ESPN has a new policy that encourages more political talk from commentators, and it s a good thing, because without it, their ratings are going to continue to tank. Plus, we talk about the Susan Rice scandal, and why it s important. And we have an exciting show lined up for you today featuring F.H. Buckley, who says that Donald Trump should pursue nationalized health care. Plus we have to get to all the latest on the latest in the Syria situation, including the news that Steve Bannon is no longer on the National Security Council. All that and much more on this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's new show, "The Ben Shapiro File," wherever you get your shows, wherever you re listening to your favorite podcast. Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with the latest Ben Shapiro news and discuss all things Ben Shapiro and his other projects. Thanks to our sponsor, VaynerMedia! Subscribe, comment, and share the show with your friends and family! Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of the show: bit.ly/support-and-subscribe to our new sponsor, to get 10% off your first month with discount code: PODCASTLEPRODUCER! to receive 20% off for the entire month, plus free shipping and free shipping throughout the rest of the year, plus a FREE 7-month VIP membership offer, plus an ad-free version of the entire year, including VIP & VIP membership, and a free of the podcast, plus 2-membership offer! and VIP membership and VIP memberships to the VIP membership plan! in-locals get 20% OFF for two months, plus VIP access to VIP access, plus full-service worldwide, plus the choice of VIP pricing, and full-choice of VIP membership worldwide, and an additional 2 VIP membership only to VIP pricing and VIP discount, and VIP pricing throughout the U.S. Watch this offer, and get exclusive VIP membership starting at $50/locals worldwide. to watch the show? and access to the entire world gets $40/month, plus they get $4/locations worldwide, plus a 2-place nationwide, and 2-choice options, and 7-country pro-choice, and they get VIP access and VIP access gets $16/choice gets $19/choice, plus all other places offer
00:00:00.000On Tuesday morning, ESPN, which has been in a losing battle to keep its subscribers, issued a new set of guidelines, recognizing the connection between sports and politics.
00:00:08.000ESPN public editor Jim Brady acknowledged the oddity of releasing those guidelines after a presidential election, but he said, quote, we are living in unique political times, which explains the revised guidelines for discussion of political and social issues.
00:00:20.000According to ESPN Vice President Craig Benston, he said that Trump's election was the essential factor behind the new guidelines.
00:00:26.000The first part of the guideline is a recommitment to objective journalism.
00:00:33.000Of course, that's not going to help much.
00:00:39.000CNN believes the same thing, and their reporting is slanted heavily to the left.
00:00:43.000The left's version of objectivity says that a story, once decided upon, must not be overtly political.
00:00:49.000But this ignores selection bias, which decides which stories are important to cover in the first place.
00:00:53.000ESPN's heavy focus on Caitlyn Jenner, for example, pushes a political agenda through selection bias as well as political bias.
00:00:59.000ESPN does make two more important changes to their policy.
00:01:02.000First, they say that hard news reporters and editors at the company should not make any public statements in any forum that would reveal their political biases.
00:02:12.000Now I can't even bear to watch it for more than 15 minutes at a stretch since it's impossible to escape the leftist propagandizing.
00:02:18.000That's not going to change under the new rules.
00:02:19.000Let's see ESPN hire some conservatives and let them talk, rather than ousting them the moment they disagree with the prevailing leftist orthodoxy.
00:02:26.000Then we can talk about a freer discourse.
00:02:27.000Until then, ESPN should shut up about politics altogether or risk watching its ratings continue to tank and subscribers continue to cut the cord.
00:02:45.000Buckley is a professor over at George Mason University School of Law, and he has a new column out in which he says that Donald Trump should pursue nationalized health care.
00:02:53.000So we'll be talking to him about that.
00:02:55.000Plus, we have to get to all of the developments in Syria.
00:02:58.000We have to get to the fact that Steve Bannon is no longer on the National Security Council.
00:04:35.000The media continued to insist that there's nothing going on with the Susan Rice scandal.
00:04:39.000So yesterday, because I was stuck at the airport all day, we couldn't actually do the show yesterday, but I do want to talk about the Susan Rice scandal and why it's important.
00:04:48.000So here is the reason that the Susan Rice scandal is important.
00:04:54.000So to back up, what we found out over the weekend and a little bit on Monday was that basically
00:05:01.000Susan Rice, who is the National Security Advisor under President Obama, had been requesting what they call unmasked intelligence reports, unmasked raw intelligence from the intelligence community.
00:05:10.000In other words, there was a paragraph that would come in and it would say, Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak was talking to U.S.
00:05:16.000Person 1 and said blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
00:05:19.000And so she would say, okay, who is U.S.
00:05:21.000I want to know the name of that person.
00:05:22.000Well, if there is no illegal nefarious activity at play, then it really shouldn't matter who US Person 1 was, but she was specifically asking for any time there was a Trump administration official, a Trump campaign official rather, and then after his election, a Trump transition official, she was asking that all those people be unmasked.
00:05:38.000Apparently she had a database, an Excel spreadsheet, in which she was keeping all the information about the various members of the Trump transition team and Trump campaign who had talked to foreign actors, even though there was no accusation, no evidence of wrongdoing, which is targeting.
00:05:52.000It's not wiretapping because, again, this is all the stuff that the intelligence community was picking up in incidental collections, so I want to be very careful about how we discuss this so that we are factual.
00:06:01.000It is Susan Rice sort of spying on the Trump administration in the sense that she is using a Trump filter to go through all of the information that's being gathered by the intel community, but that's not the same thing as like in the lives of others where the government says, I want you to go spy on this person.
00:06:17.000At no point did Susan Rice say, I want the intelligence community to go and tap Trump's phone, for example.
00:06:22.000She said, if Trump's name comes up in the communications, unmask him.
00:06:24.000Now, the reason that's a problem, it's legal to do that.
00:06:27.000The reason it's a problem, it's an abuse of power.
00:06:28.000If you're just keeping tabs on your political opponents so you know their next move, or you're just keeping tabs on your political opponent so that you can presumably leak it out to the press, which is what happened with Mike Flynn, the national security advisor who followed Susan Rice,
00:06:42.000If that's your purpose, then that is nefarious.
00:07:18.000So Rice was specifically asked about whether she knew about any intelligence gathered on Trump, and she said she didn't know anything about any of the intelligence.
00:07:52.000But she's got nothing and the Obama team has nothing and so they've got a problem on their hands because basically they were monitoring Trump and they came up with nothing.
00:08:00.000So Susan Rice was on television yesterday and she came out and she denied that she unmasked the Trump team.
00:08:07.000Did you seek the names of people involved in, to unmask the names of people involved in the Trump transition, the Trump campaign, people surrounding the President-elect, in order to spy on them, in order to expose them?
00:08:22.000Absolutely not for any political purposes to spy, expose anything.
00:08:36.000Andrea, to talk about the contents of a classified report, to talk about the individuals on the foreign side who were the targets of the report itself, or any Americans who may have been collected upon incidentally, is to disclose classified information.
00:08:54.000The allegation... Will you stop it right there?
00:08:55.000The idea that Susan Rice would never disclose classified information.
00:08:58.000This administration was the leakiest administration until now.
00:09:01.000I mean, it was a super leaky administration, the Obama administration, that continuously leaked American and Israeli national security information.
00:09:08.000They leaked national security information at an increasingly high rate as the years went on in order to push a political agenda.
00:09:14.000The idea that nobody in the Obama administration would leak is silly.
00:09:18.000Also, I like how Susan Rice may be telling the truth here, but
00:09:21.000I like when she says, I didn't look at any of this for political purposes.
00:09:25.000OK, how do you define a political purpose?
00:09:29.000But there's no way that it wasn't for a political purpose.
00:09:32.000I mean, obviously, if you come up with no evidence and you're just keeping tabs on people who are coming up in the incidental surveillance and you're just asking for every update on Trump, why would you do that if it didn't have a political purpose?
00:10:51.000And it can also be true that Susan Rice was inappropriately using the power of government in order to keep tabs on her political opponents.
00:11:20.000There is no evidence whatsoever that the Trump team surveilled or spied on illegally.
00:11:27.000There is no evidence that backs up the president's original claim.
00:11:30.000And on this program tonight, we will not insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise, nor will we aid and abet the people who are trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating
00:11:48.000I mean, I understand that CNN has to devote 27 hours out of every 24 to Trump and Russia, at least when they're not covering Malaysian airliner 360 or whatever that Malaysian airliner was that Donald Trump thought was eaten by a black hole.
00:12:12.000There is no evidence of any wrongdoing.
00:12:16.000And in fact, if anything, the NSA asking for identities was a reflection of exactly how much traffic there was involving Trump people and foreign players.
00:12:26.000The White House blasting the press for not reporting on another fake scandal.
00:12:38.000Okay, so he says that the reason that Susan Rice is keeping tabs is because there was so much traffic, so he turns it back against Trump that it's nefarious, but again, no proof that anything nefarious went on.
00:13:40.000If you want to make your significant other happy, you want to make your wife happy, you want to make your mom happy, this is the way to do it.
00:13:46.000There's nothing that people appreciate more than Flowers.
00:13:49.000As I say, I travel a lot, and when I'm out of town, I always make sure to send my wife Flowers so she knows that I'm thinking about her, and I've been using for years.
00:13:55.000Long before they were a sponsor, I was using ProFlowers.com because they are the best.
00:14:52.000He teaches at the Scalia Law School at George Mason University.
00:14:55.000His most recent book is The Way Back, Restoring the Promise of America, and we're having Professor Buckley on because he has a new column in which he suggests that President Trump should actually pursue single-payer health care.
00:15:05.000Professor Buckley, thanks so much for joining The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:15:11.000So you wrote in this column that President Trump should basically ignore repealing Obamacare.
00:15:18.000He should instead focus on the imposition of single-payer health care.
00:15:22.000And you try to justify that on conservative grounds, which is odd because single-payer isn't really conservative.
00:15:27.000You write that Trump said that he wanted a plan that would leave no one uninsured.
00:15:30.000The simplest way to do this is universal health care on the Canadian model.
00:15:34.000I actually agree that that's what Trump was promising when he said that he wanted to make sure that no one was uninsured, but he also promised hundreds of times on the campaign trail to repeal Obamacare.
00:15:45.000Do you think that those two were in conflict?
00:15:50.000I don't know if they're in conflict or not, but whether, that's a matter of verbiage, but let's just talk about whether or not something like the Canadian single-payer plan makes sense, and I think it does.
00:16:00.000And I think it does because it, I think, would appeal to most American voters as well.
00:16:06.000All those countries ahead of us on measures of economic freedom have something like single-payer.
00:16:11.000So if one's worried about economic liberty in America, as one should be, it's not about single-payer.
00:16:17.000It's about a whole bunch of other things that tend to get ignored.
00:16:19.000Okay, so I agree with you that there are a lot of other things that tend to get ignored, but to say that single-payer healthcare is not an imposition on American freedom is just not true.
00:16:28.000It creates rationing, as it does in Canada.
00:16:31.000I think that the best framework for thinking about this is that, as Dan McLaughlin in National Review said, you can have affordability, universality, and quality.
00:17:29.000I don't want to hit him while he's off the air here, but the fact is that measures of satisfaction are not a particularly good measure of whether a system is good or not.
00:17:37.000Americans are highly satisfied with Medicaid, and there are no improved health outcomes from Medicaid.
00:17:41.000But, Professor Buckley, I didn't want to hit you while you were off the air there, but I would just argue that the measure of satisfaction is not, in my view, a good one, because virtually everyone is satisfied with welfare systems.
00:17:52.000It's very rare that people are dissatisfied with stuff that they think they're getting for free.
00:18:15.000There are a lot of things you can do to make it better.
00:18:16.000It's a very different kind of playing field now than it was when these things were introduced.
00:18:21.000But in general, I think what I'm arguing against is a certain libertarian view that entitlements are the problem, and entitlements, you know what that is?
00:19:18.000But if you're talking about wasteful laws that seem impossible to repeal, adding new entitlements are the definition of that.
00:19:22.000And if you're talking about a regulatory state on steroids, then a massive new entitlement that regulates how people obtain their health care is the definition of a regulatory state on steroids.
00:19:31.000Well, in fact, you've got all of that with respect to the present system.
00:20:01.000Don't get hung up on what us would have to do to shrink the state.
00:20:06.000Well, I mean, considering that that is the vast majority of the budget, is these massive entitlement programs, it's very difficult to say that should be cut.
00:20:15.000Unfortunately, I think we lost Professor Buckley there.
00:20:20.000But my big question to Professor Buckley is basically,
00:20:24.000I understand that people want Trump to remain in power, but if they think the Democrats are going to work with Trump, and they think that socialized healthcare is conservative, then why not just become a Democrat?
00:20:31.000I mean, if the point is just we're going to create a new economic nationalism that involves adopting every socialist position, then why not just do it outright?
00:20:39.000And that is the big question, I think, that remains.
00:20:42.000Okay, so, in other news, we'll get to—I have a bunch of other news that I want to discuss here.
00:20:47.000For that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
00:20:49.000We're going to be talking about this amazing Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad.
00:20:53.000We're going to be talking about what's going on in Syria.
00:20:55.000We're going to be talking about Bannon's ouster.
00:20:56.000So Bannon has just been basically ousted from the National Security Council.
00:21:00.000I'll explain why that happened, what that means, and why that's a good thing.