While the nation focuses on scandal, other serious problems are actually cropping up. The latest updates in the Trump investigations, and we will check the mailbag. Today's mailbag includes: - What's going on with Robert Mueller's investigation? - Is there any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians? - What are the limits of Mueller's authority? - Should the Justice Department have been looking into Hillary Clinton's campaign finance practices? - Who's responsible for the dossier that became the basis for the Russian dossier? - Is the Clinton campaign responsible for paying Fusion GPS to compile the dossier? - And why did they do it? And is there any reason to suspect that the dossier was actually written by someone other than a Russian spy? - Does the dossier have any bearing on the outcome of the election? - Did Hillary Clinton have a role in writing the dossier, or did she just write it herself? - How much money did Fusion GPS actually receive from a foreign government? - Which is more likely to influence the election than the dossier itself? - Can the dossier be authentic? - Was it written by a third party? - Will the dossier ever be declassified, or is it just fake? - Why did it exist at all? - and what does it really matter? - Where did it really come from? - is it really a dossier or a fake document? - When did it become a dossier? And what will it really have any impact on the election process? - If so, who will be the real purpose of the dossier and who will it be? -- And who will win it? -- And will it ever be released? -- What will it become of this report? -- Is it ever come to the results? -- -- What s the impact of this story? -- Will it be enough? -- Does it matter? -- How will it come out of it? And how will it have a full report of the evidence? -- Can we see it come to justice? -- Should it really be considered a fair and fair and accurate? -- We ll find out? -- - Is it enough, or not? -- -- -- and does it matter, and will it matter to the public get a fair hearing? -- and how much of it matter any more of this? -- etc? -- & much more? -- Also, -- is it enough? And will we get a chance to win the gun you could take home today? -- Thank you, Ben Shapiro?
00:00:13.000Every day, another piece of news, and every piece of news more annoying than the last.
00:00:17.000So much to get to today, we'll get to all of it first.
00:00:20.000Let's talk about your Second Amendment rights.
00:00:21.000So if you're a law-abiding citizen, you want to protect your family, you want to protect your country, you want to protect your home, well then you should probably have a gun.
00:00:28.000And you should also know how to use that gun, and that's where the USCCA comes in.
00:01:23.000Okay, so let's begin with all of the legal updates in the investigation into President Trump and the Trump Organization and campaign finance violations and all the rest of it.
00:01:35.000There's a good piece today from Kimberly Strassel about the feeling that a lot of folks on the right are getting that this is all one-sided.
00:01:43.000And President Trump is among those who feel that this is all one-sided, that the investigations into Trump have been consistent, non-stop, and were never mirrored by any similar investigations into the Hillary Clinton Foundation or into Hillary Clinton's emails.
00:01:55.000This feeling that there are a lot of folks who were responsible for bad action on the left side of the aisle, but got away with it because there was no specific special investigation that was dedicated to them.
00:02:23.000And yet they are now witnessing unequal treatment in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe.
00:02:27.000Yes, the former FBI director deserves credit for smoking out the Russian trolls who interfered in 2016, and one can argue he's obliged to pursue any evidence of criminal acts, even those unrelated to Russia.
00:02:36.000But what cannot be justified is the one-sided nature of his probe.
00:02:39.000Now, I think there is truth to the idea that the DOJ should be looking into campaign finance violations, for example, by the Hillary Clinton campaign, as Kimberly Strassel will explain in a second.
00:02:48.000It looks like there were some of those violations, but those are kind of going by the wayside.
00:02:51.000However, it is important to recognize that Mueller's original purview was Russian collusion and all crimes connected thereto.
00:02:58.000And when it comes to Russian collusion and election interference,
00:03:02.000All of that seems to be coming from the Trump side of the aisle.
00:03:05.000So I'm not going to blame Mueller for the breadth of his purview.
00:03:09.000However, you can say that the DOJ, outside of Mueller, ought to be looking into campaign finance violations by the Hillary team.
00:03:14.000So here is what Kimberly Strassel writes, and I think that she's correct.
00:03:18.000She says, if there's only one set of rules, where is Mr. Mueller's referral of a case against Hillary for America?
00:03:22.000Federal law requires campaigns to disclose the recipient and purpose of any payments.
00:03:26.000The Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to compile a dossier against Mr. Trump, a document that became the basis of the Russian narrative Mr. Mueller now investigates.
00:03:34.000But the campaign funneled the money to law firm Perkins Coie, which in turn paid Fusion GPS.
00:03:39.000The campaign falsely described the money as payment for legal services.
00:03:43.000A Perkins Coy spokesperson has claimed that neither the Clinton campaign nor the DNC was aware that Fusion GPS had been hired to conduct the research, and maybe so.
00:03:51.000But a lot of lawyers here seem to have been ignoring a clear statute, presumably with the intent of influencing an election.
00:03:57.000And she points out also that there have been prosecutions under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which is what has been used to nail Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, people who are acting as essentially emissaries of foreign powers without registering as such.
00:04:08.000But Strassel points out, under this standard, where are the charges against the principals of Fusion GPS, who Senator Chuck Grassley have said
00:04:16.000So, I think that she's correct, that there should be more investigation into Perkins Coy, there should be more investigations into the DNC.
00:04:35.000However, it is imperative to note, just in the interest of intellectual honesty, that when it comes to President Trump and Michael Cohen, Michael Cohen is the president's fixer, Michael Cohen's the guy who turned on Trump, that's the reason we're talking about all of this right now.
00:04:45.000The reason we're talking about all of this right now is because Michael Cohen was the guy who was funneling the money, and he has now turned on President Trump and admitted criminal wrongdoing.
00:04:54.000The same has not held true with regard to Perkins Coy.
00:04:56.000That doesn't mean there shouldn't be an investigation, but there is a slight difference in the amount of evidence that has now been leveraged against President Trump and against the Trump Organization.
00:05:05.000With all of that said, the breaking news today is that the Manhattan District Attorney's Office is considering pursuing criminal charges against the Trump Organization and two senior company officials in connection with Cohen's hush money payment to an adult film actress, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter.
00:05:21.000A state investigation would center on how the company accounted for its reimbursement to Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 he paid to the actress Stephanie Clifford, who has said she had an affair with President Trump, the official said.
00:05:31.000Both officials stressed the office's review of the matter is in its earliest stages and prosecutors have not yet made a decision on whether to proceed.
00:05:38.000So presumably this would involve state charges against the Trump Organization or its executives.
00:05:43.000The Trump Organization involves members of President Trump's family, so it could start to get very ugly for a lot of members of President Trump's family.
00:05:50.000It's also true that the State Attorney General in New York hates President Trump and is more than interested in going after the Trump Organization.
00:05:57.000Does this look like selective prosecution?
00:05:59.000Does it look like they're going a little bit too deep?
00:06:01.000Maybe, but we're going to have to see what charges arise.
00:06:04.000Other news connected to this is that Allen Weisselberg, who is President Trump's longtime financial gatekeeper according to the Wall Street Journal, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for providing information about Michael Cohen in the criminal investigation into hush money payments
00:06:18.000Weisselberg is the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, so he's been granted immunity.
00:06:27.000The Trump Organization, again, involves members of Trump's family, so this could theoretically reach into Trump's family.
00:06:32.000It could also be that we're only finding out about Weisselberg basically becoming an informant for the government.
00:06:40.000In other words, what Weisselberg had to offer was bad material on Cohen, not about members of the Trump family.
00:06:45.000We'll have to find out about all of that.
00:06:46.000None of this is particularly good for the president, of course.
00:06:49.000And then the biggest story connected with all of this is this kind of bombshell story that has now been reported by the New York Times and a bunch of other and a bunch of other
00:06:59.000tabloid newspaper, this is the UK Guardian reporting, the National Enquirer, kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories it killed as part of its cozy relationship with President Trump leading up to the 2016 presidential election, people familiar with the arrangement have told the Associated Press.
00:07:15.000The detail came as several media outlets reported on Thursday that federal prosecutors had granted immunity to the National Enquirer's chief, David Pecker.
00:07:23.000There is a general sense, as I say, that there's a little bit of unfairness going on.
00:07:43.000There's an investigation that is going on into President Trump and all of his associates that is extraordinarily deep, that is extraordinarily detailed, that takes an enormous amount of effort.
00:07:52.000And the feeling is, why are we taking all of this effort on what may or may not be a campaign finance violation?
00:07:59.000And that effort pre-existed, the investigation into Cohen, right?
00:08:02.000We had this whole Russian collusion investigation.
00:08:04.000There's a feeling like this is fruit of the poisonous tree on the right, that the Russian investigation began, it was begun on bad auspices, that basically it was exacerbated by a bunch of bad claims from the DOJ and Obama associates and Hillary Clinton associates, that it was pushed forward by people like Peter Strzok, and that eventually, after President Trump fired Robert Mueller, and after Jeff Sessions recused himself,
00:08:25.000Then a special counsel was appointed, and that special investigator then proceeded to dig into Michael Cohen as an extension into that, and it all feels just a little too much.
00:08:34.000I think there is some truth to that, especially given the fact that the Obama administration routinely ignored crime that was happening within its own ranks.
00:08:41.000I mean, Eric Holder was held in contempt by Congress for not turning over documents, and the President of the United States, Barack Obama, presented him with executive privilege.
00:08:50.000He shielded him with executive privilege.
00:08:53.000The feeling of unfairness on one side of the aisle is absolutely true.
00:08:56.000And I think it's absolutely correct as well.
00:09:00.000It can be that unfairness is happening here, that Trump is being pursued in a way Obama never would have been, that Michael Cohen is being pursued in a way no Obama associate ever would have been.
00:09:10.000And at the same time, it can also be true that Trump is possibly guilty of some stuff and that the people around him are guilty of some stuff and have already pled guilty to some stuff.
00:09:19.000So you can feel the unfairness and you can also say that something corrupt went on here.
00:09:22.000Now, the question for the moral person, to get to the kind of root values, the question for the moral person is, do you think that this ought to result in President Trump getting off the hook as sort of a sop to the fact that the DOJ has become thoroughly politicized, or is the answer that we have to start enforcing the law somewhere, and if the law has to be enforced against people on our own side, well, that's the way it's going to have to go.
00:09:44.000In other words, do two wrongs make a right?
00:09:46.000Do we live in a political sphere where it is more important that both sides be treated equally by being let off the hook for corruption, or is it better that we actually start trying to reinstate some semblance of law enforcement in our system?
00:10:01.000It's hard because it feels like we on the right are constantly having to
00:10:05.000Basically suggests that we are on a higher plane, that we are going to play by the rules while the other side doesn't.
00:10:12.000And one of the great irritations on Twitter and on social media these days is you see all of these fools on the left tweeting out stuff about how the biggest scandal under Obama was that he wore a tan suit one time at a briefing.
00:10:24.000There's a list as long as my arm of scandals in which the Obama administration was involved, ranging from the IRS to Benghazi to Fast and Furious to the Health and Human Services corruption,
00:10:41.000And yet, they were treated as nothing by the media.
00:10:43.000And so the natural tendency of human beings is to fight back against that by saying, okay, well, if you guys aren't going to play by the rules, we're not going to play by the rules either.
00:10:49.000Why should we abide by the law if you guys are not going to abide by the law?
00:10:53.000And then when you look at the way the media treat these issues, you also feel a certain sense of unfairness.
00:10:58.000Because the media are all over American media, right?
00:11:13.000Times in the run up to the 2008 election had a tape of Rashid Khalidi, who was an actual member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who's a spokesman for a terrorist group, and Barack Obama honoring him at an event.
00:11:24.000Times refused to release that publicly.
00:11:26.000So the same folks who are railing against the National Enquirer for doing Trump's dirty work, as well they should be, a lot of them were doing Obama's dirty work when Obama was president.
00:11:37.000In just a second, I want to talk about what the predictable ramifications of that should be.
00:11:41.000But first, let's talk about the software you use at your company.
00:11:45.000When you're dealing with a real head scratcher, having a go-to person on call is a no-brainer.
00:11:48.000And that certainly holds true when it comes to figuring out what software you should be using at your company to make your company more efficient.
00:11:56.000Their team of advisors can point you in the right direction, so you can start working more effectively right away, and it's absolutely free.
00:12:01.000Just go to softwareadvice.com slash ben, answer a few short questions about your business, and then you'll be connected with an advisor to discuss the best software options for your needs.
00:12:10.000Talking to an advisor takes just 10 minutes or less.
00:12:12.000Whether you're a medical professional, a construction manager, an HR pro, software advice will save you time and help you make a more informed decision.
00:12:19.000You know, if you look across the country at the sort of software a lot of businesses use, they're using like
00:12:47.000So as I say, you look at the media, and the media who are ripping on National Enquirer, as is well deserved, the same media who rip on Fox News all day for being quote-unquote in the pocket of President Trump, those media are in the pocket of the left and have been for decades.
00:13:13.000There's an emotional sympathy that accrues to this.
00:13:15.000It feels like the DOJ let Hillary Clinton off the hook.
00:13:19.000It feels like the DOJ let Barack Obama off the hook.
00:13:21.000It feels like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch basically acted as Barack Obama's great protectors while Jeff Sessions is not doing the same for the President of the United States.
00:13:29.000And so why can't we just play by their rules?
00:13:31.000That was, in fact, one of the premises of the of the Trump campaign was they're not going to play by the rules of the Marcus of Queensbury rules.
00:13:38.000Let's just nominate the guy who's not going to play by any rules at all, who smashes every rule.
00:13:46.000And it felt like destroying the rules was the only way to win.
00:13:49.000And I think that that is a predictable effect of the left's decision to basically buck every rule for decades, for as long as I've been alive, and then insist that the right be held to precisely those rules.
00:13:59.000We're seeing the same thing with the impeachment talk today.
00:14:01.000All the same folks who are against Bill Clinton's impeachment have now turned around and said they are very much in favor of Donald Trump's impeachment on similar or lesser grounds.
00:14:15.000But the question is, is the solution to partisan hackery more partisan hackery?
00:14:18.000Is the country better off if Republicans, if conservatives, start basically shying away from the notion of law enforcement doing its job just because the left has shied away from that?
00:14:29.000Is that a recipe for a better politics?
00:14:31.000Is that a recipe for a better country?
00:14:33.000Is the way that we heal from all of this to basically go along with the left's premise that law enforcement should be used as a tool of those in power?
00:14:40.000Or should we recognize that law enforcement should have a certain level of independence?
00:14:44.000That law enforcement should prosecute crimes as they come up?
00:14:47.000Maybe that's the case we should be making to the American people.
00:14:49.000Maybe the case we should be making is, look, if this were under Obama, he would have shut this stuff down already.
00:14:53.000Because the Democrats are more corrupt.
00:14:56.000But when Republicans get in power, then Republicans get prosecuted.
00:14:59.000Because Republicans are willing to let law enforcement go forward.
00:15:02.000That seems to me like a fairly moral case that ought to be made.
00:15:05.000And, honestly, if the American people want to stand up against corruption, the answer to that is to elect people who you know are not going to stand in the way of investigation of corruption.
00:15:15.000I want to talk about President Trump's response to all of this, because President Trump, representing, as he does, the sort of id of the Republican Party, and also representing a guy who really loves himself a lot, he's very angry at Jeff Sessions.
00:15:27.000Jeff Sessions is the Attorney General, and he's angry at Jeff Sessions because Jeff Sessions has not acted as Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch did.
00:15:33.000He has not stood there and protected President Trump and President Trump's associates from investigation into corrupt activities.
00:15:39.000So yesterday, President Trump was on TV with Fox and Friends, and he went off on Jeff Sessions in pretty
00:17:08.000While I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.
00:17:13.000I demand the highest standards, and where they are not met, I take action.
00:17:16.000However, no nation has a more talented, more dedicated group of law enforcement investigators and prosecutors than the United States.
00:17:22.000I am proud to serve with them, and proud of the work we have done in successfully advancing the rule of law.
00:17:26.000The key line here is, while I am Attorney General, the actions of the DOJ will not be improperly influenced by political considerations.
00:17:33.000That's Jeff Sessions doing what he is supposed to do, which is he is saying, listen, I'm not going to be pressured into doing anything here, right?
00:17:39.000The way this works is that I abide by the law.
00:17:43.000But again, I think there's a battle that's now been breaking out on the right.
00:17:46.000I think it's a years long battle at this point as to how much of your morality, how much of decency are you going to sacrifice for victory?
00:17:54.000If you feel like we have to, and is it really a victory if you sacrifice that morality?
00:18:10.000In one sense it's a win for the right because President Trump
00:18:13.000experiences less blowback, presumably.
00:18:16.000Although, I'm not even sure that's true because the media is so much to the left.
00:18:19.000But on the other hand, what exactly is the right fighting for if not the idea that the rule of law applies to everyone?
00:18:25.000This is why I'm sympathetic to Kimberly Strassel's argument more than I am to President Trump's argument.
00:18:29.000I don't think the solution here is for Jeff Sessions to suddenly become a political actor.
00:18:33.000I do think the solution here is for the DOJ to look into malfeasance on all sides.
00:18:38.000That it shouldn't just be on one side, and that if that requires more investigators, it requires more investigators.
00:18:44.000The case against unfairness is a strong one, but the solution to unfairness I don't think is more unfairness.
00:18:50.000Unfortunately, there are some on the right who really believe that they have to go along with the president's whims here.
00:18:56.000Lindsey Graham is one of these folks, senator from South Carolina, who a long time ago was very anti-Trump, now he's very pro-Trump, obviously, and he came out and he sort of split the difference.
00:19:04.000He says he thinks that Sessions did the right thing by recusing, but if the president fires Sessions, he'll go along with it.
00:19:10.000Every president deserves an attorney general they have confidence in.
00:19:14.000As to Jeff Sessions, I've never met a finer man.
00:19:35.000But from my point of view, the country is not being well served with this much friction.
00:19:39.000I mean, that's a breach in the wall right there, because Republican senators were basically saying, if Jeff Sessions goes, we're not appointing a new Attorney General.
00:19:45.000It's just going to be whatever happens from there.
00:19:47.000But there's Lindsey Graham basically saying, if Trump fires Sessions, then we'll go along with that.
00:19:53.000Which, again, do you think that's going to redounce Republicans' electoral benefit?
00:19:56.000The American people consent when it feels like people are being corrupt.
00:19:59.000I think that, you know, we have the sense on the right that Barack Obama didn't pay a price for his corruption, that Barack Obama didn't pay a price for Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, except for the fact that Republicans have been in control of Congress since 2010 and now run the presidency.
00:20:11.000So the American people can, in fact, feel corruption, and extending the corruption to the other side of the aisle is not an actual solution.
00:20:18.000Speaking of which, we'll talk about Duncan Hunter and the case against Duncan Hunter.
00:20:22.000I also want to talk a little bit about media malfeasance and corruption because it's pretty insane.
00:20:26.000In just a second, we'll talk a little more about President Trump as well.
00:20:30.000But first, let's talk about your impending doom.
00:22:37.000Remember, the president does have the power to declassify all of this information.
00:22:40.000So when he complains about FISA abuse, Christopher Steele and his phony and corrupt dossier, the Clinton Foundation, illegal surveillance of Trump campaign, Russian collusion by Dems, and so much more, open up the papers and documents without redaction.
00:22:56.000Jeff Sessions is not the head of the executive branch.
00:22:57.000Donald J. Trump is the head of the executive branch.
00:22:59.000If he wants the papers opened up without redaction, all he has to do is declassify them.
00:23:03.000He's not doing that, which suggests to me that his legal advisors have seen this stuff, and it doesn't all cut in the direction that President Trump actually wants it to cut in.
00:23:12.000So, how much of this is fulmination for public purposes?
00:23:15.000I don't know, but I'm getting, frankly, a little frustrated with all of the abuse of Jeff Sessions from the right, particularly.
00:23:21.000I don't think Jeff Sessions is doing a bad job.
00:23:24.000And this notion that Jeff Sessions is somehow a tool of the left, when he was the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, the first, okay?
00:23:32.000Don't talk about he's not loyal to Trump.
00:23:33.000He was the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, back when Donald Trump didn't look like he had a prayer.
00:23:39.000This idea that Sessions is some sort of stool pigeon for Hillary Clinton, I find it insulting.
00:23:45.000Meanwhile, the corruption on the right side of the aisle continues to be a public issue.
00:23:51.000Duncan Hunter, the representative from California,
00:23:55.000So are you saying that it's more her fault than your fault?
00:24:16.000Well, I'm saying, when I went to Iraq in 2003, the first time, I gave her power of attorney, and she handled my finances throughout my entire military career, and that continued on when I got into Congress, because I'm gone five days a week, I'm home for two, and she was also the campaign manager, so whatever she did, that'll be looked at too, I'm sure, but I didn't do it.
00:24:38.000I didn't spend any money illegally, I did not use campaign money, especially for Wounded Warrior stuff.
00:24:51.000How about we praise law enforcement for doing its job and we recommend that law enforcement, when Democrats take power or are in power, ought to be doing the same job?
00:24:59.000Again, there are electoral consequences to not abiding by the law.
00:25:02.000Democrats found that out in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016.
00:25:07.000Republicans are going to find that out if they go the way of Democrats and start using law enforcement in order to shield all of their friends.
00:25:12.000Meanwhile, let's talk about the hypocrisy of some in the media, because it truly is astonishing.
00:25:17.000So over the last few days, there's been a lot of talk about Mollie Tibbetts.
00:25:20.000Mollie Tibbetts is a 20-year-old college student in Iowa who was essentially picked up off the street and murdered by an illegal immigrant.
00:25:40.000And this has become a national issue for a couple of reasons, some good and some bad.
00:25:44.000And I want to discuss whether it's moral to make this a national issue because when there's a school shooting, there's some of us on the right who say,
00:25:51.000The media's attempt to make every school shooting into the jumping off point for a gun control discussion without any of the facts being in, that's immoral.
00:25:58.000When we have these town hall events in Parkland where Marco Rubio is called a murderer in front of a throng of people all cheering and baying for his blood, that is a bad thing.
00:26:08.000There are a bunch of us who say that that is inappropriate.
00:26:11.000But when it comes to the Mollie Tibbetts case, then we're a little softer.
00:26:14.000Well, I think that there are some distinctions to be drawn between the Mollie Tibbetts case and some of the school shooting stuff.
00:26:43.000The other reason that, but the reason that she really deserves attention is because the media pay outsized attention to victims they think push their particular narrative, and then they ignore victims they think do not push that particular narrative.
00:26:54.000So they covered Mollie Tibbetts wall to wall until it turned out that the illegal, that the killer was an illegal immigrant, at which point they still covered Mollie Tibbetts, but they mostly covered the fact that the right was pointing out that Mollie Tibbetts' killer was an illegal immigrant.
00:27:07.000They're not going to have any town halls in Iowa about illegal immigration after Molly Tibbetts was killed by an illegal immigrant.
00:27:13.000If she'd been killed in a school shooting, there would be a town hall in Iowa tomorrow with CNN in the lead.
00:27:17.000There's no question that that would be the case.
00:27:19.000So when is it actually appropriate to talk about policy?
00:27:22.000Well, it's appropriate to talk about policy when three factors have been fulfilled, I think.
00:27:27.000First, when we know the actual circumstance of a given incident, so we actually know what happened, one of the problems with a lot of the school shooting talk is that we don't actually know what happened.
00:27:34.000Somebody shoots up a school, we don't know where they got the gun, we don't know anything about the shooter, and before the bodies are even culled, before we even know other people are alive or dead, everybody jumps to a gun control conversation on Twitter.
00:27:45.000That's inappropriate because you actually need more facts to talk about policy.
00:27:49.000In this case, the fact that this guy was an illegal immigrant
00:27:52.000It does raise one policy issue, which is, are we properly enforcing our laws?
00:27:56.000But we actually don't know why he was in the country, how he got into the country, what laws would have had to be more strictly enforced in order to keep him out of the country.
00:28:09.000You should talk about an instance when the circumstances are representative of a broader trend.
00:28:13.000There is crime among illegal immigrants.
00:28:16.000There's arguments about whether that crime rate is higher or lower than the domestic population.
00:28:20.000But the bottom line is that if one crime is committed by an illegal immigrant, then that is one crime too many, considering that that illegal immigrant should not be in the country.
00:28:27.000So I think it's fair to talk about it from that perspective.
00:28:29.000And third, you can talk about policy when the policy recommended logically concerns the trend and would have stopped the incident in question.
00:28:35.000This is where I say I'm not sure we have enough information about Malia Tibbetts yet.
00:28:39.000In what situation should we cover the Mollye Tibbetts thing?
00:28:42.000We should cover it by recognizing that the media are completely unjust in their own coverage of these issues.
00:28:47.000That Mollye Tibbetts will not be covered by CNN in the same way a school shooting would be covered by CNN.
00:28:51.000I think that's a perfectly fair political point to make on the back of the Mollye Tibbetts case.
00:28:55.000I think it is also perfectly fair to talk about
00:28:57.000Illegal immigration and the costs thereof in terms of crime because we know this guy was an illegal immigrant.
00:29:03.000However, when it comes to policymaking, I'm not sure we can actually talk about what policies ought to be implemented yet because we don't know how the guy got in the country, how long he'd been in the country, had he been deported previously, had he committed other crimes.
00:29:13.000We don't know enough about that at this point.
00:29:16.000However, the media's anger at even discussing the issue is wildly outsized and hypocritical considering how much they are willing to cover every single school shooting up the wazoo.
00:30:05.000He sounds like a hypocrite because Chris Cuomo and CNN have said that if you don't agree with them on gun control, it's because you don't care enough about the dead kids.
00:30:13.000This is one of my pet peeves in politics is when people do this routine.
00:30:16.000So I think that it's a mistake to say that folks on the left don't care about people who are killed by illegal immigrants.
00:30:21.000But it is fair to talk about border policy once all the facts are in, and it's certainly fair to point out the hypocrisy of a media that is willing to ignore crimes like this in order to focus in on crimes that push their political agenda in a more thorough going way.
00:30:34.000Geraldo Rivera does the same thing on Fox News.
00:30:37.000Obviously, he's a pro-illegal immigrant figure, and so he's very upset that people are talking about illegal immigration.
00:31:00.000I understand where you're coming from.
00:31:01.000And to use this case to make that point is wrong.
00:31:03.000Okay, well, you can use this case to make the point that any crime committed by an illegal immigrant who shouldn't be here is a mistake by federal law enforcement.
00:31:10.000We already have laws on the books, right?
00:31:11.000And by the way, people on the right make the same argument about guns.
00:31:15.000We already have gun control laws on the books.
00:31:16.000So if there's a shooting and somebody violated the law in order to get a gun, then law enforcement should have done its job.
00:31:21.000So the right is actually relatively consistent here.
00:31:23.000There are a group of people on the right who are making hay while the sun shines.
00:31:27.000They're turning this into a, well, if we can make Molly Tibbetts a household name, and if we can claim that Democrats don't care about the death of Molly Tibbetts, well, then we can make political hay.
00:31:35.000I don't think that the evidence is in for that, and I don't like that tactic very much.
00:31:39.000That said, there are some people on the left who have demonstrated some pretty cold-hearted stuff when it comes to Mollie Tibbetts.
00:31:45.000I talked about a commentator on MSNBC who basically just dismissed her death as some girl, but I think that's a minority viewpoint.
00:31:52.000There are political differences on this issue, and those are political differences we should hash out, but I want to be careful about how we handle stories like Mollie Tibbetts.
00:31:58.000She deserves coverage because every murder victim deserves coverage.
00:32:01.000We can discuss illegal immigration, but we have to wait for all the facts to come in.
00:32:05.000But we should certainly point out the hypocrisy of the media that will jump to discussing any issue so long as it is not an issue with which they disagree.
00:32:12.000Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about some actual serious issues in America, like trend lines that look really bad that are being obscured by sort of the daily headlines.
00:33:16.000If you don't believe in the political bias of the media, all you had to do is watch Chris Cuomo make a fool of himself last night interviewing Kellyanne Conway.
00:33:22.000So, Kellyanne Conway was out there making the case for the president on a variety of issues, and Chris Cuomo just will not allow her to get a word in edgewise.
00:33:30.000It's really a horrible performance by Cuomo, who's now considering himself sort of Jim Acosta, but bigger and weirder.
00:33:55.000You know, just great interviewing skills by Chris Cuomo.
00:33:57.000I can't imagine why people think that he is biased.
00:34:00.000All of this sort of back and forth in American politics is obscuring some relatively big stories that we are missing because these are the trend lines we should be watching.
00:34:06.000Terrence Jeffrey has a piece over at cnsnews.com today that says that 52.1% of children in America live in households getting means-tested government assistance.
00:34:17.000He says, in 2016, according to the most recent data from the Census Bureau, there were approximately 74 million people in the United States under 18, 38 million of them, 52.1%, resided in households in which one or more persons received benefits from a means-tested government program.
00:34:33.000That would include Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, that's food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, supplemental security income, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the National School Lunch Program.
00:34:49.000That there are approximately 320 million people living in the United States.
00:34:53.000Of these, 115 million people lived in a household that received means-tested assistance.
00:34:57.000That doesn't mean every person in the household received the aid, but it means that one or more persons living in the household did.
00:35:02.000People under 18 were the most likely to receive all of this aid.
00:35:06.000We are creating a system of government dependence that's going to be very difficult for us to recover from, and it is not sustainable long run.
00:35:12.000The only way that you're going to be able to sustain anything resembling a free market economy is if we
00:35:21.000And the way to do that is not only a thriving economy, but deregulation and also an increase in public charity, a bettering of our education system, attempts by private industry to actually go into underprivileged areas and hire people and educate people.
00:35:37.000If that doesn't happen, then we are moving very quickly toward a huge government, soft socialism.
00:35:44.000A lot of socialist systems built on top of a fading capitalist system.
00:35:47.000Think of the American system, not as a socialist system or a capitalist system, but as basically a clown on stilts.
00:35:53.000The stilts are capitalism, the clown is socialist programs.
00:35:55.000And at a certain point, if the clown gets too fat, the stilts just break.
00:35:59.000And that's basically what we are on the verge of here in the United States.
00:36:03.000Thank God capitalism is incredibly robust.
00:36:05.000Thank God business is still able to generate enough revenue to cover some of this, although we are borrowing at extraordinary, exorbitant rates.
00:36:12.000But there will come a time when those stilts break and the socialism just starts to cripple the economy in a major way.
00:36:50.000Anyway, in my experience in middle and high school, I was taught in detail about the horrors of far right wing Nazi Germany, but never in the same detail about those of other socialist regimes like China or the USSR.
00:36:59.000Considering that those powers were just as oppressive for often the same motivations, why was I never taught this in school?
00:37:04.000Is there actually a significant difference between Nazi socialism and Soviet Chinese socialism?
00:37:08.000When did the notion that Nazi Germany was far right wing become widely distributed?
00:37:11.000I know that history is often written by the winners, but if this is true, how come the USSR and China are not vilified in the same way as Nazi Germany?
00:37:18.000Any answers to one or all of these questions is appreciated.
00:37:42.000The reason that Mussolini is seen as a buffoon and not as a tyrannical evil dictator so much is because he was less racist than Hitler, basically.
00:37:50.000The racism that was embedded in the Nazi program
00:37:54.000is what made Nazism particularly toxic to those on the left.
00:37:56.000The reason for this is that the media actually have a soft spot for socialism.
00:38:00.000Up until the Soviet Union collapsed, there were a lot of people in the United States on the left who were quite warm toward the idea of a more Marxist American government.
00:38:08.000They might have wanted a socialist check on full-on communism, but they were kind of warm toward the USSR.
00:38:13.000Remember, in the 1930s, the USSR was promoted by the left in the United States as the wave of the future.
00:38:19.000HG Wells in Britain was talking about how the USSR was going to be the new way that we did things.
00:38:24.000That scientific socialism was the way that the world was going to run.
00:38:27.000And they never really quite gave up on that.
00:38:29.000I was talking about this with a friend of mine who happens to be kind of on the left, and we were discussing the fact that on the right,
00:38:35.000The right will actually excise Nazis from its ranks.
00:38:38.000There's a story this week about the Claremont Institute.
00:38:40.000There's a guy named Charles Johnson who was basically expressing white supremacist sentiments on one of their listservs and Claremont just shut it down.
00:38:47.000They shut down the entire listserv because they said we're not interacting with this guy.
00:38:51.000And the left said, look at these white supremacists who have infiltrated Claremont.
00:38:54.000Well, Claremont shut down the listserv.
00:38:55.000When's the last time somebody on the left was actually excised for their ideas?
00:39:09.000That's because the right does a better job of policing its own ideology.
00:39:13.000The right does a better job of policing the folks who are sort of on the fringes.
00:39:17.000Now, I still think we should do a better job, but the left has never policed any of this stuff.
00:39:20.000Now, the reason that Nazi Germany is considered quote-unquote far-right is because the Nazis arose in a context in Europe in which the left was the Reds, like the actual communists, backed by the Soviet Union.
00:39:31.000And in Germany, the coalition government that was put together and that led to Hitler's rise was a coalition of anti-communists.
00:39:38.000And Hitler was anti-communist, the Nazis were anti-communist, but they also believed in this big government redistributionist program.
00:39:45.000They believed in also what was called basically economic fascism, this idea that the government could regulate business incredibly heavily, that it could benefit certain businesses at the expense of other businesses, that it would run business from the top without actually nationalizing all the resources of those businesses.
00:39:58.000That's the difference between economic fascism or state-sponsored capitalism as you now see in China.
00:40:05.000Looks a lot more like Nazi Germany's economic system than like the Soviet Union's economic system.
00:40:09.000And that's because they're using capitalism, but it's state-sponsored capitalism.
00:40:13.000Nationalization of resources, regulations on certain businesses, benefiting friends of government, and all the rest.
00:40:18.000So, Nazi Germany was considered right-wing by European standards, but it is deeply dishonest when folks on the left in the United States say that Nazi Germany was a right-wing
00:40:27.000Group by American standards, that's just nonsense.
00:40:30.000The right in the United States is not for nationalization of industry or top-down control of industry.
00:40:35.000The right in the United States is not for racial classification.
00:40:39.000The right in the United States is about limited government and God-given rights, none of which were any part of the Nazi platform.
00:40:44.000Should communism be treated with the same toxicity as Nazism?
00:40:49.000The only real difference in terms of the in terms of the
00:40:52.000Classification of evil is that you could say Nazi Germany was more evil because there was this heavy racial component Which is an additional?
00:40:58.000Evil and particularly relevant to evil in the United States where racial issues have divided America for a very long time Patrick says hey Ben I love listening to music in my free time, but I've come to realize lately I could be listening to an audiobook or podcast instead.
00:41:09.000How do you balance learning and leisure?
00:42:50.000There are a couple of good books that I really like about evolution and the Big Bang and God.
00:42:52.000Gerald Schroeder is one of my favorite authors on this.
00:42:54.000I do believe that the theory of evolution
00:43:12.000Fits actually quite well with sort of the story of creation that's laid out in Genesis in terms of the ordering and the timing.
00:43:18.000And as far as the Big Bang, the Big Bang lays out much closer to the beginning of Genesis than it did to Aristotelian physics that suggests that the universe has always existed in its current state.
00:43:27.000The Big Bang suggests that out of nothing, God created everything.
00:43:31.000And that looks a lot like the Big Bang, which is why there are so many people now trying to create theories of multiple universes, because they don't like the consequences of the fact that science looks a lot like what the Bible lays out.
00:43:41.000As far as knowing which parts of the Bible to interpret as poetic, I think that the stuff that deals with human action particularly is not poetic.
00:43:49.000The stuff that deals with nature, I think you can fairly say is poetic.
00:43:53.000I think that the beginning of Genesis is pretty clearly meant in a far more metaphorical sense.
00:44:01.000I don't believe there was an actual garden where a snake talked to a man.
00:44:04.000Like, I don't think that's actually what happened in a literal sense.
00:44:08.000There's a lot of debate in Jewish circles, actually, about where the Bible begins to get historically accurate.
00:44:12.000Like, where it's actually now talking about historically accurate people.
00:44:16.000In the general consensus, from what I understand, I know Jonathan Sachs has said, this is basically, once you get to Abraham, now you're talking about an actual historical story, and before that, a certain level of metaphor that's kind of interwoven throughout the story.
00:44:30.000All right, Jessica says, Good morning, legal question.
00:44:33.000It is always my understanding that ignorance of the law is not an excuse in committing a crime, certainly not for a common citizen.
00:44:38.000Why is it that in the political sphere, there's a focus on need for intent or awareness as in the recent examples with Hillary or Trump?
00:44:43.000Thanks for all you do and your team do in the era of fake news.
00:44:46.000She asked me to read fake news in a Trump voice.
00:44:49.000Okay, so the answer is that there are certain crimes that require intent.
00:44:53.000The level of requisite intent is always a matter of debate.
00:44:57.000So it's not that you have to have had subjective intent to do things.
00:45:00.000It's that a reasonably, a reasonable person could determine that you had intent to commit the crime.
00:45:05.000So we use intent in all sorts of crimes, particularly in the criminal sphere.
00:45:09.000So when it comes to torts, you generally don't have to have as much intent.
00:45:12.000Like if I'm just walking around swinging my arm in front of me and I hit you, then that is not something that you have to show intent.
00:45:19.000If I'm negligent, you don't have to show intent.
00:45:21.000That's more of a strict liability standard.
00:45:23.000If, however, I commit... Let's say that I kill somebody.
00:45:27.000We now have to determine what level of intent I was using.
00:45:30.000Did I kill somebody by accident, like I was just walking around and suddenly I tripped forward and in order to stop my fall I pushed somebody into oncoming traffic?
00:45:41.000Whereas if I just walked up behind the guy and shoved him in front of a subway, that is first-degree murder.
00:45:45.000So intent is an element of a lot of crimes, particularly in criminal law, and you have to determine whether there was intent to violate the law.
00:45:51.000Now, ignorance of the law is not necessarily sufficient to get rid of the intent question.
00:45:57.000You can also have reckless ignorance of the law, and that's more where Trump would lie.
00:46:02.000It's not that Trump didn't know about campaign finance.
00:46:26.000That is now intent to violate the law.
00:46:28.000So it's not that you have to know everything about the law.
00:46:30.000It's that did Donald Trump have a right to trust in his lawyer to abide by the law?
00:46:34.000That's actually a fairly solid defense.
00:46:36.000As far as intent in the Hillary case, it's a pet peeve of mine that there are so many folks who pretend that intent was a requisite part of the crime.
00:46:45.000It was not a requisite part of the crime.
00:46:46.000She obviously intended to set up a server.
00:46:47.000She obviously intended to put information on there.
00:46:50.000They added this element of intent that she had to intend to expose information to foreign powers.
00:47:39.000You know that there are certain consequences to certain actions.
00:47:42.000My belief in God lies in the idea that there is a rulebook from God that tells you that if you act in a certain way, you are much more likely to succeed than if you act in a different way.
00:47:50.000I would have the faith in an author who told me that if I eat certain things, I was more likely to be healthy.
00:47:55.000I have a lot of faith in an author who says that if human beings act in a particular way, they are more likely to succeed in life.
00:48:02.000If they act in a non-particular way, they are more likely to fail.
00:48:04.000And if they act in one way, they're more likely to be moral human beings, better human beings.
00:48:27.000I don't talk about when I talk about radical Islam, I don't start citing Quranic verses because I think that we can fairly adjudicate the relevance and decency of religion by the action of its practitioners over time.
00:48:40.000That that's that's a better way of gauging the veracity of religion.
00:48:43.000And I think the way that you gauge veracity and faith in God is not just faith in faith in God is different from the belief that God exists.
00:48:51.000Belief that God exists, you can rationalize intellectually, and I think there's some good arguments for it.
00:48:56.000Faith in God is a belief that God has a plan for the universe, whether you understand it or not.
00:49:02.000And you have faith in God just like you have faith in your spouse, or you have faith in your father, or you have faith in your business partner.
00:49:08.000And that is that there's a cause and effect in the universe, and that God does what he promises he is going to do.
00:49:12.000That's what faith in God really means.
00:50:15.000Anything you can do sort of stream of consciousness is a lot of fun, but... I love all of my... I won't say I love all of my impressions equally, because I think some of them are just bad.
00:50:26.000I think that my Trump is mediocre at best.
00:51:21.000And also, with President Trump, you can also, you can rip.
00:51:25.000So earlier this week, the outtakes from the show, by the way, are phenomenal.
00:51:28.000I mean, we really at some point should start making outtakes available to subscribers because they're so good.
00:51:33.000So earlier this week, the president was talking about flipping.
00:51:36.000And for legitimately 15 minutes after the show, I just did a President Trump impersonation, him talking about all the things that I do not like about flipping.
00:51:45.000I do not like, one time I was on a trampoline, and I was jumping, jumping better, better jumping than anyone else, the highest jumps, the best, most spectacular jumps you have ever seen.
00:51:55.000And I tried to do a flip, but I failed, and I landed on my hair.
00:51:59.000Ever since, I have been very much against flipping.
00:53:31.000Now, the only problem with this book is the same problem I had with my second book, Porn Generation, which is that when you put it on your shelf, people think you're weird.
00:53:37.000Because the name of the book is Sex Matters, right?
00:53:40.000I remember when we came up with the title for Porn Generation, I thought to myself, does someone want to put that on their coffee table?
00:53:47.000But Sex Matters is actually a really good book.
00:53:49.000How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense.
00:53:52.000Monis has some really controversial stuff here, and she can get away with it because she is, in fact, a woman with a career.
00:53:57.000But she's also a person who was very high-powered in the 90s and early 2000s, and she took some breaks from her life in public, specifically in order to take care of her kids.
00:54:07.000She talks about how feminism has corrupted views of sex, views of relationships, how it's made people unhappy, and how to undercut some basic scientific truths.
00:54:16.000The book is really good and really useful, and Mona is a really clear and compelling writer.
00:55:45.000And just like Mark Duplass, who had to be shamed into apologizing for ever having met me, now Israel Broussard has been forced to apologize for having liked tweets by Trump, Marco Rubio, the President of the United States, a Senator from Florida, and me.
00:56:21.000By the way, that tweet, just so we can note this, that tweet was seconded by a bunch of folks on the left who still have the honesty to recognize that Nazi Germany is not actually us arresting people illegally crossing our border.
00:56:34.000By the way, worth noting, not a lot of folks attempting to illegally cross into Nazi Germany.
00:56:38.000That was not actually their big problem.
00:57:34.000She really hasn't written many important decisions at all.
00:57:37.000Virtually all important decisions of the Supreme Court written over the last 20 years, particularly on social issues, have been written by other justices.
00:57:43.000But she's very important because she is a woman and a feminist
00:57:48.000And oh my god, so CNN is running, I kid you not, a documentary from CNN Films called RBG Beyond Notorious.
00:58:00.000Did they ever run anything like this about Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas?
00:59:44.000If cisgender men were completely eliminated in Western civilization, I think pretty soon Western civilization would no longer exist.
00:59:51.000For both internal and external reasons.
00:59:53.000There'd be a lot of people at the gates, a lot of barbarians at the gates, who would be attempting to destroy what was left of Western civilization.
00:59:58.000And also, turns out you need some cisgender men on that wall, and you need some cisgender men to make babies and be fathers and take care of families.
01:00:05.000Again, none of this is to say that transgender people can't perform relevant and great functions in American society, but to pretend that cisgender men are the enemy is ridiculous.
01:00:14.000Anyway, they're going to do this routine where Romeo and Juliet, it includes six female and gender non-conforming actors as well as a fully female and gender non-conforming crew.
01:00:24.000So I'm confused as to why fully female is okay, but not fully male.
01:00:30.000As the government still relies on martial law to keep the factions in check, two young heirs unexpectedly fall in love.
01:00:36.000One is from the Montagues, the militaristic warmongers responsible for the purge of society's men.
01:00:40.000The other is the Capulets, controllers of information in the media, fighting to regain independence from a sovereign state.
01:00:45.000The genderqueer version of the play, the magazine says, explores mainstream feminism, patriarchal structures, and a society struggling to rebuild in their wake.
01:01:21.000But to hijack the words of Shakespeare that are specifically written for a man or for a woman and then to pretend that those are equally applicable to people who do not identify as a man or identify as a woman is really
01:01:31.000The same people who say Scarlett Johansson cannot play a transgender person will now say that Shakespeare's words that were written for a specific character should be read by somebody who does not resemble those characters in any ways and is not trying to act as the character, but is acting as a completely different character saying those words.
01:01:45.000It just doesn't make any sense on an artistic level, but I guess it's forward thinking, so who cares?
01:01:50.000Forward thinking just means having nothing to do with the original intent of the author.