Is the Fusion GPS scandal about to blow up? Plus, Democrats shut down the government, but the media are about to blame Republicans. And we will check the mailbag. So many things to do today, including: 1. Why no one cares about the porn scandal. 2. Why a porn star asked President Trump if she could spank him with a magazine cover with his face on it. 3. Why the House Intelligence Committee should release a memo alleging extensive FISA abuse related to the controversial dossier. 4. What is a Fusion GPS dossier? 5. How did the dossier come to be and why should it be kept secret from the public? 6. What are the implications of the dossier and what does it say about the Trump/Russia collusion investigation? 7. Why did the FBI have a dossier in the first place? 8. What does it mean for the Mueller investigation and the ongoing investigation into President Trump and his associates? 9. Is there any evidence that the dossier was compiled by Hillary Clinton and hired by the DNC? 10. Is it a political document or a document? 11. Is this dossier a product of a political smear campaign? 12. Does it have any relevance to the ongoing Russia investigation or is it a document that should be declassified? 13. Who is the real source? 14. Is the dossier being used as evidence? 15. What do we know about the dossier or not? 16. What kind of evidence is it really? And does it really exist? Do we really have a source or is this document being used to make this document really matter? and so much more? Is it really a document really needed to make a case for a criminal investigation or a report? Can we really be a piece of evidence or a real document or something like that? Well, does it matter to the FBI really matter, or does it have a value? Listen to the full answer to this answer to answer these questions? Don t miss it on this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show? Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro Mailbag? Subscribe on iTunes? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts? Learn more about Ben Shapiro on The FiveThirty Cent Podcasts on Freemind Your Day Offs on The Sixteenth Episode? Also, check out The Five Fifty Cent Podcast on Six Centered Podcast on The Seven Fifty Cent Radio Show on Three Breeding Podcast on Three Centered Street? On Reddit?
00:00:16.000By the way, I didn't even mention the fact that President Trump apparently, according to certain reports, asked a porn star if she could spank him with a magazine cover with his face on it.
00:00:25.000So we'll have to talk about that as well.
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00:02:40.000They were stating they would not be surprised if it leads to the end of Robert Mueller's special counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.
00:02:46.000The House Intelligence Committee passed the motion along party lines Thursday to make the classified report alleging extensive FISA abuse related to the controversial dossier available to all House members.
00:02:56.000The report apparently contains information regarding the dossier that alleges President Trump and members of his team colluded with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election.
00:03:04.000Some members of the House viewed the document in a secure room on Thursday.
00:03:07.000So, what is likely to be in the document?
00:03:09.000Well, one of the big questions about how this entire collusion investigation got started at the FBI is that Fusion GPS was compiling an OPPO research file paid for by Democrats.
00:03:20.000Obama's FBI then took that and used it as an excuse to go get a FISA warrant against American citizen Carter Page.
00:03:26.000So they didn't do it on their own recognizance, the FBI.
00:03:29.000They didn't do it because they were hearing from great sources.
00:03:32.000Basically, they got an op-ed research dump from Hillary Clinton's team at Fusion GPS, and then they used that as an excuse to go after Trump's team.
00:04:09.000Well, Liz, the allegations contained in this important intelligence document go to the very foundations of our democracy, and they require an immediate release to the public, in my opinion.
00:04:20.000Unfortunately, I cannot talk about the specific facts contained within this memo.
00:04:24.000I can only share my observation that if the American people knew what was happening, if they saw the contents of this memo,
00:04:32.000A lot would become clear about the information that I've been talking about on television for the last several months, and so I am calling on our leadership to immediately hold a vote on the floor of the House to make public the key contents of this intelligence memo regarding the FBI, the Department of Justice, and President Trump.
00:04:49.000Okay, Getz is not the only person saying this.
00:04:51.000Also, Mark Meadows, a member of the House Freedom Caucus from North Carolina, he's saying much the same thing, that this memo is shocking and that it needs to be released.
00:04:58.000I'm here to tell all of America tonight that I am shocked to read exactly what is taking place.
00:05:06.000I would think that it would never happen in a country that loves freedom and democracy like this country.
00:05:14.000It is time that we become transparent in all of this, and I am calling on our leadership to make this available so that all Americans can judge for themselves.
00:05:26.000OK, so there he is, and this is what Republicans are trying to trot out, the essence being that this memo needs to be released.
00:05:33.000Now, Democrats are pushing back, saying the memo is basically selectively put together by Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, the Republican congressman from California.
00:05:42.000They're also suggesting, and I think this is where there are a couple of open—so here are the couple open questions.
00:05:47.000I say that the narrative is basically from Republicans that a FISA warrant was issued against American citizen Carter Bage on the basis of OPPO research for political reasons.
00:05:55.000I have two questions about this particular narrative, and I think both need to be answered.
00:05:58.000The first is, let's say that all of this is true.
00:06:02.000Let's say that the FBI began an investigation into Carter Page on the basis of Democratic oppo research.
00:06:07.000And let's say that Barack Obama was behind all of that because he wanted to finish Donald Trump for the general election campaign.
00:06:13.000He wanted to knock Trump out of the race, and he wanted Hillary Clinton to win.
00:06:17.000Why didn't we hear anything about the Russian dossier until the election?
00:06:25.000James Comey came out and made an announcement about Hillary being prosecuted, and then not prosecuted, and then prosecuted, and then not prosecuted.
00:06:30.000But we never heard word one, really, about Russian collusion directly from the FBI during that entire debacle of an election.
00:06:37.000So, if this was all just a setup, where Fusion GPS was working hand-in-glove with the FBI and Loretta Lynch's DOJ and the Obama administration, why is it that we didn't hear about the Russian dossier, really, until January of 2017?
00:06:49.000So, that's question I have, number one.
00:06:51.000Question I have, number two, is if the idea here is that the FISA warrants against Carter Page was gathered under false pretenses, that basically the FBI and the DOJ were working hand-in-glove with the Hillary campaign, there's one way we can find this out.
00:07:04.000The president of the United States has the ability, as the head of the executive branch, to declassify any single document that he wants.
00:07:10.000Why won't he just declassify the FISA application?
00:07:20.000And it shows you that the FISA application was based on all of this democratic nonsense that was taken up and used by the Obama administration.
00:07:29.000So, there are people like Sean Davis over at The Federalist.
00:07:31.000He and I were debating this on Twitter this morning.
00:07:33.000He was saying, well, then it would look like Trump was interfering in the investigation.
00:07:36.000To which I say, everyone on the left already thinks Trump is interfering in the investigation.
00:07:40.000I mean, this is half of what this is about.
00:07:42.000Them thinking that he fired Comey to interfere with the investigation, or that he pressured Rod Rosenstein in order to interfere with the investigation.
00:07:49.000So, I'm not going to lay it on Trump's tact.
00:07:51.000I think that's not a good enough excuse.
00:07:52.000I don't think that Trump is tactful, and he really doesn't want to look like he's interfering, and therefore he's not declassifying the memo.
00:07:59.000Maybe that's what's happening, but at the very least, wouldn't you have somebody look at the actual FISA application and leak that to the press?
00:08:21.000The length to which the FBI and DOJ go to investigate certain matters is a lot further than they will go to investigate other matters.
00:08:26.000So it looks like Democrats don't want this memo to get out.
00:08:28.000It looks like Republicans don't really want the FISA application to get out.
00:08:32.000Because if the FISA application gets out, it puts an end, maybe, to all of the rumors about the FISA application being based on Hillary Clinton oppo research.
00:08:40.000So those are my two questions about this particular narrative.
00:08:44.000Narrative being that the dossier, the Russian dossier compiled by Carter Page, or compiled rather by Christopher Steele, the spy under the auspices of Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS at the behest of Hillary Clinton, that that was used as the DOJ and FBI's excuse to go after Trump.
00:08:59.000I think there are a couple of holes in that.
00:09:01.000Now, is it quite possible that Fusion GPS is doing something corrupt here?
00:09:05.000Is it quite possible that Fusion GPS was working with the FBI and DOJ?
00:09:10.000And we have another story today that says that the Fusion GPS group was trying to leak, at Hillary's behest, all of the information in the dossier in the last weeks of the election in order to finish Trump.
00:09:21.000We'll talk about that in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at blinds.com.
00:09:26.000So, blinds.com is the place that you go to make your house look better, because let's face it, when you look at the state of your apartment, the state of your home, the thing you think about last is the window coverings, because why bother?
00:09:39.000Except that that's really what makes your house look good very often.
00:10:47.000Of course, when you use Promo Code Ben, it lets them know that we sent you.
00:10:50.000Okay, so, is it possible that the Russians were using Fusion GPS as a cutout to funnel bad information about Trump to the FBI or the DOJ?
00:11:00.000Lee Smith has a very good piece in tablet.com basically suggesting this.
00:11:04.000Earlier this week, Senator Dianne Feinstein released a partially redacted transcript of Glenn Simpson's August 22, 2017 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:11:13.000Maybe it's a coincidence that just last week, Simpson himself, co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based strategic communications firm Fusion GPS, that assembled and distributed the now-notorious anti-Trump dossier, wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for Republican members of the committee to release his testimony.
00:11:27.000Feinstein said at first she was pressured to release the document.
00:11:29.000Now she says she wasn't, and her statement was misunderstood.
00:11:32.000The whole fight over the Simpson transcript is just part of a broader fight about what exactly was in the dossier.
00:11:37.000Was the dossier used to garner the FISA warrant against Carter Page in the first place?
00:11:47.000He says, if the FBI and the DOJ used a piece of opposition research paid for by a political campaign as evidence for a warrant to intercept the communications of a rival campaign, and the questions asked by congressional investigators suggest they did,
00:11:59.000We are now living in a very different America than the one that generations of civil libertarians and small government conservatives alike desire to maintain, and which large majorities in Congress have repeatedly voted for.
00:12:08.000The DOJ, the FBI, perhaps the CIA, would be embroiled in a scandal likely to have long-lasting, sweeping consequences for intelligence collection, national security, and the safety and privacy of American citizens, to say nothing of how it will demoralize federal law enforcement, which will appear to be mired in partisanship and political corruption.
00:12:25.000Right, that is the big question, is whether the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the Obama administration, are wiretapping Trump, supposedly, at the behest of Democrats, essentially.
00:12:38.000On the other side, there's a big problem, which is that there are a bunch of people who are still trying to track down a lot of the allegations that are in the Russian dossier, that are in the Christopher Steele collusion dossier.
00:12:48.000Glenn Simpson, you know, the Democrats have voted to release the transcript of Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, which is the Apple research firm.
00:12:56.000The House Intelligence Committee voted to release the transcript of Simpson's interview with them, and according to Business Insider, the House investigators' line of questioning touched upon subjects the Senate Judiciary Committee did not delve into.
00:13:07.000Democrats basically tried to lay out a series of breadcrumbs for the media to follow, right?
00:13:13.000And then Glenn Simpson would come out and say, well, what we were finding was financial impropriety, and kind of trying to hint at what it was that was in the dossier that was substantiated.
00:13:21.000So, there's a lot going on in this whole story.
00:13:24.000And there's even more going on now that we know, according to Powerline blog, that the House Intelligence Committee transcript shows that Glenn Simpson tried to leak all of the information in the Russian dossier to the press right before the election cycle, which is not surprising since the DNC was paying for the dossier in the first place.
00:13:40.000The Fusion GPS apparently doesn't have much on Trump, but that said, they were trying to leak it before the election.
00:13:45.000So there's a lot of dirty business going on here.
00:14:26.000If Trump were to release that FISA application, if it were to say, Fusion GPS memo is the basis of the FISA application, it basically ends the Mueller investigation right then.
00:14:41.000OK, speaking of things Trump should do, Trump is actually handling this whole government shutdown relatively well.
00:14:46.000So the government is going to shut down today.
00:14:48.000It's going to shut down because Democrats believe that it is in their political interest to filibuster the continuing resolution to fund the government.
00:14:55.000There's not a new budget on the table.
00:14:56.000We're talking about a continuing resolution that funds the government for 30 more days as a sweetener, as an attempt to cudgel Democrats into voting for the continuing resolution.
00:15:04.000Republicans are putting in there a six-year funding for CHIP, which is the Children's Health Insurance Program, as we discussed yesterday.
00:15:11.000They also are not putting in there anything about DACA.
00:15:13.000They want that to be a separate negotiation.
00:15:15.000They want a negotiation with Democrats over what happens to the Dreamers.
00:15:18.000They don't want that included in the continuing resolution.
00:15:20.000Democrats are saying, we will not vote for anything unless it includes basically amnesty
00:15:49.000Trump came out yesterday and said, listen, Democrats want a shutdown.
00:15:52.000They want a shutdown because they want to change the subject from the fact that the tax cuts are working really well, from the fact that things are going relatively well on the foreign policy front.
00:16:40.000So it's on the Republicans to pass their own stuff.
00:16:42.000The problem is Democrats are openly stating that they want to filibuster the continuing resolution.
00:16:47.000So if every Republican voted for the continuing resolution in the Senate, they had 51 votes, that's still not enough because you need 60 votes to break a filibuster.
00:16:54.000And there is no reconciliation process when it comes to continuing resolutions.
00:16:58.000The reason that you could pass the tax cuts with 51 votes is because there's a process that we've discussed often on the show.
00:17:03.000The process is that you go to the Senate Rules Committee, basically, there's a Senate Rules Arbiter, and you say to them, we want to pass a law that does not increase the federal deficit and only changes current federal law.
00:18:00.000Now, Democrats are leading a shutdown effort.
00:18:02.000And the same people who are screaming at Republicans for leading a shutdown effort in 2013 are saying that a shutdown effort would be awesome.
00:19:30.000So what our friends on the other side are saying here is they're prepared to shut down the government over the issue of illegal immigration.
00:19:43.000Now on that issue, there's a bipartisan interest in solving the DACA problem, but the president has given us until March.
00:21:12.000Health insurance, disability insurance, pet insurance, renter's insurance.
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00:21:20.000So, if you are looking for a better way to be responsible with your money, and insure that when you die, your family is taken care of, then you need to go over to PolicyGenius.com.
00:21:51.000Speaking of absolute irresponsibility, so Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader who's leading this filibuster fight, let's flashback all the way back to 2013.
00:22:00.000I know, we have to go back a really long way.
00:22:04.000Chuck Schumer, like pretty much this date in 2013, was going around suggesting that anyone who shut down the government over an ancillary issue
00:22:14.000is doing so for their own political purposes.
00:22:38.000He actually did spell out in another one of these interviews, he actually did spell out, he said, listen, I could have shut down the government over immigration reform, but I'd never do that.
00:23:21.000Our listenership may not be as high, but it'll be awesome.
00:23:23.000Okay, I'm happy to do all of those things.
00:23:25.000But if you're in Washington, D.C., if you are the political press and you spend all day covering the minutiae of all the crap that our politicians do, and then the threat is, ooh, the government's gonna shut down, ooh, we're all gonna die, then this is a big deal to you.
00:24:05.000I'm all in favor of government shutdowns.
00:24:06.000I really have no problem with government shutdowns.
00:24:08.000The government spends $4 trillion a year.
00:24:10.000It seems to me that a little shutdown wouldn't be the end of the world.
00:24:12.000It would be us canceling their credit card for a month or two.
00:24:14.000I don't think that's the worst thing that could possibly happen.
00:24:17.000But everybody in the political press thinks it's the worst thing that's going to happen.
00:24:20.000They think for some reason that if we do a government shutdown and we don't fund continuing payment of our debt, that people are going to sell our debt on the open market.
00:24:27.000It's going to crush our credit rating.
00:24:28.000Really, where are those dollars going to rush?
00:24:46.000You know, the Democrats will blame the Republicans.
00:24:48.000The Republicans will blame the Democrats.
00:24:49.000People in the middle will probably blame the Democrats because they'll say the Democrats are shutting down the government over illegal immigration.
00:24:54.000Then they'll cut some sort of deal next week and we'll all be done and that'll be the end of it.
00:24:57.000Republicans didn't lose seats in 2014.
00:25:00.000They gained seats in 2014 after the government shutdown.
00:25:03.000So this idea that government shutdowns inevitably hurt the party perceived to have been responsible for the shutdown, obviously is untrue.
00:25:10.000The only reason to talk about this is to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Democrats.
00:25:13.000Because in reality, do I think this is going anywhere?
00:25:16.000I think that in the end, the Democrats will come around, Republicans will toss them some sort of bone.
00:25:21.000It won't be DACA, but it'll be something else.
00:25:23.000Or they'll cut a DACA deal, a last-minute DACA deal, and they'll say, OK, a little bit more border security, they'll go back to the original Lindsey Graham plan, or something slightly more lucrative than that.
00:25:32.000Democrats don't want this thing continuing out for a full month.
00:26:30.000When you increase the price of labor here in the United States, corporations start doing labor elsewhere.
00:26:35.000They start purchasing their labor in China or India or Mexico.
00:26:39.000So my position is very libertarian on immigration, but it is not libertarian when it comes to the idea of people who become citizens and what their culture is, since we now have a very big government and we have a government that has essentially no constitutional boundaries anymore.
00:26:52.000The government can spend whatever it wants.
00:26:53.000It can force you to buy whatever it wants.
00:26:55.000That being the case, who we allow into the country does matter, and that's why we should, I think, pretty stringently screen for ideology and philosophy and skills.
00:27:03.000I think that that would be a worthwhile thing.
00:27:11.000This is sort of the Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump position, and that is that bringing in foreign labor is
00:27:16.000Allowing an undercutting of the American workforce, that we have to protect American citizens from the predations of people who want to come here and work for less money, that you're born in America, therefore you deserve a job, and the idea is that we'll artificially boost the price of labor by preventing immigration into the country.
00:27:31.000So, let's make immigration solely based on skills, or if it is solely based on—if it's not solely based on skills, then we should shut down immigration altogether.
00:27:42.000Now, both of these arguments can be made without reference to race, ethnicity.
00:27:46.000Both of these arguments can be made without reference to country of origin.
00:27:51.000You can make the strict immigration argument without reference to country of origin.
00:27:54.000You can just say, whoever's qualified gets in.
00:27:56.000You can make the libertarian argument, certainly, without government of origin or country of origin.
00:27:59.000You can just say, whoever wants to come in can come in, so long as they're not taking my money.
00:28:04.000Both of these arguments can fairly, and I think should fairly, be made on the basis of non-bigotry, non-discrimination on the basis of place of origin.
00:28:14.000Unfortunately, there is a tendency on the right to shift into some rhetoric that borders on the bigoted.
00:28:21.000And I think that, obviously, the bleephole comments that Trump made a week and a half ago are indicative of the ease with which some people move into this space.
00:28:27.000Tucker Carlson, on his show last night, he dropped a question that I thought was
00:28:32.000Particularly inappropriate, and I don't think actually a good question.
00:28:37.000I think Tucker does a really good show.
00:28:38.000He's super talented, but his perspective on immigration does a disservice, I think, to conservatives on immigration.
00:28:45.000How many big tech companies were started by people from Central and South America, Latin America?
00:28:54.000So, right now, I'm sitting in Phoenix, Arizona, very close to a company called Fortis, who was—that was started by a gentleman from Panama.
00:29:02.000It's one of our top engineering companies in this community.
00:29:06.000And they actually are one of our largest employers of at-risk veterans.
00:29:37.000Right, so the problem with what Tucker is saying there is, number one, very often it's the descendants of people from places of, you know, from bleephole countries, supposedly, who actually create a lot of these companies, right?
00:30:08.000That being the case, that means that Tucker's success is due to the United States being relatively open to immigration, which it was for most of its history.
00:30:17.000In a second, I'm going to discuss here another perspective that was on Tucker's show last night that also, I think, does a disservice.
00:30:23.000Mark Stein was on Tucker's show last night, and here's what Mark Stein
00:30:28.000This comment is getting a lot of flack and I think rightly so.
00:30:32.000Here's what Mark Stein had to say about the state of Arizona and DACA and illegal immigration and immigration more generally.
00:30:40.000And in fact, to go back to what your Swedish guest was saying, you know, whatever the economic benefits, which are minimal and are not evenly distributed, the cultural transformation, which is what's happening in Sweden, other parts of Europe, and is what's happening in Arizona too, that's forever.
00:31:00.000In Arizona, a majority of the grade school children now are Hispanic.
00:31:05.000That means Arizona's future is as an Hispanic society.
00:31:10.000That means, in effect, the border has moved north.
00:31:14.000Okay, I don't even know what that means, the border has moved north.
00:31:16.000All of those kids in Arizona who are actually born in the United States, or the ones who have legally immigrated, those are American citizens.
00:31:21.000Why does it matter what color of their skin or their place of origin?
00:31:24.000This sort of language does no service to those of us who've been fighting on behalf of a lot of the same policies that Mark Stein and Tucker Carlson want.
00:31:31.000I think that we probably agree 90% on immigration.
00:31:33.000But the idea that you can make these distinctions on the basis of ethnicity or place of origin as opposed to skill level, you're falling right into a trap the Democrats want to set.
00:31:42.000And it betrays, I think, the cause of being an immigration hawk.
00:32:23.000If you want to listen later, go over to iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, Stitcher, any of the various podcast apps, and you can get the podcast.
00:32:30.000Subscribe to our channel over at YouTube as well.
00:32:32.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:32:39.000All righty, time for a couple of quick things I like, and then a couple of quick things that I hate.
00:33:51.000Anyway, I'll start putting up those videos as well, and you can see me work out with Derek, and you can see me do upside-down push-ups, and flip tires, and hit things, and climb walls using only my arms, etc.
00:34:33.000Maybe we never cared that people had an affair and we were just lying to ourselves.
00:34:36.000Maybe politicians were always doing this stuff, like stooping porn stars on the side, and we just were willing to look the other way, but we never really cared about it.
00:34:44.000You hear the same thing with regard to every social change, right?
00:34:47.000When there's a social change in Britain, for example, with regard to toleration of
00:34:54.000Or the suggestion that transgender women are actually women.
00:34:56.000And then the rate of transgenderism goes up significantly in places like Great Britain.
00:35:00.000People say, well, maybe people were always transgender and they were just afraid to admit it.
00:35:03.000Maybe it's only the common acceptance that's changed.
00:35:05.000But people were always living like this.
00:35:07.000They were just afraid to express themselves more fully.
00:35:12.000People behave differently based on the society that they're in, and based on the social standards that are kept.
00:35:17.000Maybe those social standards are good when they change.
00:35:22.000To show how absurd the suggestion is that people always act the same and behave the same and are not changed by the society around them, look at the toleration for racism in the 1950s versus the toleration for racism today, and you can see that people's behavior has changed massively, how people think has changed massively.
00:35:36.000The whole purpose of politics is to create a communal fabric in which we all live and that hopefully makes more people happy.
00:35:43.000In consonance with freedom, obviously.
00:36:13.000Time for the mailbag, so let's jump right in.
00:36:15.000All right, Nicholas writes, Ben, what do you think the GOP needs to do to avoid getting clobbered this November?
00:36:21.000Well, I mean, I think that passing some form of a border security bill would be very helpful.
00:36:30.000I think that moving toward shoring up religious freedoms would be more—they need to do stuff.
00:36:36.000The problem is right now they're not doing a lot of stuff.
00:36:38.000So they did the tax cuts, and that is helpful.
00:36:42.000But they're also going to need to avoid the taxicity of President Trump.
00:36:45.000Trump is what's driving Democrats to the polls.
00:37:18.000Second-wave feminism suggested that marriage was patriarchal and bad, and that we had to set up social structures so that women didn't feel like they had to get married.
00:37:26.000Third-wave feminism goes even beyond that and suggests that men and women are essentially identical in every way, and any discrepancy between men and women can be explained by societal failures.
00:38:07.000Yeah, I feel like I've said that a few times before.
00:38:09.000I am about my wife the same way that John Kasich is about his father being a mailman.
00:38:14.000So, becoming a licensed lawyer requires you to go to school for three years.
00:38:17.000The last two years of law school are basically a waste of time, and then you pass the bar, which in most states is not all that difficult.
00:38:22.000Being a licensed doctor requires you to go to four years of college, four years of medical school, and three years of residency at minimum.
00:38:29.000And then you have to take a bunch of board exams and you have to be re-licensed every 10 years.
00:38:33.000It's very difficult to become a doctor.
00:38:35.000So I believe that that book is not actually written by a vet of the Vietnam War.
00:38:38.000I think that it's a fiction book that is written by... I've read the book.
00:39:10.000So, my take on the Vietnam War is, yes, we should have been there.
00:39:13.000Yes, it was an attempt to protect America's interests.
00:39:16.000The loss of the Vietnam War has been the single worst thing that has happened to foreign policy in America, in America's history, I would say, pretty solidly.
00:39:26.000Not just because America, quote-unquote, lost the war, but because it made it almost impossible for America to, quote-unquote, win a war.
00:39:31.000Because the idea was that Vietnam went on so long and drained so many resources that the idea of
00:40:13.000Once everyone enters office, they all become quote-unquote neocons in the sense that they feel like, in order to prevent violence on America's shores or prevent the rise of America's enemies, we're going to have to use America's military might in ways that people had not considered.
00:40:25.000Donald Trump has basically operated very much like George W. Bush on foreign policy, with a few exceptions.
00:40:30.000Even Barack Obama was not a non-interventionist, obviously got involved in Libya, which I do think was not in America's best interest.
00:40:37.000As someone who deeply believes in equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome, how far do you think equality of opportunity should go?
00:40:42.000Well, when I say equality of opportunity, I mean the rules have to be equal for everyone.
00:40:46.000Equality of opportunity is not going to exist for everyone.
00:41:21.000If you see somebody who's poor, we give private charity.
00:41:24.000But once the government starts discriminating against one group in favor of another group, no matter what the group is, then you end up in a situation where equality of opportunity is not actually being provided by the government.
00:41:33.000Equality of opportunity is being stifled by the government.
00:42:13.000Is regulation on business ever necessary?
00:42:15.000Regulation on business is only necessary to the extent that regulations on individuals are necessary.
00:42:19.000Regulations on torts, regulations on externalities, regulations on forced labor.
00:42:24.000But in terms of regulating businesses so that they don't commit or so that they are prevented from, for example, participating in a business activity to which there are no externalities, no, I don't think that regulation is necessary.
00:42:36.000When people say regulation on business, usually they mean
00:42:39.000We have to stop a business from acting in a way that does not even create externalities.
00:42:44.000We have to knock down their profit margin, for example, or force them to collectively bargain with their employees.
00:42:51.000Taylor says, Dear Ben, I saw the California State Attorney General threaten criminal action against businesses that assist ICE in conducting enforcement raids.
00:42:57.000Is there legal precedence for the state to criminally prosecute individuals or businesses assisting in the enforcement of federal law?
00:43:02.000No, I mean, this is a blatant violation of the Supremacy Clause.
00:43:05.000If there is a federal law and you are obeying the federal law and the state government tells you to disobey the federal law, this is a violation of the Constitution.
00:43:14.000The Constitution of the United States and federal law take precedence over state law, so long as state law is not acting within the purview of the Constitution or the federal government is not overreaching.
00:43:23.000Braden says, Dear Ben, what exactly does it mean to be kosher?
00:43:53.000You have to go to restaurants that have mashkiach, meaning a rabbi has come in and taken a look to make sure that it's obeying all of the various dietary regulations.
00:44:01.000Not all animals are kosher, so they have to have split hooves and chew their cud.
00:44:05.000So cows are kosher, but pigs are not because they have split hooves but do not chew their cud.
00:44:14.000All vegetables, all fruits are kosher.
00:44:16.000And so our derivatives therefrom, so like jams and jellies, are kosher unless they've been made on non-kosher equipment, meaning that that equipment has been used for non-kosher products.
00:44:25.000My favorite book to write, the most enjoyable book to write, was probably Project President.
00:44:36.000Project President was fun to write just because it's a bunch of historical research about kind of fun anecdotes about presidents.
00:44:44.000I think the least favorite book to write was Porn Generation simply because to immerse yourself in a world of disgustingness is not a pleasant activity for one's soul.
00:45:33.000It has not really been tried, at least in the traditional government owning the means of production sense in Europe, which is in many ways more capitalist than the United States when it comes to its business regulations.
00:45:43.000Anyway, Moose Goose says, I shrugged and continued my walk.
00:46:52.000The more direct democracy doesn't seem to work particularly well, simply because people are not informed on the issue and they vote based on passion.
00:46:58.000We talked about direct democracy versus the republic when we talked about Federalist number nine.
00:47:02.000No, Federalist number 10 a couple of weeks ago here on the program.
00:47:05.000So go back and listen to that episode.
00:47:06.000I explicitly contrast direct democracy with the republic.