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Aug. 4, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:10:51
Michael Knowles | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 62
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I've tried not to work in politics on several occasions because, you know, it's a drag.
I mean, it's miserable.
People yell at you.
They don't like you.
Half the country hates your guts.
It's just too fun.
I just can't help it.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
I'm eager, somewhat eager, to welcome to the show Michael Knowles, the excreble, as you know him, the host of the Michael Knowles Show.
Michael, somewhat thank you for stopping by.
Ben, thank you for having me.
Is that word, by the way, when I listen to the show, I always hear the excellent Michael Knowles.
Is that the?
That's totally not what it means.
OK, well, I'll look it up.
Absolutely.
I'll Google it.
OK, so, you know, let's start with current events.
Let's start with what's happening now.
So you've been watching these Democratic debates.
Every minute.
I don't know how you've been doing it.
I've had to... I don't drink.
I've had to drink heavily.
I will say that sniffing glue was still on the table.
Yep.
How's the experience been for you?
What was your takeaway from the... we've seen now two rounds of Democratic debates.
What's your takeaway so far?
My experience is very simple.
I put little crystals all around my couch as I sit down.
I get the orbs and the dreamcatchers hanging from the ceiling, and then I channel.
The dark, psychic force that is the 2020 Democratic presidential debates.
And then it all makes sense.
When you realize it's all a dark, psychic force and that Marianne Williamson is the most sane person on that stage, then they all start to make sense.
Because, you know, I'm mostly joking about Marianne Williamson, but she actually had, I think it was three of the most accurate sentences in that debate, the most recent debate.
The first one is that wonkiness is not going to decide the Democratic nominee.
Nobody cares about the bean counting of how many zillions of dollars of our money they're going to spend on X, Y, and Z social program.
The second one is about the dark psychic force because it actually is the case that politics at bottom is cultural and even below that is theological.
There actually is a spiritual component to politics.
It's not all just adding up numbers on a spreadsheet.
And then the third statement that I think she made correctly is that if Democrats don't change their strategy, Trump is going to win.
I mean, looking around that stage, which of those candidates is possibly going to beat Trump?
Right.
I mean, I pointed out that Marianne Williamson, everybody's sort of making fun of the whole Marianne Williamson phenomenon, but she's talking at a different level than the other Democrats.
And she's actually making what is a more honest appeal for a lot of Democrats than the other Democrats are.
The Democrats are fighting with each other over, is it Medicare for all or Medicare for anyone who wants it or whatever?
And she's talking about, no, there's deep, rough waters in this country, and we have to investigate that and get to the heart of it.
She's speaking to spirit in a way that Obama did in 2008, actually.
No one cared about Obama on policy in 2008.
It was about the hope and the feel and the zeitgeist.
And she's doing a lot more of that than any of the other candidates.
So it is kind of fascinating.
I think there is something happening with her.
She's not gonna be the nominee, but I think that anybody who's able to tap into even a remote amount of what she's doing, it could create something fascinating.
And that was night one of the debate.
Yes.
Right?
And then there was night two, which was supposed to be Rock'em Sock'em Robots with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
And Kamala Harris basically ends up in pieces on the floor, but not because of Joe Biden.
You're talking about that cop Kamala Harris?
You're talking about that crooked cop Kamala?
Yes, Kamala had her candidacy basically shredded by Tulsi Gabbard.
That was the exchange of the night.
I mean, everyone was waiting for Kamala and Biden, and Biden pretty much collapsed under the weight of his own vocabulary.
He didn't know how to say basic words.
He fumbled sentences.
It actually, I think, Biden's performance shows a little bit of the cleverness of the Trump campaign branding him as Sleepy Joe.
When they branded him as Sleepy Joe, I thought, Why not creepy Joe?
Why not liar Joe?
Why not plagiarist Joe?
Why not ineffectual?
It's because he actually comes off as old, tired, and possibly senile.
I mean, he couldn't, he said, go to Joe 3033.
He didn't know the difference between a text message and a website.
And so the more interesting exchange was Tulsi and Kamala.
There were some actual substantive There were debates going on last night.
I mean, you heard debates over free trade at the second night of the Democratic debate.
You heard debates over sovereignty, over borders.
There were these debates going on, but what it became lost in, I think, was the sloganeering of the Democratic Party.
You know, you hear the universal basic health care.
Health care is a right, not a privilege.
They're all going back to this.
I think the central figure of the debate actually was Barack Obama.
To hear them talk about Barack Obama, I thought, Gosh, this Obama guy sounds pretty good.
Maybe this Obama guy should run for office as a Republican.
Because it's this lie of leftism.
They told us in 2008, we're going to have universal health care.
This is it.
Once and for all, we're going to fix the health care system.
That whole Obamacare debate, we're going to do it.
Health care for everybody.
Now we find out Obamacare was terrible.
It didn't do anything.
It didn't achieve anything.
It's never enough with the left.
They're always moving further and further to the left.
And so they'll say, once and for all, we're going to have Medicare for all.
We're going to have universal health care.
Until eight years from now, when they have another program that costs even more money and that takes even more of our liberty away.
So you tell me, you looked at all these candidates.
How do you think this race shakes out?
And who do you think is the most plausible candidate to go up against Trump?
If you were advising the Democrats, who would you tell them to nominate?
So I called from the beginning Kamala Harris.
I thought Kamala was a pretty strong candidate.
She's a killer.
She's willing to do anything to get ahead.
I'll leave it at that.
I don't want to say anything untoward, but she's made some curious decisions in her political career.
She's willing to fight.
She's a prosecutor.
She has...
I think she was an unsuccessful Attorney General of California.
Now they're trying to make her out to be the toughest AG in American history.
I think she's got to lean into that.
I think she's got to embrace that.
That's her whole career.
She's a tough lawyer.
She was a prosecutor.
She was AG.
She's been in the Senate for five minutes.
That's her life.
If she runs away from her record, she's got nothing to run on.
So I think she could be a good candidate, but she's got to stop blowing in the wind.
She's got to stop one day saying we're going to abolish private health insurance.
Next day, we're not going to abolish it.
We're going to opinion poll and figure out which way the wind is blowing.
If she cuts that out, runs as herself, I think she's a decent candidate.
The other alternative is Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren has this crossover appeal.
The mainstream, boomer side of the Democratic Party kind of likes her.
She kind of looks like Hillary Clinton.
She kind of talks like Hillary Clinton.
But she's got much more progressive credibility, and she stole all of Bernie Sanders' plans.
So she's got a plan for everything, and it's because she went in and took it out of Bernie's desk drawer.
That gives her some appeal.
I think the weakness for Elizabeth Warren, people are going to call me a sexist for this.
It's her voice.
And the reason this isn't sexist is Elizabeth Warren is shrill.
Not all women are shrill.
Kamala Harris isn't shrill.
Tulsi Gabbard isn't shrill.
Amy Klobuchar isn't shrill.
The second shrillest candidate in this race is Cory Booker, who ostensibly is a man.
So I think they both have to fix something about their candidacies.
Kamala needs to embrace her actual life story, and Elizabeth needs to change Just the tactics of campaigning, just the tone in which he's speaking.
If they don't change those two things, it's hard for me to believe that any of those candidates are going to beat President Trump.
He has legitimate vulnerabilities, but I just don't think they're rising to the occasion.
So you're foreclosing Biden as the nominee already?
You think that Biden isn't going to be the nominee?
I think, I mean, look, if you look at the polls today, Joe Biden is the nominee, right?
He's still at the top of the pack.
He's just so weak.
And I think part of the reason his poll numbers are so high is he's been out of public life now for a few years.
Even when he was the vice president, he wasn't really in front of the public so much.
They'd trot him at his crazy Uncle Joe every once in a while.
But Joe Biden is a doofus.
People forget this.
He ran in 1988 and he dropped out because he lied about his law school record.
He plagiarized speeches from Irish politicians.
He's just a kind of a bumbling fool.
Then he ran again in 2008.
And he was nothing.
Nobody wanted him.
The only reason he got to be vice president is because Barack Obama hated Hillary Clinton so much, he couldn't stomach the thought of her being his vice president.
Now he's up again.
I mean, Joe Biden, in his entire half-century in politics, what did he accomplish?
What did he actually accomplish?
I think he has basically one piece of legislation that he can own that was pretty good legislation.
That's the 1994 crime bill, and it's the one thing he's running so fast.
If you look at those debate stages, there's a Joe Biden-shaped hole in the wall.
He's running away from his record that fast.
So considering all of that, the more that he's in the limelight, the more he's bungling his own record, the more he's bungling even the words coming out of his mouth.
It's hard to see how his poll numbers ever stay the same or go up.
It just seems like, as you said, quite rightly, I think his first day is his best day.
And I think he just keeps steadily sliding down.
And the question is, can one of the other candidates jump up and beat him before the nomination is decided?
The other reason that you have gained notoriety is, of course, because you once occupied the same august space as Alexander Ocasio-Cortez on the East Coast.
She, of course, is a woman from the heart of the Bronx, as we know from her self-described biography.
Grew up on the streets.
Jenny from the block.
So that must have been you too, because you grew up in the same area, right?
I obviously look like Jenny from the block.
The only problem with AOC's autobiography is that it's completely untrue.
Other than that, it's all good, but it's just completely untrue.
So that's the problem with it.
Actually, AOC grew up about an hour, hour and a half north of the Bronx in a town called Yorktown Heights.
Very ritzy suburb, very wealthy, not terribly ethnically diverse.
I mean, it's just what you picture the suburbs to be.
That's what it is.
I grew up Directly next door in the slightly less wealthy, slightly, you know, less affluent town.
And we grew up there for our whole life.
She was there until 18.
She then went to a private college in Massachusetts.
She then, according to Westchester land records, moved back.
Lived with her mother there until, basically until she ran for Congress.
I didn't.
After college I went down and lived in the city.
So I'm actually pretty sure I've spent much more time in my life in the congressional district in Queens and the Bronx that AOC currently represents.
But I just can't pull it off as well.
I don't know.
Maybe I need to add multiple last names or dance on rooftops.
I don't know what it is.
I just, I don't have that real, that inauthentic authenticity that AOC has.
Well, I mean, we can always hope that you can breed that into yourself, and one day you, too, can be a thought leader in the Democratic Party.
I mean, you've already written the book on it, so why not?
This is true.
I mean, you know, I think I've written the definitive work on reasons to vote for Democrats, and yet Tom Perez says that AOC is the future of the Democratic Party.
It's like, give me a little look, man.
Give me, you know, finally embrace some of the intellectual future of the left.
So since you are not the thought leader of the Democratic Party, but apparently AOC is, let's talk for a second about the Squad, led by the illustrious, brilliant, world-breaking AOC.
So the Democratic Party has embraced the Squad, which is just an act of complete imbecility, but what do you make of their rise?
Why exactly are they so popular among Democrats right now?
Well, H.L.
Mencken described democracy as the theory that the people deserve to get what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard.
And I think that's what you're seeing with the rise of the squad.
For years, decades and decades, the left has been embracing this.
Awful, petty politics of personal destruction.
The political is the personal was one of the mottos in the 1960s.
Impugning everybody's motives, accusing everyone of racism and sexism and this-ism, embracing identity politics, so what matters is not our ideas, what matters is just our skin color or our genitalia or whatever.
And the Frankenstein's monster of this political experiment is the Squad.
And so now you're seeing this turn on Nancy Pelosi.
Now you're seeing this turn on the Clintons.
And I can't really feel bad for them.
I mean, they've been encouraging this sort of thing the whole time.
And so now the chickens are coming home to roost for the Democratic Party.
The thing about the Squad that's interesting is people have been calling Ayanna Pressley the Ringo Starr.
of the squad.
And they do, they all kind of match up pretty well on, on the Beatles, you know, so you've got AOC is obviously McCartney.
She's the most marketable.
She's the most pop, you know, Ilhan Omar is John Lennon.
I think she's the genuine radical.
She has a very strange marital history.
And Rashida Tlaib is, she's George Harrison.
So Ilhan Omar's brother is like the He's the Yoko.
Is he the Yoko or is he the Cynthia Lennon?
I don't know.
It kind of breaks down a little bit.
And then, obviously, you've got George.
You've got Rashida Tlaib.
She's the quiet one, you know.
She's the spiritual one.
She plays the sitar sometimes.
She plays the sitar.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, their rise is a symptom of reality TV politics.
And politics and show business have always gone together and they always will go together.
But we're in the age of reality TV politics, The king of reality television is the president.
And these girls, I mean, they could be a reality TV show.
It's all just petty names.
It's all accusing people of bigotry and all these different personal motives.
They don't know anything about actual public policy, right?
I mean, AOC was asked in one of her first major interviews, tell me about any aspect of your policy.
Tell me about your foreign policy.
And she giggles and says, well, I'm not really the expert.
She was a major in economics.
She studied international relations in college.
She's not the expert on either of those.
She doesn't know anything about either of those because it has nothing to do with the policy itself.
The left has sort of pushed that to the side.
Now it's all just about personal character.
It's all just about those feelings, man.
And I know what you think about feelings versus fact in politics.
That's what you're seeing.
You're seeing the total inversion of the sort of politics that a self-governing republic So we saw this sort of battle breaking out between Nancy Pelosi and the Squad.
Yeah.
And this created a lot of political problems for the president in the short term.
He said certain things that just weren't true.
He said things that had people calling him racist.
All that was unpleasant to deal with during that time.
However, I actually think the cumulative effect of that was pretty helpful to the president, at least in so much as It rallied support behind the squad.
So within a week or two, you see Nancy Pelosi hosting AOC in her office.
Big smiles.
Everybody's hunky-dory.
In the long run, this is the best we can hope for.
You know, sometimes your conservatives say, we got to get AOC out of office.
We got to get Ilhan Omar out of office.
No way.
Ilhan Omar needs to be the Speaker of the House.
I want her to be in every presidential campaign.
I want her to endorse every candidate.
Because say what you will about the Squad.
At least they're honest.
At least the Squad is honest about the radicalism.
of the left, about the radicalism of the Democratic Party.
Other candidates, I mean, most famously, Hillary Clinton was really good at hiding that radicalism.
She would say abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Didn't make any sense.
If it's murder, it shouldn't be legal.
If it's just like getting your appendix out, there's no reason for it to be rare.
This squad ain't like that.
They want abortion on demand, without apology.
Ilhan Omar is praying that people open their eyes to the evils of Israel.
She says the only reason that anyone would support Israel is because the Jews are buying them off.
I mean, that kind of dormant anti-Semitism, old forms of bigotry on the left, is really coming out with them.
And I want to give them a big microphone.
I want them to come on my show.
I want them to be the face of the Democratic Party.
And that looks like that's what's happening.
How did you grow up to be a conservative?
I understand that you're still very young and that there's still time.
You may end up being a transgender liberal by the time this is all over, but where did you start?
I'll only become a transgender liberal if I ever want to run for office because I think it's the only way I'd be electorally viable at this point.
I more or less came out of the womb with parted hair, smoking a cigar, campaigning for Republicans.
One of the first statements I ever learned as a kid from my grandfather was, read my lips, no new taxes, which was the line from George H.W.
Bush.
Your grandfather was George H.W.
Bush, what are you doing here?
It's true.
No, he loved Bush and he told me this.
He taught me how to sing, it's a grand old flag, I was singing it around like two years old.
1996, it was the election of Bob Dole against Bill Clinton.
I was campaigning around my first grade classroom for Bob Dole.
I was the only person in this country excited about Bob Dole, including Bob Dole, because he was a war hero and Clinton was a degenerate draft dodger.
I flirted with liberalism.
I had my rebellion for about seven months when I was 13.
I thought John Kerry might be sort of an acceptable human.
I don't even want to say it on the air.
I then came back.
I was quite conservative.
And then I went through all the stages that young conservatives go through.
You know, I was an Ayn Rand objectivist type for about six months, and I was a jerk to all my friends.
And then I became more interested in other aspects of conservative thought and the conservative tradition.
And I was working on Republican campaigns.
That was my day job from when I was 18 until recent past.
And I was an actor.
I was an actor.
I was directing opera in college.
I was doing plays.
I was doing terrible movies that are on channel 7000 at three o'clock in the morning.
And, you know, I think both of those things are pretty related.
You know, Ronald Reagan said that a politician has to be an actor.
And in the negative sense of this, it's because they're both vain, ridiculous sort of endeavors that are selfish and self-centered.
But when they're done right, I actually think it's for the opposite reason.
I think politics and acting are similar because both have to be concerned with truth.
Acting is living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
Politics, hopefully if you're a good politician, you're concerned with pursuing some kind of political truth, ultimately a cultural or even religious truth.
And you have to like people.
If you don't like people, A, you're going to hate acting because all you're doing is building characters.
You're analyzing the human condition.
And if you hate people, you are going to be a terrible politician because you spend all your time at spaghetti dinners at the VFW Hall or at the Lions Club or something.
If you don't like them, There are many other ways to make a buck or to get your name in the newspaper.
And so I think it's why, you know, especially for Republicans, you see a lot of actors who are politicians.
And then among Democrats, you see a lot of politicians who are actors.
But it's true in Hollywood.
Every Hollywood celebrity is endorsing some leftist, crazy political agenda every other day.
They're holding fundraisers for some Democratic candidate.
I think it's not just the politics of show business for ugly people.
I think the two are very similar.
I know there are a lot of people who are watching or listening to this, and they're thinking, this Michael Mowles guy doesn't seem so exorable to me.
So why, Ben, are you constantly ripping on Michael Mowles?
For those who don't know the story of how you put out a blank book that sold 200,000 copies for no reason at all, and about which I'm supremely better, then maybe you ought to explain what exactly happened.
What inspired you to write a blank book?
That sold 200,000 copies.
Well, and actually, I should mention, you play a key role in this story.
I know you want me to remind you of this.
So I had been researching this book for my entire life.
It's called Reasons to Vote for Democrats, A Comprehensive Guide.
There's an extensive bibliography in the back.
I quoted Thucydides in the foreword, and I said, this is not a book to win the applause of the moment.
This is a work for all time.
It's eternally true.
And so the book has 250 or so Blank pages, about 10 chapters, all the different areas of policy and politics that would be the reason to vote for Democrats.
I put this up on the internet.
I self-published it.
It cost me no money.
It was a stupid joke just to bother my Democrat friends and family.
Within three days, this book becomes the number one best-selling book in the world.
It was actually blurbed by a friend of mine.
Oh, it was you!
Ben Shapiro blurbed this book, called it a thorough work.
This thing leaps to the top of the charts, and then, as I seem to recall this, as you were furious, because you've written what, 12 books?
Yes, double digits.
A million books.
As you've written all these books, all with words in them.
You see the stack of blank pages, and some of your books, best-selling books, New York Times bestsellers, and then this book sells all these copies, and you say, Knowles, I'm furious, I hate this, this is the worst thing, and then you gave me your literary agent.
That's true, I did do that.
Yeah, behind the scenes, I'm actually a nice person, but that breaks the sort of fourth wall of the show.
I think it's masochism.
That's what it's got.
It's the only explanation.
There's no question.
I mean, we continue to cut you checks despite all of this.
Okay, so let's talk for a second about trolling.
So there's this amazing trollery on the right.
Obviously, President Trump is a troll.
You are a master troll.
I mean, like grade A troll.
So why do you think President Trump does that?
And do you think there's benefit to it?
You want to actually have something to say.
You want to actually Affect a message while you're trolling.
And I think that's the key here, because some of these guys who have just been provocateurs have gone down pretty bad intellectual pathways, political pathways, and they just wash up and they're nothing.
So I think the advantage to trolling, I mean even that word, it's such a 2019 word, what we're really talking about is the advantage to a little humor in politics, to a little levity in politics.
This goes a long way.
Obviously, Ronald Reagan is one of the funniest presidents we've ever had.
He started most speeches and most cabinet meetings with a joke.
It just cuts the tension.
It makes things so much easier.
President Trump is actually the funniest president we've ever had.
It's because he's a professional TV show host.
I mean, he's a product of show business for 40 years.
He just knows how to use a line to get an audience to laugh.
And so I think that is very helpful.
You know, Today, everybody takes politics so damn seriously.
They think it's the be-all, the end-all of the whole world.
Political battles matter.
But C.S.
Lewis pointed this out.
He said a sick society needs to talk about politics.
If you don't talk about politics, the sickness could get worse.
But if all you're talking about is politics, Then you've lost the point of the society in the first place.
The reason we have politics is so that we can engage in culture, so that we can worship God as we want to worship God, so that we can have relationships with our family and our communities and our civil society and those free associations that make America what it is.
A society that can't laugh a little bit at its politics, that can't take itself lightly, doesn't have that.
You know, the writer G.K.
Chesterton said, the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
It's not that they take themselves unseriously, it's not that they make a joke of themselves, but they can take themselves lightly.
And if we can't do that in politics, the future doesn't look so bright.
Okay, so let's talk about your brand of conservatism.
So, there's a lot of debate inside conservative circles over what exactly conservatism means.
You're obviously the younger generation, and there's an open debate as to what kind of government we need.
Government involvement, what kind of culture we need.
There's a battle between conservatives and libertarians.
If you had to sort of sum up your view of conservatism, what would it look like?
I would agree with a lot of conservative thinkers, going back to, say, Edmund Burke, who I think is the founder of kind of the modern era of conservative thought.
I think conservatism is in many ways an inclination more than an ideology.
I think that it is anti-ideological.
I think we try to shun doctrines and dogmas and manifestos with five bullet points on them and say this is the sum total of politics.
I think the conservative knows that's never going to sum up the whole world.
I can't boil down my entire experience of reality, my desires, what I wish for the country, the consecration with which I view my country, the loyalty, the filial piety that I feel for the United States.
I can't boil that down into one, two, or three bullet points.
I think a lot of it comes out of a love for the tradition.
And this is a big divide.
You have some people in this country who love America for all her warts, for all her problems, for all the tragedies of history, who say, I want America to move into the future by pulling on the best of her tradition, by living up to the best of her ideals.
And being more true to herself.
And then you have some people who say, no, America's rotten.
America was never that great, like Andrew Cuomo said.
I hate America.
I don't like the flag.
I think the Betsy Ross flag is racist.
I think Jefferson and Washington, I think they're racist and terrible.
I think that's a major divide, and I think there is a broad space for the conservatives, who actually want to conserve America, to speak.
We've had this long debate in conservative circles over which brand of conservatism gets to claim the true mantle.
There are the neoconservatives, they've kind of fallen out of favor, the libertarians, the religious right, the traditionalists, the Trumpian populists, all of those.
It seems to me that it's wonderful about conservatism that there's that intellectual diversity, that there's a debate that's constantly going on there.
Maybe I favor a little bit more of the traditional side.
Maybe you favor a little bit more of the libertarian side.
Maybe some people are more religious right or neocon or whatever.
But we're able to engage in all of that with a common love of country and a common seriousness of purpose.
That is radically different from the left, which no longer has any intellectual diversity.
They used to have the blue dog, sort of socially conservative Democrats.
Now they just have one idea, which is progressivism.
And you are seeing progressivism speed up.
Every single day, it speeds up even further, to the point that now we're calling for open borders.
We're calling to dismantle American sovereignty.
And we're disrespecting even the American flag, which is a symbol of the country.
This is one of the things I fear, I think, is that the reactionary nature of our politics is driving this a little bit on both sides.
So obviously you've seen it from the left.
You've seen a reaction to President Trump.
The left thought they were never going to lose an election after Barack Obama was president.
They immediately lose the first presidential election after Obama is president.
And they're so stunned by it that they move into anti-Trump territory.
Anything Trump says must be bad, even if it's the most anodyne, normal, Typical American politics when it's apple pie and motherhood and the American flag They've decided they're against it because they're reacting to Trump and then you've seen on the right a similar tendency Which is we have to oppose the left no matter what they are doing and even if it means embracing some of our worst Instincts and I think this is where I'm more worried about the conservative movement than you seem to be and that is that I'm concerned that in the in the correct attempt to stop the left
There's a willingness to embrace bedfellows that are really alienating for future generations as well as morally problematic.
In other words, the tent can become so broad that you end up including people in the tent who probably shouldn't be in the tent simply to oppose the other side.
Well, I agree we should kick out all the bigots.
I don't think anybody disagrees about that.
But I don't really think that the right has embraced bigots, at least not in anything approaching the mainstream.
I mean, I guess these days they're calling Steven Crowder a bigot because he says that men can't be women.
They're trying to kick him off of YouTube.
But I mean the real bigots, the racial politics guys, Richard Spencer.
I mean, Richard Spencer is practically a creation of the left-wing media and the mainstream media.
He, I don't know, five years ago he had a hundred people show up to his conference.
A year ago he had about the same number of people show up to his conference.
I don't see the mainstreaming of that guy.
Mike, I guess what I'm saying is that there's a bit of a politics of convenience going on.
So, for example, for years I was informed that Russia was a geopolitical foe of the United States.
The minute that President Trump declares that Russia is not in fact a geopolitical foe of the United States, at least publicly, you know, in terms of his actual actions, he's treated Russia certainly as a geopolitical foe of the United States.
There's been a whole brand of the Republican Party that's come out and basically become quasi-pro-Putin.
You've seen this happen to trade.
I'm not totally sure.
I mean, I see your point on the Russia thing, but it's also, I mean, this is why I oppose rigid ideology or trying to, you know, boil conservatism, capital C, trademark, down to five or so bullet points.
Is because it is true, Russia was our number one geopolitical adversary for a whole century.
I mean, we fought a Cold War against them.
Then we won the Cold War.
And even during the Cold War, you saw regularly, we would play off Russia against China and China against Russia.
And obviously, today that's more important than ever.
So I think for a lot of conservatives, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the fall of Soviet communism, you look around and you say, you know, Russia is awful.
I mean, Vladimir Putin is a terrible, terrible man.
But the bigger threat comes from China.
China is violating WTO treaties, they're illegally subsidizing, they're stealing aluminum, they're stealing our property, they're spying on us, they're aggressing on some of our interests.
And so we say, you know, if we put our focus, if we take our focus away maybe from certain interests in the Middle East, even Pulling away maybe from aspects that Russia wants to intervene in.
To focus on China.
That's where the real threat will be.
Does it mean you totally, you know, cozy up to longtime foes like Vladimir Putin?
No, but it's a reordering of priorities because the circumstances of politics have changed.
Okay, so let's talk for a second about this debate that's broken out.
So you talk about sort of the Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk side of the conservative movement, maybe Patrick Deneen.
There's this side of the conservative movement that suggests that conservatism is really about honor for tradition and for the past.
Well, and I would say, importantly, about veneration.
The idea that we have very little in the United States that binds us together, especially now as we discourage assimilation, even as we increase immigration.
It's very difficult.
We no longer really have much shared religion.
We don't have much religion at all.
And we no longer venerate the symbols that we once venerated.
The flag, the Fourth of July, fireworks and hot dogs and hamburgers.
We don't have that shared love of country, and no country that I've ever seen in the history of the world can survive without some sense of the sacred.
Now, of course, because nature abhors a vacuum, you're getting new sacred things.
You know, I mean, we've replaced what would be maybe the Christian liturgical calendar with the secular leftist liturgical calendar.
So you've got in February, you've got Black History Month to celebrate not all black people, Clarence Thomas, I don't think he's being celebrated.
It's to celebrate a particular view of black oppression in the United States.
You've got Women's History Month.
Same thing.
Not to celebrate all women, to celebrate a particular view of women's oppression.
In June, what do you have?
You have Pride Month.
We're now celebrating the queen of all sins.
We're celebrating the deadliest sin of all.
I think what we would all agree on is there is that aspect of government and of politics and of living together as a nation.
And therefore, I think what the question becomes between, say, the traditionalists and the libertarians is, what is going to be sacred in the country?
Or can we try to persevere without anything being sacred?
Well, this is why I ask about the role of government, because I think that we largely agree on The sacred nature of many of the nationally binding forces.
I actually just wrote a book with words in it all about the sacred nature of history and how that has to be balanced with a limited government in the absence of a virtuous people.
You can't have liberalism in the first instance.
We're starting to see a sort of root and branch approach to liberalism, however, that I'm not sure is sustainable.
And I'm wondering where you're coming down on the side.
Because on the one hand, you have folks who are basically saying that liberalism itself, this is the Patrick Deneen case openly, is that liberalism itself has failed, that it carries within it the seeds, Lockean liberalism carries within it the seeds of atomized individualism.
And that leads to libertinism.
And that leads to the destruction of the society at large.
You don't have any binding forces, specifically because you have a liberty-rights-driven society.
And then, on the other side, you have people saying, well, so what is the alternative that you're suggesting, like government imposing virtue from above?
So where do you come down, and what do you think the role of government is in that fight?
Well, much as Buckley did in the 20th century, maybe, I propose a fusion, or at least a view that I think proposes that it's not, those two ideas are not as far apart as they may seem.
Why is that?
Because, in part, for American conservatives who want to conserve the American tradition, you are largely conserving a liberal tradition.
No one doubts the spirit of 1776 and the importance of liberalism.
And I don't think anyone wants to, well, maybe some people do, but I certainly don't want to rip that out root and branch.
But, nevertheless, you also see That liberalism has led to this atomization of the individual.
People have never been lonelier.
You have a widespread epidemic of depression, anxiety, stress, suicidality, up 70% even among teenagers in recent years.
This is a major social problem, the breakdown of institutions and the breakdown of love of country.
Now, the role of government comes in, and I think the libertarian side has not fully grappled with this.
Because I agree with John Adams that the Constitution is built for a moral and religious people, and it's not fit for the governance of anyone else.
And where do we get morality?
Where do we get virtue?
Virtue is a personal habit.
It's a personal choice.
You have to do it.
You can either discipline yourself, Or a giant government will discipline you.
Order will occur, make no mistake.
But if you want to be a free people and you want to govern yourself, you need to have that discipline yourself.
Increasingly, we have seen this go away and you've seen increasing libertinism.
You can view this in virtually any social phenomenon that we're looking around at in 2019, where we can't even agree on the definition of what a man is.
Used to be a man was not a woman.
Now, today, as a man is not a woman, secondary definition, also sometimes a woman.
We just don't know.
The role of the government comes in here because the way that you become a virtuous person, the way that you learn your morals, the way that you practice the habit of virtue is through education.
I mean, that's what the word education means.
It's how you learn to behave and form your mind and form your body.
And in the United States, broadly, Education is a matter of government.
The government is doing it.
There is no kind of education that isn't coercive.
Would that we could all have private education and your parents are directing it, but that just isn't the case and so what we need to ask ourselves is What do we want the government teaching our kids?
I mean, that is, it might not be a legitimate role of the government, but it certainly has been the role of the government for at least 100 years.
And in that time, you've seen the ability to even read the Bible in school, forget prayer in school, even to read the Bible in school.
The Bible is the bedrock of our civilization.
If you haven't read the Bible, you can't understand any of the rest of it.
And if government is going to run education, and they're not going to even expose children to that bedrock, to their own civilization, you're going to look down the road in 20 or 30 years and you're going to see a completely unrecognizable society.
You've been going around giving speeches at colleges, getting shot with fake bleach, and really enjoying yourself out there.
There's an interesting sort of debate that's broken out about what the future of colleges should be.
You seem to be hopeful and, I think, optimistic about what colleges should be.
I'm less optimistic.
I think they should be circumscribed in their authority.
I think that colleges should basically go back to either being trade schools or to not existing.
Because the fact is that they have lost the thread.
They don't have the capacity or the willingness to teach Western civilization anymore.
If we're going to have those colleges, well, they can exist, but they should be privately funded because the state is no longer going to do any of that.
What's your view on what should happen with colleges?
I'll tell you, I was more hopeful before I started my college tour than now that I've finished it and weirdos are shooting strange liquids that I don't even want to know what's in them at me.
What I'm most disappointed in in the colleges is not the students.
Students are ignorant.
That's the definition of a student.
You go to be educated so that you can stop being ignorant and start to know some things.
I don't even mind the crazy professors.
Professors have always been crazy.
They've had crazy tousled hair.
And we would play a game when I was in college.
We'd look down the street and say, is that person homeless or is he a professor?
Sometimes you can't tell.
The problem, as far as I see it, is the administration.
After I was sprayed with whatever at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, they arrest the guy.
Fortunately, they drag him out.
And the next morning, the chancellor of the university, he sent out a letter.
Apologizing to me, of course, right?
Absolutely not.
He smeared me as a bigot for saying that men are not women.
That was the title of my talk.
He then said that my talk does not go along with the University of Missouri-Kansas City's values.
So apparently their values are men are women.
I didn't know that.
That's news to me.
And then he endorsed the actions of the hecklers, the ones who were screaming from the beginning, endorsing the heckler's veto.
This is anathema to liberal education.
And then at the end he said, oh yeah, but they shouldn't get violent.
Lip service to this.
As far as I can tell, there have been no punishments, no consequences for these kids.
This has happened at elite universities all over the country.
The inmates are running the asylum here, and you can't educate anybody that way.
I mean, that's... The truth is arrogant, as a college president once said.
You know, at University of Chicago, which said, we're going to stand by free speech, they had these campus disruptions.
They sent out that letter.
You haven't heard a peep since.
Purdue University, run by the great Mitch Daniels.
There was all this craziness on campus.
He called them in.
He said, alright, I've read your demands.
And they said, well this isn't a negotiation, President Daniels.
And he said, you're absolutely right, this is not a negotiation.
And he said, Sit down, learn, and be quiet.
And you haven't heard a peep from Purdue either.
If the universities were willing to do that, I think a liberal education is essential to a free society.
I mean, liberal means free.
The liberal arts are the arts of freedom.
It's not where you go to learn how to become a carpenter.
It's not where you go to learn how to become a lawyer or a doctor.
Your undergrad liberal arts is supposed to be where you learn completely impractical things.
History, literature, mathematics.
You learn about your civilization.
You learn how to think.
Then you go to a professional school, or you get trained in some job, and then you go out into the world.
A self-governing country.
Will not exist very long if we totally lose liberal education.
The problem is I think these universities are basically rotten to the core.
I think we have to defund them.
I think you and I are complicit in this because we maybe we don't donate to our universities but we pay our taxes.
I think we need to take away the federal guarantees of these loans.
I mean, obviously, if President Pocahontas gets into office, she's going to have $1.6 trillion in student loan forgiveness.
It's going to only exacerbate the problem.
But you need a new model.
I think there are probably five universities in this country that are salvageable and good in doing the business of educating future American leaders.
That's great.
We should keep doing that.
You know, let's not forget, in 1940, 5% of Americans got a four-year degree from college.
Today, you've got 60-plus percent of high school graduates are going to college.
Many of them won't finish.
You don't need everybody to study the Aeneid that way.
I mean, it would be nice, but you actually don't need it.
I would save those handful of colleges, I would defund all of the others, and I would find some new method of education that is more tailored to the individual students so they don't need to take out a quarter million dollars in debt to not learn anything. - Well, one of the things that you've spoken a lot about is the failures of the universities one of the things that you've spoken a lot about is the failures Talk about context with regard to President Trump, but this is particularly true in the field of history where the universities seem to be teaching that everybody from history ought to be evaluated by the values that we currently hold.
Thus, you are a better person than Thomas Jefferson because Thomas Jefferson held slaves.
While you do not hold slaves, you are a better person than John Adams because John Adams condemned various forms of sin that he saw, whereas you think that those forms of sin are okay because they're consensual.
You know, that seems to be the generalized feeling among folks in history departments all over the country.
You spend an inordinate amount of time talking about A lot of historical figures.
One of the historical figures that you've gotten the most flack for for defending is Christopher Columbus.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of the mythology surrounding Christopher Columbus and why you feel he's being not given a fair shake.
Mythology is the greatest word here.
I mean, because I'm happy.
I don't think that I say that Christopher Columbus is the greatest man who ever lived.
He wasn't.
I'm totally willing to point out his flaws.
He had many flaws.
But he's being blamed for things that he didn't do.
One of his biographers, Carol Delaney at Stanford, this was what she kept going back to when she wrote about him.
She said, people, especially on the left, I guess, are attacking him.
They called him a genocidal maniac.
He didn't commit a genocide.
Now, you can oppose Western exploration of the Americas.
I mean, I guess that's what they're really talking about.
But Christopher Columbus wasn't Adolf Hitler.
They say that he had a particular hatred of the Native Americans.
In reality, he was often defending Native Americans against the harsh punishment sought by the Spaniards, by his fellow travelers.
And even Bartolome de las Casas, a Columbus biographer, the great defender of Natives in the New World, Constantly talked about how he was defending the natives.
Christopher Columbus adopted a Native American son.
Say whatever you want about his time as the governor of the Indies, I don't think he had a particular vile, vicious, bigoted hatred of Native Americans if he's going to adopt one from his dead comrade and raise him as his own son.
This is true of all history.
I mean, we're now doing this to Columbus, or to rather Washington and Jefferson.
You know, President Trump in that Difficult press conference at Charlottesville.
He said, you're talking about Robert E. Lee now, and we can all agree we hate Robert E. Lee, but who's next?
Is it Thomas Jefferson?
Is it Washington?
And now you are seeing schools in California paying $600,000 to paint over a Washington mural at Notre Dame University, where I gave a speech defending Columbus.
They have a beautiful, priceless mural of Columbus that actually shows the history of him, which nobody knows.
This systematic, you know, multifaceted mural.
They're putting a drape over it so that nobody is offended.
Where does this end?
And this gets back to the conservative inclination, why I think conservatism is more an inclination than it is an ideology.
It's an inclination fundamentally of humility, of awe, of wonder, of knowing I'm not the greatest guy that ever lived.
I don't celebrate pride.
I don't take pride in myself.
I try to be as aware as I can of my own flaws and the great gift of humility.
One, life is a lot better when you go through it and you try to be humble.
But then you also look back on history and you say, you know, maybe I shouldn't throw stones at Thomas Jefferson.
He held slaves.
I don't hold slaves.
So that's one point for me.
I do a lot of things that he didn't do that are pretty bad as well.
Just judging society.
In the 19th century, there was widespread slavery in the United States.
Many people opposed it, but there it was.
What are people going to say about us in 200 years?
The obvious example is we kill a million babies a year and we specifically target them for being mentally deficient.
We can target them now for their sex.
We target them for any reason at all.
This disproportionately affects racial minorities.
More black babies in New York City are aborted than born.
How is history going to judge us?
And if we want grace from our descendants, maybe we should give a little bit of grace to our antecedents, you know?
I think, generally, with the study of history and with the way we look at our country, I think that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and many, many people in this country think that we're flying.
So, we were talking about college experiences.
Obviously, I'm an Ivy Leaguer, you're an Ivy Leaguer.
What was your Ivy League experience like?
I went to Yale basically just before it all collapsed.
They start renaming colleges, students shrieking at their professors, which happened later on, 2014, 2015.
I feel like I was the last guy to sort of leap off the Titanic as the thing is going down.
And I wrote my essays on two topics.
One, and this was my main essay, was my love of Cuban cigars.
It was how much I've smoked Cuban cigars since I was a kid.
I kid you not.
The title of it was The Count of Monte Cristo.
I talked about the different kinds of cigars, why I liked them, what I thought they meant about the human spirit.
So that was one essay.
Well, at that point, they just had to have you, obviously.
Well, at that time, they were trying to ban smoking from campus.
And I love... I mean, you can smoke pot, you can probably smoke crack, you can do whatever you want.
They have whole sex weeks at Yale.
Heaven forfend, you smoke a cigar.
And I actually started a club when I got there.
See, some guys, they want to be the head of the debate team, they want to be the captain of the football team.
That wasn't going to be me.
So I founded a club called the Society for Intellectual Growth and Reinvigoration, or Cigar.
And we convinced them to fund my little cigar habit for about four years, Cuban cigars.
It was wonderful.
And then in order to get a little bit more money for my preferred vice, I wrote a review of cigars in the Yale Daily News.
So I got them to pay for some of them too.
I don't know how they didn't figure this out.
Only when I graduated, I think that's when they finally obliterated smoking on campus.
So you've been like a full-time troll for years.
I mean, this is not like something new.
It is.
That actually, you know, freshman, no, sophomore year, I think it was sophomore year, I had my first political job.
And I was working on a campaign in New York for my friend Nan Hayworth.
And she was running a challenger campaign against the incumbent John Hall.
John Hall had been in this rock band in the 70s called Orleans, and they did the songs like, Still the one that blah blah blah, and they did, you know, they did one, Dance with me, I want to be your partner, can't you see?
So I started this... Classics of the genre.
Classics of the 70s saccharine genre.
I started this troll campaign on the side of Nan's actual campaign.
And it was called the Young Voters for an Orleans Reunion Tour to get it all out of D.C.
back on the road.
And it was a lot of fun.
I was ripping off their songs, rewriting them, doing YouTube videos.
And this was back when you could actually get organic traction on YouTube.
Now that's virtually impossible.
So I was doing this.
A few people were paying attention.
A few people thought it was funny.
But they made the classic political mistake of overreacting.
So I got lawsuit threats from the band.
I got lawsuit threats from EMI Music.
I got lawsuit threats from the congressman himself.
All of a sudden you go from 500 people have seen this video to tens of thousands of people have seen this video.
It's all over the news.
I thought, wow, there's really something here, especially in new media.
This is an opportunity for conservatives to affect the culture more broadly, but even political races in a way that we hadn't been able to before, because the gatekeepers of the mainstream media kept us out.
So from there, I hopped on a few other campaigns.
I was part of the draft campaign for Mitch Daniels to get him to run in 2012, did a few commercials with Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High party.
We were doing all these same kinds of strategies.
And this was my day job.
As I was working in mainstream show business, trying to keep my mouth shut, hoping no one figured out that I was a conservative.
The craziest moment of this whole thing happened when I go on an audition in New York.
And they said it was for a live event, and you had to speak some different languages.
So I go in, I didn't know anything about it, no script, and they said, what languages do you speak?
I said, I speak this language, that language.
And I joked, I said, I also speak Esperanto, which is this totally made-up, leftist, stupid language from the 19th century.
You can learn it in three days, which is how I learned it.
I said, that probably doesn't matter, though.
And they turned to me and they said, actually, client number one speaks Esperanto.
I said, it's George Soros.
They said, how'd you know that?
I said, there were like five people on earth who speak Esperanto.
He's the only one who could afford to hire anybody anyway.
Long story short, I end up as a fake sommelier at George Soros' wedding.
I am serving wine to George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, Kofi Annan, you know, the head of the UN.
I was in the belly of the beast, the center of leftist politics in the world.
I thought, God, No one knows who I am.
I'm like, here, I can listen.
What could you imagine?
This kind of sums up my relationship to politics.
I've tried not to work in politics on several occasions because, you know, it's a drag.
I mean, it's miserable.
People yell at you.
They don't like you.
Half the country hates your guts.
It's just too fun.
I just can't help it.
What is your take on the president overall?
What's he doing right?
What's he doing wrong?
What can he improve on?
I'm honest.
I like the guy.
I'm, you know, I'm a conservative.
I tend to vote Republican.
I, you know, I've got a side here.
So I don't view myself as an umpire.
That isn't my, I'm not, I do have a team.
Doesn't mean I'm just going to carry water for the guy.
I mean, I criticize Trump a lot.
I think we should criticize Trump a lot.
I think it helps his presidency when we criticize Trump.
I think it pulls him away from some of his worst inclinations.
Sometimes it makes more precise his views on policy, or at least it explains maybe what conservatives Have thought in our longer conservative tradition because President Trump isn't terribly ideological.
It's one of the things that helps him in his presidency.
But then what we need to do is occasionally articulate more of the broad philosophical basis for some of the things that he's doing.
So I think he's doing pretty well.
I would, you know, I agree with the Heritage Foundation said he had been more conservative in his first year.
He instituted more of a conservative agenda even than Ronald Reagan.
Maybe we can take that with a grain of salt, but he's certainly exceeded my expectations.
There have been a few moments where I felt there were some missteps.
He had done some things I don't really like, certain pieces of legislation.
You know, he spent most of December focusing on that crime bill, letting people out of prison.
That's not a top priority for me.
I thought that was a waste of political capital.
Some people in his camp thought that that was a great idea that was going to appeal more broadly to Americans.
Okay, it's neither here nor there for me.
The question for him, looking forward to 2020, saying everything's been pretty good, the economy's going pretty well, record low unemployment, relative peace abroad.
Two questions.
One, is the economy going to falter?
If the economy falters, hard to see how he gets re-elected.
So, got to make sure the economy stays chugging along.
Two, the wall.
Where is the wall?
The wall was not just part of his campaign.
This was a central campaign promise.
And we just got that CBP report out a couple weeks ago.
It said that not one mile, not one inch of new wall has been constructed.
They've replaced old wall.
That's good.
But they haven't built new wall.
One, because it's very expensive.
Two, because there are environmental permits you need to get.
Three, there's zoning permits.
Look, I get that it's very hard.
But that was the promise.
The promise was a big, beautiful wall.
The president has gotten some pretty good news on this front in just the past couple of weeks.
So in 2016, he campaigned more or less on two things, the wall and judges.
You remember how important the legacy of Antonin Scalia and all the Supreme Court justices were going to be for the 2016 election.
He just got a favorable decision from the Supreme Court, 5-4 decision, thanks to those two justices that he appointed, that opened up about $2.5 billion worth of Pentagon funding for him to build the wall, so he could build 100 miles of border wall.
Maybe there will be more hiccups.
Maybe he won't be able to build 100 miles before 2020.
Almost certainly he won't.
But if he can run on just that decision and say, see how important it was that we got those judges.
If not for those judges, we wouldn't have gotten this wall funding.
If not for electing me, obviously we wouldn't have a president who wants to build the wall.
That's a step in the right direction.
But he's got to keep up the pressure on that.
If he doesn't show a I think he's going to lose a lot of credibility, even among those of us who want to support him.
Now, one thing that you haven't mentioned anywhere in this sort of analysis of Trump is, of course, Trump the man.
And in 2016, I was deeply concerned about a number of things about Trump.
One of those things was conservative policy.
He's delivered on a lot of those fronts, although obviously on spending, he's blown it out because no one cares about spending apparently enough to actually stop it.
But I'm not going to talk about policy with regard to Trump because the fact is that what makes Trump a polarizing figure is not in fact his policy, it is his character.
And one of the things that I was always worried about was that he was going to poison the well with suburban women, he was going to poison the well with young people.
By polling data, he's doing that.
So the question going forward, and I want to get your take on this, is How much has his character affected the future hopes of the Republican Party?
Because there are growing demographics in this country who look at the Republican Party and see President Trump and see his tweets.
And what can President Trump do, if anything, to mitigate that?
Because I think you can run on all the good policy you want.
If the American people are forced to do a referendum on Trump's character, I mean, they were able to escape that by instead having a referendum on Hillary in 2016.
But let's say the Democrats run a default candidate like Joe Biden, and he's basically just a piece of wood.
And they put up this piece of wood and they said, and look at this horrible man, Trump.
What can Trump do or what should he do to mitigate the fact that the president does what the president, Trump says what he says.
A lot of crap comes out of that mouth.
You know, I think there are two questions that this brings up.
One, is the president a bigot?
Is he a racial bigot?
Everyone calls him a bigot, right?
The mainstream media always calls him a bigot.
And he says things that raise that question.
I think it's clear from his life that he isn't a bigot.
You know, he used to pal around with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
No one called him a bigot until he ran for president as a Republican.
If he's a white supremacist, he's the worst white supremacist in history.
He's the least effective because we have record low black unemployment, record low minority unemployment.
We have, he's appointed plenty of ethnic minorities to his administration.
Criminal justice reform.
Criminal justice reform, sure.
He married off his daughter to a Jew.
He has a town in Israel named after him.
So not even just talking about bigotry toward black people, but bigotry toward Jews, bigotry.
I just, I don't see evidence of that.
I don't think neo-Nazis and white supremacists get towns in Israel named after them.
So on the question of is he a bigot, I think it's clear he isn't.
Does he say things that make people call him a bigot?
Yes.
Is he responsible for what he says?
Yes.
Would they call him a bigot no matter what he said?
Absolutely they would.
And so, in terms of the perception, they're going to call every Republican, every conservative, everybody slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton a bigot.
That's too bad.
The good news is, though, political memories are really short, so we're living in the eternal present.
I mean, there are candidates who ran for president in 2016.
Maybe you would remember who they are because you live in this.
99% of people in this country have forgotten the names of many of the people who ran for president just last election cycle.
What does this mean for the future of the party?
Do the tweets matter?
I don't think so.
Do the little non-troversies of the day matter?
I don't think so.
What matters is, is he going to be effective in office?
They said so many things about Ronald Reagan.
A new controversy has cropped up of calling Ronald Reagan a racist.
But they said it all about him during the 1980s.
And then Ronald Reagan became...
A saint.
He was a saint on the right, even many people on the left talked about what a great guy Reagan was, one of the most popular presidents in American history.
Why?
Because his administration was effective at bringing about economic growth, bringing about mourning in America, making Americans feel good about their country again, making Americans love their country again at a time when people didn't feel so great about America, gave us a quarter century of that kind of reputation and that legacy from Reagan.
There are a lot of parallels to today.
I mean, there is a great malaise in America.
There's an epidemic of despair going on in America.
You have the average life expectancy actually decreasing because of suicides and drug addiction.
People just don't feel very, very good.
If President Trump, hopefully after eight years, is able to make the economy boom, fix our border crisis, make our country more of a stable country again, make Americans love their country again, not protest the American flag, but actually revere the American flag.
If he can do that, if he can bring about a sort of mourning in America, I think all the tweets are going to fall away and people are going to look fondly on this period and that's going to bode very well for either the Republican Party or more importantly conservative ideas for the near future and then in 25 years we'll have to fight it all again.
So one of the things that's been very troubling for people on the conservative side of the aisle who would like to see President Trump Be victorious, get done a lot of conservative things, is the fact that he seems to step on himself an awful lot.
There are a lot of situations where he is so obsessed, it seems, with the trolling.
He's so obsessed with tweaking people that he goes out of his way to tweak people.
He'll go out of his way for the joke.
And we all have friends who are like this, but it can lose you a job and it can also make sure that you're a lot more unpopular than you need to be.
And so putting aside, you know, the question of his personal feelings about race, which I think, you know, for a lot of folks remains an open question, The question of efficacy, of efficiency, in how he presents himself, how do you think he's doing on that?
Because there do seem to be two schools of thought on this.
One is, he's got the base, the base already loves him, they're never going to leave him, and then there's a bunch of people in the middle of the country, and they look at his tweets, and they're off-putting, and he's putting himself behind the eight ball by continuing to do what he does.
And then there's the sort of more pro-Trump view, which is, this is all strategy, or maybe he's revving up the base and there aren't that many people in the middle.
Where do you fall on that particular debate?
I think he's good at show business, which actually takes in a lot of those different opinions.
I don't know that he's sitting there plotting out every single thing that's going to happen.
I think he just knows how to deliver a line.
He knows how to make people react to him in a certain way.
And so you're right.
I mean, a different politician who isn't Donald Trump.
You got to remember, Trump is an American original.
Some people try to emulate him.
Doesn't work.
Nobody is going to out Trump Trump.
Marco Rubio tried it in 2016.
Didn't work out.
So, a different kind of politician, a Mitt Romney-style politician, might focus on economic issues, might downplay cultural issues, immigration, things like that.
That's never going to work for Trump.
Trump is a product of the culture.
Forget the culture wars.
He is a cultural figure for the last four decades.
And so I think what he's done is, in some ways, he's made himself unlikable.
I have a lot of people tell me, I like what Trump is doing, but I hate the tweets.
I wish he would smile more.
I wish he wouldn't talk about Mika Brzezinski's face.
Sure, I see all of that.
But what he does in his provocations, in the tweets, is, one, he speaks directly to the American people.
He gives you a sense that you're really talking to him.
Sometimes he'll say, yeah, my one advisor wanted me to do this, but then my other advisor told me not to.
I think they're both idiots.
This is what I'm going to do.
I mean, he sort of gives you a window with all the misspellings and all the strange capitalizations and all of the gossip and even sometimes all of the cruelty to members of the staff.
You get that.
And what you get as a result of that, out of totally provocative statements and actions, is you get a left wing that today is calling to decriminalize border crossings.
A left wing that is protesting the American flag.
At a broad level, we're not talking about one or two players in one or two sports, we're talking about a broad movement here.
You're getting people to disrespect the United States, to refer to the 4th of July parade as a fascist endeavor.
You're getting a not insignificant portion of this country to compare the United States to Nazi Germany because AOC and the Squad are referring to immigration detention centers as concentration camps, comparing it to Auschwitz or Dachau or something like that.
This means that even if President Trump's approval rating is low.
I mean, in 2016, we had two candidates with very low approval ratings.
Even if his is low, he's running against people who are actually disrespecting the American flag of the 4th of July.
They might as well campaign against apple pie and the country itself.
And I think it puts him in a good position.
We would probably agree.
Trump has a lot of weaknesses going into this 2020 election.
If the economy starts to falter, then he's got serious weaknesses.
The only question is, who could beat him?
And of this crowd, I don't see anyone who could, especially the way that that party is trending.
So, I want to ask about sort of your religious journey.
I wanted to save it for now because I didn't want people to literally keel over and die of boredom in the middle of this actual thing.
So, I'm going to ask you to refrain from quoting doctrine too much.
But I can't speak in Latin, right?
No Latin.
Well, actually, the good thing is I actually can't speak in Latin, so that's helpful.
Okay, perfect, but you can tell it to me in Esperanto if you really want to.
But how did you become a religious Catholic?
Because for a while you weren't.
I was a total atheist.
I was, you know, baptized when I was born, cradle Catholic.
We were... I was always very interested in religion.
I actually read the Quran before I read the Bible.
I was always sort of fascinated with religious stories.
But about the time I was 13, I fell away.
I don't know.
I can't psychoanalyze myself.
Obviously, 13-year-old boys go through a lot of things.
But intellectually, at least, I was convinced that religion was childish.
This was at the time of the rise of the so-called New Atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and your buddy Sam Harris, and all those guys.
And it was just very popular at the time.
Looking back on it now, I think that their arguments are perfectly tailored to 13-year-olds.
But I was a 13-year-old, and so, at the time, I was taken with them.
And I went along with what is probably a very popular atheism for about 10 years.
Then I noticed something when I got to college.
Everyone there was very smart.
I don't mean to say my classmates were stupid.
They were really sharp.
The smartest of them were Christian.
Or Orthodox Jews, actually.
And I felt the smartest of them of all were really interested in religious tradition.
You know, they were Catholic, or they were Eastern Orthodox, they were liturgical, but they really had thought it through.
I thought, that's strange.
I thought all the smart people were atheists.
I thought all the stupid people were religious.
Then I heard some religious arguments.
One by a Calvinist philosopher, actually, Alvin Plantinga.
He popularized the modal ontological argument.
There are many other arguments for God.
The Thomistic arguments from Thomas Aquinas.
There was a very nice Protestant evangelist who handed me C.S.
Lewis one day.
Just apparently accidentally as I'm walking across the quad.
And I gave it a read and I thought, you know, this is pretty smart.
And I became fairly convinced that God exists.
And it was only after all of those intellectual arguments had taken hold, after I had appealed to my own intellectual pride and hubris, That the sense of the religious started to set in.
A little coincidence here and there.
There's a line from Alexander Pope who says, And when you look back on your life, you see direction everywhere.
all chance direction, which thou canst not see.
And when you look back on your life, you see direction everywhere.
What are the odds that this would work out?
In my own life, I've seen it a lot, pal.
You know, a blank book and all these kind of things.
So that got me interested.
Coincidentally, actually, the place that I saw that quote was on a book at a table at an event I was at.
It was a signed first edition.
I turned it over.
Bill Buckley had blurbed it and said, save this as a first edition.
I had been the Buckley fellow when I was in college.
I looked at where the church was.
It was right down the street.
I started going, and it just all clicked.
And this was now, I guess, years ago at this point.
And the more I think about it, the more endlessly I could think about it.
I mean, obviously, we cannot comprehend God.
We can't comprehend the faith.
I can't.
You could ask me a million questions about my faith that I would have no answer for.
And Cardinal Newman said, 10,000 problems doesn't make one doubt.
If I had a faith that I could perfectly explain to you, I can promise you.
It's not a true faith.
But it's something you learn.
You know, your pal Andrew Breitbart, I never got to meet him, he said politics is downstream of culture.
And Russell Kirk, the conservative writer, pointed out that cult and culture come from the same word.
The culture is actually downstream of what the culture worships.
And that's religion.
And it's been said many times that at bottom all political disagreements are really theological disagreements.
And you know this.
If we'll have a cigar, well you'll have a bubble pipe, but we'll have cigars or a drink or something like that.
Are we just talking about politics the whole time?
No way.
It always gets down to deeper questions.
And what I fear for a society that abandons that is One, you're going to have really shallow conversations to begin.
But also, everybody's got to serve somebody.
People have a lot of religious views.
They read the horoscope.
They believe in crystals.
Some of them are religions that are focused on their diet, or on their yoga, or on whatever.
Everybody's got to serve somebody.
And so, I think, if you're a serious person, you should take those questions seriously.
Because ultimately, Eternally.
Those are the questions that matter.
So other religious question that comes up a lot, and this is not just for Catholics, obviously this is true for evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews as well, is the dealing of religious people with President Trump.
So the religious people are sort of conflicted on this.
So on the one hand, President Trump has given them a lot of their priorities.
And when they look at the choice between, okay, man who we think lacks character, but is not going to attack religion, and folks who may have more personal character, but also are going to spend their days attacking religion or calling us bad Christians for not...
Applying their sense of social values, that choice is pretty easy.
But one of the things that I think that a lot of religious folks have fallen into is an inability to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
So it's turned into President Trump is the be-all end-all.
We will defend him no matter what he says because political warfare is political warfare.
And my great fear for religious folks is that, just the same as for conservatives generally, you undermine your own credibility when you refuse to call out sin, so long as the sinner happens to be promoting your particular viewpoint.
How should religious people be dealing with this dichotomy in President Trump?
Well, as always, they should do it honestly.
But I think Trump, in some ways, gets a little bit too bad a rap.
And it's not because he's this morally perfect person, but it's because he just gets a really, really bad rap.
If I'm judging the integrity of my president, one of the key features that I'm going to look at is if he keeps his promises, if he keeps his campaign promises.
There have been a lot of studies on this.
The Heritage Foundation famously did one.
He's been pretty good on the promises.
He's enacted a conservative agenda at a pretty fast rate.
They said in the early days, faster than Ronald Reagan.
That shows integrity.
That shows, you know, specifically with the case of moving the U.S.
Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Every president said they were going to do it.
It had been U.S.
policy officially since the 1990s.
And we knew they weren't going to do it.
George W. Bush campaigned on it.
He didn't do it.
Barack Obama campaigned on it.
He didn't do it.
Donald Trump campaigned on it.
I never thought he would do it.
Then he did it.
I said, wait a second, you're not supposed to do what you said that you're going to do.
Even when it comes down to trying to open up talks with North Korea, even it comes down to things that you might not like, like trade tariffs.
He's actually followed through on a lot of what he's saying.
I think that does speak to a certain kind of character.
Now, is he a thrice-married, lapsed Presbyterian?
Yeah, he might be, but who am I comparing him to when I'm looking at politicians?
If I could be ruled by an angel, I would vote for the angel, but politicians generally are pretty sordid and corrupt people, and those who seek the presidency are often the most sordid and the most corrupt, so I don't see any Conflict.
For me, I sleep easy every single night.
I don't pretend that Donald Trump is, you know, a living saint or an angel, but I'm really pleased with what he's done.
And I think he's actually, in the office, demonstrated considerable character.
Okay, so in just a second, I'm going to ask you how we convince young people, because the polls among young people are particularly awful for Republicans.
We're moving in the wrong direction in terms of religion for young people.
So what is the first step toward winning young people back?
That will be the final question.
But if you want to hear Michael Moulse's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
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Well, Michael, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.
So thanks for stopping by.
Thank you for having me.
See you next time.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Haig.
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