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May 23, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:51
The Power Of Being A Jackass | Ep. 544
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Tommy Lahren gets a drink thrown on her, President Trump goes after the deep state, and the city of Seattle decides to bankrupt itself.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, it's a tweet storm day for President Trump.
Category 5 tweet storm from the President, so we'll get into that in just a second.
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OK, so.
President Trump is gaining in the polls.
The polls right now look good for President Trump.
There was a poll yesterday that came out.
It showed that Republicans had a generic ballot six-point lead in the congressional election.
Now, that is an outlier.
There's no question that's an outlier.
The poll average still has Republicans down about four points.
That said, there has been a slow but incremental increase in Republican vote share in the congressional ballot for the last several months.
And the question is why.
Meanwhile, the Rasmussen tracking poll has President Trump up around 50%.
Even if you don't believe Rasmussen, he's in the mid-40s, his polls have also been trending in the right direction.
And the question, again, is why?
And I think that the answer lies in the fact that so many on the left have decided to just treat people with whom they disagree in deplorable fashion.
The latest example of this is Tomi Lahren, okay?
So Tomi Lahren goes out to brunch with her mom, and a bunch of people decide to scream at Tomi Lahren and then throw drinks on her.
So here's what it sounded like.
So there's a person who's tossing a drink at Tommy Lahren for no reason.
Because you're so cool because you tossed a drink at Tommy Lahren for the great sin of going to brunch with her mother.
Now, you don't have to be a Tomi Lahren fan to understand that this is awful behavior.
It's just garbage behavior.
But that's no shock, because folks on the left have been engaging in garbage behavior throughout the campaign cycle.
You know, we tend to forget.
A lot of the things that happened in 2016 because there was so much that went on in 2016.
But there were Trump rallies where people legitimately showed up and did violence to Trump supporters.
It wasn't Trump supporters doing violence to Hillary Clinton supporters.
It was Hillary Clinton supporters in many cases doing violence to Trump supporters.
Now there were cases obviously very well publicized of people hitting dissenters inside Trump Meetings and all the rest.
But if you're talking about widespread violence, wide-scale violence, I believe there was a rally in San Jose where violence broke out.
There was the rally in Chicago that had to be canceled because of violence outside.
The Democrats have decided to go full-scale 1968, and this sort of behavior is not going to help their cause.
Now, maybe this person feels they're gonna be cheered on social media for having thrown a glass of water at Tomi Lahren, but I just don't know what you gain through all of this.
Same thing is happening over at Harvard.
So the Harvard alumni from 2003 They used their alumni notes to attack Jared Kushner.
So according to Mediaite, once every five years, this has been done since the 19th century, Harvard alumni write class notes, informally referred to as the Red Book, to keep in touch with one another.
The Red Book consists of big life updates such as work, marriages, and children.
In this year's Red Book for the class of 2003, 15 years after graduation, these updates are interspersed with attacks on Kushner, according to the Boston Globe.
First of all, I know Jared Kushner.
Jared Kushner is not a fascist.
Shame on you, Jared Kushner.
Another one named John Sherman said, "I for one, I'm actually glad our class of '03 finally has a real life fascist among us.
Who says Harvard isn't diverse?" First of all, I know Jared Kushner.
Jared Kushner is not a fascist.
This is asinine.
According to the Globe, the Amen part of the disparaging class notes is to let Kushner know that his service in the Trump White House will have lasting consequences, resulting in his potential ostracization from a valuable social network of his peers.
Hey, Jared Kushner is relatively independently wealthy, meaning like worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
I really don't think he cares very much whether these ne'er-do-wells from his Harvard class of 2003 don't like him.
Shonda Prescott Weinstein is another member of the class of 2003.
She expressed discouragement that only a fraction of her classmates decided to call out Kushner in their entries.
She said he was in Jerusalem with his wife while people were being massacred.
I feel so emotional about that.
First of all, who cares how you feel?
Who cares how you feel?
Why would Jared Kushner sit around wondering how some girl he probably never met when he was at Harvard cares about the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem?
As people were being massacred, he is a person who is doing horrible things as a black woman and a Jewish woman.
I think it's disgusting.
He's not alone in doing these disgusting things, but he's certainly one of the active participants.
I think it's emblematic of Harvard culture that people didn't want to call him out.
I think people thought it was rude and didn't want to be rude.
But I think genocide is rude, and I was happy to be rude.
So, first of all, what happened, obviously, on the Gaza border was not genocide.
It was Hamas tossing up a bunch of terrorists to get killed and putting them behind civilians in order to get civilians killed.
But, again, it demonstrates the utter scorn and hatred that so many folks on the left seem to have for anybody on the right.
By virtually any measure, Jared Kushner is one of the more moderate members of the Trump administration.
The attempt to turn Jared Kushner into some sort of fascist crazy person and then to call him out in the Harvard Red Book, which is supposed to be for, like, sending each other nice notes, Demonstrative of the fact that the left has become so nasty toward people with whom it disagrees that they are actually alienating people into the moderate center or to the right.
That's the reason that Trump is gaining in the polls.
And the Democrats just keep campaigning further and further to the left.
And Meghan McCain, she came out yesterday and she's on The View, and she said, you know, on The View, I'm so sick of people on the left Submitting that Planned Parenthood is the number one issue for all women.
Why are you playing this identity politics game?
Or if I disagree with you, it's because I must disagree with all women because all women deeply care about abortion.
We've talked about this many times on the show.
For me, my women's issues, foreign policy, number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
And the idea that Planned Parenthood is the number one issue for women in America, all women.
No, not the number one, but there are issues that are specific to women.
It's just false!
I'm sick of this!
I'm sick of the idea that all women's issues...
There are issues that are specific to women, and women legislators are more likely to introduce legislation that specifically benefit women, and that's just a stat.
If you go into midterm elections with that message, it is not going to be the blue wave you think it will be.
Okay, Meghan McCain is exactly right here.
The blue wave that was supposed to crest in November is actually petering out pretty far from shore here.
And again, the reason for that is the antipathy that so many folks on the left hold for people on the right.
It's also thanks to the cultural hegemony that is experienced by folks on the left.
So at the same time, you see people Throwing glasses of water at Tomi Lahren, Harvard alumni trying to shame Jared Kushner, and folks on the left implying that everybody on the right hates women and all this kind of stuff.
At the same time, you have this nice warm cocoon of culture that has been created specifically for folks on the left.
So it was revealed over the last couple of days that Barack and Michelle Obama will work both in front of and behind the camera in a multi-year production deal with Netflix.
And listen, I love Netflix.
I'm a subscriber to Netflix.
I'm a subscriber to Amazon Prime.
There's a lot of material they generate on Netflix that I am not a big fan of.
But let's be frank about this.
Do you think they would ever consider doing a deal with George W. Bush?
Like a faith-based deal?
To make faith-based movies with George W. Bush?
Of course not.
Of course not.
There's a reason that YouTube helped sponsor The Young Turks, but YouTube will demonetize Dave Rubin.
There's a reason that all of these major media companies are happy to side with the left while excising the right.
According to CNN.com, the unique pack was announced on Monday.
The first content from the Obamas will appear in 2019 at the earliest, according to a person involved in the deal.
Netflix did not specify a timeline, but the company's announcement of the deal said the Obamas will produce a diverse mix of content, including the potential for scripted series, unscripted series, docuseries, documentaries and features.
Now, you might ask, what does Barack Obama or Michelle, what do these people know about producing film?
The answer is, of course, they know nothing.
What do these people know about great narrative art?
The answer, of course, is they don't know anything.
But because the people at Netflix are so blown away by the celebrity of the Obama, the Obama clan, they've decided that it's time to give them a multi-picture deal.
You know how many people struggle in Hollywood to ever get one picture from Netflix?
And Netflix is giving this entire broad-spectrum deal to the Obamas for no reason other than Barack Obama was a Democratic president that they admire and love.
That warm cocoon is what's driving away so many Americans.
Zip.
You know who actually wants to watch the Obamas some more?
Sometimes the former president and first lady will be on camera as hosts or moderators, the source said, on condition of anonymity.
In other cases, they will stay behind the scenes as producers.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
The Obamas are giving Netflix valuable content that many of the streaming services, 125 million members may want to watch.
And Netflix is giving the Obamas valuable platform to stay visible in their post-White House years.
I love that editorializing from CNN.
You know what the ratings are going to be on the Obama series?
Zip.
You know who actually wants to watch the Obamas some more?
No one.
There was a movie that came out about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date.
It did like $1 of business because no one cares.
But the whole point here...
is that when you feel ensconced in a cultural ivory tower where everyone loves you, everyone thinks like you, it is very easy to look down on the people outside the ivory tower and say, look at those rubes, look at those charlatans, look at those people like Tommy Lahren, look at these people who like Donald Trump.
What a bunch of morons.
Let's just sit up here and spit.
We'll hock loogies from the front of the ship, just like the characters in Titanic.
That'll be our new thing.
We'll spit down on the crowd below.
Barack Obama said, Yeah, because if there's one thing I think when I think the Obamas, I think empathy for their political opponents, whom they slandered routinely and repeatedly throughout their political career.
These are the creatures of empathy.
Yeah, because if there's one thing I think when I think the Obamas, I think empathy for their political opponents whom they slandered routinely and repeatedly throughout their political career.
These are the creatures of empathy.
But this is the whole point.
People can see themselves as empathetic so long as they are members of a tribe.
Because they look at other members of their political tribe and they say, well, I care about those people.
And those other people I don't care about, that's because they're inherently uncaring.
They're inherently intolerant.
It's okay to throw water at Tomi Lahren, because after all, she's a bad person.
She doesn't care about us.
So why should I care about her?
When you don't see each other as brothers and sisters, when you see each other instead as enemies, it's pretty easy to make a case that the other person should be treated like garbage.
It's easy to make the case that Jared Kushner is a fascist when you haven't spent any time with Jared Kushner or even looked at what he's done.
It's very easy to make these cases.
But, you know, that's what the left has tended to do.
And the American people are responding pretty badly to that whole spiel.
They're responding pretty badly.
And they're also resonating to what President Trump has to say in response to that, which I'll get to in just one second.
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Okay.
So in the face of all these people.
Who seem to hate you just because of your political points of view.
It's no wonder so many people are resonating to President Trump, because now, if people are enemies, you want the biggest hammer you can find.
And that's what President Trump has been doing.
So President Trump comes out yesterday.
He's at a pro-life gala.
And he's slapping at all of his opponents, including Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi, of course, you'll remember, essentially said that Trump was wrong to call members of MS-13 animals.
The great ironic story yesterday, of course, is that there was an MS-13 member who was arrested whose actual name, his nickname, was Animal, which is pretty hilarious.
But in any case, here was Trump going after Nancy Pelosi at a Susan B. Anthony list dinner.
And the other day, just the other day, Nancy Pelosi came out in favor of MS-13.
That's the first time I've heard that.
She wants them to be treated with respect, as do other Democrats.
That's not going to be happening.
We're not going to release violent criminals into our country.
Now, as I've been saying for a long time, the most effective tactic to take in politics is not necessarily the best tactic to take for the country.
So, I wrote an entire book called Bullies in 2013.
The entire premise, right, it was a long time ago, the entire premise is that the Democrats were spending all of their time engaged in character assassination against Republicans, and if Republicans continued to play this game where they talked policy alone without rebutting the character assassination by attacking character of Democrats, then they would lose.
Trump took up that mantle in spades.
President Trump understands character assassination better than pretty much anyone else in American public life.
He's been both the victim of it and the perpetrator of it for virtually his entire career, and that's why so many people have flocked to his banner.
The reason a lot of people are supporting President Trump right now is because you see a lot of people on the left, and you look at them, and they're yelling at people in MAGA hats, or they are trying to crash the party at particular Trump events, or they're throwing water at conservative commentators, and people go, okay, well at least Trump is fighting back.
I promise you, that's the number one phrase you get from Trump supporters.
At least he's fighting back.
And that is the perception, that he's fighting back.
And this isn't to say that Democrats have to surrender their political principles, but if they actually want to be successful, they might want to think about treating the American public as potential friends, rather than as current enemies.
If they continue to treat them as enemies, those enemies will go look for the best fighter they can find.
The perspective of a lot of conservatives is the perspective of a lot of Americans, who don't like what the left are doing right now.
Is the same perspective that was attributed apocryphally to Abraham Lincoln about Ulysses S. Grant.
I can't spare this man, he fights.
So who cares about Trump's heresies?
So long as the dude is slapping the right folks.
Well, I mean, what are you going to do?
Bend over for all these folks who are throwing water at you and yelling at you and taking out ads in the Harvard alumni newspaper to target you and calling you a rube and an idiot and signing deals with the Obamas at Netflix?
Better to have somebody who fights than somebody who's not going to fight properly at all.
And that's one of the reasons why I think the Trump investigation, the Trump-Russia investigation, is actually not redounding to Democrats' benefit.
So, let's talk about that for a second.
Democrats are very, very upset that President Trump appears to be pushing the DOJ to investigate the so-called FBI spying into his campaign.
Now, as I say, I am very skeptical that the FBI launched a politically motivated attack on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election campaign in order to uncover Russian collusion and then didn't drop any of that information the entire campaign cycle and waited until after the election cycle in order to start leaking that information.
That just doesn't make a lot of that.
That conspiracy theory does not wash for me.
And again, President Trump can declassify any of that material at any point.
Well, this has not stopped President Trump from going on a Twitter rant.
So, category five, President Trump tweet storm.
This came out this morning.
He says, if the person placed very early into my campaign wasn't a spy put there by previous administration for political purposes, how come such a seemingly massive amount of money was paid for services rendered many times higher than normal?
Well, apparently the guy who was the quote unquote spy was a professor who'd written a couple of books, none of them very good.
He was actually, the professor who was the apparent spy, it is worth noting, was actually considered by Peter Navarro, a current Trump administration member, for a position inside the Trump administration after Trump's actual election.
He was paid, he was offered like $3,000 for a piece of writing, to write an essay or something.
Not sure why that is a giant, a giant overpay.
In any case, Trump continues He says, follow the money.
The spy was there early in the campaign and yet never reported collusion with Russia because there was no collusion.
He was only there to spy for political reasons and to help Crooked Hillary win, just like they did to Bernie Sanders, who got duped.
Okay, now, none of this makes any sense.
So the spy was there to report on collusion, but he didn't report on collusion.
So he was there to spy for political reasons to help Crooked Hillary win, but he didn't help Crooked Hillary win because Crooked Hillary lost because none of this information came out during the election cycle.
So that's weird.
And then President Trump continues along these lines.
Look how things have turned around on the criminal deep state, all caps.
They go after phony collusion with Russia, a made up scam, and end up getting caught in a major spy scandal, the likes of which the country may never have seen before.
What goes around comes around.
Now, as I say, if it turns out that the Obama administration was sicking informants on the Trump campaign in order to crush the Trump campaign, Without any evidence.
It is significantly worse than Watergate.
I haven't seen the evidence to support that quite as of yet.
And then Trump continues.
He's really ranting now.
He's quoting Napolitano from Fox & Friends this morning.
And then he continues along these lines.
He says Spygate could be one of the biggest political scandals in history.
Well, I mean, it was one of the biggest football scandals in history, asked Bill Belichick.
And then Donald Trump continues.
He says, trying Trump should be happy that the FBI was spying on his campaign.
No, James Clapper, I am not happy.
Spying on a campaign would be illegal and a scandal to boot.
Fair enough.
James Clapper's an idiot.
And then he finally concludes, which aren't.
Right, all caps, WITCH HUNT!
Which, as soon as he says witch hunt, I just think of duck hunt, and I'm seven years old again playing in my grandmother's basement, and shooting the ducks with the gun right up to the TV.
So, WITCH HUNT!
This has to be the sixth or seventh time that President Trump has tweeted out witch hunt.
And this, of course, has prompted great hilarity on Twitter.
I tweeted out duck hunt with the picture of the laughing dog.
There is somebody who tweeted out Yeah, look, does President Trump have solid backing for these accusations?
No, but we're going to find out in this investigation, you would hope.
But the point is this, Democrats have decided that President Trump has no authority to do any of this, and so they've decided that he is a dictator.
Now, two things can be true at once.
Trump may not have support for this position that he was spied on by the Deep State in any serious fashion, and by the same token, or at least not in an unjustified fashion, and by the same token, when Democrats say things like Trump is a dictator, it's really stupid.
So when you have Mazie Hirono, who is the Democratic senator from Hawaii, saying that Trump is like a dictator, how is he like a dictator?
We have a system of checks and—what?
What?
But this is their routine.
So you have a president, Trump, who has attacked the media.
He's gone after judges who don't agree with him.
He's certainly going after the intelligence community, the FBI, Department of Justice.
And these are the kinds of actions taken by people like Erdogan in Turkey, Duterte in the Philippines, and of course, Yeah, exactly, because all three murdered their political opponents.
Has Donald Trump murdered any of his political opponents lately?
I missed that part.
See, this is the part where Donald Trump has a gift that just keeps on giving, and that is that everybody on the left will always overreact to everything he does.
So, what they should say is, President Trump has no support for any of the things that he is tweeting, and it's a slander on our intelligence community to suggest that they were politically motivated in their investigations into George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.
And they should just stick with that, that this guy's talking nonsense.
Instead, they go to, he's a dictator, he's like Duterte in the Philippines, who kills drug dealers.
He's like Erdogan, who imprisons and murders his political opponents.
He's like Putin, who's done exactly the same.
And you go, really?
Really?
No wonder Americans are not resonating to the Democratic message right now.
No wonder Democrats are really disheartened, because the Deus Ex Machina is not coming, okay?
Miller's not gonna save you from Trump.
Okay, so in a little while, I'm gonna talk about Democratic policy.
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All right, so.
What about democratic policy?
So they've spent all of their time ripping on President Trump and suggesting that President Trump is on the verge of being taken down, and their favorite story now is that Michael Cohen's business partner named Evgeny Friedman has agreed to cooperate as part of a plea deal.
It is not clear that this is going to have any ramifications for Trump in any serious way.
According to CNBC, Evgeny Friedman has agreed to cooperate.
The cooperation by the taxi King Friedman could spell very bad news for Cohn, who's subject to an ongoing criminal investigation by federal prosecutors in New York City.
The Times suggested that Friedman's cooperation could be used as leverage to pressure Cohn to work with the special counsel.
But again, all of this is speculation.
Bottom line is Democrats have nothing.
They do not have anything right now to run on other than just anger.
Just anger at President Trump.
They certainly don't have policy to run on.
And the latest indicator the Democrats do not have policy to run on is the way that they are wrecking major cities.
They've wrecked Los Angeles.
They've turned my city into, as President Trump might say, a bleephole.
The city of Los Angeles now has 55,000 to 60,000 homeless people who are sleeping on the streets every single night.
Enough people to fill Dodger Stadium are sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles.
They've not filled the potholes.
They've not made the city better.
They've not made the city cleaner.
They've made the city more crime-ridden.
This is true across the state of California.
And it's not just in Los Angeles.
It's in Seattle.
Seattle is a beautiful city.
I used to do a show exclusively in Seattle on station KTTH.
Now, let me tell you, Seattle, Gorgeous.
It is an upper crust city.
By income, it is an upper crust city.
It is a growing city.
It has three major companies, more than that, actually, that are located there.
It has Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks, all of which are located in the city of Seattle, and Boeing, which is located just outside the city of Seattle, Tacoma, Seattle area.
So, here's the problem.
Seattle has determined that they are so interested in social justice warrior-ing that they're going to empty out their city.
What's the latest?
So, as you recall, last week Seattle decided on an Amazon tax.
It's a head tax.
The head tax was a couple hundred bucks per employee for companies that make over $20 million a year.
And this money was supposed to go to alleviate the homeless problem.
It will not alleviate the homeless problem, because the homeless problem is created by the fact that if you won't arrest people who are sleeping on the streets, and if you won't allow people to build more housing because of building regulations, then you're going to end up with more homeless people on the streets.
And that's especially true if you implement maybe like a $15 minimum wage, which Seattle did a couple of years ago, and in doing so, helped crush a lot of small businesses and force a lot of people out of jobs.
Well now, they've decided, Seattle City Council, they've decided to go even further.
Now they're considering an enormous property tax on all of these people.
So according to Q13Fox, King County homeowners, which is where Seattle is located, they saw a bump of 17% in their property taxes in 2017.
But now, city council members want to see property taxes increased even more.
Council members Lorena Gonzalez and Rob Johnson are sponsoring the measure, which states the council wants to lift the limit on regular property taxes in order to levy additional taxes.
In 2014, Seattle voters approved a $58 million dollar levy allowing low-income kids to go to preschool for free.
Since 2015, the city says the program has allowed affordable or free preschool to 850 families.
So, just to do that quick calculation, okay?
That means that there are $58 million dollars.
That means that they have spent to put each of these preschool families in preschool.
And I assume that's about one child per family?
$68,000 dollars!
Okay?
So, well done local government.
Yay, local government.
All you had to do was spend $58 million to give affordable and free preschool to 850 families.
It's $68,000 per family.
You could have just signed them a check, gang.
Now the city wants to send hundreds more to preschool, and Mayor Jenny Durkan's office is pushing to send high school graduates to community college for free.
So they're going to establish their socialist utopia on the back of — or redistributionist, at the very least, utopia — on the back of major businesses they will tax out of business.
The property tax would amount to, on average, more than another $250 per year for homeowners.
Now, has any of this alleviated living conditions in Seattle?
The answer, of course, is no.
Seattle still has a massive homeless problem.
They have tent cities that exist all over the city.
Seattle's building code is 745 pages.
Their residential building code is another 685 pages.
So it's impossible to build anything in Seattle.
The Seattle City Council has focused far more on road diets, far more on road diets, narrowing roads via bike lanes, than on the quality of traffic.
King County spent billions of dollars on useless light rail.
They allotted something like $50 billion for a stupid light rail that nobody cares about.
But now they want to bust a homeowner's wallet again after instituting a $15 minimum wage.
This is how you empty out major American cities.
First, you create building codes because you want to maintain the pristine aura of the area.
Then, you raise rents because there's less housing and more demand and less supply.
Then, you increase minimum wage to compensate, which drives out small business.
Then you tax the big businesses to compensate.
Then they leave.
So you tax the homeowners to compensate.
So they leave.
This is how you empty out a major American city.
Detroit used to be a booming city, and then Democrats got a hold of it and they turned it to crap.
That's not a great shock, because this is what Democrats do with policy.
This is what Democrats do with policy.
And no wonder they're relying on President Trump's supposed Supposed out-of-the-box ridiculousness as president to try and drive them to victory, their policies are not attractive.
Nothing they are doing right now is attractive policy.
And by the way, Barack Obama's agenda is completely collapsing.
I mean, Donald Trump is erasing the Obama agenda one bill at a time, basically.
The Dodd-Frank bill is now being dismantled piece by piece.
So according to NBC News, the House voted late on Tuesday to pass a bill that will change significant aspects of Dodd-Frank, which is the banking reform bill introduced After loose lending and risky measures by financial institutions led to the country's worst recession since the Great Depression, since it passed in 2010, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Consumer Protection Act has been the target of animosity by many conservatives and the banking industry.
Right.
That's because the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act doesn't actually protect consumers or reform Wall Street.
In fact, it enshrines government bailouts.
It says that if there is that much risk that is taken on by a particular firm, the government has to bail them out.
It forces a government bailout.
So, the bill is likely to become law.
So, Dodd-Frank, of course, was an attempt to reestablish oversight and control over financial institutions after the economic meltdown.
It was a 2,300-page bill.
It was garbage.
It included the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has not been used for consumer financial protection, but instead has been used for cronyism by Democrats in an attempt to shut down businesses they don't like.
It has led to increased bank reporting requirements, as well as the so-called Volcker Rule in an attempt to separate hedge funds from—they've tried to reestablish Glass-Steagall, separating hedge funds from investment banks and all of the rest.
I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second.
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All righty.
So back to the Dodd-Frank bills.
So, according to NBC News, the proposed changes, to be called systemically important and subject to more regulations, banks would need assets of $250 billion rather than the current $50 billion.
That significantly reduces the number considered too big to fail.
As I said, Dodd-Frank, one of the worst things that it did is it enshrined a certain amount of risk-taking by these banks.
Basically what they said is that in the aftermath of the financial collapse, All these banks were terrible actors.
They'd undertaken great risk.
The reason they undertook great risk is because of something we call moral hazard in economics.
Moral hazard is the idea that if I pay you to do something stupid, or if you know they're going to pick you up and brush you off when you do something stupid, you're more likely to do something stupid.
So, moral hazard is me saving my son from falling off the back of a chair.
Okay, moral, it creates a certain, I should do it because he's my kid, but it creates a certain amount of moral hazard because now he thinks that he can stand on the back of the chair with no real ramifications.
Well, the bank was standing on the back of the chair and the government picked them up and brushed them off.
And Dodd-Frank, instead of saying, listen, from now on, we're not doing this anymore.
There's no more too big to fail.
You go bankrupt, you go bankrupt, that's the end of it.
Instead, Dodd-Frank enshrined all of these banks and said, if you have $50 billion in assets, well, then we will enshrine you as too big to fail and we will pay you off.
And then they said, in order to prevent you from taking these risks, we are now going to regulate you from taking the risks.
So you get the downside of too big to fail, and you also get the downsides of banks that are not willing to undertake loans that they may not have taken before, unwilling to invest in projects they may have been willing to invest in because they were the ones bearing the risk, not everybody else.
So only nine U.S. chartered commercial bank holding companies would meet the definition according to data from the Federal Reserve.
That'd be State Street, SunTrust, the U.S. Division of HSBC, Fifth Third, Key Bank, Citizens Bank.
Those would all be under the limit.
Okay, so all of those would no longer be considered too big to fail.
The new bill will allow the mid-sized banks to not be under such scrutiny when it comes to their lending practices.
Many original supporters of Dodd-Frank think that this is a rollback.
They say that this is really bad because we want to make sure that everybody is going to be regulated up the wazoo.
So banks with under $10 billion could ignore the Volcker Rule.
As I mentioned, the Volcker Rule actually allows them to deposit funds in speculation.
The Volcker Rule prevents them from using deposit funds in speculation, prevents banks from investing.
Remember, when you deposit money in a bank, it is typically used for investment in other projects.
The government has cracked down on these banks.
The market takes care of all of these things so long as people do their research.
The government involvement in the banking industry has led to additional moral hazard.
And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is one of the worst bureaus in America.
It's just garbage.
I mean, it's been used to crack down on businesses.
It's been used to crack down on particular actors that members of the government don't like.
According to Diane Katz over at the Heritage Foundation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created by Dodd-Frank is living up to its billing as one of the most powerful and unaccountable federal agencies ever created after just 18 months.
She wrote this shortly after its creation in 2012.
And with the staff exceeding 1,000 and funding of $600 million, the Bureau is restructuring the mortgage market, devising restrictions on credit bureaus, education loans, overdraft policies, payday lenders, credit card plans, and prepaid cards, amassing unverified complaints With which to assail creditors and bankers.
And they're basically unelected, the folks over at the CFPB.
You remember that earlier this year there was a big fight over the CFPB because President Trump wanted to restaff it using Mick Mulvaney to clean the place out, and Democrats cried foul.
Dodd-Frank needed to be gutted.
Good for President Trump for doing that gutting.
That indeed is something that is well worthwhile.
And look, Obama's legacy is falling apart.
It should be falling apart.
It was a bad legacy, but at least he'll still have his series on Netflix.
Now, meanwhile, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this just because it's an important global issue.
This Friday, I've been getting a lot of mail from Ireland.
I want to mention this.
Ireland is set to hold a referendum to allow abortion in state hospitals.
There's an Eighth Amendment to their country's constitution.
It recognizes a right to life for babies from conception.
Wish to God that we had that here in the United States.
Instead, there's a referendum that's on the ballot as of Friday.
It would repeal that amendment.
The government is prepared to push legislation allowing abortion up to 12 weeks.
And abortion advocates are being dishonest.
They are suggesting that it would just be to 12 weeks.
It would not just be to 12 weeks.
It would be a lot more like 23 weeks.
It would look a lot more like America's abortion laws in a lot of states.
All you're required to have an abortion in Ireland is two physicians saying the pregnancy would harm the mental or physical health of the woman in any way, which is a pretty low bar to clear.
So this means that babies who have not been killed up to this point would obviously be killed in much larger numbers.
The pro-abortion side is being incredibly disingenuous in Ireland.
So there have been a bunch of ads that were taken out featuring Down syndrome babies because abortion in Western countries has been used as basically a eugenic sterilization measure to prevent the birth of Down syndrome babies.
Well, the folks in Ireland were very upset about this.
The Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, condemned pro-lifers.
He said, It's mean to mention that.
We shouldn't be mentioning that.
Social media have taken their lead from the Irish Prime Minister, from the Irish President.
The Life News reports that the Washington Post says that Facebook announced that it would stop accepting related advertisements from groups based outside Ireland.
So if you're a pro-life group based outside Ireland, there would be no new ads that were allowed to go up during this Irish referendum.
The restriction testifies to the depth of concern that foreign advertising could skew the outcome.
This, by the way, is a great indicator of just how the left is going to use worries about Russian collusion and Russian interference in order to shut down messages they don't like.
Pro-life groups including the Pro-life Campaign, the Save the 8th group and the Iona Institute say that they are being censored by Facebook and by Google.
According to the UK Spectator, posters of unborn children have been torn down around Ireland as well.
This is a deeply important issue.
Right now the polls show that the attempt to repeal protection for the unborn in Ireland is likely to pass.
That babies will again be allowed to be killed in Ireland in large numbers.
It's a real tragedy that so many folks who grew up in a civilization that was predicated on the individual worth of each human life are now rejecting that in favor of this bizarre notion of autonomy that included killing the unborn in the womb.
It really is tragic, by the way, that the Catholic Church has not taken a stronger hand in this debate.
The Catholic Church obviously still has an enormous amount of sway in Ireland, but they've stayed out of the debate for the most part.
You know, we can all hope and pray that the folks in Ireland do the right thing and kick back against this leftist attempt to re-enshrine abortion as some sort of fundamental right for people who want to kill babies in the womb.
Okay, meanwhile...
I just have to comment on this story, because this story is pretty great.
Wynton Marsalis is, of course, a very famous jazz musician.
And Wynton Marsalis has come out, and he has said that rap culture sucks.
Okay, so he's allowed to say it, because Wynton Marsalis is black, of course.
But Wynton Marsalis, he says rap culture sucks, and he is exactly correct.
My words are not that powerful.
I started singing in 1985.
I don't think we should have music talking about n****s and b****s. It had no impact.
I've said it, I've repeated it, I still repeat it, to me that's more damaging than a statue of Robert E. Lee.
That statue of Robert E. Lee took me, I saw the statue, my great uncle hated it, I talked about it, but try to talk somewhere in front of a group of black folks about turning that off.
Okay, good for Wynton Marsalis.
I mean, this is exactly right.
Now, here's the problem.
If you are not a black person and you say that the rap culture is not good for people of any stripe, that rap culture focuses on mistreatment of women, use of drugs, materialistic nonsense, then this is considered racist in some sort of way.
It is not racist to point out that any cultural totem that glorifies the vile is not going to be good for a large number of people.
And it seems to me that there should be more folks across the political aisle who point out that when there are rap songs that glorify disgusting things, that this actually has a cultural impact.
And more of a cultural impact, by the way, as Wynton Marsalis says, than these Confederate statues.
I'm not a huge fan of Confederate statues because I think that honoring people who were slaveholders or fighting to uphold slavery is not a good thing.
I'm also not in favor of ripping down those Confederate statues.
I have the same opinion as Condoleezza Rice on this.
I think that it is valuable to have those statues in place specifically so we can have hard conversations about America's history, how America has changed, whether the statues ought to be up should be an ongoing conversation.
I think all of that is good.
You know, wiping away history I don't think is worthwhile.
But if you're talking about what's more damaging to black children, rap culture, or that statue of Robert E. Lee they've never seen in a park four miles away, I don't think that that's much of a comparison.
It seems to me that's not much of a comparison.
And it turns out that culture has a relatively large impact on how people think.
Which is, of course, one of the reasons why people are so intent on preventing the right from seizing the cultural high ground.
It's why Obama gets a deal with Netflix.
It's also why there's a controversy that's broken out over Ed Sheeran.
So Ed Sheeran has a song called Small Bump.
It came out a few years ago, and it's been used by pro-lifers.
The reason it's been used by pro-lifers is because it is obviously a pro-life song.
He wrote it about a woman he knew who'd had a miscarriage.
And here is what the song sounds like.
You're just a small bump.
For four months you're brought to life.
You were just a small bump unborn for four months then torn from life.
Maybe you...
Okay, so if you missed those lyrics, he's talking about how this small bump is a person, basically, right?
You're a small bump.
In four months, you're brought to life.
You might be left with my hair, but you'll have your mother's eyes.
I'll hold your body in my hands, be as gentle as I can.
And then he finishes, there's a miscarriage.
You were just a small bump, unborn for four months, then torn from life.
Maybe you were needed up there, but we're still unaware as to why.
Okay, so a bunch of pro-life groups started using this as sort of their anthem.
So what did Ed Sheeran do?
He whined about it.
So Ed Sheeran says, he says, you shouldn't use my video to push a pro-life message because there are a bunch of people who, based on the Irish referendum, were using this for the no campaign in the Irish referendum.
And he said he didn't like that.
He said, I've been informed my song Small Bump is being used to promote the pro-life campaign.
I feel it's important to let you know I have not given approval for this use.
It does not reflect what the song is about.
It reflects exactly what the song is about.
The song is about how it's an unborn child in there.
Culture matters.
Culture matters.
And when people in politics say culture is upstream from politics, this holds true whether it is bad culture.
I'm not saying every rap song is equivalently bad or all rap is by necessity bad.
I'm saying that too much of rap culture is about brutalization of women, use of drugs, glorification of crime.
You know, that has a cultural impact, and so do songs like Ed Sheeran's, which is why his art is beyond him, okay?
What happens in that song is beyond his capacity to hold that in, because it does promulgate what I think is a pretty important message.
Okay, time for a couple of things I like, and then maybe we'll do a thing I hate.
So the thing I like today, there's a good book by William Lane Craig.
William Lane Craig is a Christian theologian.
He's written this massive tome, along with, I'm trying to remember the name of the guy who co-wrote it with him, about Christian apologetics and arguments on behalf of God.
A much shorter version of that is a book called En Garde, Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision, with a foreword by Lee Strobel.
It's a pretty good, I would say, guide to sort of how to argue faith.
The last third of the book is great for Christians in terms of trying to argue the veracity of their faith.
I don't buy a lot of the arguments, but that's because I'm Jewish.
The first two thirds of the book is really about sort of the generic defense of God.
Why it is not unreasonable to believe that God exists from a rational point of view.
Why it is not unreasonable to believe that you need God in order to create a moral system.
He's a good debater, William Lane Craig, and if you ever watch a debate that he did with Sam Harris, it's pretty fascinating to watch.
Check it out.
The book is En Garde by William Lane Craig.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, somebody did this yesterday.
So yesterday, as you recall, On the show, I did a... This is so stupid.
I did the lyrics to Kendrick Lamar's Mad City because there was a big story about how Kendrick Lamar had brought up a white woman on stage to sing Mad City, and then when she sang his exact lyrics, then he got mad at her because he's the idiot who wrote a bunch of N-words in the lyrics.
And then when she spoke to him, he was like, no, you can't say that.
Well, so yesterday I did the lyrics without the N-word to demonstrate that it is unlistenable.
And somebody promptly, we have lots of listeners, somebody promptly took my read of the lyrics and inserted it into the song.
As you can see, this may not be where my talent lies.
Man down, where are you from?
F who you know where you from?
Where your grandma stay, huh, Mike?
Well, well, there it is.
It's just.
So that's the thing that happened.
All right.
Time for some things I hate.
Got nothing to say about that.
Time for some things I hate.
Here's the thing that I hate today.
OK, so this is unbelievable and it just demonstrates Democrats got nothing.
I mean, lately, the Democratic left has nothing, no ideas, nothing.
The mayor of West Hollywood, California, will join city officials on Wednesday to present adult film star Stormy Daniels with a key to the city.
And a city proclamation, according to a media advisory.
In the press release, city officials recognized Daniels for her leadership in the resist movement and noted that the city has previously passed resolutions calling for articles of impeachment to be introduced against President Trump.
Right, because Trump cares deeply that the city of West Hollywood thinks he ought to be impeached.
Yeah, there's a shocker.
The city of West Hollywood thinks he ought to be impeached.
For people who don't know, the city of West Hollywood very, very much to the left.
They actually fly the rainbow flag above the city hall in West Hollywood.
So they are very, very much to the left.
Daniels, according to the press release, has proven herself to be a profile encouraged by speaking truth to power, even under threats to her safety and extreme intimidation.
Really?
Seems to me she took $130,000 from the President of the United States and then has been making a lot more money and a lot more hay by talking about how one time she had sex with him.
But she gets a key to the city.
So, there are lots of doctors, lawyers, people doing great things, I'm sure, humanitarians, living in the West Hollywood area.
Did any of them get a key to the city?
No.
Stephanie Daniels, who has sex for money on camera, And then had sex with the president of the United States when he was not president, but was married and had just had a baby.
She is a class act.
She deserves the key to the city.
I can't imagine why people on the right don't take the left seriously.
I can't imagine why they don't take the left more seriously.
I mean, maybe it's because the left doesn't take themselves seriously these days.
Alrighty.
So, we will be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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