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July 2, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:45
So Much Earth-Shattering Bravery | Ep. 572
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The New York Times takes on the First Amendment, Jim Acosta loves him some Jim Acosta, and we'll talk Supreme Court.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
I hope you had a wonderfully relaxing weekend.
Mine was actually quite nice.
I did Mara's show on Friday, Bill Maher's show on Friday.
Had a lot of fun.
Bill and I had a nice civil conversation about, of all things, Russia and collusion, which was kind of interesting.
We'll get to that a little bit later in the show.
But first, I want to remind you that we have a special live stream, which is happening today at 7 p.m.
Eastern.
We are joined by special guest Jordan Peterson to celebrate our Independence Day and lament the fact that we don't actually own Canada.
God King Jeremy Boring will host a new edition of Daily Wire backstage with me and Andrew Klavan and the execrable Michael Knowles to look back on our country's birth and look ahead to its future.
Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air.
That is today at 7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
Pacific, with Jordan Peterson.
You can find our special livestream on Facebook and YouTube.
You're not going to want to miss it.
It's going to be a lot of fun.
So be there.
Hey, I'm going to be here, so you better be here.
I mean, come on, why else am I doing it?
OK, so go check that out.
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One of the nice things for President Trump is that every time President Trump does a normal thing, the left decides that the world has ended.
Really, that the world has gone crazy.
And I use as evidence of this the fact that I was on Bill Maher's show on Friday, and I was really more expecting the conversation to surround the things that Bill and I have in common, such as opposition to political correctness and aversion to identity politics.
And instead, the entire interview turned into ten minutes about Russia collusion, which Again, if you are obsessed with the Russia collusion story at this point, let me suggest that your priorities are not straight.
There's no evidence to suggest right now that President Trump has colluded with Russia during the campaign or afterward.
There's just not.
If the evidence were there, I would talk about it because I've been very fair about this, but I'm not going to pretend that there's a lot of evidence there.
The point is this.
The folks on the left have decided that President Trump must be ousted by any means, and they've decided that President Trump represents a great break in America's History.
And they believe that America itself is deeply broken.
And so now the left has decided the deep American institutions, not Donald Trump, other key American institutions, these institutions must be destroyed as well.
They believe the Supreme Court now has to be packed and they need 11 justices on the Supreme Court instead of nine, because maybe that way they can get more liberal Supreme Court justices.
They believe that the First Amendment must be overthrown.
There's an article in The New York Times.
It is 2000 words long.
It is not an opinion piece.
It is a reported piece from Adam Liptack.
Okay, Adam Liptak is one of the reporters who was on A1 of the New York Times over the weekend, and the title of the piece is, How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment.
How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment.
Now, you may ask yourself, what does that even mean?
How do you weaponize the First Amendment?
It's a right.
How do you weaponize a right?
That's like saying that law-abiding citizens weaponized the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
How do you weaponize that?
It doesn't make any sense.
But the New York Times believes that conservatives have weaponized the First Amendment because they don't like the First Amendment.
That's right.
The New York Times, a newspaper dedicated, presumably, to the proposition of freedom of the press, a newspaper that was involved in some of the great free speech cases in our nation's history, from the Pentagon Papers case To libel cases in the past.
The New York Times now says that the First Amendment has been too broadly construed.
That's how far the left has been broken.
They believe the First Amendment must be curbed because it is an institution of power.
The left is always going on about how the reason the left loses, the reason the left is not victorious, is because the system itself is corrupt.
If it weren't for the corrupt system itself, then Marxism would have already taken over the world and everything would be hunky-dory utopia.
But in the United States, where freedom reigns, they believe that the freedoms themselves are a threat to the Marxist worldview.
And so freedoms themselves must be torn down.
These are elements of a hierarchical structure.
The First Amendment.
You might think when I say freedom of speech, that means anybody can speak.
What the left says is what that really means is only powerful people can speak.
And that's why we need to crack down on the First Amendment through force of government.
The government has to shut down free speech.
To save freedom.
If that makes any sense to you, that's because you're a moron.
So here is the New York Times going on about this.
Here's Adam Liptack.
He says, On the final day of the Supreme Court term last week, Justice Elena Kagan sounded an alarm.
The Court's five conservative members, citing the First Amendment, had just dealt public unions a devastating blow.
The day before, the same majority had used the First Amendment to reject a California law requiring religiously-oriented crisis pregnancy centers to provide women with information about abortion.
Conservatives, said Justice Kagan, who is part of the court's four-member liberal wing, were weaponizing the First Amendment.
Now, I just want to point out, this is not a court's liberal wing, it's a left wing.
Okay, it's a left wing.
The difference between liberal and left is that liberals believe that we ought to maintain rights like freedom of speech, even if they believe in more government intervention in the economy.
The left believes that all of these rights ought to be subject to the needs of the community.
That basically communitarianism is the way that if it violates their precepts of the hierarchy of various power groups, then the First Amendment should be subverted.
The New York Times says, Notice how that's worded.
The way the New York Times is wording that is not that the free speech agenda that has been promulgated by the court helps conservatives, is that it is the conservative agenda that is using the mask of free speech in order to push itself.
Except for the fact that this free speech agenda has nothing to do with conservatism per se.
It just has to do with the idea that you should be able to say what you want without the government compelling you.
Well, that's a pretty radical take on what exactly the Supreme Court just did.
liberals have used the First Amendment to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples, and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and guns.
That's a pretty radical take on what exactly the Supreme Court just did.
Instead, what the court just did is they said that the government cannot compel you not to spend on elections, that the government cannot compel you to violate your own religious precepts, that the government cannot compel you to say things you don't want to say or pay money to unions you don't want to join.
Right.
Why exactly that has to do with a conservative agenda is beyond me.
That seems like just a rational freedom agenda.
But, you know, this is the New York Times.
They say the Citizens United campaign finance case, for instance, was decided on free speech grounds with the five-justice conservative majority ruling that the First Amendment protects unlimited campaign spending by corporations.
The government, the majority said, has no business regulating political speech.
The dissenters responded that the First Amendment did not require allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace and corrupt democracy.
Well, that's a stupid argument.
The First Amendment does require me to be able to speak as much as I want, and that involves me actually spending money on things.
If the First Amendment did not involve you spending money on free speech, then presumably the government could pass a law saying that corporations are not allowed to spend money on, say, printed materials in the 60 days before an election.
You know what's a corporation that spends money on printed materials 60 days before an election?
The New York Times.
The New York Times.
The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues, says Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer at the Cato Institute.
It simply means we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech.
That used to be an uncontroversial and non-ideological point.
What's now being called the libertarian position on speech was, in 1960s, the liberal position on speech.
Which is exactly right.
What Ilya Shapiro is saying is, you're calling it right-wing.
This used to be the consensus position.
And so much of American life has become this.
So much of American life is positions that all of America used to hold, and then the left decided it didn't hold anymore, and so the consensus American position is now termed the right-wing position.
So, for example, on immigration, the position that we should enforce our borders, the position that perhaps we should actually police the people coming into the country.
That was a widespread, 100% position in America.
Then the left decided that it was intolerant, and now that is a right-wing position to say that we should enforce our borders.
The same thing on free speech.
It was a widely held position across both sides of the aisle that you should be able to say basically what you want.
And then the left decided, we don't like that anymore, and so what was left was the right-wing position.
But the way that the New York Times posits, the way they pose it, is not that the left threw out the First Amendment.
It's that the right decided to cling on to the First Amendment in an unreasonable fashion.
Why does the New York Times say that?
Well, because they're the New York Times, as Andrew Klavan says in a former newspaper.
Here's what the New York Times says.
Okay, that's hilarious.
So they've decided that they're no longer absolutist on free speech.
Instead, they are more sensitive to the bad things that can happen because of free speech, which is a way of saying that we are not going to pay attention to free speech at all.
If you trade in the harms that can be inflicted by free speech for free speech itself, free speech is no longer a right.
This is like saying that there are certain harms that happen because of the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
The Fourth Amendment prevents the government from coming into your home and simply just checking out everything that's there for the hell of it.
Now, are there societal costs to that?
Sure, there's a societal cost to that.
It means that not everybody with drugs in their house is going to be seen by the government, for example.
Not everybody with an illegal gun in their house is going to be seen by the government.
But I'd much rather that a few people have illegal guns or illegal drugs than that the government have a blanket right to come into my home at any time for any reason without actually having to give a rationale.
The minute that you start saying that the downside of the right is more important than the right, the right no longer exists.
But that's what the left says.
The left doesn't like the rights.
The left does not like the free speech rights.
So liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship.
Now, many on the left see pornography as an assault on women's rights.
In 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois.
Far fewer supported the free speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Now, there is a difference, by the way, in these two cases.
I will say that there's a solid case to be made, Justice Boruck.
Would be, Justice Bork.
Judge Robert Bork once made this case.
He said the pornography is not protected by the First Amendment.
There's a pretty good solid case that the founders never intended for the First Amendment to cover dirty pictures.
But there's no question that the founders intended for the First Amendment to cover political speech, which does involve Nazis marching in Skokie.
Better First Amendment case, just legally speaking and historically speaking, for bad people marching than for naked pictures in public.
But in any case, The New York Times says there is a certain naivete in how liberals used to approach free speech, says Frederick Schauer, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
Because so many free speech claims of the 1950s and 60s involved anti-obscenity claims or civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, it was easy for the left to sympathize with the speakers or believe that speech in general was harmless.
But the claim that speech was harmless or causally inert was never true, even if it has taken recent events to convince the left of that.
The question then is why the left ever believed otherwise.
So in other words, they were happy about free speech when it was anti-Vietnam War protests and civil rights and pornography.
But the minute that it turns into religious bakers who actually just want to abide by their scruples, then all of a sudden the left is ready to toss out free speech, which is to say the left was never in favor of the right.
They were just in favor of the of the exercise of the right as they saw fit.
The left was never in favor of... This is the big problem with the left.
The left doesn't believe that you have a right to do anything the left disagrees with.
I believe, as a person on the right, that you have the right to do lots of things I disagree with.
You have the right to march in the street with pussy hats.
You have the right to act sexually how you want, basically.
I believe that you have the right to... I actually believe that you have the right to smoke marijuana.
I think there are lots of things that I believe have the right to do that I personally find abhorrent.
I hate marijuana.
I think it smells, and I think the people who smoke it are wasting their time and brain cells.
But, because I'm a freedom-believing person, I also believe that there are rights that extend to things I don't like.
I think the right to free speech extends to Nazis.
I hate Nazis.
They're awful human beings.
But the right to free speech extends to them.
The same thing does not hold true for the left.
If you disagree with the left, they want to remove your rights.
And that's becoming obvious right now.
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So back to the left's perspective on free speech.
Really an incredible front page story, A1 in the New York Times, why free speech should no longer apply.
According to Catherine McKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice.
Free speech makes the world worse.
Quote, once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful.
It's not a weapon at all.
It says the government can't impose on you.
This is the difference between how the left sees rights and how the right sees rights.
The right sees rights as things the government cannot touch.
Inalienable rights that preexist in government.
The left sees rights as things the government gives to you.
And therefore, if it's bad for you, the government can take it away from you.
So if free speech is bad for you, the government can take it away.
The right says, no, you can't do that.
The right says, that right pre-existed government.
I didn't give up that right to government when government was formed.
The government exists to protect those rights.
The left says, no, no, no, you didn't have any rights.
Then the government gave you the right to free speech.
So if it's bad for the community, well, then the idea here is that we can take it away from you using the power of government.
McKinnon says, legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists, activists, socialists, and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers, and corporations buying election.
In other words, get rid of free speech, because the people I don't like are using it.
And there's a long discussion of Robert Bork and the sort of development of free speech litigation and free speech trends.
And they say the right turn has been pronounced under Chief Justice Roberts.
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a larger share of First Amendment cases concerning conservative speech than earlier courts had.
According to a study prepared for The Times, it is ruled in favor of conservative speech at a higher rate than liberal speech as compared to earlier courts.
The court's docket reflects something new and distinctive about the Roberts courts.
According to the study, the Roberts court, more than any modern court, has trained its sight on speech protecting conservative values.
Only the current court has resolved a higher fraction of disputes challenging the suppression of conservative rather than liberal expression.
Well, the reason for that is because there is very little suppression of liberal expression in today's America.
You can say whatever you want.
Those cases were already decided.
The real crackdowns that are happening right now are crackdowns from the left on the right with regard to First Amendment issues.
But the left says that we should crack down on the First Amendment.
The radicalization of the left is an ongoing story that really is absurd.
And in just a second, I want to discuss that ongoing radicalization.
First, I want to talk a little bit about the media.
So the media, the same media who are saying that the First Amendment should be quashed for everybody they don't like, see themselves as First Amendment warriors.
So Jim Acosta over at CNN, who loves him some Jim Acosta.
I mean, that dude loves Jim Acosta.
Get you somebody who loves you the way Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
I mean, really.
He's the White House reporter for CNN.
And over the weekend, right before the weekend, he decided it would be a worthwhile thing to shout at President Trump.
So he's standing in the back of the room shouting at President Trump, and then he posted video of himself shouting at President Trump as though Trump has some sort of obvious obligation to answer Jim Acosta shouting from the back of a room.
Now, do I care that Jim Acosta shouts at President Trump?
No.
I didn't care when a writer at the Daily Caller, Neil Monroe, shouted at President Obama.
So it'd be rather hypocritical of me to care that Jim Acosta's shouting at Trump.
But it just goes to show you how, when it was a right-winger like Neil Monroe, and it was the end of the world that he shouted a question to Barack Obama, Jim Acosta does it, and he's a hero.
So Jim Acosta shouts at President Trump.
He's shouting at him because there was a shooting in a newsroom last week, and the media tried to pin it on President Trump when it had nothing to do with President Trump.
Jim Acosta shouting at the president.
Mr. President, will you stop calling us the enemy of the people, sir?
Will you stop calling the press the enemy of the people, sir?
I like the guy turning around and shushing him.
So there's a guy right in front of him, turning around and shushing him.
And then Jim Acosta gives a look to the camera like, I am so brave for saying that.
Look at these brave eyes.
So brave.
Okay, so Fox News says, well, you know, that was kind of inappropriate.
Well, all right, I don't really care about the inappropriate of it.
It doesn't make a huge difference to me.
But the part of it that's hilarious is that Jim Acosta then suggests that Fox News is a threat to free speech, basically.
Jim Acosta goes on Reliable Sources with Brian Stalter, a show I've appeared on, and Brian has him on for basically the entire hour.
I think he had him on for this long segment, which is an empty hour.
I mean, Jim Acosta, not a lot going on upstairs with Jim Acosta.
And this is really, really funny.
So first he starts off by saying, Fox News is only angry at me because they need someone to attack.
Well, no, I'm not really angry at you as much as bemused by you, Jim Acosta.
I'm not angry at Jim Acosta because I don't think he's worthy of my anger.
But I am bemused by the fact that Jim Acosta thinks he's such an important human.
And I love that CNN now does the navel-gazing routine where Jim Acosta is a hero for having shouted out a question and being shushed by a bald guy in front of him at the White House.
So here's Brian Stelter questioning him.
The president, Fox News, they don't have Barack Obama around anymore.
They don't have Hillary Clinton, although the president goes after Hillary Clinton a lot, so does Fox News.
And so we've sort of replaced Obama and Hillary.
They need somebody to attack, and I think that we've sort of filled that role.
Okay, so yeah, that must be it.
It must be that they're attacking you because they don't have Obama to kick around anymore.
Or maybe they're attacking you, Jim Acosta, because you're a highly irritating human.
And to show how irritating you are, this is the best thing ever.
So Acosta's on with Stelter, and he's asked about shouting at the president.
Listen to the amount of just drooling self-aggrandizement in which Jim Acosta engages.
It's so phenomenal.
Here we go.
Now, of course, if they're not going to take our questions, we have to find opportunities to ask those questions, and that means... Kind of like Sam Donaldson did decades ago.
That's right.
And listen, if they want to send me to hell, I'll still be shouting at the devil.
What?
What now?
If you want to send me to hell, I'll be shouting, look how brave I am!
So brave!
Send me to hell, I'll shout at the devil.
And then the devil will fart on you.
Like, what does that even mean?
Send me to hell and I'll shout at the devil?
Yes, I'm so brave and I am so tough.
We are so much journalism-ing!
Wow!
Bravery!
Ooh!
Now, the big question is, why Jim Acosta wasn't shouting at the devil when it was the devil he liked, right?
Why wasn't he shouting at Barack Obama when it was somebody that he liked?
And the answer is that Jim Acosta wasn't shouting at him because he was busy asking him kiss-ass questions.
And the media, the same media who say the First Amendment should be curbed, right?
The New York Times saying the First Amendment should be curbed for you, you know, the commenter, the little person.
It should be expanded for the press to the extent that we have to force Donald Trump to answer every question Jim Acosta might have because Jim Acosta is a brave man who shouts at the devil in hell, you drag me down to Hades, you put me on that boat, You send me across the River Styx, I'll face down the devil, stare him in his beady little eyes, and then we will have a face-to-face conversation, me and Mr. Scratch.
Jim Acosta.
But, you know, when it comes to the common person, then of course if you're a religious baker, then we have to force you to do what we want.
Or if you are a person who wants to give money in an election cycle, we have to force you to do it.
If you're not a member of a union, we have to force you to pay money to a union.
The double standard for people in the press who believe free speech should apply to them but should apply to nobody else is pretty astonishing.
Now, speaking of radicalization of the Democratic Party, What we've been watching in real time is a massive radicalization of the Democratic Party.
So right now, the person who is receiving all sorts of plaudits, of course, is this woman.
I always forget her first name.
Alexandria.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
And the reason I forget her name is because I don't think she's all that important, but the media are playing her as though she's deeply important.
This, of course, is the 28-year-old former bartender who defeated Joe Crowley, who is a 58-year-old possible successor to Nancy Pelosi as House Minority Leader.
Anastasia, or Alexandria Cortez, Ocasio-Cortez, she defeated him.
We'll talk about her in just a second.
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Okay, so the radicalization of the Democratic Party continues apace.
Alexandria Ostasio-Cortez, at some point I'll actually learn her name well enough that I don't have to pause when saying it because the media have turned her into such a ubiquitous figure.
She is leading the way.
She is leading the way.
And she is an actual card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
This is a party that has about 37,000 members.
This is supposed to be a massive movement in the United States, the DSA.
They're riding across the land.
They're taking over America, the DSA, with all 37,000 of their members.
OK, by contrast, I have, I think, 30 times that number of people who follow me on Twitter.
Okay, so that's not a big membership.
So that's not a huge membership.
But it is an increasingly important membership because the Democrats themselves have embraced the principles of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Or at least they're using them as the vanguard.
The DSA is basically the Tea Party of the left.
So we thought Occupy was going to be the Tea Party of the left.
Occupy has sort of morphed into the DSA.
And the DSA has all of these newfangled figures who are going to push the new America.
They're going to push the new America.
And what exactly is their agenda?
Well, the New York City Democratic Socialists of America They tweeted out what their agenda is.
Here's what it looks like.
Abolish profit.
Abolish prisons.
Abolish cash bail.
Abolish borders.
Abolish ICE.
Good luck with that.
Yeah, you go ahead and you try that.
Abolish profit, tweeted presumably from an iPhone.
Abolish prisons, tweeted while you're not being assaulted by a prisoner.
Abolish borders, tweeted from a country called America, where you have to actually be vetted to get in.
So this is their actual agenda.
And this is the agenda the Democrats are now embracing.
Kirsten Gillibrand over the weekend said that she no longer wants ICE to be a thing.
So if you think the DSA isn't becoming a thing, you're wrong.
It is becoming a thing.
Here's Kirsten Gillibrand, the most malleable member of the U.S.
Senate.
Remember, when she joined the U.S.
Senate, she was pro-gun and only quasi-pro-choice.
And now Kristen Gillibrand has turned into a radical left-winger because she wants to run for president as the Hillary Clinton younger clone.
So here she is talking about dumping Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
She doesn't have any substitute for ICE.
She doesn't say, well, let's just start a new branch outside the Homeland Security Department.
She just says, let's dump ICE, which, man, it is amazing how fast the radicals on the left are being mainstreamed into the Democratic Party.
We should protect families that need our help, and that is not what ICE is doing today.
And that's why I believe you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it, and build something that actually works.
What does that even mean?
What does it mean to reimagine it?
Like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory reimagine it?
Like Dr. Seuss's Imaginarium?
Like we're going to sit around, we're going to blue sky about how to take care of the borders?
You need somebody who actually wants to police the border.
You idiot.
Okay, so Kirsten Gillibrand making a fool of herself.
And then Elizabeth Warren doing the same thing.
So, Elizabeth Warren, when she first entered the Senate, she was not considered the radical that she is now.
She'd written a book, a very famous book, about what she called the two-income trap.
That basically America had lowered its standard of living in certain ways because both parents were now expected to work, which was considered by many conservatives kind of an interesting argument because it was basically suggesting that maybe a one-parent family income would be better, that maybe one of the parents should stay home and we should build society around that.
So there were a lot of family-oriented conservatives who actually liked Elizabeth Warren's book way back when.
Well, now Elizabeth Warren is a full-scale Kirsten Gillibrand idiot.
And so she has decided that she also is against ICE.
This is the new thing.
Say you're against ICE.
Let's be clear about this.
Americans are not in favor of this position.
70% of Americans think ICE ought to exist and that we ought to be enforcing our borders.
This is a 70-30 issue for Republicans.
But it is a 70-30 issue among Democrats that ICE should be abolished.
So everybody is now swiveling to take care of their radical base, hoping they'll win 2020 primaries.
Here's Elizabeth Warren doing the same thing as Kirsten Gillibrand, all of them now mirroring the Democratic Socialists of America.
The president's deeply immoral actions have made it obvious we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality and What does that even mean?
Something that reflects our morality?
What is that?
I can't even imagine what that would be.
Replacing ICE is literally a police force.
That's what it does.
It is there to police the borders.
What is she even talking about?
But the radicalism in the Democratic Party now runs deep.
They've decided they're going to swivel to the Bernie Sanders left in order to rev up the base.
So Maxine Waters, she disowns Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer saying that they will do anything to protect their leadership.
What we need to be is more radical.
This is anti-Maxine, a lady who a week ago was saying that people should be mobbed at gas stations and driven out of public life.
I was surprised that Chuck Schumer, you know, reached into the other house to do that.
I've not quite seen that done before, but one of the things I recognize, being an elected official, is in the final analysis, you know, leadership like Chuck Schumer's will do anything that they think is necessary to protect their leadership.
So she's saying that Chuck Schumer is only being civil because he's trying to protect his leadership.
The reality is that Maxine Waters has been a radical her entire career.
She used to call the Los Angeles riots the L.A.
rebellion, the L.A.
uprising.
Well, it's happening.
73 people died in those riots, and she was out there cheering it on.
Maxine Waters is the worst that the United States Congress has to offer, and she is being seen as a charming figure on the left.
And she says the people want us to be confrontational.
The only people who want confrontation in American society right now are the far left.
The people on the hardcore base of the left.
Here she is again on Joy Reid's Exscribble show on MSNBC.
People do want to see us be stronger and more forceful and to confront them on these policies.
And I'm hopeful that even Democrats haven't seen the kind of outpouring of protests, over 700 incidences of protests this weekend.
Seeing that, they will be more forceful, more confrontational, and more prepared to push back on this administration.
So people should be more confrontational.
That's what America needs, more confrontation.
So abolish ICE, embrace democratic socialism, and confront people in the streets.
This is the new Democratic Party.
This is what Trump has driven them to.
They really believe that they're going to remake the world in their image this way.
And it's pretty incredible.
It's pretty incredible.
We're going to go a little bit further in this direction.
I want to talk about the movement of the mainstream toward Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and all the rest of us.
Plus, I want to talk a little bit about Whether democratic socialism actually works, because there are a lot of myths that are floating around about democratic socialism, in just a second.
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Okay, so I want to talk more about why it is that democratic socialism is a giant fail, why the Democrats are embracing it, plus a little bit of Supreme Court talk in just a second.
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As the Democrats move more radical, people are going so crazy that even people who used to be supposedly conservative, although not all that conservative, have been echoing some of the more extreme rhetoric of the left.
See, America is on a pendulum, and it swings side to side.
Barack Obama was a radical guy, and now it has swiveled to President Trump, who is a very strong conservative in office.
Okay, that means that when the pendulum swings back, it's going to swing back to the Democratic Party.
Well, if the Democratic Party is a party of democratic socialism, meaning it's just a socialist party, then what you're going to see is an exacerbation of the conflict that is driving America into the ground right now.
It's really ugly stuff.
Jennifer Rubin, who used to be a sane person, but apparently not anymore.
I met her at Bill Maher.
She was in the green room.
I said hello.
She seems like a perfectly nice lady, except that she says crazy things now.
She says that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, that she should be made to feel uncomfortable in public places.
This is the kind of country she wants now.
Sarah Huckabee has no right to live a life of no fuss, no muss, after lying to the press, after inciting against the press.
These people should be made uncomfortable, and I think that's a life sentence, frankly.
It's a life sentence to be made uncomfortable?
Like, that's it?
Really?
That's what we're gonna do?
So, okay, I assume that the same applies to Jen Rubin, then.
So, if Jen Rubin is out eating at a restaurant, I think that her political perspective is obnoxious, and I encourage people to harass her at restaurants, then, presumably, that's totally fine with her.
Because, after all, this is the new politics.
This sort of polarization is really quite terrible for the country.
There's a piece in the New York Times talking about the embrace of full-scale socialism by the Democrats, by Michelle Goldberg, talking about the fact that this woman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28, knocked off Joe Crowley in a primary vote in New York, and Summer Lee, who's 30, and Sarah Inamorato, Talk of popular control of the means of production is anathema to many older Democrats, even very liberal ones, right?
Because they have a memory and they remember what it was like in the Soviet Union.
They remember that Cuba is still a place.
millennials are embracing socialism in large numbers.
Quote, talk of popular control of the means of production is anathema to many older Democrats, even very liberal ones, right?
Because they have a memory and they remember what it was like in the Soviet Union.
They remember that Cuba is still a place.
They remember that North Korea is garbage, that when the government controls the means of production, terrible things generally happen.
But younger Democrats believe that the only way to counter President Trump is to counter the entire system.
This is the pitch that the left has been making.
It's not a pitch in favor of their own program and the success of it.
It's a program in favor of... It's a pitch in favor...
of a replacement of the entire hierarchy with something brand new.
Trump is the product of this hierarchy.
And if the hierarchy can be destroyed, if the First Amendment can be destroyed, if the Second Amendment can be destroyed, and a private property can be destroyed, then we will no longer have to suffer with Trump.
It's not that Trump is a product of a broken civility in our politics.
Which, it really more is.
It's not that President Trump is the product of an increasing polarization in our politics.
It's not that President Trump is a backlash to the hardcore leftism of the left.
It's that President Trump is himself a product of the evil American system, and that system must be torn out root and branch.
Michelle Goldberg, who's a friend of these socialists, she says, this position, popular controls of the means of production, it plays a lot better with the young.
One recent survey shows that 61% of Democrats between 18 and 34 view socialism positively.
Indeed, while there's a lot of talk about an ideological civil war among Democrats on the ground, boundaries seem more fluid.
In Pennsylvania recently, I met with moderate suburban resistance activists who'd volunteered for Inamorato, thrilled to support a young woman who could help revitalize the Democratic Party.
And this is the entire issue for the Democrats.
The agenda of the DSA is utterly insane.
Nationalized healthcare.
Guaranteed housing.
Guaranteed government jobs.
All that would bankrupt the United States in five seconds.
The Democratic Party is happy to embrace that crowd because so long as they can wield that crowd like a club against President Trump, they're happy to do it.
Meanwhile, I love this.
Goldberg says the young members of the DSA are hopeful because their analysis helps them make sense of the Trump catastrophe.
They often seem less panicked about what is happening in America right now than liberals are because they believe they know why our society is coming undone and how it can be rebuilt.
So right now, socialists are on the rise.
There are more candidates like Ocasio-Cortez out there.
The Democrats should welcome them.
It means their youth and zeal and willingness to do the work of rebuilding the party as a neighborhood institution.
And they're coming, whether the party's leadership likes it or not.
My favorite part of the article is where Michelle Goldberg suggests that all of these socialists are very kind to one another.
She says, On some days that public schools are closed, the DSA's Socialist Feminist Committee puts on all-day events with childcare and free lunches.
Like several other chapters, the Pittsburgh DSA holds clinics, where members change people's burned-out car brake lights for free, helping them avoid unnecessary police run-ins while making inroads into the community.
A local mechanic named Metal Mary helped train them.
Here's the problem.
All that comes to an end the minute the socialists take over government.
Because there is no reason, there is no rationale whatsoever, for them to actually do community outreach the minute that the government can do all of it.
It's just a delight.
Now, let's talk for a second about the appeal of democratic socialism, because what you hear from the left is that democratic socialism is what exists in places like Denmark and Sweden.
That is real socialism.
There's only one problem.
None of this is true.
Nima Sanandanji, who writes for The Stream, he has a very good piece about myths regarding Nordic socialism.
He's an author and researcher.
He holds a PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and conducted research at the University of Cambridge.
And he has a great piece about why it is that so many people think that democratic socialist republics are the ones that are really succeeding when in reality they're succeeding in spite of their socialism.
So here's what he says.
The success of Nordic countries is based on the fact that historically they have relied on free markets and protection of private property.
The only exception is a short period in Sweden where in socialist policies crippled growth and job creation.
Nordic nations do have high taxes and generous welfare, but in many other regards, they have unusually free markets.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Rasmussen says after seeing his country held up as an example in the American presidential debate, he told students in a 2015 speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, quote, I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism.
Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear.
Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy.
Denmark is a market economy.
When it comes to areas such as business regulations, trade policy, investment freedom, vouchers in the provision of education, elderly care and healthcare, and partial privatization of retirement savings, Nordic countries are among the most free market in the world.
Hey, Nordic countries did not become rich by relying on socialism.
Sweden is the only Nordic country that actually experimented with socialism in the 70s and 80s.
And instead, it destroyed Sweden's economy.
From 1970 to 1991, Social Democrats tried to introduce this form of planned economy into the country, and Sweden's growth rate fell to the second lowest among Western European countries after being among the highest.
Also, there are a lot of people who say, well, look at Sweden and Denmark and Norway.
Look at their wonderful, wonderful lifespans and low child mortality.
There's only one problem.
Their low child mortality and lifespans pre-existed the socialist attempts to remake their economy.
In 1960, the tax rate in Denmark was 25% of GDP, lower than 27% in the US at the time.
And all of their outcomes were just the same or higher than they are now.
The top 10 countries with the longest lifespan in 1960, when these were all capitalist, Norway, Iceland, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland.
It's exactly the same now.
Except that they've actually dropped a little bit.
And they had low child mortality rates, too.
And finally, important to note, that if you're talking about why Denmark does better, Sweden does better, Scandinavian Americans do better, Scandinavia does better, important to note, all of these groups, when they come to America, do better in the United States than they do back in their home countries.
So in Denmark, Danish Americans actually do better in America than they do in Denmark.
So all of the talk about how all of these countries are thriving because of socialism just isn't true.
Now, the reason I say this, the reason that I bring all this up is because of something that is quite hilarious.
All of these millennial socialists are not socialists.
All of these millennial socialists grew up in the lap of luxury.
They grew up in capitalist luxury.
And the same thing is true in all these Nordic countries.
All these Nordic countries became wealthy because they embraced free markets and capitalism.
All of these countries in Scandinavia, all of them were among the free-trading companies, the most free-trading companies and countries in the 17th century, going all the way back, really, to the 15th and 16th centuries.
So this idea that it was socialism that made these countries rich is just absurd.
What it really was, was socialism redistributing all of the gains that had been made in capitalism.
And all of these countries, including Denmark, still have very free markets when it comes to attraction of business, they just have incredibly high tax rates that tamp down the growth of individual industry.
The reason that I bring this up is because this Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has become this big star now, right?
This 28-year-old star from New York.
It turns out that she has been living off the benefits and excesses of capitalism for her entire life.
She grew up in Westchester County, okay?
She didn't grow up impoverished in government housing.
She doesn't really have a working class background.
This is from the Daily Mail.
The hardscrawled biography of Democrat congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been called into question after the revelation that she grew up mostly in wealthy Westchester County.
Though Ocasio-Cortez, 28, was born in and currently lives in the Bronx, county land records show her late father, Sergio Cortez Roman, bought a quaint three bedroom in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1991 when she was about two.
But her biography says the state of Bronx public schools in the late 80s and early 90s sent her parents on a search for a solution.
She ended up attending public school 40 minutes north in Yorktown, and much of her life was defined by the 40-minute commute between school and her family in the Bronx.
Yeah, except she grew up in Westchester County.
She said that she was a girl from the Bronx.
She's refused comment on all of this.
It's not to say that she's wildly wealthy, but she grew up in a nice middle-class family.
Her father, who died tragically from lung cancer in 2008, was an architect and CEO of Kirshenbaum & Ocasio-Roman Architects, PC, which focused on remodeling and renovations.
He was a small business owner.
So, again, the idea that all of these people are living in absolute poverty They originally lived in a planned community in Parkchester, and then they moved out and they got a house.
They lived in a planned community of 171 mid-rise brick buildings in the Bronx, and when she was about five, they moved to this house in Westchester County.
So we're supposed to believe that she's not the result of capitalism.
By the way, she seems to be pretty capitalistic in her own life.
According to the New York Post, Ocasio-Cortez used to work at Flats Fix, which is an East 16th Street taco and tequila bar, and most of her co-workers liked her a lot.
But one waitress says that at the end of one night, when Ocasio-Cortez was tending bar at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in 2017, when it came time to split the $560 in tips she'd gotten at the bar, Ocasio-Cortez gave the waitress $50.
After the waitress complained to her manager, her take was doubled to $100.
And this waitress says that this says something about her character.
So like a lot of socialists, it's all fun and games until it comes time to stick the money in your own pocket.
Also, this was pretty funny.
So, Ocasio-Cortez was on TV, or actually, she was on Twitter, and she'd been asked about her lipstick, because she wears this bright red lipstick, and she tweeted out, Okay, then it sold out.
So, the socialists pitched a capitalistic product, and it sold out.
last two days.
I got you.
It's stylus.
Stay all day liquid in Besso.
Okay, then it sold out.
So the socialists pitched a capitalistic product and it sold out because this is still a capitalistic country and this is all stupidity.
Okay, quickly, I want to talk briefly about Supreme Court.
So the Supreme Court, President Trump is talking about what he wants to do with the Supreme Court.
And he says that abortion could end up with the states.
You could see the overturning of Roe v. Wade from Trump's mouth to God's ears.
Here's President Trump talking about it.
The Roe v. Wade is probably the one that people are talking about in terms of having an effect.
But we'll see what happens.
But it could very well end up with states at some point.
So, yeah, I mean, I hope he's right.
People on the left are going nuts over all of this.
They suggest that it's terrible, we can never overturn Roe v. Wade.
One of those people, of course, is the idiot Susan Collins, the senator from Maine.
And I hear she is saying that she won't vote for anyone who demonstrates anti-Roe opinion.
I would not support a nominee who demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade because that would mean to me that their judicial philosophy did not include a respect for established decisions, established law.
Okay, so it's established law, according to Susan Collins, except for every bad decision was established law.
Plessy v. Ferguson, which said that segregation was legal, was established law for 58 years in the United States before Brown v. Board of Education.
A case in the United States that said that same-sex marriage could be made illegal by states?
Okay, that was law in the United States for 44 years.
Whenever people on the left say precedent, what they really mean is a decision that I like.
Susan Collins is a fool when it comes to Roe v. Wade.
It should be overturned because it's a terrible decision, and I hope that it will be.
OK, so in just a second, we'll do some stuff I like and some stuff that I hate.
I have plenty of stuff I like and stuff I hate.
So let's jump in.
Things I like today.
So I already told you about Dan Jones's book on the Plantagenets.
He has a sequel to that called The War of the Roses.
Really fascinating.
If you liked the series The White Queen on Showtime, then check out The War of the Roses.
Later on, Star is the White Queen.
But the War of the Roses is really fun to read.
If you like British history, it's really enjoyable.
So go check that out because we can all use a break from politics every once in a while.
Okay, time for a bunch of things that I hate.
You ready for a lot of hate?
hate because here it comes, man.
OK, we begin today with Don Willits.
So Don Willett is a court justice.
He's a judge on the, I believe, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
And Justice Willett, as he calls himself on Twitter, he stopped tweeting as soon as he was appointed to a federal appellate court.
He was on the Texas Supreme Court, and now he's being discussed for a possible Supreme Court.
Well, ABC ran an entire piece on why Don Willett should not be allowed on the Supreme Court because of his tweets.
They quoted four tweets.
Here are the tweets that they quoted.
One from Judge Willett saying, "People of Earth, in 2018, Justice Willett will never give you up, let you down, run around, desert you, make you cry, say goodbye, tell a lie, or hurt you." They say that this tweet makes it impossible Or if it's not that one, maybe it's this one.
He tweets out, 11-year-old, daddy, why do politicians talk about Eminem's domain?
Me, that's Eminem's domain.
11-year-old, huh?
Me, sorry, you only get one shot.
Okay, so he just does dad jokes on Twitter.
According to ABC, because Don Willett does dad jokes on Twitter, we should bar him from the Supreme Court.
So if you are not a wild leftist, or you do dad jokes on Twitter, that means you cannot be allowed on the Supreme Court.
Maybe the left thinks that the Supreme Court is just a tool of policy.
Don Willett tweeted this one out.
My three favorite chocolates.
Positively.
It's a picture of three dogs.
Dark, white, and milk.
Okay, this is what he is not—he can't be allowed on the Supreme Court because he's tweeting out cute pictures of puppies?
Maybe you guys are going a little bit overboard on this whole thing.
Maybe you're just a little bit overboard on this whole thing.
So, well done, ABC.
Really vetting the candidates the way they must be vetted.
We need to make sure that—he cannot—we cannot have a man who tweets about puppies Okay, time for another thing that I hate.
So, LeBron is heading to LA.
As a Boston Celtics fan, this saddens me.
It also makes me happy in one way, which is that LeBron is no longer in the East.
But I will say that LeBron James moving over to the Lakers to try and build another super team, I guess it's good for the NBA because it's a good storyline as opposed to him staying in Cleveland.
But can we now all acknowledge that him going back to Cleveland was not something that he was doing for altruistic reasons.
It was something that he was doing for career reasons.
Because now he's coming out to LA.
He wants to make a bunch of Hollywood connections.
He's been in a bunch of movies already.
That's fine.
Listen, I'm in favor of free agency and people being able to move wherever they want.
I like job malleability.
I like you being able to choose where you want to go.
But let's not pretend that he's doing this out of reasons of principle.
That he's going to the Lakers out of reasons of principle.
Because that's just silly.
He's doing it for the money.
He's doing it for the publicity.
That's fine.
But, you know, is it something I think that's good for his sports legacy?
Probably not particularly.
OK.
Also.
This I have to show you.
So Huffington Post is now pitching drag children.
This has become a thing.
This has become a thing on the left.
That there are a bunch of 8 to 10 year old kids, boys, who decide to dress up as drag queens and now are being promoted by their parents and put in the media.
So I have a general problem with child actors as just a whole.
I think it's a huge mistake for parents to get their children into acting publicly.
Because I don't think that children should be exposed to public discourse as a general rule.
I think that kids don't know enough about what they want in their own minds.
They're not capable of making reasoned decisions.
They're not capable of making good decisions.
I think it is particularly awful for parents to be exploiting their 10-year-old boys by dressing them up as girls or allowing them to dress up as girls and parade them in front of cameras looking like drag queens because this is somehow good for them.
These are 10-year-olds.
You wouldn't allow your 10-year-old to decide whether or not to do his homework that night.
Why would you allow him?
The hormones haven't even hit at 10 years old.
This kid doesn't know he's gay.
He's 10 years old.
Unless he had an early-onset puberty, he probably hasn't thought about sex yet.
He's 10.
But we're supposed to believe that this kid I was born in Pride Month in the year 2007.
I was born in Pride Month in the year 2007.
Gay pride means self-expression to me.
Hi, I'm Desmond is amazing.
I'm 10 years old and I'm a drag kid and I live in New York City and I'm an LGBTQ activist and advocate.
Stop it for a second.
This kid is 10 years old.
How in the hell is this kid an LGBTQ activist?
First of all, 10-year-olds should not be activists about anything.
Anything.
The only thing you can fairly make a case for on politics, why 10-year-olds should be activists, is maybe on pro-life issues, just because they're not dead.
But even then, I wouldn't use a kid as an activist for pro-life causes, and I love pro-life causes.
But to make a kid an activist on sexual matters is perverse.
It's actually perverse.
If there were an adult who were not this kid's parents who dressed this kid up this way and put this kid in public, you would know that this was something perverse.
And that's what Huffington Post is.
Huffington Post isn't this kid's parents.
But it's just, it's absurd.
There's more of this.
There's more of this.
It's just, it's, as a parent of two children, I cannot imagine doing anything remotely like this to my kid.
Even if my kid wanted to dress like this, even if I thought it was okay for my kid to dress like this, putting my kid in front of cameras and playing that as an act of bravery on my part is just disgusting.
Drag is a form of expression and being yourself and dressing however you want and looking fierce.
No matter what you're wearing, even if your eyeliner went down and it's like so bad, you still look fierce.
My motto is be yourself always, but I like to add this on.
No matter what anyone says, and pain hating no one, because they're not as fierce as you.
Okay, can we stop for a second again?
So that's the end of it, I think.
So this kid, notice the use of the word fierce there?
Okay, this is because this kid has been culturally indoctrinated into the use of certain terms.
Right?
Three-year-olds, five-year-olds, ten-year-olds, they don't know the word fierce unless you have been engaged in a particular culture that glorifies a particular set of values.
And listen, as a parent, if that's what you want to do and it's not damaging your kid, that's one thing.
But to trot this kid out as an activist, as a free-minded activist, is really quite gross.
You want to be 18 and do this again?
That's your prerogative.
You want to be 25 and do this?
You want to be an adult and do this?
That's your prerogative.
This is a parent who decided that they were going to get their kid some attention and decided that they were going to therefore encourage these sorts of tendencies in the kid.
You think this kid isn't going to experience a harder life?
I'm not even talking about Quote-unquote oppression from from people outside of this kid I'm not even talking about bullying which of course is not appropriate in any case what I am talking about here is that confusing kids about their own sexual identity and gender at the age of 10 and Not attempting to provide them any sort of solid grounding for this stuff before they even hit puberty is not a recipe for mental health just But the entire left would suggest that it's intolerant to say this.
The only form of tolerance is to cheer along as a 10-year-old kid is dressed up in drag queen outfits and paraded in front of the drooling media.
It really is really quite horrifying.
Okay, final thing that I hate for today.
So, President Trump has now leaked a draft bill.
This new draft bill would declare America's abandonment of fundamental World Trade Organization rules.
So, I can't imagine this is going to pass.
The bill essentially provides President Trump a license to raise U.S.
tariffs at will without congressional consent and international rules be damned.
The bill is titled the U.S.
Fair and Reciprocal Tariff Act.
In other words, the U.S.
FART Act.
Okay, I would give President Trump unilateral power to ignore the two most basic principles of the WTO and negotiate one-on-one with any country, most favored nation principle that countries can't set tariff rates for different countries outside of free trade agreements, and bound tariff rates, the tariff ceilings that each WTO country has already agreed to in previous negotiations.
So it's walking away from our current commitments on tariffs.
It's walking away from free trade.
It is not President Trump negotiating better trade deals.
It is President Trump manipulating tariffs, which is something he likes to do.
No way in hell should Congress give him this authority.
First of all, it's legislative authority in general.
Second of all, I do not trust President Trump with trade authority, given what it is that he has done with trade thus far.
Okay, we will be back here tomorrow with all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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