The President of the United States is in supremely hot water after he calls a bunch of countries bleep holes and then suggests that people shouldn t immigrate from there to here. We ll explain what the controversy is about from every possible angle. Plus, we ve got the mailbag, and the media have decided that they don t actually have to use bleeps anymore. They re just going to say straight out holes. So we ll talk about all that and much more on today s episode of The Ben Shapiro Show. Today's After Show Was Hosted By: Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Elisha Krauss, and Drew Perla Subscribe today and become part of the conversation! You can ask questions live on the Daily Wire website at Dailywire.me/TheConversation and we ll answer them live on The Daily Wire's Facebook page, where you can watch the live stream of The Conversation, wherever you get your news and opinions. The Conversation is a weekly show hosted by Daily Wire. Daily Wire is produced by Ben Shapiro and is brought to you by Caff Monster Energy Drink. Ben Shapiro is a regular contributor to the New York Times, NPR, CBS Radio and NPR. and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post, and is the author of the book, and many other publications. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about Ben Shapiro on Apple Podcasts! and we'll get a shoutout in next week's mailbag! Subscribe and subscribe to his podcast, The Dark Lord. . Thank you for listening to Ben Shapiro's The Dark Side of the Uglyphrasmic ! Thanks for listening and Good Morning America's newest podcast, The Best Fiends and Good Mythology Podcast Good Luck Out There's Good Luck, Good Morning Out There, Good Luck! by Good Morning out there, by Bad Haber? by by Mr. Ben Shapiro Bad Morning Outlaw & Good Morning, Good Trouble Out There Great Day Outlaw, Good Day Out There by , and Good Luck by Mrs. Good Day, and Thank You, Good Life Out Here by . . Thank You by Dr. John Rell Blessings, Bad Day Out Here, Bless You, Bless You
00:00:00.000All righty, so the President of the United States is in supremely hot water after he calls a bunch of countries bleep holes and then suggests that people shouldn't immigrate from there to here.
00:00:10.000We will explain what the controversy is about from every possible angle.
00:00:13.000Plus, we've got the mailbag and the media have decided that they don't actually have to use bleeps anymore.
00:00:19.000They're just going to say straight out holes.
00:00:30.000It's another day and another controversy, which means that all of Twitter, all of the news cycle, all of Facebook is now a flaming bleephole.
00:00:58.000Pacific to DailyWire.com or our Facebook page or our YouTube page, because we're doing our fifth episode of The Conversation, which features Andrew Klavan and Elisha Krauss.
00:01:06.000Subscribe today and you become part of the conversation.
00:01:10.000And he will answer those for everyone to hear.
00:01:12.000Again, his conversation is going to stream live on the Daily Wire Facebook page.
00:01:14.000If you want to ask questions, you have to go over to our website at dailywire.com, click on the conversation page, you can watch the live stream, just type your questions into the Daily Wire chat box, and Alicia will funnel those to Drew.
00:01:25.000So you can only do that if you subscribe.
00:01:26.000Again, you can get your questions answered by Andrew Klavan, Tuesday, January 16th, 5pm Eastern, 2pm Pacific, and join the conversation.
00:03:25.000And he thinks this is an off-the-record conversation.
00:03:28.000As Trump should know by now, when you're in a room with Democrats and or Republicans, the chances that what you say remain on background or secret
00:03:47.000that Trump had been having a conversation about protecting immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries.
00:03:53.000And when he was talking about El Salvador, that was particularly of interest because the Trump administration had moved to basically revoke the temporary visas for people who have been in the United States from El Salvador, 200,000 of them.
00:04:06.000They've been there for, I think, 15 years, and Trump revoked some of their visas.
00:04:11.000We don't know the context of the comments.
00:04:13.000It's unclear where Trump made these comments.
00:04:16.000We don't know whether he was talking about the visa diversity lottery program or whether he was talking about targeted deportation of illegal immigrants from particular countries.
00:04:23.000That does make a difference because here's what Trump supposedly said.
00:04:25.000He said, quote, Bleep is another word for poop.
00:04:26.000Why are we having all these people from bleephole countries come here?
00:04:53.000So Jake Tapper reports that what he meant by that is he was specifically talking about revoking the temporary visas for Haitians who have been here after the earthquake of about 10 years ago.
00:05:03.000So that's the entirety of the comments, right?
00:05:05.000That apparently he was talking about Haiti and African countries.
00:05:09.000And he said, why are we having all these people from bleep hole countries come here?
00:05:12.000And then he said, why do we need more Haitians?
00:05:45.000But those first comments, why are we having all these people from bleephole countries come here?
00:05:49.000People are taking this to mean that he means that everyone from bleephole country is a bleephole, and that's why they shouldn't come here.
00:05:55.000I'm not sure that that is fully in evidence.
00:05:58.000So, there's a few reasons why people are angry today.
00:06:02.000And we'll go through why people are angry, and as we go through, you'll see sort of why I think that this may be a little bit overblown, depending on how you interpret his comments.
00:06:11.000First of all, let me explain the vagary in the comments.
00:06:13.000There are two ways of interpreting this comment.
00:06:15.000Way one is he's saying there are bleephole countries and the people from those countries are bleepholers and therefore they shouldn't come to the United States.
00:06:28.000It's not just silly, it's bigoted, it's racist, it's counterproductive.
00:06:32.000A huge number of Haitian immigrants come to the United States and get college degrees.
00:06:36.000I believe that the statistic is something like, for new African immigrants, for countries, Haiti's not in Africa, but for African immigrants, the number of
00:06:46.000People who come to the United States and get college degrees actually higher than the American population at large.
00:06:51.000Immigrant populations very often are escaping bad countries.
00:06:54.000That's the reason they're coming here.
00:06:55.000And so they know why their countries are bad, right?
00:06:57.000Look at Cuban immigrants who are coming from Cuba.
00:06:59.000Cuba is kind of a bleephole country according to many Cuban expatriates.
00:07:04.000The same thing is true of the Vietnamese boat people who left and came here because they're trying to escape the destruction of their country.
00:07:11.000So the idea that you're coming from a country that's a bleephole, and therefore you're a bleephole, is obviously racist and silly and bigoted.
00:07:18.000A huge percentage of people who came over from Nazi Germany ended up being wonderful citizens of the United States, Germans and Jews alike.
00:07:26.000The same thing is true of people who are trying to escape Russian pogroms and Polish pogroms.
00:07:30.000The same thing is true of people who come from China.
00:07:32.000The vast majority of immigrants to this country are wonderful people who are trying to do hard work and enrich the country by coming here.
00:07:37.000So the suggestion that you can judge a person from the country because they're from the country is, of course, bigotry.
00:07:44.000And people who are reading Trump's comments this way have a little bit of support in the idea that Trump has said in the past, for example, that a Mexican judge could not properly judge him because he was Mexican.
00:07:53.000So people are looking at Trump's track record of linking ethnicity to politics or to judgment or to capacity, and they're saying that this fits in with those comments.
00:08:41.000The Diversity Visa Lottery Program is the opposite of that.
00:08:43.000The Diversity Visa Lottery Program says that we are specifically going to bring people in from downtrodden countries, from countries that don't send a lot of immigrants through the legal immigration process.
00:08:53.000We're going to go to those countries and bring in a large number of immigrants from those specific countries.
00:08:59.000Originally, the Diversity Visa Lottery program was actually designed to get more Irish immigrants into the country in 1965, because there had been a rapid decrease in the number of Irish immigrants entering the country, and so they wanted to use the Diversity Visa Lottery to increase the number of Irish, apparently, in 1965.
00:09:14.000That shifted in 1990, and the number one beneficiary of the Diversity Visa Lottery program are people from African countries.
00:09:21.000So, here's what Trump could be saying.
00:09:22.000He could be saying, listen, if we have to judge people only by country,
00:09:26.000We're not going to look at them as individuals, which is really how we should do an immigration program.
00:09:30.000We should look at people and say, is this a good person?
00:09:46.000That's really how the lottery program works.
00:09:48.000And so Trump might be saying, listen, that seems backward to me, in the sense that if you are just going to take as the only descriptor the country of origin, you have to look at the country of origin, and country of origin does make a difference.
00:10:00.000It is easier, put aside race, it's easier, for example, to integrate someone from Great Britain into American ideals than it is to integrate somebody from, say, Russia in American ideals.
00:10:09.000Now, Russians are still white people, but the idea that you're coming from a government where there's no history of American ideology
00:10:37.000That's the way that we should do this.
00:10:39.000So those are the two plausible ways of reading what Trump said.
00:10:42.000Now in a second, I'm going to explain to you all the various ways that people have taken his comments and the way that the left, I have to say, they are so stupid because they have a win here, right?
00:10:50.000If they want to hit Trump as a racist, it's not hard to get from point A to point B, but they somehow completely miss point B and they just go to point Z.
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00:12:33.000Now, as I say, Trump could say, listen, I wasn't saying that you're judging people by their country of origin.
00:12:37.000I'm saying that if you are going to judge people by their country of origin, as the diversity visa lottery suggests, then you do have to look at the difference between the cultures of Great Britain and the cultures of, say, Russia or Spain or Greece or any other country.
00:12:50.000You're going to have a hierarchy of countries from which it is most likely that people are going to be easily able to assimilate.
00:12:55.000That doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me.
00:12:57.000And Trump could even say, if you look at that Washington Post story, I say as much.
00:13:00.000I say I want more Asian immigrants, meaning from places like South Korea, which has a very westernized country, as opposed to, say, Ivory Coast.
00:13:09.000There are certain countries where integration is going to be easier.
00:13:11.000And then you'd have to provide some statistics to prove it.
00:13:14.000And we'll talk about the statistics in a little while.
00:13:16.000But that is not what the media are going nuts over.
00:13:18.000So the media have gone nuts over a few different things here.
00:13:20.000The first thing they've gone nuts over is the actual vulgarity that Trump said the word bleephole.
00:13:24.000Now, number one, Trump said the word bleephole behind closed doors.
00:13:27.000And I find it a little bit ridiculous that everybody in the media is saying, how dare Trump say that there are countries that are bleepholes?
00:13:34.000I've sat with a lot of these members of the media.
00:13:38.000They will call their apartment a bleephole.
00:13:40.000They will suggest that the recycling center two blocks from their house is a bleephole.
00:13:44.000The idea that you can't say the word bleephole, that suddenly they're very offended by this, is belied by the fact that they then went on TV and decided to say the actual word bleephole by not bleeping it
00:14:09.000Now, what's amazing about this is, of course, this is not the first time in American politics that people have cursed before.
00:14:14.000Before I get to the media going crazy over this, first, I want to show you, okay?
00:14:17.000You remember when Joe Biden, it was a big headline, Joe Biden said to Barack Obama that when Obamacare passed, he said on an open mic, that this is a big effing deal.
00:17:43.000Seriously, you have to be a moron to fall into this particular trap, saying that there's no such thing as a bleephole country.
00:17:48.000Rich Lowry humiliated Joan Walsh, a CNN contributor, yesterday on the network.
00:17:55.000Specifically asking her, like, you're saying that some countries are not bleepholes.
00:18:00.000Would you rather live in Haiti, with its average income GDP, its average annual GDP per capita at $730 a year, its average life expectancy at 63, its literacy rate at 61%, would you rather live there or Norway, where the average income is $62,000 a year?
00:18:16.000And watch Joan Walsh try to run screaming from this question with her hair on fire.
00:18:20.000You know, you're really contradicting what the administration has already said.
00:18:24.000They have said the reason that they're ending these protections for Haitians and for Salvadorans specifically is that those countries are no longer basket cases and they can go back.
00:18:32.000Now, so you can't really have it both ways.
00:19:07.000And she's not the only one doing this.
00:19:09.000The worst, of course, is Stephen Colbert.
00:19:10.000So Stephen Colbert, last night, goes on his show, and this is clip 17, and he explains that there are no bully poll countries except the United States.
00:19:18.000We're the only one because Trump is president.
00:19:22.000This afternoon he was meeting with lawmakers to discuss immigration policy.
00:19:25.000Several of these lawmakers suggested lifting restrictions for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and various African countries.
00:19:32.000Trump reportedly said, Why are we having all these people from **** whole countries come here?
00:20:12.000Also, there is something a little bit contradictory about the idea that people have to escape bad countries to come here, but we won't label the country bad in the first place, right?
00:20:20.000So Anderson Cooper yesterday talks about how he's been to Haiti and he's helping Haitian children.
00:20:25.000This, this is, oh, it's a great story, but I'm wondering, you know, if Anderson Cooper is making the case that people from Haiti are wonderful, that's fine.
00:20:32.000But if he's making the case that Haiti is not a bleephole country, you know, in the sort of common parlance, that it's not a crappy place to live, I mean, obviously it is a crappy place to live, and Anderson Cooper is telling you a story about how crappy a place it is to live.
00:22:09.000And that's why I'm so bewildered by the attack that the media have chosen to take here.
00:22:12.000Now, in a second, I'm going to explain where the media are on more solid ground, and how they are universal in their condemnation, and where there's a possible read that is a little more vague than the one that they are espousing in just a second.
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00:24:43.000This remark by the President of the United States smacks of blatant racism, the most odious and insidious racism masquerading poorly as immigration policy.
00:25:22.000It is a plausible read that the President of the United States is saying that people from Haiti cannot properly immigrate to the United States because they are bad people because it's a bad country.
00:25:33.000To say that he harbors feelings of animosity for people of color as a whole, I think, would be a little bit too broad, considering that in the same article it says that he wants more people to come in from countries like South Korea.
00:25:43.000That's full of Asian people who are not white.
00:26:46.000It actually is racist, and it is bigoted.
00:26:48.000But there's another plausible way to read what Trump is saying, right?
00:26:52.000The other plausible way to read what Trump is saying is for him to be saying what I said earlier, which is that if you are going to judge people alone by their country, which you should not,
00:27:00.000You should not, but that's what the Diversity Visa Lottery Program does.
00:27:03.000If you're going to judge people's merit based on just country of origin, you cannot pretend that all countries of origin are equally likely to produce the same level of assimilatable citizens.
00:27:30.000Their findings are, although immigrants from South America, Canada, Oceania, and Europe use any form of welfare at the same rate as U.S.-born immigrants
00:27:38.000from Asia, Africa, Central America, and U.S.
00:27:41.000protectorates, those ones use welfare more.
00:27:43.000So, if you're an immigrant from Asia, Africa, Central America, or U.S.
00:27:48.000And then, they actually analyze to see whether this was just based on the level of poverty that people are when they come over to the United States, if it's based on family size.
00:27:56.000They say, we reject the hypothesis that welfare usage is identical across immigrants and U.S.-born, and also reject the related hypothesis that welfare usage is identical for immigrant groups.
00:28:07.000This result suggests that welfare usage is not affected by solely economic and standard demographics.
00:28:12.000This implies that culture, value, network information, or institution of groups might have a significant role to play in an individual's choice to use welfare.
00:28:20.000Culture, values, network information, and institutional background were not controlled for in our probability model and may explain the differential welfare usage across group despite controlling for the standard economic and demographic variables that should predict welfare usage.
00:28:32.000Birthplace matters for welfare usage in the U.S.
00:28:44.000It doesn't mean that as individuals we can judge you based on your country of origin.
00:28:48.000It does mean that if you are going to say, we get to now take in 10,000 immigrants,
00:28:53.000Those 10,000 immigrants are either going to come from South Korea or they're going to come from Russia, an Asian country, or they're going to come with a history of Western civilization, or Russia, where there is very little history of Westernization.
00:29:10.000You're just going to do it based on the country description.
00:29:12.000Then you would probably say, I'd want the South Korean citizens and not necessarily the Russian citizens, if you were going to create a hierarchy of people who are able to assimilate easily in the United States.
00:29:21.000That's not a rip on individual Russians.
00:29:25.000My great-grandparents came over from Lithuania.
00:29:28.000The idea that it doesn't matter at all where you came from in terms of the average, if you're doing it simply by numbers, is obviously not true.
00:29:37.000But the idea that you can judge individuals based on this is racist.
00:29:56.000You can say that on average, people who come from sub-Saharan African countries are going to have a tougher time integrating and assimilating into the United States than people coming from Great Britain.
00:30:23.000I mean, as I've said before, his history shows that he's said stuff like, a Mexican judge, meaning a judge who is descended from Mexican parents, can't properly judge his case because they're Mexican.
00:30:33.000There are cases where Trump has sounded really bad and racist.
00:30:38.000If you read these comments in the context of those comments, it's hard to avoid the conclusion the media want you to draw.
00:30:43.000But I would like more evidence on what actually happened in this conversation, because all I'm hearing is secondhand.
00:30:47.000I don't have a full transcript in front of me, and I am shy of jumping on the media's account of a secondhand conversation that was being related by Democrats.
00:30:57.000I think that to do that would be unfair.
00:31:00.000I hope that I would hold the same standard for the Obama administration or for any other politician, for that matter.
00:31:07.000So, again, should Trump have said this?
00:31:17.000The left's suggestion that there's no such thing as a bleephole country is silly.
00:31:20.000The left's suggestion that they're angry because he cursed is silly.
00:31:23.000And the left's suggestion that the only way to read that comment is simply in terms of Donald Trump is saying that every immigrant from Haiti is bad because they're black.
00:31:31.000I think that that requires a logical jump, at least.
00:32:07.000Pacific, ask Drew questions live in the Daily Wire chat room.
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00:32:40.000Now, one of the things that's going to be fascinating about what Trump just said is how it impacts his base.
00:32:45.000Because what happened yesterday is that the Republicans basically signaled that they were going to cave on DACA.
00:32:51.000So the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, of course, is the program that Obama instituted to basically give green cards in the long run to dreamers, so-called dreamers, people who are brought over as young people through no fault of their own, as the phrase goes, and have been in the country for years.
00:33:06.000So Trump wanted an end to chain migration.
00:33:09.000He wanted an end to the diversity visa lottery program, and he wanted his wall.
00:33:31.000And that Trump said this sunk even the possibility of a deal.
00:33:34.000Now Democrats are going to wait around.
00:33:35.000They're going to let DACA die on Trump's watch, claim Trump is a racist, and then know that Trump will just reinstate DACA himself, which will probably be what happens come March.
00:33:43.000In any case, before all this blew up, Trump was talking yesterday about this deal.
00:34:17.000Some of the 50,000 slots will be used for people in the country who have lost their temporary protected status, and some will be used for low-immigration countries.
00:34:23.000So they'll just reallocate some of the diversity visa lottery stuff.
00:34:26.000Very, very weak deal if this is all Republicans can get out of this.
00:34:30.000Jeff Flake, who is pretty weak on immigration, he came forward and said, we're very close on the deal.
00:34:50.000It's just another side effect of the fact that the President of the United States cannot keep his mouth shut, and he'd be better off just being quiet in many scenarios.
00:35:36.000He came here and he wrote some of the great American scores.
00:35:38.000A great classical composer, really underappreciated because film scores are underappreciated.
00:35:42.000If you don't know the original Adventures of Robin Hood, I think it may have been the very first movie I recommended on Things I Like on this show, then the music is just glorious.
00:36:47.000So the idea that you come from a crappy country, therefore you can't contribute to the United States is just asinine and racist and stupid and bigoted.
00:36:54.000If that's what Trump was saying, then he's all of those things.
00:36:56.000If that's not what Trump was saying, then he is not.
00:36:59.000And I would urge people to actually look at the evidence in front of them and come to your own conclusion.
00:37:03.000I think that either read, to be frank with you, is plausible.
00:37:06.000But I don't think that it is necessarily an irrevocable
00:37:12.000Proof that Trump is racist, that you read it in one of these two ways.
00:37:17.000Okay, so time for, you know what, let's skip the things I hate and we'll just go straight to the mailbag.
00:37:24.000Junelle writes, Hey Ben, what exactly is the problem with Keynesian economics?
00:37:27.000So the problem with Keynesian economics is the suggestion that if you redistribute money from top to bottom, or you jumpstart the economy by borrowing against the future and injecting cash
00:37:37.000Economic growth is not a phrase that means a whole hell of a lot.
00:37:56.000Makes your life better is a phrase that means a whole hell of a lot.
00:37:59.000It may make your life better in the temporary here and now for the government to give you a little bit more money.
00:38:03.000It will make your life a lot better now and in the future for people who know what to do with their money to keep their own money and invest it in things that are going to benefit you.
00:38:12.000In other words, money in Bill Gates's pocket is actually more useful than money in my pocket.
00:38:16.000And I'm talking about me personally, right?
00:38:19.000Bill Gates has made better use of his money than I have made of my money.
00:38:22.000Not only has he invested it wisely, he's also built a company with tens of thousands of employees and built products that millions of people use.
00:38:28.000And the idea that when you take money from borrowing against the future, when you take money and inject it into the economy, that this somehow gets the gears running again, that demand is what creates supply, is not true.
00:38:41.000Meaning the reason that you buy a new product is not because you have a little bit of extra money in your pocket.
00:38:45.000It's because the new product is available.
00:38:46.000You couldn't buy an iPhone 30 years ago because the iPhone didn't exist.
00:38:51.000It wouldn't matter how much money the government gave you.
00:38:53.000You can buy an iPhone now because there were creators who discovered the hidden demand in the marketplace and crafted a product specifically for it.
00:38:59.000This is my problem with Keynesian economics.
00:39:01.000The idea of the multiplier effect, I think, is sheer nonsense.
00:39:04.000Henry Hazlitt has a very long but thorough look at the flaws in Keynesian theory.
00:39:10.000It's called The New Economics, I think.
00:39:12.000The Flaws in the New Economics, something like that.
00:39:13.000It's about a 500-page book, but he really blows apart Keynesianism with alacrity.
00:39:17.000I think that it's idiotic to tax your citizens abroad.
00:39:20.000If you're abroad and you're earning all your money abroad, I'm not sure what the United States has to say about that, per se.
00:39:25.000But I feel that generally about taxes.
00:39:36.000Here, I mean, I think that the only possible argument that can be made is taxing our citizens abroad for defense purposes because our military defends you abroad the same as it would at home, right?
00:40:39.000Even if they are many times over more victimized than other so-called victim groups in the United States.
00:40:45.000I got back to Trevor Noah on The Daily Show and I said, if you want to do this thing live, as in live live, then I'm happy to do it.
00:40:55.000If you want to do it on tape delay, I'm not going to do that because I saw how you sliced and diced Jonah Goldberg, and I'm not going to allow you to slice me out of context and then not give me a copy of the tape so three million people see me, you know, getting destroyed by Trevor Noah, when in reality, it's the other way around.
00:41:09.000I don't think we have heard back from them ever since I made that demand, which is not particularly shocking.
00:41:26.000I would not have gotten the government deeply involved, to be frank.
00:41:28.000I mean, there was a huge economic meltdown in 1920-21, and the entire market recovered quickly.
00:41:35.000The reason that you had an eight-year lengthening of the Great Depression, according to UCLA Economist, is because of all the government interventionism.
00:41:40.000I certainly would not have raised tariffs.
00:41:41.000I certainly would not have moved toward government interventionism in the fiscal sector.
00:41:46.000There are two theories, basically, in conservative circles for why the Great Depression happened in the first place.
00:41:52.000One theory is the so-called tightening of the money theory, which is the Milton Friedman Chicago School of Economics, and they suggest that the Fed policy was too stingy, and therefore we needed to inject more money into the economy with a low inflation rate, which would have allowed people to retain their mortgages, for example.
00:42:08.000I tend not to agree with Milton Friedman.
00:42:10.000I'm more on the Vienna School of Economics on this thing, which suggests almost the opposite.
00:42:15.000They sort of argue that the Fed policy was too inflationary and the stock market was overvalued, and that's why you saw a stock market crash.
00:42:23.000And that the only way to get out of it would have been to, if not tighten the grip on money, then to maintain the gold standard.
00:42:30.000Now, the gold standard was technically maintained, but gold was revalued against the dollar under FDR on a pretty routine basis.
00:42:44.000I don't think that there will be a choice if this continues.
00:42:46.000And I know that there are institutional investors who are looking to do just that.
00:42:49.000Well, the best ones from Shakespeare, I love his tragedies.
00:42:52.000I'm not as big a fan of Shakespeare's comedies.
00:43:37.000I mean, I made a lot of leader references during the last election cycle with regard to how Trump treated members of the media who did his dirty work for him, people being sycophants in front of him.
00:43:47.000I've made references to Hillary Clinton being a corrupt figure in search of power, a sort of Macbeth figure.
00:43:54.000And when it comes to politics, Julius Caesar has a lot of reference to the politics of our age, how populism can be whipped up by a mob and then somebody can jump in front of it and use it for its own particular purposes, even if it started off well, right?
00:44:07.000Even if it's Brutus trying to start a popular uprising against tyranny, somebody can jump in front of that and then misuse the movement, right?
00:44:15.000You see it with Bernie Sanders, I think to a certain extent you saw it with Trump.
00:44:17.000So there are so many great Shakespeare plays that have contemporary relevance.
00:44:22.000Isaac says, So as I've said, going back to a gold standard I think would be useful.
00:44:29.000The way that you would do that is pegging the value of the dollar to the value of gold.
00:44:32.000The reason I say that is because the value of gold doesn't change radically over time in terms of the amount of gold that's being discovered.
00:46:59.000Local and state need to fund mental health services, and then when people are on the streets and are suffering from severe mental disorders, you know, they have schizophrenia, and they can't take care of themselves, it is evil to leave them out on the streets not taking their medication.
00:47:22.000The vast majority of people who are homeless from the studies that I have seen have some sort of mental disability, are alcoholic, or are drug users.
00:47:29.000You do not have the privilege of living on the streets.
00:47:39.000It's not that hard to clean up the homeless problem.
00:47:42.000But you have to have some sympathy for people who are mentally ill and people who are drug users.
00:47:46.000So I think that it's not a matter of just providing housing for the homeless.
00:47:49.000A lot of people don't want to abide by the rules.
00:47:51.000The rules are for everyone and you don't get to avoid them just because you wish to live on the streets.
00:48:12.000Well, I think a lot of this changed after 9-11.
00:48:19.000If you look at the 2000 election, I believe that George W. Bush actually won a plurality of Muslims in the United States in the 2000 election.
00:48:25.000After 9-11, things radically shifted because foreign policy became the dividing line for a lot of Muslims in the West who saw Israel or American policy in Iraq or Afghanistan or profiling of Muslims as the chief political issue.
00:48:40.000Muslims, Jews, and Christians are basically on the same page.
00:48:42.000In terms of economic issues, I think that there's a fair argument to be made by a lot of reform and moderate Muslims that conservative economics is on the same page as well.
00:48:50.000Personal responsibility, messages that you actually have responsibility to people.
00:48:53.000So I agree with you, but I think foreign policy, if you're moderate,
00:48:57.000in the Muslim community, and you don't actually suffer from a lot of the delusions that I think some of the more radical members of the Muslim community suffer from, less so in the West, but more in other countries, then I think you're more likely to be on the conservative side of the aisle on all the other issues, and maybe vote Republican.
00:49:12.000I've recommended a lot of fiction books on the show, I think.
00:49:15.000My favorite is Moby Dick, so that is where I would start.
00:49:24.000I'm also a big fan of Leon Uris as a writer.
00:49:26.000He's kind of a fun writer if you just want fun writing.
00:49:29.000One of my favorite books that nobody's ever heard of is a book called The Secret of Santa Vittoria by Robert Crichton.
00:49:33.000So see if you can pick that one up on Amazon.
00:50:19.000Parchment barriers are just parchment.
00:50:21.000You require an educated population in order to maintain freedom.
00:50:24.000This is why Ronald Reagan said that freedom is always one generation away from extinction.
00:50:28.000That's why I'm optimistic that in an era in which freedom seems to be less and less respected, I always think freedom is one generation away from revival.
00:50:35.000Justin says, Hey Ben, my friends are very anti-Israel.
00:51:10.000Native American reservations are governed by federal law, so there actually is self-governance in Native American reservations.
00:51:17.000The question is, what sort of culture do you think ought to have self-rule?
00:51:22.000So the idea of a Jewish democracy, I think that should have self-rule because I think Judaism has values, Judaic values have values, and democracy has value, and I don't think these things are in conflict.
00:51:51.000If you can govern a country well, or a territory well, and if you have a historic claim to that area, then we can talk about it.
00:51:59.000But when it comes to Native American tribes, there are some serious questions as to whether there's historic Native American claim to particular land, considering that there is no such concept in many cultures, in Native American culture originally, of private property or tribal ownership of particular property.
00:52:16.000In other words, now we're sort of past that point.
00:52:18.000But the idea of having sovereign Native American land is basically written into American law.
00:52:23.000I mean, this has become a major issue with regard to Child Protective Services and the Indian, the Department of Indian Affairs, the Department of Native American Affairs.
00:52:32.000All righty, so we have reached the end of this week's Mailback.