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Jan. 7, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:28
Being Radical Means Never Having To Say True Things | Ep. 689
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Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez accidentally spills the beans, we examine Tucker Carlson's populism, and the border wall war continues.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh man, so much to get to today.
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Okay, so we begin today with a reminder.
That the Democratic Party has now taken over the House, which means that we have to take them seriously.
We are now supposed to take all of their policy prescriptions and all the things they say seriously.
And which Democrats should we take seriously?
Well, presumably, we should take seriously the Democrats that the Democrats are taking seriously.
You know, the ones who are considered the new leaders.
We should be taking serious stock of the Democrats that the media say are the ones we should be paying attention to.
How do we know which ones?
Well, let's say that there were a Democrat who'd been ballyhooed as the new wave in the Democratic Party.
A Democrat who'd been featured on social media.
A Democrat who'd been featured with profiles in Vanity Fair, in the New York Times, in the Washington Post.
A Democrat who was featured on 60 Minutes over the weekend.
Would it be fair to pay attention to that person?
I think yes.
And I think that if people said we shouldn't pay attention to that person, that that would be a bit of media sophistry.
If the game were to be that Democrats pay attention to a person and we're supposed to ignore that person, lest we be accused of being obsessed with that person, that would be a bunch of crap.
So the person of whom I'm speaking, of course, is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Now the reason that a lot of folks on the right like to cover Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is because she says dumb things.
A lot.
Sometimes she says dumb things only sometimes.
She says dumb things routinely.
Like all the things she says, 90% of the things she says are dumb.
The only thing she says that are not dumb are things that are pop culturally related.
So when Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez talks about like instant pot recipes on Instagram, not so dumb.
When she talks about how she's a pretty good dancer, not so dumb.
When she talks about economics, it's like she stuck her head in an oven, okay?
The things she says are just idiotic, and she gets caught out saying idiotic things on a routine basis.
But this does not seem to dim her appeal any for Democrats, which leads to an ironic situation.
The same Democrats, who have accused Donald Trump of lowering the standards of truth and fact.
The same Democrats who say that Donald Trump lies on a routine basis about matters of policy are worshipping at the altar of this brash new persona, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is brash and new precisely because she won 12,000 votes in a Democratic primary in a heavily blue district that is majority-minority and where the representative happened to be a white person until Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took over.
The racial issue is only interesting insofar as it had an impact on the voting pattern in that primary.
Okay, the reason that I bring this up is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was on 60 Minutes.
Last week, she proposed what she called a Green New Deal.
The Green New Deal would have required, within 12 years, 100% of the United States economy to be on renewable energy sources.
Right now, only 17% of the U.S.
economy is supported by renewable energy sources.
So we're talking about the cost of tens of trillions of dollars at a minimum using the current technologies that we have.
And if we wanted to develop new technologies, we are probably talking about hundreds of trillions of dollars in order to get to a completely green New Deal.
She also suggested that we should have racial and gender-based equity handled by the Congress of the United States.
And that we should raise the tax rates radically.
So she did this interview on 60 Minutes because she is the new ideological thought leader, which makes sense.
I mean, we've already had the idiocy of watching Bernie Sanders be the ideological thought leader for the Democrats.
We've already watched the Democrats trot out a 70... a near-octogenarian socialist loon bag who's never passed a single piece of decent legislation from Vermont be the ideological thought leader for the Democrats.
So why not prettier, dumber Bernie Sanders?
How about that?
We can go with that, right?
So 60 Minutes brings out Ocasio-Cortez, and she says some things about policy.
So she begins by pushing a 70% marginal tax rate.
This is her big policy proposal, is that what we should do is we should pay for her Green New Deal, which, as I say, would cost tens of trillions of dollars by, you guessed it, taxing rich people more.
You have a progressive tax rate system, your tax rate, you know, let's say from zero to $75,000 may be 10% or 15%, etc.
But once you get to like the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70%.
That doesn't mean all $10 million are taxed.
At an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more.
Okay, this is like watching my four-year-old daughter explain basic addition to me.
I mean, that she has like a certain amount of kind of baseline understanding, but she doesn't really get it.
I like that Alexander Ocasio-Cortez is explaining to Anderson Cooper, who I promise you pays the top marginal tax rate, she's explaining how marginal tax bracket works.
to Anderson Cooper on national television.
This is the new wave of the Democratic Party.
You see, like, when you get up to, like, the very tippy-top and the toppity-tip toes, and when you get to, like, the $10 million, that's taxed at a different rate than, like, if you made $5.
Yes, Alexandria, we know.
And it's still immoral to steal 70% of a dollar that somebody makes for your own private purposes.
Also, the notion that this is going to pay for virtually anything is nuts.
She basically says, OK, if you make over $10 million, then we should tax all of that at a 70% rate.
And one of my favorite things about this is that people in the Democratic Party are then repeating this.
No, it's not that bad.
Like, why would that be so bad?
There is a thread.
On Twitter, this had 75,000 retweets from a person named Diana Anderson.
I don't know who this person is.
This person wrote, "Okay, so a lot of rich white folks "are freaking out about what a 70% tax rate "on the wealthy would look like, "and they're scared about it and bleep, "even though it's literally what rich baby boomers "are he dealt with." First of all, rich baby boomers did not deal with it.
They had massive tax loopholes that were applicable during the Eisenhower era when the top tax bracket, starting at about $3.4 million jointly for households, was at 91%.
The effective tax rate for those households was about 45%.
Here's what this person says, though.
They say, post-World War II, the tax rate peaked at 94% on annual income over $200,000.
This is post-World War II.
You will remember when we were still paying off, you know, a massive military spend.
By the way, $200,000 in 1946 was like 3 million bucks in 2018.
In the decades following, it dropped to a marginal tax rate of 70% of all income over $200,000 annually.
Yes, and if you'll recall, the 1970s sucked economically before Ronald Reagan massively cut the top marginal tax rate.
And this person says, let's take an example of what would happen if we had a 70% income tax rate for people making above $10 million.
So let's say you're Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
You made $65 million last year in one year.
So that $10 million cutoff is going to hit you.
70% off everything above $10 million.
That leaves you with $16.5 million.
Wow, that's a big hit, you think.
On paper, yeah, that's a lot of money to just give up in taxes.
No, not on paper.
In reality, giving up $45 million is a lot of money to give up.
But this person says, that rate still leaves The Rock with nearly $20 million, considering his $10 million is also taxed at a lower rate.
That's $20 million in net pay for a year, which is still a lot of money.
So what's The Rock whining about?
Here's why this is so intensely stupid.
The reason that this is so intensely stupid is because everyone will start using tax avoidance strategies.
How do I know this?
Because France tried to do exactly this.
A few years back, let's go back in the way back machine to like 2017, like two years ago.
The prime minister of France was a guy named Edouard Philippe.
OK, and he had to and he had tried to impose, he had tried to impose, along with Emmanuel Macron, economic reforms that have led to a massive wealth tax.
And what happened?
All the millionaires left France.
In 2016, 12,000 millionaires immigrated from France.
In 2015, 10,000 millionaires left France.
It turns out, you know what rich people are really good at?
Picking up and moving.
It turns out that rich people, if you try to tax them at a 70% rate above $10 million, you know what they'll do?
They will just sell their houses and leave and go live in Monte Carlo.
If you think The Rock is sticking around to watch 40 million bucks of his disappear every year so Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez can pay off her Green Solyndra supporters, you are out of your damned mind.
You're crazy.
It's not going to happen.
And even the Washington Post basically acknowledges this.
They do a full economic workup.
This is my favorite part.
I love this.
This is what they say.
They say, Ocasio-Cortez's suggestion for nearly doubling taxes on people earning more than $10 million would bring in $720 billion per decade, $72 billion a year.
Except that...
Accept that.
That's not what's going to happen.
Here's buried deep in this article from the Washington Post.
The real number is probably smaller than that.
Because wealthy Americans would probably find ways around paying this much higher tax.
Ya think?
Ya think maybe Iraq just wouldn't do as many movies?
I wouldn't work as hard if I knew 70% of my money were going to the federal government.
Already an enormous amount of my money goes to the federal government.
You think I would take on extra jobs just so I could pay the bills for the stupid ideas of our congresspeople?
There's something deeply immoral about stealing 70% of any dollar that anyone makes.
And if you think that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez knows how to spend her money better than The Rock knows how to spend his money, I don't know what to tell you.
I'm with Cardi B. I don't know what the government does with my bleeping money, and neither do you.
And the fact that the federal government is now trying to seize that money and people are cheering this on is nuts.
So this is the new Democratic push, is that they are going to massively raise taxes.
Yeah, go with that.
I also love the baseline lie that is being told here, which is that if you raise the top marginal tax bracket 70%, that's going to pay for everything.
You crazy?
It ain't.
People in Denmark are paying 60% of their income off the top in income tax if you make above $60,000 a year.
You want to pay for Bernie Sanders-like programs?
You can have Bernie Sanders-like taxes.
And those Bernie Sanders-like taxes do not look like a top marginal tax bracket increase.
They look like a massive middle class and lower class tax increase because you must expand the tax base.
If you do not expand the tax base, you're not going to take in more income.
But that wasn't the dumbest thing Ocasio-Cortez said.
She really spilled the beans here, and I'll explain in just one second.
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All right, so that was not the dumbest thing Ocasio-Cortez had to say, but we're not supposed to talk about the dumb things she says again.
Because she's good at Instagram, and she dances sometimes.
Ooh hoo hoo hoo hoo.
So we can't talk about that stuff.
Let's talk instead about how charming she is.
It's amazing.
If you're a Democrat, and you're charming, doesn't matter how dumb you are.
Doesn't matter how many stupid things you say.
If you're a Republican, and you're dumb, doesn't matter how charming you are.
And if you're a Republican, who is both charming and smart, then we call you corrupt.
Dan Crenshaw.
I mean, let's just take, you want to see media bias in a nutshell.
Dan Crenshaw is a war veteran who lost an eye in combat, is clever, is witty, was great when he went on Saturday Night Live.
Has he received one one-hundredth of the media attention that this 29-year-old former bartender socialist from New York is receiving?
Like one iota?
And Dan Crenshaw doesn't say dumb things all the time.
And he actually has a record of service.
And he happens to be smart.
But, you know, if you're the media, then none of that matters, right?
If you're the media, the only thing that matters is that she's a Democrat.
And because she's a Democrat, we have to give her all sorts of leeway.
And if you attack her, if you say that her ideas are bad, then this is because you are a sexist.
Just the same way that if you say Elizabeth Warren is a charmless hack, then this is because you are also a sexist.
Because if you talk about likability, but you're talking about a Democrat, this means that you're a racist or a sexist or a bigot in some way.
Okay, so.
The dumbest thing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said was so dumb on the 60 Minutes interview that even Anderson Cooper looked at her and almost vomited in her lap.
So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked specifically about the fact that she says a lot of things that are not true, that in common parlance, she lies a lot.
She will just trot out arguments that make no sense.
She will say things that are blatantly, factually false.
Listen to her response, because it is telling about the way so many folks on the political left think about what politics is, and it explains why younger generation folks are turning socialist.
What she's about to say is a sign of deep immorality.
Deep philosophical immorality.
But she says it with a straight face, and so we take it seriously.
I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
But being factually correct is important.
It's absolutely important.
And whenever I make a mistake, I say, okay, this was clumsy.
And then I restate what my point was.
But it's not the same thing as The president lying about immigrants.
It's not the same thing at all.
Um, yeah, it is.
So what she says there is that feelings don't matter about your facts, right?
My slogan is facts don't care about your feelings.
For her, feelings don't care about your facts.
So if she's morally right, she can lie.
She can get facts wrong.
We shouldn't worry about her being semantically or factually accurate.
We shouldn't worry about any of those things.
Accuracy is of no consequence when what you're saying is morally right.
So you might say that We should take her seriously, but not literally.
Now, I was informed by Democrats that Donald Trump had lowered the standards of the presidency when it came to truth.
I was informed by Democrats that Donald Trump had destroyed our politics because he says a lot of things that are factually untrue.
And I've said in the past that when Donald Trump says things that are factually untrue, that he should correct them, and that he's wrong, and that sometimes he's lying, and that that's bad.
But Democrats don't actually care about all that.
What Democrats actually care about is the narrative.
So, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when she says, Facts don't actually matter.
What matters is being morally right.
This shows why we are in the state that we are.
She is not actually saying anything different from what Democrats have said for years.
For literally my entire lifetime.
Democrats have been saying my entire lifetime that it is okay to lie so long as you get to the end point that you are seeking.
If you are Barack Obama, you can lie about liking your doctor and keeping your doctor because the ends justify the means.
The ends are morally right, therefore the means, not telling the truth to the American people, that's okay too.
So when Ocasio-Cortez says, I don't have time to tell the truth, people worry too much about me being factually accurate instead of morally right.
One of the ways we decide whether you are morally right is if you are factually accurate.
It's pretty easy to tell.
If somebody's lying all the time to you to get you to do something, Pretty obvious giveaway that what they are trying to get you to do is probably not morally right, because the truth shall set us free.
When we hear a group of facts that are laid together to form an argument, then it is inherently more convincing than a group of lies that are put together to form an endpoint if we know they are lies.
If you have to lie to get somebody to identify with your conclusion, then you are not only doing it wrong, you are doing something immoral itself.
There are certain cases in life where lying is necessary.
And there's certainly the Nazis at your door, and you've got somebody who's a resistor to the Nazis hiding in your basement.
Do you lie to the Nazi?
The typical moral answer would be yes, although Kant would say no.
That is not what we're talking about here.
What we are talking about here is basically lying to the American people because you think that your point is better than their point.
And this is what the Democrats are doing these days.
I don't like it when Republicans do it.
I don't like it when Democrats do it.
I don't like it when Donald Trump says things that are not true about the economy, or about immigration, or about the state of the Middle East.
I don't like when he does any of those things to support his political viewpoint.
It's no better when a Democrat does it.
But to pretend that the standard has only been lowered on one side is a joke.
The standard has been lowered on both sides for years, and it was lowered by Democrats a lot earlier than it was lowered for Republicans.
She just let the cat out of the bag.
So spare me your lectures about Donald Trump undermining American politics.
The same left that disdains Donald Trump for his supposed abolition of basic principles of the presidency, that same left cheers on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez every step of the way.
That same left tells us that Barack Obama never had a scandal.
That same left says that Barack Obama never told a lie.
That same left says that Bill Clinton should still be held up as some sort of halcyon of the presidency and that his wife should have won in 2016.
I'm not going to take moral guidance from these folks.
Which is not going to happen.
And I'm certainly not going to listen to Democrats when they also claim that they actually want to compromise.
That Donald Trump is the one standing in the way of compromise.
And this becomes particularly galling when you're hearing it about the wall.
So the Democrats are claiming now they don't want to compromise, or that Donald Trump doesn't want to compromise.
That they'd love to reach a compromise, but Trump won't compromise.
Again, Ocasio-Cortez, she just says things that are inadvertently true.
Like, Democrats don't care about the truth, and also we'd like to tax the crap out of you.
She also says, Democrats have compromised too much in the past.
She can't name a compromise.
Like, name a Democratic compromise of the last, say, 15 years.
The last time Republicans and Democrats compromised on a bill, honestly, maybe sequestration, even that was not really a compromise.
That was like 2011.
So that was seven years, eight years ago now.
But she says Democrats have compromised too much.
And there's something, I think, deeply telling about the fact that she thinks the Democrats have compromised too much when she can't name a single Democrat a compromise in the last 10 years.
We as a party have compromised too much, and we've lost too much of who we're supposed to be and who we are.
The Democratic Party has lost too much?
I think so.
I think we've compromised things that we shouldn't have compromised, whether it's judgeships with Mitch McConnell, whether it's Compromising on climate change.
I think there are some things that we've compromised a little bit too much on.
Okay, they have not compromised on judgeships.
Harry Reid nuked the filibuster and Mitch McConnell has ran through judges.
And on climate change, Democrats have not compromised on one iota.
They just haven't had the power to get through their radical agenda.
So, again, just a bunch of nonsense.
But it does demonstrate where the Democratic Party's head is at.
They are radical.
They don't care about truth when it comes to, at least if she's a representative of them.
I'm not saying every Democrat.
There are a lot of Democrats out there, I assume, who are still caring about truth, who would still like some compromise, who would still like some moderation, but...
Not in the leadership.
Not in the leadership.
Because Pelosi can't step on Ocasio-Cortez because she knows the passions with Ocasio-Cortez in the same way that the leadership couldn't step on Bernie Sanders because they knew that the passion was with Bernie Sanders.
So what does this lead to?
Well, it leads to the government shutdown that's happening over the border wall.
So let's talk about the latest on the border wall in just one second.
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Okay, so The Democratic intransigence that has been pushed forth by the Democratic base is exactly what I predicted last year and what anybody who's been watching the Democratic Party predicted last year.
This is not a party that was going to come in and be reasonable.
This was a party that was going to come in and push the most radical agenda they could and refuse to compromise on anything.
So Donald Trump has asked for something like $5 billion for a border wall, which, let's face it, would not be sufficient to actually build the border wall.
The actual cost of a border wall apparently is between $11 and $13 billion, not $5 billion.
In any case, $5 billion is a pittance compared to what we spend every year on virtually everything else.
And we do, in fact, have a border problem.
Huge numbers of people are coming across the border.
In 2015, this is according to the Washington Post, the year Donald Trump launched his White House bid with a promise to build a wall on the Mexico border, illegal migration to the United States plunged 31 percent.
Falling near its lowest levels in 50 years.
In 2017, President Trump's first year in office, he continued to insist on the urgent need for a border wall, even as illegal crossings dropped even further.
With parts of the federal government shut down over what has morphed into a defining symbol of Trump's presidency, administration officials are clamoring louder than ever.
Only this time, they face a bona fide emergency on the border.
This is according to the Washington Post.
Again, not the Washington Times.
The Washington Post.
And they're struggling to make the case there's truly a problem.
Record numbers of migrant families are streaming into the United States, overwhelming border agents and leaving them holding cells dangerously overcrowded with children, many of whom are falling sick.
In a letter to lawmakers on Friday, the White House and Department of Homeland Security made a fresh appeal to amend immigration laws they'd announced as legal loopholes and blame for creating a border security and humanitarian crisis.
But this is not going to happen so long as Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats refuse to compromise.
Now, That humanitarian crisis is not being created only by the lack of a border wall.
It's also being created by our immigration procedures, which require us to arrest people and then people have to go to an immigration court.
And while they're not in an immigration court, we either have to imprison them or let them go, which would be catch and release.
All of that is a mess.
And cleaning that up should be top priority.
But Democrats are not interested in cleaning up any of this.
And they are particularly anti the idea of a wall because they don't want Trump to have a victory.
So you end up with idiocies like this.
Nancy Pelosi, Out front and center saying that the wall itself is immoral.
This is what she said last week.
A wall is an immorality.
It's not who we are as a nation.
And this is not a wall between Mexico and the United States that the president is creating here.
It's a wall between reality and his constituents, his supporters.
What the hell does that mean?
A wall between reality and his supporters?
How?
How?
I love that nobody in the media just asks how.
Explain.
When it says this isn't a wall between the US and Mexico, that is literally what it is.
A wall between the United States and Mexico.
Some sort of physical barrier that allows our border patrol agents to know when people are crossing illegally.
Why this is immoral in any way, Democrats have yet to explain.
I love that they can just shout slogans like, it's immoral and it's not who we are.
Whenever a politician assures you it's not who we are, Be aware that all they are trying to do is shame you into not asking the question, why?
Why is it not who we are to protect our own border?
Why?
I will imagine there are certain things that make us not who we are, right?
Imprisoning children, not who we are, because that's not who we are, but building a wall on the border?
That's not who we are.
President Trump responds by saying, we would like a steel barrier, please.
This isn't that tough.
He tweeted out, VP Mike Pence and group had a productive meeting with the Schumer-Pelosi representatives today.
Many details of border security were discussed.
We are now planning a steel barrier rather than concrete.
It is both stronger and less obtrusive.
Good solution and made in the USA.
I don't know why Trump thinks this comes across Obviously, it does not come across as a compromise.
Nonetheless, he is trotting out members of his administration to claim that it is.
Mick Mulvaney, who is his new chief of staff, was on Meet the Press, and he said that President Trump is compromising by shifting from a wall to a fence, which is not actually a compromise, but here he is.
Fences that we have built on the southern border, the ones that were already there under Republican leadership, Democrat leadership, they're in San Diego, they're in El Paso, more than 90% effective in preventing criminal immigration.
We need more of that.
Do we need it from coast to coast, 2,000 miles all the way across?
No, and the President has admitted as such.
There are places in the middle of nowhere where technology will be better.
But a barrier?
Call it a wall, call it a fence.
The President actually said he didn't care what you call it.
He even offered to let the Democrats help him design something.
He says as long as it's effective, he doesn't care what you call it.
We need something to prevent people from coming into this country illegally.
The president isn't wrong on this and Mick Mulvaney is not wrong on this.
I will say that the tactics that are being used by both sides are obviously pandering to their respective bases.
So when it comes to the Democrats, they are pandering to their base by saying we don't need a barrier of any kind.
That walls themselves are an imposition.
Ooh, it's so terrible.
Eric Swalwell, who wants to run for president for some odd reason, he tweeted out that a wall separates us and them.
Right, like citizens and people trying to get in illegally.
Correct, Eric Swalwell.
And then he said that's not who we are in the U.S.
Literally, that's how you define a nation, is by separating us from them.
That doesn't mean that them are bad, but it does mean that you have to separate populations, otherwise you don't know who's a citizen and who is not a citizen.
So Democrats are pandering to their most radical base, and then President Trump is pandering to his base in the sense that he should have done this immediately upon entering office.
He had a Republican Congress, he had a Republican Senate.
Holding his own Senate's feet to the fire would have been a better move than trying to hold Nancy Pelosi's feet to the fire.
Now President Trump is supposedly considering using emergency powers to build the wall.
According to CNN on Friday, President Trump said he was considering using emergency powers which would allow him to use military funding to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
He said, I can do it if I want.
He said, we can call a national emergency because of the security.
I haven't done it.
I may do it, but we can call a national emergency and build it very quickly.
So presumably he would be talking about invoking two separate laws.
One is 10 U.S.
Code Section 284, support for counter drug activities and activities to counter transnational organized crime.
That provision says that the Secretary of Defense may provide support for the counter drug activities or activities to counter transnational organized crime of any department or agency of the federal government if Such support is requested by the official responsible for the counter-drug activities or by the appropriate state officials, and this could amount to the maintenance and repair of equipment that has been used to stop such drug-related activity.
So, it's never been invoked in this way, that you have somebody on the border and then they say to the president, we need border wall, please misdirect funding from other Department of Defense priorities to the wall because of counter-drug activity.
Also, it would be kind of a stretch to suggest that This would fall under maintenance or repair or upgrading of equipment that usually amounts to, you know, making the equipment better, not building an entirely new barrier that spans thousands of miles of United States border.
Legally speaking, it would be difficult for the president to do this, nor really should he, because we don't want the president routinely using national emergency powers to do stuff he can't otherwise get congressional approval for.
10 U.S.
Code 2808 is the other one that he theoretically could use.
This is construction authority in the event of a declaration of war or national emergency.
This is what he's talking about with a national emergency under this provision of U.S.
law.
In the event of a declaration of war or the declaration by the president of a national emergency in accordance with the National Emergencies Act that requires the use of the armed forces, the secretary of defense, without regard to any other provision of law, may undertake military construction projects.
This has only been used in the aftermath of 9-11 to build up military bases in certain areas.
And it's supposed to be an emergency use.
It's supposed to be that Congress just hasn't had time to consider the reprioritization of defense funding.
It is not really supposed to be a way of overruling Congress when Congress doesn't want to do something.
Listen, again, I'm in favor of the wall.
I'm in favor of Trump putting pressure on Congress over the wall.
I'm in favor of Trump saying that he's happy to shut down the government.
I don't really care about any of that.
What I do care about is you don't get to expand the national emergency powers of the executive branch without understanding that Democrats will do exactly the same thing the other way.
Wait until the shoe's on the other foot and Democrats declare that they are going to have to build out some sort of facility that you don't want them to build out, some national surveillance facility that you don't want them to build out because Congress won't give them what they want and it's a national emergency.
Wait until they do that.
Expanding the powers of the presidency is never a good idea, even when you think that the president is somebody of your party who's doing something that you like.
This would be struck down in court, and it should be struck down in court.
Now, in just a second, I want to talk about an ideological rift that's broken out inside the Republican Party that I think is really deeply, deeply important.
It's because of a monologue Tucker Carlson gave that brings it up.
I want to get to this.
I really think it may be the most important thing that we talk about today.
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Okay, I want to get to what I think is actually the most important section of today's show, which is Tucker Carlson's take on populism and the debate that's now broken out on the right over the role of government in American life and in the economy.
But first, you're going to have to go over to dailyware.com and subscribe.
So today it begins.
Starting today, The Ben Shapiro Show is rolling out two more hours of me.
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So one of the things I love talking about on the show is obviously conservative philosophy and ideology.
You know, the things that are really important that we like to discuss.
Because while the left is a real threat, there is also a serious debate that is broken out inside the right over the role of the free market.
Now, I know that a lot of folks who are kind of older conservatives, Reagan conservatives, they're not necessarily aware that this debate has broken out because it's been glossed over by a lot of politicians.
A lot of politicians say things like, I love the free market, but...
Well, once you add that but to the end of I love the free market, what you're really talking about is government interventionism in the market.
The person who made, I think, the best case for such interventionism made that case last week.
He gave a monologue on his Fox News show, Tucker Carlson.
It was about a 15-minute monologue regarding the future of economics and politics in the United States.
Now, I've interviewed Tucker Carlson.
We did a Sunday special on my podcast with Tucker where we discussed a lot of these issues.
I really think that Tucker is wrong on a lot of this, but I think that the economic populism he's espousing is becoming increasingly popular in a Republican Party that has forgotten a lot of its free market capitalistic roots.
And is ignoring the benefits of the free market in favor of government interventionism.
I think they are looking for fixes in the wrong places.
I think what ails America right now is a crisis of soul.
What ails America right now is a hole in the American heart.
A hole that used to be filled by community and social fabric and religion and that has fallen apart and now people are seeking to fill that hole with economic solutions.
In the same way that some folks on the left seek to fill that hole in the American heart with economic solutions, they attribute the problems in America to bad policy.
And there's truth to the idea that the American government has pursued bad policy, but I would say that bad policy is largely welfare-based.
Tucker and a lot of members of the Republican Party are now claiming That the bad policy is trade-based, for example, that we need tariffs.
Or that it is a failure of redistributionism, that we need higher taxes.
These are cases being made by actual populists inside the Republican coalition.
So I think the strongest possible case for this was made by Tucker over the last week.
And he basically argues that the social breakdown that we are seeing is a result of government non-interventionism.
We actually need more government in our lives.
So here is how Tucker let off his monologue.
What kind of country will it be then?
How do we want our grandchildren to live?
Those are the only questions that matter.
The answer to them used to be obvious.
The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods.
But is that still true?
Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy?
They haven't so far.
A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff, and yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country.
Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.
Okay, the health of a nation cannot be summed up in GDP.
I don't know a single Republican conservative who believes that the health of a nation overall can be summed up in GDP.
I have decried the breakdown of our social fabric in a time when we are freer and more prosperous than we have ever been.
That breakdown, though, is not attributable to economics.
And here's where Tucker goes wrong.
So what Tucker says is, our GDP has gone up and our life expectancy in the last couple of years has gone down.
Obviously, that's an economic problem.
I would say no.
What we've seen over the past two centuries is a massive rise in life expectancy, a massive decline in child mortality.
Our children are alive and our parents are alive because of the rise of free markets and capitalism and innovation and entrepreneurship, low taxes, less government regulation.
All of that has led to the prosperity we enjoy.
If we are blowing that, That is our own fault.
That doesn't have to do with our capacity to get those cheap products.
He can decry cheap products from Amazon as much as he wants, but you have a nicer phone, you have a nicer car, you have a nicer house, you have a nicer table, you have a nicer microwave, you have a nicer refrigerator, you have all those things because of the free market.
Now, nobody said that that stuff was going to make you happy.
But to conflate the two problems as though the nicer refrigerator is what has made you unhappy is a huge mistake.
And it's a mistake made by people who are on the left and also on the right.
So what I would say is, yes, all this stuff has made us more prosperous.
It hasn't necessarily made us more happy.
I don't know a single religious person who's ever made an opposite contention, by the way.
Moses says this, Jesus says this, every major prophet of the Old Testament says this, that stuff isn't going to make you happy.
The Beatles said it, right?
Stuff ain't gonna make you happy.
But Tucker seems to think that if you redistribute the stuff, then that may make you more happy.
So Tucker goes on and he says that what we really need is an economy that is structured for us, the people.
Now this sounds a lot more like Bernie Sanders than it does like Ronald Reagan.
And this is happening inside the Republican Party.
So here is what Tucker had to say.
The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity.
It's happiness.
There are a lot of ingredients in being happy.
Dignity, purpose, self-control, independence, above all, deep relationships with other people.
Those are the things that you want for your children.
They're what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.
So I agree that our leaders don't want enough social fabric for us, but again, this is not an economic problem.
And when Tucker says this is an economic problem, he's got a problem himself.
When he says that the goal in America is happiness, no, the goal in America is pursuit of happiness.
If you fail to pursue happiness properly, that is your fault.
Freedom is about getting everyone out of the way, and then it's your job To pursue happiness, which the founders saw as an actual goal.
Happiness was not just like what you want to do today.
Happiness was pursuing virtue in accordance with reason.
That's what happiness was to the founders.
And so the idea was government was going to get in your way, get government out of your way, and now it's your job to pursue happiness.
And a free economy allows you to alienate your labor and to act like a free person in doing so.
All of that is good and necessary and vital.
But the economy and your spiritual existence are two different things.
So in a second, I want to get to more from Tucker on this.
Because I think that he's not wrong when he points out that we have a sole problem in the United States.
He's wrong when he says we can fill that sole problem with an economics solution.
When he says that we want dignity and purpose and self-control and independence for our children, that's true.
But that's not a problem that can be solved by simply slapping a tariff on China.
As a parent, these are problems that are solved by you talking to your children about values, and morality, and decency.
That's where the lack comes in.
17-year-olds are not committing suicide because Pops lost his job at the factory in 1994.
17-year-olds are committing suicide because their parents got divorced.
17-year-olds are committing suicide because they live in a world without values, without social fabric, and without guidance.
That's why 17-year-olds are killing themselves.
That's why the opioid epidemic is happening.
It's happening because, yes, there were markets created for addictive substances.
And that's a place where we can talk about how the market has failed.
But that's not really what Tucker's talking about.
What he's talking about is the idea that an economy ought to be chained up and it ought to work for us.
Except you can't enslave an economy any more than you can properly enslave a person.
Nor should you.
Freedom matters.
So Tucker continues by saying that the big problem here is not that we don't know what to do, it's that our leaders just don't care about us.
And this I object to.
I think that our leaders do care about us.
I just think they suck at their jobs.
I think they care about pandering to us for votes.
I think maybe what we ought to have is a leadership class that is more concerned with doing right Then is concerned with pleasing its own population.
Edmund Burke talked about this a lot, the British statesman.
He suggested that being a representative of your public didn't just mean channeling what your public wants at any given moment.
It also meant sometimes standing up to that public and saying that what's best for them is not necessarily what they think it is.
Maybe what's best for them is freedom.
Being an elitist, it's so funny, Tucker rails against the elites.
I rail against elitists.
I think people who think they can control your life are the people who are wrong.
Tucker seems to think that the people who control your life ought to simply take control of the ring that is the government, like the J.R.R.
Tolkien ring that is the government, and use it on behalf of you.
My view is that that is an elitist point of view.
Nobody should control that ring because that ring does not belong to anyone.
The market is something we hold in common.
Our society is something we hold in common.
You don't get to seize the power from that society and then administer it top-down for the benefit of any particular group, no matter how much that group happens to be suffering.
Here's Tucker, though, making this case.
But our leaders don't care.
We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.
One of the biggest lies our leaders tell us is that you can separate economics from everything else that matters.
Economics is a topic for public debate.
Family and faith and culture, meanwhile, those are personal matters.
Both parties believe this.
That is not true at all.
Okay, the Democratic Party does not actually believe that economics is a topic for public debate, but family, faith, and culture are personal matters.
That's nonsense.
He called the Democratic Party in this monologue, functionally libertarian.
How disconnected do you have to be to believe that the Democratic Party is functionally libertarian?
They want to control every aspect of your life, but they are functionally libertarian.
It's because Tucker and a lot of populists are trying to create a third wave, right?
A new wave of people who are not Republicans and not Democrats.
They're populists.
Except it turns out that both, if there is some sort of consensus, it is from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party that they ought to control too much of your life.
Not that they agree that we shouldn't control any of your life, but that they ought to control too much of your life and restructure the economy to their liking.
Tucker makes the case that social conservatives have blown it.
Why?
Because he says that market forces have destroyed the family.
So again, this is Tucker railing against the free market.
This is happening inside the conservative movement.
Now, I like and respect Tucker a lot.
I think Tucker's a smart guy.
I think he's really talented.
But I think that this is dangerous stuff from a conservative point of view.
Tucker suggests that families are being crushed by market forces.
Here's what he has to say.
by market forces never seems to occur to them.
They refuse to consider it.
Questioning markets feels like apostasy.
Both sides in this miss the obvious point.
Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined.
Certain economic systems allow families to thrive.
You know which economic systems allow families to thrive?
The same economic systems that allow individuals to thrive.
Free markets allow families to thrive.
Socialist countries do not have solid families.
Communist countries do not have solid families.
When the government becomes your family, your family falls apart.
If you believe that capitalism has undermined the free market, I mean, it has undermined the family, what I would suggest is that cultural forces have undermined the family at the same time that capitalism has eliminated poverty globally.
Again, that's our fault.
Cultural forces and economic forces may be intertwined, but not so much so that added prosperity means that families are falling apart.
So how exactly does Tucker make that case?
So I would make the case that the economic forces that have led to the decline of families largely lie in the welfare state.
So the welfare state that has convinced people that they don't need to stay with their partner when raising a child.
That has destroyed the family.
And you can see the statistics.
In 1960, basically the White illegitimacy rate to make this a non-racial issue.
The white illegitimacy rate was near zero.
Today it's 36%.
That doesn't happen because of simple freedom in the free market.
That happens because people have been incentivized not to stick around with their kids and with their wives.
And women have been incentivized not to stick around with their husbands.
But Tucker basically proclaims that the free markets have led to the decline of family.
He says that male wages declined because manufacturing has declined.
First of all, it's not factually true.
Manufacturing has not disappeared.
It's remarkably stable.
The rest of our economy has grown.
Manufacturing represents less of a percentage of our overall economy than it did 50 years ago, but it represents exactly the same amount of productivity that it did 50 years ago.
The middle class in the United States is not disappearing.
And then he suggests that women are making too much money and that's why they're not getting married, which again is contrary to what's actually happening.
The women who are not getting married are not women making $100,000 a year and then having a baby out of wedlock.
The women who are not getting married are the women who are making $20,000 a year and don't have a marriageable husband.
And are getting knocked up.
I mean, that's where single motherhood is coming from.
Now, the real problem that I have, where it finally comes down, is that Tucker basically suggests that we have a rich class in the United States of elites who are not helping out the poor class in the United States enough, and they ought to be doing so with money.
My contention is that this is not a money problem.
This is not a money problem.
There are plenty of market failures, there are plenty of problems with the market, and we can talk about those.
But to pretend that capitalism, that market capitalism, he says, market capitalism is a tool like a staple gun or a toaster.
No, market capitalism is a representation of our deepest values, a value that suggests that we are free individuals with the capacity to alienate our own labor, to contract with each other, to make deals with each other, to make free choices in our own life.
Market capitalism is not one choice among many.
It is the only free choice in a land of tyranny.
Market capitalism isn't the problem here.
The problem is a problem of the human soul and the breakdown of the social institutions that inculcated virtue and that virtue was necessary to upholding a stable free market in which people could live together in peace and solidarity.
Okay, with all that said, time for some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So...
Things that I like today.
So over the weekend, I went and I saw Aquaman.
Now, I know everyone thinks I'm a DC partisan because I am a DC partisan, but hey, I'll say it.
I thought Justice League was abysmal, right?
I said it at the time.
I thought Justice League stunk.
And when I saw the preview for Aquaman, I didn't know what to think.
I mean, it looked kind of cheesy.
And it is.
And it's great.
OK, Aquaman, first of all, the special effects are better than anything you've seen in a Marvel movie in the recent past at all.
I mean, the special effects in this movie are actually first rate.
There are a couple of scenes that just look great.
And Jason Momoa, who plays Aquaman, it's not that he's a great actor, but he plays Jason Momoa.
And it turns out Jason Momoa is really good at playing Jason Momoa.
Aquaman is basically a dude bro.
And it's kind of great.
It's kind of fun.
So here's a little bit of the preview, which doesn't do justice to the actual movie, which is raking in the money, as well it should, because it's a pretty good movie.
And it's certainly a lot of fun to watch and look at.
Here's a little bit of the preview.
My father was a lighthouse keeper.
My mother was a queen.
But life is a way of bringing people together.
We could unite our worlds one day.
Check it out!
Arthur is talking to the fish.
Oh, let me go!
They made me what I am. - Okay, so it's kind of great, and Jason Momoa is kind of great, and there's some really terrific action set pieces.
What's amazing about the DC Universe is that they really blew it in how they rolled this thing out.
So, they rolled out Man of Steel, which is the Superman movie, and then they did not do a standalone Batman movie, and then they did not do a standalone Wonder Woman movie, and then they did not do a standalone Aquaman or Cyborg movie.
Instead, they rolled out Justice League, right?
They did Man of Steel, and then they did Batman v. Superman, and then they did Justice League.
Like, all of these right back-to-back.
I think they did Wonder Woman right before Justice League, actually.
What you have to do is what Marvel did, right?
You bring out each of these heroes individually in their own movie, and then you have the crossover.
So they blew that.
But anybody who says the DC Universe is dead, Wonder Woman is a standalone franchise, and that's making all sorts of money.
Aquaman is now a standalone franchise.
This movie is going to make more money than Wonder Woman by leaps and bounds.
It's made a bunch, a bunch of money because it's a pretty good movie.
So that means Aquaman is alive, and it means that Wonder Woman is alive.
It means you need to recast Superman.
It means you need to recast Batman.
It means that you need to do a cyborg movie that's actually pretty good.
And then it means that you need to do another crossover movie and basically act like Justice League didn't exist.
That's what has to happen in the DC Universe.
But the DC Universe is very much alive and kicking and good for the people who put together Aquaman, which is a fun movie, okay?
Okay, other things that I like today.
So, there is a rule in politics that there are certain things that you're not allowed to say, that you just can't say.
One of the things you're not allowed to say and you're not allowed to talk about is what they call rapid-onset gender dysphoria.
So we talked about this a few months back.
There was an abstract from Brown University that specifically talked about how basically gender dysphoria was being treated like cutting or like bulimia or anorexia.
It was becoming a trendy thing among certain groups.
of particularly young women, and then people were sort of doing it in groups, that people who were surrounded by folks who considered themselves transgender were more likely to start considering themselves transgender.
Abigail Schreier has a very, very gutsy column in today's Wall Street Journal talking about all of this, saying, like other social contagions, such as cutting and bulimia, rapid onset gender dysphoria overwhelmingly afflicts girls, but unlike other conditions, this one, though not necessarily at sufferers, gets full support from the medical community.
The standard for dealing with teens who assert they are transgender is affirmative care, immediately granting the patient's stated identity.
There are, to be sure, a few dissenters.
This idea of what we're supposed to do as therapists is to affirm?
That's not my job, says psychotherapist Lisa Marciano.
If I work with somebody who's really suicidal because his wife left him, I don't call his wife up and say, hey, you've got to come back.
We don't treat suicide by giving people exactly what they want, but giving in to patients' demands is exactly what most medical professionals do when faced with ROGD.
Like fashionable and tragic misdiagnoses of the past, this one comes with irreversible physical trauma.
And this column is a gutsy column talking about something you're not supposed to talk about, which is the fact that rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a thing, that it is not a reflection of a deep-seated biological need to change your gender, that the treatment for it is not always effective, and that maybe we ought to consider more seriously before we go along with the, it's time to mutilate your body because you said six months ago and discovered six months ago that you're a member of the opposite gender because you went to a gender studies course at Brown.
It's a pretty gutsy column, you should go check it out in today's Wall Street Journal.
Okay, time for a couple of quick things that I hate.
So the Golden Globes were, last night, they were predictably terrible.
The Golden Globes, I don't even know why anyone pays attention to them.
It's the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which is like seven guys who are really old from places we don't care about.
And they gave the top musical or drama award, or musical or comedy award, to the Queen movie.
Which, apparently, to Bohemian Rhapsody, which apparently wasn't even very good.
And then they gave the best drama award to, I believe, Green Book?
Correct?
Which is, by all accounts, rather mediocre.
Like, it's okay, but it's something special.
Not a shock there.
Also not a shock when a bunch of people got up and made leftist messaging points because this is what we do now.
So here is Christian Bale.
Christian Bale won a Best Actor in a Comedy award for Vice because we have to give lots of awards to a movie that no one has ever seen or will see.
Vice, a movie about Dick Cheney, apparently scrawled in crayon by Adam McKay.
Christian Bale gets up and credits Satan for his inspiration in playing Dick Cheney.
He should know, since he allegedly had a physical altercation with his own mother and was screaming at the light people famously on set.
Christian Bale, famous crazy person, talking about how Satan was his inspiration for Dick Cheney.
Thank you to that geezer over there, Adam.
He said, he said, uh, he said, I've got to find somebody who can, who can be absolutely charisma-free and reviled by everybody.
So he went, that's got to be Bale.
What do you think?
Mitch McConnell?
Next?
That could be good, couldn't it?
Thank you to Satan for giving me inspiration on how to play this role.
Okay, so he's the second prominent leftist after Saul Alinsky to thank Satan for his inspiration.
But it is amazing how everybody claps and cheers in Hollywood for all this sort of stuff.
Do you think anybody in Hollywood would ever have the balls to do a movie like this about Hillary Clinton, who actually is extraordinarily Parodical?
Like you could just do a parody of her full time?
Of course not.
The best part of this Golden Globes, by the way, was the opening monologue where Andy Samberg, along with Sandra Oh, is that who that is?
So the two of them did a monologue in which they made no jokes because this is what they have been relegated to.
What's funny about this is that everybody gets the joke, but nobody's willing to say that the joke is that everyone in Hollywood is a nasty, nasty, horrible human being who will destroy somebody's career on a whim.
Here is the opening monologue where they deliberately make no jokes.
Without mentioning that the real reason they're making no jokes is because everyone is scared crapless in Hollywood of having their career destroyed like Kevin Hart has had his career destroyed.
We're gonna have some fun, give out some awards, and one lucky audience member will host the Oscars!
Now, some of you may be wondering why the two of us are hosting together.
And the reason is, we're the only two people left in Hollywood who haven't gotten in trouble for saying something offensive.
Oh, Sandra, that reminds me.
You know what race of people really gets under my skin?
Andy?
The Hollywood half-marathon.
Because it messes up all the traffic, you know?
Oh, yeah.
I hate that race of people.
It's the worst race of people.
Okay, so again, this is what humor has been relegated to, and they don't even get that this is what they've done, right?
This is what Hollywood has done.
They're laughing at their own inability to laugh at things.
So, well done, Hollywood.
Just really, really expert stuff right there.
Okay, final point in the things that I hate today.
So, I want to mention this.
Last week, I had a meeting with some folks at a charity.
I don't want to mention which charity because it's really not relevant.
It was a non-partisan charity involved in a cause that is supremely non-partisan.
It was a charity in the arts, right?
And they were looking for a board member.
And I was seriously considering joining the board of this charity because why the hell not?
And then it occurred to me, I mean, I warned them, look, I'm political, which means that probably there'll be other people on the board who don't like what I have to say, but who cares?
I don't like what they have to say.
We're all here to help out people in the arts.
And one of the board members said, well, there may come a point where there's a bunch of resistance to you and we have to throw you off the board.
And it occurred to me that we now live in a reality so nasty and terrible that if you are of the right wing, you cannot actually be on a nonpartisan board helping people in completely nonpartisan ways, in completely anodyne ways, out of fear that somebody will target you and other members of the left who are on the nonpartisan board will see fit to destroy your life for having tried to do something charitable.
That's where we are.
Well, the same thing is true in comedy.
The same thing is true in Hollywood.
It's true across the board.
It's really nasty and it's really ugly.
If we can't get together on nonpartisan boards to even do good things out of fear that someday somebody is going to come down on one of the members of the board and the other members of the board will see fit to destroy that person who is just there trying to do a good thing, I don't know how we're going to get along.
I mean, you want to talk about the breakdown of the social fabric that has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with values, principles, and decency, all of which seem to have fled via the back door.
All right.
Well, we will be back here a little bit later today.
So go check it out over at dailywire.com.
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.
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Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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