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Sept. 20, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:23
Should Jimmy Kimmel Be Appointed King Of Health Care? | Ep. 387
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Jimmy Kimmel goes off on Republicans over their new Obamacare repeal and replacement bill.
Will Rand Paul vote for it?
Plus, President Trump goes to the UN.
We do a full analysis.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so I have a lot to say about Jimmy Kimmel's monologue last night.
Jimmy Kimmel has sort of become the face of the quote-unquote moral movement for socialized medicine in the United States because his son underwent a heart procedure over at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.
And I have a lot to say about this.
I want to go through his monologue in some detail today because I think that it is indicative of where our healthcare debate is.
That this is a serious piece of the healthcare debate now.
I don't think that it should be, because I think that we have a tendency in our politics to identify people going through a difficult time, people having experienced something, with having expertise on that particular topic.
And I don't think that's actually correct.
I think the best arguments need to be used, not the best emotional appeals.
But, I'll get to all of that in just a second.
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Okay, so.
And the big story today is the continued push, the late stage push for Obamacare, quote, repeal and replacement.
So first things first, this is not an Obamacare replacement or repeal.
It is an Obamacare cutback.
That's good.
You know, that's a step in the right direction.
I think that the Cassidy-Graham bill has a lot of flaws in it.
I don't think that it's going to lower premiums all that much, but it does pare away at the underlying structure of Obamacare, particularly a funding mechanism, which means That you're going to have a situation where state governments are forced to relieve the regulations or absorb the higher prices of insurance.
And that's not a bad thing.
Yesterday I went through in some detail what exactly the Cassidy-Graham bill is.
So if you missed it, go back to yesterday's show and listen to it so I don't have to spend ten minutes explaining exactly what's in the new version.
Basically, Republicans have to pass this thing by September 30th or they run into a hard deadline.
Because the way that this works is that under reconciliation rules, all bills have to be revenue neutral.
The only way that you can tell whether a bill is revenue neutral is if you've already passed a budget.
The current budget expires on December 30th, but for purposes of evaluation, it expires on September 30th.
And that means that they have to pass something in the next week and a half.
So they're really trying to ram this thing through quickly right now.
And that means the Democrats are starting to push back in pretty hard measure.
Now, their main point of pushback is that this is mean and cruel and cuts coverage and pre-existing conditions go away.
And all the rest of it.
First thing to know about pre-existing conditions.
When we say insurance will be forced to cover pre-existing conditions, there are a couple problems here.
Number one, insurance costs skyrocket because obviously you can't cover somebody's new conditions or conditions that already exist without having to charge them or the government more money.
And number two, if they don't increase the insurance reimbursement rates to doctors, doctors stop taking the insurance altogether.
This is why Medicare for All, Medicaid for All, it really misses a big key component here, which is doctors don't take Medicaid and Medicare in increasing numbers because the reimbursement rates are too low.
So all the talk about pre-existing conditions, it's one of those things where it's the government saying something that sounds nice, but it doesn't necessarily accomplish what it's seeking to accomplish.
It's like the South African constitution guaranteeing a right to housing, but nobody has a house.
Here you can guarantee that people with pre-existing conditions are covered, but coverage does not equal care.
Coverage does not equal care, and it certainly does not mean decreased cost for everybody else.
That's why the Affordable Care Act was so stupidly named.
It has not made care more affordable in any way, shape, or form.
So Bill Cassidy, if you recall, was the senator from Louisiana.
I criticized him at the time.
He went on Jimmy Kimmel's show on ABC News, or on ABC late night, and he said that he wanted to fulfill what he called the Jimmy Kimmel test.
Now the reason that there was the quote-unquote Jimmy Kimmel test is because Jimmy Kimmel has a son and when the son was born they detected a congenital heart abnormality and they brought him to Children's Hospital of Los Angeles where they performed emergency open-heart surgery, saved his life and presumably his son is doing fine, thank God.
All of which is wonderful.
And demonstrates, by the way, the flexibility and availability of healthcare in the United States that people can get immediate heart surgery.
And by the way, that's not restricted to Jimmy Kimmel.
Let's be clear about something.
Children's Hospital of L.A.
does these kinds of surgeries on poor kids all the time.
I know this because my wife has rotated through Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.
Not only do I know that, I also know how good the care is there.
Because my daughter had open heart surgery at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.
In fact, the same doctor, Vaughn Starnes, who took care of Jimmy Kimmel's kid, took care of my kid.
So I've had some experience with this as well.
Well, Bill Cassidy, you'll recall, the senator from Louisiana, appeared with Jimmy Kimmel, and on Jimmy Kimmel, Kimmel tried to define What he wants, the Jimmy Kimmel test, as everybody needs to be covered all the time for everything.
And Bill Cassidy sort of shied away from that, and now Kimmel is mad.
So, first of all, Cassidy says, look, what we're doing here is an attempt to make healthcare more available.
And he's right, okay?
Making healthcare more available means that you have to have a better market system.
It means you have to have a better system where prices are transparent, where doctors are encouraged to go into the market and compete for the customer with the lowest available price, where quality goes up and price goes down, just like in every other market.
And Bill Cassidy says this.
Here's what Senator Cassidy had to say about the notion that he wasn't fulfilling the so-called Kimmel test.
In your efforts to do this again, will it pass the Jimmy Kimmel test?
Absolutely.
There'll be more people covered under the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson Amendment than are under status quo, and we protect those with pre-existing conditions.
There'll be billions of dollars for coverage for working families in states like Maine, Virginia, Missouri, Florida, and elsewhere.
States that have been bypassed by Obamacare, but under Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson, those folks will have insurance.
So the way Cassidy originally stated the quote-unquote Jimmy Kimmel test was, would the child born with a congenital heart disease be able to get everything she or he would need in that first year of life even if they go over a certain amount?
The problem with framing it that way, and this is always Cassidy's fault and Kimmel's fault, the problem with framing it that way is that you are assuming that it is the government's job to do all of these things or that the government is best positioned to do all of these things.
The government is not best positioned to do all of these things.
As I say, there are a lot of people on Medicaid who are not getting the kind of care that they need, specifically because if you're on Medicaid, that doesn't mean that a doctor is forced to take your Medicaid.
Beyond that, the notion that Vaughn Starnes, the doctor who operated on Kimmel's kid and my kid, is sitting around rejecting poor kids is just not true.
Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, the hospital where Kimmel went, that hospital is a charity hospital.
That means they have an endowment of something like $200 million.
People give enormous sums of charity to Children's Hospital.
We give some every year.
I know Jimmy Kimmel gives some every year.
That charity goes toward helping these kids.
The idea that it's the government's job to do this or that it lowers healthcare costs in general by doing this and makes it more available is just not true.
In fact, many patients at CHLA who are getting these sorts of surgeries don't have Medicaid at all.
A lot of them are illegal immigrants.
Again, I know this because my wife has worked at CHLA.
So, you know, this is my problem.
Okay, so I've been kind of hitting Jimmy Kimmel without letting him speak for himself.
So here is Jimmy Kimmel and I want to go through his monologue in some detail here because I think that it is important.
I think that we have fallen into the trap of suggesting that because we have Sympathy for somebody's personal situation, we grant credence to a logic that doesn't really work.
I'm not an expert on healthcare or whatever expertise I have on healthcare does not arise because my daughter had a heart surgery.
It arises because of the fact that I've actually studied the issues.
It's because my wife works as a doctor in this system and knows the system intimately.
That's where I get whatever expertise I have.
The notion that we have in our society is so stupid now that if you are the victim of something, that makes you an expert on that issue, right?
If you're a victim of terror, now you're a terrorism expert.
That's not the way that it works.
In fact, in medicine, it's precisely the reverse.
If you're a doctor and you're told to operate on your child, you're supposed to not operate on your child because the idea is it actually distracts you from being able to concentrate on the issue at hand.
But because of the merger of entertainment and politics, we've basically said that those whose hearts are the fullest, we're just going to grant that their brains are also the fullest.
I don't think that that's necessarily true.
In any case, here is Jimmy Kimmel going after Bill Cassidy last night with alacrity.
A few months ago, after my son had open-heart surgery, which was something I spoke about on the air, a politician, a senator named Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, was on my show and he wasn't very honest.
It seemed like he was being honest.
He got a lot of credit and attention for coming off like a rare, reasonable voice in the Republican Party when it came to healthcare.
For coming up with something he called, and I didn't name it this, he named it this, the Jimmy Kimmel test, which was, in a nutshell, no family should be denied medical care, emergency or otherwise, because they can't afford it.
He agreed to that.
He said he would only support a healthcare bill that made sure a child like mine would get the health coverage he needs no matter how much money his parents make.
Okay, pause it there for one second.
So first of all, that test is not fulfilled by Obamacare.
Okay, the test that everyone can get coverage no matter if they can afford it or not is not fulfilled by Obamacare.
In fact, it's not fulfilled by any system.
There is no system on planet Earth that fulfills the notion that you get care for anything that you need at any time regardless of cost.
This system does not exist.
It doesn't exist in France where they have rationing and serious debt problems.
It doesn't exist in Japan where they're increasingly facing rationing and serious debt problems.
It doesn't exist in Canada.
It doesn't exist in the UK.
It doesn't exist anywhere.
The systems where it does exist the best, places like Switzerland, are places where they mandate that you spend a significant percentage of your income from the time you are very young on health insurance.
And you buy it.
The government picks up the slack, but you buy it in the initial instance.
And the truth is that even in systems that tend to work somewhat decently like Australia, what you basically have is a baseline, basic health care system.
And then it is on you to purchase the over-the-top health care system.
And so it's on you to purchase the comprehensive health care insurance that Kimmel is talking about.
So what he's talking about, this test, it doesn't really work in real life because there is no such thing as a system that takes care of everybody for free.
It just doesn't.
You're going to have to actually spend enormous sums of money or you're going to have to ration care.
Those are the only ways to do this.
And this has been true in every system ever.
Okay, it's not a rip on Kimmel It's just a rip on his logic because his logic here is not correct.
Okay, he continues Uh, have, uh, annual or lifetime caps.
These insurance companies, they want caps to limit how much they can pay out.
So our current plan protects Americans from these caps and prevents insurance providers from jacking up the rates for people who have pre-existing conditions, uh, of all types.
And Senator Cassidy said his plan would do that too.
Okay, so he's making a couple of statements here.
The lifetime caps, and then he's making a statement about jacking up the rates for people with pre-existing conditions.
First of all, again, Just because you have a pre-existing condition and you have a crappy health insurance program does not mean a doctor is necessarily going to take that program.
Number two, how about all the other people?
Okay, the vast majority of people who get insurance do not have pre-existing conditions.
Those people are being forced to pay through the nose and a lot of them are opting not to buy insurance, which means what do they do?
They wait until they do get a pre-existing condition, then they buy insurance, which bankrupts the health insurance companies and drives up the cost of medical care.
Okay, so what he's talking about, again, all of these things sound great, you know, the insurance companies, they want to put lifetime caps.
These are options, okay?
You can buy an insurance program with no lifetime cap.
In fact, a huge number of people throughout the United States who have employer-based health insurance, where your employer buys your health insurance, it's like 90% of people who have health insurance have employer-based health insurance.
Those people, the vast majority of them probably don't even have a lifetime cap.
The vast majority of them probably have no cap because they're buying group insurance negotiated by your employer.
Again, facts and sloganeering are not quite the same thing.
Here, Jimmy Kimmel continues.
He's said all this on television many times.
So last week, Bill Cassidy and Senator Lindsey Graham proposed a new bill, the Graham-Cassidy bill.
And this new bill actually does pass the Jimmy Kimmel test, but a different Jimmy Kimmel test.
With this one, your child with a pre-existing condition will get the care he needs if, and only if, his father is Jimmy Kimmel.
Otherwise, you might be screwed.
Now, I don't know what happened.
Okay, this is utterly untrue.
Okay, so again, there's that joke there.
Utterly untrue.
Utterly untrue.
Von Sarnes performs hundreds of surgeries a year.
Okay, hundreds of them.
The idea that they're all Jimmy Kimmel.
I'm not as rich as Jimmy Kimmel.
Thank God I do well.
But I'm not as wealthy as Jimmy Kimmel is.
And when I was, you know, getting my daughter's surgery, my health insurance provider was provided by, at that time, Salem, which is the corporation where I used to have a radio show.
Okay, at that time I wasn't making nearly the amount of money that I'm making now, but we still got the surgery.
And again, there are plenty of people who are getting charity surgeries from Von Starnes at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.
Go and ask him.
It is a fact.
Okay, so this idea that all these people are being left out in the cold because of Bill Cassidy is just not true.
And again, Obamacare doesn't fulfill the basic preconditions that Jimmy Kimmel is talking about right now.
He does not get his health insurance through Obamacare.
Jimmy Kimmel gets his health insurance through ABC.
Okay, Jimmy Kimmel does not have any problems here.
And by the way, neither does anyone else who works at ABC, because they get their health insurance through ABC.
Virtually everybody in the United States who has health insurance is not buying in the individual market.
If you're talking about in the individual market, you must have choice to bring down cost and increase quality.
End of story.
You're going to continue with this, because again, I don't like the emotional appeal, and I'll discuss the emotional appeal a little bit more in one second, but first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birch Gold.
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Okay, so let's continue with Jimmy Kimmel and the analysis here because It really is a maddening thing to me that so many people in American political discourse are interested in playing this game where sympathy overrides logic.
Here's Jimmy Kimmel continuing along these lines.
You might be screwed.
Now, I don't know what happened to Bill Cassidy, but when he was on this publicity tour, he listed his demands for a health care bill very clearly.
These were his words.
He said he wants coverage for all, no discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, lower premiums for middle class families, and no lifetime caps.
And guess what?
The new bill?
Does none of those things.
Coverage for all?
No.
In fact it'll kick about 30 million Americans off insurance.
Pre-existing conditions?
No.
If the bill passes, individual states can let insurance companies charge you more if you have a pre-existing condition.
You'll find that little loophole later.
So Cassidy disagrees with this.
He suggests that states, in order to opt out, have to show that they have affordable options for people with pre-existing conditions.
As far as universality, Obamacare doesn't create universality.
There are millions of people who opted out of buying health insurance under Obamacare.
So Obamacare doesn't fulfill really either of these first two either.
And Cassidy is saying that with more options, people will be able to buy coverage for pre-existing conditions, which by the way is true.
You know, there are groups, group insurance programs in the individual market.
People have church associations where they go and they buy with their entire church health insurance.
This stuff does exist.
Okay, Kimmel continues.
After it says they can't.
They can and they will.
But will it lower premiums?
Well, in fact, for lots of people, the bill will result in higher premiums.
And as far as no lifetime caps go, the states can decide on that too, which means there will be lifetime caps in many states.
Okay, so finally, the idea of lifetime caps, states can opt.
Not to opt out of Obamacare.
They can.
Massachusetts will still keep that law with regard to no lifetime caps.
And when he talks about affordability, this has been the big problem with Obamacare.
It's driven up the cost of insurance.
So, Obamacare doesn't fulfill any of these preconditions either, but the idea that more market options is a problem It's because Jimmy Kimmel has a very simplistic view of what health insurance is supposed to be.
The government is supposed to cover everything, and all the problems are supposed to go away.
That doesn't exist anywhere on Earth, anywhere in history, nor will it exist anywhere in the future.
That's not how healthcare works.
That's not how healthcare works.
As I've said many times, there are three elements to healthcare.
Universality.
Everyone has it.
Affordability.
It's very affordable.
Quality.
The quality is very good.
You can have two of these three.
You cannot have all three.
Most government-run systems have universality.
And affordability to the individual but not affordability to the country and the quality kind of sucks because they have to ration.
There are some countries that have universality and quality but not affordability like Switzerland where you're paying a lot of money out of pocket to make sure that your insurance is covered.
America has quality and affordability but not universality.
And when I say affordability, I'm not talking about the fact that on a per capita level we spend a lot of money.
That's true because we opt for a lot more surgeries than people do abroad.
We have a lot more administrative hurdles than people do abroad.
The collective bargaining against the insurance companies is not as strong here as it is abroad because the government basically crams down pricing.
But that's because they have rationing.
It turns out that if you're rationing care, it's cheaper than if you don't ration care and people get to spend whatever kind of money they want on a particular surgery.
I mean, you get to walk in and demand an x-ray of your doctor.
This does not exist in a lot of socialized medicine countries.
It has to be mandated from the top down by the government.
Okay, so Kimmel continues.
Any state.
So, not only did Bill Cassidy fail the Jimmy Kimmel test, he failed the Bill Cassidy test.
He failed his own test.
And you don't see that happen very much.
This bill he came up with is actually worse than the one that, thank God, Republicans like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and John McCain torpedoed over the summer.
And I hope they have the courage and good sense to do that again with this one, because these other guys, who claim they want Americans to have better health care, even though eight years ago they didn't want anyone to have health care at all, They're trying to sneak this scam of a bill they cooked up in without an analysis from the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office.
They don't even want you to see it.
They're having one hearing.
I read the hearings being held in the Homeland Security Committee, which has nothing to do with health care, and the chairman agreed to allow two witnesses, Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham, to speak.
So listen, health care is complicated.
It's boring.
I don't want to talk about it.
The details are confusing.
And that's what these guys are relying on.
They're counting on you to be so overwhelmed with all the information, you just trust them to take care of you.
But they're not taking care of you.
They're taking care of the people who give them money, like insurance companies.
Okay, stop it right there.
So they're taking care of the people who take care of them, like insurance companies?
Insurance companies donated tens of millions of dollars to Obama's campaign in 2008 and 2012.
The insurance companies have been getting huge bailouts from the federal government on a regular basis under Obamacare.
Obamacare was federal government money going to all these insurance companies to pay them off for covering the pre-existing conditions.
And as far as Jimmy Kimmel complaining about the process, I agree there, by the way.
I agree with Jimmy Kimmel.
The process should be open.
The process should be clear.
It should be transparent.
It should also have been clear and transparent when Obama was doing it.
So that's not whataboutism, that's consistency.
It should have been clear and transparent when Obama did it.
It should be clear and transparent now under Trumpcare.
Okay, finally, Jimmy Kimmel ends up reading the phone number of Bill Cassidy and urging people to call their son.
Again, this is on late night TV, right?
I mean, this is a political diatribe in the middle of late night TV.
Jimmy Kimmel can do what he wants, right?
I mean, that's his prerogative.
But, in the end, what he ends up saying is that he acknowledges that he's exploiting his son's situation in order to push a certain political viewpoint, and then he justifies that by saying it has to be done.
We're all just looking at our Instagram accounts and liking things while they're voting on whether people can afford to keep their children alive or not.
Most of the congresspeople who voted on this bill probably won't even read it.
And they want us to do the same thing.
They want us to treat it like an iTunes service agreement.
And this guy, Bill Cassidy, just lied right to my face.
And I never imagined I would get involved in something like this.
This is not my area of expertise.
My area of expertise is eating pizza, and that's really about it.
But we can't let him do this to our children, and our senior citizens, and our veterans, or to any of us.
And by the way, before you post a nasty Facebook message saying I'm politicizing my son's health problems, I want you to know I am politicizing my son's health problems, because I have to.
My family has health insurance.
We don't have to worry about this, but other people do.
So you can shove your disgusting comments where your doctor won't be giving you a prostate exam once they take your health care benefits away.
It's truly, it's unbelievable.
Somehow, Japan and England and Canada, Germany, France, they all figured health care out.
And don't say they have terrible health care, because it's just not true.
This is a bad bill.
But don't take my word for it.
Here are just some of the organizations that oppose this Graham Cassidy bill.
I mean, this is like an eight-minute PSA here.
And then he talks about all these various organizations that would make money under a socialized healthcare system.
When Kimmel says things like France, Germany, Japan, he lists off all these countries again.
If you actually look at the specifics in each of these countries, it involves a combination Of rationing or massive debt.
Massive tax increases.
There are trade-offs in healthcare just like in every other public policy area.
And when he says, take your politicization accusations and shove them up your butt.
Again, I've talked about healthcare for years on this program.
How many times have I suggested that I get my authority for discussing that on the basis of my daughter having an open heart surgery from the same doctor at the same hospital as Jimmy Kimmel?
How many times?
The answer is zero.
The only time I've ever mentioned that on the program is with regard to Jimmy Kimmel invoking it.
And me saying, listen, you can't invoke your kid's health problem in order to paint a particular picture on healthcare.
Because that just doesn't hold.
And I do think it's kind of egregious, okay?
I'm not somebody who thinks that it's worthwhile exploiting The issues your kids have had.
I mean, thank God, by the way, just to note, my kid is totally fine.
She had a hole in her heart.
It was an atrial septal defect, an ASD, and they fixed it.
She'll be good for life.
No problem.
She operates just like any other normal kid.
She has no lingering aftereffects.
She's a wonderful child.
Thank God.
Thank you, Dr. Starnes.
Thank you to CHLA, and thank you to my insurance company for covering that.
I don't exploit that to talk about insurance because I don't think personal narrative is nearly as important as making good public policy decisions.
And I'm tired of this notion that, like, he gets cheer.
He says, I'm politicizing my kid's story because there's so many others who can't.
Well, how about the people who talk actually read the bills?
How about the people who talk actually, like, study this stuff?
It's so funny, you hear about the left, they say, well, on global warming, listen to the experts, listen to the science, listen to the experts, and then when it comes to stuff like this, they say, screw that, let's listen to the guy whose kid had a health problem.
It doesn't quite work that way.
Doesn't quite work that way.
By the way, I think you should listen to experts in all of these fields, because I think expertise matters.
I think people who study things know more than people who don't study things.
I think people who know about economics know more than people who know about pizza, as Jimmy Kimmel admits there.
Okay, I'm gonna move on from healthcare, I promise.
After this I'm gonna talk about Trump's speech at the UN.
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Okay, so I'm putting aside Jimmy Kimmel now and healthcare.
I want to talk a little bit about President Trump's UN speech because I think that there are some interesting things that happened in his speech yesterday.
I think what's more interesting is the left's reaction to the speech.
So let's be straight about what President Trump's UN speech was yesterday.
It was a basic down-the-line George W. Bush foreign policy speech with a little bit less pie in the sky about building democracy.
That's basically what it was, okay?
It was well in line with the Reagan-Bush conservative hawkish foreign policy consensus.
It was not a Ron Paul speech.
He tried to use some Ron Paul language, and it created this kind of weird gap in the speech where some of the language he was using sounded like it was straight out of a Bush speech, and some of it sounded like it was straight out of a Ron Paul speech, and it was much more of a Bush speech than a Ron Paul speech.
I'll give you an example.
So here is President Trump yesterday at the UN talking about what we expect of other countries.
This is perfectly in line with basic Bush doctrine.
We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or or even systems of government.
But we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties, to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation.
Okay, so what he's saying there is essential Bush doctrine.
I mean, this is the idea that we expect other nations to have standards for their own citizenry.
And then he says stuff like this.
Here is President Trump trying to merge that with the America First language he used on the campaign trail.
As President of the United States, I will always put America first.
Just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always, and should always, put your countries first.
All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle For elevating the human condition.
That's a weird dichotomy right there because he's saying in the first clip he says as a nation as a national leader you have an obligation to your citizens to ensure interest of your people and and freedom of your people basically and then he says well everybody has the interests of their own nation and we're going to leave you alone and the nation state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.
I'm so weirded out by by this particular notion.
There are certain nation-states that do remain.
America remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.
I don't think Saudi Arabia remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.
The nation-state as an institution does not necessarily represent the quote-unquote best vehicle.
It is a vehicle, but Nazi Germany was a nation-state.
I mean, the idea that nation-states are the be-all end-all, it's kind of this weird... I've always had a problem with the difference between patriotism and nationalism.
I like patriotism because it says that we defend the principles on which America stands.
I'm not as big on nationalism, which says my country right or wrong.
I don't think that anything right or wrong.
I don't think my wife right or wrong.
I just don't believe in the idea that you should side with things that are wrong because they're things.
So I love America, obviously, but I love America because of what she is.
If America turned into a different country overnight, I wouldn't love America anymore.
It's that easy.
If America turned into Nazi Germany, I wouldn't love it.
Is this very difficult?
This is why I think that taking a value-neutral proposition like the nation-state and trying to imbue it with value, trying to infuse value into a concept like the nation-state, Which could be an evil nation-state like the Japanese Empire during World War II.
Or it could be a very good nation-state like the United States or Great Britain.
Right, that seems to me a very weird notion.
And so you can see he's trying to basically fit this square peg of American exceptionalism and principle and creedal values into this round hole of nationalism generally.
And it doesn't really work particularly well.
Which is why he ends up basically in the Bush position.
Here is President Trump sounding very much like President Bush at the end of his speech at the UN yesterday.
We need to defeat the enemies of humanity and unlock the potential of life itself.
Our hope is a world of proud, independent nations that embrace their duties, seek friendship, respect others, and make common cause in the greatest shared interest of all — a future of dignity and peace
For the people of this wonderful Earth, this is the true vision of the United Nations, the ancient wish of every people and the deepest yearning that lives inside Every sacred soul.
Now what's amazing about that is that's actually something that Bush used to say that I disagreed with.
This great yearning for dignity and peace.
Uh, no.
No, actually, I don't think that's the great yearning of the human soul is the yearning for dignity and peace.
I think there are lots of people throughout history who have yearned for destruction, violence, and bloodshed and victory, right?
I think that's the idea that if everyone yearned for dignity and peace, we'd all be fine.
We wouldn't need a UN We actually don't need a UN, but we wouldn't need an army, we wouldn't need a navy, we wouldn't need an air force.
If everybody yearned for dignity and peace, we'd all be fine, wouldn't we?
But, again, this is the awkwardness of trying to merge traditional American foreign policy with the isolationism that Trump, I think, sort of resonates to.
But then, when he gets down to situational ethics, when he gets down to Syria is gassing its own people, then he's like, fire a missile, right?
And all of that goes right out the window, and we're back to firing missiles.
In any case, This is a pretty traditional American speech on foreign policy.
Because it was traditional, because Trump over the last couple of weeks has actually acted very much like a traditional centrist Democrat president in many ways, because of all that, that means the media has to go doubly nuts.
So they try to find things to go crazy over, and it really is amusing, actually, because what you see is the media now defending Iran and North Korea from the predations of President Trump.
How dare President Trump rip on North Korea and call Kim Jong-un Rocket Man?
Right?
And now Rocketman's stuck in your head again.
I know it's not my fault, it's Trump's fault.
I did like Nikki Haley's defense of that line, by the way.
She said today that Trump, it was great that Trump used Rocketman because now everybody's talking about Kim Jong-un.
Listen, I love the UN ambassador, Nikki Haley.
I think she's doing a great job.
But I'm pretty sure that everyone was talking about the fat little dude threatening to nuke the United States before he was called Rocketman by President Trump.
I think that has more to do with Trump likes to nickname things.
He's like the Adam of nicknames.
God said to Adam, name all the animals.
God said to Trump, nickname all the people.
And that's pretty much where we are.
Right, in any case, the media go completely insane over all of this.
ABC's Jim Moran, he says that North Korea, you know, when Trump threatened to nuke North Korea if they should attack us, you know, how... Sorry, it's Terry Moran, who has the same... He has the same last name as the insane congressperson from up north.
In any case, Terry Moran says that this was a war crime.
He accuses Trump of war crimes in his UN speech yesterday.
That is a potential justification, but the word's totally destroying a nation of 25 million people.
That borders on the threat of committing a war crime.
Wow, borders on that threat.
Okay, Bill Clinton said the same thing in the 90s.
I got flack yesterday because there was a headline that President Obama had said that we could destroy North Korea, and people were saying, well, he didn't say we would destroy North Korea.
Yeah, neither did Trump yesterday.
Trump said, if they do something, then we'll destroy them, right?
If they fire a missile at us, we'll destroy them.
Obama basically said the same thing.
He said we could destroy them anytime we want, but we wouldn't want to do that because there are people who are threatened.
They're all saying the same thing.
Everybody knows that if they fire a nuke at us, we'll nuke them.
It's that simple.
Everybody knows this is the case.
But no, now it's a war crime.
The left is relegated to defending the worst states on earth in order to rip President Trump, which is actually kind of humorous to me.
I'm going to show you more of the press doing all of that.
Plus, I have to do my Jerry Brown impression coming up in a little while.
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All righty, so more of the media losing their minds.
CNN's Jim Acosta, who is not a reporter, he's a parody of a reporter.
Jim Acosta, it's like someone made a puppet of Jim Acosta and put him on TV.
So Jim Acosta is the guy who, his sole goal now is to be in the White House press room and then be shown on TV looking indignant.
And now he is looking indignant, standing in the middle of New York talking about the UN.
I always find it humorous that TV channels feel the necessity to do this.
Like, station a guy, like, on a random street corner in the middle of New York to discuss these things.
Like, they have studios.
I've been to CNN studios in New York.
They're beautiful.
But here he is in the middle of the street.
Yay.
Talking about how Trump's UN speech made everybody say, OMG.
The president certainly did not mince any words.
What now?
Really?
LMAO?
and a senior administration official tell CNN that that line about Rocketman and Kim Jong-un was added to the president's speech this morning, but that was hardly the only provocative moment as the president threatened to go to war with North Korea with a speech that made the UNGA say, OMG.
OMFG?
LOL?
What now?
Really?
L-M-A-L. O-M-F-G. L-O-L. Shruggy.
Good reporting, solid reporting from Jim Acosta.
I do appreciate Wolf Blitzer, because Wolf Blitzer's job is basically to be the stupid third grader who asks questions that everyone already sort of knows the answers to, but he has to act like he is the stand-in for the audience.
So he asks things like, President Trump said stuff, Jim.
And then Jim gives his explanation with emojis and my memory.
So well done, Jim Acosta.
It just shows you where the media are.
MSNBC had a guest on.
The guest's name was Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and he launched into, former Obama staffer, of course, and he launched into President Trump's speech, the worst speech anyone ever gave.
My God!
My first reaction was he read it from the teleprompter.
That means at least H.R.
McMaster and probably Jim Mattis and John Kelly got a look at that speech and I'm deeply saddened and embarrassed by that fact.
That was the most atrocious speech I've ever heard an American president give in any venue.
Really?
President Obama gave speeches at the UN where he legitimately ripped our race policies in the United States.
President Obama went on a full-on apology tour at the beginning of his presidency where he went to Islamic countries and talked about how America was arrogant and evil.
But again, the media...
Trump has forced them into a bad situation.
They hate Trump so much that when Trump does something right, they have to pretend that he's doing something wrong.
Naturally, we still have to trot out the corpse of Hillary Clinton to talk about how terrible Trump is.
She's never going to go away.
She's just going to be the specter haunting your home.
You're going to be taking a bath one evening and then, spookily, she's going to creep out of the mirror at you.
Alright, here is Hillary Clinton on with Stephen Colbert.
All these late night hosts are so in the tank.
It's irritating.
I get it.
Did you happen to see the President's speech at the UN today?
I saw parts of it, yes.
What did you make of it?
I thought it was very dark, dangerous, not the kind of message that the leader of the greatest nation in the world should be delivering.
about Trump's speech.
Did you happen to see the president's speech at the UN today?
I saw parts of it, yes.
What did you make of it?
I thought it was very dark, dangerous, not the kind of message that the leader of the greatest nation in the world should be delivering.
You are both...
You are both required to stand up for the values of what we believe in, democracy and opportunity as a way to demonstrate clearly the United States remains the democracy and opportunity as a way to demonstrate clearly the United States remains the beacon that we
Okay, this coming from the lady who sent a message to the entire Arab world and Muslim world in the middle of Benghazi suggesting that our values of the First Amendment were sort of a problem because it allowed people to cut videos that were not nice to Islam.
I do have one question for Hillary Clinton.
Is she colorblind?
Who picked that?
Who picked that jacket?
I really, like, I'm confused that anyone would think this would look good on television.
First of all, there's a basic rule on TV.
Do not wear patterns.
Second of all, there's a rule on TV.
Do not wear the ugliest jacket that you found at the Salvation Army.
And Hillary Clinton apparently went rubbish bin hunting and found this jacket and threw it on for Stephen Colbert's show.
But Hillary Clinton lecturing us all on foreign policy after presiding over the worst eight-year foreign policy in recent memory, probably in history.
It's pretty astonishing.
It's pretty astonishing.
So there she is ripping, again, This is the lady who was one of the architects of the Iran deal.
She was working on it before she left the Obama administration, and now she's complaining that Trump is too mean to places like Iran.
Yeah, I can't imagine why the Democrats remain unpopular.
Meanwhile, the Democrats have decided, it does go to show you, by the way, all of this goes to show you, that all of the talk from President Trump about making nice with Democrats, they will stab him in the face at the first available opportunity.
Not in the back, in the face.
He's a fool if he thinks that he can work with these people, and they will then somehow be loyal to him.
President Trump is currently trying to surrender on DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
That's not stopping Governor Jerry Brown, 1,000-year-old Jerry Brown, the governor of the state of California, from suggesting that Trump is some sort of evil xenophobe who wants to target illegal immigrants.
Doesn't matter that Trump just agreed with Pelosi and Schumer on it.
Doesn't matter.
None of that matters.
The only thing that matters is that we know, we know President Trump is a bad man who hates brown people.
We also know that my walker needs a tennis ball replaced because I keep scratching my hardwood floors.
Go, Jerry Brown!
It protects public safety, but it also protects hardworking people who contributed a lot to California.
Hardworking people who are undocumented immigrants.
Yeah, by the way, they've got a couple million working.
Our agricultural industry, our hospitality industry, our construction industry, they'd be in deep trouble without those same people.
And that's why we need immigration reform, not bluster, not rhetoric, and not this kind of xenophobia that we see too much of coming out of Washington.
It's xenophobia, do you understand?
We here in California have invited every person on earth to the state, but we have no idea why we have trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities.
The good news is I'll be dead before any of that has to be paid.
So there you are.
Also, Okay, so, there are your wonderful Democrats doing yeoman's work for the American people.
Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then I'll explain to you what this weird new Jewish holiday is and why I will not be here to provide you with my stellar and incisive commentary tomorrow or Friday.
So, time for some things I like.
So we've been doing sort of gothic romances.
I did Wuthering Heights yesterday and the day before that I did Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.
This is, there's a new production of Jane Eyre.
I don't think I've recommended this on the show, have I Mathis?
So this is actually a quite good version of Jane Eyre.
This was not my favorite book when I was in high school.
It annoyed the living daylights out of me, to be completely frank with you.
It seemed like female wish fulfillment, but I reread it recently.
It's a pretty good book, and the movie itself is also quite good.
Also, I am a huge Michael Fassbender fan.
I cannot wait for The Snowman, as I have said a thousand times.
His new movie has the worst trailer I have ever seen for any movie in history.
We did a full seven-minute segment on the show on The Snowman.
Jane Eyre is actually a good movie.
The Snowman will be a terrible movie that I will like more.
But here is the preview for Jane Eyre with Mia Wasikowsky, is that how it's pronounced?
And Michael Fassbender.
Do you know, Jane Eyre, where the wicked go after death?
They go to hell.
And what is hell?
Where are you, Ram?
If you don't sit still, you will be tied down!
Pit full of fire.
Should you like to fall into this pit and be burned there forever?
People think you're good, but you're hard-hearted.
Get out.
Children, I exhort you to withhold the hand of friendship to Jane Eyre.
This is a grand old house, but it can feel a little dreary.
Mr. Rochester... It's actually a really, really good production.
Very dark.
A lot creepier than the book.
The book isn't that creepy, but it's well worth watching.
So if you're into this sort of thing, very good production of Jane Eyre with Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska is how it's pronounced.
Okay, other things that I like.
So I just got a kick out of this.
Stephen A. Smith yesterday was on television and he asked what has to be one of the single dumbest questions in the history of mankind.
Here we go.
I think we'll favor Canelo in the rematch particularly because...
The rematch isn't going to happen at Cinco de Mayo if there is one, right?
Canelo's done fighting for the year.
He fights twice a year.
Then go to Mayo, Mexican Independence Day, because those two dates indicate that you own boxing in North America.
That's why Floyd always liked those dates.
Those are now Canelo's dates.
He's going to fight him in a rematch if it happens, I would assume, Cinco de Mayo.
Triple G's going to be 36, pushing 37 at that time.
Well, when is Cinco de Mayo?
What's the date of Cinco de Mayo next year?
Can you tell me that?
Uh, it's somewhere around May 5th, you know?
My god.
Wow.
When is Cinco de Mayo?
Well, Steven needs to brush up on his Spanish, because that is not a good question.
When is it next year?
Like, it changes year to year.
It's not like the Jewish calendar actually changes the dates year to year, because we're on the lunar calendar, not the solar calendar.
But I'm pretty sure Cinco de Mayo is on, like, May 5th, because it's called the 5th of May.
If I had to hazard a guess at this, and I don't think that it was created before the modern calendar was created.
So, good for Steven A. Smith.
Okay, time for some quick things that I hate.
Okay, so can we please stop comparing things to Jews in Nazi Germany?
Like, please?
Unless they're actually things that are comparable?
Keith Ellison, who's the last person in the world who should ever invoke the Holocaust, considering that he was a Nation of Islam backer who was wildly anti-Semitic for years and years and years and years, now he's comparing illegal immigrants living in the United States to Jews living in Nazi Germany.
So, this is not someone else's fight, this is all of our fight.
But some people are in the bullseye and others of us are not exactly the target.
Therefore, it is our responsibility to stand up, fight, and do the right thing.
And I'm going to tell you right now, I'm one of the people who believes we should give our neighbors sanctuary.
And if you ask yourself, what would I do if I was a Gentile in 1941, if my Jewish neighbors were under attack by the Nazis?
Would I give them sanctuary?
You might be about to find out what you would do.
Okay, I'm pretty sure that number one, Keith Ellison had been around in 1939 and Jews had run to him for sanctuary.
I have serious doubts that Keith Ellison would have provided them sanctuary himself if he were alive in 1939.
But beyond that, likening people who are living in the United States illegally Their kids going to public schools?
Having jobs?
Living in the freest, most prosperous country in the history of mankind to Jews living under Nazi rule is just insane.
It's just insane and ridiculous.
No purpose to it at all.
Okay, um, so I really wanted to do Tucker Carlson interviewing a witch, but I'm not sure I have time to do Tucker Carlson interviewing a witch.
You know what?
I'm gonna do it for five seconds.
So Tucker Carlson last night interviewed a witch because I can't avoid this.
This is under Things I Hate because It just, it gives the left fodder that every time they take a screencap of these things, it's like Tucker Carlson on Gypsy Invasion in Pennsylvania.
Tucker Carlson, witches take on President Trump.
Like, I understand that there's such a thing as ratings, and I understand that this gets them, I assume, but I'm not sure that this is a valuable use of news-watching time, the witches who are taking on the President.
So since you're the only witch, I've interviewed a lot of people, but I've never interviewed a witch.
Sincere question, is eye of newt an actual ingredient?
Well, I think the real problem is not whether or not eye of newt is an actual ingredient.
The real problem is we're about to have some kind of big nuclear extravaganza with North Korea.
The real problem is that we're There's a very funny thing online where this kind of nerdy guy goes through what he calls the hot crazy matrix where he talks about women who are hot versus women who are crazy and then where women fall along these lines and this would be one to avoid.
So this seems like a mistake.
Tucker, I think that you can probably get better interview subjects than the crazy witch to talk on your show.
You know, take it or leave it.
He's got better ratings than I do.
He's on Fox News.
But just saying, I'm not sure that this is a valuable use of time.
Okay, so quick explanation.
Normally we do Bible talk today.
Instead I'm going to explain to you in very basic terms what Rosh Hashanah is.
So Rosh Hashanah literally means the head of the year.
This is the Jewish new year when we believe that the earth was created.
This is one of the cool things about sort of the history of scientific thought, is that for thousands of years, people thought that the Earth actually was not created, that it existed eternally.
If you go read Aristotelian thought, Aristotle thought this, so did Plato.
They thought the planets were in eternal motion, and that the Earth had always existed, and the Bible suggested something different.
So when you read Maimonides or Aquinas, they're actually attempting to explain How the Bible can be true, and also, it can be true that the Earth always existed.
So they're trying to rectify bad science with the Bible.
It turns out that the science was bad and the Bible was right.
The Earth was created.
So at the beginning, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth, and that's what we are celebrating at Rosh Hashanah.
It's also the initiation of what we call the Days of Awe in the Jewish calendar.
It's the initiation of sort of the repentance period.
Jews have already been, for the month before Rosh Hashanah, beginning what we call Teshuvah, Which literally means return.
Returning to God.
Recognizing the sins that we've committed and committing not to do them next year.
This is why it's funny.
For Orthodox Jews, you know, there are a lot of people making New Year's resolutions.
For us, we already made our New Year's resolutions back in September sometime.
So that's basically what it is.
The idea is that God opens the book of life and the book of death and decides in the next 10 days which one you will be written down in.
And so you see Jews praying uh in an ordinate amount uh and giving charity uh and and performing uh good acts and and trying to fulfill more commandments that begins tomorrow uh and what's cool is that we celebrate the judgment right it's not something that we fear on Rosh Hashanah it's supposed to be one of the happier days of the year we eat apples with honey for a new year We are supposed to celebrate God's creation of the earth and trust in God that if we do what we are supposed to do for Him, that He is going to fulfill us spiritually the way that He has promised to do.
So that's what Rosh Hashanah is all about.
I will be out tomorrow.
I will be out Friday.
I will be here all of next week.
So I will see you on Monday.
Please, that's a long weekend.
That's a lot of time for you guys to really screw things up.
If you could avoid doing that until I get back so I can talk about it, I would very much appreciate it.
If not, you're on your own.
Enjoy.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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