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July 21, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:55
The Campus Left’s Fascism | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 344
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One of the great fantasies of the left is that if the older generation simply dies off, all their policy goals will be achieved.
In 2013, Oprah Winfrey mused, after two elections of President Obama, that it might require older white Americans to die for America to achieve racial progress.
She said, there are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die.
Now Bill Nye, the purported science guy, is thinking along the same track.
He told the LA Times on Wednesday, quote, climate change deniers, by way of example, are older.
It's generational.
We're going to have to wait for these people to age out, as they say.
Age out is a euphemism for die.
But it'll happen, I guarantee you.
That'll happen.
That's true.
So these musings are not only pathetically immoral, they are anti-democratic.
The notion behind a representative republic is that people can be convinced on the issues.
If Nye hasn't convinced people that global warming is a catastrophic threat requiring massively burdensome government interference, that would be his fault.
Perhaps he's too busy producing songs about my sex chunk.
Or cartoons with polysexual ice cream scoops.
But the fantasy of the left is that the demographics of the country will move in their direction if they can just get rid of undesirable populations.
And that has a pretty dark undertone.
Hoping your political opponents croak so that you can win legislative battles without having to win the argument.
And it's massive nastiness.
While conservatives sometimes joke about leftists having fewer babies and then losing the argument through demographics, We're not actually rooting for that to happen, nor do we think that lack of kids from leftists would be a necessity for political victory.
But on the left, the hatred for those old white Americans is pretty real, and it's one of the driving factors behind that constituency's hard turn toward candidates like President Trump.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so we are going to get to everything that is happening over at UC Berkeley.
I'll give you the update on that.
I'm going to give you the update on everything that is happening.
President Trump gave an ill-advised, shall we say, interview with the New York Times.
We will talk about it.
We will also be talking about the latest on Obamacare.
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Okay, so...
The update on UC Berkeley.
So, yesterday, I am sitting around minding my own business, as I am apt to do, and I get a notice from Young America's foundation that UC Berkeley is now attempting to quash my appearance on September 14th.
So they have gotten back to YAF, and they are now saying that they are not going to allow me to speak there on September 14th.
They don't have the facilities.
This was their excuse.
They always have to come up with an excuse.
They can't just say, he's conservative, we're not going to have him.
Instead, what they do is they make an excuse.
So, according to YAF, in an email to the Berkeley College Republicans, Dean of Students Joseph Greenwell and Student Organization Coordinator Millicent Morris Cheney denied the student's request for a venue for September 14, 2017, despite what Morris Cheney called extensive effort.
Berkeley has explained earlier that I was welcome on their campus, and they were committed to supporting my right to free speech.
The administrator said that Berkeley can only host me, quote, when events are held at a time and location that allow for the provision of any required security measures.
That's pretty open-ended.
They did not provide alternative dates, nor did they provide alternative venues.
When YAF asked for excuses, meaning like, can you give us all of the people who are speaking in the venues that have over 500 seats that night, Berkeley apparently didn't even provide that so right now what it looks like is Berkeley making an excuse for not hosting me on September 14th and offering no alternative dates.
Now Berkeley says they're going to accommodate.
They say that they are going to offer alternative dates or they're going to allow us maybe to rent a different room but they're gonna have to do that otherwise they're gonna be hit with another lawsuit because the fact is that the Bruin College Republicans, Yath, I, we all have a right to speak on the campus.
They are a duly A duly appointed student group.
They went through all the usual measures.
There is nothing wrong with me speaking at UC Berkeley.
In fact, the proof is in the pudding.
I spoke there in April 2016, no problem.
We had a packed room, about 300 students, no protesters, nothing.
So, if Berkeley doesn't actually get out of the way here, or provide the security necessary to quash their Antifa insane people, then they would be in violation of the First Amendment.
This is one of the excuses the left is fond of using now.
Don't openly say that they won't have conservative speakers.
Instead, what they do is they use the heckler's veto.
So they say, okay, well, if there's going to be a bunch of violent people who show up and make trouble, then we have to ensure safety.
And so we have to cancel the event outright, which gives the veto to the worst people on earth.
It gives the veto to those Antifa thugs.
What it really incentivizes is a bunch of people on the right to do the same thing to left-wing speakers, right?
Go out there and threaten violence.
The left-wing speakers get canceled.
It's horrible precedent.
It's really bad.
Now, I thought something was really funny.
There was somebody who tweeted me yesterday and they said, well, now that Berkeley's trying to quash you, aren't you upset with yourself that you didn't support the people who stormed the stage at Shakespeare in the Park?
And I said, no, I'm happy I did not support those people since they have the exact same rights that I do.
I mean, this is a very, very easy one.
If I have the right to speak in a public place like Berkeley, then they have the right to perform at a stage that they have the due ability to perform at.
But I think these principles have to be held consistently.
Again, I'm hopeful that Berkeley will work it out.
I'm hopeful that Berkeley will hear the hue and cry that has arisen from the masses and that they will back down off of this and they will not allow themselves to be intimidated by the Antifa people.
But there are measures available in case Berkeley does not do what Berkeley is supposed to do.
And if they want to read that as a legal threat, they certainly should because there will be legal action.
If they do not do what they are necessitated to do under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Also, Governor Brown, Governor Jerry Brown of this used to be great state of California, I would appreciate if you would get control of your own campuses.
University of California is under the auspices of the California state government.
When the when Berkeley was filled with riots in the 1960s Ronald Reagan sent in the National Guard if Jerry Brown allows Berkeley to continue being a place where free speech is shut down He's just demonstrating that he is wildly incompetent at his job and or helping out the worst form of Anti-speech fascism in America that is happening on today's college campuses So I'll continue to bring you updates as all this develops.
I mean, honestly, Berkeley's so stupid for doing this.
I'm supposed to testify in front of Congress next week, next week, about government shutdowns of free speech on college campuses.
So, I guess thanks to Berkeley for providing me material.
So, well done there, guys.
But we will bring you updates as those arise.
Okay, in other news, President Trump yesterday had an interview with the New York Times.
President Trump should not do these interviews with the New York Times.
It's really funny because for all of the talk about how Trump destroys the media, no one gives the media more fodder than President Trump, right?
He goes and he does these interviews with Maggie Haberman of the New York Times.
I think Maggie Haberman is quite a good reporter, but Trump obviously desires the love of Maggie Haberman and the New York Times because he does interviews with her regularly, routinely.
He does interviews with the New York Times because he reads the New York Times because he grew up in New York and he subscribed, I'm sure, to the New York Times.
And so he's interested in what they have to say.
He dropped a bunch of bombshells in the middle of this interview that are just not helpful.
It's really bad that Trump is, you know, I don't know that he's a stupid man, but I will say that he is a guy who really does not listen to what he says.
He has, you know, it's...
If the Trump family is sort of the Bluth family in Arrested Development, then he's played all of the different Bluth parts at one point or another.
The Democrats think that he is George Sr.
I may have committed a little light treason, that's what the Democrats think of him.
Sometimes he plays the Trump Jr.
kind of joe bluth part i've made a horrible mistake right now he's playing i think that he's actually playing tobias tobias funke and the reason that i say that is because tobias his whole problem throughout the entire series is that he says ridiculous things that he can't hear himself right like and then if he's confronted with tape he still can't hear it so he'll say things that are complete gay sexual connotations and everyone around him hears it but he doesn't I feel like that's what Trump does sometimes.
Because if you were a Democrat and you said, you know what would be awesome?
Would be if Trump said X.
Within 48 hours, Trump will be out there saying that thing, and he won't even, like, understand that he's saying it.
It's really amazing.
You know, Trump says things that are honest and says some things that are true, and he says whatever comes to his mind first.
And so, you know, that's not a good thing.
Today, actually, is a perfect day for Good Trump, Bad Trump.
Do we have access to Good Trump, Bad Trump?
All righty.
So we'll get to Good Trump in a little bit, but we'll start with Bad Trump.
So, Trump does this interview with the New York Times, and he starts off by saying that he would never have picked Jeff Sessions for Attorney General if he had known that Sessions was going to recuse himself.
The reason that this is intensely stupid is because if you want to suggest to people that you are trying to cover up some sort of crime with Russia, what you don't do is say, I really wish I had an Attorney General who hadn't recused himself so he could protect me from the investigation into Russia.
This would be the thing that you wouldn't say.
So naturally, Trump, being Tobias Fuenke, just says it and doesn't even really understand what he's saying.
So here he is, Donald Trump, analyst, therapist.
Sessions gets the job.
Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself.
Is that a mistake?
Well, Sessions should have never recused himself.
And if he would, if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.
He gave you no heads up at all?
Zero.
So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself.
I then have, which frankly, I think is very unfair to the president.
How do you take a job and then recuse yourself?
If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, thanks, Jeff, but I can't, you know, I'm not going to take it.
It's extremely unfair.
And that's a mild word to the president.
So he recuses himself.
Okay, so clearly Trump is very upset about him recusing himself over the Russia thing.
So, to be fair to Trump, the fact is that Barack Obama used Eric Holder as his shield and sword the entirety of his administration.
Holder called Barack Obama his wingman.
They said they were best buddies, they used to hang out, and obviously anytime Holder needed to be protected when he was in contempt of Congress, Obama stepped in and asserted executive privilege to protect him.
It's not unwarranted that Trump thinks the AG is supposed to be sort of his protector, but it's not good, right?
You're now suggesting that there's something that is really terrible that's going to happen because AG Sessions recused himself on Russia.
And by the way, AG Sessions is a very active Attorney General.
He's really ratcheted up prosecutions on illegal immigration.
He's done some things that are not so good either, like yesterday he came out and he really ratcheted up the idea of asset forfeiture.
Asset forfeiture is this unconstitutional notion that if you arrest somebody and you don't even charge them, then you can just seize their property, which is really quite awful.
But Sessions is a very active AG.
His job is not entirely the Russia investigation.
If Trump is saying that the sole qualifier here was going to be that the AG was not able to investigate the Russia thing and that he would have left Sessions out in the cold if he had known that, what it's going to suggest to people is that you wish that Sessions were there to protect you.
Right now, I don't know if that's what Trump wishes, but that's certainly the connotation of what he is suggesting.
Okay, then he goes further with this.
He says, "You know, I really would prefer if Robert Mueller, who is the special prosecutor, he shouldn't look into my family's finances." This is just, again, remember, Robert Mueller was only appointed not because AG Sessions recused himself, but Sessions recused himself, and then Trump fired Comey.
In order to fire Comey, if you remember the former FBI director, in order to fire Comey, he requested a letter from Rod Rosenstein, who is the Deputy Attorney General, Sessions couldn't write the letter supposedly because he was recused on the Russia stuff.
So you had Rod Rosenstein write the letter.
Now Rod Rosenstein is involved in the firing of Comey and so now when Comey comes back at Trump and he says, you fired me as basically part of a cover-up on the Russia stuff, now Rosenstein has to recuse himself and that's how you get the special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, who Rosenstein appointed.
Trump is now angry at Rosenstein because he says Rosenstein is a Democrat.
He's angry at Sessions.
And he's very angry at Mueller because he thinks the special prosecutor is going to exceed his mandate.
Which, by the way, he's not wrong about.
Mueller is going to exceed his mandate.
I'll discuss that in a second.
But what Trump says here is so not smart.
It's just not smart.
Again, it's Tobias Funke.
It's somebody saying something that he doesn't hear, and it's not good.
Mueller was looking at your finances, your family's finances, unrelated to Russia.
Is that a right one?
Would that be a breach of what his actual policy is?
I would say yes.
Yeah, I would say yes.
By the way, I would say, I don't, I don't, I mean, it's possible that it's condo or something, so, you know, I sell a lot of condo units and somebody, somebody from Russia buys a condo, who knows.
I don't make money from Russia.
In fact, I put out a letter saying that I don't make, from one of the most highly respected law firms and accounting firms.
I don't have buildings in Russia.
They said I own buildings in Russia.
I don't.
They said I made money from Russia.
It's not my thing.
I don't do that.
Over the years I've looked at maybe doing a deal in Russia, but I never did one.
Okay, so he continued by saying that it was a violation of a red line, and then he said, at the very end he said, they said, would you fire Mueller if he crosses that red line?
He said, I can't, I can't answer that question because I don't think that it's going to happen.
Okay, so first of all, here's the thing you shouldn't say.
You can investigate everything, but whatever you do, don't look in that safe.
Right, this is not the way that you're supposed to, if you want to avoid an investigation, unless you're Lex Luthor, and you actually hid the kryptonite inside the lead encased box, and you're actually trying to get Superman to open the box, You don't actually want to say this, right?
This is like, you know, the police.
The police come into your apartment and they say, can we search your apartment?
You say, absolutely you can search my apartment.
Just don't search under the floorboards in my closet.
Like, what do you think is the first place they're going to search?
Obviously.
What do you think is the very first place they're going to search?
This is the place they're going to search, obviously.
So it's really not particularly smart for Trump to say, don't look at my finance.
Look everywhere, but whatever you do, don't look at the finances.
Just don't do it.
I'd be mad if you do it.
Again, where do you think Mueller's gonna look now?
And naturally this morning, there's a report out that Bob Mueller, where is he looking?
Oh yes, at Trump's finances.
Quote, the U.S. Special Counsel investigating possible ties between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia in last year's election is examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump's business as well as those of his associates, according to a person familiar with the probe.
FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump's involvement in a controversial Soho development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, and Trump's sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008, the person said.
So I want to discuss what Trump is right about here and what he's wrong about, because he's not entirely wrong.
I think that this is going to end with Trump firing Mueller.
I think this is going to get to the point where Trump gets so annoyed that he just fires Mueller, and it will be really fascinating to see what happens next, but I don't think he's entirely wrong to be suspicious of what Mueller is doing.
I'll explain that in just a second, but before I do that, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at MyPatriotSupply.
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OK, so here's where Trump is right about Robert Mueller.
And the entire left is suggesting, how dare Trump?
How dare he even suggest all these things?
Okay, so, Andy McCarthy has a really good piece today over at the Journal of American Greatness, which is basically the Trump defense journal.
But Andy McCarthy is an honest thinker, so this is not just a knee-jerk Trump defense piece.
And he says that the problem with the special counsel, he's been saying this all along, is that the investigation that Mueller is now engaging in is too broad-ranging to actually pick up on the original mandate.
You remember, the original mandate was to investigate whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in cyber-hacking the DNC and then releasing emails.
That was the original mandate.
It is now expanded to include Trump's finances, Trump's associates, You could see a case, certainly, where Mueller investigates and he goes into Trump's finances and he finds something totally unrelated to Russia that's criminal or a problem, and that ends up being the scandal that takes down Trump.
Once you have a special counsel, these sorts of things happen.
This is exactly what happened with Kenneth Starr.
Remember, Monica Lewinsky never claimed sexual harassment.
Monica Lewinsky never claimed sexual assault.
Monica Lewinsky was a consensual affair, but that was uncovered by Kenneth Starr in the process of investigating the Paula Jones allegations, and that in turn necessitated that Bill Clinton, when he committed perjury, was going to be impeached.
So this is the problem with special counsels and this is something that Andy McCarthy points out.
He suggests that in criminal law our sites are trained on conspiracy, which makes things easy.
A conspiracy is an agreement to commit a violation of law.
To speak in terms of collusion rather than conspiracy only confuses matters.
Contrary to what you may have heard from strategists and analysts, collusion is not a crime nor a term that has a legally consequential meaning.
So that's where we are with respect to the Trump-Taller meeting, but If there's an ordinary federal criminal case, which is what Mueller would theoretically be investigating, if there's no felony, there's no cause to investigate.
But still, we're investigating.
Why?
Because once you get into a special counsel investigation, it broadens and broadens.
Now, I was in favor of appointing the special counsel originally simply because I felt that Trump had no choice at a certain point because So many people in his administration have been dirtied by the Russia allegations.
Sessions, and then Rosenstein, and the firing of Comey, and it felt like his administration was losing enough faith that at a certain point a special counsel was going to be appointed whether he liked it or not.
That's what's happened.
But now Trump is legitimately scared that something will be dug up on any grounds.
And if I were him, I'd be scared too, even if I were completely open and honest about the Russia stuff, because once people start digging, they dig until they hit bedrock.
They're gonna dig until they find something, anything, at all.
And so that is probably why Trump is so upset about the special counsel stuff and probably why in the end he's gonna end up firing the special counsel which could precipitate, it's not a constitutional crisis, he has the authority to do it, but it could precipitate a major political scandal whereby Trump didn't even do anything and ends up in the crosshairs of the Democrats for impeachment Well, I want to explain more about this.
Plus, Trump does something on Russia.
Again, I'm going to say that this is more Tobias Funke than malevolence, but we're going to talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so Trump, again, I think he says things without thinking about them that can be read in two ways.
One is that's completely innocent.
Tobias Fuenke is not, in fact, an anal rapist.
He's an analyst therapist, right?
And then, it could be read in, like, the most awful of possible ways.
So, Trump, last night, he's asked about this second Putin meeting.
So the media's been making a big deal out of the fact that at this big dinner, there was this big dinner with all of the G20 leaders and their spouses, and Trump, halfway through the dinner, his wife is sitting, apparently, next to, Melania is sitting next to Putin, He is sitting next to the first lady of Japan and he gets bored and he walks over and he sits down next to Melania and Putin and proceeds to engage with them.
He said it was a brief meeting.
Everybody there says it was like an hour and nobody from the US government was there, so we don't know what was said.
We only know what Trump says was said.
I think, by the way, the funniest thing about this, this is legitimately funny, is that apparently the first lady of Japan was sitting next to Trump.
In his interview with the New York Times, he said, yeah, I was sitting there next to her and she didn't really speak English.
People, she didn't speak.
It turns out she was fluent in English.
So she was legitimately apparently pretending not to speak English because she would not have to talk to Trump, which is.
Okay, I'm sorry.
That's really funny.
He goes and he sits down next to Melania and Putin.
And people are saying, what are you talking about for an hour?
And Trump uses legitimately the worst excuse available.
He says, I talked about Russian adoption with Vladimir Putin.
That's what we talked about for an hour.
Toward dessert, I went down just to say hello to Melania.
And while I was there, I said hello to Putin.
Really pleasantries, more than anything else.
It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, it could be 15 minutes, just talked about things.
Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.
You did?
Russian adoption, yeah.
I've always found that interesting because, you know, he ended that years ago.
And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because that was No!
Don't do that!
Okay, so here's why you don't do that.
Donald Trump's original excuse about the meeting with the Russians was that it was about Russian adoption.
your opponent.
I think most politicians, I was just with a lot of people, they said, who wouldn't have taken a meeting like that?
No, no, no, don't do that.
Okay, so here's why you don't do that.
Donald Trump's original excuse about the meeting with the Russians was that it was about Russian adoption.
It turned out that was bull.
Now Trump is being asked, what was your He uses the exact same excuse his son used that turned out to be bull.
Can't you make up anything else?
Say the weather, our kids, jujitsu, riding horses bareback, fighting bears, bathing in antler blood, which apparently Putin does.
Do any of those things, right?
You can do any of those things, but instead you go directly to the excuse that your son used that turned out to be false within 48 hours?
Why?
Why, God?
Why?
President Trump, please, for the love of God, please just no.
There are things called teleprompters.
Okay, I understand you don't like using them, but you're so much better when you use the teleprompter.
He's given some great speeches on teleprompter.
He spoke in front of a joint session of Congress.
Terrific.
On a teleprompter.
He spoke in Saudi Arabia.
Not my favorite speech.
Not a bad speech.
On teleprompter?
Great.
Spoke in Poland.
Terrific speech.
On teleprompter.
He does not have a teleprompter for these interviews.
His lawyers must just be thinking, Oh God.
Oh God, he's going to talk to the New York Times again.
No, no, no, don't do it.
Please don't do it.
Okay.
And then Trump follows this up by saying, Jim Comey tried to blackmail me.
Okay.
So his suggestion is that Jim, that Comey basically was trying to, was trying to coerce him into doing something, but doesn't make clear what it is that Comey wanted.
So here's Trump.
He also had some really fascinating choice words for former F.D.I.
Director Comey.
He sure did.
And as we know, he has said any number of choice words about James Comey for some time.
But he was very specific that he believed that Comey was trying to essentially get leverage over him with that dossier, making all sorts of wild allegations about President Trump and his appearance in Russia in 2013.
You know, as we know, he was not happy with Comey for quite some time, long before he actually fired him.
There had been some belief that he might even fire him immediately upon taking office.
He believes Comey did that in order to get leverage over him to keep his job?
Essentially, that Comey wanted to keep his job, and that was the point in showing it to him.
You know, again, the president feels sort of vindicated, as I think you have seen him say publicly.
Uh, that, uh, Comey had to acknowledge under oath that he had told the president three times that he was under investigation.
He said he would not say that publicly because it might change.
Uh, the president just doesn't, uh, uh, accept that as an answer.
Now listen, Comey is a political actor, no question, but when he says that Comey was trying to blackmail him with the dossier, we have to go back in history.
Originally, what Comey said is, I presented this dossier, you remember BuzzFeed released the dossier, which was full of false information about Russian pee tapes and stuff, and about Trump being peed on by prostitutes and all that sort of nonsense.
And Comey said, I presented that to the president because it was going around Capitol Hill.
I wanted him to be aware of it.
I wanted him to be aware that it was being investigated and that we had no proof that any of it was true.
And now Trump is saying that that was supposed to be leverage, like that was going to be released by Comey.
He doesn't have any proof of that.
And what it more looks like is, again, that he's in some sort of poop fight with Comey than that he's actually rightly trying to defend himself.
There's two things that are happening here.
Trump can be completely innocent in all of this, but he has to stop saying things that make him sound guilty and make him sound like he is getting involved in things he shouldn't be involved in.
So, okay, this is all under the heading, Bad Trump.
It is not useful.
It is harmful.
He should not speak off the cuff like this.
It is really not worthwhile.
Okay, now, it's time for some good Trump.
At long last, it's time for some good Trump.
So, I criticized President Trump yesterday and the day before, and I have for weeks.
That he has been completely hands-off on this health care thing.
He's been very hands-off on health care policy.
And it makes sense that he's hands-off on the health care policy because the truth is he doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to health insurance policy.
If you ask him what's in the health insurance bill, there's no one in America who thinks that Donald Trump is an expert on what is in Trump Care Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, what's in Obamacare, what all these things do.
In fact, there's a poll out today that shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans, 62%, now think that the federal government's job is to ensure that all Americans have health care coverage.
Okay, so they all agree with Bernie Sanders.
62%.
That would include President Trump, who back in January said, quote, I mean, that's what Trump actually said.
So, he buys into that as well.
philosophy in some circles that if you can't pay for it, you don't get it.
That's not going to happen with us.
I mean, that's what Trump actually said.
So he buys into that as well.
And that confusion, as I have said, has led to the inability of a lot of Republicans to come to a conclusion on what And so, that's been a problem.
Trump is now attempting, you know, a little too late, he's trying to apply leverage to some of the senators to vote for something.
I am glad that he is attempting to apply leverage.
The big problem is that if you apply leverage without knowing what you're trying to leverage people into, it makes it sort of difficult.
So here is what Trump is doing that is right.
He is trying to apply leverage.
Yesterday, he had a bunch of senators to the White House, and he started getting rough with them on camera, and here's what it looked like.
We can repeal, but we should repeal and replace, and we shouldn't leave town until this is complete, until this bill is on my desk, and until we all go over to the Oval Office, I'll sign it and we can celebrate for the American people.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Okay, so he then continued along these lines by openly threatening Senator Heller.
Senator Dean Heller from the state of Nevada is a moderate.
He does not believe in full repeal, basically, or at least he's made noises along those lines.
And Trump actively warned Heller, if you don't do what I want, then you might not be a senator for very long.
I think I have to get him back.
That's right.
Heller's sitting next to him.
Watch his face.
You didn't go out there.
This was the one we were worried about.
You weren't there.
But you're gonna be.
You're gonna be.
Look, he wants to remain a senator, doesn't he?
Okay.
And I think the people of your state, which I know very well, I think they're going to appreciate what you hopefully will do.
I know what it looks like.
I just want to crawl in a hole and die.
But here's, okay, so it's good that Trump's applying pressure.
What would be better is if Trump were applying pressure toward a particular actual standard.
So, the problem is this.
Let's say that you're a congressperson, you're a senator.
And you're presented with a bill.
And the bill contains some good stuff, and it contains some bad stuff.
What do you do?
Do you vote for it, or do you vote against it?
Now, Trump might like the bill, but he also might not.
So you might say, okay, you vote for it because Trump is going to use his leverage, as I have been suggesting he should do.
He's going to use his leverage to harm me if I don't do what he wants, right?
That would be the idea.
Except that a bunch of Republicans voted in the House in favor of TrumpCare Part 1, and Trump had a big celebratory meeting at the White House.
And then three days later, he came out and said that the bill was mean, mean, mean.
Why would you put yourself on the line with your own constituents to vote for an unpopular bill that has a 20% approval rating?
Under the auspices, the president's gonna pressure you if you know that he's going to stab you in the back the minute everything goes south.
So the president, in order for threat to work, right, if I threaten, if I were to threaten Mathis, if I were to say, Mathis, if you do something, if you do X, I'm going to fire you.
I have to define what X is, right, so that Mathis knows not to do it.
If I were to say, Mathis, you have to make me look good on this show or I'm gonna fire you, then it's Mathis's job to make me look good on the show, and there's only so much he can do, but he does the best that he can.
If I were to say to, if I were to say to Mathis, however, Mathis, Do some stuff, or I'm gonna fire you.
Some stuff, and it's gonna get done, or he may not have a job tomorrow.
Mathis may not sleep particularly well, but Mathis is not going to know what the hell to do, right?
Is he supposed to use the camera in a particular way?
Is he supposed to cut to a particular clip?
Is he supposed to make sure that all the clips are cut to their specified length?
What is he supposed to do?
He doesn't know.
In order for a threat to work, you have to have a natural action and then a consequence to that action, right?
If you do X, I will do Y. What's the X here?
Trump says repeal and replace, but that's super vague, because they're not going to pass a pure repeal, it appears.
It appears that they don't have the votes for this.
Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee, he says we don't have 40 votes to just repeal Obamacare.
I'll explain why this is the case in a second, but here is Lamar Alexander from Tennessee saying exactly this.
and McConnell.
But it's obvious to me, number one, that the president favors repeal and replace.
Of course, we can't repeal it all.
We're repealing parts of the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with parts we think will improve it.
And that's the main thing he favors.
He wants us to get to yes.
You favor that approach?
I favor that, too.
I don't think there are 40 votes to repeal and say to the American people, well, trust us to come up with something in the next couple of years.
I don't think that's a very good idea.
You don't think there are even 40?
What he's saying is that the Republicans are not going to just repeal.
So, the plan from McConnell was, we're going to repeal Obamacare and then we'll figure out something to do with it.
The problem is twofold.
One, The actual repeal bill from 2015 doesn't repeal all of Obamacare.
Even plain repeal.
I think they should vote on it because I think that they need pressure put on them to actually come up with a full repeal.
But, what the actual repeal bill did in 2015, remember, they can only do what's called a reconciliation.
So let me backtrack.
Reconciliation process means that you need 51 votes in order to pass something.
Reconciliation means that you can only pass a law that has an impact on the budget.
That's just these arcane Senate rules, okay?
If you don't need 60 votes to invoke cloture, you only need 51 in order to pass a bill.
The bill has to impact the budget.
The problem is, the Obamacare regulations don't actually impact the budget directly.
So it's kind of hard to use reconciliation in order to get rid of all of Obamacare.
You end up keeping a lot of the regulations, but getting rid of the subsidies and the taxes.
That inevitably will kill the Obamacare exchanges, but these insurance companies are still required to cover pre-existing conditions, which is going to drive premiums up.
That's what Republicans are afraid of.
That's why a lot of them don't want to vote for pure repeal.
The case in favor of voting for pure repeal like this is that once you do that, then you're going to be forced into a position where either you pass a bunch of regulatory reform and do away with a lot of these regulations, or all the prices go up.
It applies a certain amount of pressure.
But it's a gamble.
It's a gamble.
And a lot of people don't want to take that gamble because if premiums go up and people are tossed off of Medicaid, then the number of uninsured go up and people who are still trying to get insurance might be in a fair bit of trouble.
So that's why there's a case against plain repeal in the 2015 sense.
Now what they could do is they could actually try to repeal Obamacare wholesale and then try to leverage the Senate Rules Committee.
There's actually a person who's like the rules expert who rules on this stuff.
Try to pressure her to actually allow that to go through.
That would be the best available move.
But the Republicans are now stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place.
But when they say repeal and replace, that's not clear what they mean.
It's like when people say immigration reform.
It's a buzzword.
It doesn't mean anything.
Is immigration reform strengthening our immigration system or is it weakening our immigration system?
What does it mean to repeal and replace?
Does it mean that we're going to get rid of Obamacare or does it mean that we're going to replace Obamacare with Obamacare Part 2?
And so this is why Trump, even Trump is unclear on this.
The Republican caucus is unclear on this.
Nobody knows what they want to do.
So when Trump tries to apply pressure, To a caucus that doesn't know what it wants to do, and he doesn't know what he wants to do, you end up with this sort of wild confusion.
And you do end up with a fair bit of posturing.
So Mitch McConnell, knowing that he's not going to be able to pass a planned repeal, he said yesterday, we're going to vote to wipe the slate clean of Obamacare.
We will have a vote on this even if it doesn't pass.
As I announced last evening, after consulting with both the White House and our members, we've decided to hold the vote to open debate on Obamacare repeal to early next week.
The Obamacare repeal legislation will ensure a stable two-year transition period, which will allow us to wipe the slate clean and start over with real patient-centered health care reform.
Okay, so we'll see if that actually happens, if that vote actually takes place.
If it does, then it's at least in part an attempt by Mitch McConnell to simply get the Republican caucus off his back, saying, okay, we tried to pass it, and then we weren't actually able to pass it, so that is what it is.
Again, this is because the Republican Party does not agree on what to do.
It doesn't agree on the means that it has available to do it, and it can't even make the argument.
Again, this entire thing could have been avoided in two ways.
If you were going to leave Obamacare in place, you should have called the Democrats in from day one and said, we want to fix all of this.
Won't you help us?
And then the Democrats would say no.
And you'd say, see, we wanted to fix it.
They wouldn't help us.
Right?
That was the first way to do this.
The second way to do this was to say, we want to repeal the entire thing wholesale, and we are going to work continuously to do that.
And then say, okay, we don't have the votes to do it.
Give us more votes.
Right?
But to do this sort of repeal and replace routine where it's all bollocked up and you don't know what your goals are, you end up in a bad position.
And instead what you're going to end up with is Democrats claiming that you are the scourge of the world, which is what Democrats like Cory Booker are doing.
The senator from New Jersey says it's all sinister and evil.
It's just terrible, terrible, terrible.
I mean, that's not just cynical, it's actually sinister.
Here's a guy that promised consistently that he was, hey, only I can fix this, that I'm taking, I'm the guy, that I'm going to make healthcare for everybody, I'm going to make it affordable, oh, it's going to be, I think the word he used was terrific.
Well, he's completely abdicated that responsibility, completely broken that promise.
He outsourced this healthcare process to people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, and didn't even try to reach out to one Democrat in the Senate.
Didn't call one Democrat.
Didn't call us up to the White House.
to try to work with us.
A great deal maker failed to make a deal.
And so now he's just saying that I'm going to imperil 30 million Americans.
If Obamacare fails, it's not just people going to say, hey, policy doesn't just fail.
That means Americans will get hurt badly.
And you'll see very devastating things happen.
So that's not just a cynical way that's violating his promises.
That's sinister.
And it's evil to plot against Americans like that.
So this is the case that Democrats are going to make.
And Republican incompetent, it's going to be a little bit of a hard case, but we will see how it works.
Daniel Horwitz has a piece today in which he talks about how to defang Obamacare even without full repeal, and it's pretty good.
You should check it out over at Conservative Review.
He talks about cost-sharing associations and Forcing people to post their prices on particular costs so we can actually have some open competition.
All these are good ideas.
There are lots of good ideas that can be brought to bear, but Republicans have to decide what they want to do, and Trump has to decide what he wants to push.
Okay.
Time for some things I like, things I hate, and then we'll do the big ideas.
So...
So, before we do that, actually, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Beachbody On Demand.
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Okay, time for some things I like, some things I hate, and then the big idea.
So, things I like.
So John McCain was diagnosed really tragically with brain cancer and a lot of scummy, disgusting human beings are today tweeting out things like they're happy that he got brain cancer because they disagree with him politically.
Okay, first of all, let it be said, John McCain is not a terrorist supporter.
John McCain is not an evil person.
He's not somebody that you would shoot.
He's not somebody that it would be appropriate.
He's not an evil man and you're not at war with him.
So stop with the crap about how you want John McCain to die.
What you would really prefer is for John McCain not to be elected.
You'd prefer for John McCain not to be elected.
But that does not mean that you should be wishing death on a guy you disagree with.
Listen, I disagree with John McCain on a lot of things.
A lot of things.
I thought campaign finance reform was terrible.
I think that some of his foreign policy is not great.
The scummy people who are suggesting that John McCain ought to die, just scum of the earth.
So today, in honor of John McCain, things I like.
Faith of My Fathers is John McCain's autobiography, it's his memoir.
all about his family and his time in Vietnam.
It's actually a really good book with Mark Salter.
And it's a shockingly good memoir, which is – he wrote this back in, I think, 2000.
So it's not from his presidential run in 2008.
And he tells it really, really well, all the way through from his grandfather to his father to himself.
He's being shot down over North Vietnam, spending years in POW camps where he was beaten nearly to death.
Tortured, nearly allowed to die.
They offered him the out to come home because he was an admiral's son.
If he would just help them with their propaganda, he said no.
And it ends, actually, with McCain being released as a POW.
It doesn't have anything after that.
It's really more about his military career and his family's military career.
It's actually a really good book, Faith of My Fathers, John McCain, an honorable man, okay, for all of the talk about his politics, an honorable man who did amazing service for the United States.
He deserves our respect and our prayers.
Okay, speaking of POWs, there's a movie, if you don't want to watch, if you don't want to read the book, there's a, they did make a movie version on A&E, I think, but I've never actually seen it, so I can't recommend it.
If you want to watch a great movie about what it was like to be a Vietnam POW, like an actual Vietnam POW, Werner Herzog made a very good film called Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale.
One of Christian Bale's lesser-known parts.
Didn't do great business at the box office, but is a very hard-nosed good film about what exactly happened and about an escape from Vietnam POW camp.
Came out in 2006.
I remember seeing it in the theater and being pretty struck by it.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
Tomorrow morning at 0500 hours, we have to cross over into Laos.
Now this is Flight Lieutenant Dangler's first mission.
This mission is classified.
No one can know.
Come in!
Why are you in this war against us?
I never wanted to go to war.
I only wanted to fly.
You should sign this.
I love America.
America gave me wings.
I will not sign it.
- Absolutely not. - Been here a lot longer than people know.
Two and a half year ago now.
Two and a half years ago?
Keep your head down, your mouth shut.
Get your best chance of surviving.
You can run in here if you like, but I'm gonna scram.
You cannot escape.
Let's say you make it out of camp.
It's quite a good film.
It's a little overlong, but it's really well shot, and it's really well acted, and it's based on a true story.
I mean, this is not a false story.
This is a true story, and the other people in the, and you can see from the trailer, I mean, people were there for years on end.
There was a lot of talk about whether POWs were still there after the end of the Vietnam War, and whether they were left there to die.
I mean, it's really a tragic story.
Okay, so, time for some things that I hate.
Okay, so, as you know, I'm a big Game of Thrones fan.
I think Game of Thrones is the best show on TV.
I don't think that it's particularly close.
The only other competitor is probably Man in the High Castle, which is really terrific from Amazon.
David Benioff and D.B.
Weiss, who are the showrunners, they have a new plan for a new series.
They want to helm for HBO.
It's an alternative history series titled Confederacy, which takes place in modern-day America.
The South is separate from the North.
So it's basically Man in the High Castle alternative history, where America is divided, not by the Germans and the Japanese.
By the North and the South, which is an interesting premise, except for it's going to be really, really annoying.
I'll bet it's a pretty good show, but it's going to be very, very annoying to read all the hot takes from the left about how the South in this show is really like the South of today, how all of the white Southerners of today are really neo-Confederates who want to enslave black folks.
Okay, polls show, I've talked about this on the show before, polls show that white folks across the country have basically about the same level of racism regardless of party, regardless of location.
There's no evidence to suggest that Southerners are more hostile to black folks than Northerners are at this point in time.
History has moved beyond this.
And so I'm already preemptively hitting the hot takes.
Less than the show itself, I'm more preemptively hitting the hot takes themselves because that's going to be really irritating.
They're going to do exactly what they did with The Handmaid's Tale.
They're going to suggest that this is really about modern-day America.
It's not really about what would have happened.
It's about us.
We are secretly just like these people.
I mean, it's a compelling question.
What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War?
And it is my belief that within 20 to 25 years, the South would have moved beyond slavery anyway, because that's the direction the entire Western world was moving.
And by the 1880s, slavery was outlawed in the vast majority of the Western world.
It would have moved to probably a South African type apartheid system, more than likely, which is basically what they had anyway under Jim Crow.
But You know, thank God for the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.
The great tragedy in the aftermath of the Civil War was not the Civil War itself.
It was that in 1876, the Federals pulled out and allowed the South to reimpose all these Jim Crow sanctions on black folks.
That's a real tragedy that has yet to be told historically.
Well, that would be a fascinating thing.
It's about the loss of the Civil War after the winning of the Civil War in a particular way.
But I'm already just warning you about the hot takes that are sure to come and that will be super annoying when you have a bunch of leftists who live in Beverly Hills and see a black person only if they cast a black person, talking about how everybody down south is racist.
By the way, the South is actually significantly more integrated than cities like Boston in the North.
Okay, one more thing I hate.
We'll skip Big Idea today because we just ran out of time, but one more thing that I hate.
As you know, I'm not a big fan of kiss-assery.
I do not like sycophancy.
I'm not a fan of it.
Chris Kobach is the secretary of, he's the Kansas Secretary of State, and he works closely with the White House, and he was asked about, he's leading up Trump's voter fraud panel, and here is what he had to say.
He was asked, did Trump actually lose the popular vote?
And here was his ridiculous answer.
Do you believe Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 to 5 million votes?
You know, we may never know the answer to that.
Because of voter fraud?
We will probably never know the answer to that question because even if you could prove that a certain number of votes were cast by ineligible voters, for example, you wouldn't know how they voted.
Is that why this commission exists?
Because the president believes that he would have won the popular vote?
I'm glad you asked that question, because actually that is not the reason the commission exists.
It's not to justify, to validate or invalidate what the president said in December or January of 2016.
Okay, stop it.
So if the commission doesn't exist to validate or invalidate what the president says, why don't you just say what everybody knows is true.
Trump lost the popular vote.
Who cares?
He's the president.
Stop it.
Okay, if you're going to do this routine where you don't know who voted for what, then maybe Trump lost.
If you're going to say that there was voter fraud and you don't know who voted for what, Trump's margin of victory in the three states that he won, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, his margin of victory there was like 100,000 votes.
It's a lot easier to make the claim that voter fraud swung 100,000 votes than that it swung 3 million votes.
But again, I'm all in favor of a voter fraud commission that looks into registration of people who are dead and people who are registered in more than one state.
I think that is a worthwhile thing to do.
What I do not think is a worthwhile thing to do Is to place that on the tentative grounds, and when I say tentative, I mean baseless grounds, that Trump actually won the popular vote.
That's just silly, and there's no reason to do it.
Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow.
Tomorrow we will have the mailbag, and we will do that.
It should be awesome.
We will fulfill all of your life longings at that time.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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