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Sept. 22, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:02
Kennedy | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 69
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Time Text
Anytime something happens that feels like it's beyond our control, the knee-jerk is, we need more government, as if government is going to solve things.
Government naturally doesn't do that.
It's the opposite.
It's just layers and layers of suffocating bureaucracy that collapses under the weight of its own good intentions.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
I'm really excited to welcome to the program today American political commentator, radio personality, and the host of Kennedy at 9 p.m.
on the Fox Business Network.
Kennedy, thanks so much for stopping by.
Ben, it is so nice to be here.
Well, I'm really excited that we're in New York and we can actually get together.
I know, this is great.
Yes, and you brought the New York vibe, so well done.
Oh, perfect.
Okay, so it's dingy and horrifying.
Okay, perfect.
So, for folks who don't actually know your background, you have a really interesting background because, you know, I was political from a very young age, but you were a music person, right?
You were a VJ on MTV.
So how did you get into that in the first place?
The things that I loved most in high school were music and politics.
And I didn't graduate from high school.
I didn't get a diploma.
So my parents didn't want me to just linger in Portland, so they gave me money.
They paid me to leave, and I moved to Los Angeles to get into political consulting, because that's naturally where people go.
And I ended up getting an internship at a radio station, a really great radio station, KROQ.
And my boss there, Andy Schoen, I used to go into his office once a week as an intern, as an unpaid intern, and ask him to put me on the air.
And eventually, once he did, and so he gave me an audition and I got to do overnights.
And then I worked on Kevin and Bean.
And then Andy was hired at MTV as a Senior Vice President of Programming, and they needed new VJs, and he got me an audition, and they hired me, which was crazy.
And even he admits that he couldn't believe that they hired someone with absolutely no television experience.
So, first of all, I'm now having serious déjà vu because I think that I probably listened to you growing up in L.A.
on K-Rock driving back and forth to school.
Because even though that wasn't my particular channel, the presets were already left on 106.7, so that is really, really funny.
Yeah, I'll get into critiques of alternative rock.
I've already gotten into trouble for critiques of rap, so I have to get into critiques of alternative rock a little bit later on in the program, but how did you make the transition from you're an MTV VJ to the world of politics?
It's a pretty radical shift.
I was really into politics when I got to MTV, and I self-identified as a conservative Republican, and of course it was the beginning of the Clinton era.
So, Bill Clinton was obviously elected in November of 1992.
I started at MTV in September of that year.
And so the Choose or Lose campaign was on its maiden voyage.
And it was a very political time.
And, you know, there was this undercurrent that we needed change and younger voices.
And I always felt that the younger voices were disproportionately represented by the left.
Unchallenged, mostly.
I was already a skeptic, and I didn't really have a name for my political philosophy.
I just knew it ran counter to the groupthink and what people were spouting that I felt was very spoon-fed, with very little critical thought.
And I was interested in politics, and I loved Ronald Reagan, and was obsessed with Dan Quayle.
And I was sad to see the first Bush presidency end, because that meant that J. Danforth Quayle III went with them.
So, how did people treat you being a conservative in the music industry?
I mean, being at K-Rock, I can't imagine there were lots of folks over there at the time who were very pro-conservative.
I mean, this is the days of Jimmy Kimmel and all that.
They weren't.
It was actually before Jimmy Kimmel.
Before Jimmy, right.
Before Jimmy and Adam.
Um, but they, people were curious, and it was, a Republican in Southern California was a very funny thing.
It was a very, like, Palm Springs country club, and obviously I didn't fit that mold, um, so I wasn't a typical cookie-cutter, I-wanna-hate-you Republican, and I liked debating with people, and, you know, for that, people were, by and large, More curious.
And, you know, people would make fun of me.
I remember the first time I met Dennis Leary.
He was just relentlessly making fun of me.
He's like, you're a Republican and your name's Kennedy?
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!
And there was more discussion, whereas now we didn't have cancel culture.
And, you know, people really took in information in longer form, whereas, you know, now it's really amuse-bouche.
That's all of what social media is.
And so you have a little bit more room to defend yourself in your positions, whereas now— and I talked to Pat Smear a little bit about this in my book from The Germs and Nirvana and, of course, Foo Fighters.
And he said that if I tried to come out as a Republican today on MTV, I, first of all, wouldn't have been hired.
And the second that was sort of nationally consumed, I would have been fired or dismissed pretty quickly.
So, you didn't graduate from high school, and then you were telling me that you went to college when you were 28, which is not usually when people go to UCLA.
No!
It's a great time to go, though!
Because after you've worked a little bit, and, you know, you've tried your hand at a few careers, you figure out that you have gaps in knowledge.
And you also figure out what you want to do and what you want to focus your time on.
Because by the time you get further into adulthood, you realize that your time's a little bit more precious, and you don't have quite as much energy And you're also not as worried.
You're not consumed by the same kind of anxiety you are when you're in your late teens and early twenties, where everything has to be immediate and you have to get it done.
And so much of that is forced.
And so I found when I went to college late, I only wanted to study what I wanted to study and not what someone projected on me that I should study, like communications or business.
Those sounded very, very boring to me.
And so I started with history and philosophy and I really liked both of those and I also studied a lot of physics and science.
I realized if I were going to get, if I were going to major in physics, it would have taken two years of just math before I got to any of my lower division classes.
So philosophy it was because Every time I took a philosophy class, I loved it more and more, no matter what the subject matter was.
And I really loved ancient Greek philosophy and philosophy of science.
And I found that the two of them were asking the same kind of existential questions, and oftentimes those are unanswerable.
And, you know, for people who love philosophy, that's fine.
The fact that you're never really going to get to a terminus is acceptable, because what you find along the way, what you uncover, is in itself very satisfying.
Okay, so I want to ask about what you did after college and how you end up at Fox Business Network, because that's a hell of a transition.
I'm going to ask in one second.
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Alrighty, so let's talk about what you did after you were at UCLA.
So you go to UCLA and you're in history and philosophy and you're out of the music industry now?
Yes, so after MTV I moved to Seattle and did talk radio and then I moved to LA and did more talk radio and that's when I started going to college and hosted a couple of game shows on Game Show Network, which is the best job.
No one should ever make fun of game shows or game show hosts because it is such an amazing job and it's such a positive, optimistic environment because people who are watching, they want to watch.
And they really believe that they can achieve something in a short amount of time.
Game show fans and gamblers are cut from the same cloth, and I really like that cloth.
And then when I went to Santa Monica College and UCLA, I started doing a little bit more talk radio and then did kind of a talk soup for reality TV.
Meanwhile, in 1993, I had met Roger Ailes at Politically Incorrect, at one of the very first episodes of Politically Incorrect when it was on Comedy Central.
And I had a copy of his book that he signed.
And then I met him a few times when I was at Fox Reality Channel.
And in 2000, or sorry, in 1999, I wrote an advice book for girls.
And I went on Bill O'Reilly's show to promote it.
And Bill O'Reilly attacked me and I couldn't figure out why.
Because here's this very conservative advice that I'm giving.
Don't drink.
Don't have sex before you're married.
I interviewed a nun and O'Reilly's attacking me about something.
I'm like, you're so stupid.
But then I met with Roger, who was like, we would like you to come work at Fox one day.
I'm like, I just moved to Seattle.
That's not going to happen.
And then 2001, started college.
Did VH1's Best Week Ever, which was like a clip show where comics and journalists comment on various pop culture stories, and that's what put me through college.
And then afterward I had to start working.
And then I got a job at KFI, which is a talk radio station.
In Los Angeles.
And I really found my political voice doing talk radio in Seattle, which was an interesting place because there's the dichotomy of the ultra-liberals in Seattle and then a lot of conservatives, libertarians, and survivalists in the outskirts and in the rest of Washington state.
And I felt like those were my people.
And I really enjoyed the natural tension and found more of my voice on KFI when I left UCLA.
So what has happened to rock?
It seems like for a while there was the hot thing among high schoolers.
I remember when I was in high school, everybody was listening to that except for me.
What did you listen to in high school?
Classical music?
Yeah, you got it.
I was a classical violinist from the time I was five, and my dad's a professional pianist, so we grew up doing that.
So I didn't have, I would say, proper appreciation for alternative rock.
I probably still do not since all of my references ended about 1920.
But what do you think has happened to the alternative rock scene?
It seems like pop has eaten everything in sort of the rock sphere.
It has.
And that's okay because every generation consumes and expresses music differently.
And they should be able to do that.
But I will say two of the most brilliant kind of modern, in the Ben Shapiro spectrum, modern musicians, Trent Reznor and Scott Ian from Anthrax, they are both inspired by jazz and classical music.
And I remember driving, I was going snowboarding with Scott Ian and we were listening to classical music and he said, this is so much more hardcore than any hardcore music.
And he's like, you know, listen to the chord structure.
Listen to how the music and the tempo, how it changes.
He's like, you couldn't get away with structure like this, even in hard rock.
And I thought that was really great how, you know, these musicians were taking in music that probably would be considered contradictory to what they were putting out.
And they were deeply inspired by it.
And, you know, I always think People sound really fussy when they're like, well, back in my day, we had Nevada!
But I listen to a lot of music on Sirius XM.
I love All Nation.
And, you know, my daughters are now 10 and 14, and they listen to their own music.
Like, I've tried playing them Beastie Boys and Veruca Salt, and they're like, blah, blah, blah.
They have no time for it, which is an outrage.
But they find their own stuff.
And everyone has to find the music that resonates Within them.
I believe it was Pythagoras who said that.
Maybe you can educate me a little bit.
One of the things that I've been big on, and I just had a discussion with a rapper named Zuby about rap, and one of the things that I suggested to him is that as somebody who grew up in the classical tradition where skill was greatly prized, you know, one of my problems with rap is I'm not sure that I see the skill always first and foremost from some of the rappers.
But there are certain rock musicians who really know their stuff.
So who do you think are the best musicians in that?
In rock?
Oh gosh, that's a great question.
I mean, I really like, I really like drummers.
Like I'm always fascinated by the parts that you don't really pay attention to.
And there's a duo, well they're kind of a trio because they do have an American singer, called Mike Snow.
And they're Swedish and there's no, no one in the band is named Mike.
And I think their stuff is really interesting and I like the way they use percussion and, you know, it's like the marriage of a melody that makes you feel something and a beat that actually moves you and then words that make you cry.
It's so difficult to get all of those elements together and when people do it, I think it's such a high art form.
So I promise, final rock question.
So if you have to name your top three bands, who are they?
Oh, that's a great question.
I feel like it changes a little bit.
My favorite band of all time is a punk rock band from San Diego called Rocket from the Crypt.
And if you had a Rocket from the Crypt tattoo in the 90s and early 2000s, you got into their shows for free.
And the best shows I've ever seen in my life were Rocket from the Crypt shows.
Whether it's CBGB's or Kyber Pass.
I went and saw them in Australia and they're amazing.
I love the Shins.
I love James Mercer.
I think he's one of those people.
He's got such incredible vocal range and he's got such a melodic voice and his songs are so honest and sad and sometimes they're very opaque and sometimes they're very transparent and I think that he has a beautiful artistry and And then, you know, I love Interpol.
So do you think that the era of the music video is dead?
So is MTV killing the radio star?
And now it seems like MTV doesn't even broadcast music videos all that much anymore.
No, I think shareholders killed the radio star.
When I was at MTV, that's when they first started experimenting with long-form programming.
It was really in 1992 with the real world.
And when that took off, they realized because the rest of the day was video music day parts.
And my boss, Andy, was the one who chopped it up and said, OK, well, let's do MTV Jams, UMTV Raps, MTV Rocks, Alternative Nation, and sort of segmented it throughout the day.
So if you were a rap fan, you'd watch UMTV Raps and MTV Jams.
And if you liked R&B, and then Alternative Nation was on every night at midnight.
And, but they realized when they started inserting long-form programming that people were watching for longer periods of time, because after three minutes, if you didn't like the next music video, you would leave.
The difference was then there really wasn't any place to go.
But now, you know, I watch How My Girls Consume Media, and it's mostly YouTube.
And TikTok.
And they, I don't think they've, at least in my presence, they've never watched MTV, and they really don't watch TV anymore unless I make them watch a Yankees game.
So now let's talk about politics, because I'm sure that my political audiences, many of them are interested in the music, but I think that probably they're more interested in your politics.
So you went from being sort of a self-described conservative in opposition to Democrats in the L.A.
area to being a libertarian.
How did you realize that you were a libertarian and not just sort of a straight-line conservative?
It was really interesting because I didn't know what it meant to be a libertarian.
I really didn't know what the word meant.
And, you know, one night I was having dinner with Kurt Loder, and Kurt was a really great mentor because he was very honest and salty and didn't have time for a lot of people, but we developed a really great friendship.
And we would talk about politics and, you know, he would rail against statism and he would rail against the Clintons, but at the same time he didn't have And I was like, you know, this is really interesting.
And what he was telling me resonated.
And he was like, you're a libertarian.
And he gave me a copy of Ayn Rand's Objectivist Epistemology.
And then I met Penn Jillette at the MTV studios.
And Penn is one of those people who has the most incredible memory.
He can remember, he's one of those very few people who can remember every single day of his life.
And so he sent me an email last year and he's like, on this day, we recorded the MTV special in October 1993.
I'm like, how do you know that?
It was incredible to me.
And he also was like, OK, this is what it means to be a libertarian.
And I was like, that makes so much more sense to me, but it required more of an investigation.
You know, what does this mean?
So it was almost a conclusion that I had arrived at half blind, and then it took time to really illuminate what that meant, and what that meant to me, and how my personal feelings and beliefs interacted with the hyper-rationalism.
So when it comes to libertarianism, people from the outside tend to see libertarianism as a very specific sort of mentality.
But the fact is that there's a lot of variation within kind of strains of libertarianism.
I know libertarians who are pro-life.
I know libertarians who are more hawkish on foreign policy.
I know libertarians who have very different views on the size and scope of what government should actually be involved in.
So what's your view of what is the role of government in American life?
I think that we have way too much government, and we need to stop making excuses why we need more.
And that's become a real knee-jerk reaction for people.
Anytime something happens that feels like it's beyond our control, whether personally or culturally, the knee-jerk is, we need more government, as if government is going to solve things, or make things better, or streamline things, or do a better job.
of taking care of people who are most vulnerable because government naturally doesn't do that.
It's the opposite.
It's just layers and layers of suffocating bureaucracy that collapses under the weight of its own good intentions.
And I think there are people whom I consider to be statists who want to expand the size of government, and they have good intentions.
Like, they say they want to take care of people.
The problem is they don't take the longer view of unintended consequences.
And I think that's my biggest issue, particularly with this newest phase of socialism, and it's very unapologetic.
You know, because growing up as a kid, my mom left Romania.
They left and came over on a boat when the commies took their hemp farm.
And if you have ancestors or parents who escaped Eastern Europe in that way, there's something in your bones that, you know, is really repelled.
And you can't stand communism.
And it's just, it's baked into your personal casserole.
And I always felt that way.
And so to have people talk about how great the collective and the state and communism is, because that's essentially the conclusion that they come to, I find it deeply offensive.
So in a second, I want to ask you if there has to be a contrast between social conservatism and libertarianism.
Ask about that in one second.
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Okay, so let's talk about the maybe mutual exclusion, or maybe not, of social conservatism and libertarianism.
So I consider myself a libertarian when it comes to government, but I'm a social conservative when it comes to my own personal values and my religious values.
The way that I square this is I say that basically you do need a very strong social fabric in order to support the bulwark of libertarianism, meaning that People have a natural tendency that when the government fails to do something, they think that the government ought to, that when things fall through the cracks, they want a collective to pick up the pieces.
Normally in the past, that collective has existed in the form of social fabric.
So churches and synagogues particularly tended to pick up a lot of that slack.
Somebody in your community was suffering, you and your friends went together and helped them out.
And this is still true in, you know, synagogues like mine, where if somebody is suffering, we all get together, the hat basically, and we pass it around until we funded this.
And then there is a strain of libertarianism that seems very anti-religious in nature.
It says that religion is deeply destructive to not just American life, but human life in general.
That it's the opiate of the masses in almost a Marxist sort of way in terms of its description of religion.
How do you see the social fabric and the religious social fabric squaring with libertarianism?
I think that the religious social fabric and government are completely separate.
And as a believer, I think that we are naturally designed to worship a creator.
And, you know, obviously in human experience, that takes on many forms.
I happen to be an Eastern Orthodox Christian.
And I remember talking to my priest as I was studying philosophy, and he was very worried for me that, you know, not that he didn't want me to study, because the Eastern Church is academically very rigorous.
And, you know, some of the most beautiful and profound writings that I've read about transubstantiation and belief in the nature of the soul come from Eastern Orthodox monks who spend time in the desert as ascetics, or they're hanging from baskets.
And, you know, they cause themselves pain and deny themselves in order to be filled up by And they have a lot of time to think about and reconcile some of these questions.
And I found that going through that process actually strengthened my faith and the belief in this unifying thing that we don't need government in order to feel and express.
And, you know, it's actually government.
It's not libertinism that has weakened that social fabric.
It's this idea that, oh, I pay taxes, therefore, I don't have to go to church.
Like, I don't have to donate money.
I don't have to, you know, give $5 to a homeless guy.
Because I pay taxes.
Like, your taxes go to pensions.
You know, your taxes are a magnet for corruption that is not distributed honorably.
So, let's talk about sort of your brand of libertarianism.
So, let's start with foreign policy.
On foreign policy, which brand of libertarian are you?
I've heard sort of Larry Elder is a very hawkish brand of libertarian.
And then you have sort of the Ron Paul libertarianism, which is the United States should absolutely minimize its military and that we're too active around the world.
So, where are you?
I think we are too active around the world.
I don't know why we have so many bases open and then people say shipping lanes.
And that's all they say.
So, you know, people accept these premises without really doing any investigation.
And I'm always open to having my mind changed.
And if I have a smart person who's got a rational view of why we should be doing something specific in a certain part of the world, I'm more than willing to listen to that and to have My mind changed.
But I think when we err toward peace and capitalism, because those two things to me are inextricable, that's when we are better off.
And that's when you have fewer dead people and fewer poor people.
And I think ultimately that's a much better equation.
Is there a space for creation of free markets and capitalism without an interventionist America?
Meaning that the argument made, I've made the argument myself, on behalf of interventionism is not that we should, that anybody wants military conflict, but that if we are not protecting shipping lanes, to take an example, Then the Russians or the Chinese are interfering with shipping lanes and then shifting those to their own economic benefit, typically to the effect of strengthening communism if you're China, right?
If you're trying to take over the South China Sea and then move all those countries into your sphere of influence that they will trade with you and not with the United States and affect their governments that they're friendlier to you and your repression of a billion people, then that's a problem.
I understand that, but that's what leads to the slippery slope of the United States being interventionist and reactionary.
And then, all of a sudden, you have Afghanistan.
Like, what's to prevent the next Afghanistan in some place like Iran?
And there's no endgame, and there's also no victory.
Victory is actual free trade.
Victory is individuals making choices for themselves.
And if that means building a supply chain and a factory in Vietnam versus China, where there's arguably more economic freedom now than there is in mainland China, then I'm fine with that.
But I don't think that's up to the government.
Those decisions are up to the individual.
And we spend so much on the military, yet we deny the warriors what they really need, because the military is a lot like academia, in that there aren't a lot of great professors, and professors aren't the ones who are served.
Learning is not served, just like warriors are not served, and freedom is not served.
It's the administration.
And that's what gobbles up these giant budgets.
And in both aspects, you have unfettered spending and there is no incentive for either institution to cut down.
I mean, that's an argument for smarter spending that I think everyone hawkish end of it should be able to get on board with.
I mean, wasting money on golden toilets, I don't think is anything that Anybody should be in favor of.
So for people in the military who really truly believe in fighting for and protecting freedom, they are the ones that I've had the most interesting conversations with about cutting spending because there are ways to do that that don't make you unpatriotic.
It doesn't mean that you despise the military or that you vilify people who wear the uniform.
It's quite the opposite.
Is there a deterrent effect to having a powerful, strong military and a willingness to intervene?
Meaning that there are two ways that the United States ends up in war, typically.
One is that we intervene in places that are not necessary, and we've seen that from everywhere from Libya to perhaps Iraq, given the information being wrong as it was.
Then the other way that you end up in a war is that you end up Yes, and I think there's a difference between isolationism and anti-interventionism, and we can find that balance.
because they've used that as a launching off point, which actually was what happened in Afghanistan, for example.
Yes, and I think there's a difference between isolationism and anti-interventionism.
And we can find that balance.
We're smart enough, and we're capable of having difficult conversations.
You know, what worries me are actually people on the left who have now grown very hawkish, who don't have great regard for human life, who I think would get us into worse conflicts.
And, you know, I actually, I'm much more interested in the policy positions of people like Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard, who have, you know, been in war zones, and they've seen the cost of war firsthand.
And it doesn't make you weak to strive for peace.
I would hope that everybody is striving for peace.
I think that the balance is one between deterrence and interventionism.
Nobody actually wants to intervene, but the credible threat of force is obviously a necessary part of foreign policy.
Unfortunately, that's a large gray area.
And that's where I am most skeptical.
Because whenever, I don't care if it's climate hysteria or military hysteria, You know, you always have to be very careful when someone is selling you a bill of goods in a lead briefcase.
To take a couple of examples, right now, obviously we're watching it, Taiwan has been threatened by China for years.
What would you do about Taiwan?
I mean, is that a situation where we should be signaling to the Chinese that we are willing to supply the Taiwanese with what they need for resistance, if China should do something?
Or is that a situation where we should say that's very far away, that really doesn't have anything to do with us, they're on their own?
I don't think that China's going to get into a hot war with Taiwan.
I mean, I look at it like the stimulus spending.
You know, we were bamboozled into two stimulus packages because what happens if we don't do anything?
The exact same thing as if we do something, only we save a bunch of money.
And, you know, there we save a bunch of lives.
And is it worth making gold star families in Taiwan?
No.
But should we show China that we are allies and always on the side of freedom?
Absolutely.
And I think, you know, if if China were going to press the issue, they would have done it so far in Hong Kong.
And they're doing it subversively, but not as actively as we would fear.
We'll wait to see how things end up in Hong Kong over the next 10 to 15 years.
We don't know how it's going to end up in Hong Kong or North Korea.
So let's talk about another aspect of libertarianism that's come up.
So you've seen this argument among libertarians about abortion, about the state's role in protecting unborn lives.
So as a social conservative, but also as a libertarian, to me that's not even a libertarian issue.
If you believe this is a human life, then libertarians also believe that the state has a role in protecting human life.
Yeah, and that's also a Ron Paul.
Yep.
...belief, and I think there's something very valid to that, that whatever makes us uniquely human is implicit in our DNA.
It's not something that just happens when a fetus is viable or an infant is viable, because a three-year-old is not viable.
You know, therefore, is it acceptable to terminate the life of a three-year-old when they become an inconvenience?
Absolutely not.
That is murder.
So, you know, the idea of viability is a very slippery slope.
I like that abortion has been going in the down direction.
I like that people, that women are thinking about it seriously and, you know, there are a multitude of ways to engage in adoption that people didn't realize were open to them before because it was very scary and nebulous 20 or 30 years ago and now it's possible to have an open adoption where both sides meet each other and they know each other.
That happened in my family.
And my mom and the adoptive mom are very close friends and they have always been in each other's lives and it's beautiful.
So, you were also an early advocate of same-sex marriage, and that one libertarians seem to be pretty consistent about.
They say that the state has no role in marriage.
Now, do you believe that the state should be giving the same benefits to same-sex couples they give to married couples, or the state should give no benefits to any couples and it's none of the state's business?
I feel like the state should be giving no benefits to any couples, and I'm sure that sounds very heartless, but... Oh, no, I'm with you.
Yeah, your heterosexuality is not a precursor for state-sponsored benefits.
Do you see the case, so the case for conservatives always was that the state does have an interest in the production and rearing of children, that without a future generation that there is no, that there's nobody to pay the taxes, there's nobody to actually provide for.
But isn't it interesting because if the government wasn't tapping you on the shoulder going, Hey, have babies.
Have babies.
People would still have babies.
I mean, this is why I'm on your side of the argument.
It's a miraculous thing because people will still have children.
You can really screw with families by having a one-child policy like they've had in China.
And if you remember after the earthquake, when that school was crushed in China, there were families that were completely obliterated because their one child was killed in that natural disaster.
So on same-sex marriage, just to clarify, is that a libertarian position governmentally or a libertarian position morally?
Meaning that this is always one area where conservatives tend to butt up against libertarians.
You know, but why?
Who cares who gets married?
I just officiated a wedding between Two men who love each other.
And it's like, love to me is like the ultimate manifestation of heaven on earth.
Like, God created love.
God is love.
And if you find that with another human being, and your heart tells you that you have found your other half, and you've connected with that person, who am I to judge?
Like, I don't care.
Let's party.
So on a governmental level, I totally agree with you, meaning that if you want to perform a same-sex marriage, have at it.
On a moral level, obviously, as a religious Jew, I feel very differently.
Not only on a religious level, I think there are natural law reasons to oppose same-sex marriage, but not on a governmental level.
I don't think you can make a solid Libertarian case for why the government should be even involved in this thing at all, which is why I've always suggested that one of the happy coincidences of libertarianism is you can disagree about some of the core issues in life and still leave each other alone.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's that's what's so funny is like you really can and you just go, yeah, that's fine.
And what's amazing to me is I look around at the people, you know, whether it's relitigating the Kavanaugh accusations or talking about impeaching the president and ushering in president number 46.
Mike Pence, which, you know, will happen as a natural consequence of impeachment, which is very funny, is people are so deeply, personally hurt by the outcome of the election.
And, you know, I've got friends like Kat Tinfaner always joking, like, try being a libertarian.
Like, when's the last time one of my candidates won anything?
So that's what I'm going to ask you about next.
Why can't Libertarians get their act together?
That's a great question.
We've been hearing about the Libertarian wave for literally years.
Yes, and the Libertarian moment.
Right, there will be a Libertarian moment.
Rand Paul will emerge from the shadows and suddenly be the Republican presidential candidate and then of course he flames out within the first three weeks of the campaign.
Why is that Libertarian moment so long in coming if it's so obviously and eminently true, is the question.
I don't know.
And, you know, it's really frustrating because I'm not a member of the Libertarian Party, but obviously they run a lot of candidates that I am ideologically aligned with.
And the only thing I can think of is so much of politics today is emotion and hyperbole, and rationalism is a really tough sell in this climate.
So we need better marketing.
I don't know if you've seen these sort of studies that demonstrate the number of people who are socially liberal and fiscally liberal, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, socially conservative and fiscally conservative.
The smallest number of people among those groups are people who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
It's very popular in New York It's very popular in L.A.
Even people who tend to be fiscally liberal like to pretend that they're fiscally conservative when it comes to cutting spending.
They're the worst.
But it is a very small number of people who consider themselves both socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
Why do you think there is this culture gap between the coast and the middle of the country on this particular issue, among conservatives particularly?
You know why?
Because people on the coasts have never had someone bring them a casserole when they're sick.
And in the middle of the country, that's just what you do.
And people don't think twice about it.
You know, people will go ahead and bring you two jars of jam when they make strawberry jam or when they can their peaches.
And it's a lovely thing.
My family is from southern Indiana and I take my girls there every year so they can get a hit of real hospitality.
And, you know, it's like life is It's a little simpler, and it's a little bit slower, and people take time to talk to each other, and it's not as rushed, and it's not as selfish, and people wave.
It's funny because you can be running, and I have a friend from Minnesota, and we joke that you can be running in Los Angeles, and people don't look at each other.
But in the Midwest, you see someone, and you're like, Even if you don't know it.
Oh, it freaked me out.
The first time I was in Oklahoma.
I mean, I spent my entire life in LA and the first time I was in Oklahoma, you know, I mean, you know, because you're from LA, you walk down the street, you don't want to catch eyes with somebody that might kill you.
If you walk down the street in Oklahoma and you catch eye, like the first time I was in Oklahoma, I walked down the street, caught eyes with somebody and she goes, Oh, hey, hello.
Yeah.
And I called my father.
I was like, I don't know what's going on here.
What's wrong with these people?
But there is that there is this very different feel.
And it You know, it's something I think people in big cities are really missing.
I was discussing this with my wife, just even being in New York, it's like a nice place to visit.
Not sure that I'd want to bring up kids here.
I mean, how is family life having to live over on this coast?
It's really, you know, it was all sort of encapsulated by my daughter who is, my youngest daughter who's six, when we moved here, and she said, I think, because there were a lot of homeless people in our neighborhood, she goes, I think I have an idea how some of those homeless people could get houses.
And I was like, Tell me.
She goes, they need a bigger bucket for more money.
And I said, that's a great start.
She goes, then they can go to CVS and get a pair of flip flops so they have shoes.
Because she noticed that a lot of the homeless people didn't have shoes.
I'm like, that's great.
And then she goes, then they take the bucket to the Mac store and they get a Mac and then they go look for an apartment on the Mac.
I'm like, problem solved.
But it actually makes children very empathetic, because they see so much of life in humanity.
And they're not as fearful of other people, but they're more aware.
And they have to be more self-sufficient by nature.
And I think the world benefits from empathy and self-sufficiency because in helicoptering, we've deprived children of that, you know, of the joy of discovering their own communities and kind of fending for themselves.
You know, it's like when you have kids in New York, they have to look out for other people.
Like, you have to be able to tell the difference between a good guy and a bad guy.
And, you know, you tell your kids, if you ever get in trouble, find a mom with other kids or a cop or a firefighter and have them call me.
So what do you make, I mean, this is switching topics, but what do you make of the rise of populism?
So there's been this rise of populism on the left.
It's really a strategy more than a basket of policies.
But on the right, you've seen this rise of populism as well.
I blame the centaurum.
I've been really disturbed by it to see this kind of big government conservatism, supposed conservatism that has come to the forefront.
This idea that, frankly, President Trump campaigned on in 2016 that he was going to bring all the jobs back to Indiana and Ohio by levying tariffs and by granting subsidies.
This idea that government is here to save you from yourself and you see there's this wide gap even on Fox News between various commentators on this sort of stuff.
What do you make of the rise of the big government conservative and do you think that that's a durable message for the future considering that basically Bush was a big government conservative the same way that Trump is?
They all were, yeah, and you can always tell the populace by how much they spend and what they veto and what they don't veto.
And, you know, ultimately, I think it's very anti-individual, which means it's anti-creativity, and it's so overbearing, and it's just as bad on the right as it is on the left.
And when government is making choices for you, we all lose.
So let's talk about healthcare for a second, because this has obviously become a key issue for both the right and the left.
People on the left suggesting that healthcare is right, people on the right basically giving in to that.
Yeah, isn't that problematic?
It is to me.
I mean, nothing that has ever been declared a right Yes.
in positive fashion has ever gotten cheaper or more competitive.
Yes.
It is things that are commodities that get cheaper and more competitive because people provide commodities for a price, whereas things that are rights are pried away from you against your will generally, unless you're talking about just a right to be free of somebody else doing something to you.
But what- But that line between positive rights and negative rights has been completely blurred, And I blame the left for that, and I blame the right for not standing up to it.
And not saying, no, healthcare and health insurance are services.
Those are services that you pay for, that someone's got to pay for, and you're going to pay for it one way or the other.
I don't want you robbing me of my tax money for your bad decisions.
And that may sound heartless, but when people have less accountability, they're going to naturally make worse decisions.
And you have to trust people to make better decisions.
And magically, they will.
But with health care, I was having a conversation with a woman the other day and she said, health insurance companies should not be for profit.
And I said, why?
Like, I don't care.
If it means that I get cheaper health insurance, that's great.
That's not the problem.
The problem is the insurance companies and the health care providers working in concert with each other, masking prices and masking choices.
That's one of the bigger institutional issues.
The fact that you don't know what things cost Before you have the service.
So, if your insurance decides not to pay for something, you're on the hook for it the second you get a bill.
A bill is a contract, and people don't know that they can negotiate stuff beforehand.
So, if we adjusted some of our systems to engage in a little bit more negotiation, everyone would be better off.
Because they would be able to make informed choices about who they seek care from and what they're willing to spend money on.
So this becomes one of the issues where people have very strong critiques of libertarianism, specifically with regard to, say, people who are too sick, can't pay for their own health care, they have a pre-existing condition.
So you've seen Republicans cave in on the idea that they need to force insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions, which is like forcing fire insurance companies to cover burned down houses.
So what if you got in a car accident and totaled your car, and then you went up to GEICO and said, hey, can you insure my car?
They'd be like...
No.
Right, so what do we do with people who have pre-existing conditions?
How do we help take care of those?
I think there are some companies that will and should provide for that.
I don't think you should force every insurance company to cover pre-existing conditions.
And I don't think you should force every single person to buy an insurance policy where they have maternity and rehab covered.
I think we should have catastrophic policies, which we don't anymore.
And that's not what insurance is for.
And that is what has allowed, basically, you know, the private insurance industry to run like Medicare.
So there's been a whole critique of libertarianism from the sort of behavioral economic school.
So there's the classical economic school, which basically treats every individual as homo economist.
We're going to make rational decisions.
And even if it's not true for you specifically, it's true for the majority of people over time, that rational decisions will be made, people will act in their own economic self interest.
And then there's a group of behavioral economists.
And they say, well, that's actually fantasy that most people are going to act as as a result of emotional response.
They're going to react not in terms of their own best interest.
And this undermines the premises of libertarianism.
So to take a practical example, when you talk about drugs, so libertarians say, okay, well, listen, you choose to get hooked on a drug, that's a you problem.
You got to handle that one yourself.
That's not my problem.
That's not anybody else's problem.
And not only that, if the government tries to get involved and stop you from getting those drugs, it's a violation of liberty that basically they're stopping you from getting something that you want to get.
The behavioral economist would say, well, but people who get addicted to drugs don't have much of a choice and then buying the drug for the rest of time, you're addicted to heroin.
It's not as though you're sitting there and making an economic calculation about whether another hit of heroin is going to be good for you or not.
Yes, but what if you could make a calculation as to what was in the drug you were taking? - Then I think you would see fewer overdose deaths because if you have a black market, you know, that's the ultimate opacity.
You don't know what you're putting in your body, even if you're the most rational person in the world.
So if you were able to Seek the substance that you wanted, and you knew what you were putting into your body, the chances of you putting something deadly in there are much, much lower.
So that might stop opioid deaths, but there's the other problem, which is that... It could also stop overdoses, which don't always lead to deaths.
Right.
Putting aside even the most catastrophic cases of overdoses or death, let's talk about the innervation of people, their inability to work, inability to get a job, or to think rationally about Many, many issues.
Is there an anti-libertarian case with regard to the drug war simply on the basis of you've actually deprived people of their own agency or they've deprived themselves of their agency and now they've become wards of the rest of society?
No, but funding the drug war has deprived people of their agency in that, you know, half a million people have died and that's too many.
You know, you've got people who are murdered, massacred by cartels, because although the drug war deals with the supply, kind of, it doesn't even do a good job of that, because there seems to be plenty of workarounds.
And I went to the El Chapo trial several times and listened to the testimony, and it was fascinating when they were talking about the creative ways they got drugs into this country, and it had nothing to do with the border wall.
They would find vehicles and fruit cans and everything else.
It's the demand.
And your drug war is not going to touch the demand.
And there are people who are going to put substances in their body.
And the government arbitrarily decides that this substance is bad, but this one is just fine.
And you have people who are killing themselves in a myriad of ways.
So do you think there's any distinction made among drugs at all, or just blanket libertarian policy on all drugs?
No, I think there is a distinction, but I don't think that marijuana deserves to be scheduled with heroin and meth.
Is that the distinction between heroin and meth and marijuana?
I think it's an important distinction.
I think that we should start, you know, and we're going to have to tackle drug policy incrementally because it doesn't make a lot of sense to just throw open the pharmacy cabinet and say, hey kids, have at it!
You know, and as individuals and as parents, of course, that's not what we want and that's not what people are pushing for.
But when you have a massive Black market.
That's when people are forced into criminal activity.
And, you know, they say marijuana is a gateway drug.
Marijuana is a gateway to drug dealers!
Drug dealers are the ones who have drugs.
It's not like people smoke weed for the first time, and they're like, oh man, I gotta go get some ecstasy, and then I gotta get some meth, and then, you know, top it off with a little bit of heroin.
That's not how it works.
And the people who do have an addiction that is crippling, those are people who should be able to get help.
And the behavioral economists would tell you that that basket is much fuller than the classical economists would.
So overall, let's shift to kind of modern day politics.
President Trump obviously elected with a minority of the popular vote, but with a large majority of the electoral college vote.
How do you think that he has performed as president?
You have to give him a grade.
It depends on what it is, because his grades are all over the map.
Like, you know, he's pretty good in math.
He's like a C student in history.
And, you know, maybe like a C- in English.
And he doesn't have just one grade.
And that's the interesting thing, because it really is the first postmodern presidency.
And we're experiencing it in a number of ways at the same time.
And that's a very bizarre thing.
And it's up to voters to separate his policies from his personality, because his personality at times can be very distracting, to the point of being annoying and unbearable, but then his policies and his swerve into deregulation and tax cutting, that's all great.
It's incomplete, but that part is satisfying.
If he can do more of that, it's all good.
But if he distracts everyone with his stupid pronouncements and tweets and impulsivity, then it's just a question of whether or not a majority of people get tired of that and and they no longer wanna make the separation So when President Trump was elected, I was concerned about a few things.
I was concerned about his policies, which have been much more conservative than I thought they would be, because who the hell knew what it was going to be.
And then I was concerned that he was going to soul-suck the Republican Party to be the party of tariffs and the party of big government.
Sort of happened, sort of, but not completely.
They were already the party that was tending towards some of those things.
And then I was concerned that he was going to cripple the ability of a non-democratic party, a Republican party, to win young voters, minorities, women.
And that's the one where I feel most fulfilled, unfortunately.
What do you make of the critique of President Trump that, in the long term, that the wins that we've gotten on policy may not outweigh the losses that we experience electorally?
I think things happen so quickly, and so much can happen between now and November.
You know, we've still got 14 months until the election.
And if the economy continues to improve, I do think that's a sort of Captain America shield for him.
And, you know, it allows him to defend against the slings and arrows of his own making.
I don't buy into the idea like African-American unemployment and Asian-American unemployment is at an all-time low.
Therefore, I'm not racist.
It's like I don't know that those two things are directly correlated.
And I think Michael Goodwin in the New York Post had a really great analysis of this after So let's take a look at the Democratic Party for a second.
So it's turned into a complete horror show over there.
There's no one who can take on the president, but the president can absolutely destroy his own chances of reelectability.
So let's take a look at the Democratic Party for a second.
So it's turned into a complete horror show over there.
There used to be some people over there who are even mildly interesting.
Elizabeth Warren back in 2003 was actually mildly interesting, believed in school choice and all of this, and now she's decided to go Bernie light.
And why do you think that the Democratic Party has moved so radically in this really unattractive direction?
I mean, all they had to do was not be crazy, and it appears that they have not been able to resist the impulse.
No, and it's head-shaking for people when Beto O'Rourke stands on the debate stage and says, you're right!
Yes, we're coming after your guns!
It's like, how dumb do you have to be?
How politically inept do you have to be to say something like that?
And, you know, I don't think that guy knows a trigger from a muzzle.
I really don't.
And, you know, it's interesting because Pete Buttigieg had to kind of correct him there.
And Elizabeth Warren, while I don't agree with her on most things, I do think the fact that she has been staking out, you know, very surgically her policy positions over a number of years just speaks to her Political intuition.
And she is the most politically intuitive person there.
I don't know that she has the killer left hook necessary to end the nomination process.
And, you know, Joe Biden isn't going anywhere, and it seems like the press is having a feed of the day, just tallying up his gaffes day after day, speech after speech, you know?
Joe Biden couldn't remember the word escalator!
You know, it's like, no matter what the headline is for the day.
And if the president just stood back a little bit, you know, maybe gave us another tax cut, you know, God forbid tackled entitlement reform, maybe got a couple things passed in terms of health care and price transparency and the few things that he's talked about, he would be in better standing.
And more people would feel good about that.
You know, I talked to a lot of people in the middle of the country and a lot of the women I talked to were like, I can't stand him.
He drives me crazy, but there's no way I'm voting for a socialist.
I mean, when you look at the Democratic Party then, if you were going to handicap this race, do you think that more emerges or do you think that Biden is able to stick this thing out?
I don't know.
I mean, just over the past couple of weeks, You know, Biden got past all the weird sort of pseudo sex stuff.
And then, you know, he had his eye explode and the gaffes and the teeth and everything like that.
And, you know, he's still there, but he's only going in one direction and it's not up.
Whereas Elizabeth Warren is really figuring out.
And her brain is interesting because she's obviously a person who understands systems.
And so she's figuring out systems and where people have failed and where their inconsistencies are.
And she makes herself more consistent.
And Kamala Harris hasn't been able to do that.
I thought Kamala Harris would be that candidate.
I thought she would be the more analytical, shrewd candidate.
And she's really kind of fallen off the map.
Yeah, her collapse has been astonishing to watch because you really thought after that first debate, OK, well, now she was going to make a move into Biden's share of the black vote and then she would wrap it up.
That's really Elizabeth Warren's hole in the electorate is the fact that there's not a single black person in the country apparently who supports Elizabeth Warren.
And everybody supports Biden because he was stapled to Obama's pant leg.
But now we're going to see how that plays out.
So looking forward to the 2020 election, let's say that Biden is the nominee.
You say that the economy is going to be sort of Sword and shield for President Trump.
Obviously if the economy tanks, he's in serious trouble.
Which candidate among the Democrats do you think stacks up best against Trump?
Not for Trump, for the Democrat.
Um, in terms of the economy or just general election?
I do, I do think it's Warren.
I think there are more people, I think the more that Elizabeth Warren emerges, Bernie Sanders kind of fades and people still have great affection for him and they do love his authenticity.
They love that he really believes in what he's talking about, even though they may disagree with the means to get there.
And Elizabeth Warren every once in a while is like, no, I like capitalism.
And it's like, no, you don't.
You're one of those, you didn't build that people.
She absolutely is.
So, you know, and you don't even have to get into her fake heritage to find some flaws with her.
But I do think she has filled the establishment gaps as well.
And the fact that she is willing to help out in the down ballot races and that she's gone to the Democrat Party and said, I will give you all of my donors and all of my email lists and everything else, even if I'm not the nominee.
And that makes them more likely to support her in, you know, the subtextual ways.
So one more libertarian question for you.
One of the areas that conservatives and libertarians are really at odds over is criminal justice reform.
A lot of folks who are conservative, myself included, I'm very skeptical of the sort of, we're going to restructure criminal justice and release huge numbers of prisoners onto the streets.
Yes, there are some people who are in jail for possession.
I'm fine with those people not being in jail for possession, but the fact is that the vast majority of people who are in prison are not in jail for possession.
They're there for drug dealing or they're there for violent crime, and the rehabilitation levels for people are exceedingly low.
People have extraordinarily high recidivism rates.
Well, they do for things like rape and sexual assault.
Uh, child sexual abuse and things like that, and I think those people are monsters and they should not be walking the streets.
They're homeless people who are mentally ill and they should not be in prison.
Yes, agreed.
I mean, is that, by the way, is that a place where the government should be active when it comes to taking care of the mentally ill, for example?
So you see huge populations of the homeless in New York City where I'm from.
I would rather, I would rather see homeless people given choices and given treatment and not involuntarily committed.
You know, that has become a popular trend lately.
And as a libertarian, I could never get on board with that.
But I do think there are ways of treating people.
And I think there are more humane ways of treating people than allowing them to live in their own feces and filth and tents on public sidewalks.
I I think it is disgusting.
And I think that Eric Garcetti should be ashamed of himself that he has allowed his city to malignantly become and mutate into something like that.
I mean, I will admit, I'm an advocate for involuntary, involuntary treatment for people who are seriously mentally ill.
My grandfather was a paranoid schizophrenic.
And if there had not been, you know, if it had been up to him, he would have been trying to hang himself on a routine basis and thinking the radio spoke to him.
And so it was only through treatment that he was able to get better.
A lot of people who are severely mentally ill do not simply, they really do not have the capacity.
Well, I'd rather see people like that receive treatment than Medicare for All or the Green New Deal.
You know, people who have health insurance, we should not be diverting money in public programs to people who can seek gainful employment.
But to people who truly are incapacitated, that's, you know, if you're going to have a safety net, that's where it should go.
So, earlier you mentioned entitlement reform, and you sort of, among the list of things you think President Trump should do.
President Trump campaigned in 2016, I never ever touched any entitlements.
I know, it sucks.
And that's a complete wish list of mine that has no basis in Trump reality.
I'm wondering, I mean, listen, I'd love entitlement reform too, so would Paul Ryan, but the question is whether that has basis in any reality for the American people.
Do you think that's something that the American people will ever get behind when Bush tried to touch it after 2004?
It basically ended his term, his second term.
He had nothing done from there on in.
Do you think that the American people have any desire or taste for entitlement reform, or is this thing going to go all the way down to austerity cuts?
It's going to go to austerity, absolutely, because no one's going to have the nards to tell old people, especially, because that's the worry, is if you tackle the entitlement monster, it means that you're, you know, stopping checks to retirees who don't have any savings, and that's You can't have a system that works like that.
Because you can't just abandon the most vulnerable, but also old people vote.
And I think that's what most politicians are scared of.
So, I have one final question for Kennedy.
That is, what is the biggest problem facing the country?
Also, I want her opinion on sex robots.
Yes, that's actually going to come up.
But, if you want to hear her answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, go to dailywire.com and click subscribe.
Kennedy, thanks so much for stopping by.
Thank you, Ben.
amazing.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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