Trump talks about the NFL s new ban on kneeling during the national anthem. Plus, we meet the most entitled 30-year-old in America, and bring you the latest on Spygate 2018. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and we will be talking about all of it today on the show with host Ben Shapiro ( ) and co-host Alex Blumberg ( ). Today's episode features: - President Trump's reaction to the NFL's new ban against kneeling during The National Anthem. - Why the NFL should have banned kneeling in the National Anthem in the first place. - What's the practical effect of this ban? - Why it's a bad idea, and why it should stay in the locker room. - Who should be allowed to kneel in solidarity with people who were not allowed to do so last year? - Is this a good or bad idea? - What will happen if the ban is actually implemented? - Who will be affected the most? - And who will get the most out of it? - What s the real impact? - And how will it affect Spygate, and who will benefit the most from it? - How will the media react? - Will it have a long-term impact? - Does it have any effect? - Should it even matter? - Where will it have an impact on the game? - Can it be implemented? -- What will it really have an effect? -- And what will it even have an affect on the media say about it? -- Is it good or not? And will it be effective? - We ll find out in the next 30 minutes? - Find out on the next episode of and much more! Subscribe to the show? Subscribe to our new show, coming soon! Subscribe and review it on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe & subscribe to our podcast? Subscribe & review it so you can keep up to date with the latest updates throughout the world on your social media platforms? and other things like that s going to be the most authentic version of this podcast on the realest version of the truth about what s going on in real life, right there on the best and authentic, right here on the podcast, right on it s not real, no matter what that s real, right in real it s real and real, real, and more like it s true, right is real, really is that s that s really that s truly, right sis
00:02:13.000When your product is politicized, then you take action to prevent that politicization.
00:02:17.000But the NFL wanted to reach out to new audiences, and so not only did they support the politicization, they actually forwarded the politicization.
00:02:24.000Even before the National Anthem protests, if you recall, all the way back to 2013, 2014, during the Ferguson issues in 2014, there were a bunch of players who ran out onto the field doing the hands up, don't shoot motion, no fine.
00:02:35.000But there were people who wanted to wear gear that honored the slain Dallas police officers in 2015, and the NFL threatened to fine them, you know, before the NFL backed down.
00:02:44.000So, the NFL took positions on these issues in the worst and stupidest possible way.
00:02:48.000Well, now the NFL has decided they're going to come out and ban the kneeling altogether.
00:02:52.000ESPN reports the new policy subjects teams to a fine if a player or other team personnel do not show respect for the anthem.
00:02:58.000That includes any attempt to sit or kneel, as dozens of players have done during the past two seasons.
00:03:02.000Those teams will also have the option to fine any team personnel, including players, for the infraction.
00:03:07.000So Roger Goodell, who I think has been rather a not good NFL commissioner, actually.
00:03:11.000He's been the beneficiary of tremendous growth in the NFL.
00:03:14.000I'm not sure it's because of Roger Goodell, however.
00:03:25.000We believe today's decision will keep our focus on the game and the extraordinary athletes who play it, and on our fans who enjoy it.
00:03:30.000And the 32 teams agreed to the following requirements.
00:03:33.000All team and league personnel on the field shall stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem.
00:03:37.000The game operations manual will be revised to remove the requirement that all players be on the field for the anthem, so you can stay in the... in the... um...
00:04:07.000Okay, so what is the actual practical effect of this going to be?
00:04:10.000A bunch of people are going to stay in the locker room out of solidarity with people who would kneel but were not allowed to.
00:04:15.000As I said last year during the actual National Anthem controversy, I think it is stupid and counterproductive to kneel for the National Anthem.
00:04:41.000Or, things will get even worse, and what you will see is a bunch of players stay in the locker room, and the owners, in order to virtue-signal to the left, will decide to pay the fines.
00:04:47.000And that's what we're getting from New York Jets chairman Christopher Johnson, who says he'll take the hit.
00:05:03.000There are some big complicated issues that we're all struggling with, and our players are on the front lines.
00:05:07.000I don't want to come down on them like a ton of bricks, and I won't.
00:05:09.000There will be no club fines or suspensions or any sort of repercussions.
00:05:12.000If the team gets fined, that's just something I'll have to bear.
00:05:15.000I think you're going to see a lot of other owners follow suit, and then owners who don't follow suit will be called antagonists of free speech, people who don't support free speech.
00:05:24.000And this controversy will just continue.
00:05:26.000Well, President Trump responded to all of this by celebrating this big victory for President Trump culturally.
00:05:33.000And because everything in our politics has broken down into stupid conversations over winners and losers, as opposed to what's good for the country, this has turned into a big win for Trump.
00:05:41.000And Trump not only says that it's a big win for Trump because Trump got the NFL to cave and change their policy, but it's a big win for America.
00:06:10.000And all of the players who are black and who are protesting about supposed police brutality against black folks, I think that they would be better served to take a play from the playbook of Frederick Douglass or a play from the playbook of Martin Luther King and say, listen, I'm going to stand for the anthem because the anthem is mine too.
00:06:25.000And then they can come out and they can say,
00:06:27.000And I don't think we're living up to the anthem.
00:06:29.000It's not like these guys have no platform.
00:06:31.000When celebrities speak, people listen.
00:06:33.000But kneeling for the national anthem was a crude method of attempting to draw attention and actually created more of a backlash than it was meant to do.
00:06:40.000I do not think it is appropriate for the President of the United States to be inserting himself in these controversies.
00:06:45.000I don't think it was appropriate when Obama did it.
00:06:46.000I don't think it's appropriate when President Trump does it.
00:06:48.000President Obama, the Obama administration, inserted themselves into controversies like this in North Carolina when there was an act at the local level in Charlotte to prevent transgender people from using opposite-sex bathrooms.
00:06:59.000And there was a boycott of the NCAA, and the entire left supported it.
00:07:04.000The NCAA was not going to allow Final Four games to be played in North Carolina thanks to a local bathroom policy.
00:07:09.000They thought this was great, but if the NFL says we're not going to allow people to kneel,
00:07:13.000Then it's a huge problem because the NFL is cracking down on free speech.
00:07:16.000Now listen, I am a free speech absolutist, but private companies have the ability to take steps to curb free speech.
00:07:24.000Hey, there's a difference between me going and speaking at UC Berkeley and me going and speaking at DePaul University.
00:07:29.000When I spoke at DePaul University, they threatened to arrest me.
00:07:31.000They said if you walk on this campus, even though I'd been invited by a student group, they said if you walk on this campus, you will be arrested.
00:07:37.000And I respected that because, listen, it is a private university.
00:07:44.000Now, there is also a major difference, and I don't like the comparisons between, oh, you conservatives complaining about safe spaces on college campuses, but now you want a safe space at an NFL game.
00:07:53.000There is no comparison between a college campus and an NFL game.
00:08:34.000The NFL has always been heavily tied in with a lot of patriotic imagery.
00:08:38.000That's part of the products that they are selling to the American people, is that this is the all-American sport where we get together as a community every Sunday afternoon, and we remember that America is a great place, and we enjoy ourselves and just watch some people clock each other.
00:08:49.000That's basically what football is all about, and it's not the NFL's fault if that product is being undercut by people on the field and they say,
00:08:57.000We're not going to withstand the fans who don't want to watch our games.
00:09:01.000We are not going to withstand the ticket sales loss, and we're not going to withstand the TV ratings loss.
00:09:07.000The entire NFL is moving in the direction of whatever the TV ratings say, and the TV ratings in 2017 were down a full 8%.
00:09:12.000That's a significant, significant drop.
00:09:14.000Now, not all of that is due to the National Anthem controversy, but certainly part of it is due to the National Anthem controversy.
00:09:20.000When there have been polls done of people who say they're not watching as much NFL, something like 50% of them cite the National Anthem controversy.
00:09:26.000Because they don't feel solidarity with the players who are kneeling for the national anthem.
00:09:30.000This is not the same thing as a college campus.
00:09:32.000Again, it's more like, first of all, I'm an outside contractor who's brought in by a student group for that free exchange of ideas.
00:09:37.000Again, college campuses are for ideas.
00:09:40.000NFL games are for playing football and production of a product.
00:09:44.000It's more like if a college campus had a professor who taught engineering, and this engineering professor decided that they were going to talk politics at the beginning of every engineering class, and pretty soon, it turns out that all the students want to just learn engineering, and they're not interested in hearing the politics, and so they all drop out of the class.
00:10:00.000Does the college now have the right to lay the guy off?
00:10:03.000In my opinion, the college does have the right to lay the guy off.
00:10:05.000He's speaking outside of his realm of political purview.
00:10:09.000If you were in poli-sci, it's a little bit of a different story.
00:10:11.000If he's in engineering, he's there to provide an engineering product.
00:10:14.000And if the engineering product does not meet specifications, the college can do what it wants.
00:10:17.000And that's not quite the same thing as a student group inviting someone for a political conversation and then the college cracking down on a political side of that political conversation.
00:10:28.000The case that's being made on campus is that this is a safe space and that people with differing political points of view in an inherently political area should not be able to speak.
00:10:37.000The case being made with regard to the NFL is I'm not going to tune in to watch lectures on police brutality when I want to watch a football game.
00:10:44.000That is not the same case that's being made.
00:10:46.000It's not about the NFL being a safe space.
00:10:48.000It is about the NFL not providing what it promised to consumers.
00:10:51.000And that's why you've seen so many people drop out.
00:10:53.000Now, with that said, you know, Mike Pence tweeted out hashtag winning.
00:10:58.000It is appropriate for government officials to say that it is winning to pressure a private organization to crack down on members of its organization for political reasons.
00:11:09.000I think that it's one thing for you or for me to say I'm turning off the TV.
00:11:13.000I think if Trump said, listen, I've been turning off the TV, that's fine.
00:11:16.000I think the the attempt, the pretty clear attempt, governmental attempt to pressure private organizations to do things on the free speech basis.
00:11:29.000But I'll explain why I think this is actually counterproductive for Trump and Pence to a certain degree in just one second.
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00:12:48.000And I think that that is a useful political tactic.
00:12:50.000But in its way, it's no different from what Obama did when he would get people jazzed up about Ferguson to go out and vote for him in a midterm election or in a presidential election in 2012 by sending Joe Biden out to say that Mitt Romney was going to put y'all back in chains.
00:13:02.000I do not like the idea of the president of the United States
00:13:05.000Taking an inherently political issue and instead of being circumspect about the issues that are being, that are in play, going straight to the everybody who disagrees with me should be deported stuff.
00:13:25.000But, for the country, what I would like is more Americans to believe that standing for the National Anthem is an inherent good, not fewer Americans.
00:13:33.000The polls show that before President Trump got involved in this particular issue, something like 75%, 80% of Americans thought that it was stupid and wrong to kneel for the National Anthem.
00:13:42.000Now that Trump has gotten himself involved, it's more like 55% or 60%.
00:13:45.000So, to win for Trump, because the majority of the public still agrees with him, but it is not a win for America if 20% of the public now believes the other way simply because they don't like President Trump.
00:13:55.000So, again, I understand the gut-level response of President Trump, which is what he is, it's what he does.
00:14:02.000I understand why that's popular, but I don't think that it's productive for the country.
00:14:05.000Now, with all of that said, it was not Trump who politicized the NFL.
00:14:08.000It was the NFL players who politicized the NFL long before Trump was even involved with this.
00:14:13.000They were the ones who decided to kneel for the national anthem.
00:14:15.000They were the ones who decided to wear socks, as Colin Kaepernick did, with the depiction of cops as pigs.
00:15:56.000The guy is named Michael Rotondo, and it did not go well for him.
00:16:01.000It's my understanding you've lived, you know, at your parents' house, rent-free for eight years, and I know you do your own laundry, you buy your own food, but they asked you five times, please move out.
00:16:15.000Why couldn't you guys resolve this without the court?
00:16:21.000I would consider much of what they were doing to try to get me out as a tax and what I was trying to, I was just, you know... I mean, hey, do you, you know, a lot of us have lived with our parents maybe a little bit longer than we wish we could.
00:16:45.000But, you know, you only have one mom and dad.
00:16:47.000And I understand that you are probably more upset than even you're letting on.
00:16:52.000But don't you want to reconcile with them?
00:16:56.000OK, let me let me point out here that Brooke Baldwin obviously is having this guy on just to humiliate him.
00:17:02.000And this is this is not great as a television host.
00:17:05.000You shouldn't have people on simply to make them look stupid.
00:17:08.000I think that it's kind of a waste of time and a waste of everybody's time.
00:17:10.000That said, there's another point here to be made.
00:17:13.000So CNN is spending an awful lot of time with this guy.
00:17:15.000They spent like five, 10 minutes with this guy talking about how he wanted to stay home and he was entitled.
00:17:21.000CNN is very much in favor of the idea that if you occupy somebody else's dwelling, you should not be evicted.
00:17:27.000They're the ones who are saying that when banks evict people for non-payment of their bills, that this is somehow cruel and terrible.
00:17:34.000People on the left want to have it both ways.
00:17:35.000They want to say the millennial generation is entitled when they act precisely how CNN and MSNBC tell them to, which is, you should mooch off your parents.
00:17:43.000We were told that until we were 26, we were staying on our parents' health insurance, and we should mooch off our parents.
00:18:03.000But it does go to show you how even the underlying narrative points that CNN is trying to drive home that are successful for them, in many cases, are conservative points.
00:18:12.000When you go and you watch movies from Hollywood, you know, Hollywood, obviously, a very, very left area.
00:18:16.000It's a place where virtually everybody is a Democrat.
00:18:19.000But if you just watch the movies without knowing the politics of the people behind it, and you could avoid all of the stupid insertions of politics into the particular movies that you are watching, what you would see is actually a very conservative narrative that's drawn out in nearly every movie.
00:18:32.000It's usually a good guy and a bad guy.
00:18:57.000But because they decided to take the conservative angle, it's much more compelling TV, which is, why are you suing your parents to stay in their home?
00:19:03.000Again, it's hilarious to see so many folks on the left who are saying, you should be independent.
00:19:07.000You should get out of your parents' home.
00:19:47.000I mean, he's doing what he's supposed to do.
00:19:49.000Presumably Bernie Sanders would stand up for him.
00:19:51.000But CNN is not standing up for him because even they understand that there is nothing good happening there in terms of the useful.
00:19:57.000Okay, so before I go any further, I want to talk about President Trump and North Korea because he made a pretty major move on North Korea this morning.
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00:22:05.000Meanwhile, President Trump has gotten himself into, not a pickle, out of a pickle, I would suggest.
00:22:11.000So I have always been skeptical of the idea that there was going to be a grand summit between the Trump administration and the North Korean dictatorship.
00:22:19.000I have always been deeply skeptical of this.
00:22:20.000I was from the beginning, when people were shouting,
00:22:23.000Well, President Trump did the right thing.
00:22:43.000A few days ago, North Korea threatened a nuclear showdown with the United States.
00:22:47.000So this was just a few, a couple of days ago.
00:22:50.000North Korea, according to Huffington Post, has escalated its war of words with the U.S., repeating a threat on Thursday to call off the planned June 12 summit with President Donald Trump.
00:22:58.000Warning that a nuclear showdown could instead be on the table.
00:23:00.000In a statement published by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency, the North's Vice Minister of Public Affairs, Cho Sun-hui, blamed reckless remarks made by top U.S.
00:23:09.000officials as the reason behind Pyongyang's second thoughts.
00:23:12.000Cho took aim at VP Mike Pence in particular and called him a political dummy.
00:23:17.000Who defended North Korea with his unbridled and imprudent comments.
00:23:21.000Pence had warned in a Fox News interview that Pyongyang could follow the Libya model if Kim Jong-un doesn't make a deal, which was a deal where Muammar Gaddafi met a brutal end after his decision to denuclearize.
00:23:30.000OK, North Korea has long expressed distaste at comparisons with Libya.
00:23:33.000They don't want to look like a weak country.
00:23:35.000They gave up their nuclear weaponry and all the rest.
00:23:37.000So they were ripping on Mike Pence and they were suggesting that they were going to pull out of the June 12th summit.
00:23:43.000And so Trump came out and he wrote a letter and his letter basically said, fine, stay home.
00:24:42.000We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant.
00:24:47.000I was very much looking forward to being there with you.
00:24:49.000Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate at this time to have this long-planned meeting.
00:24:58.000Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties but to the detriment of the world, will not take place.
00:25:06.000You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.
00:25:30.000I mean, it's the president of the United States telling North Koreans, guys, like, let's be real here.
00:25:35.000You're pretending that this is a partnership of co-equals, that we're gonna sit down across the table and we're gonna pretend like North Korea is a real country and not a crazy dictatorship where you imprison in a gulag hundreds of thousands of people?
00:25:46.000And then test her crappy level nuclear weapons?
00:27:57.000What's hilarious is folks on the left are saying, how could Donald Trump do this?
00:28:01.000It just shows how Donald Trump blew it.
00:28:02.000Now, here's where Donald Trump went wrong.
00:28:04.000He shouldn't have been running around talking about how he was going to win the Nobel Prize for meeting with Kim Jong-un beforehand, but that's Trump's thing.
00:28:11.000Okay, are we going to pretend for half a second here that President Trump isn't the guy who walks around bragging about everything?
00:28:18.000Of course, as soon as people started saying Nobel Prize, he was going to go around talking about how he was about to win eight Nobel Prizes in physics, in literature, all of them, right?
00:28:28.000He was going to like that was going to happen.
00:28:30.000But here's the I thought that that was trapping him in a situation where he was going to have more stake in having the meeting than in getting something good out of the meeting.
00:29:04.000By President Trump's willingness to walk away from the table with Kim Jong-un, because I don't think that it was smart for him to put it out there that we were going to meet with Kim Jong-un without preconditions in the first place.
00:29:14.000I don't think it was smart to walk into a room not knowing what we wanted from Kim Jong-un.
00:29:48.000Well, in just a second, I'm going to give you the update on this ins— I have to talk to you about this judicial decision about Trump's Twitter feed because it's just ridiculous.
00:29:57.000But first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Software Advice.
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00:33:29.000The way it works is that you send off your little missives into cyberspace and anyone can see them, unless that person annoys you, in which case you have the ability to do one of two things.
00:33:37.000You can either mute them so you can't see their responses to you.
00:33:40.000This is my preferred method because I just am amused by the idea that there are people who are so upset about what I'm saying that they are firing back tweet after tweet at me and I can't hear them at all.
00:33:49.000It's the equivalent of me hitting mute on my TV screen or sticking my thumbs in my ears.
00:33:53.000I don't actually need to listen to you, and you still think you're talking to me, so I think that's really funny.
00:34:58.000So this would seem to suggest that if the President of the United States gives an interview to one outlet, he must give an interview to all outlets.
00:35:40.000He doesn't pay tax dollars to Twitter.
00:36:04.000Again, this is this is completely idiotic.
00:36:05.000And if this is the case, then presumably I should sue all the Democratic legislators who have been blocking me.
00:36:10.000But antipathy for the antipathy for the the Trump administration has led the judiciary just to the stupidest possible conclusions, like really, really dumb conclusions.
00:36:20.000What they say is that under Supreme Court jurisprudence, there are three types of public forums, foura, traditional, designated, and limited, and closed.
00:36:28.000So they found that this is a designated public forum because anyone can view Trump's tweets, because anyone with a Twitter account can follow Trump's tweets, because anyone who's not blocked on Twitter can interact with Trump's tweets, and because the social media directly said, social media director at the White House, Dan Scavino, said Twitter is how Trump communicates with you, the American people.
00:37:19.000So he has like 600,000 followers on Twitter, and he blocked his entire account.
00:37:22.000So presumably I can sue Michael Avenatti, since this is the way he gets out information, and I can make the claim that Michael Avenatti is not able to block me because Twitter is a public forum.
00:37:30.000Twitter's a public forum, just like in a public park.
00:37:32.000He can't force me to be removed from a public park, can he?
00:37:35.000He says, I purposely locked my account due to the following, due to the following, bots, abusive trolls, and we will be releasing some sensitive info in the coming weeks, and I want to somewhat control who has initial access to it.
00:37:46.000You're not going to control who has initial access to it, dude.
00:37:49.000You have 600,000 followers on Twitter, and a lot of those people, presumably, are going to distribute that information as soon as it hits.
00:37:56.000Ryan Lizza at CNN rightly said, this is ridiculous.
00:37:59.000He rightly said, this is hypocritical.
00:38:01.000How can you say that he's a champion of the press, when at the same time, he's blocking reporters who are covering him after there were mildly critical tweets?
00:38:09.000But again, hypocrisy, thy name be leftism, and the hypocrisy of the left is on full display throughout all of this just silliness.
00:38:18.000And this Twitter spat is really particularly stupid.
00:38:21.000I mean, the fact that Trump tweets things out and that people look at those tweets does not mean that you have direct access to President Trump's every thought, any time, regardless as to who you are, or that you have no access to Trump if you can't follow him on Twitter.
00:38:32.000I promise you, people are pretty aware of what President Trump is doing these days, but it shows the perversion of the judiciary and the fact that the judges that President Trump is selecting are deeply important because once the judiciary is monopolized by the left, then they will use that judiciary to cram down whatever dumb policy they see fit to cram down that day.
00:38:49.000Okay, meanwhile, the Mueller investigation continues to move forward.
00:39:03.000The case that was being made by the Obama administration, the FBI, the DOJ under Obama, is that it was scrutiny of George Papadopoulos that led to the opening of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, because Papadopoulos had met with a professor in London who had said that he had access to Hillary Clinton's emails via Russian hacking, and Papadopoulos had gone around bragging about it.
00:39:22.000This is what led to the opening of the investigation, according to the FBI.
00:39:26.000Now, apparently, according to CNN reporter Shimon Prokopesk, he says that the Mueller office has asked the courts to begin the sentencing process.
00:39:35.000He says, it signals to now they're done with George Papadopoulos and his cooperation.
00:39:39.000He's been providing them information for months, now cooperating with them.
00:39:42.000Within the last hour, the special counsel's office filed a status report saying they are ready for him to be sentenced.
00:40:25.000He has been very cooperative with Robert Mueller, and you recall that just a few months ago, his top-secret security clearance was revoked by John Kelly, who is the White House Chief of Staff, because he had a temporary top-security clearance, and that was revoked after there was a staffer who was ousted from the White House for having allegedly abused his ex-wife and ex-girlfriends.
00:41:21.000He has provided them with tons of documents that reflect what he's provided Congress and what else they've asked for.
00:41:27.000He sat down in the fall when they wanted to ask questions about General Flynn, and he was very happy to spend almost an entire workday when they asked again.
00:41:36.000So I would say it's the definition of cooperation.
00:41:38.000So the assumption on the part of the left is that Jared Kushner was going to go to jail, that there was too much corruption.
00:42:11.000I don't see why, if he was targeted by the FBI, he doesn't just declassify the documents demonstrating this.
00:42:16.000The President of the United States has plenary power to declassify anything he wants under FBI auspices.
00:42:21.000So that means, tonight, he could just get rid of the classification status for the FISA warrant on Carter Page.
00:42:28.000He could just get rid of the classification status on all of the information about the informant against his campaign.
00:42:33.000And again, I am not sure that, we have to be very specific in our language.
00:42:37.000When President Trump says that he was spied on, his campaign was spied on,
00:42:40.000Members of his campaign had an informant against them.
00:42:43.000That's not quite the same thing as saying that Trump himself was spied on, or Kushner was spied on, or Bannon was spied on, or any of the top members of his campaign at any point.
00:42:52.000Low-level people who are openly discussing the possibility of working with Russia, it seems to me, were the targets of the informants.
00:42:57.000The reason I'm being careful here is just I want to go where the evidence leads.
00:43:00.000If the evidence ends up leading to SpyGates 2018, fine.
00:43:04.000Fine, if that's where it leads, I'm happy to go there.
00:43:06.000But so far, I'm not seeing the evidence and I want to be very specific before we start slandering the entire FBI and suggesting the FBI was out to get Trump in March 2016 before he had even won the nomination.
00:43:16.000Okay, so, you know, let's just be specific in our accusations.
00:43:19.000Okay, I think that it's time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:43:53.000Edward IV, Richard III, who you'll recall from your Shakespeare classes in high school, if you actually went to a decent high school, and then the period immediately following with the restoration of Henry IV.
00:46:39.000Very sympathetic take on virtually all of the characters, so definitely worth checking out.
00:46:44.000Okay, now time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:46:50.000Okay, so, here is the thing that I hate today.
00:46:52.000The thing that I hate is that there was a Freedom of Information Act request that was reported by the Baltimore Post about Barack Obama and his top advisors after the tragedy at Sandy Hook.
00:47:03.000Okay, right after the tragedy at Sandy Hook, after the act of evil at Sandy Hook in which 20 children were shot and 6 staffers were shot as well.
00:47:11.000The top members of the Obama administration immediately began discussing how to use this as a political weapon before the bodies were even cold.
00:47:19.000So two days after the massacre that left 26 dead, there is a text exchange between Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff for President Obama, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
00:47:48.000And then Duncan asked about so-called gun show loopholes.
00:47:56.000He said, So they were already trading ideas on how exactly to take advantage of this entire thing, the immediate polarization, the immediate politicization, the attempt to turn it into a rallying cry for gun control.
00:48:10.000Tap people's emotions is, you know, listen, that's politics.
00:48:14.000But when it's exposed to public view, it is a little bit gross.
00:48:18.000And I think everybody should see that the the supposed sincerity of the Obama administration in pushing legislation connected with gun control was largely about tapping into people's emotion, which you could tell certainly at the time.
00:48:30.000OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with Mailbag.
00:48:31.000So if you're going to subscribe, now is the day to do it, because this means that you get to be part of our Mailbag tomorrow.