Ben Shapiro and Gary Wolfram dissect the Democratic Party’s moral collapse, mocking Biden’s alleged misconduct—dismissed by Pelosi but weaponized by Sanders’ allies—while tying it to progressive tolerance of Clinton-era scandals. Wolfram argues capitalism lifts the poorest 10% 11x more than welfare states, debunking Scandinavian socialism as entitlement traps. The episode pivots to free speech, defending Denise McAllister’s firing amid leftist backlash while contrasting it with Shapiro’s own Baylor censorship, framing the left’s double standards as proof of its authoritarian drift. [Automatically generated summary]
There are now so many Democrats running for president that election watchdogs fear the party may be planning to just invade the White House and seize control by force of numbers.
Communists, criminals, knuckleheads, and sexual predators have all joined the race, and those are only the frontrunners.
The problem the candidates face is how to distinguish themselves so that after their inevitable loss, they can still manage to wangle a talk show out of CNN before enough people cut their cable service to send the unwatchable live factory spiraling into the oblivion it so richly deserves, taking the former candidate with it.
So, in the spirit of bipartisan goodwill and vicious anti-Democrat hilarity, let's take a quick look at what some of these lovable clowns are doing to help themselves stand out in the massive, massive crowd.
Joe Biden hasn't declared yet, but is already attempting to fashion a campaign that appeals to women voters.
Biden is experimenting with such campaign slogans as, oh, baby, your hair smells so fine, vote for me in 2020, and let me whisper in your ear, I want to be your president.
After some initial out-of-the-gate excitement, Beto O'Rourke's campaign hit a slight setback when voters realized he was an idiot.
So Beto is now trying to revive the excitement with his new slogan.
The wonderful thing about Beto is Beto's a wonderful thing.
His top is made out of rubber.
His bottom is made out of spring.
He's bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, fun, O'Rourke in 2020.
When an aide remarked that was actually the Tigger song from Disney's Winnie the Pooh, Beto knocked him down and sat on his chest.
Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is keeping her slogan simple with Kamala Harris.
She's sinister and dishonest and will say anything to get elected.
Plus, she's a black woman.
Plus, maybe she'll sleep with you in exchange for power like she did with Willie Brown.
Democrat politics, that just could be the winning formula.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boom.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Kamala Harris Controversy00:15:14
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is it easy.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
The poet Shelley wrote, Nothing in the world is single.
All things by a law divine in one's spirit meet and mingle.
The poem is called Love's Philosophy, and basically it was Shelley's fancy way of talking some 19th century babe into going to bed with him.
Poets are good at that.
Recently, however, the law divine that brings men and women together seems to have become unenforceable.
A new survey from the University of Chicago says more than half of young people between 18 and 34 do not have a steady partner.
More of these young folks than ever before report having no children, and more than in any year since 2012 aren't married.
And lest you think these young folks are just having too much fun hooking up on the latest dating app, apparently not.
The CDC says the number of teenagers having less sex has plummeted, has climbed over the last 25 years or so.
Now, one thing we know, if the problem is philosophical, it can't be due to conservatives.
We haven't changed a thing.
We're still droning on and on about how sex should take place in marriage between a man and a woman and maybe a few costumes and mechanical devices.
Maybe that's too much information.
So there is something about the way leftists think of sex that's taking all the joy out of it.
Since that's the first time anyone has ever used the word leftist and joy in the same sentence, I'm guessing that must be true.
First, we're going to talk about all that, but first let us talk about Ring.
I was telling you the other day about our producer, Jonathan A. He's not a producer anymore.
He's now one of the many, many royal leaders of the Daily Wire.
And, you know, if Jonathan were a really bright guy, he'd be working somewhere else, but he's bright enough not to let someone in when they knock at his door at 3 o'clock in the morning.
And luckily, he had a ring doorbell so he could see them and talk to them and check them out and send them on their way.
Ring's mission is to make neighborhoods safer.
You might already know about their smart video doorbells and cameras that protect millions of people everywhere.
But they also have the package that turns on a spotlight when people show up.
It's motion activated.
You need to see them, talk to them no matter where you are, right on your phone.
As a listener, you have a special offer on a Ring starter kit that's available right now with a video doorbell and motion-activated floodlight cam.
The starter kit has everything you need to start building a ring of security around your home.
Just go to ring.com/slash clavin.
That's ring.com/slash clavin.
From now on, anyone shows up at your door, just you can talk to them right through the doorbell and just say, How do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
So, I'm still here in Hillsdale, as you can see by the sign behind me, which is just an absolute, I gotta say, I'm never coming back.
There's no reason to come back to LA.
I mean, it's like there's no traffic, it's beautiful, the people are nice, which is already a change of pace from where we live.
But it really is a great place.
We had our first seminar and talking to very, very smart people, which is also a change from being at the Daily Wire.
You know, I mean, I'm talking to people who actually think about things and are educated and have ideas.
And it was just really, it was really a good experience.
Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's troubles won't go away.
And they mean, there's a lot of meaning to be had here, both political meaning and in terms of the way the left looks at sexuality.
The guy hasn't even announced yet, but he has got a massive lead over everybody else.
And yesterday we talked about Lucy Flores, who was complaining about the way Biden has of sneaking up on women and rubbing their shoulders or sniffing their hair and all this.
She's a former Democrat politician.
Now there's a new story in the Hartford Current that's in Connecticut.
A Connecticut woman says Joe Biden touched her inappropriately and rubbed noses with her during a 2009 political fundraiser in Greenwich when he was vice president.
We've gone a long way from Harvey Weinstein.
I mean, before we started out with a guy who was actually, I'm almost certain, he was actually dragging women into his casting couch.
And now we've got people who rub noses.
So it's kind of going downhill a little bit.
But she says it wasn't sexual, but he did grab me by the head, Amy Lapos, her name is.
He put his hand around my neck and pulled me to rub noses with me.
When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.
She says, I never filed a complaint, to be honest, because he was the vice president.
I was a nobody.
There's absolutely a line of decency.
There's a line of respect.
Crossing that line is not grandfatherly.
It's not cultural.
It's not affection.
It's sexism or misogyny.
So interestingly, Joe is getting a lot of defenders now.
Nancy Pelosi spoke up and she said this sort of thing shouldn't be disqualifying.
And on the view of all places, on the view, they're speaking out in his defense.
He came down to do you a favor.
He was at your fundraiser.
You had every right to say, you know what?
I said, I don't do that, Joe.
But can I say that?
The media is doing some of this too.
Stephanie Carter, who is the wife of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, published a blog Sunday defending Joe Biden over a viral photo.
Yes, this viral photo came.
And he was nervous in this experience, and he kept his hand on my shoulders as a mean of offering his support.
And she said to him, Thank you for letting him feel.
They were all shown earlier in the day, and it made her feel more frank.
Let's not forget that picture.
Joe Biden knows them.
Yeah.
He was behind her whispering to, so you have to stop characterizing stuff, mischaracterizing it.
That's all.
So for her, it was a comfortable experience.
For the other woman, it was not.
But don't sit and wait and say, I'm uncomfortable on national television.
Right.
Because it makes us suspect of your.
Listen, you thought it was.
So this is very interesting and just makes me feel.
I mean, as always with the left, we're almost always watching something about power.
They'll say it's about sex.
They'll say it's about race.
They'll say it's about morality.
But it's almost always really about power.
And Joe Biden's over in Axios.
saying Joe Biden's advisors believe the coverage of these allegations of inappropriate behavior is being stoked by rival Democrats, a dynamic that could actually fire up the vice president at a time when others see success as increasingly improbable.
Several around Biden think advisors to Bernie Sanders are at least partly behind the anti-Biden campaign.
One prominent backer thinks Biden will run and is ready to kill Bernie in his, that's a quote, an unquote.
You know, that's very interesting as two white-haired white guys basically arguing it out, fighting for the lead in the Democrat Party, because both of these guys are polling at the top and Biden, I think, is polling right now beyond Trump, above Trump.
So he's a guy they think might have a chance to win.
And obviously, that's the guy they want to take out.
Interestingly, the establishment is with him.
Even the networks, their coverage, if you listen to their coverage, it's pretty sympathetic.
Listen to this.
We're still weeks away from Biden's anticipated entry into the presidential race.
And the accusation made over the weekend speaks to a part of his behavior that some find harmless, but that his accuser says deserves more scrutiny.
As the immediate frontrunner, he's going to expect a lot of scrutiny, especially as standards for what used to be acceptable interactions have changed for a lot of women in this Me Too era.
And fighting back.
Former Vice President Joe Biden respond to those accusations of inappropriate affection by the woman who said he kissed her head and invaded her space at a campaign event.
Now the women coming to his defense.
So you know that that was GMA.
You know they were for Biden when they take that tone, fighting back, he's fighting back.
You know, when they sound like that, they're making their making, that's hero noise.
They're making you a hero.
So they're basically standing behind him and saying at least at this point, if this is coming from Bernie Sanders, they think Biden has a better chance of winning than Bernie.
Over at Hot Air, Jazz Shaw, who's a very good political advisor, a political observer, he makes the point that this has been in the press forever, right?
Conservatives have been joking about Creepy Joe, creepy Uncle Joe, forever.
He comes up to women, he rubs their shoulders, he sticks his face in their hair.
He's always done it.
His hands are always wandering over people.
And, you know, it's just been there.
And so what Jazz says is, look, if this were a problem, someone on the left would have said it before.
Why does it suddenly become a problem?
Who is contacting these women?
Because these are pretty obscure people.
I mean, these are political operatives, but they're not exactly high-level people.
And who is calling them up and saying, do us a favor and take this guy down?
It's a very persuasive argument because, as I say, you can make these supercut montages of Joe Biden touching women very easily.
It's very easy to put them together.
So the fact that they're coming up now is suspect.
But here's the thing.
Like I said, whenever Democrats start talking about morality, whenever they start talking about sex, whenever they start talking about race, they are really talking about power.
There's always, they attach a philosophy to the power grab.
When Bill Clinton is president and he's got an intern young enough to be his daughter in the Oval Office, basically doing all kinds of things to him, that's not a problem, right?
That's not a problem because he was for abortion.
As many of the reporters of the time said, as long as he's for abortion, I would go in there and do what his mistress is doing.
They didn't care.
Suddenly, when it was Trump, when it was Trump talking about what women would let him do because he was a celebrity, it became a problem.
So the philosophy always follows the power.
And if you want to find out about the power and how the power is going to translate into philosophy, there's only one place to go.
We're going to go there in just a minute.
We're going to take a trip to Knucklehead Row in just a minute.
But first, let us talk about ZipRecruiter.
You know, many people listen to the Daily Wire podcast.
They listen to Ben.
They listen to me.
They listen to Matt Walsh.
And then they listen to Knowles and they think, why didn't you use ZipRecruiter before you hired somebody?
And ZipRecruiter is the best way.
It is the best way you can get people for your business.
It's a place where growing businesses connect to qualified candidates at ziprecruiter.com slash DailyWire.
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They have a powerful matching technology that allows them to scan thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience and invite them to apply to your job.
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They're so effective that 80% of employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site within the first day.
And right now, my listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com slash DailyWire.
If you want to find out what the left is thinking, there is only one place to go, and that is the op-ed page of the New York Times, or as we call it, Knucklehead Row.
Michelle Goldberg, one of the chief knuckleheads on Knucklehead Row, has a column called The Wrong Time for Joe Biden.
He's not a sexual predator, she says.
He's just out of touch.
I don't think Biden's vuncular pawing is a Me Too story, she writes.
But if Biden was more oblivious than predatory, his history still puts him out of step with the mores of an increasingly progressive Democratic Party.
So she's telling you it's not about the hands.
It's about the mind.
It's about the philosophy.
On Sunday, the New York Times reported that some Democrats are bracing for an extended reckoning about Mr. Biden and gender if he enters the race.
The inevitability of such a reckoning should make Biden reconsider getting in.
Biden's issues with gender, after all, go far beyond chronic handsiness.
His waffling on reproductive choice troubles many feminists, as the Times reported last week.
Biden's back and forth over abortion would become a hallmark of his political career.
He was the chairman of the hearings on Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination where Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, was demeaned and dismissed, which isn't true, by the way.
She was not demeaned and dismissed.
She was questioned as if she were making an accusation against somebody, and she never got corroborating evidence toward anything she said.
And again, I've said this before, but if you go back and look, the things she was charging Clarence Thomas with during his Supreme Court hearings were not even very serious.
I mean, they were nothing compared to the kinds of things people are talking about now.
So she goes on to say that Biden may seem like a safe choice.
I mean, we talk about this on the right, too.
You put up a guy like Mitt Romney.
He seems like a safe choice, but really he's kind of leaden.
He can't get people excited.
He can't reach those people who are in between, who are leaning.
Obama, who voted Obama last time, like Trump did, who got those people to come over.
So she's saying he's safe, but he's just out of touch with the leftism, the socialism that the Democrat Party now basically supports.
He says, in response to Flores, the first woman who accused him, Biden could have told her that he was sorry for making her uneasy.
Instead, he focused on his intentions rather than her experience, a faint echo of the way he ignored Hill's experiences decades ago.
I want you to follow the logic about this.
What's important is the woman's experience of the touch, not what you were actually trying to do or what you actually did.
It's her experience.
If she says she's uncomfortable, that's the thing that matters and you should apologize.
No one should judge the whole span of Biden's career by the standards of 2019.
But if he's going to run for president, it's fair to ask whether he's the right leader for this moment.
He is a product of his time, but that time is up.
So if that's the problem, if that's the problem, first of all, if that's the problem, why are you talking about sex in the first place?
Why not just talk about philosophy?
Why not just talk about policy?
But since they do, since they do, since they've got the whole Me Too thing ginned up to take down Biden, let's think about what they're saying.
What matters here is this woman's experience of being touched, hugged, nuzzled, whatever.
I don't like this either.
I don't like being hugged.
I don't like the fact that people hug me all the time when I see them.
I don't.
I really don't.
Men hug me, women hug me.
I don't like it.
I mean, they do it all the time.
I'm a private person.
I like to shake hands, say hello, but I do it constantly.
Whenever I go places, people want to take pictures with me.
They put their arms around me.
I do it, right?
I don't talk about my experience.
Why not?
Why not?
Because it's different for a man.
It's different for a man.
Women's experience of being touched is different than a man's experience of being touched, right?
Why?
Women's bodies play different roles in our sexual experience.
In our sexual exchange, a woman's body has a different role than a man's body.
Maybe it's the role of being attracted.
You know, Thomas Mond talks about this in the Magic Mountain.
He talks about the fact that if you think about it, it's kind of strange that women use parts of their body as part of their clothes.
Men don't do that, right?
Why Women Wear Leggings00:10:52
Women expose arms, cleavage, all kinds of things as part of their clothing.
It's part of their decoration because they realize they are attractive to men.
And men are attracted to women, right?
That is the way it works.
So what about men then?
If women's role is to be attractive, if women have a different role in the sexual mating experience, and part of that role is to attract, and men are being attracted by the law divine, if that's the machinery of the law divine.
And if women want men to respect them, as well they should, shouldn't women respect the feelings of men as well?
If men have this kind of supercharged feeling of attraction, wouldn't it be nice if women would just be a little bit careful about that, of have a little bit respect for that, so that men would have a different experience walking around than they do?
I'm thinking of a Catholic mother who wrote a letter to The Observer, which is a paper that serves Notre Dame University, St. Mary's and Holy Cross.
And she asked the women of Notre Dame to reconsider wearing leggings, tight leggings, because they cling to the body.
And this mother, this Catholic mother of four sons, says, I was at Mass at the basilica with my family.
In front of us was a group of young women all wearing very snug fitting leggings and all wearing short-waisted tops so that the lower body was uncovered except for the leggings.
Some of them truly looked as though the leggings had been painted on them.
And she says, a world in which women continue to be depicted as babes by movies, video games, music videos, et cetera, makes it hard on Catholic mothers who are trying to teach their sons that women are someone's daughters and sisters, that women should be viewed first as people, and all people should be considered with respect.
She says, I wonder why no one thinks it's strange that the fashion industry has caused women to voluntarily expose their nether regions in this way.
I was ashamed for the young women at Mass.
I thought of all the other men around and behind us who couldn't help but see them.
My sons know better than to oggle them.
They didn't stare and they didn't comment, but you couldn't help but see them.
So she says, she finishes up, she says, I've heard women say that they like leggings because they're comfortable.
She says, so are pajamas, so is nakedness.
And the human body is a beautiful thing, but we don't go around naked because we respect ourselves.
We want to be seen as a person, not a body.
You have every right to wear leggings, but you have every right to choose not to.
Thanks for listening to the lecture.
Catholic moms are good at those.
Take one guess.
Take one guess at the reaction of the students of Notre Dame.
1,300 of them poured out to protest this letter from a Catholic mom and declare their women and men's equalities and their right to wear leggings, which obviously she never challenged.
Valerie Mora, a PhD student, wrote a letter saying, do her sons, do this woman's sons feel like failures on some level if they experience a sexual urge?
Are they ashamed when they feel attracted to someone?
Have they let down their mom who's working so hard to protect them from the temptations of female flesh?
You know, the very fact that women wear leggings, you never see men wearing tight legs.
I mean, you do in LA, but nowhere else do you see men wearing these tight leggings to show off their backsides, right?
The very fact that women wear leggings tells you something.
The female body is made to attract.
It's not just randomly attractive.
It is made to attract men, right?
This is what Thomas Mond was writing about when he talked about this.
And it is something that actually, even before I reread Magic Mountain and noticed this passage, I hadn't noticed it the first time.
It was something I had thought about as well, that it's interesting.
It's interesting that part of a woman's clothing is her body.
When she wears a skirt, her legs are part of her clothing.
It's part of her attraction.
She knows it, right?
So men must have this powerful sense of attractive.
We all know of attraction.
We all know they do.
Last time I said it, people wrote in and said I was forgiving people for attacking women, which is obviously not the case.
I'm just saying, is it so bad if women are asking us to respect them as we should, is it so bad for them to ask us to respect our experience for the world?
Shouldn't they humanize their loveliness a little bit so that what we're not thinking all the time is, wow, you know, look at that, look at that babe, look at the legs on that babe.
I mean, shouldn't they have a little bit of understanding of what our experience is?
Not because we're not responsible for ourselves.
We're responsible for our actions.
Joe Biden is responsible for his actions.
But if the internal experience of a woman being touched by Joe Biden is what matters and not his intentions, why isn't that true of men as well?
Why isn't it true of where they put their eyes, for instance?
You know, the entire sexual world of the left is imaginary.
They want to imagine away the reality of what things are like and where our morals come from and why we say the things we say, why we restrict ourselves, why we want people to dress in a decent way.
It is absolutely fascinating to me that when the left talks about America, when they talk about sexual America, they're not talking about anything that exists.
There's a guy, Seth Moulton, who is a Massachusetts congressman, and he's just had a baby girl and he's considering whether he should run for president, because how can you be a Democrat without running for president?
So he's talking about whether he's going to run for president.
He's talking about his baby girl.
And this is what he says.
I love this girl more than I could ever imagine.
I mean, I've just met her.
She's only five and a half months old, and I'm completely in love with her.
And it's hard to leave her every time I go to Washington for a few days.
But I also feel even more invested in her future than maybe I did ever before in this job because I don't want her growing up in this country.
What do you mean you don't want her growing up in this country?
I don't want her growing up in this country the way that it is with a commander-in-chief that we fundamentally can't trust, where women are disrespected, where she doesn't have the same opportunities that a little boy growing up at the same time would have.
We have a lot of things to fix in this country, and if I can be a small part of doing that, then that's a compelling reason to work.
But ultimately, Cummins and I are going to talk about this.
We're going to decide in the next few weeks.
That's an amazing statement.
First of all, it ended his political run right there.
Like, I'll never be president.
He'll never be a candidate.
He'll never even make the debate stage just for saying that.
What is he talking about?
I mean, this is a country, seriously, really, this is a country where women are doing better than men in school.
Women are happier than they are in most other places.
And he thinks his daughter, I mean, why was he not upset when Bill Clinton was president, Bill Clinton, who'd actually been accused of rape?
Why is he so selectively upset?
Because they're never talking about sex.
They're never talking about race.
They're always talking about power.
So he's presenting an America of the imagination.
Didn't mind Clinton.
His daughter would have been perfectly safe there.
It doesn't care what's happening to women.
Now, I can't prove this, but I started talking at the opening of the show about the fact that people aren't mating anymore.
Now, it may be a good thing.
I think it is a good thing if young people aren't having sex out of wedlock.
I think that's probably a good thing, a safer thing.
You know, as I've said before, when you go and visit a prison, every cell has a fatherless child in it, every single one.
You know, it's a good thing that people are having fewer abortions, having fewer unwanted pregnancies.
It's not a good thing that young people, 18 to 34, that's not that young.
It's not a good thing that they're not getting married.
It's not a good thing that they're not mating, that they're not pairing up.
Nothing in the world is single.
All things by a law divine in one spirit meet and mingle.
Why?
Because that's the way the world is made.
That's the way humanity is made.
Maybe nobody explained this to you, but that's where babies come from.
You want people getting married.
You want them getting married at a youthful age when they can still safely have babies.
And I can't prove this, but I have to say, I think one of the reasons this is happening is the left has created a framework that removes sex from the human experience.
It removes it from the moral experience.
It removes it from the sexual experience of men and women being men and women, being like they are.
The old habits we had of opening doors for women, of women dressing in a modest way.
Those old things, you know, those are one of those walls you shouldn't tear down maybe before you find out what's on the other side of it.
Because once you remove the human framework of sex, maybe it's not as much fun as people told you it was.
Maybe you can do that with pornography easier than you can do it in real life.
Maybe when you get into real life and sex is only a single part of the human experience of relationship, then it becomes complex.
Then it becomes interesting.
I mean, but then also you have to start talking about differences.
You have to start talking about what men are like.
You have to start talking about what women are like.
They don't even want to talk about that.
Teen Vogue has a video out now.
I mean, this is Teen Vogue, where I assume some teens still go to find out or sub-teens still go to find out what life is like and what sexual life is like.
And they have a video saying that binary, the idea that there are men and women, the idea that those are the two different kinds of people, that that's ridiculous.
Here's a piece.
Hi, I'm Hannah Gabby, and I'm here to tell you that binary is bullshit.
Sex typically refers to your biological traits, as your gonads, your genitalia, your internal sex characteristics, your hormone production, hormone response, and secondary sex characteristics.
Gender is about your identity, your expression, and it's often based on ideas about sex.
It's important that we really break down what are we talking about when we talk about sex and gender, and is there something called biological sex and what does that mean?
This idea that the body is either male or female is totally wrong.
And I am living proof of that.
We know intersex people exist and break down this binary.
We all have characteristics that are typically male and typically female.
And it is really about political choices, social factors, ideological choices that we assign meaning to different parts of our body.
It's utter nonsense.
It's utter nonsense.
I mean, look, some people are born deformed.
Some people are born with one leg, you know, but human beings have two legs.
Human beings have two genders.
They have two sexes.
Are some people uncomfortable with this gender they're born with?
Yes, of course they are.
I feel sympathy for them.
I truly do.
But that doesn't change the central point of human life.
Sex difference is a human universal.
There is no such thing.
We have the closest thing to a society that does not divide the labor of men and women.
Every society that has ever existed divides the labor of men and women differently.
Every society has an idea of the yin and yang.
Every society has a creation story that includes both the creation of men and women.
You know, without sex, as I say, no humanity.
And when you take sex outside of the human experience, outside of the moral experience, outside of the internal experience, you've taken it out of life.
You've removed its actual reason for being, except the dumb pleasure that you can get with pornography just as easily.
Sex Difference Universal00:02:16
And if you want to see Democrats removing the morality from things, this is happening across the board.
The top Democrat candidates are going this week to a summit called We the People Summit in Washington, right?
The event begins on Monday, yesterday.
Jamal Watkins of the NAACP stands up and leads the crowd in this chant.
Watch this.
I came here not to talk at you.
We're going to be here all day.
It's going to be a long and powerful day.
But I want you to do something with me.
I'm going to actually have you participate with me in repeating some words from a leader by the name of Asada Shakure.
So if you can stand up with me, if you can't stand, it's okay.
But I want you to repeat after me.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
And it is our duty to win.
We must love each other and respect each other.
We must love each other and respect each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
Now we're going to take it as loud as we can get.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and respect each other.
That's your Democrat Party.
He's quoting, first of all, of course, you have nothing to lose but your chains is Karl Marx.
So that's where they're at with that.
But the chant itself was written by Asada Shakur, as he said, and he called her a leader.
Asada Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army, a national, it was a breakoff from the Black Panthers, actually.
It was an urban guerrilla group that was trying to basically bring down the government by bank robberies, killing police officers and drug dealers.
She got into a gunfight that ended up with one state trooper, a couple of her fellows dead, but also a state troomer shot to death, and she was convicted of first-degree murder.
She was sent to prison for first-degree murder.
She escaped and is living in Cuba.
That is what the Democrat Party is chanting.
They have removed, I mean, they really have lost their way.
They have removed themselves from the moral universe, and it is telling in the way they address sex, and it's now telling in the way they address politics and economics.
Market Capitalist Dilemmas00:12:28
And economics is what we are about to talk about.
I have a guest from Hillsdale.
I've got such a resource of professors and intelligence here that I would be crazy not to use it.
We're going to bring on Gary Wolfram, but first I have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But come on over to dailywire.com.
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Tomorrow, the mailbag.
See, that's why they're screaming.
The mailbag is tomorrow.
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Professor Gary Wolfram is the William Simon Professor of Economics and Public Policy and Director of Economics at Hillsdale College.
He is also the author of a capitalist manifesto, understanding the market economy and defending liberty.
Thank you very much, Professor Wolfram, for coming on.
Well, thank you for having me.
And not only that, we should mention, because now your picture is on screen, we should mention that you, is it true that you're the model for the Lincoln statue out there?
It is true.
It is true.
You said that to me and I cracked up.
It's an excellent, excellent statue.
There's an excellent Lincoln statue here.
This is, by the way, I should also mention a place with the only statue of Margaret Thatcher in the Western Hemisphere.
This is also true, right?
Oh, yeah.
And actually, I don't have a beard.
No, but you do look a little like.
Tony, put it on.
So you write a capitalist manifesto, which warms my heart.
Just the title warms my heart.
So many people are talking about socialism.
Yesterday I played a clip of Bill Maher saying, socialism, we don't want breadline socialism.
We want nice socialism like they have in Scandinavia.
And basically he's talking about wealth, redistributing the wealth of capitalism.
Why are these people wrong?
Well, for a couple of reasons.
One is if you're concerned about the poor, then you really should be for capitalism.
Ludwig von Mises in 1927 wrote a book called Liberalism in the Classical Tradition.
And he argued and made it very clear that the only system that can create wealth for the masses is market capitalism.
And so it's obvious that that is the case because I can just ask you, if you're going to be born in any country that you want, you can tell me where you want to be born.
And I'm going to say, oh, and by the way, you're going to be the poorest person there.
You're not going to say, oh, I want to be in Venezuela.
I want to be in North Korea.
I want to be the poorest person in North Korea.
And so just intuitively, we know that.
Also, if you look at the Index of Economic Freedom and the Economic Freedom of the World Index, these two indices that Heritage puts out one of them and the Fraser Institute puts out another.
You can look at the countries that are in the top 25% of economic freedom and the countries in the bottom 25% of economic freedom.
And then if you look at what the bottom 10% of the income distribution earn or receive, in the top 25% of freedom, you're 11 times wealthier than you are in the bottom 25%.
So cross-sectionally, we can see, yes, it is clear that market capitalism is the best system for the poor.
Now, we could look at it historically as well.
And when did we end up with the lowest income people actually having enough to eat?
It's when we got out of feudalism.
We got out of mercantile.
We had hundreds of years of feudalism, which is essentially what the socialists would like you to have.
In fact, Hayek's book, 1944 book, was called The Road to Serfdom.
And so you went hundreds of years with no economic growth, no innovation.
Why are you wealthier today than the King of England in 1263?
Not because you have more tapestries than he did, but rather you have all sorts of things that he never had, including indoor plumbing, which is very nice to have in February in Michigan.
And so what caused that?
Innovation.
So what drives innovation, what drives innovation is a reward for being successful.
And my mom never once said, I'm old enough, that she never once said, gee, I can hardly wait for the next Soviet washing machine to come out because it's going to be so much better, right?
You know, if some things, if there's an innovation, you know where it's coming from.
It's coming from a market capitalist system.
And the primary reason is because it rewards you for taking on the risk of innovation.
Innovation requires risk.
You're not innovative if you're just doing what everybody else was doing.
Well, let me stop you for a second.
Yesterday I said I played this Bill Maher clip, and what he pointed to was a chart of the happiest countries.
And traditionally, I mean, this happens all the time, the happiest countries are in Scandinavia.
Now, Bill Maher thinks the Scandinavian countries are socialist, and they're not, but they do have massive redistribution.
I mean, they do have massive taxes and a lot of redistribution of wealth.
Is he wrong that that is conducive to happiness overall?
Well, first of all, he is in fact wrong that these are socialist countries.
If you look again at the Fraser Institute's Index, Economic Freedom of the World Index, you'll see that they rank very high.
Because it's not a matter of the government controlling who owns the property.
It's not a matter of the government telling you what you're going to do, like you're, you know, or what you can't do.
You can't have trans fats in your French fries because some of the important people that went to the benevolent dictator school know that it's better for you to not have that.
They do redistribute.
But notice that as a real issue is when does the redistribution become a right?
Notice that there was a movie, Cinderella Man, where the boxer has to go and get some money from welfare.
But when he gets his check from the fight, he pays it back, right?
He gets back in line and pays it back.
So your attitude is, okay, we have the social safety net, which Hayek even in The Road to Serfdom said, you may have to have a social safety net because otherwise people would be afraid to be free.
But when the attitude is, which happened in the Great Society, that these are entitlement programs, once they become the idea these are entitlement programs, then that attitude starts to change.
And so a lot of it also has to do with the cultural dynamic.
But what these Scandinavian countries are finding out is as more people that are from different cultures come in, they're finding that this is a much harder thing to administer.
So, you know, it's possible.
I think that, you know, actually, if you Google Gary Wolfram Scrooge, you'll see actually an article that I wrote a number of years ago about Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol.
And the main point was at the beginning, his nephews come in and want him to contribute.
And what he says is not bas humbug.
What he says is, are there no poor houses?
And he goes on for two paragraphs about, didn't you tell me that the government was supposed to be taking care of these poor people?
Why are you asking me?
So altruism is what happens when you have market capitalism.
It doesn't happen when you have the government taking care of everybody because I'm not being philanthropic when I take your stuff and give it to the person whose house burned down.
I should be giving my own stuff to them.
So what about the buzzword on the left is inequality?
And if you listen to Alexandria Eccasio-Cortez, people are starving in the streets and living in their cars and America is just an absolute burned-out hulk of its former self.
But is there a problem with inequality?
I mean, I certainly know that the richest person in America is way, way richer than I am.
And is that a problem?
No.
In fact, we want inequality.
That is one of the foundations of classical liberalism is that you're going to be rewarded if you produce things.
Now, think about how do you get rich in a market system.
The only way you can get rich, because it's a system of voluntary exchange, is for you to please other people.
Right.
When Henry Ford wanted Edsel Ford to be a car, wanted the Etzel to be a car to be a tribute to his son, nobody wanted to buy the thing.
He couldn't force people to buy the Ed Sols, but nobody wanted to pay the cost of the resources needed to make it.
The only way I can get wealthy in a market system is to please other people.
I tell my students, look, in the Bible it says, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
In a market system, that's not good enough.
You've got to do unto others things they don't even know they want done to them yet, right?
I didn't know I was going to want an iPhone for my wife 10 years ago.
Okay, now here's, let me be the devil's advocate here.
Obviously, you know, history shows you're right about this.
I mean, history shows that capitalist countries rise, they innovate, they create these things.
But in doing so, there does create this world in which some people are really rich and some people are not so rich.
If you have something like healthcare, which is now becoming more and more sophisticated, more and more expensive, and can do more and more so that people actually can live through diseases that used to kill them like that.
Does the poor man have any kind of an argument?
It's not fair that my child, I mean, this is the argument, it's not fair that my child should not have this health care simply because I have no money.
My child has a right to this health care.
Is he wrong?
Well, yes.
I mean, where are these rights?
See, if you say you have the right to health care, then you've said that someone is required to provide it for you.
And so what we really, I mean, healthcare is a very interesting issue because the government has been running health care at least since World War II.
I say to my students, when you're taking somebody out to dinner, when do you tell them that you're picking up the tab?
And the answer is after they've ordered, right?
Think how Medicare works or think how Medicaid works.
The way it works is not only are they telling the waiter, not only telling you they're picking up the tab, they're telling the waiter they're picking up the tab.
So what am I driven to do in terms of research and put my resources?
I should invest my resources not in something which is an inexpensive way of improving someone's health condition.
It's to make something that's really super expensive that Medicare will pay for.
In fact, you've probably seen the ad on television for the scooter.
Interestingly enough, it never says how much it costs.
If you get on their website, which I have done, it never tells you how much it costs.
It tells you that what?
They'll make sure that Medicare or your insurance will pay for it.
And so what we really need to do on the healthcare system is to switch it to essentially what are health savings accounts, and that would drive down the cost of all this health care.
There are all sorts of reasons.
Why is insulin so expensive?
Well, it's so expensive because it costs $7 billion to come to bring it to the consumer.
So there's lots of things that we need to do in the healthcare system, but it is a system where the left tends to pretend that this is somehow a market economy system.
It's not.
It is dominated by the government.
Disagreeing On Healthcare00:03:46
I have to stop you there.
I'm out of time.
That really was incredibly clear.
People at Hillsdale are lucky.
The students here are lucky.
Professor Gary Wolfram, his book is a capitalist manifesto, which I'm now going to read, a capitalist manifesto, understanding the market economy and defending liberty.
Thank you very much for coming on.
Well, thank you for having me.
It's great.
Let me end with a final reflection.
Something happened on Saturday.
Actually, it was early Sunday, I guess, where it was taking place.
You know, I went out to dinner with my family, had a great time, and came back and, like a fool, went on Twitter because I never sleep and all my family went to bed.
So I went on Twitter and I saw one of our guests on a former guest on the show, DC McAllister, Denise McAllister, who writes great stuff about femininity and masculinity and marriage.
And she got into a fight with a reporter who's gay, Asher Ali.
And she said things that she should not have said.
She was absolutely brutal to him.
She had mentioned something that happened between her and her husband.
And he made a very mild comment.
When you talk about your personal life on Twitter, people get to comment about it.
And she ripped him to pieces for being gay in ways that are not things that I would do or I think any of us would really approve of.
She ended up getting fired from the Federalists.
She had previously attacked Megan McCain and The View.
And Megan McCain, of course, is the wife of Ben Dominic over at the Federalist Ben, I think our Ben Shapiro told her to take down the fact that she's written for the Daily Wire.
She was basically expelled from the community.
Here are just a couple.
I'm thinking out loud here.
I'm not coming down on anything.
I disapprove of what Denise said, but here are just a couple of things that went through my head.
The first thing that went through my head when I saw what was going on was, are there no more socialists left for us to attack?
I mean, we have to be, have we run out of people who actually want to destroy the country?
And the other thing that bothers me a little bit about this is, like I said, Denise is wrong.
Denise was wrong.
I think she said she's wrong.
I think she took the tweet down.
And it was really brutal stuff and not something that one human being should say to another human being.
The firing of people that has crept in on the right.
It used to be there on the left, but now it's crept in on the right.
Disturbs me.
I remember when John Derbyshire, or Derbyshire, however he pronounced it, was over at National Review and they fired him because he made a joke about the fact that white people should sit their children down and explain to them that black people don't like them, which was a takeoff on people saying that black people should do that with their children.
And he was fired for that, but he had been writing stuff calling himself a racist for a long time.
So they always knew who he was.
And I used to say, I totally disagree with John.
I totally disagree with his racist points of view.
It was kind of benign, non-hateful racism, but racism all the same.
But he has a right to say it, and I thought it was fine for National Review to give him that perch.
So clearly they took him down, not for what he believed, but in a way, just being afraid of what the left was going to say.
And I don't know.
I don't think, I think Denise needed a good talking too.
I think maybe she should have been called on the carpet.
But when we start to fire people because what we're afraid of what the left will say about us, because we're afraid that we can't defend ourselves from the mob, I think we've lost the game.
I think that is the game.
The game is speaking freely.
The game is talking about things.
And yes, of course, the game is being civil and moral as we do those things.
And when one of us strays, you need a good shot to the side of the head.
But Denise should not be silenced because she lost her way a little bit.
And we should not be afraid of the leftist mob and their leftist outrage because they'll never forgive us.
Every time we say we're sorry, anything we show that's weakness, it's blood in the water to them.
And they will rip us to pieces.
That was my thought about that.
I'll be back tomorrow.
Please send in your mailbag questions.
Denise's Stray Step00:01:17
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Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, the effort to shut down my speech at Baylor is ramping up.
Now, local news in Waco is reporting that I am a theocratic fascist.
So, is that label fair?
I will answer that today.
Also, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is bemoaning the price of croissants and saying that the minimum wage should be raised because croissants are so expensive.
I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but we'll try to decipher it.
And who struggles the most in the school system, boys or girls?