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June 23, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:02:03

Mark Levin | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 56

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	Autocracy is a bad thing, whether it's practiced one-on-one in the playground or whether it's practiced by government.
	And that's why I started to say, wait a minute, I like liberty, I like individualism, I like to be left alone, I like to kind of do what I want to do.
	And if that's the way you think, then big government on the left is not your answer.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
	I am super excited to welcome to the show the great one, Mark Levin, author of the brand new book, Unfreedom of the Press.
	We're going to get to all of our questions from Mark Levin in just one second.
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	Well, Mark, thanks so much for stopping by.
	It's a great honor, great pleasure.
	So we have a new book out on freedom of the press, where you talk about really the history of the press, and obviously this has become hot topic, probably hot topic number one in the country, given President Trump's use of the phrase fake news so often.
	So let's talk a little bit about where we are with the press.
	So obviously you look at the polls, people hate the press, they don't trust the press.
	Aside from the obvious, which is that the press is left-wing, why do you think that that trust was undermined?
	Because 20 years ago people did trust the press and the press was similarly left-wing.
	You get a lot more competition in the press today.
	You've got the internet, you've got your show, you've got my show, you've got other platforms that are out there.
	A citizen can go on the internet and get news from anywhere in the world, different bloggers they may follow, different sites they may follow, and then they're watching CNN.
	Or they're watching MSNBC.
	Not particularly bright people.
	Just pounding away, pounding away the same thing every day and from one perspective.
	There's no diversity in the newsroom.
	There's no diversity on these stations.
	And also, they combine news with opinion.
	You cannot tell who the news host is, for the most part, on CNN or MSNBC.
	The same blurring is occurring at the New York Times and the Washington Post between their news and editorial pages.
	And it's particularly crystallized now because they so hate Trump they can't control themselves.
	And they'll tell you they hate Trump and they can't control themselves.
	And in many ways it's become very political.
	That is, they play like to the Democrat Party base.
	That's where they play for their ratings, and they're not getting any.
	That's where they play for their hits.
	And it's not that it just happened now.
	This has been building.
	This is an ideology that's also taught in many of the journalism schools.
	Most of the journalists today didn't go to journalism school.
	A lot of them come out of the Democrat party or Democrat administration.
	Some Republicans, but mostly the other.
	And so they come with an ideological point of view.
	And there's this whole new movement called social activism journalism.
	They call it public journalism, community journalism, but it is what it is.
	And they're pushing the progressive agenda.
	And they say a lot of these guys Let's stop hiding this.
	You know, but for us, there wouldn't have been a civil rights movement.
	Well, actually, there was, but for them.
	But for us, you know, women wouldn't have voted.
	Well, actually, they would have.
	And but for us, there wouldn't be Obamacare.
	So we should proudly say who we are and interpret the news and analyze the news and give it to the public, who are, number one, too stupid, they think, or too busy to understand it anyway.
	So this whole notion of objective truth-seeking, for the most part, is dying on the vine.
	Do you think that it was better when people called themselves objective truth seekers?
	There's sort of this weird bifurcation in conservative thought about what the media should be.
	There are some of us, I'm on the side that says, don't even bother to pretend you're objective.
	Just give me who you are.
	I'd rather listen to your show, or my show, or even Pod Save America, where they say, OK, here's who we are.
	We're Democratic staffers, and this is what we think about the issues.
	Then have to hear from Chris Cuomo or Don Lemon pretending that they represent some sort of higher objective truth.
	And then there are folks who say, well, You know, the problem there is the conflation.
	What we do need is journalists who are going to get back to objective journalism.
	What do you think is the solution here?
	Is it going back to sort of the founding era partisan newspapers, or is it the pursuit of actual objective journalism?
	And this is the core of it.
	It's a great point.
	I think they're fighting among themselves in their newsrooms.
	Do we come out of the closet fully and say who we are, or do we continue to pretend that we're nonpartisan and objective?
	And about a hundred years ago, the rise of the progressive movement also infected the so-called press.
	We had the party press, where they were very transparent.
	You had papers like the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and the Arizona Republican, now the Arizona Republic.
	They aligned with political parties and candidates and ideologies, really starting about 1780, moving into the beginning of the Civil War.
	In the beginning of the last century you had this progressive movement and they were not going to leave the press alone, John Dewey and others, and so they decided we won't decide really what the news is, we of the masterminds and so forth, same people are going to run the government, run the economy, we're going to run the media too.
	And Walter Lippmann is very outspoken about this.
	He was iconic at the time, a reporter, and he said, so we're going to apply a scientific approach, a knowledge approach to all of this.
	We'll gather the information.
	Then we'll determine what the public needs to know.
	We'll use our intelligence to tell the very busy public what the news is.
	So this has been going on for about a century.
	But the difference today is this fight that's going on on the left, which really has pretty much monopoly control of news as an aggregate.
	And it's whether or not to be very blunt about it or not.
	And I think you can see that playing out on television too.
	And this commingling of news and opinion, you can see that playing out on television too.
	The answer is technology.
	The answer is Progressive creativity, not ideology.
	Progressive creativity.
	Because what is technology?
	Technology is this.
	Technology is the brain.
	Technology is people trying to figure out how to do things differently, how to do things better, to improve upon what is.
	And you can see some of that now, on the internet, these new platforms.
	And I was, George Gilder, who I had on my Fox show not that long ago, he said these current platforms, which in many ways are anti-speech, Facebook, Google, whatever you want to call it.
	He said they're going to go by the wayside because the Israelis and the Japanese are working on new platforms.
	And this is why I have a problem sometimes when people say technology puts Americans out of work, technology is a threat to America.
	No, technology is America because the freer the country, the more technology, the more creativity, the more productivity.
	So we develop our ways out of these things.
	We think our ways out of these things.
	I make a distinction between the modern mass media In a free press.
	The modern mass media is not upholding a free press.
	There's nothing to do with a free press, other than government not interfering.
	It's killing a free press.
	And that's why it celebrates certain people who are really nobodies, like AOC, one of your favorites, or Talib, or Omar.
	These are really detestable people.
	But the media play them up, the media defend them, and so forth, versus others who they either ignore, Or they try to destroy.
	That's not free speech.
	So I think free speech is in good shape, as long as we have technology, development, and no government interference.
	I think the mass media is in deep trouble.
	The New York Times would probably be out of business today, but for a billionaire out of Mexico, a telecommunications magnate bought about 20% of it.
	Washington Post would be dead, but for Bezos.
	buying it.
	CNN's ratings are in the tank just a matter of time.
	And MSNBC doesn't have a business plan after Trump leaves.
	When you talk about the contrast between the media outlets and a free press, I mean, you can certainly see that playing out even with the Blaze TV, where you do some work.
	You know, the fact is that, you know, over the past few weeks, we've seen, as Vox.com openly, I mean, they issued a letter, the editors issued a letter to YouTube asking for them to rewrite their rules to ban Steven Crowder, a comedian, because one of their journalists was offended by jokes that Crowder was making.
	It's amazing to watch pseudo-journalistic outlets that are basically activist outlets Calling for the silencing of an enormous number of voices on the other side.
	And they don't just do it by going to the big tech companies and telling them to silence.
	They don't just go to Facebook or YouTube.
	They also AstroTurf boycotts against shows like yours.
	They AstroTurf boycotts against shows like mine.
	They go after advertisers.
	They do this routine where a Huffington Post reporter will call up one of your advertisers and then say, do you agree with what Mark Levin just said on X?
	What does it matter what the advertiser thinks?
	The advertiser advertises on lots of stuff, but they're creating this pseudo-journalistic patina around an activist core, and I think that's what's driving people up a wall.
	The greatest threat to free speech is this phony journalism.
	What is freedom of the press?
	It's an extension of freedom of speech.
	And really, freedom of the press is sort of a community, aggregate people communicating with each other.
	I mean, they're only press pushing for revolution, pushing America's principles, having debates, having discussions, all that sort of thing.
	The left has no tolerance for diversity of viewpoints, has no tolerance for independent thinking, it believes in conformity and uniformity.
	And so they're attacking these platforms and these platforms are buckling if they don't believe in themselves and promote that agenda.
	YouTube is going to die if it follows Vox.
	YouTube will marginalize itself.
	YouTube will be viewed as just another left-wing I'll give you an example.
	left-wing enterprise and half the country will leave it.
	Eighty percent of Republicans right now distrust the media.
	Eighty percent of Democrats like the media.
	That's why I call it the Democratic Party media.
	That's what they are, that's what they want to be.
	If YouTube wants to be an appendage to a crackpot left-wing, vicious individual and website, fine.
	I'll give you an example.
	I was absolutely flirting with the idea of putting my radio show on YouTube.
	Now I won't do it.
	I want nothing to do with YouTube, the way that they've treated Steven Crowder.
	And please, don't tell me you don't like what Crowder says or the things he says.
	I mean, the left is embracing anti-Semites.
	The left is embracing all kinds of kooks.
	You have comedians out there who've said a hell of a lot worse than Crowder ever said 20, 30, 40 years ago.
	You have comedians who can't even go on college campuses anymore because of the speech codes and all the rest that's going on.
	We support free speech.
	We support freedom of the press.
	We support competition because we think the American people are smart.
	They'll discern one or the other what they like or what they don't like.
	What do you think ought to be done with some of these social media companies?
	There's a really interesting and sort of rich debate now happening inside the conservative movement about Facebook and YouTube and Twitter particularly.
	A lot of folks saying these are monopolies and they ought to be broken up.
	Some people suggesting that the government ought to come in and regulate them.
	I've made the argument in the past that either they're a platform or they're a publisher, that they don't get to act like Vox.com and then be treated as though they're an AT&T phone line.
	Do you think that the government has any role here or will the free market, should we just let the free market take its course, which is an argument I'm certainly I think the free market should take its course, but it's not.
	The government protects these sites.
	So the government ought to remove the protection, and now they're really in the free market.
	Let's see how they handle themselves.
	Whether it's litigation, whether it's public opinion, whatever it is, YouTube won't survive doing what it's doing.
	It's not going to survive doing what it's doing.
	It ought not be protected in any way.
	I feel the same way with the press.
	Since 1964, the Sullivan case.
	We had a very free, robust press before the Supreme Court jumped in.
	Even when we had the First Amendment originally, you still had state libel laws and so forth.
	You could still be sued under state libel laws.
	So there's no check whatsoever, not on a free press, but on absolute outrageous comments.
	That's fine.
	So let that system play out.
	Let our legal system play out.
	I don't think these entities should be protected by federal law in any respect.
	Let them be out there with the rest of us and deal with the rest of the issues and figure out their business model that way.
	The government's going to step in and do what, exactly?
	Who's going to step in and do it?
	I get very nervous when Congress steps in.
	It's filled with knuckleheads who do not respect the Constitution.
	You can see them today.
	You've had a number of administrations that have wanted to kill talk radio.
	You've had presidents like Obama that wanted to kill Fox.
	You've had this nonsense about net neutrality.
	Those are the people who are now going to manage.
	I don't think that's any better.
	The market works.
	No protections and let them die or live.
	So in a second I want to ask you about sort of broader ramifications of that conversation, particularly in the conservative movement, the battle between the so-called nationalist populists and sort of free market slash libertarian folks.
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	I want to talk a little bit about this division that's broken out inside the Republican Party.
	It seems like almost a tripartite division.
	There's sort of the libertarian contingent, people who say government should be as small as humanly possible, it shouldn't be involved in nearly any way in American life.
	social fabric should fill in the gaps, leave everybody to their own.
	That's the only way we're going to get along.
	Then there are folks who are sort of social conservatives who say, listen, government was left alone and government then started cramming down leftism.
	So we need to retake the means of production effectively and start promulgating a virtuous reform-econ agenda.
	We have to try and create certain incentives for people to get married.
	We have to start teaching certain values from the government side.
	And then we have to use the tools of government in order to promulgate certain messages.
	And then there are a group of folks who have come about who really suggest that the government ought to ratify A couple things here.
	That's a great question.
	It's very complex.
	in pretty major ways.
	They're afraid of technological development.
	They believe that the free market has led to the emptying out of the American family.
	They're afraid that market forces have hyper-individualized the country and that only government regulation can put all of this back together.
	Where do you come down in this debate?
	Where do you think the role of government lies? - Couple things here.
	That's a great question, it's very complex.
	First of all, I'm a constitutionalist when it comes to the government.
	I'm not a libertarian when it comes to the government.
	To me, that's a way of life, okay?
	If you want to live that way, in many ways I do.
	If you believe in a free market economy, when we're talking about the government, I'm a constitutionalist.
	And what does the Constitution say, basically?
	You're the powers of the federal government, no more.
	You want to expand them?
	You amend the Constitution.
	That's where my head is as a gentleman.
	That's where I start from.
	As far as libertarianism goes, I don't interpret the Constitution from a libertarian perspective.
	I interpret what it says, and I try to apply what was intended at the time.
	There's history or there's not history, and you do the best job you can.
	But in terms of libertarianism, I'm pretty much a libertarian when it comes to economic matters.
	I can be convinced that this matter or that matter, depending on what the situation is, but that's where I start from.
	I am not a national populist, because there's not a dime's worth of difference between national populism of Bernie Sanders and somebody on the right, because I can't define it, neither can they.
	As a matter of fact, they like to quote each other.
	They like to embrace each other.
	It is an odd thing to say that I'm a constitutionalist, but I'm also a national populist.
	What does that mean?
	The framers rejected both nationalism and populism.
	They created federalism.
	Moreover, they rejected populism because we don't have a democracy, we have a republic.
	Populism scares the hell out of me.
	You're telling me my neighbors get to vote if I have unalienable rights?
	My neighbors get to vote on my property rights?
	My neighbors get to make decisions like this?
	Or if that's not what populism is, what is populism?
	Are there certain politicians who get to tell us what the American people think and what the American people feel?
	I don't think so.
	So what I tell my audience is, look at the Declaration of Independence.
	That's not about populism.
	It's not about nationalism.
	It's about Americanism.
	There's a difference between nationalism and Americanism.
	Americanism is patriotic, right?
	Americanism is supporting our culture, supporting the principles of the revolution.
	I can't even... the so-called nationalists can't really define nationalism.
	And yet they tell us they're concerned about the central government and big government and they're disconnected from the people.
	Well, how do they think this is going to work?
	We're going to have plebiscites every week?
	No.
	Those same people are going to be making those same decisions in lieu of us, or in lieu of states, or in lieu of towns, or in lieu of families, or in lieu of so forth and so on.
	So nationalism clearly is not the answer.
	Populism is ill-defined.
	That's clearly not the answer.
	I don't believe in mobocracy.
	We have to do a better job, perhaps, of explaining constitutionalism and capitalism and all these things that have made us such a magnificent country.
	Any country can be nationalist, populist country.
	But that's not what our Constitution is.
	That's not what our founding is.
	So, with that said, what do you think that the role of government is?
	When you talk about the role of government under the Constitution, that really applies to the federal government, obviously.
	What do you think the role of government, let's say state and locally, ought to be?
	You're constructing the ideal Mark Levin society.
	What would government do and what would government not do?
	Probably a mix of Idaho, Utah, and Florida.
	In other words, that is a great question, separate question.
	Okay, so what kind of state?
	Like this magnificent state of California has gone to hell.
	And it shouldn't.
	The resources it has, the geography it has, the people it has, but the government is horrendous.
	And you have one party government.
	I lived here briefly.
	Well, again, I would look at the Constitution to see what the role of the government is there as well.
	But it has a bigger role than the federal government.
	and then a fairly Republican legislature.
	So what is the role of state government?
	Well, again, I would look at the Constitution to see what the role of the government is there as well.
	But it has a bigger role than the federal government.
	It's supposed to have a bigger role than the federal government.
	Roads, bridges, all this.
	I'll give you another issue where people are going to have a problem with me.
	I don't believe in a $2 trillion infrastructure program.
	I think that's nuts.
	All that does is featherbed the states and the localities and they send in a big list and all it allows is the Democrats to put in about $800 billion worth of non-road stuff and so forth.
	I joke in my community, they wind a road from two to four lanes.
	Now we have more traffic than ever before because people, oh, there's now four lanes.
	So my attitude is, even at the state level, the less government the better, but it depends.
	I mean, I want law enforcement.
	There are other things that the state government does that are important to me.
	Maybe they should be doing more.
	Rather than a federal EPA, let's leave it to the state equivalent of the EPAs.
	When it comes to states, maybe they don't have more of a say in immigration, particularly if they're on the border than they should in Washington, D.C., where they're largely unaffected or even benefit from open borders and the politics that comes with that.
	So I am of the belief that states get it wrong a lot.
	There are some terrible, terrible states, places where I wouldn't want to live.
	But that's the point, isn't it?
	I don't have to live there.
	The United States is a country. - One of the things that's been happening, and it's really, I think, a problem, is the nationalization of the locals.
	So you see this with abortion law, particularly, is that I haven't seen a lot of people from Georgia threatening not to go to New York, because New York liberalized its abortion law to the ultimate extreme.
	And yet I'm seeing businesses across the country say that they're not going to do business with the state of Georgia or with the state of Alabama because of their abortion law.
	Every local decision now becomes a national referendum on the issue itself.
	It's as though federalism, I mean, I think that it's probably dying.
	It may be well dead.
	Where do you think we stand in terms of federalism?
	And if it falls apart, do you think the country can stick together?
	First of all, I think the Supreme Court has largely nationalized these social issues.
	And it's very troubling to me.
	You know, for a lot of people in a lot of communities, they quote unquote evolve on these issues.
	You know, like the anti-sodomy laws that were used as an excuse in the 1960s for the federal government to get it, for the federal Supreme Court to get involved in a lot of these cases.
	Even though there were only 14 states that had them and they were dying on the vine anyway.
	but it's not a good thing.
	But they always want to use some event to make the case.
	It's like same-sex marriage.
	There's no constitutional basis for same-sex marriage.
	I'm sorry to upset people.
	That is a state issue.
	But over time, and you can see it with Lawrence and other cases they went through, Anthony Kennedy in particular, they worked their way through.
	They knew they'd be there 20, 25 years on the bench, and they decided to nationalize that issue.
	And what people need to understand is there's winners and losers when that happens.
	And a court can change.
	And they may nationalize an issue you don't like.
	And it's just hard for me to believe that a 5-4 decision with one justice all of a sudden can determine what a fundamental right is and what a fundamental right isn't depending on whether the justice votes this way or votes that way.
	On the abortion issue, my view is that it ought to be absolutely a state issue.
	Everybody knows Roe v. Wade is a judicial joke.
	Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks it's a judicial joke.
	If they want abortion on demand nationally, then try and get it through an amendment.
	If it is that popular in every corner of the country, and if every woman in the country believes in this, then go get your amendment.
	They don't even try, because they can't.
	Abortion is one issue, but there's a whole host of issues that are being nationalized, centralized, imposed on the American people.
	And the problem with that is, you're right, it undermines the whole notion of diversity in this country.
	One of the things that has kept this diverse country together, people with different religions and backgrounds and histories and all the rest, is the fact that you have states that have different approaches.
	It'd be like the death penalty.
	If they eliminate the death penalty all across the country, and they may one day, That means the death penalty in states that have them, aggressively, like Florida and Virginia, and I might add I have homes in both, thankfully, that will change the landscape of these states.
	And I think to myself, why is it that we don't leave people in these states alone to make these decisions?
	In other words, is it because they're dumber?
	Is it because, no, it's because they don't agree with us.
	So we're going to force our will on them.
	And when it comes to the Hyde Amendment, as an example, which is a question of whether the federal taxpayers should pay for abortion, we've now reached a point where they're saying we must pay for the abortions, even if we disagree with them.
	And it's even gotten worse.
	I think Kamala Harris has made a proposal where she says, like the Voting Rights Act, the federal government should look at it in advance.
	And I'm going, whoa, whoa, whoa.
	This is tyranny.
	And it's close to fascism, quite frankly.
	So federalism, which allows mobility, which allows diversity, is the glue that keeps the country together, ironically enough.
	Centralization, uniformity, is what tears us apart and will destroy this country.
	I also noticed that Kamala Harris proposal, and I thought exactly the same thing, talked about it on my show.
	It feels like what's happened is that all authority has now been sucked up to the federal level and then delegated from the vestigial organ that is the legislature over to the executive, which basically runs like a dictatorship regardless of which party is in charge, though the bureaucracy does everything.
	You know what's interesting about this?
	Meanwhile, they're out there with their sanctuary cities, so they don't always support federal control.
	It really is the ends justifies the means for the left.
	They'll talk about free speech for Nazis marching in Skokie and then they'll try and shut down Stephen Crowder because they don't like his speech in particular because he's effective.
	But really, do they really believe in the vote?
	They say every vote should count.
	They believe every vote should count when they win.
	They don't believe every vote should count what they lose.
	Then they turn to the courts, or they turn to the bureaucracy, the unelected parts of the government, to impose their will.
	If the President of the United States says, you know what, I'm going to get rid of DACA, And then we have a federal judge appointed by Obama who says, no, that's the law.
	No, it's not the law.
	The Department of Homeland Security issued that ruling, or that rule.
	So how is that law?
	One president is the law, and the next president can't remove that law?
	You can see it in the immigration field.
	You can see it in the environmental field, and so forth.
	So for the left, it is pushing towards their ideology, their utopia, which is really hell.
	If it's federalism one day, great.
	If it's central government one day, great.
	If it's elections one day, great.
	If it's a fiat by the Supreme Court, great.
	Whatever it is, it is.
	Do you think that the country is going to hold together?
	Because, I mean, I'm seeing... I talked recently with Baronelle Stutzman, who owns Arlene's Flowers up in Washington State.
	She's basically being shut down because, as a religious person living in a liberal state, she's being forced to cater same-sex weddings or they're going to shut her down.
	And I was talking with her lawyer, and one of the things that I said is, I don't even understand why this is a freedom of religion case.
	This seems to me like this should be a basic freedom of association case.
	Meaning, why do I have to serve anybody?
	And of course, the answer is that we have broadened out the provisions of the Civil Rights Act to include pretty much everything now.
	So, the government instituted segregation, and then the federal government came in and said, how about this?
	How about we not only overrule the states on this stuff, we also inject ourselves into private businesses, and then control that top down.
	How can the government, how can the country stick together under these circumstances?
	I think we're all, aren't we all just going to end up in areas where we agree with each other?
	It's going to be more difficult.
	There's no question about it, because you're attacking one of the strengths of the country, which is, you know, the left likes to talk about diversity, but they don't support diversity.
	It is their way or the highway, whether it's cases or whether it is what we've been talking about and so forth.
	And this is a problem, and I'm not sure how to fix it.
	And I'm not sure if it can be fixed, but we need to keep talking about it and keep exposing it because more and more people are going to feel like they're not part of society.
	It's also destructive of the culture.
	What is it exactly?
	Where exactly do they want to take us?
	I always say, you know, we have our constitution.
	That's our blueprint.
	What's their blueprint?
	Where's their blueprint?
	When does this end?
	How do we know that we have utopia?
	When will we know that we've achieved paradise?
	And this is one of the things I wrote about in my book, Emeritopia, in the first chapter, which is they never are wrong.
	We just haven't tried hard enough, or we haven't had enough resources, or people are just too intransigent, or the wrong person was running it.
	It's like Obamacare.
	I thought Obamacare was going to deliver everything we wanted.
	Nobody even talks about Obamacare anymore.
	It's now Medicare for all, you know, which is a single government, iron-fisted, Soviet-style health care from the top down.
	You know, Milton Friedman once said, that's why I'm not a national populist, you know, he once said, most of the problems we have Is with big government.
	So we have problems in our lives and problems, but the big problems we have mostly are with government, and I agree with that.
	And so people who believe there ought to be more of it, I just reject it on a hand.
	So, obviously, President Trump, controversial figure, not just now, but was in 2016.
	You voted for him.
	You supported him.
	You didn't support him in the primaries, obviously.
	I supported Cruz in the primaries.
	Right.
	And you and I had many discussions over the course of the election cycle, specifically on this issue.
	I think that, you know, you said you'll vote for him in 2020.
	I've said that I'm highly likely to vote for him in 2020 as well at this point.
	What do you make of his overall performance?
	What are you happy with and what are you disappointed with?
	I'm happy with a lot.
	And as a conservative, there's a lot he's done that I actually like.
	I look at the courts.
	I strongly support what he's trying to do with the courts.
	I look at our ally Israel.
	I mean, he's done things that I don't think any Republican would have done when it comes to the state of Israel.
	They've talked about it, but he actually did it.
	I like what he's doing with our military.
	He's trying to strengthen our military.
	I like his support for law enforcement.
	Law enforcement isn't always right, but they've been brutalized over the last 10 years, and he's making it clear that he, as a rule, stands with law enforcement.
	Spending is completely out of control.
	But you know, the spending bills come to him.
	And unfortunately, even when we had Paul Ryan in the House, I think Mitch McConnell, in my opinion, has been a disaster when it comes to the budget.
	I'm not a great fan of his.
	And the president has to make a decision.
	Sign it, because he's worried about the military, or veto it.
	I would have vetoed it, but I'm not president.
	So I disagree with that.
	I think there needs to be something done and done fast, because I think that that is a massive issue in this country.
	When it comes to tariffs, I don't agree with them, except in two cases.
	China is number one.
	China's the enemy.
	I don't think there's any question about this.
	In the South China Sea, it's provocations in Africa, where it's building bases.
	It's provocations even in our own hemisphere.
	It now controls both ends of the Panama Canal.
	That was one of the things that Ronald Reagan was very concerned about, the Panama Canal.
	It's got killer satellites up there now.
	We don't, because Obama wouldn't fund them.
	China is a grave threat, every bit as dangerous as the Soviet Union, and they're getting worse and worse and worse.
	So I support tariffs, not because I believe that somehow there's this imbalance of trade, because I don't think people understand what that means.
	It doesn't count like money that flows into this country.
	And a very, very successful country needs raw materials and other things from other countries.
	So we import them.
	Why?
	To satisfy my needs, your needs, everybody's desires.
	That's the way the cookie crumbles.
	So the reason I support these tariffs is I want him to do to the Chinese economy what Reagan did to the Soviet economy.
	Now it's going to cost us, too.
	Because as you and I both know, tariffs are a tax on us.
	But also, it limits their ability to ship things to us.
	So I'm not doing it for economic purposes, because I think it's so smart.
	And Mexico.
	I may be in a minority on this, too.
	A 5% tariff there.
	Mexico has an obligation, I think, too.
	Or the President has an obligation to secure that border.
	He's done everything he can.
	You know, when you have Democrats who are of a different mindset, who are not going to allow him to do anything, and Republicans, when they control both houses, they did nothing about it.
	When you see that we're going to have 1.1 or 1.2 million illegal aliens in this country, the cost of these border states, and California's a border state, the cost of these school districts, law enforcement, these hospitals and so forth.
	I remember when I was in the Reagan administration, all the way back then they were saying, we're being overwhelmed.
	Now imagine today, I mean we are really overwhelmed.
	I think it's important, and I look at history, as you look at history, and is Trump really doing anything truly outrageous?
	You know, when Dwight Eisenhower was president, he's considered sort of a moderate Republican president and so forth.
	He had Operation, I didn't name it, he named it, Wetback.
	And they rounded up one million illegal aliens in a period of a year or so.
	And it was school buses and trains and trucks and moved them into the interior of Mexico and so it rounded them up.
	He didn't care about, oh, you're going to round them up?
	He said, yeah, actually, we are.
	And he put out this military directive, and that's what they did.
	And I compare that to a 5% tariff, I think Eisenhower would be laughing right now.
	So again, I don't view it as wise economically.
	I view it as wise because we're trying to secure the border and he's run out of options.
	So, one of the things that I've said about President Trump is that on policy, like you, I'm very happy with a lot of his policy.
	His shortcomings, I think we agree on.
	I have been incredibly disappointed with spending, but he never pledged he was going to do anything about entitlements.
	In fact, he pledged the opposite, that he wasn't going to do anything about entitlements.
	There are other areas of policy, like some of the other There's a lot of tariffs that he's put in place that I think are mistaken, but on regulations, on judges, I'm happy.
	There's a second job the president does, and this is where I've been very critical of the president, for a couple reasons.
	One, because I think the president, unfortunately in some ways, is sort of tasked with this job.
	And two, because it actually makes a difference to the future of conservatism, and that is the job of conveying ideas.
	Now, I think a lot of conservatives, people like you, people like me, Who see him as a vessel for policy.
	We're very happy with him as a vessel for policy, generally speaking.
	The idea that he is promoting conservative ideas, I will say, on the mild end, I have been disappointed with that.
	Especially because the guy does have a unique capacity to draw cameras.
	This is an interesting point you raise.
	light for him is unbelievable.
	And yet the sort of material that he puts out into the public view is rarely conservative.
	Very often it's alienating for a lot of folks.
	And my great fear is that we will get a lot of good policy and then he will have alienated so many people, particularly people who are of my generation and younger, that we're going to be in the wilderness for a while.
	This is an interesting point you raise.
	I don't think Donald Trump is a philosophical conservative.
	I think he's come to his conservatism as a matter of practicality and in some ways principle.
	And so So I don't think he's any more a principled or philosophical conservative than George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush.
	I think there have really been two in the last little over a century.
	That would be Coolidge and Reagan.
	But other than that I can't think of any, just off the top of my head.
	Not Nixon, not Ford, not Eisenhower, certainly not Theodore Roosevelt and Harding and so forth.
	So I don't really hold that against him in terms of him promoting that kind of an agenda from a philosophical point of view, but I think it's kind of the Not our job, but our responsibility to try and explain that to a lot of people, what these policies are, our philosophy, and so forth.
	I even think a lot of so-called conservative websites and magazines have lost their way.
	They're fighting with each other over what conservatism means, or they've abandoned it in some ways because they hate Trump, or they love Trump, or whatever the situation is.
	I feel right now the intellectual conservative movement is very weak.
	I really do.
	I think you and I and others try to present that case, but from a broad-based perspective, it's quite weak.
	And I think that's a problem because some people are abandoning it.
	I'm not sure why 100%.
	I'm very troubled by some who've talked about conservatism all these years and then all of a sudden say, well, what has it ever done for us?
	And I say, let me tell you what it's done for you.
	Nine o'clock tonight, I want you to go into one of these supermarkets where I live.
	They have a place called Wegmans.
	I don't know if they have them in California.
	It's as big as a football field.
	And I want you to walk down every aisle.
	10 different types of toothpaste.
	You can get battery-operated toothbrushes or handheld, soft, medium, hard.
	Then I want you to go to the meat section.
	And I want to see how many types of meat.
	The chicken section.
	Go to the wine section.
	Wine from all over the world.
	Just look.
	Stop telling me conservatism doesn't work and capitalism doesn't work.
	We have more material things.
	In this country than any king or queen had 200 years ago.
	We get on an airplane, we fly across the country.
	That's not socialism, that's not big government.
	Those are airplanes.
	That's technology.
	That's creativity.
	And we complain whether they have peanuts or pretzels on the plane or whether we're sitting on the tarmac for an extra half hour, right?
	We need to put things in perspective.
	The things we have in this country, almost no other country has.
	Certainly two-thirds of the world doesn't have.
	Why do you think millions of people are trying to claw their way into this country?
	Because why?
	Because the middle class is under attack, because we have systemic racism, because we're not socialist enough?
	No.
	It's because of all the other reasons.
	And so, part of it is the responsibility of the individual citizen.
	Honestly, I don't look to the President of the United States or a senator or a politician of any kind to tell me, this is what you need to think.
	One of the things that we need to continue to teach people is think for yourselves.
	That's a good thing.
	Learn for yourself.
	Most of the stuff I've learned about the Constitution, I sure as hell didn't learn it in public school.
	I've learned it since I've been in school.
	And that's a good thing.
	The learning process goes on and on and on.
	But not again.
	The first chapter of Liberty and Tyranny, I say one of the reasons why we don't really appreciate liberty is because we're surrounded by it.
	And one of the reasons we don't appreciate what we have is because we're surrounded by it.
	And so we get caught up in really stupid arguments, stupid things.
	I'll give you an example.
	Last week in the whole debate on cable TV was over the word nasty.
	When the president said nasty, referring to comments that the princess made.
	I've got three days of this stuff?
	Is this a joke?
	Did he mean, did he mean she's nasty?
	Did he mean the stuff that she said was nasty?
	And I'm thinking, media is nuts.
	Or they are nuts.
	Our focus is so off.
	And then we had D-Day, the anniversary, 75th anniversary of the other day.
	And I play these old clips from World War II and you really Your patriotism is just through the roof and you see how tremendous this country is and the sacrifices people have made for this country.
	So I think it's really on each one of us, more than a president, to really explain liberty and conservatism and constitutionalism.
	And this president doesn't do that anyway.
	Most presidents don't do that.
	Like I said, I can think of two who basically did.
	But I will say this.
	Strongly, in support of the president.
	He doesn't preach the other, too.
	How rotten America is, you know, how racist America is, the wage gaps in America.
	I mean, people can't get health care in America.
	So he's not one of them.
	And so at his core, I know he loves his country.
	I do wonder still about the possibility that his personality alienates a lot of people.
	It's interesting.
	I speak to groups of older Republicans and groups of younger Republicans a lot, and when I critique the president in front of older Republicans, they start to get a little uptight.
	They start to get a little upset because I'll say what I think of his character, and frankly, it's not complimentary generally.
	And then I'll say, and I love a lot of his policy and I'll vote for him.
	And a lot of older folks get a little upset with this.
	And if I say it's younger people, it's the only reason they would even consider voting for Trump is because I'm saying to them what I think they believe too.
	And what I've said is I think the reason for that is when you're older, you basically look at politicians and maybe you have the perspective, okay, well, you know, listen, he's a guy.
	He does stuff I want.
	Good.
	What do I care what he says?
	And when you're younger, you spend an awful lot of time considering what other people think of you.
	And so how you view President Trump has now become a lens that other people view you with.
	So if you're 21 and you say that you like President Trump or that you're voting for President Trump, people immediately go to, well, that's because you're a terrible person who supports everything about him.
	And so the only way to talk to a lot of those folks is to say, OK, I like some of the stuff he's doing, but am I going to justify how he treats women?
	That's not a thing I'm going to do.
	Well, you know what's interesting about that?
	And I've thought about that.
	Some of the most foul-mouthed comics appeal to younger people and not to older people.
	Some of the lousiest movies launch and appeal to younger people and not to older people.
	One of the things I write in this book is I address this issue of character.
	And in this context, how the press covered it, but let me address it in your context.
	Since Donald Trump's been in the Oval Office, I don't know of a single hint of immoral conduct.
	Not a hint of immoral conduct.
	When John Kennedy was in office, it was constant.
	When Lyndon Johnson was in office, it was constant plus.
	And the media covered it up.
	But it was all known.
	So we can look at the life of somebody and all these very, very imperfect people.
	But since he's been present in terms of his conduct in the Oval Office, we haven't had any interim problems.
	There haven't been any whispering, none of that kind of stuff.
	So I want to point that out too.
	Maybe it's the way he speaks and tweets and people say, you know, I'm not used to that and so forth and so on.
	And people cringe.
	But here's another thing I'll point out.
	He's been called Hitler by the media.
	He's been called Stalin by the media, a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite.
	He's been called all these things by the media.
	He's never called anybody any of these things.
	Now he'll say, like with Nancy Pelosi, a horrible person, a nasty... I happen to agree with that, by the way.
	A horrible person, a nasty person, or this, that, and that.
	Oh, you're presidential.
	You shouldn't act that way.
	But, you know, he didn't have a honeymoon, a hundred-day honeymoon.
	The transition between one administration and the other.
	It seems like the Democrats didn't really want a transition from one administration to the other.
	So, to me, I see this battle that's going on now as a constitutional battle.
	As the Democrats wanting to remove a man who they never wanted in office in the first place.
	And they're not very good at poker.
	They showed, look at my hand, and this is what we're going to push the whole time.
	Whether we can ride Mueller, whether we can ride impeachment, Whatever it is.
	And so maybe it's me as a Philadelphia.
	Maybe that's the instinct.
	Maybe this way I was.
	I don't like that kind of stuff.
	So when you're trying to remove a duly elected president and disenfranchise 63 million people.
	The tweets are very secondary to me.
	I don't know how other people feel, young people feel.
	It's like, it's okay, all hands on deck.
	That doesn't mean everything that's done, I agree with that.
	You know, I show too and I explain where I agree and don't agree.
	But it means this is a top issue.
	If you're going to remove a president, or try to remove a president, based on the arguments you're making, That is damaging to this country, and it's damaging to the Constitution.
	So if he calls Nancy Pelosi horrible or talks about somebody's looks because they've talked about his looks, it almost at this point, it just bounces off me.
	So let's turn to the other side of the aisle.
	So we're approaching 2020.
	A lot of speculation about who the Democratic nominee will be or whether President Trump wins re-election.
	So first, let me get your odds on whether President Trump wins re-election at this point.
	Obviously all the smart folks, including me, had Hillary Clinton winning in 2016.
	That's what the data sort of suggested.
	Not sort of, largely, almost entirely suggested.
	And now I'm not betting on anything ever again.
	I lost $10,000 in that election, so I'm out of the betting on politics business.
	If you have to estimate the president's chances in 2020, where do you put those?
	First of all, in fairness to you, even his campaign wasn't sure he was going to win.
	I don't know, and I'm not trying to duck.
	It's going to be very, very tough.
	I saw polls, but it's really early for polls, but still, they're taking and people look at them.
	In Michigan and Wisconsin.
	He's double digits behind Biden and Bernie Sanders.
	And I look at politics almost as military operations in terms of getting votes, sneaking up, hitting them where they're not ready, stuff like that.
	They weren't ready for him.
	In Michigan and Wisconsin.
	They didn't campaign in Michigan.
	Now they've got teams of people in these heavily blue-collar union states because they don't want to happen what happened before.
	They're targeting the suburbs like they never targeted the suburbs before.
	But the president has a pretty damn good record on the economy and on other things as well, national security, that he can run on.
	And one of the things he is also going for would be his opponents.
	I mean, let's be honest, 90% of them are nuts.
	They're just absolute crackpots.
	And Bernie Sanders, I mean, you can only hide, I'll say, from your Marxism for so long.
	He's got the 50-year history.
	He's an old red from Brooklyn.
	You and I, we're well familiar with who he is.
	Joe Biden?
	I mean, Joe Biden is the bubble man.
	They try and protect him as much as he can from himself because he says dumb things because he's not particularly bright.
	And, in fact, Obama at some point may endorse him, but even Obama won't endorse him now.
	When George H.W.
	Bush was running and was challenged in the Republican primary, I think, by Pat Buchanan and so on, Ronald Reagan endorsed his vice president.
	Obama won't endorse his vice president.
	Well, you know, we've got to take notice of that.
	And look what he just did.
	He flip-flopped on abortion.
	Now, abortion is a fundamental issue.
	Okay, well, I don't want the government to fund it.
	Then he takes heat for 48 hours.
	Okay, I mean, I do want the government to fund it.
	After 46 years.
	Yeah, it's incredible.
	So, I don't know what to make of this election.
	I really don't.
	I'm very, very hopeful Trump wins re-election because if he doesn't, it's going to give further motivation to our media to continue to do what they're doing, which I think is very destructive of this republic, let alone freedom of the press.
	It's going to continue to motivate the kook left in this country and their crazy agenda, which would fundamentally change the country.
	You know, as I think about this question, You know, early on in our, before our country, the colonies, the press, they wanted to fundamentally transform government.
	That is, you know, the monarchy, they wanted representative government, limited government, and so forth.
	The progressive movement likes government.
	They want to fundamentally transform man, and fundamentally transform the civil society.
	That's the great difference.
	And whether the president is making that statement or not, He's the man we have to defend one kind of a society, and the Democrats are pushing another kind of society.
	And they know what they're doing.
	I don't mean they know the specifics of the plan.
	They know where they're pushing us.
	They don't have a plan for us to show us the plan.
	They're never going to.
	But that's the direction they're pushing us in.
	I don't know who's going to win, but I'm going to be full-throated for this president against any of their nominees.
	I don't even see a so-called centrist running.
	I don't even know if there are any so-called centrists left in the leadership of the Democrats.
	I mean, it's supposed to be Biden, but in all fairness to him, Melissa Milano did call him on the phone and that changes everything, apparently.
	Apparently so.
	One call from the star of Charmed and you just shift where you were for 50 years on an issue.
	But don't worry, he's a solid rock.
	He's the person you can trust in times of trouble.
	And this is one of the things that's been troubling me so much about the Democratic Party.
	I make a distinction.
	In my language, routinely, between leftist and liberal.
	Liberals are people I disagree with on politics.
	Leftists are people who want to shut down the debate, who are interested in polarizing people specifically on the basis of race for political gain.
	And it seems like the left has taken over completely the Democratic Party.
	It's interesting, I was watching with my wife an old movie the other night, a movie called Born Yesterday with Judy Holliday and Broderick Crawford.
	And the movie is, from 1950, it's an incredibly patriotic film.
	I mean, the entire film is basically William Holden showing Judy Holliday around the city of Washington, D.C.
	And he brings her to see the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
	They go to the Jefferson Memorial.
	And he's telling her all about the wonderful founding philosophy.
	And I turn to my wife and I said, there's no way this movie gets made today because the entire narrative of the left has shifted, even in my lifetime.
	I'm old enough to remember when the Democratic Party actually still at least paid lip service to the foundations of the country and talked about how wonderful founding philosophy was.
	And now it seems that the narrative is dominant in the Democratic Party that the founding philosophy was effectively just racism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia dressed up in fancy clothes and then sold to people.
	And that what we really have to do is cleanse the palate, get rid of all these documents and start afresh.
	Obviously, it scares the hell out of me.
	I'm seeing young people who don't know anything about history buying into it.
	How do you combat all of that?
	You know, the institution that really needs to be dealt with in one form or another is education.
	Public education in universities and colleges.
	And you and I fund them.
	The American people are funding our own demise.
	Somehow people get tenure.
	Not all, but too many.
	A vast majority.
	In our public schools, the NEA, the AFT, in our colleges and universities, they get tenure.
	And they are people who reject our founding principles.
	I mean, I always wonder how many battles of the Civil War are actually taught in high school?
	Each battle is so incredible, so unique.
	How many battles in World War II?
	How many battles in the Revolutionary War?
	Do kids today know what Lexington and Concord's all about?
	These are things that would inspire patriotism and support for the country.
	Instead, you're right.
	The founders had no positive characteristics.
	They were slaves, so they must be dismissed.
	And yet it was Abraham Lincoln who did the greatest job of explaining the founding and the founders and did more.
	for African-American slaves in this country than any left-wing professor or any leftist on TV that you can imagine.
	He led the Civil War.
	And what Lincoln said in 1858 and beyond, and he loved the founders, he said, those men wrote the Declaration of Independence.
	There's not a word about slavery in the Declaration of Independence.
	Every individual is created by God.
	Unalienable rights.
	He said, so the men, those men knew that slavery was wrong.
	But they also could not create a country because certain states like Georgia and South Carolina weren't going to go for it.
	But they knew that their children and their grandchildren would have to address this.
	That's why they wrote the Declaration of Independence the way that they did.
	And he says it's their Writing their constitution that will enable us to smite this.
	Because otherwise we wouldn't have had a country and you still would have had states or colonies with slavery and states and colonies without it.
	But history is not taught.
	It certainly wasn't, even when I was in high school, I still got the same pablum, the same left-wing agenda.
	They have managed, the progressive movement, to really control ideologically Virtually every instrumentality of our culture right now.
	That's why we have these culture wars.
	Whether it's the courts, whether it's the bureaucracy, whether it's education, whether it's the media, we always start with the progressive foundation and we're always on defense trying to respond to these things.
	We've got to do something about Colleges and universities.
	And I think we the people need to start speaking with our wallets.
	And states need to start withholding funds.
	You're going to be subsidized?
	Well, don't be subsidized so much.
	Make sure when you send your kid to college, if you're involved in that decision, that you don't send them to an indoctrination mill.
	You know, just because it's an Ivy League school doesn't mean they have to go there.
	There's other schools out there where they'll get a more traditional education and so on.
	But this is something I've been thinking a lot about.
	Maybe one day I'll write about it and give it more focus thought, but it is a huge, huge problem.
	I mean, so you spent an entire lifetime basically trying to educate people about all of this stuff.
	You've written a bevy of philosophically linked books and going all the way back through American history.
	So if you had to kind of give a beginner's reading list for people, you're the history professor now.
	So what are the books that you would recommend, aside from your own, to young students who are maybe interested in this stuff?
	Kids who are 10, 11, 12 years old who are first getting introduced to American history?
	Well, I would do it the way I did it.
	Which is, there wasn't one book or one author.
	If I would read a book and they would refer to the Stamp Act or something like that, I'd go read the Stamp Act.
	And it's right over our finger.
	I'd go to the Avalon Project and look at original documents.
	They're out there.
	And I would do those sorts of things.
	So there are certain professors I like, certain books I like, but what I would encourage people to do is go do it yourself.
	It's actually entertaining.
	It's actually interesting.
	So if you want to learn about the press, you could take a book like mine.
	I have over 400 endnotes in there.
	The reason I do that is so you can look at the endnotes and go look yourself.
	There were historians at the time.
	Ramsey is an example.
	Most people have never heard of him before.
	He was a real-time historian about the Revolutionary War, which is why the later progressive historians attack him, because they want to change the history of America from a battle over government to a battle between classes, which is what they do.
	So I would suggest that people go look at the original document.
	You don't need people to explain the Declaration of Independence to you.
	Read it.
	You don't need people, well you might, to help you with the Constitution.
	But first, read it.
	In many ways, I don't even care what the Supreme Court says.
	I read the cases like you do because we need to explain them.
	But those are lawyers, justices, they have an effect.
	But that's their opinion on what the Constitution says.
	I want to read the Constitution and why it says what it says.
	Look at the history, English common law, other things, Montesquieu, separation of powers, Locke when it comes to the Declaration of Independence.
	Go back and read those people.
	You'll be a lot smarter.
	And I think a lot more fulfilled.
	So I'm going to ask you a tough question that I often get when I'm speaking on college campuses.
	So the question that I get pretty frequently is a follow up to the kind of what books do you recommend.
	Is there anybody on the left that you read?
	Are there any liberals that you think it's worth reading or that you enjoy or think are interesting out there?
	Not really.
	I mean, some of them are very smart, but I feel like I'm bombarded with this every day.
	And if I'm going to read a leftist, I'll read an old leftist.
	I'll read a John Dewey for a while, or these guys that push the progressive movement, or Wilson, these other guys.
	They are the founding fathers of the modern-day Democrat Party.
	They are the founding fathers of the progressive movement.
	So if you really want to understand what Obama's saying, Or what their progeny are saying, read them.
	And there's a lot to read.
	And they're not the only ones.
	But they're the ones that provided the so-called intellectual basis for modern day progressives.
	Or even go back further, read Marx and Engels and Hegel and Rousseau and these guys.
	Because that's who Bernie Sanders read.
	I'm dying to have Bernie Sanders on one of my programs.
	I'm sure you are too.
	He will not come on any of my programs because I want to talk to him.
	About Marx, and Engels, and Hegel, and Rousseau, and Dewey, and all these other guys, people who he embraces, rather than these shows he goes on to do.
	Health care for, you do a great.
	That's one of my things.
	Health care for all.
	And these superficial interviews where he's just saying, you have a right to this, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's talk about this.
	What do you mean by that?
	You go, I would love to do it.
	But the only way I'm able to do it is because I read those things.
	Not people who've read those things telling me what those people said.
	Just read those people.
	It's out there.
	So, many people who listen to you may not know kind of how you got into the commentary business in the first place.
	Like, I've been following you since I was old enough to listen to talk radio, but for a lot of people who have only heard of you that way, how did you even get into doing this sort of thing?
	Well starting in a log cabin.
	No, not really.
	When I was a kid I would listen to talk radio.
	I'd listen to guys like Bob Grant in New York and others and I was mesmerized by it.
	And I'd listen to it until midnight, two in the morning.
	I actually listened to hosts I didn't even agree with.
	I just thought that whole format was fascinating.
	And then when I was about 16 years old, I contacted our local radio station.
	It was WCAU, now WPHT.
	It's a big 50,000 watt station.
	And I asked them if I could do a show.
	And of course, they blew me off.
	But then they did bring me in.
	Said, just one Sunday.
	And I did it.
	That was that.
	And I thought that was fine.
	And went on with my legal career.
	And then I heard Rush and I heard Sean.
	I used to listen to other talk radio throughout even when I was writing briefs and doing other things and so forth.
	And kind of hooked up with Rush or he hooked up with me.
	I don't really exactly remember how that happened.
	I would provide him with legal information, constitutional information.
	Then he dubbed me F. Lee Levin, his legal director.
	And then Sean, same thing.
	And then they would have me sit in for them now and then.
	And then WABC asked me if I would do a Sunday show for nothing.
	I said, OK, I'll do it.
	It's pretty cool to test out on WABC in New York.
	And that's what I did.
	And after about 14 months of that, They asked me to do a show, which is how I got here.
	So what's your conservative origin story?
	I mean, how did you get conservative in the first place?
	Because you're into talk radio from when you were 16, but have you always held these politics?
	I've always held these views, and I've wondered, because my parents always wondered.
	And by the way, they were always conservatives.
	But I don't mean in terms of philosophical conservatives.
	And 1964.
	They both voted for Goldwater.
	And they're Jewish.
	They were conservatives.
	And I asked my dad, back then, you voted for Goldwater.
	Why did you vote for Goldwater?
	He said, I knew the BS they were saying about Goldwater was wrong.
	And I started to think about that.
	I said, I have that gene.
	I don't like people pushing me around.
	I don't like bullies.
	And I don't like authoritarians.
	And that's what the left is all about.
	Bullies and authoritarians.
	So I don't like being pushed around, whether it's a regulation, a tax, a government talking down to me, a government telling me I can't think for myself.
	And by the way, I think this is how we appeal to younger and younger people, because I don't think they like it either.
	So it's not so much anti-authority, it's anti-authoritarianism.
	And so in other words, what I'm saying is, Autocracy is a bad thing, whether it's practiced one-on-one in the playground or whether it's practiced by government.
	And that's what I think, that's what I reject.
	That's why I started to say, wait a minute, I like liberty, I like individualism, I like to be left alone, I like to kind of do what I want to do.
	And if that's the way you think, then big government and the left is not your answer.
	Okay, so in a second, I want to ask you one final question.
	I want to ask you for your top five presidents and your bottom five presidents, because it's kind of a fun thought experiment.
	But if you want to hear Mark Levin's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
	To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com.
	Click subscribe.
	You can hear the end of our conversation over there.
	Well, thank you so much for stopping by.
	It's been a blast.
	It's great to see you.
	God bless you.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer, Mathis Glover.
	Edited by Donovan Fowler.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
	Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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