Another big Hillary Clinton lie blows up the political scene. Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona is on his way out and he slams the door on the way out. We ll talk about all that and more on today s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. Ben Shapiro is the host of the podcast and is a regular contributor to CNN and the Washington Post. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and has been featured on CBS News and CNN. His book is out now and is available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audio Book format. You can also get a copy of the book for free by clicking here. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends, family, and the rest of the world! Tweet me if you liked the podcast and/or have any thoughts or suggestions on how we can improve the show. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - How to get a good night s rest 2:30 - What s going on with the Trump-Russia dossier? 3:15 - Did the Russians colluded with the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign? 4:20 - Is there any evidence of Russian collusion? 5:00- Why did the dossier exist? 6:30- Is the entire dossier fake? 7:40 - Why did Christopher Steele write it? 8:15- What is the timeline? 9:40- What would the FBI do with the dossier 11: Did the dossier come out before it was declassified? 12:15 13:00 15: Why did it come out in September 2016? 16: How did it have any credibility? 17:40 17 - What would it look like it would look like? 14:30 What was the timeline ? 16 - Why would the dossier not come out after the dossier be authentic? 15, What does it matter to the FBI have any evidence? 21:30: Did it have a good timeline? ? 15 - What did it really look like in the document it did it look good? And does it make any more than that? 18:30 +3: Is it really? 19:20 Do you think it would be a good thing? Can we trust the dossier really have any chance to be a fake document? #1) And so much more?
00:00:16.000So a couple of huge news items that I want to go through today in detail, give you my perspective on them, and give you a little bit of background so that you know what you're talking about when you talk about it at the water cooler today.
00:00:25.000But before we get to that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.
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00:01:03.000Everyone from GQ to Cosmo to the New York Times are talking about Helix.
00:01:46.000Something that may not have you sleeping well at night, and certainly doesn't have Hillary Clinton sleeping well at night, is a story that is breaking out from the Washington Post last night.
00:01:55.000So, you need a little bit of background to understand what exactly is going on here.
00:01:59.000So, first I have to explain to you what the Trump-Russia dossier is.
00:02:02.000If you remember back to earlier this year, BuzzFeed released a dossier that was full of information, some of it more credible than others.
00:02:09.000People have been saying that the entire dossier has been debunked.
00:02:17.000The parts that were not substantiated included the absurd allegation that Donald Trump went to Moscow and rented a room that the Obamas stayed in and then had a bunch of Russian prostitutes come in and pee all over the bed, right?
00:02:32.000And that, of course, is not true, or at least there's no evidence to that effect.
00:02:36.000If there were, then that would be the greatest political story in the history of mankind, but it is not.
00:02:40.000So in any case, that dossier comes out from BuzzFeed earlier this year, and it came out because it had been presented, the dossier, to President Trump, or at least a summary of the allegations had been presented to President Trump by then-FBI Director James Comey just before Trump became President of the United States.
00:02:57.000The reason people were asking this is because there were concerns that maybe the Russians had basically been putting out bad info and that bad info had been used by the Obama administration as an excuse to wiretap all of Trump's friends.
00:03:09.000The allegation is, and it's more of a conspiracy theory than an allegation, that the Russians
00:03:14.000We're using Christopher Steele basically as a cutout.
00:03:17.000This is the spy who's responsible for the compilation of the dossier that he knew that the Russians were giving him bad information.
00:03:23.000He put it in the dossier, which was funded by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:03:27.000That dossier was then provided to the Obama FBI, and the Obama FBI used that as an excuse to wiretap people like Carter Page, the Trump foreign policy advisor.
00:03:36.000Or Mike Flynn, the one-time Trump national security advisor.
00:03:55.000The sort of collusion that Democrats have been accusing Trump of.
00:03:58.000And three, we would have to show that the FBI, in bad faith, went after people like Carter Page and people like Mike Flynn based on evidence they knew was shoddy in order to target them.
00:04:07.000That contention is pretty extreme, considering that, again, if the Democrats were really focused on just getting out bad information about Trump, then why would this dossier not have come out in, say, September of 2016, like before the election?
00:04:26.000So Wikipedia actually has a pretty good timeline here, so I'll use that as the basis for this.
00:04:30.000In September 2015, there was a wealthy Republican donor who opposed Trump's candidacy in the Republican primary, so he went to Fusion GPS and asked them to compile an OPPO research file.
00:04:40.000Okay, then, this Republican donor, after Trump won the nomination, the Republican donor basically dropped out, and that's when, in April 2016, the investigation contract and funding was taken over by a law firm called Perkins Coy, owned by Mark Elias.
00:05:57.000They funded the beginning of the investigation before Steele was involved.
00:06:00.000When the Republicans, when conservatives say that this was obvious collusion between Hillary Clinton and the Russian government, again, no evidence to that effect.
00:06:08.000In fact, there is much more evidence that Donald Trump Jr., for example, was attempting to make nice with the Russians than that Hillary Clinton was attempting to make nice with the Russians, at least insofar as this.
00:06:17.000She was attempting to make nice with the Russians, in all likelihood, with regard to selling 20% of America's uranium stockpile.
00:06:23.000But with regard to gathering Trump oppo intel research, not any evidence to support that.
00:06:28.000Also, the idea that the FBI was acting on orders from the Kremlin in order to get Trump, that also seems like a bit of a stretch.
00:06:34.000The reason that I lay all of this out is because I want you to have the truth about what exactly is happening here.
00:06:39.000I think that there's a lot of lies being told by both sides.
00:06:42.000On the left, they're saying, this is no big deal at all.
00:06:44.000You know, oppo research is oppo research.
00:06:47.000The big deal is that if you knew, and we don't know the answer to this yet, if you knew the OPPO research was based on Russian intel, and the Russians were funneling that intel to Christopher Steele, then it looks like collusion.
00:06:57.000So we just don't know the answer to that one yet.
00:06:59.000On the right, the same answer applies.
00:07:00.000We don't know the answer to that one yet, so you can't assume that such collusion was taking place in the first place.
00:07:05.000So here's what the Washington Post reported, and here's the key component, okay?
00:07:09.000Mark Elias apparently lied to the New York Times about his involvement in the dossier.
00:07:13.000So apparently he told Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who's not involved in the compilation of the dossier at all.
00:07:18.000He suggested the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign did not fund the dossier.
00:07:22.000The Washington Post reports that last night, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump's connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin.
00:07:37.000Mark Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
00:07:44.000After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intel officer with ties to the FBI and the US intelligence community.
00:07:52.000So Maggie Haberman was getting all sorts of crap over at the New York Times because yesterday, after this came out, she tweeted out, quote, folks involved in funding this lied about it and with sanctimony for a year.
00:08:03.000Now, it just shows you that the rabid left is just as bad as some of the more rabid people on the right.
00:08:09.000They went after Maggie Haberman tooth and nail for this.
00:09:00.000So, again, the real question here is, as always with the Clintons, what are they trying to hide?
00:09:05.000The Clintons are so bad at covering things up that whenever they cover things up, the cover-up ends up being worse than the original crime, right?
00:09:11.000Hillary did this with regard to the Whitewater papers.
00:09:14.000Hillary's still the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI.
00:09:19.000Hillary Clinton did this with regard to her email chains, right?
00:09:22.000She deleted 33,000 emails, then claimed it was completely innocent.
00:09:25.000Every clumsy attempt to obfuscate the truth ends up making people more and more suspicious.
00:09:29.000There's a reason to be suspicious around here.
00:09:32.000There's a reason to be suspicious about all of this.
00:09:35.000There's also a reason to be suspicious because it's not like Fusion GPS hasn't worked with the Russians before.
00:09:39.000So William Browder is a businessman who pushed for sanctions on Russia.
00:09:43.000He's testified in the past that the Russian government used Fusion GPS before to conduct a smear campaign against him personally.
00:09:50.000Browder admitted he couldn't connect Russian funding to the anti-Trump dossier, which means President Trump's theory of FBI-Democratic-Russian collusion is not supported by the evidence, but certain key Democrats did apparently lie about the Fusion GPS report funding, and the question is why.
00:10:03.000So that question remains an open question.
00:10:06.000And now the Democrats are pushing back by saying, listen, this is just an effort to discredit the dossier entirely.
00:10:12.000I mean, by some people on the right, I think it is a disingenuous effort to say that everything in the dossier has already been discredited.
00:10:17.000As I say, some of it has been discredited.
00:10:25.000Two, was steel being used by the Russians?
00:10:28.000Three, did the Democratic Party know that steel was being used by the Russians?
00:10:31.000And four, why did the Democrats lie about all of this if it was just an innocent opal research attempt?
00:10:37.000So here is Adam Schiff, who's a very militant anti-Trump guy, California representative, and he says that this entire story is just an effort to discredit Christopher Steele.
00:10:46.000Christopher Steele, no matter who is paying for his services, may have discovered before our own intelligence agencies that the Russians were going to interfere in our election on behalf of Donald Trump.
00:10:58.000So, we have a lot of work to do in terms of a lot of the claims in the dossier, but I don't think it really adds much value to know who paid for it necessarily, and I view this as part of the effort to discredit him, which really doesn't advance the investigation.
00:11:14.000Okay, so, Adam Schiff making the case that this is all just obfuscation.
00:11:18.000Well, it may all be obfuscation, but the Clinton campaign has some questions to answer.
00:11:23.000Now, a lot of people are doing this routine like, well, Hillary Clinton's not president, so who cares?
00:11:37.000And, again, it does shed light on the Russian collusion stuff, if, in fact, it turns out that the FBI used this dossier as the basis to wiretap people like Carter Page and Mike Flynn, and it was done in corrupt fashion with the help of the Russian government.
00:11:50.000We just don't have that information at this point.
00:11:52.000Any suggestions to the contrary are not true.
00:11:55.000Any suggestions to the contrary that the conspiracy theories have been confirmed, not true.
00:12:00.000So let's not get out in front of the story.
00:12:01.000Okay, I want to get to Jeff Flake resigning from the Senate in just a moment.
00:12:05.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the U.S.
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00:13:13.000Okay, so the other big story of the day is the chaos that's broken out inside the Republican Party.
00:13:18.000And it's all around Jeff Flake, as well as Senator Bob Corker.
00:13:24.000So we talked about Corker yesterday, and the fact that Corker is really kind of an oozy, sleazy guy, and that he and Donald Trump have now gone at it, and so Corker is in opposition to President Trump, somewhat conveniently, and has decided he was not going to run for re-election.
00:13:38.000Now, Corker, if he had run for re-election, probably would have won.
00:13:40.000Jeff Flake is a bit of a different story.
00:13:42.000I think the story that's being told to you by the media today is not true.
00:13:46.000The story that's being told to you by the media today is basically Jeff Flake, intrepid Trump fighter, struck down in the prime of his young career because he stood up against the nastiest man in the universe, Donald Trump.
00:13:57.000Breitbart and Trump stand ascendant over the prone Flake's body as Flake speaks the truth to power.
00:14:03.000That's the story that you're getting, and you're getting it from all sides.
00:14:05.000You're getting it from Flake's camp, you're getting it from the Breitbart Trump people, and you're getting it from the media.
00:14:09.000And I have to say, I don't think this story is even close to the full story.
00:14:15.000What I think the interests are for everyone in doing what happened yesterday.
00:14:19.000So to move back a little bit, Jeff Flake yesterday, the senator from Arizona, announced he would not run for re-election.
00:14:26.000And then he gave a long speech just ripping into President Trump as well as Republicans who were basically soft-pedaling President Trump for a long time.
00:14:35.000Now to Flake's credit in terms of consistency, Flake did not endorse President Trump during the last election cycle and was very critical of President Trump.
00:14:43.000I'm not saying that his opposition to President Trump isn't sincere.
00:14:47.000But I think the problem for Jeff Flake is that he knew that he was going down, and so for the past few months, he's basically attempted to carve out a position as the anti-Trump guy, right?
00:14:57.000The guy who's going to earn strange new respect from the left for saying things about Trump.
00:15:03.000I've said a lot of the same things about President Trump Jeff Flake says about President Trump.
00:15:06.000I agree with a lot of what Jeff Flake says about President Trump.
00:15:08.000But, the difference is that I also compliment Trump when I think he does something right, and I also acknowledge that people voted for Trump not because they embrace Trumpism, not because they think that Trumpism should replace conservatism, but because Trump was the only tool on hand at the time.
00:15:23.000Remember, Trump won a historic low percentage of votes in the Republican primaries to win the actual primaries.
00:15:29.000So it's not like he was well-loved inside the Republican Party.
00:15:32.000Once he was nominated, then the Republican Party swung behind him because he was the nominee against the most hated Democrat of my lifetime, Hillary Clinton.
00:15:39.000But that is not the same thing that Jeff Flake is saying.
00:15:42.000What Jeff Flake basically said in this speech is the Republican Party is a bunch of deplorables, right?
00:15:46.000I mean, he basically made the Hillary Clinton contention.
00:15:48.000The Republican Party is a bunch of deplorables who have fallen into league with Satan.
00:15:52.000Now, again, I think a lot of his critiques of Trump are true.
00:15:55.000And I think that people, I've been saying for a long time, people need to be intellectually honest about what Trump is and what Trump isn't, and they ought to call out lies and untruths and half-truths when they see them.
00:16:04.000They ought to call out the vulgarities and the stupidities that emanate from the White House.
00:16:07.000But that's not the same thing as saying that all Republicans are incapable of doing this.
00:16:11.000And this seemed to be Flake's contention.
00:16:13.000Flake was basically saying in this speech, listen, the reason I'm going down is not because of me.
00:17:41.000was a very unpopular senator pretty much from the get-go.
00:17:43.000There was an article in The Atlantic in 2013 that was titled, How Jeff Flake Became the Most Unpopular Senator in the United States, right?
00:17:50.000Four years ago, before Trump was a gleam in the media's eye or Bannon's eye and Bannon wasn't a gleam in the media's eye, right?
00:17:56.000The fact is that Jeff Flake was already unpopular.
00:17:58.000And the reason that Jeff Flake was unpopular is because he was a hard-right congressman who won 75% of the vote in his district for several terms running.
00:18:07.000And then he came to the Senate and he decided to move to the center.
00:18:10.000The American Conservative Union points out, as senator Flake's score is 80% over four years.
00:18:16.000As representative, his score was 98% over 10 years.
00:18:20.000It's a 20% drop-off in the ACU score, and it's not just that.
00:18:24.000Jason Johnson, who's a former Ted Cruz chief staffer, he laid out a bunch of the votes here.
00:18:31.000He suggested that, you know, here's what he says.
00:18:44.000Flake voted to fund President Obama's unconstitutional executive amnesty.
00:18:48.000Flake voted against Senator Mike Lee's First Amendment Defense Act.
00:18:51.000Flake voted for President Obama's $1.1 trillion Kramnabus 2015 spending bill.
00:18:56.000Flake voted for S2114, which increased Russia's power at the IMF.
00:19:01.000Flake voted for a clean debt limit suspension.
00:19:04.000Flake was one of only 11 Republican senators who voted to confirm Janet Yellen.
00:19:07.000Flake voted for the Ryan-Murray budget, which lifted spending caps and raised taxes in exchange for promises of future spending cuts.
00:19:14.000Flake voted for the Gang of Eight amnesty bill.
00:19:15.000Flake voted for the post-Newtown gun grab.
00:19:17.000Flake voted against the Defund Obamacare Act of 2013.
00:19:20.000Flake voted to increase debt by $900 billion in exchange for the promise of discretionary cuts in the future in 2011.
00:19:27.000Flake preferred John Kasich over Cruz or Trump in the 2016 GOP primary.
00:19:31.000So the point here is that Jeff Flake used to be a much more conservative guy, and he moved to the center, and as he did, he lost the support of the people of Arizona.
00:19:40.000He looked disingenuous, and so he lost that support.
00:19:42.000So here he is saying that he's going down on the burning pyre of Trump, that he's falling on his sword, that he's basically the monk in Vietnam setting himself on fire to demonstrate to the entire world just how terrible President Trump is, but that's not really accurate.
00:19:56.000He's going to run a very tight primary no matter what.
00:19:59.000Now, his opposition to President Trump hasn't helped him for sure.
00:20:03.000But again, I think that it's less about his opposition to President Trump and more about his opposition to the people who voted for President Trump.
00:20:08.000And this is a distinction worthy of note.
00:20:11.000You can oppose things that Trump does.
00:20:13.000You can even say, I don't think Trump makes a very good president.
00:20:17.000But what you can't do, and what he hasn't done, you know, Jeff Flake has not voted against Trump's agenda items.
00:20:23.000Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, Jeff Flake has voted with President Trump's agenda items.
00:20:28.000So when he says that he doesn't like Trump, it's really more a matter of what Trump says and what Trump does as president, not a matter of policy.
00:20:35.000So how that materializes is, you can say, I think Trump is vulgarizing the discourse.
00:20:39.000I think President Trump would be better off if he stopped doing this stuff.
00:20:43.000I think President Trump is not a very good president because he's not doing these things.
00:20:47.000Instead, Flake seems to go at his own constituents, and he has been since April, basically saying the Republican Party was subject to a takeover by a bunch of dolts and morons.
00:20:55.000And I don't think that that's particularly smart politics, nor do I think it's true.
00:21:00.000I think there were a bunch of people who voted for President Trump in the primaries who just thought he was the angriest guy on the stage and didn't think beyond that, which I do think is not smart.
00:21:08.000And then I think once we got past that, there were a lot of people who voted for Ted Cruz in the primaries, or voted for John Kasich in the primaries, who also voted for Donald Trump for president to stop Hillary Clinton.
00:21:17.000So Flake continues along these lines, and he decides that he is going to be the one who stands up to President Trump again.
00:21:22.000I think some of this is Flake posturing.
00:21:24.000The reason that I brought up his popularity ratings and his record is to demonstrate I think that the real story here for Flake is this.
00:21:30.000Flake does have sincere opposition to President Trump.
00:21:39.000What's really happening here is that Flake was going to lose his primary anyway, and now he sees the opportunity to go out as the tragic hero who sacrificed himself in order to throw himself on the gears of the tank to stop President Trump, instead of just another senator who wasn't particularly popular in his home state and feels certain things about Trump.
00:21:59.000So now he has an interest in basically blaming Trump for his ouster.
00:22:03.000Now Trump and Breitbart have an interest in taking credit for his ouster because they can say, listen, we run the movement now.
00:22:09.000If you cross Trump, we will toss you overboard.
00:22:12.000If you cross Trump, if you cross Breitbart, we will toss you.
00:22:15.000Again, Kelly Ward's been running for Senate for well over a year.
00:22:19.000Breitbart's only gotten involved at the very tail end, and Bannon's only getting involved now.
00:22:22.000The same thing is true of Roy Moore in Alabama.
00:22:25.000Bannon and Breitbart basically backed the guy who finished third, Mo Brooks, in the primary, until they switched to Roy Moore, and then they take credit.
00:22:31.000I think Jonah Goldberg has a good line about this.
00:22:33.000Bannon and Breitbart have a bad habit, when it comes to these races, of being the rainmaker who waits for the first rule of rainmaking, as Jonah says, is wait for it to start raining and then start dancing.
00:23:02.000That people who voted for him were wrong to do so, or not understandable, it was foolish and ridiculous for them to do so, or they're racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes who sign off on everything Trump does because they voted for him.
00:23:13.000That's lefty talk and it's not accurate either.
00:23:16.000So Trump and Bannon I don't think are telling the truth, I don't think Flake is telling the full truth, and I think the media have an interest in this narrative too because it does a couple of things for them.
00:23:25.000Mr. President, I rise today to say enough.
00:23:54.000We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal.
00:24:00.000With respect and humility, I must say that we have fooled ourselves for long enough that a pivot to governing is right around the corner, a return to civility and stability right behind it.
00:24:48.000Well, if it were really about principle, you'd stick around and run for re-election and see if you can convince the Republican Party to agree with your principles.
00:24:54.000He's bowing out because he knows he's going to lose.
00:24:57.000I'm aware that more politically savvy people than I will caution against such talk.
00:25:02.000I'm aware that there is a segment of my party that believes that anything short of
00:25:07.000Complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect.
00:25:14.000Okay, so that last line, that my party believes anything short of complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect, I think that's a pretty small segment of the party, I really do.
00:25:25.000I think the Bill Mitchells of the party, the people who think that Trump cannot be criticized under any circumstances, I don't think that's right.
00:25:32.000I think there have been a number of senators who have criticized Trump, including Rand Paul, by the way, who's going to win his re-election easily.
00:25:37.000You can criticize Trump so long as it doesn't feel like you're ripping his voters for voting for him.
00:25:42.000Again, he continues along these lines, and the martyr routine is a little bit strong here.
00:25:47.000He talks about how principled he is even more.
00:25:50.000If I have been critical, it is not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the President of the United States.
00:25:57.000If I have been critical, it is because I believe it is my obligation to do so, and as a matter and duty of conscience.
00:26:07.000The notion that one should stay silent as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined, and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters.
00:26:23.000The notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric, and I believe profoundly misguided.
00:26:32.000Again, the idea that people aren't saying anything against Trump is just absurd.
00:26:35.000Everyone's saying things against Trump.
00:26:36.000Now, listen, I think some people have been cowards in this situation.
00:26:39.000I don't want to pretend that everyone has been, you know, paragons of virtue here.
00:26:42.000I think Paul Ryan doing the, I've never seen his tweets routine.
00:26:45.000I think that Mitch McConnell doing the, I'm just going to ignore whatever the president says routine.
00:26:59.000The reason I'm objecting so strenuously to this is because I know enough conservatives to know that we are a good-hearted party.
00:27:06.000Still, that is attempting to do the right things.
00:27:08.000And I think that criticism of President Trump, so long as it's not taken as criticism of his voting base, I think that people are willing to go along with it.
00:27:15.000I think that what Jeff Flake is doing, and this is really what I object to, I feel like what Jeff Flake is doing here is he is surrendering the party to Trump and to Bannon and to the media's perception of what the Republican Party is.
00:27:26.000Solely so that he can look as though he's a martyr to this new Republican Party.
00:27:37.000I just don't see... I don't see the purpose of handing over the party to... I don't think this is true.
00:27:41.000I don't think that you have to hand over the party to everything Trump says, and drawing this false dichotomy, which is really what Flake is doing here, between the Bill Mitchell wing of the party and the true speaking wing of the party, and you have to pick one of those two.
00:27:56.000You don't have to agree with Jeff Flake on everything in order to criticize President Trump, nor do you have to say that everyone who voted for President Trump is going along with every element of his agenda in order to say that those people were voting for some— Listen, I disagreed with that vote, right?
00:28:09.000I didn't vote for anyone at the top of the ticket, but at least I understood why the vote was happening.
00:28:13.000And I'm not going to attribute bad motivations to the people who disagreed with me on that vote.
00:28:19.000And that's what I feel like Flake is doing.
00:28:20.000And I've got to say, it feels like some of this is for posturing and personal gain, considering he came out with a book called Conscience of a Conservative four months ago, and then did the rounds talking about how bad Trump was in the middle of a tough primary fight.
00:28:31.000If you want to win a primary, you don't go out there and then suggest that the party that embraced President Trump is a nasty, terrible party.
00:28:39.000What you can do instead is you can say, they were misinformed, which I think is true, that they were lied to, which I think is true, that there were people who were preying on a justified anger, which I think is true.
00:28:49.000But this is the equivalent of, this really is the equivalent of, remember when Hillary was asked whether she blamed women who didn't show up to vote for her?
00:28:56.000And she said, yes, of course I blame them.
00:28:59.000So it's convenient for Jeff Flake to do that while he's stepping down.
00:29:02.000Again, this is not even me disagreeing with Flake's critique of President Trump.
00:29:06.000I don't think President Trump has been a very good president.
00:29:08.000I think he's actually been very negative for conservatives in a number of ways.
00:29:12.000That doesn't mean he's been that across the board.
00:29:14.000I mean, as I've said, Gorsuch, regulatory cuts, right, all these things are good.
00:29:18.000But I think that the narrative that's being told to you right now is not true.
00:29:23.000And I want to explain a little bit more about this and why everybody is trotting out this narrative in just a second.
00:29:27.000But first, I want to say thank you to our friends over at My Patriot Supply.
00:29:30.000So, right now if you are looking at the news and you see there's a wildfire in Northern California, in Southern California, in Hurricanes, in Florida, in Texas, in Puerto Rico,
00:29:38.000It seems like everywhere there's some sort of natural disaster where the people there would have been in good shape had they only had some sort of emergency food supply, or at least they would have been in better shape if they had.
00:30:23.000Trump doesn't—like, Trump, I think, deserves to be attacked sometimes.
00:30:26.000I do it on a relatively frequent basis on the show.
00:30:28.000But it's Flake presenting himself as leader.
00:30:32.000If you see that the founders were right about people,
00:30:35.000The Founding Fathers basically said, the reason they structured the Constitution the way they did is because they said, people are ambitious.
00:30:46.000If you see ambition as a prime mover in human motivation, then you're more likely to understand the political dynamic every day.
00:30:52.000So Jeff Flake is an ambitious guy, right?
00:30:55.000He's a senator, of course he's ambitious.
00:30:57.000And here he is trying to set himself up as leader of the sort of anti-Trump conservative resistance, even though he has not been supremely conservative as a senator by any stretch of the imagination.
00:31:07.000He and John Kasich are sort of doing the same thing here.
00:31:10.000And if you look at Steve Bannon, he's trying to set himself up as the leader of Trumpism.
00:31:13.000Even though there is no leader to Trumpism, because Trumpism doesn't exist, there is only Zool, right?
00:32:11.000He finishes up by, and this is the part where I have a problem, where he basically throws the entire conservative agenda under the bus, saying, I am the representative of that conservative agenda.
00:32:20.000If I cannot survive as an anti-Trump speaker, then no one can survive.
00:32:27.000I'm not ready to surrender the party to people who are anti-free trade.
00:32:31.000I'm not ready to surrender the party to people who are not just anti-illegal immigration, as I am, but anti-immigration generally, as I am not.
00:32:38.000I'm not willing to surrender the party to, I think, the more base instincts of some people.
00:32:42.000I'm not ready to do that, because I don't think that's my party.
00:33:00.000I don't think that the party has been soul-sucked.
00:33:01.000I don't think every conservative has become a Trumpkin on every issue.
00:33:04.000I think that conservatives, as I've said before, see President Trump as a litmus test.
00:33:08.000That if you are going to say that Trump is awful, terrible, no good, very bad, evil, and unjustifiable, and that any vote for him was a bad vote,
00:33:18.000If you're going to say that, then that's not a referendum on Trump.
00:33:20.000That's a referendum on all the people who voted for him.
00:33:22.000It's the Hillary Clinton deplorables line all over again.
00:33:25.000I think that that is a point that people are using Trump to elucidate.
00:33:30.000I think people are using Trump as a bit of a litmus test.
00:33:33.000But you can still oppose Trump when he does things that are wrong.
00:33:35.000You can still speak up when he does things that are stupid.
00:33:37.000And I think constituents mostly understand that because a lot of Congress people do that.
00:33:40.000But here is the final thing that Jeff Flake says.
00:33:43.000Again, this is the part I really disagree with.
00:33:45.000This is why I think his motivations here are not entirely sterling.
00:33:49.000It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative who believes in limited government and free markets, who is devoted to free trade, who is pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican Party.
00:34:06.000The party that has so long defined itself by its belief in those things.
00:34:12.000It is also clear to me for the moment that we have given in or given up on the core principles in favor of a more viscerally satisfying anger and resentment.
00:34:24.000To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess that we've created are justified.
00:34:31.000But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.
00:34:35.000There is an undeniable potency to a populist appeal by mischaracterizing or misunderstanding our problems.
00:34:43.000The impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people.
00:34:48.000Okay, so I agree with a lot of the statements that he's making about the appeal to anger.
00:34:52.000I've said the exact same thing on this show.
00:35:09.000The same anger and resentment that drove the Tea Party to victory based on a small government platform drove President Trump to victory based on a populist platform, because anger does not have any philosophy to which it attaches exclusively.
00:35:21.000Anger, it can be anti-establishment anger, and that's what we're watching.
00:35:23.000And that's why I have hope for the future of the conservative movement, because I think that that anger can be turned, and should be turned, toward the right things, not the wrong things.
00:35:31.000I think President Trump has turned things toward the wrong things.
00:35:33.000I think he's turned anger toward things that are unjustified.
00:35:35.000I think that he has excused bad behavior.
00:35:37.000I think that he has made the case on philosophically false grounds that the American people are being screwed by people who really have nothing to do with it.
00:35:57.000I think Trump was the most convenient angry guy at their disposal and they picked him and it's that simple.
00:36:01.000It's not that they have rejected limited government and free markets.
00:36:04.000It's not that they've rejected limited government and free markets.
00:36:06.000I agree that anger cannot be the prime motivator for conservative thought.
00:36:11.000But to suggest that anger has become that prime motivator and Trump is the sole evidence you need and Jeff Flake's ouster is the sole evidence you need is self-serving and a little bit hypocritical.
00:36:21.000Plus, things I like, things I hate, and a little bit of Bible talk.
00:36:24.000But for that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com for just $9.99 a month.
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00:38:00.000So now I'm going to show you that, now I'm going to show you why everyone has an interest in pushing the false narrative that what happened here was not a senator who was going to lose bowing out and then putting that in the best possible light by attacking President Trump.
00:38:12.000Again, not insincerely, but a little bit politically cynically.
00:38:16.000Instead, we've gotten this narrative, Jeff Flake, fallen hero, Donald Trump, villain who put him out.
00:38:22.000And everybody basically has the same take because it's convenient for all of them.
00:38:25.000So here's the Huffington Post headline.
00:38:26.000All right, Huffington Post headlined this yesterday.
00:38:29.000There's the HuffPost big banner headline yesterday.
00:39:08.000Ben Shapiro, strange new respect, right?
00:39:10.000There's this idea that anytime you oppose Trump, strange new respect from the media.
00:39:14.000The media have an interest in promulgating that narrative because what they want is
00:39:18.000The people who are losing are the people for whom they have strange new respect, the good folks, the people who have been exiled from the party.
00:40:17.000The fact of the matter is the people they like least, the establishment, organizations inside, people inside the Republican Party, are not running for re-election because Donald Trump has helped chase them out of the party.
00:40:29.000You go back to the primary and 16 candidates, many of them cut from the same cloth as Corker and of Lake, couldn't compete with Donald Trump.
00:40:37.000Ted Cruz and Donald Trump got 80% of all Republican votes cast in that primary.
00:40:42.000The establishment candidates got less than 20% state by state by state from the beginning to the very end.
00:40:48.000So now you are seeing that manifestation of it play out in the Senate.
00:40:51.000What I have a hard time wrapping my mind around is they said you must fight, you must stop, you must stand up to President Trump.
00:41:00.000It seems to me, if you feel that fervently about standing up to fight, then you go through your primary and you prove that you can move Republicans to your direction, but instead of fighting, they yield it.
00:41:10.000Yes, I mean, I agree with the last part of what Fleischer is saying there, but what I hate is the combination where he says that, where he just sort of slips that in, 80% of the primary vote went to Trump and Cruz.
00:41:19.000Yes, and Cruz had policy prescriptions that were precisely the opposite of Trump's in many of these cases, and he was winning heavy percentages of the vote as a really unattractive candidate.
00:41:28.000Which, again, shows that Trump is the avatar of the anger, but he is not the new philosophy of the Republican Party.
00:41:34.000I'm not willing to surrender the party that Jeff Flake is.
00:41:36.000This is my biggest objection with Jeff Flake.
00:41:38.000What Jeff Flake did yesterday is he basically said, the party is now Trump's party.
00:42:46.000Uh, it's not, you know, old radio drama in the sense that you have like the, the cheesy squeaking sounds of the shoes on the pavements or anything.
00:42:53.000Um, but it's, it's great to listen to and it's getting good numbers.
00:42:56.000Go and check Another Kingdom and go subscribe to it.
00:43:00.000And you can do that at iTunes or SoundCloud as well.
00:43:03.000Andrew Clavin's Another Kingdom performed by our very own Michael Knowles, who shockingly has the capacity to act, actually.
00:43:09.000I was surprised by that, considering our interactions in the theatrical sense here at the office, because so far, I've not seen the acting chops.
00:43:25.000Kathy Griffin has decided to disown her former disowning of her beheading of Donald Trump.
00:43:32.000So you recall that she infamously held up a beheaded sort of mock-up of Trump's head with blood dripping over the face in almost ISIS fashion.
00:43:51.000And it'll be fascinating to see whether the Hollywood elite accept her back in.
00:43:54.000I think there's a good chance that they will because, you know, as time heals all wounds, it looked bad in the moment that she was beheading President Trump, but they really hate President Trump down deep too, so she'll probably start going to all the good cocktail parties again.
00:44:05.000Here she is calling President Trump a psycho.
00:44:07.000These Trump folks, they self-identify as deplorables, like, as if that's a good thing.
00:44:16.000I'm sorry that we have put this guy on everybody else's lap.
00:44:19.000And I don't know what's happening in my own country.
00:44:21.000You know, when Kathy Griffin says things like, you know, they call themselves deplorables, the reason they say they're deplorables is because they're mocking Hillary Clinton, who said that half of all Trump voters are racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes who hate the poor.
00:44:33.000And does she think that she's winning anyone over to her side?
00:44:35.000Again, I think that very few people in the country right now are focused on winning over new converts to their side.
00:44:41.000Again, this is my objection to Flake's speech.
00:44:42.000I don't think Flake's speech wins people over to his side.
00:44:45.000I think Flake's speech actually alienates a lot of the people he's attempting to reach out to, and I think he had a habit of that, which is why he was losing his Senate race to Kelly Ward, an osteopathic physician who apparently has questioned the validity of chemtrails before.
00:45:02.000The virtue signaling has to stop from all sides.
00:45:03.000It's just, it's virtue signaling, like, try to convince someone.
00:45:06.000It's so funny, you know, I get ripped in the press.
00:45:08.000I got ripped in the New York Times for quote-unquote not trying to convince people.
00:45:10.000I would bet dollars to Donuts that we have more leftists and liberals who listen to this program than who listen to the vast majority of other conservative programs.
00:45:21.000And I would guarantee you that the number of products that I personally have endorsed and said people should go read on Things I Like,
00:45:28.000from the left is much higher than it would be on some shows of the left, because I think it's interesting to read the other side.
00:45:33.000Kathy Griffin isn't interested in having the conversation.
00:45:35.000She's interested in calling people Nazis.
00:45:39.000Another way you got Trump is stupidity like this.
00:45:41.000There's this protester who showed up at the Senate yesterday, and President Trump was walking through with Turtley Turtle Man Mitch McConnell, and here is the protester throwing Russian flags at President Trump.
00:46:26.000Is it great that he's doing that right in front of the president?
00:46:29.000Not particularly, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it.
00:46:31.000What I do love is look at how the media's cameras shift, right?
00:46:34.000They're following Trump down the hall, and then immediately they all flip their cameras, and you can see one of the cameramen sort of grinning at the guy screaming, Trump is treason.
00:46:41.000You know, the media eat this stuff up.
00:47:06.000And it's another broken promise from conservatives who said they were going to stop Obama's executive amnesty, not that they were going to reinforce Obama's executive amnesty on the legislative level.
00:47:14.000Okay, so, I want to do a little bit of Bible talk today.
00:47:17.000So I've decided to change the format of Bible talk.
00:47:18.000Instead of just taking whatever the Jews happen to be reading this week, I'm going to just give a biblical thought that has been occurring to me, because I do spend a fair bit of time thinking about the depth of the Bible.
00:47:28.000So, a couple of weeks ago, we started reading the Torah again,
00:48:11.000What makes something good, in the Aristotelian view, is that it is fitted to its purpose.
00:48:17.000My watch is good, my MVMT watch right here, this watch is good, because it tells time and looks good.
00:48:22.000That is its job, and so it is good at being a watch.
00:48:25.000You're good at being a radio host if you can get listeners.
00:48:28.000You're good at being a senator if you are capable of exercising independent judgment and acting on behalf of the interests of the United States.
00:48:35.000And you're a good person, according to Aristotelian thought, if you fulfill the function of a human, which is to think and reason.
00:48:41.000This is basically Aristotle's notion of good and then virtue is all the qualities that you have to push in yourself so that you can achieve these heights of reason and rationality.
00:48:55.000Moral good is the idea that we determine of our own thinking what is a good thing to do and what is a bad thing to do.
00:49:02.000What is a moral thing to do and what is an immoral thing to do.
00:49:05.000It has little to do with purpose itself.
00:49:07.000It has to do more with our moral intuition.
00:49:09.000This, I think, is what the Bible is trying to tell us at the very beginning.
00:49:12.000So, at the very beginning of the Bible, when God says, let there be light, and then there's light, and then God says, it says, and God saw that the light was good, it was evening and it was morning the first day, right?
00:49:22.000When it does that, when it says, and God saw that it was good, what does it mean it was good?
00:49:25.000Does it mean the light was morally good?
00:49:27.000What did the light do to earn that sort of moniker?
00:49:37.000On the first six days, the only thing that is not considered fitted to its purpose is the separation of the firmaments, the separation of the waters on day two.
00:49:45.000But everything else is considered fitted to its purpose, right?
00:49:50.000Man has now been created, and God says, here's the Tree of Life, and here's the Tree of Good and Evil.
00:49:54.000He says you can eat from the Tree of Life.
00:49:55.000He never tells people not to eat from the Tree of Life, right?
00:49:57.000For all we know, Adam and Eve were eating from the Tree of Life regularly.
00:50:01.000Because he never forbids them from doing that.
00:50:02.000He only forbids them from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
00:50:06.000Okay, the word evil only pops up its head for the first time in this context.
00:50:11.000And what the Torah is saying here is it's contrasting the idea of tov, meaning fitted to its purpose, from good and evil in moral terms.
00:50:18.000And what it's saying is, if man would think in terms of what purpose are you fitted for, what purpose did God fit you to, you'll live a happier, more complete life than if you are making up your own standards of right and wrong.
00:50:37.000He has implanted... His morality can be discerned by discerning purpose.
00:50:41.000And that's the idea of the original good.
00:50:42.000But the tree of knowledge of good and evil says that man can create his own perceptions, his own subjective perceptions, of what it is that's good and evil.
00:50:50.000And so what is the natural punishment for that?
00:50:53.000Once you've done that, once you've decided that you're going to take the world that God created, ignore His purpose, and make your own, then everything falls out of kilter, right?
00:51:00.000You're not actually acting in accordance with nature.
00:51:02.000You're no longer acting in accordance with how nature is supposed to work.
00:51:09.000God says the natural consequence of you eating from the tree of good and evil is that you can no longer live forever in the sense that you're not now a part of nature.
00:51:17.000You're something separate from nature, judging it as something apart from nature for its good and moral content.
00:51:22.000And also, the earth will not yield you its fruit, right?
00:51:24.000You're gonna have to work for a living.
00:51:25.000Childbirth is going to be painful, right?
00:51:27.000I'm sure childbirth was painful before the eating from the tree, but the idea was that that was part of the purpose, right?
00:51:32.000Part of the purpose was the pain, because the pain is what allows you to- I mean, it's the cramps that push the baby out, right?
00:51:38.000It is the uterus seizing up that pushes the baby out.
00:51:56.000It's not that human beings become inherently evil.
00:51:58.000It's not the original sin is that we now become sinful.
00:52:01.000It's that before, when you're acting in accordance with God's purpose, as we were before acting in accordance with the Aristotelian notion of God's good, when you do that,
00:52:08.000Then you are always going to be acting with the good, and sin doesn't become an issue.
00:52:12.000But sin becomes an issue as soon as we start substituting our own judgment for God's, in terms of not purpose of good, but in terms of what we personally think is morally good for us.
00:52:21.000Because we're not the final judges of that.
00:52:23.000We did not make God, and we did not make the morality that God created and embedded in the universe.
00:52:27.000Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with more deep thoughts like that, and presumably more fallout from all the political matters of the day.