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Sept. 9, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
54:28
Storm Warrening For Biden | Ep. 856
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Elizabeth Warren gains in the polls, Democrats struggle with their own radicalism, and President Trump's Afghanistan policy collapses into chaos.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
There's nothing like re-emerging from a beautiful weekend to come back into a studio where it smells like something died.
But the thing that died, it turns out in the studio, at least, was not Joe Biden's poll numbers.
It was actually something.
Like, it actually smells like something died.
We'll get into Joe Biden's poll numbers, not the dead thing that is in the studio in just one second.
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OK, so we begin this week, which is a big debate week, right?
Because later this week is the first debate in which Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden will share a stage.
Bernie Sanders will be there, too.
In all likelihood, this turns into a gang attack on Joe Biden by Bernie Sanders and by Elizabeth Warren and by Kamala Harris and by Cory Booker.
And that's because the dynamics of the race have shifted somewhat.
Right now, if you are Kamala Harris or Cory Booker, what you're figuring is that Elizabeth Warren looks like she is taking a huge chunk of Joe Biden's white support.
And if Joe Biden should collapse, is the black support that Joe Biden currently has, is that support going to shift over to Elizabeth Warren?
Or is it more likely that it shifts over to somebody like a Kamala Harris or to somebody like a Cory Booker, which is why they're still in the race.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is still clinging to the hope that he is the great progressive alternative to Joe Biden, not Elizabeth Warren.
And that hope is not completely unsupportable.
The fact is that there are several polls that show that Bernie Sanders on a national level out polls Elizabeth Warren.
Elizabeth Warren is doing really well in a lot of these early states, and it's still extremely early.
And Joe Biden continues to gaffe and gaffe and gaffe and gaffe.
He's an extraordinarily weak front runner.
As I've been saying for months, Joe Biden's best day would be his first day.
And that has been obviously true.
Over the weekend, Joe Biden stumbled some more.
He was in Manchester, New Hampshire, and he continued to gaffe.
Limited to four years, I believe history will look back in this presidency as an aberrant moment in time.
But if Donald Trump is re-elected, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation.
Donald Trump does pose an existential threat to this nation.
It's not hypothetical, his threat to this nation.
Man, Joe Biden, a lot of scrambled eggs up there.
My goodness.
He poses an extra threat.
He's going to be bad.
He's going to be bad, guys.
Tim Ryan is a fellow presidential candidate.
He's going nowhere.
But his statements about Joe Biden's mental state.
Yeah, this is this is obviously true.
Here's Tim Ryan explaining that Joe Biden's mental state is a bit of an issue here, guys.
I mean, he went on Colbert to address this very issue.
It's not like I said something that a lot of people aren't thinking or he wouldn't have went on Colbert to talk about it.
So this is an issue.
We have to be honest with each other.
There's so much at stake in this election.
We can't just put somebody up there who can't beat Donald Trump, whether it's on the issues or on the issues of energy or lack of clarity.
Like, we've got to be very clear.
And I believe that I'm that person or I wouldn't be running.
And so people can support my campaign and go to Tim Ryan for America.
Yeah, nobody's doing that.
But everybody is acknowledging that Joe Biden is stumbling and bumbling and bumbling and stumbling, Chris Berman style.
But he's not going to make the end zone.
He's going to be knocked out of play probably by the time we hit the 30 yard line here, because the fact is that Joe Biden has no momentum, none.
All it takes right now is a solid love tap from Elizabeth Warren.
And Joe Biden has a serious, serious problem on his hands.
And Elizabeth Warren may not deliver it.
What her smart strategy here made it be completely inoffensive.
Let somebody else slap at Biden.
Let him continue to recede back to the field.
She's just quietly gaining.
She doesn't have to land a knockout blow on him.
In fact, I think that will be her strategy a little bit later this week.
I think that Elizabeth Warren is banking on the fact that the media love Elizabeth Warren.
For months, we've heard nothing but that Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything.
Now, her plans are bad.
Her plans don't make any sense.
But they keep saying it.
Why?
Because you have to understand that when you're a member of the coastal media, when you are writing for the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, you are a member of a particular elite.
And this elite usually means you went to a good university.
It means that you've been hanging out with people who think like you for a long time.
And the biggest thing is that you don't want to be seen by all the people who surround you as unintelligent.
The coin of the realm in coastal elite circles is not that you are the most moral person in the room, not that you're the best person, not that you give the most charity, not that you attend church the most.
The coin of the realm is that you're the smartest.
That's the thing that matters more than anything else.
My friend Dennis Prager is constantly saying that, you know, when it comes to parenting, what parents should focus on is producing good children, not kids who went to an Ivy League school.
But very often that sense of values is reversed when it comes to assessment of merit.
In the media.
So in the media, anything that makes people feel intelligent makes them really excited.
Elizabeth Warren makes them feel intelligent.
She's a Harvard Law professor.
She's obviously articulate.
She's written books.
She's read books.
And this makes them feel super good about themselves.
They love Elizabeth Warren and that says something about you.
You have to understand that when you're voting on the left, I mean, it's true on the right also, but I think it's more true on the left at this point.
The way you vote is seen as a moral imprimatur on you, not on the candidate.
It's not that you're granting your moral imprimatur to the candidate.
It's that your support of the candidate says something about you.
So, if you're a Bernie Sanders supporter, what that says about you to everyone else is why people put bumper stickers on their car.
What it says to everyone else is that you're passionate about the issues.
You're passionate about inequality.
It doesn't say anything about your intelligence.
It says that you are passionate.
And if you're a supporter of Kamala Harris, it means that you're someone who believes in criminal justice reform and racial equity.
And if you're somebody who supports Joe Biden, it says that you're sort of a reasonable elder statesman in the party, which is why you're not seeing a lot of bumper stickers, because who wants a bumper sticker that says I'm a reasonable elder statesman person, right?
That's that's not something.
Elizabeth Warren, you stick that on your on your bumper sticker and you feel progressive.
But not only do you feel progressive, you get sort of the quality of Bernie Sanders, but you also get to say, and I'm so smart too, because she has so many plans for the media.
That describes them to a T. So they've been praising Elizabeth Warren nonstop for months.
For months.
First, they tried to run interference for her after her whole ridiculous, I'm not a Native American, but I am a Native American gaffe.
They tried to pretend that her DNA test actually exonerated her on that particular claim.
And then when that failed, they shifted gears and suddenly it was, doesn't she have plans, guys?
I mean, she has so many plans.
Well, one of Elizabeth Warren's big plans that the media have paid very little attention to, I mean, they've run a couple of fact checks, but then they've ignored it.
And so she keeps continuing to claim it, is that all of her giant plans will be paid for by an enormous wealth tax.
This is Elizabeth Warren over the weekend at the New Hampshire Democratic Party Convention explaining that all she's going to do is tax people who have assets more than $50 million, 2 or 3 percent.
She's going to take all their money from them at that rate, because again, remember, that's every single year.
She's going to take 2 or 3 percent of their net wealth.
And then she's going to use that for a variety of government programs.
And oh, what a plan.
Oh, what a plan, Elizabeth Warren.
Your first $50 million, free and clear.
But your 50 millionth and first dollar, you've got to pitch in two cents.
And two cents for every dollar after that.
And what can we do with two cents?
We can do universal child care for every baby in this country aged zero to five.
Two cents!
We can make technical school, community college, and four-year college free for everyone who wants an education.
We can do all of that and cancel student loan debt for 95% of the folks who've got it.
Okay, what she's saying here is, so a few things.
One, the media keep portraying her as charismatic.
I'm not seeing it.
I'm not.
She's more charismatic than Hillary Clinton, but so is whatever died in the studio around here.
Okay, lots of things are more charismatic than Hillary Clinton.
That is not a standard for charisma.
But beyond that, her plan actually makes no sense.
Because the fact is, if she thinks she's raising $2.75 trillion over the next 10 years with this wealth tax, number one, it's unconstitutional.
There's nothing in the Constitution that allows you to tax wealth.
Not income, which was legalized idiotically by the 16th Amendment, but wealth.
There's nothing there that allows you to tax wealth itself.
Especially stuff that people have already paid tax on.
You're talking about, I already paid property tax, I already paid tax on all of the income that I make, and now you're going to come in and tax me again?
Based on what moral principle are you going to tax me?
Again, beyond that, just speaking realistically, it is not going to raise this amount of money.
That is not me speaking, that's factcheck.org speaking.
Quote, some economists think that assumption is too rosy.
While neither the Tax Policy Center nor the Tax Foundation have yet released a full analysis of Warren's plan, economists at both said there is reason to believe that Warren's revenue estimate is too high.
Kyle Pomerlew, a Chief Economist and Vice President of Economic Analysis at the nonprofit ProBusiness Tax Foundation, said the assumption of 15% tax evasion, her plan says there'll be 15% tax evasion or avoidance.
He says that's actually the average avoidance for the entire U.S.
tax system, which is primarily the income tax and payroll tax.
These taxes are much harder to avoid than a wealth tax because an income transaction is hard to game or hide from the tax authorities.
A wealth tax, on the other hand, is much harder to enforce.
For one, much of the wealth tax base doesn't have a market price.
So, for example, I own an ownership stake in Daily Wire.
How does that value out?
The answer is you have no actual answer because there is no way to evaluate the fair market value.
It is not a publicly held company.
It's not like a piece of stock that is publicly held.
And it's not just people on the right who are suggesting all of this.
Lawrence Summers, who was formerly a Harvard University Dean, and he was Treasury Secretary from 1999 to 2001, and Economic Advisor for Barack Obama, and Natasha Sarin, an Assistant Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania Law School, they published an op-ed in the Washington Post just earlier this year saying, common sense revenue estimates by economists, who are not very deeply steeped in revenue estimation, tend to be overly optimistic.
The two looked at U.S.
experience with estate tax data and concluded that Warren's wealth tax would only raise about 40% of the amount that Warren is estimating.
So not $2.75 trillion, like $1 trillion, like $1.2 trillion over 10 years, which doesn't pay for any of her stuff.
Also, it causes people not to save, it causes people not to buy assets in the United States, and it causes people to flee.
There have been a vast number of European countries that have tried a wealth tax.
Millionaires and billionaires fled.
They just took their money and they went elsewhere.
See, this is the nice thing about being super wealthy.
You don't have to stick around to watch Elizabeth Warren take your money.
You can just move your money.
You can just take your money and go to the Cayman Islands and buy a nice home there and stay there.
You don't have to worry about Elizabeth Warren.
Summers and Saron wrote, we suspect that to a great extent, it reflects the myriad ways wealthy people avoid paying estate taxes that in some form will be applicable in any actually legislated wealth tax.
So for example, the estate tax is a form of wealth tax, right?
You die, and then the government opens, like they walk right by your corpse, they open up your safe and they take a chunk of your money.
What people do is instead they create living trusts, and they put their money in a living trust for their children.
So when they die, the money didn't belong to them, it belonged to their children already.
This avoids the estate tax.
They say all of the methods that are used to avoid the estate tax will also be used to avoid the wealth tax.
They say these include questionable appraisals, valuation discounts for illiquidity and lack of control, establishment of trusts that enable division of assets among family members with substantial founder control, planning devices that give some income to charity while keeping the remainder for the donor and beneficiaries, tax advantage lending schemes, and other complex devices known only to sophisticated investors.
Except for reducing a naive calculation by 15%.
Warren's economic advisors do not seem to take account of these devices.
If our suspicion is correct, a wealth tax will not yield the revenue its proponents hope for.
And when actual scorekeepers score actual proposals, their estimates will disappoint advocates.
This is obviously true, but Elizabeth Warren's gonna keep trotting that out there.
It doesn't matter because, again, she gives a feeling of flattery to a media that is desperate to be flattered.
It's the reason the media hate Trump so much, by the way.
It's not just because Trump is a Republican.
It's because Trump makes them feel like they don't get Americans.
They look at Trump and they have scorn for him.
They think, oh, what a dummy, what a fool, what a stupid guy.
How could he be outsmarting us?
How could he have power?
How is this possible?
Elizabeth Warren makes members of the media feel good about themselves, even if her proposals don't actually make any sense at all.
And they actually don't make it.
By the way, her own proposals make so little sense, honestly, that she was rejecting a lot of her own proposals as late as 2003, 2004.
She talks about universal childcare for every child age zero to five.
She wrote an entire book about how this would disadvantage married mothers who stay at home and how you need now subsidies for married moms who stay at home.
In her book, she talks about why it would be a mistake to relieve student loans.
She said that it would be a mistake not to just cap tuition, not to just cap the amount that colleges can charge for tuition on a public level, as opposed to subsidizing the student loan industry, as opposed to paying off people's loans and quote-unquote paying for free college and all of the rest of this.
And now she backs all of those things.
Why?
Because here's the dirty little secret.
Elizabeth Warren has become a deeply dishonest politician.
I'll provide proof of this in one second, plus I will tell you where she actually stands in the polls and why she really is the shadow frontrunner at this point for the Democrats.
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Okay, so, where do we stand in the polls?
And then we'll get to why Elizabeth Warren proved that she is deeply dishonest.
Okay, so here are the polls.
According to CBS News, brand new poll.
CBS News, YouGov tracker.
They have now polled all of the Super Tuesday states.
All of the states up through Super Tuesday.
So it goes in the Democratic Party, it goes to Iowa, and then New Hampshire, and then South Carolina, Nevada, California, and a bunch of other states on Super Tuesday.
Right now, Bernie doesn't win very many delegates.
Biden has 600 delegates available through Super Tuesday.
Warren is at 545.
That's a disaster for Biden.
Biden's entire narrative is that he's the inevitable nominee and the inevitable president.
If Warren emerges from Iowa and New Hampshire victorious, I don't think that his lead simply holds up in a lot of these Super Tuesday states.
Bernie Sanders is rounding out the top tier of candidates with 286 delegates in those races.
But I don't think that Bernie retains all those delegates.
Because remember, all the polls are being done now about all of those states, but those states are time-delayed.
It goes Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and then on Wednesday you have California, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, Virginia, Minnesota, and Maine.
And Vermont.
And Massachusetts, which presumably Warren will win since she's a senator from there.
If Elizabeth Warren emerges as the serious challenger from Iowa and New Hampshire and Bernie doesn't win either of those states, I think Bernie's toast.
I think at that point Bernie is done and you can take a lot of those delegates, those 286 delegates, and you can toss them to Elizabeth Warren.
According to that CBS News YouGov poll, state by state in vote preference, New Hampshire now sees Warren just slightly up over Biden and Sanders in first choice preference there, which is a change for her.
Remember, she was underperforming in New Hampshire as of a couple of weeks ago.
They say that that's a three-way contest, but that's not a three-way contest.
If Elizabeth Warren wins Iowa, and she already is running even with Biden and Sanders in that state, then she wins that state too.
Biden holds a small edge over Sanders in first-choice preference in Iowa.
Sanders has a narrow edge over Biden in Nevada.
But where is Elizabeth Warren in these states?
Well, she has the best on-the-ground organization in Iowa.
She trails substantially by 9 to 12 points in Iowa.
She trails Bernie by 9.
She trails Biden by 12 in Iowa.
But the smart money says that that is under-polling her supporters.
Remember, Iowa is a caucus state.
You recall back in 2008, Hillary Clinton was expected to win Iowa over Barack Obama and Barack Obama won instead.
There were suspicions that that may have not been entirely on the up and up.
South Carolina, Joe Biden has a wide lead.
He's at 43% compared to Bernie at 18 and Elizabeth Warren at 14.
But again, that relies somewhat on momentum.
Remember that Ted Cruz won South Carolina, I believe, last time around, and it was widely perceived that Ted Cruz was going to have some sort of firewall.
Whenever a candidate talks about a firewall, I have yet to see a candidate with a quote-unquote firewall where the firewall holds.
Right now, Bernie Sanders is up slightly in Nevada, 29 to 27 over Joe Biden, but Elizabeth Warren's at 18, which means she is in striking distance.
Overall, in the early contest, it is now Elizabeth Warren 26, Joe Biden 25, Bernie Sanders 19.
And it is likely that Bernie Sanders is going to continue to recede and Elizabeth Warren is going to increase.
According to CBS News, Biden support has largely held and even risen in some places like in Iowa.
So the movement toward Warren is not attrition from Biden, but of lower tier candidates losing supporter who have gone to Warren or in lesser numbers to Sanders.
For instance, Warren has benefited most from former Kamala Harris' supporter switching their allegiance.
29% were backing Harris in July, whom we re-interviewed for the study of switch to Warren.
Biden only picked up 15%.
Warren is also under consideration by more Democrats, 60% than Biden is, 50%.
Biden does better than Warren in being named the first choice, but she is best among second choice candidates.
And again, it's really about electability.
And as the polls change for Elizabeth Warren on that front, that is very bad news for Joe Biden, meaning he has to continue making the case that Warren can't be Trump.
That's really what this is about.
And that case, by the way, is extremely strong that Warren cannot beat Trump.
It's a very strong case.
But among Democratic voters, the perception has been growing that Elizabeth Warren would probably win against Trump.
As of June, only 39% of Democratic voters, considering Warren, said that they thought that she could probably win against Trump.
Now it is 55%.
58% of Sanders supporters think he would probably beat Trump.
Overall, most Democrats are pretty optimistic that somebody, anybody they nominate will beat Trump.
So again, I think that, and here's, I mean, as I say, the self-flattering assumption by the media is reflected in their media coverage, and that of course shapes public opinion.
One of the numbers in this poll that really says a lot is that when asked which candidate is the most knowledgeable, it says Warren at 42%, Biden and Sanders tied at 24.
And that is because when you just keep repeating over and over and over again that Warren has a plan, it doesn't matter if the plan is crap.
And then there's a third question, which is whether age is a concern.
66% of Democrats say that Joe Biden That age is not a concern, but 31% say that he's too old.
37% say that Sanders is too old.
Only 5% of Democrats say that Warren is too old.
So more evidence of Joe Biden stumbling and bumbling about the campaign trail is not going to be good for him either.
And 46% of Democrats say that they would be enthusiastic about Elizabeth Warren as the candidate compared to 38% for Sanders and only 29% for Joe Biden.
So again, these are bad numbers for Joe Biden.
He looks very weak.
Right now, among Democrats, they ask which message is more attractive to you.
You want a candidate who is more progressive than Obama?
Or a return to the country before Trump?
Only 40% said they want a return to normalcy.
60% said they want a more progressive candidate than Barack Obama was.
So these are bad numbers.
Bad numbers for Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is weak.
And again, I don't think that Warren is really going to go after Biden in a serious way.
I think she's just going to assume that Biden is going to fade into the Brigadoon-like fog.
And I think that she's probably correct about that.
Now, there's a problem, which is that all of you talk about Elizabeth Warren being supremely honest and non-Clintonian is a lie.
That's a real problem for her because she has yet to meet serious public scrutiny.
Remember, the Elizabeth Warren who built up a public profile from 2003 to 2008 is not the same as the Elizabeth Warren now running for president.
We talked about this last week.
The Elizabeth Warren from 2003 to 2008 was actually a fairly interesting progressive figure who thought differently on school vouchers and student loans.
Who thought seriously about issues like bankruptcy.
Now she's just a rubber stamp progressive who sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders.
And here's the proof.
Today, there's a piece from Jonathan Allen and NBC News talking about how Warren and Clinton are talking behind the scenes.
Which is Warren's worst nightmare, right?
Is that she's perceived as the second coming of Hillary Clinton.
That is not what you want to be.
According to Jonathan Allen, Elizabeth Warren's team doesn't want to talk about Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't mean the 2020 presidential candidate isn't talking with her party's 2016 nominee.
The two women have kept a line of communication open since the Massachusetts senator decided to run for president, though only a conversation around the time of Warren's launch has been previously reported, according to several people familiar with their discussions, who spoke to NBC on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of private interactions.
It's hard to know exactly how many times they've reached out to each other, or precisely what they've discussed, in part because neither camp wants to reveal much of anything about their interaction.
And in part because they have each other's phone numbers, and there are many ways for two high-powered politicians to communicate that don't involve their staffs.
One source was aware of just one additional call between Warren and Clinton since then, but a person close to Clinton said the contact has been substantial enough to merit attention, describing a conversation between the two as seemingly recent because it was front of mind for her.
That has clearly not gone unnoticed.
I think she really appreciates that, the person close to Clinton said.
Well, Warren making overtures to Clinton is definitely different than Warren just a few years ago.
I'll explain momentarily.
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So again, Elizabeth Warren is now reaching out to Hillary Clinton.
This is very different from Elizabeth Warren talking about Hillary Clinton as of her book, The Two Income Trap, in 2003.
Glenn Kessler wrote about this for the Washington Post just a couple of years ago.
He said Warren noted that Hillary Clinton had received $140,000 in campaign contributions from banking industry executives as she sought a Senate seat.
Why was that relevant?
Because she talks about how she had met with Hillary Clinton about a bankruptcy bill in the early 90s.
And she praised Hillary Clinton as extremely bright.
She called her, quote, impatient, lightning quick, interested in all the nuances.
And then, it turns out that Hillary voted against the bill, or in favor of the bill that Elizabeth Warren opposed, and she tore into her in the two-income trap.
She said the bill was essentially the same, but Hillary Rodham Clinton was not.
Hillary could not afford such a principled position.
Campaigns cost money, and that money wasn't coming from families in financial trouble.
Here's Elizabeth Warren, circa 2004, talking about how Hillary Clinton is basically a corrupt figure.
She was then first lady.
This is in the 1990s, late 1990s.
Mrs. Clinton saw the piece, and I got a call from the White House.
I go over the law.
It's a complex law.
Went over the economics, showed her the graphs, showed her the charts, and she got it.
She turned around a whole administration on the subject of bankruptcy.
She got it.
And then?
One of the first bills that came up after she was Senator Clinton was the bankruptcy bill.
Her husband had vetoed it very much at her urging.
And?
She voted in favor of it.
As Senator Clinton, the pressures are very different.
Okay, so this is Warren back when she was honest.
Right now, you got Elizabeth Warren making phone calls to Hillary Clinton, now they're best friends.
And Elizabeth Warren has shifted her own positions on a variety of issues ranging from the subsidization of college education to school choice because the pressures of being a senator or a presidential candidate are very different.
Now, this does pose a problem for the Democrats because the fact is that most people in the country are not on board with all of the progressive views on all of the issues.
David Leonhardt, Has a piece in the New York Times today talking about this.
He is on the left and he says it's not that progressivism can't win.
He's saying that there are certain progressive issues that are deeply unpopular and they should be.
He points out a couple of issues as an example.
He says the first is the idea of decriminalizing border crossings so that the illegal entry into this country would only be a civil violation.
Supporters of the idea, says Leonhardt, make intricate, technocratic arguments about how decriminalization won't make the border less secure.
But most voters tune out.
They don't buy the long explanations for why the policy doesn't mean what it certainly seems to mean, less border enforcement.
In an NPR-PBS NewsHour Marist poll, 67% of registered voters called decriminalization a bad idea.
When it comes to slavery reparations, 63% of Americans call it a bad idea.
When it comes to replacing private insurance, 55% say it's a bad idea.
When it comes to free public college, 51% say it's a good idea, but 45% say it's a bad idea.
In other words, there are a lot of issues where people are generally in favor of progressive principles until they get the details in which place they switch.
But Democrats' advantage on general election-directed questions has been fading.
David Leonhardt points out that slightly more voters say that the ideas being offered by the Democratic candidates would now hurt the country more than would help the country, according to that NPR poll.
As of September 2018, 53% of Americans had a favorable view of the Democratic Party versus 42% unfavorable.
43% had a favorable view of the Republican Party compared to 52% unfavorable.
As of September 2019, fast forward a year, the two parties are now identical.
45% of Americans say that they are favorable toward one of the parties.
52% of Americans say they're unfavorable toward one of the two parties.
Meaning that basically the parties are now on even footing.
So all of the talk about Elizabeth Warren this and Elizabeth Warren that, as she skews radical, it's going to be unpopular.
And this is the problem inside the Democratic primaries.
What is going to create victory in a Democratic primary may be mutually exclusive with what creates victory for Democrats in a general election.
Take, for example, Beto O'Rourke.
So Beto O'Rourke is basically John Cusack in Say Anything, standing outside the Democratic process holding a boombox.
And what that means is that he is the most enthusiastically crude of all the candidates.
He has no nuance to his ideas.
He doesn't have any sort of attempt to round off the hard edges.
Instead, he just spits out.
He's sort of like younger Bernie Sanders.
I mean, down to the hands.
And here is Beto O'Rourke talking about what he thinks the Democratic primary voters want to hear.
America is a violent, racist country.
That's a hell of a campaign slogan there, Beto.
This is a violent country that loses more than 40,000 of our fellow Americans every year to gun violence.
And this is a country that has been defined by foundational, systemic, endemic racism since the very founding of this country, August 20th of 1619.
The first time that a kidnapped African was brought here against his will and made to serve as a slave to build the greatness and the success and the wealth of this country, which his descendants would never be able to fully participate in.
This is the reality of the United States of America.
And sooner or later, it was going to find us.
Okay, I mean, that's a hell of a campaign slogan.
America was founded in crap, and now it's still crap, and it was gonna come back to haunt us.
That sounds great, Beto.
I mean, dude needs to go back to his Ivy League education, where his rich parents paid for, and smoke a bong and chill.
Because he is just He's ridiculous.
And then Beto went further.
He said we should legalize 10 million illegal immigrants.
This is a hell of a campaign slogan right here from Beto O'Rourke.
But again, Beto thinks that he is representing the id of the Democratic Party.
He's hoping that if he says the F word a lot, if he just says, bruh, F it, if he says that a lot, and then he also says America sucks, that he'll somehow win the nomination.
We're going to legalize the presence of more than 10 million in the United States, beginning with DREAMers who will never again fear deportation back to a country they do not know, because we will make them U.S.
citizens in this, their true home country.
OK, so again, if this is where the Democratic Party wants to go and Elizabeth Warren is closer to this than she is to Joe Biden, that's a real problem for Rahm Emanuel, who is the chief of staff to Barack Obama and is certainly no right winger.
He says, listen, these positions are untenable.
You are not going to be able to win a general election on these bases.
We've taken a position so far, and the candidates have, through the process, a few have not, about basically Medicare for All, which is we're going to eliminate 150 million people's health care, and we're going to provide health care for people that just come over the border.
That is an untenable position for the general election.
Okay, and of course Rahm Emanuel is exactly right.
That's coming from a guy who is so passionate about his left-wing agenda, he used to drop dead—he was literally called Dead Fish Emanuel.
He would drop dead fish In the in like the lockers of Congress people that he didn't like in order to try to get them to vote with him, like to threaten them when he was in Congress.
I mean, that that guy is not a softie on politics by any measure.
And he's looking at the Democratic Party going, you guys are skewing way too far to the left.
And that right there is the problem for Elizabeth Warren.
Now, in a second, we're going to talk about the Republican case for 2020.
And again, This is all about, can the president control himself?
Can he control himself?
Because if he could, then he would be in pretty good shape going forward.
But we'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about, you know, you're out at some sort of dinner party, and you're looking for a job, or you're just looking to make contacts, you're rainmaking a little bit, and somebody says, do you have a business card?
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Well, we'll get to more of all of this in just one second.
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Well, before we leave the Democrats entirely, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the most incompetent candidate on the Democratic side of the aisle is not, in fact, Joe Biden.
It is Kamala Harris.
Remember that time when Kamala Harris seemed like she was skyrocketing toward the nomination?
Remember there was that first debate where she talked about busing and she attacked Joe Biden.
Everyone's like, wow, that was incredible.
And then it turns out she's terrible at this.
Well, she's truly terrible at this.
And over the weekend, she proved again that she is terrible at this.
She was campaigning and a person got up So I don't buy that argument that impeachment does not make sense, Senate will acquit.
I don't buy that argument.
There needs to be accountability.
Harris heard this and laughed.
Again, it's not a question as to whether she heard this.
She obviously heard this.
She responded directly to the comment.
Here is the original clip. - So I don't buy that argument that impeachment does not make sense, Senate will acquit.
I don't buy that argument.
There needs to be accountability.
I mean, what are you gonna do in the next one year to diminish the mentally retarded action of this guy? - Well said.
Well said.
Well, I plan to win this election, I'll tell you that.
Well said, guys.
Well said.
What do you do to plan to diminish the mentally retarded faction of this country, the guy says, and she says, well said.
I mean, she is in favor of eugenic abortion.
So that would be one thing, presumably, that should be in favor of because she's a terrible person who believes terrible things.
But I mean, the term mentally retarded, I'm old enough to remember when that was considered a really, really bad thing because it is a bad thing.
Mocking people who have a mental disability is a ridiculous, ridiculous thing.
Now, here's the funny part, right?
Kamala Harris is asked about this and then she's like, well, I never heard it.
You literally responded to the guy.
You literally responded to that human being.
Because that like, come on, come on.
Who are you going to believe?
Kamala Harris or your own eyes and ears?
Here's Kamala Harris now apologizing for this.
It's offensive and you would think that in the year 2019 people would have a much better understanding of how hurtful a term like that can be but also the history behind it which is a history of really ignoring the needs and the realities and the capacity of our disability community.
It's offensive and you would think that in the year 2019, people would have a much better understanding of how hurtful a term like that can be, but also the history behind it, for this.
You didn't correct him though.
Did you hear him?
I heard him talk about the other stuff and then that came later and it was not something that I really heard or processed or in any way condoned.
Oh really?
Right.
Really?
Is that what happened right there?
Look, in my family, we actually take this issue fairly seriously.
My grandfather used to work with Easter Seals, which is a group that worked with people who had mental disabilities.
My mom, when she first started out, did special education for kids.
Like, it's a pretty serious issue.
Kamala Harris, pretending that she didn't hear the end of that.
Remember when Donald Trump does that sort of stuff?
It's the end of the world, right?
When you have somebody who says something bad about illegal immigrants, and then he says, well, I guess you can do that when he says, Yeah, I guess you can do that in Florida.
Get away with that in the panhandle.
And everybody's like, oh, that was really bad.
Because it was bad.
And then Kamala Harris responds directly to a person who calls a vast swath of the voting public mentally retarded.
And then she's like, well, I didn't hear that part.
You know the part he said directly to me.
So how do the media cover this?
If this doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the way the media covered this, NBC News' headline.
You ready?
Senator Harris apologizes for appearing to laugh in response to men who describe President Trump's actions as mentally retarded.
Appearing to laugh.
Appearing.
Like, appeared.
She laughed.
We saw it.
We heard it.
Appeared.
It's all good.
It's all good, guys.
Well done, media.
Okay, now, to the Republican side of the aisle.
Now, the fact is that democratic radicalism should be an opportunity for President Trump.
As I have been saying for years on end, all President Trump has to do is be quiet.
That's all he has to do.
Because it turns out that reality has a fairly conservative bent on issues like illegal immigration, You know, saying that we should keep track of the people who are in the country, that we should make sure that we know who is entering the country, this seems like it makes a certain amount of root sense, especially when you get stories like this one out of Montgomery County.
According to Dan Morse, Montgomery County's top elected official Mark Elrich stood before a bank of TV cameras this summer to praise the county's diversity and promise the most limited of cooperation with federal immigration agents.
I'd say we've learned how to manage immigration pretty well, he said, without a lot of drama and nonsense.
Since then, there's been plenty of both, at least according to the opposing sides of a roiling political debate centered on the left-leaning Maryland jurisdiction.
National attention has fallen on Montgomery in large part because over the five-week stretch since the county executive's pronouncement, seven undocumented immigrants living in the county were arrested on sex assault charges.
Two were accused of raping the same 11-year-old girl, according to the Washington Post.
Another reportedly tried to kill his victim by choking her in a hallway of her apartment building.
By Friday afternoon, Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of ICE, tweeted, a debate challenge to Elrich over the merits of what Cuccinelli described as the county's sanctuary protection policies for undocumented immigrants.
Cuccinelli wrote, quote, I'll defend children and crime victims.
Elrich can defend rapists and murderers who shouldn't even be in this country.
Elrich then shot back, it's a stunt.
I might debate him if he'd agree with the statement that Montgomery County is not a sanctuary city and that Montgomery County is not protecting criminals.
The guys in jail would probably not feel very protected.
Yeah, except that when you don't cooperate with the federal government on immigration, sometimes you're not keeping track of illegal immigrants who go on to commit crimes.
These are all issues where Republicans should have an advantage.
Instead, we got a week of controversy over whether President Trump used a sharpie on a map.
Now, on the issues, again, even the left, David Leonhardt is saying on illegal immigration, on racial reparations, on getting rid of private healthcare insurance, the Democrats are way out of tune.
Shouldn't Trump just be hammering that over and over?
Instead, we got a week of controversy over whether the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration was actually right or wrong in their assessment of a threat level of a hurricane hitting Alabama.
A week of this.
A week of this.
And the news continues to break that the NOAA basically acted in order to avoid damaging President Trump's fragile ego.
This is a waste of time.
It's a waste of energy.
And the fact that people on Twitter keep defending it demonstrates that they don't understand that Twitter is not real life.
And winning the Twitter battle does not mean winning an election.
Andrew Friedman, Colby Itkowitz, and Jason Samenow.
I love that the Washington Post put three reporters on this.
NOAA staff warned in September 1st directive against contradicting Trump, nearly a week before the NOAA publicly backed President Trump over its own scientists.
A top NOAA official warned its staff against contradicting the president.
In an agency-wide directive sent September 1st to National Weather Service personnel hours after Trump asserted, with no evidence, that Alabama would most likely be hit much harder than anticipated, staff was told to only stick with official National Hurricane Center forecasts if questions arise on some national-level social media posts, which hit the news this afternoon.
They were also told not to provide any opinion, according to a copy of the email obtained by the Washington Post.
An NOAA meteorologist who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution said the note was understood initially to be referring to Trump and came after the National Weather Service office in Birmingham contradicted Trump by tweeting that Alabama would not see any impact from the hurricane.
So the NOAA sent a note saying, let's just stick with the National Hurricane Center forecast and we won't, and we won't, you know, contradict Trump.
Any attempt to shield Trump's ego, honestly, I don't see the purpose of it.
I really don't.
The fact is that President Trump, for all the talk about him being thin-skinned, dude takes more crap than any other politician I've ever seen in my life.
And guess what?
He's still there.
He hasn't gone anywhere, has he?
And yet, this attempt to sort of shield him, it ends up creating worse headlines than if you just let Trump own it.
If Trump just went, OK, screw that one up, you know, I guess I was out of the loop.
The Democrats would still attack him, but they wouldn't have any place to go because most people would be like, what are they attacking him over?
It's just a screw up.
Who cares?
Who cares?
Meanwhile, it is amusing to watch as other Republicans seem to believe that they can jump in against President Trump in this race.
So Mark Sanford, the former Republican governor of South Carolina, Remember that time when he was governor of South Carolina and then he went traveling the Appalachian Trail.
That was his euphemism for sleeping with his mistress in South America.
And then he had to resign.
And then he ran for Congress again.
Well, now he's back and he wants to run for president.
And he was expecting the strange new respect of the media.
It is incredible to watch Republicans expect strange new respect.
They really believe that the media are going to treat them with kid gloves because, after all, many in the media hate President Trump.
That means that if someone runs against Trump, they should like them.
But that's not how this works.
That's not how this works.
You're not going to receive the strange new respect of the media for running against Trump.
The fact is, many in the media would like to link every Republican with President Trump, as Democrats are attempting to do in Texas, where Trump is less popular than the Republican Party overall.
Also, Mark Sanford, like, why is he running?
Chris Wallace basically asked him this question, and Sanford didn't have a great answer.
The mistakes in life, the mistakes that we make are the great tuitions of life.
They cost us, but you can learn from them.
And for me, I learned a level of humility, a level of empathy that I didn't have before, a level of judgment.
It is something of great regret.
It's something I've apologized extensively for.
And in contrast to the President, where he says there's not a single thing that he sort of regrets or apologizes for, I profoundly apologize for that.
OK, that's always a great campaign slogan.
I profoundly apologize for that.
Sanford 2020.
Good luck with all of that.
Now, again, I don't think that Trump is going to be substantially challenged from inside the party.
I know that Matt Drudge is headlining with Sanford.
Having another challenger like Joe Walsh and Mark Sanford are going to do any damage to Trump.
That obviously is not going to be a thing.
The real damage to Trump in the end is not going to come from somebody outside Trump.
It's going to come from Trump himself.
And a good example of this happened over the weekend.
So President Trump was apparently planning to negotiate with the Taliban.
This has been going on for a while.
And a lot of people I know in the military and in the foreign policy Sort of hallways of power.
We're very skeptical of this, as well they should be.
The Taliban is a terrorist group.
The Taliban is a terror-supporting group.
That is why we went into Afghanistan in the first place.
After 9-11, the United States, under George W. Bush, offered the Taliban an opportunity to turn over Osama bin Laden.
They refused.
Afghanistan then was put on our bleep list and then we invaded.
Well now, Donald Trump is trying to negotiate directly with the Taliban.
Now, Barack Obama tried to do the same thing, and I criticized him for it because you're literally negotiating with some of the worst people on Earth to accomplish what?
The return to power of the Taliban?
You think that's a great idea?
Well, Donald Trump was apparently secretly negotiating with the Taliban, and they were even going to get together at Camp David the week of 9-11, which is just... I mean, what?
Those optics are just awful, right?
Chris Wallace pointed this out.
He said, why are we inviting the Taliban to the United States on 9-11?
How is this a good idea?
We don't think that back home in the region they would take advantage of the fact that they were at Camp David on the 18th anniversary of 9-11.
We're kidding ourselves.
Enormous psychological... But that was going to be true whether or not they had, you know, killed this one U.S.
soldier or not.
That's why I questioned the whole idea of holding a meeting.
He talks about, well, this deal would bring peace, but it wasn't going to bring peace.
I mean, as we know the outlines of it, there was no national ceasefire.
There was no assurance that there was going to be a deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban.
There was no guarantee that they were going to protect women.
I mean, the deal as we saw, the tentative deal in principle, did that make sense?
And the answer is the tentative deal in principle did not make any sense.
President Trump blew it up over the weekend.
Now again, blowing up a bad deal is not a bad thing.
Announcing secret negotiations and blowing them up at the same time is not particularly smart foreign policy.
Trump tweeted out, unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and separately the president of Afghanistan were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday.
Nothing says secret meeting quite like blowing it up on Twitter.
Said they were coming to the United States tonight.
Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great, great soldiers and 11 other people.
I immediately canceled the meeting and called off peace negotiations.
What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?
They didn't.
They only made it worse.
If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don't have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.
How many more decades are they willing to fight?
Well, I mean, the answer is you're negotiating with them, right?
So a lot.
Also, what kind of people would kill an American soldier?
What kind of people would shield al Qaeda?
What are you what are you talking about?
What are you talking about?
You're literally talking... Why are the Taliban such bad people?
I have an idea, like right here, in the back.
I have an idea of the Taliban being bad people.
Is this like a great shot?
I can't believe that the Taliban betrayed the principles of our... Really?
Really?
According to the New York Times, on the Friday before Labor Day, President Trump gathered top advisors in the Situation Room to consider what could be among the profound decisions of his presidency, a peace plan with the Taliban after 18 years of grinding bloody war in Afghanistan.
The meeting brought to a head a bristling conflict dividing his foreign policy team for months, pitting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo against John Bolton, the National Security Advisor.
As they discussed the terms of the agreement, Pompeo and his negotiator made the case that it would enable Trump to begin withdrawing troops while securing a commitment from the Taliban not to shelter terrorists.
Bolton argued that Trump should keep his campaign pledge to draw down forces without getting in bed with killers swathed in American blood.
Trump made no decision on the spot.
At some point during the meeting, the idea was floated to finalize the negotiations in Washington, a prospect that appealed to the president's penchant for dramatic spectacle.
Trump suggested he would even invite President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, whose government had not been part of the talks, and get him to sign on.
And then he wanted to bring the Taliban to Camp David, the crown jewel of the American presidency.
All of this was bad ideas.
Bad ideas.
Because it was all about spectacle and not about content.
As I say, The president's worst enemy in 2020 is, as always, the president.
Because he's done well on a lot of fronts.
He's done well when it comes to judges.
He's done well when it comes to the economy.
He's done well when it comes to regulations.
But his instinct for the dramatic is a real negative for him and it could hurt him badly come 2020.
Okay, time for some things I like and then things I hate.
So, things that I like.
So, if you're interested in a lot of the stories that have been coming out about AI and it's about the nature of the human brain and the possibility of networking in with other brains.
There was a story this week about this, about how it could change human existence as we know it.
You could read each other's thoughts and it could create network thinking and all of this.
It may raise some serious questions about free will, And the soul.
And this brings to mind a book that I recently read by J.P.
Moreland, who's a philosophy professor over at Biola University, and it's called The Soul, How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters.
Now, this is kind of a fascinating conversation, because obviously if you're a materialist, you believe that the brain is all there is, there is no such thing as a soul.
Mental phenomena are basically just what they have termed to be outgrowths of just mental activity.
They are kind of false positives that effectively your mental activity, your feeling of consciousness is not real.
It's just your brain firing.
It's just neurons firing.
There's nothing separate.
You don't have free will.
You can't make your own decisions.
I think this is a really interesting and important debate.
And as part of the debate, you should check out J.P. Moreland's book, The Soul, because the fact is if we don't have free will, that has some pretty significant ramifications for our politics and for our decision making.
If we don't have the capacity to think freely, if biology is all there is and there's no afterlife, that changes the math a bit.
All of these are interesting and fascinating debates that lie at the root of Western civilization, as I talk about in my own book, The Right Side of History.
This book is well worth reading, J.P.
Moreland.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So now we're in the game of playing according to the media.
We are going to play who took a picture with whom.
Now, it's funny.
We didn't play this for years when there were pictures of Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan.
And it was like, oh, you know, he's an event, man.
Like, why are you making a big deal out of Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan?
He's just Bill Ayers, just some guy from the neighborhood.
You know, Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright, you know, he went to his church, but did he really mean it?
Sure, he titled the second book after a speech from Jeremiah Wright, but did that really mean anything?
Well, now we're in the business of you took a picture with a guy once.
That means that you and he are in absolute cahoots.
I've experienced this myself, right?
I was in a picture with Steve King because I went and I spoke at a congressional breakfast in Washington, D.C.
This would have been two, three years ago before Steve King's big blow about white nationalism.
And so every time Steve King is in the news, people throw that picture out there as though there aren't pictures of me with literally dozens of Congress people, including with some Democrats.
Right?
You know, but apparently that's the way this now works, is that if they can catch you in a picture with somebody, very bad.
They did this to Jordan Peterson also.
Jordan Peterson was in a picture with a guy who's wearing a shirt about Islamophobia.
That was a silly shirt.
And Jordan got in trouble because the guy wore a shirt.
Okay, now this is the way that this is going to be played.
So now they're doing this with Lindsey Graham.
So Lindsey Graham, according to the Washington Post, appeared in a photo with Gert Wilders, a controversial Dutch parliamentary leader with anti-Islam and anti-immigrant views, while both attended a European security conference in Italy.
Wow, they were in a picture together?
That's unbelievable.
I mean, that must mean, you know, there are pictures of me with people on the left.
That must mean that I'm on the left, obviously.
There's a picture of me standing next to Larry Wilmore.
We must agree on everything.
And that's the way this works now.
There are pictures of me with all sorts of people.
Tens of thousands of people, in fact.
Presumably, I agree with all of them on everything.
And it's very bad that we were in a picture together.
Now, there are certain people who are so obviously evil, you don't want to be in a picture with them, right?
Somebody is wearing a Nazi uniform.
You're not going to be in a picture with them.
But do I know that Lindsey Graham knows everything about Gert Wilders, or was he just some guy who he had sort of a baseline level of knowledge about, but not enough to say, I'm never taking a picture with that guy?
It is a really, really stupid game.
And when play stupid games, win stupid prizes, that is the way that the modern media currently work.
OK, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
Welcome to the week.
There's going to be a big Democratic debate later this week.
We're going to be building up in prep for it.
So exciting.
We'll see you here a little bit later or we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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