The president has been busy, and not in a particularly good way. President Trump announces a precipitous Syria pullout, the Trump Wall remains mythical, and we explore whether feminists will allow girls to be girls. Ben Shapiro is on The Ben Shapiro Show on the Fox News Channel's "Fox News Radio" and the Fox Business Network's "The Five". He's also a regular contributor on CNN's "ACL" and host of the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and hosts the conservative radio show "The Opinionsated" on Fox News Radio's "Hollywood Squarespace." He is the author of the bestselling book and is a frequent contributor on conservative media outlets such as CNN, Fox News, and the New York Times, as well as the Atlantic and The Huffington Post. His latest book, is out now, and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you don't already have an Amazon Prime membership, you can get it for free, but you'll have access to all of the latest releases, including Prime Video, Vimeo, and other major podcasting platforms. You'll get 20% off the first month, plus free 7-day trial offers, including unlimited access to the entire Vimeo library and podcast library. Subscribe to the Vimeo account, and get a 20% discount when you sign up for Vimeo membership. . You get access to Vimeo Plus, and access all of Vimeo and all other major Podcasting and social media platforms, including Vimeo for free! Vimeo is giving you'll get 25% off your first month. v=1Vimeo membership for the past month of the year! You won't get any more than $99.99, and a limited discount on Vimeo gets you an ad-free version of the show for the entire year, plus I'll get an ad discount, and I'll be giving you 5% off my entire ad-only version for the next month, too! v=3PODCAST ONLY THE FIRST MONTH, starting on January 1st, for the rest of the month of January, 2019. Vimeo gives you access to vimeo and vimeo is getting a FREE trial, and they'll get the ad discount for free on the entire month, for a maximum of $99, plus they'll be getting a discount on the second month, they'll also get $5,000 off my review policy.
00:00:26.000Then I remind you that you're going to plot one day.
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00:01:33.000I mean, everything he has done has been something that you would have expected from the Obama administration, not something that you would have expected from the Trump administration.
00:01:40.000So, as you know, I was Luke Cold on criminal justice reform from the very beginning.
00:01:45.000I remain Luke Cold on criminal justice reform.
00:01:49.000It should not have been a top Republican priority to rewrite the law to give people greater discretion to let violent criminals and nonviolent criminals out of prison.
00:01:57.000If you want to rewrite the laws in congressional fashion to actually lower the penalties for particular crimes, go ahead and do that.
00:02:03.000But simply getting rid of mandatory minimums or ensuring that wardens can let people out of jail if they deem them to be nonviolent, I have some real problems with that ideologically.
00:02:13.000Even though I like a lot of the people who sponsor the bill and are appreciators of the bill.
00:02:17.000But that is the least of President Trump's concerns this week.
00:02:20.000I mean, in other minor concerns, the president, and it's not minor, the president issued an executive order banning bump stocks.
00:02:25.000Now, as you know, I've said on the program, I'm in favor of banning bump stocks.
00:02:28.000That does not mean the president has the power under the Constitution of the United States to simply issue an executive order getting rid of bump stocks.
00:02:35.000You need a piece of legislation to do that.
00:02:37.000So if you want to pass a piece of bipartisan legislation to make that happen, he certainly could.
00:02:41.000He certainly could have made that happen.
00:02:43.000Instead, he did it from the presidency itself, from the executive branch.
00:02:47.000And just wait until Democrats start trying to do the same thing, issuing executive orders to curb the Second Amendment in minor or major ways from the seat of government in the White House.
00:02:56.000I do not think that that is good policy.
00:02:58.000But again, even that is the least of our concerns today.
00:03:04.000President Trump today basically went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth about whether he was going to sign a bill that would allow funding for the border wall.
00:03:23.000And then suddenly, when the right started yelling at him because he was about to sign yet another continuing resolution that did not include funding for the border wall, suddenly President Trump woke up and started tweeting about it this morning.
00:03:33.000Government by tweet is not how government gets done.
00:03:36.000Government by tweet is not how legislation gets done.
00:03:39.000If President Trump is really a dealmaker, he should have gotten everybody in a room, and he should have said, listen, what do I need to give up to get what I want?
00:03:45.000Instead, President Trump basically sits there and he tweets at his members of Congress, and then he says that he's okay with a continuing resolution, a clean continuing resolution, so the Senate passes one.
00:03:54.000And then it goes to the House, and the House is ready to pass one.
00:03:57.000And then, after there's blowback for President Trump not vetoing such a bill, then he starts tweeting about it, and then members of the House start having second thoughts, and then they feel like they have to vote on a bill that would include $5 billion in border funding, and then that will probably fail, and then the President will sign the continuing resolution anyway.
00:04:14.000Whereas if he just held the line from the very beginning, there's a better shot that at least people are incentivized to do what he wants.
00:04:19.000President Trump went on a bit of a Twitter bender this morning, and last night, in which he's very upset that people are angry at him, a lot of his allies are angry at him, people like Ann Coulter are very angry at him.
00:04:29.000Ann Coulter came out yesterday and she said she will not vote for President Trump without the wall.
00:04:33.000He promptly unfollowed her on Twitter.
00:04:35.000So here is Ann Coulter, one of the earliest Trump boosters, the author of In Trump We Trust, which is an amazing title for a book.
00:04:41.000Because again, that's supposed to be God, not Trump.
00:04:43.000No matter what you think of Trump, God should not be replaced with Trump in any sentence at all.
00:04:47.000But here's Ann Coulter talking about how she would not vote for Trump without the wall.
00:04:52.000Ann, let me ask you this then, Ann Coulter.
00:04:57.000The second Tuesday after the first Monday in November 2020 comes along and there's exactly as much wall built that day as there is today.
00:05:06.000Does Ann Coulter vote for Donald Trump for re-election?
00:05:09.000No, nor will I think most of his supporters.
00:05:37.000Trump is going to get less than nothing because this compromise strips out the $1.6 billion for the wall that the Senate Appropriations Committee had already approved weeks ago.
00:05:47.000And this has caused Republicans in the house to actually say, okay, well, let's get together and let's fight for the wall.
00:05:52.000Mark Meadows, who was once considered a possibility for the president's chief of staff got up yesterday and he said, listen, we made a promise that we were going to build this damn thing.
00:06:01.000Is it actually going to get built under president Trump?
00:06:03.000The answer is in all likelihood, no, but here was Mark Meadows yesterday making the case.
00:06:06.000As I close out this particular special order, I think it's appropriate for us to remind the American people that there is a bad case of Potomac fever up here in Washington, D.C.
00:06:20.000They forget what they promised the American people, and yet what they must do is not forget this time.
00:06:27.000Mr. President, we're going to back you up.
00:06:29.000If you veto this bill, we'll be there.
00:06:32.000But more importantly, the American people will be there.
00:06:35.000Okay, so here's the part that I find intellectually dishonest about a lot of the debate that's going on right now.
00:06:39.000President Trump is supposed to be a strong negotiator.
00:06:42.000President Trump is the one who's supposed to be standing behind his own promises.
00:06:46.000It was President Trump who promised a wall that Mexico was going to pay for approximately 1,273,393 times during the campaign and in the aftermath.
00:06:55.000It was President Trump who was pushing that as a policy.
00:06:57.000Everyone who said, listen, we don't actually need a wall, we just need more border security.
00:07:01.000All those people were considered cucks.
00:07:03.000All those people were considered sellouts.
00:07:04.000It was President Trump who was saying we need a wall.
00:07:06.000And people like me agreed with him on that point, that we need some sort of physical barrier along the border, just like Israel has a physical barrier against terrorism in the Gaza Strip or in parts of Judea and Samaria.
00:07:18.000And then President Trump basically backed off of it.
00:07:21.000We have this weird case where everybody is so afraid of alienating President Trump that they feel like they have to kiss his ass routinely.
00:07:29.000They have to do this routine where if President Trump comes up short, it's everybody else's fault for coming up short.
00:07:38.000Democrats are celebrating today and they were celebrating yesterday because they think they ruled President Trump.
00:07:42.000Nancy Pelosi was literally dancing her cares away at a Christmas party last night because she knows that she is beating President Trump at his own game in all of this.
00:07:51.000If you can't see this, it's actually Nancy Pelosi, doddering old Nancy Pelosi, shuffling around to Bye Bye Miss American Pie, which was written, you know, a solid 73 years after she was born, so good for her that she's still capable of moving.
00:08:04.000She was dancing at a Christmas party last night.
00:08:05.000Seth Meyers, because all of our late night comedy must be dominated by politics, he was mocking President Trump yesterday for not getting the wall.
00:08:11.000You can see Democrats are very excited about this.
00:08:15.000Trump wanted $5 billion for a pointless border wall to enforce his racist immigration policies, but he was too incompetent to figure out how to get it.
00:08:23.000The only way Trump's ever going to get that wall is if he builds it with the portraits he bought with his charity money.
00:08:28.000The wall is just like Trump's charity, a scam that is now falling apart.
00:08:33.000One Trump associate after another is pleading guilty to federal crimes.
00:08:37.000If all these lawsuits work out, Trump might have to go live in the YMCA.
00:08:41.000Okay, so all of this is stupid from the left, but this is why President Trump should never have caved on any of this.
00:08:47.000And this kind of last-minute hemming and hawing, this whole, okay, well now I've watched Fox News, and now I'm changing my opinion back on the wall.
00:08:54.000Dude, this is not the sign of a good negotiator.
00:08:59.000Really, this sort of unpredictability, this sort of random changing of your own position all the time, it doesn't give your congressional supporters anywhere to go.
00:09:06.000They feel like you might undercut them one day.
00:09:08.000You might actually be angry at them for backing your own agenda.
00:09:11.000I've fielded calls from members of Congress over the last two years who have been utterly bewildered as to where Trump even wants them to be on particular issues, especially about the border.
00:09:21.000They say, well, am I supposed to vote for this or am I not supposed to vote for this?
00:09:23.000Because Trump will come out and endorse the CR and then everybody will be like, okay, well, I guess I'll vote for it.
00:09:27.000And then Trump will immediately undermine the same CR.
00:09:30.000There was a tweet today from a journalist saying that a member of Congress, Republican member of Congress, said they weren't going to vote for the CR until they got a tweet from the president.
00:09:38.000So we're now waiting for the president to tweet about things before we know how to vote on things, promises that he himself has been making for years on end.
00:09:45.000I mean, listen to the inconsistency in President Trump's own Twitter feed.
00:09:48.000He says, Okay, all of that is fine if that had been a consistent position.
00:09:50.000a wall, are necessary for border security, are putting politics over country.
00:09:53.000What they are just beginning to realize is that I will not sign any of their legislation, including infrastructure, unless it has a perfect border security.
00:10:02.000Okay, all of that is fine if that had been a consistent position.
00:10:05.000But within the next tweet, okay, a tweet separated by minutes, President Trump writes this.
00:10:10.000With so much talk about the wall, people are losing sight of the great job being done on our southern border by border patrol ice and our great military.
00:10:26.000According to President Trump, the one who was pitching the wall from the outset It depends on his bowel movements that day, apparently.
00:10:34.000President Trump then tweeted out, when I begrudgingly... Now he's trying to blame Paul Ryan, of course.
00:10:38.000After sending all of these mixed signals and coming to some sort of agreement with Republican leadership, now he's backing out of it, which means that, again, the House will probably pass some sort of bill or try to pass a bill with border funding.
00:10:48.000It'll fail, and then they'll pass a clean CR, and then Trump will sign the clean CR, and that's how this is probably gonna go.
00:10:53.000President Trump says, when I begrudgingly signed the omnibus bill, I was promised the wall and border security by leadership.
00:11:22.000Doesn't it make you foolish to buy the promises that were made by legislators that were never going to be kept?
00:11:27.000Or is it possible you knew all along that these promises were not going to be kept?
00:11:30.000You went along with it at the time, and now you're fussing and blaming everybody else when it turns out that you're not capable of keeping a promise that you made to the American people and to your own supporters?
00:11:39.000No, I don't want to be this critical of the President of the United States, but it is his job to get this stuff done.
00:11:47.000I'm going to get to promises that he's made in just a second, because I keep hearing about all these promises that he's kept as president of the United States.
00:11:53.000He has kept many promises as president of the United States.
00:11:56.000There are a few key ones he is not keeping, and those are coming back to bite him this week.
00:12:01.000First, we need to talk about Your capacity to sleep well.
00:12:05.000So I know that you've gotten the best mattresses on the market, which I'm sure you've heard about on this show.
00:12:09.000I am sure that you have made sure that all your air is fresh because you have the best air filters, which you have heard about on the show.
00:12:14.000But the real question is, do you also have the best sheets on the market?
00:12:17.000We're never going to agree on everything, but everyone should be able to agree you need a better night's sleep.
00:12:50.000They're so good that when we got Bull and Branch, we actually threw out all the other sheets we owned because it kind of ruined sheets for us.
00:12:56.000It was the only sheet we could actually sleep on.
00:13:30.000Republicans have now controlled the House of Representatives.
00:13:33.000They controlled it continuously from 2010 to 2018, and they were unable to pass a single budget that did not include funding for the mass abortion clinic Planned Parenthood.
00:13:43.000They've controlled Congress from 2010 to 2018.
00:13:46.000Every single appropriations bill has funded Obamacare.
00:13:49.000Every single appropriations bill has failed to fund a border wall.
00:13:52.000Every single appropriations bill has funded all of the Democratic priorities.
00:14:32.000But the President also has the bully pulpit.
00:14:34.000The President has the capacity to go out and rip on the Democrats' willingness to expose America to insecurities simply because of their own arrogance and multicultural nonsense.
00:14:42.000President Trump could do that every single day.
00:14:46.000He's gone to campaign rallies and he's said the same stuff over and over, but has he made a national address to the nation about the necessity for a border wall?
00:14:53.000Has he used the power of the presidency to push for stuff?
00:15:05.000A lot of his supporters are disappointed about the wall.
00:15:08.000And again, I'm not going to blame that on the Senate when he told the Senate to go ahead and make all of this happen without border funding.
00:15:15.000So what's happening right this second is that a bunch of people are going to the White House to meet with the President.
00:15:23.000Apparently it's Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy and Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan.
00:15:27.000They're also going to the White House to try and negotiate with the president over all of this.
00:15:33.000And what they are basically saying now is that maybe they're going to kind of deal with the Democrats where the Democrats agree to wall money and the White House and GOP fund the Gateway Tunnel, which is obviously a big project for New York Democrats.
00:15:47.000We'll see if this is something that if that happens.
00:17:24.000Bush promised that we were not going to abandon the Kurds to the whims of Saddam Hussein, and we promptly abandoned the Kurds to the whims of Saddam Hussein.
00:17:30.000The Clinton administration promised the same.
00:17:32.000Nothing happened to protect the Kurds.
00:17:33.000The Bush administration promised that we were going to protect the Kurds in Iraq, and then there was a precipitous pullout by Barack Obama that left the Kurds in the middle of nowhere, basically.
00:17:42.000And now, the Trump administration had promised solidarity with the Kurds, and they're pulling out so that the Turks can go in and slaughter the Kurds.
00:17:46.000Like, if you're the Kurds at this point, you just gotta think, Who the hell am I supposed to trust out here?
00:18:14.000And now you'll have more missiles flowing into Syria, leading to the possibility of a serious conflagration with its neighbors Jordan and Israel.
00:18:21.000Or, you'll see more mass slaughter by the Assad regime, leading to mass immigration into Europe, which will change the face of politics over there and lead, presumably, to the possibility of further terrorism in Europe itself, because sometimes terrorists hide among the refugees.
00:18:35.000Or you'll see Turkey increase its sway in the region.
00:18:38.000Turkey is a is a nasty imperialist power at this point under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who's an Islamist thug.
00:18:46.000All of this is just bad policy and the president is making political policy by tweet.
00:18:52.000There's an article in the Washington Post today.
00:18:54.000It says, in April, President Trump repeated his campaign promise to end U.S.
00:19:05.000troops would stay in Syria indefinitely, not only until the Islamic State was defeated, but also until a political solution to the overall Syria conflict was in place.
00:19:14.000And in a key part of Trump's newly announced Iran policy, all Iranian forces and their proxies aiding Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had left the country.
00:19:21.000On Wednesday, Trump sent heads spinning within his own government and around the world by apparently reversing himself again.
00:19:26.000And by the way, I can tell you that folks in the White House are confused about this.
00:19:30.000His decision was made on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the issue, following a small meeting attended only by senior White House aides and secretaries of defense and state, most of whom, if not all, sharply disagreed.
00:19:41.000We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency Trump announced in a Twitter post early the next morning.
00:19:48.000According to officials in Reuters, U.S.
00:19:50.000President Donald Trump's order to withdraw U.S.
00:19:51.000troops from Syria also signifies an end to the U.S.
00:19:56.000According to officials in Reuters, U.S. President Donald Trump's order to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria also signifies an end to the U.S. air campaign against ISIS there, U.S. officials told Reuters on Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
00:20:07.000An end to the U.S. air campaign air war will likely heighten fears that ISIS, which has lost almost all the territory it once controlled, could be given space to regroup.
00:20:16.000And this notion, by the way, that ISIS is completely defeated is sheer crap.
00:20:19.000And the fact is that when Barack Obama idiotically declared ISIS the JV squad, there were like 700 members of ISIS who promptly took over half of Iraq.
00:20:28.000Right now, there are 20,000 to 30,000 active members of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, according to Trump's own Pentagon.
00:20:35.000Coalition officials say the numbers are inflated, but two other reports by the UN and CSIS independently came up with roughly the same estimation, according to Rukmini Kalamachi, who's a correspondent for the New York Times, who covers ISIS.
00:20:46.000President Trump, in his own Twitter feed, basically acknowledged that ISIS has not been defeated, saying that Russia and Iran and Turkey were going to take on ISIS now.
00:20:54.000So they've been defeated, but they're still going to be fighting ISIS.
00:21:18.000Because they neglected to change out their air filters and their system failed.
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00:22:42.000We've beaten them, and we've beaten them badly.
00:22:45.000We've taken back the land, and now it's time for our troops to come back home.
00:22:50.000So our boys, our young women, our men, they're all coming back, and they're coming back now.
00:22:58.000We won, and that's the way we want it, and that's the way they want it.
00:23:03.000Okay, then when he says that that's the way they want it, and he points to heaven, as though the soldiers who served in Syria would definitely back his policy, this is something that politicians are not allowed to do.
00:23:38.000Not only are we abandoning our mission, we're actually exposing the West to greater threat because as ISIS gains power, they don't just stay there.
00:23:44.000How many ISIS attacks have we seen in the West over the past seven years since Barack Obama finished his pullout?
00:23:53.000It's just, it's unseemly, at the very least, to be suggesting to use the authority of people who are dead to back your own political program, almost no matter what the political program is, is unseemly at the very best, and gross at the very worst.
00:24:39.000The Turkish government is one of the worst actors in the Middle East.
00:24:43.000I know there are a lot of bad actors in the Middle East.
00:24:44.000The Turkish government is definitely one of them.
00:24:47.000The only potential upset in recent days, according to the Washington Post, was a threat by the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who spoke with Trump at the Group of 20 summit three weeks ago, and again on the telephone Friday, to send troops across the border to attack the U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in northeast Syria.
00:25:01.000Officials familiar with the Friday call said that Erdogan, among other things, had stressed to Trump that the Syrian Kurds were terrorists, allied with Kurdish separatists in his own country, and asked why the United States was supporting them rather than its NATO ally.
00:25:13.000The answer is, of course, that Turkey never should have been part of NATO.
00:25:16.000It was a joke to make Turkey part of NATO.
00:25:19.000And the idea that we were going to bring Turkey into NATO and now make their defense our mutually Defensible position that if they are attacked by the Kurds or something that the United States has to get involved.
00:25:30.000We're supposed to now worry about Turkey as a NATO ally while we don't worry about Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania as a NATO ally under Russian threat.
00:25:39.000The Erdogan noted that the Islamic State had been vanquished and questioned the need for an ongoing U.S.
00:25:46.000troop presence, saying the Turkish troops already massed on the Syrian border could handle any problem there.
00:25:50.000Apparently, the call and the withdrawal were definitely related, according to officials inside the White House.
00:25:58.000This is the only, by the way, ally of the United States in the region that cares at all, that is happy at all about this decision, is Turkey.
00:26:05.000And they are not really an ally, as I've already noted.
00:26:07.000They're an Islamist country that has now arrested 100,000 dissidents over the last couple of years in a seizure of power by Erdogan, who is one of the worst actors in the region.
00:26:15.000Lindsey Graham, who's been a reliable Trump ally on foreign policy and nearly everything else, came out and ripped President Trump yesterday.
00:26:21.000The decision today by the president, and I think it was his alone, I think it's disastrous to our own national security.
00:27:09.000I understand he's trying to do an Obama circa 2010-2011.
00:27:12.000He thinks he's going to win over people on the left.
00:27:14.000If he withdraws from Syria, it's not going to happen.
00:27:16.000That was a war that we were actually winning.
00:27:17.000If you're going to talk about withdrawing troops, at least make the argument about Afghanistan or something.
00:27:21.000Like, I think that there's a better argument for Afghanistan than there is for Syria, although I don't think there's a great argument for either.
00:27:26.000The minute we leave Afghanistan, the Taliban takes over and Al Qaeda's back, but...
00:27:30.000This notion that you can simply pull troops out willy-nilly from places without any further consequences is just ridiculous.
00:27:35.000This has been the constant lesson of the last 30 years.
00:27:38.000That doesn't mean you can nation-build every place.
00:27:39.000It doesn't mean that we can afford to put hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground in all of these places.
00:27:45.000But if, with a stable force of 2,000 people, you can lock down these areas and prevent ISIS from becoming a regional threat and an international threat again, that seems like a pretty fair bargain to me.
00:27:56.000There's always this perspective about people who serve in our military that they're sort of pawns in the game of life.
00:28:10.000Like, really, I spend a lot of time talking with people who are in the American military.
00:28:14.000And not only because I give a fair bit of money to American military charities, but also because we have a lot of folks in the military who listen to the show.
00:28:22.000These people are not joining up because they are desperate to serve on a base in Georgia.
00:28:25.000These people are joining up because they want to protect and defend the United States.
00:28:28.000So the question should not be, What is the safest place for our troops?
00:28:32.000It should be, where are our troops best utilized to keep the American people safe?
00:28:36.000That's why they join up in the first place.
00:28:38.000To say less is to denigrate their patriotism in joining up.
00:28:41.000They didn't join up just for the college benefit.
00:28:44.000Our troops joined up because they did something more patriotic than I would do, or most people in my audience would do.
00:28:49.000They joined up because they want to protect and defend the United States.
00:28:52.000Understanding that we have civilian control of the military here in the United States, and understanding that threats to the United States are ever-present.
00:28:59.000Members of the military I've talked to over the last 48 hours think that this is cowardice.
00:29:10.000It's just a very bad week for news for the Trump administration.
00:29:12.000According to the Associated Press, North Korea said Thursday it will never unilaterally give up its nuclear weapons unless the United States first removes what Pyongyang called a nuclear threat, which means what they really want is for the United States to remove all troops from the Korean Peninsula, which is never going to happen.
00:29:26.000The surprisingly blunt statement jars with Seoul's rosier presentation of the North Korean position.
00:29:31.000That's because Seoul, South Korea has what we call a sunshine government, which is dedicated to some sort of rapprochement with the North Korean government.
00:29:38.000But that doesn't mean the North Koreans are actually attempting to make a deal.
00:29:41.000I said this when President Trump held his summit with Kim Jong-un.
00:29:44.000I said either this is the most brilliant diplomatic maneuver of all time or it's utterly stupid.
00:29:49.000And the North Koreans are the North Koreans.
00:29:52.000The Kim regime over there has been utterly consistent in what they do.
00:29:57.000They lie to the West for concessions, and they go right back to developing their nuclear weapons.
00:30:02.000The latest from North Korea comes as the United States and North Korea struggle over the sequencing of the denuclearization that Washington wants and the removal of international sanctions desired by Pyongyang.
00:30:11.000The statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency also raises credibility problems for the liberal South Korean government.
00:30:17.000In other words, just like Barack Obama made a huge mistake entrusting the terrorist regime in Iran.
00:31:38.000Because our values are superior to the values of North Korea, or Iran, or Turkey, or the Syrian government, or Saudi Arabia, or any other country, frankly.
00:31:58.000Because North Korea is openly stating now they're not going to denuclearize without the United States leaving the Korean Peninsula.
00:32:04.000The statement says, the United States must now recognize the accurate meaning of the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and especially must study geography.
00:32:12.000When we talk about the Korean Peninsula, it includes the territory of our Republic and also the entire region of South Korea, where the United States has placed its invasive force, including nuclear weapons, When we talk about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, it means the removal of all sources of nuclear threat, not only from the South and North, but also from areas neighboring the Korean Peninsula, meaning they want us to remove our presence in Japan.
00:33:13.000You promised to keep the American people safe.
00:33:15.000That promise means more than a dumb promise to remove troops at whim from a place in the world where the troops were actually doing some good and abandoning our allies in the process.
00:33:26.000You made a promise to build a wall, so build the wall.
00:33:30.000All of this is, it's gotta be maddening for Trump supporters.
00:33:32.000It should be maddening for Trump supporters.
00:33:34.000And if not, if you're a Trump supporter, you should ask yourself why you're not maddened.
00:33:37.000Are you not maddened because we're so invested in President Trump just as a person that we don't care what he does politically?
00:33:43.000Or because we've convinced ourselves that every choice is a binary?
00:33:46.000That we can't push President Trump for better?
00:33:49.000That every time something President Trump does is wrong or bad, that we have to say, ah, but the Democrats would be worse?
00:33:54.000The Democrats aren't in office right now.
00:33:58.000That means it's his job to do what he said he was going to do.
00:34:00.000I have a couple more notes about this, and then I do want to get to The latest on the Trump legal barrage, the Mueller investigation coming after President Trump.
00:34:09.000Again, very bad week for the president.
00:34:10.000We'll get to all of that in just one second.
00:34:12.000First, go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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00:34:16.000When you do, you get the rest of this show live, you get the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live, the rest of Michael Knowles' show live.
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00:35:21.000Because the Mueller investigation has basically come up with its theory, I think.
00:35:25.000And its theory is that President Trump was being funneled information via a radio talk show host to Jerome Corsi, to Roger Stone, to President Trump.
00:35:33.000And so now what they're trying to figure out is whether Roger Stone lied in his House Intelligence Committee statements when he suggested that President Trump was never informed that WikiLeaks was going to dump information about Hillary Clinton and that WikiLeaks was a Russian front group.
00:35:46.000According to the Washington Post, Special Counsel Robert Mueller asked the House Intelligence Committee on Friday for an official transcript of Trump adviser Roger Stone's testimony, according to people familiar with the request, a sign that prosecutors could be moving to charge him with a crime.
00:35:58.000It's the first time Mueller has formally asked the committee to turn over the material the panel has gathered in its investigation of Russian interference.
00:36:06.000Legal analysts say that Mueller may be ready to indict him.
00:36:08.000Roger Stone says, I don't think any reasonable attorney who looks at it would conclude that I committed perjury, which requires intent and materiality.
00:36:15.000Okay, well, in the past, perjury charges have not always included.
00:36:19.000Stone is not completely wrong on this, but it is quite possible that what Mueller is actually trying to do is indict Roger Stone for perjury, and then turn on President Trump, and then turn on Stone and say, you know, Roger, you're going to do 27 years in jail.
00:36:32.000Or you're going to admit that President Trump told you to lie to the House Intelligence Committee and tell you to suborn perjury.
00:36:38.000That's basically what the Starr investigation did with Monica Lewinsky to come up with the suborning perjury charge against President Bill Clinton back in 1998 and 1999.
00:36:47.000So we will see how the Mueller investigation goes about its business in this area.
00:36:52.000Now, meanwhile, You know, it is amazing.
00:36:54.000With the Republican Party experiencing all of these difficulties, it's easy to forget the Democratic Party has been engaged in similar corruption, worse corruption in some cases, and manipulation.
00:37:05.000This is an amazing story that basically the Democrats were manipulating a race in Georgia.
00:37:11.000So here is the story from the New York Times.
00:37:13.000As Russia's online election machinations came to light last year, a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race, according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.
00:37:25.000So while the Democrats are whining that the Russians were putting up fake Facebook pages with fake news, the Democrats were doing exactly the same thing on Facebook and Twitter in the Alabama Senate race that Roy Moore ended up losing.
00:37:34.000The secret project, according to the New York Times, Well, a couple of things.
00:37:37.000Facebook and Twitter was likely too small to have had a significant effect on the race in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help Doug Jones edged out the Republican Roy Moore.
00:37:45.000But it was a sign that the American political operatives of both parties have paid close attention to the Russian methods, which some fear may come to taint elections in the United States.
00:38:01.000Look at how the New York Times covers that, right?
00:38:02.000So when the Democrats engage in deceptive activity on Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to suppress Republican votes in a senatorial election, then the New York Times notes that the secret project was likely too small to have had a significant effect on the race.
00:38:14.000When the Russians issue, like, a few Facebook posts that reach a minute number of people, I read you the statistics the other day, Then it swung the entire election.
00:38:24.000There is no media bias at all, at all.
00:38:26.000Speaking of corruption, we've been hearing nonstop about corruption when it comes to all of the Republican moves in North Carolina's 9th congressional district, the hiring of a particular person who is known for sort of stuffing ballot boxes.
00:38:39.000Now it turns out, in that investigation, that person has worked for both Democrats and Republicans, was working for Democrats in 2016, and nobody seemed to care.
00:38:46.000I love that this story is flying completely under the radar, but in California, where a bunch of late-breaking House races went for the Democrats, and everybody said, no, can't be voter fraud, that would be impossible.
00:38:56.000That would be impossible, even though California does have rules that allow people to go and ballot gather, meaning go to people's houses and pick up their absentee ballots for them.
00:39:08.000According to the Sacramento Bee, California's Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed on Monday that its director, Gene Shiomoto, will retire after three decades with the department and a tumultuous final year.
00:39:21.000Well, she's resigning because the department struggled to implement new laws this year, including the state's Motor Voter Program, which launched earlier this year to automatically register people to vote when they visit the DMV.
00:39:31.000The department announced in September it had improperly registered thousands of Californians through the program.
00:39:38.000Thousands of Californians were registered improperly by the DMV under state law in the state of California.
00:39:45.000We've been told voter fraud is the only thing that happens when Republicans suborn it.
00:39:49.000But when Democrats are involved in the possibility of voter fraud, when the laws make it easier to commit voter fraud, then we're crazy.
00:39:54.000We're trying to suppress the vote if we mention all of these things.
00:39:57.000The DMV has also faced increased challenges with issuing federally mandated Real ID cards, which are required by October 1st, 2020 for people who want to board airplanes and enter other federal facilities without a passport.
00:40:09.000Secretary of State Alex Padilla said last week, Shio Mito had lost my confidence and trust and called on Jerry Brown, the governor of California, and governor-elect Gavin Newsom to promptly appoint new leadership at the DMV.
00:40:21.000So the DMV is just a crapshoot on the state of California.
00:40:24.000But more importantly, corruption does not only exist on one side of the aisle, despite what the media would have you believe.
00:40:30.000Corruption certainly exists on the left side of the aisle.
00:40:33.000When you mention this, then Democrats say that you're trying to suppress votes.
00:40:36.000If you mention that voter fraud is a real thing, and that people can gather ballots, like literally just go door-to-door gathering ballots, and we don't know what happens between the time those ballots are gathered and the time those ballots reach their final destination, if you mention that, it's because you're trying to suppress votes.
00:40:50.000But, if Republicans do the same thing in North Carolina, then obviously what you're talking about is voter fraud, serious voter fraud.
00:40:56.000If the Russians are attempting to manipulate things via Facebook pages, it affects the entire 2016 election.
00:41:02.000But if Democrats do the same thing in Alabama, in the middle of an election, in a senatorial election, then the effect is probably too small to have swung the election.
00:42:45.000So, whatever you think of Speaker Paul Ryan, and I've not been supremely happy with his performance as Speaker because I don't know, you know, that there's ever been a Speaker of the House that I'm fully happy with.
00:43:11.000It's the case that I make in The Right Side of History, my new book that's coming out in March, which you should go check out at any bookseller, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, any of them.
00:43:26.000If I do say so myself and I wrote it, but Paul Ryan made the case basically that our focus on Washington D.C., our focus on politics ignores the fact that the country is really built outside of government.
00:43:36.000What we really need to focus on right now is rebuilding the social fabric in our neighborhood and our communities.
00:43:41.000That's the way that things are going to get done.
00:43:42.000Not by relying on some great god king in Washington D.C.
00:43:45.000of either party to magically fix your life.
00:43:55.000When in reality, The congressional system was built not to get things done.
00:43:59.000And the massive growth in government we've seen over the last 80 years has been a serious problem in trying to walk back.
00:44:06.000It's almost impossible to walk back, or at least very difficult, which is why Paul Ryan, who came into office promising entitlement reform, has spent his entire career fighting for it and failing.
00:44:14.000Here's Ryan, though, talking about what really needs to happen in society if we are to rebuild the level of trust necessary for a functioning civilization.
00:44:52.000Again, whatever you think of Paul Ryan, the message that we all need to, you know, figure out our community, and that's where real growth begins, that of course is exactly correct.
00:45:36.000So there's some vindictive piece of garbage human who's decided they're going to go into this Christian baker shop and they're going to ask him to bake every offensive cake they can think of.
00:45:44.000So they've already asked him to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding and he said, no, I can't do that because I'm a Christian.
00:45:49.000And then they sued him, and he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then it went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court sort of said, well, he gets to bake whatever cake that he wants, it's artistic expression, but the ruling was very narrow.
00:46:00.000So now they want to drag him back into court, because what they want to say is that he's still discriminating.
00:46:05.000What the Supreme Court said in the first case is that he's not allowed to discriminate, but the state of Colorado also can't be discriminatory in how it applies the rules, and obviously they had animus for this particular guy.
00:46:16.000So what the people who are going after Jack Phillips now want to do is allow the state of Colorado to show no animus, but punish Jack Phillips.
00:46:37.000So now the state of Colorado is cracking down on him again.
00:46:40.000This is honestly, this is a fascist mindset.
00:46:42.000You got to make people do what they don't want to do or they're bad people.
00:46:46.000And this is the local news reporting on it.
00:46:49.000A Colorado baker who won a victory in the Supreme Court when he refused to bake a cake for a gay couple on religious grounds has a new legal battle on his hands.
00:46:57.000The Colorado Civil Rights Commission recently ruled that Jack Phillips had discriminated against a transgender woman.
00:47:03.000They say Phillips refused to bake a cake for the woman who wanted one with blue frosting and a pink interior.
00:47:10.000The commission has made it clear that it is intent on punishing Jack Phillips.
00:47:14.000Other cake artists are allowed to decline messages that they don't want to communicate, but when Mr. Phillips does it, they come after him.
00:47:21.000Okay, so the problem here is not a double standard.
00:47:23.000So I know that the lawyers are making the case that it's a double standard because that's how the Supreme Court ruled.
00:47:27.000The real problem here is no baker should be forced to bake any cake they don't want to bake for any purpose.
00:47:34.000I don't believe the federal government or the state government should be forcing people to engage in business with people they don't want to engage in business with.
00:47:40.000I know it's a controversial position because people say, OK, what about racists who don't want to serve black people?
00:47:44.000Or what about anti-Semites who don't want to serve Jews?
00:47:46.000And my answer is, go to a different bakery then.
00:47:48.000Those people's businesses will fail because people will rightly say, I don't want to shop at a cake shop that won't serve black people or won't serve gay people or won't serve Jewish people.
00:47:56.000This is where the free market comes in.
00:47:58.000Freedom of choice involves allowing people to choose to do things you don't like.
00:48:01.000And if you don't believe that, then you might want to re-examine your assumptions about how wonderful you are as a human.
00:48:06.000Because if somebody could come along and try to force you to do something that you don't like, the sword cuts both ways.
00:48:58.000Like, the statement you need is a rich actress, a super rich actress, who apparently sits around in, like, random hotel lobbies breast pumping while wearing Versace.
00:49:07.000If I'm going to talk about, you know, heroism in breast pumping, my wife, I mean, who is a doctor, it turns out, would pump for our second child, because she was in medical school and residency when she had our kids, respectively.
00:49:23.000For my son, my wife would pump in the closet at the hospital between hospital shifts.
00:49:30.000And so that's a little more impressive and a little more feminist than, ooh, Rachel McAdams, who's exorbitantly wealthy, works, reading other people's lines, sitting there wearing makeup, and, like, the virtue signaling of breast pumping is just, I'm sorry, it's tiring, it's tiring.
00:49:43.000Like, I think that women who do it are doing something cool, I think that's great.
00:49:47.000There are women at the office who breast pump, and we provide a space for them to do it.
00:51:07.000So, some moron tweeted out about this and suggested that, they tweeted out this picture, they said, the only reason people cared about the Holocaust is because it had white victims.
00:51:21.000One, the Jews were specifically murdered during the Holocaust because they were not considered white by the prevailing dominant culture at the time.
00:51:26.000Two, These kids are not going to be sent to gas chambers with their entire families murdered and cremated.
00:51:32.000Many of them will become asylum refugees in the United States.
00:51:56.000I've written memoirs with Holocaust survivors.
00:52:00.000You know how dismissive and derisive it is to suggest this?
00:52:03.000But this idiot's tweet, this guy named FauxKhalif, he tweeted out, I will say it again, y'all only care about the Holocaust because the victims were white.