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Jan. 3, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

52:37

Chaos Theory | Ep. 687

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	President Trump does an epically chaotic press conference, Democrats keep on pushing against wall funding, and internecine warfare breaks out in both parties.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Man, the president has had himself a busy Twitter day, and I will get to all of it in just one second.
	Some of it is pretty fantastic.
	Don't worry, we'll break it all down for you in just a second.
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	Okay, so yesterday, President Trump did an epically chaotic press conference.
	And it was, you know, it was the full Trump.
	He brought it all.
	It was a new year, and that man came ready to play.
	He's been ready to play on Twitter all day long.
	He opened this morning, actually, by retweeting a Daily Wire meme that we put out a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago maybe, about Elizabeth Warren, that showed Elizabeth Warren's 2020 logo but it said elizabeth warren one out of 2020th mocking the fact that she pretends to be one out of 1024th native american president trump retweeted that today with our watermark so that's pretty spectacular ah this is this is our world and it's wonderful it's a wonderful wonderful world
	it wasn't just that president trump also did a press conference yesterday the dude loves memes i mean one thing you have to hand president trump is this is one entertaining dude how do you know Well, he did his press conference.
	And at this press conference, he is sitting there.
	I believe it's in the Roosevelt Room.
	And he's got his beautiful, his beautiful large table.
	And right there in the center of his beautiful large table is a giant 11 by 14 piece of color photocopy of a meme of him that says sanctions are coming, as in winter is coming from Game of Thrones.
	Now, the sanctions It doesn't reference, like, what the sanctions would be about, or against whom, or why this is on the table.
	And he never mentions it the entire press conference.
	He does an entire press conference with a meme of himself that says sanctions are coming in front of him.
	In a Game of Thrones pose, and no one says anything about it.
	Nobody asks him a question about it.
	Nobody says, what the hell is this doing here?
	What does this mean?
	He never references it.
	He never says, you know why this is out?
	It's because I thought it was great, and because I'm using sanctions against Russia, or Iran, or North Korea.
	No, instead, it just sort of sits there.
	And we all just accept it.
	It's like an Easter egg in the middle of life.
	It's spectacular.
	OK, so President Trump is doing this entire press conference.
	It was a wild press conference, by the way.
	It was supposed to be theoretically about the wall.
	It did not end up being about the wall.
	It ended up being about foreign policy.
	It had its ups and it had its downs.
	It was an epic, epic episode of good Trump, bad Trump.
	The president said some things that were quite good.
	He said some things that were quite bad.
	This is why you know him and this is why you love him.
	So here is President Trump on foreign policy.
	Here is something good that he said.
	He was asked about European disapproval, that right now his approval numbers When they say I'm not popular in Europe, I shouldn't be popular in Europe.
	If I was popular in Europe, I wouldn't be doing my job.
	And President Trump gets this one right.
	He says, "Who cares?
	They're European." - When they say I'm not popular in Europe, I shouldn't be popular in Europe.
	If I was popular in Europe, I wouldn't be doing my job because I want Europe to pay.
	I'm not elected by Europeans.
	I'm elected by Americans.
	And by American taxpayers, frankly.
	I wouldn't say they're thrilled.
	Because they've had many, many years where they didn't have to pay.
	So now they're gonna have to pay.
	And if that makes me unpopular in those countries, that's okay.
	But we're doing tremendous service to those countries, and they should at least respect us.
	And I love when President Trump then continued, and he said, and if I were running for office in any of those European countries, I'd win, which is just spectacular, Trump.
	I mean, that is top shelf, Trump.
	And of course, he's right about all of this.
	And it is really stupid to suggest that we need the approval of the Europeans to run our own foreign policy.
	Mitt Romney had written in his foolish editorial in the Washington Post that the Europeans had far more confidence in our foreign policy under President Obama than President Trump.
	Right, because their priorities were President Obama's priorities, whereas American priorities are President Trump's priorities.
	This is a winning point for the president.
	This is the reason that he was elected.
	It's specifically because people felt that President Obama had not done a good job of representing American interests at home and abroad, and President Trump was going to at least put American interests first, right?
	I mean, this was one of his campaign slogans.
	So that was really good.
	Then, President Trump got to his actual policy.
	Now, I wish that there were a link between President Trump's rhetoric about putting America first and his actual policy, because I think that his policy is in many cases wrong, and I think that his view of the world is in many cases wrong.
	So, I appreciate the attitude, which is that America's interests are paramount.
	I don't necessarily think it links up with his policy, however.
	So, President Trump was trying to justify his policy in Syria.
	Now, Suffice it to say, there is a complex case that can be made for his policy in Syria.
	There is an editorial that I read recently that was from an actual member of the Obama administration praising President Trump's decision to pull out of Syria, suggesting that it would sort of thrust regional responsibility onto the Turks, onto the Russians, onto the Syrians, that no solution was going to be reached with regard to northern Syria or Kurdistan without Turkish buy-in, so trying to lock the Turks out would be a mistake.
	Suffice it to say, I think that logic is wrong.
	I think that the Turkish government right now, run by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is one of the worst governments in the world.
	It's really a truly awful government.
	Erdogan is a dictatorial, autocratic thug.
	He's ripped every pretense of democracy away from his nation.
	And trying to pretend that Turkish interests are American interests are foolish.
	Trying to pretend Russian interests in the area are American interests, that's foolish too.
	Trying to pretend that the Syrians have any interest in either wiping out ISIS or in establishing any sort of stability that doesn't make them a proxy of Iran, that's foolhardy as well.
	But President Trump tries to justify his policy in Syria.
	I will say this about President Trump.
	President Trump does have a gift for aphorism.
	There's no question that the man has a real gift for being able to encapsulate his ideas in very short and convincing sentences.
	But I don't think that this is an actual policy, what he's about to say about Syria.
	Syria was lost long ago.
	It was lost long ago.
	And besides that, I don't know what, we're talking about sand and death.
	That's what we're talking about.
	We're not talking about, you know, vast wealth.
	We're talking about sand and death.
	Okay, so I'm not sure whether, if there were vast wealth there, that would really change our calculus very much.
	The reason we are in Syria, presumably, is to fight ISIS.
	He's not wrong.
	Syria is a tinderbox.
	Syria is a lot of sand and a lot of death.
	But that doesn't mean that death can't be exported to other places.
	That's the reason we were there in the first place.
	That's the reason we were in Iraq in the first place.
	So when President Trump says that Syria was lost long ago, that's true.
	The Obama administration made certain that Syria's regime would not be toppled.
	That was the case since 2011, 2012, 2013.
	But when President Trump sort of ignores the ongoing American responsibility to both our Kurdish allies and to citizens around the world, American citizens, who ought to and have right to be concerned about the continued rise of ISIS in northeastern Syria, That is a point of ignorance.
	So, again, I like President Trump's America First perspective.
	I don't necessarily think that it translates into a solid policy.
	That became particularly true when President Trump talked about issues of history.
	So, you don't need to be a historical scholar to achieve the right answer on foreign policy, but sometimes it helps.
	It means that you are less gullible, it means you are less likely to fall for a self-flattering version of history pushed by revisionist historians.
	The Russians are the leading revisionist historians on planet Earth right now.
	Every intervention in which they've ever engaged was apparently justified.
	Vladimir Putin sounds like he was whispering into President Trump's ear when President Trump talked yesterday about the situation in Afghanistan.
	He basically suggested that he was interested in pulling out from Afghanistan.
	And then he made a very weird move.
	He started talking about why the Russians need to be involved in Afghanistan.
	And he defended the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
	Now, I don't know why he would do that.
	I will admit that I would listen to a Drunk History podcast with President Trump doing history, because this does not bear any relationship with reality, what he's about to say.
	And the fact that you have a Republican president who's now praising the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which, lest we forget, happened under Jimmy Carter and led directly to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Why a Republican president would now be praising the policies of Leonid Brezhnev, that's beyond me.
	But here is President Trump defending the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I guess to defend the idea that we should thrust responsibility for Afghanistan on the Russians, maybe?
	Something like that?
	The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia.
	They were right to be there.
	The problem is it was a tough fight.
	And literally, they went bankrupt.
	They went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union.
	You know, a lot of these places you're reading about now are no longer part of Russia because of Afghanistan.
	Okay, that is, I'm not sure there's a thing there that's true.
	So, number one, Russia did not go into Afghanistan because of terrorism.
	Okay, the rise of radical Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan and today, well, post-date, The Russian leaving of Afghanistan and the American leaving of Afghanistan, right?
	The rise of Osama Bin Laden happened in the aftermath of the Mujahideen driving the Russians out of Afghanistan in the first place.
	The reason that Afghanistan was invaded by the Russians is because the Russians couped the legitimate government of Afghanistan and put in place a communist government of Afghanistan, which was then attempted.
	There was an attempted rebellion in Afghanistan and the Russians, at the behest of their communist puppet government, went in and occupied the country.
	That's the reason the Russians were in Afghanistan.
	This notion that the Russians went in there because of terrorism, their right to be there, is an almost insane one.
	It's just patently historically illiterate.
	It is not true in the slightest.
	And when the president says that Afghanistan drove the Soviets bankrupt, it damaged the Soviet Capacity to war mostly damaged them in terms of public relations.
	It meant that all of the fringe nations on the edges of the Soviet Union looked at the Russians and they said, well, you don't really have the capacity to keep us here.
	So if we feel like leaving, we're just going to leave.
	But to say that Afghanistan is what drove the Soviets bankrupt, no, communism drove the Soviets bankrupt.
	Afghanistan was just a symptom of the Soviet bankruptcy that had already taken place.
	Now, why does any of this matter?
	I'll explain in just a second.
	Why isn't it just President Trump nailing off?
	I'll explain in just one second.
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	So why exactly does any of that matter?
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	Okay, so President Trump sounds off about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
	So why exactly does any of that matter?
	Because he is using that as backdrop to why it wouldn't be bad for the Russians to go back into Afghanistan.
	Okay, that's not great.
	The Russians, when they went into Afghanistan, the reason the United States opposed that is because there was a theory that emboldening the Russian sphere of influence, broadening the Russian sphere of influence, would be bad for the United States.
	Providing them more material resources, providing them more territorial control, allowing them to expand their base of resources would be a bad idea.
	And this is right.
	This is Ronald Reagan's policy, suggesting that the Russians were right to be in Afghanistan.
	It sort of leads to the logic that the Russians are right to be in Ukraine, that they'd be right to be in Kazakhstan, that they'd be right to be in Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania.
	The fact is that President Trump's historical knowledge is not up to par on this particular issue, and that informs a foreign policy that seems ignorant in particular areas.
	Now again, you don't have to be a student of history, you don't have to know a lot about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to know that it's probably a bad idea to let Vladimir Putin expand his territorial base around the world.
	That it's probably a bad idea, if it was a bad idea for President Obama to give Syria over to Putin, it's a bad idea to give Afghanistan over to Putin.
	This would all be a bad move.
	But it certainly helps when you're not botching history to this extent.
	That wasn't the extent of the bad Trump in this press conference.
	President Trump also went after General James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, who just left.
	Now, I will say, I think the media royally miscovered the Mattis situation.
	They made it seem like James Mattis was leaving specifically over Syria, that he was very angry that President Trump was pulling over Syria.
	Apparently, there have been tensions between the two for quite a while.
	Apparently, Mattis Was very close with the then Chief of Staff John Kelly, and the two of them were sort of a clique inside the White House that was opposed to the Secretary of State, that was opposed to the National Security Advisor, that was opposed to Jared Kushner's office, that was opposed to other members of the Cabinet.
	With all of that said, When Mattis left, President Trump's best move would have been to just say, well, thank you for your service, General.
	I'll see you later.
	And if Mattis has a couple of parting shots on the way out, well, that's the way it goes.
	Nobody really cares.
	Everybody moves on with their life.
	Instead, President Trump has never been a man to take anything lying down.
	And so here is President Trump slamming James Mattis after Mattis's exit from the White House.
	General Mattis thanked me profusely for getting him $700 billion.
	He couldn't believe it.
	General Mattis thanked me even more the following year when I got him $716 billion.
	He couldn't believe it.
	Because our military was depleted.
	But General Mattis was so thrilled.
	But what's he done for me?
	How has he done in Afghanistan?
	Not too good.
	Not too good.
	I'm not happy with what he's done in Afghanistan.
	And I shouldn't be happy.
	He's slamming his own Secretary of Defense, whom he didn't fire, who resigned.
	Again, not a good look.
	If President Trump picked the best people, why exactly is he slamming the guy that he picked and one of his most popular cabinet members from the moment that he was named to the time that he left?
	President Trump has a habit of fighting back, but you gotta pick your spots.
	You really do have to pick your spots.
	That was not, in fact, the funniest thing that President Trump said about the military in the middle of this particular press conference.
	President Trump also decided that he would go off on his own military experience, which is never a bright move for the president.
	Here's the president saying that he thinks that he would have been a good general.
	Based on... Here he is.
	It's the craziest thing I've ever seen.
	I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?
	Well, I mean, who knows?
	Okay, look, here's the thing.
	When President Trump is like this, when President Trump does this sort of thing, it does raise the question as to how much his personality is impacting his policy decisions.
	Whether it's personal animus that is driving his decision-making on Syria or on Afghanistan, whether it's his personal like for Kim Jong-un that is driving his policy on Kim Jong-un, what's the separation between personality and policy?
	And the answer for Trump is, I think, not much.
	I think that personality does drive his policy in many ways, and that means that he is reacting to circumstances around him, sometimes for bad, but sometimes for good.
	And this brings us to some good Trump.
	So, President Trump, I do not think, is doing the wrong thing when it comes to this government shutdown over the wall.
	I don't think that President Trump should be blamed for the fact that Democrats are not willing to give him the money that he needs to install some sort of physical barrier on the southern border to prevent mass immigration from south of the border illegally into the United States.
	It doesn't seem like a lot to ask.
	Let's just be real about this.
	We have a $22 trillion deficit in this country.
	The Democrats pretending to be fiscally responsible is a joke.
	It is ridiculous.
	It is silly.
	It is not real.
	They have spending priorities that include funding Sesame Street, but not the actual border wall on the southern border that will protect people from being murdered inside the United States by, you know, whatever number of criminal illegal aliens actually cross.
	President Trump is not wrong to do any of this.
	So when President Trump speaks out about it, his stubbornness is an asset.
	So stubbornness, as we all know from people that we know, from our parents, from our friends, when your friend is stubborn in your defense, it's really good.
	When your friend is stubborn being a dummy, that's really bad.
	Well, President Trump is stubborn both ways, and so we've seen him, earlier in the show, be a little bit foolish with regard to, more than a little bit foolish, with regard to Soviet policy, or with regard to Syria, or with regard to General James Mattis.
	But, when it comes to him being stubborn on the wall, this is where the stubbornness can be utilized in a good way.
	This is where the fact that Trump has this real stubborn streak can pay off for conservatives.
	So here's President Trump explaining to Nancy Pelosi that, listen, The Vatican has a wall.
	Like, you guys are whining about walls.
	Walls work.
	Here's President Trump explaining, and he's of course exactly right.
	When they say the wall's immoral, well then, you better gotta do something about the Vatican, because the Vatican has the biggest wall of them all.
	Uh, the wall is immoral.
	Look at all of the countries that have walls.
	And they work 100%.
	It's never gonna change.
	A wall is a wall.
	Okay, and he's exactly right about this.
	And this is a point where his stubbornness is an actual asset.
	This is why he really should give a national address.
	President Trump should call a primetime national address on as many networks as will give him the airspace.
	And he should say, here is why we need a wall.
	Here are the names of the people who have been killed because we don't have a wall.
	Here are the costs to our country because we don't have a wall.
	Right?
	This would be a time for President Trump to use that bully pulpit and really get out there in front of the American people.
	And President Trump makes a pretty good point here, which is the courts gave President Obama tremendous power to ignore the law when it came to allowing illegal immigrants to stay.
	Imagine if we applied that kind of power to me.
	I haven't tried to seize that kind of power, but apparently the left was fine with presidents having that kind of power in the first place.
	If President Obama is allowed to do what he did on DACA, then I'm allowed to do whatever I want to do on things that You know, probably a president, as he said, probably a president doesn't have the right to do.
	Okay, and Trump is exactly right about this too, which is Democrats are very comfortable with executive power so long as the executive power is being used on their side.
	I think that President Trump's case for the government shutdown is not a bad one.
	His case for standing up for the wall is actually quite a good one, but he needs to make it more forcefully than just going on Twitter.
	And that means going to rallies.
	It means speaking out loud.
	Because now, people are actually not going to get paid.
	Starting basically on Friday, people are not going to be getting their paychecks.
	Now, do I think that the government shutdown is the end of the world?
	No, I've never thought that the government shutdown is the end of the world.
	I've never thought that it's going to be the zombie apocalypse because a certain percentage of non-essential employees will not be paid for a couple of weeks.
	I don't think that's the end of the world.
	I don't think most Americans really feel it.
	I mean, you're still getting your mail, you're still getting your social security checks, you're still getting your Medicare coverage, right?
	You're still getting all the things that the federal government is there to provide, at least so far as the left social service network is concerned.
	So I don't think there's a huge panic area, but it's a good point of leverage for President Trump.
	What's amazing, though, is the media coverage.
	So remember, When Ted Cruz was quote-unquote responsible for shutting down the government in 2013, for not giving Obama funding for Obamacare, the media put it all on Cruz.
	It was not Obama's fault.
	It was Cruz's fault.
	So it was Congress's fault for not giving the president what he wanted, and thus forcing a shutdown.
	Now, when it's Congress not giving the president what he wants, and thus forcing a shutdown, it's President Trump's fault.
	Look at the sort of media, glowing, glowing media coverage that Nancy Pelosi has been receiving for saying that she will not budge an inch on the wall.
	Here she was being interviewed on Good Morning America about the wall.
	And she says, listen, we're not going to give a dime for the wall.
	Are you willing to come up and give him some of this money for the wall?
	Because apparently that's the sticking point.
	No, nothing for the wall.
	We're talking about border security.
	Nothing for the wall, but that means it's a knock-starter.
	But we can go through this back and forth.
	No.
	How many more times can we say no?
	Nothing for the wall.
	Okay, so where is the questioner saying, okay, so you're willing to allow people to go without paychecks?
	Right, ask Nancy Pelosi the same questions you're asking President Trump, and make her answer whether she's willing to allow people to go without paychecks, to let national parks shut down, simply to not fund a border wall that will keep Americans safe.
	It's pretty incredible.
	It really is.
	In a second, I'm going to show you how the media continue to play defense for the Democrats, even in a situation where they would never do anything similar for Republicans.
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	Okay, so...
	The media continue to play defensive for Democrats.
	Take for example this clip.
	Nancy Pelosi's daughter.
	And she was on MSNBC, and she was talking about, or CNN rather, and she was talking about her mother.
	Listen to what she says about her mom, and then listen to the reaction of the anchors.
	What are your feelings about this person who you know quite well becoming Speaker of the House for a second time?
	She'll cut your head off and you won't even know you're bleeding.
	That's all you need to know about her.
	No one ever won betting against Nancy Pelosi.
	She's persevered.
	She'll cut your head off and you'll never know that you're bleeding.
	She'll disembowel you and you'll never know your spleen is missing.
	She'll cannibalize you and you'll never know that you're missing your small intestine.
	And everybody's laughing.
	Look at the anchors.
	Now, imagine for just a second that somebody had a hat on Eric Trump Jr.
	or Eric Trump.
	And Eric Trump had been asked about Donald Trump.
	And he said, you know, my dad, he can cut your head off and you'll never know you're bleeding.
	Would that ever stop being a meme?
	Would the anchors have reacted with laughter?
	Or would they have reacted with shock and outrage?
	That sort of violent language, cutting off people's heads.
	What is he, ISIS?
	What is he?
	I mean, remember how nuts they went when President Trump just tweeted out a crazy meme of himself leveling a WWE clip.
	He tweeted out a meme of himself leveling a wrestler who had a CNN logo for a head.
	You remember this?
	And it was the biggest deal in the world?
	Nancy Pelosi's daughter goes on national television and says her mom cuts people's heads off and you won't even know you're bleeding.
	Nothing.
	What about all that violent rhetoric talk?
	Where'd it go?
	We're in the middle of a government shutdown.
	Wouldn't it be better if you actually had a Speaker of the House willing to come together and compromise?
	No, let's all laugh about it together.
	That's the way the media operate these days.
	Well, meanwhile, with all this happening, internecine warfare has basically broken out in both parties.
	There's internecine warfare, obviously, inside the Republican Party between the so-called never-Trump wing of the Republican Party And President Trump and people who voted for him and plan on voting for him in 2020, President Trump leads the charge in this direction.
	Now, as I've said before, I think that when people say never Trump, they are using the category too broadly.
	I think there's a category misapplication here.
	So there are people who didn't vote for President Trump in 2016.
	Those people break down into a couple of different groups.
	There are the people who didn't vote for President Trump in 2016, and they think that everything that President Trump does, both good and bad, is actually bad for the country.
	Because the better President Trump does, the worse it is for the country, because Trump himself is bad.
	Into this category would fall Max Boot, Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin.
	Everything Trump does is bad, whether it is good or whether it is bad.
	If it's bad, it's bad.
	And if it's good, it's bad, because it helps Trump.
	That is perspective number one from the Never Trump category.
	Perspective number two.
	Never Trump was a category of people, a group of people, who said we're not going to vote for Trump in 2016 based on the available evidence at hand because we think that he lacks character and we don't know he's going to be conservative.
	And we will judge him based on his evolution and his actions on a day-to-day basis.
	This would be people like me.
	I didn't vote for President Trump in 2016.
	But I evaluate him on the basis of, is he doing something good or is he doing something bad?
	Just like we did on today's show.
	We've been utterly consistent since 2015.
	There's good Trump.
	There's bad Trump.
	They exist in the same human, right?
	All of this is true.
	So that's category number two.
	So when you're talking about the people who overall say that everything Trump does is bad.
	So I think that we should actually have three categories of people with regard to Trump.
	They're the always Trumpers.
	Everything Trump does is good no matter what.
	Doesn't matter, right?
	Him making comments about Megyn Kelly's Bleeding, wherever.
	That's good, because Trump said it, right?
	Those are the always-Trumpers.
	It's like the Bill Mitchell crowd.
	And there are the never-Trumpers.
	Everything Trump says is bad, even if he's moving the embassy to Jerusalem and helping to destroy ISIS.
	All that's bad, because it helps Trump.
	And then there are the sometimes-Trumpers who say, OK, here's what he's doing that's good, and here's what he's doing that's bad.
	I think the vast majority of people fall into the sometimes-Trump category.
	Whether or not they vote for Trump or not in 2020, they at least acknowledge what he's doing that's good and what he's acknowledging that's bad.
	Okay, so President Trump is taking on a group of people who I think are rightly being called Never Trumpers, meaning that Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, a group of people who feel the constant necessity to deride pretty much everything that the President does with the belief that President Trump's successes contribute to the unsuccess of the country.
	I think this is the subtle message of Mitt Romney's op-ed yesterday in the Washington Post.
	He acknowledges that President Trump has done good things on conservative policy, but then he basically says, all of that good is undone, and not only undone, made bad almost, by President Trump's character, because President Trump, as a man of little character, Everything that he does that's good, that re-enshrines that man in office, is a bad thing.
	That was sort of Mitt Romney's take in the Washington Post.
	Well, Trump went after Romney, and I don't think that this was completely inappropriate.
	Here was President Trump yesterday going after the senator from Utah.
	I was surprised at Mitt Romney, but I just hope he's going to be a team player, and if he's a team player, that'll be great.
	I will say this.
	If he fought really hard against President Obama, like he does against me, he would have won the election.
	Does that make sense to you?
	If he fought the way he fights me, I'm telling you, he would have won the election.
	Okay, that is the common feeling among a lot of Republicans about Mitt Romney, which is why when Romney sits on the sidelines and snipes at President Trump about his character without any real solution to it, people wonder, okay, so what exactly are you suggesting, Senator Romney?
	Same thing with Jeff Flake, right?
	Jeff Flake has made a big thing out of his disdain for President Trump's character.
	Now, again, I'm not somebody who's been kind to President Trump's character.
	I challenge you to find anywhere in the last four years in which I've said that I think that President Trump is a man of moral fiber and character.
	I don't think that President Trump is, frankly.
	But that doesn't mean that he can't have good policy.
	It doesn't mean that I can't like a lot of his policies.
	So when Trump goes after Flake, right, when Trump goes after Flake, because Flake has made sort of the leading point of the spear his argument that Trump is a man of no character, and then Trump says that Flake is going to wind up on CNN, Again, there's a grain of truth to this.
	The internecine warfare that's happening is right now in the Republican Party, not between the sometimes Trumpers and the always Trumpers or the sometimes Trumpers and the never Trumpers, but between the always Trumpers and the never Trumpers.
	And here's Trump going after Jeff Flake, that senator from Arizona.
	Wonderful guy.
	I never even met him and he's hitting me.
	He was gonna tell people how to win in 2020 because 2016 can't... He wrote a book about it.
	Didn't work out too well, that book.
	Because we won in 2016 because we didn't want to wait till 2020.
	So Jeff Flake is now selling real estate or whatever he's doing.
	He'll probably go to work for CNN.
	That's my prediction.
	The pretty brutal stuff there from President Trump.
	But again, this is why I think the international warfare inside the Republican Party should stop being so much about personality and start being a little bit more about policy and ideas.
	This is why I think the interesting conversations are being had Inside the sometimes Trump category, because sometimes Trump really means that Trump doesn't matter, right?
	Sometimes Trump means that we're holding Trump to the same standard we hold any other politician, which is, does he do good stuff or does he do bad stuff?
	If you are loyal to President Trump through and through, and he can't do anything that would alienate you in any way, then you're doing politics wrong.
	And if you are a never-Trumper in the sense that everything that President Trump does is inherently bad, then I would suggest you are also doing politics wrong, because viewing politics and policy through the lens of one particular man Okay, so in a second, I want to get to the Democratic chaos that's been breaking out, because it's not just chaos on one side of the aisle.
	The internecine warfare in the Democratic Party is going to get really bad really quickly.
	But first, you're going to have to go over and subscribe.
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	Now, I'm slightly less sick today than I was yesterday.
	Why?
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	I mean, maybe that's why.
	I will suggest that's why for purposes of selling the tumbler, but All I'll say is that I went on vacation, didn't have the tumbler, got sick.
	Came back, started drinking from the tumbler, started to get well again.
	It's possible that if your father were shot in a cave in ancient Israel, and your father were bleeding from that wound, and you found this tumbler in the cave, and you poured water from the tumbler on the wound, and your father were shown Connery, that the wound might heal.
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	Okay, so it's not just internecine warfare on the Republican side of the aisle.
	And again, I think the internecine warfare on the Republican side of the aisle is actually less divisive inside the Republican Party than the internecine warfare on the Democratic side of the aisle.
	I think the Republicans have basically come to a pretty solid consensus about President Trump.
	Overall, they like him.
	Overall, they like his policies.
	They may disdain some of the things that he does or says.
	They may have qualms about his character.
	But overall, the guy does have like a 90% approval rating inside the Republican Party.
	The same is not true inside the Democratic Party.
	And so they are deciding on which angle to take.
	And right now, they don't have an angle.
	Right now, they are just beating each other's brains in.
	It's pretty astonishing, actually.
	So this is evident in everything from their congressional policy.
	to the presidential race of 2020.
	So take, for example, congressional policy.
	It's very easy.
	It's really easy to talk about how you would run the government until you actually run the government.
	This is one of the great ironies of how party politics works in our era.
	So Alexis de Tocqueville is the author of Democracy in America, the great classic on how America's constitutional system was set up.
	He's a Frenchman who toured the United States in the 1820s and then went and wrote Probably the great tome in history about the United States.
	He talks specifically in Democracy in America about times in which parties are great and times in which parties are small.
	And what he says is that when a country is in crisis, then parties are great, meaning that they have broad, overarching ideas that they're going to bring revolutionary change.
	And when times are pretty good, when times are not chaotic, then parties are small, meaning that they fight about personality and they fight over small details.
	And they seem petty.
	That suggests to me that while we all think that we're in a crisis, what we're really in is in a pretty good time in American history.
	Because the parties seem to be pretty small and they're fighting about pretty small things.
	They like to pretend that they're fighting about big ideas and big things.
	When it comes right down to it, the warfare inside the parties, inside the Democratic Party, inside the Republican Party, they're over relatively trivial differences.
	I'll take for example the Democratic battle that is now broken out Over PAYGO budget rules.
	So for those who don't remember PAYGO budget rules, basically the rule of PAYGO is that you're not allowed to pass a bill that adds to the budget deficit without a method for rectifying the budget deficit.
	So if you pass an additional spending bill, then you also have to pass an additional tax bill.
	Well, Nancy Pelosi, believe it or not, in the House, is trying to push new pay-go rules.
	Now, you say to yourself, why would Nancy Pelosi want to do that?
	Nancy Pelosi is not fiscally responsible.
	Why would she want to rein in spending by requiring taxation to pay for that spending?
	Don't Democrats just want to blow out the deficit?
	The answer is, yes, Democrats don't care about spending.
	What this pay-go rule is actually designed to do is to centralize power in the hands of committee chairmen, in the hands of a centralized elite at the top of the Democratic Party, and also, it's meant to prevent further tax cuts.
	That's what PAYGO is designed to do.
	Basically, historically, Democrats have opposed PAYGO because they want to blow out the spending, and Republicans have opposed PAYGO because they want to lower the taxes.
	Well, Nancy Pelosi wants to put PAYGO back in place because she wants to make sure that Democrats can't propose crazy spending programs without her approval, essentially.
	And this has led to a revolt from inside her own caucus.
	So, according to the Huffington Post, A small group of progressive lawmakers are trying to derail a fiscally conservative proposal put forward by the incoming House Democratic leadership, one that could potentially block votes on ambitious policy proposals like Medicare for All unless it's completely paid for.
	The pay-as-you-go rules, commonly known as PAYGO, would require Congress to offset any increased spending with equal cuts or revenue increases elsewhere.
	The provision is contained in a larger package of rules for the incoming 116th Congress.
	The fact that Democrats are using their newfound power to stress fiscal responsibility is baffling to some progressives.
	Fiscal responsibility was hardly mentioned in the 2018 elections, whereas big legislative ideas were popular with voters.
	If leadership waives PAYGO rules, it would allow Free College, Medicare for All, to come up for a vote on the House floor and for the House to pass it, but that legislation would still not be able to become law unless both chambers of Congress voted to exempt it from statutory PAYGO, a restriction enshrined in law that leadership alone cannot change.
	There's already a statutory PAYGO rule that exists.
	All this does is it prevents a lot of these bills from coming to the floor in the first place.
	It allows for more leadership control, which is why you're seeing people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trying to vote against PAYGO and stop Nancy Pelosi from centralizing authority inside her own party.
	But the warfare that's broken out inside the Democratic Party about priorities is really a question of whether priorities should be pie in the sky policy or whether it should be governing.
	Nancy Pelosi is a lot more practical as a lawmaker than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even if they have the same overall policy.
	This division is going to keep coming up over and over and over.
	And that division is breaking out on the presidential level in 2020 in the battle between Bernie Sanders and Beto O'Rourke.
	Bernie Sanders supporters are ripping into Beto O'Rourke supporters right now.
	There's a real battle going on online between Bernie, who's a socialist, and Beto, who's kind of a quasi-socialist.
	Why?
	Well, because Beto O'Rourke is a more responsible version of Bernie Sanders, meaning that Beto O'Rourke has said that he likes capitalism.
	Beto O'Rourke doesn't believe that we should raise the tax rates, presumably to 60% across the board, the way that Bernie Sanders does.
	And Beto supporters are being ripped by Bernie supporters as insufficiently doctrinaire, insufficiently committed to the Marxist cause.
	Jonathan Chait has an interesting piece over at New York Magazine talking specifically about this.
	He says, "The first skirmish of the 2020 Democratic primary, a wave of attacks on Beto O'Rourke by supporters of Bernie Sanders took almost everybody by surprise.
	On the outside, it looks like one of those inscrutable personality-driven online spats that characterized the Twitter era, but the feud is neither petty, nor personal, nor irrational.
	It's the first shot in a war that may well continue for the next year and a half.
	He says the Sanders partisans who are attacking O'Rourke are not representative of Sanders voters as a whole.
	Sanders attracts the intense support of a small left-wing intellectual vanguard who see American politics in fundamentally different terms than most Democrats do.
	The primary struggle in American politics as they see it is not between liberalism and conservatism, But between socialism and capitalism.
	Sanders labels himself a socialist.
	He frames his rhetoric in Marxian class terms.
	Beto O'Rourke does not.
	And that means that the Beto supporters and the Bernie supporters are really going to war with one another.
	Now, this is going to take a lot of different forms, but one of the forms it's going to take is Beto supporters coming after Bernie for Bernie's personal foibles.
	Bernie Sanders made a big mistake yesterday.
	There was a story that broke in Politico about how more than two dozen women and men who worked on Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign are now seeking a meeting with Sanders to discuss the issue of sexual violence and harassment on the 2016 campaign for the purpose of planning to mitigate the issue in 2020.
	Bernie Sanders was asked about it yesterday.
	He said he didn't know anything about it at the time.
	He was a little busy, which is a bad answer.
	He should have just said, I didn't know anything about it.
	We'll get to the bottom of it.
	Things are going to get rough inside the Democratic Party.
	It is easy to be the non-governing party.
	It is much more difficult to be the actual governing party, and that's what Democrats are about to learn in both the House and they're about to learn in the 2020 Democratic primaries as well.
	Okay, meanwhile, I have to tell you the craziest Twitter story I have seen, like, ever.
	Okay, so, my business partner, Jeremy Boring, It's really spectacular.
	He was suspended from Twitter today.
	Why was he suspended from Twitter?
	Because someone wrote a tweet about a recipe for Brussels sprouts, and then Jeremy tweeted, quote, even better, coat with melted butter, salt, pepper, paprika, and a dash of Worcestershire, sear in cast iron in bacon grease for 30 seconds or until brown, then throw them away and burn your face off with the hot pan, because even that would be better than Brussels sprouts.
	And he made a joke about how Brussels sprouts suck.
	Twitter suspended him.
	I am not kidding you.
	Twitter sent him a 12-hour suspension.
	Why?
	Because they said that he had violated their rules against promoting or encouraging suicide and self-harm.
	They said you may not promote or encourage suicide or self-harm.
	When you receive reports that a person is threatening suicide or self-harm, we may take a number of steps to assist them, such as reaching out to that person and providing resources, such as contact information.
	For our mental health partners, if you are having thoughts of self-harm, suicide, or depression, we encourage you to please reach out to someone and request help.
	So, Jeremy made a joke about brussel sprouts being so terrible that you'd be better off throwing away the brussel sprouts and burning off your face with a frying pan.
	And Twitter suggested that he was recommending suicide or self-harm because of the wide spate of people across the United States who have been burning off their own faces with frying pans after throwing away their brussel sprouts.
	This is patently insane stuff.
	Ellen Barkin, the actress from Animal Kingdom, by the way, she is still on Twitter and has not been suspended despite calling for Louis C.K.
	to be raped and shot.
	That's totally okay, but Jeremy makes a joke about Brussels sprouts and vegetables and Twitter suspends him.
	Why did any of this happen?
	Why is any of this happening?
	The reason that all of this is happening in the first place is because all of our social media monitors are of the left.
	The social media monitors, here's how, here's the way it works and it works this way in terms of boycotts and it works this way in terms of Twitter suspensions or Facebook suspensions.
	There's a small group of motivated leftists.
	Here is what they do.
	What they do is they monitor accounts like mine, or like Jeremy's, or like yours, and then they find something that they can take some fringe offense at, and they send it in to the arbiters, the powers that be.
	And then they know that the powers that be are already predisposed not to like me, or like Jeremy, or like you, and then the powers that be give the benefit of the doubt to the person complaining, and they suspend you.
	That's the way this works.
	On Twitter, that's the way that it works.
	On Facebook, as well.
	It's really ugly stuff.
	It's the way that it works with boycotts, too.
	You know, we've seen boycotts in the past against Laura Ingraham, and we've seen it against Tucker Carlson, on the basis of really, really weak sauce.
	Why?
	Because what's happening is there's small groups, people like Media Matters or Sleeping Giants, and they have a list of, like, 20 activists, and they send out an email to those 20 activists, and they say, today, we want you to target X advertiser, or we want you to target Twitter, or we want you to target Facebook, or we want you to send an email or a phone call to customer service at these places complaining about such and such a person.
	And those companies, because they don't want to be bothered, respond by either dropping their advertising or suspending people or destroying their social media influence or destroying their reach.
	In other words, we live in a society that takes certain things for granted.
	One of the things that we take for granted is that we don't want to bother each other.
	But because we all take for granted living in a society together with a social fabric where we're supposed to not bother each other, because we all take that for granted, We assume that if somebody actually is complaining, if somebody actually is making trouble, if somebody actually is the squeaky wheel, they deserve the grace.
	We're making a baseline assumption of honesty and decency in our political lives, which is that nobody wants to be bothered, and you're a nice person, so you don't actually want to bother me.
	But the left does not believe like this.
	The left believes that if they can make a little bit of fuss, they can make the world a better place by cleansing the world with fire, by purifying the world with fire.
	And so a Brussels sprouts joke is a good excuse to get rid of my business partner on Twitter.
	A joke by Louis C.K.
	about the Parkland survivors.
	That's a reason to destroy Louis C.K.
	Not his personal behavior.
	His joke about the Parkland kids.
	That destroying people on social media has become a pastime for this small group of motivated people.
	Now, here's the dirty little secret.
	No one cares what these people have to say.
	Advertisers need to understand this.
	Undoubtedly, there will be calls to boycott at some point, me or anybody else, There will be no boycott.
	Boycotts don't materialize like that.
	Hey, Chick-fil-A, there were calls to boycott it.
	You know what happened to Chick-fil-A?
	It made more money because no one cared.
	But people have to stop being so scared of this small group of motivated people and understand that those motivated people have bad intent and are not actually trying to police decency.
	They're actually just trying to ram through their political point of view on the back of everybody else's apathy.
	That's what's happening in social media and that's what's happening in the advertising sphere as well.
	Okay, time for a couple of things I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
	So...
	Things that I like.
	So, over the break I had a chance to read, I hadn't read any of this before, but it was recommended by Andrew Clavin, the Hornblower series by C.S.
	Forrester, and it really is a lot of fun.
	There are all these stories about a guy who starts off as a midshipman in the British Navy fighting during the Napoleonic Wars, and they're easy reads.
	They're written, I think, in the 1930s, and they really read easily.
	They have not aged at all.
	And they're great for kids.
	I think great for teenagers.
	So go check out the Hornblower series.
	I know they made a BBC series based on the Hornblower series.
	I think it's pretty good.
	But the books themselves are really good.
	Ernest Hemingway was a big fan of them.
	A lot of great writers have looked to them as kind of models of adventure literature.
	Go check them out.
	The Hornblower series.
	This one is Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, which is the first in the series.
	Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	Okay, so a couple of things that I hate today.
	This is an amazing, amazing story.
	So, there's a story from NPR about why millions of kids can't read.
	And here is what they say.
	They say that a bunch of teachers were basically taught the stupidest possible way of teaching your kids to read.
	So, I'm lucky.
	I have really smart kids.
	My daughter is not five yet, and she is reading.
	She can read long words.
	She's a smart kid.
	But that's also because my dad, particularly, was very instrumental in teaching her how to read.
	We worked with her.
	She knows how to sound out words.
	The way that you typically teach kids to read is they have a couple of words.
	For those who have small kids, they know this already.
	But there are some words that they can identify on sight that, you know, as soon as they've identified it a few times over, and then they can now identify that word just by looking at the word.
	And then there are a lot of words that they can sound out.
	And you have to understand, this is the real breakthrough for kids, is understanding that every letter has a different sound and that the combination of those letters makes a different sound.
	This is the way that you teach kids to read.
	But social scientists were idiots, and so they decided that that's not really how kids learn to read.
	Instead, the way that kids learn to read was by guessing at meaning.
	I'm not kidding here.
	This is what NPR says.
	According to this one teacher named Harper, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 32% of 4th graders and 24% of 8th graders are not reading at a basic level.
	Fewer than 40% are proficient or advanced.
	And here is what they say.
	They say that a director of literacy over at a school in eastern Pennsylvania was assigned to find out why this was.
	The person's name was Kim Harper.
	Harper attended a professional development day at one of the district's lowest performing elementary schools.
	The teachers were talking about how students should attack words in a story.
	When a child came to a word she didn't know, the teacher would tell her to look at the picture and guess.
	The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page.
	So if a kid came to the word horse and said house, the teacher would say that's wrong.
	But Harper recalls if the kid said pony, it would be right because pony and horse mean the same thing.
	Harper was shocked because pony and horse don't mean the same thing.
	And what does a kid do when there aren't any pictures like, you know, in most books?
	This advice to a beginning reader is based on an influential theory about reading.
	It basically says people use things like context and visual clues to read words.
	The theory assumes learning to read is a natural process, and with enough exposure to text, kids will figure out how words work.
	But scientists from around the world have done thousands of studies on how people learn to read.
	They've concluded that theory is wrong.
	One big takeaway from that research is that reading is not natural.
	We are not wired to read from birth, which is obvious to anyone who has kids.
	They legitimately... There's a certain point where their brains have developed enough where now they can read, but before that, they have no clue how to read.
	Even skilled readers rely on decoding.
	People become skilled readers by learning that a written text is a code for speech sounds.
	And yet, this ill-conceived contextual guessing approach to word recognition is enshrined in materials and handbooks used by teachers, wrote Louisa Mote, a prominent reading expert, in a 2017 article.
	The contextual guessing approach is what a lot of teachers in Bethlehem have learned in their teacher prep programs.
	So in other words, this is the problem with these top-down school programs, you know, that are pushed by people who have no actual relationship with kids or parents.
	They can buy into any dumb theory of how kids are taught and then use those theories on your kids and you won't know about it until your kid can't read at age seven.
	Hey, it's insane.
	Like, you would know.
	If you actually sat and tried to teach your kid to read, you would know that this theory is nonsense from word go.
	But in these schools, you can get away with theorizing and writing master's dissertations in education on why kids don't need to learn to sound out words.
	They can just identify the picture.
	And this is supposed to teach them to read, and you can get away with it, because real-world experience in academia do not have to have any commonality.
	It's really astonishing.
	And this sort of social science nonsense has permeated every aspect of our lives, from questions about gender, where the science is very clear that there are differences between men and women, to questions about IQ, where people are now saying that IQ is not a good test of intelligence.
	No, IQ isn't a perfect test of intelligence, but IQ does actually measure some general level of intelligence, particularly in areas like fluidity and how quickly you grasp concepts.
	It doesn't have a 100% crossover with success in life IQ.
	As I've said before, I went to a highly gifted program in middle school.
	I got in, there was a cutoff at a certain IQ point.
	I was above that IQ point, but I wasn't like leaps and bounds above that cutoff point.
	There were kids who were leaps and bounds above.
	Some of them are in jail.
	Some of them are gym teachers at community colleges.
	IQ does not always correlate with success, but then there's a group of people who basically just decided to throw out IQ as a measure, because why should we bother with IQ as a measure at all?
	Let's just come up with some bad social science and pretend it doesn't exist.
	The bottom line is this.
	Common sense generally tends to merge with the social science.
	And if the social science and common sense do not tend to merge, your first instinct should be to question the social science, not to question the common sense.
	Really?
	That does not mean that social science can't overturn common sense.
	Sometimes common sense is wrong.
	Over history, there have been common sense notions about human beings and the nature of people that have been completely wrong.
	And social science sometimes has been helped to overcome it.
	More often, social science has actually been used to reinforce The wrong approaches.
	So I'm thinking, for example, on issues like race, where there is a common-sense approach that suggested that racial differences mattered an awful lot.
	That common-sense approach was wrong.
	The social science of the time actually didn't cut against it.
	It cut in favor of the wrong approach to common sense.
	It took people of moral fiber to cut against all of that.
	But, in general, as a general rule, if a social science study is teaching something that you know to be false, then your first instinct should be to question whether the social science— I'm not talking about, like, science science, like, you know, mathematical measurements or something.
	I'm talking about the science of what you know to be true about human nature.
	If it turns out that the social science is suggesting something that sounds ridiculous, it's probably because that thing is ridiculous.
	And that's true whether you're talking about reading, or whether you're talking about gender, or anything else where human beings have had good experience with human nature for quite a long time.
	For quite a long time.
	OK, we'll be back here tomorrow to talk about all these and more issues.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
	Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Alex Zingaro.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

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