Democrats attack AG Bill Barr, Ilhan Omar blames Venezuela's crisis on America, and I have thoughts on Avengers Endgame. Plus, why the Justice Department won't turn over Robert Mueller's full report to Congress, and why it's not a stonewalling tactic at all. Ben Shapiro is on The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your shows, and wherever you listen to it, you ll get the latest episode of the Ben Shapiro Report. Subscribe to The Ben and Mark Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! Thanks to our sponsor, LegacyBox, for making digital copies of all of our favorite movies and TV shows. If you haven't already, you can get 40% off your first order with discount code: BONUS40 at checkout, and you can save 40% with code BenShapiro at checkout! You can also get 20% off of your first purchase when you place an order with LegacyBox by clicking the coupon "LEGO" when you sign up for a discount code "Ben Shapiro" at checkout. . The show is now available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and Hardcover. The podcast is also available on Audible, and Audible. Kindle $9.99, and paperback $99, including Audible 49ers $99.99 & Audible Free. Hardcover 49ers 49ers, 49ers Free, $99 and 49ers & T-List 49ers.99.00, plus shipping + shipping & shipping. All other third-party shipping & freight will be available for Prime memberships starting at $99 a month. You'll get 10% off the first month, plus a limited edition copy of the book "Avengers: Endgame edition starting in January 2020. and shipping starts shipping starting in March 2020, shipping starts at $49, plus they'll get you an additional $99 + shipping starts starting in mid-May, shipping will be shipping free, plus an additional 3 months, plus free shipping starts, and shipping will get you a maximum of $99 or $99 shipping starts after that gets you get a limited offer, plus you can choose a maximum number of choices, and a discount of $49 or two months, and two months of shipping choices, plus she'll get an extra $49/month, and she'll receive an ad-only offer, and all other options, including shipping starts begining shipping starts start-up options, starting in July 2019.
00:00:10.000Oh yeah, there are going to be spoilers.
00:00:16.000So I'm just going to warn you, late in the show when we do Avengers Endgame, if you haven't seen the movie yet, I would recommend that you either fast forward or that you pause it.
00:00:24.000We'll get to all of that in just a second.
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00:02:00.000Okay, so we begin with the Democrats who are very, very angry at Attorney General William Barr.
00:02:05.000Today, the big story is that William Barr has said that he would not testify before a House panel.
00:02:10.000The Justice Department issued a double-barreled rebuff to Democrats on Wednesday, informing the House Judiciary Committee that Attorney General William Barr would not show up for his scheduled testimony before the panel, and that the Department would not comply with the subpoena for Special Counsel Robert Mueller's full report.
00:02:28.000The administration has the nerve to dictate our procedures.
00:02:30.000It's simply part of the administration's complete stonewalling of Congress, period.
00:02:36.000It's not a complete stonewalling of Congress to turn over Mueller's entire report to Congress.
00:02:40.000That is not a stonewalling of Congress.
00:02:42.000And by the way, certain Congress people have seen the unredacted material.
00:02:46.000So the notion that Congress has not seen the unredacted material, even that is not particularly true.
00:02:51.000Also, It is not the job of the Justice Department to be the investigators on behalf of Congress.
00:02:56.000There is a separation of powers in the Constitution.
00:02:59.000A separation of powers, which means Congress has investigative power, and they can subpoena things, and the Justice Department, which works for the executive branch, is not mandated to turn over those things.
00:03:09.000This is why the President can declare executive privilege.
00:03:12.000It's why the Justice Department can point out that it does not have to, under regulations, turn over underlying materials and investigations.
00:03:18.000Can you imagine if the power of Congress extended to the ability to go to the DOJ and then ask for all underlying confidential grand jury testimony?
00:03:29.000I mean, if it extended to that, you know that Congress would immediately leak that stuff into the public sphere.
00:03:35.000You know that Congress would immediately take that stuff and blow it up.
00:03:37.000The reason that William Barr is not turning over the unredacted materials in the grand jury testimony is, number one, some of that stuff is classified, and number two, It is not the job of Congress to be able to grab grand jury testimony that is being attained and obtained by the Justice Department under threat of criminal prosecution.
00:04:01.000They've got the ability to hold people in contempt.
00:04:03.000But they do not have law enforcement power.
00:04:05.000There is a difference between Congress and the law enforcement arm of the government, which is the executive branch.
00:04:11.000I think Bill Barr is completely right to say I'm not turning over unverified grand jury gossip that was not included in the final Mueller report to you.
00:04:22.000The Thursday hearing, which was set to examine Barr's handling of the Mueller report, would have included an extra hour to allow committee lawyers to question the Attorney General.
00:04:30.000The Justice Department had argued it would be inappropriate for staffers to question a cabinet member, and as a result, Barr backed out.
00:04:35.000This, of course, is indeed the prerogative of the executive branch.
00:04:38.000They don't have to agree to any of the conditions that Congress sets on them.
00:04:41.000And then, if it ends up in court, it ends up in court.
00:04:43.000If Congress chooses to hold somebody in contempt or impeach, they can hold somebody in contempt or impeach.
00:04:50.000If they want to impeach Barr, they can go for it.
00:04:51.000And they are talking about impeaching Barr, but again, they're doing so not even on the basis that he is now being obstructive, they're doing so on the basis that he's been obstructive in the past.
00:05:00.000Which is weird, because the conversation has gone something like this.
00:05:19.000So Democrats, of course, are trying to play politics with a Mueller report that did not give them what they wanted, namely a clear cause of action for impeachment or or certainly a criminal prosecution of the president of the United States.
00:05:31.000Jerry Nadler, who is deeply dishonest about all this stuff, the representative from New York, Who once used to believe that the executive branch didn't have the necessity to turn over these sorts of reports during the Clinton era.
00:05:43.000He says, given his lack of candor in describing the work of the special counsel, our members were right to insist that staff counsel be permitted to question the attorney general.
00:05:51.000I understand why he wants to avoid that kind of scrutiny, Nadler added.
00:05:53.000He is terrified of having to face a skilled attorney.
00:05:55.000Well, last I checked, these Congress people are supposed to be skilled attorneys.
00:05:59.000I mean, I'm glad they're acknowledging that they're idiots now, but it is not.
00:06:03.000It is not William Barr's decision to have to sit.
00:06:07.000He doesn't have to sit in front of a bunch of lawyers who are unelected bureaucrats to grill him so they can catch him in some sort of perjury trap.
00:06:15.000Justice Department spokeswoman Kerry Kupec countered that Nadler had established, quote, unprecedented and unnecessary conditions for the hearing, adding, quote, Congress and the executive branch are co-equal branches of government, each have a constitutional obligation to respect and accommodate one another's legitimate interests.
00:06:30.000In a separate letter, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told Nadler that his subpoena for the full unredacted Mueller report, plus the underlying evidence and grand jury information, was not legitimate oversight.
00:06:40.000The department has long resisted congressional attempts to rummage through its files, Boyd wrote.
00:06:45.000He added that Nadler had issued the subpoena knowing the department could not lawfully provide the unredacted report, that the committee lacks any legislative purpose for seeking the complete investigative files, and that processing a request would impose a significant burden on the department.
00:06:57.000Nadler says he'll hold Barr in contempt of Congress if the department doesn't turn over the unredacted Mueller report and all of the underlying evidence in the next day or two.
00:07:05.000For notes on how effective it is to hold an attorney general in contempt, he should turn to his Republican colleagues who once held Eric Holder in contempt and then did nothing about it.
00:07:12.000And Eric Holder is now sitting out there proclaiming from his perch on moral high how terrible William Barr is.
00:07:19.000The chairman also said he could issue a subpoena to compel Barr's attendance at a future hearing.
00:07:24.000The committee had teed up the clash earlier Wednesday after a tense party-line vote on establishing the ground rules.
00:07:29.000Under the motion adopted by the Democrats on the committee, the attorneys for the Democratic and Republican sides of the panel would have had an hour equally divided to question Barr, who had threatened to back out of the hearing if that was the arrangement.
00:07:40.000Democrats said that despite DOJ claims, there is ample precedent to use staff attorneys, Republicans have jumped to Barr's defense, asserting it would be disrespectful to have anyone but lawmakers question the Attorney General.
00:07:55.000Because then I'm basically testifying in the open without the help of my own legal counsel in danger of perjury from lawyers whose job it is to create what we call perjury traps.
00:08:06.000Now, there are people out there who say, there's no such thing as a perjury trap, just tell the truth.
00:08:09.000Well, sometimes you can tell a version of the truth and people will not believe you and they will still prosecute you for perjury.
00:08:18.000This is, for example, when Bill Clinton said he didn't know what the meaning of is is.
00:08:22.000That is a very lawyerly answer, for example.
00:08:24.000Well, Barr could give a lawyerly answer and still be accused of lying.
00:08:27.000In fact, there are members of Democratic Congress who have suggested that he's lying right now, and he has not yet lied.
00:08:43.000So, Steve Cohen, who's another one of the geniuses in the Democratic House, he showed up to the hearing with a ceramic chicken and a bucket of fried chicken, which he proceeded to chomp, and then talk about how Barr was a chicken.
00:09:23.000An attorney general who was picked for his legal acumen and his abilities would not be fearful of any other attorneys questioning him for 30 minutes.
00:09:31.000This man was picked to be Roy Cohn and to be Donald Trump's fixer.
00:09:36.000The Black Sox look clean compared to this team.
00:10:53.000This is what happened to the leaders in the Trump administration, especially the Attorney General, Bill Barr, who I have said was due the benefit of the doubt.
00:11:01.000How could Mr. Barr, a bright and accomplished lawyer, start channeling the president and using words like no collusion and FBI spying?
00:11:08.000Well, first of all, he used the words no collusion because the report found no collusion and FBI spying because spying means surveillance and surveillance was taking place.
00:11:16.000How could he downplay acts of obstruction of justice as products of the president's being frustrated and angry?
00:11:21.000Something he would never say to justify the thousands of crimes prosecuted every day that are the product of frustration and anger.
00:11:28.000Well, actually, James Comey, since you were incompetent at your job, you tried to rewrite the classification statutes to include intent as an element of the crime.
00:11:37.000You said Hillary Clinton didn't intend to expose classified material to public scrutiny, and therefore she was not guilty of the crime.
00:11:43.000Intent was not an element of the crime, you just rewrote the law to include it.
00:11:47.000You know where intent is an element of the crime?
00:11:50.000So when William Barr goes to the president's state of mind, that's because intent is an element of the crime.
00:11:54.000If James Comey had two brain cells to rub together, it would help.
00:11:57.000We'll get to more of James Comey on this in just a second, but first, admit it, you think cybercrime is something that happens to other people.
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00:13:08.000Okay, so James Comey writing in the pages of the prestigious New York Times.
00:13:13.000He says, How could William Barr write and say things about the report by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, that were apparently so misleading they prompted written protest from the special counsel himself?
00:13:23.000Note, as we mentioned yesterday on the show, the letter did not actually accuse William Barr of misstating the conclusions of the Mueller report.
00:13:31.000Basically, what Mueller wanted is for Barr to include all of the color commentary provided by Tom Musburger or whatever.
00:13:52.000And if no crime takes place, not my job to talk about my feelings about all of that.
00:13:57.000Nonetheless, James Comey, I mean, a guy who actually did go out and talk about all of the bad things Hillary Clinton had done and then exonerate her, now he's ripping on Barr.
00:14:05.000He says, how could Barr go before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday and downplay President Trump's attempts to fire Mr. Mueller before he completed his work?
00:14:37.000From four months of working close to Mr. Trump and many more months of watching him shape others, amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them.
00:14:44.000Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring.
00:14:46.000For example, James Mattis resigned over a principal.
00:14:48.000A concept so alien to Mr. Trump, it took days for the president to realize what had happened.
00:14:53.000You know who didn't resign over principal, as I recall?
00:15:11.000He says that William Barr and Rod Rosenstein, they've gone along with President Trump because he, because President Trump just pressures people and they fall prey to the pressure.
00:15:25.000You can't say this out loud, but in a time of emergency with the nation led by a deeply unethical person, this will be your contribution, your personal sacrifice for America.
00:15:46.000So, now we get to what the Democrats have actually been accusing Barr of.
00:15:50.000And this is bewildering, because what exactly are they accusing Barr of doing?
00:15:54.000They're mad at him that he won't talk with the lawyers.
00:15:56.000You know, maybe Barr should show up and talk with the lawyers just to show them that he can run circles around them, but there's no necessity for him to put his life in danger, the possibility of being imprisoned for a perjury trap set by Democrats, for example, or an attempt to subpoena him in violation of, for example, executive privilege.
00:16:15.000There are a lot of legal issues that arise whenever the Attorney General testifies before Congress, which is why they do have a negotiation about setting the ground rules in the first place.
00:16:23.000But what exactly is Barr accused of doing?
00:16:28.000It accurately summarized the findings of the Mueller report.
00:16:31.000Even Mueller acknowledged that it accurately summarized the findings of the Mueller report.
00:16:34.000So here was William Barr testifying yesterday and from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:16:38.000Suggesting, correctly, that focusing on his four-page synopsis when the entire report is available is really, really weird.
00:16:45.000I understood you to say, and these are my words, not yours, the first concern that Mr. Mueller had, he felt like your letter wasn't nuanced enough.
00:17:00.000Which was the, that's why I think this whole thing is sort of mind-bendingly bizarre, because I made clear from the beginning that I was putting out the report, as much of the report as I could, OK, so this, of course, is true.
00:17:14.000He put out as much of the report as he could.
00:18:16.000And then people on the left were saying, well, maybe the reason that Mueller didn't prosecute is because of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion that suggested that the president could not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice.
00:18:27.000He said, I talked to Mueller three separate times.
00:18:30.000And Mueller said he didn't decline to prosecute because of the LLC opinion.
00:18:33.000He declined to prosecute because the evidence was not clear one way or the other.
00:18:37.000Special counsel Mueller stated three times to us in that meeting In response to our questioning, that he emphatically was not saying that, but for the OLC opinion, he would have found obstruction.
00:18:51.000He said that in the future, the facts of a case against the president might be such that a special counsel would recommend abandoning the OLC opinion, but this is not such a case.
00:19:03.000We did not understand exactly why the special counsel was not reaching a decision.
00:19:10.000And when we pressed him on it, he said that his team was still formulating the explanation.
00:19:16.000Okay, so in other words, Mueller explicitly said to Barr, there's an OLC opinion.
00:19:21.000If we thought the fact pattern overcame the OLC opinion, we would just recommend the overthrowing of the OLC opinion.
00:19:32.000He said, oh, we're coming up with an explanation.
00:19:34.000The real explanation is that Mueller knew he didn't have enough to charge here.
00:19:37.000He didn't want to exonerate President Trump.
00:19:39.000So instead, he wanted to dump out into public life all of the bad stuff about Trump.
00:19:44.000Well, sort of washing his hands of the whole thing.
00:19:47.000As I said yesterday, Mueller did not have the intestinal fortitude to simply pull the trigger on an obstruction of justice charge, nor did he have the legal backing.
00:19:54.000So instead, he took what I think is a pretty cheap way out by dumping all of the material in public and then suggesting, well, not up to me, up to William Barr.
00:20:04.000Even though it is his, really, responsibility to give a determination as to whether he thinks this thing is prosecutable or not.
00:20:12.000And then Bart points out, by the way, I didn't even exonerate Trump.
00:20:15.000I just said we didn't have enough material to prosecute, but I'm not exonerating the guy on all of the stuff that he did with regard to pressuring his underlings on the Mueller report.
00:20:23.000You, in effect, exonerated or cleared the president.
00:20:29.000I said that we did not believe that there was sufficient evidence to establish an obstruction offense, which is the job of the Justice Department.
00:20:38.000And the job of the Justice Department is now over.
00:20:41.000That determines whether or not there's a crime.
00:20:44.000The report is now in the hands of the American people.
00:21:10.000William Barr is getting a lot of flack for suggesting that Mueller's letter to him was snitty.
00:21:14.000It is, in fact, a snitty letter, as I mentioned yesterday.
00:21:17.000It was Mueller not protesting that Barr had been dishonest in his letter, but protesting that Barr hadn't sufficiently captured his mood when he wrote the Mueller report.
00:21:25.000So Barr is correct in this characterization.
00:21:42.000Well, he was a very eminent... He was the head of the FBI for 12 years.
00:21:47.000I know of no other instance of... But he was also a political appointee, and he was a political appointee with me at the Department of Justice.
00:21:53.000I don't... You know, the letter's a bit snitty, and I think it was probably written by one of his staff people.
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00:23:59.000Okay, so Democrats have decided that Barr is, nonetheless, despite the fact that Barr has not actually violated the law, that he is not obstructing anything, they have decided that he is obstructing something and that secretly, deep down in the cockles of his heart, Mueller was ready to prosecute Trump and Mueller just decided not to prosecute Trump because, Mueller was ready to prosecute Trump and Mueller just decided not to prosecute Trump because, what, William He said the magic words and then Mueller turned into a pumpkin?
00:24:24.000The funniest thing here was Democrats trying to push Barr to say that Donald Trump should be prosecuted for non-criminal behavior.
00:24:32.000So the report, which I have read the entirety of, summarized twice on the show, the report does not include evidence of criminal conduct by the President of the United States, at least criminally prosecutable conduct by the President of the United States.
00:24:45.000It includes a lot of bad behavior, a lot of immoral behavior.
00:24:47.000A lot of behavior that is not appropriate for the president of the United States to engage in.
00:24:53.000As William Barr, the attorney general whose job it is to prosecute criminal violations, told Dianne Feinstein, who certainly knows better, the senator from California.
00:25:02.000You still have a situation where a president essentially tries to change the lawyer's account in order to prevent further criticism of himself.
00:26:04.000And Senator Kamala Harris got very, very angry at this.
00:26:07.000And so her suggestion is that Robert Mueller, in fact, did a very bad job and that William Barr, the Attorney General, should have gone around Mueller, looked at all the underlying evidence and then prosecuted, and then prosecuted President Trump based on evidence not synopsized, not summarized by Robert Mueller.
00:26:25.000Kamala Harris was the Attorney General of California.
00:26:27.000I promise you, if one of her lower level prosecutors came to her and say, you know, Attorney General, I've got this case.
00:26:35.000I'm not going to tell you whether you should prosecute it or not.
00:26:39.000You think that Kamala Harris is going to read the synopsis and say, you know what, this doesn't look like it rises to the level of a crime for me?
00:26:44.000Or is she going to go back through the hundreds of thousands of pages of grand jury testimony?
00:26:48.000The 25 million dollars already spent on the investigation.
00:26:51.000She's going to go around that and come to her own magical determination, ignoring Mueller.
00:26:55.000So the Democrats kept saying that Barr is going to ignore Mueller.
00:26:58.000Then Barr doesn't ignore Mueller and they're mad at him.
00:27:00.000Here's Senator Kamala Harris being deeply disingenuous.
00:27:03.000The special counsel's investigation produced a great deal of evidence.
00:27:07.000I'm led to believe it included witnesses' notes and emails, witnesses' congressional testimony, witnesses' interviews, which were summarized in the FBI 302 forms.
00:27:16.000Former FBI Director Comey's memos and the President's public statements.
00:27:21.000In reaching your conclusion, did you personally review all of the underlying evidence?
00:27:29.000No, we accepted the statements in the report as the factual record.
00:27:34.000We did not go underneath it to see whether or not they were accurate.
00:28:08.000Would make a decision about whether the President of the United States was involved in an obstruction of justice without reviewing the evidence.
00:28:17.000This Attorney General lacks all credibility and has, I think, compromised the American public's ability to believe that he is a purveyor of justice.
00:28:28.000I remember when Kamala Harris was fighting mad, fighting mad at Attorney General Loretta Lynch for not ignoring the recommendation of James Comey and looking at the underlying evidence to bring a prosecution against Hillary Clinton.
00:28:39.000I remember when Kamala Harris and the Democrats were fighting mad.
00:28:42.000Oh, wait, no, that never happened because it's too much bullcrap that she's spewing right there.
00:28:47.000OK, then you've got and then you've got Richard Blumenthal, the senator from Delaware, who lied for a very, very long time about his involvement in the Vietnam War, calling Barr a liar and saying the Barr should resign.
00:28:58.000So he has got a lot of credibility to stand right here.
00:29:01.000I think that Attorney General William Barr ought to recognize that he has an obligation to resign here.
00:29:08.000I have called at the very least for him to recuse himself from those 12 to 14 ongoing investigations into the President of the United States in other jurisdictions.
00:29:20.000In fact, he ducked the question entirely as to whether He has had any conversations with the White House about them, said he couldn't recall a response that is very difficult to believe.
00:29:41.000This is before she asked him a question, by the way.
00:29:43.000She didn't ask him a question and then accuse him of lying to her.
00:29:46.000She just said, you're a liar and a mean man and I hate you and I don't like your hair and you're ugly and you have bad glasses and you smell.
00:29:52.000Senator Maisie Hirono from the great state of Hawaii.
00:29:56.000Now the American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once Decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office.
00:30:09.000You once turned down a job offer from Donald Trump to represent him as his private attorney.
00:30:15.000At your confirmation hearing, you told Senator Feinstein that, quote, the job of Attorney General is not the same as representing, end quote, the President.
00:30:23.000So you know the difference, but you've chosen to be the President's lawyer and side with him over the interests of the American people.
00:30:41.000He actually has to sit in these committees while these Democrats say this stuff and then be polite to them.
00:30:44.000That's a very difficult job, and the man does have a lot of forbearance.
00:30:48.000But you would have to, to be the Zodiac Killer, obviously.
00:30:50.000So Senator Ted Cruz, he just rips on the Democrats, and you can see William Barr trying not to laugh as Senator Cruz does so.
00:30:59.000The principal attack that Democratic senators have marshaled upon you, it's an attack that I want people to understand just how revealing it is.
00:31:06.000If this is their whole argument, they ain't got nothing.
00:31:10.000So their entire argument is, General Barr, you suppressed the 19 pages that are entirely public, that we have, that we can read, that they know every word of it.
00:31:25.000And their complaint is it was delayed a few weeks.
00:31:28.000If that is their argument, I have to say that is an exceptionally weak argument.
00:31:38.000Even Barr can't hold himself back at this point.
00:31:40.000The best reaction in all of this, by the way, as always, belongs to Chris Matthews over at MSNBC.
00:31:45.000Come in the morning, come in the show.
00:31:48.000Maybe watch a little pornography last night.
00:31:50.000I have a few metaphors for what happened to William Barr last night.
00:32:10.000Once he's testified before Mr. Mueller's special counsel investigation, how can he now say, I won't make the same testimony in public claiming executive privilege?
00:32:20.000I think it is sort of like virginity kind of thing.
00:32:23.000Once you start talking about a matter in your jurisdiction, and then you say, oh, I'm not doing it anymore.
00:33:23.000In a second, we're going to get to the latest developments from Venezuela.
00:33:26.000Suffice it to say, things are not great.
00:33:27.000But first, It can be a little frustrating, especially if you're in a hurry or running late, to find yourself at a railway crossing waiting for a train.
00:33:35.000You're sitting there, and nothing's happening, and you're thinking, okay, I could probably make it around these little barriers here.
00:33:41.000Well, if the signals are going and the train is not even there yet, you might feel a little tempted to try to gun it and get across the tracks.
00:34:12.000The point is, you don't know how quickly the train is going to arrive, and the train can't stop even if it sees you, and sometimes you can't see the train properly, and it can't see you properly, and even if it can, it's gonna run you over.
00:34:42.000First, you have to go over to dailywire.com.
00:34:43.000For $9.99 a month, you can get a subscription to dailywire.com.
00:34:46.000When you do, you get the rest of this show live.
00:34:49.000You get the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live, you get the rest of Michael Moulse's show live, you get the rest of Matt Walsh's show live, you get two additional hours of me every single afternoon.
00:34:58.000Like yesterday, we had an Arthur Brooks from the American Enterprise Institute and Senator Ted Cruz.
00:35:03.000Also, the show is basically like an all-day show at this point, because I do this show in the morning, and then later I come back and do two more hours, so I am doing like 24-hour news coverage from this desk right here.
00:35:31.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:35:34.000Meanwhile, here is the update from Venezuela.
00:35:43.000So, the dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is still in power.
00:35:47.000The protests continue apace in Venezuela.
00:35:51.000Venezuela's Juan Guaido is remaining defiant after a failed attempt to oust Maduro.
00:35:56.000Maduro has now appeared in public with soldiers.
00:35:59.000These soldiers, some of them are Venezuelan soldiers and some of them apparently are from Cuba.
00:36:04.000According to the BBC, in a show of defiance against his opponents, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro appeared flanked by soldiers at an army base in Caracas on Thursday.
00:36:12.000Maduro called on the armed forces to oppose any coup plotter.
00:36:15.000As clashes between opposition supporters and pro-government forces continued, opposition leader Juan Guaido tried on Wednesday to spark a military defection and force Maduro from office.
00:36:23.000Guaido has urged public employees to strike to undermine the government.
00:36:26.000Maduro praised the army's loyalty on Thursday, since he's paying them off and they're running over civilians in trucks, calling on the military to unite in defense of the constitution, a constitution that he has overridden personally.
00:36:37.000He says, no one dare touch our sacred ground or bring war to Venezuela.
00:36:41.000What he's trying to do is draw the West into actual military conflict so that he can then claim imperialism is what is causing this, as opposed to an uprising by the Venezuelan people, who it turns out are not all that fond of eating dog.
00:36:52.000In January, Guaido declared himself Venezuela's interim leader.
00:36:55.000He has the support of more than 50 countries, including the United States, the UK, and most of Latin America.
00:37:01.000The reason that people are unhappy with Maduro is because they were unhappy with Chavez, increasingly, because socialism is a giant fail.
00:37:09.000Venezuela is one of the most oil-rich nations on earth.
00:37:12.000The average Venezuelan adult has lost 24 pounds over the course of the Chavista regime.
00:37:17.000On Wednesday, both pro- and anti-government supporters held demonstrations in Caracas that were initially peaceful.
00:37:22.000There were reports of gunfire in the city.
00:37:24.000A local NGO said that one 27-year-old had been shot dead during a rally in the opposition stronghold of Altamira.
00:37:30.000At least 46 people were injured in clashes between opposition supporters and the security forces.
00:37:36.000Guaido posted a video on Tuesday showing him with a number of men in military uniforms saying that he had the support of the military.
00:37:44.000That obviously has not materialized as of yet, and thus we have what is effectively a stalemate.
00:37:50.000According to the Washington Post, the United States was presented a plan by Guaido as to what exactly was going to happen here.
00:37:57.000There was a strong suggestion that Nicolas Maduro might peacefully fly to Havana.
00:38:02.000On Monday, the plan started to fall apart because Maduro had gotten wind of it, and Juan Guaido responded by rushing ahead with his plan anyway.
00:38:45.000is responsible for what's been happening in Venezuela.
00:38:48.000The United States, like us, Now, it should be noted, the sanctions that were placed in Venezuela were not placed on Venezuela as a country.
00:38:55.000They were not placed on Venezuela's oil exports.
00:38:57.000They were placed specifically, and for years, on specific leaders and business figures inside Venezuela.
00:39:15.000Ilhan Omar thinks that you should sanction Israel The only democracy in the Middle East in a place where Muslims are treated better than any place in the Middle East.
00:39:22.000She thinks that that country should be sanctioned.
00:39:29.000A lot of the policies that we have put in place has kind of helped lead the devastation in Venezuela and we've sort of set the stage for where we are arriving today.
00:39:45.000Particular bullying and the use of sanctions to eventually intervene and make regime change really does not help the people of countries like Venezuela and it certainly does not help and it's not in the interest of the United States.
00:40:05.000It's not in the interest of the people of Venezuela not to eat dogs.
00:40:21.000The President of the United States was honoring Yom HaShoah today.
00:40:24.000Yom HaShoah, of course, is the International Day for the Remembrance of the Holocaust.
00:40:30.000And that is perfectly appropriate at a time when anti-Semitism is spiking.
00:40:33.000Anti-Semitic attacks have indeed spiked to the highest level in decades.
00:40:38.000According to the Associated Press, Israeli researchers reported on Wednesday that violent attacks against Jews spiked significantly last year, with the largest reported number of Jews killed in anti-Semitic acts in decades, leading to an increased sense of emergency among Jewish communities worldwide.
00:40:52.000Capped by the deadly shooting that killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue on October 27th, assaults targeting Jews rose 13% in 2018, according to Tel Aviv University researchers.
00:41:02.000They recorded nearly 400 cases worldwide, with more than a quarter of the major violent cases taking place in the United States.
00:41:08.000That spike was most dramatic in Western Europe, where Jews have faced even greater danger and threats.
00:41:12.000In Germany, for example, there was a 70% increase in anti-Semitic violence.
00:41:16.000And this is because there are three types of anti-Semitism that are at work in today's world.
00:41:20.000There is left-wing anti-Semitism, right-wing anti-Semitism, and radical Muslim anti-Semitism.
00:41:26.000And each one of them poses a different sort of threat.
00:41:29.000So, let's start with right-wing white supremacist antisemitism.
00:41:32.000Right-wing white supremacist antisemitism, not only does it exist, it is the most individually dangerous form of antisemitism to specific Jews.
00:41:41.000Meaning that if I see that a shul was shot up in the United States, I will almost immediately assume that it is a white supremacist, because statistically speaking, it usually is.
00:41:50.000And that is because there are these marginalized, as they should be, marginalized evil people who find communities online, self-radicalize, almost like adjunct members of ISIS, and then go and shoot Jews at places like synagogues.
00:42:04.000These same people will go and try to burn down mosques or shoot Muslims in mosques in many cases.
00:42:08.000So that's right-wing extremist white supremacist antisemitism.
00:42:22.000Left-wing anti-semitism is the belief that the Jews are in control of the world because the Jews are disproportionately wealthy and successful and don't agree with the anti-biblical notions of the secular left and thus they ought to be quashed.
00:42:36.000This would be Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, it would be Ilhan Omar in the United States.
00:42:41.000Now left-wing anti-semitism is not quite as likely to lead to specific violence.
00:42:46.000It is much more likely to lead to widespread anti-semitic Act against the state of Israel collectively, for example, or to legislation that targets Jews in places like Belgium.
00:42:56.000It's much more likely to lead to government action because left-wing anti-Semitism has been mainstreamed.
00:43:01.000So right-wing anti-Semitism has not been mainstreamed.
00:43:05.000It's a small group of people who are exceedingly dangerous in how they interact with other people, but it's a small group.
00:43:11.000Left-wing anti-Semitism is less specifically dangerous, but more broadly dangerous in the sense that it leads to broad political changes that target Jews.
00:43:20.000This would be people like Ilhan Omar, who has made anti-semitic references repeatedly, and then is given the green light by the Democratic Party, celebrated, put on the cover of Rolling Stone, they raise money for her.
00:43:31.000So it's a different type of anti-semitism, and it is a type of anti-semitism that is more viral.
00:43:37.000It's more easy to spread among large groups of people.
00:43:41.000Now, Ilhan Omar tries to cover for all of this.
00:43:54.000When we are talking about anti-Semitism, we must also talk about Islamophobia. - Yeah.
00:44:03.000It's two sides of the same coin of bigotry.
00:44:05.000So I can't ever speak of Islamophobia and fight for Muslims if I am not willing to fight against anti-Semitism.
00:44:15.000Okay, but she's not been willing to fight against anti-Semitism.
00:44:17.000Now, what she says there about Islamophobia and anti-Semitism being two sides of the same coin, there's truth to that when she's speaking about right-wing anti-Semitism.
00:44:25.000They are not two sides of the same coin when it comes to left-wing anti-Semitism, because left-wing anti-Semitism is based on the hierarchy of intersectional grievances.
00:44:33.000In which case, Muslims are victimized and Jews are victimizers, according to left-wing extremists.
00:44:38.000And this has become a mainstream view inside the Democratic Party, which is why Ilhan Omar is still praised.
00:44:43.000It's also why the New York Times will print openly anti-Semitic cartoons and then pretend they don't know what they are doing.
00:44:49.000The cartoonist who drew that anti-Semitic cartoon in the New York Times earlier this week, by the way, he said that it was not an anti-Semitic cartoon.
00:45:18.000Because he says this cartoon is not anti-semitic.
00:45:20.000He claimed that the anti-semitism charges are a misunderstanding, quote, made through the Jewish propaganda machine, which is anytime there's criticism because there's someone anti-semitic on the other side, and that's not the case.
00:45:32.000He says the Jewish right doesn't want to be criticized and therefore when criticized they say we are a persecuted people, we suffered a lot, this is anti-Semitism.
00:45:38.000So it's the Jewish propaganda machine, but he's not an anti-Semite, guys.
00:45:42.000Not quite as specifically dangerous to individual Jews, deeply dangerous to Jews across the world who are then...
00:45:50.000Put at risk by both government policies on a broad scale and also by left-wing antisemitism's tolerance for the third type of antisemitism, which is radical Islamic antisemitism.
00:45:59.000Now that is widespread across the Muslim world, unfortunately.
00:46:03.000By polling data, antisemitism in the Muslim world is certainly not uncommon.
00:46:07.000There are moderate and reformed Muslims who do not believe this stuff, but there are many Muslims who do believe this stuff.
00:46:12.000And that does manifest not only in government policies in Muslim countries that crack down on Jews or bar Jews from even entering, but also it is manifest in specific acts of terrorism that have taken place across Europe.
00:46:22.000So in Europe, a lot of the attacks that are taking place against Jews are Muslim in orientation, and they are made room for by the left wing that has suggested that anti-Semitism is really just anti-Zionism, the apex case of this being the burning of a synagogue in Germany that was ruled to be an anti-Zionist the apex case of this being the burning of a synagogue in Germany that was ruled to be an So those are the three types of anti-Semitism.
00:46:45.000And as we remember the Holocaust today and the murder of six million Jews, it is worthwhile to remember that any form of anti-Semitism that collectively seeks to destroy the Jews as a people and target them as a people, those forms of anti-Semitism are not far from what happened in the Holocaust, nor are they dead.
00:47:01.000They're very much alive, and they are thriving in certain fringe areas of the right, in certain mainstream areas of the left, and in certain mainstream areas of the radical Muslim world.
00:47:09.000We have to keep our eye on that, or we fall prey to the possibility of greater evil in the future.
00:47:15.000Okay, time for some things that I like, and then some things that I hate.
00:47:46.000If you haven't seen, there's a miniseries called Uprising about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that I think is well worth watching.
00:47:52.000And then there's entire documentary series.
00:47:54.000I would watch the documentaries because the fictionalized film accounts don't do justice to what exactly happened in the camps and what exactly was the movement to put Jews, particularly specifically target Jews.
00:48:05.000This was not just a question of the Nazis killing millions of people.
00:48:07.000This was the specific targeting of Jews for their Jewish ancestry.
00:48:12.000Anybody who was at least one quarter Jewish was considered capable of being slaughtered by the Nazis.
00:48:17.000Six million Jews go to the gas chambers or are shot in mass shootings.
00:48:23.000People forget that mass graves were dug and Jews were shot en masse above the mass graves.
00:48:26.000Millions of Jews died that way as well.
00:48:30.000And the brutal nature of humanity is worthy of note.
00:48:35.000If you actually want to prevent brutality in the future, we have to realize that there is a true dark side to human nature.
00:48:40.000There's also great heroism to human nature.
00:48:42.000If you read Viktor Frankl, you see how people found purpose and kindness and generosity, even in the midst of the greatest act of collective victimization in the history of humankind by numbers.
00:48:54.000Victor Frankl, his book Man's Search for Meaning, or Elie Wiesel's Night.
00:48:57.000I was privileged to be able to help ghostwrite the autobiography of Jack Slomovic.
00:49:03.000Jack Slomovic was Elie Wiesel's cousin.
00:49:07.000He was with him in Auschwitz, and Jack Slomovic then came to the United States.
00:49:13.000He became an immigrant to the United States.
00:49:35.000He was born in 1925 in a little town in Czechoslovakia called Salatvina.
00:49:41.000With the outbreak of World War II, the Hungarians took over the town.
00:49:43.000They implemented anti-Jewish laws at the behest of the Nazis.
00:49:46.000In 1944, the Germans themselves then came and occupied Salatvina, and they moved all the Jews into a ghetto, and from there, the Jews were shipped directly to Auschwitz.
00:49:54.000Slomovic was shipped with his father, his two uncles, and his cousin Elie Wiesel to Buna, which was a labor camp near Auschwitz.
00:50:00.000His mother, five of his siblings, were immediately separated from them and then sent to be gassed to death in the chambers.
00:50:06.000Over the next year, Slomovic was shuttled to several concentration camps.
00:50:11.000He was able to steal small bits of food to keep his family alive.
00:50:16.000He tried to protect his father all the way through the Holocaust.
00:50:19.000He somehow kept his father, who was ailing, alive all the way to the end of the Holocaust.
00:50:23.000But literally the day before liberation at Theresienstadt, his father had already become deadly ill with typhus and died in his arms days after the liberation in Theresienstadt.
00:50:33.000Slomovic's story, though, is an amazing story of how human beings are able to rise from the ashes.
00:50:40.000People don't know this, but in the aftermath of World War II, after the liberation, Jews went back, in many cases, to their homes in some of these Eastern European countries, and those homes had been occupied by non-Jews.
00:50:51.000Something like 10,000 Jews were murdered in the aftermath of World War II simply for going back to their homes and saying they wanted their homes back, and then the people who were living there would kill them.
00:50:58.000In any case, Slomovic wandered the streets of Prague.
00:51:00.000Eventually, he found his way to the Sudetenland and sought an American visa.
00:51:04.000By the time he got his visa, war had broken out in the nascent state of Israel.
00:51:08.000And instead of using that visa to travel to the United States, instead, Slomovic volunteered to be smuggled into Israel to fight on behalf of the Jewish state.
00:51:16.000They took him off the boat, they gave him two hours of training, they handed him a rifle, and then they sent him to the front lines of Latrun, which was the bloodiest battle of the independence war.
00:51:24.000Now when folks talk about Israel being unnecessary, the fact that millions of Jews have been slaughtered throughout history, the fact that the population of Jews in today's world is still lower than the population of Jews in 1940.
00:51:36.000That is why the state of Israel exists to protect Jews all over the world and to give Jews a place to go when things go bad.
00:51:42.000That is one of the reasons for the Jewish state to exist on just a practical root level.
00:51:47.000And it's funny, the same people who say Israel is unnecessary are the same people who are making room for anti-Semitic attacks on Jews.
00:51:53.000They say Israel is unnecessary, Israel's bad, and also anti-Jewish acts in the West are just anti-Israel acts.
00:52:02.000That when you say you're just anti-Zionist, and therefore it's okay for people to be anti-Semitic against Jews, you think that we believe that if you got rid of the State of Israel, suddenly you'd be nice to the Jews?
00:52:58.000Supporting local schools and synagogues, became trustee of the Jim Joseph Foundation, which is a billion-dollar endowment focused on Jewish education.
00:53:40.000It's a little strong to say that I hated Avengers Endgame, but, and I don't really like throwing cold water on people's favorite movies and the things that they love a lot.
00:53:50.000Well, I won't say I don't like doing it.
00:53:53.000In any case, Avengers Endgame, it is one million hours long, it is the Wagnerian Ring Cycle, and it has moments, but There are a bunch of spoilers coming, guys.
00:54:11.000So the new Star Wars basically took all the characters you like and killed them off to make room for characters that you don't actually care about.
00:54:17.000It relies on the nostalgia that you have for the last 16 films, and it is a cool thing that they were somehow able to put together 16 films that led all the way up to this final film.
00:54:28.000Like, that's really a neat achievement on a cinematic level.
00:54:32.000The problem is that none of this works, and they destroy all of your favorite characters, with probably the exception of Black Widow, Scarlett Johansson, who finally gets a character arc that is worthy of her acting skills.
00:54:46.000Iron Man's character arc is the only interesting thing in this movie, but they totally botch it.
00:54:50.000The reason that they botch it is because Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr.' 's character, for all of his movies, the struggle for Iron Man has been not, do I go save the world or am I selfish?
00:55:12.000That was the struggle of Robert Downey Jr.
00:55:14.000When was he going to grow up and be an adult?
00:55:15.000That was the question of Robert Downey Jr.
00:55:17.000And after Thanos snaps his fingers in the first 45 minutes of the movie, you find out that Robert Downey Jr. has gotten married to Pepper Potts and that he has actually had a kid with her.
00:56:03.000The stakes are, and they present this choice, it's ready to be made.
00:56:06.000The stakes are, do you go back and change the past, and thus lose what you have built for yourself in the aftermath of you becoming a mature human being?
00:56:20.000But then they obviate that choice in the next 30 seconds of the film, where they explain that if they go back and change the past, it won't actually change this timeline, and therefore Tony Stark's kid will still be alive, and his wife will still be alive, and everything will be hunky-dory.
00:56:32.000So now this just becomes another Iron Man film, where it's about Tony Stark risking himself to go save the world, but there are no heightened stakes at all.
00:56:39.000So you've built up to his final character transformation into a responsible human being, and the question is going to be, now is he even more responsible than the responsible human being?
00:56:47.000He's built a family, now is he willing to sacrifice his own family and his own happiness in order to save the world?
00:56:53.000And the answer is, we're not going to make him answer the question.
00:56:56.000Because we don't have the guts to actually pose that choice.
00:56:59.000So that's the problem with Iron Man's character.
00:57:00.000Captain America's character... The problem with Captain America's character is they've always gotten it wrong.
00:57:04.000So Captain America is basically John McCain.
00:57:06.000He's supposed to be this crotchety old guy in a young guy's body.
00:57:33.000Well, that's not how the character is in the comics, and that's not how the character should be here.
00:57:37.000So, the stakes for Captain America aren't extraordinarily high.
00:57:41.000Now, Captain America's ending, where they have him basically go back in time, and then he is able to... and then he basically just stays back in time with the love of his life, I was fine with that.
00:57:52.000I really didn't have a huge problem with his ending.
00:57:54.000I thought his ending was the most appropriate.
00:57:55.000I thought Iron Man dying, even that would have been appropriate if they had set it up properly.
00:58:16.000Right, we've had several Thor movies at this point.
00:58:19.000Thor's problem has never been lack of courage.
00:58:22.000It's always been that he is afraid, that he does not have the moral fiber to be the leader.
00:58:28.000It's been that he's afraid of leadership.
00:58:29.000That's been his moral conflict, is that he's been afraid of leadership the whole time, and leadership has to be thrust upon him, and then he realizes he's a leader.
00:58:37.000But instead they decided to go the direction of, not that he doesn't want to take leadership, but that he's afraid to participate himself.
00:58:49.000And you never actually get to see Thor really in action, because they've decided to saddle him with a fat suit for the joke.
00:58:55.000Which is, again, not in character, and also very silly.
00:58:58.000Like, I was waiting for the point where Thor would just kind of take the hammer, or the axe, and slam it on the ground, the lightning comes, and he's back to being old Thor, right?
00:59:04.000I was waiting for that sort of transformation.
00:59:23.000I think Chris Hemsworth can with Robert Downey Jr., but they don't give him anything to do except be funny, which he is.
00:59:29.000I mean, in that there's a final kind of thing with Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth that's very funny.
00:59:34.000Okay, but he was supposed to be more than a funny character.
00:59:36.000If you watched the first Thor film directed by Kenneth Branagh, it was supposed to be far more serious.
00:59:40.000Also, as my business partner, Jeremy Boring, has pointed out, that it's pretty obvious from the film that they wanted Anthony Hopkins to come back and do a scene with Chris Hemsworth, and they weren't able to get Hemsworth to do it, so instead they brought back Rene Russo for a conversation, and it really doesn't work fantastically well.
00:59:58.000Thanos is built up in the first Avengers film as this guy with an interesting backstory and with an actual With an actual rationale, right?
01:00:06.000He feels that balance has to be brought back because he lived on a planet where overpopulation was a problem, so he snaps his fingers, half the people are gone, balance is restored.
01:00:13.000Okay, now they bring us back to old Thanos, who still has that same mission.
01:00:17.000And they basically just turned him into Big Daddy, right?
01:00:20.000Now he doesn't have an interesting backstory.
01:00:35.000Like, if you want to draw a good villain, then you can't just make them a sadist.
01:00:39.000Every bad villain, like Steppenwolf from Justice League, is just a sadist who wants to do bad stuff.
01:00:44.000But Thanos had an interesting backstory, and the thing about Thanos is that Thanos was willing to sacrifice his own daughter for what he believed in.
01:00:51.000Right, Danos, he's immoral, he's a bad person, but he's willing to make a sacrifice they don't even ask Robert Downey Jr.
01:01:39.000And she's, and she's... Dave Sexmackina.
01:01:41.000Another point made by my business partner, we had a conversation about this this morning, is that one of the problems with this film is that you also don't know the comparative power of the characters.
01:01:49.000So it's like every character has a power that is equally powerful, despite the fact that they don't.
01:01:55.000There's a scene near the end where the Avengers headquarters is hit by one million missiles, and somehow Ant-Man, who is a human, and Jeremy Renner, who is a human, are fine.
01:02:04.000They're at the bottom of twenty stories.
01:02:09.000And there's a scene where Thanos, who does not have the Infinity Gauntlet at this point, is fighting off Captain America and Thor and Iron Man.
01:02:17.000Well, if you remember back to the first Avengers film, He barely holds off Thor alone, right?
01:02:23.000Thor shows up and Thor nearly takes him out while he has the Infinity Stone.
01:02:26.000So if he doesn't have the Infinity Stone, he's basically just a big bad guy.
01:02:29.000So why are all three of them unable to take him out?
01:02:32.000And then there was the NFL ad recapitulation where they're trying to run the gauntlet between players and it's like, oh, okay, I understand you're doing fan service.
01:02:46.000And then they're just kind of throwing in the gauntlet just to remind you that all these characters exist.
01:02:51.000The center of this universe was always supposed to be Iron Man, Captain America, Thor.
01:02:55.000They turned Thor into a loser, Captain America is boring, and Iron Man, they don't give a full motivation and prohibit him from making a proper choice.
01:03:01.000Now, there are, again, scenes in this movie that are quite good.
01:03:04.000The scene between the Hulk, for example, the Mark Ruffalo character, And Tilda Swinton, the character from Doctor Strange, that's actually a good scene.
01:03:19.000But overall, I felt like it was a mishmash, I felt like it didn't really work.
01:03:23.000I understand that for uber-fans of Marvel, I'm not speaking as an uber-fan of Marvel, I've seen virtually all of these films, I think that Captain Marvel is the only one that I have not seen.
01:03:33.000There are uberfans who are sitting there, like, just picking out the Easter eggs.
01:03:36.000Oh, remember when they did that in this movie?
01:03:38.000And then we're flashing back to that movie now.
01:03:45.000And it doesn't give an emotional resonance.
01:03:46.000The only emotional resonance, really, is Iron Man's death, which I guess is what it was supposed to be.
01:03:51.000And even there, I felt like it was diminished somewhat by the fact that he basically just dies in a normal adventure story that could have taken place in any of the other Iron Mans.
01:04:09.000In fact, the battle was much more interesting when it was just a couple of people fighting before all of these things show up, before Doctor Strange unleashes the beast and all these people come walking through back from the dead.
01:04:20.000It felt throughout the movie like there were no stakes.
01:04:33.000I didn't feel like anyone was really in any danger, and even Iron Man's death is sort of inevitably foreshadowed by what happens to the Hulk when he puts on the gauntlet.
01:04:44.000I wish I had liked the movie more, since I spent three hours of my life on it and fifty bucks.
01:04:47.000The tickets for IMAX were expensive, man.
01:04:49.000But I will say that I understand why people enjoyed it, if you're a superfan.
01:04:54.000But I am not up with the, this is great.
01:06:10.000And at the end, not only does he not receive the hammer, but also he then hands off the mantle of leadership, which he has been attempting to avoid his entire life.
01:06:17.000So it's never thrust upon him, and he never takes it.
01:06:19.000So in the last Thor movie, he actually does take it.