Hollywood certainly doesn’t have a reputation for being harmless. The amount of child actors who have walked away from an acting career untouched by the social pressures are few and far between. But even more scarce are those that lead a life as “put together” on the inside as they appear to be on the outside. 
Kirk Cameron, one of such men, would be the first to admit that he’s far from perfect, but he is also quick to remind people that his faith in God is the leading reason why he enjoys the life he does. 
In a December 2019 “Sunday Special” interview with Daily Wire’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, actor and producer, Kirk Cameron, shared how his faith impacted his career in the entertainment industry and how it has proved to be the foundation of a purposeful and successful life, both in Hollywood and at home. 
Cameron’s acting career launched when he was 9 years old. Only 5 years later, he found himself starring as Mike Seaver on ABC’s hit show “Growing Pains.” It was at that point Cameron knew he was meant to be an entertainer.  
The “Growing Pains” cast was like a family, said Cameron. And his experience was an overall positive one. 
“But being a teenager in Hollywood is a pretty dicey road to take,” Cameron admitted to Shapiro. “And I think that’s where faith in God kicked in and pointed me in a different direction — I took the road less-traveled, so to speak.” 
His journey of faith started at 17 when he was “captivated by the message of the Gospel” during a Sunday church message. Cameron said it helped him answer questions, existential and philosophical, that he was wrestling with at the time. 
From that point on, Cameron worked to navigate a lifestyle of reconciling his new faith with his career in Hollywood. 
“I was trying to figure out ‘how do I do this’ — I didn’t grow up like this. ‘How do I honor God in an industry that doesn’t always look to accomplish the same goal?’”
The changes in his behavior were subtle, indicated Cameron. “I just wasn’t dropping as many F-bombs, you know. I wasn&#8217;t going to the same parties, and I wasn&#8217;t interested in some of the same stuff my friends were interested in.”
The outside response to Cameron’s conversion was about as expected, considering the track record of teen celebrities.
“I would say there were some people who had a healthy concern,” Cameron explained. “You know when you hear of teen celebrities, child actors, often things enter into their life that makes them go wrong. And you know that can be very concerning.” 
Despite those concerns, Cameron is confident that he picked the best path. And he attributes his faith for keeping him on track.
Looking back, Cameron stated, “Wow, I’m really blessed to have this life and I want to really live it in a way that honors the One who gave it to me.’ And I think that kept me on track more than anything.” 
Forging the same career path but with a new identity was not as difficult for Cameron as one might expect. Cameron said doors began to open after high school, “and the doors that were opening were lining up with things that were happening to me on the inside.” 
Not everything stayed the same — but for Cameron that was ok. 
“There may have been some parts that I had to pass on because of content or conscience issues,” admitted Cameron. However, “It wasn&#8217;t like I felt like people&#8217;s disagreements with my faith or my values was inhibiting my career.” 
Rather, Cameron has had the opportunity to pursue entertainment he’s passionate about through films including “Fireproof” and the documentary “Monumental: In Search of America&#8217;s National Treasure.” 
“I want to be about things that promote faith, I want to be about things that promote family, and marriage,” Cameron told Shapiro. “And I think it’s really helping people,” he added. 
Now, as a husband to his once-girlfriend on and off screen, Chelsea Noble, and father of six children, four of whom are adopted, Cameron seeks to live out the same values that he promotes in his films. He is convinced that, “when the family crumbles, the nation crumbles.” 
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-127379" src="https://editorial.dailywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Ben-Shapiro-Kirk-Cameron-919x576.jpg" alt="Ben Shapiro Kirk Cameron" width="600" height="376" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/07/Ben-Shapiro-Kirk-Cameron-919x576.jpg 919w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/07/Ben-Shapiro-Kirk-Cameron-300x188.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/07/Ben-Shapiro-Kirk-Cameron-768x482.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2020/07/Ben-Shapiro-Kirk-Cameron.jpg 1000w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />
In addition to his film work, Cameron and his wife lead marriage conferences across the country.
Cameron said all families begin with an expectation of success. “Nobody goes to the altar thinking, ‘Hey, if this whole thing blows up, I’m ok with that,’” he told Shapiro. Rather, he believes “people want and appreciate things that help them to live life in a way that causes people to flourish, families to flourish, and the nation to flourish.” 
With marital commitment in Hollywood today being a rare phenomena, Cameron joked during the discussion, “I’ve been married for 29 years, which is like 290 in Hollywood years.”
Parenting is also a full-time job for Cameron. He told Shapiro that there are three key principles he and his wife refer back to. The first is to be the person you want your kids to become. The second is prioritizing the relationships with your children and making sure your house doesn’t become a “correctional center,” as Cameron put it. 
Finally, “point them to truth,” urged Cameron.
“You know the kids get inundated with so much error,” he remarked, “with so much, you know, right is wrong, wrong is right.”
“For me, I go to God’s Word — those principles, those ancient truths that I can always go to,” he explained. “I want my kids to learn those things and know that truth is not relative when it comes to morality and things like that. Truth is something they can build their life on.”
Cameron is fully aware of the secularization in today’s society and is persuaded that culture is the key to bringing about change. 
“Politics is downstream of culture,” argued Cameron. “I think that the hearts and minds of young people are being formed, and they vote accordingly.” 
Cameron said one of the solutions is more people of faith in Hollywood.
Understandably, there are objections to joining such an industry. Cameron acknowledged the complaints that Hollywood can be “dark” and “dirty.” But just like politics, Cameron stated, “If you don’t like it, change it.”
While there is a strong but inarticulate demand for faith-based entertainment, fear of producing or even participating in such films is a big roadblock. Contrary to popular opinion, he suggested, there are in fact people of faith in the entertainment industry. 
Cameron said that “there are more people of faith than you would think” in Hollywood, but “many of them are very cautious about expressing that faith.” 
The actor is optimistic that we will be witnessing more people of faith “coming out of the closet,” both in Hollywood but also “all around the country and the world.” 
Practically speaking, “people are making projects where faith is at the center because it does well at the box office,” he noted.
“Many people think that what I have done, like talking about my faith, would be suicide for a career,” he told Shapiro.
To those debating whether or not they should vocalize their faith or conservative values in their professional setting, Cameron said, “Go with your convictions.” 
For him it was a matter of not wanting “to look back” in regret for not making the courageous choice. You won’t want to reflect back and say, “‘I wish I could do that over again. You know, I wish I had some courage and I wish I didn’t care so much about what other people thought.’”
“I care about people,” Cameron concluded. Ultimately that is why he wants to try to “speak the truth and live the truth in a compassionate way.”
“If I don&#8217;t do that I&#8217;m really not loving people,” he said. “I&#8217;m really just protecting myself and my career, which is selfish.”
At the end of the day, acting upon your convictions is of far greater value. 
“You only live once,” said Cameron. “Do what you believe you’re here to do.” 
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-82-kirk-cameron">Watch Cameron&#8217;s full interview with Shapiro</a>

Kirk Cameron

Kirk Cameron Discusses Finding Faith Amid Fame

Ben Shapiro

Christianity

Hollywood

Religion

Mike Rowe has parted ways with his fair share of friends. In fact, in one year, he lost as many as a million of them. 
It was around 2013, and in his re-telling, his Facebook following dropped from three million to two after he appeared on “Real Time” with Bill Maher, the left-leaning political commentator who he has described as “opinionated, polarizing and controversial,&#8221; and, that same year, joined conservative radio host Glenn Beck for an interview. 
“My buddies on the right just didn’t know what to do with the optics of me sitting next to Bill Maher,” said Rowe, who recalled the incident in a 2018 interview. “And my pals on the left just had no notion of how to square the cognitive dissonance that forced their heads to explode when they saw me sitting there with Glenn Beck.”
The former “Dirty Jobs” host added: “We’re in the world now, where it’s not what we say that gets us in trouble, it’s what we don’t. And it&#8217;s not where we are that makes people’s eyebrows arch, it’s who we’re next to. It’s the proximity of outrage. It’s the geography of all of it.”
Rowe’s observations, made during a “Sunday Special” conversation with Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro two years ago, continue to hold true — maybe even more so. 
Earlier this month, The Washington Post published a 3,000-word tome about a random woman’s decision to attend a 2018 Halloween party as Meghan Kelly in blackface. Why? Two party guests who confronted the woman at the time were still upset over it, and wanted her to endure a full-throttled public humiliation, nearly two years after she privately apologized to the host. 
Notably, Lyric Prince, one of the two guests, also wanted the host, an editorial cartoonist at the Washington Post, to condemn the woman — his own friend and a non-public figure — in public: “I want people who read this story to say to themselves, ‘I cannot excuse my friend’s bad behavior because it does reflect on me if I say nothing.’” 
The woman has since been fired from her job. Cancel culture abounds. 
According to Rowe, part of the problem can be attributed to social media. Like a gun, social media is a tool, and it demands a level of responsibility from its user. 
“We’re right on the verge, I think, of discovering some really interesting parallels between the First and Second Amendment. And I think people who would never, ever consider or associate a firearm with goodness, are ironically using speech as a real cudgel and restricting it in so many ways,” Rowe told Shapiro. 
But, how you use the tool remains an open question. “Most people simply don’t have the training or the maturity to handle it,” said Rowe. 
“The violence and the anger, and the outrage that you’re seeing, I think in part, is a result of having an unlimited amount of access to a platform that gives you both the mechanism to say whatever you want, and the anonymity, and the comfort to hide behind it,” he said. 
“So people are very shrill and they’re very brave in those scenarios,” said Rowe, who argued that those factors, when combined together, serve as the “portent to a mob.”
“I think that’s what you’ve probably seen. Things get accelerated, and then there&#8217;s no place left for it to go, and so they have to act out,” he said. 
The New York Times recently reported an uptick in high school students and alumni using “social media to expose racism,” including the use of anonymous Instagram accounts, where students can submit stories about others for public humiliation. 
One of the Instagram accounts, described by The Times, was used to share screenshots and videos of local students using anything from racial slurs to engaging in “cultural appropriation.” When students became angry about it, some started photoshopping images to retaliate, and fights between friends broke out online. 
The Times reports that the specific Instagram page in question has since been shut down. 
During the 2018 interview, Rowe told Shapiro that people in society seem to confuse passion with conviction, an observation that reminded him of the “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats’ early-20th Century poem that is infamous for its apocalyptic imagery. 
<blockquote>The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity</blockquote>
“If you don’t have the certainty of your convictions. If you can’t make a case….Then what is left? Nothing is left but an explanation of how you feel,” said Rowe. 
“If your philosophy ultimately redounds to an explanation of how you feel, then you’re completely beholden to whatever feeling you might be experiencing at any given point. And then you’re just one of those people who follow their passion. Good luck with that,” said Rowe. 
So what’s better than relying on feelings? Rowe suggests that “a good-natured skepticism, a ton of gratitude, and some honest intellectual curiosity” could be the best replacement for the “let me tell you how I feel” philosophy that dominates outrage mobs.  
“I really don’t care how you feel, honestly. I mean, over a beer it&#8217;s kind of fun,” he said. “I just don’t care. It’s so much more interesting to understand why you believe what you believe, than it is to understand what you believe. That’s why mobs are boring,” said Rowe. 
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/sundayspecialep-12-mike-rowe">Watch Rowe’s full interview with Shapiro</a>.

Mike Rowe Sunday Special

Mike Rowe’s Take-Down Of Cancel Culture, Outrage Mobs Has Gotten Even Better With Age

Cancel culture

Mike Rowe

Political Correctness

Social Media

On Wednesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about Elizabeth Warren’s collapsing campaign, and the senator bragging about taking a $3 donation from a college student with only $6 in the bank. Video and partial transcript below:
[The epic collapse of Elizabeth Warren is] more hilarious than anything else. Watching that pathological liar just fall apart like a mudslide in the Hollywood Hills has been extraordinarily entertaining. So let me just take a moment and pay tribute to the worst campaign of them all. 
Elizabeth Warren is now in full-on mourning mode and it is delicious. Last night, she said she&#8217;s not going to drop out because, of course, she can&#8217;t drop out. If she drops out, it demonstrates that her campaign has been one of the biggest failures in recent memory, since Kamala Harris. This was like a massive failure.
As of October, she was the presumptive nominee. She was leading in New Hampshire; she was leading in Iowa; she was picking up ground in places like South Carolina. And then she presented her “Medicare For All” plan. She tried to put flesh on the bones of Bernie Sanders’ garbage plan, and she completely fell apart. Just imploded…
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[Last night] a 19-year-old woman, who was going to college, came up to Elizabeth Warren complaining that she had a lot of student debt. She said, “I have six dollars in my bank account and I&#8217;m giving three dollars of it to you,” and Elizabeth Warren tweeted that out as though this was a mark of her vision. That seems, first of all, pretty regressive, is it not? The woman has six dollars to her name, and you&#8217;re taking three of them for your garbage campaign that is going to blow it on ads that have no impact? [Warren] is just terrible, she’s a terrible person. 
So last night she announced that she was staying in the race — for no apparent reason, because she&#8217;s got no shot at the nomination. I mean, Bernie is consolidated and she&#8217;s in Bernie&#8217;s lane. He&#8217;s picked up all his support from her. Here is Elizabeth Warren being awful at this:
<blockquote>WARREN: You know me, did the speech and then afterwards did a selfie line, and we were there for over an hour. People are coming through and they&#8217;re saying “thank you” and they&#8217;re given hugs and talking about what&#8217;s important to them. Young woman came up by herself and she said, “I&#8217;m a broke college student with a lot of student loan debt.” And she said, “I checked and I have six dollars in the bank. So I just gave three dollars to keep you in this fight.” That&#8217;s what we gotta do.</blockquote>
We have to take money from people who can&#8217;t afford it? That&#8217;s what you got to do? In fact, Elizabeth Warren then smacked her across the face and was like “Where’s the other three dollars?! You bring your other three dollars, lady?! Don&#8217;t you want to win?! Don&#8217;t you want my campaign to be successful?! If you were really willing to fight, you would give me the other three dollars in your bank account. And don&#8217;t worry, I&#8217;ll leave alleviate all student loan debt at the end. In fact, why don’t you just rack up another twenty grand in student loan debt, you can max yourself out right here on this campaign, and don&#8217;t worry, a little bit later, I will relieve all student loan debt. You know, if you have to falsify the documents a little bit, just give me some money and funnel it to me, and take it out of student loan debt then just kind of hand it to me.”
What a terrible human being. I mean, seriously, if somebody came up to me at an event and they were like, “I have six dollars to my name and I want you to have five of those dollars,” I&#8217;d be like, “No, here&#8217;s a twenty, go get yourself a nice meal.” Like, seriously, who is this person? Who is this? That&#8217;s insane. But that&#8217;s Elizabeth Warren&#8217;s campaign from top to bottom. Completely ridiculous, completely insane. Completely out of touch with regular Americans, even while pretending to represent regular Americans.
The lady’s been teaching at Harvard Law for twenty years, she&#8217;s not been in touch with regular Americans for several decades at this point, and by regular Americans, I mean people who don&#8217;t have tons of money in their bank account. It&#8217;s crazy. 
Her new pitch, by the way, is that people are being mean to each other and mean to her — that&#8217;s her new pitch. So she got skunked last night. I mean, just destroyed. She won 9.6 percent of the vote in a state neighboring her own, she won a grand total of eleven thousand votes last night. Just a brutal, brutal showing, and Elizabeth Warren then gets up in Manchester, New Hampshire, says, “Yeah, we were bad, but people keep fragmenting this party and that&#8217;s terrible.” 
No one has fragmented this party more than Elizabeth Warren, [she’s] been an attack dog against virtually everybody else to get on that stage, and she&#8217;s awful. Pretty soon, those sweaters — the good news is ladies, if you&#8217;re looking for Ann Taylor Loft multi-colored sweaters, those will be on half price within a matter of about three weeks because Elizabeth Warren&#8217;s demand for them have dropped ridiculously.

Senate Holds Hearing On Wall Street Reforms

SHAPIRO: The Spectacular Collapse Of Elizabeth Warren

2020 Election

Elizabeth Warren

On Monday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about the Oscars, the Woke embroidery on Natalie Portman’s dress, and Joaquin Phoenix scolding the public for drinking milk. Video and partial transcript below: 
[Natalie Portman] shows up on the red carpet wearing a cape — but it&#8217;s not just any cape — it&#8217;s a cape that is embroidered with female directors, the names of female directors who were not nominated and therefore are greatly put upon, despite the fact that they earn millions of dollars to direct apparently mediocre films. 
I mean, seriously, the names of the directors that are on there, on her cape, they include the director of “Hustlers.” Does anyone think that “Hustlers” deserve the best director nom this year? Does anyone think that &#8220;Hustlers&#8221; really, really required a best director nomination this year? One of the directors is the director of the Mr. Rogers film. Does anyone think the Mr. Rogers film deserved a best director nomination this year? Does anyone think that Greta Gerwig desperately needed a best director nomination after winning a best director nomination for “Lady Bird?” What exactly are we talking about here? 
The bottom line is that, according to Hollywood, this makes Natalie Portman not have to worry about the fact that she is wealthy and that she has a really easy life — she is now part of the victimized. She&#8217;s part of a coalition of the dispossessed. So the question becomes dispossessed by whom? People do this routinely — dispossessed by the Academy, because the Academy is the font of all evil and super white — so what does the Academy do? Instead of the academy making fun of all this nonsense, the Academy jumps right into it, and they flagellate themselves, and the Academy brings all these people forward, and then they say, “Look how, we know that we&#8217;ve got a problem, guys. We know that we&#8217;ve got a problem, and the first step toward solving a problem is admitting you have a problem and bringing forth people like Natalie Portman, a true victim in American society.”
When I think “victim” I think Natalie Portman, don&#8217;t you? She lives in France with her husband. I feel really, really terrible for Natalie Portman. I feel terrible for all those directors who were given millions and millions of dollars to play with to make really, really kind of mediocre films — that&#8217;s pretty spectacular stuff. 
At least I will hand it to Joaquin Phoenix; at least Joaquin Phoenix is crazy. All these other people are pretty much sane, so when they do stupid things, then you just make fun of them. Joaquin Phoenix, I&#8217;m not sure whether you&#8217;re even allowed to make fun of Joaquin Phoenix at this point because, honestly, he&#8217;s sort of morphed into — Is he still role playing? Is he still just being the Joker? Did he ever get out of the mindset? So Joaquin Phoenix gets up there and he&#8217;s been going around making these sort of environmentalist statements; he really made a sacrifice for the people this year and for the people of Earth — he only has one tuxedo, Joaquin Phoenix — he pointed this out that unlike all these other people of ten tuxedos, he only has one tuxedo — just like all the poor people only have one tuxedo. If you go below the poverty line, everybody&#8217;s got a tux, a thousand-dollar tux hanging in their closet.
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In any case, Joaquin Phoenix wins best actor for the “Joker,” and he makes an insane speech about cows and milk….Joaquin Phoenix last night at the Oscars, lecturing us all about speciesism, which is again, a real hot take — that really is the tragedy, I mean truly. Joaquin Phoenix should have shown up with the names of cows embroidered on his tuxedo — I mean like “Betsy,” “Old Blue,” I mean, they weren&#8217;t nominated for anything either. These cows that have given us our sustenance for generations and not one of them was nominated for an award — not a single one of them was nominated for an award, not a single cow. Unbelievable. Here&#8217;s Joaquin Phoenix explaining to all of us that veganism is the way to go and that basically drinking milk is like you&#8217;re a Nazi. 
<blockquote>PHOENIX: We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources; we feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that&#8217;s intended for a calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. </blockquote>
What now? We have to embroider his coat with milk — like “Two Percent,” “Whole” &#8212; What the hell is going on here? What is wrong with you people? What is wrong with you people? Listen, if you want to make the case against factory farming, make the case against factory farming. But we artificially inseminate these cows, and then we take her milk and we use it in our coffee, we use it in our cereal? Yes, we do; that&#8217;s true. You have scored a point against civilization, Mr. Phoenix. Just wow, solid, and the crowd gave him a standing ovation for this — all of whom drink milk, by the way, all of whom are engaging in protein consumption, animal protein consumption. Like the number of vegans in that room, not that high. But again, it&#8217;s all about the &#8220;We&#8217;ve been lectured and we know that we&#8217;ve been lectured.&#8221; 
This is the new church. It&#8217;s a church for folks on the Left, just like a lot of people go to church to be lectured by their pastor about all the sins that they&#8217;ve committed the prior weeks — [so] that they don&#8217;t commit those sins again; it&#8217;s like that at the Oscars. It&#8217;s the one time they go to church every year, and at that church they&#8217;re lectured about their insufficient Wokeness and if they wish to avoid anti-Woke hell, then they will have to pay homage and they will have to do confession with Joaquin Phoenix, which is a really weird type of confession. So, good stuff over at the Oscars, as per the usual, really in touch with the feelings of most Americans. I think that these people really have a bead on what Americans are feeling. 
Honestly, I was feeling a little optimistic this year because there were some actual movies that people saw this year, and none of them won any awards. I mean, the ones that actually won awards, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” got completely skunked; “Joker” won a couple of awards, but “Parasite” waltzed away with a bunch of these awards — a movie that no American has really ever seen — and again, a class warfare film that would have pleased Bernie Sanders if the rest of the film holds up the way that it&#8217;s holding up so far [in the first hour]. 
Well, in any case, we&#8217;ll get to the actual 2020 Democratic race, and I&#8217;ll explain in just a second why these Culture Wars actually matter, because whenever we sound off about this kind of stuff, people on the Left are like, “How dare you say you&#8217;re so triggered by the culture; you&#8217;re so triggered,” which is gaslighting because the reason you do this is because you want attention, you&#8217;re all the the 15-year-old girl who gets her hair put up in some sort of mohawk, and gets a giant nose ring, gets those earrings that like stretch out your ear lobe and then you walk on like, “Why are you looking at me? Why are you looking at me?” 
You&#8217;re the Oscars, that&#8217;s why we&#8217;re looking at you. We all get it; we all get the you want attention; so if we give you attention, you don&#8217;t get to whine about us giving you attention, and if we make fun of you, you don&#8217;t get to whine about us making fun of you. Of course we&#8217;re making fun of you because you look like idiots. 
You look like a bunch of Woke morons who have no actual relationship with like — is there a single impoverished person in America who feels better off today because of what was done at the Oscars last night?   Whose pocketbook got thicker last night? Is there a single woman in America who&#8217;s struggling to make ends meet who is like, “Yes, slay queen because female directors weren&#8217;t winning Oscar noms this year? Slay Queen Natalie Portman.” Who out there felt really emboldened and empowered by that Oscar routine last night? I have a feeling not all that many people, not all that many people, except for the Oscar voters who feel really good about themselves because, again, they get to participate in this religious ceremony once  a year.

92nd Annual Academy Awards &#8211; Show

SHAPIRO: Joaquin Phoenix Lectures The Church Of The Hollywood Elite

Oscars

On Wednesday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training who also frequently opines on issues pertaining to <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-border-wall-nice-interior-enforcement-nicer-josh-hammer">immigration enforcement</a> and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-federal-government-has-no-more-important-josh-hammer">border security</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEglbpSPJ2o&amp;feature=youtu.be">joined</a> &#8220;Tipping Point with Liz Wheeler&#8221; on One America News Network to discuss the latest immigration- and crime-related craziness to emerge from the sanctuary jurisdiction that is the state of California.
&#8220;Since California became a sanctuary state in 2017, the number of inmates with immigration detainers being arrested again after being released from jail has jumped, according to a new report from Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes,&#8221; Los Angeles&#8217; local CBS affiliate <a href="https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2020/02/04/oc-sheriff-sb-54-sanctuary-state-law-repeat-crimes-increase-undocumented-immigrants/">reported</a> earlier this week. &#8220;According to Barnes, more than 1,500 inmates released in 2019 had ICE detainers, a request from the federal agency for notification that a particular inmate has been released. Of those inmates, 238 were re-arrested in Orange County for new crimes, including assault and battery, rape, and robbery.&#8221;
&#8220;The rate of recidivism for those with ICE detainers is up from 2018, when 123 were arrested again for new crimes, out of more than 1,800 such inmates, according to the report,&#8221; the outlet continued.
Hammer has been previously outspoken on the topic of sanctuary cities, opining in a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-why-no-one-pointing-out-sanctuary-cities-josh-hammer">Daily Wire op-ed</a> last summer that the majority of sanctuary jurisdictions blatantly violate the text of <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1373">8 U.S.C. § 1373(a)</a>, which reads: &#8220;Notwithstanding any other provision of Federal, State, or local law, a Federal, State, or local government entity or official may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the [Department of Homeland Security] information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.&#8221;
&#8220;The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, as applied to § 1373(a), therefore prohibits state and local governments from shielding a removable illegal alien from ICE when ICE issues a detainer request on the alien,&#8221; Hammer wrote.
Joining Wheeler, Hammer decried the <a href="https://cis.org/Camarota/NonCitizens-Committed-Disproportionate-Share-Federal-Crimes-201116">disproportionately high rate of crime</a> for illegal aliens in America before making a similar legal point that he made in the Daily Wire op-ed. He accused sanctuary jurisdictions of adopting similar logic to that of the old Confederacy:
<blockquote>Very few people in the conservative punditry class are making this point, but my reading of federal law is that laws like California&#8217;s are blatantly illegal. If you look at title eight of the United States Code, section 1373, subsection (a), it says very clearly that no federal, state, or local government can &#8220;prohibit&#8221; or &#8220;restrict&#8221; sending any information to the Department of Homeland Security, which of course includes [Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)]. Put another way, when ICE requests detainer information, these states cannot just refuse it. That is literally against the United States Code. And of course, that law is promulgated directly pursuant to the Supremacy Clause of <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlevi">Article VI of the Constitution</a>.
Liz your high school viewers might recall from civics class in high school: This was the entire so-called &#8220;nullification crisis&#8221; of the 1830s, with John C. Calhoun in South Carolina. And it&#8217;s the reason why, in my personal writings on this topic going back months, I always refer to the sanctuary jurisdictions as &#8220;neo-Confederate,&#8221; because it&#8217;s literally what&#8217;s going on here. They are adopting John C. Calhoun-esque, defying-federal law, Confederacy-style public policy and legal argumentation.</blockquote>
WATCH:
<iframe title="Orange County Pushes Back On Sanctuary State Policies" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/pEglbpSPJ2o?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Hammer OANN 2.05.19

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: Sanctuary Cities Are ‘Neo-Confederate’

California

confederate

Constitution

Department of Homeland Security

Illegal Immigration

Immigration

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Law Enforcement

Los Angeles

Police

On Tuesday evening, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training who previously served as a judicial law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-HnMAHs3-c">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network (OANN) to discuss the news from earlier this month that a divided Fifth Circuit panel, in the case of <a href="http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/19/19-40016-CR0.pdf">U.S. v. Varner</a>, denied a motion from a biological male litigant who formally moved to have the panel address him using female pronouns.
Earlier this month, Hammer <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/culture-war-in-the-courts-federal-appeals-panel-divides-on-transgender-pronouns/">summarized</a> and briefly opined upon the case for The Daily Wire, referencing the &#8220;fascinating&#8221; development that Trump nominee Judge S. Kyle Duncan&#8217;s majority opinion used male pronouns, whereas Clinton nominee Judge James L. Dennis&#8217;s dissent used female pronouns:
<blockquote>Alas, the latest and most disputatious, headline-grabbing front of our ceaseless culture war has fully hit the federal judiciary. &#8230;
Ultimately, Duncan concluded, “[c]ourts would have to do the same. We decline to enlist the federal judiciary in this quixotic undertaking.” &#8230;
Good for Judge Duncan for both adhering to the letter of the law and for defiantly standing athwart the modern cultural Left’s pernicious insistence on gaslighting the American citizenry into thinking that words may not mean what they so clearly do, in fact, mean.</blockquote>
Earlier this week, prior to the OANN appearance with Wheeler, Hammer also wrote a <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/transgender-pronouns-fifth-circuit-rejects-them-and-lie-they-stand-on/">column</a> about the case for National Review:
<blockquote>To capitulate to the Pandora’s box of transgender pronouns is to pretend that, exceedingly rare intersex exceptions aside, there is more to sexual differentiation than the duality of chromosomal male and chromosomal female. To yield to the soft tyranny of transgender pronouns is to pretend that gender dysphoria is an anodyne lifestyle on which societal legitimacy should be conferred, not a psychological malady requiring compassion and psychological treatment. It is to act as if simple words that have meant the same thing for centuries can change their meanings overnight without ruinous consequence for the language’s durability. It is to encourage the <a href="https://time.com/5767844/transgender-youth-legislation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-reader-unique-id="21">premature sexualization</a> of children and accede to <a href="https://transcare.ucsf.edu/article/information-testosterone-hormone-therapy" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-reader-unique-id="22">often irreversible</a> tampering of their hormones. It is to undermine the ancient Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.” Paul McHugh, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, maintains that to encourage “surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”</blockquote>
Wheeler and Hammer touched upon many of the same substantive themes during the OANN TV appearance, with Hammer stating that Judge Duncan&#8217;s fearless majority opinion made him a &#8220;very proud Fifth Circuit alum&#8221;:
<blockquote>You know, I finished clerking on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit barely over a year ago, so I&#8217;m very familiar with this court. I know both Judge Duncan and Judge Jerry Smith, who was also in the majority, personally, actually. Judge Duncan, Trump nominee — a wonderful jurist based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
So basically what happened here was a very unusual procedural posture. I mean, this took the format of an order — it was more of an order than a traditional &#8220;case&#8221; or &#8220;controversy,&#8221; we might say. But the litigant formally moved to be addressed by a transgender pronoun, which is very unusual. Certainly, in my time clerking, I never came across something like that. That is not a typical motion that as a judge or a law clerk, you see on a day-to-day basis &#8230; [but] I was a very proud Fifth Circuit alum when I saw this opinion.</blockquote>
Wheeler said that she agreed with &#8220;every word&#8221; of Hammer&#8217;s.
WATCH:
<iframe title="Court Rules on Gender Pronouns" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QVp0Vdif0KA?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Hammer OANN 1.28.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: The Fifth Circuit Rejects Transgender Pronouns

Judicial Branch

Judiciary

Lawsuit

LGBT

Transgender

Earlier this week, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer joined &#8220;The Chad Prather Show&#8221; on BlazeTV for a wide-ranging (and oftentimes humorous) discussion with the eponymous host and Blaze Media resident cowboy, Chad Prather. The conversation ran the gamut of topics, covering such diverse terrain as impeachment, recent rumors and revelations pertaining to former National Security Advisor John Bolton, the debate over transgender pronouns, and &#8230; Chad&#8217;s traveling crew getting kicked out of a bar in Bakersfield, California.
The conversation kicked off around impeachment, with Prather asking Hammer why Republicans seem so opposed to calling witnesses in the current Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. Hammer said he wasn&#8217;t sure why Republicans are so opposed — a skepticism that the podcast host shared:
<blockquote>I don&#8217;t really understand why Republicans and the president are so opposed to witnesses. I mean, look, in theory, here&#8217;s how this is supposed to work. Okay, the House and Senate are supposed to &#8230; actually do what they&#8217;re &#8230; supposed to do and write bills and pass laws and all that stuff that the Constitution talks about.
It ain&#8217;t gonna happen this year because it&#8217;s very simple: The Democrats control the House, Republicans control the Senate, [and] it&#8217;s also an election year, everyone&#8217;s risk-averse, no one&#8217;s trying to stick his or her neck out, put their foot on the line. So in that context, I don&#8217;t really understand this Republican resistance to calling witnesses. Drag this thing out. How is Hunter Biden getting up there not going to help with the president and Republicans come November? I don&#8217;t see it.</blockquote>
The conversation quickly shifted to the news surrounding Bolton, with Hammer offering his take on what we know so far:
<blockquote>So the worst part is &#8230; The New York Times got a copy of his book before anyone in the administration did. You know, I&#8217;m not gonna say John Bolton had anything to do with that, but it&#8217;s pretty unforeseeable that John Bolton had nothing to do with that. That&#8217;s just not a good look.
And like you, I&#8217;m a longtime defender of John Bolton&#8217;s. &#8230; He&#8217;s a lifelong conservative, he really is. I mean, he went to Yale for both undergrad and law school. At Yale undergrad, he was a member of what the nerds of Yale call the Yale Political Union&#8217;s Party of the Right, which in their kind of nerdy political club is the most right-wing party possible. So he&#8217;s a lifelong Barry Goldwater-, Ronald Reagan-like conservative, so it&#8217;s a little weird to see what&#8217;s happening now.</blockquote>
Later in the conversation, the topic shifted to transgender pronouns in the federal courts — a topic that Hammer, a former judicial law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, wrote about earlier this week for <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/transgender-pronouns-fifth-circuit-rejects-them-and-lie-they-stand-on/">National Review</a>. Hammer explained the three reasons why he thinks conservatives must not cave on this issue:
<blockquote>There are &#8230; three reasons why I think we really should care. One is the truth, inherently, is worth defending. Truth should be defended for the sake of truth. I mean, that&#8217;s kind of historically speaking, the entire purpose of debate in the academy, going back to Socrates, Aristotle, going back to all the ancients. They literally engaged in this Socratic dialogue in order to reach the truth. So if we feel like we have the truth, then it&#8217;s worth defending for its own sake.
Second, language cannot change this much, and this drastically, and remain viable. Now, some words can change meaning over time, of course. And plenty of words do change meaning over time. Like, for example, &#8220;decimate&#8221; — the word &#8220;decimate&#8221; — back in the day, the letters &#8220;dec&#8221; mean 10, so it was literally to take out one out of ten of the opposing military. Today, it just means more generally to kind of wipe out. So words can change their meaning, but words as basic as pronouns, the building blocks of distinguishing, as you quite aptly put it, between male and female genitalia — that cannot change. Words like that just cannot change for the English language to be viable.
Third, and probably the most important reason &#8230; is because there are actually really bad side effects to the transgender movement. We saw it here in Texas with <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-father-of-7-year-old-trans-child-james-younger-speaks-out-before-gag-order/">James Younger</a>. We are encouraging the premature, preteen sexualization of children. We are encouraging children to choose their own gender and engaging in oftentimes-irreversible hormonal tampering — chemical castration, frankly, is really what&#8217;s going on here. There are really corrosive, actual real-life effects of this.</blockquote>
The whole lengthy conversation is available on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj804eZqF_M">YouTube</a>.
WATCH:
<iframe title="The Impeachment of an American President | Ep 191" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Dj804eZqF_M?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
RELATED: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-national-review-the-fifth-circuit-rejects-the-lie-of-transgender-pronouns">Hammer At &#8216;National Review&#8217;: The Fifth Circuit Rejects The Lie Of Transgender Pronouns</a>
RELATED: <a href="http://lp.dailywire.com/getelectionwire/">Sign up here for Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer’s weekly newsletter on election news, polling data, and analysis: “Election Wire”</a>

Hammer on Chad Prather Show 1.27.20

WATCH: Hammer Breaks Down Impeachment, Bolton, Transgenderism On ‘The Chad Prather Show’

Children

Hunter Biden

Impeachment

John Bolton

Sexuality

U.S. Senate

Last evening, on the 47th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court&#8217;s <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/roe-v-wade-ed-whelan/">infamous</a> Roe v. Wade decision, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training who has been a frequent proponent of both the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-what-alyssa-milano-gets-so-very-wrong-about-josh-hammer">immorality of abortion</a> and the need to overturn or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-yes-alabama-legislature-right-openly-defy-josh-hammer">openly &#8220;defy&#8221;</a> a decision as patently erroneous as Roe, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-HnMAHs3-c">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to make the straightforward constitutional argument for why Roe was indeed wrongly decided.
Hammer, a <a href="https://fedsoc.org/contributors/josh-hammer">Federalist Society campus speaker</a> who has a forthcoming piece of legal scholarship on the issue of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-conservatives-how-much-longer-are-you-josh-hammer">judicial supremacy</a>, argued in a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-it-past-time-trump-openly-defy-court-order-josh-hammer">Daily Wire op-ed</a> one year ago that President Donald Trump would be on firm legal standing to outright &#8220;defy&#8221; lawless edicts such as Roe. Hammer contrasted the language of the little-known 1958 case of Cooper v. Aaron — in which the Court pronounced its judicial supremacist adherence to &#8220;the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution&#8221; — with the language from Abraham Lincoln’s <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp">First Inaugural Address</a>, in which Lincoln disavowed the legal and moral abomination of Dred Scott v. Sandford as a broader binding political principle:
<blockquote>I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.</blockquote>
For many social conservatives and constitutional originalists, Roe is the direct <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/02/lincoln-on-judicial-despotism">legal and moral successor</a> to Dred Scott — and <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/01/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it">ought to be treated</a> as such.
But before getting there, Hammer explained to Wheeler the basic 14th Amendment argument as to why Roe is, in fact, a wrongly decided decision whose unprecedented nationalization of abortion policy under thin constitutional guise amounted to a horrific judicial power grab:
<blockquote>Let&#8217;s talk about the actual constitutional law here. The 14th Amendment, Section 1 — it was a very famous constitutional amendment ratified in 1868, in the aftermath of the Civil War, intended as a civil rights provision largely for free blacks. The Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment says that &#8220;nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.&#8221; By the Due Process Clause&#8217;s plain text, it refers only to process — it does not refer to what lawyers would call &#8220;substance.&#8221;
Nonetheless, in 1965, in a case called Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court found that due to the &#8220;penumbras&#8221; and the &#8220;emanations&#8221; that come from the Fourth, Ninth, and 14th Amendments, there is a &#8220;right to privacy&#8221; in the Constitution. That is nonsense: There&#8217;s no such thing as a &#8220;right to privacy&#8221; anywhere whatsoever in the constitutional text. But from there, it was a pretty short step, eight years later after Griswold in 1973, for the Court to say that this &#8220;right to privacy&#8221; that they found means that you have a constitutional right to abort your unborn born child.
And it is a complete distortion and bastardization of the 14th Amendment. In my opinion, Roe v. Wade, Liz, is one of the two most constitutionally unsound and horrific decisions probably probably ever promulgated by the Supreme Court. &#8230; [It&#8217;s] right up there with the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which my hero of all heroes, Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address in 1861, famously said that he would not abide by. He respected it as applied to Dred Scott himself, but would not respect the ruling as it applied to anyone else in the country. And for years now, I&#8217;ve been preaching my [fellow] conservatives to adapt and adopt that principle as it applies to Roe itself.</blockquote>
WATCH:
<iframe title="The Legal Argument to Overturn Roe v. Wade" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lBMCT8peHGE?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Hammer OANN 1.22.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: The Legal Argument To Overturn Roe

Abortion

Fourteenth Amendment

Supreme Court

Last night, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training who has been a <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/19/alexander-vindman-condemned-himself-in-his-impeachment-testimony/">frequent</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/26/why-trumps-ukraine-demands-werent-remotely-illegal/">commentator</a> on Democrats’ current partisan <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge/">impeachment</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/19/pelosis-newest-dirty-trick-putting-trumps-senate-trial-on-hold/">effort</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR6O_a8m-8A">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network (OANN) to discuss the Democrats&#8217; increasingly hard push to ensure that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-bad-trump-presidents-dismissal-john-bolton-josh-hammer">former</a> National Security Advisor John Bolton is called to testify during the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
&#8220;Democrats may decide to call Bolton to testify about a possible quid pro quo between Trump and Ukrainian officials regarding an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, even though the articles of impeachment are already published.&#8221; The Daily Wire&#8217;s Emily Zanotti <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/pelosi-threatens-to-call-john-bolton-to-testify-in-house-even-as-dems-vote-to-send-impeachment-articles-to-senate">reported</a> earlier this month. &#8220;Senior Democrats raised the possibility of subpoenaing Bolton last week, after Bolton himself admitted that, if asked to testify by the Senate, he would comply (though he did not speak on whether he would do the same for a House subpoena, and referenced Republicans specifically).&#8221;
&#8220;The theory seems to be, according to a plan of action outlined by former advisors of President Barack Obama on the left-leaning site, <a href="https://crooked.com/articles/subpoena-john-bolton-democrats/">Crooked</a>, if Bolton is called to testify in the House and provides information critical to the case against the President, that Senate Republicans will have no choice but to allow witnesses at Trump’s Senate impeachment trial,&#8221; Zanotti continued.
Last week, The Federalist&#8217;s David Marcus <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/14/john-boltons-testimony-would-not-be-the-smoking-gun-democrats-need/">argued</a> that even if Bolton testified, his testimony would hardly be the smoking gun that Democrats seem to think it would be. &#8220;[W]hat can John Bolton possibly say that would prove Trump’s intent was malicious, and not genuine concern about taxpayer dollars falling into corrupt hands?&#8221; Marcus asked rhetorically. &#8220;Is he really going to say, &#8216;The president told me he doesn’t care about corruption, he just wanted to get that pesky Joe Biden and get him good?&#8217; Is there anyone on the face of the planet who thinks that such a conversation could have taken place?&#8221;
Hammer joined Wheeler&#8217;s OANN program to discuss the same topic. Hammer agreed with Marcus that there is no plausible scenario in which Bolton&#8217;s Senate testimony would be a smoking gun.
<blockquote>[Bolton] is clearly not going to provide any kind of smoking gun testimony for the reasons that you just outlined. &#8230; [M]y boss at The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, had a good, pretty lengthy <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-two-theories-of-trumps-actions-in-the-ukraine-affair/">column for National Review</a> back in October [on this]. There are two theories as to what happened on the now-infamous July 25th phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. The first theory Ben calls the &#8220;Get Biden Theory&#8221;; the second theory is what Ben calls the &#8220;Miasma of Corruption Theory.&#8221;
So on the first hand, Trump is just trying to politically &#8230; get his opponent, Joe Biden. The second hand, he&#8217;s actually trying to attach corruption-related strings to the doling out of taxpayer aid. My reading of everything that&#8217;s happened so far is that this second theory, the &#8220;Miasma of Corruption Theory,&#8221; is more likely. Possibly, the &#8220;Get Biden Theory&#8221; is right, but as you say, the only reason — or the only way that we would ever be shown that is right — is if John Bolton was literally told by Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, &#8220;I am doing this to get Joe Biden.&#8221; That&#8217;s not going to happen.</blockquote>
Hammer also elaborated on Twitter earlier today.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Schiff is gaslighting us. What “evidence” is being hidden?<a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@benshapiro</a> laid it out well at <a href="https://twitter.com/NRO?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NRO</a> in Oct. There is the “Get Biden Theory” and the “Miasma of Corruption Theory.” There is one thing and one thing only distinguishing the two: Subjective intent. <a href="https://t.co/0wPsbGalBv">https://t.co/0wPsbGalBv</a>
&mdash; Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1219692018668130304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Any purported “evidence” that does not directly speak to that subjective intent — what lawyers call mens rea — is, in actuality, no evidence at all.
&mdash; Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1219692427335950343?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
WATCH:
<iframe title="John Bolton is no Smoking Gun" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fR6O_a8m-8A?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Hammer OANN 1.20.10

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: John Bolton Is No Smoking Gun

Democratic Party

Donald Trump

Ukraine

Volodymyr Zelensky

On Friday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training who has been a <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/19/alexander-vindman-condemned-himself-in-his-impeachment-testimony/">frequent</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/26/why-trumps-ukraine-demands-werent-remotely-illegal/">commentator</a> on Democrats&#8217; current partisan <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge/">impeachment</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/19/pelosis-newest-dirty-trick-putting-trumps-senate-trial-on-hold/">effort</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-HnMAHs3-c">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network (OANN) to discuss the recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) purporting to show that, by initially withholding the disbursement of foreign aid money to Ukraine last summer, President Donald Trump violated the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA). It is this withholding of Ukrainian foreign aid money that forms the crux of the Democrats&#8217; impeachment push.
As The Daily Wire initially <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/read-it-gaos-report-on-white-house-withholding-ukraine-aid-violated-law">reported</a> last Thursday, the officially nonpartisan GAO claimed that Trump violated the ICA and, by implication, also the <a href="https://www.heritage.org/constitution/articles/2/essays/98/take-care-clause">Take Care Clause</a> of Article II of the Constitution. “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the GAO report asserted, as The Daily Wire reported. “[The Office of Management and Budget (OMB)] withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the [ICA]. The withholding was not a programmatic delay. Therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the ICA.”
Hammer penned an <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/17/trumps-ukraine-money-holdup-doesnt-make-for-an-impeachable-breach-of-the-law/">op-ed</a> in Saturday&#8217;s New York Post in which he argued that &#8220;Trump likely did not violate the ICA,&#8221; but that &#8220;even if he did breach it, that law itself comes with its own remedy baked in — and it is a far less draconian remedy than impeachment.&#8221; He then elaborated:
<blockquote>
To be sure, expressly directing a subordinate to violate federal law is inconsistent with the Take Care Clause. But the president also has other obligations under Article II of the Constitution. The very first clause of Article II vests the president with “the executive Power.” The doling out of foreign aid is an integral part of conducting foreign affairs, and, according to a 2001 Yale Law Journal article by legal scholars Saikrishna Prakash and Michael Ramsey, 18th-century English common law — which helped form the Framers’ thinking — had an “ordinary &#8230; meaning of executive power” that “included foreign affairs power.”
Similarly, in the 1936 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., the justices describe the president as “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations — a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress.” &#8230;
[Furthermore,] as my boss at The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, quickly observed after news of the GAO report hit, the ICA prescribes a precise remedy for a situation in which the president allegedly violates it. Specifically, 2 U.S.C. § 687 provides for a cause of action by the comptroller general in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. But since the funds have been released, any legal action would be moot.
</blockquote>
On Friday&#8217;s OANN appearance, Wheeler began by asking Hammer whether the alleged ICA violation is impeachable. Hammer strongly opined that it should not be viewed as impeachable, and went on to describe the current Democratic mentality and antics as &#8220;desperate,&#8221; &#8220;reckless,&#8221; and &#8220;borderline dangerous&#8221;:
<blockquote>
The Impoundment Control Act in 1974 actually provides for a precise remedy within the statute. So a lot of people are talking about this as a possible impeachment vehicle, but it is a deliberate, disingenuous, bad faith effort to attempt to impeach as a draconian remedy where the statute itself has the savviness and the foresight to provide for a much lesser remedy.
And let&#8217;s talk about that remedy. It&#8217;s [title] two of the United States Code, then sub-section 687, I believe. The remedy is the Comptroller General of the United States is allowed to file suit in the federal trial court in the District of Columbia to force the president, essentially, to disburse the funds. Liz, here&#8217;s the problem with that: The funds have already been disbursed! They were released and there was barely any delay. So even according to the statute&#8217;s own remedy — according to the statutory structure &#8230; it&#8217;s a moot case. In law school, you learn this is called a moot lawsuit because the funds were disbursed. Ukraine didn&#8217;t even know that the funds were being withheld.
So all of this is starting to remind me a lot of the whole [Brett] Kavanaugh [Supreme Court nomination] fiasco, where they would just throw mud at the wall and see what sticks. You know, we talked about [how] the Democrats first were talking about quid pro quo, [but] that didn&#8217;t poll-test well. Then they were publicly flirting with bribery and they knew they didn&#8217;t have the legal gravitas to make that argument. They are just so desperate, at this point. Swing state poll after swing state poll shows they&#8217;re gonna lose next November — Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, all these voters are starting to turn against the Democrats. And this is really starting to get reckless; it&#8217;s actually borderline dangerous, at this point, I would say.
</blockquote>
Wheeler agreed, saying that the Democrats do routinely &#8220;move the goalposts.&#8221;
WATCH:
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Hammer OANN 1.17.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: The Truth About The GAO ‘Bombshell’

Congress

On Thursday night, Daily Wire Senior Editor Ashe Schow joined The Heritage Foundation’s Charmaine Yoest on EWTN’s “Pro-Life Weekly” with host Catherine Hadro to discuss Planned Parenthood’s annual report regarding its services and organization.
Hadro opened the segment by explaining that Planned Parenthood performed 13,000 more abortions in 2019 than in 2018, for a total of 345,672 abortions, for an increase of 3.88% over 2018. These staggering numbers caused Yoest to refer to Planned Parenthood as “Abortion, Inc.” Schow noted that while the organization increased the number of abortions it performed, all other major services actually declined.
“As abortions go up for Planned Parenthood, all of their other services that they like to saying, ‘no we’re not just [about] abortion,’ have gone down,” Schow said, citing numbers from the report <a href="https://www.lifenews.com/2020/01/06/planned-parenthood-annual-report-shows-it-killed-345672-babies-in-abortions-more-than-ever-before/">and LifeNews</a>. “You’ve got contraception down 2%, pap smears and tests down 7%, breast exams down 11%, cancer screenings down 8%. Prenatal care? Down 68% since 2010, and to put that in perspective, for last year, Planned Parenthood killed 35 babies for every one woman it helped with prenatal care. Adoption referrals down year over year and again, killed 80 babies for every one adoption referral.”
Many of the services listed by Schow had dropped, but were still provided at a higher rate than abortions. Contraception services, for example, dropped 2% to 2,556,413 in 2018, but far outpaced the nearly 350,000 abortions provided by the organization.
Schow also discussed the fact that Planned Parenthood’s annual report completely glossed over the fact that it underwent a leadership crisis in 2019 after firing Dr. Leana Wen because she tried to get the organization to focus on more than just abortion.
“She was trying to get the organization to actually focus on women’s health and other things. She tried talking to pro-life groups and people who weren’t necessarily for abortion but didn’t like medical intrusion in medical health,” Schow said. “She wanted more services for maybe mental health and addiction but within Planned Parenthood it was just, ‘no, abortion’s our thing [and] we’re sticking to it.’”
Schow also bemoaned the constant messaging surrounding abortions, suggesting women can only succeed if they abort their child.
“People know: ‘If I need an abortion, I can go to Planned Parenthood.’ And it says a whole lot about the culture. You’ve got Democrats and progressives just constantly – just recently at the Golden Globes, you had a pregnant Michelle Williams saying the only reason she was able to accept this award was because she aborted a child,” Schow said. “You’ve got this constant messaging to women that if they have a child, their life is over and they can never succeed. And it’s working, it’s clearly working. Abortions are going up even though polls show Americans don’t agree with abortion. By and large, Americans want it at least limited to just the first trimester, and yet you have all this messaging that you should have an abortion in order to succeed in life.
You can watch the full video below:
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Ashe

WATCH: Schow On ‘Pro-Life Weekly’: As Abortions Rose At Planned Parenthood, All Other Major Services Declined

Planned Parenthood

Last night, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRvUG6NTn78&amp;feature=youtu.be">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to discuss the latest twists and turns in Democrats&#8217; ongoing partisan impeachment saga, as well as to recap the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-the-new-york-post-obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge">deeply flawed nature</a> of House Democrats&#8217; two finalized articles of impeachment.
&#8220;House Democrats emerged from a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning to finally announce the much-delayed vote on sending their articles of impeachment against President Trump — passed nearly a month ago without a single Republican vote — to the Senate,&#8221; The Daily Wire&#8217;s James Barrett <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/defeated-democrats-announce-vote-on-sending-impeachment-articles-but-not-wholl-be-running-the-show">reported</a> earlier today. &#8220;The big vote will take place Wednesday, though one particularly important detail has yet to be determined: who exactly from the House is going to be presenting the Democrats’ case against the duly elected president during the Senate trial,&#8221; Barrett continued.
In a <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge/">New York Post op-ed</a> last month, Hammer explained why House Democrats&#8217; second article of impeachment, &#8220;obstruction of Congress,&#8221; is &#8220;an utterly ridiculous impeachment charge&#8221;:
<blockquote>
Our tripartite separation-of-powers edifice was hardly devised for the purpose of ensuring amiability between the legislative, executive and judicial branches. On the contrary, the Framers envisioned a national government in which the three branches existed in a state of continuous, unyielding tension with one another.
In particular, the two political branches — Congress and the executive branch — were meant to be jealous guardians of their own ambits and spheres of influence. Ceaseless tussling between them was to be the norm. “Ambition,” James Madison told us in Federalist 51, “must be made to counteract ambition.” &#8230;
That is how our separation of powers is supposed to function — in a state far closer to animosity than to geniality. Which is precisely why House Democrats alleging “obstruction of Congress” as an article of impeachment makes no sense.
</blockquote>
Wheeler began the segment last night by asking about that deeply problematic second article of impeachment. Wheeler noted that the Democrats accused the president of &#8220;obstructi[ng]&#8221; Congress without even waiting for the judiciary to weigh in with respect to congressional subpoenas issued for Trump administration officials. Hammer agreed and also reiterated, in similar fashion to the Post op-ed, that the article of impeachment is also non-sensical from the broader perspective of structural constitutionalism:
<blockquote>[T]his impeachment charge is so risible. &#8230; The entire separation of powers construct is built around tension. The three branches of government — the legislative branch, the executive branch, the judicial branch — are not &#8230; intended to exist in some state of harmony. &#8230; No, that&#8217;s not what the Framers envisioned.
James Madison, in The Federalist No. 51, maybe the most famous Federalist Paper of them all, clearly says &#8220;ambition must be made to counteract ambition.&#8221; They&#8217;re supposed to be zealous guardians of their own idiosyncratic spheres of influence. They&#8217;re supposed to butt heads. They&#8217;re supposed to use all the various tools at their disposal to push back and try to encroach upon each other&#8217;s spheres. They&#8217;re [each] supposed to want to be the most dominant branch. Each one is supposed to not get along with the others. &#8230;</blockquote>
Wheeler agreed, noting that the second impeachment charge is therefore &#8220;both practically and philosophically ridiculous.&#8221;
WATCH:
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Hammer OANN screen grab 1.13.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: A Senate Impeachment Trial Looms

Federalist

Mitch McConnell

Nancy Pelosi

U.S. House of Representatives

On Tuesday, CNN International and PBS host Christiane Amanpour conducted two interviews, one with U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and another with Iranian VP for women and family affairs Massoumeh Ebtekar, and the contrast in Amanpour’s attitude toward the interviewees could not have been more stark, as she targeted Esper while lobbing softballs at Ebtekar.
As Curtis Houck of Newsbusters <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/curtis-houck/2020/01/08/cnn-pbs-host-amanpour-shows-more-deference-iranian-vp-sec-esper">pointed out</a> in a comprehensive report, Amanpour started her interview with Esper by suggesting that the threat that the Trump administration cited for its airstrike killing Iranian general Qassem Doleimani was based on evidence that was “razor thin and the chatter was nothing out of the ordinary.” She challenged Esper to look at “the world down the barrel of this camera straight in the eye and say that there was a ticking time bomb evidence.”
Esper fired back that the evidence was “more than razor thin, and it&#8217;s persuasive,” that  Solemani aimed “to synchronize and plan additional attacks on American forces, diplomats or facilities.”
Amanpour segued to claiming that in Iran there was “not just an outpouring of grief from the people there and rallying around a regime that had been unpopular, but that it&#8217;s also a message” of revenge. As Houck noted, Amanpour posited that allies of the U.S. were calling on the U.S. to deescalate, and thus, &#8220;You are being put in the same boat as Iran. I don&#8217;t recall this ever happening before, where the United States and a nation like Iran, are both being put in the same boat, both being asked to de-escalate. How does that make you feel?”
Esper answered, “Well, I guess I disagree with your premise, Christiane. I will tell you — and I&#8217;ve talked to all these allies and partners — the ones in the region are fully, 100 percent supportive of what we&#8217;ve done and what we&#8217;re prepared to do. They see the removal of Soleimani, this known terrorist and head of a terrorist organization, his removal from the battlefield as a great victory and they know what it means — and it&#8217;s a game changer for the region.”
Amanpour then launched into a tirade attacking the decision to target Soleimani, saing:
<blockquote>&#8230; senior Americans have told me that intelligence officials in — you know, your own intelligence officials — predicted precisely this kind of Iranian escalation after the maximum pressure campaign that followed the withdrawal from the nuclear deal. They predicted attacks on shipping in the Gulf — it happened. They predicted attacks on Saudi Arabia — it happened. They suggested it might happen against U.S. bases, U.S. targets — it did happen. You talk about Soleimani, but what is the strategy here? I mean, you knew that this was possibly going to happen. Was it wise — you talk about Soleimani — nobody is claiming that he was a good guy, no — none of your allies are — and everybody knows what his role in the region was, but by the same token, previous U.S. administrations, when they could, did not take him out. Israel, when it could, did not take him out, for fear of the consequences. I guess I want to ask you, do you regret putting that extreme option on the table for the President? Wouldn&#8217;t some of the other options have sufficed in this period to send a very strong message of deterrence?</blockquote>
Esper replied, “Well, Christiane, I would say many experts, going back a few years now, predicted and were proven true, that in the wake of the JCPOA, which did not cover ballistic missiles, which did not cover Iran&#8217;s hostage-taking, which did not cover Iran&#8217;s malign behavior, that such activities would pick up — particularly when we opened up the economic spigots and we returned to them tens of billions of dollars — we saw this activity pick up across the region, again, spanning from Africa, through the Middle East to Afghanistan and what&#8217;s happened in the last few years, in Iraq in particular, in the last 12 months, is just a manifestation of an Iranian regime that is bent on exporting its revolutionary beliefs.”
In 1979, Ebtekar, who was 18 and a spokeswoman for the Iranian hostage-takers who seized 52 Americans, was <a href="https://twitter.com/HanifJazayeri/status/1214667445694275584">asked</a> about the American hostages if she could “personally lift up a gun and put it to the head of one of these people and kill him” if there were an attack on the U.S. embassy to save the hostages. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/28/world/top-woman-in-iran-s-government-once-spoke-for-hostage-takers.html">The New York Times</a> reported, she answered, “Yes. When I&#8217;ve seen an American gun being lifted up and killing my brothers and sisters in the streets, of course.&#8221; Here are some samplings of how Amanpour, who did not mention Ebtekar’s 1979 role, treated Ebtekar:
When Amanpour asked whether Iran would “respond” to American “call[s] for descalation,” Ebtekar cited “millions who are marching in support and in commemoration of&#8230;the Commander of the Hearts” against the Americans having “taken a terrorist action” in killing Soleimani. Amanpour stated she found it “interesting” that Ebtekar called the reaction in Iran to Soleimani’s death a “revival of the Islamic revolution.”
Ebtekar delightedly suggested there was a “wave of awakening” in the U.S. on social media “understand[ing] very well what has happened and the terrible actions of the American government.”
Amanpour concluded by insinuating that the Iranian leadership was moderate and “took a gamble negotiating with the United States, saying:
<blockquote>I have heard that message coming out of Iran from the days since this targeted killing, that the final response should be from your perspective to remove American forces, but what I want to ask you is this because you were and are a committed revolutionary. You were very prominent during the early days of the Islamic revolution, but you became more of a reformist as well, and you supported the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal, and diplomacy to, you know, settle some issues.
My question to you now is, is that completely out of the window? Are people like you and Foreign Minister Zarif, even President Rouhani, who took a gamble negotiating with the United States, are they sidelined? Is it now those who believe that America can never be discussed with, for want of a better word, hard-liners, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? Are they more in the ascendancy? Is there any hope for any negotiations, very briefly, if you wouldn&#8217;t mind?</blockquote>
Interviews below:
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2019 International Emmy Awards Gala

WATCH: CNN’s Amanpour Targets Def Sec Esper, Goes Soft On Iranian VP Who Once Said She’d Shoot U.S. Hostages In The Head

Last night, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, an attorney and former federal judicial law clerk, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cup29nPmOgo">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to discuss New York state&#8217;s extraordinarily controversial new &#8220;bail reform&#8221; legislation. The law, which the New York Post editorial board <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/07/with-lives-at-stake-albany-must-bail-reform-failure-now/">decries</a> today as a flat-out &#8220;bad law,&#8221; eliminates the possibility of judge-imposed cash bail for the overwhelming majority of crimes committed in the Empire State.
Here is how the Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/07/with-lives-at-stake-albany-must-bail-reform-failure-now/">describes</a> some of the problems with the law:
<blockquote>One huge problem: The new law prevents judges from ordering most criminal suspects jailed, or even requiring them to post bail, no matter how clear a threat to public safety they pose. Judges retain discretion only if the charges include a handful of very violent crimes and they deem the suspect a clear flight risk.
This guarantees a revolving door for serious perps: Caught for a minor holdup, you’ll be charged and released — and can do it again, get caught again and be released again, time after time after time.</blockquote>
The Daily Wire has also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-bail-reform-woman-involved-in-anti-semitic-attack-arrested-released-for-3-crimes-in-5-days">previously reported</a> on the law&#8217;s noxiousness. The Daily Wire&#8217;s Amanda Prestigiacomo recently <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-bail-reform-woman-involved-in-anti-semitic-attack-arrested-released-for-3-crimes-in-5-days">reported</a> on a serial anti-Semitic assaulter who astoundingly committed three separate crimes in a span of five days due to the law&#8217;s inordinate leniency. As also reported by Prestigiacomo, all five borough district attorneys in New York City have gone on the record stating that the law goes too far in favoring defendants.
Hammer has consistently been very critical of this type of pro-criminal, &#8220;jailbreak&#8221;-style legislation. Last weekend, Giancarlo Sopo of TheBlaze <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/news/virginia_weak_on_crime_democrats">quoted</a> him in the context of a similar partisan Democratic initiative in Virginia:
<blockquote>Reached by telephone, constitutional law attorney and Daily Wire editor-at-large Josh Hammer told TheBlaze that [the proposed Virginia] bill is part of a pattern among Democrats and like-minded &#8220;weak-on-crime&#8221; Republicans.
&#8220;Across the country, we see so many leftist Democrats — joined by no small share of libertarian-leaning Republicans — subscribing to the same weak-on-crime agenda,&#8221; Hammer, who has been critical of similar so-called &#8220;criminal justice reform&#8221; efforts, said.
&#8220;New York&#8217;s harrowing recent &#8216;bail reform&#8217; proposal is a shining example, and this Democratic proposal in Virginia fits in neatly, as well. Americans have historically cherished law and order, and it is devastating to see these kind of jailbreak, pro-criminal policies take hold as we descend further into mass lawlessness,&#8221; he added.</blockquote>
Wheeler began the segment by asking Hammer about the New York lawmakers&#8217; purported aim — to reduce inequality and promote justice — and why the law&#8217;s authors do not seem to care about equality and justice for the actual victims of crime. Hammer launched into a rant about how the Left is able to effectively wield seemingly anodyne language, such as &#8220;bail reform,&#8221; as a cudgel to advance their lawless agenda:
<blockquote>The problem with the Left is the Left speaks about justice and compassion and all these fancy words. They never focus on the people who actually suffer &#8230; from their policies. So in the case of border security and amnesty, there is no one who suffers worse from an open border and the human trafficking by drug cartels than the aliens themselves who are trafficked. In the case of &#8220;criminal justice reform,&#8221; &#8220;bail reform,&#8221; no one suffers more than victims of crime.
Where is anyone speaking for the victims of crime? But you know what the Left also does, Liz? The Left is amazing at getting the right version of language for their policies. &#8220;Bail reform,&#8221; it sounds so innocuous, right? What they&#8217;re doing is they&#8217;re throwing out a system of bail that has existed since at least 13th century England! That is how far back bail goes — cash bail, monetary bail. This is literally a centuries-old phenomenon that they are just throwing out.</blockquote>
WATCH:
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Hammer OANN 1.07.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: New York’s Insane Pro-Criminal Bail Law

Anti-Semitism

Crime

Hate Crime

Jail

Leftism

New York

New York City

Prison

Progressivism

On Monday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about how Ricky Gervais exposed the gap between Hollywood and the American people for all to see. Video and partial transcript below: 
Far more cold-blooded, far more brutal than the killing of Soleimani were Ricky Gervais’ attacks on Hollywood last night at the Golden Globes. The Golden Globes — opening up awards season here in Hollywood — awards season is so irrelevant these days that I didn&#8217;t even know it was happening. I forgot. 
I have worked professionally in show business, I live in Hollywood, I am right here at the center of it, and I forgot that it was going on. I didn&#8217;t know until yesterday when someone said, “You know, the Golden Globes is on.” Oh, really? Okay, who cares? That is how out of touch these people are. 
They decided to become relevant this year that the Golden Globes is going to go vegan. So they served dinner at this particular awards show, and it was going to go completely vegan to help the environment because that&#8217;s that&#8217;s the way that they&#8217;re going to finally turn their failing ratings around and relate to the American people. No, probably not. 
Ricky Gervais gets up there, he&#8217;s hosted this a number of times in the past, he said this would be his last time hosting, and Ricky Gervais didn&#8217;t care. He went for the necks of Hollywood and he — wow, I just realized the pun there because he opened up the night with an Epstein joke, so the pun was not intended. But all of Ricky Gervais’ attacks were intended. He said, I don&#8217;t care. I&#8217;m leaving nothing on the table. 
I think his monologue was pretty much the only shot that the award season has to relate in any way to the American people. It was great, and it was great at the expense of the audience in the room. The Hollywood stars, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, he open[ed] the night with a joke about Jeffrey Epstein. 
<blockquote>GERVAIS: Spoiler alert, Season 2 is on the way, so in the end, he obviously didn&#8217;t kill himself — just like Jeffrey Epstein. Shut up. I know he&#8217;s your friend, but I don&#8217;t care. You had to make your own way here in your own plane, didn’t ya?</blockquote>
Oh my gosh, what a great one-two. He opens up with the Jeffrey Epstein joke, right? That would have been enough, but Hollywood can&#8217;t laugh about Jeffrey Epstein. They didn&#8217;t laugh, they kind of stayed a little quiet. They kind of groaned, which set up Gervais for the actual punchline of his joke, which is, “Oh, shut up, I know you&#8217;re all friends with the guy” — because they are! They are all friends with the guy and they&#8217;re all friends with all the MeToo perpetrators and they&#8217;re friends with all of these sex criminals. 
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They pretend that they&#8217;re not, they clutch their pearls and they pretend to be so nice and wonderful and high and mighty. He says, “Yeah, you had to take your own plane here tonight, didn&#8217;t you?” That one finally got the lights so awkward. It was so brutal and the attacks only got harsher. From there, he went after every single person in that room for hypocrisy, and at many points, you could pretty much hear a pin drop. 
<blockquote>GERVAIS: A superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. So when you say you’re woke but the companies you work for — I mean, unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney — if ISIS started a streaming service, you&#8217;d call your agent, wouldn&#8217;t you? So, if you do win an award tonight, don&#8217;t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You&#8217;re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So if you win, alright, come up accept your little award, thank your agent, and your god, and [expletive] off. </blockquote>
That little bit that we had to bleep out there at the end is where, Ricky Gervais told people where they could go after they had received their award. It was a wonderful spectacle. It was great, Ricky Gervais is an international treasure. 
Why? Because he showed the gap between Hollywood and the American people. He showed the gap between the Hollywood foreign press, the international press — the big makers of culture and the consumers of culture. And you can&#8217;t deny that gap, because these awards shows have been tanking in the ratings for years now, every single year. Hollywood cannot even laugh at an Epstein joke — a joke about an international sex trafficking, criminal, pedophile — everything. They can&#8217;t laugh at it because they know him — because they were friends with him. They don&#8217;t understand.
The more interesting level of analysis here is whether or not Ricky Gervais was brave to do this set. The conventional wisdom is it was so brave of Gervais to do this set in front of Hollywood. Now, in many ways, it was because this will hurt his employment prospects in Hollywood. He was telling these people that they&#8217;re degenerates to their face, right? It was absolutely hilarious. In that way, it was courageous to do it. 
But in another sense, it wasn&#8217;t brave at all &#8230; [Gervais] knew that the audience would love this, that they would lap this up, that they would say, “Finally, Rickey Gervais, this guy is so good. This guy gets us.” 
He deserves credit because it really will irritate his employers, but this will make him so much more popular among the audience. The only reason that any person is talking about the Golden Globes today is because Ricky Gervais had this great, killer set. Looking ahead on the political scene to 2020, it shows you how absolutely worthless celebrity endorsements are that the Left, they&#8217;re always shocked. They say, “Oh, Hillary Clinton got all the endorsements of Hollywood, all these big-time movie stars and TV stars. How did she lose? John Kerry got all the big endorsements. Bruce Springsteen. Puff Daddy, all these guys. How did they lose?” Because none of us like Hollywood, we don&#8217;t like these people.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-michael-knowles-show/id1266577963?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Michael Knowles Show” on iTunes. 
</a><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show">Watch “The Michael Knowles Show” on-demand!</a>

NBC&#8217;s &#8220;77th Annual Golden Globe Awards&#8221; &#8211; Arrivals

KNOWLES: Ricky Gervais’ Opening Monologue: The Most Relatable Part Of Awards Season

Golden Globes

MeToo

Ricky Gervais

On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the Democrats’ response to the death of Iranian terrorist, Qassam Soleimani. Video and partial transcript below: 
I&#8217;m rarely shocked by whatever nonsense politicians do or say. Sometimes they annoy me, but mostly they just crack me up. But I was legitimately shocked by the Democrat reaction to Trump&#8217;s triumphant destruction of one of the worst people on the planet, plus the head of the terrorist group Hezbollah and a bunch of their terrorist pals.
Not only did The Washington Post talk about how revered Soleimani was, a reporter for The New York Times, a former newspaper, tweeted out video of Soleimani reciting wistful poetry about how his friends had gone away while he was left behind. Well, now he no longer has that problem, and he and his friends are reunited in the eternal flames of a just and terrible damnation and we should all be glad. 
But we&#8217;re not all glad. In our now almost completely-useless House of Representatives, shapely knucklehead Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared the targeted killing of a known killer an act of war. It wasn’t; it was a totally legal act of self-defense against a man who, according to our State Department, orchestrated 17% of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. That&#8217;s over six hundred of our troops. 
[Ocasio-Cortez] went on to call the president a monster for letting the Iranians know they&#8217;d be sorry if they tried to strike back. Anti-semitic terrorist supporter Ihlan Omar — and that&#8217;s not hyperbole, she openly supports the Council on American Islamic Relations, which has close ties to Hamas and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to funnel money to Hamas — Omar said she was outraged by what she called Soleimani’s assassination. Bernie Sanders also called it an assassination, and refused to criticize Soleimani at all. Elizabeth Warren began by criticizing him, then stopped when she came under fire from the Left, and began proposing a conspiracy theory about how Trump was trying to distract from the make-believe impeachment [that] no one was paying attention to anyway.
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Let me be honest about this: When Osama bin Laden was taken out during the administration of Barack Obama, it cost me something to sing Obama&#8217;s praises. But I did it; he deserved it — and the press dutifully echoed the Democrat talking point that Obama had made a, quote, “gutsy call.” Someone ought to make one of those montages of the number of times journalists use that phrase: “gutsy call.” But if we&#8217;re in dangerous new territory with Iran, Obama can take a lot of the blame. 
He failed to support the Green Revolution there because he was too busy negotiating the absurd nuclear deal with the mullahs, and to get that worse-than-useless deal in place, he bribed the Iranians with nearly two billion dollars in untraceable cash — cash that no doubt funded Soleimani’s murder of our guys. And if Trump is a monster for fighting back against terrorism, what about Obama in 2016 alone? Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs on seven Muslim-majority countries, his drone strikes killed countless civilians, including children and some American citizens, one of them a terrorist supporting 16-year-old. There was no outrage from the Democrats then, and you know what? There was no outrage from me either. We do what we have to do to break the back of this awful Islamist movement. Then, of course, there was the Hillary Clinton-engineered overthrow of Moummar Gadhafi in Libya. Remember how Hillary laughed about that and a CBS reporter laughed right along with her. Here&#8217;s the videotape:
<blockquote>CLINTON: We came, we saw, he died. </blockquote>
Hilarious. That led to the fatal attacks on our compound in Benghazi, where the Obama administration failed to increase security or send help in time, and then lied and lied and lied about the resulting American deaths. Some Democrats called the recent attack on our compound in Baghdad Trump’s Benghazi because Trump sent help, instantly prevented any American deaths, and then struck back by taking out Soleimani — so it was exactly the same. 
Again: Hypocrisy, lies, corruption — these were all part of politics, but not in matters like this. Democrats should grit their teeth, sing Trump&#8217;s praises, then move on to their other arguments. But they&#8217;ve fallen for the deadliest political error of them all. Reaction isn&#8217;t if Trump does it, it&#8217;s bad; if Republicans like it, they hate it. That way lies insanity — we all do that, sometimes it&#8217;s part of politics, too. But at some point, at the point where Americans are dying, being murdered, at the point where terrorists are on the loose — that&#8217;s got to stop. 
Democrats today show zero sign of liking this country at all. They say the U.S. was founded in racism, which is a stone lie. They attack the First and Second Amendments because they promote individual freedom over socialist schemes. They attack constitutional protections of our federal system like the Electoral College, and if the Supreme Court rules against them on constitutional grounds, they start threatening to pack the court. They&#8217;ve lost the plot of America, and that&#8217;s bad. But if they will not put our safety first, our lives first, our service men and women first, what claim do they have to be our fellow citizens at all? Shame on them. 
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Bernie Sanders Returns To The Campaign Trail With A Rally In New York City

KLAVAN: Democrats Show Zero Sign Of Liking This Country

On Monday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Ben Shapiro Show,&#8221; the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about Ricky Gervais&#8217; best jokes at the Golden Globes, and Hollywood&#8217;s reaction. Video and partial transcript below: 
Ricky Gervais’ final joke [at the Golden Globes] was the best joke — he was so irritated with the whole process and it was quite wonderful. He is talking here about the movies that have been nominated in the horror category, I believe, he&#8217;s talking about &#8220;Bird Box,&#8221; and he just levels Hollywood. It&#8217;s fantastic. 
<blockquote>GERVAIS: Netflix’s &#8220;Bird Box,&#8221; a movie where people survive by acting like they don&#8217;t see a thing. So, like working for Harvey Weinstein — You did it. I didn’t, you did it. </blockquote>
You can hear people like “Ohhhh.” What are you “ohh-ing” about? He’s right, you did it, you pieces of crap. You&#8217;re the ones who spent 30 years taking Harvey Weinstein&#8217;s checks while allowing him to peek down your blouse, and/or allowing him to peek down other people&#8217;s blouses. Then some of you come forward — again, I have nothing but sympathy for the women who have actually come forward — but there are a bunch of women who didn&#8217;t come forward and/or protected Harvey Weinstein knowing that he did this stuff, or he did it to them and then they came out and protected him for years because he was signing checks to them. 
Hollywood does not get to stand on its high horse about MeToo, Hollywood does not get to stand on its high horse about global warming. Honestly, the only person who was even decent in these political speeches last night was Joaquin Phoenix, got played off the stage when he suggested that people in Hollywood stopped taking private jets everywhere. Joaquin Phoenix may be a nut, but at least he&#8217;s a nut who&#8217;s trying to hold himself to a standard. 
Ricky Gervais’s hit on Hollywood, it does underscore what our politics truly is about these days, because it really is not about the complexity of politics. It really is about this cultural divide. 
The culture wars have become extremely hard fought now, a lot more hard fought in the last 20 years — 25 years — than they were for many decades before that. Why? Well, culture is usually the last vestige of unity. So when you have a common philosophy, culture, history, then culture tends to be the easiest place to unify because you can argue about TV or argue about sports really, and argue about like the products that you&#8217;re wearing — that&#8217;s the stuff that&#8217;s easy. 
The stuff that&#8217;s hard is philosophy and history and all the stuff that undergirds a successful civilization. But when all of those other things fall away and the last thing that we can unify about is culture, and then culture starts to be polarized, we end up in these culture wars we&#8217;re fighting. You can see with each successive Oscars, each successive Golden Globes, you can see that Hollywood is exacerbating those Culture Wars and Ricky Gervais just put a pin in it last night. I mean, he really just exposed it — ripped it wide open. 
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He made another joke that I don&#8217;t think we actually had a chance to pull where he was talking about the Woke nature of Hollywood, and he was saying that he was gonna do an “In Memoriam” segment last night, but he saw that there are too many dead white people. So he said, “I&#8217;m not going to do that. That&#8217;s not diverse enough. I&#8217;m not going to be the one who does that,” and people in the audience didn&#8217;t know whether to laugh or not, because what he is laughing at is their ridiculous insistence that every single part has to be given to a person who is of the actual physical description in the script. 
So if it’s a disabled person, it can’t be a person who is non-disabled playing a disabled person — which is called acting. He&#8217;s laughing at the fact that Hollywood has declared that the only way that they can find some sort of moral recompense for what they do is by hiring a certain percentage of black or gay or female actors, and that you have to have a certain percentage of black or female or gay lines in a particular script in order to make that script morally praiseworthy. 
Ricky Gervais is right about all this. Hollywood has been at the forefront of the Culture Wars and then they declared themselves on the defensive. “Oh, how dare these right-wingers like Trump, they&#8217;re always involved in the Culture Wars.” You launched it, Trump is just responding, so is the rest of America and Gervais — Honestly, like people on the Right were cheering last night — Gervais is not a Republican. 
I’ve seen no evidence that Gervais is conservative 0r Republican. He just has eyes, that&#8217;s all. He has eyes, and he has a brain, and so he can see how ridiculous these people in Hollywood are, and they are ridiculous pretending to be our moral betters. Just absurdity.
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NBC&#8217;s &#8220;73rd Annual Golden Globe Awards&#8221; &#8211; Show

SHAPIRO: Ricky Gervais’ Best Jokes Of The Golden Globes

Harvey Weinstein

On Thursday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief reviews “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” and talks about how the film provides a fantastic ending to a trilogy that otherwise shouldn’t have happened. Video, partial transcript, and spoilers below: 
If you&#8217;ve been familiar with the show at all, you know I&#8217;ve been incredibly critical of the new trilogy. I don&#8217;t like the new trilogy; I think it was unnecessary, I think they were fools, I think they tried to split the baby. So there were two things they could&#8217;ve done originally — I have to preface my take on “Rise of Skywalker” with the other two movies because it doesn&#8217;t work as a standalone film, nor is it really meant to.
This film, “Rise of Skywalker,” was designed specifically to retcon — meaning to go back in time and change the fact that “Force Awakens” and “Last Jedi” ever happened. It basically revises the entire story in a much more satisfying way.
So here was my original take on this new trilogy: There are two ways that Disney could have gone. Disney, number one, could have recast the entire original “Return of the Jedi” — they could have recast somebody as Luke, recast somebody as Leia, recast somebody as Han — which by the way, they did, they recast somebody as Han [when they] did Solo —they could have recast the entire cast and then they could&#8217;ve just picked up where “Return of the Jedi” left off with the Admiral Thrawn series. If you’ve read any of the Star Wars books — as I have — that&#8217;s actually a really good storyline. It could&#8217;ve just picked up where they left off and moved on into the future that way and would&#8217;ve gotten all of their new adventures.
Alternatively, they could have landed the Star Wars universe in like a different place, and they&#8217;re actually doing this on Disney Plus with the Mandalorian, which is kind of great — Mandalorian is really fun, Jon Favreau director. They could have gone back and they could have used some of these characters and put them somewhere else in the Star Wars universe. So Disney actually has done this with a couple of their other series, right? “Star Wars: Clone Wars,” they did this with, also “Star Wars: Rebels,” and some of the stuff is really pretty fantastic. They could&#8217;ve done any of those things.
Instead, what they chose to do was split the baby. “We’ll introduce new characters, but we&#8217;ll live off the nostalgia for the first films.” You can&#8217;t do that, and the reason you can&#8217;t do that is because if you&#8217;re nostalgic for the first films, you don&#8217;t want to see bad things happen to your favorite childhood characters. No one wants — spoiler alert — no one wants to see Han Solo die at the hands of his son like a loser divorced dad after leaving Leia alone for 20 years and flying around the galaxy smoking pot with Chewie in the Millennium Falcon. No one wants to see that, and that&#8217;s what happens in “Force Awakens.” No one wants to see Luke, who is this hero who goes from being a whiny teenager to being this mature Jedi who is able to control himself to save his father, nobody wants to see Luke become a misanthrope who milks aliens on a foreign planet while whining about his life and disparaging the Jedi tradition. No one wants to see that.
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So the new series basically took all of your favorite characters, your favorite old characters, and proceeded to ruin them, except for Leia, because Kathleen Kennedy has this feminist streak where the only characters were allowed to be competent or good are apparently the female characters. So that was the critique of this trilogy — it basically took all of my favorite characters from my childhood and they wrecked them so they could promote a bunch of characters who sucked.
Rey was a terrible character because you didn&#8217;t know — not only you didn&#8217;t know where she came from, but she was amazing at everything right off the bat. This was the biggest critique of the first part of this trilogy. The biggest critique was that Rey, who had not trained in the force for half a second, was suddenly unbelievably good at it, and Ben Solo —Kylo Ren, who is Leia’s kid with Han [and has] been training with the Force since childhood, can be overtaken in a lightsaber battle by somebody who picked up a lightsaber half a second ago. That&#8217;s not a thing. It&#8217;s stupid, and everybody who watched the series knew it was stupid.
Meanwhile, you had Poe, who was utterly incompetent, they tried to create kind of a new Han Solo character. The difference is that Han Solo in “Empire Strikes Back” — the entire story of “Empire Strikes Back” is Han Solo demonstrating that he is wildly competent at a lot of things. The entire Poe Dameron story is [that] the dude is wildly incompetent until he&#8217;s suddenly promoted to the head of the Rebel Alliance. Finn has no story arc at all. His entire story arc is that he was a stormtrooper, end of story arc, nothing happens to him for the next three movies.
So all of the new characters are completely boring, random, they should have killed Finn in “Last Jedi” when he makes that heroic run. They should&#8217;ve killed him off. They probably should&#8217;ve killed Poe in “Last Jedi,” they should have had him pull the Admiral Holdo maneuver. Instead, they bring in Laura Dern to wear weird hair and do a lightspeed trick that, by the way, if anybody could have figured that one out, they could&#8217;ve blown up the Death Star that way, like in “Star Wars: New Hope,” as well as “Return of the Jedi.” So all of this is preface to say I hated “Force Awakens,” and I hated “Last Jedi.”
“Rise of Skywalker” is an attempt to buy all of that back, and understanding that this trilogy never should have happened and understanding all the flaws of “Force Awakens” and “Last Jedi” — now you understand why I liked “Rise of Skywalker” — because they attempt to correct as many of these problems as they can while apologizing for the series, which is basically what this was. All of the stuff with Finn and Poe, no one cares about. All that stuff was dumb. No one cares about [it], it&#8217;s a waste of time. You have to do it, it&#8217;s like the worst of J.J. Abrams, it’s not a spoiler to say the film opens with the Millennium Falcon lightspeed jumping, which just turns it into like a silly prop. It&#8217;s ridiculous. It&#8217;s ridiculous.
The entire “Empire Strikes Back,” which is the best Star Wars film unquestionably — this is fact, this is known. “The Empire Strikes Back” is all about basically three, maybe four topics. One is the Millennium Falcon, it&#8217;s the entire thing in Empire Strikes Back is that the Millennium Falcon&#8217;s hyperdrive is broken. That is the central plot device. In this movie, in the new movie, in “Rise of Skywalker,” the Millennium Falcon is fully on fire and they fix it inside of 5 seconds flat. All of it. Also, “Empire Strikes Back” is about Luke growing and realizing that he is insufficient, so that&#8217;s the other topic, and also it&#8217;s about Han Solo being wildly competent. Poe and Finn, they&#8217;re wildly incompetent, the Millennium Falcon is made into a prop, like all that stuff is sort of the worst of J.J. Abrams.
The stuff that&#8217;s really good [in this movie is] actually quite good. The stuff that&#8217;s good is that they buy back Han Solo’s death, they give him sort of a new exit scene where he&#8217;s not being killed by a son where they cheat, he can&#8217;t be a Force ghost because he didn’t have the Force, but he basically is a Force ghost, he comes back. All these are spoilers. You&#8217;ve been warned one thousand times. You don&#8217;t want to hear about it, you haven&#8217;t seen the movie yet, don&#8217;t listen.
So Han Solo comes back and he talks with Kylo and he basically woos Kylo back to the light side of the Force. You find out that Leia, who uses the Force in new and bizarre ways in “Last Jedi” that are never explained — like she literally pulls herself back into a ship after being blasted out into space and you’re like where the hell did that come from Luke hasn&#8217;t even done that — you&#8217;re told in this movie that Leia was trained as a Jedi by Luke, which makes sense, right? In the book, she actually is, in the book she actually is trained as a Jedi by Luke, and [in the movie] she decided not to become a Jedi at the last minute because she foresaw, using the Force, that if she became a Jedi then her lightsaber would be used to kill Ben.
That all makes sense, so they retcon that. Then, the biggest retcon of all, the one that actually matters and that answers why Rey is cool. Answers the biggest question, why is Rey even a thing? And the answer is because she&#8217;s Palpatine granddaughter, which is fantastic. That&#8217;s a great reveal, that’s great because the most underrated Force ability person in the Star Wars series — because everyone&#8217;s focused on Anakin Skywalker, on Vader and Luke, on Leia, on Yoda, on Obi Wan — nobody&#8217;s focused on the fact that Palpatine is an unbelievable badass with the Force. Palpatine is so strong in the Force that he basically defeats Yoda, he is able to conceal his identity as the emperor for three movies, he’s able to turn Anakin to the dark side. Palpatine is an utter badass, and so they bring Palpatine back from the dead, which they sort of had to do — Palpatine is a great character — they bring in all the old musical cues, they bring in all of the old stuff, which is the stuff that I like.
So if you&#8217;re a nostalgia person, if you&#8217;re pissed at the series because you feel like it ruined your childhood, then this movie was an attempt to restore that, it was an attempt to make Han cool again — fairly successful. There&#8217;s an attempt to make Leia cool again — successful. There&#8217;s an attempt to make Luke cool, there&#8217;s a great scene where Luke does, even though he&#8217;s dead, Luke does this thing that Yoda does while he&#8217;s alive in Empire. Remember in Empire, there&#8217;s this call, there&#8217;s this scene where Yoda raises the X-Wing from the swamp because Luke fails to do so. Here, Luke is able to do that as a force ghost to hand over the X-Wing to Rey. That&#8217;s great.
The callback scene where they find the old Death Star from “Return of the Jedi,” and Rey has to confront herself, which is another callback to Empire, and then when they&#8217;re playing the old musical cues and all that stuff is great. What they do with Kylo Ren, bringing him back to the light side is pretty great.
J.J. Abrams does a great job in setting up a good reveal. So for several movies, you&#8217;ve been seeing basically Kylo and Rey Force-Skyping one another, they can talk over long distances in this movie, they can actually sword fight sort of telepathically, but it has real world ramifications. One is in one place, one is in the other place, and they&#8217;re having these lightsaber battles, but it actually has physical ramifications in the places where they&#8217;re having the lightsaber battles, and so that ends with a really fantastic reveal. All that stuff is great. Everything with Kylo, everything with Rey, everything with Palpatine is great, everything with Leia and Han is really good, like all that stuff is good. Finn and Poe continue to be disposable, all the other fringe characters end up being disposable.
There is this lesbian moment that&#8217;s been much talked about because at the very end of the movie they show a lesbian couple kissing, and it&#8217;s obviously Disney trying to shoehorn in the “Okay GLAAD, we know you&#8217;re there.” It&#8217;s very silly, and it&#8217;s sort of like that moment at the end of the “Avengers: Infinity War” where all the females land in one part of the battlefield and you’re like, “Okay, really? Was that like, c&#8217;mon.” That&#8217;s it, that&#8217;s sort of the same thing here. None of the couples are kissing except this one lesbian couple. All right, I get it, Disney, you&#8217;ve fulfilled your PC quota for the day. Whatever, man. But it&#8217;s pretty shoehorned in, it&#8217;s not a big deal, it&#8217;s just silly.
But overall, the critics are savaging this film. All it tells you about critics, all you need to know is they gave the “Last Jedi” like 92% on Rotten Tomatoes and they gave this one like 53%. They didn&#8217;t understand Star Wars, didn&#8217;t understand that this movie understands better how the Force works, this movie understands better how the weapons work, this movie understands better the dynamics between the light and the dark side; it understands Palpatine.
I&#8217;ve heard a lot of objections that this film basically makes the Skywalker-Vader interaction completely irrelevant. But that&#8217;s true the minute that Palpatine lives, and by the way, that&#8217;s true the minute that the Rebel Alliance fails. Once the Republic falls again to the First Order, then that whole thing became irrelevant. The new trilogy made that irrelevant, which is why they should&#8217;ve fast forwarded and taken it to some other part of the universe. But once you&#8217;re in the trilogy, this was the best way to end it.
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&nbsp;

Star Wars Marathon Hosted By Nerdist

SHAPIRO: My Long-Awaited Review Of ‘Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker’

Disney

Star Wars

On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles addresses the U.S. military&#8217;s response to the Iranian-backed terrorists trying to take control of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Video and partial transcript below: 
The year started off in a pretty auspicious way, it was actually a pretty good start to the year. Why? There was an attack on a U.S. embassy — that&#8217;s not a good start — [but the] good start was the response. It shows you the difference between the 2020s — between right now — and the Obama administration. Maybe there&#8217;s a difference in these two decades?
On New Year&#8217;s Eve, Iran-backed terrorists tried to attack the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. This was a replay of the Benghazi attack on September 11, [2012]. You remember that during Obama administration, in Libya, there was attack on the U.S. Embassy, four Americans killed, including the ambassador — it was an absolute disaster. When the militants started to attack, nobody responded, there was no reaction from the political leadership in Washington, they just let the consulate be attacked over there and unfortunately, these Americans died. 
Then there was a cover-up afterward: Barack Obama sent his national security adviser on national television to lie about the attack. They said that it was a spontaneous uprising caused by a YouTube video that virtually nobody had seen. Of course, it wasn&#8217;t that. It was a terrorist-plotted, -planned, and -executed attack. It led to years of investigations. Hillary Clinton famously testified about it and said [paraphrasing], “Who cares? What difference at this point does it make if they were terrorists or YouTube video demonstrators? Who cares? It&#8217;s no big deal.” Of course, it does matter.
This attack in Baghdad failed because of decisive leadership. So what happened is hundreds of terrorists, of militiamen and their supporters, showed up to this embassy in Baghdad. They broke into the compound, they destroyed a reception area, they smashed windows, smashed up the whole building, put graffiti all over the walls. This was to protest U.S. airstrikes against an Iran-backed militia that ended up killing 25 terrorists.
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So now they&#8217;re protesting this, there is going to be a response because the United States is fighting with Iran through these proxies. Now, why didn&#8217;t it turn into this disaster of Benghazi? It didn&#8217;t turn [into it] because the U.S. responded immediately, and yesterday, the militiamen, the terrorists, withdrew — they withdrew after two days of clashes with American security forces because the minute the attack began, the United States sent 100 Marines, the United States sent in 750 paratroopers to the region, they deployed troops out there, and they said you are not taking our embassy. Of course, eventually after that show force, the terrorists withdrew. 
President Trump was asked about this on New Year&#8217;s Eve at Mar-a-Lago. So he&#8217;s there in his tuxedo — looking great by the way — and Melania is standing there looking significantly better, just like the picture of elegance and grace, and they&#8217;re being asked about this attack. Trump has one clear message for the terrorists, for the international community and for the American people. He says this will not be another Benghazi.
<blockquote>TRUMP: I think it&#8217;s been handled very well. The Marines came in, we had some great warriors come in and do a fantastic job, and they were there instantaneously. As soon as we heard. I used the word immediately, they came immediately and it&#8217;s in great shape. As you know, this will not be a Benghazi — Benghazi should never have happened — this will never, ever be a Benghazi. But we have some of our greatest warriors there. They got in there very quickly, as soon as we saw, there was a potential for problem, they got in and there was no problem whatsoever. I also want to thank the Iraqi government. They really stepped up. I spoke to the prime minister today, I thanked him, but they stepped up very nicely.  </blockquote>
This story tells you two important things. It shows you, for one, the absolute corruption of the media, which was basically taking the side of the terrorists and sort of lamenting the fact that this wasn&#8217;t turning into Benghazi. That’s the first part. The second thing it shows you is the importance of political leadership. It shows you something that I predict will possibly define this decade, which is the importance of taking control of your own political destiny. The ability of us to use our will, to use our decision-making powers, to come in and take control of our political destiny. We are not simply leaving ourselves up to circumstance, we have the ability to shape our political future.
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US-POLITICS-TRUMP

KNOWLES: Trump Just Showed That The U.S. Controls Its Own Political Destiny

Hillary Clinton

Iran

Iraq

On Wednesday night, a rocket launched from Gaza seemingly targeted Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu while he was speaking at a Likud primaries conference in Ashkelon, Israel. Netanayu was taken off the stage to a bomb shelter, but returned later to speak to attendees, where he told them, “The last terrorist who ordered the rocket fire toward Ashdod when I was there is not with us anymore; the one that ordered this attack should pack his bags quickly.”
The <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Rocket-sirens-sound-in-Ashkelon-area-612138">Jerusalem Post</a> reported, “A similar incident happened in Ashdod in September when rocket sirens were fired as Netanyahu held a campaign event in the city … Gazan reports indicated that Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Khalil Batanai is the one behind the rocket fire on Wednesday night, according to Channel 12. The rocket fire in September was ordered by former PIJ official Baha Abu Al Ata, who was assassinated in November.”
Blue and White leader Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s chief opponent for the position of prime minister, took advantage of the rocket attack to attack Netanyahu, tweeting, &#8220;The situation in which the citizens of Israel are given to the grace of terrorists and the prime minister of the Israeli government can&#8217;t tour part of his country is a badge of shame for the security policies in the south and the loss of deterrence that no sovereign state can allow. We will flip the government, change the policies and return the deterrence and quiet to the residents of the south.”
Ashkelon is only 26 miles from Gaza. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/gazas-homemade-rockets-still-stretch-israels-sophisticated-defenses/2019/05/06/2ca3a46a-700c-11e9-9331-30bc5836f48e_story.html">The Washington Post</a> reported last May, “ … experts who track the weapons arsenals of Hamas and Islamic Jihad estimate that they have managed to stockpile between 5,000 and 20,000 rockets. Over the weekend, the militant groups fired a tiny fraction of them toward Israel — nearly 700 rockets and mortars, according to the Israeli military — and the unusually ferocious barrage at times overwhelmed Israeli air defenses. The key to the weapons’ effectiveness is not their sophistication in terms of range or precision but just the opposite. Many of the rockets are so cheap and easy to manufacture, in some cases requiring little more than metal casing and an explosive, that the groups have been able to accumulate them in significant numbers.”
Boaz Ganor, director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, commented, “When it’s not a precise missile, it’s quite easy to prepare a rocket if you don’t really care where it’s going to fall.” Last May four Israelis died under rocket fire from Gaza, the Post noted. A rocket that hit Tel Aviv last March had a range of 75 miles. Hamas has been manufacturing rockets in Gaza since 2001, during the Second Intifada, when a bloody rampage by Palestinians that included myriad bombings that murdered hundreds of Israelis.
After the rockets last May, former ambassador of Israel to the United States Michael Oren stated, “Hamas must go. Right after our holidays and Eurovision, Israel must evict Hamas from Gaza. The U.S. should back us militarily and diplomatically and, together with Arab states, commit to Gaza’s renewal.”
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Gaza Rocket Targets Area Where Netanyahu Is Speaking. Netanyahu Has A Message For The Terrorist Launching It.

Benjamin Netanyahu

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