Alex Acosta resigns from the Department of Labor, and President Trump says it was the right thing to do. But is it? And who else was involved in the deal with Jeffrey Epstein? And why did Epstein get a sweetheart deal with the government? Ben Shapiro answers these questions and more on today's show. Also, AOC's chief of staff says the quiet part out loud, Nancy Pelosi warns illegal immigrants how to avoid ICE, and we check the mailbag. All that and much more on The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your news and information. Subscribe to the show Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review, and subscribe to our new podcast CRIMINALS: The Making of a Political Scandal Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on Podchaser Subscribe on Stitcher Subscribe on Spare Change Subscribe on Crackle Subscribe on YouTube Learn More about our sponsorships and become a supporter of our new sponsor, OpenFitFit. Learn more at OpenFit.co/sponsorships. Become a supporter and get 10% off your first month with discount code "FitFit" at checkout. Use the discount code: FASTFOOTYFTFASTFASTFit.COM. Join FastFit.com/support FastFit! to receive $5,000 and save $10,000 in prizes throughout the month and get 20% off the entire year! and get 5 VIP packages, plus a FREE 3-day shipping offer when you sign up to six months get a year get VIP access to FastFit Pro, and get VIP membership starts starting starting starting at $24, VIP access and 7 months get $4,99, and access VIP access, and 7,000 PROMO, and 5, and VIP access gets 4 months, and a VIP membership gets VIP access only, and 2,000MBREPCREREPCARRELLERPROMO AND VIP PROMOTION gets 4 MONTH SUPPORTING VIPREPCORTERRY MURDER AND VIP SUPPORTING SUPPORTING THE FAST FOLLOWING WEEKEND AND VIPREBSEARRY BABY BOWLSHAKE AND VIP PACKING AND VIP OFFERING IS A VOTED TO BUY VIPREAR AND VIP FREE AND VIP BOWDSHARD PRODUCOR AND PATREON BOWL PRODCAST AND VIP FACEBOOK AND VIP MISSION?
00:00:09.000We have a lot to get to on today's show.
00:00:15.000The big breaking news, of course, is that the Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, is out.
00:00:21.000Thanks to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he has now resigned.
00:00:24.000His resignation will be effective within the week.
00:00:27.000Basically, he has seven days to get out.
00:00:29.000Now, Trump is saying that this was Alex Acosta's decision.
00:00:31.000The truth is that it may not have been.
00:00:34.000Acosta was creating so much pressure for Trump that it made a lot of sense for him to go.
00:00:38.000There are just too many Unanswered questions about how exactly the sweetheart deal with alleged pedophile Jeffrey Epstein went down.
00:00:44.000He's a registered sex offender in several states Jeffrey Epstein He got this pretty sweet deal from the prosecutors in the state of Florida Alex Acosta was one of those prosecutors now the case against Acosta that he had cut some sort of sweetheart deal It wasn't quite as cut and dry as I think a lot of people would like to make it.
00:01:01.000There are a few contentions that Acosta made in his own defense that are relevant and may, in fact, be true.
00:01:07.000One is that we just haven't seen all the underlying evidence in the case.
00:01:10.000We don't know how strong that evidence was.
00:01:12.000There were a lot of witnesses who said that Acosta did things to them, but that doesn't necessarily amount to a sex trafficking charge.
00:01:18.000It may amount to a sexual molestation charge on the state level, but that's a state-level charge.
00:01:23.000The trafficking charge is the federal charge.
00:01:26.000And the prostitution across state lines charge, that is the federal charge and that's what Acosta was tasked with.
00:01:31.000The real question that I have is why the state of Florida didn't go after Epstein.
00:01:35.000If it was so cut and dry that there were all these women coming forward and they had the evidence that all these women were telling the truth, why was he not in jail for statutory rape at the very least for an extended period of time or child molestation for an extended period of time?
00:01:49.000In any case, Acosta made the defense that other prosecutors signed off on this, the judge signed off on this, that deals like this happen on a fairly regular basis.
00:02:02.000There are a couple things that he said in his own defense that do not ring true.
00:02:05.000He said, for example, that he only stepped in with the federal government and the power of the DA when it became clear that the state was not going to prosecute Epstein.
00:02:12.000That's an odd contention because the feds and the state work on different levels.
00:02:17.000You don't have to wait for the state to not prosecute in order to prosecute at the federal level.
00:02:21.000That would actually be looking like double jeopardy if that were the case.
00:02:24.000But nonetheless, that particular argument by Acosta didn't hold water.
00:02:29.000Also, there are a lot of unanswered questions about all of this, such as, was it pressure from the defense attorneys on the prosecutors that led to this deal?
00:02:45.000In just a second, we'll tell you what President Trump had to say and what Alex Acosta had to say.
00:02:49.000Suffice it to say, once Acosta is gone, this is no longer a Trump administration scandal.
00:02:53.000And then the question is going to become, okay, who else was involved?
00:02:56.000And what exactly was Jeffrey Epstein doing?
00:02:59.000The going theory right now, the kind of hot theory on Wall Street right now, is that Jeffrey Epstein Who was purportedly a billionaire, and probably was not a billionaire.
00:03:07.000That he was actually making his money, this is the theory, from blackmailing people.
00:03:11.000That he was trafficking in underage girls with very famous people, and then he was blackmailing them with tape of that information.
00:03:17.000Which is an astonishing story, if true.
00:04:50.000Okay, so here is what President Trump Had to say, according to CNBC, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta said on Friday that he will resign amid controversy over the way he handled the sex crimes case against wealthy businessman Jeffrey Epstein a decade ago when he was U.S.
00:05:21.000Trump said, this was him, not me, because I'm with him.
00:05:24.000He then said, I said, you don't have to do this.
00:05:26.000Acosta told reporters he did not want his involvement in Epstein's controversy to overshadow the administration's accomplishments.
00:05:32.000Acosta said he will officially resign a week after his announcement.
00:05:35.000Deputy Labor Secretary Patrick Patrick Pazella will take his place in an acting capacity, said President Trump.
00:05:42.000Trump tweeted out, "Alex was a great Secretary of Labor.
00:05:44.000His service is truly appreciated." In his resignation letter to Trump, Acosta said, "It has meant so much to me that you have offered your steadfast support in our private discussions and in your public remarks, but your agenda, putting the American people first, must avoid any distractions." That resignation came only a couple of days after Acosta gave that press conference in which he had defended his controversial non-prosecution agreement that he cut with Epstein's lawyers in 2007 when he was the top prosecutor in Miami.
00:06:10.000The issue resurfaced on July 6th when the politically connected Epsteins, whose friends have included Trump and former President Bill Clinton, was arrested on sex trafficking charges by federal prosecutors in New York last week.
00:06:19.000By the way, speaking of Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton has gone completely silent on follow-up questions about the statement that he put out earlier this week.
00:06:25.000Clinton had put out a statement earlier this week saying, I was only on four trips on Epstein's airplane, Secret Service was there the whole time, and then folks at the Washington Examiner uncovered the fact that he was on at least seven trips with Epstein, and that Secret Service, in fact, probably was not present the whole time.
00:06:39.000They asked the Clinton camp about all of this, and Clinton went completely silent, which is suspicious and upsetting in every possible way.
00:07:17.000And because President Trump is in office, and because he was friendly with Trump, and because he had cut a deal with Trump's Secretary of Labor, this became a national story again.
00:07:27.000Well, now that new information is coming out that may implicate some of the Democrats' favorites, it'll be interesting to see whether the media just get off the horse completely.
00:07:35.000Whether they say, OK, we're not going to cover this thing anymore.
00:07:57.000Thomas, the boat skims eastward across the crystalline Caribbean, takes a turn, and there it is, the palm-fringed paradise that was the private redoubt of Jeffrey Epstein.
00:08:05.000An American flag on a towering pole flutters in the breeze.
00:08:08.000A blue and white building that resembles a temple sits atop one of the hills.
00:08:11.000The pool and cabanas are visible in the difference.
00:08:24.000This is where Epstein, convicted of sex crimes a decade ago in Florida, now charged in New York with trafficking girls as young as 14, repaired his escape from the toil of cultivating the rich and powerful.
00:08:36.000San Francisco Chronicle and Bloomberg report, few here doubt that Epstein is wealthy.
00:08:42.000Thomas aboard his private jet before being whisked by helicopter to his 72-acre retreat.
00:08:46.000He spent many millions after buying it for about $8 million in 1998, carving roads, planting scores of 40-foot palms, building several vias and temple structure, which was topped by a gold-colored dome until Hurricane Irma blew it off, according to locals.
00:08:58.000Yet the size and source of Epstein's fortune are as much a source of speculation here as they are on Wall Street.
00:09:04.000There's no question that he has assets that are worth an awful lot of money.
00:09:06.000He has companies that hold his Gulfstream jets.
00:09:07.000He obviously owns a townhouse in New York that's worth more than a hundred million dollars.
00:09:11.000Reid Weingarten, a lawyer for Epstein, didn't immediately return a voicemail message seeking comment for the story.
00:09:17.000There's no question that he has assets that are worth an awful lot of money.
00:09:21.000He has companies that hold his Gulfstream jets.
00:09:24.000He obviously owns a townhouse in New York that's worth more than $100 million.
00:09:29.000But it is unclear where exactly he was getting that money in the first place.
00:09:34.000The only unusual aspect of the main residence a former worker said he was aware of because they've interviewed people who worked on Epstein's estate here were the security boxes in The level of secrecy around a steel safe in Epstein's office in particular suggested it contained much more than just money.
00:09:51.000Outside of an occasional visit by a housekeeper, no one was allowed in these rooms.
00:09:54.000So obviously everybody wondering what's in that safe will have to deploy Geraldo Rivera to go find out what exactly is in the safe.
00:10:04.000All of this is deeply suspicious, of course.
00:10:07.000New victims are coming forward on a near-daily basis with regard to Epstein.
00:10:10.000The fact that this guy escaped prosecution for so long is truly astonishing.
00:10:14.000According to the Miami Herald, at least a dozen new victims have come forward to claim they were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, even as the multi-millionaire money manager tries to convince a federal judge to allow him to await a sex trafficking trial from the comfort of the same $77 million Manhattan mansion where he's accused of luring teenage girls into unwanted sex acts, apparently, since Saturday.
00:10:33.000Four separate women have reached out to New York lawyer David Boies, and at least ten other women have approached other lawyers who have represented dozens of Epstein's alleged victims in the past.
00:10:43.000Jack Scarola, a Palm Beach attorney, said that at least five women, all of whom were minors at the time of their alleged encounters with Epstein, have reached out either to him or Fort Lauderdale lawyer Brad Edwards.
00:10:53.000Skarola said, the people we are speaking to are underage in Florida and in New York.
00:10:57.000They are not individuals whose claims have previously been part of any law enforcement investigation.
00:11:12.000Come Monday, if Epstein is out of the headlines, you'll know that a lot of the coverage here was driven by something a little bit different than what people said it was driven by, namely outrage over the treatment of underage women.
00:13:03.000It's all they had to do, and they were completely incapable of doing it.
00:13:06.000And so they continue to be utterly and And completely insane.
00:13:11.000So, here is a story from the Washington Post about Saikat Chakrabarty, who is the supposed genius behind AOC.
00:13:18.000According to the Washington Post magazine, I mean, the kind of glowing coverage that radical leftists receive from the mainstream media is truly incredible.
00:13:27.000It's a long piece titled, AOC's Chief of Change.
00:13:30.000Saikat Chakrabarty isn't just running her office, he's guiding a movement.
00:13:36.000I remember when they used to say this sort of stuff about staffers from Paul Ryan.
00:13:40.000There'd be a staffer from Paul Ryan putting out a big plan on how to reform entitlements, and the Washington Post would run huge stories about how this nearly anonymous staffer was actually supremely powerful, a genius, wonderful, lovely.
00:13:56.000The media's love affair with the radical left is the great undercover story in American politics, except by folks on talk radio, people in the podcast world.
00:14:09.000On a Wednesday morning in late May, emissaries of two of the strongest political voices on climate change convened at a coffee shop a few blocks from the U.S.
00:14:16.000Saikhat Chakrabarty, chief of staff to Representative Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, was there to meet Sam Ricketts, climate director for Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who is running for president almost exclusively on a platform of combating global warming.
00:14:28.000A newly released plank of Inslee's climate change agenda had caught the attention of Chakrabarty and his boss, who had tweeted that Inslee's, quote, climate plan is the most serious and comprehensive one to address our crisis in the 2020 field.
00:14:40.000Pleased by the positive reception from the demands and Green New Deal wing of the climate struggle, Ricketts had set up this meeting with Chakrabarty to establish a personal connection and share approaches to climate advocacy.
00:14:51.000Now, there's a punchline to this story.
00:14:59.000So Chakrabarti is meeting with the climate director for Washington, Governor Jay Inslee, one of the million anonymous people running for president on the Democratic side of the aisle.
00:15:07.000Inslee's big spiel is that he only cares about climate change.
00:15:10.000Chakrabarti told this staffer, Sam Ricketts, quote, congrats on the rollout.
00:15:40.000Because we really think of it as a how do you change the entire economy thing.
00:15:46.000So that's saying the quiet part out loud right there.
00:15:49.000One of the suspicions of people on the right for a long time has been the global warming movement.
00:15:53.000This entire, we have to restructure the entire global economy in order to bring down the climate.
00:16:00.000And then people on the right point out, well, even if you did all the things you are talking about, that would not actually lower climate change in any marked degree.
00:16:06.000You could completely devastate the economy of the United States.
00:16:08.000China and India would still be providing a huge bulk of the carbon emissions that are allegedly leading to global warming and are leading global warming by International Panel on Climate Change Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Estimates The suspicion has been that it really isn't about lowering the climate.
00:16:25.000That it really has been about a Marxist redistributionist scheme whereby you take down the American economy and then you redistribute those resources to quote-unquote poorer countries.
00:16:34.000Or you undercut capitalism in favor of a global redistributionist system.
00:16:39.000And Chakrabarty is saying this out loud.
00:16:41.000Chakrabarty is saying what we are doing is we are using global warming as basically the opening for us to restructure the entire American economy.
00:16:49.000Now, Ricketts, who's the staffer for Inslee, I love this.
00:16:57.000It's both rising to the challenge that is existential around climate, and it is building an economy that contains more prosperity, more sustainability in that prosperity, more broadly shared prosperity, equitability, and justice throughout.
00:17:41.000Now, this is all taking place in front of a Washington Post reporter.
00:17:44.000So they are being a lot more open than you would think they would be talking in front of a Washington Post reporter, except that the Washington Post reporter is busy drooling into a cup, apparently.
00:17:54.000So Chakrabarty says, we're going to restructure the entire American economy and climate change is basically just a lever, a public relations lever for us to do exactly that.
00:18:02.000And then Inslee's guy's like, well, no, but yeah.
00:18:08.000And then Chakrabarty is saying, well, you know what?
00:18:20.000The Washington Post says Ricketts kept laying down cords in Chakrabarty's key.
00:18:24.000It was an acknowledgment of just how far inside establishment Washington the progressive movement has reached.
00:18:29.000Everything is intersectional now, including decarbonization.
00:18:33.000Chakrabarty told the Washington Post reporter, I like to show my cards and see people's reactions.
00:18:38.000I just wanted to get a sense of where they're coming from.
00:18:40.000They seem open and hungry and want to do stuff.
00:18:42.000In my mind, an ideal situation is we have a president surrounded by a bunch of people who are constantly thinking, how could we go bigger, bolder, faster, better on everything?
00:18:50.000I don't know if Inslee's going to be president, but if he runs a really good campaign, maybe he ends up running a big agency.
00:18:54.000What's the mindset he's going to bring to that agency?
00:19:56.000Bull and branch sheets are better than any sheets you've ever slept on.
00:19:58.000You probably haven't thought very much about the sheets you're sleeping on.
00:20:01.000You got it as like a wedding gift and you've been sleeping on it for a while, or you went out to the local store and you just bought whatever had the highest thread count.
00:20:55.000The left has moved so far to the left now, the Chakrabarty being posited as a hero, openly saying that the Green New Deal is not about being green, it is much more about the New Deal.
00:21:06.000That all this really is, is about restructuring the entirety of the American economy.
00:21:11.000You think that's a strong pitch to the vast majority of Americans who are looking at rising wages, who are looking at a Dow Jones Industrial Average above 27,000, who are looking at an unemployment rate of 3.7%, and saying to themselves, what we really need is a radical restructuring of this economy.
00:21:29.000They're going with, we want to restructure the entire American economy and also we're going to call each other and you racist.
00:21:34.000No, I have to say, I am really enjoying the spectacle of AOC going after Pelosi and calling Pelosi racist because Pelosi, as we pointed out on yesterday's show, has been downplaying AOC's impact inside the caucus and telling AOC to stop attacking fellow Democrats.
00:22:05.000And then she followed that one up by saying, her attacking us at a time when we're receiving death threats.
00:22:10.000AOC is using the exact same tactics on Nancy Pelosi that she has used on people like me, on people on Fox News, on anyone who has ever said anything negative about AOC.
00:22:19.000She's using the exact same tactics on Nancy Pelosi.
00:22:22.000What's hilarious is that Democrats are now coming out and saying, this is really disingenuous for doing this to Nancy Pelosi.
00:22:48.000But you're only allowed to say it, I guess, when it targets Nancy Pelosi.
00:22:52.000Now, speaking of AOC and Nancy Pelosi, the truth is that the only thing that Nancy Pelosi really dislikes about AOC is exactly what you see in that article from her chief of staff, which is that AOC keeps saying all the quiet parts out loud.
00:23:05.000When it comes to policy, Nancy Pelosi doesn't radically disagree with AOC on any of this stuff.
00:23:09.000She just thinks that AOC is pie in the sky and doesn't have any way of achieving what AOC is going for.
00:23:13.000But on policy, there are not a lot of disagreements.
00:23:17.000So AOC now says that she wants to axe the entire Department of Homeland Security.
00:23:22.000Now, I am fine with the idea of devolving a lot of the services of Homeland Security back to the Secretary of Defense.
00:23:28.000I thought the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the first place was just the creation of another giant federal bureaucracy that would grow and grow because every department does.
00:23:35.000But when AOC says she wants to axe the Department of Homeland Security, she doesn't mean she then wants to re-delegate all of the parts back to their original departments.
00:23:43.000According to the San Francisco Chronicle, although some activists have urged the government to abolish its immigration enforcement arm, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out in favor of eradicating the entire Department of Homeland Security.
00:23:56.000Not replacing it, just eradicating it.
00:23:58.000The department's creation after the terrorist attack of September 11th significantly threatened American civil liberties, Ocasio-Cortez said.
00:24:05.000She said she wanted to get rid of Homeland Security.
00:24:07.000She said people sounded the alarm back then that these agencies are extrajudicial, that they lack effective oversight.
00:24:12.000It is baked into the core foundational structure of these agencies.
00:24:15.000So she's not talking about how she would replace their services.
00:25:26.000She warned her caucus on Thursday about President Trump's planned immigration raids this weekend.
00:25:30.000She urged members to spread information about undocumented immigrants' legal rights.
00:25:34.000Speaking to closed-door whips, Pelosi urged members to spread the party's Know Your Rights campaign, according to two people in the room.
00:25:40.000Democrats took the same approach earlier this year, Pelosi told members she plans to reach out to religious leaders to encourage them to oppose the efforts, as she did last month.
00:25:50.000Pelosi even issued a statement trying to explain to people that they did not have to allow ICE agents into their homes.
00:25:58.000And she said that if somebody shows up at your house and they ask if there's an illegal immigrant there, you just say you don't have a warrant to come into my house and the illegal immigrant hides upstairs, there's nothing they can do about it.
00:26:06.000There are warrants out against these illegal immigrants.
00:26:08.000The vast majority of people Trump is talking about raiding and arresting are people with outstanding warrants.
00:26:15.000In many of these cases, not merely people who have overstayed their visas, but people who have committed separate crimes and for whom there are outstanding warrants.
00:26:22.000It's an amazing thing to watch Democrats who are now openly stumping for people to escape the hand of the law.
00:26:31.000Pelosi came out in a press conference yesterday and she said that President Trump is quote-unquote terrorizing families.
00:26:37.000It's about values that the president does not seem to share.
00:26:40.000And we saw this morning when he announced his heartless raids on families this coming Sunday.
00:26:46.000And as they prepare to go to church, they feel very threatened and scared by these raids.
00:26:53.000So hopefully the president will think again about it.
00:27:19.000Even people against whom there is an outstanding warrant, because that's who we're talking about here.
00:27:23.000And as I say, most of the people who are going to be targeted are people who have committed Other crimes other than just being in the country illegally.
00:27:54.000Kamala Harris is doing the same thing, of course.
00:27:57.000She appeared on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow, and she made the argument that what President Trump was doing with immigration raids, which, by the way, have taken place under every single president, including under President Obama, she called them a crime against humanity.
00:28:10.000It's a crime against humanity now to arrest people upon whom there is an outstanding warrant, which does raise the question as to what the hell she was doing as Attorney General of California when, presumably, she was authorizing people to be arrested.
00:28:21.000She said, the guy has now got to start distracting people from the fact that he made all these promises that I believe he had no intention of fulfilling.
00:28:27.000He has failed to perform on every level by which we should measure a president.
00:28:30.000And so he's going to create, as he often does, this distraction and do these raids, which is a crime against humanity, I believe, in the way he is coming about this and the way he has been handling the issue when you have babies in cages.
00:28:43.000It's about people who have outstanding warrants against them.
00:28:47.000I mean, this is radical, radical stuff.
00:28:50.000In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is doing the same thing.
00:28:52.000She says we'll never tolerate ICE tearing our families apart.
00:28:56.000Lightfoot said the threat of raids has forced illegal immigrants to hide in fear.
00:29:00.000She said the Chicago PD will not cooperate with ICE in detaining residents, nor will ICE have access to any Chicago police databases.
00:29:07.000So just to get this straight, according to the Supreme Court and the Obama administration, if a state decides that they are going to help arrest illegal immigrants, as they did in Arizona, that is illegal under the Supremacy Clause.
00:29:18.000If, however, a locality decides to defy ICE and apparently create objective barriers to them arresting people, that's just good policy.
00:29:28.000Harris said I assume that what Mayor Lightfoot is doing in Chicago is similar to what Mayor Breed will do in San Francisco, what Mayor Garcetti will do in Los Angeles, which is to say we don't want the limited resources of local law enforcement to go into the job that the federal government has got to do.
00:29:40.000We want our local law enforcement to be trusted by our community and not be feared by our community.
00:29:44.000She said, I don't want a victim of crime to be afraid to wave down that patrol car when she has been hurt for fear that if she stops, that police officer, she's going to be deported.
00:30:00.000We are talking about active ICE raids that are being obstructed by local governments here.
00:30:06.000By the way, if you speak to any cop anywhere in the country, And this is particularly true in Los Angeles.
00:30:10.000If you want to talk about one of the problematic enforcement issues they have, it is that they cannot arrest illegal immigrants and coordinate with the federal government to do so.
00:30:17.000A disproportionate number of people who are in California's prisons right now are illegal immigrants.
00:30:22.000Are people who came here illegally and were not deported and committed crimes in the United States.
00:30:27.000There are a lot of illegal immigrants who are in American prisons right now and were not deported.
00:30:32.000In just a second, we'll get to the extreme position of the Democratic left when it comes to ICE.
00:30:39.000Then we'll get to why it is that Joe Biden continues to soar in polling.
00:30:43.000First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber.
00:30:46.000Today, it is firefighter Bradley Topliff on Instagram.
00:30:50.000who is experiencing a harsh reality in the pursuit of living a healthy life filled with vitamin LT.
00:30:54.000In the pic, Bradley, who is sitting on his couch taking a big swig out of the world's most elite beverage vessel, writes, Mother of Zeus, these leftist tears are salty.
00:31:04.000Yes, as 2020 approaches, it will probably get even saltier.
00:31:07.000So stay hydrated, my friend, and keep up the good work out there in Oregon.
00:31:11.000Really appreciate what you do, Bradley.
00:31:13.000If you want to be featured, In our every Friday Leftist Tears Tumblr feature, all you have to do is become an annual subscriber, because with that comes the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
00:31:22.000With it comes the greatest of all beverage vessels.
00:32:25.000We have all sorts of goodies coming for subscribers.
00:32:27.000By the way, while you're at it, You should go subscribe to something that is called, it's a new podcast that we are involved with called Apollo 11 What We Saw Later in Things I Like.
00:32:36.000I'll play you a little bit of what that is about.
00:32:38.000But it is super cool so you should go to Apple Podcasts right now, iTunes, anywhere you listen to podcasts and go subscribe to Apollo 11 What We Saw.
00:32:46.000Also go subscribe over at Daily Wire so you get everything that we do.
00:32:48.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:32:52.000So, as I say, the Democrats becoming increasingly radical when it comes to ISIS.
00:33:02.000Pete Buttigieg, who, it is amazing that the gap between the amount of media coverage and money that Buttigieg has received in his polling numbers.
00:33:11.000He is polling in the RealClearPolitics polling average about 5%.
00:33:16.000Despite all of the media coverage, which you would think would put him at like 10, 12%, he is still polling in the RealClearPolitics poll average at 5.3%, which is nowhere near the leaderboard.
00:33:26.000The leaderboard right now has Biden at 27, Warren, Sanders, and Harris all tied at 15, according to the polling average.
00:33:33.000The latest poll comes from the NBC News Wall Street Journal poll that has Biden at 26, Warren at 19, Sanders at 13, and Harris at 13.
00:33:40.000So Harris lagging a little bit, which is kind of surprising.
00:33:45.000Buttigieg continues to say radical things with a straight face.
00:33:48.000Here he is saying that the ICE raids make Americans less safe.
00:33:50.000He'll have to explain why arresting people who are here criminally makes Americans less safe.
00:33:54.000I also want to get your response to the news this morning of mass immigration raids set to start in cities across the country over the weekend.
00:34:15.000This is targeting people who are caught in a broken system where there should be a pathway to citizenship.
00:34:20.000And again, in a community like mine, if rumors start going on about raids, let alone if it starts actually happening, it immediately makes the community less safe.
00:34:30.000Okay, so the argument is that if you start arresting illegal immigrants, they won't come forward to report crimes.
00:34:37.000Well, again, these ICE raids are, just as Obama's were, are largely going to target people who have outstanding warrants.
00:34:43.000Not just warrants for overstaying their visas.
00:34:45.000If we're just arresting everybody overstaying their visas, there are like 10 million people in the country, 11 million minimum.
00:34:49.000Maybe 20, according to some estimates.
00:34:54.000Jared Polis is the governor of Colorado.
00:34:56.000He said, Instead of working with Congress to find a real comprehensive solution to our broken immigration system, the president is unfortunately focused on creating uncertainty and fear.
00:35:09.000These actions make our communities less safe and increase distrust of law enforcement.
00:35:16.000We will not allow the public safety of Coloradans to be held hostage by the Trump administration.
00:35:19.000So, here is the Democratic position as of now.
00:35:22.000Get no wall on the southern border to stop illegal immigration.
00:35:26.000Get rid of the criminal section of the U.S.
00:35:28.000Code about illegal immigration that makes it a criminal offense to cross between border patrol entry points, between points of entry on the border.
00:35:35.000Get rid of that so it's just a civil offense.
00:35:37.000You basically get a ticket and then you're released into the interior of the United States.
00:36:02.000All they had to do was say, listen, we think that President Trump Is overstating the case on the evils of illegal immigration.
00:36:10.000We think that it is not nearly as dangerous as he says it is, but we understand that any sovereign country has to protect our borders, and that's why we would increase funding on the border.
00:36:18.000That's why we would provide better resources for Border Patrol so they can take care of people in humane fashion on the border, and that's why we would create a stage-by-stage program to make all the illegal immigrants in the United States actual citizens.
00:36:31.000They could push A quote-unquote moderate program.
00:36:34.000And they could probably knock Trump for being quote-unquote too extreme.
00:36:37.000Instead, they've reacted to Trump's immigration position by going so far to the left.
00:36:41.000And this is where the Democrats are completely misreading the tea leaves here.
00:36:46.000They have mistaken the fact that people find Trump to be an off-putting personality for the idea that everything Trump says is not only wrong but 100% wrong.
00:36:55.000And they have to go 180 degrees the opposite.
00:36:57.000So they can't just go 10 degrees the opposite and kind of deflect off some of the good points that Trump is making and then make quote unquote, better points, if that's what you think, more reasonable points.
00:37:07.000Instead, they've decided what we have to do is run directly the opposite direction.
00:37:09.000So as Trump says, protect the border, we say, open the border.
00:37:16.000Instead of us saying, well, no, we'll arrest some people, we'll arrest no one and we'll encourage more people to cross that border and we'll disband the Department of Homeland Security.
00:37:23.000And we'll make it a non-criminal offense to cross between points of entry.
00:37:27.000We'll encourage people to swim that Rio Grande.
00:37:29.000We'll encourage people to overstay their visas.
00:37:31.000If Democrats think this is a winning proposition, I don't know.
00:37:48.000Instead of Democrats saying, no, it's not a hoax, but we are not going to sink the United States economy.
00:37:53.000We're going to come up with some reasonable plans for government funding of decarbonization facilities, which is a new thing they're trying out in Britain right now.
00:38:00.000Instead of them saying, you know, there are certain ways that we can sort of curb our use of carbon.
00:38:04.000Instead of them being reasonable about any of this, they're out there saying, you know what we're going to do?
00:38:08.000We're going to radically restructure the entire American economy along the lines of World War II.
00:38:14.000Not only does it exist, it is the greatest crisis that has ever faced humanity, and we are going to seize control of the means of production the way that we did in World War II, effectively, and then we're going to restructure the entire American economy on the back.
00:38:25.000You think that's a winning message, guys?
00:38:28.000You really think that most Americans aren't going to look down and go, whoa, this Trump guy's weird, but you guys are out of your minds.
00:38:34.000You really think that's the direction this is going to go?
00:38:37.000Thus, Joe Biden is leading the field, despite the fact that he is a lackluster candidate, a deeply lackluster candidate.
00:38:44.000Now, in a second, we're going to get to Joe Biden and his lacklusterness.
00:38:47.000So Joe Biden is, again, leading all the polling.
00:39:02.000As Bernie Sanders falls, a lot of that support is going to Elizabeth Warren.
00:39:06.000Elizabeth Warren is, at this point, it's a three-person race.
00:39:10.000It's Elizabeth Warren, it's Kamala Harris, it's Joe Biden.
00:39:14.000And right now, you'd have to say, advantage probably Elizabeth Warren, just because it's going to be easier for Warren to wrest away control of the Sanders voters than it's going to be for Harris to wrest away total control of the Biden voters.
00:39:28.000Although, it's been pretty easy for her to grab a big segment of that.
00:39:31.000In any case, the only reason that Biden is still alive is a reason he is running away from.
00:39:35.000So Joe Biden is still alive in this race because he is moderate, because he is a known quantity.
00:39:41.000Instead, Joe Biden has been trying to head off the radicals of the past by becoming radical himself.
00:41:14.000That's why he's not going to be the nominee.
00:41:15.000And so you're going to end up with one of these radicals.
00:41:17.000Now, that would theoretically lead President Trump into a pretty good position.
00:41:22.000Because the more radical the Democrats are, the better off for President Trump.
00:41:25.000So, for example, President Trump yesterday made an announcement that he would not actually force a citizenship question onto the census.
00:41:32.000Instead, he issued an executive order ordering his other agencies to start asking questions of local agencies about the number of illegal immigrants underneath them.
00:41:39.000This avoids the constitutional problem.
00:41:41.000That was created by the latest Supreme Court decision.
00:41:44.000He decided not to go up against the Supreme Court.
00:41:46.000He announced this executive order, no constitutional crisis or anything like that.
00:41:50.000And then he launched into what is his solid campaign, right?
00:41:53.000His solid campaign is that far-left Democrats are attempting to undermine the integrity of the United States by concealing the number of illegal immigrants in the country.
00:42:05.000Today I'm here to say we are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population.
00:42:14.000As shocking as it may be, far-left Democrats in our country are determined to conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.
00:42:25.000They probably know the number is far greater, much higher, Okay, so, you know, he is not wrong about all of this.
00:42:38.000And so when he campaigns against the Democrats, as I've been saying all along, if he campaigns against their programs, if he campaigns against their radicalism, He'll be fine.
00:42:46.000If, however, he gets caught up in the fun of being a troll, then trouble awaits.
00:42:52.000And this is what happened yesterday at the social media get-together.
00:42:55.000So, the media totally botched the coverage of a lot of this.
00:42:58.000So, there's one particular area where the media not only botched the coverage, they just lied about it.
00:43:02.000So, Jim Acosta lied about an exchange that took place between a quote-unquote reporter for Playboy.
00:44:06.000Now here's the way Jim Acosta actually characterized this.
00:44:09.000They said White House officials invited Trump's social media allies to sit in the Rose Garden.
00:44:13.000But after the event was over, West Wing aides did nothing when those social media figures began to verbally abuse reporters who are trying to do their jobs.
00:44:19.000A good snapshot of how press is treated by White House.
00:44:45.000And the fact that he was confronted by Gorka's... Now, does any of this sort of stuff help the Trump administration and the image of stability they need to project?
00:44:59.000The second question is, why are you having a bunch of people who are at the very least deeply controversial to the White House in the first place?
00:45:07.000Like, there are a bunch of people who are at the White House in this particular group of folks who were basically, I mean, have been involved in conspiracy theorizing, Seth Rich conspiracy theorizing, all sorts of stuff that makes Trump vulnerable to the charge that he's bringing A bunch of people who ought not be at the White House to the White House.
00:45:26.000Why would Trump open himself up to that?
00:45:46.000If the president wants to win re-election, all he has to do is shut the hell up and let the Democrats be who the Democrats are, and then point at them.
00:45:56.000Okay, time for some mailbag because it is a Friday.
00:45:58.000So, Ethan says, Hey Ben, love the show.
00:46:02.000With both party bases getting further from the center, do you think it could lead to a dramatic split within either party?
00:46:07.000I think it is unlikely that there will be a dramatic split inside the Republican Party.
00:46:11.000I think the Democratic Party, I think party capture is more likely than a dramatic split.
00:46:16.000Mainly because I don't think that the American political system allows for a powerful split the same way that it did back in the 1850s when the Republican Party split off from the Whig Party, where you had multiple parties.
00:46:31.000You had a bunch of different parties that were running in the 1850s as the parties began to crack up and fall apart.
00:46:38.000I don't think that you're going to see the same thing.
00:46:40.000It's much easier to capture a party as President Trump did the Republican Party.
00:46:44.000Or as AOC is currently capturing the Democratic Party, than it is to split off and do your own thing.
00:46:50.000And I don't think that the lines are clearly enough drawn.
00:46:52.000So you would need one major issue where everyone disagrees.
00:46:56.000Not merely a tactical question, but an actual political question.
00:46:59.000So the reason the Whig Party split is because some of the party wanted slavery gone, and some of the party wanted slavery maintained with a Stephen Douglas-like deal.
00:47:06.000In this particular case, What is the split issue?
00:47:10.000In the Republican Party, there's fairly unanimous support for pro-life laws, for example.
00:47:14.000There's not a split wedge issue inside the Republican Party.
00:47:17.000Inside the Democratic Party, Pelosi and AOC disagree about tactics, but not much else.
00:47:20.000Pelosi is happy to pat all of the intersectional allies on the head, just so long as they back her progressive agenda.
00:47:27.000And they agree with her progressive agenda, so why wouldn't they go along with that?
00:47:30.000So the sort of ugly rhetoric that you're seeing inside both parties, the infighting, I don't think that ends in a split.
00:47:35.000Bob says, Hey Ben, after seeing all the evidence, how can you believe the moon landing was real?
00:47:39.000Take, for instance, that the American flag is blowing in the wind in the famous Apollo 11 photo.
00:47:43.000Since there's no air in space, how can the flag ripple?
00:48:16.000But the fact that people are bound up in conspiracy theories about the moon landing shows that people are willing to place an interpretation of events that far exceeds the evidence for that interpretation.
00:48:28.000It's something we should watch out for in politics all the time, is looking at a series of events and then creating a narrative to explain the series of events.
00:48:35.000As opposed to what may be the more plausible narrative, which is maybe these events don't have anything to do with each other.
00:48:40.000Conspiracy theories are a way for us to put narrative on the world, but in this case it's a false narrative to put on the world.
00:48:46.000The reason that I don't believe that this was done on a soundstage is because it was not done on a soundstage.
00:48:51.000It is because there is solid evidence that we did in fact launch people to the moon It would have required not just a few people, it would have required tens of thousands of people to be involved in a conspiracy.
00:49:02.000And one of the things about conspiracies is that conspiracies that actually happen usually are fairly small because it's hard to keep a secret like that for that long.
00:49:27.000I think there are a lot of people on the right who see politics as religion and are willing to follow a strong leader and who are willing to substitute political principle for a feeling of religious observance, who believe that if you disagree with them politically, this means that you are evil in some way.
00:49:44.000Now, I'm not saying there's no such thing as an evil belief system.
00:49:46.000I think communism is an evil belief system.
00:49:48.000I think Nazism is an evil belief system.
00:49:51.000However, if you are saying that not based on the lack of virtue in those systems, but based on this agreement about tax rates and property distribution rights and all of that, then, and if you are linking, more than that, if you are linking somebody's identity to the political views that they hold, without saying, okay, love the sin, love the sin or hate the sin, And then you are making a very large mistake.
00:50:15.000I fully agree that there are people on the right who have been sucked into spending more time thinking about political issues than about their fellow man.
00:50:23.000And what that leads to is actually less of an open debate and less of an open conversation.
00:50:27.000Because if you share general moral principles with someone, you're going to have a lot easier conversation about the political ramifications of those moral principles than if you do not.
00:50:36.000Now, I will say that there is a reaction on the right to the religious treatment of politics on the left, and that is for the right to harden its flanks.
00:50:45.000So the left, I think, has gotten a lot more religious than the right because they were irreligious in the first place, typically, and much more secular.
00:50:51.000And so their religious principle has become, if you disagree with us about environmentalism, you are damned to hell flame forever.
00:50:56.000And the right has responded by saying, well, you're saying we're damned to hell flame.
00:51:00.000You guys believe in abortion on demand.
00:51:02.000I mean, we're talking about hell flame.
00:51:03.000That seems like a pretty good place to go.
00:51:06.000Listen, I don't want to downplay serious political disagreements because there are serious political disagreements.
00:51:13.000The difference between actual practice of actual religion and the practice of politics as religion is that politics as religion inherently involves government compulsion.
00:51:23.000It's not merely about convincing each other with regard to arguments without regard to the government.
00:51:28.000Politics is about using the power of government to enforce your will.
00:51:32.000The problem is when politics becomes religion, Then government and religion are the same and you have what is effectively a secular theocracy.
00:51:40.000And there I do see some people on the right who are falling into that trap.
00:51:42.000The left has been in that trap for quite a while.
00:51:44.000Ryan says, hey, Ben, I was wondering if illegal immigrants have constitutional rights as per the text of the U.S. Constitution.
00:51:50.000Obviously, they have human rights, but it seems weird to me that specifically American rights apply to non-citizens just because they cross the border.
00:52:06.000There are certain rights that the Constitution applies to any person living within the borders of the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.
00:52:13.000So, you're not allowed to just go in and beat the living hell, like the police can't go and beat the living hell out of an illegal immigrant for no reason.
00:52:19.000So there are certain rights that apply to anybody living within our borders, but it's not every constitutional right.
00:52:24.000Not every constitutional right applies to illegal immigrants.
00:52:28.000I mean, one of the questions is, can you tell somebody's an illegal immigrant right off the bat, or not?
00:52:56.000The left doesn't want this question on the census because they believe that the Trump administration is trying to gather information about how many illegal immigrants live in districts for purposes of redistricting.
00:53:08.000That we should have districts that are drawn based on the number of American citizens living in a district, not on the number of people, including folks who cannot vote or take part in American politics, living in those districts.
00:53:19.000Basically, I think that this is animus against Trump, frankly.
00:53:23.000I don't see a rational reason not to ask that question.
00:53:26.000Matthew says, Hey Ben, I've been listening to Milton Friedman lately.
00:53:28.000It's been common knowledge that FDR and his New Deal extended the Great Depression by eight years.
00:53:32.000Where could I find some good resources on this to read more on it?
00:53:34.000So there was a good study from UCLA Anderson School of Business that came out a few years ago.
00:53:39.000If you search Anderson School of Business study Great Depression, it'll come up.
00:53:43.000Talking about how the Great Depression was lengthened by eight years.
00:53:46.000Also, there's sort of a variation between the Vienna School of Economics and the Chicago School of Economics on what exactly led to the Great Depression.
00:53:52.000Hayek wrote about it, so did Milton Friedman.
00:53:54.000Friedman basically suggests that it was a lack of inflation in the monetary supply, it was the contraction of the monetary supply.
00:54:00.000Hayek suspects, and members of the Viennese School of Economics suspect, that it was government interventionism, tariffs and trade barriers, and actually, A bubble that was created by the federal government in terms of currency in the 1920s that led to an ease of credit in the 1920s that led to the crash.
00:54:19.000There's a very good book called Vienna or Chicago by Mark Skousen that talks specifically about that argument.
00:54:26.000If you want a book that talks about the failures of FDR's policy during the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes has an excellent book about this as well.
00:54:33.000Let's see, Rohan says, Ben, Elon Musk has said that he would like to see a permanent human presence on Mars.
00:54:38.000Having a self-sustaining outpost on Mars would serve as an insurance policy if something disastrous were to happen to humanity on Earth.
00:54:44.000Do you think space exploration has the ability to serve as a social fabric, meaning it would unite Americans, allow us to move past identity politics and leftist intersectionality?
00:55:15.000We can travel across seas and to distant lands and still have those problems.
00:55:18.000Within 200 years of us colonizing Mars, within 50 years of us colonizing Mars, there will be intersectional battles over land redistribution on Mars.
00:55:25.000Human beings are always going to be human beings.
00:55:26.000Human nature is always going to be human nature.
00:55:29.000Now, increased amounts of territory are going to presumably ease some of the problems, but it depends how hard it is to colonize Mars.
00:55:38.000I assume people aren't just going to be flying up there in their own personal spaceships and then planting the flag on a bit of territory where they put some rocks down, the way that we did when people crossed America, crossed the continent to lay out a homestead, for example.
00:55:52.000I assume that a Mars colony would be a lot more organized, top-down.
00:55:56.000So, human nature is always going to be human nature, is the short answer.
00:55:59.000Maeve says, Hey Ben, you say our healthcare system is broken and that universal healthcare as the left is promoting it is not the solution.
00:56:13.000There's a very good report by Avik Roy that I've been reading through that has some kind of temporary fixes and solutions for the healthcare system in the United States, relies a lot on health savings accounts, the transition away from employer-based healthcare, and more toward individually-based healthcare, where you are responsible for purchasing your own insurance, and thus, when you lose your job, you don't necessarily lose your insurance.
00:56:35.000Obviously, being able to sell insurance across state lines would help deregulation of the insurance industry, would certainly help Lowering licensing requirements in particular areas of medicine would help.
00:56:45.000Greater price transparency on drugs would certainly help.
00:56:48.000As I say, Avik Roy is, I think, probably the leading scholar in America on this, and he has about a 300-page report that is well worthwhile kind of browsing.
00:56:58.000I intend on going through it at some point in a future episode.
00:57:00.000Maybe I'll have Avik on one of our Sunday specials, and we can talk about All of the solutions.
00:57:08.000There is no point at which they reach the end of the radical plank.
00:57:20.000Angela says, So first of all, that is a very obscure question, so I would actually have to look up to remind myself what Nietzsche's four critiques on Christianity are.
00:57:35.000So I'm going to punt on that, because I frankly don't know those off the top of my head.
00:57:42.000He I know that his sort of generalized critique of Christianity, which is that it created a slave mentality where meekness was supposed to serve as a substitute for strength and that the poor would would rule the earth and the meek would rule the earth.
00:58:09.000I think Christianity, in my read, and again, I'm not a Christian scholar, but I am, you know, more knowledgeable about Judaism, so I'll talk about Judaism.
00:58:16.000Judaism is not about a victim mentality, which he sort of suggests it is.
00:58:19.000Judaism is about the idea that you have obligations and duties to God, and you are obligated to fulfill those duties to God, regardless of whether you believe yourself to be a victim in the first place.
00:58:28.000It doesn't say that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, or any of that sort of stuff in a practical sense.
00:58:32.000What it is saying is that in a moral sense, People who are more moral in a better time will reap the benefit of their morality.
00:58:41.000I am not a fan of Nietzsche's morality.
00:58:43.000I think that Nietzsche's morality is... I think his critique of what happens when secularism takes over is exactly right.
00:58:53.000I think that his belief that Christianity falling away would lead to a better world is exactly wrong and was proved wrong in his own country within the next few years.
00:59:04.000Sarah says, Howdy Ben, what are your thoughts on robot umpires being introduced in baseball games?
00:59:08.000I've heard some people say it strengthens the integrity of the game.
00:59:35.000Paul says, my husband and I just had our first child.
00:59:37.000Well, I would like to quit my job and raise for myself.
00:59:39.000He thinks she won't develop social skills if she doesn't go to daycare.
00:59:41.000Could you please share your thoughts on daycare versus raising kids at home?
00:59:44.000I've seen very little evidence that going to daycare actually creates more social skills than going to school when you're five years old, for example.
00:59:52.000I don't think that the data is there to support that idea.
00:59:55.000Now, with that said, my kids went to preschool.
01:01:11.000We employed aircraft carriers, radar stations, all the military hardware we had to defeat our ideological nemesis.
01:01:19.000When each team had over 20,000 nuclear warheads apiece.
01:01:24.000The space race was the defining act of the second half of the 20th century.
01:01:28.000Time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement.
01:01:34.00050 years ago, men from planet Earth first set foot upon the moon.
01:01:38.000You owe it to yourself and to history to experience the space age from the inside and see how it took hundreds of small steps to get to that one giant leap.
01:01:50.000I'm Bill Whittle, and this is what we saw.
01:01:57.000Well, Bill Whittle, I'm so glad that you could stop by.
01:02:00.000Bill, of course, is hosting a brand new podcast, Apollo 11, What We Saw.
01:02:04.000So Bill, tell us about what this podcast is actually going to be.
01:02:07.000Well, we had four segments of about an hour each.
01:02:12.000So the great news is, while every segment talks a bit about the Apollo 11 mission, I get to break that down into different areas.
01:02:19.000But the great thing is we basically cover the entire space race from Chinese rocket-assisted arrows to SpaceX landing twin boosters on the Falcon Heavy launch.
01:02:28.000And, you know, one of the things I realized, Ben, is that people who have so much trouble Believing that this happened.
01:02:35.000Have trouble believing it happened because they're told that the moon landing just kind of parachuted into the world.
01:02:40.000You know, we're watching, you know, all in the family.
01:02:42.000Hey, we cut the hold on news announcement.
01:02:46.000And what they don't see is that every single three, four weeks prior to that for four or five years, there's just another mission going a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further.
01:03:02.000So, what do you think was the importance of the moon landing?
01:03:04.000I mean, we obviously all pay attention to it because it's amazing in and of itself, but what do you think was sort of the greater impact of the moon landing?
01:03:11.000Kennedy caught two things with that famous moon landing speech of his.
01:03:17.000And I don't even know if he knew that he caught him.
01:03:20.000But he said, we want to do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
01:03:23.000And what he selected was the hardest thing to do.
01:03:26.000It was the hardest thing to do in the world at the time.
01:03:30.000And so we had been so badly humiliated by the Soviets.
01:03:38.000We've got 20,000 nuclear weapons, so do they.
01:03:40.000We've got test pilots, aircraft carriers, all this stuff.
01:03:43.000We can't use them, because if we do, There goes all of our cities and there's two.
01:03:49.000So what this was, was a way for us to showcase our technology and our ability and impress third world countries and all the rest without actually killing each other.
01:03:59.000But it's all about missiles and pilots and radars and all that stuff.
01:04:02.000So Kennedy said, what is the hardest thing we can do?
01:04:05.000And since we've been so humiliated since Sputnik, He realized that the American people would, what they would think of themselves more than what the rest of the world would think of it.
01:04:14.000But the main thing he said that really got it is that opening sentence.
01:04:25.000That was the hurdle to go into the moon was making the decision to go.
01:04:30.000I mean, one of the things that you talk about in the series is the uncertainty of the people who are involved in this project as to whether it was going to work.
01:04:37.000I mean, we sort of take it for granted that the thing worked, but that was a knife's edge thing, it sounds like, for the vast majority of the planning.
01:04:44.000Armstrong and Aldrin admitted after the mission that they figured they had a 50-50 chance of getting home, which is not the kind of thing you want to do at home.
01:04:53.000You keep on going with your day, tails, you know.
01:04:56.000Close the door and turn on the car in the garage.
01:04:59.000But that's one of the reasons why they deserve the heroism.
01:05:02.000The three Apollo 1 astronauts died in a fire in the capsule that was so horrific.
01:05:07.000And I get a chance to go a little bit into those details.
01:05:10.000And I go into those details not because it's gruesome, but I don't do it because it's just kind of macabre.
01:05:16.000I do it because people need to understand the courage it took to take the risks they took.
01:05:22.000The Apollo 1 crew had complained about all of this flammable material in the capsule.
01:05:26.000And when this capsule caught fire, and all three of them died in the fire, when they got the door open, it took over an hour to get them out of the capsule because the nylon had fused them into the side of the capsule.
01:05:39.000Now, that's not a pretty image, but that image is something that every single guy who flew those missions had in the back of his mind.
01:06:03.000So I really, growing up as an experimental test pilot and stuff, and the thing I like most about the series is we get a lot of the really strange, really odd backstage stuff that nobody really gets to talk about.
01:06:16.000I mean, since you get into such an inordinate level of detail with regard to what exactly happened with Apollo 11, what do you make of all the people who remain conspiracy theorists, who think that this was all shot on some backstage lot somewhere?
01:06:28.000Well, I used to get a lot more angry at them than I do now.
01:06:31.000And having done... I mean, I knew the space program very well, but having done the research I did, I realized that the reason, as I said, that so many people have a hard time believing it Is analogous to the fact that you say that the Wright Brothers went down to Kitty Hawk in 1903 and built an F-22 Raptor.
01:06:50.000And the Wright Brothers can't build an F-22 Raptor.
01:06:53.000They built a wooden thing with canvas wings which evolved into the biplanes of World War I with canvas wings.
01:06:59.000Which evolved into the all-wood hurricane in World War II, which evolved into the P-51, now we get jets, we get the Sabre, we get the F-4, we're supersonic, fly-by-wire with the F-16, we get stealth with the F-117, we get radars with the F-15, better engines with the F-118, and then you can build an F-22.
01:07:16.000And the entire purpose of this show is to take a look at every single one of those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of small steps that got us to that giant leap.
01:07:25.000And now that we look back on this, and we haven't been back to the moon in a manned mission since, what's changed?
01:07:43.000I thought this was going to be the pinnacle of human history, July 20th, 1969.
01:07:48.000But I've changed my mind in the last couple years.
01:07:52.000What I think is going to happen is, you can measure the greatness of America by the fact that this country got bored with going to the moon.
01:11:20.000The fact that this is now being taken seriously as some sort of metaphor for why monarchy is good is hilarious to me.
01:11:26.000We may be a little bit too... We may be overanalyzing this thing a little bit too much.
01:11:31.000This columnist says, As we watch the herbivores congregate to bow down before their newborn ruler, the Lion King offers us a seductive worldview in which absolute power goes unquestioned, and where the weak and the vulnerable are fundamentally inferior.
01:11:42.000In other words, the Lion King offers us a fascist ideology writ large.
01:11:46.000There seems to be no way out for the forthcoming remake.
01:11:49.000The first thing to understand about The Lion King is that it isn't in any way about lions or any other animal species.
01:11:55.000No, it kind of is, and it says so in the title, The Lion King, and then also there are only animals and no humans in it.
01:12:06.000It's amazing how the left will struggle to say that certain things are not metaphors, and then they will immediately say that this is a metaphor for fascism on Earth.
01:12:14.000As in every fable, a variety of cute and cuddly figures stand in for human societal organizations.
01:12:19.000Mapping our internalized social hierarchies onto this pristine and neutral world of the animal kingdom renders these power dynamics natural, common sense, and desirable.
01:12:27.000Okay, so first of all, let's just be real about the animal kingdom.
01:12:32.000When they are called the king of the forest, king of the jungle, this has been a thing for quite a while, and that is because the lion is the apex predator in this particular scenario.
01:12:44.000By using the predator-prey relationships to allegorize human power, the film almost inevitably incorporates the white supremacist worldview.
01:12:52.000So now, believe it or not, the argument is that The Lion King is about white supremacy.
01:12:57.000Now, last I checked, Mufasa, his voice in The Lion King, is James Earl Jones, who is black.
01:13:06.000Simba, in the remake, is played by Donald Glover, who is black.
01:13:11.000Nala, who is his wife, is played by Beyoncé, who is black.
01:13:16.000Sarabi, who is his mom, is played by Alfre Woodard, who is black.
01:13:22.000James Earl Jones is still Mufasa, and still black.
01:13:25.000But apparently, it's all white supremacy.
01:13:31.000Obviously, such fables can serve politically to every sense, says this columnist for the Washington Post.
01:13:35.000George Orwell's Animal Farm employed a similar allegory to make class distinctions more blatantly visible and to criticize authoritarian systems of power.
01:13:43.000Disney's own Robin Hood adaptation similarly associated power systems with animal food chains, but used its allegory to poke fun at the obvious greed and corruption that define the predatory ruling class.
01:13:53.000But the sympathies of the Lion King lie elsewhere.
01:13:56.000Doubling down on Disney's historical obsession with patriarchal monarchies, it places the audience's point of view squarely with the autocratic lions, whose pride rock literally looks down upon all of society's weaker groups, a kind of Trump Tower of the African Savannah.
01:14:18.000When Grand Patriarch Mufasa explains patiently to his son how this division of power works, he emphasizes that the king must maintain balance in their kingdom.
01:14:26.000This seems fine when we think about the environment where balance sounds great, because they're living in the environment and aren't animals, so yes.
01:14:31.000But when we consider he's really explaining to his own heir why it's perfectly fine to behave dictatorially, the lion's perspective feels a lot more unsettling.
01:14:39.000Bad as it is that the powerful are presented as inherently superior to all other things, things get substantially worse once the hyenas are introduced.
01:14:47.000With the lions standing in for the ruling class and the good, herbivores embodying society's decent law-abiding citizens, the hyenas transparently represent the black, brown, and disabled bodies that are forcefully excluded from this fascist society.
01:15:01.000So the hyenas are black and brown and disabled.
01:15:10.000And they're black and brown as opposed to the lions, whose voices are all black folks.
01:15:17.000Noticeably marked by their ethnically coded street accents, the hyenas blatantly symbolize racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes of verminous groups that form an inherent threat to society.
01:15:49.000predictably orchestrated by scar the misfit lion whose opportunistic desire to advance the status of minorities echoes the way conservatives speak of liberal politicians when they act as if compassion is merely opportunism simultaneously his effeminate gestures and lack of interest in heterosexual reproduction mark him as queer like the vast majority of other villains in disney's exclusively heterosexual world what in the world what the guys did you ever did i miss this i
01:16:18.000Did you ever get that all the villains in Disney films are gay?
01:16:27.000Jafar in Aladdin literally wants to have sex with Jasmine throughout the entire film.
01:16:33.000And Scar is hitting on Simba's mom, if I don't misremember.
01:16:40.000Adding insult to injury, the social outcast rebellion against Mufasa's autocratic regime is explicitly associated with the imagery of goose-stepping Nazis.
01:16:49.000But as so often in Hollywood films, the explicit Nazi iconography serves primarily to distract us from the hero's own fascism.
01:16:56.000Simba's final ascent to the throne, his masculine roar returning Scar's dystopia to its Edenic natural state, is nothing less than the Fuhrer principle at work.
01:17:05.000The idea that those we entrust with positions of leadership are blessed with a natural, even divine, superiority.
01:17:14.000Now that Disney has become by far the most powerful entertainment company in the world, we've seen several attempts to update and correct its ideological payload.
01:17:20.000Maleficent and its forthcoming sequel changed a deeply sexist fairy tale into a feminist parable about sexual abuse.
01:17:27.000Aladdin made at least some attempt to mitigate the original film's Islamophobia.
01:17:31.000Beauty and the Beast included a very minor openly gay character, the new Ariel will be a mermaid of color, and Mulan has been overhauled to become less offensive to Chinese audiences.
01:17:39.000But we should get rid of the Lion King, presumably.
01:18:31.000Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, a former Trump staffer claims that she was the victim of battery when Trump forcibly kissed her, she says.
01:18:40.000Well, there's video now of the incident in question, and it seems to completely vindicate Trump.