Four days until Election Day, we assess the state of the race, President Trump goes off on an illegal immigration, and we check the mailbag. Plus, a special offer from Zeal Massage to help you relax this weekend and get you ready for the midterms. Thanks to our sponsor, ZERO, our listeners get $25 off your first massage with promo code Ben at zeel.co/BENSHEAPERS. You can also join the FB group and join the conversation by using the hashtag on social media, and find us on Insta: or to send us your thoughts, questions, and thoughts on the election. Thanks for listening and Happy Halloween! Ben Shapiro Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on iTunes and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and also hit us up on Anchor.fm and let us know what you thought of the show! Thank you so much for all the support, and Happy Holidays! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite thing you're thankful for? 2:30 - What are you looking forward to in the next episode? 3:00 4:15 - How do you plan on spending your Halloween candy? 5: What do you want for the election? 6: What are your favorite part? 7:15: What would you like to see in your next meal? 8:00 -- 9:30 -- How do I m voting for the next election day? 11: What s your favorite piece of food? 12:00 | What s going to be the most important part of the election night? 13:40 -- What s a good thing for me? 15:30 16: Is your biggest takeaway from this election night experience? 17:40 - What kind of thing you re you re going to vote for you? 18:30 Is your favorite moment? 19:15 -- what do you think you re looking for in 2020? 21:40 22:00 Is there any chance I m going to win it? or not? 26: Is there anything you re voting for me in 2020 or would you want to see me vote for me next week? ? 27:30 | Can I vote for someone else?
00:00:00.000Four days until Election Day, we assess the state of the race, President Trump goes off on an illegal immigration, and we check the mailbag.
00:01:48.000And suffice it to say that nobody knows what exactly is going on.
00:01:52.000The data suggests that Republicans could lose anywhere from 30 to 40 seats in the House, and they could pick up anywhere from zero to five seats in the Senate.
00:01:58.000But all of the modeling is is sketchy at best.
00:02:03.000The sort of 538 modeling suggests an 85 percent chance that Republicans
00:02:07.000Lose the House and an 85% chance they retain the Senate, but we've seen those sorts of odds bucked before.
00:02:13.000We simply don't know how turnout is going to be reflected, especially because there is high voter enthusiasm from both parties going into the election.
00:02:21.000Now, I would say that my feeling, my general feeling, is that Republican enthusiasm was higher three weeks ago during the Kavanaugh hearings because I've literally never seen Republican enthusiasm higher than it was during that period.
00:02:31.000With that said, Republican enthusiasm remains high because the country is simply so polarized.
00:02:37.000With that in mind, it's time to take a look at exactly what this election is going to be like.
00:02:43.000Well, there's very good news for Republicans going into the election.
00:02:46.000That news is the economic news that broke today.
00:02:49.000Job growth blew past expectations in October, and year-over-year wage gains jumped past 3% for the first time since the Great Recession, according to the Labor Department.
00:02:57.000So this is just a stunningly good jobs report.
00:03:00.000Powered up by 250,000 jobs for the month, well ahead of refinitive estimates of 190,000.
00:03:06.000The unemployment rate stayed at 3.7%, the lowest since December 1969.
00:03:11.000Jim Baird, Partner and Chief Investment Officer for Plant Moran Financial Advisors, talking to CNBC.
00:03:17.000He said the job market is doing remarkably well, particularly this late in the expansion.
00:03:21.000This report adds yet another data point to a narrative that has been positive for the labor market this year.
00:03:25.000Little seems to stand in the way of the economy finishing 2018 out on solid footing.
00:03:30.000Which would seem to cut in favor of Republicans, because obviously when the economy is good, the economy is good.
00:03:34.000We, however, are in the middle of an extraordinarily polarized political environment.
00:03:38.000To just finish out the news on the economy, the ranks of the unemployed rose to a fresh record.
00:03:43.000Sorry, the ranks of the employed rose to a fresh record of 156.6 million, and the employment-to-population ratio increased to 60.6 percent.
00:03:52.000That's the highest level since December 2008, so prior to the recession.
00:03:56.000That headline jobless number stayed level, even amid a two-tenths of a percentage point rise in the labor participation rate of 62.9 percent.
00:04:31.000They're on track to do it again in December.
00:04:33.000There's a lot of talk about whether the Fed is actually tamping down growth by essentially curtailing the ability to lend.
00:04:40.000But suffice it to say that if the economy is this strong with a tighter Fed, that means that the economy is really busting loose.
00:04:46.000It's doing some pretty amazing things.
00:04:47.000And that is largely thanks to consumer confidence being extraordinarily high.
00:04:51.000It's due to the fact that a lot of voters and citizens feel that
00:04:56.000Their money is not going to be taken away from them with a Republican Congress and a Republican president.
00:05:00.000All of this should cut very much in favor of the Republicans.
00:05:03.000And indeed, the Republicans do have a serious shot at keeping the House, even though the odds are stacked against it.
00:05:08.000So Sean Trent, who's an elections analyst over at RealClearPolitics, has a really good piece over there talking about what it would take for Republicans to retain the House.
00:05:18.000He says, as we move toward the close of this election cycle, impending control of the House of Representatives remains up in the air.
00:05:24.000The general consensus among analysts is that Democrats are the favorites, perhaps by a substantial margin, but that Republicans remain in the game.
00:06:10.000There's a poll today showing that Dana Rohrabacher is likely
00:06:14.000He basically goes through state by state and he says that there is indeed a significant possibility in which Republicans retain the House even as they lose 22 districts to the Democrats.
00:06:23.000So he says that basically this could be Democrats win 22 seats, two Democrats win 40 seats.
00:06:30.000And that is why, you know, how the president acts right now and how the Democrats act does have an impact on the election.
00:06:37.000So let's talk about the president's closing, his closing argument.
00:06:42.000A lot of folks, as I said yesterday, are saying, why is it that Republicans don't focus on all the good economic news and just make their message, the economy is great?
00:06:50.000And the answer is, saying the economy is good doesn't necessarily save you from voter ire.
00:06:54.000If voters are pissed off about a secondary issue, then the economy being excellent doesn't actually help you.
00:06:59.000Remember, the economic recovery of the early 1990s began under George H.W.
00:07:09.000So, a good economy is not necessarily a savior, and a bad economy is definitely a killer.
00:07:15.000That's the rule about economics in elections.
00:07:18.000So, what that means is that both sides have to get their base ramped up to ignore the economy.
00:07:23.000And the Democrats are doing this by essentially suggesting that President Trump is a very, very mean man, right?
00:07:27.000This is the way that they are doing this.
00:07:28.000And President Trump is doing this by suggesting that there are real, present threats to the United States that Democrats are willing to ignore.
00:07:34.000So Democrats claim that Trump is an alarmist.
00:07:37.000Trump claims that Democrats are sanguine about bad things happening to the United States.
00:07:40.000Both are sort of half right and half wrong.
00:07:43.000But the Democrats have decided also that Trump is Satan and Trump has decided that the Democrats are completely apathetic about bad things happening to the country.
00:07:53.000I think that Trump is closer to right than the Democrats are, but here is the Democrat closing argument.
00:07:58.000The Democrat closing argument is put by Paul Krugman, who has been on this this terror recently about how Republicans are legitimately evil.
00:08:06.000There's a piece today in the New York Times, it's called A Party Defined by its Lies.
00:08:09.000At this point, good people can't be good Republicans.
00:08:13.000Well, that's a pretty strong statement.
00:08:15.000I think that good people can be good Democrats, so I'm concerned why he would think that good people can't be good Republicans.
00:08:22.000He says, During my first year as an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, I wasn't allowed to use the word lie.
00:08:27.000That first year coincided with the 2000 election, and George W. Bush was, in fact, being systemically dishonest about his economic proposals, saying false things about who would benefit from his tax cut and the implications of Social Security privatization.
00:08:38.000But the notion that a major party's presidential candidate would go beyond spin to outright lies seemed dangerous and saying it was considered beyond the pale.
00:08:45.000Obviously that prohibition no longer holds on this opinion page.
00:08:48.000Suffice it to say that the opinion pages of the New York Times were better when Democrats like Paul Krugman couldn't overuse the word lie to label anything that they think is a misinterpretation.
00:08:58.000He says, at this point, the GOP's campaign message consists of nothing but lies.
00:09:48.000Says, Democrats aren't saints, but they campaign mostly on real issues and generally do, in fact, stand for more or less what they claim to stand for.
00:09:54.000As we'll see, this is not, in fact, true.
00:09:57.000And the total dishonesty of Republican electioneering should itself be a decisive political issue, because at this point, it defines the party's character.
00:10:09.000They lie about their agenda, pretending their policies would help the middle and working classes when they would, in fact, do the opposite.
00:10:15.000Um, did he see the economic report today?
00:10:18.000In which job growth was massive and wage growth was massive?
00:10:23.000Like, that helps the poor and working class, actually, when the economy is good.
00:10:27.000And he says, and they lie about the problems America faces, hyping an imaginary threat from scary dark-skinned people and increasingly attributing that threat to Jewish conspirators.
00:10:46.000That does not mean it's an anti-Semitic riff.
00:10:48.000Any more than it's anti-Semitic for the Democrats to claim that Sheldon Adelson funds a lot of Republican causes, which is also true.
00:10:55.000See, this is what I was saying yesterday.
00:11:01.000The Democrats have fallen right into Trump's trap, because Trump says, we've got a crisis on the southern border.
00:11:05.000Democrats, instead of saying, we do have a problem with our southern border and we need to solve that, but it's not a crisis, instead of saying that, they go to,
00:11:14.000And you're just saying that because you're racist.
00:11:16.000To which the Republican response is, go F yourself.
00:11:20.000I say that there's a threat, and you say that I'm a racist for saying there's a threat?
00:11:24.000And we'll go through the rest of Paul Krugman's column, because this is basically the Democratic closing argument, and then we'll get to how President Trump is fighting back against that.
00:11:31.000I also want to make a couple of comments about his statement that Democrats are telling the truth about their agenda.
00:11:36.000As we will see, this is eminently untrue.
00:11:38.000But first, let's talk about how you're going to pay off those credit card bills.
00:11:42.000Credit cards have been telling us for a long time, credit card companies, that you should buy now and pay it later.
00:11:46.000But the problem is that those interest rates skyrocket, which is why you should be consolidating your debt and paying off your credit cards with one fixed monthly payment with Lending Club.
00:11:54.000Since 2007, Lending Club has helped millions of people regain control of their finances with affordable fixed rate personal loans.
00:13:09.000is that a bunch of people who had individual plans before and now have to be covered by Obamacare would no longer have Obamacare and presumably go back to individual plans.
00:13:18.000So that is not actually what the CBO said.
00:13:31.000And here's where Krugman gets to the center of his contention that only bad people can vote Republican.
00:13:50.000Now, as I've said, do I think that the threat of the caravan is exaggerated?
00:13:54.000I do, because last time there was a caravan, by the time it reached the United States border, it was like 200 people, and they showed up asking for asylum at a border patrol station, and then they were processed and most of them were sent back.
00:14:04.000So is this an existential threat to the security of the United States?
00:14:07.000No, I don't think the caravan is, but it is symbolic, and it is obviously symbolic, and the fact that Democrats refuse to acknowledge the symbolism of the caravan, the fact that Democrats refuse to acknowledge that it is a stand-in
00:14:19.000For the broader issue of people crossing the border illegally without permission of the U.S.
00:14:22.000government, making themselves at home, sometimes having criminal backgrounds.
00:14:26.000That's why Democrats are not resonating with the American people on this issue.
00:14:54.000Or possibly a bunch of people who don't want anyone like Paul Krugman anywhere near the levers of power.
00:14:59.000Because the Democrats have shown themselves to be utterly irresponsible.
00:15:02.000People like Paul Krugman are completely wild.
00:15:05.000They have not posited either anything remotely approaching a moderate policy or even a moderate rhetoric.
00:15:12.000I mean, Paul Krugman is literally sitting there labeling 60 million Americans bad human beings because they're voting the way he doesn't want them to vote.
00:15:18.000He says, what will this party do if it retains full control of Congress next week?
00:15:21.000What we've seen over and over again is that for these people, there are no limits, no bottom.
00:15:25.000If they pull this midterm election out, expect the worst.
00:15:28.000What would the worst be, Paul Krugman?
00:15:31.000Would the worst be like the Holocaust?
00:15:34.000Of course, he's not going to because this is a scare tactic in and of itself.
00:15:37.000So it's so funny to hear the Democrats saying Trump engages in the politics of fear.
00:15:42.000As they suggest that half of Americans are evil human beings for voting the way they don't want, which is indeed engaging in the politics of fear.
00:15:48.000Now, it is true that both sides are engaging in the politics of fear.
00:15:52.000The question is, which fear is more justified?
00:15:53.000So President Trump yesterday gave a speech in the White House in which he talked about the military response to the caravan.
00:15:59.000Now, is it necessary to send 15,000 troops the size of the Afghanistan surge down to the border of Mexico?
00:16:07.000No, I don't think that logistically speaking that is necessary to deal with a caravan that is dwindling by the day.
00:16:14.000With that said, should we secure our border?
00:16:15.000Of course we should secure our border.
00:16:18.000And the president is using language being tough on immigration that is obviously directed toward the election.
00:16:23.000Again, directed at reminding Americans that Democrats don't take this issue particularly seriously.
00:16:28.000And he wins every time they declare that he's a white supremacist.
00:16:32.000Trump says, listen, we got a crisis at the border.
00:16:34.000And Democrats say, you're a racist for saying so.
00:16:36.000And he says, OK, so you don't even want to acknowledge that there's a problem.
00:16:39.000They say, you're a racist for exaggerating the problem.
00:16:42.000If you just keep shouting racist over and over and over, while the American people look at a caravan of illegal immigrants coming through Mexico, in some cases you can see there are tapes of people in the caravan.
00:16:53.000I'm sure a lot of people in the caravan are fine folks who just want a better economic life.
00:17:17.000Yeah, it probably is politically effective.
00:17:19.000Here's President Trump yesterday talking about what he's told the military to do in the case of people who are throwing rocks.
00:17:24.000But I will tell you this, anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police, where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico, we will consider that a firearm.
00:17:37.000Because there's not much difference when you get hit in the face with a rock
00:17:42.000Which, as you know, it was very violent a few days ago.
00:17:48.000OK, so people, of course, saying that Trump now says that if you throw a rock at the border police that they're going to shoot you to death.
00:17:53.000OK, that's not what he's really saying there.
00:17:56.000OK, and nobody in the military is going to obey that order.
00:17:58.000He's saying if you feel that your life is in danger, you can you can use rules of engagement that allow you to defend yourself with a firearm.
00:18:42.000Just politically speaking, President Trump is obviously trolling them.
00:18:44.000But the Democrats react by saying that anything Trump says about immigration is just due to racism.
00:18:50.000Which, again, alienates a huge swath of the American public that is concerned about illegal immigration, may not even love President Trump's exaggerations, but if they have to choose between Trump's exaggerations and his sort of maligning of broader groups and a Democratic Party that assumes that any talk about this issue is endemically racist, they're going to choose Trump.
00:19:14.000But if they think they're going to win on the basis of calling people racist, they are wrong.
00:19:17.000Here's Simone Sanders and CNN suggesting that, you know, President Trump's remarks are a defense of white supremacy.
00:19:24.000I hope when the White House sent out those statements today, the remarks of the President, they titled it, In Defense of White Supremacy, because that's exactly what I heard from the White House, which is unfortunate.
00:19:34.000Look, if we want to have a conversation about fixing our broken immigration system, it's not dividing, he's calling out the facts.
00:19:41.000The facts are, he's saying these brown people are coming to take your jobs, they're criminals, we can't trust them, we're going to shoot them at the border, and the Democrats just want them to come in, so you need to vote for the Republicans.
00:19:52.000Okay, well, she's adding the brown people section of that.
00:19:55.000He's saying there are people who are coming into the United States who may be criminals.
00:19:57.000There are people coming into the United States we haven't vetted.
00:20:00.000There are people coming into the United States who are going to undercut our labor base.
00:20:04.000You know who used to say that sort of stuff?
00:20:08.000It's not racist just because you are talking about a group of people coming up from a place where people have brown skin.
00:20:14.000Presumably, if there were a bunch of people coming from Canada throwing rocks at police officers while carrying the Canadian flag and trying to cross the border, Trump would react similarly.
00:20:22.000That's not going to happen because Canada is actually not a country where people are desperate to leave.
00:20:27.000It is happening from Central and Latin America because those are countries where people are desperate to leave.
00:21:57.000We talked yesterday about an ad that President Trump put out that showed a guy named Luis Bracamontes, who was an illegal immigrant who entered the United States a couple of different times, once under Clinton, once under Bush, remained under Obama, killed a couple of police officers.
00:22:10.000And Trump linked that to the illegal immigrant migrant caravan that is coming up from the South.
00:22:16.000And people immediately jumped to racist.
00:22:18.000Here's Wolf Blitzer, an objective journalist, being objectively journalismic.
00:22:57.000The suggestion it's so awful you can't even play it is just it's a bizarre contention.
00:23:02.000Again, these are folks who are fully willing to play every ad coming from Democrats suggesting that Republicans were going to deprive millions of people of their health care and leave them to die.
00:23:28.000It's just a sad page from an old playbook called Political Fearmongering 101.
00:23:36.000We've seen it used time and time and time again.
00:23:38.000It's designed to scare people and to motivate them to not focus on the issues that are really important, to distract them from issues that as I travel around the country I hear about from everyday Americans.
00:23:50.000Okay, if you're actually hearing the issues that everyday Americans care about, they do care about illegal immigration.
00:23:56.000Again, Democrats suggesting they are on their high horse about fear-mongering, it's just astonishing.
00:24:02.000There's a really good post by Noah Rothman over at Commentary Magazine in which he goes through this.
00:24:07.000He says, The Washington Post declared that Trump and the GOP have settled on fear and falsehoods as a closing argument, with a little racially-tinged rhetoric as a topper.
00:24:15.000He says, on health care and entitlements, the report noted the GOP has shown a willingness to instill fear in their electorate.
00:24:20.000You see, Republican lawmakers are suddenly supportive of protections for pre-existing conditions, despite their oppositions to the ACA.
00:24:26.000And then he goes on to talk about all of the supposed Republican fearmongering.
00:24:31.000And he says, these articles have a point.
00:24:33.000Donald Trump's attempts to suggest that radical Islamist terrorists from the Middle East had infiltrated a caravan of asylum seekers traveling north through Mexico from Honduras is fearmongering.
00:24:41.000The Times is on solid ground when it impugns efforts by Republican candidates to cast Antonio Delgado, a Rhodes scholar who toyed with the career of music, as a big city rapper.
00:24:49.000And just as all these articles note, election year efforts by the incumbent party to stoke baseless fears is a pretty standard tactic.
00:24:56.000And yet you would be hard pressed to find such ubiquitous denunciations of Democratic efforts to instill in the minds of voters a near existential fear of the GOP.
00:25:04.000And then he just lists off all of these fear tactics used by Democrats.
00:25:09.000In 2010, Republicans were admonished for circulating RNC-approved documents that labeled President Obama a socialist.
00:25:15.000The GOP's candidates were scolded for criticizing Barack Obama's support for the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan.
00:25:21.000ABC News savaged Republican candidates who attacked Democrats for supporting programs that outsourced American jobs and exported American capital to China.
00:25:30.000A party with its back against the wall routinely resorts to fear tactics.
00:25:33.000For much of the last decade, that was the Democratic Party.
00:25:35.000The Agenda Project accused the GOP of wanting to eliminate Medicare in 2011, and they illustrated that by showing Paul Ryan tossing an elderly woman off a cliff.
00:25:43.000In 2002, in 2012, sorry, Vice President Joe Biden accused the GOP of seeking to reinstitute black slavery.
00:25:50.000Senator Bernie Sanders, Senate Republican, sought the elimination of the Department of Veterans Affairs and Social Security in 2013.
00:25:59.000Summarize the Republican platform as let's kick women and immigrants out of the country in 2015.
00:26:04.000Hillary Clinton followed suit, claiming that Ted Cruz had tried to ban contraception.
00:26:08.000So all of the fear mongering, welcome to American politics, where this sort of stuff happens all the time.
00:26:13.000And it does raise a severe question for the Democrats that they don't want to deal with.
00:26:16.000And this is why they're going to simply shout racist.
00:26:19.000What would you do with this caravan of migrants?
00:26:21.000What would you do with folks who are seeking asylum and are coming here not because they actually are being targeted by any sort of political violence, but because they are looking for more economic opportunity and don't have any intention of assimilating?
00:26:36.000Well, the answer for Democrats is they won't answer the question or they'll lie about it.
00:26:40.000So, just today, a group of caravan migrants from Honduras filed a class-action lawsuit against President Trump and various government agencies, including Homeland Security, for violating their Fifth Amendment due process rights if the government turns the caravan away, as Trump has signaled he intends to do.
00:26:55.000The lawsuit was filed by 12 Honduran nationals, and it maintains that since the migrants are coming from three countries, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, suffering human rights crises, some migrants have grounds for admission as asylum seekers.
00:27:07.000By turning them away without fully hearing their asylum claims, they contend the president and his administration are infringing upon their rights under the Administrative Procedures Act and the Declaratory Judgment Act, this according to James Barrett over at Daily Wire.
00:27:20.000Though the Constitution applies to those living legally in the U.S., legal precedent has applied due process to aliens in deportation proceedings, so the lawsuit
00:27:28.000Democrats are going to have to answer.
00:27:29.000Do they think that these folks should be able to sue their way into the United States?
00:27:33.000Democrats are also going to have to answer questions about their own treatment of people who have sought asylum in the United States and crossed the border in order to do so.
00:27:42.000James O'Keefe's Project Veritas released an undercover sting video on Thursday night, appearing to show campaign staffers for Beto O'Rourke, quote, illegally using campaign resources to buy supplies and help transport Honduran aliens.
00:27:54.000Now, listen, you want to help folks who are already across the border in the United States and they are here pending an asylum claim?
00:28:03.000But misappropriating campaign resources in order to do that, that is illegal.
00:28:07.000And apparently that was happening over at Beto O'Rourke's campaign.
00:28:10.000And then they wonder why so many Americans are not resounding to the Democratic take on illegal immigration.
00:28:16.000This is why when Paul Krugman says that Democrats are being honest about their agenda, no, they are not.
00:28:22.000James O'Keefe has almost single-handedly unmasked the Democrats for just how dishonest they are, but just by speaking to members of their own campaign.
00:28:29.000Here's a little bit of the tape when O'Keefe's folks over at Project Veritas went into the Beto O'Rourke headquarters and started asking around about whether the funds for Beto O'Rourke were being used to help out Honduran caravan folks.
00:28:43.000So there's like a, you know, that migrant caravan.
00:28:46.000They just, a few of them got here already and they're dropping them off, like, really close to Missouri.
00:29:00.000This one's about, like, if you just say we're buying food for some event, like the Halloween events, because there's block walks coming up for Halloween.
00:30:02.000So Gillum is part of the crazy crazies?
00:30:04.000He is part of the crazy crazy crazies.
00:30:23.000Representative DeSantis, that is a bunch of crap.
00:30:25.000It is just not true in any conceivable way.
00:30:28.000And not only that, Andrew Gillum, like, that guy's going to call Ron DeSantis, you know, a racist and anti-Semite.
00:30:35.000Andrew Gillum has been connected with a wide variety of groups that promote boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, OK, which would destroy the state of Israel if it were adopted.
00:30:44.000Gillum has ignored growing calls to disavow this group with which he is associated, Dream Defenders, even as the largest Jewish weekly publication in the country, The Jewish Press, urged Florida's Jewish residents to vote for DeSantis.
00:30:55.000Dream Defenders and Gillum have an extensive history.
00:30:57.000He recently signed the group's freedom pledge, promising not to accept money from private persons.
00:31:01.000By signing the pledge, he endorsed the group's radical freedom papers that decry police and prisons as racist.
00:31:37.000And coming up Tuesday, November 6th, we have our Daily Wire Backstage Election Edition.
00:31:41.000We'll be here drinking ourselves to death in good humor.
00:31:44.000Or, out of just absolute rage and horror, God King Jeremy Boring, me, Andrew Clavin, the terrible Michael Knowles, Elisha Krauss, and for some reason Colton Haas will be covering all the latest election news as it happens.
00:31:56.000Our own Cassie Dillon and Colton Haas will be bringing us updates from Twitter.
00:32:01.000As always, only DailyWare subscribers get to ask the questions, so make sure to subscribe today.
00:32:05.000Also, don't miss Andrew Klavan's next chapter of Another Kingdom, performed by the ex-group of Michael Knowles.
00:32:09.000Today, we'll be live streaming the first 15 minutes of episode five, which is titled The Nightmare Feast, which might also be our election special.
00:32:15.000Come to think of it, it really depends on how that actually goes.
00:33:04.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:33:11.000OK, so let's talk about Andrew Gillum's campaign for just a second.
00:33:14.000So the dude has an FBI problem and the mainstream media have been ignoring it, like really ignoring it in a major way.
00:33:20.000Imagine that a Republican candidate had basically been implicated in an FBI sting scheme to give them a bunch of goodies.
00:33:29.000They accepted a bunch of goodies from an FBI undercover agent.
00:33:33.000Hey, that might be a front page story.
00:33:40.000Well, that's pretty much what's happened with Andrew Gillum and the Tampa Bay Times has covered it, but it's not being widely covered in the mainstream kind of national media.
00:33:49.000Starting in 2015, FBI agents came to Tallahassee, he was the mayor of Tallahassee, posing as businessmen, considering investments in the city.
00:33:57.000The three men, who reportedly identified themselves as Mike Sweets, Mike Miller, and Brian Butler, spent months cozying up to city officials and people close to them.
00:34:04.000The FBI investigation, based in part on their undercover work, has yielded several rounds of subpoenas, but no charges as of yet.
00:34:10.000A slew of Tallahassee officials and insiders have been named in those subpoenas over the past year.
00:34:16.000In 2013, the Community Redevelopment Agency in Tallahassee voted to give $1.3 million in taxpayer money to help a particular lobbyist named Adam Corey, who's a longtime Gillum friend and ally, until Gillum cut ties with him when he became inconvenient.
00:34:31.000Gillum voted with the rest of his fellow city commissioners to fund the project.
00:34:34.000At the time, Gillum's vote raised eyebrows because of his close association with Corey.
00:34:38.000One year later, Corey served as treasurer of Gillum's mayoral campaign.
00:34:42.000It also turns out that the FBI was giving all sorts of goodies to Gillum and his friends.
00:34:47.000Okay, so there's an ethics board that's been checking this out.
00:34:50.000According to the newspapers, Cory became close with Miller, reportedly introducing Gillum to an undercover agent sometime in 2016.
00:34:57.000One of the reported meetings between Cory, Gillum, and Miller, Miller being the FBI agent, at the Edison in May of that year, became a point of controversy when the Democrat, the
00:35:07.000Local newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat, reported that Corey scheduled the meeting while on vacation with Gillum and other city lobbyists in Costa Rica.
00:35:19.000Gillum says he did not discuss business in Costa Rica.
00:35:21.000It was just a vacation with longtime friends.
00:35:23.000But Corey's attorney has maintained Gillum never reimbursed the lobbyists for his portion of the trip.
00:35:28.000Also under investigation, Gillum took a trip with his brothers, Marcus, Cory, and Miller, to New York in August 2016.
00:35:33.000In an email inviting Gillup to meet up in New York, Cory noted that Miller had arranged hotel rooms, an outing to a Mets game, and a boat trip to the Statue of Liberty.
00:35:42.000The group didn't go to the Mets game, but they did get free tickets to Hamilton.
00:35:46.000Gillum says he didn't allow the FBI agent to pay for any part of his trip to New York, but the texts released by his chief lobbyist attorney showed the undercover agent paid for the Hamilton tickets.
00:35:57.000So, bottom line is that, theoretically, this FBI agent solicited help from a lobbyist who proceeded to allow payoffs to go through to Gillum, who then helped vote for this project that helped the lobbyists, right?
00:36:11.000And the mainstream media are basically ignoring all that.
00:36:14.000I have to ask why it is that Andrew Gillum is getting this sort of attention when John James, the Republican senatorial candidate in Michigan, who's a black former Air Force pilot, is getting very little attention running a very competitive race in a purple state in Michigan.
00:36:29.000And the answer has to be that the media love Andrew Gillum because Andrew Gillum is a future Barack Obama in their view.
00:37:53.000I mean, if you are dating for marriage, then you obviously need to put your values at the center of your dating life.
00:37:57.000And that means discussing issues of deep concern to you and how you want to raise your kids.
00:38:00.000If you're just dating for quote-unquote fun,
00:38:21.000If you're doing that, then presumably you do what everybody else does when they're dating for fun, which is you hide your crazy until a little bit later in the relationship.
00:38:29.000I don't think that you necessarily lead with your most extreme positions when you're talking with somebody you want to date, but you should make clear that you are of conservative political bent, that you have certain central values that you think are important to you.
00:38:41.000And then you have conversations about those values.
00:38:43.000Like when I started dating my wife, our very first date was a three-hour date in which we discussed free will and determinism and talked about sort of central values.
00:38:52.000We didn't talk a lot of politics, per se.
00:38:54.000We were talking sort of deeper levels than that.
00:38:56.000But I also knew that my wife was Orthodox.
00:38:59.000So we already had certain central values in common, which is why I think that dating folks within your religious tradition is a very good idea as a general rule.
00:39:08.000When it came to politics, my wife used to be, I think, a lot more moderate on politics.
00:39:14.000So I remember one of our first dates, we talked about the death penalty and gun control.
00:39:17.000She was more pro-gun control at that time.
00:39:20.000She was also more skeptical of the death penalty than I was.
00:39:23.000But we were able to discuss those things, and she didn't think it was crazy that I was anti-gun control, and she didn't think it was crazy that I was in favor of the death penalty.
00:39:31.000We were able to talk all of those things through.
00:39:33.000So the real question is, can you talk those things through, or are you dealing with somebody who is going to throw you out because you disagree on these issues and is non-malleable on these issues?
00:39:43.000Maybe you'll be changed by her opinions, but you should at least be able to have the conversation.
00:39:47.000Edward says, Hey Ben, this week, one of my poli-sci professors taught extensively about Republicans and their disgraceful Southern strategy as if it were established fact.
00:39:54.000It seems like this line of thinking has been taught for so long, it just seems to pass as accepted wisdom.
00:40:00.000What really happened in the South to flip it from blue to red?
00:40:02.000And why exactly do folks on the left still insinuate the South is full of racist white men who would immediately turn back to slavery if given the chance?
00:40:09.000Well, the last part is really the question, because the truth is that as the constituency in the South got younger, it got more Republican.
00:40:17.000So, as the South got less racist, it also got more Republican.
00:40:20.000There are regional polls from Pew showing that all of the kind of malign talk about people from the South being more racist than people from other parts of the country is just not true.
00:40:29.000Racism is fairly equivalent all the way across the country.
00:40:32.000Not only that, if you look historically, the Republicans didn't actually take the South in terms of the House of Representatives until basically 1994.
00:40:41.000So if it was the 1968 Southern strategy that shifted everything, then why did it take until 1994 for Republicans to take the House?
00:40:49.000The trends are just not strong enough to suggest that race alone is what shifted all of this.
00:40:54.000Now, was there a Southern strategy that was used by the Nixon campaign?
00:40:57.000Well, some members of that campaign have suggested that there was, and they've basically admitted that.
00:41:01.000Were there racial strategies used by Democrats at the same time?
00:41:04.000Sure, George Wallace was a Democrat, and the vast majority of people who voted racist continued to vote Democrat.
00:41:10.000OK, so this notion that the Southern strategy is what completely changed the facts on the ground is similar.
00:41:34.000So it was, you know, we can go through this a little bit.
00:41:37.000So let me go through a little bit of this.
00:41:38.000First, according to professors Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Schaffer of the University of Wisconsin, the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race, but of economic growth.
00:41:49.000The movement toward Republicanism in the South began in the 1950s.
00:41:53.000Well, the Eisenhower administration was forcibly desegregating schools.
00:41:56.000As the South industrialized, working-class whites and blacks remained Democrats until the 1990s.
00:42:01.000Here's the New York Times reporting on this, quote, To give one example, in the 50s, among Southerners in low-income tercile, 43% voted for Republican presidential candidates.
00:42:09.000In the high-income tercile, 53% voted Republican.
00:42:12.000By the 1980s, those figures were 51% and 77%.
00:42:16.000Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves.
00:42:20.000Sean Trent of RealClearPolitics agrees.
00:42:22.000He says the GOP gradually increased its support in the South from 1928 to 2010.
00:42:26.000And Dan McLaughlin says, as late as 2010, there were still states like Alabama and North Carolina that were voting in their first Republican legislative majority since Reconstruction, something that would have happened overnight in the late 60s if the partisan realignment had been driven by lockstep white voting loyalties along racial lines.
00:42:43.000So the data just are not there to support the idea that the entire South shifted Republican because of the race issue.
00:43:32.000I have a debate coming up against my university's Democrat club, and I've been dealt the topic of health care.
00:43:37.000Well, I believe that there's a guy named Matt Brunig, who is a big advocate of sort of Nordic socialism, or Nordic democratic socialism, because democratic socialism has a capitalist root.
00:43:58.000And he talks about healthcare fairly regularly.
00:44:02.000The truth is that the spectrum of healthcare thought is not quite broken down along left-right.
00:44:06.000Like, Avik Roy is a really good healthcare analyst, and he tends to be more right-leaning on some things and more left-leaning on others.
00:44:14.000Ezekiel Emanuel, who was one of the creators of Obamacare, has written extensively about these topics.
00:44:19.000There are a bunch of studies out there that are worth noting, by the way, on healthcare, and American healthcare in particular, some fibs that have been put out there.
00:44:28.000spends grossly more per capita GDP on healthcare than any other country, we also make grossly more money.
00:44:33.000If you actually were to chart a line among industrialized countries as to income versus healthcare spending, what you see is basically a straight arithmetic relationship, meaning that as GDP increases per capita, so does healthcare spending, and the United States is basically right along that line.
00:44:48.000We're not wildly overspending on healthcare.
00:44:50.000The other point to be made is that when people talk about life expectancy in the United States is low for spending this much money.
00:44:56.000Well, not when you remove car accidents and murders, both of which we have disproportionately here in the United States, and neither of which reflects on the U.S.
00:45:42.000A few of the students and the instructor became very unhappy that I could even think such a thing.
00:45:46.000I was then told that in the spirit of the project, I would not be allowed to continue with the topic because it is considered too offensive.
00:45:51.000So my question is, if this is supposed to be a persuasive paper, wouldn't this fit the criteria and what makes this offensive?
00:45:56.000Also, the only thing I can think of is they believe I'm attacking their victimhood.
00:45:59.000Any advice on another topic I could do?
00:46:01.000Well, I mean, dude, you knew when you said that that you were slapping them right in the face.
00:46:05.000I mean, obviously, if you had just said, listen, I want to research the pay gap and then come to the conclusion the pay gap may be a myth, then maybe they'd let you get away with it.
00:46:14.000Yeah, obviously there's nothing sexist or offensive about the idea the pay gap is a myth.
00:46:19.000The pay gap is a myth by all available data.
00:46:21.000So that is just, again, this is people taking offense at facts.
00:46:25.000I just did a speech in British Columbia at the University of British Columbia in which I began the speech by saying facts are not offensive.
00:46:31.000And then I just read basically a list of facts and people got offended because that's what happens when you say things that are factual that people do not like, unfortunately.
00:46:38.000So as far as other topics that you could do,
00:46:42.000You know, I think there are a lot of topics that you could do, but if you want one that's not going to offend people all that much, then you're going to have to pick something that is outside the realm of the quote-unquote offensive.
00:46:53.000You might do one on where you think that it is necessary for the government to start thinking about global warming, for example, because that's more of a nuanced topic.
00:47:02.000The current Nobel Prize winners have some great papers on that particular topic.
00:47:05.000It cuts against a lot of leftist preconceptions.
00:47:07.000You can go back and listen to our show.
00:47:08.000A couple of weeks ago, we talked about it.
00:47:09.000OK, time for some things I like and some things that I hate.
00:47:11.000So this entire week, because of the Pittsburgh shooting, we've been doing Jewish Negunim, meaning kind of Jewish tunes that are used in prayer a lot.
00:47:20.000It's actually an old Hebrew lullaby, and it comes from the Book of Genesis in the portion when Jacob is giving a blessing to Menachem and Ephraim.
00:49:31.000Apparently, an actor who has appeared on the television shows Better Call Saul and Longmire admitted to a local news outlet on Monday he severed his arm and lied about how it happened by posing as a war veteran.
00:49:42.000So Todd LeTourette is an Albuquerque, New Mexico based actor.
00:49:45.000He said he'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that he sawed off his arm during a psychotic episode 17 years ago.
00:49:51.000First of all, I don't know if he was mentally disordered.