The Ben Shapiro Show - February 12, 2018


The Media Love Them Some North Korea | Ep. 473

Topics
media and North Gore cheerleading squad Kim Yo-jong media scrutiny media coverage of North Gore incest and moral standards
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Donald Trump Michelle Obama Rob Portman Barack Obama Kim Jong-un Mike Pence John Kelly Katie Plattel Valentine Hillary Clinton Jonathan Haidt Fred Warmbier Michael Moll Kim Yo-jong Paul Ryan Stephen Walter Plattel Robert De Niro Michael Knowles Walter Durante Homer Simpson and 47 more
Corruption, Chaos, and Cretinism | Ep. 472 Making Wakanda Great Again | Ep. 474

Episode Stats


Length

54 minutes

Words per minute

194.38

Word count

10,636

Sentence count

806

Harmful content

Misogyny

11

sentences flagged

Toxicity

19

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The media fawn over an evil dictatorship. President Trump presents a budget that has no fiscal limits whatsoever. Plus, the worst portraits in human history are unveiled at the Smithsonian of Barack and Michelle Obama. Plus, Jeff Flake criticizes President Trump for making overtures to dictators like Vladimir Putin and calls them un-American . Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator and writer who has been critical of the President of the United States for many years. He is a regular contributor to CNN and other media outlets. He is also a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard and has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and the New York Post. He has been a frequent guest on Fox News, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, CBS and other network news outlets, and is an avid collector of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories. His latest book, Conspiracy Theories is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. You can also get a copy of the book for only $99.99. by clicking here. If you like what you hear on The Ben Shapiro Show, you'll love it! Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes and leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Thanks for listening and reviewing the show! I'll be looking out for your thoughts on the show in next week's next episode of the Ben Shapiro show on Tuesday, Ben Shapiro's "The Dark Side of the Street." and all future episodes on The FiveThirtyEight Podcasts. Subscribe and subscribe to Ben Shapiro Podcasts on Podchaser and other social media platforms! Thank you so you can be a supporter of the show. Ben's work is getting the highest quality and the most authentic, high-quality journalism in the world. I'm looking forward to hearing from Ben Shapiro on social media! Ben is a real Ben Shapiro. Thank you Ben Shapiro, too! and I'm listening to you, too Ben Shapiro and I hope you're listening to the best of Ben Shapiro s work, too much more than that, right here, right now! . . . Ben Shapiro Outtro: - The Dark Side Of This Is My Name is My Name? by , is a podcast by Ben Shapiro: The White House Podcast by . and in this episode is on this episode of

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 The media fawn over an evil dictatorship.
00:00:02.000 President Trump presents a budget that has no fiscal limits whatsoever.
00:00:05.000 Plus, the worst portraits in human history are unveiled at the Smithsonian of Barack and Michelle Obama.
00:00:10.000 They're truly incredible.
00:00:11.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:12.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:18.000 I can't wait to show you these portraits because they truly are amazing, the portraits of Michelle and Barack Obama.
00:00:23.000 Michelle's portrait looks nothing like Michelle and Barack Obama's.
00:00:25.000 It was apparently taken in the ivy at Wrigley Field.
00:00:28.000 He's legitimately sitting in the middle of like poison ivy with flowers in it in a chair.
00:00:33.000 It's so weird and I can't wait to show it to you.
00:00:35.000 But you're going to have to wait for me to show it to you because first,
00:00:37.000 I want to say thank you to my sponsors over at Helix Sleep.
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00:02:03.000 Okay, so the Olympics were happening over the weekend.
00:02:07.000 And you would think, well, this would be a good time to point out that they're happening in South Korea, the Winter Olympics.
00:02:12.000 It would be a good time to point out that South Korea is a wonderful place and North Korea is, to borrow some language from President Trump, a bleephole.
00:02:19.000 It is not a nice country. 0.75
00:02:20.000 It is the worst country maybe on the face of the earth.
00:02:23.000 Between the years 1994 and 1997, somewhere between 350,000 and 3.4 million
00:02:29.000 There's about two decades ago in mass starvation.
00:02:34.000 They still have mass gulags.
00:02:36.000 They still, in the 1980s, had concentration camps where they would legitimately torture or murder people.
00:02:41.000 They still do in some places of the country. 0.65
00:02:43.000 If you do not do what the regime wants you to do, they will kill you.
00:02:47.000 They killed—the regime, Kim Jong-un recently killed his—it was brother-in-law, I think, that he murdered.
00:02:53.000 Or his uncle?
00:02:54.000 It was both, actually.
00:02:55.000 His uncle he killed by tossing him to dogs, and his brother-in-law I believe he murdered in a VX attack.
00:03:00.000 He actually used a weapon of mass destruction in a public place.
00:03:02.000 He sent an assassin to basically put a handkerchief filled with a deadly spore over the guy's face and killed him outright.
00:03:10.000 Well, that would be an example of a bad country.
00:03:14.000 What is not an example of a bad country is the United States.
00:03:16.000 And if we're going to talk about people who are forwarding the aspirations of bad countries, you don't actually start with President Trump.
00:03:21.000 So Jeff Flake, who's the senator from Arizona, has been very critical of the president of the United States because he says that President Trump has said ridiculous things about the press.
00:03:28.000 I agree.
00:03:29.000 He said that President Trump has made overtures to regimes like Vladimir Putin's, which has been true more in theory than in practice.
00:03:35.000 Here's Jeff Flake going after Trump for giving support to dictators.
00:03:38.000 Then I'm going to show you who actually gives support to dictators.
00:03:40.000 I think the president needs to stop calling Democrats or Republicans or others who don't stand or applaud at every line that he has, that they're un-American.
00:03:51.000 He also used that term.
00:03:53.000 Or treasonous.
00:03:55.000 Words matter.
00:03:56.000 And when he talks about fake news, for example, I gave another speech where I talked about how that gives aid and comfort to authoritarians around the world who are now labeling their opposition or dismissing real dissent as fake news.
00:04:14.000 So those things matter.
00:04:16.000 OK, the reason that I'm showing this is because the media—this has been the media line, right?
00:04:19.000 Chris Cuomo yesterday tweeted out that the media have been under assault from President Trump.
00:04:24.000 And the reason people don't trust the media is because the media have been ripped apart by the president of the United States.
00:04:28.000 This, of course, is the typical line, is that dictators all over the world are taking their cues from President Trump because President Trump is so unfriendly to the press.
00:04:35.000 OK, now let's talk about why people actually hate the press.
00:04:37.000 The real reason people hate the press is because the press are a bunch of sycophants when it comes to some of the worst dictators on planet Earth.
00:04:42.000 Not everyone in the press.
00:04:44.000 Jack Tapper at CNN, notably, has been ripping other members of the press for kissing up to the North Korean regime.
00:04:48.000 But the sister of Kim Jong-un arrived in South Korea for the Olympics, and she was giving some pretty spectacular side-eye to Mike Pence. 0.98
00:04:56.000 And because Mike Pence is evil, as we all know from how he hates gay people, apparently, Mike Pence has to be given side-eye. 0.98
00:05:01.000 If you don't give Mike Pence side-eye, this means that you are a bad person. 0.99
00:05:04.000 But if you do give Mike Pence side-eye, you can go back home to a regime that routinely murders thousands of people, that shoots deserters, that attempts to take everyone who tries to make trade with the outside world and kills them, and the media will just kiss her rear. 0.96
00:05:17.000 So, here's CNN's headline. 0.64
00:05:19.000 Kim Jong-un's sister is stealing the show at the Winter Olympics.
00:05:22.000 Why?
00:05:23.000 Because she's there.
00:05:24.000 And she's smiling.
00:05:25.000 Ooh.
00:05:26.000 OK, here's another headline.
00:05:27.000 This is all from mainstream media outlets.
00:05:29.000 Let's do some more of these headlines.
00:05:30.000 This is from the Wall Street Journal.
00:05:34.000 OK, we do actually, I believe, have some actual film of the tweet squad, do we not?
00:05:42.000 So here's what the tweets of the cheer squad, rather.
00:05:44.000 Here's what the cheer squad looked like from North Korea.
00:05:46.000 And the media were just over the moon about this.
00:05:49.000 This was so glorious.
00:05:50.000 Now, I want to point something out.
00:05:52.000 We've just had two full years of the media explaining that Mike Pence and Donald Trump want to turn women in the United States into refugees from the Handmaid's Tale.
00:06:00.000 In the Handmaid's Tale, women are forced to wear red uniforms, procreate at the whim of the dictatorship, and do everything the dictators tell them to do. 1.00
00:06:08.000 Then, there's the North Korean cheer squad, which wears red uniforms, gets pregnant and has abortions whenever the regime tells them to. 0.58
00:06:17.000 We're good to go.
00:06:50.000 OK, so there you have it.
00:06:52.000 And the media love the North Korean cheerleading squad.
00:06:54.000 Sure, if they don't cheer properly, they get shot in the head back home, so that's excellent.
00:06:58.000 But this is something the media have always loved.
00:07:00.000 They love the idea of human beings as cogs in a vast machine.
00:07:03.000 I remember back during the, what was it, the 2010 Beijing Olympics?
00:07:06.000 Was it 2010 when they did the Olympics in Beijing?
00:07:08.000 I can't remember now.
00:07:09.000 I believe it was.
00:07:10.000 And when they did that Olympics, the opening ceremonies were thousands of people marching in unison and waving their arms in unison and it truly was an amazing spectacle.
00:07:19.000 And the media was just excited about it because whenever people just become little widgets to be manipulated by the state, the media
00:07:26.000 Oh my goodness, look at the coordination. 0.62
00:07:27.000 Look at the magical coordination of all the people.
00:07:41.000 Yeah, well, you know what?
00:07:42.000 I'd clap in time, too, if they were threatening to shoot my family back home if I didn't clap properly and smile properly for the cameras because of the Juche, which is what they call the regime in North Korea.
00:07:52.000 They have this philosophy of Juche, which suggests that there's a cult of personality worship for the great leaders in North Korea.
00:07:58.000 Here are some more headlines from the media celebrating all of this, of course.
00:08:02.000 So, we can go back to, we have the Wall Street Journal.
00:08:04.000 This one is from Reuters, I believe.
00:08:05.000 Amid Olympic detente, Pence snubs North Koreans and visits PyeongChang.
00:08:10.000 Oh, how dare Mike Pence snub the North Koreans?
00:08:12.000 Is he supposed to be nice to the lady?
00:08:14.000 He didn't stand for the North Korean national anthem.
00:08:17.000 So, according to the left media, it is good when Americans don't stand for the national anthem, but it is bad when Mike Pence doesn't stand for the North Korean national anthem.
00:08:25.000 You get that?
00:08:26.000 The American national anthem standing for the freest country in the history of the world?
00:08:29.000 Good when American citizens kneel for it. 0.83
00:08:31.000 Bad when Mike Pence doesn't stand for the anthem for a country that is oppressing millions of its own people, 20 million of its own people at current count.
00:08:38.000 More headlines from the media.
00:08:40.000 I mean, there are just tons of these.
00:08:41.000 This is from Politico.
00:08:42.000 Fred Warmbier criticizes North Korean Olympic spirit.
00:08:45.000 How dare Fred Warmbier criticize the North Korean Olympic spirit?
00:08:50.000 Oh, you mean just because his son was murdered by the North Koreans? 0.96
00:08:52.000 Remember Otto Warmbier? 0.98
00:08:53.000 He was the college student who traveled over to North Korea, idiotically, and then tried to supposedly steal a poster from a hotel room, and they literally beat him to death.
00:09:01.000 I mean, they beat him so badly that by the time he was returned to his parents at home, he died in the hospital just days later. 0.91
00:09:07.000 But how dare Fred Warmbier criticize the North Korean Olympic spirit?
00:09:10.000 Just terrible.
00:09:11.000 Just awful for him to do that.
00:09:13.000 And that wasn't the full extent of the media treatment here.
00:09:16.000 Okay, this one was
00:09:19.000 This one was from BuzzFeed.
00:09:20.000 The only decent one was from BuzzFeed, which shows you how crazy things are, saying, When BuzzFeed is the voice of reason, you know something has gone intensely wrong with the moral fabric inside the
00:09:35.000 American media.
00:09:36.000 And it gets even worse.
00:09:38.000 In just a second, I'm going to read to you some of the accounts of Kim Jong-un's sister.
00:09:43.000 The worshipful accounts of Kim Jong-un's sister, because it's pretty astonishing.
00:09:46.000 We're going to get to that in just one second.
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00:11:05.000 Stamps.com, you use that promo code Shapiro as well.
00:11:07.000 So that was not the extent of the media's fawning coverage of North Korea.
00:11:10.000 So here is the lead from CNN.
00:11:18.000 If diplomatic dance were an event at the Winter Olympics, Kim Jong-un's younger sister would be favored to win gold.
00:11:23.000 With a smile, a handshake, and a warm message in South Korea's presidential guestbook, Kim Yo-jong has strung a cord with the public just one day into the Pyeongchang Games.
00:11:32.000 I hope Pyongyang and Seoul get closer in our people's hearts and move forward the future of prosperous unification, she said in her guestbook message referring to the capitals of North and South Korea.
00:11:40.000 By the way, that's not a nice message.
00:11:42.000 If you think that's a nice message, it's because you don't know anything about North Korea.
00:11:44.000 It has been part of North Korea's regime.
00:11:47.000 It's been part of their stated goal since literally the first day it was initiated.
00:11:52.000 The stated goal of North Korea is reunification of South Korea and North Korea under the auspices of the Kim family.
00:11:57.000 This has been their goal since the foundation of the North Korean regime in 1950.
00:12:02.000 The idea that this was some sort of overture, oh yeah, let's get together and have a republic, a federated republic.
00:12:07.000 Nonsense.
00:12:08.000 Absolute sheer nonsense. 0.97
00:12:09.000 The Kim family knows.
00:12:10.000 The minute they break down that wall between North and South Korea, every person in North Korea rushes into South Korea. 0.84
00:12:15.000 But listen, I mean, listen to this coverage.
00:12:17.000 It's just insane.
00:12:18.000 Seen by some as her brother's answer to American first daughter Ivanka Trump, Kim at 30 is not only a powerful member of Kim Jong-un's kitchen cabinet, but also a foil to the perception of North Korea's antiquated militaristic.
00:12:28.000 That's not a perception.
00:12:29.000 They are antiquated and militaristic.
00:12:31.000 Have you ever seen those photos at nighttime from space of North Korea and South Korea?
00:12:35.000 South Korea completely lit up, North Korea completely dark, except for Pyongyang, the capital.
00:12:40.000 There's literally one light there, which is probably the presidential palace.
00:12:44.000 I love that they say that she's the answer to Ivanka Trump.
00:12:46.000 Last time I checked, Ivanka Trump isn't forwarding the deaths of tens of thousands of people one day at a time.
00:12:52.000 Last I checked, for all of the things people say about Ivanka Trump, she isn't standing up for her evil brother who's sitting around trying to launch nuclear weapons at people around the world.
00:13:02.000 Or planning to do so. 0.98
00:13:04.000 Just ridiculous. 0.81
00:13:05.000 They bury—this—paragraph 5 is finally when CNN notes that, by the way, North Korea might be a bad place. 0.67
00:13:23.000 But don't worry, CNN is there to make sure that everybody is happy about it.
00:13:26.000 Here's Reuters.
00:13:27.000 In her first appearance on the global stage, Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, had her every move closely scrutinized.
00:13:45.000 Crowds applauded as she stood for the South Korean anthem during the opening ceremony for the start of the Winter Olympic Games, while her big smiles and relaxed manner left a largely positive impression on the South Korean public.
00:13:55.000 My goodness.
00:13:56.000 I mean, this is Walter Duranty-quality stuff.
00:13:58.000 For folks who don't know, Walter Duranty was a reporter for The New York Times, and he famously traveled in, I think it was 1930, 31, over to Russia, where he promptly said that everyone in Russia was doing great.
00:14:08.000 There was no starvation.
00:14:09.000 Rumors of mass starvation of the Holodomor in the Ukraine were vastly overstated, and there was nothing like that happening.
00:14:17.000 That was a lie.
00:14:18.000 Tens of millions of people were dying in mass starvations, thanks to the Stalin regime.
00:14:21.000 The New York Times
00:14:23.000 Covered it that way, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for it, which is demonstrative of how corrupt the media are.
00:14:28.000 The media were racing to see who could provide the most fawning coverage of the North Korean sister. 0.98
00:14:33.000 Here's The Washington Post, quote,
00:14:45.000 But the North Korean first sister had none of the hallmarks of power and wealth that Koreans south of the divide have come to expect.
00:14:50.000 In looks-obsessed South Korea, many 20-something women list plastic surgery and brand-name bags as life goals. 1.00
00:14:55.000 Most of all, Kim Yo-jong was an enigma.
00:14:57.000 Just like them, but nothing like them.
00:14:59.000 A woman with a sphinx-like smile who gave nothing away during her three-day Olympic-related visit to South Korea as brother Kim Jong-un's special envoy.
00:15:06.000 Wow.
00:15:07.000 Wow.
00:15:08.000 I mean, the level of fawning from the Washington Post there is so extreme, it's crazy.
00:15:13.000 I mean, that is just—imagine they write that about Eva Braun and you're basically coming closer to what this actually is.
00:15:19.000 Eva Braun at the 1936 Olympic Games, her shockingly blonde hair, her beautiful good looks, her glamour style.
00:15:26.000 My goodness.
00:15:29.000 Again, the media have a certain love for Marxist dictatorships that they certainly do not have even for, I'd say, the American system of government in some ways.
00:15:38.000 They would never cover an emissary from America that way if they were the foreign press.
00:15:42.000 I mean, it's pretty incredible, actually.
00:15:45.000 There is something else going on here, obviously, and that is that the Trump administration is at direct odds with the North Korean regime.
00:15:51.000 And the Trump derangement syndrome that has arisen in the media is so crazy that Mike Pence being in South Korea, the Trump administration being the president, Trump being the president,
00:16:01.000 And that means the enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if that means my enemy—the enemy of my enemy is actually an evil, repressive North Korean dictatorship that slaughters tens of thousands of its own people on a regular basis. 0.82
00:16:11.000 By the way, if you actually want to help, if you actually want to help and do something about this, my friend Bethany Mandel is a big fundraiser for the Free North Korean Charity.
00:16:20.000 And you can help.
00:16:22.000 It's liberty in North Korea.
00:16:23.000 This is one of the ways that you can actually help smuggle people
00:16:27.000 If you're in the media and your life has led you to the point where you are propping up some of the worst people on planet Earth because you hate Donald Trump that much, let me suggest that you go back and repent your sins.
00:16:52.000 It's one of the things I hate most about politics. 0.72
00:16:54.000 This enemy of my enemy is my friend nonsense.
00:16:57.000 It's just not true.
00:16:58.000 I hated it when it was the Trump campaign doing it with the alt-right during the campaign.
00:17:01.000 I hate it when it's the American media doing it with North Korea.
00:17:04.000 It's worse when it's North Korea, because that's an actual foreign foe. 1.00
00:17:07.000 Like, the alt-right is a relatively small force in American politics.
00:17:10.000 They've been marginalized, I think, at this point, despite the original attempts by the Trump campaign to integrate them into the Trump campaign.
00:17:16.000 I think they've been marginalized by this point, thank God.
00:17:18.000 But I think North Korea, obviously, is a major foreign threat.
00:17:21.000 And what they've been doing lately—firing nuclear-tipped missiles, or at least dropping nuclear bombs in nuclear tests, firing long-range missiles—this stuff is extraordinarily destabilizing.
00:17:31.000 And when the media are cheering them on, it makes the North Korean regime feel that if they keep up the pressure on the United States, eventually the United States will grant them more concessions.
00:17:39.000 Understand, the North Korean economy is almost entirely dependent on infusions of foreign capital.
00:17:44.000 Those infusions of foreign capital happen because of blackmail.
00:17:47.000 The reason the North Koreans keep firing off long-range ballistic missiles is because they want the West to come to the table and then give them money as a payoff. 0.74
00:17:53.000 They did this in the 90s with Bill Clinton.
00:17:55.000 They did it in the 2000s with George W. Bush.
00:17:57.000 They've done it with the Chinese. 1.00
00:17:58.000 And now they're trying again with the West.
00:18:00.000 Trump so far has not been willing to do that, which is, of course, the right move.
00:18:03.000 We need to starve them out.
00:18:04.000 The sanctions we've placed on them are not nearly harsh enough.
00:18:06.000 Nicholas Eberstadt has an excellent column over at Commentary magazine, very long piece, comprehensive piece, about the situation in North Korea.
00:18:13.000 What he suggests is that we make the sanctions significantly harsher on North Korea.
00:18:17.000 That's exactly right.
00:18:19.000 But the fact that the media are granting all sorts of credibility to a regime simply because that regime is anti-Trump is both morally dubious and ethically astonishing.
00:18:29.000 It's truly amazing.
00:18:29.000 I mean, the Washington Post slogan is, democracy dies in darkness.
00:18:33.000 Perhaps the slogan for the entire media right now ought to be, North Koreans die in darkness, because while they are glowing about Kim Jong-un's little sister, they are 1.00
00:18:44.000 They're ignoring the fate of the people who are being slaughtered en masse in North Korea. 0.88
00:18:50.000 It's just disgusting and horrifying.
00:18:52.000 Well, in other news, there's a situation over at the White House.
00:18:56.000 The situation over at the White House continues to be relatively serious with regard to Rob Porter.
00:19:00.000 So as you recall, Rob Porter was one of the top staffers at the White House, and Rob Porter was recently forced to resign.
00:19:07.000 Last week he was forced to resign after allegations came out that he had beat two of his ex-wives.
00:19:11.000 We're good to go.
00:19:31.000 We wish him well.
00:19:57.000 He worked very hard.
00:19:59.000 I found out about it recently, and I was surprised by it.
00:20:03.000 But we certainly wish him well.
00:20:05.000 It's obviously a tough time for him.
00:20:09.000 He did a very good job when he was in the White House, and we hope he has a wonderful career.
00:20:16.000 Hopefully, he will have a great career ahead of him.
00:20:20.000 It was very sad when we heard about it.
00:20:23.000 And certainly he's also very sad.
00:20:26.000 Now he also, as you probably know, he says he's innocent.
00:20:31.000 And I think you have to remember that.
00:20:33.000 He said very strongly yesterday that he's innocent.
00:20:37.000 So you'll have to talk to him about that.
00:20:39.000 But we absolutely wish him well.
00:20:41.000 Trump reiterated this in a tweet.
00:20:43.000 He tweeted out this over the weekend.
00:20:46.000 There's a serious problem with this tweet.
00:20:47.000 There's a serious problem with...
00:21:01.000 With Trump's angle, which I think has some serious moral holes in it.
00:21:04.000 I'm going to discuss all of that in just a second.
00:21:06.000 First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Policy Genius.
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00:22:10.000 Okay, so, President Trump makes these comments about Rob Porter.
00:22:17.000 Now, I know that there are a lot of people who are Republicans, who are conservatives, who are unhappy with me that I disagree with the President on this.
00:22:23.000 The reason that I disagree with the President on this is because I am not sitting in a court of law.
00:22:28.000 I am not a jury.
00:22:29.000 Neither are you.
00:22:30.000 If you think that it is your job to grant innocence until proven guilty, if that is your job just as a citizen, not as a juror, if your job as a citizen is innocence until proven guilty, I'd want to know why you were chanting, lock her up, along with Donald Trump.
00:22:42.000 Hillary Clinton was not indicted or tried for any crime, nor was she convicted of any crime.
00:22:46.000 Yet most Republicans feel that Hillary Clinton committed a crime.
00:22:49.000 You know why?
00:22:49.000 Because she committed a crime.
00:22:51.000 She did commit a crime. 0.99
00:22:51.000 And I can say she committed a crime. 0.99
00:22:53.000 You know who else committed a crime?
00:22:54.000 O.J.
00:22:54.000 Simpson.
00:22:54.000 He was not convicted of any crime.
00:22:56.000 He lost his civil suit.
00:22:57.000 Not the same thing as being convicted of a crime.
00:22:59.000 There are lots of people who have committed crimes and gotten away with it.
00:23:02.000 There are lots of people who should have been indicted, who should have been tried, who should have gone to jail, and were not.
00:23:08.000 There was a restraining order taken out against Rob Porter.
00:23:11.000 Police didn't press charges because the ex-wives apparently didn't want to press charges. 1.00
00:23:14.000 But the idea that simply by declaring you're innocent, suddenly you are innocent, that obviously is not true in any real sense.
00:23:21.000 Even more than that, there's a real inconsistency to President Trump here.
00:23:24.000 President Trump says, you know, we need innocence until proven guilty.
00:23:28.000 This is the same guy who said that Barack Obama was born in Kenya without any evidence and maintained that for years.
00:23:33.000 This is the same guy who said that Ted Cruz was ineligible for the presidency and that Ted Cruz's father was complicit in the murder of JFK with no evidence.
00:23:42.000 This is the same guy who still says that the Central Park Five are guilty despite DNA evidence exonerating the Central Park Five.
00:23:48.000 President Trump is not exactly famous for not jumping to conclusions.
00:23:52.000 Every time there's a terror attack, President Trump, I think rightly, jumps to the conclusion, in many cases, that if it looks like an Islamic terror attack, it's probably an Islamic terror attack. 0.98
00:24:00.000 He doesn't say innocent until proven guilty in those cases.
00:24:04.000 President Trump is not famous for innocence until proven guilty.
00:24:06.000 You know why?
00:24:07.000 Because in real life, in the non-judicial world, innocent until proven guilty is not the standard.
00:24:11.000 The question is, how do you evaluate the evidence in front of you?
00:24:13.000 In this case, we have two ex-wives and an ex-girlfriend who all testify that Rob Porter is abusive.
00:24:18.000 We have a picture of the ex-wife with a black eye.
00:24:20.000 We have a restraining order that was taken out.
00:24:22.000 And we have divorce papers in which this stuff was alleged.
00:24:24.000 And it's not just women saying stuff.
00:24:27.000 But there's something weird about how President Trump tweets this and how he approaches this.
00:24:31.000 President Trump seems to side with everybody who's alleged to have sexually abused someone or sexually assaulted everyone.
00:24:37.000 He sides against everyone who commits any sort of crime.
00:24:39.000 There's a pattern here.
00:24:40.000 Bill Clinton, before Donald Trump, was bringing women to Bill Clinton's 1.00
00:24:46.000 You know who sides with Roy Moore and does the, well he says he's innocent routine?
00:24:49.000 It was Donald Trump.
00:25:05.000 Who was it that was siding with Roger Ailes and saying he didn't believe any of the allegations about Roger Ailes?
00:25:09.000 It was Donald Trump.
00:25:10.000 Bill O'Reilly?
00:25:10.000 It was still Donald Trump.
00:25:12.000 President Trump has a long— Mike Tyson.
00:25:15.000 Donald Trump, right?
00:25:15.000 Mike Tyson, when he was alleged to have committed rape, Donald Trump has said that he doesn't think that that actually happened.
00:25:20.000 Now, President Trump has a long history of standing by the sides of men who are accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment and sexual allegations and then saying, they say they're innocent, therefore they're innocent.
00:25:31.000 But he's never held the same standard with regard to any other crime.
00:25:34.000 Which I think betrays a hole in the man's moral character.
00:25:37.000 I think that you ought to use the same standards of evidence for any of this stuff, whether you're talking murder, or whether you're talking financial irregularities, or whether you're talking sexual assault and sexual harassment.
00:25:47.000 If someone provides a credible account with some supporting evidence, then that is enough to at least say that maybe the guy's guilty.
00:25:55.000 Proclaiming innocent?
00:25:56.000 There's not a criminal in prison who doesn't say he's innocent, right?
00:25:58.000 This is a joke in the Shawshank Redemption.
00:26:00.000 Right, that everybody says they're innocent?
00:26:02.000 The reason is because if you are convicted of a crime, of course you're going to maintain that you're innocent.
00:26:05.000 If you're brought up in front of a judge, of course you're going to say that you're innocent.
00:26:08.000 Everybody who's ever been accused of anything says that they're innocent.
00:26:10.000 Anthony Weiner says that he was hacked originally before he admits that he was sending pictures of his junk to random women on the internet.
00:26:17.000 Everyone says they're innocent.
00:26:18.000 Donald—and here's the real key.
00:26:19.000 Donald Trump says he's innocent, right?
00:26:20.000 Donald Trump has been accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment by a multiplicity of women, and he says, I'm innocent, therefore all the women are lying.
00:26:27.000 So he'd be in a hard spot if he said Rob Porter is probably guilty of something, because then people would say, well, you know, you have allegations just like Rob Porter does.
00:26:34.000 Why shouldn't we believe the women? 0.99
00:26:36.000 Trump has never really had to answer for that.
00:26:38.000 The left keeps trying to get him on that.
00:26:40.000 And this is just the latest iteration of that.
00:26:42.000 That said, the president could just say, listen, Rob Porter left.
00:26:46.000 There were serious allegations made against him.
00:26:48.000 End of story.
00:26:49.000 And if they say, what about the allegations made against you?
00:26:50.000 He says, I don't know what happened with Rob Porter.
00:26:52.000 I do know what happened with me because I was there.
00:26:54.000 I didn't do any of this stuff.
00:26:55.000 Now, did he do some of this stuff?
00:26:57.000 I'm sure Trump did some of this stuff.
00:26:58.000 OK, I said this during the campaign.
00:26:59.000 The idea that Donald Trump is a man of moral rectitude when it comes to the treatment of women, I think is belied by his history.
00:27:06.000 I just don't think that's the case.
00:27:08.000 And does that mean he's a bad president?
00:27:10.000 No.
00:27:10.000 Does that mean that he's doing a lot of stuff that I like?
00:27:12.000 I mean, he's doing a lot of stuff that I like.
00:27:14.000 Again, does that mean no one should have ever voted for him?
00:27:17.000 I'm not making that case.
00:27:17.000 I am making the case that President Trump, in defending Rob Porter here by saying he's innocent, or he says he's innocent, is making really a case for himself.
00:27:25.000 And that's not something pleasant.
00:27:26.000 And it's not really about Trump.
00:27:28.000 It's about you.
00:27:29.000 What standard do you use for evaluation of evidence?
00:27:32.000 I don't care about what Trump does, right?
00:27:33.000 Trump's the president of the United States.
00:27:34.000 He's there to do a job.
00:27:35.000 He's either doing it or he's not doing it.
00:27:37.000 I do think that it degrades the moral standard when the president of the United States makes light of serious allegations.
00:27:42.000 But you, how do you do it?
00:27:43.000 Because you can do both things.
00:27:44.000 You can say Trump's a great president.
00:27:45.000 You can love the guy.
00:27:47.000 You can say you love everything that he's doing.
00:27:49.000 I like some of the things that he's doing.
00:27:50.000 But it is still incumbent on you to make a moral decision about what behavior you're going to tolerate and what standard you hold people to.
00:27:56.000 And I'm not even talking about Trump's behavior.
00:27:58.000 I'm talking about Rob Porter's behavior.
00:27:59.000 If you like Trump, does that mean you have to defend Trump's defense of Rob Porter?
00:28:02.000 I don't think so.
00:28:04.000 I don't think so.
00:28:05.000 I think that you are allowed to say what is bad and what is good.
00:28:08.000 Now, instead of doing that, because people can't stand cognitive dissonance, a bunch of members of the Trump administration, or former members of the Trump administration, are blaming everybody except for John Kelly, who apparently knew about this and let it go with Rob Porter, and Don McGahn, the White House counsel.
00:28:21.000 Sebastian Gorka, the former member of the Trump administration, he came out and he blamed the CIA bureaucracy.
00:28:27.000 Believe it or not.
00:28:47.000 Thank you.
00:29:03.000 Okay, this is what I hate, is that now the deep state has become an excuse for everything.
00:29:06.000 So John Kelly apparently knew some stuff, so did Don McGahn, and now we're going to blame the deep state for everything.
00:29:11.000 When you are blaming something as the bogeyman for everything, that's always a dangerous business.
00:29:16.000 The reality is people are responsible for their actions.
00:29:18.000 Should John Kelly be ousted over the Rob Porter thing?
00:29:20.000 That's up to President Trump.
00:29:22.000 He didn't commit a crime here, but it's up to President Trump to figure out whether Kelly has compromised his administration to such an extent that he should go.
00:29:28.000 My guess is, I doubt it.
00:29:30.000 Is this a serious black mark on Kelly's record?
00:29:31.000 I think that it is.
00:29:32.000 But, you know, a black mark doesn't mean that you necessarily have to leave the administration.
00:29:36.000 That said, Kelly should be defending his behavior here.
00:29:40.000 There's another problem here, too.
00:29:41.000 And that other problem is that Republicans feel compelled to say nice things in front of President Trump because they're afraid of alienating the president because he is so thin-skinned.
00:29:50.000 So, for example, Rand Paul came out and he was struggling to avoid condemning President Trump.
00:29:54.000 That's no shock.
00:29:55.000 Again, I think that a lot of Republicans are struggling to do this.
00:29:57.000 That is not your job.
00:29:58.000 President Trump is a big boy.
00:30:00.000 He's a 71-year-old man.
00:30:01.000 He's fully capable of accepting a little bit of heat for this stuff.
00:30:05.000 And if he feels that you are attacking him too strenuously, that's really on him.
00:30:08.000 That's really his problem.
00:30:10.000 I don't think Republicans ought to discard their own moral standard in favor of appeasing the president's feelings.
00:30:17.000 OK, in just a second, I want to talk about some of the worst portraits in human history, plus Republicans spending like drunken sailors.
00:30:23.000 But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Wink.
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00:31:40.000 Okay, so I would break on Facebook normally, but I'm not going to because I definitely want to show you these actual graphics.
00:31:43.000 It would be a pity not to do this visually.
00:32:07.000 Over at the Smithsonian, they have the National Portrait Gallery.
00:32:10.000 The National Portrait Gallery has pictures of all the presidents and pictures of all the first ladies.
00:32:13.000 And they have now unveiled the pictures for Barack and Michelle Obama.
00:32:17.000 So, here is the picture of Barack Obama.
00:32:20.000 You see it there on the left.
00:32:21.000 There is Barack Obama, and he is actually sitting there in a chair that's apparently covered by leaves.
00:32:27.000 He's getting poison ivy.
00:32:29.000 He's being eaten by—this is like Little Shop of Horrors.
00:32:32.000 He's actually being eaten by the foliage and looking very serious.
00:32:36.000 And of course, this immediately made me think of Homer Simpson backing into the bushes.
00:32:40.000 That is not, of course, the best version of this.
00:32:41.000 Shoshana Weissman over on Twitter had the best version of this portrait.
00:32:46.000 Here's what it looked like.
00:32:49.000 Yeah, there it is.
00:32:53.000 So there's Barack Obama just sitting there in the bush.
00:32:54.000 It makes perfect sense, because the truth is that, aside from Obama's talk, the president of the United States was not a particularly useful guy, particularly on foreign policy.
00:33:03.000 He did not forward the ball on foreign policy.
00:33:05.000 He sort of sat there while people got slaughtered in Syria, sat there while Iran developed a nuclear program, sat there while Israel was under siege, sat there during the Arab Spring, sat there as riots happened in major American cities.
00:33:15.000 So I think it's actually a pretty good likeness of President Obama.
00:33:19.000 I think that's not a bad portrait of the president.
00:33:21.000 It's so funny.
00:33:22.000 Yeah, they're always saying we have to do something creative with the portraits.
00:33:24.000 Very important we do something creative.
00:33:26.000 So the artists said something about how we wanted to show that Obama's presidency was—was he the form figure or was he just being swallowed by history?
00:33:33.000 Was he the driver of history or was he just a representative of it?
00:33:37.000 And then apparently the various flowers here signify flowers from Kenya and flowers from Hawaii and flowers from Chicago.
00:33:43.000 I don't know what the flower from Chicago is.
00:33:44.000 I assume that it's the opium poppy.
00:33:46.000 But the idea—
00:33:48.000 That Barack Obama is sitting there in Wrigley's Ivy, in Wrigley Field's Ivy, is really weird.
00:33:53.000 He's a Sox fan, supposedly.
00:33:55.000 He's not really a Sox fan, by the way.
00:33:56.000 One of my pet peeves, as I've mentioned many times over, I am a true White Sox fan.
00:33:59.000 Barack Obama could not name one single player on the White Sox when he was interviewed during his 2008 presidential run.
00:34:05.000 A real fan he is.
00:34:06.000 Okay, so that was the picture of Obama.
00:34:07.000 That one was getting mocked pretty relentlessly.
00:34:09.000 That one is not the worst.
00:34:10.000 The worst one is of Michelle.
00:34:11.000 So here is the picture of Michelle Obama.
00:34:13.000 Okay, does that look anything like Michelle Obama?
00:34:16.000 Of course it doesn't look like anything like Michelle Obama.
00:34:18.000 It looks like Regina King, right?
00:34:20.000 The actress.
00:34:21.000 It doesn't look like Michelle Obama at all.
00:34:23.000 And so, people were making fun of this.
00:34:25.000 People were getting a big kick out of the fact that the portraits don't look like anything.
00:34:29.000 So naturally, all the lefties came out defending the portraits.
00:34:32.000 They're not supposed to look like the people, they said.
00:34:34.000 Really, this is one of the lines.
00:34:35.000 That these portraits are supposed to be artistic.
00:34:36.000 They're not just supposed to look like the people.
00:34:38.000 Well, then why don't you just put a Kandinsky up there?
00:34:40.000 Why don't you just put a Jackson Pollock up there?
00:34:42.000 Just be like a splash of paint and say, this represents Michelle Obama.
00:34:45.000 That doesn't look like anything like Michelle Obama.
00:34:47.000 This is one of my favorite things in the world, by the way, is when people do terrible portraits and terrible statues.
00:34:52.000 As you recall, I'm a huge fan of the Cristiano Ronaldo.
00:34:56.000 I don't know.
00:35:17.000 Hellspawn, because his arm is actually coming out of his body in five different ways.
00:35:22.000 It's pretty spectacular.
00:35:23.000 This one ranks pretty high up there.
00:35:24.000 It's like the Lucille Ball statue.
00:35:25.000 It looks nothing like Lucille Ball.
00:35:27.000 So well done, National Portrait Gallery.
00:35:30.000 And congratulations again to Regina King for her portrait being entered into the National Gallery.
00:35:35.000 It's very exciting.
00:35:36.000 Congratulations to Homer Simpson as well for being hidden in that picture of Barack Obama.
00:35:41.000 So all of that is very exciting.
00:35:43.000 So in less wonderful news,
00:35:45.000 It now turns out that the Trump administration wants you to spend oodles and oodles and oodles of money.
00:35:51.000 So, today they offered their budget plan.
00:35:53.000 It is a 4.4 trillion dollar budget plan.
00:35:56.000 Yes, indeed you do.
00:35:58.000 4.4 trillion dollars.
00:35:59.000 That means it carries nearly a trillion dollar deficit each of the next few years.
00:36:04.000 Just awesome.
00:36:05.000 I remember when we were the party of fiscal responsibility.
00:36:07.000 Yeah, that lasted for five seconds.
00:36:09.000 One of the fun things about being a Republican, apparently, is you get to scream about fiscal responsibility until the point you get elected, at which point you just blow out the spending.
00:36:15.000 So according to the Washington Post, President Trump on Monday was going to offer this budget plan.
00:36:19.000 It falls far short of eliminating the government's deficit over 10 years, conceding that huge tax cuts and new spending increases make this goal unattainable.
00:36:26.000 Three people familiar with the proposal said,
00:36:28.000 Eliminating the budget deficit over 10 years has been a north star for the Republican Party for several decades, and GOP lawmakers took the government to the brink of default in 2011, demanding a vote on an amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit the federal government from spending more than it takes in.
00:36:41.000 That was something the Democrats used to back, too.
00:36:43.000 Now it turns out everybody's a liar.
00:36:44.000 House Speaker Paul Ryan, who's a fiscal conservative, supposedly, when he used to chair the House Budget Committee, routinely proposed tax and spending outlines that would eliminate the deficit over 10 years, even though critics said that this would lead to a severe curtailment in government programs, because in order for you to actually fix the programs, that means that you have to restructure Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security.
00:37:01.000 Instead, we're actually expending Medicaid, we're expanding Medicare, and we're expanding Social Security, apparently, in the new budget.
00:37:09.000 In 2013, Paul Ryan proposed $4.6 trillion in cuts over 10 years, an amount he said was sufficient to eliminate the deficit.
00:37:15.000 Those changes were not adopted by Congress or supported by the Obama administration.
00:37:18.000 But now, it turns out Republicans don't care after all.
00:37:22.000 How exciting.
00:37:23.000 They've now jettisoned goals like this since Trump took office.
00:37:25.000 Trump's budget plan calls for a range of spending cuts, reducing the growth of the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years.
00:37:31.000 It would not eliminate the deficit entirely, said people familiar with the proposal.
00:37:35.000 So, what exactly does it include?
00:37:37.000 Apparently, it includes a bunch of new spending on infrastructure.
00:37:40.000 Particularly, they're now putting forth a $1.5 trillion infrastructure budget that would include $200 billion of American taxpayer money being spent on infrastructure.
00:37:52.000 One of the things that's always puzzled me about this infrastructure argument is why not just devolve it to the state?
00:37:56.000 Why not make it California's responsibility to do upkeep on its own roads? 0.88
00:38:00.000 The idea that you needed a national highway structure, that you needed Eisenhower's national highway system, is not true, and hardcore libertarians will tell you this.
00:38:07.000 The fact is that Route 66—I've said this before on the program—Route 66, which Nat King Cole used to sing about, right?
00:38:13.000 Get your kicks on Route 66?
00:38:14.000 That used to be a thing because it was a state highway connected with another state highway.
00:38:18.000 Then we built the interstate highway system.
00:38:21.000 And the interstate highway system supposedly made travel that much more convenient, but it made all of these towns ghost towns because they were no longer serving state interests.
00:38:29.000 They were now serving supposedly federal interests.
00:38:32.000 It was a boondoggle.
00:38:33.000 We spent an awful lot of money on the national highway system.
00:38:35.000 Listen, I enjoy driving on the highways as much as the next guy, but the idea that it wouldn't have existed without states is just not true.
00:38:40.000 There are state highway systems, and they just would have connected to one another.
00:38:43.000 So where are these cuts supposed to take place?
00:38:45.000 Well, the budget is expected to target spending cuts at social welfare programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program.
00:38:52.000 That's SNAP.
00:38:52.000 That's food stamps.
00:38:54.000 The White House is looking at ways to curb these programs by expanding work requirements for beneficiaries.
00:38:58.000 It's unclear how much changes like this would actually spend.
00:39:02.000 And then they're spending increases as well.
00:39:04.000 $200 billion in federal funds, I mentioned, for the infrastructure plan.
00:39:07.000 $23 billion for border security and immigration enforcement.
00:39:10.000 None of that's going to happen.
00:39:12.000 $85.5 billion for veterans programs.
00:39:13.000 $13 billion over the next two years to combat the opioid epidemic.
00:39:16.000 If you want to combat the opioid epidemic, then you actually should curb Medicaid.
00:39:19.000 One of the big problems that they've had is that everywhere that Medicaid has expanded, opioid addiction has expanded, because Medicaid actually covers the ability to get cheap opioid painkillers.
00:39:29.000 There have been several studies that have been done on this particular point.
00:39:33.000 Bottom line is that Trump is blowing out the budget now.
00:39:35.000 The media's coverage of this is always really interesting, because they suggest that this is the end of the world, that he's blowing out the budget.
00:39:43.000 First of all, this budget is not going to pass.
00:39:44.000 Second of all, the Democrats used to routinely propose budgets like this, just as big, and the media never covered it this way.
00:39:50.000 The media always covered these budget-busting budgets as something fine and decent.
00:39:56.000 It's never a big deal.
00:39:57.000 They're going to spend as much as they possibly can.
00:40:00.000 No biggie at all.
00:40:02.000 It's still not good for Republicans that we are proposing this kind of spending and demonstrative of the fact that Republicans have been lying about this stuff for years.
00:40:10.000 The budget calls for $716 billion in defense spending in 2019 in order to rebuild the military.
00:40:17.000 And again, it includes that trillion-dollar infrastructure program.
00:40:20.000 The White House budget assumes economic growth will accelerate from 2.3% last year to 3% this year and 3.2% next year, spurred on by the tax cut.
00:40:29.000 We will see if that is true or not.
00:40:31.000 Even with that assumption of robust economic growth, the federal deficit is expected to hit 4.2% of GDP this year and 4.7% next year.
00:40:40.000 It's usual, as they note, for the deficit to increase during recessions.
00:40:44.000 It is not usual for the deficit to increase
00:40:47.000 During peacetime, non-recessions, and that's exactly what is happening here.
00:40:50.000 So once again, this demonstrates this bizarre notion in the American public mind that we like to cut spending when we don't actually like to cut spending, right?
00:40:58.000 We don't actually like cutting spending.
00:41:00.000 We like to pretend that we like cutting spending, and then as soon as someone says, well, I guess we're going to have to cut something, then everybody protests and goes totally crazy over it.
00:41:07.000 OK, in other news, apparently the—sorry, quick note.
00:41:12.000 There are Republicans who are butting back against this.
00:41:14.000 We'll see if Paul Ryan does.
00:41:15.000 Jim Jordan, one of our favorite Congress people from Ohio, he came out and he said that the spending increases that were included in the major spending bill that was passed last week by the House, this is unsustainable.
00:41:25.000 You asked me if there's concerns with the Speaker.
00:41:27.000 I think there are big concerns because he just presided over one of the biggest spending increases in the history of this country at a time when we were elected to do just the opposite.
00:41:36.000 OK, that of course is exactly true.
00:41:37.000 OK, in other news, it looks like Israel is drawing closer to possible war with Iran over the weekend in news that has gone largely ignored, except on Drudge Report.
00:41:55.000 Thank you so much.
00:42:18.000 Yeah, obviously, the Syrian forces were still—they still shot down an Israeli plane, an F-16 fighter, which is scary stuff.
00:42:26.000 Prime Minister Netanyahu said, Other Israeli ministers spoke of refusing to accept Iran entrenching itself militarily in Syria.
00:42:30.000 As Netanyahu has said repeatedly, Tehran denies that it is doing so.
00:42:45.000 This is one of the holes in the Trump administration policies in Syria.
00:42:49.000 If Iran fills the gap in Syria, it endangers American allies, not just in Israel, but in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia, in Egypt. 0.83
00:42:55.000 All those countries know it.
00:42:56.000 And so, the more that Iran exercises and flexes its muscle, the more those countries are going to be forced to take military action in response. 0.51
00:43:03.000 That's not Trump's fault.
00:43:05.000 Right?
00:43:05.000 He picked up a bad situation in Syria.
00:43:06.000 That's Obama's fault.
00:43:07.000 Now, a picture of Obama receding into the bushes, even that is a little too generous for Obama's policy on Iran, which was not receding into the bushes.
00:43:13.000 It was absolutely handing Iran the pathway to a nuclear bomb, as well as regional power. 0.82
00:43:18.000 And that has serious consequences, including for our allies over in Israel, and not just in Israel, but also in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
00:43:25.000 We're good to go.
00:43:54.000 So, we are now going to do some things I like and things I hate.
00:43:56.000 But first, you're going to have to go over and subscribe over at dailywire.com.
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00:44:15.000 K-I-S-S-I-N-G, or R-E-A-D-I-N-G, emails to one another, because this Wednesday, February 14th, 5 p.m.
00:44:22.000 Eastern, the lonely, desperate, pathetic Michael Knowles will be literally waiting for your questions in our next episode of The Conversation.
00:44:27.000 Yes, he's been thrown out of his home, and he'll have nothing to do for Valentine's Day, and that's why he will be here, streaming live on Facebook, YouTube, and The Daily Wire website.
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00:45:41.000 All righty, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:45:44.000 So, things that I like.
00:45:49.000 There's a group called the Network of Enlightened Women and they're doing something where they honor gentlemen. 0.84
00:45:53.000 They have a contest, they're calling it the Gentleman Showcase.
00:45:57.000 And they honored me this month, in the month of February, which is very nice of them.
00:46:01.000 They called me their honorary gentleman, which I really appreciate.
00:46:04.000 See, I don't care about the idea of being tough and rough and humble, as you may have noticed.
00:46:09.000 That's not my thing.
00:46:10.000 But I do care about being a gentleman, because I think that gentlemen are people who understand that women and children are to be protected, innocence is to be protected.
00:46:18.000 And good principles are worth fighting for.
00:46:20.000 So go over and check them out at Enlightened Women. 1.00
00:46:21.000 That's their Facebook page.
00:46:23.000 And I have an interview over there about what it means to be a man.
00:46:27.000 And what I suggest is that we should stop criticizing manliness.
00:46:30.000 We should start talking instead about what manliness actually is.
00:46:33.000 So check out the network of Enlightened Women over at their Facebook page because they were nice enough to give me an award and therefore I will pump them because I'm just that kind of person.
00:46:42.000 OK, time for a couple of things that—well, sorry, you know, one more thing that I like.
00:46:46.000 There's a good book out by a guy named David Banson.
00:46:48.000 It's called Crisis of Responsibility.
00:46:49.000 You should check that out.
00:46:50.000 David Banson is on the board over at National Review.
00:46:53.000 He's on the board of several other organizations.
00:46:54.000 The forward has been my good friend David French.
00:46:56.000 And the book is essentially a treatise on why it is that Americans are avoiding their problems by pointing at one another and trying to
00:47:05.000 Cast responsibility for mistakes on one another.
00:47:07.000 If we could get rid of that capacity to blame one another and take some responsibility for ourselves, we'd do a lot better in life.
00:47:13.000 That's the theme of the book.
00:47:14.000 Check it out.
00:47:14.000 Crisis of Responsibility by David Bamson.
00:47:17.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:47:22.000 So Robert De Niro was over in the United Arab Emirates, and there he was ripping the United States, because this is what we do.
00:47:28.000 We praise North Korea, and we rip the United States. 0.99
00:47:30.000 Hollywood star Robert De Niro, according to Page Six, took aim at the Trump administration's stance on climate change, telling a packed audience in the Middle East that he was visiting from a backward country suffering from temporary insanity.
00:47:41.000 Which is something that I definitely want to hear from the star of Meet the Fockers.
00:47:44.000 That's clearly something that I think is deeply important.
00:47:47.000 He said in the country he's describing, and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency suggested last week, global warming may be a good thing for humanity.
00:47:54.000 He said, I'm talking about my own country, the United States of America.
00:47:57.000 We don't like to say we are a backward country, so let's just say we're suffering from a case of temporary insanity.
00:48:01.000 And he received applause and laughs when he said the U.S.
00:48:03.000 will eventually cure itself by voting our dangerous leader out of office.
00:48:07.000 He spoke Sunday at Dubai's World Government Summit.
00:48:08.000 There's a certain irony to him speaking in one of the world's leading producers of oil.
00:48:14.000 United Arab Emirates, their entire wealth base is oil.
00:48:18.000 It's why the GDP per capita in UAE is extraordinarily high, and there he is jabbering about global warming and the dangers of it, and one of the leading oil producers on planet Earth, and then ripping the United States for our supposed craziness over global warming in a country that regularly represses women, does not allow Israelis to visit, as far as I'm aware, and is a backward country in a ton of cultural respects. 0.70
00:48:42.000 Does he say any of that?
00:48:43.000 Of course not. 1.00
00:48:43.000 He goes there, and he kisses their butt, and he talks about how terrible Trump is. 1.00
00:48:46.000 Again, for the left, the enemy of their enemy is their friend, and that means that their supposed enemy in the UAE is not their enemy at all. 0.98
00:48:52.000 These people are friends because they don't like Donald Trump.
00:48:54.000 So long as they don't like Donald Trump, that means they're wonderful, wonderful human beings, which is just the worst moral code I can imagine.
00:49:01.000 Okay, other things that I hate.
00:49:02.000 So, a 42-year-old man has now married his daughter, and he was arrested for it.
00:49:07.000 So, according to Frank Kemp over at Daily Wire, a Virginia man and his 20-year-old biological daughter face incest charges after having a child together.
00:49:15.000 In 1998, Stephen Walter Plattel and his then-wife gave their daughter, Katie Plattel, up for adoption.
00:49:19.000 Approximately 18 years later, Katie found her birth parents using social media.
00:49:23.000 By August 2016, she was living with the couple and their other biological children in their Virginia home.
00:49:27.000 And then, according to warrants, Stephen Plattel and his wife legally separated in November 2016, and the wife moved out.
00:49:32.000 Plato's wife claimed her husband had begun sleeping on the floor in Katie's room prior to her vacating the home.
00:49:37.000 In May 2017, the wife discovered that Stephen had impregnated Katie.
00:49:40.000 According to WNCN-TV, she then confronted Stephen and admitted that he and Katie had been involved in a sexual relationship, resulting in the conception of a child.
00:49:47.000 And on July 21st, there was an Instagram post showing a pregnant daughter with her biological father saying that they were married now, which is just horrifying.
00:49:58.000 Now, I have a question for folks on the left and cultural libertarians.
00:50:01.000 Why is it horrifying?
00:50:03.000 Really, why is it horrifying?
00:50:04.000 For advocates of same-sex marriage, for example.
00:50:06.000 Why is this particularly horrifying?
00:50:08.000 And don't give me all the stuff about two-headed babies.
00:50:10.000 It's quite possible that the baby won't be two-headed.
00:50:11.000 It's possible the baby will be healthy.
00:50:13.000 And let's suggest, for just a second, that you were infertile. 0.62
00:50:16.000 Would that make the situation any better?
00:50:18.000 See, according to the left, the only thing that matters when it comes to sexual relationships is the value of consent.
00:50:22.000 So if both parties are consenting, did something truly terrible happen here?
00:50:25.000 One of the things that's very interesting about the way human morality works, Jonathan Haidt points this out in his book The Righteous Mind, is that there are several different variables that we use to determine our morality.
00:50:34.000 One of those variables that is completely ignored by the left is the value of purity.
00:50:38.000 The idea that there is something to the human soul that is schmutzed up, right?
00:50:41.000 There's something to the human soul that is dirtied by activities like incest.
00:50:46.000 That there's just something inherently wrong with incest.
00:50:48.000 We know that it's wrong.
00:50:49.000 We can't necessarily explain why.
00:50:51.000 And that's okay.
00:50:52.000 There are certain things that are just bad.
00:50:54.000 The left refuses to abide by this.
00:50:57.000 And forget about whether it should be illegal or not on a libertarian level, think about whether it is morally wrong.
00:51:01.000 So Jonathan Haidt starts his book talking about various different kind of gross things that people could do that cultural libertarians would say was okay, like having sex with a dead body, for example.
00:51:13.000 Is that something terrible? 0.95
00:51:14.000 So you say it's terrible, I say it's terrible.
00:51:16.000 Cultural libertarians, cultural leftists, they would say, what's so terrible about it?
00:51:19.000 Body doesn't need consent, it's an inanimate object, they're materialists, so what's the big deal?
00:51:23.000 So, Jonathan Haidt suggests that there are six foundations to moral theory.
00:51:27.000 Care, which is protecting people from harm.
00:51:29.000 Fairness or proportionality, which is, you know, what it sounds like, rendering justice to people.
00:51:34.000 Both the left and right agree on these.
00:51:35.000 Then there are a bunch of things that the left and right do not necessarily agree on.
00:51:40.000 Liberty is the loathing of tyranny, which may or may not be something the left believes in.
00:51:44.000 Loyalty, in-group loyalty, that's something the left doesn't seem to care very much about.
00:51:48.000 It's something that the right cares about but should care about on an ideological level more than they care about on a biological level.
00:51:53.000 Authority or respect.
00:51:55.000 There's an inherent value to respecting your elders, for example, because they may know something that you don't.
00:51:58.000 That's something the left doesn't agree with.
00:51:59.000 And sanctity or purity abhors for disgusting things the idea that you are more than just a collection of your body parts.
00:52:06.000 This is something the left doesn't agree with either.
00:52:07.000 So before you start condemning the daughter and the father who got married and had a baby, and you on the left, you need to examine what are your moral principles and maybe you think that it's totally fine.
00:52:16.000 If you do think it's fine, then maybe you should consider whether you are fine, whether that is actually a proper moral standard to hold.
00:52:22.000 Okay.
00:52:22.000 Now, quickly, it's Monday, so we go through a Federalist paper.
00:52:24.000 We are on Federalist 15.
00:52:25.000 We are steadily making our way through the Federalist papers.
00:52:28.000 Federalist 15 is written by Alexander Hamilton.
00:52:30.000 This Federalist paper lays forth the problems with the Articles of Confederacy.
00:52:33.000 So they've already established why they think America ought to be one country.
00:52:36.000 They've already established why they believe—
00:52:38.000 All right.
00:52:56.000 I don't know.
00:53:14.000 We owe debts.
00:53:14.000 We haven't driven people off land.
00:53:16.000 They've already surrendered to us.
00:53:17.000 We don't have control of the Mississippi River.
00:53:18.000 Our public credit is dead.
00:53:20.000 He says the problem here is lack of federal capacity, right?
00:53:22.000 If you don't have any centralized power at all, and you don't have the power of enforcement, it's going to be extremely difficult for you to actually be able to enforce America's interests at the national level.
00:53:31.000 He says that what the federal government needs is the power of coercion.
00:53:34.000 He says government implies the power of making laws.
00:53:37.000 It is essential to the idea of a law that it be attended with a sanction.
00:53:40.000 Or in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.
00:53:42.000 If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will in fact amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation.
00:53:50.000 Now there's a flip side to this idea.
00:53:51.000 If government is coercion, that means that government should be used very sparingly.
00:53:55.000 And this is something the founders understood as well.
00:53:57.000 So while they're calling for more centralization of power, there is a happy medium.
00:54:01.000 The government needs the power to coerce in cases where the government is protecting life, liberty, and property.
00:54:05.000 In other cases, the government is a big gun.
00:54:07.000 It is a giant killing people machine, a giant imprisoning people machine, a giant enforcement machine.
00:54:12.000 The government is a coercion machine, and therefore it has to be used sparingly, and we have to be very careful about where we give the government the power of the sword and where we do not.
00:54:20.000 Okay, we will be back here tomorrow with all the latest news updates.
00:54:22.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:54:22.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:54:27.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
00:54:30.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
00:54:31.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
00:54:33.000 Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
00:54:35.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.
00:54:36.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
00:54:38.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
00:54:40.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
00:54:42.000 Copyright Forward Publishing 2018.