The Ben Shapiro Show - Mulling Over Mueller | Ep. 462

00:00:00.000 So, did President Trump try to fire Robert Mueller, and if so, does it matter?

00:00:03.000 Plus, the Trump administration rolls out its big immigration plan, and people on both sides are unhappy, and we'll go to the mailbag.

00:00:10.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:10.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:16.000 All righty, so here we are, and it's finally a Friday.

00:00:19.000 Time has moved so slowly that, let me remind you, the government shutdown ended on Monday.

00:00:24.000 Okay, blipolgate started 14 days ago.

00:00:28.000 We have now gone down to the water planet in Interstellar, where every hour is actually seven years of time, and we are stuck there because every day is at least 73 news cycles.

00:00:38.000 But the good news is that gives us a lot to talk about and we'll get to all of it first.

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00:01:44.000 Okay, so, the big breaking news of the day is, of course, this big New York Times report that back in June of 2017,

00:01:52.000 President Trump tried to fire Robert Mueller.

00:01:54.000 So according—Mueller.

00:01:55.000 I looked it up.

00:01:56.000 It's now—it's Mueller.

00:01:57.000 Okay, I've been getting it wrong for months.

00:01:58.000 It's Mueller.

00:01:58.000 Okay, so Robert Mueller is, of course, the special investigator who was appointed in June 2017 after President Trump fired James Comey and then after he used Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the process of doing it, forcing Rosenstein to recuse himself in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation and turn the whole thing over to a special investigator.

00:02:16.000 Jeff Sessions did not protect Trump because he'd recused himself.

00:02:19.000 Rosenstein didn't protect Trump because he had to recuse himself because of the Comey firing.

00:02:23.000 And now it looks as though Mueller, as I've been saying for at least several weeks, is moving from collusion to obstruction.

00:02:30.000 Now, the problem with the obstruction of justice case is that in order to actually say that somebody has obstructed justice, you actually need to fulfill one of three laws.

00:02:37.000 And I've gone through the three laws a couple of times, explaining what exactly these three laws mean, because there are three different statutes.

00:02:46.000 Let's go through them again, because I think that we need to have this clear in our mind.

00:02:49.000 When people say that some sort of criminal activity went forward, or that Robert Mueller is going to get Trump, there's two ways to get Trump.

00:02:55.000 One is to hit him so hard politically the Democrats have a reason to impeach.

00:02:58.000 And the other is to actually suggest criminal obstruction of justice.

00:03:01.000 As I say,

00:03:02.000 There are three types of obstruction of justice under the U.S.

00:03:05.000 law.

00:03:05.000 18 U.S.

00:03:06.000 Code 1503.

00:03:06.000 I'm going through this background again.

00:03:08.000 We did it a little earlier this week, but I think it's important.

00:03:10.000 The Omnibus Clause covers corruptly or by any threatening letter or communication influencing or impeding or endeavoring to influence, obstruct or impede the due administration of justice.

00:03:20.000 So the clause requires a pending judicial proceeding.

00:03:22.000 So that means that Trump would presume, like, an FBI investigation isn't enough.

00:03:25.000 It would be him trying to bribe a prosecutor or something.

00:03:29.000 The Supreme Court is pretty exacting on the application of the law.

00:03:32.000 The prosecutor would actually need to prove that Trump's conduct materially impeded the investigation.

00:03:37.000 Even James Comey said when he was fired afterward that Trump did not materially impede the investigation.

00:03:41.000 So if it is true that Trump tried to fire Robert Mueller, the special investigator, then that still is not materially impeding the investigation.

00:03:48.000 So this part of the code is probably not being fulfilled.

00:03:50.000 So there are a few questions about this.

00:03:52.000 One, is an FBI investigation an official proceeding?

00:04:03.000 Two, you actually have to prove criminal intent.

00:04:05.000 You have to prove that Trump wanted to impede the investigation.

00:04:07.000 Now, this would be the area of the code where Trump would be in the most trouble.

00:04:11.000 But you also have to show that you took a substantial step toward the accomplishment of that goal, toward an accomplishment of an attempt to obstruct justice.

00:04:17.000 I'm not sure that that's fulfillable because, again, even if Trump wanted to fire Mueller, and even if you think that would constitute obstruction, he withdrew that.

00:04:24.000 He didn't actually fire Mueller.

00:04:25.000 And when he fired Comey, he had every right to do that.

00:04:27.000 You can fire your FBI director for any reason whatsoever.

00:04:31.000 So the idea that that is technical obstruction of justice is pretty weak.

00:04:34.000 It would be very difficult to convict Trump in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion, there is a different problem, right?

00:04:39.000 So here is the story from the New York Times.

00:04:41.000 With all that in mind, with the fact that there is a section of the U.S.

00:04:44.000 Code that theoretically might be applied against Trump, maybe, although you'd have to explain why it is that he doesn't have the executive authority just to fire

00:04:52.000 Fire Mueller or fire Comey for any reason at all.

00:04:55.000 Obstruction of justice, by the way, by a president would look not like him firing somebody and then letting the investigation continue.

00:05:01.000 It would look more like him going to Robert Mueller and saying, you will find me innocent or I will fire you.

00:05:06.000 Right?

00:05:06.000 Those are the two choices.

00:05:07.000 You will find me innocent or I will fire you.

00:05:09.000 That would be obstruction of justice.

00:05:10.000 For him just to say, I don't like this investigation.

00:05:12.000 It bothers me.

00:05:13.000 You're fired.

00:05:14.000 Not quite sure that that is obstruction of justice, particularly if the investigation continues afterward.

00:05:18.000 Anyway, the New York Times broke this story.

00:05:20.000 So they say, back in June 2017, as it became clear that special counsel Robert Mueller was looking for a pattern of possible obstruction of justice in Trump's behavior, Trump ordered Mueller fired.

00:05:28.000 He only retracted the order when White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to quit.

00:05:32.000 So according to the Times report, Trump said that Mueller had a bunch of different conflicts of interest.

00:05:35.000 And you can tell that this report is probably true because of what Trump said was the conflict of interest.

00:05:40.000 That is not a conflict of interest. 0.93

00:05:41.000 Again, that's silly.

00:05:57.000 Again, that is not really a thing.

00:06:00.000 Law firms represent lots of people.

00:06:03.000 If Mueller didn't work on that case, it probably wouldn't matter.

00:06:07.000 Plus, if you're talking conflicts of interest, Trump was interviewing Mueller as a possible FBI director before Mueller took the special counsel job.

00:06:14.000 Finally, Trump said Mueller had been up for the FBI director position before he was appointed special counsel.

00:06:19.000 It's unclear why that would actually be a conflict of interest.

00:06:21.000 OK, fine.

00:06:21.000 So the Times reports, after receiving the president's order to fire Mueller, the White House counsel, Don McGahn, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead.

00:06:31.000 They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified.

00:06:34.000 Discussing a continued investigation, McGahn disagreed with the president's case and told senior White House officials that firing Mueller would have a catastrophic effect on Mr. Trump's presidency.

00:06:43.000 Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own.

00:06:47.000 The president then backed off.

00:06:48.000 That, of course, was true. 0.99

00:06:49.000 Trump has been threatening to fire Sessions for over a year, has not fired him.

00:06:54.000 Trump has been threatening to fire—he's threatened to fire McGahn before.

00:06:57.000 He's threatened to fire everybody.

00:06:58.000 But the truth is that Trump really doesn't fire anyone.

00:07:00.000 Mike Flynn resigned.

00:07:01.000 He wasn't actually fired.

00:07:03.000 So why does this matter?

00:07:05.000 Number one, it's not what the left cracks it up to be.

00:07:07.000 So he didn't actually fire Mueller.

00:07:08.000 If he had fired Mueller, then we'd be talking about obstruction of justice.

00:07:11.000 It would look like the Saturday Night Massacre.

00:07:13.000 The Saturday Night Massacre going all the way back to 1973 with Watergate is when there was a special investigator, Archibald Cox, who was called in to look at Watergate.

00:07:20.000 And Trump asked his attorney general to fire Archibald Cox.

00:07:24.000 The Attorney General refused, and so Trump fired the Attorney General.

00:07:27.000 Sorry, Nixon, yes.

00:07:28.000 This would be Nixon back in 1973.

00:07:29.000 So, here is the... So, obviously, that's not happening here.

00:07:34.000 He didn't fire Mueller.

00:07:34.000 He didn't fire his Attorney General.

00:07:36.000 He didn't fire Rosenstein.

00:07:37.000 He didn't fire Sessions.

00:07:38.000 He hasn't fired anybody, right?

00:07:40.000 But here's what Mueller is going to do.

00:07:42.000 He's going to put together the following facts, and he's going to say, or he could say, that this is an attempt to obstruct justice, that Trump is attempting to skew the investigation.

00:07:50.000 So, here are all the things Trump has done. 1.00

00:07:52.000 And they're equally explicable by stupidity. 1.00

00:07:55.000 As always, I tend to believe the Trump is being an idiot, not Trump is being nefarious story, because I think that mostly Trump is being an idiot, not nefarious. 1.00

00:08:02.000 So, here are all the things Trump has done. 1.00

00:08:04.000 First, he fired National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.

00:08:06.000 Trump implied that that was prompted by Flynn lying to the FBI.

00:08:10.000 Then, he reportedly asked FBI Director Comey to lay off of Flynn.

00:08:14.000 Now, if he asked him to lay off of Flynn knowing that he had already lied to the FBI, is that obstruction of justice?

00:08:19.000 Not clearly, because he obviously didn't take any measures against Comey from February all the way until May, right?

00:08:25.000 And Comey continued to offer Flynn.

00:08:27.000 The president then fired Comey and acknowledged publicly it had to do with the Russia investigation.

00:08:31.000 But he was saying at the time that it wasn't because he wanted to stop the investigation.

00:08:35.000 It's because he is innocent and Comey wouldn't say openly that he was innocent.

00:08:39.000 OK, the president then had a continuous stream of invective against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for accusing himself on Russia again.

00:08:44.000 Is that obstruction of justice?

00:08:45.000 Not really.

00:08:46.000 The president attacked Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, attacked Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and now the president's apparent attempt to fire Mueller.

00:08:55.000 Now, none of this amounts to legal obstruction, probably.

00:08:58.000 As I say, and as Alan Dershowitz has said, the president is the head of the executive branch.

00:09:02.000 The investigation has not been quieted in any way.

00:09:04.000 So whatever attempts were happening, it's hard to prove attempt when there was no actual impeding of the investigation.

00:09:10.000 So that is point number one when it comes to this Mueller stuff.

00:09:14.000 But it's going to be used as the left as evidence that Trump actually wanted to shut down the investigation, and then he wasn't able to do it.

00:09:21.000 And then he failed in doing so.

00:09:23.000 But if he had had his druthers, he would have.

00:09:25.000 That's going to be part of this broader suggestion by the left that Trump is trying to obstruct justice, even if there's no hard proof that Trump is trying to obstruct justice.

00:09:33.000 And the more plausible case is that Trump is just pissed these people won't say he's innocent, and so he's mouthing off a lot, which I've been saying for months is my read on the situation.

00:09:41.000 OK, so in just a second, I'm going to explain another scandal that is afoot.

00:09:46.000 And that, of course, has to do with the FBI's treatment of Hillary Clinton.

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00:11:16.000 Okay, so With all of the Mueller stuff Blowing up the internet with all the Mueller stuff blowing up the the the TV and blowing up the New York Times and blowing up all the media Oh my god, he thought about doing something.

00:11:29.000 They didn't do it, which again seems not supremely scandalous to me

00:11:33.000 There is something that is supremely scandalous.

00:11:35.000 There are new texts between those anti-Trump FBI agents.

00:11:38.000 And one of the reasons that people don't trust the FBI, they don't trust the intel community on Trump, is because of this sort of stuff.

00:11:43.000 On Thursday night, Senator Chuck Grassley released seven pages of texts between FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok and his FBI paramour Lisa Page.

00:11:51.000 Those texts

00:11:52.000 Show that both Strzok and Page were interested in letting Hillary Clinton off the hook so as to earn the FBI's goodwill with the presumed next president.

00:11:58.000 So here's what the actual text said.

00:12:00.000 Page wrote to Strzok on February 25, 2016.

00:12:02.000 This is before the interview with Hillary Clinton.

00:12:14.000 The obvious implication, go easy on Hillary. 1.00

00:12:16.000 She might be the president, and then she might get angry at the FBI for having interviewed her in nasty fashion.

00:12:21.000 And Strzok wrote back, agreed.

00:12:22.000 I called the FBI counterintelligence head, Bill Priestap, and relayed what we discussed.

00:12:26.000 He agrees.

00:12:26.000 I will email you.

00:12:27.000 And redacted.

00:12:29.000 And someone else whose name is redacted.

00:12:31.000 Another one of the texts, from Page to Strzok, suggested that then-FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki thought that the FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who is still on the job, should recuse himself from the Clinton matter because of his wife's relationship with Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.

00:12:44.000 Right?

00:12:44.000 McCabe has recused himself.

00:12:47.000 Has he recused himself?

00:12:48.000 He eventually did.

00:12:49.000 He recused himself from the Clinton stuff like a week before the election, but he should have done it months before.

00:12:53.000 Apparently, Page wrote, quote, So Grassley wrote a letter to the FBI's current director, Christopher Wray, quote, So all this is really damning stuff.

00:12:59.000 For all the talk about how the FBI is crystal clear, transparent, absolutely clean,

00:13:22.000 For all of the talk about that, that is just not the case.

00:13:25.000 It's just not the case.

00:13:26.000 Now, does that mean that there's an FBI deep state coup to take down Trump?

00:13:30.000 No, the evidence isn't all there of that.

00:13:31.000 Especially because there isn't a countervailing text message from Strzok to Page saying he didn't want to be staffed on the Mueller investigation because he thought there was no there there.

00:13:39.000 I think that Chris Wallace is basically correct when he says that we're not there on the deep state coup.

00:13:43.000 Here's what Wallace said on Fox News.

00:13:46.000 Apparently, here is the Inspector General.

00:13:48.000 We only found out about this in the last week, and the Inspector General was able to come up with it.

00:13:52.000 So, again, look, there's a lot of things that are troubling.

00:13:56.000 There are a lot of questions to ask.

00:13:57.000 I fully agree that we need to pursue all of this.

00:14:00.000 I'm not sure that talking about deep state coups against the President, or corruption at the highest levels of the FBI, I'm not quite sure we're there yet.

00:14:08.000 Okay, and I think that's probably correct.

00:14:10.000 That's why I've been saying, just wait.

00:14:13.000 Just wait.

00:14:13.000 You know, hold it in abeyance.

00:14:15.000 There will be evidence that comes out on some of this stuff, but every time everybody jumps ahead of the story, it comes back to bite them, right?

00:14:20.000 Ron Johnson being the case in point, the senator from Wisconsin who had been talking about a secret society inside the FBI, and then yesterday he had to admit that maybe the secret society stuff was just a joke.

00:14:29.000 Senator, this text message seems to be a comment about secret society was unjust.

00:14:34.000 Do you agree that it appears to be it was unjust?

00:14:36.000 It's a real possibility.

00:14:38.000 Thank y'all.

00:14:38.000 Okay, so that seems to be a big step down from the notion that we were all going to find out that there was this big deep state coup happening against the Trump administration.

00:14:49.000 And now, with all that said, there's a way to jump in the other direction too.

00:14:52.000 So Shep Smith over on Fox News, who's made a bit of a cottage industry lately in quote-unquote debunking his other Fox News colleagues,

00:14:58.000 He's very upset about the Devin Nunes memo.

00:15:00.000 So, you remember, Devin Nunes is the head of the House Intelligence Committee, and he wrote up a four-page memo talking about improprieties inside the intelligence agencies that he thinks discredit a lot of what's happening in the Trump-Russia collusion investigation.

00:15:12.000 Now, that memo's been made available to all the members of the House.

00:15:15.000 Democrats are saying it's a politically driven memo.

00:15:17.000 Republicans are saying that it's pretty damning.

00:15:19.000 The DOJ is saying that

00:15:21.000 He hasn't even looked at the underlying classified documents, but they want to redact it before it's released.

00:15:25.000 Andy McCarthy, over at National Review, has been really good on all of this scandal-driven stuff.

00:15:30.000 He has a very good piece over at National Review talking about the Nunes memo and basically saying, listen, there's nothing inherently wrong with Devin Nunes writing a memo.

00:15:38.000 Maybe it's partisan, maybe it's not.

00:15:39.000 That's why it's good for the American public to see it.

00:15:41.000 And as for the notion that the DOJ hasn't gotten to review it and they're very upset about it, in order for this memo to be declassified, the President of the United States first has to sign off on it.

00:15:50.000 There's like a five-day delay mechanism specifically to allow the President to allow the DOJ to take a look at it, and then Trump can veto any attempt to declassify this material.

00:16:00.000 So it really isn't quite as corrupt as some people are making it out to be the memo.

00:16:03.000 Now it may turn out that it's just Newton's attempt to distract from the Trump-Russia collusion

00:16:08.000 This memo, from which there—if there is a basis for it to be released, the Trump administration and its people could have done that.

00:16:13.000 They've asked to see it.

00:16:14.000 He won't even let them see it.

00:16:15.000 It seems to be a classic weapon of mass distraction.

00:16:34.000 Okay, and of course the left was cheering this weapon of mass distraction.

00:16:38.000 His own friends are going around talking about how this is a weapon, about how the memo is, Shep Smith's own friends at Fox News are talking about how the memo is the end of the world, and here's Shep Smith debunking them.

00:16:51.000 What a hero.

00:16:51.000 You know, I think everybody's jumping to conclusions a little bit too quickly.

00:16:55.000 Okay, in other news.

00:16:57.000 The economy continues to boom.

00:16:59.000 Story after story about companies offering bonuses, wage increases.

00:17:03.000 So in breaking news in literally the last couple of minutes, FedEx has now announced $3.2 billion in wage increases and bonuses.

00:17:10.000 This follows Starbucks announcing raises.

00:17:12.000 It's just Armageddon all over the place.

00:17:14.000 Remember, Nancy Pelosi said all of this was crumbs.

00:17:18.000 The Democrats continue to maintain that this was all the end of the world, that everyone was going to die from the tax cuts, and it turns out everything is going fine.

00:17:25.000 It turns out that the economy is doing just fine, and all of this was overblown, which is not a shock anyway.

00:17:32.000 None of it is really a shock, but it does demonstrate the bad faith in which so many members of Congress talk about politics.

00:17:38.000 Now, this is also breaking news today.

00:17:40.000 Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Democrat from California and a very motivated political actor, he said,

00:17:58.000 Thanks for having me.

00:18:13.000 Congress should not pass a law preventing the special counsel from being fired.

00:18:17.000 The special counsel works for the executive branch.

00:18:19.000 There is separations of power in our Constitution.

00:18:22.000 There is a way for Congress to check the president.

00:18:24.000 If the president gets rid of special counsel Mueller, and people in Congress think that's corrupt, and they think it's an attempt by Trump to get off the hook, they can impeach him.

00:18:32.000 That is the prescribed constitutional remedy for all of this.

00:18:36.000 It is not a remedy.

00:18:37.000 There is no prescribed constitutional remedy to the notion that the Congress is going to tell the president who he can and cannot fire.

00:18:44.000 If they don't like him firing Comey, they can impeach him.

00:18:46.000 If they don't like him firing Mueller, they can impeach him.

00:18:48.000 But this idea that Congress is going to step in and now Congress is going to dictate which executive branch officials can be fired by the president, that's foolishness because then that person is not a member of any branch.

00:18:57.000 The person can't be fired by the legislative branch.

00:18:59.000 The person can't be fired by the president.

00:19:01.000 So the person basically is in there for

00:19:03.000 Well, the Congress doesn't have the power to do that.

00:19:05.000 Congress doesn't have the ability to do that under the Constitution.

00:19:07.000 There is this separation of powers in the Constitution.

00:19:10.000 Like it or not, the President does have the power to do this.

00:19:12.000 And that's what happened with Archibald Cox.

00:19:14.000 Nixon did have the ability to fire Archibald Cox, at least through the Attorney General.

00:19:19.000 He had the ability to fire the Attorney General.

00:19:20.000 He then put in place Robert Bork, who took over and fired Archibald Cox.

00:19:24.000 He had the ability to do that.

00:19:25.000 And then he was going to be impeached, so he quit.

00:19:28.000 Right, so there are constitutional remedies for all of this, but changing the Constitution in order to give Congress more power over the President's ability to fire a special counsel seems like a foolish thing.

00:19:38.000 Now, what's funny is people are going nuts, just to return to the Mueller thing for a second, people are going much more nuts over the Mueller stuff, this new Mueller story, that Mueller was almost fired back in June, than they are over the struck page text, which clearly suggests that the FBI was thoroughly corrupt in the Hillary Clinton investigation.

00:19:52.000 That is, that I think is

00:19:55.000 Relatively insane.

00:19:56.000 Again, people are on my case because they're saying, well, you're saying that Trump didn't commit a crime, right?

00:20:00.000 I'm saying it's not a crime to consider firing someone and then not firing that person.

00:20:04.000 That's not actually a crime.

00:20:05.000 So if you're going to accuse somebody of a crime, you have to explain why it's a crime.

00:20:07.000 You can't just say it's criminal.

00:20:09.000 And the idea that this provides intent behind Trump for obstruction, you actually have to demonstrate how Trump attempted to obstruct.

00:20:16.000 Again, I have a hard time believing that Trump is attempting to obstruct when literally this investigation is on the front page of the newspapers every single day and has not been obstructed in any serious way, as even James Comey recognized.

00:20:28.000 So, again, I think that a lot of this is overblown, and I have a feeling a lot more information is going to come out that demonstrates that a lot of the particular

00:20:37.000 Okay, so in just a second, we are going to discuss—you know what?

00:20:43.000 Let's just—let's go to it right now.

00:20:44.000 So let's discuss the new immigration framework.

00:20:49.000 A new immigration framework.

00:20:51.000 This new immigration framework is ticking people off on both sides of the aisle.

00:20:55.000 So, on the one side, you have Democrats who are calling him a racist.

00:20:57.000 I received an email last night from one of these leftist interest groups talking about how it was just terrible that Trump was proposing this immigration proposal.

00:21:09.000 So let's go through the proposal.

00:21:10.000 What exactly is Trump proposing?

00:21:11.000 Let's start there.

00:21:12.000 On Thursday, the White House released a rundown on its new proposal regarding the handling of illegal immigrants originally protected under President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

00:21:21.000 That program mandated that illegal immigrants brought to the country as children through no fault of their own register with the government and, in return, receive papers allowing work authorization and freedom from deportation.

00:21:30.000 Now, Trump, in an attempt to push forward a deal with Democrats to avoid another government shutdown or to avoid this kind of fake deadline on March 5th,

00:21:39.000 He's put together his framework.

00:21:40.000 So here's his framework, and it's making people on the left crazy, and it's making people on the right crazy.

00:21:44.000 So it says, number one, there will be full amnesty for 1.8 million illegal immigrants.

00:21:48.000 Now remember, only 700,000 illegal immigrants were actually covered by DACA.

00:21:52.000 The way DACA worked is you had to register with the government.

00:21:54.000 You had to come forward, say, I'm an illegal immigrant, I've been here since I was a kid, and then the government gave you essentially a green card to work in the country and not be deported.

00:22:02.000 Trump is extending that out to 1.8 million illegal immigrants.

00:22:05.000 So he's almost tripling that number, which is insane.

00:22:08.000 Within 10 to 12 years, those illegal immigrants would become full citizens. 0.98

00:22:11.000 That number includes, as I say, both the 700,000 illegal immigrants, so-called dreamers who registered, and other dreamers who did not.

00:22:17.000 The White House is designing this because they say that this is a big concession to Democrats.

00:22:20.000 What do they want in return for this rather generous policy?

00:22:23.000 Well, they want $25 billion for a fund for the border wall, which presumably will never happen.

00:22:28.000 You can put a bunch of money in a fund,

00:22:30.000 If it doesn't get spent right away, then the government will just take it from there and use it somewhere else, like the Social Security Trust Fund.

00:22:35.000 Republicans would also theoretically receive an end to chain migration.

00:22:38.000 Now, chain migration is the leading way that new legal immigrants come into the United States.

00:22:42.000 So this is a significant limitation on legal immigration to the United States.

00:22:46.000 I think probably a smart move. 0.98

00:22:48.000 I think chain migration, the idea that you're here and you're great, therefore we have to bring your family in, is foolish. 0.82

00:22:53.000 Chain migration would still apply to people, and it would apply to people and their parents and their immediate minor children.

00:22:59.000 But

00:23:00.000 There is a caveat, and this is what a lot of immigration hawks are upset about.

00:23:03.000 They're saying that the delay in the revocation of chain migration means that something like 4 million new illegal immigrants will come into the country because of chain migration.

00:23:14.000 This is what Mark Krikorian points out.

00:23:16.000 He says that over the course of the next 20 years, because there's going to be grandfathered in, because Trump is not just saying chain migration ends today.

00:23:24.000 He's saying everybody who's on the wait list gets in.

00:23:26.000 That wait list right now is something like 17 years long.

00:23:29.000 The original immigration hawk proposal said that if you're on the waiting list and you're within a year of getting into the country, then you get to stay on the waiting list and you get to come into the country.

00:23:37.000 But if you're not, then we will just refund your fee and that will be the end of chain migration.

00:23:41.000 So no cousins, no uncles, no grandmothers, none of this stuff.

00:23:44.000 We're not going to let just random relatives of yours come into the country if they're a year out from even having their application considered.

00:23:50.000 That's not in this proposal.

00:23:51.000 This proposal says that if you're on the waitlist right now, then you are going to stay on the waitlist so another 4 million people will enter the country. 0.85

00:23:59.000 That's a pretty massive swath of legal immigration coming into the country.

00:24:02.000 The visa diversity lottery would also be ended.

00:24:04.000 Now, Krikorian has been on Twitter encouraging people to burn their MAGA hats, and he explains why.

00:24:10.000 Over at National Review, here's what he says.

00:24:17.000 He says, the White House has botched the DACA issue, cutting Bob Goodlatte's House bill off at the knees.

00:24:23.000 Bob Goodlatte's House bill limited legal immigration and making it more likely that there will either be no bill at all or that the final bill the president signs, which is guaranteed to be even weaker than this, will fatally demoralize Republican voters in November.

00:24:35.000 If the latter happens, the president will be well on the way to joining Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in the impeached but not removed club.

00:24:41.000 Now, that's possible.

00:24:42.000 It's possible that Trump is preemptively surrendering.

00:24:44.000 That's what a lot of people are saying on the right.

00:24:46.000 That there's a betrayal, and Trump is allowing two million illegal immigrants into the country, who are in the country now to get citizenship, plus another four million legal immigrants into the country, and this is Trump caving, and why would he give away this as his opening bargaining position?

00:25:01.000 The notion here is that Trump has given away that bargaining position.

00:25:03.000 What he should have said is, I'm willing to deport everyone.

00:25:05.000 Now Democrats come to the table so we can make a deal.

00:25:07.000 That would be a stronger bargaining position.

00:25:10.000 And that's possible.

00:25:12.000 That's possible.

00:25:13.000 And Democrats are already trying to rail against Trump, as I say, calling Trump a racist.

00:25:19.000 I got an email yesterday.

00:25:22.000 Again, I don't understand how legalizing 2 million illegal immigrants, most of whom are not white, is racist.

00:25:31.000 There's a group called Credo, I guess, which is Credo Action.

00:25:35.000 They sent out a letter yesterday.

00:25:37.000 It says,

00:25:45.000 I mean, talk about being disconnected from reality.

00:25:48.000 This proposal is like a Jeb Bush proposal.

00:25:50.000 It is a Marco Rubio proposal.

00:25:52.000 And they're calling it a white supremacist fantasy to say that you want to let 4 million additional immigrants into the country who are results of chain migration, and you want to legalize 2 million illegal immigrants who are currently here, and give them citizenship 10 to 12 years in.

00:26:04.000 That does not sound particularly racist.

00:26:07.000 This is why I think that people who are suggesting that Trump is negotiating badly here are actually getting it wrong.

00:26:11.000 So I've said yesterday, I don't think Trump is a good negotiator.

00:26:14.000 But I don't think this is a negotiation.

00:26:16.000 I don't.

00:26:17.000 I don't think Trump is putting out this proposal because he's actually hoping to reach a negotiated end point with Democrats.

00:26:22.000 I think Trump is putting out this proposal because he is posturing for public consumption.

00:26:26.000 He knows the Democrats are never going to make a deal with him.

00:26:28.000 He knows the Democrats will always call him racist.

00:26:30.000 He knows no matter what he says, the Democrats are going to suggest that he is a racist.

00:26:34.000 So if he came out and he negotiated the way Krikorian wants him to, and he said, listen, I will deport everyone.

00:26:39.000 Now negotiate with me.

00:26:40.000 Then not only would Democrats not negotiate with him, they would then say, well, you're a racist, and that's why you want to deport everyone. 0.94

00:26:46.000 And then come March 5th, Trump would have to reinstate DACA himself, and he'd look like a weakling and a racist. 0.80

00:26:52.000 Right, so Trump, or at least his team knows that.

00:26:55.000 And so I think they're doing something else.

00:26:56.000 I think they understand no deal is in the offing here.

00:26:58.000 There will be no deal.

00:26:59.000 All the people who are talking about a deal are crazy and they don't know what they're saying.

00:27:03.000 OK, so here's what I think is what's happening.

00:27:05.000 I think that Trump is posturing for public consumption.

00:27:08.000 He's trying to demonstrate how much love he has for illegal immigrants.

00:27:11.000 He's trying to demonstrate that he is not racist.

00:27:12.000 He's saying to Democrats, listen, I'm giving you not only what you want, but more than what you want.

00:27:16.000 And you still won't give me border security.

00:27:18.000 So obviously I'm not a racist.

00:27:20.000 I want to let a bunch of illegal immigrants stay. 1.00

00:27:22.000 I'm letting more illegal immigrants stay than Obama would have under DACA. 0.91

00:27:26.000 I'm letting all these people stay.

00:27:27.000 Even if they didn't apply, I'm letting them stay. 0.76

00:27:29.000 That's how much I care about illegal immigrants.

00:27:30.000 But I also care about border security.

00:27:32.000 And so here's what I want in return.

00:27:34.000 And Democrats are saying, no, we don't care about the Dreamers, so we will let them suffer. 1.00

00:27:38.000 And we would rather let them suffer than give you any sort of border security.

00:27:41.000 So this is political posturing by the president.

00:27:43.000 And I think that it's not particularly unwise political posturing by the president.

00:27:46.000 There are some members of his base who will remember this proposal.

00:27:49.000 But it is a good counter-talking point.

00:27:51.000 When Democrats say he's racist about immigration, it's pretty easy for him to say, listen,

00:27:55.000 I propose something more liberal than Barack Obama on immigration.

00:27:58.000 And Democrats turn that down because they hate the idea of a border wall that much.

00:28:02.000 They turn that down because they hate the idea of restricting our immigration system in any way.

00:28:06.000 So I think that this is all kabuki theater, in other words.

00:28:09.000 If you view it as kabuki theater, then Trump's proposal here is not a bad one.

00:28:12.000 If you view it as an opening bargaining position, then Trump's proposal is a bad one.

00:28:16.000 If you viewed it as a final negotiated position, I don't think it's the worst negotiated position in the world.

00:28:21.000 Most of the dreamers are going to stay anyway.

00:28:23.000 The idea there's going to be mass deportations was never true.

00:28:25.000 So it depends on the prism through which you are viewing this particular immigration proposal.

00:28:29.000 Are you viewing it as just a public relations ploy?

00:28:31.000 If so, it's smart. 0.99

00:28:33.000 If you're viewing it as an opening bargaining position, it's dumb, as Krikorian and Coulter point out.

00:28:38.000 And if you're viewing it as somewhere in between, it's sort of what Trump actually wants, it's not the worst proposal I've ever seen, but it is also not the Trumpian, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller immigration plan that everybody was promised back during the election cycle.

00:28:51.000 Okay, so in just a second, we are going to get to some things I like and some things I hate, and then we'll also get to the mailbag.

00:28:58.000 But first, you're going to have to subscribe.

00:28:59.000 So for $9.99 a month, you can go over to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.

00:29:03.000 When you do that, when you become a subscriber to dailywire.com, you get the rest of my show live, Clavin's show live, Noel's show live.

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00:29:12.000 In the next five minutes, we'll be doing the mailbag.

00:29:13.000 You get to ask me questions and make your life eminently better.

00:29:16.000 But not only that, on Tuesday, January 30th,

00:29:18.000 Our president is going to speak to the nation in his second State of the Union address.

00:29:22.000 President Trump speaking in front of the entire nation as the president.

00:29:24.000 It'll be wild.

00:29:25.000 And you should watch it with us here at The Daily Wire.

00:29:27.000 We are having a full-on watch party starting 8 p.m.

00:29:29.000 Eastern, 5 p.m.

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00:29:30.000 We'll be hanging out with you the whole time, leading up to, during, after the address.

00:29:34.000 We're going to do the red carpet.

00:29:35.000 It'll be great.

00:29:35.000 We're going to ask what people are wearing.

00:29:37.000 We'll be there for every wild hand gesture, all of the off-teleprompter remarks, and of course,

00:29:41.000 The hilarious rebuttal from Democrats.

00:29:42.000 You know what Democrats are using, by the way?

00:29:44.000 They're now using Joe Kennedy.

00:29:45.000 Joe Kennedy.

00:29:46.000 Right?

00:29:46.000 Like Bobby Kennedy's grandson.

00:29:48.000 And they're saying he's a rising star.

00:29:50.000 What's really fantastic, I have to say, about America, one of the great things about America, is that anyone can be president if your last name is Kennedy, Clinton, Bush, or Obama.

00:29:57.000 Or Trump, right?

00:29:58.000 If you have a famous last name, you can be president.

00:30:00.000 That's one thing I love.

00:30:02.000 Any child who's born into a really rich family with famous ancestors can be president of the United States.

00:30:07.000 I mean, it really gives you hope.

00:30:08.000 Anyway, you can catch the livestream over at dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com, dailywire.com,

00:30:18.000 Our government, we're gonna mock political leaders, we're gonna mock all of the pomp and circumstance, which I dramatically hate.

00:30:24.000 And also, if you're a Daily Wire subscriber, you can ask us questions during the broadcast, and we're gonna take those live during the broadcast, which is one of the reasons you should subscribe.

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00:30:44.000 It'll be great.

00:30:45.000 So, check that out.

00:30:47.000 Next Tuesday, if you want the annual subscription, you get all of those things, plus you get this, the very greatest in all tumblers.

00:30:51.000 The leftist tier is hot or cold tumbler, which you will enjoy.

00:30:55.000 Everyone who has it has increased their income by double.

00:30:58.000 That is not an actual study, and I don't think that's true.

00:31:01.000 But you can try.

00:31:03.000 Maybe it'll work for you.

00:31:04.000 Who knows?

00:31:04.000 Correlation may not equal causation, but we can try.

00:31:07.000 Anyway, enough of that.

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00:31:13.000 We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:31:20.000 Alrighty, time for a thing I like, and then a thing that I hate.

00:31:24.000 So, and then a few things that I hate.

00:31:26.000 Actually, lots of things I hate.

00:31:27.000 Let's get hateful today.

00:31:28.000 Okay, so things I like.

00:31:30.000 We'll begin, we've been doing fantasy books, so I don't think I've recommended this before, but this is one of those, it's more along the lines of Alice in Wonderland.

00:31:37.000 It's kind of fallen out of favor.

00:31:38.000 Did you guys read this growing up, this book?

00:31:40.000 The Phantom Tollbooth?

00:31:41.000 When I was growing up, this was sort of recommended reading for people who are in third, fourth grade, and it's pretty great, by Norman Juster.

00:31:47.000 It's about a kid who has to go on a quest, but his quest takes him to all of these kind of bizarre lands.

00:31:54.000 There's like a math land and there's a grammar land, but it's really fun and it's really clever.

00:32:01.000 I'm a big fan of The Phantom Tollbooth.

00:32:03.000 I really like this book a lot.

00:32:05.000 Alright, so let us begin with CNN.

00:32:28.000 One of the things that CNN, New York Times, a lot of publications do now is they put out pieces in which they suggest that they know better about marriage than traditionalists have known forever.

00:32:38.000 So now, CNN says that maybe one way to save your marriage is to get cucked. 0.98

00:32:44.000 You know, to be a cuckold, to let your partner sleep with another person. 0.97

00:32:48.000 The authors, David Lay, Justin Laymiller, and Savage Love, right? 0.94

00:32:51.000 Of course it's Dan Savage.

00:32:52.000 Of course it's Dan Savage.

00:32:53.000 Savage Love, writer and activist Dan Savage, who is always a proponent of promiscuity.

00:32:58.000 They want you to know that most people who try being a cuck find it a positive and rewarding experience, and that, quote, acting on cuckolding fantasies can be a largely positive experience for many couples and hardly a sign of weakness.

00:33:08.000 No, it's definitely a sign of weakness. 0.94

00:33:11.000 If you want to see your partner screwed by somebody else, I'm going to go with you're a weak person, and you have no idea what morality or love really are. 0.98

00:33:19.000 I'm pretty stringent on the whole, don't be happy with your partner having sex with others. 0.99

00:33:25.000 Leigh says, this fantasy has been around as long as marriage and sexuality.

00:33:29.000 By the way, Leigh has written a book called Insatiable Wives.

00:33:32.000 But we're hearing more and more about it these days, and more people are rejecting the social stigma about this fantasy.

00:33:36.000 The authors didn't actually talk to any heterosexual couples.

00:33:38.000 The study is titled, The Psychology of Gay Men's Cuckolding Fantasies, and the only people who were interviewed for the study were 580 men who self-identified as gay.

00:33:46.000 But what did CNN do?

00:33:47.000 They extrapolated the study's findings across the board.

00:33:49.000 Of course they extrapolated the findings across the board, because they want to pretend that men and women are exactly the same.

00:33:54.000 Anybody who believes that men and women are precisely the same when it comes to sexual fantasies?

00:33:58.000 Like, you know why men don't care about being cuckolded with other men? 0.87

00:34:01.000 Because men don't care about promiscuity. 0.99

00:34:03.000 If the deal is I get to have sex with whomever I want, they're probably willing to let their partner have sex with whomever their partner wants. 0.99

00:34:10.000 Men are men. 0.99

00:34:11.000 Gay men are still men. 1.00

00:34:13.000 Men, when it comes to sex, are pigs. 1.00

00:34:14.000 And so it's not particularly a shock that men who are involved in other relationships with other men tend to be more promiscuous than men who are involved in relationships with women, by numbers. 1.00

00:34:23.000 Lay says,

00:34:33.000 One of the authors, Lay Miller, appears to have spoken to heterosexuals about cuckolding.

00:34:37.000 He said that 58% of men and 33% of women had at least thought about the practice, but he didn't get much information on whether they had tried it, or whether they thought that it would be a good idea, or whether they were the ones being cuckolded.

00:34:48.000 But because the practice isn't quite as taboo in the gay community, he says it might be a little more prevalent among gay men.

00:34:53.000 Savage, of course, is enthusiastic about this.

00:34:54.000 He says, it's not cuckolding if there isn't an element of humiliation, degradation, or denial.

00:34:59.000 Our erotic imaginations have the ability to turn shame lemons into delicious kink lemonade. 0.97

00:35:04.000 Ah, Dan Savage.

00:35:05.000 So, I'm so glad that CNN decided to cover this fringe behavior and then pretend that it applies equally to everyone, men and women, male-female relationships.

00:35:13.000 Pretending that relationships between men and men are the same as relationships between men and women is patently insane.

00:35:18.000 If you've never met a man, this makes perfect sense to you.

00:35:20.000 If you were born on a desert island and you've never met a person of the opposite sex, maybe this makes perfect sense to you. 0.99

00:35:25.000 If you have ever met another man and you're a man, you know that this, the idea that any relationship you have with another man is equivalent to a relationship that you would have with a woman is totally bizarre.

00:35:34.000 It's totally crazy.

00:35:35.000 But this is one of the things that the left has put upon us is this notion that all distinctions between men and women are obviously social constructs.

00:35:42.000 That is obviously and eminently untrue.

00:35:44.000 Okay, other things that I hate.

00:35:45.000 So now, a Chicago man is accused of sexually assaulting two six-year-olds and an eight-year-old on repeated occasions.

00:35:51.000 So what did he tell the police officers?

00:35:53.000 He told them that he was, quote, a nine-year-old trapped in an adult's body.

00:35:57.000 There it is.

00:35:58.000 38-year-old Joseph Roman, charged with repeated predatory criminal sexual assault.

00:36:03.000 The numerous attacks began in 2015, continued until earlier this month.

00:36:06.000 Roman has reportedly confessed to some of the attacks to authorities.

00:36:10.000 The victims were the daughters of his friends.

00:36:13.000 So he's now identifying as a child in a man's body.

00:36:17.000 Well, I don't see why he can't do that.

00:36:19.000 I mean, we've been told that you can be a woman in a man's body or a man in a woman's body, so it seems to me a lot easier to get to the point that you say that I have the mentality of a nine-year-old, I have the developed brain of a nine-year-old, as opposed to I have the developed brain of a woman inside a man's body.

00:36:31.000 There's just as much evidence for one as for the other, meaning none.

00:36:35.000 So I don't see why everybody is anti-trans age.

00:36:38.000 I sort of made this point in one of the famous YouTube videos that I did.

00:36:41.000 It was based on a speech that I did where a transgender advocate got up and asked why I would not say a man was a woman, and I asked her what her age was, and she said she's 21.

00:36:49.000 I said, well, why aren't you 60?

00:36:52.000 And she said, because I'm not.

00:36:53.000 Well, this guy's not nine years old either, even though he says he is.

00:36:56.000 One more thing that I hate, and then we'll get to the mailbag.

00:36:58.000 The final thing that I hate here is that UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is now being accused of having an affair with President Trump. 0.89

00:37:04.000 I'm getting really, really annoyed with the foolishness

00:37:11.000 of the left that suggests that anytime, anytime a woman of power is in Republican position, it's because she slept her way to the top. 0.88

00:37:19.000 And Nikki Haley is now being accused, kind of quasi, by Michael Wolff.

00:37:24.000 He appeared on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, and he said he was absolutely sure that Trump is having an affair, which would not be a giant surprise.

00:37:30.000 He then said that careful readers of his book could find a clue, saying, now that I've told you, when you hit that paragraph, you're going to say, bingo.

00:37:37.000 Politico says readers quickly homed in on a single sentence in the runaway bestseller, which has been criticized for everything from sloppy copy editing to gross factual inaccuracies.

00:37:44.000 Wolf writes, So now the entire media has jumped on this rumor, suggesting that perhaps Nikki Haley is sleeping with Trump.

00:37:48.000 Again, there's no evidence to this whatsoever.

00:37:59.000 Haley says that this, of course, is absolutely not true.

00:38:02.000 She says,

00:38:15.000 It goes to a bigger issue we need to be conscious of.

00:38:17.000 At every point in my life, I've noticed that if you speak your mind and you're strong about it and you say what you believe, there's a small percentage of people that resent it, and the way they try to deal with it is to try and throw arrows, lies or not.

00:38:26.000 She said, I saw this as a legislator.

00:38:27.000 I saw this when I was governor.

00:38:28.000 I see it now.

00:38:29.000 I see them do it to other women. 1.00

00:38:30.000 And the thing is, when women work, they prioritize, they focus, and they believe if they're going to do something, do it right. 1.00

00:38:34.000 Others see that as too ambitious or stepping out of line.

00:38:37.000 The truth is, we need to continue to do our job, and if that means they consider it stepping out of line, fine. 0.98

00:38:41.000 This is why Nikki Haley is very popular, because she doesn't take this kind of crap. 0.99

00:38:45.000 It is insane that the media have been running with this rumor, but the media had nothing to say for years. 0.96

00:38:50.000 Apparently there's a New York Times story out today, it's a breaking story, that a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, who was accused of repeatedly sexually harassing a young subordinate, was kept on the campaign at Hillary's direct request, according to four people familiar with what took place.

00:39:04.000 So the left, that's happily willing to defend Me Too, is also happily willing to accuse Nikki Haley of sleeping her way to the top,

00:39:11.000 And also to overlook Hillary Clinton letting a campaign aide off the hook, who is apparently sexually harassing young women.

00:39:17.000 The campaign advisor was Burns Strider.

00:39:20.000 Instead, Strider was docked several weeks of pay in order to undergo counseling, and the young woman was moved to a new job.

00:39:25.000 So just class all the way around for the left.

00:39:27.000 Well done.

00:39:28.000 Before I go any further, I do want to mention one more quick thing that I hate, and then we'll jump right into the mailbags.

00:39:32.000 That gives people a chance to actually get back into the stream.

00:39:35.000 Barack Obama took a picture with Louis Farrakhan, and the media hit it.

00:39:39.000 So there's that.

00:39:40.000 Okay, I'm just gonna put that out there, that there is this picture that exists. 0.92

00:39:42.000 Louis Farrakhan is one of the world's worst anti-Semites. 0.99

00:39:44.000 He's an absolute piece of human debris. 0.98

00:39:46.000 And Barack Obama was happy to take pictures with him, because Barack Obama was never a moderate. 0.92

00:39:50.000 He was always a radical.

00:39:51.000 We said so at the time. 0.99

00:39:53.000 It was denied by everyone, and they're all liars and terrible people. 0.99

00:39:56.000 Okay, so. 0.99

00:39:57.000 Now, time for the mailbag.

00:39:58.000 So if you have questions, send them in right this instance.

00:40:02.000 Okay, so let's start with Daniel.

00:40:03.000 He says, Hey Ben, do you think the government should be allowed to force someone to buy car insurance when a car is purchased?

00:40:07.000 How can the government force me to buy something I do not want?

00:40:10.000 So the reason that the government is allowed to force you to buy car insurance when the car is purchased is because there's an externality.

00:40:15.000 So the government is allowed to regulate

00:40:18.000 Products that have an automatic externality.

00:40:20.000 When you drive a car, if you get in a car accident, the insurance is not to protect you.

00:40:23.000 The insurance is to protect the other drivers.

00:40:25.000 If you have a bunch of drivers on the streets who don't have car insurance, and then they hit you, and they damage your car, or they kill you, then you've created a serious problem.

00:40:34.000 Now, there's a possible solution to that that doesn't involve car insurance, and that is that you actually hold people accountable under tort law, and you get rid of bankruptcy law, right?

00:40:41.000 That would be the alternative.

00:40:43.000 But, if the idea is that there is a privilege that is driving, and that privilege

00:40:47.000 Exists because their externalities to the privilege you don't have a right to drive you have a privilege to drive and That privilege comes along with externalities Then it's not wrong to have the government Make you buy car insurance if the government makes you buy health insurance is different because there it's not about externalities there it's about you are responsible for your own health and that is in that that is creating costs and

00:41:08.000 But that's on you, right?

00:41:10.000 The cost is on you.

00:41:11.000 So if you don't have health insurance, people theoretically could say, we don't want to cover you, which is what people do.

00:41:16.000 The same is not true of car insurance.

00:41:17.000 If you hit me in an accident, then I don't have a choice as to whether I wanted you to hit me in the accident.

00:41:21.000 Seth says, Mr. Shapiro, I listened to your debate with Sam Harris, and I heard you repeat the question, how do you go from an is to an ought a couple of times?

00:41:26.000 Would you mind elaborating on that more?

00:41:27.000 Is this begging the question of how morality came into existence, and the ought is the moral implication, and the is comes from an evolutionary scientific perspective derived from observation of supposed fact?

00:41:36.000 Great debate, by the way.

00:41:36.000 Love listening to these conversations.

00:41:38.000 So, I'm glad that you enjoyed the conversation.

00:41:40.000 The point that I was making was a point that was originally made by David Hume.

00:41:43.000 He basically suggested that you cannot look at the universe and then just say that because things are a certain way, then you ought to act a certain way.

00:41:50.000 There is no connection, for example, between the way the universe is constructed and morality.

00:41:56.000 You could construct a thousand different types of morality.

00:41:59.000 There's nothing that dictates they have to go from what is to what ought to be or how you ought to act.

00:42:05.000 Now, this has significant ramifications for scientific materialists like Sam.

00:42:08.000 Now, Sam has a suggestion.

00:42:10.000 His suggestion is, well, if we knew everything in the known universe, then what else would we need to know to construct a morality?

00:42:16.000 I had two objections to that.

00:42:18.000 One is, when he says construct a morality, he's assuming

00:42:21.000 A freedom of choice that I'm not sure that his philosophy allows to exist.

00:42:24.000 I mean, this is a real debate between Sam and me.

00:42:27.000 And I don't want to misconstrue his position or misstate his position, so you can read his book on free will if you think I am doing so, and get his more detailed perspective.

00:42:35.000 That's problem number one that I had, and I was trying to point that out to Sam, and I think we were talking past each other.

00:42:39.000 And problem number two is that Sam says, well, there's really three problems.

00:42:43.000 He says that if you know everything in existence, then you could be able to determine what's right and what's wrong.

00:42:47.000 I don't think that's true, because people have a unique capacity to look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions.

00:42:52.000 And then problem number three is, if you knew everything in the universe, you would be God, right?

00:42:56.000 I mean, the premise that I use is that God does know everything in the universe, and therefore he was capable of constructing morality.

00:43:02.000 So you're just assuming that eventually human beings will be able to become gods, and I'm not sure that I buy into that premise.

00:43:08.000 But that is the is-ought distinction.

00:43:10.000 That is-ought distinction can be bridged in two ways.

00:43:11.000 One is with Revelation.

00:43:13.000 So you actually have a deus ex machina.

00:43:15.000 God suggests either

00:43:17.000 Christ suggests, or the Judaic God at Sinai suggests, here are the rules. 0.83

00:43:23.000 He says, you know, you can't get from the is to the ought, so let me give you a hand with that.

00:43:26.000 Here's what you ought to do, and here's what you ought not to do.

00:43:28.000 That's Revelation.

00:43:29.000 And then there's the Greek reason argument that suggests you can look at what is and get to ought by saying, what is the purpose?

00:43:35.000 What is the telos?

00:43:35.000 You've heard me mention the Greek word telos before.

00:43:38.000 Telos is the suggestion that there is a purpose that is embedded in the universe.

00:43:43.000 So for example,

00:43:46.000 The example that's typically used is, I'm wearing a watch, right?

00:43:49.000 The watch that I'm wearing is made to tell time.

00:43:53.000 It is either good at telling time or it is bad at telling time.

00:43:55.000 What dictates whether the watch is virtuous is whether the watch fulfills its purpose.

00:44:00.000 And you can look at the universe and say, what is man made for?

00:44:02.000 Man is made to use his reason because his reason is different from what animals have.

00:44:06.000 And so he should be using his reason, and whatever is in service to reason is good, and whatever is not in service to reason is immoral.

00:44:13.000 This is sort of the Greek view of why reason is important and what virtue is built to do.

00:44:18.000 So those are the two ways to reach purpose, to reach ought from is.

00:44:23.000 The West has rejected both of those in modern times, and I think because of that, we've landed on these aimless shores with people telling you that you can construct your own purpose, and we've failed at that.

00:44:33.000 Tyler says, Ben, what was the best way you studied for the LSAT?

00:44:35.000 Any good study books you'd recommend?

00:44:37.000 Well, actually, I use Testmasters, and I'll openly say so.

00:44:39.000 Testmasters is a great program, so consider that an endorsement, Testmasters, and also advertise with us, because as long as I'm giving you plugs, you may as well pay us some money for it.

00:44:47.000 Rahamim Cooperman says, hey, Ben.

00:44:49.000 I was wondering what your opinion is on making Haredim serve in the Israeli military, and if you lived in Israel, which political party would you vote for?

00:44:54.000 I've said for years that Haredim should serve in the Israeli military, but if you have universal military service, you should not be able to opt out of Israeli military service simply because you say you are studying. 0.85

00:45:03.000 If I were a secular Jew in Israel, and my kid were going to fight in the army, and your kid were studying in Yeshiva, and the suggestion was that your kid was doing as much for the state of Israel as my kid is doing, I would say that's ridiculous and self-serving.

00:45:16.000 Now, even if you want to say that you think that there's a spiritual component to study that does not exist for fighting, and that you need a few people studying, that's one thing.

00:45:26.000 But to say that everybody who wants to study gets out of military service is a cop-out, in the same way that it was a cop-out during the Vietnam War, to say that everybody in college got out of military service. 0.82

00:45:34.000 I think that that's a foolish thing.

00:45:36.000 I've always been a great admirer of what they call the Hester Yeshivot. 0.50

00:45:38.000 These are yeshivas where people study Torah, but at the same time they are serving in the armies.

00:45:43.000 They're doing both.

00:45:46.000 Everybody I've met, like, it's universal.

00:45:56.000 Everybody's been very respectful of my time and my privacy, which is great.

00:46:00.000 And in fact, I've made it a habit to ask people if they want pictures, because people are very shy, very often, about asking for pictures, so I'm not trying to be self-aggrandizing.

00:46:08.000 I know that people want pictures, and they're trying not to be rude.

00:46:11.000 People have been really, really good about it.

00:46:13.000 Find it irritating?

00:46:14.000 I find it flattering.

00:46:15.000 I'm glad that people listen to the show.

00:46:16.000 I'm glad that people take my ideas seriously.

00:46:18.000 And if they do, I think that that's wonderful and makes a difference.

00:46:21.000 Well,

00:46:41.000 It's hard to predict how it would affect turnout.

00:46:43.000 Usually off your elections, the base is what has to turn out.

00:46:45.000 The base may not be happy with this, and so you might see a drop in turnout.

00:46:48.000 In a general election for Trump's 2020, it would probably help him.

00:46:51.000 For 2020, he would look more moderate.

00:46:54.000 People who are independents would probably flock to him more often.

00:46:57.000 Conservatives could point to the victory.

00:46:59.000 But for the midterms, I think it would probably hurt him in the short run.

00:47:01.000 Also, where do you land on your rip-throws dilemma?

00:47:11.000 The ethical theory that I most often hold to is the Judeo-Christian biblical ethical theory, which suggests that there is an objective good and there is an objective bad, and the notion that 0.97

00:47:27.000 You can construct your own good and bad is foolish. 0.94

00:47:30.000 So I agree with that.

00:47:32.000 Utilitarianism, everyone intends to be a little bit of a utilitarian, but I think that utilitarianism is open-ended and depends on what you define as your hierarchy of utility.

00:47:42.000 So it's open to various different rebukes.

00:47:44.000 I think Kant's categorical imperative is open to a bunch of different rebukes because

00:47:48.000 There are plenty of things that I would be willing to do to other people and have them done to me that other people wouldn't be willing to have done to them.

00:47:53.000 I think that the categorical imperative is a little bit weak.

00:47:59.000 The Eryphthro Dilemma, which I, to be honest with you, just looked up again because I've been going through the Republic and my head is filled with things.

00:48:06.000 The Eryphthro Dilemma found in Plato's Dialogue is where Socrates asks Eryphthro, So in other words, is God above morality or is morality above God?

00:48:12.000 So my answer is that God is above morality, but we believe in the Judeo-Christian tradition that God

00:48:27.000 has done us the great service of embedding morality in his own actions.

00:48:31.000 So God doesn't have to be moral.

00:48:32.000 He's God.

00:48:33.000 He can do whatever he wants.

00:48:34.000 He's all-powerful.

00:48:35.000 But, Judaism says that God also acts in moral fashion.

00:48:38.000 That doesn't mean we always understand the way that he is acting, but this is the entire reason that, for example, Abraham argues with God.

00:48:44.000 Right?

00:48:44.000 That God, and it's, that Abraham says to God,

00:48:48.000 Would you kill, would you destroy the city if there are 50 righteous people, 40 righteous people, 30, 20, 10?

00:48:53.000 And the reason he's bargaining with God over this is because he's trying to remind God of his own morality, right?

00:48:57.000 That's the idea here.

00:48:58.000 Moses does the same thing.

00:48:59.000 Moses says to God, if you do this, you will be perceived by the world as immoral.

00:49:02.000 So why would you do this when God talks about wiping out the Jewish people in the desert?

00:49:06.000 Moses says this.

00:49:07.000 So, the idea here is that God is above morality, but has bonded himself to a morality which we can identify a shadow of.

00:49:16.000 We can't identify all of it.

00:49:18.000 We can see God's back, but we can't see his front, right?

00:49:19.000 In the section of the Torah where Moses asked to see God's face, meaning, I want to see your logic for the universe, God says, no one can see my face and live.

00:49:28.000 You can see my back, meaning you can see the shadow of my morality, but I'm never going to allow you to see my entire math of how this works.

00:49:35.000 So the answer is piety is loved by God because it is piety.

00:49:43.000 It is not piety just because it is loved by God.

00:49:45.000 God is above morality but has bounded himself to a certain sense of morality.

00:49:51.000 I recently listened to Tucker Carlson.

00:49:52.000 Apparently, China has recently successfully cloned a monkey.

00:49:55.000 They're heralding this is a crucial step to cloning humans.

00:49:57.000 If we limited human cloning to only clone and replace damaged organs, I don't see an inherent problem with it.

00:50:01.000 However, I do see an inherent problem with attempting to regulate and enforce a policy limiting cloning to only that.

00:50:06.000 What's your take?

00:50:06.000 Well, I agree that we should limit cloning to only organ cloning for those purposes.

00:50:12.000 I think trying to clone a human life, there are serious moral issues with it.

00:50:18.000 Beyond the question of the selfishness of wanting to clone yourself, right?

00:50:23.000 And or the or the idea that you're preserved like are you let's put it this way you have grandma grandma's about to die you decide you're gonna clone her and when you clone her she is presumably uh going to come out the the she's she's going to be birth right you take her dna

00:50:37.000 You insert an egg and now you have cloned grandma.

00:50:40.000 Presumably she comes out as a baby because she's not gonna be born as a 99 year old person.

00:50:44.000 So if that's the case, then are you now putting on that person all of your preconceived notions about grandma?

00:50:50.000 Is that person actually a fully independent person?

00:50:52.000 It raises some serious ethical dilemmas.

00:50:54.000 We are kind of far scientifically from cloning a human being, at least in healthy ways, even when we've cloned animals.

00:50:59.000 Even when we've cloned animals, the animals

00:51:02.000 My understanding is have not tended to live as long as the originals.

00:51:05.000 So I think there's still some kinks to be worked out in that process.

00:51:08.000 I think that the left has fallen deeper and deeper into a victim mentality that has forced them into tribalism of the highest order.

00:51:23.000 That victim mentality is now manifesting really strongly.

00:51:26.000 I think that Barack Obama's election was part of this.

00:51:27.000 I think Obama had such an opportunity to unify the country.

00:51:30.000 And when Obama decided instead to exploit political divisions between us for his own political gain, I think the people glommed on to that, and it made the country a whole hell of a lot worse.

00:51:37.000 I think we were much more unified in 2007 with all that was going on then than we are today.

00:51:42.000 And I think a lot of that has to do with Democrats embracing polarities not only among politics and political opinions, but polarities among tribal groups, tribal identity groups.

00:51:52.000 They're using identity as a substitute for logic, reason, or even political positioning.

00:51:56.000 Okay, so we will be back here tomorrow?

00:51:59.000 Well, no we won't.

00:52:00.000 Tomorrow's Saturday.

00:52:00.000 It's the end of the week.

00:52:01.000 Excellent.

00:52:01.000 Okay, we will be back here on Monday.

00:52:03.000 Have a great weekend.

00:52:04.000 We'll see you then.

The Ben Shapiro Show - January 26, 2018

Mulling Over Mueller | Ep. 462

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