On this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, Ben talks about the importance of Jerusalem, the history of the city, and why it is holy to all of the world s major religions. He also discusses the role of the Western Wall as a holy site for the Jewish people, and the significance of the Dome of the Rock as a place where the Holy of Holies used to be located. And he explains why it's important to understand where our own values come from and how they are grounded in Judea and the Judean tradition. The show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVpn.org/ProtectYourOnlinePrivacy and use the promo code: PGPodcasts to receive 20% off your first month with discount code PGPUNIVERSAL at checkout. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use coupon code: "ELISSA" at checkout to receive 10% off the first month of your purchase when you enter the offer. Thanks to Aish Hattora for sponsoring the show, and our sponsor, ExpressVPN for sponsoring our ad-free version of the show. We hope you enjoy the show! and don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to our podcast! and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our new podcast, Rate/subscribe to our newest episode of the podcast, "The Right Side Side of History" wherever you get your favorite podcast listening to the latest episodes of the latest episode of "The Ben Shapiro Podcasts. Ben Shapiro's "Ben Shapiro Show" Subscribe on iTunes, Subscribe on Podchaser, wherever you listen to the show is available. And don't miss it! Ben's thoughts on the latest podcast? Subscribe to Ben's newest episode is on your favorite pod, subscribe on iTunes or watch it on iTunes? Subscribe on PODCAST? Learn more about you can be reached via the App, subscribe to his podcast, and subscribe on the podCast, and more! If you're looking for more like it's great, subscribe and review it on your own podcast, leave a review, comment on it's review on the Podchronicity? and more like that's a review? or share it on social media? Subscribe & subscribe to it's notepay & subscribe on your thoughts on your podcasting app?
00:00:00.000Broadcasting from Jerusalem, Democrats claim they have their smoking gun, Republicans try to storm a secret Democratic hearing, and Congress people prove they know nothing about the newfangled interwebs.
00:00:11.000The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.com.
00:00:19.000Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com.
00:00:23.000Well, first of all, before we even begin, I just want to thank Aish Hattora for putting us up in this location.
00:00:28.000This is definitely the best location we're ever going to have for The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:31.000If you don't subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show, one of the reasons you should is so you can see the view behind me, because this really is an astonishing, astonishing view.
00:00:48.000It's not really a mosque that they put right on top of the Jewish holiest site, which is what it is.
00:00:53.000The Temple Mount is behind that wall and occupies that entire plateau.
00:00:57.000We walked over there a little bit earlier this week and then were kicked off for the crime of mumbling prayers, which apparently is not allowed formally in Israel because of the Islamic Waqf.
00:01:29.000So you're one of the five people who's not one of those three things, and you are trying to figure out exactly what is the significance of that.
00:01:35.000Like, what's the significance of this place?
00:01:37.000Jerusalem, as I've said in my book, The Right Side of History, lies at the heart of Western civilization.
00:01:41.000It lies at the heart of Western civilization because Jerusalem is the holiest site in Judaism, which is the first monotheistic religion to really have tremendous impact on the world, and posits some certain central values that lie at the root of Western values, including human rights, the idea that human beings are made in God's image, the idea that the universe is a predictable place that human intellect is capable of understanding.
00:02:05.000You know, all of that is deeply important stuff.
00:02:08.000The reason that this particular site is very important is because underneath, according to Jewish thought, underneath the dome of the rock over there where the Holy of Holies used to stand in the Beit HaMikdash, in the temple, is the rock where a bunch of things happen.
00:02:26.000It's the rock where Abraham, according to the Bible, was about to sacrifice Isaac.
00:02:32.000It's also the rock where Jacob, when he was promised the land, had his dream with the ladder going up to heaven.
00:02:37.000It's a deeply important place in Jewish spirituality.
00:02:41.000And again, Jewish spirituality lies at the root of Christian spirituality.
00:02:44.000It lies at the root of Muslim spirituality.
00:02:45.000They're all based on the same book in the original.
00:02:48.000And Jerusalem is holy to all of those religions for this specific purpose.
00:02:53.000Now, to talk for a second about sort of the history and geography of Jerusalem, beyond the obvious value of understanding the heritage of your thought.
00:03:02.000And that really is important, whether you are secular or whether you're religious.
00:03:05.000Obviously, there are a lot of secular people around the West, and that's fine.
00:03:09.000You can be a perfectly moral person and be secular, but it is obvious that you do have to understand the roots of where your own values come from.
00:03:15.000And those values do spring from both Athens, the idea of Greek thought and rationality, and from Jerusalem, this idea of faith-based, you have to take it on assumption, truths about the universe that are then reasoned out through human reason.
00:03:29.000And this tug and pull between revelation and reason, between faith-based assumptions that you must make about the universe in order to create a civilization and human reason, that's what built the West.
00:03:39.000To talk about the geography for just a second, you can't really see off to my left, that would be Ir David.
00:03:43.000If you could see off to my left, what you would see is that down the hill is the actual site of the of the kingdom of David.
00:03:49.000So Old Jerusalem, which surrounds us here on my right, is actually a much later invention, historically speaking.
00:03:56.000Ir David is the stuff that's 3,500 years old, 4,000 years old, depending, going all the way back.
00:04:39.000The reason that people consider it supremely holy is because, obviously, it is also the closest place that Jews have had access to for thousands of years to pray toward the point of sort of what they call the axis mundi in Greek, or in Latin, the center of the spiritual or in Latin, the center of the spiritual universe.
00:04:59.000But the Western Wall itself, there's nothing that differentiates this particular section of the Western Wall from the stuff that is just off to my left, which is more Western Wall.
00:05:07.000And then if you continue all the way down for thousands and thousands of feet, it continues to be...
00:05:12.000There's just tons and tons of Western Wall going all the way through.
00:05:15.000The difference is that the Mamluks actually built buildings all the way up to the Western Wall.
00:05:19.000So this is all covered by occupied... I don't mean that in the sense of, like, military occupation.
00:05:24.000I mean, like, people who actually occupy apartments living up against the Western Wall and have stores up against the Western Wall.
00:05:31.000And then, of course, the retaining wall continues all the way around.
00:05:33.000And all of that is just as ancient as the Western Wall here.
00:05:35.000So there's no particular reason that the Western Wall is any more holy, theoretically.
00:05:39.000Then the Eastern Wall, or then the Northern Wall, or then the Southern Wall, except for sort of location and the ability of Jews to pray there.
00:05:45.000Now, the reason that this is important, I'll get to in just a second.
00:05:48.000The reason that Jerusalem should remain unified and has to remain in Israeli hands, I'm going to explain in just a second, because historically speaking, bottom line is, you see around me a thriving city.
00:05:57.000In 1966, this was a closed city, the Jordanians were in charge of it, and Jews could not pray at the Western Wall.
00:06:04.000All of this was closed to both Jews and largely to Christians as well.
00:06:08.000And that changed in 1967, during the Six-Day War, when Israel was able to take over the old city of Jerusalem.
00:06:14.000So I'll explain that in just one second.
00:06:16.000First, let's talk for a second about your investment.
00:06:19.000So, it's a chaotic world out there, and because there's so much chaos in American domestic politics, Foreign politics, obviously.
00:06:25.000The Middle East is a bit of a tinderbox.
00:06:26.000And when I say a bit, I mean a large tinderbox.
00:06:28.000Well, there's a reason that people are rushing to safe haven in gold.
00:06:32.000Gold is currently sitting at a five-year high.
00:06:33.000I've been telling you for years that if you are looking to at least diversify a little bit, And keep your money in a place where it's not going to be subjected to the whims of governments that inflate currency.
00:06:43.000It's going to be a little bit protected from the chaos of the world.
00:06:45.000Well, gold would be the place to go, right?
00:06:47.000Protect yourself from inflation, from national debt, from global instability.
00:06:50.000If you haven't taken the first step and actually learned about all of this, Gotten your free information kit on gold?
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00:07:43.000It's just a giant, well-populated area that stretches for you know, miles in a particular radius.
00:07:54.000So the idea of drawing a line and saying, on this side of the line, this will belong to the terrorist Palestinian authority.
00:07:59.000On this side of the line, we'll have the Israeli government, which is a free and open democratic government, which allows people of every religion to vote and to sit in it and to visit all the holy sites.
00:08:08.000This wall, the Kotel, was completely closed to Jews for years.
00:08:11.000They were going all the way back to before the establishment of the State of Israel when this was British-Palestine, Whenever you see people, by the way, talk about, well, you know, this was Palestine before.
00:08:42.000Israel fights back, and they push the Jordanians entirely out of the area, leading to the very famous statement by a member of the Israeli military, Har Habayit Be'Adenu, that the Temple Mount is in our hands, and this has been Israeli territory ever since, as it always should have been, and as it Will remain, because the fact is that there is no dividing line that can be drawn in Jerusalem.
00:09:00.000Whenever anybody says East Jerusalem is the Palestinian capital, what they're really talking about is towns that are located just outside of Jerusalem.
00:09:06.000They're not talking about, like, taking this house right here and saying this is now Palestinian Authority territory.
00:09:12.000Nobody right, left, or center in Israel, and the left largely doesn't exist because of this specific issue.
00:09:17.000Nobody is actually going to buy into the idea of taking razor wire and then dropping it right across the center of the Old City of Jerusalem.
00:09:33.000Again, if you're a Christian and you want to visit holy sites, you need Israel to be in charge of this area.
00:09:37.000If you're a Jew, you certainly need Israel to be in charge of this area because Jews have been forbidden to pray at their holy sites for hundreds of years, in many cases, relegated to specific days they could visit the Western Wall.
00:09:49.000There were riots if Jews would visit these places.
00:09:51.000Even now, there's still vestiges of this in how Israel controls the Temple Mount in the sense that Israel still makes itself subject to the whims of the Islamic Waqf.
00:10:00.000So as I learned earlier this week when I visited the Temple Mount, if you go up there and you mumble some prayers, there is a chance that you're going to get booted from the Temple Mount for the great sin of praying in Hebrew, right?
00:10:09.000If I went up there and I prayed in Arabic, then I could walk directly up to the Dome of the Rock.
00:10:13.000I could just hang out in there all day.
00:10:17.000There's a school on the on the northern side of the temple now, where children who are Muslim actually learn every day.
00:10:23.000If you're a Jew and you want to walk up there, you have to be guarded by the Mishtara, by the police.
00:10:28.000And if you commit the terrible, terrible sin of praying up there, then perhaps you will be booted.
00:10:34.000It depends sort of how the police feel that day, if it starts to get really, really bad.
00:10:39.000But that is more a vestige of sort of Jewish-Muslim relations pre-1967 than it is what exists in Israel currently.
00:10:47.000So, in other words, there are more restrictions on Jews praying in Jerusalem than there are on Muslims praying in Jerusalem in Israeli Jerusalem.
00:10:53.000So, that gives you a little bit of the context in which we sit.
00:10:55.000If you're just looking at the geography, again, that's Mount Scopus all the way in the background.
00:11:01.000You can see the Western Wall slightly below me.
00:11:04.000This is the most contested area on earth.
00:11:06.000It is also the area that it is vital remain under Israeli control.
00:11:11.000If you actually wish to see freedom of worship, if you wish to see liberalism, and I just mean freedom and openness, then the idea of handing that over to the terrorist Palestinian Authority, to Hamas, or to Islamic Jihad, or to any of the myriad parties who are currently vying for Palestinian power is full-scale insanity.
00:11:26.000So when you hear people on the American or European left say, why doesn't Israel just divide Jerusalem?
00:11:30.000Think about the idea of taking a terrorist and giving them half your house and not moving out.
00:11:36.000I mean, that is what you are talking about right here.
00:11:39.000Unworkable in every possible scenario.
00:11:42.000Even the left in Israel has now acknowledged that the city of Jerusalem is not going to be divided.
00:11:47.000As I said before, when they talk about dividing Jerusalem, they're really talking about the very, very outskirts that are largely Arab areas.
00:11:53.000Over to my left, you see some Arab towns.
00:11:57.000Everything in Israel is very, very close together because Israel is not a very large country.
00:12:01.000Um, but, I think it's important to actually see it, and be here, and if you can't see it, at least take a look at that picture, and imagine the idea of a giant wall, uh, a Berlin Wall going up, you know, half a, half a, what, maybe a quarter mile to my right here?
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00:13:42.000So to understand what is happening right here, you have to understand that President Trump basically suspended aid to Ukraine in the aftermath of the election of Ukraine's newly elected leader, Vladimir Zelensky.
00:13:54.000And the Ukrainians were not formally informed of this.
00:13:56.000They started to get sort of first indications that the United States was holding back the aid apparently in mid-August.
00:14:05.000is an obvious example of the quid pro quo.
00:14:07.000So all of this is an outgrowth of the, we have to back up for a second, all of this is an outgrowth of the testimony by Ambassador Bill Taylor, who testified in front of the House Oversight Committee, the Intel Committee, yesterday.
00:14:18.000And in his testimony, he suggested that he had worked with a bevy of Trump officials and that everybody sort of understood that President Trump wanted Ukraine to announce investigations and that the aid would be withheld if the investigations were not undertaken.
00:14:31.000Now, the question is, were those investigations motivated by an attempt to get Joe Biden or are they motivated by an attempt to quote unquote fight corruption?
00:14:38.000The answer probably is somewhere in the middle.
00:14:40.000Okay, and when I say somewhere in the middle, I don't even really mean like get Joe Biden, fight corruption.
00:14:45.000And it really is that President Trump, you have to think of President Trump's character.
00:14:50.000Do you think that President Trump for the last couple of years has been deploying Rudy Giuliani in a specific effort to suss out Joe Biden and find dirt on Joe Biden and go get Joe Biden and this was just the last step of that?
00:15:02.000Was Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine because President Trump was really ticked about all of the talk about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
00:15:08.000He had heard these wild rumors that Ukraine had Hillary's server.
00:15:11.000He kept hearing that Ukraine had worked with Hillary Clinton to dig up dirt on him and Paul Manafort.
00:15:16.000That part happens to be true as reported by Politico.
00:15:19.000And so in his head, when he heard Ukrainian corruption, all of this melds into one giant ball of mush.
00:15:24.000And then he was like, I'm gonna send Rudy over there to investigate all of that, and I want Ukraine to go along with all of it.
00:15:31.000to simply do what I want them to do and I'm going to withhold aid until they do that.
00:15:35.000Now, is that to Trump's political benefit?
00:15:37.000Is that specifically about Trump or is that about a legitimate U.S. interest in finding out what exactly happened in Ukraine in 2016?
00:15:43.000Now, if you say that it's both, well, then you're in Democrat territory because the fact is that for two and a half years, we investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.
00:16:02.000Well, if Trump does the same thing with regard to Ukraine, in other words, if Trump has bad information that Ukraine was interfering in the 2016 election, and that Ukraine was attempting to target him, and that Ukraine, for some odd reason, has Hillary Clinton's server, and he says, I want to investigate every single bit of that, I want all of that investigated, is that in his political interest?
00:16:21.000Is that in the interest of the United States?
00:16:22.000Well, yeah, actually, in the same way that it was in the interest of the United States to investigate Russian interference in the American election.
00:16:28.000So it's hard to see how you can have it both ways, that the Trump-Russia investigation was totally legit, above board and decent, but Trump investigating Ukrainian interference in 2016 was absolutely terrible, quid pro quo, solely about Trump, quote-unquote, getting his political enemies.
00:16:43.000See, I think that people are sort of assuming a level of mens rea and intent that just never applies to Trump.
00:16:48.000I just don't think Trump thinks this way.
00:16:50.000I don't, like, what is your evidence that Trump really thinks ahead and thinks step by step in logical fashion toward his end goal?
00:16:57.000Like, has this ever happened with President Trump?
00:17:20.000Or is that a quid pro quo that is real, but not illegal?
00:17:25.000And for a stupid, half stupid purpose, but not a bad purpose, right?
00:17:29.000I think that's probably where things are.
00:17:32.000So one of the points that was made by me, actually, and became sort of a popular talking point on the right is that during this famous July 25th phone call between Trump and Zelensky, Trump is supposedly pressuring Zelensky to go get Joe Biden.
00:17:44.000He mentions Joe Biden a couple of times and he mentions Burisma a couple of times and all of this.
00:17:49.000And the idea is that he's withholding military aid in order to pressure Zelensky.
00:17:52.000And as I pointed out at the time, there were several reports suggesting that Zelensky and the Ukrainians had no idea at the time that military aid was actually being withheld.
00:18:00.000And so it's hard to say quid pro quo, at least over military aid, based on that phone call before the Ukrainians know there is a pro quo.
00:18:06.000Well, now the media are trying to suggest that no, the Ukrainians actually did know that there was pressure.
00:18:11.000They didn't know that there was a quid pro quo, but they knew there was pressure, and they knew by mid-August that there was military aid that was being withheld.
00:18:17.000Okay, well, granted, they could know by mid-August, but that July 25th phone call is the crux of this thing.
00:18:23.000And you'll notice that in the discussions of the Ukraine phone call, one name seems to sort of have dropped away, and that name is Biden.
00:18:30.000So originally, the entire story was that this was all about getting Joe Biden.
00:18:34.000Then it sort of morphed and broadened into, well, Trump wanted to investigate Ukraine, and that's bad.
00:18:57.000Now, as I've been saying this now for weeks, Rudy Giuliani is going to be the one this all comes down to.
00:19:01.000Rudy is going to show up and he's going to testify and he's going to have to explain why the Burisma Joe Biden thing fits into a broader rubric of supposed election interference and corruption.
00:19:10.000And if he can't do that, then Trump is going to have some troubles.
00:19:12.000If Rudy gets up there and he says, of course we were going after Joe Biden.
00:19:27.000Now, with that said, Republicans are between a rock and a hard place a little bit because Trump's team keeps going out there and saying dumb stuff.
00:19:33.000You have Mick Mulvaney saying things about quid pro quo.
00:19:36.000You have Rudy going on TV and saying something ill-informed every five seconds.
00:19:39.000And so if you're a Republican in Congress, your best bet at this point is to sort of hold fire and wait to see more information come out.
00:19:45.000And that's pretty much precisely what you are seeing at this point, right?
00:19:49.000What you're seeing is Republicans who are instead of focusing in on the actual allegations being made by Democrats.
00:19:58.000And frankly, that's, I think, somewhat legitimate.
00:20:01.000So the media are going nuts today because House Republicans showed up to a deposition of a Defense Department official in what is called a SCIF, which is a protected information room, right?
00:20:11.000Where confidential information is being traded.
00:20:13.000And Republicans showed up and they started protesting there.
00:20:16.000And they were very upset because they say not enough Republicans are being let in.
00:20:18.000Now to be fair, there are Republicans who are sitting in these committees.
00:20:21.000Republicans are sitting in these committees.
00:20:31.000Well, because we're hearing wildly, wildly varying reports from these committees.
00:20:36.000About what exactly is happening behind closed doors.
00:20:38.000So we see the full transcript of Bill Taylor's opening testimony about why he thought that Trump was performing a quid pro quo with military aid.
00:20:46.000But then you have Devin Nunes, who sits on that committee, the representative from California, and he says that John Ratliff, who is another Republican representative, destroyed Taylor upon cross-examination, and that Taylor actually could not show a quid pro quo.
00:21:08.000In addition, it continues to be alarming to me the lack of the understanding at the State Department by the bureaucracy there about how much the Ukrainians were involved opposing Donald Trump as a candidate.
00:21:21.000Okay, so what exactly happened behind closed doors?
00:21:25.000And this is what Republicans are protesting.
00:21:27.000They're saying, okay, we're hearing one line from the Republicans, we're hearing one line from the Democrats, and we're getting selective leaks out of this committee.
00:21:32.000So the media have jumped on House Republicans showing up and chanting, let us in, and saying, this is ridiculous, there are Republicans in there.
00:21:39.000That's really not what Republicans are questioning.
00:21:41.000What Republicans are questioning is, why is all of this being done behind closed doors?
00:21:50.000Democrats say they're hesitant to do this because they don't want Trump attacking, they don't want Trump going after witnesses.
00:21:55.000Well, it seems to me that doing this out in the open would be a lot better for the American public.
00:21:59.000Listen, I was open that I wanted the Mueller report released.
00:22:02.000Okay, on the other side, I was a Republican saying I wanted every iota of the Mueller report released, I wanted the public to see it, they had legit questions, and those questions ought to be answered.
00:22:10.000Well, the public has legit questions about this, and they deserve to see all of the answers that are being given behind closed doors.
00:22:16.000And for all the talk about confidential information that's being put out there, what Like, we don't know what confidential information is being put out there, and I've yet to hear Democrats even vaguely refer to what the confidential information is.
00:22:28.000It just seems like a very convenient excuse to keep everything fairly closed.
00:22:47.000It was obviously a dramatic move by Republicans in order to get camera attention on all this.
00:22:51.000Democrats and the media are labeling this a misdirect effort by Republicans.
00:22:55.000They don't want to talk about the topic, so instead, they're wildly spinning about the closed-door nature of this.
00:23:00.000Yeah, except that if Democrats would comply with what Republicans wanted, there'd be more information, not less information, in the public view.
00:23:09.000Just going to point out here that when Democrats occupied Congress, they shut down Congress, they slept on the floor of Congress about gun control a few years back.
00:23:35.000I'm gathered here with dozens of my congressional colleagues, underground, in the basement of the Capitol, because if behind those doors they intend to overturn the results of an American presidential election, we want to know what's going on.
00:23:52.000And it's only reasonable that we would have questions, because so far, Adam Schiff's impeachment inquiry has been marked by secret interviews, selective leaks, Weird theatrical performances of transcripts that never happened and lies about contacts with a whistleblower.
00:24:10.000Okay, so the media are very upset about this.
00:24:12.000According to the New York Times, about two dozen House Republicans chanting, let us in, let us in, stormed the secure room where a Defense Department official arrived Wednesday morning to testify in the impeachment inquiry, refusing to leave and delaying her testimony for hours.
00:24:24.000When Democrats occupy Congress and sleep overnight, they're about gun control.
00:24:27.000That's just them standing up for a position.
00:24:29.000When Republicans do this for a few hours outside of SCIF, then all of a sudden it's the end of the world.
00:24:34.000The lawmakers, most of whom do not sit on the committees conducting the inquiry and are therefore not entitled to attend its hearings, said they were protesting the closed-door nature of the proceedings, which have been open to members of both parties on the committees.
00:24:49.000Adam Schiff is not somebody you trust to run this investigation.
00:24:52.000Running this in public view makes a fair bit of sense.
00:24:55.000The fact that people are sort of protesting, like, if you are in the media, wouldn't you want more information in the public view?
00:25:00.000Why are you very upset at Republicans for calling for more information in the public view?
00:25:03.000Republicans are hammering Democrats, according to the New York Times, for limiting attendance at the hearings to members of the intelligence, judiciary, and foreign affairs committees.
00:25:10.000It is common practice for sensitive congressional investigations to be conducted in closed hearings, at least in their preliminary stages.
00:25:16.000House Republicans did just that when they controlled the chamber and opened an inquiry into the 2012 attack on the U.S.
00:25:22.000Yeah, the difference was they hadn't announced it was an impeachment inquiry, had they?
00:25:26.000They hadn't come out and said this is an impeachment inquiry.
00:25:27.000They said that we're looking into the issue.
00:25:29.000If you wanted to do your preliminary work without announcing an impeachment inquiry, Nancy Pelosi, Republicans wouldn't have a lot to complain about.
00:25:35.000But you announced this is now an impeachment inquiry, which means that it should be done out in the open.
00:25:39.000Democrats say they plan to hold open hearings after the committee's finished opposing witnesses.
00:25:43.000They intend to make public complete transcripts of witness testimony after they've been reviewed for classified material.
00:25:49.000If that's true, then these complaints are basically a bunch of nonsense.
00:25:51.000If it is not true, then Democrats are holding this stuff back for purposes of selective leaking.
00:25:56.000Democrats are looking to take the impeachment probe public, apparently, as soon as mid-November.
00:26:02.000According to the Washington Post, they say over the past three weeks, a parade of current and former Trump administration officials have testified behind closed doors, providing House investigators with a compelling narrative of President Trump's campaign to extract political favors from Ukrainian officials.
00:26:15.000But some Democrats are feeling pressure to advance public hearings in the hopes of avoiding further disruptions, which, of course, is exactly what they should do.
00:26:23.000Republicans were very passionate about all this.
00:26:25.000Some of this is performative for President Trump.
00:26:27.000Some of this is performative for the camera.
00:26:28.000Steve Scalise, the representative from Louisiana, said sort of the same thing.
00:26:32.000He said, this sort of stuff was commonplace in the Soviet Union.
00:26:45.000I think that's a question so many people have, so many of my colleagues have, so many people in the press should have, is through those hidden closed doors over there, Adam Schiff is trying to impeach a President of the United States behind closed doors, literally trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election A year before Americans get to go to the polls to decide who's going to be the president.
00:27:08.000And frankly, it should be the people of this country who decide who's going to be the president, not Nancy Pelosi and not Adam Schiff in secret behind closed doors.
00:27:17.000Okay, so Democrats are certainly feeling the pressure to go ahead and open the doors, which is a good thing.
00:27:22.000Now, there is an amazing, amazing story from the New York Times today about President Trump.
00:27:28.000It's called, Trump's War on the Deep State Turns Against Him.
00:27:31.000They say, the impeachment inquiry is in some ways the culmination of a battle between the president and the government institutions he distrusted and disparaged.
00:27:38.000He's the president of the United States.
00:27:39.000It is not the job of the institutions he oversees to undermine his presidency.
00:27:44.000Hey, that's not the way this is supposed to work.
00:27:46.000Trump's whole complaint about the deep state, I was always under the impression that that was overwrought, but it's hard to say it's overwrought when the New York Times is out there bragging about the so-called deep state going after Trump.
00:27:56.000That's not something that you want from the executive branch.
00:27:58.000You can see why President Trump is very upset about all of this now.
00:28:03.000It can be true that there are real open questions as to what happened in this whole Ukrainian investigation.
00:28:07.000It can also be true that the Democrats are partisan hacks and the only reason they care about this is they want Trump out.
00:28:12.000It can also be true that the deep state stuff now appears to be a lot more real than it did just a few weeks ago.
00:28:17.000So all these things can simultaneously be true all the way through.
00:28:20.000One thing that is not helpful, obviously, Is the president of the United States excoriating Republicans who disagree with him as quote-unquote human scum?
00:28:29.000Like, if you're looking for supporters, this is probably not the way to do this.
00:28:32.000He's presumably referring here to Bill Taylor, who was a Trump appointee, right?
00:28:39.000It was the Trump administration who wanted Bill Taylor involved in Ukraine.
00:28:44.000Yeah, but you asked him to be there, dude.
00:28:46.000Either you run your administration or you don't.
00:28:48.000Trump tweeted out that never-Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our country than the do-nothing Democrats.
00:28:59.000I mean, you might want to reserve that language for ISIS.
00:29:01.000Like, if we're gonna go human scum, Bill Taylor, the ambassador that you picked for Ukraine, probably it's a little bit much.
00:29:09.000He said, he said, Never Trump or Republican John Bellinger represents never Trump or diplomat Bill Taylor, who I don't know, in testimony before Congress.
00:29:25.000It would be really great if the people within the Trump administration, all well-meaning and good, I hope, could stop hiring never-Trumpers, or worse than the do-nothing Democrats, nothing good will ever come from them.
00:29:34.000So President Trump is attributing all of this to bias.
00:29:36.000Now, does the bias against Trump exist?
00:30:17.000And by a bit of a mess, I mean a very, very large-scale mess.
00:30:20.000Now, meanwhile, The Democratic side of the aisle is a similar mess.
00:30:24.000The Democratic side of the aisle is a similar mess, and we'll get to that in just one second.
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00:31:30.000OK, so meanwhile, the Democratic side of the aisle is a bit of a mess as well.
00:31:33.000So there's a reason Democrats are staking a lot of their hopes on all of this impeachment stuff.
00:31:38.000And the reason is because their side of the aisle Is a complete and utter mess as well.
00:31:44.000And so what you are starting to see, there's a poll, a CNN poll that showed, shockingly, that Joe Biden is now popping back up in the polling.
00:32:51.000Well, Biden's rise, according to CNN, is coming from a consolidation of support among his core backers.
00:32:56.000Who are taking a look at other candidates and then returning to him that polling data was collected from October 17th to 20th during the Hunter Biden news cycle.
00:33:04.000So people are still seeing him as default Democrat, which is very good news for him.
00:33:09.000And again, the reason for that, the Democratic field is terrible.
00:33:12.000It's a terrible, terrible field, right?
00:33:14.000Biden's basic pitch, Biden's basic pitch is that he is Barack Obama, part three.
00:33:19.000So Biden came out yesterday and he says, really, if you like everything about the economy, you should, you should credit me with that.
00:33:55.000Okay, so there is Joe Biden making his very lackluster pitch, but that lackluster pitch is certainly better than Elizabeth Warren, as you will see in just one moment.
00:34:02.000First, let me talk about safety and security.
00:34:04.000So as you know, when I'm in the United States, I have 24-7 security.
00:35:07.000Okay, more on the 2020 Democratic presidential race, which is not quite the Elizabeth Warren walkover that people were predicting just a couple of weeks ago in the aftermath of the latest round of debates.
00:35:17.000First, you're going to have to go over to Daily Wire and subscribe.
00:35:20.000We have all sorts of goodies for you over there, including our brand new Sunday special.
00:35:24.000This week's Sunday special features Preet Bharara.
00:35:27.000Now, to be fair to Preet, we recorded this before some of the Some of the newest impeachment stuff.
00:39:17.000These campaigns are not connecting with the heart of America right now.
00:39:20.000Now, this is why President Trump really needs to cut out the shenanigans, because the fact is that so long as he remains top of the headlines, Democrats are going to benefit.
00:39:27.000I mean, the polls right now on impeachment are not good for President Trump, but this Democratic field is extremely weak.
00:39:33.000Plus, Hillary Clinton is waiting in the wings.
00:39:35.000Philippe Raines, who was her chief of staff for many, many years, was on Fox News last night, and he actually said that Hillary is explicitly leaving the door open to jumping back into the race.
00:39:43.000And if you're Hillary, as I've been saying now for a week, you gotta think to yourself, like, why not?
00:39:48.000You think that, like, Joe Biden's it, guys?
00:40:00.000She put out a new video saying that her foreign policy was a disaster.
00:40:03.000Step down from your throne and fight with me.
00:40:06.000It's funny how when I said that AOC should have a discussion slash debate with me, that's sexist.
00:40:11.000When Tulsi Gabbard says that Hillary should step down off her throne and have a debate with Tulsi, that's just her being a hard-nosed politician.
00:40:16.000Here's Tulsi going after Hillary Clinton.
00:40:17.000Hillary Clinton, your foreign policy has been a disaster for our country and the world.
00:40:23.000It's resulted in the deaths and injuries of so many of my brothers and sisters in uniform.
00:40:28.000It's devastated entire countries, millions of lives lost.
00:40:32.000It's time for you to acknowledge the damage that you've caused.
00:40:35.000And it is long past time for you to step down from your throne so that the Democratic Party can lead with a new foreign policy, which will actually be in the interest of and benefit to the American people and the world.
00:40:49.000So you want to know why the Democrats are so impeachment focused right now?
00:40:51.000Take a look at that field and you tell me why the Democrats are so impeachment focused right now.
00:40:56.000By the way, how bad is Elizabeth Warren's campaign?
00:40:59.000And how hard are the media pushing her?
00:41:00.000There is an opinion piece in the New York Times today by a woman named Alyssa Quart, the author of Thoughts and Prayers.
00:41:06.000It's called Elizabeth Warren has a poet on her team.
00:41:10.000And the entire thing is about why you need more poets in politics.
00:41:15.000I don't even know how to pronounce this name, so I'm just going to butcher it.
00:41:19.000Kamanhe Felix became the director of surrogates and strategic communications for Senator Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign in June.
00:41:25.000She's also the author of Build Yourself a Boat, a debut collection of poetry that was recently included on the long list for the National Book Award.
00:41:32.000Felix's writings describe sexual assault, first-hand experience of abortion, and police violence, including poems about the trial of George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin.
00:41:49.000President Trump and his cronies alter our language for the worse, renaming white nationalists the alt-right and calling journalism fake news.
00:41:59.000This is how you win back Michigan right here.
00:42:02.000You win back those Michigan auto workers by going and getting the lady who's on the shortlist for the National Book Award for writing poems about her first-hand experience of abortion.
00:42:12.000I can't imagine why everybody is so focused on, get rid of Trump now, because if we don't, we have serious trouble.
00:42:17.000And meanwhile, the Democrats on Capitol Hill, I have to say, it's always amusing to watch members of Congress question members of big tech.
00:42:24.000The reason is, members of Congress don't know what a computer is.
00:42:27.000They're still using Abacuses, Abakai, and they are using like 1984 Macs.
00:42:34.000Because they don't know what the internet is, they don't know what the internet is for.
00:42:38.000And so this is, what, the third time that Mark Zuckerberg has testified on the Hill?
00:42:42.000And you gotta feel bad for the guy, honestly.
00:42:44.000Because when you see the questions he's being asked, it is so obvious that Democrats desperately want to take control of the creation that Zuckerberg created, and use it to control political rhetoric.
00:42:54.000Hey, my friend Steven Crowder came out with information suggesting that YouTube was actually de-promoting results.
00:43:01.000It was demoting results from Tulsi Gabbard in moments of great import to the Tulsi Gabbard campaign.
00:43:07.000If big tech is doing that, I'm sure they are doing that at the behest of Democrats who would like to run this thing from above.
00:43:13.000Because when you hear Democrats question Zuckerberg, what they want to do with the First Amendment, what they want to do with free speech, and what they want to do with big tech is truly frightening.
00:43:20.000This is why when I hear Republicans and they're like, ah, the government should take control of big tech.
00:43:24.000It's like, understand that Elizabeth Warren and AOC are going to be running that thing.
00:43:41.000So now she's writing her own questions.
00:43:43.000And that's sort of like letting actors on set write their own lines, which is just a huge, huge mistake.
00:43:47.000Here is AOC questioning Mark Zuckerberg, asking why Mark Zuckerberg would even do business with The Daily Caller, which of course is a conservative publication.
00:43:55.000She says, The Daily Caller has ties to white supremacists.
00:43:58.000Why would you even allow Daily Caller on your platform, basically?
00:44:01.000Can you explain why you've named the Daily Caller a publication well-documented with ties to white supremacists as an official fact-checker for Facebook?
00:44:12.000We actually don't appoint the independent fact-checkers.
00:44:14.000They go through an independent organization called the Independent Fact-Checking Network that has a rigorous standard for who they allow to serve as a fact-checker.
00:44:26.000You would say that white supremacist-tied publications meet a rigorous standard for fact-checking?
00:44:34.000And Zuckerberg's like, is that English?
00:44:39.000They have an actual process by which they deem somebody a fact-checker on Facebook.
00:44:45.000And as for the quote-unquote ties to white supremacists, I assume that she's referring to a couple of low-level writers for The Daily Caller who ended up being fired after old Facebook posts came out from like 10 years ago or 5 years ago or whatever it was.
00:44:56.000The Daily Caller does not have documented ties to white supremacist groups.
00:45:01.000It's like saying that James Hodgkinson, who is the mass shooter of Republican Congress people, was a member of the Bernie campaign, and therefore Bernie has ties to mass shootings.
00:45:12.000Democrats want control of the methods of dissemination of information.
00:45:17.000They made that perfectly clear to Zuckerberg.
00:45:20.000Do they understand what Facebook is for?
00:45:23.000They were attacking Zuckerberg over Facebook, and they were attacking Zuckerberg Over the creation of Libra, which is basically a Bitcoin thing, right?
00:45:31.000And Bitcoin, in my opinion, is generally a good.
00:45:33.000I like the idea of people being able to barter and exchange using a currency that is not under the control of a centralized government.
00:45:39.000I don't like the idea that the United States government can simply devalue their currency whenever they please.
00:45:53.000So, take for example, do we have this clip of Maxine Waters talking about misinformation?
00:45:59.000So, Maxine Waters questioned Zuckerberg, and she asked specifically about whether Zuckerberg was putting out misinformation, and AOC did the same thing, like, well, are you willing to put out campaign ads that have overt lies in them?
00:46:11.000And Zuckerberg's like, well, Not if they're suppressing votes, right?
00:46:16.000I mean that has an actual impact, but it's not our job to evaluate for our readers true and false coming from prominent politicians.
00:47:09.000The policy of Facebook is that when politicians put out ads, they do not fact check the ads for taking down because they feel the fact checkers are then going to fact check those ads.
00:47:17.000When it comes to people putting out direct attacks on people that are not politicians, when it comes to political speech, in other words, Facebook takes a pretty broad view.
00:47:27.000When it comes to, supposedly, when it comes to, you know, an advertiser who is advertising a product and they're slandering somebody, then Facebook won't put that up.
00:49:04.000I don't trust anybody in big tech to keep to their promises.
00:49:05.000But Zuckerberg has at least articulated a standard.
00:49:09.000You think I trust Al Green who is questioning whether Libra should be able to go forward based on how many people who believe they are a member of the opposite sex are working on the tech for Libra?
00:49:27.000Okay, time for some quick things that I hate.
00:49:32.000There is a poll out about Jewish Americans.
00:49:34.000Apparently, nearly a third of Jewish Americans say they've hidden their religious identity or avoided carrying items that would identify oneself as Jewish in public due to threats of anti-Semitism, according to a poll released by the American Jewish Committee.
00:49:45.000Apparently, 31% of respondents said they had avoided publicly wearing, carrying, or displaying things that might help people identify them as a Jew.
00:49:52.000I mean, frankly, you know, look, I wear a kippah everywhere.
00:49:56.000In the United States, I feel very, very safe as a Jew.
00:49:58.000There are certain areas where if I'm walking around, I'm probably going to wear a baseball cap because I feel like they're less safe for Jews.
00:50:34.000And that's why a state of Israel that defends Jews, that is a place where Jews can go if things get rough, is a very, very important thing.
00:50:42.000I will also point out that I'm quite amused by Ilhan Omar, who's an overt anti-Semite.
00:51:00.000In any case, Ilhan Omar had a piece today called, And she made the case that the United States should not put sanctions on Turkey, Even though Turkey ran roughshod over the Kurds.
00:51:12.000The United States should not involve itself in sanctions.
00:51:15.000She says, in so much of our foreign policy, we rely on muscle memory and a limited toolbox to decide the best course of action.
00:51:20.000Too often, sanctions regimes are ill-considered, incoherent, and counterproductive.
00:51:27.000Ilhan Omar is totally fine with everybody on earth, including states, boycotting the Jewish state, the only democracy in the Middle East.
00:51:33.000But if you're going to, if you suggest that you're going to put economic sanctions on Islamic dictatorship in Turkey that just bombed the living daylights out of the Kurds, that, Ilhan Omar is very much against that.
00:51:41.000That is very, if, she also says we should not have sanctions on Venezuela, where people have, been relegated to eating their household pets because everybody is starving in Venezuela thanks to socialism.
00:51:51.000She says that we should not put sanctions on Venezuela or Iran.
00:51:55.000She says we should not have sanctions on Iran either.
00:51:58.000She says that sanctions have simultaneously strengthened the Iranian regime's credibility at home and united human rights activists and the Iran leadership in opposition to the strategy.
00:52:05.000If you're a human rights activist and you're very, very pro-Iran in their fight against the sanctions, you're not very much of a human rights activist.
00:52:11.000But, so she, just to get this straight, No sanctions on Venezuela.
00:53:06.000We've done enough things that I hate today.
00:53:09.000You know, one more quick thing that I hate.
00:53:10.000So, the media, President Trump's lawyer is defending President Trump today because President Trump is trying to defend himself against attempts to go after his tax returns.
00:53:21.000Well, attorneys for President Trump said that if President Trump shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, New York authorities could not punish him while he's in office.
00:53:28.000That's what the president's lawyers argued.
00:53:30.000And this was treated as a grand revelation.
00:53:32.000How could you possibly say that if Trump murdered someone on Fifth Avenue, he couldn't be prosecuted?
00:54:40.000After weeks of closed-door Democratic impeachment meetings, Congressman Matt Gaetz leads a group of Republicans to storm the secretive deposition room to demand transparency.
00:54:51.000Meanwhile, a top aide to Hillary Clinton signals that America's favorite battle axe may be running again.