The FBI opens an investigation into President Trump as a Russian agent, the government shutdown continues, and Democrats move even further to the left. Ben Shapiro talks about it all on this week's Daily Wire show. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star review! Subscribe, Like, and Share to keep us in your eardrums and ears right in the loop on all things going on in politics, pop culture, and pop culture. Today's episode is brought to you Live from the March for Life in Washington, D.C. by The Daily Wire and The Weekly Standard. Thanks to Pale Fire and Mossy Creek for sponsoring this episode. Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project, Recorded live at WFMU and recorded live at the March For Life in DC on Friday, February 15, 2020. All rights reserved. Used w/ permission from the author and copyright of their respective record labels. If you like what you hear, share it on social media or share it with a friend or become a supporter of our work, we'll be giving you a FREE ad-free version of the show on our new podcast, "The Daily Wire Show." Thanks again for listening and sharing it on your socials! - Ben Shapiro Thank you Ben Shapiro and Good Morning America - Thank you for listening! and Merry Christmas! Ben and Good Luck! -- Your continued support is greatly appreciated! (A very much appreciated. - The Shapiro Show is your support is much appreciated and much more than you could be helping us make a difference in the world by supporting us out there. -- Thank you so much! -- Ben Shapiro, too much appreciated! -- The Shapiro Team! -- Your support is truly means the world needs it! -- by Ben Shapiro is helping us build a better place for us to have a better world! -- Our goal is to make the world better than we can be heard in the rest of the world can help us all out here! -- Thanks, Ben Shapiro's Best Effort, Thank you, Ben and Thank you! -- Alyssa, -- -- Thanks Ben Shapiro & Thank you to you, Matt, Matt Moreland . - & much more! -- His words really means a lot more than that's enough! -- Matt, too good to be heard by you, too you can do it!
00:00:00.000The FBI opens an investigation into President Trump as a Russian agent, the government shutdown continues, and Democrats move even further to the left.
00:00:34.000It's to be there with us, and then we can all suffer together through the blistering cold of Washington, D.C.
00:00:39.000I'm from L.A., so anything below 70 degrees is super cold.
00:00:42.000Okay, we'll get to all the actual news of the day in just one second.
00:00:45.000First, we need to talk about your screen time.
00:00:48.000Now, I know you spend an awful lot of time on the screens, and frankly, we're grateful here at The Daily Wire, because that means you're probably engaging with our content.
00:00:54.000But you know how you have those headaches?
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00:02:19.000Okay, just on the face of it, it is ridiculous.
00:02:21.000The idea that the President of the United States was a Manchurian candidate, that somehow he was being blackmailed with kompromat by Vladimir Putin, that all of the activities during the campaign weren't just Trump not knowing what he's doing or being incompetent, that we had to chalk it all up to President Trump was in a back room with Vladimir Putin, and they were putting together their master plan for taking over the universe.
00:02:41.000And then he was going to be triggered by some sort of watchword from Vladimir Putin or something.
00:02:48.000Here's what the New York Times reported, however.
00:02:50.000In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as FBI director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president's behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
00:03:05.000This is a wild overreach by the FBI and it gives a lot of credence to the Trump administration and Trump ally claim that the FBI and the so-called Deep State were out to get President Trump.
00:03:16.000Because what triggered this was not all of the knowledge during the campaign.
00:03:20.000What triggered this was not all of the contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian officials or the Trump Tower meeting of June 2016.
00:03:26.000No, what triggered this was Trump firing James Comey.
00:03:29.000So what this sounds more like is the President fires the head of the FBI, who was an incompetent boob, And then all of the people left over at the FBI say, well, you know what?
00:03:39.000I'll bet the president fired him because he's a Russian agent.
00:03:41.000Now, James Comey himself testified openly before Congress that Trump did not attempt to shut down the Mueller investigation or hamper the Mueller investigation in the wake of James Comey's firing or before James Comey's firing.
00:03:52.000In fact, he was just irritated that Comey wouldn't issue a statement saying that Trump was not under investigation.
00:04:00.000He said, the reason that I fired James Comey is because I asked Comey for a declaration that I was not personally under investigation, and Comey said he wouldn't do it, and so I fired him.
00:04:09.000And he said that it would take pressure off him with regard to Russia.
00:04:11.000People interpreted that as though Comey was on the verge of nailing Trump on his Russian relationships.
00:04:17.000When in reality, what Trump was saying was, I want Comey out because Comey won't just leave me alone about the Russia stuff, and I didn't do anything, so why wouldn't he just leave me alone?
00:04:26.000And the FBI, in the aftermath of Comey's firing, which Trump had every legal ability to do.
00:04:31.000Every president can fire every head of the FBI.
00:04:33.000The executive branch is a unitary branch.
00:05:26.000If you don't actually have evidence that the president is being blackmailed, if you don't have evidence that the president is in fact a Russian agent, then evaluating his policies with an eye toward whether he is a Russian agent is just an executive branch agency second-guessing the policies of the president.
00:05:42.000Can you imagine if the FBI had opened up an investigation against Barack Obama in 2013 on his Syria policy?
00:05:48.000Remember, in 2012, Barack Obama openly, on a mic that everyone heard, said to Medvedev, who was then the Prime Minister or the President of Russia, he said to him, at that time, if you get your boss to leave me alone, then I'll have more flexibility in dealing with Russia once I am re-elected.
00:06:06.000The Russians went into Crimea and Obama did nothing.
00:06:10.000The Russians went into Syria and Obama handed over control of the Syrian situation to the Russians.
00:06:16.000Did the FBI open an investigation and say, hey, wait a second, you know, Obama, he had this promise that he made to the Russians about the election.
00:06:23.000And then he was real soft on the Russians after the election.
00:06:28.000Can you imagine if they'd opened that investigation?
00:06:30.000Everybody would have said, rightly so, that the FBI has no right and no capacity to go after a president based on public policy simply because they don't like the public policy that the president is pursuing.
00:06:44.000And this is coming from somebody who has said we should wait for the results of the Mueller investigation.
00:06:48.000I've said all along, let's wait for the results of the Mueller investigation.
00:06:51.000Let's wait for all the facts to come out.
00:06:52.000I don't believe in the Russian collusion theory.
00:06:54.000I think that it's hogwash as far as the evidence that I can see so far.
00:06:57.000But I can see why people would have been suspicious of Carter Page.
00:07:00.000I can see why people would have been suspicious of various other members of the Trump campaign.
00:07:05.000I can see why their actions, Papadopoulos, I can see why those actions would have looked suspicious to people.
00:07:10.000I can see why the Trump Tower meeting looked suspicious to people.
00:07:12.000But that does not mean that the FBI opening an investigation into the President of the United States and suggesting that the President of the United States is in fact a Russian plant, that that's justified constitutionally or otherwise.
00:07:25.000And opening it under the counterintelligence rubric, by the way, is really kind of gross.
00:07:30.000Andy McCarthy points this out today in a piece over at Fox News.
00:07:34.000He's been saying for a long time that the FBI was using the rubric of counterintelligence in order to target President Trump.
00:07:41.000The case he's basically been making is there are two types of investigations that the FBI does.
00:07:44.000One is counterintelligence, which is them trying to fight off Russian influence.
00:07:49.000And then there's criminal investigation, them trying to investigate criminal activity on American soil.
00:07:54.000The standard of proof for counterintelligence is not the same as the standard of proof for a criminal investigation.
00:07:59.000If they actually wanted to bring some sort of criminal prosecution against someone, you have to reach a certain level of proof.
00:08:04.000Counterintelligence is not designed to do that.
00:08:06.000Counterintelligence is just designed for you to go and see the facts and then fight those facts on the ground as they exist, usually abroad.
00:08:14.000What McCarthy's been saying for a long time is the FBI was going after Trump with counterintelligence so that they didn't have to reach the level of proof necessitated by a criminal investigation.
00:08:24.000McCarthy writes this today, former federal prosecutor.
00:08:26.000He says, Because the FBI did not have solid evidence of a crime, they did it under counterintelligence authority rather than criminal authority, calculating that the cover of probing Russia's interference in the 2016 election would enable them to keep investigating while they tried to tighten up the obstruction case or find some other criminal defense.
00:08:43.000In other words, the counterintelligence aspect here was just a cover for them to go after Trump personally.
00:08:49.000McCarthy says the investigation was always hoping to find something on Trump.
00:08:52.000That is why, for example, when Director Comey briefed then-President-elect Trump about the Steele dossier, he told Trump only about the salacious allegation involving prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.
00:09:02.000He did not tell the President-elect either that the main thrust of the dossier was Trump's purported espionage conspiracy with the Kremlin, nor that the FBI had gone to the FISA court to get surveillance warrants based on the dossier.
00:09:14.000The FBI was telling the president-elect that the allegations were salacious and unverified, yet at that very moment, they were presenting them to a federal court as information the judges could rely on to authorize spying.
00:09:57.000This is the so-called Omnibus Clause under American law.
00:10:01.000It covers corruptly or by any threatening letter or communication influencing or impeding or endeavoring to influence, obstruct or impede the due administration of justice.
00:10:09.000But that requires a pending judicial proceeding.
00:10:11.000In other words, there's a trial going on and you try to obstruct justice by intimidating a witness.
00:10:16.000There is no pending judicial proceeding.
00:10:44.000This provision covers destroying evidence related to a federal investigation.
00:10:48.000There's no allegation even that Trump destroyed evidence.
00:10:50.000So when people talk about the FBI opening an obstruction of justice investigation into Trump over firing someone he has plenary power to dispense with, that's nonsense.
00:11:02.000According to the New York Times, agents and senior FBI officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump's ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign, but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude.
00:11:18.000Well, if you knew about all the stuff in 2016, the stuff in 2017 was not worse than the stuff in 2016.
00:11:46.000The president's activities before and after Mr. Comey's firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, according to people at the FBI.
00:11:59.000Again, if your boss gets fired and you open an investigation into his firing, I'm going to say that that looks very retaliatory.
00:12:05.000It doesn't look like this is power the FBI should have.
00:12:08.000I'll get more into this in just one second.
00:12:10.000First, let's talk about how you actually frame your pictures.
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00:13:34.000Okay, so the New York Times reports But the special counsel, Robert Mueller, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed days after FBI officials opened it.
00:13:43.000That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller's broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them.
00:13:51.000It is unclear whether Mr. Mueller is still pursuing the counterintelligence matter, and some former law enforcement officials outside the investigation have questioned whether agents overstepped in opening it.
00:14:01.000The answer, of course, is, yeah, I mean, it kind of looks like it.
00:14:05.000What they're basically claiming is that if Trump fired Comey to stop the Russia investigation, that would have been obstruction.
00:14:24.000So where exactly is the case for obstruction of justice?
00:14:27.000Where exactly is the case that Trump is in fact a Russian agent?
00:14:32.000Rudy Giuliani is the president's lawyer.
00:14:34.000He says the fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it, that showed a breach of national security means that they found nothing.
00:14:41.000Trump is rightly very upset about all of this and he has a right to be.
00:14:46.000If it turns out that at the end of this long chain of events, the Mueller investigation comes up with basically nothing, Then that is going to speak to whether this investigation should have taken so long, whether this investigation was appropriately launched in the first place, whether this investigation was in fact a political project to get Trump out.
00:15:03.000It can be true that the investigation comes up with nothing and that it was launched in good faith.
00:15:08.000But it makes it hard to make that claim when you got members of the FBI apparently vindictively launching investigations into whether Trump was a Russian asset in 2017.
00:15:17.000When you do have people inside the FBI, like Peter Strzok, a motivated anti-Trump guy, leading the investigation.
00:15:23.000If we're not asking these questions, we are not doing our job.
00:15:27.000Now, the media are beginning to realize, at least some members of the media, that the Mueller investigation may not end the way they want it to.
00:15:33.000ABC News' Jonathan Karl made a stunning admission yesterday on This Week on ABC News.
00:15:38.000This is all building up to the Mueller report and raising expectations of a bombshell report.
00:15:44.000And there have been expectations that have been building, of course, for over a year on this.
00:15:48.000But people who are closest to what Mueller has been doing, who have interacted with the special counsel, caution me that this report is almost certain to be anti-climatic.
00:15:57.000That if you look at what the FBI was investigating in that New York Times report, look at what they were investigating, Mueller did not go anywhere with that investigation.
00:16:09.000That's been my prediction for a long time, is that we come up with some nasty indicators that members of Trump's team were talking with the Russians, like Donald Trump Jr., for example, or that members of Trump's team were unwittingly working with Russians who were connected to the Russian government, something like that.
00:16:24.000The idea that Trump was sitting behind the curtain Waving his wand and making the magic happen.
00:16:29.000I just don't think that there's any evidence of that whatsoever.
00:16:31.000If that changes, then I'll change my opinion.
00:16:33.000But based on the evidence so far, you gotta be asking what exactly prompted the FBI to open an investigation for Trump as a Russian agent?
00:16:40.000The guy's one of the most prominent people in American public life for the last four decades.
00:17:05.000I'm going to ask the FBI director, was there a counterintelligence investigation opened up regarding the president as being a potential agent of the Russians?
00:17:39.000I think the vast majority of FBI agents are wonderful folks who are doing a really great job keeping Americans safe.
00:17:44.000I want to believe in our law enforcement institutions.
00:17:46.000When the leadership of those law enforcement institutions are people like Peter Struck and Lisa Page, it makes it kind of hard.
00:17:52.000And when they're making claims that Trump was a Russian agent, not just that they were going to investigate Russian ties and then see where those led, but instead that Trump was himself deeply involved.
00:19:14.000They had to have a very deep level of concern about this president to take this step.
00:19:20.000And that's again why we need to protect the Mueller investigation.
00:19:23.000And I think that's going to be a critical issue in the Judiciary Committee hearings about the Attorney General nominee.
00:19:29.000Will you guarantee to protect this investigation?
00:19:32.000And will you make sure that the American public and Congress get the results of it?
00:19:35.000So here, this really is the key question, though.
00:19:37.000The real key question is the one that Cain is mentioning here.
00:19:39.000How deep does the FBI's level of suspicion have to run for them to launch an investigation?
00:19:44.000If they're talking about Trump as Russian agent, my suspicion is not all that deep.
00:19:48.000That they could just take flyers on investigations, which does raise systemic questions about the FBI.
00:19:52.000Not just about the Trump investigation, but what kind of information is necessary for them to actually open an investigation targeting American citizens?
00:20:01.000It makes you really disquieted about the nature of American power, about law enforcement power.
00:20:05.000It makes you into sort of a reason.com libertarian.
00:20:08.000Looking at this sort of stuff and going, hold up, the FBI can just launch an investigation based on a couple of people who don't like Trump, not liking that he fired James Comey, and then they can open a full-on counterintelligence investigation into the president?
00:20:26.000So Mark Warner from West Virginia, he says the FBI went after President Trump for good reason also.
00:20:32.000I think we're seeing these independent actions, even independent of Mueller, which is the lead up in some of the rationale about why this investigation started and why so many Americans, like myself, have been concerned for so long.
00:20:45.000There was enough concern that the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bipartisan fashion, the House Intelligence Committee in a slightly less bipartisan fashion, Yeah.
00:20:58.000Our investigation is almost, it's not quite two years in, but we have literally spoken to hundreds of witnesses.
00:21:05.000We may have spoken to even more witnesses than Mueller, and we have a very important story to tell to the American public.
00:21:11.000Okay, then you could just tell that story to the American public instead of just telling us how important the story is you're gonna tell.
00:21:16.000You know, we've seen about 1,000 trailers for this movie.
00:21:18.000At what point do we actually get to see the movie?
00:21:20.000When the Mueller investigation comes out, it better be public.
00:21:23.000We need full transparency because all we've seen is narrative from both sides.
00:21:26.000John Solomon has a piece over at The Hill specifically talking about all of these allegations that there was too much smoke for the FBI not to investigate.
00:21:35.000He points out there was a presidential candidate in 2016 whose husband traveled to Moscow and collected a $500,000 speaking fee from Vladimir Putin cronies while she was still serving as Secretary of State negotiating with the Russians.
00:21:47.000There was a candidate in 2016 who ran a cabinet agency that authorized the sale of a large swath of strategic American uranium assets to Putin, who served in an administration that helped arrange and approve billions of dollars in nuclear fuel contracts for Moscow and American nuclear plants just a short while before Putin invaded Ukraine.
00:22:04.000Whose campaign chairman served on the board of a clean energy company that received 35 million bucks from Russia while she was Secretary of State.
00:22:11.000Whose prominent fundraiser subsequently came under investigation for possible illegal lobbying activities involving Paul Manafort and Russian-backed Ukraine politicians.
00:22:19.000And whose family charitable empire accepted support from a lobbying and public relations firm working for a Russian nuclear giant.
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00:23:40.000Okay, so the President of the United States is asked about all of this, the FBI investigation, all the rest.
00:23:46.000He calls into Judge Jeanine, because this is our new world, where the President has time on a Saturday night, calls into Fox News shows.
00:23:53.000So, President Trump calls in to Judge Jeanine, and she asks him straight up about the Russian collusion stuff, and here was his response.
00:24:02.000Now, or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?
00:24:05.000I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked.
00:24:09.000I think it's the most insulting article I've ever had written.
00:24:13.000And if you read the article, you'd see that they found absolutely nothing.
00:24:17.000But the headline of that article, it's called The Failing New York Times for a reason.
00:24:22.000They've gotten me wrong for three years.
00:24:23.000They've actually gotten me wrong for many years before that.
00:24:26.000Okay, so what was funny about this is you can hear Trump just denies it openly, right?
00:24:30.000Trump says, listen, this is a ridiculous story.
00:24:32.000The media, people like Maggie Haberman at the New York Times, a reporter who does some good work, okay, but she tweeted out, Trump does not deny.
00:24:39.000And that was the headline that the media ran with.
00:24:41.000So Judge Jeanine asks him, are you a Russian agent?
00:24:43.000And he goes, it's the most ridiculous question I've ever heard.
00:25:02.000Again, even if you think that Trump was in cahoots with Russia, the best available theory would have been that the guy's a dupe.
00:25:07.000It wouldn't have been that the guy's a paid agent of the Russians, or involved in kompromat or something.
00:25:11.000And again, there's no evidence for any of this stuff at this point.
00:25:14.000The media's attempt to go after Trump from every angle is pretty astonishing.
00:25:19.000The Washington Post has a piece today about how Trump concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in the administration.
00:25:25.000Now, members of his own administration are denying this.
00:25:28.000Folks in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's office, they say, no, we know everything he said to Putin.
00:25:32.000We know what he said, but according to the Washington Post, President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S.
00:25:57.000officials learned of Trump's actions when a White House advisor and senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.
00:26:06.000The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States' main adversaries as a result.
00:26:20.000officials said, according to the Washington Post, there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump's face-to-face interactions with Vladimir Putin.
00:26:28.000Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone the one that Russia sought to install through what U.S.
00:26:33.000intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
00:26:38.000Now, I have a possible alternative explanation as to why President Trump was seizing the notes of his interpreters.
00:26:56.000And that theory is backed to a certain extent by the fact that not only does everything leak, but if I recall correctly, there was an actual article written by an interpreter in the Trump administration who talked about how she had left the administration.
00:27:13.000There was an article in July 19, 2018, about the interpreter.
00:27:18.000It was from the New York Times, and who heard what Trump said to Putin?
00:27:22.000Marina Gross, the only other American in the room during President Trump's meeting on Monday with Vladimir Putin of Russia, was the interpreter for Laura Bush at the Russian resort of Sochi in 2008 and interpreted for former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Moscow in 2017.
00:27:35.000She appears to live in an apartment in Arlington, Virginia, is an employee of the State Department, and is unsurprisingly fluent in Russia, but little else is known about Ms.
00:27:44.000Her white pad of notes, visible in photographs from the summit meeting, are probably useless.
00:27:47.000Experienced government interpreters said, dictated in her personal shorthand, that it would be illegible to anyone else.
00:27:53.000And if she were to say what exactly transpired, she would violate an ethics code of confidentiality similar to lawyer-client privilege or the silence of a priest during confession.
00:28:02.000So they were already reporting on who the lady was, right?
00:28:05.000The media were already targeting who the translator was.
00:28:09.000They had full articles about Marina Gross, the translator, during the Trump meeting.
00:28:16.000And then they wonder why Trump was trying to seize the notes?
00:28:18.000Like the media were trying to take pictures of her notes.
00:29:08.000Can you imagine anybody doing this with Obama?
00:29:10.000Like, really, I don't like using the, can you imagine the Obama routine, but it is literally impossible to imagine the media going along with anything like this about Barack Obama.
00:29:19.000Barack Obama had back channel negotiations with the Iranian government, with the Iranian government, actual enemies of the United States.
00:29:26.000I mean, the Russians are enemies of the United States.
00:29:28.000They're geopolitical foes, would be a better way of putting it.
00:29:30.000The Iranians are active enemies of the United States, and Obama was having open conversations with them.
00:29:35.000We didn't know any of those details, and everybody assumed that's what the president gets to do, because he's the president.
00:29:39.000Just because you don't like the president of the United States doesn't mean you get to shrink either the executive power, or that you get to pretend that normal exercise of executive power is somehow now barred.
00:29:49.000So now Democrats are claiming that they're going to probe Trump's meetings with Putin as though he was having these... I don't know what kind of spy novels they're reading, honestly.
00:31:10.000We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:31:13.000All righty, so the government shutdown continues apace.
00:31:21.000According to a new CNN poll, President Trump is bearing the brunt of this.
00:31:24.000Now, I would like to remind folks that polls a year and a half out, two years out from an election, don't matter at all to the president.
00:31:32.000Barack Obama's approval rating in the middle of his first term were not good, and then he won re-election, it turns out, fairly easily over Mitt Romney.
00:31:40.000So right now, people all look at Trump's approval ratings.
00:31:48.000In a presidential race, Trump's approval ratings, even when he was running against Hillary Clinton, never came close to cracking 50% and then he won anyway.
00:31:55.000It turns out that most people see presidential elections as binary in every election.
00:32:00.000So all the people who are agonizing over Trump's approval ratings are so low.
00:32:03.000This is where Trump should say, OK, well, if I have to take the hit, I take the hit.
00:32:07.000I will give you the evidence that this is sort of what he should do.
00:32:11.000What it finds is that Trump is being blamed by a majority of Americans now for the government shutdown.
00:32:18.000Trump's approval rating in the poll is down to 37%, as opposed to 57% disapprove.
00:32:24.000That disapproval has risen five points since December, which is not a shock since he's been the subject of unending bad media coverage, and also because the president can't keep his fingers away from the Twitter buttons.
00:32:34.000The increase in disapproval for the president comes primarily among whites without college degrees, 45% of whom approve, and 47% disapprove.
00:32:42.000That's a really interesting stat because what that suggests is, again, this has more to do with media coverage than policy.
00:32:48.000If you think that whites without college degrees are really pro-illegal immigration, I'm gonna need the evidence for that.
00:32:54.000In December, his approval rating with whites who have not received four-year college degrees stood at 54%, so he's dropped pretty precipitously among people who don't have a college degree.
00:33:03.000Among whites who do hold college degrees, Trump's ratings are largely unchanged, and they remain sharply negative.
00:33:36.000Democrats are more unified in their blame for Trump.
00:33:38.000Republicans are Kind of not unified at all.
00:33:42.000Rank-and-file Republicans blame Democrats by 65%, but 23% do blame President Trump for the shutdown.
00:33:48.000Now, if Trump can't sell the shutdown to his own base, that's a Trump problem.
00:33:52.000That's not really a shutdown problem, that's a Trump problem.
00:33:53.000That's because Trump went on national TV and said, I'll own the shutdown.
00:33:57.000Brilliant strategizing and communications from the president.
00:34:00.000Independents are more apt to blame Trump, 48 to 34, and are most likely to say both sides are responsible because independents are the only people who apparently have not lost their minds.
00:34:09.000Again, if they say both sides are responsible, it means 48% of independents say that Democrats at least hold some responsibility for all of this.
00:34:16.000Now, here's the part of the poll that is actually more telling and suggests that Trump should take a little bit of short-term pain in order to reach some long-term gain.
00:34:25.000While more than half of Americans are now blaming Trump for the government shutdown, the wall itself has become more popular.
00:34:32.000This new poll said support had increased for the wall from 34% to 42%.
00:34:36.000The CNN poll had it going up from 35% to 39%.
00:34:39.000In other words, Trump's pitch for the wall is going well.
00:35:17.000In January of 2013, there was a government shutdown.
00:35:20.000Republicans then won a sweeping victory in November of 2014.
00:35:22.000No one cares about government shutdowns five minutes after they're over.
00:35:26.000The only thing that people care about is the long-lasting impression of Republicans.
00:35:30.000In 2014, most Americans thought Republicans wanted to end Obamacare, Obamacare was deeply unpopular, and Republicans took back the House of Representatives.
00:36:22.000And he is correct about all of this because Democrats are being increasingly forced to deal with the consequences of their own intransigence.
00:36:32.000I mean, there's a piece in the Washington Examiner today all about the Democrats during the government shutdown.
00:36:41.000According to the Washington Examiner, some 30 Democratic lawmakers left the government shutdown behind on Friday on a chartered flight to Puerto Rico for a winter retreat with 109 lobbyists and corporate executives, during which they plan to see the hit Broadway show Hamilton and attend three parties, including one with the show's cast.
00:36:59.000Is it just me, or I thought that Puerto Rico was just hit by a hurricane, right?
00:37:03.000Right, so if they were hit by a hurricane, how much money are the Democrats spending on this retreat?
00:37:06.000Maybe they should donate a little bit of that to the people who are suffering in Puerto Rico, if this is their thing.
00:37:11.000Those attending the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Bold Pack Winter Retreat in San Juan plan to meet with key officials to discuss cleanup after Hurricane Maria at a roundtable on Saturday, but the weekend is packed with free time for the members and their families on a trip.
00:37:24.000Apparently some 109 lobbyists and corporate executives are named in the memo at a rate of 3.6 lobbyists for every member.
00:37:31.000And these include some of the biggest lobbyists in the country.
00:37:34.000Senator Bob Menendez was spotted shirtless on the beach in Puerto Rico talking to some blonde lady on the beach.
00:38:02.000Representative Steve King from Iowa, who was quoted by the New York Times in an interview that he did not deny, saying that there was nothing wrong with the terms white nationalism and white supremacy, which is insane.
00:38:12.000And I called for him to be immediately primaried and maxed out for his opponents, actually, in that primary.
00:38:17.000Kevin McCarthy, the Senate, the House Minority Leader, he came forward.
00:38:21.000He said there will be consequences for Steve King from the Republican caucus.
00:38:25.000Watch on the other side that they do not take action when their members say something like that.
00:38:36.000As a leader, there is a number of things you'll see that has taken place.
00:38:39.000But I will not stand back as a leader of this party, believing in this nation that all are created equal, that that stands or continues to stand and have any role with us.
00:38:48.000Okay, so this is the exact right perspective that McCarthy is articulating right here.
00:38:52.000Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, the only black senator in the Republican caucus, he says that, he says, Some in our party wonder why Republicans are constantly accused of racism.
00:39:02.000It's because of our silence when things like this are said.
00:39:04.000Immigration is a perfect example in which somehow our affection for the rule of law has become conflated with the perceived racism against black and brown people.
00:39:12.000He says, King's comments are not conservative views, but separate views that should be ridiculed at every turn possible.
00:39:17.000Conservative principles mean equal opportunity for all to succeed, regardless of what you look like or where you are from.
00:39:22.000It is maddening to see so many folks who believe this and have only good intentions in their hearts tarnished by these radical perspectives, which is why silence is no longer acceptable.
00:40:02.000And they are fresh, not because they're the only new Congress people, but because two of them are Muslim and one of them was a former bartender and is kind of pretty, right?
00:40:10.000That's really why the media are paying attention to these folks.
00:40:13.000Well, they're going to pay attention, but not enough to actually question the bigotry among these actual members, particularly the anti-Semitism of these actual members.
00:40:43.000Wearing the Palestinian ceremonial kind of scarf that you see very often.
00:40:46.000And he tweeted, I was honored to be a Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib swearing in ceremony in Detroit and private dinner afterward with the entire family, friends and activists across the country.
00:41:46.000They're all asked about her calling the president a mother effer.
00:41:49.000How many were asked about the fact that she's an anti-Semite?
00:41:52.000How many were asked about Ilhan Omar, who has a similar record of anti-Semitic statements?
00:41:57.000How many have been asked not about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's bizarre take on domestic policy, but about her association with people like Linda Sarsour?
00:42:11.000Okay, which just goes to show you that when it comes to who is being held accountable for the nasty, evil comments within their own caucus, the only people ever held responsible are Republicans.
00:42:21.000And Republicans, I think, hold themselves responsible, as Senator Tim Scott is pointing out.
00:42:29.000Not only do they not do better, they then claim that if you question them about these things, that it's an evidence of some sort of bias.
00:42:36.000People were complaining that Rashida, it was funny, AOC, Ocasio-Cortez, was complaining that the media were reporting much more on Rashida Tlaib's calling President Trump a mother effer than they were on Steve King's white supremacist comments.
00:45:07.000Here, Spider-Man is done differently than anything else I've ever seen.
00:45:10.000So what's fascinating is that Sony owns the animated rights to Spider-Man, but Marvel, meaning Disney, owns the live-action Spider-Man.
00:45:19.000I will tell you what, I am much more interested in seeing more animated movies like Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse than the Tom Holland Spider-Man that we've seen in The Avengers.
00:45:28.000Even though I kind of like Tom Holland in The Avengers.
00:45:30.000This movie, Into the Spider-Verse, is one of the most beautifully animated films I have ever seen in my entire life.
00:45:35.000It's an amazing artistic accomplishment.
00:45:38.000Basically, it looks like a moving comic book.
00:45:40.000If you can't actually see the trailer, we'll show you a little bit of the trailer right now.
00:45:44.000They combine all these different styles.
00:46:30.000I think you're gonna be a bad teacher.
00:46:33.000The movie's really good, and it's all about, basically, the basic premise is that there's a portal that opens and all the Spider-Mans from the multiverse are sucked into this one Portal.
00:46:42.000Now, people who are comic book fans all have their favorite Spider-Man.
00:47:13.000It's not appropriate for kids, probably under the age of maybe seven or eight.
00:47:17.000But if your kid's 10, your kid could easily see this movie.
00:47:19.000And it's not scary in any sense beyond that.
00:47:22.000And again, the animation is just incredible.
00:47:25.000And it's got a bunch of, like John Mulaney comes in for a bit, that's great.
00:47:28.000Nick Cage comes in as Spider-Man Noir, which is my favorite bit of the film, is that one of the multiverse Spider-Men is Spider-Man Noir, so he's like from the 1930s, and it's Nick Cage being Nick Cage.
00:47:47.000If it doesn't win the Oscar for best animation or best art direction or something, then the Oscars are irrevocably broken, which they are already.
00:47:57.000We already know that, but worth seeing.
00:47:58.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:48:03.000Okay, so thing that I hate, number one, there's a director named Duncan Jones.
00:48:06.000He made a movie called Moon, which I've recommended on the show, before Talented Guy.
00:48:09.000He tweeted this out yesterday, and I just find this obnoxious.
00:48:12.000He tweeted out, I have two kids, two and a half years and nine months old, respectively.
00:48:15.000I'll tell you something I never see anyone admit.
00:48:17.000They're exhausting, frustrating, and life's destabilizing.
00:48:38.000First of all, just to go back to the first part of that tweet where he says, I never hear people talk about how exhausting and horrifying children are, how frustrating and life destabilizing they are.
00:48:47.000Is he like, does he have actual mental problems?
00:50:01.000And your high is a 10, because you have a partner in life.
00:50:04.000And that partner in life, when you're with them, it makes life just that much better.
00:50:07.000And your low is like a 0, because when something bad happens to the person you're with, then it's worse than something bad happening to you.
00:50:12.000When my wife is sick, it is much worse for me than when I'm sick.
00:50:16.000And all boundaries on the upper and lower thresholds disappear completely.
00:50:20.000The best things that ever happen to you in life will happen with your kids, and the worst things that ever happen to you in life will happen with your kids.
00:50:25.000There's nothing better, nothing in the world better, than hanging out with my daughter, and teaching her things, and having her say funny things, or me being in the car and partying with the kids in the back.
00:50:47.000And then when something terrible happens to your kid, when your kid is throwing up in the middle of the night, and you're cleaning up and trying to make them feel better, or when, God forbid, your kid has a surgery or something, which I've been through with my daughter, when all that happens, that's the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life.
00:50:59.000Is that something that you would trade away?
00:51:09.000At every stage of life, there's a point where you don't remember what happened before.
00:51:12.000After you get married, you don't remember what it was like to be single.
00:51:15.000It's very difficult to remember what it was like to be single.
00:51:17.000Because now you have someone you are attached to.
00:51:19.000And then you have kids, and you really don't remember what it was like not to have kids.
00:51:22.000Which is why you see so many couples struggling with empty nest syndrome after the kids leave.
00:51:26.000Because your life totally shifts around that.
00:51:29.000It's like in The Wizard of Oz, the original Wizard of Oz, where everything is in black and white and then the house lands in Oz and suddenly the door opens and everything is in color.
00:51:43.000That's because there's something wrong with your eyes.
00:51:46.000It's because if you look at your kids and you only see the same blacks and whites you saw before you had kids, then I would suggest that you have some sort of vision adjustment because you got a problem.
00:51:57.000As I've said before, the entire goal of Western civilization is to protect innocents.
00:52:00.000That is what Western civilization is about.
00:52:02.000It is about curbing the worst instincts of humanity, whether they are masculine or feminine, whether they come from one group of people or another group of people.
00:52:10.000Western civilization is about the idea that everyone can be civilized to be a good person, and all of that is designed to protect innocent people.
00:52:17.000We as a society are failing the history of Western civilization.
00:52:43.000So there are a couple of different drag kids.
00:52:44.000These drag kids are 10-year-old, 11-year-olds who have been featured in the media, and they're supposed to be the heroes of our new society, right?
00:52:52.000It is heroic to bring your children, your male children, to dress up as female children in a sexualized fashion.
00:53:04.000A 10-year-old Canadian boy named Nemus Quinn Maloncon-Golden was featured in a troubling Huck magazine piece highlighting the life of a so-called child drag queen, young Nemus, whose drag name is Queen Lactatia.
00:53:23.000Because of what I'm about to tell you.
00:53:24.000Was shot by photographer Jonathan Frederick Turton for the spread.
00:53:27.000In one of the shots that did not make the magazine, Nemus, in full drag makeup and a black dress, is posing for a photo with the Season 7 winner of RuPaul's Drag Race, Violet Chachki.
00:53:37.000In a shocking photo, Violet is wearing nothing but a pair of heels and a small piece of fabric covering his genitals, as seen in this screenshot.
00:53:46.000Interviewed and photographed, Queen Lactatia for Huck Magazine about life as a child drag queen, posted Turton.
00:53:52.000Turton has shot for mainstream outlets like the BBC.
00:53:54.000Adidas dazed and confused the Discovery Channel.
00:53:58.000The Huck Magazine piece, by the way, called me out personally for over-sexualizing drag kids.
00:54:05.000I'm the bad guy for pointing out that it is a bad thing to take ten-year-old boys, dress them as girls, and then put them in the presence of naked men pretending to be women.
00:54:16.000Nemus's mother, Jessica Malankan, conceded that drag has a sexual component and is unapologetic about her young son wearing sexually suggesting clothing if it makes him feel beautiful.
00:54:24.000This is according to Amanda Prestijakama over at Daily Wire.
00:54:28.000She said, drag is an adult arena and that's where people question our judgment.
00:54:55.000It is disgusting to violate the innocence of a child like this, and then to pretend you're doing it for the child's own sake.
00:55:00.000You wouldn't let your kid not eat his vegetables, you wouldn't let your kid ditch school, you wouldn't let your kid prostitute himself, and yet you are acting as his pimp.
00:55:07.000To put him in a photo like that, you are acting as his pimp.
00:55:33.000You know this isn't just a kid playing.
00:55:34.000You know that there are people who are going to victimize your child.
00:55:37.000You know that you are victimizing your child.
00:55:39.000This idea that you're supposed to substitute the judgment of your children for your own judgment as an adult.
00:55:44.000It's one of the aspects of our civilization that has gone completely awry.
00:55:48.000The idea of being a civilized human being is that you don't know crap when you're a kid and then you get older and you know crap and you try to stop your kids from having to experience the same garbage that you experience.
00:55:57.000And we now have a society where we're supposed to supplant our own judgment with that of our children.
00:56:09.000This has nothing to do with the welfare of the kid.
00:56:11.000This has everything to do with the subjective self-satisfaction of a terrible mother.
00:56:16.000I rarely rip parents like this, but this parent deserves every bit of ripping, and I am dead serious when I say that Child Protective Services should show up at this person's house.