There are certain clarifying moments in political discourse, moments that demonstrate just where the various parties stand. Never has the gap been so obvious as this last week. On Friday, the left declared the world was in imminent peril. On Saturday, a group of Islamic terrorists dropped a van into a crowd on London Bridge and then jumped out of the vehicle and started stabbing people in surrounding establishments. Meanwhile, the right shrugged and pointed out that global warming wasn t a problem anyway. What explains this gap between left and right? And why the media seems to be more interested in covering Iran than we should be talking about the threat of Islamic terrorism. ProFlowers has a special offer just for our listeners that gets you $10 off your purchase of $29 or more. It s a no-brainer gift for a birthday, for an anniversary, for Father s Day, or any other occasion where you love your spouse. I use it to make my marriage better, because I love to show love to my spouse, and all shows love to his or her. I m making it better than it ever has been before, and I m going to make it even better after you use code "BENSHOW" at checkout to get 10% off any purchase or $29, plus a significant discount. To get that great deal, go to proflowers.com right now and enter "BenSHOW at checkout at checkout" and enter code BENSHOW. We re good to go and get a $10 discount! Ben Shapiro and you ll be good to me! . - Ben Shapiro - The Ben Shapiro Show is a show about all things politics, economics, economics and pop culture, and everything in between. - Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's new book, coming out soon! Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro show on Amazon Prime? Subscribe to his newest podcast, coming soon. Subscribe on Audible. Subscribe to The FiveThirtyEight.co/Ben Shapiro Show? Learn more about Ben Shapiro: Ben Shapiro is a writer, editor, podcaster, and host of The Six Figure Podcasts on The Six Figures Podcast? Subscribe and subscribe to his podcast on Podchaser. and much more! - click here to become a supporter of Ben Shapiro on The Five Thirty Eight Podcasts Subscribe & review Ben Shapiro s latest book, Ben Shapiro Podcast is a must-listen to The Six Million Dollar Man? and more!
00:00:11.000President Trump pulled out of the altogether meaningless Paris Climate Accord, a worldwide agreement requesting non-binding commitments from signatories about future carbon emissions cuts.
00:00:42.000It pointed out the agreement didn't really do much anyway.
00:00:45.000It didn't bind China and India to any serious commitments.
00:00:47.000The Senate had not passed any enabling legislation.
00:00:49.000Perhaps non-governmental alternatives should be considered before diving headlong into empowerment of the regulatory state to fight a rising temperature over the next century.
00:00:58.000On Saturday, a group of Islamic terrorists dropped a van into a crowd on London Bridge and then jumped out of the vehicle and started stabbing people in surrounding establishments.
00:01:07.000The right immediately labeled the attacks yet another example of Islamic extremism on the march, linking them with the Manchester terror attack.
00:01:14.000President Trump took to Twitter to denounce the terror attacks and call for an end to politically correct policies, as well as to stump for his travel ban.
00:01:21.000Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic complained about leftist multiculturalism creating room for Islamic terror growth.
00:01:29.000Sally Cohn tweeted about the glories of political correctness.
00:01:32.000Paul Krugman compared being killed in a terrorist attack to being killed by a drunk driver.
00:01:36.000Democrats complained about President Trump's attacks on Khan, who is busy urging Londoners to stay calm after panicking about global warming just a few days ago.
00:01:43.000What explains this gap between left and right?
00:01:46.000The left believes that human beings are inherently good, and that only environment defines whether they will act in evil fashion.
00:01:52.000That's why Senator Bernie Sanders articulated in 2016
00:01:55.000That global warming was the spur to terrorism.
00:01:57.000It's why the Obama administration routinely suggested that poverty causes terrorism.
00:02:01.000External circumstances dictate the morality of individual actors.
00:02:05.000That's also why the left argues we shouldn't hold people responsible for their actions as a general rule.
00:02:28.000It goes to the nature of humanity and our perception of that nature.
00:02:31.000But it's requiring a greater and greater strain these days to blame anybody but individual human beings in free Western societies for their own descent into evil.
00:02:47.000I want to talk about what we really should be talking about, and then I want to talk about what the media is instead talking about.
00:02:51.000Of course, these Comey hearings, and then NSA head Mike Rogers is in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, both of them testifying right now.
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00:04:25.000Okay, so, let's start with what people should be talking about today.
00:04:36.000What people should be talking about today is there is a global threat of Islamic terror.
00:04:40.000There's an Islamic terror attack in Canada over the weekend, everybody ignored it.
00:04:46.000Actually is now basically at war with Iran, and Iran is now blaming Saudi Arabia.
00:04:50.000So the chances of a Middle Eastern conflagration are growing exponentially.
00:04:53.000Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is in the middle of a firefight, a political firefight anyway, with the nation of Qatar.
00:05:01.000Qatar is a backdoor terror supporter, and they have been for a long time, and now Saudi Arabia is posing itself in opposition to them.
00:05:08.000Things are shaping up for what could actually turn into a hot conflict in the Middle East between Iran and Saudi Arabia, or Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
00:05:15.000Things could get very ugly very quickly over there.
00:05:18.000And meanwhile, all of that is resulting in an increase in terror abroad.
00:05:21.000ISIS is trying to demonstrate that it still has muscle, so there have been terrorist attacks, as I say, in Britain, in Toronto, there's one in the Philippines, and the London mayor was asked by the, I think it's by Piers Morgan actually,
00:05:34.000What exactly he's doing to stop terrorism and basically said we can't do much.
00:05:40.000Mayor of this capital city, where are they?
00:05:44.000What I can do is make sure the policies, because what we can do though is make sure the resources for the police and the experts to follow these people.
00:06:06.000The answer is that he can, but he won't, because the fact is we are deploying our law enforcement resources in the West in exactly the wrong way.
00:06:12.000We have used politically correct ways of doing it.
00:06:15.000You know, people wonder why it is that the intelligence community has these blanket surveillance tools they use for all Americans.
00:06:21.000One of the reasons is political correctness.
00:06:23.000If we weren't politically correct, then we'd be using all of our law enforcement resources at the hottest spots.
00:06:28.000We still are using a disproportionate amount, but we have to pretend that we're not, so instead we decide it's more important to surveil everyone equally, and so we have these giant metadata programs instead of focusing in on, say, people who are coming back from Syria, or people who are going to Wahhabi-funded mosques, Saudi-funded mosques.
00:06:43.000Meanwhile, Democrats, of course, are not focusing on the threat of Islamic terror at all.
00:06:48.000They are trying to continue to play identity politics.
00:06:50.000They're trying to say that Republicans are evil and terrible, not because Republicans are bad at protecting you from terrorism.
00:06:55.000They're evil and terrible because they're racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic.
00:06:59.000So Andrew Cuomo, who's the governor of New York, who should theoretically be spending a lot of his time focused on the terror threat to places like New York City.
00:07:06.000Instead, he's spending his time preparing for a 2020 run by going around
00:07:10.000Saying that President Trump hates immigrants and just wants to deport people, so he should deport Andrew Cuomo.
00:07:28.000The fact is that the Democrats are seeking to avoid the real discussion, which is, what do we do about radical Islamic terror?
00:07:34.000What they are really wanting to focus on is, of course, these hearings that are happening on the Hill right now.
00:07:39.000So there are a bunch of breaking pieces of news last night surrounding James Comey, the former FBI director and President Trump.
00:07:45.000And the big question from all of this, because today, as I said, we have the National Security Advisor, the head of the National Security Agency, rather, Mike Rogers, testifying on the Hill.
00:07:55.000There were reports that Rogers had been asked by Trump
00:08:13.000And those reports were all coming out in the last couple of weeks.
00:08:15.000They are testifying today on the Hill.
00:08:17.000You also have the, you have Comey himself is testifying on the Hill tomorrow.
00:08:22.000So I want to bring you all the updates about this.
00:08:23.000But the only question that matters here, the only question that really matters is did President Trump in any way attempt to hamper the investigation into Trump campaign Russia connections?
00:08:35.000That's the big question in all of this.
00:08:51.000You gotta be saying, well, sure, of course.
00:08:53.000I mean, it looks like now, according to these reports, he asked Coats to tell Comey to back off.
00:08:57.000He asked Rogers to tell Comey to back off.
00:09:00.000He asked Coats to disown the Russian dossier we talked about several months ago, this intelligence dossier about Trump and Russia, much of which turned out to be false, and Coats refused to do it.
00:09:12.000You have to be saying well yeah I mean there's pressure everywhere and to be fair if the situation were reversed if you had Barack Obama and Barack Obama's IRS head were being investigated and she went up and she testified that Barack Obama did not put any pressure and he had some secret conversations with her in their reports that he had asked her to target 501c3 charities and
00:09:32.000The question was, did he pressure you to push 501c3 charities that were conservative out the back door?
00:09:38.000We would all be saying, well, why would we trust her answer?
00:09:51.000According to Rogers today, he just testified moments ago that he has not felt pressure from the Trump administration to do anything illegal.
00:11:02.000This is evidence of tremendous, tremendous media bias.
00:11:05.000But the media are all hot and bothered about this, so they're leaking incessantly about Comey and about Coates and about Rogers and about all of this.
00:11:12.000So, here's the Washington Post report last night.
00:11:18.000He met with CIA Director Mike Pompeo and DNI Dan Coats.
00:11:22.000They attended a briefing at the White House.
00:11:24.000He pulled them aside and told everybody else to leave.
00:11:26.000And then, quote, the president started complaining about the FBI investigation and Comey's handling of it, said officials familiar with the account Coats gave to associates.
00:11:34.000Two days earlier, Comey had confirmed in a congressional hearing the Bureau was probing whether Trump's campaign coordinated with Russia during the 2016 race.
00:11:41.000After the encounter, Coats discussed the conversation with other officials and decided that intervening with Comey, as Trump had suggested, would be inappropriate.
00:11:48.000According to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters.
00:11:53.000So I'm not sure where the illegality lies.
00:11:57.000The president can say anything he wants, but it's not obstruction of justice unless he actively does something to obstruct justice.
00:12:03.000And if I went to Dan Coats and I said, Dan, I'd appreciate if you dropped this investigation, it wouldn't mean anything.
00:12:08.000If the president does it, it doesn't really mean anything either.
00:12:11.000Maybe it's a backdoor sort of pressure, but it's not obvious that that is pressure rising to the level of obstruction of justice.
00:12:18.000Is it just possible that Trump is so annoyed with the Trump-Russia investigation because he himself knows that he's innocent that he's saying off-the-cuff silly things to people?
00:12:26.000My theory is that that's what best fits with the evidence.
00:12:28.000Not that Trump is some sort of mastermind attempting in Nixonian fashion to quash the investigation, but that Trump is so frustrated with Comey and with the Trump-Russia investigation that he's angry at everyone.
00:12:38.000There's a report today that he's angry at Jeff Sessions.
00:12:41.000Jeff Sessions, of course, is his Attorney General and one of the more solid populist nationalists in the administration.
00:12:47.000If you are somebody who likes Trump's agenda, Jeff Sessions is your man.
00:12:50.000I mean, Jeff Sessions is the guy who is anti-immigration.
00:12:52.000Jeff Sessions is the guy who is in favor of harsher restrictions on immigration and harsher enforcement of crime.
00:13:02.000Jeff Sessions is somebody you want to see stay, in other words, if you are a fan of Trump.
00:13:05.000But now there's tension between Trump and Sessions, apparently.
00:13:08.000According to ABC News, Justice Department spokesperson Sarah Isker Flores would not comment when asked by ABC News if Sessions had threatened or offered to resign.
00:13:17.000White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer yesterday would not confirm whether Trump still has confidence in Sessions, saying, I said I have not had a discussion with him on the question.
00:13:25.000If I haven't had a discussion about a subject, I tend not to speak about it, which is a pretty weird way of answering a question about whether the president has confidence in his own attorney general.
00:13:34.000Sort of this language that was being mirrored by Sean Spicer before Comey was fired.
00:13:38.000So clearly there's tension between Sessions and Trump.
00:13:40.000So in other words, Trump is angry at everyone.
00:13:43.000That the Trump-Russia investigation won't just die, not because he's guilty, but because Trump thinks he's innocent.
00:14:02.000That is not evidence that Trump himself did something.
00:14:04.000And you can sense that Trump has a divide in his own mind between the Trump campaign and Trump himself.
00:14:09.000And by the way, if you're Mike Flynn and you were cutting some sort of corrupt deal with the Russians, or Paul Manafort and you were cutting some sort of corrupt deal with the Russians, the last person you would tell is Donald Trump for two reasons.
00:14:21.000And two, even if Trump didn't fire you, you're now making him privy, well, three reasons.
00:14:26.000Two, you're making him privy to information that could get him impeached if he ever was discovered to have been involved in this.
00:14:32.000And three, if you tell Trump there's a good shot that Trump will say something dumb about it on national TV and get everybody in trouble.
00:14:39.000So the reality here is that Trump probably is innocent, Trump probably is irritated, and Trump probably is going around saying to everyone he can find, can you please stop this because it's annoying me.
00:14:48.000That, I think, is the account that best fits with the evidence, but that's not what Democrats are saying.
00:14:52.000I'm going to get to that in just a second, the over-the-skis nature of this, the Democrats really pushing a narrative that doesn't exist, a narrative that is far over the top, and they're going to continue pushing it
00:15:01.000And it's up to Trump how to tamp that down.
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00:17:38.000Now James Clapper was doing a speech to the National Press Club in Australia, and here is what he had to say about the Trump administration.
00:17:45.000The subsequent actions sharing a sense of intelligence with the Russians and compromising its source reflect either ignorance or disrespect, and either is very problematic.
00:17:57.000Similarly, the whole episode with the firing of Jim Comey, a distinguished public servant, in part from the egregious, inexcusable manner in which it was conducted, reflect complete disregard for the independence and autonomy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, our premier law enforcement organization.
00:18:18.000I have to say- So pause it right there for a second.
00:18:20.000When he says that it reflects a lack of respect for the autonomy of the FBI, what he is implying there is that Trump is invading the autonomy of the FBI, meaning that he is attempting to cram down his view of the Trump-Russia investigation on the FBI.
00:18:32.000No evidence has been provided of that.
00:18:35.000Trump has every right to fire James Comey, who was, is, and will be an incompetent, bloviating blowhard.
00:18:49.000Watergate does not pale in comparison for two reasons.
00:18:56.000One, there was an underlying crime in Watergate.
00:18:57.000We know there was a break-in at the Watergate hotel.
00:19:07.000We know that it was subordinates of President Nixon who conducted that break-in.
00:19:12.000And we know that President Nixon attempted to cover it up, obstruct justice, and fire people.
00:19:16.000Here, we don't know that there was an underlying crime.
00:19:18.000Here, we don't know that Trump was actually trying to obstruct when he fired Comey.
00:19:21.000And there's been, by all the available actual evidence that we've seen, no one can provide a shred of evidence, other than accusations, that there's been an actual attempt to shut down the investigation.
00:19:32.000In fact, the people who are key, people like Rob Rosenstein, people like
00:19:36.000Rogers, people like DNI Coats, all of these people have said there is no actual intervention into the Trump-Russia investigation, so how can he sit there and claim this is worse than Watergate?
00:20:00.000But what you really need if you're the left is you need Trump to continue to fulminate.
00:20:03.000You need Trump to continue to get angry and tweet things, because the more Trump tweets, the more he fulminates, the more he acts out, the more he asks people to shut down investigations, the more he tells people, can you please leave this alone?
00:20:13.000The more irritated Trump gets, the more volatile he gets.
00:20:16.000The more volatile he gets, the more he tends to say,
00:20:19.000Innately not smart things to people about an investigation that may not be obstruction of justice, but they give hints of obstruction of justice if you are a member of the left.
00:20:27.000So the best thing that Trump can do right now is to take it easy.
00:20:30.000That'd be the best thing that Trump can do.
00:20:31.000I'm going to talk about what exactly Trump can do to tamp all this down.
00:20:35.000He's, I think, starting to do some of this, but he's going to need to not live tweet Comey's testimony tomorrow to do the rest.
00:20:41.000But in order for you to hear what the strategy ought to be and how Republicans are responding to all of this, you need to go over to dailywire.com right now and become a subscriber for $8 a month.
00:20:49.000You, too, can subscribe at dailywire.com.
00:20:52.000That monthly subscription will get you the rest of the Ben Shapiro show live.
00:20:56.000You can be part of the mailbag, which we are going to be doing on Fridays.
00:22:00.000So dailywire.com, become a subscriber or if you just want to listen to the show later, go over to iTunes or SoundCloud and make sure that you leave a review over at iTunes.