Ben Shapiro dissects Obamacare’s absurdities—$400B Medicaid cuts, the "People Will Die provision," and forced abortion coverage for nuns—while mocking media hypocrisy over Trump’s NATO stance. His praise for Texas’ booming economy (2.7% job growth), no income tax, and gun-friendly culture contrasts with California’s decline, blaming leftist policies for driving migrants to Texas despite its conservative governance. The episode ends by framing Texas as America’s future model, teasing Michael Knowles’ return and critiquing Hollywood’s media bias through Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. [Automatically generated summary]
Is the Senate Health Care Bill an improvement over Obamacare?
Let's compare.
Under Obamacare, you can keep your doctor unless you can.
And if you like your current plan, up yours.
Under Obamacare, premiums go down unless you live in the continental United States or Alaska or Hawaii, where they skyrocket.
At the same time, policies become unavailable, forcing you to beg for the money you need to beg for the insurance you can no longer get.
You do, however, receive free gynecological care unless you're a woman.
Then you have to marry a guy with insurance.
Under Obamacare, you are forced to pay for abortions unless you're a nun, and then you are forced to perform abortions, preferably on other nuns, while Satan laughs and screams, I love Obamacare, in a terrifying, echoic voice that seems to contain the despairing cries of the damned.
Under Obamacare, your insurance covers any health expense over the $70,000 deductible.
This is not as expensive as it sounds because there are no available doctors.
You can, however, listen to old news reports about what a great president Obama was and how the utter collapse of his signature program is the fault of the Republicans who didn't vote for it.
After listening to the pro-Obama reports, you'll be put to death and turned into Soil and Green, a process that is not covered under the insurance you don't have to pay for the doctor who doesn't exist but whom you couldn't afford if he did.
Then you'll be eaten.
So that's Obamacare.
And while Democrats in Congress say the law only needs to be tweaked, most people who use Obamacare feel that the Democrats need to have their noses tweaked and then stretched away from their faces and then snapped back so hard that their entire bodies vibrate like a plucked string and then slowly shimmy out of Washington so that they can't do any more damage.
Now, let's compare the Senate bill.
As it now stands, the Senate bill addresses Obamacare's over $400 billion expansion of Medicaid by cutting the rate of growth to $8.50, so it will not reach full expansion until Thursday instead of Wednesday.
This portion of the bill is called the People Will Die provision because it causes Democrats to run around screaming people will die for no discernible reason.
The Senate bill also ends the Obamacare mandate, which forced you to buy insurance on penalty of death unless you were a nun, in which case it forced you to perform abortions before the penalty of death was carried out.
Finally, the Senate Health Care Bill arranges Obamacare's repeal by mandating a change in the definition of the word repeal so that it now means not repeal.
From henceforth, the word repeal will be used to describe the act of doing nothing while Democrats run around in hysterics.
I hope this clarifies the differences between Obamacare and the Senate bill and between the Senate bill and a free market featuring affordable health care, which you'll never see ever again.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Klavan, and this is The Andrew Klavan Show.
Hoorah Hooray Suits00:03:02
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bibby-zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, now here we are, and we are in Glenn Beck's Blaze Studios, one of the nicest studios in the world.
It really is spectacular.
We're here in Dallas on George W. Bush's birthday, and it's kind of lovely to be here because I'm sort of a Glenn Beck early responder, early adapter.
Because when Glenn was first starting his new enterprise, he would fly me out to New York where his tiny little studio was, and I would do some videos.
But they just felt they couldn't expand until they got rid of me.
And I think they were right.
They obviously got rid of me.
Now they have this beautiful, beautiful studio, and it really is terrific.
And I've been here many times and they always are incredibly efficient, incredibly well done.
Now you're looking at me, I know, and you're saying, where is the usually dapper, brilliantly dressed, incredibly debonair host that we know?
And why do you look like such a schlub?
Well, it's because I've been living out of my suitcase for days and my wife went home after the 4th of July and nobody irons my shirts and so I look like this.
But normally I look great and the reason is Indochino because at Indochino you can get tailor-made suits and shirts at a price you can afford.
It really is amazing.
It's very cool.
If in most in a lot of places, there will be a place you can actually go to and get all your measurements done and then they put them in their computer and they have them.
So whenever you want something new, you can then just get in touch with them and they'll send it to you.
If that's no good, if you don't have a place, it's too far away, you can do it.
You get your spouse to measure your, you know, take your measurements, send them in, same thing.
They will have them in their computer.
Then, then they will just tailor-make these suits and shirts any way you want them.
You can pick your cuffs, you can pick where the pockets are, you can pick what kind of collar you have.
And it really does, it really does give you an incredible fit.
I have them at home, stuff they made directly for me, and it really fits better than anything you're going to get off the rack.
This week, my listeners can get any premium Indochino suit for just $379 at Indochino.com when they enter Claven at checkout, K-L-A-V-A-N at checkout.
That's 50% off the regular price for a made-to-measure premium suit.
And even the regular price is low.
I mean, if you're talking of a tailor-made suit, a bespoke suit, as we say in England, and the shipping is free, that's IndoChino.com, promo code Clavin, for any premium suit for just $379 and free shipping.
It's an incredible deal for a suit that will fit you better than anything off the rack ever could.
All right, we have a special visit today from Michael Knowles later on in the show, but that will come after the break.
So we will say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube so you will have time to run for your life before Knowles comes off the air.
Jim Acosta On Russia00:15:11
No, you want to be here for that.
That is what you come here to see.
You come here to see the king of trolls, Michael Knowles.
He's been talking about what's right with Texas on this George W. Bush's birthday in Dallas.
And it is amazing.
I mean, we were here for the 4th of July.
I have to tell the story before you talk, before Knowles talks on the air.
We're here for the 4th of July.
We had this wonderful, wonderful party in a park in Slayton.
And this was before the fireworks morning, the guy's on a band singing country music, and there's all the people there.
And they had, as a fundraiser, they had these teenage cheerleaders.
I guess they were teenagers.
They were like 13, 14 years old.
And they're the cheerleaders.
And they would sit on a little platform.
And I'm sure you've seen this at your local fairs.
And little boys would throw balls at the target.
And if you hit the target, then you dunked the cheerleader.
And, you know, there's a vague thrill to dunking a cheerleader.
So Knowles says to me, Why don't you go over and do that?
And I would say, because that is the creepiest thing I've ever heard for an old man to come over because you get to pick which girls go.
He's like that one over there.
And by golly, I'll pay $2,000 to dunk that.
You know, it's three bucks for three balls.
Knowles goes over and does it.
And not only does he go over and do it like that creepy little lech he is, but he misses every throw.
So now the girl is sitting there going like, I don't know, older men, you know, I thought they'd be kind of, you know, and finally walks over and dunks the girl.
You push the target with your hand.
It was basically the creepiest.
It was like something out of Thailand.
I paid my $3.
I wanted to get my dunk.
To dunk your teenage cheerleader.
All right.
So I have to say, I am so tired of talking about CNN.
But I can't, you know, there's actually some real news.
Trump is traveling overseas.
He was in Poland today, and he's now in Germany, which should be really interesting.
And, you know, it's important that Trump is in Poland because Poland feels quite reasonably under threat from our old friend, the Ruskies.
You know, the Russians, they have moved into Ukraine, into Crimea, and Eastern Europe feels like, oh, no, they're coming back.
And they want to hear that Donald Trump is going to support NATO and going to support their protection, but also because Poland is the conservative outsider in the EU, and the EU is fighting with them about taking more Muslim refugees.
And people in Poland have never been shy about not wanting people to come in to their country.
And they're just saying, no, these people don't like us.
And of course, that is part of Trump's appeal.
So, first of all, you've got a lot of things going on.
You've got the North Korea inter-ballistic missile thing, you know, and now how are we going to respond to that?
And Trump's over there and he gets asked, you know, what's he going to do on North Korea?
So let's listen.
I just want to hear the way the press reacted.
Here's the press conference he gave with the president of Poland, Andrei Dudai.
I think his name is, that's from the Camptown Races.
I think that's after that.
They've named Dudai.
No, that's Duda Duda.
I'm sorry.
Making funny name jokes.
That's so low.
Don't laugh at those, Jay.
It just encourages me.
All right.
They asked him what he's going to do about North Korea.
And here is his important reply.
As far as North Korea is concerned, I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
I don't like to talk about what I have planned, but I have some pretty severe things that we're thinking about.
That doesn't mean we're going to do them.
I don't draw red lines.
President Obama drew a red line, and I was the one that made it look a little bit better than it was, but that could have been done a lot sooner, and you wouldn't have had the same situation that you have right now in Syria.
That was a big mistake.
But I think we'll just take a look at what happens over the coming weeks and months with respect to North Korea.
It's a shame that they're behaving this way, but they are behaving in a very, very dangerous manner, and something will have to be done about it.
So here's the president of the United States talking about a nuclear power.
We've got some pretty severe things on the table.
He says something's got to be done.
You would think this would be the headline.
No.
Because now the reporter, he's an American conservative reporter.
Now he asks him about what's going on with CNN and Trump let's fly.
I think what CNN did was unfortunate for them.
As you know, now they have some pretty serious problems.
They have been fake news for a long time.
They've been covering a very dishonest way.
Do you have that also, by the way, Mr. Fresno?
What CNN and others, I mean, not others.
NBC is equally as bad, despite the fact that I made them a fortune with The Apprentice, but they forgot that.
But I will say that CNN has really taken it too seriously, and I think they've hurt themselves very badly, very, very badly.
And what we want to see in the United States is honest, beautiful, free, but honest press.
We want to see fair press.
I think it's a very important thing.
We don't want fake news.
And by the way, not everybody is fake news, but we don't want fake news.
Bad thing.
Very bad for our country.
So I have to say, it made me a little nervous when he turned to Duda and said, you know, you have reporters in your country because Duda's been a lot tougher on the press than I want to see anybody be here, right?
He's actually tried to take over, you know, make government appointments into the public press.
And so I don't want Donald Trump to hear that and go like, huh, I didn't know you could do that.
You know, it's like, no, you're in Poland, Mr. President.
You can do it in Poland, but you can't do it in America.
Oh, well, never mind then.
So now, Jim Acosta, our old pal, Jim Acosta, what's his problem?
Oh my gosh, he unleashes on Trump.
He says, I want to make sure we play the right cut here because it gets funnier and funnier as he goes along.
First of all, he let me make sure I've got.
Yes, first, he responds to Trump's attack.
Jim Acosta, this is loudmouth.
And remember, just to remind you, CNN has now doxxed an ordinary citizen because they put out a meme or a gif or a gif or whatever you call it of Donald Trump body slamming a guy with CNN's head pasted on.
And this is like the worst thing that has ever happened to the Constitution in the living memory of anyone at CNN, which goes back all the way to last Tuesday.
And so, you know, they're so upset and they think this is the biggest story ever.
And here is Jim Acosta responding.
Oh, first they ask him this question.
They ask him, you know, isn't it indecent for him to go overseas and attack us on this trivial story that we've been covering now longer than we covered the sniper attack on the congressman.
So here is Jim Acosta unloading on Trump.
This is cut seven.
Unfortunately, this was not a surprise at all that the president would take the first question from an American reporter during his foreign trip here, and that it would be from the friendly news media, a friendly reporter who teed up a question about CNN.
For the president to go off on CNN as fake news, to me, just made this entire spectacle seem like a fake news conference.
This was not an attempt by the president to seek out a question from somebody who was going to challenge him on the issues.
David Martasco and I have known each other for a long time.
He covered Donald Trump out on the campaign trail.
I think he's a really good guy.
But in this instance, I think the conservative news media was being used here.
And I do think that's unfortunate.
What I love about this is like he unleashes on the president.
The president is actually making news overseas and doing this.
And he unleashes on the guy.
He says, oh, it's fake news.
It's a fake news conference.
The whole thing.
And he goes on.
Now he goes into the famous CNN two step.
All right.
This is the dance.
Step one is you put your foot in your mouth.
Step two is you shoot yourself in the foot, thereby blowing your own head off.
Because now Acosta makes an utter fool of himself.
Now he goes after the president about fake news.
Listen to this.
This is amazing.
This is the other Acosta cut.
A couple of things we do want to point out, though, very quickly.
One is the president once again said that Barack Obama did nothing from August to November about Russian meddling.
That is simply fake news.
President Obama talked to Vladimir Putin at a G20 summit in September about all of this.
To say otherwise is simply fake news.
Barack Obama went farther, by the way, in that meeting with Vladimir Putin than President Trump is promising to do himself.
He's not even promising to bring up election meddling in his bilateral with Vladimir Putin.
So for the president to say, well, Barack Obama did nothing, he is at this point promising to do less than nothing on that front.
The other thing that was fake news coming from President Trump is when he said, well, I keep hearing it's 17 intelligence agencies that say Russia meddled in the election.
I think it's only three or four.
Where does that number come from?
Where is this three or four number come from?
My suspicion, Chris and Poppy, is that if we go to the administration and ask them for this question, I'm not so sure we're going to get an answer.
And if we do get an answer, it'll probably be off camera.
Have to ask him.
It was in the New York Times.
The number comes from the correction that the New York Times and the Associated Press ran.
That this number 17 was in fact fake news, just like Donald Trump says.
Acosta is accusing Trump of fake news, and he's getting it wrong in the process.
And what's so fascinating about the correction itself is it came days and weeks after the Daily Wire covered it.
It came weeks.
They're just not reading us.
They're just not reading us.
They don't know what's going on.
So there's Acosta accusing Trump of fake news, creating fake news in the process.
Plus, he's protecting Obama about this thing with the election.
And I'll get to that in a minute.
But first, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But stay with us.
Come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can hear the rest of the show.
You'll get to hear Michael Knowles, and I know you love Michael Knowles.
And you can subscribe while you're there at the old low rate still.
We're still in the old low rates of the lousy eight bucks a month.
Lousy eight bucks a month.
You get to be in the mailbag.
You get to ask questions.
If you subscribe for a year, you get Ben Shapiro's new book about the White Sox.
It's great.
And then on July 10th, I keep forgetting the day.
July 10th, the rates go up to, I think, $20,000 a day.
And we'll come and collect, you know, repossess your car and everything.
So come on over to TheDailyWire.com.
So I just, I couldn't help covering that thing with Acosta.
I mean, it really was funny.
The other thing he's talking about is that, you know, this is the big, this is the big show part of this trip, is that Trump is going to go talk to Putin.
And so nobody knows what he's going to say.
I'm just hoping they just have an arm wrestling match.
I don't actually want them to discuss anything.
I just want, you know, we are two strong men.
We arm wrestle.
Whoever wins gets country.
Aha.
You know, that's the kind of thing we want to see from Donald Trump.
I don't want to see this talking and reasoning and, you know, policy stuff.
I just want, maybe they should actually take off their shirts and do the whole, you know, just in the mud or something.
Yes, now your country belongs to me.
You know, I think that would be much better.
But nobody knows what he's going to say.
Jim Acosta is attacking the president.
First of all, because he insulted the precious.
He insulted Obama, said Obama didn't do enough, which is true.
He knew that the election was being hacked, didn't tell the people, lied to the people, basically said nobody could hack our elections.
But from Donald Trump's point of view, everybody is hacking everybody else's election.
Everybody is trying to mess up everybody's election.
We know the vote count wasn't changed.
There's no evidence that the voting count was changed.
There's no evidence that they actually affected anybody in any way.
And so Donald Trump feels this has been made a big deal simply to delegitimize his presidency.
And he's right.
He is right.
Of course, it's bad, but it's kind of like when you catch a spy in your country, you catch an Israeli spy, and we all have to clutch our pearls and grab our foreheads and say, oh, my God, there's a spy.
We know we're all spying on each other.
We know this stuff is going on.
Donald Trump is absolutely right.
There's much more important stuff to talk about, namely the Ukraine, namely whether we're going to start arming the rebels in the Ukraine and whether or not we're going to undo their sanctions, the sanctions that are against them and all this stuff.
And Putin is going to be asking for stuff and anything they give him is going to be perceived as weakness.
So we'll see how Trump deals with this guy who he is supposed to have been in bed with.
I just want to cover briefly before we get to Knowles.
I want to just talk about the speech that he made in Poland because they gave him a hero's welcome.
They turned out chanting and cheering.
He did the thing that the media was complaining about that he didn't do in his last trip.
He said, you know, that we will in fact cover the NATO agreement.
An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.
And the people are yelling and they're chanting Donald Trump, Donald Trump, President Trump.
They love him because he represents their point of view.
And he made this very, very ringing speech about defending the West.
So let's listen first of all to what he said about Russia.
Today the West is also confronted by the powers that seek to test our will, undermine our confidence, and challenge our interests.
To meet new forms of aggression, including propaganda, financial crimes, and cyber warfare, we must adapt our alliance to compete effectively in new ways and on all new battlefields.
We urge Russia to cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere and its support for hostile regimes, including Syria and Iran.
and to instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.
This is very important, right?
This is an important thing that he's doing.
First, he's telling the Polish people he's not going to let them mess with them.
This is everything that they were complaining about on the last trip.
And the media is just going to ignore all this, but it doesn't matter because they heard it and they were cheering and people saw it.
It's on TV.
We don't need the media to tell us what's going on.
We can see it with our own eyes.
He was basically slapping Putin upside the head.
This is what Obama never did.
Putin knew he could get away with every move he made in Syria and the Ukraine and Crimea because he knew Obama would never fight back.
He knew he was a weak president and he doesn't know what Trump is going to do.
And the thing about Putin is he is a bad guy.
All these people, there are people on the right who keep saying, you know, like, oh, Putin, you know, he's a strong leader.
Putin is everything we hate.
He is a bone-crushing, press-crushing, people-crushing, freedom-crushing dictator.
Terrorism and Texas Borders00:16:31
He is in the mold.
He's not obviously Adolf Hitler, but he's in the mold of those fascist dictators.
He has destroyed any chance of freedom the former Soviet Union had.
When the Soviet Union fell, it had a brief window when we could have encouraged them.
It's not our fault.
They have to do it themselves, but we didn't really encourage them.
We accepted Putin every step that he made.
We gave him legitimacy.
We sent the Olympics to Sochi.
We did all the stuff that he wanted us to do.
We treated him like a real person.
The reset button from Barack Obama, George W. Bush saying, I looked into his soul, all this stuff.
And all Putin is, is a tiger who will eat whatever he can get.
He will eat whatever meat we put in front of him.
And if Trump is as good a dealmaker and as good a judge of character as he says he is, he'll give him nothing without getting something back.
And not just promises, not just smiles, not just looking into his soul, but he will get something back.
And that's going to be the telling moment in this trip.
But so far, still, just hearing this voice again, hearing the voice of America speaking up for the West after eight years of this little will-of-the-wisp president who could not find it in himself to love his country and to love with a country and a culture that had given him everything he had, everything he had.
It's just refreshing.
I'm sorry, it is just refreshing.
Whatever problems I have with Trump, whatever problems anybody has with Trump, it is really refreshing to hear him talk as he talks here about defending the West.
That our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will.
Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means, but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have.
The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.
Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?
Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders?
Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?
We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on earth.
But if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive.
Funny, the press, some of the people in the media got a hold of this and says, oh my God, he's talking about families and values and God, we hate this.
This is terrible.
You know, on the plane coming out here, I was sitting next to my wife.
My wife was reading People Magazine, which she reads on planes.
And I'm looking over her shoulder and the magazine, to put it politely, is trash.
But it's not the trashiness of celebrity culture that bothered me.
It was the way they legitimized behavior, the behavior of celebrities of all kinds.
It was obviously despicable and disgusting.
So there was one article I saw on Kuhn's Puff Daddy, whatever the hell, you know, and it was like, what a wonderful father he is.
And his strong mothers of his children, you know, really support the family.
All three of the mothers of his children, who he never married, are producing this children.
And, you know, I don't mean to pick on him because the whole attitude of the magazine was this, you know, what a wonderful family, the sentimentalization of unmarried, of unmarried couples, of illegitimate children, things that we know, we know have bad effects on people.
And this is what the media wants to sell you, that you can turn into a girl.
If your boy plays with a doll for 10 minutes, you should immediately take him out and give him hormone injections.
This kind of craziness that they are trying to, a toxic attitude that they're trying to inject into the culture.
And I am not a reactionary culturally.
I mean, that's not my thing.
You know, I don't care what people do.
I understand that people have different attitudes.
I understand that people have problems and sexual problems and sexual differences and all this stuff.
But to tell us that the truth is not the truth, that boys are not boys, that girls are not girls, that families are not families, is ridiculous.
And it is, I'm sorry, it is refreshing to hear Trump talk about this.
I want to end with one more cut, and then we will get to Michael Knowles.
I just wanted this one cut on defending us against Islam, because this, I think, is what the people in Poland turned out to hear.
While we will always welcome new citizens who share our values and love our people, our borders will always be closed to terrorism and extremism of any kind.
We are fighting hard against radical Islamic terrorism and we will prevail.
Of course, that's what the Poles want to hear because they're defending their borders.
They don't want people, more Islamists coming in and causing them the kinds of problems they're getting in Sweden.
And I just want to end with this one thought, that the idea that for eight years Barack Obama could not say the word Islam in connection with terrorism, you know, you think about that for a minute and you think what it means, what it says about him, but what does it say about his attitude toward us?
What did he think we were going to do?
What did he think we were going to do if he confirmed what we all saw with our eyes, that Islam, there is a problem in the house of Islam that is creating terrorism, whether it's inherent in the religion or whether it's not, it is true.
It's happening around the world every day.
I think something like 75% of the armed conflicts involved in Islam right now, most terrorism involves Islam.
What did they think we were going to do if they told the truth?
They thought we were going to go out with our Bibles and our guns and throw our Bibles and shoot our guns, whatever the hell they think we do with our Bibles and guns and set the mosque on fire and start tormenting people if they didn't tell the truth.
When in fact, it's the other way around.
When you deprive people of the truth, that's what makes them frustrated.
That's what gets them angry.
That's what makes them go insane.
And speaking of insane, Michael Knowles is with us today.
The man who picked out a little girl to dunk in water, and yet somehow he runs free on this set today.
I got to get out of this state before the police catch up to me.
No, there are, this is not California.
There are laws about this stuff here.
You know what I am insane from is we've been in Texas now about four or five days.
I have not gone more than 27 minutes since I've landed without eating a slab of beef.
It has been disgusting to watch you.
I have to say.
I'm getting the beef shakes.
I'm getting the beef shakes all right.
I know.
Like the guy in the Denzel Washington movie who's eating people and he shakes it.
You have eaten stuff that I didn't know it was legal to eat.
Yeehaw.
You got to get down to Texas.
This place is great.
And, you know, right when we landed in Texas, the top trend on Twitter became, Texas, America's future is Texas.
Ah, okay.
That's a little strange.
You just landed here.
What does that mean?
It was referring to an article in the New Yorker.
Now, I have a strict rule.
I never read anything in the New Yorker ever, but I said, okay, if it's trending, we're in Texas.
It's the 4th of July.
I guess I'll give this a read.
It was a 19,000-word article in the New Yorker.
You know my feelings on lengthy, wordy literature.
I read the whole thing.
But I thought, America's future is Texas.
This is terrific.
America's, you know, zippity-doo-dahl.
Let's play the happiness montage.
The author, Lawrence Wright, took a different view.
The subheader said, With right-wing zealots taking over the legislature, even as the state's demographics shift leftward, Texas has become the nation's bellwether.
Texas is the nation's bellwether.
Now, as a right-wing zealot myself, I thought I would look at some of those economic indicators and see what that means for the rest of the country.
The shift rightward that he's referring to happened after 2003.
Really, it's been happening for a century.
But Texas, since Reconstruction, had been Democratic.
And in 2003, there was some redistricting to get rid of the Democratic gerrymandering and maybe in a moment of candor have a little Republican gerrymandering in there.
Since then, the Republicans took over the Texas House of Representatives.
Then, a little over 10 years later, in 2015, Republicans took over the Texas State Senate.
And after, beginning with George W. Bush and Rick Perry, and now Greg Abbott, we have the governor's house as well.
So Republicans run this state.
What has that meant for Texas?
Before we get into all of the wonderful prosperity that this has brought, I would like a moment coming from New York and California to marvel at how they set up their state government here.
It's wonderful.
It is wonderful.
In Texas, the legislature meets once every two years.
They meet for 140 calendar days.
They're paid a little over $20,000 per year on average.
I love it.
Because they're only paid when they meet.
So, you know, $40,000 better get them through two years.
Right.
And the legislature cannot call a special session.
So in other legislatures and U.S. Congress, you can call a special session.
Only the governor can call the special session.
So it's up to Greg Abbott if Greg Abbott wants to pass a bill through.
The redistricting plan was called in a special session.
Right.
Several special sessions, actually, after Democratic obstruction.
They were the specialist sessions.
But during that special session, the legislature is only allowed to consider what the governor explicitly says.
Excellent.
So they can't go nuts and start raising taxes.
They can't go nuts.
No man's property is safe while the legislature is in session.
That's right.
And so even the special session that only the executive can call for limits the scope of what that legislature can do.
As a result, you get a big, free state.
Nice.
So since this time, first of all, in Texas, there's no state income tax.
Our state of California.
It's still my heart.
Over 13% income tax in California.
Last year, Texas had the 10th largest economy in the world.
Is that right?
The state of Texas had the 10th largest economy in the world.
This was last year.
Obviously, there was a little dip in the oil industry, oil and gas industry, which hurt the jobs numbers a little bit, knocked Texas down a little bit.
But all economic indicators show that there's a recovery in oil and gas.
Right.
And the unemployment numbers are looking great, and economic prospects for Texas this year are looking excellent.
That's incredible.
So the Dallas Federal Reserve actually upped its job growth projections to 2.7% this year.
Excellent numbers.
One thing I've noticed walking around everywhere from West Texas coming out here, you can carry guns everywhere.
Yeah.
You can carry guns everywhere.
Actually, the author of that New Yorker piece complains about this in a way that I think is a wonderful marvel.
You can skip the line going into the state capitol if you show your carry permit because you don't have to go through the metal detector because obviously you're carrying a gun.
You know, it's amazing.
Everybody here is so nice and so polite.
And that may have something to do with it.
Everybody knows you do not want to start trouble when everybody's packing a gun.
That's absolutely true.
I do love that the Capitol has created an incentive to carry a gun.
You get to skip the line through the metal detector.
But I will say, my fiancé when we came here was floored coming from New York and LA that people can be nice in this country.
Oh, yes.
I know.
I know.
You know, and it's funny.
LA, people are nice in L.A.
I don't want to say they're not, but people are so nice the minute you leave the coasts.
That's right.
I mean, it is like a different country, and they're so kind, and they will go out of their way for you, and they'll treat you like a neighbor no matter who you are.
And, you know, they look at us.
Let's face it, they look at us, they know exactly who we are.
They know exactly what most people from Los Angeles think of them, and yet they continue to be kind.
They tease us and troll us a little bit, but always with good nature and all this.
It is amazing.
And it's amazing, too, how much time it's taken.
All we've done is go from west part of Texas to a more eastern part of Texas.
That's a long time for that tiny sliver of the country between Los Angeles and New York.
That little bit of the country.
I don't think we've even covered most of it yet.
You know, I noticed when you were talking about this New Yorker article, you said a really interesting thing.
They're complaining that the government is going further to the right, while the demographics are going further to the left.
But why are the demographics going further to the left?
You have seen the wrinkle in my celebration here.
Well, they're all coming from our state, California.
You're kidding.
That is right.
For eight years in a row now, Harris County, Texas has added the most citizens to their county of any county in the entire country for eight years in a row.
And this is true statewide.
Statewide, Texas has added a lot of people.
In 2015, 200,000 people moved into Texas.
And to put that into perspective, New York, the capital of the world, the greatest city in the world, lost 73,000 people in that year.
They're probably all here.
They're probably all coming down here.
From 2005 to 2015, 156,000 Californians moved to Texas.
That is incredible.
And one of the reasons it's incredible, I mean, to tell the truth, just to speak bluntly, it's hot here.
That's right.
You know, it's hot here.
And in California, where we live, it is perfect.
It is perfect most of the year, 50 weeks of the year.
The weather is beautiful and perfect.
And here, it's hot.
So that means that people are leaving paradise and coming to this very hot place because of the way it's run.
It is interesting that beginning from the age of discovery onward, people left nice civilized places to go to terrible wastelands and be free and be free and start a new business.
So will these people understand?
I mean, this is the million-dollar question.
They have turned, they're like locusts.
They sweep into the nice places.
Because California used to be a red state.
And they came to California.
It was a great state.
And now it's sinking into the sea from just the weight of the spending, which is almost all graft.
I mean, let's face it, all these programs that are sold to us on compassion and helping the poor and all this stuff.
It really is just government work.
It's just more money going into the government.
So will these people understand that the reason they're here is the right-wing government?
That's why they're here.
Well, I do worry.
This gets to my essential theory about leftism and leftists, which is that they want the structure of the thing.
They want the appearance of the thing, but they don't want the essence of the thing.
They like decaffeinated coffee.
And there is this worry.
There was some hope because the Attorney General in California actually barred state employees from business trips to Texas because Texas won't let men use the ladies' room.
This is true.
When Texas took up bathroom laws, the California Attorney General barred state employees from state-funded travel.
It wasn't enough to stop the hordes of people fleeing that state.
That's amazing.
And there is a little bit of hope too, because disproportionately, the people leaving California for Texas are lower income.
So there is some hope that people who aren't cultural elites, people aren't moving their film studios down here, that people that Donald Trump has shown a disproportionate ability to speak to are coming to Texas.
That's the most optimistic I can be.
But obviously, certain states that have been affected largely by these patterns, like Austin, have already gotten weirder and weirder.
Well, Austin, that's their saying, keep Austin weird.
You know, with Illinois and Connecticut and New Jersey going down the drain, really circling the drain because of the spending and the craziness and the stuff that chases businesses away, and people just crowding into this state where, as I say, it's hot.
There are rattlesnakes here for crying out loud.
Tarantulas.
Tarantulas, I know.
And yet, and yet people come here because it is just that well run.
And the reason it's well run is because they just don't run it that much.
They let the people run.
You know, walking around, I did see a shirt.
Don't California, My Texas00:03:23
I have to buy it.
Someone has to tell me where to get it.
It says, don't California, my Texas.
That's great.
And I live in California.
I'm only visiting Texas.
But I am pleading with you.
Do not California, my Texas.
But feel free to Texas our California.
That's right.
Because as the article in New Yorker promises, America's future could be Texas.
We've seen an encouraging six months.
And hopefully America learns the lessons of Texas.
You know, this is the funny thing.
It's supposed to be a laboratory of states where each state is a laboratory of ideas.
best idea wins but it's like the best idea they just want to ruin it so that they don't lose their graft and their and their that's exactly right During the Obama era, Texas created more jobs than the next six states combined.
So learn the lessons and don't make Texas like those other states.
All right, so you're going to come back here Monday?
That's right.
And then, no, you went back to the back.
Not here.
And then you're going to get your own podcast.
That is true.
I will.
That is the rumor.
I hope you don't become so incredibly big that you won't occasionally visit and chat.
Well, yeah, you can talk to my assistant.
I'll have my assistant.
Say all your assistant.
All right.
Michael Knowles, thank you very much.
And listen to his podcast when it comes up.
And you and I will also have a, are also putting together a special podcast that we'll talk about.
That is very exciting.
And we'll talk a little bit more about it.
It's a little different than what we're doing now.
That is different.
It's off the political grid.
All right.
Stuff I like, and then I will get out of here.
I've been talking.
I was talking yesterday about Absence of Malice, one of the very few Hollywood movies that depicts the press as irresponsible and oppressive.
It was during a very brief period when movie stars woke up to the fact that the press was ruining their lives and thought, oh, this might actually happen to regular people too.
Not that we care, but maybe they'd like to see a movie about it.
But you should also read the novel Scoop, 1938 novel by the great, great English writer Evelyn Waugh.
Now, people have forgotten Evelyn Waugh, but if you've ever heard of P.G. Woodhouse, the Jeeves and Wooster novels, Evelyn Waugh was that kind of writer, except about more serious topics.
He actually was more of a satirist.
And of course, the one story everyone has heard is his non-satirical novel, Brideshead Revisited, which is a very beautiful novel.
But Scoop is his novel about the press because Evelyn Waugh was stationed in Obsidia and he actually got the scoop that Mussolini was going to invade and he sent it in and they threw it away.
They just binned it.
They didn't know, I guess they didn't take it seriously and they just binned it.
So he wrote this very funny novel about this young man who's like just a, he's just a, what is he working?
He writes about nature and somehow he gets sent overseas to a make-believe country and he is sent over to become a war correspondent.
And it is about how the, it's about fake news.
It is a comedy about fake news.
It's very, very funny.
Parts of it are laugh out loud funny, which is hard to do in a novel, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh.
If you want to just see the press as it really is instead of as the press depicts itself, it's a really terrific novel to read.
All right, tonight we travel back to California.
We're all a little bit exhausted, but we will have one more show.
We have a Friday show, so it'll be a shorter Clavenless weekend because I know we had a long Clavenless weekend for the 4th of July.
We will be back again tomorrow in California with more taxes, harder to get guns.
I don't know why we're going back exactly, but we are.