Former FBI agent Peter Strzok gets clocked by a bevy of Republicans, President Trump takes on Theresa May for no apparent reason, and we check the mailbag. - Ben Shapiro - The Ben Shapiro Show: When the news is this stupid, it's not hard to do a show - and we have lots to get to today. - FBI Agent PeterStrzok Testifies in front of the House Government Oversight Committee - What did the DOJ know about the Hillary Clinton/Russia collusion investigation? - Why did the FBI hire a spy to spy on Donald Trump? and more! - And who is Theresa May, the British Prime Minister, and why does she hate Donald Trump so much that she's running against him in a presidential election? - And why is she running against Donald Trump, and how does she do it so badly? - What does she have to do with the Trump-Russia investigation? - and why did she vote for Trump? - Is she a racist, a sexist, a misogynist, a homophobe, a hater, a neofascist, or something else? - or is she just not smart enough to know what s going on? - Find out in our live Q&A hosted by Elisha Krauss! Subscribe to our new show, The Conversation, featuring our host Andrew Klavan, and ask Drew, "Where all of his hair went?" on YouTube and The Daily Wire's own Andrew Kavan with our host, Drew Kavan. Go check out The Conversation on The Conversation's live Q & A on The DailyWire. Join the Conversation! and ask your questions! Subscribe, and be sure to be included in our next episode next Tuesday, July 17th at 5:30pm et/11/19th! Thanks for listening to DailyWire's newest episode of The Conversation. . The Conversation? Subscribe and Share The Conversation! Subscribe to Dailywire. Subscribe & Subscribe to The Dailywire! to be notified when we deconstruct the latest in politics, culture, entertainment, culture and culture! in our new podcast, The Swamp Dweller Podcasts! The Swamp Thing by clicking here! Check out our newest episode on The Swamp People Podcasts Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and other awesome things going on the Swamp Thing Podcasts, and we'll send us your thoughts and reviews! Thank you for listening!
00:00:00.000FBI agent Peter Strzok gets clocked by a bevy of Republicans, President Trump takes on Theresa May for no apparent reason, and we check the mailbag.
00:02:02.000Yesterday, Peter Strzok, you remember this guy, this is the guy who is an FBI agent having an affair with another FBI agent and he was texting with her the whole time about how much he hated Donald Trump.
00:02:12.000And this only matters because Peter Strzok was in charge of both the Hillary Clinton email investigation as well as the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
00:02:18.000And as you will also recall, the Inspector General of the DOJ, Michael Horowitz, found that Peter Strzok's bias against President Trump could not be counted out when it came to analyzing his activities with regard to these investigations.
00:02:30.000So, for example, there was a point in late September when it became clear to the FBI that there were Hillary Clinton emails on Huma Abedin's computer.
00:02:38.000Instead of prioritizing that and checking it out, Peter Strzok decided it was imperative to put all of his resources on the supposed Trump-Russia collusion that was happening.
00:02:47.000And instead of checking out the Hillary thing, he checked out the Trump thing.
00:02:50.000That delayed the Hillary thing until late in the election cycle.
00:02:52.000Ironically, that ended up boosting Hillary Clinton out of the presidency.
00:02:55.000It ended up creating a Donald Trump presidency, possibly, by allowing the FBI and James Comey to re-announce an opening of Hillary's email investigation like five, six days before the election actually happened.
00:03:17.000So he shows up on the Hill yesterday and he's testifying in front of the House Government Oversight Committee.
00:03:23.000Let me say at the outset, I don't think that this was a useful hearing.
00:03:26.000The reason I don't think this was a useful hearing is because no new information was available.
00:03:30.000We already knew what Peter Strzok was going to say about all of this because it said all of it in the Inspector General report.
00:03:35.000The only thing that would have been useful is if the members of the House Committee on Oversight, if the Government Oversight Committee, if they'd actually asked Strzok about specific instances of decision making and whether those decisions were biased by his anti-Trump hatred.
00:03:50.000Right, so if they'd actually had in front of them, like, a complete timeline of Peter Strzok's decision-making, from the initiation of the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russia collusion investigation, all the way through today, and said, okay, here's all your decisions, here's why this one seems biased, explain yourself.
00:04:48.000And I can't help but wonder, when I see you looking there with a little smirk, how many times did you look so innocent into your wife's eye and lie to her about Lisa?
00:05:14.000When Louie campaigned for Roy Moore in Alabama, when Louie was a big Trump supporter, is it a little ironic?
00:05:21.000Yes, of course it's a little ironic, but I will point out that I would like for there to be a standard that adultery is bad in the country, so it doesn't really bother me that Peter Strzok is getting smacked around over the fact that he was cheating on his wife with another FBI agent and texting little nothings, sweet nothings about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to her.
00:05:37.000That doesn't bother me in the slightest.
00:05:38.000OK, so Strzok made himself look really bad yesterday.
00:05:41.000He started off the hearing by saying that even this questioning is a win for Vladimir Putin.
00:05:46.000And he's becoming a hero to the left because of all of this.
00:05:48.000It's sort of an Oliver North moment from the 1980s during Iran-Contra.
00:05:51.000Oliver North was the colonel who had been involved in smuggling weapons to the Contras in Nicaragua.
00:06:05.000He has a bunch of Democrats who are now rushing to defend him and talk about how wonderful he is because he suggests that even this line of questioning helps Vladimir Putin.
00:06:14.000I have the utmost respect for Congress's oversight role, but I strongly believe today's hearing is just another victory notch in Putin's belt and another milestone in our enemy's campaign to tear America apart.
00:06:26.000OK, well, there are serious questions to be asked about Peter Strzok.
00:06:29.000Yeah, I don't think that having a hearing about whether the FBI was biased in its investigation is irrelevant.
00:06:34.000This is the job of the Government Oversight Committee.
00:06:36.000I don't think that this is a huge problem.
00:06:38.000Daryl Issa, again, this is all grandstanding, it was all very entertaining, but I don't think anybody came out of this looking great.
00:06:44.000Daryl Issa made Peter Strzok read his texts, and it was kind of hilarious.
00:06:50.000And I'm gonna just go to a date and then ask you to read your own words.
00:07:27.000He explained his text messages, his anti-Trump text messages, by basically suggesting he did nothing wrong.
00:07:32.000That when he said, we'll stop it, you know, as a high ranking member of the FBI, meaning Trump's campaign, we'll stop Trump from becoming president.
00:08:23.000OK, so here is that actual little exchange where Gowdy says to him, that's a great answer to the question nobody asked.
00:08:28.000But that's the only question that matters, honestly.
00:08:30.000The only question that matters is not whether Peter Strzok hated Donald Trump.
00:08:32.000We know Peter Strzok hated Donald Trump.
00:08:34.000I'll bet there are a bunch of people in the FBI who weren't real fond of Hillary Clinton either.
00:08:37.000The real question is, was the investigation biased?
00:08:39.000And this is why I say that I think this hearing was kind of a waste of time, because it didn't get to the question of whether his actual actions impacted the actions of the FBI in the Russia investigation.
00:08:49.000And for that, we're gonna have to wait for more information to come out.
00:08:51.000Now, does it demonstrate that Peter Strzok is the worst?
00:08:53.000Yeah, the guy's pretty much the worst.
00:08:55.000I mean, there's a gif going around, a jif going around, of Peter Strzok making these weird faces, and it's like Kevin Spacey from Seven.
00:09:03.000But does that actually answer the question as to whether the Russia investigation was, from the very outset, poisoned by the FBI, directed at making sure that Trump was not president, corruptly investigated?
00:09:13.000Now, I have my suspicions, but those suspicions were not actually provided with any evidentiary support during this hearing.
00:09:21.000Now, we gotta be objective in how we view this.
00:09:25.000Yes, the Democrats who defend him for all of this are ridiculous.
00:09:29.000But if you're going to imply that Peter Strzok was responsible for an investigation that was utterly corrupt beginning to end, you actually need to show some evidence that he's responsible for corrupt portions of the investigation.
00:09:39.000I'm waiting to hear that because there's an actual Inspector General report that's going to come out about the Russia investigation.
00:09:45.000I don't think it's anywhere out of the realm of possibility that the Russia investigation, the collusion investigation, was tainted from the outset by Strzok and his anti-Trump bias.
00:09:54.000I don't think that's impossible at all.
00:09:56.000What I do think is that if the Republicans were going to have this hearing, they should have hit him with all that stuff.
00:10:01.000They should have had that information.
00:10:02.000They should have made that information public.
00:10:04.000Again, none of this is to suggest that Strzok is innocent.
00:10:47.000But we need to see the evidence of that impact before we can say the entire investigation needs to be thrown out top to bottom.
00:10:51.000Now, I don't think the investigation is going to come up with anything anyway.
00:10:54.000I think the investigation is likely to come up short on a variety of issues.
00:10:58.000I don't think it's going to reach all the way to President Trump.
00:11:00.000I don't think it's going to show that President Trump and the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Russian government.
00:11:04.000I don't think any of the evidence is there for any of that.
00:11:07.000But what I do think is that Peter Strzok and the FBI need to do a much better job of cleaning up exactly how it is that they are pursuing these issues.
00:11:18.000Because obviously it's dirty in the way they are pursuing it.
00:11:21.000The question is how dirty and how impactful.
00:11:23.000That's not stopping Democrats from defending Peter Strzok.
00:11:26.000Democrats are out full force defending Strzok, saying that Strzok is just a wonderful, wonderful dude.
00:11:30.000We'll talk about that in just a second.
00:11:31.000First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Policy Genius.
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00:12:39.000With all of this said, with Peter Strzok being as corrupt as Peter Strzok is, with him being as smug as he is, and the smugness matters here.
00:12:47.000Hey, listen, I have a certain amount of sympathy for people who are smug, considering that I am a charter member of the Smug Club, but if, in fact, Peter Strzok is really smug about what he believes, what that tends toward is a certain level of certainty in his activity with regards to his professionalism.
00:13:02.000And he tends to believe that his opinion is fact, which is why he's so smug about it.
00:13:05.000When you start to believe that your opinion is fact, well, that tends to creep into a mission.
00:13:12.000If I could give you a purple heart, I would.
00:13:39.000This has been an attack on you in a way to attack Mr. Mueller and the investigation that is to get at Russia collusion involved in our election.
00:14:05.000And this is a guy who has disgraced the FBI, no matter how you slice it.
00:14:08.000But according to the Democrats, because he sent a bunch of anti-Trump text messages, he deserves a purple heart.
00:14:14.000Now, what's hilarious about this is that it's probably Peter Strzok's fault that Hillary Clinton is not president right now.
00:14:19.000If Peter Strzok had simply investigated the Hillary Clinton email stuff on Huma Abedin's computer and released that in early October, as opposed to the very tail end of October, then Hillary Clinton wouldn't face that round of bad headlines at the end of October.
00:14:48.000The left can really be bought for a song.
00:14:50.000All you have to do is scream about how much you dislike Trump, and the left suddenly loves you.
00:14:54.000The left suddenly is just your... It's become an entry key to the leftist kind of lounge, if you dislike President Trump.
00:15:05.000It's funny, the other night, I went with my wife over to a place in Los Angeles called the Magic Castle.
00:15:09.000The Magic Castle is just spectacular, it's a lot of fun, and we went there for our 10th anniversary, and one of the magicians there, who's this very famous magician, he's got a show on Netflix, I believe, he started off his little routine with a joke about Trump.
00:15:22.000He said, I was in New York, and everybody cheers, and then he goes, and I walk past Trump Tower, and everybody starts booing.
00:15:30.000Like, this is how you're going to signal to your audience that you are one of them?
00:15:34.000All these rich people sitting at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles on a Tuesday night, and you're talking about how you walked by Trump Tower?
00:15:56.000It's something that they really enjoy.
00:15:58.000Now, meanwhile, President Trump has headed over to Britain.
00:16:02.000And there he's gotten himself in a little bit of hot water.
00:16:04.000So he did an interview with the UK Sun, which is just a huge mistake.
00:16:08.000And in this interview with the UK Sun, he ripped into current Prime Minister Theresa May.
00:16:11.000So for folks who haven't been following this, Theresa May is the Prime Minister of Britain.
00:16:15.000And she is also in serious trouble electorally, because if there should be a no confidence vote and they call a new election, Theresa May probably loses her prime ministership.
00:16:26.000I mean, Jeremy Corbyn is an actual former Soviet asset inside the UK.
00:16:37.000Jeremy Corbyn is an actual terrorist sympathizer.
00:16:39.000He's one of the worst people on planet Earth, Jeremy Corbyn.
00:16:41.000He could be the next Prime Minister of Britain if the Conservatives blow it.
00:16:45.000Well, the Conservatives have been fighting amongst themselves over how to handle Brexit.
00:16:48.000So as you recall, a couple of years ago,
00:16:50.000Brexit was voted on by the British public and they voted that they wanted to exit the EU.
00:16:53.000And it was unclear what exactly that meant.
00:16:55.000How exactly were you going to carry out this exit from the EU?
00:16:59.000So there have been two plans that have been forward.
00:17:00.000One is sort of called for shorthand soft Brexit and the other is hard Brexit.
00:17:04.000Hard Brexit is we are going to cut off all of the current treaties that we have with the EU and renegotiate all of them.
00:17:09.000Soft Brexit is, we're going to exit in certain areas, but we're going to leave a lot of the rules in place in other areas.
00:17:15.000So as The Sun describes it, the Tory manifesto vowed to withdraw Britain from the single market and the customs union so that we can end free immigration and quit the EU court.
00:17:22.000But Labour has not signed up to that approach.
00:17:24.000A soft Brexit would see the UK have a similar membership of the European Economic Area to that of Norway.
00:17:29.000That would mean that the country would still have access to the single market while being able to make deals without the rest of the EU, so they could make outside deals.
00:17:36.000It would also see the UK stay within the EU Customs Union, meaning exports would not be subject to border checks or tariffs.
00:17:43.000And a softer Brexit could see the UK making payments into EU budgets and accepting the four freedoms, movement of goods, services, capital and people.
00:17:50.000So soft Brexit is unpopular with the hard base of support that supported Brexit.
00:17:55.000Hard Brexit is not popular with the vast majority of the British public.
00:17:59.000So Theresa May has been having to walk this very fine line.
00:18:02.000Well, thankfully, she has the subtlety of Donald Trump to help her guide her through this.
00:18:08.000Donald Trump is about as subtle as a brick through a window.
00:18:10.000And so Donald Trump comes in and he starts preaching to Theresa May exactly how she should handle Brexit, obviously based on his vast experience with the British public.
00:18:17.000The reason this is stupid is because you don't want to undermine your ally there.
00:18:21.000If he undermines Theresa May, then Jeremy Corbyn could easily become prime minister.
00:18:25.000And then he has to deal with an open socialist who hates Trump, hates the United States, hates all of America's other allies.
00:18:31.000Does Trump really have that much of an interest in how Brexit is negotiated, that he wants to undermine Theresa May?
00:18:36.000And yet there he was, praising Boris Johnson, another member of Theresa May's cabinet who just resigned over her soft Brexit stance.
00:18:42.000Here is Trump praising Boris Johnson, saying he'd make a great prime minister, boosting an actual competitor to Theresa May within her own party, in an interview with the UK Sun.
00:18:51.000I think he's a great representative for
00:19:26.000Like, I presume that Donald Trump wouldn't want Theresa May traveling over to the United States and dictating to him how we ought to do our tax policy or our tariff policy.
00:19:33.000I assume that he'd get mad about that.
00:19:35.000But he's going over there and telling Theresa May that she ought to basically renegotiate all her trade deals with the EU.
00:19:41.000Which makes no sense, by the way, because the amount of trade that Britain receives from the EU surpasses, I think, by a bundle, the amount of trade that they receive from the United States.
00:19:49.000Here he is, in any case, ripping soft Brexit, saying that is not what the Brits voted for.
00:19:53.000Well, I think the deal that she's striking is not what the people voted on.
00:19:57.000It's a much different deal than the people voted on.
00:20:01.000It was not the deal that was in the referendum.
00:20:04.000Playing expert on stuff that you really don't know much about is really not smart.
00:20:17.000UK exports to the US were worth about £100 billion in 2016 compared to £234 billion to the EU in 2016.
00:20:26.000In other words, if they have to choose between the EU and the United States with regard to their trade policy, I don't think it's going to be any question that they're going to pick the EU, because it would be foolish otherwise.
00:20:35.000Okay, so that wasn't all that Trump had to say.
00:20:37.000Trump then continued, he was talking with the UK Sun some more, and he ripped into Sadiq Khan.
00:20:42.000Sadiq Khan is the mayor of London, and here's the president ripping into Sadiq Khan.
00:20:45.000Now this is the part where Trump actually says some stuff that's true.
00:20:48.000You have a mayor who's done a terrible job in London.
00:21:01.000I agree with Trump here, but at least if you're going to attack your opponents, attack your opponents when you are abroad.
00:21:06.000Okay, with all that said, the President of the United States is making a lot of waves over there.
00:21:10.000It's not stopping the, hilariously enough, it is not stopping the left from making even greater fools of themselves than they otherwise would.
00:21:18.000We'll talk about that in just a second.
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00:22:34.000None of this is stopping the leftists in the UK from making the same sort of fools of themselves that leftists in the United States have as well.
00:22:41.000So they started off by flying a baby Trump balloon over the Westminster.
00:22:49.000Okay, so there was a lot of talk about how big this thing was going to be.
00:22:51.000And there were a bunch of pictures of it.
00:22:53.000They basically suggested it was going to be a blimp-sized baby Trump balloon that was flying over Westminster Abbey, which is really close to Parliament.
00:23:02.000And here is the actual size of the balloon that they flew.
00:23:06.000That thing is not even the size of like a small bounce house.
00:23:09.000That's what you order from Amazon versus what comes in the mail right there.
00:23:22.000So the leftists, you know, doing wonderful work over all of this.
00:23:25.000And then Jeremy Corbyn, he says that Trump is best friends with Theresa May and it's just terrible.
00:23:29.000Why would Theresa May be friends with Trump?
00:23:31.000This is why Trump should not have undermined Theresa May.
00:23:34.000But Jeremy Corbyn, this old loon bag, I mean, he makes Bernie Sanders look like a model of propriety and sanity, Jeremy Corbyn.
00:23:40.000Here's Jeremy Corbyn going off on Theresa May.
00:23:42.000Theresa May has invited President Trump to this country at a time when his dangerous and inhumane policies are putting the lives and the well-being of millions of people at risk.
00:23:54.000The Labour Party is committed to dialogue, including of course with those we strongly disagree with.
00:24:02.000Okay, so Jeremy Corbyn using this as an opportunity to rip into Theresa May.
00:24:06.000This is why, you know, I know that the Trump policy is basically going to, he's a bull in a China shop with everything.
00:24:14.000Sometimes the China needs to be broken.
00:24:16.000I'm not sure our relationship with Theresa May needs to be broken at this time with Jeremy Corbyn sitting there waiting to pick up all of the pieces.
00:24:22.000Now, that doesn't mean that everything that Trump has said in Britain is wrong.
00:24:24.000Some of the stuff he said in Britain is right.
00:24:26.000Here's Trump, for example, talking about immigration into Europe.
00:24:29.000And people are taking this as Trump's a racist.
00:24:31.000No, what Trump is saying here is that lack of assimilation into Western civilization creates all sorts of cultural problems.
00:24:37.000He's not the first person to say stuff like this.
00:24:38.000David Cameron, former conservative Prime Minister of UK, has said the same thing.
00:24:42.000Angela Merkel has said the same thing.
00:24:43.000Here is Trump talking about mass immigration into the EU.
00:24:46.000I just think it's changing the culture.
00:24:49.000I think it's a very negative thing for Europe.
00:24:53.000I think having Germany, and I have a great relationship with Angela Merkel, great relationship with Germany, but I think that's very much hurt Germany.
00:25:05.000I think it's very much hurt other parts of Europe.
00:25:10.000I mean, I was in France a few years ago, and there's no question that there are certain districts in France that are just not safe for Jews to travel in.
00:25:17.000And that has been an effect of unvetted mass migration into the EU.
00:25:21.000It's one of the reasons Brexit happened in the first place was people in Britain said, we don't want free travel of people all around the EU.
00:25:26.000They come and they settle in Britain and then they just stay here and they create enclaves.
00:26:32.000So President Trump was asked about the Sun interview and then he called it fake news.
00:26:38.000And unfortunately, there was a story that was done, which was generally fine, but it didn't put in what I said about the Prime Minister, and I said tremendous things.
00:26:49.000And fortunately, we tend to record stories now, so we have it for your enjoyment if you'd like it.
00:26:55.000But we record when we deal with reporters.
00:26:57.000It's called fake news, and we solve a lot of problems.
00:27:39.000Well, I do think that as people shift how they are going about their business of consuming news, there will be a decline in the ratings for a lot of cable news networks, just because younger people have cut the cord in a way that older people have not.
00:28:03.000That said, I think that the cable news industry is obviously thriving and robust right now,
00:28:07.000If you had to invest your money in a 20-year plan for the future, everybody is moving online, and this is true for a lot of the cable news networks as well.
00:28:12.000They're starting to expend more resources to move into that space.
00:28:16.000I think at a certain point, everyone will own the tear-filled Tumblr or the equivalent on the left.
00:28:20.000I think that the cable news model in 20 years is probably not going to be a thing.
00:30:26.000No, I didn't, because I think that speed limits are generally stupid.
00:30:29.000Really, I think they're generally stupid.
00:30:30.000I think we have reckless driving laws.
00:30:32.000I think that if you get yourself into an accident, that's your own fault, but...
00:30:35.000Speed limits are generally an idiotic thing.
00:30:37.000There are certain countries, like Germany, I believe there are certain areas of Germany, like on the Autobahn, where the speed limit is basically non-existent.
00:30:44.000And I have not seen a huge increase in the number of accidents because of that.
00:31:07.000Get your subscription to this, The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:31:09.000You get to ask live questions in the Mailbag right now if you're a subscriber.
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00:32:11.000It's not an American who's actually involved in the hacking, and there's no charge that these people are involved specifically with the Trump administration.
00:32:18.000These are the first charges by the Mueller office directly accusing the Russian government of meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
00:32:25.000I think we all acknowledge already that the Russian government was meddling in the election, so watch as everybody goes nuts today, but I don't think that it's going to be that big a deal.
00:33:34.000All I can say is that ladies love the tumblers.
00:33:37.000So if you pledge that your tumbler will be hers forever, no matter what happens in the divorce,
00:33:42.000I will suggest that your shot with Veronica will be much better, because when you pool your assets, including tumblers, you're both richer for it.
00:33:49.000Okay, Edward says, Ben, I recently read Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.
00:33:53.000While I agree with him regarding his philosophy of nonviolent protest, he also criticizes the notion that citizens should obey laws we feel are wrong until the law is changed, even going so far as to say we shouldn't pay taxes if we felt they were going to be used for immoral purposes.
00:34:06.000There are plenty of laws currently on the books that I believe to be wrong, and a plethora of programs I don't want my tax dollars funding.
00:34:11.000So should we disobey all the laws we don't like and not pay taxes?
00:34:14.000Or are there just some laws like slavery that are so egregious that we have to take a stand against them?
00:34:17.000If so, what determines those kinds of laws?
00:34:20.000This is a serious question in the history of American law and jurisprudence, and it's one that requires a lot of thinking because
00:34:26.000The general answer is you should obey the laws that are the products of a system that you can change from within.
00:34:31.000If, however, the laws are the products of a system you cannot change from within, and they are so evil as to require you not to obey them, then armed rebellion might be necessary.
00:34:40.000So, for example, the American Revolution was founded on the idea that the founders were being taxed without representation.
00:34:45.000They had no capacity to affect the change within the system, and therefore they had to rebel.
00:34:52.000There's a good case to be made that disobedience to slave laws, like disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850...
00:34:59.000That was morally justified because there was no real chance of changing that at the federal level.
00:35:04.000That was something that should have been disobeyed in practice and that basically is what happened in large swaths of the North.
00:35:10.000The idea that you can disobey tax law, I think that's a little bit different simply because tax law changes all the time and you actually can't have a pre-market impact on how the tax law is both created and interpreted.
00:35:19.000John says, Ben, do you have any advice for aspiring authors, especially with regard to publishing and marketing your book?
00:35:23.000Well, my advice for aspiring authors is do some reportage.
00:35:26.000Go out and write something that people... Once you have a certain level of notoriety, you can write whatever you want, obviously.
00:35:32.000It can be Bill Clinton and write a mystery novel with James Patterson.
00:35:35.000But if you are somebody who's up and coming and you want to get into, say, the thought space, not necessarily the fiction space, but the non-fiction thought space, then I would recommend you go out and do some reporting.
00:35:45.000My first book was a reported book, brainwashed all about
00:35:49.000I don't think there's any real rule with regards to what kind of fiction works and what kind of fiction doesn't, and what gets published and what doesn't.
00:36:02.000It seems to me that you can be as marketable as you want to be, and it's completely subjective as to how these books are selected, which is why so many bad books get published.
00:36:10.000Kurt says, Ben, I'm in a conservative echo chamber.
00:36:13.000I ignore left sources because of their condescending, misleading, or unfactual, hateful, and poisonous speech.
00:36:18.000However, Jordan Peterson is slowly convincing me I should listen to both conservative and liberal voices.
00:36:22.000He states the West's success depends on both sides and we should be talking to each other.
00:36:25.000Could you name a few podcasters and or journalists who present the news and information based on facts and their values and not their party ideology or some far-left nonsense?
00:36:32.000I'm looking for the Ben Shapiro on the left.
00:36:34.000Well, there are certain people on the left who I actually enjoy talking to, who I'm friendly with, and whose stuff I enjoy reading.
00:36:41.000So, my favorite right now is there's a gal named Jane Koston who writes over at Vox.com.
00:36:46.000Now, I'm not a Vox.com fan, but I think Jane actually tries to be thoughtful about how she approaches these issues.
00:36:50.000What's hilarious about that is that I originally met Jane after she wrote a piece ripping the crap out of me in the New York Times, saying that I was an emissary of hollow bravery.
00:37:19.000Some journalists who do a better job than others and at different times, right?
00:37:23.000I think Jake when it came to for example that gun debate in Parkland It was not doing the job, but I think Jake when it comes to covering for example the When it came to covering the Hillary Clinton email stuff I think Jake was significantly better and asked some real tough questions of people so you sort of have to determine on a case-by-case basis unfortunately trying to think who else is is a good reporter and
00:37:44.000On the left, Maggie Haberman from Time to Time.
00:37:48.000There are some reporters at the Washington Post who do a fairly decent job, some at the New York Times.
00:37:54.000I'll try to compile a list and put it out there, because I think there are some people who are at least doing their best, trying, on the left.
00:38:48.000It's another thing if you're enabling.
00:38:50.000And if a parent is enabling, or if you are becoming a sponge off your parents, if the idea is you don't want to pay the bills, so that's why you're staying home, or you're too lazy to get an apartment, or you don't want to do your own laundry, or that kind of stuff, then you really should move out and your parents are not doing you any sort of great benefit by not kicking you out of the house.
00:39:05.000They're actually making your life worse in a lot of ways.
00:39:08.000I do think that you reach a certain age, and no matter what your priority, you really should get out of the house.
00:39:13.000I mean, if you're 25, 26 years old living at home, I think that you should really start thinking about getting an apartment, move out, live on your own.
00:39:19.000Living on your own is something that's worthwhile as a general rule.
00:39:36.000I'm reading a book on time right now that I'm going to recommend next week.
00:39:39.000There's a good case to be made that time is actually an illusion, that it's something that human brains use to organize the stuff that happens in their lives, but that essentially all time exists kind of simultaneously and that you are, as a creature traveling through this
00:39:55.000This mixture of material and time that you are just observing things in a weird way.
00:40:04.000All these weird questions are raised by quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity.
00:40:08.000There are all sorts of weird questions about how time actually works, but if you were to think in a timeline way, no, I don't think that there is like a fixed timeline.
00:40:14.000No matter what you do, it can't change.
00:40:16.000I think that, I'm not a determinist, I'm a free will believer, so I think that there are such things as alternative timelines if you could time travel.
00:40:23.000I just find movies and TV shows based on a fixed timeline utterly boring, because you know what's going to happen at the end anyway, so what the hell's the point?
00:40:30.000Chris says, Hey Ben, I have a question about the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Declaration of Independence.
00:40:35.000In the Declaration of Independence, the word God and Creator are used in the document.
00:40:38.000In the Declaration of the Rights of Man, God or Creator is not mentioned at all.
00:40:41.000I know for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson were two of the main writers.
00:40:45.000With Thomas Jefferson being the main writer of the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, why is God excluded from the Declaration of the Rights of Man?
00:41:16.000That the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution is that the American Revolution still paid fealty to Judeo-Christian values, whereas the French Revolution, in the memorable phrase used at the time, was all about strangling the last king with the guts of the last priest.
00:41:28.000So the idea was that religion was an eminent bad, and overthrowing religion in favor of a sort of deist worldview was the best way to achieve a reasonable society.
00:41:37.000You have to more your values to something.
00:41:39.000And in America, you more those values to the Judeo-Christian God.
00:41:43.000Jefferson himself, people say that he was a deist, but
00:41:46.000His deism was not just the sort of clockwork God, God made stuff and then left it on its own.
00:41:52.000There's a good case to be made that he believed in a slightly more involved God than that, although not a God who was constantly involved in human affairs on a constant level.
00:42:00.000He believed that human beings, through reason, were more likely to shape the world around them.
00:42:04.000He did believe in the natural law and the idea that the universe had been constructed according to certain laws that required certain human behaviors, right?
00:42:10.000This was common to virtually all the founders.
00:42:12.000Washington believed this, Adams believed this, Jefferson believed this.
00:42:15.000I mean, listen, there's something called the Jefferson Bible, where Jefferson tried to go back and reorganize the Bible and tried to make it sound more reasonable, basically.
00:42:23.000So this is not somebody who's trying to disconnect the people from the Bible as a general rule.
00:42:27.000Aslan says, Hey Ben, I watch your show every day.
00:42:45.000Okay, well if you know you love her and she loves you and you share values, the answer is propose to her today and get married tomorrow.
00:42:50.000Like seriously, there's no reason to delay things.
00:42:53.000I'm speaking as somebody who got engaged to my wife after three months of dating and got married to her after eight months of dating.
00:42:58.000Okay, and that's just because it took that long to get the wedding together.
00:43:01.000OK, so it's and we've been married for 10 years and we're quite happy when you share values.
00:43:05.000This idea that the longer you live together with somebody, the more you are likely to live together well with somebody is belied by every statistic.
00:43:11.000People who live together before marriage actually are less likely to stay married over the course of time because you already know each other's flaws.
00:43:57.000In the Pursuit of Happiness, the Happiness Hypothesis, his book on happiness, basically he says the relationships start off like this.
00:44:03.000Here is your passionate level of love, it is up here.
00:44:06.000And then down here is your companionate level of love, meaning the amount of trust you have in the person, how well you know the person, how predictable that person is.
00:44:14.000And over time, in the first year basically, the first couple of years, passionate love goes like this, and companionate love goes like this.
00:44:20.000And the marriage that you have 10 years from now is not going to be the marriage that you have when you are first married.
00:44:58.000The question is, how do you get from passionate love to companionate love and stay in companionate love and be satisfied with companionate love?
00:45:06.000And the answer is that marriage was designed, marriage was designed to hem in passionate love into companionate love.
00:45:13.000It was not designed, there was supposed to be this gap, okay?
00:45:15.000Passionate love was supposed to immediately move into marriage.
00:45:18.000The beginning of your marriage was passionate, and then that would gradually move into companionate love.
00:45:22.000If you do that while you are dating, then you're basically at low ebb with passionate love.
00:45:26.000And then you think, well, what happened to the passion?
00:45:28.000When you're married, you know what happened to the passion is you built a life together.
00:45:31.000When you're not married, what happened to the passion is you just hung out together for too long a time and you're bored with the person.
00:45:35.000Why don't I go search for the next passionate experience?
00:45:38.000And this is the problem that people have, really.
00:46:45.000Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.
00:46:47.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:46:53.000Alrighty, so Sasha Baron Cohen, you know, we now know that he tried to prank Sarah Palin into doing a bit on a series with him.
00:47:02.000And apparently what he did is he said that he was a wounded veteran who wanted to talk with her for a series on Showtime.
00:47:09.000And according to Breitbart News, which has deep connections with Palin, so I'm sure this is true, Cohen pretended to be a disabled veteran from Kentucky who was a big fan of Governor Palin.
00:47:18.000He was wearing a necklace made of bullets and had a laptop covered in InfoWars stickers.
00:47:21.000The bullet necklace and stickers for Alex Jones' InfoWars website were part of the persona Cohen was playing, according to the source.
00:47:27.000His disguise was basically a caricature of a conservative middle-class Trump voter who was asking her absurd, racist, homophobic, sexist questions that were all meant to mock Trump voters as a bunch of ignorant and offensive kooks.
00:47:36.000Some of the questions focused on Palin's support of the Second Amendment.
00:47:39.000He was asking her things like, why can't the mentally ill be armed with assault weapons?
00:47:42.000We'd love to discuss his background, why she got into politics, her personal story, her experience and career in Alaska, and on a national level as well.
00:48:08.000We'd love her insight on the past, present, and future of America.
00:48:10.000It's a free forum to talk about issues that matter without being attacked.
00:48:14.000Show her perspective without bias directly to our audience.
00:48:16.000This is a great way to connect with a younger generation of voters.
00:48:21.000So this was Showtime basically lying to Sarah Palin.
00:48:23.000Now, as somebody who has done a book that was based on people thinking I was someone that I was not, you cannot lie when you do this.
00:48:31.000So the reason that people thought I was someone I was not when I wrote, for example, Primetime Propaganda,
00:48:36.000Is because they assumed something that was not in evidence.
00:48:38.000I said that I was writing a book about the history of Hollywood, and that I wanted to interview the most important people in Hollywood, and that I was a Harvard Law School graduate.
00:48:45.000A simple Google search would have shown exactly who I was.
00:48:48.000But all of these people in Hollywood were too lazy to do that.
00:48:50.000They saw the last name Shapiro, they saw Harvard Law, they figured I was a leftist.