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March 8, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:41
Ep. 85 - Beyonce Isn't Sexy

Ben explains the difference between sexy and pornographic, plus he talks establishment vs. anti-establishment vs. conservative, and a hilarious "Stuff I Like" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Why hi there.
I'm Ben Shapiro, and we're back.
It's a Tuesday.
There's so much to talk about.
I want to talk today about the real breakdown inside the Republican Party.
It's not what everybody says it is.
We'll talk about what really is breaking the Republican Party apart.
We will also talk about Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders just making complete asses of themselves on Fox News last night.
Plus, it's International Women's Day.
Do you feel like a natural woman?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So it is International Women's Day, a day when we celebrate the fact that a bunch of men voted to make an International Women's Day in what has to be one of the more condescending moves ever.
And we'll get to all of that.
There's so much to talk about.
But first, folks, we're so excited that we finally have sponsors for the show.
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Okay, so it's pretty obvious right now that things are in wild disarray inside the Republican Party.
Did you miss it?
We've been talking about it for several months at this point.
So it's now reaching sort of cataclysmic proportions today.
There are a bunch more primaries.
These are primaries that are expected to split between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
Trump isn't going to walk out with major delicate victories today.
He's going to split relatively evenly with Cruz.
And then we get to next Tuesday, and there's pressure on Marco Rubio to drop out, and Marco Rubio isn't dropping out.
But bottom line is this.
If Marco Rubio loses Florida, he's done.
If John Kasich wins Ohio, he's not.
And he will have deprived Donald Trump of enough delegates that this actually becomes a really close competitive race.
Not to beat Donald Trump in the delegate count, but to prevent him from getting to 1,237 delegates.
If that happens, then the question is whether there's some sort of backroom deal between all of the other candidates to get behind Ted Cruz, because the only other people who are eligible for the nomination are people who have won eight states.
Cruz has won six.
By the end of today, he will have won at least seven.
He's supposed to win Idaho.
He has to win eight, so he'll win eight.
There's no question.
By the end of this process, he'll have won eight states.
He may be the only alternative to Donald Trump.
Okay, so what's happening to the Republican Party here?
There's a very interesting column My David Brooks, who's a fake conservative who writes for the New York Times.
We've talked about David Brooks before.
He's sort of a faux conservative, an establishment guy.
A couple of weeks ago he wrote a piece saying that Barack Obama, we're gonna miss him when he's gone because he's so genteel and civil and wonderful.
This is the columnist who's the conservative at the New York Times.
Today, he has a piece called, It's Not Too Late.
And here's what he says.
He says, It's 2 a.m.
The bar is closing.
Republicans have had a series of strong and nasty Trump cocktails.
Suddenly, Ted Cruz is beginning to look kind of attractive.
At least he's sort of predictable, and he doesn't talk about his sexual organs in presidential debates.
Well, Republicans, have your standards really fallen so low so fast?
Are you really that desperate?
Can you remember your 8 p.m.
selves and all the hope you had about entering a campaign with such a deep bench of talented candidates?
Back in the early evening before the current panic set in, Republicans understood Ted Cruz would be a terrible general election candidate, at least as unelectable as Trump and maybe more so.
He's the single most conservative Republican in Congress, far adrift from the American mainstream.
He's been doing well in primaries because of the support of extremely conservative voters in very conservative states.
He really hasn't broken out of that lane.
His political profile is a slightly enlarged Rick Santorum, but without the heart.
He's cruel.
He's nasty.
David Brooks once said that he represented a sort of, quote, pagan brutalism.
He said that about Ted Cruz.
He says on policy grounds, Cruz would be unacceptable to a large majority in this country, but his policy disadvantages are overshadowed by his public image ones.
His rhetorical style will come across to young and independent voters as smarmy and oleaginous.
Oleaginous means greasy.
In Congress, he had two accomplishments.
The disastrous government shutdown and persuading all his colleagues to dislike him.
And then he says, there's another path.
A better path.
One that doesn't leave you self-loathing in the morning.
It's a long shot, but given the alternatives, it's worth trying.
And that is, basically, prevent Trump from winning the nomination, go to an open convention, and then select somebody who's not really conservative.
He says, this isn't about winning the presidency in 2016 anymore, this is about something much bigger.
Every 50 or 60 years, parties undergo a transformation.
The GOP is undergoing one right now.
What happens this year will set the party's trajectory for decades.
And David Brooks, remember, an establishment guy, he says, since Goldwater and Reagan, the GOP has been governed by a free market, anti-government philosophy.
But over the ensuing decades, new problems have emerged.
First, the economy has gotten crueler.
Technology is displacing workers.
Globalization is dampening wages.
Second, the social structure has atomized and frayed, especially among the less educated.
Third, demography is shifting.
Orthodox Republicans, seeing no positive role for government, have had no affirmative agenda to help people deal with these new problems, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What we really need is a big government conservatism.
Okay, so here's just a brief review.
When we first started this campaign, the conventional wisdom, and I talked about it on the show, was that there were four lanes.
There were four lanes in the Republican primaries.
Lane one was the establishment lane.
That was Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
Lane two was the Tea Party lane.
Lane two, that was the Ted Cruz Tea Party lane.
Lane 3 was the Evangelical Conservatives' lane.
It was supposed to be Mike Huckabee's lane, or Rick Santorum.
And lane 4 was the Libertarian, and that was supposed to be Rand Paul.
Obviously, that didn't work out because pretty much none of those candidates, except Cruz, have had any sort of appeal at all.
Then we went to a second model that people have been pushing now for months.
And that is the establishment versus anti-establishment model.
There's the establishment, that's Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush and John Kasich.
And there's the anti-establishment, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
What this doesn't explain is why Cruz and Trump have been going at it so hard.
If they're in the same lane and they represent the same people, why is it that there's so much ire between the Trump and the Cruz people?
And the answer is because it's an insufficient model.
That model is not correct.
In reality, there are three lanes, and this is what's tearing apart the Republican Party.
Imagine a Venn diagram.
Now normally, a Venn diagram, if you remember back to school, you have three circles and they all overlap in one particular area.
That's not how this Venn diagram looks.
The Venn diagram for the current Republican Party is three circles all in a row with small overlap.
So circle, circle, circle, right?
And there's just two areas of overlap, but at no point do the two circles on the ends touch each other.
So you've got the anti-establishment on one end, the establishment on the other, and the conservatives in the middle.
That's basically the model.
And what's happening is that the anti-establishment people are pulling at the conservatives from one side, saying, you can't go along with those establishment people.
They're terrible.
They're awful.
They're the ones who surrendered to Democrats.
And then on the other side, you've got the establishment people pointing at the anti-establishment people and saying, conservatives, you gotta come with us, you can't go with those people, they back Trump, and Trump's not even conservative.
You gotta come with us, he's crazy, he's gonna destroy the conservative movement.
And so what you're seeing is the conservatives, the people who actually care, about constitutional conservatism getting torn right down the center between the anti-establishment and the establishment.
And this is why things are playing out the way that they are.
To understand this, you have to understand anti-establishment is not conservative.
We've said this multiple times.
So let's go through these three groups inside the Republican Party.
Who's right?
Who's wrong?
And how do we hope all of this shapes up?
So first things first, the establishment.
The establishment, they're people like David Brooks.
The establishment are people like David Brooks.
They find Donald Trump, they actually kind of like Donald Trump on policy is the truth, but they find Donald Trump off-putting.
They think that he's rude, they think he's loud, obnoxious, and he says things that are brutal to minorities, and he alienates people, he can't do outreach.
That's what they think of Donald Trump.
But these same people hate Ted Cruz because they're not really conservative.
So they really dislike Ted Cruz.
He's just too harsh.
He's just too constitutional.
He's just too small government.
He can't go along to get along.
He can't make deals.
He has no allies.
And the establishment view is much more like Trump than it is like Cruz in terms of pure politics.
For example, let me read again that part where Brooks talks about what the new Republican Party should look like.
It sounds a lot like Trump.
He says, Right.
We call this modern American conservatism.
But over the ensuing decades, new problems have emerged.
First, the economy has gotten crueler.
Technology is displacing workers.
Globalization is dampening wages.
Hey, we've heard this about the Trump supporters.
The Trump supporters are people who've been thrown out of work in the Rust Belt, they were working in manufacturing, they can no longer work in manufacturing, and so they've been hurt, and so they want help, and the new Republican Party has to help these people.
Okay.
First, technology displacing workers?
This is nothing new.
Anybody who thinks this is nothing new knows nothing about history.
There's a group called the Luddites back in 1850s Britain, during the Industrial Revolution, and they literally smashed machines.
This is what they did.
They actually made it a death penalty offense in Britain for people to smash machines because it became so common.
People were afraid the machines would take their jobs, and so they started destroying machinery.
These were called the Luddites, okay?
So the idea that technology has replaced jobs has been true ever since the real advent of the Industrial Revolution.
It's been true for 160 years at this point.
Nothing is new under the sun.
Then he says, social structure has atomized in phrase.
That's been true, but that was true before Reagan.
That started in the 60s.
So what exactly does social conservatism do, except say, we need to rebuild that social conservatism in the home?
Not with government, in the home.
So there's nothing wrong with that from this perspective either.
And finally, he says demography is shifting, so Republicans have to presumably crater and cave on issues like immigration.
This is silliness.
Also, conservatism is a philosophy, it's not a race.
This is why I object so strongly to the sort of white nationalist bent of some of the Trump support that we've been talking about, and they're louder than they are deep.
There's a few of them, but they're very noisy.
But they do represent a real phenomenon.
The Republican Party should not be catering to any of this, okay?
The economy is what the economy is.
And we'll get to Trump and his positions on the economy in a second, but it's important to note the establishment sides with Trump on a lot of policy.
They want back George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism.
A big government conservatism that helps the little guy.
There's a name for this.
This is called liberalism.
The fact is that this is why the establishment is so reviled by conservatives, because we feel that they actually represent the opposite of what they say they're going to represent.
So, the fact is that, you know, Mitt Romney, for example, you know, when he says there's no establishment, of course there's an establishment.
Here's Mitt Romney trying to explain away the establishment on Sunday.
Here we go.
How about the argument, and again we heard this from Rush, this is the establishment basically trying to maintain control of a guy and push back a guy that they wouldn't be able to control.
Well, you can't control Ted Cruz, for instance.
No one has suggested you could do that.
And Marco Rubio, everybody tried to stop Marco Rubio from going against a sitting Republican governor in Florida.
He did it anyway and won.
Establishments suggest that there must be some Wizard of Oz somewhere pulling the strings.
That's not the way it works.
There are individuals like myself.
I sat there and watched Donald Trump and I said, look, someone's got to say something.
I didn't talk to anybody and say I'm gonna do a speech.
You got some ideas?
This is something I did on my own because I care very deeply about the country.
I love America.
Okay, we can stop it there.
He says there's no establishment.
It's all the Wizard of Oz.
Nobody's saying that there's a Wizard of Oz.
Nobody's saying there's this grand conspiracy among the establishment.
What we're saying is there are a bunch of like-minded people who believe like-minded things and what they believe in is a bigger government conservatism.
Romney was their favorite in 2012 because he created Romneycare.
Not in spite of Romneycare, because of Romneycare.
John McCain was their favorite in 2008 because of campaign finance reform.
Not in spite of campaign finance reform, because of it.
George W. Bush they liked a lot in 2000 because he was talking about bigger government, not in spite of the fact that he was talking about bigger government.
There doesn't have to be a conspiracy, a bunch of people in a smoke-filled room trying to coordinate in order for there to be a group of like-minded people who actually have a major impact on politics.
Like, I'm a Cruz supporter.
I don't coordinate with all of the various Cruz supporters.
All of us just have a common ideology.
We have a common notion of how government should work.
I'm a conservative.
That doesn't mean I talk with every other conservative.
In fact, we have disagreements among ourselves, but we do have a coherent ideology.
There is an establishment.
It does exist.
And so now the establishment, you know, we've got people like John Kasich, who also represents the establishment.
Kasich's a perfect embodiment of what the establishment wants.
You know, Michael Medved, I think, is a good ideological indicator of where the establishment is.
He loves John Kasich.
He thinks John Kasich is great.
By the way, so does David Brooks.
In this column, he talks specifically about John Kasich.
He says, if the GOP is going to survive as a decent and viable national party, it can't cling to the fading orthodoxy Cruz represents.
It's not fading orthodoxy.
There are certain eternal truths.
Government sucks at things, and the less government there is, the more freedom you have.
These are eternal truths.
These are not fading orthodoxies.
Government didn't magically discover how to work.
Government has never worked well.
The idea that government ever can work well, this is a myth.
But he says, we can't shift to ugly Trumpian nationalism.
We have to find a third alternative.
Limited but energetic use of government.
This is his phrase.
Limited but energetic use of government.
That doesn't help you at all.
Okay?
Limited has no meaning because you haven't defined it.
Energetic, what does that mean?
That it can't suck at things?
Well, but the definition of government is that it does suck at things.
But he says this is what Kasich and Rubio and Paul Ryan are all about.
This is the establishment and what they think.
So, John Kasich has become their current favorite.
So here's what John Kasich has to say.
He says he's gonna win Ohio.
Let's talk about Ohio, Governor, because you say you're going to win there, and yet Donald Trump is ahead of you in your home state.
You're governor of Ohio.
What the heck is happening there, and what's your strategy to best him?
Katie, don't worry about Ohio.
We're going to win Ohio.
We're working very hard in Ohio.
These polls are very old.
But why is he ahead of you in the polls?
Why is he ahead of you?
He's not ahead of me.
These polls are goofy.
You know, you take three or four hundred samples, you use some computer mechanism to do it, and you call it legitimate.
It's not legitimate.
Kasich says that he's going to win this primary.
I just, I don't get the warmth I usually get from Kasich when I can't see his hands air chopping fruit.
It's just, it's sort of boring.
But when John Kasich, he is the representative of the establishment.
So is Marco Rubio.
And so there are a lot of establishment people saying we'll stop Trump by depriving him of the delegates.
And then we'll come in with John Kasich or Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney.
We'll just, we'll break out somebody from our own side.
This in turn has led to the anti-establishment.
We'll talk about them.
In just a moment, we have to take an obscene, disgusting profit timeout that Bernie Sanders would hate, but you know what?
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Okay, so the establishment, right, so we've got the establishment on the one side, and the establishment, these are big government conservatives.
On the other side, because they've catered to Democrats for so long, and surrendered for so long, and said that the Democrats are really not bad people, they're just misguided, you know, they really don't have bad intentions, when they're anti-nationalist, there's nothing really wrong with that.
When they say these sorts of things, the anti-establishment goes, wait, what the hell?
I've been left behind.
I'm pissed.
I'm ticked off.
But the anti-establishment is not conservative.
There are conservatives in the anti-establishment, but there are also plenty of populists in the anti-establishment.
It's more a feeling than anything else.
Being anti-establishment is not a philosophy.
It's more of just a backlash.
So, for example, Mike Ditka, who's the coach of the Chicago Bears.
Ditka, he came out and he said he's voting for Trump.
Here is Mike Ditka, his explanation of why he's voting for Trump.
I worry about the direction of the country.
I really do.
Because you're a patriot.
I think we're devoid of leadership right now, and I think we need leadership.
And whether you agree with everything the man says or not, he's a hell of a lot better leader than some of the other guys I hear about.
Do you regret your vote for Obama in 2012?
What?
I didn't vote for Obama.
He's breaking your chops, Mike.
What are you kidding me?
Obama's the worst president we've ever had.
You know, it's funny you say that.
Like St.
Peter.
Yeah, you've been very adamant about that when you've been on with me down in Florida, Coach Ditka, how you really disdain for Barack Obama.
And I always thought in my lifetime Jimmy Carter, late 1970s, was the worst.
But I'm with you.
I think Barack Obama's eclipsed Jimmy Carter.
So you're telling me, Mike, in your long stay on this planet, even a Dallas Cowboy, when Kennedy was assassinated, I think around that time, that Barack Obama is the worst president of your lifetime?
Well, I think so, really.
And here's why.
Barack Obama's a fine man.
I mean, he's pleasant.
He would be great to play golf with.
He's not a leader.
This country needs leadership.
It needs direction.
It needs somebody that steps up front.
We need somebody like Ronald Reagan.
Every once in a while you're going to get punched in the chops, but you keep going forward.
That's all there is to it.
You know, it's not always going to be a perfect situation.
Okay, so we can stop it there, but it is.
Trump is a leader.
Trump is a leader this, Trump is a leader that.
By the way, Trump is a leader to the extent that he sends literal busts of himself.
This was reported today.
Busts of his own head to campaign headquarters all over the United States, which is just creepy.
It's not a very good looking bust either, but in any case.
The idea for the anti-establishment is Trump is a leader, he'll bust things up, he'll come in, he'll just take a bat and break everything and it'll be great.
But is Trump actually conservative?
No, he's just anti-establishment.
He's just anti-establishment.
My problem with Trump is that he pretends he's conservative when he's just anti-establishment.
So, for example, here's Donald Trump explaining he really is very conservative when you get right down to it.
And the single most named criticism or question I get, tell me where Donald Trump is conservative.
Explain how he'll be conservative.
And I want to give you that opportunity to explain to people because no one ever asks you that.
Sure, I mean, I'd like to do that, and in so many ways.
But at the same time, I don't like labels necessarily, because a label doesn't mean very much.
But when it comes to being conservative, I happen to be conservative.
I'm very, very strong on energy independence, as you know, and I think that's the most conservative position, and I have the most conservative position on that.
I'm very, very so-called conservative on the military.
I want a very, very strong military.
I want to build up, you know, our military is totally depleted.
We're going to take care of our vets as part of that whole situation because our vets are not taken care of properly.
Nobody is more conservative when it comes to trade than I am now.
You can go and you can say, well, gee, I'm not a free trader, but I am a free trader, but I'm also a fair trader and a smart trader.
I want to make sure that the United States gains something.
Okay, we can stop it here.
So Trump says he's conservative, and then he names three issues, and on one of them, he's not conservative, right?
When it comes to free trade, he's not conservative.
Okay, the conservative position on free trade is that you should be in favor of free trade unless there's a human rights component here, like Ronald Reagan, for example.
stopped or shut down a lot of trade with the Soviet Union because he wanted to collapse their economy.
He succeeded in doing this.
The reason, and we'll get to more on trade in just a second, so I'll wait for my explanation of why free trade is conservative.
But Trump says he's conservative.
He really isn't.
He's more of a nationalist populist.
He's somebody who believes he can make America great again, but he doesn't understand what made America great in the first place.
He just thinks that if he's a strong leader, that makes America great again.
And this is what he says, right?
For example, here's Donald Trump explaining how he's going to win for you.
This is more along Trump's lines at his rallies.
This is what he says.
So, I just want to tell you it's a special place.
We're going to work really well with your leaders.
We're going to bring jobs back to Mississippi like you've never seen before.
You are going to be so happy.
And I say this often.
Our country doesn't win anymore.
We're going to start winning in so many ways.
We're going to win with the military.
We're going to knock out ISIS fast.
We're going to win with our military.
We're going to take care of our vets.
We're going to win with our vets.
We're going to win with education.
We're going to win on trade.
We're going to win when we get rid of this horrible Obamacare and we're going to get you something great.
We are going to win, win, win.
We're going to win so much.
And you're going to be so proud.
And you're going to go back and you're going to remember your vote tomorrow.
And you're going to say in a couple of years from now and long after that, that that was one of the great votes you've ever cast for anything.
And I just want to thank you, Mississippi.
I love you.
Special people.
Incredible.
I love you.
Thank you, Mississippi.
Thank you.
Okay.
We're going to win, win, win, win, win, win.
Right?
That's what we're going to do.
We're just going to win.
By the way, Donald Trump said yesterday that he's greedy, but he's greedy for America.
That's what he says.
He's Gordon Gekko.
Greedy for America.
So he's going to win.
There's nothing here that says conservative because Donald Trump is not conservative.
And to get back to the free trade point, which he's now, this is really what it comes down to.
A lot of people, Clavin's been talking about this for a long time.
Brooks is talking about it.
The dispossessed, the people who have lost their jobs thanks to the shifting economy away from manufacturing and toward the information sector.
And Trump has talked about it a lot too.
And the solution is presumably to stop free trade, to stop free trade.
And here, and Donald Trump calls this conservative.
It's not.
Here's Donald Trump on free trade agreements.
All this free trade.
You know what?
It's free trade for them, not free trade for us.
We're losing our shirts.
And look, I believe, I think free trade's fine.
But the leaders of these other countries, whether it's China, $500 billion a year trade deficit with China.
What the hell good is that for us?
Where does it help us?
So you have China, you have Japan, where the cars come in by the hundreds of thousands.
They pour off the boats.
It's like Mark is driving the car.
I've never seen.
They come off.
You wouldn't drive them.
It's too reckless.
They come off these boats going like 40 or 50 miles an hour.
It's like the Long Island Turnpike or Long Island Expressway.
They come pouring off the boats, one after another, after another.
And we send them like Nothing.
We send them nothing.
And by comparison, nothing.
We have to make smart deals.
We can no longer, you know, we're losing.
Okay, so we can stop.
That's the same routine.
And he tweeted out yesterday, he's trying to win Idaho.
And he tweeted this out yesterday about Idaho potatoes.
Let's see if we can bring up that tweet.
Or actually, he said it yesterday.
Here's what Trump had to say about potatoes.
Here's what Trump humped in.
I came onto the stage and I said, oh, this is nice.
But now I walk up here.
Look at the good time I'm having.
You know why?
I had four great polls from the great state of Michigan.
That's a biggie tomorrow.
You and Michigan, we have Hawaii, and we have the greatest potato group in the world, Idaho.
I love Idaho.
I love Idaho.
I told them, I just tweeted, I said, I love your potatoes.
I hope you're going to vote for me.
I'll protect you.
Nobody's going to take those potatoes away from Idaho.
Nobody's going to take the potatoes away from Idaho.
This has nothing to do with conservatism.
Let me explain why.
OK, tariffs are not conservative because all tariffs are indirect taxation.
Right?
I'm a consumer.
You're a consumer.
Everybody in America is a consumer.
Let's say, for example, that we decided that we were just going to take a tax on all of us who are consumers and give a welfare payment to farmers.
Right, if you're a farmer, we're gonna give you a welfare payment.
You're a farmer in Idaho, you grow potatoes, you're having a rough time, so we're gonna tax all of us $10 a year, and we're gonna just give it to the farmers in Idaho.
For no reason.
We're just gonna give it to them.
Right?
This would be called redistribution of wealth.
That's what a tariff is.
All a tariff is, is they raise the price of imported goods.
Right?
Because you're buying your potatoes wherever you want to buy your potatoes.
They could come from South America, or they could come from Asia.
You're buying your potatoes wherever they're the cheapest.
And that's your right to buy potatoes at whatever price is the market price.
And the government is saying to you, you can no longer do that, right?
We're banning that.
So now you have to pay more for potatoes.
So the money is just going to go to those farmers in Idaho.
It's exactly the same thing as if they raised your taxes and just handed your money to the farmers in Idaho.
It's corporate welfare.
It's crony capitalism.
That's what it is.
Okay, it's no different, no different, than the government taking your money and handing it to some person in the inner city, or handing it to some poor person in West Virginia, or handing it to a farmer.
It's all the same.
When the government gets involved in the economy for purposes of sending your money elsewhere, this is called redistributionism.
By the way, the idea that China is just making a boon off of their trade with us, it's nonsense.
Okay, China has had two fiscal collapses in the last six months.
China is attempting desperately not to devalue its currency anymore, because if they devalue their currency anymore, their economy collapses.
Think about it this way.
What would happen to you today if the American dollar were sliced in half in terms of value?
All your money, you have $100,000 in the bank, you've spent your entire life building it up, and now it's only worth $50,000.
You'd be a lot poorer, wouldn't you?
Well, that's what happens when you devalue the currency.
Because all the government does is it prints another $100,000, so your money is worth half of what it used to be worth.
So you can't buy as much stuff with it.
Now, on the flip side, what it means is that everything that you're making is now worth half of what it was, so it's cheaper to export things, right?
Let's say you make cars.
It used to cost you $60,000 to make a car.
Now it costs $120,000 for you to make a car.
But that means the person abroad doesn't have to spend as much money to buy your stuff.
The exchange rate is much better.
The exchange rate is much better for the person abroad.
If you inflate your currency, that means that your currency goes further.
So if China, let's say they inflate their currency, So it used to be that, let's say, these are random numbers.
Let's say that it was 5 yen to 1 American dollar.
Now it's 10 yen to 1 American dollar.
That means you can buy more stuff in China, right?
You go to China, you spend 1 dollar and it's worth 10 yen.
That's more than 5 yen.
You can buy more stuff with it.
Okay, that doesn't help the Chinese economy in any real way.
It does in the short term, but it also impoverishes their entire population, which is what you've had.
Right?
When you have a trade deficit, Thomas Sowell makes this point.
When you have a trade deficit, typically, that only happens when you're rich.
Poor countries don't have trade deficits.
Rich countries have trade deficits, because we can afford to buy other people's stuff.
If you can't afford to buy anything, there's no trade deficit.
You can't actually buy things.
Your money doesn't go anywhere.
And by the way, what do you think happens to your dollar?
It's in a different demarcation than the N. If I send my dollar to China, it doesn't just sit in a bank there.
Eventually, they have to spend the dollar somewhere.
That means they have to spend it in the U.S.
economy, because we're the only people who use dollars.
So, bottom line is this.
Do you want better things for cheaper?
That's all this is.
Do you want better things for cheaper?
If you do, free trade is the answer.
You have people like Bernie Sanders saying, well, wages are stagnant.
We're earning less in the manufacturing sector than we used to.
Okay, the number of your wage is irrelevant.
It's what you can buy with your dollar that matters.
Money is just a substitute for goods.
Money is just a substitute for stuff.
If I have $100,000 but I live on a desert island, my money is worthless.
If I have $100,000 and I can buy lots of cool stuff, that's good.
If I have $100,000 and I can shop at any place on earth through the internet, that's even better.
Because now my money is worth more stuff.
Free trade has made America incredibly powerful.
It wasn't tariffs that made America powerful.
It's free trade that's made America powerful because we out-compete other people in making great, expensive products.
And again, think about it in terms of your own family.
Would you prefer that your child was getting subsidized to work in the coal mines, or would you prefer that your kid were working in IT?
That your kid were working in Silicon Valley?
The answer is, you'd prefer your kid working in Silicon Valley, would you not?
The same is true for the entire American economy.
We can either tax the people in Silicon Valley in order to pay for the people working in the coal mines, or we can understand that there are certain industries in America that are too expensive to run in America, and we can shift our focus over to jobs that are more cutting-edge, that are higher-end.
That's what's happened to the American economy, and the unemployment rate has basically stayed the same.
So the idea that there are millions and millions of people putting out of work by technology, yes, this doesn't help the individual who's put out of work.
But on a global economic scale, forget global, on an American economic scale, Americans are better off with free trade.
Americans are much worse off with tariffs.
There's never been a country in history that had high tariffs that ended up succeeding because of the high tariffs.
There's never been a country in history that succeeded By devaluing its currency, by inflating its currency.
You know, Trump says China's out-competing us?
Ask the Weimar Republic how well it worked.
Ask Venezuela how well it worked.
If it's really such a great idea to just inflate your currency, why is it that the people in the Weimar Republic weren't super wealthy?
Why is it that Venezuela has empty shelves everywhere?
There's nothing you can buy.
So that's sort of the story with free trade.
Has nothing to do... Being anti-free trade is not a conservative principle.
Okay, so we have one group, the establishment folks.
We have a second group, the anti-establishment folks.
And then we have a third group, and these are the conservatives.
And the problem is the conservatives are split.
Because the conservatives know Trump isn't conservative.
They also know the establishment isn't conservative.
They don't like Trump's agenda, but they also don't like the establishment's agenda, so they're kind of caught in the center.
And you can hear that from, for example, Rush Limbaugh, who's a real leader in the conservative movement.
Here's what Rush had to say about Mitt Romney attacking Donald Trump.
Let's talk about that, because there is a lot of commentary, and some of it coming from conservatives, who say that the Republican Party is in danger of tearing itself apart.
We've seen splits many times before over political philosophy, but that's not what's happening this time.
This is the establishment, the elite of the party, versus the grassroots base.
Exactly.
But it really isn't anything new.
They were this way with Ronald Reagan before Reagan was elected.
They tried to deny Reagan in 76, and they tried to deny Reagan in 1980.
They're not conservative.
This is... When I hear Governor Romney in his speech last week talk about how the Republican Party must stand for legitimate conservative values, they don't.
That's why they're in the problem.
They're having the problem they're having.
They're not conservative.
They're being run by their donors.
You look at these primaries so far, do you realize they don't like Cruz either, Chris?
In fact, maybe they dislike Cruz more than Trump.
But Cruz and Trump are the only guys who don't want anything.
The establishment candidates in this race cannot get noticed.
The Republican primary voters, whether they're closed primaries or open, are voting for anybody but candidates attached to the Republican establishment.
Okay, so what you're hearing from Rush there.
What you're hearing there is this split, right?
He likes Cruz.
He understands Cruz is more conservative.
He also hates the establishment, and so he's going soft on Trump.
And because of that, you've got this weird situation where conservatives themselves, people like me, are feeling torn.
I really dislike Trump, obviously.
I said I won't vote for Trump, right?
I really dislike Trump, and I'll get to that in a second.
But, I also really dislike the establishment.
So we're being torn apart because the establishment created the anti-establishment, and the anti-establishment, instead of being conservative, actually reflects the politics of the establishment, they're just ruder about it.
And they hate the people in the establishment.
So you've got two More left-leaning groups, the anti-establishment and the establishment, the populist anti-establishment and the establishment, tearing at each other, and the conservatives caught in the middle and really have nothing to do with either so much.
They hate the establishment, but they also dislike the anti-establishment that's gone full populist.
Pro-Trump.
Okay, I want to talk about something very briefly.
You know, last week I announced I'm not voting for Trump no matter what.
I think that Donald Trump is a disaster area for conservatism.
And the most common response I've received is that a failure to vote for Trump is a vote for Hillary.
This is not true.
I will give you three reasons this is not true.
First, basic math.
Basic math.
No, it's not.
Okay, so Hillary and Trump are tied.
Let's say that yours is the deciding vote in America.
For some odd reason, it's come down to you.
And now you have to decide, is it Hillary or is it Trump?
If you abstain, does Hillary become president?
No, she doesn't.
When you say you're not going to vote for Trump, what you're doing is you're splitting your vote, basically.
Your vote is neutral.
You're just saying no.
You're not saying you're pro-Hillary.
You're not saying you're pro-Trump.
You're saying neither, right?
You're saying a pox on all your houses, I'm not part of this, and you can't peg me to that.
So the idea that a vote against Trump is a vote for Hillary is just not true.
It's not statistically true.
Okay, second point, the ideological.
If I don't vote for Trump, it's not a vote for Hillary.
It's not even a statement I think Hillary would be a better president than Trump.
I think Trump probably would be a better president than Hillary because it's hard to imagine somebody being worse than Hillary except President Obama.
But my top priority is not defeating Hillary Clinton.
It's preserving conservatism for the future.
I don't think Trump's going to save the country.
I don't think he's even going to reverse the process.
I think Trump is just going to walk toward the cliff slightly slower than Hillary Clinton.
Maybe, if we're lucky.
And I'm not going to side with that.
And more than that, I think he'll destroy conservatism from within, as I've talked about.
Finally, there's the moral component.
If Trump loses to Hillary, that's not my fault.
It's funny how this works.
All the Trump supporters out there, they say, it's not our fault, the ones who stayed home, it's not our fault Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama.
We stayed home because we didn't like Romney.
He didn't appeal to us.
Not our fault.
If he wanted to win, he should have done a better job.
That's true.
It's also true that if Donald Trump wants to win, he should do a better job.
He should not be a populist demagogue, which is what he is.
If he wants my vote, then he can appeal to me.
If he doesn't want my vote, he doesn't have to.
That's not my fault, that's yours.
If you want to vote Donald Trump the nominee, that's your problem, but I don't have to be complicit in it and I'm not going to be forced through blackmail into supporting a candidate who I find to be disreputable.
Okay, so a couple of quick notes and then things I like and things I hate.
Okay, so First of all, CNN is just terrible at everything.
Quick note about the media.
CNN is awful at everything.
Last night, CNN reported that Marco Rubio was going to drop out of the race.
This, it turns out, was not true.
They'd already said the same thing about Ben Carson.
Here's them doing this report yesterday about the Rubio campaign.
Rubio, Alex Conant is the Communications Director for Senator Rubio, who's with us as well.
Alex, thanks very much for joining us.
Let's talk a little bit about what Jamie Gangel has been reporting, what you're hearing, that Rubio himself, very, very bullish, wants to stay in this race, but some advisors may be wondering if he can't win in Florida, maybe it's best to get out before March 15th.
Uh, Wolf, Jamie's report was utter nonsense.
She did not contact the campaign prior to coming on the show last hour and reporting that.
It is 100% absolutely false.
I think CNN is doing a disservice to voters by airing that sort of reporting without even checking with the campaign.
Her sources, whatever they are, have no idea what the internal deliberations of the campaign are.
Because if she did, she would know that Marco feels confident about Florida.
Just a new poll today, a public poll today, should Marco gaining from double digits down two weeks ago, single digits now.
We're ahead in the early voting.
We're going to be there for the next week.
We know how to win in Florida.
We're going to win in Florida.
And it's going to be a new campaign.
We can stop it there.
So bottom line is CNN blew this report just like they blew the Carson report.
And naturally there were people in the cruise camp because we can't have a week where it's not like this.
Where somebody in Hawaii started emailing out that Rubio was going to drop out based on the CNN report.
Exactly the same thing that happened with Ben Carson.
The cruise campaign slapped them down.
Won't matter.
Rubio will complain that he was jobbed by Cruz again, which of course helps Trump.
Okay.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the Hillary Sanders battle continues apace.
and it really is just an amazing thing.
It's an amazing thing that Republicans are losing to these people, or that they're going to lose to these people.
Like, for example, Bernie Sanders, he said that there's no such thing as white poverty.
It doesn't exist, right?
Today, he reversed himself.
He says, no, no, no, I know everything there is to know about white poverty.
Here's Bernie Sanders on white poverty.
Look, there is no candidate In this race, Swiss talk more about poverty than I have.
And one of the things that's disturbing, media doesn't often cover that.
We have 47 million people in this country living in poverty.
That is a higher rate than any other country in the industrialized world.
We have the highest rate of child pornography of almost any major country on earth.
I talk about poverty all of the time.
What I meant by that is that in African-American communities, you have people who are living in desperation, often being abused, Okay, and there he is playing the bongos, Bernie Sanders.
This guy is, I mean, he's even undermining his own socialist case on national TV to say black people suffer more than white people and white people don't know what it's like to be impoverished.
I don't know what that has to do with racial profiling.
It's a crap show.
I mean, it really is for the Democrats.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton also a crap show.
Here's Hillary Clinton.
She's asked tough questions about her email server last night, and she looks terrible doing it.
You said at a March press conference in 2015, quote, I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.
There is no classified material.
So can we say definitively that that statement's not accurate?
No, you can't.
Here's what happens.
The State Department has a process for determining what is or isn't classified.
If they determine it is, they mark it as classified.
Well, who decides?
The State Department decides.
But what about you, when you're typing an email?
No, the State Department decides what is, and let me go a step further here.
I will reiterate, because it's a fact, nothing I sent or received was marked classified.
Now, what happens when you ask, or when you are asked to make information public, is that it's reviewed, and different agencies come in with their opinions.
As you know, just recently, Colin Powell's emails were retroactively classified from more than 10 years ago.
As he said, that was an absurdity.
I could not agree more. - So your contention now is the 2100 and one emails contained information that should be classified at any time.
That should be now or then.
You're just saying it's not, it wasn't, it shouldn't have been classified.
- Well, what I'm saying is it wasn't at the time.
- Okay, so she's all over the place.
She has no good answers to this.
But it won't matter because Republicans are too busy clocking each other.
And the Democrats, we keep hearing about how extreme Republicans are.
You want to hear extreme?
Listen to Bernie Sanders on abortion.
The Democrats have gone through several debates, not been asked a single question by the media about abortion because it's awkward.
Here's Brett Baier asking Bernie Sanders about abortion.
Listen to his answer.
This is full-on evil right here.
Senator, can you name a single circumstance at any point in a pregnancy in which you would be okay with abortion being illegal?
It's not a question of me being okay.
Thank you for the question, Brett.
I happen to believe, and let me be very clear about it, I know not everybody here will agree with me.
I happen to believe that it is wrong for the government to be telling a woman what to do with her own body.
I love all the women in the background cheering wildly for us.
I think, I believe, and I understand there are honest people.
I mean, I have a lot of friends, some support us and some disagree with me.
They hold a different point of view and I respect that.
But that is my view.
And I'll tell you something which I don't like in this debate.
There are a whole lot of people out there Okay, we need to cut this off now.
Okay, so let me explain something to you, Senator Sanders.
We'll get government off our backs.
My Republican friends want to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education.
But somehow on this issue, they want to tell every woman in America what she should do with her body.
Okay, we can really cut this off now.
Okay, so let me explain something to you, Senator Sanders.
The government is empowered to stop people from murdering each other.
End of story.
End of story.
It's such a dishonest argument by the left.
Oh, this is big government now trying to get into the woman's womb.
No, it turns out we don't care about her appendix or her rectum or any other part of her.
The only thing that we care about is the baby living in there.
Okay, last night I was sitting around, my wife is about, I think she's 26 weeks pregnant, now I think her due date is the end of May.
I know her due date is the end of May, it's May 25th.
And we were sitting on the couch, and she'd eaten something spicy, and that means that the baby starts jumping.
And if you've ever felt a baby kick in the womb, don't tell me that a woman has the right to define whether that's a life or not.
That's the same thing as slavery, the idea that white people got to define whether black people were a life or not, depending on whether you were in Mississippi or Massachusetts.
That's absurd and disgusting.
And when Bernie Sanders does this routine, well, good-hearted people can disagree.
No, good-hearted people cannot disagree.
When that baby is kicking in the womb, don't you dare tell me that's not a human being worthy of protection.
But this is how extreme Democrats are.
This is how extreme Democrats are, and they get away with it.
So while the Republicans are busy slugging it out, I'd much rather spend my time on this show, going after Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who are deeply corrupt and believe evil things about the way the world works.
Unfortunately, we first have to decide who we're going to go up against them with.
Okay, time for some things I like and some things that I hate.
First, some things that I like.
If you've never seen, there's a great, great, great movie musical.
I think it's the best movie musical of all time.
There's really only two that vie for it.
It's American in Paris and West Side Story are the two that vie for it.
Some people like Singing in the Rain better.
They're wrong.
It's just not right.
American in Paris is a better movie.
American in Paris, the music is better.
It's Gershwin music.
The dancing is better.
This is Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.
And I'll point something out after we play a little bit of this clip.
It's just, this is from the ballet scene near the end of the movie.
And folks, if you want to watch a romantic movie that really is terrific, this is it.
It's fun, it's romantic, the music is terrific, the lyrics are... It's just, it's a great, great movie.
Here we go.
So the whole movie is just spectacular.
It's really great.
There's so many good scenes.
Oscar Levant, who's a classically trained concert pianist, really good pianist, plays Gene Kelly's best friend.
You can see Leslie Caron, you can't really see her well here, but she was gorgeous at this point.
I think she was only 18 when she filmed this?
She was just a baby.
And Gene Kelly is, of course, this is in the prime of his career.
This actually won Best Picture over Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun in 1953.
And a lot of people think that's wrong.
I don't.
I think it totally deserved it.
It's a great, great film.
The reason that I like this, I grew up and I am this way in my life with my wife.
I actually believe in romance.
I think romance is an important thing.
And by the way, this is a very sexy scene, okay?
This is a sexy movie, it's a sexy scene, and I want to juxtapose that with the vulgarity, with the vulgarity of today's modern sexiness, okay?
So Kim Kardashian decided that she was gonna do a naked picture of herself the other day, and this is supposed to be sexy.
It's not.
It's just gauche.
Okay?
Pornography is sexy in the sense that it makes men have sexual thoughts, but let's be real about this.
Any naked woman at any time makes straight men have sexual thoughts.
That doesn't make it sexy.
It doesn't make it sensual.
It doesn't make it romantic in any way.
It doesn't mean that there's the sort of yearning that goes along with romance.
It just means that you want to get your rocks off.
And you can see, I want to juxtapose two types of dancing.
This, which is just beautiful, well-choreographed, and yes, sexy, with Beyoncé.
So Beyoncé, um, somebody did this mashup, and this is hysterical.
My sister sent this to me, and I could not stop laughing.
This is Beyoncé at a recent concert.
You'll see that they used different music for Beyoncé, and you'll see precisely why I like this video so much.
Here we go, Beyoncé dances.
But first, I gotta read you.
Oh, my God. my God.
and it is Xact.
I mean, she is doing the chicken dance, but she's doing all these supposedly sexy motions.
Don't tell me Leslie Caron in American in Paris is not more sexy than Beyonce there.
Okay, that's not sexy.
It's pornographic.
Yeah, there is a difference again.
It has to do with sex.
It's in the realm of sex.
It has to do with the actual act of sex more, presumably, than what Leslie Caron is doing.
Sex looks a lot more like what Beyonce's doing on the stage there, thrusting her legs open and closed, than it does like Leslie Caron dancing romantically with Gene Kelly.
But when it has to do with romance and love, there's no question.
That what is more sensual is the first.
And by the way, if you're talking about your wife getting in the mood, there's no question that American in Paris is gonna do it better than a Beyonce concert.
The fact is that what romance has become now, romance has been dumbed down because there's a spiritual side.
I thought Drew made a great point about this on his podcast several weeks ago.
He said rape is a spiritual crime, right?
Because the fact is the act of rape is the same thing as the act of sex.
It's just there's consent that's missing.
So it's a violation of the woman's soul.
It's a violation of her will.
It's a violation of her consent.
Well, that assumes that there is a will and a soul and a consenting side, and that means that there's a spiritual connection that should be made prior or during the act of sex that has something to do with it.
This is why I believe in virginity until marriage.
This is why I was a virgin until marriage.
It's something I wanted to share with the person, not only that I love, but that I'd already made a lifetime commitment to.
And this is why I think that romance is so important, particularly in the context of marriage and leading up to marriage.
Because once you lose the spiritual connection that has to do with sex, you may as well go get a prostitute.
I mean, and that's essentially what our culture has become, and it really is gross.
Okay, couple of things.
One more thing, two more things that I like real fast.
So these are just funny little things.
I don't know if you saw this from the Trump rally the other day.
See if you can spot something happened during this Trump speech.
You know, see if you can spot it.
Is this the gif?
Okay, see if you can spot what's going on.
Okay, did you miss it?
Take a look at the, just below Donald Trump's left hand.
The people in the background, play one more time.
The guy's right behind Donald Trump on his left side.
So, we always like to make fun of the people who come in and do this behind... We did it behind... There was the one behind Hillary.
Remember that guy who was making all the crazy faces?
So now we got the guys feeding each other what looked like bugles behind Donald Trump during his speech.
So I just thought that was funny and I had to show it to you.
The other thing that I think is even funnier is what these people did to a Bernie Sanders sign.
So I'm not condoning people destroying other people's property, but this is very funny.
So somebody cut a Bernie Sanders sign in half.
You can't see it if you're listening.
They cut a Bernie Sanders sign in half.
And they wrote on the other half, they taped a piece of paper that says, I took half of your sign because you had one and I didn't.
I'm sure you understand.
Classic, that's good stuff.
Okay, close with one thing that I hate.
So here's the thing that I hate.
We already know that J.J.
Abrams wants to diversify Star Wars by adding a gay character for no reason, because sexuality is not at the center of the Star Wars universe.
It's not something that's deeply important.
In fact, last time they tried sexuality, a dude made out with his sister and it was all awkward.
So, sexuality has never been at the apex of the Star Wars universe.
However, now we've decided that we have to have transgenders and gays.
I mean, first of all, I think we can just call Jar Jar Binks all of those things and be done, right?
I mean, then we just can skip all the rest of it.
I mean, it's a woman!
Um, but, but Mark Hamill now says that his iconic character Luke Skywalker could be gay if you want him to be.
In an interview with The Sun, he said he believes Skywalker's sexuality is meant to be interpreted by the viewer.
I'd say it is meant to be interpreted by the viewer.
If you think Luke is gay, of course he is.
You should not be ashamed of it.
in school, I'm afraid to come out.
They say to me, could Luke be gay?
I'd say it is meant to be interpreted by the viewer.
If you think Luke is gay, of course he is.
You should not be ashamed of it.
Judge Luke by his character, not by who he loves.
Okay.
Bye.
Does Luke like Aardvarks?
It's all up to your interpretation.
You don't know.
Maybe he likes Womp Rats.
Who knows what he was doing?
You know, when he says he was shooting Womp Rats back on his home planet of Tatooine, who knows whether this was correct or not?
Maybe that was just a euphemism.
Maybe he likes Womp Rats in a different way.
Maybe when they were talking about the thermal exhaust port, they were talking about something completely different in Star Wars.
Who knows?
It's all up to your interpretation.
I hate this kind of crap.
Okay, stories have meaning, words have meaning.
No, Luke isn't gay.
There are no implications in any of the original films that he is gay.
In all likely, Rey is his daughter, by the way, so that would make things real awkward.
But this whole, like, anyone could be gay, it's all depending on your interpretation as to whether they're gay.
No, it isn't.
Okay?
No, it isn't.
And if you want to ruin Star Wars, just turn it into, Darth Vader secretly had a thing for the Emperor, and they used to electrify each other at night.
It's so stupid.
But this is what we've become in Hollywood.
Why can't we just have a movie that speaks for itself, as opposed- This is like when J.K.
Rowling randomly decided Dumbledore was gay.
Who was it?
It wasn't Dumbledore.
It was the- It was Dumbledore!
Okay, so she randomly decided Dumbledore was gay, and no one was- Oh, and everybody was like, What, what does that have to do, like, what was going on in the shed with Harry?
It was just, it just made things weird for no reason.
Like, you wanna make a character gay, make a character gay.
But don't take iconic old characters and then make them gay for no apparent reason other than you're being politically correct.
It's silly, and it's ridiculous, and it's, and it's just, it's just dumb all the way through.
Well, I'm sure we'll talk more about such things tomorrow.
We'll also talk about the results of today's primaries.
There's always more to talk about because the world will keep spinning until Donald Trump carves it into the shape of his face and puts it on your mantle.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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