The left has no idea how to deal with President Trump's pick of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. Plus, we'll talk all about the fallout from Trump's decision to nominate Brett to the high court. Plus, President Trump travels over to visit with NATO before his big meetup with Vladimir Putin in Europe, and Sacha Baron Cohen embarrasses himself in front-page news coverage of his appearance on "Saturday Night Live." Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of the conservative website The Weekly Standard, and is a regular contributor to The Daily Wire. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and has been featured on CNN, NPR, CBS, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox News, among other media outlets. His new book, is out now and it's available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you don't already have an Amazon Prime membership, you can get it for free, but you'll have to go through the Prime membership process to get it. Prime membership before July 17th. You'll get access to all of the Prime Video streaming services, including Prime Video, Vimeo, and other major podcasting and social media platforms, including the Huffington Post, NPR and NPR. Subscribe to Prime Video wherever you get your Prime membership. . Prime Video is also available on most major podcast directories, including Apple Podcasts, the BBC, CBS All Access, NPR All Access and the BBC. and the National Geographic Channel. All of your favorite podcast directories and so much more! Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro's The Conversation. - Ben Shapiro s The Conversation? - subscribe to our new show on all of these links are linked in the Apparel and Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes. Subscribe on Podchaser and subscribe to Ben's podcast on your preferred podcast platform! Learn more about Ben's new book: The Truth About It? Ben's New Book: The Truth about It by Ben Shapiro Outtro: How to Be a Good Person by the Greatest of All of Ben Shapiro? and Ben's Other Podcast Epilog on his new novel, The Good Thing Is Better than Meghan s New Book Outtrope: Good Thing? by Good Thing, Bad Thing Is Good, Bad Things by Bad Thing? by Bad Things Happened by Good Things Happening by Good News Out There?
00:00:22.000Plus, we'll get to President Trump traveling over to visit with NATO before his big meetup with Vladimir Putin, which is happening in Northern Europe somewhere that I don't really care about.
00:00:31.000But we will get to all of that in just a second.
00:00:33.000First, I want to mention to you that our next episode of The Conversation is coming up quickly this Tuesday, July 17th, 5.30pm Eastern, 2.30pm Pacific.
00:00:40.000All of your questions will be answered by our own Andrew Klavan with our host, Elisha Krauss.
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00:00:53.000Once again, subscribe to ask Drew live questions, Tuesday, July 17th at 5.30 p.m.
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00:02:01.000There are a bunch of people in the office who use Blue Apron.
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00:02:38.000The left has no idea how to deal with President Trump's pick of Brett Kavanaugh, because it turns out that Brett Kavanaugh is a pretty well-respected jurist.
00:02:46.000Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years.
00:02:48.000He has 300 decisions to his name, and none of them are particularly controversial.
00:02:52.000Now, this is one of the areas where I'm not the biggest Kavanaugh fan, is that I like judges who are straightforward and open about their beliefs about precedent and how they would rule in particular cases.
00:03:03.000Unfortunately, our system now favors judges who are not quite as open about all those things because we have to get those people through confirmation hearings.
00:03:09.000And that is because of the Democrats' politicization of the court beginning with Justice, or should have been Justice, Robert Bork back in the 1980s when Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden decided to destroy the man's life for no reason other than he disagreed with them about constitutional interpretation.
00:03:23.000Kavanaugh is providing all sorts of problems for Democrats who have no clue exactly how to handle him.
00:03:29.000And naturally, this means that Democrats, folks on the left, are blaming Republicans for politicizing the court.
00:03:33.000So the fact is that it was not Republicans who politicized the court.
00:03:36.000It was Democrats who decided that they were going to use the court as a political tool openly.
00:03:40.000And this begins all the way back in the 1930s when a lot of FDR's New Deal program was unconstitutional.
00:03:46.000It violated the bounds of the Constitution.
00:03:48.000And the court said it violated the bounds of the Constitution.
00:03:50.000And so FDR threatened to pack the courts.
00:03:52.000He threatened to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court from 9 to 15.
00:03:56.000And he offered that he was going to push in a bunch of Democrats who were going to just greenlight everything he did.
00:04:00.000And so the court, in order to protect itself, basically ruled that all of his nonsensical programs that
00:04:05.000lengthened the Great Depression by up to eight years, that all of these programs were actually constitutional.
00:04:09.000They get a spate of horrific decisions in the 1930s and 1940s, basically sanctioning enormous government growth, up to and including the worst case maybe in constitutional history, just in pure legal terms, Wickard v. Filburn, a case in which the Supreme Court held that you could not grow grain in your backyard for your own use without the federal government intervening.
00:04:28.000The federal government had a right to intervene in you growing stuff in your own backyard because that would affect commerce somehow in some vague way.
00:04:35.000Well now, because President Trump has gotten two picks in the last year and a half, Democrats are now suggesting that it's Republicans who are politicizing the court, even though it was Democrats who originally politicized the court and have continued to do so by treating the court as a super legislator, a super legislature of genius, wise liberals who are going to impose their viewpoint on the rest of us.
00:04:56.000And these are the people who worship the altar of the notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
00:04:59.000Hey, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decisions are garbage.
00:05:02.000I've read a lot of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's decisions.
00:05:04.000None of them have anything to do with the Constitution.
00:05:05.000All of them have everything to do with her personal politics.
00:05:31.000If her routine is that grueling, then she'd be dead.
00:05:34.000But here is what the New York Times writes today.
00:05:37.000Or at least Lee Epstein and Eric Posner, Epstein, a political scientist and law professor at Washington University, and Posner, a professor at University of Chicago Law School, write about the move by President Trump to put originalists on the court.
00:05:51.000Here's what they write in the New York Times.
00:05:52.000President Trump was always going to pick a conservative for the Supreme Court.
00:05:55.000The only question has been whether to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy with a business conservative or a religious conservative.
00:06:00.000No one seriously thought he would consider a moderate, a liberal or an ideologically ambiguous replacement.
00:06:07.000You'll notice that whenever I talk about the Supreme Court, I never talk about a conservative justice.
00:06:12.000The reason I don't talk about a conservative justice is because a judge should not let his or her political proclivities influence the decision-making.
00:06:19.000I always talk about an originalist justice or a textualist justice, somebody who is actually going to interpret the words of the law as they were written and as they were understood at the time.
00:06:28.000That is not the same thing as a conservative justice who would presumably just rule in favor of whichever interest he thought was most compelling politically.
00:06:36.000So it's only the left that talks about openly political judges.
00:06:38.000It says, well, we need a moderate or a liberal on the court.
00:06:42.000They say, well, sure enough, Brett Kavanaugh is a conservative in good standing.
00:06:44.000Well, Brett Kavanaugh is actually a textualist in pretty good standing.
00:06:47.000And the New York Times continues these two professors.
00:06:49.000They say, the next Democratic president will nominate a liberal to the court in the hope of tilting it in the other direction.
00:06:54.000Everyone is so accustomed to this state of affairs, people have forgotten to question it.
00:06:57.000But we wonder whether a Supreme Court that has come to be rigidly divided by both by ideology and party can sustain public confidence for much longer.
00:07:04.000Weird how they only have this problem when it comes to Republicans replacing Republican appointees with other Republican appointees.
00:07:11.000I don't remember them having the same problem when Elena Kagan, who is a wild leftist, and Sonia Sotomayor, who is an even wilder leftist, were appointed to the court by Barack Obama.
00:07:46.000Because they actually do have ideological litmus tests.
00:07:48.000And because when you are not tied to the words of the Constitution and the meaning of the Constitution, this leaves you free to pick among the various solutions that most appeal to you personally.
00:07:57.000You end up very quickly picking somebody who agrees with you politically.
00:08:00.000But according to these professors at the New York Times, it's the right that's politicized the court.
00:08:21.000The percentage of votes cast in the conservative direction by justices who are appointed by Republicans has also shot up.
00:08:26.000Now, the reason for that is because of the rise of the Federalist Societies.
00:08:29.000The Federalist Society is a conservative-minded group, an originalist-minded group.
00:08:33.000So they're conservative politically, but they're more originalist and textualist than anything else.
00:08:36.000I'd say politically, they're actually closer to libertarian.
00:08:38.000And that group has done a better job of vetting Republican candidates.
00:08:41.000This is why I'm not concerned that Kavanaugh is going to end up like David Souter.
00:08:44.000The reason being, when David Souter was appointed, you didn't have large groups of people who were devoted to vetting David Souter's record.
00:08:49.000Now you have enormous groups of people who can, with the touch of a button, pull up every decision Kavanaugh has ever written on and then analyze it for signs of exactly how he will rule in the future.
00:09:00.000It is good that we are treating the Supreme Court with this level of care.
00:09:02.000And it is demonstrative of the fact that as soon as conservatives woke up and started realizing that the Supreme Court was being used as a tool of policy by the left, they started making sure that appointees to the Supreme Court might actually have to reflect an originalist or textualist bent.
00:09:15.000But according to these professors at the New York Times, they say this is a bad thing.
00:09:20.000They say this trend is extreme and alarming.
00:09:22.000In the 1950s and 60s, the ideological biases of Republican appointees and Democratic appointees were relatively modest.
00:09:27.000The gap between them has steadily grown, but even as late as the early 1990s, it was possible for justices to vote in ideologically unpredictable ways.
00:09:35.000In closely divided cases in the 1991 term, for example, the single Democratic appointee on the court, Byron White,
00:09:40.000Voted more conservatively than all but two of the Republican appointees, Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist.
00:09:45.000This was at a time when many Republican appointees like Sandra Day O'Connor, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter frequently cast liberal votes.
00:09:51.000That's because conservatives had done a crappy job.
00:09:54.000And that's also because Byron White was appointed way back when, right?
00:09:57.000Byron White, the justice on the Supreme Court,
00:10:00.000He was originally appointed, if I am not mistaken, by President John F. Kennedy.
00:10:04.000So the Democratic Party back in 1960 was not the same as the Democratic Party became in 1990, by the time Byron White was ruling on the court.
00:10:12.000And this is a reality, is that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in 1960 were much closer on policy than the Democratic Party and the Republican Party by 1990.
00:10:19.000In the past 10 years, they've read the New York Times, justices have hardly ever voted against the ideology of the president who appointed them.
00:10:26.000Only Justice Kennedy, named to the court by Ronald Reagan, did so with any regularity.
00:10:29.000Now, I don't think this is actually true.
00:10:31.000If you look at how Justice Scalia voted on some civil libertarian issues, he was constantly sort of surprising people on how he voted on a lot of those issues.
00:10:38.000And the same thing will probably hold true of, I think, maybe Gorsuch.
00:10:53.000And if they do, it's only on the narrowest of grounds.
00:10:56.000These professors say it's hard to think of any historical precursors.
00:10:59.000The most famous period of ideological division on the court was in the 1930s when it repeatedly struck down liberal legislation.
00:11:05.000But what is remarkable is that the division was not strongly partisan.
00:11:08.000Among the Four Horsemen, the diehard opponents of the New Deal, one was appointed by a Democratic president, another was a Democrat appointed by a Republican president.
00:11:14.000Among the three justices who typically voted to uphold New Deal programs, two were appointed by Republican presidents.
00:11:19.000Again, that's because the parties themselves were much closer in ideological orientation during the FDR period.
00:11:25.000Remember, Herbert Hoover imposed basically the same policies that FDR did, just in slightly smaller scale.
00:11:34.000and Lee Epstein, they continue by suggesting that all of this changed in the 1950s and 60s.
00:11:39.000They say, Again, for the 30th time, Dwight Eisenhower was a very, very moderate Republican.
00:11:41.000In fact, he was so moderate that in 1948, the Democrats seriously considered the possibility of having Dwight Eisenhower run on the Democratic ticket in 48 and 52, if I'm not mistaken.
00:11:59.000The Warren Court took a liberal stand on the most controversial issues of the day, including civil rights, sexual freedom, and the rights of criminal suspects and political dissenters.
00:12:06.000The post-Warren Court case of Roe v. Wade finally galvanized the right.
00:12:09.000And that is correct, because Republicans basically started seeing that the court was going to be used as a club.
00:12:14.000But only now, apparently, are they upset about this.
00:12:17.000Well, that wouldn't be a risk if the left hadn't already politicized the court.
00:12:47.000That's why we are having these battles.
00:12:48.000It's because the left decided that the court was going to be a tool of policy and it was not actually going to be a tool on behalf of the Constitution of the United States.
00:12:55.000Okay, so I want to talk a little bit more about that and explain why the left is so exercised over Brett Kavanaugh in just a second.
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00:13:53.000Okay, so the left is really exercised over Brett Kavanaugh because they recognize that the right, in attempting to reconstrain
00:14:19.000And so the idea of a Brett Kavanaugh who's going to come in and help create a new majority on the court that's actually going to stick to the judiciary's job, that scares the living hell, scares the living daylights out of Democrats.
00:14:48.000And so they're just lying about Brett Kavanaugh now.
00:14:50.000So the first lie they're telling is they are suggesting that President Trump is appointing Brett Kavanaugh because Brett Kavanaugh is going to protect President Trump from impeachment.
00:14:58.000This is legitimately what they're saying.
00:15:09.000But on this issue, the Mueller issue, which came up after the vetting by these two groups, he's probably the most extreme.
00:15:16.000And it wouldn't surprise me if that was very important to Donald Trump.
00:15:20.000Knowing Donald Trump, and I have no proof, do you think he didn't inquire about this?
00:15:25.000Every word of what Chuck Schumer just said is a lie.
00:15:27.000First of all, not every judge on that list would vote to overturn Roe.
00:15:30.000In fact, I have serious doubts that Kavanaugh will vote to overturn Roe.
00:15:33.000We'll get to that in just a little while.
00:15:35.000This implication that Kavanaugh is somehow going to protect the president of the United States from criminal indictment is just not true.
00:15:42.000Not only is it not true, even the Washington Post says it's not true.
00:15:45.000So the accusation is that Kavanaugh, in 2009, published an article in the Minnesota Law Review in which he discussed the possibility of indicting the sitting president of the United States criminally.
00:15:54.000And here is what he says, according to the Washington Post.
00:15:57.000And not according to me, not according to National Review, according to the left-wing Washington Post.
00:16:01.000Kavanaugh helped investigate President Bill Clinton as part of independent counsel Ken Starr's team in the 1990s.
00:16:06.000Looking back, Kavanaugh wrote in his 2009 article, the nation certainly would have been better off if President Clinton could have focused on Osama bin Laden without being distracted by the Paula Jones sexual harassment case and its criminal investigation offshoots.
00:16:17.000Which is an interesting switch by Kavanaugh, who was part of, again, the Ken Starr team.
00:16:22.000What he says, the president should not be indicted, but he says you need an act of Congress to prevent the president from being indicted.
00:16:28.000In other words, it's not up to the judiciary to protect the president.
00:17:39.000Okay, here's what Nerrell actually tweeted.
00:17:41.000We'll be DAMNED, DAMNED, all caps, if we're gonna let five men, including some frat boy named Brett, strip us of our hard won bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
00:17:52.000First of all, it's not hard won bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
00:18:50.000Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years.
00:18:51.000Before that, he was involved in virtually every level of federal litigation.
00:18:55.000Brett Kavanaugh is about the nerdiest guy you will ever find.
00:18:57.000He's a hardcore Catholic who sends his daughters to Catholic school, coaches his daughter's basketball team, and volunteers at the soup kitchen.
00:20:16.000Also, like, there have been a fair number of actual prominent Bretts in American public life, including, of course, Brett Favre, who is a very manly man, and not the Brett at Ruby Tuesdays.
00:21:31.000It is not, uh, Judge Jeanine Pirro, which I, at one point in time, thought was actually a possibility of becoming Supreme Court Justice, so... So it could have been worse.
00:21:39.000For you, it could have been much worse.
00:21:41.000Well, he might be just a quieter version of Judge Jeanine.
00:21:51.000He's a better version of Judge Jeanine.
00:21:53.000He's a quieter version of Judge Jeanine.
00:21:56.000Yeah, if you're a nutcase, if you were dropped on your head as a baby, if you fell off the stupid tree and you hit every branch on the way down, he's just like Judge Jeanine except for nothing.
00:22:06.000Except for, you know, his wisely considered and brilliant defenses that run like 50 pages at a time.
00:23:00.000Also, these watches are incredibly durable.
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00:23:10.000Movement started off from being crowdfunded kids working out of a living room, and they've grown like crazy.
00:23:14.000They now have almost 2 million watches sold in 160-plus countries, and they continue to revolutionize fashion on the belief that style should not break the bank.
00:23:22.000Their watches are about looking good, keeping it simple.
00:25:35.000Within an hour of Donald Trump's announcement he would nominate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the law school published a press release boasting of its alumnus' accomplishment.
00:25:43.000Right, because he went to Yale Law School.
00:25:44.000And wouldn't you boast if one Yale Law School alumnus was going to be on the Supreme Court?
00:25:49.000The school's post included quotes from Yale Law School professors about Judge Kavanaugh's intellect, influence, and mentorship of their students.
00:25:54.000Yet the press release's focus on the nominee's professionalism, pedigree, and service to Yale Law School obscures the true stakes of his nomination and raises a disturbing question.
00:26:04.000Is there nothing more important to Yale Law School than its proximity to power and prestige?
00:27:21.000Because that's a bunch of high IQ people in that room.
00:27:24.000And it's not the job of Yale Law School to determine how Brett Kavanaugh thinks.
00:27:28.000It is the job of Yale Law School to determine whether they have been successful in training a lawyer prominent enough to reach the level of the Supreme Court.
00:27:35.000It would be one thing if Brett Kavanaugh were some sort of Richard Spencer-esque neo-Nazi, but there's no evidence of any of that.
00:28:14.000And he starts mouthing off about Merrick Garland and how the Merrick Garland seat was stolen by the Republicans.
00:28:19.000And then he drops some bizarre language here.
00:28:22.000I'm a little critical of President Obama for whom I voted.
00:28:25.000He should have nominated Merrick Garland and should have sworn him in and should have dared the Republicans to say, kick him out of office.
00:29:34.000Has her heart in the right place sometimes.
00:29:35.000I think that she hasn't studied these issues particularly well.
00:29:38.000I think that her ideas on abortion are inane, to put it mildly.
00:29:43.000And she was on Fox & Friends this morning, and she was talking about Roe v. Wade and soon-to-be Justice Kavanaugh using her vast legal experience to delve into the intricacies of Supreme Court precedent.
00:29:56.000And here was Tomi Lahren explaining why conservatives really should just let Roe v. Wade alone.
00:30:01.000Some of my fellow conservatives who have put it out there that we are, quote, coming for Roe v. Wade.
00:30:07.000That is a mistake, because we are putting it out there and implying that we are sending a justice to the bench to carry out religious judicial activism, which is a mistake and is unconstitutional.
00:30:21.000And if we as conservatives are going to imply that, if that's going to be our messaging, we might as well spit on the Constitution.
00:30:38.000Read the Constitution, and you show me where in the Constitution there's a right to abortion, and then we can start talking about whether this is a religious edict trying to take down Roe v. Wade.
00:31:14.000The reason people oppose Roe v. Wade is not just because they are against abortion.
00:31:18.000If they were just against abortion, then they would presumably be pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion across the country, or federal legislation to ban abortion across the country.
00:31:26.000That would be their primary focus, the constitutional amendment.
00:31:28.000The reason that there are so many people on the right who hate Roe v. Wade is not just because it is an immoral outcome, but because it has nothing to do with the Constitution.
00:31:36.000I can't name a single person, a single legal theorist on the right who says, I oppose Roe v. Wade because I'm a religious person.
00:31:48.000Even people on the left who are honest will acknowledge that while they like the outcome of Roe v. Wade, it has nothing to do with the law and has nothing to do with the Constitution.
00:31:55.000And playing into this propaganda effort by the left to suggest that it's just a bunch of religious fanatics who want to overturn Roe v. Wade is deeply irresponsible by Tomi Lahren.
00:32:06.000I mean, that's the part of this that's so ironic, is that, you know, Tomi Lahren and some people who are fans of hers are suggesting that, you know, it's anti-establishment to suggest that Roe v. Wade should be upheld, or that we should stay away from social issues.
00:32:34.000I've been saying for years that Republicans running away from social policy is foolish because people actually want to hear about the morality of politics.
00:32:45.000I wish that, I'm struggling for words here, because again, I don't want to rip on Tomi Lahren, but when you say stuff this ignorantly, with this much confidence, then you need to be called out for it, because this is just not true, and it's not right, and I don't know what she thinks she's doing here.
00:32:58.000We're going to talk about Trump at NATO in just a second, but first, you're going to have to go over to Daily Wire and subscribe.
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00:34:40.000He tweeted this out from the White House account, this video of him slamming NATO for their levels of defense spending.
00:34:46.000Now, I think that a lot of what President Trump is saying is true here.
00:34:49.000I also think that there is a bit of an optical problem.
00:34:52.000I'm going to explain why President Trump is both right and wrong here, because I think that's probably the best description.
00:34:58.000Here he is slamming NATO for its levels of defense spending.
00:35:01.000Many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money from many years back, where they're delinquent, as far as I'm concerned, because the United States has had to pay for them.
00:35:11.000So if you go back 10 or 20 years, you'll just add it all up.
00:35:14.000It's massive amounts of money is owed.
00:35:57.000It was never that they were going to sign us a check at any point.
00:36:00.000And we're spending on our own defense because we want to spend on our own defense.
00:36:03.000But he is not wrong when he says, you guys,
00:36:05.000You want to spend less money than you should on your own defense, and then you expect us to come save you if something goes totally wrong.
00:36:10.000Like, that part is actually sort of true.
00:36:13.000And Jim Garrity has a really good piece today over at National Review on exactly what it is that President Trump is talking about.
00:36:20.000He says that, because President Trump continued along these lines.
00:36:23.000Let's play a little more President Trump here.
00:36:25.000He went after Germany because he says, listen, Germany, you're spending 1% of your GDP on defense.
00:36:29.000And then you're complaining that Russia is being really aggressive.
00:36:32.000Well, then why are you signing massive natural gas deals with Russia at the same time that you're spending 1% of your GDP, not 2% of your GDP on national defense and then expecting the United States to rush in and save you from Russia?
00:36:47.000Germany is totally controlled by Russia, because they will be getting from 60 to 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline.
00:36:56.000And you tell me if that's appropriate, because I think it's not.
00:36:59.000And I think it's a very bad thing for NATO, and I don't think it should have happened.
00:37:03.000OK, so the idea that Germany is totally controlled by Russia is, of course, a Trumpian overstatement, but he's not totally wrong here.
00:37:10.000As usual, Trump is down the street and around the corner from a legitimate point.
00:37:13.000Well, actually, he's a little bit closer this time.
00:37:15.000If you think Trump's past business connections to Russian figures are troubling, you probably ought to be livid about how former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has decided to become the chief lobbyist for Vladimir Putin in Europe.
00:37:24.000One of Schroeder's last acts in office in 2005 was authorizing Nord Stream, a pipeline bypassing key territories and controlled by Russia's Gazprom energy company.
00:37:33.000Shortly after leaving office, Vladimir Putin arranged for Schroeder to chair the project.
00:37:37.000And then he started pushing for a second pipeline, Nord Stream 2.
00:37:40.000Instead of diversifying Europe's energy supply, Schroeder pushed policies that make the continent more dependent on Russia, not less.
00:37:47.000In September 2017, Putin arranged for Schroeder to become a chairman of Rosneft, the state-owned Russian oil giant.
00:37:53.000The Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins wrote earlier this year, Schroeder's exactly the kind of wealthy, well-connected, influential figure acting on behalf of Russia the US sanctions are supposed to target.
00:38:02.000And Schroeder's been hanging out with Putin at the World Cup.
00:38:06.000politics is suddenly deeply concerned, some would say paranoid about Russian influence, that Schroeder's cheerful embrace of lobbying for Russia has barely made a ripple on this side of the pond?
00:38:14.000The cynical answer is that most of those screaming the loudest about Russia today don't think of Putin as sinister because of his lack of criticism of Trump.
00:38:21.000They think of Trump as sinister because of his lack of criticism of Putin.
00:38:24.000Indeed, Russia shot down a passenger airliner over Ukraine in 2014.
00:38:29.000But their cynicism doesn't change the fact that Russia is generally hostile to American policies under presidents of either party, and Vladimir Putin would love to see NATO alliances collapse.
00:38:38.000In that light, the reluctance of some NATO members to honor their agreements and spend the required 2% of GDP on military spending is baffling.
00:38:44.000In 2017, just four member states hit that 2% threshold, the US, Greece, the UK, and Estonia, and will give Poland the benefit of the doubt because it was barely under 2%.
00:38:55.000They spent less than one half of one percent on their military.
00:38:58.000Perhaps Luxembourg's leaders figured that they're nestled between France, Germany and Belgium, so they can count on their neighbors to slow down any invading Russians.
00:39:04.000But NATO members in Eastern Europe have no excuse.
00:39:08.000So the point here is that Trump isn't totally wrong about all of this.
00:39:11.000Now, there's an upside to Trump pushing this, which is that he's correct.
00:39:15.000The downside is that it makes it look like NATO is a fracturing, fragmenting alliance.
00:39:20.000In a second, I'm going to talk about Angela Merkel's response to all this and why this isn't an unmitigated good what President Trump is saying here.
00:39:26.000So, President Trump trying to get the Europeans to spend what they should on their national defense?
00:39:30.000I don't think that's the world's most terrible thing.
00:39:32.000I think, in fact, that that's basically fine.
00:39:34.000I think the president of the United States ripping into Germany for its hypocrisy and talking about the Russian threat while bringing in 70% of all of its natural gas through a pipeline negotiated by its former prime minister into Germany.
00:39:47.000I don't think that that's wrong either.
00:39:48.000However, I think that Vladimir Putin is sitting there and he is wondering to himself whether President Trump is really signaling that if he were to make a move against Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania, that President Trump would not actually back a NATO action against such a move.
00:40:01.000Because the reality on the ground is that the United States is in fact the largest sponsor behind NATO.
00:40:07.000We spend an enormous amount of money on NATO every year.
00:40:12.000Remember, NATO was built in the aftermath of World War II in order to curb German ambition and in order to aim this alliance against Russia.
00:40:19.000That was in America's national interest.
00:40:21.000It created a more hegemonic, a more understandable and consistent social order.
00:40:27.000It prevented European wars that had been plaguing the continent for literally a thousand years.
00:40:31.000It prevented those European wars from happening since 1945.
00:40:34.000There hasn't been an intra-European war except for
00:40:38.000Depends on whether you consider Yugoslavia a European country or not.
00:40:40.000But if you do, that was the only European war.
00:40:42.000There hasn't been an internecine European war since 1945.
00:40:49.000That is because of the United States' commitment to this world order.
00:40:52.000And yes, we were the chief sponsors of it, but we were also the chief beneficiaries of it.
00:40:55.000The United States is the largest, most powerful economy on Earth, and having a more orderly world order, of which we are the head, is a good thing for the United States.
00:41:03.000What you don't want is all of these countries fragmenting and building up new alliances.
00:41:06.000You don't want Germany, for example, breaking away from the EU, rearming, and then siding with Russia again.
00:41:12.000That didn't work out great the first time.
00:41:14.000So the idea that we are going to cast aspersions at NATO generally, I think, is a huge mistake.
00:41:21.000That said, the president's critique of members of NATO for not doing enough, and the fact that they are free-riding, he is not wrong about any of that.
00:41:30.000She has responded to President Trump, noting that she grew up under a Soviet-controlled regime in East Germany.
00:41:34.000She says, Trump had earlier said exactly the opposite.
00:41:36.000He said, Well, if you're that upset about it, perhaps
00:41:52.000The best thing that you could do is to actually stop importing enormous amounts of natural gas from Russia.
00:41:57.000I remember in the aftermath of September 11th, there was a lot of talk about the United States needing to get off of Saudi oil because there was fear that we were generating policy based on our dependence on OPEC nations.
00:42:06.000I didn't think that was completely out of the realm of possibility.
00:42:08.000Well, the same thing is true here with regard to Germany.
00:42:11.000Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are being cynical right now.
00:42:13.000They put out a joint statement on the Trump-Putin summit, which is coming up.
00:42:17.000And here's what they say, they say, That's a weird critique, considering that Trump is ripping Germany for working too closely with Putin.
00:42:34.000Right, so even if you think that Trump is working closely with Putin or that he's friendly to Putin, you might want to wait until Trump actually has his meeting with Putin, his face-to-face, in which Trump will likely be very, very kind to Putin, just as he was very kind to Kim Jong-un, then I think the critique is fair.
00:42:46.000But if Trump's critique of Germany is they're too close to Putin, and your critique of Trump is he's too close to Putin because of what he just said about Germany, I'm not sure how you logically get from point A to point B.
00:42:56.000Pelosi and Schumer say, if the president leaves the Putin meeting without ironclad assurances and concrete steps toward a full cessation of Russian attacks on our democracy, the meeting will not only be a failure, it will be a grave step backward for the future of the international order and global security.
00:43:09.000Allow me to say that this is cynical hypocrisy by the Democrats, considering they were perfectly fine with Barack Obama sitting there in 2012 and openly telling Dmitry Medvedev, then the president of Russia, that he wanted to offer the Russian government flexibility.
00:43:36.000But I don't think that this is good evidence that the president is being weak on Russia.
00:43:38.000It seems to me the president is actually pushing all of these European nations to be harsher on Russia by spending more on their own defense.
00:43:45.000Maybe that's driven by Trump's weird zero-sum game belief that the United States is picking up the defense spending for all of Europe.
00:43:53.000Regardless of what it's driven by, the outcome would be a good outcome, which would be a more robust NATO, not a less robust NATO, if they would spend more on their own defense and then have the capacity to defend themselves over time.
00:44:21.000I didn't watch it when it came out in the theater.
00:44:22.000I was mostly concerned that Tony Kushner, who I think is one of the world's most overrated writers, the creator of Angels in America, who wrote the script for Lincoln, was going to turn this into
00:44:31.000Sort of an anti-Bushian routine, considering this came out in 2012, I believe.
00:44:37.000It's been a while since Lincoln came out.
00:44:39.000But it was available on Netflix for free, and so I finally started watching it.
00:44:42.000The great thing about the movie is Daniel Day-Lewis's performance.
00:44:44.000So first of all, it's a star-studded cast.
00:44:46.000Daniel Day-Lewis is the best thing in it.
00:44:47.000Sally Field is terrific as Lincoln's wife, as Mary Todd.
00:44:52.000The I think Tommy Lee Jones choose the scenery a fair bit in this in this film.
00:44:56.000But Daniel Day-Lewis is spot on because he is the great actor of our generation.
00:45:00.000Without a doubt, we can only hope that he reverses his decision to leave acting after Phantom Thread.
00:45:05.000My my criticism of the movie is that the movie is overwritten because that is Tony Kushner, right?
00:45:10.000Everything Tony Kushner writes is a lot like Aaron Sorkin, where you just feel the writing.
00:45:15.000You feel the writing like the best writers.
00:45:16.000I don't think you actually feel the writing.
00:45:17.000You just feel the characters in this particular movie.
00:45:22.000It's good, Tony Kushner, meaning that it's the best of what Tony Kushner has to offer.
00:45:25.000But it's like watching an Aaron Sorkin film.
00:45:26.000When you watch an Aaron Sorkin film, it's like when you watch A Few Good Men, it's like, hey, look, there's Jack Nicholson playing Aaron Sorkin.
00:45:39.000The same thing is sort of true when it comes to Tony Kushner.
00:45:41.000But here's here's some of the preview for Lincoln.
00:45:42.000If you haven't seen it, it's now available to watch free streaming on Netflix.
00:45:47.000We can't tell our people they can vote yes on abolishing slavery unless at the same time we can tell them that you're seeking a negotiated peace.
00:45:55.000It's either the amendment or this confederate peace.
00:47:00.000the same way he directs Lincoln, basically.
00:47:02.000And that means that it's a real hagiography of Lincoln.
00:47:06.000What it does convey is some of the complexities that Lincoln had to face.
00:47:09.000And the political manipulation that Lincoln was happy to be involved in, or was willing to be involved in, in the face of all of this, it takes on some serious racial issues.
00:47:29.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:47:34.000Okay, so the first thing that I hate, Sacha Baron Cohen, I find very funny.
00:47:39.000I think the Sacha Baron Cohen stuff is really funny, although I could use a little less of the bizarre nudity in some of his films, but Sacha Baron Cohen is doing a new series, apparently, and he went after Sarah Palin, because we have to go over people who are largely irrelevant in American politics, or at least have been for, what, 10 years now?
00:47:57.000I mean, she ran for vice president in 2008.
00:48:00.000In any case, Sarah Palin was apparently
00:48:03.000She was interviewed by what appeared to be a disabled veteran in a wheelchair.
00:48:22.000She assumes that that was Sacha Baron Cohen in disguise.
00:48:25.000He peppered her with questions she added, adding that were full of Hollywoodism, disrespect, and sarcasm.
00:48:30.000She said she finally had enough and literally physically removed her mic and walked out.
00:49:28.000So there's this video that's going around that's really annoying and irritating, and pretty bad, of a young black kid who is selling candy bars outside of a store, and a random old lady comes up and demands to see a business license.
00:49:58.000I'm standing up for this young person.
00:50:00.000Yeah, you're really standing up for them and yelling at them.
00:50:03.000Oh, and they take it all around the country and you should see how they live.
00:50:08.000Okay, who is this random old lady and her fervor to stop young people from selling things next to a grocery store?
00:50:17.000First of all, if the grocery store or the CVS or whatever this place is wants to call the cops and say, listen, this guy's undercutting our price by selling directly outside and he doesn't have a business license, that's fair.
00:50:25.000But for the random old lady to try to shut down somebody's business, I find really gross.
00:50:29.000Like in Los Angeles, we have a lot of people who sell fruit on street corners, right?
00:50:32.000You see these people and they have these carts and they're selling fruit on street corners.
00:50:55.000I just, I find that really off-putting and this is where the libertarian in me comes out and I say that people should really get off their high horse and recognize that one of the things that built this country was the fact that young people were allowed to go out there and make money for themselves by engaging in commerce.
00:51:10.000We want more people engaging in commerce.
00:51:11.000This kid right here is trying to sell a product.
00:51:15.000Okay, he could be out there with a cup.
00:51:16.000And he couldn't be out there with a hat doing nothing.
00:51:18.000Instead, he's actually trying to sell a product to people.
00:51:20.000I don't see any problem with that as a general rule, and I find this really off-putting.
00:51:24.000Now, of course, the left only cares about this because the lady is white and the kid's black.
00:51:28.000It's the implication that this is a racist thing.
00:51:30.000Maybe it is a racist thing, but I would care about it whether it was white or black.
00:51:34.000You see this a lot happening to white kids where you'll see some little girl who's running a lemonade stand and some idiot decides they're going to report her to the local government because she's operating a lemonade stand without a license.
00:51:52.000So Trevor Noah, who, again, is being treated as a political commentator.
00:51:56.000The conflation between comedians and political commentators is highly irritating.
00:52:01.000Because it would be fine if we could actually treat these people as political commentators and just say, listen, your political commentary is stupid.
00:52:35.000That's how you know he's not in joking mode.
00:52:37.000And his serious face says that Trump is just like African dictators.
00:52:42.000Donald Trump reminds me, in many ways, of many African dictators.
00:52:47.000You know, his demeanor, his style, who he presents himself as and how he processes his power is something that's all too familiar.
00:52:56.000He's just like an African dictator, except for the non-forced land redistributions, the non-genocides that are happening in the streets, and the non-ability to take over the entire government, make it a tool of his will, and then line his own pockets dramatically.
00:53:46.000This is why we have a constitutional system.
00:53:48.000I don't believe that people are just sort of born better in the United States and born worse in Africa, for example.
00:53:53.000I don't think African dictators are African dictators because people in Africa are naturally worse, because that's stupid and there's no evidence to back that.
00:54:00.000I think that America has a long cultural history of checks and balances.
00:54:04.000And so it doesn't matter what Trump's attitude is.
00:54:06.000It matters whether the checks and balances actually operate.
00:54:22.000It's one of the reasons why I believe the Supreme Court matters and why I believe the Constitution matters.
00:54:25.000It is the most durable document in human history with regard to the creation of government.
00:54:29.000I mean, democracies tend to collapse in on themselves relatively quickly.
00:54:33.000The American Republic has not only not collapsed in on itself, it's grown better over time.
00:54:38.000At least not with regards to the administrative state, but everything else in terms of the inclusion, in terms of its capacity, in terms of the power of the American economy.
00:54:45.000All of these things have grown over time because of the durability of the Constitution, not in spite of them.
00:54:49.000The same Trevor Noah, who will sit there and whine about Trump being like an African dictator, will sit there and whine about the shortcomings of the U.S.
00:54:55.000Constitution and why he wants one branch, the judiciary, to have absolute power over exactly how everything ought to work in the country.
00:55:54.000And now, you kings, be wise, be admonished, you judges of the earth.
00:55:57.000Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice with quaking.
00:55:59.000Arm yourselves with purity lest you become angry and you perish in the way.
00:56:04.000So, the section of this that people like to cite in the New Testament context is, of course, the part where it talks about, you are my son this day, I have begotten you, and people who believe in the New Testament, Christians, take that extremely literally.
00:56:19.000In Judaism, Jews are frequently referred to as God's children.
00:56:24.000The people of Israel are frequently referred to in psalms as God's son.
00:56:36.000But the interesting part of this psalm is there's this very sort of Hegelian notion that if God doesn't like somebody, they are going to lose and that if you disobey God, then you're going to lose.
00:56:45.000Then you look at the world and you see a lot of evil people really thrive.
00:56:48.000So how do you reconcile those two things?
00:56:49.000And I think the answer lies in this particular verse from the psalm.
00:56:54.000It says, request of me and I will make nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession.
00:56:58.000And the word request is in Hebrew, Sha'al, which means ask of me.
00:57:02.000It means really kind of plead with me, sort of.
00:57:04.000And the idea here is that God's justice is only going to occur when those of us who believe in God and believe in the Judeo-Christian system actually repent of our sins and lean on God for our moral system.
00:57:17.000When that happens, there'll be a natural outgrowth of that and that will allow us to gain a certain amount of power
00:57:24.000I think the reason Judeo-Christian civilization has been so powerful is specifically because we have clung to particular values that inherently make nations more powerful and wiser and better.
00:57:35.000I am not a multiculturalist in the sense that I don't believe that all cultures are created equal.
00:57:40.000I believe that Judeo-Christian culture, Judeo-Christian civilization is the best civilization ever put on earth at any time.
00:57:46.000The more pride we take in it, and the more we request that God bring us close within that context, the better we will do in the real world as well.
00:57:53.000I think this holds true for individuals who try to hold by a certain level of biblical morality in their own lives, too.
00:57:59.000Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest updates.