Ben Shapiro reacts to Joe Biden's reported interest in jumping into the 2020 Democratic presidential race, Ilhan Omar's anti-Semitism, and much, much more. Plus, a call-in mailbag from Ben Shapiro on why we should call a convention of states to force term limits on Congress and force them to balance the budget. Ben Shapiro and Mark Meckler are on the ground in New Hampshire, and the Democratic primary field is starting to fill up. Don't miss it! Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review of the show. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive 20% off your first month with discount code: CRIMINALS at checkout. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers and use coupon code "RATE" at checkout to receive 10% off "Your Day Off" when you shop at Target or Best Fiends. We'll see you in the Badger Den! on Dec. 31st! Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Timestamps: 5:00 - What's your favorite thing you like about the show? 6:30 - What are you looking for in 2020? 7:15 - What do you think of Joe Biden s 2020 campaign? 8:40 - Is Joe Biden a serious contender? 9:00 -- Is Ilhan Orhan Omar s anti-Semitic? 10:20 - What should Joe Biden running for president? 11:30 -- What would you like to see Joe Biden do? 15:00 16:40 -- What does Joe Biden have a chance to win the 2020 primary race? 17:15 -- What s your favorite moment? 18:00 | What are your favorite piece of advice for Joe Biden? 19:00-- Is he a better than Bernie Sanders? 22:30 | What s he better than Kamala Harris? 26: Is he more progressive? 27:40 | Is he the most progressive candidate? 29:30 26-16: Is there any chance he s going to run against Bernie Sanders better than Hillary Clinton? 30:00 Is he really a better guy than Hillary s? 35:00 & 27:00 // 27:20 -- Does he have a better chance of winning the primary?
00:00:23.000Okay, Congress is full of people who don't know what the hell they're doing, but want to control your lives.
00:00:27.000And they also are not interested in circumscribing their own power the way the Constitution was designed to do.
00:00:33.000But this is why we need to take control of Congress once again, and it's why I'm a big believer in calling a convention of states where we the people can propose amendments.
00:00:41.000Yes, amendments that could force term limits on Congress, for example, and make them balance the budget.
00:00:45.000We've got to stop these idiots before it is too late, because they obviously are not protective of their own power from the executive, and also, they don't care about limiting the power of the government at all.
00:00:54.000This is why we need to restore the checks and balances that the Constitution provided for originally, but have been overridden by administrative government for the last century.
00:01:02.000Can you imagine the look on the faces of these congresspeople when they realize that they have been circumscribed once again in their power by amendments to the Constitution?
00:01:09.000This is why calling a convention of states is the only way to get the job done.
00:01:12.000There are already 3.8 million people with us on this, more every day.
00:02:05.000Yeah, so that guy, he's about to join the 2020 race.
00:02:08.000According to The Hill, he is basically setting up all of his campaign apparatus in New Hampshire, in South Carolina.
00:02:16.000According to The Hill, in recent weeks, the former vice president's longtime advisors, Steve Reschetti and Mike Donilon, Have led a string of meetings with potential aides to fill out the campaign if Biden makes a decision to enter the race, according to various sources.
00:02:28.000Whenever the VP makes a decision, we'll be ready to go, said one source with direct knowledge of the planning.
00:02:32.000Greg Schultz, who has run Biden's PAC American Possibilities and served as his political director in the White House, is expected to be the campaign manager.
00:02:40.000Apparently, Mike Donilon is expected to play the role of chief strategist.
00:02:44.000Cade Bedingfield, who was Biden's communications director in the White House, is also expected to run his communications shop.
00:02:50.000Longtime advisors have been talking to other Biden alumni for other press jobs.
00:02:54.000Now, if Biden doesn't get Barack Obama's endorsement, he's going to have a bit of a rough ride here because he is outflanked on his left by Bernie Sanders and he is outflanked on the intersectional side by Kamala Harris.
00:03:04.000So the early polls that have him up, I've been around through several presidential election cycles with open primaries, and what you see is that very often the person with the highest name recognition leads initially, and then immediately falls away as soon as the competition actually begins.
00:03:20.000Biden does not have a massive lead in places like New Hampshire.
00:03:24.000He's up like 26-22 on Bernie Sanders in some of the polling.
00:03:27.000Were he to declare, he might jump to 30, but by no means is Biden the prohibitive frontrunner inside the Democratic Party.
00:03:34.000And he knows this, which is why Biden is constantly playing both sides of the fence.
00:04:45.000But when people on the left are called out by their own side, they will not step forward to defend people with whom they are purportedly friends very often.
00:04:54.000I mean, I said, even on my birthday this year, for example, I talked with a lot of folks on the left that I consider friends.
00:04:59.000Many of them would text me or direct message me on Twitter saying, happy birthday, and would not do so publicly, specifically because they were afraid that they would get blowback from their friends.
00:05:08.000This is not a rarity that is confined to presidential politics.
00:05:21.000Joe Biden must never acknowledge Mike Pence as a human being.
00:05:25.000According to the radical left, Joe Biden acknowledging Mike Pence is akin to saying he agrees with Mike Pence.
00:05:30.000And we all know that Mike Pence is a vicious bigot and homophobe who wants to put gay people in re-education camps or something.
00:05:38.000So Cynthia Nixon, the failed gubernatorial candidate in New York against Andrew Cuomo, she tweeted out, Joe Biden, you've just called America's most anti-LGBT elected leader a decent guy.
00:05:48.000Please consider how this falls on the ears of our community.
00:05:51.000And then she also atted Biden's wife to make sure that Joe Biden would see her tweet.
00:05:57.000So he can't be a decent guy because you disagree with him on same-sex marriage.
00:06:07.000I was making a point in a foreign policy context that under normal circumstances, a vice president wouldn't be given a silent reaction on the world stage.
00:06:14.000But there is nothing decent about being anti-LGBTQ rights.
00:07:39.000We just talked about guns and gun control and the various positions and where pro-gun people are coming from, what the Second Amendment means and all the rest.
00:07:49.000And as he was leaving, I said, dude, you may not want to let people know publicly that you were here because you're going to get clocked by your own side.
00:07:55.000Well, about a month later, Duplass tweets out, if you want to follow somebody from the other side who's honest and well-intentioned, you should follow Ben Shapiro.
00:08:02.000And he's hit with an inordinate number, a wave, a tsunami, a tidal wave.
00:08:07.000of hatred from the left saying Ben Shapiro isn't a decent guy.
00:08:10.000Do you think Ben Shapiro is a decent guy for X, Y, and Z?
00:08:13.000Here's all the bad things we think Ben Shapiro has ever said.
00:08:16.000So simply for saying I'm a decent guy with whom he disagrees, he gets hit with a wave of response.
00:08:21.000And then, being a coward, Mark Duplass backs off his original comment, deletes his tweet saying that I'm a well-intentioned person, and puts out a statement saying that he stands against racism, bigotry, sexism, and homophobia.
00:08:39.000I think this is an endemic thing to an enormous number of people on the left.
00:08:42.000They are so afraid of their own side eating them for simply acknowledging the humanity of people who disagree with them, that they are willing to dump those people under the bus at the drop of a hat.
00:09:00.000But that does not change the reality on the ground that Mike Pence is a decent American who is well-intentioned, even if he and Biden disagree.
00:09:10.000It's really something I've striven to do.
00:09:12.000I've been striving to try and grant the initial recognition of people with whom I disagree, the initial recognition of their good intentions.
00:09:27.000Sometimes it's not possible to read people's comments other than as a reflection of underlying animus.
00:09:33.000But there's a concept in Judaism called Dan Lechav Tzchuz, which means that you are supposed to try and see people in the most favorable possible light.
00:09:40.000You're supposed to treat them like human beings.
00:09:41.000And if we don't do that, we can't have a common conversation.
00:09:44.000Because if, in the end, Joe Biden believes that Mike Pence is a bad, ill-intentioned guy, there's no conversation to be had.
00:09:50.000Then it's just about clubbing him to death like a baby seal.
00:09:53.000Joe Biden got clubbed into shape by Cynthia Nixon, who's not even a mainstream political figure in the Democratic Party.
00:10:00.000I got an email from a friend last night.
00:10:06.000And this person emailed me and said, you know, is the conservative movement... This person was watching.
00:10:12.000CPAC, and was noticing that there are some people who are sort of fringy at CPAC, and this person was saying, do you think that the conservative movement is unusually susceptible to grifters?
00:10:22.000Do you think the conservative movement is unusually susceptible to people who take advantage of conservatives?
00:10:27.000Because there are a lot of people in the conservative movement who rely on purity tests, meaning that it's very easy to get people to buy into your program when you say things like, people who disagree with me are insufficiently pure, therefore come around to my side.
00:10:41.000And I said to this person, no, this exists on all sides of the political aisle.
00:10:44.000But it certainly exists on the left, because what just happened there is Joe Biden throwing the sitting vice president of the United States under the bus as an even decent human being, just because Cynthia Nixon, a radical in every sense of the word, a radical, says that Joe Biden should not even make absolutely anodyne, milquetoast comments about Mike Pence being a human being.
00:11:15.000And he demonstrated that in front of the world.
00:11:17.000Nobody's going to pay attention, of course, because if you hate Mike Pence or what Mike Pence stands for, then you also don't believe he's a human being.
00:11:22.000But if we don't get to the point where we acknowledge that people on the other side are at least human beings or that they can be human beings and that simple political disagreement is not a mark of bigotry, animus and hate, There's not gonna be a republic for very long in this country.
00:11:37.000If you really believe that your opposition is innately motivated by bigotry and hatred, why exactly would you respect their vote?
00:11:44.000Why would you respect their right to free speech?
00:11:45.000Why would you respect their right to congregate and associate?
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00:14:30.000He lost his attempt to move up in the Senate last year and then became a national political star because the media decided that he was a hero.
00:14:37.000O'Rourke told the Dallas Morning News on Wednesday, Amy, that's his wife, and I have made a decision about how we can best serve our country.
00:14:42.000We are excited to share it with everyone soon.
00:14:44.000And then he ruled out running for Senate against John Cornyn, the other senator in Texas.
00:14:50.000So he is famous for skateboarding and riding bicycles and generally being a rad dude.
00:15:44.000Well, according to PolitiFact, she actually lies about her own record now.
00:15:48.000They say presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris has made protecting undocumented youth a top priority during her time in the Senate.
00:15:54.000She's been a vocal supporter of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gives temporary protections to more than 700,000 young undocumented immigrants or dreamers brought to the country as children.
00:16:04.000But on the campaign trail in Iowa this past weekend, Harris made some questionable statements about a 2008 San Francisco policy that reported undocumented youth to federal immigration officials upon their arrest by local police.
00:16:16.000At the time, Harris was the San Francisco DA, and she supported the policy, which didn't take into account whether the youth were actually found guilty of a crime, meaning as soon as they were arrested, ICE was notified.
00:16:34.000So she was asked, could you give us some insight on how, when for whatever reason you were supporting this policy that was essentially handing over undocumented people to ICE before they had been convicted, what's changed on that?
00:16:44.000How did you come up with those changes?
00:16:46.000Harris said, that ended up being an unintended consequence of the policy, and I did not support that consequence of the policy.
00:16:53.000And I believe that policy has since been changed because it was not the intended purpose of that policy.
00:16:58.000That, unfortunately, is completely false.
00:17:02.000Former San Francisco County Supervisor David Campos strongly opposed the policy change.
00:17:06.000He said that her statement just doesn't fly.
00:17:08.000He said, with all due respect to Senator Harris, who has been a friend, I don't understand how she can say that.
00:17:13.000Turning over young people and children who are accused of a crime that later turned out they did not commit was not an unintended consequence of what was going on.
00:17:20.000It was precisely what was going on and what we were trying to avoid when we changed the policy.
00:17:28.000Gavin Newsom at the time was the mayor of San Francisco and he refused to enforce the reversal.
00:17:33.000Harris, of course, explained her position, saying, there was an initiative that was written by a board of supervisors that was passed, and there was opposition to that, but it did pass.
00:17:41.000We're going to have to wait to see how the courts interpret it.
00:17:43.000From my perspective, I think it would be in conflict with federal law, and we have to follow the law.
00:17:48.000So she knew full well the consequences of the policy when she endorsed it.
00:17:53.000PolitiFact, which is a left-leaning source, if ever there was one, they say that the very purpose of the policy that Harris endorsed is the one she says she did not endorse.
00:18:02.000They say, Kamala Harris does have an opening to her left.
00:18:04.000that undocumented residents should be protected by and able to trust local law enforcement.
00:18:08.000That sentiment, however, does not take away from her mischaracterization of the goal and fraught history of the 2008 policy she supported.
00:18:14.000And they write Kamala Harris's claims false.
00:18:17.000This is Kamala Harris does have an opening to her left.
00:18:19.000Bernie Sanders is going to take that opening.
00:18:21.000So again, I think that Joe Biden right now has the most name recognition, but there is not a clear path to him to the nomination unless he is endorsed by Barack Obama, who looks like he's going to sit this one out.
00:18:31.000And the Democratic base is too radical for Kamala Harris, so Bernie may be the guy.
00:18:37.000Beto is sort of hoping he can draw enough from these various pools to win the nomination.
00:18:41.000But it's going to be a I think it's a Bernie versus Kamala race, maybe to the end here with Biden trying to sneak up the middle.
00:18:48.000So that's basically where things stand.
00:18:49.000Meanwhile, the Democratic extremism is not relegated only to the 2020 race.
00:19:20.000Ilhan Omar, it, usually it's about 10, and then she has to reset it back to zero.
00:19:25.000So you'll recall that Ilhan Omar, like, literally two and a half weeks ago, tweeted out, it's all about the Benjamins, with regard to American support for Israel, as though the Jews, the nefarious Jews, were paying off Americans to support Israel.
00:19:39.000And then she apologized for it, but not really.
00:19:42.000She says, no, I never apologized for being anti-Semitic.
00:21:56.000But Ilhan Omar never apologized really for those comments, but we were all supposed to overlook that because so fresh, so faced, and of course she can claim in her intersectional way that she is a minority woman from Somalia who is a Muslim, and therefore that's the reason people are angry.
00:22:09.000Not because she's a rabid anti-Semite, and she's been consistently anti-Semitic for legitimately her entire career.
00:22:48.000And at a certain point here, somebody in the audience yells out, it's all about the Benjamins.
00:22:52.000And both Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar smile, according to press reports.
00:22:56.000And then Ilhan Omar explains that what she really wants to question is why these nefarious Jews are so loyal to Israel.
00:23:04.000I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.
00:23:15.000I want to ask, why is it okay for me to talk about the influence of the NRA of fossil fuel industries or big pharma and not talk about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing why is it okay for me to talk about the influence Okay, because the NRA is pushing for a principle.
00:23:39.000Okay, the Koch brothers push for principles.
00:23:40.000Your suggestion, Ilhan Omar, you anti-Semite, your suggestion is that AIPAC and the Jews broadly in the United States and American Israel supporters in the United States are not supporting Israel based on principle.
00:23:53.000They are doing so based on dual loyalty.
00:23:55.000They are doing so based on tribal loyalty to Jews.
00:23:57.000So in other words, if Israel decided to become a monstrous dictatorship overnight and start legitimately executing people, that all the Jews in the United States would call for continued American support for Israel.
00:24:30.000Because it is a country that has stood for human dignity and liberty, because it is a country that is democracy, because it is an ally of the United States in real politic terms.
00:24:39.000Does this mean that I have allegiance to Great Britain?
00:24:42.000That I have full allegiance to the British?
00:24:50.000And I think that backing the continued existence of the State of Israel in the face of genocidal terrorism is not, in fact, a violation of America's priorities.
00:24:57.000I think it should be one of America's moral priorities.
00:25:00.000That does not indicate dual loyalty or allegiance to Israel.
00:25:45.000That the Jews particularly don't have any central moral principle for supporting Israel.
00:25:49.000There's no moral principle underlying it.
00:25:50.000It is simply dual loyalty or allegiance to the government of Israel.
00:25:54.000That is a vile smear that has been perpetrated against Jews for legitimately centuries.
00:25:58.000That the Jews are a people apart who only have tribal loyalty and they don't have any underlying principles that leads to a belief that the Jewish people should exist.
00:26:33.000Are you going to hear anything from Chuck Schumer, that supposed great friend to Jews in New York?
00:26:38.000No, he's not going to say a damn thing.
00:26:40.000Because the Democratic Party is fully comfortable with the intersectional pyramid that suggests that if you rank higher in terms of victimology in the United States than the white Jews, then that means that you get to say whatever anti-Semitic things you please.
00:26:51.000Now, what's so hysterical about this, of course, is that if you're going to look, by hate crime statistics, at who is most victimized, who should be higher on the intersectional pyramid, in terms of, for example, hate crimes, Jews should be higher than Muslims on the intersectional pyramid.
00:27:05.000Because Jews are victimized at twice the rate of Muslims in the United States on a per capita basis, according to FBI statistics.
00:27:11.000That cuts no ice for folks on the left who believe that Jews are too successful to be part of the intersectional pyramid.
00:27:17.000Jews, broadly speaking, are too successful, therefore, if they are insulted by a group that is less successful in the United States because all unsuccess in the intersectional pyramid is based on American bigotry.
00:27:28.000It's based on the idea that America is a vile, terrible place that is keeping people under its boot.
00:27:33.000Those groups are allowed to victimize Jews and yell about Jews and be as anti-Semitic as they damn well please.
00:27:55.000And the mainstream Democratic Party is disappearing.
00:27:58.000And it's leading us down a path where there can be no agreement.
00:28:02.000I mentioned earlier, Joe Biden basically suggesting you can't be friends with a Republican, that there are no decent Republicans.
00:28:08.000He called Mike Pence a decent guy and then immediately walked it back.
00:28:11.000Well, among the Democrats, now Democrats are going after not only Republicans, but each other.
00:28:16.000So first of all, they continue to suggest that all people they disagree with are vicious racists.
00:28:20.000Rashida Tlaib, who again is just as vile as Ilhan Omar in her anti-Semitism.
00:28:26.000You'll recall that a couple of days ago during the Michael Cohen hearing, Michael Cohen was contending that President Trump was a racist.
00:28:31.000And Mark Meadows pointed to a woman named Lynn Patton who works with President Trump.
00:28:37.000And he said, well, Lynne Patton works with President Trump every day, and she's here, and Lynne Patton has given me this piece of testimony saying that she's never seen President Trump be a racist.
00:28:55.000She said that Mark Meadows was an actual racist for saying, here's a black person who knows President Trump and doesn't think that he's a racist and deals with him every day.
00:29:03.000Rashida Tlaib said that Mark Meadows was a racist and that was a racist act.
00:29:07.000And then she supposedly apologized for that.
00:29:09.000But just like Ilhan Omar's apology, it's not real.
00:29:12.000She then went on CNN and doubled down on it.
00:29:13.000Do you still today believe that Congressman Mark Meadows engaged in a racist act?
00:29:19.000I believe that that moment, as a person of color, and not only myself, two, I think three other of my colleagues had mentioned how insensitive that act was.
00:29:29.000I think all of us, I mean even folks at home, kind of gasped when that actually happened.
00:29:34.000I think if we want to talk about race in this country, that was not the way to do it.
00:29:38.000So in other words, she says that that still was a racist act.
00:29:40.000Mark Meadows participated in racism by saying, here is a black woman that I know who works with President Trump, and she can testify that President Trump has never acted in a racist way toward her.
00:29:50.000Well, supposedly because Mark Meadows was engaging in a form of tokenism.
00:29:53.000It's very weird when the left will suggest that tokenism is occurring.
00:29:56.000So the left will suggest that tokenism is occurring when, for example, Mark Meadows says, here's a black person who knows President Trump.
00:30:02.000But tokenism is not occurring when Michael Cohen asks how many black people are on President Trump's staff, as though if he had a bunch of black people working for him, that would also be a defense against racism.
00:30:12.000So tokenism only works when the left says that it works.
00:30:18.000Also, it's a little bit insulting to a black woman, Lynne Patton, to suggest that she's willing to stand there and be used as a token of her race.
00:30:26.000Lynne Patton immediately responded along those lines.
00:30:28.000Here's what Lynne Patton had to say about Rashida Tlaib.
00:30:31.000What I'd like to ask the Congresswoman from Michigan is, you know, why does she take the word of a self-confessed perjurer and criminally convicted white man over a black female
00:30:46.000Who's highly educated, rose up through the ranks of one of the most competitive companies in real estate, spoke before 25 million people at the Republican National Convention, and now works in one of the most historic administrations in history.
00:31:03.000And so to me, that would be my question.
00:31:05.000That's more racist than being put up there as a quote-unquote prop.
00:31:10.000Okay, yeah, calling her a prop, that is a bad thing, right?
00:31:13.000That's not, that seems pretty racially charged.
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00:33:52.000Okay, so House Democrats are now dividing in on themselves.
00:34:00.000It's not just that Democrats have become radical and attack Republicans as racist and bad people at every turn, while engaging in some of the most racist anti-Semitic behavior I've seen in modern American history.
00:34:29.000And then there are the leftists, who are censorious woke-scolds, who are trying to shut down members of their own party.
00:34:36.000Mike DeBonis is reporting, he says, House Democrats exploded in recriminations Thursday over moderates bucking the party, with liberal representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threatening to put those voting with Republicans on a list for a primary challenge.
00:34:58.000In a closed-door session, a frustrated speaker, Nancy Pelosi, lashed out at about two dozen moderates and pressured them to get on board.
00:35:04.000We're either a team or we're not, and we have to make that decision, Pelosi said.
00:35:08.000According to two people present but not authorized to discuss the remarks publicly, but Ocasio-Cortez, the unquestioned media superstar of the freshman class, upped the ante, admonishing the moderates and indicating she would help liberal activists unseat them in the 2020 election.
00:35:21.000Corbyn Trent, a spokesperson for AOC, said she is putting her colleagues, the Democrats, she told her colleagues, the Democrats who side with Republicans, are putting themselves on a list.
00:35:30.000Oh, this isn't going to go poorly at all.
00:35:34.000Apparently AOC and her other leftist colleagues are targeting the quote-unquote moderates.
00:35:38.000By the way, those moderates now include apparently people like Dianne Feinstein, one of the most left-leaning members of the Senate in American history.
00:35:45.000I mean, those moderates include people who exist in purple states.
00:35:50.000It's really funny, there was a lot of talk about how the Tea Party had made the Republican Party more radical, how people had been primaried, moderates had been primaried and replaced with less traditional candidates who were purer ideologically, and how bad that was.
00:36:02.000I'm missing that same sense of recrimination from the media when AOC, an open democratic socialist who is a member of the DSA, when she says that she's going to cleanse the party with fire.
00:36:12.000Triggering the blowup were Wednesday's votes on a bill to expand federal background checks for gun purchases.
00:36:17.00026 moderate Democrats joined Republicans in amending the legislation, adding a provision requiring that ICE be notified if an illegal immigrant seeks to purchase a gun.
00:36:30.000Why would, if an illegal immigrant tries to buy a gun, why should ICE not be notified?
00:36:34.000So in other words, Democrats believe that if an American citizen purchases a gun, that should basically not be allowed, but if an illegal immigrant tries to purchase a gun, ICE shouldn't even know about it.
00:36:44.000The Democratic infighting reflects a fractured caucus and a diverse freshman class, with dozens of moderates elected in districts President Trump won in 2016 at odds with hard-charging liberals.
00:36:54.000The split has exposed divisions among Pelosi and her top lieutenants, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland and Majority Whip James Clyburn, South Carolina, over the party's strategy to keep its newfound majority.
00:37:05.000It's going to get uglier inside the Democratic Party because, again, the radicals have control of the tiller.
00:37:10.000Nancy Pelosi may just be along for the ride, or maybe she's going to have to fight AOC for the actual control of the party.
00:37:17.000Whatever it is, there's no question the Democratic Party has lost, is losing whatever moorings in reason are available.
00:37:25.000And that means moorings in a social fabric.
00:37:27.000And listen, the right is not immune to this.
00:37:30.000I've been very critical of Republicans this week on a variety of issues, but let's be clear.
00:37:36.000What the Democratic Party is doing in embracing the most radical form of their base is deeply damaging not just to the Democratic Party overall, I think we need two viable parties, but deeply damaging to the country because that radical base is firmly convinced that people on the other side are bad human beings who must be destroyed at any cost and believe that they can say anything in the pursuit of that destruction.
00:38:15.000Listen, as a Jew, I'm not a big fan of the idea that your feelings are typically a sin.
00:38:20.000I think that usually your actions are a sin.
00:38:23.000Judaism is more of an acts-based religion than a faith-based religion in the sense that facts don't care about your feelings and acts don't care about your feelings.
00:38:30.000So, sinful anxiety, I would assume, would be taking measures that demonstrate a lack of faith in God in some sort of fulsome fashion.
00:38:40.000Um, but just being anxious over the future I think is sort of a natural part of the human condition.
00:38:44.000Trying to fight it is going to make your life better.
00:38:46.000Trying to be more accepting is going to make your life better.
00:38:49.000Here's a phrase my dad taught me many years ago when I had a little bit of anxiety in law school.
00:38:55.000I didn't like living in an apartment by myself.
00:38:58.000I had lived at home during college and so I, you know, used to get anxious being by myself.
00:39:03.0003,000 miles away from my family and he used to say acceptance is relaxation and That is a basically religious principle that you have to sort of accept the reality of what is But as far as anxiety itself being a sin, I think it's something that can be fought without it necessarily being a sin I tend to think of sin as activity not as feelings now again if you allow the feelings to dominate your life the part of your life that you can control, then you may be veering into sin, but I don't think that the feeling itself is sinful.
00:39:29.000Nicholas says, "I was recently a part "of a discussion about abortion.
00:39:32.000"I was in charge to combat this question.
00:39:33.000"Where do we draw the line in terms of what is okay "to use as birth control, such as the morning after pill?
00:39:37.000"I'm interested to hear your response." So the basic pro-life position on this is that once conception has taken place, anything that ends the chain of creation of human life is in fact abortion and not birth control.
00:39:48.000So condoms, for example, are birth control and not abortion.
00:40:30.000Wouldn't it be better to encourage businesses to keep all their profits and put the money back into the business, expand or even give higher wages?
00:40:36.000Wouldn't the economy grow faster that way?
00:40:38.000Or are there enough loopholes that most businesses don't pay taxes and Amazon is just the fall guy at the moment?
00:40:43.000Well, loopholes don't... When people use the phrase tax loopholes, that's not a phrase that really exists.
00:40:56.000Some people have a mortgage deduction.
00:40:58.000Some people don't have a mortgage deduction.
00:40:59.000If you rent, you don't have a mortgage deduction.
00:41:01.000Does the person with the mortgage deduction have a tax loophole?
00:41:04.000No, that's called a mortgage deduction.
00:41:06.000Amazon uses whatever deductions are available to it.
00:41:08.000As far as the idea that taxing businesses is bad for the economy, of course that's true, which is why one of the most fascinating things about the Nordic countries that the left so loves is that their corporate tax rates have generally been lower than America's corporate tax rates, which is why they can still support this massive social welfare state, despite the fact that they have high personal income.
00:41:26.000Businesses are still willing to invest over there because businesses can still make a profit over there.
00:41:35.000The Indiana Senate just passed a hate crimes law, which is significant because Indiana is one of five states that has no hate crimes law.
00:41:42.000But the law has raised a considerable amount of controversy because the Republican senators stripped away specifically protected characteristics from the law.
00:41:49.000So I think hate crimes laws are garbage.
00:41:52.000the hate crimes law allows a judge to determine the bias of a crime more generally as you can imagine my cheery co-workers at npr along with all forms of press in indiana and all the democrats in the state are furious that specific characteristics in the bill are not mentioned everyone is painting the republicans as foolish weak and parochial what is your take on hate crimes laws so i think hate crimes laws are garbage i don't see a rationale for them every crime is motivated by a certain level of hate and i don't see why we should punish certain levels of hate more than we punish other levels of hate
00:42:18.000You're not, in fact, creating an impetus for people not to be hateful simply because there are hate crimes laws on the books.
00:42:28.000As far as the idea that you're not going to name protected classes, I assume the reason you're not naming protected classes is because you don't want people filing hate crimes legislation against you if you have, for example, a religious bakery that says, I don't want to cater this same-sex wedding.
00:42:40.000And then someone says, oh, well, that's a hate crime.
00:42:43.000Or you're a business, and you don't hire a transgender person because you're a religious day school.
00:42:48.000Or simply because you don't want to hire a transgender person for a makeup job or something.
00:42:53.000You should be able to associate with whomever you want, and if people want to react to that by boycotting you, that's their problem.
00:43:28.000As far as sort of other lyricists, Johnny Mercer is a fantastic, fantastic lyricist.
00:43:33.000But again, I favor some of the old lyricists.
00:43:35.000I don't think any of the new lyricists do anything of a real import, to be frank.
00:43:39.000Zachary says, I've recently watched The Best of Enemies, the documentary about the debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the 68 election.
00:43:46.000Given that you're a conservative like Buckley, if a similar documentary were to be made about politics today, who would be your Gore Vidal?
00:43:51.000Well, I mean, the problem is that most folks who are prominent on the left are not interested in actually having discussions.
00:43:58.000So it's difficult to find a Gore Vidal.
00:44:00.000I mean, at least in 68, Buckley and Vidal would get on set together and then argue with one another.
00:44:05.000It's difficult to get people to do that on a repeat basis these days.
00:44:09.000There are people with whom I disagree, with whom I am very friendly.
00:44:12.000I mean, Eric Weinstein is the person who comes to mind.
00:44:47.000I mean, if you're in the Hasidic community, I assume that people use the word yarmulke more often.
00:44:52.000In my Orthodox community, virtually everyone calls it a kippah, not a yarmulke.
00:44:56.000In conservative and reform communities, the word yarmulke tends to be used a little more frequently.
00:45:01.000Ashley says, As you may know, the Missouri House of Representatives has perfected and passed the most restrictive pro-life bills in the country.
00:45:07.000I work as a legislative chief of staff for a state rep that supports this legislation.
00:45:10.000Per usual, reps are in support of this, and they're receiving a ton of emails in opposition.
00:45:15.000But one of them stuck out to me because this person claims that anti-abortion laws are anti-Semitic.
00:45:19.000Please help me understand her reasoning.
00:45:32.000These are all Orthodox, very, very prominent rabbis of the last century.
00:45:36.000The basic Jewish position is that abortion is the taking of a human life and is unjustifiable except in cases in which the mother's life is in danger.
00:45:44.000Now, there may be dispensations that are given by individual rabbis for a variety of individual reasons.
00:45:49.000But the basic rule is the rule that I just stated.
00:45:52.000And as far as the notion that in the Talmud it suggests that the fetus is quote-unquote like water for the first 40 days, Moshe Feinstein, who's an actual posaic, a person who gives halachic judgment, Jewish law judgment,
00:46:07.000Has said from what I've heard anyway that that judgment is meant to reflect Simply the the status the sort of purity status of the woman if she were to lose the baby at that point that it doesn't count As a miscarriage at that point for purposes of purity that doesn't mean you can have an abortion There are no Orthodox rabbis of whom I know who believe that abortion on demand is a thing none and by the way I find it highly ironic that When people who are pro-choice suddenly start citing rabbis as their rationale for why the law should be pro-choice.
00:46:36.000What happened to your theocracy complaints?
00:46:38.000What happened to your whole, we shouldn't listen to these religious crazy people.
00:46:41.000Let's listen to these other religious crazy people.
00:46:51.000Brian says, Hi Ben, I'm a veteran and my main incentive for serving was the GI Bill.
00:46:55.000Many people are advocating for free college.
00:46:56.000What do you think the effect would be on a volunteer-only military if we take the GI Bill off the table because we offer free school to everyone?
00:47:43.000I pointed this out literally the day this happened when AOC suggested That it was a first draft.
00:47:48.000I said, okay, so where's the final one?
00:47:50.000Like, if I posted a draft on a website of an article that a final draft existed, and I found out about it, we'd immediately take down the first and put up the second.
00:48:10.000My question regards the death penalty.
00:48:11.000As a pro-life conservative, I often find myself debating others on the right regarding the death penalty.
00:48:15.000Being pro-life, I believe, as in the Well, that's not moral relativism.
00:48:19.000Moral relativism is the belief that there is no such thing as evil.
00:48:21.000Moral relativism is the idea that in any given situation, there is no better choice and no worse choice.
00:48:25.000resort to moral relativism, the left-wing belief, where I hear phrases such as, well, these people are evil, so they don't deserve to live.
00:48:50.000That's saying that people are responsible for their actions.
00:48:53.000The best argument against the death penalty is that it is unequally applied, that it is applied after too long, that there's a possibility of making mistakes.
00:49:00.000Those are all good arguments against the death penalty.
00:49:02.000The principled argument that you should not execute anyone for any reason is something with which I heartily disagree.
00:49:07.000If somebody rapes and murders a five-year-old, that person shouldn't just die.
00:49:10.000That person should be put to death seven times and then burn in hell for eternity.
00:49:13.000Benjamin says, Ben, often you guys at the Daily Wire complain about the double standards on the left.
00:49:18.000What are the conservative double standards we need to be careful of?
00:49:21.000Well, I mean, obviously there are people on the right who are willing to justify behavior by President Trump.
00:49:25.000They would never, they would never justify if that behavior were on the left.
00:49:30.000There are also certain I would say that on the right, there's a certain willingness to engage in an affirmative action belief that we ought to give more value to certain opinions because of the speaker, which is something I generally disagree with.
00:49:44.000The identity of the speaker should bear no relevance to the efficacy or use of what the person is saying.
00:49:50.000There are people on the right who, again, will change their standards of objectivity when it comes to folks on the left.
00:49:59.000I'm sure I could come up with ten more.
00:50:00.000I think that political partisanship, as I've said before, is a hell of a drug.
00:50:04.000And I think that people are willing to blind themselves to basic double standards out of lack of ability to comprehend cognitive dissonance.
00:50:24.000He and Dave Rubin invited me to stop by, and I did a little bit of a Jordan Peterson impersonation.
00:50:28.000It was more in content than in style, but I walked on stage and I presented Dave Rubin with a cupcake because there was this big controversy over whether I would bake a cake for Dave Rubin's wedding.
00:51:02.000What you have to understand is that a real cake is instantiated with work and a reality that doesn't really reflect the underlying hardship of life.
00:51:54.000So, my sister, Abigail Roth, opened CPAC today.
00:51:58.000And forget your politics, whatever your politics are.
00:52:01.000She is an immensely talented human being.
00:52:03.000Here she was singing the Star-Spangled Banner to open CPAC this morning.
00:52:08.000O say can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
00:52:33.000Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight So Abbey is immensely talented, obviously.
00:52:51.000She went to the Metropolitan School of Opera on scholarship.
00:52:55.000She had a full scholarship, full ride at USC in opera.
00:52:59.000She's an incredibly talented human being.
00:53:00.000You can follow her on Twitter, at ClassicallyAbbey, and she does all sorts of kind of makeup videos and classical music stuff, and she really is an incredibly talented person.
00:54:38.000You're not allowed to mention Porgy and Bess anymore because it's very bad.
00:54:42.000Even though it's one of the great works of American art of all time by George Gershwin, we're not allowed to mention Porgy and Bess because it has to do with race.
00:54:48.000And then he also won best score for Irma La...
00:54:52.000Adaptation or treatment for Irma LaDuce and also for 1964's My Fair Lady, immensely talented human being and also a terrific composer.
00:54:59.000So you can go check out a lot of Andre Previn's work on YouTube.
00:55:03.000Go check it out in tribute to him today.
00:55:05.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:55:12.000So final word on the excreble Ilhan Omar, who truly deserves the accolade.
00:55:15.000Now, I've called Michael Knowles excreble in joke, in jest.
00:55:19.000Ilhan Omar is truly an excreble human being.
00:55:20.000She proved that today when she said that she would not recognize the interim president of Venezuela.
00:55:25.000So just to get this straight, she's very much against Israeli dictatorship and Trump's dictatorship, but actual dictators who slaughter people in the streets and also make sure their citizens eat dogs, those people should remain, according to Ilhan Omar, at least in Venezuela.
00:55:40.000We're sending humanitarian aid that is in the guise of, you know, eventually invading this country and the people of the country do not want us there.
00:55:51.000You don't support, like your fellow Democrats and like the US government does and the Canadian government does, you don't support the leader of the opposition as being the president right now, not President Maduro?