Breaking News: Paul Manaford has struck a deal with the Mueller investigation, which means that he may be flipping on President Trump. Plus, Democrats pull a horrendous last-minute dirty trick on Brett Kavanaugh, and we review the results of last night's primary elections in New York. And we answer your Mailbag questions. All that and more on The Ben Shapiro Show, wherever you get your mailbag questions answered. Subscribe to my new show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share to get notified when I deconstruct the latest breaking news in politics, entertainment, social media, and business. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Ben Shapiro Also, if you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a five star rating and review in iTunes. We'll be looking out for your comments and reviews in next week's mailbag. Thank you so much for all the love, support, and your support! Timestamps: 5:00 - Democrats Pull a Huge Last Minute Dirty Trick on Brett Kavanagh 7:30 - The Mailbag 11:00 - What's the best way to vote in a primary election? 16:15 - Who should Brett Kavanaugh get the nod? 17:00 | Can Brett get a shot at the Supreme Court? 18: How should I vote for Brett? 19:40 - What s the worst dirty trick Brett should do? 21: What should I do with Brett? 26:00- What do I do next week? 27:00 -- What s I m voting for? 27:30 -- What do you think I m going to vote for? 28: What s my favorite candidate? 29:40 -- Is Paul Manus? 30:30 31:00-- What s a good deal for me? 35:40 36:00 Is there a good bet? 36:10 -- How much do I have a chance of a good chance of getting a reduced sentence? 39:30 Is there any chance I m not guilty? 40:30 Do you have a guilty plea deal? 45: Is it a deal I m getting a chance to avoid a longer sentence? 41: Is this deal better than a shorter sentence? 42:00 + 3? 47:00 Do you like it better? 44:00 What s your opinion?
00:00:13.000All right, we have a lot to get to today.
00:00:14.000A lot of breaking news happening, and we will break down everything that happened in New York last night.
00:00:18.000But first, let's talk about your safety and security.
00:00:21.000I am somebody obsessed with safety and security, and that is why I use Ring.com at my home.
00:00:26.000Ring is the video doorbell company that allows you to see and speak to anyone when they come to your door, and they've actually sent us actual footage of Ring busting crooks in the act.
00:01:02.000Much love and God bless for both gods.
00:01:22.000All right, so the breaking news today is that Paul Manafort has apparently cut a deal with the federal government, with the Mueller investigation.
00:01:26.000We don't know what that deal encompasses.
00:01:52.000Already been convicted on several felony counts related to bank and tax fraud charges.
00:01:59.000And then he was to move on to a second trial, and he pled guilty in that trial to avoid a longer sentence, apparently.
00:02:06.000According to the New York Times, the negotiations over a plea deal related to a separate set of seven charges encompassing conspiracy, obstruction of justice, money laundering, false statements and violations of a lobbying disclosure law.
00:02:18.000It's not clear exactly what Manafort might plead guilty to.
00:02:20.000Apparently, he's pleading guilty to a bunch of charges having to do with failing to register as a foreign agent of the Ukrainian government back when a schmuck named Yanukovych was running the country.
00:02:32.000In any case, Manafort's trial on the second set of charges was scheduled to get underway on Monday, but now he has pled guilty.
00:02:38.000He's going to turn over, apparently, an enormous amount of property to the federal government.
00:02:41.000What is more important, because who cares about Paul Manafort?
00:02:44.000What's more important here is that Paul Manafort is apparently working under a cooperation agreement
00:02:48.000With the Mueller investigation, which means that presumably he is flipping maybe on President Trump.
00:02:54.000And this is the part where it starts to get real dicey for the Trump administration because nobody actually knows what Manafort knows.
00:03:00.000Nobody knows exactly what Manafort was doing.
00:03:02.000Now again, there's no evidence that's actually been shown that Manafort was actively cooperating with the Russian government on behalf of Trump.
00:03:08.000Trump could still say, listen, I just hired this guy Manafort because this guy Manafort has long-standing high-level RNC ties going back legitimately years.
00:03:17.000I mean, ties to top members of RNC Finance, ties to top political members of the RNC going back election cycles.
00:04:03.000Again, what's the information that he's going to turn over to prosecutors?
00:04:06.000What exactly are they getting in return for a reduced sentence of some sort?
00:04:11.000We don't know the answer to that, and we're gonna have to wait for the answer to that, but it's not good news for President Trump, obviously.
00:04:17.000President Trump, you remember, was tweeting incessantly after the Paul Manafort convictions a couple of weeks ago, which came out on the same day that Michael Cohen pled guilty and said that he was cooperating with federal prosecutors.
00:04:30.000You recall that President Trump tweeted out how much he loved Manafort for not flipping on him.
00:04:38.000So Manafort has indeed agreed to cooperate with the special counsel in the Russia probe.
00:04:42.000On July 31st, Manafort's attorney had told CBS there was no chance his client would cooperate with the special counsel to avoid his first trial, but now he is apparently going to have to cooperate to avoid the second trial.
00:04:54.000This could be very ugly for the Trump campaign, the Trump administration.
00:04:58.000We're going to have to see what this actually means.
00:05:00.000Everybody's jumping to the conclusion that this is the end of Trump.
00:05:02.000You know, again, unless there is something deeply, unless there is something, I think, deeply indicting and convicting of President Trump himself, it's going to be very difficult to make the claim that President Trump was personally approving any sort of Putin manipulation of the election.
00:05:20.000But we'll have to see the evidence that Manafort provides, because after all,
00:05:24.000And Manafort, again, does have an incentive, I would say, to spill as much of his guts as he possibly can on the president or to theoretically make things up in order to avoid the consequences of his own corruption apparently going back years.
00:05:40.000is flipping as bad news for President Trump.
00:05:42.000Meanwhile, the Democrats are trying to play every dirty trick they can with regard to Brett Kavanaugh.
00:05:46.000Yesterday saw the dirtiest trick of all.
00:05:48.000This was Dianne Feinstein, who's the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
00:05:52.000She referred information involving Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, to federal investigators on Thursday, but the senator declined to make public what exactly the matter involved.
00:06:03.000Two officials familiar with the matter say the incident involved possible sexual misconduct between Judge Kavanaugh and a woman when they were both in high school.
00:06:10.000So now we're going to go back 35 years to try and find something that Brett Kavanaugh allegedly did wrong.
00:06:15.000Okay, Dianne Feinstein's announcement yesterday was just perverse because here's what she announced, quote, So in other words, somebody came with information,
00:06:36.000I'm not going to tell you what the information is.
00:06:38.000I'm not going to tell you where it came from.
00:06:39.000I've referred it to federal authorities.
00:06:49.000And this is where you start to look at this stuff and say, yeah, this is pretty dicey stuff.
00:06:53.000If Dianne Feinstein really knew months ago that Brett Kavanaugh had raped somebody, wouldn't she have been under an obligation to tell federal law enforcement then?
00:07:01.000Why wait until a week or two before the confirmation vote on Brett Kavanaugh except to scuttle the boat, simply
00:07:42.000They waited until now to take an allegation that Kavanaugh has apparently completely denied.
00:07:48.000and throw that into the public square as sort of a red meat thing to stop Brett Kavanaugh's nomination.
00:07:54.000Democratic lawmakers didn't do anything about it.
00:07:56.000The allegation dates back to the early 1980s, when Kavanaugh was a high school student at Georgetown Prep School in Bethesda, Maryland, and the woman attended a nearby high school.
00:08:04.000In the letter, the woman alleged that during an encounter at a party, Kavanaugh held her down and that he attempted to force himself on her.
00:08:10.000She claimed in the letter that Kavanaugh and a classmate of his, both of whom had been drinking,
00:08:14.000turned up music that was playing in the room to conceal the sound of her protests and that Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand.
00:08:20.000Although the alleged incident took place decades ago and the three individuals involved were minors, the woman said the memory had been a source of ongoing distress for her and that she had sought psychological treatment as a result.
00:08:30.000In a statement, Kavanaugh said, quote, I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation.
00:08:34.000I did not do this back in high school or at any time.
00:08:38.000So, how exactly is Dianne Feinstein bringing this up now?
00:08:39.000Again, with no evidence other than this woman's allegation, which has been denied by everyone else who was there.
00:09:10.000The only time the Democrats have tried this routine.
00:09:12.000They tried the same routine with Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas' hearing, bringing up allegations that were thoroughly non-credible for a variety of reasons about Clarence Thomas supposedly sexually harassing Anita Hill, talking and making jokes about pubic hairs on Coke cans and such.
00:09:25.000And this was supposed to sink Clarence Thomas.
00:10:36.000But I think that this is a pretty egregious example.
00:10:38.000I mean, over the last couple of weeks, when we've seen Cory Booker
00:10:41.000I'm doing this routine where he is Spartacus by revealing documents that were already revealed.
00:10:46.000Or when you saw Kamala Harris implying that Brett Kavanaugh had been corruptly discussing the Mueller investigation with members of President Trump's firm, with no evidence of that whatsoever.
00:10:55.000When you had Sheldon Whitehouse proclaiming that he didn't feel subject to the law because Merrick Garland should be on the Supreme Court.
00:11:01.000And now when you have Dianne Feinstein dumping into the public record
00:11:06.000Unsourced allegations of an alleged sexual assault that took place 35 years ago in order to stop Brett Kavanaugh's ascension to the Supreme Court.
00:11:38.000Instead, what you should be doing is checking out Quip.
00:11:40.000Quip is an electric toothbrush that is a fraction of the cost of bulkier brushes, while still packing just the right amount of vibration to help clean your teeth.
00:11:46.000Quip's built-in timer helps you clean for the dentist-recommended two minutes, with guiding pulses that remind you when to switch sides.
00:12:09.000They were on Oprah's O-List, named one of Time's best inventions, and they're the first subscription electric toothbrush accepted by the American Dental Association.
00:12:41.000So that was not the only dirty attempt by Democrats, not just the Brett Kavanaugh thing.
00:12:46.000The White House, by the way, has responded
00:12:48.000Immediately to this, White House spokeswoman Kerry Kupec said, throughout his confirmation process, Judge Kavanaugh has had 65 meetings with senators, including Senator Feinstein, sat through over 30 hours of testimony, addressed over 2,000 questions in a public setting, and additional questions in a confidential setting.
00:13:05.000Not until the eve of his confirmation has Senator Feinstein or anyone raised the specter of new information about him.
00:13:10.000Senator Schumer promised to oppose Judge Kavanaugh's nomination with everything I have.
00:13:13.000It appears he is delivering this 11th hour attempt to delay the confirmation.
00:13:20.000That's not the only gross allegation today.
00:13:21.000There's a headline at the New York Times today going after Nikki Haley, who's the single most popular Republican in the country.
00:13:27.000And as I said before on this show, my spirit animal, here is the headline from the New York Times.
00:13:32.000State Department spent $52,701 on curtains for Nikki Haley's residence.
00:13:38.000So this is an attempt to paint Nikki Haley as a sort of Scott Pruitt, casually corrupt official who's spending enormous quantities of taxpayer cash in order to pad her residence.
00:13:50.000Here's the piece from the New York Times.
00:13:52.000You stop me when you think you hear the problem with this New York Times piece.
00:13:56.000Spent $52,701 last year buying customized and mechanized curtains for the picture windows in Nikki Haley's official residence as ambassador to the UN, just as the department was undergoing deep budget cuts and had frozen hiring.
00:14:08.000The residence in a new building on First Avenue has spectacular views, and Ms.
00:14:11.000Haley is the first ambassador to live in it.
00:14:13.000For decades, her predecessors lived in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
00:14:16.000But after the hotel was purchased by a Chinese insurance company with a murky ownership structure, the State Department decided in 2016 to find a new home for its top New York diplomat because of security concerns.
00:14:27.000The government leased the apartment just blocks from the delegation's offices with an option to buy, according to Patrick Kennedy, the top management official at the State Department during the Obama administration.
00:14:36.000The full-floor penthouse with handsome hardwood floors covering large open spaces stretching nearly 6,000 square feet was listed at $58,000 per month.
00:14:53.000Haley had no say in the purchase, he said.
00:14:56.000So the headline is, Nikki Haley is responsible for spending 53 grand on curtains.
00:15:01.000And then buried in paragraph four of this piece is the actual story, which is that the Obama administration outfitted the place for 58 grand on curtains because they were fully expecting the UN ambassador to be a Democrat.
00:15:14.000The Obama administration was expecting the next person to occupy that penthouse to be a Democrat.
00:15:18.000And so they decided to spend inordinate quantities of cash on curtains.
00:15:23.000But they're trying to pin it on Nikki Haley anyway.
00:15:26.000So instead, it's going to be that Nikki Haley is somehow responsible for all of this.
00:15:31.000Really a tremendous smear, a really massive smear from the New York Times.
00:15:36.000Again, in an attempt to get top Republican officials.
00:15:39.000And then you wonder why folks don't actually trust the media.
00:15:42.000Well, meanwhile, there were a series of elections in New York last night, and there's a bizarre split that happened in New York last night.
00:15:49.000There were a bunch of very, very far-left candidates who won in sort of local races, the most prominent of whom is Julia Salazar, a 27-year-old Democratic Socialist.
00:15:59.000Who is plagued by negative news coverage in the final weeks of her insurgent campaign against incumbent New York State Senator Martin Dillon for making misleading statements about her background.
00:16:07.000She had claimed that she was the child of Colombian Jewish immigrants.
00:16:11.000That she had immigrated, she was an illegal immigrant who was poor from Colombia and Jewish.
00:16:29.000So she's basically a sociopath, just essentially lying about key elements of her background.
00:16:34.000That didn't stop people in this New York district from voting for her for the New York State Senate because this is a small district in the middle of North Brooklyn.
00:16:42.000And as we know, Brooklyn is a very, very left area.
00:16:45.000Voters in North Brooklyn, this is according to the Huffington Post, which loves Salazar.
00:16:48.000Voters in North Brooklyn on Thursday found her preferable to Dylan's close ties to the real estate lobby, as Salazar triumphed in the Democratic primary for the New York State Senate's 18th district seat.
00:16:57.000The voters may also have been sending a message of disgust with corruption scandals that have rocked the state Senate.
00:17:02.000Susan Kang, a leader of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Salazar, and she's an active dues-paying member of the organization, she said,
00:17:26.000And that shows how important the issues really are.
00:17:29.000So she again implied that she was an immigrant.
00:17:50.000Salazar's policy platform earned her the enthusiastic grassroots support of the Democratic Socialists of America.
00:17:55.000Basically, you're talking about one area of New York that is far-left socialist and keeps electing similar people from Alexandria, Ocasio-Cortez.
00:18:06.000That same district last night that voted for Julia Salazar voted basically 2 to 1 for Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
00:18:17.000So, Cynthia Nixon, who was running to the far left, she put out a series of tweets this morning talking about how she was very disappointed that so many people showed up and turned out to vote for Andrew Cuomo, which is a weird thing for a democratic socialist to say, supposedly a power to the people person.
00:18:32.000She also talked about how true priorities like banning plastic bags were not going to be taken care of by Andrew Cuomo.
00:18:39.000In any case, Cynthia Nixon, who did win, by the way, one third of the vote,
00:18:43.000Being her only qualification for office, being extraordinarily radical on politics, here's what she had to say in the aftermath of her defeat.
00:18:49.000It is about offering a vision of the way things could work if only we have the leadership and the political courage to make it a reality.
00:19:00.000This race for the Democratic nomination may be over, but the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is just beginning.
00:19:12.000OK, now here's the part that is actually kind of true about what she's saying.
00:19:16.000And here is where Republicans run into a bit of a pickle.
00:19:20.000Republicans are betting on Democratic radicalism to save them.
00:19:23.000They're betting on the fact that the Democrats have moved very, very far to the left to save them in general elections like 2020.
00:19:28.000Because President Trump's approval ratings are low, because President Trump will be hit with another slew of negative headlines regarding Paul Manafort, for example.
00:19:35.000And so the feeling is the only way that President Trump cruises to victory in 2020 is because the Democrats are just bad at this.
00:19:42.000The Democrats are likely to nominate somebody who's a far left radical who's easy to pillory.
00:19:47.000I'm not so sure that's true because where Cynthia Nixon is correct is that her agenda is in fact taking over the Democratic Party, the mainstream Democratic Party.
00:19:57.000People on the right are counting on the Julia Salazars and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes of the world to take over the party.
00:20:04.000They're counting on people who are overtly nuts to take over the root of the Democratic Party.
00:20:09.000And to a certain extent, that's worked on the grassroots level.
00:20:11.000But I think that as we rise in Democratic politics, they're actually winnowing out the most ridiculous candidates.
00:20:17.000So I'm a little bit concerned about the fact that Andrew Cuomo defeated Cynthia Nixon.
00:20:20.000I was hoping Cynthia Nixon would win because then we'd actually have the specter of Cynthia Nixon as New York governor.
00:20:29.000But Andrew Cuomo is, in fact, a professional politician.
00:20:33.000And I'm going to explain why that's important in just one second.
00:20:35.000But first, let's talk about natural disasters.
00:20:39.000Right now, there's a natural disaster bearing down on the east coast of the United States.
00:20:43.000And there's a solid possibility that a lot of folks are going to be cut off from grocery stores, from the ability to get potable water, and all the rest.
00:20:49.000And this is one of the reasons why you really ought to have some food in your house that is available in case of emergencies.
00:20:55.000When there's no power, refrigeration fails, stores close, and then what do you do?
00:20:58.000Well, I trust MyPatriotSupply for dependable food storage.
00:21:50.000As I say, the problem for the Democrats is the possibility of unpalatable faces repeating a Democrat socialist platform.
00:21:57.000People like Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and yes, Cynthia Nixon.
00:22:01.000But instead, what has happened is mainstream members of the Democratic Party have simply moved to the left to co-opt all of the ideas of the hardcore left Democratic Party.
00:22:11.000When Cynthia Nixon says there's a war inside the Democratic Party, the war is over and the mainstream left lost.
00:22:18.000The people who are now in full control of the Democratic Party are in fact Democratic Socialists who are basically campaigning that way.
00:22:25.000Even people like Elizabeth Warren who says she's pro-capitalism.
00:22:28.000Yesterday she came out and she said we should break up Amazon and we should break up JP Morgan.
00:22:32.000I'm not sure under what guise you would claim that Amazon is a monopoly that needs to be broken up, but all of this is sort of the populist demagogic rhetoric you hear on a regular basis from democratic socialists all across the country.
00:22:43.000And it's folks like Beto O'Rourke, who is beloved by the Democratic base, where he's spending his time campaigning in Washington, D.C.
00:23:46.000And they won't even have, apparently, people like Norm MacDonald on the late show, because Norm MacDonald is too politically incorrect.
00:23:52.000But Beto O'Rourke, who is going to lose his race to Ted Cruz in all likelihood, that's a guy who they'll have on the late show.
00:23:58.000Any Democrat who has higher aspirations will get a slot on the late show.
00:24:02.000But the point here is a little bit broader, which is that Beto O'Rourke and mainstream Democrats, they have embraced the radical platform of people like Julia Salazar and Cynthia Nixon, but they put a more palatable face on it.
00:24:16.000Nobody's talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president.
00:24:18.000Even if she ran for Senate and won, nobody would be talking about her for that.
00:24:21.000But Beto O'Rourke is a pretty smooth, polished politician.
00:24:25.000And you can see that he's effective in pushing exactly the same message.
00:24:29.000And again, you can see the radicalism of the Democratic Party at work among mainstream political figures who feel the need to adopt that platform.
00:24:35.000Chelsea Clinton is doing the same thing.
00:24:37.000So Chelsea Clinton is the child of the guy who said safe, legal, and rare should be the standard with regard to abortion.
00:24:42.000Here she was yesterday saying it would be unchristian, unchristian to go back to a time when abortion was illegal.
00:24:49.000You know, we just can't go back to that.
00:24:57.000And also, and I'm sure that this will unleash another wave of hate in my direction, but as a deeply religious person, it's also unchristian.
00:25:15.000But again, the point here is the broader point.
00:25:18.000What's happening is that the Democratic Socialist platform is now rising up in the Democratic Party among more palatable figures, including folks like Andrew Cuomo.
00:25:25.000The reason that Andrew Cuomo beat Cynthia Nixon is because the difference between Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon was simply not broad enough to justify voting for an actress from Sex and the City over a sitting governor of the state of New York with a long family history in New York politics.
00:25:39.000When that happens, then Republicans really should be worried.
00:25:41.000Republicans should be worried that Democrats will pick somebody who's a little bit more publicly palatable, but is mimicking exactly the same messages of Bernie Sanders.
00:25:49.000It won't be a crazy old loon bag from Vermont running this time.
00:25:52.000It'll be somebody who's more attractive.
00:25:54.000It'll be somebody who's better at this.
00:25:55.000It'll be somebody who is capable of winning a national election on a far-left platform.
00:26:02.000And the hope stands in the fact that a lot of the primary voters
00:26:08.000On both sides are more motivated by anger and revenge than they are by anything remotely approaching typical politics.
00:26:14.000And this is why Michael Avenatti, I think, still provides an outsized threat on the left.
00:26:19.000I think that basically the 2020 nomination, the Democratic Party, at this point, if you had to give odds, you'd say Elizabeth Warren is the odds-on favorite.
00:26:25.000Elizabeth Warren is dangerous because she is picking up all of the cues from the hard left.
00:26:30.000Elizabeth Warren used to be kind of moderate.
00:26:32.000Back in the day, she wrote books about the two parent and the two
00:26:47.000Elizabeth Warren was not a hardcore radical.
00:26:49.000She's become a hardcore radical specifically because she knows that that is what plays with the Democratic base.
00:26:54.000And while she is a personally unappealing candidate in some ways, she can answer the one question that probably lost Hillary Clinton the election.
00:27:21.000And then you've got the sort of insurgent candidacy of probably Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate from California, who's a senator out here.
00:27:50.000This is what Republicans are banking on, is that the Democratic base will be driven so nuts by Trump, they just decide to go get the angriest guy on television.
00:27:57.000And so while the rest of the country and the elites particularly are laughing at Michael Avenatti's pretensions to glory, they also laughed at Donald Trump's pretensions to glory all the way until he was president of the United States.
00:28:08.000Michael Avenatti was on Tucker Carlson last night.
00:28:10.000And I have to say, you know, Tucker, I thought, did a pretty funny job handling it.
00:28:16.000It was clearly planned that this thing was going to be just a
00:28:21.000Rock'em, sock'em robots, punching match between Tucker Carlson and Michael Avenatti.
00:30:30.000But again, this sort of oppositional... It's funny.
00:30:33.000Everybody in the elites thinks people are watching the Elizabeth Warren of it all, thinks they're watching the Kamala Harris of it all.
00:30:38.000More people will watch the clips of Tucker versus Avenatti than will see that Elizabeth Warren has ever said anything about antitrust.
00:30:45.000This is the best hope for Republicans.
00:30:47.000The best hope for Republicans is that they control the Democrats into nominating somebody like a Michael Avenatti.
00:30:52.000The worst nightmare for Republicans is that somebody who's a credible candidate comes along
00:30:57.000Who's even remotely likable and hijacks Cynthia Nixon's platform and uses that all the way to the presidency.
00:31:03.000That is the worst nightmare for Republicans and they should take that under advisement.
00:31:06.000We shouldn't be quite so sanguine about the possibility that the Democratic move to the left is inevitably going to lead to failure on their part.
00:31:13.000Okay, we're gonna get to the mailbag in just a second, but first I want to talk to you about your Second Amendment rights.
00:31:17.000Now, as you know, I'm sure that you know I'm a proud member of the USCCA, right?
00:32:26.000We'll get to the mailbags, I say, in just a second.
00:32:28.000First, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe for $9.99 a month.
00:32:32.000When you do that, you get the rest of this show live, the rest of Michael Knowles' show live, the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live, the rest of Matt Walsh's show live, by the way.
00:32:38.000You get all of those things when you subscribe.
00:32:40.000Plus, it is almost time for our next episode of The Conversation today.
00:33:35.000Well, I mean, the answer is that the government should, you know...
00:33:50.000Putting yourself in a bad situation doesn't mean that the government isn't compelled to try to help you out, right?
00:33:56.000I mean, if you walk through a heavily crime-ridden neighborhood in the middle of the night and you get mugged, the police are still supposed to show up.
00:34:02.000If you stay in an area where you're not supposed to be, the FEMA rescuers are still supposed to show up.
00:34:07.000I do think that you ought to bear a higher financial cost.
00:34:10.000Like, I think that you should actually have to pay more money for doing that.
00:34:13.000The government should fine people for staying in areas where they are expected not to pick up the cost even if their house gets flooded by water.
00:34:23.000Many years from now, how do you think this era of politics from roughly 2012 to today and on will be taught in education?
00:34:28.000Do you think there's any chance the left-leaning education systems will fail at some point and change perspective?
00:34:32.000Well, the Howard Zinn version of history is taught routinely in the United States.
00:34:35.000His book, A People's History of the United States, has sold over 2 million copies, basically attributing every individual evil to America.
00:34:52.000And every individual good to the world civilization at large.
00:35:02.000Landing man on the moon, world achievement.
00:35:04.000Ending World War II, world achievement.
00:35:06.000Ending sexism, ending slavery, ending racism, world achievements.
00:35:09.000All of that is absolute nonsense and there's no basis for that whatsoever.
00:35:14.000As far as how do I think this year of politics will be taught?
00:35:16.000Well, I think if people regain sanity, they're going to look at 2012 as the election that broke the country.
00:35:20.000I think 2012 really made the country worse in a variety of ways.
00:35:24.000Like, imagine right now if Mitt Romney were in his second term or he'd been running for re-election in 2020 as opposed to Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.
00:35:32.000Do you think the country might be better in a lot of ways?
00:35:34.000I think the country would be a lot better in a lot of ways if Obama had not won a second term in 2012 and used his
00:35:40.000Identity politics in order to seize victory.
00:35:44.000I think that would have been very... I think that election was horrible for the country.
00:35:48.000I think it trolled the right into near insanity.
00:35:50.000And I think that, in turn, has trolled the left into near insanity.
00:35:52.000It has polarized politics in dramatic ways.
00:35:55.0002008 didn't break the country, but I think 2012 really did serious damage to the country.
00:35:59.000I know there's a general saying about men falling in love or marrying a woman similar to their mothers and women with their fathers.
00:36:48.000And because I admire my mom a lot, I would say that my wife is similar to my mom in those ways.
00:36:52.000But there are ways in which my wife is different.
00:36:53.000There are things about my mom that, you know, I like less than I like about my wife.
00:36:57.000And I looked specifically for ways in which my wife would be different from my mom.
00:37:01.000I think that one of the things that can help you pick a good spouse is making a serious objective analysis of what you like and dislike about your parents, because that allows you to get a little bit of distance instead of sort of falling instinctually into the pattern of marrying somebody who's exactly like your parents.
00:37:15.000Your parents are models for your life, so of course you're going to marry somebody
00:37:18.000Who seems to be like your parents in a lot of ways, but trying to analyze what it is that drives you nuts about your parents is also a good way to avoid marrying somebody who exhibits those same characteristics.
00:37:27.000Andrew says, Hey Ben, I'm a Spanish professor and I want students to join my major, but I also want my students to make money after college.
00:37:32.000What should the role of humanities in college be related to yesterday's comments?
00:37:37.000Well, listen, I think that the humanities education was originally designed to inculcate things like virtue and American values and a certain level of background knowledge about your civilization.
00:37:45.000But, since we no longer do that, obviously, things should be job-related.
00:37:49.000Now, I think that being a Spanish major is actually pretty useful.
00:37:54.000Last night, my wife and I spent half an hour with Rosetta Stone, specifically because we're trying to learn Spanish.
00:37:58.000So, yeah, I think that your major is actually a useful major.
00:38:01.000When it comes to English majors, however, it seems to me that the only thing that trains you to be an English teacher or an English professor, because the number of successful writers in the United States is extraordinarily low as a percentage,
00:38:12.000That doesn't mean people shouldn't major in English or enjoy English.
00:38:27.000If you could have majored in something that was going to earn you more money, would that have been the best possible use of your time as opposed to majoring in something that you maybe enjoyed more?
00:38:36.000College has essentially become a sorting mechanism for grad school.
00:38:40.000It doesn't almost matter where you went to college, it matters a lot more where you went to grad school.
00:38:44.000It doesn't matter how much I went to UCLA, it matters a lot more I went to Harvard Law School because Harvard Law prepared me for an actual job.
00:38:56.000Well, I think that it is important to be able to support your family, obviously, but I think that the first thing that you should be considering is whether you are capable of living a responsible lifestyle generally and treating your wife or husband with the most appropriate level of respect and dignity necessary.
00:39:13.000Treating them as an individual human being, not as a tool for gratification of your emotional desires.
00:39:48.000Cynthia Nixon said earlier today that we need a Democratic Party that embraces single-payer healthcare.
00:39:52.000It's like every major Democratic candidate has now embraced the Medicare for All plan.
00:39:58.000Now, there's some folks who I respect in healthcare policy who say, well, embracing Medicare for All doesn't necessarily mean it's single-payer.
00:40:04.000No, it means it's the first step towards single payer because once you have a government option, the government can simply undercut everybody else.
00:40:10.000The government does not cost you anything.
00:40:12.000Why would you buy private supplemental insurance if the government is going to cover it anyway?
00:40:16.000Maybe you do that, but the government is then going to have to restrict your access to that insurance in order to prevent every doctor from simply taking that insurance and rejecting Medicare.
00:40:24.000So, heavily regulating, creating a public option does create an enormous number of problems in the private market, and in fact does lead more toward a single-payer system, although obviously there are hybrid systems like Australia, where a huge number of people buy supplemental health insurance.
00:40:53.000Basically, the idea of evolution being consonant with creationism is there is a force that stands behind evolution.
00:41:01.000God has to use a mechanism, that mechanism is evolution.
00:41:04.000I honestly find it puzzling that folks have a very tough time rectifying the balance between the two.
00:41:11.000I understand why folks, by the way, would want to take the Bible literally, because they say if you're going to take this part metaphorically and you take this part literally, how do we know what's metaphorical and what's literal?
00:41:18.000And the answer to that is sort of the Thomas Aquinas answer, which is what science tells us is also the presence of God in the universe.
00:41:26.000So science and the Bible cannot be in conflict.
00:41:28.000You're either misinterpreting the Bible or you're getting the science wrong.
00:41:31.000One of the two has to be wrong if you're a true Jew or Christian.
00:41:34.000But creationism is fully consonant with the idea of evolution because, again, the order of creation suggests that God created living material, and then he created plants, and then he created animals, and then he created human beings.
00:41:48.000There's nothing there that says by what mechanism God actually did all of that.
00:41:53.000You'd have to say Washington, just because he's the greatest man in American history.
00:42:14.000The confidence that you have to have to say, I'm walking away from power now, I'm going to hand it to somebody who I don't necessarily even trust, like John Adams, and I'm going to hand it to that guy and just walk away.
00:42:24.000House has been what legal authority do public universities have to deny students their Second Amendment rights?
00:42:29.000Well, public universities, from my understanding, have the same authority as local cities and localities and counties, which is, they can make regulations that prevail on their particular swath of territory, as long as those don't violate the Constitution with regard to the Second Amendment.
00:42:51.000So, that really hasn't been litigated too much.
00:42:53.000You haven't seen a lot of cases with regard to the Second Amendment, frankly.
00:42:57.000Well, let's say the state of Texas were to pass a law saying that concealing carry is the law of the land, and then the University of Texas said no, it's hard to see how that could trump the state law of Texas, actually.
00:43:08.000Let's see, Finn says, Well, I mean, frankly,
00:43:19.000I think that we have the money to pay for the border wall.
00:43:22.000It is in pretty much every attempted defense appropriations bill.
00:43:26.000Do I think the border wall is BLNL, by the way?
00:43:33.000I think the chief method for curbing illegal immigration is deportation, and that needs to rise with regard specifically to people who have overstayed their visas.
00:43:39.000But it is a serious problem that we have avoided paying our freight on a variety of issues, and the border wall included.
00:43:46.000Mexico is not going to pay for it, by the way.
00:45:06.000It is only the localities have decided that they're not going to do anything about the homeless problem.
00:45:10.000The homeless problem remains a major problem in cities like Los Angeles, where we have 60,000 homeless people at last count, and Seattle, where the attempts to build tent cities that are reminiscent of Hoovervilles has continued unabated for the past several years, turning the Emerald City a worse shade of poor.
00:45:28.000Well, I think that the evidence is that they will turn more right-leaning, but the question is how many?
00:45:58.000You know, deeply troubled by President Trump's rhetoric a lot of the time.
00:46:01.000I think he's driving away future generations from the Republican Party, and the polls bear out my point of view on this.
00:46:06.000I don't think that this is as simple, this is as simple as people get older, they pay taxes, and they turn Republican.
00:46:11.000I just, I don't think that's the case, unfortunately.
00:46:13.000Culture wars seem to matter a lot more than economic ones.
00:46:27.000It's basically part of my lunch routine at this point.
00:46:29.000Not really politics, but I wanted to ask for your opinion on purely cosmetic surgery.
00:46:33.000I don't have any real convictions one way or the other, although I do lean heavily against them following the whole they're unnatural and a waste argument.
00:46:39.000This is an issue specifically in my case, mostly because I have parents who have been hounding me for about a year to get some sort of nose job.
00:46:44.000I know a lot of people from my ethnicity end up getting one at some point.
00:48:05.000The latest in the series is I Am Neil Armstrong, in which, presumably, Neil Armstrong does indeed plant a flag on the moon, unlike in First Man.
00:49:30.000And because she's a cop, it seems like the police department is doing its damnedest to try and justify the shooting.
00:49:38.000And so they've now issued a search warrant against his apartment and they found pot there.
00:49:42.000If you think that being shot in your own apartment... I don't care if this guy had a hydro lab in his apartment.
00:49:47.000I don't care if he was baking crystal meth in his apartment.
00:49:50.000If he was in his apartment and he wasn't doing anything... And when I say he wasn't doing anything, I mean he wasn't threatening anyone else.
00:49:56.000You cannot go into his apartment and shoot him.
00:49:58.000Particularly if there's not a search warrant.
00:49:59.000Like, it's one thing if the guy's baking crystal meth in his apartment, and the cops come to raid his apartment, and he resists arrest, in some way he goes for the cop's gun and gets shot.
00:50:08.000But if he's literally just in his apartment, making some tea, and in the other room he was baking crystal meth, and you made a mistake, and you wandered into his apartment and shot him, and, oh look, it just happens to be he's got crystal meth in the bathtub, what exactly does that have to do with the shooting?
00:50:22.000And the marijuana certainly has nothing to... So what?
00:50:38.000This idea that police officers have to be given this above and beyond level of exemption for behavior that is clearly criminal seems to me absolutely absurd and that needs to stop as soon as possible.
00:50:48.000You want to restore trust between the police and the community.
00:50:52.000One of the ways to do that is to actually prosecute police when they do bad things.
00:50:56.000And not to try and obscure these facts with silliness about marijuana being found in an apartment.
00:51:02.000So CNN's John Avalon is doing one of the things that the left loves to do, which is suggesting that presidential policy is going to lead to people dying.
00:51:12.000So far, we haven't really had a lot of evidence that people die because of global warming.
00:51:15.000What we have seen is evidence that global warming may be happening over a period of time, that human impact has some effect on the environment, that even if you make the case that storms are more severe because of this, that doesn't necessarily link the death toll to the severity of the storm, right?
00:51:32.000There are a lot of intervening factors, like how well is the town built if people evacuate, right?
00:51:36.000There are a lot of things that are linked to that, but
00:51:39.000What we are now seeing from CNN is the attempt to use this current Hurricane Florence that is threatening the East Coast as a club against Trump.
00:51:46.000So now, you have John Avalon on CNN claiming that President Trump's policies could lead to 80,000 excess deaths per decade.
00:51:54.000Dismantling the Clean Power Plan and opening nearly all our coastline to offshore drilling.
00:51:59.000It's so bad that according to two Harvard scientists, Trump's environmental policies could lead to an additional 80,000 unnecessary deaths every decade.
00:52:10.000I'm so glad that they have now linked policies to death.
00:52:14.000So how many excess deaths would Affordable Care Act have led to based on shortages in doctors?
00:52:19.000How many excess deaths have been created by the National Health Service?
00:52:23.000All of these calculations are based on the kind of modeling that you do.
00:52:27.000And the modeling doesn't take into account market changes, it doesn't take into account migration, it doesn't take into account future technological changes.
00:52:34.000It's very easy to say that the policies of your opponent are going to cause death, but that seems like an extreme case.
00:52:41.000If you actually want to make the case against President Trump's policies, instead of saying it's going to cause death, which is just off-putting and silly, say President Trump's policies are irresponsible with regard to the environment, and they are going to cause an upsurge in bad weather that has significant impact on the economy.
00:52:55.000And that may result in additional danger to populations if, for example, storms get worse.
00:53:00.000Don't try and forecast how many people are going to die because Trump didn't pick up an Obama-era regulation.
00:53:05.000It's just, it's silly towns, and it's an exaggeration that most people can detect.
00:53:09.000Okay, we'll be back here on Monday with all of the latest.