12/21/17 - Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck

Love,

courage, truth, Glenn Beck.

Hey, hey, this is Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck here on the Glenn Beck program.

It is an honor to sit behind the microphone, often imitated, never duplicated Glenn Beck program, the call-in line 888-727-BEC, 888-727B.

And I wake up this morning and I think to myself, where'd everybody go?

Like, really, where is everybody?

Because I was reliably informed that everyone would be dead because of the Republican tax cut.

The Democrats have been saying for a while here that everyone would die.

Now, I have to admit, I didn't take the warning all that seriously.

I mean, they had said that we were all going to die because President Obama pulled out of the Paris Accords.

We had been informed that we were all going to die because of net neutrality repeal.

And then they said that we were all going to die because of the tax reform.

And I thought, that must be crazy.

There's just no way.

I mean, come on, really?

They're going to put some more money back in my pocket?

And we're all going to die because of that?

That seems a little bit extreme.

And then I woke up, and the world was empty.

There was no one on the roads.

Everyone, it appeared, was dead.

Actually, no, it was just like 5.30 L.A.

time.

Everybody's alive.

Everybody's fine.

Nobody is dead.

But the Democrats are protesting nonetheless.

And what's really fascinating is to watch the ideological breakdown with regard to these protests.

Because the Democrats are having a tough time coming up with the rationale for why they are so all-fired angry at this particular tax cut.

Are they angry because of the deficits?

Because Because that's a new one.

The folks on the left angry because of deficits after President Obama doubled the deficit, doubled the national debt rather.

That seems a little bit weird to me.

Are they angry because they think that this is going to screw the middle class?

We keep hearing that.

This is going to hurt the middle class.

Well, if that's the case, if that's the case that it's going to hurt the middle class, they have to explain why it is that pretty much everybody in the middle class gets a tax cut.

and why a series of companies came out yesterday and announced that they were going to give their employees pretty significant Christmas bonuses because of the tax cut.

What does it really all come down to?

Well, Ted Liu, the Democratic congressperson, tweeted something out this morning that I think is really quite telling, really explains what it is that is driving so many of

these talking points from the Democrats.

Here's what he tweeted out, and it shows that there is a moral conflict that undergirds everything here.

He tweeted out, GOP underestimates how people feel when they know others got a better deal.

If Sally gets a tax cut of $380, but others get $200,000, she will be upset.

And wait until Joe finds out he's getting a tax increase for residing in California.

That's why the tax bill is so unpopular.

Human nature.

It's kind of a deep tweet when you think about it.

Not because Ted Lew is saying anything that we didn't know, but because he's admitting that what actually drives democratic policy is a pure violation of the Ten Commandments.

There is a commandment not to covet thy neighbor's property.

What makes you a good person is not looking at your neighbor's stuff and saying, God,

that's my stuff.

How dare he have stuff?

In Jewish law, I'm an Orthodox Jew.

In Jewish law, you're allowed to look at your neighbor's stuff and say, I really wish I had a car like that.

Maybe if I work really hard, one day I will have a car like that.

What you're not allowed to do under Jewish law is look at your neighbor's stuff and say, that's my stuff.

Why does he have stuff and I don't have stuff?

That should be my stuff.

That's a violation of the Ten Commandments.

And yet, the Democrats use that motivation to drive policy.

People on the left use that motivation to drive policy.

They're right, that human nature is rooted in jealousy.

The founders knew that, too.

The difference is that the founding fathers said, you know what?

Why don't we have this set of checks and balances?

Why don't we actually stop each other?

from allowing our jealousy to run roughshod over each other.

Why don't we just prevent that?

Instead, the Democrats say, no, no, no, more of that.

We need more jealousy.

We need to oppose tax cuts because you understand the rich guy getting more of his money back than the poor guy, not in percentage terms, but in absolute terms, that means that the poor guy is going to be jealous.

You see, if the rich guy pays hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes and gets back 10,000 bucks, and the poor guy pays 100 bucks in taxes and gets back 20 bucks, of course the poor guy is going to be jealous.

Now, the rational response, the moral response is, well, if you don't make as much money, you're not going to get as much of a tax cut.

And you don't have a right to somebody else's money just because you're jealous.

But what Lou is expressing is this view that the rich don't deserve to have their money.

So you have to go from point A to point B.

Point A is people are jealous of one another.

And we'll all admit that.

We'll all agree with that.

People are jealous of one another.

There's no question.

We all covered our neighbor's property.

Again, the idea in...

sort of biblical morality and traditional morality is that God commands you to do things because you don't want to do them.

God didn't command you to wake up this morning and breathe because you're going to do that.

God doesn't command you to eat because he knows you're going to do that.

God does command you not to covet other people's property because he knows that you will do that.

He knows that you're going to wake up in the morning and covet other people's property.

And so he says, don't do that.

Makes you a bad person.

Avoid.

But Democrats and people on the left, they go from point A, which is you are jealous, to point B, which is your jealousy deserves to be acted upon.

Your jealousy deserves some sort of government redress.

So now we're not just violating one of the Ten Commandments, the jealousy commandment, we're violating at least two others.

One, we're turning government into God.

We're suggesting that government is some sort of great centralizing power that we should go to for redress of all personal grievances, justified or not.

So we're turning government into our idol.

And we're actually legalizing thievery, right?

It is theft.

If you ran into my house in the middle of the night because you were jealous that I have a thicker wallet than you and you broke into my sock drawer and you just grabbed the cash right out of my wallet, this would make you a thief.

If you vote for people to do that, it doesn't make you any less of a thief.

But Ted Lu thinks that this is a good justification.

And at least he's honest.

I'll give him points for honesty because

it's so funny to watch the Democrats try to spin away from the reality of what Ted Lou says.

What Ted Liu says here is true and it is profound, but Democrats shy away from it because it's a little too honest.

It lets us a little bit too much into the heads of the Democratic policies.

And it's kind of ugly in there.

It's kind of yucky in there.

Instead, we have Democrats tweeting out, really, you know, for a middle-class family, for a poor family, does $80 a month really mean anything?

And people tweeting back at them saying, yeah, it means something.

It means I get to take my kids to dinner once a week.

It means I can take my kids to a movie.

And hell, would I like more money back?

Sure.

But it's better than nothing.

Democrats have been trying to shy away from the implications of Ted Lou's jealousy argument, basically arguing that Republicans are trying to hurt the poor in favor of the rich, or that this thing is rigged for business, and that businesses won't spend the money.

They'll instead take the money and invest in stock buybacks.

That, by the way, is a weird argument coming from Democrats again.

The idea that businesses should not have as much money because they'll invest in stock buybacks.

What do they think drove up the stock market during the Obama years?

If you look at corporate profit lines, corporate profit margins, Obama was bragging about his healthy recovery, his vast recovery.

What was driving that recovery was corporations taking their money and instead of investing it in new technologies and new workers, instead they were taking that money and plowing it back into buying back their own stock.

If that was their actual goal, and in doing so, drove up the stock prices.

And then Obama would go out on the campaign trail and talk about how the stock market was doing great.

So it's weird to hear Democrats complain about corporations using the money to prop up their own stock price when that was largely the Democratic argument for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In the end, it comes down to a basic group belief.

Is your property your own or is your property someone else's?

The only way that Democrats can get from point A, jealousy, to point B, I can take your money, is if they believe it's not really your money in the first place, of course.

They don't believe like the Founding Fathers did.

They don't believe like John Locke did, that what makes property yours is that you mix your labor with the land.

You mix your labor with the property.

You are the one who came up with the way to make the money.

You are the one who participated in that lawful, legal transaction.

You're the one who made somebody's life better and in return they made your life better in a market exchange.

The left doesn't believe that.

They don't believe that government was instituted to protect your right to do that.

They believe that every dollar in your pocket is there through the grace of government.

They believe, as Hobbes did in Leviathan, they believe that absent any sort of government, that life would be nasty, brutish, and short, and that property rights really don't even exist.

They believe in what they call positive law, the idea that government is what institutes rights.

Not that rights pre-exist government, and government is instituted to protect those rights.

Not that you have inherent value as a human being and that your labor therefore belongs to you.

But that your labor really belongs to the government and the government is kind enough to let you keep some of it.

And if the government lets some people keep more than others, even if you pay more in, that means the government is being unfair.

This is what undergirds the entire logic that Democrats were using for years with regard to the Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama notion.

You didn't build that.

In their belief, government built all of it.

Government built that road, and therefore government owns your store that is built next to the road.

Sure, you built the store.

Sure, you could have built your store anywhere else.

And if there were no road, maybe you would have worked with your neighbors to build one.

But in the end, it's government that stands between you and the wolves.

And if it weren't for government, you wouldn't have any rights at all.

That underlying perspective allows jealousy to creep in the back door and then take over the mansion.

And that's what Democrats are pushing here.

And it ain't pretty.

As we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, Chuck Schumer made a very, very big boo-boo and was immediately called out by reality on it.

It's really, really funny.

I've got the audio for you.

I'll play it.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

This is Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn is off for the holidays, earning a well-earned vacation for Glenn.

And it really is a pleasure and an honor to sit behind the microphone for the Glenn Beck program.

Okay, so President Trump was celebrating the passage of the Republican tax reform package.

There's another bill, by the way, that's on the way that's going to fill in the gap with regard to the children's health insurance program.

Democrats have been saying Republicans cut taxes just so that they couldn't pay for children to have health insurance.

That program was created by a Republican in 1995.

And now Republicans are going to continue funding it.

So that's not true.

But

President Trump gets his day in the sun.

This is the only major legislative achievement of his first year.

He's had a lot of other achievements.

And a little bit later in the program, I want to talk about some of those achievements.

I want to give him a grade.

I want to go through what he's done this year that's good, what he's done this year that's bad, how we can have a better year next year.

But President Trump gets his moment in the sun, and he deserves it.

So here's President Trump yesterday explaining that he has now liberated the economy from overreach.

We've liberated the American economy from Washington overreach, cutting 22 regulations for every one new regulation, the most in history by far.

We've cut hundreds and hundreds of regulations allowing people to have their businesses, work their businesses and hire people.

And we still have plenty of regulation.

Don't worry.

We have plenty of regulation.

Regulation is not the worst thing.

Regulation was stifling in our country.

You couldn't do anything.

And then he talked about how it's fun to win, which, of of course, we know that President Trump is very big on the winning and the winning and the winning.

So here he is talking about winning.

Paul Ryan and Mitch, it was a little team.

We just got together and we would work very hard, didn't we?

It seems like it was a lot of fun.

It's always a lot of fun when you win.

If you work hard and lose, that's not acceptable.

Okay, so Trump is big into the winning.

And this is always the way that people who stumped for Trump thought this was going to work, is that Trump was basically going to sit in the White House and Congress would shape legislation and then send it to him and he'd sign it and and he wouldn't know what was in it, but he'd be happy.

And there's some truth to that, right?

There's some truth to that.

That's basically how this tax cut worked.

The truth is, it didn't really have tons to do with President Trump as much as it had to do with Mitch McConnell doing the hard work in the Senate.

He's the one with the two-vote majority in the Senate.

President Trump gets credit because he's the president when this happens, but this was mainly a slog by Congress.

What was odd watching yesterday was there's a press conference and they went around the table with President Trump and everyone feels this weird necessity to to just praise the president to the skies.

You know, Vice President Pence, a man whom I like, he spent an awful lot of time saying really sycophantic things to President Trump, which is kind of an unattractive personal quality in the president that he needs to be praised by those around him every time something goes right, and even when things go wrong, it does provide a hindrance from time to time.

It didn't yesterday.

And maybe this is just the way that conservatives have to play it.

Maybe the way that conservatives have to play it with President Trump is they understand how the man ticks.

President Trump is driven by praise and criticism.

And so if you praise him when he does the right thing, then maybe he'll do more of the right things.

If that's the case, then a little bit of praise in the end of the world.

Okay, so I promised that I had evidence that Chuck Schumer is a dold.

Well, that evidence came in full-fledged form yesterday.

So Chuck Schumer was going out ripping the tax plan, of course, the Senate minority leader from New York, and he decided to tear into ATT.

He used ATT as his example of a company that certainly would not hire more people, pass profits down to the low-level employee.

AT ⁇ T, he said, had just socked away its corporate profits in years past.

They had not expanded.

They had not benefited employees.

Here's Chuck Schumer ripping into AT ⁇ T.

Well, if you believe trickle-down economics, he's right.

The trouble is no one in America, not the American public,

not the economists, believe that trickle-down works.

Corporations are flush with cash right now.

The stock market's booming.

Job creation isn't.

Look at all the companies that have already said they're going to use their tax break for stock buybacks, for dividends that don't affect average Americans.

And I love the example of AT ⁇ T.

Over the last 10 years, AT ⁇ T has paid an average tax rate of 8 percent a year.

They have 80,000 fewer employees today than they had then.

Tax breaks don't lead to job creation.

They lead to big CEO salaries and money for the very, very wealthy.

Okay, so literally as Chuck Schumer was saying this, like in the moment Chuck Schumer was saying this, ATT was making an announcement.

It's literally at the same time, like on a split screen.

What did ATNT announce?

They announced that once President Trump signed the bill into law, they would, quote, invest an additional $1 billion in the United States in 2018 and pay a special $1,000 bonus to more than 200,000 ATT U.S.

employees.

That's a lot of money.

Okay?

And all of it was given out as Christmas bonuses.

So you have to love the irony of Chuck Schumer Steady, AT ⁇ T, evil company, socking away corporate profits.

Nobody will ever see a dollar of that except the CEOs at AT ⁇ T.

And meanwhile, CEO at AT ⁇ T is going, yeah, everybody gets $1,000.

Everybody.

Just amazing.

Just amazing.

Also worth noting, just to debunk this idiotic talking point.

The reason that AT ⁇ T did not increase employment and paid an 8% tax rate is because they weren't experiencing a major growth curve.

The reason that you can pay a lower tax rate as a corporation when the corporate tax rate in the United States prior to this bill was 35%, the highest in the industrialized world, is because AT ⁇ T was not running a massive profit.

AT ⁇ T was having some problems.

That's why they had a bunch of tax write-offs from years past.

Don't complain about people paying low taxes.

when the reason they're paying low taxes is because they were not growing at the rate they wanted to grow.

I mean, Chuck Schumer has the polarity exactly backwards here.

They don't pay the 8% tax rate so that they can pay their CEOs lots of money.

They pay the 8% tax rate specifically because they weren't earning as much as they wanted to earn.

If they were making more money, they would have been subject to a higher tax rate.

That doesn't mean people don't game the system.

Of course, they game the system.

The number of tax write-offs in this country is extraordinarily high.

But that doesn't mean that AT ⁇ T was somehow screwing its employees for years.

And by the way, it's not just AT ⁇ T that's doing this.

A lot of businesses doing something that I think is quite smart.

They're announcing and making clear to their employees that good tax policy is good for their business.

That good tax policy helps the bottom line for their employees.

This is something I've urged business owners to do for a long time.

Make clear to your employees that national policies have an effect on their business, on the business in which they work.

Because otherwise you have this massive disconnect between employees and employers.

Where employers don't sound off about politics and employees think, well, my employer must be doing fine.

I mean, he's not not saying anything.

So maybe a higher tax rate on my employer won't do anything.

Maybe he's just socking all that money away for the second swimming pool.

I think it's actually really important that corporate owners go out and say, listen, this bill is bad for me, as with Obamacare, or listen, this bill is good for me.

Now, here's what I object to.

What I would object to is a bunch of businesses coming out and doing this for essentially being bribed by the government.

So I was not in favor of, for example, the carrier deal.

During the transition period, President Trump announced that he was going to push some sort of tax incentive in the state of Indiana.

Vice President Pence was at the time still governor of Indiana because he had not been inaugurated yet.

And so he and Trump worked together to give some giveaways to Carrier.

And Carrier thanked them.

And Trump said, oh, I just saved a bunch of jobs at Carrier.

And I thought, this is not good, right?

This is crony capitalism.

This is corporatism.

I don't believe in the term crony capitalism because crony capitalism is not, in fact, capitalism.

It is corporatism.

I said, I don't like that.

It's a special giveaway.

It's kind of a boondoggle on behalf of one company.

But when you have a policy that affects a broad swath of Americans, it is perfectly fair for people to say, this policy is good for me, or this policy is not good for me.

And in this case, a lot of companies are coming out and saying it's good for them.

It's not just AT ⁇ T.

Boeing announced an immediate commitment to investing $300 million in corporate giving, workforce development, and investment in workplace of the future facilities and infrastructure enhancement.

Fifth Third Bank Corp, a bank headquartered in Ohio, announced they'd raised the minimum wage for their employees to $15 following the tax reform bill.

So already positive fallout from the tax reform bill.

And I'll explain what's in this thing when we return.

I'm Ben Shapiro in for Glen Beck.

Glenn Beck.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

Ben Shapiro here in for Glenn Beck here on the Glenn Beck program.

Hope you're having a wonderful morning.

It is a good morning, thanks to the tax reform package that will put a little bit more money back in your pocket.

That begins in January.

And it does mean that the average American family is going to take home about $2,000, which is great.

That's a terrific thing.

If you're up at the higher end of the income specter bracket, then you will take home a little bit more money.

If you're like me, you'll actually take home less money, right?

I'm in California.

California is a terrible state.

So out here in California, that means that I now have to pay those state and local tax deductions basically disappear for me.

So I may pay actually an additional tax if you're a high-income earner in the state of California.

But I am perfectly willing to do that if it means that everybody else gets a tax cut because I think that's better policy.

And a lot of corporations are coming out and demonstrating to the world that when you free them up to spend their money, it's not that they're altruists.

It's not that they're just sitting around waiting to spend the money in ways that benefit other humans.

It's that they understand understand that in order to be competitive in a competitive market, putting a little more money in their pocket allows them to make their workers happier, more productive, invest in better services, invest in better products.

That's the idea here.

That's the reason why Fifth Third Bank Corp is a bank headquartered in Ohio, and they announced that they would raise the minimum hourly wage for all employees to $15

following the tax reform bill and would give a one-time bonus of $1,000 to more than 13,500 of their employees.

I do love that they're raising the minimum wage to $15 because you've heard this from the left for a while.

I used to do a show in Seattle, and when I was in Seattle, there was a big push by a socialist councilwoman named Shama Sawant.

She was the originator of the fight for 15, $15 minimum wage.

And she had pulled the $15 minimum wage statistic directly from Rcullen.

I mean, it was not as though I asked her this directly.

I said, is $15 minimum wage tethered to anything?

Is there a reason for $15 as opposed to, say, $1,000?

I mean, you're a socialist, so why not go all the way?

And she didn't really have an answer.

And the truth has always been that when you push minimum wage regulations, what you end up doing is decreasing employment.

You're forcing employers to hire people at a wage they wouldn't normally pay.

But when employers are growing, then it's not really a problem getting them to pay more than $15.

It's why virtually everyone in the United States is being paid more than minimum wage.

The current federal minimum wage is not close to $15.

Very small percentage of Americans actually make minimum wage.

Really a tiny number of Americans.

And that's because the market drives salaries up.

If companies could just hire you as slave labor, presumably they would do so.

They can't in a competitive, free, and open market.

Wells Fargo also has announced they will increase their minimum hourly pay rate to 15 bucks, and they will aim for $400 million in philanthropic donations next year thanks to the newly passed GOP tax bill.

It's good that businesses are making clear to everybody that a good tax bill helps them.

Because the problem is this, government makes a habit of telling people how they help people.

Government programs, people who are in in favor of government programs, they spend an awful lot of time saying, well, you know, Medicaid helps you.

Welfare helps you.

Food stamps helps you.

And here's the evidence.

The evidence is you have an EBT card now in your wallet.

The evidence is that you have a little bit more in the check that you get from the welfare office this month.

The government is very good at making clear to people upon whom those people rely, government.

But when it comes to corporations, they really don't have, they don't do a good job of this.

They don't make clear to people that you are actually reliant on capitalism.

You are actually reliant on people going out and building businesses and earning.

That's what you're reliant on.

If people knew that, they might be a little more warm toward policies that help businesses, whether big or small.

I've never understood, frankly, the distinction between big business and small business outside of the realm of lobbying.

Business is business.

A big business is very successful.

A small business is somewhat successful.

But in the end, a business is comprised of investors and people who are working.

And the size of the business, I've never understood this idea that big just means bad.

And bad means bad.

That we have a word for bad.

It's called bad.

You don't need another word that means that's big.

Big does not always mean bad.

By the way, Comcast has also announced they're going to give $1,000 bonuses to over 100,000 eligible frontline and non-executive employees and invest $50 billion over the next five years in infrastructure based on the passage of the tax reform.

FedEx has announced that they're going to ramp up hiring.

The Washington Post reports, executives at the package delivery company say the passage of the bill, which promises massive cuts to the corporate tax rate, would prompt the company to increase spending on new hiring as well as new equipment and technology.

The company also projects the changes amount to a $1.3 billion increase in annual profits, according to calculations by Bloomberg.

Frederick Smith is chairman of FedEx.

He said, quote, this legislation offers pro-growth, pro-business tax reform solutions that will power the economy.

So, I mean, these are not the only ones.

CVS actually announced back in October that if if the corporate tax rate dropped, it would create 3,000 permanent new jobs.

Now, let's talk about what exactly is in the bill, because there's been a lot of kind of broad talk about what's in the bill.

But I want to get a little bit more specific about what is in the bill and why it's a win.

Why should we care that the corporate tax rates went down?

Yes, the individual tax rates went down, but the heart of this bill is the corporate tax rates dropping.

That's really what lies at the heart of it.

Okay, so

here's what's in the bill.

First of all, virtually everybody gets a tax cut.

The average household receives a tax cut of about $1,600, $1,610 in 2018.

Average household earning $1 million or more sees a tax decrease of approximately $70,000, $870 for households making between $50,000 and $75,000.

Now, before you get jealous and before you say, that's terrible, understand, the top tax quintile in the United States pays all net taxes in the United States.

That's all taxes paid to the federal government minus all of the benefits that you receive from the federal government.

The individual tax increases do sunset in 2025, but that's because they were playing some magic tricks with the statistics.

The idea here was that you somehow have to game the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, into stating that this bill will be deficit neutral, the bill will not be deficit neutral.

This is the drawback of the bill.

That's why deficit hawks are not happy with it.

The drawback is that we're going to be spending a lot of money and we're not paying for that spending.

But that seems to me more of a problem of the government spending than it is the problem of the government giving you back more of your own money.

Those individual tax increases are supposed to decreases, are supposed to sunset in 2025, go away in 2025.

In reality, they will likely continue.

The big part of this bill is that corporate tax rate decrease.

Hey, before the bill, the U.S.

had the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

It was 35%.

The average European corporate tax rate, and the left always wants to follow Europe.

Oh, the Europeans.

Their governance is so great.

First of all, they should look at Europe's restrictions on abortion.

Europe has significant restrictions on abortion, particularly Eastern Europe.

But in any case, the average European tax rate, corporate tax rate, is 18%.

Before this bill, the corporate tax rate in the United States was 35%.

We cut it to 21%.

Why is that good?

Because every time countries massively cut their corporate tax rates, you see a rather marked increase in GDP.

The best example is Ireland.

Ireland in 1995 had a 40% corporate tax rate rate, even higher than ours.

In that year, they cut their corporate tax rate from 40% to 12.5%.

Since then, they have seen 23% GDP growth.

That's as compared with 7.2 percent GDP growth from 1960 to 1995.

So, major boost.

There is a big increase in the child tax credit.

So, the child tax credit goes up to 2,000 bucks per child.

I got to admit, I'm sort of split on the child tax credit.

As a guy with two kids, I'm excited that presumably I would receive money back if I were not sort of banned by income.

But in any case,

There are a lot of people who have kids who need that extra money.

It'll certainly come in handy.

On the other hand, I'm not a big fan of government picking and choosing which people to benefit with tax cuts and tax credits.

Itemization has basically been made a thing of the past for a lot of folks because the standard deduction was doubled.

So that means that if your itemization is less than the standard deduction, you just take the standard deduction instead of the itemization.

You can fill out your taxes on the back of a postcard, which is a major tax reform.

It's a very good thing.

Perhaps the second biggest move after the reduction in the corporate tax rate is not the individual tax rate reduction.

It's the death of the individual mandate.

Now, the death of the individual mandate is an interesting thing.

It's interesting because President Trump declared yesterday that now that the individual mandate is gone, Obamacare has been repealed.

Here's Trump saying that yesterday.

He said, Obamacare has now been repealed because the individual mandate is gone.

Do we have that clip?

Disease and

cerebral palsy.

Oh, no, this is Nancy Pelosi.

You can hear those dentures moving around.

A few clips later, Trump was saying that Obamacare has been repealed.

The individual mandate is being repealed.

When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed because they get their money from the individual mandate.

So the individual mandate is not.

Things stop right there.

That's not true.

What President Trump is saying there is not true.

The individual mandate being repealed is a very good thing.

It means you are not going to be forced to buy health insurance if you don't want to buy health insurance.

However, it does not repeal Obamacare.

The individual mandate just means that you won't be forced to purchase health insurance.

Now, the reason that the Republicans stuck this in the bill is because, again, this was a little bit of

deficit game playing.

The individual mandate, getting rid of the individual mandate, lowers the deficit because a lot of people, knowing that they're going to be fined by the government, go and sign up for Medicaid.

Fewer people are now going to go sign up for Medicaid.

And so that means that the deficit goes down on the federal level.

But the individual mandate disappearing doesn't disappear Obamacare.

Insurance companies are still required to cover preexisting conditions.

All the regulations on pricing still exist for the insurance companies.

And in fact, it means that the cost on the insurance companies just went up because the individual mandate forced young, healthy people like me to subsidize older, sicker people by paying into the insurance programs.

So the individual mandate going does not mean Obamacare is dead.

So that is not true what President Trump is saying.

And it's actually a bad indicator.

If he thinks that's all we're doing on Obamacare, then that's going to be a serious problem.

It is because you're going to see prices jump in the individual insurance market, and Republicans will pay a price for that unless they do what they're talking about doing, which is backfill that hole by directly federally funding people who are sick and needy in these states, in the individual market, which basically means a new entitlement program.

So you got rid of the individual mandate, but you're instituting a new entitlement program.

That is not getting rid of Obamacare.

Getting rid of Obamacare means you actually have to get rid of the regulations.

It's disappointing that President Trump is not stumping for that.

Now, as we continue here on the Glenn Beck show, I got in a bit of a Glenn Beck program.

I got in a bit of a fight with

Rosie O'Donnell on Twitter yesterday.

When I say a bit of a fight, I mean that it was really insane.

I will tell you all about my fight with Rosie O'Donnell as we continue.

Ben Shapiro win for Glenn Beck.

Glenn back.

Glenn Beck.

Ben Shapiro here for Glenn Beck.

You're on the world-famous Glenn Beck program.

All right, so this was rather hysterical yesterday.

So the left lost its mind over this tax bill.

And as I've mentioned, there's a lot to like about the tax bill.

There's a lot there that's good.

There's some things in there that are not so good.

There are a few deductions that went away that hurt specific groups of people.

There are deductions that hurt people, particularly in high-tax blue states.

That'd be the biggest one.

There's a decrease in the mortgage interest deduction, which hurts people in areas that have high real estate prices, which, coincidentally, also happens to be places like California and New York and Massachusetts.

But some people just lost their minds or what was left of those minds.

Rosie O'Donnell, who's a highly unpleasant person, she's just a very unpleasant human being.

I think one of the reasons that President Trump is president is because he was one of the first to recognize that Rosie O'Donnell is a deeply unpleasant human.

So Rosie O'Donnell tweeted out that she wanted to bribe a bunch of senators.

And as this thing was being passed, she tweeted out, how about this?

I promise to give $2 million to Senator Susan Collins and $2 million to Senator Jeff Flake.

If they vote no, no, I will not kill Americans for the super rich, DM me, Susan.

DM me, Jeff, no bleep, $2 million cash each.

Well,

that was a problem because that's actually a violation of the law, right?

That's a federal felony under 18 code section 201B,

in which it basically says that if you try to bribe a congressperson for a vote, then you have to pay up to three times the amount of the bribe to the federal government.

That'd be $12 million in this case, or spend 15 years in prison or both.

Now, would Rosie ever be convicted of this?

Probably not, because you say a lot of things on Twitter.

And she'd just say, oh, I was joking.

I wasn't really serious, except that she kept saying over and over on Twitter she was serious.

So I jokingly tweeted out yesterday that if President Trump told

Attorney General Sessions to initiate prosecution of

Rosie O'Donnell, if he told him to begin an investigation into Rosie O'Donnell, then immediately they would begin the carving of President Trump's face on Rushmore.

Rosie O'Donnell didn't like that.

She got mad.

And so she tweeted back at me,

suck my bleep, Ben,

which was weird for a variety of reasons.

It's really odd.

And so I tweeted back, you're already a felon, Rosie.

Don't be a homophobic sexual harasser as well.

Hashtag, me too.

So yes, I was sexually harassed on Twitter by Rosie O'Donnell, which is just a horrifying proposition.

And I feel deep down in the cockles of my tiny heart that I've been targeted on the basis of my sex by Rosie O'Donnell.

And I don't like her homophobic language that she's using there either.

Also, I'm not sure why she's so transphobic to suggest that...

She has a set of male genitalia when clearly she does not.

Or at least supposedly she does not.

I mean, I don't know, maybe she does and she's just been hiding it from everybody for years.

I don't know.

She's the one who's saying to do this.

I'm not.

But this is the level of ire and silly that we have reached from some folks on the left.

So Rosie O'Donnell sexually harassing me on Twitter.

Yeah, this year has been kind of weird.

Kind of weird.

Now, speaking of weird, Nancy Pelosi dropped what I thought was the weirdest reference in modern memory.

I mean, I want to discuss that in a little while, actually.

First, I have to play Bernie Sanders vowing revenge.

So So, Bernie Sanders, speaking from the Marxist grave, and Bernie Sanders, a member of the Socialist Undead, he says that he will have revenge.

There will be revenge as well as pudding cups.

I would like pudding cups in many flavors and shapes and varieties, and also revenge.

But the failures of this government, Bernie Sanders speaking, go.

He vows revenge.

Based on the fraudulent theory of trickle-down economics, and that is if you give huge tax breaks to large corporations corporations and the wealthy, somehow the middle class and working families benefit.

Problem is, that theory has never worked.

It didn't work under Reagan, it didn't work under George W.

Bush.

It didn't work recently in the state of

Kansas.

This is a payback for wealthy campaign contributors, and I think the Republicans will rule the day.

They may be celebrating today.

Glenn, back

Love.

Courage.

Truth.

Glenn Beck.

Ben Shapiro here in for Glenn Beck on the Glenn Beck program.

Always an honor to sit in for the great man himself.

So, one of the things that's been really hilarious is watching his Democrats try to come up with a victim on the tax reform bill.

I mean, really, like, laugh out loud, funny.

They've been looking around the United States, trying to find someone who's been hurt.

And we were told beforehand, as I said earlier, that everyone is going to die.

Every single person in the United States will die because of tax reform.

People will die.

Millions of Americans will just ⁇

it'll be like the book of Revelation.

You know, Mitch McConnell will ride in on a pale horse, and everyone will just be ⁇ everyone will be zapped to heaven or hell.

That's how this is going to go.

Instead, it turns out that nobody's been damaged.

A lot of people getting a little more money in their paycheck, and that's great.

So Democrats have been searching, and what they came up with in their search is something curious.

Nancy Pelosi has found the first victim of the Trump tax reform bill.

The first victim, it turns out, is a fictional British character first released in London in 1843 by Charles Dickens.

Of course, we'll be tiny Tim.

Here's Nancy Pelosi, dentures and moving,

former Speaker of the House, current minority leader in the House.

Here's what she had to say about the Republican tax bill and whom it would hurt.

Simon has a rare disease and

cerebral palsy.

His mother spoke of how their family watches the Muppet version of a Christmas Carol and how Simon sees himself in Tiny Tim, another kind boy with braces on his legs.

Unfortunately, this story, as of today, does not have the same kind of happy ending as a Christmas Carol.

But this story is not over.

And like Tiny Tim, Simon and his family now find their future in danger because of the greed of those with power.

Now, the bill is going to kill Tiny Tim.

So she came up with somebody who's like Tiny Tim.

Not sure why he's like Tiny Tim.

I mean, Tiny Tim was in danger of being sent to the workhouse.

I'm pretty sure Simon is not in that serious a danger of being sent to the workhouse.

She's not the only person who's invoking Tiny Tim.

Jackie Speyer, a Democrat from California, she says that this is the most shameful day in the history of Congress.

Really?

In the history of Congress?

Like, has she fugitive slave?

Do you even Fugitive Slave Act, bro?

Do you even

do you even Japanese internment camp, bro?

I mean, like, there are a lot of bad laws in congressional history.

Like, a lot of really, really bad laws in the history of Congress.

But Jackie Speier says this was the most shameful day in the history of Congress.

And then she, too, invokes Tiny Tim.

Tiny Tim is going to die.

Like, tiny Tim

he might be died from the overload of metaphor from the Democrats.

They've piled so much metaphor on top of him that his frail body couldn't handle it anymore, and Tiny Tim keeled over.

But Jackie Spider trotting out the corpse of Tiny Tim, anyway.

You know, this is the ultimate bad Christmas Carol story.

This may be the most shameful day in the history of Congress.

Today, in the House, we are going to shake down hardworking Americans for a $1.3 or $2.3, depending on how you count it, trillion-dollar tax cut.

And at the same time, we're going to put 9 million kids in this country at risk.

And these 9 million kids aren't eligible for Medicaid, and their families can't afford the Affordable Care Act because they have to pay a certain amount, and the subsidized amount doesn't cover the cost.

So they are truly out in the cold.

And then she said, Tiny Tim's crutch is being taken away.

Tiny Tim's crutch, he's going to fall over.

Poor Tiny Tim, just going to kill over there in the street in fictional London in 1843.

And just a quick note on Tiny Tim and Democrats.

If Nancy Pelosi and Democrats had their way, remember Tiny Tim was the son of the Cratchits in the story.

If Nancy Pelosi and Klan had their way, Tiny Tim never would have been born.

Presumably he would have been aborted so that the Cratchits could have moved to Paris and indulged in a little body painting.

Also worth noting, in the actual story, A Christmas Carol, the government does not come in and take Scrooge's money and give it to Tiny Tim.

The whole story is about how religious observance and adherence and belief in God and the value of Christ,

these are the things that drove Scrooge to give money to the Cratchits.

It was Scrooge as a private citizen.

who chimes in.

But again, this is, it's sort of like when Barack Obama was talking about how Trayvon Martin was his fictional son.

If you have to resort to fictional characters in order to make up victims for your narrative, you're not doing a good job politically.

Just not doing a real smart job politically.

Meanwhile, the press have been doing their best to tear down this tax reform bill as well.

There were a couple instances on cable news yesterday that were truly insane.

Katie Tur over at MSNBC actually questioned Dave Bratt.

I think it was Dave Bratt from Virginia.

And at one point, she asked him how much money he made.

The suggestion, of course, being the only reason that Dave Bratt would support a tax cut is because Dave Bratt was set to make a lot of money.

And Dave Bratt immediately said, well, Katie, how much money do you make?

Because Katie Turr must make a lot more money than Dave Brat.

Dave Bratt probably makes $150,000 a year.

Katie Turr has got to be making $400,000 to $500,000 a year minimum.

But the notion from the media has been throughout that this is some sort of giant boondoggle giveaway to the rich, and only rich people support tax cuts.

This I find deeply insulting.

Okay, I supported tax cuts when I was not rich.

I support tax cuts now that I make a lot of money.

I've I've supported tax cuts throughout my entire career.

I supported tax cuts when I was making no money and I was in law school and I was racking up debt.

Support for a particular economic program has very little to do with where you are on the economic scale.

And it has a lot more to do with do you think this is going to be effective?

Do you think it's good policy?

Do you think that it re-enshrines rights or that it invades rights?

But for the left, the only reason you could possibly be in favor of a tax cut is because you're selfish and greedy.

Now, it's hilarious that the same left will then say it's not selfish or greedy for you to oppose a tax cut and want a redistributionist program if you're poor.

So, if you're poor and you want somebody else's money, or you're low income, and you think that the government should take someone's money and give it to you, that's not greedy.

That's altruism.

But if you're a rich person who wants to keep more of your own money, then that is just sheer greed.

It's just sheer, absolute greed.

And this is one of the reasons why the American people have this very bizarre view of the tax bill.

So, there have been a couple of polls out that show the tax bill is not wildly popular yet.

That number seems to be moving a little bit, as well, it should.

50% of Americans in a recent poll said that they thought their taxes were going to increase under this bill.

50%.

That is factually untrue.

It is factually untrue.

It is just not correct.

80% of Americans will see a tax decrease.

Only 5% of Americans will see any form of tax increase under this bill.

But that's because the media have been pumping out headline after headline, trying to make it sound as though this bill is specifically directed at helping the rich and at damaging the poor.

I mean, if you go over to CNN and you look at their headlines, headlines, then

it's obvious which side they are taking.

I mean, look at this, right?

So I discussed earlier the fact that a bunch of companies have come out and said they're going to spend new dollars, they're going to give bonuses.

Listen to CNN's headline, right?

Quote, tax cut prompts promises of bonuses.

Sub-headline, banks and Boeing, among those pledging to spend more on workers, but there's debate over whether others will.

But there's debate over other, whether other, like, what?

Can you imagine that headline about Me Too?

Women accuse men of sexual harassment.

Prominent women accuse prominent men of sexual harassment and abuse, but there's doubt about whether others will.

Why are others...

Why is that part of the story?

Why is that part of the headline?

O.J.

Simpson allegedly murders ex-wife, but there's doubt whether others have murdered their ex-wives.

Like, what?

What is the headline?

That's not the only silly headline.

Why the AARP doesn't like the tax bill is what it says.

You wonder why the AARP doesn't like the tax bill?

Because it's a Democratic lobbying program.

Okay, the AARP is a giant Democratic donor base.

I love it so much.

I mean, the media are so over the top with this stuff.

It's absolutely wild.

And if you go over to NBCnews.com, you get exactly the same thing.

I'm looking this up in real time, so it's not like I've pre-screened these headlines.

I can seriously just pick any of these sites and

find a bunch of headlines that are not even true.

A bunch of headlines about the tax bill that are not actually reality.

If you look at the the NBC News, right, the problems with the this is an actual headline.

The problems with the GOP tax plan began as a 1974 bar napkin doodle.

This is what it is an opinion piece about the laugher curve, presumably.

They have a headline that says, with CHIP funds running out, there are no good options, official says.

Well, how about the option of funding it, which is what Congress is about to do?

Like, that's about to happen right now.

But it's just, it's incredible.

So, the media have been wildly untruthful over this particular bill.

Very, very untruthful over this particular bill.

Trump is right.

Here's the thing.

When Trump hits the media, I've always thought it's a good idea to hit the media when they lie.

My problem with President Trump typically on the media has been that he says that the media are fake news when they're not actually reporting fake news.

Not everything the media say is fake news.

A lot of what they say is true news.

But he's not wrong when he says their coverage of this bill is fake news.

Here's President Trump yesterday saying the media are obviously working to make the bill unpopular

it's trump talking about the media working to make our bill unpopular

you can stay if you want it because you need the prayer more than i do i think you may be the only ones maybe a good solid prayer and they'll be honest

okay so you know i think that he's he's right he says that the the press needs more prayers than he does at this point.

But you can see the media is iron.

So Jim Acosta, one of the worst reporters over at CNN, you can hear the ire dripping from his voice when he says, this is the happiest Republicans have been all year.

I mean, just listen to his voice.

He's with us, our senior White House correspondent, Jim.

What was it like to be you were there in the mix listening to all those different speeches?

What was that like?

What was your impression?

Well, I think this is the happiest the Republican Party has been visibly all year long.

I mean, we saw that here on the south lawn of the White House.

You saw every major Republican leader come up and take the microphone and praise this president.

You heard the House Speaker Paul Ryan praise what he called the exquisite leadership of President Trump.

Okay, so you just, how dare they?

How dare they?

This kind of coverage has been blanket on the networks.

No shock there.

But you know what?

I think as Americans see more money in their pocket, hopefully, and as corporations come out and say that the bill's helping them, and if President Trump can stay off Twitter and not get in a fight with LeVar Ball, then good things can happen here.

And as we continue here, I want to talk about whether it matters,

whether in the end, President Trump's popularity ratings matter.

Because right now, we have this real disconnect.

Good policy, bad poll numbers.

How do we change that?

We'll discuss that in just a minute.

I'm Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn back.

Glenn back.

So, this has been a very good month for President Trump in terms of policy.

When he's got his tax reform plan complete with the repeal of Obamacare's individual mandate, he announced earlier this month in what I thought was a brave, gutsy move that the U.S.

would be there to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

We'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes because Trump is making some statements that I he made some statements.

Even I, who did not vote at the top of the ticket, I love what he's doing on Jerusalem.

I just, I love it.

But he has appointed 12 circuit court judges so far, which is more than any other president ever in the first year of an administration.

The economy continues to do well.

ISIS seems to be in its death throes.

A very good month for President Trump.

And yet there's a big disconnect between the policies that he is pushing and the popularity thereof and his approval rating.

So right now, according to Real Clear Politics, Trump's approval rating is 38%.

Congress's job approval rating is 14%.

Democrats have an 11-point advantage on the generic congressional ballot.

The latest poll from CNN has them with an 18-point advantage.

That is wipeout territory for the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot.

And when I say wipeout, I don't just mean they lose the House.

I mean they lose the Senate if those numbers hold.

So where is this disconnect coming from?

It's not coming from policy because the policy hasn't really changed particularly much from normal Republican conservative policy.

Now, what the left would like to do is attribute the unpopularity to Trump's conservative policy.

But that's not what's going on here.

What's really going on is that Trump himself is personally unpopular.

Unlike Barack Obama, where his policies were unpopular, but he was popular, you got the reverse with Trump.

His policies are relatively popular, but he himself is unpopular.

Now, there are a lot of folks on our side of the aisle, on my side of the aisle, the conservative side of the aisle, who believe that we should basically ignore what Trump says and just focus on what he does.

And we evaluate how he's doing.

We should just ignore the stuff that comes out of his face or that comes out on his Twitter feed.

And instead, we should focus exclusively on the actions that he takes.

And those actions have largely been very good.

And I would not argue with the value of the actions.

What I would argue, however, is that politics is about a little bit more than the stuff that you do, particularly the presidency.

When we think about presidents in the past, presidents, great presidents of the past, how much of that greatness is wrapped up in their rhetoric?

And not just presidents, political figures generally.

The reason that Winston Churchill is considered such a heroic political figure is not just because of his policies.

Name his economic policy.

Quick.

Can anybody?

The real reason that Winston Churchill is considered a heroic figure is because of his unique capacity for rhetorical motivation in the midst of war.

That's really why Winston Churchill was well known.

The same thing is true of Ronald Reagan.

We on the right love Reagan's tax cuts, but those are somewhat controversial on the left.

But what can't be doubted is that Reagan's feel of optimism, his belief that America was a shining city on a hill, his understanding that America had to win the Cold War, led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Bill Clinton is going to be remembered for only a couple of things, very little having to do with policy.

One of them is going to be the era of feelings, the I feel your pain Bill Clinton, and the other is going to be all the rhetoric and hubbub surrounding impeachment and his sexual proclivities.

George W.

Bush, only going to be remembered for a couple of things by history.

The war in Iraq and his response to 9-11.

And those are connected.

That's really all he's going to be remembered for in history.

Because in history, you get boiled down to your essence.

And in voting, the truth is, you sort of get boiled down to your essence too.

People don't look at policy nearly as much as they look at the character of the person that they are voting for.

And right now, people don't like Trump even if they like his policies.

And that does make a difference.

It's actually deeply important for conservatives, even now more important than it was before Trump was implementing conservative policies, that Trump bring up his approval rating, that he contain himself, that he not get involved in foolish fights on Twitter, that he not get dragged down into the mud or drag himself down into the mud to fight with Colin Kaepernick about kneeling in the NFL, that the President of the United States not start some sort of silly Twitter firefight.

One of the reasons things have been good for the last couple of weeks is because Trump has not been active on Twitter.

He's not created distractions the media can glom onto to have the character discussion instead of the policy discussion.

If Trump went on vacation for the next two weeks, this is what he should do.

He should just go on vacation.

Mr.

President, you've earned a vacation.

It's the end of the year.

Go to Mar-a-Lago, golf a lot, stay off Twitter, have yourself a Shabbos, right?

As an Orthodox, you have yourself a Shabbos.

Turn off the phone, turn off the TV, don't watch the morning shows.

Let your aides bring you the good news.

If there's anything really bad, I promise you there are people watching.

I know a lot of the folks in the White House, and they're on top of it.

They know when something bad is happening.

They will bring it to your attention.

But the way for Trump to actually win now, not just win in terms of policy, but win, is for him to make himself more popular.

That does matter.

Those polls do matter because if Trump loses the Congress in 2018, if he loses the Congress and the Senate, the Democrats will look to impeach him in the House.

His popularity will drop because he won't be able to get anything done.

And then in the couple of years after that, if there's anything bad that happens politically,

he's going to pay the price for that.

And Republicans will pay the price for that too.

And then a lot of the gains that Trump has made as president will be reversed.

Remember, the only major legislative gain really is tax reform.

There are only a couple of irreversible things that Trump has done.

And they're great, right?

Justice Gorsuch, the appellate court judges, tax reform, right?

Those are relatively irrevocable.

But all of the executive actions he's taking, virtually all of those are changeable at a moment's notice by a Democratic president.

So if you like what Trump is doing and want to preserve those accomplishments, it's time to urge President Trump to really focus in on how he can make himself more popular.

I've been given more by President Trump on policy than I was led to expect he would provide.

In the last election cycle, he campaigned as a sort of independent, non-conservative guy.

He's governed very much like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would.

He really has.

When it comes to his rhetoric, it's not been quite as grand, and that does matter.

So let's make sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here and just suggest that because everything has been doing much better in terms of policy, that this

heals all the woes, that it heals all the problems.

It doesn't.

The President of the United States needs to, needs to go on a public relations campaign on his own behalf, not even on behalf of his policies, on his own behalf.

He needs to show the American people that he cares about them.

He needs to talk in positive terms about unifying the country, and he needs to avoid the big blunders.

If he can do that, then he's ending the year on an up note, no question.

As we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, I want to talk about Russian collusion, because we've been hearing for a year now that it's collusion this and collusion that, right?

It's Trump colluding with Russia.

I have a couple of stories that throw some severe doubt on this narrative.

And one particular story that says that Trump may not have been the president who is colluding with the Russians.

Be right back.

Ben Shapiro, Glenn Beck Program.

Glenn back.

This is the Glenn Beck Program.

Is Ben Shapiro here in Fort Glen Beck?

Honored to be sitting behind the microphone.

All right, so the UN General Assembly,

that scurvy battalion of galactic rogues, it's the most Isley

of

global politics.

They're getting together, the UN General Assembly today, to vote on a resolution condemning the United States for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

And the entire left is going, that's, well, doesn't this show that the world is angry?

Ooh, so angry.

Oh,

everyone's going to die.

Oh,

world on fire.

Arab free drop.

Okay, since Trump announced a couple of weeks ago that the United States would move its embassy to Jerusalem, there have been, as far as I'm aware, there's been one death, one.

Okay, it was of a rioter, a Palestinian rioter attacking Israeli soldiers.

If you haven't seen, by the way, the amount of garbage that Israeli soldiers take, it's just insane.

There was a video that was going around a couple of days ago showing Palestinian children who are put up to this by their loving parents and Hamas, walking up to Israeli soldiers and slapping them in the face.

And the Israeli soldiers are standing there and taking it because they've been told and trained not to respond to this sort of thing because what the Palestinians want is the headline that the Israelis are abusing children.

That's what they are looking for and they are willing to sacrifice their own children to that effect.

This is why the Palestinian Authority, which is a terrorist government and has been working with other terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad,

This is why they have been pushing this line that the end of the world is nigh.

Now, here's the funny thing about the Jerusalem announcement.

The end of the world has not been nigh.

Nothing has really happened.

Like, really nothing.

One of the reasons for that is because all of the countries that used to be deeply allied with the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, they don't care.

The reason they don't care is because there's an existential threat at their doorstep in the form of Iran.

That existential threat was created by the Obama administration, which we'll talk about in a little while.

All of those countries have decided that they need Israel for an ally in this fight against Iran, that they are all going to pose a unified front.

And so they basically told the Palestinians, sit down and shut up.

And President Trump has done the right thing by saying to this newfangled alliance, guys, in order for this alliance to have any sort of legs, you have to acknowledge a basic reality.

Jerusalem is Jewish territory.

And by the way, historically, morally, legally, Jerusalem is Jewish territory.

The only reason anyone on earth cares about Jerusalem is because the Jews cared about it first.

The only reason Christians care about Jerusalem is because Jesus was a Jew.

The only reason Muslims care about Jerusalem is because Jerusalem was

the holy site for Jews and Christians before Islam existed.

Jerusalem was the dream of the Jewish people for 1,500 years minimum before the temple stood 1,500 years before Islam ever came into the brain of Muhammad.

This ridiculous notion that it's not Jewish territory, it's just ahistorical, it's insipid.

When Muslims have controlled areas of Jerusalem, those areas have basically become off-limits to Jews.

The Islamic Waf controls the Temple Mount, which is the holiest site in Judaism.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Western Wall is not the holiest site in Judaism.

The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism because it was the mount on which the Temple stood.

The Islamic Waf controls the Temple Mount, thanks to Israeli stupidity.

And they've barred Jews from going up there.

If you go up there as a Jew and you start mouthing words from Psalms, If you start mouthing David's words, King David David's words on the Temple Mount, you will be arrested.

Really, the Israeli government will arrest you.

I know people to whom this has happened.

Anyway, the UN General Assembly is very mad that President Trump recognizes reality on the ground that Israel is not giving up Jerusalem, nor should it.

And so the UN General Assembly has declared that they are going to pass a resolution.

Oh, you betcha, a strongly worded letter.

And the media are buying into this whole thing.

They're saying a showdown is expected on the floor of the UN on Thursday, according to FoxNews.com, as countries prepare to vote on a resolution condemning President Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Trump's Trump's decision, which he announced this month during a speech ordering the State Department to begin moving the U.S.

embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, rankled many in the global community.

Critics worry the President's word will inflame tensions.

Ooh hoo-hoo-hoo.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that Islamist dictator, said on Thursday he hopes the U.S.

will be taught a lesson during a U.N.

vote on the issue and accused Trump of seeking countries whose decisions can be bought with dollars.

He said, Mr.

Trump, you cannot buy Turkey's democratic will with your dollars.

Erdogan's wanted to talk about the democratic will.

He's literally arrested hundreds of thousands of people.

Erdogan is a dictator.

Turkey used to be an Israeli ally.

They had significant military cooperation between Turkey and Israel, particularly against Iran.

That has died because Islamist Erdogan has basically turned the place into an Islamist dictatorship and purged the military.

But he's talking about democratic will.

Hanana Shrawli, the Palestinian spokeswoman,

she came out and she said that the United States is engaging in

blackmail, that we're engaging in blackmail because we have said that we're not going to give foreign aid to countries that oppose us on this one.

President Trump said this.

You got to love the stones on this guy when he says stuff like this.

I mean, really,

this takes a pair.

Here's President Trump saying, listen, if they oppose us at the UN, good, we'll just cut their funding.

They take hundreds of millions of dollars and even billions of dollars and then they vote against us.

Well, we're watching those votes.

Let them vote against us.

We'll save a lot.

We don't care.

Love, love, love, love, love.

Thank you, Mr.

President.

This is what American leadership leadership looks like.

We are right on this, and the world is wrong.

The world is wrong on this matter, and the world is wrong, because there's a lot of anti-Semitism that still exists in Europe.

There's a lot of Holocaust guilt that still exists in Europe.

And if somehow you can shift the blame onto the Israelis and suggest that the Jews are the new Nazis, then that sort of alleviates past history.

The Muslim world, of course, hates Israel for religious reasons.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, he says Jerusalem is Israel's capital, regardless of the outcome of Thursday's vote, it is.

The Palestinians wanted a General Assembly vote because the U.S.

on Monday vetoed a resolution supported by 14 other UN Security Council members that would have required Trump to rescind his declaration.

Well, what do they have to say about where we put our embassy?

Screw them.

Who cares?

The resolution is being co-sponsored by Turkey, which is chair of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

Okay, so let me talk now about the UN and why the UN is a moral hellhole.

The UN has done nothing about Syria, nothing.

Zero things has the UN done about the slaughter of 500,000 Muslims in Syria.

The UN has done nothing about the Rohingya in Malaysia, nothing.

The UN has done nothing about Sudan, which has been a cesspool of human violence and corruption for decades.

The UN is a toothless, feckless, morally corrupt organization.

You know why?

Because when you grant an equal vote to countries that are tyrannical dictatorships that espouse anti-Western values, You shouldn't be surprised when they vote that way.

Why countries that don't even allow their own citizens to vote should be voting on how we conduct our policy is beyond me.

There's a Supreme Court case called Kilo versus New London in which the Supreme Court found that the federal government and state governments can remove land from one private actor and give it to another private actor in the name of eminent domain.

It's one of the worst decisions in Supreme Court history.

I am willing to make an exception if the federal government uses eminent domain to hand over the UN building to the Trump corporation and President Trump bulldozes that place and builds a Trump Tower on top of it.

I am perfectly willing to do that.

In fact, I think we can do one better than that.

I think we should empty the UN building completely and pay for the cost of all this by finally making all those diplomats pay their parking tickets and pay for their crimes.

We should turn that UN assembly building, we should turn that GA into a housing space for refugees from those countries.

So all these countries that are voting on whether Jerusalem should be Israel's capital, the only free country in that area.

They're voting on whether Jerusalem should be Israel's capital, whether it should be handed over to the terrorist Palestinian Authority.

They have the gall to do that.

But this is no shock.

Okay, this is no shock.

The UN has always been wildly anti-Israel since Israel's inception.

I'm going to give you some statistics.

You wonder about how many times the UN has condemned evil countries?

For goodness sake, they have countries like Yemen that sit down their Human Rights Council.

A couple of years ago, Sudan on the Human Rights Council.

Just ridiculous.

Hey, let me explain how this has basically just become an anti-American, anti-Israel tool.

That's all the UN is at this point.

The UN doesn't do anything.

The UN is a beyond useless counterproductive organization.

It's just gross.

Here's some stats.

From June 2006 through June 2016,

the UN Human Rights Council adopted 135 resolutions criticizing countries.

Now, it's the UN Human Rights Council.

You'd assume that they would focus in on human rights abuses.

Let's say the prosecution of gay people, the forcing of women into

sackcloths,

the beating of women for sexual activity,

the condemnation of Christians who have converted from Islam.

You assume the UN Human Rights Council might do something about that.

Nope, not so much.

From its creation in June 2006 through June 2016, The UN Human Rights Council adopted 135 resolutions.

68 were against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East.

How about the UN General Assembly?

The most eisily, as I say,

of the political world.

From 2012 through 2015, the UNGA adopted 97 resolutions criticizing countries.

83 of the 97 were against Israel.

You think maybe Israel is just an easy target for an organization that has 193 member countries and 57 of them are members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation?

57.

Over a quarter of all countries in the UN are Muslim countries that hate Israel's guts.

And then you got the European countries.

UNESCO,

right?

That's the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, adopts 10 resolutions a year.

They've only criticized Israel.

They've never criticized another UN member state.

Zero.

Okay, and UNESCO has been used.

UNESCO facilities were used by Hamas during the Gaza war in order to provide launching points for rockets against Jews.

Did UNESCO adopt a single resolution against their own facilities being used as terror sites?

Of course not.

Of course not.

How about the World Health Organization?

For one week every year, the UN World Health Assembly meets to formulate global health policy.

They adopt resolutions to address global health issues.

There's one exception.

They have one annual resolution entitled Health Conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, singling out Israel for condemnation.

No other country on planet Earth is condemned by the World Health Organization.

So is the U.S.

right to stand with Israel against the U.N.?

Yes.

My only qualm is that we shouldn't be signing a single dollar of aid to the U.N.

We should cut that bastardized organization off at the knees.

Let's form a new organization of countries that actually give a crap about human rights.

The UN needs to go.

I hope that President Trump fulfills his word.

I am hoping that all the countries except for the United States vote against Israel on this UNGA resolution and that the United States then cuts off all their foreign aid, starting with the Palestinian Authority, to whom we give $400 million, much of which is immediately designated and earmarked for terrorism.

As we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, I want to talk about one of the more insane pieces in recent history from a woman who has no business ripping American foreign policy.

Susan Rice, she says that Trump has undermined American foreign policy.

Yes, Susan Rice.

Takes a fair bit of intestinal fortitude to try that one.

We'll talk about it.

Ben Shapiro win for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

Truly, there is nothing that I love better than hearing a woman responsible for the worst Syrian policy on planet Earth.

A woman responsible for lying repeatedly to the American people about events in Benghazi.

A woman responsible for a foreign policy that elevated Iran at the expense of American allies.

Jab Iran about how President Trump is undermining American values in terms of his foreign policy.

Susan Rice is back.

Yes.

It is amazing.

Ben Rhodes, who is just an excorable human being, Ben Rhodes, the former national security advisor, whose vast foreign policy expertise before joining the administration resided entirely in writing fiction stories from an apartment in Brooklyn.

That guy was tweeting out about how the Republicans, their obituary should have a picture of them standing next to President Trump because Trump is so terrible.

Their obituary should have a picture.

If Ben Rhodes has an obituary, he should live long.

When his obituary is finally written, there should just be a picture of an Iranian missile on it.

Because the fact is that the Obama administration not only emboldened Iran, but made Iran a regional power.

Susan Rice was part of that.

Now she has a piece in the New York Times on their op-ed page, which is the centralizing point for at least 72.3% of all human stupidity.

Susan Rice has this piece.

Here's what she writes.

Okay, it is titled, I'm not joking, When America No Longer is a Global Force for Good.

You know, ignoring the whole part where the Obama administration backed Iran and backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and backed the Palestinian Authority against the Jews

and did nothing about the slaughter in Sudan and did nothing about the slaughter of Christians across the Middle East.

They're the ones who are going to lecture us about when American foreign policy is not a force for good.

So Susan Wright says, President Trump's national security strategy marks a dramatic departure from the plans of his Republican and Democratic predecessors, painting a dark, almost dystopian portrait of an extraordinarily dangerous world characterized by hostile states and lurking threats.

That's not dystopian.

That's reality.

And there are a lot of hostile states and a lot of lurking threats.

She says there is scant mention of America's unrivaled political, military, technological, and economical strength or the opportunities to expand prosperity, freedom, and security through principled leadership.

I would just like to note at this point, I think it's worthwhile noting, that President Obama is the one who insisted that we cut literally trillions of dollars from the defense budget in order so that we wouldn't raise taxes.

That was the sequestration deal.

That was President Obama's deal.

Trotting out Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes as the moral leaders of the Obama administration demonstrates how hollow everything was.

And this may be the area in which Trump has been the strongest.

ISIS has basically been defeated.

Its territorial holdings are down to nothing.

ISIS only grew because of the cowardice of the Obama administration.

They only grew because Obama decided to pull out of Iraq.

And Susan Rice was there for all of this stuff.

And now she's lecturing the Trump administration.

She's lecturing Republicans, conservatives on how foreign policy should be conducted.

Absurd.

I'll show you how absurd in just a second, because it gets even more absurd than that, really.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck.

Love.

Courage.

Truth.

Glenn Beck.

While Nikki Haley doing serious damage over the U.N.

General Assembly right now.

That wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenbeck here on the Glenbeck program.

Right now, as we speak, Nikki Haley speaking to the UN General Assembly, which is considering whether to vote on a resolution condemning the United States for moving its embassy to Jerusalem in Israel and condemning Israel for existing, of course.

And she just said, quote, the decision does nothing to harm peace efforts.

Rather, the President's decision reflects the will of the American people and our right as a nation to choose the location of our embassy.

There's no need to describe it further.

Thank you, Nikki Haley.

She is just, she's awesome.

She's awesome.

And one of the best moves of the president, making Nikki Haley his UN ambassador, she has been stalwart, to say the least.

Now, on foreign policy, what we've been hearing for a year and a half is that the Trump-Russia connection is eventually going to amount to collusion, right?

That eventually we are going to find out that the Trump campaign colluded with Vladimir Putin, came up with a strategy, an evil nefarious plot to win Trump Trump the presidency.

And we know that Putin was warm toward Trump, and we know that Trump was warm toward Putin.

They like each other.

That is not a great thing because Vladimir Putin is one of the worst people on planet Earth.

But this has been wildly blown out of proportion to suggest that Trump is somehow in Putin's pocket, that Trump somehow finagled it so that Putin would skew the election toward him, somehow Putin would convince Hillary Clinton never to visit Wisconsin or Michigan.

And this has been the Democratic line for well over a year at this point.

But when it comes to collusion, it seems like there's a lot more evidence that the Obama Obama administration colluded with Russia than that the Trump administration did.

Like a lot more evidence.

So first, some contrary evidence to the idea that Trump is colluding with Russia.

So yesterday, this piece of news breaks.

The Trump administration on Wednesday approved the sale of lethal arms to Ukraine's government as the country battles pro-Russian separatists in its eastern provinces.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday the administration approved the sale of Model M107A1 sniper systems and associated equipment to the country country at a value of $41.5 million.

The administration has not moved to approve heavier arms requested by Ukraine's government, but the move from the White House is a departure from the Obama administration, which frequently condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine but refused to approve the sale of arms to the country's Western-aligned government.

So that raises a weird question.

Why or why?

Did the Obama administration not do what Trump just did and allow sales of weapons, lethal weapons to the Ukrainians?

If Trump is such a tool of the Russians, why'd he just do that?

If Trump is such a tool of the Russians, why is he basically opposed them in many ways in Syria?

If Trump is such a tool of the Russians, then why is he doing what he's doing right now against Iran?

In fact, the evidence seems to be pretty substantial that if anyone was colluding with Russia, it was President Obama, who back in 2012, you will recall, was caught on a hot microphone saying directly to the then president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, that he should inform Vlad

to back off before the election, because after the election, Obama would have some flexibility.

There's a shocking story that has received almost zero mainstream media attention.

The story is in Politico.

But if this had been about Trump, is there any doubt that this would have been leading the newspapers for weeks?

Not for days, for weeks, maybe months.

Here is the story, according to Politico Europe.

This is Politico Europe.

Basically, it's called The Secret.

It's by Josh Meyer.

It's the secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.

Now, Ben Rhodes, as we say, the excrable former national security advisor for the Obama administration, a guy who made his name writing bad fiction from an apartment in Brooklyn, that guy says that Politico has an institutional bias against the Obama administration.

To which I say, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Really?

You have to be on LSD to believe that.

Any case, here's what the article says, quote.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a political investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the DEA amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering, and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia used wiretaps, undercover ops, informants to map Hezbollah's illicit networks with the help of 30 U.S.

and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States.

They tracked the river of dirty cash.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy.

When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigation, prosecutions, arrests, and financial sanctions, officials at Justice and the Treasury Department delayed, hindered, or rejected their requests.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah's high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary kudz force.

And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

In other words, as David Asher says, the guy who helped establish this Project Cassandra as a Defense Department finance analyst, quote, this was a policy decision.

It was a systematic decision.

They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.

Why?

Because Obama wanted his Iran deal.

He wanted that deal that supposedly stopped the Iranian nuclear program, but did no such thing, that merely greenlit the Iranian nuclear program a decade from inception and ensured that Iran would become a regional power through conventional weaponry and terrorism.

And not only that, they colluded with the Russians to make this happen.

They colluded with the Russians to make this happen.

It is amazing stuff.

In practice, this is again Politico.

It's not me.

Politico, a left-wing source.

In practice, the administration's willingness to envision a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with Hezbollah is a terrorist group, by the way, folks.

Hezbollah is an evil terrorist group that fires missiles into northern Israel on a routine basis and has turned what was once a flower of the Middle East, Lebanon and Beirut, has turned it into an absolute hellhole.

Lebanon is not a place you want to be hanging out or visiting.

In practice, the administration's willingness to envision a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a negotiated settlement to Iran's nuclear program, translated into a reluctance to move aggressively against top Hezbollah operatives.

And here's the collusion with Russia.

You ready?

Here we go.

Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayyad.

A suspected top Hezbollah operative whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014.

Good news, he's arrested, right?

They can now extradite him.

But for nearly two years, Fayad was in custody.

Top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.

Fayad, who'd been indicted in the U.S.

on counts of charges of planning the murders of U.S.

government employees, this guy's a murderer, attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization, attempting to acquire, transfer, use anti-aircraft missiles, was ultimately sent back to Lebanon.

He is now believed by U.S.

officials to be back in business, helping to arm militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons.

That sounds a lot like collusion.

It sounds a lot like

the Obama administration working with the Russians on behalf of a terrorist group, Hezbollah.

Also,

so that Obama rather could pursue his evil, despicable Iran deal,

all of which he thought would redound to his benefit politically.

That's collusion, folks.

That's collusion.

Not the nonsense that's being thrown up there as collusion.

Again, all of the charges that I've seen so far in the Mueller investigation have been about people lying to the FBI.

You shouldn't lie to the FBI.

Lying to the FBI is bad in case you missed it.

But there's been no evidence whatsoever of active collusion yet between the Trump administration and the Russian government about the election.

And in fact, Mike Flynn, right, who's now been indicted,

he's pled guilty to lying to the FBI.

What did he lie to the FBI about?

Supposedly he lied to the FBI, according to the charges themselves.

He lied to the FBI about a call he made to the Russians during the transition period in which he asked them to back off of a resolution that was against Israel.

That does not sound like Russian collusion to me.

Russia, by the way, did not back off.

That does not sound like Russian collusion to me.

maybe there's further evidence maybe it'll come out maybe it'll all come out in the wash maybe all of the rumors will end up being true it won't just be smoke it'll be fire but one thing is eminently true and obviously true there was actual evidence of serious criminal collusion between the obama administration and the russians because it is criminal to back state department

stated terrorist groups because you want an iran deal that was with the terrorist government which is exactly what was happening here and that's exactly what was happening here.

Just astonishing.

And speaking of collusion, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is now requesting more information on the Uranium One deal.

So things may be about to get very hot for the old Obama officials.

We'll give you all the updates.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn back.

Glenn Back.

Okay, so this is breaking news.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions apparently has ordered investigators at the Justice Department to ask FBI agents to explain all of the evidence they found in the Uranium One investigation.

This is a report from Tom Winter, Pete Williams, and Ken Delanion at NBC News.

Apparently, the interviews with FBI agents are part of the Justice Department's effort to fulfill a promise to an assistant attorney general made to Congress last month to examine whether a special counsel was warranted to look into what has become known as the Uranium One deal.

You remember all the details surrounding Uranium One.

Ed issues a 2010 transaction in which the Obama administration allowed the sale of a U.S.

uranium mining facility to Russian State Atomic Energy Company.

Hillary was Secretary of State at the time.

The State Department was one of the nine agencies that agreed to approve the deal.

Now, a senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the initial FBI investigation told NBC News there were allegations of corruption surrounding the process under which the U.S.

government approved the sale.

No charges were filed.

But as the New York Times reported in April 2015, some of the people associated with the deal contributed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

And Bill Clinton was paid half a million dollars for one speech in Moscow by a Russian investment bank with links to the transaction.

Hillary says she had nothing to do with it.

Of course, that is somewhat doubtful.

That is somewhat doubtful.

And there were a lot of people a few weeks back who are trying to undermine the suspicions about the uranium-1 deal.

And I did a bit of a summary over at my website, Daily Wire, talking about what exactly happened in the Uranium-1 story.

So here is what was true about the Uranium-1 deal.

There's a guy named Frank Giustra.

Frank Giustra was the original owner of Uranium One.

And people said, okay, well, he divested by the time of the sale of uranium-1 and its assets to Razatom, the Russian atomic energy agency.

But here's what is true, okay?

Giostra owned a company called Eurasia.

That was sold to Uranium One.

Giostra then said he divested his personal stake in the company, but his shareholders still owned 60% of the company, and there's no way to confirm the truth of his claim.

In 2009 and 2010, Razatom, which is Russia's atomic energy agency, was poised to buy a majority of the company.

They were barred by law from exporting American uranium abroad, so it wasn't that Russia was going to buy the uranium, send it back to Russia, and then use it to make bombs to murder Americans or something.

That was not really the concern.

The real concern here was that Russia bought Uranium-1 because they actually didn't want the American assets.

They bought Uranium-1 because Uranium-1 had assets in other countries that they could use to make nukes.

In 2013, Russia bought the rest of Uranium-1 with the approval of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, as well as the U.S.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Utah agencies.

The CFIUS includes the State Department.

Hillary said she had nothing to do with the green lighting.

So, how much money actually flowed from Uranium 1 beneficiaries to the Clinton Foundation?

Well, if we don't include Giustra, then about $4 million.

If you include Giustra, it's $145 million.

But this is all a little too simplistic.

So in 2015, here's what the New York Times reported.

Uranium 1 acquisition actually began in 2005 while Giustra still owned the company.

Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton flew with Giustra to Kazakhstan, where the two of them dined with the authoritarian president, a guy named Norsulton Nazarbayev.

Clinton then handed the Kazakh president a propaganda coup.

This is the New York Times, not me, when he expressed support for Mr.

Nazarbayev's bid to head an international elections monitoring group undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of Kazakhstan's poor human rights record by, among other people, Hillary Clinton.

Within days of the visit, Justra's fledgling company Eurasia signed a preliminary deal giving it stakes in three uranium mines controlled by Kazatapram, which was the Kazakhstan official energy agency.

Eurasia, then in 2007, merged with Uranium One, a South African company with assets in Africa and Australia, in a $3.5 billion transaction.

The new company kept the Uranium One name.

It was controlled by Eurasia investors, including Ian Telfer, who was a Canadian who became chairman.

Justra says at that point he sold his stake.

Soon, Uranium One began to snap up companies with assets in the United States.

In April 2007, it announced that it was going to purchase a uranium mill in Utah.

Hey, the questions about Razatom's Razatom's control of uranium isn't really about the Russians crafting nukes, as I say.

It's about shortages of uranium in the United States and us being dependent on foreign sources for that material.

And again, about Razatom purchasing nuclear material in Kazakhstan.

And the Clintons were still involved at this time.

They were involved past the sale.

This is the point.

It didn't end with Justra selling Razatom.

I mean, selling Uranium 1.

The new head, Ian Telfer, he gave between $1.3 million and $5.6 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation

from a constellation of people with ties to Uranium One or Eurasia.

Without the assets, the Kassock mines, the Russians would have had no interest in the deal.

Amid the influx of Uranium-1 connected money, Clinton was invited to speak in Moscow in June 2010, the same month Rosatom struck its deal for a majority stake in Uranium One.

So the same month that Rosatom decided to buy Uranium One, Clinton spent time in Moscow and got 500 grand for it.

It's not at all unclear that the Clintons were unrelated to Uranium One.

So again, just more evidence that Democrats were perfectly willing to work with the Russians when they saw a way to benefit from it.

Pretty amazing.

Pretty amazing.

Well, meanwhile, the Pope has now spoken out just before Christmas in a way that I think is actually valuable.

So Pope Francis gave a homily, and he talked about fruitfulness.

He commented on how in these days, sterility is considered a virtue.

He says, back then, sterility was considered a shame when the birth of a child was seen as a grace and a gift from God.

He said, in the Bible, there are many sterile women who desire a child.

Fruitfulness in the Bible is a blessing.

And then he pointed his criticisms at countries that have, quote, chosen the path of sterility and suffer from that serious disease that is a demographic winter.

They do not have children.

He said the material and spiritual fruitfulness means giving life.

He said a person may choose not to marry like priests and consecrated persons, but must live by giving life to others.

Woe to us if we are not fruitful with good works.

And then the Pope went further.

He said that willful infertility is an instrument of Satan.

He says he does not want us to give life, be it physical or spiritual, to others.

He who lives for himself produces selfishness, pride, vanity, greasing the soul without living for others.

The devil is the one who grows from the weeds of egoism and stops us from being fruitful.

Then he actually pointed an empty cradle.

He said, here is an empty cradle.

We can look at it.

It can be seen as a symbol of hope because the child will come, or it can be seen as an object from a museum empty of life.

Our heart is like the cradle.

Is it empty?

Or is it open to continuously receive and give life?

Come, Lord, fill the cradle.

Fill my heart.

Help me to give life to be fruitful.

A nice Christmas message from the Pope and something to keep in mind in a society where we value sex and have completely disconnected it from childbearing, child-rearing, and commitment.

In a few minutes, this is exactly what I want to talk about because there's this bizarre notion that has sprung up in the wake of

the Me Too movement

that a sex completely divorced from meaning, that sex completely disconnected from commitment, that somehow this is a net positive, but by the same token, we are going to target men if women feel uncomfortable about those standards.

This bizarre, vague standard has been set up, and it doesn't work.

And I want to talk about that because now there are actual columnists coming out on the left saying that yes doesn't even mean yes.

Sometimes yes means no and sometimes no means yes.

So what exactly are men and women supposed to do in this society?

I'll tell you in just a second.

Ben Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Nikki Haley just wrecking people over at the UN, and it is glorious.

Ben Shapiro in for Glenn Beck.

She just told the UN, quote, the U.S.

will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation.

We'll remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more.

Nikki Haley doing yeoman's work.

The UN, it's always been bizarre to me that people take the UN seriously as a moral institution.

Name five moral things the UN has ever done.

Five.

Okay, it's really not that difficult to name five moral things any other institution that's worthwhile have ever done, but you can't really do it with the UN because it turns out when you have a lot of crappy countries voting for crappy resolutions, crappy things happen.

Now, in other news, I'm going to talk a little bit about the progression of the Me Too moment and why exactly confusion seems to be setting in.

Because at the beginning, it seemed like Me Too was going to be a very, very clear movement, right?

A very clear and obvious movement with real repercussions.

That basically the Me Too moment was going to be about the idea that men were not allowed to sexually abuse women.

If you sexually abuse women, you're in trouble.

And this makes sense if you have a definition of sexual abuse, if you have a definition of sexual harassment.

But very quickly, it seemed like a lot of folks started to conflate sexual abuse and sexual harassment.

They started to conflate Harvey Weinstein with

some guy saying something lewd at a bar.

They started to say this is all the same thing.

Matt Damon, who I'm no fan of Matt Damon,

but Matt Damon basically was correct when he said, listen, all this stuff is bad, but some bad is worse than other bad.

And clearly that is true.

But we decided we can't do that.

We have to treat all bad as the same.

And then we got down into some really dicey area because it turns out that while the left says that no means no and yes means yes, they're now beginning to realize that even consent is a little bit of a murky concept.

When does yes mean yes?

When does no mean no?

It's not me asking this question.

It's now the left asking this question.

Over the weekend, a woman named Jessica Bennett, who is the gender editor of the New York Times, that is an actual job.

It's a job that presumably someone trained for and pays for, the gender editor of the New York Times.

Great.

Wrote a piece titled, quote, when saying yes is easier than saying no.

So basically, in this piece, she argues that sometimes women say yes because it's too much trouble to say no, but they're not really into it.

She says, in many cases, women say yes to sex, but they actually don't want the sex.

She says, sometimes yes means no simply because it is easier to go through with it than explain our way out of the situation.

Sometimes no means yes because you actually do want to do it, but you know you're not supposed to let, you're not supposed to lest you be labeled a slut.

And if you're a man, that no often means just try hard because, you know, persuasion is part of the game.

Okay, I think there's actually some truth to what Bennett is saying, but the problem is that if you've made your only value consent, then you can't start muddying the lines.

You can't start taking those lines and playing with them because some guy's going to end up losing his career or going to jail over your muddy definition of consent.

Bennett says that consent is actually societally defined, quote, our idea of what we want, of our own desire is linked to what we think we're supposed to want.

But again, the problem here is that this lady's not offering any clear solutions.

So let's say it's true.

that women sometimes say yes, but mean no.

And a man then has sex with a woman who says yes, because that's that's what her face says.

She says yes.

Like it actually, the word yes comes out of her mouth, but she actually means no.

And then she feels bad about it later.

Did the man do something wrong?

Are men supposed to be mind readers now?

And if a woman says no, but then a man seduces her until she says yes, are we supposed to take stock of the original no or of the final yes?

Like which one are we supposed to like?

Is Baby It's Cold Outside a rapey song?

Right?

This is one of the things the left has said.

That Baby It's Cold Outside is a rapy song because the guy is basically trying to convince the woman to stay the night.

And she's saying that she really feels she's torn.

She feels like she has to go, but she sort of wants to stay.

Is the guy like a rapist or what?

Unfortunately, the left offers no guidance on these issues.

Neither does a woman named Rebecca Reed.

Okay, how crazy is this?

You ready for crazy?

Here's crazy.

She wrote in the Metro UK that she once participated in a threesome because she, quote, didn't want to be rude.

Which I got to say, like, That's weird.

I'm not, your sex life is your business.

But if you're participating in threesomes because you don't want to be rude, like

I don't think it's rude to say no to that.

Like, that seems pretty odd.

Like, if they invited you to participate in a cannibalistic ritual, it would be kind of rude to say no, but also kind of gross to say yes.

Reed says such experiences aren't uncommon.

Quote, there are hundreds of reasons why, but they all boil down to the same thing.

We're nice girls.

We've been raised to be nice.

Note the definitional change in the term nice girls here.

I mean, when I was growing up, I'm not that old.

When I was was growing up, to be a nice girl meant a girl who did not have sex before marriage.

A nice girl meant a classy girl.

A nice girl meant a girl who was not promiscuous.

That was typically how your mother used it.

Now a nice girl means you have to have a threesome because you don't want to offend somebody at a dinner party.

Weird.

This woman, Rebecca Reed, she says, sometimes being careful means having sex that you don't want.

That leaves you feeling dirty and sad and a bit icky.

It's not rape, it's not abuse, but it's not sex either.

So what exactly is the problem with doing that?

She says that women are scared into having sex.

They feel like if they don't have sex with men, that men are going to abuse them.

So, in the end, even a woman feeling emotionally torn about sex is the fault of a man who may or may not be threatening her.

There's this crazy story today.

There's a woman who wrote a short story in the pages of The New Yorker.

It's a 4,000-word story called Cat Person, and it describes a 20-year-old woman named Margot who seduces a 34-year-old man.

She sends him all these signals that she wants to have sex with him.

He brings her back to his place.

She sends all the signals.

She says yes, but she doesn't really feel good about it.

And then she never calls him again because it was awkward.

And here's what the piece says.

It says, She knew that her last chance of enjoying this encounter had disappeared, but that she would carry through with it until it was over.

And in the end, she refuses to text the guy back.

He wants some sort of emotional connection.

She refuses, and then he texts that she is a whore.

And this story has become sort of a women's lib piece for some reason.

That a woman who is torn over whether to have sex with a guy and then has sex with a guy, but gives him no signal that she's not interested in him, and then cuts him off completely, that he's the villain in this piece because he's threatening her with violence in some way that is not really stated.

That woman just received a $1 million book advance.

And the woman who wrote that piece received a $1 million book advance because apparently these feelings are so common among women.

So I have a few questions about this, about these feelings among women.

Not that women have these feelings, but what societal standard has prevailed that this feeling has become more common?

What are men supposed to do in these scenarios now?

As a society, we are beyond suggesting that women are doing anything wrong in consenting to non-marital sex.

We've decided that you want to have whatever sex you want to have, no problem morally.

Not just governmentally, right?

I'm a libertarian governmentally, but morally, there's no problem with you having sex with whoever you want to have sex with at any time for any reason, anywhere, with however many people and or objects and or animals.

Everyone is free to do what they want, but right now we're in the midst of a push to punish male aggressors, so you can't have both ways.

If we water down consent to nothingness, if we say that consent, sometimes yes means no, sometimes no means yes,

how can you ever expect a sexual encounter, a consensual sexual encounter to occur?

And how can a man ever feel safe he's not going to be prosecuted or his life ruined over an accusation?

Now, there's another aspect to this that I think is really the deeper one, and it's not really about consent.

It's about societal expectation.

So all three of the articles that I just mentioned articulate this complaint that women are having sex because they want to fulfill male expectations, that men expect women to have sex with them.

And so women are doing it either to be nice, as in one article, or to avoid the awkwardness in another article, or because

it's just too weird to avoid it in a third article.

But there's a deeper expectation, which is why are women expected to please men sexually without being married to them in these situations?

That's the shifted societal standard.

The shifted societal standard is not really with regard to consent.

The shifted societal standard is with regard to the expectation that women are supposed to accede to men's requests prior to commitment being available.

When you watch TV shows today, you know, when I was growing up, when my parents taught me about sex, what they said is when a man and a woman get married, and that was the standard I held.

And both my wife and I were virgins until we were married.

And I think it's made our marriage that much richer because the only people we've ever experienced that intimacy with is each other, which is great.

I've never regretted that for one solitary second, really.

But then we move to you have sex with the person you love, right?

Not that you're married to, the person that you love.

And love can be momentary, it can be fleeting, but as long as you love them, it's okay.

So not in the context of commitment, but in the context of love.

And then it became sex is completely disconnected from love.

So now you will see the reverse of the way that things used to be, right?

If you watch a movie from the 1940s, you'll see a man and a woman want to have sex.

So the man romances her, they fall in love, they are committed, they get married, and then fade to black as they enter the bedroom, right?

That's 1940s.

Then it turned into man and woman know each other, like each other, say they love each other, have sex, but no marriage.

Then it turned into man and woman decide to go to bed together, but they're still awkward about saying, I love you, right?

Watch any sitcom today, and this is an actual plot point.

This is something that's in virtually every sitcom, every cultural totem now, is this.

Man and woman hop in the sack together, but then it's awkward.

So it wasn't awkward to get naked with the person and share your most intimate time with the person.

It's awkward to talk to them afterward.

So that expectation has now been set that women are expected to have sex.

They were not expected to have sex without commitment by society or by men.

Men may have had the hope, but they certainly did not have the expectation that women were going to have sex with them without any sort of commitment prior to the rise of the third wave feminist movement.

If you ask a person of traditional moral standards whether the woman should have said no in all of the stories I mentioned before, and the answer will be yes.

But then you're a prude, according to feminists.

You're a prude, upholding the patriarchy.

Traditional mores ruled out the male expectation of sex in non-commitment scenarios, but the feminist movement said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Men are, it's okay if men expect sex.

Right?

That's the backhanded thing.

They say it's not okay for men to expect it, but once you say that women are going to have sex without commitment and that they should because it's enriching, men are going to act on that with a certain expectation, and women are going to respond to that expectation.

Thanks to our consent-only society, in which sexual activity has basically become a throwaway, no longer anything connected to commitment, and any notion of cherishing intimacy is really laughed at as patriarchal and prudish and backwards, men have developed an expectation that may be unjust, but is certainly explicable.

And the cost to that system is not borne by men.

The cost to the system is borne by women.

So a system that protected women from the male expectation of sex has been discarded in favor of a system that does not protect women from those predations and then is surprised when women feel bad about it.

That's why everything seems so messy nowadays because it is messy because we have done away with a certain societal standard that set expectations

and replaced it with a certain expectation that has gotten rid of all standards entirely.

As we continue here on the Glenn Beck program, Hollywood may actually be doing something right.

I just ripped on Hollywood.

Hollywood may be doing something right, shockingly.

I will tell you about it because it's kind of amazing.

Ben Shapiro in from Glenn Beck,

Glenn back,

Glenn, back.

So, beginning in April, a movie will be in theaters that I think conservatives should go see.

The movie, I can't believe it's taken them, I mean, I can, but I can't believe that it's taken them legitimately half a century to come up with this movie.

The movie is Chappaquitic.

And they finally made a movie about Ted Kennedy essentially being guilty of manslaughter for driving a car off a bridge with his girlfriend in the back and then leaving her to die, swimming to safety, going to sleep for the night, and then coming back the next morning.

And oh, look, amazing.

When you leave a woman in the back of your car in the middle of water for an entire night, she dies.

Well done.

Well done, Teddy Kennedy.

But it took them 50 years to make this movie.

And this is the amazing thing about Hollywood, right?

They'll make a movie about

seriously, they made a movie about

the ridiculous scooter-libby Valerie plame routine, which was a big nothing.

They made an entire movie about that within two years.

It took them 50 years to make a movie about a leading senator in the United States Senate who's probably going to be president leaving a woman to die in the back of his car, right?

It took them 50 years to make it, but the new trailer is out for Chappaquittic,

and it looks as though they are actually going to be accurate about how they portray Kennedy.

Now, the media are going to play this as though it's supposedly about Kennedy being the victim, right?

People magazine headlined, watch Ted Kennedy's life life get derailed, an exclusive Chappaquiddick trailer.

It turns out that he was not the victim in Chappaquittic.

The victim in Chappaquittic was the chick he left for dead in the backseat, Mary Joe Copechni.

Okay, but good news, Variety has actually seen the film and reviewed it.

And here's what they say.

The film says that what happened at Chappaquittic was even worse than we think.

Copechni's body was found in a position that implied she was struggling to keep her head out of the water.

And what the film suggests is that once the car turned upside down, she didn't die.

She was alive and then drowned after a period of time as the water seeped in.

This makes Edward Kennedy's decision not to report the crime a clear-cut act of criminal negligence, but in spirit, if not legally, it renders it something closer to an act of killing.

Chappaquittic is a meticulously told chronicle.

No more and no less.

And at times, there's a slight detachment in watching it because it's too tough and smart to milk the situation by turning Edward Kennedy into a tragic figure.

In certain ways, he may well have been, and there are moments when we see the sad grandeur with which this disaster hangs on his stooped shoulders, but the movie is fundamentally the portrait of a weasel, a man who, from the moment the accident happens, takes as his premise that he will not suffer the consequences and then does what it takes to twist reality so that it conforms to that scenario.

If that's what this movie is, oh boy.

Oh boy, won't that be nice?

The sad part, of course, is that it only takes Hollywood 50 years to make a movie that tells the truth about something like Chappaquita.

Can you imagine if a Republican drove off a bridge with a girl in the back seat, left her for dead?

Would it take five or ten minutes to Hollywood for Hollywood to green light that film?

And Hollywood is already greenlighting TV series based on Trump.

He's still in office and nothing terrible has happened yet.

Just shows how Hollywood is disconnected from reality.

But it is good to see that after 50 years or so, Hollywood finally deems it safe to talk in serious terms about a guy who left a woman to die, even though his name was Kennedy.

Hopefully, in another 50 years, we can actually talk about what the Obama administration did in Iran, because obviously Hollywood ain't going to tackle that anytime soon.

Well, it's been a pleasure to join you here on the Glenn Beck program.

It's an honor to fill in for Glenn.

I'm Ben Shapiro sitting in for Glenn Beck.

Glenn back.