security and he is not wrong to push it.
00:25:56.000But the Democrats are very radical on this issue and that's a winning issue for the president of the United States.
00:26:00.000How radical are Democrats on this issue?
00:26:02.000Here's an editorial from the Boston Globe about this.
00:26:04.000They're very, very upset because the president over the last week has expanded his plan to dramatically expand the so-called public charge rule.
00:26:13.000The public charge rule says that the administration is not going to allow people to come into the country who might become a public charge.
00:26:19.000In other words, you don't get to come in the country if you're going to come here and be on public benefits.
00:26:22.000So according to the Boston Globe, the rule is meant to prevent people who might become a public charge from entering or establishing legal residency in the United States.
00:26:29.000Historically, the test was narrow, designed to identify those who would rely on the government as their main source of support.
00:26:35.000The test considered only cash-based aid, which only 3% of non-citizens use.
00:26:38.000Trump wants to expand factors considered to include food stamps and housing assistance programs like Section 8 and Medicaid, among others.
00:26:44.000Additionally, establishes new factors that would count against non-citizens.
00:26:47.000Earning an income of less than 125% of the federal poverty level, lacking English proficiency, having a poor credit score, or being older than 61 or younger than 18.
00:26:56.000These new rules would apply to foreign-born individuals seeking a green card and to some abroad requesting visas.
00:27:04.000I think if you ask the American people, do you want people immigrating to the country who depress wages because they earn low wages abroad, who have low levels of education, who are more likely to depend on food stamps and Section 8 housing, most Americans would say, no, we don't want those people coming into the country Just as a general rule, because if they're going to take advantage of our public benefits programs, then how are they of net benefit to American society?
00:27:27.000Now, I'm libertarian on immigration in a non-social welfare-based system.
00:27:31.000When my great-grandparents came to the United States, great-great-grandparents came to the United States in 1907, 1908, there were none of these social welfare programs in place.
00:27:39.000If there are no social welfare programs in place and you just want to come here and work, You just want to come here and be free?
00:27:45.000But if you're coming here and you are likely to rely on public benefits, how exactly do you hope that we are going to be able to support those public benefits on the back of such immigration policies?
00:27:56.000But Democrats on the left are so radical on this that they say that if you don't agree that we should bring in people to be on our welfare systems, then this means that you're some sort of racist or xenophobe.
00:28:07.000So, it really is an amazing, amazing statement by folks on the left.
00:28:11.000The Boston Globe concludes, in the past, the government has encouraged low-income people to enroll in public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid, so it'd be especially unfair to make those choices count against immigrants now.
00:28:25.000I mean, just because the government had bad policy in the past, we have to maintain that bad policy now?
00:28:29.000With so much harm, what could possibly be the intent of this policy change?
00:28:33.000Homeland Security said in a statement that the policy would, quote, "...promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers." This is called rationality.
00:28:43.000But the rule says the Boston Globe would do exactly the opposite.
00:28:46.000It would cripple low-income immigrant families who are doing everything by the book and trigger aftershocks that would hurt all Americans.
00:28:52.000No, no, it would remove people from the public roles is what it would do.
00:28:59.000But this is how extreme the Democrats are.
00:29:00.000They say not only should we not build a wall, we should encourage people to come here and then we should tell them to get on public benefits.
00:29:08.000And so when folks on the left say that Trump's border policy is all about xenophobia and racism, it just doesn't ring true in any real sense.
00:29:15.000That's not going to stop them from saying it though.
00:29:17.000CNN's Angela Rye says that Trump's wall is all about xenophobia and racism because for the left, everything Republicans do is about xenophobia and racism.
00:29:24.000Donald Trump is fixated on the southern border as he was the day that he announced his campaign.
00:30:13.000"Our new deal with Mexico and Canada, "the US MCA is so much better than the old, "very costly and anti-USA NAFTA deal "that just by the money we save, "Mexico is paying for the wall." No, that is not true.
00:30:44.000If the trade deal is better, that means both sides benefit.
00:30:47.000So, I don't understand how that pays for the border wall.
00:30:50.000If this is Trump's idea of fulfilling a promise, that's silly.
00:30:53.000But again, it was a silly promise to begin with, and no one was going to hold him to it anyway.
00:30:56.000The only question is whether he actually builds the wall and pleases all of his fans who wanted him to build the wall.
00:31:01.000It seems like, unfortunately, President Trump is making noises in which he's going to claim that he's already built the wall, even though he has not.
00:31:07.000The Department of Homeland Security put out a memo today saying that the wall has never been built higher than it is now.
00:31:12.000In other words, we didn't build a new wall, but we extended upward the wall that we already had, the fencing that we already had.
00:31:20.000If you want to buy that, you can buy it, but that is not a fulfillment of his campaign promise.
00:31:24.000Okay, in just a second, I want to get to media bias, because we have a couple of amazing stories of media bias over the last couple of days.
00:31:32.000And then we also have to talk about the increased radicalism inside the Democratic Party and the Boy Scouts on the verge of bankruptcy.
00:31:38.000But first, let's talk a little bit about another podcast that you ought to give a listen to.
00:31:55.000And there's a great show on Netflix called Narcos about Pablo Escobar and the drug cartels.
00:32:00.000Well, there are episodes coming up on Kingpins all about Pablo Escobar and Thelma Wright and Al Capone, about people who control the landscape around them and use force and cruelty to control, use extortion and violence and even murder to protect their empires.
00:32:14.000The misuses of human power are one of my chief sources of fascination in life, and Kingpins really takes it on on a narrative level.
00:32:50.000OK, for more on media bias and all the rest, we have pretty good things I like and things I hate coming up today.
00:32:57.000You're going to want to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
00:32:59.000We have so many great things coming for you in the new year when you become a subscriber.
00:33:03.000You get not only the rest of all the shows live and all the rest of it and ability to join the mailbag and ability to ask questions during the during the conversations.
00:33:11.000You also are going to be able to ask me questions live on air like every day when you're a subscriber because we're doing two more hours of the show every day.
00:33:20.000That's how hard I'm slaving my fingers to the bone for you people.
00:33:24.000So all you have to do is go become a subscriber and then you get access to that stuff.
00:33:28.000And we're doing a live radio show and we'll be simulcasting that and I'll be answering your questions during the commercial breaks and everything.
00:34:09.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:34:11.000So the media obviously are wildly biased against Republicans.
00:34:21.000And you can see it in terms not only of the immigration debate, where you have everybody ripping on President Trump's eminently practical policies with regard to illegal immigration, but in virtually every aspect of the media.
00:34:33.000It is amazing how much the left will go out of its way in the media to cover for its own.
00:34:40.000To cover for members of the media who are on the left and to cover for politicians on the left.
00:34:44.000And this is how you end up with stories like this one from the LA Times.
00:34:48.000So it turns out that the CEO of the LA Times was talking openly about a Jewish cabal that ran Los Angeles.
00:35:00.000Several months after taking control of the troubled Tribune Publishing Company in 2016, Chicago investor Michael Farrow convened a session of corporate leaders from within his own news empire, including chief news executives from such storied papers as the L.A.
00:35:11.000Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun.
00:35:13.000The group of about 20 people trooped from Chicago's iconic Tribune Tower on Michigan Avenue to an upscale restaurant nearby.
00:35:19.000In a private room, participants dined on seafood and steak while Farrow, then the company's chairman, held forth on his plans.
00:35:25.000His own net worth was newly in the nine figures.
00:35:28.000Associates and peers say Farrell held ambitions that were wide-ranging, even audacious, given the newspaper industry's stiff headwinds.
00:35:34.000At the dinner, as at other moments, Farrell railed against those he felt were impeding him, including perceived rivals and competitors.
00:35:40.000Among them, Eli Broad, who's a Southern California billionaire and civic leader.
00:35:43.000Farrell called him part of a Jewish cabal that ran Los Angeles.
00:35:48.000A spokesman for Faro denied the incident occurred and called the claim reckless allegations.
00:35:51.000Nothing really spells out how much you should trust the media than that a bunch of members of the media were in a room with a high-powered guy who owns a bunch of newspapers and failed to report for several years that the man was talking about a Jewish cabal running Los Angeles.
00:36:05.000It's amazing how the left is willing to accept antisemitism when it comes from its own ranks.
00:36:08.000Tribune Publishing made the first in a series of secret payments to total more than $2.5 million to avert a threatened lawsuit by a fired newspaper executive, according to three people with knowledge of the deal.
00:36:19.000That had the effect of keeping Farrow's antisemitic slur out of the public spotlight.
00:36:22.000So in other words, intrepid journalists sitting at the Stinner hearing the CEO of the LA Times rail against the Jewish cabal in Los Angeles.
00:36:53.000Also, not a shock from the folks at the LA Times who have legitimately, for years on end, hidden a tape Now it's been hidden for a full decade.
00:37:01.000A tape of then-Senator Barack Obama attending a party at which Rashid Khalidi, an actual terrorist spokesperson, spoke up in his favor and then Obama spoke about him.
00:37:10.000That tape should have come out during 2008.
00:37:12.000The LA Times hid it and they refused the offer of payment of I think it was $100,000 from Andrew Breitbart to release the tape.
00:37:19.000How long do you think it would have taken for that tape to release, to leak, if it had been a Republican making such comments?
00:37:26.000Media bias is pretty extraordinary, and media bias is so extraordinary that you can get away with pretty much anything so long as you are still in the leftist wheelhouse.
00:37:35.000So yesterday on MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski was talking about Mike Pompeo, who is the Secretary of State, and she's very angry that Secretary Pompeo, what she believes is being weak, With dictators around the world.
00:37:47.000And she proceeded to use a phrase that if any Republican used it, that Republican would immediately lose his job.
00:37:52.000She still maintains her job because that's how this works.
00:37:54.000Joy Reid can say whatever homophobic thing she wants and maintain on MSNBC.
00:37:58.000And Mika Brzezinski can say whatever homophobic thing she wants and maintain her job on MSNBC.
00:39:09.000Anybody does that on Fox News, they're immediately suspended, maybe fired, because that's the way that the media protect their own.
00:39:15.000Well, because the media are so far to the left, that is increasing the radicalism inside the Democratic Party, and this does have consequences.
00:39:21.000So, how radical is the Democratic Party becoming?
00:39:26.000What has happened inside the Democratic Party is that Bernie Sanders has become the mainstream.
00:39:29.000It's one of the reasons why Bernie Sanders is not going to run successfully in 2020.
00:39:32.000He made the mistake of being too successful in 2016.
00:39:35.000The Democratic Party decided to basically cannibalize Bernie Sanders' campaign and then ingest it and then poop out a bunch of candidates who mirror Bernie Sanders' priorities.
00:39:46.000So here is Bernie Sanders yesterday talking about greedy billionaires controlling the USA.
00:39:49.000The only real question about this is, is there any Democrat who's going to run in 2020 who disagrees with this?
00:39:58.000Okay, this is the exact sort of language that everyone in the Democratic Party now uses, particularly folks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who I bring up because, again, I know every time we talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we're accused of being obsessed with her.
00:40:22.000Except that there are articles in mainstream media today calling for her to run for president.
00:40:27.000She's not even eligible for the presidency.
00:40:29.000You have to be 35 to be president of the United States.
00:40:32.000Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who does not know things, is 29 years old and she's being touted as the new hot thing in Congress because she's good at social media, which she eminently is.
00:40:44.000Matthew Iglesias, the Ralph Wiggum of political commentary over at Vox.com.
00:40:49.000He has an article today called, It's Ridiculous That It's Unconstitutional For Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez To Run For President.
00:40:56.000He says, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the biggest star in the Democratic Party and she has been ever since she unseated Representative Joe Crowley in a surprise primary upset in May.
00:41:04.000That her win didn't, in the final analysis, launch a wave of leftist primary victories only goes to show what a phenomenon she personally is.
00:41:12.000I mean, I don't wish to review the history here for all that long, but Representative Joe Crowley was a representative from a majority-minority district, and she won 17,000 votes in the primary.
00:41:22.000So, like, five people showed up, and of those five people, three voted for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
00:42:09.000Matthew Iglesias, man, that guy was dropped on his head as a baby many times.
00:42:13.000He fell off the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.
00:42:15.000A House Democratic staffer told me the other day that ACO was a good example of something.
00:42:20.000I knew exactly who she meant, despite the error, because there aren't any other members of Congress who have widely recognized nicknames you would just drop into casual conversation.
00:42:27.000Is having a nickname a sign you would exercise good judgment in the Oval Office?
00:42:39.000Arnold Schwarzenegger, kind of vaguely Trumpish figure in California politics.
00:42:43.000Had he run for president in 2012, he probably would have lost badly in the primaries on the grounds of not being right-wing enough.
00:42:48.000But it's at least conceivable he would have won, and he'd have been a tough opponent for Barack Obama to beat for the best possible reasons.
00:42:53.000His politics are considerably saner and more humane than the average Republican, but he didn't run.
00:42:58.000We never got a glimpse of what a run would look like, because immigrants, like 20-somethings, are constitutionally barred from serving.
00:43:17.000People were running for president at 35 and were allowed to do so because you were working when you were like 13 and you were dying when you were 50.
00:43:25.000were 50. 35 in 1789. 35 in 1789 is basically the equivalent of like 55 now.
00:43:32.000So I don't know by what logic you have.
00:43:36.000So you live in your mother's basement.
00:46:00.000The movies that were nominated for Best Picture that year were Chariots of Fire, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is the most memorable of all these movies, and Reds, which is the most overrated of all of these movies.
00:46:10.000But On Golden Pond is really worth watching.
00:46:12.000It's a very sweet, Movie, it's got a lot of great acting, so much great acting that it won Best Actor for Henry Fonda and Best Actress in a Leading Role for Katherine Hepburn and was nominated for Best Actress for Jane Fonda, who's really good in the movie.
00:46:26.000She's not a good person but a very good actress.
00:46:29.000So go check out On Golden Pond if you have the time.
00:46:41.000She talked about President Trump's predictable unpredictability when it came to foreign policy and how she was able to utilize that for good purpose.
00:46:48.000I needed to pick up the phone and say, this is what I'm going to do.
00:46:51.000You know, are you good with this or this?
00:47:40.000So there's a great organization that is run by Gary Sinise, who is a wonderful human being.
00:47:47.000And this organization is entirely dedicated to The families of soldiers and remembering the past, Gary Sinise basically took a hundred kids who are children of people who are KIA or killed in action and took them to the war memorials in Washington, D.C.
00:48:08.000A bunch of people on the ground at the airport where they were received stood there and cheered these kids as they got off the plane and then sang them the national anthem.
00:48:36.000I mean, this stuff is really moving, and he actually sent more than 650 families, who are Gold Star families, to Disney World via the Gary Sinise Foundation.
00:48:45.000Certainly a charity worthy of your support, a charity worthy of my support as well.
00:48:50.000This was at the Nashville International Airport, where there was a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, where the families were waiting to board the plane as service members stood at attention.
00:48:58.000It's just beautiful stuff, and Sinise is known for being extraordinarily pro-military.
00:49:03.000And his service in that respect is really extraordinary.
00:49:07.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:49:13.000So the Boy Scouts are now on the verge of bankruptcy.
00:49:17.000It turns out that when you abandon the chief values for which you once stood, people do not want to sign up for your organization.
00:49:22.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Boy Scouts of America is considering filing for bankruptcy protection as it faces dwindling membership and escalating legal costs related to lawsuits over how it handled allegations of sexual abuse.
00:49:33.000It's not really that that's bankrupting the Boy Scouts of America, it's that their membership is wildly down ever since they decided that they would admit girls, and that they would allow gay scoutmasters, and that they would no longer focus on the Judeo-Christian heritage of the organization.
00:49:47.000Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts say that more than 110 million people have participated in its educational programs, which promote outdoor skills, character building, and leadership.
00:49:55.000The Boy Scouts have been at the center of sexual abuse scandals in the past.
00:49:59.000The organization is facing a number of lawsuits alleging inappropriate conduct, By employees or volunteers, an incident stating back as far as the 1960s.
00:50:07.000But that's not really what is going on here.
00:50:09.000What's really going on here is that the Boy Scouts are being bled dry by people who do not want to be part of the Boy Scouts now that they have forcibly caved to the radical left.
00:50:18.000There's a famous video of me online talking to a girl about the Boy Scout, about pronouns, gendered pronouns, like boy and girl, meaning things, meaning biological boy and girl.
00:50:29.000And why the Boy Scouts should not allow biological girls into the Boy Scouts.
00:50:34.000And a woman at one of my speeches saying, well, how do you know that?
00:50:37.000I said, because it's in the name Boy Scouts.
00:50:39.000Well, then the Boy Scouts flipped and agreed with her and decided boy can also mean girl.
00:50:42.000With that kind of intestinal fortitude, a lot of people are not going to join the Boy Scouts.
00:50:47.000The Boy Scouts currently have more than 2.3 million youth members.
00:50:50.000And why exactly are they losing members?
00:50:52.000Well, the Mormons, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, formerly one of the group's largest sponsors, said that it's going to withdraw from the Boy Scout programs.
00:50:59.000Instead, they're going to develop its own program for young men.
00:51:02.000The Boy Scouts group drew scrutiny over its slow pace to become more inclusive, but it wasn't that that created problems in the Boy Scouts.
00:51:08.000It was that they caved to social justice warriors who insisted that they change their mainline mission.
00:51:13.000Under pressure from legislators in California who said they would withdraw 501c3 status from the group and sponsorship from the group if the group did not cave to the social justice warrior demands.
00:51:24.000This is what happens when groups that are based on historic values decide to destroy those historic values in the name of convenience.
00:51:37.000So, in all of the hubbub over Jamal Khashoggi, who is the Saudi Arabian citizen who was murdered by the Saudi government at the Saudi embassy in Turkey, Creating worldwide chaos.
00:51:51.000People have forgotten a couple of quick things.
00:52:28.000He's tried to assassinate political rivals himself.
00:52:30.000He wanted a dissident named Gulen shipped from the United States back to Turkey so he could basically do the same thing to him that the Saudis did to Khashoggi.
00:52:38.000And now, Erdogan is saying that he is going to wipe out the Kurds in eastern Syria.
00:52:43.000He says that Turkey will launch a military operation against the Kurds in northern Syria within days, a decision that could signal a shift in Turkish-U.S.
00:52:50.000relations and have far-reaching consequences for Syria's future, is according to The Guardian.
00:53:29.000It is always important to recall that whenever there's a Middle Eastern conflict, the answer usually is there are no good guys.
00:53:35.000And when it comes to Erdogan, he is an absolute bad human being.
00:53:38.000He's a bad, radical, terror-supporting human being.
00:53:41.000And the fact that so many people have fallen for the idea that because Erdogan says something, we have to take it seriously or that it has no geopolitical ramifications.
00:53:50.000To take positions that help Erdogan is absurd.
00:53:54.000Turkey is an extraordinarily powerful military player in the region.
00:53:56.000They have a much more powerful military than any other military in the region with the possible exception of Israel.
00:54:01.000And the fact that the Turkish government has been able to go about its business without any serious blowback from the West is an incredible, incredible thing.
00:54:07.000And that we're focused more on the Saudis who are much more helpful to us in geopolitical terms than the Turks right now.
00:54:12.000We're more focused on the Saudis killing a Saudi citizen on Turkish, on Saudi territory in Turkey.
00:54:18.000We're more focused on that than the Turks going in and wiping out the Kurds in Eastern and Northern Syria.
00:54:23.000It demonstrates that we have very little geopolitical vision and that we are apt to fall for whatever is the convenient narrative that the media wish to tell us about ongoing geopolitical conversations.
00:54:32.000Another example of that, Ben Rhodes came out recently.
00:54:35.000Ben Rhodes, a national security advisor for President Obama, he came out recently and he said that the United States should not be involved in the war on Yemen.
00:54:47.000It just turns out that the Obama administration had an agenda to push forward the ambitions of the Iranian government, and Trump doesn't have those ambitions.
00:54:55.000And because the press loves Obama and hates Trump, they've decided to side with the ambitions of the Obama administration, even if that means emboldening enemies of the United States and radical Islamists across the world.
00:55:04.000OK, well, we'll be back here tomorrow to discuss more on all of this.