President Trump celebrates his birthday with a historically good economy, we talk over President Trump's comments about Kim Jong-un, plus, the DOJ Inspector General's report on James Comey is breaking and we ll talk about it. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, where Ben talks about all things financial, political, and pop culture news. Today's After Show Hosts: Ben Shapiro, Sruthi Pinnamaneni, Sriram Krishnakumar Chaudhuri, and Michael Bloomberg. Special thanks to our sponsor, LendingClub, for sponsoring today's show. Thanks also to our patron and supporter, Anecdotal Evidence, for supporting the show and helping us raise awareness about the podcast. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your fellow podcasting friends! Ben Shapiro is a writer, editor, and podcaster. He is the host of the podcast and is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The Weekly Standard, and The Huffington Post. The Daily Beast. His work can be found online at bit.ly/TheBenShapiro and he is a frequent contributor to The Financial Times. Subscribe to his new book, The Secret Life of a Billionaire: A Guide to the Billionaire s Guide to Money, Wealth, Health, Money, and Happiness, which is out now! He's also on the cover of The New York Times, Forbes, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes, and he's a regular on the Hill, and many other publications, including the New York Sun, The Hill, among other publications. Also, check him out on social media accounts, including his new podcast, The Daily Mail, and his website is . Subscribe and subscribe to his podcast, on Podchaser, and his podcast is on the air on the pod is is on the Podchronicity is , and he also is on on The Hill. on TikTok, on Social Media is and on the Vineyard. and so much more! on Insta- on his , on , on the podcast is ! and on your favorite podcast is . and you can become a Friend of the Weekly Beast? Thank you for listening!
00:00:19.000I mean, a lot of news breaking, like, right now, and we'll go through all of it in just a second.
00:00:23.000But first, I want to talk to you a little bit about the fact that you need some money, right?
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00:01:59.000The President of the United States is having himself an upswing in the polls, and there are a lot of elements where the President looks really good.
00:02:06.000So, this is a great story for him today.
00:02:08.000The Federal Reserve just raised its outlook on U.S.
00:02:12.000The median real GDP forecast rose to 2.8%, up from 2.7% for this year.
00:02:17.000There are no changes for 2019 and 2020.
00:02:20.000Economic activity has been rising at a solid rate, according to the Fed statement, marking an upgrade from moderate in the previous statement.
00:02:26.000Also, there is a report out today, put out by Jim Pethokoukis, all about how there are banks that were now revising the growth estimates for the last quarter, up dramatically, all the way up to 4% from 2.8%.
00:02:37.000So what we are seeing here is a booming economy.
00:02:40.000This is the quote from JP Morgan, actually.
00:02:42.000On the heels of this data, we now estimate real GDP is expanding at a 4.0 annual rate in Q2, up from our prior estimate of 2.75, almost twice the 2.2% growth rate experienced in Q1.
00:02:53.000I'm old enough to remember when it was considered crazy when President Trump suggested that he was going to get the annual growth rate up to four or five percent of GDP.
00:03:02.000So that is great news for the President of the United States.
00:03:05.000Obviously, the North Korean summit is also very good news for the President of the United States, at least in terms of public relations.
00:03:10.000The public is very happy that President Trump did this.
00:03:12.000They think that maybe, just maybe, this will open us up to a new world.
00:03:15.000We'll talk a little bit about that in a bit.
00:03:17.000What it is that is being opened up here, whether in fact President Trump has opened negotiations that will lead to
00:03:22.000Denuclearization of the North Korean peninsula, or whether what we are really talking about is another sort of plan that President Trump has in mind.
00:03:29.000I want to talk about that in a little while.
00:03:31.000Plus, in sort of hilarious news, you recall that President Obama spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to bring the World Cup to the United States.
00:03:40.000He talked with Sepp Blatter, who was the head at that point of FIFA, the World Cup, about bringing the World Cup to the United States in, I believe it was 2022.
00:03:49.000Well, now it turns out that the administration that got it done is actually the Trump administration.
00:03:53.000Now, the Trump administration was involved in sort of covert ways, right, in quiet ways, but they put together what's called the United Bid.
00:03:59.000The United Bid was a bid for the World Cup between Canada, Mexico, and the United States.
00:04:06.000And that group is going to host some 80 World Cup games.
00:04:10.000The vote passed, so they are going to host the World Cup.
00:04:12.00060 of those games will be held in the United States, 60 of those matches.
00:04:15.000Now, I am not a soccer fan, so I really don't care all that much, but
00:04:18.000It is a thumb in the eye to the Obama administration that spent years trying to woo the World Cup to the United States and then President Trump gets it done in the first year and a half.
00:04:26.000So that's pretty hilarious and you have to enjoy that.
00:04:28.000So President Trump is having himself a good birthday.
00:04:31.000Adding to that good birthday is the fact that the Department of Justice Inspector General report just released a report blasting James Comey for violating FBI protocol during the Hillary Clinton investigation.
00:04:41.000This is a report that's going to be interpreted a couple of different ways.
00:04:43.000It's going to be interpreted in the worst possible light for the FBI by Republicans and the best possible light for the FBI by Democrats.
00:04:51.000So on Thursday, Bloomberg News got the early scoop on the DOJ Inspector General's report on the actions of the FBI
00:04:57.000During the 2016 election cycle with regard to the investigation into Hillary Clinton's misuse of her email server.
00:05:03.000So according to Bloomberg, the report's conclusion from Inspector General Michael Horowitz, you remember this guy is the same one who recommended the prosecution of former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe for leaking information in an authorized fashion to the press.
00:05:14.000So he has a pretty good track record of calling things out when he sees them.
00:05:18.000He says that James Comey and the FBI violated protocol, but did not do so for reasons of political bias.
00:05:23.000And this is where the Republicans are going to be spitting mad.
00:05:26.000What they are going to say is that, of course, James Comey operated by breaking protocol in terms of political bias.
00:05:32.000And the left is going to say the same thing, by the way.
00:05:34.000They're going to say that the FBI violated protocol in order to make Hillary lose the election.
00:05:38.000Everybody's going to attribute to James Comey and the FBI political bias.
00:05:42.000I think there is political bias, but not quite in the way that people think the political bias works.
00:05:46.000So people think political bias means that Comey liked Hillary or Comey liked Trump.
00:05:50.000I don't think that's the political bias at work here.
00:05:52.000I think the political bias at work is that James Comey wanted to exonerate Hillary Clinton knowing that that's what the DOJ wanted him to do.
00:05:59.000And at the same time, he didn't want the FBI slandered with the idea that the FBI had been ordered by the DOJ to clear.
00:06:05.000I don't think you have to make up another explanation for why it is that James Comey violated protocol.
00:06:08.000Here's what the DOJ report concludes, the IG report concludes.
00:06:25.000While we did not find that these decisions were the result of political bias on Comey's part, we nevertheless concluded that by departing so clearly and dramatically from FBI and Department norms, the decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the Department as fair administrators of justice.
00:06:39.000So here is what Michael Horowitz claims.
00:06:41.000He says that James Comey had troublingly failed to inform the Department of Justice in advance about his July 5th statement condemning Clinton for carelessness but absolving her of criminal activity.
00:06:49.000So in other words, James Comey had been told by Loretta Lynch that she would basically accept his recommendation instead of him going to Loretta Lynch with his recommendation quietly and then Loretta Lynch announcing everything.
00:06:59.000He went out there and he did his famous July 5th press conference where he basically announced that Hillary was guilty but he wasn't going to recommend prosecution for her anyway because she didn't have requisite intent even though the law itself does not need intent.
00:07:11.000The law is written along lines of negligence, it is not written along lines of Hillary Clinton must have wanted to expose classified information to foreign sources.
00:07:19.000But James Comey added that element of the law, and then he said later that we wouldn't prosecute anybody under these same circumstances, which is sort of a dicey proposition.
00:07:26.000Michael Horowitz says that the big problem here is not the actual statement that Comey made, it's that James Comey did not coordinate with Loretta Lynch on all of this.
00:08:06.000Now, Comey will say, the reason I didn't talk to Loretta Lynch is because I thought Loretta Lynch might be corrupt.
00:08:10.000She'd met on the tarmac with Bill Clinton.
00:08:12.000The right will say the reason that Comey didn't coordinate with Loretta Lynch on all this is because he didn't want to look corrupt, but he actually was corrupt.
00:08:17.000He knew what Loretta Lynch wanted, and he gave it to her.
00:08:20.000So both sides are going to read this report the way they want to read this report.
00:08:23.000Horowitz also investigated anti-Trump text messages between the FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
00:08:28.000Remember, there were all these anti-Trump text messages during the campaign about how much they disliked Trump.
00:08:33.000And Horowitz found there was, quote, no documentary or testimonial evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, directly affected the specific investigative actions we reviewed.
00:08:43.000Now, it's worth noting, that is pretty weak legal language there, right?
00:08:46.000That's a little bit of lawyer fudging right there.
00:08:48.000When he says that there's no evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, quote, directly affected the specific investigative actions, how about indirectly affected the specific investigative actions?
00:08:58.000What if it's not that they decided they were going to get Trump overtly, but they decided they were going to be a little harder on President Trump, or a little bit easier on Hillary Clinton because they didn't like President Trump?
00:09:08.000That's a little bit of wiggle room in the language.
00:09:10.000Horwitz said the conduct by these employees did cast a doubt over the entire FBI investigation.
00:09:14.000So as I say, it's easy to look at this report and see how Republicans come to the conclusion that Comey acted politically, how Democrats come to the conclusion that Comey acted politically, because after all, Comey did more damage to Hillary Clinton than he did to Donald Trump during the campaign itself.
00:09:28.000Comey did tremendous damage to Donald Trump after the campaign, once Trump was president, but Comey's real damaging impact during the campaign itself was actually anti-Hillary.
00:09:36.000It was the reopening of the investigation in late October that damaged Hillary Clinton, you know, right about the time that she needed to surge in the polls and instead she faded in the polls so dramatically that she ends up losing the election.
00:09:46.000So Democrats are going to claim that the report is biased.
00:09:48.000Republicans are already claiming that the report is biased.
00:09:50.000There are a bunch of Republican Congress people who have put out a letter to the inspector general of the DOJ asking for drafts of the report.
00:10:00.000They want to make sure that it was not watered down.
00:10:02.000So here is what Andy Biggs, Ron DeSantis, and Matt Goetz write.
00:10:05.000They say, we are concerned that during this time people may have changed the report in a way that obfuscates your findings.
00:10:10.000Per Congress's oversight authority, we request you supply your original drafts along with the final published form.
00:10:15.000Unfortunately, over the past year, the DOJ has repeatedly fought requests by Congress to produce documents related to this investigation, and when the DOJ actually provided documents, the materials have been heavily redacted.
00:10:25.000Past and present DOJ officials have asserted security concerns, even though the documents we have seen do not legitimately contain these issues.
00:10:31.000We have every confidence your investigation and report has been thorough and accurate.
00:10:36.000They think that Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein over at the DOJ had some sort of impact on Michael Horowitz's final report in this Inspector General report, and I don't blame them for being suspicious.
00:10:45.000After all, Sessions and Rosenstein have not been forthcoming with documents that have been subpoenaed by Congress.
00:10:50.000At the same time, I don't really blame the DOJ for being suspicious of Republican Congress people who've been leaking as much as they can to the press at the first available opportunity and sometimes taking things out of context.
00:11:00.000This is why I've been saying for a long time, President Trump should just declassify everything he can possibly declassify.
00:11:05.000The President of the United States does have the executive authority to declassify as many materials as he wishes.
00:11:14.000I think everyone else does too, and I think that these second-hand reports are not nearly as useful as our ability to peruse the documentation ourselves.
00:11:22.000Okay, so in just a second I want to talk about another piece of breaking news that is not as good for President Trump.
00:11:27.000So this IG report is pretty decent for President Trump.
00:11:31.000That's going to be enough for President Trump to go after him.
00:11:34.000There's a piece of bad news for President Trump I want to talk about in just a second.
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00:12:54.000Meanwhile, in a piece of not-so-great news for President Trump on his birthday, the New York Attorney General, who is wildly anti-Trump, wildly anti-Republican, right?
00:13:01.000The New York Attorney General is so anti-Trump and anti-Republican that after Dinesh D'Souza was given a pardon, you recall the New York Attorney General's office stumped for an end to quote-unquote, double jeopardy rules.
00:13:12.000That allowed Dinesh D'Souza to escape.
00:13:14.000Okay, the whole point of a double jeopardy rule is that once you've been pardoned, you've been pardoned, or if you're acquitted, you're acquitted.
00:13:18.000We don't get to try you twice for the same crime.
00:13:20.000The New York Attorney General's office said, we should create state laws that allow us to try you twice for the same crime, which is idiotic.
00:13:26.000So, it's a very, very biased New York Attorney General's office.
00:13:28.000However, they did unveil a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation.
00:13:31.000They are now calling for the Trump Foundation to be forcibly shut down.
00:13:34.000The lawsuit was also launched against President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump.
00:13:38.000Their accusation is that the Trump campaign used the
00:13:57.000They say that in violation of state and federal law, senior Trump campaign staff, including campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, dictated the timing, amounts, and recipients of grants by the foundation to nonprofits.
00:14:08.000And then they include, for example, an email from Corey Lewandowski to the head of the Trump Foundation saying, Alan, is there any way that we can make some disbursements this week while we are in Iowa, specifically on Saturday?
00:14:18.000Meaning it's in the middle of the campaign.
00:14:20.000Can we make some foundation charitable contributions in Iowa?
00:14:23.000Because we're in the middle of the campaign, right?
00:14:24.000That's pretty damning stuff, and that is not useful to the Trump Foundation's claims of objectivity and separation.
00:14:31.000Now, do I think that these charges are being wildly over-publicized?
00:14:40.000And I'll explain that in just a couple of moments, but the New York Attorney General's office continues.
00:14:45.000The Trump Foundation also entered into at least five self-dealing transactions that were unlawful because they benefited Mr. Trump or businesses that he controls.
00:14:52.000They say these include a $100,000 payment to settle legal claims against Mr. Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, $158,000 to settle legal claims against Trump National Golf Club, and $10,000 to purchase a painting of Mr. Trump displayed at the Trump National Doral.
00:15:05.000All these are taken a little out of context.
00:15:07.000I'm going to explain them in a second.
00:15:34.000Megyn Kelly did a debate, and he didn't like the questions that he was being asked during that debate, and so President Trump decided to skip that debate.
00:15:41.000Instead, he counter-programmed the debate with a charity fundraiser for veterans.
00:15:46.000Right, and the AG's office claims that this event was not designed to raise money for charity, but to benefit Trump politically.
00:15:51.000They say it was, quote, a Trump campaign event in which the foundation participated.
00:15:55.000The event was planned by the campaign, allegedly with administrative assistance from the foundation.
00:15:58.000The real problem began when the foundation ceded control over the charitable funds it raised to senior Trump campaign staff, who dictated the manner in which the foundation would disperse those proceeds, directed the timing, amounts, and recipients of the grants.
00:16:10.000Trump used checks from photo ops with his presidential campaign slogan on the checks, for example.
00:16:16.000Now, a lot of people on the right are immediately going to flashback to the Clinton Foundation, and the idea of the Clinton Foundation was basically a pass-through for the Clintons, that if you gave Hillary Clinton's foundation a bunch of money, suddenly you got a meeting with the State Department.
00:16:37.000Or if you were warm with the Clinton Foundation, suddenly the State Department and Hillary Clinton, they were pretty warm toward allowing the State Department to make deals with your particular company in a foreign country.
00:16:47.000Or they started pushing particular policy.
00:16:49.000And you'd be right to be concerned about this.
00:16:51.000And you'd be right to wonder, did the New York Attorney General's Office ever do a similar investigation of the Clinton Foundation?
00:16:57.000Now, this is not whataboutism, because if the Trump Foundation violated the law, which it appears they have in some ways, then they will be punished and they will be fined.
00:17:05.000But it is also important to note that political bias in the New York AG's office has been rife for years.
00:17:10.000Whether it's Eliot Spitzer, or there is Eric Schneiderman, or whether it is the current New York Attorney General, this is an office that has been used for vindictive political purposes by a bunch of Democrats for a very, very long time, and I find it highly suspicious that they say the Trump Foundation was
00:17:25.000Acting badly for 25 years, for 30 years, and yet only during the campaign did they see fit to launch an investigation into the Trump Foundation.
00:17:31.000You want to talk about a ginned up investigation?
00:17:46.000Uh, for some sort of zoning violation, and they were ordered to give $100,000 to charity, and Trump, instead of signing out of his pocket $100,000 to charity, told his foundation to give $100,000 to a different charity.
00:17:57.000Now, you know, is that really all that corrupts, considering that Trump supposedly gives a fair bit of money to his own foundation?
00:18:04.000Well, I mean, again, if he gives money to his foundation, and then he tells his foundation to give money to another foundation,
00:18:09.000In the end, a charity is receiving the money, right?
00:18:11.000The same thing is true in Iowa, right?
00:18:12.000In Iowa, there's a lot of complaints about he was doing this for political purposes, which is probably correct.
00:18:17.000Did the veterans receive the money or did they not receive the money?
00:18:19.000I mean, they apparently received the money.
00:18:20.000There were complaints for a long time they were not going to receive the money.
00:18:23.000Now, again, it is also worth noting here that prosecutions of charities tend to be very selective.
00:18:29.000So I've worked with a number of 501c3s.
00:18:32.000Violation of the law on 501c3s is rife.
00:18:38.000They are generally handled with not the proper amount of care.
00:18:43.000Major board organizations, you know, organizations that have $100 million in the bank, $200 million in the bank, these are run really in accordance with the law because they can't afford an audit.
00:18:51.000But a lot of smaller organizations, like the Trump Foundation, run sort of haphazardly.
00:18:56.000And conveniently, and it's easy for people to get caught up in the haphazard and convenience of it, and they just use it how they want to use it, and then there's a violation of the law.
00:19:03.000Does this mean that Trump is deeply corrupt?
00:19:06.000All of the payments that were made from the Trump Foundation were made to other charities on behalf of Donald Trump and the Trump Foundation.
00:19:12.000So, do I think this is the end of the world for President Trump?
00:19:19.000I mean, it'll probably stand up in court.
00:19:21.000It is just worthwhile noting that the New York AG's office
00:19:24.000They seem rather pumped up about this investigation as opposed to other investigations of charities that they have done before.
00:19:32.000Again, if these same allegations were made about the Clinton Foundation, I assume people on the right would be fully up in arms, but I also think that, you know, it is worth looking at the extent of the violations here, and the extent of the violations here does not appear to me to be supremely grave.
00:19:45.000You're talking about ten, a hundred thousand dollars here and there, and again, money given from one charity to another charity, yes, for Trump's personal benefit, but
00:19:52.000Unfortunately, I know too much about charities to be particularly perturbed about this set of charges.
00:19:56.000Okay, meanwhile, President Trump continues to push forward on the North Korean summit and the after effects of that.
00:20:03.000We'll talk about that in just a second.
00:20:04.000But first, I want to talk about your target practice.
00:20:08.000Okay, so the fact is you probably don't go to the range often enough.
00:20:11.000Okay, 42% of American households have a firearm, with 3 in 5 receiving formal firearms training, but an even smaller percentage regularly practice with the weapon they would use in a self-defense situation.
00:20:19.000Like, my wife and I, we don't go to the range all that much, right?
00:20:21.000We own a 9mm and we own a shotgun, and we don't go to the range all that much because we have two kids who has time to go to the range.
00:20:27.000Well, that means that if you're not practicing, you're probably getting to be a worse shot, right?
00:20:30.000You're not keeping up with the times, and that is why iTarget exists.
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00:21:22.000I'm using it, I'm gonna get my wife to use it as well.
00:21:25.000Uh, and it is supremely easy to set up.
00:21:27.000I mean, very easy to set up and very easy to use.
00:21:29.000You can save money, time, take your skill to the next level safely and effectively.
00:21:33.000There are folks in our office who are legitimate, like, target shooting champions, and they use iTargetPro at home.
00:22:05.000Is that really something that is going to happen here?
00:22:08.000I do not think that this is Trump's goal.
00:22:10.000I do not think that denuclearization is something that's actually going to happen because I think if you're Kim Jong-un you'd have to be a moron to give up your nukes.
00:22:15.000Your nukes are what brought you to the table.
00:22:17.000Your nukes are what made everybody pay attention to you.
00:22:19.000Your nuclear program over the past 30 years has allowed you to be bribed by the West over and over and over.
00:22:24.000What this really is, if we were really going to be honest about this, what this really is is Trump attempting to do what Nixon did when Nixon went to China.
00:22:30.000Opening up China, liberalizing China, turning China from a one-party dictatorship that was repressive in extraordinary amounts against its people and militaristic as well, into a still militaristic, still repressive regime, but less than it was.
00:22:46.000Turning North Korea into Vietnam, right?
00:22:48.000Turning a threatening communist country into a slightly less threatening communist country.
00:22:52.000If that were the actual goal here, the stated goal here, then you'd sort of understand what Trump is doing a little bit better than the claims that North Korea has become a non-threat or that they are going to denuclearize.
00:23:01.000I don't think any of that is going to happen.
00:23:02.000It is also worth stating that President Trump's tactics here are something new.
00:23:06.000Now, we're not going to know whether the tactics are good or bad until we have the effect of the tactic.
00:23:10.000We're not going to know whether or not this is effective until we find out what exactly Kim Jong-un is willing to give up.
00:23:17.000But the president is taking a very high-risk tactic here and his high-risk tactic is that he's going to flatter Kim Jong-un into liking him.
00:23:23.000He's going to flatter Kim Jong-un into believing he can be part of the family of nations.
00:23:26.000I'm not a big believer in this tactic.
00:23:27.000I wasn't a big believer in this tactic when President Trump did it with Iran.
00:23:30.000I mean, when President Obama did it with Iran, when he said, these are the moderates.
00:23:33.000The mullahs, we're going to put them aside.
00:23:35.000The moderates in Iran will be elevated by involvement in the world economy, globalization.
00:23:40.000The hilarity of this sort of position, actually, is that President Trump's position, he's very anti-globalist, but he's essentially saying globalization and integration into the world economy is going to make North Korea more moderate.
00:23:52.000We've been trying this for several decades and it's not actually working, so maybe something different is called for and new.
00:23:57.000With that said, there is another question, and that is, how far does Trump have to go in order to try to integrate Kim Jong-un into the world economy?
00:24:04.000Does he actually have to praise him to the skies the way that he has been doing?
00:24:10.000Because some of the stuff that President Trump has been saying
00:24:14.000I mean, there's no other way to put it.
00:24:44.000Hey, when you take over a country, a tough country, with tough people,
00:24:48.000And you take it over from your father, I don't care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have, if you can do that at 27 years old, I mean that's 1 in 10,000 that could do that.
00:25:01.000So he's a very smart guy, he's a great negotiator, but I think we understand each other.
00:26:34.000I don't think there's a lot of in-between with President Trump as a human being.
00:26:36.000I think that President Trump either hates you and then he gives you a nickname on Twitter, or he loves you, in which case, you are the greatest person who ever was.
00:26:42.000So, he has the best relationships, right?
00:26:43.000When he was at the G7, like, three days ago, when he evaluated his relationships with the other people at the G7, on a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 10.
00:26:50.000But there is no 5 in President Trump's scale, right?
00:26:54.000So it went from a 10 to a 1 in the space of about 25 seconds.
00:26:57.000As soon as Justin Trudeau said something that Trump didn't like, then it went to a one, right?
00:27:00.000Then Justin Trudeau was a cheat and a liar.
00:27:02.000Right now, Kim Jong-un is a wonderful dude.
00:27:04.000But the minute Kim Jong-un screws President Trump, then presumably he becomes a cheat and liar little rocket man again.
00:27:10.000There's something to the idea that President Trump does have the capacity to swivel on a dime, and so if Kim Jong-un does not...
00:27:15.000Fulfill his oaths here than President Trump swivels on him, but still there's something deeply wrong about saying that a man who has 25 million people in abject slavery in a slave state and 200,000 people in gulags, there are lots of people who sin.
00:27:30.000Now again, the reason that I'm not taking it a little bit more seriously in terms of, you know, President Trump specifically praising Kim is because he says this crap about everybody.
00:27:37.000So in the same exact interview he was asked about Xi Jinping.
00:28:10.000But the predicate to his answer about President Xi is that he thinks that President Xi is a good guy.
00:28:16.000So if President Xi is a good guy, then everything that he does is good.
00:28:18.000And President Trump did exactly the same sort of thing with regard to Vladimir Putin.
00:28:22.000You'll remember during the election cycle, he was asked by Bill O'Reilly that Vladimir Putin's a killer.
00:28:26.000And Trump said, well, we kill lots of people too.
00:28:28.000Now, this is President Trump's version of realpolitik.
00:28:32.000His version of realpolitik is that we're not allowed to call anybody out morally because everybody on the world stage is dirty, and there's basically just a set of competing interests.
00:28:39.000Morality doesn't really take a leading role here.
00:28:41.000It's instead us, in hard-hearted and gimlet-eyed fashion, determining what America's interests are.
00:28:47.000Right now, our interests are in trying to woo North Korea, and that means that we have to be really, really nice to North Korea.
00:28:52.000I have problems with this particular approach, which I'll explain in just a second.
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00:30:07.000So the going perspective seems to be that when President Trump says stuff, it's just him saying stuff.
00:30:11.000So if President Trump says nice stuff about Putin yesterday, whatever, he says stuff.
00:30:14.000Because, as I've said before, he's a dude who says a lot of stuff.
00:30:18.000You know, President Trump says many a thing.
00:30:20.000And, I mean, that could frankly go on his epitaph.
00:30:22.000I mean, you know, after 120 years, when the president finally has a gravestone, then, you know, it could say on it, Donald Trump, the man said a lot of things, okay?
00:30:31.000Because that's President Trump's shtick.
00:30:32.000And I think everybody in the United States has learned to discount these things.
00:30:35.000But on the international stage, people don't automatically discount what it is that you're saying.
00:30:39.000They take what you're saying a lot more seriously.
00:30:41.000And so when President Trump starts praising dictators, it gives dictators a feeling that they can get away with things.
00:30:47.000And the way that you know this is that Barack Obama did exactly the same thing with Iran, and Iran proceeded to get away with things.
00:30:53.000Barack Obama did the same thing with Vladimir Putin.
00:30:54.000Putin proceeded to get away with things.
00:30:56.000George W. Bush, by the way, did the same thing with Putin when he said that he looked into Putin's eyes and he saw his soul, and then Vladimir Putin promptly decided that he was going to invade Georgia, the neighboring country of Georgia.
00:31:07.000Dictators, bad people, aggressive people, they tend to react to warmth.
00:31:13.000As though that warmth is a sign of weakness.
00:31:16.000I liked it much better when President Trump was being aggressive.
00:31:20.000If you were very fond of when President Trump was being aggressive, I'm not sure how you are very fond of when he is not being aggressive anymore.
00:31:25.000I mean, to the extent that he's not being aggressive.
00:31:26.000So, for example, President Trump, when he was meeting with Kim Jong-un, this video just came out.
00:31:30.000It was revealed, actually, by the North Korean media, which is just wonderful.
00:31:34.000And it is a picture of President Trump saluting a North Korean general, right?
00:31:38.000Now, you recall when President Obama bowed before the Saudi kings and everybody went nuts, right?
00:31:44.000I was one of the people who said, like, what the hell is this?
00:31:46.000When President Obama bowed to, I think it was the Japanese president, Japanese premier, and everybody went nuts.
00:31:52.000Like, why is he running around the world kowtowing to people?
00:31:55.000Well, here's the president of the United States who, instead of shaking the hand of this North Korean general, is going up for the salute.
00:31:59.000Like, you shouldn't be saluting generals of tin-pot dictatorships who keep their people in abject poverty and slavery.
00:32:13.000The reason I don't think that's true is because one of the things that helped bring down the Soviet Union was the fact that we had something called Voice of America in Europe, for folks not all that familiar with the history.
00:32:23.000We had something called Voice of America in Europe.
00:32:26.000In the Soviet Union, you were forbidden from listening to Western media.
00:32:28.000You could not get Western media, you couldn't see Western papers, you couldn't listen to Western radio.
00:32:31.000So we had basically bootlegged radios into the Eastern Bloc, into the Soviet Bloc, and then we would broadcast Voice of America, and we would talk about how great America was, and how terrible Soviet Russia was, and how Soviet Russia was repressing you, and if it weren't for Soviet Russia, your life would be so much better.
00:32:47.000Part of that was designed to let people on the other side know that we were on their side, right?
00:32:51.000To let people who were living under this dictatorship know that we were on their side.
00:32:55.000If you're in North Korea, there are a lot of bootleg radios in there, and a lot of bootleg pieces of technology in North Korea.
00:33:01.000Wouldn't it be good to know that the President of the United States is not fomenting your dictatorship?
00:33:04.000That the President of the United States is trying to weaken that dictatorship?
00:33:08.000Now, the president can't openly say that, but at the very least, the president shouldn't be praising the dictator.
00:33:13.000It does have an impact on the people who are living inside the country.
00:33:15.000It also has an impact on the other countries in the region, which are now being told, essentially, that they should not isolate North Korea any longer.
00:33:21.000They should preemptively de-isolate North Korea, and this is somehow going to fix things.
00:33:25.000Now, I guess the question is, what do you think is the most realistic possible outcome here?
00:33:29.000If you think the most realistic possible outcome is the liberalization of North Korea into a quasi-China state, then maybe all of this works out.
00:33:37.000Even so, I'm not sure why you need the fawning language from President Trump, even though I don't think President Trump means it.
00:33:42.000I think President Trump, as I said, this is how he negotiates.
00:33:44.000He flatters you, he flatters you, he flatters you until you say no, at which point he clubs you.
00:33:48.000But if your goal here is sort of the liberalization of North Korea,
00:33:55.000I gotta admit, I'm not a huge fan of this grand strategy, typically.
00:33:59.000I understand the strategy, maybe it's the best strategy that's available, but I'm not a huge fan.
00:34:03.000The reason I'm not a huge fan is because I'm not sure that Nixon made the right decision in actually liberalizing China, because I'm not sure China was liberalized.
00:34:09.000China is a more powerful threat on the world stage today than they were in 1970.
00:34:14.000In 1970, they were a poor, rogue state run by Mao Zedong, who had murdered 40 million of his own people, and we proceeded to engage in a tremendous amount of commerce with them.
00:34:24.000That may have liberalized their economy, it may have gotten some people out of poverty, all of which is good, but the Communist Party is still running the place as a repressive dictatorship.
00:34:32.000Maybe the better strategy would have been to do to China exactly what we did to the Soviet Union, which is you cut them off at the knees, you are belligerent, you build up your arms, you suggest that you're not going to allow them to expand their sphere of influence, and then you wait for them to collapse from within.
00:34:46.000Maybe it turns out that by giving money to dictatorships, you're actually strengthening the dictatorships.
00:34:51.000I'm not going to say that my argument is dispositive, or that my argument is the only one that's being made, and maybe President Trump is totally right, and I'm totally wrong on all of this.
00:35:00.000I will say, however, I do not think that it is appropriate or decent for the President of the United States to speak the way that President Trump does about dictators, even though I get it.
00:35:07.000He's President Trump, and he says this kind of stuff about virtually everybody.
00:35:13.000The media has been responding to President Trump's criticism.
00:35:16.000President Trump has been going after the media.
00:35:17.000He tweeted out the other day that the worst enemy of the United States were the mainstream media, a statement which I agree with that the media are a problem.
00:35:25.000I think that we have worse enemies than Wolf Blitzer.
00:35:28.000I just, I think that Kim Jong-un is a worse enemy to the United States than, like, Jake Tapper.
00:35:32.000But Wolf Blitzer, the fact that the media feel the need to defend really demonstrates why the media are blowing it.
00:35:37.000So here is Wolf Blitzer trying to explain that he is not your worst enemy.
00:35:40.000A lot of his supporters believe that we are the enemy of the American people, and that is really, really an awful situation.
00:35:47.000We are not the enemy of the American people.
00:36:16.000It turns out that probably you've blown a lot of your credibility already.
00:36:19.000The reality is that the media have blown their credibility in a pretty significant way over and over and over, and President Trump, when he picks on the media, all he is really doing is signifying to them once again.
00:36:31.000That they do not have the trust of the American people.
00:36:34.000The only way they're going to win back the trust of the American people is to cover things in an objective fashion, which apparently they refuse to do.
00:36:40.000Okay, meanwhile, party infighting is breaking out on both sides of the aisle.
00:36:44.000The Republican Party is having an ongoing gun battle between the so-called establishment and the so-called anti-establishment.
00:36:50.000I find this battle sort of confusing in the sense that
00:36:54.000He's the president of the United States.
00:36:55.000He's the most powerful man on planet Earth.
00:36:57.000And the idea that if you don't like some of his policies that somehow you're now pro-establishment is bizarre to me.
00:37:02.000You know, I always defined establishment, there's this fungibility about some of the political language that I find deeply stupid.
00:37:09.000So, here, for example, when people say establishment, I always took establishment to mean
00:37:15.000Too willing to work with the other side, too conciliatory, too willing to promote leftist policies not in alignment with conservative values.
00:37:33.000Establishment has been turned into an all-purpose club to wield against virtually anybody.
00:37:38.000So, for example, Corey Stewart, he says that his victory in the Republican primaries in Virginia shows that the establishment is going the way of the dodo bird.
00:37:46.000Corey Stewart probably will lose to Tim Kaine in Virginia.
00:37:49.000He has a long history of hobnobbing with sort of alt-right figures.
00:37:54.000A lot of Republican Party politicians are not in love with Corey Stewart for, I think, a lot of very good reasons.
00:37:58.000Here is Corey Stewart saying the establishment is going the way of the dodo bird.
00:38:02.000If the Republican establishment wants to continue to oppose the president, myself and others who support him, on those things, they're going to go the way of the dodo.
00:38:34.000The head of the GOP, the head of the RNC, is Romney McDaniel.
00:38:42.000And she came out with a statement yesterday.
00:38:44.000She actually tweeted out, in pretty incredible terms,
00:38:48.000I want to find her exact tweet so that I can read it to you, because it's pretty astonishing.
00:38:53.000So, Ronna McDaniel, who you'll recall, actually used to call herself Ronna Romney McDaniel, and then Trump asked her not to use her maiden name, Romney, because he found it insulting, and so she just changed it on behalf of the President of the United States, which, if that doesn't show you the power of President Trump, I'm not sure what does.
00:39:22.000Anyone that does not embrace the Donald Trump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake.
00:39:28.000Anyone who doesn't embrace the Trump agenda... Listen, I love a lot of the Trump agenda.
00:39:31.000I think a lot of the Trump agenda is just great.
00:39:32.000I've been very, very positive about President Trump's political agenda for the last year and a half.
00:39:36.000I've said that I think that it's the most conservative year and a half of governance I've ever seen.
00:39:40.000But I'm not a fan of this whole, you know, Donald Trump is the king and we must all bow before him because I'm not the fan of doing that with any politician.
00:39:47.000I think we ought to praise him when he does something good, and we ought to criticize him when he does something bad.
00:39:50.000But if the idea is that he is not the establishment, I'm not sure where you are getting that.
00:39:54.000So we have all of these terms that have now been twisted to mean whatever people want them to mean.
00:39:58.000So that's the fight inside the Republican Party.
00:40:00.000Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to be as stupid as they possibly can.
00:41:30.000So whatever problems we're having inside the Republican Party, at least we're not spraying ourselves in the face with pepper spray in order to demonstrate that our agenda is apparently superior.
00:41:51.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:41:54.000So, the thing I like today, I was on a plane yesterday because I'm doing my show from Dallas today where I'm speaking at the TPUSA event, and I was able to watch a movie called The Death of Stalin.
00:42:03.000Now, I will admit, when I saw the preview for Death of Stalin,
00:42:06.000I was not necessarily enthralled because I thought this was gonna make light of the Soviet Union.
00:42:11.000I thought that what it was gonna do was it was going to make light of one of the most monstrous regimes in the history of the world.
00:42:16.000And instead, instead, the movie is spectacular.
00:42:20.000I think it is the best movie that's been made in maybe the last five years.
00:42:58.000Okay, so the preview makes it look like just an outright comedy.
00:43:00.000The opening scene of the film, like the first three minutes of the film, is taking place at a concert where Stalin calls the person who is the head of the radio broadcasting facility, and they're playing a Mozart piano concerto.
00:43:15.000And he calls up the guy, and then he says, I want a recording of this.
00:43:19.000And it turns out the guy has not been recording it.
00:43:21.000And so he forces everybody back into the theater, essentially at gunpoint, and then makes them replay the entire concerto and applaud because he doesn't want to be shot by Stalin.
00:43:30.000I mean, the opening scene of this is Stalin, with all of his cronies, handing out death lists and people being dragged out of their apartments and shot.
00:43:37.000So, the comedy is a darker than dark comedy, and the whole point of this is that everybody who was there was just an evil, evil human being.
00:43:43.000These were evil human beings, and that the cult of personality is really dangerous.
00:43:48.000If you want to understand what North Korea really looks like, then this is actually a pretty good indicator, right?
00:43:51.000Better than sort of the overt, silly comedy of Team America.
00:43:54.000You want to know what North Korea really looks like?
00:44:11.000So go check that out, The Death of Stalin.
00:44:12.000I believe it's available on Amazon right now.
00:44:14.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:44:21.000Okay, so Nature Magazine, right, which is one of the most prominent and prestigious journals in science, has now run an editorial calling for diversity in science.
00:45:03.000Remember, this is in a science journal, quote,
00:45:14.000So in other words, if you have a black set of researchers that are going to research different questions than white researchers, do they present any evidence for this whatsoever?
00:45:22.000Widening the focus is essential if publicly funded research is to protect and preserve its mandate to work to improve society.
00:45:28.000For example, a high proportion of the research that comes out of the Western world uses tissue and blood from white individuals to screen drugs and therapies for a diverse population.
00:45:36.000Yet it is well known that people from different ethnic groups have different susceptibility to some diseases.
00:45:42.000What you're now suggesting, really, is that we should take into account more minority groups when we do the research into tissues and blood samples.
00:45:49.000But that doesn't say you need a black doctor to do it.
00:45:50.000I mean, that's like saying that we need more dogs used in experiments than rats used in experiments, and we need more dog doctors.
00:46:19.000If you took psychology 101 in college, you know about the Zimbardo experiment.
00:46:22.000What it was is this guy, Philip Zimbardo, is in the early 60s, I believe.
00:46:26.000He took a group of volunteers and he separated them into prisoners and guards.
00:46:30.000And then supposedly what happened is that the guards, just by being labeled guards and the prisoners by virtue of being prisoners, the guards started basically torturing the prisoners and after six days they'd shut down the experiment because the guards had become vicious, brutal, horrible guards and the prisoners had been tortured, you know, beyond the pale.
00:46:45.000Well, it turns out the entire experiment was a fraud.
00:46:47.000According to an article at Medium from a guy named Ben Bloom, this was all nonsense.
00:46:50.000Basically, the people who were acting as the prisoners say they faked their breakdowns for the cameras, that they were shouting and screaming and protesting because it was all not real, and the guards themselves were being told by the scientists in charge that they needed to act as brutal as humanly possible.
00:47:04.000So, for example, one of the guards, a guy named Dave Eshelman, explained, quote, I took it as kind of an improv exercise.
00:47:09.000I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do, and I thought I'd do it better than anybody else by creating this despicable guard persona.
00:47:15.000I'd never been to the South, but I used a Southern accent which I got from Cool Hand Luke.
00:47:21.000He testified before Congress at the request of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and he said the guards were, quote, simply told that they were going to go into a situation that could be serious and have some danger.
00:47:30.000They made up their own rules for maintaining law, order, and respect.
00:47:34.000His grad students told them exactly how to act.
00:47:36.000Now, the reason this experiment was supposedly important is because what it supposedly taught you is that, just as a normal human being, you were a sadist.
00:47:51.000Okay, what this experiment actually suggests, and what similar experiments like the famous Milgram experiment suggest, is that human beings, in order to be brutal, have to buy into an idea of a higher good which they are serving.
00:48:02.000We tend to treat each other as ends in normal individual life, right, when we meet each other on the street, but when we have a higher purpose, depending on what that higher purpose is, we start treating each other as means or obstacles to that end, which is really, really dangerous stuff.
00:48:14.000And the Milgram experiment, which is sort of similar,
00:48:17.000As an experiment where, again, scientists brought in a group of volunteers, and then they separated them into two groups.
00:48:22.000One was going to be the subjects of an experiment, and one was going to be the experimenter.
00:48:25.000Now, what the people in the volunteer group didn't know is that everybody who was selected to be the volunteer group for the experiment, the subjects of the experiment, all of those were actors who had been hired by the experimenters, and the people who were supposed to be testing those actors, those were the volunteers.
00:48:38.000So, the way that it worked is they would put the actors in a room, and then they would have the volunteers, who are now the experimenters,
00:48:44.000Turn a dial that was supposedly sending an electrical shock to the actors if they got questions wrong.
00:48:50.000And the scientists would stand over the shoulders of the various people who are administering the shocks, and they would say to them, you know, for the sake of science, we have to find out whether, you know, if you torture people, they are going to give answers.
00:49:00.000Like, if you torture people, they'll give better answers.
00:49:02.000And even when people are screaming and pleading for help, supposedly, according to the Milgram experiment, people continue to shock those people.
00:49:08.000Now, the problem with the Milgram experiment is it was not replicable.
00:49:10.000There were a bunch of different groups.
00:49:11.000Some of them, like 70% of them, would shock people.
00:49:13.000Some of them, 20% would shock people, or 10% or 5%.
00:49:18.000It depended how many people in the group believed in the usefulness of the experiment itself, believed in the value of the scientific discovery being made.
00:49:25.000In other words, it's going to be kind of difficult to get people to be Nazi prison guards unless they are Nazis.
00:49:31.000It's kind of difficult to get people to be Joseph Mengele unless they believe that they are forwarding the cause of Nazi racial science.
00:49:38.000So what this means is be very careful about the causes that you pick, be very careful about the tribe that you choose, because if you're not careful then you end up treating people not as individuals but as widgets that you can manipulate and harm for whatever purpose necessary.
00:49:52.000Your own practical interests do not outweigh the rights of others and do not outweigh the necessity to be decent to individual human beings.
00:49:59.000That's a warning to everybody on all sides of the aisle.
00:50:01.000Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.