Pro-choice comedian Patrick Tomlinson presents the greatest pro-abortion argument of all time, and then he gets blocked for it. Plus, President Trump goes after President Obama for not caring about dead troops, and Jimmy Kimmel gets called out for being a creep by women who have been sexually harassed in the past. Plus, why the pro-life crowd hates on Trump and why it's a good thing he's not a big fan of the Me Too movement that's going around social media right now about women who claim they've been sexually harassed by men on social media, and why they should be fired if they want to have a baby in the first place. All that and much more on this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. If you like the show, please consider becoming a supporter by rating and/or reviewing in iTunes. The opinions stated here are our own, and do not necessarily those of our parent companies. We do not endorse the views expressed in the books we publish. Thank you for supporting the show and our efforts to make it a safe and respectful place for our listeners to support the show. It helps us grow and grow as a community of like-minded listeners. Ben Shapiro's words are always being taken with love, support, and support in order to keep it real, honest, and respectful discussion. - and we do not take it on the road to where it s going to be the best possible place for all of us to grow and learn, grow, and have the most of all of our listeners getting the most out of their day-day to day experiences. This show is not meant to be a place where they can have the best of what they can access the most authentic and the most important information they can get. Thanks for listening and support the most uplifting and most importantly, it s a place they can expect the most profound experience possible. You are not going to get more information about the things they can do the most meaningful and most impactful thing they can achieve in their day to day life, and most of their dreams and their day will be the most influential, and they will get the most opportunities to achieve the most amazing things they will be able to do so by listening to the most rewarding day to understand the most beautiful day in the world, the most they can be most authentic experience possible
00:00:01.000We're gonna talk about abortion and sex in Hollywood and lots of things having to do with Trump and dead soldiers and all sorts of stupid things also.
00:00:19.000Every time we open this show, I have to look to a different camera, and I am very awkward at it.
00:00:22.000So if you can't see the show, that's what you're missing out on, folks.
00:00:25.000Okay, so before we get to any of these things, so somebody on the left this morning on Twitter presented the greatest pro-abortion argument of all time.
00:00:34.000And then I refuted it, and then he blocked me.
00:00:36.000So I will explain to you why this was not, in fact, the greatest pro-abortion argument of all time, and why it is that people think it was.
00:00:42.000We'll also talk a little bit more about the Me Too hashtag that is going around, all these women posting on social media about how they've been sexually harassed in the past, which is fine and dandy, but I do have a couple of questions that I think need to be answered if we're going to actually do something practical with all that information.
00:00:58.000Plus, President Trump goes after President Obama for not caring about dead troops or something, which is just awesome.
00:01:04.000We'll get to all of that, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Legacy Box.
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00:03:00.000I would tell you how many followers he has except that he blocked me.
00:03:02.000So, Patrick Tomlinson is apparently the author of something called the Ark Trilogy.
00:03:06.000He's a sci-fi author, calls himself a comic.
00:03:09.000I'm going to read you his nasty little tweetstorm, and then I'm going to explain why it is so appealing on the surface to pro-choicers, and then I'm going to explain why it makes no sense.
00:03:18.000So, here is his argument in favor of abortion.
00:03:21.000And it just drips with condescension and disdain.
00:03:24.000Anyone who disagrees with him is a fool and a liar.
00:04:36.000In a decade of arguing with anti-abortion people about the definition of human life, I have never gotten a single straight A or B answer to this question.
00:04:58.000They will never answer honestly, because we all instinctively understand the right answer is A. A human life is worth more than a thousand embryos, or ten thousand, or a million, because they are not the same.
00:05:52.000I mean, just the utter genius of this guy.
00:05:53.000If I had thought of this example, if I had thought of this hypothetical, stupid question, like, I don't know, 10 years ago, totally would have changed my worldview.
00:06:00.000I would have voted for Hillary Clinton, and I'd be wearing a sticker with a pussy hat on it.
00:06:05.000Okay, so, let's put aside the fact that this guy's obviously a douchebag.
00:06:09.000The commenters on the Twitter thread are properly puzzled.
00:06:12.000The reason they're properly puzzled is because he is correct that your moral intuition suggests that you save the five-year-old child and not the box marked 1,000 viable embryos.
00:06:20.000Here is why this does not prove the point he thinks that it proves.
00:06:22.000There are many reasons why this does not even come close to proving the point he thinks it proves.
00:06:26.000He thinks this proves that human embryos aren't life.
00:06:28.000He thinks that this proves that we are all liars when we say that human embryos are human life.
00:06:32.000He says that this proves that human embryos are not babies.
00:06:36.000He says that this proves that we are all liars.
00:06:37.000Okay, so here is why this is not true in any sense.
00:07:01.000I think they're fun, so that's why I'm focusing on this because I think that it's good for you to get better at thought experiments, and it's fun for me to go through them.
00:07:07.000So, here's another famous thought experiment.
00:07:08.000This, of course, is the trolley problem.
00:07:10.000Everyone knows of the trolley car problem.
00:07:21.000It goes to the right, and it goes to the left.
00:07:22.000On the left, there is Nell, who is tied to the track, and on the right, there are five people who are tied to the track, okay?
00:07:29.000Do you pull the switch and switch the trolley car from the one that is going to kill the five people to the one that is just going to kill Nell?
00:08:30.000We can give all sorts of these thought experiments, proving that the moral intuition goes the other way.
00:08:34.000So, for example, let's say that instead of a five-year-old and a box of 1,000 random viable embryos, it was a box of two embryos, and they were your children.
00:08:43.000You are infertile, and your wife is infertile, but somehow, through a miracle, they've created two embryos that are your children, your only possibility of having children, and they are viable, so we know that they will implant and be fine, right?
00:09:32.000It's always Kim Bauer, that idiot, getting captured, and then Jack has to decide whether to save the entire city of Los Angeles or his dumbass daughter.
00:09:40.000It's the premise to every ticking bomb thriller.
00:09:59.000Is that a moral decision, or is it just a moral impetus?
00:10:01.000So just because you feel like you want to save the five-year-old, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're correct.
00:10:05.000Okay, second point on this stupid hypothetical.
00:10:08.000It doesn't actually reveal the value of embryonic life.
00:10:11.000So, we can agree with Tomlinson that you should save the five-year-olds rather than the box of embryos on a moral level, and still, that would not admit that embryonic life is meaningless.
00:10:20.000It would just mean that you care more about the five-year-old life than you care about the embryonic life.
00:10:25.000In fact, we can imagine a counter scenario where you care more about the embryonic life than the five-year-old.
00:10:29.000So let's take a sci-fi scenario, since Tomlinson is a sci-fi writer.
00:10:33.000Let's take the sort of Battlestar Galactica scenario, okay?
00:10:36.000The fate of humanity rests on this one box full of 1,000 embryos that have males and females in them.
00:10:43.000And now there's a fire on your spaceship, and you can save a screaming five-year-old, the only child, or, right, it's just you and the five-year-old.
00:10:49.000There are no other people alive, right?
00:10:53.000You can save those 1,000 embryos, and you can ensure that they are born from artificial wombs, and they will live and create a new human species, or you can save this one five-year-old, and you can both die alone in the middle of space.
00:13:06.000Because the vast majority, the vast majority of religions, in fact all that I know of including Catholic doctrine, say that if you have to choose between the life of the mother and the life of the unborn child, you choose the life of the mother.
00:13:17.000This is, in Catholic doctrine, to give a perfect example from Catholic doctrine, because Catholics are the most strict on this, the doctrine is, let's say that you're a woman and you have uterine cancer, and chemo and surgery are the only way to prevent you from dying from this uterine cancer, and the side effect of the chemo is that it's going to kill the embryo.
00:13:38.000Because we value the life of the mother, and you are not actively killing the child, you are passively killing the child.
00:13:43.000It's a secondary effect of the chemo that you're trying to do to save a life.
00:13:48.000The same exact premise applies in this particular hypothetical that Tomlinson puts forward.
00:13:52.000And finally, the hypothetical isn't reality.
00:13:55.000Okay, this is the part that's the stupidest.
00:13:57.000I'm not even arguing with the hypothetical now.
00:13:58.000The hypothetical is saying, five-year-old child versus embryos, choose.
00:14:03.000When women get abortions, they don't have a choice between five-year-old child and the embryo.
00:14:07.000They are just choosing to kill the embryo.
00:14:09.000An abortion doctor doesn't have a five-year-old child with a gun to their head in the next room and says, well, I saved that five-year-old.
00:14:50.000I'm stunned by the fact that no one has
00:14:53.000Taken taking your genius at face value.
00:14:56.000Okay, so in other news There's this this hashtag that's going around on social media me too And there are people that I know members my family have posted on this hashtag me too about being sexually harassed at work Sexual harassment is awful sexual harassment is evil.
00:15:10.000It's why I am supremely careful around women I do not
00:15:15.000I think that, you know, touching at the office is inappropriate.
00:15:19.000I think that, you know, the only person of the opposite sex that you should be touching other than a handshake is your spouse.
00:15:26.000This is my view of the matter as a general matter.
00:15:29.000And it's funny, because the same people who will claim sexual harassment and yell sexual harassment say that I'm a prude for saying stuff like this.
00:15:34.000I'm a prude for saying that you shouldn't touch other people at the office.
00:15:43.000You can't rip on Mike Pence for being super careful at the office and then suggest that Mike Pence is sexually harassing a woman if he touches her on the shoulder.
00:15:51.000You can't say that Joe Biden is doing just fine every time he gives some random lady a shoulder rub, but Mike Pence is totally wrong every time he says he's not going to touch anybody but his wife.
00:16:00.000One of the problems that I have with the Me Too thing is this.
00:16:03.000There are a lot of people who are hashtagging Me Too and telling their stories of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
00:16:17.000And I think men should be very aware of the fact that women are not going to like it always when they go in for a hug, or when they give them a kiss on a cheek, or when they give them a shoulder rub, or any of this kind of stuff, right?
00:16:27.000Men should be aware of all of these things and be supremely careful, as I suggest.
00:16:31.000However, one of the things that I have a problem with
00:16:54.000This has been a really hard week for women in Hollywood, for women all over the world, and a lot of situations and a lot of industries are forced to remember and relive a lot of ugly truths.
00:17:01.000I've had my own experiences that come back to me very vividly, and I find it hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings I've been having about anxiety, honest...
00:17:09.000Honestly, the guilt for not speaking up earlier says I feel true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger at the agents and producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment.
00:17:20.000And I wish I could tell you that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly it wasn't.
00:17:23.000I've had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault and I don't speak about them very often.
00:17:58.000However, that is not what modern leftist society has said on sex, right?
00:18:02.000Modern leftist society has said for decades on sex that sexual looseness at the office is actually a good thing.
00:18:08.000Maybe the woman would like... I mean, let's not pretend that romances have not started at the office because a huge number of people are currently living together who met at the office and started going out and
00:18:19.000The way that human touch works is not always a guy with a checklist coming up and saying, I need you to check every one of these boxes, right?
00:18:25.000When somebody makes a move, it's very easy to do this in the abstract, but when somebody makes a move, very often it is not a move where somebody says, is it okay right now if I kiss you?
00:18:34.000Okay, that's generally not how it happens as far as I'm aware.
00:18:38.000And I'll appeal to the female in the room and make her quite awkward now.
00:18:40.000Jess, do you believe that this is the way that it works in human relationships?
00:18:44.000That guys typically ask girls before they kiss them, can I kiss you or hold your hand?
00:18:49.000Or, have you had experiences where a guy has just made a move on you and it hasn't been the end of the world?
00:18:57.000Right, it's 50-50, and this is sort of the problem, right?
00:18:59.000Is that there's no hard lines with regard to this stuff, and there are times when a guy will make a move on a girl and the girl is totally fine with it, and there are times when a guy will make a move on a girl and she's totally not fine with it.
00:19:08.000And because there's no hard line on this stuff, it's hard to know for a lot of guys where exactly to draw the line.
00:19:13.000Now we can say, as I would say, that the guy should ask consent always before kissing, right?
00:19:18.000When I first kissed my wife, that's actually what I did.
00:19:19.000I said, do you mind if I kiss you now?
00:19:21.000Which is not the most romantic thing to do, but that's how I operate.
00:19:25.000But that is not always how human relationships work.
00:19:28.000And so I'm seeing a lot of stories online, in these Me Too circles, that don't actually draw the hard line.
00:19:33.000Like, would you report a guy for he's drunk at a party and he tries to kiss you?
00:19:38.000Would you report a guy to HR for that?
00:19:41.000Some women would say yes, some women would say no.
00:19:45.000We need to have some hard lines in society and figure out where the line is actually drawn.
00:19:50.000Apparently the line isn't even drawn at actual sexual assault in Hollywood.
00:19:53.000These women, America Ferreira says that she was sexually assaulted at the age of nine.
00:19:57.000She says, first time I can remember being sexually assaulted, I was nine years old.
00:20:00.000I told no one and lived with the shame and guilt, thinking all along that I, a nine year old child, was somehow responsible for the actions of a grown man.
00:20:06.000I had to see this man on a daily basis for years to come.
00:20:09.000He would smile at me, wave, and I would hurry past him, my blood running cold, my guts carrying the burden of what only he and I knew, that he expected me to shut my mouth and smile back.
00:20:16.000Right now, Alyssa Milano is saying some of the same stuff.
00:20:19.000America Ferrer is a big girl now, okay?
00:20:21.000Like, I understand when you're nine years old not speaking out about that.
00:20:44.000I need a specific name and a specific example so I can fight it with you.
00:20:48.000I need a specific instance with a specific name so I can fight it with you or decide whether you are just being oversensitive with regards to the Me Too stuff.
00:21:16.000She experiences stuff I'm sure male doctors don't, where patients will hit on her on a pretty regular basis.
00:21:21.000The example that she gave is she was working at the Veterans Administration, and one guy said to her, this is like an older guy, probably 60 years old, said to her something like, your eyes are so blue and so deep, they're like the ocean.
00:21:32.000And she was like, should I have been insulted by that, or should I have been sort of complimented by that?
00:21:36.000I chose to be sort of complimented by it, but I could see being insulted by it, and that's sort of right, right?
00:21:42.000The problem with a lot of this sort of stuff is, it's I know it when I see it.
00:21:44.000Now I think there are some obvious hard lines that are pretty clear, and this is why I'm very frustrated with these actresses who are now big stars and who are leaving predators in positions of power by not naming names.
00:21:53.000There is no statute of limitations to child molestation.
00:21:56.000But the fact that that is not what's happening is a problem.
00:22:00.000And again, I think that we're all on the same side.
00:22:02.000I think that when we are vague about these things, it actually creates false divisions that don't exist.
00:22:06.000I think all good-hearted people want to see men who sexually harassed called out.
00:22:10.000I think that we need hard standards of what sexual harassment constitutes, what sexual assault constitutes.
00:22:15.000And it can't just be that something bothered me 10 years ago, I said nothing about it, I come out today, I give a vague reference to being sexually harassed at work, and then we're all supposed to just say, well, that's society.
00:22:32.000But since as a society we have not decided to abide by my standard, apparently, since we've decided that it's prudish to abide by Mike Pence's standard.
00:22:39.000Then I don't know what standard we are supposed to abide by.
00:22:42.000And I would like for all... This is not a critique.
00:22:45.000This is all of us coming together and creating a formal societal standard where we know what's good and what's bad so that we can target the bad guys.
00:22:50.000I don't see why that's too much to ask.
00:22:54.000That is saying when you say Me Too, how about you say who did it and what it was so that we can determine whether it was something bad enough that the person should lose their job, lose their career, lose their livelihood and go to jail.
00:23:27.000Well, if we're not living in an abortion hypothetical, what you actually do is you go over to Blinkist.com slash Ben, and there you download all of their books, because what they do is they summarize the main points of all of the best-selling books in the nonfiction world.
00:24:25.000And when you go to slash Ben, you get your free trial.
00:24:27.000And that free trial is for our audience right now.
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00:24:34.000Or you can get three months off of your yearly plans.
00:24:36.000You can join for a year and you get three months off of the yearly plans.
00:24:38.000You get it for cheaper at Blinkist dot com slash Ben.
00:24:41.000Again, it's Blinkist dot com slash Ben.
00:24:44.000It's pretty awesome, and some of the books that are on there, many books that I've read and spent hours reading, things like Flow, The Power of Habit, Drive, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Smarter, Faster, Better, you know, all of these self-help books, pop sociology books that I really enjoy, plus actual hard history books, things like Why Nations Fail, it's a 600-page book, you can get it in 15 minutes over at Blinkist.com, so Blinkist.com slash Ben, and you get either that free trial or three months off your yearly plan when you join today, go check it out and make yourself smarter.
00:25:14.000Again, final word on the Me Too thing, just to reiterate.
00:25:17.000I think it's good that women are calling out sexual harassment in the workplace.
00:25:20.000I think in order for us to fight sexual harassment in the workplace, two things have to happen.
00:25:24.000I think Me Too does one thing, but it doesn't do the other.
00:25:26.000Me Too makes men aware that they need to be careful around women, as well they should, but what it does not do is it allows us, it does not allow us to actually target the guys who have already done bad stuff and should have known better.
00:25:36.000In order for that to happen, you have to name names, and you have to name scenarios, and we need to know what constitutes the line that was crossed.
00:25:44.000I can't help feeling that some of this is politicized.
00:25:47.000Look at those pictures of Joe Biden being really awkward around women, okay?
00:25:51.000And let me ask, how many Democrats are willing to say that Joe Biden should not run for president or should not have been a senator or should not have been VP?
00:25:59.000The right decided it was fine for Trump to be president, and the left decided it was fine for Clinton to be president, and both of them have some pretty nasty histories with regard to this sort of stuff.
00:26:07.000Okay, so, I also want to talk today about the Trump versus Bannon war, supposedly, over establishment versus non-establishment.
00:27:11.000Everything he does is the greatest, the best, the brightest, the most incredible, the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the worst, the most horrible.
00:28:15.000Again, the easiest thing to say here is President Trump misspoke.
00:28:27.000Of course, other presidents called the families of fallen troops.
00:28:30.000I think people who are on Obama's team are right to be angry about this because that is something that Obama apparently did do.
00:28:36.000But it's also the sort of thing where because the media is going to jump on it, a lot of people on the right are going to claim that it's unfair.
00:28:44.000Instead of making the critique that I just made, that Trump always speaks like this, he speaks in superlatives, that puts him in a position of saying things that are not true, and frankly, disingenuous.
00:28:54.000Instead of just saying that, instead they have to go completely overboard.
00:28:57.000Trump's a scum, Trump's a cockroach, Trump's the worst guy in the world.
00:28:59.000CNN's Faux Mud did exactly that last night.
00:29:04.000Boy, it's a tough day for the President.
00:29:05.000How about for the families who accepted a child or a father or spouse home in a casket?
00:29:12.000This guy has the empathy of a cockroach.
00:29:15.000From the day after his inauguration, when he showed up at my agency, my former agency, the CIA, in front of the Wall of Fallen Heroes, and spoke about the size of his inauguration, fast-forwarding now, what is it, nine months, and he can't figure out his responsibility, not only as the Commander-in-Chief,
00:29:32.000But as the Consular-in-Chief is to tell those families, it's not about me.
00:29:37.000It's about 330 million Americans saying thank you for having someone in your family.
00:29:42.000This sort of talk is not helpful to the other side.
00:29:44.000So I mean, I don't give advice to people who are on the Democratic left.
00:29:48.000But let me give you a little piece of advice here.
00:29:50.000It is not helpful to the American experiment for you to suggest that Trump has no sympathy for the fallen soldiers.
00:29:58.000What you can say is that Trump is overstepping.
00:30:00.000What you can say is that Trump lied about President Obama.
00:30:03.000What you can say is that Trump is mean, and when he says that about President Obama, it is wrong for him to impute that sort of motivation to President Obama.
00:30:09.000But to go to, he has no empathy at all for the fallen troops, is you now overstepping in the other direction.
00:30:14.000And this is, every controversy is now this.
00:30:18.000Trump says something wrong, the left oversteps way too far in the other direction, the right oversteps way too far in the opposite direction, and nobody actually ends up in the place where the truth is, right?
00:30:27.000The truth is Trump said something that is wrong and false and nasty, and instead of just saying this is wrong and false and nasty, people immediately go to, well, he hates the troops.
00:30:40.000I don't see why people would do that at all.
00:30:42.000And it's because of that reactionary tendency in politics that President Trump won, really.
00:30:46.000Like, people say, how could he win in spite of saying things like this?
00:30:48.000It's not in spite of saying things like this.
00:30:50.000It's because he said things like this.
00:30:52.000And the right inherently believes that there are a lot of people on the left who don't care enough about fallen troops because it's always easy to impute bad motivations to the other side.
00:30:59.000And then the left immediately claims that Trump doesn't care about the fallen troops, and the right says, well, screw you!
00:31:28.000She can wrap herself in a box and mail herself there.
00:31:32.000I mean, that's the only way that she's gonna get in.
00:31:35.000But in any case, Trump says, and he's correct, that Hillary, who's been very supportive of these people kneeling for the national anthem in the NFL, that's why she lost.
00:31:44.000When you take a knee, well, that's why she lost the election.
00:31:48.000I mean, honestly, it's that thinking that is the reason she lost the election.
00:32:33.000Okay, that is certainly what he desperately hopes.
00:32:36.000Okay, so, let's talk a little bit about the other sort of controversy that broke out around President Trump yesterday.
00:32:44.000This is the one that's making all the headlines.
00:32:45.000The reason I didn't start the show with this is because I think it's really overblown.
00:32:49.000And I will explain in just a second, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Zeal.
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00:35:08.000The Mercers spend a lot of money on politics.
00:35:11.000They spent a lot of money on Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in the last election cycle, and so they are funding some of the people that Bannon says that they should fund.
00:35:18.000Now, what Bannon is smart about is he's not going to pick—I don't think he's going to make the mistake anymore of picking primary challengers who are bad candidates or who don't already have momentum or who wouldn't win anyway, in other words.
00:35:30.000I think that Trump is going to pick winners.
00:35:32.000Uh, and I think, I mean, Bannon is going to pick winners and then he's going to claim that he is responsible for their victory.
00:35:36.000That's basically what happened in Alabama.
00:35:38.000So Bannon went down to Alabama, he campaigned for Roy Moore over Luther Strange in the Republican primary down there.
00:36:34.000Steve Bannon, from what I know of him, and I've said this openly, is a guy who basically has glommed on to power for as long as I've known of him.
00:36:43.000He glommed on to Sarah Palin, he glommed on to Sean Hannity, he glommed on to Dick Morris, he glommed on to Michelle Bachman, he glommed on to Andrew Breitbart, and then he glommed on to Trump.
00:36:51.000The idea that Bannon is the engine of a movement
00:38:00.000against Obama and the Obama movement, not based on race, not even based on excess spending, but based on a generalized anger at the way that politics has been done.
00:38:10.000People feel like they're cut out of the loop.
00:38:11.000The Tea Party movement started long before Steve Bannon was even involved at Breitbart.
00:38:15.000Breitbart wasn't even around in 2010 when the Tea Party movement really started.
00:39:16.000Bannon's just a guy who's picking some people and directing mercenary money toward them.
00:39:20.000Which is fine, but I think it's easy to overestimate the lengths to which people are going to exaggerate this conflict, the so-called establishment versus anti-establishment conflict.
00:39:29.000These terms have no meaning that I can spot.
00:39:32.000Except for a feeling, and I'll explain that feeling in just a second.
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00:41:05.000So the Bannon-Trump thing broke out into the open yesterday because the idea is that Bannon is on one side, primarying people, and Trump is on the other side, opposing the primaries.
00:41:16.000Bannon has a particular idea of, and just like a lot of us do, by the way, I'm sort of on Bannon's side of this argument, Bannon has a particular idea of who are candidates who are worth backing in primaries, and Mitch McConnell has a separate idea of which candidates are worth backing in primaries.
00:41:33.000And Mitch McConnell would have backed David Dewhurst in Texas instead of Ted Cruz.
00:41:37.000Presumably he would have backed whoever was not Rand Paul in that primary.
00:41:42.000But, you know, there are differing opinions on basically who should be the senator, but that's more an attitudinal thing rather than a positional thing.
00:41:49.000It's more of an attitude rather than a position.
00:41:51.000The idea that Mitch McConnell is the quote-unquote establishment and Steve Bannon is not the establishment, you have to show me where they differ on policy.
00:41:58.000And where do they actually differ on policy?
00:41:59.000I know it's kind of a hard question and a surprising one.
00:42:03.000Because when you think of Steve Bannon, you think, oh, he must really disagree with Mitch McConnell on policy.
00:42:35.000This is why I say it's more attitude than it is anything else, which is why Trump is president and Ted Cruz isn't, right?
00:42:40.000It's more about the attitude that best channels the conservative anger, best channels the anger on the right, than it is about a set of populist nationalist ideas or any of this kind of nonsense.
00:42:49.000And what this now comes down to is the varying personalities.
00:43:01.000But I dislike this idea that you back Trump because Trump has an attitude, but you don't back Mitch McConnell because Mitch McConnell doesn't have the right attitude.
00:43:37.000I don't think that matters all that much unless it has an impact as to the efficacy of pushing a particular point of view.
00:43:43.000The way this is broken down, therefore, is you have Steve Bannon, who's very loud and says a lot of stuff and pretends he's Darth Vader, and Mitch McConnell, who is a turtle.
00:43:53.000And then in the middle, you have Donald Trump, who has sort of attitudinal affinity to Steve Bannon, but who knows that Mitch McConnell is the guy who actually has to get his agenda done.
00:44:03.000And that's really how this is breaking down.
00:44:04.000So here is Donald Trump saying, listen, we're not getting anything done, but I'm not going to blame me.
00:44:08.000And it's because Trump feels like nothing's getting done that he's tempted to blame McConnell.
00:44:55.000It depends on who you're talking about.
00:44:56.000There are some Republicans, frankly, that should be ashamed of themselves.
00:45:01.000But most of them, I'll tell you what, I know the Republican senators.
00:45:04.000Most of them are really, really great people that want to work hard and they want to do a great thing for the American public.
00:45:11.000But you had a few people that really disappointed us.
00:45:14.000Okay, so there is Trump basically saying he sympathizes with Bannon, but then Mitch McConnell is whispering in Trump's ear going, um, President Trump, if you lose the majority because we primary a bunch of people who are going to win general elections, then you're not going to be able to do anything.
00:45:27.000If you lose the House in 2018, they'll impeach you.
00:45:29.000So that is, so that's what McConnell did.
00:45:31.000They did a, they did a lovey-dovey sort of press conference yesterday between McConnell and Trump.
00:45:37.000Attitudinally, the two guys couldn't be more different.
00:45:39.000But Trump needs McConnell, and McConnell needs Trump.
00:45:43.000And that's why you have Trump saying that he likes McConnell, right?
00:45:45.000So this is Trump's new shtick, is that he likes McConnell, even though he clearly hates him.
00:45:49.000My relationship with this gentleman is outstanding, has been outstanding.
00:45:55.000We are working very hard to get the tax cuts.
00:45:58.000We will continue to work hard to get the health care completed.
00:46:03.000Okay, so again, the reason that I'm bringing this up is because I think that the media narrative is not true.
00:46:08.000The media narrative is it's establishment versus anti-establishment, O'Connell versus Bannon.
00:46:12.000That's not really what's happening here.
00:46:13.000What's happening here is that Steve Bannon wants to be perceived as the head of a movement that he is not the head of.
00:46:18.000He's going to pick some candidates like Chris McDaniel in Mississippi, who came very close to knocking off Thad Cochran in Mississippi, and then he will back him,
00:47:05.000But it is about the idea that Aristotelian ancient thought informed the founder's view of America.
00:47:11.000This is a pretty abstruse debate in conservative circles, which is did founding philosophy break with ancient thought from Aristotle about what man was created for, or does it jibe with that?
00:47:24.000Is the natural rights theories of the founders
00:47:26.000Are they disconnected from the idea of Aristotle that human beings have a purpose that we can discern?
00:47:37.000So Thomas West is pointing out that the founders truly believed in duties, they just didn't believe that it was the government's job to impose those duties on other people.
00:47:45.000I agree with Thomas West's general premise here.
00:47:48.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate because we're running short on time.
00:47:51.000The quick thing that I hate is that Jane Fonda is back and better than ever.
00:47:55.000Or worse than ever is the case, maybe.
00:47:57.000Jane Fonda, if you recall all the way back to the 1960s and 70s, she went over to Vietnam and she posed on a North Vietnamese gun that was actually aiming at American planes.
00:48:08.000And then she proclaimed herself a patriot.
00:48:10.000She says she has no regrets about any of that.
00:48:12.000And then she says that she is not proud of how America is today.
00:48:16.000Infamous photograph of you with the anti-aircraft weapon.
00:49:06.000Okay, so I think that you want to know why, again, we don't have to continuously do why is Trump president, but this is why Trump is president, okay?
00:49:12.000The reason that President Trump is president is because you have a woman who posed alongside people who are attempting to murder American soldiers, and she's saying that she's not proud of America today.
00:49:21.000If you have to choose between Jane Fonda and Donald Trump, people are going to choose Donald Trump.