The Ben Shapiro Show - April 16, 2018


The Full Comey | Ep. 518

Topics
James Comey interview mission accomplished Suicide of The Neo-West silent protest at school
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Donald Trump Slimeball James Comey Hillary Clinton Hitler George Stephanopoulos Joe Biden Mussolini Colin Kaepernick Jonah Goldberg Bashar Assad Jonathan Chait Barack Obama Christopher Steele Loretta Lynch Stalin Al Sharpton Corey Walsh Chuck Schumer Adam Best Skillshare and 39 more
Come-y On Already | Ep. 517 Cohen’s Big Day | Ep. 519

Episode Stats


Length

52 minutes

Words per minute

207.97

Word count

10,842

Sentence count

829

Harmful content

Misogyny

17

sentences flagged

Toxicity

63

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

James Comey gets his two hour special, President Trump attacks Syria, and the March for Science takes place, and no one showed up. Ben Shapiro breaks it all down and explains why this is a scam for the ages. He also explains why the media are biased in favor of James Comey and why he should have been fired years ago. And he explains why we should all be focused on leadership, not on other people. Plus, he talks about how James Comey should have written a book, and why you should write a book about how you can be useful to other people, especially people who don t have the same values as you do. All that and much more on this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show with your host, Ben Shapiro! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, "The Weekly Standard" wherever you get your shows. Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with the latest news and discuss the happenings in the world of politics and culture. Enjoy & spread the word to your friends about what's going on in your world! -Ben Shapiro's Daily Mail - Subscribe to his new podcast, The Weekly Standard! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Like, comment and subscribe to his podcast on whatever you're listening to - Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform you're using - Subscribe for a chance to win a FREE summer reading of his newest book, "I'm a Millionaire's Journalist" coming out next week! If you're looking for a new book recommendation, hit me up on Amazon Prime Day! I'm listening to his latest episode of his new novel, "How I Learned How I'm I'm a Badass, I'm A Badass by Ben Shapiro? I'll Be Good at It's a Good Guy Too Good at That's Good At It, Too Bad at It, I'll See You, Too Good At That Too Good By Me? and I'll Tell Me How I Can Have It All, Too Much Good At At That, I Can't Say That, Too Nice By Me Too By Me And I'll Send Him That's A Good Thing by Me Too, Too Maybe I'll Say That by Me And More by Me by Meghan Or How I'll Hear That by Him By Meals, Too Fucking Well Done by Him Or Not By Me Can I Can Say That By Me By Me Or Not I'll Have It by Me Or I Can Do That By Someone Else?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 James Comey gets his two-hour special, President Trump attacks Syria, and the March for Science takes place.
00:00:06.000 It is massive, meaning no one showed up.
00:00:08.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:08.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:14.000 So as you can tell, I am in fine form this morning.
00:00:17.000 I'm here with a cold and up at five in the morning since my wife is on rotation, so everything is awesome.
00:00:24.000 But don't worry, everything is also awesome in the world of politics.
00:00:27.000 I will describe for you all of the crazy that happened over the weekend.
00:00:30.000 No Disneyland for anyone.
00:00:31.000 I took my kids to Disneyland yesterday.
00:00:33.000 If you're a fan of mine and you were there yesterday, that was strictly forbidden.
00:00:37.000 You're not allowed because obviously I told you not to ruin things over the weekend as always and I said there would be no Disneyland for you if you did continue to ruin things and yet things have been ruined and I will discuss all of those things in just a minute.
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00:02:06.000 The big news over the weekend is, well, twofold.
00:02:08.000 Number one, there was an attack on Syria, which we'll discuss in a little bit.
00:02:11.000 And second of all, James Comey sat down with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News.
00:02:15.000 So, first of all, it is always obligatory, whenever I mention James Comey, whenever I mention George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, I must recall, he was the former chief of staff for the Clintons.
00:02:25.000 So, this is a guy who is very tied into the Democratic network.
00:02:29.000 I mentioned that not because I thought he did a particularly terrible job last night in the interview, but to point out that the media are wildly biased in favor of James Comey, who is playing one of the great scams of all time.
00:02:38.000 I mean, the guy was largely responsible for Hillary Clinton losing the election, and now he's going to retire off of Democrats who are angry that Hillary Clinton lost the election.
00:02:45.000 So well done, James Comey.
00:02:47.000 I mean, that is a scam for the ages.
00:02:48.000 That is usual suspects-type stuff.
00:02:50.000 Just incredible stuff.
00:02:51.000 So James Comey does a full
00:02:53.000 Two hour interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC News.
00:02:56.000 Did he have anything brand new, shocking to say?
00:02:58.000 Not really.
00:02:59.000 It was mainly vindictive and self-gratifying and self-justifying.
00:03:04.000 That's what it was.
00:03:04.000 It was James Comey grandstanding at his best.
00:03:07.000 There are a few takeaways from this interview.
00:03:09.000 It was kind of interesting.
00:03:10.000 He had some interesting things to say.
00:03:13.000 I have to say, the amount of ego that was just pouring off the screen was incredible.
00:03:16.000 The amount of smug between Stephanopoulos and James Comey.
00:03:19.000 It is amazing that the world did not implode from simple overload of smug.
00:03:23.000 And I should know.
00:03:23.000 I mean, I'm a pretty smug dude.
00:03:24.000 But let me tell you something.
00:03:25.000 James Comey and George Stephanopoulos outclassed me by at least a couple of weight classes.
00:03:30.000 It's pretty impressive.
00:03:31.000 James Comey started out the interview by saying, quote, I was never going to write a book, but I decided I had to try to write this one to try and be useful.
00:03:37.000 That was my goal after I was fired, to be useful.
00:03:39.000 And it occurred to me maybe I can be useful by offering a view to people, especially to young people, of what leadership should look like and how it should be centered on values.
00:03:46.000 In other words, maybe I should write a book talking about how awesome I am in order to inform all the young people about how awesome I am so they too can one day be awesome like I am.
00:03:54.000 Or, alternative explanation, you're fired.
00:03:57.000 And you want to make a lot of money.
00:03:58.000 I'm going to go with that one. 0.96
00:03:59.000 You're going to get a giant advance and sell hundreds of thousands of copies of your bitchy book. 1.00
00:04:03.000 I'm pretty much going to say that's probably what James Comey was doing. 0.81
00:04:06.000 It probably wasn't like, you know what?
00:04:07.000 I'm out of office now.
00:04:08.000 What do I have to do?
00:04:09.000 You know what?
00:04:09.000 I'm going to go home.
00:04:10.000 I'm going to look over my flower garden.
00:04:11.000 I'm going to write about leadership.
00:04:12.000 Because that's what young people need today.
00:04:14.000 Leadership.
00:04:15.000 No, it's probably the whole selling lots of books thing.
00:04:18.000 And then he goes on in the interview to rip on President Trump.
00:04:21.000 He, of course, says that Trump is a forest fire, going to do tremendous damage, going to damage important norms.
00:04:26.000 But a forest fire gives healthy things a chance to grow.
00:04:28.000 They had no chance before that fire.
00:04:30.000 And the entire interview is just incredibly self-serving.
00:04:33.000 My favorite metaphor that he used for himself is he said that when he went to the White House to talk to President Trump, he said,
00:05:01.000 What a hero.
00:05:01.000 He's just like Bruce Willis from the Sixth Sense, guys.
00:05:03.000 It's just amazing.
00:05:04.000 He's walking around, he's dead, he doesn't know it the entire time.
00:05:06.000 Spoiler alert!
00:05:08.000 James Comey.
00:05:08.000 Don't worry, though.
00:05:10.000 He doesn't have ego.
00:05:11.000 This is a man who is completely free from ego.
00:05:13.000 What a wonderful man he is.
00:05:15.000 Throughout the interview, he praises President Obama, Jeh Johnson, the former Department of Homeland Security Secretary.
00:05:21.000 He says that he wishes Hillary Clinton would read the book so that she would know why he did what he did during the election cycle.
00:05:26.000 And then, of course, he dumped on Trump personally.
00:05:28.000 So here was James Comey dumping on President Trump personally.
00:05:31.000 This is clip seven.
00:05:33.000 It was the first time he met Donald Trump.
00:05:35.000 What was your impression?
00:05:36.000 He had impressively coiffed hair that looks to be all his.
00:05:40.000 I confess I stared at it pretty closely.
00:05:43.000 And my reaction was, must take a lot of time in the morning.
00:05:46.000 His tie was too long as it always is.
00:05:49.000 He looked slightly orange up close with small white half moons under his eyes, which I assume are from tanning goggles.
00:05:58.000 Okay, so this is definitely the kind of image that James Comey wants to project, right?
00:06:02.000 He wants to project lawman image.
00:06:04.000 And that's what a lawman would do.
00:06:05.000 I mean, that's really, if you were just like Jimmy Stewart, G-Man, and you were to give an interview about a president who you thought might be corrupt, the first thing you'd do is talk about the half moons under his eyes and the length of his tie.
00:06:16.000 That really makes James Comey look real good here.
00:06:18.000 I mean, this is obviously not somebody, he was writing a book about leadership, guys, a book about leadership for children.
00:06:23.000 That was his goal.
00:06:24.000 It was not to be the center of attention.
00:06:26.000 No, not he.
00:06:27.000 Not he.
00:06:28.000 And then, of course, James Comey liked to drop a bunch of inflammatory lines in the middle of this interview because there really is nothing new in the book other than him whining about President Trump and talking about how President Trump is terrible.
00:06:37.000 Now, whatever you think about Trump, they're two separate questions, right?
00:06:41.000 Is Trump corrupt?
00:06:42.000 Has Trump done things that are ill-advised?
00:06:45.000 Has President Trump interfered in investigations, right?
00:06:47.000 These are all legit questions, but
00:06:49.000 What is not really a legit question is whether James Comey is a politically motivated actor.
00:06:52.000 He's pretty clearly a politically motivated actor.
00:06:54.000 That was pretty obvious when he admitted on camera that when he went to speak with President Trump, you recall, he went to speak with James Comey, former FBI director, when he was, when Trump first was about to take office, Comey went to brief him.
00:07:05.000 He briefed him on the Russian dossier, the Steele dossier, which had been compiled by a British spy named Christopher Steele.
00:07:10.000 It had been paid for by Fusion GPS, which was being paid for in turn by Hillary Clinton's law firm.
00:07:15.000 And James Comey did not reveal to President Trump that this dossier had been gathered at the behest of Hillary Clinton's pay.
00:07:22.000 He admits that in clip 8.
00:07:24.000 Did you tell him that the Steele dossier had been financed by his political opponents?
00:07:28.000 No.
00:07:28.000 I didn't even think I used the term Steele dossier.
00:07:31.000 I just talked about additional material.
00:07:32.000 But did he have a right to know that?
00:07:34.000 That it had been financed by his political opponents?
00:07:37.000 I don't know the answer to that.
00:07:39.000 It wasn't necessary for my goal, which was to alert him that we had this information.
00:07:46.000 Well, who cares about your goal?
00:07:47.000 He's the President of the United States.
00:07:49.000 Don't you owe him that information?
00:07:50.000 I mean, you work for him.
00:07:51.000 I mean, you're the head of the FBI, and the FBI is an executive branch agency.
00:07:54.000 Shouldn't you have told him that the Steele dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton?
00:07:57.000 Wouldn't that have been a little bit important for him to know?
00:08:00.000 But again, the goal here is for James Comey to obviously come off as above the fray.
00:08:05.000 Well, he didn't come off as above the fray anywhere in this interview.
00:08:09.000 There's an enormous amount of self-serving material in this interview.
00:08:12.000 And of course, he's giving the press everything spicy they want to.
00:08:14.000 Is Clip 9 available?
00:08:15.000 Do we have Clip 9?
00:08:16.000 Okay, so, at one point during the interview, Comey is asked specifically about the pee tape, and here's what he said.
00:08:22.000 He said, and then Trump said to me, another reason you know it's not true is I'm a germaphobe.
00:08:26.000 There's no way I'd let people pee on each other around me.
00:08:28.000 And that caught me so much by surprise, I actually let out an audible laugh, and because it was just one of those, I was startled by it.
00:08:33.000 And I remember thinking, well, should I say that?
00:08:35.000 As I understand the activity, sir, it doesn't require an overnight stay, and given that it was allegedly the presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton, I would imagine you could be at a safe distance from the activity.
00:08:43.000 All these things are bouncing around my head, but instead of saying it, it just led me to think the world's gone crazy.
00:08:48.000 But again, the goal here for James Comey is to sell as many books as humanly possible.
00:08:52.000 There are really three scandals in which James Comey is involved, right?
00:08:56.000 Scandal number one is the Hillary Clinton issue, right?
00:08:59.000 The Hillary Clinton issue.
00:09:00.000 Scandal number two is the Russian issue with President Trump.
00:09:03.000 And scandal number three is his firing.
00:09:04.000 They're three separate issues.
00:09:05.000 And in each one, the story he tells is really not particularly great.
00:09:09.000 Okay, so the Hillary handling itself was bad.
00:09:12.000 First of all, let's get out of the way how much he hates President Trump.
00:09:14.000 The man just hates President Trump.
00:09:15.000 So, here are several clips of him talking about how much he hates President Trump.
00:09:18.000 Here's where he compares President Trump to a crime family.
00:09:21.000 Again, I'm not sure why no political advisor sat Comey down and said, you know, James, it might be worthwhile for you to appear not to hate President Trump if you actually want to go after him, right?
00:09:30.000 You might want to look as though you're disinterested rather than that you have a personal animus toward him.
00:09:34.000 Apparently nobody bothered telling him, so instead he compares Trump to a crime family.
00:09:38.000 I had a flashback to my days investigating the mafia, La Cosa Nostra.
00:09:44.000 There's a distinction between a friend of yours and a friend of ours.
00:09:48.000 I felt this effort to make us all, and maybe this wasn't their intention, but it's the way it felt to me, to make us all a Mika Nostra. 0.92
00:09:55.000 We're all part of the messaging.
00:09:57.000 We're all part of the effort.
00:09:58.000 The boss is at the head of the table.
00:10:00.000 We're going to figure out together how to do this.
00:10:02.000 How strange is it for you to sit here and compare the president to a mob boss?
00:10:08.000 Well, okay, come on.
00:10:09.000 What kind of question is that, George Stephanopoulos?
00:10:11.000 How strange is it? 1.00
00:10:12.000 He's doing it on purpose to sell books, you idiot! 1.00
00:10:14.000 But of course, George Stephanopoulos knows that. 1.00
00:10:16.000 He's not an idiot. 0.88
00:10:17.000 Okay, that was not all that Comey had to say about President Trump personally. 0.76
00:10:20.000 And then he talks about how Trump was morally unfit to be president, this is clip 16.
00:10:24.000 This is Comey talking about how Trump is just unfit, right?
00:10:27.000 Again, a lot of this is being driven by the fact that Comey is angry that Trump fired him.
00:10:32.000 You're right that President Trump is unethical, untethered to the truth.
00:10:37.000 Is Donald Trump unfit to be president?
00:10:41.000 Yes.
00:10:42.000 But not in the way I often hear people talk about it.
00:10:45.000 I don't buy the stuff about him being mentally incompetent at early stages of dementia.
00:10:50.000 He strikes me as a person of above average intelligence who's tracking conversations and knows what's going on.
00:10:55.000 I don't think he's medically unfit to be president.
00:10:58.000 I think he's morally unfit to be president.
00:11:00.000 Okay, and then he continued exactly along these lines, again talking about how Trump has been compromised by the Russians.
00:11:06.000 He says that it's possible the Russians compromised Trump.
00:11:08.000 Now again, he doesn't have any evidence of this.
00:11:10.000 Anything's possible.
00:11:11.000 Anything's possible.
00:11:12.000 Does George Stephanopoulos follow up by saying, do you have evidence that the Russians have compromised Trump?
00:11:16.000 No, of course not.
00:11:17.000 They just sort of let it hang out there.
00:11:18.000 So here's James Comey saying that it's possible that Trump is compromised by the Russians.
00:11:22.000 Do you think the Russians have something on Donald Trump?
00:11:25.000 I think it's possible.
00:11:26.000 I don't know.
00:11:27.000 These are more words I never thought I'd utter about a President of the United States, but it's possible.
00:11:31.000 That's stunning.
00:11:33.000 You can't say for certain that the President of the United States is not compromised by the Russians. 1.00
00:11:39.000 Yeah, it is stunning, and I wish I wasn't saying it, but it's just, it's the truth.
00:11:43.000 Great interviewing there again.
00:11:44.000 Great interviewing there again by George Stephanopoulos.
00:11:46.000 Just reiterate the point.
00:11:47.000 That is stunning, what you're saying.
00:11:48.000 I'm not going to ask you for any evidence of what you're saying, but it is stunning that you would even say that, Mr. Comey.
00:11:53.000 Just incredibly stunning.
00:11:54.000 Again, the goal here for Comey is to sell books.
00:11:57.000 The goal here for George Stephanopoulos is to use Comey as a baton in order to club President Trump.
00:12:01.000 Okay, that is the goal here.
00:12:02.000 Now, we can talk about in a second exactly what Comey did during the Hillary scandal, during the Trump investigation, and to get fired.
00:12:10.000 We'll talk about all that in just a second.
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00:13:59.000 All right.
00:14:00.000 So Comey, in his book, he talks about really three separate things.
00:14:03.000 He talks about the Hillary investigation.
00:14:05.000 He talks about the Trump investigation on Russia.
00:14:06.000 And then he talks about being fired.
00:14:08.000 And so what he says about Hillary demonstrates what a political actor he is.
00:14:12.000 So recall that back in July, it was James Comey who came out and made a long statement basically about why Hillary Clinton had violated the law but should not be indicted.
00:14:20.000 Remember, he said that she had been extremely careless with her emails, which is the definition of gross negligence under the law.
00:14:26.000 And then he says we won't indict her anyway.
00:14:28.000 We shouldn't have indicted her anyway.
00:14:30.000 So now he says he shouldn't have described how sloppy Clinton was with all of her email server stuff. 0.87
00:14:41.000 What she did was really sloppy.
00:14:43.000 Okay, he says what she did was really sloppy, but he says that he made a mistake describing how sloppy she was with her email scandal because in doing so it made it look like she had violated the law, when in his opinion she had not actually violated the law.
00:14:53.000 Then later he says that the reason that he came forward with the letter, remember the letter right before the election in which he says that hundreds of thousands of her emails were found on Anthony Weiner's computer?
00:15:03.000 And then he says that he released a letter a few days before the election.
00:15:06.000 Now he says the reason that he did that is because the polling showed that Hillary was really far up in the polls.
00:15:10.000 And if she won, he didn't want this cloud to be over her presidency.
00:15:14.000 So he says, I came out with that letter just to be completely transparent.
00:15:16.000 And he says that assuming Hillary would have won, probably influenced his decision making.
00:15:22.000 I don't remember consciously thinking about that, but it must have been.
00:15:25.000 Because I was operating in a world where Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump. 0.89
00:15:29.000 And so I'm sure that it was a factor.
00:15:32.000 Like I said, I don't remember spelling it out, but it had to have been.
00:15:35.000 That she's going to be elected president, and if I hide this from the American people,
00:15:41.000 She'll be illegitimate the moment she's elected. 1.00
00:15:43.000 So he's so above the fray.
00:15:44.000 Don't you see how above the fray James Comey is?
00:15:46.000 He's such a non-political actor.
00:15:47.000 What a good guy he is.
00:15:48.000 You know, he wants to exonerate Hillary Clinton before the election, or at least he wants the American public to know about this stuff so that when she's elected, then she'll be clean. 0.99
00:15:55.000 But don't worry, he's totally above the fray.
00:15:58.000 You can see how upset he was that Trump was elected because he literally says in this interview, Oh my God, did we have some role in this?
00:16:05.000 It is legitimately what Comey says in the middle of this interview.
00:16:08.000 And what part of you is thinking, I helped elect Donald Trump?
00:16:12.000 A whole lot of me was thinking, oh my god, did we have some role in this?
00:16:17.000 Did we have some impact on the election?
00:16:19.000 Okay, well, why would you be thinking that?
00:16:21.000 Let's say that you actually were the typical G-man. 1.00
00:16:23.000 Let's say that you were the honorable FBI guy, the loyal FBI guy that James Comey says he is.
00:16:28.000 Wouldn't you just abide by the law?
00:16:31.000 Instead of saying, oh my God, were we part of this?
00:16:32.000 Wouldn't you have just said, listen, the law says I have to do X, this is what I have to do.
00:16:36.000 And therefore, no, that had no impact on my decision making.
00:16:39.000 I did what I had to do, that's my job.
00:16:41.000 I'm above personal petty grievances.
00:16:44.000 I'm above personal petty politics.
00:16:46.000 But he had no intention of saying any of that because, of course, it's not true.
00:16:51.000 The reality is that James Comey is not above personal petty politics, as we've seen.
00:16:55.000 He doesn't like President Trump.
00:16:56.000 He was very disappointed when Trump won.
00:16:58.000 It's pretty obvious.
00:16:59.000 Or now he's at least disappointed that he was fired.
00:17:02.000 And so he's trying to drag out every piece of dirt he can on President Trump.
00:17:05.000 He's trying to dump that out in the public view.
00:17:07.000 But he really doesn't have a lot there.
00:17:09.000 And so it's all speculation.
00:17:10.000 Maybe Trump obstructed justice.
00:17:11.000 Maybe he's going to be blackmailed by the Russians.
00:17:13.000 When there's no there there, all you have to do is dump out a bunch of inflammatory material and the media will pick it up and try and run with it.
00:17:19.000 Okay, well now, in the meantime, President Trump is firing back, so President Trump takes to Twitter, and here are some of the things that President Trump has been tweeting about James Comey.
00:17:28.000 Quote, Comey drafted the crooked Hillary exoneration long before he talked to her, lied in Congress to Senator G, then based his decision on her poll numbers, disgruntled he, McCabe, and the others, committed many crimes.
00:17:39.000 Okay, so.
00:17:41.000 All of this is true.
00:17:42.000 I just don't know why President Trump feels the necessity to go out there and say it, because again, look, I know President Trump is a counterpuncher.
00:17:49.000 I know that he doesn't like what Comey's saying about him, but this is not productive.
00:17:52.000 The president should shut up.
00:17:53.000 All he is doing is driving the news cycle.
00:17:59.000 All he's doing is driving people to buy the book, the same way that he drove the Fire and Fury
00:18:03.000 Crap book to the top of the bestseller list.
00:18:04.000 Now he's going to help drive James Comey's book to the top of the bestseller list. 0.98
00:18:07.000 If you can somehow get Trump to attack you and you're in the book market, that is the best way to sell books.
00:18:13.000 Trump continues along these lines.
00:18:14.000 He tweets, Again.
00:18:25.000 Don't know how useful this is?
00:18:28.000 I never asked Comey for personal loyalty.
00:18:30.000 I hardly even knew the guy.
00:18:31.000 Just another of his many lies. 0.90
00:18:33.000 His memos are self-serving and, all caps, FAKE.
00:18:36.000 But he's not done yet.
00:18:37.000 He continues.
00:18:39.000 Okay, but is he done yet?
00:18:39.000 Nope, the president has even more.
00:18:40.000 Jail.
00:18:41.000 Why did he lie to Congress?
00:18:42.000 Jail.
00:19:03.000 Why did the DNC refuse to give server to the FBI?
00:19:05.000 Why didn't they take it?
00:19:07.000 Why the phony memos?
00:19:07.000 McCabe $700,000 and more.
00:19:09.000 Okay.
00:19:09.000 And so, you know, this is, you know, President Trump on the warpath on Twitter, obviously.
00:19:16.000 Now, here's the reality.
00:19:17.000 Everything he's saying in this Twitter thread is true.
00:19:20.000 Everything he's saying about Comey in this Twitter thread is true.
00:19:22.000 Again, the question is not true or not true.
00:19:24.000 The question is useful or not useful.
00:19:26.000 When the president attacks Comey and Comey attacks the president, Trump is punching down and he's allowing Comey to go out there and respond to him.
00:19:33.000 He's allowing Comey to go out there and tell his side of the story with broader public appeal.
00:19:37.000 It's not smart of the president to punch back in this particular way, even though I think that Comey is exposing himself for what he is.
00:19:44.000 And he concluded this Twitter thread Trump did by saying,
00:20:00.000 Okay, so I guess we have Slippery James Comey and Slimeball James Comey.
00:20:04.000 The president really going after it on Twitter, really enjoying himself.
00:20:07.000 Yeah, again, he has the right to do whatever he wants.
00:20:08.000 Do I think this is highly useful?
00:20:10.000 I do not, especially because Comey's getting himself in hot water with a bunch of people, right?
00:20:14.000 Not just folks on the right.
00:20:15.000 He's now got himself in hot water with Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general at the time.
00:20:20.000 James Comey has accused Obama and Loretta Lynch of taking actions that jeopardized the DOJ's status in the middle of the Hillary Clinton email investigations.
00:20:27.000 What he says is, when Loretta Lynch got on the plane with Bill Clinton, that necessitated the FBI stepping in and making some sort of argument as to why Hillary should or should not be indicted, because obviously now people are going to think the whole thing was corrupt.
00:20:40.000 Well, now Loretta Lynch is firing back on Comey and suggesting that Comey is terrible. 1.00
00:20:44.000 She says,
00:21:01.000 Through it all, I've never hesitated to make the hard decisions guided by the Department of Justice's core principles of integrity, independence, and above all, always doing the right thing.
00:21:08.000 The Justice Department's handling of the Clinton email investigation under my leadership was no exception.
00:21:13.000 Any suggestion I invoked this bedrock policy for any reason is simply false.
00:21:17.000 Throughout the process, I did what I always do, rise above my politics and uphold the law.
00:21:21.000 Does anyone really believe Loretta Lynch rose above her politics to uphold the law?
00:21:24.000 Does anyone truly believe that?
00:21:25.000 Well, neither did James Comey.
00:21:27.000 You wonder why people don't trust the so-called deep state at this point?
00:21:30.000 It's because it's filled with people who are political appointees, and these political appointees have actual access to grind.
00:21:36.000 And so, you know what's the best way for you to appear above the law?
00:21:39.000 By being above the law.
00:21:41.000 By being above the law, by acting as though you are above, or rather, by being above politics.
00:21:45.000 You want to appear as though you're above politics?
00:21:47.000 All you have to do is be above politics.
00:21:48.000 But none of these people are, and that is eminently obvious at this point in time.
00:21:52.000 Well, in just a second, I'm going to get to Syria, plus the March for Science happening over the weekend.
00:21:56.000 But first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
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00:22:29.000 Believe it or not, gotta calm down after the day.
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00:22:44.000 I think so.
00:23:06.000 Okay, so meanwhile... 1.00
00:23:28.000 The March for Science happened over the weekend, and the March for Science is stupid. 1.00
00:23:33.000 The reason I say the March for Science is stupid is because it is not a march for actual science. 0.99
00:23:37.000 Because, as Dave Burge over at IowaHawk put it, that's like saying, I'm going to go dance for architecture. 0.99
00:23:43.000 What does that even mean?
00:23:44.000 March for science.
00:23:46.000 Dance for architecture.
00:23:48.000 Preach for mathematics.
00:23:49.000 What are you even talking about?
00:23:52.000 There's no such thing as a March for Science.
00:23:54.000 Because everyone that I know is pro-science.
00:23:57.000 Like if you want to say you're anti-flat earth, right?
00:23:59.000 Like there's three people who still believe in the flat earth.
00:24:01.000 Or let's say that you want to say you're going to march for cap and trade, right?
00:24:05.000 That's an actual policy you're marching for.
00:24:07.000 One of the things that drives me most crazy is when you name your march something that is universally applicable and then claim that anyone who opposes your march is against those things.
00:24:14.000 When you say march for our lives, right?
00:24:16.000 This is the pro-gun control march.
00:24:17.000 So there's a pro-gun control march, and they call it March for Our Lives.
00:24:20.000 Why don't they just call it March for Gun Control?
00:24:21.000 Well, because then we'd all be able to be pro or against it. 0.94
00:24:23.000 But when they say March for Our Lives, the implication is that if I oppose your agenda, I want you to die.
00:24:28.000 Which, of course, is not true.
00:24:29.000 Well, they're now doing the same thing with science.
00:24:32.000 They have their March for Science. 0.95
00:24:33.000 And if you say, listen, this march is really dumb because all you're preaching here is non-scientific stuff, 0.96
00:24:37.000 Then they say, well, no, that's because you hate science. 0.98
00:24:40.000 That's the real issue here.
00:24:40.000 You hate science.
00:24:41.000 First of all, I will just point out the media coverage of the March for Science was glowing.
00:24:45.000 Much more glowing than the March for Life ever is.
00:24:47.000 The March for Life is always undercovered.
00:24:49.000 The March for Life, of course, is the pro-life march that happens in Washington, D.C.
00:24:52.000 each and every year.
00:24:54.000 And the March for Science was way down in attendance.
00:24:58.000 So last year, a bunch of people showed up to march because in 2017, you could get people to march for virtually anything because they were angry about Trump.
00:25:04.000 So he said, march for chicken.
00:25:06.000 And people would be out in the streets going, we hate Trump.
00:25:08.000 We hate millions of people in the streets marching for chicken.
00:25:11.000 Well, now people are not showing up for the March for Science because they have better things to do.
00:25:15.000 But listen to how CNN describes the March for Science.
00:25:17.000 It's pretty incredible.
00:25:18.000 They say, quote, Saturday's crowds were notably smaller than those that showed up for the first march in April 2017.
00:25:24.000 Really?
00:25:27.000 Is that news coverage?
00:25:29.000 Can we have a scientific measure?
00:25:33.000 It's a March for Science.
00:25:34.000 Can we have a scientific measure of the hope and optimism, please?
00:25:37.000 Can we know by what specific percentage the hope and optimism were up or down over the last year?
00:25:42.000 Real scientific writing there in the March for Science, CNN.
00:25:45.000 Sure, half the people showed up, but let me tell you, their spirit is what counted.
00:25:49.000 It was their heart that mattered.
00:25:51.000 It was their, so much enthusiasm, so much optimism.
00:25:55.000 So, did they actually talk about science?
00:25:56.000 Did they get up there and lecture about physics?
00:25:59.000 Did they start doing Bernoulli's formula?
00:26:01.000 Like, is this their thing?
00:26:03.000 No, that's not what they did.
00:26:05.000 Instead, they talked about racial diversity amongst scientists, quote,
00:26:09.000 The challenges are real for underrepresented students in science, said Corey Welch, director of the STEM Scholars Program at Iowa State University.
00:26:15.000 We have to overcome the reality that few or no faculty share our identities or fully understand our situation on campus, and now we have to relate back to our communities.
00:26:23.000 The diversity research clearly demonstrates, bringing all people to the table, to the scientific table.
00:26:28.000 I don't know what the scientific table is.
00:26:30.000 They're like the table of elements.
00:26:35.000 This is what Welch says.
00:26:37.000 Cory Welch, the director of science, technology, and math at Iowa State University.
00:26:44.000 OK, does any of that sound scientific to you or does that sound like a bunch of garbled nonsense?
00:26:47.000 Because, let me tell you something, it isn't scientific.
00:26:49.000 Okay?
00:26:50.000 Studies do not show, in fact, that racial diversity leads to better ideas, kinds of more ethical solutions, or a more informed public policy.
00:26:58.000 This is untrue. 0.99
00:26:59.000 Robert Putnam of Harvard University, who is a leftist, says, quote, So, if we're going to pretend that, like, because we have a couple of black scientists in the room, they have black answers to scientific questions, this sounds suspiciously like idiotic 0.98
00:27:17.000 Eugenic policy in the early 20th century. 0.79
00:27:20.000 Again, you want to talk about something that is wildly anti-scientific, it is the idea that racial diversity has anything to do with scientific discovery. 0.94
00:27:28.000 That's ridiculous. 0.63
00:27:29.000 Ideas have to do with scientific discovery. 0.98
00:27:31.000 There are great black scientists, there are great white scientists.
00:27:33.000 Their blackness or whiteness have nothing to do with their 0.81
00:27:37.000 Quality as scientists.
00:27:38.000 Nothing.
00:27:39.000 Zero things.
00:27:40.000 You know why?
00:27:41.000 Because science is verifiable or non-verifiable.
00:27:43.000 And your race has nothing to do with whether your scientific experiment is verifiable or non-verifiable.
00:27:47.000 Science is perfectly objective.
00:27:49.000 Or at least it should be.
00:27:50.000 And yet we are being told at the March for Science that one of their chief goals is to ensure that there are more black people in the sciences.
00:27:56.000 What does that have to do with marching for science?
00:27:57.000 If you want to say it's a march for affirmative action, fine. 0.96
00:27:59.000 That's at least honest.
00:28:00.000 But how are you going to say that's a march for science?
00:28:02.000 It, of course, is not a march for science. 1.00
00:28:04.000 This is incredibly stupid. 0.99
00:28:06.000 Nazi policy, by the way, is that there was such a thing as Jewish science. 1.00
00:28:09.000 Jewish science was that weird Einsteinian stuff. 0.98
00:28:13.000 You know, the stuff that actually led to the creation of the nuclear bomb that ended World War II?
00:28:17.000 Honestly, if the Nazis had not been anti-Jewish, and they'd been able to harness the intellectual firepower of all the Jews living in their society, there's a good shot the Nazis would have had a nuclear weapon before the United States did, and all of world history would have changed. 0.97
00:28:29.000 Thank God, they were a bunch of horrible, racist pieces of human filth, and therefore, they thought there was such a thing as Jewish science versus non-Jewish science, and they threw all the Jews out. 0.95
00:28:37.000 It turns out there isn't such a thing as Jewish or non-Jewish science, there's just science. 0.99
00:28:41.000 Well, again,
00:28:42.000 The people who are in the white coats, it doesn't matter what race they are, so long as they are actually pursuing science.
00:28:47.000 But the March for Science has nothing to do with science.
00:28:49.000 This guy named Adam Best, who is a left-winger on Twitter, he tweeted, quote, 0.91
00:29:08.000 Okay, this is ridiculous.
00:29:09.000 Again, the reason to oppose the March for Science is because it had nothing to do with science. 0.89
00:29:13.000 It has to do with science!
00:29:14.000 But science is not the same as science.
00:29:16.000 Okay, so science is just like, you know, verifiable data, and you do experiments with hypotheses, and they're either shown to be correct, the hypotheses, or not.
00:29:24.000 Science, however, is just a bunch of left-wing terminology, right?
00:29:27.000 It's cap-and-trade, and racial diversity above all, and again, a bunch of assumptions you're making about policy that may or may not be true, but certainly are not verified by any sort of hard scientific research. 0.95
00:29:39.000 If this idiot, Adam Best, can show me what a march for science has to do with creating a cell phone, then I'm happy to put down my cell phone. 0.78
00:29:45.000 But it has nothing to do with it. 0.99
00:29:48.000 I hate to break it to the folks on the left, but the march for science was never about science in the first place.
00:29:52.000 And it is the extremism of the left that is so galling today with the march for science.
00:29:57.000 There's a piece by Jonathan Chait over at New York Magazine.
00:29:59.000 It's amazing.
00:30:00.000 The left has so little self-awareness.
00:30:02.000 I mean, a tremendous lack of self-awareness.
00:30:03.000 Jonathan Chait
00:30:04.000 wrote a piece in the New York Magazine today asking why so many Republicans had not jumped to the Democratic Party after President Trump was elected.
00:30:11.000 The piece was called, The GOP's Never Trumpers Are Really Just Never Democrats.
00:30:16.000 And then he criticized David Brooks of the New York Times, who suggested that Democrats ought to reach out to Republicans, and Chait wrote instead, quote, So his take is that if you were really a good Republican, you'd be a Democrat.
00:30:24.000 If you were really a good conservative who didn't like President Trump enough, you would just have voted for Hillary Clinton.
00:30:40.000 Here's what Chait writes.
00:30:41.000 He's trying to figure out why it is that people didn't jump from not supporting Trump to supporting Democrats?
00:30:45.000 I can give him a very simple answer.
00:31:08.000 Democrats are extreme leftists.
00:31:10.000 That's why.
00:31:10.000 I would never have voted for Hillary Clinton even though I did not vote for President Trump.
00:31:15.000 I would never have voted for Hillary Clinton because Hillary Clinton is a wild leftist who not only disagrees with me on policy, she thinks I'm an deplorable human being for believing that babies before birth deserve a right to life and believing that my church or synagogue ought to be able to do whatever it damn well pleases. 0.99
00:31:29.000 And she thinks I'm a bad person for thinking that.
00:31:30.000 Why would I possibly vote for Hillary Clinton?
00:31:33.000 I think her viewpoint is anti-American.
00:31:35.000 Why would I possibly vote for her just because I didn't approve of President Trump's comments about grabbing women by the bleep? 0.99
00:31:41.000 It's ridiculous. 0.99
00:31:42.000 It's a ridiculous argument Shane is making here. 0.99
00:31:44.000 It's the extremism of the left that is driving people to the right. 0.91
00:31:48.000 It's a major factor.
00:31:50.000 But in just a second, I'm going to explain a little bit more about this.
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00:32:51.000 So back to Jonathan Chait's piece at the New York Magazine.
00:32:54.000 So he's arguing again that Republicans should have become Democrats if they didn't like President Trump enough.
00:32:58.000 They didn't like President Trump, so they should have just voted Hillary Clinton.
00:33:01.000 He says, quote,
00:33:11.000 Looking around at what 16 months of President Trump has wrought, watching Fox & Friends, refreshing the news sites for the latest national security debacle, would you decide each morning to remain in the Republican Party?
00:33:20.000 The absence of Republican moderates, among both elected officials and intellectuals associated with the party willing to openly join or work with the Democratic Party, suggests that the power of partisanship remains overwhelming, even among those Republicans who profess the strongest aversion to partisanship.
00:33:33.000 Well, I am anti-partisan in the sense that I am not going to knee-jerk vote for a Republican just because they're a Republican.
00:33:38.000 I am a conservative.
00:33:39.000 You have to back my values.
00:33:41.000 That's the way this works.
00:33:42.000 But, that's the point.
00:33:43.000 I am a conservative, and I don't support leftist values.
00:33:45.000 Why would I go hang out with Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi just because I think that President Trump's record with women is abominable? 0.96
00:33:51.000 Why would I do that?
00:33:53.000 How does that make any sense at all?
00:33:54.000 My whole point is that I don't think Trump is conservative in his personal life.
00:33:57.000 I don't think that he's conservative enough on certain social issues. 1.00
00:34:00.000 So my solution is to go to the party that says you should stab a baby in the head and suck its brains out one day before it's born? 1.00
00:34:07.000 That's my solution? 1.00
00:34:08.000 How in the hell is that a solution?
00:34:10.000 See, here's the thing.
00:34:10.000 Democrats don't understand this.
00:34:12.000 Folks on the left don't understand this.
00:34:13.000 You know, there's this really interesting chart that's been done for years by Gallup, and it shows the overlap in ideas between the two parties.
00:34:21.000 And what it looks like is basically two sort of mountains that overlap a little bit, right?
00:34:26.000 So you'll have the one that's the Republican mountain, and then they'll have the Democratic mountain.
00:34:30.000 And you see that the shape of the mountain changes a little bit over time, because it flattens out in certain places and it rises in certain places.
00:34:36.000 The reason being that the views inside the parties change.
00:34:38.000 Well, since 2010, the right has basically been stagnant.
00:34:42.000 The right has had the same ideas now that it had in 2010.
00:34:44.000 The left, however, has moved dramatically to the left.
00:34:47.000 Dramatically.
00:34:48.000 Remember, in 2010, Barack Obama still endorsed
00:34:51.000 Traditional marriage.
00:34:53.000 That only came later, the same-sex marriage stuff.
00:34:55.000 That was only eight years ago.
00:34:57.000 Not only that, Barack Obama never in 2010 would have talked about the idea of forcing churches to perform same-sex ceremonies or forcing bakers to cater same-sex weddings.
00:35:06.000 Certainly Barack Obama probably would have used the language in abortion of safe, legal, and rare.
00:35:10.000 The Democratic Party doesn't do any of these things.
00:35:12.000 All pro-lifers have been forcibly excluded from the Democratic Party at this point.
00:35:16.000 And then folks on the left are wondering why Republicans don't join them even if they don't like what Trump is doing.
00:35:21.000 Because they still like what Trump is doing a hell of a lot better than what you're doing.
00:35:25.000 Trump's still a lot closer to the values that I profess than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer or any of the rest of these wild leftists.
00:35:33.000 If Democrats want to know why it is that President Trump can alienate so many members of his own party and still get away with it, one of the reasons is because the left has been so overtly nasty to people who are conservative.
00:35:44.000 So overtly crappy to people of conservative bent. 0.96
00:35:47.000 Again, why in the world would I pay attention to a party whose spokesman Joe Biden is saying that Republicans don't want black people voting? 0.97
00:35:53.000 Hey, Joe Biden actually came out and said that over the weekend.
00:35:55.000 He's going into the Wayback Machine all the way back to 2012 when he suggested that Mitt Romney could not be President of the United States because Republicans want to put y'all back in chains.
00:36:05.000 Now Joe Biden is using that same exact sort of nasty language, and then you wonder why I'd never vote for Joe Biden?
00:36:10.000 This is why I would never vote for Joe Biden, right here.
00:36:14.000 You realize just this past year, in 24 states, the administration's allies have introduced 60 pieces of legislation, or maybe 70 pieces of legislation, to curtail the franchise.
00:36:30.000 Look, that's what these guys are all about, man.
00:36:32.000 Yeah.
00:36:33.000 These Republicans don't want working class people voting. 0.96
00:36:36.000 They don't want black folks voting. 1.00
00:36:38.000 Okay, and he's saying this to Al Sharpton, one of the worst race baiters in the modern history of the United States. 0.97
00:36:42.000 And then you wonder why conservatives aren't going to back Joe Biden or Al Sharpton.
00:36:46.000 Al Sharpton was a Democratic presidential candidate as late as 2004.
00:36:50.000 Of course we're not going to back this party.
00:36:52.000 Of course not.
00:36:52.000 So Jonathan Chait, you want to know why it is that we're ignoring your call to join you?
00:36:57.000 Because the party that you purport to represent has no interest in representing people like me.
00:37:01.000 They hate people like me.
00:37:03.000 They may have temporarily forgotten that hate for five seconds when I've been critical of President Trump when I think he's deserved it.
00:37:08.000 But that hate still exists.
00:37:10.000 I know it does.
00:37:10.000 So does everybody on the right.
00:37:12.000 Everybody on the right knows how Joe Biden feels about them.
00:37:14.000 Everybody who's mildly right of center knows that Joe Biden thinks they're rubes.
00:37:19.000 It's just, it's so, it's so gross that all these folks on the left, their suggestion is that the only way to forestall their anger, the only way to prove your moral mettle, is to join the party that espouses everything you disagree with.
00:37:33.000 You don't see people on the right saying this, by the way.
00:37:34.000 It's so weird.
00:37:35.000 You never see people on the right saying things like, you know, you guys, you really didn't like Hillary Clinton.
00:37:38.000 Why didn't you give President Trump a try?
00:37:40.000 I mean, I assume that you didn't like Hillary Clinton because she was corrupt and because she was off-putting, but I don't assume that you agree with my principles.
00:37:48.000 I mean, you've been voting Democrat your whole life.
00:37:50.000 But here's the point.
00:37:51.000 Folks on the left think that folks on the right only vote for the right because they are morally deficient.
00:37:56.000 And they can't understand why, if there are people who didn't vote for Trump, which they think is morally praiseworthy, those people aren't automatically Democrats.
00:38:02.000 They see every question of politics as a question of character.
00:38:05.000 We don't on the right.
00:38:06.000 We see certain questions of character as questions of character, and certain questions of politics as questions of politics.
00:38:11.000 Okay, so meanwhile,
00:38:13.000 Obviously over the weekend.
00:38:14.000 The other big story is that war broke out once again in Syria.
00:38:18.000 The United States launched some missiles into Syria backed by the UK as well as France.
00:38:24.000 According to CNBC, the Pentagon claimed Saturday the US led attack on Syria set back
00:38:29.000 That's right.
00:38:55.000 A former Pentagon official who's an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is a Washington, D.C., think tank.
00:39:02.000 Well, President Trump, for his part, was very excited about these strikes, which happened late Friday night after Shabbat was just beginning to start on the West Coast.
00:39:10.000 Here was President Trump's tweet.
00:39:12.000 Quote, a perfectly executed strike last night.
00:39:15.000 Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine military.
00:39:19.000 Could not have had a better result.
00:39:20.000 Mission accomplished.
00:39:22.000 Okay, so it was the mission accomplished that got him a little bit in trouble.
00:39:24.000 He then had to tweet out his explanation for why Mission Accomplished, and his tweet was, quote,
00:39:43.000 Okay, all right, sure.
00:39:45.000 And the reason people were upset with the mission accomplished is because, of course, George W. Bush's mission accomplished banner after the original Operation Iraqi Freedom, the original invasion, in three weeks toppled the Saddam Hussein regime, and he put mission accomplished, or his people did, on an aircraft carrier.
00:39:59.000 Apparently it was members of the aircraft carrier who did it, and he was ripped for that for years.
00:40:04.000 Now Trump is purposefully using that phrase.
00:40:06.000 I don't think he did it because he's historically knowledgeable. 0.98
00:40:08.000 I think he did it because he's historically ignorant, but honestly, who cares? 0.92
00:40:11.000 The question is, was the mission accomplished? 0.95
00:40:13.000 And the answer is, we don't know.
00:40:15.000 Because the actual mission here is to stop Bashar Assad from using chemical weapons.
00:40:19.000 We're not going to know the answer.
00:40:20.000 He would have said, mission accomplished in April 2017.
00:40:23.000 And then Bashar Assad used chemical weapons again.
00:40:25.000 Here is the major problem.
00:40:27.000 The United States and the people of the United States do not know what we want our role in the world to be.
00:40:31.000 Do we want our role in the world to be global policemen?
00:40:35.000 Do we want to be
00:40:36.000 I don't actually buy the argument that's been pushed by some folks who are in favor of a larger Syrian intervention, that use of chemical weapons in Syria is somehow a threat to the United States because now it will be more commonly used on the United States.
00:40:55.000 Anybody knows, they fire on U.S.
00:40:57.000 troops, we will go to war with you and we will finish you. 1.00
00:40:59.000 Hey, if the United States wanted to take out Bashar Assad, like finish his regime, the United States, if we wanted to exert the full brunt of our military, the United States could take out Bashar Assad inside of a week.
00:41:09.000 Like legitimately inside of a week.
00:41:10.000 It would take a while to do cleanup, right?
00:41:11.000 Years to do cleanup.
00:41:12.000 But if we wanted to, we could.
00:41:14.000 But the fact is that we're not sure that we want to, and we have this weird bipolar personality disorder when it comes to foreign policy.
00:41:21.000 We don't care what happens in Syria until there's a picture on our TV of a kid choking to death, and then all of a sudden we care what happens in Syria. 0.68
00:41:28.000 Well, we're going to have to figure out pretty quickly what it is that we think our role in the world is.
00:41:32.000 If we want to stop chemical weapons usage, then probably this sort of strike is not going to do it.
00:41:36.000 Probably going to need a larger effort to counter Russian and Iranian influence in the region.
00:41:41.000 And there has to be the possibility of deposing Assad, or at least crippling his capacity to expand his growing dominance inside Syria.
00:41:48.000 He's basically won the Syrian civil war.
00:41:50.000 At this point, it was a mistake for us to pull out of Iraq in 2010, 2011.
00:41:54.000 That led to the rise of ISIS.
00:41:55.000 That also led Bashar Assad to have the excuse to attack Syrian rebels.
00:42:00.000 None of this has been good.
00:42:01.000 But the question as to where we go from here is a definitional one.
00:42:04.000 What do we want America to do in the world?
00:42:06.000 If the goal here is to stop him from using chemical weapons, the threat against him and Russia and Iran has to be great enough that he doesn't do it again.
00:42:12.000 I'm not sure a couple of airstrikes are going to do it.
00:42:14.000 And if we want to ensure that people aren't being gassed en masse, then we're going to actually have to solidify northern Syria, a place where certain progress actually has been made in the face of the Assad regime and despite the intervention of the Turks as well.
00:42:26.000 So, it's important for us to define what exactly our mission is before we declare mission accomplished.
00:42:31.000 Unfortunately, I don't think that the Trump administration has actually done that.
00:42:34.000 I think they say mission accomplished every time they fire a missile. 0.97
00:42:36.000 I think the left complaining about it is similarly ridiculous. 0.77
00:42:39.000 They were the ones talking about pinprick strikes five seconds ago when Obama was president. 0.72
00:42:44.000 Okay, time for some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
00:42:47.000 So I have an awful lot of things that I hate today, but I have a couple of things that I like to start.
00:42:50.000 So, first thing that I like, Jonah Goldberg's new book is going to be coming out very shortly.
00:42:54.000 I believe it comes out later this week.
00:42:56.000 It comes out April 24th, so it comes out a week from tomorrow.
00:43:02.000 It is well worth pre-buying.
00:43:03.000 It's called Suicide of the West, How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy.
00:43:09.000 So I have some significant quibbles
00:43:11.000 With Jonah about his book, but his book is indeed a really good defense of Enlightenment philosophy.
00:43:18.000 There's a lot of this going around lately.
00:43:19.000 Steven Pinker has one that defends Enlightenment philosophy.
00:43:21.000 I've recommended it on the show.
00:43:23.000 Jonah Goldberg is defending Enlightenment philosophy.
00:43:25.000 Jonah's book really is less about defense of the Enlightenment philosophy and more about what happens if we allow that Enlightenment philosophy to fall apart.
00:43:32.000 Now, the quibbles that I have with Jonah, I'm going to say from my own book, which I'm in the middle of writing right now.
00:43:36.000 I'm about two-thirds of the way through it.
00:43:37.000 And it covers a little bit of the same ground, but mostly not the same ground as Jonah's.
00:43:41.000 My big quibble with a lot of the Enlightenment thinking right now is that it seems to assume that history sort of started in 1750 for no reason, that suddenly
00:43:48.000 I don't know.
00:44:04.000 We're looking at the forcible and willing suicide of a civilization that was a brief, unique moment in time.
00:44:11.000 And if we don't preserve those values, then we're going to lose it.
00:44:14.000 Contention with which I wholly agree.
00:44:16.000 Check out Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg.
00:44:18.000 That is worth checking out.
00:44:19.000 Okay, other things that I like.
00:44:20.000 So today, or last night, I guess, there was a Capitals fan who was a little girl who was waiting right behind the glass.
00:44:28.000 And you're going to see one of the players here ensure that she gets a puck. 0.98
00:44:31.000 Apparently, she's not given the puck, and two of the boys around her are.
00:44:36.000 And then finally, he just keeps coming back until she finally gets a puck.
00:44:39.000 It's really cute.
00:44:40.000 Look at this adorable little girl, banging on the glass. 1.00
00:44:44.000 Brett Connolly saw her and just figured, I'm going to make this girl's night, right? 0.99
00:44:48.000 Look, here's the problem with being the shortest kid around.
00:44:51.000 That kid grabbed the first puck from her. 1.00
00:44:53.000 Now look at her face. 1.00
00:44:55.000 Look at this.
00:44:56.000 Is that the saddest?
00:44:58.000 Look at her.
00:44:59.000 She is devastated.
00:45:01.000 So Connelly comes back, and now that kid steals a puck from her! 1.00
00:45:05.000 What are we doing here?
00:45:06.000 Were you raising gentlemen or what?
00:45:09.000 So now Connelly's got to go back, get a third puck.
00:45:12.000 If he could rip that pane of glass out and just hand it to her, he would, which would have been nice because, ay-yi-yi, what are we doing?
00:45:19.000 Connelly! 0.69
00:45:22.000 Hey, that father orchestrated that because only the cute little girl was gonna get it. 0.90
00:45:27.000 He made sure all three of his kids got a puck.
00:45:29.000 Right, so that's good for Connelly.
00:45:31.000 It is true, by the way.
00:45:32.000 There's no question that the dad knows.
00:45:35.000 Okay, so the dad's getting a lot of flack today, actually, because the dad gave the pucks to the other two boys first before he gave to the girl.
00:45:41.000 It's only to say he's sexist.
00:45:42.000 He's sexist.
00:45:43.000 Or maybe he's manipulating, right?
00:45:45.000 Maybe the dad there is grabbing the pucks and he's making sure that all three of his kids actually get pucks and he knows that while the little girl is really excited about it, in two years she's not going to care about hockey in all likelihood, but the boys will and it'll make their lives.
00:45:55.000 So he's going to ensure they get pucks even though Connelly wants to get it to the little girl.
00:46:00.000 Good for Connelly in any case.
00:46:01.000 He's a real gentleman and you like to see when people treat people well that way.
00:46:05.000 Okay, time for some quick things that I hate.
00:46:11.000 So, Bill Maher on HBO, he came out over the weekend and he said that if President Trump was president in 1938, he would have loved Hitler and Mussolini.
00:46:19.000 And by the way, if this was 1938, what do you think Donald Trump, if Donald Trump is president in 1938, before we know about the death camps, okay, I'll give him that, what do you think he would have been saying about Hitler and Mussolini?
00:46:31.000 America first.
00:46:31.000 Strong leaders.
00:46:32.000 Strong leaders.
00:46:34.000 Very strong.
00:46:36.000 Turkey, Philippines.
00:46:37.000 Yes, he would love them.
00:46:38.000 He'd be saying America first, which is what the Nazis in the United States were saying in the 1930s.
00:46:43.000 Okay, so let me point something out.
00:46:45.000 The people who are actually the biggest fans of Mussolini and Hitler at the very beginning were folks on the left.
00:46:49.000 There were a lot of folks on the left who were big fans of fascism.
00:46:51.000 H.G.
00:46:52.000 Wells in Britain, a lot of members of the Roosevelt administration were big fans of Stalin.
00:46:56.000 Big fans of Hitler. 0.99
00:46:57.000 I like that Marge sort of leaves out Stalin right there because the left, of course, was sponsoring Stalin.
00:47:02.000 We're big fans of Stalin.
00:47:04.000 But Mussolini and Hitler. 0.85
00:47:05.000 Read Liberal Fascism by Goldberg, his other great book, and what you will see is that the left was very much ensconced with it.
00:47:11.000 They loved the idea of a centralized power structure that was going to restructure all of civilization and therefore change the nature of man.
00:47:18.000 Mussolini and Hitler were very, very, very popular with the American left.
00:47:22.000 Really popular.
00:47:23.000 And there's a reason that Hitler was labeled Time's Man of the Year, I believe it was in 1938. 0.77
00:47:27.000 So, again, this is a misread of history.
00:47:30.000 Listen, I don't know what Trump would have thought about Mussolini and Hitler in 1938.
00:47:32.000 There were a lot of decent people who thought Mussolini and Hitler weren't that bad in 1938 because they didn't know the first thing about politics, and they didn't care about fascism, and it was before the death camps. 0.70
00:47:42.000 There's this revisionist history that reads back into history.
00:47:44.000 The entire left hated Mussolini and Hitler.
00:47:46.000 Stalin had a treaty with Hitler at this time in 1938.
00:47:49.000 And Mussolini had a treaty with Hitler.
00:47:53.000 All of these people were allied with one another.
00:47:55.000 And the left kind of liked it.
00:47:57.000 Not kind of.
00:47:57.000 Strongly liked these folks.
00:47:59.000 It was only after Hitler launched war in 1938-1939 that the left began to come around.
00:48:05.000 But that took a while.
00:48:06.000 So this is revisionist history at its finest.
00:48:08.000 Okay, other things that I hate.
00:48:12.000 Over the weekend, there was a report that Colin Kaepernick, who is the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, that he had not been offered, actually, the ability to try out for the Seattle Seahawks, and he had not been offered that ability because he still wants to kneel for the national anthem.
00:48:27.000 Now, listen, that is his choice.
00:48:29.000 It's also the choice of the Seattle Seahawks, whether they want to deal with the fallout from that this year, or whether they actually want fans in the stands to be able to come and cheer.
00:48:35.000 Sunny Hostin, who's one of the hosts over at The View, she says that Kaepernick is the greatest of all time, and it's just great what he's doing.
00:48:42.000 The most patriotic thing you can do is exercise your constitutional rights.
00:48:49.000 Colin Kaepernick is the new Muhammad Ali.
00:48:54.000 He is the GOAT.
00:48:56.000 He has put everything on the line for what he believes in, and that's what a true American does.
00:49:00.000 My feeling is that, and there's a lawsuit, let's remember, there's a lawsuit that Colin Kaepernick has filed with the assistance of my friend Mark Garagos, and he has filed a lawsuit saying that the NFL owners have colluded to keep him from playing, and that is exactly what they've done.
00:49:17.000 There have been...
00:49:19.000 Depositions in seven cities this week, all around the country, and the NFL is going to have to pay Colin Kaepernick.
00:49:25.000 I'm going to make that prediction right now because they're keeping him off the field and it is not productive.
00:49:30.000 Okay, they're not keeping him off the field.
00:49:32.000 He is keeping himself off the field because he's the one who's deciding exactly how he wants to act on the field.
00:49:36.000 That is Colin Kaepernick's choice.
00:49:37.000 Now maybe you like what he's doing, maybe you don't.
00:49:38.000 I don't. 0.98
00:49:39.000 I think it's stupid, I think it's counterproductive, and I want to point out that Colin Kaepernick only started the kneeling routine 0.99
00:49:44.000 After he was made a backup. 0.99
00:49:46.000 He was made a non-star, and then he decided to make a name for himself by kneeling.
00:49:50.000 Now, maybe it's not quite as cynical as all that.
00:49:52.000 Maybe he actually believes what he's doing.
00:49:54.000 Maybe that's possible. 0.92
00:49:54.000 Although I will point out, the man has worn socks depicting cops as pigs on them, and that's ignored by the entire left. 0.92
00:50:01.000 But this idea that Colin Kaepernick is some sort of great civil rights hero because he was paid millions and millions and millions of dollars and then he decided that he was going to kneel when he became less popular, I just find that a little bit hard to believe.
00:50:12.000 Maybe I'm just being too cynical.
00:50:13.000 Okay, final thing that I hate. 0.68
00:50:15.000 There is a — I mentioned last week that there was this girl, Lizzie Martinez, who was asked by a school official at Braden River High to cover her nipples with Band-Aids because she showed up to school wearing no bra.
00:50:24.000 And I suggested, maybe if you're a 17-year-old girl and you show up to school wearing a loose shirt with no bra, and your nipples are showing through the shirt, then you might know exactly what you're doing with regard to dudes.
00:50:34.000 That's not a justification of bad male behavior, but it is to suggest that we have dress codes in school for a reason.
00:50:39.000 Well, now she's holding a bra cot with fellow students on Monday.
00:50:42.000 Participating girls can forego their bras and participating boys could place bandages over their shirts.
00:50:47.000 Apparently, this is now a civil rights issue.
00:50:48.000 She said it's a form of silent protest that speaks not only to what happened at the school, but also what happens around the country.
00:50:53.000 She says besides the incident on Monday, I think it's been an ongoing issue that women have these standards they have to supposedly live up to, even with the Women's Rights March, the Me Too movement.
00:51:01.000 I think it's all very relevant.
00:51:03.000 Okay, you are not part of the MeToo movement.
00:51:04.000 You were not sexually harassed or assaulted.
00:51:06.000 You weren't, I'm sorry.
00:51:07.000 You went to school, dressed inappropriately, the administrators asked you not to dress inappropriately, end of story.
00:51:12.000 That is perfectly within their rights.
00:51:13.000 If you showed up wearing no shirt at all, and then the administrator said, you know what, that might be a problem, would that also be part of the MeToo movement? 1.00
00:51:20.000 So unbelievably stupid. 1.00
00:51:23.000 So unbelievably stupid. 1.00
00:51:24.000 But of course, we have to be outraged about everything, including the dumbest things on planet Earth. 1.00
00:51:30.000 If we're not outraged about things, then I guess that, you know, what else are we going to do with our lives if we're not outraged about dumb things like 17-year-old girls trying to not wear bras to school and then claiming they're victims when the teachers say, put a bra on? 0.89
00:51:43.000 OK, so we'll be back here tomorrow.
00:51:44.000 We didn't have time for Federalist Paper today, but hopefully we will tomorrow.
00:51:47.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:51:47.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:51:52.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
00:51:55.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
00:51:56.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
00:51:58.000 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
00:52:00.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.
00:52:01.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
00:52:03.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
00:52:04.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
00:52:07.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.