Mike Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI, the Republicans are passing a tax cut, and Kate Stanley's killer was let go on charges of murder, but he will still go to jail on gun charges. We ll explain what that means, plus the mailbag. All that and much more on today s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: PODCAST to receive 20% off your first month with discount code: CRIMINALS at checkout. Use the code: "ELISSA" at checkout to receive $10 and contribute $10 to a charity of your choice. Enjoy & spread the word to your friends about this show! Ben Shapiro is a writer, editor, and podcaster. His work has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post. His work can be found online at huffingtonpost.co/BenShapiro and he is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard. Subscribe to his new book, "The Devil Next Door" which is out now! Learn more about him at bit.ly/benshapiro. If you like what you read, consider pledging a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and subscribe to his other projects! Subscribe and comment below! You can also become a supporter of his work by becoming a patron of his excellent work, Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, "Mr. Shapiro's Unfiltered Media." and support him on his newest podcast "Uncle Ben Shapiro s Uncle Ben's Uncleared" on Podcoin. Ben's new book is out on amazon. is also available in paperback and hardcover on Amazon Prime and paperback, The Devil's Mailbag on the Kindle and paperback edition is out in paperback, $99.99, and also on Audible, $19.99 and $24.99 at Audible. Also, you can get his autographed copy of his new paperback edition of his newest novel, "Blindeepers Only the Devil Knows How to Read a Good Thing? He also has an ebook out now on the Audible and more than $50,000 in paperback $24,000 at $39.99.00, and he also has a course on Amazon, and his new T-shirt is available on Vimeo and Audible?
00:00:32.000Some days are like drinking from a fire hose, and this is that day.
00:00:35.000There are just too many big news stories happening all at once, and I'm sure that by the end of the show, another big news story will have broken, destroying the rest of the structure of the show.
00:00:44.000But, before we get to any of the big news, and it is really big news today, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birchgold.
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00:02:02.000Apparently he lied to the FBI because he had been speaking with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak,
00:02:07.000In order to convince Kislyak to lay off of backlash against the United States after the Obama administration in its waning days, as retaliation for supposed Russian election interference, put new sanctions on the Russians.
00:02:17.000And you recall that Putin didn't respond to that, and there was speculation that was because Flynn had reached out to Putin and told him, don't do it, things are going to change come January 20th.
00:02:26.000I said at the time, I don't see what is particularly wrong with that.
00:02:30.000It was already pretty clear he was going to be part of the administration.
00:02:33.000There's no real violation of law there, so what's the big deal?
00:02:37.000The fact, though, that he was allowed to plead on only the charge with regard to lying to the FBI suggests to me that he is about to flip on the Trump administration and that suspicion has now been confirmed.
00:02:47.000The reason I say that this is pretty clearly a plea deal that minimizes what Flynn did
00:02:52.000Is because there have been reports coming out of the Mueller probe that they were investigating Flynn for having made a deal with the Turkish government to kidnap a guy who's a Turkish dissenter from the United States and send him back to Turkey.
00:03:03.000They've been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Turkish government.
00:03:06.000In other words, it looks like there were more serious charges on the table, and in exchange for those charges going away, Flynn took this much lesser charge in order to get this thing over with.
00:03:14.000So according to ABC News, here's what they are saying.
00:03:16.000They are now saying that Flynn had resisted
00:03:40.000If you are just a normal person, you can't afford the lawyering up that it costs to fight people like Robert Mueller.
00:03:46.000And there was no one there to pick up the cost for Mike Flynn.
00:03:49.000So in order to defray those costs, he's apparently cutting a deal with the Mueller investigation.
00:03:54.000Brian Ross on ABC News Special Report is reporting that Flynn has promised, quote, full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump, quote, directed him to make contact
00:04:10.000This means that Mike Flynn is going to testify that Donald Trump told him to coordinate campaign activities with the Russians, and that's why Hillary Clinton lost the election.
00:04:18.000That is not clear by any stretch of the imagination.
00:04:21.000There is lots of coordination between the Hillary Clinton team, for example, and we know members of the Ukrainian government.
00:04:28.000That members of campaigns don't talk to foreign officials is just not true.
00:04:31.000So it's quite possible that Trump told Flynn, I want you to go talk to Putin, talk to him about what their priorities are, what our priorities are, if I become president of the United States.
00:04:41.000The only thing that would be illegal is, presumably, if there was actually a conspiracy, an exchange of information that would be designed to subvert the United States election, and there are actual conspiracy laws, then you'd have to see if they violate them legally, and that's a little bit
00:04:57.000In other words, even if collusion occurred, that might be grounds for the political crime of impeachment, that would require impeachment, but it's not grounds for any actual crime that has been committed.
00:05:51.000There's also the possibility, however, that the special counsel is charging Flynn on the lying to the FBI charge because what he's hoping is that now he's going to be able to go after other members of the Trump administration for the same thing.
00:06:02.000There will be a sort of domino effect that he's sort of fishing.
00:06:05.000That what he's doing here is he's going to nail Flynn on the lying to the FBI charge, get him to plead out on that, and then they're going to go back and talk to some other folks who have talked to the FBI, I think in the administration, that includes
00:06:16.000I think Kushner has talked to the FBI.
00:06:18.000I think there are several other members of the administration who have talked to the FBI.
00:06:21.000The possibility exists that they will try to have Flynn testify against those people and then try and get those people on charges of lying to the FBI and try and flip this upward, right?
00:06:29.000Create a domino effect and maybe one of those people flips on the president and finally spills the beans about the president.
00:07:32.000Unless we're just going to round up a bunch of people unjustly.
00:07:36.000And this is something that special counsels have done in the past.
00:07:38.000You recall that it was special counsel, I believe it was Patrick Fitzgerald, who went after Scooter Libby.
00:07:43.000Scooter Libby was working for the President of the United States.
00:07:46.000He was an American lawyer, former advisor to VP Dick Cheney.
00:07:50.000And you recall that he actually ended up in jail, and he was pardoned by President Trump, or his sentence was commuted, more specifically, by President Bush, because Scooter Libby had apparently fibbed to the FBI.
00:08:24.000about her identity after Joe Wilson, her husband, suggested that the Bush administration had lied about yellow cake from Niger being sold to the Iraqi regime.
00:08:34.000And the person who actually ended up doing it, I believe, was Richard Armitage.
00:08:40.000The person who ended up leaking it was not, in fact, Scooter Libby.
00:09:21.000The White House says that they have no comment on this at this point, which is the proper stance.
00:09:24.000In the middle of a legal proceeding, the last thing you want to do is start going out and mouthing off.
00:09:29.000Mike Flynn had made comments in 2016, it's gonna get played all over the news today, that if he did a tenth of what Hillary Clinton had done, he would be in jail today.
00:09:37.000There's a real possibility that that is true, by the way, that he really did not do much here, and that he could end up in jail anyway, just because this is the way the political prosecutions go.
00:09:47.000We're saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today.
00:10:01.000So, crooked Hillary Clinton, leave this race now!
00:10:07.000So I'm not saying it's a political prosecution.
00:11:02.000So he was charged with second degree murder.
00:11:04.000The jury also could have found for involuntary manslaughter that was on the table as well.
00:11:08.000It seems to me that second degree murder was too high a charge and that involuntary manslaughter seems like the situation that best fits the evidence.
00:11:14.000This may be a case, to give the best gloss on the jury, this may be a case where the jury was basically thrown off by the prosecutors
00:11:22.000Failing to press the charges properly.
00:11:24.000That's a possibility here, and I'll explain why in just a second.
00:11:29.000On July 1st, 2015, Kate Steinle was fatally struck in the back by a single bullet as she walked on Pier 14 with her father to view the San Francisco Bay.
00:11:36.000Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was a Mexican citizen illegally in the United States, and he fired the gun that killed Steinle.
00:11:41.000So first of all, for political reasons,
00:11:43.000It doesn't matter whether the guy was convicted or not.
00:11:45.000This guy should not have been in the United States.
00:11:47.000He had been deported, I believe, six times, five times before for seven separate crimes.
00:11:52.000If the man had been a citizen in the state of California, he probably would have already been in jail for life.
00:11:56.000Because there's a three strikes law in the state of California.
00:11:58.000Mostly it involves violent crime, not drug offenses.
00:12:01.000But the idea that he would have been out on the street
00:12:10.000He would not be out on the street if he were a citizen, so he actually had the special privilege of being deported, then recrossing the border, coming back, and then, you recall, he was picked up on a drug charge by the local authorities.
00:12:20.000They asked the local authorities to hold him so they could come get him, and because San Francisco is a sanctuary city, he was then released into the general population as well, where he got a hold of this gun and killed Kate Steinle.
00:12:34.000It's pretty clear to me that this was an involuntary manslaughter.
00:12:37.000I'll explain to you why in just a second.
00:12:38.000I'll give you all the legal breakdown, putting on my lawyer hat.
00:12:41.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
00:12:44.000So, according to the US Department of Justice,
00:12:47.000Over 34,000 carjackings happen every single year.
00:12:49.000Do you know how to protect yourself and your family?
00:12:51.000Do you know when it's actually legal to draw a gun?
00:12:53.000Well, the self-defense experts at the USCCA created a free video series to show you exactly what to do during a deadly carjacking, but it's only free for a limited time.
00:13:42.000What happened is that this piece of garbage illegal immigrant, and he's not a piece of garbage because he's an illegal immigrant, he's a piece of garbage who is an illegal immigrant.
00:13:51.000He was walking around on the pier and he has the gun.
00:13:55.000The defense says that he found the gun on the pier, okay?
00:13:59.000How many times have you been walking around and you just find a gun lying around?
00:14:01.000You're walking around and boom, look, there's a gun.
00:14:04.000Okay, it never happens, and the idea that this happens in San Francisco on a regular basis is insane.
00:14:09.000San Francisco has some of the tightest gun laws in the nation.
00:14:11.000So he says that he's walking around, he finds a gun, he picks it up, he goes, hey, a gun!
00:14:16.000He picks it up, and then magically the gun just goes off.
00:14:19.000It is clear from the evidence that the bullet hit the cement before it hit Steinle.
00:14:23.000So it wasn't like he picked up the gun, aimed it at Steinle, shot her in the back.
00:14:26.000Okay, he picked up the gun, he fired it,
00:14:29.000It bounced off the concrete, it hit Kate Stanley in the back, it killed her.
00:14:32.000And the defense was that he basically, that he's a moron.
00:14:37.000That basically he's walking around, hey look, a gun!
00:14:39.000He picks it up, it goes boom in his hand for no reason at all, it's just a pure accident, the bullet bounces, it skips off the concrete and hits Kate Stanley in the back and she dies.
00:14:47.000The problem with this particular theory is several-fold.
00:14:50.000One, the gun had been missing for four days from a federal agent's car.
00:14:53.000Somehow it just winds up in the hands of this illegal immigrant.
00:15:21.000According to the San Francisco Chronicle, defense lawyers said the shooting was an accident that happened when Garcia Zarate, who had a history of drug crimes but no record of violence, found the gun wrapped in a t-shirt or cloth under his seat on the pier just seconds before it discharged in his hands.
00:15:34.000When I see a bundle of cloth under my seat at a public pier, I reach down and I start investigating, and if I find a gun, I go, urgh, a gun!
00:15:42.000Matt Gonzalez of the Public Defender's Office said his client had never handled a gun.
00:16:21.000Okay, during the trial, jurors watched video from Garcia Cerati's four-hour police interrogation in which he offered varying statements about his actions on the pier.
00:16:28.000Number one, when someone constantly changes their story, that's a pretty good indicator they're not telling the truth.
00:16:33.000At one point, he said he had aimed at a sea animal.
00:16:36.000At another point, he said the gun had been under a rag that lay on the ground near the waterfront and that it fired when he stepped on it.
00:16:40.000Gonzales said it was clear in the video.
00:16:42.000By the way, guns don't fire when you step on them.
00:16:45.000There are people who are saying that it was a Sig Sauer, and this is a Sig Sauer with a quick trigger because it was basically set up for a federal agent who knows how to use it.
00:16:55.000We only had four pounds of trigger pressure.
00:16:56.000Okay, even if it only has four pounds of trigger pressure, you can't step on a gun and it fires.
00:17:09.000Unless the hammer was already cocked or something.
00:17:13.000Gonzales said it was clear in the video that he did not fully understand what the officers were asking through an officer's Spanish translation.
00:17:26.000Six people just gathered and decided that instead of throwing the gun in the bay to discard the gun, which is five feet away, they decided what would be better.
00:18:13.000Accidental discharges does not mean that you have not acted with criminal negligence.
00:18:17.000If you pick up a gun, and you point it anywhere near the vicinity of people, and your hand is anywhere near the trigger, that does not count as a pure accident.
00:18:27.000Okay, this is why you are taught, when you buy a gun, when you train with a gun, you are taught, never point the gun anywhere you are not willing to kill somebody.
00:18:34.000Never point the gun anywhere you're not willing to destroy.
00:18:37.000Never have your finger anywhere near the trigger if you don't mean to fire it.
00:18:39.000Okay, but the idea is that, again, this guy's a dunce, and he walks up, and he doesn't know what a gun is, it just looks like a fancy cheese cutter, and he picks it up, and then, boom, it goes off in his hand because he never even touched the trigger.
00:18:51.000Okay, this is, so, they say that this is the defense presenting a reasonable doubt case,
00:18:58.000They said he's a homeless illegal immigrant, unfamiliar with the gun, and that's why.
00:19:01.000Okay, so, I think that what happened here, if you're trying to make the best case for the jury, is that there was a prosecutorial overreach.
00:19:07.000So they pushed hard for a first degree murder verdict, or a second degree murder verdict, which suggests that you must have intent.
00:19:14.000They have to have intent to have killed.
00:19:16.000Involuntary manslaughter does not require intent.
00:19:18.000So the prosecution in this case said that he was playing like a game of Russian roulette in his head and just shot the lady.
00:19:44.000Involuntary manslaughter in California, the standard is without malice, without intent to kill, with reckless disregard for human life.
00:19:50.000So the difference between involuntary manslaughter and excusable accident is participation in either an unlawful act not amounting to a felony, so that would be picking up an illegal gun, or a lawful act involving a high degree of risk of death or great bodily injury.
00:20:02.000That would involve picking up a gun and pointing it anywhere in the vicinity of people.
00:20:05.000And in fact, there's a law firm out here in California that has a defense law firm that has a very good rundown on this law, and the exact example they use of involuntary manslaughter is a woman who's in a fight with her husband, brandishing a gun at her husband, the gun accidentally goes off and kills her husband.
00:20:18.000Right, that falls under involuntary manslaughter.
00:20:21.000Okay, Jeff Sessions has a statement on it.
00:20:22.000This was clearly involuntary manslaughter.
00:20:43.000Now, President Trump, when he says we need a wall, the reason we need a wall is because it's not enough to just repeatedly deport people.
00:20:48.000You actually have to have some way of preventing them from recrossing into the country because you have sanctuary cities, you have places where these people can hide.
00:20:56.000Trump should be making hay while the sun shines out of this because he is right.
00:21:00.000It's because of issues like the Kate Steinle issues I said last night on Fox News.
00:21:04.000Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, issued a statement, the feds may bring charges of their own.
00:21:08.000Jeff Sessions said, when jurisdictions choose to return criminal aliens to the streets, rather than turning them over to federal immigration authorities, they put the public safety at risk.
00:21:15.000San Francisco's decision to protect criminal aliens led to the preventable and heartbreaking death of Kate Steinle, while the state of California sought a murder charge for the man who caused Ms.
00:21:23.000Steinle's death, a man who would not have been on the streets of San Francisco if the city simply honored an ICE detainer.
00:21:28.000The people ultimately convicted him of felon in possession of a firearm.
00:21:31.000So, again, once you're a felon in possession of a firearm, if that firearm goes off and you kill somebody, it's pretty hard to see charging and convicting someone of felony possession of a firearm without also charging them with and convicting them of involuntary manslaughter in a case like this.
00:21:44.000The Department of Justice will continue to ensure that all jurisdictions place the safety and security of their communities above the convenience of criminal aliens.
00:21:50.000There should be blowback on sanctuary cities, and it shouldn't have to do anything with the verdict here.
00:21:55.000If the guy was convicted, there should still be blowback.
00:23:30.000You should only be forced to speak to an agent if you really want to, and Policy Genius will let you avoid speaking to insurance agents, which is a wonderful thing in and of itself.
00:23:37.000Policygenius.com, make sure that your family is taken care of.
00:23:40.000Okay, so, Mitch McConnell has now announced on the floor of the Senate that we are about to pass this tax reform bill.
00:23:46.000The tax reform bill has at least 50 votes, maybe 51, it depends on what Bob Corker decides, maybe they get 52, but bottom line is that it is a good shot that this is
00:23:59.000It is a good shot that the tax bill wins.
00:24:05.000It is unclear what exactly is in this thing now because they were futzing around with it as late as yesterday.
00:24:11.000Right now, as of last night, the Republicans were redrawing the tax bill to reduce the size of the tax cuts because there was a report yesterday that the deficits were too high.
00:24:18.000There are a lot of people today talking about deficits.
00:24:20.000Deficits, oh, the tax cut's going to create deficits.
00:24:22.000I am deeply concerned about deficits, but let's be clear about something.
00:24:26.000It does not create deficits for me to keep more of my own money.
00:24:29.000It creates deficits for you to spend money I did not give you.
00:24:33.000I hate this logic that is constantly used by the left, that if I'm paying 50% taxes, and you're taking in a million dollars from me, which is not accurate, but let's say I were paying 50% tax and you're taking a million dollars from me, and you were spending two million dollars, so we have a million dollar deficit,
00:24:52.000Well, if you reduce my taxes by 50%, so now I'm only paying $500,000, then you've increased the deficit by $500,000.
00:26:04.000The Laffer Curve, for those who don't know, I've explained it on the program before, Art Laffer famously had what he called the Laffer Curve.
00:26:10.000The Laffer Curve basically looks like this.
00:26:32.000Then, and here again you have zero, and here you have a hundred.
00:26:35.000Then what will happen is that as the tax rate goes up, you will see the government receipts go up, but there is a law of diminishing returns.
00:27:00.000So what the Laffer Curve also says is that there is a point, let's say that you are here on the Laffer Curve, let's say the tax rate is where this X is, that what you would be better off doing to increase government receipts is to actually lower the tax rate.
00:27:44.000In any case, the leading GOP senators are saying that Republicans redrew the tax bill last night to reduce the size of the tax cuts.
00:27:49.000John Cornyn said the move came after the Senate parliamentarian ruled against a complex trigger mechanism that would have automatically cut back the taxes if they didn't produce economic growth and higher than expected tax revenues.
00:27:59.000So what the Republicans were trying to do is they were trying to cut taxes in a significant way, and then they would have a trigger in the bill that said if the government revenues do not increase by a certain amount,
00:28:08.000Then we will ratchet back down the tax cuts.
00:28:26.000The Senate parliamentarian doesn't know better than you do how much revenue the government's going to take in.
00:28:32.000The Senate parliamentarian would have ruled that Obamacare was deficit neutral, which it clearly is not.
00:28:36.000So I don't buy any of this stuff, but this is good news for the Trump administration.
00:28:40.000They do need a big win in terms of policy.
00:28:42.000The tax cuts are a big win in terms of policy.
00:29:03.000Okay, so before I go any further here, there's some other news that I want to talk about.
00:29:07.000The possibility of a government shutdown, the battle between Jimmy Kimmel and Roy Moore, and we've got to get to the mailbag.
00:29:13.000So we're going to go about an hour and a half today on today's show.
00:29:16.000We're going to get to all of those things, but for that,
00:29:18.000You have to subscribe to the Daily Wire.
00:29:21.000So $9.99 gets you a subscription to Daily Wire.
00:29:23.000You get my show live, you get the Andrew Clavin show live, you get the Michael Molls show live, you get to be part of the mailbag in just a few minutes.
00:30:29.000And for that price, a cheaper price than the monthly, you also get this, the very finest in beverage vessels, reminding you each and every day that you're a constituent of The Ben Shapiro Show and The Daily Wire, the leftist here's hot or cold Tumblr, often imitated, never duplicated.
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00:30:56.000Alrighty, so here we are, and it looks like a government shutdown may be in the works.
00:31:01.000And this is a good government shutdown for President Trump.
00:31:02.000I said yesterday, I think that President Trump would win on a government shutdown issue with the Democrats, particularly after Steinle.
00:31:08.000He should be pushing for funding in the new government shutdown negotiations.
00:31:12.000He should basically be saying, I want funding for the wall in this bill, and if you don't give it to me, then I'm just not going to sign the funding bill.
00:31:20.000I'm not going to increase the debt ceiling.
00:31:21.000I'm not going to sign funding, and there'll be a shutdown.
00:31:24.000Because you guys are willing to obstruct so that we don't have any sort of physical barrier that would prevent people from entering the country, as in the Kate Stanley case.
00:31:49.000But Trump is not wrong when he says that a government shutdown sometimes benefits the president.
00:31:53.000That was the logic that was used for Obama when Cruz was involved in a government shutdown.
00:31:57.000Okay, so that's what's going on with the government shutdown.
00:31:59.000We'll bring you more on that if it actually materializes.
00:32:02.000Meanwhile, the battle continues over Roy Moore in Alabama.
00:32:06.000And I just want to show you the reactionary nature of American politics.
00:32:09.000As I have said to you, I believe that Roy Moore did the things he's alleged to have done.
00:32:13.000I think that because there's been no anywhere near convincing rebuttal of any of the testimony or evidence put forward by the accusers.
00:32:21.000Meanwhile, Hollywood is basically willing to ignore a lot of the evils in their own midst and of course they are very upset about Roy Moore because Roy Moore is a Republican.
00:32:29.000They were all defending Bill Clinton and they would again today if they had the choice.
00:32:32.000As far as I know, Jimmy Kimmel has not been commenting on Al Franken.
00:32:35.000If he has, then I miss it and I apologize, but I haven't seen that.
00:32:38.000Jimmy Kimmel deployed a guy down to Roy Moore's church in Alabama.
00:32:46.000And this guy went into a speech that Roy Moore was giving at the church and started berating him at the church in the middle of his speech.
00:32:55.000I can't remember the name of this fella because I don't watch Jimmy's show, but I believe that his name was, let's see, Rich Barbieri, who's better known as Jake Byrd.
00:33:04.000So here is a pretend Roy Moore superfan who's actually an employee of Jimmy Kimmel's.
00:33:50.000Okay, so he's removed, and then Roy Moore tweets out at Jimmy Kimmel and they get in a big tweet fight, right?
00:33:55.000And this is a fight that only helps Roy Moore and only helps Jimmy Kimmel and doesn't help anybody who is rational on these subjects and trying to figure out exactly how to vote or who is guilty or who is innocent.
00:34:04.000So the tweet fight goes something like this.
00:34:30.000And he fires, he says, despite DC and Hollywood elites' bigotry towards Southerners, Jimmy, we will save you a seat on the front pew.
00:34:38.000Okay, so he's just going in for more, and then Jimmy Kimmel responds, okay, Roy, but I'm leaving my daughters at home.
00:34:42.000P.S., wear that cute little leather vest.
00:34:44.000Okay, so the only people who are benefited by this sort of stuff are Jimmy Kimmel, who looks like he gets to virtue signal to his audience, and Roy Moore, who gets to look like he's virtue signaling to his audience because Hollywood is so bad and Hollywood is so terrible and all this nonsense.
00:34:56.000The reality is that everybody's already made up their mind on Roy Moore.
00:35:00.000All of the virtue signaling on the back of this seems to me a little bit much.
00:35:04.000I think that there is a complex moral calculus that is happening for people who are in Alabama.
00:35:09.000It's a very similar moral calculus to the one that was made during the 2016 election.
00:35:12.000I think some people of good heart are going to come down on one side.
00:35:14.000Some people of good heart are going to come down on the other side.
00:35:17.000I think that it is not the right moral decision to vote for Roy Moore in Alabama.
00:35:21.000The man is a credibly alleged child molester.
00:35:24.000But on the other hand, I think that to
00:35:27.000Do the kind of virtue signaling that Jimmy Kimmel is doing and that Roy Moore is doing off the back of Hollywood.
00:35:32.000All this does is exacerbate the reactionary political moment that we're already in.
00:35:38.000Okay, so I want to do some things I like and then some things I hate.
00:37:46.000So, as an Orthodox Jew, I really like that the United States is a Christian nation, because I think the closer that the United States is to its Christian roots, the closer they are to their biblical roots.
00:37:55.000And the closer they are to their biblical roots, at least in private values, the better off the country is in terms of social structure.
00:38:12.000But the President of the United States saying it obviously is attempting to make a culture statement.
00:38:16.000A lot of people on the left are maddened by this, but I don't think that most of the people in the center either care or oppose it.
00:38:21.000So here's President Trump overtly invoking Jesus during Christmas, which seems to me to make sense since I don't celebrate Christmas because it's about the Jesus.
00:38:48.000From the earliest days of our nation, Americans have known Christmas as a time for prayer and worship, for gratitude and goodwill, for peace and renewal.
00:38:59.000Melania and I are full of joy at the start of this very blessed season.
00:39:05.000We're thrilled to think of the people across the nation and all across the continent whose spirits are lifted by the miracle of Christmas.
00:39:15.000For Christians, this is a holy season.
00:39:18.000The celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
00:39:30.000Am I glad that the President of the United States is even paying lip service to the Christian nature of the country and the Christian nature of Christmas itself?
00:39:38.000Yes, I'm very glad that he's doing it.
00:39:39.000So good for President Trump for doing that.
00:40:06.000The Navajo windtalkers instead, they spoke Navajo.
00:40:09.000And so they were used as basically message purveyors
00:40:13.000By the way, folks, when you see that I do something wrong on the show, I don't mean like politically wrong, because I'm never politically wrong, but
00:40:32.000But when I'm factually incorrect, please let me know, because I'm more than happy to make the correction, because I don't want to give bad information.
00:40:45.000But Theresa May was, as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, Theresa May was not opposed to Brexit, which is one of the reasons why she took the place of David Cameron when David Cameron stepped down.
00:40:56.000Let's just go directly to the mailbag, because that's an... I really hate corrections, and I had to do them, so... We're just going to the mailbag now.
00:42:20.000And therefore, you know, that is not worth killing.
00:42:23.000I think that it's difficult to make the case it's not human life, frankly.
00:42:26.000Gregory says, Dear Ben, I hear the argument from you that private businesses should have the right to not serve whomever they please, and that the free market would discourage the use of this policy to discriminate because people don't like racism and such.
00:42:36.000Does this position still hold in the time period directly after the abolition of slavery, when there is very little free market provision from discrimination?
00:42:42.000If yes, does this not prolong segregation?
00:42:45.000The answer is that the free markets of the North were significantly better at restricting the discrimination than the very restrictive markets of the South.
00:42:54.000Jim Crow laws came in, and they were specifically designed to prevent free market development of anti-discrimination.
00:43:00.000So I'm not saying that everybody is grand and everybody is great.
00:43:03.000I am saying that everybody does like money, and if they see money to be made, then they are going to appeal to populations that were otherwise marginalized.
00:43:11.000So that doesn't mean that in every situation there won't be private discrimination.
00:43:16.000You know, in the aftermath of slavery, of course there was going to be lots of private discrimination.
00:43:19.000But the federal government, because of that, the federal government wasn't even going to put anti-discrimination law into policy in the first place at that point.
00:43:25.000So the best you could do is free markets.
00:43:27.000Usually it's the government used the other way.
00:43:29.000Usually it's the government preventing anti-discrimination by actually forcing discrimination.
00:43:33.000Well, number one, I think that we have to actually do something that we all, as religious people, find kind of unpalatable and not really nice.
00:43:37.000Maimonides, when he talks about charity, says that the highest form of charity is giving anonymously.
00:43:52.000And I, well he says the highest form is giving somebody a job.
00:43:55.000The second highest form is giving anonymously.
00:43:56.000I think that that is right because you don't want to glorify yourself for doing something that you are obligated to do, right?
00:44:14.000Red states give lots more charity than blue states per capita.
00:44:17.000Religious people give lots more charity than non-religious people.
00:44:20.000So if you want to talk about how much we care about people, why don't you look to the people who are voluntarily signing checks as opposed to doing it at the point of a gun.
00:44:39.000I limit her use of TV pretty significantly in terms of what she is allowed to watch.
00:44:43.000And I plan on doing the same with computers.
00:44:45.000I would want her to use computers in order to gather information, but smartphones, iPads, these have become distraction tools as opposed to learning tools, and so I think that I would much rather she read a book than be caught up in the social media on the internet.
00:44:59.000Like, for example, I wouldn't want my daughter...
00:45:01.000To have a Facebook account until she was in her teens.
00:45:04.000Like, I just don't think children should have that stuff, or a Twitter account.
00:45:12.000I think I explained this a few days ago on the show, didn't I?
00:45:15.000I did a whole segment on net neutrality, I thought, where I discussed at length the idea that ISPs... Basically, net neutrality is the suggestion.
00:45:22.000It was only put into place in the last couple of years of the Obama administration.
00:45:25.000And before that, the internet was working just fine.
00:45:28.000Net neutrality is basically the suggestion that internet service providers have to supply traffic, supply all use of traffic the same price.
00:45:36.000So Netflix, which eats up an enormous amount of bandwidth, has to be charged the same as some schmo in his basement who is just loading up his blog.
00:45:44.000And it's also, net neutrality also says that all pages have to be loaded at the same speed.
00:45:49.000Well, the problem with that, of course, is that it benefits big corporations like Netflix over the little guy.
00:45:54.000The reality is that if you're taking up a huge share of the bandwidth, then there might be companies that say, you know, we will provide you a faster access, but you have to pay more money.
00:46:05.000It's not incumbent on internet service providers to be forced to be treated like public utilities.
00:46:10.000The way to think of it is that internet service providers are like the pipes, and the content of the internet is like water.
00:46:18.000Everybody should be able to turn on the tap at the same time and get the water.
00:46:20.000Or that the pipe company should be able to charge you what they want or charge the water company what it wants for the water moving through the pipes.
00:46:31.000Is because you can have multiple pipes, right?
00:46:33.000There are multiple internet service providers.
00:46:35.000One of the reasons that net neutrality has become such an issue is because of special deals with local governments by a lot of the internet service providers, so they're the only providers in their region.
00:46:43.000If there were open competition, you would actually see competition.
00:46:46.000Like for people, for example, who only use email but don't watch streaming video, right?
00:46:49.000Like older people who only want to watch TV but don't actually want to use Netflix or Hulu.
00:46:54.000They should be able to get the internet cheaper than people who want to be able to get Netflix and Hulu.
00:46:58.000Or if you only want to get Netflix and Hulu and you don't use email, you just use text messages, you should be able to have these options.
00:47:04.000There's nothing wrong with any of this.
00:47:06.000This is why when people say it's a corporate giveaway to get rid of net neutrality, there are major corporations like Google and Netflix who basically want to prevent smaller companies from being able to take advantage of differential pricing on ISPs to compete with them.
00:47:18.000So it depends which corporations you're talking about.
00:47:48.000So, I don't, as I've said before, I think people who are trying to escape horrible situations to come to a better life, I don't blame somebody for trying to jump the border.
00:47:58.000I've said this many times and I've been very clear about this and pretty consistent on it.
00:48:01.000If I were living in Mexico, I'd also try to jump the border because America's an amazing place.
00:48:04.000If I had no other choice, but that does not mean that the United States has an obligation to take those people in.
00:48:14.000So it's not up to South Korea to say, we must take in everyone from North Korea.
00:48:19.000South Korea can say, no, we're going to put that person in some sort of temporary internment camp until we can figure out where they ought to immigrate to, for example.
00:48:27.000But the idea that everyone who is fleeing human rights violations has therefore a claim on your country is not true.
00:48:36.000Also, I would say that the Mexican government is not equivalent to the North Korean government anyway.
00:48:40.000There are lots of problems in Mexico, including drug cartels.
00:49:05.000One of the ways, God loves us, and so he wants us to feel fulfilled.
00:49:07.000The way that people feel fulfilled is not by being given things, and it's not even if, you know, what somebody's gonna do.
00:49:13.000It's being given a choice, and then acting in accordance with that free will.
00:49:16.000Free will is what makes life meaningful.
00:49:18.000So, what I would ask your friend is how he would define the existence of free will without God or without a supernatural.
00:49:24.000If you're a scientific materialist, there's no evidence whatsoever that free will exists.
00:49:27.000Sean says, have you thought about your New Year's resolution yet?
00:49:30.000Well, actually, the truth is that Jews do our New Year's resolutions around Rosh Hashanah.
00:49:34.000During the Jewish New Year, that's why we do it in actual atonement.
00:49:36.000I would say the Jewish New Year is a lot more meaningful than the secular New Year where we all get drunk and then pretend we're going to lose weight and then don't.
00:49:44.000Last week you said DC movies should have 20% added to their critical scores, Marvel movies should have 20% taken away.
00:49:49.000Why do you think DC movies should receive affirmative action?
00:49:51.000Shouldn't they have to stand on their own mediocrity?
00:49:53.000I'm not saying that Rotten Tomatoes has to do that.
00:49:54.000I'm saying if you want an accurate portrayal of how DC movies are treated, then you should add, like in your own mind, you should add 20% to the Rotten Tomatoes score because everything they say is 30 for a DC movie's a 50, and everything they say is a 90 for a Marvel movie's a 70.
00:50:18.000So one of the reasons that Jews reject
00:50:37.000Jesus is because we don't believe the authenticity of the Gospels.
00:50:40.000Meaning that, if we actually believe the authentic- So, C.S.
00:50:43.000Lewis' proof relies on you believing the historicity of the Gospels.
00:50:46.000That everything the Gospels said was true, and therefore, either Jesus was crazy, or Jesus was evil, or Jesus was telling the truth, right?
00:50:54.000Well, I don't think that, like, as a Jew, like, the Jewish perspective on Jesus is that that's not actually the case, right?
00:50:59.000The Jewish perspective on Jesus is that the people who wrote the Gospels were writing the Gospels decades after Jesus' death, and that Jesus was actually pretty much a normal Orthodox Jew who tried to lead a rebellion against the Romans and was killed for his trouble.
00:51:09.000That's, that he was attempting to lead a secular messianic movement, because that's, and when I say secular, I mean a Jewish messianic movement, because the Jewish Messiah has no, there's no notion of divinity entering the world through the Jewish Messiah.
00:51:25.000I have desperately been trying to pay him for word for a couple of years now.
00:51:30.000Again, one of the great moments of my career will be firing Michael Mowles.
00:51:38.000Well, they should be used as feedback, but they shouldn't be used as guidance.
00:51:42.000So, what I mean by that is it's good to know what people like and what people don't, because that also allows you to tailor your message on what is good policy.
00:51:49.000But I don't think that you should shift your policy preferences based on public opinion.
00:51:53.000I don't think that it should be like, well, I'm for tax cuts, but now that the public hates it, I'm for tax increases.
00:52:13.000So I believe that there have been several, you know, kind of key periods of my life.
00:52:17.000I would say that one of those key periods was when I was growing up and I went to middle school, I went to public school, and I was viciously bullied there, and then I was viciously bullied in high school.
00:52:25.000I think it's not a good thing that it happened, but it's a character-building exercise.
00:52:28.000You have to grow a thick skin, and you have to learn that the world is not your friend, and that you're going to have to make your own way.
00:52:34.000And so I think that was a deeply upsetting but valuable experience to me.
00:52:39.000Harvard Law School is a great place to learn how to argue and learn how to think.
00:52:43.000I think that the last year and a half has been a really tremendous character building experience and has changed my thought process.
00:52:50.000And somebody wrote a column criticizing me, and talking about a column I wrote in 2007 about dissenters from the Iraq war.
00:52:57.000There were a bunch of Democrats at the time, like Dick Durbin, who were talking about how they were glad that America was basically losing the war in Iraq.
00:53:02.000And I said this was traitorous, essentially, and in a column I even said that we should revivify the Alien Sedition Act, not the Alien Sedition Act, the Espionage Act from 1917 under Woodrow Wilson.
00:53:13.000I feel—and then Barack Obama became president, and you become the dissent.
00:53:17.000And then you realize, well, you're going to have to have a certain standard.
00:53:20.000It's easy to be the people in power, and it's hard to be the people out of power.
00:53:23.000And then, during this election cycle, the question was, were you going to maintain that standard now that you had the possibility of power again?
00:53:29.000And I think the answer is that if you're not learning throughout your life and changing how you feel based on new evidence, not based on new feelings, but based on new evidence, then you're not doing the right job.
00:53:39.000I wish I hadn't written that 2007 column because I don't think that's right.
00:53:42.000I don't think that the Espionage Act should be revivified against people, even people who say egregious things about war and say things that harm the war effort and I think put the troops in a bad position.
00:53:52.000Free speech is valuable because you can end up on the wrong side of it.
00:53:55.000So there are certain areas in life where I've changed my position because new evidence has been presented to me that I had not experienced before.
00:54:02.000The Obama administration changed my way of thought.
00:54:04.000The Bush administration changed my way of thought.
00:54:05.000The Trump administration changes my way of thought.
00:54:08.000If you're not changing your way of thought based on new evidence, then you've stopped thinking and you've become rigid and sort of locked in.
00:55:08.000So all the stuff aboard the Death Star is fantastic.
00:55:11.000If that had been the entirety of Return of the Jedi, then Return of the Jedi would be up there.
00:55:16.000It comes in fourth for me, so those are my top four.
00:55:17.000Well, there are so many pieces that are great for people who are just starting out with classical music.
00:55:33.000A lot of them are cliched, so you want to actually listen to some stuff that... I'd have to know sort of what music you like, believe it or not, in sort of the pop arena, to know what music you would like in classical, but you'd have to start, anybody would have to start with some Bach, start with Toccata and Fugue, which is very user-friendly.
00:55:49.000When I was younger, I really liked Dvorak's New World Symphony, which is really exciting and fun to listen to.
00:55:55.000Mozart's The Overture for Don Giovanni, and the last number for Don Giovanni, the last aria in Don Giovanni, or second-to-last aria in Don Giovanni, where Don Giovanni is dragged to hell.
00:57:18.000And you should only be able to take money out of your account that already exists.
00:57:21.000So all of your costs should be cash in hand, cash out of pocket.
00:57:24.000That seems to me a very good way of preventing yourself from running into serious debt, which is where people really get into trouble.
00:57:29.000Also, what I say is that recognize the stuff that's going to bankrupt you and the stuff that's not going to bankrupt you.
00:57:33.000It's not going to bankrupt you to go to a movie once a week.
00:57:35.000It will bankrupt you to get an expensive car.
00:57:37.000So, there's sort of these big purchases that people spend a lot of money on that are worthless.
00:57:41.000You're better off living a quote-unquote rich lifestyle by going to a movie once a week, which makes you feel rich and makes you feel involved in the world, as opposed to getting a nice car, which honestly is separated from like a mediocre car by...
00:58:22.000You're going to get arrested immediately.
00:58:23.000Plus, because you're going to get a ticket every two seconds because the cops are looking for those cars.
00:58:27.000Kevin says, Some time ago, a close family friend switched from being an obstetrician working at a hospital to being an obstetrician working for Planned Parenthood.
00:58:37.000He and his family were always pro-choice, but now he is an active participant in legalized murder.
00:59:05.000I mean, if somebody is committing what you believe to be a moral atrocity on a regular basis, it's very difficult to... I was talking with a friend about this last night, and one of the things that I think is actually bad and wrong is that we, in our personal lives, will take people who we know are garbage people, and we'll say, oh, he's a nice guy.
00:59:24.000I'm not sure she'd be treated with kid gloves.
00:59:26.000Tim says, finally, why do ex-husbands still have to take care of ex-wives in a divorce?
00:59:30.000I understand the reasoning behind it back before women had rights and were able to work, but today they have rights and want even more, and they are more than capable of finding jobs to support themselves without a man.
00:59:38.000So again, why do we still have a judicial system that favors women now?
00:59:41.000Why would I lose my house that I pay for and she gets half of my assets on top of it if I didn't break the marriage agreement?
00:59:47.000This seems to me a perfectly fair question on the back of feminists.
00:59:50.000It seems to me child support is entirely appropriate.
00:59:53.000But in a world in which men and women are equally capable of holding jobs, in a world in which women who are single, straight out of college, not married, no kids, are actually making more than men in most of America's major cities, I think that it may be a time to look back at how we arrange these things.
01:00:09.000There are situations, by the way, in which women are paying support to men.
01:00:12.000They're paying spousal support to men, but that's rare.
01:00:14.000There is a bias in our judicial system against men with regard to parenting as well as marital law.
01:00:19.000Okay, so this brings us to the end of today's program.
01:00:22.000Just news-breaking fast and furious this week.
01:00:26.000We'll be back here on Monday, and by that point, I can only expect that the aliens will have arrived, given the quick-moving news cycle in which we are now taking part.
01:00:34.000But try not to ruin things while I'm gone.