The Ben Shapiro Show - Ye, Verily Ye | Ep. 650

00:00:00.000 We lived by the Kanye, and we died by the Kanye.

00:00:03.000 A plot to target Robert Mueller spirals out of control, and polarization continues over the Pittsburgh anti-Semitic shooting.

00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:09.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:15.000 You know, take a big man to forego saying, I told you so, when he tells somebody that something was going to happen and then it happened.

00:00:22.000 I am not that man.

00:00:23.000 I'm going to tell you exactly when I was right.

00:00:25.000 I was right about Kanye West because, of course, I mean, come on.

00:00:27.000 I wasn't the only one saying this.

00:00:29.000 We'll get to Kanye West.

00:00:30.000 We'll also get to the funniest story of the day.

00:00:33.000 And we'll get to a lot of other material, including a weird segment on Dr. Phil.

00:00:38.000 That was really strange.

00:00:39.000 We'll get to all of that in just one second.

00:00:41.000 First, let's talk about how you protect your eyes.

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00:00:54.000 And then when I think about myself, I'm thinking like, only 11 hours?

00:00:57.000 I'm awake for at least 16, so that means that 14 of the 16 hours I'm probably on a screen.

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00:01:58.000 Okay, so I do want to get to Kanye, and I do want to get to the Jacob Wohl story.

00:02:03.000 You've never heard of Jacob Wohl?

00:02:04.000 Well, you will by the end of today's show.

00:02:06.000 I want to get to all of that, but I have to begin today.

00:02:09.000 With the full insanity on display from some members of the hardcore left.

00:02:16.000 There's a lot of talk this week about radicalization and polarization.

00:02:20.000 And the idea is that right-wing radicalization is being led by the right-wing rhetoric at Fox News and the right-wing rhetoric from President Trump.

00:02:28.000 Expressing this viewpoint today is Paul Krugman, who is legitimately

00:02:32.000 One of the worst columnists in America.

00:02:33.000 He has heavy competition over on the New York Times editorial page with folks like Charles Blow, but Krugman is truly an exorable columnist.

00:02:40.000 I usually reserve that word only for Michael Moles, but it certainly applies to Paul Krugman as well.

00:02:45.000 Krugman has a column today called The Hate is on the Ballot next week.

00:02:49.000 And here is what he says. 0.93

00:02:50.000 He says, in America 2018, whataboutism is the last refuge of scoundrels and bothsidesism is the last refuge of cowards.

00:02:58.000 So his suggestion here for folks who don't know what these words mean, whataboutism is a kind of newfangled word for you don't want to pay attention to the stuff your own side is doing so you blame the other side. 0.95

00:03:09.000 So if you're talking about President Trump's sexual infidelity,

00:03:13.000 Then you say, oh yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton's sexual infidelity? 0.90

00:03:17.000 That would be whataboutism.

00:03:18.000 So he's saying that whataboutism is now taking place on the basis of rhetoric.

00:03:21.000 He says, if you hadn't noticed, we're in the midst of a wave of hate crimes.

00:03:24.000 Just in the past few days, bombs were mailed to a number of prominent Democrats plus CNN.

00:03:28.000 Then a gunman massacred 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

00:03:31.000 Meanwhile, another gunman killed two African-Americans at a Louisville supermarket after first trying to unsuccessfully break into a black church.

00:03:38.000 If he had gotten there an hour earlier, we probably would have had another mass murder.

00:03:41.000 All of these hate crimes seem clearly linked to the climate of paranoia and racism deliberately fostered by President Trump and his allies in Congress and the media.

00:03:48.000 Killing black people is an old American tradition, but is it experiencing a revival in the Trump era? 0.92

00:03:53.000 That sentence is purely despicable. 0.99

00:03:55.000 The idea that killing black people is an old American tradition, but it is experiencing a revival. 0.95

00:03:59.000 I assume what he means by that is that slavery and Jim Crow were old American traditions, and that Trump is reviving those, which of course is a complete lie.

00:04:08.000 He continues, he says, when the bombs were discovered, many on the right immediately claimed they were fake news or a false flag operation by liberals.

00:04:14.000 But the FBI quickly tracked down the apparent source of the explosive devices, a fanatical Trump supporter, who many are already calling the MAGA bomber.

00:04:21.000 Well, that would be all of the folks on the left who wish to attribute his actions directly to President Trump.

00:04:26.000 The man arrested at the Tree of Life Synagogue, Paul Krugman writes, has been critical of Trump, who he apparently believes isn't anti-Semitic enough.

00:04:32.000 But his rage seems to have been fueled by conspiracy theories being systematically spread by Trump supporters

00:04:37.000 The claim that Jewish financiers are bringing brown people into America to displace whites.

00:04:42.000 So, here's when he gets to the point.

00:04:44.000 He says,

00:05:01.000 Now, I know you're sitting there, you're yelling at your phone, you're yelling at your car radio, you're saying, but Paul Krugman, it's not just that Democrats have engaged in screaming at people at restaurants.

00:05:11.000 The Volusia County headquarters of the Republican Party was shot up, right?

00:05:15.000 People shot bullets through the windows a day ago.

00:05:18.000 A Bernie Sanders supporter shot up a bunch of Congress people, including Steve Scalise, whom he nearly murdered.

00:05:24.000 So, what are you talking about?

00:05:26.000 But that would be whataboutism, according to Paul Krugman.

00:05:28.000 If you mention that, that is now whataboutism.

00:05:30.000 He says,

00:05:37.000 He says, You might have thought that the horrifying events of recent days would finally break the norm, but you would have been wrong.

00:05:42.000 Both sides' ism, it turns out, is a fanatical, cult impervious to evidence. 0.72

00:06:00.000 Trump famously boasted that his supporters would stick with him, even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue.

00:06:05.000 What he didn't point out was that pundits would piously attribute the shooting to incivility, and that Sunday talk shows would feature Fifth Avenue shooting advocates and give them a respectful hearing.

00:06:13.000 This needs to stop, and those who keep practicing both sides need to be shamed.

00:06:18.000 At this point, pretending that both sides are equally to blame or attributing political violence to spreading hatred without identifying who's responsible for that spread is a form of deep cowardice.

00:06:26.000 The fact is that one side of the political spectrum, says Paul Krugman, is peddling hatred while the other isn't.

00:06:32.000 And refusing to point that out for fear of sounding partisan is, in effect, lending aid and comfort to the people poisoning our politics.

00:06:38.000 Yes, hate is on the ballot next week.

00:06:40.000 So it's the Democrats are completely innocent.

00:06:42.000 The Republicans are completely blameworthy for every terrible thing that's been said, leading to a rash of hate crimes.

00:06:48.000 And it's not just Paul Krugman saying this.

00:06:50.000 It's also Don Lemon.

00:06:51.000 So Don Lemon on CNN, a man who you recall defended Antifa in recent weeks.

00:06:57.000 He went on his show with Chris Cuomo.

00:07:00.000 The worst segments on CNN are always Don Lemon with Chris Cuomo.

00:07:04.000 They're always just the worst.

00:07:07.000 Because, again, it's just two blocks of wood clonking each other.

00:07:11.000 But here's Don Lemon talking about, he doesn't see Democrats killing people over politics.

00:07:16.000 I mean, that's just not something that's, well, actually, let's do this one first. 0.98

00:07:19.000 Don Lemon says, the biggest terror threat is white men. 0.95

00:07:21.000 Listen to his language here. 0.98

00:07:24.000 He says, we have to stop demonizing people. 1.00

00:07:26.000 We have to stop demonizing people, but white men are the devil. 1.00

00:07:30.000 Here is Don Lemon saying the biggest terror threat is white men. 1.00

00:07:33.000 So we have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right. 0.98

00:07:44.000 And we have to start doing something about them. 0.97

00:07:46.000 There is no travel ban on them.

00:07:50.000 There is no ban on, you know, they had the Muslim ban.

00:07:52.000 There is no white guy ban.

00:07:54.000 So what do we do about that?

00:07:55.000 So I've heard that inflammatory rhetoric only is present on the right.

00:08:00.000 And I also don't know whether Don Lemon can even hear the words coming out of his own mouth.

00:08:04.000 He says we need to stop demonizing people.

00:08:06.000 Also, white men need to be stopped. 0.88

00:08:09.000 Okay. 0.99

00:08:10.000 Well, that's weird. 0.97

00:08:12.000 And listen, statistically speaking, the majority of terror killings in the United States over the past year since 9-11 have been perpetrated by white men. 0.97

00:08:21.000 That is true. 0.94

00:08:22.000 And that is an accurate statement. 0.98

00:08:25.000 It is also accurate to say, just statistically speaking, that the disproportionate number of murders committed in the United States are committed by young black men. 0.85

00:08:32.000 That doesn't mean that we ought to be targeting young black men or that we ought to be targeting white men. 0.96

00:08:36.000 It means that we ought to be targeting criminals.

00:08:38.000 But Don Lemon is fully fine with demonizing an entire segment of the population on the basis of a few fringe actors who commit acts of evil.

00:08:46.000 And then Don Lemon goes even further.

00:08:48.000 He says, I don't see Democrats killing people over politics.

00:08:50.000 Like, that's not a thing that's happening.

00:08:52.000 Which is a weird thing to say a year after somebody shot up a congressional baseball game and nearly killed the House majority whip. 0.97

00:08:58.000 But here's Don Lemon being an ignoramus. 0.95

00:09:00.000 A right-wing group killed the woman in Charlottesville. 0.99

00:09:03.000 This guy is a right-winger who killed the people in the synagogue.

00:09:07.000 The right-wingers sent bombs to CNN and to Democrats.

00:09:13.000 I don't see Democrats killing people because of political... Yeah, there may be Democratic operatives who are out there saying... Well, they tried to.

00:09:22.000 Okay, and then when that guy said they tried to, then both Max Boot and Don Lemon went nuts.

00:09:26.000 How dare you say that?

00:09:27.000 The rhetoric of the Democrats is not the same as the rhetoric of the Republicans.

00:09:31.000 This is the routine that Democrats are pulling these days.

00:09:33.000 Brian Stelter, he's a Sunday news host on CNN, he says,

00:09:42.000 I sure hope some of those Fox hosts, some of those commentators, take a moment, take a minute to think about their role in this environment.

00:09:49.000 Hopefully there's some soul-searching right now in the wake of this massacre.

00:09:52.000 Brian, do you have a fever right now?

00:09:54.000 I mean, what are you thinking?

00:09:55.000 What are you thinking?

00:09:56.000 They like ratings.

00:09:58.000 They like winning the ratings war.

00:10:01.000 That's what this is about.

00:10:04.000 And then there's Allison Camerata suggesting that Fox News hosts don't care if people die so long as they get their ratings.

00:10:10.000 Steve Schmidt, former McCain campaign advisor in 2008, who's been making bank off of being the Republican who's not actually a Republican on MSNBC for years, he blames Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh, and he says they have blood on their hands.

00:10:22.000 The propaganda industry that she commands with the vile president that she serves, abetted by Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh, 0.88

00:10:32.000 And Breitbart and Newsbusters and Judicial Watch and all the rest of them have blood on their hands for the incitements that they have made that have triggered and radicalized these crazy people.

00:10:49.000 It is deliberate and... So we've talked about radicalization, right?

00:10:52.000 We've talked about radicalization and the left keeps saying it's radicalization of rhetoric on the part of people on the right.

00:10:58.000 That has led to this increase in hate crimes.

00:11:00.000 Again, statistically unverified as of yet, because we don't have the FBI statistics for this year.

00:11:04.000 They're only done a little bit later.

00:11:06.000 But beyond that, this idea is that it's only the rhetoric of the right that is to blame.

00:11:09.000 And if you mention the rhetoric of the left, then this is whataboutism.

00:11:12.000 It is whataboutism.

00:11:13.000 There are two ways to radicalize folks, and they're interrelated.

00:11:16.000 One is inflammatory rhetoric.

00:11:19.000 Rhetoric is connected with violence because it's connected with action.

00:11:21.000 Now, that doesn't mean that rhetoric is always incitement to violence.

00:11:24.000 That's an actual legal standard that nothing President Trump has said meets.

00:11:29.000 But, there's no question that rhetoric and violence, or rhetoric and radicalism, these things are related.

00:11:35.000 But, there are two ways in which rhetoric can lead to radicalization.

00:11:39.000 One is radical rhetoric leading to radicalization.

00:11:42.000 The other is gaslighting.

00:11:43.000 And I'm going to explain what I mean by this in just one second.

00:11:46.000 Because I know that there are people who are listening to this show right now, who are watching this show right now, and they are feeling more angry and more radical after having listened to Paul Krugman.

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00:13:13.000 So, Steve Schmidt is a schmuck, okay? 0.98

00:13:16.000 When he says that Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh are to blame for an anti-Semite shooting up a synagogue. 1.00

00:13:20.000 Mark Levin happens to be Jewish, by the way.

00:13:23.000 And then Chris Hayes in that same clip comes back and says, well, yeah, there used to be all these Republicans who used to condemn bad rhetoric like Mitt Romney and Ben Shapiro.

00:13:29.000 It's like these people haven't listened for five minutes to my show in which I condemn bad rhetoric on all sides on a routine basis, like legitimately every day.

00:13:37.000 Every day.

00:13:37.000 But.

00:13:39.000 There's a narrative that's being driven here by Don Lemon, a guy who defended Antifa.

00:13:43.000 That only one side of the aisle is responsible, and if you mention the other side of the aisle, this is because you're being dishonest.

00:13:49.000 This is gaslighting.

00:13:50.000 So a lot of President Trump's critics have, in some cases rightly, suggested that President Trump gaslights his opponents.

00:13:56.000 Though what he does is he says something that is false.

00:13:59.000 People say that it's false.

00:14:00.000 He says, I never said that.

00:14:01.000 That's not what I said.

00:14:02.000 What I said is something completely different.

00:14:03.000 Who are you going to believe? 0.94

00:14:05.000 You or your own lying eyes? 0.79

00:14:06.000 Okay, the left is doing that right now.

00:14:08.000 What the left is doing is engaging in inflammatory rhetoric.

00:14:11.000 They are claiming that Republicans across the country are responsible for an anti-Semitic slaying at a synagogue, are responsible for a nut job, a whack job in Florida sending pipe bombs to Democratic officials.

00:14:22.000 And then they say, who, us?

00:14:23.000 We're radicalizing people?

00:14:24.000 No, how dare you?

00:14:26.000 How dare you?

00:14:26.000 We're just here calling it like we see it.

00:14:29.000 We're just here being honest about the situation that we face.

00:14:33.000 And at the same time saying, well, no, no, Democrats have never engaged in violence.

00:14:37.000 It's not just the congressional baseball shooting, folks.

00:14:40.000 Within the past few years, we've seen riots in Ferguson, Missouri.

00:14:42.000 We saw riots in Baltimore, Maryland.

00:14:44.000 We saw riots in Charlotte, North Carolina.

00:14:47.000 All of those riots were pushed for, were inspired, were justified by a number of Democratic officials basically saying that the cause that was being rioted about was a just cause.

00:14:59.000 When five police officers were shot to death in Dallas a couple of years ago, a few years ago, President Obama had said a lot of things against the police just before that.

00:15:08.000 Obama wasn't responsible for the shooting. 0.96

00:15:10.000 But if we're gonna talk about a radical political environment that oft times is involved with raising the temperature so that violence breaks out, to ignore all of this is just ignorant. 0.99

00:15:20.000 And not only ignorant, it's a deliberate attempt to drive you nuts. 0.99

00:15:24.000 It's a deliberate attempt to raise the temperature. 0.99

00:15:27.000 And that is unsustainable.

00:15:29.000 It's unsustainable.

00:15:31.000 When Representative Maxine Waters is saying that President Trump should take responsibility for the bomb threats, the same Maxine Waters who called the LA riots an uprising and called for Republican public officials to be confronted in public places, when Julia Jaffe of GQ is blaming President Trump for his extreme rhetoric and then goes on CNN and says that Trump radicalizes more people than ISIS, when Vice President Joe Biden says that Americans should vote for politicians out of character, the same Joe Biden who said that Mitt Romney was going to re-enslave black folks in the United States, of course we feel like we're being gaslit.

00:16:02.000 I have some more thoughts on this in just a second.

00:16:05.000 Of course we feel like we're being gaslit, because we are being gaslit.

00:16:08.000 Okay, the Democrats have suggested that they are responsible for none of what has happened.

00:16:12.000 President Trump is the beginning of time.

00:16:14.000 With President Trump, the universe burst into being, suddenly.

00:16:17.000 The Big Bang of politics occurred, and suddenly time began flowing forward.

00:16:21.000 Before, there was no such thing as time.

00:16:23.000 Then, President Trump sprung on the scene, and suddenly he was the creator, lord, and master of all bad rhetoric in the United States.

00:16:33.000 I will condemn President Trump when I believe that he has used inflammatory rhetoric.

00:16:36.000 I will condemn other hosts when I think that they are using inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerating their case or making things up.

00:16:41.000 I do it every single day on the program.

00:16:43.000 But I'm not going to sit by and pretend that the left is not responsible for at least an equal amount of this sort of rhetoric.

00:16:50.000 I'm not going to pretend that anti-Semitism among white supremacists

00:16:54.000 is somehow a massively greater threat to Jews across the world and in the United States than the Democratic Party's full embrace of radical anti-Semites like Linda Sarsour.

00:17:07.000 That's the mainstream Democratic Party doing that.

00:17:13.000 It's a mark of both political immaturity and deep philosophical shallowness to refuse to look in the mirror.

00:17:23.000 And Democrats right now are refusing to look in the mirror.

00:17:25.000 There are Republicans who for years have been refusing to look in the mirror.

00:17:29.000 I've been a big advocate of everybody ought to look in the mirror, and it's all of our responsibilities to take the temperature down.

00:17:33.000 That's something we actually ought to be doing.

00:17:35.000 But Democrats aren't interested in doing that. 0.98

00:17:37.000 They're interested in raising the temperature. 0.69

00:17:38.000 Does Paul Krugman think the temperature is raised or lowered when he suggests that Republicans are all a bunch of evil people who don't care whether folks get shot at a synagogue?

00:17:47.000 Does Don Lemon think he's making the country more or less polarized, more or less radicalized, when he suggests that President Trump and Republicans are responsible for terror attacks?

00:17:57.000 Do they think that they're making things better?

00:17:59.000 Of course they don't think they're making things better.

00:18:01.000 And if folks on CNN can accuse Fox News hosts of dialing for ratings, then CNN is doing exactly the same thing with its own base.

00:18:09.000 I'm amused, amused, by Democrats and CNN hosts who suggest, while Republicans are engaged in conspiratorial thinking, we never engage in conspiratorial thinking.

00:18:18.000 Really?

00:18:18.000 I've been alive for the past 20 years.

00:18:20.000 I'm old enough to remember when you suggested that Halliburton was behind the Iraq war, when you suggested that George W. Bush lied specifically to get American soldiers killed because Iraq was a war for oil.

00:18:30.000 I'm old enough to remember when you suggested, without any evidence whatsoever, that Donald Trump actively coordinated with the Russian government to skew the results of this election.

00:18:39.000 I've been here the whole time, and you have too.

00:18:42.000 Bad rhetoric has been a part of American politics for a very long time.

00:18:47.000 It has ratcheted up in recent years.

00:18:48.000 It did not start with President Trump.

00:18:50.000 President Trump exacerbates it because President Trump has never lowered the temperature on anything in his life.

00:18:55.000 But that does not mean that he is the only one who's engaged in this.

00:18:59.000 The media have ramped this thing up to 11.

00:19:00.000 I've been saying this for years.

00:19:02.000 President Trump is at 11.

00:19:03.000 The media are at 11.

00:19:04.000 And then they're surprised when the temperature is overheated.

00:19:09.000 You gaslight people, they get angry.

00:19:10.000 They get radicalized.

00:19:13.000 I've never seen Republicans, conservatives, as angry as I saw them about a month ago during the Brett Kavanaugh saga.

00:19:20.000 That wasn't a result of deplorable Republicanism.

00:19:23.000 That was a result of the Democrats engaging in extreme partisanship and extreme rhetoric. 0.97

00:19:28.000 Failing to recognize what exactly is happening here, calling it whataboutism, when you suggest correctly that bad things are happening on all sides and that everybody is kind of acting like garbage right now, 0.95

00:19:40.000 That is contributing to this environment. 0.70

00:19:42.000 That is making things significantly worse.

00:19:44.000 And I think folks on the left know this, but I think there are some folks on the left who don't care, because they are so ensconced in their partisan worldview that to even acknowledge that folks on their own side are engaged in bad behavior would be to lend credence to the other side.

00:19:57.000 And when it comes to defeating Trump, everything is on the table, up to and including lying about the other side, and more importantly, lying about your own side.

00:20:04.000 And the mark of a good person, and the mark of a good political movement, is the capacity to look at yourself, recognize where you're flawed, and try to become better.

00:20:12.000 All the people in your life that you know and that you like, when you make a critique of them, their first reaction, and your first reaction too, their first reaction is, okay, maybe I should think about that.

00:20:23.000 Maybe I should think about that, right?

00:20:24.000 When I'm criticized, my first reaction generally is, maybe I did do something wrong.

00:20:29.000 And sometimes I did do something wrong.

00:20:31.000 And I have to change.

00:20:32.000 But nobody seems to want to do any sort of self-reflection because we're in the middle of bashing each other across the skull with bricks as hard as we can, and then suggesting that we are innocent in this brick fight.

00:20:42.000 That's not the way that any of this works.

00:20:45.000 Well, in just a second, I want to talk about the latest from Pittsburgh.

00:20:49.000 President Trump visited Pittsburgh.

00:20:51.000 What was the fallout from that?

00:20:52.000 Plus, we're going to talk about white privilege.

00:20:54.000 We're going to talk about the Kanye West story.

00:20:58.000 There's a lot of stuff coming up.

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00:22:05.000 Okay, so, as all of this breaks out, we could be having a moment of unity.

00:22:09.000 We could.

00:22:10.000 Instead, we won't.

00:22:11.000 We could be having a moment when we all say something terrible just happened.

00:22:15.000 What can we do to fight anti-Semitism?

00:22:17.000 Instead, what we're going to do is use every individual evil incident as an excuse to bash each other and club each other.

00:22:24.000 So President Trump goes and he visits Pittsburgh and protesters, of course, show up to protest President Trump.

00:22:29.000 Now, this is not a bunch of people who happen to be

00:22:33.000 You know, philo-semitic, wonderful, pro-Jewish people who are just angry at President Trump for his failure to sufficiently condemn the alt-right in 2015.

00:22:41.000 It turns out that all of these protesters are radically left, generally anti-Israel protesters, who are out there protesting President Trump.

00:22:50.000 Shocker.

00:22:50.000 But the media is going to cover this as though this is a referendum on President Trump's rhetoric, when in fact it's just a bunch of people who don't like Trump and they're using this as an opportunity to club Trump.

00:22:58.000 And they've been doing this for a while now.

00:23:00.000 The media malfeasance, even on Pittsburgh, has been truly astonishing.

00:23:05.000 The story that I talked about a couple of days ago, in which the media suggested that Jewish leaders didn't want Trump to come to Pittsburgh,

00:23:14.000 And then they quoted a group called Bend the Arc and refused to acknowledge that that was a group run by Alexander Soros, George Soros' son, that's stated mission is to stop Trump.

00:23:24.000 That's media malfeasance.

00:23:26.000 The media... I mean, another example of media malfeasance on the Pittsburgh issue.

00:23:30.000 So, the chief rabbi of Israel is Rabbi David Lau.

00:23:34.000 So, Rabbi Lau, there's a lot of controversy in Israel over whether the conservative and the reform movements in Israel ought to be accepted by the rabbinate.

00:23:41.000 My personal opinion is no, because they're not halachic, right? 1.00

00:23:46.000 They don't work according to Jewish law.

00:23:47.000 There's a good argument to be made whether or not there actually ought to be a rabbinate in Israel, whether there ought to be, like, an official religious rabbinate in Israel, but

00:23:55.000 Put that aside, that controversy has existed.

00:23:58.000 In the aftermath of the shooting, there was a story that went out at the Washington Post and a bunch of other leftist outlets, trying to suggest that David Lau refused to acknowledge that the shooting happened at a synagogue.

00:24:07.000 They suggested that Rabbi Lau had said that the shooting did not happen at a synagogue, it happened at a place of significant Jewish character.

00:24:13.000 That was a lie.

00:24:14.000 If you go back and you read David Lau's comments in Hebrew, he calls it specifically a Beit Knesset, which is to say, a place where people pray, right, which is a synagogue.

00:24:23.000 And the media completely misreported it because they have an agenda which is to even split the Jewish community between the Orthodox and the non-Orthodox in the middle of an anti-Semitic shooting.

00:24:31.000 In any case, these protesters gathered for Trump and watch the media coverage.

00:24:34.000 It's pretty astonishing.

00:24:35.000 That sadness, that absolute shock at what has happened has turned into anger with news of the president's visit.

00:24:42.000 There are several hundred people here at this protest getting ready to march just as the president

00:24:49.000 We're good to go.

00:25:03.000 Okay, he's unwelcome in this neighborhood.

00:25:04.000 And then you look at the video, and there are people wearing SEIU jackets, and carrying ACLU handmade, not handmade, printed out placards.

00:25:13.000 Okay, the idea that all of these people are just grassroots folks who are showing up with no agenda, other than they're just very upset about President Trump and his feelings about anti-Semitism, it's just nonsense.

00:25:24.000 But that's not the way the media cover all of this.

00:25:26.000 And then the media, of course, decided they were going to cover, in great specificity, a family of one of the synagogue shooting victims rejecting a Trump meeting, saying that he was blaming the community.

00:25:37.000 They neglected, of course, to mention that one of the people who was shot and survived was, in fact, a Trump voter, and that there were other Trump people, fans of Trump.

00:25:45.000 Trump's a polarizing guy.

00:25:47.000 This is not any great shock.

00:25:49.000 I mean, we've all known this for a while, but the media have decided to play this up.

00:25:52.000 And the Democrats have decided to play this up, too, for political purposes.

00:25:55.000 So President Trump wanted to do a unity rally in Pittsburgh.

00:25:57.000 He wanted the mayor to come.

00:25:58.000 He wanted Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to come.

00:26:00.000 They all turned him down.

00:26:01.000 They all turned him down.

00:26:02.000 Why would they turn him down?

00:26:04.000 Well, specifically for political purposes.

00:26:06.000 And let's be real about this.

00:26:07.000 This is not over outrage and associations with anti-Semites.

00:26:10.000 If it were, they wouldn't be running Keith Ellison for the head of the DNC.

00:26:13.000 This is specifically about, they don't like Trump, and this is a club they can wield against Trump.

00:26:17.000 That's really cynical.

00:26:18.000 Dividing Americans even further on the basis of this stuff is cynical. 1.00

00:26:21.000 Now, with that said, does President Trump have an unfortunate tendency of putting his foot so far down his mouth that it goes through his colon, out his ass, and then back into his mouth again, creating an Ouroboros of stupidity? 1.00

00:26:31.000 You bet he does. 1.00

00:26:32.000 So President Trump tweeted this out after visiting Pittsburgh. 0.96

00:26:35.000 I mean, it's just ridiculous. 0.90

00:26:36.000 He tweeted out, 0.57

00:26:54.000 Okay, so, it is true, as I say, that the media have miscovered this story from beginning to end.

00:26:59.000 It is also true that when you go and visit the site of a mass anti-Semitic shooting, the worst in American history, the key central part of the story is not how you were treated.

00:27:10.000 That's not really the important part of the story.

00:27:13.000 It's not.

00:27:14.000 And it looks like grandstanding.

00:27:15.000 Now, Mr. President, please don't do that.

00:27:18.000 I always say, please don't do it.

00:27:19.000 He's not going to listen, but this, of course, is not helping in any serious way.

00:27:24.000 Okay.

00:27:25.000 Well, meanwhile, there are a couple of other stories that we must comment on here.

00:27:29.000 So as I said long ago, live by the Kanye, die by the Kanye.

00:27:32.000 So Kanye West became beloved of the right for the last six, seven months after he started making noises about how he loves President Trump.

00:27:39.000 And he was wearing a MAGA hat and he was saying that he was thinking freely, all of which is totally fine.

00:27:43.000 But as I tweeted, as soon as he started doing this,

00:27:46.000 Live by the Kanye, die by the Kanye.

00:27:48.000 Kanye West is not a stable figure.

00:27:50.000 He is not somebody who decided to become an ideological conservative after reading the combined works of William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk.

00:27:58.000 Kanye West is a guy who sort of says whatever is on his mind that day.

00:28:03.000 Well, that resulted in a reversal on Twitter yesterday.

00:28:05.000 He has not rejected President Trump or ripped into President Trump, but he started tweeting out about sort of his political leanings now.

00:28:12.000 He said, And then he continued, he said,

00:28:22.000 I support those who risk their lives to serve and protect us, and I support holding people who misuse their power accountable.

00:28:27.000 I believe in love and compassion for people seeking asylum and parents who are fighting to protect their children from violence and war.

00:28:33.000 Okay, all of this sounds like a stump speech, and then he gets to the point.

00:28:36.000 He finally tweets out, I introduced Candace Owens, this would be Candace Owens, the black conservative who was associated with Kanye's move to the right. 0.96

00:28:45.000 I introduced Candace to the person who made the logo, and they didn't want their name on it, so she used mine.

00:28:50.000 I never wanted any association with Blexit.

00:28:52.000 I have nothing to do with it.

00:28:53.000 So, Blexit is a movement that Candace has been pushing and Charlie Kirk has been pushing to get black folks to leave the Democratic Party. 0.79

00:29:01.000 And in announcing Blexit, Candace suggested that the logo for Blexit was designed by Kanye West.

00:29:08.000 He obviously does not feel that way and he's upset about it.

00:29:11.000 And he tweeted out, my eyes are now wide open and now realize I've been used to spread messages I don't believe in.

00:29:17.000 I am distancing myself from politics and completely focusing on being creative.

00:29:21.000 So, ouch.

00:29:23.000 And also, ouch.

00:29:25.000 So, that's not good.

00:29:26.000 But when you bet on people who are not the most stable people in the world, and you pretend that they are deeply stable, this is a not unpredictable consequence.

00:29:34.000 I think it is fair to say that is not the least predictable consequence that has ever happened in human history.

00:29:39.000 Fortunately, that was not the dumbest story of the day. 0.99

00:29:41.000 The dumbest story of the day came courtesy of a guy named Jacob Wool. 0.98

00:29:45.000 I'm going to explain this story to you in just a second, because it is too wild and ridiculous for me to forego on this of all days. 0.99

00:29:53.000 We'll discuss that in just a second.

00:29:55.000 Now, this is the kind of story where, to really enjoy it properly, you're going to want a drink in your hand.

00:30:01.000 You're gonna want a glass of wine, a beer, a spirit, some liquor.

00:30:05.000 You're gonna want some of that in your hand.

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00:30:40.000 For a limited time, you can get $15 off when you download the Saucy app and enter promo code Ben.

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00:31:09.000 Okay, I want to get into this Jacob Wohl story.

00:31:11.000 Also, Dr. Phil.

00:31:13.000 We're gonna get into that in just a second, but...

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00:32:59.000 So how crazy are our politics?

00:33:00.000 Well, Kanye West was the second craziest story of the day.

00:33:03.000 The first craziest story of the day yesterday was this crazy story about folks who are trying to sink Robert Mueller.

00:33:09.000 They're very upset with Robert Mueller and they believe that Robert Mueller is somehow

00:33:15.000 Deeply compromised.

00:33:16.000 How's he compromised?

00:33:17.000 Well, he's compromised because he's investigating Trump and therefore there was a scheme to find women and pay them to lie about being sexually assaulted by Robert Mueller.

00:33:26.000 I kid you not.

00:33:27.000 According to the Daily Beast, the scheme became public on Tuesday when Robert Mueller's staff formally asked the FBI to launch an investigation into the matter.

00:33:34.000 But for weeks, it has been simmering below the surface with numerous reporters having been tipped off by a woman who claims she'd been approached with promises of cash.

00:33:41.000 At the center of the scheme is publicity-hungry Republican lobbyist Jack Berkman, who has repeatedly dabbled in Internet conspiracy theories in the past, including promoting the idea that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed by deep state government operatives.

00:33:54.000 Berkman denied involvement in any attempts to pay people to frame or accuse Mueller, but he also claims he has witnesses who are going to expose the special counsel as a sexual harasser.

00:34:03.000 He scheduled a Thursday press conference at a Holiday Inn

00:34:06.000 In Northern Virginia, to introduce his first accuser, number one, if you ever are attempting to launch, in credible fashion, some sort of accusation, you should upgrade from the Holiday Inn.

00:34:16.000 Just a recommendation.

00:34:17.000 It's like, here we are, in the parking lot of Motel 6.

00:34:21.000 The light's always left on for you.

00:34:22.000 I mean, good luck with this. 0.99

00:34:24.000 That's not the part that, so Bergman says that we're gonna prove that Robert Mueller is a drunk and a sexual abuser. 1.00

00:34:30.000 Yeah, sure you are. 0.98

00:34:31.000 But that's not the part that's the best.

00:34:33.000 The best part is that Berkman apparently hired an intel agency that was supposed to investigate

00:34:46.000 Robert Mueller.

00:34:47.000 In his efforts to dig up dirt on Mueller, Berkman appears to have enlisted outside help.

00:34:50.000 Jacob Wohl is a right-wing Twitter personality who's tweeted inane things for years about MAGA MAGA President Trump.

00:34:57.000 He's a self-described friend of Berkman.

00:34:58.000 He said Berkman had told him he'd hired Matthew Cohen, who claims to be a managing partner at the private investigations company Surefire Intelligence, to assist with the investigation.

00:35:08.000 Only one problem.

00:35:09.000 Who is Matthew Cohen?

00:35:11.000 Who is Matthew Cohen?

00:35:13.000 Matthew Cohen, as it turns out, is Jacob Wohl.

00:35:16.000 Okay, and Jacob Wohl apparently set up a bunch of fake LinkedIn accounts for people who worked for Surefire Intelligence by grabbing all these just random pictures from the internet and using them as employee pictures for his fake business.

00:35:33.000 So for example, he said that an investigator was named Donald Treehorn.

00:35:38.000 Okay, that is a stock photograph of an actor.

00:35:41.000 And he just used that.

00:35:42.000 And then, the Tel Aviv station chief, he called Talia Yaniv.

00:35:49.000 Only one problem.

00:35:50.000 That's a picture of Bar Refaeli, the Israeli supermodel.

00:35:54.000 So he went through all this trouble.

00:35:56.000 I feel bad for him a little bit.

00:35:57.000 He went through all this trouble to create a fake business to hide what he was doing from the government.

00:36:02.000 And then he went and got pictures of actors and used them as his fake employees.

00:36:08.000 The financial investigator at Surefire Intelligence is supposedly a guy named Simon Frick.

00:36:12.000 Who is Simon Frick?

00:36:13.000 It's a picture of Christoph Waltz.

00:36:15.000 It's a pretty solid hire there.

00:36:18.000 Somehow got the guy from Inglourious Basterds to be the financial investigator at Surefire Intelligence.

00:36:22.000 I mean, Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds does have a good record of tracking people down.

00:36:28.000 But, I mean, my goodness.

00:36:30.000 Apparently, the deputy director of operations for Surefire Intelligence is Dr. Mike Harding of the First Baptist Church of Troy, Michigan.

00:36:36.000 So, well done.

00:36:38.000 The best part of this is that Wool was asked about all of this.

00:36:42.000 And he denied all of it.

00:36:44.000 And then, it turns out that he registered the website

00:36:49.000 Under the name- under the phone number of his mother.

00:36:52.000 This is what the Daily Beast is saying.

00:36:53.000 So, suffice it to say, our politics is too crazy.

00:36:55.000 People have been driven out of their minds.

00:36:58.000 Surefire's website domain data lists an email address bearing Wohl's name and that of a legally suspect financial firm he held, Nex Management.

00:37:05.000 Surefire's website also contains images uploaded to the same Google Cloud account.

00:37:09.000 Wohl, who hinted at the Mueller investigations on Monday night, denied any involvement in or knowledge of Surefire.

00:37:16.000 He said he works for an influence marketing company in LA.

00:37:19.000 Yeah, turns out that, um, not so much.

00:37:22.000 So, yes, things are crazy out there, and everybody needs to calm down.

00:37:27.000 Now, that did not end the crazy yesterday.

00:37:29.000 There was a lot of crazy yesterday.

00:37:30.000 My favorite bit of crazy, actually, was not even that.

00:37:33.000 It came courtesy of Joe Donnelly.

00:37:34.000 This was late-breaking crazy last night.

00:37:35.000 So, Joe Donnelly is the Democratic Senate candidate in Indiana.

00:37:39.000 He's the current senator in Indiana, and he was in a debate, and he started trying to describe his staff.

00:37:46.000 Um, it didn't go well.

00:37:48.000 Here's what Joe Donnelly had to say.

00:37:50.000 Our State Director is Indian American, but he does an amazing job.

00:37:57.000 Our Director of All Constituent Services, she's African American, but she does an even more incredible job than you could ever imagine.

00:38:07.000 But?

00:38:08.000 I wasn't aware that that's it.

00:38:11.000 It finally hit Colton back here exactly what that means.

00:38:14.000 She's an Indian American, but she does an incredible job. 0.99

00:38:16.000 You know, like, unlike the other Indian Americans. 1.00

00:38:19.000 My state director of grassroots operations is black, but

00:38:22.000 She does an incredible job.

00:38:23.000 Now, imagine that we're Republican.

00:38:25.000 Would that headline ever stop?

00:38:26.000 No, the headline would never stop.

00:38:28.000 Ever, ever, ever, ever. 1.00

00:38:29.000 But that's the way that this works now, is that Democrats can say the most absurd, on-their-face, stupid, ridiculous things and get away with it. 1.00

00:38:36.000 But you have to enjoy... I mean, that is a full-on Michael Scott fail right there. 1.00

00:38:40.000 That is the office-style Michael Scott failure.

00:38:42.000 So, well done.

00:38:43.000 Well done, Democrats.

00:38:45.000 Just amazing stuff.

00:38:46.000 Okay, so in just a second, I want to talk to you about a segment on Dr. Phil that really suggests one of the big problems in the country right now.

00:38:53.000 So, I don't know much about Dr. Phil.

00:38:55.000 I don't watch a lot of daytime TV.

00:38:57.000 I know a lot of people love Dr. Phil.

00:38:58.000 He did a segment in which he had on Michael Eric Dyson and a bunch of other sort of social activists, particularly in the black community, and he did what he called a study.

00:39:07.000 What was this study?

00:39:07.000 Well, he got a bunch of people of different races and sexes and sexual orientations to line up, a bunch of young people.

00:39:14.000 In a line.

00:39:15.000 And then he had somebody ask them some 30 questions about privilege in their life.

00:39:21.000 And then he had you take a step forward for everything that you, every privilege you had, and take a step back for every privilege you didn't have.

00:39:29.000 So, it was stuff like, if both your, if one of your parents works nights to support the family, take a step back.

00:39:36.000 If you've ever been sexually harassed, take a step back.

00:39:39.000 And by the end of that little exercise, some of the young people were pretty far forward on the stage and some of the young people were pretty far backward on the stage.

00:39:48.000 And here's how some of those young people responded to learning about their privilege.

00:39:53.000 Thank you all for participating today.

00:39:57.000 I'm very aware of my white privilege, but it really showed through when I looked behind me and most of the people in the very back were people of color. 0.95

00:40:06.000 I was in the back.

00:40:09.000 I'm not ever in the back of anything that I do.

00:40:12.000 Being in the front made me feel uncomfortable.

00:40:14.000 It's an awkward feeling to be up there and know that everyone behind you can look at you, right?

00:40:18.000 But you can't look at them.

00:40:20.000 I landed in the very back of the crowd.

00:40:22.000 I was a bit surprised.

00:40:25.000 I didn't have very much growing up, but I've always thought that there are other people who had less.

00:40:31.000 I didn't know I was going to end up in the front.

00:40:33.000 The way I was raised by the border in Mexico, that I would be less privileged.

00:40:38.000 So it's weird to know that I am actually doing good.

00:40:41.000 I think talking about white privilege in a room full of white people is awkward, but in a room full of different ethnic groups, I think it's necessary.

00:40:49.000 It's a very sensitive topic.

00:40:51.000 You don't want to offend anyone, but it's true.

00:40:53.000 There are racial and social... Okay, how is any of this useful?

00:40:55.000 So here's the question.

00:40:56.000 Dr. Phil says, ah, this was really interesting.

00:40:59.000 And really, it was really something.

00:41:01.000 I'm glad we did.

00:41:01.000 Well, Dr. Phil.

00:41:04.000 It's not.

00:41:04.000 It's actually a bad thing.

00:41:05.000 The reason it's a bad thing is you can listen to what some of these young people are saying.

00:41:08.000 So there's a woman who is standing in the back, and she appears to be of maybe Filipino extraction, and she says, you know, it never occurred to me that I had it rough, right? 0.95

00:41:17.000 It always occurred to me that there were people who were worse off than I was.

00:41:21.000 Why is that a bad attitude?

00:41:23.000 That's a really good attitude and being awakened to the fact that you have it really rough and being thought of thinking of yourself as a victim is a really easy path to slide into resentment and anger and rage at other people who quote-unquote have it better.

00:41:38.000 There's a young black woman there who says, you know, I've never stood in the back in my life.

00:41:43.000 That's the right attitude.

00:41:44.000 The right attitude is you don't have to stand in the back just because of dint of birth or problems that you had growing up.

00:41:50.000 In America, you can get ahead.

00:41:51.000 But the entire privilege discussion is supposed to not awaken people to the fact that there is inequality in the United States in terms of where we start.

00:41:59.000 We all know that. 1.00

00:42:00.000 You have to be an idiot not to know that. 1.00

00:42:02.000 But it's supposed to instead instill in people who were better off growing up that they somehow had an unfair advantage over others and to instill in people who are worse off growing up that the people in the front screwed them. 1.00

00:42:15.000 Right?

00:42:16.000 To even set it up in this sort of physical dichotomy where the people who are quote-unquote more privileged are ahead and the people who are less privileged are behind is to suggest a sort of back-of-the-bus mentality.

00:42:24.000 Oh, you've been treated by America wrongly.

00:42:27.000 Somebody has victimized you in some way.

00:42:28.000 Well, virtually none of the questions that were asked in that segment.

00:42:33.000 were about members of the group victimizing each other.

00:42:36.000 It was never, if you've been victimized by somebody in this group, take a step back.

00:42:40.000 If you've victimized somebody in this group, take a step forward.

00:42:42.000 None of those questions were about that.

00:42:44.000 If it were about that, then we could talk about whether inequality and inequity are linked.

00:42:47.000 But it wasn't about that.

00:42:48.000 It was about, have you had it rougher or have you had it better?

00:42:51.000 Why do you need full discussions of who's had it?

00:42:53.000 There's no more boring discussion in the world than who's had it rougher or who's had it better.

00:42:59.000 And I don't just mean boring in terms of, like, actually not interesting.

00:43:04.000 I mean that it is useless and counterproductive.

00:43:07.000 And there's a famous joke that says, there's nobody more boring than a person who you ask them how they are and they actually tell you.

00:43:12.000 Okay, the same thing is true when it comes to this sort of stuff.

00:43:15.000 Because in a country that is free, where you started is not where you end up.

00:43:19.000 And re-inculcating the idea that where you started is where you end up is a way of ensuring that people don't do all that they can in order to better themselves.

00:43:28.000 Thinking of yourself as a victim is the first path toward irrelevance and toward destroying your own life. 0.98

00:43:33.000 It's really, really dumb stuff. 1.00

00:43:35.000 It's really dumb stuff. 0.99

00:43:36.000 Well, in just a second, I want to talk about specifically, you know, all of the kind of attempts to paint Americans as victims. 0.98

00:43:43.000 There's a study out today.

00:43:44.000 Here's an example.

00:43:45.000 There's a study out today that is from USA Today.

00:43:50.000 And what it says is that 62% of jobs don't support middle class life after accounting for the cost of living.

00:43:55.000 Well, that sounds terrible, doesn't it?

00:43:57.000 It sounds like 62% of Americans are basically on the verge of poverty.

00:44:02.000 Well, that's not what the study says.

00:44:03.000 So here's what the study says.

00:44:04.000 Shocker.

00:44:27.000 Now, here's the problem.

00:44:28.000 It says, a slight majority of Americans, 52%, do live in middle-class households, according to a recent annual report by the Pew Research Center.

00:44:38.000 Another 20% or so live in upper-income households.

00:44:42.000 In other words, 72% of Americans are middle-income or better, are middle-class or better.

00:44:46.000 So how does that square with 62% of middle-class jobs don't actually lead to middle-class lifestyles?

00:44:52.000 It says,

00:44:52.000 That's because they're juggling multiple jobs or relying on investments and inheritance or other household members who may have higher paying jobs.

00:45:00.000 Right.

00:45:01.000 So what?

00:45:02.000 Most households in the United States have two people working.

00:45:05.000 Most households in the United States have a person who may be working a couple of jobs.

00:45:09.000 My entire life growing up, both my parents worked.

00:45:12.000 My dad was home more than my mom.

00:45:14.000 And my dad worked multiple jobs at a time when he was young with my mom. 0.76

00:45:18.000 It's so foolish to suggest that people are starving in New York City while earning $50,000 a year.

00:45:25.000 If you really believe that you're starving living in New York City, maybe the solution to that is to get rid of rent control, thereby lowering the rents, not to start saying that capitalism is responsible for all of these failures. 0.63

00:45:37.000 It's just... The twisting of statistics is pretty astonishing.

00:45:41.000 It says the rankings highlight some vivid contrast.

00:45:44.000 A factory machinist in Cedar Rapids, Iowa earns an average of $46,000 a year, more than enough to meet the $40,000 threshold for a middle-class job in the area.

00:45:52.000 A similar machinist makes more, $57,000 in San Francisco, but that's far short of the $82,000 minimum for a middle-class job in that area, according to the report.

00:46:00.000 Why do you think that is?

00:46:02.000 That's because San Francisco is governed like a liberal area with heavy rent control.

00:46:05.000 So the problem here is not lack of jobs or lack of opportunity.

00:46:09.000 The problem is that there are a bunch of regulations that make life more expensive in leftist areas.

00:46:14.000 And maybe if you're a machinist, you're better off living in Idaho or Iowa.

00:46:18.000 Maybe you're better off moving to Cedar Rapids than living in San Francisco.

00:46:21.000 Is that a possibility?

00:46:23.000 But we can never contemplate that possibility.

00:46:25.000 Everybody's entitled to a job wherever they want, and also entitled to a rent-controlled apartment that raises rents for everybody else.

00:46:32.000 So, just genius stuff.

00:46:34.000 Now, speaking of fun with statistics, I do want to point one thing out because I've seen this a little bit.

00:46:38.000 Maybe I'll say this for things I hate.

00:46:40.000 So we'll do a quick thing I like and then we'll do a quick thing that I hate.

00:46:42.000 So, things that I like.

00:46:44.000 So this week, because I did some Jewish music yesterday, I decided that the rest of the week I'm going to pick some of my favorite nigunim. 0.92

00:46:53.000 Nigunim are kind of Jewish tunes.

00:46:55.000 This one was actually written and performed by a friend of mine from back in high school.

00:47:03.000 And it's quite good.

00:47:05.000 What's fun about this, actually... His name is Eitan Katz.

00:47:08.000 Eitan Katz was in my high school class.

00:47:10.000 And if you go back to one of his very first albums, you can actually hear me playing violin in the background on the album.

00:47:16.000 He just needed a violinist for, like, a cut or two.

00:47:18.000 And so I came in and played the violin in the background a little bit.

00:47:20.000 Here is Eitan singing.

00:47:23.000 This phrase is... It's all about...

00:47:31.000 Obviously, I want to find the exact translation.

00:47:34.000 It says, Act for your sake, our God, and not from ours. 0.82

00:47:37.000 Behold our spiritual position, destitute and empty-handed.

00:47:39.000 The soul is yours, the body is your handiwork.

00:47:41.000 Take pity on your labor.

00:47:42.000 This is something the Jews say on Yom Kippur night in Slicho, which are sort of these special prayers that we say during this period.

00:47:48.000 So, here's Eitan singing it.

00:47:56.000 We're good to go.

00:48:02.000 I think?

00:48:08.000 I think?

00:48:13.000 I think?

00:48:23.000 We're good to go.

00:48:28.000 I think?

00:48:31.000 We're good to go.

00:48:45.000 We're good to go.

00:49:13.000 Let's go!

00:49:19.000 So, it's really nice stuff.

00:49:20.000 Eitan's a really talented guy.

00:49:22.000 I got the words wrong at the very beginning.

00:49:24.000 In Hebrew, it's... So, for those who speak Hebrew, I want to make sure.

00:49:33.000 Every time I screw up the Hebrew, believe it or not, there are people who actually email me, and they say, you screwed it up.

00:49:38.000 So, a couple of days ago, I got a bunch of emails from Orthodox Jews saying I'd screwed it up. 1.00

00:49:41.000 So, I try to correct myself when I do.

00:49:44.000 Okay, so...

00:49:45.000 That's the thing I like for today.

00:49:47.000 Yeah, spirituality.

00:49:48.000 It's kind of a nice thing from time to time.

00:49:50.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.

00:49:56.000 So there's a statistic that's been cited routinely by the mainstream media suggesting that Jews are no longer safe in the United States, and they cite a study put out by the Anti-Defamation League, which suggests that there has been a 57% increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017.

00:50:11.000 That figure was reported in NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post,

00:50:14.000 We're good to go.

00:50:33.000 So, this ADL study counts incidents that have been reported to the ADL by the media, law enforcement, and the public, and the ADL openly acknowledges that some of the increase in documented incidents is not an actual increase, but results from more people reporting incidents to the ADL than ever before.

00:50:49.000 Also, the report doesn't just count certifiable anti-Semitic incidents, but any incident that results in Jews perceiving themselves as being victimized due to their Jewish identity.

00:50:58.000 So, that methodological tick includes 163 bomb threats made to the JCC, even though that perpetrator was not motivated by anti-Semitism.

00:51:09.000 Right?

00:51:09.000 2017 saw an elevated kind of response from the Jewish community to perceived threat, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the number of actual violent incidents on record has increased.

00:51:17.000 In fact, the ADL study shows a 47% decrease in physical assaults against Jews in the United States from 37 to 19.

00:51:23.000 So it shows a 57% increase in incidents overall, but a 47% decrease in physical assaults in 2017.

00:51:33.000 Which is not consistent with all of the other data.

00:51:36.000 So this is...

00:51:38.000 You know, let's get the data right.

00:51:39.000 Do I think that there's increased anti-Semitism?

00:51:41.000 I'm seeing increased anti-Semitism on my Twitter feed and in my own life.

00:51:45.000 But do I think that that is necessarily statistically representative?

00:51:48.000 No.

00:51:48.000 And even if it is, we're going to need better data than the ones that are being cited by the media and all this.

00:51:53.000 OK, we have time for a quick Federalist paper here.

00:51:55.000 So every week we go through a Federalist paper.

00:51:57.000 We're all the way up to Federalist 49.

00:51:58.000 This one's by James Madison.

00:52:00.000 In this one, Madison argues specifically with Thomas Jefferson.

00:52:03.000 So Jefferson had proposed that

00:52:05.000 The new constitution allowed that whenever two of the three branches of government concur, a convention could be called for altering the constitution.

00:52:12.000 So, the judiciary and the executive don't like what the legislature is doing, so they call for a new constitutional convention.

00:52:19.000 Jefferson was much more of a Democrat than a Republican, not in the modern sense, but in the idea that he liked direct popular control a lot more than some of the other founders.

00:52:27.000 He also likes the idea of constitutional revision on a fairly consistent basis.

00:52:32.000 He argued that Madison says that if you are continually revising the Constitution, that undermines its appeal.

00:52:37.000 It undermines the durability of the system.

00:52:39.000 He writes,

00:52:45.000 In every other nation, the most rational government will not find it a superfluous advantage to have the prejudices of the community on its side.

00:52:51.000 The danger of disturbing the public tranquility by interesting too strongly the public passions is still a more serious objection against a frequent reference of constitutional questions to the decision of the whole society.

00:53:02.000 So basically, for all those people who claim that America is a democracy, it's not.

00:53:05.000 It's a republic.

00:53:06.000 One of the reasons is because the founders were deeply fearful of public passions resulting in bad policy and high rates of turnover in the

00:53:13.000 Consistency of that policy.

00:53:15.000 Madison also argued that the procedure wouldn't actually curb the government because the legislature is more populist than the other two branches.

00:53:21.000 So that means they'd probably win any convention fight.

00:53:23.000 But once again, this cuts to the heart of how American government runs.

00:53:27.000 It was not designed to be a system that quote-unquote gets things done.

00:53:30.000 It was designed to be a system replete with gridlock specifically so that the more

00:53:35.000 Unbridled passions of the public were not the most easily recognized and put into law by our system.

00:53:44.000 The idea is that if we really want to get something done, we can, but we really had better want to get something done.

00:53:48.000 And even then, it can't violate those fundamental rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.

00:53:52.000 Okay, well, we will be back here tomorrow with all the latest.

00:53:55.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:53:55.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:54:00.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.

00:54:06.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:54:10.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:54:12.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Caramina.

00:54:14.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:54:15.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

00:54:18.000 Copyright Ford Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 31, 2018

Ye, Verily Ye | Ep. 650

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