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March 3, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:00:07

Dan Crenshaw | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 40

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	You can't have liberty if you don't have a personally responsible individual.
	And you can't have pure liberty if you don't have people who are mentally tough and able to compete in a free market.
	All of these things are intertwined.
	Here we are on the Sunday special, and I'm excited to welcome Congressman Dan Crenshaw.
	We're going to be getting to all of our questions for Dan Crenshaw, his entire life story.
	Everything you need to know about Dan Crenshaw, we'll get to in just one second.
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	Well, Congressman Crenshaw, thanks so much for stopping by.
	Thanks for having me.
	It's really cool to be here.
	I'm very excited to have you here, although less excited than I was before since we arm wrestled, which went very poorly for me before the show.
	Yeah.
	No, you were doing really well.
	And then you weren't.
	Thanks.
	That's just how that happens.
	Yeah, well, this is how I know you're a nice guy.
	For a short half second, I felt a surge of hope in my heart.
	Yeah, I wanted to give that to you.
	That was nice of you.
	Because you were just bragging about doing CrossFit earlier this week.
	I have a hundred push-ups, no problem.
	I mean, these are your words.
	These are your words.
	This hurts a little bit.
	I mean, I say facts don't care about your feelings, but I didn't say they don't care about my feelings.
	Yeah, the feelings matter sometimes.
	Let's talk about how you got here.
	So most people who know you nationwide know you from the appearance on SNL, but I want to start before that.
	How did you get to Congress in the first place?
	Because your story is really quite fascinating.
	Truth is, I never wanted to leave the Navy.
	So I was wounded back in 2012.
	And I think people know this story pretty well by now.
	I was blown up by an IED blast.
	My interpreter was killed right in front of me.
	And I was blinded and miraculously recovered through just absolute miracles in the operating room.
	I did two more deployments after that.
	Not combat related, but back to the Middle East and to Korea after that.
	And eventually the Navy realized that I couldn't see very well and I had to go on to a medical retirement track.
	So I left in late 2016, went to Harvard.
	I think you spent some time there as well.
	Wonderful place.
	And I did my master's there.
	My wife actually both went in the sense that she can take classes with me.
	It was actually a pretty great year.
	First of all, Harvard makes everybody think they can be in politics and then be a president, especially at the Kennedy School.
	And so in the back of my mind, I knew if I wanted to really have an impact on all of the policy issues that I care about, not just maybe a singular policy focus, that you eventually have to get into politics.
	But how do you do that?
	Okay, there's three things you really need.
	You either need to be independently wealthy, you need to have great political connections, or you just need to have a window of opportunity.
	And so our window of opportunity came when Ted Poe announced retirement.
	It was my home district, and we went for it.
	I came home one day, asked my wife, should we do this?
	She goes, yep.
	It was without hesitation because it has to be a family.
	It has to be a family decision.
	And so we went for it.
	We tried to connect with as many people as we could.
	It was kind of this desperate sort of grassroots campaigning.
	And it worked out.
	We won the primary.
	And we only had a couple months because we made this decision in November.
	The primaries in Texas are March 6th.
	So, and early voting starts two weeks before that, mail-in ballots a whole month before that, so you really gotta get ahead of the curve here.
	We got second place in that election by 155 votes.
	And then we were off into a runoff, and the rest is history.
	So, what actually prompted you to get in the military in the first place?
	We're of the same generation, we're nearly the same age, and very few people of our generation actually joined the military.
	I'm a good example of this, so you did something that I didn't do, so thank you for that, obviously.
	But what prompted you to get into the military?
	You said you wanted to be in the Navy, and you were a Navy SEAL, obviously.
	obviously.
	So what made that happen?
	I read a book when I was maybe eight years old called Rogue Warrior.
	And if you talk to most SEALs, this is generally their story because the only way you really make it through something like BUDS is to have wanted it your entire life.
	There is no choice for you once you get there.
	It doesn't matter how long they keep you in the Pacific Ocean.
	It doesn't matter how long they make you run with a boat on your head or how many hours of log PT you do.
	It just doesn't matter to you because it's just something you have to get through.
	Now, You complain about it, you whine about it, but you just have to do it.
	And that's just our mentality.
	And if you didn't want that your whole life, it's really tough to have that mentality.
	Most guys I know have the same story I did.
	Yeah, it's just a childhood dream.
	And we went for it.
	And what is the BUDZ program like?
	I mean, most of us haven't experienced it, obviously.
	Well, it's just an online course.
	It's like Harvard, yeah?
	Yeah, it's just like Harvard.
	Well, it's a lot of fun, but it's also quite terrible.
	Looking back on it, we have a lot of fond memories.
	So it's six months long.
	The first two months are called first phase, and the second Second phase then third phase.
	First phase is you're not really learning anything except how to harden yourself.
	All right, how to push yourself way past the limits you thought possible.
	The fourth week of first phase is hell week.
	Okay, so you're up for about six days.
	I broke my leg my first time through.
	It would be recycled throughout the entire program.
	You'd run about 200 miles with these, with calm IBS, inflatable boat systems, basically a river rafting boat.
	A boat crew of six takes these everywhere with you.
	You run about 200 miles throughout the course of just that week.
	You've been doing it for about a month.
	Second phase is dive phase.
	You know, a lot of controlled, what I would call controlled drowning.
	You know, it's, those are some of my least favorite parts of BUDS because they're trying to make you comfortable underwater, trying to make you comfortable in the worst situations possible at the bottom of the pool.
	And you get through that, you go to third phase, it's land warfare phase.
	And they make that painful and difficult for all, a whole bunch of other sorts of reasons.
	And even after BUDZ is over, you're not a SEAL yet, you have to go through what's called SEAL qualification training.
	Now you're really learning, you're really honing some skills, then you get your trident, and then you go to a team, and then you go through an entire other year or so of training with your platoon so that you are just a really perfect warfighting machine when you actually deploy.
	That's amazing.
	So when you decided to join Congress, what were sort of the ideological goals that you had?
	It's interesting because I have an easy job.
	I get to talk about politics all day long.
	I get to be as pure as I want to be.
	A few months ago, I was supposed to speak on the Hill.
	I was supposed to speak actually at Georgetown, and they canceled my speech because there was a big snow day.
	And so instead, I ended up doing a kind of impromptu session with all the congressional staffers A couple hundred congressional staffers showed up and they were, you know, talking about how much they enjoyed the show.
	I said, well, you guys have the hard job.
	I feel the same thing about you.
	I mean, you have a rough job.
	Being in Congress means you have to make deals.
	It means you have to compromise on principle.
	How is that shift between being the ideologue who wants to run for Congress and then actually sitting in Congress?
	There's two questions, which is what I ran on and then this broader question of how do we maintain that balance between ideological purism and practicality.
	So, I tried to run on things that I knew I could at least fight for in a very real way.
	I ran on border security.
	I ran on the debt, things I really care about, mostly because of how old we are, right?
	And I believe this is, and also I think this is something that reaches across party lines when speaking to people our age.
	I've noticed that.
	I ran on the third rail of politics, you know, entitlement reforms, because it's going to crush our generation.
	That actually speaks to a lot of young people.
	So I talked about that a lot, a lot more than most politicians think they should.
	And actually, I was rewarded for it, you know, for being honest about these things.
	I ran on flooding issues.
	That's a unique local issue to Houston.
	It's not really partisan, so it doesn't really acquire any kind of purism there.
	But this broader question, like you said, and I think what you're getting at is how do we deal with conservative media?
	How do we deal with people who only want you to support the president no matter what, or support certain ideals no matter what?
	Never vote for anything.
	And then trying to balance that into some kind of practical sense, and I think the solution For politicians is just be open about it, just be open about why you're voting a certain way, like what pressures you had to face and to get that.
	And I think voters are more willing to listen than a lot of politicians realize.
	And so, I mean, just honesty, knowing why you believe what you believe and knowing and knowing why you can't quite get there, being able to take that.
	You know, win a few yards, as opposed to a Hail Mary touchdown, I think is important for us to do, and simultaneously doesn't require us to let go of those fundamental principles that drive us there in the first place.
	So what do you think are the fundamental principles that drive you?
	What's your political philosophy?
	What's your brand of conservatism?
	I would say the things that make our country sustainable.
	And I like to put it in very simple terms like that.
	So what are the things that make a country sustainable?
	And give it longevity.
	And really, they're the greatest ideas we've ever had, and they were written down in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
	So these ideas of limited government and local control, right?
	Where we have a diverse set of opinions and preferences across this country, and the only way to maintain that without it boiling over is to give people local control.
	Okay, that's a very conservative answer to that, basically.
	What I'm talking about is federalism, right?
	But I like to talk about these things in ways that people understand, because if you just say federalism and limited government, A lot of liberals just turn off, right?
	That's just a conservative talking point.
	I don't want to hear it.
	Okay, so we have to boil this stuff down a little bit better than I think we normally do.
	Individual freedom and liberty.
	Personal responsibility.
	So these kind of cultural values that I think are important to keep a society Again, together.
	Because if people don't believe in personal responsibility, if you are more inclined to believe in victimhood as opposed to personal responsibility, well, think about if everybody did that.
	And this is what I try to explain to people.
	What if everyone thought that way?
	How long would we really last?
	If no one takes responsibility, if at least your first choice isn't, you have to take care of this.
	And then maybe it's your family, and then it's your community and your church, and then it's your local government, and then it's your state, and then it's the federal government.
	Try to help people understand that sort of line of reasoning and why that's the best way to run a society.
	Other cultural values I would actually throw out there are mental toughness.
	So a sense of grit, a sense of ability to this kind of American pioneer spirit that I think we're losing.
	And this kind of speaks to my whole history and outrage culture, which I was a part of the SNL skit and how that all turned out.
	And what I was glad to be able to do was just rebuff outrage culture.
	This idea that you have to be offended, that a grieved victim status is the greatest thing you can accomplish.
	And pointing out that that's just not a healthy place for us to go.
	Other cultural values I think.
	I think are important.
	You know just basic notions of Liberty and also how these things are interconnected.
	You can't have liberty if you don't have a personally responsible individual, right?
	And you can't have pure liberty if you don't have people who are mentally tough and able to compete in a free market.
	All of these things are intertwined.
	So, you know, to answer your question in a long-winded way, you've got to start with the cultural aspects.
	Because culture, you know, as you always say, politics is downstream of culture and the policy is downstream of politics.
	You've got to start with the culture, then you can get to the politics, then we can win, and then we can actually put in the policy that reflects those cultural values that give ourselves So let's talk about the culture for a second, because as I said at the very top, the way that most folks know you is because of the SNL situation.
	So for folks who may have missed that story, and for folks who may not have seen it unfold, maybe you can tell us what that was like from your perspective.
	Yeah, I mean, I woke up Sunday, and all my friends are texting me.
	They're saying, hey, you made it.
	You're on SNL.
	It's a great job there.
	And then we see it.
	And it doesn't make me mad right away.
	I'm from the SEAL teams.
	We have a very different sense of humor.
	We're pretty thick-skinned.
	For folks who missed it, Pete Davidson, who is one of the stars of SNL, made a joke about your eye patch and suggested that you were a pirate or that you were some sort of James Bond villain or something.
	Yeah, something like that.
	And that was fine.
	That wasn't even, you know, his comments weren't that bad.
	It was the part that maybe was scripted, maybe not.
	And he just said, oh, lost it in war or whatever.
	You know, it was an extremely dismissive thing.
	And that's what made America angry.
	It kind of brought us together for a little bit.
	And, you know, SNL was taking a lot of fire for that.
	And they came around to emailing me an apology.
	And then eventually the producers called me and said, why don't we have you on this weekend?
	You can say whatever you want.
	I said, well, this weekend's Veterans Day weekend.
	I can't really go on.
	I've got a lot of events already planned.
	They said, no, it has to be Veterans Day weekend for exactly the reasons of, you know, because we insulted veterans.
	I said, that's a good point.
	So let's make it happen.
	And let's make this a fun, cool thing to do.
	And I think we did.
	We had a lot of fun doing it.
	Yeah, it really is pretty fantastic.
	For folks who haven't seen the segment, you should go on YouTube and you should check it out.
	Basically, you did something that was unique.
	First of all, your comedy bit was hilarious.
	Oh, I agree.
	Thank you.
	Dan goes after Pete Davidson and makes fun of his appearance.
	And the whole point is obviously that we can make jokes.
	And that was what was unique.
	It was unique moments.
	I said online I thought it was maybe the most uplifting moment in American politics I'd seen in a decade because it was you sitting next to him and actually Empathizing with him and saying, listen, we can get beyond the outrage culture is something that I thought was pretty unique.
	Yeah.
	And it's it's so important that we're able to joke with each other again.
	I think we've really lost that.
	You can just you can look in the news almost every single day and find an example of this, of where we're just we're so ready to to pounce.
	Right.
	Republicans pounce.
	Right.
	But it's not you know, and we've got to be careful to not to be Not to be overly sensitive.
	And for the most part, I think we're better about that.
	But it doesn't mean we're perfect.
	And we don't want to be hypocrites either on this particular issue.
	But it's really a shame.
	I'm not sure how to fix it except for to just not be part of the problem.
	And to, you know, encourage a little lightheartedness every once in a while.
	But, I mean, geez, you saw my joke about the Super Bowl.
	I was like, really, this is what triggers people?
	It's amazing.
	It's amazing.
	Anything will trigger anybody.
	In a second, I'm going to ask you how you think conservatives can do better in the culture wars and how you actually define the culture wars as opposed to the political wars.
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	So we're talking about the culture wars, and again, I said at the time, I've told members of the press that I think one of the reasons that you've become such a new fresh face of the Republican Party, so fresh, so fresh, is that you've actually engaged positively and in an effective way in the culture wars.
	How do you define the culture wars, and why do you think so many conservatives, particularly in politics, seem to miss the importance of the culture wars generally?
	Two very important questions there.
	So, how do we define the culture war?
	There's different battle lines drawn on the culture wars, so I think examples are the best way to talk about the culture wars.
	One example, I had a curator here in California recently.
	There was a lady, I think she worked for Santa Barbara Community College.
	She was upset that they no longer did the Pledge of Allegiance before board meetings, or something along those lines.
	I think I'm getting the story right.
	And as she was testifying her story, she got up and did the Pledge of Allegiance.
	And she was met with the most ferocious, ferocious leftist attacks.
	And they were there in the room just screaming at her, shouting her down.
	And she's in tears as she's giving the Pledge of Allegiance.
	That is a fundamental part of the culture war.
	This idea that either you love your country and we all agree on that, or you truly despise your country.
	You have contempt for it.
	I think that's the most important part of the culture, this idea of whether we love our country or not.
	That's what worries me.
	What I try to ask liberals is, I mean, you know, don't you think we're on your, conservatives, don't you think we conservatives are on your side on this?
	Don't we all love our country and don't you realize that you're being sucked in by the leftists here?
	I mean, as you always point out, there's quite a difference between leftism and liberalism.
	My worry is that liberalism opens the gates to leftism.
	Right?
	Because it's not bad to be concerned about income inequality.
	It's not bad to care about the poor.
	It's not bad to care about equal rights and justice and all of these things.
	That's not a fundamentally bad thing to do.
	But what I want liberals to understand is that it does give way to these things.
	It does give way, eventually, If given free reign to leftism, the kind of things we see there in the culture war, I think other aspects of the culture war, I think you see it on campus all the time, whether free speech is a fundamental right or not.
	The social justice movement as a whole and those kind of battles, I think that is more of a culture war issue, sometimes less of a policy issue.
	It does manifest in policy sometimes.
	The other aspect of your question is how do politicians fight it?
	And I do think it's important for us to do that because it's what people listen to.
	And again, politics is downstream of culture.
	You can't win in politics until you've won the culture war.
	So you have to engage on that front.
	You have to engage on whether it's right to appreciate the national anthem or not.
	Because that, again, this idea of whether we should have contempt for our country or not is an important It's an important part of our culture.
	It's the one thing that brings us together.
	We have ideals that bring us together.
	We don't have skin color.
	We don't have religion.
	You know, even geography isn't a great thing to bring people together.
	You need ideas.
	You need fundamental values.
	And I worry greatly that those are being undermined.
	And I worry greatly that politicians aren't fighting on those fronts enough.
	So that's the benefit of going on SNL.
	That's the benefit of of doing the media that we do, sharing yourself a little bit more with people on social media.
	I don't think politicians do enough of that.
	I think they're a little too careful.
	We don't need to be so careful.
	All right.
	Let's share yourself with the people, connect with people, let them know you're human, let them know the things you like to talk about, maybe outside of politics.
	That would go a long way.
	I think one of the reasons the SNL moment went so viral and I think it was hailed by people on all sides is that I think the left was shocked that a Republican was a human being.
	And this is sort of the problem.
	When you talk about liberalism sliding into leftism, all the things that liberals talk about, maybe with the exception of income inequality, because I think the conservatives are more concerned about the growth of poverty than they are about some people being rich and some people being poor.
	But all the...
	Exactly.
	But all the other issues that you talk about, those are issues where conservatives are also deeply engaged.
	And the way that liberals slide from being a liberal into a leftist is by casting aspersions at people on the other side and suggesting we don't care about the same things.
	You're bad, you're vile, you're terrible.
	And so when you are on SNL and suddenly you are a nice guy, and not only that, you're being extraordinarily generous with somebody who had personally insulted you and then made an offhand nasty remark about military service.
	I think that's why so many people It was dragging leftists back from leftism and toward liberalism, the idea that we all still have some things in common.
	Yeah, I think that's a good point.
	I saw this trending on Twitter the other day, this, I'm the radical left, you know, and then they'll have this explanation for what that means.
	And it's usually along the lines of, you know, because I care about the environment and I want everybody to have access to health care.
	I was like, do you think you're the only ones who want those things?
	You know, don't demonize us in this terrible way.
	Do you really think that the right doesn't believe that?
	I mean, and I don't know if it's intellectual dishonesty or if they've just really have never spoken to a conservative.
	Oftentimes, they've just never spoken to a conservative.
	And I saw that at Harvard quite a bit.
	I mean, they've never seen one.
	It's really funny.
	And they truly don't know what we believe.
	I've watched them try to make arguments that they think that we'll like.
	You know, the carbon dividend is a great one, a great example.
	So this idea that you can have a carbon tax, but you're going to distribute it.
	So the government's not making money, therefore it's conservative.
	I'm like, that's not what conservatism is.
	You want to create a whole new bureaucracy to redistribute money?
	How is that efficient?
	That's not good limited government.
	And I would tell these professors this.
	I'm like, do you realize that you're not making the right arguments towards conservatives?
	This is not the way to win our hearts.
	I'm just letting you, they really don't know what we think.
	They've never bothered to study it, which is strange because I think there's a lot of history and framework to conservatism.
	What worries me about progressivism is It's progress at any cost.
	So it can go anywhere.
	There's no limits to this.
	There's no way to box that in.
	Again, that's why good-natured, well-intentioned liberalism eventually leads to what is more dangerous, which is progressivism.
	You know, the Wilsonian progressivism where they openly have contempt for the Constitution.
	That worries me.
	There is no limit to that.
	It is power at all costs to do good things.
	Well, who decides good things?
	Well, they do.
	Whatever that might mean at the moment.
	And that changes over time.
	And we've seen... I think your average voter will say, hey, both sides have just moved to the extreme.
	Maybe that's true.
	And it is true as far as willingness to cooperate, willingness to vote with the other side.
	And you can measure these things, okay?
	So that is true.
	Both sides have moved to extremes on that.
	But then we have the question, okay, who has really moved to the extreme on policy?
	Conservatives haven't really, okay?
	Now, the Trump administration is a little different, of course, especially with trade policy.
	But for the most part, conservatives still believe what we believed decades ago.
	The left hasn't.
	The left has changed quite a bit.
	The border debate is a big example of that, right?
	Like, you know, again, we don't have to rehash all the speeches made by Chuck Schumer and others, you know, being so strong on border security and then doing a 180 now.
	I think they've gone more radically left on abortion issues.
	They've gone way more radically left on economic issues.
	Socialism is no longer a dirty word.
	Why is that?
	Because progressivism has no limits.
	That's a scary thing.
	That's what I want people to understand.
	That when they're voting, they're voting based on a governing philosophy.
	That's what you should be voting for.
	You know, vote for issues if they're really important to you, but please vote on a governing philosophy.
	And I think conservatism is the right governing philosophy.
	It's what gave us everything we have.
	We should have some gratitude for that.
	So progressivism is something you don't know where it's going, and that should scare us.
	So you have to deal with Democrats, I'm sure, much more now in Congress than you had to do in your home district.
	So now you're in Congress.
	You're having to deal with Democrats.
	And what I've heard from members of Congress, members of the Senate, is a couple of different stories.
	One is that the Democrats are true believers in this wild progressive agenda, that they actually believe what it is that they're saying.
	And then I hear sometimes that no Democrats actually behind closed doors know that what they're saying is pretty wild and they're catering to a base.
	And if you actually get them off the record, then they're quite willing to be moderate.
	It's just that once they get a camera on them, all of a sudden they move to the radical left in order to please their base.
	Which have you found to be more true or does it sort of depend on the person?
	It depends on the person.
	I think both are true.
	It does depend on the person.
	What I find, there's a couple things I find actually being behind the scenes.
	On the border debate specifically, they agreed with us.
	A lot of them agreed with us, but just would never vote for us.
	That was extremely frustrating.
	I found that to be a deeply dishonest way to govern.
	And I'm still frustrated about it.
	I'll continue to fight those battles on Homeland Security Committee.
	The border is a pretty important thing to me.
	On the bigger issues and sort of the more radical socialism, Green New Deal type issues, I have yet to talk about that kind of stuff with a lot of the more moderate Democrats.
	What I see from the more moderate ones, which is generally the ones I hang out with, what their tendency is is to cover for the socialists, right?
	They'll dismiss it as, yeah, yeah, we know about all that, but don't worry.
	Well, what do you mean, don't worry?
	This is really gaining traction.
	At a certain point, you have to recognize that.
	Green New Deal has quite a few co-sponsors.
	Most presidential candidates want the Green New Deal.
	They advocate for the Green New Deal.
	Beto's talking about tearing down walls in El Paso, contrary to what his mayor and his residents think and say, and then he backtracked on that.
	I was very proud of that, by the way.
	I was able to, that was my doing.
	Getting him to answer that question.
	I guess both are true is the answer.
	And I would also say that I wish people understood people actually get along better behind closed doors than you would see in public.
	And, you know, the more we can showcase that as members of Congress, I think the better for the American people.
	So specifically on the border issue, since you mentioned it a couple of times, do you think that there really is a national emergency at the border or is it just a slow rolling problem at the border?
	How should Americans view it since you're obviously much more fluent with those issues?
	It's, you know, now we're defining emergency very narrowly.
	I would say it's been an emergency for a very long time.
	And when you have 400,000 people a year apprehended crossing the border illegally, that's a pretty enormous number.
	And Border Patrol indicates to me that they maybe catch one in three.
	And so, you know, you can triple that number.
	And that's the lowest in decades, because Democrats immediately come back at me and they'll say, well, would you agree that's the lowest in decades?
	Yes.
	Is it low?
	No.
	Okay.
	Next question.
	It doesn't matter.
	You know what helped lower that?
	Enforcing the border.
	Putting this bollard fencing where we need it.
	And I think we should continue to do that.
	So, is it an emergency?
	Yes.
	Is the policy right?
	Yes.
	Is the process the President is undertaking the best one?
	It's not the best one.
	It's not ideal.
	I think you can argue both ways on that.
	I am worried about the precedent, but maybe not as much as people Should be?
	Okay, let me explain that a little bit.
	So what the president is doing is he's appropriating money that wasn't given to him to enforce a law that exists, okay?
	And the law is you can't cross the border, okay?
	So that's very different from, say, declaring a national emergency on gun violence and then changing gun laws, right?
	So the equivalent of a Democrat president doing that would essentially be appropriating more money to enforce the same laws.
	That's not really that bad.
	So I'm not so sure that we need to worry that much about the precedent.
	You could also argue, constitutionally speaking, the precedent is there to faithfully execute the laws written by Congress.
	That's literally what it says.
	What do the laws say?
	They say you're not allowed to cross the border.
	Again, that's arguing both sides of it.
	It's still not a great process, and I think it's going to get bogged down in courts.
	And that's my biggest frustration with it.
	It's creating a lot of political uncertainty.
	Probably won't work.
	And I'd rather continue to fight this in Congress because I think we eventually started winning the messaging battle.
	I think we were losing that for a long time.
	I think we're using the wrong arguments and letting Democrats use very dishonest arguments instead of using unassailable arguments.
	Again, like that 400,000 number, using unassailable arguments and then making them be more honest about what they believe and what they don't believe.
	And the biggest frustration with how all these negotiations went over the last few weeks was that I no longer believe the Democrats actually want border security or enforcement.
	And this is based on what they were asking for in those negotiations.
	I'll give you some examples.
	When Border Patrol is asking for $5.7 billion, what they're asking for is to fund their top eight priorities.
	And those priorities are geographic in nature.
	Democrats wanted to say, OK, fine, we'll fund three of them.
	And we're like, oh, great, one through three.
	No, no, no, six through eight.
	Why on earth would you?
	Why?
	What could possibly be your reason except you want less enforcement?
	The other thing they did was they were demanding that we decrease the number of detention beds.
	So that's a decrease in our ability to enforce.
	There is no other reason for that except you don't like enforcing this law.
	You don't like enforcing illegal immigration.
	You have reasons for that.
	It's unclear what they are, but they're not good.
	There was another provision snuck in there, which essentially makes it more likely that children will be trafficked.
	I think you've covered this before, so I don't need to delve into it too much more.
	No, I mean, it's fine.
	Maybe folks have not heard.
	Well, what this provision says is that if you're a sponsor of a child, or a potential sponsor, or a potential sponsor in the household, then you can't be deported by ICE.
	So for an unaccompanied minor who has crossed the border.
	Well, what does that mean in practice?
	What it means in practice is this.
	When I was down at the border, we saw 16 kids.
	This was just one day as I was with Border Patrol.
	They had 16 kids who were identified who came with adults who were not their parents.
	Further questioning, they found a stash house in Houston with about 54 illegal immigrants in it.
	Why were there 54 people in a house?
	Well, because the drug cartels would not let them leave.
	Because they were being trafficked and because they hadn't paid their dues yet.
	Drug cartels have complete operational control of the southern border on the Mexico side.
	The Mexican government has no say in how that works.
	Illegal immigrants do not come across by themselves.
	That does not happen.
	They have to pay somebody.
	And this is enforced violently because it's a business for them.
	They lose money if they don't allow this to be enforced.
	That's what people need to understand about it.
	Those are the right arguments and we can win those arguments if we say them enough and say it with honesty.
	Don't overstate our point.
	You always get slammed if you overstate your point, right?
	So that's what I try to do on the Board of Debate.
	So I want to ask you about the Budget Committee and your work there.
	Before I get to that, I do want to ask you about, again, it must be tough to be in Congress.
	It's a rough job.
	And it's a rough job because, number one, you have to deal with people you disagree with all the time who are sometimes being honest, sometimes being dishonest.
	And the other fact is that you get a lot of flack from the outside.
	And I've found myself really thinking a lot more in recent years about, as influence has grown, about how to wield that influence when it comes to members of Congress.
	Because there is a tendency to call for people's heads if they don't do exactly what you want.
	I think unfair to a lot of politicians.
	Leave us alone, Ben.
	It does happen.
	So I haven't been in politics that long.
	I haven't dealt with this very much, but I certainly see it.
	I see how it can work.
	And there's really two separate movements in the conservative movement that do this, right?
	There's the more puritan.
	Conservatives, again, people I pretty much agree with on just about everything, but they don't want you to vote any other way.
	They don't want you to make any deals.
	They want a touchdown.
	They don't want you to move the ball forward a few yards.
	That's not acceptable.
	That's what hurt us, by the way, I think, in the last couple of years with health care and with the border issues.
	So that's a problem.
	You know, you've got to let us work.
	And you've got to understand, too, that these politicians aren't selling out to the swamp, whatever that means.
	I was asking, what does that mean?
	And nobody can tell me.
	Like, I don't know what it means to sell out, okay?
	The reality is that most members of Congress are catering to somebody, yes, but it's their constituents.
	Because that's the people who vote them in, you know?
	So it's not as, it's this idea of this being this corrupt place, that's just not entirely true.
	It's not what I've seen.
	I'm not saying it can't happen, I'm just saying I haven't really seen it.
	The other element of what we deal with is this need to support the president no matter what.
	And again, I support the president on pretty much everything.
	There's a couple things I disagree with, and I'm very open about that.
	He said a piece in the Wall Street Journal about this, about how much I disagree with pulling out of Syria.
	And I disagree with his trade policy because it's bad for my district.
	So that's fine.
	That's fine.
	And frankly, he's fine with it.
	He understands that.
	You know, it's I think as time has gone on to he's going to get more comfortable in the executive position.
	And I think we can openly disagree about these things.
	But but there's certainly a sense even among my voters.
	And they'll say, you know, we just get the sense that the Republicans just aren't supporting the president.
	And I'm like, why?
	Why do you think that?
	You know, what did Mitch McConnell do to you?
	He held up the process for the Supreme Court nominees.
	He got you Neil Gorsuch.
	He got you Brett Kavanaugh.
	What did he do to you that you're so mad about?
	He would not allow a spending bill on the floor until the president said he would sign it.
	I mean, what did Mitch McConnell do that is so bad?
	And I get that they don't do everything perfectly.
	I'll tell you, I fully agree.
	But we have to be a little more careful with eating our own.
	It's not exactly what you think.
	And this goes back to, remember, my cultural values of mental toughness and discipline.
	I want to dig for a second on the issue of the swamp.
	dropping counting to 10 and saying, is there more to this story?
	Is there more to the story?
	Can I breathe?
	Can I breathe and have the mental fortitude to say there might be more to this than I think?
	I want to dig for a second on the issue of the swamp.
	So you mentioned the swamp.
	And I tend to agree with the idea that it's not that Congress people are being randomly paid off by evil corporate paymasters who smoke cigars and look like me.
	But in any case, that seems to be a prevailing myth, that everybody in Congress just wants to go to cocktail parties.
	And I've never been to one of these cocktail parties.
	They are supposed to be unbelievable.
	I keep hearing about these amazing cocktail parties.
	Frankly, sitting with a bunch of Congress people having cocktails sounds about like the worst evening I could ever possibly have.
	There's no fun cocktail parties.
	And if there are, I haven't been to any.
	I mean, there's lobbyists.
	You get to know them, sure.
	You're with other members of Congress, but...
	It's just not what people think it is.
	I mean, how does that speak to campaign finance?
	So AOC, I know, is getting a lot of attention because she did a questioning on campaign finance where she basically suggested that anyone who takes any sort of lobbyist money is in the pocket of the lobbyists.
	It's always seemed to me, having dealt with, at this point, probably almost 100 members of Congress, that what actually happens is lobbyists tend to find people who already support their agenda and then they contribute to their campaigns because they like to see those people in Congress.
	But where do you come down on campaign finance?
	Yeah.
	Well, you know, first of all, it seems like they're fine with a very transparent corporate PAC money.
	Or they're sorry, they're not fine with that, which is very transparent, but they're totally fine with ActBlue, which is extremely hard to find the origin of.
	So I don't see how you can balance those two ideas, but they do.
	Here's what a corporate PAC is.
	First of all, it's a bunch of people who work for a corporation who pool their money together and then donate.
	Okay, and the max they can donate is $5,000.
	All right, so can I be bought off with $5,000?
	The answer is no.
	It's very simple, no.
	And you're absolutely right.
	They only come to you if they already agree with you.
	And we might have more detailed discussions on, OK, what issues do you guys care about?
	Can I get behind that?
	No, yes, maybe, probably not.
	It's a very simple conversation.
	But the reality is, is they just don't wield the power that people think they do.
	They bring up issues that you never would have heard of otherwise.
	And I don't fundamentally see a problem with that.
	It's very—this is a very strange attack on corporations.
	And again, this goes back to the culture wars, right?
	Like, do we want to punish success?
	Do we—or do we—do you believe in socialism or do you believe in the free market?
	All of this stuff can always be traced back to the culture war.
	It has always puzzled me, the idea that money is in complete control of American politics, and that if the NRA signs a check it's because they bought somebody.
	If that were the case, don't you think the NRA would just go bribe every Democrat, and then we could get...
	Right, that's a good point.
	Or that near all pro-choice America would come bribe every Republican.
	I want to get to your work on the budget committee.
	So you said you campaigned on entitlement reform.
	That's an amazing thing.
	I wonder, is that ever going to happen?
	Because I look at the situation.
	People love their entitlements.
	Two-thirds of the American budget every year constitutes entitlement spending and it's mandatory.
	It is not discretionary spending.
	Do you ever see a future where there is a restructuring of entitlements?
	Are we going to go the way of Europe and basically we'll have an economic meltdown and then we'll have to take austerity measures?
	Well, Medicare goes insolvent in 2026, and Social Security goes insolvent in 2034.
	I really hope we deal with it before then, because here's what that means.
	When Social Security, for instance, goes insolvent, that means that benefits automatically get cut.
	That's what happens according to current law.
	Well, what's instead going to happen, because we're not actually going to cut benefits to seniors who are relying on those things?
	Well, they're going to tax us.
	They're going to tax my generation, your generation, and they're going to tax us pretty heavily.
	And we're going to be told that it'll be fine for a little while, then they're going to have to tax us more.
	OK, this is a completely unsustainable program now.
	But the question is, are we going to fix it?
	Well, I'd like to.
	I'm going to keep fighting to fix it.
	Democrats have no interest in fixing it.
	That's that's a real problem.
	They again, we fundamentally disagree on why there's a debt.
	That's a real problem.
	We fundamentally disagree on the facts.
	And that's what I get out of these budget hearings.
	Democrats honestly believe that history began two years ago with President Trump and history began with the tax cuts.
	They will actually argue that the reason we have bad deficits is because of these tax cuts.
	Okay, well, let's look at the numbers on this.
	Without the tax cuts, in about 10 years, we'd have around $32 trillion in debt.
	With the tax cuts, we have about $33 trillion in debt.
	Those are not causing the debt.
	I mean, this is real simple numerical, some numerical evidence that we can look at to prove that.
	But they believe it.
	And they'll hammer that, and they'll hammer that.
	And we'll say, listen, 70% of spending is mandatory spending.
	That's Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt.
	Some other entitlement programs as well.
	Things we can't control, things we refuse to vote on.
	And that's a real problem.
	That's the issue.
	How can we get to a point where we actually vote on these programs?
	Because the thing we fight about constantly, every year, and again going back to what we're held accountable for by conservative groups, is 30% of the budget.
	That's, you know, we're fighting, and it's worth fighting over, don't get me wrong, but that's not what's causing our future $33 trillion debt.
	It's mandatory spending, it's increasing healthcare costs, and it's a completely unsustainable social security system.
	And again, I think we can reach out to younger people our age and get them to vote Republican based on this issue.
	And I'll just be very honest with them when I talk about it, say, listen, we have to raise our retirement age.
	We're living longer.
	We have to.
	I shouldn't be retiring at 67.
	I would like to.
	I think that would be great.
	I want to live in this utopia that Drew is talking about but it just can't happen.
	So let's actually make the hard decisions.
	Again, back to the culture.
	Are we willing to have the mental fortitude and personal responsibility to make the hard decisions so that we can live in a sustainable society?
	A society that has longevity.
	That's what it always comes down to.
	That's connecting the policy with the culture.
	But you've got to get the culture right first.
	One of the things that's been obviously disappointing to watch is the newfound embrace by the radical left and many young people of socialism full scale.
	They call it democratic socialism now, which is, I guess, a soft version of socialism where you use capitalist infrastructure and then build a bunch of socialist institutions on top of it.
	Why do you think the newfound warmth for socialism, in a time where capitalism has essentially cured extreme human poverty, where free markets have generated the capacity to literally buy anything and have it at your door in two days, thanks to Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
	So, why do you think so many young people are buying into the lies of socialism?
	Well, it's a lack of gratitude, you know, and I kind of steal this idea from Jonah Goldberg in his book.
	He really talks about this a lot.
	But I think it really opens up the truth here.
	So, there's a complete lack of gratitude for these principles that gave us all of these things.
	And again, those principles is kind of, I think those cultural narratives, and I always hit back on these, personal responsibility, this idea that liberty is good.
	Okay, this idea of fairness where you get what you deserve, not that everybody gets equal stuff.
	Okay.
	That leads to the free market, that leads to the ability to thrive in a free market, and that leads to prosperity.
	And we have all this proof that this prosperity exists based on these principles, and yet there's no gratitude for them.
	Right?
	Every generation sort of wakes up and thinks it knows so much better than the last generation.
	And this one is unique because, I think, for two reasons.
	One, this generation was coddled a lot by the previous generation, like, you know, no longer allowed to play on playgrounds, told you that, you know, second place trophies, all that, right?
	This whole kind of change in culture.
	And on top of that, On top of that, they have the Internet.
	So the Internet makes you more knowledgeable, but it doesn't necessarily make you smarter, and it doesn't teach you the framework in which to absorb those new ideas that you have at your fingertips.
	So that's an interesting combination because it means that they are very confident in their ability to say what they want and that their feelings matter most and that they can kind of pick what ideas they want to use there.
	So I think that from the Internet.
	And that results in this lack of gratitude.
	It results in this situation where it's like the idea of you're walking through a forest and you see a fence.
	Why is the fence there?
	The conservative might say, well, there might be a good reason that there's this fence here.
	Maybe there's landmines on the other side.
	And I don't like landmines, as you know.
	But I think this new generation, somebody on the left who thinks they're smarter than everybody else would say, obviously, there's no reason.
	They said, just obviously, there's no reason for this fence.
	I mean, we're not even going to question it.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	Well, maybe there is, all right?
	And maybe we should find out.
	And maybe we should be a little bit more responsible in our policymaking as we move forward.
	Do you think that unity is possible in the country at this point?
	Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the country coming together again?
	Because in some ways it seems like there's sort of moments of optimism, your SNL appearance, and then there are vast swaths of desert where people are just clubbing each other like it's Mad Max.
	I mean, where do you stand on being positive or negative about the country, which feels at many points like it's coming apart?
	Oh, that's a good question.
	And it's very difficult to answer.
	I'm not overly optimistic.
	I'm not overly pessimistic.
	I think...
	I think our country has seen worse before.
	People don't realize that a lot, just looking at history.
	That being said, it's hard to see a way out of it.
	And I would just ask that more people stop being part of the problem.
	Stop looking for reasons to club.
	And that would be nice.
	And I have to pull myself back from that sometimes.
	You know, and the standard I try to give myself is attack ideas, don't be afraid to attack ideas, even make fun of ideas, but try not to question the character of the others.
	That would be a good next move and something I hope we can aspire to.
	And as conservatives, I think the character, our character is questioned in immense ways.
	And I would like to see a stop to that.
	But at the same time, we shouldn't do it to the other side.
	And we've got to refrain at those moments.
	But I would say instead of being neutral, I'm more optimistic than I am pessimistic.
	But we've got a lot of work to do.
	All right.
	So I want to ask you about your foreign policy, about Syria and all that.
	First, I read a piece where you were talking about your thoughts on campaign finance reform and campaign finance limits.
	And I was wondering if you might explicate that.
	Sure, sure.
	So we were talking about the corporate PAC money side.
	But there's another aspect to that, which is, what should the limit be, and how arbitrary is that?
	And what I don't think a lot of people understand, and a lot of people who are railing against corporate PAC money, railing against money in politics, they don't really know what that means.
	Well, here's the actual reality.
	Somebody like me, who's got no independent wealth, I've got no political connections, and I want to get into politics.
	So how does that happen?
	Well, it doesn't happen very easily, because there's something called campaign contribution limits.
	You can only take a certain amount of money and it's not that big.
	You can go up against somebody who can self-fund their own campaign.
	So in my primary, there was one candidate, and this is just one out of nine, they all had a lot of money, but one had six and a half million dollars to spend on her campaign.
	That's impossible to compete with.
	So you've created a system by over-regulation and by limiting campaign contributions, you've created a system where only the rich and the well-connected can actually compete.
	And again, this philosophy carries on into broader government regulation on businesses and the economy at large.
	It also matters in campaign finance, and I don't think a lot of people understand that.
	Okay, so now I want to get to your foreign policy.
	So, obviously, your military experience is a defining characteristic for you, and you've been watching the Trump foreign policy.
	I've agreed with large swathes of Trump foreign policy.
	There are a couple areas where I have significant disagreements.
	I sense that you share some of those disagreements.
	One of them is pulling out American troops from Syria.
	Where are you on that, and why?
	Yeah, I say don't do it.
	At least don't do it in a quick manner.
	And I say very simply to people who question this, and both the right and the left questions this, and I say, listen, we go there so that they don't come here.
	It's really that simple.
	The world is a very small place.
	You can hop on a 12-hour flight and you can be here, or you can get here even faster with the movement of the internet, and you can radicalize people remotely.
	Okay, we saw that in Orlando, we saw that in San Bernardino, we see it in Paris.
	This happens.
	When you give terrorists like ISIS the space to operate, They will act on that.
	They're not satisfied with what they have there.
	What they really want is to take down Western civilization.
	And I know this because they talk about it all the time.
	Like, we don't have to guess, you know?
	We don't have to guess what their intentions are.
	And the same with Afghanistan.
	American leadership matters a lot more so than people realize.
	And we've actually found the right balance.
	And this is what I tell the president.
	He has actually found the right balance here.
	Between massive amounts of troops and really ill-advised pullouts like the one that happened in 2011 under Barack Obama in Iraq.
	Neither of those are good.
	What President Trump has is a small contingent.
	Relatively cheap in terms of costs, and it's the right move.
	It allows us to have eyes and ears on the ground so that we can predict future attacks.
	This is our intelligence collection side of it.
	Allows us to build capacity within our partner forces, whether that's the Kurds in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or in Afghanistan, the Afghan government.
	They're not ready yet, and we risk those being toppled, and we risk a lot of sacrifices being made in vain, and I really don't want to see that.
	Not that I care about my eye, I'm still very, you know, That's fine, but there's a lot of friends who have made the ultimate sacrifice, and if they could be here right now, they'd go right back, just like I would.
	This is one of the issues that I have with how politicians generally talk about foreign policy in a way you're not talking, and that is that they just lie about the expectations of foreign policy.
	This idea that, well, there's going to be a ringing victory in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria, and then we'll bring the troops home, there'll be a big ticker tape parade.
	That hasn't happened since World War II, and there we were fighting an actual government with uniformed soldiers.
	It was not a war on terrorism.
	The fact is that low-level conflicts like Afghanistan or like Syria, and I mean by that it's not hundreds of thousands of troops in simultaneous combat, the reality is that a holding pattern may in fact be the best that we can do in many of these cases, and yet no politician actually wants to say that.
	It's an insurance policy, right?
	It's an insurance policy against future attacks, and what we hit on is the definition of mission success.
	That's really the point you are making, I think.
	Which is, how do we define mission success?
	And politicians have not been honest about what mission success is.
	Maybe they don't understand the problem well enough to define it for the American people.
	The American people, you know, they're willing to listen if we have leaders who are willing to talk to them in honest ways.
	And they can tell.
	Alright, and so I don't define missions... you can't define mission success in this case as beating a well-defined group in a territory, right?
	So just kind of your typical warfare where there's...
	You know, people wearing uniforms and such.
	You know, there's no head of state to negotiate with here.
	This is different.
	This is an ideology that you're battling, and it requires presence in order to battle it.
	And it requires building capacity amongst your partners.
	And mission success is actually every day that we don't have another 9-11.
	That's mission success.
	And I think that's what politicians need to be more honest about.
	So you've been dealing with President Trump, as everybody has.
	He's sort of become the star around which all politics apparently revolves.
	If you had to grade the president on his performance so far, how would you grade him?
	Well, I'd grade him pretty high, as far as policymaking goes.
	Again, there's only a couple things I really disagree with, and that's the pullout from Syria and Afghanistan and a lot of his trade policy.
	And not that I don't see and understand where he's trying to go with his trade policy.
	It just hurts my district.
	That's the reality.
	It's not workable for my constituents.
	But overall, pretty good, you know?
	I don't know about a grade.
	I don't like grading things.
	But I would say overall pretty good.
	I like how open he is to members of Congress.
	You know, he does listen.
	It's a very open White House.
	I think he should get some accolades for that.
	Unfortunately, I think, again, I'm still very passionate about the border.
	issue.
	I think he's absolutely right on the border issue.
	And I think, but I do think we could have done a lot better job as a whole, a lot better job negotiating that and a lot better job messaging that.
	And the fight's not over though.
	So we still have a chance to come back from that.
	So for people who are skeptical about Congress, particularly among Republicans, Republicans basically have a theme, which is when Democrats are in charge, we stop them.
	And then when we are in charge, then Republicans pass a tax cut.
	And that's pretty much what we do.
	It's So what would you say to people who watch Republican Congress and they're constantly disappointed by, you know, all the promises to defund Planned Parenthood, to End Obamacare, to secure the border.
	People who look at President Border struggling with the border now and say, where were you in 2017?
	Like, why wasn't this the top issue in 2017?
	Why are we doing this now the Democrats have taken over Congress?
	What would you say to folks?
	Are we getting it right when we criticize Congress or are we getting it wrong?
	A lot of those criticisms, I think, are correct.
	Yes and no.
	So, on the border deal specifically, yes.
	We should have some self-critique there.
	We could have done better.
	I wasn't there, so, you know, not my fault.
	But it always goes back to this idea of are you trying to do a Hail Mary or are you trying to have a win?
	And boy, I think every Republican would go back to those deals being made right now and And absolutely make those deals that were that were going on back then.
	There's a lot of inside baseball there that even I don't really understand, just again, because I wasn't there.
	But it's but it's very frustrating to voters because.
	And I think here's why, because a lot of politicians that go into office and I think they overpromise.
	I think they forget to inform people that you need 60 votes in the Senate for a lot of things, right?
	And so a lot of people don't realize things like that.
	So they go in thinking, well, you have a majority, so what's the problem?
	Get it done.
	You have a majority, and you're all supposed to be exactly the same, too.
	Well, first of all, not all Republicans are the same.
	They cater to different bases, okay?
	I can be pretty conservative.
	I am pretty conservative.
	That's just how I'll vote.
	But I have to be understanding of some of the Republicans who don't have those kind of districts.
	And in the end, they're not selling out to anybody except their own constituents, which is kind of the whole point of representative democracy.
	You know, I want voters to be able to understand that, understand that I will fight for the things I said I was going to fight for.
	I also try not to overpromise things that I just can't get done.
	And again, when you campaign, it's up to you as a good politician to just be more honest with your voters.
	So now I have to ask you a weird personal question.
	You brought your wife along here today.
	take some honesty and some authenticity.
	It's okay.
	We don't have to be so cagey and programmed all the time.
	And I think I was rewarded for it.
	And so we'll keep doing that. - So now I have to ask you a weird personal question.
	So you brought your wife along here today.
	And how did you guys meet? - So we met through a friend in San Diego.
	I had just come out there to start Buds.
	Actually, I had just broken my leg my first time through Hell Week.
	I was friends with another girl who was in the Navy.
	They were both Navy brats and they went to middle school together.
	And they introduced us, so here we are.
	How long did you guys date before you got married?
	Jeez, how long did we date?
	Seven years.
	Oh, wow.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	What took you so long, dude?
	You know, I got blown up.
	Let me just go back to that excuse.
	That's about as good an excuse as I've ever heard, actually.
	Yeah, right?
	I was like, jeez, what am I saying?
	So we got married in 2013.
	So what are your future aspirations?
	So you obviously have raised your profile more than any other member of Republican Congress since your election.
	I mean, you've only been in Congress for about five minutes here.
	What are your future aspirations on the Republican side?
	First, we've got to do right by our district.
	That's always the very first thing before you start thinking bigger than that.
	Politics is often about opportunities more so than a very well-defined pipeline upward.
	You know, as you can probably imagine, as you well know, I think the opportunities that come to you, maybe you run for Senate one day, maybe you run for Governor, maybe you stay in the House and try to go to a leadership position.
	Well, these days everybody runs for President, so who knows?
	For right now, I'm young.
	I can be patient.
	I don't have to leave my constituents and try to move on to something bigger right now.
	I want to do right by them.
	And there's local issues that matter to them that I think we have to fight for before we start believing that we're worthy of something bigger.
	How have you been treated by the media after the SNL thing?
	Obviously there's a lot of warm media coverage.
	My experience with the media has been every time there's a bit of warm media coverage, it's immediately followed by a piano being dropped from a high story.
	What's been your experience with the media since the SNL stuff?
	Yeah, it's not terrible, but it's not great either.
	You know, it depends on which parts of the media, of course.
	Obviously, conservative media, I'm still, you know, we're still friends, and that's good.
	I like to keep it that way.
	And I think your more mainstream media hasn't hit me hard in any way.
	You know, your CNNs, even your MSNBC, every morning, Joe had me on.
	They didn't try to give me a right hook or anything.
	It was okay.
	But then you do something like make a joke about the Super Bowl and you joke about the 70% tax rate.
	Oh boy, they will come after you.
	That was the funniest thing.
	Yeah, that was an absurd thing.
	For people who missed it, AOC tweeted something out about, well, she'd been suggesting a 70% tax rate for people making above $10 million, and after New England won the Super Bowl, Dan tweeted out that New England should redistribute its points or its Super Bowls or something like that.
	Yeah, I was like, we should tax the Patriots a 70% to make the NFL more fair and equal.
	Right, and then she tried to explain marginal tax rates.
	The joke went completely over her head, which seems to happen a lot, which is amazing for a woman as brilliant and well-informed as AOC.
	It was such a strange thing.
	Of all the things that I thought would trigger the left, I mean, that one, wow.
	You can't joke!
	Can't joke anymore.
	Well, this is one of the things that I think has made you popular, and I think it's one of the things that the left can't handle, is that you do have a sense of humor, you are good-natured.
	What they actually want in Republicans is people who look mean, who look nasty, and who are going to get angry at every single problem here.
	Well, that's a good point to touch on, actually.
	They do want us to be old white guys.
	That's what they want.
	They targeted our female candidates in this last election heavily.
	Young Kim in California, Mia Love was targeted heavily.
	Katie Arrington out in South Carolina.
	So, you know, they don't want us to be anything else but old white guys.
	And that's a problem.
	It's a problem for us.
	We need to identify that.
	We should be more diverse because it's helpful to our message if we have different kinds of people messaging it.
	And I think that's important.
	Again, you know, we don't like identity politics and ideas matter much more than that.
	But we're foolish if we think that it's not beneficial to have more people on our side, more different types of people, male, female, you know, different races, all of it.
	We have to.
	And I think, you know, and I think that'd be to our benefit.
	But Democrats certainly don't want that.
	They don't want us to be funny.
	They don't want us to be good people.
	And they'll hit you in very interesting ways, as I've noticed, and some of my local media has done similar ways.
	I don't call it fake news, but I do call it deliberately misleading news, where they're reporting facts, but it's facts that are very clearly meant to mislead the public in a certain direction.
	And that's just unfortunate.
	And you bring this up to a lot of journalists and they'll be so indignant about it.
	Like, how could you possibly say that?
	We are the press.
	They put themselves on this pedestal that is really unbelievable and I don't quite understand.
	I don't know.
	I mean, you're part of the press, maybe.
	It's my fault.
	So in a second, I want to ask you one final question.
	I want to ask you about what you think is the biggest problem facing America that's solvable.
	Some of these things may be intractable.
	What do you think is the biggest solvable problem facing the country?
	I'm going to ask that question to Representative Dan Crenshaw, but to hear his answer, you actually have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
	So subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
	Well, Congressman Crenshaw, thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate your time, and thanks for all you're doing, and thanks for all you have done.
	Really appreciate it.
	It's awesome to be here, Ben.
	I'm a big fan, so this was a pretty cool honor.
	Thanks a lot.
	Thanks a lot.
	Thanks.
	Thanks a lot.
	Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer Mathis Glover.
	Edited by Donovan Fowler.
	Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
	Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
	Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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