The Ben Shapiro Show - Ep. 349 - What Do The Democrats Have To Hide?

00:00:00.000 On Monday, two very different videos went viral.

00:00:02.000 The first featured an 11-year-old boy, Tyler, from Conyers, Georgia.

00:00:05.000 Tyler was 18 months old when his stepfather, Don Gauss, entered his life.

00:00:09.000 The video shows Tyler approaching his stepfather and reading a letter.

00:00:12.000 When I was one and a half years old, something happened to me.

00:00:15.000 God sent me a real dad.

00:00:16.000 Dad, I have been your child in love since I can remember, but I want to be your son legally.

00:00:20.000 Will you please adopt me?

00:00:22.000 Don says yes, at which point he embraces the crying boy in a bear hug.

00:00:25.000 It's nearly impossible not to have the odd speck of dust in your eye while you watch it.

00:00:28.000 Meanwhile, another heart-rending video made the rounds.

00:00:31.000 This 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.

00:00:38.000 Charlie suffers from a rare degenerative disease that ends in death.

00:00:41.000 The Great Ormond Street Hospital refused to release him to his parents,

00:00:44.000 Juxtaposing these two videos is very awkward for the political left.

00:00:46.000 It'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.

00:01:09.000 The 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. 1.00

00:01:15.000 That's what happened with Charlie Gard.

00:01:17.000 The question is not whether you agree with Gard's parents or not.

00:01:19.000 Perhaps the doctors were right, and his parents were grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to ignore the agonizing reality of the situation.

00:01:26.000 The question is whether parents have the right to make such decisions to begin with.

00:01:29.000 We're not talking about abusive parents who physically harm their kids.

00:01:32.000 We're not talking about a child endangerment scenario.

00:01:34.000 We're talking about parents choosing a culture of life with which the prevailing leftist sentiment disagrees.

00:01:39.000 There is no objective standard suggesting that so-called death with dignity should overcome the value of preservation of life.

00:01:45.000 That is a subjective decision at best.

00:01:47.000 Yet the hospital, the UK government, and the EU decided they knew better than Charlie Gard's parents.

00:01:51.000 They don't.

00:01:52.000 The judges who decided Charlie Gard's fate have never met Charlie Gard.

00:01:55.000 They never spent hours crying by his bedside or rubbing the fuzz on his head.

00:01:58.000 Had Charlie been healthy, they wouldn't have been aware of him at all.

00:02:00.000 Yet they know better than Charlie's parents what ought to happen.

00:02:04.000 The devaluation of parenting on the left isn't restricted to life and death decisions.

00:02:08.000 It reaches down to the basics of parenting.

00:02:10.000 What value system should be taught to kids?

00:02:12.000 Last month, the British government threatened to shut down an Orthodox Jewish girls' school for the crime of not teaching children the prevailing LGBT agenda.

00:02:19.000 Inspectors 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.

00:02:33.000 This 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.

00:02:41.000 In 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.

00:02:50.000 Their excuse?

00:02:51.000 Failure to do so might result in damage to the child.

00:02:53.000 Instead, the government could take hold of the child, place him in the system, and then promote sex transition. 0.68

00:02:57.000 Once again, this has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics.

00:03:01.000 The roots of this disdain for parenting lie in Rousseau and the Romantics, who saw parents as a burden on childhood freedom and exploration.

00:03:07.000 But the truth is far less stunning for kids who lack parental guidance.

00:03:10.000 They have higher rates of depression and suicide, higher rates of drug use, higher rates of promiscuity, higher rates of involvement in crime.

00:03:17.000 We 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. 0.99

00:03:23.000 The left, however, seems determined to write parents out of the story of their own children's upbringing.

00:03:27.000 The state knows best how to care for your child, on everything from nutrition to sex ed to life itself.

00:03:31.000 If that means death for a baby, so be it.

00:03:33.000 At least the state's view of the value of life has been promulgated.

00:03:36.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:03:37.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:03:44.000 Okay, a lot to get to today.

00:03:45.000 I 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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00:04:49.000 We're good to go.

00:05:11.000 There's a lot of stuff happening right now, all of it bizarro world.

00:05:15.000 Over on the Democratic side of the aisle, everybody's covering what's happening in the White House.

00:05:18.000 So before I even get to what is happening in the White House, I first want to discuss what is happening with the Democrats.

00:05:23.000 Because as I reported yesterday, Imran Awan was a Democratic IT consultant.

00:05:27.000 And 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.

00:05:36.000 He had access to some of their passwords.

00:05:38.000 He 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.

00:05:44.000 He had wired $300,000 to himself in Pakistan.

00:05:48.000 Debbie Wasserman Schultz only fired him on the day that he was captured by the police.

00:05:52.000 He was paid, he along with his family members, paid like four million dollars over the last several years to do IT for the Democrats.

00:05:58.000 And what's weird is that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been trying to pressure the police to hand over her laptop.

00:06:02.000 Now that's evidence in an ongoing local case, right?

00:06:05.000 I mean, this is an actual crime.

00:06:08.000 And 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. 0.91

00:06:15.000 So 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.

00:06:33.000 The authorities arrested Imran Awan at Dulles, where he had a flight booked to Pakistan through Qatar.

00:06:40.000 Several relatives of the 37-year-old were fired months ago as well, and Awan was kept on staff by Wasserman Schultz

00:06:47.000 For reasons we are just, we have no idea why she waited so long to fire him.

00:06:52.000 But Ronna, I'm wondering if there's a lot more to this.

00:06:55.000 I know that he is facing charges of bank fraud, but does he have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?

00:07:00.000 Is this more about terrorism than just bank fraud?

00:07:05.000 We 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.

00:07:13.000 So 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.

00:07:27.000 We're not hearing the Democrats talk about it at all.

00:07:29.000 Where's Debbie Wasserman Schultz? 1.00

00:07:32.000 She's totally right.

00:07:32.000 They're not talking about it.

00:07:33.000 Imagine 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.

00:07:43.000 And Paul Ryan had hired him up until the day that he fled, and then as soon as he fled, he fired him.

00:07:46.000 And also, he wouldn't let the police do their full investigation.

00:07:49.000 Imagine if that's what had happened.

00:07:51.000 It'd be insane, right?

00:07:51.000 I mean, the left would never let go of it.

00:07:53.000 It would be the end of the world.

00:07:55.000 It'd be the end of the world.

00:07:57.000 But the left is ignoring this as far as they can, and the question is why.

00:08:02.000 The question is why all of this was happening.

00:08:04.000 You 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.

00:08:14.000 Now, does that tie to another story that the left is largely ignoring?

00:08:19.000 So, the Senate Democrats yesterday attempted to prevent a witness from Fusion GPS from testifying.

00:08:24.000 Fusion 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.

00:08:34.000 So that was Fusion GPS.

00:08:35.000 Well, the Senate is currently investigating this according to Weekly Standard.

00:08:38.000 The Senate is investigating allegations that elements of the Trump campaign may have been colluding with Russia, but now an interesting angle has emerged.

00:08:44.000 Fusion GPS is now accused of simultaneously being hired to work for Putin's moneyed interests in the West.

00:08:50.000 Fusion 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.

00:09:06.000 Or Veselnitskaya, I think it's pronounced.

00:09:08.000 Furthermore, the firm also being accused of engaging in unethical and illegal behavior while representing Russian-connected interests.

00:09:14.000 So what it looks like is that the Russians were not intent on having Trump elected or just attacking Hillary Clinton.

00:09:20.000 The 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.

00:09:31.000 According to the Weekly Standard, Bill Browder is a financier with an extensive history of dealings in Russia.

00:09:35.000 His testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday is worth reading in full, because the machinations are complicated.

00:09:41.000 But briefly, the story is this.

00:09:43.000 After 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.

00:09:53.000 Browder, 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.

00:10:11.000 and Akhmetchin and Veselnitskaya.

00:10:15.000 It 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.

00:10:23.000 That's basically the allegation.

00:10:25.000 So it's getting a little complicated here, but what it looks like is that it could be a setup, right?

00:10:29.000 It looks like not that Donald Trump Jr.

00:10:31.000 should have taken the meeting.

00:10:32.000 That doesn't let him off the hook.

00:10:33.000 But, like, the Democratic operatives were working with the Russians in order to try and entrap Donald Trump Jr.

00:10:39.000 I mean, that seems to be

00:10:40.000 We're good to go.

00:10:56.000 Fusion GPS has previously been in the news for the harassment of Republican campaign donors in the 2012 presidential election.

00:11:03.000 As 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.

00:11:12.000 So again, this is a story that is being undercovered.

00:11:15.000 And it's being dramatically undercovered because, of course, it has to do with Trump.

00:11:18.000 And it has to do with the Russians' involvement with a Democratic-oriented firm that was attempting to gather information on Donald Trump.

00:11:24.000 And this undercuts the entire narrative of Democrats.

00:11:27.000 Of course the media are ignoring this as far as they possibly can.

00:11:30.000 It ought not be ignored.

00:11:32.000 This is important stuff.

00:11:33.000 If 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

00:11:42.000 You have to make the same case about Ukrainian interference with Hillary Clinton.

00:11:46.000 All of these things are a must.

00:11:48.000 So 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.

00:11:54.000 It looks like Russia was doing what the intel agency said it was doing.

00:11:57.000 Remember, there was a disagreement even among the intel agencies who felt that Russia was involved in the election cycle.

00:12:02.000 Even among the intel agencies, there was a basic disagreement on one question, and the question was, did Russia want Trump to win?

00:12:08.000 And 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.

00:12:15.000 They were working with Fusion GPS, allegedly, on the left, and then they were working with Don Trump Jr.

00:12:20.000 on the right.

00:12:21.000 They 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.

00:12:28.000 Well, before we get to

00:12:30.000 Before 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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00:13:51.000 The latest on Scaramucci is that there's a lot of hubbub breaking out inside the Trump White House now.

00:13:56.000 It seems like chaos because the man at the top doesn't seem like he is laying down the law.

00:14:00.000 For 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?

00:14:12.000 He sort of breaks a pool cue, throws it down and says,

00:14:15.000 Only one of you is going to get a job, right?

00:14:17.000 This is Trump's routine.

00:14:18.000 Right now, the two people who he's tossed a piece of pool key to are Reince Priebus and Anthony Scaramucci.

00:14:22.000 Now, 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.

00:14:32.000 So he loves Anthony Scaramucci.

00:14:34.000 He is less enamored of Reince Priebus.

00:14:36.000 I mean, there's been every two weeks talk about Reince Priebus being fired.

00:14:41.000 That is alive once again.

00:14:43.000 People are talking about that again.

00:14:45.000 And Scaramucci, this time, actually looks like he wants to make that happen.

00:14:48.000 So Scaramucci, yesterday, tweeted out that he thought, basically, that Reince Priebus was the leaker.

00:14:55.000 So, 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.

00:15:06.000 Now, there's a couple problems with this.

00:15:07.000 Number one, you can't leak public disclosures.

00:15:10.000 They're public.

00:15:10.000 So all his financial disclosures, those became public like several days ago, and it wasn't a leak.

00:15:15.000 But he accused somebody of a felony, and then he directed the tweet at Reince.

00:15:20.000 He directed it directly at Reince Priebus.

00:15:22.000 The 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.

00:15:36.000 But 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.

00:15:42.000 He said he was going to send the FBI and the DOJ information about the leaks, and then he tagged Reince at the end.

00:15:46.000 And people were like, whoa, so you're reporting Reince Priebus to the DOJ and the FBI?

00:15:50.000 And apparently, according to multiple media reports, Ryan Lizzo was one of them,

00:15:53.000 We're good to go.

00:16:13.000 He says that he and Priebus are like brothers who fight a lot.

00:16:16.000 Some brothers are like Cain and Abel.

00:16:17.000 Others fight but get along.

00:16:18.000 The implication, of course, is that they were the latter, and maybe more like the former.

00:16:23.000 He says, now if you want to talk about the Chief of Staff, we have had odds.

00:16:26.000 We've had differences.

00:16:27.000 When I said we were brothers from the podium, that's because we're rough on one another.

00:16:29.000 Some brothers are like Cain and Abel.

00:16:31.000 Other brothers can fight each other and get along.

00:16:34.000 I don't know if this is reparable or not.

00:16:35.000 That will be up to the President.

00:16:37.000 And then he said that he was going to take down leakers.

00:16:40.000 He said the leakers are traitors.

00:16:41.000 And a century ago, if you had leaked, it would have gotten you hung, which is not really true.

00:16:46.000 And then he says that he and Trump have a very, very good idea of who the senior leakers are in the White House.

00:16:51.000 He said it's absolutely, completely, totally reprehensible.

00:16:54.000 And 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. 1.00

00:17:01.000 So Scaramucci doing exactly what Trump would want him to do, which is kiss Trump's ass shamelessly in public and also hit people. 0.99

00:17:07.000 Trump likes the sport of this, and so he likes that Scaramucci is really militant. 0.99

00:17:11.000 So it appears that Reince is in serious trouble, may in fact be on his way out.

00:17:15.000 Reince says that he's sticking around, of course.

00:17:17.000 Everybody says they're sticking around.

00:17:19.000 And now there's a report that the Senate is beginning to buck.

00:17:23.000 So this was always the question.

00:17:24.000 Could there be a point where people say to Trump in the Senate and in Congress, we're not going any further than this?

00:17:31.000 And it appears that the Sessions thing and maybe the Reince thing, these are a little bit of a breaking point.

00:17:37.000 The Sessions thing because if he gets rid of Sessions, the Senate has to approve a new Attorney General.

00:17:42.000 And Senators are all friends with Sessions.

00:17:43.000 Remember, Sessions was part of their caucus until five minutes ago.

00:17:46.000 And so Lindsey Graham came out and he said, listen, if you fire Attorney General Sessions, 0.71

00:17:52.000 And Grassley said, this is Chuck Grassley from Iowa, he said, you're not getting new hearings.

00:17:55.000 There will be no new hearings on an attorney general.

00:17:57.000 You'll just have to serve with Rod Rosenstein as the acting attorney general.

00:18:00.000 And there's nothing you can do about it because we're not going to allow you to ask Sessions.

00:18:03.000 So there's beginning to be a bit of a spine from Congress with regard to Trump and on the right stuff.

00:18:09.000 Sessions is the right place to do all of this.

00:18:11.000 But there is a lot of chaos right now.

00:18:14.000 There's a bed, there are betting pools.

00:18:15.000 Which one is going to be the first to go?

00:18:16.000 Is it going to be Reince?

00:18:17.000 Is it going to be Session?

00:18:18.000 Is it going to be?

00:18:20.000 Tom Price?

00:18:21.000 Is it going to be Tillerson, who is now on vacay?

00:18:24.000 Is it going to be Mattis?

00:18:25.000 Mattis 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.

00:18:37.000 All of this is just a big wake-up call to the Trump administration if Trump is capable of being awoken.

00:18:42.000 This is just the entire Republican base, well not the entire Republican base, the entire base in Congress, 0.99

00:18:48.000 The people who are capable of checking Trump saying, listen, dude, get your crap together. 1.00

00:18:52.000 Please get your crap together. 1.00

00:18:54.000 And it gets worse than that. 0.99

00:18:55.000 Okay.

00:18:56.000 So 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.

00:19:04.000 The interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, got in the middle of it.

00:19:06.000 We'll explain what's happening there.

00:19:07.000 And we'll get to transgender policy and why everybody is wrong about everything. 0.52

00:19:11.000 We'll get to all of those things.

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00:20:10.000 Okay, so meanwhile, all this is going on inside the White House, and Anthony Scaramucci continues his defense.

00:20:16.000 He says that people don't understand Trump, right? 0.96

00:20:19.000 I mean, Trump lives in the White House and the elites don't, so sit down and shut up.

00:20:22.000 Here's Scaramucci doing that routine last night.

00:20:25.000 You'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.

00:20:40.000 It's actually not what the surveys show.

00:20:41.000 It shows most people don't think that they're appropriate.

00:20:44.000 Okay, okay, but you know what?

00:20:47.000 They're still voting for him.

00:20:48.000 He's still the president.

00:20:49.000 Last time I checked, he's living in the residence up here, and the elites aren't.

00:20:58.000 Okay, 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.

00:21:04.000 Scaramucci, though, this is really more about Scaramucci auditioning for Trump.

00:21:06.000 A 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.

00:21:13.000 Scaramucci uses this kind of language, and I think Trump loves it.

00:21:16.000 Scaramucci says, I don't stab people in the back, I stab people in the front.

00:21:20.000 What I don't like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel. 0.96

00:21:24.000 They're very nice to your face, and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back.

00:21:30.000 I don't like it.

00:21:30.000 You 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.

00:21:40.000 Okay, so this is the kind of talk that Trump likes.

00:21:42.000 The question is, is it going to be effective?

00:21:44.000 So, another example of something being ineffective.

00:21:47.000 So, Trump is trying to put pressure on Lisa Murkowski to vote for the Senate bill.

00:21:50.000 That's fine.

00:21:51.000 I mean, he should put pressure on Lisa Murkowski to vote for some form of repeal. 0.74

00:21:55.000 I mean, they just keep shrinking down what exactly it is they're going to vote for.

00:21:57.000 And I was on the Hill this morning, and I met with several Congress people.

00:21:59.000 They're deeply frustrated.

00:22:01.000 With the Republicans in the Senate who won't vote for any form of repeal at all.

00:22:04.000 So Trump is exactly right to go after Murkowski.

00:22:07.000 But apparently, last night, Trump and apparently Priebus and Scaramucci, they all sort of made threats toward the Alaskan senator.

00:22:18.000 And 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.

00:22:26.000 And 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.

00:22:34.000 So it's just battle royale between Trump and everybody.

00:22:37.000 Right now it's a war of all against all.

00:22:39.000 The reason that this matters, the reason that this is bad,

00:22:43.000 Because what we're watching right now is it's not just important to do the right thing in politics.

00:22:48.000 I think Trump is doing some of the right things.

00:22:49.000 You have to do the right thing in the right way.

00:22:51.000 The reason the right way matters is because what happens after you do the thing, right?

00:22:56.000 So 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.

00:23:08.000 The 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.

00:23:15.000 If 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.

00:23:23.000 And that actually ends up helping Democrats.

00:23:25.000 Because 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

00:23:33.000 The Democrats are becoming very open about their agenda here.

00:23:36.000 So 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.

00:23:41.000 Here is Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois.

00:23:43.000 He says, listen, whatever happens here, we're going to move closer to single payer on the other side.

00:23:48.000 Senator Durbin, this is Eddie Glaude.

00:23:49.000 Let's pan out a little bit.

00:23:50.000 The Democratic Party just released its Better Deal to kind of offer a vision of their policy initiatives over the next few years.

00:23:59.000 There's clamoring among the base for single-payer.

00:24:03.000 How, 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?

00:24:12.000 This 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.

00:24:19.000 If we can't make this work with the private health insurance industry, we start moving closer to a Medicare model.

00:24:26.000 From my point of view, Medicare has a lot of positive things to offer the American people.

00:24:30.000 How many folks say, darn it, now I qualify for Medicare?

00:24:33.000 Most of them say, hooray! 0.92

00:24:35.000 I don't have to worry about pre-existing conditions.

00:24:37.000 I've paid into it.

00:24:38.000 I can get the best hospitals and doctors and I have peace of mind.

00:24:41.000 That's what people are looking for in health insurance.

00:24:44.000 This is the point.

00:24:45.000 The Democrats are already moving to the left.

00:24:47.000 This is the point.

00:24:47.000 The Democrats are already moving to the left.

00:24:48.000 If you do something that makes a good policy unpopular, that is almost worse than doing nothing at all.

00:24:53.000 And this is my problem with how Trump dragged out the transgender policy change that he did yesterday.

00:24:59.000 The fact that Trump did it via tweet.

00:25:01.000 Poisoned the well a little bit.

00:25:02.000 Because it made it difficult to defend.

00:25:05.000 Imagine 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.

00:25:18.000 And 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.

00:25:26.000 It would be very difficult for the left to take the opposing viewpoint.

00:25:28.000 Instead, Trump tweets out something, and everybody runs for the hills.

00:25:32.000 And it looks, most of all, disrespectful to people who are transgender and currently serving in the military.

00:25:37.000 Now, 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. 1.00

00:25:45.000 And 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.

00:25:53.000 There'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.

00:26:02.000 We 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.

00:26:07.000 But when you're doing actuarial selections,

00:26:10.000 When you are doing an insurance table, they don't have to get to know every aspect of you.

00:26:14.000 They 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.

00:26:20.000 So here's what we're going to charge you.

00:26:21.000 That's how they do this.

00:26:22.000 And that's not about devaluing you as a human being.

00:26:24.000 It's using probability theory to gauge what's going to happen.

00:26:28.000 The same thing happens when you decide which groups to recruit for the military and who should be allowed in.

00:26:33.000 If 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.

00:26:51.000 The same thing is true for gender dysphoria.

00:26:54.000 So 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.

00:27:01.000 It's important for Trump to start doing the right thing the right way.

00:27:03.000 You can see the reporter's virtue signaling.

00:27:04.000 Yesterday at the White House, every reporter felt the necessity to get up and speak openly and passionately about transgender soldiers in the military.

00:27:12.000 Apparently there are about 4,000 active-duty transgender soldiers in the military.

00:27:16.000 That seems high to me.

00:27:17.000 I'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.

00:27:24.000 Is 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?

00:27:33.000 No, 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.

00:27:43.000 So, the impression we get at the Pentagon is they were a little bit flat-footed by the President's tweets.

00:27:52.000 As 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

00:28:03.000 And for the President to then go on Twitter to announce this ban.

00:28:06.000 And as you already told us, the White House and the Pentagon are going to have to lawfully implement that.

00:28:11.000 Typically 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.

00:28:21.000 Why wasn't any of that work done?

00:28:23.000 And why was the Pentagon caught so surprised this morning by the President's tweets on that?

00:28:27.000 Okay, we can stop it there.

00:28:29.000 I 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,

00:28:57.000 All of this could have been avoided.

00:28:58.000 Instead, all you're seeing all over the TV is Caitlyn Jenner angry at Trump.

00:29:00.000 Now imagine if it weren't Caitlyn Jenner versus Trump, it were Caitlyn Jenner versus Mad Dog Madness.

00:29:05.000 Who do you think wins that public relations battle? 1.00

00:29:07.000 But here's Caitlyn Jenner doing his routine and Trump does not look the better for wear on this.

00:29:13.000 Caitlyn Jenner tweeted, there are 15,000 patriotic transgender Americans in the U.S.

00:29:17.000 military fighting for all of us.

00:29:18.000 What happened to your promise to fight for them?

00:29:20.000 Now 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.

00:29:26.000 So doing the right thing the wrong way is sometimes even worse than doing nothing.

00:29:31.000 And that's not, again, a rip on policy choices that Trump made with regard to transgender soldiers.

00:29:35.000 I'm fully in agreement because I think that most

00:29:38.000 Military 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.

00:29:56.000 And again, you have small units of soldiers on the front lines day after day after day.

00:29:59.000 That's not exactly a pressure-free environment.

00:30:01.000 If 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. 1.00

00:30:10.000 I mean, that's just not going to go well.

00:30:12.000 So, again, I think Trump can be right, but he has to get over doing it the wrong way.

00:30:16.000 That's actually a deeply important thing.

00:30:18.000 So, 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.

00:30:23.000 You have a lot of stuff going on today.

00:30:25.000 I have a lot of stuff going on today.

00:30:26.000 I testified on the Hill, and I'm doing the show, and I did a bunch of interviews.

00:30:29.000 I still had time to read a book.

00:30:30.000 How did I have time to read a book?

00:30:31.000 Because I was using my Blinkist app while I walked.

00:30:33.000 The Blinkist app allows you to essentially sample, you get a summary,

00:30:38.000 Of over 2,000 of the best-selling nonfiction books transformed into these powerful packets you can listen to in 15 minutes.

00:30:43.000 It'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...

00:30:54.000 Even 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.

00:31:00.000 So, having it boiled down into 15-minute forms so that you can get the main gist of it.

00:31:04.000 We do it every day in our lives.

00:31:07.000 We should be doing it with books too, and that's what Blinkist is for.

00:31:09.000 We're talking great books like Why Nations Fail.

00:31:11.000 Again, 600-page book.

00:31:12.000 We're good to go.

00:31:30.000 And go over and check it out and you will not be disappointed.

00:31:35.000 It is fantastic.

00:31:36.000 You get that free trial or three months off your yearly plan when you join today.

00:31:39.000 Everybody that I know who's used it loves it.

00:31:41.000 I was talking to Dana Perino the other day and she said she's been using Blinkist because she heard it on the show.

00:31:45.000 It's just great.

00:31:46.000 So, make sure that you check out Blinkist.

00:31:49.000 Actually, Congressman said his wife uses Blinkist now because of listening to the show.

00:31:53.000 So, make sure that you go there, use the promo code that lets them know that we sent you.

00:31:56.000 Plus, it means that you are going to get that discount.

00:31:58.000 So, pretty awesome.

00:32:00.000 Okay, so, time for some things I like and some things that I hate.

00:32:04.000 Things that I like.

00:32:06.000 So I did testify on the Hill today.

00:32:07.000 I'll have clips of it tomorrow.

00:32:08.000 We'll play them on the show.

00:32:10.000 It was a lot of fun, something I'd never done before.

00:32:12.000 The 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.

00:32:29.000 And I had some basic thoughts on this.

00:32:30.000 First 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.

00:32:44.000 So 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.

00:32:51.000 It was interesting because I think that some of the main issues were sort of skirted over with regard to free speech.

00:32:57.000 So 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.

00:33:04.000 There are several people on the left side of the aisle who kept saying, well just leave it to administrators.

00:33:07.000 Just leave it to administrators.

00:33:08.000 And I kept saying, there has to be some sort of ramification for administrators if they do not do their job.

00:33:13.000 If they use

00:33:15.000 We're good to go.

00:33:35.000 That's a chilling effect on the expression of a different point of view.

00:33:38.000 There 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.

00:33:44.000 End of story.

00:33:45.000 End of story.

00:33:47.000 But there's this attempt to to promote sensitivity

00:33:51.000 That is in conflict with the notion of free speech because free speech is not about sensitivity.

00:33:55.000 It's about suck it up buttercup. 1.00

00:33:57.000 And the left wants to sort of have it both ways.

00:34:00.000 So what was fascinating was to watch how the Democrats attempted to turn the hearing from one about administrative malfeasance on campus

00:34:06.000 We're good to go

00:34:25.000 We're good to go!

00:34:55.000 Individuals 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.

00:35:09.000 But 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.

00:35:16.000 So it was fascinating to watch the Democrats try to redirect this into the alt-right is the real threat on campus.

00:35:21.000 Okay.

00:35:22.000 It's not, okay?

00:35:23.000 It's not.

00:35:23.000 The 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.

00:35:31.000 There'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.

00:35:38.000 And 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.

00:35:44.000 A lot of those, by the way, are coming from the left. 0.97

00:35:46.000 So, 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. 0.84

00:35:59.000 They were very upset, actually, about this Wisconsin bill.

00:36:03.000 That 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.

00:36:13.000 And the administration allowed that to go forward.

00:36:16.000 The Democrats kept ripping on this.

00:36:17.000 And the problem is, the bill itself doesn't say that, the bill is meant to prevent people from preventing other people's speech.

00:36:23.000 Instead, the way they interpreted it was they were trying to shut down protest.

00:36:27.000 No one's trying to shut down protest. 0.98

00:36:29.000 Now, 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.

00:36:36.000 I 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.

00:36:44.000 Democrats universally were on message with regard to what they were attempting to push and also how they were pursuing their question.

00:36:50.000 There 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.

00:36:57.000 Our friends at Heritage allowed us to broadcast from there today, so that's great.

00:37:01.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate and then we'll do the big idea and leave.

00:37:05.000 So, things I hate.

00:37:11.000 For 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.

00:37:29.000 And apparently there are now two of them who were doing this.

00:37:32.000 Here is tape of this California imam talking about the Jews.

00:37:36.000 Does the Prophet Muhammad have judgment day until the Muslims fight the Jews? 1.00

00:37:42.000 And the Jews hide behind stones and trees. 0.99

00:37:45.000 And 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. 0.88

00:38:05.000 We're good to go.

00:38:26.000 Okay, we can stop it.

00:38:30.000 He says, This is a lot like a lot of the sermons that are out of the Middle East.

00:38:36.000 It was posted to the Islamic Center of Davis' YouTube channel on Friday.

00:38:40.000 The sermon lasted about two and a half minutes.

00:38:42.000 And remember, the Al-Aqsa Mosque is only open because the Jews allow it to be open. 1.00

00:38:47.000 And 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. 0.96

00:38:57.000 And one of them, one of the attackers is still alive apparently, sadly, because evil people who stab people should die. 0.81

00:39:05.000 But this is...

00:39:07.000 You know, the idea that Islamic extremism is a tiny, tiny percentage of the population worldwide is not true.

00:39:13.000 In the United States, thank God, it's still a fringe element.

00:39:15.000 But across the world, it is certainly not fringe, certainly not in the Palestinian Authority.

00:39:20.000 And when you're seeing this kind of stuff said in the United States, it should be slightly disturbing.

00:39:24.000 Okay, I want to say something on the big idea.

00:39:27.000 So on Thursdays we have the Big Idea.

00:39:28.000 The 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.

00:39:34.000 So, 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.

00:39:47.000 These are legal tests to determine what rationale the government has to come up with in order to regulate something.

00:39:52.000 So, for example, strict scrutiny, that's invoked when there's a fundamental right at stake.

00:39:57.000 So there's a First Amendment violation through the law.

00:40:01.000 The law violates the First Amendment.

00:40:03.000 The question is, is that allowed or not?

00:40:04.000 Because the First Amendment is not unlimited, right?

00:40:07.000 I can't, like, walk into your house and just start shouting.

00:40:09.000 There's a compelling state interest in preventing me from walking into your house and shouting at you.

00:40:14.000 Strict scrutiny is invoked here.

00:40:15.000 Strict scrutiny is invoked when a fundamental right is at stake.

00:40:18.000 The 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.

00:40:26.000 One 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.

00:40:37.000 Intermediate scrutiny is the next level.

00:40:39.000 This is usually related to discrimination on the basis of gender or sex.

00:40:45.000 So if there's a law that says that you have to have separate bathrooms for men and women, for example,

00:40:50.000 That would fall under intermediate scrutiny.

00:40:51.000 You 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.

00:41:00.000 And 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.

00:41:10.000 Now, here is the problem.

00:41:11.000 You hear these kinds of terms thrown around, especially on the left.

00:41:13.000 They like to throw these terms around as if they mean something.

00:41:16.000 They don't mean anything.

00:41:17.000 The first rule of constitutional law is that it has nothing to do with the Constitution.

00:41:21.000 These are made up terms.

00:41:23.000 They're made up by judges and they are twisted to fit the facts.

00:41:28.000 You'll see cases that ought to fall under intermediate scrutiny, fall under strict scrutiny.

00:41:32.000 You'll see cases that are intermediate scrutiny cases that are treated as though they're strict scrutiny cases.

00:41:37.000 These malleable terms of art don't mean anything.

00:41:39.000 And it's dangerous, excuse me, when you see justices

00:41:43.000 Attempting to apply vague standards to the law instead of just the words of the Constitution themselves.

00:41:49.000 This is why I think that Clarence Thomas is very loathe to use these sorts of terms.

00:41:53.000 He's exactly right.

00:41:54.000 As 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.

00:42:00.000 So anytime you hear someone say, well that deserves strict scrutiny, just think to yourself,

00:42:04.000 I have no idea what that means, and why don't you actually tell me what the Constitution has to say about this particular issue.

00:42:10.000 Don't be fooled by the legal jargon.

00:42:12.000 This is pretty much meaningless legal jargon that allows people to stretch to their perceived wanted conclusion at any point.

00:42:19.000 Okay, we'll be back tomorrow.

00:42:21.000 We'll be back in our beautiful LA studios, and I will be doing the mailbag as well, so make sure that you check that out.

00:42:26.000 Plus, we'll be playing excerpts from my testimony on Capitol Hill, which was a lot of fun.

00:42:30.000 We'll be doing all of that.

00:42:30.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:42:31.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 27, 2017

Ep. 349 - What Do The Democrats Have To Hide?

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