Rudy Giuliani provides a weak defense for the President of the United States, and Asia Argento is implicated in a mea culpa mess of her own making, and Al Sharpton makes an astonishingly great TV error. Plus, a new report from the New York Times suggests that Trump's White House counsel, Don McGahn, may have lied to Robert Mueller's investigators about what he told them during 30 hours of interviews with the special counsel's investigators, and why it could be damaging to the president. Plus, the Krasnerstein Brothers tweet a picture of a buff, shirtless Chippendale, and then tweet it to the world, which is even more weird than normal, because they don t have a clue what they were talking about. And, of course, there's still time to get your first three meals delivered to your door with Blue Apron! Subscribe to Shapiro's new show, The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your news and gossip, and don't miss out on the latest episodes of The Weekly Standard, The Five, FiveThirtyEight, and Rachel Maddow's new podcast All Things Consuming. Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with the latest news and discuss all things going on in the world of politics, culture, entertainment, and social media! Subscribe, and let us know what you thought of the latest episode of the Ben Shapiro show! on Apple Podcasts and wherever else you re listening to your favorite podcast! and sharing it on your social media platforms! If you like it, share it with a friend, and tell a friend about it! or share it on Insta- and we'll be sure to spread it around the wide and wide spread it everywhere else! Thank you for listening to Ben Shapiro's thoughts and spreading it everywhere! - Ben Shapiro, the truth, Ben Shapiro is a real Ben Shapiro. . Thanks for listening and love Ben Shapiro - The Reverend? - Rachel Gooden and Ben Kaspbrak - Thank you, Ben Karshaw, the R&B, the Reverend Jimmie, AKA & much more. - Yours Truly Amazingly Awesome, Cheers, Rachel Gooding, Sarah Gooden, Sarah Baden, Sr., Thank You, Mr. Ben, Sarah Gooding Love, Kristy, Sr. & Gorms, MJK, Jr.
00:00:00.000Rudy Giuliani provides a weak defense for the President of the United States, Asia Argento is implicated in a Me Too mess of her own making, and Al Sharpton makes an astonishingly great TV error.
00:01:29.000Okay, so there's a lot going on over the weekend.
00:01:35.000The big story over the weekend is that the New York Times supposedly is about to break open the Mueller investigation.
00:01:42.000Everyone very, very excited because this new report from Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt, both Pulitzer Prize winners over at the New York Times, suggest that Don McGahn, who is President Trump's attorney in the White House, he's the White House chief attorney,
00:01:55.000That this guy spoke to the Mueller investigation.
00:01:58.000And according to the New York Times, this means that Trump is in for it now.
00:02:02.000Finally, Robert Mueller is going to seize President Trump in his clutches, just as the Krasnerstein brothers would want.
00:02:08.000The Krasnerstein brothers, for folks who don't know, are these people who have basically become famous on Twitter for tweeting incessantly about President Trump.
00:02:14.000And then they tweeted over the weekend a cartoon of a buff, shirtless Chippendale, Robert Mueller.
00:02:31.000President Trump's lawyers do not know just how much the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn, told the special counsel's investigators during months of interviews, a lapse that has contributed to a growing recognition that an early strategy of full cooperation with the inquiry was a potentially damaging mistake.
00:02:45.000So at this point in the piece, we still don't know what McGahn told the investigators.
00:02:50.000Nothing in the piece actually says what McGahn talked to the investigators about or why it would be so potentially damaging to the president of the United States.
00:02:58.000According to the New York Times, however, the president's lawyer said on Sunday that they were confident that Mr. McGahn had said nothing injurious to the president during the 30 hours of interviews.
00:03:06.000But Mr. McGahn's lawyer has offered only a limited accounting of what Mr. McGahn told the investigators, according to two people close to the president.
00:03:13.000That has prompted concern among Mr. Trump's advisors that Mr. McGahn's statements could help serve as a key component for a damning report by the special counsel Robert Mueller, which the Justice Department could send to Congress, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
00:03:25.000What this suggests is that the Mueller investigation is going to come up with nothing, and then they're going to send a report to Congress suggesting that the president acted badly, that while he didn't formally obstruct justice, which is a charge that has a very specific meaning and involves destruction of evidence or attempts to intimidate witnesses or some sort of witness tampering or perjury,
00:03:41.000The president hasn't done any of those.
00:03:43.000There's nothing to actually show the president has done any of those things.
00:03:46.000Despite that, they'll send a damning report to Congress, and then a Democratic Congress will be forced to try to impeach.
00:03:51.000Mr. Trump's lawyers realized on Saturday they had not been provided a full accounting after the New York Times published an article describing Mr. McGahn's extensive cooperation with Mr. Mueller's office.
00:04:00.000After Mr. McGahn was initially interviewed by the special counsel's office in November, Mr. Trump's lawyers never asked for a complete description of what Mr. McGahn had said, according to a person close to the president.
00:04:10.000All of which actually speaks to the idea that Trump didn't feel like he had a lot to fear from Mueller, right?
00:04:14.000He let his lawyer over at the White House go and talk to Mueller.
00:04:19.000He could have just claimed executive privilege.
00:04:21.000He could have claimed that there was attorney-client privilege.
00:04:23.000He could have claimed a lot of things that would have prevented McGahn from actually having to go talk with Mueller.
00:04:28.000Into any of those things, which suggests that Trump doesn't feel like he really has all that much to hide.
00:04:33.000And the New York Times continues in this vein for a very long time.
00:04:36.000It's pages and pages of writing on this.
00:04:39.000And there's really nothing that comes out from it.
00:04:43.000Basically, the only thing that comes out from it is that McGahn's people are sort of leaking to the press, it appears, that Trump
00:04:49.000Set up McGahn for a possible obstruction charge, and so McGahn was talking to Mueller.
00:04:52.000That's the suggestion in the actual article, is that the only thing of relevance here is that McGahn felt pressured by Trump and therefore he went and talked to the investigators.
00:05:04.000So here's what the New York Times says.
00:05:05.000In its article, the Times said Mr. McGahn had shared detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the investigation into whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in the Russia inquiry.
00:05:14.000Some of the episodes, like Mr. Trump's attempt to fire Mr. Mueller last summer, would not have been revealed to investigators without Mr. McGahn's help.
00:05:20.000The article set off a scramble on Saturday among Mr. Trump's lawyers and advisers.
00:05:24.000The president, sequestered at his private golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, solicited opinions from a small group of advisers on the possible repercussions from the article
00:05:32.000The president ordered Mr. Giuliani to tell reporters the article was wrong, but Mr. Giuliani did not go that far in his television appearances.
00:05:38.000As we'll see, Rudy Giuliani went on national TV and said the president really has nothing to hide.
00:05:42.000Apparently, Trump wanted him to go out and say that the articles were wrong in all of their major facts, which apparently was not true.
00:06:12.000Okay, so people are picking on the fact that Trump himself is suggesting that John Dean was a rat.
00:06:17.000For those who don't know, John Dean was a White House attorney under Nixon.
00:06:20.000He went and he talked to the Watergate investigators, and it was very damaging to President Nixon.
00:06:25.000But what Trump is actually saying here is, people are jumping all over him for this, he's not wrong, right?
00:06:29.000He allowed Don McGahn to go and testify.
00:06:31.000Now people are saying at the New York Times that Trump did this basically because he's ignorant, and so he allowed McGahn to talk to Mueller.
00:06:59.000He says, Okay, again, I understand why Trump is upset about this.
00:07:02.000He said, My lawyer went and talked to Mueller and you guys are yelling at me for that and saying that I'm obstructing even though my guy went and talked.
00:07:27.000Again, the sort of implication that Trump is trying to hide something when he allows his counsel to go and talk with the Mueller investigation is a weird one.
00:07:36.000Nonetheless, Rudy Giuliani was out there making the rounds and sort of demonstrating that Trump is upset about the media coverage.
00:07:44.000And Giuliani is just not a good representative for the president.
00:07:47.000This is one of the big problems with representing President Trump is that every attorney who has ever represented Trump
00:07:52.000You don't know 100% of what he testified to?
00:08:16.000I think that through John Dowd, we have a pretty good sense of it, and John Dowd yesterday said, I'll use his words rather than mine, that McGahn was a strong witness for the president.
00:08:27.000So I don't need to know much more about that.
00:08:29.000Okay, so if McGahn was a strong witness for the president, and McGahn went and talked to the special counsel, and in the end, the special counsel has to prove obstruction.
00:08:39.000Not intent, not intent to obstruct, actual obstruction.
00:08:42.000Andrew McCarthy makes this great point over at National Review today.
00:08:45.000Obstruction is an actual statutory crime.
00:08:48.000If you're going to prove obstruction, you have to prove that the president actually took acts designed to stop or meddle with the investigation.
00:08:54.000There's nothing to suggest he actually took these acts.
00:08:56.000He said stuff, but saying stuff does not constitute obstruction.
00:08:59.000The president has the ability to say as much stuff as he wants.
00:09:02.000He just can't commit perjury, and he can't actually engage in witness intimidation.
00:09:22.000They have to write a report, and they don't have a single bit of evidence.
00:09:26.000Okay, so it is very possible that Mueller has no evidence.
00:09:28.000That New York Times report, however, looks like a leak from McGahn's team.
00:09:31.000It looks like McGahn is leaking to the press that the reason that he talked to Mueller is because he was afraid of being hung out to dry.
00:09:36.000It would be weird if that leak was coming from Team Mueller.
00:09:38.000They're just sentences in the report that appear that it makes it look like it's from McGahn.
00:09:42.000And then Giuliani gets himself in the biggest trouble of all.
00:09:44.000Now, what Giuliani says in this particular clip is going to be wildly misinterpreted.
00:09:48.000I don't think Giuliani is completely wrong, but expressed in the worst possible way.
00:09:52.000And in a second, I'm going to talk about why this sort of stuff matters.
00:09:56.000And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well, that's so silly because it's somebody's version of the truth, not the truth.
00:10:04.000He didn't have a conversation about- Truth is truth.
00:10:08.000I don't mean to go like- No, it isn't truth.
00:10:26.000When he says that there is such a thing as a perjury trap, that if I tell the truth in front of Robert Mueller, I still may be brought up on obstruction charges, I still may be brought up on perjury charges, because it's possible there are two people who are telling different sides of the same story, and one of them sees it a different way, and therefore a perjury charge emerges.
00:10:47.000Rudy Giuliani is just not a good representative of the president when it comes to this sort of stuff.
00:10:51.000What he should be saying is no lawyer worth his salt would put his client in front of a motivated prosecutor determined to rack that guy up on perjury charges or obstruction charges.
00:11:03.000No one would do that, particularly not a president who is fond of speaking off the cuff.
00:11:06.000So even if the president is in general telling the truth and he makes a slight slip up,
00:11:11.000And not only that, questions can be asked that are specifically designed to elicit a particular response that makes you subject to perjury.
00:11:17.000A good prosecutor can do this sort of stuff.
00:11:19.000But saying truth isn't truth obviously lends itself to the idea that the Trump administration is being deeply dishonest about all this stuff.
00:11:24.000Now, the irony is that because the Trump administration has been dishonest about so many things regarding the Russia investigation from the outset, it's obscuring the larger point, which is that Trump, I think, is probably telling the truth when he says there was no collusion.
00:11:37.000But this stuff does have consequences.
00:11:44.000The post office is a great place, but you don't actually want to be standing in line at the post office.
00:11:48.000What you want to do is save your company time and money by instead working from your office and printing out your postage directly onto envelopes, onto stickers, directly onto a piece of paper that you can tape.
00:13:22.000The big problem, however, is that when Rudy Giuliani goes on TV and says things like truth isn't truth, all it's doing is underscoring the dishonesty of the Trump administration time and time again during the Russia collusion investigation.
00:13:33.000The broader point that Trump is making, I did not collude with the Russians to change the effects of the election, I think is probably true because there has not been evidence presented yet to show that the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Russians in shifting the election.
00:13:47.000That's not the same thing as active collusion and coordination to violate the law in pursuit of changing the electoral result.
00:13:55.000But because the Trump administration, because the Trump campaign was so dishonest about the Trump Tower meeting, for example, because Rudy Giuliani has shifted his story multiple times, it makes Trump look dishonest.
00:14:04.000And it occurs to me what a problem this is.
00:14:17.000We like to do kind of experiences for birthdays and anniversaries instead of me just getting her a nice piece of jewelry or in addition to me getting her a nice piece of jewelry.
00:14:24.000But in any case, we decided to go glassblowing.
00:14:27.000And the woman who's teaching the class is, of course, as you would imagine in Los Angeles, somebody who's very much on the left.
00:14:32.000And we start talking about politics, because she brings it up.
00:14:35.000I was not all that interested, but she wanted to.
00:14:37.000And so we started talking about politics.
00:14:39.000And she started talking about what a bad guy Trump was.
00:14:42.000And I said, but his policies really haven't hurt you in any way.
00:14:45.000In fact, the economy has been pretty good.
00:14:47.000His policies are stuff that you kind of like.
00:14:50.000And she goes, you know who else I dislike?
00:14:56.000And the idea that he is some sort of grave grand theocrat attempting to govern you from above, I just don't think that's true.
00:15:03.000And then she starts launching into Mitch McConnell.
00:15:05.000And after a little while of this, it occurred to me, the policy just doesn't matter.
00:15:09.000When it comes to people voting, the vast majority of people vote and think based on their personal like or dislike of particular people and candidates.
00:15:16.000People don't think in terms of policy.
00:15:18.000People don't think in terms of truth or falsehood in the Russian collusion investigation.
00:15:23.000All they think is, is Trump dishonest or is Trump not dishonest?
00:15:26.000And so even if Rudy Giuliani is not wrong about perjury traps and Robert Mueller, when you represent the worst face to the public, that has serious electoral consequences.
00:15:36.000That's stuff that doesn't get brushed under the rug when it comes time for people to vote.
00:15:39.000The grand perception of President Trump as a dishonest guy is not going to be dissipated by the constant reiteration by his counsel, Rudy Giuliani, of that sort of dishonesty and that feeling of dishonesty.
00:15:52.000It's this miasma of bad stuff surrounding the Trump administration that does more harm than the actual
00:15:57.000Criminality, because I don't think there's actual any criminality when it comes right down to it.
00:16:01.000Meanwhile, the media, of course, have every interest in blowing up everything bad about President Trump to inordinate heights of outrage.
00:16:26.000Now, all she said is that she didn't get along with Trump, she didn't get along with John Kelly, and now she says Trump was a racist after spending years talking about how wonderful President Trump was, and everyone would literally bow before him.
00:16:35.000Now she's going around, and she has earned strange new respect from the media.
00:16:39.000So, she's gotten most of that strange new respect courtesy of the folks over at places like MSNBC.
00:16:44.000In a grand meeting of the minds, Al Sharpton had on Omarosa on MSNBC over the weekend, and they were talking about race.
00:16:52.000From Al Sharpton, a man who has legitimately participated in the inception of race riots in places like New York, Omarosa talking with Al Sharpton, race baiter par excellence, about why Donald Trump is going to start a race war.
00:17:07.000And in fact, we're losing right now because Donald Trump is disingenuous about his engagement and his outreach.
00:17:12.000And in fact, I believe he wants to start a race war in this country.
00:17:16.000You know, for a lady who was fired from the administration, did not quit, it's pretty wild for her to suggest that Trump wants to start a race war in the country.
00:17:23.000It's particularly rich for her to be saying this to a guy who legitimately has started race riots in the United States, or at least allegedly been involved with the inception of those race riots, particularly the 1991 race riot in Crown Heights that claimed the life of an Orthodox Jew.
00:17:35.000But I guess that the media have to be treated with respect here.
00:17:38.000Al Sharpton certainly has to be treated with respect.
00:17:41.000The worst botchery of Al Sharpton's weekend was not actually his interview with Omarosa.
00:17:44.000It was the lead-up to his interview with Omarosa.
00:17:48.000This is a thing that actually happened on national television.
00:17:51.000Is it fair to say Al Sharpton is a dummy?
00:17:53.000I think that based on clips like this, the ongoing battle between Al Sharpton and his teleprompter is one of the great battles in human history.
00:18:00.000I mean, it really is like the battle of Stalingrad, really.
00:18:34.000Well, you just hope that Al Sharpton is never in a position where he's on Wheel of Fortune and you have the R, the S, the P, the C and the T. And then he has to buy a vowel because, my goodness, it's literally our most famous song.
00:18:52.000I can't imagine why folks don't take the media seriously.
00:18:55.000But again, the media continue to portray the Trump administration as a place in flux and chaos.
00:18:59.000They continue to give lots of respect to people like John Brennan, a guy who lied to Congress, a guy who was involved in basically smuggling classified information over to Harry Reid in the Senate so he could make trouble during the last campaign.
00:19:12.000Here was John Brennan on national TV talking about how Trump is treasonous.
00:19:16.000The media are all in on the idea that Trump is a treasonous fellow.
00:19:20.000The reason, again, this is relevant is because the Trump team has to fight back on that perception and making botcheries with Rudy Giuliani is not the way to do this.
00:19:28.000I called his behavior treasonous, which is to betray one's trust and to aid and abet the enemy.
00:20:06.000But Clapper actually started talking, he's former Director of National Intelligence under President Obama, even he says that Brennan has gone too far here.
00:20:14.000So even as the Trump campaign, the Trump team, Rudy Giuliani fail on their lines, folks on the left are failing on theirs, right?
00:20:21.000So John Brennan starts ripping into James Clapper and he's exactly correct.
00:20:25.000Or to the opposite, Clapper starts ripping on Brennan and he's exactly right here.
00:20:28.000You know, John is sort of like a freight train, and he's going to say what's on his mind.
00:20:34.000But John and his rhetoric have become, I think, an issue in and of itself.
00:21:05.000It's a battle of incompetence, people beating each other with sticks.
00:21:09.000It's really a clown show out there on the highest possible level.
00:21:13.000The only way this is ever going to get sorted out is the next ballot box, and that is a problem for Republicans, because again, the president's popularity rating is not as high as it should be right now, given the geopolitical situation.
00:22:28.000Okay, so the other big story of the weekend is that Asia Argento
00:22:48.000Who is one of the lead figures in the Me Too movement.
00:22:50.000It turns out that she was actually involved in paying off a 17-year-old for sexually assaulting him in a California hotel room.
00:22:58.000Here is the story from the New York Times.
00:23:07.000She became a leading figure in the hashtag MeToo movement.
00:23:09.000Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight.
00:23:13.000But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms.
00:23:17.000Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser, Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier when he was only two months past his 17th birthday, which would be statutory rape.
00:23:31.000The age of consent in California is 18.
00:23:34.000That claim and the subsequent arrangement for payments are laid out in documents between lawyers for Ms.
00:23:39.000Argento and Mr. Bennett, a former child actor who once played her son in a movie.
00:23:43.000The documents, which were sent to the New York Times through encrypted email by an unidentified party, include a selfie dated May 9, 2013 of the two lying in bed.
00:23:51.000As part of the agreement, Mr. Bennett, who is now 22, gave the photograph and its copyright to Ms.
00:24:00.000Argenta and her representatives have not responded to any of this.
00:24:04.000Mr. Bennett, who lives in Los Angeles, would not agree to be interviewed.
00:24:07.000As he said his lawyer, Gordon Satro, in the coming days, Satro wrote in an email, Jimmy will continue doing what he has been doing over the past months and years, focusing on his music.
00:24:15.000Mr. Bennett is a child actor who charmed Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis, earned the nickname Jimmy Two-Takes because he rarely flubbed his lines.
00:24:21.000The 2013 hotel room encounter was a betrayal that precipitated a spiral of emotional problems, according to documents.
00:24:28.000The fallout from a sexual battery was so traumatic it hindered Mr. Bennett's work and income, threatened his mental health.
00:24:35.000Goldberg, who's a lawyer, to handle the case.
00:24:38.000Mr. Bennett's notice of intent asked for $3.5 million in damages for the intentional infliction of emotional distress, lost wages, assault, and battery.
00:24:46.000Mr. Bennett made more than $2.7 million in the five years before the 2013 meeting with Ms.
00:25:01.000Now, a lot of people are using this to try and discredit the broader MeToo movement, suggesting that if Asia Argento has been responsible for the sort of sexual battery herself and covered it up, that the credibility of some of the leaders of the MeToo movement is compromised.
00:25:14.000There's no question that her credibility is compromised, but the idea of the MeToo movement, which is that sexual assault is bad, is obviously true.
00:25:21.000But again, radicalism tends to discredit the main ideas underlying some good movement.
00:25:27.000And this is what we're seeing in politics.
00:25:28.000It's what we're also seeing with cases like the Me Too movement.
00:25:30.000Speaking of radicalism, there's an article in the New York Times.
00:26:12.000The article is titled, Witchcraft in the Me Too Era.
00:26:16.000If you want to make the case for Me Too, if you want to make the case against sexual assault, you probably don't want to start with witchcraft.
00:26:23.000Witchcraft in the MeToo era is actually basically the plot of The Crucible by Arthur Miller, but The New York Times reports thusly,
00:26:42.000I do love the romance that the New York Times gives witchcraft and people who are crazy because they're part of a coven.
00:26:47.000I do love that they don't talk this way about
00:27:07.000They don't talk this way about Catholic ritual.
00:27:08.000They don't talk this way about Protestant ritual.
00:27:10.000But a bunch of nuts gathering in the middle of Central Park get this sort of treatment from the New York Times.
00:27:15.000And then they wonder why maybe the Me Too movement is stalling out a little bit here.
00:27:18.000When you undermine your own credibility by embracing radical silliness, this is sort of what happens.
00:27:25.000The Temple of the Spiral Path, which includes the North Wildwood and Stranger Gates Covens, has performed rituals in this clearing, known among the witches as the Green Cathedral, for 20 years.
00:27:34.000The worshippers sat cross-legged around a circle of flowers, dried kalunda, chamomile, lavender, and rose petals, carefully arranged in a spiral.
00:27:42.000Miss Crucy led them through a meditation.
00:27:44.000Then, they slowly joined hands and began singing.
00:27:46.000And one by one, they entered the spiral.
00:27:48.000Their dancing crew increasingly raucous as they intoned, We are a circle moving.
00:27:56.000In such a large and diverse city, says the New York Times, it is no surprise that the craft is fairly accessible, if you know where to look.
00:28:02.000Nearly 80 covens and pagan organizations operate in the New York metropolitan area, according to the pagan networking site, The Witch's Voice.
00:28:12.000Nationally, about 734,000 Americans identify as pagan or Wiccan, according to a 2014 Pew Research survey, which is fewer than the number of people who listen to this show daily.
00:28:22.000So it's not exactly like a burgeoning mass movement all across the country.
00:28:27.000Apparently 10,000 witches live in practice in New York.
00:28:30.000I don't know what it means to practice witchcraft.
00:28:33.000I guess that you, like, do you ride a broom?
00:28:35.000In any case, this sort of thing is not, I think, good for association with the Me Too movement, but radicalism always tends to draw a bunch of people who are the most enthusiastic.
00:28:47.000And we're seeing it in our politics as well.
00:28:50.000So we're seeing with the MeToo movement, as some of its leaders are some of the most morally questionable and radical people, even though the MeToo movement has some underlying good points to make, we're seeing it also with regard to our politics, where the most radical people from both sides are tending to hijack movements that actually have some credibility to them.
00:29:04.000So on the right, you have people like Kelly Ward.
00:29:06.000Kelly Ward is running in a primary in Arizona right now against Martha McSally.
00:29:09.000Martha McSally is a much better candidate.
00:29:12.000She's a representative from Arizona, former Air Force
00:29:16.000Colonel, I believe, who is the first woman to fly in combat, if I'm not mistaken.
00:29:20.000Her record is pretty sterling, Martha McSally.
00:29:23.000She's running against Kelly Ward, who is kind of a nutcase.
00:29:26.000And Kelly Ward is running around touring with Mike Cernovich, a guy who's most famous for promoting Pizzagate.
00:29:31.000She was on MSNBC, and she's promoting her candidacy by saying that she doesn't know who Mike Cernovich's audience is, but she wants to appeal to them also.
00:29:38.000It's very easy for radicals to get a lot of attention, and Kelly Ward is getting a lot of attention, specifically because folks on the left have an interest in elevating her, and also because radicals, again, are some of the most outspoken and loud and entertaining people in America.
00:29:50.000I mean, Mike Cernovich has an audience that we want to reach, and that includes Republicans, conservatives, liberals, Democrats, people of all ilks.
00:30:01.000And so if he's coming on the bus tour, I think that he'll have a voice and he'll have something that he wants to say.
00:30:06.000Meanwhile, on the left, what you're seeing is the complete seduction of the Democratic Party into hardcore actual socialism, even though they won't actually define their terms.
00:30:13.000There's an interesting column by Elizabeth Brudig, who is the in-house socialist over at the Washington Post.
00:30:19.000The irony, of course, is that I couldn't access this column without actually
00:30:22.000Paying for the paywall, even though it's about the glories of socialism, so that's too bad.
00:30:26.000But we'll get to that in just one second.
00:30:28.000First, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
00:30:30.000For $9.99 a month, you get a subscription to Daily Wire.
00:30:32.000When you do, you get the rest of this show live, you get the rest of the Andrew Klavan show live, you get the rest of the Michael Knowles show live, if that's something you're interested in or into.
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00:31:01.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:09.000So as I say, every major movement in the United States right now is in danger of being taken over by radicals because radicals are the most motivated part of any base.
00:31:17.000I've talked about the process of renormalization before on the show.
00:31:21.000It's a term that was used by the guy who wrote Skin in the game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
00:31:34.000If you are a family and one daughter is vegan, very soon you will all be eating vegan because mom or dad does not want to bother with actually making two separate dinners for everybody, one meat and one vegan.
00:31:43.000Instead, everybody will just eat vegan and suddenly the whole family is vegan.
00:31:46.000And then when that family goes to a party and the whole family is vegan, the entire party becomes vegan because it's a lot easier and cheaper, the transaction cost of having to
00:31:54.000Cook two meals is higher than the transaction cost of just going along with the most radical people in any part of the base.
00:32:01.000You want to satisfy the base because the base is the loudest and the most polarized.
00:32:05.000So you see this with regard to the Me Too movement, where every accusation has to be taken with equal seriousness, no matter how stupid, no matter how unjust, which is bad for the Me Too movement because it undermines the credibility of the Me Too movement.
00:32:17.000With regard to the right, where a lot of folks who should not be given credibility have been given credibility because they are the most motivated.
00:32:23.000And you're now seeing it on the part of the left, where democratic socialists are taking over the mainstream Democratic Party because the Democratic Party wants to cater to its most motivated base, the people who go out and knock on doors.
00:32:33.000So Elizabeth Bruning, who is the in-house socialist over at the Washington Post, her husband, Matt Bruning, they're both nice people I've talked to, at least Matt.
00:32:41.000Nat runs something called the Public Policy Institute, which is a 501c3 pushing socialism, but not really socialism, kind of pushing Nordic socialism, which is not quite the same thing.
00:32:50.000Well, Elizabeth Bruning has a column today about why it's time to reclaim socialism from the dirty word category.
00:32:56.000The problem for her is that she actually doesn't
00:33:00.000want to define what socialism is, because socialism is inherently radical.
00:33:04.000You can define socialism however you want.
00:33:07.000Some people define socialism as stuff I like from the Nordic countries, and some people define it as getting rid of the profit motive, which is how the democratic socialists of America do.
00:33:15.000The goal of socialists is to pretend they are not what they are, which is radical.
00:33:18.000So here's Elizabeth Bruning's column, and you'll see how she's sort of obfuscating the terminology she's using in order to cover for her own radical agenda.
00:33:31.000Well, 57% of Democrats polled said they view socialism positively.
00:33:35.000Only 47% said the same of capitalism, down from 56% in 2016.
00:33:39.000Republicans, meanwhile, remain pretty enthusiastic about capitalism, with 71% rating it positively.
00:33:44.000Still, 16% of GOP voters said they even view socialism through a friendly lens, which raises the question, when Americans say they view socialism one way or the other, what exactly do they have in mind?
00:33:54.000The United States doesn't have a familiar established socialist history to look to for guidance on what socialism might mean in this country.
00:34:12.000It is central planning from the top of the economy up to and including full-scale nationalization of resources without regard to profit motive.
00:34:19.000That would be sort of the usual mechanism by which socialism runs.
00:34:22.000What the left has tended to do is redefine socialism as capitalism with some socialist redistributionist policies on top.
00:34:30.000What's weird about that is, take, for example, John Rockefeller.
00:34:33.000So the Rockefeller family earned an enormous, enormous amount of money in capitalism.
00:34:37.000Then they gave an enormous amount of money to charity.
00:34:41.000I would say they were capitalists who gave to charity.
00:34:43.000Perhaps, if you are going to say that charitable giving forced by the government is socialism,
00:34:48.000What you would say is that the Rockefellers were actually socialists, because they used capitalism in order to create this enormous amount of wealth, and then they redistributed the wealth.
00:34:55.000What that really is, is the growth engine is capitalism, and the redistributive mechanism is socialism.
00:35:00.000And this is why breaking down each particular policy is sort of important, so we can determine whether a policy is good.
00:35:05.000But calling entire countries socialist or capitalist, unless you're talking about Cuba, which is entirely socialist,
00:35:13.000What she does instead is she refuses to define the term.
00:35:15.000She says the United States doesn't have a familiar established socialist history to look to for guidance on what socialism might mean in this country.
00:35:22.000But that doesn't mean socialism is hopelessly nebulous or that Americans who are interested in the idea are wandering dabblers.
00:35:27.000It just means that socialism, like any sophisticated term, warrants thoughtful consideration.
00:35:32.000Socialism has meant different things to different people in different times and places, while maintaining a stable core of themes and objectives.
00:35:37.000Social, as opposed to private control of the means of production.
00:35:40.000Okay, now she's talking about nationalization, you would think.
00:35:42.000And of all the societal, humanitarian, and political economic changes that entails, especially where freedom and autonomy of working people are concerned.
00:35:49.000Again, this is extraordinarily vague, because if you say, does that mean nationalization?
00:35:54.000And then if you said, well, does that mean that workers are supposed to take over the factory?
00:35:57.000She'd say, well, maybe, but it's not specific enough for us to actually dig down.
00:36:02.000So what she's doing is smart because she's attempting to guise her radicalism in this sort of vague incrementalism.
00:36:08.000She says, the term itself, socialism, came into being in the early decades of the 19th century, and like any good word, inspired a great deal of imagination.
00:36:15.000For the non-Marxian English socialists of the 1840s, socialism mainly meant opposition to the competitive, dehumanizing effect of liberal economies, local experiments with communitarianism and cooperatives, and demands for the privileges of freedom, autonomy, and participation in government to extend to the lower classes.
00:36:30.000None of which you would actually define as socialism per se, because if you and your family decide to get together and do a co-op, that's not quite socialism if it's private.
00:36:38.000It's just, meanwhile, Marxian socialism focused on the conditions of production.
00:36:42.000Who owns what, the relationships between wage earners and owners, and how stuff gets made in a society, and the kind of politics these conditions produce.
00:36:49.000Even when socialism was a relatively new term, in other words, its exact meaning was disputed.
00:36:54.000And what Bruning is basically going to do here is obscure that there is such a thing as socialism.
00:36:59.000Instead, what she's going to do is just claim that all the stuff she likes is socialism, and all the stuff she doesn't like is not socialism.
00:37:05.000Which is a smart way of sort of ushering socialism into the mainstream, but it's also a dishonest way.
00:37:10.000And I'll explain more in just one second.
00:37:13.000So Bruning continues, she talks about, now, as in the 19th century, confusion about what socialism means is stoked by political interest in clouding the issue.
00:37:21.000As Eric Levitz notes in New York Magazine, conservatives tend to oscillate between arguing that successful countries such as Finland, Norway, and Denmark, generally regarded as socialist, are actually as capitalist as the United States, and claiming, as Fox Business Network's Trish Regan recently did, that socialism has made these countries stagnant and stultifying.
00:37:49.000That is what has created all growth curve in Scandinavian countries for as long as human history, because socialism has never created serious growth in any country.
00:37:58.000State-sponsored capitalism is merely the state using capitalistic profit-seeking methods in order to subsidize particular industries, which creates growth in those industries but sucks growth out of other industries.
00:38:08.000But socialism is the idea that the profit motive doesn't matter and we ought to redistribute all resources.
00:38:13.000Again, obscuring the terminology is an easy way of preventing people from understanding what socialism means.
00:38:19.000I like that Elizabeth Bernie concludes this way.
00:38:21.000At the heart of the Democratic Socialist vision, finally she gets to her definition.
00:39:04.000Now you have to hide it, but this is really what's going on, which is working Americans deserve a say in how the country's vast wealth will be used.
00:39:12.000It is wealth earned by individuals who are working hard and playing by the rules and employing other individuals.
00:39:18.000By treating all wealth as a collective is the way that you actually get to gulags.
00:39:22.000The direct line between the country owns all the wealth and the gulags is actually relatively short.
00:39:28.000Because working Americans deserve a say in how the country's vast wealth will be used.
00:39:31.000And that will be possible only when inequality is reduced, corporate and big money donors are banished from politics, and lawmakers are truly accountable to the people.
00:39:38.000It's not so much to ask, but democratic socialists are the only one asking.
00:39:42.000Which, of course, is not true when you talk about corporate and big money donors being banished from politics.
00:39:47.000I assume she's not talking about the Washington Post, which is a giant corporation involved in politics.
00:39:52.000I assume she's not talking about her husband's Public Policy Institute, which is deeply involved in taking large donations, I assume, from donors who then wish to promulgate a political agenda.
00:40:01.000And when she says lawmakers being truly accountable to the people, it seems to me that the Tea Party was asking for exactly the same thing.
00:40:07.000So the socialists play this double game, just like radicals often do, of pretending that they are not radical, but then at the end stripping away all of this in favor of their radicalism.
00:40:16.000This is why it's important to identify, I think, that there is a common center to the country still.
00:40:21.000There's still a group of people in the country who wish to have intelligent conversation about actual terminology, but that can only happen when we get down to the actual root of the issue.
00:40:29.000So, if we want to have a discussion about Me Too, then it can't all be about Harvey Weinstein and Asia Argento.
00:40:36.000Instead, it's got to be about what social standards we wish to purvey when it comes to sex and sexuality.
00:40:41.000We can have an honest conversation about what conservatism looks like, but that cannot be a conversation about whether Mike Cernovich and his crowd are worth catering to.
00:40:50.000We can have an honest conversation, even about the lengths to which we should redistribute resources in the United States.
00:40:57.000There are a lot of people who think a lot more.
00:40:59.000But we can't do that so long as people are obfuscating and hiding all this under the rubric of democratic socialism, because what they mean is being deliberately obscured.
00:41:08.000The radicals are taking over a lot of areas of American life because they are the loudest and because they shout the loudest and because they get the most media attention and because both sides have an interest in highlighting the most radical people on the other side in order to clarify the distinctions between the sides.
00:41:22.000But the only way we're going to have a common conversation is if we get down to the roots of actual terminology.
00:41:44.000Conflation of good ideas with bad ideas or conflating ideas we can all agree about with radical ideas is the way that politics ends up becoming polarized and radicalized and then we have no common center for us to have a conversation anymore.
00:41:57.000Okay, time for some things I like and then we'll get to some things that I hate.
00:42:05.000It doesn't come out, I believe, till November, but you can pre-order it right now.
00:42:07.000It's called The Once and Future Worker.
00:42:09.000Now, Oren Kass and I disagree on elements regarding free trade, for example.
00:42:13.000He's a lot more trade restrictionist in certain ways.
00:42:15.000He's still in favor of trade, but he's more trade restrictionist than I am in certain ways, although I think he might argue he's more free trade than I think he is.
00:42:22.000He is a really good thinker over at the Manhattan Institute who talks about why it is that certain jobs in the United States, in the manufacturing base particularly, have been hollowed out.
00:42:32.000It has something to do with technology, but it has more to do with the fact that we have made our business environment uncompetitive through environmental regulation in certain areas and through union contracts as governed by the National Labor Relations Act.
00:42:45.000He makes a case for actual adoption of certain European styles with regard to, for example, unions and education.
00:42:50.000And this is the part that's really fascinating.
00:42:52.000There are good conversations to be had about why there is less income inequality in certain areas of Europe.
00:42:58.000Or why education is better in Sweden than it is in the United States.
00:43:01.000No one wants to have those actual conversations.
00:43:03.000Instead, we all want to do bumper sticker stuff about why Sweden is spending so much of its GDP on government redistributionism.
00:43:09.000Why not instead look at what they're actually doing with regard to education?
00:43:15.000So, for example, in the United States, there are no tracks, right?
00:43:17.000We all go to the same classes, and then we get to decide whether to go to college, and everybody has the opportunity to go to college.
00:43:22.000In Sweden, in Israel, in a lot of other countries, what they do is, by the time you're in eighth grade, you're basically deciding, is this a person who's ready for college, or is this person not ready to go to college?
00:43:32.000If they're not ready for college, we get them an apprenticeship program, where they actually are learning practical skills for a job they're going to do.
00:43:55.000It would be better off if a lot of the folks who are not going to college... The college attendance rates, by the way, have been pretty stable in the United States for a fair bit of time.
00:44:03.000And that's because there are a lot of people who just aren't ready for college and instead ought to be prepped for a job.
00:44:07.000Orrin Kass talks about a lot of these sort of policy solutions that nobody wants to talk about.
00:44:14.000It's a sophisticated take on a lot of deep policy issues and worth checking out.
00:44:18.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:44:24.000So as I mentioned earlier, Alyssa, there are a lot of people on the left who are deep believers that character is the defining issue in politics, except when it comes to people on their own side.
00:44:36.000And this means that they are going to be as radical as they want to be.
00:44:39.000So Alyssa Milano tweeted this out over the weekend.
00:44:42.000She tweeted out a picture of herself in what looks like a Little Red Riding Hood costume.
00:44:46.000It's like she couldn't even afford to go get the full Handmaid's Tale costume, so she went out and she got like a little Red Riding Hood costume, and she put it on, and then she tweeted out, holding a sign that says, never Kavanaugh, never Gilead, because Justice Kavanaugh, a Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, would apparently usher in the era in which women were just essentially birth mothers who were raped at will, because that's what Justice Kavanaugh's all about.
00:45:09.000I mean, if you hadn't noticed, that's clearly his deal.
00:45:11.000And she tweeted out, hashtag riseupforRoe, hashtag wearenotproperty, hashtag stopKavanaugh.
00:45:17.000The character assassination is pretty astonishing and somewhat hilarious, but demonstrative of how people on the left really want to see their political opponents.
00:45:27.000People on the right do the same thing with regards to their political opponents, too.
00:45:30.000Everybody is a demon, everybody is a devil.
00:45:32.000But I think right now the level of demonization on the left of the right is a lot higher than the demonization of the right.
00:46:49.000The people who want to have honest conversations and actually drill down into terminology are being obscured by folks who don't want to have conversation.
00:46:56.000They just want to rile up their own base because every election is now about base politics.
00:47:43.000Representative Joe Kennedy said, there's heartless and then there's whatever the hell this is.
00:47:47.000I mean, the Kennedy family should know about Heartless.
00:47:49.000Leaving a woman to die in an air bubble at the top of a car is not exactly showing a lot of heart.
00:47:53.000But the entire media go nuts over all of this.
00:47:55.000There is only one problem with this story.
00:47:58.000It turns out the guy who was arrested was arrested because he's suspected of murder.
00:48:02.000There's an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Mexico on homicide charges.
00:48:06.000So, this isn't, they just decided to pick up a guy who's an illegal immigrant at a gas station while he's driving his wife to the hospital for a c-section.
00:48:13.000The guy is legitimately a suspected homicide perpetrator.
00:48:26.000So, getting back to the foundations of the country and the philosophy that has supported it,
00:48:30.000We go through a Federalist paper every week.
00:48:32.000This week's Federalist paper is Federalist 42.
00:48:34.000This is the second most cited Federalist paper in all of court jurisprudence, I believe, after Federalist 78, which we will eventually get to.
00:48:42.000He talks about the powers of the federal government, including the power to control foreign policy and treaties, and why the federal government ought to have these powers.
00:48:49.000There's one particular section that is worth reading, and that is the section in which James Madison talks about
00:48:54.000The Constitution and its designs towards slavery.
00:48:57.000So one of the great lies that has been perpetrated by the political left in the United States for a long time is that the Constitution was designed to enshrine slavery.
00:49:04.000The Constitution was designed to gradually kill slavery.
00:49:09.000This isn't just me saying this, this is James Madison writing at the time.
00:49:12.000It were doubtless to be wished that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until the year 1808, or rather that had been suffered to have immediate operation.
00:49:21.000And he's saying, I would rather if we had just gotten rid of the importation of slaves like now.
00:49:25.000But it is not difficult to account either for this restriction on the general government or for the matter in which the whole clause is expressed.
00:49:31.000It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of 20 years may terminate forever within these states a traffic which has so long and so loudly uprated the barbarism of modern policy.
00:49:42.000That within that period, it will receive a considerable discouragement from the federal government and may be totally abolished by a concurrence of the few states which constitute the unnatural traffic in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union.
00:49:54.000Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren.
00:50:01.000The idea that Madison is espousing here is he thought, and a lot of the founders did, that slavery would go away a lot earlier than it actually ended up going away.
00:50:08.000Instead, the South clung to slavery for decades longer than, you know, was not only morally decent, but even politically necessary, and that led to the Civil War.
00:50:17.000But if the idea was that the Constitution of the United States was intended to protect slavery, that is simply not true.
00:50:22.000It was a compromise position adopted in order to pass the Constitution, but
00:50:26.000The reason we got to that compromise is because most people in the United States, because the North was more heavily populated, most of the people in the United States were already in favor of getting rid of slavery as early as the adoption of the Constitution, in all likelihood.
00:50:39.000And that was certainly true in places like New York, which is where the Federalist Papers were originally published.
00:50:44.000The paper also discusses the uniform power of preventing internal tariffs, the power to control citizenship, talks about why the government, the federal government, has to have the power over all of these.
00:50:51.000But that section about slavery is telling and is a good rejoinder to all these folks who say that the Founding Fathers were simply attempting to enshrine slavery because they loved it so much, which is not true.
00:51:01.000James Madison, by the way, was a Southerner, right?