Ep. 463 - The Inevitable Impeachment
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Summary
Walmart apologizes for a coked out Santa Claus and so much more. Plus, a special holiday offer from Ring that keeps you safe in the midst of all the chaos! Subscribe to the new Gimlet show Gimlet to get notified when a new episode is available.
Transcript
00:00:07.160
On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you.
00:00:33.040
Democrats plan to move forward with two articles of impeachment against President Trump.
00:00:41.360
How did we get to the point where we can't agree on anything?
00:00:56.500
We will examine how this rot has been building since the 80s, at least.
00:01:01.100
And we will chart a path forward for how we can all get along.
00:01:04.620
Then Walmart apologizes for a coked out Santa Claus and so much more.
00:01:09.000
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
00:01:18.780
Even Santa Claus needs a mountain of narcotics.
00:01:28.320
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00:03:09.780
I mean, it's breaking news, except we could have predicted it three months ago.
00:03:12.740
But it's still, it's breaking news technically.
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The Democrats are going to file two articles of impeachment against President Trump.
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There's the shallow political story here, which is about the impeachment.
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There's the broader political context, which is the IG report.
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And then there's the 30,000-foot view context of why this is all happening now.
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I think this has everything to do with the kind of disagreements you're seeing on the right right now.
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I mean, for the last three days, conservative Twitter has been arguing about porn for some reason.
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It all has to do with this central problem that has been building now for at least three, four decades.
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Democrats are now officially filing articles of impeachment against President Trump.
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The articles are for obstructing Congress and abuse of power.
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You can look through the Constitution and say, where is that as an impeachable offense?
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The third article was supposed to be for bribery.
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That was going to be the actual crime that they were committing or accusing Trump of committing.
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And in exchange for that, he's getting an investigation into his political rival, Joe Biden.
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That was the whole point of these impeachment hearings.
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And they're abandoning that because there's no evidence of that.
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Tells you everything you need to know about this partisan, ridiculous, farcical impeachment.
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You only get abuse of Congress and obstructing, or obstructing Congress and abuse of power.
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On obstructing Congress, they're saying Trump obstructed Congress by not letting the executive branch employees testify.
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Trump did have a number of executive branch employees testify, didn't he?
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None of them provided any evidence that Trump committed the crime that they're accusing him of, which is bribery, which is the quid pro quo.
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Because the Democrats aren't filing the charge for quid pro quo.
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And actually, Gordon Sondland, who is the only guy to actually talk about Trump's dealings with Ukraine, repeatedly said that Trump requested no quid pro quo.
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Alan Dershowitz, who we have on the show sometimes, we have him on the radio show sometimes.
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Alan Dershowitz, great law professor, repeatedly points out this is not an impeachable offense.
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It might be deserving of censure, let's say, but it is not an impeachable offense.
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Now, there was another charge that the Democrats were considering adding.
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A far left representative, Pramila Jayapal, suggested adding the charge of obstruction of justice.
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They're saying he obstructed Congress because he didn't send all of his people to go testify.
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Obstructing justice, they were considering adding because Trump went to the courts to push back against this impeachment farce.
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Going to the courts, going to the third co-equal branch of government is not obstruction of justice.
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If anything, that is pursuing justice and not allowing the legislature to run roughshod over the executive.
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They have these two very weak arguments, as we've just shown.
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Those two charges fall completely flat, which means that in their actual public testimony, Democrats are reverting to their former argument.
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The only actual impeachment argument that they have ever been making consistently.
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Here is the Democratic counsel, Barry Burke, making this argument in explicit terms.
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Before I had the great honor of being a counsel for this committee, my young son asked me a question.
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He said, Dad, does the president have to be a good person?
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Like many questions by young children, it had a certain clarity, but it was hard to answer.
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I said, son, it is not a requirement that the president be a good person, but that is the hope.
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And it is not a requirement that the president be a good person.
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I think I'm not going to leave just the studio or the Daily Wire.
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I think I'm going to leave the country because obviously this experiment in self-government that we've had is over.
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When you when you were trying to overturn a presidential election, when you were trying to impeach the president and for the first time in history, try to remove him from office through the process of impeachment because your son wonders if he's not a good person.
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We we might be past the point of self-government.
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We'll get to why a little bit later in the show.
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If the Democrats had not backed themselves into a corner, what they could have done here is had the hearings figured out to everybody who's paying attention that Trump did not commit an impeachable offense and then censured him anyway.
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So then the Congress votes to censure him and they can take this as at least a slight political victory.
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But they've backed themselves too far into a corner and their base is demanding removal from office because as Democratic Representative Al Green says, they fear that if they don't impeach this president, he will be reelected.
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They fear that he's actually doing good things and he's fairly popular.
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And so they've got to remove him from office extra constitutionally or else he's going to get reelected.
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And so it's the Democratic council talking to his little boy saying, gosh, the president's a bad man.
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And let me look, article two, I don't know, section five or six or seven.
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There's got to be some section here where you can remove the president for being a meanie, for being a really bad guy.
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Representative Doug Collins, the Republican, who actually was a star yesterday at the impeachment hearings.
00:10:01.480
Doug Collins said what we're all thinking, that this is a farce, that there is no impeachable offense.
00:10:09.660
What would be known about this one is probably where's the impeachable offense?
00:10:16.400
I tell you, this may be, though, become known as the focus group impeachment because we don't have a crime.
00:10:23.400
And nobody understands really what the majority is trying to do, except they interfere and basically make sure that they believe the president can't win next year if he's impeached.
00:10:33.600
The focus group impeachment takes words and then takes them to people and say, how can we explain this better?
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A focus group impeachment says, you know, we really aren't working with good facts, but we need a good PR move.
00:10:53.620
They've tried to impeach him now for three years for different reasons.
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The only thing that stayed the same, the only thing that's been consistent is the fact that they want to impeach him.
00:11:12.540
It's a crime committed or not a crime, but an abuse committed while he was being impeached, obstructing Congress.
00:11:28.300
All that's been consistent is that they want to impeach the guy.
00:11:30.960
I like that the point that he's making, that this is being focus grouped on the reasoning, the conclusion always being the same.
00:11:37.760
It's a little bit of a weak talking point and no one's going to refer to the focus group impeachment.
00:11:43.120
It's one of those things that sounds really good to people in D.C.
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The American people don't register with that too much.
00:11:52.000
I think probably the better term that resonates with them is the term Trump has been using, which is that it's a BS impeachment.
00:11:57.680
I think we can all identify with that, but absolutely Collins' point stands.
00:12:03.080
He then starts drilling down on these democratic councils.
00:12:08.240
He exposed the greatest irony of the whole impeachment scam, which is that the only person to commit the offense that Democrats were initially at least accusing Trump of is not Trump, not somebody who worked for Trump, not another Republican.
00:12:28.400
He gets, Collins gets the Democratic council, Daniel Goldman, to admit that the only person to commit a quid pro quo here with Ukraine is Joe Biden.
00:12:38.420
As I remember going over to the Ukraine, convincing our team, our leaders, convincing them that we should provide for loan guarantees.
00:12:45.180
I went over, I guess the 12th or 13th time to give, I was supposed to announce that there was a billion dollar loan guarantee.
00:12:51.580
And I got a commitment from Poroshenko and they said that I would take action against, that they would take action against the state prosecutor.
00:12:58.540
So they said, so they said they had, they were walking out to the press conference.
00:13:02.820
I said, nah, I'm not going to, or we're not going to give you the billion dollars.
00:13:06.400
They said, you have authority and you have no authority.
00:13:09.760
The president said, I said, call him, laughter.
00:13:13.140
I said, I'm telling you, you're getting, you're not getting the billion dollars.
00:13:15.940
I said, you're not getting the billion dollars.
00:13:17.500
I'm getting, I'm getting, I'm getting ready to be leaving here.
00:13:22.780
I looked at them and said, I'm leaving here in six hours.
00:13:25.380
If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.
00:13:30.840
Did he ask for something, request something and hold something of value?
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Either Joe Biden's a liar telling a story to make people impressed, or he actually did this.
00:13:53.960
So he did it in holding, withholding actual dollars, actual thing, holding this out there.
00:13:59.260
So Joe Biden, of everybody that we discussed about, is the only one that's done a quid pro quo.
00:14:03.620
He's the only one that's used taxpayer dollars to actually threaten a foreign government.
00:14:07.940
And yet we're sitting here pretending that this is not happening?
00:14:12.520
Thank you, Representative Collins, for saying the most obvious point about the whole impeachment
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hearing, that we're initially, at least, going after Trump for a quid pro quo that he didn't
00:14:25.300
commit, when if he did commit a quid pro quo, it was only to investigate the quid pro quo that
00:14:30.220
we know for a fact Joe Biden committed because he admitted it.
00:14:35.040
Not that it matters, because nobody cares about the actual facts of this, because we are dug
00:14:39.900
into our partisanship because of this root problem that we've had now for a few decades,
00:14:46.780
But it just shows you the absurdity, the hypocrisy of the whole hearing.
00:14:59.900
Barry Burke, who's the other Democratic Council.
00:15:07.280
It's worth pointing out that the expert witness that the Republicans called on their behalf
00:15:12.480
was John, Jonathan Turley, who's actually a liberal, who actually voted against President
00:15:18.280
Trump, who, who, in so much as you can be nonpartisan here, is definitely not partisan
00:15:24.020
Democrats are just doubling down on their guys.
00:15:26.480
You then have, after Doug Collins just knocks down this whole impeachment nonsense, you
00:15:33.960
then have Matt Gaetz, Congressman Matt Gaetz, come in for the kill and expose the rank partisanship
00:15:47.080
Mr. Castro, how long have you worked for the House?
00:16:05.100
Matter of fact, you've given tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats, right?
00:16:09.320
Sir, I think it's very important to support candidates for office.
00:16:12.820
Mr. Castro, have you ever tweeted anything at the president?
00:16:18.160
Um, I have made a number of tweets in my private capacity before I came to this job when I was working in the media, yes.
00:16:27.760
Matter of fact, this is one of those tweets, right?
00:16:32.980
Oh, no, you looked into my political donations and my Twitter account.
00:16:35.880
So he points out that Daniel Goldman's given tens of thousands of dollars to Democrats.
00:16:39.900
And Barry Burke, the other Democrat counsel, has given over $100,000.
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What's offensive to all of us is when Daniel Goldman says, I'm not a partisan.
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Nancy Pelosi says, this has nothing to do with politics.
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Well, if it didn't have anything to do with politics, maybe you would have found a crime.
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Maybe you would have found an impeachable offense.
00:17:06.540
The whole thing is about defending Democrats on two fronts.
00:17:11.680
It's about defending Democrats against an investigation into the Russia investigation.
00:17:17.240
We just got the first part of that investigation, the IG report.
00:17:20.520
And it's about defending Democrats from their own weak presidential field.
00:17:24.300
Speaking of the latter, let's check in with Democratic front-runner Joe Biden.
00:17:29.780
So you go ahead and you stack spaghetti sauce at a store and in a supermarket.
00:17:34.280
You control the guy or the woman who runs the, brings out the carts on a forklift.
00:17:42.720
Things going about as well as the last time we checked in on Joe Biden.
00:17:48.920
There's a new poll out from Harvard Harris showing the top five 2020 Democratic presidential
00:17:57.100
Right now it's Biden at 29%, Sanders at 16, Warren at 13, Buttigieg at eight, and Bloomberg
00:18:07.420
Probably not going to go anywhere, but still, you know, he's doing, doing better than some
00:18:14.020
That's the Harvard Harris poll as it stands right now.
00:18:16.780
The minute that you add people like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry into the race, Biden
00:18:24.780
So if you add Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, you now get the front runner as Hillary Clinton
00:18:31.660
with 21%, Joe Biden with 20, Sanders at 12, Warren at nine, Buttigieg and Kerry at five.
00:18:39.560
The multi-time loser, one of the most reviled women in America, Hillary Clinton, is currently
00:18:51.880
leading the pack of Democratic presidential candidates and she's not even running.
00:18:56.200
This is a bad situation for Democrats to be in.
00:19:00.680
The impeachment is in part to distract from this bad pack of candidates.
00:19:04.880
The, now, the theater here, the theater helps President Trump, right?
00:19:11.760
Because they're distracting from the candidates with impeachment.
00:19:18.200
Quarterly polling by the Republican firm Firehouse Strategies has President Trump struggling,
00:19:23.420
or it had President Trump struggling in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
00:19:27.000
Those are all the battlegrounds those states are very likely to determine the 2020 election.
00:19:34.880
Until the poll that came out after impeachment had started, in which he beats every single
00:19:41.680
Nothing could be better for Trump than this impeachment.
00:19:45.380
You know, Lindsey Graham on the Judiciary Committee is saying that once the House impeaches
00:19:49.800
and it goes to trial in the Senate, they're going to get this impeachment over with ASAP.
00:19:58.660
This is so helpful to Trump, this should drag on for two months.
00:20:01.560
Now, I think what Lindsey Graham is thinking, what Republicans on the Hill are thinking,
00:20:06.780
is we need to wrap this up because we've already won.
00:20:11.620
Let's just get it over with before something bad happens.
00:20:15.820
You could call Joe Biden to testify and he could start crying and show himself to be a sympathetic
00:20:23.580
You could get Hunter Biden to testify, a complete degenerate, but he could still evoke some sympathy.
00:20:32.920
I don't think you need to get either of those guys to testify.
00:20:35.480
Just keep dragging out all these Democratic lawyers who are so awful.
00:20:40.100
Pamela Carlin, Daniel Goldman, Noah Feldman, all these guys that are just so unlikable and
00:20:47.300
so elitist and so disconnected from the American people.
00:20:50.220
That is how you, drag out Adam Schiff, get Adam Schiff to testify before the Senate.
00:20:57.260
I don't know, drag out Hunter Biden's Coke dealer.
00:21:04.580
It drills the point home that Democrats have nothing.
00:21:08.780
And the Democrats will pretend to have something even when they've got nothing, right?
00:21:12.480
So the thing is, if you wrap up impeachment right now, the Democrats are going to declare
00:21:16.820
a victory, even though they've lost on every single stage of this.
00:21:21.240
So you've got to keep showing the American people that the Democrats have nothing.
00:21:25.320
Otherwise, the mainstream media aren't going to do it for you.
00:21:35.500
After years of President Trump calling it a deep state, saying the FBI was anti-Trump when
00:21:41.780
it launched an investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Russia, tonight
00:21:46.480
the long-awaited independent report, the Justice Department's Inspector General revealing there
00:21:52.200
was no evidence of a witch hunt, determining the FBI had enough evidence pointing to either
00:21:57.120
a federal crime or a threat to national security or both to justify the probe at the height of
00:22:03.160
the election, and that the agents who made the final decision to launch the investigation
00:22:18.740
Except, of course, that's not really what happened.
00:22:22.840
The IG report, I mean, the IG report is extremely long, so you can read the executive summary or
00:22:27.360
It's said that the FBI committed a whole slew of errors in the lead up to wiretapping and
00:22:37.880
Now, ultimately, the IG said this wasn't some politically motivated conspiracy.
00:22:41.660
It was just incompetence and a number of mistakes.
00:22:45.160
So spying on the Trump campaign, spying on Carter Page, it was all flawed but not improperly
00:22:52.160
Okay, 17, quote, serious performance failures relating to warrants obtained by the FBI through
00:22:58.500
the FISA courts, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment courts.
00:23:03.200
On the spying on Carter Page, spying on the Trump campaign, that FISA warrant was reauthorized
00:23:11.460
It contained false and misleading information about Page repeatedly.
00:23:15.940
It failed to disclose the fact that Page had already disclosed his Russian contacts to a
00:23:25.620
It overstated the government's confidence in the Steele dossier, and it also ignored Christopher
00:23:34.180
And it never mentioned that Page and Manafort, Paul Manafort, the former chairman of the Trump
00:23:45.800
So you're just saying, okay, the FBI, they made some mistakes, but there's no problem
00:23:55.800
The IG report just came out, and I was just briefed on it, and it's a disgrace what's happened
00:24:02.300
with respect to the things that were done to our country.
00:24:07.480
It should never again happen to another president.
00:24:09.780
It is incredible, far worse than I would have ever thought possible.
00:24:21.720
It's everything that a lot of people thought it would be, except far worse.
00:24:27.460
So I'm going to get some very detailed briefings, but they are, it's a very sad, it's a very
00:24:47.700
I happen to agree with him on the main points here.
00:24:52.480
The trouble is that the conclusions of the IG reports were too weak.
00:24:58.480
They gave too much deference to the bureaucrats.
00:25:04.140
He's pointing to the actual facts of the investigation.
00:25:06.400
I think Lindsey Graham had the most nuanced and accurate take on this, which is the flaws
00:25:15.560
of the investigation itself, the actual facts that the IG found, that is what is disturbing.
00:25:25.520
I believe there will be no debate among reasonable minded people, particularly lawyers, about how
00:25:31.940
the system not only got off the rails, but in my view, became a criminal enterprise to
00:25:38.240
defraud the FISA court, to deny American citizen Carter Page's constitutional rights, and to
00:25:44.680
continue an operation against President Trump as president of the United States, that I think
00:25:51.500
Even if the initial process of spying on the Trump campaign, even if we're going to grant
00:26:00.560
the benefit of the doubt to these bureaucrats, certainly after the beginning, after the middle,
00:26:08.160
in the late stages of this, this had become something far, far worse than a simple mistake.
00:26:18.020
You don't repeatedly omit relevant information.
00:26:20.440
You don't repeatedly lean on a source who is being paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign
00:26:30.580
When you add to that all of the text messages we saw between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, when
00:26:35.100
you add to that the meetings that were alleged to have happened in Andy McCabe's office, when
00:26:39.640
you add to that everything we already know, this thing stinks to high heaven.
00:26:44.400
And beyond Trump's take, beyond Graham's take, you get the Attorney General, William Barr,
00:26:49.460
who importantly disagreed with the conclusions of the IG report.
00:26:55.120
The Inspector General's report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation
00:26:59.520
of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions, in my view, that, in my view,
00:27:09.100
So the IG says they were sufficient to take the steps that they did to spy on the Trump
00:27:16.200
FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings,
00:27:21.240
and suppressed or ignored information, negating the reliability of their principal source.
00:27:29.140
John Durham, who is the investigator, the, the U.S. attorney appointed by Bill Barr months
00:27:38.240
And at the time we thought, wait a second, you've already got the IG.
00:27:42.300
It's because obviously the AG, William Barr, knew at that time that the IG was not going
00:27:49.420
So he was appointing another investigator to pursue a criminal investigation on the matter.
00:27:57.120
Last month, we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report's
00:28:02.920
conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.
00:28:07.620
Now, the big question we have, how does this all relate to internet porn?
00:28:18.000
We have been having lots of cultural debates on the right about the, the nature of what we
00:28:23.660
believe, what we want for America, how we can conserve the American nation, how we should
00:28:28.840
relate to libertarianism and traditionalism and all.
00:28:41.600
Why are we impeaching the president over nothing?
00:28:43.840
Why is the bureaucracy trying to overturn the will of the American people?
00:28:57.720
And this was because of a deal made between the right and the left decades ago that has
00:29:07.440
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Why are Democrats impeaching a president for nothing?
00:30:24.920
That's why the big, the big argument on the right in recent months has been between the
00:30:34.040
The, between the Saurabh Amaris and the David Frenches, between the people who want to ban
00:30:41.260
porn and the people who want there to be porn all over the place, even if they don't like
00:30:44.960
it, they want everyone to have the opportunity to see it.
00:30:46.860
It's between the people who say that the ultimate aim of politics is a good society and the people
00:30:55.200
who say that the ultimate pursuit of politics is leave me alone, libertarian, individual
00:31:09.480
From the 80s to the present, there has been this strange left-right consensus.
00:31:16.140
There's actually been something of a consensus, an alliance between left-wing liberals who
00:31:21.220
want to be left alone on social issues and between right-wing liberals, I say liberal in
00:31:27.940
the kind of classical sense of that word, who want to be left alone with their money.
00:31:32.400
So you got the left-wing liberals who say, don't bother me about sex or culture or the
00:31:42.680
And then the right says, okay, we'll leave you alone on that.
00:31:45.780
If you leave us alone on our money, let us keep all of our money.
00:31:48.360
And the left doesn't usually go along with that, but that's, that's the rough alliance
00:32:00.920
We can't agree on what life is or when it begins.
00:32:04.700
We can't agree on what the government should be or look like or is.
00:32:17.160
It's now a controversial conservative opinion to say that we should speak English in America.
00:32:23.260
Often you'll call a customer service line and you'll, you'll hear for English press one
00:32:28.560
and you're, you'll hear something in Spanish that maybe you can't understand.
00:32:34.100
It's now considered bigoted in some quarters to say that the official language of America
00:32:41.820
We can't even agree on the language that we should speak to talk about whether we agree
00:32:51.860
That's the fruit of hyper-individualism on the social side when it comes to the left
00:32:55.820
and on the money side when it comes to the right.
00:33:02.620
I don't think we should have more government regulations coming in and taking my property.
00:33:06.680
But the reason for that is economic freedom is a good way to pursue a good country, a good
00:33:22.400
Maximal individual autonomy is not an end in and of itself.
00:33:26.760
The end that that allows for is virtue, is a good life, is good healthy communities,
00:33:39.520
I think the whole leave me alone politics, oh come on, who cares?
00:33:44.640
You can have your weird creepy sex stuff and we can keep all of our money and never the
00:33:49.920
That is a losing proposition because eventually if Andrew Breitbart is correct that politics
00:33:56.480
is downstream of culture and if also politics affects culture, ultimately you are going to
00:34:02.000
have a country that's so separated that we're going to come to heads.
00:34:10.040
If we were a country that kind of understood one another, that we had a basically similar
00:34:16.180
sense of the common good, the highest good, similar kind of sense of culture, similar kind
00:34:24.440
I'm not saying we need some totally uniform, prudish country.
00:34:30.760
Just saying we have to kind of agree on what we're all about.
00:34:33.640
If you had that, then you wouldn't have a bogus impeachment over nothing.
00:34:39.380
You wouldn't, and at least come up with some shred of a crime, wouldn't they?
00:34:43.480
You wouldn't have the bureaucracy trying to attack the people.
00:34:48.060
You wouldn't have these separate languages where half of the country thinks that the
00:34:54.600
other half of the country are Nazis, are literal Nazis, are bigoted, awful, terrible,
00:35:00.000
deplorable, irredeemable people like Hillary Clinton said.
00:35:02.180
You wouldn't have that because we would at least, I'm not saying we would agree on everything,
00:35:07.660
We would have a general sense of where we're all going, what we all want.
00:35:13.420
That's the fruit of hyper, super duper individualism.
00:35:16.560
If we are going to come back together, the answer is not to go to the lowest common denominator
00:35:21.340
and say, fine, I'm not going to ever tell you anything that you should do, and please,
00:35:27.640
The answer is we need to actually engage with one another.
00:35:31.100
We do have to say there is a good, there is something we should be doing, there is propriety,
00:35:36.220
there is a definition of a man, there is a definition of marriage, there is a definition
00:35:42.660
That takes a little courage, that takes a little bit of virtue.
00:35:45.280
Unfortunately, we've so whittled away at that over the past several decades that it's hard
00:35:51.340
That is the task before us, and it's not an easy one, and it's not going to be terribly pleasant,
00:35:57.080
and it might look like there's more conflict in the short term.
00:36:00.240
In the long run, that's the only way that we are going to have a peaceable society again.
00:36:04.460
It's the only way that we're going to have a society based on reason, based on persuasion,
00:36:08.320
and that's the only way that self-government persists.
00:36:12.000
Now let's get to an important issue like a coked up Santa Claus.
00:36:15.000
Walmart has issued an apology for a third-party item that was listed for sale on its Canadian
00:36:23.240
The item is a sweater with the design of a Santa not wearing pants sitting on top of a
00:36:31.440
couch or a bed with a bunch of like a little snowflake Christmas tree on one side and then
00:36:37.660
lines of Coke on the other, and the shirt says, let it snow.
00:36:42.920
So Walmart issued this big apology, they're so sorry that they've got this shirt here,
00:36:57.300
You know, so many people, as we've been having these kind of traditionalist debates over porn
00:37:01.860
and all that kind of stuff, they've said, you conservatives are prude.
00:37:04.820
The reason that I don't like porn is not because I'm totally scandalized by sexual images or
00:37:17.460
It's because it has a bad effect on the individual and on society and there's nothing good about
00:37:23.560
I don't think that we should get rid of shirts that have Santa blowing Coke.
00:37:28.580
I mean, in this, what is that song, I Get a Kick Out of You, classic American songbook
00:37:39.980
People have talked about coke, made jokes about coke, sung about coke.
00:37:45.900
I'm just saying you can have a shirt that makes a joke about cocaine looking like snow
00:37:56.140
The only criticism that I will make of this sweatshirt is that these sweaters are kind
00:38:04.360
The idea of the ugly Christmas sweater that's really subversive and that's really telling
00:38:10.200
a naughty joke, that has now become lame because that's all you ever see now in stores are these
00:38:16.060
I actually think it would be funnier to just wear a regular Christmas sweater.
00:38:35.320
As we've had all this bad news on the show, I want to leave on some good news.
00:38:39.460
On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a 2017 pro-life law in Kentucky that requires
00:38:48.540
doctors to perform ultrasounds and play the sound of the baby's heartbeat to women who are seeking abortion.
00:38:58.220
They say, all right, if you want to get an abortion, if you want to kill your child, you have to hear that your child has a heartbeat.
00:39:05.180
You have to see the ultrasound, that it's really a baby.
00:39:09.320
The whole law says before you can have an abortion, you have to have all the information.
00:39:17.880
The left doesn't want you to have information on abortion.
00:39:20.980
Because the minute you have information, you realize that the left has been telling you lies about abortion for decades.
00:39:39.400
The Supreme Court, to their credit, says, no, this is perfectly constitutional.
00:39:49.480
You know, there's this British actress who I've never seen in anything, but she's got a blue checkmark on Twitter.
00:39:55.540
She has been defending abortion in such a crazy, wild, intense way that it makes me think she doesn't really believe what she's saying.
00:40:06.220
She tweeted out, quote, receiving thousands of messages about how I made a mistake having an abortion seven years ago and how I must be a miserable person.
00:40:17.280
I am, in fact, a happy, thriving multimillionaire, madly in love with free time, good sleep, and a wonderful career and life.
00:40:35.600
She clearly feels some shame, some regret, at least, at the very least, some uncertainty about her decision to kill her child and sacrifice her child on the altar of mammon, on the altar of money and fame and relaxation and sleep.
00:40:58.420
She said, yes, I killed my child, but in return for killing my child, I'm happy.
00:41:09.760
Oh, you committed an immoral act and were rewarded with wealth?
00:41:25.460
This actually does get to the debate that we were talking about, the kind of leave-me-alone debate, the kind of hyper-individualism debate, the kind of I'm-not-my-brother's-keeper debate.
00:41:39.740
What the left wants to do is leave me alone, let me have whatever sex I want, let me pursue my career, let me kill my babies.
00:41:47.980
What the right wants, at its worst, in this kind of hyper-individualist, selfish way, is let me keep all my money.
00:42:05.100
You can pretend that men are women and women are men, and you can pretend that you're happy.
00:42:14.900
Well, that's a deal that dooms and destines society to have a bad time, to not really get along with one another.
00:42:24.900
Winston Churchill famously said, and Ronald Reagan repeated it in one of his most famous speeches, A Time for Choosing.
00:42:30.980
The destiny of man is not measured by material computations.
00:42:35.580
When great forces are on the move in the world, we know that we are spirits, not animals.
00:42:40.740
A good life is not measured by how many millions of dollars you've made.
00:42:45.760
It's not measured by how much free time you have to do nothing.
00:42:49.000
It's not measured by how much good sleep you were able to get, or how many movies or TV shows you were able to appear in.
00:42:56.400
Likewise, a good life is not measured by how much money you were able to keep for yourself.
00:43:02.280
And you can do wonderful things with money that you keep for yourself, but that's not the measure of a good life.
00:43:06.900
A good life is not even measured by how many of your own wins and desires and appetites you were able to indulge.
00:43:25.600
That's what we should be striving for if you want to have a good life, if you want to have a happy life.
00:43:32.440
If you want to have a good life, you've got to be good about it.
00:43:34.420
You can't just indulge your appetites all the time, because very often we have disordered appetites.
00:43:40.580
If we want that, if we want to try to rediscover that wisdom that we knew 40 years ago, that Ronald Reagan knew, that Winston Churchill knew, that everybody knew up until now except for us, because we have so degraded our culture.
00:43:52.900
If we want to recover that, then we have to start having conversations not merely about equality, not merely about social justice, not merely about material wealth, not merely about liberty, not even merely about this hyper-individual liberty,
00:44:12.800
but rather what Edmund Burke, the great conservative philosopher, talks about as the spirit of an exalted freedom, we have to talk about the good.
00:44:23.780
That is going to be a difficult conversation, and I don't know that we're going to have a very good time doing it, but we can try.
00:44:32.680
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00:44:43.720
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00:44:49.060
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00:44:54.020
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00:45:01.220
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00:45:25.780
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