The latest on North Korea, the latest on the latest in the Trump/Kim Jong-un situation, and the latest mailbag. President Obama is coming back to the political scene. The Fire and the Fury and the Furiosa! All of it will be discussed! Plus, we talk about the Mailbag! You can be a part of it! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: "ELISSA" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you download our newest free epsiode of the show. Enjoy & spread the word to your friends about this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! ENJOYING IT? CHAT WITH ME AND OTHER VIPS IN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP AND DISCORD CHAT SERVER! AND SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST AND OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA! We post polls, questions and thoughts on all of our social media platforms and the results/comments are featured on the episodes as well! Send your voice messages to sws@whatiwatchedtonight.co.uk and we'll get them on the show! Thanks for listening and supporting! Timestamps: 5:00 - What do you think of the latest episode? 6:30 - What would you like to see next? 7:15 - What are your thoughts on a future episode of the Ben Shapiro show? 8:20 - Is Obama back in 2020? 9:40 - Is it too tough? 10:00? 11:00 12: What is too tough for Obama back? 15:00: Is it tough enough? 16:00 | What do we need to go harder? 17:00 + 17:30? 18:00 Should we go further? 19:00 Is this too tough enough?? 22:00 Do you agree or not tough enough ? 21:00 Can we go farther? 26:00 More? 27:00 Are you back to be tougher? 29:00 What are you agree? 32: Should we be tougher than this? 35:00 Or not? 36:00 How do we have a stronger country? 37:00 We re going to go further than that? 39:00 Would you agree with this statement? 40:00 My thoughts on this statement ?
00:00:17.000Alright, so we're going to give you the latest on North Korea in just a moment, plus the Democrats basically taking sides with North Korea over Donald Trump, if forced to make a decision.
00:00:26.000Some Trump staffing issues, some Trump-Russia stuff, plus we're going to do a fulsome mailbag today.
00:00:31.000But before we get to any of that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
00:00:35.000So right now, things seem a little uncertain.
00:00:38.000Do you wake up in the morning wondering whether you will survive a nuclear attack?
00:00:41.000If so, you may want to consider what would happen to the markets if, in fact, the world situation grows more volatile rather than less.
00:00:47.000The stock market took a dump yesterday to the tune of about 200 points.
00:00:51.000This is why you should have at least some of your assets in precious metals, and that's why I trust the folks at Birch Gold with my precious metals investment.
00:00:58.000Birchgold.com slash Ben gets you a comprehensive 16-page kit
00:02:06.000So, you remember a couple of days ago, Trump said about North Korea that if North Korea were to continue to threaten, then he would unleash the fire and the fury and frankly, the power.
00:03:01.000So we are doing the same flyovers of North Korea that we've always been doing.
00:03:05.000We've been doing the same joint naval exercises with the Japanese and with the South Koreans, rather with the South Koreans that we've always been doing.
00:03:11.000Nothing has really changed along those scores.
00:03:14.000So the idea that Trump is dramatically escalating the situation, it's just not true.
00:03:18.000His rhetoric is constantly escalating because Trump gets a high off of his own fumes when it comes to the level of his rhetoric.
00:03:24.000I mean, this is why he has people apparently bring him folders filled with pictures of him looking powerful.
00:03:28.000So yesterday, he's asked about the fire and the fury and the furious and phenomenal, phenomenal fury.
00:03:34.000And he was, and he says, not only was I right then, I'm going to double down.
00:05:49.000The Kim Jong-un regime is mainly interested in self-preservation.
00:05:53.000It's a stable regime because they don't care if they continue killing their own people and oppressing their own people for decades on end.
00:05:59.000They've been doing it now for 60 odd years, so nothing really changes there.
00:06:03.000All they care about is maintaining their own power, and that means the last thing they're going to do is launch a nuclear weapon at Guam or launch a nuclear weapon at the United States.
00:06:10.000What they could do is act bellicose in an attempt to gain concessions from the world, because this is what they've been doing for the past couple of decades.
00:06:17.000If Trump shows that they're not going to get any concessions for this, that in fact we're going to ratchet up sanctions every time they do this, then maybe they'll cut out even that.
00:06:23.000Now, is that the greatest possible outcome?
00:06:26.000I mean, it would be great if the Kim family would just all drop dead immediately.
00:06:29.000You know, that would be the best possible outcome for the world.
00:06:31.000It'd be the best possible outcome for the North Korean people, who don't deserve this monstrosity that's been thrust upon them for the better part of half a century.
00:06:38.000But, that said, are we at the verge of nuclear war?
00:06:53.000One threat is that all of the neighboring countries are then going to say, okay, well, if they have a nuclear weapon, we should have a nuclear weapon.
00:07:00.000Like, South Korea will say, listen, we can't be living under the nuclear umbrella of the North Koreans.
00:07:04.000We should have the capacity to say to them, if you fire anything at us, we will nuke you.
00:07:56.000Iran is going to proliferate thanks to the Obama administration.
00:07:59.000Saudi Arabia in response could proliferate thanks to the Obama administration.
00:08:02.000You could see Turkey and Jordan proliferate.
00:08:04.000You could see a widespread development of nuclear weapons and that would be very dangerous because again all it takes is one mistake for things to go boom.
00:08:12.000It's one thing when you're talking about two regimes.
00:08:14.000When you're talking about the USSR and the United States, and we were basically the only nuclear powers, then, you know, that was hard enough to keep us from going boom, right?
00:08:21.000We had things like the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Six-Day War in 1967.
00:08:27.000There were serious nuclear threats that were issued by the Soviets with regard to the Middle East.
00:08:31.000So, you know, it was very tenuous even between two powers, one of which was good, one of which was evil, but both of which were rational in terms of self-preservation.
00:08:39.000What happens if you have a regime that is really tenuous and that feels that its only method of defense is a nuclear weapon and everybody else is proliferating?
00:08:49.000Danger number two is you could see a world in which the North Koreans start to pursue more aggressive action and attempt to ratchet up pressure on the world to give them concessions.
00:08:57.000And so they start destroying South Korean boats.
00:09:00.000They start threatening Japan, firing missiles at Japan every so often and basically saying, listen, what are you going to do about it?
00:09:13.000But is the danger immediate nuclear war?
00:09:15.000No, I don't think the danger is immediate nuclear war.
00:09:17.000So everybody ought to stop thinking that they're Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, where they're grabbing a chain link fence as the blast wave hits them and rips their skin away from their body.
00:09:25.000I don't think that's what's about to happen here.
00:09:28.000By the same token, the military option certainly should not be off the table because things are only going to get worse, not better with North Korea.
00:09:33.000I think everybody who's assuming that this regime is just going to magically collapse... Again, the Soviet Union collapsed because Mikhail Gorbachev made a vast miscalculation with regard to modernization.
00:09:42.000He felt, okay, if we modernize, if we open our doors a little bit...
00:09:45.000If we do Glasnost, the Soviet Union will survive.
00:09:47.000Instead, everyone who could opt out of the system opted out of the system.
00:09:51.000The Kim regime is not going to make the same mistake.
00:09:52.000They're going to keep this thing locked down as long as humanly possible.
00:09:55.000Kim Jong-un is a very young man, and that means that he is going to be around for quite a while, unfortunately, barring some sort of miracle that takes him out.
00:10:04.000You know, you hate to pray for God to kill people, but if God's going to take somebody, let him take Kim Jong-un.
00:10:21.000He could be around for another 50 years.
00:10:23.000So the idea that this is on the verge of collapse is just not true.
00:10:26.000And that's why it's such a dangerous situation.
00:10:27.000Now, because it's a dangerous situation, you would assume that the Democrats should, for just a second, put aside their animus for President Trump and start talking instead about supporting
00:10:37.000A basic American stance on this, which is that North Korea has to calm this stuff down, or we're going to be forced into taking action.
00:10:43.000In North Korea, the negotiations should be taking place, that when Trump says things, he does have the credible threat of force behind him.
00:10:50.000And instead, Democrats have decided it's more important to shame President Trump.
00:10:53.000Talk about that in just a second, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
00:11:25.000Just because you're defending yourself in your own home, just because you're defending yourself from home intruders, that doesn't mean that the police aren't going to come and arrest you and you might not be prosecuted.
00:11:34.000And that's why you need to work with the USCCA.
00:11:36.000The USCCA wants to protect hard-working Americans who are trying to defend themselves and their families.
00:11:40.000That's why they're there to educate, train, ensure responsibly armed citizens before, during, and after a self-defense incident
00:11:46.000No one should go through the aftermath of a self-defense incident alone, and the USCCA is making sure you can defend yourself.
00:11:51.000They're giving a gun away every day to show appreciation and support for our Second Amendment rights.
00:11:56.000For information about their lifesaving coverage, visit DefendMyFamilyNow.com today.
00:12:16.000If, God forbid, you have to use your gun in a self-defense scenario, then they will help you ensure that you are legally covered and you don't either go bankrupt or spend the rest of your life in court or jail.
00:12:28.000So go over and check out defendmyfamilynow.com.
00:12:31.000Okay, so naturally Trump is saying all this stuff and the media is trying to make it out that he's a crazy person who's gonna get us into a nuclear war.
00:13:11.000Well, the first thing is that I think some of these threats have been made because the president has also made his own threats.
00:13:18.000And so that's why I'm saying that we need to allow diplomacy a chance to work instead of going tit-for-tat with a 32-year-old dictator in North Korea.
00:13:29.000In fact, there are reports today that diplomacy is moving forward, that the Trump administration has had contacts for months with the North Koreans, and that we are moving toward some sort of defusing of the situation.
00:13:44.000But the idea that you're going to go on national TV and you're going to undercut the credible use of military force with regard to North Korea is a very dangerous notion.
00:13:52.000Maxine Waters is doing the same thing again.
00:13:54.000Maxine Waters has been proclaiming for months that Trump will be impeached, or Trump will plot, or something will happen that will get Trump out of there through some democratic created miracle.
00:14:04.000You never want to say that the President of the United States is bluffing.
00:14:07.000When Obama drew his red line in Syria, there were those of us who said, it's stupid to draw the red line if you're bluffing.
00:14:13.000But it was not a good thing if we were out there saying he's definitely bluffing.
00:14:17.000You don't want to show enemy regimes that you think the president of the United States is full of it because it means that their credible threat for use of force is gone.
00:14:27.000How do you deter if people think that you're completely full of it?
00:14:30.000Here's Maxine Waterhouse, however, whose top priority is not preventing North Korea from getting aggressive.
00:14:35.000Her top priority is instead trying to humiliate President Trump.
00:14:39.000I believe that North Korea is interesting threats to the United States.
00:14:45.000But I think there are some things that they want from us.
00:14:50.000And we have to find out whether or not we can work with them on the things that they're asking for.
00:14:56.000And so this is something that we should be very concerned about.
00:15:00.000But this is not the time to go bluffing and threatening.
00:15:13.000The whole idea of diplomacy is supposedly the iron fist inside the velvet glove.
00:15:18.000And you either get the velvet glove or you get the fist.
00:15:21.000If there is no credible threat, then why engage in diplomacy in the first place?
00:15:25.000I mean, if the North Koreans know we're not going to do anything, then why wouldn't they just continue to develop their nuclear weapons and threaten whomever they want and fire nuclear weapons at whomever they choose?
00:15:34.000There has to be a credible threat of force.
00:15:35.000Democrats treat diplomacy, it's a pet peeve of mine, they treat diplomacy as though diplomacy is an actual policy instead of diplomacy being a strategy toward the achievement of policy.
00:15:47.000A policy is something that you are attempting to forward.
00:15:50.000Obviously, you would prefer diplomacy to force if they achieve the same end, but if they don't achieve the same end, then you have to determine, is diplomacy better, or is force better?
00:16:10.000Maybe to defuse the situation, I need to give her space.
00:16:12.000Maybe to defuse the situation, I need to hug her and talk.
00:16:15.000But those are strategies towards defusing the situation.
00:16:18.000The goal of the situation isn't for me to have alone time.
00:16:21.000The goal of the situation isn't for me to grab a hug.
00:16:24.000You know, Maxine Waters and Democrats, they treat diplomacy as though the goal of the situation is to talk with North Korea.
00:16:28.000Who wants to spend their time talking with North Korea?
00:16:30.000The purpose of talking with North Korea is to achieve some sort of settlement where we're not on the verge of nuclear war every five seconds with a nutcase who lives there.
00:16:39.000One of my pet peeves here is also Ben Rhodes, who just needs to go away and shut up.
00:16:43.000Ben Rhodes is the idiot National Security Advisor under President Obama.
00:16:48.000His great national security experience before that had been being a failed novelist.
00:16:53.000He'd written half a novel that was never published.
00:16:56.000And it's really, uh, he is the author of the egregious and horrifying Iran deal and he's tweeting out about this stuff.
00:17:03.000He should shut up because the bottom line is that we're going to be in the same situation with Iran in about five minutes here because he signed a nuclear deal with the Iranians that allows them to pursue a nuclear weapon.
00:17:11.000The minute they say they have developed a nuclear weapon, then all of a sudden we're going to get, oh, it's because Trump undermined the nuclear deal.
00:17:17.000No, the reason this happened is because Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon, the Obama administration chose to ignore it in favor of trying to make overtures to one of the most evil regimes on the planet, exactly as the Clinton administration did during the 1990s.
00:17:30.000Ben Rhodes, he said, he's tweeting out now, Trump turned to national security was inevitable given domestic failures and constraints, but this week doesn't bode well for next three years.
00:17:52.000But the Democrats hate Trump so much that everything, everything is Trump's fault.
00:17:57.000And then you've got Ben Rhodes tweeting about how we can't back out of the Iran deal because if we back out of the Iran deal then it's just terrible.
00:18:51.000So I'm highly doubtful that we're in the midst of a nuclear war here, but this is what Democrats want you to believe so that you're scared of President Trump.
00:19:05.000You want to present a united face when it comes to your national security team.
00:19:08.000Trump's governing by chaos is not useful when it comes to national security.
00:19:11.000So you've got open battles now between Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, and H.R.
00:19:16.000McMaster, Trump's national security advisor.
00:19:18.000McMaster has ousted a bunch of Bannon loyalists inside the administration, some of whom should have been ousted, some of whom probably should not have been ousted.
00:19:24.000McMaster is an expert on counterinsurgency.
00:19:29.000His perspective on Afghanistan is apparently one of the things at issue with Steve Bannon.
00:19:33.000Bannon just wants to get out of Afghanistan.
00:19:34.000McMaster is saying, guys, Al Qaeda is still there.
00:19:38.000If we get out of there, there will be another terrorist attack.
00:19:40.000We ought to be staffing up, not staffing down in Afghanistan.
00:19:45.000That fight is causing Bannon to feel marginalized and lash out at McMaster.
00:19:52.000There are some ancillary issues regarding McMaster.
00:19:53.000McMaster is not particularly pro-Israel, which I think is a problem, obviously.
00:19:57.000But Trump is the president, and if he can check McMaster on Israel and then listen to his advice on Afghanistan, that seems to me probably a better strategy.
00:20:04.000Trump has been forced to come out yesterday, for example, and say that he has confidence in his own national security advisor.
00:20:13.000What you want when it comes to foreign policy is a united front where people know that whatever you say is credible, that they're not arguments among your members of your administration publicly.
00:20:22.000You don't want members of your administration arguing with each other.
00:20:25.000That creates confusion and it leads America's enemies to sit around thinking, okay, what do they really think?
00:20:47.000Okay, so, you know, he's sticking with McMaster for now.
00:20:50.000The right is very upset with McMaster because of all the purges of a lot of the abandoned people, and the feeling that McMaster is more of a traditional defense guy who's willing to work with Obama holdovers.
00:21:25.000Yeah, he and Rex Tillerson, Trump's own Secretary of State, are going at it because Tillerson is saying, don't worry about the militaristic rhetoric, we're working on something, and Gorka's out there saying, Tillerson's at SAIT, he doesn't get to talk about what Defense Department is doing, and so now Gorka is under fire for going to war with Tillerson.
00:21:42.000Sebastian, you know this is going to be all over the papers, and whether you had the exact meaning that people have now interpreted it as, it looks like, to some people, it looks like, forget backstabbing, that you frontstabbed the Secretary of State, and, you know, people look at that and say, who was he to admonish any process that the Secretary of State would take?
00:22:08.000I was admonishing the journalists of the fake news industrial complex who are forcing our chief diplomat into a position where they are demanding he makes the military case for action when that is not the mandate of the Secretary of State.
00:22:27.000That's why we have a Department of Defense.
00:22:29.000If a journalist doesn't know the difference
00:22:32.000So Gorka tries to turn on the media, but again, Trump needs to get his team under control.
00:22:36.000You'd hope that John Kelly would help him with this, but obviously Kelly is not able to get everything under control as of yet, and that is not a good thing.
00:22:45.000Okay, so before we get to things I like and things I hate, and then I want to spend some ample time on the mailbag,
00:22:50.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at PolicyGenius.
00:22:54.000So, right now, if you don't have a life insurance policy, you are making a very large mistake.
00:22:57.000You should have life insurance policy no matter how young you are, no matter how old.
00:23:01.000The bottom line is, you don't want to die and leave your family in the lurch.
00:23:04.000PolicyGenius.com is the place you can go to learn about life insurance, compare quotes from America's top providers, and save up to 40%
00:23:51.000Make sure that your family is covered in case something bad happens.
00:23:57.000Okay, so before we get to things I like and things I hate in the mailbag, first we have to say goodbye to you over on Facebook and on the visuals of YouTube.
00:24:07.000So, if you do not know and you just listen to us online,
00:24:10.000We are in a visual show, not just an audio show.
00:24:13.000If you want to watch us, if you want to watch this show unfold in real time, watch the magic happen.
00:24:17.000If you want to be part of the mailbag, we have a mailbag, and you can be part of the live mailbag right now, today, if you go over and subscribe at dailywire.com for just $9.99 a month, you get the subscription to not only this show, but Andrew Klavan's show.
00:26:29.000Back at what it was, it looks forward to what's going to happen there.
00:26:34.000It talks about its level of stability, what comes after if the Kim family should basically lose power, whether there is in fact some sort of internal turmoil.
00:27:24.000That's the guy that they are trying to restore to the leadership of the Democratic Party.
00:27:27.000The guy who created a coalition so fragile that even Hillary Clinton couldn't mobilize it in her own favor to defeat a reality TV game show host.
00:28:20.000According to the report from the Washington Examiner, the unidentified female candidate dropped out in early August during a three-week course in San Diego that began July 24th.
00:28:28.000It was the first assessment of potential SEAL officers before they can be sent on to more grueling courses, according to the website, which cited multiple Naval Special Warfare Command sources.
00:28:37.000So, before January 2016, women were not allowed in military combat roles.
00:28:41.000There were no female applicants in the 18 months since that historic change until July, which is when this woman enlisted.
00:28:51.000Okay, so the fact that she signed up, listen, anybody who signs up is doing more than I have, so I can't criticize them on that basis, but the stupidity of a left that suggests that women are exactly the same as men in every way is demonstrated every single day by reality.
00:29:06.000By the way, this is one of the reasons I think this movie Atomic Blonde is failing.
00:29:10.000Before the show, Mathis and Austin saw the movie, he thinks it's really good.
00:29:14.000I haven't seen it yet, so I really have no opinion on the quality of the film.
00:29:16.000Apparently it has a 20-minute fight sequence that's really amazing.
00:29:19.000I have a general problem with female fight sequences where you get one woman beating up guys who are 200 pounds, like she's 105 pounds soaking wet, and she's beating the crap out of guys who are 200 pounds.
00:29:42.000I think that's one of the reasons why the female action star genre hasn't been doing particularly well.
00:29:47.000There have been a bunch of movies that have come out recently with the female action star, and they just don't work that well, typically, because the suspension of disbelief to watch some beautiful woman the size of my wife
00:29:58.000Throw around some six-foot-three dude who weighs 240 pounds.
00:30:03.000It requires certain suspension of disbelief.
00:30:05.000I think also the marketing for that film, it seemed to make a lot of the lesbian relationship in the film.
00:30:10.000And I think that that's a mistake for the marketers.
00:30:12.000Not just because some people are put off by that, but also because... This is a question I asked Austin.
00:30:20.000I asked, in the film, is there a reason that Charlize Theron's character had to be a woman instead of a man?
00:30:25.000Is there anything about her character in the film that makes her necessarily female in any real way, other than the fact that she's a female?
00:31:11.000I think that people, there's something that doesn't ring authentic about women who just could be men on screen, or men who could just be women on screen.
00:31:18.000You know, that men and women are different, and we pick up on that, and films lack authenticity when they don't play into that, I think.
00:32:40.000Okay, the reason that he should not say stuff like this is because literally a week and a half ago, he was on tape talking to police officers and saying, when there is a criminal suspect, don't put your hand on the top of their head.
00:32:48.000If you have to rough them up a little bit, go ahead.
00:32:51.000Right now he's talking about it's really tough stuff that Paul Manafort got woken up in the middle of the night.
00:33:46.000So he's sort of half-joking there, but I'm not sure what that joke is supposed to mean, considering that all of these people are still employed by the United States.
00:34:44.000Okay, first of all, on Twitter, and in life, whenever you say, I'm just gonna say it, it's usually followed by something you really should have thought more about saying, right?
00:35:06.000Your domestic security threat, when you suggest that Americans ought to be armed in case of violence, that Americans ought to be armed in order to protect themselves from home invasion, exercising their Second Amendment rights, that's what the NRA is for.
00:35:18.000And when Dana Lash points out that it's a threatening world out there, they're a domestic security threat?
00:35:23.000No wonder Republicans say the Democrats are fascists when they issue stuff like this.
00:35:27.000Once you label someone a domestic security threat, that leads to a justification for shutting them down.
00:35:34.000Okay, final thing that I hate, and then we'll do some mailback.
00:35:36.000So, final thing that I hate here is ABC's chief political analyst, a guy named Matthew Dowd, he tweets out dumb stuff about religion all the time.
00:35:42.000He used to be a Bush 2004 campaign chief strategist.
00:35:46.000About a month ago, he tweeted out that he was Catholic, and he said, being Christian is a state of being.
00:35:50.000Practicing Louvre, some of the most Christian folks I know in life are atheists.
00:35:54.000And every Christian went, wait, wait, wait, hold up a second, just what?
00:35:57.000Like, being a nice person and being a Christian are not identical, right?
00:36:02.000Some of the most Christian people that he knows are not atheists, because, like, I'm a very nice person to my employees, despite me making fun of them a lot.
00:36:54.000That's because the vast majority of bombings worldwide, the vast majority of terrorist bombings worldwide are being carried out by radical Muslim fundamentalists.
00:37:03.000Okay, tens of thousands of people dead every year thanks to radical Muslim fundamentalism.
00:37:07.00024% of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal, unerrant word of God.
00:37:11.000And there's another 47 who believe that it's inspired by God.
00:37:14.000So, the vast majority of Americans are at least religious to that extent, and a quarter of Americans are religious fundamentalists, according to Matthew Dowd, and yet we don't see Christians going around and raiding gangs, raping and looting and blowing people up.
00:37:29.000But this is the stupidity of the media that's looking for moral equivalence wherever it can find it.
00:37:32.000Okay, so, let's do some of the mailbag now.
00:37:35.000Alright, Dean says, Ben, quick, top 5 Halloween October movies, go.
00:38:22.000I like lock-box movies, the ones where it's like
00:38:24.000Two people in an enclosed space and they sort of have to deal with it, but that's not my favorite thing.
00:38:29.000So instead of answering your question, I'm gonna answer a question I'm making up on my own because it occurred on Twitter yesterday, and that was top five action movies.
00:38:35.000So I separate action from adventure, which is why my list is a little bit different from other people's lists.
00:38:41.000So I don't include movies like Indiana Jones in my top five action movies because it's more of an adventure movie.
00:38:46.000Adventure to me is characterized by going to
00:38:49.000I know a lot of people disagree with this.
00:38:51.000There are some other action movies that I think are close up on the list.
00:39:16.000Particularly, like, some people put Gladiator.
00:39:18.000Gladiator's not an action movie to me.
00:39:21.000It's not really as much of an action film.
00:39:23.000For me, if no one fires an automatic weapon at any point in the film, then it's probably not an action movie, unless there are a bunch of great action set pieces, like a train trying to run you over, like in The Fugitive.
00:39:34.000It's amazing how The Fugitive has sort of been forgotten, but it's so eminently watchable.
00:39:37.000If you're flipping around TV and The Fugitive is on, then the chances are that you're going to end up watching at least 15 minutes of it.
00:39:43.000But Die Hard, obviously top of the list.
00:39:45.000Die Hard is just an amazingly good film.
00:42:52.000But just like abortion, that's like using rape and incest to justify the whole thing.
00:42:55.000What about somebody who just has depression?
00:42:57.000Right now, I think the statistics are like 1 in 200 people in the Netherlands is put to death through euthanasia.
00:43:03.000I don't want doctors to be trained in death.
00:43:06.000You actually get a market for that then, right?
00:43:08.000You get a market in doctors who dispense death at the lowest available prescription rate.
00:43:12.000And I think that a society that forwards dealing in death is likely to start taking life less seriously.
00:43:21.000Plus you could have a lot of malfeasance.
00:43:22.000I mean, you could see a situation in which family members are pressuring an older member of the family to just get it over with so that they can take the inheritance.
00:43:30.000Or somebody has Alzheimer's and the family just decides, okay, put them out of their misery.
00:43:34.000I think it's a bit of a slippery slope, euthanasia.
00:43:45.000The Bill of Rights originally did not apply to the states.
00:43:47.000It is only about the federal government because it is a federal document.
00:43:50.000Over the course of time, the Supreme Court gradually did what they called the Incorporation Doctrine, where in order to apply a lot of the elements of the Constitution to southern states, particularly, that were violating those provisions of the Constitution with regard to their black population,
00:44:06.000The Supreme Court started using the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, the Due Process Clause, to try and suggest that states were bound by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause to enforce all of the other elements of the Constitution.
00:44:20.000That seems bad constitutional law to me.
00:44:21.000The First Amendment actually does not apply.
00:44:23.000I mean, the wording of the First Amendment obviously doesn't apply to the states, right?
00:44:26.000It says, Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
00:44:32.000I don't know how you apply that to the states, but now that it's been legally applied to the states, it applies.
00:44:37.000So, if you were to apply the Second Amendment to the people of California, then yes, California's gun laws almost universally violate the Second Amendment to the Constitution.
00:44:49.000Do you think legalizing medical marijuana on the federal level would help combat the opioid epidemic?
00:44:53.000Also, do you think Big Pharma would lobby against this?
00:44:56.000So, Tyler, I haven't seen evidence that marijuana presence in particular states has lowered effects of the opioid epidemic.
00:45:02.000So, if you could show me evidence of that, then I'd be all in favor of that.
00:45:05.000I'm in favor of legalizing marijuana on the federal level anyway, because I don't think that the federal government has done a good job of policing it.
00:45:14.000With that said, I think that it is worth noting that the high apparently that you get from marijuana is not even close to the high that you get from opioids.
00:45:21.000And opioids are significantly more addictive.
00:45:23.000The evidence on marijuana addictiveness is mixed at best.
00:45:26.000The evidence on opioid addictiveness is extraordinarily strong.
00:45:29.000Maybe next week we'll talk a little bit more about President Trump's decision to declare the opioid epidemic a national emergency.
00:45:36.000I'm not sure what the federal government can do here.
00:45:38.000The bottom line with the opioid epidemic is it sprang from two particular sources.
00:45:42.000Influx of heroin from down south across the Mexican border to the over prescription of drugs like Vicodin and Oxycontin that started in the in the 1990s and 2000s and so people would have an injury and then they would go get Oxycontin.
00:45:57.000They'd be basically using what is a soft form of heroin and then they would go out and seek a further high.
00:46:03.000Actually one of the things the federal government did was exacerbate this because people who are on Medicaid could go get a
00:46:36.000If you were to ask a question for the mailbag, what would it be?
00:46:39.000Well, it would be, Ben, why don't they double your salary?
00:46:42.000That would probably be, and my answer would be, I don't know, I'm the boss, I should do that, shouldn't I?
00:46:46.000Tyler says, hey Ben, I don't like sports, I don't drink, I'm 22, how on earth am I supposed to have a social life?
00:46:51.000I find it hard to have friends when most of my peers have totally different priorities.
00:46:55.000I'm generally a social guy and by no means an introvert, but I have almost no interest in what most people my age care about.
00:47:00.000I imagine this is a rather common problem with young conservatives.
00:47:02.000How would you advise people like me deal with this dilemma?
00:47:04.000So, you know, I think that, listen, when I was in college, I was not the world's most social animal.
00:47:09.000When I was in law school, I also don't drink.
00:47:13.000Not out of principle, because I'll have a drink every so often, but because I have some bad acid reflux, so it doesn't do, it does a job on me.
00:47:22.000I do like sports, I can talk about that, but I think that America's a huge place with lots of people with varying interests.
00:47:28.000Obviously, we have a huge audience here at The Ben Shapiro Show, and that means there are lots of people who think like you, if you listen to the show, and want to talk about issues like this because they spend time every day listening to this content.
00:47:38.000If you're interested in politics, politics is a conversation starter, and you should be able to find people who are willing to talk about deep issues.
00:47:44.000By the way, when you're dating, that is the stuff that you should talk about, are the deep issues.
00:47:48.000My wife, I've said this before, our first date was legitimately a three-hour conversation about free will and determinism.
00:48:03.000Does the Jewish faith teach that some sins are worse than others?
00:48:06.000Also, does it teach that there are unforgivable sins?
00:48:07.000So, Judaism says that some sins are more serious than others.
00:48:11.000Obviously, there's a different level of punishment for different levels of sins.
00:48:14.000Murder is a more serious crime than eating not kosher, for example.
00:48:18.000And I think any religion that suggests that all sins are equally as egregious is not a religion worth listening to because obviously that's not true.
00:48:26.000Judaism does say that you can't impute to God your own justification for a particular sin.
00:48:31.000So it's up to God to decide which ones are more severe.
00:48:33.000But yes, there are levels of severity.
00:48:35.000When it comes to sin, as evidenced by the different punishments.
00:48:37.000Some you can bring a sacrifice for, some you die for, right?
00:48:40.000As far as unforgivable sins, so I believe that they say the unforgivable sins in Judaism, and forgive me if I get this wrong, I'm sure other Orthodox Jews will write me if I do, but the unforgivable sins, in the sense that you must pay for them, are adultery, idolatry, and murder, I believe are the three biggies.
00:48:55.000So if you do those three, any of those three, then those are essentially unforgivable.
00:49:00.000Jackson says, what's your beef with Michael Knowles?
00:49:02.000I don't have a beef with Michael Knowles.
00:49:04.000My beef with Michael Knowles is, where is the beef?
00:49:06.000I mean, that's my beef with Michael Knowles.
00:49:08.000He wrote an empty book and sold 120,000 copies of it.
00:49:28.000You want to bring up your children so that they do that.
00:49:31.000And I think repentance is a wonderful thing.
00:49:33.000I think that you realizing that you made a mistake and that you wish you hadn't, that's okay.
00:49:38.000You know, we all make mistakes in life.
00:49:39.000You know, being honest about your past and suggesting that you've gotten beyond it is the best way for your potential spouse to know that you're capable of that sort of thing, which is really important.
00:49:48.000No, I don't think that they've wasted their education at all.
00:49:50.000I think that whatever choice you make to be at home with your kids is a good choice.
00:49:53.000And the balance that you choose to make between career and being at home
00:50:07.000I think that, you know, women who choose not to be at home with their kids at all have a serious problem.
00:50:11.000It's why, one of the reasons my wife is working the way she's working is because she's hoping that when she's done, she's able to create a much better work-life balance than if she didn't go through a couple of years of poop to get to the roses.
00:50:22.000And as my grandmother used to say, sometimes you have to walk through the poop to get to the roses, the manure to get to the roses.
00:50:27.000And I think that that's what a lot of, you know, the educational process is all about.
00:50:31.000But no, I think that, you know, stay-at-home moms are doing something that is
00:50:35.000I mean, you can see that there's been a tremendous impact on children who don't have parents around as much, thanks to things like divorce.
00:50:42.000This is not a rip on working women, but everybody has to balance out how much time is necessary with your kids and how much time is necessary in the workplace.
00:50:49.000And this idea that you can have it all.
00:50:53.000You can have a lot of most things, and this is not a case against women in the workplace either.
00:50:56.000Okay, a couple more questions and then we'll go.
00:51:00.000Callie says, with Google and the memo being a hot topic in the news this week, I was wondering what is your belief the role should or should not play if a business is discriminating in hiring and or paying employees?
00:51:08.000My belief is that the government should pay no role in this because if a business discriminates in hiring, then they are losing money because the idea is of discrimination inherently is that you're going to avoid hiring the best person for a particular job.
00:51:20.000And you're going to hire instead somebody else, which means somebody else is going to hire the best person to make more money than you, and if you don't pay employees that well, then you're going to be able to, then that person can go across the street.
00:51:30.000Free markets tend to get rid of discrimination, not for everybody, but over the course of time.
00:51:36.000I'm going to try and read this backwards.
00:51:59.000Well, again, I think that there is something to be said for the Google memo guy, who we had on yesterday, just in the sense that he has now raised the consciousness of the country with regard to the sort of discrimination that's happening at Google.
00:52:14.000You have to decide whether you think you're going to do the most good by fighting the power where you stand, or by, you know, staying in the closet as conservative until you have more power.
00:52:22.000And I think that that changes situation by situation, but I don't think that it's worthwhile always granting a baton to the bad guys in order to make a point, because sometimes that point does not go over or is worthless.
00:52:32.000Okay, so, we'll be back here next week with all of the latest news.
00:52:36.000Thanks so much for everything that you do for the show.
00:52:39.000Again, we are the number two podcast in America after Oprah, and if we continue to grow, then we will overtake Oprah, Oprah Delenda-esque, and we will eventually take that top slot on iTunes, which would be pretty awesome.