The Ben Shapiro Show - Mulling Over Mueller | Ep. 668

00:00:00.000 Will President Trump pardon Paul Manafort?

00:00:02.000 Will Robert Mueller indict President Trump's buddies?

00:00:05.000 Will you drive a car in 10 years?

00:00:06.000 These and other questions will be answered.

00:00:08.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

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

00:00:10.000 You know, it's kind of an oingapotch news cycle, meaning that the news cycle is sort of all over the place.

00:00:20.000 It's just, it's a weird news cycle.

00:00:22.000 And there's a lot to talk about in a variety of different topics.

00:00:24.000 We'll get to all of those things.

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00:01:22.000 Check them out at BlackRifleCoffee.com.

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00:01:32.000 It's really fun to watch.

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00:01:44.000 By the way, as I say, I would give Black Rifle Coffee as a Christmas gift to the people who work here.

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00:01:59.000 All right.

00:02:00.000 So today's news.

00:02:03.000 All right, fine.

00:02:03.000 Do we have to do the news today?

00:02:05.000 Let's do the news today.

00:02:06.000 All right.

00:02:06.000 So the latest news is with regard to Paul Manafort and Donald Trump.

00:02:12.000 This is my least favorite news cycle.

00:02:13.000 Why?

00:02:13.000 Because the truth is we're not going to know anything until the Mueller report actually comes out.

00:02:17.000 So everything is speculation.

00:02:18.000 Listen to a lot of other shows and you're going to get tons of speculation about Trump.

00:02:22.000 And Mueller.

00:02:22.000 And Manafort.

00:02:23.000 And is Trump going to be impeached?

00:02:24.000 And is Trump going to go to jail?

00:02:26.000 And is Paul Manafort going to be set on fire by Robert Mueller after being dumped off the top of the Randy's Donuts sign in downtown Los Angeles?

00:02:32.000 Who knows?

00:02:33.000 No one knows, right?

00:02:34.000 And this is why I really don't like talking about these topics so much, because I'm an evidence-based person, and that means that I like to wait for all the evidence to come out before speculating upon it.

00:02:44.000 Two things drive me to talk about this.

00:02:45.000 One, it's a slow news cycle.

00:02:47.000 We've got to talk about something.

00:02:48.000 And two, the fact is that the news is now replete with speculation about Mueller.

00:02:53.000 So let us debunk some of the speculation.

00:02:55.000 A couple of things right off the top.

00:02:56.000 First off, yesterday we reported that there was a shock Guardian story from the UK Guardian talking about Paul Manafort meeting with Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, which is a Russian front group that hacked Hillary Clinton's emails and John Podesta's emails, and then started releasing them en masse just before the election.

00:03:15.000 And the allegation has been that President Trump's campaign was working with Assange and with Wikileaks and with the Russian government in order to skew election results, specifically in order to prevent Hillary Clinton from being elected.

00:03:27.000 So, The Guardian comes out with this bombshell report, and this would be a big dot to connect, right?

00:03:31.000 Because now you would have the campaign chairman for President Trump meeting with Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, in advance of WikiLeaks releasing these emails.

00:03:41.000 Well, as it turns out, not so fast, everyone.

00:03:50.000 Let's hold that back.

00:03:51.000 Paul Manafort has now denied ever meeting with Julian Assange.

00:03:54.000 Now, why should we believe Paul Manafort?

00:03:55.000 Well, maybe we shouldn't.

00:03:56.000 I mean, Robert Mueller says that Paul Manafort's a liar and lied to him.

00:03:59.000 We'll get to that in just a second.

00:04:01.000 But Manafort himself says he is denied ever meeting Assange following a report he had met with the WikiLeaks founder at least three times in previous years.

00:04:08.000 On Tuesday, The Guardian reported, this is according to CNN.com, that Manafort had secretly met several times with Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, including around the time he was made a top figure in the Trump campaign.

00:04:18.000 The Guardian citing sources, just sources, right?

00:04:20.000 Not like sources where they are.

00:04:22.000 Are they in the Ecuadorian embassy?

00:04:24.000 Are they in Mueller's camp?

00:04:25.000 Just sources.

00:04:26.000 And whenever somebody says, I cite my sources, let's just remember that President Trump said that he had very good sources suggesting that President Obama was born in Kenya.

00:04:34.000 So sources don't mean anything.

00:04:36.000 Anyway, the Guardian citing sources, which is to say, no one, said Manafort had met with Assange in 2013, 2015, spring 2016.

00:04:43.000 Manafort responded to the Guardian's report.

00:04:46.000 He called it totally false and deliberately libelous.

00:04:48.000 And then he kind of took the lapels on his ostrich jacket and went, With them, because that's awesome.

00:04:53.000 Manafort said, quote, I've never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him.

00:04:57.000 I've never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly.

00:05:01.000 I've never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter.

00:05:04.000 We are considering all legal options against The Guardian, who proceeded with this story, even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.

00:05:10.000 The newspaper said it was unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.

00:05:14.000 It's not just Manafort saying that this is false.

00:05:17.000 Assange also says that it's false.

00:05:19.000 More importantly, there are a bunch of people who deal pretty regularly with Julian Assange and they say it is legitimately impossible for Manafort to have visited Assange and for it not to be recorded in the Ecuadorian embassy logs.

00:05:29.000 Because this is one of the problems with the Guardian story.

00:05:31.000 Nowhere in the embassy logs does Paul Manafort appear.

00:05:35.000 Eva Gollinger is an author who has visited Assange several times.

00:05:38.000 She says, quote, It is impossible that Manafort went into the Ecuador embassy to see Assange and was not registered or videotaped.

00:05:44.000 Everyone was, no exceptions.

00:05:46.000 I was there many times.

00:05:47.000 The security were not friendly to Assange.

00:05:49.000 They would have not done any favors.

00:05:51.000 And then she questioned the sourcing for the article.

00:05:53.000 She said they cite documents from Sinayn, Ecuador's intelligence agency, currently being disbanded because of dubious activities.

00:05:59.000 They've fabricated documents before to serve their agenda.

00:06:01.000 And they are definitely out for Assange because he published some of their secret documents.

00:06:05.000 The Daily Beast, Betsy Woodruff, noted that The Guardian then went and started stealth editing their piece.

00:06:11.000 Self-editing means you go and you edit a piece without actually noting the correction.

00:06:15.000 Sometimes it's innocuous, and sometimes you're actually changing the material in the piece without notifying readers, so that you're sort of hiding the boo-boo that you made before.

00:06:24.000 The Guardian weakened some of its language in the Manafort-Assange story.

00:06:28.000 So, originally it said, it is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.

00:06:32.000 They changed it to read, it is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.

00:06:37.000 Right, before the last apparent meeting, as opposed to before, but the last meeting.

00:06:41.000 So, they're now weakening all the language.

00:06:43.000 Manafort, as we say, is now threatening a lawsuit against the UK Guardian.

00:06:46.000 So all of the hubbub yesterday over this bombshell story that Manafort had met with Assange, it turns out that that may be collapsing in on itself.

00:06:54.000 Meanwhile, there's a story today about Jerome Corsi, who apparently has a deal with President Trump.

00:07:01.000 Jerome Corsi is the author and conspiracy theorist who had written an entire book about why Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

00:07:09.000 He used to write for WorldNetDaily.

00:07:12.000 And he now claims in a forthcoming book that he has a joint defense agreement with President Trump and was provided limited immunity during his testimony before special counsel Robert Mueller's grand jury to discuss a cover story he claims he crafted for Trump confidant Roger Stone.

00:07:24.000 This is according to the Daily Caller.

00:07:26.000 Corsi has been interviewed six times in the investigation over the course of more than two months, and he writes in a new book that he entered into a defense agreement with Trump after being advised that Trump's lawyer, Jay Sekulow, was interested in the arrangement.

00:07:37.000 The defense agreement would basically involve Corsi under investigation talking with Trump's team to inform them of the questions he was being asked by Mueller.

00:07:44.000 This of course would make Mueller deeply upset and angry because you don't want your witnesses talking to one another and getting their story straight.

00:07:50.000 Describing his interactions with the special counsel's office, Corsi claims he was granted what's known as limited use immunity.

00:07:56.000 For testimony he gave during his September 21st grand jury appearance regarding conversations with Roger Stone about an August 31st, 2016 memo he wrote about former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

00:08:08.000 Corsi says he received immunity for testimony that he and Stone developed a cover story to help explain Stone's now infamous August 21st, 2016 tweet that it would soon be Podesta's time in the barrel.

00:08:19.000 According to Corsi, He and Stone hatched a plan in which Corsi would write a memo about the Podestas to allow Stone to cite it as the basis for his tweet retroactively.

00:08:27.000 So the implication from Stone's tweet is that he knew in advance about Wikileaks releasing Podesta's emails and then Wikileaks released the emails showing that Stone had been coordinating with Wikileaks and presumably if Stone was in touch with the Trump campaign then this would be the avenue by which Russian collusion was taking place.

00:08:43.000 Corsi supposedly is going to testify that He and Stone came up with an arrangement where he would sort of backfill the story.

00:08:52.000 Instead of it being that Stone was working with WikiLeaks and then he sort of let the cat out of the bag saying that WikiLeaks was going to release stuff on John Podesta, now the story was going to be that Jerome Corsi had come up with a memo and that was the basis for Stone's tweet.

00:09:06.000 The revelation, if accurate, would undercut Stone's testimony to the House Intelligence Committee that opposition research on the Podesta brothers' business activities was the catalyst for the tweet.

00:09:14.000 Stone vehemently denied Corsi's claim about the origin of the memo to the Daily Caller on Monday.

00:09:19.000 He insisted that he and Corsi discussed the Podesta brothers' activities and that his tweet was a reference to oppo research that would come out on the topic.

00:09:26.000 And there are a bunch of Twitter posts on this particular subject.

00:09:29.000 Of course, he announced the release of his book on Monday in an interview.

00:09:32.000 He also claims that prosecutors wanted him to plead guilty to making false statements regarding WikiLeaks.

00:09:37.000 He rejected the offer, saying he would not plead guilty to a crime that he did not commit.

00:09:41.000 And again, he says that Jay Sekulow, Trump's lawyer, suggested a mutual defense agreement that could be verbal in nature and did not need to be put In writing, joint defense agreements are common in criminal proceedings when multiple witnesses and investigative targets are dealing with the same prosecutors.

00:09:54.000 Trump has one with Paul Manafort, for example.

00:09:57.000 So here's where things start to get dicey.

00:09:59.000 Does it look like Paul Manafort and Jerome Corsi and President Trump are coming up with a mutual defense agreement because they are trying to get their story straight and protect themselves from the from the special investigation of Robert Mueller, or is it that Robert Mueller is actually being predacious, that he's being predatory, that he actually is trying to peel off these people one by one and hit them with false allegations, and then force them to turn on each other and testify about each other falsely, and so you need a mutual defense agreement so that people can coordinate with each other.

00:10:29.000 From a defense perspective, the latter.

00:10:31.000 From a prosecution perspective, the former.

00:10:33.000 But does any of this look particularly good for President Trump?

00:10:36.000 Not really.

00:10:37.000 when you are coordinating with other witnesses in a case about you, it looks like you're trying to set up some sort of cover story.

00:10:42.000 Corsi writes of one instance in which his lawyer had contact with Trump's lawyer.

00:10:47.000 He says he wanted his lawyer to warn Trump.

00:10:49.000 We had to assume the special counselor would have everything.

00:10:51.000 All emails, text messages, written notes, phone records could be obtained by search warrants.

00:10:55.000 I wanted the president, I wanted the president warned not to give in-person verbal testimony to Mueller under any circumstances, he said, expressing concern that prosecutors were moving sort of perjury trap against him for misremembering details about a July 25th, 2016 email that he received from Roger Stone.

00:11:11.000 And one of those emails supposedly is an email from 2016 from Corsi to Roger Stone about the WikiLeaks email dumps.

00:11:18.000 NBC News has obtained draft court papers sent to Corsi by Mueller's office in which Corsi apparently said that Roger Stone asked him in the summer of 2016 to get in touch with an organization identified by Corsi as Wikileaks about unreleased materials relevant to the presidential campaign.

00:11:33.000 The email to Corsi on July 25, 2016.

00:11:38.000 From Stone apparently says get to Assange at Ecuadorial Embassy in London and get the pending WikiLeaks emails.

00:11:45.000 Corsi said he declined the request and made it clear to Stone that an attempt to contact WikiLeaks could put them in the investigators' crosshairs according to the draft court documents.

00:11:53.000 Mueller's team said that was a lie.

00:11:55.000 Instead of turning down the request, Corsi in fact passed it along to a person in London according to the draft court documents.

00:12:00.000 So we'll have to see how all of this shakes out.

00:12:02.000 Corsi, meanwhile, says, I didn't do any of this stuff.

00:12:04.000 And the Mueller investigation is simply trying to push me into making false statements about President Trump with the threat of prosecution looming over my head.

00:12:13.000 All of which raises another question.

00:12:15.000 Is President Trump going to solve this sort of Gordian knot by simply cutting it and pardoning Paul Manafort?

00:12:21.000 And this is one of the pieces of speculation that is out there today.

00:12:23.000 I think this is highly, highly unlikely.

00:12:25.000 I'll explain why in just one second.

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00:14:23.000 Okay, so, Paul Manafort's lawyer is said to have briefed President Trump's attorneys, according to the Boston Globe.

00:14:29.000 This is a report that came out yesterday.

00:14:31.000 A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president's one-time campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump's lawyers on his client's discussions with federal investigators after Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Trump's lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

00:14:45.000 The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with Mueller's office when prosecutors discovered it after Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said.

00:14:53.000 Some legal specialists speculated it was a bid by Manafort for a presidential pardon.

00:14:56.000 And here's where we get into the diciest territory.

00:14:58.000 Will President Trump simply stop this investigation by pardoning Paul Manafort?

00:15:02.000 If Paul Manafort is indeed the key to this entire thing, will President Trump just say, listen, you guys have trumped up all these charges You never would have prosecuted him under any other circumstances except that he was involved with my campaign, you don't like me, so you went after him for a bunch of foreign affairs stuff that a bunch of lobbyists in Washington do all the time and get away with.

00:15:23.000 But you're going after him now, so I'm just gonna pardon him, and then you got nothing.

00:15:26.000 Then you can't try to leverage him into making false statements about me, or is he trying to pardon Manafort In order to obstruct justice, right?

00:15:32.000 Is he trying to pardon Paul Manafort in order to prevent the investigation from going forward?

00:15:37.000 Andy McCarthy has a long piece about this in National Review today.

00:15:41.000 He says, Mueller's prosecutors are laying the groundwork to argue that Paul Manafort should not get any credit for pleading guilty and sparing the public the need for a second trial because, as we learned yesterday, the Mueller team now says that Paul Manafort lied to them so they want to revoke his plea agreement and that would kick back in all the possible consequences.

00:15:58.000 Of severe jail time.

00:15:59.000 In the submission, the special counsel points out that Manafort did not decide to plead guilty until the last minute, so prosecutors in the court had to gear up for trial.

00:16:06.000 Moreover, the prosecutors emphasized the alleged breach relieves the government of any duty to support Manafort's claim that he has demonstrated acceptance of responsibility, which is a standard sentencing reduction for defendants who plead guilty.

00:16:18.000 Here's the key.

00:16:18.000 For their part, Manafort and his lawyers are clearly preparing to argue that Manafort was honest, but that Mueller's rabidly anti-Trump prosecutors did not like what he had to say, i.e.

00:16:27.000 he would not implicate the president in misconduct.

00:16:29.000 This would echo a theme posited by Judge T.S.

00:16:31.000 Ellis in Manafort's Virginia trial.

00:16:33.000 Mueller aggressively pursued Manafort on charges that had nothing to do with Russia's interference in the 2016 election in order to squeeze Manafort into singing or even composing as a witness against the president.

00:16:44.000 And this is where we get into the pardon issues.

00:16:48.000 In just a second, I'm going to explain to you where the pardon issue comes in.

00:16:52.000 So, as Andy McCarthy continues, he says, there is a highly unusual twist here.

00:16:56.000 The possibility that President Trump could pardon Manafort on the theory the Justice Department would never have charged Manafort for his political consulting activities in Ukraine and the lavish income he earned and failed to report from it.

00:17:07.000 And that Manafort was charged as a pressure tactic.

00:17:09.000 to help Mueller try to make a collusion case against Trump under circumstances where there is no evidence of a Trump-Russia criminal conspiracy.

00:17:16.000 Many will thus detect a play for a pardon in Manafort's alleged breaching of the plea agreement, coupled with his public stance that far from lying, he has been resisting Mueller's heavy-handed attempt to make him lie.

00:17:25.000 This take on things finds support in some of President Trump's tweets, such as this one from August 18th, quote, Justice took a 12-year-old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him.

00:17:38.000 And unlike Michael Cohn, he refused to break makeup stories in order to get a deal.

00:17:42.000 Such respect for a brave man.

00:17:44.000 So McCarthy says he doesn't think that Mueller's report is forthcoming, but it is possible that President Trump could simply pardon Manafort, risk impeachment in the House, know that he's not going to get convicted in the Senate, and then see what happens right there.

00:17:58.000 And this is the case that is now being made by both Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone, is that Mueller's selective prosecution of Manafort has resulted in an attempt to make him lie, and that Mueller is now trying to make Jerome Corsi lie and trying to make Roger Stone lie in order to set up a chain of events that looks like Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi acting as go-betweens for WikiLeaks with the Trump campaign.

00:18:18.000 This is what Jerome Corsi was saying yesterday.

00:18:20.000 Again, you gotta take everything Jerome Corsi says with a very, very large grain of salt.

00:18:24.000 This is a guy who wrote an entire book about how Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

00:18:27.000 This is not a reliable source.

00:18:29.000 Here is Tucker Carlson asking him some questions last night on Fox.

00:18:32.000 I've read accounts in the press, I read one in the Washington Monthly, a liberal magazine, saying that you deserve to go to prison because you've expressed views that they don't like.

00:18:43.000 Do you think that your political views are playing a role in the decision of the special counsel to charge you with a felony?

00:18:49.000 Yes, I think, and also, by the way, they accused me of deleting emails and I told them to restore, they restored the emails that I supposedly deleted through the time machine.

00:18:58.000 This is a political winch-hut.

00:19:01.000 Okay, so, you know, this is Corsi's perspective.

00:19:03.000 It also is Roger Stone's perspective.

00:19:04.000 He says that Roger Stone says that Jerome Corsi's being browbeaten.

00:19:08.000 Of course, they all have a stake in saying this because if they're not being browbeaten, then somebody's going to jail, probably.

00:19:13.000 Here's Roger Stone trying to defend Jerome Corsi.

00:19:16.000 On August 21st, I posted a tweet that said, The Podesta's time in the barrel will come.

00:19:22.000 I meant that public scrutiny of the Podesta's Russian business interests, as I had been briefed about by Jerry Corsi, would be in the media.

00:19:32.000 Now Jerry Corsi has been browbeat into claiming that that was some kind of a cover story.

00:19:37.000 And because I was taking heat for that tweet.

00:19:40.000 But that's not even logical, Laura, because my tweet wasn't controversial until six weeks later when Julian Assange published John Podesta's emails.

00:19:50.000 Right, except that it would make sense for the tweet to be uncontroversial until then, because you said, cryptically, that there would be time for John Podesta in the barrel, and then later it was John Podesta's time in the barrel, which makes it seem like you had some inside information there.

00:20:04.000 All of this is questionable.

00:20:06.000 Will this result in Manafort being pardoned simply to end this?

00:20:08.000 I really doubt that.

00:20:09.000 I think that President Trump would not do that.

00:20:11.000 I think it would be a mistake.

00:20:12.000 I think that he would be impeached automatically by the new Democratic House.

00:20:15.000 I think that they would have a relatively solid basis for doing so.

00:20:18.000 It would look too much like obstruction for them to avoid doing anything else.

00:20:21.000 And it would put Republicans in a terrible position.

00:20:23.000 Now they either have to say that it's okay for the President to pardon people who are being questioned about his campaign activities in order to avoid scrutiny, or they have to vote against the President's remaining in office.

00:20:34.000 I don't think that President Trump is going in this direction.

00:20:36.000 Lending credence to the idea he might go in this direction was the fact that yesterday he was in an interview with somebody, I believe from the Washington Post, and he was asked about the possibility of pardoning Manafort.

00:20:46.000 He went off the record, and then the reporter said, can we put any of that on the record?

00:20:49.000 And then they went back off the record.

00:20:51.000 That suggests that Trump is thinking thoughts that he doesn't necessarily want people to know about.

00:20:57.000 Again, Mr. President, don't do this.

00:20:59.000 Let it go forward.

00:21:00.000 If this investigation turns out to be the sham that a lot of people think it is, if this investigation turns out to be as empty and as goal-seeking as it appears to be in many cases, then we will all be here to defend you against false charges.

00:21:14.000 But if you cut this thing short, it's going to look like you're guilty.

00:21:17.000 And it's going to look like you're guilty because maybe you're guilty.

00:21:19.000 So don't do it.

00:21:20.000 So don't pardon Paul Manafort.

00:21:21.000 It would be a big mistake at this point.

00:21:23.000 President Trump, however, is busy fulminating on Twitter about all of this.

00:21:26.000 Again, I'm not sure how this is helpful to him.

00:21:28.000 He is saying, Again, it's true.

00:21:29.000 The Mueller witch hunt is a total disgrace.

00:21:31.000 They are looking at supposedly stolen, crooked Hillary Clinton emails, even though they don't want to look at the DNC server, but have no interest in the emails that Hillary deleted and acid-washed after getting a congressional subpoena.

00:21:41.000 Again, it's true.

00:21:43.000 Hillary should have been prosecuted. 1.00

00:21:44.000 It is also true that this does not actually mean that you are innocent of things just because somebody else is guilty of a thing.

00:21:51.000 President Trump then retweeted an account called the Trump Train with a graphic of virtually every Democrat on planet Earth behind bars and it says now that Russia collusion is a proven lie, when do the trials for treason begin?

00:22:04.000 So, all good times over on President Trump's Twitter account.

00:22:08.000 In just a second, I want to get to President Trump, who appears to be fulminating more often than I think is useful for him.

00:22:16.000 Again, the economy's good.

00:22:18.000 I don't see why we're doing this.

00:22:19.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:22:20.000 First, let's talk about you getting better at investing.

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00:23:16.000 When I was much younger, when I was back in college, I actually tried to take out an account at one of these other trading sites.

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00:23:42.000 Okay, so President Trump...

00:23:44.000 Obviously is is in a mood.

00:23:46.000 I think he's not happy with with that with the how the midterms went.

00:23:49.000 He shouldn't be.

00:23:49.000 We lost 40 seats.

00:23:50.000 Republicans did in the House.

00:23:52.000 They only picked up two seats in the Senate.

00:23:54.000 So it's 53 seat majority for Republicans in the Senate.

00:23:57.000 That is not a supremely strong majority.

00:23:59.000 It's a little stronger than it was.

00:24:01.000 Obviously, the House was a complete wipeout.

00:24:03.000 In the end, it was a blue wave.

00:24:05.000 People who tell you differently are fibbing to you.

00:24:07.000 2006 was a blue wave. 0.97

00:24:08.000 Democrats won in the House popular vote, not the stupid Senate popular vote, which means nothing. 0.70

00:24:12.000 In the House popular vote, Democrats won in 2006 by 8 points. 0.86

00:24:16.000 They won in 2018 by 8.1 points.

00:24:19.000 So if 2016 was a wave, so was 2018.

00:24:23.000 President Trump, not happy about that.

00:24:25.000 Obviously not happy about the media treatment, justifiably.

00:24:28.000 Obviously unhappy about all the headlines being leaked from the Mueller investigation.

00:24:32.000 And this is causing him to do what he does a lot in social media and publicly, which is puff up his chest.

00:24:39.000 And right now would be a good time to go quiet.

00:24:41.000 Seriously.

00:24:41.000 What President Trump needs to understand, I think that sometimes he gets it and sometimes he doesn't.

00:24:46.000 Let's put it this way.

00:24:47.000 I think he has one half of the equation.

00:24:49.000 President Trump has the capacity to draw spotlights.

00:24:51.000 That is a wonderful capacity in a politician.

00:24:54.000 President Obama could do it, too.

00:24:55.000 It's great.

00:24:56.000 When you're a politician who is capable of drawing spotlights from every angle, it means that you can shift topics pretty easily.

00:25:01.000 President Trump likes the attention.

00:25:03.000 He's always liked attention.

00:25:04.000 There's a guy who was on the cover of Playboy magazine back in the 90s.

00:25:06.000 I mean, this is somebody who does not shun attention.

00:25:08.000 But the president, because he has such capacity to draw attention, also has the capacity to deprive the media of fodder.

00:25:16.000 Just by going silent, the media would drive themselves nuts.

00:25:18.000 Every time President Trump goes out of the country and he travels around, he's busy all the time.

00:25:23.000 His approval ratings rise five points.

00:25:25.000 Not kidding.

00:25:26.000 Go back and look at the record.

00:25:27.000 The reason for that is because the media have nothing to play with.

00:25:31.000 The president is just going around doing presidential things.

00:25:34.000 He's not tweeting.

00:25:35.000 He doesn't have access to cable TV.

00:25:37.000 He's just going around doing what the president should be doing.

00:25:40.000 Every time President Trump misdirects away from a topic of importance or gives the media a topic to focus on that is not good for him, It is a problem for him and a problem for Republicans.

00:25:51.000 Well, President Trump, because he's in a bad mood, though, is now fulminating and he's doing it a lot on Twitter.

00:25:56.000 Again, Twitter is sort of his outlet.

00:25:58.000 I got a text from somebody today on the left saying, do you think President Trump is going on Twitter strategically?

00:26:03.000 And I was like, nope, I think he's bored.

00:26:04.000 And I think that's pretty obvious from his Twitter feed this morning.

00:26:08.000 He retweeted a tweet from a fake Mike Pence account.

00:26:12.000 He retweeted a bunch from an account called The Trump Train.

00:26:15.000 A couple of those tweets are actually factually... They're factually wrong.

00:26:19.000 So he retweeted...

00:26:21.000 He retweeted the Trump train saying, illegals can get up to $4,000 a month under federal assistance program.

00:26:26.000 Our social security checks are an average $1,200 a month.

00:26:29.000 Retweet if you agree.

00:26:30.000 If you weren't born in the United States, you should receive $0 of assistance.

00:26:33.000 That last part is true.

00:26:35.000 The other part is based on Canadian statistics.

00:26:37.000 It's not actually based on American statistics.

00:26:40.000 And then he started retweeting accounts that were tweeting out old footage of Hillary Clinton talking about Eric Holder and Cory Booker as black people.

00:26:48.000 Uh, and we'll get to GM in just a second.

00:26:51.000 But you can tell that President Trump is bored, and when President Trump is bored and feeling bad, he tends to sound off about how great he is.

00:26:56.000 I mean, because today ending in Y. So, he did an interview with, uh, he did an interview, uh, yesterday, in, or at least there was a new book out Tuesday, uh, and the president, in this book, said that, well, he said he feels that, quote, I blow Ronald Reagan away.

00:27:14.000 Mm.

00:27:16.000 It's a statement.

00:27:17.000 It's a statement.

00:27:17.000 He says, the amazing thing is that you have certain people who are conservative Republicans that if my name weren't Trump, if it were John Smith, they would say I'm the greatest president in history and I blow Ronald Reagan away.

00:27:27.000 Hey, I've said before, I think that President Trump has governed more conservatively than Ronald Reagan.

00:27:32.000 I do.

00:27:32.000 I think that he has governed more conservatively than Ronald Reagan.

00:27:35.000 He does not have Ronald Reagan's capacity to win 49 states, or to draw the country together, or to be optimistic.

00:27:41.000 Reagan was a lot more than just his policy.

00:27:44.000 But on policy, Trump isn't wrong that he's quite good.

00:27:46.000 But that was not the best quote.

00:27:48.000 The best quote from President Trump in these various interviews, I mean, this is like full-on Yogi Berra stuff.

00:27:53.000 It's so good.

00:27:54.000 So President Trump, in this interview, He did an interview on Tuesday with the Washington Post, and he said a lot of stuff.

00:28:04.000 So he was asked about the declines on Wall Street and GM's announcement it was laying off 15% of its workforce.

00:28:09.000 President Trump responded by criticizing the Fed.

00:28:11.000 He said he's not worried about a recession.

00:28:13.000 And then he said, quote, about the Fed.

00:28:15.000 He said, they're making a mistake because I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me.

00:28:25.000 Strong stuff.

00:28:26.000 Strong stuff.

00:28:27.000 I gotta admit, that's solid stuff.

00:28:29.000 I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else's brain can ever tell me.

00:28:34.000 Well, it depends if you've had, like, a burrito lately, really.

00:28:37.000 If your gut is telling you more than somebody else's brain could ever tell you.

00:28:41.000 My colon tells me more than Albert Einstein's prefrontal cortex.

00:28:45.000 Let me tell you something.

00:28:46.000 My biotech is more intelligent than any number of experts from the American Enterprise Institute.

00:28:53.000 What's funny about this, now, I do have to note, and I'm making fun of President Trump over this, Barack Obama was exactly the same way.

00:28:58.000 Barack Obama was exactly the same way.

00:29:00.000 He famously, during the 2008 campaign, said that he was his best campaign manager, his own best speech writer, his own best policy wonk, he was his own best everything.

00:29:08.000 Like, Barack Obama loved him some Barack Obama.

00:29:11.000 I mean, Barack Obama, like President Trump, trusted his gut. 1.00

00:29:15.000 Mainly because he got to know his gut face to face by sticking his head up his own ass so often. 0.98

00:29:19.000 But, President Obama, when you talk about people who are egotistic, again, I'm making fun of President Trump simply because I think that President Trump Would be better served by simply receding into the background, letting his policies take the fore. 0.98

00:29:32.000 And by the way, he's not wrong when he says he'd get more praise if he acted more presidential.

00:29:36.000 What he's saying in that first quote about how he's better than Ronald Reagan.

00:29:38.000 Well, then why don't you let people, I don't know, look and enjoy your policies as opposed to you fulminating online.

00:29:45.000 In any case, as I say, when people say that Donald Trump is a wild departure from the president for presidential politics, Let's just remember, he's not the first guy who loves him some president.

00:29:56.000 Here's President Obama yesterday, openly lying about his record on fossil fuels, for example.

00:30:02.000 Barack Obama now takes credit for everything, from the economic recovery, the weakest economic recovery in American history that he presided over, and growth really began in earnest under a Republican Congress.

00:30:13.000 He blames, he takes credit for that, and now he takes credit for low oil prices.

00:30:19.000 This is just unbelievable.

00:30:22.000 Suddenly America's, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest... That was me, people?

00:30:27.000 I just want you to... So... So... It's a little like, you know, sometimes you go to Wall Street and folks will be grumbling about anti-business, and I said, Have you checked where your stocks were when I came in office, where they are now?

00:30:47.000 What are you talking, what are you complaining about?

00:30:49.000 Just say thank you, please.

00:30:50.000 So he's the president for the oil companies in Wall Street now, which is really interesting, because that's not how the oil companies felt.

00:30:57.000 When he takes credit for us being the world's biggest oil producer, with the leading oil producer, this is, honestly, this is sort of like the, it's sort of like, Ralph Branca taking credit for Bobby Thompson's home run.

00:31:11.000 I know it's an old reference for people who aren't baseball fans, but it's like a bad pitcher saying that he takes credit for the home run that was hit off of him.

00:31:20.000 The oil companies had to work around Barack Obama on a routine basis.

00:31:23.000 He was constantly attempting to prevent people from drilling.

00:31:26.000 It was President Obama who was trying to crack down on the fracking industry that made oil and natural gas that much cheaper.

00:31:31.000 And now he's taking credit for all of this.

00:31:33.000 So the reason I point this out is because it is simply not rare in presidential politics for presidents to take credit for things they have nothing to do with.

00:31:40.000 But that attitude does lead to bad policy, whether you're talking Republicans or Democrats.

00:31:43.000 And I'm going to get to that bad policy in just a second with regard to General Motors.

00:31:47.000 But first, let's talk about what you are going to get your loved ones for this holiday year.

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00:32:10.000 I even have my assistant write a love note to her just so I don't have to do it.

00:32:13.000 Just kidding.

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00:33:05.000 Okay, I want to talk about General Motors and President Trump's war with General Motors in just a second, but you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and check it out.

00:33:11.000 For $9.99 a month, you can get a subscription to Daily Wire.

00:33:14.000 When you do, you get the rest of this show live, the rest of Michael Moll's show live, the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live.

00:33:19.000 I mean, these are all great shows except for Michael Mowles.

00:33:21.000 You're going to want to be part of them.

00:33:23.000 And you get all sorts of great goodies.

00:33:25.000 Like, you get to see all of our answers when we do the Sunday Special.

00:33:29.000 Like, there's a final answer.

00:33:31.000 The final answer we get from our guests on the Sunday Special.

00:33:32.000 You don't get that unless you're a subscriber.

00:33:34.000 So, for example, this week's Sunday Special features my good friend David Limbaugh, who I've known for 17 years but only met in person yesterday.

00:33:41.000 David is going to be on the Sunday special talking about, as I mentioned yesterday, our upcoming pre-Christmas series, Who Can Convert Ben Shapiro?

00:33:48.000 He has a new book called Jesus is Risen.

00:33:49.000 We talk about religion and politics and all the rest.

00:33:51.000 Here's a little bit of the preview.

00:33:53.000 I'm David Limbaugh.

00:33:53.000 I want to encourage you to tune in this week to the Ben Shapiro show, the Sunday special.

00:33:58.000 He was gracious enough to interview me and we talked about my book, Jesus is Risen.

00:34:03.000 We talk about Trump and Christianity, church and state, the founding fathers and whether they were Christian.

00:34:10.000 I think we have a good, wholesome discussion.

00:34:12.000 At least Ben contributed very well.

00:34:14.000 I was sitting here listening.

00:34:16.000 So, you can go check that out this Sunday when you subscribe.

00:34:18.000 Also subscribe over at iTunes or YouTube.

00:34:20.000 Leave us a review.

00:34:21.000 And when you get the annual subscription for $99 a year, you get this.

00:34:24.000 The very greatest in beverage vessels.

00:34:25.000 Now, as I say, everyone in my family has been ill.

00:34:28.000 I have not.

00:34:29.000 And I'm not going to pretend that it's because of this Tumblr.

00:34:32.000 But let me just say that without this Tumblr, I don't know what it would have been.

00:34:35.000 Do you?

00:34:35.000 I mean, who knows?

00:34:36.000 Could have been different.

00:34:39.000 Lots of circumstances in life.

00:34:40.000 And every point is an inflection point.

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00:34:43.000 If I had not taken a sip from this, perhaps right now I'd be deathly ill.

00:34:48.000 I can't give you any more of a guarantee than that.

00:34:50.000 I'm sorry.

00:34:50.000 But you can get all of that for $99 a year.

00:34:52.000 Again, we are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:35:00.000 Okay, so speaking of fulmination, President Trump is very, very upset at General Motors.

00:35:03.000 General Motors has just decided that they are going to outsource a bunch of jobs.

00:35:08.000 They are going to cut a bunch of factories in the United States.

00:35:12.000 None of this is particularly shocking, but President Trump is very, very angry at it.

00:35:15.000 The reason he's angry at it is because General Motors basically signaled months ago that the steel tariffs that President Trump was now putting on were going to damage its business.

00:35:26.000 So at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio last year, he talked about how we weren't going to lose any automotive jobs.

00:35:31.000 Jim has estimated that the tariffs that President Trump put on steel and aluminum have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:35:38.000 They said that this was not the sole reason for the cuts.

00:35:40.000 Ford announced last month that it would make an unspecified number of cuts as part of a redesign of the company.

00:35:45.000 They say that the tariffs have cost the company $1 billion so far.

00:35:50.000 And Robert Scott, who's a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, left-leaning, said despite GM's assertions to the contrary, the company is likely to protect itself against a future economic downturn.

00:36:00.000 Says they can read the crystal ball.

00:36:01.000 They see what's coming.

00:36:02.000 This is chickens coming home to roost on the broader Trump economic policies.

00:36:05.000 Of course, this is a leftist saying so.

00:36:07.000 But this has got President Trump very angry because President Trump likes auto jobs.

00:36:11.000 He likes manufacturing jobs.

00:36:12.000 And he's upset with GM.

00:36:14.000 This has caused President Trump to get very angry at GM and blast them, saying that they better put jobs back in or we're going to kill the subsidies to GM.

00:36:22.000 So just to get this straight, the U.S. government never should have been subsidizing GM.

00:36:25.000 We should have allowed GM to go bankrupt back in 2008.

00:36:28.000 If we had allowed GM to go bankrupt back in 2008, it would have been scrapped and sold off for parts, or more likely the brand would have been maintained and bought up by other investors for pennies on the dollar, at which point they would have created new efficiencies and new cost of scale, new efficiencies of scale, It would have made the company better and stronger, and then it would have been on more competitive international footing.

00:36:46.000 Instead, we subsidized it with hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States Treasury.

00:36:50.000 And when we did that, We took an ownership stake in GM and then resold the ownership stake in GM and all the rest.

00:36:56.000 When we did that, we put them basically on the government dole, and this caused President Trump to say, okay, well, if you ship jobs overseas, then we are going to remove your subsidies.

00:37:04.000 Which, by the way, will actually involve GM losing more jobs.

00:37:09.000 See, taking more money out of GM's pocket doesn't make them more likely to bring the jobs back, it makes them more likely to cut more jobs.

00:37:16.000 Here's President Trump, however, saying that he wants to punish GM for making an economically feasible decision, thanks in part to his tariffs.

00:37:22.000 He's done a lot for General Motors.

00:37:24.000 You better get back in there soon.

00:37:25.000 That's Ohio.

00:37:27.000 And you better get back in there soon.

00:37:28.000 So we have a lot of pressure on them.

00:37:31.000 You have senators.

00:37:32.000 You have a lot of other people.

00:37:33.000 A lot of pressure.

00:37:34.000 They say the Chevy Cruze is not selling well.

00:37:38.000 I say, well, then get a car that is selling well and put it back in.

00:37:42.000 Okay, well thank you for that information on running a car company, President Trump.

00:37:47.000 The Chevy Cruze isn't selling well.

00:37:49.000 Maybe we ought to use a different car and put it back in.

00:37:52.000 That's what they're doing, but the Chevy Cruze is mainly manufactured in the United States, and a lot of their other cars, their SUVs, are manufactured overseas, or at least in part overseas.

00:38:00.000 Also, it's really silly to talk about where these cars are manufactured as though the Chevy Cruze is manufactured 100% in America.

00:38:05.000 That's not how any of this works.

00:38:07.000 There are supply chains that extend all across the world.

00:38:10.000 When you raise tariffs on products and auto inputs, it raises the price, it makes you less competitive.

00:38:14.000 So how did President Trump respond to all of this?

00:38:16.000 By more interference in the economy.

00:38:17.000 This is why I don't like when presidents take sole credit for economic wins or economic losses, as though they are responsible for creating jobs.

00:38:25.000 Obama was not responsible for creating jobs.

00:38:27.000 Private industry.

00:38:28.000 was responsible for creating jobs.

00:38:30.000 You can create a business climate that is friendlier for job creation, but you, the president of the United States, are not responsible for creating jobs because you do not have the capacity to do anything other than take money that does not belong to you and spend it on people who are then going to be in your political pocket.

00:38:44.000 So what exactly is President Trump doing?

00:38:47.000 So he put in the steel tariffs.

00:38:49.000 This damaged the car companies.

00:38:50.000 Now, in response, he wants to get more involved in the economy.

00:38:53.000 He wants to go after GM by removing their subsidies, which we should never have given them in the first place.

00:38:59.000 And then he wants to raise tariffs on car imports to create a protectionist kind of placid swimming pool for GM.

00:39:08.000 He says, the reason that the small truck business in the U.S.

00:39:10.000 is such a go-to favorite is that for many years, tariffs of 25% have been put on small trucks coming into our country.

00:39:16.000 It is called the chicken tax.

00:39:18.000 If we did that with cars coming in, many more cars would be built here, and GM would not be closing their plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Maryland.

00:39:23.000 Get smart, Congress!

00:39:25.000 Also, the countries that send us cars have taken advantage of the U.S.

00:39:27.000 for decades.

00:39:28.000 The president has great power on this issue because of the GM event that is being studied now.

00:39:31.000 So now, he threatened, so he did steal tariffs, which hurt the car industry.

00:39:35.000 Now he says, what if I protect the car industry by putting on tariffs?

00:39:38.000 Well, what will that affect?

00:39:39.000 That will affect everyone who buys a car in the United States.

00:39:41.000 It will now be more expensive to buy a car or a truck in the United States, which has downstream economic effects on other businesses, because now you're not going to be able to spend that dollar that you were going to spend on something else on that thing.

00:39:52.000 You're now going to have to spend it on this car because President Trump decided to raise the tariff rates.

00:39:57.000 This is the thing about policies like tariffs that have a small number of beneficiaries, but diffuse numbers of people who are hurt.

00:40:05.000 If it hurts me $100 worth, but somebody gets to keep a job at GM, it's very obvious to the person who keeps the job at GM that their job is due to the tariff.

00:40:15.000 It's not clear to me that my $100 increase in price outweighs that person's job.

00:40:19.000 But what if it's millions of people paying $100 extra?

00:40:22.000 All of this is not economically efficient.

00:40:24.000 It is simple redistribution of wealth.

00:40:26.000 That's all that's happening here.

00:40:27.000 This is not for national security reasons.

00:40:29.000 President Trump has a deep and abiding love for tariffs.

00:40:32.000 His abiding love for tariffs is going to be extraordinarily economically damaging.

00:40:35.000 He has a very, very strong economy.

00:40:37.000 The economy was probably artificially boosted last quarter because so many companies in the United States decided to import products now, as opposed to waiting for President Trump's tariffs to kick in.

00:40:47.000 Right now, a lot of American companies that are exporters are seeing retaliatory tariffs from other countries.

00:40:52.000 In particular, the soybean industry in the United States is about to collapse entirely.

00:40:56.000 Soybean exports, which from the United States mainly go to China, have decreased by 98% going into January, apparently.

00:41:03.000 Is that good for the economy?

00:41:05.000 You may say that we ought to fight China. 0.75

00:41:07.000 That's fine.

00:41:08.000 But let's not pretend that it's economically beneficial for us to do so. 0.93

00:41:12.000 That's silly.

00:41:13.000 But President Trump, again, when you think that the job of the president is to run things, to run the economy, to run things, then you get yourself into all sorts of hot water here.

00:41:22.000 Also, all of this stuff is simply not feasible in the long run.

00:41:26.000 I'm going to explain why in a second.

00:41:28.000 All these subsidies and tariffs and trying to protect certain industries, none of it's feasible in the long run.

00:41:33.000 Now, the reason that none of this stuff is feasible in the long run, the reason that tariff policy, that protectionism, That control from the top down, whether it's by Trump or whether it's Obama on oil and gas or whether it's Trump on cars.

00:41:44.000 The reason none of this is feasible in the long run is that technological advances outpace the capacity of governments to control those technological advances.

00:41:52.000 President Obama tried to shut down oil drilling.

00:41:54.000 What did that do?

00:41:55.000 It artificially raised the price of oil.

00:41:57.000 By doing so, it provided incentive for businesses to create fracking.

00:42:00.000 Those businesses then lowered the price of gas, natural gas, undercutting the coal industry, and also ensuring a cheap supply of natural gas for the future, because President Obama was restricting oil supply.

00:42:13.000 And the same thing is going to happen in the car industry.

00:42:15.000 Uber's CEO says, and I think he's entirely right about this, that in 10 years, nobody is going to own a car.

00:42:21.000 Here is what Uber CEO Dara Khrushchev, I think that's how it's pronounced, said that in a decade, nobody is going to own a car.

00:42:28.000 And I think this is probably correct.

00:42:30.000 Hopefully you won't own a car.

00:42:31.000 You'll essentially come to us and we will give you the choice of whether you want to take a regular Uber, you want to pool with someone, but we're also going to show you this is a bus stop that's next to you and a bus is going to be coming in six minutes from now.

00:42:44.000 You can take the bus today or you can take an electric bike or scooter today as well.

00:42:49.000 We want to give you every single choice.

00:42:52.000 Okay, so the car industry, I totally agree with this, by the way.

00:42:54.000 I think the car industry in the United States is going to completely collapse in a manner of, I think 10 years is too soon.

00:43:01.000 I think within 20 years, automated driving combined with Uber technology is going to allow you to not own a car.

00:43:08.000 Basically, you're just going to pull up an app on your phone, if we even have apps on phones by then.

00:43:13.000 We're going to be able to simply pull up an app on our phone, punch a button, and then a car with the requisite number of seats will arrive to take you to your destination.

00:43:21.000 It won't be worth it to own a car.

00:43:22.000 You're just going to buy a subscription from a company like Uber.

00:43:24.000 You're going to pay $100 a month to buy that subscription from Uber.

00:43:28.000 And you're going to pay that $100 a month instead of paying for an individual ride.

00:43:32.000 And you can use as many cars as you want.

00:43:34.000 And that's how the car industry is going to work.

00:43:35.000 How exactly do you crack down on that?

00:43:37.000 Well, people like Tucker Carlson have said on this show, actually, that they would prevent automatic driving from happening to protect jobs.

00:43:43.000 But you know what's going to happen then?

00:43:45.000 All that's going to happen then is other economies are going to take advantage of those technologies, and those other economies are going to grow faster than the United States economy.

00:43:52.000 You want to know why America's economy is the dominant world economy?

00:43:55.000 Because it does not prevent innovation.

00:43:57.000 Because it does not freeze the economy and attempt redistribution.

00:44:00.000 It does not see innovation as a threat.

00:44:01.000 It sees it as a benefit.

00:44:02.000 And for all those people who think, oh, well, we're going to kill too many jobs with all this stuff, we have literally said this about every technological advance of the last 200 years.

00:44:10.000 For 200 years, people have been doomsaying that every technological advance was going to end with massive unemployment.

00:44:16.000 It has not happened.

00:44:18.000 There are people who will be unemployed for a short period of time.

00:44:21.000 And then they will get jobs in other industries.

00:44:23.000 There will be people who are retrained for other jobs.

00:44:25.000 Should we ease their way?

00:44:26.000 Sure.

00:44:27.000 That's what social fabric is for. 0.99

00:44:28.000 That's where social institutions come in. 1.00

00:44:30.000 But this idea that from the top down you're simply going to redistribute jobs to particular areas you need to win in a presidential election, this says that the federal government is simply too powerful. 0.78

00:44:38.000 This says that the federal government is involved in crap that it should not be involved in, in the first place.

00:44:42.000 And that is true whether you're talking about oil drilling under Barack Obama, or whether you're talking about car industry stuff under Donald Trump. 0.94

00:44:48.000 This is not the business of the federal government.

00:44:50.000 This is not the business of the President of the United States, absent a national security need.

00:44:56.000 Meanwhile, I will say that President Trump's continued popularity has very little to do, I think.

00:45:00.000 There's been an attempt to link his popularity among Republicans with GM, blue collar, Rust Belt kind of stuff.

00:45:07.000 I don't think that's reality.

00:45:08.000 I think that President Trump remains popular because he has a gut level.

00:45:11.000 His gut is right on this.

00:45:13.000 He has a gut-level patriotism for the United States.

00:45:16.000 Unfortunately, his gut-level patriotism for the United States is not being reflected by millennials.

00:45:20.000 There's a new study out that shows that millennials, half of them, think that America isn't great and think that Barack Obama was more important than George Washington.

00:45:30.000 A new poll conducted by the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness found that a huge percentage of younger Americans are expressing their disdain for American ideals.

00:45:37.000 Almost half believe America isn't great.

00:45:38.000 Roughly 20% think the American flag is a sign of intolerance and hatred.

00:45:42.000 29% were okay with burning the American flag.

00:45:45.000 We have some serious crises of American conscience that are cropping up with younger Americans and in the near future.

00:45:52.000 That's why when President Trump says he's better than Ronald Reagan, if he wants to be better than Ronald Reagan, it can't just be that he's cutting regulation.

00:45:59.000 It has to be that he's making an affirmative case for America as a great free country and why you should join that adventure rather than sitting on the sidelines screaming about how America is terrible.

00:46:08.000 Otherwise we will see the end of America no matter how good the economy is.

00:46:11.000 People are driven by ideas.

00:46:12.000 People are driven by passion.

00:46:13.000 People are not necessarily driven simply by their pocketbook, and that is particularly true when you're talking about young people who mainly are living off mommy and daddy's pocketbook.

00:46:21.000 Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.

00:46:24.000 So, things that I like today.

00:46:26.000 This is the second book by Jesse Norman I've recommended in a couple of months.

00:46:29.000 I recommended his biography of Adam Smith.

00:46:31.000 His first biography was of Edmund Burke, one of the first real conservatives.

00:46:36.000 Edmund Burke's conservatism was of a brand that suggested that Basically, Western civilization had been the product of a fabric created over thousands of years and hundreds of generations, and that that fabric had to be preserved, and that if we were going to change the fabric, then we had best consider what it was we were removing before replacing it.

00:46:56.000 And this is why Edmund Burke was not a fan of the French Revolution, but he was a fan of the American Revolution, which he saw as Americans simply seeking to defend their rights as Englishmen.

00:47:06.000 And he saw the French Revolution as people who were seeking to overthrow the fundamental institutions of society.

00:47:13.000 The book is really good by Jesse Norman.

00:47:15.000 Edmund Burke, the first conservative.

00:47:17.000 This is not the only biography of Edmund Burke that's good.

00:47:19.000 Russell Kirk has one that's quite good.

00:47:21.000 If you are actually interested in conservatism, the history of conservative thought, and not merely tax rates, then it's incumbent on you to read some Edmund Burke, who really is terrific and an amazing writer, by the way.

00:47:32.000 Very readable, even though he was writing in the late 18th century.

00:47:36.000 So go check that out right now.

00:47:37.000 Okay, other things that I like today.

00:47:41.000 Well, I have to admit, That I do actually like this story from a sci-fi writer who says that the orcs from Lord of the Ring are racist.

00:47:52.000 I am not kidding.

00:47:53.000 Science fiction author Andrew Duncan has a message for JRR Tolkien fans.

00:47:57.000 He says Tolkien discriminated against orcs, and the Lord of the Rings books promote racism.

00:48:01.000 Duncan was discussing Lord of the Rings as part of a wider discussion on fantasy.

00:48:05.000 He says it's hard to miss the repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others, or that some people are just worse than others.

00:48:11.000 And this seems to me in the long term, if you embrace this too much, it has dire consequences for yourself and for society.

00:48:15.000 Uh-huh.

00:48:18.000 A couple of things.

00:48:20.000 Lord of the Rings was written with the Nazis in mind. 0.53

00:48:23.000 Are some people worse than others?

00:48:25.000 Yes.

00:48:26.000 Yes, they are.

00:48:27.000 You know how you could tell sometimes?

00:48:29.000 When they wear a swastika on their arm.

00:48:31.000 That's a pretty good indicator that's not a good person.

00:48:34.000 So, this is insane.

00:48:35.000 But again, for folks on the left who believe that everybody is of equal moral value, and that every choice is of equal moral value, this is silliness.

00:48:43.000 Also, the idea that it's discriminatory because it leads to the idea that biologically there are no good orcs. 0.65

00:48:49.000 It's a fantasy book, you dope!

00:48:51.000 And not only is it a fantasy book, nowhere in that book is there a suggestion that hobbits themselves are genetically good, right?

00:48:59.000 I mean, spoiler alert from 80 years ago, but Smeagol was once a hobbit, right? 0.86

00:49:05.000 So the fact is that Smeagol turned bad.

00:49:07.000 He turned into Smeagol. 0.99

00:49:09.000 So, this whole thing is just silly.

00:49:11.000 But, you know, silliness in the woke sci-fi community has become a thing, which is why I think sci-fi literature is getting worse and worse. 0.56

00:49:17.000 He says, we should allow the orcs to explain themselves.

00:49:21.000 Uh-huh.

00:49:21.000 So that's, yeah.

00:49:24.000 They mainly do.

00:49:25.000 It seems like they want to eat people.

00:49:27.000 That's their thing.

00:49:29.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.

00:49:34.000 Okay, so, things that I hate.

00:49:37.000 There are all these stories that often go viral, and it's really absurd why these things go viral.

00:49:45.000 Here's one example.

00:49:45.000 There's a teen who graduated from a Catholic high school, and when he spoke at this Catholic high school, he was met with a standing ovation.

00:49:53.000 Why?

00:49:54.000 Because he came out as gay in front of the high school. 0.54

00:49:58.000 And here is what he had to say.

00:50:00.000 Announcing yourself to the world is pretty terrifying because what if the world doesn't like you?

00:50:05.000 I decided that it was finally time to tell someone the truth.

00:50:11.000 It wasn't easy, but I told my mum that I thought I might be gay.

00:50:15.000 When I said it, I just felt this energy pass through me, and I felt that was the first time I'd really been proud of who I was.

00:50:26.000 Okay, so everybody is, wow, it's so brave, it's so wonderful.

00:50:30.000 First of all, bravery requires risk.

00:50:32.000 I'm not sure what the risk is here.

00:50:33.000 I mean, this is a guy who's now being featured on the news for saying he's of a particular sexual orientation in front of a crowd.

00:50:39.000 Second, you know, I went to an Orthodox Jewish high school.

00:50:42.000 The standard at the Orthodox Jewish high school, there are standards on a lot of things, on Sabbath observance, on kosher observance, and yes, on sexual proclivities and sexual practices.

00:50:53.000 To go into a place where everyone knows the standard up front, and to enroll in that place with the agreement that you're going to abide by those rules, and then to get up and then say that the rules are bad as you graduate, is not really an act of respect.

00:51:06.000 It is not really an act even of self-respect.

00:51:09.000 It is an act of rebellion against the school that you basically lied to.

00:51:13.000 If you want to come out, come out.

00:51:15.000 Do whatever you want, man.

00:51:15.000 It's a free society.

00:51:16.000 I really don't care.

00:51:18.000 But, if you are going to go to, take my example, a Jewish day school, and then at your graduation, you're going to announce, you know what?

00:51:24.000 I hate Sabbath.

00:51:26.000 Sabbath is not for me. 0.99

00:51:27.000 Sabbath is dumb. 0.99

00:51:28.000 And I think this whole thing has been a sham. 1.00

00:51:30.000 Is that bravery, or is it just you being kind of a jerk? 1.00

00:51:33.000 Now, I'm not saying that being gay is him being a jerk. 1.00

00:51:35.000 Obviously not. 0.99

00:51:36.000 As I just said, if he wants to come out, let him come out.

00:51:37.000 But to take the advantage of a Catholic school graduation, and then to say at the Catholic school graduation, by the way, your entire moral standard with regard to sexuality is wrong, and you should change it because I'm gay, is really not an act of humility or decency.

00:51:52.000 It's really an act of self-aggrandizement that I don't think is really worthy of celebration.

00:51:58.000 Again, for the 1,000th time in this segment, do whatever you want.

00:52:01.000 But if the idea here is that you're doing something grand and good by challenging the status quo at a school that you apparently accepted the moral standards of when you were going there, seems to me a slap in the face to the religious upbringing from whence you came and the school to which you go.

00:52:18.000 You want to leave the school and then rip the school for its policies?

00:52:20.000 Fine.

00:52:20.000 You want to take advantage of their platform to talk about how you hate everything they stand for on this particular issue?

00:52:26.000 Because it makes you feel good in front of 1,500 people?

00:52:29.000 Not cool.

00:52:30.000 Now, if you want... And here's the other thing.

00:52:32.000 If the school approved the speech, if the school was cool with it, then still not sure how it's brave, because at that point the school approves of it.

00:52:39.000 So either this is an act of self-aggrandizement or it's not a lot of bravery.

00:52:43.000 Bravery would be if you want to come out and then challenge bad policy, right?

00:52:50.000 And you want to challenge a bad policy.

00:52:51.000 But if you want to go to a religious school that you went to and then rip the school, I just, I think that that's...

00:52:56.000 I think it's an act of true arrogance, in a certain respect.

00:53:02.000 And again, I don't think this kid thinks of it like that, and I don't blame him, but I don't think the media have to celebrate this sort of stuff either.

00:53:08.000 Okay, other things that I hate today.

00:53:10.000 So, there's this story about this American Christian missionary who was killed when he tried to contact a hostile hunter-gatherer tribe on an isolated island in the Indian Ocean.

00:53:20.000 So, some see John Chow as a symbol of Western arrogance.

00:53:22.000 This is according to the Washington Post.

00:53:23.000 A reckless evangelist who attempted to supplant a culture thousands of years old when he broke Indian law and set foot on the North Sentinel Island.

00:53:31.000 Some Christians see him as a martyr, if perhaps a misguided one, who recognized no exceptions to the evangelist's mission when he tried to take the Bible to a people known to kill outsiders on sight.

00:53:42.000 But only one person gleaned from Chow Slang a model for national immigration policy. 0.87

00:53:46.000 There's a piece in Australia about how the natives had a great immigration policy.

00:53:51.000 But in any case, here's where I think all of this goes wrong.

00:53:56.000 So I want to talk about the perspective that the tribe was okay killing this guy.

00:54:01.000 Why?

00:54:02.000 Just why?

00:54:03.000 Like, I don't understand.

00:54:05.000 Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations.

00:54:06.000 So, if you come to my house with a book in a Western civilized society, missionaries come to my house all the time because people knock on your door, and they want to talk about the Book of Mormon, right?

00:54:17.000 They want to talk about the Latter-day Saints, or they want to talk about Seventh-day Adventism, or something.

00:54:21.000 Let's say they did that. 0.99

00:54:22.000 I went into my gun safe, I took out my pistol, and I shot them to death on my doorstep. 0.99

00:54:28.000 This would make me a fairly crappy human being. 1.00

00:54:30.000 And when I say fairly crappy, I mean an irredeemably crappy human being. 0.99

00:54:33.000 If somebody came to me and said, I'd like to talk to you about Jesus. 0.97

00:54:36.000 Like I did my Sunday conversation with David Limbaugh and he said, I'd like to talk to you about my book, Jesus is Risen.

00:54:41.000 And I took this Tumblr and beat him to death with it.

00:54:44.000 This would make me a very, very bad person. 0.98

00:54:47.000 It would make me guilty of murder.

00:54:48.000 I would probably be executed if I were not in the state of California. 0.82

00:54:51.000 In the state of California, if you kill a Christian, then basically, they actually make you a saint, I think, in the state of California. 0.97

00:54:55.000 But if we were in a normal state, then this would make me a bad person. 0.90

00:55:01.000 I don't understand why, if you live in a primitive tribe, it's okay to kill somebody who shows up on your island with a book.

00:55:07.000 Why?

00:55:08.000 Is it because they're more innocent?

00:55:09.000 This noble savage routine?

00:55:10.000 Well, they're just noble.

00:55:11.000 Well, not really, when you kill somebody showing up with, again, If you're a Christian missionary showing up there with a gun to try and convert people at sword point, that's one thing. 0.99

00:55:18.000 If you're somebody who's showing up to talk to somebody about God and the afterlife, I don't understand why we should celebrate a pagan tribe for doing that when we would rightly in Western civilization excoriate anybody who did something similar to anyone of any particular religious sect. 0.90

00:55:35.000 Primitivism is still primitive even when practiced by primitive people.

00:55:39.000 Okay, and when I say primitive, that's not meant as an insult.

00:55:42.000 These are people who are literal hunter-gatherers who live in, like, loincloths.

00:55:45.000 This is like an actual description.

00:55:47.000 They're not sophisticates.

00:55:48.000 They're not cultural sophisticates, okay?

00:55:49.000 They're not building cars.

00:55:50.000 Xi'an has no plants on this island.

00:55:52.000 I don't understand why it is that we in the West are so sanguine about the evil activities.

00:55:58.000 And it is evil to murder people!

00:56:00.000 This shouldn't be controversial.

00:56:01.000 Evil activities of people who are not from Western societies. 1.00

00:56:05.000 Really, like, I would expect better behavior from my four-and-a-half-year-old. 0.96

00:56:09.000 My two-and-a-half-year-old not, because he's a monster.

00:56:11.000 In any case, let's talk about a Federalist paper.

00:56:13.000 So we are all the way up to Federalist 51, one of my favorite Federalist papers.

00:56:16.000 Wow, I really like Federalist 51.

00:56:18.000 One of the more famous Federalist Papers, and one of the most often quoted for a reason, is by James Madison.

00:56:23.000 It's about checks and balances.

00:56:24.000 Why we need checks and balances in the government and how to achieve that.

00:56:27.000 So there are several fundamental principles he talks about in Federalist 51.

00:56:30.000 He says, first, every department must be separate and have little impact on appointment to other branches.

00:56:34.000 So you can't have members of the executive branch appointing members of the legislative branch, or basically the legislative branch would be in control of the executive branch.

00:56:41.000 You can't have members of the legislative branch appoint members of the executive branch, or The executive branch will be in the control of the legislative branch.

00:56:49.000 This is one of the reasons why the idea of bureaucratic government is such a problem.

00:56:53.000 Because bureaucratic government, you basically have bureaucracies that are created by the executive branch and are given tremendous leeway by the legislature to create regulations that belong inside the legislature.

00:57:03.000 The founders never would have thought that there should be such a thing as a two million person executive branch.

00:57:09.000 It's insane.

00:57:10.000 Okay, two.

00:57:11.000 Branches must be able to avoid encroachments by other branches.

00:57:13.000 So, you want the branches to fight with each other and defend their own priorities and power from one another.

00:57:19.000 So, Madison says this, and this is, again, one of the most oft-cited parts of the Federalist Papers for a reason.

00:57:24.000 He says, The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.

00:57:30.000 It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.

00:57:35.000 But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

00:57:39.000 If men were angels, this is the most important single line in the Federalist Papers right here.

00:57:43.000 If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

00:57:47.000 If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on the government would be necessary.

00:57:52.000 In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this.

00:57:57.000 You must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

00:58:03.000 A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on the government, but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

00:58:09.000 So what he's saying is, people aren't angels, people aren't devils.

00:58:13.000 If people were devils, no government could control them.

00:58:15.000 If people were angels, you wouldn't need a government to control them.

00:58:17.000 So what you need is a government that can protect people from the predations of others, and at the same time, is capable of stopping its own predations.

00:58:24.000 How do you do that?

00:58:25.000 You do that by creating a multiplicity of interests and pitting them against one another, so only an overwhelming consensus on an issue allows anything to get done.

00:58:32.000 This is to protect the rights of minorities.

00:58:34.000 So he says, quote, it is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part.

00:58:43.000 Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens.

00:58:45.000 If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.

00:58:49.000 Therefore, what you really need, he says, is that the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens that the rights of individuals or of the minority will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. - Yeah.

00:59:03.000 It is no less certain than it is important, notwithstanding the contrary opinions which have been entertained, that the larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government.

00:59:13.000 And happily for the Republican cause, the practicable sphere may be carried to a very great extent by a judicious modification and mixture of the federal principle.

00:59:20.000 So, we want the states to check the federal government.

00:59:22.000 We want the legislature to have two branches, to have two chambers that will check each other.

00:59:27.000 We want the legislature to check the executive, the executive to check the judicial, the judicial to check both.

00:59:31.000 We want all of these things to happen.

00:59:33.000 And we want that because we don't actually want lots of things to get done.

00:59:37.000 See, this is the great lie from every president.

00:59:40.000 Why can't we get more done?

00:59:41.000 Politics is broken.

00:59:42.000 Why can't we get more done?

00:59:43.000 We don't want things to get done.

00:59:45.000 Getting things done is a threat to your freedom.

00:59:47.000 The only way things should get done is if we were to have an enormous, if we were to have an enormous consensus on an issue, an overwhelming consensus on an issue.

00:59:59.000 If we were to have that overwhelming consensus on an issue, then we get things done.

01:00:02.000 You make a constitutional amendment, you pass a piece of legislation.

01:00:05.000 But, if not, then we should be very wary of doing things with the power of the ring.

01:00:11.000 The power of government is the power of the one ring.

01:00:12.000 Better that it should be wielded by no one, than that it should be wielded by one person who gets things done.

01:00:17.000 This is why I don't like pragmatism politically, and this is why I'm not in favor of people who think we should just run roughshod and break all the things in order to get done what I want to get done.

01:00:24.000 Because guess what?

01:00:25.000 That sword can be turned against you tomorrow.

01:00:27.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.

01:00:29.000 I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.

01:00:35.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal.

01:00:37.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

01:00:39.000 Senior producer Jonathan Hay.

01:00:41.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

01:00:42.000 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

01:00:45.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

01:00:46.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

01:00:48.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

01:00:50.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 28, 2018

Mulling Over Mueller | Ep. 668

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