President Trump's DOJ opens a criminal probe into the Trump-Russia investigation. We lay out the two theories of Trump's Ukraine activities. And there are new developments in the case of a 7-year-old boy being treated as a girl by his mom in Texas. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and it's sponsored by ExpressVPN. Protect your online privacy today at Express VPN. 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 Weekly Standard, and National Review. His articles have been featured on Fox News, CNN, CBS, NPR, and other media outlets. You can find Ben Shapiro on all social medias, if you search for "Ben Shapiro" in your preferred provider, and find him on Apple Podcasts, too. If you like what you hear, share it on your social media accounts, and tag Ben Shapiro, and let him know what you think of it! Thanks Ben Shapiro! You'll get 10% off your first month with discount code: "TheBen Shapiro Show" at linktr.ee/TheBenShapiroShow. To find a list of our sponsors and get 20% off my entire annual membership offer, go to bit.ly/thebenapersonaldosepennepersonal. I'll be giving you 5% off the first month, and receive 5% discount when you enter the offer starts July 1st July 2019. Subscribe to my newsletter! I'm looking for 5 stars and get 5-of-a-only discount code "The Ben Shapiro's Secret Diary? at $50 or more than $75, and I'll get $5 off my first month get 5 VIP access to Ben Shapiro gets 5 VIP discount when I get a VIP discount offer, and get a discount of $99 or more get 2-of $5 VIP access at Ben Shapiro starts shipping my VIP membership offer? and Ben will also get $25 off my ad discount when he does that starts in July 5/month, and he'll get an ad discount at $49 or more, and they'll get my discount offer starts starting at $99/month get my VIP discount starts after I get my first promo code "the Ben Shapiro VIP access starts in six months, and Ben gets my discount starts at $48/month?
00:00:28.000Okay, so the big news of the day is that the Justice Department is apparently going to open now a criminal inquiry into the Trump-Russia investigation.
00:00:36.000And the media are already playing defense on this thing.
00:00:38.000The media are already suggesting that this thing is wildly out of bounds.
00:00:42.000Just to get this straight, it was totally inbounds when we spent two and a half years spending Millions of dollars investigating the Trump-Russia collusion non-entity.
00:00:51.000It ended up being a big nothing burger, at least the collusion part of it.
00:00:53.000The obstruction part of it ended up piggybacking off of that and really was only generated by the presence of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation in the first place.
00:01:03.000It was good to have the DOJ investigating the President of the United States, which effectively is what the Trump-Russia Mueller investigation became.
00:01:12.000That was all good, wonderful, according to the press.
00:01:15.000But when the Trump administration looks into the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, which may or may not have been badly founded, well, then it's a terrible thing.
00:01:26.000It's something that William Barr clearly should not do.
00:01:28.000It's just William Barr, the Attorney General, being a political hack.
00:01:30.000There are no legitimate questions to be asked.
00:01:32.000So we'll get to what exactly William Barr is investigating here and whether it is illegitimate.
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00:03:07.000Okay, so, the New York Times is obviously very hot and bothered about the prospect of William Barr looking into the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.
00:03:18.000My friend Andrew McCarthy over at National Review, the legal analyst, he's been suggesting from the very beginning that this thing was basically a put-up job.
00:03:24.000That effectively speaking, the Obama administration was eager, very eager, to look into the Trump campaign.
00:03:30.000And as soon as they started receiving notes on the Steele dossier from the Hillary campaign, they were ready to go.
00:03:36.000They're ready and they're raring to go.
00:03:37.000And it turns out that they couldn't dig up anything before the election that was truly damning of President Trump.
00:03:42.000But there were leaks, slow leaks along the way, and McCarthy's theory, and the theory of a lot of other people, is that basically a lot of members of the so-called deep state, members of the intelligence community who didn't like Trump, who feared Trump, who thought that Trump would be a terrible president, they were digging up all this material in case Trump should be elected so that they could then break glass in case of emergency and basically sideline his presidency by Pushing into investigative territory, right?
00:04:06.000So, according to the New York Times today, for more than two years, President Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal, even months after the special counsel closed it.
00:04:15.000Now Trump's own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.
00:04:19.000Now, there was already an investigator, an inspector general, Michael Hoare was.
00:04:25.000who is going to release a report, a public report.
00:04:28.000He said today it'll be a public report.
00:04:29.000There will be no private version or classified version and public version.
00:04:33.000And it will be a report into how all of this started.
00:04:36.000Now, my theory has been that this thing was started not under false pretenses, but under authentic concern over the activities of people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
00:04:45.000And that it quickly morphed into something that went beyond its original mandate.
00:04:49.000It quickly morphed thanks to people who are all fired gung-ho to go get Trump into, Let's look into every one of Trump's associates and all of his business connections, Let's suggest that President Trump is in fact a plant of Vladimir Putin and all the rest of this.
00:05:03.000But what does it mean that this has now shifted into a criminal investigation?
00:05:06.000Well, it means that the Justice Department now has additional legal tools at its disposal.
00:05:10.000According to the New York Times, Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by William Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter.
00:05:20.000The move gives the prosecutor running at John Durham the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.
00:05:29.000Now, here's where the New York Times starts playing defense for the Democrats.
00:05:32.000Normally, that would be the story, right?
00:05:34.000They've opened the criminal investigation.
00:05:36.000The New York Times, however, does what they are so fond of doing.
00:05:46.000Instead, what they do is they sort of, they kind of slide into the DMs.
00:05:49.000They just slide into the reporting other people's opinions.
00:05:52.000The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies.
00:05:59.000Okay, that's called editorializing right there.
00:06:20.000See, Mr. Trump fired James Comey, the FBI director, under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election.
00:06:31.000Mr. Trump has made clear he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies.
00:06:40.000Trump has made clear he sees the DOJ as his personal tool.
00:06:44.000Okay, yeah, and Eric Holder called himself Barack Obama's wingman.
00:06:47.000So, you know, it turns out that presidents have long sort of seen the DOJ as a way of pursuing their own agendas.
00:06:54.000That doesn't mean it's good when Trump does it.
00:06:56.000It just means that to pretend that this is unique to Trump is to ignore American history.
00:07:01.000According to the New York Times, that view factors into the impeachment investigation against him, as does his long obsession with the origins of the Russia inquiry.
00:07:07.000House Democrats are examining, in part, whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power.
00:07:15.000The move also creates an unusual situation in which the DOJ is conducting a criminal investigation into itself.
00:07:21.000And then they say, well, you know, the real reason that Barr is doing this is so that he can use Durham as a front.
00:07:25.000The entire article is just speculation about how corrupt Barr is.
00:07:29.000They're not waiting for the report to come out.
00:07:32.000And at no point did they ever suggest that the emptiness of the final Trump-Russia collusion report from Robert Mueller invalidated the investigation to begin with.
00:07:39.000The investigation was valid, according to the New York Times.
00:07:41.000It was just that it didn't come up with the answer that they wanted.
00:07:44.000But here, they're trying to invalidate the entire investigation before they even know what the results are, which is Frankly, kind of Trumpian in its approach to the investigation.
00:07:53.000They say Mr. Barr's reliance on Mr. Durham, a widely respected and veteran prosecutor who has investigated CIA torture and broken up mafia rings, could help insulate the Attorney General from accusations he is doing the President's bidding and putting politics above justice.
00:08:07.000It was not clear what potential crime Durham is investigating, nor when the criminal investigation was prompted.
00:08:12.000Okay, so you don't know anything about the investigation.
00:08:21.000People who are likely to see things a certain way.
00:08:23.000They say, Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation.
00:08:32.000In May, Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the FBI officials who opened the case had committed treason.
00:08:38.000When Barr appointed Durham to lead the review, he had only the power to voluntarily question people and examine government files.
00:08:44.000But now the criminal investigation is open, that means that there are new tools at their disposal.
00:08:49.000So the New York Times obviously is very upset about all of this.
00:08:54.000Revelations so far about Durham's investigation have shown he has focused in his first months on the accusations that Trump's conservative allies have made about the origins of the Russia inquiry and their efforts to undermine it.
00:09:04.000Durham's efforts have prompted criticism that he and Barr are trying to deliver the president a political victory.
00:09:09.000The investigators would typically run down all aspects of the case to complete a review of it.
00:09:12.000So now, they're already forecasting the results of this thing before it comes out, which reads like preemptive spinning, does it not?
00:09:18.000It reads like they are very much afraid of what's going to be in Durham's final report here.
00:09:22.000They're afraid of what's going to be in the Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report, and so they're already trying to spin it away as, well, it was a selective investigation done at the behest of the President of the United States.
00:09:33.000In interviewing more than two dozen former and current FBI and intelligence officials, Mr. Durham's investigators have asked about any anti-Trump bias among officials who worked on the Russia investigation and about one aspect of the investigation that was at the heart of highly contentious allegations that they abused their powers, the secret application seeking a court order for a wiretap on Carter Page.
00:09:53.000Law enforcement officials suspected that Page was the target of recruitment by the Russian government, which is tonight.
00:09:57.000Carter Page, by the way, was never prosecuted at any level for this sort of activity in which he was involved and for which he was investigated.
00:10:05.000Some CIA officials are already retaining criminal lawyers.
00:10:09.000It's not clear whether Durham is scrutinizing other former top intelligence officials as well.
00:10:14.000Durham has indicated he wants to talk to the people who ran the CIA in 2016 to find out how this whole thing started.
00:10:19.000He has not yet questioned either John Brennan or James Clapper.
00:10:23.000As Durham's investigation moves forward, according to the New York Times, the Justice Department Inspector General is wrapping up his own inquiry into aspects of the FBI's conduct in the early days of the Russia investigation.
00:10:33.000Among other things, Michael Horowitz is scrutinizing the application for a warrant to wiretap Mr. Page.
00:10:39.000So, this whole article is basically speculation that some sort of corruption is going on in investigating the investigators.
00:10:46.000As opposed to, you know, you could just wait until you find out whether the investigation of the investigators comes up with something damning.
00:10:52.000I encouraged people to wait on the Mueller report.
00:11:03.000They've already declared this thing a corrupt attempt by Trump to swivel the DOJ to punch his political opponents.
00:11:09.000And that seems like fairly bad journalism-ing from where I sit.
00:11:15.000Okay, in just a second, I want to get into a recap of the Trump-Ukraine allegations, because it's all confusing, I understand.
00:11:23.000I mean, there's a lot going on there, a lot of moving pieces, and I want to, for just a few minutes, Go through and explain piece by piece how this whole thing fits together, how there are two plausible theories of Trump's activities in Ukraine, how the media are only treating that as one plausible theory, but there really are two plausible theories.
00:11:39.000We're gonna get to that, and I'm gonna give you all the details on how all that fits together in just one second.
00:11:43.000First, let's talk about life insurance.
00:11:46.000Who wants to talk about life insurance?
00:11:52.000The fact is, if you don't, if you don't think about the future that awaits all of us, then you're unlikely to actually protect yourself from things that can harm your family.
00:12:01.000I mean, the fact is, if God forbid something happens to you, they lose a source of income, how are they going to pay for your funeral?
00:12:05.000How are they going to take care of themselves?
00:12:53.000I want to take a minute now and explain the Trump-Russia allegations, where we currently stand, because there is so much floating around, and it's very difficult to break down.
00:13:01.000And you're hearing wild allegations from all sides.
00:13:03.000On the part of Republicans, you're hearing this is all closed-door stuff.
00:13:06.000Behind closed doors, Democrats are simply prying information out of people, and then they're twisting that information in public.
00:13:12.000And from Democrats, you're hearing, we have the damning information that is going to condemn President Trump to removal by the Senate.
00:13:39.000Because there are right now two plausible theories of what Trump was doing in Ukraine and what Trump was withholding military aid in order to do in Ukraine.
00:13:46.000And those two plausible theories, it's basically choose-your-own-adventure time when it comes to Ukraine.
00:14:43.000So Taylor's theory of Trump's behavior was pretty simple.
00:14:46.000Trump withheld hundreds of millions in congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine in order to benefit himself politically going into 2020.
00:14:53.000In particular, by leveraging the aid to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden and Biden's son, Hunter.
00:15:01.000All the other corruption stuff, that was kind of a smokescreen for him trying to impact the 2020 election by doing something politically beneficial for himself.
00:15:09.000That's what we'll call the Get Biden Theory.
00:15:13.000It's the theory of the media that Trump was trying to shape the 2020 election by having Ukraine go and do his dirty work for him and withholding military aid to make Ukraine go do his dirty work.
00:16:02.000A particular segment of the American people are wildly angry about impeachment.
00:16:05.000A particular segment of the American people are extraordinarily excited about impeachment.
00:16:09.000And then there are the people in the middle who are trying to figure out what actually happened here and are sort of wavering on the fence.
00:16:15.000Okay, so that's theory number one is the Get Biden Theory.
00:16:18.000Then there is another plausible theory.
00:16:20.000This one we'll call the Miasma of Corruption Theory.
00:16:25.000But it's not great for Trump in a non-impeachable way.
00:16:29.000So the Get Biden Theory's story is a story of a scheming president who is seeking re-election by twisting American foreign policy to his political benefit, right?
00:16:39.000Trump is the guy who's sitting there and he's trying to skew foreign policy so that he'll get re-elected, and he's trying to withhold American military aid so that he'll get re-elected.
00:16:49.000It's the story of a president who's being petty and vindictive and obsessive about the 2016 election, not about 2020, about 2016, and following breadcrumbs left for him by his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
00:17:01.000It's the story of a president who doesn't actually trust his foreign policy establishment because he believes that they are there to undermine him, and a president who believes conspiracy theories and refuses to let them go even when the evidence doesn't really match up.
00:17:12.000So which of those two sounds more like Trump?
00:17:14.000The guy who is like a laser, focused on 2020 and ready to skew things so that he can win 2020?
00:17:20.000Or the guy who is obsessed about 2016, talking about his crowd sizes, doesn't trust his own people, and so he brings in Rudy Giuliani and creates irregular channels and then buys whatever information confirms whatever pre-existing bias he already had?
00:17:34.000So in this story, this is a story of a quid pro quo, not to help Trump in 2020, but a quid pro quo to target This miasma of Trump-perceived corruption that the president believes led to the Russian collusion narrative that damaged his legitimacy.
00:17:48.000So he has been obsessed since 2016 with the idea that Democrats are undermining his victory by saying that Russia interfered in the election.
00:17:54.000He's saying, no, Ukraine interfered in the election.
00:17:56.000The American people have a right to know just the way you say they have a right to know if Russia interfered.
00:17:59.000We have a right to know if Ukraine interfered.
00:18:01.000And as part of all of that, if Ukraine interfered, maybe one of the ways that they interfered is by not going forward with an investigation of Democrats in the middle of the 2016 election, including Joe Biden.
00:18:11.000Right, so if the second theory is true, then Trump was acting wrongly and stubbornly and foolishly and on bad information, but he didn't commit an impeachable offense because the stuff he was trying to target in his own mind was in America's interest.
00:18:26.000So, in story number one, again, this comes down to your judgment of Trump's character, which is why it's a Rorschach test.
00:18:31.000In story number one, Trump is this strategic thinker who initiated the Ukraine scandal, deployed Rudy Giuliani to go after Joe Biden, militarized our aid to Ukraine to help Giuliani left the Ukrainians high and dry in the face of Russian aggression because he likes Putin.
00:18:43.000In story number two, Trump was led astray by Giuliani and his own rich sense of grievance, but it was much more about 2016 than it was about looking forward to 2020.
00:18:51.000So, Which of these theories is more plausible?
00:18:58.000We'll look at the timeline a little bit here.
00:19:00.000So, this all begins with Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney.
00:19:03.000This whole story begins with Giuliani.
00:19:05.000So in June 2017, well it really starts with Biden and Biden's whole...
00:19:09.000Deal with his son and his son working for Burisma and then Biden withholding Ukrainian loan guarantees until they fired a prosecutor who allegedly was going to look into Hunter Biden.
00:19:22.000That allegation was floating out there and it was floating out there thanks to the New York Times, by the way, which reported on it.
00:19:26.000And then there were allegations in 2017 that Hillary Clinton was coordinating with the Ukrainian embassy in order to find dirt on Donald Trump.
00:19:35.000That was reported by Politico, that the DNC actually had sent an operative to the Ukrainian embassy to gather all this data.
00:19:44.000So in June 2017, Rudy Giuliani visits Ukraine, and he meets with the president at the time, a guy named Petro Poroshenko, and a prosecutor named Yuri Lutsenko.
00:19:53.000In August 2018, Giuliani is hired by a company run by Lev Parnas, who's a Ukrainian businessman, and Giuliani clearly begins to funnel information provided by Parnas, as well as Parnas' partner, Igor Fruman, to Trump.
00:20:05.000In late 2018, Parnas and Fruman fix up Giuliani with a former Ukrainian prosecutor named Viktor Shokin, as well as Lutsenko.
00:20:14.000According to Lutsenko, Giuliani pushed him to open investigations into the Bidens and Burisma.
00:20:21.000According to the New York Times, Giuliani met with Lutsenko multiple times in January 2019, allegedly asking Lutsenko about Burisma, the Bidens, and Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine.
00:20:32.000And Giuliani told Trump about these conversations.
00:20:34.000In March 2019, Lutsenko opens two investigations, one into Burisma and one into the Bidens.
00:20:40.000And according to The Times, Lutsenko accuses Yovanovitch of corruption as well.
00:20:43.000And Trump starts tweeting about all of this stuff.
00:20:46.000So at this point, certainly it is plausible that Rudy Giuliani is out there to quote unquote, get Joe Biden to get Burisma.
00:20:53.000It's also plausible that as Rudy Giuliani himself later says, he's actually out there to defend his guy from the Trump-Russia stuff by targeting Ukraine, right?
00:21:01.000Which ties back into 2016, not forward into 2020.
00:21:04.000By April, Trump is telling Sean Hannity that Attorney General William Barr might consider allegations about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, which, by the way, he actually is doing, right?
00:21:12.000I mean, that stuff is being investigated right now.
00:21:14.000By April 29th, Yovanovitch was being recalled.
00:21:17.000The Wall Street Journal later says that Giuliani was actually telling Yovanovitch, telling Trump that Yovanovitch, the ambassador, was, quote, obstructing efforts to persuade Kiev to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.
00:21:30.000Okay, fast forward to May of this year.
00:21:31.000The New York Times reports that Giuliani was set to visit Ukraine.
00:21:35.000They said Mr. Giuliani's planned trip, which has not been previously reported, is part of a months-long effort by the former New York mayor and a small group of Trump allies working to build interest in the Ukrainian inquiries.
00:21:44.000Their motivation is to try to discredit the special counsel's investigation, undermine the case against Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump's imprisoned former campaign chairman, and to potentially damage Mr. Biden, the early frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
00:21:57.000So Giuliani then does an interview with Fox News in which he talks about his theory that Ukraine worked with the Clinton campaign in 2016 and discussed the Bidens.
00:22:04.000Days later, Trump says to Politico it would be appropriate to ask Attorney General William Barr to open an investigation into the Bidens.
00:22:10.000Trump says, I've not spoken to him about it.
00:22:12.000When I speak to him about it, I haven't thought of that.
00:22:14.000All of this is the backdrop to Trump's decision to pressure Ukraine.
00:22:18.000So, was Giuliani telling Trump he had a way of quote-unquote getting Biden?
00:22:21.000Or is he telling Trump that bad actors in Ukraine had covered up Ukrainian election interference in 2016 and Biden-related corruption?
00:22:30.000So Giuliani had sort of tweeted out about this in June of 2019.
00:22:35.000Giuliani is, again, the key figure when it comes down to it.
00:22:42.000So Giuliani had tweeted out about all of this in 2019, in May of 2019, in June, rather, of 2019.
00:22:50.000He tweeted out that the president was going to, that there had to be some sort of investigation into Ukraine in 2016 and the Biden's, right?
00:23:02.000That language was then parroted by Trump.
00:23:04.000So again, was Giuliani coordinating with Trump to get Biden, or was Biden merely part of this broader ball of corruption that Giuliani was supposedly attempting to fight, including fighting the Trump-Russia collusion narrative by looking into a Ukraine Hillary collusion narrative.
00:23:18.000We're not going to know this until Giuliani testifies.
00:23:20.000Either way, Trump decides to withdraw the military aid from Ukraine contingent on Ukrainian public commitments to fight corruption, which now in Trump's mind include both 2016 election interference as well as the Bidens.
00:23:32.000Even today, Giuliani continually insists that his Ukrainian efforts were not an attempt to go after the Bidens, really.
00:23:38.000They were aimed at defending his client Trump, presumably from charges of Trump-Russia collusion in 2016, and not aimed at targeting Biden.
00:23:44.000Specifically, he tweeted out yesterday that his job is to defend Trump from all charges.
00:23:57.000We're going to get into more of the evidence in just one second.
00:24:00.000So you can see how an honest person can see the interpretation, the Bill Taylor interpretation, and how an honest person can also see the President Trump.
00:24:11.000Okay, we'll get to that in just one second.
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00:25:45.000Okay, so back to the two theories of this Trump-Ukraine stuff.
00:25:51.000Okay, so the next piece of the puzzle.
00:25:53.000So we have Giuliani's activities, right?
00:25:55.000We now know that Rudy Giuliani was wandering around Ukraine, funneling information to Trump via corrupt Ukrainian business people and prosecutors who were saying that Ukrainian corruption involved willful overlooking of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and Burisma.
00:26:11.000Okay, now we get to the phone call, right?
00:26:12.000This is the famous transcript of the phone call.
00:26:14.000So according to that transcript, to that July 25th phone call that initiated this whole mess, Between Trump and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, Trump asked Zelensky for a favor because, quote, our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.
00:26:26.000I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine.
00:26:34.000They say a lot of it started with Ukraine.
00:26:35.000Whatever you can do, it's very important you do it if that's possible.
00:26:39.000So here, what the hell is Trump talking about?
00:26:42.000Well, he is referring to the baseless conspiracy theory that Russia was framed by Ukraine for the 2016 hack and supposed and subsequent release of a damaging tranche of DNC emails, which involved a supposedly secret DNC server being spirited away to and hidden in Ukraine.
00:26:58.000This theory has no evidence to back it.
00:27:00.000And Trump seems to be asking Zelensky to investigate the conspiracy theory, presumably in the hopes that this will then remove the taint of Russian interference from the 2016 victory.
00:27:08.000So Lensky then responds by mentioning Giuliani because this is the source of the information.
00:27:12.000And Trump jumps on the mention saying, quote, Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy.
00:27:17.000If you could speak to him, that would be great.
00:27:19.000And then he adds, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution.
00:27:22.000And a lot of people want to find out about that.
00:27:24.000So whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.
00:27:26.000So is this call evidence of Trump seeking a quid pro quo to quote unquote get Biden or a pressure campaign to fight Trump's Giuliani fueled idea of corruption, including but not exclusively focused on Biden in Ukraine?
00:27:38.000Okay, now fast forward to the text messages.
00:27:41.000We're going through each piece of evidence here, and you can see how it all fits within each one of the two theories.
00:27:45.000There are a series of text messages that have been revealed between the Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, Special Envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, and Taylor.
00:27:53.000In those texts, Volker says that after explaining that he's fixed up a meeting between Giuliani and a Ukrainian representative, quote, most important is for Zelensky to say that he will help investigation and address any specific personnel issues if there are any.
00:28:07.000And then Volker later reiterates, quote, heard from White House, assuming President Xi convinces Trump he will investigate, get to the bottom of what happened in 2016.
00:28:15.000We'll nail down date for visit to Washington.
00:28:18.000So it appears that American diplomats have basically accepted that Trump is just listening to Giuliani now, and that pleasing Giuliani, and then therefore pleasing Trump, is the key to restoring aid.
00:28:27.000Taylor is incredulous about all of this, right?
00:28:29.000He reads the investigations as a pretext for getting Biden from the start.
00:28:32.000He says, are we now saying that security assistance and White House meeting are conditioned on investigations?
00:28:37.000He texts again, as I said on the phone, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.
00:28:43.000And Gordon Sondland responds, quote, Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump's intentions.
00:28:47.000The president has been crystal clear, no quid pro quos of any kind.
00:28:51.000The president is trying to evaluate whether Ukraine is truly going to adopt the transparency and reforms that President Zelensky promised during his campaign.
00:28:59.000I suggest we stop the back and forth by text.
00:29:00.000Okay, so that brings us forward to the actual perceptions of the people involved in the text.
00:29:04.000That'd be Gordon Sondland specifically.
00:29:06.000As well as Bill Taylor, the charged affairs in Ukraine.
00:29:11.000So Sondland submits written testimony.
00:29:12.000Again, we haven't seen the full testimony, which is part of the problem here.
00:29:15.000Republicans want the public to see the full testimony.
00:29:18.000Democrats want to hold it back, at least for now.
00:29:20.000So Sondland's written testimony suggests his own confusion about Trump's agenda.
00:29:24.000He acknowledges that, quote, corruption poses challenges to the legitimacy and stability of government.
00:29:30.000He also says, quote, President Trump was skeptical that Ukraine was serious about reforms and anti-corruption, and he directed those of us present at the meeting to talk to Mr. Giuliani, his personal attorney, about his concerns.
00:29:41.000It was apparent to all of us that the key to changing the president's mind on Ukraine was Mr. Giuliani.
00:29:46.000And then Sondland says, based on the president's direction, we were faced with a choice.
00:29:50.000We could abandon the goal of a White House meeting for Zelensky, which we all believed was crucial to strengthening U.S.-Ukrainian ties and furthering long-held U.S.
00:29:56.000foreign policy goals in the region, Or we could do as President Trump directed and talk to Mr. Giuliani to address the President's concern.
00:30:04.000Someone says he didn't understand until much later Giuliani's agenda might also have included an effort to prompt the Ukrainians to investigate VP Biden or his son or to involve Ukrainians directly or indirectly in the President's 2020 re-election campaign.
00:30:17.000He also says he spoke to Giuliani in short conversations in which Giuliani quote-unquote emphasized that the president wanted a public statement from President Zelensky committing Ukraine to look into anti-corruption issues.
00:30:28.000Giuliani specifically mentioned the 2016 election including the DNC server and Burisma as two anti-corruption investigatory topics of importance for the president.
00:30:36.000He denies that Biden was ever specifically mentioned in these conversations.
00:30:40.000And he also says that his statement that no quid pro quos had taken place came directly from conversations with Trump.
00:31:00.000Okay, that brings you forward to Taylor's testimony.
00:31:02.000And this, of course, is the big testimony, right?
00:31:04.000This is the testimony that's going to end Trump's presidency, according to the media.
00:31:07.000So in contrast with Sunlin's lack of clarity on Trump's agenda, because Sunlin is clearly in the ball of corruption category, the miasma of corruption theory.
00:31:15.000Taylor seems pretty clear on this thing, right?
00:31:17.000Taylor seems convinced the entire Giuliani hunt was about Biden specifically and that Trump withheld the aid in order to target Biden, right?
00:31:25.000And that all of this really, in the end, was about affecting 2020.
00:31:28.000His written testimony repeatedly suggests as much.
00:31:30.000Like Sondland, he says he found that Giuliani was actually running the Ukraine show.
00:31:34.000He testified, quote, by mid-July, it was becoming clear to me that the meeting President Zelensky wanted was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections.
00:31:44.000It was also clear that this condition was driven by the irregular policy channel I had come to understand was guided by Giuliani, right?
00:31:51.000Later, he says he realized security assistance was also conditioned on those terms.
00:31:57.000But again, it's not clear whether all of this is conditioned on generalized investigation of corruption regarding 2016 or whether, again, this is about affecting 2020 for the president's political benefit.
00:32:09.000He says that the term investigations, quote, was used to mean matters related to the 2016 elections and to the investigations of Burisma and the Bidens.
00:32:17.000But were there open questions to ask about the Bidens?
00:32:19.000In other words, would Trump have to be motivated by a simple desire to quote-unquote get the Bidens rather than to wrap up the Burisma Biden investigation in the broader rubric of fighting corruption in Ukraine, an issue that Trump cared about because he was personally invested in the 2016 election and feels that his legacy has been tarnished by all the Trump-Russia stuff?
00:32:37.000Trump found all of this urgent because he'd read the media coverage about Ukraine's cooperation with Hillary's campaign in 2016, believed conspiracy theories about CrowdStrike, believed that maybe Ukraine is where all the answers were hidden about 2016.
00:32:50.000Okay, that brings you forward to Mick Mulvaney's statement.
00:32:52.000So Mulvaney is Trump's chief of staff, right, and he's been roped into this debacle because Trump ordered him to effectuate the withholding of the military aid.
00:33:00.000He gave a pretty disastrous press conference in which he talked about Trump engaging in a quid pro quo.
00:33:04.000But his comments didn't clear up the nature of the quid pro quo itself.
00:33:31.000As always, Trump never helps himself, right?
00:33:33.000He continually breathes life into the worst theory of events.
00:33:36.000He says he'd like to see China investigate Joe and Hunter.
00:33:38.000He says he'd accept information about political rivals from foreign sources.
00:33:41.000He continually cites Giuliani, mouths silliness about obvious conspiracy theories, but that doesn't change the basic question.
00:33:48.000Was this an attempt to get Biden or a petty, foolish, misinformed attempt to fight the corruption that he thinks targeted him in 2016?
00:33:58.000And more to the point, did Trump commit an impeachable offense?
00:33:59.000In one second, we're going to discuss whether Trump, in all of this, committed the impeachable offense and why these two theories end up mattering, why this is the crux of the whole impeachment argument.
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00:36:35.000The theories are only mutually exclusive because the Get Biden Theory forecloses the possibility that Biden could have ever been investigated as part of a generalized, non-2020-oriented push to investigate Ukrainian corruption.
00:36:47.000In other words, if there was a dual intent, then the dual intent makes it impossible to discern whether this was in fact a corrupt quid pro quo.
00:36:54.000If Trump had in his mind, yeah, Biden was part of this whole 2016 corruption, Ukrainian corruption fiasco, and if that affects 2020, then sure, I guess it affects 2020.
00:37:26.000Virtually everything a president does is attempted to affect his re-election possibilities, right?
00:37:31.000Virtually everything on economics, on foreign policy, all of it has to do with the president's re-elect possibilities.
00:37:36.000So it's simply too broad an argument to say foreign policy is being directed toward helping a president.
00:37:41.000Yeah, I mean, again, every president does that.
00:37:43.000The question is whether Trump did something criminal in withholding military aid By going after Joe Biden specifically, in order to go after Joe Biden specifically, an American citizen, initiate a corrupt investigation into Biden, from a foreign government, in order to affect 2020.
00:37:57.000So dual use is not a possibility, under the Get Biden theory.
00:38:01.000The answer as to whether the Bidens could ever be legitimately investigated by Ukraine, thanks to pressure from you Trump, is the distinguishing point in the two theories.
00:38:07.000So under the Get Biden theory, the answer is no.
00:38:10.000Even as part of a broader Ukrainian anti-corruption push, any mention of Biden turns that push into a corrupt effort to use American taxpayer dollars to attack a political rival and skew 2020.
00:38:21.000Under the miasma of corruption theory, investigating the Bidens doesn't automatically mean that Trump was aiming at 2020 electioneering purely.
00:38:29.000Rather, he was obsessed about 2016 and wanted everything he'd ever heard from Rudy Giuliani investigated on that score.
00:38:36.000So, your theory of Trump's impeachment comes down to which of these two theories you find more plausible, as I've been saying all along.
00:38:43.000There are only two people, really, who are gonna be able to answer this question, right?
00:38:45.000Trump himself could answer the question, but is unlikely to.
00:38:49.000Rudy Giuliani could answer the question, and this is the thing that should scare Trump.
00:38:52.000If, in fact, Rudy Giuliani was delegated by Trump to Ukraine to go get Joe Biden, it's gonna be a problem.
00:38:57.000Rudy Giuliani's got a big mouth, and he goes on TV, and he says dumb crap all the time.
00:39:01.000Which is why Trump's closest allies are telling him, tell Rudy to shut his head, like to stop, the face needs to stop moving, like enough.
00:39:09.000Okay, so it's really down to Trump and Giuliani, which I've been saying for weeks, right?
00:39:13.000For weeks, I've been saying until Rudy Giuliani testifies, all this other stuff is just third party perception of firsthand knowledge, right?
00:39:21.000Bill Taylor's perception of events is not the same thing as Rudy Giuliani being ordered by Trump to do X. Because Bill Taylor's perception is closer to the events than mine, but in effect, he's still hearing stuff secondhand.
00:39:36.000And the same thing is true with Gordon Sumlin, right?
00:39:39.000Because Gordon Sumlin and apparently Taylor totally construe this differently.
00:39:45.000In one way, we're going to know the truth one way or the other, but now at least you understand the theories.
00:39:50.000Now at least you see how all of this plays out.
00:39:54.000Okay, now I want to get to the latest on this Texas case.
00:39:58.000So, as you know, there's been this case, we've all been following it, in which there's a seven-year-old named James Younger, and there's a ruling that came down from a court that originally was going to grant sole custody to this kid's mother, Dr. Ann Georgalis.
00:40:11.000Georgalis, according to the father, has been, since the age of three, indoctrinating this kid to believe that he's a girl.
00:40:17.000Has been telling him that he is a girl.
00:40:18.000In fact, there is tape of this kid being asked, when he's three years old, why he thinks he is a girl.
00:41:15.000It's your job as a parent to parent your child, not to humor his fantasies about life.
00:41:21.000Yeah, well, here's the latest development in this case.
00:41:24.000According to the Daily Wire, Amanda Prestigiacomo reporting, on Thursday, Judge Kim Cook's ruled Texas father Jeffrey Younger has a say in his seven-year-old son's gender transition, which is being facilitated by the boy's mother and Younger's ex-wife, Dr. Angie Orgelas.
00:41:38.000Younger's attempting to halt the boy's transition.
00:41:40.000Cooks of the 255th district ruled that the parents will have joint conservatorship over James, which includes making joint medical decisions for the child.
00:41:48.000However, Cook's also placed a gag order on Younger so that he can't speak to the press about the case and decided the father is not required to pay attorney's fees, which means that Younger's Save James website, which has circulated videos of James' testimonials and vital court documents, will have to be shut down pursuant to the order.
00:42:05.000So now that means that if Mommy continues to manipulate the case and then the judge rules for sole conservatorship, he won't have been able to say anything or he'll be in danger of violating a gag order.
00:42:15.000So it sounds more like the judge is just saying, listen, we don't like all this public scrutiny.
00:42:18.000We don't like that Greg Abbott stepped in.
00:42:20.000The Texas governor said he would investigate and send Child Family Services to investigate.
00:42:23.000He doesn't like that Ted Cruz mouthed off about it and Dan Crenshaw.
00:42:26.000He doesn't like that people like me mouth off about it.
00:42:29.000Right, so the judge is just saying, well, you know what?
00:42:31.000Let's just keep going with what we've got going here, and you don't say anything.
00:42:34.000There's no gag order on Georgulas, by the way.
00:42:37.000Right, as far as we know, there's no gag order on Georgulas.
00:42:39.000So she can continue to put up pictures on her website of her son in a dress and talk about her modern parenting methods, which is apparently something that she does.
00:42:45.000Right, she's a doctor, and her medical practice website, until recently, according to Matt Walsh, had a picture of her and her son up there, him wearing a dress.
00:42:54.000Which is incredibly, incredibly invasive for a seven-year-old child.
00:43:00.000And what you're seeing is that the media are being denied access.
00:43:03.000Before the judge handed down her verdict, she kicked out all media sources, including the Texan Daily Mail and LifeSite News, as well as ABC, CBS 11.
00:43:10.000Well, ABC, CBS 11, and NBC were reportedly allowed access, but all family and friends were kicked out, and anybody who covered this thing skeptically.
00:43:21.000Reporting from the Texan says that Giorgoulis' lawyers, Jessica Janicek and Laura Hayes, claimed during the trial the mother does not plan on giving James hormone blockers at this time, but no one has stated that Giorgoulis would not be open to using them when James begins puberty, which is when he is like 11 and a half.
00:43:33.000So, you know, people who are reporting that she's about to start using hormones is not true, but she says nothing would stop her, presumably.
00:43:40.000She could start using hormones on him at 11 and a half and the father couldn't do anything about that.
00:43:45.000Plus, She obviously gets to continue to indoctrinate her child in the belief that he is, in fact, a little girl when, by all biological metrics, he is not a little girl.
00:44:00.000The vast majority of children who say that they are members of the opposite sex end up abandoning that belief as they get older.
00:44:08.000Okay, the whole thing, George Liss's July 2018 testimony apparently reveals that if James persists, is set to be evaluated for hormone suppressants as young as age 8.
00:44:20.000This is just incredibly disturbing stuff.
00:44:23.000A couple of weeks ago, you may remember that people got very uptight with me when I said that I do not like the idea of the state being able to tell me how to parent my child.
00:44:31.000I don't want the state should be able to shut down my religious school on the basis of my religious school being offensive to their ears, and I wouldn't like it if the state decided that they were going to shut down my ability to homeschool my child, and that if I moved states and this became federal policy, That there would be no place for me to go and if it came to the police showing up at my door calling me a truant parent and threatening to remove my child from my home because I can't parent my child the way that I see fit.
00:44:56.000Then I would meet those people at the door with a gun if I had no other choice, right?
00:44:59.000If I had no choice, it was not... Voting is no longer an issue, right?
00:45:03.000I mean, somebody shows up at your door to take your child away.
00:45:04.000Voting is not really the issue, right?
00:45:06.000You remember I got myself in all sorts of angry waters on Twitter.
00:45:11.000By the way, that's called the Constitution of the United States, when fundamental rights are absolutely breached and are unchanging, and now you are faced with a violation of those fundamental constitutional rights.
00:45:20.000The Declaration of Independence and Constitution are pretty clear on this.
00:45:25.000We are now living in an era where it is considered a fulsome good for the state.
00:45:31.000I mean, the state was this close to telling this father he could not, that he had to treat his son as a girl, according to media reports, that he would be forced by the state of Texas to treat his boy as a girl.
00:45:43.000And if he did not, he would be removed from custody of his own son.
00:45:47.000Don't tell me that the sort of debates that we have on politics in this country don't have very personal ramifications for parents and how they treat their children.
00:45:55.000Don't tell me that this is all about non-interventionism and kindness and protection.
00:46:01.000It is about invalidating particular points of view.
00:46:03.000It is about invalidating what I believe to be decent and good parenting.
00:46:07.000Namely, it is your job to guide your child, not to humor their delusions when they are three years old or five years old or seven years old.
00:46:33.000But don't tell me it's fantasy land when I say that there are folks on the left who absolutely would like to invade your home and not only tell you how to raise your child, but mandate via the state how to raise your kids or threaten to remove them.
00:46:44.000Because that's basically what happened in this case, at least originally, as reported.
00:46:49.000By the way, Matt Walsh makes a great point on this.
00:46:52.000He writes for us over at Daily Wire and he was really terrific on this issue.
00:46:55.000It was his attention to this issue that probably created a lot of the firestorm that led to the governor of Texas stepping in.
00:47:02.000He points out something that is quite important.
00:47:06.000He says that if you read all of the reports of this, this kid, when he was three, was saying that he was a girl.
00:47:14.000But he wasn't just saying he was a girl.
00:47:15.000He was saying, actually, that his first name was Starfire.
00:47:20.000Interestingly, The amicus attorney Dunlop revealed that Georglas told him that Luna was not the first female name that James picked out.
00:47:28.000The first was Starfire, a female character from the superhero cartoon Teen Titans Go!
00:47:33.000Georglas, however, encouraged him to pick a different name.
00:47:37.000Walsh says, while this shows what realm James was living in when he allegedly claimed he was a girl, he was in the same realm of every normal child inhabiting from infancy until adolescence, the realm of fantasy.
00:47:49.000There's no substantive difference between this self-identity and the self-identity of my own three-year-old boy, who regularly claims to be a dinosaur, a bear, a bear hunter, a shark, or sometimes all four.
00:47:58.000He said, kids at that age have no understanding of reality in theory or practice.
00:48:13.000The fact that James identified not just as a girl, but as a cartoon girl should make it pretty clear that this is magical thinking and psychological immaturity.
00:48:22.000He also says, reflect on the fact that James' mom didn't let him go by Starfire.
00:48:43.000But letting him go through life and encouraging him to go through life, believing that he's a member of the opposite sex, not only is that legitimate, that's solid parenting, according to the members of the social left.
00:48:54.000Walsh says indeed it is striking that these painfully progressive parents who want their children to have the freedom to choose their own gender still won't let them choose their own names.
00:49:01.000There's a reason why trans kids always have names like Luna or Jazz or Sky or Parker or something similarly ambiguous and trendy.
00:49:07.000Do we think three and four year olds are hopping onto Google to find out which unisex monikers are in fashion at the moment?
00:49:12.000No, if you left it to a young child to decide for himself, he'll inevitably gravitate towards something like Starfire, or Ninja, or Pirate Poopbutt.
00:49:19.000All of these options would be better than Luda, but they still wouldn't look great on a resume.
00:49:23.000But you never end up with a trans daughter named Pirate Poopbutt or Starfire, because even Ange- Georgalus knows her son is too young to be entrusted with choosing his own name, and that eventually he'll grow up and won't be as fond of the name he liked when he was a child.
00:49:35.000What sort of idiot parent would allow her young son to make that kind of decision, knowing how immature he is, and how certain it is that he will grow out of this phase?
00:49:41.000We don't let our kids choose their names for the same reason we don't let them get tattoos.
00:49:47.000Okay, but this is... It's not alarmism to say that the social left would love to parent children, parent your children, and take your children away from you and tell you that you're not allowed to determine how you want to parent your child and they will militarize the power of the state if they can in order to accomplish this.
00:50:21.000Not the way the media are treating this issue, not the way Hollywood treats this issue, and certainly not the way that Democrats are treating this issue.
00:50:26.000Already going along with every, I mean, basically, Democrats are five seconds away from declaring it child abuse for you to say to a three-year-old child who says that he is a girl and he's a boy, that he is a boy.
00:50:39.000That's already happening up in Canada.
00:50:40.000So to pretend that this is not, A coming issue is to ignore the reality on the ground.
00:50:45.000But this is what you see so often from the left.
00:51:01.000Okay, so, quick thing that I like today.
00:51:03.000So, I have decided that a couple of years ago, I was going through the Bible week by week, and I feel like now's a good time to sort of get back into that.
00:51:12.000Now, you don't have to be a believer in the Bible to sort of find inspiration in the Bible or to Think about some of the deep messages of the founding document of Western civilization and the most read book of all time, right?
00:51:25.000Even if you are not a believer in the veracity of biblical stories, even if you're not a believer in God, per se, it is important to understand where your civilization came from and some of the thoughts that are embedded at the deepest levels of what you would consider myth, but what people who are in religious circles would consider to be God's God's story about the world, the story that God tells us.
00:51:48.000So this week restarts the Jewish canonical cycle.
00:51:53.000So we've reached the end of reading the Torah every year.
00:51:57.000The Jews read through all five books of Moses.
00:51:59.000We read portion by portion, one every week.
00:52:01.000And this week we finally finished the final portion of the Torah, Bezos HaBracha.
00:52:20.000I mean, just on the face of it, it's a very weird story.
00:52:22.000You've got God going around telling people they can eat from certain trees and not eat from other trees.
00:52:26.000And then you've got a snake who shows up and says, a talking snake, and he shows up and he says to a lady, well, you know, if you eat from that tree, everything is, you're going to be like God.
00:52:33.000You're going to know the difference between good and evil.
00:53:31.000And all of this seems pretty harsh, because as soon as this happens, God is like, okay, well now you're gonna die, you're gonna live by the sweat of your brow, you're gonna suffer in childbirth.
00:53:39.000I mean, the snake actually sort of gets it right when you read the biblical account, right?
00:53:43.000Because God says to Adam, really says to Adam, if you eat from that tree, on that day you will surely die.
00:53:49.000And the snake says, well, well, the snake says, quote, you will not surely die, for God knows that on the day you eat thereof, your eyes will be open.
00:53:57.000You'll be like angels, knowing good and evil.
00:53:59.000And sure enough, the snake seems to be correct, right?
00:54:01.000God's first words after the sin to the angels is, Behold, man has become like one of us, having the ability of knowing good and evil.
00:56:48.000Those are things that occur in life according to God.
00:56:50.000Maybe those are evil, maybe they're unfit, and maybe they're not unfit, but they're not evil, right?
00:56:56.000They're good or they're bad, but they're not evil.
00:56:59.000Human beings see these things as evil, and that's why the natural consequence of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge is that suddenly action that was good in the Aristotelian sense becomes evil in our own eyes.
00:57:09.000So to take an example, I don't actually think that childbirth was easy and painless before Adam and Eve sinned.
00:57:15.000I don't think, like, that's not human biology.
00:57:17.000It was probably pretty painful before Adam and Eve sinned.
00:57:20.000But only now does Eve actually perceive childbirth as sorrow and pain, because now she sees stuff that's bad happening to her as a moral problem, right, as the theodicy problem.
00:57:31.000It's a problem of God's justice, it's a problem of the moral system of the world.
00:57:34.000And that's a problem, because she's no longer trying to reflect the mind of God, now she's trying to project her own moral system onto the world.
00:57:40.000Whereas before, Adam was already told to work, and presumably he had to sweat when he worked.
00:57:45.000But now the ground is quote-unquote cursed for your sake, with the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, for you were taken there from, for dust you are, and to dust you will return.
00:57:53.000So Adam now enters this world of existential angst.
00:57:56.000Before, work was the goal of life, now it's an obstacle to pleasure.
00:58:01.000So things radically change, and human beings become human beings because they struggle with the failure of human-created moral systems to match God's moral system, and because human beings have a tendency to sort of supplant one for the other and to ignore even the idea of an Aristotelian good.
00:58:17.000By constructing our own moral frameworks, subjective moral frameworks, rather than attempting to reflect a more objective moral framework, we actually exile ourselves from reality and rebel against us, and then we're barred from the Garden of Eden by flaming swords of our own creation.
00:58:30.000There's no way to get back in, because there's no way for human beings to actually perceive what God wants, and so we instead supplant our own idea of what is evil for God's idea of what is good or not good.
00:58:42.000Alright, so what does it mean that we're going to die upon eating the tree of knowledge?
00:58:45.000Human beings didn't die even in the story itself.
00:58:53.000Well, the part of us that actually gives us eternal life, that immediate communion with God.
00:58:58.000So, the Bible has this beautiful language when it talks about the creation of man, that we're formed from the clay of the earth and then God breathes life into us, right?
00:59:06.000When we die, according to religion and according to a lot of philosophers, the soul doesn't disappear so long as we use our earthbound bodies to work in God's service.
00:59:14.000We're not even separated from him while we're alive.
00:59:17.000But, our bodies, once they become obstacles to our perception of God, well then, a part of us has died.
00:59:23.000We're now more animal than man, right?
00:59:25.000We are trapped in the same world as the animals, experiencing pleasure and pain, driven by the same instincts that Thomas Hobbes and David Hume talked about, as opposed to that attempt to reason, that attempt to rise above, that attempt to commune with a higher level of morality.
00:59:38.000Okay, so there's your read on the beginning.
00:59:40.000of Genesis, and I hope that you enjoyed that.
00:59:44.000And I, frankly, it's my show, so I get to say what I want.
00:59:48.000So we'll do some more of that next week.
00:59:49.000Otherwise, you know, if you don't like it, you can always tune out early from the show.
00:59:52.000But I think that it's important to understand the Bible.
00:59:54.000I think that it's important to understand what religious people think of the Bible, and that we are not all simpletons who simply go around thinking that snakes talk to people and say weird stuff, and then there are flaming swords and all that.
01:00:03.000Like, there's actual meaning to these stories, which is why they're so deeply embedded in Western consciousness.
01:00:08.000Okay, unfortunately we are out of time, but there are two additional hours of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up later.