Former FBI Director James Comey s Trump memos hit the press, President Trump brings in Rudy Giuliani, and we check the mailbag. - Breaking News: James Comey's memos that he wrote contemporaneously when he was FBI Director and had conversations with President Trump and then President Trump have hit the media, and now we ll go through them and tell you everything that you need to know. - Plus, we ll be joined by Rudy Giuliani to answer your Mailbag questions! Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share for exclusive bonus episodes, unlimited access to all new episodes, and much more! - Ben Shapiro's Mailbag is a weekly show with a new weekly theme song written and performed by his band, The Ringer. Enjoy! Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project, recorded live at WFMU and produced by Riley Bray and the WMMU Jazz Band, recorded in Baltimore, MD. Thanks to Pale Fire and Mossy Creek Records, and our sponsor, Zapsplat Records, for sponsoring the show! and thanks to our sponsor ZipRecruiter for sponsoring today's mailbag! . Check out the Mailbag on The Daily Wire here at the Daily Wire and The Dailywire here at The DailyWire. and check out our new podcast, Check The Mailbag here at Ben Shapiro s website! ! Thanks, Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro and the entire team at The Weekly Standard Thank you for all your support and support, thank you for your support, thank you Ben Shapiro Media, and we really really really appreciate you, Ben and God bless you, God Blessings, Thank you Ben and Good Morning America, Thank You, Sarah, and Good Luck, and Much More! Love, Sarah and Much Blessings - Yours Truly, - Thank you, Sarah & Good Luck & Good Morning, Sarah and Good Blessings. -- Yours, Rachel -- Sarah, Kristy, Amy, Amy and Mike, Rachel, Mike & Mike & The Crew, Rachel, etc., - - Cheers, Rachel & John xx - Ephraim, -- - Ben and Mike - Kristy and Sarah, etc., etc., Kristy & Mike, Natalie & Mike & Ephron, etc. & the Crew, Amy
00:00:12.000As always, lots of breaking news today.
00:00:14.000James Comey, he had those memos that he wrote contemporaneously when he was FBI director and had conversations with President-elect Trump and then President Trump.
00:00:21.000And now those memos have hit the press.
00:00:22.000We'll go through them and tell you everything that you need to know.
00:00:53.000They even spotlight the strongest applications you receive, so you never miss a great match.
00:00:57.000The right candidates are out there, and ZipRecruiter is how you find them.
00:00:59.000It's the reason we use ZipRecruiter here at The Daily Wire and here at The Ben Shapiro Show, when we have to get rid of people and then replace them with better people.
00:01:34.000There's been hubbub for literally over a year about James Comey's firing.
00:01:38.000James Comey was fired as head of the FBI because James Comey refused to say that President Trump was in the clear with regard to the Russia investigation.
00:01:45.000Or at least that President Trump was not under investigation.
00:01:48.000And Trump got mad about that, and so he fired James Comey.
00:01:50.000He made that pretty clear at the time.
00:01:52.000Well, James Comey immediately came out after that, just to recapitulate the history.
00:01:56.000James Comey came out after that, and he leaked some contemporaneous memos to one of his friends, a Columbia University law professor.
00:02:03.000He took these memos that he'd written that were supposed to be notes of meetings that he'd had with Trump, and he leaked them to one of his friends so that they'd get out in the press with the express purpose of trying to get a special prosecutor involved.
00:02:14.000The idea here was this, that President Trump had fired Comey, and now the DOJ had recommended that on the basis of Rod Rosenstein.
00:02:21.000So remember, Jeff Sessions had recused himself from everything Russia-related.
00:02:24.000And that meant that Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, was the guy who wrote a letter saying that James Comey should be fired.
00:02:30.000President Trump used that letter as the basis for firing James Comey.
00:02:33.000James Comey then leaked a bunch of memos about his relationship with Trump to the press in the hopes that Rosenstein would have to recuse himself and appoint a special prosecutor.
00:02:44.000Because once it became clear that Trump had actually done this over the Russia stuff, and Rosenstein had been involved in the firing of James Comey, then suddenly a special prosecutor is necessary.
00:02:52.000That's why these memos became a big issue in the first place.
00:02:54.000It was on the basis of these memos that James Comey was called in front of Congress to testify.
00:02:58.000It was on the basis of these memos that James Comey got his big book deal.
00:03:01.000And it's on the basis of those memos that James Comey is now running around on television every single night.
00:03:07.000Yesterday, the DOJ turned over these memos to Congress.
00:03:10.000There's some controversy related to this, because remember, the DOJ had suggested that originally these memos could not become public because it would be a serious infringement on national security.
00:03:19.000Classified material would make it into the public sphere if these memos were to be made public.
00:03:24.000And so here is what you need to know from the Comey memos.
00:03:26.000First of all, there's really nothing groundbreaking about the Comey memos themselves.
00:03:28.000So, everything that you knew that James Comey had already said, he said he said in these memos.
00:03:49.000So his contemporaneous memos are very consistent with what he has been saying publicly.
00:03:53.000According to James Comey, he went to President Trump.
00:03:55.000He told him about the Russian dossier that was compiled by Christopher Steele at the behest of Fusion GPS, which was paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:04:05.000Which paid Christopher Steele to compile a dossier on President Trump, and that dossier made its way to the FBI, and James Comey showed the most salacious parts of that dossier to President Trump, and Trump and Comey at length discussed the infamous pee tape.
00:04:18.000Of course, this is the portion of the dossier alleging that President Trump went to Russia in 2013 and had Russian prostitutes pee on a bed once occupied by the Obamas, which is real weird.
00:04:28.000Okay, and then Trump apparently told Comey at one point,
00:04:31.000That Putin had bragged about the quality of Russian hookers, which is like, okay, whatever.
00:04:37.000And then apparently Trump joked about jailing reporters and Comey laughed about it.
00:04:42.000And Trump said that Michael Flynn had serious judgment issues, which is not a great shock.
00:04:45.000He ended up firing his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and then asking James Comey if there was any way he could see himself cleared to letting Michael Flynn go, which is not obstruction since he didn't actually pressure Comey to let Michael Flynn go.
00:05:27.000Now Comey says he only leaked one memo to his friend and that memo was unclassified, but we're going to have to figure this thing out because the fact is that according to the letter from the DOJ to Congress releasing these memos, quote, pursuant to your request, we are providing the requested memoranda in both redacted and unredacted formats for your convenience.
00:05:45.000The unredacted documents are classified and we'll provide those in a separate secure transmittal to the House Security Office tomorrow.
00:05:51.000Which seems to imply that Comey's memos were not all unclassified.
00:05:55.000Okay, also, this seems to suggest that the DOJ fibbed about the importance of the memos in the first place.
00:05:59.000As I mentioned, the DOJ refused to turn over the memos when requested under the Freedom of Information Act last year.
00:06:04.000They claimed that the release of the memos would somehow impede the Mueller investigation.
00:06:08.000Nothing in the memos seems to suggest this is true.
00:06:10.000The memos also do not suggest obstruction.
00:06:12.000So this is a point in favor of President Trump.
00:06:15.000After the release of the memos, Representatives Devin Nunes, Bob Goodlatte, Trey Gowdy, they tore into Comey.
00:06:20.000They said, quote, Furthermore, the memos demonstrate that Trump didn't want Russian election interference investigation ended.
00:06:33.000But the suggestion that he had engaged in lewd personal conduct he wanted investigated.
00:06:36.000So he was much more concerned with the allegations about the P-Tape than he was concerned about the idea that Russia interfered in the election.
00:06:42.000He wasn't seeking to shut anything down or direct the investigation in any particular direction except on the P-Tape, according to the Comey memos.
00:06:49.000As the congressman points out, the memos also show former director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened.
00:06:56.000He didn't feel obstructed or threatened until he was fired, at which point it became sour grapes.
00:07:00.000Maybe I was fired because of obstruction as opposed to I was fired because I'm wildly incompetent at my job.
00:07:05.000It is also true that these memos show that James Comey held the Trump administration and President Trump to a different standard than he held members of the Obama administration.
00:07:13.000So, Comey has stated he interfered in the Hillary Clinton email investigation in an unprecedented way, right?
00:07:18.000He went out there, he did his big press conference where he announced basically why Hillary Clinton should be indicted and then said she shouldn't be indicted.
00:07:24.000He did that in an attempt to shield Loretta Lynch, the Attorney General, from
00:07:31.000Well, he never wrote contemporaneous memos about his meetings with Loretta Lynch or Barack Obama during that time, even though he was so worried about it that he interfered in the middle of an investigation in a way that is wildly unprecedented.
00:07:41.000He only reserved those memos for Trump.
00:07:43.000And this is what the congressmen point out.
00:07:45.000He chose not to memorialize conversations with President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, Secretary Clinton, Andrew McCabe, or others, but he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump.
00:07:55.000These memos also lay bare the notion that former Director Comey
00:08:00.000Comey also never bothered to try to launch a special counsel investigation against Lynch and Clinton through leaks.
00:08:06.000Also worth noting in these memos, Comey defended McCabe repeatedly and personally to President Trump.
00:08:10.000It now turns out that McCabe was in fact lying repeatedly and now is under criminal investigation.
00:08:16.000That came out yesterday that Andrew McCabe has been now referred by the IG for criminal investigation on the basis of leaking to the press.
00:08:23.000A bunch of stories about his involvement in the Hillary Clinton Foundation scandal and his attempts to investigate it.
00:08:30.000So the Comey memos don't actually help Comey's case.
00:08:33.000They don't show us anything we didn't already know, but they do undercut the case that Comey was being pressured in any real way by President Trump.
00:08:39.000All of this prompted President Trump to tweet.
00:08:41.000So here's what President Trump tweeted about all this, quote, James Comey memos just out and show clearly there was no collusion and no obstruction.
00:08:48.000Also, he leaked classified information.
00:08:58.000I mean, there's no collusion, no obstruction, and it is pretty clear that he may have leaked classified information.
00:09:03.000So, all of this, this whole thing, this whole special counsel investigation, which was launched on the basis, not the Russia investigation, the special counsel Mueller investigation, which was launched on the back of Comey's memos, seems really weak.
00:09:15.000There's another theory that is now being put out there by Molly Hemingway over at The Federalist that is worth noting here.
00:09:23.000What the memos really show is that James Comey and James Clapper, the former head of the CIA, and the press were in cahoots in their attempts to get the information about the P-Tape out into the public sphere.
00:09:37.000So here is what Molly Hemingway writes.
00:09:39.000So she writes, quote, in multiple memos, Comey specifically mentioned that CNN had the dossier, the famous P-Tape dossier, and wanted a news hook that would enable the network to report on its most salacious allegations, even though they had not been verified.
00:10:09.000I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook, Comey added in his memo about the briefing with Trump on January 6, 2017.
00:10:16.000On January 28, 2017, Comey wrote that in a separate meeting, Trump mentioned the allegation about the alleged tape of prostitutes at the hotel and called it fake news.
00:10:24.000Comey said, I explained again why I had thought it important that he know about it.
00:10:27.000I also explained that one of the reasons we told him was that the media, CNN in particular, was telling us they were about to run with it.
00:10:36.000Because on January 10th, just four days after James Comey briefed the President of the United States about the P-Tape, there was a CNN story, and it said, quote, Extremely well-placed sources told CNN that the Obama administration's top intelligence appointees had briefed Obama, Biden, and Trump all about a dossier they took incredibly seriously and considered credible.
00:10:57.000But it sounded really bad, as the headline indicated.
00:10:59.000CNN declared Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.
00:11:05.000And just a few minutes later, BuzzFeed published the actual dossier, showing the world that the dossier was riddled with salacious gossip that lacked even a possibility of corroboration.
00:11:16.000They tell Trump that we may have a media scandal on our hands if they can find a news hook.
00:11:22.000And then what does CNN use as the news hook?
00:11:24.000The fact that James Comey told President Trump that he may have a media scandal on his hand.
00:11:28.000You see how the circular system works here?
00:11:31.000So I'll explain more of that in just a second.
00:11:32.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Ring.
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00:12:12.000Much love and God bless for both gods.
00:12:18.000Okay, so it's not clear this guy's a criminal, but clearly this guy is weird, and you really don't want weirdos hanging out outside your house without you being able to see what exactly is happening in there.
00:12:28.000This is one of the reasons that you need a ring.
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00:13:06.000Back to the reports about the Comey memo that are really interesting.
00:13:11.000Now, this has not been substantiated, but the going theory now on the right seems to be that James Comey and company went to President Trump and informed him about the p-tape dossier, not just because they wanted to inform him, but maybe because they wanted to leak the news that that meeting had taken place so that CNN could use it as a news hook.
00:13:31.000This is what Molly Hemingway is saying over at the Federalist.
00:13:34.000Keep in mind that nothing we now know about the dossier had been reported at the time.
00:13:37.000It wasn't yet reported that it was used by the FBI to provide a substantial basis to wiretap at least one Trump affiliate, despite the fact that it was unverified.
00:13:44.000It wasn't yet reported that the product was bought and paid for as a Hillary Clinton campaign operation, or that it was secretly funded by the DNC, using a law firm as a pass-through to hide its prominence in federal campaign filings.
00:13:54.000After nearly a year of wrangling, the seven memos written by Comey were finally handed over on Thursday to Congress, which oversees the operation and funding of the FBI and DOJ.
00:14:02.000The memos purport to show Comey's version of his interactions with the president before Comey was fired last May.
00:14:10.000Something weird is going on here, right?
00:14:12.000That Comey claims that James Clapper over at the CIA wanted Trump to be briefed on the p-tape and on the dossier.
00:14:19.000And in the briefing, in his notes, he told Trump, CNN has this information, they may run with it at any time, they just need a news hook.
00:14:25.000And the very news hook that CNN used was, Trump has now been briefed about this stuff.
00:14:30.000So if it wasn't Comey, then that does raise some questions about James Clapper, because Clapper obviously is a highly partisan player, and if James Clapper was basically using this as an excuse to get the p-tape nonsense out there in the first place, that is pretty damning and very, very troubling.
00:14:46.000In any case, none of this is particularly troubling for President
00:14:50.000I mean, the only material on the table right now that could be a serious problem for President Trump is whatever the FBI's got from Michael Cohen, right?
00:14:56.000That's the stuff that could actually hurt President Trump.
00:14:57.000But this P-Tape stuff, the dossier stuff, the Comey memos, none of them actually seem to be breaking any significant news.
00:15:04.000James Comey still won't leave our TV screens, however, because he's got a book to shill.
00:15:09.000And it's amazing to watch as James Comey backs off of his own strong position that Trump may be compromised.
00:15:14.000So he was asked by Jake Tapper yesterday whether President Trump has been compromised by Russia.
00:15:18.000Now, remember, the reason that he told President Trump about the P-tape in the first place is because of the possibility that Trump might actually be affected by so-called kompromat, right?
00:15:27.000James Comey says, actually, it's kind of unlikely that Russia has that sort of compromising information.
00:15:32.000I'm not going to talk about the investigation of possible cooperation between Americans and the Russian effort to influence our election.
00:15:41.000What you're asking about now is, why did I say what I said when people asked me whether I thought it was possible that the Russians had derogatory information on President Trump?
00:15:50.000I think it's unlikely, but I think it's possible.
00:15:52.000Unlikely but possible is different from what he said earlier, which is he said it was just possible.
00:15:57.000Bottom line is, Comey has no news to break, and the media are struggling for news.
00:16:00.000Well, in their struggle for news, James Comey tried to bring out another piece of information yesterday, and I'm going to explain that one here.
00:16:05.000So President—so James Comey says that, in the memos, Trump told him that he talked with Putin about hookers.
00:16:12.000So, according to the memos, James Comey told Trump about the p-tape allegations, and Trump responded by saying that he had not spent the night in Russia.
00:16:27.000And then, James Comey said to Trump that—and then Trump said to James Comey that Vladimir Putin does vouch for the hookers over in Russia.
00:16:34.000Okay, so James Comey is trying to break this as a big piece of news, and then we will explain why Trump probably said this in the first place.
00:16:41.000I think there was public reporting that he had spoken to Vladimir Putin as sort of a welcome, you know, congratulations on taking office thing at that point.
00:16:49.000I'm not suggesting they talked about how beautiful the hookers were in Russia, but I do know there was at least one publicly reported conversation.
00:16:57.000So what exactly happened with the hookers?
00:16:59.000Why exactly did Trump say that in the first place to Comey?
00:17:02.000Probably because just a few days beforehand, Vladimir Putin had announced to the world that Russia has the best hookers.
00:17:06.000This happened about, like, a week and a half before Trump told Comey about Putin talking about hookers.
00:17:12.000The chances that Putin actually talked directly with Trump about hookers are extraordinarily low.
00:17:16.000But he did speak to the world about hookers, which is weird.
00:17:18.000So here is Vladimir Putin at the time talking about how great hookers were in Russia.
00:17:23.000I find it difficult to believe that he ran to a hotel to meet with our girls of reduced social responsibility.
00:17:43.000When you're talking about prostitutes and you're bragging about the quality of your prostitutes, that is one leader of a country right there.
00:17:48.000That is probably why Trump said that, not because Putin actually told Trump that the hookers in Russia were actually the best.
00:17:53.000OK, so, meanwhile, the other breaking news from all of the Trump-Russia stuff is that apparently Rudy Giuliani has now joined the team.
00:18:02.000Rudy Giuliani, of course, was very close with the Trump campaign.
00:18:04.000He was very involved in the Trump campaign.
00:18:06.000He has a very close and weird relationship with President Trump going back years.
00:18:09.000In fact, here's some early audio and video of President Trump, then just Donald Trump with the mullet.
00:18:16.000I mean, really, business in front, party in back.
00:18:19.000And Rudy Giuliani is about 1990, I believe?
00:19:23.000Out of the realm of possibility, either, because I'm not sure that Mueller actually has anything so far as this Russia collusion stuff goes.
00:19:28.000And the obstruction case is extremely weak, if by obstruction you mean that he fired James Comey.
00:19:32.000Even James Comey can't say that it was obstruction.
00:19:35.000Makes it very difficult to claim that there was serious obstruction by Team Trump.
00:19:38.000Now, again, the real danger to President Trump is not that.
00:19:41.000The real danger to President Trump is in the Michael Cohen stuff, in the fact that his personal lawyer's offices were raided on the basis of supposed campaign finance violations.
00:19:49.000Alan Dershowitz, who's been a pretty strong legal ally for President Trump throughout this process,
00:19:53.000He says that President Trump has to assume that people are going to flip on him.
00:20:01.000They can charge you with a dozen crimes, even if they're relatively technical crimes, that accumulate with the guidelines and tell you you're going to never see freedom again.
00:20:11.000You're going to serve the rest of your life in prison.
00:20:14.000That kind of pressure brings about not only singing, but sometimes composing.
00:20:19.000I think the president has to assume that his closest friends, his greatest associates, the people he trusts the most, if
00:20:26.000Exposed to the pressure, the risk of life imprisonment will flip.
00:20:30.000That has to be his working assumption.
00:20:32.000Okay, so then the question becomes, what exactly does Michael Cohen have on President Trump?
00:20:42.000I think that's why they're being cooperative with Mueller.
00:20:44.000I think that's why Trump is really not concerned with firing Mueller, because all of that
00:20:49.000After a year and a half of this nonsense, we'll finally come to an inglorious end.
00:20:53.000It'll really be on the Michael Cohen investigation.
00:20:55.000Democrats are now going to have to shift their hopes from Trump-Russia collusion to Michael Cohen engaging in some sort of illegal activity with Trump in order to push their impeachment hopes.
00:21:05.000OK, so meanwhile, I just have to tell you this story, and then we'll get to the mailbag, because I want to do some mailbagging it up today.
00:21:14.000So Trayvon White is a Democrat from Ward 8 in Washington, D.C.
00:21:19.000He's a council member, and he had said, if you recall, that the weather was controlled by the Jews.
00:21:25.000He blamed the Jews for the weather in Washington, D.C., which is a real weird thing.
00:21:28.000Like, we, the Jews, the Juden, we control many things, but we do not control the weather, as far as I'm aware.
00:21:34.000If not, I'll have to talk to the elders of Zion about it at my Friday night meeting.
00:21:37.000I mean, it's already Friday, so I figure tonight we'll get together and we'll talk about whether we can control the weather, because if so, then there are a few places that ought to be hit with lightning.
00:21:47.000So Trayon White, in an attempt to do penance for this, went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
00:21:53.000So he said that he apparently spent some time on this tour, and it got very weird.
00:22:00.000So he suggested that an image of a German girl being marched through the streets of Norden in 1935 as humiliation for an alleged relationship with a Jew was actually depicting her being protected by Nazi troops surrounding her.
00:22:13.000She's wearing a sign around her neck, being paraded through the streets.
00:22:16.000And the sign says, I slept with a Jew, basically.
00:22:18.000And this idiot, Trayvon White, actually thought that this was the Nazis protecting this woman from the population outside, which is very, very weird.
00:22:28.000And that's when the museum experts pointed out that this was untrue.
00:22:32.000And then it apparently got weirder and weirder.
00:22:35.000Apparently, he suggested that the Warsaw Ghetto was a gated community.
00:23:07.000But if this had been a Republican lawmaker of any caliber, it would be all over the front pages of every newspaper that this person went to a Holocaust museum and thought that the Warsaw Ghetto was a gated community.
00:23:31.000I've been living overseas for the past couple of years.
00:23:33.000I was recently having a discussion with another Marine about our Founding Fathers and their statues across the country.
00:23:37.000As a minority and someone who had ancestors that were slaves, he can't bring himself to respect them and doesn't understand why we still have statues honoring them.
00:23:43.000He asked why in the world should a modern-day person of color in America want statues of slave owners still all over the country?
00:23:48.000I've always had a passion for American history and have revered our Founding Fathers, but I'm starting to rethink my position as I look at it from his point of view.
00:23:54.000I totally understand why people of color or people who have ancestors who were slaves would be upset with the idea of statues of people who held slaves.
00:24:04.000With that said, the reason that we're honoring Thomas Jefferson is not because he held slaves.
00:24:07.000The reason that we're honoring Thomas Jefferson is because Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, the creator of the Louisiana Purchase, a president who stood for states' rights, and instrumental in the drawing of the Constitution of the United States.
00:24:20.000You don't honor him for his slaveholding.
00:24:22.000This is like a woman saying about Martin Luther King, you know, Martin Luther King, that statue right there, you know, I understand that Martin Luther King did some great things, but Martin Luther King was also really, really nasty about women.
00:24:32.000I mean, Martin Luther King had a very bad record of philandering with regard to his wife.
00:24:37.000And as a woman, it makes me very upset to see that statue of Martin Luther King.
00:24:40.000Well, the answer to that is that's not why we honor Martin Luther King.
00:24:43.000So, recognizing that we build statues to people for the things that they do well, not for the things they do badly, and yet that people are rounded human beings who do bad things sometimes, I think is really important.
00:24:53.000I think that statues generally should be taken as jumping off points for having exactly these sorts of discussions, but pretending that honoring Jefferson with the Jefferson Memorial, for example, is honoring slavery is just silly.
00:25:06.000It's like saying that the Lincoln Memorial, honoring Abraham Lincoln, is really about honoring his original sentiments with regard to the inferiority of black people.
00:25:13.000If you go back and read Abraham Lincoln in 1856...
00:25:16.000He was saying openly that he didn't think that black people were of the same capacity as white people.
00:25:22.000We honor him because of the Emancipation Proclamation and his belief in the end that black Americans were Americans and these were American citizens and these people should be freed from slavery.
00:25:31.000And so what we choose to honor people about doesn't obscure the rest of their history.
00:25:35.000But we should recognize that us honoring Thomas Jefferson or George Washington is about honoring their achievements.
00:25:42.000And that we can discuss those demerits in the same breath as those achievements and recognize that people were people who lived of their time.
00:25:47.000It is also relevant to note that with regard to slavery, virtually everyone, virtually everyone for thousands of years was living in a slave-holding society.
00:25:56.000And again, there are lots of people who today I think are real garbage, but we still honor their works of art.
00:26:02.000How many artists do we know who are just bad people, like rotten human beings, but we still recognize that they made a good movie?
00:26:08.000How many politicians leave a woman to die at the bottom of a river, and yet are called the Lion of the Senate?
00:26:16.000When you look at human beings, it is worthwhile to look at them in their entirety.
00:26:19.000But when you're looking at a monument, the monument is really to the achievements of the human beings.
00:26:22.000Nick says, Ben, what is your stance on global warming, now climate change?
00:26:25.000I know a lot of conservatives seem to be split on the issue.
00:26:28.000I have heard you before say that you would like to do more research on the issue before you discuss it, but I'd really like to know your opinion.
00:26:32.000This is a big issue between my friends and me.
00:26:34.000We discuss this regularly, listen to you every morning, keep up the good work.
00:26:36.000Okay, so Nick, here is my feeling on this.
00:27:12.000I would assume that it is a non-insignificant percentage.
00:27:15.000It's attributable to man-made activity.
00:27:17.000And then finally, there's the third question, which is, what should we do about it?
00:27:20.000And the what should we do about it question is really the hardest, because I've noticed that there's this kind of nasty conflation that happens all the time on the global warming argument, which is, if I say to you that I agree with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that there will be a seven degree Fahrenheit change in the average global climate by the year 2100, if I say I agree with you, I agree with all of the premises of this,
00:27:39.000If I say to you that this is going to mean that things change on the globe, but if I also say to you, listen, I think that your solutions like the Paris Accords are not actually going to make enough of a difference to be worth sacrificing trillions of dollars in future income and development in a wide variety of developing countries.
00:27:56.000So really what we should do is let the market handle it, and we should aid people who need to move from particular areas if climate threatens the places that they live.
00:28:04.000But population movement and transition due to climate change has been true as long as human beings have been on planet Earth.
00:28:10.000If I say that, then you say, well, you're denying climate change.
00:28:12.000Well, no, I'm not denying climate change.
00:28:13.000I'm just saying it happens, but my solution may not be your solution.
00:28:17.000And I think that we ought to analyze whether a particular solution is actually calibrated to do good,
00:28:21.000So, you know, I was a big fan of Pope John Paul II.
00:28:57.000It's hard to tell, honestly, what he's saying sometimes because obviously he speaks a different language than I do.
00:29:01.000And beyond that, some of the reporting is inaccurate.
00:29:03.000So sometimes you'll see people report things like Pope Francis says there's no hell.
00:29:07.000And then it turns out that it was just an atheist newspaper in Italy and they were misconstruing what he was saying.
00:29:12.000If you were to believe what the left believes about Pope Francis, I would say that I'm not as fond of him as a pope.
00:29:17.000If you were to believe, you know, what the right says about him, then maybe he's fine.
00:29:20.000But I will say that the headlines that I've seen him make, some of the things that he said about foreign policy, some of the things that he said about immigration, some of the stuff that he said about the environment, I don't find any of this to be deeply tied into theological concerns.
00:29:34.000I think it's much more political than theological.
00:31:01.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:09.000Well, this is a real difficult thing, because many states require that you be a member of a teacher's union in order for you to teach, right?
00:31:24.000And that means the teacher's unions are obviously taking money from your paycheck and then using it for biased political curricula.
00:31:30.000You can do your best to teach straight politics.
00:31:32.000I would say start a private school, honestly.
00:31:35.000As far as the public education system, I think that it's run by the government, and as Ludwig von Mises suggested about bureaucracy, once a bureaucracy is owned by the state, it is very difficult for it not to promulgate the
00:31:49.000Once you're being paid by the state, your interest, obviously, is in maximizing the power of the state.
00:31:54.000Michael says, Ben, my question is this.
00:31:55.000My daughter is a freshman in high school, and over the summer, I would like her to be reading material that will help prepare her to think critically, philosophically, and with purpose.
00:32:01.000I'm looking for suggestions of material that would aid in this.
00:32:04.000Political philosophy, general philosophy, history, mythology, et cetera.
00:32:07.000Anything that would allow her to think independently and critically, which seems to be lacking in today's public school education.
00:32:11.000So the number one book I always recommend is there's a book by Henry Hazlitt called Economics in One Lesson.
00:32:48.000Because now that criminal has broken a window and the business owner is going to have to pay the glass manufacturer in order to fix the window.
00:32:55.000What Hazlitt points out is, of course, this is not true, that the criminal is, of course, hurting the economy because that baker, who had his window broken, could have been spending that money on hiring more employees to bake more goods and making his price cheaper.
00:33:06.000Could have been spending his money to repaint the place.
00:33:08.000Could have been spending his money on a yacht.
00:33:10.000Bottom line is, when you get to choose the products you consume, the economy runs better and to more to your pleasure than when the government controls what it is that you are consuming and what you must consume.
00:33:21.000That's the kind of thinking that goes into economics in one lesson.
00:34:26.000There's a story that I saw the other day that was widely covered about a woman who had graduated law school and she had, I think it was, five children.
00:34:36.000And I believe that the story was that she was never married in the first place, I think.
00:34:41.000If not, then this story is irrelevant.
00:34:42.000But let's assume for the sake of argument, because the media does this all the time, that the media glorifies single motherhood in a way that
00:34:49.000The media will suggest that a woman who has a child, and she's not married, and then she overcomes obstacles, like having a child, in order to succeed in business, is somehow greater than the woman who actually made the decision to get married.
00:35:03.000Privilege of decision-making is what matters in the United States.
00:35:05.000In a free country, the decisions that you make ought to have an impact on how you live.
00:35:09.000If you choose to get married before you have a child, that is something you did right.
00:35:12.000And we should be celebrating that a lot more than the person who had a child out of wedlock and then succeeds.
00:35:17.000It's great that the woman who had a child out of wedlock succeeds, but she did set up an obstacle to herself.
00:35:22.000She did set up an obstacle to herself in terms of succeeding, because now she obviously has higher costs, she has to do childcare, and she's deprived her kid of a father in the home.
00:35:31.000So, you know, this is why responsible decision-making matters.
00:35:40.000There are a bunch of different commentaries and rulings on contraception.
00:35:43.000The general rule on contraception according to orthodoxy, as I understand it, is that contraception is forbidden, except in cases of health.
00:35:51.000It is relatively widely prescribed, but it depends on the type of contraception.
00:35:54.000So, in Judaism, the birth control pill is recommended more highly over prophylactics, for example.
00:36:04.000I have a question for you regarding end-of-life care and the role of government, Medicare, Medicaid.
00:36:07.000Well, I mean, sure, just the same as it would in the medical system, which is you save up a lot of money that did not go to Social Security and taxes from Medicare and Medicaid, and you set that aside for the day at the end of life when it's going to cost a lot of money.
00:36:15.000Plus, when you don't have government subsidies,
00:36:33.000And when you don't have mandates that are crammed down on doctors to prescribe certain things, then competition should lower the cost.
00:36:40.000One of the fastest growing industries in the United States, for example, are assisted living facilities in the private sector.
00:36:45.000And because there's a lot of competition in assisted living facilities, the prices have actually been dropping pretty precipitously in certain areas of assisted living facilities.
00:36:52.000In certain areas, they're growing because the demand is outstripping the supply, but that's just going to lead to more supply.
00:36:57.000Supply and demand don't cease to work just because the cost of a particular product is particularly high.
00:37:02.000Daniel says, Hey, Ben, if slavery and indentured servitude are outlawed by the 13th Amendment, why is jury duty legal?
00:37:53.000I think it's tied up with lack of values.
00:37:54.000I think it's tied up with a country where we have all determined to see ourselves as victims rather than active players in our own lives.
00:38:01.000And if we get beyond that, if we determine that the decisions we make in our own lives are important, and that we're not victims of circumstance, and that it is our job to seek the purpose that we are to live out, right?
00:38:13.000We are here to better the world in accordance with our reason, as Aristotle would put it, or we're here to live out God's will for us, as Judeo-Christian values would put it.
00:38:22.000I think that would alleviate a lot of this.
00:38:24.000Just, I think that so much of our culture is also designed to make you jealous of other people's material belongings.
00:38:29.000People tend to get depressed about their lack of material success when, in reality, success is not dependent on the amount of money that you make.
00:38:35.000You know, my dad spent a lot of my life not earning a lot of money, and I would say that he's a very successful human being because he also raised four fantastic kids.
00:38:46.000Which is something I've always been somewhat proud of.
00:38:48.000Well, I think that it depends on time.
00:38:57.000So I think that to label Germany the worst country in the world as though there is a unique sort of German character is relatively inaccurate because Germany was only constituted formally in the middle of the 19th century as one state.
00:39:09.000Before that, it was several states, right?
00:39:27.000The idea that Germany was the worst country in the world in, say, 1805, I think is silly, considering that Napoleonic France was still on the rise, that it was the worst country during the French Revolution.
00:39:45.000But to ignore the achievements of some Germans and pretend that, you know, it's not the country that brought you Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach, and then to suggest in the same breath that Germany is responsible for the Nazis,
00:39:57.000Again, you know, as I said about individual human beings a little bit earlier, it's also true of countries.
00:40:57.000I like some of the old school, like 1960s, 1970s rock bands.
00:41:00.000I think some of those are actually pretty good and pretty creative.
00:41:04.000Stevie Wonder, I think, is a tremendous musician.
00:41:07.000But what I hate is the lack of musicality in rock music as compared to other forms of music, even jazz, is pretty astonishing on every level.
00:41:15.000Michael says, Hi Ben, I wanted to hear your opinion on the possibility of President Trump reinstating the draft.
00:41:19.000Well, I mean, if there were a draft, I think people would cooperate.
00:41:21.000Is the president going to restore the draft?
00:41:22.000I think the draft is a thing of the past.
00:41:38.000Well, the fact is that we have a pretty large standing military, and the best way to increase the size of that military would be to offer people more money to join it, presumably, as opposed to reinstating the draft more broadly.
00:41:50.000Alrighty, so, now a couple of things that I like, or a thing I like, and then maybe one thing that I hate here.
00:42:07.000It's called Losing the Nobel Prize, A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor.
00:42:11.000The book is really pitched as a critique of the Nobel Prize and why the Nobel Prize is corrupt.
00:42:16.000But the book really is a really fascinating history into the investigation of the universe, the Big Bang, and the theory that the universe has been here in perpetuity.
00:42:26.000It's really a good, user-friendly history.
00:42:29.000I'm not going to say it's not difficult.
00:42:32.000But I think Brian really dumbs it down to the point where folks like me, who don't have a tremendous scientific background, can understand it.
00:42:37.000The book is losing the Nobel Prize, so if you've ever wondered how it is that we discovered the Big Bang and what
00:42:42.000Cosmic background radiation is some of the terms that are used by astronomers.
00:42:48.000Then this book is really good for that.
00:42:50.000Also, it has some pretty interesting discussions of religion and science.
00:42:53.000Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating.
00:42:55.000You can pre-order it on Amazon right now and it should arrive sometime next week.
00:42:58.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:43:04.000OK, so first of all, I think that to look in the United States for incidents of racism is not all that difficult.
00:43:09.000I do think that there are people who are doing racist things, and they're doing them on a not infrequent basis.
00:43:14.000Now, we have to take that as a percentage of the population.
00:43:16.000But the reason that I want to show this is because there's been so much focus put on what happened at Starbucks, in which two black guys were allegedly told that they had to leave the restaurant, refused to leave the restaurant after not buying anything, demanding to use the bathroom, and then were arrested.
00:43:30.000And this has become a national issue on Good Morning America.
00:43:34.000Okay, so this happened over at Syracuse University, and there was an idiotic frat party, and the frat brothers did stuff that idiotic frat brothers do, which is they said a bunch of racist, anti-Semitic, stupid crap.
00:43:45.000And this is not getting the sort of national attention that the Starbucks thing did, which is amazing because this is absolutely, clearly an indication of racist rhetoric, for example.
00:43:54.000Tonight, video from inside a Syracuse fraternity sparking outrage.
00:44:06.000We're not showing the full disturbing video obtained by the school paper, but the university calls it, and additional videos in its possession, extremely racist, antisemitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities.
00:44:20.000I solemnly swear, I solemnly swear, to always have hatred in my heart for, to always have hatred in my heart for,
00:44:28.000Okay, so this stuff is obviously idiotic.
00:44:29.000This is one of the dangers of the alt-right that I was talking about last year is because political correctness has taken so much
00:44:48.000Precedence at colleges all over the United States.
00:44:51.000There are a bunch of people who think that the way to fight political correctness is to be a piece of crap.
00:44:55.000And this is obviously a case of that happening in Syracuse.
00:44:58.000I also point this out because, again, if you want to talk about this sort of racism as a response to political correctness, or if you want to talk about racism existing in American society, stuff like this is a pretty obvious case.
00:45:09.000But instead, we're focusing on this Starbucks case, which I think is a lot less obvious.
00:45:13.000I think the reason for that is because there are some folks on the left who like to pick controversial cases and make them national issues, specifically because they know it'll draw opposition.
00:45:20.000If you say that this Syracuse tape is racist, everyone says, you're right, that's racist.
00:45:23.000But if you say the Starbucks incident, where we still don't have tape, was racist, and somebody says, well, you know, I'd like to see, like, the whole tape of that, they go, ah, you know, the reason that you're not paying attention to that incident is because you're covertly racist.