A bunch more bombshells breaking in the FBI texting scandal, plus, President Trump wants a military parade, and Democrats are filibustering for a government shutdown AGAIN, AGAIN! Ben Shapiro's take on it all on today's Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro Show. (1:00) Democrats are claiming that the end of the Republic is upon us (3:00). (4:30) President Trump has asked the Defense Department to explore a possible military parade in honor of Veterans Day (5:00), and the White House says they are looking into it. (6:00.) (8:00): Why does President Trump want a parade on Veterans Day? (9:00)? (10:30): Is it a good idea? (11:00%) (12:00 ) Why does Trump need a parade? (13:00 Is it even a thing? Does it make any sense to have a military celebration in the middle of Washington, D.C. on Memorial Day? ) (14:00_) (15:00)! What's going on with the FBI Textgate Scandal (16:00?) (17:00)... (18:30). The Democratic response to President Trump's request for a parade. (19:30.) Is this a bad idea or is it actually a good one? ? (20:00-) (21:30 How much money should we be celebrating our troops in a parade?? and (22:00: Is it worth it? Is a parade a thing we should be celebrating the troops in the right thing to do? And is it a thing to celebrate them in Washington, or should it be on Memorial day or Memorial Day, or not? Can we do it in the Fourth of July, or Veterans Day or not?? (23:00+) And should we have a parade at all of those things? Do we really need a military parades in Washington? or just a big one in Washington D.D.C.? (26:00-27: What's the difference between a parade and a parade in DC or a big parade in New York City, or in San Francisco, New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles, or somewhere else in San Fran, etc.? Thank you for listening to this episode of The Daily Wire?
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00:02:24.000The leaders of the Republican Party have been silent.
00:02:28.000We desperately need more of our Republican friends to stand up and speak out, particularly the Republican leadership, because their silence is rapidly becoming complicity
00:02:39.000So, as you know from this show, one of the things I hate most in politics is the sincere voice, where everybody goes down real low, like they mean it.
00:02:47.000And that's what you get from Chuck Schumer.
00:02:48.000It's a pretty good indicator the person's lying to you when they go to sincere voice.
00:02:52.000If your spouse ever was talking to you, and they said,
00:02:56.000You can be guaranteed that the garbage never was taken out.
00:03:15.000He has asked the military for a parade, and the Pentagon is reviewing potential dates.
00:03:19.000So, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she said in a statement, Trump had asked the Defense Department to explore the idea.
00:03:25.000She says President Trump is incredibly supportive of America's great service members who risk their lives every day to keep our country safe.
00:03:30.000He has asked the Department of Defense to explore a celebration at which all Americans can show their appreciation.
00:03:36.000And the Washington Post reported last month that Trump wanted a military parade.
00:03:40.000Apparently, he visited France, and he really liked the Bastille Day military parade.
00:03:45.000He said last September in a conversation with the president of France, Macron, that when he came back from France, he wanted a military parade on the 4th of July in Washington.
00:03:54.000There are a lot of people who are looking at this and saying, well, why do we need a military parade?
00:03:58.000I mean, number one, it costs a lot of money.
00:04:00.000Number two, the idea of tanks rolling down American civilian streets
00:04:04.000When we haven't just won a war, we're not actually celebrating anything, or not on Memorial Day, or not on Veterans Day.
00:04:30.000There's one under FDR, which is really creepy because there's actually like a giant head of FDR, like a giant bust of FDR that was in the parade.
00:05:37.000I was stunned by it to be quite honest.
00:05:39.000I mean we have a Napoleon in the making here and I believe that we have so many issues around the world in terms of preparing for wars that are ongoing
00:05:53.000And wars that may be, you know, often because of what's happening in North Korea, that I would say that it's really a waste of money.
00:06:05.000And I think everyone should be offended by his need to always be showing.
00:06:16.000OK, and then Jeff Flake gets up yesterday on the floor of the Senate.
00:06:18.000We discussed that President Trump had said the Democrats were—he joked—the Democrats were participating in treason when they didn't clap for him in the middle of the State of the Union, which, as I said, was a dumb remark.
00:06:28.000Jeff Flake, who is not running for re-election in the Senate in Arizona because he would probably lose, he has now made it his mission to go on the floor of the Senate every chance he gets and say things about Trump so that he can presumably primary him in 2020.
00:07:26.000But the idea that Trump is degrading the Republic beyond belief.
00:07:29.000Okay, the election of Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton was the worst choice ever.
00:07:34.000Remember, all the way back—forget about what Trump has done since that I like, all his policies.
00:07:38.000The election between Donald Trump, a guy who is manifestly character-free in many ways, and Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt politician in modern American history, that was not a good election.
00:07:48.000If we're going to talk about stuff that degrades the republic, however, stuff that has real impact on the republic, we can't start with Trump saying stuff about military parades or suggesting that Democrats are treasonous for not clapping for him.
00:07:59.000As I mentioned yesterday, Democrats said for years that you were treasonous if you did not sufficiently support Barack Obama's agenda.
00:09:02.000So Biden obviously wants to run in 2020 as well.
00:09:04.000Remember, Joe Biden is the guy who got up in the middle of the 2012 election cycle and said Mitt Romney wanted to put y'all back in chains.
00:09:10.000Or if that's not the definition of treason, you know, if that wouldn't be him calling Romney a traitor, I'm not sure what would be.
00:09:15.000That he wants to enslave his fellow American citizens.
00:09:33.000It really was the Obama administration.
00:09:35.000I have a lot to say on this particular subject.
00:09:37.000There's some breaking news I want to bring to you, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at 1-800-Flowers.
00:09:41.000So, you know, Valentine's Day is coming up, and you know you're lazy.
00:09:44.000You know that you're not going to do anything up until the day of Valentine's Day, and then you're going to rush over to the local grocery store, and you're going to pick up a box of chocolates, and bring it home to your wife, and she's going to look at you like, this is all you did?
00:09:54.000Well, that's why you should instead be going over to 1-800-Flowers.com right now.
00:09:59.000They always have my back in tight situations, as I mentioned when I went to the Super Bowl.
00:10:57.000There is a bunch of breaking news that shows who is really endangering the institutions of the republic.
00:11:02.000And the answer is, it was the Obama administration.
00:11:05.000I mean, there are a lot of problems that I've had with the Trump administration, but when we talk about destroying the institutions of the American republic, there was so much going on in the last election cycle that was troublesome.
00:11:15.000And before that, for the last eight years before that, I mean, I wrote a full book on all of the corruption inside the Obama administration called The People vs. Barack Obama.
00:11:23.000But in the last couple of weeks, there has been a letter from Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley, a referral to the Department of Justice.
00:11:32.000And the referral basically says a few things.
00:11:35.000It says, according to Gabriel Mailer, his lawyer, he says, first, that the October 2016 FISA and warrants application seeking surveillance of Carter Page disclosed, did disclose,
00:11:43.000That the Steele dossier was compiled in the direction of a political client.
00:11:47.000It did not disclose that it was compiled in the direction of the DNC.
00:11:50.000At the time of that warrant application, the FBI thought Steele had not previously disclosed dossier information to anyone but the FBI and his client.
00:11:57.000It turns out that he instead disclosed it to the media.
00:12:02.000They used both the Steele dossier and a media report based on a leak from Christopher Steele to the media.
00:12:07.000The FBI believed that that was Steele's first media disclosure, but it turns out that it was not.
00:12:11.000And so, they fired him, and they did not include that in the warrant.
00:12:15.000Subsequent to April 2017, they did not include in warrant renewal applications
00:12:19.000The new information that Steele had previously lied to the FBI about media disclosures prior to October 2016, the referral states, quote, instead, the post-April 2017 application still relied primarily on Steele's credibility prior to the October media incident.
00:12:33.000So, we're still figuring out exactly what was going on with the Carter Page FISA application.
00:12:39.000We're still figuring out exactly what happened with the Carter Page FISA application, but there's some new information that is pretty damning as far as how the FISA application process works.
00:12:47.000The most honest take here, I think, is that the FISA application process is deeply flawed.
00:12:52.000Since the initiation of the FISA courts, which is back in, I think, 2002, 2003?
00:12:59.000Since the initiation of the FISA courts, there have been a grand total of something like 21 FISA applications that have been turned down by the FISA courts.
00:13:05.000So basically, the FBI brings information to the FISA court, and they rubber-stamp wiretaps.
00:13:27.000That Steele dossier was used as the basis for the FISA warrant, or as the primary basis for the FISA warrant against Carter Page.
00:13:32.000We already know the DNC was paying for it.
00:13:34.000But we are now finding out that that wasn't the only way that Hillary Clinton was funneling bad information to the FBI, or may have been doing so.
00:13:41.000According to a report from Mark Hemingway over at the Weekly Standard, the FBI is now investigating a second Trump dossier.
00:13:47.000This one is complete with information allegedly compiled by a Clinton crony named Cody Shearer.
00:13:51.000Natasha Bertrand of The Atlantic says she's seen the memo, and that it covers, quote, a range of allegations concerning the president's personal behavior and financial transactions.
00:13:59.000According to Bertrand, Obama's State Department Special Envoy to Libya, a guy named Jonathan Weiner, passed information from Shurer, who is a Hillary buddy, on to British spy Christopher Steele, who is busily compiling opposition research on Trump on behalf of the DNC and Hillary Clinton via Fusion GPS.
00:14:13.000So here's how the chain of information went.
00:14:15.000There's a Hillary crony named Cody Shearer.
00:14:17.000He was working with Sidney Blumenthal.
00:14:18.000Sidney Blumenthal is Hillary's hatchet man and one of the sleaziest liars in the history of American politics.
00:14:23.000Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer were working to compile information that may or may not have been false to hand over to Christopher Steele.
00:14:30.000They didn't just hand it over directly to Christopher Steele, however.
00:14:32.000Instead, they sent it to Jonathan Weiner.
00:14:34.000Jonathan Weiner was working at the State Department.
00:14:37.000He was working for John Kerry at the State Department.
00:14:39.000He was a Hillary staffer who moved over to John Kerry.
00:14:44.000And so, the State Department then funneled that information, not to the FBI, but to Christopher Steele, who included it in the Fusion GPS dossier, which eventually was forwarded to the FBI.
00:14:53.000So, it looks like the State Department being militarized on behalf of Hillary Clinton to funnel information to Christopher Steele, who would then send it to the FBI, which would then look to target the Trump campaign, right?
00:15:03.000That's what this chain of information looks like.
00:15:24.000Which all makes the Page-FISA request look shoddier and shoddier.
00:15:27.000If the FBI knew that Seals' information came from Hillary's buddy and was funneled through the State Department, that's damning stuff.
00:15:32.000It looks like the militarization of the State Department and then perhaps of the FBI on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:15:39.000Now, that would not be a supreme shock if the FBI was biased on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:15:43.000Late on Tuesday evening, Fox News released a new shocking report on texts.
00:15:47.000Between FBI agents and lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
00:15:51.000Both of them, you recall, were fired from the Mueller investigation for bias against President Trump.
00:15:54.000So, according to Fox News, Page, this is Lisa Page in relation to Carter, texted her lover Peter Strzok on September 2, 2016, with the news that FBI Director James Comey wanted them to prepare an update on ongoing investigations because, quote, POTUS wants to know everything we're doing.
00:16:10.000Which sounds like Obama wanted to be updated on a routine basis on the Hillary Clinton investigation.
00:16:15.000Fox News says that this is about the Hillary investigation, not about Trump-Russia collusion.
00:16:19.000Now, what makes this weird is that Obama had said back in April of 2016 that he did not interfere in FBI investigations, that he didn't want to know what was going on in FBI investigations.
00:16:36.000I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case.
00:17:10.000But the idea that Obama said that he was not going to get involved in any of these investigations, and then suddenly
00:17:15.000Obama was going on national TV and saying that he didn't know Hillary had a secret email server and he found out about it on the news, even though he was obviously emailing with her at her private email address.
00:17:23.000The fact that the FBI and the DOJ deliberately overlooked that, the fact that the FBI and the DOJ were coordinating on the Hillary email campaign, the fact that they were texting—I mean, those texts show that they wanted to go easy on Hillary because they thought that she might be the next president of the United States.
00:17:36.000All of this makes the FBI and the DOJ look incredibly dirty.
00:17:41.000Molly Hemingway has a piece over at The Federalist talking about that grassly Lindsey Graham memo that has now been sent over to the DOJ.
00:17:50.000And again, according to that letter, it says,
00:18:01.000It did so based on Mr. Steele's personal credibility and presumably having faith in his process of obtaining the information, but there is substantial evidence suggesting that Mr. Steele materially misled the FBI about a key aspect of his dossier efforts, one which bears on his credibility.
00:18:24.000I mean, here's what we really need at this point.
00:18:26.000If we want to actually figure out what's happening here, first we need the FISA application, OK?
00:18:29.000Trump needs to declassify the FISA warrants application on Carter Page.
00:18:32.000Because all we've been hearing from the Democrats is that Republicans are leaving out key components.
00:18:36.000All we've heard from Republicans is that the FISA application shows that there was some sort of collusion going on between the FBI and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
00:18:45.000We're not going to know the answer to any of that until that actual FISA application is released.
00:18:50.000Now, what this seems to me is that there's two possible theories.
00:18:52.000One is that the Trump campaign was being targeted by the FBI on behalf of Hillary Clinton.
00:18:56.000The other is that the FISA applications that are sought by the FBI are really shoddy on a regular basis.
00:19:03.000If it's the latter, then we have a very deep systemic problem with the process.
00:19:07.000If it's the former, then we have a very deep systemic problem with the quote-unquote deep state and the FBI.
00:19:13.000I always tend to attribute this sort of stuff to stupidity and incompetence rather than malice.
00:19:19.000But I can't take malice off the table because I just don't know at this point.
00:19:23.000Trey Gowdy was already on TV last night, essentially hinting that it was the Hillary Clinton campaign sending information to the State Department forwarded on to Steele, which was forwarded on to the FBI, in a pipeline of information.
00:19:34.000Here is the representative from South Carolina.
00:19:36.000So weeks before the election, somebody in the Obama State Department was feeding information from a foreign source to Christopher Steele.
00:19:44.000When you hear who the source, one of the sources of that information is, you're going to think, oh my gosh, I've heard that name somewhere before.
00:20:10.000So it is Sidney Blumenthal, apparently, according to Trey Gowdy, all of which should be deeply troubling to anyone of decent mind.
00:20:16.000Meanwhile, I mean, if you want to know, again, who's destroying institutions in the United States, it doesn't help when Trump attacks institutions wrongly.
00:20:22.000I've attacked him when I thought that he was doing so.
00:20:25.000But it was the Obama administration that was compromising the integrity of these institutions, and it was these institutions who are apparently compromising their own integrity with either bad intel they were funneling to the FISA courts or FISA courts who aren't willing to do the work necessary to suss out whether an American citizen ought to have a warrant put on him, despite lack of evidence, all of which is deeply troubling.
00:20:44.000Again, the Democrats are willing to believe pretty much anything.
00:20:48.000Adam Schiff, the Democrat, he essentially said yesterday that he was caught on tape being pranked by radio hosts who claimed they had naked pictures of Trump.
00:20:54.000That just shows how willing the Democrats are to believe anything about President Trump.
00:21:36.000Obviously, Adam Schiff getting pranked by a couple of Russians who are calling him up and saying that he is apparently going to be given pictures of naked Trump.
00:21:46.000Whatever gets your rocks off, apparently.
00:21:48.000So, in a second, we're going to discuss
00:21:51.000The latest episode in government shutdown, because I guess we're going to have to do this every couple of weeks here.
00:21:55.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Blue Apron.
00:21:58.000So Blue Apron is the leading meal delivery kit service in the United States.
00:22:02.000And a lot of people may know what they do, but they don't know how good the recipes are.
00:22:05.000OK, we're talking about seared steaks and thyme pan sauce with mashed potatoes, green beans, and crispy shallots in under 45 minutes.
00:22:11.000Short rib burgers with a hoppy cheddar sauce on a pretzel bun, right?
00:23:26.000OK, so with all of that said about the compromising information regarding the Carter Page FISA warrant, we need to see the actual FISA application.
00:23:33.000And if we don't see the actual FISA application, it's just going to turn into everybody accusing everybody else of treason all the time.
00:23:39.000And that is not going to be beneficial for the Republic in any way, shape, or form.
00:23:44.000Meanwhile, in another development that is certainly not going to help the tenor of political conversation in the country, we are now on the verge of another government shutdown.
00:23:52.000This is exactly the same as the last government shutdown, as I predicted, right here on this program.
00:23:56.000No deal has been made on DACA, nor will any deal be made on DACA.
00:24:00.000Remember, we have until, I believe, next week for them to reach some sort of continuing resolution.
00:24:49.000It just keeps flying because nobody is willing to actually sit down and hammer out a budget.
00:24:53.000If they do hammer out a budget, it only grows in size and scope.
00:24:56.000Right now, the debate over the continuing resolution is whether or not the Democrats will allow the government to continue to be funded if no DACA deal is cut or no promise of a DACA deal is made.
00:25:06.000Now, the Trump administration has already offered a deal.
00:25:09.000That deal is extraordinarily generous.
00:25:10.000That deal includes the legalization of 1.8 million illegal immigrants and a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants.
00:25:17.000It also includes the possibility of the importation of another 4 million legal immigrants into the United States.
00:25:24.000Through chain migration, which would come to an end, but only gradually over the course of the next 20 years.
00:25:29.000All of that, the Democrats have decided, is of no merit.
00:25:31.000Instead, they just want a full-on DACA right now.
00:26:18.000And if we have to shut it down because the Democrats don't want safety, and unrelated but still related, they don't want to take care of our military, then shut it down.
00:26:39.000They won't give it to us because of DACA.
00:26:41.000That would be the smarter way to do this.
00:26:42.000But what he's saying is essentially correct, that if the Democrats decide to shut this thing down over immigration, again, I don't understand how this is any different than it's been since we did this like two weeks ago.
00:26:51.000Remember, we did this two and a half weeks ago.
00:26:52.000And at the time, Chuck Schumer argued that we should shut down the government over DACA.
00:26:59.000And he got essentially nothing for his trouble, other than some bad poll numbers.
00:27:03.000So Trump is exactly right here to hold the Democrats' feet to the fire.
00:27:06.000And John Kelly, who is very, very hawkish on immigration, Trump's chief of staff, he spoke to the media yesterday.
00:27:11.000He said, listen, we've offered a lot more than other people have offered.
00:27:15.000He makes a comment in here that Democrats are seizing on and trying to claim is racist.
00:27:18.000Of course, because that's the way this works.
00:27:20.000The president sent over what amounts to be two and a half times that number to $1.8 million.
00:27:28.000The difference between 690 and 1.8 million were the people that some would say were too afraid to sign up, others would say were too lazy to get off their asses, but they didn't sign up.
00:27:38.000So the President shockingly said, okay, 1.8 million, and then probably the biggest shock was in a path to citizenship.
00:27:47.000That's beyond what anyone could have imagined, whether you're on the right or the left.
00:27:53.000So people on the left have gone crazy over this.
00:27:57.000OK, maybe some of them were lazy, maybe some of them were not.
00:28:03.000The fact is that a lot of people didn't sign up for DACA specifically because they were concerned that if they signed up and then Trump revoked DACA, they would now be on the government's radar.
00:28:11.000So I don't think that's quite fair of the White House Chief of Staff.
00:28:14.000That said, this is not a winning issue for Democrats.
00:28:17.000They are beholden to their radical Democratic base.
00:28:19.000And that's the one thing that Trump always can count on here, is that no matter what crazy stuff Trump does, the Democrats will do something even crazier.
00:28:25.000So, Nancy Pelosi has decided to get up and filibuster.
00:28:28.000She may still be filibustering this DACA—they're calling it a DACAbuster, because it's not technically a filibuster in the House.
00:28:35.000And she's going to talk and talk and talk and talk.
00:28:36.000As of this speaking, she's still talking.
00:28:38.000I believe she's nine hours in at this point.
00:28:41.000And she's still jabbering on about why it is that we can't pass a budget, why we can't fund the government, because we need to instead cut a deal legalizing all illegal immigrants, not just in exchange for border security, but just plainly.
00:28:53.000So here's Nancy Pelosi starting to jabber about this today.
00:28:56.000The Republican moral cowardice must end.
00:28:59.000Members of Congress are trustees of the people and of our nation.
00:29:03.000Why are we here if not to protect the patriotic young people who are determined to contribute and to strengthen America?
00:29:10.000So I'm going to go on as long as my leadership minute allows.
00:29:16.000I want to speak to the Bible in Luke 10, 25-37, the parable of the Good Samaritan.
00:29:23.000There's nothing I like better than when Nancy Pelosi, an abortion fanatic, quotes the Bible.
00:30:06.000And by the way, that's not a suggestion that the Bible itself is against intermarriage with regard to race, for example.
00:30:12.000That's a suggestion that the Bible is very much in favor of boundaries that establish the sanctity of certain practices and the sanctity of certain
00:30:21.000I mean, obviously the Bible is all about the sanctity of the Jewish people, at least in the Old Testament, and it says that they are people to be kept separate in certain ways, so the Bible is not all about the idea of full-on everybody gets to come in and every person is of the same mindset.
00:31:33.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:31:40.000So, one of the reasons that it's so stupid for Democrats to claim that they want to basically shut down the government over DACA is because the Democrats are constantly wanting to cut the military budget.
00:31:49.000And Trump sort of made reference to that a little bit earlier when he said that the Democrats are willing to let the military go unfunded in order to protect illegal immigrants.
00:31:56.000Democrats are constantly looking to cut the military.
00:31:59.000At the same time, they're looking to expand the budget for social services and various other spending initiatives.
00:32:04.000And General James Mattis, former General James Mattis, Secretary of Defense, he came out and he says, listen, the worst thing that can happen right now is for us not to end sequestration.
00:32:12.000Sequestration was a budget cap that was put in place.
00:32:15.000The Democrats insisted that half of the budget cap come from cuts to military spending because Democrats are anti-military.
00:32:20.000And here is what Mattis had to say about that in his testimony yesterday.
00:32:25.000If we are to sustain our military's primacy, we need budget predictability.
00:32:31.000Congress must take action now to ensure our military's lethality is sufficient to defend our way of life, to preserve the promise of prosperity, and to pass on the freedoms we enjoy to the next generation.
00:32:44.000And I ask that you not let disagreements on domestic policy continue to hold our nation's defense hostage.
00:32:51.000Now, this is always the one place where Democrats are willing to cut the budget.
00:32:54.000They're never willing to cut the budget anywhere else.
00:32:56.000As an example, Democrats are now calling for a new child and family leave plan, one that is more generous, supposedly, than the one that's being pushed by Ivanka Trump and Marco Rubio.
00:33:04.000So, Senator Rubio and Ivanka Trump are trying to come up with a paid family and medical leave program that would essentially allow you to take money out of your Social Security to cover your paid family and medical leave.
00:33:14.000And the Democrats, people on the left, very upset about this.
00:33:17.000They say instead that we should just have the government borrow from the Chinese, essentially, to pay for it.
00:33:21.000Elizabeth Bruning writes a piece over at Washington Post suggesting that it is our obligation, all of our obligation, to pay for other people to take paid family and medical leave.
00:33:36.000After the city or political community comes the world, following the convention that treats the household, city, and world as three successive levels of human society.
00:33:43.000For the ancients, families were the first and smallest of societies, units of cooperation and order within which people learned to get along with others.
00:33:49.000Together, families formed political communities, cities, as Augustine put it, and together, these political communities made up the world, which was a society of communities.
00:33:59.000But what she's about to suggest next is that it is the job of the government to ensure that we pay you to stay home with your baby for the first six weeks.
00:34:18.000And how strange it is to have completely dismissed the idea in modern thought.
00:34:21.000Our world is one of individuals making a series of contracts and agreements with one another in hopes of getting the most one can out of the world.
00:34:27.000The lives of the others are none of our business, and ours are none of theirs.
00:34:30.000Nowhere is this clearer than in conservative policymaking, where family policy is absurdly individualized.
00:34:36.000And she makes the contention, essentially, that we should turn the family into a government concern again.
00:34:43.000I'm writing a book on ancient thought and modern political thought as well.
00:34:47.000And one of the dangers of a lot of ancient thought is there's the suggestion implicit in a lot of ancient thought that if the idea of the human being is that you are virtuous by exercise of the faculty of reason, if the idea is that
00:34:59.000Your virtue is tied up in being a good citizen of a community, as Plato and Aristotle both suggest.
00:35:04.000Then why isn't it the job of the community to function in making you a good citizen?
00:35:09.000Why isn't the job of the community to basically make you a cog in the wheel?
00:35:12.000In Plato's Republic, he talks at length about the idea of fostering this sort of utopian vision for a society in which families are governed by the state, in which children are removed from parents and educated in a certain way, in which the wisest of the children are put in particular sorts of schools.
00:35:29.000Once you say that the community is responsible for the family, as opposed to the family being responsible for itself and then building a community, then you end up in some real trouble.
00:35:36.000The basis of the liberal public order is the idea that the family, as an atomized group of people who have care for one another,
00:35:43.000Take care of one another and then they, together with other families, form a community.
00:35:47.000Not that the community is designed to form families.
00:35:49.000And that if you try top down to have the community form families, all you end up with is the community dictating to families what should and should not be true.
00:35:56.000Because the same government that can provide you paid family leave is the same government that can tell you that you need to educate your child in a particular viewpoint about the world.
00:36:05.000It's a serious danger and it's the difference between some Enlightenment thought and some of the pre-modern thought, right?
00:36:09.000Some of the ancient thought and even some of the high medieval thought with regard to the value of community and family and the balance between the two.
00:36:16.000Essentially, after the high Middle Ages and after the Renaissance, there's a feeling that's beginning to
00:36:22.000grow because of the high levels of warfare, that centralized state power was a problem.
00:36:26.000And that the best thing that you could do was devolve authority back down to the lowest level, which meant, in essence, the individual and the family.
00:36:33.000And that authority sprang from the individual and the family.
00:36:35.000This is the idea of John Locke, right?
00:36:37.000That there's a social contract that is made by people who originally existed in a state of nature.
00:36:41.000That state of nature, by the way, does not mean that there was no government and no state.
00:36:45.000It just means a state of nature in which there were very few rules, right?
00:37:10.000The idea there is that family predates society.
00:37:13.000And so the authority that society has comes from the family.
00:37:17.000Not that the society's job is to create the family out of whole cloth.
00:37:21.000Because otherwise, what you're going to do is you're going to have some families using the tools of society on behalf of themselves and at the expense of other families.
00:37:27.000But this is a little too complex for Elizabeth Brutigas' take.
00:37:31.000She goes all the way back to Augustine and to some of the ancients who suggest that the state's job is to uphold the family.
00:37:36.000By the way, that is unclear from Augustine anyway, right?
00:37:39.000Augustine's correct when he says that when you look at the three levels of society, you're looking at family and then community and then society at large.
00:39:34.000Babies and children were given care by members of the family.
00:39:38.000A husband and a wife decided how they were going to care for children is how it works in my family.
00:39:42.000My wife and I decided exactly how the kids were going to get taken care of, the grandparents chip in a lot, and we help pay for a nanny, and I am home a lot, and my wife is home.
00:39:49.000Mothers and fathers need time and money to give care.
00:39:52.000Then they should go out and they should make money before having children.
00:40:19.000And then society decided the government was going to take care of the elderly folks, and the elderly folks stopped having as many kids, and so the social security pyramid scheme turned upside down, and now it's bankrupt.
00:40:29.000But Brutig writes at the Washington Post, Babies and children learn and grow, adults work and produce, and the elderly help and rest.
00:40:35.000There's a place for every stage of the life cycle in the grand order of things, and a just state would ideally defer to that natural rhythm.
00:40:43.000Right, by removing itself from the rhythm.
00:40:46.000I mean, when the state interferes in the rhythm by offering incentives or by perverting those incentives, the state ends up doing a great disservice.
00:40:52.000But she says, instead, conservatives plan would penalize the elderly for their decision to have raised families all in the interest of making parental leave a self-contained option, no burden to anyone but the parents themselves.
00:41:01.000It shouldn't be a burden to anyone but the parent themselves.
00:41:03.000I know this is actually an argument inside conservative circles.
00:41:05.000There are some people like Ross Douthat, Raihan Salaam over at National Review.
00:41:10.000They argue that it is the government's job to help foster families.
00:41:13.000That it's the government's job to help ensure that parents can stay home more or that parents can have more money.
00:41:18.000That is why they believe in the child tax credit.
00:41:20.000As I've said, I'm not a believer in the child tax credit.
00:41:22.000I don't believe that parents are essentially having children in order to get tax credits.
00:41:26.000I think that's a misread of why most people have kids.
00:41:31.000Society obviously has an interest in the bearing and rearing of the next generation.
00:41:34.000The easiest way to incentivize that is to incentivize communities to come together and form their own societies.
00:41:40.000As I've said many times, I've said it in virtually every speech I've made for the past several years, the order of preference, if you need help, should go family, and then community, and then the state.
00:41:51.000It should not be state, and then community, and then family, if you need help.
00:41:55.000But the idea here is that Republicans are doing something deeply wrong in suggesting the primacy of family not only as the element of political conversation, but also as the source of help for members of the family.
00:42:09.000Instead, it says the proposal would penalize bigger families more than smaller ones, couples with more children to face working further into old age before receiving retirement benefits.
00:42:17.000Well, yes, because it would be their choice to have those children.
00:42:20.000Moreover, it would mean, likely, that lower-wage workers would end up putting off retirement longer than wealthier workers with ample company benefits.
00:42:26.000Well, yes, it's better to be rich than poor in the United States, as everywhere else in human history.
00:42:30.000If you're not particularly well-to-do and you want a family, in other words, you'll need to be prepared to pay for it in your old age.
00:42:34.000Your family, your choice, your problem.
00:42:37.000Yes, except that if you're in my religious community, then we help you out informally, because that's something else that we need to build up.
00:42:42.000The idea that government is there to fill all gaps, and that you are not there to actually help out members of your own community is another falsehood promulgated by the left.
00:42:49.000The idea that the only source of help in times of trouble is the government is absolutely untrue.
00:42:57.000But the piece concludes, quote, One of the things that's so fascinating about this argument, by the way, is that the same people arguing for paid parental leave are the same people who argue that same-sex marriage is a grand and great idea.
00:43:14.000Same-sex marriage has no bearing on childbearing and rearing.
00:43:17.000The whole reason the government used to prefer traditional marriage to same-sex marriage was because of benefits in terms of childbearing and rearing.
00:43:25.000So it's kind of ironic to watch the left completely abandon that position, even as it embraces the position that we should have the government pay for paid family and parental leave.
00:43:34.000But again, if you want liberty, you're going to have to accept that there's some responsibility that goes along with it.
00:43:38.000And if you want a family that is free of government interference, you're going to have to understand that the government that gives with one hand also takes with the other.
00:43:45.000Okay, in just a second, let's do some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:44:30.000But the critics hated it anyway, because anybody who mentions Benghazi must be cast into the outer darkness.
00:44:35.000You're not allowed to mention the fact that Hillary and the Obama administration blew it.
00:44:38.000Like, if I had made the 13 Hours movie, it would have opened with Hillary cackling over the demise of Muammar Gaddafi, saying, we saw he died.
00:44:45.000And then it would be Hillary talking about how grand and great Libya was, and then fast forward to what's happening in Benghazi.
00:46:31.000I have no clue because it has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and half of the reviews are all about how important the film is.
00:46:37.000There's an idiotic, idiotic tweet out from Salon.com talking about how Black Panther is important because it's the first blockbuster release format featuring a black hero front and center.
00:46:47.000Yes, except for all of the other ones.
00:46:59.000Except for all of those, it's the first one.
00:47:01.000You can't trust the critics, I think, is the bottom line here.
00:47:03.000There are certain movies where you can trust them, maybe on some of the big-budget, some of the big-budget kind of superhero flicks that are not politically charged, you can trust them.
00:47:12.000But you can't trust them on drama that has any sort of political orientation.
00:47:16.000The difference between The Reception of 13 Hours and Black Panther, I think, is a good example of that.
00:47:20.000Although, again, maybe Black Panther is the greatest movie ever made.
00:47:22.000If you look at its reviews, apparently this suckers up with Citizen Kane.
00:47:25.000I'm planning on seeing it this weekend so that I can actually give you an honest appraisal of the film itself.
00:47:29.000Suffice it to say, I have my doubts that the movie is as good as the critics have said it is, simply because I don't think any movie ever has been as good as the critics say that Black Panther is.
00:49:08.000So there is a shot of the Tesla sports car in space, and then there's a space-suited mannequin strapped in the driver's seat, and the radio is set to play David Bowie's soundtrack on a loop.
00:49:17.000Apparently, the rocket was so powerful that it actually blasted them outside the elliptical orbit they were originally going for, and there's a chance that the car actually lands on Mars, which is pretty amazing.
00:49:26.000So, it is essentially three of SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 vehicles strapped together, and as the usual practice for SpaceX, all three boost stages returned to Earth to attempt controlled landings.
00:49:38.000The third booster was due to settle on a drone ship stationed several hundred kilometers out at sea, but it was unable to slow its descent by reigniting sufficient engines.
00:49:45.000It missed the target and was destroyed as it hit the water at some 500 kilometers an hour.
00:49:50.000But by then, the upper stage of the Falcon Heavy
00:49:52.000According to the BBC, was heading on a trajectory that would hopefully take it toward Mars orbit.
00:49:57.000A lot of people are upset about this because they say that the government has sponsored Elon Musk with something like $500 million of subsidies.
00:50:03.000I promise you that they've spent a lot more on that than that on NASA.
00:50:07.000And now again, I'm not in favor of government subsidies.
00:50:09.000I think that Elon Musk is a very wealthy man, and I'm not sure that the government subsidies are necessary.
00:50:14.000But you can still recognize when a cool thing happens with government subsidies, even if you oppose the government subsidies.
00:50:19.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:50:26.000Okay, so there's a gay Olympian who's now saying that Mike Pence, Vice President of the United States, who is set to lead the Olympic delegation, should not do so.
00:50:33.000Because he says that Mike Pence backed gay conversion therapy.
00:50:35.000We're going into the Olympics and myself and Adam Rippon are the two first openly gay males competing in the Olympics and it's just incredible to see how times have changed because of people like you and athletes in the past and so many people that have paved the way.
00:50:49.000But then to have someone leading the delegation that's
00:51:03.000Mike Pence never supported gay conversion therapy, which is the therapy where people are given electroshock and essentially tortured in an attempt to create an association between the pain and homosexual thoughts.
00:51:37.000What happened here is that this guy lied about Mike Pence on national television, and the left has been lying about Mike Pence on national television about this stuff for quite a while.
00:51:44.000What Pence did say is that any sort of bill that includes funding for individuals who are seeking to
00:51:52.000Have psychological therapy should include coverage for people who are seeking to change their own, their own sexual orientation, right?
00:52:00.000The bottom line is what he's saying is that if we're going to give money to you for some sort of therapy, you get to choose the therapy that you want to choose.
00:52:05.000That is not the same thing at all as saying that Mike Pence is in favor of trying to shock gay people into not being gay anymore.
00:52:11.000But again, lies can travel around the world faster than the truth can put its boots on.
00:52:23.000Justin Timberlake's entire career and art is based on his ability to be smooth, to create music that seduces us with references to the past, with appropriations, with artful mixes, and never quite shows any struggle.
00:52:43.000We are living in a moment of struggle and we want our pop music to also reflect that struggle.
00:52:48.000And frankly, Timberlake now embodies that phrase so often spoken today, white male privilege.
00:53:04.000OK, then I think that we're going to—for the use of tonal music, we're going to have to credit every black star with using the rise of tonal music in the West, right?
00:53:12.000It's not true that tonal music exists everywhere equally on Earth.
00:53:15.000I mean, there are different cultures that have different types of music.
00:53:18.000Pop music goes a lot more to the classical heritage in terms of the tones that it uses than it does, for example, Indian music, right?
00:53:27.000I mean, like the country of India, or Chinese music.
00:53:29.000It owes a lot to Western music, right?
00:53:31.000The idea that cultural appropriation is not part and parcel of culture itself is absurd.
00:53:36.000The idea that Justin Timberlake embodied white privilege by singing songs that weren't protest chants and that in order for the NFL to really have a pop star that mattered, the NFL had to have Beyonce do a Black Panthers routine again is just absurd.
00:53:49.000Again, poisoning our culture is something the left is intent on doing and polarizing us along every possible line.
00:53:54.000OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.