The Ben Shapiro Show - The Secret Plan | Ep. 816

00:00:00.000 AOC's chief of staff says the quiet part out loud, Nancy Pelosi warns illegal immigrants how to avoid ICE, and we check the mailbag.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:07.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:09.000 We have a lot to get to on today's show.

00:00:15.000 The big breaking news, of course, is that the Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, is out.

00:00:21.000 Thanks to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he has now resigned.

00:00:24.000 His resignation will be effective within the week.

00:00:27.000 Basically, he has seven days to get out.

00:00:29.000 Now, Trump is saying that this was Alex Acosta's decision.

00:00:31.000 The truth is that it may not have been.

00:00:34.000 Acosta was creating so much pressure for Trump that it made a lot of sense for him to go.

00:00:38.000 There are just too many Unanswered questions about how exactly the sweetheart deal with alleged pedophile Jeffrey Epstein went down.

00:00:44.000 He's a registered sex offender in several states Jeffrey Epstein He got this pretty sweet deal from the prosecutors in the state of Florida Alex Acosta was one of those prosecutors now the case against Acosta that he had cut some sort of sweetheart deal It wasn't quite as cut and dry as I think a lot of people would like to make it.

00:01:01.000 There are a few contentions that Acosta made in his own defense that are relevant and may, in fact, be true.

00:01:07.000 One is that we just haven't seen all the underlying evidence in the case.

00:01:10.000 We don't know how strong that evidence was.

00:01:12.000 There were a lot of witnesses who said that Acosta did things to them, but that doesn't necessarily amount to a sex trafficking charge.

00:01:18.000 It may amount to a sexual molestation charge on the state level, but that's a state-level charge.

00:01:23.000 The trafficking charge is the federal charge.

00:01:26.000 And the prostitution across state lines charge, that is the federal charge and that's what Acosta was tasked with.

00:01:31.000 The real question that I have is why the state of Florida didn't go after Epstein.

00:01:35.000 If it was so cut and dry that there were all these women coming forward and they had the evidence that all these women were telling the truth, why was he not in jail for statutory rape at the very least for an extended period of time or child molestation for an extended period of time?

00:01:48.000 Those are state crimes.

00:01:49.000 In any case, Acosta made the defense that other prosecutors signed off on this, the judge signed off on this, that deals like this happen on a fairly regular basis.

00:01:58.000 That may be true.

00:01:59.000 I've talked to several prosecutors.

00:02:00.000 Some say true, some say not true.

00:02:02.000 There are a couple things that he said in his own defense that do not ring true.

00:02:05.000 He said, for example, that he only stepped in with the federal government and the power of the DA when it became clear that the state was not going to prosecute Epstein.

00:02:12.000 That's an odd contention because the feds and the state work on different levels.

00:02:17.000 You don't have to wait for the state to not prosecute in order to prosecute at the federal level.

00:02:21.000 That would actually be looking like double jeopardy if that were the case.

00:02:24.000 But nonetheless, that particular argument by Acosta didn't hold water.

00:02:29.000 Also, there are a lot of unanswered questions about all of this, such as, was it pressure from the defense attorneys on the prosecutors that led to this deal?

00:02:37.000 What evidence did they actually have?

00:02:39.000 Were they trying to shut down the FBI investigation?

00:02:42.000 And all the rest.

00:02:42.000 So Acosta basically had to go.

00:02:45.000 In just a second, we'll tell you what President Trump had to say and what Alex Acosta had to say.

00:02:49.000 Suffice it to say, once Acosta is gone, this is no longer a Trump administration scandal.

00:02:53.000 And then the question is going to become, okay, who else was involved?

00:02:56.000 And what exactly was Jeffrey Epstein doing?

00:02:59.000 The going theory right now, the kind of hot theory on Wall Street right now, is that Jeffrey Epstein Who was purportedly a billionaire, and probably was not a billionaire.

00:03:07.000 That he was actually making his money, this is the theory, from blackmailing people.

00:03:11.000 That he was trafficking in underage girls with very famous people, and then he was blackmailing them with tape of that information.

00:03:17.000 Which is an astonishing story, if true.

00:03:19.000 We'll get to that in just a second.

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00:04:50.000 Okay, so here is what President Trump Had to say, according to CNBC, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta said on Friday that he will resign amid controversy over the way he handled the sex crimes case against wealthy businessman Jeffrey Epstein a decade ago when he was U.S.

00:05:03.000 Attorney for Southern Florida.

00:05:05.000 Acosta made the announcement to reporters while standing next to President Trump outside the White House.

00:05:09.000 Trump said Acosta had called him Friday morning and that it was Acosta's decision to quit, which may or may not be true.

00:05:14.000 You know, it's quite possible that Acosta looked at the media coverage.

00:05:17.000 He figured that Trump was going to cut his legs out from under him anyway.

00:05:19.000 Better to quit than to get fired.

00:05:21.000 Trump said, this was him, not me, because I'm with him.

00:05:24.000 He then said, I said, you don't have to do this.

00:05:26.000 Acosta told reporters he did not want his involvement in Epstein's controversy to overshadow the administration's accomplishments.

00:05:32.000 Acosta said he will officially resign a week after his announcement.

00:05:35.000 Deputy Labor Secretary Patrick Patrick Pazella will take his place in an acting capacity, said President Trump.

00:05:42.000 Trump tweeted out, "Alex was a great Secretary of Labor.

00:05:44.000 His service is truly appreciated." In his resignation letter to Trump, Acosta said, "It has meant so much to me that you have offered your steadfast support in our private discussions and in your public remarks, but your agenda, putting the American people first, must avoid any distractions." That resignation came only a couple of days after Acosta gave that press conference in which he had defended his controversial non-prosecution agreement that he cut with Epstein's lawyers in 2007 when he was the top prosecutor in Miami.

00:06:10.000 The issue resurfaced on July 6th when the politically connected Epsteins, whose friends have included Trump and former President Bill Clinton, was arrested on sex trafficking charges by federal prosecutors in New York last week.

00:06:19.000 By the way, speaking of Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton has gone completely silent on follow-up questions about the statement that he put out earlier this week.

00:06:25.000 Clinton had put out a statement earlier this week saying, I was only on four trips on Epstein's airplane, Secret Service was there the whole time, and then folks at the Washington Examiner uncovered the fact that he was on at least seven trips with Epstein, and that Secret Service, in fact, probably was not present the whole time.

00:06:39.000 They asked the Clinton camp about all of this, and Clinton went completely silent, which is suspicious and upsetting in every possible way.

00:06:48.000 So, Alex Acosta is out.

00:06:50.000 That's not going to stop this thing from moving forward.

00:06:53.000 Now, here's the fascinating part.

00:06:55.000 What'll be fascinating is to see whether now that Acosta is out, the media coverage just drops off a cliff.

00:07:00.000 Because remember, in 2007, 2008, Epstein was a very prominent political player.

00:07:04.000 I mean, he'd been giving money to all sorts of big-name groups, all sorts of big-name politicians.

00:07:09.000 He was hobnobbing with the Clintons.

00:07:11.000 He was hobnobbing with major Hollywood figures.

00:07:13.000 And no one cared when he got prosecuted.

00:07:16.000 Now he's getting prosecuted again.

00:07:17.000 And because President Trump is in office, and because he was friendly with Trump, and because he had cut a deal with Trump's Secretary of Labor, this became a national story again.

00:07:27.000 Well, now that new information is coming out that may implicate some of the Democrats' favorites, it'll be interesting to see whether the media just get off the horse completely.

00:07:35.000 Whether they say, OK, we're not going to cover this thing anymore.

00:07:37.000 Now it's over.

00:07:38.000 It doesn't impact Trump.

00:07:39.000 So therefore, it's not relevant.

00:07:40.000 That will be fascinating to see.

00:07:43.000 Now, again, there's all sorts of mystery that surrounds all of this.

00:07:47.000 There's gonna be a lot of other ugly material that comes out, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

00:07:52.000 And Bloomberg.

00:07:53.000 The mystery surrounding Jeffrey Epstein's private island continues.

00:07:56.000 Quote, from the harbor on St.

00:07:57.000 Thomas, the boat skims eastward across the crystalline Caribbean, takes a turn, and there it is, the palm-fringed paradise that was the private redoubt of Jeffrey Epstein.

00:08:05.000 An American flag on a towering pole flutters in the breeze.

00:08:08.000 A blue and white building that resembles a temple sits atop one of the hills.

00:08:11.000 The pool and cabanas are visible in the difference.

00:08:13.000 No traffic on the winding dirt roads.

00:08:14.000 It's quiet now on the island of Little St.

00:08:16.000 James.

00:08:17.000 Epstein dubbed it Little St.

00:08:19.000 Jeff's.

00:08:20.000 Locals have other names for it.

00:08:22.000 Pedophile Island and Orgy Island.

00:08:24.000 This is where Epstein, convicted of sex crimes a decade ago in Florida, now charged in New York with trafficking girls as young as 14, repaired his escape from the toil of cultivating the rich and powerful.

00:08:36.000 San Francisco Chronicle and Bloomberg report, few here doubt that Epstein is wealthy.

00:08:41.000 He routinely touched down on St.

00:08:42.000 Thomas aboard his private jet before being whisked by helicopter to his 72-acre retreat.

00:08:46.000 He spent many millions after buying it for about $8 million in 1998, carving roads, planting scores of 40-foot palms, building several vias and temple structure, which was topped by a gold-colored dome until Hurricane Irma blew it off, according to locals.

00:08:58.000 Yet the size and source of Epstein's fortune are as much a source of speculation here as they are on Wall Street.

00:09:04.000 There's no question that he has assets that are worth an awful lot of money.

00:09:06.000 He has companies that hold his Gulfstream jets.

00:09:07.000 He obviously owns a townhouse in New York that's worth more than a hundred million dollars.

00:09:11.000 Reid Weingarten, a lawyer for Epstein, didn't immediately return a voicemail message seeking comment for the story.

00:09:11.000 currencies.

00:09:17.000 There's no question that he has assets that are worth an awful lot of money.

00:09:21.000 He has companies that hold his Gulfstream jets.

00:09:24.000 He obviously owns a townhouse in New York that's worth more than $100 million.

00:09:29.000 But it is unclear where exactly he was getting that money in the first place.

00:09:34.000 The only unusual aspect of the main residence a former worker said he was aware of because they've interviewed people who worked on Epstein's estate here were the security boxes in The level of secrecy around a steel safe in Epstein's office in particular suggested it contained much more than just money.

00:09:51.000 Outside of an occasional visit by a housekeeper, no one was allowed in these rooms.

00:09:54.000 So obviously everybody wondering what's in that safe will have to deploy Geraldo Rivera to go find out what exactly is in the safe.

00:10:04.000 All of this is deeply suspicious, of course.

00:10:07.000 New victims are coming forward on a near-daily basis with regard to Epstein.

00:10:10.000 The fact that this guy escaped prosecution for so long is truly astonishing.

00:10:14.000 According to the Miami Herald, at least a dozen new victims have come forward to claim they were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein, even as the multi-millionaire money manager tries to convince a federal judge to allow him to await a sex trafficking trial from the comfort of the same $77 million Manhattan mansion where he's accused of luring teenage girls into unwanted sex acts, apparently, since Saturday.

00:10:33.000 Four separate women have reached out to New York lawyer David Boies, and at least ten other women have approached other lawyers who have represented dozens of Epstein's alleged victims in the past.

00:10:43.000 Jack Scarola, a Palm Beach attorney, said that at least five women, all of whom were minors at the time of their alleged encounters with Epstein, have reached out either to him or Fort Lauderdale lawyer Brad Edwards.

00:10:53.000 Skarola said, the people we are speaking to are underage in Florida and in New York.

00:10:57.000 They are not individuals whose claims have previously been part of any law enforcement investigation.

00:11:02.000 All of this could get quite ugly.

00:11:05.000 But will the media's interest wane now that the Trump administration is really no longer involved?

00:11:11.000 We will find out.

00:11:12.000 Come Monday, if Epstein is out of the headlines, you'll know that a lot of the coverage here was driven by something a little bit different than what people said it was driven by, namely outrage over the treatment of underage women.

00:11:23.000 It should be driven by that.

00:11:24.000 I don't think the media's coverage was really, really driven by it.

00:11:27.000 We'll find out, though.

00:11:28.000 Maybe I'm wrong.

00:11:29.000 Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to The big political story of the day, which is the Democrats really veering hard to the left.

00:11:36.000 I know this has been the story of the last few years, but they're doing it on a daily basis, and it's getting more and more extreme.

00:11:43.000 We'll get to that in just a second.

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00:12:54.000 OK, so the Democrats are now saying the quiet part out loud increasingly, and it's it's amazing.

00:13:00.000 All they had to do was not be crazy.

00:13:03.000 It's all they had to do, and they were completely incapable of doing it. 0.99

00:13:06.000 And so they continue to be utterly and And completely insane.

00:13:11.000 So, here is a story from the Washington Post about Saikat Chakrabarty, who is the supposed genius behind AOC.

00:13:18.000 According to the Washington Post magazine, I mean, the kind of glowing coverage that radical leftists receive from the mainstream media is truly incredible.

00:13:27.000 It's a long piece titled, AOC's Chief of Change.

00:13:30.000 Saikat Chakrabarty isn't just running her office, he's guiding a movement.

00:13:36.000 Ooh! 0.96

00:13:36.000 I remember when they used to say this sort of stuff about staffers from Paul Ryan. 0.96

00:13:40.000 There'd be a staffer from Paul Ryan putting out a big plan on how to reform entitlements, and the Washington Post would run huge stories about how this nearly anonymous staffer was actually supremely powerful, a genius, wonderful, lovely.

00:13:56.000 The media's love affair with the radical left is the great undercover story in American politics, except by folks on talk radio, people in the podcast world.

00:14:06.000 Here's the story.

00:14:09.000 On a Wednesday morning in late May, emissaries of two of the strongest political voices on climate change convened at a coffee shop a few blocks from the U.S.

00:14:15.000 Capitol.

00:14:16.000 Saikhat Chakrabarty, chief of staff to Representative Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, was there to meet Sam Ricketts, climate director for Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who is running for president almost exclusively on a platform of combating global warming.

00:14:28.000 A newly released plank of Inslee's climate change agenda had caught the attention of Chakrabarty and his boss, who had tweeted that Inslee's, quote, climate plan is the most serious and comprehensive one to address our crisis in the 2020 field.

00:14:40.000 Pleased by the positive reception from the demands and Green New Deal wing of the climate struggle, Ricketts had set up this meeting with Chakrabarty to establish a personal connection and share approaches to climate advocacy.

00:14:51.000 Now, there's a punchline to this story.

00:14:53.000 Here's the punchline.

00:14:54.000 Just wait for it.

00:14:55.000 You ready?

00:14:56.000 Here's the punchline for the story.

00:14:59.000 So Chakrabarti is meeting with the climate director for Washington, Governor Jay Inslee, one of the million anonymous people running for president on the Democratic side of the aisle.

00:15:07.000 Inslee's big spiel is that he only cares about climate change.

00:15:10.000 Chakrabarti told this staffer, Sam Ricketts, quote, congrats on the rollout.

00:15:14.000 That was pretty great.

00:15:15.000 Ricketts said, thank you again for the kudos you guys offered.

00:15:18.000 We wanted to be a pace setter in the field.

00:15:20.000 I think we're there now.

00:15:21.000 I wanted to ask you for input in addition to hearing what you guys are working on.

00:15:24.000 Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure.

00:15:28.000 He said the interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all.

00:15:33.000 Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an intensive poker face, reports the Washington Post.

00:15:37.000 Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?

00:15:39.000 Chakrabarti continued.

00:15:40.000 Because we really think of it as a how do you change the entire economy thing.

00:15:46.000 So that's saying the quiet part out loud right there.

00:15:49.000 One of the suspicions of people on the right for a long time has been the global warming movement.

00:15:53.000 This entire, we have to restructure the entire global economy in order to bring down the climate.

00:16:00.000 And then people on the right point out, well, even if you did all the things you are talking about, that would not actually lower climate change in any marked degree.

00:16:06.000 You could completely devastate the economy of the United States.

00:16:08.000 China and India would still be providing a huge bulk of the carbon emissions that are allegedly leading to global warming and are leading global warming by International Panel on Climate Change Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Estimates The suspicion has been that it really isn't about lowering the climate.

00:16:25.000 That it really has been about a Marxist redistributionist scheme whereby you take down the American economy and then you redistribute those resources to quote-unquote poorer countries.

00:16:34.000 Or you undercut capitalism in favor of a global redistributionist system.

00:16:38.000 That's really what this is about.

00:16:39.000 And Chakrabarty is saying this out loud.

00:16:41.000 Chakrabarty is saying what we are doing is we are using global warming as basically the opening for us to restructure the entire American economy.

00:16:49.000 Now, Ricketts, who's the staffer for Inslee, I love this.

00:16:52.000 He responds, yeah.

00:16:53.000 Then he said, no.

00:16:55.000 Then he said, I think it's a duel.

00:16:57.000 It's both rising to the challenge that is existential around climate, and it is building an economy that contains more prosperity, more sustainability in that prosperity, more broadly shared prosperity, equitability, and justice throughout.

00:17:09.000 Chakrabarti liked the answer.

00:17:10.000 He said, There's more to come on this front and other key components.

00:17:34.000 We're going to be rolling forward.

00:17:35.000 Speak to some of the key justice elements of this, ensuring every community has got a part of this.

00:17:39.000 So notice how that conversation goes.

00:17:41.000 Now, this is all taking place in front of a Washington Post reporter.

00:17:44.000 So they are being a lot more open than you would think they would be talking in front of a Washington Post reporter, except that the Washington Post reporter is busy drooling into a cup, apparently.

00:17:53.000 As all of this happens.

00:17:54.000 So Chakrabarty says, we're going to restructure the entire American economy and climate change is basically just a lever, a public relations lever for us to do exactly that.

00:18:02.000 And then Inslee's guy's like, well, no, but yeah.

00:18:08.000 And then Chakrabarty is saying, well, you know what?

00:18:10.000 Let's go even further.

00:18:12.000 And then Ricketts gets excited.

00:18:13.000 He's like, yeah, let's do that, man.

00:18:14.000 Let's restructure the American economy.

00:18:16.000 Nationwide economic mobilization, justice, community.

00:18:20.000 The Washington Post says Ricketts kept laying down cords in Chakrabarty's key.

00:18:24.000 It was an acknowledgment of just how far inside establishment Washington the progressive movement has reached.

00:18:29.000 Everything is intersectional now, including decarbonization.

00:18:33.000 Chakrabarty told the Washington Post reporter, I like to show my cards and see people's reactions.

00:18:38.000 I just wanted to get a sense of where they're coming from.

00:18:40.000 They seem open and hungry and want to do stuff.

00:18:42.000 In my mind, an ideal situation is we have a president surrounded by a bunch of people who are constantly thinking, how could we go bigger, bolder, faster, better on everything?

00:18:50.000 I don't know if Inslee's going to be president, but if he runs a really good campaign, maybe he ends up running a big agency.

00:18:54.000 What's the mindset he's going to bring to that agency?

00:18:58.000 Amazing.

00:18:59.000 Wow.

00:18:59.000 And then, of course, we get 4,000 words of absolute drool with regard to Chakrabarty from the Washington Post.

00:19:05.000 Now, the hilarious thing is that Nancy Pelosi and the other members of the Democratic Party want Chakrabarty out. 1.00

00:19:10.000 They want him out because he is promoting AOC's notion that Nancy Pelosi and the moderate Democrats are a bunch of racists. 0.56

00:19:17.000 He's the one tweeting out that they're a bunch of Jim Crow racists. 0.57

00:19:20.000 So a bunch of black Democrats today were ripping on the Justice Democrats, who are largely led by Chakrabarty. 0.95

00:19:26.000 And saying, why are you guys all only attacking black Democrats from the South? 0.85

00:19:29.000 You know, you called Nancy Pelosi a racist for opposing you. 0.89

00:19:33.000 You seem kind of racist for opposing us. 0.99

00:19:34.000 So it's an intersectional crap fight over in the Democratic Party. 0.99

00:19:37.000 Totally what they deserve. 0.99

00:19:38.000 But this is what happens when you spin down that wild left rabbit hole.

00:19:42.000 We'll get to more of the wild left rabbit hole in just one second.

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00:20:55.000 The left has moved so far to the left now, the Chakrabarty being posited as a hero, openly saying that the Green New Deal is not about being green, it is much more about the New Deal.

00:21:06.000 That all this really is, is about restructuring the entirety of the American economy.

00:21:11.000 You think that's a strong pitch to the vast majority of Americans who are looking at rising wages, who are looking at a Dow Jones Industrial Average above 27,000, who are looking at an unemployment rate of 3.7%, and saying to themselves, what we really need is a radical restructuring of this economy.

00:21:24.000 You think this is a strong pitch?

00:21:26.000 But this is where Democrats are going.

00:21:28.000 This is where they're going.

00:21:29.000 They're going with, we want to restructure the entire American economy and also we're going to call each other and you racist.

00:21:34.000 No, I have to say, I am really enjoying the spectacle of AOC going after Pelosi and calling Pelosi racist because Pelosi, as we pointed out on yesterday's show, has been downplaying AOC's impact inside the caucus and telling AOC to stop attacking fellow Democrats.

00:21:51.000 That's been delicious.

00:21:52.000 So AOC has been attacking Pelosi.

00:21:53.000 She said yesterday that not only is Nancy Pelosi a racist, basically, she said that she's attacking women of color. 1.00

00:21:59.000 And I'm not saying you're a racist.

00:22:01.000 I'm just saying you're attacking women of color. 0.98

00:22:03.000 Which means you're a racist. 0.98

00:22:05.000 And then she followed that one up by saying, her attacking us at a time when we're receiving death threats. 0.60

00:22:10.000 AOC is using the exact same tactics on Nancy Pelosi that she has used on people like me, on people on Fox News, on anyone who has ever said anything negative about AOC.

00:22:19.000 She's using the exact same tactics on Nancy Pelosi. 0.99

00:22:22.000 What's hilarious is that Democrats are now coming out and saying, this is really disingenuous for doing this to Nancy Pelosi.

00:22:27.000 Right.

00:22:27.000 It was disingenuous the whole time, you rubes.

00:22:30.000 It was disingenuous.

00:22:31.000 It was a lie the entire time.

00:22:32.000 You were happy when it was knocking on people you don't like.

00:22:36.000 But as soon as she's knocking on Nancy Pelosi, then it's, God, this lady's out of control. 1.00

00:22:39.000 What's she doing?

00:22:40.000 Why is she playing the race card on Nancy Pelosi? 1.00

00:22:42.000 That seems dishonest.

00:22:43.000 Yes, that's right.

00:22:44.000 It is dishonest.

00:22:45.000 It was dishonest the entire time.

00:22:47.000 It was dishonest the entire time.

00:22:48.000 But you're only allowed to say it, I guess, when it targets Nancy Pelosi.

00:22:52.000 Now, speaking of AOC and Nancy Pelosi, the truth is that the only thing that Nancy Pelosi really dislikes about AOC is exactly what you see in that article from her chief of staff, which is that AOC keeps saying all the quiet parts out loud.

00:23:05.000 When it comes to policy, Nancy Pelosi doesn't radically disagree with AOC on any of this stuff.

00:23:09.000 She just thinks that AOC is pie in the sky and doesn't have any way of achieving what AOC is going for. 0.65

00:23:13.000 But on policy, there are not a lot of disagreements.

00:23:16.000 Let's take an example.

00:23:17.000 So AOC now says that she wants to axe the entire Department of Homeland Security.

00:23:22.000 Now, I am fine with the idea of devolving a lot of the services of Homeland Security back to the Secretary of Defense.

00:23:28.000 I thought the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the first place was just the creation of another giant federal bureaucracy that would grow and grow because every department does.

00:23:35.000 But when AOC says she wants to axe the Department of Homeland Security, she doesn't mean she then wants to re-delegate all of the parts back to their original departments.

00:23:43.000 According to the San Francisco Chronicle, although some activists have urged the government to abolish its immigration enforcement arm, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came out in favor of eradicating the entire Department of Homeland Security.

00:23:56.000 Not replacing it, just eradicating it.

00:23:58.000 The department's creation after the terrorist attack of September 11th significantly threatened American civil liberties, Ocasio-Cortez said.

00:24:05.000 She said she wanted to get rid of Homeland Security.

00:24:07.000 She said people sounded the alarm back then that these agencies are extrajudicial, that they lack effective oversight.

00:24:12.000 It is baked into the core foundational structure of these agencies.

00:24:15.000 So she's not talking about how she would replace their services.

00:24:20.000 She just wants it gone.

00:24:21.000 Okay, so who exactly is then going to protect the homeland?

00:24:24.000 When I say I don't want extra bureaucracy, it's because I think we don't need an extra department to do the same work.

00:24:28.000 When she says she wants to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, she means she wants to disband ICE.

00:24:32.000 She wants to get rid of all of the enforcement agencies. 1.00

00:24:36.000 Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove said that this was, quote, moronic, stupid, naive, and dumb. 1.00

00:24:41.000 Went direct to the thesaurus and came up with that, which is exactly true. 1.00

00:24:46.000 Some members of Congress worried that the White House originally was concealing the department's true costs.

00:24:50.000 That's true.

00:24:51.000 Some conservative Republicans were opposed to it.

00:24:54.000 I was not in favor of setting up a DHS at the time, if I recall correctly.

00:24:58.000 Still, that is not what Ocasio-Cortez is talking about.

00:25:01.000 She's talking about getting rid of the services of the DHS, not re-delegating them.

00:25:05.000 Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, is just as radical, or more radical, than AOC.

00:25:11.000 Not on DHS, but on ICE.

00:25:13.000 How do we know this?

00:25:14.000 Because yesterday, Nancy Pelosi released a statement in which she suggested that illegal immigrants basically hide from ICE.

00:25:25.000 It's amazing.

00:25:26.000 She warned her caucus on Thursday about President Trump's planned immigration raids this weekend.

00:25:30.000 She urged members to spread information about undocumented immigrants' legal rights.

00:25:34.000 Speaking to closed-door whips, Pelosi urged members to spread the party's Know Your Rights campaign, according to two people in the room.

00:25:40.000 Democrats took the same approach earlier this year, Pelosi told members she plans to reach out to religious leaders to encourage them to oppose the efforts, as she did last month.

00:25:50.000 Pelosi even issued a statement trying to explain to people that they did not have to allow ICE agents into their homes.

00:25:58.000 And she said that if somebody shows up at your house and they ask if there's an illegal immigrant there, you just say you don't have a warrant to come into my house and the illegal immigrant hides upstairs, there's nothing they can do about it. 0.78

00:26:06.000 There are warrants out against these illegal immigrants.

00:26:08.000 The vast majority of people Trump is talking about raiding and arresting are people with outstanding warrants.

00:26:15.000 In many of these cases, not merely people who have overstayed their visas, but people who have committed separate crimes and for whom there are outstanding warrants.

00:26:22.000 It's an amazing thing to watch Democrats who are now openly stumping for people to escape the hand of the law.

00:26:31.000 Pelosi came out in a press conference yesterday and she said that President Trump is quote-unquote terrorizing families.

00:26:37.000 It's about values that the president does not seem to share.

00:26:40.000 And we saw this morning when he announced his heartless raids on families this coming Sunday.

00:26:46.000 And as they prepare to go to church, they feel very threatened and scared by these raids.

00:26:53.000 So hopefully the president will think again about it.

00:26:56.000 Families belong together.

00:26:59.000 Every person in America has rights.

00:27:02.000 These families are hardworking members of our communities and our country.

00:27:06.000 This brutal action will terrorize children and tear families apart.

00:27:10.000 Pelosi is talking about a blanket amnesty right here.

00:27:12.000 She's talking about a blanket amnesty.

00:27:13.000 Everybody who is in the country illegally now effectively becomes an American citizen who gets to live here forever. 0.99

00:27:18.000 That is what she is talking about.

00:27:19.000 Even people against whom there is an outstanding warrant, because that's who we're talking about here.

00:27:23.000 And as I say, most of the people who are going to be targeted are people who have committed Other crimes other than just being in the country illegally.

00:27:30.000 So here's what Pelosi did.

00:27:31.000 She apparently read from a card at her weekly press conference.

00:27:33.000 She said, quote, An ICE deportation warrant is not the same as a search warrant.

00:27:38.000 If that is the only document ICE brings to a home raid, agents do not have the legal right to enter a home.

00:27:42.000 If ICE agents don't have a warrant signed by a judge, a person may refuse to open the door and let them in.

00:27:47.000 So she's trying to tell people exactly how to avoid ICE's legal enforcement actions. 0.99

00:27:54.000 It's unbelievable.

00:27:54.000 Kamala Harris is doing the same thing, of course.

00:27:57.000 She appeared on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow, and she made the argument that what President Trump was doing with immigration raids, which, by the way, have taken place under every single president, including under President Obama, she called them a crime against humanity.

00:28:10.000 It's a crime against humanity now to arrest people upon whom there is an outstanding warrant, which does raise the question as to what the hell she was doing as Attorney General of California when, presumably, she was authorizing people to be arrested.

00:28:21.000 She said, the guy has now got to start distracting people from the fact that he made all these promises that I believe he had no intention of fulfilling.

00:28:27.000 He has failed to perform on every level by which we should measure a president.

00:28:30.000 And so he's going to create, as he often does, this distraction and do these raids, which is a crime against humanity, I believe, in the way he is coming about this and the way he has been handling the issue when you have babies in cages.

00:28:40.000 That's not what this raid is.

00:28:41.000 It's not about babies in cages.

00:28:43.000 It's about people who have outstanding warrants against them.

00:28:47.000 I mean, this is radical, radical stuff.

00:28:50.000 In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is doing the same thing. 0.99

00:28:52.000 She says we'll never tolerate ICE tearing our families apart.

00:28:56.000 Lightfoot said the threat of raids has forced illegal immigrants to hide in fear.

00:29:00.000 She said the Chicago PD will not cooperate with ICE in detaining residents, nor will ICE have access to any Chicago police databases.

00:29:07.000 So just to get this straight, according to the Supreme Court and the Obama administration, if a state decides that they are going to help arrest illegal immigrants, as they did in Arizona, that is illegal under the Supremacy Clause.

00:29:18.000 If, however, a locality decides to defy ICE and apparently create objective barriers to them arresting people, that's just good policy.

00:29:28.000 Harris said I assume that what Mayor Lightfoot is doing in Chicago is similar to what Mayor Breed will do in San Francisco, what Mayor Garcetti will do in Los Angeles, which is to say we don't want the limited resources of local law enforcement to go into the job that the federal government has got to do.

00:29:40.000 We want our local law enforcement to be trusted by our community and not be feared by our community.

00:29:44.000 She said, I don't want a victim of crime to be afraid to wave down that patrol car when she has been hurt for fear that if she stops, that police officer, she's going to be deported.

00:29:51.000 OK, that's a separate issue.

00:29:52.000 We are talking about active ICE raids now.

00:29:54.000 We're not talking about whether somebody witnesses a crime, reports it, and then we check their immigration status.

00:29:59.000 That's a different issue.

00:30:00.000 We are talking about active ICE raids that are being obstructed by local governments here.

00:30:06.000 By the way, if you speak to any cop anywhere in the country, And this is particularly true in Los Angeles.

00:30:10.000 If you want to talk about one of the problematic enforcement issues they have, it is that they cannot arrest illegal immigrants and coordinate with the federal government to do so. 0.85

00:30:17.000 A disproportionate number of people who are in California's prisons right now are illegal immigrants.

00:30:22.000 Are people who came here illegally and were not deported and committed crimes in the United States.

00:30:27.000 There are a lot of illegal immigrants who are in American prisons right now and were not deported.

00:30:32.000 In just a second, we'll get to the extreme position of the Democratic left when it comes to ICE.

00:30:39.000 Then we'll get to why it is that Joe Biden continues to soar in polling.

00:30:42.000 These are not unrelated questions.

00:30:43.000 First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber.

00:30:46.000 Today, it is firefighter Bradley Topliff on Instagram.

00:30:50.000 who is experiencing a harsh reality in the pursuit of living a healthy life filled with vitamin LT.

00:30:54.000 In the pic, Bradley, who is sitting on his couch taking a big swig out of the world's most elite beverage vessel, writes, Mother of Zeus, these leftist tears are salty.

00:31:02.000 Hashtag leftist tears, Tumblr.

00:31:04.000 Yes, as 2020 approaches, it will probably get even saltier.

00:31:07.000 So stay hydrated, my friend, and keep up the good work out there in Oregon.

00:31:11.000 Really appreciate what you do, Bradley.

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00:31:33.000 This week's Sunday special, Daniel Hannan, the UK Member of Parliament for the EU Parliament, He joins us.

00:31:42.000 Daniel is a really tremendous scholar and a great thinker.

00:31:46.000 Here's a little bit of what his hand's like.

00:31:49.000 Britain, in the end, was not prepared to become a province of a country called Europe.

00:31:53.000 We want to have the best and closest relations with our neighbours.

00:31:57.000 They will remain our friends and our allies and our suppliers and our customers.

00:32:01.000 But we want to live under our own laws, just like any other country.

00:32:07.000 So that is, it's a great interview.

00:32:09.000 Daniel Hannan is a brilliant guy, a really learned guy.

00:32:12.000 We have some disagreements.

00:32:13.000 We have a lot of agreement.

00:32:14.000 He really explains, I think, in depth what Brexit is all about.

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00:32:52.000 So, as I say, the Democrats becoming increasingly radical when it comes to ISIS.

00:33:02.000 Pete Buttigieg, who, it is amazing that the gap between the amount of media coverage and money that Buttigieg has received in his polling numbers.

00:33:09.000 So Buttigieg is solidly second tier.

00:33:11.000 He is polling in the RealClearPolitics polling average about 5%.

00:33:16.000 Despite all of the media coverage, which you would think would put him at like 10, 12%, he is still polling in the RealClearPolitics poll average at 5.3%, which is nowhere near the leaderboard.

00:33:26.000 The leaderboard right now has Biden at 27, Warren, Sanders, and Harris all tied at 15, according to the polling average.

00:33:33.000 The latest poll comes from the NBC News Wall Street Journal poll that has Biden at 26, Warren at 19, Sanders at 13, and Harris at 13.

00:33:40.000 So Harris lagging a little bit, which is kind of surprising.

00:33:43.000 Buttigieg at just 7.

00:33:45.000 Buttigieg continues to say radical things with a straight face.

00:33:48.000 Here he is saying that the ICE raids make Americans less safe.

00:33:50.000 He'll have to explain why arresting people who are here criminally makes Americans less safe.

00:33:54.000 I also want to get your response to the news this morning of mass immigration raids set to start in cities across the country over the weekend.

00:34:04.000 Well, this makes America less safe.

00:34:07.000 Look, I don't think anybody disagrees that there ought to be law enforcement protecting people from danger.

00:34:14.000 That's not what this is about.

00:34:15.000 This is targeting people who are caught in a broken system where there should be a pathway to citizenship.

00:34:20.000 And again, in a community like mine, if rumors start going on about raids, let alone if it starts actually happening, it immediately makes the community less safe.

00:34:30.000 Okay, so the argument is that if you start arresting illegal immigrants, they won't come forward to report crimes. 0.97

00:34:37.000 Well, again, these ICE raids are, just as Obama's were, are largely going to target people who have outstanding warrants.

00:34:43.000 Not just warrants for overstaying their visas.

00:34:45.000 If we're just arresting everybody overstaying their visas, there are like 10 million people in the country, 11 million minimum.

00:34:49.000 Maybe 20, according to some estimates.

00:34:51.000 That's not what this is.

00:34:53.000 Jared Polis is going even further.

00:34:54.000 Jared Polis is the governor of Colorado.

00:34:56.000 He said, Instead of working with Congress to find a real comprehensive solution to our broken immigration system, the president is unfortunately focused on creating uncertainty and fear.

00:35:09.000 These actions make our communities less safe and increase distrust of law enforcement.

00:35:14.000 Colorado celebrates our immigrant communities.

00:35:16.000 We will not allow the public safety of Coloradans to be held hostage by the Trump administration.

00:35:19.000 So, here is the Democratic position as of now.

00:35:22.000 Get no wall on the southern border to stop illegal immigration.

00:35:26.000 Get rid of the criminal section of the U.S.

00:35:28.000 Code about illegal immigration that makes it a criminal offense to cross between border patrol entry points, between points of entry on the border.

00:35:35.000 Get rid of that so it's just a civil offense.

00:35:37.000 You basically get a ticket and then you're released into the interior of the United States.

00:35:42.000 Also, you can't deport anyone.

00:35:44.000 So if people overstate their visa, we should never have an immigration raid.

00:35:47.000 You should never deport anyone.

00:35:48.000 So what they are calling for is open borders and blanket amnesty.

00:35:51.000 There is no other way to read the combined policy of what they're talking about.

00:35:54.000 Have they said anything about border enforcement anywhere in here?

00:35:57.000 Anywhere in here?

00:35:59.000 It's unbelievable.

00:36:00.000 All they had to do was be reasonable.

00:36:02.000 All they had to do was say, listen, we think that President Trump Is overstating the case on the evils of illegal immigration.

00:36:10.000 We think that it is not nearly as dangerous as he says it is, but we understand that any sovereign country has to protect our borders, and that's why we would increase funding on the border.

00:36:18.000 That's why we would provide better resources for Border Patrol so they can take care of people in humane fashion on the border, and that's why we would create a stage-by-stage program to make all the illegal immigrants in the United States actual citizens.

00:36:31.000 They could push A quote-unquote moderate program.

00:36:34.000 And they could probably knock Trump for being quote-unquote too extreme.

00:36:37.000 Instead, they've reacted to Trump's immigration position by going so far to the left.

00:36:41.000 And this is where the Democrats are completely misreading the tea leaves here.

00:36:44.000 It's pretty amazing.

00:36:46.000 They have mistaken the fact that people find Trump to be an off-putting personality for the idea that everything Trump says is not only wrong but 100% wrong.

00:36:55.000 And they have to go 180 degrees the opposite.

00:36:57.000 So they can't just go 10 degrees the opposite and kind of deflect off some of the good points that Trump is making and then make quote unquote, better points, if that's what you think, more reasonable points.

00:37:07.000 Instead, they've decided what we have to do is run directly the opposite direction.

00:37:09.000 So as Trump says, protect the border, we say, open the border.

00:37:12.000 We say, arrest no one.

00:37:14.000 Trump says, we'll arrest everyone.

00:37:16.000 Instead of us saying, well, no, we'll arrest some people, we'll arrest no one and we'll encourage more people to cross that border and we'll disband the Department of Homeland Security.

00:37:23.000 And we'll make it a non-criminal offense to cross between points of entry.

00:37:27.000 We'll encourage people to swim that Rio Grande.

00:37:29.000 We'll encourage people to overstay their visas.

00:37:31.000 If Democrats think this is a winning proposition, I don't know.

00:37:34.000 They're high.

00:37:35.000 It's unbelievable.

00:37:37.000 I mean, they're in Colorado smoking up dope with Governor Palos.

00:37:41.000 It's unreal.

00:37:43.000 President Trump says, I don't believe in climate change.

00:37:45.000 I think climate change is a hoax.

00:37:46.000 It's a Chinese hoax, yadda yadda. 0.99

00:37:48.000 Instead of Democrats saying, no, it's not a hoax, but we are not going to sink the United States economy.

00:37:53.000 We're going to come up with some reasonable plans for government funding of decarbonization facilities, which is a new thing they're trying out in Britain right now.

00:38:00.000 Instead of them saying, you know, there are certain ways that we can sort of curb our use of carbon.

00:38:04.000 Instead of them being reasonable about any of this, they're out there saying, you know what we're going to do?

00:38:08.000 We're going to radically restructure the entire American economy along the lines of World War II. 0.85

00:38:13.000 So Trump says climate change doesn't exist.

00:38:14.000 Not only does it exist, it is the greatest crisis that has ever faced humanity, and we are going to seize control of the means of production the way that we did in World War II, effectively, and then we're going to restructure the entire American economy on the back.

00:38:25.000 You think that's a winning message, guys?

00:38:28.000 You really think that most Americans aren't going to look down and go, whoa, this Trump guy's weird, but you guys are out of your minds.

00:38:34.000 You really think that's the direction this is going to go?

00:38:37.000 Thus, Joe Biden is leading the field, despite the fact that he is a lackluster candidate, a deeply lackluster candidate.

00:38:44.000 Now, in a second, we're going to get to Joe Biden and his lacklusterness.

00:38:47.000 So Joe Biden is, again, leading all the polling.

00:38:51.000 He's only up by a few points.

00:38:52.000 I don't think he ends up being the nominee.

00:38:54.000 If he had been sticking around in the mid-30s, I think maybe he'd be the nominee.

00:38:57.000 But he has been gradually sliding down.

00:38:59.000 And so has Bernie Sanders.

00:39:01.000 And this is the important thing.

00:39:02.000 As Bernie Sanders falls, a lot of that support is going to Elizabeth Warren. 1.00

00:39:06.000 Elizabeth Warren is, at this point, it's a three-person race. 0.99

00:39:10.000 It's Elizabeth Warren, it's Kamala Harris, it's Joe Biden.

00:39:14.000 And right now, you'd have to say, advantage probably Elizabeth Warren, just because it's going to be easier for Warren to wrest away control of the Sanders voters than it's going to be for Harris to wrest away total control of the Biden voters.

00:39:28.000 Although, it's been pretty easy for her to grab a big segment of that.

00:39:31.000 In any case, the only reason that Biden is still alive is a reason he is running away from.

00:39:35.000 So Joe Biden is still alive in this race because he is moderate, because he is a known quantity.

00:39:41.000 Instead, Joe Biden has been trying to head off the radicals of the past by becoming radical himself.

00:39:46.000 And that is not going to work.

00:39:48.000 Because the truth is that he is not passionate about the wild left nonsense of the Democratic Party.

00:39:57.000 So he's also not a very good candidate, is the sad truth for Joe Biden.

00:40:01.000 So yesterday, Joe Biden gave a long, meandering foreign policy speech in which he ripped into President Trump and talked about Trump.

00:40:08.000 It was incredibly boring.

00:40:09.000 It didn't really do anything for him. 0.66

00:40:11.000 Not only did it not do anything for him, it sort of reminded everybody that the Obama administration's foreign policy really sucked.

00:40:16.000 It was probably the worst aspect of the administration.

00:40:18.000 They left the Middle East in absolute flames. 1.00

00:40:20.000 They left Iran in control of regional power.

00:40:23.000 But here was Joe Biden ripping into Trump.

00:40:25.000 Donald Trump has absolutely corroded our country's credibility.

00:40:30.000 This president has bankrupted America's word in the world at the moment.

00:40:34.000 He's alienated us from the very democratic allies we need most.

00:40:40.000 Trump has taken a battery ram to the NATO alliance.

00:40:45.000 He treats us like it's some kind of American-run protection racket.

00:40:49.000 He just doesn't get it.

00:40:50.000 I really don't think he gets it.

00:40:52.000 Okay, well, I'll tell you who doesn't get it.

00:40:54.000 It was the Obama administration, which you talk about undermining our democratic allies.

00:40:57.000 Try Israel and Britain and Poland. 0.96

00:40:59.000 There are a lot of democratic allies that the Obama administration left out there.

00:41:03.000 In the dust, Biden's record is not all that good.

00:41:05.000 The only thing that's keeping him alive is that he is a known quantity.

00:41:08.000 He feels solid.

00:41:09.000 He feels stable.

00:41:10.000 But lately, he's been feeling wavering.

00:41:12.000 He's been feeling old.

00:41:14.000 That's why he's not going to be the nominee.

00:41:15.000 And so you're going to end up with one of these radicals.

00:41:17.000 Now, that would theoretically lead President Trump into a pretty good position.

00:41:22.000 Because the more radical the Democrats are, the better off for President Trump.

00:41:25.000 So, for example, President Trump yesterday made an announcement that he would not actually force a citizenship question onto the census.

00:41:32.000 Instead, he issued an executive order ordering his other agencies to start asking questions of local agencies about the number of illegal immigrants underneath them.

00:41:39.000 This avoids the constitutional problem.

00:41:41.000 That was created by the latest Supreme Court decision.

00:41:44.000 He decided not to go up against the Supreme Court.

00:41:46.000 He announced this executive order, no constitutional crisis or anything like that.

00:41:50.000 And then he launched into what is his solid campaign, right?

00:41:53.000 His solid campaign is that far-left Democrats are attempting to undermine the integrity of the United States by concealing the number of illegal immigrants in the country.

00:42:02.000 This happens to be true.

00:42:03.000 Here is Trump explaining.

00:42:05.000 Today I'm here to say we are not backing down on our effort to determine the citizenship status of the United States population.

00:42:14.000 As shocking as it may be, far-left Democrats in our country are determined to conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.

00:42:25.000 They probably know the number is far greater, much higher, Okay, so, you know, he is not wrong about all of this.

00:42:38.000 And so when he campaigns against the Democrats, as I've been saying all along, if he campaigns against their programs, if he campaigns against their radicalism, He'll be fine.

00:42:46.000 If, however, he gets caught up in the fun of being a troll, then trouble awaits.

00:42:52.000 And this is what happened yesterday at the social media get-together.

00:42:55.000 So, the media totally botched the coverage of a lot of this.

00:42:58.000 So, there's one particular area where the media not only botched the coverage, they just lied about it.

00:43:02.000 So, Jim Acosta lied about an exchange that took place between a quote-unquote reporter for Playboy.

00:43:07.000 He's not actually a reporter.

00:43:08.000 His name is Brian Karam, a supposed journalist.

00:43:11.000 And this reporter actually, we'll play the tape, he actually screamed at the people who were there.

00:43:16.000 And then he was confronted by Sebastian Gorka, who's another radio host on Salem Radio Network.

00:43:22.000 Here was the exchange as it actually happened, and then I'll show you what Jim Acosta said about it.

00:43:27.000 Don't be sad.

00:43:28.000 Don't be sad.

00:43:29.000 No, I'm just standing alone.

00:43:31.000 This is a group of people that are eager for demonic possession.

00:43:34.000 Demonic possession?

00:43:37.000 You're a journalist, right?

00:43:38.000 That's right!

00:43:39.000 Hey, come on over here and talk to me, brother.

00:43:41.000 We can go outside and have a long conversation.

00:43:43.000 You're surrounding me now in the White House. 0.98

00:43:47.000 You are a punk! 0.99

00:43:50.000 You're not a journalist, you're a punk! 0.97

00:43:53.000 Go home! 1.00

00:43:54.000 Go home!

00:43:56.000 Hey, Borka, get a job! 1.00

00:43:59.000 Hey, just for the record, he'd kick your punk ass. 1.00

00:44:04.000 Okay, so that was the exchange. 1.00

00:44:06.000 Now here's the way Jim Acosta actually characterized this.

00:44:09.000 They said White House officials invited Trump's social media allies to sit in the Rose Garden.

00:44:13.000 But after the event was over, West Wing aides did nothing when those social media figures began to verbally abuse reporters who are trying to do their jobs.

00:44:19.000 A good snapshot of how press is treated by White House.

00:44:22.000 You heard the exchange.

00:44:24.000 This quote-unquote reporter, Brian Karam, said that everyone in the garden was eager for demonic possession.

00:44:30.000 Okay, that's not journalism.

00:44:31.000 That's some serious journalism-ing right there, Brian Karam.

00:44:34.000 Serious journalist, Brian Karam.

00:44:37.000 Gorka confronting him was the least of the problems.

00:44:39.000 Gorka's an opinion host.

00:44:41.000 And Brian Karam is supposed to be a journalist.

00:44:43.000 He's not a journalist, he's a joke.

00:44:45.000 And the fact that he was confronted by Gorka's... Now, does any of this sort of stuff help the Trump administration and the image of stability they need to project?

00:44:53.000 Of course not.

00:44:54.000 There's two separate questions here.

00:44:55.000 One is, are people like Brian Karam terrible?

00:44:57.000 The answer is yes.

00:44:59.000 The second question is, why are you having a bunch of people who are at the very least deeply controversial to the White House in the first place?

00:45:07.000 Like, there are a bunch of people who are at the White House in this particular group of folks who were basically, I mean, have been involved in conspiracy theorizing, Seth Rich conspiracy theorizing, all sorts of stuff that makes Trump vulnerable to the charge that he's bringing A bunch of people who ought not be at the White House to the White House.

00:45:26.000 Why would Trump open himself up to that?

00:45:28.000 What is the benefit of that?

00:45:29.000 Now, maybe it's to motivate the base, but I promise you guys, everyone knows the base is motivated. 0.99

00:45:35.000 It's dumb, and frankly, it's wrong. 0.97

00:45:37.000 I mean, people who conspiracized about Seth Rich should probably not be at the White House. 0.99

00:45:41.000 They really should not be.

00:45:43.000 Because that was gross. 0.80

00:45:46.000 If the president wants to win re-election, all he has to do is shut the hell up and let the Democrats be who the Democrats are, and then point at them. 0.96

00:45:52.000 Just stare at them and point to them.

00:45:53.000 That's it.

00:45:54.000 That's all he has to do.

00:45:56.000 Okay, time for some mailbag because it is a Friday.

00:45:58.000 So, Ethan says, Hey Ben, love the show.

00:46:02.000 With both party bases getting further from the center, do you think it could lead to a dramatic split within either party?

00:46:07.000 I think it is unlikely that there will be a dramatic split inside the Republican Party.

00:46:11.000 I think the Democratic Party, I think party capture is more likely than a dramatic split.

00:46:16.000 Mainly because I don't think that the American political system allows for a powerful split the same way that it did back in the 1850s when the Republican Party split off from the Whig Party, where you had multiple parties.

00:46:30.000 The Free Soil Party was a party.

00:46:31.000 You had a bunch of different parties that were running in the 1850s as the parties began to crack up and fall apart.

00:46:38.000 I don't think that you're going to see the same thing.

00:46:40.000 It's much easier to capture a party as President Trump did the Republican Party.

00:46:44.000 Or as AOC is currently capturing the Democratic Party, than it is to split off and do your own thing.

00:46:50.000 And I don't think that the lines are clearly enough drawn.

00:46:52.000 So you would need one major issue where everyone disagrees.

00:46:56.000 Not merely a tactical question, but an actual political question.

00:46:59.000 So the reason the Whig Party split is because some of the party wanted slavery gone, and some of the party wanted slavery maintained with a Stephen Douglas-like deal.

00:47:06.000 In this particular case, What is the split issue?

00:47:10.000 In the Republican Party, there's fairly unanimous support for pro-life laws, for example.

00:47:14.000 There's not a split wedge issue inside the Republican Party.

00:47:17.000 Inside the Democratic Party, Pelosi and AOC disagree about tactics, but not much else.

00:47:20.000 Pelosi is happy to pat all of the intersectional allies on the head, just so long as they back her progressive agenda.

00:47:27.000 And they agree with her progressive agenda, so why wouldn't they go along with that?

00:47:30.000 So the sort of ugly rhetoric that you're seeing inside both parties, the infighting, I don't think that ends in a split.

00:47:35.000 Bob says, Hey Ben, after seeing all the evidence, how can you believe the moon landing was real?

00:47:39.000 Take, for instance, that the American flag is blowing in the wind in the famous Apollo 11 photo.

00:47:43.000 Since there's no air in space, how can the flag ripple?

00:47:45.000 It had to be on a soundstage.

00:47:47.000 Well, it wasn't.

00:47:48.000 Not only was it not on a soundstage, There is a fantastic series, I've referred to it on the show already, called Apollo 11.

00:47:55.000 What we saw.

00:47:56.000 It's coming out very soon.

00:47:57.000 You should go subscribe to it and listen to every detail along the way as we were in the space race, as we landed a man on the moon.

00:48:06.000 Bill Whittle, the host, does a great job of debunking a lot of these particular myths about the flag rippling.

00:48:11.000 It's the momentum of the flag when you put it down on the moon and all that.

00:48:13.000 It wasn't actual wind on the moon.

00:48:16.000 But the fact that people are bound up in conspiracy theories about the moon landing shows that people are willing to place an interpretation of events that far exceeds the evidence for that interpretation.

00:48:28.000 It's something we should watch out for in politics all the time, is looking at a series of events and then creating a narrative to explain the series of events.

00:48:35.000 As opposed to what may be the more plausible narrative, which is maybe these events don't have anything to do with each other.

00:48:40.000 Conspiracy theories are a way for us to put narrative on the world, but in this case it's a false narrative to put on the world.

00:48:46.000 The reason that I don't believe that this was done on a soundstage is because it was not done on a soundstage.

00:48:51.000 It is because there is solid evidence that we did in fact launch people to the moon It would have required not just a few people, it would have required tens of thousands of people to be involved in a conspiracy.

00:49:02.000 And one of the things about conspiracies is that conspiracies that actually happen usually are fairly small because it's hard to keep a secret like that for that long.

00:49:11.000 Samson says, Hi Ben.

00:49:12.000 You often talk about the United States needing to become a more virtuous society again.

00:49:16.000 How religion is a great way to do so. 0.92

00:49:17.000 I think the case could be made that many people on the right also see their politics as their religion and source of identity.

00:49:22.000 What is the difference between that and a leftist?

00:49:24.000 P.S.

00:49:24.000 I'm not talking about racism and white supremacy.

00:49:26.000 So I agree with this.

00:49:27.000 I think there are a lot of people on the right who see politics as religion and are willing to follow a strong leader and who are willing to substitute political principle for a feeling of religious observance, who believe that if you disagree with them politically, this means that you are evil in some way.

00:49:44.000 Now, I'm not saying there's no such thing as an evil belief system.

00:49:46.000 I think communism is an evil belief system. 0.80

00:49:48.000 I think Nazism is an evil belief system.

00:49:51.000 However, if you are saying that not based on the lack of virtue in those systems, but based on this agreement about tax rates and property distribution rights and all of that, then, and if you are linking, more than that, if you are linking somebody's identity to the political views that they hold, without saying, okay, love the sin, love the sin or hate the sin, And then you are making a very large mistake.

00:50:15.000 I fully agree that there are people on the right who have been sucked into spending more time thinking about political issues than about their fellow man.

00:50:23.000 And what that leads to is actually less of an open debate and less of an open conversation.

00:50:27.000 Because if you share general moral principles with someone, you're going to have a lot easier conversation about the political ramifications of those moral principles than if you do not.

00:50:36.000 Now, I will say that there is a reaction on the right to the religious treatment of politics on the left, and that is for the right to harden its flanks.

00:50:45.000 So the left, I think, has gotten a lot more religious than the right because they were irreligious in the first place, typically, and much more secular. 0.58

00:50:51.000 And so their religious principle has become, if you disagree with us about environmentalism, you are damned to hell flame forever.

00:50:56.000 And the right has responded by saying, well, you're saying we're damned to hell flame. 0.84

00:51:00.000 You guys believe in abortion on demand.

00:51:02.000 I mean, we're talking about hell flame.

00:51:03.000 That seems like a pretty good place to go.

00:51:06.000 Listen, I don't want to downplay serious political disagreements because there are serious political disagreements.

00:51:13.000 The difference between actual practice of actual religion and the practice of politics as religion is that politics as religion inherently involves government compulsion.

00:51:22.000 That's what politics is all about.

00:51:23.000 It's not merely about convincing each other with regard to arguments without regard to the government.

00:51:28.000 Politics is about using the power of government to enforce your will.

00:51:32.000 The problem is when politics becomes religion, Then government and religion are the same and you have what is effectively a secular theocracy.

00:51:40.000 And there I do see some people on the right who are falling into that trap.

00:51:42.000 The left has been in that trap for quite a while.

00:51:44.000 Ryan says, hey, Ben, I was wondering if illegal immigrants have constitutional rights as per the text of the U.S. Constitution.

00:51:50.000 Obviously, they have human rights, but it seems weird to me that specifically American rights apply to non-citizens just because they cross the border.

00:51:57.000 Thanks, Ryan.

00:51:58.000 Well, it depends on the right.

00:52:00.000 So obviously illegal immigrants do not have the constitutional right to live where they please, right? 1.00

00:52:05.000 They can be deported.

00:52:06.000 There are certain rights that the Constitution applies to any person living within the borders of the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

00:52:13.000 So, you're not allowed to just go in and beat the living hell, like the police can't go and beat the living hell out of an illegal immigrant for no reason. 0.95

00:52:19.000 So there are certain rights that apply to anybody living within our borders, but it's not every constitutional right.

00:52:24.000 Not every constitutional right applies to illegal immigrants. 1.00

00:52:28.000 I mean, one of the questions is, can you tell somebody's an illegal immigrant right off the bat, or not?

00:52:32.000 That's not clear.

00:52:33.000 So you have to assume they're an American citizen until you have proof otherwise, presumably.

00:52:37.000 Bryant's has been.

00:52:38.000 Am I taking crazy pills?

00:52:39.000 This question of citizenship has appeared on the census for more than 100 years.

00:52:43.000 It is public record.

00:52:44.000 Most census questionnaires ask for birthplace appearance, immigration legal status.

00:52:48.000 Many literally have a citizenship column on the census form.

00:52:51.000 This has been standard procedure for years.

00:52:52.000 What am I missing?

00:52:53.000 What are people arguing about?

00:52:54.000 Excellent question. 1.00

00:52:55.000 They're arguing over stupidity. 1.00

00:52:56.000 The left doesn't want this question on the census because they believe that the Trump administration is trying to gather information about how many illegal immigrants live in districts for purposes of redistricting. 1.00

00:53:06.000 Which, by the way, should be done.

00:53:08.000 That we should have districts that are drawn based on the number of American citizens living in a district, not on the number of people, including folks who cannot vote or take part in American politics, living in those districts.

00:53:19.000 Basically, I think that this is animus against Trump, frankly.

00:53:22.000 It's animus against Republicans.

00:53:23.000 I don't see a rational reason not to ask that question.

00:53:26.000 Matthew says, Hey Ben, I've been listening to Milton Friedman lately.

00:53:28.000 It's been common knowledge that FDR and his New Deal extended the Great Depression by eight years.

00:53:32.000 Where could I find some good resources on this to read more on it?

00:53:34.000 So there was a good study from UCLA Anderson School of Business that came out a few years ago.

00:53:39.000 If you search Anderson School of Business study Great Depression, it'll come up.

00:53:43.000 Talking about how the Great Depression was lengthened by eight years.

00:53:46.000 Also, there's sort of a variation between the Vienna School of Economics and the Chicago School of Economics on what exactly led to the Great Depression.

00:53:52.000 Hayek wrote about it, so did Milton Friedman.

00:53:54.000 Friedman basically suggests that it was a lack of inflation in the monetary supply, it was the contraction of the monetary supply.

00:54:00.000 Hayek suspects, and members of the Viennese School of Economics suspect, that it was government interventionism, tariffs and trade barriers, and actually, A bubble that was created by the federal government in terms of currency in the 1920s that led to an ease of credit in the 1920s that led to the crash.

00:54:19.000 There's a very good book called Vienna or Chicago by Mark Skousen that talks specifically about that argument.

00:54:26.000 If you want a book that talks about the failures of FDR's policy during the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes has an excellent book about this as well.

00:54:33.000 Let's see, Rohan says, Ben, Elon Musk has said that he would like to see a permanent human presence on Mars.

00:54:38.000 Having a self-sustaining outpost on Mars would serve as an insurance policy if something disastrous were to happen to humanity on Earth.

00:54:43.000 What are your thoughts on this?

00:54:44.000 Do you think space exploration has the ability to serve as a social fabric, meaning it would unite Americans, allow us to move past identity politics and leftist intersectionality?

00:54:52.000 Best, Rohan.

00:54:53.000 Well, yeah, I mean, I think it'd be great.

00:54:55.000 I think that what Elon Musk is talking about by colonizing Mars, that'd be fantastic.

00:55:01.000 I think humanity totally should do that if we can, and it would be a worthwhile mission, a useful mission.

00:55:06.000 Now, here is the big issue.

00:55:08.000 Is that going to solve the problems that we have here on Earth?

00:55:10.000 No, because we're human beings, and human beings have problems.

00:55:13.000 We can go anywhere and have problems.

00:55:15.000 We can travel across seas and to distant lands and still have those problems.

00:55:18.000 Within 200 years of us colonizing Mars, within 50 years of us colonizing Mars, there will be intersectional battles over land redistribution on Mars.

00:55:25.000 Human beings are always going to be human beings.

00:55:26.000 Human nature is always going to be human nature.

00:55:29.000 Now, increased amounts of territory are going to presumably ease some of the problems, but it depends how hard it is to colonize Mars.

00:55:38.000 I assume people aren't just going to be flying up there in their own personal spaceships and then planting the flag on a bit of territory where they put some rocks down, the way that we did when people crossed America, crossed the continent to lay out a homestead, for example.

00:55:52.000 I assume that a Mars colony would be a lot more organized, top-down.

00:55:56.000 So, human nature is always going to be human nature, is the short answer.

00:55:59.000 Maeve says, Hey Ben, you say our healthcare system is broken and that universal healthcare as the left is promoting it is not the solution.

00:56:03.000 I agree on both fronts.

00:56:05.000 What do you think should be done to improve America's healthcare system from where it is now?

00:56:08.000 I've been a listener of your podcast for a while, recently became a Dailyware subscriber.

00:56:11.000 Well, appreciate it.

00:56:13.000 There's a very good report by Avik Roy that I've been reading through that has some kind of temporary fixes and solutions for the healthcare system in the United States, relies a lot on health savings accounts, the transition away from employer-based healthcare, and more toward individually-based healthcare, where you are responsible for purchasing your own insurance, and thus, when you lose your job, you don't necessarily lose your insurance.

00:56:35.000 Obviously, being able to sell insurance across state lines would help deregulation of the insurance industry, would certainly help Lowering licensing requirements in particular areas of medicine would help.

00:56:45.000 Greater price transparency on drugs would certainly help.

00:56:48.000 As I say, Avik Roy is, I think, probably the leading scholar in America on this, and he has about a 300-page report that is well worthwhile kind of browsing.

00:56:58.000 I intend on going through it at some point in a future episode.

00:57:00.000 Maybe I'll have Avik on one of our Sunday specials, and we can talk about All of the solutions.

00:57:08.000 There is no point at which they reach the end of the radical plank.

00:57:08.000 No.

00:57:14.000 It is free everything all the way down.

00:57:15.000 Now, in terms of policy, none of it will apply.

00:57:18.000 In terms of policy, none of this stuff will be done.

00:57:19.000 It's all nonsense.

00:57:20.000 Angela says, So first of all, that is a very obscure question, so I would actually have to look up to remind myself what Nietzsche's four critiques on Christianity are.

00:57:35.000 So I'm going to punt on that, because I frankly don't know those off the top of my head.

00:57:42.000 He I know that his sort of generalized critique of Christianity, which is that it created a slave mentality where meekness was supposed to serve as a substitute for strength and that the poor would would rule the earth and the meek would rule the earth.

00:57:54.000 And so it's an anti meritocracy.

00:57:56.000 I think that that is a complete misread of Christianity.

00:57:58.000 I also think it's a complete misread of Judaism.

00:58:00.000 He sort of conflates the two.

00:58:02.000 I don't think that that is right.

00:58:04.000 He says that Christianity is about victimization, basically, and it's about pity.

00:58:08.000 I don't think that that is correct.

00:58:09.000 I think Christianity, in my read, and again, I'm not a Christian scholar, but I am, you know, more knowledgeable about Judaism, so I'll talk about Judaism.

00:58:16.000 Judaism is not about a victim mentality, which he sort of suggests it is.

00:58:19.000 Judaism is about the idea that you have obligations and duties to God, and you are obligated to fulfill those duties to God, regardless of whether you believe yourself to be a victim in the first place.

00:58:28.000 It doesn't say that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, or any of that sort of stuff in a practical sense.

00:58:32.000 What it is saying is that in a moral sense, People who are more moral in a better time will reap the benefit of their morality.

00:58:41.000 I am not a fan of Nietzsche's morality.

00:58:43.000 I think that Nietzsche's morality is... I think his critique of what happens when secularism takes over is exactly right. 0.83

00:58:53.000 I think that his belief that Christianity falling away would lead to a better world is exactly wrong and was proved wrong in his own country within the next few years.

00:59:04.000 Sarah says, Howdy Ben, what are your thoughts on robot umpires being introduced in baseball games?

00:59:08.000 I've heard some people say it strengthens the integrity of the game.

00:59:10.000 I am totally for robot umpires.

00:59:12.000 I am 100% for robot umpires.

00:59:14.000 I want more pitches called correctly.

00:59:16.000 I don't want a changing strike zone.

00:59:18.000 I don't want pitch framing to be the big issue at a game.

00:59:21.000 I want to know on an objective level.

00:59:23.000 I like data.

00:59:23.000 I want to know on an objective level whether a pitch is a ball or a strike.

00:59:26.000 I think hitters would like that. 0.98

00:59:27.000 I think pitchers would like that.

00:59:29.000 Then it's just a straight up competition between the players. 0.99

00:59:30.000 Making the umpire the issue is really dumb. 0.99

00:59:33.000 Paul's final question. 0.98

00:59:35.000 Paul says, my husband and I just had our first child.

00:59:37.000 Well, I would like to quit my job and raise for myself.

00:59:39.000 He thinks she won't develop social skills if she doesn't go to daycare.

00:59:41.000 Could you please share your thoughts on daycare versus raising kids at home?

00:59:44.000 I've seen very little evidence that going to daycare actually creates more social skills than going to school when you're five years old, for example.

00:59:52.000 I don't think that the data is there to support that idea.

00:59:55.000 Now, with that said, my kids went to preschool.

00:59:57.000 My kids right now are in preschool.

00:59:59.000 So, you know, I think that there's nothing wrong with sending your kids to preschool.

01:00:04.000 My wife works, obviously. 1.00

01:00:06.000 But at the same time, You know, raising your kids at home and being home with your kids?

01:00:11.000 There's nothing wrong with that either.

01:00:12.000 You're going to make playdates.

01:00:13.000 You're not just going to be at home with your kids all the time.

01:00:15.000 You're going to make playdates, you're going to meet other kids, you're going to bring them to church groups.

01:00:18.000 Kids will find a way to socialize and you will find ways for your kids to socialize.

01:00:21.000 You don't necessarily have to send them to daycare in the care of another adult.

01:00:25.000 It'll be one adult for 30 kids.

01:00:27.000 Depends on the daycare.

01:00:28.000 Honestly, it also depends on the quality of the daycare.

01:00:30.000 Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.

01:00:32.000 Extra long show today.

01:00:35.000 Things that I like.

01:00:36.000 So I've had a chance to sit down with Bill Whittle.

01:00:38.000 I mentioned this before.

01:00:39.000 Apollo 11, what we saw.

01:00:40.000 Go subscribe right now.

01:00:42.000 It's great.

01:00:43.000 This is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

01:00:46.000 I sat with Bill a little bit yesterday and we talked about what exactly happened with Apollo 11, why it's still important.

01:00:55.000 Welcome to Apollo 11 Mission Control.

01:00:59.000 What's left of it anyway.

01:01:01.000 The Space Race.

01:01:02.000 12 years of open warfare between two superpowers.

01:01:05.000 The United States and the Soviet Union.

01:01:08.000 We used our best missiles, our best pilots.

01:01:10.000 Scientists and engineers.

01:01:11.000 We employed aircraft carriers, radar stations, all the military hardware we had to defeat our ideological nemesis.

01:01:19.000 When each team had over 20,000 nuclear warheads apiece.

01:01:24.000 The space race was the defining act of the second half of the 20th century.

01:01:28.000 Time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement.

01:01:34.000 50 years ago, men from planet Earth first set foot upon the moon.

01:01:38.000 You owe it to yourself and to history to experience the space age from the inside and see how it took hundreds of small steps to get to that one giant leap.

01:01:50.000 I'm Bill Whittle, and this is what we saw.

01:01:57.000 Well, Bill Whittle, I'm so glad that you could stop by.

01:02:00.000 Bill, of course, is hosting a brand new podcast, Apollo 11, What We Saw.

01:02:04.000 So Bill, tell us about what this podcast is actually going to be.

01:02:07.000 Well, we had four segments of about an hour each.

01:02:10.000 The final one turned into almost two.

01:02:12.000 So the great news is, while every segment talks a bit about the Apollo 11 mission, I get to break that down into different areas.

01:02:19.000 But the great thing is we basically cover the entire space race from Chinese rocket-assisted arrows to SpaceX landing twin boosters on the Falcon Heavy launch.

01:02:28.000 And, you know, one of the things I realized, Ben, is that people who have so much trouble Believing that this happened.

01:02:35.000 Have trouble believing it happened because they're told that the moon landing just kind of parachuted into the world.

01:02:40.000 You know, we're watching, you know, all in the family.

01:02:42.000 Hey, we cut the hold on news announcement.

01:02:44.000 We've landed on the moon apparently.

01:02:46.000 And what they don't see is that every single three, four weeks prior to that for four or five years, there's just another mission going a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further, a little bit further.

01:02:57.000 And we get to talk about all of them.

01:02:59.000 No, Sirius is beautiful.

01:02:59.000 I mean, it looks beautiful, it sounds terrific.

01:03:01.000 It really is.

01:03:02.000 So, what do you think was the importance of the moon landing?

01:03:04.000 I mean, we obviously all pay attention to it because it's amazing in and of itself, but what do you think was sort of the greater impact of the moon landing?

01:03:11.000 Kennedy caught two things with that famous moon landing speech of his.

01:03:17.000 And I don't even know if he knew that he caught him.

01:03:20.000 But he said, we want to do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

01:03:23.000 And what he selected was the hardest thing to do.

01:03:26.000 It was the hardest thing to do in the world at the time.

01:03:30.000 And so we had been so badly humiliated by the Soviets. 0.60

01:03:35.000 We're in a war with the Soviet Union.

01:03:38.000 We've got 20,000 nuclear weapons, so do they.

01:03:40.000 We've got test pilots, aircraft carriers, all this stuff.

01:03:43.000 We can't use them, because if we do, There goes all of our cities and there's two.

01:03:49.000 So what this was, was a way for us to showcase our technology and our ability and impress third world countries and all the rest without actually killing each other.

01:03:59.000 But it's all about missiles and pilots and radars and all that stuff.

01:04:02.000 So Kennedy said, what is the hardest thing we can do?

01:04:05.000 And since we've been so humiliated since Sputnik, He realized that the American people would, what they would think of themselves more than what the rest of the world would think of it.

01:04:14.000 But the main thing he said that really got it is that opening sentence.

01:04:18.000 He says, we choose to go to the moon.

01:04:19.000 And that's it.

01:04:21.000 Once you make the choice to go, it's just an engineering problem.

01:04:24.000 That was the hard part.

01:04:25.000 That was the hurdle to go into the moon was making the decision to go.

01:04:30.000 I mean, one of the things that you talk about in the series is the uncertainty of the people who are involved in this project as to whether it was going to work.

01:04:37.000 I mean, we sort of take it for granted that the thing worked, but that was a knife's edge thing, it sounds like, for the vast majority of the planning.

01:04:44.000 Armstrong and Aldrin admitted after the mission that they figured they had a 50-50 chance of getting home, which is not the kind of thing you want to do at home.

01:04:52.000 Flip a coin, it's heads.

01:04:53.000 You keep on going with your day, tails, you know.

01:04:56.000 Close the door and turn on the car in the garage.

01:04:59.000 But that's one of the reasons why they deserve the heroism.

01:05:02.000 The three Apollo 1 astronauts died in a fire in the capsule that was so horrific.

01:05:07.000 And I get a chance to go a little bit into those details.

01:05:10.000 And I go into those details not because it's gruesome, but I don't do it because it's just kind of macabre.

01:05:16.000 I do it because people need to understand the courage it took to take the risks they took.

01:05:22.000 The Apollo 1 crew had complained about all of this flammable material in the capsule.

01:05:26.000 And when this capsule caught fire, and all three of them died in the fire, when they got the door open, it took over an hour to get them out of the capsule because the nylon had fused them into the side of the capsule.

01:05:39.000 Now, that's not a pretty image, but that image is something that every single guy who flew those missions had in the back of his mind.

01:05:48.000 And that's why...

01:05:52.000 You need to tell that part of the story because of the heroism.

01:05:54.000 But to be honest with you, since I was, look, I was an astronaut when I was five.

01:05:58.000 I didn't want to be.

01:05:59.000 I was.

01:05:59.000 It was just a paperwork issue.

01:06:01.000 You had to sort it out.

01:06:03.000 So I really, growing up as an experimental test pilot and stuff, and the thing I like most about the series is we get a lot of the really strange, really odd backstage stuff that nobody really gets to talk about.

01:06:16.000 I mean, since you get into such an inordinate level of detail with regard to what exactly happened with Apollo 11, what do you make of all the people who remain conspiracy theorists, who think that this was all shot on some backstage lot somewhere?

01:06:27.000 Yeah.

01:06:28.000 Well, I used to get a lot more angry at them than I do now.

01:06:31.000 And having done... I mean, I knew the space program very well, but having done the research I did, I realized that the reason, as I said, that so many people have a hard time believing it Is analogous to the fact that you say that the Wright Brothers went down to Kitty Hawk in 1903 and built an F-22 Raptor.

01:06:50.000 And the Wright Brothers can't build an F-22 Raptor.

01:06:53.000 They built a wooden thing with canvas wings which evolved into the biplanes of World War I with canvas wings.

01:06:53.000 But they did.

01:06:59.000 Which evolved into the all-wood hurricane in World War II, which evolved into the P-51, now we get jets, we get the Sabre, we get the F-4, we're supersonic, fly-by-wire with the F-16, we get stealth with the F-117, we get radars with the F-15, better engines with the F-118, and then you can build an F-22.

01:07:16.000 And the entire purpose of this show is to take a look at every single one of those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of small steps that got us to that giant leap.

01:07:25.000 And now that we look back on this, and we haven't been back to the moon in a manned mission since, what's changed?

01:07:31.000 Is it the scope of American ambition?

01:07:33.000 Is it our belief in ourselves?

01:07:34.000 What do you think has changed in terms of how we view space?

01:07:39.000 I think we will go back.

01:07:42.000 I didn't think so three years ago.

01:07:43.000 I thought this was going to be the pinnacle of human history, July 20th, 1969.

01:07:48.000 But I've changed my mind in the last couple years.

01:07:52.000 What I think is going to happen is, you can measure the greatness of America by the fact that this country got bored with going to the moon.

01:08:01.000 You know?

01:08:01.000 I mean, you have to think really, it's really what happened.

01:08:03.000 We went to the moon?

01:08:04.000 Yeah, all right, I'm done.

01:08:05.000 What's next?

01:08:06.000 We spent two generations essentially in orbit with space shuttles and Skylab and stuff.

01:08:11.000 We're essentially retracing John Glenn's flight from, you know, 1962.

01:08:16.000 And so we spent two generations going nowhere.

01:08:19.000 But with SpaceX and Blue Origin and all the rest of this stuff, we're seeing a new kind of enthusiasm.

01:08:27.000 And as I say in the podcast, I was 10 years old at the Plaza Hotel when they actually stepped foot on the moon.

01:08:34.000 And we had the windows open, and down in Central Park, there were probably 30,000 or 40,000 people watching these projection screen TVs.

01:08:41.000 And when he stepped on the moon, this cheer just came up, you know?

01:08:44.000 It's just this unbelievable sound.

01:08:46.000 Never heard it at a football game, anything like it.

01:08:49.000 But I did hear it from the millennials who were inside the SpaceX building when those two boosters came down and landed.

01:08:57.000 It was that same almost unbelievable pitch of excitement.

01:09:01.000 And I think the second time is going to be a lot looser, a lot more fun.

01:09:06.000 Any company, Ben, any company whose recovery ship's official name is, of course I still love you, those guys are going to Mars.

01:09:14.000 And I don't have any doubt about that at all.

01:09:16.000 Well, Bill, the series is called Apollo 11, What We Saw.

01:09:19.000 Everybody should go check it out.

01:09:20.000 You can subscribe over at Apple Podcasts.

01:09:22.000 You can get it at iTunes, anywhere you get your podcasts.

01:09:23.000 Go subscribe right now.

01:09:24.000 It really is terrific.

01:09:25.000 Bill, thanks for stopping by.

01:09:26.000 My pleasure, buddy.

01:09:26.000 Good to see you.

01:09:27.000 I've got to go back to the underground control chamber now, where I've been since I was 10.

01:09:31.000 You know, we had mission control back up there in case the Soviets launched a nuclear attack, and I've basically been there since 1969.

01:09:36.000 Well, as long as they don't have Twitter, you're better off.

01:09:39.000 What?

01:09:39.000 Catch you in a bit, Bill.

01:09:41.000 I agree with me.

01:09:41.000 You betcha, buddy.

01:09:42.000 Go and subscribe right now.

01:09:44.000 Apollo 11, what we saw.

01:09:45.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate. 0.99

01:09:51.000 Alrighty, so here is a very stupid thing. 0.98

01:09:54.000 There is a person named Dan Hassler Forrest, and he writes a piece for the Washington Post today. 0.98

01:09:59.000 He's an author and public speaker on media franchises, cultural theory, and political economy.

01:10:03.000 He works as assistant professor in the media studies department of Utrecht University.

01:10:08.000 And he has a piece today in the Washington Post titled, The Lion King is a Fascistic Story.

01:10:12.000 No remake can change that.

01:10:15.000 Oh my.

01:10:18.000 I mean, last I checked, The Lion King was actually just a story about lions.

01:10:21.000 But apparently not.

01:10:22.000 Apparently it's about the evils of democracy.

01:10:26.000 Here's what this columnist writes.

01:10:27.000 Last November, Disney broke the internet with its teaser trailer for The Lion King.

01:10:30.000 This 93-second video gave millions of people chills by faithfully recreating key moments from the original film's beloved opening number.

01:10:37.000 But as nostalgic as Circle of Life may make us feel, this bombastic scene is also a painful reminder of the film's ideological agenda.

01:10:44.000 It introduces us to a society where the weak have learned to worship at the feet of the strong.

01:10:50.000 Oh.

01:10:51.000 My.

01:10:52.000 God.

01:10:55.000 Basically, the Lion King is just Hamlet, right?

01:10:57.000 I mean, that is the basis of the Lion King.

01:10:59.000 It is the uncle who tries to kill the father, and Mufasa dies, spoiler alert, and then the son has to do something about all of that.

01:11:09.000 If Hamlet were a straightforward story, then it would look like the Lion King.

01:11:12.000 It's obviously based on the Lion King with the toucan as Polonius and the whole thing.

01:11:18.000 The whole thing.

01:11:20.000 The fact that this is now being taken seriously as some sort of metaphor for why monarchy is good is hilarious to me.

01:11:26.000 We may be a little bit too... We may be overanalyzing this thing a little bit too much.

01:11:31.000 This columnist says, As we watch the herbivores congregate to bow down before their newborn ruler, the Lion King offers us a seductive worldview in which absolute power goes unquestioned, and where the weak and the vulnerable are fundamentally inferior.

01:11:42.000 In other words, the Lion King offers us a fascist ideology writ large.

01:11:46.000 There seems to be no way out for the forthcoming remake.

01:11:49.000 The first thing to understand about The Lion King is that it isn't in any way about lions or any other animal species.

01:11:55.000 No, it kind of is, and it says so in the title, The Lion King, and then also there are only animals and no humans in it.

01:12:06.000 It's amazing how the left will struggle to say that certain things are not metaphors, and then they will immediately say that this is a metaphor for fascism on Earth.

01:12:14.000 As in every fable, a variety of cute and cuddly figures stand in for human societal organizations.

01:12:19.000 Mapping our internalized social hierarchies onto this pristine and neutral world of the animal kingdom renders these power dynamics natural, common sense, and desirable.

01:12:27.000 Okay, so first of all, let's just be real about the animal kingdom.

01:12:29.000 Lions eat zebras.

01:12:32.000 When they are called the king of the forest, king of the jungle, this has been a thing for quite a while, and that is because the lion is the apex predator in this particular scenario.

01:12:43.000 That's called nature.

01:12:44.000 By using the predator-prey relationships to allegorize human power, the film almost inevitably incorporates the white supremacist worldview.

01:12:52.000 So now, believe it or not, the argument is that The Lion King is about white supremacy.

01:12:57.000 Now, last I checked, Mufasa, his voice in The Lion King, is James Earl Jones, who is black.

01:13:06.000 Simba, in the remake, is played by Donald Glover, who is black.

01:13:11.000 Nala, who is his wife, is played by Beyoncé, who is black.

01:13:16.000 Sarabi, who is his mom, is played by Alfre Woodard, who is black.

01:13:22.000 James Earl Jones is still Mufasa, and still black. 1.00

01:13:25.000 But apparently, it's all white supremacy. 0.96

01:13:28.000 It's all white supremacy. 0.93

01:13:30.000 Wow.

01:13:31.000 Obviously, such fables can serve politically to every sense, says this columnist for the Washington Post.

01:13:35.000 George Orwell's Animal Farm employed a similar allegory to make class distinctions more blatantly visible and to criticize authoritarian systems of power.

01:13:43.000 Disney's own Robin Hood adaptation similarly associated power systems with animal food chains, but used its allegory to poke fun at the obvious greed and corruption that define the predatory ruling class.

01:13:53.000 But the sympathies of the Lion King lie elsewhere.

01:13:56.000 Doubling down on Disney's historical obsession with patriarchal monarchies, it places the audience's point of view squarely with the autocratic lions, whose pride rock literally looks down upon all of society's weaker groups, a kind of Trump Tower of the African Savannah.

01:14:10.000 So now Mufasa is Trump.

01:14:12.000 Oh man, I love these lions.

01:14:13.000 They're unbelievable.

01:14:15.000 Simba, let's go eat a zebra.

01:14:18.000 When Grand Patriarch Mufasa explains patiently to his son how this division of power works, he emphasizes that the king must maintain balance in their kingdom.

01:14:26.000 This seems fine when we think about the environment where balance sounds great, because they're living in the environment and aren't animals, so yes.

01:14:31.000 But when we consider he's really explaining to his own heir why it's perfectly fine to behave dictatorially, the lion's perspective feels a lot more unsettling.

01:14:39.000 Bad as it is that the powerful are presented as inherently superior to all other things, things get substantially worse once the hyenas are introduced.

01:14:47.000 With the lions standing in for the ruling class and the good, herbivores embodying society's decent law-abiding citizens, the hyenas transparently represent the black, brown, and disabled bodies that are forcefully excluded from this fascist society. 0.98

01:15:01.000 So the hyenas are black and brown and disabled. 1.00

01:15:04.000 Where's the disabled? 1.00

01:15:05.000 Is there a disabled hyena? 0.97

01:15:07.000 Like a hyena rolling around in a wheelchair?

01:15:09.000 Did I miss that part?

01:15:09.000 In Lion King?

01:15:10.000 And they're black and brown as opposed to the lions, whose voices are all black folks. 0.99

01:15:17.000 Noticeably marked by their ethnically coded street accents, the hyenas blatantly symbolize racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes of verminous groups that form an inherent threat to society.

01:15:27.000 Oh, that's what's going on. 0.96

01:15:28.000 It's the Jews! 1.00

01:15:28.000 How did I miss this whole thing? 1.00

01:15:30.000 I mean, maybe I missed it because they're obviously supposed to be Nazis.

01:15:33.000 They have like an actual Nazi march with goose stepping in the original Lion King movie.

01:15:37.000 When Scar sings Be Prepared, the hyenas actually march like Nazis.

01:15:41.000 It's an obvious Nazi allegory. 0.89

01:15:43.000 Nonetheless, this is so great.

01:15:47.000 This fallible betrayal of tradition.

01:15:49.000 What in the world?

01:15:49.000 predictably orchestrated by scar the misfit lion whose opportunistic desire to advance the status of minorities echoes the way conservatives speak of liberal politicians when they act as if compassion is merely opportunism simultaneously his effeminate gestures and lack of interest in heterosexual reproduction mark him as queer like the vast majority of other villains in disney's exclusively heterosexual world what in the world what the guys did you ever did i miss this i

01:16:18.000 Did you ever get that all the villains in Disney films are gay? 0.81

01:16:22.000 I feel like I missed this part.

01:16:24.000 Wow, that's amazing. 0.95

01:16:27.000 Jafar in Aladdin literally wants to have sex with Jasmine throughout the entire film. 0.86

01:16:33.000 And Scar is hitting on Simba's mom, if I don't misremember. 0.86

01:16:40.000 Adding insult to injury, the social outcast rebellion against Mufasa's autocratic regime is explicitly associated with the imagery of goose-stepping Nazis.

01:16:47.000 They're actually the good guys.

01:16:49.000 But as so often in Hollywood films, the explicit Nazi iconography serves primarily to distract us from the hero's own fascism.

01:16:56.000 Simba's final ascent to the throne, his masculine roar returning Scar's dystopia to its Edenic natural state, is nothing less than the Fuhrer principle at work.

01:17:05.000 The idea that those we entrust with positions of leadership are blessed with a natural, even divine, superiority.

01:17:12.000 Unbelievable.

01:17:14.000 Now that Disney has become by far the most powerful entertainment company in the world, we've seen several attempts to update and correct its ideological payload.

01:17:14.000 Unbelievable.

01:17:20.000 Maleficent and its forthcoming sequel changed a deeply sexist fairy tale into a feminist parable about sexual abuse.

01:17:27.000 Aladdin made at least some attempt to mitigate the original film's Islamophobia.

01:17:31.000 Beauty and the Beast included a very minor openly gay character, the new Ariel will be a mermaid of color, and Mulan has been overhauled to become less offensive to Chinese audiences.

01:17:39.000 But we should get rid of the Lion King, presumably. 0.96

01:17:43.000 These people are the worst. 0.92

01:17:45.000 Ruining everything in American life and culture, making everything worse, all in the name of wokeness. 0.99

01:17:50.000 Well done, everyone.

01:17:51.000 Well, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content, as if we haven't already given you enough.

01:17:56.000 And then we'll be back here on Monday.

01:17:57.000 So if you don't see it until then, have a wonderful weekend.

01:17:59.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

01:17:59.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

01:18:01.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.

01:18:09.000 Directed by Mike Joyner.

01:18:10.000 Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:18:12.000 Senior Producer, Jonathan Hay.

01:18:14.000 Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.

01:18:17.000 And our Technical Producer is Austin Stevens.

01:18:19.000 Edited by Adam Sievitz.

01:18:21.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.

01:18:23.000 Hair and Makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:18:25.000 Production Assistant, Nick Sheehan.

01:18:26.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

01:18:29.000 Copyright Daily Wire 2019.

01:18:31.000 Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, a former Trump staffer claims that she was the victim of battery when Trump forcibly kissed her, she says.

01:18:40.000 Well, there's video now of the incident in question, and it seems to completely vindicate Trump.

01:18:46.000 We're going to talk about that.

01:18:47.000 I'll play the video, and we'll talk about what we can learn from this whole case.

01:18:51.000 Also, I want to discuss a real example of true courage and female empowerment.

01:18:57.000 This is a teenage girl in Connecticut who is standing up against the madness of allowing biological boys into girls' sports. 0.82

01:19:05.000 This is something.

01:19:05.000 This, as I said, is real empowerment.

01:19:07.000 This is courage.

01:19:08.000 This is something feminists should be celebrating, but for the most part, they're not. 1.00

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 12, 2019

The Secret Plan | Ep. 816

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