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March 22, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:06:34
The Ingratitude Trap | Ep. 743
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Time Text
A Time Magazine journalist reveals the true motivation behind AOC's rise.
Democrats reveal their brutally anti-Israel streak.
And we check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
What a long and yet beneficial week.
I mean, so this has been a long but great week.
If you haven't picked up a copy of my book, The Right Side of History yet, go do it now.
It is number one on Amazon.
It is number one in nonfiction on Barnes and Noble.
So thank you all if you've already picked up a copy of the book.
I'm very proud of it.
I think that it's a real useful work.
And I think it'll be useful for you and your kids and people that you know.
So help us keep it number one.
Maybe we'll knock on the door of the top of the New York Times list.
That list, by the way, is a joke.
I can discuss that a little bit later.
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All right, so a lot to get to here.
Expectation is that the Mueller report could drop as early as today.
According to NBC News, President Trump on Friday continued to claim there is no collusion between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia, as Washington braces for special counsel Robert Mueller's highly anticipated report.
Trump said he has no idea when the report is going to drop.
He says, it's all a big hoax.
And here's the reality.
In all likelihood, this report is not going to contain anything the Democrats can run on.
He added that the AG, the Attorney General William Barr, will ultimately make a decision about the report's release.
Mueller is supposed to submit the report to Barr at the conclusion of his investigation into the Russian election interference and Trump.
Barr is required to notify Congress about Mueller's findings.
However, Justice Department regulations do not require Barr to give a comprehensive report to lawmakers.
In fact, the report is expected not to be comprehensive.
It is expected not to include all sorts of unverified allegations because of current Justice Department regulations.
Unlike the Starr investigation, the Justice Department regulations now govern what comes out from the Mueller report.
Apparently, they're reporting no more indictments are expected, is according to ABC News.
Jonathan Karl reporting, there is no shortage of speculation on the special counsel Robert Mueller's report, much of it totally uninformed.
But we don't need to speculate on the scope.
The man who appointed Mueller has already given us a potential roadmap on what to expect from the special counsel.
The bottom line, do not expect a harsh condemnation of President Trump or any of his associates if they have not been charged with crimes.
Why?
Because it turns out the prosecutors aren't supposed to just spill their guts into the public unless they are charging you with a crime.
It is not their responsibility to inform the public about all of the other various and sundry matters in which you may have been involved.
The roadmap comes in the form of a little-noticed 12-page letter written by Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein last June.
The much-maligned Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein.
Trump dislikes him.
The letter was written to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley.
The letter was in response to Grassley's demands for more information on the special counsel investigation, and it offers a brief history of special counsel investigations.
It actually quotes former and future A.G. William Barr, who appointed three special counsels during his time as A.G. under President George H.W. Bush.
In the letter, Rosenstein makes it clear he believes the DOJ will not and cannot, without violating longstanding Department of Justice policy, include disparaging or incriminating information about anybody who has not been charged with a crime.
So don't expect this thing to be a 500-page Ken Star compendium of details about Donald Trump's private life.
Rosenstein wrote, Sources familiar with the investigation believe there are no more indictments coming from the special counsel.
Amika Brzezinski was reading this story on air this morning on Morning Joe, and you could see her face collapse.
I mean, she was really upset about this, that there were no more indictments expected from the special counsel.
If that's all that Mueller's got, This thing has been a giant waste of time.
Legitimately.
Like, if all he came up with is a bunch of people who lied to the FBI about ancillary matters going to jail for a bunch of random stuff, For very short periods of time, for the most part.
If all that came out of this was that they nailed Paul Manafort for being a violator of the Foreign Registration Act, the Foreign Lobbyist Registration Act, and all they got out of this was Michael Cohen and taxi medallions, my goodness, what a waste of America's time and money.
Rosenstein is emphatic on this point.
He says, in fact, disclosing uncharged allegations against American citizens without a law enforcement need is considered to be a violation of a prosecutor's trust.
Which, of course, makes sense.
What you don't want is people being tried in the court of public opinion based on information that wasn't strong enough to prosecute in the first place.
Later in the letter, Rosenstein says he makes this standard clear to anyone under investigation, even public officials.
He says, no matter who an investigation involves, an ordinary citizen, a local or state politician, a campaign official, a foreign agent, an officer of the federal legislative executive or judicial branch, agents and prosecutors are obligated to protect its confidentiality.
Now, I know there are a lot of people who are on the left listening to this and they're thinking, wait a second, didn't James Comey come out about Hillary Clinton and give a full explanation of their entire investigation before recommending that she not be indicted?
The answer is yes, and that's why James Comey should have been fired at the time.
When James Comey came forward and exonerated Hillary Clinton on charges for which she should have been indicted, he should have either shut up and said, no indictment necessary, or he should have come forward and indicted.
He split the baby and it ended up costing Hillary Clinton the presidency, at least quite plausibly.
In this letter from last year, Rosenstein directly takes issue with the justification then-FBI Director James Comey used to publicly criticize Hillary Clinton in 2016, even as he decided not to charge her with a crime.
At the time, Comey justified the break with longtime DOJ practice as an extraordinary step necessary because of circumstances so unusual they were comparable to a 500-year flood.
That's because Comey was an idiot and terrible at his job.
Rosenstein wrote, it is important for the DOJ to follow established procedures, especially when the stakes are high.
Rosenstein is correct.
James Comey, by the way, the reason he did that is because he knew that Hillary Clinton probably should have been indicted.
But as testimony now from Lisa Page and Peter Strzok has established, the Obama DOJ crammed down on the FBI that she would not be indicted.
And thus, James Comey decided to take it on his own shoulders, the hit.
He decided that to preserve the reputation of both the FBI and DOJ, he would come clean with the American public.
He did a deep disservice to both Hillary Clinton and the general public in doing what he did.
He should have been fired forthwith.
But the fact is that the Obama administration wanted him to do that because they figured that it would end up getting Hillary Clinton off the hook, not costing her the presidency.
Of course, they ended up figuring wrong.
So if the Mueller report drops today, obviously all the presses will stop.
It will be the big deal.
We will see what is in this thing, presumably pretty quickly, because you assume there's not going to be a long turnaround time between Mueller releasing the report and William Barr condensing that report and releasing it to Congress, in which case it'll be leaked to the public in relatively short order.
But this is good for President Trump.
This timeline is good for President Trump, assuming there's no deeply damning material in the report.
And there is one exception.
It is possible that Mueller If he thinks these offenses are impeachable but not criminal, could in fact include a lot of detail in this report simply to justify his time expenditure on this thing.
But if it ends up that there's not much here?
And we are getting rid of this in March of 2019, not in November of 2020.
That is very good news for President Trump.
He can then move on and we won't have to hear President Trump fulminate, except that he will rightly say that he is going to be continued to be targeted by the Democratic House for a bunch of investigations that the Mueller investigation has already concluded are unnecessary.
That is where this is moving.
If it turns out that the Mueller indictments are a big nothing, there are no more indictments.
If the Mueller report is essentially an empty bag and Democrats continue to launch investigations into matters already covered by Mueller, Trump is always going to be able to say, listen, he said I didn't obstruct justice.
He said I didn't collude with Russia.
And now, you're coming after me for the same exact crap, simply to smear me?
Obviously this is politically motivated.
There is no real serious allegation that I impeded the Mueller investigation at any step along the way.
See, this is the thing.
All the folks on the left who keep claiming that Trump obstructed justice, there is no actual evidence of Trump obstructing justice.
He's tweeted a few times at people like Michael Cohen.
That is the closest you can come to an argument that he obstructed justice.
It is not like when Bill Clinton legitimately told people to lie to the FBI for him, like directly told people to do this, according to the Star Report, and according to testimony from those people.
That's what Bill Clinton was caught up on.
There's nothing like that in the Trump case, at least so far as I can remember or see.
We've been through a lot of this material.
What that means is that if the Democrats continue to press on this score, they're going to be seen as vindictive.
They're going to be seen as petty.
And they could get caught up in this thing for the next two years as a sort of fan service.
It's funny, sometimes you watch movies and the movies have plot lines that make no sense, kind of ancillary plot lines that make no sense.
You're like, why don't you just stick to the main plot line?
And then you'll hear inevitably, oh, this is fan service.
This is particularly true in comic book movies.
There's some sort of plot line that nobody cares about.
You're like, why is this here?
Oh, because it was in the comics.
And there's a small group of fans who desperately wanted to see this character from the comics.
It's fan service.
The Democratic Party has to decide whether it wants to be a fan service party or whether it wants to win the 2020 election.
It can't have both.
If the Democrats decide to be a fan service party and spend all of their time launching foolish investigations into President Trump, Trump is rightly going to be able to say, you guys are wasting your time and my money and everybody's money on your dumb investigations instead of focusing in on the issues at hand.
And then his fulmination will actually have some teeth to it.
Him fulminating against Mueller never made any sense.
Mueller works for the executive branch.
Him fulminating against Jeff Sessions, the AG, didn't make any sense either.
Jeff Sessions worked for him and was selected by him.
Rod Rosenstein works for President Trump.
They're all in the executive branch.
But Trump fulminating at Congress, that is a tried, tested, and true strategy for winning re-election.
This has been true ever since Harry Truman won re-election in 1948 on the back of arguing that he had to deal with a do-nothing Republican Congress.
And he pulled his chestnuts out of the fire against Thomas Dewey.
This has been a long-standing, historical, running strategy by presidents.
President Obama, by the way, did the same thing in 2012.
He said, we were going great guns until 2010, and now we're being obstructed, and I'm running against a do-nothing, useless Congress.
And then he won re-election.
Trump can do the same thing now.
So in a certain way, it could be a blessing in disguise if Democrats decide to investigate him up the wazoo.
Yeah, it'll be a pain in the butt.
Yeah, it's bad for all the people who work for President Trump who are going to have to lawyer up and spend a lot of money to defend themselves against dumb investigations.
But it does give Trump something to run on that is not the Democrats calling him an deplorable human being.
In just a second, we will discuss An amazing Time Magazine cover piece about AOC.
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OK, so as I say, the Democrats are in a bit of trouble if they have staked all of their all of their claim to the presidency on the back of Trump colluded with Russia.
And they box themselves in here.
They couldn't accept the fact that Trump won the election in the same way that Stacey Abrams in Georgia refuses to accept that she lost her election for governor of Georgia.
And now the Democrats are trying to elevate her.
This seems like a failed strategy.
It used to be in American politics that if you lost, you went away.
The idea was that if you lost, you went away, and we didn't really want to hear from you because we had rejected you.
And if you wanted to run again later in some other lane, you did that, right?
Mitt Romney.
No one wanted to hear from Mitt Romney after he lost in 2012.
There wasn't a lot of talk about voter fraud or Mitt Romney being jobbed out of being the President of the United States.
He sort of went away, and then the Republican Party moved on, and then he ran for Senate in Utah, and he won!
And now we care what he thinks again.
But until then, not so much.
John Kerry, after he lost in 2004, went away.
Al Gore, after he lost in 2000, went away.
Now Democrats, after they lose, say that they didn't lose, and then not only don't they go away, they rip on the institutions of American government and suggest that because they didn't really lose, the other person in office is illegitimate.
If that's your best shot at president, I just, I literally do not understand the strategy.
I legitimately don't understand that strategy.
It's not like President Trump doesn't provide them fodder to run on every day, but if they are fully invested in the narrative that Hillary Clinton is the actual president of the United States, and thus, the best attack on President Trump is that he is illegitimate, that sort of stuff does not carry weight with the American public, for whom President Trump has been the legitimate president since his election in 2016.
Again, that doesn't mean Democrats aren't going to show up.
They will.
They don't like President Trump.
But if your best shot at Trump is Russian collusion after all of this, Man, what a disappointment you're gonna be to the vast majority of Americans in the upcoming election cycle.
Okay, meanwhile, the true star of the Democratic Party, so fresh, so incredibly fresh, and so incredibly phased, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Wow, she is so fresh and so phased.
She's on the cover of Time Magazine today.
Now, we, here at the Ben Shapiro Show, are obviously obsessed with her because we talk about her when she's on the cover of Time Magazine.
Just like we talk about other politicians when they're on the cover of Time Magazine.
And just like we cover politicians when Tom Perez calls them the new fresh face of the Democratic Party.
But there is an amazing piece by a woman named Charlotte Alter over at Time Magazine.
And the piece is a window into the utter ingratitude of an entire generation of people in the United States.
I'm talking about people my age, around my age and younger.
AOC is only about five years younger than I am.
So Charlotte Alter says, change is closer than we think.
Inside AOC's unlikely rise.
Her piece says, every 10 minutes or so someone knocks on the big wooden door of AOC's office on Capitol Hill.
The noise makes staffers stiffen.
It's almost always a harmless fan.
One of dozens will arrive each day leaving neon-colored post-it notes as devotional offerings.
But in her first three months in Congress, they'd say, enough people have threatened to murder Ocasio-Cortez.
that Capitol Police trained her staff to perform risk assessment of her visitors.
This is the daily reality for America's newest human Rorschach test.
Wonder Woman of the left, Wicked Witch of the right, Ocasio-Cortez has become the second most talked about politician in America after the President of the United States.
That's not actually true.
If you look at the number of Google mentions of AOC, she does follow Joe Biden.
She follows, she follows Beto O'Rourke.
She follows Bernie Sanders.
She follows Nancy Pelosi in many cases, but nevermind.
She's very fresh and very face.
Now, here's what I love about this.
The entire article is about how AOC has lived a suffering life.
The entire article is about how AOC understands the plight of young people who are truly suffering in today's America.
And yet it contains this line.
At the same time, she's a freshman legislator trying to get the hang of her first big full-time job.
She's 29 years old.
This is her first big full-time job in Congress?
That does not sound like a life of hardship in the United States.
Going to Boston University, being given a degree for learning apparently nothing, working at various odd jobs while your parents are upper-middle income, and your first big-time job is in Congress, that doesn't sound like a rags-to-riches story.
That sounds like a some-riches-to-more-riches story.
And yet, she is a suffering servant.
She's a suffering servant, according to Charlotte Alter.
I miss being able to go outside and sweat, she says in her office one day in March, settling into a black leather chair after a long day of subcommittee hearings.
She's much smaller than she looks on TV, with a warm but cautious manner.
Oh my god, the hagiography.
I can't go anywhere in public and just be a person without a lot of people watching everything I do.
Oh, poor you.
Welcome to the club.
And come on, who cares?
AOC represents one vision of the Democratic Party's future.
She's a young Hispanic woman, three cornerstones of the party's electoral coalition.
She's a democratic socialist at a time when confidence in capitalism is declining, especially among progressive millennials.
And then this article just goes on to talk about how wonderful she is in every aspect.
She's wonderful and caring and decent and terrific.
I love this.
On Ocasio-Cortez's office bookshelf, near a picture of her late father and a photo of her with a local Girl Scout troop, two books nestled together in uneasy union.
One is The Federalist Papers, written mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and published in 1788.
The other is The Uninhabitable Earth, Life After Warming, written by journalist David Wallace-Wells 231 years later.
There's a picture of Wonder Woman leaning in one corner of the office and a giant cardboard cutout of Cardi B's face in another.
Oh, wow.
She's just, she's unbelievable.
She's amazing.
Now, here is where things become hilarious.
They say she was born into a working class family in the Parkchester section of the Bronx.
Yeah, her family moved out of there real fast, into a pretty upper-income area of New York.
As Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire has pointed out, he grew up in the neighboring county, which was not quite as wealthy.
Her dad owned a small architecture company.
Her Puerto Rico-born mother cleaned houses.
They were deeply rooted in the neighborhood, but also wary of its limitations.
Ocasio-Cortez has told friends she learned early on that wearing hoop earrings and the nameplate necklaces was fine in the Bronx, but she wouldn't be taken seriously if she wore them to a job interview.
The family moved to the prosperous Westchester County suburb of Yorktown Heights when she was about five.
Five.
So the first part of that paragraph makes it sound as though she lived her entire life growing up in the Bronx, and then she moved into the upper echelons of American society.
Her family moved into a nice area when she was five.
Five.
She describes herself as a dorky kid who once asked for a microscope for her birthday.
Her 2007 high school microbiology project on the effect of antioxidants on the lifespan of roundworms won second place in the microbiology category at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
She often joined her mom to clean the homes of neighbors, and she wrote her college application essay about two of them helping a man who lost the wife the only way they could, by cleaning out his fridge.
She took out student loans to enroll at BU.
Wow.
I mean, unlike everyone else, she took out loans to go to college.
Wow.
She really must have been hard up.
Graduating in 2011 with a degree in economics and international relations.
By the way, she knows nothing about either of those two things.
That shows you how crappy our colleges are.
Now, the part of this that is really galling is not that Time Magazine put her on its cover.
The media have been pushing her since she defeated Joe Crowley with like 15,000 votes in a deep blue area in a plurality Hispanic congressional district.
People treat this as though it's a massive shocker.
It was only a massive shocker if you weren't following the race all that closely, is sort of the truth.
But regardless, you don't want to diminish her accomplishments.
She won 15,000 votes in a heavily blue suburb that was majority or plurality Hispanic against a white guy who was not super popular and didn't spend a lot of time in his home district, reportedly.
In any case, Regardless, she won, but she was immediately elevated to the upper echelons of democratic leadership, and the real reason is because she's attractive, and she looks like she's having a good time, and she's kind of fun, and she knows how to use Instagram, and she has an instant pot, and all the rest of this.
But Charlotte Alter, the columnist of Time, is what I actually want to talk about, not AOC.
Because she spilled the beans on why it is that millennials think like AOC.
And it is pretty astonishing.
It is pretty astonishing and pretty damning.
If you're a millennial and you think like AOC because you think like Charlotte Alter, You need to get your head straightened out because you are not being accurate about the state of the world.
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OK, so the real story here is not AOC.
The real story is the columnist who wrote about her, Charlotte Alter.
So Charlotte Alter, has been appearing on all the major media to talk up her big news story about AOC.
Yeah, she's the best.
So Charlotte Alter suggested that AOC's dominance is inevitable.
Inevitable.
This is what she suggested.
Her assent is inevitable.
And honestly, it is in some ways.
And the thing about AOC and the reason that she is, I think, tapping into something that is so exciting to some and threatening to others is that she is really bringing us into the politics of the 21st century.
She is a 21st century leader trying to tackle 21st century problems in a body that is largely dominated by 20th century thinking.
Okay, what the hell is she even talking about?
That makes no sense.
Why is this person a columnist?
Why is this person our reporter?
She calls herself a journalist for Time Magazine, just writing these drooling pieces about AOC.
And then she says the reason that people are upset at AOC is because they're just jealous.
It's not that AOC is completely ignorant and says dumb things and gets massive media attention.
It's just pure jealousy.
Pure jealousy.
Weird, because I don't really feel jealous of her as much as I feel angry at the media for having decided that her ideas are worth airing and defending, despite the fact that they are unintelligible masses of gibberish.
Here is Charlotte Alter playing defense as a journalist for AOC.
Again, she's a journalist, folks.
Don't worry, the media are not biased in any way.
There are certainly some Democrats who are a little annoyed that she's getting so much airspace and so many headlines.
And they think that she, and they, you know, frankly, I think, seem a little jealous that she's getting so much attention.
They would like to be on the cover of Time magazine.
But everyone that we spoke to who's worked with her has said that she's kind, she's prepared, she, you know, she shows up, she does her homework.
Oh, well, everyone you spoke to, is it?
Maybe you might want to broaden that circle out from her immediate family and people she pays.
Because if you actually talk to anyone in the Democratic caucus who knows anything, they are all deeply unhappy with the fact that AOC is constantly stepping all over every serious legislative proposal they put out.
But that's not even the key here.
Here is the key.
Charlotte Alter tweets this out.
She tweets out, AOC and I were born the same year.
Remember, she's a journalist, folks.
She's not the official autobiographer.
She's not a ghostwriter for AOC.
She's a journalist.
Quote, AOC and I were born the same year.
She was a Dunkaroos kid.
I liked Fruit Roll-Ups.
People our age have never experienced American prosperity in our adult lives, which is why so many millennials are embracing democratic socialism.
You have got to be kidding me.
People our age have never experienced American prosperity in our adult lives, You spoiled child.
You spoiled brat.
And AOC, you spoiled child.
You spoiled brat.
AOC writes, yes, and this is not just my story.
This is true of wide swaths of our entire generation who are now poised to become a much more influential civic and electoral bloc as we mature into our 30s and beyond.
Wow.
Wow.
So it's so tough to be a millennial.
Well, it's so brutal to be a millennial.
Shut your head.
Honestly, shut your head.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
You are living the best life any people have ever lived on planet Earth.
You're living in a country where you can say anything you want.
You're living in a place where you have more income than anyone in history.
With a touch of a button, any product anywhere on Earth will arrive at your door in three days for the cheapest available price.
You're living in a world where your chances of starvation are zero, where your chances of homelessness are effectively zero, if you have any sort of social fabric or any money at all.
A world in which you live in a nation with 3.8% unemployment and 7 million unfilled jobs.
Where your poverty line involves having a microwave, a car, a stove, and a TV.
You're whining about poverty?
You?
Charlotte Alter is whining about poverty?
Really?
Okay, Charlotte Alter also tweeted out, in order to understand AOC, you have to look at what she experienced and what she didn't.
Red scare, Reaganomics, and prosperous 90s were all before her time.
Her adulthood was defined by financial crisis, debt, and climate change.
No wonder she and her peers are moving left.
If you think that living in the 2000s and the 2010s is brutal, you're a doof.
You don't know anything about history.
You don't know anything about any place else on planet Earth.
You're dumb.
You're ignorant.
I mean, like, I don't mean to be insulting, but I do.
I'm sorry, I do mean to be insulting, because these ideas are laughable.
Charlotte Alter complaining about the difficulties of millennials.
Let me tell you something about Charlotte Alter, okay?
We're gonna talk about, for a second, who this woman is, who is claiming that as a millennial, you have never experienced prosperity.
Charlotte Alter was born in 1990.
1990, okay?
So that means that she is, what, 29 years old?
She's the same age as AOC.
Her father is Jonathan Alter.
He's a columnist for Newsweek and a correspondent for NBC News.
He's one of the more famous political commentators of the modern world.
Her mother was Emily, executive producer on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central.
Her grandmother was the first woman elected to public office in Cook County, Illinois.
Her uncle was the CEO of Sony.
She went to Harvard University, and then worked at HBO, and now has a show on SiriusXM.
Oh, the suffering!
Oh, the humanity!
Charlotte Alter and her peers, they've never experienced prosperity.
Ever.
It's just incredible.
I mean, what, what unbelie- Listen.
I know that there are some people in America who are experiencing poverty.
I know there are some people in America who grew up in single-parent households and really had to struggle to get ahead.
I know there are some people in America living in areas where the jobs have left.
But they're nothing compared to Charlotte Alter.
I mean, my goodness.
Imagine the difficulty of having to grow up in a house where your mom produces for Comedy Central and your dad is one of the more famous columnists in the West.
Just imagine how rough that must be.
I weep for her.
I weep for her.
It's always astonishing to me to watch people who've really had it pretty good in the United States whine about how rough they have it in the United States.
Like me, I've had it great in the United States.
I don't whine about having it rough because I've had it great, okay?
And I grew up in a two-bedroom house in Burbank, California that fits six people.
It was like an 1,100-square-foot house.
It fits six people.
It had one bathroom.
I slept in the same bedroom as my three younger sisters until I was 11 years old.
And you know what?
My life was phenomenal.
I had two parents who loved me.
I lived in a neighborhood where all of us knew each other.
There was a social fabric because America is freaking great.
America is terrific.
Millennials whining about how rough they have it while chomping down on avocado toast is one of the more obnoxious phenomena of our modern world.
Learn a thing.
A thing.
In a second, I'm going to show you some charts to demonstrate that it's not just Charlotte Alter's story, that millennials have actually been pretty well off, that they stand on a 3,000-year tradition of a West that has produced prosperity, science, decency, morality, and democracy, and then they sit there and whine about it all day and talk about tearing it down in favor of a socialist utopia that has never existed and will never exist.
I'm going to show you the stats that show that Charlotte Alter is not an outlier in terms of being benefited from being in the United States.
I have some charts, and facts, and figures, which mean more than Charlotte Alter's tweets about Dunkaroos.
By the way, I don't even know why she's suggesting that eating Dunkaroos is some sign of poverty.
When I was a kid, that's all I wanted.
Dunkaroos, I don't think, were kosher, and I was always looking at the commercials on TV, and I'm like, God, those look fantastic.
Cookies that you dip into chocolate dip, and it comes in a package?
That's amazing!
Hey, in a second, we'll get to all of that.
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Okay, so it's time for me to share with you some actual statistics.
Not like AOC, I used to eat Dunkaroos and live in an upper middle class area.
What a victim am I?
We're going to talk about the spread of products into American households more generally.
This is a timeline.
If you can see, this is why you should subscribe so you can see.
This is a timeline of when products were invented and how long it took for them to be integrated into 100% of household use in the United States.
So the telephone took essentially a full century from its invention until it was available in 100% of households.
By 1970, it was available by about 80% of households.
You know, 70 years between invention and its actual acceptance by the vast majority of American households.
If you look at electricity, electricity was made available at the beginning of the 20th century.
It was not widely available in all American households until you got to about 1945, 1950.
That's when it was available in like 80% of American households.
The radio was invented in the mid-1920s, and it was available in most American households, and the vast majority anyway, by 1940.
Now look at the right side of this chart, the right-hand side of this chart.
Every major invention of the modern era, the line from invention to prevalence is essentially straight up.
The smartphone was invented shortly after 2000.
By 2010, the smartphone was available for more than 50% of the public.
And by 2015, it was available to 75% of the public.
A 15-year lag period between invention and acceptance by everyone.
The digital camera was invented in about 1995.
It was already available for pretty much everybody.
Everyone had one by 10 years later.
So basically, any major product that has been invented since 1970 in the United States has been available to pretty much every American household within 10 to 15 years.
And we are whining about this?
We are complaining about this?
In 1980, I have statistics on consumption and wealth.
The consumption per capita in 2015 dollars in 1980 was $19,182.
By 2015, it was $38,146.
We had doubled our rate of consumption.
$19,182.
By 2015, it was $38,146.
We had doubled our rate of consumption.
That doesn't sound like poverty to me.
The share of household budget spent on food, clothing, shelter, and utilities went down The share spent on entertainment and recreation went from 8.9% in 1980 to 14.3% in 2015.
in 2015 the share spent on entertainment and recreation went from 8.9 percent in 1980 to 14.3 percent in 2015 the average size of a new home went from 1595 square feet in 1980 to 2700 square feet in 2015 in other words um guys things have gotten a lot better and you should stop your whining That's not true for everyone.
Listen, if you're an exception, if you're somebody who's really had it hard, you grew up in poverty, obviously this is not true for you, but that's been true for all time.
There are people growing up in poverty.
AOC is not one of them.
To pretend that millennials, as a generation, have it significantly worse off than past generations is to ignore the products that we get to consume now.
The people who are middle class now live better than rich people did even 30 years ago.
The market capitalization of all listed U.S.
firms in consistent 2015 dollars, $3.4 trillion in 1980, $25.1 trillion in 2015.
Life expectancy has risen by nearly six years since 1980.
The overall death rate has dropped from 1,007 per 100,000 people to 724 per 1,000 people.
trillion dollars in 2015.
Life expectancy has risen by nearly six years since 1980.
The overall death rate has dropped from 1,007 per 100,000 people to 724 per 1,000 people.
It has declined the death rate for heart disease, for cancer.
For automobile deaths.
Dramatically for automobile deaths.
For airline deaths.
It has gone from 53.9 per 100 billion miles flown to 0.2.
Working conditions.
We are working fewer hours.
Output per work hour has risen.
It has essentially doubled in the United States.
Employee benefits have increased.
Mean retirement age has decreased.
Work-related deaths have been sliced by four, by a factor of four.
And we're whining about this?
We are complaining about this?
You've got to be kidding me.
The money prices for consumer goods move steadily upwards.
Americans' true cost of living is better measured in hours and minutes of work, and that has been moving downward, consistently.
So money prices have gone up, but that's because of inflation.
But when you look at work hour prices, meaning how much work it takes to buy a particular product, that has been declining steadily since 1900, to all-time lows now.
There is falling real cost of everyday products.
The iPad, okay, the iPad, when it was introduced in 2010, and now what it costs, it only costs 85% of what it used to.
and now what it costs.
It only costs 85% of what it used to.
A movie costs 74.6% of what it used to.
A pizza costs 59% of what it used to.
Cheaper products.
Better products.
And we are complaining about this?
This is what is causing socialism?
So the answer is it's ingratitude that's causing socialism.
It's not real conditions.
It's a lot of people like AOC whining about their wonderful upbringing in a fantastic country.
Show a little gratitude and maybe you'll stop whining about the system and start focusing on maybe the fact that if you are not succeeding the way you want to, you need to change the decisions that you are making.
You are in control of your own life, not some impersonal chaotic forces beyond your control.
What we are watching right now is a return to a misunderstanding of civilization.
That's what we are watching right now.
I'm going to talk about that in just a second.
So, what we are watching In essence, in the United States, is a misunderstanding of the system under which we live.
We live in a free system.
You get to make decisions.
That doesn't mean we all start off in the same place.
It doesn't mean we all face the same obstacles.
We obviously do not.
We all grew up with certain advantages and certain disadvantages.
Some of those are much greater than others.
Some of us grew up incredibly wealthy.
Some of us grew up smarter.
Some of us have more athletic ability.
We all have different capacities and we are all born into different situations.
The question is, do we live in a country that is free for you to make decisions and reap the consequences of those decisions?
Or is the system, quote-unquote, rigged against you?
And if it is, quote-unquote, rigged against you, is that because reality is just reality?
Or is it because there's somebody who's actively standing in your way?
What I mean by that is that there are certain people who are just going to do better than others in American society.
People who are more likely to make good decisions.
People who may be smarter, or faster, or bigger, or taller, or more beautiful.
That's been true for all of human history, and government is not in a position to rectify these cosmic inequities.
The question is, is government actively impeding you from feeling the effect of your own choices?
And if it is not, then maybe we ought to examine the choices and discuss how we can make better choices so that we succeed in American society.
This is why I dislike populism of both right and left.
Populism basically says to people, we'll give you what you want, an excuse.
Populism of the right says, well, you know, there are all these factory towns where the jobs have gone away and we lie and we say it's because of China and Mexico, not because of technological development.
And then we say, well, we want to make sure that the system isn't quote-unquote rigged against you.
And we're going to have to show me which part of the system was rigged and why we wouldn't be better off just saying to folks, listen, let's help you make decisions.
If we're going to help you, let's find private charitable ways to help you make decisions that better your life.
Here's the truth.
In a free country, the decision to better your life is up to you.
And that's the country we live in.
Because that is the civilization that we founded.
The civilization we founded was based on certain fundamental principles.
You are not at the mercy of forces around you.
You're a free, rational actor, made in the image of God.
So are all the people around you.
You get to make those decisions and you have a responsibility to make good and moral decisions.
To make virtuous decisions.
Decisions that make your life better and build the social fabric.
This is what my entire book, The Right Side of History, is about.
If we reject those fundamental assumptions and we assume that we are in fact just corks bobbing about on the eddies of civilization, and that if we just radically reshifted civilization, then suddenly it would be better for everyone?
Any attempt to radically reshift human nature away from freedom and toward oppressiveness from the top down in the name of kind-hearted, smiley-faced, redistributive justice and social justice, all that's going to do is create more misery, which is typically what these systems do.
In the long run.
Meanwhile, I think it is worthwhile noting the Democratic Party has moved dramatically anti-Israel.
Not only did Ilhan Omar win, Ilhan Omar, the anti-Semite, the representative from Minnesota, Not only did she somehow amazingly get the Democratic Party to fold to her, but now the entire Democratic Party is essentially mirroring her position on the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.
So AIPAC is not a lobbying organization.
They do not pay people, okay?
They're a lobbying organization in the sense that they bring Congress people to Israel and educate them about the issues.
They do not give direct donations to candidates.
AIPAC does not.
AIPAC is largely considered just a pro-Israel place, and virtually every candidate right, left, and center has spoken at AIPAC, no matter their position, even if that position happens to be an incredibly dovish position on Israel.
Barack Obama used to speak there every year, despite the fact that Barack Obama was dramatically anti-Israel in policy.
Because he wanted to show, listen, my policy is not driven by anti-Israel animus.
Now the Democrats have decided they are not showing up anymore.
Ilhan Omar won.
How do we know she won?
Because she's retweeting people saying she won.
Because Ilhan Omar started this whole thing by saying it was Jew money behind American support for Israel and what she really meant was AIPAC.
That's the Jew money.
And the Democrats have decided, OK, I guess we'll go along with that.
I guess we won't speak at AIPAC anymore.
Now, listen, I have never been a big advocate of AIPAC.
I think that they are too left wing.
I think they haven't taken strong positions on things like the Iran deal.
I've been highly critical at times of AIPAC.
Go back and look at the record.
But for every Democrat to basically say we're not speaking to a pro-Israel group because it would signal to our base that we like Israel is pretty astonishing.
Ilhan Omar won.
Five, count them, five Democratic candidates say they will not attend the AIPAC policy conference this year, which is an astonishing move considering, again, that all of these people want to win Democratic primaries and Jews vote overwhelmingly Democrat.
Elizabeth Warren says no.
Kamala Harris says no.
Bernie Sanders says no.
Julian Castro says no.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is also skipping.
Apparently Howard Schultz, former Starbucks CEO, is not going.
MoveOn.org condemned AIPAC on Wednesday in a series of tweets.
And so they're all now following the lead of MoveOn.org.
Of course, AOC and Ilhan Omar have been leading the charge, and it was AOC's Chief of Staff who tweeted out today, What was her courage?
She said it was Jew money behind American support of Israel, and then she pointed her finger at AIPAC.
Ilhan Omar for showing such courage.
What was her courage?
She said it was Jew money behind American support of Israel.
And then she pointed her finger at AIPAC and the entire left-wing media went, yeah, let's ask some questions about those Jews and their money.
The New York Times ran a headline saying, And now?
Listen, we know where the heart of the Democratic Party is.
It is no longer with Israel.
It is not a pro-Israel party anymore.
It is an anti-Israel party.
The fact that they won't even go speak, even to share their differences with AIPAC, demonstrates where they stand.
Loudly and proudly.
These are the fresh faces of the Democratic Party.
It's courage now?
It's courage?
By the way, apparently more Democrats have said that they are not going to go now.
It's not just five.
Beto O'Rourke also says that he is not going to show up either.
So that means that there are six Democratic candidates who say they will not show up at AIPAC because they're afraid of ticking off the anti-Israel and at least partially anti-Semitic base of the Democratic Party.
That is pretty astonishing.
Meanwhile, President Trump yesterday recognized that the Golan Heights were a part of Israel, which is a good move considering you don't want the Golan Heights, which is a strategically important, valuable asset in the hands of Syria.
It is literally a giant cliff, the Golan Heights, from which Syrian batteries were shelling Israel in 1973.
Israel had to expend thousands of lives in order to take the Golan Heights and keep them safe for civilized people in Israel.
Good for the Trump administration.
Yet we're told the Trump administration is anti-Semitic, but Ilhan Omar is not.
Yeah.
Any more lies you want to sell there, press?
All right.
Time for the mailbag.
So it's a Friday.
That means that we are obligated morally and logistically to do some mailbag questions.
So here we go.
George says, Hi Ben.
As we all know, the New Zealand Prime Minister announced the country would ban all semi-automatic guns less than a week after the shooting.
As a conservative, I'm weary of legislative changes being made in reactionary fashion, but I have difficulties explaining why.
Could you maybe explain why reactionary legislative action is bad?
Or even maybe why it isn't bad?
What are your thoughts?
My general thoughts are that reactionary legislation, unless it is driven by a pressing policy need that is backed by evidence, Are bad.
Why?
Because emotional responses are generally bad.
It is your job as a human being to exercise your reason, not your knee-jerk emotional response.
And it seems that in the aftermath of tragedy, very often what people do is they say, here's my knee-jerk emotional response.
Guy used a gun, get rid of all the guns.
And if you don't agree with me, it's because you're a bad person.
Because you don't care about what just happened.
We saw this with Sandy Hook.
In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, that was when Piers Morgan was doing this every night, and I said to him that he was bullying people by suggesting their moral inferiority if they didn't agree with him on gun control.
Which of course was true, and effectively ended his career on television.
The fact is that too many people in positions of legislative power react to events with character assassination of people who disagree with them on policy.
That is not a recipe for good policymaking.
If you have good evidentiary policy that has been based on evidence, then you should be putting that forward in non-crisis scenarios.
And then if there's a crisis and public attention is on the issue, then you put it forward again.
But if the idea is that we are supposed to react in non-reasonable fashion to bad stuff that happens because there's an emotional appeal and we can use it as an emotional club, that's bad policymaking and worse morality.
Stephen says, hey, Ben, do you have thoughts on President Trump's executive order to protect free speech on campus?
Thanks.
And I love your show.
Well, Stephen, I'm glad you asked.
I do have some thoughts on this.
So, President Trump's executive order, I was withholding judgment until I saw the text of it.
The text of it is benign.
The text of it basically just says that it's essentially advisory.
It says to college campuses, unless you take proper procedures to protect free speech, we are going to remove your research funding.
But it doesn't go any further into specifics.
That effectively means that it's up to the Department of Education to determine whether the First Amendment has been violated in terms of removing public funding from universities that engage in anti-free speech activity.
I have a feeling that it's not going to be invoked very often, but just as a sort of advisory opinion, I think it's a good thing, and every administration, Democratic and Republican, should reinforce that idea.
By the way, it should be uncontroversial.
Barack Obama himself was very hard on colleges that attempted to shut down free speech.
I praised him for it at the time.
So I'm a traditionalist when it comes to baseball, so I'm not generally in favor of the DH rule.
I think it changes the strategic nature of the game.
Should the National League adopt the DH rule?
So I'm a traditionalist when it comes to baseball, so I'm not generally in favor of the DH rule.
I think it changes the strategic nature of the game.
I understand the rationale, which is to keep old players from having to play the field.
And also you don't lose a position in the batting order.
And There are some rule changes I think that would be good.
I think that, number one, you should have to pitch to more than one batter if you are a relief pitcher, because it is very irritating to watch seven relief pitchers be brought in to finish one inning.
It just wastes a lot of time.
Second of all, absolutely there should be a pitch clock.
And not only should there be a pitch clock, batters should not be allowed to back out of the box 1,000 times, no more Garciaparra style, and relace their gloves every five seconds.
It's ridiculous.
As far as the intentional walk, that's a bad rule change.
You should have to throw the pitches for the intentional walk.
I've seen ball games where somebody throws away the ball on an intentional walk and somebody scores from third base on it.
That doesn't waste, really, a lot of time in baseball.
There's some rule changes that are just dumb.
The idea that we go to extra innings and you put a runner on second.
Sort of like the football rule that the first person who scores wins.
It's just dumb.
It's silly.
But as a general rule, listen, baseball is one of the healthier sports right now.
Baseball, if you had to buy stock in sports right now, you'd buy stock in basketball and you'd buy stock in baseball and you'd sell on football.
Noah says, Hey Ben, you often speak about the social fabric and community institutions like churches being there for those in need.
If these avenues continue to decline, how can those in need get help?
Good question.
I'm not sure they can, other than government interventionism, which is why you're seeing an increasing demand for government interventionism.
The beautiful thing about being a government interventionist is you intervene with the government in the name of doing good.
You crowd out private alternatives, and then you point to the fact that private alternatives have been crowded out to grow government even more.
That's what the welfare system generally does.
It reduces private giving because we have less money to give.
Yesterday, it was pretty fantastic.
It was Purim, which is one of my favorite Jewish holidays.
It really just is a time of joy.
I told the story of it on yesterday's podcast, so go back and listen to it and things I like.
And I was just driving around my local community, which is heavily Orthodox.
It's a very Jewish community.
And I'm seeing parents walking around on the street with their kids dressed up in costumes.
I'm seeing them drop off gift baskets, mishloch manot, at everybody else's house.
We ourselves are driving around my car.
My kids and I are walking up to front doors and dropping off gift baskets.
And you receive, you know, 20, 25 gift baskets just from people in the community who you've had over to your house and who have been over to your house.
And you think to yourself, this is what the social fabric looks like.
You know if you have a social fabric and you know if you don't.
And the reason the social fabric exists is, of course, this is a pretty diverse group of people, diverse jobs, diverse experiences from a variety of countries.
And yet we all have a common goal, and that is to worship God in Jewish fashion.
And that is a good thing.
It builds community.
I mean, I turned to my wife last night and we were driving around, I said, This kind of social fabric is really what built the West.
It's this kind of social fabric that makes America a terrific place.
De Tocqueville talks about this, and it's worthy of emulation and strengthening.
Daniel says, Hey Ben, my 13-year-old son Elliot is listening to the podcast with me today.
Can you give him a quick shout out?
Done.
Elliot, sup dude?
Alright, let's see.
Beatriz says, I think this week you mentioned it was a Jewish fast day, and therefore you could not drink out of the leftist year's tumbler.
That got me thinking.
How do you include young children in the celebration of Jewish holidays?
Although I am Christian, I think there is value in observing the Jewish holidays with my family.
Would love to get your advice on this topic.
Thank you.
I'm listening from Spain, waiting for your new book to arrive.
Well, Beatrice, I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for buying the book.
You know, we include... The Jewish holidays are really heavily geared toward kids.
Passover, particularly, is very geared toward kids.
Famously, the kids ask the four questions, manishtan, aha, laila, that whole thing.
The whole goal of that is to get kids involved in the Seder.
So you give them projects, you give them assignments.
Every Saturday, every Shabbat, my kids have to tell us about the Bible portion of the week, and they learn about it in school.
The kids are pretty knowledgeable.
My daughter, who's five, knows the entire story of Purim, and she can tell it back to you, and she finds it interesting and entertaining.
Jewish holidays really, so many institutions in Judaism are geared toward teaching of children.
It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
And by the way, I think that Christians should know a lot about Jewish holidays.
After all, if you're a Christian, Jesus was a Jew.
You should know about the holidays that Jesus celebrated.
I mean, the Last Supper was a Pesach.
It was a Pesach dinner.
It was a Passover dinner.
Paul says, Ben, congratulations on the success of your new book.
Can't wait to read it.
What are your thoughts on the group of Orthodox Jews who came out in defense of Representative Omar?
I assume you're talking about the Neturei Karta.
They're a terrible group of people.
They suggest that the state of Israel is a moral abomination.
They've gone and met with the dictators of Iran.
They are used as a front group for anti-Semitism by anti-Semites all over the world who hate Jews and find them a convenient face.
They're sort of the right-wing version of J Street.
It's a front group that is designed in anti-Israel, anti-Jewish way or Jewish voices for peace.
And then people who don't like Israel can point to, oh, here are my Jews.
These are the Jews I like over here.
Kate says, Hey Ben, huge fan of yours.
My question is as a pro-life woman and someone who is struggling with fertility problems, I'm curious about your view on in vitro fertilization.
From what I've gathered, clinics automatically destroy embryos that don't meet a certain standard.
Do you believe this is a form of abortion, and if so, should this be something we talk about as pro-life conservatives in order to be consistent in our views of life at conception?
Thank you so much.
So I don't know enough about the destruction of embryos.
My view is that if you destroy an embryo that is, in fact, a form of abortion, And that's why you should only implant the number of embryos that you are willing to give birth to.
And that may be more expensive, but that seems to me the only pro-life way to do it.
So I'm not against in vitro in the sense that if you fertilize an egg and then you implant it artificially in a woman's uterus, that that is something terrible.
I don't agree with that, but the destruction of an embryo obviously does raise serious pro-life moral concerns.
Jeffrey says, Hi Ben.
You have said we should not be prejudiced against people who practice a religion.
Does this mean we shouldn't be prejudiced against people who practice a religion that holds very evil views and morals?
Can you see a religion that is not acceptable and worthy of being prejudiced against?
Well, a religion is a viewpoint.
What I mean by you shouldn't be prejudiced against a religion is that religious practice alone should not disqualify you from being seen as holding certain views.
So I've said, for example, that wearing hijab does not mean that you are anti-Western or anti-American or anything like that.
I wear a funny hat every day.
I think that your viewpoint can obviously be held against you, and it depends on your viewpoint.
If you are a radical Islamist, that is a religious viewpoint.
Radical Islamism is very, very bad.
Radical Islamism is not only fundamentalist, it is anti-woman, and it is anti-Western.
So obviously you can hold that viewpoint against someone just as you would hold communism or socialism against somebody, ideologically speaking.
What I mean is that simple religious practice alone cannot be the barrier to being seen as a fully-fledged Westerner, obviously.
You should be able to worship however you choose, so long as your ideology itself is not evil.
So, again, religious practice generally is not sufficient as a marker to rule people out of line in that way.
Rachel says, Ben, Thursday you talked about how it's unfair to judge Jordan Peterson on being photographed with someone in a dumb shirt.
Did this also apply to Obama and Farrakhan, or is this different because we know the views of Farrakhan?
Thanks and love the show.
Well, obviously, I think it's different because Farrakhan has been a longtime open anti-Semite.
Jordan Peterson didn't know this guy.
This guy walked up wearing a shirt with a lot of words on it.
I assume that Jordan wasn't sitting there scrutinizing his shirt.
So that's a different thing.
Louis Farrakhan is a very, very famous anti-Semite who has met with pretty much every Democratic member of Congress at this point, or at least a lot of them.
So that is a very different thing.
Alfredo says, Dear Ben, you often talk about the fresh faces of the Democratic Party.
Who, in your opinion, is the future of the Republican Party?
Is a run for any type of office in your future?
From your fellow California Alfredo.
A couple of answers to this one.
I obviously have praised Nikki Haley highly in the past.
I really like Nikki Haley.
I think a lot of the people who ran last time are quite wonderful.
I like Ted Cruz.
I like Senator Cruz.
I like Senator Rubio.
I like Representative Dan Crenshaw.
I like Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.
I like Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida.
There are a lot of really good up-and-coming young Republicans who have pretty solid records, and I'm excited about the future of conservatism among a lot of those faces.
As far as a run for office in my future, man, you'd have to make a convincing case.
I love my job.
I have a great life.
I get to sit here and be as purist as I want to be.
I don't have to travel around, leave my family for weeks at a time.
I don't have to fundraise.
You'd have to make a really, really strong affirmative case as to why I should run.
Thanks.
Absolutely.
I have a book.
Hi, Ben.
I'm French and in love with U.S. main values.
I understand them a lot more since I follow you.
Can you explain the difference between the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment and the French one?
Thanks.
Absolutely.
I have a book.
It's called The Right Side of History.
And a large part of that book is dedicated to the difference between the Scottish, English, American Enlightenment and the French Enlightenment.
The French Enlightenment saw the Enlightenment as a break between reason and religion.
That all the Judeo-Christian values of the past could now be abandoned and we had to build a new morality on the basis of reason alone.
The cult of reason was actually an actual worshipped cult in France during the French Revolution.
Like they actually went into They actually went into Notre Dame, they ripped out all the crosses, and they put up a statue of something that they called Reason.
And then they actually worshipped Reason.
This is not a joke.
This is something that actually happened during the French Revolution.
It was called the Cult of Reason.
And then there was the Cult of the Supreme Deity, and that was founded by Robespierre, and that was supposed to be sort of the deist response to the Cult of Reason, but it effectively was the same thing.
The fact is that when you withdraw from the fundamental principles that undergird Western civilization in the name of reason, you destroy reason itself.
What America understood is that you need a social fabric built on Judeo-Christian values, and that you can reason, but you have to make the fundamental assumptions of Judeo-Christian values, and then use reason in accordance with those.
So the fundamental premises themselves should not be questioned, meaning the fact that the universe is an orderly place, the fact that Human beings are made in the unique image of God, and human beings have creative power and free will, and that history is a progression, and that you can impact the world.
All of these principles are stuff I talk about in The Right Side of History.
The French Revolution dispensed with them.
In doing so, they dispensed with individual rights in favor of romantic nationalism.
They valued equality of outcome rather than equality of rights, and they did an enormous amount of damage.
People, I've heard the critique that my book is anti-Enlightenment.
That is such absolute sheer crap, I can't even believe it.
I mean, you have to be illiterate to believe that.
I'm super pro-Enlightenment.
The goal of my book is to explain that the Enlightenment had roots and didn't magically spring into being in 1760, and that we have to recognize those roots or we lose the part of the Enlightenment that is actually worth preserving.
Matthew says, Hi Ben.
You got me hooked on the Bible.
I can't thank you enough for that.
You made me rethink my views.
I went from being an atheist to a devout Christian.
That's fantastic.
I've had the Bible read to me carefully twice.
I'm amazed at how much I still don't understand.
It took me seven hours to read Deuteronomy chapters one and two.
Well, then you're reading it correctly.
I'm really frustrated with how difficult it is to read the Hebrew and understand it.
Are there things that I just won't understand unless I speak Hebrew and read it in Hebrew?
What do you recommend I do?
Any help would be extremely appreciated.
Well, if you want a pretty good translation of the Hebrew, there's a new Bible commentary that is out by Rabbi Soloveitchik that I don't remember if I've recommended it already this week.
I think that I have.
It's a Bible commentary by Rabbi Joseph Baer Soloveitchik, one of the more famous rabbis of the 20th century.
And the translation of the Bible is quite good and it has his commentary below it.
So that's a good way to study it, so that you're not just trying to read it straight.
Speaking of which, there's another great book by Rabbi Soloveitchik called Halakhic Man, all about why Jews follow Jewish law, why Jewish law matters, even in a world where you think that you have natural law principles.
Really, really worth reading.
Rabbi Soloveitchik, one of the great thinkers in modern Jewish history.
So you can go pick up a copy of Halakhic Man.
Alrighty.
Okay, let's move to a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so a couple of things.
Elizabeth Warren, not understanding things.
So Senator Elizabeth Warren, she's running the progressive, populist, left-wing viewpoint, which is shocking, because she started her career as a moderate, talking about economic problems in the United States, the two-income trap, and all the rest of this stuff.
She suggested she was a fan of school vouchers, for example.
Now she's abandoned all that, and she claims that she wants to break up Amazon.
But don't worry, guys, it won't hurt anybody in any way, because if one person knows how to run a business, it's the lady who's never done it.
Somebody starts to grow a business in there, then Amazon, Google, Facebook just reaches out and snatches up the business.
And that doesn't promote competition.
So I think they ought to be broken apart.
Run that platform.
You can still go online and search for 28 coffee makers that can be delivered in 24 hours.
But break that up from the part about running a business that competes on that platform.
Okay, this is so dumb.
It's so unspeakably stupid.
So her suggestion is that you're going to be able to get the same things at the same prices if you increase the cost of production for Amazon.
She says that Amazon shouldn't be able to be vertically integrated, in other words.
She wants it so that if you Make coffee makers.
You should not be able to distribute those coffee makers.
This is true of legitimately every business in the United States.
That you're going to give competitive advantage to the products that you make.
So the hell what?
That's good for the market.
Like if Amazon produces a product and then they have product services, why would I not buy the one that is cheapest and best?
The left made the same argument about Microsoft.
They're like, oh, you know, it'd be great.
Let's break up Microsoft.
It's too big.
And you know what happened?
The product got worse and the price went up.
So when Elizabeth Warren says, yeah, by breaking them up and increasing their cost of production, I'm serving the consumer.
No, you're not.
You're not serving the consumer.
You're serving the interests of people who would like to artificially raise the cost of doing business to Amazon.
This is the difference between consumer-based antitrust action and production-based antitrust action.
Consumer-based looks at the consumer and says, is the consumer being jacked?
If not, shut up.
Production side antitrust says the company's too big.
Why?
Because I say so.
Time to break it up even if it's not hurting the consumer.
That's a bunch of nonsense.
That's what Elizabeth Warren engages in pretty regularly.
Other things that I hate.
So better!
Yeah, dude's rad!
So he has a bad habit of jumping up onto countertops, which is both unsanitary and stupid.
It's like he watched Dead Poets Society one too many times.
He's like, you know what would be great?
I'm just gonna find a countertop and jump on it!
That's what I do!
I eat New Mexican dirt and I jump on countertops.
Beto!
Skateboarding into your heart, yeah!
So here's Beto explaining, we don't need any walls.
We don't need any walls in a room filled with walls.
We do not need any walls, $30 billion, 2,000 miles long, 30 feet high, that will not be built on the international boundary line, which is the center line of the Rio Grande River.
That wall will be built well into the interior, on someone's ranch, someone else's farm, someone else's home.
You and I will be forced to take their property to solve a problem that we do not have.
Okay, I'm so bored with Beto O'Rourke at this point.
Not only is his point not well taken, because if you are to build any sort of barrier, presumably there will be land upon which the barrier must be located, and we should always worry about the extent of government overreach when it comes to eminent domain.
Something he, by the way, did not worry very much about when he was a city councilman in El Paso.
But Beto O'Rourke's sophomoric ramblings about why walls are unnecessary generally The fact this guy is considered a frontrunner to the Democratic Party shows a certain lack of ideas.
Now, it doesn't mean everybody on the left lacks ideas, but the fact that this guy is considered an idea guy.
Like, here's the thing.
No one considered Trump an idea guy.
Like, I can't name the number of people, like, legitimately, who think, wow, Trump, there's a man with ideas.
It was more like, Trump, there's a man who's a giant pulsating middle finger to everyone I dislike.
That was the appeal of Trump.
For Beto, it's like, man, he's a deep thinker.
And he's like, yeah, brah, I am a deep thinker.
Have you ever wondered?
Why, you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?
Have you ever wondered that?
Like, really thought about it?
Have you ever spent any time thinking about, like, why is it that they put locks on 7-Elevens if they're open for, like, 24 hours a day?
Like, what's the point of a lock, yo?
That guy.
Alright, we'll be back here a little bit later with two more hours of wonderful goodness.
You can subscribe right now and you can get that.
Or, we'll see you here on Monday.
Also, make sure that you pick up a copy of my best-selling book, The Right Side of History, number one on Amazon, number one in non-fiction, at Barnes & Noble, really racing up the sales charts.
Thank you so much for supporting it.
I think it's an important book.
I really, I don't think all of my books are equally important.
I do not love all of my children equally.
This is the book I love the most.
I think it is the most important book I've ever written, so I appreciate you going out and taking a look at it, and we'll see you here a little bit later.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright, Daily Wire 2019.
Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, with all of these very deep ideological divides in our country, are we on the verge of a civil war?
What would it look like if we were headed in that direction?
What would a civil war look like?
We'll try to talk about all that today.
Also, how old is too old to be president?
Should there be a cap, an age limit on the presidency?
And finally, What does it mean to say that the Bible is the inspired word of God?
That's what Christians say.
But what does it mean practically speaking?
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