The Ben Shapiro Show - The Anti-Trump Culture War | Ep. 616

00:00:00.000 Nike rewards Colin Kaepernick for kneeling.

00:00:02.000 Judge Brett Kavanaugh has his day before the Senate.

00:00:05.000 And, as President Trump's tweets gain volume, anti-Trump commentators use John McCain's funeral to slam the president.

00:00:10.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:11.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:17.000 Well, the news cycle just keeps on going.

00:00:19.000 It doesn't matter that you took the weekend off.

00:00:20.000 The news did not take the weekend off.

00:00:21.000 And so we are back here to review all of it with you.

00:00:25.000 And we'll go through all of it in just one second.

00:00:26.000 But first, let me remind you that our national debt is $21 trillion and counting.

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00:01:44.000 All right.

00:01:44.000 So we begin today.

00:01:46.000 With Nike.

00:01:47.000 So actually, you know what?

00:01:48.000 Let's not begin with Nike.

00:01:49.000 Screw that.

00:01:49.000 Let's start with the judicial hearing.

00:01:51.000 So this morning, Brett Kavanaugh, who is the judge who is now being appointed by President Trump to the Supreme Court of the United States, was scheduled to have his opening hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee.

00:02:02.000 Now, all of this is a giant waste of time.

00:02:04.000 It's a giant waste of time, and has been for 40 years, because, number one, nobody actually wants the answers to their questions.

00:02:10.000 Instead, we just go through this rigmarole to pretend that these judges don't already know what they are going to decide on certain cases, and then we ask them, and then they lie, and then they go on the court, and they do exactly what we all thought they were going to do before, unless they're a Republican appointee, in which half the cases they do exactly the opposite of what we thought they were going to do before.

00:02:28.000 In any case, Brett Kavanaugh is a textualist.

00:02:30.000 He's somebody who takes the text of the Constitution seriously, and that means that the Democrats oppose him.

00:02:35.000 How do we know they oppose him?

00:02:36.000 Well, because they've said so.

00:02:37.000 Senator Cory Booker has already come out and opposed him.

00:02:39.000 Senator Kamala Harris from California, she's already come forward and opposed him. 0.98

00:02:43.000 But that's not going to stop the Democrats from pretending that the real reason they don't want to give Brett Kavanaugh a vote is because they just don't have enough information on Brett Kavanaugh.

00:02:52.000 So they say, we need millions of pages of everything that Brett Kavanaugh has ever written in order for us to determine whether he should sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. 0.94

00:03:00.000 Again, this is a stupid line considering they have already come out preemptively and said that they don't support Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court of the United States.

00:03:08.000 Well, once you've said that, what's the point of these hearings? 1.00

00:03:11.000 Now they're doubly useless.

00:03:12.000 Number one, even if we were going to pretend that they were useful,

00:03:15.000 You're not really seeking answers from these prospective justices.

00:03:18.000 And number two, when you've already said you're voting against the guy, are we supposed to take your protestations seriously?

00:03:24.000 That if you don't get the materials, you're not going to vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh?

00:03:29.000 So naturally, the whole thing devolved into farce.

00:03:31.000 Remember, the only reason Republicans can ram through the justice they want right now is because Harry Reid, the former Senate Majority Leader, when he was in power from 2008 till 2010, Harry Reid rammed through.

00:03:43.000 Actually, it was all the way until 2014.

00:03:46.000 Harry Reid rammed through a process by which you could, through the workings of 51 votes in the Senate, get your judicial nominee.

00:03:54.000 In 2013, he invoked the so-called nuclear option, which allowed a ruling from the Senate Rules Committee, or the Senate parliamentarian, that allowed 51 votes to elevate someone to the Supreme Court or to any federal court.

00:04:07.000 And now Republicans have just reversed that process, and now they're doing the same thing that Harry Reid sought to do.

00:04:13.000 This, of course, has the Democrats

00:04:15.000 Mr. Chairman?

00:04:16.000 Mr. Chairman?

00:04:17.000 Mr. Chairman, I'd like to be recognized for a question before we proceed.

00:04:19.000 Regular order, Chairman.

00:04:44.000 Mr. Chairman, I'd like to be recognized to ask a question before we proceed.

00:04:49.000 The committee received just last night, less than 15 hours ago, 42,000 pages of documents that we have not had an opportunity to review.

00:04:59.000 Mr. Chairman, if we cannot be recognized, I move to adjourn.

00:05:03.000 Mr. Chairman, I move to adjourn.

00:05:04.000 Mr. Chairman, I move to adjourn. 0.71

00:05:13.000 Okay, so this is all a bunch of nonsense.

00:05:15.000 Chuck Grassley is the Republican senator who's in charge of that.

00:05:17.000 That was Kamala Harris that you heard there, who was saying that she received all these documents.

00:05:21.000 Except that, as I mentioned, she has already come out against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

00:05:26.000 So, what are the documents going to do?

00:05:28.000 Change her vote in favor of Brett Kavanaugh?

00:05:30.000 Of course this is a bunch of nonsense.

00:05:31.000 And then you have Ron Wyden, who's jumping in there. 0.71

00:05:34.000 And you have Senator Richard Blumenthal, who's jumping in there.

00:05:36.000 A bunch of different Democratic senators saying, well, we move to adjourn.

00:05:39.000 Guess what, buddy?

00:05:40.000 You don't have the vote.

00:05:41.000 So this is a waste of time.

00:05:42.000 What Grassley should have done is he should have said, listen, since you're making a mockery of this, we're just going to skip the hearing and vote him out of committee.

00:05:48.000 We can save everybody a month.

00:05:50.000 We'll save everybody a month of time and stupid effort, and instead we'll just vote the guy directly out of committee and down to the floor, and then we can have a vote, and this guy can be sitting on the Supreme Court by the end of the week.

00:05:58.000 Because that's where this is going. 0.84

00:06:00.000 Instead, we're gonna waste a month with all of this bureaucratic nonsense where Democrats oppose because they have to oppose, and Republicans vote for him, and that's the end of the story.

00:06:09.000 But I do enjoy

00:06:11.000 I do enjoy the theatrics, the kind of kabuki theater of all this.

00:06:14.000 The real reason that all of these Democrats who are running for president want the hearings is so they can have their sort of Ronald Reagan 1980 moment.

00:06:22.000 In the 1980 primaries, I think it was the New Hampshire primary debate, there was a point where Ronald Reagan was debating George H.W.

00:06:29.000 Bush.

00:06:29.000 And he had paid for part of the sponsorship of the debate and they tried to cut off his mic and he said, I paid for this microphone, Mr. Breen.

00:06:37.000 And the crowd erupted.

00:06:38.000 And it was this big moment.

00:06:39.000 All these Democrats are looking for that, except in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

00:06:41.000 They're all looking for that moment where they get to say to Brett Kavanaugh, you, sir, are representative of the regime from the handmaid's tale. 0.94

00:06:50.000 Okay, so people were actually being dragged out, I am not kidding, kicking and screaming from the hearing room, a bunch of the folks on the left who dress up in pussy hats and Handmaid's Tale costumes.

00:06:59.000 They were actually brought out by their hands and feet, like, carried out by their hands and feet, because they were screaming about Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

00:07:06.000 Wait until President Trump gets to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court if you want to see people burn stuff down, because they're almost doing it for Brett Kavanaugh, who, it should be remembered, is replacing Antonin Scalia, another conservative on the court.

00:07:20.000 It is a replacement of an originalist by an originalist who's probably a little bit softer than Antonin Scalia.

00:07:26.000 And yet we're getting all of this hootenanny, this hot and bother from the left.

00:07:30.000 It's really insane.

00:07:32.000 I know that they think under Article 47 of the Constitution of the United States there's a whining clause that allows them to whine their way into obstructing this, but there's no way for them to actually obstruct this, so it's all a waste of time.

00:07:42.000 It's all virtue signaling nonsense.

00:07:44.000 And again, all of these judicial hearings annoy me in the first place because if somebody were to give an honest answer, they would immediately be ruled out of order by the Senate.

00:07:52.000 We know this because when Robert Bork gave honest answers back in the 1980s, he was not put on the Supreme Court for answering honestly questions about, for example, Roe vs. Wade.

00:08:00.000 And this led Democrats to quote-unquote Bork him.

00:08:02.000 It became a term of art.

00:08:03.000 And now Democrats do this with anybody who tells the actual answers to the questions.

00:08:07.000 Which we all know.

00:08:08.000 As a lawyer, as a constitutional lawyer who has spent time talking constitutional law with a wide variety of experts on the subject.

00:08:15.000 I'm not going to drop my grades.

00:08:17.000 I'm not going to drop my grades from Harvard Law like A-plus in constitutional law.

00:08:21.000 Let's just say

00:08:22.000 That constitutional law is a thing I am into.

00:08:25.000 As somebody who has studied it for a very long time, to pretend that judges who sit before these committees don't have extraordinarily set views on the nature of precedent and on the nature of particular cases is just silly.

00:08:36.000 But we all sit there and we pretend anyway, because supposedly this makes our country better in some way.

00:08:40.000 It doesn't.

00:08:40.000 They should just vote them out of committee.

00:08:41.000 They should just vote them out of the Supreme Court.

00:08:43.000 We should all recognize this for what it is, a partisan exercise.

00:08:45.000 And it would be a partisan exercise if the Democrats were to do it also.

00:08:48.000 The Supreme Court has become a partisan tool because the left made it a partisan tool decades ago, and now the right is responding by simply trying to appoint originalists to the bench over the hoots and howls of insane Democrats.

00:09:01.000 Meanwhile,

00:09:02.000 The culture war continues to polarize.

00:09:05.000 The big story over the weekend is that Nike, in a viral piece of marketing, decided that it was deeply necessary to reward Colin Kaepernick.

00:09:12.000 So you remember Colin Kaepernick.

00:09:13.000 He's that irrelevant backup quarterback from 2016 who made a name for himself by kneeling for the national anthem.

00:09:20.000 And let us recall that Colin Kaepernick had already been made a backup quarterback.

00:09:24.000 I think it was Blaine Gabbert in San Francisco. 0.99

00:09:27.000 In other words, he was a garbage quarterback. 0.97

00:09:29.000 He was one of the lowest rated quarterbacks in the NFL. 0.99

00:09:31.000 I think he was at the time he was benched the lowest rated quarterback in the NFL.

00:09:34.000 He got a 32 starting quarterbacks.

00:09:35.000 He was number 32.

00:09:37.000 And Colin Kaepernick was benched.

00:09:38.000 And then in the preseason of 2016, before Trump was president, he started to kneel for the national anthem.

00:09:44.000 It is also to be remembered that Colin Kaepernick

00:09:46.000 Who said he was kneeling for the national anthem to protest widespread police brutality or some such nonsense. 0.98

00:09:52.000 He's the kind of person who is wearing on practice field socks with pictures of cops as pigs. 0.98

00:09:57.000 There's legitimately pictures of pigs with cop hats on them. 0.97

00:10:00.000 Because this is what he thinks of police officers. 0.81

00:10:03.000 This guy who grew up actually pretty privileged.

00:10:06.000 He was adopted and he grew up in a pretty privileged area of California. 0.97

00:10:10.000 It's all kind of ridiculous. 0.99

00:10:12.000 It's all kind of ridiculous. 0.96

00:10:13.000 But Colin Kaepernick was made into a national hero by the left, which thinks that it is a Muhammad Ali-like stance to kneel for the national anthem.

00:10:22.000 He did this in 2016.

00:10:23.000 It became a national issue.

00:10:24.000 President Trump commented on it as a candidate.

00:10:26.000 It was very polarizing.

00:10:27.000 Most Americans opposed kneeling for the anthem, but there's a heavy segment, particularly in the black community, that supported Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the national anthem.

00:10:35.000 There's a very big racial gap in the polling numbers on kneeling for the national anthem.

00:10:39.000 So Colin Kaepernick was offered in 2017, or in 2016, he was offered the chance to join the Denver Broncos.

00:10:47.000 John Elway announced this

00:10:49.000 In 2018, he was asked about picking up Colin Kaepernick, and he said,

00:11:06.000 And then the Broncos selected a couple of backup quarterbacks, and he lost his opportunity.

00:11:10.000 And it turned out nobody really wanted the headache of Colin Kaepernick, not just because of the publicity, although publicity is something you have to take into account when you are a National Football League team, but also because he's just not a very good quarterback.

00:11:21.000 Because Colin Kaepernick, after basically one spectacular season, fell off the map.

00:11:25.000 And that's not unusual.

00:11:26.000 There are a bunch of quarterbacks in the NFL who've had one great season, then fallen off the map.

00:11:30.000 And this has nothing to do with politics.

00:11:32.000 I remember RG3, who is a quarterback in Washington for the Redskins, had one fantastic season, and then he sort of fell off the map.

00:11:41.000 And that's not unusual.

00:11:42.000 Again, once people figure out your sort of tricks as a quarterback, it's difficult to recover, and that's sort of what happened to Kaepernick overall.

00:11:49.000 But Kaepernick played his way out of a starting job, and then once he was on the bench, he started kneeling for the national anthem.

00:11:53.000 It is now two years later, and this conversation has not ceased since.

00:11:57.000 It has continued to be a thorn in the side of the NFL ever since because the NFL didn't take strict action against it.

00:12:02.000 And we'll talk about the latest iteration of this controversy in just one second.

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00:13:17.000 So the latest iteration of the Colin Kaepernick controversy, because it has continued all the way till now, President Trump

00:13:23.000 I said I didn't think he should get involved in this.

00:13:25.000 He did as president because he likes this culture war.

00:13:28.000 He thinks it's a good culture war to fight.

00:13:29.000 He thinks he wins this culture war.

00:13:31.000 And he's likely right.

00:13:31.000 He does win this culture war, but at the cost of polarizing the debate a little bit more.

00:13:35.000 When President Trump took office, some 75% of Americans thought kneeling for the national anthem was bad.

00:13:41.000 Now that number is in the low 60s, last time I checked.

00:13:43.000 A lot of that has to do with President Trump's polarizing personality.

00:13:47.000 With all of that said, the media have latched on to the national anthem controversy, and they have not let go since.

00:13:52.000 The NFL has done a horrible job of killing the controversy, instead of just killing it at the outset by saying, listen, you don't get to kneel for the anthem, you're fine.

00:13:59.000 You want to protest in your off hours?

00:14:02.000 Enjoy.

00:14:02.000 But you don't get to do it on our fields.

00:14:04.000 Instead of them doing that, they allowed it to happen, they allowed it to fester, and it ended up hurting the NFL in a pretty serious way.

00:14:10.000 The ratings for the NFL have been in decline for the last two years.

00:14:12.000 It's been a serious image issue for the NFL.

00:14:15.000 Well now, Nike is jumping into the fray.

00:14:17.000 So Nike decided that they are going to

00:14:20.000 Do the the this this huge ad campaign that is going to focus on Colin Kaepernick.

00:14:27.000 He is part of the 30th anniversary of Nike's Just Do It campaign.

00:14:31.000 And here's what the ad looks like.

00:14:33.000 It's a picture of Colin Kaepernick, a close-up of his face in black and white.

00:14:35.000 It says, believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.

00:14:40.000 And then there's the Nike swoosh and it says, just do it.

00:14:43.000 So there's so many elements of this that are just fabulously ironic.

00:14:47.000 First of all, this social justice warrior campaign to sell sneakers

00:14:52.000 Produced by small children in Vietnam, presumably.

00:14:55.000 It's kind of hilarious watching the entire left resonate around a huge billion-dollar company, a huge corporation that allegedly exploits child labor in third-world countries because, hey, Colin Kaepernick.

00:15:07.000 That's pretty hilarious. 0.96

00:15:08.000 It is also kind of hilarious that the slogan itself, Believe in Something, even if it means sacrificing everything, it's a really dumb slogan. 0.96

00:15:14.000 In fact, 0.73

00:15:15.000 It's basically Thanos' slogan from Avengers Infinity Wars.

00:15:18.000 Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing half of humanity.

00:15:21.000 What you believe is actually the key issue.

00:15:22.000 I mean, if we're actually going to take that slogan seriously, believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything, it's not about believing in something.

00:15:29.000 It's about what you believe in.

00:15:30.000 The question is, are you believing the right things?

00:15:33.000 Colin Kaepernick is not.

00:15:34.000 He's never provided a shred of data to support his assertions that black people in the United States are being disproportionately shot by police because, in fact, they are not.

00:15:42.000 And then we get to the actual issue of Colin Kaepernick being the face of this particular culture war.

00:15:48.000 We get to the bottom line here.

00:15:50.000 And there's a great irony to it, which I'll discuss in just a second.

00:15:53.000 So Colin Kaepernick, again, says, believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything over his face for the Nike Just Do It campaign. 0.95

00:15:59.000 I do love the fact that when you hashtag Just Do It with all the capitals properly utilized, it looks like just dolt. 0.75

00:16:06.000 But in any case,

00:16:08.000 Using Colin Kaepernick, he's a poor example of this.

00:16:11.000 Because he didn't sacrifice anything.

00:16:13.000 Colin Kaepernick did not sacrifice a thing.

00:16:15.000 If we're going to talk about people who sacrificed in the NFL, there are legitimate former military members in the NFL.

00:16:21.000 Pat Tillman died in the line of duty, as a soldier in Afghanistan for the NFL.

00:16:28.000 Did Nike do a campaign around him?

00:16:29.000 Of course they didn't, right?

00:16:30.000 They just do it around Colin Kaepernick.

00:16:32.000 And this is for capitalistic reasons.

00:16:34.000 It is to make money.

00:16:36.000 Nike is a corporation.

00:16:37.000 They know we'll be talking about it today.

00:16:38.000 They hope that by right-wingers talking about it, they will drive more people on the left to go out and buy sneakers on the basis of, we don't like President Trump.

00:16:46.000 And let's be frank about this.

00:16:47.000 This is an anti-Trump campaign.

00:16:49.000 This rally first started in the 2016 campaign.

00:16:52.000 If Hillary Clinton were president right now, do you think that Nike would actually be running this ad campaign?

00:16:57.000 Of course not.

00:16:58.000 Of course not.

00:17:00.000 Colin Kaepernick has not sacrificed anything. 0.85

00:17:02.000 Not only did he not sacrifice nothing, he only started doing this when he became a useless backup quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers.

00:17:08.000 And then, after that, he has kept his name in the headlines.

00:17:10.000 He's been on the cover of Sports Illustrated despite not playing for two years.

00:17:15.000 Tim Tebow isn't on the cover of Sports Illustrated every two weeks because Tim Tebow isn't in with the Social Justice Warrior crowd, but Tim Tebow was, in many ways, sort of the equivalent of Colin Kaepernick in that he had one kind of terrific season where he unexpectedly led the Denver Broncos to wins in the playoffs, and then he fell off the map.

00:17:33.000 But Colin Kaepernick, you know, he took over for Alex Smith halfway through a season with the San Francisco 49ers, they went to the Super Bowl, he lost, and then he was nothing.

00:17:41.000 Okay.

00:17:59.000 He has not sacrificed anything and he's slated to earn legitimately millions of dollars.

00:18:03.000 He's going to get a branded line off of not being in athletics for two years.

00:18:07.000 He's getting a branded line and he's going to make millions of dollars off of kneeling for the national anthem.

00:18:14.000 So why is Nike doing all of this?

00:18:16.000 Precisely so that we'll talk about it. 0.93

00:18:17.000 It is a troll. 0.96

00:18:18.000 It's obviously a troll. 0.95

00:18:19.000 They're hoping that the President of the United States sounds off about it.

00:18:22.000 Trump undoubtedly will sign off on it.

00:18:24.000 I mean, he will undoubtedly sound off about it on Twitter because he thinks, again, that this is a culture war worth fighting.

00:18:30.000 But there's no question that this is all designed to sell more sneakers.

00:18:33.000 And one of the reasons that Nike thinks that they can get away with this, obviously, is because disproportionate amounts of money are spent on clothing and apparel by members of the black community, many of whom are supporters of Colin Kaepernick in this particular controversy.

00:18:46.000 That is not a racial supposition.

00:18:47.000 That is an economic supposition.

00:18:49.000 Economist Kerwin Charles, Eric Hurst, Nikolai Rusinov,

00:18:52.000 From University of Chicago did a study called conspicuous consumption and race.

00:18:55.000 What they found is that blacks and Hispanics spend a lot more than whites with comparable incomes on visible goods, meaning clothes, cars and jewelry up to an additional 30%.

00:19:04.000 There's been a long standing.

00:19:07.000 A longstanding sort of sociological investigation into why, for example, it seems that lower income black folks spend more on sneakers.

00:19:15.000 And some of that has to do with with pride in culture.

00:19:18.000 Some of that has to do with the fact that, you know, like Air Jordans were a massive cultural totem in the 1990s.

00:19:24.000 All that is true.

00:19:24.000 But just for capitalistic purposes, it's pretty obvious that Nike is attempting to appeal to this particular consumer base, along with a left that will resonate to the support of Colin Kaepernick.

00:19:34.000 And it's also important to note that according to Nielsen, African-Americans are more likely to interact with brands on social media or to use social networks to support companies and brands 44% more likely.

00:19:45.000 So they're hoping that this campaign goes viral, particularly among black audiences, and that people on the left will resonate to this as well.

00:19:51.000 So in the end, capitalism wins.

00:19:53.000 The great irony of this is that the social justice warriors championing this

00:19:57.000 They're really championing the power of capitalism.

00:19:59.000 But is it insulting?

00:20:01.000 Of course it's insulting.

00:20:01.000 Is it designed to slap President Trump?

00:20:03.000 Of course it's designed to slap President Trump.

00:20:05.000 And honestly, I'm not sure that President Trump could ask for much more.

00:20:08.000 Nike made an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign.

00:20:11.000 Because if this battle in 2018 and 2020 is going to be about kneeling for the flag, most Americans are not on board with that.

00:20:17.000 Most Americans don't look at Colin Kaepernick and see an American hero.

00:20:20.000 They don't even see a guy who's made a lot of sacrifices.

00:20:22.000 Muhammad Ali was the champion of the world.

00:20:24.000 He was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world when he was suspended from boxing for not volunteering for the Vietnam draft, for not being drafted, and for saying things about the Viet Cong and all this kind of stuff under the influence of Elijah Muhammad and the evil nation of Islam. 0.99

00:20:38.000 But at least he sacrificed something.

00:20:40.000 The guy sacrificed years of his career.

00:20:42.000 He went to jail for this.

00:20:43.000 Colin Kaepernick has sacrificed zero things, but apparently sacrificing everything means signing contracts worth millions of dollars in order to promote a quote-unquote globalist brand that is selling sneakers made at half price off by child labor.

00:20:55.000 So that's exciting stuff.

00:20:56.000 Speaking of sort of virtue signaling and the backlash to President Trump, the other big story over the weekend

00:21:03.000 It was obviously the funeral for John McCain.

00:21:05.000 We're going to talk about that in just one second.

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00:22:27.000 Okay, so.

00:22:28.000 John McCain's funeral took place over the weekend.

00:22:30.000 It was after a week of American mourning for an American patriot and hero.

00:22:35.000 But his funeral turned into a bit of a, as I've said in the past, a turd tornado.

00:22:41.000 It turned into a bit of craziness.

00:22:44.000 And that's because a bunch of speakers decided to get up and bash President Trump.

00:22:48.000 Do I think that President Trump treated John McCain well in life?

00:22:52.000 No, I don't.

00:22:53.000 I think it was ridiculous for President Trump to say that John McCain was not a war hero. 0.89

00:22:56.000 It was kind of a gross thing to say. 0.70

00:22:58.000 Do I think that John McCain didn't like President Trump?

00:23:00.000 Yes.

00:23:00.000 It seems to me that his peak and his anger at President Trump led him to make a terrible decision when it came to Obamacare and prevent the overthrowing of large portions of Obamacare simply out of a level of personal peak.

00:23:12.000 Was I a huge John McCain fan as a politician?

00:23:15.000 No, I was not a huge John McCain fan as a politician, but with that said, was it petty for the president to not lower the flag to half-staff for a week as a sort of normal procedure?

00:23:25.000 Yes, it was petty. 0.76

00:23:26.000 Did it look silly? 0.98

00:23:27.000 Yes, it looked silly. 0.96

00:23:28.000 The president shouldn't have engaged that way. 0.99

00:23:31.000 With that said, using a funeral in order to promote an anti-Trump agenda is foolish for a couple of reasons.

00:23:37.000 First of all, I think that John McCain's life was about a fair bit more than Donald Trump. 0.57

00:23:42.000 I really do.

00:23:43.000 I mean, as a guy who had served since the late 1960s, boiling that down to an anti-Trump message seems to me a real

00:23:50.000 We're good to go.

00:24:06.000 Let's not be intellectually dishonest.

00:24:08.000 It was very obvious that there were a bunch of overt slaps at President Trump.

00:24:11.000 And more than that, I think it was counterproductive.

00:24:14.000 Even if you don't like the way that President Trump goes about politics, even if you think that President Trump is uncivil, which I do, even if you think that President Trump

00:24:21.000 It does not serve his own purpose as well when he lashes out at people, which I do.

00:24:26.000 Even if you think that President Trump says things that are cruel and vile on a fairly frequent basis, which I do, is it worthwhile?

00:24:33.000 Is it useful for a bunch of people to get up at John McCain's funeral and say all of this stuff?

00:24:38.000 And more importantly, is it useful to do that from quote unquote both sides of the aisle?

00:24:41.000 Because I think that what that's doing is promulgating a myth that Trump is actually the response to.

00:24:45.000 The myth is that there was a civil politics before Trump.

00:24:48.000 There was not.

00:24:49.000 The idea that there was a civil politics before Trump means that you were not watching.

00:24:53.000 For 20, 30, 40 years, you were not watching.

00:24:55.000 In the 1960s, there were political riots in this country.

00:24:58.000 At the 1968 Chicago Convention, there were legitimate riots in the street at the Democratic National Convention.

00:25:03.000 There were thousands of bombings, political bombings, across the United States in the 1970s.

00:25:09.000 During the Barack Obama administration, we saw riots in Baltimore.

00:25:14.000 We saw riots in Ferguson.

00:25:15.000 We saw riots in other places in the United States.

00:25:18.000 We saw at President Trump's rallies during the 2016 campaign, Trump supporters being physically beaten.

00:25:24.000 We saw President Trump have to cancel an actual rally in Chicago due to intimidation outside the events.

00:25:29.000 We've seen over the past several years before Trump was in office.

00:25:32.000 When I went to Berkeley, I required 600 police officers to protect me.

00:25:36.000 I remember there was a near-riot when I spoke at Cal State Los Angeles, and that was before Trump was president.

00:25:41.000 The idea that politics was some sort of civil game where everybody got along before President Trump is nonsense.

00:25:46.000 And more than that, to paper over these serious political divisions in this country with this veneer of civility, it makes it look like there's a professional political class invested in civility because they actually like each other, and Trump is the great outsider, and so we don't like Trump because he's the great outsider.

00:26:02.000 Again, there are legitimate reasons to criticize the President of the United States for his approach to politics.

00:26:07.000 But, when you promulgate this absolute myth, this absolute myth, that there was a civil politics between, say, Barack Obama and John McCain, or Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

00:26:16.000 I mean, Barack Obama basically called George W. Bush a war criminal.

00:26:19.000 You've got to get the job done there.

00:26:20.000 And that requires

00:26:44.000 Okay, Barack Obama accusing George W. Bush of presiding effectively over war crimes, but we are supposed to believe that it was Donald Trump who broke our politics?

00:26:57.000 This is why I say all of this leads to a backlash in favor of President Trump.

00:27:02.000 Having all of these mainstream political figures from both sides of the aisle kind of unite in opposition to Trump, but not on the basis of actual sins committed by President Trump, on the basis of, he's just not nice enough and look how we get along.

00:27:15.000 Look how George W. Bush and Bill Clinton get along.

00:27:16.000 Look how George W. Bush and Barack Obama get along.

00:27:20.000 I don't like that part of politics, okay?

00:27:23.000 There's this sense.

00:27:25.000 I'm a sports fan.

00:27:26.000 So as a sports fan, there used to be something called non-fraternization rules in sports, where it was like the New York Yankees were playing the Boston Red Sox and you weren't allowed to go out to dinner with members of the opposing team after the game because you felt that that sort of sacrificed the competitive edge.

00:27:39.000 That if you were too close with your competitors, then they sacrificed the competitive edge.

00:27:43.000 And so there were all these owners who basically said you're not allowed to fraternize with members of the opposition team.

00:27:48.000 I don't

00:28:08.000 I want them to recognize that they shouldn't be demagoguing issues.

00:28:13.000 That's where you can criticize President Trump.

00:28:14.000 But when you act like you're best friends and you're buddy-buddy and we're all part of this big group who loves each other, and then there's that ugh, that Trump guy, all that ends up doing is driving people into President Trump.

00:28:24.000 I mean, ironically, it helps President Trump.

00:28:26.000 Because even people like me look at this and they go, I'm sorry, but if politics is how nice George W. Bush is to Michelle Obama by handing her candy, I'm not all that interested.

00:28:35.000 Because the things they do have real stakes.

00:28:38.000 The politics that they embrace have actual stakes.

00:28:41.000 And again, I'm somebody who is warm toward the argument that President Trump has not been good for American politics in a wide variety of ways.

00:28:48.000 But when you push this lie that politics is really about George W. Bush and Michelle Obama being besties, and that there are no consequences to any of this,

00:28:57.000 I don't care whether George W. Bush likes Michelle Obama.

00:28:59.000 I don't care whether George H.W.

00:29:01.000 and Bill Clinton are friends.

00:29:02.000 I don't want them to be friends because I don't think that that is reflective of deep underlying political differences that exist in this country.

00:29:10.000 I want them to be battling tooth and nail.

00:29:12.000 If they can be friends and battle tooth and nail, that's one thing.

00:29:14.000 But I don't think that they were battling tooth and nail.

00:29:15.000 I think that there's a feeling in this country that the elites in both parties are actually backpatting each other and are too friendly for the good of the country.

00:29:24.000 That what we actually need, in some ways, is more political conflict.

00:29:27.000 That doesn't mean more incivility.

00:29:29.000 But again, like, people were chanting, oh, look how nice it was that George W. Bush was handing Michelle Obama candy.

00:29:33.000 Listen.

00:29:34.000 Is it fine that he's handing her candy?

00:29:35.000 Sure.

00:29:36.000 I'm not going to pretend that I think he should reject the candy.

00:29:38.000 I don't mean that he shouldn't hand Michelle Obama candy.

00:29:42.000 But, by the same token, people celebrating this say, oh, well, isn't this what American politics is really about?

00:29:47.000 George W. Bush hunting Michelle Obama candy?

00:29:49.000 No, it seems to me what American politics is really about is Barack Obama slandering George W. Bush as a war criminal for eight years, and then running on the back of that to become President of the United States and push policies, actively create policies that are targeted at people like me.

00:30:05.000 And when I say people like me, I mean particularly religious conservatives.

00:30:09.000 That's the part I care about.

00:30:10.000 I don't care about them handing candy to each other. 0.71

00:30:12.000 People feel there's a veneer to politics that is a lie, and this all was part of the veneer of politics that was a lie.

00:30:17.000 In a second, I'm going to show you the clips of these various speakers who are engaging.

00:30:20.000 I'm going to show you why people think this is a lie.

00:30:23.000 But first, let's talk about your life insurance.

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00:31:27.000 Alrighty, so, in just one second I want to get into the actual material from the funeral, but first you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

00:31:34.000 For $9.99 a month, you can get a subscription to dailywire.com.

00:31:37.000 When you do, you get the rest of this show live, the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live, the rest of Michael Knowles' show live, and you also get to be part of the mailbag on Fridays where you ask me all your questions and I give you answers.

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00:32:09.000 We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:32:16.000 So here are the clips of the various people at McCain's funeral bashing President Trump.

00:32:19.000 You're going to see George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Meghan McCain go after President Trump.

00:32:23.000 Again, everybody has the right to say what they want about President Trump.

00:32:28.000 But do I think that this is productive in terms of forwarding the national discourse?

00:32:31.000 I don't.

00:32:31.000 I actually don't.

00:32:32.000 I think this is counterproductive.

00:32:34.000 I think that it leads people to believe that there is this sort of

00:32:37.000 The America of John McCain is generous and welcoming and bold.

00:32:40.000 She is resourceful and confident and secure.

00:32:42.000 She meets her responsibilities.

00:32:44.000 She speaks quietly because she is strong.

00:32:46.000 America does not boast because she has no need to. 1.00

00:33:06.000 The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great.

00:33:11.000 Okay, so that's sort of, you know, sloganeering about the America of John McCain was always great.

00:33:19.000 Obviously, it's a direct slap at President Trump.

00:33:21.000 Again, I know Meghan McCain. 0.99

00:33:23.000 I think that Meghan McCain says a lot of smart and good things.

00:33:25.000 I think that this was a politically inept move.

00:33:29.000 I think it was a politically inept move. 0.90

00:33:30.000 And she can say what she wants. 0.80

00:33:31.000 Her dad's the one who's in the coffin.

00:33:33.000 But still, I have to analyze this politically.

00:33:36.000 Do I think it was effective or not in making the country a better place?

00:33:40.000 Bring the country around to John McCain's brand of politics?

00:33:43.000 I don't think so.

00:33:43.000 Here's George W. Bush doing some of the same.

00:33:45.000 He respected the dignity inherent in every life.

00:33:49.000 A dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators.

00:33:55.000 Perhaps above all, John detested the abuse of power.

00:33:59.000 Okay, so again, people took this as an implicit rebuke of President Trump, and then Barack Obama gets up.

00:34:04.000 And Barack Obama, of course, is somebody who abused power quite frequently, right?

00:34:07.000 You have George W. Bush critiquing abuse of power.

00:34:09.000 Here's Barack Obama, a man who basically weaponized his IRS against his political opposition, doing the same routine.

00:34:16.000 Part of what makes our country great

00:34:19.000 Is that our membership is based not on our bloodline, not on what we look like, what our last names are.

00:34:28.000 It's not based on where our parents or grandparents came from or how recently they arrived, but on adherence to a common creed.

00:34:41.000 That all of us are created equal.

00:34:43.000 Again, this idea that Barack Obama and George W. Bush are on the same political side and Donald Trump is on the other political side, I think it's a big mistake because the reality is that Barack Obama was pushing things.

00:34:54.000 Barack Obama was pushing a race-based politics, particularly in 2012 and beyond, in which he was saying things like Trayvon Martin could have been my son, suggesting police departments across the country were racist.

00:35:05.000 Here's why people aren't taking this seriously.

00:35:07.000 Here's why people look at this and they get a little on the right and they feel uncomfortable.

00:35:11.000 And again, this is coming from somebody who blasted President Trump last week over his mistreatment of John McCain.

00:35:17.000 I mean, I blasted him last week, if you recall back that far.

00:35:20.000 I still think this was not only inappropriate, I think it was politically dishonest because

00:35:24.000 When you move over to how the left side of the aisle treats people, the left side does not treat people with civility.

00:35:29.000 The left side treated John McCain like trash while he was alive until he turned toward their side, at which point he became a hero.

00:35:34.000 That's how the left always treats people. 0.82

00:35:36.000 How do I know this?

00:35:37.000 Because while they're calling for civility, and while people like George W. Bush are calling for civility and saying we ought to treat with the other side, and not just calling for civility, but calling for compromise and moderation,

00:35:48.000 Here's what is actually happening in sort of leftist halls.

00:35:50.000 All we have to do is skip over to the Aretha Franklin funeral, which also happened over the weekend, where Al Sharpton, an actual open anti-Semite, was speaking and ripping into President Trump with Bill Clinton sitting right there in the audience.

00:36:00.000 You know, the other Sunday on my show, I misspelled respect.

00:36:05.000 And a lot of y'all, a lot of y'all corrected me.

00:36:11.000 Now I want y'all to help me correct President Trump to teach him what it means.

00:36:20.000 Okay, and there's everybody cheering, and President Clinton is sitting right there.

00:36:23.000 Here's a picture of President Clinton on stage with three great racists. 0.97

00:36:28.000 Here's President Clinton standing next to Jesse Jackson, who called New York Hymietown, Al Sharpton, who talked about diamond merchants in Crown Heights and led to the, and his language helped incite a riot, and Louis Farrakhan, who has called the Jews devils and white people devils. 0.94

00:36:41.000 And there's Bill Clinton standing there grinning alongside them.

00:36:43.000 So you're telling me that our politics is about Bill Clinton being friends with George H.W.

00:36:46.000 Bush, but in his off hours, Bill Clinton gets to hang out with people who are essentially the equivalent of David Duke.

00:36:51.000 Louis Farrakhan is the equivalent of David Duke.

00:36:53.000 And there's Bill Clinton, standing on stage with him, hanging out with him.

00:36:57.000 They're best friends.

00:36:58.000 Everything's great.

00:36:59.000 And then we're going to get lectures about civility?

00:37:02.000 This is how you got Trump because there's a hypocritical sense that all of these elites are happy to backslap each other and go to the same clubs and smoke cigars with one another.

00:37:10.000 And then they pretend for the cameras. 0.89

00:37:12.000 They play this Kabuki theater.

00:37:13.000 Again, everything's about Kabuki theater.

00:37:14.000 They're out there playing this game where they pretend to dislike each other and oppose each other on politics.

00:37:20.000 Now, I think you can oppose each other on politics and still be civil to one another.

00:37:24.000 I think that you can rip the President of the United States when he's being not only uncivil but vile in particular cases.

00:37:29.000 I've done it myself many times.

00:37:31.000 Do I think that using a funeral as the opportunity to show bipartisan support for the anti-Trump

00:37:38.000 Tactics?

00:37:39.000 Is that a worthwhile thing?

00:37:40.000 No, I think it strikes people, it strikes a false note.

00:37:42.000 It strikes a false note for people.

00:37:44.000 It makes people think it's Trump versus the establishment.

00:37:46.000 Which, again, is the battle Trump actually wants.

00:37:48.000 The battle Trump wants is Trump versus the establishment.

00:37:51.000 Because people don't actually like the establishment very much.

00:37:54.000 It's that feeling of buddy-buddy chummery.

00:37:56.000 There's a difference between being civil

00:37:58.000 And being best friends.

00:37:59.000 There's a difference between being civil and pretending that the other guy's political point of view is in some way the same as mine.

00:38:05.000 And that's what was happening there, right?

00:38:07.000 George W. Bush and Barack Obama were speaking of a common American vision that they do not share.

00:38:12.000 Barack Obama's vision of the United States and George W. Bush's vision of the United States are not the same.

00:38:17.000 And there are a lot of folks who are going to perceive that if George W. Bush's vision of the United States and Barack Obama's vision of the United States are more closely tied together than Donald Trump's and George W. Bush's, and yet for some odd reason Donald Trump is implementing conservative policies in the same way Bush would have done,

00:38:32.000 Then something has gone wrong.

00:38:33.000 And the real gap here is a cultural gap, not really a political gap at all.

00:38:37.000 Okay, meanwhile, I do have to show you this.

00:38:39.000 This is from Aretha Franklin's funeral. 0.98

00:38:41.000 The same group of people who are ripping into Donald Trump for being, you know, uncivil and awful and terrible and garbagey with regard to women. 0.96

00:38:49.000 Again, some of which I think is justified. 0.98

00:38:51.000 These are the same people who are hanging out with Bill frickin' Clinton.

00:38:55.000 You got George H.W.

00:38:56.000 Bush, who plays buddy-buddy with Bill Clinton. 0.93

00:38:58.000 Here's Bill Clinton at Aretha Franklin's funeral, checking out Ariana Grande's butt. 0.98

00:39:04.000 Ariana Grande, first of all, looks like she's 16 years old, and there's Bill Clinton, who looks like the old child molester from Family Guy, just sitting behind Ariana Grande, and legitimately can see him stare her up and down. 0.95

00:39:16.000 And that's the kind of class that our politics is supposed to stand for. 0.99

00:39:19.000 Now, Bill Clinton, he understands the American vision, but Donald Trump doesn't understand the American vision. 1.00

00:39:23.000 What a bunch of absolute horse crap. 0.99

00:39:26.000 So much of Trump's power, so much of his persona, is driven by the fact that it feels like he is ripping away curtains. 1.00

00:39:32.000 That there's a veil of pretend that he just tears apart.

00:39:38.000 And contributing to this veil of pretend is not useful.

00:39:41.000 America is built on a creed.

00:39:43.000 America is built on the idea that we are brothers and not enemies.

00:39:46.000 All of that is true.

00:39:46.000 And when President Trump does things that are terrible, we ought to comment on it.

00:39:50.000 But to pretend that there are not serious differences between left and right in the country, that the real differences are between the civil and the uncivil, is, I think, ignorant of the reality of the situation.

00:40:00.000 Now, speaking of areas where the president deserves criticism, the president over the weekend decided to take to Twitter, as he is fond of doing, and he tweeted out a bunch of cryptic and bizarre things.

00:40:09.000 So he tweeted out, Good job, Jeff.

00:40:27.000 The Democrats, none of whom voted for Jeff Sessions, must love him now.

00:40:31.000 Same thing with Lion James Comey.

00:40:33.000 The Dems all hated him. 0.98

00:40:35.000 Wanted him out until he was disgusting. 0.99

00:40:37.000 UNTIL I FIRED HIM. 0.98

00:40:38.000 All caps.

00:40:39.000 Immediately he became a wonderful man.

00:40:41.000 A saint-like figure, in fact. 0.70

00:40:42.000 Really sick. 0.99

00:40:43.000 So the part of this that's troubling is not all the stuff about James Comey, which is just dumb. 0.97

00:40:47.000 The part that's really troubling is in the first tweet here, when he says that Jeff Sessions and the DOJ should not prosecute actual corruption in government because it might endanger congressional seats.

00:40:58.000 You're not supposed to say that part out loud, Mr. President.

00:41:02.000 When you suggest that the rule of law comes secondary to the political victory of your own party, it's not a good thing.

00:41:09.000 That is a bad thing.

00:41:10.000 And it was a bad thing when Obama was doing it, and it's a bad thing when President Trump is doing it.

00:41:13.000 It's a bad thing when the Attorney General is the President's wingman and ignoring crime, and the President is using executive privilege to shield particular figures, which is what Barack Obama did.

00:41:21.000 And it's a bad thing when the President of the United States is bizarrely going on Twitter to rip the Attorney General who works for him for prosecuting actual crime in Congress.

00:41:30.000 So there was that.

00:41:31.000 And then the president also decided to tweet out about the FBI.

00:41:48.000 I'm so confused by this tweet I can't even express.

00:41:50.000 Is he ripping the FBI for trying to go after Putin loyalists before he was even running for office?

00:41:56.000 Is that the point he's making here?

00:41:57.000 I mean, to be charitable, I guess maybe the point that he's making is maybe that this investigation preceded anything having to do with Donald Trump, and that he's been kind of swept up in an investigation that has nothing to do with him, but he's not making that particularly clear.

00:42:10.000 There are plenty of grounds on which to criticize the President of the United States. 1.00

00:42:14.000 Claiming that the left and the right are on the same page and Trump is not, and that Trump is something foreign to politics, when we all know that Trump was the seething underbelly of politics for at least two decades in this country, is just historically ignorant and also incredibly stupid. 0.99

00:42:28.000 Again, also that the tolerant left is so tolerant that they are now disinviting people. 0.99

00:42:32.000 So the New Yorker,

00:42:34.000 I love this.

00:42:35.000 Steve Bannon is the former White House chief strategist. 1.00

00:42:38.000 I am a longtime critic of Steve Bannon, who I think is a flaming garbage heap of a human being. 0.99

00:42:43.000 The New Yorker shouldn't have invited him. 0.98

00:42:44.000 He's been irrelevant to politics since President Trump fired him and labeled him Sloppy Steve.

00:42:48.000 But they invited him, and then a bunch of lefties dropped out, and then they decided, OK, well, we'll disinvite him.

00:42:54.000 You shouldn't invite people and disinvite them.

00:42:55.000 If you don't want to invite Steve Bannon, don't invite him.

00:42:57.000 If you disinvite him because of pressure from your mail room, then I would suggest that you guys lack a little bit of courage in regard to your devotion to open conversation, obviously.

00:43:08.000 Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.

00:43:11.000 So, things I like today.

00:43:13.000 Last night I had the opportunity to go see Operation Finale with Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley.

00:43:20.000 Ben Kingsley is

00:43:22.000 One of the best living actors, Ben Kingsley, is just tremendous in everything.

00:43:26.000 And he is predictably excellent in this.

00:43:28.000 He plays Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi mastermind of logistics during the Holocaust.

00:43:35.000 And Oscar Isaac plays an Israeli agent who is tasked with tracking him down, not only tracking him down, but also getting him to sign a document that gives permission for his trial to be held in Israel.

00:43:45.000 And the face-off between the two of them is the best part of the movie.

00:43:48.000 The movie is effective.

00:43:50.000 It's very effective.

00:43:51.000 Not only is it effective, I'm always pleased when there's no sucker punches.

00:43:54.000 So whenever I see a movie that's set up like this, I always think, okay, here comes the sucker punch. 0.97

00:43:58.000 Here comes the Steven Spielberg, Munich-like sucker punch, where we learn that the Israelis are really the Nazis, or the Israelis are really the great oppressors. 0.94

00:44:05.000 In Munich, that's what Spielberg did.

00:44:07.000 There were Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the Olympics, and somehow Steven Spielberg drew a moral equivalence between those people and Israeli agents tracking them down, which is an amazing, amazing feat of 1.00

00:44:19.000 Sort of intellectual gymnastics and moral gymnastics.

00:44:22.000 In this particular movie, however, there are no sucker punches. 0.83

00:44:24.000 Israel is perceived as good because it is a good country filled with people who are trying to survive in the face of radical anti-Semitism across the world, and the Nazis are bad.

00:44:33.000 Also, the movie takes on some serious issues with regard to the banality of evil.

00:44:37.000 So Hannah Arendt, a very, very famous writer with, I would have to say, far left leanings on politics.

00:44:43.000 She wrote an entire book called Eichmann in Jerusalem about Eichmann's trial because Eichmann was in fact brought back to Israel for trial.

00:44:49.000 He was put inside a glass booth actually to prevent him from being assassinated and he was then hanged.

00:44:56.000 Hannah Arendt did an entire book on him and basically she made the claim that Eichmann was

00:45:01.000 Just in effect of the banality of evil to phrase use the banality of evil.

00:45:04.000 Now I have some fondness toward the idea that human beings are programmed to look the other way when their in-group is threatened.

00:45:09.000 When your in-group is threatened that you tend to go along with evil.

00:45:12.000 But for you to be an architect of evil I think requires a little bit more. 0.58

00:45:16.000 It seems that later research has sort of shown Hannah Arendt's banality of evil point as applied to Adolf Eichmann to be kind of ridiculous. 0.85

00:45:22.000 That Adolf Eichmann was in fact a rabid anti-Semite.

00:45:25.000 You have no interest in what I have to say.

00:45:27.000 Unless it confirms what you think you already know.

00:45:29.000 My job was simple.

00:45:53.000 Save the country I love from being destroyed.

00:45:55.000 Is your job any different?

00:46:03.000 So the movie is quite good.

00:46:06.000 Again, I think it doesn't sucker punch anybody.

00:46:08.000 It does demonstrate the... One thing that is shocking is the virulence of antisemitism under the Peron regime in Argentina.

00:46:16.000 You have a bunch of people on the left who somehow still have fondness for the Peronists in Argentina, which is kind of shocking.

00:46:21.000 The Peron regime was indeed an evil regime, and they shielded a crapload of Nazis who were attempting to escape justice after World War II. 0.94

00:46:29.000 Go check it out.

00:46:30.000 Operation Finale.

00:46:31.000 It's in theaters right now.

00:46:32.000 It is well worth the watch.

00:46:33.000 It's definitely disturbing, but it should be disturbing.

00:46:36.000 It's a movie about the Holocaust and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

00:46:38.000 So go check it out right now.

00:46:39.000 Operation Finale.

00:46:40.000 Okay, other things that I like.

00:46:43.000 Speaking of American flag controversies, last week we talked at length about this new movie, First Man, from Damien Chazelle.

00:46:49.000 Honestly, I'm very sad that Damien Chazelle is being hit with controversy, because I think he's one of the best directors working today.

00:46:54.000 I think La La Land, for its flaws, is a very good movie, and I think The Whiplash is a terrific movie, one of the best movies of the last ten years.

00:47:00.000 Well, his new movie, First Man, about Neil Armstrong doesn't contain Americans planting the flag on the moon.

00:47:05.000 We all know why.

00:47:06.000 It's because he's afraid that it's going to kill the box office in China.

00:47:09.000 But Ryan Gosling went out there and suggested that it was because it was an international achievement, a world achievement to put a man on the moon, not an American achievement, which, of course, is a bunch of nonsense.

00:47:18.000 Buzz Aldrin, who was part of the Apollo 11 mission, he also tweeted out a picture of them putting up the flag on the moon.

00:47:25.000 And then he tweeted out, hashtag proud to be an American, hashtag freedom, hashtag honor, hashtag one nation.

00:47:30.000 Hashtag July 1969.

00:47:31.000 Hashtag Apollo 11.

00:47:32.000 Hashtag Road to Apollo 50.

00:47:35.000 Like, yes.

00:47:36.000 Okay, yes.

00:47:36.000 This is not a difficult one.

00:47:38.000 The fact that the Americans put the flag on the moon is an amazing achievement, especially given the fact they were essentially using slide rules.

00:47:46.000 It's an amazing thing and it is an American achievement because America has been the world power and the single dominant hegemony over the globe for ever since World War II and probably before World War II, although we really only began to take more of an active role in world affairs during and after World War II.

00:48:00.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.

00:48:06.000 So you've heard all this stuff about how the Swedish healthcare system is just the best healthcare system, how nationalized healthcare systems, they have no cost.

00:48:12.000 Everything is fantastic in nationalized healthcare systems.

00:48:14.000 Well, Sweden is not a hugely populous country.

00:48:18.000 It is a country where people are taxed at more than half their income.

00:48:20.000 The total population of Sweden is about 9.9 million, which is about the size of Los Angeles County.

00:48:26.000 But we are told that if we just applied Swedish solutions to our healthcare, everything would be all better.

00:48:30.000 There's an article in Agence France-Presse today, all about the Swedish healthcare system, and here is what they find.

00:48:36.000 Swedes are frustrated over their universal healthcare, one of the main pillars of their cherished welfare state, with long queues due to a shortage of nurses and available doctors in some areas.

00:48:46.000 No.

00:48:46.000 You mean a non-market-based system generates shortages?

00:48:49.000 I can't believe it.

00:48:50.000 Just like in every other product in human history?

00:48:52.000 When you have a non-market-based system, then price and supply do not match?

00:48:56.000 I can't... No!

00:48:57.000 Demand and supply curves actually... What?

00:48:59.000 What?

00:49:00.000 I thought if you declared something a right, then the laws of supply and demand no longer apply. 1.00

00:49:04.000 If you're stupid... 0.99

00:49:06.000 So Swedes, who on average pay more than half of their income in tax, see access to healthcare as the most important issue in the September 9th general election poll. 1.00

00:49:13.000 Prime Minister Stefan Löfven's Social Democrats, the largest party, are on course for a record low score.

00:49:19.000 They're instead losing to the far-right Sweden Democrats, who I believe started off with actual neo-Nazi roots, if I'm not mistaken.

00:49:25.000 So the far right is gaining because Sweden has not taken immigration seriously and because all of the social welfare promises of the Swedish state are experiencing some difficulty.

00:49:39.000 But 271 days in the northern county of Västerbotten, official figures show.

00:49:45.000 Swedes complain about not being able to see their own regular general practitioner, as a growing number of doctors and nurses are temporary hires employed by staffing companies.

00:49:52.000 Some 80% of the healthcare sector is in need of nurses, according to official data, which means that's underestimating.

00:49:58.000 Online services where patients see a doctor via webcam have mushroomed as well.

00:50:03.000 So everything is going spectacularly.

00:50:05.000 And what are the Social Democrats vowing?

00:50:09.000 They're vowing to spend three billion kroner to hire more health care staff if re-elected.

00:50:14.000 So they're going to spend their way out of the crisis.

00:50:16.000 We'll see if that works.

00:50:17.000 Eventually, the bill comes due for all of this.

00:50:19.000 So it is worth noting this whenever you hear about the wonders and glories of nationalized health care systems.

00:50:24.000 Again, this is not a defense of the American health care system, which is almost the worst of both worlds.

00:50:28.000 Heavily regulated and then free market with massive subsidies.

00:50:32.000 The American healthcare system's a mess, but the solution is not a nationalized healthcare system, at least not in the way the Swedes do it. 1.00

00:50:39.000 Okay, so, meanwhile...

00:50:41.000 Pope Francis on Monday said silence and prayer were the answer to those seeking scandal and division amid a barrage of attacks from ultra-conservative Catholics.

00:50:48.000 First of all, I love how Yahoo News and the AFP call it attacks from ultra-conservative Catholics, as opposed to, you know, Catholics who don't like seeing little boys molested by priests.

00:50:56.000 Now they're ultra-conservative.

00:50:57.000 So back in 2003, when it was the Spotlight scandal, then it was every good-hearted person wanting to stop the abuse of children.

00:51:03.000 Now it's ultra-conservative Catholics.

00:51:06.000 I can't believe the press is taking this line, but this is how much they love their leftist Pope Francis.

00:51:11.000 The Pope has so far refused to respond to allegations made last month that he for years covered up sexual abuse allegations against a prominent U.S.

00:51:18.000 Cardinal.

00:51:19.000 Francis said at a prayer service at St.

00:51:21.000 Martha's, with people who lack goodwill, with people who seek only scandal, who seek only division, who seek only destruction, even within the family, there is nothing but silence and prayer.

00:51:29.000 Or, theoretically, you could fire everybody who was abusing a child, turn them over to civil authorities and have them prosecuted.

00:51:35.000 Or, theoretically, you could reveal all of your records to the general public so we know who exactly was covering up what. 0.96

00:51:41.000 Or I guess you could stay silent and pretend it's not a big deal when little boys get raped. 0.96

00:51:44.000 I guess you could do that. 0.98

00:51:46.000 And honest to God, it's just, it's astonishing.

00:51:48.000 It's astonishing to watch the press cover for Pope Francis.

00:51:50.000 If Benedict had done the same thing, if John Paul II had done the same thing, and this sort of scandal had broken,

00:51:56.000 The press would be ripping them up and down endlessly, ceaselessly, with no break.

00:52:00.000 It is Pope Francis who is a leftist on a bunch of issues from economics to the environment, and therefore he will be defended with the hardest core defense possible by the left-wing media.

00:52:10.000 Whenever they say that they actually care about children, you should remember this particular thing because it's pretty, pretty astonishing.

00:52:17.000 Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.

00:52:20.000 Welcome back to the Workweek, gang.

00:52:22.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:52:22.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:52:27.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.

00:52:33.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:52:37.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:52:39.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

00:52:40.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:52:42.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

00:52:45.000 Copyright Ford Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - September 04, 2018

The Anti-Trump Culture War | Ep. 616

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