Ben Shapiro explains why the left is hell-bent on destroying the role of parents in their children s lives, and why it s time for the government to step in and take control of parenting back from the parents. He also points out that if a mother gives her child too much apple pie, it ll call the state to do something about it. That s what happened with Charlie Gard, a baby with a rare degenerative disease that could have resulted in his death if left-wing policies were implemented. Ben Shapiro: We need more Kris Gardes and more Don Gausses, not more bureaucrats certain that they know what's best for their own children and don t care about the ones they care about The left will pay lip service to motherhood and apple pie. But if you give your child too many apple pies, you ll be called a bad parent, and the state will do what it does best: call the police to take care of your kid. What does that mean, you ask the question? What value system should be taught to your kids? And why is it so important for kids to be taught about the value of life? The answer may surprise you, not by the left, but by the fact that it s based on the values that the left has been systematically devaluing the value system that should be promoted by the state? It s time to get a grip on the basics of parenting, because the state knows best for your child, and doesn t care what you should be told about the best way to care for your own child and does not care about your child s education, nutrition, health care, sex ed, hygiene, and so on the best kind of life And so on and so much more. The truth is that the best child will be better off without parental guidance from the state, not only by the best education, but also by being taught by the right kind of education, and how to be well-behaving in the best possible circumstances by being well-to-be so that they can be better parents the best in life, not the best of all things . it s better than you, the best you can be, not better than the ones you can have the best parents you could ever be if you have a good one in the first place of a good childhood that means they have a better chance
00:00:22.000Don says yes, at which point he embraces the crying boy in a bear hug.
00:00:25.000It's nearly impossible not to have the odd speck of dust in your eye while you watch it.
00:00:28.000Meanwhile, another heart-rending video made the rounds.
00:00:31.000This was video of Chris Gard and Connie Yates, parents of infant Charlie Gard, announcing they would no longer attempt to remove Charlie from the UK for treatment.
00:00:38.000Charlie suffers from a rare degenerative disease that ends in death.
00:00:41.000The Great Ormond Street Hospital refused to release him to his parents,
00:00:44.000Juxtaposing these two videos is very awkward for the political left.
00:00:46.000It's awkward because while the left likes to claim that it stands with parents, it actually promulgates policies antithetical to parental control of their children.
00:01:09.000The left will pay lip service to motherhood and apple pie, but if a mother gives her child too much apple pie, it'll call the state to do something about it.
00:01:15.000That's what happened with Charlie Gard.
00:01:17.000The question is not whether you agree with Gard's parents or not.
00:01:19.000Perhaps the doctors were right, and his parents were grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to ignore the agonizing reality of the situation.
00:01:26.000The question is whether parents have the right to make such decisions to begin with.
00:01:29.000We're not talking about abusive parents who physically harm their kids.
00:01:32.000We're not talking about a child endangerment scenario.
00:01:34.000We're talking about parents choosing a culture of life with which the prevailing leftist sentiment disagrees.
00:01:39.000There is no objective standard suggesting that so-called death with dignity should overcome the value of preservation of life.
00:01:45.000That is a subjective decision at best.
00:01:47.000Yet the hospital, the UK government, and the EU decided they knew better than Charlie Gard's parents.
00:01:52.000The judges who decided Charlie Gard's fate have never met Charlie Gard.
00:01:55.000They never spent hours crying by his bedside or rubbing the fuzz on his head.
00:01:58.000Had Charlie been healthy, they wouldn't have been aware of him at all.
00:02:00.000Yet they know better than Charlie's parents what ought to happen.
00:02:04.000The devaluation of parenting on the left isn't restricted to life and death decisions.
00:02:08.000It reaches down to the basics of parenting.
00:02:10.000What value system should be taught to kids?
00:02:12.000Last month, the British government threatened to shut down an Orthodox Jewish girls' school for the crime of not teaching children the prevailing LGBT agenda.
00:02:19.000Inspectors said that the failure to teach children about leftist views of sexual orientation, quote, restricts pupils' spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development, and does not promote equality of opportunity in ways that take account of differing lifestyles, unquote.
00:02:33.000This is despite the fact that the inspectors openly acknowledge that the school's culture is clearly focused on teaching pupils to respect everybody, regardless of beliefs and lifestyle.
00:02:41.000In Ontario, Canada, legislators recently passed a regulation that would allow the government to remove children from the home if parents refused to accept a child's self-perception as transgender.
00:02:51.000Failure to do so might result in damage to the child.
00:02:53.000Instead, the government could take hold of the child, place him in the system, and then promote sex transition.
00:02:57.000Once again, this has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics.
00:03:01.000The roots of this disdain for parenting lie in Rousseau and the Romantics, who saw parents as a burden on childhood freedom and exploration.
00:03:07.000But the truth is far less stunning for kids who lack parental guidance.
00:03:10.000They have higher rates of depression and suicide, higher rates of drug use, higher rates of promiscuity, higher rates of involvement in crime.
00:03:17.000We need more Kris Gards and more Don Gausses, not more bureaucrats certain that they know what's best for a child they've never met and don't care about.
00:03:23.000The left, however, seems determined to write parents out of the story of their own children's upbringing.
00:03:27.000The state knows best how to care for your child, on everything from nutrition to sex ed to life itself.
00:03:31.000If that means death for a baby, so be it.
00:03:33.000At least the state's view of the value of life has been promulgated.
00:03:45.000I did testify on The Hill, which means that we have a slightly abbreviated show today because I have to run for a plane pretty soon, but before we get to everything that happened on The Hill, which is really fascinating, I have some thoughts on it, and everything that is happening over at the White House, which is also fascinating and I have some thoughts, and before I even get to the scandal that nobody is talking about inside the Democratic Party, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors
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00:04:40.000People in the office have said that it is really good, and you can tell from our production quality that they're drunk half the time, so that's how good the wine is over at trywink.com.
00:05:11.000There's a lot of stuff happening right now, all of it bizarro world.
00:05:15.000Over on the Democratic side of the aisle, everybody's covering what's happening in the White House.
00:05:18.000So before I even get to what is happening in the White House, I first want to discuss what is happening with the Democrats.
00:05:23.000Because as I reported yesterday, Imran Awan was a Democratic IT consultant.
00:05:27.000And he was apparently stealing laptops from Democratic members of Congress, and then he was selling them, and they found a bunch of smashed equipment in his house.
00:05:36.000He had access to some of their passwords.
00:05:38.000He had Debbie Wasserman Schultz's computer and her password that gave him access to a lot of DNC material, and he was caught trying to flee the country.
00:05:44.000He had wired $300,000 to himself in Pakistan.
00:05:48.000Debbie Wasserman Schultz only fired him on the day that he was captured by the police.
00:05:52.000He was paid, he along with his family members, paid like four million dollars over the last several years to do IT for the Democrats.
00:05:58.000And what's weird is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been trying to pressure the police to hand over her laptop.
00:06:02.000Now that's evidence in an ongoing local case, right?
00:06:08.000And Debbie Wasserman Schultz apparently called up the chief of police in DC and yelled at him that she wanted her laptop back and threatened him that she wanted her laptop back.
00:06:15.000So Ronna McDaniel, who is the chair of the RNC, she says that it's pretty clear that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has something to hide here.
00:06:23.000...IT worker facing charges for bank fraud this morning, accused of double billing the government for computer equipment, but they caught him as he was trying to flee the country at Dulles Airport.
00:06:33.000The authorities arrested Imran Awan at Dulles, where he had a flight booked to Pakistan through Qatar.
00:06:40.000Several relatives of the 37-year-old were fired months ago as well, and Awan was kept on staff by Wasserman Schultz
00:06:47.000For reasons we are just, we have no idea why she waited so long to fire him.
00:06:52.000But Ronna, I'm wondering if there's a lot more to this.
00:06:55.000I know that he is facing charges of bank fraud, but does he have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?
00:07:00.000Is this more about terrorism than just bank fraud?
00:07:05.000We have to get to the bottom of this, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz has obstructed at every level on something that affects potentially our national security.
00:07:13.000So to have this gentleman try and leave the country yesterday, and now we know there's bank fraud, and we know he destroyed these hard drives, and when you talk, when you read the story about the Marine that found them in the apartment he was trying to rent, I mean it is, it's a long story, but it's something we have to get to the bottom of.
00:07:27.000We're not hearing the Democrats talk about it at all.
00:07:33.000Imagine if Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, somebody had tried to flee the country after having stolen Ryan's hard drive and smashed a bunch of hard drives of other members of Congress, apparently.
00:07:43.000And Paul Ryan had hired him up until the day that he fled, and then as soon as he fled, he fired him.
00:07:46.000And also, he wouldn't let the police do their full investigation.
00:07:57.000But the left is ignoring this as far as they can, and the question is why.
00:08:02.000The question is why all of this was happening.
00:08:04.000You know, and the only rational answer I can come up with, obviously, is that not only does Wasserman Schultz have something to hide, but it has something to do with the information on her laptop.
00:08:14.000Now, does that tie to another story that the left is largely ignoring?
00:08:19.000So, the Senate Democrats yesterday attempted to prevent a witness from Fusion GPS from testifying.
00:08:24.000Fusion GPS, you'll recall, was the research firm that was commissioned by interests aligned with the Democratic Party to produce the dossier of Trump intelligence, including all the crap about the pee tape.
00:08:35.000Well, the Senate is currently investigating this according to Weekly Standard.
00:08:38.000The Senate is investigating allegations that elements of the Trump campaign may have been colluding with Russia, but now an interesting angle has emerged.
00:08:44.000Fusion GPS is now accused of simultaneously being hired to work for Putin's moneyed interests in the West.
00:08:50.000Fusion GPS was apparently representing the same Putin-connected interests when they were involved in arranging the controversial meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort had with Rinat Akhmetyan, a former Russian intelligence officer, and Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
00:09:06.000Or Veselnitskaya, I think it's pronounced.
00:09:08.000Furthermore, the firm also being accused of engaging in unethical and illegal behavior while representing Russian-connected interests.
00:09:14.000So what it looks like is that the Russians were not intent on having Trump elected or just attacking Hillary Clinton.
00:09:20.000The Russians were also attempting to go after President Trump, then-candidate Trump, by essentially working with and hiring Fusion GPS to build this OPPO file on Trump.
00:09:31.000According to the Weekly Standard, Bill Browder is a financier with an extensive history of dealings in Russia.
00:09:35.000His testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday is worth reading in full, because the machinations are complicated.
00:09:43.000After Browder exposed the corrupt financial practices of Putin's cronies, Putin came after Browder personally, deporting him in 2005 and 18 months later, seizing all the documents related to his investment in the country.
00:09:53.000Browder, with the help of a guy named Sergei Matsnitsky, who is a Russian dissident,
00:09:59.000...filed criminal complaints about Russian officials stealing from the country's tax coffers, rather than came to Washington, D.C., and Fusion GPS eventually ended up arranging a meeting between Don Trump Jr.
00:10:15.000It says Fusion GPS, according to Browder, was behind that meeting, which means that the Russians were hiring a Democrat-connected firm to set up the meeting with Donald Trump Jr.
00:10:56.000Fusion GPS has previously been in the news for the harassment of Republican campaign donors in the 2012 presidential election.
00:11:03.000As of yesterday, the investigative reporter, former investigative reporter Glenn Simpson, who is the founder of Fusion GPS, he refused to testify before the Senate and said that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right.
00:11:12.000So again, this is a story that is being undercovered.
00:11:15.000And it's being dramatically undercovered because, of course, it has to do with Trump.
00:11:18.000And it has to do with the Russians' involvement with a Democratic-oriented firm that was attempting to gather information on Donald Trump.
00:11:24.000And this undercuts the entire narrative of Democrats.
00:11:27.000Of course the media are ignoring this as far as they possibly can.
00:11:33.000If you are going to say that all of the... If you're going to make the case that everything ought to be investigated and that Trump ought to be investigated for his Russian connections, you have to make the same case about Fusion GPS
00:11:42.000You have to make the same case about Ukrainian interference with Hillary Clinton.
00:11:48.000So this is not quite as clean-cut a case as the left wants to make it, that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election.
00:11:54.000It looks like Russia was doing what the intel agency said it was doing.
00:11:57.000Remember, there was a disagreement even among the intel agencies who felt that Russia was involved in the election cycle.
00:12:02.000Even among the intel agencies, there was a basic disagreement on one question, and the question was, did Russia want Trump to win?
00:12:08.000And most of the intelligence agencies were saying no, it wasn't about Russia wanting Trump to win, it was just about them screwing with the election, which means they were screwing with the election from both sides.
00:12:15.000They were working with Fusion GPS, allegedly, on the left, and then they were working with Don Trump Jr.
00:12:21.000They were just trying to get their hands muddy, and banking on everybody being dishonest in order to do that turns out that that may have been a very good bet.
00:12:30.000Before we get to the latest with Anthony Scaramucci and the battle that's now going on between Anthony Scaramucci and Reince Priebus, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at FrameBridge.com.
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00:13:51.000The latest on Scaramucci is that there's a lot of hubbub breaking out inside the Trump White House now.
00:13:56.000It seems like chaos because the man at the top doesn't seem like he is laying down the law.
00:14:00.000For all the talk about Trump being a great CEO, the truth is for a very long time Trump has functioned in a world where he sort of acts like the Joker in that scene with the two leftover thugs from the other guy's gang, right?
00:14:12.000He sort of breaks a pool cue, throws it down and says,
00:14:15.000Only one of you is going to get a job, right?
00:14:18.000Right now, the two people who he's tossed a piece of pool key to are Reince Priebus and Anthony Scaramucci.
00:14:22.000Now, he obviously loves Scaramucci because Scaramucci went on TV and was highly complimentary to him for several months and ripped on CNN and got CNN to retract a story, which is like the Holy Grail in Trump world.
00:14:45.000And Scaramucci, this time, actually looks like he wants to make that happen.
00:14:48.000So Scaramucci, yesterday, tweeted out that he thought, basically, that Reince Priebus was the leaker.
00:14:55.000So, essentially, he tweeted out yesterday that there was a felony that had taken place and that Reince Priebus, this was the implication, that Reince Priebus had leaked his public disclosures.
00:15:06.000Now, there's a couple problems with this.
00:15:07.000Number one, you can't leak public disclosures.
00:15:10.000So all his financial disclosures, those became public like several days ago, and it wasn't a leak.
00:15:15.000But he accused somebody of a felony, and then he directed the tweet at Reince.
00:15:20.000He directed it directly at Reince Priebus.
00:15:22.000The reason he's angry is because it appears from Politico that Scaramucci's profits from the sale of his hedge fund group are apparently, he's still receiving those profits, and he has not divested himself from his old firm.
00:15:36.000But then Scaramucci went on CNN, he said that putting Reince's name at the end of the tweet didn't mean that he wanted Reince investigated.
00:15:42.000He said he was going to send the FBI and the DOJ information about the leaks, and then he tagged Reince at the end.
00:15:46.000And people were like, whoa, so you're reporting Reince Priebus to the DOJ and the FBI?
00:15:50.000And apparently, according to multiple media reports, Ryan Lizzo was one of them,
00:16:41.000And a century ago, if you had leaked, it would have gotten you hung, which is not really true.
00:16:46.000And then he says that he and Trump have a very, very good idea of who the senior leakers are in the White House.
00:16:51.000He said it's absolutely, completely, totally reprehensible.
00:16:54.000And as you know from the Italian expression, the fish stinks from the head down, but I can tell you two fish that don't stink, and that's me and the president.
00:17:01.000So Scaramucci doing exactly what Trump would want him to do, which is kiss Trump's ass shamelessly in public and also hit people.
00:17:07.000Trump likes the sport of this, and so he likes that Scaramucci is really militant.
00:17:11.000So it appears that Reince is in serious trouble, may in fact be on his way out.
00:17:15.000Reince says that he's sticking around, of course.
00:18:25.000Mattis hasn't talked about leaving and Trump isn't talking about ousting him, but the Pentagon released a statement today saying they weren't changing their transgender policy pending more information from the President, which means they really haven't been coordinating on any of that.
00:18:37.000All of this is just a big wake-up call to the Trump administration if Trump is capable of being awoken.
00:18:42.000This is just the entire Republican base, well not the entire Republican base, the entire base in Congress,
00:18:48.000The people who are capable of checking Trump saying, listen, dude, get your crap together.
00:18:56.000So in a second, I'm going to talk about what's happening with regard to Alaska, because it's getting pretty rough where Trump is actually putting pressure on Alaska from a different source.
00:19:04.000The interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, got in the middle of it.
00:20:01.000We are the largest conservative podcast in the nation.
00:20:10.000Okay, so meanwhile, all this is going on inside the White House, and Anthony Scaramucci continues his defense.
00:20:16.000He says that people don't understand Trump, right?
00:20:19.000I mean, Trump lives in the White House and the elites don't, so sit down and shut up.
00:20:22.000Here's Scaramucci doing that routine last night.
00:20:25.000You'll see that the base and the majority of the American people, and certainly all of the American people that voted for him, either don't care about the tweets, they find them funny, they find them refreshing, they don't overreact and microanalyze them the way you guys do.
00:20:40.000It's actually not what the surveys show.
00:20:41.000It shows most people don't think that they're appropriate.
00:20:49.000Last time I checked, he's living in the residence up here, and the elites aren't.
00:20:58.000Okay, so this constant refrain that Trump can do whatever he wants because he won, that doesn't mean that he's governing well, and this is a problem.
00:21:04.000Scaramucci, though, this is really more about Scaramucci auditioning for Trump.
00:21:06.000A lot of the administration has now been about showing Trump that you're loyal, and showing him that you're a tough guy, and all this.
00:21:13.000Scaramucci uses this kind of language, and I think Trump loves it.
00:21:16.000Scaramucci says, I don't stab people in the back, I stab people in the front.
00:21:20.000What I don't like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel.
00:21:24.000They're very nice to your face, and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back.
00:21:30.000You know, Anthony, I'm a Wall Street guy, and I'm more of a front-stabbing person, and I'd rather tell people directly how I feel about that.
00:21:40.000Okay, so this is the kind of talk that Trump likes.
00:21:42.000The question is, is it going to be effective?
00:21:44.000So, another example of something being ineffective.
00:21:47.000So, Trump is trying to put pressure on Lisa Murkowski to vote for the Senate bill.
00:22:01.000With the Republicans in the Senate who won't vote for any form of repeal at all.
00:22:04.000So Trump is exactly right to go after Murkowski.
00:22:07.000But apparently, last night, Trump and apparently Priebus and Scaramucci, they all sort of made threats toward the Alaskan senator.
00:22:18.000And they said that we're going to start re-regulating, or at least not deregulating, the Alaskan energy industry unless you give us your vote.
00:22:26.000And Murkowski immediately responded by refusing to see any of the nominees for the undersecretary positions over at the Interior Department where Ryan Zinke is working.
00:22:34.000So it's just battle royale between Trump and everybody.
00:22:37.000Right now it's a war of all against all.
00:22:39.000The reason that this matters, the reason that this is bad,
00:22:43.000Because what we're watching right now is it's not just important to do the right thing in politics.
00:22:48.000I think Trump is doing some of the right things.
00:22:49.000You have to do the right thing in the right way.
00:22:51.000The reason the right way matters is because what happens after you do the thing, right?
00:22:56.000So Obama thought he did the right thing with Obamacare, but the way he did it was the wrong way, and that's what led to 70% disapproval ratings on Obamacare, even though now people, you know, by and large are largely positive about Obamacare.
00:23:08.000The same thing is happening with regard to, and that's at least with the poll show, the same thing is happening with regard to single-payer health care.
00:23:15.000If Trump goes too far on health care and he does it in a way that people don't appreciate, they're going to hate no matter what he proposes, how it got done, and there's going to be blowback.
00:23:23.000And that actually ends up helping Democrats.
00:23:25.000Because remember, if you do this wrong and people react badly, they're going to vote for Democrats in 2018 and 2020, and then the Democrats will have their shot at re-implementing
00:23:33.000The Democrats are becoming very open about their agenda here.
00:23:36.000So if you do it wrong, and you hand the baton to the other guy, then they're not going to be shy about cramming that baton down your throat.
00:23:41.000Here is Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois.
00:23:43.000He says, listen, whatever happens here, we're going to move closer to single payer on the other side.
00:23:50.000The Democratic Party just released its Better Deal to kind of offer a vision of their policy initiatives over the next few years.
00:23:59.000There's clamoring among the base for single-payer.
00:24:03.000How, in the course of this debate, will you respond to those of us on the left who really think that single-payer might be the answer to the health care issue?
00:24:12.000This is the last gasp, but what we're going through now is the last gasp for private health insurance in America, as far as I'm concerned.
00:24:19.000If we can't make this work with the private health insurance industry, we start moving closer to a Medicare model.
00:24:26.000From my point of view, Medicare has a lot of positive things to offer the American people.
00:24:30.000How many folks say, darn it, now I qualify for Medicare?
00:25:02.000Because it made it difficult to defend.
00:25:05.000Imagine that instead of doing that, Trump had gone to General Madison and said, I understand you have a six month study, I want you to accelerate the study, and then I want you to come out with results, and I want you to tell the world why it is that you think that transgender people serving in the military is bad for the military.
00:25:18.000And then Mattis came forward and said, listen, as somebody who served my entire life in the military, as somebody who cares deeply about unit cohesion, it's important that we not do this.
00:25:26.000It would be very difficult for the left to take the opposing viewpoint.
00:25:28.000Instead, Trump tweets out something, and everybody runs for the hills.
00:25:32.000And it looks, most of all, disrespectful to people who are transgender and currently serving in the military.
00:25:37.000Now, listen, I am not... I mean, if you listen to the show at all, or watch the show at all, you know that I believe that transgenderism is a gender dysphoria, is a mental illness.
00:25:45.000And that you're suffering from a severe mental disorder, and as a general rule, bringing in groups of people who have severe mental disorders to the military is not a strong move.
00:25:53.000There's a point that David French, former military guy, that he makes over at National Review, that when you look at military policy, it's sort of like when you look at insurance policy.
00:26:02.000We in regular life, when we deal with each other on a one-to-one basis, we expect to be treated as individuals, not as members of groups.
00:26:07.000But when you're doing actuarial selections,
00:26:10.000When you are doing an insurance table, they don't have to get to know every aspect of you.
00:26:14.000They look at your age, they look at your prior health, and they say, OK, based on the information we have, there's a good likelihood you'll be dead in 30 years.
00:26:20.000So here's what we're going to charge you.
00:26:22.000And that's not about devaluing you as a human being.
00:26:24.000It's using probability theory to gauge what's going to happen.
00:26:28.000The same thing happens when you decide which groups to recruit for the military and who should be allowed in.
00:26:33.000If you had a group among which there was a significant, I'm talking 40% rate of schizophrenia, you can bet that group would have a hard time being recruited into the military because, again, it could manifest at any time, and you don't want to be in a position where this entire group of people are seeing the symptoms of schizophrenia in the battlefield when they're under pressure.
00:26:51.000The same thing is true for gender dysphoria.
00:26:54.000So all of the virtue signaling from the left is really ridiculous, but it was made possible in part because Trump did the right thing the wrong way.
00:27:01.000It's important for Trump to start doing the right thing the right way.
00:27:03.000You can see the reporter's virtue signaling.
00:27:04.000Yesterday at the White House, every reporter felt the necessity to get up and speak openly and passionately about transgender soldiers in the military.
00:27:12.000Apparently there are about 4,000 active-duty transgender soldiers in the military.
00:27:17.000I'm not sure how many of those people are open about their transgenderism, but in any case, here the reporter is just virtue signaling one after another.
00:27:24.000Is the president considering looking at any kind of policy about transgender people serving in the White House now that he's tried to make a decision on transgender people serving in the military?
00:27:33.000No, once again this was a decision based on what was best for the military and military cohesion and on the counsel of his national security team.
00:27:43.000So, the impression we get at the Pentagon is they were a little bit flat-footed by the President's tweets.
00:27:52.000As I understand it, this was, and has been for the last couple of weeks of conversation here, specifically about TRICARE coverage for transgender procedures, and it suddenly evolved
00:28:03.000And for the President to then go on Twitter to announce this ban.
00:28:06.000And as you already told us, the White House and the Pentagon are going to have to lawfully implement that.
00:28:11.000Typically when you have an announcement of this magnitude, all of that work has been done at the procedural level between the bureaucracy of the Pentagon and the White House.
00:28:29.000I mean, bottom line is that, again, if Trump had gone to Mattis and let Mattis be the tip of the spear, or if he had laid out a long essay, or if he had given Sarah Huckabee Sanders talking points,
00:29:18.000What happened to your promise to fight for them?
00:29:20.000Now remember, again, it would be very difficult for Caitlyn Jenner to make that case if it were General Mattis who had actually laid out this policy.
00:29:26.000So doing the right thing the wrong way is sometimes even worse than doing nothing.
00:29:31.000And that's not, again, a rip on policy choices that Trump made with regard to transgender soldiers.
00:29:35.000I'm fully in agreement because I think that most
00:29:38.000Military minds who put aside the political correctness understand that putting a group of people in harm's way who have a 40% lifetime suicide rate, 90% of military veterans who are transgender have been diagnosed with a mental illness after leaving the service, none of this bodes well for building the best fighting force in the world.
00:29:56.000And again, you have small units of soldiers on the front lines day after day after day.
00:29:59.000That's not exactly a pressure-free environment.
00:30:01.000If transgender people have a 40% lifetime suicide rate in the United States, which is a pretty welcoming environment, try it when you're a soldier in Afghanistan.
00:30:10.000I mean, that's just not going to go well.
00:30:12.000So, again, I think Trump can be right, but he has to get over doing it the wrong way.
00:30:16.000That's actually a deeply important thing.
00:30:18.000So, before I get to some things I like and some things I hate, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Blinkist.
00:30:23.000You have a lot of stuff going on today.
00:30:31.000Because I was using my Blinkist app while I walked.
00:30:33.000The Blinkist app allows you to essentially sample, you get a summary,
00:30:38.000Of over 2,000 of the best-selling nonfiction books transformed into these powerful packets you can listen to in 15 minutes.
00:30:43.000It's not a full summary of the book because it doesn't go through every point of the book, but it picks the most important points from any of these books and then gives it to you so in 15 minutes you can get the main point of a book, which is great because the fact is...
00:30:54.000Even if you were to read a 500-page book, you're probably not going to retain more than 3 or 4 minutes worth of material on it anyway.
00:31:00.000So, having it boiled down into 15-minute forms so that you can get the main gist of it.
00:32:10.000It was a lot of fun, something I'd never done before.
00:32:12.000The panel was Nadine Strassen from the ADL was on my right, and then Adam Carolla was on my left, and there were two administrators, a fellow whose name I can't recall, from Evergreen State College, and on the very end, a fellow named, last name Lawrence, who was the dean at Brandeis University and now works for the Anti-Defamation League.
00:32:29.000And I had some basic thoughts on this.
00:32:30.000First of all, it's great that Representative Jim Jordan from the 4th District of Ohio, he put the thing together, and it was just fabulous because it's taking on a much-needed issue that has been ignored for too long, which is the threat to free speech that's happening on campus.
00:32:44.000So good for Representative Jordan, good for the other members of the committee, including ranking Democrats for getting together on this thing and putting it together.
00:32:51.000It was interesting because I think that some of the main issues were sort of skirted over with regard to free speech.
00:32:57.000So the main issue, which is that people should be allowed to say what they want on campus, speakers should be allowed to speak, everyone basically agreed with that.
00:33:04.000There are several people on the left side of the aisle who kept saying, well just leave it to administrators.
00:33:35.000That's a chilling effect on the expression of a different point of view.
00:33:38.000There should be a blanket rule on public university campuses that if you're going to have any speaker that the university will say this person does not represent us.
00:34:55.000Individuals on campus doing terrible things, which we all agree, you know, if you commit a crime, which is, you know, not just saying something offensive, but you're actively, what you're doing can be interpreted or should be interpreted by a reasonable person as an actual threat of violence, then that's a crime.
00:35:09.000But if the idea here is that that's the same thing as an administration that's attempting to crack down on free speech, it is not.
00:35:16.000So it was fascinating to watch the Democrats try to redirect this into the alt-right is the real threat on campus.
00:35:23.000The fact is that the threats of violence are in the main not coming from the right on campus because the right doesn't really exist on campus, or at least if it does, it exists in very small measure.
00:35:31.000There's a very small group of all right people who may be terrible on campus, but that is certainly not a vast bevy of problems on campus.
00:35:38.000And I'm speaking as someone who's Jewish, and there have been a lot of hate crimes, you know, so-called hate crimes against Jews on campus.
00:35:44.000A lot of those, by the way, are coming from the left.
00:35:46.000So, it was fun to watch as the Democrats tried to twist away from just saying, you should be allowed to say what you want on campus, enough of the stupid diversity training, enough of the administrative malfeasance, let's focus on letting everybody speak freely.
00:35:59.000They were very upset, actually, about this Wisconsin bill.
00:36:03.000That is passing, it's passed through the Assembly over there in Wisconsin, largely on the heels of my lecture at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where a bunch of people invaded the lecture, stood in front of the stage, and then insisted on not allowing me to speak.
00:36:13.000And the administration allowed that to go forward.
00:36:29.000Now, maybe you have problems with the wording of the bill, but the idea that allowable protest involves shutting down other people's free speech is just asinine.
00:36:36.000I have some ideas about the workings of the committee itself and what Republicans should do better, because I think some Republicans were great and some Republicans were not as strong.
00:36:44.000Democrats universally were on message with regard to what they were attempting to push and also how they were pursuing their question.
00:36:50.000There are also some great moments, but we'll go through that much more in detail tomorrow when we can actually cut the audio for you, because we literally just finished that and then came over here to Heritage Foundation.
00:36:57.000Our friends at Heritage allowed us to broadcast from there today, so that's great.
00:37:01.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate and then we'll do the big idea and leave.
00:37:11.000For people who say that all Muslims in the United States are moderate and that there's no such thing as a Wahhabi-funded mosque, that's scary, and that we should never worry about radical Islamic extremism inside the United States, this tape has now emerged of a California imam, he's quite prominent, who is appearing to call for the annihilation of the Juden.
00:37:29.000And apparently there are now two of them who were doing this.
00:37:32.000Here is tape of this California imam talking about the Jews.
00:37:36.000Does the Prophet Muhammad have judgment day until the Muslims fight the Jews?
00:37:42.000And the Jews hide behind stones and trees.
00:37:45.000And the stones and trees say, O Muslim, O servant of Allah, they will not say, O Egyptian, or Palestinian, or Syrian, or Afghan, or Pakistani, that the time will come, the last hour would not take place till the Muslims fight the Jews.
00:38:30.000He says, This is a lot like a lot of the sermons that are out of the Middle East.
00:38:36.000It was posted to the Islamic Center of Davis' YouTube channel on Friday.
00:38:40.000The sermon lasted about two and a half minutes.
00:38:42.000And remember, the Al-Aqsa Mosque is only open because the Jews allow it to be open.
00:38:47.000And it was Palestinians who, I got this story wrong the other day slightly, it was Palestinians who decided that it would be worthwhile to stab to death two Druze Israeli police officers and then were shot for their trouble.
00:38:57.000And one of them, one of the attackers is still alive apparently, sadly, because evil people who stab people should die.
00:39:28.000The Big Idea is where we take a concept that you may have heard about but you don't know that much about in politics, and we break it down for you so that you can use it yourself.
00:39:34.000So, one of the things that you hear a lot whenever there's a constitutional case that comes up is you'll hear that justices will say things like, this law had to be, we had to apply strict scrutiny to this law, or intermediate scrutiny to this law, or rational basis review.
00:39:47.000These are legal tests to determine what rationale the government has to come up with in order to regulate something.
00:39:52.000So, for example, strict scrutiny, that's invoked when there's a fundamental right at stake.
00:39:57.000So there's a First Amendment violation through the law.
00:40:15.000Strict scrutiny is invoked when a fundamental right is at stake.
00:40:18.000The government can only regulate these fundamental rights when there is a quote-unquote compelling state interest and the regulation is as narrowly tailored as possible.
00:40:26.000One of the big questions in the upcoming Masterpiece Cakeshop case is going to be whether the discrimination law is tailored closely enough to prevent the violation of the fundamental right to practice your religion.
00:40:37.000Intermediate scrutiny is the next level.
00:40:39.000This is usually related to discrimination on the basis of gender or sex.
00:40:45.000So if there's a law that says that you have to have separate bathrooms for men and women, for example,
00:40:50.000That would fall under intermediate scrutiny.
00:40:51.000You have to show the government is allowed to show that it can discriminate on the basis of sex for an important government objective, and that the act is substantially related to achieving that objective.
00:41:00.000And finally, there's rational basis review, where the person challenging the law has to show that the government has no real interest in law or policy, and there's no link between the interest and the challenged law.
00:41:54.000As soon as you start talking about what sort of scrutiny is appropriate, you're now living in judge land, you're not living in Constitution land anymore.
00:42:00.000So anytime you hear someone say, well that deserves strict scrutiny, just think to yourself,
00:42:04.000I have no idea what that means, and why don't you actually tell me what the Constitution has to say about this particular issue.