In honor of Memorial Day, we take a look at why food stamps should not be a right, and why we should not have a right to food. Plus, we pay our respects to those who have laid down their lives for our freedom, and President Trump's speech at Arlington National Cemetary on Memorial Day. We also discuss the Jared Kushner scandal, and the best mattress we ve ever slept on. And we talk about how to get a good night s rest, if you like to lie on your back, and if you don t like to fall asleep on the floor, do you like the idea of a mattress that s a little firmer or softer? Thanks to our sponsor, Helix Sleep, for sponsoring this episode. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use coupon code "ELISSA" at checkout to receive 10% off your first pack and a freebie when you place an order of $35 or more at our webstore, or use coupon Code: CROWN10 at checkout. We're giving you a discount on your first purchase of $99 or more, and we'll send you a free copy of our new cookbook, CROWN 10% OFF your first box of the cookbook! Thank you for helping us make this podcasting app, CRICKET, and for supporting us with your support! . This episode is sponsored by HelixSleep and we hope you enjoy the podcast, Ben and Ben & Ben are listening to this episode of The Good Morning Coffee, Good Morning America. and Good Night, Good Luck, Good Ol Olie, and Good Olie. . . . Good Luck! - Ben Goodnight, Ben & Good Morning, Ben and Good Luck. - Thank You, Ben Good Night! -- - Yours Truly, Sarah Goodnight. Sarah, Sarah and Good Day, Sarah, Amy Goodnight , Sarah Goodness, by: Good Morning Good Night Good Night by Ben & Sarah Good Night by Happy Monday, Good Blessings, , Good Luck by Sarah Good Morning by, Good Day by You, Sarah & Happy Day, Good Bless You, Good Rest, Good Night Bye, Good Evening, Good Life, by Your Day, by Mr. Good Night & Good Day
00:00:40.000The South African constitution guarantees a right to all of these commodities.
00:00:43.000In fact, the constitution even creates a legal duty for the government to help secure such commodities.
00:00:48.000Yet there are some 11 million food insecure people in the country, including 1.5 million children with chronic malnutrition and growth stunting.
00:00:56.000Life expectancy in South Africa is 57 years.
00:00:59.000There are currently 12 million people in the country without adequate housing.
00:01:02.000The population of South Africa is about 55 million people.
00:01:05.000Declaring a commodity a right, it is obvious, does not make that commodity materialize.
00:01:09.000And it certainly doesn't make it materialize in the most efficient fashion.
00:01:12.000Markets make commodities materialize in the most efficient fashion.
00:01:16.000In the United States, 9 out of 10 Americans live above the global poverty standard.
00:01:21.00096% of poor parents say their children were never hungry in the past year, according to scholars at the Heritage Foundation.
00:01:26.000And a poor child is more likely to have a cable TV, a computer, a widescreen plasma TV, an Xbox, or a TiVo in the home than to be hungry.
00:01:33.000Even the Department of Agriculture, the government agency responsible for administration of food stamps, upon which approximately 15% of Americans now rely, admit that well under 6% of Americans' households have to worry even about decreased calorie consumption.
00:01:46.000Want to know what fills the gap for Americans when they're poor?
00:01:49.000Feeding America, a private charity that receives $900 million per year in food donations, the vast bulk from private companies.
00:01:55.000In fact, there's a strong link between food stamps and obesity.
00:01:59.000So, is America worse off than South Africa despite our constitution not mandating food as a right?
00:02:05.000We're significantly better off because it turns out that using government to confiscate wealth from the very people who produce cheaper and more plentiful products ends up exacerbating scarcity.
00:02:14.000Declaring things rights feels good, but when those rights come with forced redistributionism, the things become less available.
00:02:20.000So no, you don't have a right from the government to food.
00:02:23.000You have the freedom from government to live in a country where food is available in plenty
00:02:35.000Well, I hope everybody had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.
00:02:38.000I hope that you took a few minutes to pay honor and tribute to the men and women who have sacrificed their lives, laid down their lives for the freedoms that we now enjoy.
00:02:45.000Obviously, that's a sacrifice we can never live up to, but that doesn't stunt our ability to try or relieve us of our ability to try.
00:02:52.000I want to talk a little bit about President Trump on Memorial Day, which I thought was actually quite wonderful.
00:02:56.000And I also want to talk about the breaking scandal, non-scandal of Jared Kushner and all of that.
00:03:02.000I wanna say thank you to our friends over at Helix Sleep, our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.
00:03:06.000So, this is the best mattress that I have ever slept on.
00:03:10.000So, Helix Sleep, the way that this works, you go to helixsleep.com slash ben, they give you a survey as to which, do you like to lie on your side, do you like to lie on your stomach when you sleep, do you lie on your back, do you like the mattress to be firmer or softer, do you like it to be
00:04:47.000When Trump talks about the military, and I think this is why so many people resonate to Trump and resonated to him during the general election, when Trump talks about the military,
00:04:58.000This is a guy who has respect for the military.
00:05:01.000It's somebody who sees the military as the leading edge of American power and American goodness and decency.
00:05:06.000As opposed to President Obama, who always seemed a bit discomfited with the American military.
00:05:11.000He always seemed like somebody who's uncomfortable with American military power, somebody who's uncomfortable around soldiers and other members of the military.
00:05:19.000The same thing with Hillary Clinton, who reportedly back in the 90s actually asked if there was a way that she could prevent people from wearing the uniform in the White House.
00:05:27.000That was according to a couple of people who worked in the White House at the time.
00:05:30.000Trump obviously has a lot of warmth toward the military and that showed on Memorial Day, which is quite wonderful.
00:05:35.000Here was President Trump speaking yesterday about the sacrifice made by the fallen.
00:05:39.000Let us also pledge to tell the stories of Robert, Chris, Andrew, and all of America's fallen warriors today and for the next 1,000 years.
00:05:54.000And he spoke, I thought, in really glowing terms about the military.
00:06:01.000He also marked his first Memorial Day as Commander-in-Chief by heading through the throngs of motorcycles participating in Rolling Thunder.
00:06:06.000The Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, also was part of Rolling Thunder.
00:06:13.000He called service members, angels sent to us by God.
00:06:15.000He said, to every Gold Star family, God is with you and your loved ones are with him.
00:06:19.000They died in war so that we could live in peace.
00:06:21.000Every time you see the sunrise over this blessed land, please know that your brave sons and daughters pushed away the night and delivered for us, for all of us, that great and glorious dawn.
00:06:32.000And again, this is one of the reasons, I think, why President Trump is... I think this is why President Trump is... There's a certain gut-level Americanism that people resonate to in Trump.
00:06:45.000There are things about America that I think Trump doesn't understand, but I think he does understand gut-level patriotism.
00:06:50.000There's a great picture of Trump hugging a six-year-old boy named Christian Jacobs who's dressed like a Marine because his father, who's a Marine Sergeant Christopher Jacobs, was killed during a training accident in California in 2011.
00:07:00.000And you won't see any of this on the news, by the way.
00:07:03.000The media refused to cover anything that Trump does that's unifying or nice, and this was unifying and nice, and good for President Trump for doing it.
00:07:11.000The other, I thought, great tribute to the military came from an active, or a former active-duty military guy, was active-duty until five minutes ago, General James Mattis, who of course is the Secretary of Defense.
00:07:21.000He was asked over the weekend on one of the news shows about what keeps him awake at night.
00:08:01.000You know, pay attention to, pay attention to policy.
00:08:04.000If you just buckle down, do patriotic rallies, go out there.
00:08:07.000This is why I think on his foreign trip, he gained some points in the estimation of the American public, because he didn't represent America badly.
00:08:15.000I mean, there were a lot of people in the media who were very upset about him, like pushing the president of Estonia, I guess, out of the way, or doing this kind of weird handshake with Emmanuel Macron, who's the president of France.
00:08:25.000But in essence, Trump was fine abroad.
00:08:28.000And despite the media's best efforts to paint him as some sort of idiot who's going to make America look boorish and terrible on the world stage, we'll talk about Europe's reaction to Trump in just a second because it's actually Europe that's being really stupid.
00:08:38.000And we'll talk about that in a second.
00:08:40.000But the point I'm making here is that Trump is still a president with potential.
00:08:44.000At this point in time, Bill Clinton had a lower approval rating than Donald Trump does.
00:08:48.000So Trump still has the potential to turn this thing around.
00:08:51.000In order for him to turn this thing around though, he's going to need to start acting in ways that aren't vague.
00:08:56.000What I mean by that is that the big controversy over the weekend was this controversy over Jared Kushner.
00:08:59.000Jared Kushner is of course Trump's son-in-law.
00:09:01.000Jared Kushner really has no business being part of the government.
00:09:04.000I mean, I'm sorry to break it to folks, but Jared Kushner is not qualified to be in government.
00:09:08.000He spent no time at all in his life thinking about government, thinking about governance.
00:09:14.000He's a stock market Wall Street guy who happens to be married to the president's daughter, and suddenly he's in charge of Middle East peace, the opioid crisis, the infrastructure plan, and all these other things Trump doesn't want to deal with.
00:09:24.000Again, if Hillary Clinton had done the same thing with Chelsea's husband, we'd all be saying this is ridiculous in every sense of the word.
00:09:30.000Trump has given all this power to Jared, and now Jared got Trump sort of in trouble because there are all these stories breaking over the weekend.
00:09:36.000I want to deconstruct them and break them down because the media is making more of them than they are, but Trump should still move on beyond Jared Kushner, who is a New York leftist who has no business
00:10:06.000Then on Friday, the Washington Post drops a bombshell, right?
00:10:09.000They report that Kushner and the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and Slate has a good rundown of this.
00:10:14.000They're real leftists, but this is basically just straight reporting.
00:10:16.000They reported that Kushner and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak discussed setting up
00:10:21.000A secret communications back channel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin in December.
00:10:27.000In March, the White House said the two had met, but the Post sources say the FBI took an interest in what was discussed.
00:10:32.000And then, apparently, right after that, Kushner had a meeting with the head of a Russian Putin-run bank, basically, right about the same time.
00:10:40.000The detail in the Washington Post report that's damning is not that they were setting up back channels.
00:10:43.000Lots of presidents set up back channels.
00:10:45.000With other countries for negotiation purposes because they don't want every negotiation to be out in the open.
00:10:50.000It's important you be able to pick up the phone and have talks with people.
00:10:53.000The one of the more nefarious ones that should have drawn more scrutiny was in 2008 Barack Obama set up a back channel with the Iranian government which really should have drawn scrutiny should have prevented him from being elected if we didn't have our heads up our butts but
00:11:03.000You know, the back channels are certainly common in American politics.
00:11:07.000The problem with this back channel is that according to the Washington Post, and this is under dispute now, Fox News said that it didn't really go down this way.
00:11:13.000The New York Times said it couldn't confirm.
00:11:14.000The Washington Post sticks by its reporting.
00:11:37.000Why would you want to set up what is basically what they call a SCIF, which is a secure
00:11:42.000A secure compartmentalized area where intelligence can't get in.
00:11:46.000Why would you do that from the Russian embassy?
00:11:47.000Why would you want it so that the Russian KGB, the FSB, why would you want it so that the FSB could monitor your communications but the NSA could not?
00:11:56.000That is suspicious and that's a problem.
00:11:57.000But again, that has not been confirmed and there's suspicion that maybe the Russians are leaking that out there just to make trouble.
00:12:02.000So we don't have confirmation on that.
00:12:04.000It is notable the White House has not formally denied that yet.
00:12:09.000Then, on Saturday, Reuters reported Kushner had made undisclosed contacts with Kislyak between April and November of last year.
00:12:14.000Its sources said the two discussed terrorism and economic relations between the US and Russia.
00:12:19.000On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Kushner was among the voices pushing Trump to fire James Comey.
00:12:26.000And Monday, the New York Times reported that Kushner
00:12:31.000That's a weird report also because Gorkov is not a political actor, he's actually just a financial actor, so that's a very weird way of setting up a back channel.
00:12:44.000So it's the way the back channel was set up that's a little bit suspicious, and the fact that they didn't report any of these contacts in the first place, which they could have done in confidential classified settings,
00:12:54.000Now, the answer to this is basically one of two things.
00:12:58.000One is, they were setting up some sort of back channel because they don't trust American intelligence not to leak.
00:13:03.000That's quasi-fair, considering that American intelligence has been unbelievably leaky ever since Trump took office.
00:13:08.000It's also a little bit suspicious, again, because the people in intelligence, whatever else you say about them, David French makes this point, at least they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, you can't say the same about the FSB.
00:13:19.000And if you're talking about people with nefarious beliefs and nefarious intent, I'd go FSB before CIA.
00:13:25.000But defense number one is that defense number two is just ignorance that Jared didn't know what he was doing.
00:13:30.000He wanted to set up a secure back channel where he couldn't be monitored.
00:13:33.000And so he walked into the Russian embassy and wanted something done there.
00:13:37.000And he proposed this kind of off the top of his head because he's a dum-dum.
00:13:41.000And possibility number three is that there's actual corruption going on.
00:13:44.000So here's the way this played out over the weekend.
00:13:45.000James Clapper, the former head of the CIA under President Obama, he
00:13:50.000He has said over and over and over, he has no evidence of collusion between the Trump team and the Russians, but he says a warning light was on regarding Russian collusion.
00:13:57.000But just from a theoretical standpoint, I will tell you that my dashboard warning light was clearly on, and I think that was the case with all of us in the intelligence community, very concerned about the nature of these approaches to the Russians.
00:14:18.000Okay, so that's the one that the left is leaning on.
00:14:21.000The right is leaning on the fact he says he has no evidence of collusion.
00:14:25.000You can be suspicious, and you can also say there's no evidence as of yet.
00:14:28.000General John Kelly is the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and he said that no one should be worried about setting up these back channels.
00:15:05.000Okay, but then he was asked, well, how about using the Russian embassy, and he didn't really have a great answer to that.
00:15:09.000We'll get to some more reactions to the Kushner story and what I really think is going on in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Legacy Box.
00:15:17.000So, as I say frequently, preserving your memories is, I think, one of the most important things that you can do.
00:15:22.000My wife and I take tons of pictures of our kids.
00:18:05.000It's absolutely, yeah, and the negotiations with Canada occurred in secret, occurred in Canada in secret, our negotiations with the Cubans.
00:18:16.000I don't quite understand where's the crime, other than it's another piece that has Russia in the headline, Trump people in the headline, and thus it's supposed to be scandalous.
00:18:30.000I don't see what's scandalous about the story.
00:18:32.000It's not really standing up to scrutiny over time.
00:18:35.000However, I do want to talk about why it is that Americans are drawing such divergent conclusions from the behavior of the Trump administration, and how Trump can help cure that.
00:18:42.000Some of this is the media, and the media are never going to let go of it, but I want to talk about what Trump can do to get past this, because it will dog him regardless of who you blame.
00:18:49.000It's going to continue to dog him until we come to some sort of
00:18:52.000Realistic conclusion on all of this so in order for you to hear about that though You're gonna have to go to dailywire.com right now and become a subscriber so for $8 a month You can go over to dailywire.com And you become a subscriber if you're a daily subs if you're already a normal subscriber you get an annual subscription Then not only will you still have access to the rest of the live show and be part of the mailbag and be part of Andrew Clavin's mailbag see the rest of his live show we're gonna be adding new material and
00:19:15.000In the coming months, that's going to be really stellar.
00:19:17.000But if you become an annual subscriber right now, you get a free signed copy of a book I wrote with my dad, Say It So, Papa, Dad, Me, and the 2005 Chicago White Sox Championship season.
00:19:26.000Brand new book from me and my dad, all about fathers and sons and baseball.
00:19:29.000My dad and I are both huge baseball fans.
00:19:31.000Perfect Father's Day gift for your dad.