Trump sicks the DOJ and the FBI. Leftists cry foul. And did the Pope just shift Catholic policy on homosexuality? We ll talk about all of it on today s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsors
00:00:14.000Oh, yes, and I am so happy to be back.
00:00:16.000I had a wonderful three-day weekend because it was the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, which meant that I was barred from electronics and couldn't travel and all that, which meant I got to spend time with my family and read, which are my two favorite things in the world.
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00:02:13.000The big news, of course, is this blow up between President Trump and the FBI.
00:02:17.000So President Trump over the weekend tweeted out that the FBI had been surveilling his campaign during the campaign based on stories that broke late last week from the New York Times that there was an informant who'd been working within the Trump campaign to bring information about supposed collusion between members of the Trump campaign and Russia.
00:02:35.000And Trump pointed back to his tweet early in 2016 in which he said that he was wiretapped at Trump Tower.
00:02:40.000Trump himself was not wiretapped to Trump Tower.
00:02:42.000However, he did allege that he was surveilled during the campaign.
00:02:45.000It's not clear that Trump personally was surveilled during the campaign, but there were members of his campaign who were surveilled during the campaign.
00:02:50.000So the reason that I want to clarify all of this is because what you're hearing from both left and right, I think, are overbroad versions of the stories that are actually worth telling.
00:02:58.000So from the right, what you're hearing is there was a deep
00:03:00.000Okay, we'll go through the evidence for that and demonstrate what's true about that and what is not true about that.
00:03:05.000What you're hearing from the left is Trump obviously colluded with Russia.
00:03:21.000The members of the Trump team were in bed with Vladimir Putin and Putin was actually calling the shots from the Kremlin.
00:03:27.000And he was deciding how exactly Trump should campaign.
00:03:30.000He was deciding how the campaign would go.
00:03:32.000So everything was totally above board by the FBI.
00:03:35.000OK, so we're going to go through all of the evidence here and we're going to discuss what is real and what is not.
00:03:40.000Here is what happened over the last 24 hours.
00:03:45.000White House Chief of Staff John Kelly plans to convene a meeting between top law enforcement and intelligence officials and GOP congressional leaders to quote-unquote review highly classified and other information the lawmakers have requested about the FBI's use of a confidential source to aid an investigation of the Trump campaign, a White House spokeswoman said Monday.
00:04:04.000President Trump met for an hour Monday with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
00:04:12.000The meeting came a day after the DOJ asked its Inspector General to investigate Trump's claim that his campaign may have been infiltrated by the FBI source for political purposes and amid continued demands from GOP lawmakers that the department produce materials on the person.
00:04:25.000White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that at a meeting, it was agreed that White House Chief of Staff Kelly will immediately set up a meeting with other FBI, DOJ, and DNI together with congressional leaders to review highly classified and other information they have requested.
00:04:38.000The significance of that was not immediately clear.
00:04:40.000DOJ leaders have fought vigorously against revealing to Congress materials on the source.
00:04:43.000They say that if they reveal who the informant was, that will leak to the press.
00:04:46.000The press basically has already come up with who the informant was.
00:04:49.000It has not been fully confirmed yet, so I'm not going to mention the name of the informant on the show.
00:04:54.000It's pretty obvious who this informant was through basic Google searches.
00:04:58.000It was not clear whether they had backed down from their position and would now allow GOP leaders to look at the documents or whether there would simply be a follow-up meeting for more discussion.
00:05:06.000So, according to Republicans, there have been two big boo-boos.
00:05:09.000And these two big boo-boos demonstrate ill will toward the Trump campaign and demonstrate that the Obama-run FBI was actually attempting to get Trump all the way back during the Republican primaries.
00:05:19.000So these two boo-boos supposedly were the use of an informant to go after George Papadopoulos and to go after Carter Page, two Trump foreign policy aides.
00:05:28.000Papadopoulos had met in, I believe, April in London with a Russian cutout who was a professor in London who had close ties with the Russians and who had suggested that the Russian government could get information about Hillary Clinton's emails to the Trump campaign.
00:05:42.000Papadopoulos had run that up the chain.
00:05:44.000Nothing had happened because of it, but Papadopoulos
00:05:47.000Obviously, he was apparently bragging about it in front of the Australian ambassador.
00:05:50.000The Australian ambassador called the FBI.
00:05:52.000The FBI decided to put an informant on Papadopoulos.
00:05:54.000It's sort of how the timeline there goes.
00:05:56.000The implication here by Republicans is that all of that was useless, not only useless, counterproductive, not only counterproductive, politically motivated.
00:06:03.000That if Papadopoulos had been working for Hillary Clinton, nobody would have even attempted such a thing.
00:06:09.000Claim number two is that the Carter Page FISA Warrant, which was gotten late in the years, like September 2016, the Carter Page FISA Warrant was ill-gotten.
00:06:17.000That it was gotten on the basis of the Steele dossier.
00:06:19.000Now, you recall the Steele dossier, I know this all gets complicated, but I'm trying to break it down.
00:06:22.000The Steele dossier, as you recall, was originally a dossier funded by the Washington Free Beacon that was supposed to uncover OPPO research about President Trump.
00:06:32.000The Washington Free Beacon was working through a firm called Fusion GPS.
00:06:35.000Before Christopher Steele, a British spy, signed on, the Washington Free Beacon dropped all of this and they said, we're not interested in doing this anymore.
00:06:43.000And so the Fusion GPS group went and got Hillary Clinton's campaign to fund it.
00:06:47.000At that point, Christopher Steele, who's a British spy, signed on and provided all of this information about Trump.
00:06:55.000Some of it may be true about Trump and Russia.
00:06:59.000Okay, and Christopher Steele's dossier was supposedly used as the basis for the FISA warrants against Carter Page.
00:07:03.000Now, Carter Page had been, again, a low-level foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign since 2013.
00:07:08.000Carter Page had been in the eye of the intelligence community.
00:07:11.000People in the intelligence community were afraid that maybe he was a Russian spy.
00:07:15.000He'd been going around basically soliciting money from the Russians, apparently, allegedly, and so they looked at this and they said, okay, well, let's get
00:08:08.000Now, the New York Times, of course, has the New York Times has suggested that even by Trump going to his own DOJ and asking for an investigation, that this is obstruction.
00:08:42.000All of that is within his legal power.
00:08:44.000What could look like obstruction of justice, criminal obstruction of justice, is if President Trump were to come forward and to say something like, I know that you're about to find me guilty of obstruction or you're about to indict me on obstruction.
00:08:55.000I order you to clear me on obstruction instead.
00:08:57.000That he cannot do, but anything else he can pretty much do.
00:09:00.000So the New York Times is whining about this.
00:09:02.000Charlie Savage of the New York Times says,
00:09:20.000It was pretty obvious from the outset of the Hillary investigation that Barack Obama was never going to allow the DOJ to actually prosecute Hillary Clinton.
00:09:27.000He said that he wasn't going to interfere, Loretta Lynch said she wasn't going to interfere, and then she was meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton in the middle of the investigation.
00:09:34.000Barack Obama was going on national television saying he didn't see any evidence that Hillary ought to be indicted.
00:09:38.000None of this spoke to the independence of the DOJ.
00:09:41.000Eric Holder was calling Barack Obama, he was saying that he was Barack Obama's wingman.
00:09:46.000During his actual service as Attorney General on the DOJ.
00:09:49.000So the idea that the DOJ is a completely independent agency has no basis in law or fact.
00:09:53.000Nonetheless, the New York Times says that Trump is doing something unprecedented.
00:09:57.000Rebecca Roife is a professor at New York Law School who helped write a coming scholarly article on the limits of presidential control over the Justice Department.
00:10:04.000She says it's an incredible historical moment.
00:10:06.000Mr. Trump's move is the culmination of a lot of moments in which he has chipped away at prosecutorial independence.
00:10:23.000government does not have independent agencies.
00:10:25.000There are agencies that are under the legislative auspices, there are agencies that are under the judicial auspices, and there are agencies that are under the executive auspices.
00:10:33.000The DOJ is a constitutional position filled by the President of the United States.
00:10:59.000As part of that pattern, he has also denied the account by James Comey, an FBI director he abruptly fired, that the president privately urged him to drop an investigation into Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security advisor.
00:11:09.000Now, here it is important to recognize a distinction.
00:11:12.000Trump is not telling anybody to drop the Mueller investigation.
00:11:15.000He is not telling Rod Rosenstein to actually fire James Comey.
00:11:18.000I mean, to actually fire Robert Mueller.
00:11:20.000He's not telling anybody to shut down the SDNY investigation into Michael Cohen.
00:11:24.000He's saying, open an additional investigation into something I find corrupt.
00:11:28.000This is utterly and completely within his power.
00:11:48.000He's not interfering into the SDNY investigation, into Michael Cohen, the Southern District of New York investigation, into his personal attorney, Michael Cohen.
00:11:55.000Okay, so for all the talk about this is Trump muddying the waters, interfering, doing something.
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00:13:41.000Another former Trump campaign aide named Michael Caputo, he came forward, he said that another informant approached me.
00:13:46.000So he's saying that there was one, the reports are there was one informant that approached Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
00:13:54.000Now they're saying there's a second informant that approached Michael Caputo during the campaign.
00:14:00.000Let me tell you something that I know for a fact.
00:14:02.000This informant, this person that they tried to plant into the campaign and even into the administration, if you believe Axios, he's not the only person that came at the campaign.
00:14:12.000And the FBI is not the only Obama agency that came at the campaign.
00:14:24.000Okay, so if it turns out that pretty much everyone in the Trump campaign, whether or not they were involved in suspicious contact, was being targeted by informants, then it starts to look a lot more like the conspiracy theory is true.
00:14:33.000That the Obama FBI was targeting the Trump campaign in the very early stages.
00:14:37.000Mike Pence is saying that Trump is very grateful the DOJ is looking into surveillance.
00:14:43.000The President, I think, is grateful that the Department of Justice is going to have the Inspector General look into it and determine and ensure that there was no surveillance done for political purposes against our campaign.
00:14:58.000I think it would be very troubling to millions of Americans if that took place, but we're very confident.
00:15:04.000Now if there was, in fact, a politically motivated attempt to take out the Trump campaign by the Obama FBI, that is, in fact, worse than Watergate.
00:15:11.000Remember, the Watergate scandal involved members of the Nixon campaign
00:15:29.000Members of the Nixon campaign who broke into the Watergate Hotel in an attempt to bug George McGovern's campaign in 1972.
00:15:38.000And then there was a subsequent cover-up.
00:15:40.000What we're talking about here is the use of American government officials
00:15:44.000to go into the Trump campaign and destroy the Trump campaign.
00:15:47.000So it's significantly worse than Watergate are the accusations that are being made right now.
00:15:51.000And it's no wonder that so many top Republican officials who suspect that this is the case are very upset over it.
00:15:57.000And there would be prosecutions over it and people would go to jail over it.
00:16:00.000Hey, so, Devin Nunes, as I say, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, he comes forward, he says, listen, there's a red line here, okay?
00:16:07.000If the DOJ or the FBI funded a spy inside the Trump campaign, then what we're talking about is certainly an area where people would have to go to jail.
00:16:16.000We can't confirm whether there's an informant or not an informant because we've never been told nor given documents.
00:16:21.000And in fact, we've never even asked for the name of any informants or any sources whatsoever.
00:16:27.000If any of that is true, if they ran a spy ring or an informant ring and they were paying people within the Trump campaign, if any of that is true, that is an absolute red line.
00:16:40.000Okay, and these are like really serious accusations.
00:16:43.000We're not talking about the full politicization of our law enforcement agencies in a serious way.
00:16:47.000Jonathan Turley, who's a lawyer at George Washington University, he says, look, Trump was pretty right when he said that he was surveilled.
00:16:53.000What I think is being a case of willful blindness here is that we have confirmation that Trump apparently was correct when he said over a year ago that he had people in his campaign that were under surveillance.
00:17:06.000It turns out that it was much broader than we thought, even though people like Clapper and others in the Obama administration denied it.
00:17:13.000It does appear to be a surveillance program.
00:17:15.000It does appear to be an investigation.
00:17:17.000So that means that the serious question here is, even if the FBI was putting informants into the Trump campaign, the question is, was the investigation legit from the beginning?
00:17:33.000Now here is the case that it was justified.
00:17:35.000Okay, I'm just playing devil's advocate here.
00:17:37.000Here is the case that it was justified.
00:17:40.000I think that this is not a terrible case.
00:17:42.000The case that it was justified is that George Papadopoulos, again, met with a Russian cutout in London and then bragged about meeting with the Russian cutout in London to the Australian ambassador.
00:17:57.000had a meeting at Trump Tower with a Russian cutout who was promising information about Hillary Clinton.
00:18:01.000If that had been Chelsea Clinton meeting at the Clinton Foundation with a Russian proxy saying they had information about Trump, you would want that investigated.
00:18:08.000Carter Page had a long-standing relationship with the Russian government, apparently.
00:18:11.000Paul Manafort had a long-standing relationship with the Russian government.
00:18:14.000Michael Flynn, the incoming National Security Advisor, had been paid by Russia Today, which is a Russian propaganda outlet, and it sat next to Vladimir Putin.
00:18:22.000If any of this had happened under Barack Obama or under Hillary Clinton, people on the right would have said that this deserved to be investigated.
00:18:29.000The question was, did the FBI have decent grounds for looking into this stuff?
00:18:33.000Because the question is not whether they used an informant.
00:18:36.000Police use informants all the time, and they use informants knowing that people are not guilty, or at least suspecting that they might not be guilty.
00:18:43.000People use informants to gather information.
00:18:47.000When the police launch an investigation into someone, they don't know the person's guilty yet, but they have to investigate.
00:19:09.000I think the American public has to be assured that there was a basis.
00:19:12.000It's not enough for Jeffrey Toobin to say there was collusion already at that time.
00:19:17.000I want to know what the facts were that justify that.
00:19:20.000And here is the bottom line in all of this.
00:19:22.000And here's why I'm suspicious of the conservative narrative that this was a giant conspiracy.
00:19:26.000There are two inconvenient facts that make me suspicious that this was not a giant collusion, a giant conspiracy between members of the FBI and the Obama DOJ to get Trump.
00:19:54.000If this were all a conspiracy to take down Trump, why didn't break?
00:19:57.000Piece of evidence number two I think is even more damning for the for the conservative case.
00:20:01.000President Trump, as I say, has plenary power over the executive branch.
00:20:05.000He has the ability to declassify any and all of this.
00:20:09.000He can declassify the Carter Page warrant, the FISA warrant.
00:20:12.000He can declassify it right now, today, and we can find out whether it was trumped up or whether there was additional material in that FISA warrant.
00:22:22.000He doesn't actually want them released in full, because if they're released in full, it undercuts his case that he has been targeted by the FBI and the Obama DOJ.
00:22:30.000Possibility number three, he doesn't want to look like he's interfering too much in the system, and so instead he's going to call for an investigation by an inspector general.
00:22:37.000The inspector general is independent of the Trump
00:22:42.000And so the Inspector General is sort of a non-political appointee, not somebody appointed by President Trump, and that person can go through and do the full investigation.
00:22:49.000Whatever it is, I assume eventually this information will come out and then we'll know whether or not this was a corrupt investigation into Trump or whether there were grounds for the investigation into Trump.
00:23:01.000When the left cries foul, when the left suggests that Trump using the DOJ to investigate these issues, that that's completely illegitimate,
00:23:08.000They have no grounds to stand on here.
00:23:11.000He was saying that the congressman from California who lives, literally lives, at the media center near the White House and he's actually set up a pup tent there and every morning he gets up and he takes his thermos and he fills it with coffee and then he goes and gets a bowl of cereal then he sits right back down in the pup tent until he's called into the CNN or NBC briefing room.
00:23:28.000So Schiff, he says this is a Saturday night massacre in slow motion.
00:23:31.000Well, it certainly looks like a Saturday night massacre in slow motion.
00:23:36.000We have seen the erosion of the independence of the Justice Department, which alarms me.
00:23:41.000We saw it in the lifting of the gag rule on the witness in Uranium One.
00:23:45.000We saw it in the acceleration of the investigation against Andrew McCabe so that he could be fired before his pension vested.
00:23:52.000And now we see it in the president ordering an investigation of his own investigators.
00:24:15.000There was a special investigator named Archibald Cox.
00:24:17.000He ordered his Attorney General to fire Archibald Cox.
00:24:19.000The Attorney General refused to fire Archibald Cox, so he fired his Attorney General, replaced him with Robert Bork, who then fired Archibald Cox.
00:24:25.000That's what the Saturday Night Massacre was.
00:24:32.000So, none of that is in evidence at all.
00:24:34.000Nonetheless, Democrats are very excited.
00:24:36.000Democrats are hoping that Trump makes a big mistake here.
00:24:38.000They are hoping that President Trump doesn't use the law enforcement methods at his disposal, that he just precipitously goes and fires a bunch of people inside his own administration and then they can claim that it was obstruction.
00:24:48.000So here is a congressman named Eric Swalwell who says, maybe this will lead to impeachment.
00:25:21.000Uh, in the Russia investigation after Jeff Sessions recused himself and she was fired when she refused to defend President Trump's travel ban in court, which is not her job.
00:25:30.000She's supposed to do the bidding of the president of the United States.
00:25:34.000Well, now she's on Morning Joe and she's claiming that the the DOJ has been corrupted by President Trump and she claims that Trump has taken his assaults to a new low.
00:25:44.000But you know, I think what we're seeing here is the president has just taken his all-out assault on the rule of law to a new level.
00:25:51.000And this time, he is ordering up an investigation of the investigators who are examining his own campaign.
00:25:59.000Here's the great irony of what she's saying there.
00:26:04.000We're supposed to trust the investigators of President Trump's campaign, but we're not supposed to trust the investigators of the investigators of President Trump's campaign because those investigators were run by President Trump while the first investigators were run by President Obama.
00:26:35.000We do know that there have been devastating leaks about this investigation from members of the so-called Deep State after President Trump was elected.
00:26:41.000That's the part where I agree with the Republican conspiracy theory.
00:26:44.000There I do think that there are members of the FBI, who are Obama holdovers, who are attempting to leak out information.
00:26:49.000Members of the DOJ, who are Obama holdovers, who are attempting to leak out information.
00:26:53.000Now, is it possible that the conspiracy theories about Trump's campaign being targeted by Obama are true?
00:27:05.000I don't think the evidence lines up in that direction at this point in time.
00:27:09.000Is it also true that there was no Russian collusion?
00:27:11.000Yes, I have seen no evidence that there was active Russian collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
00:27:16.000So lots of things can be true at one time.
00:27:19.000Lots of things can be true at one time.
00:27:21.000One more twist that we need to add on this particular story, and that is there have been a bunch of stories lately regarding the possibility that the so-called Steele dossier, that dossier that I discussed earlier,
00:27:31.000That was funded by Fusion GPS, which in turn was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:27:43.000Very possible that it was leaked to the press.
00:27:45.000However, the going theory now is that there are a series of text messages and emails between top members of the Obama DOJ and the Obama FBI talking about the possibility that this dossier was going to be leaked.
00:27:56.000And that this was all a setup because, in reality, what was happening is that CNN was waiting to leak the Steele dossier, to reveal the Steele dossier, until they had a news hook.
00:28:04.000So James Comey went to the White House, informed President Trump, this became the news hook, and then CNN released the dossier.
00:28:11.000It is also quite possible that CNN called up all of these top officials about the dossier, and they knew CNN was going to break the dossier, and so then they went and informed Trump.
00:28:19.000Because if they had broken the dossier and Trump didn't know about the dossier, then Trump would have gotten mad at them.
00:28:23.000In other words, there are a lot of possibilities out there.
00:28:25.000We don't have the evidence for any of them that is strong enough yet to be all outraged about anything that has happened.
00:28:30.000I'm not outraged that Trump is investigating it.
00:28:32.000I'm not outraged about the FBI's conduct during the campaign yet, except with regard to Hillary Clinton, whom they should have indicted.
00:28:38.000I'm not outraged about anything except for the FBI's conduct with regard to Hillary Clinton in 2016, which is outrageous, and the FBI's conduct after the election, the leaks that have been coming from the DOJ and the FBI after the election.
00:28:49.000Everything else, I think, it's still up in the air.
00:30:03.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:30:11.000So speaking of this Texas shooting, 10 dead, 17-year-old junior walked into the school wearing a trench coat in 88-degree weather and was carrying a .38 pistol as well as a shotgun, I believe is the latest.
00:30:35.000It's a little bit tough when the kid is 17 because you've taught your kids to use the guns, you want your kids to be able to know how to defend the house when you're not there.
00:30:42.000The reality is that, barring red flags, there are certain of these incidents that are going to be very difficult to prevent unless you actually harden the barriers around these schools.
00:30:48.000I've been saying for literally years at this point that kids at schools should be guarded like we guard banks.
00:30:58.000There's no reason why, you know, I went to a private school.
00:31:01.000We had hard barriers around our private school.
00:31:03.000You had to check in, you had to be buzzed into the school.
00:31:05.000And we had, for a school of maybe 300 kids, we had five or six different security guards who were armed on the school premises.
00:31:12.000It seems to me this should be the very least that we can do for our public schools as well.
00:31:16.000I promise, if you had 20 or 30 armed security for 1,500 students, it would be a lot better than if you had four or five just because there are too many gaps in the security.
00:31:23.000Plus, you actually have to have a hard security barrier
00:31:27.000Listen, if this sort of stuff is going to continue to happen, we do need to guard our schools better.
00:31:32.000There's a very good piece by David French, who's good on these topics, over at National Review, in which he writes about Malcolm Gladwell's theory that the reason that it seems like we're seeing an uptick in school shootings right now is because the barrier to entry for school shootings has become so much lower.
00:31:46.000The barrier to media coverage is lower now.
00:31:48.000With each individual shooting, it looks like it's becoming more common.
00:31:51.000And so people think that it's happening a lot.
00:31:53.000Um, even though statistically speaking it's really not happening particularly much.
00:31:56.00022, you know, the CNN was reporting there have been 22 school shootings this year.
00:32:42.000Gun owners, non-gun owners, on common sense gun safety legislation.
00:32:47.000Okay, you know, everyone is united on all these things except for when you get down to the brass tacks, people are not united on these things.
00:32:52.000When people hear gun show loophole, they say, we oppose the gun show loophole.
00:32:55.000When they hear that means that every private transaction that happens in the United States is basically barred unless it goes through a gun store.
00:33:01.000Then people suddenly say, well, hold on a second.
00:33:33.000There's this disconnect that happens when we label people and we don't actually make clear whom we are talking about.
00:33:39.000The number of people in Congress who legitimately do not care about school shootings, I would put at zero.
00:33:44.000Even people I disagree with politically.
00:33:46.000I do not think there are a lot of people in Congress who legit don't care about school shootings, who sit around every day and they go, you know what?
00:33:51.000If 100 kids have to get shot, then fine.
00:33:56.000I think there are significant disagreements on policy, and these disagreements on policy are important and have ramifications, which is why we need to talk them through.
00:34:03.000But what is not useful is creating this broad class of people, this group of faceless, nameless people, and then you say, well, you know, Congress just doesn't care.
00:34:14.000How many people who say the NRA are terrorists have ever talked to an NRA member?
00:34:18.000How many people who say that NRA members don't care about dead kids have ever spent time with NRA leadership?
00:34:24.000And when my friend Dana Lash is talking about the measures she thinks are useful in preventing school violence and gun violence at schools, does anyone really think, anybody who's spent time with Dana really think that Dana doesn't care about kids who are getting shot on campuses?
00:34:37.000And yet this is used as such a convenient club and it completely undermines and destroys our politics.
00:34:41.000If you actually believe that the people you're talking to
00:34:51.000Now, the reason that I mention this is not just because this is in the news, but because there's another story in the news today that I think is being completely miscovered.
00:35:01.000He apparently told a gay man that God loves him during a private meeting.
00:35:04.000OK, so this is according to the UK Sun.
00:35:06.000In a private dialogue, the pontiff is understood to have told Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests, that God loves gay people and it is fine to be homosexual.
00:35:14.000The comments are the most striking public acceptance about homosexuality ever made by the head of the Roman Catholic Church.
00:35:19.000The remarks were made during a private meeting at the Vatican between the pair, in which the Pope offered a heartfelt apology.
00:35:24.000So, Cruz was a victim of a pedophile priest named Fernando Caradima.
00:35:28.000He was found guilty of sexual abuse by the Vatican in 2011.
00:35:32.000Cruz claims his suffering was ignored by a number of Latin American bishops who used his homosexuality to brand him a liar when he spoke out.
00:35:39.000And then, speaking to the Spanish newspaper, Cruz said, the Pope told me, quote, Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter.
00:35:45.000God made you like this and loves you like this, and I don't care.
00:36:16.000But a religious person, including the Pope, can believe that homosexual orientation could be implanted within you and also believe that homosexual acts could be a sin and still love you for who you are.
00:36:27.000I love that the left has attempted to say that if you think homosexual sex is a sin, that therefore you hate gay people, these two things are not related.
00:36:36.000And this goes right back to that original argument that was being made about guns, which is, just because you disagree with someone about activities that people ought to engage in or not engage in, does not mean that these people are engaged in hate.
00:36:46.000It does not mean that these people hate you.
00:36:48.000And labeling them as haters is just a way for you to disregard their opinion and avoid having a conversation in the first place.
00:36:56.000We have to discuss this new Starbucks policy.
00:36:58.000So, the stupidity of leftism on full display in the Starbucks policy.
00:37:02.000So, as you recall, there's this big blow-up over at Starbucks when it turns out that there are these two black guys who are sitting at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, and supposedly, the manager of the Starbucks would not give them permission to use the bathroom, and then when they would not buy anything, ask them to leave, and then when they would not leave, call the police on them.
00:37:19.000And the implication was that she was a giant racist.
00:37:21.000A story I have found hard to believe and hard to confirm.
00:37:23.000This lady, according to members of my own audience who know her, is an SJW leftist.
00:37:30.000Somebody who has chided people on the proper use of pronouns.
00:37:32.000There are several cameras in the establishment.
00:37:34.000We still have not seen full tape of what happened in that Philadelphia establishment.
00:37:36.000Well, thanks to the outrage over that supposed racist event,
00:37:41.000Again, this is weird, because there are actual racist events that have taken place in the United States.
00:37:46.000You don't hear about those, because when everybody recognizes something is racist, the media has nothing to talk about.
00:37:50.000The media purposefully pick instances where there's a plausible story that nothing racist happened, and then they use these as flashpoints.
00:37:57.000If you don't immediately bend to the narrative they wish to purvey, then this means that you don't take racism seriously enough.
00:38:02.000In any case, Starbucks reacted to the Philadelphia story by telling everybody that they had to get retrained on implicit bias, which is just sheer nonsense, and then they changed their policy.
00:38:11.000Okay, they changed their policy, and their policy was that anyone who came into a Starbucks could now use the restroom.
00:38:17.000The problem was that there are Starbucks on every corner, and lots of homeless people go into Starbucks, and they go into the bathrooms, and there they proceed to set up shop or do drugs.
00:38:28.000Well, now they have to clarify their policy toward non-paying guests.
00:38:31.000The Seattle-based retailer on Saturday, this is according to the Wall Street Journal, had said it would allow all guests in its U.S.
00:38:36.000company-owned stores to use its cafes, including its restrooms, whether or not they make a purchase.
00:38:40.000Again, this would be idiotic policy if you just allow people to sit down in your chairs and sit there all day.
00:38:45.000How in the world are you actually going to sell anything at Starbucks?
00:38:47.000That announcement, which attracted some support, also drew complaints that cafes would not have enough seats for paying customers and would turn into homeless shelters and drug havens.
00:38:55.000This is certainly true in Seattle, which has experienced a massive upsurge in the number of homeless people in the city.
00:39:00.000Well, on Monday, Starbucks revealed more about the policy.
00:39:03.000They told the Wall Street Journal that employees now have detailed instructions on what to do if someone is behaving in a disruptive manner, such as smoking, using drugs or alcohol, using restrooms improperly, or sleeping.
00:39:13.000At issue, in essence, is whether Starbucks views itself as a business that caters to customers or a quasi-public place generally welcome to all.
00:39:50.000But if you sit there for too long without buying something, I've known for years, like I've worked for many coffee shops over my years because I always work from a laptop.
00:40:12.000Businesses cannot operate so long as they make political correctness their first priority.
00:40:16.000And it's amazing to watch all these social justice warrior-led companies that built themselves on the basis of free market capitalism and a willingness to do business with customers now try to shift their policy because they want to appear kinder and gentler to the public.
00:40:29.000You saw the same thing over at Google with James Damore.
00:40:44.000There are fewer women who are applying in science, technology, engineering, and math because there are fewer women who have a predilection to go into those jobs.
00:40:51.000And also because what the bell curve tends to show with regard to performance in sciences and math is that women tend to be closer to the center of the bell curve.
00:41:00.000So men either are really bad at math or really good at math.
00:41:03.000And that means that when you go up to the upper level, there are more men than women on a proportional basis.
00:41:06.000James Damore, his memo prompted his firing, and then Google put out a memo suggesting to all of its managers that things like meritocracy were white constructs.
00:41:16.000Well, if Google had operated off that premise, Google would not be a multi-billion dollar company, obviously.
00:41:23.000All the things that made businesses successful, they're now willing to dump on the side of the road in order to make nice with the press and politically correct idiocy.
00:41:29.000The good news there, I guess, is that new capitalist businesses that don't abide by the politically correct idiocy will now be able to make their way in the marketplace.
00:41:37.000If Starbucks is gonna be dumb, there'll be other coffee shops that rise to the occasion.
00:41:40.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:43:03.000Okay, so, time for a thing that I hate.
00:43:10.000Alrighty, so the thing that I hate today, this is another manufactured stupid controversy.
00:43:14.000So Kendrick Lamar, who is apparently a rapper of some sort, demonstrating my full knowledge of the pop cultural range, I believe he's a rapper.
00:43:21.000So Kendrick Lamar had, he was doing a concert, and he invited a fan on stage to sing.
00:43:27.000And then he asked the fan, who's a white woman, to sing the lyrics of his song, Mad City, which is M-A-A-D City, which is not how you spell mad, but sure.
00:44:28.000You don't want somebody actually reading the lyrics of your song or doing the lyrics to your song.
00:44:32.000Don't write the lyrics in there or ask the lady up.
00:44:34.000If you've got a problem with a white lady rapping your song as you wrote it, then maybe you should have invited a black lady up there to rap your song as you wrote it.
00:44:41.000You've got plenty of black fans there.
00:45:02.000Lamar was evidently under the impression that Delaney would censor herself and skip the racial epithet in the song, but she clearly did not get the memo.
00:45:11.000And then, so Delaney, who is this woman who was called out of the crowd, said, man down, where are you from, N-word?
00:45:17.000F who you know, where are you from, my N-word?
00:45:19.000What your grandma say, huh, my N-word?
00:45:21.000Okay, so, it's not like this appears one time in the song.
00:45:48.000Okay, I understand that there are distinctions between black people using the N-word and white people using the N-word and that there's a whole attempt by certain members of the black community to co-opt the term N-word and then use it as a way of empowerment.
00:46:26.000Especially to avoid situations just like this, because it sets up this ridiculous double standard.
00:46:30.000I don't think it is worthwhile to have that lyric in the song, but if you are going to have that lyric in the song, you can't be surprised when people sing your song.
00:46:36.000The whole point of you singing the song is that others will sing your song.