Trump tweets about trade, the stock market tanks, and we should give drug dealers the death penalty. It's a rough 48 hours for the President of the United States and we'll cover it all in this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. Links From This Episode: Free Masterclass on Bitcoin and Gold from the Bitcoin Masterclass All Previous Podcast Episodes Leave Us a Review On Apple Podcasts Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review, and subscribe to our other podcasting platforms! The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, and are not related to those of any of our corporations, banks, hedge funds, or other organizations. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a supporter of our show by becoming a patron. We do not endorse, promote, or endorse any product or service discussed in this podcast. We are not affiliated with any of the products discussed here. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional financial advice, recommendation, diagnosis, or consultation, advice, or recommendation for financial advice. The views expressed here is not that of any person, product or product recommendation, whether it's a professional, financial advice or not. Ben Shapiro is not a professional financial adviser, recommendation or recommendation, and does not represent any of that would be appropriate for that matter. Thank you for considering such matters. - Ben Shapiro's work is not professional advice, unless otherwise stated here. If you are looking for professional support, please contact Ben Shapiro, Ben Shapiro s rep or any other person, or you are considering seeking professional support from a professional professional, including a professional adviser. . Ben's website is linked here: bit.ee/BenShapersonal.org/ben@benshapersona.co/benshareepr@benhecox.org? Thanks for listening to the Ben Shapiro show? Ben is a friend of Ben's work, Ben's bio is and Ben is an employee of Ben Shapiro thank you for listening and reviewing this podcast, if you would like to support the show and reviewing Ben's content is appreciated? - Thank you Ben's words are appreciated - thank you, Ben s work is appreciated, Ben s words are greatly appreciated - tweet me in the Ben's review of this podcast is ?
00:00:00.000President Trump endures staffing problems, announces tariffs and tanks the markets, and says we should give drug dealers the death penalty.
00:01:05.000Now would be a good time for you to take some of that money you got in the stock market and maybe invest it in some precious metals that aren't going to be touched by the stupidity of American trade policy and or inflationary policy.
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00:02:16.000Except they dropped a thousand points the month before.
00:02:18.000So, one of the reasons they continue to drop is because the President of the United States does not know what the hell he is talking about on trade.
00:02:44.000So, as I said yesterday, he said a bunch of stupid crap on guns, and then he's not going to implement any of it because Congress is going to stop him.
00:02:49.000On trade, the president has plenary power essentially on trade because Congress has abdicated its duty over the past 50 years and given the president the ability to raise and lower tariffs essentially on his own for virtually any purpose.
00:03:06.000When a country, USA, thank you, Mr. President, is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good and easy to win.
00:03:16.000Example, when we are down 100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don't trade anymore.
00:03:24.000The levels of stupidity are like a Russian nesting doll here.
00:03:27.000You open up the top level of stupidity and there's another level of stupidity beneath it, except it's an infinite regress of nesting dolls because there is no tiniest nesting doll of stupidity in this tweet.
00:03:36.000Okay, so we'll go through this sentence by sentence.
00:03:39.000When he says that we are losing many billions of dollars on trade, you don't lose money on trade.
00:03:44.000When you go to Amazon.com and you buy yourself a used book, did you lose money on the trade?
00:03:49.000No, you voluntarily opted to buy a product.
00:04:17.000It's not just that free trade is more efficient, though it is, it's also that it is more moral because you get to determine how much your labor is worth and how much your money is worth.
00:04:24.000And if you don't like paying 50 cents for an apple here, you can go down the street and you can pay 40 cents for an apple somewhere else because of competition in free trade.
00:04:32.000When he says that trade deficits necessitate trade wars, and when he says trade wars are good and easy to win, name one.
00:04:39.000Name a trade war that was good and easy to win.
00:05:00.000How do you retaliate against the grocery store?
00:05:02.000Are you angry at the grocery store because they didn't use your services?
00:05:06.000And do you decide that what the best possible solution would be is to not go to Ralph's but instead to go to Gelson's where everything is twice as much and go over to Gelson's and pay twice the amount because Ralph's isn't using you and Gelson's might?
00:05:23.000But you decide that you're going to penalize Ralph's because Ralph's used to use you and now they're no longer using you so you decide to pay twice as much for your groceries.
00:05:30.000If Amazon.com is not hiring you as a contractor, do you stop shopping at Amazon and instead go over to the local bookstore and pay twice as much money?
00:05:37.000Of course you don't because that would be stupid.
00:05:42.000Whatever it is that you paid for the product, when you buy from the grocery store, you now have a trade deficit of $100 if you spent $100 on your groceries because the grocery store didn't buy anything from you.
00:05:51.000Does that mean you should go to a more expensive grocery store?
00:05:53.000And that if you boycott the grocery store, you have somehow won?
00:05:57.000No, it means that you just chopped your own leg off because you're stupid.
00:07:40.000Our steel industry is not in bad shape.
00:07:41.000Our steel industry, as I told you yesterday, was up 5% in production last year, and all of our steel companies have had stock increases over the last 10 to 15 years.
00:07:49.000Nucor, which is the top steel producer in the United States, its stock price is at $12 in 2000.
00:09:05.000Chinese citizens are paying at least 50% more for the same product.
00:09:08.000They're impoverishing their own citizens.
00:09:10.000They're just making their own citizens pay more for a product they could have gotten more cheaply elsewhere.
00:09:14.000So is the solution for the United States to jack up its own prices?
00:09:17.000Remember, everyone in the United States is both a producer and a consumer.
00:09:20.000In the steel industry, there are going to be a lot of people who are very happy with the tariffs because now they don't have to compete with foreign sources.
00:09:25.000But for every steel job, there are 45 jobs in this country that use steel inputs whose prices just went up.
00:09:33.000So Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary who's most famous for falling asleep in cabinet meetings and drooling.
00:09:47.000Okay, and Wilbur Ross goes on television today and he says, you know, there's a ton of steel in American cars and that means that if you raise the tariff by 25%, it's only raising the amount of the car by like half of 1%.
00:10:15.000There are lots of contractors between the ore and between the car.
00:10:19.000Okay, and at every step of the way, there is markup.
00:10:21.000So, if there is a steel product that is used in the making of an engine, that is very often outsourced to another company.
00:10:27.000That means that that company now has to pay more for the steel, which means that they manufacture the product, and they don't just pass the amount of the cost on, they pass the amount plus the labor plus the profit.
00:10:48.000When the President of the United States, Barack Obama, raised tariffs on Chinese tires, we lost 12,000 jobs in the auto industry because Barack Obama raised the prices of tires.
00:10:59.000Okay, and tires are a lot cheaper to manufacture and make and sell than cars are.
00:12:32.000I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at My Patriot Supply.
00:12:35.000So, right now, there's natural disasters going on all around the world.
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00:12:42.000Imagine there's a natural disaster in your area, and the government can't get to you, and all the grocery store shelves have been emptied because the chain of supply has been disrupted by a stupid trade war.
00:12:51.000And imagine that you now have to figure out how to live.
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00:14:28.000Number one, tariffs are an unfair tax.
00:14:30.000You are taxing one industry on behalf of another industry.
00:14:33.000You are taxing people who buy cars on behalf of the steel industry.
00:14:36.000And jobs will be lost in the car industry because you are attempting to save jobs in the steel industry.
00:14:41.000As I said yesterday, there were 200,000 jobs that were lost in the United States between 2001 and 2003 because of George W. Bush's far less stringent steel tariffs.
00:14:51.000And Trump isn't just talking steel tariffs anymore.
00:14:53.000He's talking about full-scale trade war with everybody who has tariffs on our products.
00:14:58.000If all of these countries wish to charge their own citizens more for products to protect their domestic industries, then fine, we should take advantage of that.
00:15:06.000You get richer when you buy cheaper products.
00:15:09.000If you don't have to pay as much for stuff, you're getting richer.
00:15:11.000And we're not all reliant on foreign trade.
00:15:13.000The United States is a massive market economy.
00:15:17.000I mean, most of what we produce, we consume here in the United States in most businesses.
00:15:22.000So if everybody else decides that they are going to try to destroy our ability to import into their country, to export into their country, then why exactly would we cut off our nose to spite our face by making our own consumers pay more?
00:15:38.000When you remove money from profitable industries, people who don't need tariffs and subsidies to survive, and you give it to those who are inefficient, it keeps jobs in industries that are less efficient.
00:15:47.000And if competition is never allowed, then product quality actually declines over time.
00:15:51.000So you're buying worse cars over time if you tariff foreign cars.
00:15:54.000And then when you open up the market, because people are tired of buying crappy American cars, for example, this is what happened in the 1970s, then we're flooded with a bunch of Japanese cars and suddenly the American market share goes down dramatically.
00:16:04.000This is exactly what happened in the 1960s and 1970s in the American auto industry.
00:16:11.000Okay, America is not, as I say, damaged by unfair trade practices of other countries in the sense that they put a tariff on us and therefore we are greatly hurt.
00:16:20.000So all of the talk about how China also is manipulating its currency.
00:16:24.000Okay, if manipulating currency were that easy and that profitable, if that were really the big issue in America, then we would just print a bunch of money and we'd walk around with wheelbarrows like Weimar Germany.
00:16:34.000And the people in Weimar Germany or in Venezuela today or in Zimbabwe where inflation was at one point at 1000% a day.
00:16:40.000Those people were not immensely wealthy.
00:17:27.000Thomas Sowell points out that if Japanese sold us a lot of cars and we send them lots of dollars, they're going to use those dollars to buy American assets.
00:17:33.000Scott Lincecum, who is a trade lawyer at Cato, he says, In other words, we buy goods and services from foreigners, they buy an equal amount of our exports, plus our financial assets, aka foreign investment, in the United States.
00:17:55.000If trade were really about just beating the other guy to prevent them from importing stuff, why not just sink all the Chinese ships bringing products into the country?
00:18:01.000Does anyone think that'd be good for the economy?
00:18:36.000Here is the latest on the chaos inside the White House.
00:18:40.000So, right now, here is where things stand.
00:18:43.000Hope Hicks, the president's top aide, is stepping down.
00:18:46.000Jared Kushner, one of the people the president is closest to, just lost his top-level security clearance.
00:18:50.000Gary Cohn, who was discussed as chief of staff to replace John Kelly about a week and a half ago and is the head of Trump's economic program, is now threatening to quit.
00:18:59.000McMaster is apparently on the ropes, as well.
00:19:02.000So, basically, every top-level administrator, except for John Kelly, is on the ropes.
00:19:06.000That is not the sign of a healthy administration.
00:19:09.000Even John Kelly doesn't sound super enthused about all of this.
00:19:11.000Here is the White House Chief of Staff yesterday talking about taking the job as White House Chief of Staff and moving on from Homeland Security.
00:19:19.000Truly, at six months, the last thing I wanted to do was walk away from one of the great honors of my life, being the Secretary of Homeland Security.
00:19:28.000But I did something wrong and God punished me, I guess.
00:19:32.000Now there's an enthusiastic guy about his new job of keeping the president under control.
00:19:35.000God punished him by moving on to the White House.
00:19:37.000He talked about how he's happy to be helping the president push the agenda.
00:19:40.000I'm sure he is, but it is not an easy job.
00:19:42.000The reason the turnover at the White House is so high is because everything is variable over there.
00:19:46.000Now, let it be known, this does not mean that everything that Trump is doing is bad.
00:19:50.000The president of the United States, by the time he has finished his first term, will have replaced almost half of all of the judges on circuit course across the country.
00:19:58.000He's doing a great job on that because he's delegated it out.
00:20:01.000But when Trump is bored and he gets his hands on the gears of power, when he grabs those levers and he starts playing video games, all that comes out is bad stuff.
00:20:09.000The president needs to be disciplined.
00:20:11.000This is not because I want him to lose, it's because I would like for him to be a good president.
00:20:15.000And I would like for the country to win with him.
00:20:40.000The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 are widely perceived to have led to the Great Depression and helped exacerbate it into a 10-year Great Depression as opposed to a relatively insignificant recession.
00:20:53.000One of the reasons that Trump is doing all this stuff now is because when Trump is isolated, when he feels like he doesn't have all the people around him he likes to have around him, when Hope Hicks is gone and Jared and Ivanka have been marginalized, and it's just a bunch of people he doesn't know, like John Kelly, sitting around him, he feels like he has to go back to his gut.
00:21:09.000And his gut on certain issues is not bad, and on other issues, it is sheerly terrible.
00:21:16.000The New York Times is reporting on the situation in the White House.
00:21:19.000Apparently, people in the White House did not even know that Trump was going to announce the steel tariffs and aluminum tariffs yesterday.
00:21:24.000By the way, the price of beer is going to go up, too.
00:21:26.000Every beer can in America is used—is made with aluminum, which means that if you like your beer, you're not going to get to keep your beer.
00:21:33.000The price on it is going to go up, which is—I think most Americans are not going to be super happy with that.
00:21:38.000The previous day, according to The New York Times, Mr. Trump's chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, warned the chief of staff, John Kelly, he might resign if the president went ahead with the plan.
00:21:46.000According to people briefed on the discussion, Cohn had lobbied fiercely against the measures.
00:21:51.000We'll see if he quits next week, if Trump actually implements this stuff.
00:21:54.000As I said, the stock market today has taken a dump.
00:23:07.000He said, no, 25, because it's a round number.
00:23:10.000If we are going to be setting tariffs based on multiples of five, let me suggest this is not an outgrowth of economic expertise, it is rather an outgrowth of economic foolishness.
00:23:22.000Obviously, there's been tremendous turnover in the White House, and the discomfort that Trump is feeling is obvious to everyone.
00:23:28.000Again, when he says things like the WTO has been a disaster for this country, and it's been great for China and terrible for the United States and great for other countries, why is it the United States still has the most powerful economy in world history?
00:23:38.000And why is it that we generate virtually all of the economic growth on planet Earth?
00:24:57.000That also lets them know that we sent you.
00:25:00.000Another piece of unfortunate news for the White House.
00:25:02.000So, President Trump has been on a tear against Andrew McCabe, the ex-deputy director of the FBI.
00:25:09.000And the reason that he's been on a tear against Andrew McCabe is because his supposition is that McCabe and Comey and the rest of the FBI were out to get him during the last election cycle and in the post-election period.
00:25:19.000Well, now it turns out that a Justice Department review is actually expected to criticize Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director under Comey.
00:25:31.000Because he was too mean to Hillary Clinton.
00:25:35.000So Trump's own Justice Department is about to find that Andrew McCabe, the guy that Trump has been ripping on, it wasn't that he was too hard on Trump, it's that he was too hard on Hillary Clinton.
00:25:45.000They're going to condemn him for authorizing the disclosure of information about a continuing investigation to journalists, according to four people familiar with the inquiry.
00:25:52.000Such a damning report would give Trump new ammunition to criticize McCabe, who's at the center of Trump's theory that deep state actors inside the FBI have been working to sabotage his presidency.
00:26:00.000But Mr. McCabe's disclosures to the news media do not fit neatly into that assumption.
00:26:04.000They contributed to a negative article about Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration's DOJ, not Mr. Trump.
00:26:11.000The Department's Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, has zeroed in on disclosures to The Wall Street Journal as part of a wide-ranging investigation into, among other things, how the FBI approached the 2016 inquiry into Mrs. Clinton's handling of classified information.
00:26:23.000Mr. Horowitz said he expects to release a report this month or next.
00:26:27.000So, McCabe already said he was going to step down.
00:26:30.000He stepped down as deputy director in late January.
00:26:33.000So, all of this is fodder for Trump, that the FBI is corrupt, but unfortunately, the corruption doesn't seem to run toward Trump.
00:26:39.000It seems to run toward there are a bunch of people in the FBI who are deeply discomfited with Hillary Clinton's corruption, and we're releasing information to the press, which cuts against Trump's argument.
00:26:50.000Trump's whole argument is the FBI is out to get him.
00:26:52.000I've been skeptical of the story that the FBI was out to get Trump.
00:26:56.000I still think there are open questions about how the FISA warrants were used against Carter Page, whether the FISA courts in general take bad information and turn them into warrants.
00:27:04.000But I've been unconvinced by the evidence produced so far that the FBI was out to target Trump, out to destroy Trump, out to destroy his administration.
00:27:12.000I think there are bad people inside the FBI like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
00:27:15.000Those people should have been fired and Mueller did fire them.
00:27:17.000I think the FBI's current investigation into Trump-Russia collusion is going to come up with nothing.
00:27:22.000I think that what the FBI is doing right now is overblown.
00:27:26.000But I don't think that during the transition period, the evidence is there yet.
00:27:31.000I don't think the evidence is there yet that the FBI was quote-unquote out to get Trump, as opposed to they're overzealous on virtually everything, and this is just another thing that they are overzealous on.
00:27:40.000OK, so in other bad news for Trump, again, it's been a bad Trump day.
00:27:44.000And I hope that by the time we get to Monday, he's turned it around and things are going great again.
00:27:47.000But, OK, this is not a great indicator.
00:27:50.000Yesterday, the president did a hearing, an open forum on the opioid crisis.
00:28:56.000OK, when he says some countries have the very toughest penalty, the ultimate penalty, he's talking about the Philippines, where they legitimately execute drug dealers.
00:29:04.000So there are already laws on the books that if you're a drug kingpin and your drugs result in death, that you can actually get the death penalty in the United States.
00:29:10.000But if we're going to extend this to all drug dealers across the country, that if you're dealing pot, that we're now going to execute you, I think this might be a little bit over the top.
00:29:18.000So in the last 48 hours, the president of the United States has suggested, number one, removing guns from people without due process.
00:29:50.000And even I think Trump's feeling some heat from his right, which is good.
00:29:53.000You know, one of my great fears before Trump was elected was the soul sucking of the Republican Party, the soul sucking of the conservative movement, that a lot of people were just going to follow Trump wherever he goes because the president is the president and he has a lot of public sway.
00:30:05.000And I do think that we've seen a couple of areas where the where the conservative commentariat is not willing to go, even a lot of Trump supporters.
00:30:12.000So Tucker Carlson is a good example of this.
00:30:14.000So, Tucker, yesterday I had this to say about the president's talk, his loose talk about guns.
00:30:20.000At one point, the president said the government should, quote, take the guns first, go through due process second.
00:30:27.000Now, I mean, how honest do you want to be?
00:30:29.000Imagine if Barack Obama had said that.
00:30:32.000Just ignore due process and start confiscating guns.
00:30:35.000Obama would have been denounced as a dictator.
00:30:37.000We would have denounced him first, trust me.
00:30:39.000Congress would be talking impeachment right now.
00:30:41.000Someone would be muttering about secession.
00:30:43.000Well, the media agreed with what the president said yesterday, so they've underplayed it, or they presented it as just a little battle between the president and the NRA.
00:30:51.000Okay, so there's Tucker Carlson ripping into Trump.
00:30:53.000Pretty rare thing when you see Tucker ripping into Trump.
00:30:56.000But, again, Trump's not had a good 48 hours.
00:30:59.000Good for Tucker and good for conservatives who are saying when things are wrong, they're wrong, whether it's Trump saying it or whether it's Obama saying it.
00:31:05.000Okay, so we'll continue with this and also a poll that shows that Democrats really do want to grab guns.
00:31:55.000Okay, this is the leftist tears hot or cold tumbler and you get that with your annual subscription for just $99 the whole shebang and that means that you get all of the aforementioned glories and this which will grant you life and wonder.
00:32:14.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:32:22.000So Democrats are jumping on board with what Trump was suggesting.
00:32:26.000And this is why I said yesterday, I'm not super worried about what Trump had to say yesterday, because right now Republicans are in charge of the Congress.
00:32:31.000What happens if Democrats win control of the Congress?
00:32:33.000Well, I have a good hint for you as to what happens.
00:32:36.000They listen to what Trump says, they go and they talk with Trump, and then Trump says this sort of stuff and they draw up
00:32:41.000Legislation specifically to his specs.
00:32:44.000They draw it up for him, and they pass it through the House, and then it's up to Mitch McConnell to stand between you and doom.
00:32:49.000And everybody who's ripping on Mitch McConnell is the weakling who had to be defeated by the Trumpists that Mitch McConnell was the guy who had to be stood up to because he was too weak in caving to the left.
00:32:57.000If the Democrats win the House, things are going to get real nasty, and Mitch McConnell could be the guy standing between conservatism and disaster.
00:33:06.000OK, but here is what the Washington Examiner reported this yesterday.
00:33:08.000Senate Democrats said they will introduce a gun control bill that would expand background checks, ban certain weapons, and give the courts the power to temporarily take guns away from people who are deemed to be a threat to themselves and others after President Trump offered support for these goals in a White House discussion on Wednesday.
00:33:24.000Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the only way to advance the measure in the GOP-led Senate is with the endorsement and help from President Trump.
00:33:30.000He described a scenario in which the Senate could pass Schumer's proposal with mostly Democratic support and a few Republicans encouraged by Trump.
00:33:36.000And Schumer then reached out to Trump directly and said that the president should endorse the Schumer plan.
00:33:42.000He said the president is the first step.
00:33:44.000He said that McConnell would not bring up the bill without the president's persuasion.
00:33:47.000So, as I say, Trump had the NRA in the room, everything was hunky-dory, but House Democrats, Senate Democrats, they've put together basically a gun ban bill, and they're asking Trump to take the lead on it.
00:33:59.000If they were to take control of the House and the Senate, you can't rely on their good graces to maintain gun rights.
00:34:20.000Okay, 55% of Americans say they support, they favor strongly, or favor somewhat, banning all semi-automatic weapons in the United States.
00:34:30.000Okay, that is the removal of 300 million guns from people in the United States.
00:34:34.000Okay, and by party ID, 82% of Democrats, 82% of Democrats are in favor of removing all semi-automatic weapons from the citizens of the United States, banning them.
00:35:02.000The difference between a revolver and a semi-automatic weapon is that when you shoot a revolver, then the cylinder moves, and it re-chambers by moving the cylinder, and when you shoot a semi-automatic handgun, one bullet pops up into the chamber automatically every time you fire a bullet until the magazine is empty.
00:35:17.000Okay, here are the numbers on people who would ban all guns.
00:35:47.000Okay, so that means that they are basically split 50-50 on repealing the Second Amendment, like taking away all guns in the United States.
00:35:55.000They're split 50-50 on whether to remove all guns in the United States.
00:35:58.000In other words, they are exactly what you thought they were.
00:36:01.000Hey, Democrats are people who want to remove as many guns as possible in the United States, and then they have the gall to tell people like us that they don't actually want to remove the Second Amendment from folks.
00:36:13.000It's obvious they want to take away your gun.
00:36:15.000And this is why it matters when the President of the United States endorses their program and why it is imperative that Republicans keep the House and keep the Senate in next year's election cycle.
00:36:23.000Now, there are a couple of obstacles to keeping the House.
00:36:32.000And the third obstacle is a lot of the gerrymandering, a lot of the redistricting that's happened over the past several years actually has not been particularly good, as good for Republicans as they thought that it was going to be.
00:36:42.000So, G. Eliot Morris, who is a data journalist at The Economist, he says,
00:37:01.000So, in other words, Republicans were trying to gerrymander so that there was, you know, 2 percent more Republicans than Democrats in a particular district.
00:37:07.000But off your election, those people don't show up.
00:37:09.000And so, they actually created fewer hard red districts and hard blue districts than created a lot of purple districts in the hopes that they would win.
00:37:16.000That means a lot of seats are vulnerable.
00:37:18.000That means there are a lot of seats that are vulnerable.
00:37:20.000So, if you look at the R-plus district, if you look at the Republican voter share districts,
00:37:27.000There are, at last count, let's say the R plus, so first of all, I'm just counting the numbers here.
00:38:14.000In districts, by the way, that are dead even, there are another two districts there.
00:38:16.000So that's 24 seats that are either dead even or Democratic plus in a midterm election.
00:38:20.000If you add in areas where it's slightly R plus, there are another 10 seats that are R plus three or so, within R plus three.
00:38:30.000Okay, so that means if Democrats have a wave, they could easily take 50 seats in this election cycle.
00:38:34.000If there's a wave, Democrats could easily take 50 seats in the House.
00:38:37.000Okay, this is dangerous, dangerous stuff, and it is not good news.
00:38:41.000So, this is why it is imperative the President govern well, it's why it's imperative that the President be popular, and it's why it's imperative that the Presidents of the United States not do stupid things and sink the trade
00:39:18.000He's tweeted out today that he wants to commit Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation and hold ourselves publicly accountable toward progress.
00:39:27.000That means shutting down more accounts, presumably.
00:40:40.000But I don't want an enforcement body sitting above anyone, either on Twitter or Facebook or in the government, saying that we are going to pass rules about civility and then ban people for it.
00:40:50.000I'd much rather have a raucous, nasty exchange of opinions than have no exchange of opinions at all or an approved exchange of opinions by our masters.
00:40:59.000So, in just a second, we're going to do some things I like and some things I hate, and then we'll get to the fabled mailbag.
00:41:05.000So, let's jump in with some things that I like.
00:41:08.000So, the new Star Wars movies have left me cold, as you may have noticed.
00:41:12.000So I thought that The Force Awakens was wildly overrated.
00:41:14.000I also thought that the sequel, The Last Jedi, was better than The Force Awakens.
00:41:20.000I'm the only person who believes this, apparently.
00:41:22.000I think the Last Jedi was significantly superior to The Force Awakens, which I thought was derivative, and destroyed my childhood by turning Han Solo into a loser single dad who gets murdered by his son.
00:41:44.000That starts, picks up right after the destruction of the second Death Star, and it starts with the book Heir to the Empire, and it tells a whole different story than what's told in The Force Awakens, and it's way better.
00:41:56.000Honestly, they should have just gone back and adapted these, because the books are much, much better.
00:42:00.000It's about the rise of a particular admiral, who's a brilliant admiral who's sort of on the outskirts of the galaxy, and how he manipulates things so that the Empire actually has a comeback.
00:42:08.000It's not just fast-forward 40 years and the First Order is back, and we don't know how they got here or why they're here.
00:42:13.000The book is well-written, it's clever, and also all of your favorite characters actually appear, so we don't have to deal with all of the new characters that nobody cares about, right?
00:42:21.000And is hoping die as soon as humanly possible, right?
00:42:23.000It doesn't cannibalize the characters that you love in order to preserve characters who you don't give a damn about.
00:42:45.000Let me tell you why I'm a defender of the Second Amendment.
00:42:48.000I was a little girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late 50s, early 60s.
00:42:53.000There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham police were going to protect you.
00:42:57.000And so when white night riders would come through our neighborhood, my father and his friends would take their guns and they'd go to the head of the neighborhood, it was a little cul-de-sac, and they would fire in the air if anybody came through.
00:43:08.000I don't think they actually ever hit anybody.
00:43:56.000There were like two of these movies that anybody saw.
00:43:58.000One was Get Out and the other was Dunkirk.
00:44:00.000No one has ever seen any of these other movies.
00:44:02.000Okay, the one that's going to win is, so here's what I'm going to do.
00:44:06.000I'm going to describe who I think is going to win, but I'm going to do it in terms that you're going to understand, because I'm going to use projects that you've actually seen.
00:44:42.000You haven't seen any of these movies, but that's how you're going to know who these people are.
00:44:46.000You know there was a long period in America where at the Oscars, every picture that won had been a box office top 20 film?
00:44:55.000That's because it used to be that the critics respected the American public enough that if the American public actually liked to go watch something, they gave it a little bit of respect at the box office.
00:45:02.000But it just shows you, anything that the American people actually like to watch, the critics are going to denigrate as
00:45:17.000In fact, they should give it all the Oscars, I think.
00:45:19.000First of all, I actually do think that Michael B. Jordan should probably be nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Killmonger, because he's actually pretty great in the film.
00:45:27.000But I think we should just write it in for a sweep, because it's very important.
00:45:30.000Honestly, the only big shock this year is that Wonder Woman didn't win everything, because it was the greatest movie ever made, according to the critics, because women.
00:45:56.000My new wife, her pedigree's German, three quarters German, from Omaha, and a quarter Irish, and I'm proud of that background.
00:46:05.000And any Semites call her Jewish and everything else, and if she was, I'd be proud of it, but no, she's got a noble nose, but she's not Jewish.
00:46:15.000So, you know, that's what all this comes down to, ladies and gentlemen.
00:46:20.000So, I am not anti-Semitic, but my wife has a giant nose and people think she's a Jew.
00:48:14.000There's a professor at Yale who's actually on the left who does an excellent analysis of sort of originalist doctrine on the Second Amendment.
00:48:21.000And when I remember his name, I will bring it up.
00:48:23.000But it's a lot of con law stuff, so there's some good con law books on it.
00:48:27.000Justice Bork has a couple of books in which he discusses the Second Amendment.
00:48:32.000I'm a 17-year-old junior in high school, and I'm a firm believer in the Second Amendment and a member of the NRA.
00:48:36.000At the moment, myself and others in my school are being threatened by the leftist narrative that we are a heartless coward for defending our rights.
00:48:41.000My school will allow students to do a walkout.
00:48:42.000I and others will not participate because it is obviously all about gun control.
00:48:46.000Ben, how should my friends and I exhibit our First Amendment during the walkout?
00:48:48.000It's obvious that myself and other conservative high schoolers are being threatened.
00:48:57.000I think that you should walk out with all the other kids, and I think you should bring a sign that says, here to save lives, I love the Second Amendment.
00:49:05.000I think that you should say both of those things.
00:49:08.000I think that you should make it clear that you are there to help save lives and prevent school shootings, and that these two things are connected.
00:49:14.000The reason that you like the Second Amendment is so good people can stop bad people.
00:49:26.000Well, it's hard to predict a pandemic.
00:49:28.000I would say that, you know, the chances of a pandemic have grown because of the resistance to antibiotics and some strains of disease.
00:49:37.000So that's always a solid bet because pandemics do happen.
00:49:41.000As far as global economic collapse, I don't think that's going to happen anytime in the near future unless we actually start—if by global economic collapse you mean a severe economic recession or depression, I think that you could see that, but I don't think it's going to last, you know, inevitably or interminably.
00:49:56.000I think the possibility exists, but it's not super high.
00:50:00.000I actually don't think that we are on the verge of a global catastrophe.
00:50:03.000I think the greatest catastrophe that could happen right now is America falling more and more into the trap of European-style thinking because we've abandoned American founding principle and a slow slide, I would say, into global degradation
00:50:18.000I think that's probably the worst thing that could happen.
00:50:20.000But I don't think it's going to be like a big flashpoint World War III.
00:50:23.000Everybody's too afraid of nukes at this point for that to really happen.
00:50:27.000Well, the reason it's so attractive to intellectuals is because intellectuals like to think that they are smarter than the common man.
00:50:38.000And that the reason that the society has not worked is because they're not in charge.
00:50:42.000Commands and control economies are very attractive to people who think they are much smarter than everybody else.
00:50:47.000Capitalism, free market economics, laissez-faire, these assume that Joe Schmoe Plummer knows better to do with his money than you know what to do with his money.
00:50:55.000And intellectuals don't like that very much.
00:50:57.000Intellectuals like to think that they know better what to do with your money than you know what to do with your money.
00:51:01.000They think that everybody is ruled by passion except for them.
00:51:03.000They're the reasonable people at the top who can construct society in such a way so that everyone is happy.
00:51:10.000Hence the drive toward progressivism and bureaucracy and the notion of expertise ruling the roost.
00:51:14.000The thing is that collective expertise is always better than individual expertise.
00:51:18.000This is why command and control economies always fail, because when you have somebody at the top who supposedly knows about trade, that person knows way less about trade than the collective intelligence of the American people, for example, who trade with each other on a daily basis.
00:51:30.000Spencer says, So I am writing a book on this right now.
00:51:39.000I think it's going to require a renewed teaching of values that spring from Judeo-Christian culture as well as Greek reason.
00:51:45.000So, the Greek style Enlightenment, the Lockean philosophy that combined these two forces, we're going to have to reinculcate a sense of community based on a value system that is Judeo-Christian in origin, and also based on a Greek teleology that suggests that you can discover morality by using logic and reason and the nature of the universe around you.
00:52:05.000You can't just come up with moral systems in your head that have no relation to the nature of things and the nature of being.
00:52:09.000But you can, by investigating the nature of the universe, see what the underlying cause of things is, and therefore come up with certain aspects of virtue.
00:52:17.000In order to boil that down into practical practice, you usually need some form of religion, Judeo-Christian religion being the most prominent.
00:52:24.000Matthew says, Dear Ben, with YouTube being as large as it is today, do you think there's an issue with the way they're handling their business?
00:52:29.000Should we just attempt to take our business elsewhere if we do not agree with their practice, or is it possible that outlets like YouTube and Twitter need to potentially have regulations?
00:53:35.000Have you talked previously on homelessness, how homeless people do not have a right to the streets and that they should seek community support?
00:53:40.000My question is, what do you think we should do specifically?
00:53:42.000There's a large homeless population, many of whom don't have a community to fall back on.
00:53:45.000I agree that people should set themselves up in a community.
00:53:53.000If you are living on the street, you should be arrested.
00:53:55.000And then, you are one of a few types of people.
00:53:58.000Either you are mentally ill, you're one of the mentally ill who's on the street, in which case, we should be looking at commitment, and we should be looking at mental health treatment for you.
00:54:06.000And if it has to be involuntary, because otherwise you're a schizophrenic and you're out wandering the streets as a danger to yourself, then that's the way it's got to be.
00:54:14.000If you're a drug user, then drug use is still a crime in the United States, or at least living on the street is.
00:54:21.000So if you're living on the street, we'll either arrest you or, you know, if you're using—we'll try to detox you.
00:54:27.000We'll do our best to help you, put you in a community center.
00:54:29.000But if you're back on the street again, we'll arrest you again.
00:54:31.000Very little of this is economically driven, is the point that I'm making here.
00:54:35.000Because if it were just a matter of economics, and therefore there are a lot of homeless people, then the answer would presumably be that there's not much you can do unless you generate more jobs.
00:54:43.000But that's really not the biggest problem with homelessness.
00:55:00.000Well, I'm in favor of going back to a gold system.
00:55:01.000I know that this is considered heresy now.
00:55:04.000Or at least I'm in favor of pegging the price of the dollar to the price of gold.
00:55:08.000So the gold system suggested you could actually physically turn in your dollar for a certain amount of gold, but I don't know that you actually have to do that.
00:55:14.000What you could do instead is simply peg the price of the dollar to the price of gold, which was the Bretton Woods system up until it was revoked in the 1970s.
00:55:22.000So I don't see a reason we couldn't go back to something like that, and it would be automatic.
00:55:25.000Tyler says, Ben, can you give your opinion on capital punishment and how to argue for it, but still hold the belief that killing is sin?
00:55:31.000So, the answer is, well, on the biblical level, the word that is used in the Bible is do not murder.
00:55:38.000There's a different word in Hebrew for murder than for killing.
00:55:48.000Okay, on just a secular moral level, there are certain crimes that are so egregious that if you were to keep people in jail for them,
00:56:06.000You would be doing a disservice to the society at large.
00:56:09.000So, I'm not even talking about it on a deterrent level.
00:56:12.000There are two types of things you're trying to deter.
00:56:13.000One is you're trying to deter people from committing the crime, because they know they'll get the death penalty.
00:56:17.000And the second thing is you're trying to deter tribal vengeance.
00:56:20.000And one of the reasons that the government has a monopoly on the legal use of force, except in self-defense, is because what we don't want is tribal warfare.
00:56:27.000Tribal warfare usually happens when you have one tribe, and they kill somebody from the other tribe.
00:56:31.000And then the second tribe says, you know, in revenge, we're going to go kill somebody from the first tribe.
00:56:34.000And the first tribe says, oh my God, you killed that guy.
00:56:36.000Let's go kill that guy from the second tribe.
00:56:38.000This is how intra-tribal conflicts start.
00:56:40.000It's why gang violence, which is basically just tribal conflict in the inner cities, is so awful.
00:56:45.000That's why you actually need a system where people feel like the problem is being taken care of by a third party, and that problem does involve the execution of people who kill other people.
00:56:55.000We're having elections for our city council and mayor this year, and campaign finance reform is a huge topic.
00:56:59.000As I'm doing the research for myself, I'm curious as to what your opinion is on campaign finance regulation on a federal, state, and local level.
00:57:05.000I do not think that the government ought to be involved in campaign finance regulation on any level.
00:57:11.000I think they should be involved in bribery.
00:57:14.000If you are bribing somebody to vote a certain way, that is a crime.
00:57:16.000But if I decide to spend my money, and my friends and I decide to spend my money on an election,
00:57:22.000I don't see the problem with that, and I think it's an aspect of free speech.
00:57:27.000I should be able to buy the free speech that I'm capable of having.
00:57:31.000It is none of the government's business, because once the government butts in, it's pretty rare that it's not going to have some sort of impact that is politically motivated.
00:57:37.000Campaign finance reform is being pushed by Democrats, not because Democrats actually care about corruption in the election system, because they're perfectly happy with watching unions spend millions of dollars—billions of dollars, actually—on politicians they like.
00:57:51.000It's because they think that they're going to be ruling out the rich, fat cats on Wall Street while allowing the unions to do what they want.
00:59:25.000So we are huge Sox fans, because—and I will pass it down to my son, because suffering is just in our nature.
00:59:30.000I need to pass it down to my son, rooting for a team that nobody else roots for, and that has only won one World Series in the past hundred years.
01:00:00.000When you're just cohabiting, there's always the feeling that one person has at least one foot on the threshold because there's no loss of income, there's no community property, there's no notion that you actually lose anything by walking out the door.
01:00:13.000So every day is a re-evaluation as to whether this ought to happen.
01:00:17.000It's sort of like a game of chicken when you put a brick on the accelerator and you show everybody that you've done so.
01:00:22.000Once you've done that, you've pre-committed to everybody else that you are not walking out that door.
01:00:26.000And children need to feel that sense of security.
01:00:28.000I think it's very important that children feel secure in their upbringing, secure that mommy and daddy are still going to be there to help them.
01:00:33.000And cohabitation, by the way, is a really bad indicator.