Team Obama defends Iran from Benjamin Netanyahu, the White House faces down special counsel Robert Mueller, and the Boy Scouts have decided to rename themselves the Save America Pod. Plus, a special Mother's Day offer from 1-800-Flowers to remember her with and a new name for the group: Save America Tehran. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and become a supporter of the Weekly Standard s New York Times bestselling author Tommy Vietor on his new book, "Save America Tehran: A Guide to Fighting the Iran Deal." Subscribe now using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first pack! Want to support the podcast and/or have your own personal ad-free version of the show? Just go to gimlet.fm/supportnow and enter the promo code: "supportnow" at checkout to receive $10 and receive 10 free tickets to our upcoming events and a free VIP membership offer. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a five star review! rating and review on iTunes and we'll give you 5 stars on your favorite streaming platform so we can keep giving you the best listening experience possible! You'll get 10% discount code: SAVAGE10 at checkout and get 10 free meals and free shipping throughout the rest of the week! Thank you, Ben Shapiro's new book "Saving America Tehran" is out there! Save America, Save America is coming soon! is available in paperback and on Audible. in paperback, Kindle, iBookshop, Paperback, and Audible, and also on Podcoin, and on Vimeo, and all other major podcasting platforms! It's all over the web! and all kinds of great rewards, including the web, including Vimeo and Vaynermedia, and so much more! I'm giving you access to everything you need to help you get the best experience in the best of it! The best of the best in the whole world, the best podcast on the best, the most affordable and the most authentic, the whole thing I can do it's all that you can do, and I'm listening to it, and more, and there's more than you'll get the most of it, I'm talking about it, too, and you get it all, so you can be there, and it's gonna hear it, right here, too!
00:00:00.000Team Obama defends Iran from Benjamin Netanyahu, the White House faces down special counsel Robert Mueller, and the Boy Scouts have decided to rename themselves.
00:01:35.000Team Obama is very angry today because it turns out that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government revealed for all the world to see that Iran has been consistently lying about its nuclear program for years.
00:01:44.000Not only did they lie about the extent of their nuclear program in the run-up to the Iran deal signed by the Obama administration, but they also continued to lie after that.
00:01:52.000Because they hid all of these documents, and they refused to inform the IAEA of where any of these documents were.
00:01:58.000They had secret sites that nobody knew about.
00:02:01.000And so, Team Obama is very, very mad about this.
00:02:04.000Iran has now threatened Israel over Netanyahu's speech.
00:02:07.000So, they say, according to Amir Khatami, who is the Iranian defense minister, he said, they must stop their conspiracies and dangerous behavior because Iran's response will be just surprising and make them regretful.
00:02:17.000Israel and Iran, of course, are clashing diplomatically after Netanyahu revealed that they had stolen 100,000 documents out of Iran itself, which is an amazing, amazing intelligence accomplishment.
00:02:28.000But, Tommy said, the timing of this show by a person who has a record of such acts proves that in addition to the general goals of this regime in pursuing hostility toward the Iranian nation, it also pursues other specific goals, which include following suit with President Trump's hostile scenario against the Iranian nation.
00:02:43.000Netanyahu, of course, has claimed that the nuclear deal gives Iran a clear pass to an atomic arsenal and says that it never should have been concluded in the first place.
00:02:49.000What's amusing to watch is as folks on the left struggle to come up with a response to the fact that Iran is a government of liars, that the mullahs are in fact tyrannical dictators who repress women and gay folks and people of other religions.
00:03:02.000And the media are struggling to figure out why exactly they should continue to support this deal.
00:03:06.000And so instead, what they have decided to do is side almost openly with Iran.
00:03:09.000So leading the charge is Tommy Vietor.
00:03:12.000If you've never heard of Tommy Vietor, you're in good company.
00:03:26.000On Twitter, to mock people who are angry about the Iran deal, to Tehran Tommy.
00:03:30.000He started off as a van driver in a 2002 local campaign and worked his way up to be the National Security Council spokesperson under President Barack Obama, showing you that mobility still happens in the United States.
00:03:48.000Trump is very angry at the Israelis for having revealed the fact that the Iranian government is filled with people who lie about their nuclear weapons program.
00:03:55.000Barak Ravid, who's a reporter from Israel, said an Israeli official said the timing of the publication was coordinated with the White House and the reason it was published this week was due to the May 12th deadline regarding the Iran deal.
00:04:03.000So Vidar tweeted, quote, After years of bashing U.S.
00:04:06.000intelligence agencies for getting Iraq WMD wrong, Trump is now cooking up intel with the Israelis to push us closer to a conflict with Iran.
00:06:47.000Because this deal—the fact that you have a dangerous deal, the fact that Iran is keeping or not violating a dangerous deal doesn't make it less dangerous.
00:07:04.000Right, the argument Netanyahu is making from the very beginning, and made by people on the right like me from the very beginning, is that the Iran deal gave Iran a clear pathway to a nuclear weapon after 10 years with all sanctions lifted, allowed them to develop ballistic missiles technology, and didn't really force them to dismantle their nuclear program in any serious way.
00:07:20.000It prevented them from ramping that nuclear program up, but it didn't prevent them from maintaining all the equipment in a back basement somewhere, which presumably is exactly what they've done.
00:07:29.000The only reason that we know about the extent of their nuclear program is not because Iran turned over its materials to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
00:07:37.000The reason we know about it is because the Jews smuggled 100,000 documents out of Tehran.
00:07:42.000But again, the media are really invested in the Iran deal, and they are very much invested in attempting to forward the Iran deal.
00:07:48.000And so, you saw yesterday, CNN's Jeff Zeleny, he was asking the White House whether they even take the Iran deal stuff seriously.
00:07:54.000Again, this sort of scorning, dripping media coverage, it demonstrates full scale how much the media were in the pocket of the Obama administration, and how much they now seek to defend Iran in pursuit of defending their own legacy for defending Obama in the first place.
00:08:06.000You believe that the White House has a credibility problem around the world with statements like this.
00:08:43.000Okay, in other news, in other big news today.
00:09:13.000Apparently, Donald Trump is—the situation with Robert Mueller is now coming to a head.
00:09:18.000So, Robert Mueller is, of course, the special counsel who's investigating so-called Trump-Russia collusion.
00:09:21.000Again, there is no serious evidence that has been presented to date that demonstrates any real collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 campaign.
00:09:31.000And the best that they've done is saying that Carter Page traveled to Moscow.
00:09:34.000Carter Page still has not been indicted.
00:09:36.000They've indicted George Papadopoulos, who's a low-level campaign staffer for the Trump team, who was meeting with some Russian connected professor in London.
00:09:49.000There's no evidence that any information actually passed hands or was funneled to the Trump campaign.
00:09:55.000And the only other piece of evidence that I've seen that is suspicious in any serious way is that Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., some members of the Trump campaign, and a lawyer that was connected to the Russian government.
00:10:04.000At best, what that shows is a willingness to cooperate with Russia.
00:10:07.000There's no actual evidence of cooperation with Russia in any serious fashion.
00:10:10.000Well, Robert Mueller is apparently going to ask President Trump about all of this, and he wants to ask President Trump specifically about obstruction.
00:10:16.000So this investigation has now shifted in tone and tenor from an investigation about supposed election interference to obstruction of justice.
00:10:24.000Is Donald Trump trying to fire people and obstruct justice in order to protect the government from finding out about something?
00:10:30.000Now, the problem with obstruction charges is it's very easy to bring obstruction charges in virtually any case.
00:10:35.000All you have to do is get someone on the record once lying.
00:10:38.000Once that happens, once you lie to the FBI, that's a crime.
00:10:41.000And once you lie to special counsel Mueller, that's a crime.
00:10:43.000Doesn't matter whether you're under oath or not.
00:10:45.000It is also true that if you fire somebody to stop an investigation, for example, even if the investigation were to find you innocent, then they could try to go after you for obstruction of justice.
00:10:55.000Well, this looks like the path that Mueller is now attempting to take.
00:10:58.000The Washington Post broke news last night of a meeting in early March with special counsel Robert Mueller in which President Trump's lawyers insisted he had no obligation to talk with federal investigators probing Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
00:11:11.000But Mueller, it looks like, is now getting rough.
00:11:16.000He could issue a subpoena for the president to appear before a grand jury, according to four people familiar with the encounter.
00:11:21.000John Dowd, who's the president's lead lawyer, then said, So where do things currently stand?
00:11:29.000Well, I'll explain it in just one second.
00:11:31.000First, I want to say thanks to our new sponsors over at OMAX.
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00:13:18.000All of this with Trump and Mueller is coming to a head.
00:13:21.000So in the wake of that meeting that I was discussing, Robert Mueller's team agreed to provide the president's lawyers with more specific information about the subjects prosecutors wanted to discuss with the president.
00:13:30.000So they sent them a bunch of questions.
00:13:31.000And that's when all of those questions were leaked.
00:13:33.000So there were a bunch of questions that were leaked by apparently Team Trump is probably the best guess.
00:13:39.000What Mueller wants to talk to Trump about.
00:13:40.000He wants to talk to him about the collusion, but he also wants to ask him pretty far ranging questions like, what were you thinking about James Comey before you fired James Comey?
00:13:48.000And what did you think of James Comey when you first came into office?
00:13:50.000And what were you thinking during this meeting?
00:13:51.000And what were you thinking during that meeting?
00:13:52.000Well, Trump doesn't have any obligation to answer those questions.
00:13:56.000He can always just say, I don't remember.
00:14:06.000Here's Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Toobin on CNN yesterday discussing whether Trump would plead the fifth if he were in fact subpoenaed by the special counsel.
00:14:14.000By the way, the special counsel does have the power to subpoena the president in a civil or criminal procedure in all likelihood.
00:14:19.000But Trump probably will not plead the fifth for a pretty specific reason.
00:14:23.000I think the president has a way of short-circuiting this entire process, and I think that's what he's going to do, ultimately, which is take the fifth, which he's refused to answer.
00:15:10.000Well, if you give somebody immunity, you can't plead the fifth.
00:15:12.000So pleading the fifth only protects you from criminal prosecution.
00:15:15.000If I am a witness in a trial, for example, and criminal prosecution is not imminent, then I am not allowed to plead the fifth.
00:15:22.000Pleading the fifth only applies to self-incrimination when criminal charges are on the table.
00:15:26.000Once you are granted immunity, if I'm granted immunity as a witness, I can no longer plead the fifth because the fifth is to protect you from self-incrimination.
00:15:34.000So what instead, what Dershowitz is saying, what Mueller will do instead is he'll say to the president, listen, we're not going to prosecute you.
00:15:56.000The best thing for Trump to do is avoid the interview with Mueller as long as he possibly can, and then if there's anything even mildly incriminating, the president ought to be saying, I do not remember.
00:16:04.000Because, frankly, even if the president is completely innocent, he has a habit of stepping in doo-doo, and I don't think that he should be stepping in doo-doo in front of a talented lawyer like Robert Mueller.
00:16:14.000Meanwhile, in breaking news, apparently the Boy Scouts of America are now going to change their name.
00:16:18.000So we've reached the point in American society where it is just not tolerant enough for there to be things like Boy Scouts anymore.
00:16:24.000There's a famous clip of me online talking to a woman about transgenderism, in which we're talking about the Boy Scouts, and she says, why shouldn't girls be allowed to be in the Boy Scouts?
00:16:34.000Meaning, why shouldn't girls who believe they're boys be allowed in the Boy Scouts?
00:16:38.000And I said, because it's called the Boy Scouts.
00:16:41.000Well, now the Boy Scouts have changed their names.
00:16:43.000They've already been moving to the left on a bunch of social issues under pressure from various state governments.
00:16:48.000The state of California tried to remove the state tax-exempt status of the Boy Scouts of California if they had not actually allowed gay Scoutmasters, for example.
00:16:56.000The Boy Scouts have become a much more secular organization, and they've begun admitting girls as well.
00:17:01.000According to the New York Post today, for 108 years, the Boy Scouts of America's flagship program has been known simply as the Boy Scouts, with girls soon entering the ranks.
00:17:08.000The group says that iconic name will change.
00:17:10.000Now, you may be asking yourself, why can't there be a Girl Scouts?
00:17:13.000Because there are Girl Scouts and they sell me cookies.
00:17:15.000Why does there have to be a Boy Scouts that allows girls?
00:17:18.000And the answer is because the left is so stupid and terrible that they believe that any such situation in which boys play only with boys must by its very nature be sexist and discriminatory.
00:18:11.000The Girl Scouts are really mad that the Boy Scouts are now allowing girls.
00:18:13.000They're afraid that the Boy Scouts are going to suddenly have Girl Scout troops, and suddenly the Girl Scouts, which is an independent organization, will cease to exist.
00:18:24.000Chief Scout Executive Mike Cerbaugh said many possibilities have been included.
00:18:27.000They've renamed the Boy Scouts program Scouts BSA, right, which really means Scouts Boy Scouts of America, but they're not going to use Boy Scouts of America anymore.
00:18:35.000The parent organization remains the Boy Scouts of America.
00:18:37.000The Cub Scouts keeps its title, but the Boy Scouts, the program for 11 to 17 year olds, is now the Scouts BSA, and the organization has already started admitting girls into the Cub Scouts.
00:18:46.000Scouts BSA begins accepting girls next year.
00:18:50.000They say that now they are going to refer to themselves simply as scouts rather than boy or girl or another modifier like that.
00:18:56.000Now listen, we here in this office, we sign a lot of letters in congratulation for folks for becoming Eagle Scouts.
00:19:01.000It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to become an Eagle Scout.
00:19:04.000But Girl Scouts have a similar process, and that's okay.
00:19:32.000Once you obliterate the distinction between the sexes, you end up destroying the feminists.
00:19:37.000So the Girl Scout leaders say they are blindsided by the move.
00:19:39.000They're gearing up an aggressive campaign to recruit and retain girls as members.
00:19:42.000Among the initiatives is creation of numerous new badges that girls can earn, focusing on outdoor activities and on science, engineering, technology, and math.
00:19:51.000The number of girls who are desperate to get merit badges in science, engineering, technology, and math, just by choice, is a lot lower than the number of girls who want to do all the other merit badges.
00:20:23.000But again, I think that the obliteration of sexual distinctions is really, really stupid.
00:20:28.000And not only that, it is from the left a fascistic matter.
00:20:32.000The attempt to break down cultural distinctions by the left in order to level all human beings into these sexless widgets is really counterproductive and really, really stupid.
00:21:26.000Alas, at last count, barely more than one-third have done so, with the rest of Americans leaving it up to the medical profession and ill-prepared family members to decide when and how to provide life-prolonging treatment.
00:21:35.000But even the many who, like me, have done due diligence—this is written by a doctor named Jane Brody—completed the appropriate forms, selected a health care agent, expressed their wishes to whomever may have to make medical decisions for them, may not realize that the documents typically do not cover a likely scenario for one of the leading causes of death—dementia.
00:21:51.000Missing in standard documents, for example, are specific instructions about providing food and drink by hand as opposed to through a tube.
00:21:57.000Now, this is the part where it starts getting weird.
00:22:00.000It should talk about things like whether you want the plug pulled or whether you want to be on life support, under what conditions you want your life support maintained, all of that.
00:22:07.000But there is no circumstance under which you should be denying food to people who can still eat.
00:22:16.000And what's happened in some of these cases is that you'll have a patient with dementia, no longer capable of making decisions, and when they did not have dementia, they handed power of attorney, they handed power of agency over to another family member, and in that directive, in the final directive, it said that
00:22:34.000If I am afflicted with dementia, then I want you to provide me with food and water.
00:22:39.000And then the person will actually get in that situation.
00:22:41.000It turns out that whether you have dementia or not, you still want to eat and drink.
00:22:56.000So according to the New York Times, while trying to provide nourishment for a terminally ill person nearing death is commonly done in the name of comfort and caring, if that person cannot benefit from food or drink, it can become quite the opposite.
00:23:05.000When patients can no longer swallow what they are fed, they may choke and aspirate food or drink into their lungs, resulting in pneumonia that adds to their misery and hastens their death.
00:23:14.000There's no question that that's true, but...
00:23:16.000The problem with the advance directive that this article then directs you to is it makes no distinctions as to whether you are capable of swallowing the food or not.
00:23:23.000What it says is, do you wish to be denied food and drink in the case of dementia when you are terminally ill?
00:23:29.000So that means that you're basically pre-deciding that you want to starve to death.
00:23:32.000And the doctors are supposed to make this happen for you?
00:23:37.000So, again, the New York Times moving us in the direction of Europe on a lot of these topics, and that is very, very scary stuff.
00:23:44.000Now, speaking of movements in a scary direction, CEO Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook now says that Facebook is going to rank news outlets by trustworthiness.
00:23:53.000I can't imagine how this is going to go wrong.
00:23:56.000Mark Zuckerberg said in a meeting Tuesday with media executives that the company has begun implementing a system of ranking news organizations by trust, relying on user surveys to determine which news sources are broadly trusted.
00:24:06.000I can't imagine how this could go wrong.
00:24:08.000I can't imagine how an online survey of people might not be reflective of people's general feelings about a particular news outlet.
00:24:15.000I can't imagine, for example, that a bunch of lefties might not spam the Daily Wire account saying they know the Daily Wire, but they don't trust the Daily Wire, and therefore we get dinged in the Facebook rankings.
00:24:23.000I can't imagine anything like that would happen
00:24:28.000I can't imagine that Facebook would construct a system that benefits only left-wing outlets, even though that's apparently what they've been doing.
00:25:02.000How is it that Daily Wire was not invited to that meet?
00:25:05.000How is it that, I assume, Daily Caller, The Blaze, you know, a bunch of other right-wing websites were not invited to that meet in all likelihood?
00:25:11.000Why is it that Atlantic Media, which just fired Kevin Williamson for having a dissenting point of view, they are a trusted news outlet, presumably, but who knows whether National Review is?
00:25:20.000It's pretty amazing that Zuckerberg is so obviously doing this at this point.
00:25:23.000He says that Facebook has a responsibility to help reduce polarization and help people find common ground, and that a shared set of facts and a common understanding of truth is essential for democracy.
00:25:32.000Okay, well if Zuckerberg believes this, why doesn't he just start his own publication?
00:25:35.000Really, if Zuckerberg actually believes that it is his job to police the facts, then he could just create Facebook News.
00:25:41.000He could hire a bunch of reporters who've been fired by all these other outlets, and he could go out and he could investigate the news himself and become the most trusted name in news himself.
00:25:57.000Yesterday, you may have noticed that if you were on Facebook, there were a bunch of links that were cut.
00:26:01.000Everybody who was putting out anything, any material, there was a little link at the bottom that said, is this hate speech?
00:26:07.000And then you were allowed to click yes or no.
00:26:10.000And then Facebook later took down that notice and they said, oops, that was something we were trying out, but we're really not going to do it.
00:26:16.000And why is it that every error Facebook makes always seems to cut against the right?
00:26:20.000Even the notion of labeling things hate speech is a left-wing propaganda item.
00:26:25.000Hate speech is not an actual element of speech.
00:26:28.000It's not an actual legal element of speech.
00:27:36.000And if they're a publisher deciding what gets, what content sees the light of day, and which content does not see the light of day, they're then responsible for all the content that appears on their platform, and they are suable.
00:27:45.000They are now legally liable for the material that appears on Facebook because they're acting as a gatekeeper.
00:27:50.000They're no longer acting as a platform.
00:27:52.000All of this is what the left wanted from Facebook, of course.
00:27:55.000The left wanted Facebook to be bullied into embracing their perception of what news constitutes.
00:28:01.000The left was desperate to paint Facebook as responsible for Hillary Clinton's loss so they could push Facebook into stop being a neutral platform and they could push Facebook into becoming a publisher of the left.
00:28:11.000They could let Mark Zuckerberg's instincts roam free and suddenly Mark Zuckerberg could play Jeff Zucker.
00:28:16.000Suddenly, Mark Zuckerberg could morph into Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, and he could sit around deciding what news ought to see the light of day and which news ought to be ruled out of the relevant and of the good.
00:29:00.000Starting this Sunday, by the way, May 6th, we have a brand new edition of my podcast.
00:29:04.000It's the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, in which I will host weekly in-depth conversations with
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00:29:12.000The best part is for current subscribers to my show, you don't even need to hit a separate button because these episodes will just show up in your feed.
00:29:17.000This Sunday's premiere episode features Jordan Peterson.
00:29:29.000And we have great new episodes coming up.
00:29:30.000So if you're not a subscriber already, if you've just been sort of listening to us on an episode-by-episode basis, please hit subscribe so it appears in your news feed and you no longer have to worry about it.
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00:30:08.000All right, so meanwhile, more fallout from Kanye West.
00:30:11.000So, yesterday, as we mentioned, Kanye West was ripped into by Maxine Waters, who called him ignorant.
00:30:16.000Now, you know, I don't think that Kanye West is any great shakes at politics.
00:30:20.000I think that Kanye West doesn't know very much about politics.
00:30:22.000The one thing that I think Kanye has done that is very important is he has said that people should think for themselves and people should, you know, occasionally think outside the box.
00:30:32.000You know, Kanye, I warned you about this before, Kanye is not a conservative thought leader.
00:30:37.000There's this tendency on the right, and it's really troubling, that anytime a celebrity says anything you like, suddenly this person becomes capable of being president.
00:30:45.000There was this guy named Donald Trump, you may remember him, and he used to say out-of-the-box things on a fairly regular basis.
00:30:52.000And then, people deemed him a thought leader, and now he's the president of the United States.
00:30:55.000And that's worked out pretty well in terms of conservative ideas.
00:30:58.000But, if we apply that same logic to every celebrity, say Kid Rock,
00:31:02.000I don't think it's going to work out quite as well.
00:31:04.000Maybe you got lucky with Trump's policies, but I don't know that you'd get quite as lucky with celebrities who just mouth the occasional anti-leftist talking points.
00:31:13.000Now, Kanye West has become close with Candace Owens, who is, of course, a black conservative.
00:31:58.000I'm just telling you, being dumb does not own the libs, okay?
00:32:00.000If you want to own liberals, if you want to own the left, you actually have to look at their arguments, you have to determine why their arguments are wrong, and then you have to dismantle their arguments, and that takes a few facts.
00:32:09.000Otherwise, you end up in situations like this.
00:32:10.000So yesterday, Kanye was at TMZ with Candace Owens, and things went wildly wrong when the topic of slavery came up.
00:32:17.000A black employee over at TMZ confronted Kanye and started asking him about Donald Trump, and then he invoked slavery.
00:32:24.000Now, Kanye's response should have been, listen, slavery was an awful evil, but what does that have to do with Donald Trump?
00:32:29.000Slavery is an awful evil, promulgated by the Democratic Party, and then pushed into law, and then after the end of slavery, Jim Crow was codified into law by a bunch of Democrats.
00:32:40.000And the Republican Party has stood for individualism since its inception, and it should continue to stand for individualism now.
00:32:48.000That would be the conservative defense against, you know, sort of random charges of slavery, but that's not what Kanye does here, because I'm not sure that Kanye knows enough to actually combat the charges that are aimed at him.
00:32:57.000You know, do I think it'll affect Kanye in any real way?
00:33:00.000Probably not, but this isn't very good.
00:33:02.000Here was Kanye yesterday talking about slavery at TMZ.
00:33:04.000When you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years?
00:33:49.000But what that has to do with slavery is beyond me.
00:33:50.000When he says 400 years, that sounds like a choice.
00:33:52.000You know, there are people like my quasi-friend, Michael Knowles, who have been arguing that what Kanye is saying is that slavery began in the United States in 1619.
00:34:10.000Kanye's saying something different, and he made that pretty clear on his Twitter feed.
00:34:14.000What he's actually saying here is that if you were in slavery for a very long period of time, you did not do so without bowing your neck to the yoke, which is, I think, a really messed up argument.
00:34:24.000People who were forcibly transported across the ocean into slavery for 400 years,
00:34:29.000And the transatlantic slave trade did last for 400 years.
00:34:31.000The American slave trade lasted, you know, from the inception of America until 1865.
00:34:35.000The transatlantic slave trade began in the 15th century and lasted all the way into the 19th century.
00:34:41.000So that 400 year period is actually not including the stuff after 1865.
00:34:45.000In any case, what Kanye is saying here doesn't do any great service.
00:35:15.000Kanye can say whatever he wants, right?
00:35:17.000But again, I think what Kanye should really stick to, if I were Kanye, what I would be doing today is I'd be starting KanyeCon, right?
00:35:21.000I would actually have like a convention event where I have a bunch of people from all over the aisle talk to each other, and I would say, I'm trying to open up gates.
00:35:29.000I'm trying to make sure that everyone talks to one another.
00:35:32.000But making him a spokesperson on all of these issues that he doesn't know much about, it's a mistake for conservatives.
00:35:37.000I think it's a mistake generally to do this with people who don't know what they are talking about, and Kanye apparently is one of those people.
00:35:45.000The caravan is being stopped by the Justice Department.
00:35:48.000So for people who have not been following this story, there's a migrant caravan that starts in South America and travels all the way through Central America up to the United States.
00:35:59.000Organizers of the Caravan of Migrants Seeking Asylum in the United States said Tuesday the Department of Justice's announcement that it had charged suspected members of the group was an attempt to criminalize the caravan.
00:36:08.000Alex Mensing is project coordinator of Pueblos Enfronteras, an aid group that helped organize the caravan.
00:36:13.000With regards to the people that the Department of Justice has said are crossing illegally, that's clearly an attempt to criminalize the refugee caravan.
00:36:20.000The group of about 120 migrants continued waiting Tuesday at a border crossing between Tijuana and California to plead their cases for asylum after a grueling journey to the border.
00:36:28.000By Tuesday evening, 28 of the asylum seekers had been allowed inside the San Ysidro port of entry.
00:37:14.000The Trump administration has described the caravan as a threat.
00:37:17.000Now really what the caravan is is a PR stunt, but there's an ideology that underlies the caravan that is a threat to the United States.
00:37:22.000And that ideology is that it is the United States' fault whenever something bad happens on planet Earth, and therefore it is our job to take in every refugee everywhere.
00:37:30.000So, for example, there's an article in The Guardian by a guy named Levi Vonk, and Levi Vonk marched with these migrants a few years back, and he says,
00:37:54.000During the traditional reenactments in Latin America, Christ cries out as he is crucified, my God, why have you forsaken me?
00:38:00.000Trump and his evangelical base must now decide if they will forsake the migrants as well.
00:38:04.000So the idea here is that if something bad is happening in South America, it's the United's job, the United States' job, to accept the refugees from that situation.
00:38:11.000In much the same way, the idea is that Syria is collapsing in on itself, and that means that it is the job of the Europeans to accept millions of migrants from Syria into the heart of Europe.
00:38:26.000If those independent governments suck, it is not the job of the rest of the world to take in all of the refugees, right?
00:38:32.000It is the job of that country to fix itself.
00:38:34.000Maybe you can argue there's a moral case to be made that the United States should intervene in some of these countries, but most of these people don't want the United States intervening in most of these countries.
00:38:43.000They want the United States to be isolationist in its foreign policy, and then they want the United States to take on all of the burden of the folks who are trying to escape.
00:39:03.000Not refugees they don't want to accept.
00:39:06.000Now, I'm not saying, again, that it wouldn't be a nice thing to accept refugees, or that it wouldn't be a nice thing to accept migrants.
00:39:12.000I'm saying there is no obligation, legally or morally speaking, for a sovereign country to have anyone else determine who gets to enter that sovereign country.
00:39:20.000Just because things are bad someplace doesn't mean it's the job of the United States to accept everyone who's coming from that country.
00:39:26.000Should we try to find solutions out of the goodness of our heart?
00:39:42.000The reason that nations are important.
00:39:44.000There's a great book coming out by a guy named Yoram Hazoni, who's a professor in Israel, about the case for nationalism.
00:39:49.000He calls it the virtues of nationalism.
00:39:52.000And in this book, he argues that nationalism is deeply important because it is broader than tribe, it's not tribalism, but it also grants us ties that bind.
00:40:02.000And when you say that anyone else gets to define your nation, you are immediately dissolving the ties that bind us together because we no longer have the capacity to decide as a group what we want to do and what we do not want to do if some outside force is deciding for us.
00:40:14.000There's a reason why Brexit just happened in Britain.
00:40:16.000There's a reason why the United States elected Donald Trump on the basis of this sort of nationalism, and that's not a bad thing.
00:40:21.000It is important that a nation be able to define itself, and one of the ways it defines itself is not by having anyone else determine for it what sort of refugees ought to enter and what sort of refugees ought not enter.
00:40:31.000Okay, time for a thing I like and then a thing that I hate.
00:41:54.000Their other great song, of course, is What is Hip, which is just a great song.
00:41:57.000I think I may have played it on the show before.
00:41:59.000If I haven't, then I definitely should.
00:42:01.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:42:02.000And I really do not like, this is a bad one.
00:42:08.000Okay, so here is the thing that I hate.
00:42:09.000So, Mike Pence, I have a lot of respect for Vice President Pence for a lot of different reasons, but he did something I think yesterday that was really, truly pretty egregious.
00:42:16.000He's doing a rally in Arizona, and in the middle of the rally, he decides to stop and pay tribute to Joe Arpaio.
00:42:22.000Joe Arpaio, you'll recall, is the sheriff that President Trump
00:42:24.000And I just found out when I was walking through the door that we were also going to be joined today by another favorite.
00:43:12.000In 2007, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors settled a lawsuit by the founders of the Phoenix New Times newspaper against Arpaio and the board for $3.5 million.
00:43:21.000The newspaper founders sued after they were arrested by deputies for publishing details of a grand jury subpoena for the paper's notes and sources for its coverage of Arpaio.
00:43:30.000The charges against the newspaper were dropped.
00:43:47.000Arpaio's jail lost its accreditation after investigators found jail officials provided false information inside the facility.
00:43:53.000Arpaio himself has engaged in apparently massive corruption, alleged massive corruption, using his office to funnel money to particular folks.