Well, the media think Trump is on his way out, but is he? Trump takes to Twitter to fight back, the Republicans finally pass a tax bill, the President of the United States sounds off on Roy Moore, and we ll go through all of the biblical allusions to taxes. Yes, really. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and I m going to give you an intellectually honest look at whether President Trump is really in trouble over this whole Mike Flynn indictment thing. What does the Flynn indictment actually mean, and what does it mean for the rest of the Mueller investigation? Plus, I ll talk about the Supreme Court case that s going to be discussed tomorrow, the Tax Bill, and much, much more! Ben Shapiro is a writer and host of the podcast and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, CBS, and other media outlets. He is also the author of several books, including The Devil Next Door and The Dark Side Of . and has been featured on ABC s Good Morning America, CBS Radio s Morning Show, NBC s Meet the Press, and NBC s Nightly News. His new book Other Words For Smoke is out now. You can find Ben Shapiro on all of these things on Amazon, Podchaser. and many other good reads at The Huffington Post, and if you search for him online, you'll find him on Apple Podcasts, too. If you like what you like, listen to his work, subscribe to his podcast, he's podcast, if you're looking for a good time. Subscribe to his excellent work, be sure to check out his podcast on social media about politics and other things going on in general election related to politics and pop culture, and his podcast recommendations, he'll be listening to him on The FiveThirtyEight, and he's also on The Six Sigma, The Sixix podcast, and more. . Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, Ben Shapiro s on his podcast is a must-listen to The Six Figures podcast. Also check out our new podcast on the Four Corners Podcast. The Six Figure Man Podcast on the Six Figures Podcast on his new show on Six Figures of the Week, The Seven Figures Podcast, The Five Cameo Podcast, and The Five Figured Out Podcast on this episode of The Five Figure Mythology, The Real Reel Podcast on Six Sigma.
00:00:21.000So much coming up and I'm going to give you an intellectually honest look at whether President Trump is really in trouble over this whole Mike Flynn indictment thing.
00:00:29.000What the Mike Flynn indictment thing actually means.
00:00:31.000I don't think it means nearly as much as the media are making it out to mean.
00:00:35.000I think the media are way out in front of what the news is actually showing and in fact
00:00:40.000It seems to me that the Flynn indictment, in some ways, actually shows that the Mueller investigation is not going to end with anything except for a political prosecution of the President of the United States by Democrats.
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00:02:18.000Okay, so we start, of course, with the big news that broke on Friday, that Mike Flynn had pled guilty to lying to the FBI.
00:02:25.000The indictment showed that that was really all that was there, and I had speculated two possibilities.
00:02:29.000Possibility number one is that he pled to lesser charges in order so the FBI could get him to flip on Trump.
00:02:34.000Possibility number two is that this is basically all the FBI had.
00:02:37.000And now the FBI is just going to charge a bunch of people for lying to the FBI in the absence of any crime.
00:02:42.000Remember, what Mike Flynn, the former National Security Advisor, was charged with was lying to the FBI about him making phone calls to the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, on December 22nd.
00:02:52.000What exactly did he say in those phone calls that was so all fired terrible?
00:02:56.000Apparently, he called up and he said, President Obama, on his way out, is attempting to create these new sanctions.
00:03:02.000He wants to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton lost because we cheated in the election.
00:03:35.000It has not convicted a person, not one.
00:03:38.000So the idea that suddenly it's going to be applied for the Trump administration is absurd.
00:03:41.000You've seen many Democrats who have applied their own foreign policy while Republicans were in office, while other Democrats were in office, for that matter.
00:03:48.000Jimmy Carter basically ran North Korean foreign policy while Bill Clinton was in office.
00:03:52.000Teddy Kennedy tried to go over to the USSR and then make a deal with the USSR so that they would help affect the 1984 election cycle so that he could get in.
00:04:00.000But Barack Obama was conducting calls with
00:04:03.000Other members of foreign governments long before he took office in 2009.
00:04:07.000All this stuff has been happening routinely, so the idea that Mike Flynn did anything deeply wrong by contacting the Russian ambassador is absurd.
00:04:13.000Also, apparently, he asked the Russian ambassador to help stymie a UN resolution that Barack Obama was trying to push in his final days to slap Israel over so-called settlements.
00:04:22.000And so Kislyak was called by Flynn, presumably at the behest of Jared Kushner, and Kushner said, if you could back off that, that would be nice.
00:04:29.000Again, I don't see anything wrong with any of this.
00:04:31.000I really don't see anything terrible about this, but he did lie to the FBI.
00:04:34.000So now what it looks like is that Robert Mueller is putting together a bunch of charges based on lied to the FBI.
00:04:39.000Well, if this turns out to be a bunch of people who lied to the FBI about non-criminal activity, as I said last week, this sounds a lot like Scooter Libby.
00:04:46.000Scooter Libby, if you recall, was an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney during the W administration, and there was a story going around that someone in the White House had leaked
00:04:54.000The personal information of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, in order to get revenge on her husband, Joe Wilson, because Joe Wilson had written a long op-ed in the Washington Post about how the Bush administration had been wrong about WMD in Iraq.
00:05:05.000It turned out that it was Richard Armitage over at the State Department who had leaked Valerie Plame's name, but Scooter Libby sort of either got a conversation wrong or lied about a conversation to the FBI.
00:05:14.000He was prosecuted, he was put in jail, and Bush commuted his sentence.
00:05:19.000Scooter Libby didn't actually commit any crime other than lying to the FBI.
00:05:23.000Lying to the FBI is a crime, but if there's no underlying crime, it's not Watergate.
00:05:27.000Watergate was a bunch of lies about an actual crime.
00:05:29.000A break-in at the Watergate Hotel that was designed to put bugs in the Democratic National Headquarters.
00:05:35.000Okay, nothing like that has happened here.
00:05:36.000There's no evidence of any actual crime by anyone in the Trump administration with regard to collusion, with regard to working with the Russian government, no charges of serious crime.
00:05:44.000And all the rumors that Mike Flynn was going to be charged with corrupt ties to Turkey or to Russia, none of that materialized.
00:05:50.000Andy McCarthy over at National Review, he has a really fascinating piece in which he discusses at length the idea that
00:05:57.000There'd be some sort of deal cut where Flynn only gets prosecuted with the smallest possible crimes and he's let go on the bigger ones in order to cut a deal with them.
00:06:03.000He says that's not the way it works with prosecutors.
00:06:06.000Andy McCarthy, former federal prosecutor, he says what you do is you actually prosecute the biggest crimes and then you say in the plea agreement that he's going to get off on lesser years for bigger crimes unless he works with us.
00:06:18.000Because the problem is once you file charges, the charges are filed.
00:06:21.000Right, so if all they're filing charges on are the lesser charges, that's not much of a threat to Mike Flynn.
00:06:26.000So, all this talk about how, inevitably, it must be that Mueller has something really terrible on Flynn, and now Flynn is gonna say something really terrible about Trump, not a lot of evidence to suggest that in any case.
00:06:37.000So, President Trump responds over the weekend.
00:06:40.000You know, the President of the United States really should keep his mouth shut on this stuff, or he should send out his lawyers to say something, but the President always feels the need to sound off himself, and in doing so, he gets himself in a little bit of hot water.
00:06:50.000Here is President Trump defending Mike Flynn.
00:09:54.000I think we see this in the indictments, the four indictments and pleas that have just taken place and some of the comments that are being made.
00:10:04.000I see it in the hyper-phonetic attitude of the White House, the comments every day, the continual tweets.
00:10:12.000And I see it, most importantly, in what happened with the firing of Director Comey.
00:10:21.000And it is my belief that that is directly because he did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation.
00:10:29.000Okay, the problem here is that there is no clear-cut obstruction of justice, even if he fired Comey.
00:10:35.000He fired Comey because he wanted Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
00:10:39.000There's no clear-cut investigation, obstruction of justice, because the president does have the power to fire the FBI director for any reason he sees fit.
00:10:46.000I've actually looked at the statutes, and I'm going to go through the statutes right now with you on obstruction of justice, as to whether obstruction of justice actually took place.
00:10:54.000Not clear legally that obstruction of justice has taken place.
00:10:57.000By the way, the idea that Trump shut down the investigation is obviously untrue.
00:11:00.000I mean, the special counsel has gone forward.
00:11:01.000Trump has the power to fire the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller.
00:11:04.000He has not, in fact, done any of that.
00:11:06.000So before I get to whether this is obstruction of justice, even if the Democrats' worst suspicions are confirmed, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Saucy.
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00:14:21.000Does that mean that it's smart for the President of the United States to go out there and start saying that he knew that Flynn lied to the FBI and then he fired the FBI director?
00:14:29.000No, that is not smart of the President of the United States.
00:14:31.000It gets him in all sorts of hot water, and that's why the President's lawyer came forward and said, I wrote that tweet, it wasn't Trump.
00:14:36.000The idea being that it doesn't establish Trump's knowledge that Flynn lied to the FBI if the lawyer wrote the tweet.
00:14:42.000Now, what's interesting is when you watch the conflation of two separate narratives from the Democrats.
00:14:46.000Dianne Feinstein, I believe, is a lawyer, so she knows enough to know that you can't make charges of collusion without evidence, or you shouldn't, and that the Mike Flynn charges don't show that there is actual cheating in the election between Russia and the Trump
00:15:02.000Joy Behar, however, is a moron, and so she doesn't know that.
00:15:04.000So Joy Behar over at The View, she completely misconstrues the report from Mike Flynn, and you'll hear the crowd cheer as they think they finally got Trump.
00:15:12.000ABC News Brian Ross is reporting Michael Flynn promised full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians!
00:16:53.000This FBI agent, the story here is that there was an FBI agent who had texted some nasty things about Trump and Robert Mueller fired him.
00:16:59.000The question is how Robert Mueller found out about it.
00:17:02.000So if Robert Mueller found out about it and fired him, then Robert Mueller is not biased, right?
00:17:07.000That would be evidence that Robert Mueller is trying to do the right thing.
00:17:09.000If he found out about it because the media reported on it and then he fired him, then it might be that the Mueller investigation is inherently biased.
00:17:15.000I don't think Mueller is necessarily biased against Trump.
00:17:18.000I think that this is what special prosecutors do.
00:17:20.000They dig and they dig and they dig and they dig until they find a crime.
00:17:23.000And if they can't find a crime, then they get a bunch of people in there to talk to the FBI, and then they use that to create crimes.
00:17:28.000And I'm not saying that Mike Flynn was in trap.
00:17:30.000Mike Flynn is an intelligent guy, should have been there with a lawyer.
00:18:12.000Then he went directly after James Comey.
00:18:14.000So Comey, why Comey is still in the news is really beyond me.
00:18:18.000I guess just because Comey, the suggestion is that he obstructed justice by firing Comey.
00:18:23.000But Trump says, I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
00:18:25.000Just more fake news covering another Comey lie.
00:18:28.000So, Comey is the one who testified to that.
00:18:30.000Trump is now saying that he never told Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
00:18:34.000The evidence on Trump's side on this is that Comey didn't actually stop investigating Flynn, and even after Comey was fired, the investigation into Flynn obviously didn't stop.
00:18:41.000So, it's possible that Trump said, I wish that you would see your way clear to letting Flynn go.
00:19:59.000Particularly because of this retracted report from Brian Ross.
00:20:02.000So let's start with the actual Brian Ross report.
00:20:03.000So Brian Ross originally reported this about Mike Flynn and President Trump.
00:20:10.000He's prepared to testify, we are told by a confidant, against President Trump, against members of the Trump family, and others in the White House.
00:20:17.000He's prepared to testify that President Trump, as a candidate, Donald Trump, ordered him, directed him, to make contact with the Russians, which contradicts all that Donald Trump has said at this point.
00:20:27.000As well, we're told that Flynn made the decision to cooperate only in the last 24 hours, that he is distraught about the decision, but feels he's doing the right thing for his country, that he was facing huge legal bills of more than a million dollars,
00:20:40.000And that he said that finally he had to go ahead and do this for that reason.
00:20:44.000He expects to put his house on the market.
00:20:46.000He is facing serious financial problems.
00:20:48.000Okay, so Ross has been in trouble a few other times for getting the story completely wrong.
00:20:52.000Here he got the story completely wrong.
00:20:53.000It turns out that Flynn had not, was not going to testify that candidate Trump told him to contact the Russians, but that President-elect Trump had told him to contact the Russians.
00:21:03.000President-elect Trump telling him to contact the Russians is not a big deal.
00:21:06.000It doesn't go to the question of whether the Trump campaign was working with the Russians in the first place.
00:21:10.000So Brian Ross is forced to retract this.
00:21:12.000Here he is retracting this just over the weekend.
00:21:15.000He was then suspended for a month for getting this report wrong.
00:21:18.000And David, a clarification tonight on something one of Flynn's confidants told us and we reported earlier today.
00:21:23.000He said the President had asked Flynn to contact Russia during the campaign.
00:21:26.000He's now clarifying that, saying, according to Flynn, candidate Trump asked him during the campaign to find ways to repair relations with Russia and other hotspots.
00:21:34.000And then after the election, the President-elect told him to contact Russia on issues including working together to fight ISIS.
00:22:04.000In part, I think justifiably, in part he's making things worse for himself.
00:22:08.000When he lashes out this way, it makes him look like he has something to hide, even though he doesn't.
00:22:11.000I've said from the very beginning, from literally the outside of this, that when he fired Comey, it seems to me that the best possible explanation for what Trump does is incompetence, not malice.
00:22:20.000That usually it's about President Trump being angry at something that's going on, firing somebody, not about him just deciding that he wants to cover up some sort of nefarious crime.
00:22:29.000I'll get to all that in just a second.
00:22:30.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at USCCA.
00:22:34.000So, gun lovers, I have a huge announcement for you.
00:23:46.000Again, I'm not sure it's worth the president getting his hands dirty because when the president does this, it gives off an air of desperation that I don't think is actually warranted here.
00:23:53.000He says, people who lost money when stock market went down 350 points based on the false and dishonest reporting of Brian Ross of ABC News, he has been suspended, should consider hiring a lawyer and suing ABC for the damages this bad reporting has caused.
00:24:07.000I don't really think he wants to go here.
00:24:09.000The fact is the President of the United States has momentarily tanked various stocks over his presidency by naming companies and bashing them.
00:24:16.000If they can sue over Trump doing that, then, you know, they can also sue over Brian Ross, I suppose.
00:24:21.000Trump continues along these lines, and he says,
00:24:25.000Trump goes after the media, he goes after Brian Ross.
00:24:39.000Many people in our country are asking what the Justice Department, justice in scare quotes, is going to do about the fact that totally crooked Hillary, after receiving a subpoena from the United States Congress, deleted an acid wash 33,000 emails.
00:25:20.000Mike Flynn might have lied to the FBI, but it was about an underlying crime that doesn't exist.
00:25:24.000And then maybe down the road, when all that comes out is that it's a bunch of lied-to-the-FBI charges with no underlying crime, he can always do the Scooter Libby, just commute everybody sentence.
00:25:34.000To me, that seems like the best possible solution.
00:25:35.000But what's happening here is I think Trump is getting so upset about this that now he's thinking about firing Robert Mueller, the special counsel.
00:25:41.000Once you fire the special counsel, then all hell breaks loose because people are going to assume, rightly or wrongly, that you really do have something to hide.
00:25:48.000So whoever is around President Trump should be encouraging him today not to fire Mueller, but to be encouraging
00:25:53.000Mike Flynn that he's probably never going to serve a day in jail for lying to the FBI about something for which there's no underlying crime.
00:25:58.000Chris Ruddy, who's a friend to President Trump, says that Mueller is an existential threat to the Trump presidency at this point.
00:26:04.000That's true in the sense that the more of this builds up, the more Democrats might try to impeach him.
00:26:19.000Here's Chris Ruddy, though, saying that Trump is feeling really threatened.
00:26:22.000You know, at the end of the day, my view is that Robert Mueller poses an existential threat to the Trump presidency.
00:26:29.000He's gotten four major, uh, two convictions, two plea agreements, lightning speed.
00:26:35.000Okay, I don't think that he poses an existential threat to the Trump presidency, unless you think that Trump actually has something to hide.
00:26:40.000If Trump does have something to hide, then it was Trump that posed an existential threat to the Trump presidency, not Mueller.
00:26:45.000That said, this does not look like this is an apolitical investigation by any stretch of the imagination.
00:26:51.000It looks like an investigation designed to elicit charges of lie to the FBI that is not designed to elicit actual underlying crimes.
00:26:58.000We were told this investigation was all about collusion with the Russians.
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00:28:56.000President Trump has endorsed Roy Moore.
00:28:58.000I'm going to save that for things that I hate, but first I want to get to tax reform passing.
00:29:02.000So all of this Flynn news has swamped what is the biggest accomplishment so far of the Trump presidency outside of the Gorsuch pick for the Supreme Court, and that is the passage of tax reform in the Senate.
00:29:12.000I've discussed sort of the merits of the tax
00:29:17.000I think there's a lot that is good to it.
00:29:18.000The Democrats are suggesting that it is just the worst thing ever.
00:29:21.000Patton Oswalt, the insufferable comedian who was also the voice of the rat, Remy, in Ratatouille, he tweeted out, Does it matter now if Trump is impeached?
00:30:08.000Until then, the idea that the government could force you to buy an entirely optional product with no externalities on anyone else, this is a brand new concept.
00:30:15.000And that fundamentally changed things.
00:30:37.000It was done with handwritten notes in the margins.
00:30:41.000By the way, that's not as rare as it seems.
00:30:42.000There have been a bunch of Congress people who have done that before.
00:30:45.000The Dodd-Frank bill had handwritten notes in the margins.
00:30:47.000All of that said, it was rushed through without proper evaluation or debate.
00:30:52.000That was done because senators didn't want blowback, but
00:30:56.000It's a pretty typical Republican bill.
00:30:57.000It's not like there's anything groundbreaking here.
00:31:00.000The biggest problem with the bill is that it doesn't cut expenditures, which is really what I wish Republicans would focus on.
00:31:07.000Right now, Republicans inflate the deficit by cutting taxes.
00:31:11.000Even though the tax revenues in the long run grow, it may not make up for the tax revenues that are lost in the short run, meaning the government takes in less money.
00:31:18.000Democrats blow out the budget by increasing spending, even if they raise taxes.
00:31:22.000I don't think Republicans shouldn't lower taxes, I just think they need to pair that with some actual cuts, which I highly doubt they will do, and so we continue to kick the can down the road on our debt.
00:31:31.000But the idea that this is the end of America, it demonstrates that for the left,
00:31:35.000They truly believe, I mean they really do believe, that it is the government's job to control your life, and anything the government doesn't do to control your life is bad for America.
00:31:44.000The more the government does to control your life, the better it is for America.
00:31:47.000So, Larry Summers is the former president of Harvard, former Clinton treasury secretary, and he predicted 10,000 people would die per year because of tax reform today on CNBC.
00:31:56.000There's pretty clear evidence looking across different states and looking when health insurance has been phased in and out.
00:32:03.000When people lose health insurance, they're less likely to get preventive care, they're more likely to defer health care they need, and ultimately they're more likely to die.
00:32:12.000And it's very hard to quantify precisely.
00:32:15.000My piece explains why an estimate that thousands will die as a consequence of this bill is actually a very conservative estimate.
00:32:25.000So the reason he says that is because the bill also gets rid of the individual mandate.
00:32:28.000It doesn't force you to buy health insurance.
00:32:29.000But the idea here is that if the government doesn't force you to buy health insurance, and you opt not to, that is the same as the government killing you.
00:32:37.000That means that the government didn't force me this morning to get up and wrap myself in bubble wrap.
00:32:42.000The government didn't wake me this morning and say, you have to eat healthy today.
00:32:45.000That means the government is killing me.
00:32:47.000By not telling me what to do, the government is killing me.
00:32:49.000This is precisely the reverse of the notions of American liberty enshrined in the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence.
00:33:39.000Okay, and he's not the only person who's speaking religious sophistry.
00:33:42.000There's a female rabbi named Dania Rutenberg, and she tweeted something out like, if the Bible is so against systemic solutions to poverty, why is a Jubilee year declared that releases people from debt to alleviate intergenerational poverty?
00:33:56.000In a second, I'm going to go through actually what the Bible says about taxes, but I first want to point something out.
00:34:05.000The Bible never says that it's the government's job to provide for the poor.
00:34:09.000It says that it is your job to provide for the poor.
00:34:12.000This is why religious people give significantly more charity than irreligious people.
00:34:15.000It's why conservatives give a lot more personal charity than non-conservative people.
00:34:19.000So all the people who are generous with everybody else's money by using the government as a crammed down mechanism for welfare, all those people are happy to use my money in the ways they see fit, but they are not willing to actually dip into their own pocket and make it happen.
00:34:30.000The reason that, whether you're talking about Jesus or you're talking about the Old Testament, all of the religious sources in Judeo-Christian history have been talking
00:34:38.000Not about what the state should do, but about what you should do.
00:34:41.000How you have a religious obligation to help out the poor, and the needy, and the widow, and the orphan.
00:34:45.000Okay, now I'm going to actually go through the Bible.
00:34:47.000So there are a bunch of people who have complained before about, well, you know, you're a religious person, Ben, you wear a yarmulke, and yet there are a bunch of things in the Bible that talk about taking care of the poor.
00:34:55.000Okay, now I'm going to go through them, and I'm going to show you what sort of taxes the Bible is talking about to take care of the poor.
00:35:00.000Okay, number one, the Bible talks about taxes explicitly twice.
00:35:03.000I'm talking here about the Tanakh, the Old Testament.
00:35:06.000It uses the Hebrew word, which is mas.
00:35:11.000It only uses it twice, in the entirety of the Torah, in the prophets, and in the writings.
00:35:17.000It uses it with regard to the king, Rehoboam, who is Solomon's son.
00:35:21.000Solomon raised taxes, and then his son raised taxes, and the actual effect of that is that the kingdom of Israel split in two because taxes were too high.
00:35:28.000Talks about that a little bit later in the prophets.
00:35:32.000And then Ahasuerus in the Purim story raised taxes at the end of the story, demonstrating his mastery over the far-flung domains.
00:35:40.000In neither context are the taxes seen as something good.
00:35:44.000The Talmud especially rips into the tax of Ahasuerus.
00:35:47.000Okay, now, let's talk about other biblical forms of tax.
00:35:51.000Okay, when it talks about tithing, specifically it's talking about something in Hebrew that's called maser cheni.
00:35:56.000Now, I know I don't want to get too abstruse here with the biblical teaching, but since I actually do read the Bible in the original Hebrew, I'm going to use some Hebrew terms here.
00:37:15.000In fact, in Judaism, once you hit a certain, once you hit, I believe it's 20% of your money to charity, you're supposed to think seriously about whether to give more than that because you're actually undercutting your own ability to take care of your family.
00:37:27.000Democrats are talking about maintaining tax rates of above 50%, okay?
00:37:31.000So don't talk to me about what the Bible says about taxes.
00:37:33.000Okay, then they talk about two further biblical provisions.
00:37:37.000There is Shemitah, which is the sabbatical year.
00:37:38.000Every seventh year, you leave the land fallow.
00:37:40.000The idea there was that the land is going to recover.
00:37:56.000The Talmud says that they designed something called a pruzbul, which was a basic legal workaround so that you could continue to lend, because lending ground to a halt.
00:38:05.000Also, the purpose of having all the land revert back to its original owners in the 50th year was not
00:38:11.000Okay, so there is your basic biblical breakdown.
00:38:12.000I know that's more specific than most people would want, but the idea that the Bible mandates that you are supposed to give enormous amounts of charity via government compulsion is just not true.
00:39:03.000He'll make a cake even for your gay wedding.
00:39:05.000What he won't do is decorate it in particular styles.
00:39:07.000He's not going to use his artistic skill in order to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding.
00:39:12.000So he's not going to decorate a cake that says, Happy Gay Wedding, John and Bob.
00:39:16.000He's not going to actually take one of those cake toppers with two dudes and stick it on top of the cake.
00:39:20.000That's something that Jack is not going to do.
00:39:22.000So, the leftists at the Colorado Civil Rights Commission said that Jack has to be forced to violate his own religious beliefs as a result of their own ruling.
00:39:30.000He lost 40% of his business, more than half of his employees, all for abiding by his biblical beliefs.
00:39:36.000The left says the government should be able to force Jack to decorate the cake for the gay couple for their wedding.
00:39:41.000Okay, this is viscerally anti-religion.
00:39:44.000It's also anti-freedom of association.
00:39:46.000And Sarah Jones is a leftist columnist in the New Republic.
00:39:49.000Here's what she says, and I think this is right.
00:40:07.000I don't think that if you're a leftist radio host, you should be forced to have me on your show.
00:40:11.000I don't think that if you're a leftist speech writer, you should be forced to work for President Trump and use your artistry to that effect.
00:40:15.000I don't think that if you're a gay business owner, you should be forced to
00:40:18.000Bake me a cake that says on it Leviticus 18.22.
00:40:21.000I don't think you need to do any of those things because I'm for freedom.
00:40:24.000Freedom only exists in the spaces where we acknowledge that we have no right to someone else's labor or approval.
00:40:29.000Tyranny grows when we refuse to approve those spaces.
00:40:34.000It's about do you have the freedom to act in ways you see fit even if others don't like it and even if it means that others can't take advantage of your services.
00:40:41.000The answer is, was, and always will be constitutionally yes.
00:40:44.000That is why I believe fully that you are able to turn away whomever you want from your business, and yes, that includes for bad people, right?
00:40:51.000Racists can turn away people, anti-Semites can turn away Jews.
00:40:58.000They'll walk across the street, and those racists will go bankrupt.
00:41:00.000As I've said in a thousand speeches at this point, the fact is that capitalism doesn't care about color, it doesn't care about creed, all it cares about is cash.
00:41:07.000And if you're turning away a vast bevy of clientele, you're undermining your own business.
00:42:30.000And just made it into a lesser of two evils choice.
00:42:32.000By overtly endorsing Roy Moore, it is very difficult to escape the public perception that you're poo-pooing
00:42:38.000The actual child molestation allegations.
00:42:41.000Now the Democrats have no leg to stand on here since they're going to let Al Franken sit in the Senate after we have pictures of him trying to grow up a woman's breasts while she's sleeping.
00:42:47.000Democrats don't have much of a leg to stand on so long as John Conyers is in Congress.
00:42:51.000So long as Bill Clinton is still an honored member of their society.
00:42:54.000That said, is this good for the country?
00:42:56.000No, it's not good for the country when you're going to have an alleged child molester sitting in the Senate.
00:43:07.000Now that Al Franken is staying, he'll be seated.
00:43:09.000And you see that Mitch McConnell is making those moves too.
00:43:12.000Here's Mitch McConnell in Alabama saying, we'll let the people of Alabama decide whether he ought to be seated.
00:43:16.000Well, I think we're going to let the people of Alabama decide a week from Tuesday who they want to send to the Senate, and then we'll address the matter appropriately.
00:43:25.000I've already said in the past that I thought this was a matter that would have to be considered by the committee.
00:43:31.000Ultimately, it would be up to them to make that decision, and they'll make it, depending upon whether Judge Moore ends up coming to the Senate.
00:43:40.000Do you believe that Judge Moore should be in the Senate?
00:43:43.000I'm going to let the people of Alabama make the call.
00:43:46.000It's a move by McConnell in the wrong direction.
00:43:48.000So we've seen all these politicians basically futzing over these allegations.
00:43:51.000First you had Nancy Pelosi defending John Conyers.
00:43:53.000Now you have Mitch McConnell basically defending Roy Moore.
00:43:56.000Everything is getting worse and worse on this score because no one is willing to take a moral stand and take a temporary loss.
00:44:00.000You do wonder, you know, back in 1993, I think it was, David Duke ran for Senate in Louisiana.
00:44:04.000And the Republicans said, we would rather you vote for the Democrat than David Duke.
00:44:08.000You do wonder today if the Republican Party would do that, or if the Democratic Party would do that if the case were reversed.
00:44:13.000We may be so partisan that we're beyond saving here.
00:45:43.000Well, in doing so, he actually debunks a couple of very popular 20th and 21st century notions.
00:45:48.000The idea of democratic peace theory, that democratic countries don't fight each other, and the idea that countries that do commerce don't fight each other.
00:45:54.000So he debunks both of these, which is really interesting because I agree with Hamilton.
00:46:00.000Say they, say his opponents, is pacific, meaning that they are peaceful.
00:46:03.000The spirit of commerce has a tendency to soften the manners of men and to extinguish those inflammable humors which have so often kindled into wars.
00:46:10.000Commercial republics like ours will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other.
00:46:15.000Meaning, this is what they've often called the McDonald's arches theory of diplomacy, that countries that have McDonald's and free commerce are less likely to go to war with one another.
00:46:23.000He says, they will be governed by mutual interest, will cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord.
00:46:27.000But then he says, have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies?
00:46:32.000Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter?
00:46:34.000The founders are constantly focusing in on human frailty, human weakness, and human flaw.
00:46:38.000And that's why the Constitution is such a grand document.
00:46:41.000He says, are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, desires of unjust acquisitions that affect nations as well as kings?
00:46:47.000In other words, democracy is not a cure-all for war, which is obviously true.
00:46:51.000We've seen democracies go to war with one another.
00:46:54.000The Soviet Union originally was a popular movement.
00:46:57.000It was a minority popular movement, but it was popular.
00:47:00.000Most, as I've said before, virtually all fascist nations in the West started off under democratic auspices before power was either seized or democratic means were used to elevate a bad guy to power.
00:47:10.000Sparta, Athens, Rome, Carthage were all republics, says Hamilton.
00:47:13.000Two of them, Athens and Carthage, of the commercial kind.
00:47:16.000Yet were they as often engaged in wars, offensive and defensive, as the neighboring monarchies of the same times?
00:47:21.000Meaning being a commercial republic is not going to save you.
00:47:25.000And then he says, from this summary of what has taken place in other countries, whose situations have borne the nearest resemblance to our own, what reason can we have to confide in those reveries which would seduce us into an expectation of peace and cordiality
00:47:36.000In other words, if we don't have a strong centralized government, the states are going to be fighting each other in five seconds.
00:47:43.000Have we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses and evils incident to society in every shape?
00:47:53.000He says, there's always going to be conflict.
00:47:54.000That's why we need to band together against all outsiders instead of banding together against each other.
00:48:00.000He says, it's time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age.
00:48:04.000And to adopt as a practical Marxism for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue.
00:48:14.000This is so different from how the left thinks, that human beings are capable of something great.
00:48:17.000This is why we have to have a world government.
00:48:19.000This is why, if every man were left to imagine, in John Lennon's style, everything would be all better.
00:48:24.000The founders were ultimate realists, and that's why their words are still important, because while we may have different notions of how government ought to work, they were more correct than we, because our notions of human nature are worse than theirs.
00:48:34.000Okay, so, now we have reached the end of today's show.
00:48:37.000There will be a lot more to discuss tomorrow.