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Aug. 1, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:13
The Legend Of The Mooch | Ep. 352
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Senator Jeff Flake follows in the footsteps of his maverick Arizona colleague John McCain.
He's never afraid to piss off Republican voters.
The latest example, Flake on a book tour for his Conscience of a Conservative, an obvious play on former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, has been ripping President Trump up and down.
The book itself doesn't pull punches.
Flake says that Trump was, quote, a candidate who entertained voters and offered oversimplified answers.
In an op-ed for Politico, Flake wrote, quote, we created him and now we're rationalizing him.
When will that stop?
That unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.
So, has Flake earned the respect of Democrats for his willingness to go it alone?
Have Democrats cheered Flake's appearance in trepidaty?
Have they celebrated Flake for speaking what they perceive to be hard truths about Trump?
Of course not!
They've ripped him up and down for continuing to vote for conservative policy priorities.
Here's the Twitter take, quote, voting in line with the guy you criticize is literally the opposite of intellectual honesty, David Greenwald.
Thanks for your op-ed, Jeff Flake.
Now back it up with reality on the Senate floor or you're just too dishonest, too.
Cat with bat.
Here's Alex Shepard in The New Republic, quote, in this respect, conscience of a conservative may be the most clear-eyed and righteous takedown of Donald Trump from a Republican in office.
But what the reader may not know about Jeff Flake, and which he certainly doesn't reveal in his short book, is that he has voted with Donald Trump 95% of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight.
This is the problem for the left.
They don't expect intellectual honesty from Republicans.
They expect submission.
They want Republicans not merely to criticize obvious moral failings within the party, or buck Trump on policy heresies.
They want Republicans to vote for Democratic priorities in order to fight Trump.
Which is pretty convenient, since they'd like Republicans to vote for Democratic priorities anyway.
If Trump were to push single-payer, would they applaud Republicans for voting it down?
This is one of the big reasons Trump actually won in 2016.
Republicans got tired of hearing that they must hold themselves to a higher standard when any standard other than complete surrender to Democrats is insufficient to Democrats.
Democrats could cheer Ted Kennedy and praise him as the conscience of the Senate.
Democrats could openly state that Bill Clinton's myriad moral monstrosities were just fine and dandy so long as he protected the killing of the unborn.
But Republicans are expected to condemn immoral behavior and abandon their own principles.
If not, they're hypocrites.
This should be a lesson for conservatives.
No matter how intellectually honest you are with regard to your own side, no matter what moral standard you hold them to, you will be castigated alongside those whose behavior you condemn if you share political priorities.
That's not an excuse to toss morality out the window, but it's certainly a reminder that the leftist priority here is not a more decent country, but a more leftist one.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Is this real life?
Is this just fantasy?
He was just a poor boy.
Nobody loved him.
Anthony Scaramucci hits the skids.
He is out of the White House, and I am hardest hit.
I mean, normally, the New York Times says things like, world to end tomorrow, blacks and women hardest hit.
Well, Anthony Scaramucci out of the White House, Ben Shapiro show hardest hit, because we love that, dude.
I am so sad.
It does make you question the presence of a benevolent God in the universe.
We're fasting, and today's a Jewish fast, the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar.
It is Tisha B'Av.
We'll talk about that a little bit later.
But I'm also quasi-fasting for the ouster of Anthony Scaramucci.
I just can't believe it.
In fact, In a moment, I want to do a special tribute to Anthony Scaramucci, but first, I have to say hello to our advertisers over at MyPatriotSupply.
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Okay, so, in just a few minutes we're going to be having on Dinesh D'Souza.
He has a brand new book out that's already climbing the bestseller charts, The Big Lie.
So we'll have him on in just a minute.
But first, I would be remiss if I did not pay tribute to my favorite member of the Trump administration so far.
I'm really angry at the writers on this season of Trump.
I'm really upset with the writers on this season of Trump because I have to say, this season of Trump, like, if you're gonna set up the Fonz, you have to keep him around for a few seasons before you cap him.
I mean, you can't have the Red Wedding unless you have three seasons of Rob.
I mean, you can't do this, guys.
But, you know, in honor of Anthony Scaramucci, I just want to take a moment of silence, in memoriam, Anthony Scaramucci, the mooch, July 21st to 2017, July 31st to 2017, his epitaph, I'm not trying to suck my own bleep.
Anthony Scaramucci, a moment of silence, folks.
Okay, well that's over.
So, the Mooch is now out, and it's all hilarious and ridiculous.
I was trying to search for ways that this was done.
There were stories yesterday that the Mooch was ousted by John Kelly, who's the new chief of staff, that he came in, he was sick of the Mooch, the Mooch wanted direct access to Trump, and John Kelly basically took him out.
And it looked a little bit like this from Braveheart.
In this particular scene from Braveheart, you will be seeing The part of King Edward Longshanks being played by John Kelly and the part of Anthony Scaramucci being played by random advisor to the prince.
It does not go well for Anthony Scaramucci.
Who is this person who speaks to me as though I needed his advice?
I have declared Philip my High Counselor.
Is he qualified?
I am skilled in the arts of war and military tactics, sir.
Are you?
Then tell me, what advice would you offer on the present situation?
Poor Mooch.
There he goes.
Well, that's too bad.
You know, there goes the mooch.
John Kelly's taking control.
The other one that it reminded me of was the scene, obviously, from The Godfather.
John Kelly left the gun, took the cannoli.
Leave the gun. - Take the cannoli.
Oh, well.
So legitimately yesterday at the White House, the mooch is gone.
I'm really upset about this because the mooch was just wildly entertaining.
I would never run out of material if the mooch had stuck around.
Understand that in the space of ten days, he was hired by Trump, he got Sean Spicer fired, his wife left him, and then he was fired.
Okay, that's the life of a fruit fly right there.
That's not even like a human life, right?
It's just amazing.
So yesterday, after he was fired, this shot was taken outside the White House.
This is not a joke.
Okay, this is an actual shot outside the White House.
A couple of security guards taking a skeleton, wheeling a skeleton outside the White House.
And so everybody, of course, is saying, well, there goes the mooch.
It's just really sad.
There are a bunch of funny memes that were going around.
There was one that was going around.
Kate Hudson actually tweeted out how to lose a guy in 10 days, and it was a picture of Trump and Scaramucci.
The good news for Scaramucci, of course, is that his tenure at the White House lasted about five times longer.
than Britney Spears' marriage to Jason Allen Alexander.
This is actually a cartoon embodiment of Scaramucci's tenure at the White House.
And there he goes.
So, what's hilarious about all this is that the only reason that this happened is the blowback was so strong that eventually Trump felt like he had to do something.
It is really funny to watch the members of the Trump administration get fired and then the various excuses that are given for their firing.
So Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she's trying to explain why Scaramucci was ousted yesterday.
I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you if you believe this explanation for why Anthony Scaramucci was let go.
Scaramucci said that he had a direct line of communication with the President.
There's been some speculation that General Kelly may try to tighten up the number of inputs that the President has.
So was it something about the chain of command, or did it have anything to do with that interview with Scaramucci?
Look, the President certainly felt that Anthony's comments were inappropriate for a person in that position.
And he didn't want to burden General Kelly also with that line of succession, as I think we've made clear a few times over the course of the last couple of days to several individually.
But General Kelly has the full authority to operate within the White House.
Okay, so a couple of things here.
Number one, if you truly believe that Trump was shocked and appalled by Anthony Scaramucci's language, you are so dumb.
I can't even express to you how stupid you are if you believe that.
Okay, Donald Trump loves that stuff.
He loves that stuff.
He spent the entire campaign saying that kind of stuff.
That's just, that's just silly.
So, you can say that they wanted to bring in Kelly, Kelly wanted a fresh start, and Kelly wanted the guy out because of all of this, but to say that Trump was just offended by his language, I mean, honest to goodness, Trump being offended by his language, that's, that's like saying that George Carlin was offended by his language.
That's just, no, no, that's just, that's just silly.
By the way, it's good, in my view, for the administration that Scaramucci is gone.
Pat Buchanan feels the same way.
Buchanan's a fan of the administration.
He says that he's glad that they got rid of Scaramucci.
What happened was the General came in, General Kelly, and he basically was ruined by what Scaramucci said and the way he said it and what he said about his colleagues.
This is not the kind of operation or individual that the General wants in his operation.
And he exercised immediate and swift and decisive command and got rid of an individual.
And it sends a message, I think, out to the country that you have a man in charge who is the Chief of Staff.
Who does decide on people who are even those close to the President of the United States?
Right, okay, so this is the new pivot, right?
Kelly is the new pivot, and Kelly offing Scaramucci is the way that Trump is now going to reestablish control over his administration.
So I'm going to talk about the ramifications of that in a little bit, because I wonder whether it's true or not, and what Trump is going to actually have to do.
In order for this to succeed.
But before we do any of that, I first want to bring on a friend of the program, obviously best-selling author, the creator of some of the most successful documentaries in American history, author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Hillary's America, and now author of the brand new book, The Big Lie, exposing the Nazi roots of the American left, Dinesh D'Souza.
Dinesh, thanks so much for joining the show.
Appreciate it.
Hey, Ben.
It's a pleasure.
Good to be on the show.
So I just want to jump right into the book, because I think that there's a lot of material in there that's vital for people to know.
The left is constantly suggesting that folks on the right are Nazis, and we've seen them use this as an excuse for punching people.
We've seen them use this as an excuse for opposing politicians they don't like.
But essentially, you make the contention in your book, The Big Lie Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, that the American left is significantly more tied to Nazism, to National Socialism, than the American right.
So what's the basic case for that?
Well, I'm making a contemporary case that is sitting on top of a historical case.
And the contemporary case is very simple.
That fascism at its core is the ideology of the centralized state.
Mussolini put it very well when he said, nothing outside the state.
The individual is in a sense subordinate to a collective power.
Well, that doesn't sound like modern American conservatism.
It sounds a lot more like the ideology of the progressive left.
Second, fascist tactics.
Now, if we go and watch these Antifa guys, the so-called anti-fascists, they wear costumes, they wear masks and hoods, they carry weapons, they not only block people and burn things and use violence, But they use intimidation.
They're trying to terrorize people into submission and into silence.
They're trying to control the debate in the public square and on campus.
Now, does this sound like fascists?
This sounds a lot like Hitler's brown shirts or Mussolini's black shirts, with the only difference being that the old fascists admitted who they were, and the new fascists are posing as anti-fascists.
Dinesh, some of what seems to me to be the problem in terms of the political lexicon is that European politics and American politics are completely dissimilar.
And so the Nazis may have been right-wing in comparison to the communists, but that doesn't mean that they're right-wing in comparison to American conservatives.
They're far left in comparison to American conservatives.
And you would see members of the conservative parties in Germany, people like von Papen, People like Hindenburg, all these members of the so-called conservative parties in Germany who were largely in favor of big government opposing the communists and supporting Hitler's regime.
And so a lot of people have translated that over to say, okay, well, American conservatism and German conservatism circa 1932 are exactly the same.
But as you make clear in the book, that's not really the case at all.
Yeah, I think we have to back up a little further because the first fascist regime in the world was not Hitler, it was Mussolini.
Mussolini, in a sense, was the founder of fascism as a political phenomenon.
Mussolini was a lifelong Marxist, he was a socialist, and his fascism grew out of that.
In other words, Mussolini saw that the prophecies of Marx were not coming true.
And he thought that part of the reason for that is that people's loyalty wasn't just based on class, it was also based on their love of nation.
And so Mussolini began to marry the concepts of nationalism with socialism, creating, if you will, National Socialism.
Later, of course, Hitler called himself a National Socialist.
Now, what's remarkable is that now, when we look back at all that, the left has performed a kind of sleight of hand.
They've taken the socialism out of national socialism.
They've forgotten that these phenomena were on the left, and they've sort of moved them into the right-wing column, where they can conveniently use it to bash Republicans, conservatives, and Christians.
Now, Dinesh, in your book, The Big Lie, obviously the big question the Democrats are going to be asking is a question they asked to Jonah Goldberg when liberal fascism came out, which is, are you really suggesting that today's Democratic Party are genocidal monsters who want to commit holocaust?
Because there is this sort of rule on the internet, Godwin's Law, that whoever invokes the Nazis first loses the argument.
Now, there's no question the left has invoked the Nazis first.
I mean, they keep saying that Donald Trump Is some sort of Hitlerian proto-fascist, but you know the the question is going to be when you say that the the Nazi roots of the American left exist Are you suggesting that the left is okay with the Holocaust?
Are you suggesting that the modern left would be okay with the Holocaust?
What's it?
What's the well?
How do you take on that particular issue?
You know, after World War II, fascism and Nazism became ineradically stained with the reputation of Holocaust, with Auschwitz and so on.
And we look at those things now in that way, it's almost difficult for us to understand why anybody would be a fascist.
Given that this is what fascists did.
Let's remember that that's not how fascism was perceived in Italy in the 20s or in Germany in the 30s.
And so part of what I try to do is recover that original meaning of fascism and of Nazism.
Even the left, when they say that Trump is a Nazi, they're not saying that Trump has started a world war and killed six million Jews.
What they're saying is that Trump resembles Hitler circa 1933.
In other words, Hitler was a demagogue who promised the restoration of Germany.
Trump is promising to make America great again.
We're really arguing about fascism in its sort of original or germinal phase.
Now, what I'm saying is that there is a whole history of progressivism and of the Democratic Party being in bed with fascism and even early Nazism that was covered up after World War II, and I bring all that secret history to light in the book.
And the book, again, is The Big Lie, Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.
Dinesh, last question for you, because I know that you have a really busy schedule today.
The book was just released yesterday.
So what do you hope to accomplish with the book?
Because obviously the left is going to claim that you're just trying to pander to the base and that you're trying to sell books by By using inflammatory language, but what's your goal here?
Well, my goal in Hillary's America, the previous book and movie, was to take away the race card from the left, which I felt that they were playing illegitimately against people, us, who are not racist.
And here I want to take away the fascism card, and not just take it away, but expose a whole facet of American history that has, you may say, been swept under the rug.
I think if people recognize that fascism is truly a phenomenon of the left and not of the right, my book will have done its work.
The book, again, is The Big Lie, Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.
It came out yesterday.
It's already soaring up the Amazon bestseller list.
Let's make it a New York Times bestseller as well.
Dinesh, really enjoying the book.
I'm in the middle of it right now.
And thanks for all the great work that you're doing out there.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Before we go any further, I want to discuss the ramifications of the Scaramucci ouster and what's going to happen next with Kelly, and I want to give you the recap on the debate that I did with Cenk Uygur on Sunday, as well as I want to talk about a couple of major stories that are breaking inside the Trump administration.
Plus, I want to analyze that it's Tisha B'Av, right?
It's the most tragic day on the Jewish calendar.
I'll talk about all of these things, but before I do any of those things, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at LendingTree.
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Okay, so a couple of notes on the Kelly Ouster of Scaramucci.
So people are treating this as though this is the beginning of the Trump pivot, right?
Kelly is coming in.
Kelly's a four-star general.
He is going to take control.
We talked about this a little bit yesterday.
And him firing Scaramucci is obviously the sign that now someone who's an adult is in charge.
There is one problem with this logic, and that is this.
John Kelly is now in an unenviable catch-22.
We have seen President Trump operate throughout his campaign.
And in his campaign, we saw multiple quote-unquote pivot points, right?
We saw Manafort was going to come in, take over for Corey Lewandowski.
This was going to be the adult in the room.
Then Manafort was ousted, and Bannon came in, and he was going to be the adult in the room.
And Kellyanne Conway was going to be the adult in the room.
And then after the admin—and then they picked Mike Pence, and he was going to be the adult in the room.
And then they were going to bring in General Mattis, and General Mattis was going to be the adult in the room.
Now, there is a difference between some of these people, right?
So Mattis obviously is the adult in the room on defense, but he's not in the White House next to Trump every day.
And the same thing is true with some of the other members of the administration who are doing fine jobs.
If you're not in Trump's immediate purview and your job isn't to control Trump, then you can do a great job, right?
You can be off to the side doing a wonderful job.
If, however, your job is to is to militate against Trump's Obvious volatility.
If that is your job, you are in a catch-22.
Because if you actually solidify Trump, if you actually get Trump to calm down, if you get him to stop tweeting stupid crap and attacking his Attorney General, if you get him to start pursuing legislation instead of saying random things, then one of two things is going to happen.
Either Trump is going to settle down, ha ha ha, or you're going to be covered in the media as the guy who got Trump to settle down.
Right?
The media is always going to treat Trump like he's a zoo animal.
And so if you are the person who tamed the lion, what happens?
Your face ends up on the cover of Time Magazine, just like Steve Bannon.
And what happened after Bannon's face was on the cover of Time Magazine?
Trump got pissed at him, began to marginalize him, because obviously it was Bannon in control and not Trump.
We got a lot of President Bannon talk.
Well, now you're going to get a lot of President Kelly talk.
Right?
There's a headline from The Onion that Alaa Pundit over at Hot Air took note of.
This headline over at The Onion said, U.S.
forces take control of Oval Office.
Right?
The idea being that Kelly, it's supposed to be funny, right?
U.S.
military occupation of the Oval Office.
But this is going to be the headline.
If things calm down now, who's going to get the credit?
Is it going to be Trump?
No.
And Trump, unlike Harry Truman, you know, unlike Ronald Reagan, Harry Truman said, the buck stops here.
Ronald Reagan said, you can go, you can get incredibly far when it doesn't matter to you who takes the credit.
Trump only cares about who takes the credit.
So if Kelly starts getting credit for calming him down, then Trump is going to get angry at Kelly.
He's going to lash out at Kelly.
This is what he does.
And if Kelly doesn't calm him down, then nothing has really been accomplished here.
And it's going to look like even John Kelly, a four-star general, wasn't able to get Trump under control.
I mean, people are grasping at straws here.
There's really an attempt, I think, to paint this as another Trump pivot.
People are saying, well, at least Trump isn't tweeting yet.
Guys, it's been like 10 hours.
It's been like 10 hours.
I mean, if our standards are this low, then we should really think about whether we need to raise our standards a little bit.
It's just not... not particularly smart.
Like, let's wait on this.
Let's find out whether Kelly can get it.
Listen, I hope and pray Kelly can get this under control.
Again, you have a Republican president with a Republican House and a Republican Senate.
Things should be happening.
That's only going to happen if Trump gets his crap under control.
And the only way that's going to happen is if he starts listening to the people around him.
Already you can see that the pressure is starting.
Ivanka Trump tweeted out this morning, we look forward to working alongside General Kelly.
Not we look forward to... I'm really excited that he's his chief of staff and we're all going to work for him, right?
The line was, as you saw from Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Pat Buchanan, that everything was now going to run through Kelly.
Early in February, there was a report from Vanity Fair that everything was going to run through Reince Priebus.
How well did that work out?
If Ivanka and Jared decide to walk in the Oval Office, John Kelly is not going to be able to stop them and Trump is not going to stop them.
So I think that it's important to recognize that when there are gaps in policy, not everything is going to go smoothly.
So we should just keep that in mind before we start celebrating and thinking that all the chaos is past.
Okay, meanwhile, some of the chaos, I hope, is passed, because there's another story that came out yesterday that is completely wild from CNN.
We'll talk about that in just a second, but for that you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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Okay, so the reason that we hope that Kelly comes in and provides some solidity is because this is just a hysterically amazing story.
It is from CNN.
A self-described email prankster in the UK fooled a number of White House officials into thinking he was other officials, including an episode where he convinced the White House official tasked with cybersecurity that he was Jared Kushner and received that official's private email address unsolicited.
Tom, we are arranging a bit of a soiree toward the end of August.
Fake Jared Kushner wrote on an Outlook account to the official White House email address of Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert, it would be great if you could make it.
I promise food of at least comparable quality to which we ate in Iraq.
Should be a great evening.
Bossert wrote back, thanks Jared, with a promise like that I can't refuse.
Also, if you ever need it, my personal email is... and then he gave his personal email.
The best thing, however, is that he pretended to be Sean Spicer in an email exchange with Anthony Scaramucci.
And this is just impressively incredible.
Masquerading as Ryan's prebis, the prankster emailed Scaramucci's official account using a mail.com account on Saturday, the day after Prebis's resignation was announced.
Quote, I promised myself I would leave my hands mud-free, wrote fake Prebis, but after reading your tweet today, which stated, how soon we will learn who in the media has class and who hasn't, has pushed me to this.
That tweet was breathtakingly hypocritical, even for you.
And then Scaramucci, very real Scaramucci, replied, you know what you did.
We all do, even today.
But rest assured, we were prepared.
A man would apologize.
Fake Previous wrote back, I can't believe you're questioning my ethics.
The so-called mooch, who can't even manage his first week in the White House without leaving upset in his wake.
I have nothing to apologize for.
Scaramucci replied, read Shakespeare, particularly Othello.
You are right there.
My family is fine, by the way, and will thrive.
I know what you did.
No more replies from me.
Also, he pretended to be the ambassador to Russia designate John Huntsman, and he wrote to Scaramucci, whose head should roll first, meaning Bannon or Priebus.
And real Scaramucci wrote back both of them.
This is all written to just a prankster who used their public government email address and wrote to them pretending to be another government official.
Just amazing stuff.
Guys, please, for the love of God, get better at this.
I am very fearful that you're going to write an email to another member of the Trump administration.
They're going to actually give you the nuclear launch codes.
Like, you must get better at this.
Also worth noting, when the head of cyber security is handing out his personal email address, I seem to remember, this is not a good idea, I seem to remember like a three year long scandal because a particular lady who ran in the Democratic Party was using a private email address and private email server for political business.
Don't do this, people.
Please don't do this.
John Kelly, please, please take control.
For the love of God, please take control.
I beg of you, please do it.
Another bad story out of the White House today.
I don't want it to all be bad news, because I think, I hope that John Kelly's going to take control.
There's a lawsuit that's out today.
You don't know who to trust in this sort of thing, the lawsuits all the time.
But now there is a lawsuit that is suggesting, the plaintiff is Rod Wheeler, who's a Fox News contributor, former homicide investigator, and he is now claiming that President Trump himself worked with Fox News and a wealthy Republican donor to push the Seth Rich murder story.
I hope that isn't true, because if so, that's really gross.
But we'll give you more information if more information breaks on that score.
Okay, so, for those of you who weren't able to actually come out to my debate with Cenk Uygur, I thought it was a great event.
3,000 people showed up for the event.
They had to move the venue because so many people showed up.
About 2,000 people were fans of the show, fans of mine.
Which is really fun and unexpected.
In the past, debates including Cenk have really been Cenk's army outnumbering whoever the conservative is.
People like Dinesh, people like Ann Coulter.
But I thought the debate was actually really substantive.
I was not expecting it to be substantive.
To be completely honest with you, I was expecting it to look a lot more like Cenk's debate with Ann or Dinesh, where it turned into a slap fight, where it was really Cenk taking some piece that Someone wrote ten years ago, using it out of context, and then turning to the crowd and calling them racist.
That actually didn't happen.
It turned out to be a pretty substantive debate.
I wanted to give you some of the highlights in case you weren't able to see it.
You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
It was trending all day on YouTube yesterday.
It's trending all day on YouTube today.
Hundreds of thousands of hits.
Millions of hits, actually, at this point when you aggregate them for this debate, which I thought was really an important debate.
An actually useful, important debate.
We talk about healthcare and taxes.
Here are just a few of, I thought, the best moments for me.
Uh, and, uh, here is, uh, my explanation of capitalism.
Cenk had contended that Keynesianism was the- was the best possible solution to making economic prosperity happen.
Here was me debunking that.
Uh, the- the problem with Keynesian economics is that it doesn't even work in theory because, again, once you go to the logical extreme, which is remove all of the money from the rich people who are saving all their money and give it to all the poor people to buy hamburgers, that doesn't help the economy or spur the economy.
What spurs the economy is a higher level- What?
What spurs the economy is the creation of new products and services, and that is only going to be done by people who have expendable capital to actually invest in the new products and services that we all enjoy.
This is what creates economic growth.
It's also worth noting that this myth that spending is inherently better for an economy than saving, that's only true if you're talking about somebody who's actually taking the cash and just shoving it into their mattress.
Banks are in the business of lending.
When they take the money in, they don't just stick it in Al Gore's fake lockbox, they actually lend the money back out to people to actually create new businesses and new products.
You had an investor, right?
When you started TYT, You were given $4 million by Buddy Romer to start TYT.
That's great.
That's the way business should work, right?
But that money didn't come from a bunch of poor people buying hamburgers.
It came from a very, very wealthy guy who gave you money to create a business a lot of people want to patronize.
If you want better products and better services, you need more investment in the products and services.
The basic name trickle-down economics is not something that any conservative even proposed.
It's a leftist revision of what economics actually is, because you're not giving me the money.
It was my money in the first place, created through voluntary transactions that I had with others.
I've not stolen money from anyone, neither have you.
And the idea that money has to be forcibly taken from you and handed to somebody at the bottom end of the economic spectrum to somehow jog the economy that may jog McDonald's but is not going to jog all of the creation of the products and services that make all of our lives much better today than they were 30 years ago in terms of the stuff we have access to.
So as I say, I think that it was a really substantive, interesting debate.
I wanted to make a few notes about Medicare because Cenk was talking a lot about Medicare in this debate.
He talked a lot about the glories of Medicare and how popular it was.
Just because a program is popular doesn't mean the program is actually good.
I talked about the cost of Medicare.
There's a $43 trillion outstanding debt on Medicare.
That's how much money it's going to cost the United States.
According to a columnist over at National Review, I want to get his name, Michael Tanner.
He gives some good statistics on all of this.
He points out that not only is there $60 billion of fraud and improper payments in Medicare per year, but right now, if somebody pays into Medicare, Chen kept saying you pay into Medicare and you get out of Medicare.
What you pay into Medicare is not what you get out of Medicare.
A married couple with two average earners turning 65 in 2020 will have paid about $150,000 in Medicare payroll taxes over their lifetime.
Given their life expectancy, they can expect to receive almost $500,000 in benefits.
That means that you're going to spend an enormous amount of money.
Beyond that, Medicare is not actually doing that great a job because a lot of doctors are not accepting Medicare anymore.
They won't accept new Medicare patients because Medicare reimbursement rates are simply too low.
So just because there is Medicare doesn't mean that everybody takes Medicare, which is why a lot of people are forced to pay out-of-pocket.
It is also true that, according to this column, not only will this force even more physicians out of the program, according to the actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the combination of effects leads to roughly half of hospitals, 70% of skilled nursing facilities, and 90% of home health agencies losing money by 2040, which will lead to widespread closures.
You pay people too little money, and they're not going to actually succeed.
Also, the Journal of American Medical Association has found that for 16 of 40 standard indicators, Medicare patients received less Recommended less care than two-thirds of the time.
Less care than recommended two-thirds of the time.
Other studies have shown that Medicare patients receive a lower quality of care than do similar patients with private health insurance.
A study in the Journal of Health Services found Medicare coverage at 65 for the previously uninsured is not linked to improvements in overall health status.
We've seen that with Medicaid as well.
There is no advantage to actually being on Medicaid in terms of life expectancy and health outcome.
So for all the talk about Medicare for all, It costs a lot of money, and it ain't that effective, and it drives doctors out of the program.
It leads to rationing, by the way.
As I've said before, I don't believe that the government should be involved in healthcare.
Healthcare is an individual decision that you make, and there should be a social fabric that picks up the pieces for people who can't afford for themselves.
But, if you were to have some sort of program, the most effective program, in terms of health insurance, is the Swiss program, the Switzerland-mandated program, where you all buy health insurance, just like car insurance, but it's almost entirely privatized.
The problem there is that the number of people who are not able to get the insurance that they want to get is like 31%.
Because obviously, as I said in this debate, when it comes to health care, you can only have, when it comes to health insurance and health care, both of these things, well health care really, when it comes to health care, you can only have three things, right?
You have affordability, universality, quality.
You can have two of those three.
You cannot have all three.
Obamacare has created more universality, it has not created more quality, and it has not created more affordability.
And Chen kept saying, no, no, you can have it all.
You can have it cheap, you can have it effective, you can have it for everybody.
No, that's not true because there is no area in life where you can make something cheap and effective for everybody unless you have a free market system driving prices down and quality up.
Anytime you have a mandate, all that does is it drives the quality down and the prices up.
Which is exactly what's happened with Obamacare.
Other things from the debate that were fun, uh, there was, uh, Cenk's big thing is he doesn't like money in politics, and I was pointing out to him that money will always be in politics, and that's not a bad thing, considering that we spend lots of money here at the Daily Wire on bringing you political material.
Cenk spends a lot of money over at TYT bringing people political material.
Pretending that my $200 donation to a candidate is the same thing as Cenk spending millions of dollars to bring his particular political view to the public, which definitely forwards the agenda of particular politicians.
That's just silly.
Money is a form of speech.
We all know this because this is why we wouldn't allow the government to come in and shut down the New York Times on the grounds that, hey, after all, they're just spending money.
It isn't speech.
I made this point to Cenk in rather colorful fashion.
If the government is in the business of regulating business, what would be the problem with the government telling Buddy Romer he is not allowed to invest in your business?
No!
That has... No, no, those are two different issues.
No problem.
No problem.
No, it's... One thing is to say, hey, let's set reasonable limitations on what can happen around elections, which is, again, what most developed Western countries do.
So... And they have different versions of that rule.
There's ads you can run... You can't run ads within a certain period of time.
You have public financing versus private financing.
Those are rules around an election.
That is a completely different issue than the government saying randomly you can and you can't invest in businesses.
So you're conflating those two issues that have nothing to do with one another?
Why?
So, let's just, uh, we're... What does why mean?
Hey, you know, you believe in education, so why do you believe in healthcare?
Because it's a free country and I get to spend my money wherever I damn well please.
And then finally, Cenk had said something.
He was trying to make the distinction between money and speech when it comes to politics.
And so he said, well, if money is just speech, then why isn't all money just speech?
Well, money for political speech is political speech.
Money on other things is not.
But in any case, he compared it to prostitution.
He said, well, if money is just speech, then why can't I just, you know, go spend money on a hooker and call it speech?
Here was my response.
When you say money in politics is bad, again I ask you, Buddy Romer gave you four million dollars to start TYT.
What did he expect in return?
Should he not have given you money?
Was the money not speech?
It was just money after all, it's just like a hooker I assume, so are you the prostitute?
Dude, how did this work?
Yeah, it got interesting.
So, if you missed the whole thing, then you can go and check it out on YouTube.
We also have it up on my Facebook page as well.
We are releasing clips of it too.
It was a lot of fun.
It's about an hour long, so it shouldn't take too much of your time.
But we'll be releasing some of the better clips from it as time progresses.
Okay.
Time for some things I like, and then some things I hate, and then I want to talk about Tisha B'Av, which is the Jewish fast day that we are participating in today.
So, things I like.
So, we have been paying tribute to Scaramucci.
I didn't know he was going to be fired yesterday, but we started our tribute to Scaramucci yesterday with Wall Street.
Today, I want to pay tribute to Scaramucci with another clip from a movie that is just very Scaramucci.
This, of course, would be the famed Harry Ellis from Die Hard, one of my favorite characters in film history.
Hope I'm not interrupting.
What does he want?
It's not what I want, it's what I can give you.
Look, let's be straight, okay?
It's obvious you're not some dumb schmuck up here to snatch a few purses, am I right?
You're very perceptive.
I watch 60 Minutes, I say to myself, these guys are professional, they're motivated, they're happening, i.e., they want something, huh?
Now personally, I couldn't care less about your politics.
Maybe you're pissed off at the camel jockeys, maybe it's the heebs, Northern Ireland, it's none of my business!
I figure you're here to negotiate, am I right?
You're amazing, you figured this all out already.
Business is business.
You use a gun, I use a fountain pen.
What's the difference?
Let's put it in my terms.
You're here in a hostile takeover, you grab us for some green meal, but you didn't expect some poison pill was gonna be running around in the building.
Am I right?
Hans!
Bobby!
I'm your white knight.
I must have missed 60 minutes.
What are you saying?
The guy upstairs is f***ing things up, huh?
I can give him to you.
*Bad* Yeah, so I've watched Die Hard and unfortunately what happens to the mooch in this movie is also what happened to the mooch politically.
So things go very poorly for him.
I wonder what happened to Hart Botchner.
Hart Botchner had a bit of a career being like a jerk.
He's in a great movie that I've recommended on the show before called Breaking Away.
He's the villain in that movie as well.
He's just terrific in it.
I'm not sure what he's been doing lately.
Apparently a lot of TV.
I'm looking up his IMDB right now.
Looks like a lot of TV stuff.
But he hasn't been in a lot of big stuff, really, since the 80s.
And he's starting to do a lot more TV in the last three or four years.
I miss you, Hart Botcher.
Come back and play the mooch.
I mean, come on.
It's the most obvious casting of all time.
He's probably a little old for the part now.
But fantastic in any case.
Okay.
Time for some things that I hate.
So, the first thing I hate is the Democrats, the left, they just can't stop, they can't stop with the comparisons that are actually insulting.
So, when I do all of this, it's all in love, it's all in fun, I mean this is all ridiculous.
The left Treats Trump like he's an actual dictator.
As Dinesh said before, they tried to suggest that he's Hitlerian.
Chris Matthews, well that's a freeze frame for you.
Chris Matthews, alright, I'm gonna say, he's talking about Trump purging his administration.
It's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like the worst dictators in history, purging their administration.
Like taking people and shooting them.
Throwing them in a ditch.
Throwing them in the Tiber River.
Letting them wash up later all bloody and disgusting.
Trump, he's the worst!
It's Kim Jong-un!
Go!
With the regularity of the nightly news, President Trump is throwing bodies out of the White House at a rate that matches the Russian Revolution.
I think all this going around and purging people, just like Kim Jong-un, what is he doing?
Knocks off all his relatives when he gets scared?
When you get scared of your position, you start killing people around you.
We don't do that in this country.
We fire them.
Trump seems to know how to fire.
That's my argument.
My argument is he's a terrible person.
I get up in the morning, I look at my hair, it's all messed up, get a shoe, brush my hair with the shoe, feel better about myself, and then I start thinking, is he like Kim Jong-un?
Well, not really, but I'm gonna say it anyway, because come on, it's inflammatory, Mussolini, Hitler, Kim Jong-un, boo!
So, again, Democrats, you might want to just point out the fact that this is more incompetence than it is malevolence.
It's not like he brought in the mooch because he wanted to kill the mooch, okay?
He brought in the mooch because the mooch was wildly entertaining, and again, I am so sad about all of this.
I mean, you don't get rid of the Fonz before he can become your breakout character.
He was your Urkel.
He was your The Fonz.
You don't get rid of the breakout character, guys!
Come on!
Come on!
Okay, the other thing that I hate, Jeffrey Lord comes out and he says that when it comes to Trump, they're talking about how Trump spoke at this police academy, and he said something about how, you know, if you're putting people in a car and you don't put your hand on top of their head, that's okay, that's okay, they just killed somebody, you know, okay, whatever.
And people, oh, he's for police brutality.
I think Jeffrey Lord is right about this, but I want to make a point about what Jeffrey Lord says.
Jeffrey Lord says this is just Trump being a New Yorker.
I think this is actually correct.
Here's Lord.
I mean, I have to say, he's a New Yorker, standing in front of New Yorkers on Long Island.
My whole family's from there, that's the way they talk.
Okay, that's 100% true.
So I was in New York last week, and I was walking along the street, and there was a shirt that said, this is literally what the shirt said, and it was just in a store window.
F-U-U-F-F.
Right, that's what the shirt said.
And I thought, this could not be on sale anywhere else in the United States.
Like legitimately nowhere else in the United States would there be anyone who buys this shirt.
This shirt's probably a bestseller in New York.
And that's why Trump won.
He won because the rest of the United States takes his tough talk and his brash nonsense really seriously.
In New York, he's just a cab driver.
Everyone talks like Trump in New York.
Right, when people were doing the, well the mooch is copying Trump's hand motions with all this stuff.
No, the mooch is just from New York.
Okay, so people from New York talk like this, and that's why nobody from New York takes Trump all that seriously, but in the rest of the country, he uses this inflammatory language, and everybody goes, oh, he must mean it, because around here, when we see F-U-U-F-ing F, you must have, like, punched my sister in the face or something for me to say that.
No, in New York, that just means that you were standing in line in front of me and you didn't move up quickly enough in the line.
Right, so that's why it's not worthwhile taking Trump's rhetoric super seriously on the stuff like, ooh, he's calling for police brutality.
No, he's just a guy from New York.
Okay, so, today is, in fact, despite the show, today is in fact the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar.
It's why Jews have been fasting from last night to tonight.
No food, no water.
It's a real bag of laughs.
But Tisha B'Av, the reason that it is the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar, a bunch of bad things traditionally happened on Tisha B'Av to the Jewish people.
So in 1313 BCE, spies returned from the Promised Land and gave a bad report about the Promised Land.
In 423 BCE, the first temple was destroyed on the Temple Mount.
In 70 CE, the second temple was destroyed on the Temple Mount.
In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain.
So this date has some sort of particular cosmic significance, obviously, when it comes to God.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about what the significance of the day is, aside from bad things happened today to the Jews, so we commemorate that.
So, the typical lesson from Tisha B'Av, which means the 9th of Av.
It's the month of Av in the Jewish calendar.
It's, you know, Jesus would have celebrated the month of Av for Christians out there.
It's just how the Jewish calendar works.
It's the 9th of Av today.
The most famous story in the Talmud about this talks about why it was that the temple was destroyed.
So we don't tend to do this now.
Now when bad things happen, when world events happen, we tend not to attribute them to specific causes.
In the past, that was much more common.
If you read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, the author, Gibbon, he goes out of his way to actually try and explain what the causes are for the fall of the Roman Empire.
We today, something bad happens and we don't go, what was the cause of that?
We just assume that it happened.
In Jewish philosophy, there's a thought which is that the Second Temple fell because of what we call sinat chinam, meaning unrooted hatred.
Just hatred for no reason.
And there's a story about what that meant in the times of the Talmud.
It's an apocryphal story, but it's kind of informative.
So, the story goes like this.
There was a banquet in Jerusalem at the time of the Second Temple.
And there was a very rich, wealthy guy who had an enemy whose name was Bar Kamsa.
He also had a friend whose name was Kamsa.
He had this big feast, and he wanted to invite Kamsa, his friend.
Instead, he invited Barkhamsa by accident.
His messenger went to the wrong guy, went to Barkhamsa, and Barkhamsa shows up at this feast, thinking, okay, we're going to make nice now.
Barkhamsa sits down, he starts eating.
And the guy who's throwing the feast comes up to him and says, what the hell are you doing here?
I don't want you here.
You're a jerk.
And Barcom says, listen, you know, now you're... there are lots of people here.
I don't want to be humiliated.
You throwing me out of here.
I'll pay for my own meal.
Like, I'll give you money.
I'll get to stay here.
What's the, you know, what's the problem?
And the guy says, no, I want you out of here forthwith.
Bar Kamsa was so angry about this, and so angry that there were a bunch of rabbis there who didn't actually do anything, that he immediately went to the Romans and apparently gave them security information about the way that the Jewish rebellion, the way that the Jewish rule was working, and then supposedly gave them the impetus to come in and destroy the temple and disperse the Jewish people.
That's the story.
It's apocryphal, right?
I mean, there's not a lot of historic evidence that's the way that it happened, but that is the story, the way that it happens in the Talmud.
So what does that mean?
That doesn't seem like baseless hatred, right?
It seems like Bar Kampsa has a pretty solid case that something bad happened to him.
But here, I think, is the point of that particular story.
And we should take it to heart because it has some impact on politics in the United States and for Western civilization.
And that is, baseless hatred is about you attributing motives to people that you don't actually know.
That's what baseless hatred is.
Because if you know what somebody's motive is, then you have a good reason to hate them.
If they did something wrong to you, you hate them.
That seems not like Sina Adchinam.
It seems just like Sina.
It just seems like anger and hatred.
But the point here is this.
This guy was so angry at the person who wronged him that he decided the entire society had to pay.
Society at large was responsible for the sins of this one man.
And therefore society at large had to pay.
The system was corrupt and bad things wouldn't happen in a non-corrupt system.
Therefore the system had to be torn down.
This is always the danger to systems of thought.
It's the danger to Judaism.
It's the danger to Christianity.
People do this all the time.
They see an Orthodox Jew who does bad things, and they say, well, he's a bad guy.
Therefore, Orthodox Judaism must be false.
They do it to Christians all the time.
That guy says he's a Christian, but did you see what happened to those priests in the Catholic Church?
Christianity must be complete nonsense if people can do stuff like that.
You can't attribute to a system the actions of an individual.
People do this with America all the time.
Individual act of racism.
It's because America is racist.
Therefore, America must be destroyed and replaced by something better.
That destroys the temple.
That destroys the temple.
The idea the temple can still be pure, even if people who visit the temple, or participate in services at the temple, or give money to the temple, are not.
And we need to identify individual sins for what they are, rather than attributing to a broader society the motivations of the sin.
If we don't do that, we are engaging in baseless hatred, not only against one another, but against the society at large, and that's what tears down civilization.
Okay, so I will spend the rest of the day in fasting and prayer, which is one of the things that we do, and I hope that you have a more enjoyable day than we will.
And we will be back tomorrow to discuss all the latest in the ongoing circus that is American politics.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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