The Ben Shapiro Show - Hath Not A Giuliani Eyes? | Ep. 592

00:00:00.000 Rudy Giuliani flubs his landing, we examine the midterm races, and the President of the United States goes after 3D gun printing and the Koch brothers.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:07.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:12.000 One of the beautiful things about living in the Donald Trump news cycle is that every morning, the president begins the news cycle anew.

00:00:17.000 So, I do show prep a lot the night before, and then I wake up in the morning and it's an entirely new show prep, which is really exciting because that means there's a lot to talk about and a lot to do.

00:00:25.000 We'll get to all of that in just a second.

00:00:27.000 First, let's talk about your Second Amendment rights.

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00:01:33.000 Also, I just want to remind you, you've heard, I know, that we're taking the Ben Shapiro Show live this August to audiences in Dallas and Phoenix, but you should know we are now two weeks away from those events and we are almost entirely sold out.

00:01:43.000 So if you haven't gotten your tickets yet, you pretty much have to do it now or you're going to miss it entirely.

00:01:46.000 And then you're just going to be sad, right?

00:01:47.000 You're going to be sitting around weeping to yourself thinking, why, God, why?

00:01:51.000 Well, it's your own fault.

00:01:52.000 It's your own fault.

00:01:52.000 If you didn't go to dailywire.com slash events and buy a ticket right now, we're going to party it up in Dallas and Phoenix.

00:01:57.000 And if you're not there, well, you snooze, you lose, gang.

00:01:59.000 That's the way that it works.

00:02:00.000 OK, so on to today's news.

00:02:02.000 The president of the United States, you're speaking about gun rights.

00:02:05.000 The president of the United States.

00:02:07.000 Has now come out with a bizarre tweet in which he attacks 3D gun printing.

00:02:12.000 Now, listen, the president does a lot of very good things on policy.

00:02:16.000 And then he says a lot of stuff on Twitter.

00:02:17.000 As I've said before, the president is fond of the saying of the things.

00:02:20.000 Well, the president decided to go on Twitter and sounds off about 3D gun printing this morning based on essentially no knowledge of 3D gun printing.

00:02:27.000 And so here's what he tweeted out.

00:02:28.000 I am looking into 3D plastic guns being sold to the public.

00:02:31.000 Already spoke to the NRA.

00:02:33.000 Doesn't seem to make much sense.

00:02:35.000 That's not what 3D gun printing is, okay?

00:02:38.000 Seriously, if you think that 3D gun printing is John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire, making plastic guns in his basement, that's not what 3D gun printing actually is.

00:02:48.000 Steven Gutowski of the Washington Free Beacon points out that it is easy and legal to find gun blueprints online, and it should be, because otherwise, you have to crack down on the internet.

00:02:56.000 You have to crack down on people's use of the internet to put out blueprints for guns.

00:03:01.000 That's silly, it's ineffective, it doesn't work.

00:03:03.000 And Gutowsky also points out the vast majority of 3D printed gun designs are not undetectable to metal detectors because that's actually illegal. 0.69

00:03:10.000 It's actually illegal.

00:03:11.000 The ban on the creation of such weapons was extended to 2023 under the Undetectable Firearms Act, so you're not allowed to actually manufacture a plastic gun that can move through a metal detector.

00:03:20.000 That is illegal under federal law.

00:03:22.000 Also, 3D printed guns are made of metal.

00:03:24.000 Okay, they're actually made of metal, the vast majority of them.

00:03:28.000 It's just a 3D printer that uses metal in order to carve out the parts, and the vast majority of people who are using gun blueprints online to build their guns are buying the constituent parts from gun manufacturers in the first place.

00:03:38.000 It's not like they're sitting around and spending $100,000 on a 3D printer, which is what a good 3D printer costs.

00:03:44.000 Why in the world would you go and get all the materials for a 3D printer to make an AR-15 in your basement

00:03:50.000 It'll cost you $150,000.

00:03:51.000 Or you could just go on down to your local gun dealer and buy one for $1,500.

00:03:56.000 Why exactly would you do any of that?

00:03:58.000 The media put out all this misinformation on the threat of 3D guns.

00:04:01.000 People sitting in their basements putting together these guns by getting their HP laser jet printer from 1997 and then printing out a bunch of guns they put together and go assassinate people.

00:04:11.000 That's not the way any of this works.

00:04:13.000 Also, 3D guns are notoriously unreliable to this point.

00:04:16.000 They break down easily.

00:04:17.000 They're very expensive to produce.

00:04:18.000 They're not nearly as accurate as manufactured weapons.

00:04:20.000 You can't fire them all that many times before they start to fall apart.

00:04:24.000 Laws attempting to crack down on this stuff are foolhardy.

00:04:26.000 But this is why the president shouldn't be tweeting about these issues, because all it does is create blood in the water for gun control Democrats.

00:04:33.000 Speaking of which, talking of blood in the water for Democrats, the president has attacked now the Koch brothers.

00:04:39.000 The reason he's attacking the Koch brothers is because the Koch brothers do not like his tariffs.

00:04:43.000 So the Koch brothers, for those who don't know, are these brothers who run Koch Industries, which is essentially, I believe, a natural gas and oil industry.

00:04:52.000 And the Koch brothers are worth something on the order of $80 billion.

00:04:56.000 They're worth some enormous amount of money.

00:04:58.000 And they've used a lot of this money to promote various causes, political and non-political.

00:05:02.000 They've given money to a variety of charities.

00:05:05.000 They're libertarian in orientations.

00:05:06.000 They're not social conservatives.

00:05:08.000 They are very pro-free trade, and they are very pro-immigration.

00:05:11.000 And this is just how they've been for 30 years.

00:05:14.000 Well, they came out the other day and they sort of said that President Trump's tariff policy is bad, which is correct. 0.99

00:05:19.000 His tariff policy generally is bad, unless he is using it to ratchet down tariffs with the rest of the world.

00:05:24.000 So far, it seems like some of that has happened, but the president has this bizarre love for tariffs that don't make a lot of sense.

00:05:30.000 So, the Koch brothers said they're not going to support a particular candidate Trump wants them to support, so he tweeted this out.

00:05:42.000 Number one, I don't know what powerful trade is.

00:05:44.000 That's not a term that means anything.

00:05:46.000 Free trade is a thing.

00:05:47.000 Fair trade doesn't mean anything.

00:05:48.000 Powerful trade certainly doesn't mean anything.

00:05:51.000 But he continues, I never sought their support because I don't need their money or bad ideas.

00:05:55.000 They love my tax and regulation cuts, judicial picks, and more.

00:05:58.000 Okay, so then why are you ripping on them?

00:06:00.000 And then he continues by saying, So he's attacking the Koch brothers.

00:06:15.000 Listen, the president can attack whomever he wants, and this is a good populist line.

00:06:18.000 Bernie Sanders has spent the better part of several years attacking the Koch brothers.

00:06:21.000 The Democrats have turned the Koch brothers into this evil, nefarious, shadow enterprise.

00:06:26.000 The truth is the Koch brothers have supported Republicans by and large, and they've supported free market Republicans by and large.

00:06:31.000 The Koch brothers are not the enemies here, and it's not the Koch brothers that are inhibiting Trump's trade agenda.

00:06:36.000 It's the market itself.

00:06:38.000 The reality is Trump's trade agenda is not particularly good.

00:06:40.000 Now, it is interesting.

00:06:41.000 I was on Laura Ingraham's show last night,

00:06:43.000 And Laura is much more of a trade restrictionist than I am. 0.99

00:06:46.000 She brought this up, and she was suggesting that it's Trump's trade policy that makes him so popular in places like Michigan and Ohio and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

00:06:53.000 I don't actually think that's the case.

00:06:55.000 I think that President Trump sounding off about tariffs sounds like he's pro-manufacturing, and so a lot of people resonate to that.

00:07:01.000 On a sort of emotional level, but the truth is that Trump's tariff policy has actually hurt a lot of these manufacturing centers a lot more than it's helped these manufacturing centers because a lot of the companies that manufacture things have to use imports as inputs.

00:07:13.000 They're importing steel from the EU or from Canada, and then they're using that in their production of trucks.

00:07:19.000 Or they have parts that are coming in from China and they're using that in the production of their final product and tariffs hurt those companies.

00:07:25.000 What the president is very good at is expressing sympathy for these folks who are losing their jobs.

00:07:29.000 I do think there's a cultural battle that the president has engaged in, in which

00:07:34.000 He's very good.

00:07:34.000 I think he has an innate sympathy for people who do blue-collar work in the Rust Belt in a way that Democrats do not.

00:07:39.000 The Democrats, as I talked about on the show a few weeks ago, have a lot of innate sympathy for the New York Daily News reporters who are being laid off.

00:07:45.000 They think those jobs are deeply, deeply important.

00:07:48.000 But the factory worker in Ohio, they don't really care too much about that guy.

00:07:51.000 The truth is that we should care

00:07:53.000 An equivalent amount about all of these jobs.

00:07:55.000 I don't think the manufacturing job in Ohio is necessarily worth more than a reporting job in New York.

00:08:00.000 But the other way around is true also.

00:08:02.000 I don't think a New York reporting job is any more important than a manufacturing job out there in Ohio.

00:08:06.000 A job is worth what the job is worth.

00:08:08.000 That said, we ought to be easing the pain of people who live in those areas and are seeing their industries left behind.

00:08:14.000 That's why job retraining is good.

00:08:15.000 That's why folks like Mike Rowe have

00:08:17.000 Millions of dollars that they've placed into job retraining programs in order to create skill sets for people who are moving out of industries that are falling apart and being out-competed.

00:08:25.000 I don't think tariff policy is the best solution for that.

00:08:28.000 The president's attacking the Koch brothers.

00:08:30.000 I'm not sure how that is politically effective.

00:08:32.000 And this is why the sort of circular firing squad that the president sometimes engages in is not particularly a bright move.

00:08:39.000 I just don't think that's particularly smart.

00:08:40.000 Speaking of not particularly smart, the president on Twitter, like really, if the president just didn't tweet, you know how popular he'd be right now?

00:08:46.000 I know there are a lot of people in Trump's support base who believe that what makes Trump popular is his Twitter.

00:08:51.000 And I think with some folks in the base, that's true.

00:08:53.000 They feel like Trump is fighting.

00:08:54.000 He's out there fighting for them.

00:08:55.000 And you can sense what he wants and how he feels because he's constantly tweeting things.

00:08:59.000 So for those 35% of people, 30% of Americans, great.

00:09:04.000 But what about the other 70% of Americans?

00:09:06.000 Here's the thing.

00:09:06.000 I think if Trump stopped tweeting, all those people who are already sympathetic to Trump are still going to be sympathetic to Trump.

00:09:11.000 And I think that his

00:09:13.000 Tendency to run on at the tweet is not going to hurt him with people in the middle if he stops doing it so much, right?

00:09:19.000 The diarrhea of the Twitter is not helpful to him with people who are in the middle of the country or in the middle of the political spectrum.

00:09:25.000 It's just not useful.

00:09:26.000 An example of this.

00:09:27.000 So the president this morning, not only does he go off on 3D guns, again, wrong, or go off on the Koch brothers, again, I think overstated and wrong, even if I disagree with the Koch brothers on some of their immigration policy,

00:09:38.000 Not only that, the president sounds it off on collusion.

00:09:41.000 Now, as we mentioned yesterday on the show, Rudy Giuliani

00:09:44.000 Have not a Giuliani eyes.

00:09:46.000 But Rudy Giuliani, yesterday, he was speaking on CNN, and he talked about how collusion was not a crime.

00:09:52.000 And I said yesterday, this is not a smart legal strategy.

00:09:55.000 It is just not smart to go out there talking about how collusion is not a crime in the middle of you making the case that the president didn't engage in collusion in the first place.

00:10:03.000 And then Giuliani botched it even worse yesterday.

00:10:06.000 He went on Fox News to try and explain himself, and he made things significantly worse by hinting at the possibility of a second meeting

00:10:13.000 Within the Trump campaign, about the meeting between Donald Trump Jr.

00:10:16.000 and Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian-connected lawyer who is supposedly going to present Clinton-Oppo research to the Trump campaign, Giuliani called in to Fox News, and then he proceeded to just bosh things dramatically.

00:10:28.000 Here was Giuliani talking to the ladies of Outnumbered.

00:10:31.000 It did not go well.

00:10:34.000 One of which has leaked out, the other of which has been given to three reporters, and Jay Sekul and I have been successful, I think, in beating it back.

00:10:42.000 There wasn't another meeting that has been leaked that hasn't been public yet.

00:10:48.000 That was a meeting, an alleged meeting, three days before.

00:10:52.000 According to Cohen, or according to the leak, maybe Cohen will withdraw this.

00:10:56.000 I don't know.

00:10:57.000 They haven't pursued it.

00:10:59.000 And the two publications are not going to publish it.

00:11:01.000 I think they've found independent contradiction.

00:11:04.000 OK, so here's what Giuliani, I think, is trying to say, is that there is the meeting in Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr.

00:11:10.000 and Jared Kushner and a bunch of members of the Trump campaign and this Russian-connected lawyer.

00:11:15.000 And now, that was meeting number one, and now Giuliani is sort of letting it slip on Fox News that there's an accusation that there was a second meeting three days before about this primary meeting.

00:11:24.000 Well, we didn't know about that until Giuliani went on national TV and talked about it.

00:11:28.000 And then he said, well, that meeting didn't happen.

00:11:30.000 So then why are you talking about that meeting?

00:11:31.000 Like, we didn't know about it until you just said it one second ago.

00:11:34.000 So I don't know why Rudy Giuliani is doing this.

00:11:37.000 I don't know whether he's just confused about the issues.

00:11:40.000 I don't know whether he has coined his own version of law.

00:11:43.000 This is not good defense strategy.

00:11:45.000 It's not good legal defense strategy.

00:11:46.000 The problem is the president sort of bought into it and mirrored that on Twitter today.

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00:13:07.000 Okay, so.

00:13:09.000 Giuliani doing yeoman's work to confuse everyone about the situation regarding the Trump Tower meeting.

00:13:17.000 And then Giuliani follows that one up by saying, listen, we don't have to cooperate with Robert Mueller.

00:13:21.000 We're going to, you know, not obstruct, but we're not going to cooperate with Robert Mueller.

00:13:24.000 He says this yesterday on Fox News.

00:13:26.000 I thank John for all the cooperation he gave them because he puts us in a position where we don't have to cooperate.

00:13:32.000 Given some of the revelations in the last three or four weeks, we've been driven further away from the idea of answering any questions from them.

00:13:38.000 We don't think they have a legitimate investigation.

00:13:41.000 OK, so we're not going to answer any questions now.

00:13:43.000 If you want to look innocent, this is probably not the smartest way to do it.

00:13:47.000 And then Trump decides to double down on Giuliani's strategy.

00:13:50.000 So Trump tweets this out today.

00:13:52.000 He tweets out, collusion is not a crime.

00:13:54.000 But that doesn't matter because there was no collusion, except by crooked Hillary and the Democrats. 0.82

00:13:59.000 That tweet is slightly confusing for a couple of reasons.

00:14:01.000 First of all, he is correct that collusion is not a crime.

00:14:04.000 However, collusion is not an illegal term.

00:14:07.000 Conspiracy is a crime.

00:14:08.000 If it turns out that the Trump campaign was coordinating with the Russians to affect the election, that's probably a campaign finance violation.

00:14:13.000 It's a violation of federal law.

00:14:14.000 Obstruction is a crime.

00:14:16.000 If you decided to lie to the FBI, that's a crime, if Donald Trump Jr.

00:14:19.000 did that.

00:14:21.000 And then Trump says, that doesn't matter, there was no collusion.

00:14:23.000 Okay, you could have just said there was no collusion in the first place, which is your strongest case, right?

00:14:27.000 If somebody says, Shapiro, you committed tax evasion, I said, tax evasion isn't a crime, and also I didn't do it.

00:14:33.000 You'd be kind of confused, right?

00:14:35.000 And I think that this is just not good PR.

00:14:36.000 Listen, I actually sort of believe Trump, at least so far, because I don't see the evidence that he was involved in any sort of campaign collusion, that he knew about coordination with the Russians, or that he himself was coordinating with the Russians, or even that the campaign actively coordinated with the Russians, other than, you know, wanting to.

00:14:52.000 I don't see the actual evidence that they did so.

00:14:54.000 But for Trump to say this sort of stuff is not great.

00:14:56.000 And then for him to finish up that tweet with, Hillary colluded, but you just said collusion isn't a crime.

00:15:01.000 So which is it?

00:15:02.000 Earlier this week, he suggested that Hillary Clinton, by the way, should be prosecuted for collusion.

00:15:05.000 So you're going to need to get your story straight here.

00:15:08.000 Except for the fact that I think people have made up their mind on the Mueller investigation. 0.99

00:15:12.000 If you're a Trump fan, you think that it's a bunch of crap. 0.99

00:15:14.000 If you're not a Trump fan, you think that Mueller's going to nail Trump to the wall. 0.99

00:15:17.000 In the end, does any of this really damage Trump?

00:15:19.000 Probably not.

00:15:20.000 That's why we're going to have to wait to see what exactly comes out from all of this.

00:15:24.000 I don't think anything is going to come out, but that's why Trump would be better off just kind of lowering the chaos level a little bit.

00:15:30.000 That said, you can see the Democrats getting out over their skis.

00:15:33.000 They are very eager for Trump to go down here.

00:15:35.000 Jonathan Turley over on MSNBC, he says that essentially we are one witness away from catastrophe here.

00:15:42.000 I think the Cohen development is very serious.

00:15:44.000 I mean, he's one witness away from a potential catastrophe.

00:15:48.000 If any of those five witnesses breaks and supports Michael Cohen, this is going to get real bad, real fast.

00:15:55.000 Okay, so there is this hope on the left that Michael Cohen is going to take down President Trump.

00:15:59.000 I don't think that's the case, but I do think it would behoove President Trump to simply go silent.

00:16:03.000 Again, I am a lawyer, okay?

00:16:04.000 As a lawyer, the first rule of lawyering is tell your client to shut up.

00:16:08.000 Seriously, that's like the very first rule of lawyering. 1.00

00:16:10.000 Even if you watch movies, what you see is the idiot client who tells their lawyer, I'm going to talk to the police. 0.99

00:16:14.000 I'm going to say what I want to say. 1.00

00:16:15.000 And the lawyer's like, no.

00:16:18.000 Well, if Rudy Giuliani were doing his job right now, he would be saying to the president, Mr. President, stop, just stop.

00:16:23.000 Like, I'm going to make sure that you're OK here, but you really need to stop with the tweeting because that's what any lawyer worth his salt would be doing.

00:16:31.000 I'm sort of surprised that Giuliani hasn't done more of that, frankly.

00:16:34.000 Okay, so how is this having any impact on the midterm elections?

00:16:38.000 Let's talk about where we stand just a few weeks away from the midterm elections.

00:16:41.000 We're now entering August.

00:16:42.000 We're about to enter August.

00:16:43.000 So that leaves us August, September, October, and then we are at the elections.

00:16:46.000 We're three months away from the midterm elections, and they do not look particularly good for Republicans right now.

00:16:51.000 That's why

00:16:52.000 I'm not in favor of this sort of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil strategy that so many commentators are on the right.

00:16:58.000 We need to look at the data.

00:17:00.000 I understand that polls were not accurate with regard to President Trump.

00:17:03.000 That does not mean you shouldn't look at the warning signs and think maybe the Republicans need to do something a little bit better leading up to the elections.

00:17:10.000 According to the New York Times, they have this comprehensive look at the battleground seats.

00:17:13.000 And here is what Nate Cohn reports.

00:17:15.000 He says, the battleground in the fight for control of the House is starting to come into focus with 99 days to go until the November election.

00:17:21.000 It's not exactly the battleground that analysts expected.

00:17:23.000 It's not dominated by well-educated suburban districts that voted for Hillary Clinton.

00:17:27.000 Instead, the battleground is broad, and it includes a long list of working class and rural districts that voted for President Trump in 2016.

00:17:34.000 The broader battleground is a positive development for Democrats.

00:17:37.000 It's a reflection of how much the Republicans' structural advantage in the House has eroded over the last year, while remains of it isn't helping the Republicans as much as analysts assumed it would be, at least not yet.

00:17:47.000 So they looked at the various districts that are assumed to be competitive by Cook Political Report, and what they are finding is that white districts are heavily Republican, obviously.

00:17:56.000 Black districts are very heavily Democrat.

00:17:58.000 Hispanic districts are very heavily Democrat.

00:18:01.000 Districts with college graduates are very heavily Democrat.

00:18:04.000 Rural districts are very heavily Democrat.

00:18:06.000 Suburban districts are heavily Republican.

00:18:08.000 So there is this really interesting divide.

00:18:11.000 The broader battleground has also opened up a gap between two common ways of thinking about the midterms, says Nate Cohn.

00:18:15.000 National polls and historical voting patterns suggest that Democrats are only slight favorites to take the House.

00:18:20.000 Well, early polls of individual districts, special election results, and the ratings of expert prognosticators suggest that the Democrats are in a stronger position.

00:18:28.000 To this point, we've mainly seen polls of the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters whether they intend to vote Democrat or Republican.

00:18:34.000 Democrats have generally led on this ballot by six to eight percentage points over the last few months, which is around what analysts believe Democrats need to have an even shot of retaking the chamber.

00:18:42.000 The Republicans still have structural advantages, but there have been a flurry of Republican retirements, which has led to 42 open seats.

00:18:48.000 Many of them the sort of well-trenched and entrenched incumbents in competitive districts whose retirements are most valuable for Democrats.

00:18:55.000 On paper, the Republicans still have a big geographic advantage.

00:18:58.000 There are only nine Republican-held districts that voted more favorably for Democrats in the last two presidential elections than the rest of the country did.

00:19:05.000 But that advantage doesn't seem to be helping the Republicans as much as it has been in past presidential cycles.

00:19:11.000 Democrats are putting conservative districts into play because the overall national political environment is more favorable to Democrats than the generic ballot polls imply.

00:19:19.000 It's also possible that the district's presidential vote choice will play a smaller-than-expected role in determining how a district will vote for the House, which makes sense.

00:19:26.000 There's been a very broad gap in 2010 and 2014 between the presidential year ballots and the off-year election ballots.

00:19:33.000 A lot of that has to do with enthusiasm.

00:19:35.000 Trump voters aren't going to show up when Trump isn't on the ballot.

00:19:37.000 There's a lot of enthusiasm among Republicans for Trump himself.

00:19:40.000 Is there as much enthusiasm for their local congresspeople?

00:19:43.000 Not necessarily.

00:19:44.000 And the same thing is obviously true for Democrats.

00:19:46.000 All the places where people were really enthusiastic to get out there for Hillary Clinton, they're not showing up either.

00:19:51.000 What that means is that the vote totals are reverting to a sort of norm that you see in off-year elections.

00:19:56.000 Now, when Democrats are in charge, that means that Republicans are more fired up to go out and vote.

00:20:00.000 When Republicans are in charge, Democrats, presumably, are more fired up to vote.

00:20:05.000 So, the most vulnerable Republican-held districts are only somewhat better educated and somewhat more suburban than the country as a whole.

00:20:11.000 They are broadly representative of non-urban America.

00:20:13.000 They backed Mr. Trump for president.

00:20:14.000 About 31% of residents have a college degree, slightly more than the national average.

00:20:19.000 But the sheer number of competitive districts is important in its own right.

00:20:23.000 On paper, it would be enough to make Democrats fairly clear favorites if one assumes Democrats do well in each category, as the party out of power has done in recent wave elections.

00:20:31.000 This is what I've been suggesting is that the president's, you know, kind of hot button approach to issues, it could actually fire up the Democrats.

00:20:41.000 It could be that the Democrats are so upset with President Trump that they go out and they vote in large numbers in these congressional elections.

00:20:47.000 And that could be a serious problem for Republicans in these election races.

00:20:52.000 Now, again, maybe all the polls are wrong.

00:20:54.000 Maybe Republicans somehow recover.

00:20:55.000 Maybe it doesn't end up being as bad as it looks like it's going to be right now.

00:20:59.000 But to sort of ignore the data, I think would be a fairly large mistake at this point in time.

00:21:04.000 Okay, meanwhile, we're going to talk about the President of the United States and what he has to say about the government shutdown, because this is part of his election strategy in just a second.

00:21:12.000 First, I want to tell you about this really, really awesome service that I have found.

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00:22:12.000 I mean, that's essentially the way that they save their money.

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00:22:37.000 I mean, this is a no-brainer, frankly.

00:22:39.000 Okay, so.

00:22:40.000 Meanwhile, the president is trying to gin up the base with a lot of the immigration talk.

00:22:43.000 The problem is that it's not clear the president is supremely credible when it comes to the idea that he is going to hold fast on the immigration issue.

00:22:51.000 So the president yesterday said that he is willing to do a government shutdown over the immigration issue, over wall funding, but he has no red line, which means that he really isn't willing to shut down the government, but he's sort of signaling that he is.

00:23:03.000 So what exactly is this supposed to mean?

00:23:05.000 No one really knows.

00:23:07.000 I would be certainly willing to consider a shutdown if we don't get proper border security.

00:23:13.000 Thank you.

00:23:13.000 Please.

00:23:14.000 Sir, just to follow up on that quickly, is the $25 billion a red line for you?

00:23:19.000 I have no red line, unlike President Obama.

00:23:22.000 I just want great border security.

00:23:24.000 Okay, so that means nothing, right?

00:23:26.000 If you don't have a red line, if there's no point at which you're willing to say no, then you don't mean that you're going to veto a bill that comes down that doesn't have the border wall funding.

00:23:34.000 There are folks like Ann Coulter who have been stumping for the wall.

00:23:36.000 This has been her chief goal in life, is to get President Trump to build this wall.

00:23:39.000 This wall has not been built, and the President does have to hold Congress's feet to the fire.

00:23:43.000 The President does actually have to say to Congress, listen, you send me a bill I don't like, I will veto it.

00:23:47.000 So when Trump says, listen,

00:23:49.000 I want that border wall funding.

00:23:50.000 They say, do you have a red line on signing a bill?

00:23:52.000 And then he says, no.

00:23:53.000 What he really means is that he's not going to veto anything.

00:23:55.000 And that's a sign of weakness.

00:23:57.000 The Hill is reporting right now that President Trump has privately agreed with congressional Republicans to delay the fight over funding for his border wall until after the November midterm elections, despite his public statements expressing a willingness to shut down the government over the issue, an administration official is telling the Wall Street Journal.

00:24:11.000 So in other words, Trump is saying that he's willing to do a government shutdown, but he's not really willing to do a government shutdown.

00:24:19.000 Now, this is where Trump is at odds with some congressional Republicans like Mitch McConnell.

00:24:23.000 McConnell thinks government shutdowns are always bad for Republicans.

00:24:26.000 I don't agree.

00:24:27.000 I don't think Mitch McConnell is right about this.

00:24:29.000 I think that bad policy is bad for Republicans.

00:24:31.000 I don't think that many Americans care about government shutdowns.

00:24:33.000 And I do have an ideological problem with Republicans who are so frightened of government shutdowns on a routine basis.

00:24:40.000 Oh no!

00:24:40.000 They're gonna shut down the government.

00:24:41.000 We're all going to die.

00:24:43.000 I thought you were the party of limited government.

00:24:44.000 I thought you were the party that said that the government was not the be-all end-all.

00:24:48.000 And yet, here we are, suggesting that it is the be-all end-all, and if the government shuts down, everyone is going to die, and it's going to be the worst thing that ever happened.

00:24:56.000 This is how you end up with Republicans spending insane, insane amounts of money.

00:25:01.000 Right now, the Republicans have essentially racked up more debt than the Democrats did at the same time.

00:25:07.000 It's really crazy.

00:25:09.000 The Republicans just racked up, I think it was another $1.33 trillion of debt.

00:25:14.000 This is the party that is supposed to be standing for fiscal responsibility.

00:25:21.000 It just makes no sense to me.

00:25:22.000 If you're going to shut down the government, now's the time to do it because you're not going to have the Republican votes later.

00:25:27.000 If things keep going the way they are going, the Republicans lose the House and they may lose the Senate, then you think you're going to have the ability to get Democrats to play ball on this?

00:25:34.000 You think you're going to get wall funding from the Democrats?

00:25:36.000 You think the Democrats are actually going to come forward with wall funding?

00:25:38.000 They have a solid interest in preventing anything from happening so that they can defeat President Trump in 2020.

00:25:46.000 This is a limited window.

00:25:47.000 Once we hit the election of 2018, that wall funding is basically gone.

00:25:50.000 If the Republicans lose the House, there will be no wall.

00:25:53.000 End of story.

00:25:54.000 It is that simple.

00:25:55.000 Which means that you better make hay while the sun shines.

00:25:57.000 This is the reason why Mitch McConnell is saying, let's confirm as many judges as humanly possible right now, because if we lose the Senate, we're basically toast.

00:26:04.000 Anyone who's watching this stuff knows the Democrats are not going to work with Trump on any of this stuff, but McConnell is deeply afraid of the blowback.

00:26:10.000 Anytime there's any sort of government shutdown, he thinks that the American people simply can't stomach it.

00:26:15.000 I think the American people are a little tougher than this.

00:26:16.000 Mitch McConnell is wrong here.

00:26:18.000 Here's the Senate Majority Leader saying that the wall funding has to wait until after the midterms.

00:26:22.000 Is the funding of the border wall going to wait until after the midterm elections?

00:26:26.000 Probably.

00:26:27.000 That's something we do have a disagreement on.

00:26:29.000 So Homeland Security won't get funded before the midterms?

00:26:32.000 Probably not.

00:26:33.000 But most of the government will be covered.

00:26:36.000 So you're not worried about a government shutdown before the midterms?

00:26:38.000 No, that's not going to happen.

00:26:39.000 Okay, so McConnell just assuring that it'll never happen, and Trump obviously doesn't have the willingness to actually go all the way to the wall for his own preferred border policy.

00:26:48.000 If you're a Trump voter who voted based on his immigration policy, you've got to be disappointed with the president not pushing Republicans hard enough.

00:26:54.000 Is it McConnell's fault?

00:26:55.000 Sure.

00:26:56.000 Is it the fault of people like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins and the various sort of moderate caucus of the Republicans in the Senate?

00:27:01.000 Absolutely.

00:27:02.000 But in the end, it's the President of the United States who gets to decide what he signs and what he doesn't.

00:27:06.000 Remember, it was President Obama who shut down the government in 2013, not the Republicans.

00:27:11.000 It was Obama who said, I will not sign a bill that does not include funding for Obamacare.

00:27:14.000 Ted Cruz said, here's a bill.

00:27:16.000 No funding for Obamacare.

00:27:17.000 And Obama simply said, I'm not going to sign it.

00:27:20.000 And that was that.

00:27:21.000 And then the Republicans caved and they made some sort of a deal with the Democrats.

00:27:24.000 Why exactly Trump can't do the same thing or is unwilling to do the same thing is beyond me.

00:27:27.000 Why are Republicans more afraid of government shutdowns than Democrats?

00:27:30.000 Why?

00:27:32.000 It grants the Democrats their premise.

00:27:33.000 Democrats are happy with government shutdowns because they think that the government is absolutely necessary and vital.

00:27:39.000 Republicans should say, listen, we're not going to pass a budget unless the budget is good.

00:27:43.000 And then if we pass a bad budget, then we are wasting other people's money.

00:27:46.000 We are racking up debt that we're never going to repay.

00:27:48.000 If we shut down the government and there is no funding for these sort of various and sundry items, guess what?

00:27:55.000 The country still continues to function.

00:27:57.000 We are always warned that there will be zombie apocalypses in the streets if a budget doesn't pass.

00:28:02.000 And guess what?

00:28:03.000 It's happened like four times in the last five years, four times in the last six years.

00:28:07.000 You know how many times there's been a zombie apocalypse?

00:28:09.000 Zero.

00:28:10.000 Barack Obama had to manufacture crises during a government shutdown in order for people to even care.

00:28:15.000 Nobody would have even noticed, except that Barack Obama decided he was going to ban people from open park memorials.

00:28:20.000 He was going to somehow shut down the World War II monuments in Washington, D.C.

00:28:23.000 so that veterans couldn't visit it, just so that people would feel the pain.

00:28:26.000 He was going to shut down national parks, for example.

00:28:29.000 There's no reason that... I think it would be a good example to the American public, once in a while, for there to be a government shutdown which doesn't result in the end of the world.

00:28:37.000 And the fact that Republicans are running away from this is just beyond me.

00:28:41.000 I don't understand why they would do this. 0.98

00:28:42.000 I don't understand why they think it's going to energize the base to continue passing trillion-dollar budget packages that suck and are filled with pork. 0.95

00:28:49.000 The Republican Party, when they do this sort of stuff, they look like Democrats lite. 0.97

00:28:52.000 They look like Democrats lite, except more gutless.

00:28:55.000 Just not good stuff any way around.

00:28:58.000 Meanwhile,

00:28:59.000 In breaking news, the first trial of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe got underway on Tuesday with Paul Manafort, a former chairman of U.S.

00:29:05.000 President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, facing charges that he had tens of millions of dollars earned in Ukraine in offshore accounts and defrauded banks for loans, this is according to Reuters.

00:29:14.000 The tax and bank fraud trial in a Virginia federal court represents the first test of Mueller's ability to win a conviction of a former Trump aide.

00:29:20.000 Now, recognize the Manafort indictment has nothing to do with campaign 2016.

00:29:23.000 It is just Manafort being

00:29:27.000 Prosecuted for his various and sundry illegalities, alleged illegalities, with regard to Ukraine years ago.

00:29:32.000 Three other aides, including Manafort's longtime business partner Rick Gates, have already pled guilty and are cooperating with Mueller's probe.

00:29:39.000 Prosecutors are seeking to provide details of Manafort's work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, raising the possibility that new information about his Russian connections could, in fact, emerge.

00:29:48.000 Manafort has filed a motion to have the details of that work excluded from the trial.

00:29:52.000 Again, not clear that anything has to do with President Trump.

00:29:56.000 Protesters are showing up trying to suggest that Manafort is going down and that will bring Trump down with him.

00:30:00.000 But there's no evidence that that is actually the case.

00:30:02.000 Manafort worked for Trump for something like four months.

00:30:05.000 Honestly, I don't think that Trump really knew Manafort.

00:30:07.000 I think that what happened here is that no one who had a great reputation was working for Team Trump.

00:30:12.000 And so they simply went and they got

00:30:14.000 The one guy who the RNC recommended.

00:30:17.000 Manafort was very tied into the RNC.

00:30:19.000 And so they went to the RNC, they said, who should we get as a campaign manager?

00:30:22.000 They said Paul Manafort.

00:30:23.000 He hired Paul Manafort.

00:30:24.000 Manafort ends up being corruptifierism.

00:30:26.000 I don't know why Manafort has to be tied to Trump per se, but the Democrats are fully on board with the idea that Manafort is going to bring down Trump again.

00:30:33.000 I think that that is a lot of wishful thinking on the part of the Democrats.

00:30:36.000 OK, I want to talk about President Trump and Iran.

00:30:38.000 I also want to talk about sports for a little while.

00:30:41.000 But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

00:30:43.000 So go ahead over there, subscribe, dailywire.com.

00:30:46.000 $9.99 a month gets you a subscription to our podcast, Michael Knowles' Excalibur podcast, The Andrew Klavan Show.

00:30:52.000 Go check all of that out.

00:30:53.000 Plus, you get to be part of our mailbag on Fridays.

00:30:55.000 And when you get the annual subscription, this, the very greatest in all beverage vessels, the leftist year is hot or cold tumbler.

00:31:00.000 It is indeed fantastic.

00:31:01.000 Go check it out right now.

00:31:03.000 It's 99 bucks a year.

00:31:04.000 Also, subscribe to YouTube.

00:31:05.000 Please subscribe to iTunes.

00:31:07.000 Go check us out over there so that you can be part of our Sunday special.

00:31:10.000 In fact, I think, do we have a clip from the upcoming Sunday special with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

00:31:17.000 Do we have that clip?

00:31:18.000 We're going to try and have on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 0.99

00:31:21.000 I think we have a bit of a preview of that, actually.

00:31:23.000 I think my strength is that I am honest and I am authentic.

00:31:29.000 And I think that even Republicans write letters to our campaign saying, thank you.

00:31:35.000 If corporations paid, if we reversed the tax bill but raised our corporate tax rate to 28%, which is not even as high as it was before, that's $2 trillion right there.

00:31:48.000 And then the last key, which is extremely, extremely important, is reprioritization.

00:31:58.000 Okay, just a quick note to all of the folks on the left who didn't understand that Ali Stuckey's parody of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was in fact a satire.

00:32:05.000 That's satire, okay? 0.71

00:32:06.000 I didn't actually interview Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, just so you idiots don't think that I'm making it up and that I actually interviewed her and I'm taking her out of context. 0.97

00:32:14.000 That's what we call humor right there, a little bit of humor to spice up your day.

00:32:18.000 Okay, so go check us out, iTunes, SoundCloud, YouTube.

00:32:20.000 Subscribe, leave us a review, we always appreciate it.

00:32:22.000 We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation. 1.00

00:32:30.000 Yeah, everything is stupid. 1.00

00:32:31.000 That should be my slogan. 1.00

00:32:32.000 We need to have a t-shirt that says, everything is stupid, Ben Shapiro. 0.99

00:32:36.000 That's really, we need that t-shirt in the Shapiro store ASAP over at Amazon. 0.99

00:32:41.000 Okay, so meanwhile, speaking of everything is stupid, yesterday the president, again, speaking out of turn on a topic of which he knows very little, he was asked about meeting with Iran with no preconditions. 0.96

00:32:49.000 I recall literally a week ago, one week ago, the President of the United States went on Twitter and he threatened Iran with all-out nuclear war, in all caps, which was basically DEFCON 2. 0.98

00:32:59.000 Yesterday, he was asked whether he would meet with the Iranian leadership, and here's what he had to say.

00:33:02.000 I'm ready to meet anytime they want to, and I don't do that from strength or from weakness.

00:33:08.000 I think it's an appropriate thing to do.

00:33:09.000 No preconditions.

00:33:10.000 If they want to meet, I'll meet.

00:33:14.000 No, no.

00:33:16.000 OK, in 2007, Barack Obama said he would meet with the Iranians without preconditions. 1.00

00:33:20.000 And we all went nuts on the right because that's a stupid idea. 0.99

00:33:22.000 You don't meet with America's enemies without preconditions. 0.99

00:33:25.000 Now, I know there are a lot of you out there right now.

00:33:26.000 You're saying, but didn't President Trump meet with Kim Jong-un without preconditions? 0.99

00:33:30.000 Yes, I thought that was stupid as well. 0.99

00:33:32.000 And guess what? 0.98

00:33:33.000 It turns out not to have actually accomplished anything.

00:33:35.000 According to the Washington Post, multiple intelligence officers have been monitoring ongoing activity recently from North Korea's nuclear and missile testing facilities.

00:33:42.000 And what they find is that North Korea is building new possible intercontinental ballistic missiles despite Kim Jong-un's denuclearization agreement from his summit with President Trump.

00:33:51.000 Now, I know that it's the Amazon Washington Post.

00:33:53.000 Don't believe them.

00:33:54.000 Here's the thing.

00:33:55.000 I don't actually believe that North Korea is going to disarm because Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump are best friends who are gonna go golfing now.

00:34:01.000 I don't think that's how diplomacy works.

00:34:03.000 I think Trump is wrong when he thinks that you just get into a room with a bad guy, and then you become friends, and you have cigars together, and you go to a strip club, and then everybody's friends, and then they give up their nuclear weapons.

00:34:13.000 That's not what happens here.

00:34:14.000 Iran doesn't become friendly just because you meet with them.

00:34:17.000 This idea that interpersonal relationships are the basis of foreign policy, they never have been.

00:34:23.000 And this is not just a myth that is promulgated by, you know, President Trump or Obama.

00:34:27.000 It's a myth that was promulgated... Honestly, it's been promulgated for a long time.

00:34:30.000 If you go over to the Reagan Library, for example, I love the Reagan Library.

00:34:32.000 It's just fantastic.

00:34:33.000 And Ronald Reagan, great president.

00:34:35.000 But one of the exhibits over at the Reagan Library has this exhibit showing Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev.

00:34:40.000 And the idea is that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev really got along, and that's why the Soviet Union collapsed.

00:34:46.000 That is not why the Soviet Union collapsed.

00:34:47.000 The Soviet Union collapsed because Mikhail Gorbachev miscalculated.

00:34:51.000 He thought

00:34:52.000 That the Soviets could not continue their defense buildup, and so they had to loosen the reins on the various satellite states that made up the USSR.

00:34:58.000 Those satellite states then quickly broke off as fast as possible, and it was too late to stop the momentum.

00:35:02.000 There's nothing that he could do about it.

00:35:04.000 If you read the Russian internal documents, it is very clear that's exactly what happened.

00:35:07.000 It was not that Ronald Reagan got into a room and he and Mikhail Gorbachev had a cup of coffee together and suddenly they're best friends and Mikhail Gorbachev was like, you know what?

00:35:15.000 Get rid of communism!

00:35:16.000 Great idea!

00:35:17.000 That's not what happened. 0.98

00:35:19.000 So this idea that Trump is going to sit down with Hassan Rouhani, who is a terrorist-supporting piece of crap, and that Rouhani is suddenly going to decide that he's going to give up his terroristic program, that's not what's going to happen. 0.93

00:35:29.000 I don't like ideological inconsistency. 0.99

00:35:31.000 And the fact that there are so many people who are willing to bend over backwards to make excuses for this sort of stuff, I find completely ridiculous. 0.97

00:35:38.000 It's just, it's ridiculous to me. 0.95

00:35:39.000 It doesn't make a lot of sense.

00:35:40.000 Now, I've been very critical of the Trump administration today because President Trump was very busy in saying things, but then there's what they actually do.

00:35:48.000 And this is the part that's really hard for folks to wrap their brains around.

00:35:51.000 They'll say, Shapiro, you say so many things about the president saying things that you don't like, but you're very supportive of the administration.

00:35:57.000 Right, because what they do and what they say are two completely different things.

00:36:00.000 So, for example, they have now launched a religious liberty task force over at the Department of Justice.

00:36:04.000 Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that they would provide religious liberty guidance central to the new task force rooted in President Trump's executive order from last year directing agencies to respect and protect religious liberty and political speech.

00:36:16.000 The task force is going to be co-chaired by Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio, according to Sessions.

00:36:21.000 So he said that there have been a lot of examples recently of religious Americans being targeted.

00:36:26.000 Nuns being ordered by contraceptives.

00:36:28.000 U.S.

00:36:28.000 Senators asking judicial and executive branch nominees about dogma.

00:36:31.000 And so we need a task force to protect religious Americans.

00:36:34.000 Yes, we do.

00:36:35.000 OK, we have a civil rights task force inside the DOJ.

00:36:38.000 It was used by the Obama administration for various and sundry political activities that were actually not good.

00:36:44.000 Protecting religious Americans from the predations of local government is a worthwhile thing. 1.00

00:36:48.000 Protecting religious Americans from discrimination is a good thing.

00:36:51.000 So the Trump administration continues to do a lot of good things at the same time that President Trump continues to say a lot of chaotic things.

00:36:57.000 And this is why, if the president could just become a spokesperson for his own policies, I don't think I'm asking too much here.

00:37:03.000 If he could just become a spokesperson for his administration's own policy, for the freedoms that are being promoted by this administration, for the economic record of this administration,

00:37:12.000 Republicans would actually have a better shot in 2018.

00:37:15.000 This Religious Liberty Task Force is a very good thing and it's an area where Democrats are extraordinarily extreme.

00:37:20.000 It's an area where Democrats have been proclaiming that you have to force religious bakers to bake that cake.

00:37:24.000 It's an area where they have been suggesting that religious people are bigots and terrible folks.

00:37:28.000 President Trump has fought back against that, tooth and nail.

00:37:30.000 That's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

00:37:32.000 Why don't we know about it?

00:37:33.000 Why isn't the president tweeting about that?

00:37:35.000 He should be.

00:37:35.000 The answer is he should be.

00:37:36.000 He's now in a position to tweet about his great record, not just tweet about things that don't really matter, like the Mueller investigation, which I don't know is actually going to end up being a thing anyway.

00:37:46.000 You know, the president has a good story to tell if he is just willing to tell it.

00:37:51.000 Now, speaking of people who don't have a good story to tell, I have to comment on a guy named Cenk Aygar.

00:37:56.000 You may not know about Cenk Aygar.

00:37:58.000 Cenk is a guy who runs something called the Young Turks.

00:38:00.000 And I've debated Cenk Aygar on everything from health care policy to mostly health care policy.

00:38:05.000 But Cenk is a very hardcore leftist.

00:38:09.000 And he's very upset.

00:38:10.000 Why is he upset?

00:38:11.000 Well, he's upset with Tucker Carlson because Tucker Carlson said the other day that adult film stars are indecent.

00:38:16.000 Which seems to me definitional.

00:38:18.000 Like, that's literally their job is to be indecent. 0.99

00:38:22.000 Their literal job is to take off their clothes and have sex with people for money on camera. 0.93

00:38:25.000 So I'm not seeing the decent part of that.

00:38:28.000 Tucker Carlson said it was indecent for Democrats to portray Stormy Daniels as a heroine when she had a one-night stand with a married man and got paid 130 grand to shut up about it and then decided to become a political figure.

00:38:39.000 I don't think Tucker Carlson's wrong about that.

00:38:40.000 Does that make Trump's behavior with Stormy Daniels decent?

00:38:43.000 No.

00:38:44.000 But let's not pretend that Stormy Daniels is the great hero of feminism. 1.00

00:38:48.000 In any case, Chang is very upset.

00:38:49.000 So Chang tweeted out, I'm not done yet.

00:38:51.000 Tucker Carlson says that adult film stars are indecent.

00:38:54.000 Really?

00:38:54.000 How many adult films do you think Tucker has watched in his life?

00:38:57.000 In the thousands at least.

00:38:58.000 Is he claiming he has never watched any?

00:39:00.000 Same with Ben Shapiro who writes an anti-porn book.

00:39:03.000 Please!

00:39:03.000 Okay, I have a few comments on this.

00:39:06.000 First of all, real weird that Chang is sitting around thinking about how much porn I watch.

00:39:11.000 Very, very weird.

00:39:12.000 I don't know what he fantasized about in his spare time, but I'm a little creeped out. 0.79

00:39:17.000 I was just sitting here doing nothing, and suddenly I'm being attacked by Chan Kyger with the suggestion that I watch porn.

00:39:23.000 I did write a book about why pornography is bad, because pornography is bad.

00:39:28.000 Like, it's not decent.

00:39:30.000 It's immoral.

00:39:32.000 Now,

00:39:33.000 I'm also confused by this idea that Tucker Carlson is not allowed to say that porn is indecent if he has ever seen any porn at all.

00:39:41.000 This is like saying that you think drug use is indecent, but if you've ever used drugs, you can't say that.

00:39:46.000 I'm super confused by this argument, but it's an argument frequently used on the left.

00:39:50.000 I will also say that the only pornography I need is the film of Cenk Aiger, 1.00

00:39:55.000 Mourning the election loss like that's the only pornography I need is actually just Cenk sitting there Weeping over the election loss the night of the election because it's so it's so good.

00:40:04.000 It's still hilarious So well done Cenk really doing credit to to the agenda of the left by talking about Republicans watching pornography.

00:40:13.000 Okay, speaking of other weird topics.

00:40:15.000 So LeBron James

00:40:16.000 Who's now in Los Angeles because he just moves teams with a certain amount of regularity.

00:40:21.000 He's actually done some good stuff, LeBron James.

00:40:23.000 One of the things he's done is he's opened a charter school, basically.

00:40:26.000 And this charter school is doing good work.

00:40:28.000 They're actually bringing kids in, creating mentorship programs for them, preventing them from living in bad situations.

00:40:34.000 All of that is wonderful.

00:40:35.000 LeBron sees himself as a sort of quasi-political figure, which means sometimes he says smart stuff and sometimes he says dumb stuff.

00:40:40.000 Because everybody in politics does.

00:40:42.000 LeBron yesterday was interviewed about all of this, and he said that President Trump is using sports to divide us. 0.96

00:40:47.000 This is one of the dumb things that LeBron James is saying. 0.92

00:40:49.000 And I'm not somebody who thinks that LeBron James has to shut up and dribble. 0.96

00:40:52.000 You know, LeBron James can say whatever LeBron James wants to say.

00:40:55.000 I don't know that he's a political expert.

00:40:57.000 In fact, I'm pretty sure that he's not. 0.95

00:40:58.000 But here's the thing he said that I think is inherently silly.

00:41:02.000 What I noticed over the last few months, that he's kind of used sport to kind of divide us.

00:41:08.000 And that's something that I can't relate to because I know that sports has never been something that divide people.

00:41:13.000 It's always been something that brings someone together. 0.99

00:41:15.000 Okay, here's the part that's stupid. 0.98

00:41:16.000 I remember sports dividing people long before President Trump was actually in the Oval Office. 0.99

00:41:20.000 I remember canceling my subscription to Sports Illustrated when they put Caitlyn Jenner on the cover.

00:41:25.000 Because I said, this is not an athletically relevant person, has not been for 30 years, but now I'm going to get transgender propaganda in my sports magazine?

00:41:34.000 In fact, I remember sports being so politicized that I was threatened on national television and grabbed by the back of the neck on national television talking about sports on national television before President Trump was ever a candidate.

00:41:44.000 Talking about the Caitlyn Jenner issue, where I suggested that Caitlyn Jenner was in fact a biological man because

00:41:49.000 Caitlyn Jenner happens to be a biological man.

00:41:51.000 I'm old enough to remember when, during Ferguson, a bunch of football players were running out on the field in the hands-up-don't-shoot pose, which was completely fictitious.

00:41:58.000 Michael Brown had never said hands-up-don't-shoot. 0.97

00:42:01.000 The idea that politics and sports have been politicized by President Trump is just ignorant, okay? 0.89

00:42:06.000 Colin Kaepernick was kneeling on the field before Trump was even running for president, so none of this makes any sense.

00:42:12.000 But I guess we're now in the space where we can blame President Trump for anything and for everything and anything.

00:42:18.000 It doesn't, it doesn't wash, but I guess it's a convenient, it's a convenient scapegoat for all this stuff.

00:42:23.000 Okay, time for some stuff I like and then a thing that I hate.

00:42:28.000 So, let's thing I like it.

00:42:29.000 Okay, thing I like.

00:42:31.000 Over the weekend, I saw Ant-Man and the Wasp.

00:42:33.000 So, the original Ant-Man is a better movie.

00:42:35.000 The sequel is also fun.

00:42:38.000 It focuses a lot less on Paul Rudd, which is kind of unfortunate, because Paul Rudd is hysterically funny.

00:42:43.000 And they kind of make him out to be even more of a doofus in this one than he is in the first one.

00:42:47.000 This one features a lot of Evangeline Lilly.

00:42:50.000 It's a lot more of The Wasp than it is Ant-Man.

00:42:53.000 But that said, the film is still fun.

00:42:55.000 The highlight of the film, honestly, is Michael Peña, who is just an underrated actor in every sense.

00:43:00.000 He did the best thing in the original Ant-Man.

00:43:01.000 If you didn't see the original Ant-Man, it is actually one of my favorite Marvel movies, specifically because it is what it purports to be, which is a cotton candy

00:43:08.000 It's a candy apple of a movie.

00:43:12.000 There's nothing of real weight or substance to it, but it has one of the best sight gags ever, and it also has this little riff that Michael Peña does where he is explaining how he got to where he is.

00:43:23.000 It's really good.

00:43:25.000 In any case, Ant-Man and the Wasp is definitely worth seeing.

00:43:27.000 It's a lot of fun.

00:43:28.000 You'll enjoy it.

00:43:29.000 It's not memorable, but it is a kick.

00:43:31.000 So here's a little bit of the preview. 0.74

00:43:38.000 I do some dumb things, and the people I love the most, they pay the price.

00:43:44.000 Maybe you just need someone watching your back. 0.95

00:43:50.000 Like a partner.

00:43:55.000 Okay, so it's fun.

00:43:57.000 And if you're just looking for something to kind of entertain you over the weekend, this is the first time in a while there have been actually like three or four movies in the theater that I actually want to see.

00:44:05.000 So I haven't seen the Mission Impossible movie yet.

00:44:06.000 I've heard that it's fun, and I've heard that the action sequences are amazing.

00:44:10.000 And I will let you know after I see it.

00:44:11.000 Also, I've heard Incredibles 2 is really good.

00:44:13.000 Over the weekend, I showed my daughter Incredibles 1, because she's never actually been to the theater.

00:44:16.000 So I want to take her to see her first movie.

00:44:19.000 And I've heard that Incredibles 2 is a good start.

00:44:20.000 My sister saw it with her kid.

00:44:21.000 She said it was good.

00:44:22.000 So we'll go check that out, and then I will let you know.

00:44:24.000 OK, time for a thing that I hate.

00:44:26.000 And we'll mix it with the deconstruction of the culture, actually, since it's a Tuesday.

00:44:30.000 So Anne Hathaway is now sounding out about things that Anne Hathaway knows, like being black in America, which is 0.95

00:44:37.000 Not a thing she knows about, really.

00:44:39.000 Here's what happened.

00:44:40.000 She railed against white privilege and she questioned how decent white people really are after this 18-year-old woman named Naya Wilson died when she and her sister Latifah, 26, were attacked by a white male on a subway train in Oakland on Sunday night, July 22nd.

00:44:53.000 Naya died from her injuries after she was stabbed in the neck by a guy named John Lee Cowell, and Anne Hathaway put this out on Instagram.

00:44:59.000 She said, the murder of Naya Wilson, may she rest in the power and peace she was denied here, is unspeakable and must not be met with silence.

00:45:05.000 She is not a hashtag, she was a black woman,

00:45:06.000 Okay, I agree. 0.96

00:45:06.000 That's an awful, awful, terrible thing. 0.96

00:45:07.000 And I hope that this guy is given the death penalty. 1.00

00:45:10.000 Okay, I agree. 1.00

00:45:10.000 That's an awful, awful, terrible thing. 1.00

00:45:12.000 And I hope that this guy is given the death penalty. 1.00

00:45:14.000 Okay, I agree. 1.00

00:45:15.000 That's an awful, awful, terrible thing. 1.00

00:45:16.000 And I hope that this guy is given the death penalty. 1.00

00:45:17.000 Okay, I agree. 1.00

00:45:17.000 That's an awful, awful, terrible thing. 1.00

00:45:18.000 And I hope that this guy is given the death penalty. 1.00

00:45:20.000 Okay, I agree. 1.00

00:45:21.000 That's an awful, awful, terrible thing. 1.00

00:45:22.000 And I hope that this guy is given the death penalty. 1.00

00:45:23.000 Okay, I agree. 1.00

00:45:24.000 That's an awful, awful, terrible thing. 1.00

00:45:25.000 And I hope that this guy is given the death penalty. 1.00

00:45:27.000 Okay, I agree. 1.00

00:45:27.000 That's an awful, awful, terrible thing. 1.00

00:45:29.000 And I hope that this guy is given the death penalty. 1.00

00:45:30.000 Okay, I agree. 1.00

00:45:30.000 That's an awful, awful, terrible thing. 1.00

00:45:31.000 And I hope that this guy is given the death penalty. 1.00

00:45:33.000 Okay, I agree. 1.00

00:45:33.000 That's an 1.00

00:45:35.000 So, I'm confused what exactly this murder has to do with white privilege.

00:45:39.000 Really, I am.

00:45:40.000 I mean, the guy was arrested.

00:45:41.000 He's going to go to death row if he is convicted.

00:45:44.000 What exactly is the problem?

00:45:46.000 Anne Hathaway, can't name it. 0.71

00:45:47.000 Also, the idea that black people in America are fearing for their lives every single day is such an overgeneralization, I can't even speak to it.

00:45:53.000 I mean, maybe there are some black people in America who are fearful for their lives every single day, but we'd have to ask whether that fear is justified based on circumstance.

00:46:01.000 I'm sure that there are some black people for whom that is, I'm sure there are some white people for whom that is true as well, depending on where they are living, the levels of violence. 0.97

00:46:07.000 Okay, but

00:46:08.000 You know, there are a lot of black people in the United States who are living kind of middle class lives and who are not threatened with violence on a daily basis.

00:46:15.000 I don't think they're walking around thinking that they're in Fallujah.

00:46:18.000 This idea that simply because of skin color in the United States, you're walking around in daily fear for your life is such a misnomer.

00:46:24.000 And it really is her talking down for virtue signaling points.

00:46:28.000 Like Anne Hathaway knows that she is going to be met with all sorts of kudos from people on the left for simply saying this stuff.

00:46:33.000 Okay, so what is Anne Hathaway going to do about any of this stuff? 0.93

00:46:36.000 Really, if Anne Hathaway wants to make all these problems better, what is she gonna do other than sound off on Instagram about it? 0.99

00:46:40.000 She says, don't just hashtag.

00:46:41.000 Okay, well, you just went on Instagram and posted something.

00:46:43.000 Now, practically, what are you gonna do, Anne Hathaway, about any of this stuff?

00:46:46.000 At least LeBron James is trying to do something.

00:46:48.000 At least LeBron is actually creating schools to increase education levels in the black community.

00:46:52.000 At least LeBron James is trying to do something publicly minded about this sort of stuff.

00:46:57.000 These actors and actresses who go out and sound off on hashtags, and then they say, we need to do more than hashtags.

00:47:01.000 Okay, anytime you're ready.

00:47:03.000 We're waiting.

00:47:04.000 And again, that broad overgeneralization about black people in America fearing for their lives, it's hilarious to me that if I say that there's a free country where effort is rewarded, that that is considered racist.

00:47:15.000 And if Anne Hathaway says all black people are living in fear, then that is not considered a racial judgment.

00:47:21.000 So I say something completely nonracial and it's considered racial, and she says something completely racial and it is considered nonracial because the left approves of it. 0.92

00:47:28.000 Pretty insane.

00:47:29.000 Okay, other things that I hate today.

00:47:31.000 So, Twitter has now hired academics to monitor hate speech, which is very exciting.

00:47:35.000 That's just what we need, a bunch of leftist academics determining what exactly is hate speech.

00:47:39.000 According to the UK Telegraph, Twitter has hired academics from institutions including Oxford University to help it combat intolerant discourse and monitor the health

00:47:48.000 Of the social network.

00:47:49.000 The firm is working with social psychology professor Miles Houston and John Gallagher along with Dr. Mark Herding from the University of Amsterdam to study the spread of hate speech.

00:47:58.000 The move is part of Twitter's aim to create algorithms that better distinguish between hate speech and conversations that break the norms of politeness.

00:48:04.000 I don't know why any of this is necessary, frankly.

00:48:06.000 If you don't want to see hate speech on Twitter, don't subscribe to somebody's Twitter feed or just mute somebody.

00:48:11.000 The nice thing about Twitter is they have all of these features you can use to not listen to folks, but I guess that we are not allowed to point that out at any point. 0.87

00:48:18.000 We just have to assume that we're too stupid to actually gauge the level of conversations that we wish to participate in.

00:48:25.000 And so we have to have these overlords, these academic overlords, who tell us what's good and what's not. 0.95

00:48:29.000 All of this is highly foolish, and it undercuts, I think, the claims of Twitter to a sort of neutrality that they have not actually put into practice.

00:48:37.000 OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest. 0.73

00:48:40.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:48:41.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:48:46.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.

00:48:52.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:48:56.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:48:57.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

00:48:59.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:49:01.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

00:49:04.000 Copyright Ford Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 31, 2018

Hath Not A Giuliani Eyes? | Ep. 592

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