Imran Awan was an aide to 25 members of the House Democratic Caucus. Over the past decade, Awan and his family members were paid some $4 million by House Democrats. While other House members fired Awan months ago, former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz decided to keep him on payroll until the day of his arrest, and attempted to stop the cops from looking at her smashed laptop which Awan apparently had. Naturally, top Democrats are claiming that Awan may have been arrested due to, you guessed it, Islamophobia. All of which should raise some serious questions: 1. Why was Awan being paid so much money for so long? 2. What information did Awan transfer? 3. Why aren t the mainstream media covering this story? 4. What is Wasserman Schultz trying to hide? 5. Is she concerned that maybe Awan might be in some way connected to DNC leaks that damaged Democrats, or that will do so in the future? This is a major, major story, and it's certainly weird that it's being buried by mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, and the Daily Caller. Ben Shapiro's show on The Ben Shapiro Show on the conservative mind on The Weekly Standard and The FiveThirtyEight. Subscribe to his new show, "The Ben Shapiro File," wherever you get your news and information, wherever he gets his news. The most authentic conservative voice in the world. He's not going to be stopping you from listening to the show, is he? And he's going to make you better than you'll ever be able to be that again, no matter where he is or isn't listening to it, either on the internet or anywhere else, right or not even knows where it s even is or he s going to go it s better than that s gonna be it s a good thing, is that s saying it s good, is a fact, right he s gonna say it s gonna help you s a real thing, or he's gonna be that s a girl, is going to say it, right s to be it, or it s not, right is a girl s right sis is a real sis, right cuz he s s to say that s not gonna be a real girl s s s or a real ceeeeeeeeeeeedeedeedeeeeeedeedeeeeedeee he s really that s sotaeee or a s=c he s or n c he s not?
00:00:01.000Awan was an aide to 25 members of the House Democratic Caucus.
00:00:04.000Over the past decade, Awan and his family members were paid some $4 million by House Democrats.
00:00:09.000He was arrested on charges of bank fraud yesterday while attempting to flee the country.
00:00:13.000He was headed to Pakistan, where he had reportedly wired nearly $300,000 to himself.
00:00:18.000Smashed hard drives were reportedly found at his home.
00:00:20.000According to Politico, Awan and his wife had been investigated for stealing equipment from some House members.
00:00:25.000There are suspicions that Awan may have put information from that equipment onto the cloud.
00:00:29.000While other House members fired Awan months ago, former DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz decided to keep him on payroll until the day of his arrest and attempted to stop the cops from looking at her smashed laptop, which Awan apparently had.
00:00:41.000Naturally, top Democrats are claiming that Awan may have been arrested due to, you guessed it, Islamophobia.
00:00:46.000All of which should raise some serious questions.
00:00:47.000Question number one, why was Awan being paid so much money for so long?
00:00:51.000According to the Daily Caller, Awan wasn't even doing a good job.
00:00:54.000In fact, he and his team weren't on mandatory phone calls.
00:00:56.000They write, fellow IT staffers the DCNF interviewed said the Awans were often absent from weekly meetings and email exchanges.
00:01:04.000One of the fellow staffers said some of the computers the Awans managed were being used to transfer data to an off-site server.
00:01:13.000The Daily Caller, which has been all over this story, reports that Awan had, quote, access to all emails and files of dozens of members of Congress, as well as the password to the iPad that Debbie Wasserman Schultz used for DNC business before she resigned as a TED in July 2016.
00:01:26.000Question number three, what is Wasserman Schultz trying to hide?
00:01:29.000Not only did Wasserman Schultz keep paying Awan until yesterday,
00:01:33.000She reportedly threatened the chief of the U.S.
00:01:35.000Capitol Police with consequences for holding equipment that she says belongs to her.
00:01:39.000Again, here's The Daily Caller, quote,
00:02:17.000Are mainstream outlets concerned that maybe Awan might be in some way connected to DNC leaks that damaged Democrats or that will do so in the future?
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00:04:39.000Okay, so that Democratic story about the IT staffer who was caught leaving the country after having wired a bunch of money to Pakistan, that's not making the rounds anywhere in the mainstream media.
00:04:48.000And there are suspicions that perhaps that's because
00:04:50.000This was one of the sources for WikiLeaks, right?
00:04:53.000So this is the speculation that maybe this guy was actually taking all of that information and funneling it to WikiLeaks, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz doesn't want to let that cat out of the bag, because if the Democrats were to find out that Russia didn't have to do with this, then it completely implodes their entire narrative.
00:05:08.000This guy looks more like a scamster who is
00:05:11.000Maybe blackmailing somebody like Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
00:05:13.000I mean, he was, again, getting untold sums of money.
00:05:16.000Wasserman Schultz had him hired until the last five minutes.
00:05:18.000I doubt that he has anything to do with WikiLeaks, and we've had no indications that he did.
00:05:22.000So I wouldn't put that conspiracy theory sort of on the back burner until there's at least a shred of evidence for any of that.
00:05:28.000But it is highly weird that the media are ignoring it, and it is even more weird that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is trying to kill an investigation into a guy who apparently stole and smashed her laptop.
00:05:38.000I mean, that's just weird stuff and we ought to keep an eye on it.
00:05:40.000Okay, in other news, President Trump has been on a rampage against Jeff Sessions.
00:05:45.000So this morning, President Trump, seeking to distract from the Jeff Sessions stuff, and I think it's pretty clear that's what he was trying to do, he tweets out that he wants to end the policy that the Obama administration put into place in June of last year that would allow transgenders to serve openly in the military.
00:05:58.000It was a bad policy because it made the entire army and the entire military
00:06:03.000Change its policies to basically fit the needs of a very small contingent of people who unfortunately suffer from severe mental illness.
00:06:10.000Suddenly you have women who are expected to shower with men who say they are women.
00:06:13.000The military is expected to cover the cost of transgender surgery and hormone replacements and all the rest of it.
00:06:19.000You know, that's something that has nothing to do with military readiness and unlike race, which has no impact on military readiness and ability to serve,
00:06:25.000Mental illness has always been a 4F issue.
00:06:29.000You don't have a right to serve in the army.
00:06:30.000No one has the right to serve in the army.
00:06:31.000And listen, this is not a rip on the patriotic transgender people who want to serve in the army.
00:06:36.000I mean, that's an amazing thing, and good for them.
00:06:38.000They're making a sacrifice that I was not willing to make, so I have nothing but praise for them.
00:06:41.000But that does not mean that the army, that the military, has a responsibility to take in people who it thinks are going to harm unit cohesion, destroy the ability of people to get along in small areas under lots of pressure, and the ability of the military to actually take a look
00:07:46.000People who have served on the front lines, I have yet to meet a soldier who serves on the front lines who thinks that unit cohesion will not be harmed by the inclusion of transgender soldiers on the front lines, in battle areas, in combat areas.
00:07:59.000So, in any case, President Trump is right on the policy, but how he rolled it out, I think, is really not appropriate.
00:08:04.000So he goes on Twitter, and as a... I think this is all a distraction from Sessions, because within five minutes he's tweeting about Sessions again.
00:08:40.000And the reason I say this is because this was not a well-timed, well-coordinated rollout of an organized policy.
00:08:46.000As I said this morning, General Mattis at the Department of Defense should have been the leader on this.
00:08:50.000He's in the middle, like a month ago, he announced that there was going to be a pause on the recruitment of transgender troops, and he was going to do a six-month study on how it was going, the embedding of transgender troops in the military.
00:09:00.000And so we were going to have a full study, he was going to make a full case for why transgenderism in the military is not a good idea for morale and unit cohesion and all the issues that really matter on the battlefield.
00:09:11.000General Mattis is the guy who should be in charge of this effort, and Trump should have used him, right?
00:09:14.000I mean, because the fact is that if General Mattis comes to Trump's conclusion, then he is the best advocate for that.
00:09:19.000It's very difficult for the left to say that General Mattis doesn't take seriously military readiness.
00:09:23.000It's a lot easier for them to point to Trump and say, well, you draft dodged, and all these people are braver than you are, so what are you doing saying they can't serve in the military?
00:09:30.000Just from a political point of view, it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense for Trump to just tweet this out.
00:09:34.000It's also sort of disrespectful to the transgender individuals currently serving in the military to just tweet out the policy with no supporting details, no explanation of where this is going.
00:09:44.000Right now, the Department of Defense website still has the old Obama policy on it with regard to transgender individuals, so I'm glad the policy is apparently changing, but the Pentagon seems a little bit bewildered by this.
00:09:54.000It's not that Trump never talked to Mattis about it, apparently he has,
00:09:57.000But it looks like the Pentagon was taken by surprise by the process.
00:09:59.000Like, you don't tweet out major policy decisions like this and then just expect everybody to fall in line.
00:10:04.000Also, the timing really could not be much worse because it looks like what Trump is doing is picking on transgender individuals in order to distract from the session stuff.
00:10:12.000At least that's how the left is going to play it.
00:10:14.000And the timing is even worse than that.
00:10:16.000On this date, this date in 1948, was the date when President Harry Truman integrated the military racially.
00:10:23.000So, if you are trying to draw the perspective that the military should not be used for social experimentation, I would really prefer, from a PR standpoint, that you not pick the day that Harry Truman integrated the military, because obviously the left argument is going to be that integration of the military racially is the same as integrating the military in terms of transgenders.
00:10:43.000It's just, the way this was rolled out was once again, 987,000 degree wizard, underwater, upside down, mahjong, Hungry Hungry Hippos wizard style.
00:10:53.000I mean, it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense the way this is rolled out, except that it's a big distraction.
00:10:58.000It's not distracting people though, because it's so obvious.
00:11:00.000Because within literally 40 minutes of Trump tweeting out this major shift in American military policy, he's back to tweeting about Jeff Sessions.
00:11:08.000And this was the big story of the day, it continues to be the big story of the day.
00:11:30.000You have the capacity to fire Senator Sessions, or Attorney General Sessions, and now you are in the position of basically whining about something you have power over.
00:11:37.000He did it again today, by the way, on Iran policy.
00:11:39.000There was an interview at the Wall Street Journal where he said, if it were up to me, I would have gotten out of the Iran deal 180 days ago.
00:11:50.000If you want to do something about it, do something about it.
00:11:52.000And the problem is that Trump has sort of put his credibility on the line here.
00:11:55.000There's a good case to be made that when a president makes a commitment like this, when a president goes after his own AG, he's got to follow through for credibility reasons.
00:12:02.000If you are a politician in the Senate and Trump threatens you right now, are you going to take that threat seriously?
00:12:08.000It's hard to take the threat seriously when he's out there fulminating over Jeff Sessions but not actually doing anything about it.
00:12:13.000If you are a foreign adversary and you see President Trump...
00:12:38.000The reason the Special Counsel was appointed is because President Trump fired James Comey without any rhyme or reason, except for the Russia stuff, which he then went on national television and talked about, and in the process tried to hide behind a letter written by Sessions' deputy, right?
00:12:51.000Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General.
00:12:53.000That forced Rosenstein to recuse himself.
00:12:56.000And that's how you get the Special Counsel.
00:13:40.000Are they so in love with the sort of red meat that he throws to his base every so often that they are willing to overlook the facts that he's not really getting a lot of policy done?
00:13:47.000What does he have to do in order to alienate them?
00:13:49.000And it seems that there are a lot of Trump fans who are alienated by the Sessions thing, which I think is encouraging because their standard may not be my standard in terms of what they think Trump is doing wrong, but there is something that Trump could do that can alienate some of them.
00:14:00.000So Trump leads off last night by saying,
00:14:03.000Aside from Lincoln, he can be the most presidential president ever.
00:14:05.000He said this during the campaign as well.
00:14:25.000Okay, it's real easy except he's not doing it, and he's spending his days online watching TV like my grandmother, and then tweeting things out not like my grandmother.
00:14:48.000Almost immediately after he took office, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me prior to taking office, and I would have quite simply picked somebody else.
00:14:59.000So I think that's a bad thing, not for the president, but for the presidency.
00:15:04.000I think it's unfair to the presidency, and that's the way I feel.
00:15:09.000Again, it's not unfair to the president for the AG to recuse himself in a situation where it is politically appropriate for him to recuse himself.
00:15:15.000And again, Sessions has nothing to do with the appointment of the special counsel.
00:15:18.000Right now, it's pretty clear that Trump wants to pressure Sessions into quitting.
00:15:22.000So you can claim he didn't fire Sessions, but everybody knows that he wants Sessions gone at this point.
00:15:26.000So I want to talk a little bit more about this and the reaction from the right and whether Trump is susceptible
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00:16:37.000What you're seeing from the Trump administration is that the people who are loyalists to Trump, not the people who are policy focused, but the loyalists to Trump, the people whose job it is to make Trump look good, they keep saying Sessions has to go.
00:16:46.000So, Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday, she says, I don't think that Trump's issues with Sessions are just going to dissipate.
00:16:51.000She doesn't think that this is going to be glossed over and made better in any real way.
00:16:56.000He's continuing to move forward and focus on other things, but that frustration certainly hasn't gone away.
00:17:05.000Okay, and you're starting to see some people, even on Trump's right, you know, people who have been longtime fans of Trump, begin to lose faith with him on the Sessions thing.
00:17:13.000I want to get to that, but for that you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com for a subscription, $9.99 a month, and that means you can see the rest of the show live.
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00:18:00.000We are the largest conservative podcast in the nation.
00:18:07.000So I've said for a long time that the litmus test, there has to be some sort of litmus test for Trump.
00:18:11.000It's one of the reasons that I've respected, for example, Ann Coulter's take on Trump more than I've respected Breitbart News' take on Trump as a general matter.
00:18:31.000If you elected Trump because you wanted something and he's not giving it to you, then you should say something about it.
00:18:35.000Well, finally, it seems with Sessions, there are a lot of people who are on the Trumpian right, who are beginning to lose a little bit of faith in Trump.
00:18:59.000I think the President has a peculiar concept of what the Attorney General's job is.
00:19:04.000He seems to think the Attorney General is some kind of goalie for him to protect him from whatever may come his way from forces that he finds inimical to him.
00:19:14.000That's not the job of the Attorney General.
00:19:41.000It helps nobody but the partisans who are pushing it.
00:19:44.000So it's easy to understand the frustration the president feels.
00:19:48.000But publicly attacking Jeff Sessions for all of that, that is nuts.
00:19:51.000Senior White House staff thinks so too.
00:19:53.000They have asked the president to stop, so far without success.
00:19:56.000Meanwhile, Sessions hasn't said a word.
00:20:00.000Okay, so Tucker, too, is saying that there is a breaking point.
00:20:03.000Breitbart News yesterday printed a story in which it said Trump vs. Trump and attacked Trump for attacking Sessions.
00:20:08.000Pat Buchanan said Sessions deserves far better than the manner in which he's being treated.
00:20:12.000Gingrich says that Trump should stop his attacks on Sessions.
00:20:14.000So, you're seeing virtually the entire Trumpian right, at least the academic class,
00:20:18.000Say to Trump, this is something you can't do.
00:20:20.000And the reason you're seeing that is because there is a group of people who believed that Trump was going to be the avatar for their policy.
00:20:25.000They didn't just elect Trump to yell at things and scream at the TV and tweet silly things.
00:20:30.000They actually elected somebody because they thought he can be, he can do all those things and that's great, but he can also be the avatar of our policy goals.
00:20:36.000And when Trump does things that just not only distract from that, but undermine it, Jeff Sessions is a person who was on the Trump train before anyone else.
00:20:44.000I mean, he was the engineer on the Trump train.
00:20:46.000This is a guy who, he was the first senator to endorse Trump in the primaries.
00:20:50.000He was the driving force behind Trump's immigration policy, which is probably Trump's most popular policy with his base.
00:20:55.000Getting rid of Sessions is a huge mistake for Trump.
00:20:57.000We will see whether Trump has painted himself into a box here.
00:21:01.000Has Trump gone so far down this path that now he can't afford to back off?
00:21:04.000Will he have to fire Sessions because he's come out so obviously against Sessions, and is that why he's trying to feed red meat to the crowd with the transgender policy stuff and mentioning how people will talk about Merry Christmas again?
00:21:15.000He's basically going to revamp all of the old Fox News talking points from five years ago, the war on Christmas kind of stuff, in order to pander to a particular crowd, so then when he fires Sessions, we go, oh, okay, fine, but at least he said no transgenders in the military.
00:21:26.000That's what I'm not, I'm hoping that's not what happens here.
00:21:28.000I'm hoping that Trump pursues good policy like the transgender policy that he is pursuing in accordance with General James Mattis, who actually knows what he's doing, and that he lays off accessions and gets back to work because that's what we need more of.
00:21:40.000And Trump is perfectly capable of doing this.
00:21:42.000So Trump is perfectly capable of doing good things.
00:24:16.000Get over your issues and start working for the American people.
00:24:21.000Meanwhile, speaking of people who are not working for the American people, the United States Senate is right now looking at a bunch of options on healthcare.
00:24:27.000They passed the motion to proceed that basically needed 51 votes to consider the House bill
00:25:50.000You should have been able to do this pretty easily.
00:25:54.000They didn't send us here just to do the easy stuff.
00:25:59.000They expect us to tackle the big problems.
00:26:04.000And obviously we can't get an outcome if we don't start the debate.
00:26:09.000And that's what the motion to proceed is all about.
00:26:15.000Many of us on this side of the aisle have waited for years for this opportunity and thought it would probably never come.
00:26:23.000Some of us were a little surprised by the election last year.
00:26:29.000I'm sorry, I can't play too much of this audio, lest everyone drive off the road if you're listening and burst into fiery flame, the boredom from listening to Mitch McConnell.
00:27:21.000And then he voted in favor of the motion to proceed.
00:27:23.000So the left was saying, well, if you want bipartisanship, why are you voting on a motion to proceed to move forward?
00:27:29.000And the right was saying, but in the same speech, he said he's not going to vote for the actual bill.
00:27:33.000So if you're not going to vote for the actual bill, why vote on the motion to proceed?
00:27:35.000You already have two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who say they won't vote for any underlying bill, which means basically all this stuff is DOA.
00:27:42.000In any case, McCain gave this speech, and a lot of people were celebrating it.
00:28:48.000Our strange rules and seemingly eccentric practices that slow our proceedings and insist on our cooperation are important.
00:28:56.000Our founders envisioned the Senate as the more deliberative, careful body that operates at a greater distance than the other body from the public passions of the hour.
00:29:05.000We are an important check on the powers of the executive.
00:29:09.000Our consent is necessary for the President to appoint jurists and powerful government officials, and in many respects, to conduct foreign policy.
00:29:18.000Whether or not we are of the same party, we are not the president's subordinates.
00:29:29.000But then here's the part that's the problem.
00:29:31.000Okay, so he has two things that are a problem.
00:29:33.000He calls for a return to regular order.
00:29:34.000Regular order means that you're not going to use reconciliation in order to pass things.
00:29:38.000You're actually going to gather a filibuster-proof majority in order to move things to debate, and that would probably require bipartisan consensus.
00:29:48.000Our system doesn't depend on our nobility.
00:29:51.000It accounts for our imperfections and gives us an order to our individual strivings that has helped make ours the most powerful and prosperous society on earth.
00:30:02.000It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than winning.
00:30:11.000Okay, so then he finishes up by bashing talk radio because this is John McCain's thing, he has to be above it all, he bashes talk radio, of course.
00:30:17.000I hope we can again rely on humility, on our need to cooperate, on our dependence on each other, to learn how to trust each other again, and by so doing better, serve the people who elected us.
00:30:30.000Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the internet.
00:31:05.000And in doing so, John McCain put together what they called the Gang of Fourteen, and he made a deal with a bunch of Democrats that certain judicial nominees would go through, and certain judicial nominees would not, but they wouldn't use the filibuster in order to shut down the process.
00:31:15.000It was unprecedented to use the filibuster to shut down judicial nominees before this point.
00:31:39.000And John McCain goes to the Democrats, and he says, I would like a new gang of 14.
00:31:43.000Let's put together a gang of 14, and we'll get together, and we'll hash out some compromises on health care that we're able to proceed with.
00:31:49.000And the Democrats turn to John McCain, and they go, you go screw yourself.
00:31:53.000Return to regular order is only a thing if Democrats are willing to work with you.
00:31:57.000Democrats are not willing to work with Republicans, and they are willing to bend the rules and break them, which means that the rules themselves no longer apply when it comes to these sorts of niceties.
00:32:06.000Listen, I would prefer that we had bipartisanship in the Senate, too.
00:32:16.000I prefer that unicorns were able to power our cars with their magic poop.
00:32:20.000Lots of things I wish, but John McCain's wish for what the Senate should be is not what the Senate is.
00:32:24.000And when John McCain says, stop listening to those bombastic loudmouths on talk radio, it's those bombastic loudmouths on talk radio that won your party a majority and ensured that Obamacare repeal stays on the table and does not allow you guys to get away with crappy compromises that end up compromising the promises that you made.
00:32:41.000I'm getting kind of tired of this elitist, and this is elitism, this elitist routine where we in the Senate, we know better, don't listen to those people who elected us.
00:32:47.000The people who elected you are the ones who listen to those of us who actually speak about politics for a living because we care enough to try and tell our audiences what's happening.
00:32:59.000I appreciate that he has a lot of respect for the processes of government, but he needs to live in the real world with regard to this stuff, and stop trying to pretend the Senate is something it's not, and more than anything, stop trying to pretend Democrats are something they aren't.
00:33:09.000Okay, before I get to things I like and things I hate, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the U.S.
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00:34:39.000Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then the Bible.
00:36:11.000Okay, so Van Jones is... One of the things that drives me absolutely up a wall, and we talked about this a little bit yesterday, is the attempt to infuse politics into every aspect of pop culture.
00:36:20.000The one that drives me the most nuts is infusing politics into sports.
00:37:52.000Okay, when Muhammad Ali was mouthing off about politics, it was not because he was widely knowledgeable about politics in the United States.
00:37:58.000Most of what he was saying was wrong and fed to him by the Nation of Islam.
00:38:01.000The idea that athletes, on a routine basis, are saying intelligent things is just silly, and it demeans our culture.
00:38:06.000You want to know how you got Donald Trump as president, lefties?
00:38:09.000You merged culture and politics, and then you're surprised when a cultural figure becomes a politician and wins everything.
00:38:14.000Okay, so, before we leave, quick Bible note.
00:38:17.000So, we've gone through all of the various parts of the Old Testament, so now we've been doing parts of the Prophets and the Writings that correspond to the Old Testament.
00:38:26.000So, one of the pieces that we read this week is from the Book of Isaiah, and there's one particular verse from the Book of Isaiah that I want to point out, and that is from Chapter 1, the very beginning.
00:38:36.000It says, The vision of Isaiah, the son of Amos, what he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah,
00:38:41.000And it says, Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord has spoken.
00:38:45.000Children I have raised and exalted, yet they have rebelled against me.
00:38:48.000So, what does it mean to have the heavens and the earth actually testify against a people, right?
00:38:57.000And the idea is that God created the world for a purpose.
00:39:00.000He created the world for the purpose of man, and created the world as a testimony to man.
00:39:05.000And this is why man's control of nature
00:39:08.000Is so unbelievably beyond anything else that you find in the animal kingdom because he created our minds in accordance with his.
00:39:15.000He created our ability to shape the world around us in accordance with his will.
00:39:19.000He also gave us the power to destroy and what we do with the world around us is going to be the testimony against us.
00:39:25.000So this is not an environmentalist call never to cut down a tree, but it is a suggestion that if we do not do the right things,
00:39:33.000Then the Earth itself will be testimony against us for having done the wrong things, because if the Earth was only created in order to help us be better to one another and fulfill God's mission, then our failure to do so will basically disown the reason for Earth's creation in the first place.
00:39:48.000You know, Earth is not the center of the universe, obviously, but we are the center of God's universe, and that's what makes... and He loves us so that He placed us in a place that we had the capacity to control the elements around us.
00:39:59.000If we fail to do that in proper fashion, if we fail
00:40:02.000To use our powers for good, then the existence of the universe essentially becomes meaningless in the religious point of view.