Feb. 19, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:11:39
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| As I sit here in the middle of February, we're about eight months away from Election Day 2016. | ||
| Doesn't that sound completely insane? | ||
| I mean, think about it. | ||
| We've been talking about this election for at least a year, and we're still over half a year away from it. | ||
| That is completely bonkers. | ||
| So much of the election process is just insider nonsense and day-to-day PR, so it's hard to focus on what issues are actually important. | ||
| Not only does the 24-hour cable news cycle thrive on election drama and distractions, but the entire process of electing our politicians seems to be built on getting we the people to actually never talk about the big issues in an honest way. | ||
| We have debates with catered questions and no actual debating, we have town halls which are just forums for talking points, and social media campaigns to spread candidates' messages without ever explaining how their ideas will actually solve anything. | ||
| You know, there's a strange collusion between the media and politicians to keep us all in the dark about what's really going on here. | ||
| What I actually want to hear candidates talking about are big ideas, not political talking points. | ||
| To explain their economic philosophy and how it came to be, to say how they came up with a moral argument for or against abortion, and to let us know why America's role in the world should be larger or smaller. | ||
| Unfortunately, big ideas don't fit into 30-second soundbites, leaving us with a media that wants views and clicks instead of substantive debate, and a political class who, of course, are all the happier to provide meaningless slogans that sound good in a headline but don't mean anything at all. | ||
| That brings me to the two people really shaking up the system at this point, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. | ||
| Bernie says he wants a political revolution, while Trump says he wants to make America great again. | ||
| I doubt there'll ever be another candidate like Bernie, a world-weary, lifelong politician who wants to fundamentally change how things operate from the inside. | ||
| Whether you agree or disagree with him, it's a powerful message. | ||
| Then, of course, there's Trump, a billionaire who's using years of boardroom and TV experience to give his supporters whatever they want, even if they don't know exactly what that is. | ||
| What these two men have in common, though, is more interesting. | ||
| They both openly mock the powerful and corrupting influence of money in politics, while only existing as legitimate contenders because of its very existence. | ||
| It shouldn't be lost on us that it's actually the very strength of our democratic system that allows two people who want to totally upend it to be surging in the polls. | ||
| And as warped as our system is, it's the two guys who are the most plain spoken who are being heard the loudest. | ||
| Although the countdown to election 2016 frustrates me, as a political junkie, I can't pretend that I don't enjoy The Clown Show. | ||
| It's a soap opera with characters you just can't make up. | ||
| We've got the ex-president's wife, the socialist Jew, the billionaire, and the neurosurgeon. | ||
| It basically sounds like a spin-off of Gilligan's Island. | ||
| Unfortunately, while Gilligan and his friends were eventually rescued from their island, the only ones who can rescue us from this shipwreck are ourselves, the citizens. | ||
| To help me navigate these choppy waters this week is my guest Ben Shapiro, the editor-at-large of Breitbart.com. | ||
| Many of you have asked us to have a sit-down to dig into some of his conservative ideas. | ||
| Can a liberal and a conservative coexist? | ||
| Well, if Thurston Howell III and Ginger could do it, I have a feeling that Ben and I will be able to as well. | ||
| Every election year, politicians remind us that their election is the most important of a generation. | ||
| Usually that's just more hyperbole nonsense, but this time it could actually be true. | ||
| Regardless of who wins, whether it's one of these two, Hillary, or Jeb, or the skipper, our system is fundamentally shaking right now, as evidenced by both the Sanders and Trump surges. | ||
| Can we address real issues in the months to come, or will we keep talking about sideshow nonsense? | ||
| Can we get a fairer election system, or will big donors always run the show? | ||
| Can we elect officials who will compromise to make the country stronger, or will partisan points always win the day? | ||
| These are just a few of the huge issues we have to discuss, and that's not even touching on immigration, healthcare, and terrorism. | ||
| A lot of people mock the idea of American exceptionalism, especially on the left, but I actually do believe in it. | ||
| There has never been a country in the history of the globe that has taken more people from across the world and helped them make a better life for themselves, their children, and their children's children. | ||
| Even now, with all of our problems, people still want to come to America for a better life. | ||
| We have massive issues, but underneath it all there's a bedrock based in democratic principles which still makes our position in the world truly unique. | ||
| It doesn't mean America can or should tell the world what to do, but it does mean we have a responsibility to be fairer, freer and more functional whenever we can. | ||
| All these reasons are why I've made this show about ideas and not minutia. | ||
| There is an endless cycle of noise designed to keep us distracted and divided. | ||
| Our politicians will only be better if we demand they be better. | ||
| We'll only demand our politicians be better if we are better ourselves. | ||
| As you guys know, I love to say that two things can be true at the same time. | ||
| Maybe we can have a political revolution while at the same time making America great again. | ||
| This change doesn't start with Trump and Sanders, though. | ||
| It starts with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, just as the great Gilligan once said. | ||
| My guest this week is editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com, editor-at-large of Breitbart.com, a syndicated columnist, a radio host, and a New York Times best-selling author. | ||
| You want me to throw in anything else in there? | ||
| No, you got it. | ||
| You got a serious resume. | ||
| I mean, I was doing some research on you. | ||
| You pretty much do everything. | ||
| I fill my time. | ||
| It's a busy day, yeah. | ||
| Alright, well, I'm very happy that you're here because I've had all of Twitter basically saying to me for about six months, you've got to talk to this guy. | ||
| This is the guy who will either convert you to conservatism or you guys are just going to hate each other. | ||
| I'll turn you into a flaming Bernie Sanders socialist, yeah. | ||
| That's pretty much... Pretty sure that's not the direction... Good, so he'll be a conservative by the end of the conversation. | ||
| Well, let's see. | ||
| Solid territory. | ||
| Yeah, let's see what happens. | ||
| But a lot of people also said that even liberals that know of you said, I don't agree with this guy a lot, sometimes I don't even like him, but there's some principle based around what he does. | ||
| And that's pretty much the spirit of what I do here, so that's why I wanted to have you on. | ||
| Well, thanks for having me. | ||
| I got a lot of requests to come on your show, so I'm glad you invited me. | ||
| Yeah, alright, so let's get to it. | ||
| So first off, you were actually born in L.A. | ||
| and brought up in L.A. | ||
| I thought there were no conservatives in L.A. | ||
| What the hell are you doing here? | ||
| Yeah, so my parents were both—they voted for Carter in 76, and then they were Reagan Republicans. | ||
| And then, because we're Orthodox Jews, religious Jews tend to vote Republican and be culturally conservative, and so that's sort of the milieu in which I grew up. | ||
| So, yeah, I became conservative basically from birth. | ||
| I'm not a new convert. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So how is that, growing up a conservative as a kid? | ||
| Because what's that saying, you know, if you're not liberal in your 20s, you have no heart, and if you're not conservative in your 30s, you have no brain, something like that? | ||
| Right, yeah, exactly. | ||
| How is that as a kid? | ||
| I have no heart, so it works out beautifully. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, how is that as a kid, growing up, you're conservative as a kid? | ||
| It just doesn't sound right somehow. | ||
| Well, again, growing up in a religious community is a little bit different than growing up in a non-religious community. | ||
| Religious communities tend to be more conservative. | ||
| And in L.A., conservatism is all about social issues, right? | ||
| When it comes to economics, you'll see the people driving around in the Mercedes-Benz with the Bernie Sanders sticker, but everybody knows they're full of it. | ||
| There's a lot of that in Beverly Hills right now. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And it's like, OK, you can just drive down to Cars for Kids any day now. | ||
| Just give it away and enjoy yourself. | ||
| Like, I don't understand why you need my money. | ||
| You clearly have some of your own. | ||
| So anytime. | ||
| But in L.A., it's all a cultural thing. | ||
| I mean, conservative versus leftist. | ||
| And I like to distinguish leftists from liberals because I don't think they're the same thing. | ||
| Conservatives versus leftists in L.A. | ||
| is very much about kind of a character assumption. | ||
| If you're a leftist, you're a good person. | ||
| If you're a conservative, that means you're an uptight John Lithgow type from Footloose who don't want anybody to dance. | ||
| That's what it comes down to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I definitely want to dig into the difference between liberals and leftists with you, because it's something you've focused on a lot from the right, and it's something that I've focused on a lot in the last year from the left. | ||
| So we're going to dive into that. | ||
| But let's just do some election stuff first. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| Let's get the easy stuff out of the way. | ||
| That's the fun stuff, all right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So this election seems completely insane to me. | ||
| Let's start with Trump. | ||
| You're big on Trump? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| How are you feeling about Trump? | ||
| I think Trump's a loudmouth. | ||
| I think he's a braggart. | ||
| I think that Trump is bad for American politics. | ||
| I think that there's a couple of things that I like about Trump. | ||
| One is that he says things that are not politically incorrect. | ||
| The problem with Trump is that he fails to distinguish politically correct from just being a jackass. | ||
| So, there is a difference. | ||
| I mean, there's a difference between being rude and being politically incorrect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Being rude is telling Megyn Kelly she's bleeding from her wherever. | ||
| Being politically incorrect is saying that some immigrants across our southern border are criminals. | ||
| That's politically incorrect, but it's not rude. | ||
| But saying that Megyn Kelly's bleeding from her wherever, that's not politically incorrect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's just being a jerk. | ||
| So is part of it that his— But people mistake the two. | ||
| So because the reign of political correctness is so strong, people have now interpreted being politically incorrect as just anything you say that pisses someone off. | ||
| That means you're politically incorrect, and that's not what political incorrectness is. | ||
| Sure, so it's this conflation of just saying anything, and he's really good at that. | ||
| I mean, I've noticed the more I watch him, it really, you can whittle him down to some pretty basic stuff, because he just says a lot of circular logic stuff, and this person's great, and that person's great, and they love me, and they hate me, and that and that, and he's actually never really saying anything. | ||
| Is that sort of the genius? | ||
| This is what I don't like about him, and it is the genius of him because we live in a me culture and a me time and a me media, and so Trump is all about Trump. | ||
| I mean, that's really the only thing that matters to him. | ||
| So if Vladimir Putin insults him tomorrow, that matters more than if Vladimir Putin invades a country. | ||
| Because all that matters is Trump, and so he speaks about himself in third person, and everything that he talks about is, I'm going to do this, I'm going to build a wall, I'm going to fix it, I'm going to make a great deal, I'm good for the blacks, I'm good for the Hispanics. | ||
| Nowhere in there do I hear, as a conservative, nowhere in there do I hear anything about what's the proper role of government in my life. | ||
| Which is the part that I care about, right? | ||
| The part I don't care about Donald Trump. | ||
| I don't think he cares about me, and I don't think that we should care about each other. | ||
| I want him to leave me alone. | ||
| I want Barack Obama, I want all these people to leave me alone so I can live my life. | ||
| So that's the conservative principle there? | ||
| Yes, just leave me alone. | ||
| Like, the government was not meant to do this many things. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| I mean, the Constitution is very explicit about the things government is supposed to do, and pretty much nothing on Trump's list, except for maybe border security, is really something the government ought to be doing. | ||
| And, again, what that comes down to—and this is the problem—is I think that the | ||
| danger of Trump is that the left for 100 years has fallen in love with the idea of the strongman. | ||
| I mean, you go all the way back to Woodrow Wilson, and Woodrow Wilson is writing about | ||
| the president should be the strongest man possible, the only limits on his power should | ||
| be his vision, basically, which, you know, could come straight from Mussolini. | ||
| And Woodrow Wilson was actually as close to a dictator as America has ever had. | ||
| That's carried through to FDR. | ||
| It's carried through to LBJ, to Obama. | ||
| On the right, at least they made overtures toward, we're not going to have the strong man who gets involved in your life and fixes all your problems. | ||
| Trump is the strong man. | ||
| And I think after so many years of a lot of Americans on the right feeling emasculated by President Obama telling them that they're racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, and by Hillary Clinton telling them that we're their too kind of testosterone-y in orientation toward the world. | ||
| Basically, I wrote this yesterday, I think that the response to Trump from the right has basically been, he's the biggest swinging set of balls in the race and because that's what he is, I'm for him. | ||
| And you hear that from Trump supporters, well he'll do something. | ||
| Maybe he will, maybe, I don't know. | ||
| Will it be good? | ||
| That's sort of my question. | ||
| So as a conservative though, so as a true conservative, this must make you feel crazy, right? | ||
| I mean you must be really enraged at your own party because it's looking more and more every day like he's actually Yeah, I mean, I don't know who to be the most pissed at, honestly. | ||
| I mean, you've got the GOP establishment, which cannot get off the Jeb Bush train for the life of them, and they just unify behind somebody like a Marco Rubio. | ||
| And they hate Ted Cruz so much, they would side with Trump over Cruz, probably. | ||
| Right, so Cruz to them is too far right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they think he's unelectable. | ||
| And more than that, Cruz actually, I think, believes the things they say they believe. | ||
| So he says, I believe in a small government. | ||
| I think that we should cut the government. | ||
| I think the government shouldn't be important in people's lives. | ||
| And the RNC, which makes its money off government being important to people's lives. | ||
| I mean, how much money would you give to a political party if the government didn't matter in your life? | ||
| The RNC would raise zero dollars if No one cared what happened in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And so, Cruz scares them from that angle. | ||
| I don't think Trump scares them. | ||
| I think Trump annoys the establishment, but he doesn't scare the establishment. | ||
| So, I'm annoyed at the establishment. | ||
| I'm annoyed at—you know, Cruz is a very good constitutional conservative, but he's just an—he's not a great candidate by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| And then there are the Trump people, who are so populist and in love with the feel of Trump that they forget that this guy could actually be president. | ||
| Like, if he's president, what is that going to look like? | ||
| So it's frustrating, definitely, all the way across the board, and I think maybe the most frustrating thing of all is that beating Trump is actually not that hard. | ||
| Trump is a schoolyard bully, and somebody needs to just say to him, in the last debate it was so clear, if you actually want to stop Trump, you can't do what Jeb did. | ||
| I mean, Jeb stood there and he said, you know, Donald, you're bullying people, and also stop being mean to my mother. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I mean, all Trump is, if my thesis is correct, that basically Trump just represents the balls of American politics, then the only way to beat that is to kick him in the balls, right? | ||
| I mean, figuratively speaking, that's the only way to do it. | ||
| Literally, it could work, too. | ||
| It might work, literally. | ||
| But the only way to really beat him is for somebody on the stage to say to him, Donald, you act like a big, tough guy. | ||
| Papa gave you $40 million to play with. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've never had anyone say no to you in your entire life. | ||
| You're a pathetic weak specimen. | ||
| Every time somebody takes you off, you turn as red as the background on that stage the other night. | ||
| I mean, he actually faded into the woodwork during that debate. | ||
| And if anybody on the stage really needs to shut the hell up and just listen for a second, it might be you, since you clearly know nothing about anything. | ||
| So what does that tell you about the rest of these guys that nobody does it? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It's not in Jeb's character. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just not there. | ||
| I don't think it's in any of their characters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what does that say then about this group of people? | ||
| This is why they lose. | ||
| I mean, it is in Obama's character. | ||
| Obama would do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think it's actually in Hillary's character. | ||
| I think that folks on the left understand that presidential politics is a knife fight, and people on the right are constantly engaged in this game where it's a discussion over policy. | ||
| So, Jeb Bush this morning, for example, he's on, he's talking about Trump, and he says something to the effect of, you know, my goal as President of the United States is to grow our GDP from a 2% growth rate to a 4% growth rate. | ||
| I thought, yeah, that's going to be Trump. | ||
| That's a solid argument. | ||
| Like, they don't understand that Most politics comes down to character arguments. | ||
| Once you get the character arguments off the table, then you can have a good policy argument. | ||
| But most people on the left like to say to people on the right that you're just bad people. | ||
| You're racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, so we shouldn't listen to you. | ||
| And that's what Trump does so well. | ||
| And so what you see on the right is, yeah, but you're not a conservative. | ||
| That's an argument about policy. | ||
| It's not an argument about character. | ||
| Right, so for a guy that obviously doesn't like Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, do you at least envy the fact that in their debates, it seems to me, that it's much more substantive? | ||
| There's at least, you know, they're really saying, I'm the progressive, I'm the progressive. | ||
| Now, you may hate all progressive ideas, but at least there's a, you know, you got the D plus from the NRA and I got a C or whatever. | ||
| There's a little more of that. | ||
| So I think that they stay away from the character attacks, which I appreciate. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| Although I think that, you know, in Hillary's case, some character attacks would be necessary if Bernie actually would like to win, and not just run a campaign. | ||
| At some point he's going to have to say, you're corrupt. | ||
| He's sort of saying it though, right? | ||
| Now, and it's a little late, right? | ||
| And by the way, she's vicious. | ||
| I mean, attacking him as a racist? | ||
| I'll say a lot of bad things about Bernie Sanders, but calling Bernie Sanders a racist is absurd. | ||
| And she's so set on, I have to win the ethnic minority vote, that I'll send out my surrogates like David Brock to suggest he doesn't care about black lives, which is absurd. | ||
| I'd like to see a little more character attacks on the left, and between them, anyway. | ||
| And as far as policy, I've watched a couple of their debates. | ||
| I have yet to see a significant area of disagreement. | ||
| I think they're just coming at it from, we agree on everything, it's just a question of how we talk about it. | ||
| So Bernie says, let's talk about it honestly, and Hillary says, let's lie about it a little bit so that people don't really figure out what we're up to, and then we'll do it and it'll be too late. | ||
| Right, so I sense, at least with them, there's a... Hillary's trying to hit Bernie on this, that you're a big idea guy, but actually I can get some of this stuff done. | ||
| Now, I don't know that the Republicans would be any more inclined to work with her than they would with... I mean, they say that, but it's boring. | ||
| I mean, they say that, but it's boring, right? | ||
| Christie was saying that in every debate, right? | ||
| You'd have Rubio and Cruz go at each other, and then there's Chris Christie doing the, well, I'm Josh Hooks. | ||
| I'm just a governor. | ||
| I don't understand what you're saying. | ||
| You know, what are you talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, because it's a dumb thing to do. | |
| He acts like a hick when he does that, Christy. | ||
| You're a governor of a major state. | ||
| Acting like you don't know how the political game is played, or like you don't know what the Senate does. | ||
| I just don't know what these people are arguing about over here. | ||
| They're just in meeting zones. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| I do real things, like hug Obama. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| So all of politics, everybody's playing politics right now at this level, and nobody's playing politics like where the real ideologies are. | ||
| Which is why I would like to see, what I would love to see, I think it would be good for the country, is a Sanders versus Cruz race. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That would actually be a fascinating race. | ||
| Because at that point, if Sanders can stay away from the whole you're a racist sexist, bigot, homophobe thing, we could actually have a | ||
| discussion about whether socialism is a good idea or a bad idea. | ||
| Is income inequality something that we ought to worry about or is it just ramifications | ||
| of a free market system in which people make voluntary transactions happen? | ||
| These would be interesting conversations, but we just don't get to them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So would the real battle of ideas, though, be if it was Sanders and had Rand Paul not | ||
| There's a good case for that. | ||
| That would have been the real battle. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, my problem with Rand Paul was always on foreign policy. | ||
| I'm not an isolationist, and so Rand sort of is. | ||
| But it's, but, yeah, I mean, that too would be a battle of ideas that would be worthwhile. | ||
| Yeah, so the Republican Party in general, and I hear this a lot on the left, you know, that it's this group of homophobes and racists and all this stuff, and I've been fighting against this. | ||
| I've been fighting from the liberal side against the regressive left, you know, the people that are on the far left to me. | ||
| And I saw something interesting that you retweeted, and remind me who said this, but somebody made a point of saying that this morning Nikki Haley, an Indian, an American Indian, And Tim Scott, an African-American, have both endorsed Marco Rubio, who is Latin. | ||
| These are all Republicans. | ||
| So an Indian, a black person, and a Latino. | ||
| And these are Republicans. | ||
| And Tim Scott is a black Republican from the South. | ||
| Somehow that messaging doesn't really make it through, does it? | ||
| Well, it doesn't because they're not real black people or real Latinos or real foreigners, you know, of foreign extraction. | ||
| I mean, Nikki Hale is born here, but her parents are from India. | ||
| Isn't that the point? | ||
| Isn't that the point of America? | ||
| That's what I would think. | ||
| I think, right? | ||
| But we've broken down into this identity politics that really is quite sad and traps people in a group identity rather than you're an individual, go out and make something of yourself, go out and do something. | ||
| This is a message that's not popular in certain quarters. | ||
| When you say to people, look, your life is in your own hands, there's a lot of responsibility that comes with that, which is you don't get to blame society for your problems. | ||
| This is why I think the Bernie Sanders argument, the Hillary Clinton argument, Is wrong. | ||
| You know, Bernie Sanders, he's, every other tweet from Bernie Sanders is something like, we live in a world where there's massive income inequality and we need to do something about that. | ||
| And I think to myself, well, that's called a world of reality. | ||
| I mean, every society in history has had income inequality, including communist ones. | ||
| And you're not showing me a villain, right? | ||
| You're saying reality is bad. | ||
| Blame society for all the problems. | ||
| Show me an actual villain and I'm happy to fight them. | ||
| Show me some ghost villain and I can't fight ghosts. | ||
| I just can't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So when you hear that stuff, though, do you acknowledge at some level that there's some level of crony capitalism that keeps making the big companies bigger and crushing all of the small companies? | ||
| And so I think he's talking to that point, but I guess he's not doing it in like a really direct way. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you were attacking crony capitalism, he and the Tea Party are on the same page. | ||
| I mean, the problem with the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was supposedly ripping crony capitalism, is they were saying, crony capitalism is bad, therefore the government should pick more companies to help, or should nationalize companies outright, which is not the solution, right? | ||
| If you say crony capitalism is bad, first of all, I don't like the term crony capitalism because it's not capitalism, it's corporatism. | ||
| Capitalism is not – being a person who operates in business does not make you a capitalist. | ||
| Business people take loans and subsidies from the government all the time. | ||
| That's not a capitalist thing to do. | ||
| It's a self-interested thing to do, but self-interest and capitalism are not identical. | ||
| If you wanted to actually fight crony capitalism, then cut off the tie between government and the private sector completely, which I would certainly prefer. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And this is part of the Republican Party that I dislike. | ||
| I think there's a certainly corporatist side of the establishment Republican Party that is very much in favor of government involvement in the economy, and I don't like that in the slightest. | ||
| But that's not Bernie's real critique, because if it were a full free market system, if the | ||
| government weren't reaching out to people—and by the way, the government—if you're going | ||
| to argue against crony capitalism, you also have to argue against government-subsidized | ||
| loans for people who can't afford them for houses, right, which causes massive economic | ||
| crashes, which Bernie apparently doesn't oppose, right? | ||
| I mean, he would like more of those things. | ||
| He would like all of us to subsidize bad—you know, folks with bad credit taking out loans. | ||
| If you actually—if you got rid of all those things, if you got rid of government involvement, | ||
| Bernie Sanders would still think that something was wrong if Bill Gates is earning a lot of | ||
| money and somebody at the bottom is earning none. | ||
| He sees somebody in a room with $5 and somebody with $1 and he immediately says the guy with $5 must have stolen something from the guy with $1. | ||
| Whereas I say I have no evidence of that until you show me that evidence. | ||
| Maybe the guy with $5 produced more than the guy with $1. | ||
| Right, so I'll follow you on that line of thinking. | ||
| So then where do we get to a point where, like to me at some level, there should be some sort of progressive tax. | ||
| It shouldn't be necessarily, you know, when they talk about the 1%, the studies are sort of all over the place, but it sounds like if you earn about 400 grand a year, you're in the 1%. | ||
| I'm not in the 1%. | ||
| I am. | ||
| You're in the 1%? | ||
| Yeah, I am. | ||
| Alright, well. | ||
| But it took me a long time to get there. | ||
| Can I borrow some money? | ||
| No. | ||
| Alright, there you go. | ||
| That's why I'm in the 1%. | ||
| There you go, because people in the 1% know how to take care of their money. | ||
| By the way, I'm proud of that fact. | ||
| I'm not going to act like everybody acts ashamed about how much money they earn in this country. | ||
| I think this is the only thing that's charming about Donald Trump is that I think that you should be proud of how much money you earn in this country, because if you worked to get there, I mean, I spent a lot of money to go to law school, and then I spent a lot of time slogging in the trenches, and now I make a really good living. | ||
| And I work a lot of hours to make that really good living. | ||
| And my wife, you know, we had to pay her entire medical education out of pocket, and she's going to be a doctor, and she's going to make a really good living. | ||
| Good for her. | ||
| Good for me. | ||
| Good for anybody who earns a living in this country. | ||
| That's a good thing. | ||
| Right, as far as the progressive tax, no, I think the progressive tax is a bunch of crap. | ||
| Well, what about at some point? | ||
| So you get to ten million dollars a year that it could be progressively, you know, going up a little bit. | ||
| You just don't believe in that? | ||
| No, because I don't see why you deserve a bigger percentage of my money because I make more money. | ||
| All taxes are, is a gangster shakedown. | ||
| And that's all they are. | ||
| And so we can all agree that some gangster shakedowns are worthwhile because we have to pay for police, but the idea that... Here's the problem with any sort of progressive tax. | ||
| This is just the general problem with progressive taxation. | ||
| You have three people in a room, two of them are not Bill Gates and one of them is. | ||
| They vote two to one that they should take half of Bill Gates as well. | ||
| Okay, this is a simplified version of American politics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here's my basic rule for all legislation and all taxation. | ||
| If you pass this law, are you willing to shoot the person who disobeys? | ||
| Because that's what the government is. | ||
| The government is just a big shooting people machine. | ||
| That's what the government does, whether you're talking national defense or the police. | ||
| There's certain laws where you pass them and you say, "If you disobey this law, and if | ||
| you resist me with a gun, I'm willing to shoot you." | ||
| So what laws are you willing to shoot somebody over? | ||
| This seems to me a pretty good measure of, "Am I willing to?" | ||
| So for example, for taxation, yes. | ||
| So the question is, are you willing to shoot people who don't pay taxes if those taxes go for the national defense that protects us all? | ||
| The answer is yes, because if nobody pays that tax, then presumably everybody dies in some sort of terrorist attack. | ||
| But if you're going to ask me, you know, are you willing to pay a progressive tax for whatever stupid government bull they're pushing today? | ||
| And am I willing to shoot somebody over that? | ||
| No, I think the purpose of the tax is just as important as the percentage of the So is that really the problem? | ||
| That we have no idea at this point where our money goes? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We just don't, even now I'm hearing, you know, Bernie will say, I'm rate, you know, he talked to that guy at the town hall. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the guy said, I earned $41,000 a year. | ||
| And Bernie admitted your taxes will go up. | ||
| And then he explains, well, the health costs are going to go down or whatever, which may or may not. | ||
| Makes no sense. | ||
| He says, I'm going to tax you $5,000 and you're going to get $10,000 back in medical service. | ||
| What magic, what magical box did you make that happen in? | ||
| Is there, are there doctors in the back room? | ||
| Well, that's funny, because when he said that, I was thinking, well, if you're healthy... If the government's that good at things... Honestly, I wish leftist solutions worked, because they're the easiest solutions in the world, right? | ||
| It's a recession. | ||
| Tax everybody at 100%, redistribute the wealth, in two days, the recession's over. | ||
| They don't work. | ||
| They're crap. | ||
| By the way, they're also immoral. | ||
| You know, the left talks about these things as though it's moral. | ||
| It's not moral to steal other people's wealth just because you're poorer than they are. | ||
| All right, so let's dive into the left then. | ||
| So, as I told you before we started, and I hinted at here, so I came from the progressive world. | ||
| I've been, I now view being progressive basically as a mental disorder or something. | ||
| But I consider myself classic liberal, which really, really is conservative in a lot of respects. | ||
| Yeah, it's libertarian essentially. | ||
| Yeah, it's technically defined as conservative or libertarian, so I'm somewhere in there. | ||
| And it seems to me that the Republicans, if they would stick with what are supposed to be their principles that you're talking about, they would have a much better argument than what they have right now, and that they don't stick to their argument, and that's part of the problem. | ||
| Well, I think that what's happened is, as government has gotten larger, it turns into this giant grab bag of cash. | ||
| And so what you have is a bunch of constituencies in the United States who are dependent on these grab bags of cash. | ||
| I remember I was down in Palm Beach, Florida for a conference, this must have been five years ago, and Linda Lingle, who was then running for Senate in Hawaii, former governor of Hawaii, Republican, she was speaking at a synagogue. | ||
| And I was there, and this little old lady, Palm Beach, a very rich area, this little old lady toddles up to her, Pearl necklace, diamond earrings, and she walks up to her and says, what will you do to keep them from cutting my social security? | ||
| And I thought to myself, Who are you? | ||
| Like, you paid $50 into Social Security when you were 35, and you're probably getting out $3,000 a month now. | ||
| But because people have been made that promise, they're now dependent on the government. | ||
| So what do Republicans do? | ||
| Republicans say, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I would never do away with Social Security, right? | ||
| We would transition it, or we would save it. | ||
| Once you get into the business of the government takes care of you in your old age, now we're just arguing over methodology. | ||
| We're not arguing over morality. | ||
| My view is that People have been made promises. | ||
| We have to keep those promises because otherwise we just have too many people who have no source of income. | ||
| You make a promise, you keep a promise. | ||
| But if you are under a particular age, no Social Security at all. | ||
| I want my money back, okay? | ||
| I'm getting 15% of my salary taken every year to be put in a fund that I will never see again. | ||
| Again, I have one child and I have another one on the way. | ||
| I would much prefer to put that in a SEP IRA and just let that grow with the stock market. | ||
| By the way, you want the stock market to boom. | ||
| Take all the money out of Social Security and put it into companies on the stock market. | ||
| You want to see an actual economic growth curve. | ||
| That would do it, as opposed to pretending that it's in a lockbox somewhere that doesn't exist when they're just raiding it every two days. | ||
| The lockbox never existed. | ||
| Never existed. | ||
| Gore said he had the lockbox. | ||
| There was no lockbox. | ||
| There was no lockbox. | ||
| It's a Ponzi scheme. | ||
| All right, so to the left, though, because I'm with you on that, that they're sort of just not holding to their principles. | ||
| So what I've seen in the left is that most people went from being liberal and then somehow over the last couple of years they've become these social justice warriors and they've divided everybody by what all our differences are of skin color and religion and all that. | ||
| And they've picked a pecking order of who's the most aggrieved. | ||
| The victim hierarchy. | ||
| The victim hierarchy. | ||
| And because of this, it seems to me that it's just that there's no end to it. | ||
| That's what scares me the most about the ideology, is there simply is no end game with it because | ||
| ultimately it has to eat itself. | ||
| Because then one day you'll fight for everybody else and then they'll come around and they'll | ||
| come for you. | ||
| I mean, this is what's happening on college campuses, right? | ||
| College campuses are about as left as it's possible to be, except that the leftists are now eating their own, right? | ||
| They're going to the administrators and saying, you're all micro-aggressing us, and we need trigger warnings, and it's white privilege, and they're ousting people who were protesting in these buildings 40 years ago! | ||
| On the left. | ||
| And they're getting them fired now. | ||
| I mean, Lawrence Summers was Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury. | ||
| I was at Harvard when they threw him out, right? | ||
| And they threw him out because he made the politically incorrect statement that maybe there weren't that many women in the high reaches of science because women didn't want to be in the high reaches of science, or it's possible there weren't enough women who were qualified for that. | ||
| And they threw him out for that. | ||
| I mean, what's happened, I think, is that we've reached a point—we're the wealthiest society in the history of the world. | ||
| The people here are the wealthiest that any people have ever been. | ||
| And we've also forgotten that there's any sort of ideological existential threat. | ||
| I was four when the Soviet Union collapsed. | ||
| So people my age and younger don't remember the Soviet Union. | ||
| They don't recall it. | ||
| It's not important to their lives. | ||
| And when they think of socialism, they think of kind of the happy-dappy socialism of Denmark. | ||
| They never look at the tax rates. | ||
| They think, OK, everything's going OK in Denmark. | ||
| They forget the fact that we've paid for Denmark's national security for the last half century. | ||
| Forget the fact that they're now having to cut their taxes. | ||
| Forget the fact they just elected a conservative government to keep out the Islamic wave that's now swamping them. | ||
| All those things go by the wayside. | ||
| So what happens is that all these people kind of live off the fat of the land. | ||
| We all do. | ||
| And then rip away at the foundations. | ||
| Because when you're living in such a rich society, and you look at, for example, income inequality, and you | ||
| say there are some people who are earning millions of dollars, | ||
| and there are some people who are earning tens of thousands of dollars. | ||
| What we forget is that in human history and in human society, | ||
| the difference—there's the difference between millions of dollars and tens of thousands of dollars. | ||
| And then there's where people have been historically, which is here, right? | ||
| And when you rip away the foundations, everybody's going to end up down here. | ||
| You can't just take all of the founding principles of small government and free markets and rip them away. | ||
| But what's happened is, young people are always looking for a reason to fight. | ||
| I mean, we want to change the world. | ||
| That's our thing, changing the world. | ||
| When the world's pretty good, what do you change? | ||
| We've basically changed a lot of the external circumstances, and now the question is, you're rich, you live a pretty free life. | ||
| Right, so what's wrong? | ||
| Only what I feel is wrong. | ||
| What's in here is what's wrong. | ||
| And so it's become a very feelings-based society. | ||
| Anything that's said to me that hurts my feelings is now no longer just something hurtful, it's a microaggression, right? | ||
| And I can actually reach out and I can harm you, I can ban you, I can call the police if you hurt my feelings. | ||
| At University of Missouri, there was actually, when this whole thing was going down, the University of Missouri Police Department put out a notice, if somebody says something to you that's racist, call the police department. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a poll that just came out that 70% of college students are comfortable with hate speech codes on campus. | ||
| 40% of millennials, people aged 18 to 34, 40% of them believe that speech that's offensive to women or minorities should be banned in the United States across the board. | ||
| So is some of this though that young people are just kind of dumb? | ||
| Like the world is going to teach you some stuff and when you're at college you're going | ||
| to be kind of dumb. | ||
| I had a guest on a couple of weeks ago, Michael Shermer, who said that all this microaggression | ||
| stuff and all this free speech stuff, as horrible as it sounds to us, right, he sort of was | ||
| arguing that in a way you could say this shows the progress. | ||
| Because instead of having to fight for actual things, they're fighting for these feelings | ||
| and not that he was for that. | ||
| But it shows you that we've progressed and that, you know, that black people aren't fighting so that they have separate water fountains, they're now fighting over things that are just about feelings, and that's obviously a lot better in progress. | ||
| No, it's a testament, and you're right, it's a testament to the progress, but, I mean, to go off what you were saying, 50 years ago black people were fighting to not have separate water fountains And today they're fighting to have separate water fountains, right? | ||
| I mean, they actually want separate black housing at USC. | ||
| They actually wanted a separate black safe space at University of Missouri. | ||
| This is dangerous stuff. | ||
| And what's more dangerous is an entire political hierarchy that benefits from this. | ||
| Because now you've got candidates who benefit by telling particular interest groups and racial groups, you're a victim, we're going to help you out. | ||
| The way we're going to help you out is by specifically calling the rest of the society racist. | ||
| You're a victim forever. | ||
| And the longer we can make you feel like you're a victim, the more you're dependent On us, right? | ||
| I mean, Hillary Clinton was doing this in Harlem the other day. | ||
| She was saying, yeah, we haven't cured racism in the country, and that's why I'm going to take hundreds of millions of dollars and pour it into Harlem. | ||
| As though nobody's poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Harlem before. | ||
| The only dollars into Harlem that are actually going to matter are police dollars to clean up high-crime areas so that investors will go in. | ||
| The reason that businesses aren't going into high-crime areas is because they're high-crime areas, and just dumping money in there isn't going to help anything. | ||
| You would agree that racism exists at some level, right? | ||
| That there are people that are legitimate racists. | ||
| It would be idiotic to think otherwise. | ||
| Of course there are legitimate racists and we should target them and we should find them and we should hurt their careers because racism is unacceptable. | ||
| But what I don't agree with is this. | ||
| I don't like fighting phantoms, as I said earlier. | ||
| Institutional racism is a meaningless phrase. | ||
| Libraries are not racist. | ||
| Schools are not racist. | ||
| You have to show me a law, a policy, a person who's racist. | ||
| You can't just say American society is racist because that doesn't mean anything. | ||
| Show me the actual problem that we can discuss because when you just throw tautologies out there like that, | ||
| what am I supposed to do? | ||
| I mean, there's no way to fight that. | ||
| There's legitimately no way to fight that. | ||
| Right, so I discussed that with Larry Elder, who's conservative, but on the libertarian side. | ||
| And he basically said what you just said. | ||
| And I think some of my progressive friends would say, well, it may not be institutional anymore | ||
| in that there are laws that existed, no longer exist, but they would say, well, certain communities will get less | ||
| because of racism, just because of the idea of racism, will get less qualified people to teach | ||
| and that they will be treated differently by the police. | ||
| Well, by income level, that's true, but it's true by income level. | ||
| Race and income level tend to correlate, unfortunately, but that's more to do with income level than it has to do with race. | ||
| It's not like there's somebody sitting in Sacramento today in California going, oh, black community, we're not putting anybody in there. | ||
| I mean, the real gap in the country, especially between rich and poor, is two-parent households, not race. | ||
| I mean, the poverty rate in the black community for two-parent households is 7 percent. | ||
| The poverty rate in the white community for single-parent households is 22 percent. | ||
| So, Larry said that to me also, that same thing, and he got a lot of hate for it, and then I got lumped into the hate. | ||
| So, I'll just go with you on that for the purpose of this. | ||
| I mean, a statistic is a statistic, right? | ||
| So, I'll trust that you're giving me a fair statistic, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's a real statistic. | ||
| So, fair enough. | ||
| But that enrages people. | ||
| There's something about that concept, I think, that really upsets people. | ||
| And you would say that that's really because of the feeling thing? | ||
| Well, yeah, as my catchphrase goes, facts don't care about your feelings. | ||
| I mean, the reality is... Pin-tweet. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| As we move forward in American society, the only thing that's going to cure the ills that we have is looking at some of the real problems straight in the face. | ||
| I mean, the fact is that when welfare was instituted in the 60s, before it was instituted, the black single motherhood rate was 20%. | ||
| It is now in excess of 70%. | ||
| And it's not just impacting the black community, it's impacting the white community. | ||
| The white community used to have a 5% single motherhood, right? | ||
| Now it's in excess of 40%. | ||
| The fact is you're going to get higher crime, you're going to get more poverty. | ||
| The Brookings Institute, which is a left institute, right? | ||
| It's a liberal institute, the Brookings Institute, and they kind of straddle that line between liberal and left. | ||
| They say that if you don't want to be permanently poor in the United States, you need to do three things and three things only. | ||
| Graduate high school, get a job and hold it, don't have a baby before you're married. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And by the way, Those things have nothing to do with racism. | ||
| There's not a white person... I would be hard-pressed to find a black person in America... You almost straw-manned yourself there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'd be hard-pressed. | ||
| Maybe there is one. | ||
| Maybe there's one. | ||
| I don't know how many black single mothers got pregnant because a white man was holding a gun to a black man's head and said, I want you to impregnate this person, then leave. | ||
| Okay, single motherhood is a decision that's made by the people who are involved in the sexual act and what happens afterward. | ||
| And it's the single best predictor of intergenerational poverty. | ||
| So make good decisions. | ||
| So it's really the issue that when the left doesn't deal with these things honestly, that then they're just handing it to the right. | ||
| I mean, I see this, we've been talking about this a lot, related to all this stuff with Islamism, that because the left calls everyone a racist, so anytime Me or any of my friends that are talking about this. | ||
| There's not many of us on the left. | ||
| Every time we bring it up, I mean, I'm getting called a bigot left and right now, and yet they can't. | ||
| I say, well, can you point to something bigoted I've said or something racist I've said? | ||
| They can't. | ||
| It's a feeling. | ||
| They feel offended. | ||
| They feel offended. | ||
| But is this where, if the left doesn't deal with something, so, you know, you can talk about Islamism or if the left doesn't deal with the roots of income inequality as you've laid out, that you just hand it to the far right, ultimately, right? | ||
| I mean, doesn't this sort of explain Trump to you a little bit? | ||
| I think, well, to a certain extent I think that that's right. | ||
| I think that what happens is that there is a, and I would never justify people reacting in racist fashion because, you know, you can react in reasonable fashion to stupidity. | ||
| People say silly things like single motherhood doesn't matter. | ||
| And I say no, single motherhood absolutely does matter. | ||
| But what people tend to, what some, a certain segment of the population, and this is true | ||
| both on the left and the right, is when somebody says something they don't like, they immediately | ||
| go to racism. | ||
| I mean, I can't tell you the number of tweets I've received after I said that I don't like | ||
| Donald Trump. | ||
| That's when the anti-Semites come out of the woodwork. | ||
| And it's bizarre to me. | ||
| Like, it's, like, what does my Jewishness have to do with not liking Trump? | ||
| As far as I'm aware, his daughter is an actual convert to Judaism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| So it's weird. | ||
| But yeah, I think that it's polarizing the debate in a way that need not. | ||
| We're not trying to solve problems anymore in American politics. | ||
| All we're trying to do is demonize the other side and turn them into the bad guy. | ||
| So my goal is to demonize the people who try to demonize. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Those are the people who ought to be demonized. | ||
| If your goal in politics is to just make character attacks without regard to facts, then I'm not interested in debating you on facts, because you're clearly not interested in debating on facts. | ||
| Yeah, so that's a good segue, because I read your 11 rules for debating a leftist, and I just read the entire thing this morning. | ||
| It's pretty short, but it's on my mind. | ||
| And basically everything you said, I was struggling when I was reading it because I was like, ugh, I'm agreeing with all of this. | ||
| Because I still consider myself liberal and there's a part of me that I don't want to read something by a guy that's conservative and go, I agree with this stuff. | ||
| But a lot of what I saw in there are the exact tactics that I've seen this regressive left use on me and use on Sam Harris and all these other people. | ||
| Yeah, exactly, that's right. | ||
| Relentlessly. | ||
| So you really gave the antidote to some of these things. | ||
| So you don't have to lay out all 11, but do you wanna pick some highlights? | ||
| 'Cause I think there's some really interesting-- | ||
| Yeah, I mean, a lot of them kind of turn into, okay, so I'm trying to remember all 11 off the top of my | ||
| head or at least some of them. - We can do, yeah, | ||
| give me a couple of 'em. | ||
| So the first one is that you have to embrace the fight. | ||
| You have to understand going in that you're in a fight, usually, and you have to sort of determine the purpose of the conversation that you're having. | ||
| And this is true if you're left or right, actually. | ||
| Determine what your goal is. | ||
| Is your goal to convince the person on the other side? | ||
| Is the person open to being convinced? | ||
| If not, you're wasting your time. | ||
| Are you on a show and there's an audience, in which case you're not speaking to the person, you're speaking to the audience. | ||
| And once you determine that, understand that If there's hostility, you have to be ready to punch back twice as hard, and be preemptive in that attack. | ||
| Which, by the way, you say that's a left idea. | ||
| These are all left ideas. | ||
| To punch back twice as hard. | ||
| Oh yeah, I mean, it was President Obama who coined the phrase, right? | ||
| He was the one who was saying that his supporters ought to punch back twice as hard. | ||
| And I've sort of hijacked that, because I think that it's actually an effective tactic and necessary. | ||
| I've also said that it's important at the very outset to ensure that the framing of questions is proper, because one of the ways that the left succeeds, and you see it in the Republican debates particularly, is they'll ask a question and then the Republicans won't even bother to try reframing what the question is. | ||
| So, John Dickerson the other night, in the CBS debate, he opens up with, and he tries to browbeat Ted Cruz on, You say that nobody should be confirmed in the last year of a president's run. | ||
| Isn't it true that the Constitution says the president gets to pick the nominee? | ||
| And Cruz, instead of just saying, John, I don't care about the timeline, I don't know what you're talking about, we're not going to confirm anybody who doesn't agree with Scalia. | ||
| Instead of just saying that, and it's not our obligation to do that, the Constitution | ||
| has many provisions, John. | ||
| Instead of just reframing the question, he sort of bought into it. | ||
| And you see that from a lot of these, from a lot of Republicans. | ||
| They just accept the question as it comes to them, rather than thinking there's a second | ||
| question that's usually kind of embedded in the first question that's being asked in most | ||
| debate. | ||
| There's a couple examples. | ||
| There's also, you don't have to accept the kind of hero worship that so many Republicans do. | ||
| One of the frequent ones that you do is somebody will say, well, Ronald Reagan was for amnesty. | ||
| Why do I care? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I was two when he did amnesty. | ||
| You want to talk about Reagan or when people try to misdirect to Bush. | ||
| They don't like you're saying something about Obama, so they say something about Bush. | ||
| So your proper answer should be FDR, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Catholic. | ||
| You want to talk about Bush? | ||
| We'll talk about Bush. | ||
| You want to talk about Obama? | ||
| We'll talk about Obama. | ||
| Like, let's stick to the topic at hand. | ||
| My basic rules for debate can basically be boiled down to two, which is get the character assassination off the table. | ||
| If they're going to call you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, the proper response is not, no, I'm not a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe. | ||
| Here's all the proof that I'm not. | ||
| It's, no, you're a jackass because you have no proof of calling me that. | ||
| And accusing people of things without evidence is the mark of being a jackass. | ||
| And that is the proper response. | ||
| And then once that's all off the table, then we can actually have a policy argument. | ||
| So what do you do about people that don't stop doing that? | ||
| I had some... | ||
| You leave. | ||
| You just let it be because... | ||
| You leave. | ||
| I mean, you say this is not a worthwhile debate, you're an asshole, and I'm leaving. | ||
| There's no purpose to... | ||
| But sometimes don't you think that not picking up the fight, and this would be whether you're | ||
| on the left or the right, whatever fight you're in, that sometimes by not picking up the fight | ||
| you actually are strengthening them? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, I think you're strengthening... Here's the logic, right? | ||
| If somebody calls you a racist and you say, no, no, no, let me explain to you why I'm not a racist. | ||
| What you're really saying, what you're really saying is, you're a rational fellow. | ||
| Let's have a conversation about why I'm not a racist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| By even granting the predicate You're a rational fellow. | ||
| He just called you a racist, right? | ||
| If you say to me, I'm a racist, and then I say, well, you're a rational fellow, I'm saying to you, you're right, I'm a racist. | ||
| You're a rational fellow calling me a racist. | ||
| A rational person could theoretically think I'm a racist. | ||
| No, the answer is that's an irrational thought. | ||
| You're being irrational. | ||
| What you're saying is ridiculous. | ||
| And you're a bad person for dropping charges on me without evidence. | ||
| Only bad people do this. | ||
| If you're going to drop a charge, make sure you can back it up. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| I find that there's an incredible lack of being able to back it up. | ||
| And there's a constant, I don't know that you address this specifically, but I find in a lot of these debates, when I have these debates with people, there's a constant moving of the goalpost. | ||
| So you say something, and you sort of get the point across, and they can, even if they don't outwardly accept that it is, they intellectually do, and then they just move what they say, and then they just keep moving it and moving it, and then, you know, you're back in a circle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I do say in that pamphlet that Arguing with people on the left is sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. | ||
| The minute you finish one argument, they're already on to the next. | ||
| And they're usually swiveling to places that they're more comfortable, like same-sex marriage or social issues, because those are issues closer to the heart, so they're more comfortable for them to argue. | ||
| And so if you're arguing economics, invariably you find yourself talking about why Republicans are mean to gay people or something. | ||
| It's always a shifting goalpost. | ||
| Because you can't get in—if the left—this is what I like about Sanders. | ||
| I think Sanders will actually give honest answers to questions. | ||
| If I say to Bernie Sanders, Bernie, what constitutes income equality? | ||
| Forget income inequality. | ||
| Like, what gradation would be income equality? | ||
| Does everybody have to earn the same? | ||
| Because there's a name for that, right? | ||
| I mean, if everybody earns the same, the only way to do that is to confiscate all wealth and redistribute it. | ||
| That's called communism, right? | ||
| I think that Sanders would actually answer that, but most people on the left won't. | ||
| They'll just move the goalposts and say, What do you think he would actually say? | ||
| I think what he would probably say is he would say the sort of income inequality that we see in Europe is more beneficial to the United States. | ||
| And you say, well, okay, that requires a 60% tax rate. | ||
| It means literally the prices of your car will double because they have massive excise taxes over in Denmark. | ||
| And if that's something that you want to do, you're also going to have to raise taxes on | ||
| the poor, raise taxes on the middle class. | ||
| You're going to have to gauge the fact that every business in America is going to leave, | ||
| which is not going to be pleasant for you. | ||
| Are you willing to build? | ||
| Here's the thing about Bernie Sanders' economic policy. | ||
| Donald Trump wants to build a wall to keep people out. | ||
| Bernie Sanders will have to build a wall to keep businesses in, because they will leave. | ||
| You'll actually have to chain them to a stake in order to keep them here. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So we've talked about a lot of stuff that we sort of agree on. | ||
| I haven't agreed with everything, but I'm letting you talk. | ||
| People always yell at me. | ||
| They say, you don't yell back at your guests. | ||
| Let's do the spicy stuff. | ||
| So let's get into some other stuff. | ||
| So the gay marriage thing. | ||
| Let's talk gay marriage. | ||
| You're not big on gay marriage. | ||
| No, I'm not on a social level. | ||
| I think the government ought to be completely out of the business of marriage. | ||
| I think the government sucks at everything, is my short message for today. | ||
| The government is terrible at everything. | ||
| If the government's goal was to forward traditional marriage, it utterly failed, obviously. | ||
| But you don't mind it being out of the business of traditional marriage at all? | ||
| No, I think the government should be out of all marriage. | ||
| I think the government stinks at this. | ||
| Now, I will say that I think the idea of the government subsidizing gay marriage is silly because I don't think that there's societal benefit to gay marriage. | ||
| If you're going to make the argument that government should be involved in marriage at all, Which is not even an argument with which I agree at this point. | ||
| But it's the way it is right now. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Let's just go from that base. | ||
| So before I get there, one quick point. | ||
| The reason I want the government out of the business of marriage is because now that the government has enshrined gay marriage, the next step is going to be going to religious people and telling them they have to engage with same-sex weddings. | ||
| So as a religious person, this is problematic to me. | ||
| I want a society in which I can do what I want and I don't have to care what you think and you can do what you want and you don't have to care what I think. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| That doesn't mean you get to come into my synagogue and get married. | ||
| It also doesn't mean that I have to go to your gay wedding. | ||
| Right. | ||
| See, that's an interesting place to have the discussion, because I would argue for gay marriage for the exact reasons. | ||
| I don't want the government involved in all of these things. | ||
| And that's exactly why gay marriage should exist. | ||
| And I think if Rand Paul had hit that point harder, it would have made a sensible libertarian argument for limited government. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| You want to marry a dude? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| And you want to smoke weed? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Well, I tend to agree. | ||
| Both of those things I agree with. | ||
| And by the way, I find people who smoke weed unbelievably irritating, but that's not my business. | ||
| I mean, this is the beauty of America is you don't have to give a crap what I think. | ||
| We usually end the show by taking a bong hit. | ||
| Oh yeah, well, it's going to be awkward then. | ||
| But as far as the secondary argument about, let's take the predicate that government is now involved in marriage. | ||
| Should government subsidize gay marriage and straight marriage the same way? | ||
| My answer is no, because the only purpose for the government getting involved in marriage is the procreation of the next generation and the raising of that generation. | ||
| And it's my belief that a man and a woman do a better job of raising a child and producing children, obviously biologically, than two men or two women. | ||
| But isn't the child part of it sort of secondary? | ||
| I mean, there are plenty of people that get married to gay couples and straight couples that don't have kids, so marriage in and of itself isn't just about... But at a governmental level, I don't care about those people. | ||
| Meaning, like, I'm happy that they're happy, but I don't really care what they do. | ||
| The government, theoretically, has an interest in the production of the next generation, right? | ||
| That's the only interest in marriage. | ||
| So, in fact, you could even make a case that the government ought to be giving, basically, tax benefits for having kids, and no benefit for marriage. | ||
| But the truth is, the reason that this was created in the first place, obviously, is because long before the advent of modern birth control, the fair assumption was that if you were having sex, then you were going to get pregnant. | ||
| At least if you're having straight sex, you're going to get pregnant. | ||
| And thus, we wanted to incentivize people to stick around for that, because single motherhood is bad for the community. | ||
| And so, we're going to subsidize that with tax benefits. | ||
| By the way, there is no marriage benefit. | ||
| There's a marriage penalty. | ||
| My wife and I pay a significantly higher tax rate because we have a combined income. | ||
| Right, so you're not against, so despite coming from some sort of... This is not a religious argument. | ||
| I don't make a religious argument. | ||
| So that's what I want to distinguish, because of court, because we should be for separation of church and state, and I think you are for separation of church and state. | ||
| So the separation of church and state means, I just want to make a quick distinction, Separation of church and state doesn't mean that I can't bring my religious values to bear in how I vote. | ||
| It just means that I can't leverage Jewish ritual on you. | ||
| There's no establishment of Jewish religion or Christian religion, but I should be able to make a secular argument for why what I'm saying is right, is my general rule, because otherwise we're operating in different spheres. | ||
| If I cite the Bible, it makes no difference to you. | ||
| You don't care about the Bible. | ||
| Right, so I'm a secular Jew. | ||
| I mean, I'm an atheist, so it doesn't... Right, so your Judaism is ethnic and irrelevant in every other respect. | ||
| I like curb. | ||
| You like curb? | ||
| Who? | ||
| Curb your enthusiasm. | ||
| Oh, well, eh. | ||
| I mean, that's cultural Judaism, like bagels and matzo balls. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It's still pretty good. | ||
| Okay, so let's not get hung up on that. | ||
| So you're making the distinction between this isn't coming from a religious place. | ||
| Now I think part of the problem when it comes to gay marriage is that a huge portion of the Christian right is trying to impose their religious values on this. | ||
| But the policy itself isn't religious. | ||
| No, but I want to make that distinction. | ||
| Like the rationale for the policy, this is where I'm making a distinction. | ||
| The rationale for people voting can still be religious, but if the policy is not religious, if there's a secular rationale—this is what Scalia said about it, actually—if there's a secular rationale to it, then the motivations of the voters don't matter. | ||
| Like, I don't care what the motivation of the voter is in virtually any circumstance. | ||
| I matter what the vote is. | ||
| And if somebody wants to vote for lower taxes, I don't care whether they're doing it because they're on principle for lower taxes or whether they personally want lower taxes on their income. | ||
| I just care about the outcome of the vote. | ||
| The outcome of the vote. | ||
| Okay, so basically you don't care about gay marriage as this country stands right now. | ||
| You simply don't care. | ||
| Your one concern though is that ultimately this will lead to the government forcing gay marriage on synagogues that don't want to have it or mosques that don't want to have Yeah, not ultimately, like now. | ||
| In California, they've already passed laws that you have to teach same-sex marriage in public schools, for example. | ||
| Like, it changes the nature of the teaching. | ||
| My view on that is I don't know why—I went to public school for elementary and part of junior high. | ||
| I don't understand why the government is teaching me anything about this stuff. | ||
| This is for my parents to teach me. | ||
| Like, this is a values thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I guess that's sort of where it's just—values just get conflated with what we're taught. | ||
| Like, it's just sort of a— Yes and no. | ||
| I mean, there are no values to math. | ||
| They're no values to biology. | ||
| They're values to history, which is why it's dicey, and it's disingenuous what the left has done with the education system. | ||
| There are multiple perspectives on history, and the monopolistic takeover of the liberal arts is a real problem. | ||
| And you can have multiple perspectives on that, but we're not teaching marriage in the context of history or English, we're teaching it in the context of science, which has nothing to do with anything. | ||
| And again, a PC comes in. | ||
| When they were doing sex ed, when I was in junior high, they were making a big deal out of the idea that everybody is equally likely to get AIDS, for example. | ||
| Not true. | ||
| I mean, it's just not true. | ||
| AIDS is a behaviorally driven disease. | ||
| I will never get AIDS, barring a blood transfusion that has AIDS. | ||
| I don't do intravenous drugs, and I don't have promiscuous sex, and I was a virgin when I married my wife, and she was a virgin when she married me. | ||
| So we're safe. | ||
| We're good. We're about as safe as you can get on this. | ||
| And so I don't like the, again, the facts being trumped by what we wish the facts were so that we could push certain political agendas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So how do you then, taking this argument from a secular place, how do you then feel being in the same party of so many people that are taking it from a right-wing Christian place? | ||
| Because there is a seemingly odd alliance there that I think is... | ||
| Not really. | ||
| I agree with them on the end point. | ||
| I even agree with them religiously. | ||
| I just don't think they're good spokespeople for their cause. | ||
| I mean, I think that if your chief citation to your opposition to gay marriage is Leviticus 18.22, I don't think that that's a solid argument that's going to convince a lot of people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that, you know, there are better arguments against gay marriage than that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, you know, this is something I talk about at religious schools, and I've been asked by, you know, pastors and rabbis and priests to talk to students about, okay, you have these religious principles, is there any justification outside of the Bible says so for why this is correct? | ||
| And as a religious person who's actually thought through his positions, I tend to believe there is. | ||
| As a religious person, I believe that God didn't create stupid rules. | ||
| So if you believe that God didn't create stupid rules, then you have to come up with some sort of justification for the rules that are being expressed. | ||
| Like there's some that you can't understand, that's just an article of faith, but the big ones about human behavior, there should be a decent rationale you can explain to people who don't buy into revelation. | ||
| Sure, so there I would just say, well, you're basing your belief in God, it's just a belief, not anything that could be proven, so... Right, but that's every belief system. | ||
| No, no, no, but anyone that's basing anything on religion is just basing something on some unproven thing. | ||
| So I would say I want that nothing to do with my life. | ||
| Which is fine, and that's why we live in America, good. | ||
| But I will say this, every belief system is based on something unproven. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| Human rights means nothing. | ||
| Where do you get your basis of human rights? | ||
| From a feeling. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| Which is subjective. | ||
| I handed it to you. | ||
| Well, right, but that's a blend. | ||
| So you're saying, basically, where the liberals would say, I'm for this because I'm for gay people. | ||
| I want gay people to be able to do what they want to do. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| You know, pursue happiness like anyone else. | ||
| You would say, well, just, this has nothing to do with government and whatever. | ||
| So I can't, there's not a lot of... No, there's not a lot of conflict here. | ||
| My governmental policy, because I'm basically a libertarian, is I don't care about that. | ||
| I mean, again, the government sucks everything. | ||
| So what do we do to strengthen that group of people? | ||
| So clearly we don't agree on... It's getting there. | ||
| We don't quite agree on this thing, but I understand your rationale and you're not trying to stop gay people from getting married. | ||
| I think right now the next conflict is not going to come from the right, it's going to come from the left pushing the ball. | ||
| Meaning that it's going to come from the case in Oregon with this baker who doesn't want to service a same-sex wedding, doesn't want to actually have to cater it. | ||
| I think that good-hearted people should say, fine, you do what you want, go across the street to the bakery, like who cares? | ||
| That's what I would say. | ||
| This is the difference between a liberal and a leftist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In a nutshell, this is the difference between a liberal and a leftist. | ||
| A liberal says, your business, I don't care. | ||
| A leftist says, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I think it's imperative that you will be made to care, right? | ||
| In Eric Erickson's phrase, you'll be made to care. | ||
| A man will come to your house with a gun and he will tell you that if you do not cater this wedding, they were forced to pay a $175,000 fine for not catering a lesbian wedding. | ||
| There's a bakery across the street. | ||
| You know, this is really nefarious stuff. | ||
| So this is where, you're asking where the momentum comes from? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is where the momentum comes from. | ||
| So when I make an argument to conservatives and religious people that the government ought to get out of the business of marriage, I'm not saying that because I'm pro-gay marriage. | ||
| I'm very much anti-gay marriage in the social sense. | ||
| I don't think that, you know, as a religious person, I think homosexuality is a sin. | ||
| I think lots of things are sins that people engage in. | ||
| I think they should be free to engage in them. | ||
| But as a religious person, that's not, That's not my thing. | ||
| I don't think that gay marriage is a great, massively good thing for society on a social level, but on a governmental level, if you guys don't just get out of this business entirely, the left has no end point. | ||
| Their only end point is using the government as a club against you. | ||
| So now that they've got gay marriage, it will go to, it will go to, we're going to stop accrediting schools that don't teach gay marriage or hire homosexual employees, right? | ||
| And you've got Catholic churches saying I don't want to pay the health benefits of somebody's gay partner. | ||
| That's a Catholic church. | ||
| Why should it have to? | ||
| But the left would say, "No, they have to. | ||
| You will be made to care. | ||
| You're a bad person if you don't do this." | ||
| And so my argument to the right is... | ||
| This is where I'm a sensible liberal. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| But this way you'd actually get heavy argument from the not so sensible liberals, probably | ||
| including all the Democratic nominees. | ||
| The fact is that what I'm saying is the best argument for the libertarian position on the | ||
| right here is going to be a rearguard action. | ||
| It's not going to be, it's better for straight people and it's bad for gay marriage to get it out of that realm. | ||
| I think that if you want to fight against gay marriage, do it on the social level with your church, teach your kids what you want to teach them. | ||
| But when it comes to making this argument to conservatives, the real argument is, if you don't take power out of the hands of government, if you don't take that ring away from Gollum and throw it into Mount Doom, then it will be used against you. | ||
| There will—the government is just—government is the ring. | ||
| So does this—my direct message at the top of the show, I was talking about just how | ||
| stupid our election system is and how everything's down to soundbites and everything, you know, | ||
| our debate is so nonsensical and all that. | ||
| So everything you just laid out there is a much more clean and clear explanation, and | ||
| where you actually are separating church and state and doing the intellectual rigor to | ||
| make a sensible argument, where if they talk for the little bit that they've talked about | ||
| gay marriage, which I'm glad, because I don't think it should be talked about that much, | ||
| Let it be, and that will be fine in my opinion. | ||
| But nobody, you know, Marco Rubio will talk about the family, but he's purely doing it from a religious perspective. | ||
| Well, there's an identity politics that's been created on the right in response to the identity politics of the left. | ||
| So if we're going to be attacked as religious people, we have to talk as religious people. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| So I have to go preach from a pulpit, and if I don't cite, you know, if I don't cite Genesis to talk about a man shall leave his, a man shall leave his parents and cling to his wife, if I don't, if I don't cite that, then I haven't spoken the end code that shows that I care about the values of people like you. | ||
| And this is the way the political game is played. | ||
| So, again, I sort of wish that Americans would see through the political game on all sides. | ||
| Meaning, I wish religious people would just say, I understand you're anti-gay marriage, and I also understand what you're doing here to protect religious people, and you don't have to cite Bible verses at me to prove it. | ||
| And you end up with idiocies like Donald Trump on stage waving around a Bible, pretending he gives a damn what's in it. | ||
| Right, misquoting. | ||
| After two marriages and several adulterous affairs and bragging about having experiences with married women, standing up there with a Bible and going, this is an even better book than the odd of the deal. | ||
| If this is how you vote, if you're able to be pandered to that way, that's a sad commentary on American politics. | ||
| And in its way, it's really no different from Hillary Clinton going to the black community and saying, you're the victims, you're the victims, and now I'm going to speak the language you understand. | ||
| Here's how you know that I care about you. | ||
| I'm not big into caring. | ||
| You know, I think that people who pretend to care about you are generally people who want the power to control your life. | ||
| The only people that I want power in their lives, and they want power in my life, are my immediate family. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You know, my parents, my sisters, my wife, my children, and they're independent human beings too, right? | ||
| So caring is the way that Caring is the way that the left controls. | ||
| They don't come with the jackboots first. | ||
| They first come and they say, we care so much about you. | ||
| We have to do these things for you. | ||
| And by the way, we brought some guns to help out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it shows sort of the beauty or the scariness of identity politics, because it sounds really good. | ||
| I guess that's why they always say socialism will come with a big smile, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| This is Joan Goldberg's point, liberal fascism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so we only have a couple minutes left, but let's just knock out a couple other things. | ||
| So I saw when you were on Piers Morgan with that whole gun thing way back when, and I watched it again in preparation for this, and I never liked Piers Morgan. | ||
| I thought he was doing a talk show the wrong way. | ||
| I hope people don't view me in that way. | ||
| But what you did with him in the argument was really kind of brilliant, and it goes to some of the 11 things. | ||
| I don't really agree with your stance on guns. | ||
| So, can you sort of recap what happened? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, first of all, like Trump, now that you've complimented me, like Putin, now you're a good person. | ||
|
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See? | |
| You see what I did there? | ||
| I told you I read the rules. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| So, what happened in that debate is that Piers Morgan had basically been doing a lot of the things we're talking about. | ||
| For weeks, he'd been saying after Sandy Hook that anybody who disagreed with him on gun control, the only possible reason to disagree with him is because you don't care about what happened on gun control. | ||
| And you saw Barack Obama do this, you know, after the last mass shooting, right? | ||
| After Umpqua Community College, and he got up there and he did the teary-eyed routine. | ||
| I don't like tears. | ||
| Stop. | ||
| Just give me your policy. | ||
| Do you think he faked the tears? | ||
| People were saying he touched his eye in a weird way. | ||
| I don't think he did that. | ||
| He was tearing out over here. | ||
| I think Obama is an unusually skilled politician and I think he worked himself up to tears. | ||
| I think that good actors can. | ||
| The idea that the emotion is fake, I don't think the emotion is fake, but the emotion of actors isn't fake either. | ||
| If you talk to actors who work themselves up to tears, they actually feel sad when they are crying. | ||
| That's how you get yourself to cry, right? | ||
| I think Obama worked himself up there. | ||
| He's a method actor. | ||
| Otherwise he'd be crying every other press conference. | ||
| I mean, he's talking about all sorts of crap that goes on in the country that's terrible. | ||
| Like, every time he gets out there and he talks about the economy, he'd be crying. | ||
| I mean, he'd be completely emotionally unstable. | ||
| It's one of the two. | ||
| So what I said to Piers Morgan is, I said, you're a bully, and the way that you bully people is you stand on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook to push your political agenda. | ||
| And he didn't know how to come back from that, because that was his entire strategy, and now it had been unmasked. | ||
| And actually, during the break, he had planned to bring in a kid who'd been shot, and was in a wheelchair, and say, well you've said it to me, now say it to this small pool of child. | ||
| And he couldn't do it, because if he had done that, I immediately would have said, first you stood on the graves of the kids, and now you're standing on this poor guy's wheelchair. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| But, so that was sort of the content of the argument. | ||
| He tried to throw the Ronald Reagan was in favor of banning assault weapons at me. | ||
| I don't care, as I've said, what Ronald Reagan had to say. | ||
| He's a guy. | ||
| Sometimes he's right, sometimes he's wrong. | ||
| So he wasn't a god? | ||
| Is that? | ||
| You're confirming that. | ||
| As a religious person, I only have one, and it's Reagan. | ||
| Not him. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Okay, so that's not the one. | ||
| I knew there was one. | ||
| Right, it's just not Reagan. | ||
| It's just not Reagan. | ||
| Okay, got it. | ||
| I know, because he's not back, right? | ||
| He could be, he could be. | ||
| So my feelings on the gun thing is that basically, because I believe in the Second Amendment, people should have access to guns. | ||
| As it's clear after an hour together, I'm not a huge fan of the government, so I do believe people should be able to protect themselves and all of those things. | ||
| What I think is that we should be able to control it a little bit more than we are. | ||
| I think that the NRA does wield too much power. | ||
| And then I would say at the same time, as I always like to say, two things can be true at the same time. | ||
| We have a massive mental health problem in this country, and that's the part that we're not talking about, because every commercial for every cable news channel is for some other drug that it turns out that some crazy percentage of these shooters are on. | ||
| Right, so when it comes to gun violence, there's two problems. | ||
| There's inner city violence, which really is a matter of gang violence and people shooting each other. | ||
| Unfortunately, because they're involved in gangs. | ||
| And this is what's happening every day in Chicago. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. | ||
| and all the major cities. | ||
| I mean, all the heavily gun-controlled areas, Democratic areas, these are the places where people are getting killed en masse. | ||
| And then you have the mass shooting issue. | ||
| And the mass shooting issue is largely because in the 1960s and 1970s, this is the one area where I think the government actually should be involved. | ||
| In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a decision that was made basically all across the country to empty out all the mental facilities because there was an idea that went around the country and gained a lot of traction that mental illness was basically one flew over the cuckoo's nest. | ||
| Nobody was seriously crazy, everybody was just eccentric. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is why you have a mass growth in homeless people. | ||
| In 1960, how many people do you think in 1960 were in mental institutions in the United States? | ||
| I mean, I can't imagine, I would guess... Half a million. | ||
| Half a million people. | ||
| Half a million people, right? | ||
| And we had half the population then, right? | ||
| Today, there's 25,000 people in mental facilities. | ||
| So you've got a lot of violent people on the streets. | ||
| And so you have a lot of violent people on the streets, you're going to end up with more mass shootings. | ||
| And that's why every time there's a mass shooting, almost invariably, it's somebody who is crazy, and we've known they're crazy. | ||
| And involuntary commitment laws are really, really difficult because you have to show | ||
| that the person is a threat to themselves or others, as opposed to the old standard | ||
| which was they're incapable of caring for themselves. | ||
| One of the big problems with paranoid schizophrenia, which has afflicted a lot of these shooters, | ||
| is that you have a condition where you literally can't even recognize that you have the condition, | ||
| so you won't take your drugs. | ||
| If we let you out, you'll just go off the drugs and you'll go right back to doing what | ||
| it was that you were doing in the first place. | ||
| But even the drugs often is part of it. | ||
| It's people that are off the drugs and it's people that are on the drugs. | ||
| Most of the people who are committing these acts are not on heavy medication. | ||
| Most of the people who are committing these acts are people who have gone off their medication and they have significant mental illness and they need to be medicated. | ||
| So, you know, this is an area where the mental health system is dramatically underfunded, the laws are complete. | ||
| When it comes to people who legitimately cannot take care of themselves, I'm talking, and I'm speaking as somebody whose grandfather was a schizophrenic who went into a mental hospital, they gave him lithium, and then he spent the rest of his life as a happy, productive human being. | ||
| Right? | ||
| These are things that might not have been possible now. | ||
| And so this is, you know, this is an area where I actually think that there is a role for the government in this. | ||
| John Locke would have thought the same. | ||
| John Locke said this in his writings. | ||
| He said that the problem of mental illness is one that sort of falls on society as a whole because you have a group of people who can't take care of themselves. | ||
| That's the real problem with mass shootings. | ||
| Taking my guns away from me or taking another law-abiding person's gun away from them, that's not going to stop the mass shooter. | ||
| In fact, it's probably going to create more mass shootings because now I can't defend myself. | ||
| So would you say the NRA is a problem at all within this? | ||
| I think the NRA is an incredibly valuable organization because it's pushing against people on the other side. | ||
| I don't have to agree with everything the NRA says to think that they're an incredibly valuable organization that's channeling the legal hopes of a lot of Americans to protect the Second Amendment. | ||
| And we're about one vote away on the Supreme Court from the Second Amendment disappearing entirely. | ||
| Yeah, so let's just do some Supreme Court stuff and that's how we're going to end this. | ||
| So with this whole thing with Scalia right now and this spot, where do you stand on this? | ||
| It seems to me that Obama has to nominate someone. | ||
| That's his job. | ||
| He's the president. | ||
| Are you with me so far? | ||
| He's the president right now. | ||
| He can. | ||
| He doesn't have to. | ||
| But it's his job. | ||
| Of course he will. | ||
| But if it was a Republican... Of course he will. | ||
| Okay, and now it's up to us. | ||
| And I don't care if he does. | ||
| As you say, he has the capacity to do it. | ||
| It's one of the only things that he's actually allowed to do as president that he's doing, as opposed to all the other things he's doing which he's not allowed to do. | ||
| But we've got to finish up here. | ||
| We have to focus on this one. | ||
| Alright, so we're in agreement on that, and then it'll be up to the Senate to either confirm this person or not. | ||
| They don't have to give them an up or down vote though, right? | ||
| They can do whatever they want. | ||
| So what do you make of, you know, Mitch McConnell and the rest of these guys that are like, ah, you know, he shouldn't even nominate anybody and all that? | ||
| I think it's an idiotic line of argument. | ||
| I mean, I think it's a really dumb line of argument. | ||
| I went to Harvard Law School and I wrote my third year paper at Harvard Law School on the idea that Marbury versus Madison was wrongly decided. | ||
| I don't think that the Supreme Court should have the capacity to decide for everyone. | ||
| For conservatives to think that the entire future of the Constitution rests on one guy not dying is really sad. | ||
| And the reason for that is because the Supreme Court has now been seen as this great moral arbiter I don't think it is. | ||
| I think that the Supreme Court has been responsible for some of the worst decisions in human history. | ||
| I mean, the Supreme Court is responsible for Roe, which is a disaster. | ||
| The Supreme Court was responsible for Plessy v. Ferguson. | ||
| Everybody always wants to talk about Brown v. Board. | ||
| If they'd gotten Plessy right in the first place, you don't need Brown v. Board, and segregation ends in 1900. | ||
| So the Supreme Court is a serious problem. | ||
| There are nine unelected people, which I don't even care about the unelected, but there are nine people who are given the power to control everybody's life in the name of a document that most of them don't even take seriously. | ||
| So is that the irony with the Supreme Court, that they're supposed to be above partisan politics, and yet the whole system to get them there is partisan? | ||
| And they're partisan themselves. | ||
| I mean, Elena Kagan is a hardcore Democrat. | ||
| Elena Kagan was the Solicitor General for Barack Obama. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| I mean, I went to—she was the dean when I was at Harvard Law School. | ||
| She was a hardcore leftist then. | ||
| You know, the idea that people are free of politics—I'm what they call a legal realist. | ||
| I believe that virtually everybody has their perspective on life, and that comes out in how they adjudicate. | ||
| Uh, and you have to work very hard to remove yourself from that. | ||
| I think most judges don't. | ||
| I think most judges rule based on what they feel. | ||
| Like Anthony Kennedy, you can't tell him, regardless of what you think about same-sex marriage, you cannot tell me that the Constitution of the United States, or the 14th Amendment there too, which was ratified in 1868, was demanding that the states not pass laws in favor of traditional marriage. | ||
| That's absurd. | ||
| Well, no, but equal protection, he was using that argument, right? | ||
| So the equal protection argument that we should all be treated equally... That's a bunch of crap, because equal protection does not mean that a law should have an equal effect on everyone. | ||
| No law has an equal effect on everyone. | ||
| The question is whether the law itself, whether the law itself discriminates against someone on the basis of an immutable characteristic. | ||
| And one of the problems with the whole gays are blacks is that gays are not blacks. | ||
| I mean, the fact is that a gay person who never has sex with another man is not going to manifest their homosexuality in a way that society cares about. | ||
| They may be gay, they may have a sexual orientation. | ||
| That's a guy who's going to shoot up a place. | ||
| Well, maybe he will, maybe he won't. | ||
| I mean, I assume that for the last couple of thousand years, when gays were not treated well in Western society, that not all these scrutinly gay people were going and killing folks. | ||
| I think more gay people than that. | ||
| I think that gay people have the same self-control that straight people do. | ||
| I don't think they're any better. | ||
| I don't think they're any worse in terms of their sexual self-control. | ||
| I will say that I think men, in general, are less good in terms of sexual self-control than women, which explains why gay men have sex with more people than straight men, because women don't want to have sex with men as much as men want to have sex with men. | ||
| Men have strong sex drives. | ||
| But that's well off topic. | ||
| Back to the Scalia for a second. | ||
| The problem here is that the Republican Party, when they say things like, it's the timeline, it isn't the timeline. | ||
| Okay, if somebody replaces Justice Scalia, who's of the left, and I don't care when this is, if Hillary gets elected, if we're 20 years from now, one more vote on the Supreme Court and the leftists on the court do not see the Constitution as a piece of law, right, to be interpreted like the Sherman Antitrust Act or like Obamacare. | ||
| They see the Constitution as a piece of poetry to be interpreted as their feelings dictate. | ||
| And this is the point that I'm making about Kennedy. | ||
| This is the through line through sort of everything we're talking about. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And this is the point that I'm making about Kennedy, specifically, and the gay marriage decision. | ||
| There is not one iota of evidence that the law, that when it was written, meant anything to this effect, or that it meant to leave an open space for the Supreme Court to come in and leverage down on state same-sex marriage. | ||
| Laws mean what they mean when they're written. | ||
| They don't mean what they mean 200 years from now. | ||
| If somebody picks up this interview in 200 years and starts to read into my perspective that I'm super pro-homosexual behavior, I would be a little bit surprised, right? | ||
| But that's essentially what happened in 1868. | ||
| He's taking a clause that was written by a bunch of people who were very much not in favor of even, forget homosexual marriage, who criminalized sodomy, right? | ||
| And saying to them, okay, well those people really meant, what they really meant here was pro-same-sex marriage. | ||
| If you want to make same-sex marriage legal, make it legal. | ||
| You know, that's what you can do through the ballot box, is the beauty of a republic. | ||
| But you don't get to have nine unelected judges who are these special moral people who've been dinged by the hand of God. | ||
| I believe all human beings are capable of good. | ||
| I believe all human beings are capable of evil. | ||
| I believe all human beings are selfish and all are capable of altruism. | ||
| I don't believe that there are nine perfect human beings who sit on the Supreme Court and rule us as a magical, angelic oligarchy. | ||
| I think that's a pretty solid ending to this. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Sounds good to me. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, well, I think what we did here was exactly what I want this to be, that we don't have to agree on everything, but I do sense a sort of new center coming together with people that are on the right. | ||
| That was my left, but you see what happened there. | ||
| People that are on the left and on the right, that there's a way where you can be moral and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with religion, or you can be moral and it has something to do with religion, but that's not how you want to be governed, and I think that's going to be my takeaway from this. | ||
| No, I think that's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, as I say to people who disagree with me, the beauty of the country is that you don't have to care what I think. | ||
| The minute you bring the government into saying that I have to care what you think, then we're at odds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as long as the government's out of it, we can have these discussions all day long and it's just good fun. | ||
| The minute you bring the gun to the party, you're the fascist. | ||
| More importantly than any of that, Milo Yiannopoulos is going to be so jealous that we sat here for an hour. | ||
| Anyway, I want to thank Ben, and you can check out his work pretty much all over the place, but I believe it's Benjamin Shapiro, Doctor. | ||
| Go to Daily Wire is probably the best place. | ||
| Dailywire.com and he's doing the Breitbart thing and all that. |
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