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Feb. 9, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
24:00
The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 250 - Republicans: Let The Crazy Lady Talk!
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On Tuesday, in a self-immolating display of narcissistic stupidity, the Daily Californian, which is the student newspaper over at UC Berkeley, ran an op-ed defending the use of violence in shutting down a speech by alt-right popularizer and professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
The op-ed, titled Violence as Self-Defense, was a whole series of op-eds, actually, talking about why violence was useful in shutting down political debate.
Nisa Deng, an alumna of the university, she wrote, To people with platforms who decide when a protest should and should not be violent, you speak from a place Of immense privilege, as I recently wrote in a tirade against this brand of idiocy, asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.
This, actually, is kind of evil.
The notion that words are violence, when the words do not explicitly call for violence, that's kind of an excuse to beat the living hell out of anyone you disagree with.
It's also worthwhile noting that Yiannopoulos, for all of his myriad faults, which I have discussed at length, has never said that individuals' lives don't matter.
That is a baseless slur.
Illegal immigrant student Juan Prieto, he explained in an op-ed titled, Violence helped ensure safety of students, quote, We share our stories and provide insight to the reality of the flawed immigration system.
To out us is to remove that agency from us.
In other words, he's here illegally.
He's an illegal immigrant.
So, more illegal activity is now necessary to make sure that his original illegal activity is left alone.
Got it.
Neil Lawrence, who's a former Daily Californian columnist, wrote that the so-called Black Bloc, the anti-fascists supposedly, was made up of people with the most to fight for and the most to lose, and did what the campus should have.
Except that the vast majority of such protesters actually live in mommy's basement, by statistics, and all the students at UC Berkeley are sponsored by taxpayers to be there, majoring in uselessness.
One Desmond Meagly wrote, First off, you shouldn't be scared of other people speaking unless they're violently threatening you.
was more terrifying to me than potential injury or arrest.
First off, you shouldn't be scared of other people speaking unless they're violently threatening you.
Second, no one worried about protesters putting their own safety on the line It was beating the hell out of other people we were mostly worried about.
Finally, Josh Hardman wrote, quote, The principle of freedom of speech should not be extended to envelop freedom of hate speech, for the unchecked normalization of hate speech will have real consequences.
If leftists were really, really worried about normalizing Milo, burning things and breaking windows did more to make him a mainstream victim than anything he's ever said or done.
It gave Yiannopoulos the ability to don that college Republican outfit on Tucker Carlson and dump all the alt-right talk and pretend to be a normal conservative for 10 minutes.
The students at UC Berkeley don't seem to understand the crucial mistake they made this week.
That means they'll repeat it.
And that's no good to anybody except for Milo.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, so there's so much to talk about today, as always.
But really, more particularly today, there's a lot to talk about.
Apparently, Elizabeth Warren has been shut down, and if you ask how, she also asks how.
But Elizabeth Warren has been shut down by the Republicans in the Senate.
I'll explain why, I think that's actually really, really dumb, in just a second.
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Okay, so, Elizabeth Warren, she sent some smoke signals yesterday on the Senate floor about how much she hated Jeff Sessions.
She, you know, participated in the sort of usual stupidity we've become used to from Elizabeth Warren, and Mitch McConnell then got up and reprimanded Warren and told her she had to stop, and when she didn't, then the Senate voted 49-43 to gag her.
That's not as much fun as it sounds like.
They didn't actually take her and put a gag in her mouth or anything.
They actually just told her to shut up and then according to the Senate rules she has to shut up for the remainder of the Jeff Sessions debate.
The big problem here, the reason they could do that, is because there's a rule, it's Rule 19, where it's supposed to stop you from being uncivil to Senate colleagues.
If you're uncivil to Senate colleagues, if you accuse them of things on the floor of the Senate, then the Senate has the right to shut you up.
What she was doing is she was reading a letter from Coretta Scott King Jeff Sessions was anti-civil rights and so forth and so on.
We've talked about the fact that this is a lie before, that there's no evidence that Jeff Sessions has shut down civil rights or voting rights or that he has cracked down against black people.
All of that is false.
But instead of just letting Warren spout, the Republicans in Congress decided, no, we're finally going to shut her up.
And Elizabeth Warren then proceeded.
It looked like this.
Here's Mitch McConnell doing it.
A person who has exhibited so much hostility to the enforcement of those laws.
The Senator is reminded that it is a violation of Rule 19 of the Standing Rules of the Senate to impute to another Senator or Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or becoming a Senator.
Okay, and then he proceeded to say that she would not stop doing that, and so one of the phrases that has gone viral now because of this is that Mitch McConnell said she persisted in doing this, therefore she is ruled out of order, and the sanctions, the boom come the sanctions.
So, very exciting stuff on the Senate floor.
Okay, this is really stupid.
This is really, really stupid.
The Republicans should not have done this.
The reason they should not have done this is because it's super dumb.
There are three reasons why this is incredibly dumb.
First of all, well, four, really.
First, it didn't actually silence Elizabeth Warren.
After she was thrown out of the Senate debate, she then proceeded on her own personal trail of tears where she Explained everything that she could about why Jeff Sessions was the worst person in the world.
world.
She went on Twitter and she said, "Tonight on the Senate floor I tried to speak about why Senator Sessions is totally unfit to serve as Attorney General.
On the floor I read a letter that Coretta Scott King wrote in 1986 opposing Senator Sessions' judicial nomination.
I spoke out about Senator Sessions until Senate Majority Leader McConnell decided to silence me." Makes it sound like he clocked her with a brick or something.
"I will not be silent about a nominee for AG who has made derogatory and racist comments that have no place in our justice system.
I I will not be silent while the Republicans rubber stamp an AG who will never stand up to the president when he breaks the law.
First of all, it's kind of ironic since Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder never stood up to Obama when he broke the law repeatedly.
She concluded tonight, Senate Majority Leader silenced Mrs. King's voice on the Senate floor and millions who are afraid and appalled by what's happening in our country.
Now, unless you actually want to make Elizabeth Warren the nominee in 2020, which is possible.
Maybe you actually want to make Elizabeth Warren the nominee in 2020.
You want Focahontas to be the nominee in 2020.
The reason we call her that, by the way, is because she claimed for years that she was of Native American ancestry, and there is no evidence whatsoever that she is.
It's how she got a job at Harvard.
They claimed that she was a member of a minority, and they called her a minority hire.
She's significantly whiter than I am.
Significantly whiter.
I mean, honest to God, she's significantly whiter than this piece of paper right here.
I mean, she is the whitest person in human history, but she said all this.
In any case, they silence her, and this is the problem.
Number one, they gave her what she wanted.
So, I let off today's broadcast by talking about if you want to give Milo what he wants, just keep telling him to shut up.
If you want Milo to get what he wants, all you have to do is keep burning things over at Berkeley.
If you want to give Elizabeth Warren what she wants, more publicity, all you have to do is tell her to shut up and then invoke the Senate rules.
That's number one.
Number two, I'm sorry, but Republicans don't get to play the civility game anymore.
Okay, the civility game is over.
And honestly, I hate the civility game in the first place.
I think the civility game is stupid.
A lot of people are very upset about President Trump because President Trump is uncivil.
That's the least of my concerns with President Trump.
I don't really care that much about civility.
I think civility, it's one thing to say that you shouldn't go out of your way to gratuitously insult people.
It's another thing to say that you have to be perfectly civil and it's tea time in the Senate.
I hate The idea that the Senate is this place of great decorum and civility.
Because the Senate passed a lot of crappy laws.
I prefer it when they yell at each other.
I prefer when they scream at each other.
I like when there's conflict, because what that means is that nothing gets done.
And as you know, my perspective on government is that we are best off when the government is not really able to do anything.
So, when Republicans do this, but it is hypocritical.
When every time Donald Trump tweet farts, and everybody on the Republican side immediately responds with, well, he has a unique way of communicating.
When Donald Trump is insulting people routinely, and people go, well, that's just Trump, and then Elizabeth Warren says that the potential Attorney General is a bad guy, and everybody goes, no!
Silence her!
It's hypocritical.
It is.
And just to be intellectually honest, it's ridiculous to do that.
Okay?
Playing by the we-don't-need-no-stinking-civility rules, And then turning around and saying, but civility for you?
It's a game the left likes to play a lot.
I don't like it when the left plays it.
I don't like it when the right plays it.
If we're not going to have civility, which I'm fine with, then let's stop with all the protestations about how it's so awful that Elizabeth Warren said stuff about Sessions.
Finally...
You can't be in favor of censorship when it's your opponent, and against it when it's you.
So, the best way to stop Elizabeth Warren is to let her just continue babbling like a nonsensical moron, because she does that really well.
She talks and she talks and she talks, and the more she talks, the stupider she sounds.
If you actually want her to lose, then what you have to do is just let her talk.
And then you say, none of that's true, and you're crazy.
That's a much better way of doing this than by voting to shut her down.
Look, is it emotionally satisfying for a lot of Republicans to shut Elizabeth Warren down and make her be quiet?
Yeah, of course it's emotionally satisfying to put her back in her teepee.
I mean, I understand.
But that doesn't mean that you actually are supposed to do that as a strategy for winning.
It doesn't allow you to win.
It just makes you look intolerant and foolish.
There's no reason to do it that way.
So, that's my problem with the Elizabeth Warren thing.
That said, the Democrats in the Senate are really making asses of themselves in a major way.
To take an example, it is amazing to me that if you look at Cory Booker, Cory Booker portrays himself as this moderate.
Cory Booker is supposed to be this giant moderate.
And a few years ago, here's what Cory Booker had to say about school choice.
He was speaking, by the way, at an event for Betsy DeVos, who's the new Secretary of Education.
She was approved yesterday.
He voted against her.
Here's what he was saying just a few years, I think it was two years ago, at a Betsy DeVos event.
Here's Cory Booker.
There are people that say I'm against school choice, and I don't understand that.
I cannot ever stand up and stand against a parent having options, because I benefited from my parents having options.
And when people tell me they're against school choice, whether it's the Opportunity Scholarship Act or charter schools, I look at them and say, as soon as you're telling me you're willing to send your kid To a failing school in my city, or in Camden or Trenton, then I'll be with you.
But as far as I know, all the people representing my city right now, I'm not exaggerating, I've looked, maybe I'm wrong, but all the people representing my city, in elected office, that have children in schools, let's start at the top.
I'm going to be out there fighting for my president, but he does not send his kids to Washington D.C.
public schools.
I got a governor!
in the state house.
Okay, we can stop it right there.
So there's Cory Booker, you know, doing a really good job of explaining school choice.
And then yesterday he turns around and says, we can never vote for Betsy DeVos because she's for school choice.
It just shows how ridiculous the Democrats are and they truly are insipid and ridiculous on these topics, which is why I like it when they talk.
The more they talk, the better Republicanism sounds, the better conservatism sounds.
No better case of this than last night, Senator Ted Cruz debates Bernie Sanders on CNN about health care and health insurance.
And Bernie Sanders' argument, as always, it's always the same argument.
It always comes down to, the world is full of unfair things, and those unfair things must be made fair by government.
That makes things more unfair, but they will be made fair by that same government, because only the government can make everyone poor, and then everyone is fair.
Fair, fair, fair.
I have three houses, a nice car.
I live in the lap of luxury, in the richest country in the history of mankind.
But that has nothing to do with all the policies that have been purveyed until now.
The only thing that matters is that we impute socialism and put it into, we import it, and we put it into policy here in the United States.
And also, I would like a pudding cup.
Right now, a pudding cup.
So that was basically how the debate went last night.
And Ted Cruz, Really sort of destroyed him because Bernie had no stats, he had no facts.
His entire argument last night was that.
It was, life is unfair, poor me, yay government.
And so he just kept saying over and over and over that we spend lots of money on healthcare and that other countries have it better.
And then Cruz would come back and he would say, no, and I'll explain why that's not true.
And then Sanders would wander dazedly around the auditorium.
But it's fun to show some clips of this because it does demonstrate the lack of factual knowledge among Democrats who stump for nationalized healthcare.
Here is, I want to start with clip 19 actually.
This is Ted Cruz destroying Bernie Sanders' tax plan.
Because Bernie says we should have nationalized healthcare and the way he's going to pay for it is by taxing rich people.
Okay, that is not going to work.
Let me give you an example.
The National Health Service in Britain is a nationalized healthcare system which rations and they have all sorts of severe problems.
It's basically bankrupt at this point.
They have to charge everybody who makes more than $50,000 a year in American dollars 40% income tax.
That's aside from all of the other fees and taxes they have to pay.
40%.
And by way of contrast, in the United States, the income tax rate for people who make like 50 grand in the United States is, what, like 20%?
Something like that?
It's like half of that?
So, you know, to pretend that you can pay for all of this stuff just by taxing rich people is nonsense, and that's what Cruz says, and he destroys Sanders over and over.
It's kind of fun to watch Sanders' face as this happens.
But let me make a broader point on taxes, which as many times in this debate, Bernie has talked about providing health care for free from the government.
You know what?
The simplest principle in economics is Tonstoffel.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
The liberal-leading Urban Institute scored Bernie's health plan.
Concluded it would cost 2.5 trillion dollars in the first year and 32 trillion dollars over 10 years.
Now how much is that?
Trillions is a big number.
It's not clear what that is.
Let me put it in perspective.
All of the federal income taxes we pay today are about 1.5 trillion a year.
2.5 trillion means every one of us paying income taxes would have to about triple what you pay in income taxes to get an additional 2.5 trillion.
Now Bernie, no doubt, is going to come back and say, no, no, no, no.
None of you are going to pay.
Just the rich.
Well, how about if we took every person that makes over a million dollars a year and confiscated a hundred percent of their income, took every penny that they make?
That would raise only enough money to fund Bernie's plan for five months.
Here's another idea.
Bernie's looking real awkward.
How about if the government confiscated the assets?
of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and ExxonMobil, if it came in and illegally seized those companies and sold them, that would pay for one year of Bernie's plan.
If you don't want to see your taxes triple, in addition to the wait list, in addition to the rationing, in addition to fewer MRIs and mammograms, to worse care, then you don't want to see Bernie's Medicaid for all, You want to see cheap, affordable healthcare that you can choose to put you in control.
Yeah, great stuff from Senator Cruz right there.
And it went like this all night long.
Perhaps the most shocking incident was, there's a woman named LaRonda who gets up, and she's from Texas, and she asks Bernie Sanders, she says, I have 49 employees at this hairdressing employeum that I own, and I don't want to pay for everybody's health insurance because I will go out of business.
And Bernie Sanders' answer is, and this is the cruelty of socialism, Bernie Sanders' answer is, maybe you should go out of business.
Maybe you should.
If you cannot pay the health care, perhaps you should go out of business.
Ignoring the fact that then everybody at La Ronda's is not going to have a job and be on the government dole, but that's actually what he wants, right?
Socialism is all about driving people out of private industry and into the arms of the public sector.
Bernie Sanders said many times last night, he said a bunch of times, that the Medicare is deeply, deeply popular, Medicaid is deeply- Right.
Because when you make people dependent on something, it turns out that that thing is super popular with the people who are dependent on it.
But here was this exchange, it was pretty amazing, this clip 8.
This is this woman, LaRonda, questioning Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders basically saying, You go out in the cold, and you should die out there!
You're a bad person!
You're a very bad person!
I've been living on the public door for years, why cannot you also do the same thing?
Pudding!
Now!
Under Obamacare, I am restricted because it requires me to furnish health insurance if I employ more than 50 people.
Unfortunately, the profit margin in my industry is very thin, and I'm not a wealthy person, so it's impossible for me to grow my business.
My question to you, Senator Sanders, is how do I grow my business?
How do I employ more Americans without either raising the prices to my customers or lowering wages to my employees?
Let me give you an answer you will not be happy with.
And that I think that for businesses that employ 50 people or more, given the nature of our dysfunctional health care system right now, where most people do get their health insurance through the places that they work.
I'm sorry.
I think that in America today, everybody should have health care.
And if you have more than 50 people, you know what?
I think, I'm afraid to tell you, but I think you will have.
Okay, so basically, you should go screw yourself!
You're a terrible person.
And you should fire all of your employees, you should go out of business, and then you should get in a boat off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico, drill a hole in it, and drown.
That is my plan for healthcare.
Thank you, Bernie Sanders.
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Okay, so back to this Cruz-Bernie Sanders debate.
Speaking of annoying, there was one aspect where I thought that Republicans are constantly making a mistake.
And that aspect is they grant the lefty premise that profit is bad.
Instead of just saying that free markets, you know, make things better, what they really should be saying is, look, the only reason free markets work is because there's a profit incentive.
The reason free markets work, the reason people want to become doctors, the reason drug companies produce new drugs, the reason that the hospital takes care of you, is not out of the charity and goodness of their heart.
Part of it is that.
But a huge part of it is that they're making money off of it, because no one can afford to be charitable full-time.
And so, the healthcare system is no exception.
The reason I say there's a problem is, for example, here's Ted Cruz talking about insurance companies.
Bernie Sanders says, the insurance companies are screwing you!
They're making so much money!
And Ted Cruz comes back, not with, listen, insurance companies only make money by insuring people.
They're voluntary transactions.
And you may not like your insurance company.
The reason you probably don't like your insurance company is because there's not open competition, so the product is worse.
The government heavily regulates the insurance companies.
The government now crams down bad deals on insurance companies from the state, and that's why your health insurance costs are so high.
It's why they've risen under Obamacare.
You need to restore an honest and open free market with profit incentive so that everyone can make money, right?
The idea here is that insurance companies make money, and they should make money, and doctors make money, and they should make money, and you should be able to make more money by paying your insurance company less.
That's how free markets work.
Instead, Cruz does this.
In 2008, the 10 largest insurance companies in America made just over $8 billion profit.
In 2016, 2015 rather, those same 10 largest companies made $15 billion in profit.
Insurance company profits have doubled under Obamacare.
That was the result.
Bernie helped write Obamacare.
I don't think the federal government ought to be passing a law that doubles insurance company profits.
And while those profits were doubling, what happened to the average American family?
The average American family, your premiums have gone up $5,462.
Okay, so what he's saying here is true, and he's also undermining Bernie's argument that Obamacare makes the insurance companies, you know, less profitable.
But it's also not true in the long term, because the fact is that it's bankrupting insurance companies, which is why there's so many states.
And there was one point where Cruz did this.
He took out a map showing how many states only have one insurance company now that Obamacare has been implemented.
Insurance companies are dropping out specifically because it isn't that profitable.
In the short term it's really profitable because everybody is now forced to buy health insurance.
In the long term it really isn't because now health insurance is forced to cover pre-existing conditions, which means that you can wait till you get cancer and then pay your $500 premium and then all of a sudden you have health insurance for cancer after never having paid into the system your entire life.
This is not the best way to defend the private market.
It's basically undermining the private market even as you're trying to defend it.
So I want to talk a little bit more about this.
When we continue over on dailywire.com.
But you have to subscribe for that, plus I want to get to the continuation of the Trump media battle.
Trump is tweeting, and some of it is good, and some of it is not so good, as per our usual arrangements.
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