In this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, Ben talks about massive protests in Iran, President Trump is doing the right thing, and CNN turns to pot on New Year's Eve. He also talks about Logan Paul walking into a suicide forest. Links From This Episode: All Previous Podcast Episodes Free Training From The Daily Caller Leave Us a Review On Apple Podcasts Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review, and subscribe to our new weekly newsletter! It helps spread the word about our show and gives you a chance to become one of the most influential people in the Bitcoin community. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $5 and contribute $5 to OWLS Lacrosse you get 10% off your first month with discount code "UPOLD" at checkout. Enjoy & spread the Bitcoin and other precious metals wherever you get your Gold, Silver, Copper, and Metals! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and Subscribe! We'll be looking out for your Subscriber Submitted SubscRIPT! Want to become a Friend of the Show? Subscribe to our newest show, Gold and Silver Talk Podcast? Get exclusive, expanded weekly episodes every Monday morning with a new episode every Tuesday, Wednesday evening, Thursday evening, Friday night, and Saturday night, 7 PM Eastern Standard Time, 6 PM Pacific Standard Time! Subscribe on the 27th of January, 7th of February, 9/19th, 7/7th of March, 9th of April, 8th of 7/30th, 8/6th of September, 9/9/8th of 9/6, Come join us in the rest of the week, 7/9th of 6/9, we'll have a new month, and so on, 6/6/9 , and 7/6 I'll have access to all the best of all things Gold and 6/7, , 6/8 & 7th, . 5/7/7 8/7 day, I hope you'll like it? Thank you for listening to Gold & 6/ 7/8, I'll hear from you can vlogged in real-time Gold and other things like that? & so much more!
00:00:00.000So, massive protests have now broken out in Iran, President Trump is doing the right thing, Democrats are not doing the right thing, and CNN turns to pot on New Year's Eve.
00:00:25.000Yes, it had its ups and downs, like The Last Jedi, but was it okay in the end?
00:00:30.000Yeah, it was okay in the end, sort of like The Last Jedi and sort of not.
00:00:33.000So, we will get to all of the late breaking news that happened over the break, most of it coming from abroad.
00:00:39.000We'll get to all of the media's insane coverage of the situation in Iran.
00:00:43.000We'll also get to some guy named Logan Paul, who I hadn't heard of until the last five minutes, and him walking into the Japanese suicide forest.
00:00:50.000There's lots to talk about, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
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00:01:43.000So, over the last week and a half, while we have been gone, massive protests have broken out in Iran.
00:02:10.000They've resulted in the death of apparently 15 people.
00:02:12.000The Iranian Revolutionary Guard is shooting people in the streets.
00:02:16.000They are now arresting hundreds of dissidents.
00:02:18.000The protests apparently started originally when people who did not like Hassan Rouhani, who is the radical leader of the political arm of the Ayatollahs in Iran, they didn't like Rouhani because the economy has been bad and they started protesting him.
00:02:33.000Just like all the other protests in the Muslim world that took place during the Arab Spring,
00:02:37.000The original purpose of the protest very often has nothing to do with where the protest goes, right?
00:02:41.000The original protest against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt ended up with the Muslim Brotherhood taking power.
00:02:46.000In this particular case, it looks like there were some radical fundamentalists who started some of the protests, and then the moderates turned out in force.
00:02:52.000And now you have thousands of people marching through the streets of Iran.
00:02:54.000It's so bad over there that the Iranian government has shut down Twitter, they've shut down Facebook, they've shut down social media.
00:03:00.000I don't know whether these companies, by the way, are engaging in that process, whether they're allowing Iran to do that or not.
00:03:41.000President Obama really did nothing about it.
00:03:44.000In fact, we have a clip of President Obama in 2009
00:03:47.000While he's protesting how Iran was treating dissidents, he also said, we respect Iran's sovereignty.
00:03:51.000Basically, they can do what they want.
00:03:52.000We're not going to do anything about it.
00:03:54.000I've made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran's affairs.
00:04:05.000Okay, that remarkable opening came to nothing because President Obama did nothing to foster it.
00:04:17.000In fact, at the time when President Obama was basically kowtowing to the Iranians, he was doing so because he was trying to force forward
00:04:25.000That Iranian nuclear deal that was just a disaster area for all involved, maximized Iran's power, shipped pallets of cash to Iran, made Iran a regional power, allowed them essentially to take over Iraq, allowed them to prop up Bashar Assad in Syria, allowed them to extend their influence into Lebanon and Afghanistan and Yemen.
00:04:41.000A lot of that had to do with President Obama deciding that he was going to turn the radical government of Iran into some sort of beacon of power in the region.
00:05:08.000As late as five months ago, there were Christians, newly converted Christians in Iran who were sentenced to 10 years in prison, maybe about 11 of them, all of them sentenced to years and years in prison for converting to Christianity.
00:05:19.000There is no major opening in Iranian society.
00:07:00.000The left likes to proclaim that President Obama was a world leader.
00:07:03.000And we're going to get to the Obama administration response to all of this in a second.
00:07:05.000They like to claim that Obama was a world leader and that Trump has abdicated world leadership.
00:07:09.000Susan Rice, the awful national security advisor for Obama, the lady who used to go on TV and lie routinely about Benghazi, she wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which she accused Trump of abdicating moral leadership in the world.
00:07:21.000But that's because the left and the right have two very different pictures of what moral leadership constitutes.
00:07:27.000The Obama administration is the kind of administration where when Israel had a guy named Qasem Soleimani, who was the commander of the Quds Force, which is a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a terrorist group, Israel had that guy in their crosshairs.
00:08:06.000Why is it that people on the left believe that Obama was a great world leader and people on the right believe that Trump is actually exhibiting leadership here?
00:08:13.000First of all, I'd like to point out that what Trump is doing here is very different than what Trump did on the campaign trail.
00:08:19.000On the campaign trail, Trump was a quasi-isolationist.
00:08:21.000America First seemed like a slogan that was more from Pat Buchanan than it was from Ronald Reagan.
00:08:26.000It seemed more like a Charles Lindbergh slogan than a George W. Bush slogan.
00:08:29.000In practice, it turns out that President Trump has acted a lot more like Ronald Reagan than he has like...
00:08:35.000Woodrow Wilson, or rather, then he has like a Pat Buchanan or Charles Lindbergh figure.
00:08:41.000That has been, I think, a very positive move.
00:08:45.000But the big difference between Obama and Trump on this stuff is how they view universal values like freedom and liberty.
00:08:53.000So, for Obama, the way that he defined liberty and freedom is he looked to the Europeans.
00:09:09.000And if the entire European body says that freedom in Iran is allowing the regime to continue to maintain control, then we will allow them to do so, because that's freedom.
00:09:26.000Trump's version of leadership is saying, listen, I think that there's a value called freedom.
00:09:30.000I think there's a value called liberty.
00:09:31.000And I think that America is a promulgator of those forces in the world.
00:09:34.000I think that America makes the world a better place.
00:09:37.000And I think that so long as we can pursue policies that make America stronger,
00:09:41.000that benefit America first, but America should be benefited because it is good, and because it is great, and because it is true to those universal values that are not decided by majority vote in the halls of power in Europe, then we should stand by the Iranian people.
00:09:57.000And it's much more akin to George Washington than anything that Obama said.
00:10:00.000If you look at what George Washington said about foreign policy, he said that we shouldn't get caught up in entangling alliances.
00:10:06.000What he meant by that was he said, the big danger to the United States, the big danger to the United States, because we will be a world power, this is what he said in his farewell address, the big danger to us will be entangling alliances.
00:10:16.000Did he mean that we can't have alliances at all?
00:10:18.000No, what he meant was that America has to follow her own star.
00:10:21.000That American values are not necessarily going to be the values of Europe.
00:10:24.000And we can't sign permanent agreements with nations on the basis of values that can change over time.
00:10:29.000And we can't see ourselves seduced away from universal values that are worthwhile.
00:10:35.000We can't be seduced away from those values simply because the Europeans would like us to be.
00:10:39.000I think that is what Trump is saying here.
00:10:41.000And I think Trump is doing the right thing here.
00:10:44.000Now, in a second, we're going to discuss exactly what it is that the left is responding to, because the left's response to Trump has been truly astonishing, right?
00:10:51.000These are all the people who say that Trump was not going to react well to chaos in the world, that Trump was going to be a danger to the world, that Obama was some sort of great halcyon of freedom and liberty and world leadership.
00:11:03.000But the response from the Obama administration figures, from the media too, has just been astonishingly garbage.
00:11:29.000Samantha Power, who wrote a book on genocide and then presided over part of the administration that actively sought to allow Bashar Assad to participate in genocide, Samantha Power tweeted out, And so she's slapping Trump.
00:11:42.000So we're in the middle of a fight with the Iranian government that is repressing its own people, and Samantha Power takes time out to bash Trump because Trump has a travel ban against people traveling from Iran.
00:11:54.000Now, I think what Samantha Power misses here are a couple things.
00:11:57.000One, Samantha Power has no leg to stand on whatsoever, as in no leg to stand on whatsoever, when it comes to speaking about the Middle East.
00:12:05.000She was a participant in an administration that upheld and strengthened the worst terror regime on planet Earth in Iran.
00:12:12.000But beyond that, the reason that so many Iranians want to flee the country is in part because they were propped up by the Obama administration.
00:12:19.000If the Iranians actually had a good government, they wouldn't need to come here.
00:12:40.000And it's not just Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, who is just a despicable human being.
00:12:43.000Ben Rhodes is, of course, the former deputy national security advisor and special counsel to the president on foreign policy.
00:12:50.000He was a fiction writer who wrote short stories, unpublished short stories, from a Brooklyn apartment before he was elevated to foreign policy specialty under the Obama administration.
00:12:58.000You'll recall that Ben Rhodes is the same guy who lied repeatedly to the American people.
00:13:02.000The Obama administration had a ridiculous story that they used to push the nuclear deal.
00:13:09.000The ridiculous story that they used to push the nuclear deal was that the Iranian regime had now become more moderate, that Hassan Rouhani, the new leader after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he was actually a new moderate type.
00:13:42.000Twitter, it seems lost on too many that this is about what Iranians want for Iran and not about us.
00:13:54.000First of all, Ben Rhodes, shut it, dude.
00:13:58.000If there's one guy who's responsible for the rise of Iran in the region, Ben Rhodes is that guy.
00:14:03.000But beyond that, if they're rightfully demanding dignity, less corruption, more opportunity, and greater control, might that have something to do with them protesting the same regime you just handed billions of dollars?
00:14:12.000The same regime you gave regional power?
00:14:52.000When he says this is an Iranian moment and we should shut up, and when he says the rights of people to protest peacefully are universal, governments should respect that, those are mutually exclusive statements.
00:15:01.000If it's an Iranian moment and we should shut up,
00:15:04.000Then we should shut up about how Iran is putting down the protesters.
00:15:08.000But the point here is that we shouldn't shut up about how Iran is putting down the protesters.
00:15:10.000We should be siding with the protesters.
00:15:12.000We should be giving them as much covert aid as possible.
00:15:15.000Because they are part and parcel of bringing down possibly the most evil regime on the planet.
00:15:21.000The only other possibilities for that title would probably be North Korea and some of the Sub-Saharan African regimes that have led to slaughter of their own people.
00:15:31.000The notion that John Kerry is some sort of voice of leadership here.
00:15:35.000All of this is to say, you know, Susan Rice is saying the same thing.
00:15:37.000She wrote an op-ed for the New York Times saying that everybody should be quiet, Trump should be quiet.
00:15:47.000The reason that so many people are saying this is twofold.
00:15:49.000One, they're embarrassed by Obama's record on this.
00:15:52.000And they should be embarrassed by Obama's record on this.
00:15:55.000Obama's record on this is embarrassing.
00:15:57.000Obama's record on Iran is embarrassing.
00:15:59.000It is the great blot on his presidency, even more so than Obamacare.
00:16:02.000His movement of Iran to a central focus of the Middle East demonstrates that his heart was not in the right place when it came to the Middle East.
00:16:11.000I truly believe the Obama administration has blood on its hands for handing billions of dollars to a terror regime knowing full well that the terror regime was going to use that to fund Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad and terrorist groups around the world.
00:16:23.000So the media are working full time to avoid criticizing Obama because Obama, of course, is their great god and he must never be ripped or sneered at in any way.
00:16:34.000Now the other thing is that there is this feeling among a lot of the intelligentsia that America is evil too.
00:16:39.000This is what I objected to when President Trump during the campaign was saying things as I mentioned before about how the United States was like Russia and we kill people too.
00:16:46.000That sprang from the sort of Ron Paul isolationist wing of the Republican Party.
00:16:57.000He believed that America had done terrible things across the globe and that as America shrunk her influence that somehow this would make the world a better place.
00:17:05.000He believed that America was a participant in domestic
00:17:09.000In domestic evils that were on par with some of the things that were happening abroad.
00:17:13.000I remember he gave a speech at the United Nations.
00:17:16.000And at the speech at the United Nations, he criticized America's policies on policing.
00:17:20.000I remember this because I wrote about it.
00:17:21.000I used to actually watch all of his speeches and write them up.
00:17:24.000And there's a reason that the Iranian government is jumping on that.
00:17:27.000The Iranian government loves the perspective of the left on the United States.
00:17:31.000The Iranian government believes that the United States is an evil place domestically.
00:17:36.000And that America is a place filled with horror and awful and evil and garbage.
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00:20:39.000Okay, so, as I mentioned, there's a reason that the Ayatollahs are pushing the notion that America is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad place.
00:20:48.000The reason that they are pushing that notion is because they have allies in the United States who are happy also to push that particular notion.
00:20:54.000And those allies are not just crazy columnists for the Huffington Post.
00:21:11.000Right, so this is the real problem, is that the demonstrators ignored the calls for calm.
00:21:15.000It's not that there's a repressive regime that will literally arrest or shoot people who dissent.
00:21:19.000The real problem is that these people were just ignoring calls for calm.
00:21:22.000It's funny, I don't remember any of these sorts of headlines with regard to the Palestinians who literally assault Israeli soldiers, like walk up and slap them in the face.
00:21:33.000And the Israeli government is not a repressive government.
00:21:35.000The Israeli government is the only free government in the Middle East.
00:21:37.000I don't remember any of these headlines.
00:21:39.000Every time the Palestinians throw rocks at an Israeli soldier, they're heroes.
00:21:42.000And the Israeli government's a democratic government, and the Palestinian government is not.
00:21:46.000Every time Iranian protesters stand up against a repressive regime, the New York Times is talking about how, really, they're just ignoring the moderation of the Iranian regime.
00:21:54.000This article from the New York Times is astonishing, right?
00:21:58.000And it demonstrates the fundamental disconnect that the left has with reality with regard to Iran.
00:22:03.000Which, again, is reflective of both Obama administration policy and, more deeply, of the left's discontent with America's role across the world and in the Middle East.
00:22:11.000Thomas Erdbrink is the author of this New York Times piece and says he reported that violence broke out in Iran, quote, after demonstrators ignored calls for calm by President Hassan Rouhani.
00:22:21.000And then he termed Rouhani, who is a tool of the mullahs, right?
00:22:23.000No one gets elected president of Iran unless the mullahs say, OK.
00:23:03.000Yes, I am sure that Rouhani is speaking absolutely objectively and honestly, that he believes in their right to protest and won't arrest them or shoot them at all.
00:23:11.000Can you, you need to, that sounds like not a big number.
00:23:15.000Imagine if in one weekend there were protests in the United States against President Trump and 15 of the protesters wound up being shot by the cops.
00:23:58.000Many youths in larger cities enthusiastically voted for Mr. Rouhani when he was re-elected in May, raising expectations among many in the reform camp.
00:24:05.000But since then, even many of the president's supporters say he has failed to fulfill his promises for improving an economy sorely hobbled by years of sanctions, corruption, and mismanagement.
00:24:15.000Beyond that, the United States has continued other sanctions, making it still harder for Mr. Rouhani to make gains.
00:24:22.000The reason there are protests in Iran is because Trump is mean to Rouhani, and then Rouhani doesn't have the money to pay off the youngsters.
00:24:40.000Again, this just demonstrates that when the left thinks moral leadership, they think the Europeans ought to be exhibiting it, and American presidents ought to be taking a back seat.
00:24:48.000This is Arwa Damon, who is a senior international correspondent for CNN, and she talks about how America doesn't have any moral leg to stand on.
00:24:57.000A lot of nations and their populations, no matter how they feel about their governments in particular, do perceive the United States as not really having a moral leg to stand on.
00:25:10.000They don't perceive us as having a moral leg to stand on?
00:25:13.000The Iranian government literally hangs gay people from cranes, and we don't have a moral leg to stand on?
00:25:18.000And CNN is repeating that sort of nonsense?
00:25:21.000And the fact is, the people in places like Rasht in Iran, they require our help.
00:25:25.000And I hope that President Trump has authorized all covert help to topple this regime.
00:25:29.000It would be a massive benefit to the world.
00:25:31.000Honestly, I didn't think we would see a repeat of 2009 in my lifetime.
00:25:33.000I could not be more pleased that within 10 years we are seeing another huge movement against the Ayatollahs.
00:25:41.000That is a great thing, and I hope that the Trump administration continues to do what it's doing.
00:25:45.000The media's defense for Obama on this is just astonishing, and it's really gross, and there's really no excuse for it.
00:25:51.000But speaking of media bias, The New York Times has now released a story in an attempt to quash all of the talk about the Russia dossier.
00:26:02.000The New York Times has released a new story.
00:26:03.000This was the big news story last week.
00:26:23.000Based on the dossier, the so-called Russian dossier.
00:26:26.000That Russian dossier had been paid for by Fusion GPS.
00:26:29.000Fusion GPS had been funded by Democrats.
00:26:31.000They dug up a bunch of supposed dirt about Trump.
00:26:35.000And then the FBI had jumped on that dossier to get a bunch of FISA warrants and go after members of the Trump team.
00:26:40.000A lot of people, including me, had said that if that was true, if that was really why FBI had launched its investigation based on this dossier, then that called into question the entirety of the investigation.
00:26:50.000If based on a Democrat-funded OPPO research project that had not been substantiated in any real way, they've started this entire effort, then it looks like a lot of smoke and no fire.
00:26:59.000So the New York Times came out with an article over the break, and that article basically tried to kill that narrative.
00:27:07.000That the reason the FBI originally launched its investigation is because there was a guy, as you remember, his name was Papadopoulos, right?
00:27:16.000His name was George Papadopoulos and George Papadopoulos was a foreign policy advisor to the Trump administration.
00:27:23.000And the idea was that George Papadopoulos had basically gone around telling people that the Russian government had hacked Hillary's servers or had hacked the DNC and had been giving material to the Trump campaign.
00:27:39.000And based on that, the FBI had found out about this and then launched an investigation into collusion between Trump and Russia.
00:27:46.000So it had nothing to do with the dossier at all.
00:27:49.000This is what the New York Times reported.
00:27:50.000So number one, I'm not sure how much to trust the story because, again, it is based on anonymous sourcing.
00:27:55.000And whenever you have an anonymously sourced story like this, it's very difficult to trust it all the way.
00:28:02.000Second of all, even if it was based on Papadopoulos going around and saying things, that doesn't necessarily mean that the actual investigation came up with anything, or that it wasn't biased in how it pursued the investigation.
00:28:12.000If they then went ahead and used the dossier in any way, then that calls into question bias in the investigation, the fact that Peter Strzok, who was, as you recall, a high-ranking lawyer who was working with the FBI and the DOJ in their pursuit of Trump-Russia collusion, that he was an anti-Trump
00:28:48.000So does Andrew McCarthy over at National Review.
00:28:52.000And he points out, does Andrew McCarthy, that the Times collusion narrative, the Times story about Trump-Russia collusion seems to be a lot of garbage for the most part.
00:29:05.000That the catalyst for this entire investigation was not actually Papadopoulos, it was actually Carter Page.
00:29:10.000You remember that Carter Page was the guy who originally they got the FISA warrant against, and that deepened into a full-scale investigation because Carter Page traveled to Moscow.
00:29:18.000Again, a lot of smoke, no fire, not much here.
00:29:23.000This is another astonishing story that broke over the weekend.
00:29:26.000Hillary Clinton supported David Brock's American Bridge 21st Century Foundation.
00:29:29.000This, according to the New York Times, again, gave attorney Lisa Bloom's firm $200,000 to help support a sexual misconduct case against Donald Trump, according to the New York Times.
00:29:37.000Sources were described as two Democrats familiar with the arrangements.
00:29:40.000They also said that a fashion designer named Susie Tompkins Buell gave $500,000 for the same purpose.
00:29:46.000The sources claim that Bloom returned money to Buell but kept the cash from Brock.
00:29:50.000Bloom declined to name the donors when the Times reached out for comment.
00:29:54.000She said the donors reached out to her and asked how they could help.
00:29:56.000She told them that she was working with several women who could find the courage to speak out if funds were given for security and the like, even a safe house.
00:30:04.000One woman wanted $2 million and declined to talk.
00:30:08.000You want to talk about dirty campaigning?
00:30:10.000Dirty campaigning involves partisan people funding sexual assault allegations against a particular candidate.
00:30:19.000Like, I understand that it's a risky business for women to come forward and claim sexual assault, but it does cast a lot of doubt on your account if you are being paid by the opposition.
00:30:27.000If you're being paid by Hillary Clinton's camp, and then you're making allegations against Donald Trump, it does raise some serious questions about the nature of the allegations that you are putting forth.
00:30:37.000So that is not good for the entire narrative that the only person who was cheating in the election, the person who was really manipulating the election, was President Trump.
00:30:45.000Okay, before I go any further, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at ZipRecruiter.
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00:31:49.000Okay, so I want to talk for a second about Logan Paul.
00:31:58.000You've probably never heard of him, but your kids probably have.
00:32:01.000He has just a ton of social media following, something like 9.4 million followers on YouTube.
00:32:08.000And again, he's one of these folks who I have no idea who he is, because while I am technically a millennial, I'm at the upper bracket of millennial.
00:32:16.000I'm not close enough to millennial age to really understand why a guy running around being weird is worth watching, particularly.
00:32:23.000But Logan Paul decided that he was going to Japan's so-called suicide forest near Mount Fuji.
00:32:28.000They've made a movie about the suicide forest recently.
00:32:56.000Well, he went into the forest, and instead, what he actually found is within basically minutes of walking into the forest, he found a guy hanging from a tree.
00:33:02.000He found somebody who'd hanged himself.
00:33:03.000And we're not going to show much of the video, because it's now been pulled down, but Logan Paul walks in wearing, you know, the green alien's hat, really, from Toy Story, and then he stumbles on this dead body, and they shoot the dead body.
00:33:19.000I mean, they, like, shoot it on camera for minutes at a time, and basically end up joking about it.
00:33:49.000Okay, so they actually show the guy hanging from the tree and then they keep showing the guy hanging from the tree and it's like a ten minute video.
00:33:55.000So Logan Paul pulled down the video because he got a lot of flack for it.
00:33:58.000As well he should, making light of this.
00:34:00.000There's no reason why you would show video of suicide.
00:34:02.000Suicide particularly is an imitative act in many cases.
00:34:06.000There have been a lot of high profile suicides and data show that after high profile suicides, there's actually a wave of suicide that happens because people think, well, if that person can do it, then so can I. This is a really bad move by Logan Paul.
00:34:19.000What I want to discuss here is not the bad move by Logan Paul because I think that's obvious and everybody understands it.
00:34:24.000What I want to discuss here instead is the fact that the entire media internet went crazy even after he pulled it down.
00:34:30.000So the guy pulls down the video and people continue to lose their minds over it to the extent that they were calling for the entire demonetization of his YouTube channel.
00:34:38.000I think that's a massive, massive mistake.
00:34:41.000There are these social media pylons that now happen that I think are not good for the country or for the world.
00:35:39.000There is this tendency now that when something goes wrong and we can all condemn it, like 100% of people condemn it, that now we have to rip down the person's career or destroy their entire life over it, even after they do the right thing.
00:35:50.000He pulled this thing down within like 24 hours.
00:36:07.000It's easy to talk about what I object to in the video, which is quite terrible, but I think I'd rather talk about what I object to in the social media age, which is this idea that if somebody like Justin Sacco tweets something
00:37:18.000So, if your other mug has already overflowed, then buy a subscription for one of your friends and then steal this particular tumbler and use it as a second overflow mug.
00:37:26.000In any case, you can get that for your annual subscription.
00:37:28.000Also, you get to ask us questions in the mailbag on Friday and be part of the show more broadly.
00:37:33.000The Shapiro store will be launching sometime this year.
00:38:04.000Let's begin with the Sam Harris debate.
00:38:05.000So, as I said late last year, I think it was early December, I did a debate with Sam Harris, who does his own podcast called Waking Up With Sam Harris, and Eric Weinstein, who's become a friend.
00:38:45.000Also, this week, tomorrow, we're going to be doing Dave Rubin's show, so you should take a look at that, because we're going to livestream that as well, so I'll be on Dave Rubin.
00:38:52.000Also, I believe I'm on Jordan Peterson's show this week.
00:38:55.000I'll be making the rounds in the New Year, so that's really exciting.
00:38:57.000But this was a really fun discussion, and it gets to some really root issues about religion and belief and meaning and free will and determinism and choice.
00:39:08.000Sam's a really good guy, and we may disagree on some of the most fundamental issues of the universe, but there are certain things we definitely do not disagree on, and that is the value of discussion and the value of free speech.
00:39:20.000So I have become a big fan of this show on Netflix called The Last Kingdom.
00:39:25.000So if you're on sort of Game of Thrones hiatus and you're looking for something to watch, this is basically Game of Thrones without the magic.
00:39:33.000It's got some sex scenes, but they are kind of parodic in how they're done.
00:39:41.000The show is about the birth of England in the 9th century.
00:39:45.000It's all about how England was unified into one country because it used to be a bunch of separate kingdoms, basically.
00:39:51.000And it follows this guy, Uhtred, who is basically a Saxon kid who was kidnapped by the Danes and raised as a Dane, and so he's sort of half Dane, half Saxon.
00:40:00.000If you don't know anything about British history, it's really fascinating.
00:40:03.000The Vikings were a large part of British history.
00:40:06.000They basically invaded the island of Britain
00:41:10.000So as you recall, we made fun of it on the show.
00:41:14.000Clay Travis was on CNN last year, one of my favorite media moments in all of last year.
00:41:18.000Clay Travis was on CNN with Brooke Baldwin, and he was talking with her, and suddenly he just launched into a random monologue about how his two favorite things were boobs in the First Amendment.
00:41:27.000Should have said his three favorite things were boobs in the First Amendment.
00:41:30.000And she acted all offended, and it was just terrible.
00:41:33.000So there was a couple who decided to fake a wedding proposal to mock CNN.
00:42:40.000And that's exactly what CNN deserves, because I'm going to show you in my Things I Hate in just a second some things about CNN that, um, yeah.
00:45:40.000CNN went crazy because the Trump team hired a white truck to basically roll alongside the CNN camera crew and prevent them from shooting into the golf course.
00:45:50.000And they went nuts over on CNN about it.
00:45:52.000The President doesn't really and his staff doesn't really tell us when he is golfing and we have taken to going outside the golf course and filming him as he golfs through a break in hedges near the club.
00:46:03.000Today a big white box truck parked in front of those hedges trying to obscure our shot of President Trump golfing.
00:46:10.000Now this may seem trivial but it is important to get video of the President as he does these things on a daily basis and it gets to something that is larger.
00:46:18.000The President and the White House have tried to obscure the fact that President Trump golfs on a regular basis.
00:46:26.000What the, what the, like yes, I'm, yes, clearly you guys are covering the news that matters.
00:46:30.000It's deeply important that you see Trump swing the club.
00:46:34.000That's deeply important and how dare that truck.
00:46:36.000So people started making memes of the white truck pulling in front of the Iranian protests so that CNN would have an excuse not to cover the Iranian protests.
00:46:44.000I think that that is basically correct.
00:47:19.000So, President Trump took to Twitter this morning.
00:47:22.000And I don't like when Trump tweets stupid things in the middle of a serious news cycle because it allows the media the excuse to distract from the actual news, which is what's going on in Iran, which is what they should be forced to cover.
00:47:31.000Like, Trump should be using his Twitter, his Twitter machine, as a battering ram.
00:47:35.000He should be clubbing the media with it.
00:47:37.000Instead, Trump tweets out stuff like this.
00:49:02.000Here is the problem with this particular statement.
00:49:04.000So, what this is basically saying is that if the Democrats don't make a deal on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programs, if they don't give him his wall, or if they don't give him his increased immigration funding, or his crackdowns on some illegal immigration,
00:49:18.000Then President Trump will just put DACA back in place, and then presumably Hispanics will be super happy with him.
00:49:24.000That's not a bargaining strategy, and it doesn't even make any sense.
00:49:27.000If you're going to bargain, you actually have to take a hard position.
00:49:30.000I'm not sure by what math Hispanics are going to go hard against the Democrats who are pushing for a pure DACA and fall for President Trump and fall in love with Republicans and their president, unless, presumably, Trump were to basically throw over his base and just replace DACA with new DACA, Trump DACA, Trump-ACA.
00:49:46.000I don't think that that's going to happen.
00:50:03.000So Federalist number nine is Federalist paper number nine, written by Alexander Hamilton.
00:50:08.000So this one, Hamilton is continuing his discussion
00:50:10.000On how a national government is going to be stronger than several governments in the United States that are not under the rubric of one united government.
00:50:17.000You know, just the country of South Carolina, for example.
00:50:20.000So critics, says Hamilton, condemn republicanism as unstable.
00:50:23.000And he points out, from the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics, the advocates of despotism have drawn arguments, not only against the forms of republican government, but against the very principles of civil liberty.
00:50:33.000They have decried all free governments as inconsistent with the order of society, and have indulged themselves in malicious exaltation over its friends and partisans.
00:50:40.000First of all, Hamilton's a beautiful writer.
00:50:42.000But second of all, what he is saying here is he's saying there are a lot of people who say that monarchy despotism is better than democracy because democracy devolves into anarchy.
00:50:52.000And this would be sort of the Thomas Hobbes argument in Leviathan.
00:50:55.000This, Hamilton says, is wrong because there are many different types of democracy and equating all of them is foolish.
00:51:01.000Like there's messy democracy and then there's well-ordered Republican checks and balances.
00:51:05.000And that's what Hamilton is making the argument for.
00:51:07.000He says we've basically designed a new form of government which includes modern inventions like checks and balances and institutions of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior.
00:51:17.000And he says that this is also going to, one of the checks against an overpowering central government here is going to be the states.
00:51:23.000The states are going to be their own republics and they will have their own localities.
00:51:28.000And so the devolution of authority down to lower and lower levels is going to lead to checks and balances that prevent the irrigation of all authority in a centralized figure and also prevent