The Ben Shapiro Show - Is Honesty Dead? | Ep. 583

00:00:00.000 President Trump reverses himself on Putin, sort of.

00:00:03.000 Barack Obama re-emerges to remind us why President Trump won in the first place.

00:00:06.000 And environmentalists fret over whether to have babies or not.

00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:09.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:16.000 Another packed news day because the news cycle never stops.

00:00:19.000 Remember that it was like nine days ago?

00:00:20.000 Nine days ago when the President of the United States nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court?

00:00:25.000 Nine days ago because time is now moving backwards?

00:00:28.000 Because we have 73 news cycles every single day?

00:00:30.000 We'll get to the latest news cycle in just one second.

00:00:33.000 First, let's talk about your Second Amendment rights.

00:00:35.000 Are you in the market right now?

00:00:36.000 So which gun is at the top of your bucket list?

00:00:55.000 Is it a Kimber 1911 or a Glock 19, maybe a new hunting rifle?

00:00:58.000 Head over to defendyourfamilynow.com right now, and you will instantly lock in your five big chances to win.

00:01:03.000 That's all you have to do.

00:01:04.000 Look, $1,776, a lot of money, but you're running out of time, so don't miss your last opportunity to get in on the coolest gun giveaway of the season.

00:01:11.000 Remember, those five chances to win, they vanish July 20th at midnight, so don't get left behind.

00:01:16.000 It's defendyourfamilynow.com.

00:01:18.000 That's defendyourfamilynow.com.

00:01:20.000 The USCCA does all sorts of

00:01:21.000 Wonderful things for you.

00:01:22.000 They have a lot of great services, educational services, legal services, in case, God forbid, you actually have to fire your gun at somebody.

00:01:28.000 Go check them out right now over at DefendYourFamilyNow.com, and you can enter to win that $1,776 toward guns and ammo.

00:01:34.000 Go check it out.

00:01:34.000 DefendYourFamilyNow.com for the USCCA.

00:01:37.000 Okay, so, President Trump has now walked back his original statements with regard to Vladimir Putin.

00:01:44.000 So you remember that on Monday, the President of the United States appeared alongside Vladimir Putin, and this is what he said.

00:01:50.000 This is clip 11.

00:01:51.000 My people came to me.

00:01:53.000 Dan Coats came to me and some others.

00:01:56.000 They said they think it's Russia.

00:01:58.000 I have President Putin.

00:02:01.000 He just said it's not Russia.

00:02:03.000 I will say this.

00:02:04.000 I don't see any reason why it would be.

00:02:06.000 But I really do want to see the server.

00:02:12.000 I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful.

00:02:24.000 Okay, so Trump was not particularly unclear about his perspective on this.

00:02:30.000 He believes that the Russians didn't actually hack, or at least if they did hack, then he's not going to grant that credibility to the intelligence services.

00:02:37.000 He takes Putin and the intelligence services.

00:02:38.000 He trusts both of them.

00:02:39.000 He was not unclear about this.

00:02:41.000 He was very clear about this.

00:02:42.000 Well, yesterday, in what was a necessary move, he tried to walk this back.

00:02:46.000 But as is typical with the president, when he tries to walk something back, he then walks back the walk back.

00:02:51.000 He started off by saying that he does have full faith in the American intelligence agencies, right?

00:02:57.000 This is something he should be saying, because the reality is there is unanimity among the intelligence agencies that Russia was involved in attempting to hack the DCC, as well as the DNC, as well as the Hillary Clinton campaign.

00:03:07.000 So here's President Trump yesterday suggesting that he has full faith and support with America's intelligence agencies, and then you'll hear at the very end of his attempted walk back, he walks back to walk back.

00:03:18.000 Let me begin by saying that, once again, in full faith and support for America's intelligence agencies, I have a full faith in our intelligence agencies.

00:03:31.000 Whoops, they just turned off the light.

00:03:32.000 That must be the intelligence agencies.

00:03:36.000 There it goes.

00:03:37.000 Okay.

00:03:38.000 You guys okay?

00:03:40.000 That was strange.

00:03:42.000 But that's okay.

00:03:44.000 So I'll begin by stating that I have full faith and support for America's great intelligence agencies.

00:03:53.000 Always have.

00:03:54.000 And I have felt very strongly that while Russia's actions had no impact at all on the outcome of the election,

00:04:03.000 Let me be totally clear in saying that, and I've said this many times, I accept our intelligent community's conclusion that Russia's meddling in the 2016 election took place.

00:04:20.000 Could be other people also.

00:04:21.000 There's a lot of people out there.

00:04:25.000 There was no collusion at all.

00:04:28.000 And people have seen that, and they've seen that strongly.

00:04:34.000 I will say the president's pathological incapacity to just walk something back.

00:04:37.000 Like, it's the simplest thing.

00:04:38.000 All he has to say is, yeah, I screwed that one up.

00:04:40.000 What I really meant was that we obviously should trust our intelligence.

00:04:43.000 And I was trying to be polite to Putin, right?

00:04:45.000 It was a mistake, and I shouldn't have said that.

00:04:46.000 It's the easiest thing in the world.

00:04:48.000 But instead, the president says that he has full faith in our intelligence services.

00:04:51.000 He accepts their conclusion that it was the Russians.

00:04:53.000 But it could be other people also.

00:04:55.000 So we're back to the 400-pound man in his mother's basement who's hacking the DCCC and the DNC.

00:05:00.000 So, a lot of people jumped on this.

00:05:01.000 They say, obviously, Trump's apology, it's not really an apology, his sort of walk back here is not genuine.

00:05:06.000 Yeah, you think?

00:05:08.000 You think?

00:05:08.000 Yeah, right.

00:05:09.000 Of course, his walk back isn't genuine, but it's something that's necessary.

00:05:12.000 Now, the reason that the walk back is necessary, obviously, is because when you keep signaling to Russia that you are not going to take seriously their election meddling, then that gives them the impetus to meddle more.

00:05:21.000 It makes them think they can get away with it.

00:05:23.000 And it also means that they think maybe they can get aggressive on other fronts.

00:05:26.000 We'll talk about that in a little while.

00:05:27.000 Well, the president's explanation for why he was walking this back was even less convincing than that unconvincing walk back itself.

00:05:35.000 This part is just spectacular.

00:05:37.000 We played you the clip of what he actually had to say, and the direct quote was, as you recall, the direct quote was, I have President Putin, he said it's not Russia.

00:05:46.000 I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be.

00:05:49.000 And here is President Trump attempting to walk that back in the most awkward possible fashion.

00:05:54.000 A lot of people have come out strongly on that.

00:05:56.000 I thought that I made myself very clear by having just reviewed the transcript.

00:06:02.000 Now, I have to say, I came back and I said, what is going on?

00:06:05.000 What's the big deal?

00:06:07.000 So I got a transcript.

00:06:08.000 I reviewed it.

00:06:09.000 I actually went out and reviewed a clip of an answer that I gave.

00:06:15.000 And I realized that there is a need for some clarification.

00:06:21.000 It should have been obvious.

00:06:22.000 I thought it would be obvious, but I would like to clarify just in case it wasn't.

00:06:27.000 In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word would instead of wouldn't.

00:06:33.000 The sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why I wouldn't or why it wouldn't be Russia. 0.99

00:06:42.000 Just to repeat it, I said the word would instead of wouldn't, and the sentence should have been, and I thought it would be maybe a little bit unclear on the transcript or unclear on the actual video, the sentence should have been, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia.

00:07:02.000 Sort of a double negative.

00:07:04.000 So you can put that in and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.

00:07:10.000 I have on numerous occasions noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections.

00:07:18.000 Well, thanks for that clarification, Mr. President.

00:07:21.000 Okay?

00:07:22.000 My favorite part of that is where he goes on for like five minutes in the original Monday Presser saying that Russia did—he believes Vladimir Putin, and he explains in fulsome detail why he doesn't trust our intelligence services.

00:07:33.000 And then he says, well, I thought I was pretty clear about this, that I trust the intelligence services and I don't trust Vladimir Putin.

00:07:39.000 I thought I was pretty clear about that, guys.

00:07:41.000 I mean, I thought I made myself clear by having just reviewed the transcript.

00:07:44.000 You know, I got the transcript, I reviewed it, and then maybe there was a need for some clarification.

00:07:48.000 I meant the exact opposite of what I said the other day, but you guys should have gotten that.

00:07:51.000 I mean, come on, how could you not get that?

00:07:53.000 Like people going crazy over the thing I said as opposed to the thing that I didn't say?

00:07:57.000 How dare you?

00:07:58.000 How dare you, sir?

00:08:00.000 Pretty spectacular.

00:08:01.000 By the way, this is something I'm definitely going to try on my wife. 1.00

00:08:04.000 I will see how this goes. 0.94

00:08:06.000 The next time she asks me if I would want to have sex with another woman, I'll say, I absolutely would. 1.00

00:08:12.000 And then when she says, what? 0.98

00:08:14.000 I'll say, no, no, no, you misheard.

00:08:16.000 I said wouldn't.

00:08:16.000 And we'll see how that goes.

00:08:18.000 We'll see how well that goes.

00:08:19.000 Honey, I want you to take out the garbage. 0.99

00:08:21.000 Well, I would like to take out the garbage, but I can't.

00:08:24.000 Oh, sorry.

00:08:25.000 I meant I can.

00:08:26.000 What?

00:08:27.000 Okay.

00:08:29.000 Pardon me for being slightly confused, Mr. President, but I feel like that's more on you than on me at this point.

00:08:35.000 But listen, I'm glad that he's quasi-walking this back.

00:08:38.000 Now, here is the part that actually matters from what he said, and this is the part where he requires a fulsome commitment from the President.

00:08:43.000 All this stuff right now is just, the President said something dumb, then he tried to walk it back, then he half-walked back the walk back, and as we'll see, he

00:08:49.000 Almost completely walked back the walk back. 0.55

00:08:51.000 It's a mishmash because that's what President Trump does.

00:08:53.000 He'll say he did the exact same thing with Charlottesville. 0.99

00:08:55.000 He said something dumb about Charlottesville.

00:08:56.000 And then he had a walk back on Monday in which he said, I should never have said that. 0.95

00:09:00.000 That's not what I meant.

00:09:01.000 Here's what I meant.

00:09:02.000 And it clarified and everybody was like, oh, OK, I guess we're done.

00:09:04.000 And then the next day he was like, I didn't like how you reacted to that.

00:09:07.000 I'm going back to my original statement.

00:09:08.000 And he does this kind of thing over and over and over again, which is why people don't take these sorts of comments seriously.

00:09:14.000 To begin with, the part that we should take seriously is this last comment that he makes during this presser yesterday.

00:09:19.000 In which he says that he is going to aggressively attempt to stop Russian interference in future elections.

00:09:23.000 Now the question is, do you take that seriously?

00:09:25.000 Because that's the part that matters.

00:09:27.000 The policy is what matters.

00:09:28.000 Not what the president has to say about his own personal conspiratorial beliefs about DNC servers.

00:09:32.000 The part that matters is, you're the head of the United States Executive Branch.

00:09:36.000 Are you going to do what you can to stop Russian election meddling?

00:09:39.000 Are you going to do what you can to stop Russian foreign aggression?

00:09:41.000 And here's what the president had to say about that yesterday, and this part was actually quite good.

00:09:46.000 Unlike previous administrations, my administration has and will continue to move aggressively to repeal any efforts and repel.

00:09:55.000 We will stop it.

00:09:56.000 We will repel it.

00:09:58.000 Any efforts to interfere in our elections.

00:10:02.000 We're doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018.

00:10:09.000 And we have a lot of power.

00:10:11.000 As you know, President Obama was given information just prior to the election.

00:10:17.000 Last election, 2016, and they decided not to do anything about it.

00:10:22.000 The reason they decided that was pretty obvious to all.

00:10:27.000 They thought Hillary Clinton was going to win the election.

00:10:30.000 And they didn't think it was a big deal.

00:10:32.000 When I won the election, they thought it was a very big deal.

00:10:35.000 And all of a sudden they went into action, but it was a little bit late.

00:10:38.000 So he was given that in sharp contrast to the way it should be.

00:10:44.000 And President Obama, along with Brennan and Clapper and the whole group that you see on television now, probably getting paid a lot of money by your networks.

00:10:53.000 They knew about Russia's attempt to interfere in the election in September.

00:10:58.000 And they totally buried it.

00:10:59.000 So what President Trump has to say there is not completely wrong.

00:11:02.000 When he talks about how the Democrats basically didn't do enough to stop the Russian election interference, he's right about that. 0.81

00:11:07.000 And it's his job to stop Russian election interference from now on, since he's the President of the United States.

00:11:11.000 It is worth noting here.

00:11:12.000 That if the Obama administration had come out fulsomely and said Russia's attempting to interfere in our election by attempting to swing votes behind Trump, Trump and everyone in the media would have suggested that the Obama administration was trying to rig the election results by letting all that information slip.

00:11:25.000 So it is true that Obama should have done more.

00:11:27.000 There's no question Obama should have done more.

00:11:29.000 The question now is, will Trump do more?

00:11:31.000 And that really is a major question, as we'll talk about in just a second.

00:11:35.000 You know, Trump needs to be pretty clear about what he means to do, rather than this kind of wishy-washy, walking back the walkbacks.

00:11:42.000 I mean, he's basically doing the Michael Jackson moonwalk all over his own position, and it's very confusing.

00:11:47.000 It's very confusing from any objective point of view.

00:11:49.000 We'll talk a little bit more about that when we get to his interview on Tucker Carlson in just a second.

00:11:52.000 First, let's talk about the fact that you're going to die.

00:11:55.000 Sorry to break it to you. 0.93

00:11:55.000 You're going to plot. 0.93

00:11:56.000 And when you plot, it's a good idea if you have life insurance because if you don't, your family is going to be left without money and they're going to be paying for the cheapest possible casket and they're going to bury you in a pauper's grave.

00:12:05.000 This is why you need life insurance.

00:12:08.000 This is why everyone needs life insurance because you don't want to leave your family behind with no money.

00:12:12.000 Well, Policy Genius is the easy way to compare life insurance online.

00:12:15.000 You can compare quotes in just five minutes.

00:12:17.000 When it's that easy, putting it off becomes a lot harder.

00:12:19.000 You can compare quotes while sitting on the couch, watching TV, or while you're listening to this podcast.

00:12:23.000 Just go try it.

00:12:23.000 Policy Genius has helped over 4 million people shop for insurance.

00:12:26.000 They've placed over $20 billion in coverage.

00:12:28.000 They don't just make life insurance easy.

00:12:30.000 They also compare disability insurance, renter's insurance, and health insurance.

00:12:33.000 If you care about it, they can cover it.

00:12:34.000 So, if you need life insurance, but you've been putting it off because you were too lazy or procrastinating,

00:12:39.000 No excuses.

00:12:40.000 Go to PolicyGenius.

00:12:41.000 It's the easy way to compare top insurers, find the best value for you.

00:12:43.000 This applies to everyone.

00:12:45.000 Everyone should have a life insurance program.

00:12:46.000 There's no sales pressure, zero hassle.

00:12:48.000 It's free.

00:12:48.000 PolicyGenius.com.

00:12:50.000 When it's this easy to compare to life insurance, there's no reason to put it off.

00:12:53.000 Go do it right now.

00:12:54.000 You owe it to yourself.

00:12:55.000 You owe it to your family.

00:12:56.000 Again, you really don't have the excuse that it's too much time.

00:13:01.000 It isn't.

00:13:01.000 Go check out PolicyGenius.com.

00:13:03.000 Go get it done, and then you won't have to worry about it ever again.

00:13:06.000 Okay, so.

00:13:07.000 The President of the United States completed the walkback of his walkback on Twitter this morning when he decided that after the presser, it was necessary for him to clarify that he didn't mean what he said in the presser.

00:13:17.000 So here's what he tweeted out.

00:13:18.000 He tweeted out this morning.

00:13:19.000 This is 20.

00:13:20.000 He tweeted out,

00:13:38.000 And so there are people who are misinterpreting this tweet to suggest that he was saying people in the intelligence community loves his press conference.

00:13:43.000 No, that's not what he means.

00:13:44.000 What he means is that smart people loved his press conference in Helsinki.

00:13:47.000 And when he means smart people, what he means is people who like President Trump and agree with him on everything.

00:13:51.000 And then when he says that we got along well and that bothered many haters, no, I'd like for the president to get along well with Putin without actually compromising our position vis-a-vis Putin.

00:13:59.000 I don't really care whether he gets along with Putin, to be frank with you.

00:14:01.000 You know, let me reverse that.

00:14:02.000 I'll walk that back.

00:14:03.000 I don't care whether he gets along with Putin.

00:14:05.000 I don't think it's important for foreign leaders to get along with each other. 1.00

00:14:08.000 I think it's important that we not go to war with people, and I think that it's important that we stand up for our interests abroad.

00:14:13.000 Also, when President Trump says big results will come, he said the same thing about Kim Jong-un.

00:14:18.000 I think it's fair to say that Kim Jong-un, when he said that he would denuclearize, what he actually meant was wouldn't.

00:14:23.000 I think what he meant to say was wouldn't.

00:14:25.000 And maybe we should clarify that.

00:14:26.000 Maybe y'all got that wrong.

00:14:28.000 Well, no, I'm not interested in going to war with Russia.

00:14:30.000 I'm also not interested to kowtowing to a second-rate power that has the economy of Italy.

00:14:44.000 That's not something that I'm interested in doing at this point.

00:14:46.000 I don't think that most Republicans, most conservatives, most Americans are interested in doing that at this point.

00:14:52.000 Nobody cares that he gets along with Putin.

00:14:54.000 The only thing we care about is whether he's dumping our own intelligence services under the bus in order to kiss Putin's rear.

00:14:58.000 Right?

00:14:59.000 That's what people are concerned about.

00:15:00.000 And this false dichotomy that he's drawing here, it made me angry when Obama does it.

00:15:04.000 It makes me angry when Trump does it.

00:15:06.000 The alternative to not getting along with, the alternative to getting along with Putin or Iran is not going to war with Putin or Iran. 0.68

00:15:13.000 I don't know.

00:15:32.000 Give Putin a big bear hug.

00:15:52.000 On Fox News.

00:16:11.000 I do think that there is a tendency among a lot of folks to have Trump double down on his worst excesses.

00:16:16.000 And Tucker really pushed him along that path in this interview.

00:16:19.000 It is not good for the United States.

00:16:20.000 It is not good for President Trump.

00:16:21.000 If you want to see Trump be a successful president, you can't have him making these kind of overtures toward Russian aggression.

00:16:27.000 And that's basically what he did last night.

00:16:28.000 So, Tucker went on last night and he started off his show by saying that this was basically a hostage tape, that Trump's walk back was a hostage tape.

00:16:35.000 In the first place, he wishes that Trump had stuck with his original position, which is that the intelligence community is wrong and Vladimir Putin is right.

00:16:40.000 I don't know why Tucker would say this.

00:16:42.000 It really doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

00:16:44.000 Does he really believe that all 17 American intelligence agencies who all agree that Russia attempted to hack the DCCC, DNC, and Hillary Clinton campaign, all of them are lying?

00:16:53.000 All of them are conspiratorial.

00:16:54.000 All of them are wrong.

00:16:55.000 But Vladimir Putin, who literally murders dissidents in his own country and interferes with elections all over the world, that guy is not lying to us.

00:17:02.000 Here is Tucker saying that Trump was basically taken hostage by, I guess, the quote-unquote Republican establishment, another term that bothers me deeply.

00:17:10.000 If you want to say establishment, you have to define establishment.

00:17:12.000 Is Newt Gingrich the establishment?

00:17:13.000 Because Newt was ripping on Trump over this.

00:17:15.000 Was Laura Ingraham the establishment?

00:17:16.000 Because Laura Ingraham was not happy with Trump over this.

00:17:19.000 But here is Tucker basically ripping on the establishment and suggesting Trump should have gone along with Putin.

00:17:23.000 So that's the hostage tape.

00:17:25.000 The president buckled to criticism.

00:17:27.000 I don't know what they're saying, that's exactly what happened.

00:17:28.000 He buckled.

00:17:29.000 And that happens.

00:17:30.000 This is politics, after all.

00:17:32.000 Okay, so the idea that this is a hostage tape, it's true that Trump didn't want to walk it back, but I'm not sure why him walking back a bad idea is a bad idea.

00:17:41.000 It actually is quite a good idea.

00:17:42.000 And then Tucker went on to suggest that Trump bowed to the intelligence community, and he said the intelligence community is trying to destroy democracy.

00:17:47.000 Now, I have a lot of questions about the intel community.

00:17:50.000 I have a lot of questions about Peter Strzok.

00:17:51.000 I have a lot of questions about Lisa Page.

00:17:53.000 I have a lot of questions about James Comey.

00:17:54.000 Those questions have not been answered yet.

00:17:56.000 We don't have the full Inspector General report on the Russian collusion investigation.

00:18:01.000 But if the suggestion is that anything the intel community does is trying to destroy democracy, because some members of the intel community are bad, so in other words, you don't like the Russian collusion probe, and therefore the Russian interference probe is bad, this is a logical fallacy.

00:18:18.000 The intelligence community is fully capable of deriving the fact that the Russians were attempting to hack into the DCCC, the DNC, and the Hillary Clinton campaign without you having to accept the legitimacy of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

00:18:30.000 It's not like you either accept all or none.

00:18:32.000 You can say what they are doing, trying to track down all of the bad action by the Russians in the election cycle,

00:18:38.000 That stuff is fine.

00:18:39.000 It's when they started targeting President Trump in overt fashion, when they started stretching the law in order to get Trump.

00:18:44.000 That's the bad stuff.

00:18:45.000 But Tucker apparently wants to wrap the whole thing up in a ball and then suggest that Trump bowed to the intel community and the intel community is trying to destroy democracy, as opposed to whom?

00:18:52.000 Vladimir Putin, who hates democracy and has been in power since 2000?

00:18:56.000 He's been in power for nearly 20 years as a dictator in Russia?

00:18:59.000 Well, as the rage storm swirled, the president bowed to the inevitable, genuflecting before U.S.

00:19:04.000 intelligence agencies whose judgment must never be questioned, and recited the now-obligatory oath of loyalty to the spy bureaucrats now in charge of our country.

00:19:13.000 This is about democracy, whether or not voters rule their country.

00:19:18.000 It turns out the very people telling you they are saving our democracy are working overtime to destroy it and scolding you as they do.

00:19:25.000 Okay, that is such an overstatement.

00:19:28.000 It's not the very same people working overtime to save our democracy.

00:19:31.000 Those people are not Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

00:19:34.000 That is not those people.

00:19:34.000 It's not James Comey.

00:19:35.000 There are lots of people in the intel community working overtime to prevent Russian interference in our elections and many other bad things.

00:19:42.000 And to watch this sort of blanket condemnation of the intel community, it's this sort of feel that is going to allow Putin, I think, to feel like he can interfere in our elections without a lot of blowback.

00:19:51.000 Because if we think our enemies are the intel community, then I guess that he's not our enemy anymore.

00:19:56.000 After all, he's the one being targeted unfairly by our intel community, apparently.

00:20:01.000 Tucker's support of President Trump on his original Helsinki presser, I think is deeply counterproductive for President Trump.

00:20:07.000 And again, I respect Tucker.

00:20:08.000 I think Tucker's a smart guy.

00:20:09.000 But I think his perspective on this is skewed by the fact that Tucker tends toward isolationism on foreign policy.

00:20:14.000 We're going to discuss President Trump and isolationism and NATO in just a second because he got into it with Tucker on his show last night.

00:20:20.000 First, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Zeal.

00:20:24.000 You need a massage.

00:20:25.000 I need a massage.

00:20:25.000 We all need to relax because, let's face it, life is stressful.

00:20:28.000 Well, this is where Zeal comes in.

00:20:30.000 Zeal.com, or Zeal's iPhone or Android app, Z-E-E-L.com.

00:20:33.000 It allows you to select from top local, licensed, pre-screened massage therapists.

00:20:37.000 You no longer have to book a day at the spa.

00:20:39.000 You no longer have to wait in line, wait weeks for an appointment.

00:20:41.000 Instead, choose your favorite technique, gender preference, time and location for your massage, and people show up immediately, pretty much.

00:20:46.000 Zeal sends one of their 10,000 licensed massage therapists with a massage table and music.

00:20:51.000 Let's do it!

00:21:16.000 And there's nothing more luxurious than not having to spend a bunch of money to have somebody come to your house and lay out the whole table and the candles and the scented oil, the whole deal, and give you a relaxing massage.

00:21:25.000 It's pretty amazing.

00:21:26.000 There's a reason that Zeal's been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Vogue, Good Morning America.

00:21:29.000 It brings the spa to you.

00:21:31.000 Right now, our listeners can get 25 bucks off their first massage with promo code Ben at Zeal, Z-E-E-L dot com.

00:21:36.000 Promo code Ben right now.

00:21:37.000 Go to Zeal dot com or Zeal's iPhone or Android app.

00:21:40.000 Get a special offer when you try Zeal today.

00:21:42.000 Promo code Ben.

00:21:42.000 Get 25 bucks off your first in-home massage.

00:21:45.000 Oh, great way to feel wealthy without actually having to be wealthy.

00:21:48.000 Go check it out.

00:21:48.000 Okay, so, President Trump is on with Tucker Carlson last night, and it wasn't just Tucker mouthing, I think, what were basically platitudes about the intel community trying to destroy democracy, and how Trump was now being held hostage by the intel community.

00:22:02.000 Egged on by Tucker Carlson, Trump made some, I think, very ill-advised comments about NATO.

00:22:06.000 Now, there are a lot of people who, last week, were worried about Trump and NATO.

00:22:08.000 And I said, there's not really a reason to worry that much about Trump and NATO, because Trump's going to say a lot of stuff, right?

00:22:13.000 My theory about Trump has been pretty consistent here, which is Trump says a lot of stuff, most people ignore most of that stuff, and then policy sort of gets done in the background.

00:22:21.000 There's one area where this is not true, and that is if the President of the United States signals weakness to foreign adversaries, and those foreign adversaries take those signals seriously and then get aggressive.

00:22:30.000 We saw this happen with Crimea and Barack Obama.

00:22:33.000 We saw this happen with Georgia and George W. Bush.

00:22:35.000 We saw this happen with Saddam Hussein and George H.W. 0.79

00:22:38.000 Bush.

00:22:38.000 When an administration signals they're not going to do anything about aggression by a foreign adversary, foreign adversaries, foreign dictators, they start to get aggressive.

00:22:46.000 This is not unique to any administration.

00:22:48.000 It's true for every administration.

00:22:50.000 Trump has not been pushed yet.

00:22:51.000 Usually what people say is that every new president is pushed with some sort of foreign crisis in the first couple of years.

00:22:56.000 Trump has avoided that so far, but he is almost egging it on in some of these comments about NATO because, let's face this, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was put in place after World War II in order to check against Soviet aggression, that has been the key keeper of peace in the region for the last 70-odd years.

00:23:14.000 For the last 73 years, that's been the key keeper of peace in the region.

00:23:17.000 Remember, Europe was one of the most war-torn places on planet Earth for literally centuries.

00:23:22.000 And then came NATO.

00:23:24.000 In the century before NATO, there were two world wars.

00:23:26.000 There was a Franco-Prussian war.

00:23:28.000 There were several Balkan wars.

00:23:31.000 There were a bunch of different wars that were happening on the European continent in this time.

00:23:35.000 Since NATO, there have been zero major wars on the European continent, the only exception being Yugoslavia, where NATO actually took an active role in bombing. 0.97

00:23:42.000 So the idea that NATO has been some sort of net negative for the United States or for world peace is just foolish.

00:23:48.000 But here's what President Trump had to say about NATO.

00:23:51.000 And this is actually, this is troubling stuff because if you're Vladimir Putin, you're sitting back and you're hearing Trump say this, you might be saying to yourself, hey, maybe I ought to get aggressive.

00:23:58.000 Here's what Trump had to say to Tucker Carlson.

00:24:01.000 NATO was created chiefly to prevent the Russians from invading Western Europe.

00:24:05.000 I think you don't believe Western Europe's at risk of being invaded by Russia right now.

00:24:09.000 So what is the purpose of NATO right now?

00:24:12.000 Well, that was the purpose.

00:24:13.000 Pause there for one second.

00:24:14.000 First of all, the original creation of NATO to protect against Soviet interference in Western Europe

00:24:19.000 Now applies to Russian interference in Eastern Europe.

00:24:22.000 Eastern Europe still matters. 0.98

00:24:24.000 East Germany was a part of Soviet Russia.

00:24:26.000 Just because the Soviet Union collapsed doesn't mean that we should allow Poland and Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and Albania and all these countries on the border of Russia to suddenly become Soviet client states again, Putin client states again.

00:24:39.000 That's the actual answer here.

00:24:41.000 Here's the answer Trump is going to give.

00:24:43.000 Well, that was the purpose.

00:25:02.000 A long time.

00:25:04.000 Other countries were delinquent.

00:25:05.000 You know, in the real estate business, we use the word delinquent.

00:25:08.000 They didn't pay.

00:25:08.000 They didn't pay for past.

00:25:10.000 So I went there three, four days ago, and I said, folks, you got to pay.

00:25:14.000 Because we're not going to pay from 70 to 90, and I think 90 is really the right, you know, depending on the way you define it, 90%.

00:25:20.000 We're not going to pay 90% of the cost to defend Europe.

00:25:24.000 And on top of that, the European Union kills us on trade.

00:25:27.000 We lost $151 billion last year on trade.

00:25:30.000 Okay, so what he has to say there is not actually accurate.

00:25:32.000 The way that NATO works is that people have a pledge to spend a certain percentage of their GDP on defense.

00:25:36.000 He is right that people should increase their defense spending, but it's not like they owe us money, okay?

00:25:40.000 That's not how it works.

00:25:41.000 It's not that they pay us and then we actually go out and defend them.

00:25:43.000 The idea is they're supposed to keep a certain level of defense readiness.

00:25:47.000 The worst part of this interview is what Trump actually said right after that.

00:25:50.000 So, Tucker Carlson asks him why his son should go die for Montenegro.

00:25:54.000 Okay, and I don't think we actually have this clip.

00:25:56.000 So Tucker Carlson asks him, why should his son die for Montenegro?

00:26:00.000 And here's what Trump says, quote,

00:26:14.000 But that's the way it was set up.

00:26:15.000 Remember, I just got here a little over a year and a half ago and I took over the conversation three or four days ago and I said, you have to pay, you have to pay.

00:26:21.000 It was very unfair.

00:26:22.000 They weren't paying.

00:26:22.000 So not only were we paying for most of it, but they weren't even paying and we're protecting them.

00:26:26.000 So add that to your little equation on Montenegro.

00:26:29.000 He's basically saying there's no reason why we should defend Montenegro.

00:26:32.000 Right?

00:26:32.000 He's saying that Tucker Carlson is right.

00:26:34.000 Why should my son die for Montenegro? 0.82

00:26:35.000 Now, I heard Tucker Carlson say the same thing to Max Boutin in an interview about a year ago, and I thought that it was really an asinine point, this idea, why should my son die for Montenegro? 0.59

00:26:43.000 Well, why should your son die for Poland? 0.98

00:26:44.000 Why should your son die for Germany? 0.86

00:26:46.000 Why should your son die for England?

00:26:47.000 Why should your son die for New York?

00:26:49.000 Why should your son die for anything?

00:26:50.000 Right?

00:26:50.000 I mean, the whole point of having a military is that you are to defend your allies.

00:26:54.000 No one is calling on Tucker Carlson's son to die and nobody is calling on American soldiers to die.

00:26:58.000 Every single foreign policy decision has to be made on the basis of whether we think that it is positive for the United States to intervene or whether it is negative.

00:27:04.000 But one of the things that prevents us from having to intervene is a perception that we will if we have to.

00:27:09.000 This is what Reaganism was all about.

00:27:11.000 Reaganism was about the idea of mutually assured destruction and peace through strength.

00:27:15.000 You're not going to cross that trip wire, because if you do, we will mash you. 0.99

00:27:18.000 You're not going to invade Montenegro, because if you do, we'll kill you.

00:27:21.000 And it's this notion that prevents us from actually having to expend soldiers in Montenegro.

00:27:26.000 It is when the other side walks over the line that American soldiers die.

00:27:29.000 It's in Vietnam, when the United States does not have a credible threat of retaliation, and then we gradually escalate to lots of American soldiers die.

00:27:36.000 It's when that happens in Korea that American soldiers die.

00:27:38.000 It's when that happens in the Gulf War that American soldiers die.

00:27:41.000 It does not happen when there's a perception on the other side that if you cross us we will break you, that we will absolutely shatter you.

00:27:47.000 When that is the perception, then Vladimir Putin has no interest in crossing those borders.

00:27:52.000 Beyond that, Trump's suggestion that Montenegro is aggressive with Russia is Russian propaganda.

00:27:58.000 It's just nonsense.

00:27:59.000 Montenegro is a tiny little country that has no aggressive instincts vis-a-vis Russia.

00:28:02.000 In fact, it was the Russian government that in 2016 tried to assassinate, allegedly, the prime minister of Montenegro and replace him with a Russian proxy.

00:28:10.000 So it's Russia that's aggressive toward Montenegro.

00:28:12.000 I don't understand what Trump's deal with Montenegro is.

00:28:14.000 I mean, that's kind of a weird one.

00:28:15.000 And then Trump's suggestion, this is the worst thing of all, right?

00:28:18.000 Trump's suggestion that mutual defense under NATO is a problem.

00:28:21.000 The NATO Charter has been invoked one time.

00:28:24.000 One time.

00:28:24.000 Okay, NATO Charter has been invoked one time.

00:28:26.000 What was that one time it was invoked?

00:28:28.000 After we were attacked on September 11th.

00:28:30.000 Montenegro currently has troops in Afghanistan because Montenegro came to the common defense of the United States after we were attacked on September 11th.

00:28:37.000 So ripping on Montenegro and ripping on NATO is so foolhardy.

00:28:41.000 And not only is it foolhardy, it sends a signal to Putin that you might be able to walk in.

00:28:45.000 Now, maybe Putin doesn't take that seriously.

00:28:47.000 Maybe Putin doesn't move forward with that.

00:28:48.000 But if I'm an Eastern European ally, I'm going to have my doubts.

00:28:52.000 I'm going to have some serious questions.

00:28:54.000 Now, I said the same thing about Barack Obama.

00:28:55.000 When Barack Obama pulled missile defense out of Poland, I said, this is a signal to Vladimir Putin he can get aggressive.

00:29:01.000 And the Polish took it that way, too.

00:29:03.000 And it created a rift in American-Polish relations.

00:29:05.000 Well, the same thing could easily happen here with President Trump saying this sort of stuff.

00:29:09.000 And it gets worse in a certain way.

00:29:11.000 Trump was specifically asked about who is better, Angela Merkel or Vladimir Putin.

00:29:15.000 Now, I'm not a fan of Angela Merkel. 0.99

00:29:16.000 I think Angela Merkel has been a garbage chancellor of Germany. 0.99

00:29:19.000 She's opened Germany's borders. 1.00

00:29:21.000 She's helped subvert its welfare state. 1.00

00:29:23.000 She's done an awful lot of bad in Germany.

00:29:26.000 But if I have to choose between Angela Merkel and a murderous dictator like Vladimir Putin who literally went on national television a night ago and said that he kills people, but so what?

00:29:35.000 Kennedy was killed in the United States.

00:29:37.000 I'm going to choose Angela Merkel every time over Vladimir Putin.

00:29:40.000 And people who don't believe that, I think, don't know enough about Vladimir Putin.

00:29:43.000 But here was Trump basically demurring on the question.

00:29:45.000 I don't want to say who's better and who's not better, but I will say this.

00:29:48.000 She's been very badly hurt by immigration. 1.00

00:29:52.000 Very, very badly.

00:29:53.000 I don't want to say who's better and who's not better.

00:29:55.000 It's a pretty obvious question.

00:29:57.000 Okay, I know who's better.

00:29:58.000 You know who's better.

00:29:59.000 Everyone knows who's better.

00:30:00.000 This sort of signaling to Putin is really, it's bad stuff.

00:30:03.000 It's just bad stuff.

00:30:04.000 Okay, now that doesn't mean that Trump's activity vis-a-vis Russia has been weak in practice, but that's not the entire question.

00:30:10.000 The question is also how much Russia is going to take away from this that Trump is a pushover and somehow they can push him around.

00:30:16.000 I don't want Trump to be this.

00:30:17.000 I want Trump to be stronger.

00:30:18.000 I want Trump to succeed.

00:30:19.000 I want him to be a successful president.

00:30:21.000 I want every president to be successful in defending the United States and our allies.

00:30:25.000 And when President Trump signals weakness out of a sort of Pat Buchanan-esque isolationism, I think that it is a deep mistake.

00:30:31.000 I think it's a serious mistake for the president, and it's not helping him in any serious way.

00:30:35.000 Now, there's been a lot of talk

00:30:37.000 about that.

00:30:58.000 You can also ask us questions when we do our special Q&A sessions.

00:31:01.000 We had the conversation yesterday with Drew, and you can ask a question if you were a member.

00:31:05.000 Go over to dailywire.com to subscribe for $99 a year.

00:31:08.000 You get all of those things, plus this, the Leftist Tears hot or cold tumbler.

00:31:11.000 You will love it.

00:31:12.000 It is spectacular, and it is cheaper than the monthly subscription, so go check that out.

00:31:16.000 Also, subscribe over at YouTube.

00:31:17.000 Make sure that you hit the little bell.

00:31:18.000 There's a little bell there that notifies you when a new video comes out.

00:31:21.000 You have to do that because YouTube plays with the algorithm, and sometimes they don't update you.

00:31:24.000 In a world where families are torn apart between left and right perspectives, on the Ben Shapiro Sunday Special, I'll be talking to Ben about above-ground nuclear testing, trade, immigration, and how to make America viable into the future.

00:31:35.000 Join us, won't you?

00:31:57.000 Best promo yet, guys.

00:31:59.000 Really appreciate it.

00:31:59.000 Okay, so, go check it out.

00:32:01.000 We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:32:08.000 Okay, so a lot of people very bothered about the perception that President Trump was dishonest in his walk back, and then his walk back of the walk back, and then his walk, walk, walk back, right?

00:32:15.000 I mean, he walks off in his Barry Bonds.

00:32:17.000 That's, I understand.

00:32:19.000 I also found that off-putting.

00:32:21.000 However, let's be real about something.

00:32:23.000 The same people crying about Donald Trump's dishonesty, the same people crying about Donald Trump's weakness on Russia from the left, are people who cheered Barack Obama's weakness on Russia from the left, who laughed and scoffed when Mitt Romney said that Russia was a geopolitical threat, and then Obama said, well,

00:32:37.000 The 1990s called.

00:32:38.000 They want your foreign policy back.

00:32:41.000 Remember that?

00:32:42.000 Yeah, I remember that, too.

00:32:42.000 And then Barack Obama had the temerity to give a speech yesterday in South Africa in which he talked about politicians shamelessly lying.

00:32:49.000 You want to know why Trump is president?

00:32:50.000 He's president because this guy was the president before he was. 0.92

00:32:53.000 I mean, Donald Trump is a direct response to the the the imbecility of the Obama administration and Barack Obama's own egotistical mode of fibbing, lying and considering himself a great truth teller at the same time. 0.52

00:33:07.000 We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they're caught in a lie and they just double down and they lie some more. 0.96

00:33:16.000 Wow, I mean, the utter lack of shame.

00:33:17.000 Who would have such a lack of shame, Mr. President?

00:33:19.000 Who in the world would tell a lie and then just keep doubling down on the lie?

00:33:22.000 Who would do that?

00:33:23.000 I don't know.

00:33:24.000 If you like your doctor.

00:33:26.000 You can keep your doctor under the reform proposals that we put forward.

00:33:30.000 If you like your private health insurance plan, you can keep it.

00:33:33.000 If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.

00:33:36.000 If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor too.

00:33:39.000 We will keep this promise to the American people.

00:33:44.000 If you like your doctor,

00:33:46.000 You will be able to keep your doctor.

00:33:47.000 Who would lie shamelessly to the American public?

00:33:49.000 Shamelessly!

00:33:50.000 Who would do that?

00:33:51.000 Who would lie shamelessly to the American public over and over and then go out and lecture about the lack of self-awareness among America's leadership?

00:33:57.000 Who would do such a thing?

00:33:58.000 Like, who would say, like, 22 times that he couldn't unilaterally grant amnesty and then grant amnesty and then praise himself for doing so?

00:34:06.000 Who would do such a thing?

00:34:08.000 Can you imagine anyone who would do that?

00:34:10.000 I don't know.

00:34:10.000 Could you?

00:34:12.000 I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States.

00:34:16.000 We're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around Congress.

00:34:20.000 I do have an obligation to make sure that I'm following some of the rules.

00:34:24.000 I can't simply ignore laws that are out there.

00:34:27.000 I've got to work to make sure that they are changed.

00:34:30.000 You know, I'm not a king.

00:34:32.000 I am the head of the executive branch of government.

00:34:35.000 Shamelessness?

00:34:36.000 Dishonesty?

00:34:37.000 No, no.

00:34:38.000 Barack Obama was an emissary of truth and good and kindness and happiness.

00:34:43.000 That's who Barack Obama was. 0.98

00:34:45.000 You wonder why the right looked at this guy and they went, you know what, we'll put up any shameless person who is willing to smack the Democrats in the head.

00:34:50.000 You wonder why the right went in that direction?

00:34:52.000 It's because Barack Obama was this self-satisfied, smug guy who lied to us over and over and over about the Iran deal, and about healthcare, and about the IRS, and about immigration, over and over and over again.

00:35:04.000 Now, that wasn't the only thing that Barack Obama said that was dishonest yesterday.

00:35:08.000 So he said something that is pretty amazing, actually.

00:35:10.000 So, Barack Obama

00:35:13.000 says something that sounds like it's coming out of my mouth.

00:35:15.000 Right, really.

00:35:15.000 Like, what he's about to say right here is a message that I have been saying on college campuses for literally years.

00:35:20.000 And I've been called a white supremacist for saying it.

00:35:22.000 I've been called a racist for saying it.

00:35:23.000 Because I am a member of the white privileged class.

00:35:25.000 Barack Obama said it yesterday in South Africa and he's 100% right.

00:35:28.000 There's only one problem.

00:35:29.000 For eight long years, he promoted exactly the opposite message.

00:35:32.000 So here's Barack Obama talking about why identity politics is flawed.

00:35:36.000 We're able also to get inside the reality of people

00:35:39.000 We're different than us, so we can understand their point of view.

00:35:43.000 Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they'll change ours.

00:35:47.000 And you can't do it if you insist that those who aren't like you, because they're white or because they're male, that somehow there's no way they can understand what I'm feeling.

00:36:00.000 That somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.

00:36:05.000 Okay, that's exactly what I say.

00:36:06.000 In like every speech, virtually word for word, that's what I say and then people on the left say I'm a racist for saying that because I'm a white male saying that white males can have perspectives on things too and that the basis of a functional republic is the idea we can have conversations with one another.

00:36:18.000 And in just a second I'm going to show you how often President Obama lied on this particular issue.

00:36:22.000 You wonder why so many Republicans seem not to care all that much about President Trump's flip-flops on various issues and his vagaries and why they take him seriously but not literally?

00:36:31.000 You wonder why?

00:36:32.000 Well, it's because Barack Obama fibbed to everybody's face for eight years and the media went along with it and they smooched him repeatedly over it.

00:36:39.000 So, for example, here at Barack Obama, you just heard him rip on identity politics.

00:36:43.000 Well, here's Barack Obama talking about Hispanics, right?

00:36:46.000 He's talking to a Hispanic group, and he says that Hispanics as a group should actually punish other people.

00:36:52.000 If Latinos sit out the election, instead of saying, we're going to punish our enemies and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us, if they don't see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it's going to be harder.

00:37:06.000 But I thought tribal identity politics were bad.

00:37:08.000 He just said so, and he was the great emissary of non-tribal identity politics. 0.79

00:37:12.000 I mean, it's not like Barack Obama ever would have said that, for example, black people should vote as a bloc, and that they should only ally with people who represent quote-unquote black interests.

00:37:19.000 It's not like Barack Obama ever said anything like that, like he's about to do in clip 9.

00:37:23.000 It's never like he ever said anything in that range.

00:37:26.000 We have achieved historic turnout in 2008.

00:37:29.000 And 2012, especially in the African American community, I will consider it a personal insult, an insult to my legacy if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election. 1.00

00:37:42.000 You want to give me a good send-off?

00:37:44.000 Go vote!

00:37:46.000 Go vote, right? 0.81

00:37:46.000 I mean, black people. 0.81

00:37:47.000 Go vote and go vote as a black bloc, not as a group of individuals who actually agree with the agenda. 0.98

00:37:52.000 If black people don't vote, it's an insult to him because obviously Barack Obama is a black president. 0.68

00:37:56.000 You know, it's not like Barack Obama, after spending years using identity politics, would then turn around and rip identity politics for political gain.

00:38:04.000 It's not like he would ever do that.

00:38:05.000 The lack of honesty on the part of Obama defenders is what led to Donald Trump.

00:38:10.000 It led to the right saying, listen, you guys ripped down Mitt Romney in 2012.

00:38:13.000 He was a clean candidate.

00:38:15.000 You ripped him down.

00:38:15.000 You said that he was going to put y'all back in chains.

00:38:17.000 You suggested that he was a racist who wanted to make binders full of women because he was a sexist. 0.97

00:38:21.000 Not because he wanted to hire women, but because he hated women. 1.00

00:38:23.000 This is what you did. 0.99

00:38:24.000 And then if you're going to do that, we'll just run the guy who is going to slap you as hard as he can across the face. 0.75

00:38:29.000 And if he fibs some, then he fibs some.

00:38:31.000 But we're not going to play along with this.

00:38:33.000 Every time you see Obama, you realize why Trump was elected president in the first place.

00:38:36.000 You realize it.

00:38:37.000 Right?

00:38:37.000 The same guy who is now saying that we can't have a tribal identity politics in the United States spent his days talking about how the United States was not cured of racism and then suggesting that people who disagreed with him were emissaries of this racist America.

00:38:49.000 Racism.

00:38:50.000 We are not cured of.

00:38:51.000 It's not just a matter of overt discrimination.

00:38:54.000 We have to... societies don't...

00:38:58.000 Overnight, completely erase everything that happened two to three hundred years prior.

00:39:03.000 And then his suggestion constantly, politically, was that if you disagreed with him, it's because you were an emissary of the bitter clingers.

00:39:09.000 Now this sort of reversal, listen, I'm happy that Obama has reversed himself.

00:39:12.000 The real reason Obama has reversed himself on all of this is because he sees that the identity politics coalition that he built is not replicable for other Democratic candidates.

00:39:20.000 That's really what's going on here.

00:39:22.000 There are other Democrats like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker who want to use Obama's model.

00:39:26.000 They want to cobble together an intersectional coalition of blacks and Hispanics and LGBT people and women and Jews and Asians, and they want to cobble that together and form a majority.

00:39:36.000 And Obama's realizing that it doesn't work for anybody except Obama.

00:39:38.000 Obama was a grand and glorious politician at getting himself re-elected.

00:39:42.000 He was terrible at helping his agenda.

00:39:44.000 In the first two years, he pushed forward his agenda, which, by the way, did not include immigration reform, and then

00:39:49.000 He basically got nothing done for the subsequent six years, except for promoting himself at the expense of his own party.

00:39:54.000 And now he says, hey, guys, maybe we shouldn't have gone in that intersectional politics dynamic direction.

00:39:59.000 Well, it's a little late, Mr. President.

00:40:01.000 It's a little late.

00:40:02.000 Now, am I glad that he said this?

00:40:04.000 Am I glad that Barack Obama said this?

00:40:05.000 Yes.

00:40:05.000 I'm glad when anybody says something true.

00:40:07.000 I'm glad that Barack Obama said something true.

00:40:09.000 I'd like for the Democratic Party to pick up that banner.

00:40:11.000 But he let that genie out of the bottle.

00:40:12.000 I'm not sure that genie is going back in that bottle.

00:40:15.000 I think that the genie is out of the bottle.

00:40:16.000 And you can see this by the fact that Joe Lieberman

00:40:19.000 We're good to go.

00:40:43.000 And he talks about the fact that she's a radical and the fact that there's this intersectional politics that's taken over the Democratic Party. 0.95

00:40:50.000 I think Obama sees the same thing.

00:40:52.000 But it's too late.

00:40:52.000 It's too late to put that genie back in the bottle.

00:40:54.000 You want to know why so many on the right are willing to overlook flaws with President Trump?

00:40:57.000 It's because the left continues to do what the left has always done, which is embrace the most radical elements of its own base.

00:41:03.000 Time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.

00:41:06.000 So, things that I like today.

00:41:07.000 So I've been reading a great book on sort of the physics of time called The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, all about why it is that time moves forward, not backward.

00:41:16.000 Whether it is true that time actually flows forward or whether time is merely a sort of human perception, that we perceive things wrong.

00:41:23.000 And reading the book is really fascinating because

00:41:27.000 All of the physics of time suggests that the sort of theistic notion that God can exist outside of time and space, or that God at least exists outside the timeline, if time is actually just a human notion to a certain extent, and there is no actual hard-line timeline, then that lends credence to the idea that existing outside of time is not all that uncredible, actually.

00:41:47.000 It's really kind of fascinating.

00:41:49.000 But the basic theory is this.

00:41:50.000 When you think about it, you and I are not existing in the same moment.

00:41:53.000 We don't actually exist in the same moment.

00:41:54.000 There's my timeline and there's your timeline.

00:41:56.000 By the time you hear my voice, my voice has already stopped resonating in my vocal cords.

00:42:01.000 You are living, even the people in this room are living a slight fraction of a millisecond behind me, because even if their perception of me is actually slightly behind what I'm doing right now, is obviously true in the case if we had a person on Mars, there'd be a 15 minute delay between any communications.

00:42:16.000 You actually see this with regard to clocks.

00:42:17.000 If you fly in a very, very fast airplane around the Earth, and then you measure your clock against a person who stayed on the ground, your clock will actually be slower if you were in the airplane.

00:42:26.000 Time moves slower when you move quickly.

00:42:28.000 This is Einstein's special theory of relativity.

00:42:31.000 Time is relative.

00:42:34.000 The reason that it's called theory of relativity is because time is relative.

00:42:36.000 There is no absolute correct time.

00:42:38.000 There's a time for each individual.

00:42:40.000 The same thing is true of space, which can warp time because space and time are really part of a seamless fabric.

00:42:45.000 The book is really well written and I think simple enough for dummies like me to understand.

00:42:50.000 Go check it out.

00:42:50.000 Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time.

00:42:52.000 He's also the author of a good book called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

00:42:55.000 It's fascinating stuff.

00:42:57.000 I really enjoy that kind of stuff.

00:42:58.000 Okay, other things that I like.

00:43:00.000 You know what?

00:43:00.000 I've run out of things I like.

00:43:01.000 Let's do some things I hate.

00:43:07.000 Alrighty, so, things that I hate.

00:43:09.000 James Comey has now emerged to explain that everyone should vote Democrat.

00:43:13.000 So, the guy who probably lost Hillary Clinton in the election, hilariously enough, now says everyone should vote Democrat to undo his big boo-boo, which was completely botching both the Hillary Clinton investigation and the Russia investigation.

00:43:24.000 Here, Comey tweeted out, This Republican Congress has proven incapable of fulfilling the founder's design that ambition must counteract ambition.

00:43:30.000 All who believe in this country's values must vote for Democrats this fall.

00:43:33.000 Policy differences don't matter right now.

00:43:35.000 History has its eyes on us.

00:43:37.000 The self-aggrandizing nature of this douche is just insane.

00:43:40.000 History has its eyes... He's always tweeting stuff like this. 0.75

00:43:42.000 History has its eyes on us.

00:43:44.000 Well, history had its eyes on you when you decided not only to botch the original Hillary investigation, but then re-botch it right before the election, and then to stay around for Donald Trump's administration rather than quitting out of pique, supposedly. 0.99

00:43:56.000 And then you decided not to tell the truth about the investigation publicly, and then Donald Trump fired your ass. 0.99

00:44:01.000 And now you're saying history has its eyes on us? 1.00

00:44:04.000 Worst FBI director in modern history. 0.86

00:44:05.000 I mean, really, just an awful, awful FBI director.

00:44:08.000 And James Comey suggesting that the Republicans must be thrown out of Congress so that Democrats can come in and check Trump.

00:44:13.000 I'm wondering how Trump hasn't actually been checked.

00:44:16.000 Really, like, in terms of policy, where has Trump been unchecked?

00:44:18.000 I would say one area, and that really is tariffs.

00:44:20.000 But otherwise, has the Mueller investigation been shut down?

00:44:23.000 No.

00:44:24.000 Is that investigation continuing?

00:44:25.000 Sure.

00:44:26.000 Does Trump say what he wants?

00:44:27.000 Yeah, but guess what?

00:44:28.000 So did Obama.

00:44:29.000 The idea that Democrats are going to check Trump in any serious way other than passing a bunch of bad legislation I think is foolhardy.

00:44:35.000 You think you can trust Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer?

00:44:37.000 Listen, I understand the tendency for Americans to like split government because they like the gridlock.

00:44:41.000 I get it. 1.00

00:44:42.000 But James Comey suggesting that ambition must counteract ambition and Republicans aren't doing it so now we have to elect Democrats is just, it's so silly that even Brian Fallon, former Hillary Clinton campaigner, he came out and he said basically to Comey, we don't want your help, you're an idiot. 1.00

00:44:56.000 So, there's that. 0.99

00:44:58.000 Okay, meanwhile, I have to tell you about this piece over at the New York Times by a guy named Roy Scranton.

00:45:03.000 So Roy Scranton is the author of a book called We're Doomed, Now What?

00:45:06.000 Essays on War and Climate Change.

00:45:08.000 Real picker-upper.

00:45:09.000 And he has a piece over at the New York Times called Raising My Child in a Doomed World, which is, I gotta say, I have two kids.

00:45:17.000 That's not something you want to convey to your kids.

00:45:19.000 So here's what he says in his piece.

00:45:20.000 He says,

00:45:21.000 I cried two times when my daughter was born.

00:45:23.000 First, for joy, when after 27 hours of labor, the little feral being we'd made came yelling into the world.

00:45:28.000 And the second, for sorrow, holding the Earth's newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-thrus and drainage ditches and asphalt in the waste fields that had once been oak groves.

00:45:40.000 A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed.

00:45:45.000 My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way

00:45:52.000 Okay, what I like about this particular paragraph is it doesn't say, I looked around the hospital room and I saw the IV that was connected to the person birthing my child, and I looked around and I saw the doctors and the nurses who had modern medical equipment, and I looked around and I saw the antiseptic room in which we were sitting that did not have germs that could infect this person or my baby so that my baby wouldn't die of a disease before the baby turned eight days old.

00:46:13.000 He doesn't say that.

00:46:14.000 Instead, he looks out the window and he sees some cement and he's like, oh my god!

00:46:17.000 I wish you were all oaks.

00:46:18.000 But guess what?

00:46:19.000 If you were living in the middle of the forest right now, the chances that the woman who birthed your child and the child would die would be a lot higher than you sitting in a beautiful antiseptic hospital connected to an electrical grid created by all of the environmental catastrophe that you think happened.

00:46:31.000 And were you writing this on a laptop?

00:46:33.000 I assume the answer is yes.

00:46:35.000 So, the whole thing is just inane, but he continues, like, this idea that we're living in this dystopian future, where it's Logan's run, the environment has been so overrun, it's soil and grain that we're going to have to eat people?

00:46:45.000 We're going to put down Edward G. Robinson and turn them into potato chips?

00:46:48.000 Like, that's where we are now? 1.00

00:46:49.000 It's just so stupid. 1.00

00:46:51.000 It's so stupid, it's beyond description. 1.00

00:46:54.000 I understand you're worried about global warming. 1.00

00:46:56.000 Okay, well then let's discuss solutions to the possibility of global warming.

00:46:59.000 Okay, and those actual solutions should not be just pie in the sky, what if we all live like it's 1850 solutions?

00:47:05.000 Maybe they're market-oriented.

00:47:06.000 Maybe we're talking about, yes, cap and trade, even though I disagree with cap and trade.

00:47:10.000 Maybe we're opposing solutions.

00:47:12.000 But this, how do I bring up a child in a world as horrible as this?

00:47:15.000 Understand, if you were born at any point in human history, any point in human history prior to about 1950, and you visited now,

00:47:24.000 You would think you literally died and went to heaven.

00:47:26.000 You would literally think that.

00:47:27.000 That baby that just came out can expect to live to 80 years of age.

00:47:31.000 80!

00:47:32.000 Okay, the life expectancy a century and a half ago was like 40.

00:47:35.000 80 years of age you can expect to live to. 1.00

00:47:38.000 That's not because of the oak trees, you idiot. 1.00

00:47:40.000 Okay, the oak trees have always been there. 1.00

00:47:43.000 Along with poison oak.

00:47:45.000 Which we now have creams for, which didn't exist before.

00:47:48.000 This doofus Roy Scranton continues, anyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim.

00:47:54.000 It is not unreasonable to say the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted.

00:47:58.000 That's a little unreasonable.

00:48:00.000 I mean, we did wipe out one third of the species with the Black Plague, and then we also had the risk of nuclear war, as well as two world wars that killed literally tens of millions of people, also the scourge of communism that wiped a hundred million people off the planet.

00:48:11.000 Yeah, it's a little overstated to say that if the temperature changes by 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, that that's the worst challenge we've ever faced, I think.

00:48:18.000 Because anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume we're almost certainly going to botch it.

00:48:22.000 To stop emitting waste carbon completely within the next 5 or 10 years, we would need to radically reorient all human economic and social production, a task that's scarcely imaginable, much less feasible.

00:48:31.000 It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, enormous state investment in carbon capture and sequestration, and global coordination on a scale never before seen.

00:48:40.000 Right, because we're not actually going to stop carbon emissions completely, because number one, we still have questions about the sensitivity of the climate to carbon.

00:48:48.000 I do believe that carbon emissions affect climate change, but there are still questions as to how much that is, and what are the outliers?

00:48:54.000 What's the possibility that it's big?

00:48:56.000 What's the possibility that it's small?

00:48:58.000 And also, the climate's been changing routinely over the past several billion years on this planet, and so there's quite the possibility that people just move.

00:49:05.000 There are water levels that rise and there are water levels that fall.

00:49:07.000 This is not to make light of the impacts of climate change.

00:49:10.000 It is to say we should have a reasonable expectation of what exactly is going to happen, as opposed to this day after tomorrow, there's going to be a giant tsunami that washes over the Statue of Liberty and freezes it with Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal underground.

00:49:21.000 And then he continues, barring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns.

00:49:28.000 Unpredictable biological adaptation, so you're going to turn into a fish.

00:49:30.000 It's going to be weird.

00:49:31.000 And a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war.

00:49:38.000 War is literally at an all-time low in human existence right now.

00:49:42.000 And if you think that that's going to increase radically because the temperature changes three degrees Fahrenheit over the next 20 years or a degree and a half or two degrees, I would be surprised.

00:49:50.000 This is just like the doom and gloom predictions that Paul Ehrlich was making in the 1970s with the population bomb where billions were going to die of starvation.

00:49:57.000 And then he, this is the best part, he says, some people might say the mistake was having a child in the first place.

00:50:02.000 As Maggie Astor reported, more and more people are deciding not to have children because of climate change.

00:50:06.000 This concern, conscious or unconscious, is no doubt contributing to the United States' record low birth rate.

00:50:10.000 No, it isn't.

00:50:12.000 No, it isn't. 1.00

00:50:12.000 The number of people who are stupid enough not to have a kid because they're afraid you're going to have to run the A.C. 1.00

00:50:16.000 a little more often in the United States is like you. 1.00

00:50:20.000 Like you and a couple of your friends.

00:50:22.000 It's the same people who said, how can I bring my child into a polluted world in 1970?

00:50:26.000 And then the world actually got less polluted.

00:50:27.000 So there is that.

00:50:30.000 The reason the U.S.

00:50:30.000 birth rate has gone down is because of the availability of contraception, the fact that it costs a lot of money to raise a child, and the decline of marriage.

00:50:36.000 Those are the real reasons that the number of children being born has dropped dramatically.

00:50:40.000 It's happened in every industrialized society, including the United States.

00:50:43.000 It is not because of climate change.

00:50:46.000 He says, Well, I don't know why you'd be that interested in the persistence of human culture through time, generally, considering that you really, really like those oak trees.

00:51:06.000 Why is he not a deep green?

00:51:08.000 There's a whole group of people called deep greens who think that if human beings ceased to exist, the world would be better off because then the squirrels could play and live with the unicorns freely in the forests of Albania. 0.93

00:51:19.000 This whole thing is so self-involved and so ridiculous. 0.73

00:51:23.000 Every day brings new pangs of grief. 0.83

00:51:26.000 Seeing the world afresh through my daughter's eyes fills me with delight, but every new discovery is haunted by death.

00:51:30.000 Boy, take a Prozac, dude.

00:51:32.000 Reading to her from Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear, a book I've read to my daughter, I can't help marveling at the disconnect between the animal life pictured in that book and the mass extinction happening right now across the planet.

00:51:41.000 By the way, the polar bear population is not in danger of mass extinction.

00:51:44.000 I believe it's increased, actually, over the last 10 years, if I'm not mistaken.

00:51:47.000 When I sing along with Elizabeth Mitchell's version of Froggy Went to Courtin', I can't help feeling like I'm betraying my daughter by filling her brain with fantastic images of a magical non-human world when the actual non-human world has been exploited and despoiled

00:51:59.000 How can I read her Winnie the Pooh or the Wind in the Willows when I know the pastoral harmony they evoke is lost to us forever and has been for decades?

00:52:04.000 There are more trees in the United States now than there were 50 years ago.

00:52:09.000 And by the way, Winnie the Pooh and Wind in the Willows were written by people who had just experienced World War I, which was a hell of a lot worse than any of the environmental degradation that you're talking about.

00:52:19.000 Literally, Winnie the Pooh was written by A. A. Milne, who had just returned from World War I, where he had watched his friends get gassed.

00:52:25.000 Okay, that was it.

00:52:25.000 And watch the entire continent of Europe basically despoiled.

00:52:29.000 Watch France turn into a giant mud pit of flaming hell.

00:52:32.000 And you're talking about how rough it is because you look out your parking lot of your hospital and you see a light pole?

00:52:39.000 My goodness.

00:52:40.000 This essay is extraordinarily long.

00:52:42.000 He finishes up, I can't protect my daughter from the future.

00:52:44.000 I can't even promise her a better life.

00:52:45.000 All I can do is teach her.

00:52:46.000 Teach her how to care, how to be kind, how to live within the limits of nature's grace.

00:52:49.000 I can teach her to be tough but resilient, adaptable and prudent because she's going to have to struggle for what she needs.

00:52:53.000 But I also need her to teach to fight for what's right because none of us is in this alone.

00:52:57.000 I need to teach her that all things die, even her and me and her mother and the world we know, but that coming to terms with this difficult truth is the beginning of wisdom.

00:53:04.000 So yeah, tell your three-year-old that you're gonna die.

00:53:07.000 Good luck with that conversation.

00:53:08.000 And that you're gonna live in a dystopian hellscape where Viggo Mortensen roams around with a cart, right, and then ends up dying at the end of the movie.

00:53:15.000 Spoiler alert.

00:53:16.000 So, yeah, I can't imagine that this kid's gonna have any problems in life.

00:53:20.000 I can't imagine with parents like that this kid's gonna have any problems in life.

00:53:23.000 Okay, time for a quick psalm.

00:53:24.000 So, on the uplifting note, it's a Wednesday, so we do a little bit of psalmage.

00:53:28.000 So we are up to Psalm 3.

00:53:32.000 This one says, Basically, his son tried to depose him, King David, and he got in a big war with his son, and his son was basically chasing him around with half the generals.

00:53:41.000 Oh Lord, how many have my adversaries become?

00:53:43.000 Great men rise up against me.

00:53:45.000 Great men say concerning my soul, he has no salvation in God's eternity.

00:53:48.000 But you, oh Lord, are a shield above me, my glory, and he who raises up my head.

00:53:51.000 With my voice I call to the Lord and he answered me from his holy mount to eternity.

00:53:55.000 I lay down and slept, I awoke, for the Lord will support me.

00:53:58.000 That last injunction that is incumbent on the Lord to save is such a hopeful injunction, right?

00:54:02.000 That it's God's job to save us, that it's God's job to reach out and take care of us and take care of our souls.

00:54:05.000 It's such a hopeful note.

00:54:20.000 I think so.

00:54:40.000 When we realize that the Lord supports us, when we realize that God supports us, that you don't get a civilization this great without something designing it, then we awake and we realize just how much we have been blessed and why it is incumbent upon His people to bless Him forever.

00:54:53.000 Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest.

00:54:55.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:54:56.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:55:00.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.

00:55:06.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:55:11.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:55:12.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Caramina.

00:55:14.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:55:16.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

00:55:18.000 Copyright Ford Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 18, 2018

Is Honesty Dead? | Ep. 583

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript