We may be looking at war in the Middle East, John Kelly's nightmare is coming true, and Elizabeth Warren speaks to a Native American group. We'll tell you all about it on today's Ben Shapiro Show. Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro is the Founder and CEO of The Ben Shapiro Foundation and is a regular contributor to the New York Times, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, "The Dark Side of America" is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. See linktr.ee/TheBenShapiroFoundation for the entire list of our sponsorships. If you like what you hear here, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron! You'll get access to all of the latest Ben Shapiro must-read books, videos, and podcasts, including The Dark Side Of... and much more! Subscribe to the show and receive immediate access to Ben Shapiro's newest book "The Devil Next Door" wherever you get your books and other digital media products! Watch the show on Audible and subscribe to our social media platforms! Learn more about Ben Shapiro and his upcoming book "Mr. Shapiro's new book "Dangerous: How to Succeed in the 21st Century". Watch this video series on his upcoming movie "I Am Who I Am I?" on HBO's "Doomed to Win It All"? Subscribe and Subscribe to our new video series "The Man Who Knocked Me Down". Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to my channel! Subscribe on iTunes and leave us a review! Become a Friend on Podcoin? Subscribe on Podcharts.fm/Ben Shapiro's Podcast! Leave Us a Reviewed Podcast? Thanks for listening and Share the Video? Subscribe & Share Ben Shapiro on Social Media? and Share Ben's Workplace? If You're Interested in Ben's New Book "The Best Thing I've Ever Read or Share His Story On Amazon Prime Video And More? Connected To Ben's Podcasts? I'll Be Considered a Friend Of Ben's Story On Social Media And More Like Him On It On Reddit? And His Podcasts On The Podcasts And This Other Podcasts Are Also A Friend On His Story And A Podcast On The Same Page And More!
00:00:00.000We may be looking at war in the Middle East, John Kelly's nightmare is coming true, and Elizabeth Warren speaks to a Native American group.
00:00:07.000I'll tell you all about it, Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:14.000So Foca Honta is speaking in front of a Native American group today, sending some serious smoke signals from her wigwam about her future presidential run.
00:00:21.000That is not me mocking Native Americans, by the way.
00:00:22.000That is me mocking Elizabeth Warren's pretensions to be a Native American.
00:00:26.000She used that nonsense to essentially become a professor at Harvard Law School, apparently.
00:00:31.000And now she's trying to use this Native American group as a shield in order to shield herself from accusations that she's a liar about that Native American heritage.
00:00:40.000We'll get to all of those things first.
00:00:41.000I want to say thank you to our sponsors over
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00:03:00.000And they legitimately proceeded to destroy half of the Syrian air force while it was on the ground.
00:03:05.000Because don't screw with the Israeli military, I think is the main message there.
00:03:11.000They went in in an air raid, and they destroyed half the Syrian air force on the ground.
00:03:15.000One of the things this makes clear, by the way, is just how much of a lie it was when Barack Obama said there was nothing we could do in Syria to stop, for example, the gassing of citizens of that country.
00:03:26.000Israel, in legitimately an hour, destroyed half the Syrian Air Force.
00:03:30.000If the United States had wanted to, under President Obama, after the original Bashar Assad chemical attack, we could have grounded his entire air force nearly immediately.
00:03:39.000But that's not the extent of the conflict.
00:03:40.000At that point, the Syrians basically backed off of Israel and said, OK, we're not interested in doing this right now.
00:03:45.000But that's really a proxy war, Syria, between Israel and Iran, because Iran is funneling supplies to Hezbollah, a terrorist group in Lebanon, through Syria, and they are moving all of those supplies directly through areas that Israel has been hitting.
00:03:57.000Meanwhile, there's the Syrian proxy war heating up between the United States and Russia.
00:04:01.000So, on Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported that U.S.
00:04:03.000and Kurdish forces in Syria had killed 200 fighters, including a bunch of Russians.
00:04:08.000So, Russia has a bunch of contract mercenary soldiers on the ground over there.
00:04:13.000And the Russians were fighting on the side of the embattled leader Bashar al-Assad.
00:04:16.000They attacked a military base in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria on February 7th.
00:04:20.000Now, there is no congressional authorization for American forces to be in Syria.
00:04:24.000This is why we actually need, as Rand Paul says, we need congressional authorization.
00:04:28.000If we're going to be there, then we ought to have Congress authorize it.
00:04:30.000The American people ought to be clear about what exactly our goals are there.
00:04:47.000force station with Syrian Democratic Force troops on a base, and those troops responded with artillery fire and airstrikes, and 200 to 300 Russians were apparently killed.
00:05:21.000He said officials believed roughly 100 people were killed in the raid, though he said he couldn't speculate about their nationality.
00:05:26.000Bloomberg reported the number dead was closer to 200.
00:05:28.000The New York Times said dozens of Russians were believed to be killed.
00:05:32.000CIA Director Mike Pompeo, this is according to Vox.com, also refused to confirm specifics when asked whether the U.S.
00:05:37.000was responsible for killing Russian contract soldiers in Syria during a hearing on Tuesday.
00:05:41.000He said, So, again, in the last week, we've seen Israel take out half of the Syrian Air Force, and we've seen the United States kill something like 100 Russian fighters, apparently.
00:05:57.000So, all of this is heating up in rather rapid fashion.
00:06:01.000And meanwhile, on the domestic political scene in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu may be in some trouble.
00:06:06.000The prime minister of Israel has now been indicted on a couple of counts of bribery.
00:06:11.000One of those counts essentially suggests that he was accepting gifts from wealthy benefactors in return for advancing their interests.
00:06:20.000There's another case that suggests that he was trying to strike a deal that would have given him positive coverage in Yediot Aharonot, which is one of the major newspapers in Israel, in exchange for hurting Israel Hayom, which is the free rival to Yediot Aharonot.
00:06:32.000That one I find a little more suspicious, since the fact is that Israel Hayom is very pro-Netanyahu in the first place, and it is funded by Sheldon Adelson, who's an ally of Bibi's politically.
00:06:42.000According to the police, in Case 1000, Netanyahu received champagne, cigars, jewelry and clothing by demand and systematically valued at about a million shekels, which is about 280 grand in American dollars.
00:06:52.000The gifts he received from the Israeli-American Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan increased significantly once Netanyahu was elected prime minister.
00:07:00.000There is a case to be made against him in the media case.
00:07:03.000One of the problems in that case is that one of the people testifying against him is a political rival who is a former news guy, Yair Lapid.
00:08:04.000The Trump administration has said a lot of the right things on the Middle East, but they're not actually doing a lot on the Middle East.
00:08:09.000So whenever there's an uprising in Iran, for example, we say a lot of stuff, but it's not clear that we're actually doing much of anything.
00:08:15.000In Syria right now, we're doing a few things, but not enough that we're actually seriously involved, and too much to say that we're not involved at all.
00:08:23.000At a certain point, we're going to have to take a harder position on what exactly we want to see happen in Syria because otherwise the chances of escalation here are increasingly likely.
00:08:31.000It's increasingly likely that this will end up spiraling out of control.
00:09:15.000You want to make sure that you are able to move up in the world.
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00:09:32.000So, whether you're trying to deepen your professional skill set, start a side business, or explore a new passion, Skillshare is there for you.
00:09:37.000I've been taking the social media marketing classes.
00:09:40.000I know folks in this office have taken graphic design classes.
00:09:44.000I took a watercolors class, which relaxes me in the evening time.
00:09:47.000Skillshare just has a ton of these courses that are available for you.
00:11:00.000And again, whenever I say things like this, it's not because I'm mocking Native American culture.
00:11:03.000It's because I'm mocking Elizabeth Warren for appropriating Native American heritage.
00:11:08.000So here's what she said to the Native American Conference.
00:11:10.000By all accounts, my mother was a beauty.
00:11:12.000I know Elizabeth Warren, by the way, and she is one of the more obnoxious humans on planet Earth.
00:11:16.000By all accounts, my mother was a beauty.
00:11:18.000She was born in eastern Oklahoma on this exact day, Valentine's Day, in February 14th, 1912.
00:11:23.000She grew up in the little town of Wetumpka, the kind of girl who would sit for hours by herself playing the piano and singing.
00:11:28.000My daddy fell head over heels in love with her, but my mother's family was part Native American, and my daddy's parents were bitterly opposed to their relationship.
00:11:35.000So, in 1932, when my mother was 19 and daddy had just turned 20, they eloped.
00:11:40.000Okay, so she doesn't provide any evidence, by the way, that she is of Native American heritage at all.
00:11:45.000And then she says, this is my favorite line, She's openly admitting that she's not enrolled in a tribe, that you won't be able to find any of her family members on the Native American rolls.
00:11:59.000Remember, the record-keeping for Native American heritage is extremely good, right?
00:12:02.000It is very in-depth, which is why you can have situations where
00:12:06.000Legitimately, the government will come and take somebody who's a quarter Native American out of their foster home and bring them back to a reservation because of how good the rules are.
00:12:32.000Each time someone brings up my family's story, I'm going to use it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.
00:12:37.000And that last line there, as Alex Griswold says at Free Beacon, that is called using the Native American community as your political human shield.
00:12:45.000Every time someone calls her foca-hontas,
00:12:47.000Every time President Trump botches it and calls her Pocahontas, every time that happens, she's simply going to shift it and say, Native Americans are so important.
00:12:55.000Native American heritage is so important.
00:12:56.000Never mind the fact that we call her Pocahontas because she's been lying about her Native American heritage.
00:13:00.000I mean, she's as Native American as Sean King is black, apparently.
00:13:04.000The idea that Sean King, by the way, his father was white, his mother was white on the birth certificate.
00:13:10.000There's no evidence that any of this is true.
00:13:13.000The same thing is true of Elizabeth Warren.
00:13:15.000She suggests that she is Native American.
00:13:16.000There is no evidence at all that Elizabeth Warren is Native American.
00:13:19.000How much of a joke is her Native American heritage?
00:13:21.000It's such a joke that Elizabeth Warren used as evidence of her Native American heritage the fact that she had submitted a recipe to a cookbook called, I kid you not, Pow Wow Chow.
00:13:33.000And the recipe that she actually submitted was a recipe for crab bisque.
00:13:38.000Which, it turns out, she actually copied from a copy of Good Housekeeping or something.
00:13:42.000It turns out that crab bisque is not actually a Native American heritage thing, because crabs are not wandering across the fruited plains of Oklahoma, which is where she is from.
00:14:51.000But 47% is a very solid approval rating for President Trump.
00:14:54.000So despite the attempts to beat him down over the Rob Porter situation or the bleephole countries remark, it's as I said, everything is baked into the cake except the evidence of how the economy is doing.
00:15:05.000All of the character stuff is baked into the cake with Trump.
00:15:08.000So, for example, there's a story out today that Michael Cohen, who is Trump's lawyer, did in fact pay Stormy Daniels, a porn star, $130,000 out of his own pocket, supposedly out of the goodness of his heart.
00:15:19.000That Cohen says, quote, neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms.
00:15:24.000Clifford, that's Stormy Daniels, and neither reimbursed me for my payment, either directly or indirectly.
00:15:31.000Clifford was lawful and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.
00:15:36.000He was asked, by the way, why it was that he had actually just signed a six-figure check to a porn star with whom he had not had personal relations, and he refused to answer those questions.
00:16:06.000The Stormy Daniels stuff happened two weeks ago and no one cared.
00:16:08.000Everybody immediately brushed off the fact that the President of the United States, when he was married and his wife had just given birth, was having an affair with a porn star and then dropped $130,000 on her days before the election to keep it quiet.
00:16:22.000Man, I gotta get me one of those lawyers.
00:16:23.000I gotta get me one of the lawyers who actually signs my gas bill.
00:16:27.000The lawyer who just says, I love my client so much that out of the goodness of my own heart, I just pay people off.
00:16:32.000So that doesn't have any impact on Trump.
00:16:34.000And so Democrats are struggling because the character attacks aren't doing a lot of good for them.
00:16:38.000They're going to continue to leverage them, of course, but they're so ensconced in the identity politics of what they do that they're having some serious trouble translating that into political victory.
00:16:49.000And so they have to sort of tell fibs.
00:16:52.000Now, their best angle of attack here would be that President Trump doesn't care about you.
00:16:57.000This is always the gap for Republicans.
00:17:16.000Not all the people who insist on being offended.
00:17:18.000Being offended by Trump plays into his shtick.
00:17:20.000If you are offended by Trump, Trump has won.
00:17:23.000And if you say that Trump doesn't care about people like you, that is always the most fruitful line of attack against Republicans.
00:17:28.000But Democrats don't seem to care about that, and so they're continuing on with this intersectional nonsense.
00:17:32.000So, for example, Senator Bob Menendez from New Jersey.
00:17:35.000He's going on and on about how Trump doesn't care about immigrants, and we shouldn't use the term chain migration.
00:17:39.000Again, this is intersectional nonsense.
00:17:41.000Now, I find it obscene, the phrase chain migration.
00:17:47.000It is incredibly cruel to those whose ancestors were brought to this country in chains in slavery.
00:17:55.000It is a dehumanizing element of what is in essence family reunification, which has been the core of American immigration principle for over a century.
00:18:04.000The belief that when we have families together,
00:18:07.000Okay, so this is absolutely idiotic, obviously.
00:18:15.000The term chain migration has nothing to do with slavery.
00:18:17.000It was coined in the mid-50s, I believe, or since before then.
00:18:22.000It has nothing to do with slavery whatsoever.
00:18:23.000The idea is that chain migration is like a daisy chain, like you're bringing people in in a chain.
00:18:48.000Okay, so this of course is not true at all.
00:18:49.000The suggestion that President Trump is enthralled to Russia, the American people are able to discern the fact that Trump refuses to say that Russia interfered in the election because he feels that it is a blot on his victory.
00:19:15.000They're able to distinguish that from the idea that he is pro-Russia, because obviously his policy has been significantly more hawkish on Russia than, for example, the Obama administration, which pledged flexibility to Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin in 2012, and then gave them exactly that flexibility.
00:19:31.000By the way, the idea that Trump is somehow avoiding sanctions because he loves Russia, that's not even true.
00:19:37.000According to Noah Rothman, who's no ally of the administration, over at Commentary magazine, quote, And they did.
00:19:52.000The law also required the administration to provide a report detailing the impact of sanctions on Russia's sovereign debt, which they did.
00:19:58.000The law provided the administration a 120-day grace period for imposition of new sanctions on unspecified targets if the president can claim those targets have already substantially reduced their business activities in the Russian defense and intelligence sectors.
00:20:10.000The State Department declared that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions, therefore satisfying that requirement.
00:20:18.000So the idea that the Obama—that the Trump administration, rather, has been deliberately avoiding imposing sanctions is just not true.
00:20:24.000But the Democrats continue to trot this stuff out, and this is why they continue to lose.
00:20:28.000This is why they have a serious problem on their hands.
00:20:31.000Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about another serious problem Democrats have, and that is full-on disdain for religion.
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00:22:15.000When I talk about the Democrats being at a complete disconnect with the American people, nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to disdain for religion.
00:22:22.000So, yesterday on The View, Joy Behar, who is just an insufferable human being, which, again, Joy, have me on your show.
00:22:36.000Nonetheless, the view, you know, I think they are probably a little afraid to have me on that show, which I would be too if I were their producers.
00:22:42.000In any case, Joy Behar goes after Mike Pence yesterday in the most disgusting terms about his religious observance.
00:23:04.000Okay, so just to be straight about how the left views religious people, if you say that you heard the voice of God, what you mean usually—okay, let me just explain.
00:23:12.000On behalf of religious people everywhere, when you say that you got a message from God, you don't actually mean that God sent you an email.
00:23:57.000So if you're a man and you say you're a woman, you're not mentally ill.
00:23:59.000If you're a woman and you say you're a man, you're not mentally ill.
00:24:01.000But if you're a religious person and you say that you are trying to believe according to the dictates of Jesus and that you feel that you've gotten messages from Christ in your life, that this means that you're a full-on nutso.
00:24:12.000It's that sort of disdain for religion that is driving millions of people in the United States away from people like Joy Behar.
00:24:19.000One of the people who's been most irritating about the Olympics is an ice skater named Adam Rippon.
00:24:23.000He's gay, which wouldn't make a difference, except he has made this the entirety of his identity.
00:24:28.000And when I say—I mean, like, he's made it his entire public persona.
00:24:31.000Not that he's a great ice skater, which apparently he is, but that he is gay and that he hates Mike Pence.
00:24:35.000So he apparently was ripping on Pence for being at the Olympics in the first place, suggesting that Mike Pence was for gay conversion therapy.
00:24:41.000We talked about this a couple of weeks ago.
00:24:53.000Well, yesterday he came out and he says, listen, I don't want my Olympic experience to be about Mike Pence, so let's get this straight.
00:24:58.000You punch Mike Pence in the face rhetorically, and then you run, screaming from the room, and then you say you don't want your Olympic experience to be about Mike Pence?
00:25:06.000Because you've implied that religious people all over the United States hate gay folks?
00:25:09.000Here is Adam Rippon doing the same routine.
00:25:11.000I have no problem talking about, you know, what I've said, because I stand by it.
00:25:21.000But I think right now, the Olympics are about Olympic competition and the athletes involved.
00:25:30.000And I talked, you know, I talked to you about how I felt before the games.
00:25:36.000And, you know, it's brought a lot of attention to, you know, and questions to my other teammates.
00:25:42.000And I don't want to distract from their Olympic experience.
00:25:46.000And I don't want my Olympic experience to be about my pens.
00:25:53.000You rip Mike Pence as a religious bigot, and then you come out and you say, well, I don't want my Olympic experience to be like that.
00:25:59.000Maybe you should have thought about that before you decided to rip Mike Pence as a religious bigot, and by extension, all of the people in America who are evangelical Christians as religious bigots.
00:26:07.000The culture wars that the left launched brought them Trump.
00:26:11.000When I say this is how you got Trump, this is how you got Trump.
00:26:13.000You got a bunch of people in America who feel like they are constantly being set upon and torn to shreds for simply being religious people.
00:26:20.000Or simply being white, right, in some cases, based on the intersectional politics of the left.
00:26:25.000Or simply for being in a Midwestern state.
00:26:28.000There are all these groups that the left has seen as great oppressors in American life.
00:28:05.000CNN writes, quote, So notice already how CNN starts calling this girl he.
00:28:08.000This is a biological woman, and CNN is already calling this girl he in order to bias the case.
00:28:10.000Because if the parents won't acknowledge it, CNN will.
00:28:28.000The teen's parents want court authority to stop their child from getting the treatment and therapy that was recommended by his medical team in what it characterizes as a possible life-or-death situation.
00:28:35.000What makes it a life-or-death situation?
00:28:59.000The next step is going to be, you have a five-year-old child, and your child says that she is a he, and you say, sweetheart, no you're not.
00:29:08.000You know, we'll go and we'll talk to somebody about this, but you are a girl, and we're going to try and get through this together in the best, most healthy possible way.
00:29:16.000Courts will be sent in by the left to take your child away from you.
00:29:33.000This is the reason why the APA's evidence-less reclassification of gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria actually matters.
00:29:40.000So, gender identity disorder suggests that when you are disordered, right, when you're a male who believes that you're a female, that this is a disorder
00:30:21.000Non-disordered levels is just not true, right?
00:30:24.000There's no evidence that the suicide attempt rate in the transgender community post-surgery, or if everybody calls you by your preferred pronoun, goes down to the normal rate of a normal man or a normal woman who does not believe they're a member of the opposite sex.
00:30:37.000The court is probably going to try and take away this kid and give the kid to the grandparents, who apparently are going to go along with the treatment.
00:30:44.000And they're saying that, apparently, the attorney for the family says, the parents maintain that they love their child and said the child's mother said the child has nothing to fear from her and she wants to have a relationship with her child.
00:30:56.000She also acknowledged that if the parents are granted custody, they want the child to continue to live with the maternal grandparent, not in an effort to avoid parenting their child, but because they believe that the current living arrangements is in the teen's best interest.
00:31:05.000But they say this kid is not capable of making a life-altering decision right now.
00:31:09.000The court is going to disagree, and they're going to say that if they call the kid by the kid's normal name, if they say that the she is a she, then the kid is going to commit suicide.
00:31:18.000This is a very dangerous precedent that's being set.
00:31:20.000It's the reason why we're in the middle of a brutal culture war, and it is—there are political aspects to this that are really—that are really a problem, that are a serious problem.
00:31:28.000OK, in just a second, I'm going to give you the update on the Rob Porter fallout, because it looks like it's getting worse, not better, for the White House.
00:31:34.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Tracker.
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00:34:22.000So, in some bad news for the White House, Trey Gowdy, the House Oversight Committee chair, or at least a member of the House Oversight Committee, he said that the House Oversight Committee kicked off an investigation into the Trump administration's employment of Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary who resigned last week, and what White House officials knew about domestic abuse allegations against him.
00:34:43.000So, Gowdy said you can call it official, you can call it unofficial.
00:34:46.000I'm going to direct questions to the FBI that I expect them to answer.
00:34:49.000And if they don't answer them, then I'm going to expect a really good reason why.
00:34:54.000Senior White House officials have been struggling to come up with an answer for exactly how they allowed Rob Porter to get so high up in the administration, despite all of the allegations about spousal abuse.
00:35:04.000He has two separate ex-wives who allege spousal abuse.
00:35:08.000Paul Ryan said the White House has to work to improve their vetting system.
00:35:12.000I don't know how exactly they'll do that.
00:35:17.000One of the big problems yesterday is that the FBI Director Chris Wray came out and he said that the timeline that was presented by the White House with regard to Rob Porter was just not true.
00:35:25.000That basically the White House had known for months, maybe years, about Rob Porter's allegations.
00:35:37.000is that the FBI submitted a partial report on the investigation in question in March and then a completed background investigation in late July that is soon thereafter we received requests for follow-up
00:35:57.000So, it is pretty obvious that the FBI was continuously updating the White House and the White House did nothing about it.
00:36:04.000There have been serious rumors inside and outside the White House that John Kelly is on his way out.
00:36:25.000The general who was supposed to have brought order to the White House has instead exacerbated the disorder, particularly with regard to this Rob Porter fallout.
00:36:33.000There was talk yesterday that Gary Cohn, as Breitbart would call him, the globalist Gary Cohn, would take over as Trump's chief of staff, if that were the case.
00:36:40.000There was even some rumors going around that he might bring back the mooch, which would be the greatest thing on planet Earth.
00:37:13.000Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders trying to make that case yesterday.
00:37:16.000Look, we explained the process extensively last week.
00:37:20.000The White House Personnel Security Office, staffed by career officials, received information last year on what they considered to be the final background investigation report in November, but they had not made a final recommendation for adjudication to the White House because the process was still ongoing when Rob Porter resigned.
00:37:38.000In the view of Personnel Security Office, the FBI's July report required significant additional investigatory fieldwork before Personnel Security Office could begin to evaluate the information for adjudication.
00:37:51.000As Director Wray said, information was still coming to the White House Personnel Security Office in February.
00:37:58.000Now, the truth is that the chief of staff's job is essentially to keep the president in line.
00:38:02.000And unfortunately, it's become a sort of babysitting job, to a certain extent, making sure that Trump is not talked to by some of the worst people, keeping bad influences away from the Oval Office.
00:38:11.000And Kelly had been doing a good job of that until the whole Rob Porter scandal happened.
00:38:16.000You do have to ask yourself why it was that Kelly stuck by him.
00:38:18.000Maybe it's because we all, as human beings, have an individual tendency to pretend that folks that we know aren't really bad people.
00:38:24.000Like, think of the people in your life.
00:38:26.000And think of some of the things that they've done.
00:38:27.000Are all of them universally good people?
00:38:29.000I know some people in my life who, if I heard about their stories, and I heard about them secondhand, I'd think, wow, that guy's a jerk.
00:38:37.000But you make provisions for people that you know in your personal life.
00:38:39.000The problem is, when you're working on a governmental level, you don't have the ability to do that.
00:38:43.000You don't have the capacity for forgiveness, particularly in a case like this, where
00:38:47.000You really shouldn't have a capacity for forgiveness in any case when the guy isn't asking for forgiveness where it's apparent that he was fibbing about knocking around women.
00:39:12.000Barrack has already said that he's not particularly interested.
00:39:16.000There are apparently other factions that are looking to bring in a new chief of staff.
00:39:21.000Apparently, Jared and Ivanka Trump want to bring in Gary Cohn.
00:39:25.000So, last night, three Republicans said that Trump had offered the job to Cohn, but then Trump told Sean Hannity that he'd not chosen Cohn, and that's because Cohn is not a career Republican, right?
00:40:10.000I'm not sure that it would balance a lot of the competing interests inside the White House.
00:40:13.000McCarthy apparently is sort of interested, and today he refused to suggest that he would not take the job if you were offered it.
00:40:19.000A Republican has said that McCarthy is going around saying that the president needs better messaging, which is obviously true.
00:40:25.000So, a little bit of chaos inside the White House.
00:40:29.000Apparently, the president made sure last week that Kelly had heard that he called Reince Priebus for advice, which was a way to alienate Kelly and maybe get Kelly to quit.
00:41:11.000The administration is going to have to do something to cure the perception that there's serious chaos breaking out inside the administration.
00:41:55.000As I suggested before, the Democrats have been unable to capitalize on Trump's unpopularity.
00:42:00.000Again, he's hitting his high water point now, and that's 47%, which is not super high.
00:42:06.000So, in order for the Democrats to capitalize on his unpopularity, they're going to have to connect his supposed lack of passion for the American people with their passion for the American people, but that would force them to abandon their intersectionality.
00:42:18.000They actually have to say, listen, we like Americans more than Trump does.
00:42:21.000That's a hard call when you're sending the entire media out to talk about the glories of North Korea and the stupidity of Mike Pence.
00:42:40.000Another Republican Senate seat, state Senate seat.
00:42:43.000That's 36 legislative seats that Republicans have lost since Trump took office.
00:42:46.000That doesn't have the makings of a wave yet, but it certainly should be a disquieting note for a lot of members of the administration who seem to suggest that nothing terrible is going on and everything's going to be OK.
00:43:09.000And they don't want Bill Clinton anywhere near it.
00:43:11.000So they're scared of Bill Clinton now.
00:43:12.000So they're making the same mistake they always made.
00:43:14.000They're suggesting that Hillary Clinton was a better candidate than Bill Clinton.
00:43:17.000They're just addicted to the victim politics.
00:43:20.000They're addicted to the identity politics.
00:43:22.000It is going to destroy the Democratic Party.
00:43:23.000It's really a giant failure on their part.
00:43:26.000Bill Clinton is still, still tremendously much more popular than Hillary Clinton ever was.
00:43:32.000They're trying to take advantage of the MeToo movement by suggesting that the Trump administration is mean to women, and John Kelly is mean to women, and Trump is mean to women, and all this.
00:43:40.000That's not how you get people out to the polls.
00:43:42.000You get people out to the polls by suggesting that the other side is not just morally bad, but effectively bad.
00:43:46.000And Democrats haven't done that in any real serious way.
00:43:55.000And the White House's story on Porter continues to just fall apart.
00:44:00.000Late yesterday, there was a report that even after the news of Rob Porter giving his ex-wife a black eye had come out, that he had sat down for an off-the-record meeting with four reporters
00:44:11.000And the reporters present for the meeting, which included the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, Washington Post's Josh Dowsey, Axios' Jonathan Swan, and Wall Street Journal's Michael Bender, press reported to explain the picture of his wife with the black eye, and he told them what he had told his colleagues, that on vacation in Venice, the two had quarreled over a Venetian glass vase, and that his then-wife had accidentally bruised her eye in the course of that altercation, which happens all the time.
00:44:32.000The vase just reaches out and touches somebody in the eye.
00:44:53.000She will only listen to classical music because I have molded her and I've shaped her.
00:44:58.000And now she is an elitist, which is exactly what I want her to be when it comes to her musical taste.
00:45:03.000One of the pieces that she really likes is The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra by Benjamin Britten.
00:45:08.000This piece is—the reason it's called The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra is basically it goes through all of the instruments in the orchestra, and they each play individually throughout the course of the piece.
00:45:16.000And so she's gotten really good at naming all of the various pieces in the orchestra.
00:45:20.000She knows the difference between an oboe and a bassoon, which is pretty sophisticated for a just-turned-four-year-old.
00:45:25.000In any case, here is Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
00:46:07.000It's a really fun piece, so go check that out.
00:46:09.000It's a great way to educate your kids about the instruments in the orchestra, which, at least if my daughter is any indicator, they really enjoy.
00:46:27.000She's not thinking about being political.
00:46:29.000She's thinking about what resonates and what is common to all of us.
00:46:33.000I think that that's harder and harder to do, because people are trying to win their point of view, as opposed to saying, what if I spoke to everyone?
00:46:47.000My friend who's a great comedy writer, Jim Downey, he's accused of being a right-wing writer, a comedy writer, if there is such a thing.
00:46:54.000He says, no, no, I just think the way that the Democrats handle things is poor, where they try to pick out little pieces of a population that, well, we represent the Hispanics, we represent the LGBT or something.
00:47:06.000And they're not speaking to everyone at once.
00:47:08.000And it's almost demeaning to say, I'm choosing you because you're a splinter group or you're a certain minority group.
00:47:15.000There's almost a resentment that somehow you're separated again by a politician.
00:47:38.000The idea that Bill Murray is suggesting to Democrats that they ought to abandon identity politics, that they don't wish to alienate the vast majority of the country, is of course exactly right.
00:47:58.000Greg Popovich has become so obnoxious.
00:47:59.000This is the coach of the San Antonio Spurs and suddenly the great arbiter of American morality.
00:48:05.000Here is what he had to say yesterday about America and how racist America is, which is incredible considering that all of the players who play for him, who are black, are making millions and millions and millions of dollars for playing a game.
00:48:16.000Here's Greg Popovich, nonetheless, talking about what a terrible place America is.
00:48:37.000But more importantly, you know, we live in a racist country that hasn't figured it out yet.
00:48:43.000And it's always important to bring attention to it, even if it angers some people.
00:48:49.000The point is that you have to keep it in front of everybody's nose to understand it still hasn't been taken care of and we have a lot of work to do.
00:48:55.000So if this is something that Greg Popovich actually believes, then he doesn't understand the nature of America.
00:48:59.000He doesn't understand the nature of Americans who are shelling out millions of dollars a year to go watch a bunch of black guys play basketball.
00:49:05.000In Popovich's words, that's not because they're a bunch of racists.
00:49:09.000The reason that you know that is because for a long time, the NBA was not integrated.
00:49:13.000For many years, when racism was much more prevalent in the country, it was a rarity for there to actually be black basketball players.
00:49:18.000Adolph Rupp, the famous college basketball coach at the University of Kentucky, would not allow black players on his team.
00:49:23.000That obviously is not the case, and the NBA is a growing concern.
00:49:26.000If you were to buy a team in any sport right now, your best investment would probably be in the NBA, because Americans are not afraid of black folks.
00:49:33.000Americans are very much ensconced in black culture and in parts of culture that are influenced by powerful black people.
00:49:42.000I think that's a good thing, because I think that black folks contribute an enormous amount to the culture.
00:49:46.000And I think white folks contribute enormous amounts of the culture.
00:49:49.000But the fact that Popovich suggested America is a deeply racist place immediately after saying the entire NBA is black and these folks are making millions of dollars, there's a pretty strong disconnect there.
00:49:57.000OK, so quick Bible note, since it is indeed a Wednesday, we haven't done Bible study in a little while.
00:50:01.000So I wanted to point this out with regard to preemptive war.
00:50:05.000So if you're talking about war in the Middle East and the possibility of preemptive war in the Middle East, Israel striking Iran, for example, or the United States taking out Russian mercenaries, there's this idea that
00:50:15.000A lot of religious people are sort of uncomfortable with preemptive war.
00:50:21.000In Exodus 22.1, it specifically talks about the fact that preemptive war is necessary, and preemptive killing can sometimes be necessary, if you can discern the person's rationale for attacking you.
00:50:39.000Meaning that the responsibility for his own death is on his head.
00:50:43.000And so Rashi, who's the most famous of Jewish commentators, he comments on this, and he says, And this thief has come to kill you because he knows that no one can hold himself back and remain silent when he sees people taking his money.
00:50:51.000Therefore, the thief has come with the acknowledgement that if the owner of the property were to stand up against him, the owner would kill the thief.
00:51:08.000Meaning if someone breaks into your house at night with a clear intent to steal stuff from you and harm you, then you have the ability to kill them.
00:51:14.000The Torah actually makes a distinction in Exodus between if you are robbed during the day and robbed during the night.
00:51:21.000But the very next verse says, So in other words, you can't kill him.
00:51:23.000You have to capture him if he comes during the day.