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Nov. 3, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:52
It’s Bernie’s Party Now | Ep. 410
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Sergeant Beau Bergdahl goes free in breaking news.
Plus, Hillary Clinton basically just gave up the Democratic Party to Bernie Sanders, and we'll check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so breaking news.
Sergeant Bo Bergdahl, the guy who just pled guilty to both desertion and misbehavior before the enemy and could have received life in prison, instead goes free.
He received zero prison time.
I'll explain just how outrageous this is, plus some comments from the judge that are nearly as outrageous in just a second.
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Okay, so the breaking news is that Bo Bergdahl, Sergeant Bo Bergdahl, who, as you recall, was treated as a hero by the Obama administration, was actually a traitor or at the very least a deserter.
He deserted his post while he was in Afghanistan.
His fellow soldiers, some of whom I know and have met, some of them have told me that he was a weirdo before that.
He wandered off and wandered directly into the hands of the Taliban.
He says he wasn't trying to join the Taliban.
Whatever he was trying to do, they ended up basically capturing him and keeping him in captivity for several years.
President Obama then traded five Gitmo terrorists in favor of Bo Bergdahl.
So the guy wandered off his post.
Not only did he do that, we had to send out soldiers looking for him because it seemed like he might have been captured, right?
Not that he deserted, but that he might have been captured.
And six American soldiers were killed in the process of attempting to get the guy back, plus a military dog as well.
That's according to Mark Thompson over at Time Magazine in 2016.
in 2014.
He wrote then, chances are you haven't heard of the six soldiers who died hunting for Bergdahl after he went missing, according to military officials.
Now that Bergdahl has been sprung, soldiers who served with Bergdahl are grumbling that he deserted and shouldn't be hailed as a hero, especially given the resulting cost in American lives.
Bergdahl himself pled guilty to desertion and misbehavior in the face of the enemy.
According to Politico today, the Associated Press, a military judge has found that Bill Bergdahl should serve no prison time, zero prison time for endangering his comrades by walking off his Afghanistan post.
The judge also gave Bergdahl a dishonorable discharge, reduced his rank to private, said he must forfeit pay equal to $1,000 per month for 10 months.
A $10,000 fine for getting six American soldiers killed because you walked off duty.
Really?
Okay, desertion used to be punishable by trea- it used to be treated like treason, right?
Life in prison or you're taken in front of a firing squad.
You get your fellow soldiers killed because you decide to wander off your post and join the Taliban, or at least go and hang out with them, and you don't get any prison time at all?
They just bust you down to private and take away some money?
According to Politico, Prosecutors have sought stiff punishments because of wounds to service members who searched for Bergdahl after he disappeared in 2009.
Some of those wounds are really grievous.
There's a guy in a wheelchair because of Bergdahl.
The defense sought to counter that evidence with testimony about Bergdahl's suffering during his five years as a captive of Taliban allies, his contributions to military intelligence and survival instruction, and his mental health problems.
Bergdahl was 23 years old when, after five months in Afghanistan, he disappeared from his remote infantry post near the Pakistan border, triggering a massive search operation.
And then he showed up in the hands of the Taliban.
And, of course, in May 2014, he was handed over to U.S.
Special Forces in a swap with the Taliban.
Here's what's most outrageous about this.
What's most outrageous about this was pointed out by Jon Podhoretz over at Commentary magazine.
This is just a few days ago.
The New York Times reported, quote, The judge in this case, a guy named Colonel Jeffrey Nance, said, quote, Okay, mitigation evidence.
I mean, that's insane.
So basically, what the defense was trying to say is they were trying to say that Trump was making statements about the case.
And they talked about how Trump had made numerous statements during the nomination and in the general election about Bo Bergdahl, and the accused then pled guilty.
And then he held a press conference on October 16, 2017, and he said, I can't comment on Bo Bergdahl because I guess he's doing something today, but they're sending up sentencing, so I'm not going to comment on him, but I think people have heard my comments in the past.
The defense immediately filed for dismissal saying that Trump had biased the case beyond measure and therefore they should release Bergdahl.
The judge said, I'm not going to release Bergdahl based on that, but I will be taking this into account.
Right?
He said that he would take into account as mitigation evidence what Trump had said.
And pretty ridiculous.
So they said that essentially, he says at the end of his little ruling, he said, I will consider the president's comments as mitigation evidence as I arrive in an appropriate sentence in this case.
Furthermore, I will require anyone involved in any way in the exercise of discretion and any post-trial aspect of this case to read the statement from the White House press office of 20 October 2017 before they exercise that discretion, unless the defense requests that I not issue that order.
Because on October 20th, there had been some statement from the White House about all of this.
It was a statement regarding military justice.
And it said, quote, the president, quote, expects all military personnel who are involved in any way in the military justice process to exercise their independent professional judgment.
Thank you.
Right, and so the judge said he wasn't going to take this into account, but he did take it into account.
It looks a lot like the judge basically said, I'm not going to release Bergdahl because Trump did this, but I'll kind of release Bergdahl because Trump did this.
At least that seems to be the implication here.
Pretty horrifying stuff.
Bergdahl, no doubt, will be treated as a hero by the left in exactly the same way that Chelsea Manning has been treated as a hero by the left.
Anyone who turns against the U.S.
military is treated, at least by a segment of the left, I don't say the whole left, by a segment of the more extreme left as somebody who has done something worth celebrating.
And Bo Bergdahl will, I'm sure, get a large contract from some book company in order to tell his story, while the people who were shot and wounded or killed searching for him end up, you know, with nothing.
Just insane, disgusting stuff.
Okay, well.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are in complete disarray.
One thing that is very clear is that Bernie Sanders now runs the Democratic Party.
Bernie Sanders is the king of the Democratic Party.
He lost the battle, but he won the war.
He lost in 2016, but he won the war.
Because now, every Democrat goes on bended knee to pay homage to Bernie Sanders.
All of his agenda items must be treated with respect.
When he talks about Medicare for all, you have people like Elizabeth Warren and people like Cory Booker and people like Kamala Harris all paying homage to Bernie Sanders' priorities.
It's amazing how a loon bag old socialist who's never passed a serious piece of legislation in his life was kicked out of a commune in the 1970s for being too useless for a commune.
That guy is now the leader of the Democratic Party.
Yeah, it's no more absurd, certainly, than Donald Trump being the leader of the Republican Party.
But it does demonstrate the loss of faith in the parties themselves have led to the takeover of those parties by outside forces.
Sanders is an outside force.
Trump is an outside force.
And this demonstrates, again, that when you have parties that have lost their way, when you have parties that don't have a reason for existence, they are susceptible to being taken over.
It's really obvious now that folks like Elizabeth Warren are crowning Bernie Sanders king, and the only question is what Bernie Sanders is going to do with that.
Elizabeth Warren was asked yesterday by Jake Tapper on CNN whether Bernie was robbed in the 2016 election cycle by Hillary Clinton and the DNC.
She had said last year that he was not robbed, but now she's switched her tune because obviously everyone must now must now bend before Bernie.
This is a test for Tom Perez.
And either he's going to succeed by bringing Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders' representatives into this process, and they're going to say it's fair, it works, we all believe it, or he's going to fail.
And I very much hope he succeeds.
I hope for Democrats everywhere.
I hope for Bernie and for all of Bernie's supporters that he's going to succeed.
Very quickly, Senator, do you agree with the notion that it was rigged?
Yes.
Okay, so suddenly she agrees with the notion that it was rigged.
Funny how that works, right?
Five seconds ago, five seconds ago, she was saying it wasn't rigged.
Now she's saying it's rigged.
Does that sound honest to you?
Or does that sound like playing political games?
Does that sound like she knows that Bernie Sanders is the power inside the party, this loon-bag old septuagenarian socialist from Vermont?
That guy, the guy who you can find recordings of singing, this land is your land, this land is my land, in his crazy voice.
Really, it's worth watching.
We'll have to pull it at some point.
That guy now runs the Democratic Party.
So the question becomes this.
Is Bernie Sanders going to actually run for president again in 2020?
I think he would be a fool not to.
I think that if he ran in 2020, he'd win the nomination, and he would likely win the presidency.
Truly.
I think that is a very high possibility.
Now, he also has the possibility that he could sit outside and just become the patron to the Democratic Party.
He could sit outside, he could campaign for all the candidates, he could make them come to him.
That may be his best move in certain ways because then he gets to be the leader of a movement as opposed to the guy who's expected to actually implement.
And Bernie's not going to be able to implement a damn thing.
I mean, Bernie doesn't have the power, he doesn't have the support of legislators in order to do all of this, but if he just sits outside and he talks about all of his socialist priorities and Democrats mirror his socialist priorities, he can actually pose more of a threat from the outside than he does from the inside.
But it is very clear that the DNC is moving in Bernie's direction.
Tom Perez, who took over the DNC from Donna Brazile.
We talked about Donna Brazile yesterday.
The reason all this is coming up is because Donna Brazile has a new book where she says Hillary Clinton took over the Democratic Party wholesale in August of 2015, long before she was the nominee.
Now Perez runs the party and he's just trying to keep his head down saying we're going to move forward.
What he means by move forward is follow Bernie down the primrose path here.
Well, hey, we're moving forward.
We're building, you know, I've been asked that question a number of times since I started.
And one of my goals here as the DNC chair is to make sure that the nominating process for 2020 is a process that's totally fair and transparent for everybody.
That's what we're fighting for.
That's what we will do.
And we're going to set the primary debate schedule well in advance of when we know who the candidates will be there.
We have to make sure that everything is fair and open.
Everybody has a fair shake.
Okay, so obviously he's now paying lip service to Bernie Sanders amid all of this.
One of the points that's worth making here is it really is fascinating how the 2016 election played out in light of the fact that Hillary Clinton was picking up all of Barack Obama's bills at the DNC.
One thing that Donna Brazile said in that piece is that Barack Obama had run up $24 million in debt against the DNC, and then Hillary Clinton came in and backfilled that debt.
Well, maybe that was one of the reasons why Barack Obama kept saying to Joe Biden he wasn't going to endorse him.
Because this was one of the questions during the primaries.
What if Barack Obama had endorsed Joe Biden?
Wouldn't Biden then have beaten Hillary Clinton in the primaries?
And nobody could really understand why it was that Joe Biden wasn't getting Obama's endorsement.
Obama had talked in warm terms about Biden.
He obviously likes Joe Biden a lot.
He felt that Joe Biden was a good support for him.
And yet he was standing aside and letting Hillary Clinton basically take the lead.
It is not unheard of for presidents to endorse their vice presidents during the primary cycle.
That is not unheard of at all.
In fact, it happens relatively routinely.
Obama didn't do that.
Maybe one of the reasons he didn't do that is because Hillary Clinton was basically signing the checks for all of his bills.
A lot of Obama consultants were still being paid by the DNC with Hillary cash while all of this was going on, which shows how corrupt Obama is if that's the case.
Joe Biden, by the way, is probably going to run again in 2020, but now Joe Biden could run into the Bernie Sanders buzzsaw.
Biden is still making the rounds talking about Trump tweeting and all the rest of this.
Trump had a long tweet storm today about how the DNC is corrupt and how it should be investigated by the FBI and the DOJ.
I'll talk about that in just a second.
But here is Joe Biden desperately trying to cling to relevance.
We've got to stop this tweeting.
We've got to stop this sort of... No, it is so... I've tried to stay out of the mosh pit the President and I, Obama and I have.
But it's childish.
It's time to grow up.
Pretty amazing.
And so Joe Biden continues to try and maintain his place as a possible 2020 frontrunner.
Now, I do want to talk in just a second about why it is that this is a problem for the Democratic Party and why it's going to continue to be a problem for the Democratic Party.
Plus, Hillary's corruption still looms as a specter on the horizon and why neither party will let it go in just a second.
I also want to talk about Republicans on taxes and a big loophole that they created that's kind of disastrous.
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Okay, so again, Joe Biden versus Bernie Sanders.
It's looking like the battle of the walker riding titans.
They're just going to beat each other with walkers with tennis balls at the end of them.
And then they'll run against Donald Trump, who will also be in a walker.
It'll just be wildly entertaining in 2020.
But Joe Biden looks like he will get the short end of the stick.
He got it from Hillary last time.
Now it looks like he's going to get it from Bernie Sanders.
Big problem for the Democratic Party because all of the splits that pre-existed are now going to be exacerbated.
Bernie Sanders is not a unifying figure.
Bernie Sanders is a very divisive figure inside the Democratic Party.
The Hillary wing still thinks she got jobbed.
The Hillary wing still thinks she should be president.
Hillary is still out there defending herself.
The best thing that could happen for the Democratic Party is for Hillary to just disappear.
This is why there's a concerted attempt now to do away with all of the Hillary Clinton people.
Tom Perez, five minutes ago, just fired the top DNC fundraiser claiming that basically this person was involved in the Hillary stuff.
They aren't explicitly saying that, but that seems to be the implication, because slow fundraising has plagued the party.
Bernie Sanders is the only capable fundraiser in the party anymore, along with Nancy Pelosi.
That's it.
So the Democrats are now going to fight an internal battle.
Hillary continues to cling to her relevance.
So you've got Biden clinging to his relevance, Hillary clinging to her relevance, and Bernie Sanders ascendant.
Pretty amazing.
Here's Hillary Clinton yesterday trying to explain why she didn't collude with Russia, even though she paid millions of dollars, apparently, in order to get a dossier on Donald Trump that involved getting information directly from Russian governmental sources.
Okay, so she says that she's going to blame it on the FBI, but that's really not the question here.
The question is, why was she paying Russian sources to obtain information on President Trump?
And she's not able to shake this.
The fact that she continues to be in the public eye is a disaster for Democrats.
It is a disaster.
It is great for President Trump, however, because President Trump needs Hillary Clinton to be out there.
The reason he needs Hillary Clinton to be out there is so long as Hillary Clinton is out there, the specter of Hillary looms large, all the folks who voted for President Trump don't have to consider whether they would vote for him again.
Because now it's the same election over and over and over.
They can just do the same election over and over in their heads.
If you voted for Donald Trump, it's not that he has to do a good job, all you have to do is look on the TV screen, there's Hillary Clinton, and you breathe a sigh of relief.
At least we didn't get her.
And this is the way people are gauging President Trump's performance at this point.
Not by whether he's doing a good job, not by whether he's been successful, not where he's been successful or how he's been successful, but at least he's not that lady.
So her continued presence on the national stage The ubiquity of her mug on the television set.
Very, very good for President Trump.
And Trump jazzes up his bass when he says stuff like this.
So Trump told my friend Larry O'Connor over in Washington, D.C.
He told Larry that he's very frustrated he can't personally go after Hillary Clinton.
The left is going nuts over this.
But Trump knows exactly what he's doing when he says it.
The saddest thing is that because I'm the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department.
I'm not supposed to be involved with the FBI.
I'm not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing.
And I am very frustrated by it.
Okay, so a lot of people on the left went nuts over this.
A lot of people on the left suggested that this is President Trump's dictatorial sensibility coming to the fore.
He wants to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
Let's be very real about this.
This is Trump saying he can't do it.
Right?
This is Trump saying he can't do it.
For all of his fulminations on Twitter, What Trump is doing here is certainly no worse than what President Obama did repeatedly with the IRS, where he kept saying that it'd be great if someone would go after these 501c3s, these conservative 501c3s, and then administrators at the IRS got the picture and they went ahead and went after the conservative 501c3s.
It's very funny to watch the left, which seriously objects to what Trump is saying publicly, Basically gloss over the IRS scandal and pretend that it never happened.
Now listen, I don't think that the president should be telling the FBI what to do.
It does require a certain level of independence.
He has power over the FBI because he has power over his DOJ.
But we don't want the DOJ to simply become an arm of the White House.
It was under President Obama.
It's not under President Trump.
This is something that even the left should acknowledge.
Okay, the DOJ under President Trump is not an arm of the White House.
It really has not been.
Eric Holder was the guy who described himself as Barack Obama's wingman.
If you want to talk about perversion of the DOJ to the uses of the White House, it was a lot worse under Obama than it was under Trump.
And this is coming from someone who's very skeptical of Trump's perspective on the Constitution and the rule of law.
Trump has certainly not used the DOJ as his weapon against political opponents in nearly the way that Democrats use the DOJ as a weapon on behalf of their political allies.
That is clearly true.
Tucker J. Christian Adams, who's over at the DOJ during the Obama administration, and the DOJ Civil Rights Division, was basically throwing out cases against the Black Panthers, even as the Black Panthers, the new Black Panthers, were wielding nightsticks outside of voting places.
The DOJ under Obama was much more wing of the White House than it is under President Trump, so I don't buy a lot of the kind of left-wing outrage that Trump is trying to sick the DOJ and the FBI on Hillary Clinton.
If he wanted to do it, he actually has the power to do it, but he is not doing that right now, so the left needs to just calm down.
Okay, so in a second I want to talk about the Republican tax plan, then we have the mailbag today.
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Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about the Republican tax plans.
So yesterday, I ran through some of the things you need to know about the Republican tax plan.
What I basically said is, it makes some difference for people in the middle class, it raises taxes a little bit on people who are in the upper bracket, and it definitely lowers taxes on corporate taxes.
The corporate tax rate reduction from 35% to 20% is definitely a massive improvement.
35% is the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.
So that would be a big move.
However, the Republicans, as always, Fail to make their argument.
They always buy into left-wing premises, and then they use those to make bad arguments.
So, an example today.
There's a loophole in the new Republican tax bill.
Remember, the Republicans run the House, they run the Senate, they run everything, right?
The Republicans run the whole shebang.
They don't have to bargain with the Democrats.
And yet now, they are basically preemptively bargaining, here is what they did.
The new House tax bill doesn't just leave taxes in place for people who earn more than $500,000 and couples earning more than $1 million.
It increases taxes by 6% on each dollar earned from $1 million to $1.2 million for single people, and $1.2 million to $1.6 million for married couples.
So in other words, it actually raises taxes on people who are high-income earners.
That is designed to make up for the reduction in the lowest tax bracket to 12%.
So the low tax bracket is moving down to 12% from something like 25%.
As Phil Kirpin has pointed out, this means the effective rate in the bubble is 46%.
So if I make between a million bucks and 1.6 million bucks, or between 1.2 and 1.6 million bucks, I'm married, that means that every dollar I earn there, 50% of it will go to the federal government.
Almost 50% of it will go to the federal government.
Plus, that also means that because this tax bill basically gets rid of the state tax deduction, meaning that California has 10% state income tax, And then there's a business tax in the city of Los Angeles.
That means that every dollar that I earn between 1.2 and 1.6 million dollars, that looks more like 60% of my income leaving my pocket in that case, which is an insane amount of money.
That's an insane amount of money.
Let's just be frank about this.
You know, the fact that I have to make a lot of money in order to pay the tax, I'm very grateful for the fact that I make a lot of money.
It's my money.
It is not the government's money.
It is not your money.
It is my money.
Just as when I was making $60,000 a year, that was my money.
I'm the same person.
I'm earning the same way.
That means that the money is mine.
The money is not yours.
Republicans fail to understand this basic point, and so they engage in class warfare in a stupid way.
They're constantly granting the point.
This is the sort of idiotic populism that I keep hearing from people on the right.
They grant the left's point that it is fairer to tax people at the upper end of the income spectrum.
Nonsense.
Nonsense.
Taking a dollar from someone's pocket without an exchange of services is theft.
Okay, the exchange of services in the Constitution is roads, bridges, defense, right, because you have the equal capacity to use these things, but Not for redistributive programs.
Not for Social Security.
Not for Medicare.
Okay, the idea that you get to remove money from my pocket and give me nothing in return just because I'm earning more money than I was five years ago seems to me morally unprincipled.
I give lots of charity.
That's good.
That's on me.
But the government seizing money from people's pockets They can do it to me, they can do it to you, and that's exactly what they do in socialistic countries like Denmark.
Denmark has low corporate tax rates, by the way, but really high individual tax rates.
If they can take 60% of my income between 1.2 and 1.6 mil if I'm lucky enough to make that this year, then they can move that down tax bracket-wise until they're making up this deficit.
Because bottom line is, both parties want to blow out the debt.
Here's the other thing that Republicans fail.
Republicans should make this argument, okay?
The reality is, The money in my pocket is better for the economy than the money in the pocket of somebody who is lower on the income spectrum.
That is not a rip on the person who's lower on the income spectrum.
That person may need the money more than I do.
I will freely admit that.
But in terms of who pays that person to have a job, it is me.
There are a lot of people who are at my company who are making, you know, 60 grand a year, 75 grand a year.
There are a lot of people at this company who are earning at the middle class income, in the income bracket.
If I'm not making as much money, if my company isn't making as much money, okay, and it's being redistributed to the people who work for me, is that supposed to be a benefit of them?
Because what happens if I just decide to shut it down?
The case in point of this is that Joe Ricketts, who owns the, he owns Gothamist, or did, and New Yorkist, he just shut down the companies.
Why?
Because all of the employees decided to unionize.
A week later, he said, screw this, I'm not making enough money on it, he shut it down.
Was that good for them?
Was it good for the economy?
Or would it have been better for them not to unionize, and instead go in and ask for a raise if they thought they deserved it?
Well, basically, when the government removes income from my pocket, it's the government unionizing my workers against me, right?
I mean, that's basically what it's doing.
It's basically them saying, your workers should get more of your profits, and therefore, we are going to take your money out of your pocket and give it to your workers.
It doesn't work that way.
This is why businesses shut down.
You increase the rate of taxation high enough and businesses will shut down.
Again, Is this particular tax increase the biggest deal?
Do I think that it's not worth voting for the tax bill over?
No, I don't.
Will I survive?
Of course I'll survive.
I'm not complaining about the amount of taxes breaking me or anything.
I don't think that's real.
What I am saying is that Republicans fail to make honest economic arguments and they fail to make honest moral arguments.
Taxation at root is theft unless you are giving back products and services in exchange for the taxation.
And it is also true That people at the upper end of the income spectrum are the people who are creating the vast majority of jobs in the country and paying, by the way, nearly all of the net taxes in the country.
The top tax bracket paid 95% of all net income taxes in the United States.
Net meaning they don't get any services back, but people in the lower income brackets do.
Republicans don't make these arguments because they think it's politically unpalatable, that people won't understand them.
I don't think that's right.
I think people get this.
I think everybody works for a rich person, right?
Until I was rich, I worked for rich people.
I still work for people richer than I am.
Okay, that's the way this works.
Okay, the fact is that an economy runs based on the expenditure of capital in pursuit of better jobs and services, better goods and services.
And if the people at the upper end are going to be punished for doing that, you're going to see the jobs market go down.
The reason I hate this is not, again, because I think it's a huge deal, but because when you use Democratic arguments, you're never going to win.
Because what the Democrats are going to do is they're going to say, listen, the Republicans are right.
Of course we should tax the people at the upper end more.
Why don't we tax them 90%?
Right?
This is the argument that Cenk Eiger made when we debated.
He said, well, the economy was better when we had people at the upper income brackets, people making more than a million dollars, paying 90% of their income to the federal government.
First of all, important to note, virtually everyone avoided taxes, right?
The effective tax rate for people making more than a million dollars in those years was incredibly low because everybody was just using every loophole available.
So that tax rate was never achieved.
But beyond that, the Democrats can use this argument for anything.
Once you acknowledge that people who earn more should pay more taxes, not as an absolute amount, which is fine, but on a percentage basis, once you say that, you're basically acknowledging that you get to rob Peter to pay Paul.
And eventually, Peter gets sick of being robbed, and he's going to stop hiring people.
So, you know, again, the GOP needs to get out of this rut where they continue to nonsensically mirror the things the Democrats say about tax policy.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things I hate, and then we'll get to the mailbag.
So, things I like.
This week I've been doing books about children, and books about parenting.
Amy Chua has a really fun book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
It made a lot of noise at the time.
Amy Chua is a professor, I believe, at Yale, and her book is basically about raising her children in a sort of traditional Chinese way, meaning achievement-oriented, that self-esteem is not given, it is earned.
And I think that there's a lot to this.
I mean, if you want to look at areas of the world where children are the best educated, areas of the world where children are high achievers, they're all areas of the world where parents don't shy away from putting pressure on their children to achieve.
It's a world where they demonstrate high expectations for their children.
We in America have this bizarre notion that if we treat our children like Rousseau treats a meal, that we just let our kids run around free naked on a playground somewhere, that they're going to end up being a Nobel Prize winning scientist.
That's not the reality, okay?
The push to achieve is something that is deeply necessary.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is a really fascinating memoir about her raising of her children and how to sort of balance American tendencies with Chinese tendencies, as she puts it.
So check it out, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate and then I want to spend some real time with the mailbag today.
So Tucker Carlson, who is an immensely talented guy, but who has done this mirroring of the populist shtick for at least the last several years, he decided to go off on what he calls the ruling class.
Now, I have real objections to this notion, the quote-unquote ruling class.
Who are the ruling class?
I mean, Tucker Carlson grew up about as Tony as it gets, right?
I mean, Tucker Carlson grew up in the lap of privilege.
His mother, I believe, is Margaret Carlson.
He grew up like a multi-multi-millionaire.
Tucker Carlson has been earning his entire career.
That's not a rip on Tucker, but all of this sort of class warfare, you hear this from Laura Ingraham, too, the elite.
When you're making as much money and you went to the best schools as Laura did and you clerked for Justice Thomas, I'm pretty sure we can call you an elite.
This idea that the ruling class prefers immigrants to Americans, here's what Tucker Carlson has to say about this.
Now, I think that there is something to be said for the idea that there are folks on the left, that leftist ideology favors the importation of people who do not buy into American culture over people who actually buy into American culture.
What Tucker's about to say here smacks to me of both class warfare and a little bit of anti-immigrant sentiment.
I'll explain why in a second.
Why was this man even in our country?
Well, he was here because this country's leaders have decided that diversity, in and of itself, is of greater importance than the well-being of this country's people.
That's literally true.
Saipov was admitted to the U.S.
under the so-called Diversity Lottery, something you've likely never even heard of until today.
And then he continued.
That part, what he said, is not so bad.
But then he said this.
He said, quote, Well, that's not really true.
I mean, the amount of ire that's been poured on the opioid epidemic is pretty significant.
But the idea that our ruling class prefers immigrants to Americans, here's why I say this is sort of anti-immigrant sentiment.
legally, or the 60,000 American citizens who died of drug ODs last year, it's not even close.
Well, that's not really true.
I mean, the amount ofire that's been poured on the opioid epidemic is pretty significant.
But the idea that our ruling class prefers immigrants to Americans, here's why I say this is sort of anti-immigrant sentiment.
Not all immigrants are the same.
I have a big thing here on the program and in my general political philosophy.
Everyone gets treated as an individual.
The idea that all Americans are better than all immigrants, or all immigrants are better than all Americans, is stupid.
Just because you were born in the United States does not mean you are a moral human being.
It doesn't mean you're of higher worth.
There are lots of immigrants I prefer to Americans, depending on the American, and there are lots of Americans who I think stink.
There are lots of Americans who are better than some immigrants, and there are some immigrants who are better than lots of Americans.
To pretend that all immigrants are the same and all Americans are the same, or that you are of higher moral value or worth because you are an American, or that we shouldn't attempt to import people who have good moral values, is stupidity.
Some of the people who we are proudest of in American history were immigrants, obviously, and some of the people who we are least proud of are immigrants.
Saipov, we're not proud of him, right?
Immigrant.
Albert Einstein, kind of proud of him.
Immigrant.
Okay, the fact is, not all immigrants are created the same.
So when he says, you know, they prefer immigrants to Americans, I prefer people who buy into American ideology.
I prefer people who buy into traditional political philosophy of the United States over everyone, whether they are immigrants or native-born.
That's why I've said, and I've said it before and I'll say it again, I would prefer to deport a bunch of Americans who don't believe in American philosophy Rather than illegal immigrants who come here and want to engage in American philosophy.
Because I care about the philosophy.
I care much more about the philosophy.
I shouldn't say illegal immigrants, but immigrants themselves.
Where you came from is of little matter to me.
What you believe is of total import to me.
Saipov should not have been in the United States.
Not because Saipov was an immigrant, but because there was no proof that Saipov actually believed in American ideology when he was allowed into the country.
That's why I don't like this particular binary that Tucker is choosing to play on.
It smacks me of nativism rather than patriotism.
I think patriotism is about upholding American principles and nativism is about upholding the notion that you are better if you are born in the United States.
I don't like that idea at all.
Okay, other things that I hate.
April Ryan.
Asked a question at the White House press conference the other day that was really one of the dumber questions.
She asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders whether Donald Trump believes in slavery, whether he thinks slavery is wrong, and then she defended that the other day.
The question is, does this administration believe, does this president believe slavery was wrong?
And before you answer, Mary Frances Berry, a historian, said, In 1860, there was a compromise.
The compromise was to have southern states keep slavery, but the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter that caused the Civil War.
And because of the Civil War, what happened?
I think it is disgusting and absurd to suggest that anyone inside of this building would support slavery.
And she's of course exactly right, but this is something Democrats have been doing for decades.
Joe Biden suggested about Mitt Romney in 2012, and of course there's no evidence to suggest that anyone in the White House supports slavery.
You want to know why you got Trump?
Again, for the one millionth time, this is why you got Trump.
You accuse everyone who disagrees with you, everyone who basically repeats the Ken Burns version of the Civil War narrative, or the Shelby Foote version of the Civil War narrative, you use that as an excuse to say that they love slavery?
It's absurd.
Okay.
Time for the mailbag.
So, if you are in our live, if you're watching this live, you now get to type in your questions and I will answer them as they come up.
Okay, so David says, I am a fellow California lawyer who just subscribed to The Daily Wire and have often wondered, why are so many extremely successful entrepreneurs, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, George Soros, liberal Democrats, thereby supporting a financial system that is antithetical to their success?
So I think that some of these people were on the left before they became very wealthy.
But I think another thing that happens, and you see this in Hollywood a lot, is a lot of people who get very wealthy then feel the need to sort of make excuses for their wealth.
They're not proud of it, right?
They don't go around saying, you know, I earned this and I'm proud that I earned this because that shows, you know, that I've done well and made good decisions in business.
Instead, it turns into, how can I buy off the public?
How can I make the public think I'm a good guy?
I can't make the public think I'm a good guy if they just look at my wealth and say he made good decisions.
Instead, I'm going to suggest that my wealth is some sort of, it's some sort of cruel burden to be born.
And instead, I'm going to handle off my wealth, right?
Here's the fact about Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or George Soros or Oprah Winfrey.
All of these people have created many, many, many, many, many more jobs in their businesses than they have in giving charity.
The Bill Gates Foundation has done less for the world than Bill Gates in his corporate capacity.
And that's not a rip on the Bill Gates Foundation doing things, but I think there is a guilt that is associated with wealth in Western countries that is entirely unjust and inappropriate.
There are good people who are rich, and there are very bad people who are rich.
You know, I don't know enough about that subject to really comment intelligibly on it, so I'm going to read up on it and get back to you, Dawn.
Sort of hysterical that one thing that I found sort of hilarious is that the Catalonians are voting for independence that for a long time Catalonians wanted to be independent from Spain.
And the Israelis endorsed the Catalonian independence effort, and Spain went nuts.
And the Israelis basically laughed at them and said, guys, you're the ones who are pressuring us to make concessions to Hamas, so you shut up.
Kyle says, hey Ben, currently applying for law school next fall.
Working on my personal statement.
Any advice?
Kyle, keep politics out of it.
You want to get into a good law school?
Do not go political.
Because the fact is that any excuse that some of these law schools have and law professors have, the admissions boards have, for Kind of covering over your politics, they will do that.
So, I dressed up for Halloween on the show because it's sort of a fun gag, but we don't actually celebrate Halloween in the Orthodox community typically because it's sort of considered a pagan holiday, just as in many evangelical communities, Halloween isn't a big thing.
When I was growing up and we weren't as Orthodox and I used to dress up for Halloween, But we have a whole holiday in the Jewish community where kids dress up.
It's called Purim, and we do that in March.
Usually it's March or April.
So we'll be doing that.
Last year, my kids... We like to do family costumes because that's really fun.
So last year, I went as the straw man, my wife went as Dorothy, my dad went as the tin man, my mom went as the Wicked Witch of the West, and my two kids went as, respectively, Glinda and the Cowardly Lion.
So it was quite adorable.
I have pictures of it.
This is one of the great tragedies, I think, of the social media age and the fact there's so many garbage people out there, is my kids are just adorable.
I mean, as people in this room can attest to be fired, my kids are incredibly cute.
My kids are very, like, objectively speaking, they are beautiful children, and they also happen to be really sweet, and I wish I could put up pictures of them because it would probably double my social media following, but it's nobody's business what my kids look like, and my kids shouldn't be saddled with the burden of having a public figure for an ad.
So I try to keep them out of the public eye as much as possible.
Matthew says, Ben, I usually try to ask questions that have either cultural or political significance, but those never get read during the podcast.
So in hopes of getting my question read live, I have to ask, boxers or briefs?
So I always hesitate to answer these particular questions, but in all candidness, I go with boxer briefs.
I go with boxer briefs.
from our particular friends over at the company that we endorse.
So they are terrific, by the way.
So if you don't know what company that is, just look up on our website.
Todd says, have you seen Steven Crowder's impersonation of you?
It's pretty good.
I'm curious.
Can you impersonate Steven Crowder?
I've never actually tried or thought about impersonating Crowder.
First, I'd have to put on a T-shirt or take off my shirt entirely.
Second, I'd have to really bulk up, like just guzzle steroids and weight powders and all this sort of thing.
And then I'd have to dance geekily to bad music.
So that would be the way that I would imitate Steven Crowder.
Lots of head motions, I would imagine.
But I haven't spent too much time on it.
Naftali says, hey Ben, what are your thoughts on the draft?
Do you think it is beneficial in countries that have mandatory service?
Would it benefit the US if we reinstituted it?
Is it legal?
I am not sure that... Well, the draft is legal in emergency situations.
I am not a huge fan of reinstituting the draft.
I think that Israel has national service.
I think that a lot of the public education that is done is...
It's mandatory that we go to schools.
I think that we have a failure of schools, not a failure of public service.
So the idea that we have to take two years of everybody's life and dedicate it to the state, not a big fan of if you don't have an emergency situation.
If you do have an emergency situation, I'm in favor of a draft, right?
If it's World War II and you need to call people up, then you call people up.
But the idea that everyone has to serve the nation in some way is not something I'm a huge fan of.
I think we just need to do better civil education.
Yeah.
I mean, if you show up at a synagogue, nobody's going to toss you out.
Nobody's going to say, like, do you believe in God?
as presented by their respective churches.
Do synagogues allow atheists to sit and listen?
Yeah.
I mean, if you show up at a synagogue, nobody's going to toss you out.
Nobody's going to say, like, do you believe in God?
And if you say no, then we just, we hit you with the Star of David.
That's not how it works.
So, yeah.
You're welcome to show up at a synagogue.
I'd recommend that that's actually not the best way to learn about a church or synagogue is to show up at their services because services can be extremely boring.
I would instead recommend that there are some classes you can take online and then you also don't make everybody awkward when you show up wearing Your cut-off genes in the middle of an Orthodox prayer service, which just makes everyone feel weird.
So, I will acknowledge that my favorite pudding cup flavor is vanilla.
I truly enjoy vanilla.
It is delicious.
Also, when you mix the vanilla and the chocolate, it is also delicious.
Candy says, is pudding kosher?
It depends on the brand of pudding.
Daniel says, how long do you think Bernie could survive without pudding?
Well, you know, we haven't tried it.
I'm not sure how long Bernie could survive without pudding.
I wouldn't want to try it, but Bernie should live long.
It's the same blessing I have for the czar.
May he live well and live far, far away from me.
Like, that's my basic Bernie Sanders thing.
And I hope that he survives many years on pudding cups.
Yeah, actually, I sleep pretty well.
I try to pack in all of my work in specific hours of the day and really focus when I'm working.
So Twitter does not help with this, but it seems to me that most of the time that's lost during the day is lost to being distracted.
You're in the middle of a task and then you look up and ten minutes have gone by and you haven't done anything.
When I'm writing, I'm writing.
When I'm reading, I'm reading.
When I'm on Twitter, I'm on Twitter.
I don't think that it's an intentional step in forwarding a morally relativist agenda.
and it seems like Disney is setting up a breakdown of the difference between the light and dark sides of the Force, that it is all just the Force.
Do you think this is likely, and do you think this is an intentional step in forwarding a morally relativist agenda?
I don't think that it's an intentional step in forwarding a morally relativist agenda.
I just think that if you read some of the Star Wars literature, there have been hints at this.
I also think that basically at a certain point people are bored of the dark side of the Force versus the light side of the Force, and they're trying to come up with something new.
And the two things that they've come up with that are new are maybe the crossover between the light and dark sides of the Force and a Porg.
Those are the two things that they have come up with that are new.
I will say that I'm interested in the merger of the light and the dark side of the Force, because I've always thought that this sort of Zen view of quote-unquote the Force was kind of dumb.
This idea that this binary, almost Gnostic view of the Force.
That, you know, you fall into the evil side of the Force and it's powered by anger and fear.
I really don't like that because sometimes anger is justified.
Like, it seems to me that Luke has some pretty good excuse to be pissed at the end of Return of the Jedi.
And then they're like, well, you're going to fall to the dark side if you ever get mad.
Never get mad.
It seems to me there's some good times to get mad.
Like, when the Emperor is threatening to kill your sister, you know, that seems to me like a pretty good time to get mad.
When he's, like, laughing as your friends are getting blown up in space.
Seems like a good time to get pissed.
And by the way, the one thing I've always found weird about Return of the Jedi is that his anger obviously does make him stronger, right?
He literally beats Darth Vader down and then chops off his hand.
And then he steps back and he turns off the lightsaber.
And, like, he's very lucky that Darth Vader decides to turn around and be a nice dad and all.
But if Darth Vader decides to get up and kill him, this does not go well for him.
Like, how many times can Obi-Wan Kenobi die before you just end up with, like, an afterlife full of Jedi who are glowing but can't actually do anything useful?
Well, I don't think you have to encourage businesses to take advantage of free markets.
The only thing you have to do is discourage monopolies, and the way monopolies are generally established is through government.
It's through people working with the government and getting the government to ban competition and prevent competition.
So if you can get the government out of the business of markets, then monopolies very rarely occur.
And many times monopolies are quite good for the market.
I mean, Microsoft, when it was broken up, had cheaper prices than after it was broken up.
It was good for consumers.
The way that you maintain a monopoly is by creating a great product that you continually change.
See, Tyra says, So it depends on the drugs, I've said.
I think marijuana is a better solution.
Libertarian solutions on marriage, I think, are right.
I've said that I think the state should get completely out of the business of marriage.
I'm struggling to come up with examples where conservatism and libertarianism radically differ on matters of economics.
Usually they're pretty much on the same page.
I think the libertarian solution with regard to incentivization of behavior is generally better.
I don't think the government is good at incentivizing behavior.
My son, who is otherwise rational and sane, has fallen for the flat-earth conspiracy and believes that NASA and every other space program is lying and everything is faked.
He has also shown a propensity to want to believe in other conspiracy theories.
How would you recommend helping him recognize the problem with conspiracy theories and develop stronger critical thinking skills?
Well, I think the first thing that you should do, you know, first of all, I mean, I hesitate to say this on, you know, national air, but I will say that if your kid is continuously falling for conspiracy theories, you should probably get your kid to a psychologist, really.
Because that tends to be a little bit pathological.
Like, if you believe in lots of conspiracy theories and people are out to get you and everybody's lying to you, there tends to be a certain pathology to that that I don't think is healthy.
Beyond that, if it's just a matter of critical thinking, then maybe you should ask him why he believes that people are so capable of putting together these plans.
In his own personal experience, are people really good at putting things together?
Like, here's my general problem with conspiracy theories.
It requires thousands of people to be in on it.
Right?
Conspiracy theories that involve, like, one guy, I'm generally okay with.
Right?
Like, the Obama incentivizing the IRS to go after the conservative 501c3s.
Makes perfect sense.
It's Obama saying things and people taking him up on it.
That doesn't require a whole hell of a lot.
But the idea that George W. Bush was behind the 9-11 attacks, for example.
Idiotic.
Right?
Because, you know how many people would have to be in on that and keep silent about it?
The biggest scandal in the history of the world?
This idea that there was some sort of giant conspiracy to cover up Barack Obama's birth certificate.
You know how many people would have to be in on that without it leaking?
A lot of people.
So I just don't believe that people are that capable.
And you should ask your son whether he believes people are that capable.
Because I don't think that that is perfectly accurate.
Okay, so, we have come to the end of this week's Mailbag.
I have to say, I'm disappointed in some of the live questioners who seem to only be interested in pudding.
But, apparently you guys are only interested in pudding.
To which I suggest you go out, buy some pudding, satisfy your craving, and come back with better questions next week.
In the meantime, have a good weekend, we'll see you on Monday.
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