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March 22, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:16
Facebook On The Hot Seat | Ep. 501
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It's fight night at the White House.
President Trump, Joe Biden going mano y mano.
Plus, Mark Zuckerberg's week just got worse and Republicans struggle to pass their big omnibus spending bill.
We'll go through all of this stuff and an exclusive interview with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So indeed, yesterday we were in Washington, D.C.
We had a great time.
We got to go to see all of the sites from the inside.
We got to meet with Speaker Ryan.
We'll have our exclusive interview with Speaker Ryan a little bit later in the program, which I'm very much looking forward to showing you, because it was a lot of fun.
We didn't talk a lot, actually, about kind of day-to-day politics.
We talked more about broad things that he should be doing in Congress to change the nature of government, which I think is a little more important, because we talk day-to-day politics on the show.
We'll get to all of that, plus the greatest story of the last Two years?
Maybe?
Maybe.
It's pretty great.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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OK, so there is a lot of actual news to talk about, but the most important news, the thing that we all care about the most is that there's going to be a fight, fight, fight, fight.
Fight between Joe Biden, the former vice president of the United States, in this corner.
And in this corner, Donald J. McFace Trump.
It's going to be so great.
OK, so here's how it all started.
So Biden has been trying to outman Trump.
OK, Biden understands something a lot of other politicians don't.
You can't actually just fly over the top of Trump.
You can't say, I'll play the high road and he'll play the low road and we'll be in Scotland before you.
You can't actually do that with Trump.
You actually have to get down in the mud with him.
So Biden gets this.
And so Biden speaks Trump's language.
So They're sort of weird reverse mirror images of one another.
It's like Bizarro Trump is Joe Biden and Bizarro Biden is Trump.
So it's very weird.
So it starts off, clip 13, Joe Biden yesterday saying that he would have beaten up Trump in high school, which is a real weird thing to say. - When a guy who ended up becoming our national leader said I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it, and then said, I made a mistake.
They asked me what I like to debate, I said, no.
I said, no, I said, we're in high school, I take a kind of jam and beat the hell out of him. - Right, we're in high school, I beat the hell out of the president of the United States.
And then he continues this way. - Locker was my whole life.
Pretty damn good athlete.
Any guy who talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest SOB in the world. - So Trump is a fat, ugly SOB, and the only people who talk like that are the biggest, fattest, ugliest SOBs in the room.
Funny, because you're talking like that right now, Senator Biden, or Vice President Biden.
And then Trump fires back.
So here's what Trump tweets.
Come on, this is great stuff.
This is great stuff.
God, how can you not love this?
OK, here's what he tweets back this morning.
It's so phenomenal.
Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy.
Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically.
And yet he threatens me for the second time with physical assault.
He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.
Don't threaten people, Joe!
It's the best!
Okay, so Joe Biden had threatened to beat Trump up actually several months ago, saying that if they got in a fight, he would take down Trump.
And now you got the President of the United States.
Imagine this, there's a very funny Twitter account that takes all of Trump's tweets and puts them in the format of presidential statements.
Imagine the presidential statement, like you wake up from a coma and this is what you see.
And you're like, oh, Donald Trump's in a fight with, wait, Donald Trump's the president and he tweeted that?
So yeah, that's the thing that happened.
And I love it.
I gotta say, I love it.
Right?
He is weak, both mentally and physically.
And yet he threatens me for the second time with physical assault.
He doesn't know me.
He would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.
Love it.
Fast and hard, crying all the way.
Yes!
And actually, so they're now booking a fight.
And the fight will be booked.
And we actually have some training footage of what's been going on in the run-up to this massive fight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do a million of these a day.
So just give me five.
Hey, look at this!
Oh, my God!
The hostile takeover of Donald Trump on this big man!
Oh, man, that's hilarious.
That's Joe Biden pumping iron.
He's on the phone, he's got like a dumbbell and he's pumping iron.
Then it's Trump from WWE just knocking people over.
It's so great.
So, I have volunteered.
If they do this fight, first of all, there's no way this is bad for America.
OK, America's already toast when it comes to our vulgar political culture.
We're done.
OK, Donald Trump is the president.
Hillary ran.
Joe Biden is an idiot.
He's going to run.
He may win in 2020.
Oh, my goodness.
OK, so I volunteer.
OK, I volunteer.
I won't I won't get paid for it.
I want to be the announcer on this.
OK, I want to be the announcer on this.
I tweeted out some of the things that I thought would happen.
Some people tweeted back some lines.
So not all of these lines that you're about to hear on my own, but I do want to announce this fight.
I think it would sound something like this.
Something like this.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the ruckus in the hospice.
The brawl on Geritol, the melee over the Jell-O tray, the headlock on Matlock.
This is a 12-round bout between 74-year-old Donald J. Trump and 78-year-old Joseph R. Biden, fought at the catchweight of 245 pounds.
Biden has had to drink four ensures per day to make weight.
Bernie Sanders was invited, but there was not enough pudding in the world to ensure that he reached catchweight.
Let's get ready to stumble!
And here we go.
Trump comes out jabbing insulin.
Biden hits him with a hard left.
And Trump is spitting dentures.
Trump responds with a clap to Biden's cheek.
He clapped on and Biden clapped off.
Biden's going to feel that in his walk-in bath tomorrow.
Trump's out there looking a little bit fuzzy out there, as fuzzy as a tennis ball is on his walker.
And now they're both down on the mat!
They're both down on the mat!
They are both napping!
Oh, and they're back up again, circling each other warily, looking for an opening, and boom!
Trump just pulled the old reverse mortgage on Biden, and Biden is down!
Biden is down!
He's fallen, and he can't get up!
He's punching his life alert button!
Oh my goodness, both of them now being carted off in wheelchairs, but to be honest, both of them were carted in in wheelchairs.
But still.
So, it would sound something like that.
I mean, wouldn't that be great?
Come on!
Come on!
This would be great for American politics.
There's no way this goes wrong.
Yes, things are incredibly stupid, ladies and gentlemen.
Things are incredibly stupid.
Well, in other stupid news, it's time for Congress to pass another crappy omnibus package, so...
There's a big omnibus package coming out.
Congress is no longer capable of actually just passing appropriations bills.
Here is the problem.
The Congress, the House of Representatives, will go forward with appropriations bills.
They will pass through the normal appropriations process.
The way that you're supposed to do budgets is you are supposed to fund individual departments, and then you're supposed to send a bill to the Senate, and the Senate is supposed to fund that individual department, and then the President signs it.
Instead, what has happened, because Mitch McConnell does not have a governing majority in the Senate, he has 51 votes, but they're all fractious, instead, They just slap everything together in a crap sandwich of a bill that's 2232 pages long.
And then they give people 48 hours to read it and say, we got to vote.
And they put a bunch of good stuff in there and they put a bunch of bad stuff in there.
So some of the good stuff that is in there, OK, there is there is some funding for the wall, like a very, very, very little bit of funding for the wall.
There's some things that are being pushed by sort of the left wing of the Republican Party.
There's increased funding for the Child Care Access Means Parents in Schools program, which means that parents will have access to on-campus child care and this sort of thing if this is your stuff, if this is the stuff that you like.
The funding is there for the military.
This is what Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has focused on.
He says that this is the biggest increase in the military in 15 years, the biggest pay raise for our men and women in uniform in eight years.
We need to rebuild our military.
So there is an increase in funding for the military.
It does a little bit of funding for the wall.
It has a little bit of funding for fighting opioid addiction.
And it does not, in fact, enshrine DACA.
So this is one of the things Democrats are saying.
Democrats are saying they're going to vote against the bill because the bill doesn't provide full funding for the DACA program to allow people in the country legally to remain here working legally.
But that's because Democrats don't actually want to deal on DACA.
As I've been saying for literally years at this point on the show.
Democrats want to use illegal immigration as a hot-button issue when it comes to the elections, but they don't actually want to solve the problems for illegal immigrants.
In fact, Paul Ryan went to the Democrats and he offered them a really sweetheart deal.
He offered them three years of funding for the wall.
So $25 billion over three years for the wall.
And in exchange, three years of additional funding for the DACA program, right?
We'd push off DACA, nobody would get supported.
Democrats turned that down flat, okay?
And they waited until the last minute to do it, and now they'll vote against the bill saying that Republicans didn't give enough.
So Democrats were offered what they wanted on DACA and would have brought them past the next presidential election, actually, and they turned it down anyway because they just want to run on this issue.
Here are some of the conservative concerns with all this.
The Freedom Caucus, the House Freedom Caucus, I've spoken to a lot of members of the House Freedom Caucus, spoken to several senators who have opposed the bill.
Senator Mike Lee in Utah is opposed to the bill.
He says it's just unconscionable that Mitch McConnell is forcing through another one of these omnibus packages that is essentially a giant crap sandwich that nobody is going to read.
Here's what the Freedom Caucus says in their statement.
They say the policy proposals outlined in this $1.3 trillion spending bill are not consistent with what we told the American people we would do when they sent us to Washington.
Many of the policies in the bill are, in fact, the opposite of what we promised.
In fact, one of the members of the Freedom Caucus was saying to me yesterday that he was tempted to call this the Broken Promises Act of 2018.
This bill barely provides for border security, yet continues to allow federal dollars to flow to sanctuary cities.
It also includes the fixed NICS proposal without including reciprocity for Americans with concealed carry licenses, something congressional leadership promised would not happen.
It continues to fully fund grants that go to Planned Parenthood.
It makes no changes to reduce Obamacare's burdensome regulations on America's families.
It doesn't get rid of Obamacare regulations.
And on top of the massive price tag, leadership is forcing a vote on this 2,232-page bill in under 36 hours.
It's an insult to America's taxpayers, as well as many rank-and-file representatives who had no say in the omnibus negotiations.
So the House Freedom Caucus coming out extraordinarily strong against all of this.
Now, will it probably pass anyway?
Sure, because a majority of Republicans will vote for it, and then there will be a bunch of Democrats who vote for it because it's a big omnibus package.
But there's a procedural hurdle they have to jump today.
It'll be interesting to see whether they are able to do so, because in order for that procedural hurdle to be jumped, every Democrat's going to jump against it.
It's possible that this bill gets voted down and is brought back for further changes.
So one of the things that the Freedom Caucus talks about there is the fixed NICS bill.
So, what exactly is that?
Is that Jacob Sallam over at Reason Magazine says this.
He says, legislation aimed at improving background checks for gun buyers may be included in a must-pass spending bill Congress is expected to approve tomorrow or Friday.
The bill would encourage data sharing with the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
It's faced a bunch of resistance for a measure that has broad support.
Some of the resistance is tactical because Democrats want broader gun control.
But there are also substantive concerns about the bill raised by supporters of gun rights who worry that it will help block firearm sales to people who pose no threat to others.
I'll explain why in just a second.
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So, what exactly is the problem with the Fix NICS program that is embedded in this bill?
Well, Senator Cornyn from Texas introduced this last November in response to the Sutherland Springs shooting.
Cornyn's bill aims to prevent the screw-ups that prevented the sharing of information with the National Instant Background Check System.
They would also encourage sharing of local and state records.
But, for example, Senator Lee has due process objections to the bill.
He argues that the Department of Veterans Affairs wrongly identifies veterans as mental defectives, which disqualifies them from gun ownerships when they need help managing their benefits.
This was a serious problem with an executive order that Obama had tried to put out last year that was revoked by President Trump.
That executive order was an attempt to prohibit seniors who had other people do their finances from owning weapons.
Well, this sort of does the same thing because the Department of Veterans Affairs will say that veterans have mental defective, are mentally defective if they need help managing their benefits.
Lee says about 168,000 veterans have lost their Second Amendment rights as a result of that particular policy.
Lee favors an amendment requiring a judge to determine a person's danger to himself or others.
So nobody's against more transparency in the national instant background check system.
But the question is, what standard is going to be used to deny people a gun?
And that standard does have to be changed.
Other conservative concerns with this bill, aside from the process, aside from the fact that these omnibus packages stink, that they are garbage, and again, I think this is less on Speaker Ryan, because the House has consistently passed appropriations bills, and it's more on Senator McConnell.
Now listen, it's up to Ryan to please McConnell, right?
He could just tell McConnell, listen, Bob, you're on your own.
Get it right.
Do the appropriations process.
Do what you need to do.
You do this.
But he's not.
He's working with McConnell.
Back channel.
This is one of the great tensions that exists on the Hill.
I just was in Washington, D.C.
yesterday.
My speech at Georgetown was canceled by actual snowflakes, not like the students, by like actual snow.
I spent some time talking with a bunch of congressional staffers and a bunch of Congress people, including members of the Freedom Caucus, and this is the difficulty, okay?
People like me actually have a relatively easy job.
My job is to get on the air every day and to talk to you about the things that are going on and to explain what I think is right and wrong about these bills and to analyze and to stump for better bills.
When you're in Congress, there's also a tendency to try and get things done, right?
The government needs to be funded.
We need to somehow bridge the gap between what we want and what we can get.
Well, sometimes that makes things pretty awkward, because there are a lot of Republicans who are going to vote from an omnibus package.
Number one, because they want to maintain their seats, and it's better to have a Republican in that seat than a Democrat.
And number two, because they are seriously concerned about things like military spending.
So what's the easiest way to do this?
The easiest way to do this is to slap together a crappy omnibus package, and then you say to your constituents, listen, I didn't like a lot of the stuff in there, but I liked some of the stuff in there, and I needed to vote for it because of that.
This is why it's up to Mitch McConnell to do a better job of keeping his members in line.
Now, what's amazing is that a lot of senators are afraid of Senate Majority Leader McConnell.
A lot of senators are afraid that he is sort of in de facto control of the National Senatorial Committee for the Republicans, the NRSC, that he is going to remove money from them or undercut them.
And so they are willing to go along, get along with Senate Majority Leader McConnell.
But the reality is that if they don't stand up at a certain point and say to McConnell, listen, we're not going to vote for these omnibus packages anymore.
We're going to only vote for packages that we like.
Then you're never going to get anything better.
The government is just going to continue to grow.
So the Republican Study Committee stayed up all night last night to try and read through this egregious bill.
And some of the stuff that they found in there truly is not great.
So let's start going through it.
So here's what they say.
Here's the statement from the Republican Study Committee.
from the Republican Study Committee.
They say some conservatives will be concerned that the bill would fund the federal government at a level that exceeds the BCA discretionary spending caps for fiscal year 2018 prior to the passage of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018.
Particularly concerning is the increase in non-defense discretionary spending, which exceeds the cap by $63 billion and fiscal year spending by $60 billion.
The boost in non-defense discretionary spending represents the largest single-year increase in non-defense discretionary spending since the BCA caps, this would be the sequestration caps, were created.
Conservatives may believe this is a reflection of the fact that Democrats have been successful in handcuffing NDD spending to fully funding the national defense.
Together, the omnibus's increase in defense and non-defense spending will increase the deficit by $143 billion.
This goes to a point that I've been making for a long time.
Republicans are in the business of cutting taxes.
They're not actually in the business of cutting spending.
Too many Republicans don't care about cutting spending.
See, it's fiscally hard to cut spending.
It is politically hard to cut spending.
You take a lot of crap for cutting spending.
You never take crap for increasing spending.
And this is one of the problems here, is that so many folks are focused on being popular and not enough focused on doing the right thing, especially in an off-year election, right?
In 2018, there's a fear that Republicans are going to lose the House, and then what do you have?
Then you have Nancy Pelosi in charge of making these laws.
So, listen, I have a lot of sympathy for Republican staffers and Republican House members trying to figure out what to do here.
Go back to the drawing board.
Give us something better.
This bill is not up to the standards.
And what's the point of you winning elections if you're not going to do anything with the power once you finally have the power?
Right?
It continues to fund things like local transit programs.
It funds the D.C.
Opera House.
It has large spending increases in the Agriculture Appropriations Division, which is idiotic.
It funds the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
It funds the Refugee and Entrance Assistance Programs.
It funds the Social Security Block Grant Program.
It doesn't change Obamacare in any significant way.
It does not include Dodd-Frank rollback language.
It doesn't include a provision prohibiting funding for administrative expenses of an Obamacare multi-state plan that provides coverage for abortion.
It doesn't include a provision to prevent federal funding for ICE enforcement to provide for abortions.
The bill does not contain the Conscience Protection Act.
The bill contains a Treasury forfeiture fund, no explicit prohibition on the Gateway Tunnel funding.
The bill doesn't include a provision to prohibit the EPA from implementing greenhouse gas regulations.
In other words, it's a garbage program to fund the government so that people don't actually have to do anything.
And now again, is there some good stuff here?
Yes.
I mean, we do have to fund defense.
Defense has been just slashed tremendously by the number of, by the Obama era cuts.
And that's really, you know, quite disastrous that Obama did that in the first place.
We have to ramp up our defense spending again.
Republicans are in charge, and it's on Republicans' head what they pass here.
Go back to the drawing board, make some changes.
I have a feeling you can get at least something better.
You can get at least something better, because this is just not a thing.
This is just not good enough for a Republican House to pass.
Okay, meanwhile, Meanwhile, Facebook is finding itself in additional trouble.
So, Mark Zuckerberg has been on the hot seat for quite a while here, and he's continuing to be on the hot seat, but not for good reason.
I think there are lots of good reasons for Mark Zuckerberg to be on the hot seat.
I think as a conservative, the discrimination against conservative news outlets has been egregious over the past several months, and that's why you've seen traffic decline for every conservative website, like all of them.
Okay, but the reason that he's really getting flack is because the left has decided that Mark Zuckerberg is responsible for Hillary losing.
So, let's count all the people responsible for Hillary losing.
According to the media, it's not Trump, right?
Trump didn't win the election, he lost.
The people responsible for Hillary losing are, in order, James Comey, the Russians, the conservative media, And social media, right?
And so they finally got into the last on their list, social media.
And they're trying to encourage everybody on social media to change the nature of their algorithms in order to prevent conservatives from disseminating information.
So CNN is hot and bothered about Facebook having allowed companies to gather information from Facebook.
Which, as I've said, everyone does on Facebook.
If you join Farmville on Facebook, if you play Farmville, you are having your information drawn from Facebook.
Every time you click on anything on the internet, somebody is gathering that information in order to drive an ad program to you.
This is how people make money on the internet.
But CNN grilled Zuckerberg and they asked, can people trust Facebook?
The answer is, of course people can't trust Facebook.
They never could trust Facebook.
If you thought that Facebook was your friend and that Facebook wasn't attempting to market to you, how do you think they made their money?
It's ridiculous.
Facebook has asked us to share our data, to share our lives on this platform, and has wanted us to be transparent.
And people don't feel like they've received that same amount of transparency.
They're wondering what's happening to their data.
Can they trust Facebook?
Yeah, so one of the most important things that I think we need to do here is make sure that we tell everyone whose data was affected by one of these rogue apps.
And we're going to do that.
We're going to build a tool where anyone can go and see if their data was a part of this.
So the 50 million people that were impacted, they will be able to tell if they were impacted by this?
Yeah, and we're going to be even conservative on that.
So, you know, we may not have all the data in our system today, so anyone whose data might have been affected by this.
Okay, this is such nonsense.
I mean, okay, want to know whose data was affected?
Everyone's.
Okay, on Facebook, because everyone is gathering information from you all the time.
On Facebook, it's how Facebook makes their money.
Okay, this is just silly talk.
It's silly talk.
And Zuckerberg pretending, oh, we'll be fully transparent.
Oh, we'll finally reveal everything that we know.
Oh, we're finally going to show you the inside workings of our company.
None of this is going to happen.
None of this is going to happen.
Zuckerberg's pandering, by the way, is really egregious.
I mean, he even says that he would love to see regulations on Facebook.
OK, this is just nonsense.
Here's Zuckerberg saying that he's not even sure that they shouldn't be regulated.
Given the stakes here, why shouldn't Facebook be regulated?
Um, I actually am not sure we shouldn't be regulated.
What the hell?
Okay, of course he's sure they shouldn't be regulated.
Why do you think he's attempting to self-regulate right now?
He doesn't want to be regulated because he's afraid it will cut into his bottom line.
So what's he doing?
He's doing what Democrats want so they don't regulate him.
Okay, this is outside Democratic pressure in order to ensure that social media companies do what Democrats want.
In a second, I'm going to give you the update on what Zuckerberg posted, because he posted this long, ridiculous letter about what's been going on with the Cambridge Analytica situation.
I'm going to read it to you in just a second and analyze it.
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OK, so Mark Zuckerberg issues a letter yesterday about the Cambridge Analytica situation.
And here's what he says, quote, I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation, including the steps we've already taken and our next steps to address this important issue.
We have a responsibility to protect your data.
And then he gives a timeline of events.
He says, in 2007, we launched the Facebook platform with the vision that more apps should be social.
It says, in 2007, we launched the Facebook platform with the vision that more apps should be social.
Your calendar should be able to show your friends' birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address books should show their pictures.
Your calendar should be able to show your friends' birthdays.
Your maps should show where your friends live and your address book should show their pictures.
To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.
To do this, we enable people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.
In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Alexander Kogan created a personality quiz app.
It was installed by about 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data.
Given the way our platform worked at the time, this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data.
In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access.
Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app.
Okay, so here's what I want to point out here.
Okay, what happened in this timeline?
He goes from 2007 to 2014.
He just skips over everything else.
What, hmm, what happened between 2008 and 2012?
We're like, there's some things that happened.
Like, I seem to remember in 2012, for example, the Obama administration using exactly the same strategy in order to gather data on people.
He just skips right over that.
It's just Cambridge Analytica that's doing terrible, terrible things.
Listen, do I think Cambridge Analytica may have been a little shady?
Sure.
Do I think they did anything dramatically different, as far as I'm aware, than the stuff that Obama was doing?
Am I supposed to be angry that people gather data on Facebook?
This is all nonsense.
It's all nonsense.
I mean, this is all crazy.
He says, in the next month, we'll show everyone a tool at the top of your newsfeed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps permission to your data.
We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings.
Now we will put this tool at the top of your newsfeed to make sure everyone sees it.
So I'm glad they've used the newsfeed to get rid of all the people you actually follow.
And now they're going to insert a bunch of crap that they want you to know about.
But they're not going to allow you to pick the people you choose to follow.
Facebook is increasingly a disastrous medium.
And Zuckerberg seems to have lost control of his own pet project, which is an amazing thing.
I mean, there's a reason that the stock is dropping.
OK, so yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with Paul Ryan.
And some of the folks who helped us make this happen were the folks, my friends over at Young America's Foundation, which is the exclusive home of my college tour.
So we were in D.C.
this past week.
And even though the city shut down for the snow day, YAF helped us make sure that we were able to sit down with Speaker Ryan for a few minutes to talk about some of the issues Republicans are working on, as well as the future of the conservative movement.
And here is what it sounds like.
Well, we are here with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, which is pretty awesome.
And we are here in the ceremonial room outside the Speaker's office, where apparently they sign bills and have heads of state, which I'm sure you're honored to be here with me.
I am.
Good to have you.
Good to have you, Ben.
Welcome.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
So, you know, there's a lot to talk about.
Obviously, the elections are coming up.
And first, let me get your thoughts on where you think things are going to head, you know, It's a long ways away.
I feel good about our chances.
Midterm elections are hard on the majority party.
Midterm elections for a president's first midterm, on average, you lose like 32 seats.
We've got a 24-seat majority.
So just clearly, with the headwind of history in front of us, That's not a good thing.
But I feel like we're going to have a tailwind of accomplishments to get us into the midterms.
We can get into all the agenda, but we've done so many things in such a short period of time that will actually make a positive difference in people's lives.
And I think we're going to have a really good story to tell, not to mention the fact that our candidates, our members, are battle-hardened.
They know how to run tough races.
So I feel very, very good about where we are.
So I want to start by talking about some of those accomplishments, and then I want to get to sort of the tactics that you guys are going to use in the election campaign.
So, obviously, the top of the list for accomplishments is the tax bill, and Democrats losing their minds over the tax bill did not look particularly good.
So it's fair to point to Nancy Pelosi saying that you've given the American people crumbs and say that that's wrong.
So how much do you think that will impact the election?
That's going to be the gift that keeps giving, just that statement.
But every single Democrat voted against this.
I really think they did that because they thought they were going to psych us into defeating ourselves, particularly in the Senate.
And when they kept pushing this line, they went so far left, so hard progressive, that every single Democrat voted against it.
They're on the wrong side of history, and they're on the wrong side of results.
I've been working on this issue a long time.
We have.
This is bigger than 1986 tax reform.
So this is the first time in 31 years we've done tax reform.
But it's much more profound than the tax reform we did back then in 1986.
Because this completely changes the way we tax ourselves on an international competitive basis.
And this will put such a strong foundation of growth and opportunity and free enterprise in America, more so than any kind of economic reform in my lifetime.
I'm convinced of that.
And so, they're on the wrong side of history.
This takes a tax system that was the worst in the industrialized world and gives us a tax system that we think is in the top three of the industrialized world's tax systems.
That means more jobs in America, more opportunity in America, businesses coming back to America, bringing capital back to America, expanding.
And that is a phenomenally good thing.
It's going to get more careers, better wages, better benefits, more entrepreneurship, and the Democrats are against all of that.
Well, one of the things that's really difficult in the job that you have, Mr. Speaker, is obviously that you are forced to do... I mean, your job is to do policy.
But at the same time, it seems to me that elections are very little about policy these days, and they seem to be much more about different moral stances and maybe, we hope, a battle of ideas.
How do you plan on tackling that?
Because we can talk about our policies being great all day long.
If good policy won, Republicans would never lose.
But the problem is obviously that, particularly if you look at the polls among young people, they're really, really egregiously bad.
I mean, 70% of my audience is under the age of 35, and the polls, even among conservative youngsters about Republicans, are not good.
How are you going to win the battle of ideas when you're so focused on talking policy?
And is there a way to shift away from that?
That's always been my issue.
I've always strongly believed that elections need to be about choices and about ideas.
And that's why in 2016 I got our House Republicans together to come up with an agenda and to run on it.
We called it The Better Way, so that we would have a game plan, we would give the country a very clear choice, and that if we won the election we would have earned the right to put that agenda in place.
We're two-thirds of the way through doing that right now.
And that gives us a good story to tell, which is, here's what we said we would do, here's what we did.
This is what we did in Wisconsin, by the way, in 2010, the state legislature, our governor.
It's a model that I believe in, that I saw work there.
It's something we're trying to apply here nationally.
And then we also have to go with new ideas in the election to continue this reform agenda, to disrupt it.
Now, the point you made, I think, is important, but what about young people?
The thing that bothers me the most, and I know you've talked about this a bit, is identity politics.
I hate identity politics.
It's wrong.
It's morally wrong, but also it's insidious, and it's practiced on both sides.
Our job is to reject identity politics and try and replace it with better ideas and idea and aspirational politics.
I'm a Jack Kemp acolyte.
I'm a big believer in using our core founding principles, applying to the problems, and show that there are solutions for everybody.
And that, to me, is the kind of an agenda and temperament we have to have going into the 2018 elections.
And so I wanted to ask you about that specifically, not in terms of, you know, efficiencies and economics, but about the moral differences that you see between right and left, because I think that's the real issue, particularly for young people, because, you know, you and I are both big fans.
Obviously, you long before I was, and in a much more prominent way, but you're big on entitlement reform.
is obviously a difficult thing to sell to a bunch of 17 year olds who never think they will be 60, right?
There's not a 17 year old in America who cares about their social security because they're never gonna be of age to receive it.
And so, when I speak to young people, which I do on a regular basis, it seems to me that what they really wanna hear is about this moral differentiation.
So in your view, moving below sort of the top of the iceberg in politics, moving below the water level, what do you think is the big distinction between right and left in American politics that needs to be elucidated? - Yeah, we believe in equality of opportunity.
They believe in equality of outcome.
Equality of opportunity means we want to make sure that we use these guiding principles that built this country, liberty, freedom, free enterprise, self-determination, government by consent, which gives you an open economy, which gives you freedom, which gives you the ability to chart your life the way you want to.
And we strive to promote equality of opportunity so that the most people can get the most opportunities possible.
And nowhere else is that ever made more clear than a free enterprise system, than a freedom Democratic capitalism like we have, like our system is built on natural rights.
What the left believes in, and look, you're asking a conservative what the left believes in, but they believe in equality of outcome.
The difference in the kind and size and role of government you have between what we're saying and what they're saying is enormous.
Having an equality of outcome agenda means elites in Washington, unelected bureaucrats, micromanage our lives and everything we do in such a way that they believe they have to decide what the results of our lives are.
That's very different.
That's the sense of equality, which is they make things equal in the end and the outcome of things.
That gives you a stagnant society.
That gives you a top-down society.
I come from Wisconsin, which is the birthplace of the Progressive Party.
They believe in all this early 20th century progressivism and Hegel and Bismarck and all these guys who basically I think that we're all rubes and dubes and we don't know enough, so we need to delegate our power to these smart bureaucrats that are insulated from elections so they can harmonize and micromanage our lives.
And that is an equality of outcome philosophy.
It's antithetical to our founding philosophy.
And that, at the end of the day, is the big difference here.
And so the fights we have up here, in many cases, not every one, but in many cases, are fights of that origin.
And I think that, you know, I've been watching, obviously, your political ascent for my entire life because you're younger.
But certainly over the last, you know, 15 years.
And one of the things that I wish that you had the opportunity to speak more about that Because it seems like you're sucked more into speaking about the efficiency outcomes.
Yeah, I'm in the day job.
Yeah, right.
Exactly, exactly.
Because we do need thought leaders in the conservative movement who are talking specifically about the roots of the left and talking specifically about the way that natural rights have been overcome by a different regime of how rights are thought about, right?
The difference between positive and negative rights.
So when I go to... I talk to schools all the time, young people.
I always say, look, these are our rights given to us pre-government.
You don't even have to believe in God to believe that they come from God.
They're pre-government.
So government can't take those away from us.
That's us.
We're sovereign.
I don't even like the idea of negative versus positive.
That's more of a left construct.
But the idea of government-granted rights means we give our power to the government.
I always say the healthcare debate.
Everybody says healthcare is a right.
If you buy into that premise, then we're saying we're giving our power to our government to tell us how, when, where, and under what circumstances we get to exercise that right.
We're giving the government way too much power than we should.
That's what the left is saying when they say they want to grant us these new rights.
The best thing that I've found when I talk to young crowds is if we do not get entitlements under control, which we can with more choice and competition and free enterprise and choice, if we don't get these things under control, we are going to bankrupt the next generation.
We've run the federal government, I round the numbers, we've run the federal government For the last 60 years, by taking about 20 cents out of every dollar made in America, produced in America to pay for the federal government, if we do nothing, and no new programs do nothing, by the time my kids are having kids, we're going to have to take 40 cents out of every single dollar made in America to pay for this government at that time.
Before they even get on to doing something else they want to do with their government.
So we will bankrupt the next generation.
I actually had the CBO run numbers years ago on what tax rates would have to be.
It goes up as high as 88% for tax rates just to pay for this government at that time.
So I try to explain to people in dollars and cents Just what's going to happen to them if the left gets their way, they produce this equality of outcome agenda, we don't reform entitlements, and we stick with these kind of command and control systems.
So I try to find a way of explaining in dollars and cents what their future will look like from an economic and tax standpoint and how liberty and opportunity will be crushed if we stay in this particular path.
Okay, so I also, while I have the opportunity, wanted to ask you about sort of the legislative versus executive balance, because one of the things that I've been critiquing for a long time in the country, and I was doing it under Bush, I was doing it under Obama, I'm doing it now under the Trump administration, is the increasing power of the executive branch, seemingly at the expense of the legislative branch, the growing bureaucracy, and the feeling that the legislative branch, over the last century and a half really, has abdicated its duty by kicking it over to the bureaucracy.
A good example of this being trade.
You know, the President obviously is pushing a particular agenda on trade.
This was not in the purview of the Executive Branch originally.
This is in the purview of the Legislative Branch.
You're the Speaker of the House.
How do you hope to, if you do, hope to reestablish the balance originally drawn?
I wrote the Trade Promotion Authority law, which was to allow us to go get trade agreements.
And we brought some of that power back into the Legislative Branch, but not nearly as much as we'd like.
So I can go into the particulars of that.
There's a couple of things that we're trying to do here that we've passed out of the House.
The biggest complaint you'll hear from a House Republican is the Senate filibuster and getting things through the Senate.
We have this thing called the REINS Act, which we think is sort of the catch-all of reclaiming Article 1, which is, 32 state legislatures do this.
You pass a big law, it's vague, and then the bureaucracy fills in the details with its rules and regulations.
And that just then happens.
And so you end up having all these unelected bureaucracies effectively writing the laws we experience.
We think that's wrong.
So what we're saying with this REINS Act, which is you pass a law, the rules and regulations get published, and then those rules and regulations come back to Congress for a final vote, approval, or amendment before they go into effect.
So that they're consented to by the elected branch of government, the people who are elected to write the laws before they go into effect.
And that holds us accountable, too.
So to that end, what we do is we try to, in the bills we pass, since we can't get that through the Senate yet, we try to do it on an individual basis, on a bill-by-bill basis.
And then I did something else.
We had these lawyers called the Legislative Council.
It's the Office of Legislative Council.
This is the actual bill drafters.
I used to chair the Ways and Means Committee, which is mostly tax laws and healthcare laws.
Tax laws have to be written really tightly, very, very prescriptively.
And so, I was worried we were writing too vague of a law.
We were just writing really vague laws and giving all this discretion to the bureaucracy.
Except in tax laws.
So what I did was I promoted the guy who was head of the tax law writing department to run the entire legislative council department to train the other lawyers of the legislative council how do you write laws really prescriptively so that we can reduce the kind of open-ended discretion we end up getting the executive branch.
So I'm trying to change sort of the culture of the way we legislate here so that we're far more detailed and prescriptive to not give all this discretion to the executive branch.
I really appreciate you taking the time, and again, you have one of the hardest jobs in all of America.
I do not envy you, but I appreciate that you're trying to make philosophical arguments in a time when it seems that a lot of people are caught up in tribal politics.
It's actually the best part of my day, so thank you.
I appreciate it, thank you.
Okay, so that was our sit-down with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
We expect to do a longer sit-down with him sometime in the near future, and then I can ask him about things like today's budget bill, which is garbage.
And we can talk a little bit more about what he intends to do to stop the overreach of the Senate, which seems to only want to pass these omnibus packages that should not really be passed.
OK, so I'm going to talk a little bit about other scandals brewing.
Apparently Stormy Daniels is going to be on 60 Minutes.
The weather is getting stormy.
And so we'll talk about all of that.
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All righty.
So a quick roundup of other news.
So, meanwhile, 60 Minutes is now ready to do its interview with Stormy Daniels.
According to the Daily Mail, the head of CBS News said Tuesday that a 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels, who is of course the porn star that Trump stopped, is on its way, but that more journalistic work needs to be done on the story.
David Rhodes is the president over at CBS News.
I've met him.
He's actually a reasonable fellow, I think.
He said at a conference in Israel on Tuesday that the first time CBS had confirmed that it interviewed Daniels, who has alleged an extramarital affair with Trump before he became president, she passed a lie detector.
Listen, of course he had an affair with her.
Of course.
I'm so tired of people futzing around this issue.
Oh, she's lying.
You're right.
She's lying, as is every other porn star.
All the women are lying.
They're all lying.
It's just not credible.
I'm sorry.
Michael Avenatti is a lawyer for the actress, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.
Last week, he tweeted a picture of himself, Clifford, and Anderson Cooper.
No air date has yet been set for the interview, but they are preparing.
This is one of the weird things about the Stormy Daniels story.
Jonah Goldberg pointed this out.
A lot of people saying, well, you know, Trump denied all the sorts of activity during the campaign.
But he's not, you know, he's denying that he had an affair with Stormy Daniels.
But then why would he be paying Stormy Daniels $130,000 in order to shut her up?
Like, to talk about an affair they didn't have?
Then he could sue her for libel.
So, what exactly would be the point of any of this?
It doesn't make any sense at all.
So, all of this continues to roll out over the Trump White House.
None of it is obviously particularly good for President Trump.
Meanwhile, President Trump continues to fulminate about Russia and Vladimir Putin.
He is Obviously very sensitive about comments made about Russia.
A lot of people were very critical of the president, including me, when he congratulated the Russian president on his dictatorial victory in the new fake elections over in Russia.
He'd been bashed by some people, including Ben Sasse, the senator from Nebraska, who I think says a lot of very intelligent things.
Sasse said a couple of things on the floor of the Senate the other day.
He said, number one, Trump obviously should not be praising Putin, and number two, that material should not be leaking from the White House.
Which obviously is true, okay?
There's no way that there should be material leaking from the White House that says that people were telling Trump not to—that it was written on a memo in front of him, do not congratulate Putin.
There are only a certain number of people in that room.
If Trump really wants to be sure, he can just fire everybody who was in the room when he made the phone call, or everybody who had seen that memo.
In any case, here was Ben Sasse saying what he said, and then Trump responding.
Vladimir Putin is not a friend.
Vladimir Putin is a despot.
The President of the United States was wrong to congratulate him, and the White House Press Secretary was wrong to duck a simple question about whether or not Putin's re-election was free and fair.
It was not.
The American people know that, the Russian people know that, and the world knows that.
And yesterday, when the White House refused to speak directly and clearly about this matter, we were weakened as a nation, and a tyrant was strengthened.
And Sass went on to talk about how none of this stuff should have been leaked from the White House anyway, which is of course true.
Trump responded by ripping on everybody else about his own comments about Putin.
So here were some of his tweets on this topic.
He said, I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory.
In past, Obama called him also.
Okay, that's true.
This is true.
Okay, so far, this is all somewhat fair, right?
They never would have called for Barack Obama to rip on Putin.
In fact, they were fine with Barack Obama offering flexibility to Putin right before a presidential election, and then handing over control of Syria in the midst of a genocide to Vladimir Putin.
So, he's not wrong to be critical of the media.
But this is where he begins to go wrong.
Then he tweets this.
They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran, and even the coming arms race.
Bush tried to get along, but didn't have the smarts.
Quote-unquote smarts.
Nothing says that you are a smart person who can use the word smarts like using scare quotes improperly.
Obama and Clinton tried, but didn't have the energy or chemistry.
Remember, reset peace through strength!
OK, that's not what peace through strength means.
They cannot help us solve problems with North Korea.
They have dealings with North Korea.
They cannot help us solve problems in Syria, where they've been bolstering the Assad regime and its genocide.
They certainly cannot help us solve problems in Ukraine, which they invaded.
They are not going to help us with problems with Iran, considering that they are fans of Iran.
And as far as the coming arms race, it's Vladimir Putin who is currently testing long-range missiles again and talking about how they're upgrading their entire missile system to avoid missile defense.
Trump ripping on Bush and saying that he didn't have the smarts is just yuck.
It's, I'm sorry, it's just, it's classless.
And I love that it's, that he thinks, here's the thing about Trump.
Trump thinks that everything comes down to personal relationship because in essence, President Trump is a salesman.
So he thinks that his relationship with Putin is going to go well because he's a good salesman.
Okay, Trump is a good salesman, but that's not how international relations work.
Good salesmanship does not mean that you are better on the international stage.
Proper use of the iron fist and the velvet glove, power and threat of force and the use of those things, right?
That is the essence of diplomacy.
Trump is not good at those things.
When he says peace through strength, Ronald Reagan's peace through strength was that there would be peace because they knew that if they crossed the line, we'd bash them in the head.
That's what peace through strength meant.
Trump is saying nice things about Putin for no reason, then calling it peace through strength.
That's not what that is, and it's foolish of President Trump to say that.
Okay, time for a thing I like and then a thing I hate, and then we'll be back here tomorrow with the mailbag.
So, things I like.
So, this is not for the kiddies.
It's probably not for many of the adults.
There's a show on Netflix called Altered Carbon.
It is heavily nudified.
Okay, it's like Game of Thrones-style nudity.
Lots of lots of boobies on this particular show and it's not particularly necessary I guess you can make the argument that it's sort of artistically necessary because the whole point of the show is that there is a future in which human beings have a Have their personality embedded in essentially a computer chip And that computer chip is in the base of their skull and that computer chip can actually be removed and implanted in other bodies.
So you actually don't die when your body dies.
They just take that computer chip and they take all your memories and everything.
They just stick it into another body and you're good to go.
And so this body substitution regime is sort of the point of the series.
I'm about five episodes in.
It's sort of noir-ish.
If you like Blade Runner 2049, it's that sort of feel.
It's this kind of dark futuristic vision with neon colors.
It looks a lot like that movie.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
Your body is not who you are.
You shed it like a snake sheds its skin.
You transfer the human consciousness between bodies to live eternal life.
How long have I been down?
- How have I been down? - 250 years. - You are the property of Bancroft Industries.
You've been provided with this body, which came equipped with military-grade neurochem and combat muscle memory.
Mr. Kovacs.
So it's an interesting series.
It's a cool-looking series.
I've heard that it gets kind of twisty near the end of the first season, so I'm looking forward to that.
Again, it's heavily pornified, but the whole point here is that it's actually not sexy.
So the fact that there is so much nudity, actually, it's like Westworld.
It actually makes it not particularly sexy, specifically because the message of the film, the message of the series, is that your body is not all you are.
In fact, it's very little of who you are.
But it is something.
It raises some interesting philosophical questions.
So, worth watching if you can stand the NC-17 rated of it.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Alrighty, so there are two quick things that I hate.
First of all, apparently there's a student in the UK who is now alleging that he was reprimanded by his school for watching a video on a public computer of me talking with Dave Rubin.
Here's what he said.
I got reported by someone for watching disturbing, hateful content in university premises and received an email from faculty course officer who wanted to be summoned for a student meeting.
And apparently the student says that because they were watching this video of Rubin and me, That they were threatened with suspension from school.
This is certainly crazy, but it is unfortunately not all that uncommon.
The left likes to lump into the category of hate speech anyone that it doesn't like.
This is why they're trying to say that Jordan Peterson is responsible for hate speech.
It's that Harris, who's not even on the right, is responsible for hate speech.
All of it is stupid.
All of it is nonsense.
And it's why hate speech legislation like they have in Britain is insanely dangerous, because you can just start banning viewpoints that you don't like.
OK, the other thing that I don't like is Ellen Dershowitz had a debate with Jeffrey Toobin Over on, I believe, CNN, about the Mueller investigation.
And Dershowitz has been making—Dersh, as we used to call him at Harvard Law School—has been making the case that I think is a pretty solid case, that the investigation, the Mueller investigation, has exceeded its legal boundaries, and he's now digging in areas where he was not originally designed to go.
Jeffrey Toobin, who's a former Dershowitz student, he says that Dershowitz is now a shill of the Trump administration.
They go at it on CNN.
Here's what it looked like.
How has this come about that in every situation over the past year you have been carrying water for Donald Trump?
This is not who you used to be and you are doing this over and over again in situations that are just obviously ripe with conflict of interest and it's just like what's happened to you?
What conflict of interest?
I attacked President Trump... Not you!
I'm talking about not your conflict of interest, these conflicts of interest.
I attacked President Trump for his banning of Muslims.
I attacked President Trump for leaking material to Russia.
I have attacked President Trump for many, many things.
I'm not carrying his water.
I'm saying exactly the same thing I said.
Okay, and Dershowitz is exactly correct here, of course.
You may disagree with Dershowitz's analysis, but it's getting tiresome to watch people who don't like Trump simply suggest that anyone who defends Trump at any juncture, even if we've been very critical of Trump at other junctures, that those people have now become shills for the Trump administration.
This polarized political environment is really gross.
Just because you defend Trump when he's worth defending does not mean that you like Trump overall or you think everything that he's doing is right.
And just because you say that Trump does something wrong doesn't mean that you hate Trump overall.
You may still like Trump overall.
You know, we should be able to say what we think is right and what we think is wrong.
I think Dershowitz has done a pretty good job of that.
All right, we will be back here tomorrow with the mailbag.
I look forward to seeing you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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