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Sept. 1, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:45
The Scorn For The Heartland | Ep. 374
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Politico runs the most anti-Hurricane Harvey victim ever, until Charlie Hebdo runs another one that's even worse.
We'll talk about the all-female Lord of the Flies.
Yes, Hollywood is doing this stupid thing.
Plus, Trump talks taxes.
Are we actually going to get tax breaks?
We'll find out.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, another day, another dollar.
We're here with you, and we're going to go through all of the news of the day.
I want to talk at length about all-female Lord of the Flies, because I think this is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard that does not work in any sense.
First of all, there already is an all-female Lord of the Flies.
It's called The View, and it blows.
It's awful.
But we'll talk about all of the things Lord of the Flies related, plus we'll talk about Trump talking taxes, and the left's bizarre reaction to Hurricane Harvey, or at least a few people on the left.
But before we get to that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birchgold.
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Okay, so I'm really eager to talk about this all-female Lord of the Flies thing and why it's so stupid, so I really want to get to that.
But before I get to that, I first want to talk about this cartoon that came out in Politico.
If you want to know why there's a cultural divide in this country, it's because even the things that ought to bring us together can still be used to tear us apart.
Here is a cartoon that came out yesterday from Politico.
The author, the creator of this atrocity, his name is Matt Worker, I believe, and if you can't see it, What it shows is a helicopter with the U.S.
logo on it trying to rescue a guy.
The guy is obviously supposed to be a Texan, right?
And he is sitting there in a shirt that is a Confederate flag and a cowboy hat and boots.
For some reason, his jeans are tucked into his boots.
I've never met a Texan who actually tucks his jeans into his boots.
But in any case, he's there in a basket and next to him is a flag that says, don't tread on me as he's being picked up from the waters.
And then the guy is shouting, angels sent by God.
And then there's a house next to him and the water is up to the roof of the house and on top there is a sign that says secede, like Texas secede.
And then a little girl on top of the roof and a rescuer who is trying to put a life jacket on the little girl and it says, actually coast guard sent by the government.
So not angel sent by God, coast guard sent by the government.
There are so many things wrong with this idiotic comic that it's almost impossible to hit them all.
Number one, let's begin with the caricature of religious people.
This angel sent by God routine.
This is so intensely stupid I can't even tell you.
The reason this is so intensely stupid is because religious people don't actually believe that angels are going to save them from the water.
They believe that human beings can sometimes act as instruments of God's will in saving them.
Okay, there's a very famous religious joke.
Every religious person knows this joke, but for those who are not religious in the audience, this is something religious people tell.
This is a religious person joke, okay?
Here's the joke.
Isn't that good?
But here's the joke.
Okay, the joke is there's a flood, and there's a guy who's trapped in the flood.
And so he prays to God, and he says, God, please send me help.
And next thing he knows, a car drives up and says, hop in, dude.
It's time to get out of here.
And he says, listen, I've talked to God.
God is going to send me help.
So the car drives away.
Next thing that happens, a boat comes up.
And the guy in the boat says, jump in.
And the religious guy says, no, no, no.
I've prayed to God.
God will help me.
So the boat motors away.
And here comes a helicopter.
And the helicopter comes and says to the religious guy, dude, jump in.
Lowers the rope to him.
He says, no, no, no.
God is going to save me.
So naturally, he drowns.
And then he goes up to heaven.
And he says to God, hey, I prayed.
Where were you?
And God says, I sent you a boat.
I sent you a car, a boat, and a helicopter.
What do you mean, where was I?
That's how religious people actually think of this sort of thing.
So this idea that it's angels sent by God, like they don't understand that it's actually the Coast Guard.
It can be both the Coast Guard and also human beings can act as angels in times of need.
In fact, little known fact about Hebrew that our non-Jewish friends probably don't know, the word for angel is malach in Hebrew.
The word for messenger in Hebrew is malach.
So human messenger and angel are the same exact word in Hebrew.
Okay, so it just demonstrates there's an identity here.
Human beings can act as messengers of the Lord even when they are acting in pursuit of their everyday duties.
So this idea that we're all just a bunch of religious morons is ridiculous.
Second of all, the idea that this guy's wearing a confederate shirt and that means obviously that he must be a racist redneck.
It's worth noting that the precincts that have been flooded in this hurricane voted for Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly.
Overwhelmingly, they voted for Hillary Clinton.
In fact, the state of New Jersey voted in fewer numbers for Hillary Clinton than these districts did by percentage.
So it was a bunch of Democrats getting hit by this hurricane.
So they're ripping on the people of Texas as though they are uniformly Trump voters.
Not even true.
Okay, finally, when it says It's the Coast Guard sent by the government.
How dare people in Texas think that they want to secede?
Let's be clear about this.
The vast majority of resources that are being brought to bear in Houston are local and state.
They are not federal resources.
Federal resources provide the vast minority of support.
That means that even if Texas were to secede, do you think they really wouldn't have any sort of Coast Guard facilities?
Texas is a very wealthy state.
Texas has its own nuclear weapons and the Air National Guard.
The idea that Texas is going to, I mean they're under federal auspices, but still, the idea that Texas is going to go completely broke if it were to secede, they wouldn't be able to rescue their own citizens, is absolute nonsense considering the people who are actually rescuing their citizens are folks who are working for the state of Texas.
And just because you believe in state sovereignty, just because you believe in state power under the Constitution, does not mean that you're against the government helping you out with your own taxpayer dollars.
I mean, that's why we pay for fire services.
This is why we pay for the police.
So this cartoon is so stupid in every way, but what it's really designed to do is suggest that Texans are just a bunch of loon bags who don't understand the beauty of government.
If they just understood the power of government and the beauty of government, then they would get behind a bigger, stronger government and spend more money and they wouldn't be these crazy Trump voters that they are.
That's what this cartoon is supposed to mean.
It's cruel, it's nasty, and it's stupid all at once.
It's especially stupid because the fact is that how are Texans acting during this?
They're not sitting around waiting to be rescued.
This is a picture tweeted out by a radio host named Michael Berry.
This is the 12.
This is a picture of a bunch of people in Texas in line.
Can we grab that?
Okay, there it is.
Okay, so you can see this giant line of people.
Is that giant line of people people waiting to get services?
Is that a giant line of people at a food bank?
No, it turns out that these are a bunch of people in the center of Houston who are waiting in line to volunteer.
Look at the size of that line.
Hundreds of people waiting in line to volunteer.
Those are the people that this idiot asshat, Matt Worker, is ripping on in Texas.
Those are the people of Texas.
Those are the people who are helping each other out.
Charlie Hebdo did exactly the same routine except more blatant.
Charlie Hebdo, which is, at least they're equal opportunity offenders.
They went after Muslim, Mohammedan, and Islam in such a way that they ended up as the target for a terrorist attack a few years back, as you recall.
Charlie Hebdo ran a cartoon that showed a bunch, it says, do you existe?
I don't speak French, so I assume that means God exists.
And they are celebrating the flood, because it's a bunch of people, you can't see it, but I'll describe it to you.
It's a bunch of hands going up in the Heil Hitler salute, and a bunch of Nazi flags that are halfway underwater.
So it's a bunch of Nazis who are drowned.
It says, the cover of the magazine is totally captioned, God exists, he drowned all the neo-Nazis of Texas.
Again, the districts were a bunch of Democrats.
Second, the people of Texas are not neo-Nazis.
This is insane.
The racial makeup of the city is not... Let me give you the racial makeup of the city of Texas according to the census of 2000.
Okay, it's 49.3% white, which includes Hispanic.
Okay, 25% black or African-American.
So that means that this is one of the most diverse cities in America, and they're saying that it's a bunch of white supremacists, but again, the left's stereotypes have no end here, and they're really quite horrifying and disgusting.
And you wonder why people react by saying that they'll vote for Trump?
It's because they're reacting to stupidity like this.
It's because they're reacting to grossness like this.
Okay, so...
The truth is that the vast majority of people are not reacting well to these sorts of cartoons.
Even the left was a little upset with Politico revealing the hard left's biases.
Charlie Hebdo's cartoon is not going over like gangbusters.
But it does demonstrate the cultural stereotyping that goes on of people in Texas.
That everybody thinks that people in Texas are a bunch of rednecks outside of Texas.
And that cultural divide is getting worse, not better.
I mean, to the point where when Chris Pratt, the actor, said at one point that Hollywood doesn't do a good job of appealing to blue-collar Americans outside the major cities, and he was ripped up and down by the left and then forced to backtrack, it's true.
Hollywood does a horrible job of demonstrating what it is for people who live outside the major cities, because the vast majority of people who populate our pop culture are folks who are from major cities.
They're people from LA, I've lived here my entire life, people from New York, people from Chicago, They mostly come from big cities.
The myth of the person who comes from Kansas and hits it big in Hollywood?
It happens.
It's true.
But the vast majority of people who work in Hollywood are from Hollywood.
The vast majority of people who write are from New York or Hollywood.
The vast majority of people making our entertainment are like that.
And that's why they have such scorn for people that they've never met halfway across the country who are suffering at this time.
Okay, so...
With that said, I think that also demonstrates, now I get to talk about my favorite subject, the all-female Lord of the Flies.
Before I talk about all-female Lord of the Flies, however, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Upside.com.
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Okay, so...
Here is what we know about, when I say that Hollywood is out of touch, I mean that Hollywood is seriously out of touch.
They're planning a movie that makes no sense, the all-female Lord of the Flies.
Why do I think this is important?
Because I think that it is important to understand that the left's perverse and weird notion of what exactly men and women are, boys and girls, is exactly that.
It's weird and perverse.
So if you actually read Lord of the Flies, it is a book about boys becoming men.
It is a book about what happens to boys in the absence of civilization.
It is a book about the violent nature of particularly men.
And it's funny that they'd want to do an all-female version of this because the fact is that one of the things that feminists are constantly ripping about men is that men are violent, right?
This is the routine we got from Hillary Clinton.
That if Hillary had been elected president, there would never be another violent thing that happened ever, because all wars in history have been men!
You get that routine from the feminists all the time, but now they want to do Lord of the Flies, which is based on physical violence being done between groups.
I guess that now that they've done the all-female Ghostbusters, and that was such a smashing success, and such a horrible movie, and now Scott McGehee and David Siegel have made a deal at Warner's to direct a new version of Lord of the Flies, they plan to be faithful to the novel with one major twist.
The young students stranded on a remote island who descend into a savage social order will be girls.
And so here's what they say, according to Paul Bois over at Daily Wire.
David Siegel says, First of all, why would you have to do a contemporized adaptation of the book?
It's literally a bunch of boys stuck on an island.
Does that need a lot of updating?
It's not like you're updating Shakespeare or something and you have to update the language.
It's not like there are a bunch of cultural totems in Lord of the Flies.
Literally, there is a conch shell.
That is the entirety of the props in Lord of the Flies.
Okay, there's like a pig head.
That's pretty much it.
I guess they can have Lena- they're the glasses, that's true.
Thank you, Taylor.
I guess that you could theoretically cast Lena Dunham as Piggy, which might make some sense, but David Siegel says, we want to do a faithful but contemporized adaptation of the book.
It says, it is a timeless story that is especially relevant today with the interpersonal conflicts and bullying and the idea of children forming a society and replicating the behavior they saw in grown-ups before they were marooned.
That really is not what the book is about.
The book is really not about that.
If you've read the book, the book is really not about them imitating the adults.
The point of the book is they get to the island and they realize there are no adults here.
We can do whatever we want.
That is the first three chapters of the book.
Have they even read it?
The entire point of the book is that man without civilization descends into anarchy and violence.
That's the entire point of the stupid book.
And the book isn't stupid, but this is ridiculous.
McGee, he says, the subject matter is aggressively suspenseful and taking the opportunity to tell it in a way that hasn't been told before with girls rather than boys is that it shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew.
It breaks away from some of the conventions, the way we think of boys and aggression.
We don't think of boys in aggression.
Boys are aggressive.
Okay?
I have a girl and I have a boy.
The girl is three and a half years old.
She is calm.
She is delightful.
She is not aggressive.
I have a boy who is a year and a half old.
I love him very much.
He is awesome.
He also will beat the living crap out of you if you cross him.
Okay?
He's a boy.
That's what they do.
That's just what they are.
People still talk about the movie and the book from the standpoint of pure storytelling.
It is a great adventure story, real entertainment, but it has a lot of meaning embedded in it as well.
We've gotten to think about this a while as the rights were worked out, and we're super eager to put pen to paper.
So, they say, uh, this is just ridiculous.
Okay, a few things about this that are particularly ridiculous.
First of all, Boys and girls are not the same.
This is one of my pet peeves in film.
It's one of the reasons I think I said on the show, "Atomic Blonde" failed.
I think the reason "Atomic Blonde" failed is because the character could have been a man and there would have been no difference to the story at all.
Like legitimately down to the seduction of a woman.
Like there's literally no difference in "Atomic Blonde" between her being a man and her being a woman.
Any movie where there's no difference in the main characters, like an action movie that actually implicates the differences between men and women, Any movie that focuses on men and women being exactly substitutable, being exactly the same, it just does not work that way.
It doesn't work for the viewer because the viewer knows there are differences between boys and girls.
Here's the fact, okay?
The movie would not work in any real sense because girls do not act the same as boys.
Quick question for you.
How many physical fights, not like yelling at each other and then crying on the phone fights, like physical fights have most girls been in?
Most girls have been in very, very few physical fights, if any.
The vast majority of girls that I know haven't been in any physical fights.
How many fights have the vast majority of boys been in?
The answer is probably greater than five.
Boys, particularly young boys, fight with each other all the time.
They have physical fights with each other.
Their arguments escalate to physical aggression in short order in a way that girls don't.
Girls don't sit around smacking each other in the face, okay?
That's not what girls do.
When I was in law school, there was a group of guys who would legitimately go to bars, get drunk, and sock each other in the balls.
This was like their way of having fun.
Okay, the idea that girls, like, I've never heard of girls doing this.
Okay, guys are much more aggressive than girls, which is why guys join the army and murder each other.
This is why the vast majority of murderers in every culture in history have been men.
The idea that women and men are exactly the same is stupid.
They don't even group the same way.
You know what would happen if a bunch of girls got stuck on an island together?
First of all, they would actually share and talk about their feelings, because they like that stuff.
Guys don't like that stuff.
Half of the beginning of Lord of the Flies is the guys don't want to share feelings, and Piggy wants to share feelings, so they murder him.
Okay, so that's legitimately what happens in the book.
If a girl tries to share her feelings in an island with a bunch of other girls who are just shipwrecked, they will sit around and bond over this.
That's what they will do.
Beyond that, girls don't tend to break into giant groups.
They don't break into giant tribes.
There have been studies that have shown this.
There was one from the National Institute of Health that came out.
Just recently.
And what they found is that girls actually like to get together in sort of best friend forever circumstances.
They have a very close-knit circle of friends, right?
They have, girls will have their best friend and that's it, right?
Guys will get together in packs and they roam around in packs.
That's what they do.
Because guys are basically just chimpanzees, like male chimpanzees.
They walk around in packs.
That's what happens in Lord of the Flies.
They break down into packs, and then they fight each other.
Because men are looking for physical safety from other men, and so they band together to provide that physical safety for one another.
Girls in the absence of guys are not deeply worried about other girls physically attacking them, and so they only need somebody with whom they can spiritually and mentally bond.
That's what they are looking for.
This is why guys don't understand girls and girls don't understand guys.
When guys get angry and when guys get upset, guys get silent.
When girls get angry and upset, they get very talkative.
Girls actually want to talk about their feelings.
They want to talk about what's upsetting them.
Guys tend to go quiet, and then girls are like, why won't you talk to me?
It's like, because this is what guys do.
Guys and girls are largely... This doesn't mean every guy and every girl.
These are generalizations.
But these generalizations exist for a reason and are scientifically backed.
There's a study conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health and Georgia State University, and what they found is that girls, again, like to get together in one-on-one relationships with BFFs, and boys are more attuned to group dynamics and competition.
That's not something that girls are that interested in engaging in.
Beyond that, boys don't like sharing.
Girls like sharing.
This is according to the APA, the American Psychological Association.
Quote, Yes, this is correct. this is correct.
This is what men think.
When people want to share feelings, we're like, shut up!
No one cares!
Okay, when girls want to share feelings, they think sharing feelings makes social bonds stronger.
Girls are right on this, and guys are wrong, but guys are right that if you spend all your time sharing your feelings, nothing gets done.
Okay, but this is why you have societal breakdown in Lord of the Flies, because it's not a bunch of guys sitting around and talking about how sad it is that some of their friends just drowned, and how they wish they could get back to civilization, and how much they miss their parents.
It's a bunch of guys going, I don't want to talk about that crap, let's go kill a pig!
Right?
That's what Lord of the Flies is.
So, the reason I'm upset about this is, once again, Hollywood is trying to promote this idea that boys and girls are the same.
Boys and girls are not the same, and people who say that boys and girls are the same are super, super stupid in every possible way.
Boys and girls are not the same.
Boys can't become girls.
Girls can't become boys.
There are some boys who tend toward more feminine behavior, and some girls who tend toward more masculine behavior, but on the whole, there are massive differences, and just plopping girls into boys' roles doesn't do the trick.
It's, it's so annoying.
I mean, can you imagine, like, how about in all-male beaches?
Right, I mean, as long as we're gonna be just substituting sexes, how about we just do all-male beaches, you know, with, like, Bette Midler?
How bad would that movie be?
Right, about as bad as an all-female Lord of the Flies.
Do you really want a movie that has in it Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey and Mayim Bialik and then instead you have like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone?
They're just sitting around talking about their feelings and there's a picture on the piano of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone in the poster for the film?
Yeah, I didn't think so either.
God, people.
Can we understand that human beings like watching human beings act like the actual human beings that they see in real life?
They don't want women who act like men.
It's one thing—this is not to say women can't be action stars, right?
If you watch Aliens, then you see Ripley, right?
You see Sigourney Weaver picking up the mantle of what could be a male action part, but the whole point is because everyone else is dead and there's no one there to save her, right?
She has to fulfill that role.
This happens in real life too, and that's why it rings true.
Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, she's also forced into the circumstance.
Like the transition between Linda Hamilton in Terminator 1 and Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 is really fascinating.
In Terminator 1, she's a very feminine character who's being protected by this guy who has come to protect her unborn child, right?
Protect her from being murdered.
And so she's a very feminine character.
In Terminator 2, there's no one there to protect her, and so she has to step up into it herself.
It's not the same thing as saying that Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 should have been Linda Hamilton in Terminator 1 and told the guy who came back from the future to go, screw himself, she can protect herself.
That would be a dumb movie.
No one would watch that movie because it would be stupid.
Okay.
Meanwhile, on a less light note, President Trump traveled to Missouri yesterday to talk about taxes.
I want to talk about that.
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Okay, so President Trump was on the campaign trail yesterday.
I mean, that's basically what it was.
He went over to Missouri and he gave a speech about taxes.
Now, a lot of people on the left were very upset about this notion that Trump was talking taxes in the middle of the hurricane.
I know people on the right did some of the same stuff with Obama.
Do I think it's a huge deal that he made a speech on taxes in the middle of the hurricane?
I don't.
Do I think he should have delayed it?
Probably.
It just, it seems like a little, not untoward so much, but just, it doesn't seem like great timing.
If you want to make headlines about taxes, don't do it in the middle of the worst natural disaster in, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the country.
But, do I think it's a huge deal?
I really don't.
Trump demonstrated some of that fabled empathy that the media says he has none of in his speech in Missouri.
Here's what he had to say.
I was on the ground in Texas yesterday to meet with Governor Abbott, who is doing, by the way, an incredible job, and local officials so that we could coordinate the very big and unprecedented federal response.
In difficult times such as these, we see the true character of the American people, their strength, their love, and their resolve.
We see friend helping friend, neighbor helping neighbor, and stranger helping stranger.
And together, we will endure and we will overcome.
Okay, all of that's fine.
I don't see a huge problem with any of that, and of course everything that he is saying there is fine and good.
There are people saying he seems insincere.
I hate this kind of analysis.
I think it's really dumb.
This kind of stuff where it's like, oh, we're gonna read his brain, okay?
There's not, like, a huge amount of stuff to read there in any case.
The idea that we're gonna sit around reading, you know, his emotions on Hurricane Harvey I just find absolutely asinine.
Okay, and then he gets into the real tax reform talk, and I'm going to explain what I think is right and what is wrong here.
He says that this is the opportunity to deliver real tax reform, and he's committed to working on it.
So this is our once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver real tax reform for everyday hardworking Americans, and I am fully committed to working with Congress to get this job done, and I don't want to be disappointed by Congress, do you understand?
Okay, so he's ripping on Congress, which is fully his prerogative.
You know, I think that it's actually not a bad thing for him to be ripping on Congress.
McConnell and Ryan didn't get the job done on healthcare.
But, once again, what you're going to see is that Trump is running into some serious problems here because he doesn't know specifics and he doesn't care about specifics.
Just as with healthcare, he seems to be laying out these broad guidelines and then suggesting that Ryan and McConnell have to hash them out themselves.
They've proved themselves incompetent at that.
That means that Trump actually has to get his hands dirty.
This is the problem with having someone who legitimately is not only not a policy wonk, he doesn't even have a bunch of people who surround him who are real policy wonks on taxes.
Like, who's gonna pitch this thing?
Jared Nivanka?
Who's gonna pitch this thing?
Steve Mnuchin, who was a Democrat until five minutes ago?
Gary Cohn, who's still a Democrat as far as I know?
So some of the stuff that he says about taxes I think is correct.
I mean he talks about getting rid of loopholes and complexity.
He talks about lowering the competitive tax code.
This is clip four where he talks about getting rid of some of the upper tax brackets on corporate tax rates.
Second, we need a competitive tax code that creates more jobs and higher wages for Americans.
It's time to give American workers the pay raise that they've been looking for for many, many years.
Okay, so again, that's about right.
I mean, everything he's saying there is correct.
We do have some of the highest business rates among developed nations.
You know, the average business tax rate has fallen, as Trump says, from 45% to 24% in developed nations, and we are at 35%.
Corporations pay a lot less than that in their effective tax rate, but that's because they're doing what everyone does.
They're taking every deduction.
They're moving jobs offshore.
They are moving their money offshore.
They are reverse merging with companies outside the United States.
They don't have to pay American tax rates.
So yes, we have to do all those things.
He talks about his sort of theory of how we are going to bring about economic growth with tax cuts.
Here's clip five.
We will lower taxes for middle-income Americans so they can keep more of their hard-earned paychecks.
And they can do lots of things with those paychecks.
And that really means buying product ideally made in this country.
This is a theory that's often put out about tax cuts in general to the middle class.
First of all, the middle class is not the hardest hit bracket by any stretch of the imagination by taxes in the United States.
It is the upper class that is hit by the top tax brackets.
They are destroyed by the top tax brackets.
The top 5% of income earners, let me look up the exact statistics, They pay, I believe, something like 30% of all taxes.
The top 1% is according to CNBC, not exactly a right-wing source.
The top earning 1% of Americans pay half of federal income taxes for 2014.
That's a pretty astonishing statistic.
They will pay 45.7% of all individual income taxes in 2014.
That is up from 43% in 2013 and 40% in 2012.
individual income taxes in 2014.
That is up from 43% in 2013 and 40% in 2012.
The bottom 80% of Americans are expected to pay only 15% of all federal income tax.
So the idea that it's the middle class tax cut that boosts the economy is not true.
What boosts the economy is people who have money to invest in the creation of new products and services actually doing that and creating jobs.
Right?
We here at The Daily Wire have created an enormous number of jobs.
Why?
Because we have funders who are billionaires who decided to invest that capital in building a new company and trying to generate more profit.
And in generating that new profit, That has made people who work for the company more wealthy.
It's made people who work for the company more employed.
You know, all of this is how economics actually works.
No one has ever worked for a poor person.
It doesn't work that way.
You don't get hired by a poor person.
Even middle class people, it's good that they should have more money in their pocket that they earned, just as a moral principle.
But the way that economics really moves forward, the reason you have better products and services for the same dollars you used to spend on an iPhone 3, you're now spending on an iPhone 7, is because there are people at the top who are actually directing those funds toward investment.
So we must, we have no choice, we must lower our taxes.
the buying of things, right?
There's actually a Keynesian view that Trump is espousing there of taxes.
And Trump is using the tax issue to stump against Democrats.
Here's Trump bashing Claire McCaskill, who's the senator from Missouri.
So we must, we have no choice.
We must lower our taxes.
And your senator, Claire McCaskill, she must do this for you.
And if she doesn't do it for you, you have to vote her out of office.
The problem here is that Trump is not really going to take a leadership role with Congress, which is what he needs to do.
He was elected on the back of the idea that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are untrustworthy.
They need to be led around like dogs with a leash, okay?
They cannot be allowed to run the show.
And yet Trump has basically abdicated and said to them, you guys handle it and I'll just go out and stump for it.
I don't think that's going to work here.
I don't think that that's going to be an effective tactic.
You know, there are a bunch of people who are Trump supporters who are upset with him that if he's going to use his political capital, why is he using it on tax cuts in the first place?
Ann Coulter has been going after Trump very hard.
She says this is a tone-deaf speech.
Why is he paying attention to Wall Street?
Why is he paying attention to all of this?
We'll explain why corporate tax rates need to come down in a second.
But a lot of his base is not particularly concerned with this.
And Republicans in Congress, it's a question as to why they're going to get this together.
Senator Mike Lee from Utah, he said, listen, if we don't get tax reform, we're dead.
Of course, Republicans had been saying the same thing about Obamacare repeal, and they didn't get that either.
The American people elected us expecting us to repeal Obamacare and bring about tax reform.
We haven't repealed Obamacare.
If we don't get tax reform done, we're dead.
We might as well fold up our tent and go home.
Okay, well, they keep saying that, except for the Democrats continue to suck at their jobs, so it almost doesn't matter what Republicans do in any of this.
They can continue to stink at their jobs and nothing major will happen.
Now, what's interesting is that the Democrats, in stinking at their jobs, have come down along two lines.
One version of the Democrats, they say, let's hold our fire.
Let's keep our powder dry.
Let's wait till Trump makes a big boo-boo, and then we can jump on him with both feet.
And the other group of Democrats are the people who are still rabid over the last election, and they are interested in tearing down Trump every day.
Dianne Feinstein, who's a much more clever Democrat than most of them.
She's my senator out here in California.
I think she's a garbage senator, but she's a clever woman.
And here's what she had to say about President Trump that kind of shocked her own constituents when she was doing an event out here in California.
Look, this man is going to be president most likely for the rest of this term.
I just hope he has the ability to learn and to change.
And if he does, he can be a good president.
And that's my hope.
Okay, so she said she hopes he's a good president.
This is anathema for a lot of people on the left, but she's smart.
By saying this, it allows her to draw distance from him when he actually does something wrong.
It sounds like she's propping him up, but she's just gonna kick that, that crutch away as soon as it becomes convenient to do so.
This is the smart version of what Democrats are doing.
Here's the dumb version of what Democrats are doing.
Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, says that he would support Trump, except that Trump's a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad racist.
He had two factions in the White House.
You had one faction that actually had some of the policies that we would have supported on trade and infrastructure, but they turned out to be racist.
And on the other hand, you had people that weren't racist, but they were Wall Streeters.
Okay, so the idea that all the people he was trying to do business with, they were all a bunch of terrible, horrible racists.
Again, it's kind of funny hearing this from a lot of these unions like the AFL-CIO.
There are major union issues in the first part of the 20th century, and most of the 20th century actually, in which the unions would not allow black people to join because it was considered a union against a lot of the freed slaves.
who were going to swamp the labor market.
That's what the union was designed to do, actually.
For example, the Pullman car strike in the late 19th century was designed to keep black people out of jobs, so it's funny to hear the unions talk about their lack of racism.
Okay, so, I want to get to some things I like and then some things I hate, and then I want to get to the big idea today, because today is a Thursday, which means we talk about a big idea.
Okay, so, let's do some things that I like.
So, the thing that I like today, I've been talking philosophy all week.
I stumbled on this new podcast that's been featured over at iTunes, and I really, really enjoy it.
It's called Philosophize This, and the guy who hosts it is not a university professor.
His name is Stephen West.
He is a guy who really knows how to bring the philosophers sort of down to root level.
You don't have to have a PhD in order to listen to this podcast and understand it.
He goes through all of the major philosophers, discusses their major views in a really user-friendly way.
I really enjoy this podcast.
I think that it's really terrific.
I actually reached out to him, and it was kind of funny.
I reached out to him just to tell him I enjoyed his work.
I do this a lot with folks whose work I enjoy.
And he actually wrote back and said, I listen to your show, too.
I'm a big fan.
So thanks, Stephen.
I appreciate it.
Go give it a listen.
It's a really good education.
And if you look at the episodes, then you will see that he goes through everything from Marx.
Right now he's doing the Frankfurt School, actually.
So that's pretty fascinating.
He's talked about Ayn Rand.
He's talked about Sartre.
He's talked about Aristotle.
He goes all the way back to the beginnings of Western history.
He goes into Eastern philosophy, talks about Heidegger.
I mean, it's really eclectic, and he's done a really good job, I think, popularizing what are some pretty abstruse philosophies.
As I said yesterday about reading some of these philosophers in their original language, or at least translations, is that most of them are really crappy writers.
A lot of them really don't know how to write very well at all.
And so sometimes you're better off hearing a good summary from somebody who's read them and understands them, and that's what this podcast is – Highly recommended.
Philosophize this.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, as you recall, there was a white supremacist neo-nazi guy named Christopher Cantwell.
You remember him.
We talked about him after the Charlottesville attacks.
There was tape of him talking to this reporter from Vice with enormous glasses, in which Christopher Cantwell described his point of view on life.
I'm here to spread ideas, talk, in the hopes that somebody more capable will come along and do that.
Somebody like Donald Trump, who does not give his daughter to a Jew.
So Donald Trump, but, like, more racist.
A lot more racist than Donald Trump.
I don't think that you could feel about race the way I do and watch that Kushner bitch walk around with that beautiful girl.
We're here obeying the law.
We're doing everything that we're supposed to do, trying to express opinions.
And the criminals are over there getting their way.
And that is a foundational problem in our society.
And whatever you think of my opinions, that's going to be something that puts you in danger.
Yeah, and that is because this city is run by Jewish communists and criminal... That's exactly what it is.
You're the true non-violent protester.
Nice guy.
You know, really, really just a charming fellow.
So yesterday, he did an interview with the Daily Beast, and here's what he said.
When I come down here for a permitted demonstration, championed by the ACLU, where the police are supposed to be clearing our enemies for our path, and then I find myself involved in a riot facing 20 years in prison, I got emotional, shockingly enough.
One minute I'm an effing white supremacist terrorist, and the next minute I'm an effing crybaby.
I'm a GD human being.
So the reason that I put this in things I like rather than things I hate is because I think there is something to this.
When I say there's something to this, I don't mean that he's a victim.
I mean that bad people are human beings.
We have a tendency as human beings to take people who we think are absolute crap human beings and say, that's a monster, that person's a monster.
You notice on the show I never call people monsters.
The reason I don't call people monsters is because monsters don't exist.
Okay, there are evil people, but there's still people.
And the reason that that's an important distinction is because we should all recognize that deep down in the cockles of our little hearts, we all have the capacity for evil, which is why we have to constantly be examining ourselves.
Are we doing things because we think that they are actually forwarding good purposes?
Are we treating people as means rather than ends?
Are we looking at the world in the most rational possible way?
Or are we attempting to just justify our own nasty biases about other people in order to justify the actions that we take?
We all have the capacity.
I mean, it's sad to say this, but we all have the capacity to become somebody like Christopher Cantwell.
One of the things that drives me absolutely up a wall is whenever people discuss the Nazi period, they treat it as though it was like a collective psychosis just came over Germans.
Like they were just sitting there one day and then boom, a miasma of insanity hit the German people and they were all Nazis murdering Jews.
That's not how evil works, okay?
It didn't work that way in the Soviet Union.
It didn't work that way in Germany.
There are a lot of people who you would consider very good who went along with Hitler because they thought they were doing the right thing for their country.
There are a lot of very good people who went along with the Confederacy because they thought that they were doing the right thing and it turned out they were believing something really evil in order to justify their own behavior.
Everyone has the capacity to be evil, okay?
This is the difference between the religious, and by the way, scientific worldview, and the sort of post-enlightenment, rationalistic, secular humanist worldview.
The post-enlightenment worldview of the secular humanist is that human beings were created to do good.
It's only our circumstances, our social environment that has made us bad.
If it weren't for that social environment, we would have the capacity to rise to the stars.
The religious worldview says we are born essentially sinful creatures.
There are limitations to our good.
We can try to overcome them.
The Jewish view is that your good side and your bad side are basically fighting it out.
There's something called the Yetzer Hara, which is your desire to do evil.
And then there's your Yetzer Hatov, which is your desire to do good.
And those are in constant conflict with one another.
That notion is a lot closer to the scientific notion of what human beings are.
We are not blank slates, as John Locke actually thought.
We are much more akin to The sort of pre-written vehicles that David Hume or Immanuel Kant talked about.
These folks who thought that we were stamped with the imprimatur of nature and God, and that means that we are capable of both good and evil.
We can all become this piece of garbage, okay?
He is a human being.
He is a human being.
That's not a recommendation for him.
It's a warning to us.
Okay, the label human being isn't a recommendation of evil human beings.
It's a warning to us that we can become evil human beings.
So that's why I put this in things I like.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So Michael Eric Dyson, who I believe is a professor over at Georgetown, he was giving a speech yesterday, and once again, he's trotting out this same nonsense that he used to say about Mitt Romney, that if Donald Trump doesn't like you, it's just because you're black.
So he suggests that Donald Trump doesn't like Barack Obama, not because he disagreed with Barack Obama or thought he was a bad president, but because he hated the fact that a black man was in charge.
The reason we are here is to remind this nation that God is still on the throne.
That no matter how much power you think you got, you ain't God.
Now let's be real, we ain't said much about it today, but we know part of the problem going on now is cause one guy in office hated the guy who came before him.
You just mad a negro was in charge.
The anti-blackness that we see manifest with lethal ferocity and troubling reality is mirrored in the fact that he just hate the fact that a black man was in charge.
Smarter than you.
Don't go tired of this nonsense.
Maybe Trump just didn't like Obama because he didn't like Obama and he doesn't like lots of people.
This attempt by the left to paint everything as racist, including the things that Republicans hate, everything Republicans hate is because of racism.
It has its natural outcome in cartoons like that idiotic cartoon that you saw at Politico or the one from Charlie Hebdo.
If you disagree with Michael Eric Dyson, it's because you must not like having a black guy in charge, not because you thought Obama was a crappy president.
Okay, I want to get right to the big ideas before we run out of time here.
So, I want to talk about taxes and why it is imperative to lower taxes.
Okay, so, this is something called the Laffer Curve.
This is a very famous thing.
I'm going to explain to you what this means.
Okay, basically the Laffer Curve, which is something that an economist named Art Laffer basically drew up on the back of a napkin to show to the Reagan administration, and this became sort of their guiding policy.
What he said is, if you are, there's tax rates, zero to a hundred percent, and then there's tax revenue, how much the government takes in.
If you go to 0%, the government takes in $0, right?
Because if you take 0% of anybody's income, the government has no money.
If you take 100% of everybody's income, the government also has $0 because people just stop producing.
Why would you produce for a government that's just going to take your money anyway, without compulsion?
That's what the Laffer Curve shows.
So he says, is there some point in the middle of that curve where you reach maximum possible tax revenue brought into the government?
And what you see is that, historically speaking, every time taxes are dramatically decreased, income to the government, revenue to the government goes up.
So, when tax rates were slashed dramatically during the 1920s, dropping from over 70% to less than 25%, personal income tax revenues increased substantially.
Revenues rose from $719 million in 1921 to $1.164 billion in 1928, an increase of 61%.
In the 60s, same thing.
John F. Kennedy lowered tax rate reductions, moved the top tax rate down from 90% to 70%.
Tax revenues climbed from $94 billion in 1961 to $153 billion in 1968, an increase of 62%.
John F. Kennedy lowered tax rate reductions, moved the top tax rate down from 90% to 70%.
Tax revenues climbed from $94 billion in 1961 to $153 billion in 1968, an increase of 62%, still 33% increase after adjusting for inflation.
Under the Reagan tax cut, the tax revenues received by the government rose from $517 billion to $909 billion in 1988.
That's because of the Laffer curve, right?
The idea is that we're too far over toward the right side of this chart.
Well, if this is behind me, the left side of this chart.
We're too far over toward the left side of this chart, and therefore, we have to move back toward the place labeled T. And that's almost always true, because the government is always going to be on the side of taking too much revenue, not too little.
The problem with the Laffer Curve is that people have begun using the Laffer Curve as an excuse for what tax rates ought to be.
Well, you see, a lower tax rate would be better because the government can then take in more money.
The Laffer Curve is a defensive argument for conservatives, not an offensive argument.
The argument in favor of lowering taxes is not, we want the government to have more money.
The argument in favor of lowering taxes is that you deserve to keep your own money because you're going to use your money better than the government will.
And then if somebody says, well, that's going to lower the amount of money the government has to spend, then you say, well, no, not necessarily.
If you move the tax rate down, the government can still take in more money because the economy grows as a whole.
But people have started using this on the right as an offensive argument.
You see, we should lower taxes because then the government can take in more money.
The problem with this is the Democrats always have the easier argument, which is they say, well, what if we just, what if we're actually below that point T?
What if we just move the point T up?
What if we just move the tax rate up?
Because maybe we're actually on the wrong side of this curve.
Maybe if we move the tax rate up, then we'll hit the point where we've reached maximum government revenue.
So, this is a defensive argument, not an offensive argument to be used.
But the idea that lowering taxes inherently leads to deficits is not true long run.
In the short term, it's true, because anytime you lower the amount of money that you're taxing from people, in the next year, you're gonna get less money.
But, over the next five years, you'll get more money, because the pie itself will expand.
This is what they call dynamic scoring.
When you hear people talking about Congressional Budget Office views, Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest updates, and we'll do the mailbag.
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