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Aug. 2, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:18
The Seductiveness Of Power | Ep. 594
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The New York Times' newest editorial hire has a controversial history, a woman writes about why she wishes she had aborted her Down syndrome child, and Barack Obama stabs Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez directly between the shoulder blades.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, we have so much to get to today.
Really, a lot of news and analysis.
All the things you've come to know and love here on the Ben Shapiro Show.
I would be remiss if I did not note that we do have a couple of events coming up in just a couple of weeks now in Dallas and Phoenix.
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Okay, so, in breaking news, the New York Times has decided that they are going to hire a woman named Sarah Zhang to join their editorial board.
Now, why is this relevant to your life?
The reason this is relevant to your life is because Zhang previously wrote for a publication called The Verge and authored The Internet of Garbage, which is a book about online harassment and free speech.
The problem for Sarah Zhang is that people actually went through her old tweets, and some of the things that she has tweeted in the past are not particularly great.
She has tweeted things like this, quote, Dumbass effing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.
This is back in 2014, so...
Not supremely long ago, but a few years ago.
Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?
Hashtag cancel white people.
Oh man, it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.
I dare you to get on Wikipedia and play things white people can definitely take credit for.
It's really hard.
This is Sarah Zhang, the New New York Times editorial board author.
White men are BS.
No one cares about women.
You can threaten anyone on the internet except cops.
I just realized, these are all old tweets of hers, and she was hired.
I'm sure the New York Times, if they didn't do a background check on the person they hired over at the New York Times, then they were entirely remiss.
They say, I just realized why I can't stand watching Breaking Bad or Battlestar Galactica.
The premise of both is just white people being miserable.
And she also tweeted, white people have stopped breeding.
You'll all go extinct soon.
This was my plan all along.
So she seems like a real delight, this Sarah Zhang person.
I have been told that she is basically one of the more brilliant people out there and that these tweets are not indicative of her prior work, which I'm willing to hear.
But by the rules of the left, this person should now be excised from polite society because that's how the rules work on the left, right?
The way that this works is that if they unearth an old tweet, if somebody unearths an old tweet that nobody likes, then we finish your career.
We yell at you and we scream at you until you stop being able to write for a major publication like the New York Times.
Now, should she apologize for those tweets?
I think probably that is merited.
Is it indicative of the mentality of the New York Times they think it is appropriate to hire somebody like this?
It is indicative of that mentality because the fact is that if anybody who is white wrote this about anybody of any other race, Sarah Young is Asian.
If somebody who's white wrote this about a black person or Hispanics or Latinos or Asians or anybody, then that person would be out of a job forthwith.
In fact, if you're Kevin Williamson and all you did was make a joke one time about hanging women for abortions, then we kick you off the staff of the Atlantic.
If you're me and I say that I don't like rap, then I'm a racist and Mark Duplass has to, director Mark Duplass has to delete his tweet saying that I'm a nice guy and you might want to follow me on Twitter.
The way this works on Twitter is that if we find something we don't like about you in your past, then we absolutely destroy your career.
Again, it is indicative of the New York Times' belief system that they are pretty much fine with going after, with their columnist saying stuff like this.
Because again, if this were anybody on the other side of the aisle, you can bet money.
That it would not go as easy on that person.
Now, will the New York Times back down and fire this lady?
I doubt it.
I think the New York Times will probably maintain.
I hope the New York Times does maintain.
I think it is good to have a plethora of voices.
I prefer more speech rather than less speech.
I think it's also your decision.
Whether you wish to subscribe to a newspaper like the New York Times.
I do not.
You probably don't either.
But if you do wish to subscribe, then maybe you want to give that a second thought.
That is your prerogative as well.
But it is, again, telling that the same folks on the left who suggest that you are out of the realm of polite discourse, so long as they deem it so, are perfectly willing to welcome into the realm of polite discourse people like Sarah Zhang, who I assume is not even remotely as bad as people like Al Sharpton, who has been legitimately a race-baiting piece of human debris for decades now.
So again, this is pretty telling about exactly how the left operates when it comes to the opinions they seek to protect.
I was talking with a friend of mine earlier today who happens to be on the left.
She's a liberal and she also happens to be black and also happens to be a lesbian.
So she checks off a lot of the intersectional boxes that a lot of folks on the left really seem to care a lot about.
We were talking about intersectional politics and she was contending that America is basically run on intersectional politics.
That identity politics, politics where we care about your race, your sex, your ethnicity, your orientation.
That these politics have always driven the United States.
And what I was arguing is one of the problems that we're seeing right now is that if you look at the history of the United States in terms of how intersectional politics has worked, you know, race politics, identity politics, it is fair to say that racial and identity politics have declined markedly since, for example, the 1960s.
But if you were to create a scale of 1 to 100 of identity politics, what you would probably say is that at the very beginning of the Republic, Identity politics?
It was at 100 because there were actually black slaves and people arguing that black people ought to be slaves.
It's about as racist as it could possibly be.
Then after the Civil War, it drops to about a 70 on the scale of 100 because black people are no longer slaves, but we are going to suggest that they are inferior if you are the dominant American society.
And you're going to excise Asians, and you're going to excise Latinos, and all the rest of it.
And then, over the course of the next hundred years, it drops to perhaps 60, all the way up to the end of Jim Crow, and then it plummets precipitously to the point that when I was growing up, and I'm 34 years old, when I was growing up, the worst thing you could call somebody in America was not a racial slur, it was a racist.
If you want to destroy somebody's life, if you want to make them feel awful, you call them a racist.
Racist became the slur du jour because everybody understood that racism was a bad.
Like the idea of talking to people my age and saying to them that certain people are genetically inferior because of the color of their skin, it doesn't even compute.
It doesn't make any sense to people who are below the age of 40 in the United States because we've grown up in the post-Jim Crow era and we find all of that stuff abhorrent.
So intersectionality took a nosedive.
But now, intersectionality is recovering because the argument the left has made is that America was historically based on the notion of white supremacy.
It was historically based on racism from white people.
And now, intersectional groups must have their revenge.
Now we have to have a reverse identity politics where whatever you say about white people is totally okay.
We never had our chance in the sun.
Racism can only come from dominant groups.
It can't come from put-upon minority groups.
This is an argument that's made by a lot of folks on the left.
A really serious argument made by a lot of folks on the left, that if you see Sarah Zhang, an Asian, saying racist things about white people, it's not actually racist, because Sarah Zhang is an Asian, and Asians have historically been put upon in the United States, even though Asian households have the highest household earning capacity of any households in the United States.
White Americans, for example, earn 76 cents on every dollar that Asians earn in the United States if you just average out the salaries, but the intersectional idea goes that if you're Asian, you're a member of a minority group, therefore, if you are racist toward a white person, it's not actual racism.
And white people are saying, wait a second, racism is racism.
Now listen, I understand that virtually all politics is reactionary.
I understand that we all react to one another and that there's a desire for turnabout as fair play.
But if you want to get to a society that actually means something, then we all ought to be stomping against this sort of bigotry, no matter the source.
The problem is that folks on the left have decided that white bigotry is bad, which is true, but they've decided that non-white bigotry is totally okay because it is non-white bigotry, therefore it is not bigotry because non-white people cannot be bigots.
That's a very bad thing and it's contributing to a sense of destruction in America's politics in a pretty significant way.
The intersectional politics that have dominated our proceedings over the last few years are really quite disgusting.
Now speaking of disgusting, I want to talk about a piece over at the UK Daily Mail because I think it is again indicative of a mentality on the left.
So we're going to talk about a couple of ideas today about where the left is going.
So the left is moving in a couple of different directions.
So, direction number one, the left is moving, is in this intersectional direction where race matters more than anything else, and certain races are more valuable than other races, and we can determine whether your opinion is good or decent or valuable or worth listening to based on the color of your skin or the formation of your bone structure.
We can tell all of that just by looking at you, whether we ought to give you a listen or not.
That's point number one in the left's new agenda.
Point number two in the left's new agenda is that all moral standards are subservient to your suffering.
That we ought to give you leeway because you've had a hard life.
This has been part of leftist trope since forever, basically.
I mean, even if you go back and you listen to West Side Story, the song G Officer Krupke is based on mocking this trope.
That people who are juvenile delinquents are only juvenile delinquents because they've been put upon.
In reality, people are juvenile delinquents very often because they make a choice that is a really bad choice and decide to be bad people.
Well, the left has decided they're going to double down on the idea that you're allowed to do bad things so long as those bad things make you feel good.
That's what this article is in the UK Daily Mail.
It's an article by a woman named Julianne Ralph.
She's a 69-year-old mother of a 47-year-old son.
His name is Stephen.
There's only one problem.
Stephen has Down Syndrome.
And that means that Jillian wishes that she had killed him before he was born.
I'm not joking.
It's an actual, like, eight-page article in the UK Daily Mail.
The piece is basically this heartbreaking, extraordinarily lengthy description of how hard it is to deal with a Down Syndrome child.
Jillian's care for her son is obviously heroic.
This Jillian Ralph person, right, she's taking care of her son, who is severely Down Syndrome, and, and...
You know, can't take care of himself, can't wipe himself.
He's now 47 years old and all the rest.
But here is what Ralph says.
She says, Perhaps you'll expect me to say that over time I grew to accept my son's disability.
That now, looking back on that day 47 years later, none of us could imagine life without him.
And that I'm grateful I was never given the option to abort.
However, you'd be wrong.
Because while I do love my son and am fiercely protective of him, I know our lives would have been happier and far less complicated if he had never been born.
I do wish I'd had an abortion.
I wish it every day.
If he had not been born, I'd probably have gone on to have another baby.
We would have had a normal family life, and Andrew would have had the comfort rather than the responsibility of a sibling after we're gone.
Instead, Steven, who struggles to speak and function in the modern world, has brought a great deal of stress and heartache into our lives, and this is why I want to speak in support of the 92% of women who choose to abort their babies after discovering they have Down syndrome.
Okay, so the second point in the Democratic platform, first point is intersectionality.
Second point is this idea that subjective pain allows you to perform objectively sinful activities.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so point one in the Democratic platform, intersectionality.
Point two, subjective So, if you're somebody who's had to suffer with having to deal with a Down syndrome child, you should go out there and you should talk openly about the fact that you wish you'd killed that person before birth.
Now, never mind that's deeply immoral.
Never mind that having children is always a sacrifice.
In my case, it's also a joy because I, thank God, have two healthy children, even though, you know, there are hard times, including, you know, we've had to have open-heart surgery on our daughter.
That doesn't mean that pain is a good excuse for obliterating another human life.
How many people who are 60 years old have an 80 year old parent who is suffering in the throes of dementia?
Does that mean that it's moral to stick a pin in their arm?
Stick a needle in their arm and just put them down?
Like a dog?
Does it mean that it's okay?
When somebody is causing you insane amounts of pain, is it okay to go murder them?
When that person is causing you grief and pain and difficulty, is it okay for you to actually go and kill that person?
Of course the answer is no, but in the democratic agenda, it really is that our level of sympathy is supposed to trump objective morality and the value of human life.
So that's prong number two in the democratic platform.
All of this is is peculiarly self-centered.
That if you're a particular race, you get to be as vengeful as you want about another race, so long as you're not white.
And that if you are suffering from anything in your life, you get to obliterate that thing, so long as Democrats say it's okay for you to obliterate that thing.
And that brings us to the third prong of the Democratic platform, and that is the economic plan.
The economic plan, of course, is Democratic Socialism.
So let's talk about Democratic Socialism.
Obviously, this is rising inside the Democratic Party.
There's this great battle going on right now inside the Democratic Party for the future of that party.
They're sort of the gradualists, and then there are the extremists.
The gradualists are people like Barack Obama, believe it or not, and Hillary Clinton.
People who believe that you can't go full-scale socialist without alienating the American people and disrupting the system.
So you have to take it one step at a time.
We'll move toward more and more socialism, more and more restributionism, in short order.
And then there are the people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I'm getting better at her name, guys.
I'm saying it right now.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who says, let's go full-scale socialism right now.
This is the Bernie Sanders plan.
Let's go full-scale socialism right now.
Well, Barack Obama is now sounding off on the 2018 elections in a really interesting way.
So here is what the former president has to say.
He announced on Wednesday the first wave of Democratic candidates that he is endorsing for November.
In a series of tweets, he listed candidates in more than a dozen states that he is backing in 2018.
in 2018, he wrote, I'm confident that together, we'll strengthen the country we love by restoring opportunity, repairing our alliances, and standing in the world, and upholding our fundamental commitment to justice, fairness, responsibility, and the rule of law.
But first, they need our vote.
So who exactly did he endorse?
Well, he endorsed Gavin Newsom in California, who is, to put it kindly, a poop tornado.
Jared Palos in Colorado, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, J.B.
Pritzker in Illinois, and Richard Cordray in Ohio.
He also endorsed a bunch of people in the House, but he did not endorse Beto O'Rourke in Texas, for example.
He also did not endorse Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Now, the reason that he didn't endorse Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is because he doesn't want to endorse the most radical candidates he can find.
He doesn't want to give that side of the party impetus running up to the 2020 election.
Obama's a smart enough politician to know that if Democrats want to win in 2020, they have to present a candidate who is not seen as too extreme by the American people.
The Democratic Party, however, is running full scale toward embrace of democratic socialism.
So, obviously, they've decided to make their face Ms.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who, by the way, it's really bizarre that she's being treated as this rising star in the Democratic Party.
She ousted Joe Crowley, who is a Democrat in her district and was this sort of well-known 10-term Democrat in New York.
The district is 50% Latino or 50% Hispanic.
She is also Hispanic.
Joe Crowley is not Hispanic.
She won with a grand sum total of 17,000 votes in this primary.
So she won 17,000 votes in a primary.
It's like as many votes as I would get in a CPAC straw poll.
Okay, she won that.
She won 17,000 votes in this primary.
And this makes her the new face of the Democratic Party because she's 29 years old and because she's kind of pretty and because she has a certain level of charisma and enthusiasm even though she doesn't know what the hell she's talking about.
But the problem is that the democratic platform of democratic socialism is too extreme for the American people as well it should be.
But now it's being treated as mainstream.
And so there's a bevy of articles over the past several weeks about democratic socialism, its rise, why this is the future of the Democratic Party.
And there's a lot of talk in 2016 about how Trumpism was taking over the Republican Party.
And there were a lot of attempts to say what Trumpism was.
Was Trumpism about Protection of trade.
Was Trumpism about subsidies to blue-collar white areas?
Was Trumpism about protectionism and closing the border?
It turns out that Trumpism was basically just about Trump, right?
Trumpism was about people liked that President Trump is a puncher, people like the President Trump is aggressive.
There's a wide variety of perspectives about his policies, but there's not a lot of variety about people in the Republican Party liking Trump personally, which is why he has such diehard loyalty among his base.
But for the Democrats, there really is an ideological takeover of this party that has happened since 2010.
The Republican Party has not moved in ideology since 2010, which is why Trump is now implementing policies that would be exactly the same in a Rubio administration, or a Cruz administration, or even a Jeb Bush administration, except for maybe on immigration.
But when it comes to the Democratic Party, their actual policies have moved hardcore to the left.
This is what Obama is recognizing, is that the Democratic Party has moved to the left.
So again, their new three prongs are intersectionality, complete subjectivism when it comes to personal activity, even activity that affects others, and finally, and most importantly, an embrace of democratic socialism.
And this embrace of democratic socialism is the one that's going to absolutely destroy them.
Intersectionality alienates the middle of the country.
It alienates white voters.
The subjectivity alienates religious voters, and democratic socialism alienates anyone with half a brain.
Because democratic socialism does not, in fact, work.
Now, in a second, I want to go through some of the myths that surround democratic socialism, because there's this new kind of narrative that's being put out by a bunch of folks on the left, that democratic socialism is different than socialism, that we ought to take it very seriously, that if you look at the United States, what really is missing is this sense of redistributionist justice, this social justice that we need to bring about.
We need to rectify income inequality by moving toward a more equitably distributed resource base.
That's what we really need?
But that's not really what Democratic Socialism is about.
What Democratic Socialism is about is a complete takeover of the economy.
So, let's jump into seven myths, okay?
There are seven myths about Democratic Socialism that are purveyed by these advocates of the new Democratic Party platform.
You know, the Ocasio-Cortezes and the Bernie Sanders.
So first, they claim that Democratic Socialism is not the same as Socialism.
That is not accurate.
So democratic socialism is the idea that it's going to be socialism, but we're going to vote for it, and therefore it's not really socialism.
Well, that's not what socialism means.
Socialism is just about the idea, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, as ensured by nationalization and centralization of government resources and nationalization of industry.
Socialist programs redistribute.
Socialist economies abolish private property and nationalize industry in order to redistribute.
It's important to differentiate these two things.
So, for example, if you have a socialist welfare policy that takes money from some and gives to others, that is a socialist welfare policy.
It does not mean you live in a socialist country.
The United States is a capitalist country with socialist programs, right?
So Medicare is a socialist program of redistribution.
Social Security is a socialist program of redistribution.
We lie about it and we say that it's you putting the money in and getting it back out, but it's actually a socialist redistribution program.
Socialist redistribution programs are socialist.
It doesn't make the entire country a socialist country.
It makes it a capitalist country with a solid welfare base.
Which is still not ideal, but we have to be clear about what we are talking about.
Nationalized healthcare is socialized medicine, but Canada is not a socialist country.
Canada is in fact a capitalist country with socialized medicine.
It's an important distinction, we need to be clear about that.
And when democratic socialists say that democratic socialism is different from socialism, Not really.
Not really.
They need to be clear about what they're saying.
Myth number two is that democratic socialism is not, in fact, use of force.
So democratic socialists claim that they aren't for overthrowing democracy.
They want industry to just be run by the people.
So factories should be run by the workers.
And industries should be run by the employees.
How are you going to do that, though?
Well, what you're going to do is you're going to go out and you're going to vote for the government to take over those industries and basically regulate them into the dust.
Okay, that is, in fact, use of force.
Just because you voted for the use of force doesn't mean that the use of force is not being applied.
If Colton and I decide that we want to rob somebody else in this room until we vote on it, then, yeah, you.
If we decide that we're going to rob this young lady right here, then that's still theft, right?
Even if we vote on it, that's use of force and that's theft, because I assume she's not going to willingly give me her wallet, and she shouldn't, because it's not my money.
Okay, so, the idea that democratic socialism is not force is, of course, very silly, And socialism always tends to degrade into force because what happens if the people don't want socialism?
What happens if the people vote against democratic socialism?
What happens if they vote against industrialization, nationalization of industry, and quote-unquote democratization of industry?
What if they vote against that stuff?
Well, if they vote against that stuff, then it must be because they are emissaries of the evil capitalist system that bred them, and so we must gulag them.
We must send them out for re-education to the gulags, or we must liquidate the dissenters.
Third myth that is pervaded by these pushers of democratic socialism is that socialism is fairer.
They say socialism is more fair.
Yeah, I'm going to talk about that in just a second.
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Okay, so...
The third claim that is made by advocates of democratic socialism is that socialism is fairer.
Socialism is not fairer.
It is deeply unfair.
Fairness rests on the basic idea that you get what you deserve.
This is why, it's really fascinating, there are all these social science studies that demonstrate that people will go out of their way, they will harm themselves in order to punish people who they feel are cheating.
So if you play, there are all these really interesting studies where They'll put a group of people in the room and you have a choice as to whether you want to sacrifice some of your own money to punish somebody else in the room or whether you want to keep your own money or whether you want to grab somebody else's money.
And people who grab other people's money Are immediately hit with people who will spend their own money in order to punish those people.
Human beings have an innate sense that it is wrong to take other people's money without proper justification and without any right to that money.
Socialism seeks to destroy consequences for actions.
Charity is based on the idea that we ought to help people in need.
Socialism is based on the principle that need creates additional rights.
This is a very, very different thing.
Charity is about my capacity to give.
What about my obligation to give?
Socialism is about the idea that if I am poor, I now have additional rights that I did not have when I was not poor.
Simply by virtue of becoming poor, I now have the ability to steal your wallet.
So when I wasn't poor, if I stole your wallet, you would have said that I was a criminal.
But now that I am poor and I steal your wallet, well, that's just socialism.
That's deeply, deeply immoral stuff.
A fourth claim that democratic socialists make is that socialism was not present in the USSR or Venezuela or Cuba.
This is what we call the no true Scotsman fallacy.
Anything that is bad isn't something that you did.
Any communist country that ends in murderous tyranny isn't actually communism or Marxism.
Those are just misapplications of the rule.
We've never actually tried real Marxism.
If we tried real Marxism, you'd actually probably like it.
This is an argument that losers make with regard to dating.
Where a girl says, I don't want to date you because I've seen how you date other people.
You're like, right, but you haven't tried it yet.
If you tried it, then it would just be, it would be completely different.
Your life would be so much better if you dated me.
Even though you saw how like I used to...
I used to dine and ditch on my prior girlfriend.
That wasn't the real me.
Once you get to know the real me, you'll understand that I pay for the best dinners in town.
If you believe that guy, you're an idiot.
And if you believe socialists who say that USSR, Venezuela, and Cuba are not socialists, you are also, similarly, an idiot.
And the fact is that all of these countries are stated Marxist countries, they all ended the same way, because when you take socialism to its ultimate extreme, which is nationalization of all industry, and shutdowns of private industry, through use of government force, you end up in a pretty awful place, pretty quickly.
Which brings us to the fifth claim that democratic socialists make.
And this is the claim that they are using most often right now.
That is the claim that socialism is what makes Nordic countries awesome.
So what they will say, you'll hear Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren all say that when they say socialism, what they really mean is Norway.
They don't mean Venezuela, they mean Norway.
They don't mean Cuba, they mean Denmark.
There are a few problems with this.
The big problem is that, again, they are conflating socialist redistribution programs with socialist economies.
Denmark has socialist redistribution programs.
We have to assess whether those are successful on their own merits.
Denmark is not a socialist economy.
Denmark is a freer economy than the United States.
It has higher tax rates, that's the redistributionist part, but in terms of business regulation, in terms of capacity to attract foreign investment with free markets, Denmark is significantly more free than the United States.
In fact, in 2015, Denmark's prime minister explained, quote, I know that some people in the U.S. 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.
This is exactly right.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing source, this is their ranking of economic freedom.
Switzerland, right, ranks 4th.
Denmark, 12th.
Sweden, 15th.
The Netherlands, 17th.
The United States, the evil, rapacious, capitalist United States, ranks 18th in economic freedom according to the Heritage Foundation.
Norway, that socialist hotbed, ranks 23rd.
What made all of these countries wealthy, by the way, is the fact that they are capitalist and that they were more capitalist in the past.
Capitalism makes countries wealthy.
Socialism simply takes all that wealth and redistributes it, shutting down industry in the process.
And here's the proof that all of these countries were doing well long before they had socialism.
The proof is that, by statistics, this is the case.
Number one, by statistics, this is the case.
Number two, if you take all these people from Denmark, from Norway, from Sweden, and you actually transplant them to the United States, they have higher incomes in the United States than they do in all of these other places.
They actually earn more, and they do better economically.
So the idea that socialism is what creates awesomeness in these cultures is not right.
Okay, culture created awesomeness in these cultures and then socialism was a follow-on that has actually tamped down the economy in these various countries.
When you take that culture and you transplant it to a free country like the United States where tax rates are lower, then all these cultures thrive in the United States as well.
Now, Nordic countries do have high levels of social services because they charge exorbitant taxes.
Denmark has a 60.3% tax rate plus a 25% national sales tax.
Which is why everything costs an arm and a leg in Denmark.
Between 2007 and 2015, not surprisingly, Denmark experienced a 5.5% decline in real GDP.
Which is comparable to the decline in growth in Spain, which essentially went bankrupt during the same period.
The natural result was the election of a center-right coalition in Denmark.
Sweden, another supposed socialist paradise, grew because of capitalism.
According to an economic scholar named Nima Zananjanji, who is from Norway, between 1870 and 1936, Sweden enjoyed the highest growth rate in the industrialized world.
Between 1936 and 2008, the growth rate dropped to 13th out of 28 industrialized nations.
Between 1975 and the mid-1990s, Sweden dropped from being the 4th richest nation in the world to the 13th richest nation in the world.
And that is a direct result of restrictions on the economy and redistributionist programs.
Norway, which is the left favorite country these days, they moved on from Denmark and Sweden because both of those places have elected right-wing governments now.
Norway is propped up by an enormous, enormous oil find off their coast.
And even their nationalized oil companies, which are now used to prop up their social welfare programs, those companies run along private lines in that the government basically is a major stockholder in these companies.
But it's not just government appointees who run the companies.
It's people who are supposed to run these along profit lines.
The government is not actually allowed to intervene in policy in serious ways in the Norwegian oil industry.
It's also worth noting that in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the top 10% of wealth owners hold between 65 and 69% of all wealth in those countries.
Hold between 65 and 69% of all wealth in those countries.
That's actually not that much lower than in the United States.
All of these countries were significantly more robust economically before they started with their socialist nonsense.
And the idea that high life expectancy in Scandinavia is an outgrowth of socialism is not true.
In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark.
By 2005, the gap between Scandinavian countries and the UK and the US had actually shrunk considerably.
That's after the implementation of socialism in a lot of these countries.
Also worth noting, you can't just take the socialist programs of Norway, which may work for a country of 5.3 million people, and apply them to the United States, where there is not the same level of cultural cohesion, cultural homogeneity, and a history of exactly that sort of cohesion and homogeneity.
The population of LA County alone is double the population of Norway.
You can't just take a program that works for five people and apply it to five million and expect it to work exactly the same way.
Okay, in just a second, I'm going to get to the last couple of myths about democratic socialism being pushed by the left.
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Okay, final two myths about democratic socialism.
So, we are also hearing that democratic socialism is the solution when it comes to the medical industry.
What we really need is to nationalize our healthcare system.
Now, let's be clear.
There are lots of different government schemes with regard to medicine.
America's scheme does kind of suck.
Okay, because it is not a free market system.
The great lie about America's medical system is that it is free market.
It is not.
It is the most heavily regulated area of American life.
The profit margins for insurance companies in the health insurance industry are like 2%.
They're not that high.
And one of the reasons that the health insurance system sucks in the United States is because of employer-based insurance programs, which were crammed down by the government in the 1950s.
Basically, in the 1950s, we had wage controls.
And in order to edge around those wage controls to give people raises, companies started paying for their employees' health insurance.
But there's no reason that your health insurance should be tied to your job.
Really, you should just be paying for your health insurance yourself.
That's what happens in Switzerland, which is probably the world's most successful healthcare system.
The way that Switzerland works is that you are mandated, just like Obamacare, you are mandated on an individual level to buy your health insurance, but there's no employer-based insurance in Switzerland.
Plus, They penalize you pretty heavily if you don't buy health insurance.
If you don't buy health insurance and then you get sick, and then you go in for care, then they will force you not only to pay a surcharge of like 50% on your health insurance bill, they will also back charge you for all the health insurance you should have been paying for the last several years.
Switzerland has a very, very robust program in force to force people to buy their own health insurance.
It is also worth noting that all of these other countries that supposedly have wonderful health care systems have their drawbacks as well.
Canada, of course, has very long wait lines.
The same thing is true in the UK.
In Australia, a large percentage of the population buy supplemental health insurance on the private market.
So it's not just a matter of a universal health care system in Australia.
And they are facing some significant financial issues because of the aging of the population.
When people talk socialized medicine as the be-all end-all, they're also forgetting that virtually all medical advances in the industrialized world are coming out of the United States.
The U.S.
is responsible for 44% of all new molecular entities, which would be the drugs that you actually take, and that those numbers would be a lot higher if not for government regulation from the FDA.
We also drive medical innovation in other countries.
The truth is that the American healthcare market, where people are able to charge what these drugs are worth, actually subsidizes the rest of the world.
So, When Canada collectively bargains with a drug company to provide them a certain number of drugs, they're able to do that because the United States is paying a higher price.
Because we are paying a higher price in the private market for all of that.
So, they're exploiting, all these drug companies are basically exploiting the private market, and then making deals on the back end with all these socialized medicine systems.
If the United States went socialized medicine, the prices would skyrocket for everyone on drugs, because nobody would be subsidizing this stuff anymore.
Also, it is still true.
If you've got the money, America is the best place to be for medicine.
If you've got the cash, then America is still the best place to be.
It would be even more like that if we would deregulate the system.
Okay, final lie.
Final lie that democratic socialists tell is that capitalism is a giant failure.
This is the dumbest argument of all.
Capitalism is the most dramatic success in the history of the world.
People living on a dollar a day or less That fell from about 27% of the global population in 1970, all the way down to 5.4% in 2006.
That's an 80% decline.
Poverty worldwide included 94% of the world's population in 1820.
In 2011, it was down to 17%.
Mortality rates for kids under the age of 5 declined by nearly half between 1990 and 2013.
included 94% of the world's population in 1820.
In 2011, it was down to 17%.
Mortality rates for kids under the age of five declined by nearly half between 1990 and 2013.
Virtually no American lives in poverty by global standards.
So the third plank of the Democratic platform, which is this economic democratic socialism, it's a giant fail in the world.
It's a giant fail on every score.
And the fact that it's even being considered by the Democrats demonstrates how far left they have moved right now.
Now, in just a second, I want to talk about the latest with regard to President Trump and witch hunts and Paul Manafort and all the rest.
There's a lot to talk about there, but final note when it comes to the Democrats' kind of socialist platform here.
The final note is that the only thing that will allow Americans to vote for a platform this radical, an intersectionality-based, subjective morality-based, democratic socialism-based platform, is if the Republican Party just sucks at things.
Really.
We have such a great story to tell.
Conservatism has a great story to tell.
A story about individual human freedom.
About individual rights.
Inalienable rights.
About the right to life.
About the value of life.
About the value of serious morality that has consequences for your daily life.
About the idea of hard work and achievement and meritocracy.
If we blow that opportunity and hand it over to these idiots, if we blow that opportunity and hand it over to this radical program, that's a referendum on our inability to sell the greatest, honestly, the greatest system that has ever been devised by God or man.
I mean, it's really an impressive failure on the part of conservatives if they can't sell this stuff.
Okay, speaking of which...
The president of the United States is once again going after Jeff Sessions.
So on Wednesday, he called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to end the special counsel inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.
He issued an unambiguous directive on Twitter to shut down an investigation that even now is scrutinizing his tweets for evidence of obstruction.
So the left immediately has jumped to, this means that Trump is actually obstructing.
This is clearly obstruction.
Well, it's actually not clearly obstruction.
The reason I can say it's not clearly obstruction is because, in fact, he didn't fire Robert Mueller.
He has the power to fire Robert Mueller.
He has the power, more importantly, has the power to fire Sessions, the power to fire Rosenstein.
He can do whatever he wants.
He's the head of the executive branch.
He didn't fire him, so this is indeed Trump mouthing off.
With that said, is it smart for Trump to mouth off on this sort of stuff?
No, it's not particularly smart of the president to mouth off on this kind of stuff.
Like, for example, the president didn't just mouth off about the Mueller investigation, he also mouthed off about the Manafort trial.
So Paul Manafort is his former campaign manager, ran the campaign for something like four months.
I actually believe that Trump didn't really know who he was, because he was sort of an RNC insider who was appointed by the RNC to help Trump run his campaign, and then he was out as soon as bad stories started to break about Paul Manafort.
Well, Manafort is now on trial for fraud, and Trump tweeted out that even Alphonse Capone was not treated with the sort of disdain with which they are treating Paul Manafort.
Why is the president defending Paul Manafort?
The Manafort trial has nothing to do with Russian collusion.
The Manafort trial has nothing to do with the 2016 election.
All of the charges being brought against Paul Manafort pre-exist the election cycle of 2016.
Why the president wants to jump in here with both feet is absolutely beyond me.
It doesn't make any sense, except I think he's just so angry at Mueller right now that he is willing to basically rip on anything Team Mueller does, which isn't a particularly good look.
I'll also say, in Paul Manafort's defense, the prosecution has focused apparently an awful lot on the clothing that he bought with alleged Russian money.
So, I mean, here's what the prosecution has presented evidence that Paul Manafort spent $15,000 on a jacket made of ostrich.
I am not kidding.
He's like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.
He's got a vest made of real gorilla chest.
He's got a $15,000 ostrich jacket.
He also has a $9,500 ostrich vest.
And I think most importantly, he has an $18,500 python jacket.
I think that there is a solid case to be made that we should exonerate him based on his wardrobe choices.
I think that if you can't use Russian money to buy a $19,000 python jacket, this is no longer America.
Listen, America, this is America.
In America, you get to buy a $19,000 python jacket if you want to buy a $19,000 python jacket.
Actually, this is kind of funny.
So, the judge in the Manafort trial actually scolded the lawyers for bringing all this stuff up.
Judge Ellis, he said, the government doesn't want to prosecute someone because they wear nice clothes, do they?
Let's move on.
That's enough.
So I kind of appreciate the judge for doing all that, and I agree.
Again, if I decide to go out and I decide to make a jacket out of gopher heads, that is my prerogative.
And if it cost me $19,000 in Putin's money, that's my prerogative too, man.
Come on.
This is still America.
Now, here's the problem with all of this, obviously, for President Trump.
The more President Trump focuses in on the Mueller investigation, the less we are talking about all of the great messages that conservatism has to provide.
The less we are talking about the failures of the democratic program.
The less we are talking about socialism versus capitalism.
The less we are talking about inalienable rights versus government interventionism.
If you're not talking about those things, then you are failing to paint the left for what they are.
If you're talking instead about Robert Mueller is the worst, and Paul Manafort's innocent, it's just a distraction from the program that Republicans can sell right now, a great economy based on increase in capitalistic principles, reduction of regulation, and tax cuts.
It's a pretty good sales pitch.
But the Republicans aren't making it right now at all, and that is deeply problematic in a number of ways.
If President Trump wants to have a Republican Congress, he even cares about that, then it is incumbent on him to start talking about the issues that matter in a way that actually gets people jazzed up for the election and isn't just self-serving narcissism, you know, navel-gazing.
Okay, so let's do a couple of things I like, and then we'll do a couple of things that I hate.
While I was on the plane, I finally watched the movie Steve Jobs.
Danny Boyle was the director, and I would say this is a thing I am lukewarm on.
I wouldn't say this is a thing that I like.
I will say Michael Fassbender is probably my favorite actor working today, or at least one of the top three.
It's like Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Fassbender, I think, maybe?
For me?
Not necessarily in that order, probably Day-Lewis, Bale, and then Fassbender.
In any case, Michael Fassbender stars as Steve Jobs.
Doesn't look anything like Steve Jobs, but he's a great actor, so he's able to pull it off.
That's what I like about the film, is that Fassbender's performance is really terrific.
The things I don't like about the film are that the score is egregiously bad.
I mean, the score is just hysterical and overwrought in every conceivable way.
And the script is written by Aaron Sorkin, which means that every character is Aaron Sorkin.
So when Kate Winslet is acting in this film, it's Aaron Sorkin with a wig.
What do you do?
One of the problems with Aaron Sorkin's writing generally is that there's no characterization whatsoever.
Everything is all about the fast patter.
It's like sort of watching an upscale Gilmore Girls, an upscale episode of the Gilmore Girls.
In any case, here's a little bit of the preview for Steve Jobs, which is it worth seeing?
Yes.
Is it a great movie?
No.
Is it, you know, mildly entertaining and diverting?
Yeah, I think so.
What do you do?
You're not an engineer.
You're not a designer.
You can't put a hammer to a nail.
I built the circuit board.
The graphical interface was stolen!
So how come, ten times in a day, I read Steve Jobs as a genius?
What do you do?
Musicians play their instruments.
I play the orchestra.
You see how this reminds you of a friendly face?
So the entire movie is built basically around three set pieces, where Fassbender plays Jobs at sort of the launch of the original Mac, which is a failure, and then the launch of Next, which is also a failure, and then the launch of the iMac, which was a success in 1998.
So it's kind of interesting.
Worth checking out, so go check that out right now.
Okay, now let's do a few things that I hate.
Let's do it.
Okay, so Vox.com has an article today about a Pew survey which has found that Americans say they pray more than any other wealthy nation.
55% of Americans report that they pray at least once daily, six percentage points higher than the international average.
Well, that may not seem like a big gap on its own.
America is an extreme statistical outlier when it comes to countries with at least a $30,000 per person GDP.
So in this category, the global average hovers around 40%.
So in Canada, for example, Only 25% of people pray daily.
That number is 22% in Europe, 18% in Australia, and 6% in Great Britain.
In other words, with great wealth comes less religiosity.
In the United States, we're still a relatively religious country, and 55% of Americans report praying at least once daily.
Vox.com, of course, thinks this is because we're stupid and backwards, and we're a bunch of bitter clingers who cling to our God and our guns.
I think this is because America is freaking amazing.
Because it really is.
You know, one of the things that you learn when you study the Bible is that people don't stop worshipping God when bad things happen to them.
This is one of the great lies of atheism, is that the reason people fall away from God is bad stuff happens to them and they look around at the universe and they say, why would a child suffer?
There must be no God.
That's not the real reason, really, why people stop being religious and worshipping God and praying.
The real reason people stop worshipping God and praying is because they look around, things are pretty good, what do I need God for?
People get fat and happy, and they think that they did it themselves, and then they feel like God is superfluous.
Why do I need to thank God for anything?
What am I praying for?
Everything is pretty great, and it was created by a bunch of scientists who don't believe in God, so what the hell do I need this whole God thing for?
The reason that religiosity is important, particularly in an industrialized, civilized society, is because that is what ties us to basic fundamental principles.
And those basic fundamental principles are, in fact, the lines of thought that undergird Western civilization.
You would not have that iPhone in your hand were it not for the Bible.
You would not have that iPhone in your hand were it not for Greek reason combined with a biblical sense of morality because capitalism is based on certain principles.
Those principles include inalienable rights in you.
You have inalienable value.
You are worth something.
Your labor is worth something.
You as an individual are made in God's image and you are more important than any collective that is put together in order to crush your rights on behalf of some sort of communal priority.
All of that is rooted in a certain fundamental biblical morality that is based, again, on the most important sentence, I think, in human history.
The most important sentence in human history is not, in my opinion, treat thy neighbor as thyself, or love thy neighbor as thyself.
It is not, do not unto others what you would have not have them do unto you.
I think the most important sentence in human history is that man was made in God's image.
That is the most, in, in, in, male and female, he created them.
That, that image from Genesis is the most important Verse in the history of humanity and it is the beginning of all wisdom and the beginning of all human rights So I'm deeply grateful that America is is still the most religious country.
It's the reason why we are the world leader Everybody else can basically climb on our backs because the reality is that this country with our backwardness and our religion and our church going Has been driving the global economy for NIA for well over a century for well over a century.
Okay other things that I hate today, so The media are still in full-scale weeping mode for themselves.
So Jim Acosta is still going on national TV whining about the fact that he went to a Trump rally and people yelled at him.
Is it good that people yelled at him at a Trump rally?
No, it's not.
I said yesterday, I think it's more like a sporting event to people than it really is.
Like, I wish I... I would... I hate Jim Acosta.
The way you can tell this is when the cameras go off, they immediately go up and they want to take pictures with Jim Acosta, right?
They treat Jim Acosta as though he's the rival sports star on another team.
So they sort of treat like LeBron James or Laker now.
Celtics fans treat LeBron James the way that Trump fans treat Jim Acosta, basically.
That LeBron probably comes to the Boston Garden, or whatever they call it now, and he plays, and everybody boos him, and they say that he's a traitor, and they say he's terrible, and then after the game, they are clamoring for an autograph.
If you go to Trump rallies, that's actually the way that Acosta is sort of treated.
People yell at him, they scream at him, it's fun.
It's fun to say that CNN sucks, because CNN does, in many cases, suck.
And then, Jim Acosta, and then they go up and they take pictures with Acosta.
Well, Acosta is still complaining about this, suggesting that we're not in America anymore.
By the way, he came out this morning and attacked Sean Hannity and said that Sean Hannity is a terrible human.
So it's okay to attack other members of the media, it's just not okay for anybody to attack Jim Acosta.
Here is Jim Acosta talking about his horrifying experiences.
I mean, brutal, brutal, terrible.
This isn't America anymore.
It's just like back in the Soviet Union where they'd stack you up.
At the bottom of the KGB building, where the floors were slanted to catch all the blood, and then they'd shoot you.
It's exactly like that, except that Jim Acosta got his hair messed up a little bit.
Not by anybody throwing anything at him, but just because he was so frustrated.
So here's Jim Acosta.
Honestly, it felt like we weren't in America anymore.
I don't know how to put it any more plainly than that.
Americans should not be treating their fellow Americans in this way.
I agree.
Talk to Maxine Waters.
Talk to members of Antifa.
Talk to all of these other folks on the left who have been willing to do this for a very long time.
But apparently you are special, Jim Acosta, and so it didn't happen until it happened to you, right?
Until it happened to you, it was no big deal.
It's just like, it's amazing.
The media only discovered that the alt-right were a bunch of jackasses when the alt-right started attacking people on the left, right?
The alt-right started attacking Julia Jaffe, for example, and suddenly the alt-right was a thing.
I took months of alt-right abuse, but that was totally okay because I was on the right, obviously.
The media's selective coverage is one of the reasons why people don't trust the media at all.
You see the same thing from ABC's Sunny Hostin, who's over on The View.
She says that President Trump's attacks on the press are like the acts of a dictator.
Their jobs are to report the facts, and I think that's one of the reasons why this president has started this war against the media, because he doesn't like that the truth is being reported.
And I think that means that as journalists, you have to continue to do so.
These are the acts, in my opinion, of a dictator.
Dictators attack the press routinely.
Okay, yeah, it's just like a dictator, except that when dictators attack the press, they then go and shoot members of the press.
Like, Vladimir Putin actually just goes and kills people.
So, it's just like that, except for he says a lot of dumb stuff on Twitter.
So, exactly the same.
Pretty much exactly the same.
Okay, well, we will be back here tomorrow, with the mailbag.
So, if you have your questions, you need to subscribe now, and then ask those questions, and you'll have a better chance of me answering those questions and making your life just infinitely better.
Go check it out right now at dailywire.com.
We'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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