Today is the big tax reform day. It finally has passed through Congress and your taxes will go down. The Democrats moan in lamentation. We'll talk about all that. Plus, I sort of face-planted Rosie O'Donnell on Twitter, and it's hilarious. Plus, we talk about the passing of the tax reform package, and the fact that everyone is dead in fact, because no one went to sleep last night. And we read a story about a zombie apocalypse in the afterlife. Ben's back from a trip to Florida, where he had a great time meeting with college students and getting to meet Donald Trump Jr. Ben also talks about the mass slaughter of innocent people at the hands of the media and the Democratic Party, and how it's time for me to take a look at what's really going on in the Dead Zone. Thanks to Helix Sleep for sponsoring the show. If you like the show, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms! Thanks also to our sponsor, HelixSleep, for sponsoring this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. It helps us make a difference in the world. Thank you so much! Ben Shapiro - Ben Shapiro - and the rest of the team at Ben Shapiro's Law School Podcast is a great resource for all things tax reform, and we'd like to hear your thoughts and opinions on tax reform and other topics related to tax reform. Please write us down in the comments below! Thanks Ben's thoughts, thoughts, opinions, thoughts and thoughts on taxes, and thoughts, and your thoughts on this week's tax reform update. . We'll get them on the next episode of the Ben Shapiro show! - The Weekly Standard - Ben's Law Lesson: Tax Reform. - Thank you, Ben Shapiro: Tax reform and all that's going to be a good one! . . . Ben Shapiro is a real person, right? Ben s Lawless, right here on the internet, right now! (Music: "lawless, not a real thing? ) (cuz he's dead, right there's a song about it's good, right??) , right there in this week, right in the middle of it's a real life, right on it's real, right down to it's not?
00:02:03.000Okay, so, today dawned amidst a cacophony of howling dogs mourning their dead masters.
00:02:07.000Men, women, children killed in a mass senseless slaughter by the passage of tax reform.
00:02:30.000The Republicans just said that they wanted to lower taxes, but Democrats knew, the media knew, that if this tax reform package were to go through, then it would be like The Walking Dead.
00:02:38.000Zombies would wander the earth, just dead bodies stacked up in cars on the highways.
00:02:44.000That's exactly how it was this morning.
00:03:01.000Now, the amazing thing is that I didn't know that everyone could be killed again since everyone was killed by net neutrality repeal a week ago.
00:03:07.000But apparently, death can be died a thousand times.
00:03:10.000And so, everyone's dead from net neutrality repeal, and repeal of the Paris Accords, and all the rest of it.
00:04:09.000You'll get a little bit of money back on your taxes if you are in the middle class.
00:04:13.000The average household is supposed to receive, according to the Tax Policy Center, a tax cut of about $1,600 in 2018.
00:04:22.000An average household earning a million bucks or more would see a tax decrease of approximately $70,000.
00:04:28.000compared to $870 for households making $50,000 to $75,000, that's because people at the upper end of the tax spectrum are paying nearly all the net taxes in the country.
00:04:36.000It's not because the Republicans just decided to benefit the rich.
00:04:39.000It's that if you reduce rates for the rich, they are getting back a lot more money because they're making a lot more money and they're paying a lot more money.
00:04:45.000Okay, this isn't the biggest tax cut in history, but it's not insignificant.
00:04:48.000The idiotic idea that apparently 50% of Americans believe that you're gonna pay more tax because of this bill is just stupid, and it's because the media have been lying to you.
00:04:57.000The media have been saying this is a redistributionist bill from poor to rich.
00:05:04.000Okay, so in 2025, the individual tax decreases are supposed to go away, but in all likelihood, they're going to remain.
00:05:11.000The reason they're going to remain is who actually wants to vote openly for tax increases.
00:05:14.000Democrats are probably going to maintain those middle-class tax rates.
00:05:17.000The reason that Republicans had them sunset in 2025 is because one of the budget tricks that has to be done here is if you wanted to pass in the Senate with 51 votes, which is how many votes it got, if you wanted to pass in the Senate with that number of votes instead of 60 to kill a filibuster,
00:05:31.000Then the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has to rule that the bill will be deficit neutral.
00:05:36.000So, the bill is deficit neutral, according to the CBO.
00:05:38.000That's because of some gamesmanship by Republicans.
00:05:41.000Okay, here's the thing about the corporate tax rates, and here's the case no one's gonna make.
00:05:44.000Corporate tax rates go down, that means companies can afford to give raises.
00:05:48.000That they can afford to actually create jobs.
00:05:51.000And the early evidence of this is today, AT&T announced that it would give a $1,000 across-the-board bonus to everyone, thanks to the tax decrease.
00:06:00.000That now that this corporate tax rate has been reduced, they will give a $1,000 bonus to everyone.
00:06:05.000Now, some may say that this is a cynical ploy by AT&T.
00:06:09.000To basically give the Trump administration a good headline so that Trump will allow the AT&T Comcast merger to go through.
00:06:16.000I'm not going to say that that sounds right to me, but it sounds exactly right to me.
00:06:19.000Still, the corporate tax rate dropping is a good thing for business.
00:06:22.000And the proof that it's a good thing for business is that in every other country where the corporate tax rate has been dropped precipitously, what you see is significant GDP growth.
00:06:32.000Ireland actually has a 12.5% corporate tax rate, so it's become a sort of business haven for corporations that want to do business overseas, and they've seen high sustained growth thanks to that healthy business climate.
00:06:42.000In 1995, they actually had a corporate business tax of 40%.
00:06:45.000They dropped it to 12.5%, and they've seen 23% GDP growth since, compared to 7.2 GDP growth
00:06:55.000So, over the course of 35 years, they saw 7.2% GDP growth.
00:06:59.000Then, they moved the corporate tax rate down from 40% to 12.5%, and over the last 27 years, they have seen a 23% increase in GDP.
00:07:09.000So, this has also been seen in countries ranging from Germany to Spain.
00:07:13.000When you reduce the corporate tax rate, it makes it easier for companies to invest in the United States.
00:07:19.000They no longer are trying to organize as offshore companies.
00:07:22.000There's also, in this bill, a big increase in the child tax credit.
00:07:26.000That child tax credit is truly a redistribution scheme because a lot of people who don't pay taxes are getting the child tax credit, but it's backed by a lot of Republicans because they think that families with children have higher expenses and we ought to give them benefits.
00:07:40.000I am actually, as the father of two children, I'm not really in favor of the child tax credit on a strictly libertarian viewpoint.
00:07:46.000I don't think the government should be giving you incentives to behave in certain ways, and I don't think anybody is having kids for the tax credit.
00:08:19.000Tax reform includes reductions in tax deductions for state and local taxes.
00:08:23.000So people in high-tax states like California, they're reducing my taxes through the tax rate, but they're increasing my taxes because the deductions are not even close to what I'm going to be paying in my state tax in the state of California.
00:08:36.000Plus the mortgage interest deduction has been decreased markedly.
00:08:39.000You can now only take a mortgage interest deduction up to $750,000 loan.
00:08:43.000In the state of California, pretty much everybody who owns a home has a mortgage that is bigger than that.
00:08:55.000No longer have to itemize, because you're only deducting, you're only doing itemized deductions if you want deductions above and beyond the standard deduction.
00:09:03.000Now the standard deduction has been doubled, so that means that itemized deductions are probably going to go the way of the dodo bird for a lot of folks.
00:09:20.000Why does it reduce deficits when you get rid of the individual mandate?
00:09:23.000When people are supposedly being forced to pay into the system?
00:09:25.000The reality is that because of the individual mandate, because you are forced to go get health care, people have gone and registered with Medicaid.
00:09:32.000That costs millions and billions of dollars to the federal government.
00:09:35.000Fewer people are going to register for Medicaid because they're not mandated to do so.
00:09:41.000Well, it would be entirely a good thing just on the surface of it, right?
00:09:44.000You no longer have the federal government forcing you into a position where you must, must, must do this.
00:09:50.000However, it's not good for one reason that I'll explain in just a moment.
00:09:56.000I mean, the reason that the individual mandate leaving may not be the world's greatest thing is because if the individual mandate goes away, you have to fill the gap for all of the sick people who are still in the individual insurance market, right?
00:10:07.000The way that we were filling that before is we were basically forcing young, healthy people to buy insurance, and that was driving the rates down in the individual insurance market.
00:10:15.000They were basically paying to compensate a bunch of old, sick people in the individual insurance market.
00:10:18.000Those rates are now likely to go up some, and that means that the federal government is going to have to make a choice.
00:10:23.000Either they're going to have to remove the Obamacare regulations,
00:10:27.000Or, they're going to have to fill in, backfill, the funding insurance companies lose because of the individual mandate.
00:10:34.000That, unfortunately, seems like the way the federal government is going.
00:10:36.000It seems like Republicans are going to be voting, basically, for a new, it looks like the Republicans are going to be voting for a new entitlement program, which is not a grand and glorious thing.
00:10:45.000So, I want to give you the rest of what's in this tax bill.
00:10:47.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Birchgold.
00:10:51.000Despite the fact that the stock market is soaring, despite the fact that the economy is going supremely well, despite all of that, I think that it is necessary to point out that the economy can always tank at any time, right?
00:11:04.000Everybody thought the economy was going gangbusters in early 2007 and then it tanked on you.
00:11:07.000One of the reasons that you ought to diversify and ought to have some money in precious metals is because of the risk of an economic downturn, which could be brought about by anything from a public event to a foreign policy event.
00:11:20.000I'm not saying take your entire portfolio and put it in gold.
00:11:22.000But I am saying take some of your money and put it in precious metals.
00:11:25.000And when you choose to do that, go to my friends at Birch Gold Group.
00:11:27.000They have a long-standing track record of continued success with thousands of satisfied clients, countless five-star reviews, an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
00:11:34.000And right now, they're giving away a comprehensive 16-page kit showing how gold and silver can protect your savings, how you can legally move your IRA or 401k out of stocks and bonds and into a precious metals IRA if that's something you choose to do.
00:11:45.000Right now, if you're looking at Bitcoin and saying, wow, Bitcoin is doing really well,
00:11:48.000That's because Bitcoin is basically a controlled asset.
00:12:42.000The worst thing about this bill is that deficits are going to increase.
00:12:44.000The Republicans have said that we'll grow our way out of deficits.
00:12:48.000That will be true to a certain extent.
00:12:49.000It won't be true to the point where it will cover for the government revenue hole that's been blown in the budget.
00:12:55.000But that's why Republicans should be focused on cutting now.
00:12:57.000Republicans should actually use this opportunity to cut.
00:12:59.000Now, I know Republicans just want to win elections.
00:13:02.000But what that leads to is big government.
00:13:04.000It leads to a battle between big government Republicans and big government Democrats.
00:13:07.000And both of them end up blowing up the deficit.
00:13:10.000If Republicans actually want to make a difference, they're going to have to take up another priority of Speaker Ryan's, and that is Medicaid reform, Medicare reform, block grants to states.
00:13:18.000All these are things that the Republicans are going to have to do.
00:13:19.000OK, so, all this said, I like this bill.
00:13:34.000They have gone absolutely insane over this.
00:13:36.000So, yesterday at the Capitol, in the middle of the vote, there was a group of protesters who started chanting about how the bill was going to end in their imminent demise.
00:13:47.000The actual medicine is not produced here.
00:13:56.000The chair has detected a disturbance in the gallery in contravention of the law and against the rules of the house.
00:14:05.000The sergeant at arms will identify the person or persons responsible and have them escorted from the house chamber.
00:14:13.000So all these idiots are up there shouting, kill the bill, don't kill us, and apparently one of them decided to take off her top, which, I mean, she understands she's in Congress, right?
00:14:21.000Like, in Congress, like the same Congress that houses half the sexual perverts in America, she just incentivized Congress to pass a tax bill every single day.
00:14:29.000I didn't see a picture of the lady, but I assume that, you know, if she is of the female persuasion and has breasts, then half the congressmen in the place are excited about that form of protest.
00:15:34.000Or offers or promises any public official or any person who has been selected to be a public official to give anything of value to any other person or entity with intent to influence any official act shall be fined under this title not more than three times the monetary equivalent of the thing of value, whichever is greater, or imprisoned for not more than 15 years or both, and may be disqualified from holding any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States.
00:15:58.000So she's openly offering $4 million to Republican senators for them to change their vote, which is bribery under federal law.
00:16:06.000She's doing that in front of apparently 32,000 likes.
00:16:10.000So that, you know, I guess she must be willing to pay $12 million to the federal government.
00:16:14.000I said earlier, if President Trump tells Jeff Sessions to initiate a prosecution against Rosie O'Donnell, they will begin carving his face into Rushmore tomorrow.
00:16:23.000Right, I mean, he will immediately move to the list of the nation's greatest presidents if he initiates prosecution against Rosie O'Donnell for bribery.
00:16:31.000So I tweeted out, half-jokingly this morning, lock her up, lock her up.
00:16:36.000And Rosie O'Donnell got mad, and she tweeted back at me, suck my bleep, Ben.
00:16:41.000Which doesn't make sense for a variety of reasons, as far as I'm aware.
00:16:45.000And so I tweeted back at her, you're already a felon, Rosie.
00:16:48.000Don't be a homophobic sexual harasser too.
00:16:51.000And then I followed it up with hashtag me too.
00:16:53.000So that is my A-plus troll game right there, gang.
00:17:15.000I guess they have this giant ceremonial gavel that they bring out for important occasions and also for sex parties.
00:17:21.000And so Paul Ryan dragged that sucker out of storage when Nancy Pelosi stood there with the giant gavel when she first became Speaker and she had a bunch of children she hadn't aborted standing around her.
00:17:29.000He brought that out of storage and he was whacking that on the podium as they passed it.
00:17:36.000Here was the video of them passing this thing in the House yesterday.
00:17:39.000On this vote, the yeas are 227 and the nays are 203.
00:17:44.000The conference report is adopted without objection.
00:17:47.000The motion to reconsider is laid upon the table.
00:17:56.000Okay, so that is a big win for Paul Ryan.
00:18:03.000Without this win, he does not have a signature legislative achievement his entire first year.
00:18:08.000Without that win, the biggest things that he's done this year are Justice Gorsuch, and the movement of the embassy to Jerusalem, and the filling of the appellate judges.
00:18:15.000I talked in the last podcast about all of the things that I think Trump has done right.
00:18:20.000But this is a signature achievement in his first year, and he needed one, right?
00:18:44.000This is one of the most important pieces of legislation that Congress has passed in decades to help the American worker, to help grow the American economy.
00:18:54.000This is profound change, and this is change that is going to put our country on the right path.
00:19:00.000Okay, so the Democrats, of course, went completely nuts because their basic belief system suggests that you don't own your own money, right?
00:19:06.000That any tax cut to you, you keeping more of your own money, is actually theft from the federal coffers.
00:19:11.000And this just demonstrates the genuine disconnect as far as what Republicans and Democrats think in terms of where your rights come from.
00:19:21.000Democrats believe that your rights come from government.
00:19:23.000Your right to have property is because the government has allowed you to have property.
00:19:27.000If it weren't for the government allowing you to have property, you wouldn't have property, right?
00:19:30.000This is the Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama view, that you didn't build that.
00:19:33.000Your property rights are based on a government that makes those property rights available to you.
00:19:38.000The Republican notion, the conservative founding notion, is that property rights predated government, that government was instituted in order to protect those property rights, and that if the government violates those property rights, it has lost its raison d'etre.
00:19:50.000It's lost the reason for its existence.
00:19:52.000So, you can see this gap in the way the Democrats talk about this.
00:19:55.000So, Nancy Pelosi went up there with a giant yellow sign that says, hashtag GOP tax scam, and says that raises taxes on 88 million middle class families.
00:20:35.000If you're eligible for Medicaid, you can go get covered by Medicaid.
00:20:38.000What it means is that the vast majority of people who are going to be dropping out don't want to bother with doing these things, and so they haven't bothered to go buy insurance, and they shouldn't be forced to.
00:20:46.000But in any case, here's Nancy Pelosi saying that this tax plan is theft.
00:21:56.000Nancy Pelosi says that not only is this a tax theft, not only is it creating plutocracy, it betrays what the founding fathers would have wanted.
00:22:04.000It does violence to the vision of our founders.
00:22:07.000It disrespects the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, who are a large part of our middle class and to whom we owe a future worthy of their sacrifice, and it betrays the future
00:22:21.000And betrays the aspirations of our children.
00:22:24.000And betrays the future and betrays our past, the founding fathers.
00:22:27.000Does she understand that the reason that we fought a revolution is because no taxation without representation?
00:22:31.000It was literally the slogan of the revolution.
00:22:33.000Is she aware that one of the reasons people were mad is because Britain kept putting taxes on all of the imported goods?
00:22:39.000Right, with the Stamp Act and the Tea Act.
00:22:41.000Is she aware of anything remotely related to American history here?
00:22:45.000The founders would have hated our tax regime.
00:22:47.000The founders didn't even believe in an income tax.
00:22:49.000We had to pass a constitutional amendment to allow an income tax, one of the worst constitutional amendments in American history.
00:22:55.000I would say easily, actually, the worst constitutional amendment in American history, even worse than Prohibition.
00:23:06.000The Democrats have made up an alternative history of the United States in which Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Adams and James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were all giant government, centralized government people, which is just patently insane.
00:23:19.000You know that if you listen to the show.
00:23:20.000We go through a Federalist paper every Monday.
00:23:22.000Have we yet come to the point where we say we need a federal government to suck up all the resources and redistribute them?
00:23:27.000Has that ever come up in the Federalist Paper?
00:23:29.000It has not, nor will it ever, even when we get through all 80-odd Federalist Papers.
00:24:50.000Part of it is that Republicans are incompetent at pitching this thing.
00:24:53.000You know, President Trump, he gets credit for passing this thing, but it would be great if the President would spend a fair bit of time explaining, for example, why the corporate tax rate needed to drop.
00:25:03.000I'd like for him to tax, honestly, I'd like for him, use Twitter for good effect, I'd like for the President to tweet out the European corporate tax rates, and then the American corporate tax rates.
00:25:13.000Because the average European corporate tax rate right now is 18.43%.
00:25:16.000We just brought our corporate tax rate down to 21%.
00:25:20.000We brought it down by 14% and it is still higher than the average European corporate tax rate.
00:25:26.000President Trump really should do a public relations blitz.
00:25:46.000So I'd love to see him put that to good effect here, put that to good use.
00:25:48.000That I think would be an excellent thing.
00:25:50.000So I'd like to see the President of the United States do that.
00:25:54.000Also, the Republicans kept pitching this thing in terms of individual tax rates.
00:25:57.000None of them have ever bothered to explain why corporate tax rates going down is better.
00:26:01.000And the reason corporate tax rates going down is better is because that money can now be used by the corporation to hire more people, to invest more, to pay their workers more, to give people raises.
00:26:13.000Republicans should be making that case loudly and proudly, and they should be saying, every Democrat opposed this.
00:26:17.000Your taxes went down, and every Democrat opposed this.
00:26:21.000But, unfortunately, the Republicans have not done a good PR job.
00:26:25.000When you have an unpopular bill and you pass it, even if it's good for Americans, it's pretty rare that an unpopular bill gets wildly more popular over time.
00:27:33.000The fact they had to rush it through is going to be picked on by the media, and now every piece of fallout from this bill is going to be used to club Republicans to death over it.
00:27:42.000So, Republicans had better shape this thing in the public imagination right now, not just wait for the inevitable time when Americans realize tax cuts are good.
00:27:50.000That I think would be a very big mistake.
00:27:53.000Again, if you look at the polls on tax cuts historically, then what you see is that the Bush tax cuts were significantly more popular than the Trump tax cuts.
00:29:13.000It is also because the Republicans have done a piss poor job of selling their bill.
00:29:15.000They need to get out there and they need to sell that bill because bills don't get more popular over time, even when people feel the benefit of it.
00:29:21.000Democrats will pay, by the way, when they try to raise the taxes.
00:29:24.000But remember, they're not going to have to actually try to do that until 2025.
00:29:28.000They can just sit there and let it go all the way until 2025 and then wait to see what happens.
00:29:33.000Okay, so as we continue in just a second, I'm going to talk about the media bias and how the media bias plays in because it really is truly astonishing.
00:29:40.000I want to show you some clips of members of the media and how they have responded to these tax cuts.
00:29:49.000So Savannah Guthrie over at NBC News, she was questioning Paul Ryan.
00:29:57.000And Ryan is talking about the tax cuts and what kind of good they're going to do.
00:30:00.000And Savannah Guthrie literally asks him if he is living in a fantasy world on national television after they passed a massive Republican tax plan.
00:30:07.000The problem is, is a lot of CEOs have said, really candidly, I'm looking at a list of CEOs who said, we don't plan to reinvest.
00:30:14.000What they're planning to do is to do stock buybacks, to line the pockets of shareholders.
00:30:19.000Let me quote Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire, hardly an enemy of business.
00:30:23.000He said, CEOs aren't waiting on a tax cut to jumpstart the economy, a favorite phrase of politicians who have never run a company or to hand out raises.
00:30:31.000It's pure fantasy to think that the tax bill will lead to significantly higher wages and growth.
00:30:37.000I'll ask you plainly, are you living in a fantasy world?
00:30:40.000What the hell kind of question is that?
00:32:19.000Well, we'll check out what you're making, too, Katie, so it's fair and balanced.
00:32:23.000Good for Dave Brat right there, because the fact is that when they ask Dave Brat that he's lowering his own taxes, that's why he's doing this thing.
00:32:30.000It's just, the entire premise of the question is so sick and messed up.
00:32:33.000The entire premise of the question that she is asking right there is the only reason that you would want taxes decreased is not because you think it's better for the American people or your constituents or the economy.
00:32:43.000It's because you personally are seeking to benefit from the tax bill.
00:32:46.000But all those Democrats who are rich, they're just men of the people.
00:33:45.000All these Republican legislators, they're sitting around thinking, yeah, you know what?
00:33:48.000By the way, if you wanna get rich in Congress, the easiest way to get rich in Congress is not giving yourself a tax cut.
00:33:52.000The easiest way to get rich in Congress is through insider trading.
00:33:55.000It's by knowing which bills are gonna pass, and then you buy stock in particular companies, knowing how the bill's gonna impact that company.
00:34:01.000Peter Schweitzer showed this in one of his books a few years back, where he talked about corruption in D.C.
00:34:07.000This notion that Republican legislators are only doing this because they're so evil,
00:34:13.000By the way, I'll bet you Katie Tour is making a lot more money than Dave Brat.
00:34:16.000If I had to bet on it, I mean, Dave Brat, I believe, is a college professor.
00:34:19.000If he's in the 24% tax bracket, that means he's not making, I mean, he's making decent money, I think, but the idea that he's making all sorts of cash is not actually the case.
00:34:30.000So I'm gonna, you know, I wanna look that up, because I would guarantee you that Katie Tour is making a lot more money than Dave Brat.
00:34:37.000So yeah, if Dave Brat is in the 24% bracket, that means he's making between $82,000 and $157,000.
00:34:42.000If he's in that bracket, by the way, then that means that he's probably only saving $3,000, $4,000.
00:35:13.000Well, he was battling ALS, and he waited outside Lindsey Graham's office in order to yell at Lindsey Graham over this, because Lindsey Graham and the Republicans voted to get rid of the individual mandate, the most unpopular aspect of Obamacare.
00:35:25.000And so they put him on MSNBC, and he talked about how Lindsey Graham ran away from him.
00:35:30.000I said, Senator Graham, he was talking about John McCain, his beloved colleague, who, like me, is dying of a brain disease.
00:36:02.000Okay, I objected to it when Piers Morgan did it on gun control, and I object to it now.
00:36:26.000The idea that your philosophy of governance has to change because you're now meeting somebody who is suffering from a particular condition is just asinine.
00:36:36.000It's in effect the same thing as Jimmy Kimmel taking his baby out every so often and holding up his baby and saying that he knows about health care now.
00:37:07.000And then, when Lindsey Graham says, you know, it's been nice talking to you, and the guy refuses to shake his hand because Lindsey Graham is voting for something the guy doesn't want, the media blow it up.
00:37:16.000Oh, watch this courageous man suffering from ALS take Lindsey Graham to the woodshed.
00:37:22.000If I were Lindsey Graham, I wouldn't engage in that conversation either because it's not worth it.
00:37:26.000Where's the public relations upside and where's the win?
00:37:29.000You're not even having an honest conversation.
00:37:30.000It's not like this guy actually wants to discuss with Lindsey Graham.
00:38:33.000My math was always, is the president doing conservative things?
00:38:36.000The last three weeks of President Trump's governance have been some of the most conservative weeks of governance that I have ever seen, period, from any president.
00:38:42.000I'm pretty young, so the last Republican administration I remember was Bush.
00:38:45.000He was not as conservative as Trump has been in the last three weeks for sure.
00:38:48.000And so this has been a very good three weeks of governance.
00:38:52.000So that means that I raised Trump's grade from a C- on the year to a C+, which is a pretty major shift, right?
00:38:57.000I mean, that shifts him almost to full-letter grade in the last three weeks of the year.
00:39:01.000The only reason that he's not doing better than that is because his approval ratings are bad, because Republicans are running really far behind in the generic congressional ballot.
00:39:08.000They're down 18 points in the latest poll.
00:39:11.000One of the things that Trump has to do here, as I spoke about the other day, it's very important now that now that Trump is actually pursuing conservative policies, he represent conservatism well, because otherwise all of those conservative policies will be rolled back.
00:39:24.000It's very important that he represent my view well.
00:39:26.000Right now he's a representative of my ideology when he's actually acting in consonance with my ideology.
00:39:33.000I don't want his personal unpopularity to drag down the good policy he's been making.
00:39:56.000I would like to see his popularity increase on the back of that good policy, and that means some discipline.
00:40:00.000So, Mr. President, if you're listening, please.
00:40:03.000Have some discipline about your messaging.
00:40:05.000I think that you've won some major victories.
00:40:07.000Even the media are going to have to recognize that you've had a major upswing in the last month of your presidency with regards to policy wins.
00:40:13.000You have some momentum going into next year.
00:40:50.000You deserve a rest, Mr. President, is what I'm saying to you.
00:40:53.000I mean, I wish that you deserved rest on Twitter the entire year, but now you really do deserve a rest because you've gotten some stuff done.
00:40:58.000Bask in the glow of having a major piece of legislation passed.
00:41:15.000Because now, there's actually, and here's the thing, Republicans are more likely to follow you, Mr. President, if you don't blow it.
00:41:22.000And if you actually start to boost your own approval ratings, Republicans are more likely to come around on some of your other policy priorities, like immigration.
00:41:29.000And please, for the love of God, don't try to tackle DACA.
00:43:18.000This is Bill Clinton's favorite movie.
00:43:20.000A lot of people on the right objected to this being Bill Clinton's favorite movie because the entire plot surrounds a sheriff who is basically left alone by the town to defend the town against a bad guy.
00:43:29.000And a lot of conservatives said, well, that's really not how towns work, right?
00:43:34.000That's actually, if Clinton viewed himself as the lone hero striding into history, that's not good for the presidency.
00:45:13.000I have to admit, I cannot stop laughing at the fact that Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cornel West are now going at it.
00:45:18.000Cornel West, of course, a radical black activist.
00:45:20.000Ta-Nehisi Coates is a slightly less radical black activist.
00:45:24.000Ta-Nehisi Coates fancies himself in the mold of James Baldwin.
00:45:27.000Cornel West fancies himself in the mold of Malcolm X. Both of them have a rather racially separatist view of American politics.
00:45:38.000And Cornel West wrote an entire column where he says, Ta-Nehisi Coates' We Were Eight Years in Power, a book about Barack Obama's presidency and the tenacity of white supremacy has captured the attention of many of us.
00:45:47.000He says, Coates and I come from a great tradition of the black freedom struggle.
00:45:50.000He represents the neoliberal wing that sounds militant about white supremacy but renders black fight back invisible.
00:45:55.000This wing reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and peoples.
00:46:22.000He sees it everywhere and ever reminds us of its plundering effects.
00:46:26.000Unfortunately, he hardly keeps track of our fight back and never connects this ugly legacy to the predatory capitalist practices, imperial policies, or the black elite's refusal to confront poverty, patriarchy, or transphobia.
00:46:37.000In short, Coates fetishizes white supremacy.
00:46:39.000He makes it almighty, magical, and unremovable.
00:50:19.000Okay, finally, let's do a little bit of Bible talk.
00:50:21.000So, there's a lot of talk from the left today about how it is unbiblical, it is just terrible that we are not talking about centralizing government.
00:50:27.000Centralized government is dedicated, like God wants government to create the tendency for fairness.
00:50:35.000So this is a section from the book of Judges, I believe it's chapter 8 of the book of Judges, and it talks about the rule of Gideon.
00:50:42.000So Gideon was of course a prophet in Israel and he leads his men in a fight against the Philistines and other groups that are oppressing the Israelites.
00:51:02.000Which is a pretty astonishing statement.
00:51:04.000The Bible is, at best, ambivalent about monarchy.
00:51:06.000Like, really ambivalent about monarchy.
00:51:07.000Moses warns that it's not going to be good.
00:51:09.000Samuel, Shmuel, warns in 1 Samuel, 1 Samuel.
00:51:14.000We call it Shmuel Aleph in Hebrew, which is why I hesitate on the English translation.
00:51:19.000In Shmuel Aleph, Samuel gives an entire lecture to the people about why it's going to suck once they appoint a king.
00:51:24.000You have this in the book of Judges where Gideon says, rule yourselves, basically, don't have a centralized government that rules over you.
00:51:30.000The idea of a theocratic government that is centralized from the very top is not really well spelled out in the Old Testament at all, and it's not spelled out well in the New Testament either.
00:51:39.000I mean, the idea of Render unto Caesar in the New Testament is very much reflective of the basic Jewish idea of Dina D'melchus Adina,
00:51:46.000Which literally means the law of the land is the law.
00:51:48.000And insofar as it doesn't conflict with the law of God, you have to obey it.
00:51:51.000What's fascinating about this section with regard to Gideon is not just that he says that he's not going to rule over the people, that they have to rule themselves, that God is going to rule over them.
00:51:58.000He says, I would make a request of you that you give me every man the nose ring of his spoil.
00:52:02.000For they had golden nose rings because they were Ishmaelites.
00:52:05.000And they said, we shall willingly give.
00:52:06.000And they spread out the garment and every man therein threw the nose ring of his spoil.
00:52:10.000And then Gideon takes all of these rings and then he makes
00:52:14.000…which is a breastplate, and he sets it up in his home city, and it says, and all Israel went astray after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon into his house.
00:52:21.000The importance of this, the reason this matters, is when a group of people decide to collectively pool their labor and make something, you have to be very careful they don't begin to worship the thing that they make.
00:52:31.000And this is true of the American government.
00:52:34.000We're very proud of our system of government.
00:52:35.000We're proud of Washington, D.C., the big buildings and how pretty it is and all this.
00:52:39.000But it's very easy for us to start worshipping the thing that we have made with our own hands, and to suggest that it has some sort of outsized power, even though we are the ones that made it.
00:52:46.000And to suggest that people in the future need to throw their nose rings into the pot as well.
00:52:51.000That's not the way the American government was meant to be built.
00:52:53.000It's not the way that it even was in the Bible.
00:52:56.000There's a reason the Bible says that this becomes a snare to the leaders, it becomes a snare to the people.
00:53:01.000Collective action must be taken from time to time, but the key there is from time to time.
00:53:06.000Okay, we'll be back here tomorrow with more notes on all the fallout.