A new tape breaks from Michael Cohen, President Trump slams the media, and Elizabeth Warren makes her pitch. Ben Shapiro is back on The Ben Shapiro Show! Today's episode features: YAF announces the six finalists for my fall campus tour, including USC, USC, UVA, UMD, UNLV, UC-Berkeley, UNI, UW-Milwaukee, and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a new YAF Tour shirt, a "Shapiro Tour" t-shirt, and a new "Kids and Guns" guide from Defend My Family Now. The Shapiro Show is now available on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your favorite podcasting platform, so make sure to check it out! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron! You'll get access to all of Ben Shapiro's latest courses, books, and podcasts, plus a chance to win a FREE copy of his new book, "Kids & Guns: A Guide to Protecting Your Family's Second Amendment Rights in the 21st Century." by clicking HERE. You can also join our FB group, and get 20% off your first month with discount code "SHOP" when you become a patron. . You won't want to miss it! ! It's free and it'll help spread the word to your friends, family, friends, and supporters everywhere about the show! Ben's Freebie! Thanks to Ben Shapiro! and much more! - Ben Shapiro Subscribe to the show and get a discount code: SHOPBERYAFTERBUYTERTERMTERY! Shout it out on the show to help Ben Shapiro Podcasts! Learn more about Ben Shapiro at Defend Your Family Now! Subscribe and Subscribe to his new podcast, SHOPTER! FREE PROMO HERE! Get a shirt from Ben Shapiro here! Can't get more? more Ben Shapiro? Subscribe on iTunes? Watch Ben Shapiro on his new show on YouTube? and other links mentioned in the show? Learn about Ben's new book? Here's a link to the book "Kids And Guns Guide? here's Ben's New Book: "Shopping for Ben Shapiro?" Thanks for listening?
00:00:12.000Well, a lot of breaking news today, but let's begin with this.
00:00:14.000I have some exciting news to announce.
00:00:16.000I know you've all been waiting with bated breath for this, particularly my college fans.
00:00:19.000Right now, we are about to announce where exactly I shall be going with YAF, Young America's Foundation.
00:00:25.000Last month, we announced the finalists for my fall campus tour.
00:00:28.000Those are the schools that just might be so lucky as to risk the ire of triggered leftist students when the hurricane that is me comes to campus.
00:00:35.000Well, today, I'm excited to announce the six colleges that make the cut.
00:00:42.000USC, okay, so we begin with University of Southern California on October 4th, and then we move on to University at Buffalo on October 8th, North Central College on October 10th, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on November 12th, Ohio State University on November 13th, and University of Pittsburgh on November 14th.
00:01:01.000So if you are looking for tickets at any of those lucky schools, then make sure you go over to yaf.org slash ShapiroTour, yaf.org slash ShapiroTour, and get this,
00:01:46.000I mean, come on, we've met, haven't we?
00:01:48.000Okay, before we go any further, I also want to mention your Second Amendment rights.
00:01:51.000So, you've heard all these stories in the news where a kid gets hold of a firearm and then something terrible happens.
00:01:57.000Well, you don't want that to happen to you, obviously, but you also want to make sure that you're exercising your Second Amendment rights, which is why you need to go talk with my friends at the USCCA.
00:02:06.000They want to give your entire family a 100% free guide and audiobook for complete
00:02:57.000So, last night, late in the evening, Chris Cuomo, the slightly lesser block of wood known as the Cuomo brothers, Chris Cuomo on CNN brought out his big reveal.
00:04:02.000It's very weird to tape a conversation with your client because the only point of taping a conversation with your client, presumably, would be either blackmail or the possibility of violating attorney-client privilege.
00:04:13.000Or maybe you want to show your client later that he said something that he said he didn't say.
00:04:24.000It is not illegal because the state of New York, oddly enough, is a one-party consent state.
00:04:28.000There are different laws in different states around the country as far as whether you can tape people.
00:04:31.000So California, where I live, is a two-party consent state.
00:04:34.000You cannot tape a conversation with anyone unless it's for news purposes.
00:04:38.000You're not allowed to tape a conversation with anybody without that person's consent, which is why you generally have to get release forms or you at least have to ask on the tape whether it's okay to tape.
00:04:47.000In New York, so long as one of the members of the conversation is okay with the taping, in this case, Michael Cohen, the taping is in fact legal.
00:04:54.000And what exactly are they talking about?
00:04:56.000Well, apparently, they're having a conversation about how to pay off Karen McDougal.
00:05:00.000Karen McDougal is another one of the bevy of porn stars that President Trump stooped during his great adventures in the Vietnam, that is, the STD-ridden world of pornography.
00:05:11.000So, Karen McDougal's former Playboy Playmate.
00:05:14.000The president has basically had sex with, I think, 10 out of every 12 Playboy Playmates at last count.
00:06:03.000I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David, you know, so that... I'm going to do that right away.
00:06:41.000The shtick would work is that David Pecker would go out and buy the life rights for all of these women who had stripped Trump, and then Trump would set up a shell corporation and then pay David Pecker to actually convey those rights to Donald Trump so these stories would never hit the press.
00:06:54.000And apparently this is a fairly regular thing according to various news reports.
00:06:57.000Well, as the election approached, Michael Cohen comes to Trump and he says, David Pecker has just bought the rights to Karen McDougal's story about schtuping you.
00:07:05.000And he says, we need to basically figure out a way to pay David Pecker for those rights.
00:07:09.000We need to give him some cash and then he'll give us the information and then the information will never go anywhere.
00:07:15.000And so we'll set up a shell corporation that nobody really knows about.
00:07:18.000And the key part of that is at the very end where Trump says something about cash and then Cohen says back to him, no, no, no, no.
00:07:50.000It's a legal agreement for somebody to shut up.
00:07:51.000So Trump has done this apparently a lot.
00:07:53.000There's nothing illegal about that, so he's not in any legal trouble for that, as Alan Dershowitz has pointed out.
00:07:58.000Where there could theoretically be legal trouble is we are approaching the 2016 election, and Trump wants to keep Karen McDougal silent, and so this act is essentially a campaign expenditure.
00:08:08.000The reason he's paying off Karen McDougal is because he wants her to keep quiet in the run-up to the election.
00:08:13.000Same sort of accusations were made about Stormy Daniels, that the reason the president actually paid off Stormy Daniels is because he thought that if those stories broke right before the election, he wouldn't win the presidency, and he wanted to keep those people quiet, so he paid them a bunch of money.
00:08:25.000And then, more importantly, he didn't actually report that to the FEC.
00:08:28.000So if it's a campaign expenditure and he didn't report it to the Federal Elections Commissioner, then that could be a violation of campaign finance law.
00:08:35.000Now, is it really a violation of campaign finance law?
00:08:40.000Very difficult to say yes, considering that John Edwards did the same thing back in 2008.
00:08:48.000He, in 2008, was one of the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he'd been knocking on one of the photographers on his campaign.
00:10:17.000Here's Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen's lawyer, on what these tapes supposedly show.
00:10:22.000We know that Trump has lied, even during the campaign when his campaign spokesman denied, two months after this tape, that he knew anything about Karen McDougal.
00:10:32.000Ladies and gentlemen, if you voted for Donald Trump, listen to the tape and ask yourself, is Donald Trump lying when he said he didn't use the word cash and accuses Michael Cohen of using the word cash?
00:11:12.000Because Michael Cohen thinks that he's going to be prosecuted, and if he flips on the president, that his prosecution will basically be kicked to the second priority position.
00:11:23.000He says only drug dealers and mobsters use cash.
00:11:26.000The idea here is to make Trump look as bad as possible so that it looks like Cohen actually has material.
00:11:30.000Gotta say, Cohen is a pretty sleazy dude here.
00:11:34.000Now, this is not to excuse the president's sexual profligacy.
00:11:38.000It's not to excuse the fact that Donald Trump has a
00:11:40.000Really, really poor history with women is not to excuse any of those things.
00:11:44.000But when I see this situation, the first thing that occurs to me is Michael Cohen was happy to ride on Trump's coattails for years and take his money and play his protection man.
00:11:53.000And then the minute things go wrong, he's out there ratting on him.
00:11:57.000But it's not even ratting about anything that's necessarily illegal.
00:12:00.000It's just ratting on him in order to avoid culpability for other activities, perhaps.
00:12:04.000But Lanny Davis says that this is mobster type stuff, what Trump did here.
00:12:07.000There's no way that Mr. Giuliani, who knows from being U.S.
00:12:11.000Attorney, the only people who use cash are drug dealers and mobsters.
00:12:37.000Now it appears that he may have paid via cash.
00:12:39.000But again, I don't think that any of this is going to make a large difference.
00:12:41.000I'm going to explain that in just a second.
00:12:44.000Let's talk about the software that you are using for your company.
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00:12:52.000And this is particularly true when it comes to the world of software, which is really, really complex.
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00:13:33.000There's no way the president is going to be talking about setting up a corporation
00:14:04.000Okay, well, I honestly think that's sort of an irrelevant point.
00:14:13.000In the end, is this going to take down Trump?
00:14:15.000No, of course this isn't going to take down Trump.
00:14:16.000Now what we do have to discuss here is the way that the media has treated this particular issue.
00:14:20.000So when it was President Clinton, again, I don't mean to misdirect away from the supposedly central issue, which is how President Trump acted with regard to money.
00:14:29.000When it was John Edwards, when it was President Clinton, when it was Ted Kennedy, the media buried this stuff.
00:14:34.000The media were not interested in covering this stuff.
00:14:42.000When it comes to tapes that are being released by Michael Cohen, then the media is eager to run all of those, right?
00:14:47.000This is the same media who decry all the people who are running all of the Hillary Clinton emails that were being put out there by WikiLeaks.
00:14:54.000The same media is now saying, well, you know, if we decide to run these tapes, it's totally fine to run these tapes.
00:15:00.000In the end, none of this is going to matter.
00:15:01.000The reason it's not going to matter is because everybody already has an opinion on President Trump.
00:15:05.000Everybody already knows that this is the sort of stuff that President Trump does.
00:15:09.000None of this is particularly telling, none of it is particularly revealing, and none of it is particularly troubling if you already like President Trump.
00:15:17.000So all of this talk about this is going to take down Trump seems to me wildly exaggerated.
00:15:21.000And it's a level of enthusiasm that I think is rather uncalled for, given the fact that everybody already assumed all this stuff was true.
00:15:49.000Because they already figured that that was baked into the cake.
00:15:51.000The same thing is true of Karen McDougal.
00:15:53.000They figure Trump's gonna say what Trump's gonna say to get himself off the hook, but they're very understanding about that because they feel as though President Trump is being unfairly targeted.
00:16:00.000And to a certain extent, they're not wrong.
00:16:02.000President Trump is being unfairly targeted in the sense that if the same stuff had happened with regard to a Democrat, it is highly doubtful whether the media would be treating this with anything like the same sort of enthusiasm.
00:16:13.000So all the talk about why is it that Trump supporters don't just understand, why don't they get on the bandwagon that he's a bad guy who does bad things?
00:16:21.000Well, the answer is because they already priced that in.
00:16:23.000And what they decided is that they don't trust you more than they don't trust President Trump because they know where Trump is lying, but they don't know where you are lying.
00:17:38.000My friend, Kyle Cashew, who I've mentored a little bit, he helped put together the speakers list while Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, spoke there.
00:17:45.000At a certain point, the students started chanting, lock her up.
00:17:48.000Now, I've been in a position like this.
00:17:49.000I was at CPAC and people started chanting, lock her up.
00:17:53.000And my immediate response was, there's no reason to lock her up because she's already living in a hell of her own making.
00:17:58.000She's wandering around the woods of upstate New York.
00:18:44.000But if you just read the media headlines, it sounds like the Attorney General of the United States is abusing his power by standing there and chanting, lock her up with a bunch of students.
00:19:40.000It's the same interview in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested that she didn't know anything about foreign policy, and she obviously didn't know anything about capitalism or economics, and she looked like an idiot.
00:19:50.000So what Allie did is she cobbled together a video of her questioning Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and it was very funny.
00:19:58.000And the reason you know it's not real is because the background for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not even remotely the same as the background in the video for Allie Stuckey.
00:20:06.000It is obvious that it's not, that it's not, you know, that Cortez is not sitting down with Allie Stuckey.
00:20:12.000You can also tell because in some of the cutaway shots, you can see Margaret Hoover's dress, which is green.
00:20:17.000And then when they cut away to Allie Stuckey, she's wearing a blue dress.
00:21:16.000Because the left does this exact same tactic all the time.
00:21:19.000For instance, last week, Stephen Colbert.
00:21:22.000We'll get to Stephen Colbert in just a second, because I'm going to show you how the left uses this exact same tactic, and then I'll give you the punchline exactly how the left treated this Allie Stuckey video, because it's totally insane.
00:21:30.000First, I want to remind you that you may be spending too much on your credit cards, right?
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00:21:36.000Or you're buying it now and then you're paying for it later.
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00:21:42.000But with LendingClub, you can consolidate your debt or pay off your credit cards with one fixed monthly payment.
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00:22:43.000Allie Stuckey cuts this video with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
00:22:46.000And as I say, this this parodic video in which she sits across from the radical socialist, self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez goes viral.
00:23:03.000Because Stephen Colbert did it last week with President Trump.
00:23:05.000So President Trump did an interview with Bret Baier.
00:23:08.000Except Stephen Colbert has significantly better graphic artists than Ali does.
00:23:11.000Ali basically just cut back and forth one-camera shots of her face and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's face.
00:23:17.000Here, the producers over at Stephen Colbert's show are actually able to essentially superimpose Stephen Colbert over Bret Baier in this particular interview.
00:23:25.000And so, or with Sean Hannity, rather, in this particular interview, here's Colbert interviewing President Trump using exactly the same tactic as Ali Stuckey used with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
00:23:36.000Mr. President, right off the bat, I gotta say, wow, what a summit.
00:23:41.000You managed to bring both sides of the aisle together to agree that you historically sucked.
00:23:47.000How do you think your buddy Vlad came off?
00:23:49.000I thought that President Putin was very, very strong.
00:23:52.000What else can you tell us about the man?
00:23:54.000President Putin is very much into... Undermining our democratic process.
00:24:09.000Okay, and then he actually just trots over and he sits down with Vladimir Putin, right?
00:24:13.000So this is a frequent tactic that is used by folks on the left.
00:24:15.000I'm old enough to remember when you had Conan O'Brien doing a routine where somebody would play Bill Clinton's lips, right?
00:24:21.000Where there would actually be like a still photo and then just Bill Clinton's mouth would move and it would be as though he was interviewing Bill Clinton.
00:24:52.000I mean, honestly, perhaps we ought to look into a governmental program of forced redistribution of senses of humor so she ends up with one.
00:25:05.000But what the left really can't deal with, the real truth they can't deal with, is that some people on the right actually have a sense of humor.
00:25:11.000The left wants to paint the right as completely humorless.
00:25:13.000This is one of their favorite things to do.
00:25:14.000What the right really is is we're all John Lithgow in Footloose.
00:25:17.000We sit around telling the kids not to dance.
00:25:20.000But if we're ever funny at all, then it turns out that it's because we're racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, or because we're faking it.
00:25:26.000So, you could forgive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for having no sense of humor about herself.
00:25:31.000You know, as somebody who is parodied on a pretty frequent basis, I can tell you, I find most of the parodies about me pretty funny.
00:25:38.000But apparently, if you're a hardcore democratic socialist, humor was outlawed by Stalin a century ago, and so we ought to simply pretend that it doesn't exist.
00:25:47.000The part of it that's hilarious, though, is the way the media treat this stuff.
00:26:18.000Like, yes, it's shot with different resolution because it was done on the cheap.
00:26:22.000Because it's not like she's spending, Ali is spending tons of money on a Stephen Colbert-style implant you in the video talking to President Trump.
00:26:30.000I love that the people on the left were so exercised over this.
00:26:32.000I mean, they were really exercised over this.
00:26:33.000The Washington Post ran a full piece about this.
00:27:05.000He says, the video traveled quickly after being shared Monday on Facebook, gathering more than 1.5 million views in less than a day.
00:27:11.000In it, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the congressional candidate from New York whose democratic socialist campaign has struck a lightning bolt into the world of democratic politics, appeared to give bizarre answers in a two-and-a-half-minute video that was staged as an interview with conservative commentator Ali Stuckey on the site TRTV.
00:27:26.000Ocasio-Cortez shook her head no when Stuckey asked if she had any knowledge about how the political system worked and seemed to imply that Venezuela was in the Middle East and was a model of socialism.
00:27:34.000But the video did not depict a real interview, despite its caption.
00:27:38.000Okay, and the grills is in scare quotes.
00:27:44.000Instead, it used heavily edited footage.
00:27:51.000After an outcry, the Facebook page for Stuckey's show was updated to note that the video was satire and included a reference to the original PBS show.
00:27:57.000But the fact the video traveled so widely has served as another example of how misleading information continues to thrive in the fast-paced flow of information online, despite Facebook's promise to better weed it out.
00:28:07.000So now the Washington Post is calling for regulation of Facebook because people cannot recognize a satire video.
00:28:13.000And then you wonder why when President Trump says, why are you listening to the media?
00:28:17.000So many people on the right nod along and go, yeah, that's right.
00:28:19.000You know, when I saw this video, this, this, this Allie Stuckey video for the first time, it was a couple of nights ago when it first went up and my father was online.
00:28:26.000He said, look at this hilarious video.
00:29:27.000We will be changing the regime of Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people.
00:29:35.000Governor, then I'd like to hear your response on that.
00:29:38.000If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us.
00:29:41.000I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, we do it this way, so should you.
00:29:49.000Okay, so, okay, this is a tactic that's frequently used, and this is the part that drives me up a wall.
00:29:54.000When you undercut your own credibility on a regular basis, members of the media, it's going to be very difficult for you to fight President Trump when he says that you've destroyed your own credibility.
00:30:01.000Okay, before we go any further, let's talk about your impending death.
00:30:06.000And when you do, if you don't have life insurance, your family is going to be a lot poorer than they were while you were alive and earning, son.
00:30:43.000So if you need life insurance, but you've been putting it off because it's too confusing or you don't have the time, check out PolicyGenius.
00:30:48.000It's the easy way to compare top insurers and find the best value for you.
00:30:51.000There's no sales pressure, zero hassle, and it's free.
00:31:41.000Also, when you subscribe at YouTube and you hit that little bell so that you're updated, you will be able to know when we release a new episode of our Sunday special.
00:31:48.000And this Sunday special is pretty awesome.
00:31:50.000Coming up this Sunday, Mike Rowe is stopping by.
00:32:20.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:32:28.000So when the left and the media aren't pretending that satire videos are real for the sake of attacking people, people on the left are also proposing some brand new ideas.
00:32:56.000That people in the top brackets in the United States are already paying the overwhelming majority of actual net tax dollars toward the federal government.
00:33:23.000That's what negotiations are all about.
00:33:25.000It's that... It's 50% obviously too high?
00:33:28.000Look, there was a time in a very prosperous America, an America that was growing the middle class, an America in which working families were doing better generation after generation after generation, where the top marginal rate was well above 50%.
00:33:48.000The left never, ever, ever will actually give you a straight answer on this particular question.
00:33:52.000When you say to them, what is your preferred top tax rate?
00:33:55.000They'll never tell you that it's 100%, but it basically is 100%.
00:33:59.000Folks on the left will say, you know when the tax rate's really good?
00:34:01.000It's when the top marginal tax rate was 91% under JFK.
00:34:05.000Ignoring, of course, the fact that everybody basically avoided paying the 91% top tax rate with a variety of loopholes and deductions.
00:34:11.000But if you really believe that this is a winning campaign in the United States, a winning campaign is I want to raise everybody's taxes dramatically.
00:34:27.000Also, outrage is on the program as well.
00:34:29.000So Cory Booker also wants to run for president in 2020.
00:34:32.000This is why when people say that Donald Trump is running at a disadvantage in 2020, I just wonder who they think he's going to run against.
00:34:38.000If it's going to be Elizabeth Warren, who's sending smoke signals, or Cory Booker, wild-eyed Cory Booker, the advantage has to be with Trump.
00:34:45.000Cory Booker is the senator from New Jersey, one of the senators from New Jersey, along with the ex-global Bob Menendez.
00:34:50.000And Cory Booker has decided that he is going to play crazy-eyes Mr. Potato Head in his 2020 campaign.
00:35:40.000Moral outrage does not work against President Trump, and it doesn't work on the American people.
00:35:44.000When you're talking about the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the left is already attempting to mobilize against Kavanaugh's nomination, not by suggesting that there are holes in his legal resume, or by asking specific questions about his record, or how he will rule on future cases, but simply by stating over and over and over again that you are evil if you support Brett Kavanaugh.
00:36:02.000Well, this was exactly the thing that led to Trump's presidency in the first place.
00:36:05.000Everybody on the right got tired of hearing they were evil for disagreeing politically, and so the left is doubling down on all of that.
00:36:11.000So what have we learned from the left in the last 24 hours?
00:36:14.000We've learned that their program involves
00:36:17.000dishonestly suggesting that satire is actually real for the purposes of attacking people.
00:36:22.000We've learned from the left that they want tax rights radically elevated and we've learned from the left that you are evil if you support a judge who disagrees with Cory Booker on abortion.
00:36:31.000This is what we've learned from the left.
00:36:33.000The radicalization of the Democratic Party is happening in real time.
00:36:35.000And this is not me suggesting this from some subjective point of view.
00:36:40.000RealClearPolitics has these charts that show sort of the movement in the party politics over the past 20 years.
00:36:46.000And what you see is that the Republican Party moved to the right, leading all the way up until 2010.
00:36:50.000And since 2010, the Republican Party has basically been stagnant in its policies.
00:36:55.000And what you see is that the left, the Democratic Party, has moved radically to the left since 2010.
00:37:00.000And that's not a giant surprise, because just watching it in real time, you can see it happening.
00:37:04.000I'm old enough to remember when Barack Obama was running on behalf of traditional marriage and suggesting that he didn't want to raise taxes in 2008.
00:37:11.000And now you've got Elizabeth Warren, who's going to run on transgender bathrooms and 50% tax rights.
00:37:16.000That might be a little bit too radical for the American people.
00:37:20.000Now the other angle that folks on the left could take is that the Republicans in Congress aren't checking President Trump quite enough.
00:37:25.000That the Republicans in Congress are letting President Trump have his way.
00:37:28.000The problem is it's hard to come up with the evidence that on policy they're actually letting Trump have his way except perhaps
00:37:33.000on the issue of tariffs, where Congress really should seize back its power.
00:37:36.000It's a legislative power under Article 1 of the Constitution to handle tariff policy.
00:37:41.000But on other areas, for example, on Putin, the left has suggested that the Republicans are complicit in allowing President Trump to sell out the country to Vladimir Putin, except for the fact that the policy that has been promulgated by Congress is much harsher under President Trump than it ever was under President Obama.
00:37:57.000Yesterday, for example, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, cocaine Mitch, he came out and he said that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan
00:38:04.000The two of them would not be welcoming Putin to give some sort of joint address to the Houses of Congress, so they're not going to go along with the sort of warm feeling that President Trump has for Putin.
00:38:12.000Again, the policy that Trump has pursued via Putin is very different from the verbiage he has spoken via Putin with regard to Putin.
00:38:21.000Well I can only speak for the Congress.
00:38:23.000The Speaker and I have made it clear that Putin will not be welcome up here at the Capitol.
00:38:29.000OK, well, again, if the idea is you need to elect Democrats to check the president of the United States, I'm failing to see where Trump has really overridden his constitutional boundaries, except in the area of tariffs.
00:38:39.000And there is a case to be made that Republicans should stop him on that stuff for the sake of Trump's own presidency.
00:38:44.000But the case for a Democratic Congress has never been weaker, I think.
00:38:47.000And that's why I'm so bewildered by folks like George Will, who have suggested we need Democrats in Congress to check President Trump.
00:38:52.000You may not like President Trump, but the policy that is emerging from the Trump administration is not the same as President Trump's personality and what he believes personally.
00:39:01.000They're not quite the same thing at all.
00:39:03.000I'm not sure how you trust Democrats, especially considering this final plank of the Democratic platform that I'm going to talk about in just one second.
00:39:09.000So, final plank of the Democratic platform apparently for 2020 is going to be plastic straws suck.
00:39:14.000And no, I don't mean that in punny fashion.
00:39:16.000I mean that they're no longer going to allow you to slurp through plastic straws in cities like San Francisco.
00:39:21.000According to the San Francisco Chronicle, soon to be heard in San Francisco, the last slurp through a plastic straw.
00:39:27.000This morning, my kids wanted to drink some tea and they wanted to use plastic straws.
00:39:30.000So I guess I am now complicit in evil, according to Cory Booker.
00:39:33.000This board of supervisors passed an ordinance on Tuesday that will prohibit the city's restaurants, bars, and retailers from providing customers with plastic items such as straws, stirrers, or toothpicks beginning July 1st, 2019.
00:39:45.000If the ordinance passes the board on the second reading next week, it will then be presented to Mayor London Breed.
00:39:50.000If the mayor signs the measures, retailers will be prohibited from selling single-use food service products made with fluorinated chemicals.
00:39:56.000So you're not going to be allowed to get like a Starbucks cup anymore.
00:39:59.000Instead, you're going to have to use biodegradable straws that taste like corn every time you use them.
00:40:04.000She says, this is about changing people's behavior.
00:40:05.000Do you really need to offer a straw with a glass of water?
00:40:18.000Well, yeah, I mean, I kind of want the straw, so a little bit.
00:40:23.000And by the way, all of the propaganda surrounding plastic straws is absolutely silly.
00:40:27.000When people say that plastic straws are actually contributing to the degradation of the environment in a serious way, it's just not true, okay?
00:40:35.000There's basically a survey that was done by an eighth grader suggesting that there are eight million plastic straws that are thrown into the ocean, but that's just not, it's not true.
00:41:42.000Okay, the notion, that means that for all three of us using zero, in order for us to get to 500 million, there has to be some person out there who's using 10 plastic straws in a day.
00:41:53.000For that to average out to 500 million.
00:41:55.000Somebody has to be using 10 plastic straws.
00:42:02.000The source of the figure was actually a survey conducted by a nine-year-old.
00:42:06.000Two Australian scientists estimated there were 8.3 billion plastic straws scattered on global coastlines.
00:42:11.000But even if those straws were suddenly washed into the sea, they'd account for 0.03% of the 8 million metric tons of plastics estimated tend to the oceans in a given year.
00:42:20.000The city of Santa Barbara has also passed an ordinance that will allow restaurant employees to be punished with up to six months of jail time or a $1,000 fine for giving plastic straws to their customers.
00:42:30.000The bill was passed unanimously last Tuesday.
00:43:07.000This is pretty nuts stuff, but again, the left is not known for its moderation on issues of virtue signaling, and this is merely the latest example of all of that.
00:43:15.000So, again, I'm very glad that the leftists have decided the crucial threat to the planet is plastic straws.
00:43:21.000And that that must be ended immediately.
00:43:23.000But the spread of poop on sidewalks, that's cool.
00:43:26.000Homeless people occupying every square inch of Los Angeles, that's fine.
00:43:30.000Just make sure those homeless people don't have plastic straws while they're spreading disease at Skid Row in Los Angeles.
00:44:16.000You know, jazz really is the great American musical form.
00:44:19.000And it's obviously present in stuff like this, from the blues that we played yesterday to the kind of torch songs that you hear here from Sarah Vaughan.
00:45:16.000I guess you transferred over into heroin.
00:45:18.000So this wasn't the typical sort of story that you hear with regard to heroin addiction in sort of more prosperous communities where somebody goes to the doctor and then they are prescribed some sort of opioid and they can't get the high from the opioid that they used to and the prescription runs out so they start using heroin, black tar heroin instead.
00:45:34.000There's a great book called Dreamland by a guy named Sam Quinones that I've recommended on the show before about the problem of heroin trafficking in the United States.
00:45:41.000But there is something to be said about the idea that when you have
00:45:45.000A severe epidemic of drugs in upper class communities.
00:45:49.000I mean economically viable communities.
00:45:52.000It's not something you can blame on economics.
00:45:55.000It's something that you do have to blame at a certain point on lack of a moral framework for folks.
00:46:02.000And that's not to suggest that Demi Lovato is not a victim of her own addiction.
00:46:06.000I think that addiction can be treated as a disease.
00:46:09.000I think we have to treat it as a disease.
00:46:10.000It is also something that self-control helps with, which is why you have 12-step programs, as I've talked about a little bit earlier this week.
00:46:18.000But the idea that society as a whole is responsible for addictions like Demi Lovato, I have a bit of a problem with this.
00:46:23.000The reason that I say this is because the same day this happened with Demi Lovato, there was an article in a publication called NME by a guy named Barry Nicholson, and it says,
00:46:35.000And I just thought to myself, well, I'm not.
00:46:47.000At the film's core is a single deeply unsettling question.
00:46:50.000How did a happy, healthy, outrageously gifted 14-year-old, glimpsed in its opening moments, become a traumatized figure we all recognize from her final months?
00:46:58.000By the end, the coroner's verdict of death by misadventure doesn't seem to tell the whole story.
00:47:02.000This was death by a thousand cuts and agonizingly drawn out demise of cumulative influences, appetites, and mistakes.
00:47:08.000So the basic suggestion is that by humoring our most talented people in their excesses, that we are complicit in their fall.
00:47:17.000I think there is some truth to that to the people who immediately surround a star.
00:47:20.000I think there are a lot of people who, when you get famous, there are a lot of folks who surround you who are going to tell you yes to a lot of things, and people who want to be your friends who are going to tell you yes to anything that you want to hear because saying no means you're going to be unpopular with the famous cool kid.
00:47:32.000You know, we here at The Offices know a lot of very famous people.
00:47:35.000And this is a serious problem with famous people, is that they're often told yes by their hangers-on, and being told yes a lot means that you're going to start engaging in more and more outrageous excesses.
00:47:45.000That's why it's important to surround yourself with good people as a famous person.
00:47:48.000In the end, regardless of whether you are famous or whether you are not, if you believe in the idea that there is some level of personal responsibility for your own activity, I think blaming society for consuming your product is a little bit
00:48:00.000I don't think that it's the people who watched Roseanne who are responsible for Roseanne having serious life problems.
00:48:07.000I don't think that it's the people who bought Amy Winehouse albums who are responsible for Amy Winehouse doing what she did.
00:48:11.000I don't think it's the people who were fans of Demi Lovato who are responsible for Demi Lovato doing what she did either.
00:48:16.000I'm not suggesting, by the way, that Demi Lovato suggests that it is their fault.
00:48:19.000But I think there's a tendency on the part of the media to suggest that personal problems are actually societal problems and societal problems are actually personal problems.
00:48:28.000Yeah, I think the only way we're going to recover from this is with the belief that a more virtuous society in which we are all held to account and in which we protect each other from our excesses by not setting stumbling blocks in front of the blind, that's the kind of society that's going to protect people who do have a tendency toward addiction, who do have a tendency toward making mistakes in their personal life.
00:48:47.000Honestly, prayers for Demi Lovato, and I hope and pray, as I would for anyone, I hope that she gets over
00:49:16.000And what's really fascinating about the book of Psalms is there's a really good book that I've recommended on the show before called Poetic Diction.
00:49:24.000And the basic suggestion of that book is that when you read old poetry, when you read ancient poetry, that it feels more substantive.
00:49:30.000It feels like there is something more whole about that poetry than there is about modern poetry.
00:49:34.000And the reason for that is that the language of the time, particularly if you read Psalms in Hebrew, for example,
00:49:40.000It conveys more meaning than the language now.
00:49:43.000Like we in the West, in English, we have words for spirit and for wind, right?
00:51:03.000But listening and trying to figure out what it is that might make your life better on your own might be a better solution than constantly crying out to the heavens.
00:51:15.000It's one of the reasons why I think Eastern forms of meditation, in many cases, are extraordinarily useful.
00:51:20.000The idea of actually just taking a break and shutting up for a second.
00:51:23.000In politics, if we did this a little more, if we shut up a little bit more and listened a little more and talked a little bit less, I think that we'd all be better off.
00:51:29.000I think it's certainly true when it comes to our personal interactions with the divine as well.
00:51:33.000And I'm not saying that God is going to speak to you because I don't think that most people have the ability of prophecy.
00:51:38.000But I do think that you just listening is going to allow you to maybe see beyond yourself.