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Jan. 29, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:01
Easier For A Kamala To Pass Through The Eye Of A Needle | Ep. 705
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Kamala Harris does her big town hall.
Howard Schultz preps his presidential run.
And Democrats talk up Marxism.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh man, a lot of news coming your way.
And also a lot of me blowing my nose because this cold just will not leave.
We'll get to all the news in just a second.
But first, let's talk about the fact that in 2008, the U.S.
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All right, so it is obvious that the radical Democratic base has now taken over the entire party because there are no centrists left who are running for president in 2020 in the Democratic Party.
It's amazing to watch as members of the media label random members of the Democratic coalition centrists.
So they've been making the claim that Kamala Harris, the senator from California, is the new centrist.
She's a centrist voice as opposed to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Now, the reason that they are saying that is because she had a history as a prosecutor.
So that means that, naturally, she is more centrist than a lot of the other Democratic members of the coalition.
The only problem is, she isn't.
And she served as a prosecutor because she felt that would be a gateway to higher office.
But the reality is that Kamala Harris is every bit the radical of Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders, or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, or anybody else you think is the face of the radical Democratic Party.
Now, she's getting hit from the left today.
And the reason she's being hit from the left is, again, because of that prosecutorial career.
There's a clip going around of her speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
Really nice group of folks.
And it's a clip of her back when she was Attorney General of the state of California, talking about how she used to prosecute the parents of kids who were truant.
Here's what she said.
She said, I believe a child going without without an education is tantamount to a crime.
So I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy.
Well, that was a little controversial in San Francisco.
And you can actually see her laughing in the tape.
She says, frankly, my staff went bananas.
They were very concerned at the time.
We didn't know at the time whether I was going to have an opponent in my reelection race.
I said, look, I'm done.
This is a serious issue.
I've got a little capital.
I'm going to spend some of it.
And this is what we did.
We recognized as a prosecutor in law enforcement, I have a huge stick.
The school system has a carrot.
Let's work in tandem around our collective objective and goal, which is to get those kids in school.
Well, the internet was going nuts over this last night because the suggestion is that Kamala Harris was going after parents of kids who were truant.
And really what you require is a social worker in these cases.
You don't require a police officer.
It's kind of fascinating to watch as the left resonates to Kamala Harris despite her record in this particular area.
It is also important to note that when she says something should be tantamount to a crime, you as Attorney General do not get to decide what is and is not a crime.
You do not get to decide that everything you don't like is now enforceable by the police.
If you do, that makes you a centralized government control tyrant.
And Kamala Harris does have those tendencies.
But all of that is being pushed to the side by the fact that Kamala Harris is an intersectional candidate.
She's female and she's black.
And that means that she must be a great, great candidate, even if she's spouting the same nonsense that all the other Democratic candidates are spouting ad nauseum.
So last night she did a town hall on CNN and it was just a wonderful example of CNN, again, playing host to a propaganda piece on behalf of a Democrat.
So she's in front of a group of people, probably, you know, 400, 500 people maybe.
And I love that CNN was like, she did this in Des Moines, Iowa, and CNN was touting this online, like, wow, look at the crowd Kamala Harris can draw.
Not to be self-centered here for a second.
I have not spoken to a crowd smaller than 500 people in probably three years.
And I'm not a senator from California.
So it's pretty amazing that people are now touting this as an example of her ability to get people out there.
I mean, CNN's broadcasting this thing live.
You think CNN is going to be interested in hosting an event that has a bunch of empty seats in the background?
In any case, she was asked a bunch of questions about policy, and she proved just how radical she is.
So she was specifically asked about private health care insurance.
So she is a proponent of Medicare for All, the Bernie Sanders plan that would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, it would double the size of the federal government, and it would also destroy the private sector.
Now, there are a lot of folks who say, well, you know, Medicare for All wouldn't destroy the private sector because health insurance would still continue to exist in the private sector.
But, according to Kamala Harris, she actually wants it to destroy private sector medical insurance.
She believes that everybody should be thrown onto government care.
That you shouldn't be able to buy private sector health insurance.
Because once the taxpayer is footing the bill for Medicare, Number one, there's not going to be a ton of money left over to pay for private health care insurance.
Two, most people are going to be getting their health care insurance through the government of the United States.
And three, if you have private health insurers competing with the federal government, that's not good for the federal government, because the federal government is then going to have its care rejected.
This is the great hole in a lot of these systems.
You can have supplemental health insurance in a lot of nationalized health care countries.
For example, in Canada, you can get supplemental health insurance, although it took a while for them to allow even that.
In Israel now, you can finally get supplemental health insurance.
In Australia, most people have private supplemental health care insurance.
Medicare for All in Australia is really just for basic care.
But for full proponents of Medicare for All, people who believe that the government should cover all costs, it's going to come down to rationing.
And it's going to come down to banning private healthcare insurance.
Because remember, let's say that there's a private healthcare insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield or something, and that private healthcare insurer can offer doctors a better reimbursement rate than Medicare.
Well, who do you think the doctors are going to look to In order to get patients.
Are they going to look to Medicare?
Or are they going to look to the private healthcare insurers?
That's why many countries have outright banned private healthcare insurance.
They don't want to compete with the private sector.
They want to crowd the private sector out.
So Kamala Harris was asked specifically about this and she came down full scale on the side of nationalization of the healthcare system and full scale destruction of private health insurance.
Here is Kamala Harris doing just that.
I believe the solution, and I actually feel very strongly about this, is that we need to have Medicare for All.
And you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require.
Who of us has not had that situation where you've got to wait for approval and the doctor says, well, I don't know if your insurance company is going to cover this?
Let's eliminate all of that.
Let's move on.
So in other words, 95% of people in the United States have health care from their insurance company via their employer.
If you like your doctor, you will not be able to keep your doctor.
If you like your plan, you will not be able to keep your plan.
She wants to take all of those things directly from you.
I mean, this is a massive segment of the United States economy.
If you think that you're going to remove legitimately like a trillion dollars from American industry with no questions asked, and that people are going to be supremely happy when you take away their health plan, Then think again.
Now think about Obamacare.
Obamacare is a piece of crap legislation, but the thing about Obamacare is that Obamacare was purportedly about trying to help people in the individual market.
If you had your health insurance program through your employer, Obamacare theoretically did not touch it.
Now, that's not true.
Obamacare did regulate the insurance companies and make it nearly impossible for you to get the same level of care.
At the same cost as you did before.
It raised health care costs across the board.
But it was specifically driven by the needs in the individual market.
People who had lost their jobs and had a health problem and now couldn't get health insurance.
But it was not directed at destroying the entire system.
Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, these are folks who want to destroy the entire system from the very center of the system.
They want your plan to be gone.
They want your doctor to be gone.
It was an amazing statement by Kamala Harris to just come out and say that part.
She said the quiet part out loud.
Now, everybody knows that that is where this is going, but everybody is pretending that that is not where this is going right now.
Here's what Kamala Harris actually said.
She said she felt very strongly about Medicare for All.
And then, when she was pressed by Jake Tapper, if that means eliminating private insurance, she said yes.
She said yes.
She said the idea is everyone gets access to medical care.
Okay, and then she said, let's just get rid of it.
So there's no, let's just be done with it.
Well, I'm glad that she can summarily dismiss 25% of the American economy right off the top.
And by the way, the part of the economy that also happens to generate all of the medical innovation, that also happens to generate all of the profit incentive for doctors to go into the industry in the first place.
Democrats are incredibly extreme on this stuff.
All Trump should do for the next two years if Kamala Harris is indeed the Democratic nominee is play the clip of her over and over and over again saying she's going to take away her health care program.
She's going to take away her health insurance.
Let's see how the elderly feel about that.
Let's see how you feel about that when she says she's taking away health insurance for your child so that you can work with a government bureaucrat.
I also love the suggestion by Kamala Harris there that the solution to all of your paperwork ills is the federal government.
Since when has that ever been true?
Has there been any area of American life in which your life has been made simpler by the federal government?
Like less paperwork?
I highly doubt it.
But that wasn't her only extreme statement of the night.
She was also asked specifically about guns.
And she said that we should basically ban all semi-automatic weapons in the United States.
There is no reason in a civil society that we have assault weapons around communities that can kill babies and police officers.
There is no reason why we cannot have reasonable gun safety laws in this country.
And guess what, guys?
Here's the reality of it, also.
We're not waiting for a good idea.
We have the good ideas.
An assault weapons ban.
Background checks.
Okay, so she then went on and she specifically said, you know what we should do?
We should force legislators to look at autopsy photos.
And this is the ugliest part of American politics right now.
The idea that if you disagree with Kamala Harris about her gun proposals, it's because you just don't care about the children.
If only you cared about the children, then you would agree with her.
That all semi-automatic weapons in the United States, when she says assault rifles, she means semi-automatic weapons, that all semi-automatic weapons in the United States ought to be banned or confiscated outright.
You are talking about hundreds of millions of weapons in the United States.
And she suggests that if I oppose her stupid policy, then that's because I don't care about dead kids.
Here she is doing this routine.
Twenty six and seven year old babies were massacred in Connecticut.
They failed to act.
Here's what I think.
I think that somebody should have required, and this is going to sound very harsh, I think somebody should have required all those members of Congress to go in a room, in a locked room, no press, no one, nobody else, and look at the autopsy photographs of those babies.
And then you vote your conscience.
Okay, so we're going to force them to look at the pictures Kamala Harris wants them to look at in order to get them to change their mind.
Okay, fine.
If she wants that to be the case, then how about this?
How about every Democrat in the United States Congress has to look at a picture of an aborted baby at 22 weeks, and then they can vote their conscience on free choice.
Then they can vote their conscience on whether it's okay to slaughter babies in the womb.
But people on the left would say, well, you know, that's an emotional appeal.
That's not a logical appeal.
Well, that's exactly what Kamala Harris is doing there with regard to slaughtered kids in classrooms.
The suggestion that I'm supposed to give up my rifle because something bad happened to kids not perpetrated by me.
By somebody I would have attempted to stop if I'd been there with my gun.
We'll get to more of the extremism of Kamala Harris in just a second.
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Kamala Harris making the case that we should ban all assault rifles in the country.
So far, we're going to ban private health insurance, and we're going to ban all semi-automatic weapons in the United States.
But that's not all from Kamala Harris.
She also continues by saying that we should basically ban all private vehicles in the United States.
She said she backs the Green New Deal.
This is the new, fresh thing among Democrats, is the Green New Deal.
Now, as you'll recall, the Green New Deal is this purported piece of legislation that would radically shift the nature of the American economy.
The idea is that within a decade, we would be completely carbon fuel free.
We would no longer be using gas.
We would no longer be using coal.
We would be carbon neutral.
And the idea here is that we would require a vast shifting of how the American economy works.
The cost on this Green New Deal, by the way, would be $18 trillion.
$18 trillion over the course of the next decade or so.
Sorry, I'm underestimating.
The Green New Deal, according to PJ Media Analysis, would cost $49 trillion in the first 10 years.
That's an amazing, amazing statement, but it doesn't matter.
The entire left has decided to resonate around all of this.
The Green New Deal would include a federal jobs program.
It would include getting rid, basically, of all private cars.
And here is Kamala Harris supporting it.
We've been hearing more about a Green New Deal to fight climate change.
You have yet to fully endorse or reject it.
Will you fully endorse the Green New Deal tonight?
I support a Green New Deal and I will tell you why.
Climate change is an existential threat to us and we have got to deal with the reality of it.
All children need to be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water.
We've got to have a commitment to a policy that will allow that to happen for ourselves and our children and our grandchildren and right now we don't.
That Green New Deal that she is endorsing right there requires cutting the United States military in half, ending 87% of U.S.
energy, and banning cars.
So that is the new program that she is supporting, Kamala Harris.
Very exciting stuff.
If you think that this is mainstream thought, it is inside the Democratic Party.
I mean, it's pretty astonishing.
It's pretty astonishing.
So, so far, ban guns, ban private health care, and ban cars.
But at least we know she's a moderate.
That's the really important thing, is at least we know that Kamala Harris is a big moderate, according to members of the Democratic Party.
Then, finally, Harris got to her prosecutorial record.
So as we say, she's pandering to the left.
She's just as left as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
And she was asked specifically about her prosecutorial record.
And this is where she's going to have a little bit of trouble with the radical left inside her own party.
I compare my record to any prosecutor, any elected prosecutor in this country, in terms of the work that I have done to reform the criminal justice system.
I am a daughter of parents who met when they were active in the civil rights movement.
Nobody had to teach me about the disparities in the criminal justice system.
I was born knowing what they are.
I made a conscious decision to become a prosecutor because I understood if we're going to reform systems, yes there is going to be the power that we have on the outside and also we need to have people on the inside where the decisions are being made.
By the way, the question she was asked was why she did not support a bill requiring her office to investigate fatal shootings involving police officers.
And her answer was, I'm black and that's why I became a prosecutor.
Which is not a good answer.
Okay, so she's gonna get flack from the left and from the right on her prosecutorial record.
The good news is that the flack from the left is only gonna last so long.
As the media focus on the question, which is to say, not long at all.
They're instead going to focus on the radical leftist policy she takes on, for example, border security.
So she was asked last night about her position on a border wall, and she said something so radical that most Democrats, I would think, disagree with it, which is that she will not be in favor of a border wall under any circumstances, even if it means guaranteeing the legal status of so-called dreamers who are already in the United States.
Let me be very clear.
I'm not going to vote for a wall under any circumstances.
And I do support border security.
And if we want to talk about that, let's do that.
And let's talk about what really accomplishes border security, which is let's upgrade the technology.
Let's look at the fact that the folks who are working on border security on the ground know that they need upgraded infrastructure around things like drones and they need cameras.
So yes, I'm all for increased border security where we need it.
I am not for a wall.
Okay, so she still can't explain what kind of border security she wants.
She has something about drones and cameras, but that really doesn't solve any of the question.
And saying that she would leave the Dreamers hanging, specifically to avoid Trump's program, is pretty amazing stuff.
There's an article in the New York Times today that does point out a serious flaw for Kamala Harris.
I've pointed out her prosecutorial record here a couple of times.
It is too right-wing for the left and too left-wing for the right.
Well, the New York Times has an article today talking about how that could really impact Kamala Harris' race with regard to black voters.
So the title of the piece is, Can Kamala Harris Repeat Obama's Success with Black Voters?
It's Complicated.
They say, Interviews with more than 30 black voters and political leaders in early primary states like South Carolina and her home state, California, show that Ms.
Harris faces challenges.
She'll have to persuade black activists skeptical of her record as a prosecutor, overcome sexism and a bias on the part of some voters that a female candidate cannot be President Trump, and work to gain broader support from black men, who generally express more wariness about Ms.
Harris in interviews than black women.
She would also need to win over left-leaning young black voters, some of whom were ultimately disenchanted by Mr. Obama's presidency and may value political ideology more than racial solidarity.
So she does have some problems in this race.
The good news is she may be able to pander her way out of it.
So the way she's going to pander her way out of it is by invoking stupidities like mansplaining.
She's going to explain that everyone who opposes her is just a sexist.
So she was asked about mansplaining last night in a typical left-wing question.
Here is the charisma-free Kamala Harris.
Given what occurred in 2016 and the current political climate, that a male nominee will have a better chance this time around than a female nominee.
Would you please respond to this so that this man has a response ready the next time a man tries to mansplain why a man would make a better nominee?
The people who vote, the people who live in this country are smarter than that.
They're going to make decisions based on who they believe is the best leader.
They're going to make decisions based on who they believe is speaking truth.
Who is doing it in a way that gives people dignity.
Doing it in a way that elevates public discourse as opposed to bringing us to the lowest common denominator and base instincts.
That's how the voters are going to vote.
And that is going to be the basis upon who will win.
You know that the question is really hard-hitting when the candidate stands up and applauds the question.
I love guys who ask women about mansplaining.
That guy, that's a real man's man right there.
That guy who asked her about mansplaining.
Solid, solid stuff.
So that's really exciting.
Kamala Harris was also asked about how she would stay on message debating President Trump.
Once again, her answer was less than inspiring.
Well, first, it's very important that anyone who presents themselves as a leader and wants to be a leader will speak like a leader.
And that means speaking with integrity.
It means speaking truth.
It means speaking in a way that expresses and indicates some level of interest and concern in people other than oneself.
Okay, honestly, I think that if she ends up being the candidate for the Democrats, I think Trump has a pretty good shot of beating her.
I'll explain why in just a second.
Like, really, the more I see her, the more comfortable I am with President Trump running against her.
I'll explain in just one second.
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Okay, so I'm looking at this tape of Kamala Harris last night on CNN.
And here's what I'm seeing.
I'm seeing a person who is radically pandering to the far left.
I'm seeing somebody who's struggling with her own record as a prosecutor.
And I'm seeing somebody who is giving platitudinous answers to obvious questions.
She's not really exciting, is the thing.
Barack Obama could do this because he was the first Barack Obama.
But you can't be the first Barack Obama if you're the second Barack Obama.
You just happen to be female.
There's nothing particularly exciting about Kamala Harris, and the media trying to manufacture excitement for her is pretty astonishing, honestly, because she is not an exciting candidate.
When you watch her, if you're on the left, you watch her and you go, wow, she is just, she blows me away, or does she feel a lot more like sort of a typical politician than something brand new and exciting?
There's no sizzle there.
You know, Donald Trump, if you've got a stage with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, it looks a lot more like the stage of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than it looks like Donald Trump versus Barack Obama, for example.
She's just not nearly as talented a politician as Barack Obama was.
I mean, few people are.
I mean, that's not a rip on her.
That's just a reality.
Barack Obama was a very talented politician.
She happens not to be.
She ran in a very safe state in California.
She was given her first lift in politics by a married man she was dating.
She's had a pretty easy ride to the position that she now occupies.
There's nothing about her that makes people stand up and cheer, really.
I mean, they're told they should cheer by the media.
They're told that they should cheer because we need a black female president, as opposed to just a black male president, we now need a black female president.
But, if you are progressive, are you more excited by her, or are you more excited by the full-on Marxism of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders?
If you are a millennial, are you really excited by Kamala Harris?
Does she strike you as somebody who is gonna make you get out there and pound on doors?
I don't think so.
And I think that she's also going to get Republicans out there to vote en masse.
I mean, she is saying openly that she is going to destroy the entire private health care system in the United States.
Now, when Elizabeth Warren says it, I guess that lefties get excited.
But when Kamala Harris says it, it just feels like she's a government bureaucrat who spends her entire life being a government bureaucrat and doesn't know what she's talking about.
So, I don't know.
I've got more questions about Kamala Harris's candidacy today than I had yesterday.
I know I'm shifting on this based on new evidence.
I was suggesting that she's the frontrunner.
And I think that, with all the media attention, she will leap to the front of the pack for a time.
But I'm not sure that lasts.
Because I don't think that she is particularly exciting.
Maybe I've got this totally wrong.
I just don't get that feeling from her.
Now, the way that you know the Democrats are a little bit panicked is by their reaction to Howard Schultz.
So Howard Schultz is the former Starbucks CEO.
And he is now talking about running for president of the United States.
He's talking about running, basically, as a middle-of-the-road Democrat.
And Democrats are panicked about this.
I mean, freaking out.
So, last night, he was doing a book event, and it was a town hall event, and some guy got up and started yelling at Howard Schultz about not running for president.
Please don't run for president, you're gonna keep Trump in the Oval Office.
I am seriously considering running for president as a centrist independent.
And I wanted to clarify the word independent, which I view merely as a designation on the ballot.
Don't help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire!
Okay, so I love that people are really upset about this.
It's not just that random guy in the audience.
I mean, frankly, I don't understand what Cory Booker is doing out there in the audience shouting at him.
Don't help elect Trump!
But Democrats are so threatened by the possibility of a centrist Democrat running that they're getting up and shouting at Howard Schultz.
Now, the way to stop people from voting for Howard Schultz, if you're a Democrat, is to nominate somebody who isn't bat bleep crazy.
It's to nominate somebody who isn't pledging to destroy one quarter of the American economy.
How about you nominate somebody who doesn't pledge to remove guns from the hands of a hundred million people?
Why don't you start with that?
And if you nominated somebody who wasn't quite as nutty, then maybe you wouldn't have to worry about Howard Schultz.
But the fact is that Democrats in the base want their cake and they want to eat it too.
They want to be able to nominate somebody radical without alienating everybody in the middle.
This is why Michelle Goldberg over at the New York Times did a sheer panic today.
Michelle Goldberg has a piece today called Howard Schultz, please don't run for president.
A bid by an ex-chief of Starbucks would be reckless idiocy.
Why would it be any more idiotic than Elizabeth Warren running for president?
Well, because Howard Schultz is moderate.
So here's what Michelle Goldberg said.
She says, So, she's happy that he is associated with Starbucks because then they can boycott Starbucks.
Schultz is a genuinely successful businessman who built a company that's become part of the daily lives of people across America.
For this, those of us who are horrified by Trump's relentless grifting should be grateful.
It gives us something concrete to boycott should Schultz decide to launch a narcissistic spoiler campaign for president.
So she's happy that he is associated with Starbucks because then they can boycott Starbucks.
Worth noting, Michelle Goldberg is so dumb that she doesn't even recognize that he is the former Starbucks CEO.
He is no longer associated with Starbucks.
So she's going to boycott a company he's no longer involved in.
Brilliant.
But here's what Michelle Goldberg writes.
I mean, do they even have editors over at the New York Times anymore?
She says, he could end up helping get Donald Trump reelected.
Schultz appears to share the conviction, endemic among American elites, that the country hungers for a candidate who is socially liberal but fiscally conservative.
After all, if you're rich, you probably know a lot of people like this.
I'm socially liberal, fiscally conservative centrist, who would love to vote for a rational Democrat and get Trump out of the White House.
A chief executive of a major bank who wanted to remain anonymous recently told Politico, lamenting Michael Bloomberg's poor odds in a Democratic primary.
But this frustrated executive's politics aren't widely shared by people who haven't been to Davos.
In a 2017 study, the political scientist Lee Druttman plotted the 2016 electorate along two axes, one dealing with social issues and identity, the other with economics and trade.
Only 3.8% of voters fell into the socially liberal, economically conservative quadrant.
So then, here's the question, what is Michelle Goldberg so scared of?
Why is she so scared?
Like, what's she worried about?
If nobody in the Democratic Party is going to vote for this guy, then what is she worried about?
Is she worried about What's her face?
Marianne Williamson, who announced she's going to run for president?
Is she worried about Marianne Williamson?
Why isn't there a column in the New York Times about the kooky yoga instructors who are going to vote for Marianne Williamson?
The answer is nobody knows who she is and she's not going to win any votes.
So if there's no constituency for Howard Schultz, why is Michelle Goldberg all upset about his possible candidacy?
So here's what she says.
says she says bloomberg's research underscores the folly of schultz's trial balloon on monday bloomberg who is contemplating a 2020 run as a democrat put out a statement that seemed aimed at schultz though it didn't mention him by name in 2020 the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-trump vote and end up re-electing the president wrote bloomberg that's a risk i refuse to run in 2016 and we can't afford to run it now by flirting with such a risk schultz is demonstrating a level of megalomaniacal recklessness that is itself disqualifying
So the fact that Schultz thinks maybe I should run or raise because there's a bunch of people who don't like either party, that's megalomaniacal now.
So you can't have it both ways.
Either no one's going to vote for him, so why are you worried?
Or everyone's going to vote for him, so maybe he should run.
But Michelle Goldberg and many in the Democratic Party want it both ways.
They know they're too radical for the American people, and it freaks them out that somebody might be running a third-party candidacy that could damage a beloved candidate like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders.
Okay, in just a second, I want to get to more of Howard Schultz's program and why Democrats should feel threatened by it.
First, let's talk about the coffee you had this morning.
Now, was it that good?
My guess?
Mediocre.
You'll want better coffee.
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These are not the PC folks who are going to be ensuring that their coffee shops turn into bathroom stop for randos.
These are folks who actually just want to make good coffee and bring it to your door and then give some money to vets and first responder causes.
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BlackRifleCoffee.com slash Ben and get their roast to order coffee club to make sure that everything is arriving at your door on a regular basis.
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So Democrats are in a full scale state of panic over Howard Schultz, and he's actually building out a team.
He has now hired ex-Obama aide Bill Burton as a communications advisor.
As the former Starbucks CEO, Mull's running for president in 2020, he's adding people on both the right and the left to his campaign.
Burton is looking to bring on other public relations representatives in order to promote Schultz's story of being raised in Brooklyn, New York to becoming a prominent executive in the business industry.
The addition of Burton could potentially boost Schultz's elite PR team, which already includes Steve Schmidt, who used to be a vice chairman at Edelman and managed John McCain's presidential campaign.
So this could be a true quote-unquote centrist campaign.
Now, what's fascinating is that the left feels that they have not adequately served their base.
You're not seeing a lot of people who are Trump fans who are deeply worried about Howard Schultz's campaign, about Schultz playing spoiler.
Why?
Well, because conservatives are pretty conservative and Bloomberg and Schultz is not conservative enough For them.
But folks on the left feel that they have sort of had to put one leg on each stilt.
They've got one leg on the more moderate stilt.
And they've got one leg on the radical stilt.
And the radical stilt is moving away from the other stilt very quickly.
And that means pretty soon they're going to lose their balance.
Opening a way for a third party candidate to win maybe 15-20% of the vote.
So Trump could then win 43-44% of the vote.
Howard Schultz picks up 15% of the vote.
43, 44% of the vote.
Howard Schultz picks up 15% of the vote, and the Democrat loses the race.
That is what they are worried about right now.
And they should worry about that.
Again, the solution would be not to be radical, crazy people.
But they can't do that because it turns out they're radical, crazy people, so they're not going to do that.
So, Howard Schultz, if you look at what he's been saying, a lot of it is true.
And a lot of it, I think, appeals to people in the center.
So, for example, he was specifically asked about Democratic health care plans.
Now, you already saw earlier in the program, Senator Kamala Harris talking about how she wants to do away with all private health insurance in the United States of America.
An insane position.
An insane position that will end with massive numbers of doctors going into concierge cash for payment.
That will end with hospitals going bankrupt.
That will end with people getting poorer care and ration care.
Here's Howard Schultz talking about how these health care plans, they're just not realistic.
Every American deserves the right to have access to quality health care.
But what the Democrats are proposing is something that is as false as the wall.
And that is free health care for all, which the country cannot afford.
Okay, and that, of course, is exactly true.
The country cannot afford, quote-unquote, free healthcare for all.
There's no system on planet Earth that makes healthcare affordable, universal, and quality.
There's no way to do it.
And when I say affordable, universal, and quality, I mean that if you want the best in choice, you're going to have to have a free market system.
Now, the best system that is available, if you're going to look just at the efficacy of a healthcare system, is probably Switzerland's system.
There you have what is essentially a massive individual mandate where you are forced to pay for health insurance yourself from your own pocket to a certain percentage of your income, and then the government may supplement the rest if you can't actually afford health care insurance.
But it's still largely private, meaning there are private health care services in Switzerland.
In France, most of the hospitals are still private.
Most of the care is still private.
It's just there's heavy government subsidization of private care.
When Kamala Harris talks about a full takeover of the government industry, She's talking about something that looks more like the UK or Canada, and that is a radical shift from what we have in the United States.
By the way, the French healthcare system, which looks a lot more like the United States' healthcare system, actually, than it looks like Canada or the UK.
Even the French healthcare system right now is experiencing massive shortages of doctors in the very near future, because it turns out that when government pays reimbursement rates, those reimbursement rates are not high enough to keep doctors in the industry.
In other words, when it comes to healthcare policy, if you actually want the best, what you need is a free market.
If you want universality, you need some sort of safety net.
In the United States, we have Medicaid, we have Medicare.
These are safety nets that exist on the governmental level.
I would prefer that most of the social safety net be devolved to the local level, and that communities be responsible for picking up the slack for people who are members of those communities, as opposed to these massive federal programs.
But, Nobody in the United States is really very much in favor of the abolition of everyone's health insurance programs.
When Schultz says, we can't afford this, when Schultz says it's gonna bankrupt the country, he's exactly right about that.
He's exactly right.
And the fact is, again, the United States' health problems, health problems in the United States don't match up to Norway.
Like, the people in the United States are not the same as the people in Norway.
You can't compare the two, in terms of health problems, in terms of diversity, in terms of age, in terms of income, it's just not comparable.
But I love that Democrats have this one-size-fits-all solution that most Americans don't like.
So Schultz is more moderate on this, and it's a reason why Democrats feel threatened by him.
And then there's Howard Schultz on the debt.
So here is Schultz talking about a problem that no one wants to talk about, the fact that we have $21 trillion in debt in the United States economy right now.
I think the greatest threat domestically to the country is this $21 trillion debt hanging over the cloud of America and future generations.
And the fact that interest rates are going up, we're going to be paying close to over $400 billion in interest expense, which I think is the number one or number two issue in terms of federal expense to the country.
The only way we're going to get out of that is we've got to grow the economy, in my view, 4% or greater, and then we have to go after entitlements.
Okay, all of that is 100% true.
And what he's saying there is more conservative than what Donald Trump has said on the issue.
Trump himself said he didn't want to touch entitlements.
You need to touch entitlements.
You know, honestly, if Howard Schultz runs as an independent on this platform, It's doubtful a lot of Republicans are going to break with Trump just because Trump is such a polarizing figure.
You either love him or you hate him at this point.
But are there middle-of-the-road Democrats who will break for Howard Schultz?
I think there are and I think that's why these people are scared to death of him.
I think they are scared to death that Michael Bloomberg or Howard Schultz runs and that Howard Schultz wins 15-20% of the vote.
They are scared to death.
They don't have anyone electrifying who is currently running.
They need somebody who's going to win 50% of the vote.
And the possibility of a serious third-party candidacy doing damage is very real.
Americans don't like either party right now.
Look at the polls.
When Howard Schultz blasts both parties, he is not wrong.
Here is Schultz blasting both parties the other day.
Both parties are consistently not doing what's necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged every single day in revenge politics.
Well, we are sitting today with approximately $21.5 trillion of debt, which is a reckless example not only of Republicans, but of Democrats as well.
as a reckless failure of their constitutional responsibility.
Okay, all of this is true.
And again, you know, if I'm a Democrat, I'm scared of Howard Schultz, which is why they're screaming at him right now.
Now, meanwhile, does that mean that they're going to change their policies?
Of course not.
It means they're going to keep doubling down on radicalism and then hope that Howard Schultz withdraws out of the goodness of his heart and that the American people reject him simply because they hate Trump so much.
So Jamel Bouie, another leftist on the New York Times editorial, Which is just what they need.
They need another member of the leftist cadre over at the New York Times.
Very important.
They must never hire an actual conservative.
There's still, by the way, not a single person of whom I am aware who is on the editorial board or who writes columns for the Washington Post, for the New York Times, for Time Magazine, for any of these places, who plans on voting for Trump in 2020.
Not one, which is amazing, because half the country is going to vote for Trump.
But Jamal Bowie was recently hired over at the New York Times, and he has an article today about how Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and Sanders are the future of the United States and how they represent the history of the United States.
Now, they may in fact be the future of the United States if the future of the United States is suicide, but the case that America's history is deeply intertwined with radical redistributionism is simply nonsense.
Nonetheless, Democrats are going to continue to make this case.
They feel like Trump's unpopularity is a window for them to push as hard left as they want to push.
So here's Jamal Bowie.
He says, "An old but still potent critique "has reemerged in American politics, "one that holds concentrated wealth "and perhaps American capitalism itself "as inimical to the democratic society we want to build.
"The basic idea holds that holds capitalism as, at best, "an uneasy partner with our democratic values.
At worst, it erodes them completely, undermining the social and material basis of Republican citizenship as envisioned by the American revolutionaries.
Since the start of the new year, this thinking has become especially prominent.
And then he quotes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.
This is idiocy, of course.
The idea that capitalism is inimical to American democratic values, it's just not true.
Now, aristocratic concentration of wealth is.
inimical to American values.
If you read Alexis de Tocqueville, if you read Thomas Jefferson, if you read The Founding Fathers, one of the things that they were hoping to escape in Europe was this idea of an aristocratic wealth system in which the centralized government passed on favors to a select few.
That they were seeking to avoid.
But a free market system where people can freely alienate their labor and trade goods and services for other goods and services, that was something all the founders were in favor of.
Now, the United States was also uniquely blessed.
De Tocqueville talks about this.
The United States was uniquely blessed with an extraordinary level of middle-class development, specifically because we lived on a relatively uncultivated continent with lots of free land for everybody, so it wasn't that hard to go out there, stake your claim, and suddenly you were a middle-class farmer.
But the idea that the solution was for government to forcibly redistribute wealth, that was something that the founders never contemplated and set up a government to prevent.
Yet Jamal Bowie makes the case that America has always been in favor of such redistributionism.
Shall we say the evidence is rather scanty of this?
So here is his suggestion.
He says, most Americans tend not to think of these egalitarian, even anti-capitalist sentiments as part of the nation's intellectual heritage.
But Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, and similarly situated politicians like Bernie Sanders are drawing on influential currents in American political history.
First of all, I should Note that here he is ripping off Joseph Ellis's new book about the Founding Fathers, which has some serious problems.
I've recommended it on the show, but it's got some serious selective reading problems.
Here's Jamal Bowie again.
is that some of those stretch back to the founding era.
Despite his own status as a wealthy slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson was wary of extreme disparities of wealth and thought it was incompatible with Republican political ideals.
Commenting on the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind in Europe, he described his position in a famous letter to James Madison in 1785.
Whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.
The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.
If, for the encouragement of industry, we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment must be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.
Okay, what he's specifically talking about there is the idea that rich people are going to have control of all the land, and poor people won't be able to work on the land.
Well, that's written into American law.
There's something called adverse possession in American law, in which if I buy a huge tract of land, and I don't do anything with it for 20 years, and you, without my knowledge, go and cultivate a piece of that land and turn it into your family farm, you actually now have possession of it under American law.
Well, he's certainly not talking about the forcible extraction of wealth from people.
The key part of that phrase, when Jefferson is writing, is whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor.
Where are the uncultivated lands?
And then, I love this.
He just fast forwards to Eugene Debs.
No stop in the middle.
So, Jamal Bowie goes from Thomas Jefferson, who's a radical, a radical, decentralized power guy.
He didn't want power centralized in a government at all.
Jefferson was closer to anarcho-capitalism than he was to a centralized government Marxism.
I love this.
Jamal Bowie skips from here, from misrepresentation of Jefferson, forward to Eugene Debs, an actual socialist in the early 20th century, and then suggests that socialism is written into the American compact.
You may miss some folks, like in between, and around, and like in the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, and like all of American history, you may have missed there.
But I guess if you quote Eugene Debs, who is legitimately a socialist, then I suppose that we're on solid ground now.
Jamel Bowie concludes, by the end of the 20th centuries, the insights of the New Deal period had been smothered by corporate power and its political allies with predictable consequences.
We live with a narrow politics where democratic deliberation rarely touches the fundamental questions of power and ownership.
That's weird because it seems to me that every five seconds we're discussing how much wealth to expropriate from people who have already paid their taxes.
He says, as Americans across the political spectrum gear up to try to deny President Trump a second term in office, All of this may seem divisive, a distraction from the emergency at hand.
Just the opposite is true.
Trump's presidency is a symptom of profound democratic weakness.
Should he lose in 2020, that will be the beginning of a recovery.
We'll still need to rethink and rebuild our democracy, and that has to include a reimagining of the economy on which it rests.
Okay, so the Democrats have made a mistake here.
They are misinterpreting dislike for President Trump, who is, in truth, a relatively unlikable fellow.
They are now misinterpreting lack of support for President Trump with support of full-scale Eugene V. Debs socialism.
And then they wonder why maybe Howard Schultz is dangerous to their program.
And all they have to do is not be crazy, and they can't even do that.
It's just amazing.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
America's an amazing place.
So, there was an Air Force veteran with no family, and he passed away.
And there was a story about this, that folks, he had nobody to show up at his funeral.
Well, folks like Jake Tapper, some other folks in the media, they made the case that folks should show up to this guy's funeral.
Again, Air Force veteran, had no family, And thousands of people showed up to the funeral of a person they did not know.
That's an amazing thing.
Here is a picture, if you can't see it, of a line of cars.
It's like Field of Dreams.
A line of cars stretching off into the horizon for people showing up to pay homage to an Air Force veteran with no family who is buried after fears that no one would actually attend his funeral.
It's an amazing, amazing thing.
It's an amazing country.
It really is.
There's so many good people in this country.
And the fact that some people in politics want to polarize us from one another so we can attack each other's wealth or attack each other by identity, group.
It's really, it's really gross.
This is what America is all about.
People showing up to the funeral of a person who they didn't even know.
You know, the highest form of charity, it says in Jewish thought, is going to somebody's funeral because it's charity that can never be reciprocated, obviously.
The fact that Americans still understand that they owe something to veterans with whom they are not related.
It's just, it's an amazing thing.
Okay.
Other things that I like today.
So...
It's amazing how members of the LGBT community are considered a one giant kind of intellectual block.
That obviously is not true.
It simply is not true.
If you are a lesbian or a gay person, there is no reason that you should buy into the propaganda that suggests that men can become women and women can become men.
And yet, if you are a lesbian or a gay person who believes in biological sex, you will be ostracized just the same way any conservative would be.
So, for example, there was a Well, in order for that to make any sense, sex has to be in a non-changeable category.
lawyer and spokeswoman for Women's Liberation Front spoke against the so-called Equality Act, denouncing the transgender and gender identity movement as anti-woman and anti-lesbian in particular, which makes perfect sense.
I mean, if you are a lesbian, presumably you prefer members of your same sex.
Well, in order for that to make any sense, sex has to be in a non-changeable category.
Otherwise, a man could be a woman.
I mean, we have seen weird situations like this.
My My sister used to teach at a college, and she told me that there was a situation in which a man who identified as queer, meaning that he was not straight, and a woman who identified as transgender and queer.
Ended up marrying each other.
So it was just a man and a woman marrying each other, but they had weird labels that they had attached to themselves.
But it was just a normal marriage.
But apparently, if you are in the lesbian or gay community, you must be forced to abide by dictates that actually make your own view of sexual orientation and sex relatively obsolete.
Here are some members of a panel at Heritage Foundation talking about this.
I got kicked off of the Baltimore mayor's LGBTQ commission as the only lesbian, simply for stating biological facts.
After a month's long witch hunt, I was found guilty of violence.
My crime?
Using male pronouns to talk about a convicted male rapist who identifies as transgender and prefers female pronouns.
It doesn't matter that he sexually assaulted two women in a women's prison after being transferred there on account of his gender identity.
Oh no, it is far more criminal for me to call a male rapist he than it is for him to rape.
Okay, and that's Julia Beck, who is a lesbian, talking about this.
It is pretty amazing.
It is pretty amazing.
But that is the world in which we now live, and it's a pretty ugly world.
Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So it now appears that there is no plan in Afghanistan.
President Trump is about to sign a new peace deal, apparently, with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Now, there was a case we made that originally, when we invaded Afghanistan, the entire goal was just to destroy the Taliban and then prop somebody else up and leave.
We tried that, and apparently that has failed.
I've talked to many people who have served in the military in Afghanistan, people who have been in positions of power in Afghanistan, And what they say is that unless you are willing to cross the border and do the heavy lifting of going after terrorists in Pakistan, unless you're willing to tick off the Pakistani government, the Taliban was always going to end up retaking Afghanistan.
Now the question is whether the United States is going to hastily withdraw from Afghanistan and turn the country back over to the Taliban.
Just as in Syria, there seems to be a real desire for America to withdraw.
The fact is that if America does withdraw, the Taliban will take over again.
It will once again become a safe harbor for terrorists.
We'll ignore it for 10 years and then there will be a terrorist attack.
The entire reason we went into Afghanistan again was because of 9-11.
This was the good war, supposedly, according to Barack Obama.
Even that good war is now being undermined by the idea that the United States has to pull out as fast as possible.
Damn the future consequences.
Well, according to the New York Times, a hasty American withdrawal would erode the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan government, raising the risk that the Taliban could recapture control of the country.
Short of that, it could consign Afghanistan to a protracted bloody civil war.
Here's the thing about American foreign policy.
There are not always great answers.
Sometimes the best answer is just to muddle through.
And it seems like most presidents kind of get this.
President Trump gets this.
So did Barack Obama.
Barack Obama wanted to pull out of Afghanistan too.
He didn't.
Because once you get in that chair and information comes across your desk, you now have to make difficult decisions.
It's easy to campaign on the isolationism that is popular among Americans.
It is much harder to govern from that popular isolationism when you want to keep America safe.
All of which suggests the American people should get real about their own foreign policy.
If you want to be safe, that means that we are going to have to be in places that are uncomfortable.
If, however, you are willing to take the sacrifice of Americans at home being in more danger, then you can be a little bit more isolationist than you might otherwise necessarily be.
But let's be straight about the choices that are being made.
Let's not fib and say we can have everything, a fully isolationist foreign policy, and a less dangerous world.
It doesn't work that way.
Alrighty.
Well, we'll be back here a little bit later with two more hours, if my cold can bear it.
We'll see you there later, or we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villarreal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens, edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
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