The Ben Shapiro Show - September 25, 2017


Trump vs. The NFL | Ep. 388

Topics
Trump vs. NFL Protest politics and entertainment Copulated Five Proofs of the Existence God Jimmy Kimmel's monologue and Obamacare repeal
Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Donald Trump Colin Kaepernick Jimmy Kimmel Barack Obama Tim Tebow Chuck Schumer Ron Paul Anthem Edward Fazer Steph Curry Eugene Gu Ring Steve Mnuchin Leshawn McCoy Alyssa Milano LeBron James Nancy Pelosi Kneeling Dwight Eisenhower Melissa Milano and 33 more
Should Jimmy Kimmel Be Appointed King Of Health Care? | Ep. 387 Did Trump Just Deflate Football? | Ep. 389

Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

208.67

Word count

9,390

Sentence count

810

Harmful content

Misogyny

13

sentences flagged

Toxicity

94

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Ben Shapiro explains why Colin Kaepernick's decision to kneel for the national anthem is not a political protest, and why the NFL should not have been so dumb as to punish him for it. He also explains how the NFL has long allowed political expression on the field, and how it doesn t seem to be a big deal when it comes from the standpoint of the rest of the league. Ben Shapiro is a columnist for The Daily Wire, and host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show" on Comedy Central. He is also the author of the book "The Biggest Loser" and hosts the radio show "The View From The Top" on SiriusXM Radio's The View From the Top, and is a regular contributor on Fox News Radio's "The HOSTAGE" and "The FiveThirtyEight". He's also a frequent contributor on CNN and the New York Times, and has been featured on CBS Radio's Hard Knocks and NPR's Morning Mashup, as well as other media outlets such as CNN and NPR. His new book, "The Kneeling Man," is out now. It's a must-listen for all things NFL related, and it's available for purchase on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. Click here to get a copy of "Kneeling for the National Anthem" for free! If you like the show, please consider becoming a patron of the show. and/or share it on iTunes, wherever else you can get your own copy of The Ben Shapiro Podcast. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever else works best serves you get the best listening to the latest episodes of The Most Stupidest Thing on the most stupidest things in the most dumbest thing on the internet. You'll get 10% off your choice of books, including Best Fiends, Besties, Good Morning America, The Most Stupidest Podcasts, The Huffington Post, The Root, and Good Morning's newest podcast. The Root and The Root's newest novel, "Noah's Guide to the World's Most Brilliantest Thing." Learn more about him on the world's Dumbest Thing That's Smartest Thing I've Ever Seen Him on Good Morning Joe, Goodreads, Good Podcasts and Good Mythology, Good Day, Good Life and Good Life Podcasts Good Readings, Good Read, Good Luck, Good Grief and Good Relationships, and Good Luck!

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 When I left on Wednesday, I told you not to make everything more stupid or no one would be going to Disneyland. 0.99
00:00:05.000 No Disneyland for anyone! 0.99
00:00:07.000 No Disneyland, you understand me?
00:00:10.000 I'm turning this car right around.
00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show. 0.99
00:00:20.000 Damn it, people. 0.99
00:00:20.000 Every time I sign off the internet, every time I finish the podcast, I think to myself, the world can't get any dumber. 0.99
00:00:26.000 And then the next time I come on, I think, things were so much smarter the last time I was doing a podcast.
00:00:30.000 And that's what happened over the weekend.
00:00:32.000 We are going to get into all things NFL related, and bend the knee, and kneel, and knights of knee, and all of it.
00:00:38.000 We'll get to all of those things.
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00:01:48.000 Again, use that slash Ben so they know that we sent you. 1.00
00:01:50.000 Okay, so, as I say, everyone's a moron. 0.97
00:01:53.000 That is the quick summary of today's episode, so we can skip the rest of the show. 1.00
00:01:57.000 Okay, so, the stupidity begins with the NFL. 1.00
00:02:00.000 Everybody's trying to blame Trump for the advent of the stupidity. 1.00
00:02:02.000 Now, Trump has his own brand of silliness that he has injected in here, and I actually don't think it's politically silly. 1.00
00:02:08.000 I think it's bad for the country, but I think it's politically smart. 0.90
00:02:11.000 But we need to start off with a simple fact.
00:02:13.000 The NFL politicized itself years ago.
00:02:16.000 This idea that Trump politicized the NFL is sheer nonsense.
00:02:19.000 It's just not true.
00:02:20.000 The NFL made a conscious decision to allow politics on the field.
00:02:24.000 They've done this for years.
00:02:25.000 In 2014, you recall after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, the St.
00:02:29.000 Louis Rams came out on the field and did the infamous hands-up-don't-shoot pose as they were coming out of the tunnel onto the field.
00:02:36.000 Big deal at the time.
00:02:37.000 Did they get fined?
00:02:38.000 They did not get fined.
00:02:39.000 It was nothing from the NFL.
00:02:40.000 The NFL was fine with it.
00:02:41.000 No problem.
00:02:42.000 Okay, then in 2016, Colin Kaepernick decided that he was going to kneel down for the National Anthem during a preseason game.
00:02:49.000 Did the NFL fine him?
00:02:50.000 No, they did nothing.
00:02:51.000 But what did the NFL do?
00:02:53.000 They threatened the Dallas Cowboys with fines if they wore police decals in the regular season on their helmets after there was that shooting of police officers by a Black Lives Matter-associated radical in 2016.
00:03:06.000 So here's the headline.
00:03:07.000 If you had the decal on your helmet, they would not allow you to wear the decal on your helmet.
00:03:12.000 Same year, if you wanted to wear cleats that paid homage to victims of 9-11, the NFL said you were not allowed to do this.
00:03:19.000 Some players did it anyway, and then the NFL ended up waiving the fine.
00:03:22.000 But if you wore even special breast cancer gear, then the NFL threatened to fine you.
00:03:28.000 If you did an end zone dance that was too provocative, the NFL fined you.
00:03:32.000 So the NFL cracked down on everything except for leftist political expression.
00:03:36.000 Everything except for leftist political expression.
00:03:38.000 I assume that, you know, the response would be, well, they didn't crack down on Tim Tebow, except that Tim Tebow kneeling to do his own private prayer is not really a political presentation.
00:03:46.000 Kneeling for the national anthem pretty clearly is.
00:03:48.000 So, the NFL had politicized itself long ago.
00:03:51.000 And then President Trump decided to step in.
00:03:53.000 So let's be clear about something.
00:03:54.000 There was a consensus until the middle of last week, until Wednesday of last week, when last we left our story.
00:04:00.000 There was a consensus in the United States. 1.00
00:04:02.000 Kneeling for the National Anthem is a stupid thing to do. 1.00
00:04:05.000 It is an unpatriotic thing to do. 1.00
00:04:06.000 This was the general American consensus.
00:04:08.000 Now, there were some people who said, well, it's still patriotic to kneel for the Anthem because you're really trying to say that the Anthem isn't being fulfilled in the way that it was meant to be fulfilled.
00:04:15.000 Okay, you made the statement about the Anthem.
00:04:18.000 The Anthem is one of the few unifying features of American life.
00:04:22.000 The American flag, the National Anthem, these are unifying features of American life, and to kneel for the Anthem suggests that you are anti-American.
00:04:28.000 Okay, it does.
00:04:29.000 There are plenty of ways to protest against police brutality or systemic racism if these are things that you feel the necessity to do.
00:04:35.000 Listen, I think that you're wrong.
00:04:37.000 I think that you are operating on faulty assumptions.
00:04:40.000 According to the Washington Post, there have been 761 police shootings this year.
00:04:44.000 Nine of them, nine of them, were of an unarmed black person.
00:04:48.000 And of those nine, not all nine were cases in which the person was just sitting around doing nothing.
00:04:52.000 In many cases, there are serious questions about confrontations with the police. 0.51
00:04:57.000 So the idea that cops are going around shooting people is in and of itself ridiculous, that they're going around shooting people based on race.
00:05:03.000 Not a lot of evidence to support that.
00:05:04.000 That said, if you want to protest, there are plenty of ways to protest.
00:05:07.000 Making the specific statement that you're going to bow down during the national anthem on national TV, it's a statement.
00:05:13.000 It's a political statement and it says that America is inherently steeped in racism, founded in racism, and inescapably tied to racism.
00:05:20.000 Okay, that's what that says.
00:05:21.000 So Americans didn't like that.
00:05:22.000 If you look at the polls, Americans didn't like this, and it was actually hurting the NFL's ratings.
00:05:26.000 The NFL had a trio of serious PR problems before the middle of last week.
00:05:31.000 The NFL had the CTE scandal.
00:05:33.000 You know, the fact that if you get hit in the head many times, then you are likely to end up, or it's possible that you end up with brain damage.
00:05:40.000 They could end with early death.
00:05:41.000 CTE is a brain disease in which you get plaque in your brain, essentially, and that comes from too many hits to the head.
00:05:48.000 So that was one thing the NFL had to deal with.
00:05:50.000 The NFL also had to deal with a serious spate of domestic violence incidents where a bunch of their players were knocking around women.
00:05:55.000 And the NFL, you recall this with Ray Rice, the NFL didn't know what to do.
00:05:58.000 They sort of said that they were going to do something, then they didn't do anything, and then they did something again.
00:06:02.000 So that was the second thing.
00:06:03.000 And then they had the Kaepernick thing.
00:06:04.000 All of this was contributing to a drop in ratings for the NFL.
00:06:08.000 And in fact, J.D.
00:06:09.000 Powers did a poll, and it showed that for whatever number of people were not watching the NFL anymore who had watched before, 26% of those people said that their number one reason for turning off the NFL was the National Anthem protests.
00:06:21.000 They didn't like the politicization of sport.
00:06:23.000 Which makes sense.
00:06:24.000 We have to have a water cooler culture. 0.99
00:06:26.000 We have to have something in common.
00:06:28.000 We don't have politics in common.
00:06:29.000 We don't have church in common.
00:06:30.000 We don't even have entertainment in common.
00:06:32.000 But sports seemed like a pretty easy one, right?
00:06:34.000 Bunch of people run around after a ball.
00:06:35.000 How do you screw that up?
00:06:36.000 Well, we found a way to screw it up.
00:06:39.000 So, the NFL was facing all of these problems.
00:06:41.000 There was a consensus. 1.00
00:06:42.000 The consensus was, people like Colin Kaepernick, dolts, doing stupid things, not good for the country. 1.00
00:06:48.000 But should Colin Kaepernick be fired because of that? 1.00
00:06:51.000 Probably not.
00:06:52.000 Most people didn't really feel like it was necessary to call for a firing.
00:06:56.000 Didn't really feel like it was important to call for a firing, or if the owners wanted to fire on their own recognizance, that's their problem.
00:07:03.000 I mean, right, it's a private business.
00:07:05.000 If they want to fire Kaepernick, they can fire Kaepernick.
00:07:07.000 That's their call.
00:07:08.000 What it is not is the government's job to get involved.
00:07:10.000 The government should not be involved in this.
00:07:12.000 Now, the reason those of us on the right thought this is because we don't like when the government or government actors sound off on these issues generally.
00:07:19.000 How would we feel if President Obama had said about Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla, that it's a good thing that Mozilla fired him.
00:07:26.000 After all, the guy was for traditional marriage.
00:07:29.000 I mean, that's pretty discriminatory.
00:07:31.000 We would have all been fighting mad.
00:07:32.000 We would have said, what business is it of the President of the United States to make noises about that?
00:07:37.000 Imagine for a second the counterfactual.
00:07:39.000 Let's say Tim Tebow gets down on a knee, but he doesn't just get down on a knee to pray.
00:07:43.000 He gets down on a knee because he is overtly protesting the abortion culture in the United States.
00:07:49.000 And let's say that Barack Obama is the president and he comes out and he says, that's inappropriate.
00:07:52.000 Sports is sports.
00:07:53.000 Cut that stuff out.
00:07:54.000 I hope Tim Tebow gets fired.
00:07:56.000 Somebody needs to fire Tim Tebow.
00:07:57.000 Let's boycott the NFL until Tim Tebow is fired.
00:07:59.000 We all would have said, wait a second.
00:08:01.000 Is that the job of the president?
00:08:02.000 Like, it's our job to decide whether or not we want to watch a game.
00:08:05.000 It's the owner's job to decide whether or not somebody gets fired.
00:08:08.000 So this was the consensus. 1.00
00:08:09.000 Stupid politics are stupid. 1.00
00:08:11.000 And also, it's the owner's job and the patron's job to decide whether they want to watch something or fire somebody. 1.00
00:08:17.000 This was the consensus.
00:08:18.000 It was pretty well settled.
00:08:19.000 You weren't seeing a significant increase in the number of NFL players who were kneeling for the anthem. 0.98
00:08:23.000 It was basically Colin Kaepernick, and now it's not even Kaepernick because the guy doesn't have a job because he's a crappy quarterback. 0.93
00:08:28.000 So, that is the lead-up. 0.84
00:08:30.000 Then along comes President Trump.
00:08:32.000 Now, I'm not sure that what President Trump did last week was politically designed.
00:08:37.000 I'm not sure that he meant to start this firefight.
00:08:40.000 I think that Trump likes to say things to audiences where they clap, right?
00:08:43.000 I think that that's really as deep as it goes for President Trump.
00:08:46.000 But the effect of what President Trump does is that President Trump, whether he likes it or not, basically, no matter what he says, it's going to be taken the same way that reverse psychology is taken with my three-year-old.
00:08:55.000 So the way that I get my three-year-old
00:08:58.000 No, you're not big enough to eat all that food.
00:08:59.000 You can't eat all that food.
00:09:01.000 No way.
00:09:01.000 Well, no matter what Trump says, the left responds like three-year-olds.
00:09:03.000 So whatever Trump says, they immediately respond with,
00:09:20.000 Not only will we kneel for the anthem, we'll poop on the field!
00:09:23.000 That's what we'll do, just to show you, because Trump, huh?
00:09:25.000 Huh?
00:09:26.000 Okay, so Trump leads all this off with statements that really are divisive and not useful.
00:09:30.000 Okay, so here's the part of what Trump says that's useful. 1.00
00:09:34.000 What he says that's useful is, kneeling for the national anthem is stupid. 1.00
00:09:37.000 Agree! 1.00
00:09:38.000 Everyone agrees.
00:09:39.000 But that's not enough.
00:09:40.000 Trump goes further.
00:09:41.000 He gets back into his full-on WWE TV persona, and he decides that he's going to call for people to be fired.
00:09:47.000 Right?
00:09:47.000 He's gonna go, you're fired!
00:09:48.000 He's even gonna bring out his old slogan, because he's not getting anything done legislatively, and everybody's sort of disappointed in him, and people are sort of frustrated.
00:09:56.000 So he's gonna bring back an applause line in Alabama, because whenever he gets in front of a crowd, this is what he does.
00:10:00.000 Trump is a consummate performer.
00:10:02.000 It's what he does for a living.
00:10:03.000 He's not president for a living.
00:10:04.000 He's a performer for a living who happens to be president.
00:10:07.000 That's how he got here.
00:10:08.000 He didn't get here through great legislative leisure domain.
00:10:10.000 That's not how he got here.
00:10:12.000 I'm going to play the tape of Trump and explain what happens next in just a second.
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00:11:20.000 Okay, so.
00:11:22.000 President Trump.
00:11:23.000 So, President Trump goes to Alabama.
00:11:25.000 And it's a rally.
00:11:26.000 And he decides that it's time to drop some red meat. 0.89
00:11:28.000 So here's President Trump dropping the red meat. 1.00
00:11:30.000 Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now. 1.00
00:11:40.000 Out. 1.00
00:11:40.000 He's fired. 1.00
00:11:40.000 He's fired! 1.00
00:11:45.000 More roaring, yeah!
00:11:48.000 Okay, so, the him condemning, the players who kneel, I'm fine with that.
00:11:53.000 I've been doing it for years now.
00:11:55.000 I think most people in the United States have been doing it for years.
00:11:57.000 He is the President of the United States.
00:11:59.000 He is not a Breitbart commenter.
00:12:01.000 He is not the local drunk at your pub.
00:12:02.000 Okay, he's the President of the United States.
00:12:05.000 And now it's time for the President to be the President.
00:12:07.000 Perfectly fine for him to say.
00:12:08.000 People should not kneel for the national anthem.
00:12:10.000 It destroys a feeling of unity that America is built upon.
00:12:13.000 We all strive to do better.
00:12:14.000 Not okay for the President of the United States to say, the owners should move to fire people.
00:12:19.000 And that's not where Trump stops.
00:12:20.000 So Trump goes to Twitter, and he unleashes a full-on Hurricane-5 level tweet storm.
00:12:25.000 So here's what he tweets.
00:12:26.000 If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect.
00:12:32.000 Our great American flag, or country, and should stand for the national anthem.
00:12:35.000 If not, you're fired!
00:12:39.000 Find something else to do.
00:12:41.000 Okay, so, here is the problem.
00:12:43.000 There are a couple of words here to start that are a problem.
00:12:45.000 One, allowed.
00:12:46.000 All right, go back to that first tweet for a second.
00:12:49.000 Allowed.
00:12:49.000 Okay, so, in that first tweet, should not be allowed.
00:12:52.000 By whom?
00:12:53.000 By whom?
00:12:54.000 Okay, the NFL gets to make its own rules. 0.84
00:12:56.000 If they decide they want to let these dolts be dolts, that's their problem. 1.00
00:12:59.000 But this aloud coming from the President of the United States carries the patina of government action.
00:13:03.000 Trump probably doesn't mean that.
00:13:05.000 Okay, Trump doesn't even have the power to get a healthcare bill passed, but this is not the kind of stuff that the President of the United States should be saying.
00:13:10.000 And then when he says that they should be fired, again, I ask you, if the situation were reversed, take off your partisan hat for a moment.
00:13:18.000 If he had said, no one should be allowed to kneel against our great American law, Roe v. Wade, if not, you're fired, how would you feel about that?
00:13:27.000 And if you say you'd feel fine about that, you're lying.
00:13:29.000 Okay, and here is President Trump continuing along these lines, and then he tweets, Roger Goodell of NFL just put out a statement trying to justify the total disrespect certain players show to our country.
00:13:37.000 Tell them to stand.
00:13:38.000 Okay, like, look, this part I don't have a problem with, okay?
00:13:42.000 Roger Goodell.
00:13:43.000 You know, again, private industry, I don't think the President of the United States should be saying this.
00:13:47.000 I agree with the general sentiment.
00:13:48.000 Again, there's a difference between when I say it or you say it, and the President says it because he has a different role in the American Republic.
00:13:54.000 This is not something the President should be doing.
00:13:56.000 Okay.
00:13:58.000 Then he continues.
00:13:58.000 Again, he just can't let this thing go because he thinks he's got a winner here.
00:14:01.000 And he does.
00:14:02.000 Okay, here's the irony.
00:14:03.000 The irony is that Trump does have a winner here.
00:14:06.000 So Trump says, So now he's openly calling for people to boycott a particular business until they suspend or fire someone.
00:14:17.000 Imagine if Barack Obama said, everyone should stop patronizing Chick-fil-A until the owner of the business is moved out of power. 0.80
00:14:26.000 Would that be okay?
00:14:27.000 The answer is no.
00:14:29.000 And then he says, NFL attendance and ratings are way down.
00:14:31.000 Boring games, yes, but many stay away because they love our country.
00:14:34.000 Leagues should back U.S. 0.99
00:14:35.000 Again, it's just more and more of the same.
00:14:37.000 He feels like he's a terrier with a bone and now he's not gonna let it go.
00:14:41.000 And he continues along these lines, it just never ends.
00:14:43.000 Great solidarity for our national anthem and for our country.
00:14:45.000 Standing with locked arms is good.
00:14:47.000 Kneeling is not acceptable.
00:14:48.000 Bad ratings.
00:14:49.000 I don't know if that was translated into North Korean and then into Korean and then back into English, but in any case,
00:14:56.000 When he says here, you know, I actually, here's what I suggested.
00:14:58.000 I said, listen, if you want to show solidarity with the people who are kneeling but you disagree with them, then put your hand on their shoulder or something.
00:15:04.000 And then say after the game, I disagree with him, but it's his right to say what he wants to say, and that's America.
00:15:09.000 Trump, I think, is sort of trying to say the same thing there, but okay.
00:15:12.000 Then he says, courageous patriots have fought and died for a great American flag.
00:15:14.000 We must honor and respect it.
00:15:16.000 Make America great again!
00:15:17.000 And then the choir starts singing.
00:15:19.000 Okay, so I agree.
00:15:20.000 I agree with all of this.
00:15:22.000 I agree with all of this.
00:15:23.000 But, again, he's the president.
00:15:26.000 I'm a talk show host.
00:15:27.000 Okay, there's a difference.
00:15:29.000 Is that the finale of his great rant?
00:15:31.000 I think that's the finale of his great rant.
00:15:33.000 Then, that's not all.
00:15:34.000 He sends his Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, to go out and comment on this too.
00:15:38.000 Again, why is the
00:15:40.000 Okay, as a conservative, I want the government less involved in telling private businesses what to do. 1.00
00:15:46.000 Even if I disagree with what a business is doing, there are plenty of businesses that I think are full of schmucks. 0.98
00:15:50.000 That doesn't mean that as the President of the United States I get to tell them what to do. 0.99
00:15:53.000 So again,
00:15:54.000 Two things can be true at once.
00:15:55.000 You should not kneel for the anthem. 0.70
00:15:57.000 It makes you an a-hole.
00:15:58.000 Two, as the President of the United States, you should not go around telling other businesses to fire people based on political predilection.
00:16:07.000 This makes you malfeasant in your duty.
00:16:10.000 So here is Steve Mnuchin, a guy most famous recently for using taxpayers' dollars so he can take his wife on their honeymoon or something.
00:16:16.000 Here's Steve Mnuchin explaining why Trump is right to Jake Tapper on CNN.
00:16:21.000 The NFL has all different types of rules.
00:16:24.000 You can't have stickers on your helmet.
00:16:26.000 You have to have your uniforms tucked in.
00:16:29.000 What the president is saying and I think the owner should meet and they should vote on a rule.
00:16:34.000 This is about respect.
00:16:36.000 For our military, this is about respect for our first responders.
00:16:40.000 This is not about Republicans or Democrats.
00:16:43.000 Players have the right for free speech off the field.
00:16:47.000 On the field, this is about respect for lots of people.
00:16:50.000 And I don't understand why there's rules that when the Dallas Cowboys wanted to put stickers on their helmets out of respect for people there, they couldn't do it.
00:16:59.000 Okay, I agree with all the things that he's saying right now.
00:17:01.000 Why is the Treasury Secretary of the United States commenting on this?
00:17:04.000 Why?
00:17:05.000 Okay, we complained when Barack Obama and his government got involved in trying to regulate the name of the Washington Redskins, and we said, why are you talking about this? 1.00
00:17:13.000 Go do your stupid job, you stupid! 1.00
00:17:16.000 Okay, and now everybody's talking about it. 1.00
00:17:17.000 Okay, so why is this really happening?
00:17:19.000 It's because Trump's actually doing something quite clever.
00:17:21.000 Okay, whether he means to or not, what he's doing right now is quite clever.
00:17:24.000 What he is doing is he is saying, I am on the side
00:17:27.000 I right here, I'm on the side of the national anthem and the flag.
00:17:30.000 I love it.
00:17:30.000 It's great.
00:17:31.000 And then he knows.
00:17:32.000 The Democrats are going to respond like three-year-old children.
00:17:34.000 They're going to say, yeah?
00:17:35.000 Well, you like the flag?
00:17:36.000 You like the anthem? 1.00
00:17:37.000 Well, screw you! 1.00
00:17:38.000 I hate the anthem! 1.00
00:17:39.000 I hate the flag! 0.91
00:17:42.000 And that's exactly what Democrats do. 0.96
00:17:45.000 Okay, naturally, this is exactly where Democrats go because they just can't help themselves.
00:17:48.000 So, here's a former Maryland Democratic representative saying that all NFL players should kneel in response to Trump.
00:17:56.000 She said,
00:18:04.000 So what happens?
00:18:05.000 A lot of the NFL players do.
00:18:06.000 They decide that they hate Trump so much they're going to kneel for the anthem.
00:18:09.000 So, here's what the left sees and here's what the right sees.
00:18:10.000 Because we now live in completely different bubbles, right?
00:18:12.000 We don't have conversations with each other.
00:18:14.000 We don't talk with each other.
00:18:15.000 We don't try to understand each other.
00:18:17.000 So here's what the left sees.
00:18:18.000 The left sees a bunch of people kneeling to protest a President of the United States making statements that are beyond his ken.
00:18:24.000 The President should not be commenting on this, so let's all kneel in solidarity to show that we don't like what the President said.
00:18:30.000 Here's what the rest of America sees.
00:18:32.000 They see a bunch of people kneeling during the national anthem that people have fought and died to protect.
00:18:37.000 They see a bunch of people disrespecting the flag that a bunch of people have fought and died to respect.
00:18:41.000 So, what the left did is they took an unpopular protest movement, a protest movement that no one on the left was seriously backing, and then they made it their rallying cry. 0.99
00:18:51.000 This is what we're going to rally around now, is this unpopular stupid thing. 0.98
00:18:55.000 And Trump's standing over here going, I love the flag. 1.00
00:18:57.000 It's great.
00:18:57.000 Look at all those people kneeling.
00:18:58.000 It's not about me.
00:18:59.000 They hate the flag.
00:19:00.000 They hate the National Anthem.
00:19:03.000 So the real debate here is not even had.
00:19:07.000 The real debate is whether it's appropriate to kneel for the flag.
00:19:09.000 Half the people kneeling about the flag and National Anthem are doing it specifically to piss off Trump.
00:19:14.000 If you think you're pissing off Trump, you're wrong.
00:19:16.000 Trump is winning because of this.
00:19:18.000 You think you can win back Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by kneeling during the national anthem?
00:19:24.000 Are you out of your mind?
00:19:25.000 But the Democrats think they're going to win with their base.
00:19:28.000 Trump thinks he's going to win with his base.
00:19:30.000 And they're both sort of right.
00:19:31.000 They're both sort of right.
00:19:32.000 So what breaks down?
00:19:33.000 The only thing that breaks down is our capacity to speak with one another.
00:19:36.000 Americans are the ones who get hurt. 1.00
00:19:38.000 We just want to watch our football and drink a beer and be left alone.
00:19:42.000 That's all.
00:19:43.000 It's all we ask.
00:19:44.000 Is it so much?
00:19:45.000 I've been saying this about sports for years.
00:19:47.000 I was saying this when the NFL was trotting out Beyonce to do a Black Lives Matter routine during halftime.
00:19:52.000 Or Katy Perry, who's a very political person, right?
00:19:55.000 I've been saying this for a long time.
00:19:57.000 Let me watch my sports and leave me alone.
00:19:59.000 And they won't do it.
00:20:00.000 And now Trump has just taken it to the next level.
00:20:02.000 He's just taken it to the logical next step.
00:20:04.000 And now everybody's mad.
00:20:05.000 Okay, and now we have nothing to talk about.
00:20:07.000 The ratings for the NFL are going to tank because the NFL is going to defend its players.
00:20:10.000 People are going to get mad.
00:20:11.000 They don't want to watch the players kneel for the anthem.
00:20:13.000 They think it's unpatriotic because it is.
00:20:16.000 Now, there are people who say it's not unpatriotic for two reasons.
00:20:19.000 One is, when you kneel for the anthem, then you're really kneeling because you respect the anthem, right?
00:20:23.000 It's because you respect the anthem so much and we're not living up to it.
00:20:27.000 This, I think, is a poor argument.
00:20:28.000 This runs in the same category as people who say that burning the flag is showing the highest form of respect to the flag.
00:20:33.000 Because we're burning the flag to show the flag doesn't live up to what we think it should live up to.
00:20:36.000 That's not really what kneeling for the anthem shows.
00:20:39.000 The other thing is a little more understandable.
00:20:41.000 That is, it's not unpatriotic to kneel because we're not kneeling because we don't like the anthem or the flag.
00:20:45.000 We're kneeling because we want to show Trump that he can't tell people not to kneel. 1.00
00:20:49.000 Again, stupid, but not unpatriotic. 1.00
00:20:51.000 What a lot of people in the middle of the country see is people kneeling during the anthem. 1.00
00:20:55.000 Here is what people see, and you're going to see what you want to see, right?
00:20:58.000 Here's what you're going to see.
00:20:59.000 Leshawn McCoy, right, who is a running back for the Buffalo Bills, this is what he was doing during the national anthem.
00:21:04.000 Not even kneeling, stretching. 0.98
00:21:21.000 Okay, that's a garbage thing to do. 0.99
00:21:22.000 I don't care what reason you're doing that for, stretching during the National Anthem is a garbage thing to do. 0.98
00:21:26.000 It's not even kneeling, right? 1.00
00:21:27.000 Kneeling is bad enough, but stretching is really just you being a garbage person. 0.97
00:21:31.000 So, President Trump thanks Leshawn McCoy for his campaign donation 2020. 0.98
00:21:35.000 Because I promise you, this helps Trump.
00:21:38.000 This helps Trump.
00:21:39.000 And then it becomes a big thing, right?
00:21:40.000 You've got National Anthem singers who are kneeling.
00:21:41.000 You had one do it at the Seahawks-Titans game, right?
00:21:44.000 So you've got the Color Guard out there.
00:21:46.000 And then the Color Guard is out.
00:21:48.000 These are men and women serving in our American military standing there for the flag.
00:21:52.000 And the National Anthem singer is kneeling in front of the people who are willing to spend their lives and their lifeblood protecting that flag and this National Anthem.
00:21:59.000 It's gross.
00:22:11.000 So after singing, they kneel.
00:22:12.000 Well, because we have to show that kneeling is important.
00:22:14.000 Kneeling is not important.
00:22:15.000 Again, you want to show solidarity with the players.
00:22:17.000 Don't kneel.
00:22:18.000 Just hold hands with them while they kneel.
00:22:21.000 Right?
00:22:21.000 If you're going to lock arms, locking arms.
00:22:22.000 As Trump himself said, and I think he's right, locking arms, fine.
00:22:26.000 Right?
00:22:26.000 We're all part of the same country.
00:22:27.000 As Lincoln said, we must be friends, not enemies.
00:22:29.000 We must be brothers, not enemies.
00:22:31.000 Okay, here's another national anthem singer kneeling.
00:22:34.000 Again, this is Detroit and Atlanta.
00:22:39.000 Okay, so there are a lot of places where people were booed, right?
00:22:56.000 The Patriots, for example, were booed.
00:22:58.000 A bunch of them kneeled, and the crowd booed them, which I think is totally appropriate. 1.00
00:23:05.000 You can hear them booing the players, right?
00:23:08.000 This is what Trump has done, and this is what the left fell right into.
00:23:10.000 Trump said, if you kneel, you're unpatriotic, and you should be fired.
00:23:14.000 And a bunch of people said on the left, OK, fine, then we'll all kneel.
00:23:18.000 So what are you doing?
00:23:18.000 You're alienating your own audience.
00:23:19.000 Here's a montage of all the players around the NFL kneeling.
00:23:22.000 OK, you can see this is the Cleveland Browns, who knelt and then just kept kneeling throughout the game because they stink.
00:23:31.000 Here's Leshawn McCoy, and here's the Jaguars.
00:23:37.000 Right, there's the Atlanta Falcons.
00:23:41.000 Okay, so now I'm going to show you how this breaks down because of what Trump did.
00:23:47.000 Instead of this being a debate about kneeling, about police brutality, it's turned into a debate about the national anthem itself and about Trump.
00:23:55.000 Trump has taken what was a tiny protest movement and turned it huge, and in the process polarized the country in a politically intelligent way, but in a way that's not very good for the country.
00:24:03.000 I'm going to get to the hero of last night, the hero of yesterday, and some of the villains.
00:24:08.000 Okay, so we'll get to that in just a second.
00:24:10.000 I want to say thank you to our friends over at Blinkist.
00:24:12.000 So, you have a lot to do today, right?
00:24:14.000 I mean, it's Monday, you just came off a really stupid weekend, and so now you have a backed-up email, you got a lot of work to do, you're not going to be able to spend a lot of time reading, are you?
00:24:22.000 Just things that you want to read. 0.84
00:24:23.000 Well, that's why when you get in the car, it's time for you to turn on Blinkist.
00:24:26.000 You need to download the Blinkist app because it allows you to go through the world's best books in 15 minutes or less.
00:24:33.000 They boil down the main points of books into 15-minute power packets they call Blinks
00:24:38.000 And then you can listen to them.
00:24:39.000 It really is amazing.
00:24:40.000 I know a lot of people listening to this show, people like Dana Perino now use Blinkist, and the reason for that is because Blinkist is just a tremendous way of gathering information.
00:24:48.000 You can spend five hours reading a book and come away with the same amount of material that you would in a 15-minute summary from Blinkist, because how much of that book that you read three months ago do you actually remember?
00:24:57.000 And these are all the nonfiction books that you'd want to read.
00:24:59.000 It's things like Why Nations Fail, 600-page book, really good book.
00:25:02.000 Do I remember 15 minutes worth of material in it?
00:25:05.000 Not really.
00:25:05.000 So if you listen to The Blink, now you just saved yourself four, you saved yourself seven hours.
00:25:10.000 Right?
00:25:11.000 The titles that they have there are just like 2,000 titles.
00:25:14.000 It's things like Thinking Fast and Slow, the famous Daniel Kahneman book about how the brain works.
00:25:18.000 That's a 400 page book.
00:25:20.000 Okay, what are you going to remember from it?
00:25:21.000 Fifteen minutes worth of material, probably.
00:25:23.000 That's why Blinkist works. 0.51
00:25:24.000 Blinkist right now has a special offer just for our audience.
00:25:27.000 Go to Blinkist.com slash Ben right now and you get your free trial or three months off your yearly plan when you join today.
00:25:33.000 That's Blinkist. 0.98
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00:25:36.000 Blinkist.com slash Ben to start your free trial or you get three months off your yearly plan.
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00:25:45.000 Go and check it out and make sure that you use slash Ben's that they know that we sent you.
00:25:50.000 So, the big hero of yesterday when all was said and done was not any of the players who were kneeling.
00:25:54.000 It was one player on the Pittsburgh Steelers.
00:25:56.000 His name is Alejandro Villanueva.
00:25:58.000 He did three tours, I believe, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is a West Point graduate.
00:26:05.000 He's an offensive tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers. 0.99
00:26:07.000 The entire Pittsburgh Steelers team decided that it was necessary not to come out for the national anthem over all of this stupidity. 0.98
00:26:13.000 And the entire Pittsburgh Steelers team stayed in the locker room, except for Villanueva, who served in the line of duty in order to protect this national anthem and protect this flag. 0.99
00:26:21.000 And here is some video of Villanueva standing for the anthem.
00:26:26.000 So Chicago Bears, they came out and they all linked arms.
00:26:34.000 It didn't deal.
00:26:39.000 The only player on the Steelers who came out was this guy.
00:26:50.000 We're good to go.
00:27:06.000 I'd like
00:27:23.000 The more Americans wear the Villanova jersey, the better off we are.
00:27:26.000 The better off we are.
00:27:26.000 Obviously, you know, this guy is the hero of the day.
00:27:30.000 And this is the new debate, right?
00:27:32.000 Trump got what he wanted.
00:27:33.000 He got what he wanted.
00:27:34.000 He wanted us to be saying that the heroes of the day are the people who stood for the anthem and the people who weren't Neil.
00:27:39.000 Because that's what we felt before.
00:27:41.000 But now a lot more people are Neil-ing because they don't like Trump. 1.00
00:27:43.000 And you can see the virtue-signaling stupidity of the left here. 1.00
00:27:48.000 I mean, it really is astonishing. 1.00
00:27:50.000 Alyssa Milano, right, the actress.
00:27:52.000 She took a picture of her kid kneeling.
00:27:53.000 Because there's nothing better than politicizing your own child.
00:27:56.000 I know, it's just wonderful.
00:27:57.000 I really object to this.
00:27:59.000 As I say, I have two kids under four.
00:28:00.000 I keep them separate from politics.
00:28:02.000 I don't even put pictures online of them.
00:28:04.000 People who are willing to use their kids for this kind of stuff, I really don't like it.
00:28:08.000 Alyssa Milano tweeted, Okay, so, what does Alyssa Milano object to?
00:28:16.000 Does she object to President Trump saying that people who kneel for the anthem are SOBs?
00:28:21.000 Is that what she objects to?
00:28:22.000 Or does she object to the President of the United States saying they should be fired? 0.98
00:28:26.000 If the latter,
00:28:27.000 Then what I would like to know from Melissa Milano is does she stand up for the rights of people to speak at Berkeley?
00:28:33.000 Does she stand up for the rights of people to work at Mozilla Firefox?
00:28:36.000 Does she stand up for the rights of people to continue working at their bakery if they don't wish to service a same-sex wedding? 0.80
00:28:44.000 Like, how much freedom in the workplace is Melissa Milano for, or is this just, you know, virtue signaling? 1.00
00:28:48.000 I think we all know the answer.
00:28:49.000 Stevie Wonder did the same routine. 0.99
00:28:50.000 Stevie Wonder got down on one knee as well, so it's become a big cultural thing now.
00:28:59.000 Tonight, I'm taking a knee for America. 0.99
00:29:07.000 Wow.
00:29:10.000 Kind of.
00:29:10.000 There's a risky business there.
00:29:15.000 Wow.
00:29:15.000 So emotional.
00:29:16.000 But that's just one knee.
00:29:19.000 I'm taking both knees.
00:29:23.000 I have a Monica Lewinsky joke here, I won't tell.
00:29:25.000 But in any case, the idea that this is somehow doing some sort of great service to the United States, for the United States.
00:29:32.000 If you're praying for America, that's one thing.
00:29:33.000 That's normally what we mean when we kneel.
00:29:35.000 But this idea that we all have to take a knee for America, that our solidarity is protesting the anthem.
00:29:41.000 So American solidarity now is protesting the things that we stand for.
00:29:45.000 That's weird.
00:29:46.000 My favorite one of these, by the way, was this surgeon whose name is Eugene Gu, MD, and he says, I'm an Asian American doctor and today I take the knee to fight white supremacy.
00:29:56.000 This currently has 117,000 likes on Twitter.
00:30:00.000 Eugene Gu is a surgeon-scientist hoping to cure heart and kidney diseases in babies.
00:30:04.000 He's blocked by President Trump.
00:30:05.000 He's the president of Ganogen Inc.
00:30:07.000 and Stanford and Duke Med School alum.
00:30:09.000 Let me just say that if we're talking about institutional racism, I'm gonna go with Eugene Gu does not really get to talk about that so much.
00:30:16.000 Hey, Eugene Gu, as I say, went to Stanford and Duke Medical School.
00:30:20.000 And let's be clear about this.
00:30:22.000 5% of the American population is Asian.
00:30:24.000 20% of med school graduates are Asian, last I checked.
00:30:27.000 So if we're talking about institutional racism, I think they keep picking poor examples.
00:30:31.000 So all of this redounds to Trump's benefit.
00:30:33.000 This is the amazing thing, right?
00:30:34.000 If you're a Trump fan, then you like all this.
00:30:37.000 If you're a big Trump fan, you like all this.
00:30:39.000 Not because you care, not because of what it does to the country.
00:30:42.000 I think it's terrible for the country.
00:30:43.000 But if you think that Trump needs political support, the best way to earn political support is to play this game that they like to call kind of political sumo wrestling.
00:30:51.000 So sumo wrestling is about you get the person in the circle with you, and then you throw them out of the circle.
00:30:56.000 Right, you get your enemy in the circle with you, and then you throw them out of the circle.
00:30:58.000 So, what that means politically is you get everybody to agree to a certain proposition, and then you take your enemy and you throw them out of the circle.
00:31:04.000 They don't believe in that proposition.
00:31:06.000 Most people in America like the anthem.
00:31:08.000 Most people in America like the flag. 0.99
00:31:10.000 If you get your enemy somehow to make the idiotic mistake of somehow saying, I hate the flag, I hate the anthem, you have won. 1.00
00:31:17.000 And that's what Trump inadvertently did because the left is so damn stupid. 1.00
00:31:22.000 I mean, so unbelievably stupid. 1.00
00:31:23.000 Like, light years of stupid. 1.00
00:31:26.000 Basically, the left does something dumb with the anthem, Trump does something dumber with regard to the anthem, and then the left does something even dumber. 1.00
00:31:32.000 We are now in an endless vortex of stupid. 1.00
00:31:35.000 It's a black hole of stupid and eventually we'll emerge on the other side and Mitt Romney will have been elected in 2012. 1.00
00:31:41.000 When we merge on the other side of that wormhole. 1.00
00:31:43.000 That's how dumb everything is. 0.98
00:31:44.000 It didn't end there, by the way. 0.98
00:31:45.000 Trump is now in a fight with members of the NBA as well.
00:31:49.000 So Steph Curry said that he wasn't going to go to the White House to meet Trump.
00:31:52.000 Okay, as I've said before, I think players have a right to do this.
00:31:55.000 I think Tim Thomas did that, the goalie for the Boston Bruins.
00:31:58.000 He did that with Obama because he's a pro-life guy and Obama's pro-choice.
00:32:02.000 I think that's perfectly acceptable.
00:32:03.000 Steph Curry said he didn't want to meet Trump.
00:32:05.000 So Trump, instead of accepting that with good grace or just moving on and saying, you know, that's too bad, I really would have liked to meet him,
00:32:11.000 You know, just being gentlemanly.
00:32:12.000 Instead, Trump does what he always does, which is, you can't quit.
00:32:15.000 You're fired!
00:32:16.000 Right?
00:32:16.000 He tweets out, going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team.
00:32:20.000 Steph Curry is hesitating.
00:32:21.000 Therefore, invitation is withdrawn.
00:32:23.000 He wasn't hesitating.
00:32:24.000 He said he wasn't going to come.
00:32:26.000 So again, that's the same thing that Trump did with his economic and jobs advisory council.
00:32:29.000 You remember this.
00:32:30.000 After Charlottesville, all of them quit.
00:32:32.000 And he said, you can't quit.
00:32:33.000 I've disbanded your council.
00:32:35.000 So Curry immediately responded by taking the high road.
00:32:37.000 He said, this is beneath the president.
00:32:39.000 It's kind of surreal to be honest.
00:32:44.000 I don't know why he feels the need to target certain individuals rather than others.
00:32:51.000 I have an idea of why.
00:32:55.000 It's just kind of beneath a leader of a country to go that route.
00:33:04.000 It's not what leaders do.
00:33:05.000 So the left loves this battle.
00:33:07.000 LeBron James also sounds it off because we definitely needed The King to sound off on all of this.
00:33:12.000 I mean, our lives would not be complete without LeBron James' political commentary.
00:33:15.000 Here he is.
00:33:16.000 I'm just a little frustrated, man, just because this guy that we've put in charge has tried to divide us once again.
00:33:27.000 And obviously, we all know what happened with Charlottesville and the divide that caused.
00:33:35.000 And now it's even hitting more home for me now even more because he's now using sports as the platform to try to divide us.
00:33:44.000 Right, okay, so, you know, I love again that LeBron James had no problem with Colin Kaepernick dividing us, or President Obama dividing us, but Trump is the one who's dividing us.
00:33:52.000 And this is the point, okay?
00:33:54.000 We are now living, Dwight Eisenhower talked about the idea of this military-industrial complex. 0.78
00:33:58.000 We're gonna get into wars that were stupid, because we have this military-industrial complex that has an interest in building up our armaments and then using them. 0.99
00:34:07.000 So we'll get into wars that are dumb. 0.99
00:34:08.000 This is what Eisenhower said in his farewell address in 1961.
00:34:12.000 Okay, well, when it comes to political cultural entertainment, we have a political entertainment wing.
00:34:18.000 A political entertainment complex that has an interest in culture wars. 1.00
00:34:22.000 Stupid culture wars. 1.00
00:34:23.000 Culture wars that don't benefit anyone except the politicians and the cultural figures. 1.00
00:34:27.000 That's it.
00:34:28.000 They don't benefit Americans.
00:34:29.000 They don't help the country.
00:34:30.000 They don't tie us closer together.
00:34:31.000 They divide us.
00:34:32.000 Right, now we're supposed to choose sports.
00:34:33.000 Like, if you love America, you're supposed to choose NASCAR.
00:34:35.000 And if you hate Trump, you're supposed to choose the NFL and the NBA.
00:34:38.000 This is the game that we're gonna play now.
00:34:40.000 The only people who benefit from this are cultural figures who get to feel very special about themselves, and feel like they are culturally and politically important, and political figures like President Trump who get to make hay off of this.
00:34:50.000 Now, the left is okay with this because the left dominates the culture.
00:34:53.000 This is a point Ross Douthat has made over at the New York Times.
00:34:56.000 He says the left, we've never had a greater dichotomy between politics and culture.
00:35:00.000 The right is dominating politics and the left is dominating the culture, and that's because they act off of each other.
00:35:06.000 Politics is people reacting to culture, and culture is people reacting to politics.
00:35:10.000 But they also are clutched in this love embrace, right, where Trump loves this.
00:35:14.000 It's great for him politically.
00:35:15.000 And the left loves this culturally because it's great for them culturally.
00:35:18.000 They get to complain about America and talk about how terrible it is and talk about Trump and win some adherents and fans and double down with their own base.
00:35:25.000 Everyone wins with their base, the middle of the country, everybody who just wants a better country where we can live together and respect each other's opinions. 0.99
00:35:31.000 We all hate each other and we think that we're jerks now. 0.97
00:35:33.000 Like, it's made everything significantly worse, this political entertainment complex. 0.98
00:35:37.000 As I tweeted yesterday, politics and entertainment 0.92
00:35:40.000 Copulated, and now they both have syphilitic brain disease. 1.00
00:35:43.000 Politics has become infused with entertainment-oriented stupidity, and entertainment has become oriented with politically-oriented stupidity, and that means that both are worse off. 1.00
00:35:52.000 Both are worse off. 1.00
00:35:52.000 Meanwhile, we ignore the actual policy problems. 1.00
00:35:54.000 So I'm going to talk about the policy problems in just one second.
00:35:58.000 But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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00:37:18.000 Alrighty, so, while all of this is going on, and this just goes to show you that entertainment has overcome politics entirely, President Trump tweets this.
00:37:27.000 Okay, so he had that giant tweetstorm about the NFL.
00:37:28.000 That's what everyone's paying attention to today, because, let's be frank, it's more fun and entertaining to talk about that.
00:37:33.000 So, here is President Trump tweeting about North Korea yesterday.
00:37:36.000 Okay, here is what he tweeted.
00:37:39.000 Last heard, just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at UN.
00:37:42.000 If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won't be around much longer!
00:37:46.000 Exclamation point.
00:37:48.000 So the President of the United States is threatening nuclear war and calling the dictator of North Korea Little Rocket Man.
00:37:54.000 Now, so he's adding a, he's like, it's like Little Marco and Rocket Man.
00:37:58.000 So that's exciting.
00:37:59.000 This happens and the blowback is zero.
00:38:01.000 Why?
00:38:01.000 Because we've been inured to this.
00:38:03.000 But we've not been inured to the cultural wars, so we pay more attention to the cultural wars than, you know, the possibility of a nuclear conflagration with another country, so that's exciting.
00:38:11.000 Meanwhile, on policy, everything proceeds apace, right?
00:38:15.000 What's amazing about this, as you recall, that when I last, we left our story, I was talking about Jimmy Kimmel and healthcare, you remember that?
00:38:21.000 Like, a year ago?
00:38:22.000 Like, four days ago?
00:38:24.000 You remember that?
00:38:24.000 Well, this was supposed to be the healthcare push, right?
00:38:27.000 Donald Trump was going to ram through the Cassidy Graham healthcare bill,
00:38:31.000 We're finally going to repeal at least parts of Obamacare.
00:38:34.000 We're going to leave the vast majority of it in place, but we're going to make some significant substantive changes to it. 1.00
00:38:39.000 Trump's closing pitch was, the NFL is stupid and full of sons of bitches, right? 1.00
00:38:43.000 That was his closing pitch, which is just great. 1.00
00:38:47.000 You remember his closing pitch on healthcare last time was, my attorney general is terrible.
00:38:51.000 So his closing pitch needs a little bit of work, and we're not paying any attention to the healthcare stuff.
00:38:56.000 Meanwhile, it's unclear whether the health care bill is going to pass.
00:38:58.000 So why doesn't the president focus on rounding up the votes for that?
00:39:02.000 Because he is enjoying the limelight.
00:39:05.000 Because again, he's a performer.
00:39:06.000 He's not a politician.
00:39:07.000 So here's Rand Paul saying he's not going to vote for the Graham-Cassidy bill.
00:39:12.000 I think what it sets up is a perpetual food fight over the formula.
00:39:17.000 What if Democrats win?
00:39:17.000 They're going to try to claw back that money from Republican states and give it to Democrat states.
00:39:21.000 This is a bad idea.
00:39:22.000 It's not repeal.
00:39:23.000 However, all that being said, if they narrow the focus to the things we all agree on, expanding health savings accounts, giving governors more freedom through waivers,
00:39:33.000 Okay, so here he is.
00:39:34.000 This is Rand Paul's schtick, by the way.
00:39:35.000 He's always too pure to vote for things.
00:39:37.000 You know, again, I
00:39:53.000 I like Rand Paul a lot on a lot of things.
00:39:55.000 But in this case, if this is the best that we're going to do, this is the best that we're going to do.
00:39:59.000 I mean, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are saying they're going to try and extract concessions in order to vote on this thing, which I think is the proper stance.
00:40:05.000 That's what Rand Paul should be saying if he wanted to make a better piece of legislation.
00:40:08.000 But he's not the only one.
00:40:09.000 So remember, Republicans only have 52 votes in the Senate. 0.97
00:40:12.000 They lose three and the sucker's done.
00:40:13.000 McCain is already saying he probably won't vote for it. 0.82
00:40:15.000 So that means they can only lose two more.
00:40:17.000 Rand Paul is another one.
00:40:18.000 So that means any vote lost, any one vote lost in the Senate and this latest Graham-Cassidy
00:40:23.000 You know, Obamacare fix or Obamacare change goes down in flames.
00:40:27.000 Susan Collins is also saying that she probably won't vote for it.
00:40:30.000 So this thing is, you know, it's right on the brink.
00:40:32.000 This is where the president's weight could be useful.
00:40:35.000 Jake, it's very difficult for me to envision a scenario where I would end up voting for this bill.
00:40:46.000 Okay, so again, this is where Trump really should be putting his efforts right now.
00:40:49.000 That is not where he's putting his efforts, obviously.
00:40:51.000 Okay, time for some quick things I like, and then a thing I hate, and then please, when we break, don't ruin things more, guys.
00:40:58.000 It's just, there's only so much more we can ruin.
00:40:59.000 Okay, time for some things I like.
00:41:02.000 Edward Fieser, I recommended one of his books the other day.
00:41:04.000 That was The Last Superstition.
00:41:06.000 He has a brand new book that just came out called Five Proofs of the Existence of God.
00:41:09.000 It's about Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz.
00:41:12.000 And it talks about the logical proofs for God that have been put forward over history and that really have not been well debunked by the secular theistic movement.
00:41:23.000 And it is not the usual cosmological argument that you hear.
00:41:26.000 Usually what you hear when it comes to the cosmological argument is, everything has a creator, therefore God.
00:41:32.000 Right?
00:41:33.000 If everything has a creator, therefore God.
00:41:34.000 And then that usually leads people like Sam Harris, the atheist.
00:41:37.000 I'm going to be on his podcast, that should be fun.
00:41:39.000 It leads people like Sam Harris to say, well, if everything has a creator, who created God?
00:41:42.000 That's not what these arguments actually say, okay?
00:41:44.000 That's not what the argument is.
00:41:46.000 And if you want the fully fleshed out argument in readable prose, Five Proofs of the Existence of God by Edward Fieser is quite a good book.
00:41:53.000 I had an opportunity to speak with Professor Fieser a little bit yesterday and clarify some of my own questions about the arguments that he was making in the book.
00:41:59.000 I think that it is well worthwhile.
00:42:02.000 Do I think that these are dispositive?
00:42:03.000 Do I think that
00:42:05.000 Do I think that they absolutely prove that God exists?
00:42:08.000 Do I think it's possible to argue?
00:42:09.000 I think it's possible to argue with them.
00:42:11.000 But I think that they are a good logical presentation of what an argument in favor of God looks like that isn't based simply on revelation.
00:42:17.000 So, yeah, I think that that's a worthwhile thing.
00:42:20.000 So again, five proofs of the existence of God from Edward Fieser.
00:42:23.000 Okay, other things that I like.
00:42:24.000 I love that Nancy Pelosi, who is the least hip person in the world, 0.91
00:42:28.000 Although she may have had a hip replacement, I don't know, so maybe she got more hip recently. 1.00
00:42:32.000 But in any case, Nancy Pelosi is very unhip, and she doesn't know who Colin Kaepernick is, or what football is, or why she's here, or what's going on in the room around her.
00:42:41.000 Here she was yesterday trying to pronounce Colin Kaepernick's name.
00:42:44.000 He should see this as an opportunity.
00:42:46.000 Somebody, Colin Kaepernick, doing what he did, says this flag enables me to do this.
00:42:54.000 Colin Kaepernick.
00:42:55.000 So, well done, Nancy Pelosi, demonstrating how cool you are.
00:42:57.000 Okay, finally, time for a thing I hate.
00:43:04.000 The answer is everything.
00:43:06.000 Okay, but besides everything, here's a specific thing that I hate.
00:43:09.000 So, according to the Washington Free Beacon, late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have coordinated behind the scenes for months to oppose Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare.
00:43:18.000 Kimmel, whose son was born with a congenital heart disease, has been an outspoken critic of the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare because he believes the most recent Republican efforts to replace Obamacare don't protect people with pre-existing conditions like his son, according to the Daily Beast.
00:43:31.000 So he's done a bunch of monologues this week.
00:43:33.000 He did some after I left the air.
00:43:34.000 If you want to see my monologue about Kimmel's monologue, go back to last Wednesday's episode.
00:43:38.000 I did a very long explanation of what Kimmel was saying and why he's wrong and why it's not right to stand on your child's health condition in order to promote your views of health care.
00:43:47.000 In any case, it turns out that Schumer and Kimmel were speaking.
00:43:51.000 Schumer encouraged Kimmel to speak out in opposition to Graham and Cassidy's bill when it became apparent Republicans would try to pass it.
00:43:57.000 So in other words, does Kimmel know anything about the bill?
00:43:59.000 Did he make an independent study?
00:44:01.000 No, he's a Democrat, so he talked to Chuck Schumer.
00:44:03.000 He doesn't like anything that touches Obamacare.
00:44:05.000 There would be no Republican program Jimmy Kimmel would back.
00:44:07.000 End of story.
00:44:08.000 That's the whole thing.
00:44:09.000 So long as that is the case, that's all that matters.
00:44:12.000 So long as that's the case, that is the only thing that matters, right?
00:44:15.000 Is that he was never going to back anything Republicans had to propose, so it was a political put-up job.
00:44:20.000 And I think that means something, because if you're going to make an emotional appeal, then we should know if you were planning to use the emotional appeal in order to promulgate your politics because you were talking with partisans on one side.
00:44:29.000 You didn't come to your own conclusions, you just talked to Chuck Schumer and had him give you some talking points.
00:44:35.000 Alright, so, we'll be back here tomorrow.
00:44:38.000 In the meantime, as I say...
00:44:39.000 Everything's getting ruined.
00:44:40.000 Just stop it.
00:44:41.000 Take a break.
00:44:42.000 Go out for ice cream.
00:44:43.000 Enjoy your family.
00:44:44.000 Enjoy your kids.
00:44:45.000 Enjoy your neighbors.
00:44:46.000 We still live in the greatest country on the face of the Earth.
00:44:48.000 And if we would look into each other's faces once in a while, instead of trying to see into the blackness of each other's souls, the darkness of each other's souls, then perhaps we'd all be a little bit better off.
00:44:58.000 I'll see you here tomorrow.
00:44:59.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:44:59.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.