The Ben Shapiro Show - Memo Fight 2018! | Ep. 466

00:00:00.000 Memo Fight 2018.

00:00:02.000 The Republicans take on the FBI in the Royal Rumble.

00:00:05.000 Plus, Mika Brzezinski throws Michael Wolff off the set of Morning Joe.

00:00:09.000 And Republicans should read books, and I will show you an example why.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:13.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:19.000 We'll bring you the latest on MemoGate 2018.

00:00:22.000 MemoFight.

00:00:23.000 It's the most exciting rumble in the history of American politics.

00:00:27.000 Everybody's going to just show up from the side of the stage and just club each other with reams of paper.

00:00:33.000 It'll be so exciting.

00:00:34.000 Devin Nunes versus Adam Schiff.

00:00:36.000 Face-off! 1.00

00:00:37.000 Nancy Pelosi versus Paul Ryan.

00:00:40.000 Pounding to the mat.

00:00:42.000 It's going to be incredible.

00:00:42.000 We'll discuss all of those things first.

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00:01:49.000 Okay, so, again, MemoGate!

00:01:51.000 I'm just excited to say MemoFight and MemoGate, and it's all so exciting.

00:01:56.000 In truth, none of it is all that exciting.

00:01:58.000 I'm going to try and break down what's happening here, because if it seems like all is chaos and confusion, if it feels like the Ouroboros of confusion and chaos has taken over your life—I've been hanging out with Jordan Peterson too much—then you need to

00:02:09.000 We're going to try and break down and separate out all of the various strands of what's going on in the FBI scandal, and who's to blame, and who is lying.

00:02:18.000 Okay, so first, let's begin with this.

00:02:20.000 The FBI is basically asking you to trust them.

00:02:23.000 And the Republicans are asking you to trust them.

00:02:25.000 And the Democrats are asking you to trust the FBI.

00:02:27.000 And President Trump is asking you to trust the Republicans.

00:02:30.000 And you don't know who to trust, because the truth is, we don't have all the information.

00:02:34.000 What we do know is a couple of things.

00:02:35.000 There are a few different strains here.

00:02:36.000 Strain number one, the FBI, in all likelihood, acted corruptly in allowing Hillary Clinton to get away with storing classified information on a private, unsecured email server.

00:02:46.000 OK, that was FBI malfeasance and it was probably planned by the Obama administration in coordination with the DOJ and the FBI.

00:02:52.000 There's pretty solid evidence to that effect.

00:02:54.000 I talked about it a few days ago on the show.

00:02:56.000 If you go back about a week and listen to my show in which I discuss Andrew McCarthy's piece over at National Review laying out the case that there was essentially coordination between the Obama team in the White House and the FBI to let Hillary Clinton off the hook specifically because Hillary was illegally storing classified information on her server and using a private email address

00:03:13.000 And Obama was emailing her at that email address, meaning he knew that she was using a private email address for classified material, which was not in fact legal.

00:03:21.000 That piece by McCarthy is pretty damning and pretty telling about what the FBI was doing.

00:03:26.000 And now we know, according to The Wall Street Journal, this is breaking news yesterday, top FBI officials were aware for at least a month before alerting Congress that emails potentially related to an investigation of Hillary Clinton had emerged during a key stretch of the 2016 presidential campaign, according to text messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

00:03:44.000 So, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had learned about the thousands of emails by September 28, 2016.

00:03:49.000 Director James Comey informed Congress on October 28, 11 days before the presidential elections.

00:03:54.000 But Mr. Comey said nothing.

00:03:57.000 Comey later said nothing about how early he had known about those emails.

00:04:00.000 So, he went a month without hearing about those things.

00:04:02.000 So, Democrats are complaining that Comey sandbagged Hillary Clinton. 0.82

00:04:04.000 In all likelihood, what happened here is that Comey felt it was necessary because they'd actually gone through, they'd reviewed a lot of these emails, and they were seeing some stuff they didn't like.

00:04:12.000 But that took them a month to announce to Congress.

00:04:15.000 So, when people talk about corruption inside the FBI, when they talk about the gaming of the FBI by the Obama administration, there's some pretty good evidence for that.

00:04:23.000 And so, it's hard to trust the FBI when the FBI says, don't release this four-page memo about Trump-Russia collusion.

00:04:28.000 Now, Devin Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee,

00:04:32.000 He's put together a four-page memo, this much-valleyhood memo, from the House Intelligence Committee that details intelligence malfeasance not just in the Hillary Clinton investigation, but also supposedly in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.

00:04:44.000 And this has been seen now by a lot of conservatives as sort of the last great hope to save Trump from the Mueller investigation.

00:04:51.000 This, I think, is an oversell.

00:04:53.000 We know that the FBI was acting in bad faith on Hillary Clinton.

00:04:56.000 We don't know that the FBI was acting in bad faith on the Trump-Russia collusion stuff.

00:05:00.000 And one of the weird things about this whole memo routine, as I've said, is Trump can declassify all of the underlying materials that the memo supposedly contemplates.

00:05:08.000 He can do that right now, but he hasn't.

00:05:10.000 Instead, he's allowing the Republicans to charge around with this four-page memo, talking about how this memo is the smoking gun that shows that the investigation into Trump himself has been corrupted and ruined from the very outset.

00:05:20.000 Well, the FBI has now responded to the House Intelligence Committee's vote to release the memo by expressing grave concern over the memo's accuracy.

00:05:29.000 So, the FBI released a statement on Wednesday.

00:05:31.000 They said they had, quote-unquote, grave concerns about the accuracy.

00:05:34.000 of a top secret House Intelligence Committee memo alleging anti-Trump bias within the Justice Department, challenging President Trump's pledge to release it.

00:05:42.000 But a few hours after the public rebuke by the top U.S.

00:05:45.000 law enforcement agency, a Trump administration official said the memo was likely to be released today, on Thursday.

00:05:50.000 The FBI said in a statement, quote, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it.

00:05:56.000 As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy.

00:06:04.000 So, the FBI released this statement.

00:06:06.000 Presumably, you would figure Christopher Wray, Trump's own appointee at the FBI, had reviewed the statement before it went out.

00:06:11.000 So, even he doesn't think this memo should be released, and it compromises national security.

00:06:14.000 So, now the question is this.

00:06:15.000 Do you believe the House committee?

00:06:17.000 Do you believe the Republicans on the House committee who say, we need to get this information out there, the FBI acted correctly?

00:06:22.000 Or do you believe the FBI, saying that it's dangerous to release this memo, and in fact, the memo skews the fact?

00:06:27.000 Which one do you believe?

00:06:28.000 Now, it's almost impossible to tell who to believe because we haven't seen the memo.

00:06:33.000 We haven't actually seen the underlying memo, and more than that, we haven't seen any of the underlying materials in the memo.

00:06:38.000 So we're fighting, everyone's fighting right now over a memo that none of us have seen.

00:06:42.000 We've heard second-hand accounts.

00:06:44.000 So this is basically an argument from authority on all sides.

00:06:47.000 It's the worst kind of argument.

00:06:48.000 The worst kind of argument is the argument from authority, the one that says, you know, Dr. So-and-so said X, therefore X is true.

00:06:55.000 No, that's not a convincing argument.

00:06:57.000 Devin Nunes said X, therefore X is true is no more convincing argument than Adam Schiff said X, therefore X is true, or Trump said X, therefore X is true, or the FBI said X, therefore X is true.

00:07:06.000 If you don't know what X is, it's impossible for you to independently judge whether X is true or not.

00:07:11.000 And I don't trust any of these people enough to know whether I believe their account of what's actually in the memo or what happened on Trump-Russia collusion or any of the rest of it.

00:07:21.000 My own personal supposition is that the memo's materials about Hillary Clinton are probably pretty damning.

00:07:27.000 The memo's materials about the Trump campaign and FBI investigation into the Trump campaign would probably be less so.

00:07:32.000 The allegation, presumably Nunes sort of, Nunes said this yesterday,

00:07:36.000 The allegation is that the FBI utilized the Steele dossier, which was the OPPO research dossier gathered by Fusion GPS, a Democratic OPPO intelligence firm, at the behest of Hillary Clinton, that the FBI got a hold of that OPPO research file and used it to open a FISA warrant on Carter Page, a Trump foreign policy advisor, and that's what launched the entire Trump-Russia collusion probe.

00:07:56.000 And so Republicans are saying that's corrupt.

00:07:57.000 You used Democratic research, basically funneled by Russia, to open the Trump-Russia probe in the first place.

00:08:04.000 But I'm not sure that there's a huge case for that.

00:08:07.000 I would probably think that they based their original FISA application on more than just the dossier.

00:08:13.000 If they based it on just the dossier, that's a problem.

00:08:15.000 But even then, there was a FISA warrant out for Carter Page tapping his phone since 2014.

00:08:21.000 So Carter Page has been on the FBI's radar long before President Trump was an issue and long before he was on Trump's campaign.

00:08:29.000 So, in any case, just because the FBI did stuff wrong in the Clinton investigation doesn't necessarily mean they did anything wrong in the Trump-Russia investigation.

00:08:35.000 And Republicans, by tying the two together, by suggesting the FBI screwed up the Clinton investigation, therefore they're out to get Trump?

00:08:42.000 Saying that is a jump.

00:08:44.000 It's a logical leap.

00:08:45.000 And it makes Republicans look like they're actually trying to take down the FBI in order to protect Trump, as opposed to looking at the facts on the ground.

00:08:51.000 Now, Democrats, on the other hand, have been saying that the FBI is clean all the way through.

00:08:54.000 So they look like partisan hacks as well.

00:08:56.000 So the Republicans look like partisan hacks by tying together what we know about FBI malfeasance on Hillary and what we don't know about FBI malfeasance on Trump.

00:09:03.000 And the Democrats look like hacks by saying the FBI is clean and pure as the driven snow and has been all along.

00:09:11.000 So, again, this leaves us with the who-do-you-trust scenario.

00:09:14.000 Now, the Trump administration is now telling Major Garrett over at CBS News that the memo is not going to be approved today, that it will instead be sent back to House Intelligence Committee tomorrow with redactions from the White House based on internal consultations with the FBI and other agencies.

00:09:29.000 So the FBI gave advice, and the Trump administration will take that advice and strike out some of the language.

00:09:34.000 And then the White House will not release the memo, but send it back to the committee for its release on its own timetable, meaning that they would vote again

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00:11:49.000 Let's get back to Memo Fight 2018.

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00:11:54.000 Memo Fight 2018.

00:11:56.000 So now we know, according to Major Garrett, that the White House will not, in fact, release the memo today.

00:12:01.000 The memo will be released presumably next week.

00:12:05.000 Then next week, we'll find out what exactly is in the memo.

00:12:10.000 And as I say, I think that it's overblown on pretty much every side, but you can see the two sides battling it out.

00:12:14.000 So Representative Mark Meadows, member of the Freedom Caucus, representative from, I believe, North Carolina, he comes out, he says, Devin Nunes, who is the head of the House Intelligence Committee, he has a duty to inform Congress about abuses, and that's why the memo was written.

00:12:26.000 Chairman Nunes has an obligation, an obligation to inform Congress when there has been FISA abuses.

00:12:34.000 And so all he's doing is following on his constitutional duty to let us know about that.

00:12:40.000 Okay, so that is the Republican attempt to justify the memo.

00:12:44.000 And then the Democrats say, don't release the memo.

00:12:46.000 Now, when the Democrats say don't release the memo, it makes Republicans, who have become somewhat conspiratorial on this, think, well, there must be something in it they don't want seen.

00:12:53.000 Why wouldn't they want to release the memo?

00:12:54.000 We're not going to take Democrats in good faith when Democrats say we want to protect the intelligence community.

00:12:58.000 There is a certain irony to the Democrats yelling and screaming about protecting the FBI when they spent years under Bush ripping the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community up and down all the time, all over.

00:13:09.000 Suddenly, the FBI are their best friends.

00:13:12.000 But this is the attack the Democrats are going to take.

00:13:14.000 Joe Manchin, Democrat from West Virginia, Senator, he says don't release the memo.

00:13:17.000 Would you say that the President is wrong to release that memo?

00:13:20.000 I would definitely say, Mr. President, please don't do that.

00:13:23.000 That is wrong.

00:13:24.000 It is absolutely wrong.

00:13:26.000 First of all, he won't even reveal his sources.

00:13:30.000 Devin Nunes, okay?

00:13:31.000 This is a man that was sanctioned by his own committee members that he couldn't be on the Russian probe.

00:13:37.000 This is a person who basically kind of shoots from the hip.

00:13:40.000 And I said, Nunes has neutered the credibility of this Intelligence Committee on the House.

00:13:47.000 The Senate Intelligence Committee is the only thing that we have left that can put confidence into the system and also into the investigation.

00:13:55.000 Nunes, to recall, Nunes back in April went and visited the White House, and there he saw documents that he said suggested that members of the Obama administration had unmasked members of the Trump administration in FISA warrant situations.

00:14:06.000 So, unmasking is a process whereby when officials first get reads on wiretaps that are between foreign agents, foreign people who are wiretapping American citizens, the names of the American citizens are hidden to protect their privacy.

00:14:20.000 The members of the administration can ask for those names to be unmasked.

00:14:23.000 Susan Rice presumably did that with Mike Flynn, the former national security advisor, when he was talking with members of the Russian government or members of the Turkish government.

00:14:32.000 And Devin Nunes said that this was a misuse of her authority.

00:14:35.000 And then he was sort of forced to recuse himself.

00:14:38.000 He didn't technically recuse himself, but he sort of recused himself from the Russia investigation.

00:14:41.000 But he maintained that he was going to continue looking into FBI malfeasance with regard to, for example, obstruction of justice, as well as the Hillary investigation.

00:14:49.000 So all this gets rather complicated.

00:14:51.000 But suffice it to say that Nunes is a controversial character and Democrats are seizing on that.

00:14:57.000 Adam Schiff, Democrat from California, he's been leading the charge every day that Trump-Russia collusion is real.

00:15:01.000 He goes on CNN routinely.

00:15:03.000 It's like he has an office staked out there at CNN.

00:15:05.000 He has his own green room just labeled with his name, Adam Schiff.

00:15:08.000 And he has been saying every day Trump-Russia collusion is real.

00:15:10.000 Now he says that to release this memo would smear the FBI.

00:15:14.000 Sadly, we can fully expect that the President of the United States will not put the national interest over his own personal interest.

00:15:22.000 But it is a sad day indeed when that is also true of our own committee, because today this committee voted to put the President's personal interest, perhaps their own political interest, above the national interest in denying themselves even the ability to hear from the Department and the FBI.

00:15:41.000 And that is, I think, a deeply regrettable state of affairs.

00:15:45.000 But it does show how, in my view, when you have a deeply flawed person in the Oval Office, that flaw can infect the whole of government, and today, tragically, it infected our committee.

00:15:57.000 So Schiff is gifted at making it sound like partisan talking points are not in fact partisan talking points, but this is in fact a partisan talking point.

00:16:03.000 We don't know whether the memo smears the FBI because we haven't seen the memo, and we don't know whether the FBI is defending itself by trying to keep the memo hidden.

00:16:09.000 We just don't know.

00:16:11.000 Democrats, of course, are suggesting that the only reason the Republicans want to release the memo is to kill the Mueller investigation.

00:16:16.000 Now, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has suggested that the memo is important because it reveals FBI abuses in the Hillary investigation, but this isn't necessarily an attempt to stop the Mueller investigation.

00:16:29.000 And I think that's an important distinction.

00:16:30.000 If Republicans were making that distinction day in and day out, they'd have a lot more credibility on this issue.

00:16:35.000 They are not making that distinction.

00:16:36.000 They are making it sound as though if the FBI did the wrong thing on Hillary Clinton, that means we have to stop the Mueller investigation.

00:16:41.000 That makes it look like they are wielding their evidence of failure by the FBI in the Hillary investigation in order to protect Trump from his own collusion or from his own potential criminality.

00:16:51.000 That's exactly what Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat, said about the Republican attempts to release this memo.

00:16:58.000 But you're saying this morning that there is dangerous classified information that should not be released.

00:17:03.000 Absolutely.

00:17:04.000 And why are the Republicans going to release him?

00:17:05.000 Because the president wants to pursue this idea that somehow the dossier was related, that the dossier is representative of why this whole investigation began.

00:17:19.000 OK, so this is the Democratic take on all this.

00:17:22.000 Now, the Democrats have been trying really hard to stop the memo from coming out.

00:17:25.000 So last night, Adam Schiff came out and he said that the memo should not be released because the version of the memo that was approved by the House Intelligence Committee was not the version of the memo that was sent to the White House.

00:17:35.000 He said that Devin Nunes actually changed the memo itself and then sent it to the White House.

00:17:39.000 So he released a letter.

00:17:41.000 And he tweeted out, breaking, So Trump is attempting to prevent the stalemate here by just sending the memo back to the House Intelligence Committee, essentially.

00:17:46.000 Nunes responded by slapping at Schiff and suggesting that instead, quote, and this is what Nunes says, his spokesperson, quote,

00:18:07.000 We're good to go!

00:18:31.000 So all of this, I understand, is really confusing.

00:18:34.000 It's really confusing.

00:18:36.000 But here's the bottom line.

00:18:37.000 Republicans either want this memo out because they want to discredit the FBI with regard to the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton, or they want this memo out because they think it's going to end the Mueller investigation.

00:18:46.000 If the latter, we must see evidence.

00:18:48.000 If the latter, we must see evidence.

00:18:49.000 Otherwise, it's just a cover-up attempt.

00:18:52.000 Meanwhile, if the memo comes out and it does show evidence of these things, and Democrats were trying to cover up the memo, then that is, too, a partisan hack attempt to protect the FBI so that the FBI can continue its investigation into Trump.

00:19:04.000 And if it turns out there's evidence of FBI malfeasance on Trump-Russia collusion, and the FBI was using national security as an excuse to shut down public knowledge of that fact, then that would demonstrate a certain level of corruption inside the FBI as well.

00:19:19.000 So, bottom line is this.

00:19:20.000 Either somebody's lying, or everybody's lying.

00:19:23.000 There's no situation in which nobody is lying.

00:19:25.000 Either the Republicans are lying when they say that the FBI has been compromised, and they are just trying to cover for Trump, or the Democrats are lying when they say the FBI is crystal clean, crystal clear, and therefore, any attempt to shut down any investigation is an attempt to protect Trump.

00:19:39.000 So somebody is lying here.

00:19:41.000 Or it's possible everybody's a little bit lying.

00:19:42.000 It's possible that Republicans are telling the truth about the FBI and Hillary, but lying about the FBI and Trump-Russia.

00:19:48.000 It's possible that Democrats are telling the truth about the FBI and Trump-Russia, but lying about the FBI and Hillary.

00:19:54.000 It's possible that Trump doesn't know what's going on.

00:19:56.000 It's possible Trump knows fully what's going on and thinks that this is going to be an excuse for him to fire the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein or to get rid of people inside the FBI who are involved in the Mueller investigation.

00:20:07.000 We just don't know yet.

00:20:08.000 So as I've been saying now for a couple of weeks, it is imperative that we sit and wait for the answer.

00:20:14.000 This is not something where we can just jump to particular conclusions, especially not having seen the underlying documents and not having seen the underlying classified material.

00:20:23.000 It does make me suspicious, by the way, that the White House is sending the memo back with FBI changes.

00:20:29.000 And not just releasing it.

00:20:30.000 That's suspicious simply because I think that what it looks like is the White House doesn't want to have its fingerprints on this thing.

00:20:37.000 But the White House is going to have its fingerprints on this thing no matter what.

00:20:39.000 The media, I think, are rightly going to assume that the Trump administration was coordinating with the Republican House Intelligence Committee in coming up with this memo.

00:20:47.000 I'd be shocked if there was no coordination.

00:20:49.000 Again, if you just reverse the situation, pretend that these were Democrats doing this, I'd be just as suspicious.

00:20:54.000 So I'm trying to be a little bit objective here.

00:20:57.000 If the Democrats—if Hillary Clinton were under investigation by the FBI for collusion with a foreign country or for obstruction of justice, and then the Democrats came up with a four-page memo suggesting that the intelligence community was responsible for—the deep state was out to get Hillary Clinton,

00:21:12.000 I would think the same thing Democrats are thinking today.

00:21:14.000 This smells.

00:21:15.000 This smells.

00:21:16.000 So, that means the burden on Republicans to come out with some actual evidence here is pretty high, particularly when you have all the Republicans rushing to the microphones to explain that this memo is going to change everything, that it's going to change everything.

00:21:27.000 Well, in just a second, I'm going to explain a couple more scandals that are brewing.

00:21:31.000 Yes, believe it or not, more scandals brewing, because it just never stops.

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00:22:08.000 And I smell great as well.

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00:22:14.000 And that is because of Dollar Shave Club and me using their products.

00:22:18.000 I use Dollar Shave Club for pretty much everything.

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00:22:54.000 Thank you, Ben.

00:23:16.000 So, check it out.

00:23:17.000 DollarShaveClub.com slash Ben.

00:23:19.000 Use the slash Ben so they know that we sent you.

00:23:20.000 OK, other scandals a-brewin'.

00:23:22.000 So, one of the other scandals that broke late last night is that Mark Corallo, who is a former Trump legal spokesperson, is planning on telling Robert Mueller, according to the New York Times, about a previously undisclosed conference call, which led him to believe that Hope Hicks, who's a special aide to the President of the United States, was going to obstruct justice.

00:23:40.000 Oh no.

00:23:41.000 So here is what the New York Times says.

00:23:53.000 Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms.

00:23:56.000 Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr.

00:23:59.000 before the Trump Tower meeting, in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians, quote, will never get out.

00:24:06.000 That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms. 0.95

00:24:08.000 Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.

00:24:11.000 In a statement on Wednesday, a lawyer for Ms.

00:24:13.000 Hicks strongly denied Mr. Corallo's allegations.

00:24:16.000 So, she is denying.

00:24:18.000 She is suggesting that this is untrue.

00:24:20.000 Even if the allegation is true, that she said it would never get out, that's not an implication necessarily.

00:24:25.000 I mean, this would be the legal defense by her lawyer.

00:24:27.000 It's not necessarily meaning I'm going to destroy the documents.

00:24:29.000 It just might be nobody's ever going to discover that these emails exist, right?

00:24:32.000 How are they going to know?

00:24:33.000 It was a closed loop.

00:24:34.000 But with all of that said, they obviously did come out.

00:24:37.000 And if it turns out that the Trump administration knew about the emails from Trump Jr.

00:24:41.000 to a Russian-connected lawyer offering Russian help in the election, and that the Trump administration then was complicit in destroying materials,

00:24:51.000 Then you do fall foul of obstruction laws.

00:24:53.000 Obstruction actually requires destruction of documents under one of the statutory frameworks, and that means that if the Trump administration tried to destroy materials, that could very well be obstruction.

00:25:03.000 Trump may not be complicit in that, but if Hope Hicks gets rolled up into that, then you could see Hope Hicks getting rolled up and Donald Trump Jr.

00:25:09.000 getting rolled up.

00:25:10.000 Things could get very ugly very quickly.

00:25:12.000 In other words, if this story is true, Hope Hicks is denying it, so we'll see how that plays out.

00:25:16.000 Meanwhile, there's another story coming out.

00:25:19.000 I mean, so many leaks.

00:25:21.000 A new report from CNN.

00:25:22.000 Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was essentially asked if he was loyal to the president when the DOJ official visited the White House last month to seek assistance from the president.

00:25:30.000 Rosenstein had gone there to ask if Trump could help him stave off document demands from House Intel Committee Chair Devin Nunes.

00:25:36.000 First of all, I don't know why Rosenstein was asking that.

00:25:38.000 Why not just hand the documents over to Nunes?

00:25:40.000 But the president apparently, according to CNN, had other priorities ahead of a key appearance by Rosenstein on the Hill.

00:25:46.000 Trump wanted to know where the special counsel's Russia investigation was heading.

00:25:49.000 And he wanted to know whether Rosenstein was, quote-unquote, on my team.

00:25:53.000 OK, so that's not a giant surprise.

00:25:55.000 Presumably, he had asked James Comey if he was loyal to Trump.

00:26:00.000 And of all of the things that Trump has said, this is the one that I find maybe least objectionable, just because, not to do a little bit of whataboutism, but here's some whataboutism.

00:26:07.000 Eric Holder was the attorney general for Barack Obama and went around openly calling himself Barack Obama's wingman.

00:26:12.000 So the idea that the FBI deputy director is somehow completely separate

00:26:17.000 Sorry, not Deputy Director for the FBI, but that the DOJ Assistant Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, is somehow not supposed to be loyal to the President of the United States.

00:26:29.000 If that were true, I would like to hear where the Democrats were when Eric Holder was pledging loyalty openly, on camera, to Barack Obama.

00:26:37.000 I'd like to know where everybody's ire was then.

00:26:40.000 So, there's going to be an attempt here to suggest that Trump was asking for loyalty tests because he's trying to quash the Mueller investigation again.

00:26:45.000 In order to show obstruction, you actually have to show an attempted obstruction.

00:26:49.000 Asking people whether they are loyal is not an attempted obstruction.

00:26:52.000 Firing people who work for you is not an attempted obstruction.

00:26:55.000 An attempted obstruction is when you actually are, number one, attempting to obstruct the investigation.

00:27:00.000 So if he would tell Mueller that the investigation must find him innocent or he will be fired, that would be obstruction.

00:27:06.000 Or if he destroyed documents, that would be obstruction.

00:27:08.000 If he fires Mueller, it's not even clear that's obstruction because he does have the statutory authority to do that.

00:27:14.000 Is that criminal obstruction?

00:27:15.000 Maybe not.

00:27:15.000 It's probably impeachable, but it's not necessarily criminal obstruction.

00:27:19.000 Okay, so that's another piece of news on the scandal front.

00:27:22.000 Furthermore, you can see that the FBI is trying to restore its own credibility after all of the accusations of bias in the Hillary Clinton probe.

00:27:28.000 According to CNN, emails obtained by CNN show that Peter Strzok, the FBI agent at the center of the Capitol Hill storm, played a key role in a controversial FBI decision that upended Hillary Clinton's campaigns just days before the 2016 election.

00:27:42.000 We're good to go.

00:27:58.000 Right, so that is, you know, that is a new piece of information.

00:28:00.000 And the idea here is to sort of rehabilitate Strzok.

00:28:02.000 The idea is that Strzok wasn't corrupt.

00:28:04.000 Strzok wasn't out to save Hillary Clinton.

00:28:06.000 He wrote the letter that reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton.

00:28:09.000 But that does not tell the whole story, because it's also true that Strzok had expressed his doubts about whether the investigation should go forward or the importance of the new emails that were found.

00:28:19.000 You know, he did work for Comey, so if Comey wanted that letter drafted, he had to draft the letter.

00:28:22.000 I mean, that's sort of his job.

00:28:23.000 The real problem for Strzok is the text messages exchanged between him and his lover, Lisa Page, showing that Strzok was openly talking about how Hillary Clinton needed to be let off the hook because she might be president at some point.

00:28:35.000 OK, so with all of this in the wind, one of the worst things that can happen to the country right now

00:28:40.000 is the level of vitriol to which this has now risen.

00:28:43.000 Because we're talking about the destruction of the FBI as a credible institution.

00:28:47.000 We're talking about the destruction of both political parties as credible institutions.

00:28:51.000 And everybody needs to turn down the rhetoric a little bit.

00:28:53.000 Unfortunately, they're just turning it up.

00:28:55.000 Steve King from Iowa, a Republican from Iowa, he says that, again, the Nunes memo is earth-shaking.

00:29:01.000 It is worse than Watergate.

00:29:02.000 We are about to find out that the entire deep state was out to get Trump.

00:29:05.000 We're going to have a Congress that does oversight. 1.00

00:29:07.000 We can't accept the FBI or the DOJ or any other branch of government from closing the gate in front of us and saying, sorry, you can't look at this because it's classified.

00:29:17.000 Then what I saw and what I believe happened could go on in perpetuity and we become a banana republic.

00:29:23.000 This is earth-shaking.

00:29:25.000 And it does go deeper than Watergate.

00:29:27.000 And that memo doesn't answer at all by any means.

00:29:30.000 How is it deeper than Watergate?

00:29:32.000 And how is it deeper?

00:29:35.000 Because the FBI and the DOJ, by the information that I have observed and the testimony that I have analyzed from listening to and questioning multiple members of the FBI and the DOJ, tells me that the FBI and DOJ have been weaponized.

00:29:55.000 OK, so that's a pretty strong allegation by Steve King, of course.

00:29:59.000 And then on the other side, you have Phil Mudd, the national security analyst for CNN, and he loses it about the Nunes memo.

00:30:04.000 So again, the rhetoric here is so hot and it's so high, and the reality is nobody's seen the memo.

00:30:09.000 Nobody knows what they're talking about.

00:30:10.000 Steve King may have read the memo, but Steve King is also a partisan Republican.

00:30:14.000 So that means you haven't seen it.

00:30:15.000 I haven't seen it.

00:30:16.000 So we have no basis for judgment.

00:30:17.000 All we have are these people who we either trust or we don't trust.

00:30:20.000 Here's Phil Mudd presenting the opposite point of view and going nuts over the Nunes memo.

00:30:23.000 Give me a break.

00:30:24.000 I'm going to break the camera here in a moment, Aaron.

00:30:26.000 Have you ever worked in Washington, D.C.?

00:30:28.000 I've worked at the highest levels of the FBI, the CIA.

00:30:30.000 I've worked on the National Security Council and the White House.

00:30:33.000 In the midst of the highest profile investigation of political corruption we've seen since the 1970s, in the midst of a precedent of cooperation,

00:30:42.000 Between the Congress, including Devin Nunes in the White House, do you think it was a secret that congressional officials were preparing a memo of this import and nobody knew at the White House?

00:30:53.000 You've got to be kidding me.

00:30:54.000 I'm going to tell you the moon's made of green cheese.

00:30:56.000 I'm not saying there was cooperation.

00:30:58.000 I'm not saying there was collusion.

00:31:00.000 I'm saying in that small town of Washington, DC, 0.92

00:31:03.000 That to suggest that nobody at the White House knew that congressional staffers were discussing a memo of this import, that's ridiculous. 1.00

00:31:11.000 It's not about whether Devin Nunes coordinated, it's whether somebody knew over a cup of coffee and talked about it, and to tell me they didn't is just stupid. 0.99

00:31:19.000 OK, so everybody is going nuts over this stuff. 0.99

00:31:21.000 We will find out.

00:31:22.000 We'll find out by next week.

00:31:24.000 Let's put it this way.

00:31:25.000 If the memo turns out to be a giant nothing, the blowback will be very intense.

00:31:29.000 If the memo turns out to be a nothing, and it turns out that the Trump administration was attempting to set up the memo as a way to take down the Mueller investigation, there will be intense blowback, and it will be deserved.

00:31:38.000 If the Republicans decide that they went forward with a memo that was an attempt to take down the Mueller investigation, or if they mouth off the way they have been for the past few weeks, it's such a mistake.

00:31:47.000 You know, in business and in life, there's a simple rule that allows you to lead a happier life.

00:31:52.000 Under promise, over deliver.

00:31:54.000 Right?

00:31:55.000 Just say what the memo is.

00:31:56.000 This is what Paul Ryan, I think, was rightly trying to do.

00:31:58.000 The memo is about FBI malfeasance in the Hillary Clinton investigation and other FBI malfeasance.

00:32:03.000 And when you see the memo, you'll know whether it's important or not.

00:32:06.000 And let it speak for itself.

00:32:07.000 But instead, everybody pitches what they're doing.

00:32:09.000 And that means that if they pitch more than they can deliver, there's going to be a lot of disappointment.

00:32:13.000 And disappointment in politics is absolute poison.

00:32:16.000 Okay, well, in just a second, we will get to some things I like and some things that I hate, and also an amazing segment on MSNBC.

00:32:22.000 But for all of that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

00:32:25.000 So for $9.99 a month, you can get your subscription to Daily Wire.

00:32:27.000 That means you get my show live.

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00:32:32.000 You get all of those live.

00:32:33.000 You get to be part of my mailbag tomorrow, so you get to ask all of your questions, and you get to see all of our exclusive videos.

00:32:41.000 And all of our subscriber offers.

00:32:42.000 And if you get the annual subscription, you also get this, the very greatest in all beverage vessels, the Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumbler.

00:32:48.000 Unparalleled.

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00:32:52.000 So, you know, if you are considering other tumblers, do not.

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00:32:57.000 So check that out.

00:32:57.000 If you just want to listen later, go over to SoundCloud, iTunes, Stitcher, any of the podcast apps will have our podcast.

00:33:05.000 Because, of course, we are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:33:14.000 All righty, so, in other news, the media are beginning to realize that they may be out over their skis on the Michael Wolff book. 0.55

00:33:22.000 So, Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury has turned out to be a load of trash, which we said, essentially, at the time. 0.98

00:33:28.000 It is a very juicy load of trash, but it is trash nonetheless. 0.94

00:33:31.000 And so, Michael Wolff, the author of Fire and Fury, which has now sold something like 2 million copies, is promoted at the Grammys by Hillary Clinton. 0.98

00:33:37.000 It's been promoted by every major media outlet.

00:33:40.000 It was treated as a serious work, even though it was completely fictionalized in parts, and it was basically as told by Steve Bannon.

00:33:47.000 Even Saturday Night Live, I think, rightly mocked Michael Wolff as sort of a Steve Bannon tool in writing Fire and Fury.

00:33:54.000 Well, Michael Wolff appears on MSNBC this morning—this is earlier this morning—and Wolff had implied over the last couple of weeks that Nikki Haley was having an affair with President Trump. 0.67

00:34:04.000 Like, this was the actual implication, which is just ridiculous.

00:34:08.000 There's no evidence of that whatsoever.

00:34:09.000 And finally, finally, Mika Brzezinski has had enough, and here's how that goes.

00:34:13.000 Wait, are you suggesting that the language is not ambiguous in any way in the things that you've said and the way you've stated it?

00:34:21.000 Are you kidding?

00:34:22.000 You're on the set of Morning Joe.

00:34:24.000 We don't BS here.

00:34:27.000 Read me the language.

00:34:29.000 Are you kidding me?

00:34:30.000 I'm not reading you anything.

00:34:31.000 If you don't get it, if you don't get what we're talking about, I'm sorry.

00:34:35.000 This is awkward.

00:34:37.000 You're here on the set with us, but we're done.

00:34:39.000 Michael Wolff, thank you.

00:34:40.000 We're going to go to break now.

00:34:42.000 So Brzezinski throws him off the set because it's sexist. 0.94

00:34:44.000 Everything about Nikki Haley is sexist, but implying that Trump is a crazy person, all of that was totally in bounds, and the spirit of it was true.

00:34:50.000 Mika Brzezinski two weeks ago said that Michael Wolff's book has problems, but the spirit of the book is true. 0.89

00:34:56.000 This is the problem with building up crazy people like Michael Wolff?

00:34:59.000 The problem with building up bad sources like Michael Wolff? 0.86

00:35:01.000 OK, the reality is that Michael Wolff is a smear merchant.

00:35:05.000 He always was a smear merchant.

00:35:06.000 And one of the funniest things of the day is watching Michael Wolff go after—he is.

00:35:11.000 He's now going after Mika Brzezinski.

00:35:12.000 He's actually tweeting out—he tweeted out earlier today, quote, 0.73

00:35:24.000 Now remember, the President of the United States said that Mika was a liar and that she had come to him with a bloody face and he didn't want her at his event because her face was bloody.

00:35:33.000 Trump went after Mika Hart.

00:35:34.000 Now Michael Wolff, who was built up by Mika Brzezinski, is very, very angry.

00:35:37.000 He says, the last time I was on Morning Joe off camera, Joe and Mika eager to gossip about who Trump might be sleeping with.

00:35:43.000 He said it would really be hard to gossip more eagerly off camera than Mika and Joe gossip.

00:35:48.000 So, this snake in the grass, this is the problem of letting a snake into your house.

00:35:51.000 Eventually, he's going to bite you, and that's exactly what happened to Mika Brzezinski.

00:35:55.000 So, Mika's getting all sorts of plaudits.

00:35:56.000 She did the right thing here, obviously.

00:35:58.000 But, why was it that for literally weeks, Mika and the rest of the media were building up Michael Wolff?

00:36:04.000 And this just shows, you know, there are two types of bias in the media.

00:36:07.000 Bias number one in the media is the notion that you can bias a story. 0.65

00:36:15.000 That a story comes through and you read it in the most ridiculous possible sense, in the most anti-conservative possible sense.

00:36:22.000 That's one form of bias.

00:36:23.000 The other form of bias is to have on a series of guests

00:36:26.000 Who will all do that for you?

00:36:27.000 So having Michael Wolff on MSNBC is one example of this.

00:36:30.000 Another example of this, Ellen DeGeneres just had on Michelle Obama. 1.00

00:36:33.000 Why is Michelle Obama on with Ellen DeGeneres? 1.00

00:36:36.000 Why is she relevant?

00:36:37.000 The answer is she's not, right?

00:36:38.000 She's not launching a new program.

00:36:40.000 She's not doing anything important.

00:36:42.000 She's just doing her first interview since she left the White House.

00:36:44.000 But here's what Michelle Obama said, and this came out this morning, quote,

00:36:56.000 And that's what she told DeGeneres when asked what advice she would give to people who find the world to be a scary place right now.

00:37:01.000 She said, I would just encourage your viewers, the country, to do the things we do every day, to love each other, to take care of each other, to show empathy.

00:37:06.000 And you can't do that only when people make you feel good or safe.

00:37:09.000 We've got to do it all across the board.

00:37:23.000 We have to be an open-hearted nation.

00:37:25.000 That's who we are.

00:37:25.000 So, this is another form of bias to have on Michelle Obama to just lecture us pap about empathy.

00:37:32.000 By the way, I've said many times before, empathy in politics is poison.

00:37:36.000 Sympathy is useful.

00:37:37.000 Empathy is wrong.

00:37:38.000 The reason empathy is wrong is because when you put yourself in somebody's shoes, you're immediately taking yourself out of everyone else's shoes.

00:37:44.000 If you have empathy for one person, that means that you are feeling what that person is feeling, but you're not feeling what the other 300 million people in the country are feeling.

00:37:51.000 Making policy should not be based on empathy.

00:37:53.000 And it is telling, the sort of language Michelle Obama uses, where the good things that we do, we show empathy, we care for each other.

00:38:00.000 Those are not good things that we do.

00:38:01.000 Those may be good things that we feel, but the good things that we do actually have to have good benefits, right?

00:38:05.000 I mean, if you're going to do something good, you have to benefit somebody.

00:38:08.000 But it's all intent and no delivery for so many folks on the left.

00:38:13.000 But this is just another form of bias.

00:38:14.000 Another form of bias.

00:38:15.000 Jimmy Kimmel.

00:38:17.000 All right.

00:38:34.000 The idea that—would Jimmy Kimmel ever have me on?

00:38:36.000 Ever?

00:38:37.000 In a million years?

00:38:38.000 Our listenership is about the same size as Pod Save America's, by the way, because we broadcast more often.

00:38:41.000 So we have the same number of listeners in aggregate that Pod Save America does.

00:38:45.000 Would they even in a million years consider having me on to talk about State of the Union on Jimmy Kimmel?

00:38:49.000 The answer, of course, is no.

00:38:50.000 But they'll have on people who are just as partisan—I'd say more partisan than I am.

00:38:53.000 I mean, I'll hit Trump when I think he's wrong.

00:38:55.000 The Pod Save America guys,

00:38:57.000 I think they actually have a shrine to Barack Obama, and every so often they open up the curtains and they light candles in front of that shrine.

00:39:04.000 It's pretty insane.

00:39:05.000 They were on Jimmy Kimmel the night of the State of the Union address to analyze Trump's State of the Union address.

00:39:10.000 Again, bias inaction.

00:39:11.000 And then, you know, Kimmel demonstrates his own bias because he decides that it's time for him to push again.

00:39:16.000 I don't know who died and made Jimmy Kimmel the moral authority in the country.

00:39:20.000 I mean, the guy who used to have women grab his shorts and tell him what was in his pants on The Man Show.

00:39:27.000 Honestly, I feel bad saying all this stuff. 0.99

00:39:28.000 Like, I've hit Jimmy Kimmel so many times, but it's his own damn fault. 0.79

00:39:31.000 I mean, he feels like a nice person. 0.98

00:39:33.000 And I know a lot of people who know Jimmy Kimmel.

00:39:34.000 He's a really nice, genuine fellow.

00:39:36.000 And I feel like he'd be a good guy to hang out with. 0.84

00:39:39.000 But this idea that he knows anything about politics or that he's a moral authority is really ridiculous.

00:39:43.000 He can have his opinion.

00:39:45.000 But once he gives his opinion, then I get to knock him for his opinion, because his opinion is just wrong in many of these cases, because it's not based on the facts.

00:39:51.000 So in any case, he does a shtick about how

00:39:57.000 Dreamers ought to be let in the country, and Obama was nice, and Trump is cruel.

00:40:01.000 Never mind the fact that Trump is about to let in three times as many dreamers as Obama ever was.

00:40:05.000 He's about to legalize that many dreamers.

00:40:07.000 So, Kimmel decides that he's going to do this routine where he has a bunch of people who oppose DACA meet a dreamer family.

00:40:13.000 He's going to have a bunch of people who oppose DACA meet a dreamer family. 0.53

00:40:15.000 And this is how, again, talk about bias in the media, this is it in spades.

00:40:19.000 This is Esmeralda, and this is her daughter, Rose.

00:40:23.000 And, uh, Esmeralda came here.

00:40:25.000 How old were you when you came to this country?

00:40:26.000 I was two.

00:40:28.000 You were two years old.

00:40:29.000 Parents brought you here from where?

00:40:30.000 Mexico City.

00:40:31.000 From Mexico City.

00:40:32.000 Yes.

00:40:33.000 You have a baby now.

00:40:34.000 Yes.

00:40:35.000 And you are a DACA recipient.

00:40:38.000 You signed up.

00:40:39.000 You did a background check.

00:40:41.000 Yes.

00:40:41.000 You were fingerprinted.

00:40:43.000 You have a job?

00:40:44.000 Yes.

00:40:44.000 You pay taxes?

00:40:45.000 Yes.

00:40:46.000 You go to nursing school?

00:40:47.000 Yes.

00:40:48.000 How many of you think it would be right for Esmeralda to be sent back to Mexico, a country that she's never known?

00:40:55.000 OK.

00:40:56.000 And the idea here is to show how mean these guys are.

00:40:57.000 And of course, two of the people who are there are wearing Trump hats, right?

00:41:01.000 One is wearing a hat that says, make California great again.

00:41:04.000 And another one is wearing a hat that says, make America great again.

00:41:07.000 And, of course, it's two white guys who kind of look slovenly. 0.99

00:41:10.000 And this is the idea, that it's a bunch of racists who want to do this, and then a woman who's raising her hand as well.

00:41:14.000 There's a black woman in the audience who's not raising her hand, and two other women.

00:41:17.000 So the females are the moral voices in this panel. 1.00

00:41:19.000 Now, you can point out that there are Dreamers who—listen, would I send Esmerelda back? 0.99

00:41:25.000 I wouldn't.

00:41:26.000 I mean, so long as she's of benefit to the American society.

00:41:28.000 But you can be in favor of a policy and still know that there are sympathetic people who may be hurt by the policy.

00:41:36.000 And that happens all the time.

00:41:38.000 I'm in favor, for example, of getting rid of Obamacare.

00:41:40.000 Are there people who benefit from Obamacare?

00:41:42.000 Clearly there are some people who benefit from Obamacare.

00:41:44.000 Am I in favor of getting rid of Obamacare?

00:41:46.000 I am.

00:41:46.000 And the reason I'm in favor of getting rid of Obamacare is because I think that over the broad swath of human beings, it will be better for America to get rid of Obamacare than to maintain Obamacare.

00:41:55.000 But this is the way the media biases the cases.

00:41:57.000 Like, would they ever do this with a bunch of people from sanctuary cities?

00:42:00.000 Like, would Jimmy Kimmel ever have a bunch of left-wing activists from San Francisco sit there and talk to the families that Donald Trump mentioned during the State of the Union address?

00:42:08.000 Ever?

00:42:09.000 Would that ever happen? 0.72

00:42:10.000 Would he ever just have the two families—remember, there are the two black families whose daughters were murdered by an illegal immigrant? 0.99

00:42:17.000 Would he ever have those families confront people who are fans of Sanctuary Cities?

00:42:20.000 Of course not.

00:42:21.000 Of course not.

00:42:22.000 This sort of media bias is what frustrates so many people on the right.

00:42:24.000 And it's what, I think, wrongly allows them to engage in reactionary politics where they say that all news is fake news or deride anything the media ever say.

00:42:33.000 But when members of the media do this routine, particularly members of the cultural media do this,

00:42:37.000 It makes us all nuts.

00:42:38.000 And it should make us all nuts.

00:42:40.000 Because it's sad to say, but Jimmy Fallon, who's the most apolitical of the hosts, has fallen in the ratings specifically because he is the most apolitical of the hosts.

00:42:47.000 Because left-wingers are now tuning into Jimmy Kimmel to get their feel-good moment for their leftist politics in a way that they are not for Jimmy Fallon.

00:42:54.000 I'm not a fan of either Kimmel or Fallon.

00:42:56.000 In fact, I think Kimmel is funnier than Fallon.

00:42:59.000 But I think that apolitical comedy is

00:43:02.000 Is going by the wayside here, and that's simply too bad.

00:43:05.000 So again, I think this is just more evidence of a media that's biased.

00:43:11.000 They set up situations deliberately in order to achieve certain results.

00:43:14.000 I talked about this a little bit on Dave Rubin's show with Jordan Peterson yesterday.

00:43:18.000 What the media do in order to gain results, and that's why people like me, people like Jordan, people like Sam Harris, we may all disagree on politics, but if we refuse to accept the bait that the media are presenting, if we refuse to acknowledge the situation that the media are putting us in in order to try and drive us to a certain conclusion, we're seen as outliers.

00:43:36.000 And this is, I think, why there are so many people who listen to us.

00:43:39.000 The media setup routine is getting old, and I think most people know it.

00:43:42.000 Okay, time for a couple of things I like, and then some things that I hate.

00:43:47.000 Let's do a thing I like.

00:43:48.000 So we're doing Bach this week.

00:43:49.000 One of the great pieces of music of all time, of course, the St.

00:43:52.000 Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach.

00:43:55.000 One of the wonderful things about Bach is Bach was a deeply, deeply religious guy, and that comes through in his music.

00:44:02.000 One of the things that is fascinating, again, I just read this Brahms biography.

00:44:06.000 I'm now in the middle of that Bach biography that I told you about.

00:44:08.000 One of the things that's fascinating is that Bach thought that there was a system to music.

00:44:12.000 He thought that there was a natural

00:44:15.000 Yeah.

00:44:32.000 It's because this was basically the idea of the founding fathers, that natural law, natural rights were things that you could derive from nature, right?

00:44:38.000 There are self-evident truths in government, and there are self-evident truths when it comes to music.

00:44:41.000 And Bach felt this, Brahms felt this, Beethoven felt this, Mozart felt this, all the greatest musicians in history felt this.

00:44:47.000 Because we moved away from that notion that there's an objective musical truth out there that can be discovered and accessed, and toward the idea that all music is subjective, music has gotten significantly worse.

00:44:57.000 It is impossible to listen to St.

00:44:58.000 Matthew's Passion and then listen to pop music and think that there is no objective difference between the two. 0.99

00:45:03.000 There is a very large objective difference between the two, and anybody who doesn't believe that, anybody who thinks all art is equivalent, that all art is of equal quality or equal genius or equal beauty, those people are fools. 0.96

00:45:14.000 Again, here's St. 0.98

00:45:15.000 Matthew Passion by Bach.

00:45:19.000 Let's go.

00:45:40.000 We're good.

00:46:02.000 It's just an amazing piece.

00:46:03.000 It's very long.

00:46:04.000 It's a couple of hours, St.

00:46:05.000 Matthew Passion, but it's an incredible piece of music. 0.93

00:46:08.000 Okay, time from the sublime to the ridiculous. 0.96

00:46:10.000 Time to do some things that I hate. 0.94

00:46:12.000 So...

00:46:16.000 Thing that I hate, number one.

00:46:17.000 Numero uno. 0.95

00:46:18.000 So, Tommy Lahren, who was ousted from Blaze after she went on The View and talked about why pro-life people were basically stupid, and now she is on Sean Hannity's show, where she gives her final thoughts, which I think is an apt description of her segment, Final Thoughts.

00:46:33.000 So I think she, in any case, Tommy, I think Tommy's a nice person. 0.57

00:46:37.000 I've met Tommy.

00:46:38.000 I think that

00:46:39.000 You know, maybe she's trying, but this is not good.

00:46:43.000 Okay, so Tommy was giving her response to Joe Kennedy's response to the State of the Union address, and here is what she came up with. 0.95

00:46:53.000 If you haven't yet had the displeasure of watching that little little response to President Trump's State of the Union, I suggest you take some Pepto-Bismol or some Midol or whatever you need to do to get through it because it was pathetic and it was embarrassing. 0.97

00:47:07.000 Oh my God. 0.97

00:47:08.000 OK, so she's going after him, she calls him a limp bleep, and then she also said something about how he was a ginger or something.

00:47:16.000 I mean, this idea that Tommy Lahren is some sort of thought leader for conservatives should be humiliating to conservatives.

00:47:23.000 I'm sorry, Tommy Lahren is not a thought leader for conservatives.

00:47:26.000 Tommy Lahren is a pretty woman, a beautiful woman, who says things. 0.84

00:47:31.000 I mean, that's it.

00:47:33.000 That's it.

00:47:50.000 Otherwise, we're not having arguments, we're just insulting each other.

00:47:53.000 And it's just, I hate this kind of stuff.

00:47:54.000 I really, really do.

00:47:55.000 I think that, you know, listen, I'll drop insulting language every so often, but nothing of that magnitude.

00:48:01.000 And I attempt to support my arguments not with insults, but with actual data.

00:48:07.000 Conservatives, if you're a young conservative and you're looking for somebody to look up to, I'm not saying you have to look up to me.

00:48:12.000 You don't.

00:48:12.000 There are plenty of people to look up to.

00:48:13.000 All I'm saying is that

00:48:15.000 You should probably steer away from the people who do this kind of stuff.

00:48:18.000 Just read a book.

00:48:19.000 It's just—it's not worthwhile.

00:48:21.000 Okay, other things that I hate.

00:48:22.000 So, apparently, there was an immigrant group that decided to watch Trump's State of the Union address, and to demonstrate their cultural sensitivity, I guess, they decided to throw shoes at the wall. 0.96

00:48:34.000 This is what it looked like.

00:48:51.000 It's so funny, you see, because they're throwing shoes.

00:48:52.000 You get it?

00:48:53.000 Because they're, like, throwing shoes.

00:48:54.000 Now, what's funny about the throwing shoes thing is this is not an American thing, the throwing shoes thing.

00:48:57.000 I mean, like, there's no history of Americans throwing shoes at the wall when people speak.

00:49:03.000 The last time I remember somebody throwing a shoe was actually when George W. Bush was in Iraq and in the middle of a press conference, a guy threw a shoe at him and Bush ducked out of the way.

00:49:09.000 You remember that?

00:49:11.000 But this is, I think,

00:49:13.000 Demonstrative of the level of vitriol and anger that people hold against Trump and his policies.

00:49:18.000 Imagine if Republicans did this. 0.81

00:49:20.000 There'd be talk, when Obama was president, there'd be talk of they're promoting violence, they're promoting assassination, they're promoting actual physical harm toward the President of the United States.

00:49:29.000 People do this against Trump, and suddenly it's totally fine.

00:49:32.000 So vitriol exists on all sides, but it's only called out on one, and that's one of the places where I have a serious, serious problem.

00:49:39.000 Okay, final thing that I hate.

00:49:42.000 So, there's a great article by Katherine Kirsten over at Weekly Standard describing the social justice factory in the city of Edina.

00:49:50.000 So, Edina, Minnesota, has a public school district, and these public schools have now been unraveling academic rigor.

00:49:58.000 Why?

00:49:58.000 Because they're actually mandating that students read books like children, small children, read books like A is for Activist.

00:50:05.000 This is for tiny kids, like kids who are third graders.

00:50:08.000 A is for activist.

00:50:08.000 T, by the way, in that book is for trans, which is something you definitely want to be teaching seven-year-olds about.

00:50:14.000 And then they make posters with gay rights flags, and they make posters with police brutality and Black Lives Matter.

00:50:22.000 Apparently, according to the Weekly Standard, the shift began in 2013, when Adina school leaders adopted the All-for-All Strategy Plan, a sweeping initiative that reordered the district's mission from academic excellence for all students to racial equity.

00:50:35.000 Equity does not mean equality or fairness.

00:50:37.000 It means racial identity politics, an ideology that blames minority students' academic challenges on institutional racial bias, repudiates Martin Luther King's colorblind ideal, and focuses on uprooting white privilege.

00:50:49.000 So what did it do?

00:50:49.000 It mandated that henceforth, all teaching and learning experiences would be viewed through the lens of racial equity, and that only racially conscious teachers and administrators should be hired.

00:50:58.000 District leaders assured parents this would reduce ADINA's racial achievement gap, which they attributed to barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings.

00:51:05.000 Absolute nonsense, by the way.

00:51:07.000 That if you teach people about Black Lives Matter, it closes the racial gap.

00:51:09.000 There's no evidence of this whatsoever.

00:51:11.000 So now, they start teaching kids about white privilege in kindergarten.

00:51:15.000 So K-2 students participate in the melanin project.

00:51:19.000 Students trace their hands, color them to reflect their skin tone, and place the cutouts on a poster reading, stop thinking your skin color is better than everyone else's.

00:51:26.000 Everyone is special.

00:51:27.000 And then they have racially conscious elementary school principal who runs a blog for the school's community, and they put up pictures of protesters holding a banner proclaiming gay marriages are right. 0.99

00:51:36.000 I mean, this is just ridiculous. 0.98

00:51:38.000 Oh, happy, happy day. 0.95

00:51:39.000 How about, like, learning to read?

00:51:39.000 How about that?

00:51:40.000 And we're making kids useless before they even have a chance to become useful.

00:51:58.000 It's pretty amazing.

00:51:59.000 You wonder why the homeschooling movement is gaining steam.

00:52:01.000 This is one of the reasons that the homeschooling movement is gaining steam.

00:52:04.000 By the way, here's the data.

00:52:05.000 Four years into Adina's school's equity crusade, black students' test scores continue to disappoint.

00:52:10.000 There's been about a single positive point of data.

00:52:12.000 Black student reading scores for all grades have increased from 45.5% proficiency in 2014 to 46.4% proficiency in 2017.

00:52:21.000 So, just marginally, right?

00:52:23.000 Black students on track for success in reading decreased from 48% in 2014 to 44% in 2017.

00:52:26.000 Math scores decreased from 50% proficiency in 2014 to 47% proficiency in 2017.

00:52:28.000 Black students on track for success in math decreased from 51% in 2014 to 44% in 2017.

00:52:31.000 In high school, the scores dropped the most?

00:52:44.000 Math scores for black students in 11th grade at Adena Senior High dropped from 31% proficiency to 14% proficiency in 2017.

00:52:53.000 And in reading, in 10th grade at Adena, from 52% in 2014 to 40% in 2017.

00:52:59.000 So, well done everyone. 0.98

00:53:01.000 Valuing the stupidity of identity politics above the glory of learning, this is what you end up with. 0.99

00:53:06.000 No shock, parents are pulling their kids out of school. 1.00

00:53:08.000 If my kid were in that district, I'd pull my kid out of those schools as well.

00:53:11.000 All righty, well we will be back here tomorrow, presumably with more on MemoGate 2018.

00:53:16.000 The fight continues.

00:53:18.000 We'll be back here with all the updates.

00:53:19.000 I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 01, 2018

Memo Fight 2018! | Ep. 466

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