The Ben Shapiro Show - Corruption, Chaos, and Cretinism | Ep. 472

00:00:00.000 A soap opera breaks out at the White House, the Republicans decide that it's time to spend all the monies, and we check the mailbag.

00:00:05.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:06.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:12.000 So many dramatic and terrible events all in one day, and we'll discuss all of them in just a moment.

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00:01:42.000 Okay, so, the continuing controversy that follows the White House today is, of course, the controversy over Rob Porter.

00:01:56.000 When did the White House know that top Trump aide Rob Porter had allegedly beaten not one, but two of his ex-wives, and when did they know about it?

00:02:05.000 What did they know about it, and when did they know about it, right?

00:02:06.000 Those are the two questions.

00:02:08.000 John Kelly is the White House chief of staff.

00:02:10.000 He's the one who stood by Porter as late as Tuesday afternoon.

00:02:13.000 He was saying that Rob Porter was his man.

00:02:14.000 He was standing by Rob Porter.

00:02:16.000 Rob Porter was just great.

00:02:17.000 There are a bunch of defenders inside the Trump administration.

00:02:20.000 And it now turns out that Trump is angry at those defenders because there's a photo of one of this guy's ex-wives.

00:02:26.000 And one of this guy's ex-wives actually has a photo of a big shiner on her face. 1.00

00:02:31.000 We showed it to you yesterday.

00:02:33.000 Well, one of the big questions that has arisen is, there are questions now about Hope Hicks.

00:02:37.000 Hope Hicks is the beautiful young staffer who works at the White House. 0.99

00:02:40.000 She's very close to the president.

00:02:42.000 She started off, I believe, as a PR flack for Ivanka's fashion line, and then moved into the Trump campaign, and now is at the top levels of the White House.

00:02:49.000 Apparently, very nice person, but has terrible taste in men. 1.00

00:02:52.000 And she is now dating Rob Porter, and Rob Porter's ex-wife says, listen, Hope, if Rob hasn't been abusive with you yet, don't worry, he will.

00:03:01.000 Rob Porter's now in a relationship with the White House Press Secretary, Hope Hicks.

00:03:06.000 Do you think he's changed?

00:03:09.000 I don't think he's changed.

00:03:13.000 Does that worry you?

00:03:17.000 It worries me for a lot of reasons.

00:03:20.000 I mean, it definitely worries me because if I'm being frank with you, if he hasn't already been abusive with Hope, he will.

00:03:29.000 And particularly now that he's under a lot of stress and scrutiny, that's when the behaviors come out.

00:03:35.000 And if he hasn't already, he will.

00:03:37.000 So Hope Hicks is under a lot of fire from the White House.

00:03:39.000 She's under a lot of fire from outside the White House.

00:03:41.000 And for pretty good reason here, because what we have on our hands here is indeed a soap opera.

00:03:46.000 Yes.

00:03:48.000 Hope Hicks, a young woman looking for love in all the wrong places.

00:03:52.000 She dated Corey Lewandowski, the Trump campaign manager who was married at the time.

00:03:57.000 During the campaign, was spotted yelling at him on the street by the New York Post.

00:04:02.000 Corey Lewandowski, of course, had a penchant for grabbing women and bruising them and then lying about it for three weeks.

00:04:08.000 Hope Hicks then moved on from Corey Lewandowski to Rob Porter, who it turns out has a penchant for allegedly punching women in the face.

00:04:15.000 Hope Hicks then helped co-write the memo, and that memo that would exonerate Rob Porter, that memo basically was written for Kelly and said that Rob Porter was a wonderful man.

00:04:25.000 So not only does Hope Hicks have some problems in choosing dudes, Hope Hicks has some problems in defending bad dudes. 0.99

00:04:31.000 And President Trump is rightly angry, saying, why in the world are you defending a staffer over me?

00:04:37.000 Your job is to protect me from bad staffers.

00:04:40.000 Trump apparently didn't know about the statement that had been drafted in order to help exonerate Rob Porter.

00:04:45.000 He didn't know about any of that stuff until it came out and it was too late for him to do anything.

00:04:48.000 So he's spitting mad at Hope Hicks as well he should be.

00:04:51.000 So that is the soap opera portion of what's going on at the White House.

00:04:54.000 We also have the John Kelly portion of what's going on at the White House.

00:04:57.000 So Kelly...

00:04:58.000 It now turns out, testified in 2016 on behalf of a Marine who is alleged to have committed some sort of sexual abuse or sexual assault, and then he went on to go—according to The New York Times, this Marine went on to abuse a child sexually.

00:05:09.000 So, there are a lot of problems inside the Trump administration with defending some pretty bad folks.

00:05:14.000 Raj Shah was out there defending the White House response yesterday.

00:05:17.000 Why was he out there as opposed to Hope Hicks?

00:05:19.000 Well, because Hope is at the center of the soap opera.

00:05:22.000 Is any of this good for the White House?

00:05:24.000 The answer, of course, is no.

00:05:25.000 But we've had a lot of bad staffing decisions, right? 0.99

00:05:27.000 In the first year of the Trump administration, we had Steve Bannon, a piece of crap, who was in and then he was out. 0.98

00:05:32.000 We had Anthony Scaramucci, who was in for five minutes and then out. 0.99

00:05:35.000 We had Mike Flynn, who's now under indictment.

00:05:39.000 He was in and then he was out.

00:05:40.000 We've had 37 people inside the Trump administration who were in and then they were out.

00:05:45.000 Not good.

00:05:46.000 So Raj Shah was out there trying to explain this yesterday because Hope Hicks couldn't come front and center and defend what she'd done because she's involved with the man.

00:05:53.000 By the way, Lewandowski, the other element to the soap opera that I forgot, the other element is that Corey Lewandowski allegedly is the one who leaked to the media all of the information about Rob Porter.

00:06:02.000 Apparently.

00:06:02.000 Yeah, we can play the music.

00:06:03.000 That's right.

00:06:04.000 Corey Lewandowski.

00:06:05.000 The allegations made against Rob Porter, as we understand them, involve incidents long before he joined the White House.

00:06:35.000 Therefore, they are best evaluated through the background check process.

00:06:39.000 It's important to remember that Rob Porter has repeatedly denied these allegations and done so publicly.

00:06:46.000 That doesn't change how serious and disturbing these allegations are.

00:06:50.000 Okay, the problem is that a lot of people knew about this at the time.

00:06:53.000 The Washington Post reporting today, quote, in January 2017, right, this is a year ago, White House counsel Don McGahn learned of the allegations and he wanted Porter to stay put because he saw the Harvard Law Train Capitol Hill veteran as a steadying professional voice in the White House, according to people familiar with the matter.

00:07:07.000 His view didn't change in June when the FBI flagged some of its findings to the White House, nor did he act in September.

00:07:12.000 We're good to go.

00:07:30.000 Which raises some questions.

00:07:31.000 What exactly is the White House looking for?

00:07:32.000 Are they looking for good staffers, capable staffers?

00:07:34.000 Is the White House looking for people who are good at their jobs?

00:07:37.000 Or is the White House looking for loyalty?

00:07:38.000 Because you look at Raj Shah's response yesterday saying, well, the process sort of had to play out.

00:07:42.000 And now look at the White House response to Omarosa.

00:07:46.000 OK, let's look at the White House response to Omarosa.

00:07:48.000 So Omarosa yesterday, to go back for a second, Omarosa Manigault is a person who is on Trump's reality TV show.

00:07:54.000 She was fired three times on his separate reality TV shows. 0.88

00:07:57.000 Then he hired her for the campaign.

00:07:58.000 And then she was working in the White House, basically walking around doing stuff that nobody knows what she was doing. 0.52

00:08:03.000 And then she came out yesterday on TV.

00:08:05.000 She said that everything at the White House is awful.

00:08:07.000 Here's what she had to say.

00:08:10.000 Not there.

00:08:12.000 It's not my circus, not my monkeys.

00:08:16.000 I'd like to say not my problem, but I can't say that because it's bad.

00:08:23.000 Oh, it's so bad.

00:08:24.000 Okay, so she says all this stuff and people are, oh my goodness, the crying.

00:08:28.000 Yes, Trump picked this person to be in the White House.

00:08:30.000 Solid staffing pick by the president.

00:08:32.000 She then came out and she said that she would not vote for Trump again if she were given the opportunity.

00:08:37.000 Would you vote for him again?

00:08:41.000 Never.

00:08:45.000 Not in a million years, never.

00:08:47.000 Not in a million years.

00:08:47.000 Okay, so how did the White House respond to that?

00:08:49.000 The White House ripped the crap out of Omarosa. 0.96

00:08:51.000 So, you have a guy in the White House who's credibly accused by two ex-wives of beating them, and the White House quasi-defends until the last minute. 0.98

00:08:59.000 Omarosa says, I won't vote for the guy again.

00:09:00.000 She was a reality TV star. 1.00

00:09:02.000 Was this non-predictable?

00:09:04.000 Right?

00:09:04.000 And here's the White House ripping Omarosa.

00:09:06.000 What is the White House's reaction to comments made by former White House aide Omarosa on Celebrity Big Brother, where she said, quote, she is haunted by the president's tweets.

00:09:14.000 She described the situation inside the White House as bad and said it is not going to be okay.

00:09:21.000 Not very seriously.

00:09:22.000 Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice.

00:09:25.000 And this was the fourth time we let her go.

00:09:28.000 She had limited contact with the president while here.

00:09:31.000 She has no contact now.

00:09:32.000 Okay, so I love that.

00:09:33.000 They fired her three times, but then they brought her back the fourth! 1.00

00:09:35.000 And then they fired her a fourth time. 0.99

00:09:37.000 But they're really pissed at Omarosa.

00:09:38.000 But Rob Porter...

00:09:39.000 You know what they're really dicey about, which demonstrates that when it comes to the Trump administration, loyalty matters a lot more than competence, and that's a serious problem.

00:09:45.000 That should not be the case at any business.

00:09:47.000 Loyalty matters.

00:09:48.000 Competence matters more, particularly at the level of the White House, right?

00:09:51.000 People who made one anti-Trump remark during the campaign have been banned, essentially, from the White House, or at least were when they originally staffed it up.

00:09:58.000 And that rules out a lot of pretty competent people, because they weren't quote-unquote loyal, and so you end up with loyalists who may not, in fact, be particularly competent.

00:10:05.000 There's a bunker mentality at the White House, and it came to bear here, and it's really nasty, and there is no excuse for it.

00:10:10.000 It is disgusting that anyone was defending Rob Porter after these allegations were known.

00:10:14.000 It is particularly disgusting that people were defending Rob Porter after, you know, after there were reports on Tuesday.

00:10:22.000 Again, all of that, there's just no excuse for it, and you have to wonder whether the people in charge who knew about it ought to be fired.

00:10:28.000 And I am talking about John Kelly.

00:10:30.000 If John Kelly knew and he was defending this guy for a year, if McGahn knew for a year, they've misserved the president of the United States.

00:10:37.000 OK, so I do want to talk about a piece of even bigger news.

00:10:40.000 That is the Republicans deciding that fiscal conservatism is no longer a thing.

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00:12:00.000 All right, so last night,

00:12:02.000 Late in the evening, right?

00:12:03.000 In the early wee morning hours on the East Coast, the Republican Congress, along with a bunch of Democrats, voted in favor of a two-year funding bill.

00:12:11.000 This is not a budget, okay?

00:12:13.000 It's not technically a budget.

00:12:14.000 The reason that makes a difference is if you don't pass a budget, you can't use reconciliation processes to pass new bills.

00:12:20.000 I don't know.

00:12:36.000 So that prevents them from passing any new legislation that really affects spending, so they can pass something on DACA maybe.

00:12:42.000 But that's about it, right?

00:12:42.000 There'll be no further movement on Obamacare.

00:12:45.000 There'll be no further movement on taxes.

00:12:47.000 There'll be no further movement, significant movement, on regulation in all likelihood.

00:12:50.000 You know, that's a serious problem.

00:12:52.000 The bigger problem, however, is they just blew out the budget.

00:12:54.000 I mean, blew it out.

00:12:56.000 They're spending more money now than Barack Obama was spending.

00:12:58.000 They're spending about the same amount of money, actually, as Obama was spending.

00:13:00.000 They blew out a trillion-dollar debt yesterday, a trillion-dollar deficit in the budget.

00:13:04.000 They blew a hole in it.

00:13:05.000 Rand Paul wanted to stand up and say something about it.

00:13:08.000 You know, Rand has a knack for standing and talking at these times, and that's something you've got to appreciate about the senator from Kentucky.

00:13:15.000 Here is Rand Paul saying, listen, you know, we campaign on fiscal responsibility, and then we lie about it.

00:13:20.000 And, you know, the thing is, is we think when Democrats are in charge that the Republicans are the conservative party.

00:13:25.000 The problem is when the Republicans are in charge, there's no conservative party.

00:13:29.000 And that's kind of where we are now.

00:13:31.000 Someone has to stand up and say, you should spend what comes in.

00:13:35.000 We should balance our ledger.

00:13:37.000 And that used to be what it meant to be conservative.

00:13:39.000 But a lot of so-called conservatives lose their mind.

00:13:43.000 Once it becomes a partisan thing, and they say, oh, we must govern now.

00:13:46.000 So they govern by giving us massive new debt.

00:13:50.000 And I don't think that's good for the country.

00:13:51.000 I think ultimately it threatens our security, not only our external security, but also the internal foundation of the country is threatened by so large a debt.

00:14:00.000 He is exactly right here.

00:14:01.000 The real problem with the debt is not that we're going to go bankrupt immediately.

00:14:04.000 We're still the strongest economy on planet Earth.

00:14:05.000 That means people are going to continue buying our bonds.

00:14:07.000 But one of the problems you have is that over time, as you accrue more and more debt,

00:14:12.000 Where are you going to keep getting people to buy into that?

00:14:15.000 Right now, the American debt-to-GDP ratio is growing and growing.

00:14:20.000 So I want to look it up right now.

00:14:22.000 The United States-American debt-to-GDP ratio, let's see, what is it here in the United States?

00:14:28.000 Is...

00:14:30.000 Let's see, it is 106.1% of the country's GDP.

00:14:35.000 We have a government debt equivalent to more than the entire country's GDP.

00:14:39.000 Okay, that is not a good thing.

00:14:40.000 That is not a good thing.

00:14:42.000 Okay, we reached a record low in that number in 1981 under Reagan when our government debt was only 32% of GDP.

00:14:49.000 But that is not a healthy number.

00:14:51.000 Okay, if you look at debt to GDP ratio by country, we are starting to climb those charts and they are not good in the slightest.

00:14:59.000 Right?

00:14:59.000 In Japan, of course, Japan is basically bankrupt.

00:15:02.000 Their public debt is now 243% of GDP.

00:15:06.000 But China's really low.

00:15:06.000 It's like 23% of GDP because they can just tax the crap out of their own citizens.

00:15:10.000 I think so.

00:15:30.000 We're good to go.

00:15:47.000 Now government's taking off, and this new stimulus of deficit spending will be as big as President Obama's stimulus.

00:15:55.000 Don't you remember when Republicans howled to high heaven that President Obama was spending us into the gutter, spending us into oblivion?

00:16:04.000 And now Republicans are doing the same thing!

00:16:07.000 And so I ask the question, whose fault is it?

00:16:10.000 Republicans?

00:16:12.000 Yes.

00:16:13.000 Whose fault is it?

00:16:14.000 Democrats?

00:16:14.000 Yes, it's both parties' fault.

00:16:17.000 You realize that this is the secret of Washington.

00:16:19.000 The dirty little secret is the Republicans are loudly clamoring for more military spending, but they can't get it unless they give the Democrats welfare spending.

00:16:29.000 So they raise all the spending.

00:16:31.000 It's a compromise in the wrong direction.

00:16:34.000 Okay, and he is correct about this.

00:16:36.000 He is wrong, by the way, about military spending as a general matter.

00:16:40.000 This is one of the problems with Rand Paul is that Rand is very anti-military spending.

00:16:43.000 I'm fine with the idea that we don't have to radically revamp our military spending and jigger it upward in any tremendous way.

00:16:51.000 Rand actually wants to cut it tremendously because he thinks that we should just bring our troops home from Afghanistan, for example, which is quasi-delusional.

00:16:57.000 But when he talks about the fact that Republicans have ceased to care about the budget, he's 100% correct.

00:17:01.000 Here's what is in this bill, OK?

00:17:03.000 According to ABC News, the two-year budget deal would lift caps on defense and non-defense spending by $300 billion over two years.

00:17:10.000 It includes $6 billion to fight the opioid crisis, $5.8 billion for child care development block grants,

00:17:16.000 $4 billion for veterans' medical facilities.

00:17:17.000 $2 billion for medical research.

00:17:19.000 $20 billion to augment existing infrastructure programs.

00:17:21.000 $4 billion for college affordability.

00:17:23.000 Is college going to get more affordable?

00:17:25.000 No, it's not going to get more affordable.

00:17:26.000 The measure would extend government funding at current levels until March 23rd to allow lawmakers to finalize details on the spending in a separate measure.

00:17:33.000 Lawmakers would also raise the nation's debt limit into 2019 so we'll have no more government shutdowns until past the congressional elections, which was part of the goal here.

00:17:41.000 Jazz Shaw at Hot Air is fulminating over this.

00:17:44.000 He says, listen, everyone who's fighting for conservative principles, this means that you no longer get to talk about fiscal conservatism in the future.

00:17:51.000 You can't talk about fiscal conservatism, about fiscal responsibility, when you're blowing out budgets to the tune of trillion-dollar deficits.

00:17:57.000 With an entirely Republican Congress, by the way.

00:17:59.000 They told me if I didn't vote for Trump, we'd get trillion-dollar deficits and DACA.

00:18:04.000 And apparently they were right.

00:18:05.000 I mean, this is pretty amazing stuff.

00:18:08.000 And there are a bunch of fiscal conservatives of days past who voted for this thing.

00:18:12.000 Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

00:18:14.000 Senator Ted Cruz.

00:18:16.000 Both of these people voted for the new budget.

00:18:17.000 Cruz said he had to for the disaster funding.

00:18:19.000 Most of the disaster funding had already taken place.

00:18:21.000 It's like $51 billion of disaster funding had already been funded.

00:18:24.000 This adds a bunch of boondoggle on top of it.

00:18:27.000 Paul Ryan was interested in raising the military spending.

00:18:29.000 Okay, well then get your own people in line, sir.

00:18:33.000 Then get your Republicans in line.

00:18:35.000 There are 16 Republicans who didn't vote for it, including Rand Paul and Mike Lee.

00:18:39.000 Mike Lee was really angry because he said this process is completely corrupt, which it is.

00:18:43.000 The way appropriations are supposed to be done are not in these 700-page omnibus packages that are rolled out at midnight and no one reads.

00:18:50.000 That's not the way this is supposed to be done.

00:18:51.000 Appropriations packages are supposed to be done by apartment and by department.

00:18:54.000 The way it was supposed to work is that if you have a Department of Defense bill, you have a Defense Spending Bill, a Defense Authorization Bill, then you have a Health and Human Services Authorization Bill, then you have a Commerce Authorization Bill, then you have a Department of Education Authorization Bill, and then we can debate what should be in and what should be out of each one of those bills.

00:19:09.000 The House, by the way, 100 days ago passed 12 authorization bills for each of the departments.

00:19:14.000 The Senate didn't move on any of them.

00:19:15.000 Instead, the Senate moved into the back room and they negotiated an omnibus package and they said you get to vote up or down.

00:19:22.000 That is not a way to be fiscally responsible.

00:19:25.000 But Republicans don't care about that anymore. 0.95

00:19:26.000 You know why Republicans don't care?

00:19:27.000 Here's the dirty little secret.

00:19:28.000 The dirty little secret is that Trump's populism works because, politically speaking, Trump is recognizing a truth that fiscal conservatives are going to have to come to grips with.

00:19:36.000 That is, voters lie.

00:19:38.000 Voters say they want fiscal conservatism.

00:19:40.000 Voters say they want cuts.

00:19:41.000 Voters say they want the government to spend within its limits.

00:19:43.000 But the minute you say to voters, guys, we're going to have to restructure Social Security, voters balk.

00:19:48.000 And then they vote Democrat.

00:19:49.000 In other words, we like to pretend that we're the child who's capable of delayed gratification.

00:19:54.000 There's a very famous delayed gratification experiment where you can actually tell IQ of children in a very basic way through this experiment.

00:20:00.000 If you take a four-year-old and you say to them, I'm going to put this cookie in front of you right now.

00:20:04.000 You can either eat that cookie right now, or if you wait three minutes, you will get a second cookie.

00:20:07.000 You get two cookies.

00:20:09.000 Kids who have lower IQs tend to pick the cookie up and eat it right away.

00:20:12.000 Kids with higher IQs tend to sit there and wait for the second cookie.

00:20:16.000 Okay, well, we all like to pretend that we're the kid with the second cookie, that we're the higher IQ kids.

00:20:21.000 In reality, we are not. 1.00

00:20:22.000 We like to think of ourselves as smart, but we're dumb. 0.96

00:20:24.000 So when it comes to actual, like, we say, yeah, let's cut the spending, but the minute that it comes to something we want, then all of a sudden we don't care about the spending anymore. 0.96

00:20:31.000 And we're always saying it's an emergency situation.

00:20:33.000 John Cornyn yesterday, he ripped into policy.

00:20:35.000 I know he wants to make a point.

00:20:36.000 He has that right.

00:20:37.000 I agree with many of his concerns about deficits and debt.

00:20:39.000 But we are in an emergency situation.

00:20:41.000 When's the last time we weren't in an emergency situation?

00:20:44.000 When's the last time we actually had a full-throated debate about government spending and we weren't in a quote-unquote emergency situation?

00:20:50.000 Not as far as I can recall.

00:20:53.000 Last time I remember was when Bush was president.

00:20:55.000 When Obama was president, then, you know, we had significant debates over spending.

00:20:59.000 The budgets that the Democratic Congress passed were abysmal.

00:21:03.000 Once Republicans gained control of the Congress, it's been emergency measures all the way down.

00:21:08.000 Here's the problem.

00:21:09.000 If you're never willing to shut down the government, if you're never willing to actually have these hard-headed contacts, if you're never willing to actually have conversations about what needs to stay and what needs to go, you're never going to get to anything remotely approaching fiscal responsibility.

00:21:22.000 Just a disaster.

00:21:24.000 And the fact that so many supposed fiscal conservatives are looking the other way on this demonstrates that some of the Tea Party was a lie.

00:21:31.000 There are a lot of people who are Tea Partiers who are saying they wanted lower government spending, but they only wanted lower government spending when they thought Democrats were doing it.

00:21:37.000 The minute it's Trump in charge and the Republicans in charge, they're willing to look the other way because, after all, tax cuts and defense spending.

00:21:44.000 And if we have to get those things, then I guess we can blow out spending like it's 2009. 0.63

00:21:49.000 Just ridiculous. 0.93

00:21:50.000 A ridiculous deal. 0.99

00:21:51.000 There is no reason that Republicans should have signed off on it. 0.97

00:21:53.000 And it is a disgrace to a Republican Party that does—it no longer represents anything.

00:21:58.000 It no longer represents anything that means anything when it comes to government, when it comes to smaller governments or government limitations.

00:22:05.000 Just terrible.

00:22:05.000 Okay, so in just a second,

00:22:07.000 I'm going to give you the latest update on MemoFight 2018.

00:22:12.000 But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Dollar Shave Club.

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00:23:24.000 Okay, so more on Memo Fight 2018.

00:23:25.000 I know you're getting tired of it.

00:23:26.000 I'm getting tired of it, too.

00:23:27.000 It hurts my throat.

00:23:28.000 At a certain point, you can only say Memo Fight so many times before you start to get a sore throat, but

00:23:47.000 There's more information on Memo 5.

00:23:49.000 OK, so Devin Nunes has essentially uncovered—the new memo that's going to come out is going to cover the fact that apparently Hillary's State Department was funneling information to Christopher Steele via a few of Hillary Clinton's special allies.

00:24:04.000 Basically, Christopher Steele was making a Trump dossier based on Hillary sources, providing the information to the John Kerry State Department, which was staffed by Hillary holdovers and Hillary friends, and they were passing that information on to the spy, Christopher Steele, to pass it on to the FBI.

00:24:18.000 That's the chain of events.

00:24:19.000 Well, now the guy who was in the middle of that, the guy at the State Department, a guy named Jonathan Weiner, he is writing about this in the pages of The Washington Post.

00:24:26.000 Here's what he writes.

00:24:26.000 He writes, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes announced last week that the next phase of his investigation of the events that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller will focus on the State Department.

00:24:35.000 His apparent area of interest is my relationship with former British intelligence professional Christopher Steele and my role in materials Steele ultimately shared with the FBI.

00:24:43.000 So he says, here's the real story.

00:24:45.000 In the 1990s, I was a senior official at the State Department and he worked on Russian matters.

00:24:49.000 After 1999, I left the State Department, developed a legal and consulting practice that involved Russian matters.

00:24:55.000 In 2009, I met and became friends with Steele after he retired from British government service, focusing on Russia.

00:25:00.000 We're good to go.

00:25:17.000 In the summer of 2016, Steele told me he had learned of disturbing information regarding possible ties between Donald Trump, his campaign, and senior Russian officials.

00:25:23.000 He did not provide details but made clear the information involved active measures

00:25:42.000 A Soviet intelligence turned for propaganda and related activities to influence events in other countries.

00:25:46.000 In September 2016, Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the dossier.

00:25:51.000 Steele's sources suggested that the Kremlin not only had been behind the hacking of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign, but had also compromised Trump and developed ties with his associates and campaign.

00:25:59.000 So now Steele wasn't just blabbing to the FBI, he was blabbing to the State Department, which has no power to really do anything in this matter.

00:26:06.000 The FBI, presumably, should be the one telling the State Department what it needs to know.

00:26:10.000 It's their job to do that.

00:26:11.000 It's not Christopher Steele's job to do that.

00:26:13.000 He says he was allowed to review but not to keep a copy of these reports to enable me to alert the State Department.

00:26:17.000 I prepared a two-page summary and shared it with Newland, who indicated that she felt the Secretary of State needed to be made aware of the material.

00:26:23.000 And then here's where it gets good.

00:26:25.000 In late September, says Jonathan Weiner, the State Department hack, I spoke with an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal.

00:26:30.000 We're good.

00:26:49.000 They got to talking about the hacking, and Blumenthal discussed Steele's report.

00:26:53.000 He showed whiner notes gathered by a journalist I did not know, Cody Shearer, another Blumenthal-Hillary hack, that alleged the Russians had compromising information on Trump of a sexual and financial nature.

00:27:02.000 What struck me was how some of the material echoed Steele's but appeared to involve different sources.

00:27:06.000 On my own, I shared a copy of these notes with Steele to ask for his professional reaction.

00:27:10.000 He told me it was potentially collateral information.

00:27:12.000 I asked what that meant.

00:27:13.000 That meant that it was confirmatory information.

00:27:14.000 So, in other words, this guy at the State Department was funneling information to Steele.

00:27:18.000 Now, here's the question.

00:27:20.000 Let's say that he knew that there was terrible stuff going on.

00:27:23.000 Why was he funneling it to Steele and not directly to the FBI?

00:27:27.000 He works for the government.

00:27:28.000 Why didn't Jonathan Weiner just take the information he was receiving from Hillary's flax and forwarding that on to the FBI, as opposed to funneling it through Steele?

00:27:35.000 The answer is that he sent it to Steele, because if he had sent it directly from the State Department to the FBI, the FBI would have said, where did you get it, Jonathan?

00:27:42.000 And he would have had to say, Sidney Blumenthal, and the FBI would have gone, you've got to be kidding me.

00:27:45.000 We're not even taking a look at this.

00:27:47.000 Whereas if he funneled it to Christopher Steele, Steele could obscure the source of the information, and then the FBI would take that for a FISA warrant.

00:27:53.000 That's the most plausible possible explanation here.

00:27:56.000 So there is something dirty going on.

00:27:58.000 Weiner says,

00:28:16.000 So yeah, this is a serious problem.

00:28:17.000 And that's not the only serious problem.

00:28:18.000 Apparently, there's a story out today.

00:28:21.000 People, I think, are taking this a little bit too much.

00:28:24.000 I think they're reading too much into this.

00:28:26.000 There's a story today out from Ed Henry at Fox News.

00:28:29.000 He says that Senator Mark Warner, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who'd been leading a congressional investigation into President Trump's alleged ties to Russia, had extensive contact last year with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch who was offering Warner access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele,

00:28:45.000 According to text messages obtained exclusively by Fox News.

00:28:47.000 So Warner texted this lobbyist who was in the pocket of the Russians.

00:28:51.000 We have so much to discuss, you need to be careful, but we can help our country.

00:28:53.000 Waldman said, I'm in.

00:28:55.000 He had ties to Hillary Clinton as well as to Russia.

00:28:57.000 So that was not the extent of the text.

00:29:00.000 According to the text exchanges, Warner seemed particularly intent on connecting directly with Steele without anyone else on the Senate Intelligence Committee being in the loop, at least initially.

00:29:08.000 In one text to the lobbyist, Warner wrote he would rather not have a paper trail of his messages.

00:29:12.000 An aide to Warner confirmed to Fox News that the messages were authentic.

00:29:15.000 The messages were obtained by a Republican source, marked confidential, and are not classified.

00:29:20.000 They were turned over to the Senate panel by Waldman last September.

00:29:24.000 Waldman is best known for signing a $40,000 monthly retainer in 2008 and 2009 to lobby the U.S.

00:29:29.000 government on behalf of a controversial Russian billionaire who's connected with the Russian government.

00:29:34.000 So, in aid to Richard Burr, who's the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he told Fox News that Burr was aware of the contact Warner had made with Steele's representatives.

00:29:42.000 He said,

00:29:50.000 So, the way they could read too much into this is by ignoring the fact that Richard Burr says this isn't a big deal.

00:29:54.000 So, Warner's text messages were quietly given to the Intelligence Committee after he and Burr signed a joint request for the messages last June.

00:30:00.000 Warner and Burr privately informed the rest of the Democratic and Republican senators on a panel of Warner's text messages in a meeting last October.

00:30:06.000 I don't know.

00:30:22.000 You know, if they didn't—and this is where I say you can read too much into this—if they didn't, then that would be troublesome.

00:30:27.000 Marco Rubio is suggesting that it's not a big deal.

00:30:29.000 He tweeted out today, Senator Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago, has had zero impact on our work.

00:30:35.000 The real question is whether the Republicans were being kept contemporaneously advised of Mark Warner reaching out via Russian sources to Christopher Steele.

00:30:43.000 If the answer is yes, if the Republicans were aware, then it's not a big deal.

00:30:46.000 If, however, they were not aware, then it could theoretically be a big deal.

00:30:49.000 It looked like the Democrats were fishing for information from Christopher Steele without knowledge of the Republicans, which is not a particularly great thing.

00:30:57.000 So there's a little bit more here.

00:30:59.000 Here's another story as well that is, I think, troubling.

00:31:02.000 And this one is not really about Trump.

00:31:03.000 It's more about Hillary Clinton.

00:31:05.000 It's gotten dramatic underplay in the media.

00:31:08.000 I'm going to get to that in just a second.

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00:32:59.000 All right, so here is this final story that you need to know about today in the news roundup of scandal.

00:33:04.000 So, an FBI informant, according to The Hill, connected to the Uranium One controversy, told three congressional committees in a written statement that Russia routed millions of dollars to America with the expectation it would be used to benefit Bill Clinton's charitable efforts while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quarterbacked a reset in U.S.-Russian relations.

00:33:21.000 The informant's name is Douglas Campbell.

00:33:22.000 He said in a statement obtained by The Hill that he was told by Russian nuclear executives that Moscow had hired the American lobbying firm APCO worldwide, specifically because it was in position to influence the Obama administration, and more specifically, Hillary Clinton.

00:33:35.000 Democrats have cast doubt on Campbell's credibility, so they're going to have a big battle over all of this.

00:33:40.000 So, again, it sounds like there is more to the Uranium One scandal than the media were willing to cover or let on early on.

00:33:45.000 We will follow that as it continues.

00:33:47.000 Okay, so time for a couple things I like, then a couple things I hate, then we'll mailbag it up.

00:33:51.000 Things I like.

00:33:52.000 So today, there's a good book out by Douglas Murray.

00:33:55.000 It's called The Strange Death of Europe.

00:33:56.000 It talks all about, in a not-unsympathetic way, the problems with mass migration into Europe, particularly Islamic mass migration into Europe, failures of assimilation inside Europe, and how this is posing threats to the future of the continent and Western civilization as a whole.

00:34:11.000 It is well worth the read.

00:34:12.000 It is sobering, for sure.

00:34:14.000 Check it out.

00:34:14.000 Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe.

00:34:16.000 Okay, so.

00:34:17.000 A couple of things that I hate.

00:34:19.000 So, thing that I hate, number one.

00:34:22.000 Alright, thing that I hate, number one.

00:34:27.000 So, on CNN, Allison Camerota had on a Nazi. 0.62

00:34:30.000 Why did she have on a Nazi?

00:34:31.000 Because this Nazi won a GOP primary in Illinois. 0.99

00:34:33.000 Now, this schmuck wins a primary in Illinois every couple of years. 0.99

00:34:36.000 The Republicans will refuse to sponsor him and throw him off the ballot. 0.99

00:34:39.000 That's going to happen again this year.

00:34:40.000 But since the media are fully informed that they are

00:34:45.000 Since the media are fully cognizant that they are trying to turn Republicans into Nazis, it behooves them to find any Nazi who calls himself a Republican and put him on TV. 0.99

00:34:51.000 They would never put Louis Farrakhan on TV or any member of the Congressional Black Caucus and ask them about Louis Farrakhan, but they will do this with this obscure moron from Illinois. 1.00

00:35:00.000 That said, it does demonstrate the stupidity of Nazis. 1.00

00:35:03.000 She does a good job of grilling him, for what that's worth. 1.00

00:35:05.000 Are you a Nazi?

00:35:09.000 Well, for the past 15, 20 years, I have not had anything to do with any national socialist organization on a formal basis.

00:35:19.000 But do you call yourself a Nazi?

00:35:22.000 I don't call myself a Nazi.

00:35:24.000 I call myself an American patriot and statesman.

00:35:26.000 Okay, well let me give our viewers some details about this just so they can decide for themselves.

00:35:31.000 You've been part of anti-Semitic groups since the 1970s.

00:35:34.000 You go to neo-Nazi rallies.

00:35:36.000 We have pictures of you there.

00:35:38.000 You were part of the White People's Party.

00:35:41.000 You dress in Nazi garb and you celebrate Hitler's birthday. 0.99

00:35:44.000 You're a Nazi. 0.95

00:35:47.000 Well, yes. 0.99

00:35:48.000 I mean, I do love the one, your first response.

00:35:50.000 I haven't been like a formal Nazi for like 15 or 20 years.

00:35:54.000 Okay, well done, dude. 1.00

00:35:55.000 So, Nazis, stupid and bad, a thing I hate. 1.00

00:35:58.000 Okay, other things that I hate. 1.00

00:36:00.000 A woman is now claiming that she was forced to flush her emotional support hamster down the toilet.

00:36:06.000 I am not kidding.

00:36:07.000 Apparently, an employee for Spirit Airlines allegedly demanded a young woman either let her pet hamster free outside the airport or flush it down the toilet, leading her to choose the latter.

00:36:15.000 Which is just yuck.

00:36:17.000 Which is like, what?

00:36:39.000 Wait, what now?

00:36:40.000 Like, if you have it in a cage, you couldn't just, like, leave it there or find a mailing depot?

00:36:44.000 You flush it—you killed the animal?

00:36:46.000 Okay, so there's that.

00:36:47.000 Number two.

00:36:49.000 An emotional support hamster?

00:36:50.000 Like, we've seen emotional support peacocks.

00:36:52.000 How about this?

00:36:53.000 You know, children, like small children, like my children, they have what they call loveys, right?

00:36:57.000 We're talking about, like, blankies or little stuffed animals.

00:36:59.000 How about that?

00:37:00.000 Do that.

00:37:01.000 What is this emotional support hamster nonsense?

00:37:04.000 I can't wait for them to have emotional support snakes just so we can have snakes on the plane! 1.00

00:37:07.000 I'm really excited about that.

00:37:08.000 I want somebody to have an emotional support cobra.

00:37:11.000 And then we can actually... There's snakes on the MFN plane.

00:37:14.000 I'm looking forward to that.

00:37:15.000 Okay, final thing that I hate. 1.00

00:37:17.000 So I have to go through this in detail because it is astonishingly stupid. 1.00

00:37:19.000 Astonishingly terrible. 1.00

00:37:20.000 So, there is a piece that is out at a publication called The Forward.

00:37:24.000 The Forward is a radical left publication.

00:37:27.000 Every so often, they ask me to write something for them.

00:37:29.000 Sometimes I do, sometimes I do not.

00:37:31.000 The publisher is pretty good about letting opposing views appear there, but there's no question that it is a far left publication.

00:37:39.000 Well, they have a piece out today from a woman named Tamara Colton.

00:37:44.000 She's a female rabbi and psychologist in Birmingham, Michigan.

00:37:47.000 Now, number one, when most people say female rabbis, there are some female rabbis who are knowledgeable.

00:37:52.000 But most female rabbis are in the Reconstructionist or Reform movement, and they're not very knowledgeable.

00:37:56.000 Like, I, as a lay Orthodox Jew, not a member of the priestly caste, not a rabbi, know a lot more than somebody like Tamara Colton just because I read the Bible on a regular basis.

00:38:05.000 How do I know I know more than she does?

00:38:06.000 Because my God, dude.

00:38:08.000 Like, here's what she wrote.

00:38:09.000 She wrote a piece basically saying that Adam and Eve is the first case of Me Too, of hashtag Me Too.

00:38:15.000 And I have to explain this because it's so insane.

00:38:18.000 This excreble journey into biblical exegesis goes so far off the rails that it actually starts running Harrison Ford down. 1.00

00:38:25.000 Harrison Ford actually has to run to avoid the engine of stupidity churning the ground up after him. 1.00

00:38:29.000 He has to dive into a ravine to avoid it. 0.99

00:38:32.000 And only later does he find out that he can get rid of his leg chains.

00:38:35.000 I mean, it's just terrible.

00:38:36.000 Anyway, here is Tamara Colton. 0.90

00:38:37.000 So she says, quote,

00:38:39.000 As a 47-year-old woman rabbi, I've become emboldened by these brave young women to speak a truth that I've known in my heart for a long time but have been hesitant to share.

00:38:46.000 The time has come for me to step forward, too.

00:38:48.000 It's time we all acknowledge an overwhelmingly powerful source of shame and silence in the Bible.

00:38:53.000 Okay, now, you'd expect her to go from here to, like, the stuff in Leviticus about virginity until marriage, or, like, the stuff in Leviticus about homosexuality, or the stuff in Leviticus about forbidden sexual relationships.

00:39:05.000 Or the stuff in Jewish tradition about modesty, right?

00:39:06.000 That's where you would expect her to go. 1.00

00:39:08.000 It would be stupid, but that's where you would expect her to go. 0.99

00:39:10.000 But that's not where she goes. 1.00

00:39:11.000 Instead, she goes to Adam and Eve.

00:39:13.000 Now you ask, how does Adam and Eve have anything to do with me too?

00:39:18.000 Well, let Rabbi Colton tell you.

00:39:20.000 Quote, The story that begins the Bible, the first one that we learn in Sunday school, the founding story of man and woman, upheld for thousands of years by Judeo-Christian religion, is actually the story of the first sexual assault of a woman.

00:39:30.000 The woman's name is Eve, and the perpetrator is God.

00:39:34.000 Does she read?

00:39:35.000 Like, English?

00:39:37.000 Or Greek?

00:39:38.000 Or Hebrew?

00:39:39.000 Or any human language?

00:39:41.000 Okay, here are a few words that describe this. 1.00

00:39:43.000 Stupid, fatuous, harebrained, doltish, preposterous, asinine, ridiculous, ludicrous, imbecilic. 1.00

00:39:47.000 Those are just a few words that come to mind. 1.00

00:39:50.000 The story of Adam and Eve has literally nothing to do with sexual assault.

00:39:53.000 It has to do with Eve disobeying a direct command from God not to eat from a certain tree.

00:39:56.000 She eats from the tree at the behest of the snake who tells her that nothing bad will happen and that God has been lying to her.

00:40:00.000 It turns out God is not, in fact, lying to her.

00:40:02.000 And then he says, what did you do?

00:40:04.000 And then she makes an excuse for it.

00:40:05.000 And then he curses her with pain and childbirth and curses Adam to have to till the ground with the sweat of his brow.

00:40:10.000 Okay, that's the story.

00:40:11.000 What in the world does that have to do with sexual assault?

00:40:14.000 Nothing.

00:40:15.000 But here's what she says.

00:40:15.000 To paraphrase Shakespeare, what the F?

00:40:38.000 There is no way to read that story and come away with that.

00:40:40.000 Here is the relevant verbiage from the book of Genesis.

00:41:04.000 You notice anything there about, like, horrific pains of hunger that she had to be sated with only this fruit?

00:41:09.000 As opposed to all the other trees in the garden, which God has said she can eat from?

00:41:12.000 Is there anything there about God shaming her for her nakedness?

00:41:14.000 Or is it that she eats a piece of fruit, realizes she's naked, and then feels ashamed because she feels that she has misused her purpose in the world, which is what the story is really about?

00:41:24.000 None of this makes any sense.

00:41:25.000 But Colton's not done.

00:41:26.000 She says, No.

00:41:26.000 Here's the actual Bible.

00:41:27.000 Where was she silenced exactly?

00:41:29.000 He asked her a question and she answered the question. 1.00

00:41:49.000 But this is so—I mean, it's just so stupid. 1.00

00:41:51.000 The story is not about men violating women. 1.00

00:41:53.000 God commands Adam.

00:41:54.000 God commands Eve.

00:41:55.000 He punishes them both.

00:41:56.000 He punishes the snake. 0.88

00:41:57.000 The end.

00:41:58.000 That's the whole story. 1.00

00:42:00.000 You have to be a moron to come up with this pathetic interpretation. 1.00

00:42:04.000 But I guess when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 1.00

00:42:08.000 And when you're a MeToo hammer, everything, including stories that have nothing to do with MeToo, look like a nail. 1.00

00:42:12.000 My goodness, the stupidity. 1.00

00:42:13.000 Wow. 1.00

00:42:14.000 High-level stupidity. 1.00

00:42:15.000 Okay. 1.00

00:42:15.000 Time for some mailbag. 1.00

00:42:16.000 Let's mailbag this up.

00:42:18.000 Alright, so.

00:42:19.000 If you have live questions, now is the time to ask them in the Dailyware chat box.

00:42:22.000 And no, I will not answer questions about Pudding or Michael Moulse's evening attire.

00:42:26.000 It's just horrifying.

00:42:27.000 OK, Lowell says, I feel modern libertarianism is gaining popularity after seeing Gary Johnson's gain from the 2012 to 2016 elections, and what I feel is a growing popularity for Rand Paul libertarian leanings.

00:42:36.000 Why, in your opinion, is the Libertarian Party not prominent in the government today?

00:42:39.000 Because they suck at everything, is the answer. 1.00

00:42:41.000 OK, the Libertarian Party convention was a crap show. 1.00

00:42:44.000 It was a guy running out naked with an iron cross. 0.99

00:42:46.000 There's a bunch of people, like John McAfee, talking about legalizing acid.

00:42:50.000 Okay, that's not what you'll lead with if you're the libertarians.

00:42:52.000 If you're the libertarians, why don't you go get some decent candidates who can talk in conservative-slash-libertarian tones about the necessity for small government and how that leads to freedom?

00:43:01.000 Why is it that I'm a better representative of the libertarian than Gary Johnson?

00:43:04.000 Why is it that I'm a better representative of libertarianism than anyone who's on the stage at the Libertarian Party Convention?

00:43:09.000 It makes you think that the Libertarian Party is actually a giant scam to get you to give them lots of money and then not earn enough of the vote to actually be put under severe government scrutiny.

00:43:18.000 Because, my goodness, how else could you explain the supreme incompetence at every level of the Libertarian Party?

00:43:23.000 Plus, again, they've elevated members of the Libertarian Party who are soft defense libertarians, which is not smart.

00:43:28.000 People who say that they're sort of almost anarcho-capitalists to the top levels of the Libertarian Party.

00:43:34.000 That is not an electoral position for victory.

00:43:36.000 So the Jewish view is that original sin is not about you have a sin that must be relieved by God's grace that is imbued in you because of original sin.

00:43:42.000 There is no concept of original sin in Judaism in that sense.

00:43:55.000 What original sin is, is that Adam committed the sin of disobeying God, and this led us to, I think, there are a few interpretations, obviously, of this story, but I think the one that I like the best is the interpretation that essentially says that before man ate from the tree of knowledge, there was a full identity between what things were for and what they were.

00:44:12.000 Meaning that, just as in the Aristotelian notion,

00:44:16.000 If a watch is made for telling time, then man was made to do certain things, and fruit was made to fulfill certain needs, and animals were made to fulfill certain tasks.

00:44:25.000 Everything was made for its purpose, and we could see that, but we didn't necessarily have our own logic as to morality.

00:44:31.000 God's morality was our morality.

00:44:32.000 Once we supplanted our morality for God's morality, that led us to an inordinate number of conflicts that prevented us

00:44:38.000 In any real sense from seeing paradise because the world around us started to look malevolent as opposed to looking like what it was.

00:44:44.000 The world is just the world and the world fulfills a purpose that is not our own, right?

00:44:47.000 The world fulfills a purpose that is God's.

00:44:49.000 The idea of original sin that has to be expiated, I don't think that's right.

00:44:54.000 Judaism doesn't think that's right. 1.00

00:44:55.000 Judaism thinks that human beings are human beings and that the capacity for sin comes along with the capacity for free will and that that cannot be expiated by the sacrifice of another person or a person in the form of God.

00:45:09.000 That's not a thing.

00:45:10.000 Sacrifices that you bring in Jewish tradition are to expiate your own personal sin, not to expiate sins of the past. 0.95

00:45:15.000 Kevin says, with all of the bombshells about the FBI and Obama's DOJ coming about, will Hillary Clinton finally be indicted, or has the time passed?

00:45:21.000 I'm a bit jaded with our government.

00:45:22.000 I seriously doubt she'll be indicted.

00:45:24.000 I seriously doubt she'll be indicted, as well.

00:45:26.000 Number one, you'd have to have such strong evidence to indict her at this point, after the FBI basically cleared her last year, that I think that the impetus for indicting her would be pretty weak.

00:45:37.000 I also think that even if there's a political argument and an argument from a country basis, that indicting her might not be the smartest move, just because I could see this really quickly leading to a situation where whoever runs in an election and loses gets indicted by the other side.

00:45:51.000 It's sort of banana republic stuff, even though everyone should be held accountable to the law, and I think Hillary should have been indicted last year. 0.98

00:45:57.000 I think that now it looks more to the public like a revenge play by Trump's DOJ or FBI than it would look like a real investigation.

00:46:04.000 I mean, nobody trusts the DOJ and the FBI on the right.

00:46:06.000 Nobody trusts the DOJ and the FBI on the left.

00:46:07.000 I'm not sure this would restore that trust.

00:46:09.000 You don't agree it necessarily shows that.

00:46:11.000 Well, we haven't actually seen the FISA application.

00:46:27.000 According to the reports of the FISA application, they're not really about Trump.

00:46:30.000 The stuff about Papadopoulos might be, so it's possible that some of it involves Trump-Russia collusion, and they think Carter Page is a part of that because he was part of the Trump campaign.

00:46:37.000 But the stuff in the Steele dossier is not just about Trump, right?

00:46:42.000 I mean, it is about Trump-Russia campaign collusion, but the stuff that was specifically referencing Carter Page also had to do with Carter Page making specific outreach moves toward the Russian government.

00:46:55.000 If it was entirely about Trump, then you could say that the Pfizer warrant was, I guess, targeting Trump in ancillary fashion.

00:47:06.000 Let me backtrack for just a second.

00:47:09.000 If the question is, was the FBI only targeting Trump with the Carter Page warrant, the answer is maybe, but the investigation started before Carter Page.

00:47:18.000 So it's actually two separate questions.

00:47:19.000 You can believe that the FBI was targeting Trump with the Carter Page warrant.

00:47:23.000 The question is, was that legit or not?

00:47:24.000 Or was the Carter Page warrant trumped up in order to get Trump?

00:47:27.000 And the answer is not supremely clear.

00:47:29.000 If there was independent evidence to go after Trump,

00:47:32.000 Anyway, and this was just part of that general investigation, as opposed to Carter Page initiated the investigation, and that's the only evidence that we have that Trump did anything wrong.

00:47:40.000 So, if I made the implication that the FBI was, quote-unquote, not out to get Trump at all, or that they thought Trump was not involved at all, I don't think that the FBI thought Trump was not out—that Trump was not involved at all.

00:47:51.000 The FBI probably did think that Trump was involved in some way, but out to get Trump and thinks Trump is involved in some way are two separate contentions.

00:47:58.000 It's two separate contentions.

00:48:00.000 Okay, so let's see.

00:48:01.000 Joseph says, Okay, so there's two ways to read free will.

00:48:03.000 There is the but-for choice.

00:48:23.000 That you actually have the capacity to make a choice.

00:48:25.000 This is how people have traditionally thought of free will.

00:48:27.000 I can choose right now to say the next sentence.

00:48:29.000 I can choose not to say the next sentence.

00:48:31.000 It's up to me.

00:48:31.000 It's not determined by my environment.

00:48:33.000 It's not determined by my genetics.

00:48:35.000 That I do have but for free will.

00:48:36.000 We don't understand how it works, but that's the way that it works.

00:48:38.000 That you do control your own action.

00:48:39.000 You have the capacity for change.

00:48:41.000 Then there is the version of free will that is essentially passive free will, suggesting that random chance governs human behavior and that there's no way to fully predictably

00:48:50.000 Say what exactly you're going to do next, right?

00:48:52.000 I think that's Sam Harris's version of free will, which isn't really free will at all, as he correctly points out.

00:48:58.000 It's just suggesting that random chance has a role in what we say and what we do.

00:49:03.000 But if you can't control that random chance, then it's not free will, right?

00:49:07.000 The words free and will, neither of them apply.

00:49:09.000 You're talking about random chance governing.

00:49:11.000 That is the significant difference.

00:49:13.000 And so the question for me is, how can you propose that human beings be active in the universe when activity is formally banned by your definition of free will?

00:49:20.000 Isaac says, In the Christian viewpoint, you'd have to ask Drew and Michael, because they're Christian, what they think of the house of Israel and where it stands in the covenant.

00:49:26.000 But from the Jewish perspective, we are still the covenant.

00:49:29.000 And that covenant was never broken.

00:49:43.000 Sure.

00:49:43.000 The Harvard Law School, for a long time, had quotas on Jewish students at the law school.

00:50:02.000 We're good to go.

00:50:21.000 Well, opera singer Pavarotti, non-opera singer, you have to go with Sinatra for his phrasing, although I do have a sneaking fondness for Mel Tormé.

00:50:28.000 Now Patrick says, Hey Ben, I recently went to a facility to give plasma and was able to get paid for my contribution, if you can call it that.

00:50:34.000 That got me thinking, what would be the ethical implications of offering to sell parts of our own bodies?

00:50:38.000 Should an organ be able to be sold if the owner is willing to take money for it?

00:50:41.000 What would be the impact on the organ donation system?

00:50:43.000 So I have always been in favor of an organ market.

00:50:46.000 I'm in favor of the idea that you should be able to sell your kidney or sell a lobe of your liver if they can do a liver transplant.

00:50:53.000 There would have to be some stringent regulations about, like, you're not allowed to kill yourself for the money.

00:50:58.000 You're not allowed to kill a family member for the money.

00:51:00.000 There would have to be some actual stringent regulations with regard to this.

00:51:04.000 But it seems to me that this is a much better solution to the organ shortage than attempting to determine if somebody is dead or not and then harvesting their organs.

00:51:13.000 Ido says, you spoke of your favorite sci-fi books.

00:51:15.000 What are your top three sci-fi movies?

00:51:18.000 So I actually named these the other day.

00:51:19.000 I'm trying to remember what I said about it.

00:51:22.000 So I'm not going to count fantasy in my sci-fi rankings here.

00:51:26.000 And I'm not going to give you three.

00:51:27.000 I'm going to give you a bunch, OK?

00:51:28.000 Because there are a lot of sci-fi movies that I love.

00:51:31.000 So obviously, Star Wars is up there, although it's slash fantasy, probably.

00:51:35.000 And just in terms of pure sci-fi,

00:51:38.000 I think Blade Runner 2049 was really good this year.

00:51:40.000 I thought that it was top-notch.

00:51:42.000 I liked Interstellar a lot.

00:51:45.000 I like... A lot of these are modern films.

00:51:48.000 Planet of the Apes is the oldest sci-fi film that's really good.

00:51:50.000 Planet of the Apes is terrific.

00:51:51.000 The original with Charlton Huston.

00:51:54.000 Let's see.

00:51:55.000 What was the one...

00:51:57.000 We're good to go.

00:52:19.000 Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

00:52:21.000 I'll have to make a complete list and put it up on Twitter, but there are a bunch of them.

00:52:24.000 E.T.

00:52:24.000 is a really good movie.

00:52:26.000 I love sci-fi, and I love sci-fi flicks.

00:52:28.000 Tommy says, Ben, how important do you think it is for all Americans to read the memos?

00:52:31.000 Everyone seems to have an opinion, but few seem to have read it.

00:52:33.000 Is this folly?

00:52:34.000 Yes, everyone should read the memos.

00:52:35.000 And please, if you want to solve the question as to whether the FBI was explicitly targeting Trump with the Carter Page FISA warrant, again, by the way, quick note on what I said before about the page warrant, I think it is worthwhile noting

00:52:48.000 That none of that stuff leaked until after the election.

00:52:51.000 And also, it is worth noting that when it comes to the Carter-Page-Pfizer warrant, that the application for the warrant still has not been made public by President Trump, who can do it right now.

00:53:01.000 He can declassify it right now.

00:53:02.000 I wish he would, so that we can find out what exactly was in it and what exactly wasn't in it.

00:53:07.000 I would privatize the entire thing.

00:53:08.000 I would say to people, it's your money.

00:53:09.000 Maybe have them make an opt-out system where

00:53:16.000 Default is that a certain amount of your money goes into a social security trust fund just for you But you actually get to opt out now what I would do to finance the remaining social security that's on the books is you would have to Presumably sell bonds and borrow to finance social security But you're gonna have to cut off a cutoff point now or there's not gonna be any cutoff point later Basically everyone who's already on social security gets paid what they're owed on social security when I say what they're owed I mean what they've been promised and people who are maybe five ten years away from social security get to opt into

00:53:44.000 It's a meaningless term at this point.

00:53:46.000 It means anything that they don't like.

00:53:48.000 There are a couple things here that are problematic.

00:53:50.000 George Papadopoulos going to London and soliciting information from a Russian source about Hillary Clinton emails and the Donald Trump Jr.

00:53:55.000 meeting at Trump Tower.

00:53:55.000 Those are the two big ones.

00:53:57.000 Other than that, I have seen no

00:54:13.000 I see no evidence of Russian collusion whatsoever at this point.

00:54:17.000 Well, the real answer is Russia sometimes wants to take out Islamic regimes that threaten them.

00:54:21.000 Sometimes Russia wants to crack down on Islamic radicals in Chechnya, for example.

00:54:37.000 But aside from that, we do not have a lot of coinciding interests with the Russian regime.

00:54:42.000 It is an incredibly self-interested regime.

00:54:45.000 It is a regime that is interested in maximization of Vladimir Putin's personal power.

00:54:48.000 So, there's not a lot of crossover there, other than maintaining a status of non-nuclear war, I would think.

00:54:54.000 Gabe says, Ben, I'm in law school and leave every class in despair because the Supreme Court seems to have trampled the Constitution at every available opportunity, at least since the 1930s.

00:55:01.000 Should we, as conservatives and originalists, be worried that we are past the point of no return?

00:55:05.000 Yes.

00:55:05.000 I mean, we should have been worried about that back in the 1930s, which is why, as I've stated repeatedly, I've been trying to get a hold of this paper for years.

00:55:14.000 I wonder if Harvard actually has it.

00:55:16.000 I'd have to call them up.

00:55:17.000 I wrote my third-year law paper on why judicial review should essentially be undone.

00:55:21.000 The idea that judiciary gets to overrule the legislature on behalf of an oligarchy of those chosen not elected seems supremely anti-Republican to me.

00:55:35.000 I tend to lean toward theism on this topic.

00:55:37.000 I think God can be the creator and evolution can still exist.

00:55:39.000 Where do you stand on this issue?

00:55:40.000 Of course I think that that's the case.

00:55:42.000 I think that God can use whatever natural mechanism he chooses and God tries to, in order for God to assume your faith, he's not going to show you miracles every day unless you're looking for them or unless you see miracles in the natural world and in the system of God's laws.

00:55:55.000 In fact, Newton was more likely to see miracles in the systematization of the universe than he was to see miracles in, you know, the splitting of the Red Sea.

00:56:02.000 I think that God can use whatever mechanism he chooses in order to forward the possibilities of humanity.

00:56:08.000 And that's what he did with evolution, in my opinion.

00:56:11.000 There's a great book called God and the Big Bang by Gerald Schroeder.

00:56:18.000 You can check that out.

00:56:20.000 It's all about the consonants between the Bible and evolutionary theory and the theories of the Big Bang.

00:56:25.000 Really fascinating stuff.

00:56:26.000 Okay, so we've reached the end of today's nearly endless mailbag.

00:56:30.000 We'll be back here on Monday to discuss all of the latest.

00:56:33.000 Have a wonderful weekend.

00:56:34.000 Please don't ruin things or there will be no Disneyland for you.

00:56:37.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:56:37.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:56:42.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.

00:56:44.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:56:46.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:56:47.000 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:56:49.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:56:51.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

00:56:52.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:56:54.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

00:56:57.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 09, 2018

Corruption, Chaos, and Cretinism | Ep. 472

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