The Ben Shapiro Show - Clintonian Lies And A Republican Flake Out | Ep. 403

00:00:00.000 Another big Hillary Clinton lie blows up the political scene. 1.00

00:00:03.000 Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona is on his way out, and he slams the door on his way out.

00:00:08.000 We'll talk about all of that.

00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:10.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:16.000 So 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.

00:00:25.000 But before we get to that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.

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00:01:03.000 Everyone from GQ to Cosmo to the New York Times are talking about Helix.

00:01:07.000 I don't know.

00:01:29.000 We're good to go.

00:01:46.000 Something 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.

00:01:55.000 So, you need a little bit of background to understand what exactly is going on here.

00:01:59.000 So, first I have to explain to you what the Trump-Russia dossier is.

00:02:02.000 If you remember back to earlier this year, BuzzFeed released a dossier that was full of information, some of it more credible than others.

00:02:09.000 People have been saying that the entire dossier has been debunked.

00:02:12.000 That is not true.

00:02:13.000 Some of the dossier has actually been substantiated.

00:02:16.000 Some of the dossier has not. 0.96

00:02:17.000 The 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? 0.87

00:02:28.000 That was peegate, if you recall this. 0.99

00:02:30.000 It was ridiculous. 0.94

00:02:30.000 We made fun of it. 0.94

00:02:32.000 And that, of course, is not true, or at least there's no evidence to that effect.

00:02:36.000 If there were, then that would be the greatest political story in the history of mankind, but it is not.

00:02:40.000 So 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.

00:02:55.000 So where did this dossier come from?

00:02:57.000 The 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.

00:03:08.000 This is the allegation.

00:03:09.000 The allegation is, and it's more of a conspiracy theory than an allegation, that the Russians

00:03:14.000 We're using Christopher Steele basically as a cutout.

00:03:17.000 This is the spy who's responsible for the compilation of the dossier that he knew that the Russians were giving him bad information.

00:03:23.000 He put it in the dossier, which was funded by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

00:03:27.000 That 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.

00:03:36.000 Or Mike Flynn, the one-time Trump national security advisor.

00:03:40.000 That's the allegation anyway.

00:03:42.000 There are a few pieces of evidence that have to be there in order for this allegation to hold true.

00:03:45.000 One, we have to show that Christopher Steele, the spy, actually was being played by the Russians.

00:03:49.000 Number two, we have to show that the DNC and Hillary knew that Christopher Steele was being played by the Russians.

00:03:54.000 That would look like collusion.

00:03:55.000 Right?

00:03:55.000 The sort of collusion that Democrats have been accusing Trump of.

00:03:58.000 And 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.

00:04:07.000 That 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?

00:04:21.000 It didn't.

00:04:22.000 So here is the full timeline on the Trump

00:04:24.000 The Trump-Russia dossier.

00:04:26.000 So Wikipedia actually has a pretty good timeline here, so I'll use that as the basis for this.

00:04:30.000 In 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.

00:04:39.000 For months, they did.

00:04:40.000 Okay, 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.

00:04:53.000 Or Elias.

00:04:54.000 He's the lawyer who represented both the DNC and the Clinton presidential campaign.

00:04:58.000 So the Hillary campaign knew. 0.61

00:04:59.000 The DNC knew.

00:05:00.000 The Hillary people are claiming they didn't know.

00:05:02.000 That's really not credible.

00:05:04.000 And it was not until after Elias came on board that Christopher Steele was hired as the dossier compiler.

00:05:09.000 So the claim has been basically that even Mark Elias didn't know Steele was the guy compiling the dossier.

00:05:14.000 That's a little bit weak.

00:05:15.000 In June 2016,

00:05:18.000 We're good to go.

00:05:37.000 That's the timeline on the Trump Russia dossier.

00:05:52.000 So it is not correct when the media say that the Republicans funded the Steele dossier.

00:05:56.000 That's not technically true.

00:05:57.000 They funded the beginning of the investigation before Steele was involved.

00:06:00.000 When the Republicans, when conservatives say that this was obvious collusion between Hillary Clinton and the Russian government, again, no evidence to that effect.

00:06:08.000 In 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.

00:06:17.000 She was attempting to make nice with the Russians, in all likelihood, with regard to selling 20% of America's uranium stockpile.

00:06:23.000 But with regard to gathering Trump oppo intel research, not any evidence to support that.

00:06:28.000 Also, 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.

00:06:34.000 The reason that I lay all of this out is because I want you to have the truth about what exactly is happening here.

00:06:39.000 I think that there's a lot of lies being told by both sides.

00:06:42.000 On the left, they're saying, this is no big deal at all.

00:06:44.000 You know, oppo research is oppo research.

00:06:46.000 What's the big deal?

00:06:47.000 The 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.

00:06:57.000 So we just don't know the answer to that one yet.

00:06:59.000 On the right, the same answer applies.

00:07:00.000 We don't know the answer to that one yet, so you can't assume that such collusion was taking place in the first place.

00:07:05.000 So here's what the Washington Post reported, and here's the key component, okay?

00:07:09.000 Mark Elias apparently lied to the New York Times about his involvement in the dossier.

00:07:13.000 So apparently he told Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who's not involved in the compilation of the dossier at all.

00:07:18.000 He suggested the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign did not fund the dossier.

00:07:21.000 That turns out to be false.

00:07:22.000 The 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.

00:07:36.000 People familiar with the matter said.

00:07:37.000 Mark Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

00:07:44.000 After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intel officer with ties to the FBI and the US intelligence community.

00:07:52.000 So 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.

00:08:03.000 Now, it just shows you that the rabid left is just as bad as some of the more rabid people on the right. 0.88

00:08:09.000 They went after Maggie Haberman tooth and nail for this. 0.98

00:08:11.000 So Mark Elias lied to her.

00:08:13.000 She said he lied to me, and she's the bad guy.

00:08:15.000 She's the problem here, Maggie Haberman, who has been thoroughly, thoroughly Trump-skeptical from the start.

00:08:22.000 In any case, it says, Fusion GPS officials had pled the fifth before the House Intel Committee to avoid answering funding questions.

00:08:27.000 So there's still questions.

00:08:29.000 Why was the DNC, and why were Hillary hiding this?

00:08:31.000 That's the big question here.

00:08:33.000 Why?

00:08:33.000 What do they have to hide?

00:08:34.000 Because they were lying about it.

00:08:35.000 For months.

00:08:36.000 Or taking the fifth.

00:08:37.000 Like, what's the big deal?

00:08:39.000 Why didn't they just come up front and say, listen, sure, we funded an OPPO research file.

00:08:43.000 Sure, Christopher Steele was one of those guys.

00:08:46.000 So?

00:08:47.000 So?

00:08:48.000 I mean, if the implication is, well, they were using foreign sources to gather intel, we already knew that from Hillary's camp.

00:08:54.000 They were using the Ukrainian government to gather foreign intel.

00:08:57.000 We know that.

00:08:57.000 Politico reported it last year.

00:09:00.000 So, again, the real question here is, as always with the Clintons, what are they trying to hide?

00:09:05.000 The 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?

00:09:11.000 Hillary did this with regard to the Whitewater papers. 0.70

00:09:14.000 Hillary's still the only First Lady in American history to be fingerprinted by the FBI. 0.99

00:09:19.000 Hillary Clinton did this with regard to her email chains, right? 0.95

00:09:22.000 She deleted 33,000 emails, then claimed it was completely innocent.

00:09:25.000 Every clumsy attempt to obfuscate the truth ends up making people more and more suspicious.

00:09:29.000 There's a reason to be suspicious around here.

00:09:32.000 There's a reason to be suspicious about all of this.

00:09:35.000 There's also a reason to be suspicious because it's not like Fusion GPS hasn't worked with the Russians before.

00:09:39.000 So William Browder is a businessman who pushed for sanctions on Russia.

00:09:43.000 He's testified in the past that the Russian government used Fusion GPS before to conduct a smear campaign against him personally.

00:09:50.000 Browder 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.

00:10:03.000 So that question remains an open question.

00:10:06.000 And now the Democrats are pushing back by saying, listen, this is just an effort to discredit the dossier entirely.

00:10:11.000 Well, yes, it is.

00:10:12.000 I 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.

00:10:17.000 As I say, some of it has been discredited.

00:10:20.000 Some of it has not.

00:10:22.000 But there are serious open questions on both sides of this.

00:10:24.000 One, what in the dossier is true?

00:10:25.000 Two, was steel being used by the Russians?

00:10:28.000 Three, did the Democratic Party know that steel was being used by the Russians?

00:10:31.000 And four, why did the Democrats lie about all of this if it was just an innocent opal research attempt?

00:10:37.000 So 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.

00:10:46.000 Christopher 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.

00:10:58.000 So, 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.

00:11:14.000 Okay, so, Adam Schiff making the case that this is all just obfuscation.

00:11:18.000 Well, it may all be obfuscation, but the Clinton campaign has some questions to answer.

00:11:23.000 Now, a lot of people are doing this routine like, well, Hillary Clinton's not president, so who cares?

00:11:27.000 Why is it a big deal?

00:11:28.000 If Hillary's not president, what exactly are you whining about? 0.97

00:11:31.000 And the answer is, if she had been president, you'd be saying it's beneath her to answer these questions.

00:11:34.000 So, wrongdoing is still wrongdoing.

00:11:37.000 And, 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.

00:11:50.000 We just don't have that information at this point.

00:11:52.000 Any suggestions to the contrary are not true.

00:11:55.000 Any suggestions to the contrary that the conspiracy theories have been confirmed, not true.

00:12:00.000 So let's not get out in front of the story.

00:12:01.000 Okay, I want to get to Jeff Flake resigning from the Senate in just a moment.

00:12:05.000 But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the U.S.

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00:13:13.000 Okay, so the other big story of the day is the chaos that's broken out inside the Republican Party.

00:13:18.000 And it's all around Jeff Flake, as well as Senator Bob Corker.

00:13:24.000 So 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.

00:13:38.000 Now, Corker, if he had run for re-election, probably would have won.

00:13:40.000 Jeff Flake is a bit of a different story.

00:13:42.000 I think the story that's being told to you by the media today is not true.

00:13:46.000 The 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.

00:13:57.000 Breitbart and Trump stand ascendant over the prone Flake's body as Flake speaks the truth to power.

00:14:03.000 That's the story that you're getting, and you're getting it from all sides.

00:14:05.000 You're getting it from Flake's camp, you're getting it from the Breitbart Trump people, and you're getting it from the media.

00:14:09.000 And I have to say, I don't think this story is even close to the full story.

00:14:13.000 So first, let me express...

00:14:15.000 What I think the interests are for everyone in doing what happened yesterday.

00:14:19.000 So to move back a little bit, Jeff Flake yesterday, the senator from Arizona, announced he would not run for re-election.

00:14:26.000 And 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.

00:14:35.000 Now 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.

00:14:43.000 I'm not saying that his opposition to President Trump isn't sincere.

00:14:46.000 I think it is sincere.

00:14:47.000 But 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?

00:14:57.000 The guy who's going to earn strange new respect from the left for saying things about Trump.

00:15:01.000 I want to be fair here.

00:15:03.000 I've said a lot of the same things about President Trump Jeff Flake says about President Trump.

00:15:06.000 I agree with a lot of what Jeff Flake says about President Trump.

00:15:08.000 But, 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.

00:15:23.000 Remember, Trump won a historic low percentage of votes in the Republican primaries to win the actual primaries.

00:15:29.000 So it's not like he was well-loved inside the Republican Party.

00:15:32.000 Once 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. 0.57

00:15:39.000 But that is not the same thing that Jeff Flake is saying.

00:15:42.000 What Jeff Flake basically said in this speech is the Republican Party is a bunch of deplorables, right?

00:15:46.000 I mean, he basically made the Hillary Clinton contention. 0.97

00:15:48.000 The Republican Party is a bunch of deplorables who have fallen into league with Satan.

00:15:52.000 Now, again, I think a lot of his critiques of Trump are true. 0.78

00:15:55.000 And 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. 0.99

00:16:04.000 They ought to call out the vulgarities and the stupidities that emanate from the White House. 0.98

00:16:07.000 But that's not the same thing as saying that all Republicans are incapable of doing this. 1.00

00:16:11.000 And this seemed to be Flake's contention.

00:16:13.000 Flake was basically saying in this speech, listen, the reason I'm going down is not because of me.

00:16:19.000 It's not even because of Trump.

00:16:20.000 It's because the Republican Party has fallen into disrepair. 1.00

00:16:23.000 The Republican constituents, my base, the people who elected me, are a bunch of dunderheads. 0.99

00:16:28.000 It's not that they made a choice against Hillary Clinton. 0.99

00:16:30.000 It's not that they held their nose and voted for Trump.

00:16:32.000 It's not even that they like Trump, but they can also critique him.

00:16:34.000 It's that they have fallen full-scale under the sway of President Trump.

00:16:37.000 I think this is a wild overstatement.

00:16:39.000 I also think it's a politically convenient one.

00:16:40.000 So let's play Flake's speech, and then I'm going to explain what I think is really going on.

00:16:43.000 So Flake gets up yesterday on the floor of the Senate, and he says that he is not going to run for re-election.

00:16:49.000 He explains why.

00:16:50.000 Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office.

00:16:54.000 And there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles.

00:17:00.000 Now is such a time.

00:17:01.000 Okay, so he says that now is the time for all men of goodwill to stand up.

00:17:05.000 Except that he's resigning, right?

00:17:07.000 He's not sticking around to fight Trump's bad agenda items.

00:17:09.000 He's not sticking around to run for re-election and try and, you know, wrest control of the party away from Trump.

00:17:15.000 No, Jeff Flake is resigning.

00:17:17.000 So where exactly is the, where is he risking his career in favor of principals?

00:17:21.000 Where was the risk?

00:17:23.000 This is the part that I don't really buy.

00:17:25.000 The idea that he risked his career to stop President Trump.

00:17:28.000 Jeff Flake has been the most unpopular senator in the United States Senate since 2013.

00:17:33.000 So long before Trump was running for president.

00:17:35.000 Long before anyone cared about Steve Bannon.

00:17:37.000 Long before anyone cared about Breitbart.

00:17:39.000 The fact is that Jeff Flake

00:17:41.000 was a very unpopular senator pretty much from the get-go.

00:17:43.000 There was an article in The Atlantic in 2013 that was titled, How Jeff Flake Became the Most Unpopular Senator in the United States, right?

00:17:50.000 Four 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?

00:17:56.000 The fact is that Jeff Flake was already unpopular.

00:17:58.000 And 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.

00:18:07.000 And then he came to the Senate and he decided to move to the center.

00:18:10.000 The American Conservative Union points out, as senator Flake's score is 80% over four years.

00:18:16.000 As representative, his score was 98% over 10 years.

00:18:20.000 It's a 20% drop-off in the ACU score, and it's not just that.

00:18:23.000 Here's a list of some of his votes.

00:18:24.000 Jason Johnson, who's a former Ted Cruz chief staffer, he laid out a bunch of the votes here.

00:18:31.000 He suggested that, you know, here's what he says.

00:18:44.000 Flake voted to fund President Obama's unconstitutional executive amnesty.

00:18:48.000 Flake voted against Senator Mike Lee's First Amendment Defense Act.

00:18:51.000 Flake voted for President Obama's $1.1 trillion Kramnabus 2015 spending bill.

00:18:56.000 Flake voted for S2114, which increased Russia's power at the IMF.

00:19:01.000 Flake voted for a clean debt limit suspension.

00:19:04.000 Flake was one of only 11 Republican senators who voted to confirm Janet Yellen.

00:19:07.000 Flake voted for the Ryan-Murray budget, which lifted spending caps and raised taxes in exchange for promises of future spending cuts.

00:19:14.000 Flake voted for the Gang of Eight amnesty bill.

00:19:15.000 Flake voted for the post-Newtown gun grab.

00:19:17.000 Flake voted against the Defund Obamacare Act of 2013.

00:19:20.000 Flake voted to increase debt by $900 billion in exchange for the promise of discretionary cuts in the future in 2011.

00:19:27.000 Flake preferred John Kasich over Cruz or Trump in the 2016 GOP primary.

00:19:31.000 So 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.

00:19:40.000 He looked disingenuous, and so he lost that support.

00:19:42.000 So 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.

00:19:55.000 Jeff Flake was going to be primary.

00:19:56.000 He's going to run a very tight primary no matter what.

00:19:59.000 Now, his opposition to President Trump hasn't helped him for sure.

00:20:03.000 But 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.

00:20:08.000 And this is a distinction worthy of note.

00:20:11.000 You can oppose things that Trump does.

00:20:13.000 You can even say, I don't think Trump makes a very good president.

00:20:16.000 You can do all of those things.

00:20:17.000 But what you can't do, and what he hasn't done, you know, Jeff Flake has not voted against Trump's agenda items.

00:20:23.000 Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, Jeff Flake has voted with President Trump's agenda items.

00:20:28.000 So 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.

00:20:35.000 So how that materializes is, you can say, I think Trump is vulgarizing the discourse.

00:20:39.000 I think President Trump would be better off if he stopped doing this stuff.

00:20:43.000 I think President Trump is not a very good president because he's not doing these things.

00:20:46.000 But that's not what Flake does. 1.00

00:20:47.000 Instead, 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. 1.00

00:20:55.000 And I don't think that that's particularly smart politics, nor do I think it's true. 1.00

00:20:59.000 I really don't think that's true.

00:21:00.000 I 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.

00:21:08.000 And 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.

00:21:17.000 So Flake continues along these lines, and he decides that he is going to be the one who stands up to President Trump again.

00:21:22.000 I think some of this is Flake posturing.

00:21:24.000 The 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.

00:21:30.000 Flake does have sincere opposition to President Trump.

00:21:32.000 He does not like President Trump. 0.98

00:21:34.000 He thinks President Trump is a boor and a vulgarian. 0.96

00:21:36.000 I think some of those critiques are fair. 0.96

00:21:38.000 I really do.

00:21:38.000 But...

00:21:39.000 What'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.

00:21:59.000 So now he has an interest in basically blaming Trump for his ouster.

00:22:03.000 Now Trump and Breitbart have an interest in taking credit for his ouster because they can say, listen, we run the movement now.

00:22:09.000 If you cross Trump, we will toss you overboard.

00:22:12.000 Right? 0.98

00:22:12.000 If you cross Trump, if you cross Breitbart, we will toss you. 0.98

00:22:15.000 Again, Kelly Ward's been running for Senate for well over a year. 1.00

00:22:19.000 Breitbart's only gotten involved at the very tail end, and Bannon's only getting involved now.

00:22:22.000 The same thing is true of Roy Moore in Alabama.

00:22:25.000 Bannon 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.

00:22:31.000 I think Jonah Goldberg has a good line about this.

00:22:33.000 Bannon 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.

00:22:44.000 Right?

00:22:44.000 Because then people mistake the dancing for the cause of the rain.

00:22:47.000 And I think that that's exactly what's happened here.

00:22:49.000 So Breitbart and Trump have an interest in saying, we run the party now.

00:22:52.000 Cross us and we'll burn you down.

00:22:54.000 I don't think that's actually real.

00:22:56.000 I don't think that's actually true.

00:22:58.000 I think that you can cross Trump pretty much with impunity, actually.

00:23:01.000 As long as you don't say, 0.99

00:23:02.000 That 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. 0.96

00:23:13.000 That's lefty talk and it's not accurate either. 0.94

00:23:16.000 So 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.

00:23:23.000 One, it allows them to

00:23:25.000 Mr. President, I rise today to say enough.

00:23:54.000 We must dedicate ourselves to making sure that the anomalous never becomes the normal.

00:24:00.000 With 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.

00:24:15.000 We know better than that.

00:24:17.000 By now, we all know better than that.

00:24:20.000 So there he is.

00:24:21.000 We all know better.

00:24:22.000 Nothing good is coming around the corner.

00:24:23.000 Again, all of this is fair, but I don't know why it's effective or useful.

00:24:29.000 Like, I think that we all have our feelings about President Trump.

00:24:32.000 I've been highly critical of President Trump.

00:24:34.000 But I do not know what the purpose of all this is.

00:24:37.000 And here's where he casts himself in the role of martyr.

00:24:39.000 Here's where he does the Joan of Arc routine.

00:24:40.000 He's going to hop up on that pyre and light the flame.

00:24:43.000 He says that, you know, this is not about political savvy.

00:24:46.000 This is about principle.

00:24:48.000 It's about principle.

00:24:48.000 Well, 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.

00:24:54.000 He's bowing out because he knows he's going to lose.

00:24:56.000 Here he is.

00:24:57.000 I'm aware that more politically savvy people than I will caution against such talk.

00:25:02.000 I'm aware that there is a segment of my party that believes that anything short of

00:25:07.000 Complete and unquestioning loyalty to a president who belongs to my party is unacceptable and suspect.

00:25:14.000 Okay, 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.

00:25:25.000 I 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.

00:25:30.000 I just don't think that's true.

00:25:32.000 I 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.

00:25:37.000 You can criticize Trump so long as it doesn't feel like you're ripping his voters for voting for him.

00:25:42.000 Again, he continues along these lines, and the martyr routine is a little bit strong here.

00:25:47.000 He talks about how principled he is even more.

00:25:50.000 If I have been critical, it is not because I relish criticizing the behavior of the President of the United States.

00:25:57.000 If I have been critical, it is because I believe it is my obligation to do so, and as a matter and duty of conscience.

00:26:07.000 The 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.

00:26:23.000 The notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric, and I believe profoundly misguided.

00:26:32.000 Again, the idea that people aren't saying anything against Trump is just absurd.

00:26:35.000 Everyone's saying things against Trump.

00:26:36.000 Now, listen, I think some people have been cowards in this situation.

00:26:39.000 I don't want to pretend that everyone has been, you know, paragons of virtue here.

00:26:42.000 I think Paul Ryan doing the, I've never seen his tweets routine.

00:26:45.000 I think that Mitch McConnell doing the, I'm just going to ignore whatever the president says routine.

00:26:50.000 I think that's wrong.

00:26:51.000 I think that they should speak out.

00:26:52.000 But again, I don't think speaking out is the same thing as saying that you're going to go down simply because you spoke out.

00:26:58.000 I don't think that's correct.

00:26:59.000 The reason I'm objecting so strenuously to this is because I know enough conservatives to know that we are a good-hearted party.

00:27:06.000 Still, that is attempting to do the right things.

00:27:08.000 And 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.

00:27:15.000 I 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.

00:27:26.000 Solely so that he can look as though he's a martyr to this new Republican Party.

00:27:30.000 So that he can play, you know, St.

00:27:32.000 Thomas Beckett against Henry II.

00:27:36.000 Like, I just don't... Henry II.

00:27:37.000 I just don't see... I don't see the purpose of handing over the party to... I don't think this is true.

00:27:41.000 I 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.

00:27:54.000 I don't think that's right.

00:27:55.000 I think that

00:27:56.000 You 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?

00:28:09.000 I didn't vote for anyone at the top of the ticket, but at least I understood why the vote was happening.

00:28:13.000 And I'm not going to attribute bad motivations to the people who disagreed with me on that vote. 0.72

00:28:17.000 I mean, that's just, that's silly.

00:28:19.000 And that's what I feel like Flake is doing.

00:28:20.000 And 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.

00:28:31.000 If 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.

00:28:39.000 What 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.

00:28:49.000 But 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?

00:28:56.000 And she said, yes, of course I blame them.

00:28:58.000 It feels like some of this.

00:28:59.000 So it's convenient for Jeff Flake to do that while he's stepping down.

00:29:02.000 Again, this is not even me disagreeing with Flake's critique of President Trump.

00:29:06.000 I don't think President Trump has been a very good president.

00:29:08.000 I think he's actually been very negative for conservatives in a number of ways.

00:29:12.000 That doesn't mean he's been that across the board.

00:29:14.000 I mean, as I've said, Gorsuch, regulatory cuts, right, all these things are good.

00:29:18.000 But I think that the narrative that's being told to you right now is not true.

00:29:23.000 And I want to explain a little bit more about this and why everybody is trotting out this narrative in just a second.

00:29:27.000 But first, I want to say thank you to our friends over at My Patriot Supply.

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00:29:38.000 It 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.

00:29:47.000 That's why you need to prepare, okay?

00:29:48.000 Get a 102-serving survival food kit for just 99 bucks from my friends at My Patriot Supply.

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00:30:16.000 Okay, so, again, part of the problem with this speech is not that it was just an attack on Trump.

00:30:22.000 I don't care.

00:30:22.000 That's fine.

00:30:23.000 Trump doesn't—like, Trump, I think, deserves to be attacked sometimes.

00:30:26.000 I do it on a relatively frequent basis on the show.

00:30:28.000 But it's Flake presenting himself as leader.

00:30:32.000 If you see that the founders were right about people,

00:30:35.000 The Founding Fathers basically said, the reason they structured the Constitution the way they did is because they said, people are ambitious.

00:30:41.000 People want power.

00:30:42.000 Ambition should therefore counteract ambition.

00:30:45.000 They should check each other.

00:30:46.000 If you see ambition as a prime mover in human motivation, then you're more likely to understand the political dynamic every day.

00:30:52.000 So Jeff Flake is an ambitious guy, right?

00:30:55.000 He's a senator, of course he's ambitious.

00:30:57.000 And 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.

00:31:07.000 He and John Kasich are sort of doing the same thing here.

00:31:10.000 And if you look at Steve Bannon, he's trying to set himself up as the leader of Trumpism.

00:31:13.000 Even though there is no leader to Trumpism, because Trumpism doesn't exist, there is only Zool, right?

00:31:17.000 Trump is the only one who exists.

00:31:19.000 Trumpism is not a real philosophy.

00:31:21.000 If you see that everyone is trying to set themselves up as leader, you're more likely to understand what's going on. 0.93

00:31:25.000 So here is Jeff Flake trying to set himself up as leader in opposition to the bad, evil, terrible President Trump.

00:31:31.000 Leadership knows that most often

00:31:34.000 A good place to start in assigning blame is to look somewhat closer to home.

00:31:39.000 Leadership knows where the buck stops.

00:31:42.000 Humility helps.

00:31:44.000 Character counts.

00:31:46.000 Leadership does not knowingly encourage or feed ugly or debased appetites in us.

00:31:51.000 Okay, again, I agree with a lot of this.

00:31:55.000 I've said it before, that all politicians pander to anger.

00:31:57.000 Politicians make their bank off of anger.

00:32:00.000 But his idea that I am the leader, that's the undercurrent here.

00:32:05.000 Leadership knows this.

00:32:06.000 Leadership knows that.

00:32:08.000 Who knows that?

00:32:09.000 I know that.

00:32:09.000 Well, that's amazing.

00:32:10.000 Look at that coincidence.

00:32:11.000 He 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.

00:32:20.000 If I cannot survive as an anti-Trump speaker, then no one can survive.

00:32:24.000 The party has been taken over.

00:32:25.000 Run for the hills.

00:32:26.000 I'm not ready to run for the hills.

00:32:27.000 I'm not ready to surrender the party to people who are anti-free trade.

00:32:31.000 I'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.

00:32:38.000 I'm not willing to surrender the party to, I think, the more base instincts of some people.

00:32:42.000 I'm not ready to do that, because I don't think that's my party.

00:32:44.000 I don't think that's my movement.

00:32:45.000 Maybe Jeff Flake is right.

00:32:48.000 Maybe it's time for despair.

00:32:50.000 There's a lot of despair, I think, in the traditional conservative movement, that the party has been soul-sucked.

00:32:56.000 I feared that that was going to happen when Trump took office.

00:32:59.000 I fear it a little less now.

00:33:00.000 I don't think that the party has been soul-sucked.

00:33:01.000 I don't think every conservative has become a Trumpkin on every issue.

00:33:04.000 I think that conservatives, as I've said before, see President Trump as a litmus test.

00:33:08.000 That 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,

00:33:18.000 If you're going to say that, then that's not a referendum on Trump.

00:33:20.000 That's a referendum on all the people who voted for him.

00:33:22.000 It's the Hillary Clinton deplorables line all over again.

00:33:25.000 I think that that is a point that people are using Trump to elucidate.

00:33:30.000 I think people are using Trump as a bit of a litmus test.

00:33:33.000 But you can still oppose Trump when he does things that are wrong. 1.00

00:33:35.000 You can still speak up when he does things that are stupid. 0.99

00:33:37.000 And I think constituents mostly understand that because a lot of Congress people do that. 0.99

00:33:40.000 But here is the final thing that Jeff Flake says.

00:33:43.000 Again, this is the part I really disagree with.

00:33:45.000 This is why I think his motivations here are not entirely sterling.

00:33:49.000 It 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.

00:34:06.000 The party that has so long defined itself by its belief in those things.

00:34:12.000 It 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.

00:34:24.000 To be clear, the anger and resentment that the people feel at the royal mess that we've created are justified.

00:34:31.000 But anger and resentment are not a governing philosophy.

00:34:35.000 There is an undeniable potency to a populist appeal by mischaracterizing or misunderstanding our problems.

00:34:43.000 The impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people.

00:34:48.000 Okay, so I agree with a lot of the statements that he's making about the appeal to anger.

00:34:52.000 I've said the exact same thing on this show.

00:34:53.000 I don't disagree with him.

00:34:55.000 But it's that first sentence that bothers me.

00:34:59.000 The anger and the resentment, he is right.

00:35:01.000 They are not a governing strategy.

00:35:03.000 But he himself is suggesting that they are replete with a particular philosophy, and I don't think that's right.

00:35:08.000 I don't think that's true.

00:35:09.000 The 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.

00:35:21.000 Anger, it can be anti-establishment anger, and that's what we're watching.

00:35:23.000 And 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.

00:35:31.000 I think President Trump has turned things toward the wrong things.

00:35:33.000 I think he's turned anger toward things that are unjustified.

00:35:35.000 I think that he has excused bad behavior.

00:35:37.000 I 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.

00:35:44.000 I think all of those things are true.

00:35:45.000 But the idea that

00:35:47.000 That that represents, that Trumpism is the final iteration of Americans' anger.

00:35:52.000 That Trumpism is the final stage of Republican anger.

00:35:56.000 I don't think that's right.

00:35:57.000 I think Trump was the most convenient angry guy at their disposal and they picked him and it's that simple.

00:36:01.000 It's not that they have rejected limited government and free markets.

00:36:04.000 It's not that they've rejected limited government and free markets.

00:36:06.000 I agree that anger cannot be the prime motivator for conservative thought. 0.92

00:36:11.000 But 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.

00:36:20.000 I want to talk more about this. 0.72

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00:36:50.000 Tumblr, which is the greatest beverage vessel ever created by human or godly hands.

00:36:55.000 It is just incredible.

00:36:57.000 Again, the big mistake that the bad guy makes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is that he does not pick this mug.

00:37:04.000 Had he done so, then all would have been well, and his face would not have fallen off, and he wouldn't have turned into a horrible-looking skeleton.

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00:37:15.000 And the Shapiro store is coming.

00:37:16.000 I keep saying it.

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00:38:00.000 So 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.

00:38:12.000 Again, not insincerely, but a little bit politically cynically.

00:38:16.000 Instead, we've gotten this narrative, Jeff Flake, fallen hero, Donald Trump, villain who put him out.

00:38:22.000 And everybody basically has the same take because it's convenient for all of them.

00:38:25.000 So here's the Huffington Post headline.

00:38:26.000 All right, Huffington Post headlined this yesterday.

00:38:29.000 There's the HuffPost big banner headline yesterday.

00:38:32.000 Bannon storms the desert, right?

00:38:33.000 It's Bannon who took out Jeff Flake.

00:38:36.000 Nonsense.

00:38:37.000 Nonsense.

00:38:39.000 I worked at Breitbart, okay? 1.00

00:38:40.000 This is crap. 1.00

00:38:41.000 It's crapola. 1.00

00:38:42.000 Kelly Ward was running against Jeff Flake for well over a year before Bannon even knew how to spell Arizona. 1.00

00:38:47.000 This idea that Breitbart was the

00:38:50.000 soul mover here is a creation of the media because the media love this story, right?

00:38:54.000 They want it to be a fight for the soul of the party between two bad guys.

00:38:58.000 That's their goal, right?

00:38:59.000 The losers are all the good, honest, noble men, the people for whom the media have a strange new respect, right?

00:39:05.000 Jeff Flake, strange new respect.

00:39:06.000 Ben Sasse, strange new respect.

00:39:08.000 Ben Shapiro, strange new respect, right?

00:39:10.000 There's this idea that anytime you oppose Trump, strange new respect from the media.

00:39:14.000 The media have an interest in promulgating that narrative because what they want is

00:39:18.000 The 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.

00:39:24.000 And the people who are winning?

00:39:25.000 It's Steve Bannon and his white nationalist brute squad.

00:39:28.000 They're the people who are winning.

00:39:29.000 So Huffington Post is happy to push that.

00:39:31.000 Of course, so is Breitbart.

00:39:32.000 So Breitbart immediately posts the HuffPo headline as its own headline, saying, look, even HuffPo says this.

00:39:37.000 Of course, HuffPost says this.

00:39:39.000 I mean, they have an interest in pushing this.

00:39:41.000 Trump has an interest in pushing this.

00:39:43.000 Jeff Flake has an interest in pushing this.

00:39:45.000 I think everyone is misinterpreting here.

00:39:46.000 I think it's a big mistake, right?

00:39:48.000 Ari Fleischer, who typically, his political analysis is pretty good.

00:39:52.000 But, you know, when he says this is a win for Trump and Bannon, in what sense is it a win for Trump and Bannon?

00:39:57.000 I mean, it's quite possible that Kelly Ward loses the Senate race and then Trump loses the seat in Arizona.

00:40:02.000 And again, you can't pin this one on Trump because Jeff Flake was

00:40:06.000 You know, the lowest rated senator among his home state contingent of any senator in the country for years before any of this happened.

00:40:13.000 Look at events today and not declare that Donald Trump won.

00:40:16.000 Steve Bannon won.

00:40:17.000 The 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.

00:40:28.000 But go back in time.

00:40:29.000 It is true.

00:40:29.000 You 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.

00:40:37.000 Ted Cruz and Donald Trump got 80% of all Republican votes cast in that primary.

00:40:42.000 The establishment candidates got less than 20% state by state by state from the beginning to the very end.

00:40:48.000 So now you are seeing that manifestation of it play out in the Senate.

00:40:51.000 What 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.

00:40:59.000 But then they don't run.

00:41:00.000 It 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.

00:41:10.000 Yes, 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.

00:41:19.000 Yes, 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.

00:41:28.000 Which, again, shows that Trump is the avatar of the anger, but he is not the new philosophy of the Republican Party.

00:41:34.000 I'm not willing to surrender the party that Jeff Flake is.

00:41:36.000 This is my biggest objection with Jeff Flake.

00:41:38.000 What Jeff Flake did yesterday is he basically said, the party is now Trump's party.

00:41:41.000 The party is not Trump's party.

00:41:43.000 Trump is just the figurehead for a party, and he's a figurehead of the id.

00:41:47.000 But Jeff Flake had every right to be in the Senate, just as Trump has to be in the White House.

00:41:50.000 And the idea that Jeff Flake is sort of responsible for, that Donald Trump is the final iteration, is just silliness.

00:41:58.000 It's not true.

00:41:59.000 Trump is not, and again, conflating his popularity and his ideology would be a big mistake and a not true one.

00:42:06.000 It's just not true.

00:42:06.000 Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then we'll do a little bit of Bible talk.

00:42:09.000 So, things I like.

00:42:11.000 So today's Things I Like is a podcast called Another Kingdom.

00:42:15.000 This is a fictional podcast put together by our very own Andrew Klavan and performed by our very own Michael Knowles.

00:42:20.000 It is not actually a Daily Wire project.

00:42:23.000 One of the reasons for that is because it is replete with cursing.

00:42:26.000 But it is really entertaining, it's really well done.

00:42:29.000 Knowles acts it, Klavan wrote it, and the basic premise is that there's a failed Hollywood screenwriter

00:42:36.000 Uh, who stumbles into a doorway that leads him, a portal that leads him into basically a fantasy knights and maidens world.

00:42:43.000 Uh, and it's, it's really well written.

00:42:45.000 It's really fun to listen to.

00:42:46.000 Uh, 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.

00:42:53.000 Um, but it's, it's great to listen to and it's getting good numbers.

00:42:56.000 Go and check Another Kingdom and go subscribe to it.

00:42:59.000 I think Ricochet puts it out.

00:43:00.000 And you can do that at iTunes or SoundCloud as well.

00:43:03.000 Andrew Clavin's Another Kingdom performed by our very own Michael Knowles, who shockingly has the capacity to act, actually.

00:43:09.000 I 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.

00:43:15.000 But he shows them.

00:43:17.000 He shows them in Another Kingdom, so check it out.

00:43:18.000 OK, time for some things that I hate.

00:43:24.000 So it's virtue signaling all around.

00:43:25.000 Kathy Griffin has decided to disown her former disowning of her beheading of Donald Trump.

00:43:32.000 So 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.

00:43:42.000 And she was castigated for it.

00:43:43.000 She lost her job at CNN for it on New Year's Eve.

00:43:46.000 And now Kathy Griffin is back at it. 1.00

00:43:48.000 And she's saying Trump's a psycho. 0.98

00:43:49.000 She's trying to earn her way back in. 1.00

00:43:51.000 And it'll be fascinating to see whether the Hollywood elite accept her back in. 1.00

00:43:54.000 I 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. 0.95

00:44:05.000 Here she is calling President Trump a psycho. 0.89

00:44:07.000 These Trump folks, they self-identify as deplorables, like, as if that's a good thing. 1.00

00:44:12.000 And they're psychos. 1.00

00:44:13.000 I mean, they're nuts. 1.00

00:44:13.000 So I'm here to apologize. 1.00

00:44:16.000 I'm sorry that we have put this guy on everybody else's lap.

00:44:19.000 And I don't know what's happening in my own country. 0.97

00:44:21.000 You 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. 0.96

00:44:32.000 I mean, let's be real about that. 0.96

00:44:33.000 And does she think that she's winning anyone over to her side?

00:44:35.000 Again, I think that very few people in the country right now are focused on winning over new converts to their side.

00:44:41.000 Again, this is my objection to Flake's speech.

00:44:42.000 I don't think Flake's speech wins people over to his side.

00:44:45.000 I 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.

00:44:59.000 You know, like, I just don't...

00:45:02.000 The virtue signaling has to stop from all sides.

00:45:03.000 It's just, it's virtue signaling, like, try to convince someone.

00:45:06.000 It's so funny, you know, I get ripped in the press.

00:45:08.000 I got ripped in the New York Times for quote-unquote not trying to convince people.

00:45:10.000 I 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.

00:45:21.000 And I would guarantee you that the number of products that I personally have endorsed and said people should go read on Things I Like,

00:45:28.000 from 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.

00:45:33.000 Kathy Griffin isn't interested in having the conversation. 0.99

00:45:35.000 She's interested in calling people Nazis.

00:45:37.000 Again, this is how you got Trump. 1.00

00:45:39.000 Another way you got Trump is stupidity like this. 1.00

00:45:41.000 There'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. 1.00

00:45:53.000 Trump is treason! 0.98

00:45:54.000 Trump is treason! 1.00

00:45:55.000 Trump is treason! 1.00

00:45:58.000 Trump is treason! 0.99

00:46:00.000 Why are you talking about tax cuts when you should be talking about treason? 0.62

00:46:03.000 Why is Congress talking about tax cuts when they should be talking about treason?

00:46:08.000 This president conspired with agents of the Russian government to steal an election.

00:46:12.000 We should be talking about treason in Congress, not about tax cuts.

00:46:16.000 Okay, so that guy, of course, was very happy to get all the attention. 0.97

00:46:20.000 What I hate about this is not the guy throwing the flags, because that's dumb, but, you know, it's America. 0.94

00:46:25.000 It's free speech. 0.88

00:46:26.000 Is it great that he's doing that right in front of the president?

00:46:29.000 Not particularly, but I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it.

00:46:31.000 What I do love is look at how the media's cameras shift, right?

00:46:34.000 They'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.

00:46:41.000 You know, the media eat this stuff up.

00:46:44.000 They love the polarization.

00:46:45.000 It's their favorite thing.

00:46:46.000 Instead of focusing on what unifies us, the media have an interest in driving us apart.

00:46:49.000 Okay, final thing that I hate.

00:46:50.000 Paul Ryan says that the DREAM Act, the new DREAM Act, is going to be part of the spending bill.

00:46:54.000 Once again, I hate omnibus bills.

00:46:56.000 I hate them.

00:46:57.000 The idea that in order for me to fund defense, I have to fund the DREAM Act, green cards for so-called DREAMers. 1.00

00:47:05.000 It's absurd.

00:47:06.000 It's absurd.

00:47:06.000 And 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.

00:47:14.000 Okay, so, I want to do a little bit of Bible talk today.

00:47:17.000 So I've decided to change the format of Bible talk.

00:47:18.000 Instead 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.

00:47:28.000 So, a couple of weeks ago, we started reading the Torah again,

00:47:33.000 We're good to go.

00:47:48.000 And I have a read on the tree of good and evil, knowledge of good and evil, that I think is kind of interesting at the very least.

00:47:54.000 So, here I want to pose two ideas that are sort of in opposition.

00:47:58.000 One is the idea of Aristotelian good, and the other is the idea of moral good.

00:48:02.000 These are not the same thing.

00:48:03.000 So, the way Aristotle thought of something being good was the way that you would think of a watch being good.

00:48:09.000 Or a hamburger being good.

00:48:11.000 What makes something good, in the Aristotelian view, is that it is fitted to its purpose.

00:48:17.000 My watch is good, my MVMT watch right here, this watch is good, because it tells time and looks good.

00:48:22.000 That is its job, and so it is good at being a watch.

00:48:25.000 You're good at being a radio host if you can get listeners.

00:48:28.000 You'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.

00:48:34.000 That's what makes you good at things.

00:48:35.000 And you're a good person, according to Aristotelian thought, if you fulfill the function of a human, which is to think and reason.

00:48:41.000 This 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.

00:48:52.000 That's Aristotelian good.

00:48:54.000 Moral good is something different.

00:48:55.000 Moral 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.

00:49:02.000 What is a moral thing to do and what is an immoral thing to do.

00:49:05.000 It has little to do with purpose itself.

00:49:07.000 It has to do more with our moral intuition.

00:49:09.000 This, I think, is what the Bible is trying to tell us at the very beginning.

00:49:12.000 So, 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?

00:49:22.000 When it does that, when it says, and God saw that it was good, what does it mean it was good?

00:49:25.000 Does it mean the light was morally good?

00:49:27.000 What did the light do to earn that sort of moniker?

00:49:29.000 Right?

00:49:29.000 It says it was tov, it was good.

00:49:31.000 What it did is it was good at being a light, right?

00:49:33.000 It fulfilled its purpose.

00:49:34.000 It was fitted to its purpose.

00:49:37.000 On 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.

00:49:45.000 But everything else is considered fitted to its purpose, right?

00:49:48.000 It is towed.

00:49:49.000 Then we get into the Garden of Eden.

00:49:50.000 Man has now been created, and God says, here's the Tree of Life, and here's the Tree of Good and Evil.

00:49:54.000 He says you can eat from the Tree of Life.

00:49:55.000 He never tells people not to eat from the Tree of Life, right?

00:49:57.000 For all we know, Adam and Eve were eating from the Tree of Life regularly.

00:50:01.000 Because he never forbids them from doing that.

00:50:02.000 He only forbids them from eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

00:50:06.000 Okay, the word evil only pops up its head for the first time in this context.

00:50:11.000 And 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.

00:50:18.000 And 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.

00:50:31.000 Right?

00:50:31.000 Your subjective standards of right and wrong.

00:50:33.000 Now God has implanted his morality in the world, is the idea here.

00:50:37.000 Right?

00:50:37.000 He has implanted... His morality can be discerned by discerning purpose.

00:50:41.000 And that's the idea of the original good.

00:50:42.000 But 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.

00:50:48.000 Right?

00:50:48.000 This morally relativistic perspective.

00:50:50.000 And so what is the natural punishment for that?

00:50:53.000 Once 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?

00:51:00.000 You're not actually acting in accordance with nature.

00:51:02.000 You're no longer acting in accordance with how nature is supposed to work.

00:51:05.000 So what happens?

00:51:06.000 God says, it's not a curse.

00:51:08.000 It's not that God's angry.

00:51:09.000 God 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.

00:51:17.000 You're something separate from nature, judging it as something apart from nature for its good and moral content.

00:51:22.000 And also, the earth will not yield you its fruit, right?

00:51:24.000 You're gonna have to work for a living.

00:51:25.000 Childbirth is going to be painful, right? 1.00

00:51:27.000 I'm sure childbirth was painful before the eating from the tree, but the idea was that that was part of the purpose, right?

00:51:32.000 Part 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?

00:51:38.000 It is the uterus seizing up that pushes the baby out.

00:51:40.000 We understood that.

00:51:41.000 But now, all of a sudden, we recognize pain as evil.

00:51:45.000 We recognize work as an evil.

00:51:47.000 And so now, stuff that was just considered natural and purposeful is considered an evil.

00:51:52.000 So we start seeing things in darker terms.

00:51:54.000 And that's what happens.

00:51:55.000 That's the transition.

00:51:56.000 It's not that human beings become inherently evil.

00:51:58.000 It's not the original sin is that we now become sinful.

00:52:01.000 It'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,

00:52:08.000 Then you are always going to be acting with the good, and sin doesn't become an issue.

00:52:12.000 But 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.

00:52:21.000 Because we're not the final judges of that.

00:52:22.000 God made us.

00:52:23.000 We did not make God, and we did not make the morality that God created and embedded in the universe.

00:52:27.000 Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with more deep thoughts like that, and presumably more fallout from all the political matters of the day.

00:52:34.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:52:35.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 25, 2017

Clintonian Lies And A Republican Flake Out | Ep. 403

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