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Sept. 28, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:59
Hefner Dies, Left Mourns Their Hero | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 391
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So, he spoke last night at the University of Utah.
I'll give you the rundown.
We have some pretty amazing information from there.
Plus, Hugh Hefner is dead.
And aside from talking First Amendment boobs, we'll also talk about tax reform and where that is.
We'll give you all of the information.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so I want to start by talking about Hugh Hefner because Hugh Hefner's death is apparently a deep cultural moment.
The obituaries are just endless.
The New York Times ran a 3,300-word obituary about a guy who's mostly famous for putting boobs in a magazine, which is pretty incredible.
He lived the life of a Saudi oil chic, but occasionally published John Updike and Norman Mailer, and therefore, I guess, his entire life was just roses and nothing but.
We'll get to all of that.
And as you may have noticed, I don't abide by this rule that when someone dies, we have to pretend they were awesome.
So I'm going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and what Hugh Hefner meant to culture, and what we should take away from that.
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OK, so I was going to begin with Trumponomics, but it's more fun to talk about Hugh Hefner.
Right?
I mean, this is why Hugh Hefner is a cultural figure, because we have to pretend that Hugh Hefner was a forward-thinking genius of the culture instead of basically a purveyor of pornography.
Now, none of this is to say that he doesn't have a First Amendment right to push his pornography.
I mean, he did have a First Amendment right to push his pornography, although I think there actually is a fairly decent argument under the First Amendment that the First Amendment was not supposed to cover obscenity.
Like, I don't think that John Adams and James Madison were sitting around in 1789 thinking to themselves, you know what we really need to protect?
Hugh Hefner with the money shot.
That's what we need to protect, right?
What Robert Bork argues in his book talking about the First Amendment is that the First Amendment was essentially enshrined to protect political speech.
That was the goal.
But let's assume that we're going to take a libertarian position on the First Amendment.
Better that government should not regulate any of this than that government should regulate the wrong stuff.
So let's say that all this stuff is protected.
Now the question becomes, was Hugh Hefner's business good for the world, or was it kind of bad for the world?
So what I've seen a lot of in the obits today is focus on stuff that is not Hugh Hefner's core business.
I've seen a lot of focus on the fact that he supported civil rights.
Which is great!
Terrific!
You know who else supported civil rights?
Rosa Parks.
You know what she didn't do?
Pose nude.
So this idea that Hugh Hefner is somehow culturally important because of civil rights is not the case.
Let's be real about this.
Hugh Hefner is famous because he was an old perv.
Okay, he was a perv from the time that he was young and he was a perv when he was super old and became a parody of himself.
He didn't become a different human.
He wasn't different at 30 than he was at 91.
He's the exact same person.
He never changed and that's why it was so ridiculous watching him try to live the life of a 30-year-old swinging bachelor when he was 91 and somebody had to milk his prostate for him.
The whole thing is ridiculous.
The New York Times runs this glowing obit of Hugh Hefner.
I did look it up.
I was trying to figure out whether they granted more time to Hugh Hefner or Ronald Reagan.
They did grant more time to Ronald Reagan, so good for the New York Times on that.
They granted more time to Hugh Hefner than William F. Buckley, which I think is sort of telling about where the Times stands on this.
But here's what they write, and this is, I don't even have to give you indicators like this.
I'll just read you this glowing profile of Hugh Hefner, apparently one of the greatest human beings to have ever walked the Earth.
It goes, Moses, Jesus, Hugh Hefner.
So here is Hugh Hefner.
Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy Magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment industry giant, all the while, as its very public avatar, squiring attractive young women and sometimes marrying them well into his 80s, died on Wednesday at his home, the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.
He was 91.
Hey, let's imagine for a second that Donald Trump, God forbid, had died before he became President of the United States.
His obituary would read very much like this from the New York Times.
Right, Donald Trump, a man famous for squaring around young women and sometimes marrying them.
But now, the New York Times doesn't like Donald Trump because Donald Trump's a political figure, right, on the right, and therefore he's an evil, vile man with women.
Evil and vile, do you understand?
Now, I think that Hugh Hefner was pretty vile with women.
I think that Trump's history is not particularly great with women.
I'm pretty consistent on this stuff, but it is amazing how the politics shift how people view people's treatment of women.
I'm old enough to remember when feminists thought Hugh Hefner was gross, but now he's sort of a hero, right?
Hugh Hefner's great.
He liberated us from the constraints of our own sexual puritanism.
First of all, the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of the 1960s generation feeling that they are the first to discover that it feels good when you put a penis in a vagina is just incredible to me.
Like, I'm sorry, people have known this since forever.
This is how evolution built humans and animals.
There's nothing new here.
And treating it as though there was some sort of grand movement forward, because Hugh Hefner put boobs that men like in magazines, and then slapped a John Updike article between the boobs.
Like, this was always the joke about Playboy, right?
He'd put these kind of highfalutin essays in the middle of money shots of 18-year-old girls, and then it was like, ooh, isn't he a sophisticate?
Isn't he a sophisticate now?
Wouldn't he have been more of a sophisticate if he just, I don't know, published John Updike?
Like, maybe the only way he thought he could get people to read Updike was to put it between the boobs, but I'm pretty sure that the main point of Playboy was the boobs and not the John Updike, and he was just trying to facilitate his own fame and reputation for being a sophisticate by publishing highfalutin essays.
There's no difference between Playboy and Hustler Magazine except for the essays and this bizarre cultural impression that Hugh Hefner was somehow a force for tremendous good while Larry Flint is just a smut purveyor.
Anyway, here's what the New York Times continues to write.
You know, before I get to it, I want to say that you want to watch how America has evolved.
Don't look at Hefner.
Look at the feminist take on Hefner.
So, the feminist take on Hefner in the 1960s was that Hefner was somebody who was helping to objectify women.
Which was 100% true.
And then the feminist take became, he's empowering women.
He's giving women the opportunity to do what exactly?
Disrobe in front of men if they see fit?
And this is empowering?
Okay, like women always had that power because men have lizard brain and we like naked women.
I mean, like, I don't understand why this is like a very difficult concept.
And then it turned into, no, he's a cultural hero because he empowered women.
Okay, only, really, if you think that it is empowering to women to publish nude photos of them, maybe the woman wants it, but as a general, that's the, it may be empowering to that individual woman in that sense, I suppose, but is it empowering to women all over the United States that men are looking at lots of pictures of naked women?
If you think that's the case, I would recommend you talk to a man one time, like this many times.
And if you do, you will recognize that men who watch pornography are not on the side, typically, of being more empowered toward women.
And it's just not the way that this works.
Men who have respect for women don't tend to revel in pornography.
Because, again, there is something at odds with seeing something as a human being and seeing someone as an actual object worthy of genuine affection, love, and respect.
Anyway, the endless obituary continues.
Hefner, the man, and the playboy, the brand, were inseparable.
Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American prickishness and wider social intolerance.
Both were derided over the years as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic.
All of those criticisms are true, but Mr. Heffner was a stunning success from the moment he emerged in the early 1950s.
His timing was perfect.
Don't you understand?
He was slapping those Puritans right in the face.
A note about those sexual puritans of the 1940s.
They had more babies than any generation in American history.
They knew what sex was.
Again, every generation seems to think that they're the only people who've ever discovered sexual organs, and it's just incredible to me.
You get that today from people who are my age, right?
People who are younger.
Well, my parents didn't know anything about sex, but I know something about sex.
Guess what?
Your parents did.
You know who else did?
Their parents.
You know how I know this?
Because you're here, moron.
Okay, so he was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane, and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production.
He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie.
It starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.
Well, that doesn't mean that you have to liken his life to a romantic movie, right?
He was a rich guy who got a bunch of women to disrobe in front of him, who didn't have any affection for him, and who were occupying his... Do you really think all these hot, young 21-year-olds were, like, that hot on the 80-year-old creep?
He couldn't even sell his house because he insisted that he be allowed to live in the house, and nobody wanted to live in the house with him.
He tried to sell his house in LA, like, a couple of years ago, and no one was willing to buy it, because one of his preconditions is that he would be still wandering around the house, and nobody wanted that guy wandering around the house in his bathrobe.
Plus, I mean, what would it do to the home price if he blacklighted the place?
My goodness.
It says, the first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.
And I love this.
I'm going to skip forward a little bit here because what he says about his wife is really quite incredible about his first wife.
He says, still, Mr. Hefner wielded fierce resentment against his era's sexual strictures, which he said had choked off his own youth.
A virgin until he was 22, he married his longtime girlfriend.
Dun-dun-dun-dun!
Horror of horrors!
He was a virgin until he was married.
Yeah, that's what made his life empty and meaningless.
It wasn't the endless sex with a random bevy of women.
And the uselessness of his own... And the uselessness of his own perspective.
No, it was... What really ruined him is that he didn't have sex until he was 22.
I'm sure that ruined his life, just as it made meaningless the lives of Thomas Aquinas, just as it made meaningless the life of Jesus, right?
All of these lives were meaningless.
If they'd had sex at 15, guess how much better?
You know what they could have done?
You know what Thomas Aquinas would have thought if that dude had an orgasm at age 16?
Can you just imagine?
It's so stupid.
I was married at 23.
I was a virgin until I was married.
It was a good decision.
You know why?
Because the only person I have ever had sex with is my wife.
We were going to be married for 10 years.
I promise you, my life is significantly more fulfilling than Hugh Hefner's was.
Because I'm not going to die lonely and alone.
As Matthew said, he lived as he died in a bed.
I'm not going to die lonely and alone, surrounded by people who don't know me and don't really care about me.
It's just This idea that the promulgation by the media of the idea that he was living a lifestyle that is something that should be emulated is truly amazing, and it's truly amazing from the same newspaper, by the way, that will talk routinely about toxic masculinity.
But it'll talk routinely about, is James Bond sexist?
What?
What?
I mean, a week ago, everybody in the media was saying that Clay Travis was just a boor for saying on national television that he believed in two things, the First Amendment and boobs.
That was basically Hugh Hefner's slogan, and now it's a 3,300-word obit.
In the New York Times.
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Okay, so back to Hefner.
Now, none of this should be taken, again, as the idea that the government should be banning pornography or that the government should be involved in the process of doing this.
The point I'm making is that the cultural celebration of vulgarization of the culture, the idea that this was somehow a broadening of the public mind, that society was made better by this, Not all exercise of rights are useful.
Doesn't mean they should be bailed, right?
What I said a couple of days ago with regard to, for example, kneeling for the National Anthem, is that do you have a right to do that?
Of course you have a right to do that, right?
Your employer can do something about it, but you have a right under the First Amendment to not be punished by government for doing that.
Every right contains the possibility of misusing the right or using it in a way that's dumb or counterproductive.
The First Amendment may contain the right to publish nude photos of women, but to glorify it, to say that this is some sort of cultural step forward for women, is just ridiculous.
You could have a feminist movement without women posing nude.
You could.
This has always been my critique of third wave feminism.
First wave feminism said, men are acting like pigs, they're barring us from the workplace, we should be able to get the jobs that we want, and we should be treated on equal par with men.
Totally agree with that, right?
That's why my wife's a doctor, my mom worked, my dad stayed home.
But, The third wave feminism basically said, men act like pigs.
They're gross.
They treat women badly.
You know what?
That's standard.
They have a different standard for us.
They want us to be all princesses in the ivory tower instead of demanding that men be gentlemen.
Instead, get rid of the ivory tower entirely.
No rules for anyone.
No rules for anyone.
That does not mean that I'm in favor of sexual law.
Okay?
I'm not.
Again, I think the government is really bad at promulgating this sort of thing, but I am in favor of social standards that actually instill virtue.
This is why I'm in favor of people going to church.
Well, I'm in favor of you instilling virtue in your children.
You want to have a happier life?
Live a virtuous life.
This has become very controversial of late, that virtue and happiness are connected.
But the ancients never thought that.
In fact, Aristotle connected virtue with happiness.
The definition of happiness was living in accordance with virtue, which meant living in accordance with your purpose.
Unless you think your purpose on this earth is to masturbate as much as humanly possible, Hugh Hefner was not a man driving you toward virtue.
He was not a man who was helping to instill virtue.
So, you know, this thing goes on and on and on.
It says, The Playboy philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all of its aspects, for which Mr. Heffner won civil liberties awards.
He supported progressive social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting black guests to his televised parties at a time when much of the nation still had Jim Crow laws.
Again, Leonard Bernstein invited black people to his parties too, but he didn't have naked women running around there.
The idea that it was necessary to use sex as a lever in order to break open the hidebound stupidities of things like Jim Crow, the hidebound evil of things like Jim Crow, I just don't think is true.
And you know who would have agreed with me?
People like Martin Luther King, who was a preacher.
I seriously object to the idea that Hugh Hefner is somebody who ought to be emulated or whose life we ought to celebrate, particularly when the central point of his life was not civil rights stuff.
The central point of his life was that he wanted people to be able to get nudie magazines.
That's all.
3,300 words on Hugh Hefner, 3,000 words on William F. Buckley, the founder of the modern conservative movement.
Just amazing.
Again, we as a society tend to think, it's true in politics too, that we have to swallow the chaff with the wheat.
If you want Republicans or conservatives to be in the White House, then it has to come through Donald Trump.
If you want to win the culture war, then you have to go along with the vulgarization of the culture.
I don't think that's true.
I don't think that's true.
I think you can fight for good things without utilizing bad methods and without embracing bad things.
I think you can fight for civil rights without embracing the idea that men should treat women like disposable objects and when they age out of their beauty, then you just throw them by the side of the road, which is Hugh Hefner's entire ideology.
Okay, so enough about Hugh Hefner.
He is wherever he is today.
I'm sad for him that I think that he wasted his life.
I'm not gonna make any bones about that.
I do think that he wasted his life because I think he obviously is a very bright guy who could have done a lot more to make the world a better place than promulgate the idea that promiscuity was virtue.
And he didn't do all bad things.
He did some good things.
But when you see somebody who does good things and does bad things, you just wish they had done a lot more good things and a lot fewer bad things.
But I want to talk a little bit about the next step for Republicans on Capitol Hill.
So Republicans on Capitol Hill have now moved on from health care.
So great job on health care, guys.
Just stellar, stellar work.
So we now have, we're now, what, Trump took office in January.
It is now the end of September.
So they have been off, they've been in office for nine months.
There is no wall.
They've not revoked the Iran deal.
President Trump is working hard on making sure that DACA is re-enshrined.
They've not lowered the budget.
They've not cut off funding for Planned Parenthood.
And now we're going to move on to not passing tax reform.
That, I guess, is the next item on the agenda.
So Trump's tax reform that he's proposing increases taxes, apparently, on people who are in the upper tax bracket.
Now, what's funny to me is all the people who are lamenting this today, like Trump didn't say this on the campaign trail.
Trump said this repeatedly on the campaign trail.
Trump said many times on the campaign trail that he would increase taxes on the rich.
He did a famous Good Morning America spiel in which he said, taxes on people like me, they'll go up.
Those taxes.
They'll go up on people like me.
I pay, I make enough money.
Right?
Because this is his populist routine.
It's popular.
It's kind of dumb.
The reason it's kind of dumb is because the people who are paying the vast majority of federal taxes in the United States are the people who make the most money.
So when we say we're going to raise taxes on the rich but lower it for everyone else, it's kind of hard to lower taxes for people who are actually getting net benefits from the government.
In the United States, 2011, as of the Congressional Budget Office, the highest quintile, people who make above $235,000 a year in the United States, were paying, on average, to the federal government, nearly $58,000 in taxes per year.
The fourth quintile, people making above $84,000 a year, They're paying about $14,800 to the federal government.
The third quintile, about $50,000 a year, they were paying $7,400 to the federal government.
The second quintile, above $30,000 a year, they're paying $3,200 to the federal government.
And the lowest quintile, above $15,500 but lower than $30,000, were paying $500 to the federal government.
But that's not the entire story.
A lot of these quintiles receive net benefits back from the federal government in the form of disability, in the form of food stamps, in the form of welfare, in the form of state-sponsored benefits.
Social Security, right?
There are a lot of benefits that go back to these various quintiles.
When you factor in how much money people are receiving back from the federal government in checks, in actual transfer payments, what you find out is that the richest 20% of Americans are paying virtually all in net federal revenue to the government.
Nearly all of it.
According to Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, the richest 20% of Americans by income aren't just paying a share of federal taxes that would be considered fair, They are shouldering almost 100% of the entire federal tax burden of transfer payments and all other non-financed government spending.
So the idea that you're raising taxes on the rich because the rich aren't paying their fair share, it's just not factually true, but this is an unpopular thing.
Whenever Republicans try to pass a tax cut because they say it'll spur economic growth, we'll talk about deficits in a second, whenever Republicans say that they want to pass a tax cut because it'll spur economic growth, people on the left go, they just want to cut taxes for their rich, their crony rich friends.
Here's the reality.
It's very difficult to cut taxes on people who are not paying a lot of taxes in the first place.
And if you want to spur economic growth, I have never worked for somebody who only makes $50,000 a year.
The people you work for are typically the people in the top quintile.
And by the way, those people are not stagnant.
People go into the top quintile, people fall out of the top quintile.
The idea that there's a 1% screwing the bottom 99% is just not factually true.
The number of people who are in the 1% 10 years ago who are now in the 1% is really low.
People move up and down in terms of income all throughout their life.
When you're 20 years old, you're probably in the bottom three quintiles.
By the time you're 40, you're probably in the upper two.
You're the same person where you're a bad person when you're 40 and you're a good person when you're 20.
So this idea that it's this group of people who are screwing people to get into the top 1%, for example, it's just not true.
And if you want economic growth, you're naturally going to have to cut taxes for the people who are capable of investing money.
The people who are actually capable of consumption, because those are the people who are paying the taxes.
But nobody's willing to say that because that's unpopular.
So instead, they say things like, we're going to cut taxes for the middle class and raise them on the wealthy, right?
The people who actually pay the vast bulk of taxes.
So that is what Trump is saying today, which is a betrayal of his conservative base.
But it's not really a betrayal of what he was saying.
And this was the problem with Trump all the way through, is that Trump, throughout his campaign, was sending mixed messages.
I'll never raise taxes on the rich, but I might raise taxes on the rich, guys.
And you see this, you know, even from his own administration, this pretty consistent message.
So you'll see Ted Cruz, for example, talking about how we need a tax cut desperately.
Here's Senator Cruz from Texas making exactly this point.
If you want to see Reagan-era economic growth, if you want to see booming GDP, small businesses growing, you've got to have Reagan-style tax cuts.
Real tax cuts.
Not just deficit-neutral, adjusting, emptying one bucket and filling another.
You've got to have a real tax cut on small businesses, on job producers, on working families.
That's how we unleash the economy.
Okay, so you have Cruz there making the typical conservative case.
Now here's Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, making precisely the opposite case from the Trump administration.
As it relates to the high end, you know, there's lots of changes.
We're getting rid of lots of deductions.
We're trying to get rid of state and local deductions to get the federal government out of subsidizing it.
And yes, I can tell you the current plan for many, many people, it will not reduce taxes on the high end.
Okay, so there you have a mixed message from the Republican Party.
This is why tax reform will be difficult.
Because there are going to be some people who say, we're not willing to allow you to raise taxes on the highest earners.
And then you're going to see a bunch of people who say, we have to raise taxes on the highest earners.
So there's no guarantee they even get through tax reform here.
Especially because they have to do tax reform through, essentially, a 51-vote majority.
They only have 52 votes.
And they have to show that the tax reform is deficit-neutral if they want to use reconciliation.
Right?
So, again, it's going to be very hard to show that a tax cut is revenue-neutral in general unless you show some spending offsets or unless—so that means we need 60 votes in the Senate.
In order to pass tax reform.
So that's not the easiest thing in the world.
I'm going to talk about deficits in just a second and what the Republican and conservative perspective should be on tax cuts versus deficits.
It's really a two-sided argument and I'll discuss both sides and you can sort of make up your own mind on that.
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Okay, so, this brings up a second question with regard to taxes.
The Republicans have been split on ever since really the days of Paul Volcker, who was the Treasury Secretary, or the Fed Reserve Chairman, rather, under President Reagan.
And that is, do you want to expand the deficit But lower taxes.
Is that one of your goals?
Now, there's some fiscal hawks who say, listen, the economy this quarter grew at 3.1%.
That's a good rate.
And the reason it's a good rate, this shows you, by the way, that doing nothing is actually really good for the economy, as a general rule.
There's this idea that Radical change to the economy doesn't harm the economy.
One of the reasons the economy stagnated during President Obama's recovery, yet the weakest post-war recovery in American history, the reason for that is because there was so much uncertainty about how exactly businesses were going to be able to operate.
Was he going to issue a new regulation tomorrow?
Was he going to pass a tax increase?
Businesses have faith that Trump isn't going to do anything to dramatically harm the economy, and so they're now spending money that they were not spending before, and that is creating new jobs, they're investing, and they're growing, right?
So, right now, do we need a tax cut?
Listen, we always need lower taxes.
As somebody who pays an enormous amount of taxes to the government every year, I would personally be hiring more people if I didn't have to pay those taxes.
Trump, by the way, is wavering on some of this.
He now says he wants a 20% corporate tax rate after saying he wanted a 15% tax rate the entire election cycle.
The real question is if you're going to pass tax cuts and you're not going to focus at all on entitlement reform, you're just going to continue blowing out the deficit in the short term.
Now the argument is that you're going to expand the pie too.
The government increases in its capacity to bring in tax revenue as the economy increases.
So this is the idea of static versus dynamic modeling.
Static modeling says that the economy is a given size.
If you take a higher tax rate, that means that the government's going to take more of that money.
That's static.
Dynamic means the economy doesn't stay at that one size.
When you give tax cuts, that increases the economy.
It did so for JFK.
It did so for Ronald Reagan.
It did so for George W. Bush.
And that increasing economy is going to mean that a smaller percentage is still a bigger absolute number.
Right?
A smaller percentage of $100,000 is still a bigger absolute number than 100% of $100.
That's sort of the logic here.
That's true.
But in the long run, what is really going to heal the economy of the United States is not tax cuts so much as it is entitlement reform, which is Paul Ryan's thing.
And that's the thing that Trump won't touch.
That's the thing that Trump won't touch.
Because that is the third rail.
Saying to people that we're going to have to restructure Medicare.
I'm saying to people that we're going to have to restructure Social Security.
That is the truth.
That is the truth.
What is going to bankrupt this country is not a Bush tax cut.
It is not a war in Iraq or Afghanistan.
What will bankrupt the country is this looming time bomb of the amount of money that we owe to people who are going to be on Medicare in the very near future, on Social Security in the very near future.
The only way those people are going to make their money is if we either increase taxes radically, borrow radically, which we can't do forever, or inflate the dollar.
That's really, that's it.
Or we can cut benefits, which we shouldn't do now, but we should structure it so that there is a trailing benefit.
That's what we should do, because I'm never going to see my Social Security money.
Entitlement reform would be better for the future of the country than a tax cut.
Tax cuts are more politically profitable.
So, with a Republican majority, what I would suggest is that Republicans start pushing both.
The Republicans start pushing both.
And then entitlement reform is the more important of the two.
Do the Republicans have the guts to do that?
I doubt it.
They couldn't even pass tax reform.
I mean, they can't even pass health care reform, which they've been campaigning on for seven years.
But that's the real looming time bomb in all of this.
So what's interesting about this is with all these divisions inside the Republican Party, Some leadership would be really great right now.
You know, President Trump saying, here's what I want.
Here's why I want it.
Make the case to the American people.
Take that bully pulpit that he's got and go out and bully a little bit.
Stop talking about the NFL so much and go out and start talking about, here's my plan.
Here's why it's good.
Do the Ronald Reagan thing.
Take out a chart and show people how this works.
But that's not what Trump That's not what Trump is doing.
And that's a problem.
I want to talk about that problem and how Republicans are reacting to that problem.
I also want to talk about some more of the NFL follow-up.
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So with the Republican Party so split, this is the time where presidential leadership is really Barack Obama was good at this.
George W. Bush was good at this.
Trump, unfortunately, gets easily distracted.
If you've ever seen the movie Up, Trump is basically the dog.
Right?
It's just there's a squirrel, and it runs by, and then Trump goes, Squirrel!
And then he just runs after the squirrel.
And this is not a useful quality when you actually need single-minded focus to wrangle the herd of cats.
You need the dog to wrangle the cats.
You don't need the dog to chase the squirrel, is what I'm trying to tell you here.
And right now, the dog is not wrangling the cats in the Senate.
So Trump is spending his time still moaning about why health care didn't pass.
And he's saying things that are actually not true about health care.
He's saying that health care reforms didn't pass because Dad Copper and the senator from Mississippi was in the hospital.
No, that wouldn't make any difference at all.
They didn't have the votes for it.
But Trump keeps saying this kind of stuff, right?
Here's Trump talking about health care.
I also want to provide a brief update on health care.
We have the votes on Graham Cassidy.
Okay, he said that we, but he didn't.
So there's that.
Um, and then you have Paul Ryan.
And what's weird is that you can have the situation where Trump is really necessary to push this thing forward and he's not doing what he needs to do, but everybody is afraid enough of crossing him that they're just going to continue paying him homage, which doesn't create an incentive for him to actually do the right thing.
So Paul Ryan, who I mean, I've never seen a person become as uncomfortable in his own skin as Paul Ryan over the last year.
There's something desperately funny about watching videos of Paul Ryan trying to push policy into the absolute void that is our current political discussion.
Like, in the middle of the NFL debate earlier this week, Paul Ryan just tweeted out a video of himself talking about tax reform and how he's pushing for a better way.
And it was like, it really was like Kevin Bacon in Animal House.
And everybody behind him is just screaming and beating each other with gloves.
And he's going, everyone stay calm.
It's all fine.
Everything is good here.
So he's on with Sean Hannity last night, and Sean obviously is a huge Trump fan.
And here is Paul Ryan bending the knee to President Trump.
What's your relationship with it?
It's very good.
It's the opposite of that.
We have a great relationship.
Are you happy with his presidency?
I'm very happy, but you don't have that in the House of Representatives.
We have caucuses every week.
You don't hear that kind of talk from the House of Representatives.
I have not heard it from House members.
So you don't hear that from House members.
Look, I think the President is giving us the kind of leadership we need to get this country back on the right track.
He's so happy.
He's so happy with the leadership!
Yeah, I don't think Paul Ryan's super happy with the leadership, but he knows that if he crosses President Trump, then Trump starts slapping Ryan instead of slapping McConnell.
And it's actually really funny.
It's turned into basically a Three Stooges routine, where Trump knocks Ryan on the head and Ryan pokes, takes his fingers and pokes McConnell in the eyes.
And that's basically why nothing's getting done, because we're all laughing at slapstick.
Here's Ryan bashing McConnell yesterday on Sean's show.
Of course I'd like to see them do majority votes on these things.
Have you ever asked McConnell that?
We've talked about it a lot.
I don't think they don't have the votes there for it.
That's just the flat, simple answer.
So, what do I do as a House leader?
You don't think he'd even get the votes to get that done?
That's right.
Doesn't he have in charge of the rules?
No, but I don't think there's enough Republicans to vote for that.
Because they worry that when liberals take over government, liberals will ram through liberalism.
Okay, so, and then he pulls out a chart, actually, and he shows a chart of how many bills the House has passed, and how many bills the Senate has passed, and of course the Senate's passed nothing, so he's slapping McConnell for that.
And basically, it's a signal to Trump, please don't slap me.
I'm your friend, Mr. Trump.
Please leave me alone.
The president's fear is not being used in the proper way.
Okay?
The fear of the presidency is not being used in the proper way.
You gotta wield.
You gotta deal.
This was the stuff Trump said he was good at.
Remember, Trump promised this was all going to be easy.
He said it over and over.
And the guarantee it was gonna be easy is that he was a great businessman who was awesome at making deals, right?
This was his shtick.
His entire shtick was, it's gonna be so easy, it's gonna make your head swim.
We're gonna win.
And we're gonna win.
And we're never gonna stop winning.
We're just gonna win forever.
Right?
Why?
Because all these people can't make deals.
Right?
I'm a dealmaker.
Look at me.
I make deals.
Huns.
Boobies.
But that's not what's happening.
And instead, it's funny because where he should be herding cats instead, It's just him running after the latest squirrel, and the Republicans using that as an excuse to bolt.
And look, some of this isn't Trump's fault.
Like, it's not Trump's fault that the Senate can't get together.
But it is a missed opportunity, and that's Trump's fault.
So it's not Trump's fault that McCain and Susan Collins and Rand Paul can't get on the same page.
Of course they can't get on the same page, but it certainly doesn't help when the President of the United States' final healthcare push is that Colin Kaepernick's a jerk.
His last healthcare push, if you recall, a few months ago, his final healthcare push there was, Jeff Sessions is a jerk.
His own attorney general.
So, like, if he would focus a little bit, that would be really, really helpful.
And I don't see an incentive for him to focus, so long as Republicans keep saying how great he is, and Trump threatens them that if they don't work with him, he's just gonna walk across the street to his good friends Nancy and Chuck.
Here's the thing.
I'm not sure that the fear of Trump is particularly justified.
What I mean by this is that people are not voting, like people, as I said yesterday, if you slap Trump openly, then people get mad at you.
If you say as a politician that I think Trump's doing a crappy job, then people get angry at you in the Republican Party because they think you're being disloyal to a guy they all voted for.
That much is true.
And that's why I don't think that it's incumbent on Paul Ryan to say, I think Trump's doing a crappy job.
But I think that when he's asked about it, he should say, I think President Trump has the right principles in mind, but I would love to see him really push that to the American public more.
Try and prompt him in the right direction.
That he can do, and that's not being done.
The reason that I think that can be done is because you actually saw that happen in Alabama, right?
Trump actually endorsed the candidate who lost, and the Tea Party people, who have been really driving this movement since 2010, pushed Roy Moore instead, and they went right over Trump's head.
And Roy Moore wasn't seen as an enemy of Trump.
So long as he said that he liked Trump, everything was fine.
So I think so long as you say that you don't hate Trump, then you can actually make the case for conservative principles.
I'm not sure that the fear of Trump is justified.
If Trump brings the hammer to you, you're inherently finished.
I think that you have to do one very specific thing, and that is go after Trump personally, and then people get mad at you.
But if you say you think Trump needs to do a better job, I don't think that people are going to get particularly happy with you.
Plus, the idea that Trump is somebody who is going to do anything beyond just fulminating on Twitter is, I think, a little bit exaggerated.
The deep truth about Trump is that Trump doesn't actually like getting into conflict where he's personally responsible.
It's kind of weird.
Trump likes to talk the language of conflict, but he doesn't like to fire people.
He doesn't like to openly break with people.
He likes to keep his options open.
Uh, much like Hugh Hefner.
He likes to keep his options open.
And so here is, for example, you know, Tom Price, his Health and Human Services Secretary.
He can't be happy with Tom Price.
Tom Price was taking government jets to different places and spent a lot of money, didn't do much on the healthcare vote.
And here was Trump being asked about Tom Price yesterday, and here is Trump's response.
Uh, I, I was looking into it, and I will look into it, and I will tell you personally, I'm not happy about it.
I am not happy about it.
I'm going to look at it.
I am not happy about it, and I let him know it.
Do you have confidence in Secretary Price?
We'll have to ask Senators about that.
He's not happy about it.
And that's what Trump said, if you recall, about Jeff Sessions.
He says this about a lot of his people, that he's not happy about them, but then he doesn't really fire them.
He doesn't really fire them.
The only person that he's legitimately fired in his administration was James Comey.
He tried to pawn that off on Rod Rosenstein.
Right, so he actually doesn't like firing people.
So, you know, I think that you can push Trump without him spewing all over you, except maybe a little bit on Twitter.
And I think the Republicans should prod him in the right direction, because if they don't, then it's just going to be squirrel chasing from here for the rest of the presidency.
Okay, so now on to the NFL fallout.
Meanwhile, while I talk about the dysfunction on the right, the dysfunction on the left is just increasing at an equal or greater pace.
Whatever the poop storm that is that has begun on the right, it is twice that on the left.
The language that is being used, the polarizing language that really alienates Americans on these issues being used by the left, being embraced by Democrats, is truly astonishing.
So Spike Lee, who is obviously somebody who is considered by the left a civil rights hero and a civil rights leader, The filmmaker, he is using a sort of polarizing language that is not going to benefit Democrats.
It really doubles down on the identity politics that Democrats have embraced.
It's not going to be good for Democrats, and it's not good for the country.
They're taking the opportunity of, they don't like Trump, to go as radical as they possibly can, which I think is so stupid.
I mean, if Trump makes a mistake, why don't you just call him on the mistake?
This is what I've been saying to people on the left forever.
I don't get it.
If you think Trump's making a mistake, why don't you just say, here's the mistake you're making and here's why it's bad, instead of, it's the end of the world, the sky is falling, we're all gonna die, he's a racist, the KKK will be outside my house in the morning.
Like, you're not doing anyone any favors by always turning that knob to 11.
Here's Spike Lee turning the knob past 11, actually turning the knob off the stereo.
It's just gone now.
It's rolling around on the floor somewhere.
Here's Spike Lee.
It's like the owners, or the plantation owners, and the guys playing a league, You know, they're on the plantation and you can't say anything.
And so, the thing is really escalating.
Okay, so he compares the NFL owners to members of a plant- plantation owners.
Those guys make millions of dollars a year, and they are paid to play a sport.
It is not like a plantation, and it's deeply insulting to people who lived in slavery, and some who still live in slavery, to suggest that people in the NFL are like plantation owners.
Every business, if the NFL decided tomorrow that they actually wanted to make the players stand up, or they would suspend them or fine them, they'd be well within their rights to do that.
Do I think they ought to do that?
At this point, I don't think they ought to do that, but Is that something that the NFL could do and has the right to do?
Yes.
Would that make them plantation owners?
Absolutely not.
Any more than any business has rules.
I said this even about James Damore at Google.
I think Google was wrong to fire James Damore for putting out a memo that seemed to me largely well-reasoned.
Did they have the right to do it?
Of course they had the right to do it.
Did it make them plantation owners?
No.
I mean, he had a job for which he was being paid.
They didn't like him, so they fired him.
That was bad.
That was wrong.
But that's not the equivalent of living on a plantation.
Steph Curry is doing some of this polarizing language too.
So he was talking about the Sports Illustrated cover we mentioned yesterday.
Sports Illustrated is trying to take the tactic of the kneeling isn't about the anthem and it's not about the flag and it's not even about police brutality.
It's about opposition to Trump.
So what they did is they elided Colin Kaepernick from their cover.
And so people on the left are understandably angry about this.
They say Kaepernick started this movement.
Why isn't he on the cover with the rest of us standing up to police brutality?
What they don't understand is the more you tie yourself to Colin Kaepernick, that dude is an anchor on your movement.
If you want to tie your leg to Colin Kaepernick's leg, you are going down and those waves will swallow you immediately.
Steph Curry doesn't seem to really get that.
Here he is.
Sports Illustrated cover, you're right in the middle, but there's no sign of Kaepernick.
How do you feel about that?
That was terrible.
Just kind of capitalizing on the hoopla and the media and all that nonsense.
The real people that understand exactly what's been going on and who's really been active and vocal.
truly making a difference.
Truly in his face, it's Kaepernick is truly making a difference.
Kaepernick is super unpopular with the American people.
The American people don't like Kaepernick's protest.
They don't want people fired, but they don't like it.
And the more the left ties itself to Kaepernick, this is where Trump's little routine has worked very well, actually, is that the left, instead of saying, we have the right to stand or kneel as we see fit, they said, we like Colin Kaepernick.
He's a hero.
Again, that overreach is not smart politics.
Michelle Obama engaged in some very not smart identity politics yesterday.
Here she is saying that any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against women generally.
She told this audience at this conference in Boston, here's just one piece of it, quote, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice.
What does it mean for us as women that we look at these two candidates as women?
And many of us said, that guy, he's better for me.
His voice is more true to me.
Well, to me, that just says you don't like your voice.
You like the thing.
So she's saying women don't like their own voice if they didn't vote for Hillary Clinton.
Maybe they just didn't like Hillary Clinton's voice because she's a crazy old bat.
Like, maybe people just didn't like Hillary Clinton because she's really off-putting as a candidate and off-putting as a human being.
Maybe that's why.
But the left has to engage in this identity politics.
You really think you're going to win back the white women who voted majority for Trump by saying that they didn't understand what it was like to be a woman and so they didn't vote for Hillary Clinton?
Is that really the direction that you want to go, leftists?
Is that really the pitch you want to make?
So when I say there's dysfunction on the left, this is the dysfunction on the left.
The dysfunction on the right is that they can't get their act together, they don't have any centralizing principle, and so they're fragmenting in every possible direction and unable to get anything done.
The fragmentation on the left is less a fragmentation than a movement toward a more unpopular politics that makes the country worse in the nature of identity politics.
I'm frankly, I'm shocked that Michelle Obama came out and said that because I think that she's smarter than that.
That's just dumb politics.
But for her to do that, It just demonstrates how far down the rabbit hole the Democrats are with regards to this identity politics.
Okay.
Time for some things I like, and then we'll do some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
So, I was at University of Utah last night.
We had a fantastic event.
Packed house.
Enthusiastic audience.
It was really quite wonderful.
There were protesters outside, some people got violent, three people were arrested.
Watch Steven Crowder's show tonight.
Okay, Steven Crowder has a show tonight.
He apparently went undercover, not Gay Jared, went undercover, he's a producer, went undercover with Antifa and the film is truly amazing.
So we'll play clips of it tomorrow on the show, but if you don't Get a chance.
Watch Crowder's show tonight.
Crowder, I mean, this is great journalistic work.
You should go check it out tonight on Louder with Crowder.
Go check it out.
It's really, really amazing stuff.
I've seen some of the footage.
It's truly amazing.
So, we're gonna do, because we're in Utah, we're gonna do Mormon-related things that I like and things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
Mormon-related.
So there's a movie that came out in 2003.
It didn't get a lot of play, but it's actually quite a good movie.
It's called Saints and Soldiers.
It's about World War II.
It's a World War II movie in which it's basically a band of American soldiers trying to make it out from behind enemy lines in, I think it's in Belgium, and back across to American lines.
And the main character is a guy who carries around the Book of Mormon with him.
And it's actually quite a moving film.
Sort of about the role of religion in imbuing virtue, and the role of heroism, and also the role of redemption.
You've made mistakes, you've done things that are wrong, and what can you do to redeem yourself?
The movie is Saints and Soldiers.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
This is Armed Today.
Supreme Allied Headquarters reported American combat troops taken prisoner, then famously executed by their German captors near the Belgian town of Malmedy.
An unknown number of Germans are making a push towards this little town.
They're shooting prisoners who are behind enemy lines.
They've punched through all along here.
Trapped deep behind enemy lines.
Possession of some crucial intelligence.
This is a major German offensive!
Okay, so the movie's actually quite good, and you should check it out.
It's on Amazon Prime.
So if you're a Prime member, then you can watch that for free.
I don't know if it's on Netflix, but it is well worth watching.
And again, I like movies that take seriously the contentions of religion, even if you don't believe in all the particular doctrines of a particular faith.
Like, take religion seriously.
One of my pet peeves about a lot of atheists is they do this routine where they'll say things like, if you're a religious person, how do you, you know, do religious people even know?
Like, how can there be a God if bad things happen in the world?
Have you even thought of that?
Hmm?
It's like, yes, we've thought of that.
Yes, we, yes.
Every religious thinker in history has taken on this question.
Like, do some basic research.
Like, please, for the love of Pete, if you're gonna rip on religion, like, do some research.
Okay, time for some things I hate, and we'll do Mormon-related things I hate.
Okay, so the thing that I hate today is the musical The Book of Mormon.
The Book of Mormon is very clever.
I mean, I think that it's got stuff that's funny.
It's super vulgar, which makes sense because the guys who wrote South Park wrote The Book of Mormon.
It is clever.
The thing that I hate about it is the scorn that it shows for Mormonism as a faith by mocking its central beliefs.
Let's be straight about religion in general, organized religion in general.
Most religions make miraculous claims.
Now, I think some of those miraculous claims are more ludicrous than others, but virtually every major religion makes claims about miracles, and at a certain point you're going to have to take a leap of faith.
Mocking those leaps of faith to me is just sneering at somebody else without recognizing your own vulnerability on these issues.
There's also something to me that's a little bit off-putting about targeting Mormons, who are legitimately like the nicest people in America.
I said last night at the beginning of my speech that this is the only state in the union where I'm the least clean-cut guy in the state.
I mean, Mormons, the Mormons that I know, the Mormons in general that I know are the nicest, cleanest-cut people with wonderful families, and ripping on the Mormons is like hitting a puppy.
Like, really?
The Mormons?
Those are the people that you're going to rip on?
If you really had any guts.
And Traystone and Matt Parker do have guts, because they've actually tried to go after, like, drawing cartoons of Muhammad on South Park.
But let's just put it this way.
Book of Mormon came out, and the people in the Mormon church, they said they were actually happy about it, because it gave them an opportunity to actually hand out more copies of the Book of Mormon and recruit.
Right?
If they had done the Book of Muhammad, every theater in the United States would now be on fire.
There would be legitimate ISIS terrorist attacks on theaters in the United States if they put out the Book of Muhammad.
So it seems like it's an easy target.
Here's one of the songs from the show that is supposed to demonstrate sort of the naïveté of Mormons.
By the way, it's When I say they're the sweetest people, here's what I mean.
I get off the plane yesterday.
And I come down into the baggage claim area.
And there's a huge crowd of people.
They're not waiting for me, of course.
They're there waiting for people who are coming back from mission.
A huge crowd of people.
Families with signs.
People who have gone abroad trying to help people.
And these kids who are out helping people.
How many 17, 18 year old kids do you know who are spending a couple of years of their life going out and helping random people who are in dire poverty?
And they're being celebrated by their families, these beautiful families, who are saying to them, congratulations on doing something good for the world.
I mean, it's the opposite of Hugh Hefner.
Congratulations on doing something good for the world.
These are the people who you're going to mock?
These are the people who you're going to say are the problem?
So here's the number from the Book of Mormon.
Again, doing the very easy thing of mocking somebody's ludicrous religious beliefs, which, again, I can do the same thing about scientific materialism.
Scientific materialism is based on premises that cannot uphold the central contentions of scientific materialism.
Under scientific materialism, you cannot argue for truth, you cannot argue for reason, you cannot argue for logic, you can't even argue for the scientific method by the tenets of scientific materialism.
So I can mock to death this stuff.
I don't do that because I think that it's worth taking seriously other people's claims.
Anyway, here's a number from the Book of Mormon.
Ever since I was a child, I tried to be the best.
So what happened?
My family and friends all said I was blessed.
So what happened?
It was supposed to be all so exciting.
To be teaching of Christ across the sea.
But I allowed my faith to be shaken.
Oh, what's the matter with me?
I've always longed to help the needy.
To do the things I never dared.
This was the time for me to step up.
So then why was I so scared?
A warlord who shoots people in the face?
What's so scary about that?
I must trust that my Lord is mightier and always has my back.
Now I must be completely devout.
I can't have even one trend of doubt.
I believe that the Lord God created the universe.
I believe that he sent his only son to die for my sins.
And I believe Ancient Jews built boats and sailed to America.
I am a Mormon.
And a Mormon trusts.
Okay, so this is the part that I hate about this, is the idea, that last lyric there, again, is it funny?
Of course.
It's easy to make fun of people's religious beliefs.
It's super, super easy.
But when he says things like, I believe that the Lord God created the universe, I believe that Jesus died for my sins, I believe that the ancient Jews sailed on boats to America, and then the audience laughs, the idea is that all of these beliefs are equally stupid, and all of these beliefs are equally ignorant, and what this guy is doing, he's just doing because he's a naive fool.
That's the idea, is that religious people are naive fools who believe they can make the world a better place with their belief in this giant spaghetti monster in the sky.
That is super dismissive of what religious people have done, what religious people have built, and what religious people actually believe.
Talk to a religious person sometime.
If you think that religious people have never thought about the ridiculousness of some of the things that we believe, and the leaps of faith that we have to make, you've never talked to a religious person.
And we're not just all fools who go around thinking to ourselves, well, you know, every word of the Bible is not only literally true, but I don't see why anyone can't believe it.
Okay?
If you don't doubt, you're not a religious person.
That's what faith means.
Faith means not only that you have doubts, but that you live with the doubts and you wrestle with the doubts every day.
This is why I love to say that the word Israel, right?
I'm a member of the nation of Israel.
You know, I'm Israel, right?
That word in the Bible, That's what it means.
That's what it means to be a religious person.
And it seems to me that if you're going to do a musical about religious people, it should look a lot more like the movie Silence from Martin Scorsese and a lot less like the Book of Mormon.
OK, so we'll be back here tomorrow.
And I will be back from our beautiful studios in Los Angeles.
And I look forward to seeing you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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