The Ben Shapiro Show - Chaos Theory | Ep. 687

00:00:00.000 President Trump does an epically chaotic press conference, Democrats keep on pushing against wall funding, and internecine warfare breaks out in both parties.

00:00:07.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:08.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:14.000 Man, the president has had himself a busy Twitter day, and I will get to all of it in just one second.

00:00:18.000 Some of it is pretty fantastic.

00:00:20.000 Don't worry, we'll break it all down for you in just a second.

00:00:22.000 But first, we need to talk about your mouth cleanliness. 0.95

00:00:25.000 Your mouth health.

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00:01:45.000 Okay, so yesterday, President Trump did an epically chaotic press conference.

00:01:51.000 And it was, you know, it was the full Trump.

00:01:53.000 He brought it all.

00:01:54.000 It was a new year, and that man came ready to play.

00:01:57.000 He's been ready to play on Twitter all day long.

00:02:00.000 He opened this morning, actually, by retweeting a Daily Wire meme that we put out a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago maybe, about Elizabeth Warren, that showed Elizabeth Warren's 2020 logo but it said elizabeth warren one out of 2020th mocking the fact that she pretends to be one out of 1024th native american president trump retweeted that today with our watermark so that's pretty spectacular ah this is this is our world and it's wonderful it's a wonderful wonderful world

00:02:27.000 it wasn't just that president trump also did a press conference yesterday the dude loves memes i mean one thing you have to hand president trump is this is one entertaining dude how do you know Well, he did his press conference.

00:02:38.000 And at this press conference, he is sitting there.

00:02:40.000 I believe it's in the Roosevelt Room.

00:02:42.000 And he's got his beautiful, his beautiful large table.

00:02:46.000 And right there in the center of his beautiful large table is a giant 11 by 14 piece of color photocopy of a meme of him that says sanctions are coming, as in winter is coming from Game of Thrones.

00:02:58.000 Now, the sanctions It doesn't reference, like, what the sanctions would be about, or against whom, or why this is on the table.

00:03:07.000 And he never mentions it the entire press conference.

00:03:10.000 He does an entire press conference with a meme of himself that says sanctions are coming in front of him.

00:03:16.000 In a Game of Thrones pose, and no one says anything about it.

00:03:20.000 Nobody asks him a question about it.

00:03:21.000 Nobody says, what the hell is this doing here?

00:03:23.000 What does this mean?

00:03:24.000 He never references it.

00:03:25.000 He never says, you know why this is out?

00:03:26.000 It's because I thought it was great, and because I'm using sanctions against Russia, or Iran, or North Korea.

00:03:31.000 No, instead, it just sort of sits there.

00:03:33.000 And we all just accept it.

00:03:35.000 It's like an Easter egg in the middle of life.

00:03:37.000 It's spectacular.

00:03:38.000 OK, so President Trump is doing this entire press conference.

00:03:41.000 It was a wild press conference, by the way.

00:03:43.000 It was supposed to be theoretically about the wall.

00:03:46.000 It did not end up being about the wall.

00:03:47.000 It ended up being about foreign policy.

00:03:48.000 It had its ups and it had its downs.

00:03:50.000 It was an epic, epic episode of good Trump, bad Trump.

00:03:54.000 The president said some things that were quite good.

00:03:55.000 He said some things that were quite bad.

00:03:57.000 This is why you know him and this is why you love him.

00:03:58.000 So here is President Trump on foreign policy.

00:04:00.000 Here is something good that he said.

00:04:01.000 He was asked about European disapproval, that right now his approval numbers When they say I'm not popular in Europe, I shouldn't be popular in Europe.

00:04:09.000 If I was popular in Europe, I wouldn't be doing my job.

00:04:11.000 And President Trump gets this one right.

00:04:14.000 He says, "Who cares?

00:04:14.000 They're European." - When they say I'm not popular in Europe, I shouldn't be popular in Europe.

00:04:19.000 If I was popular in Europe, I wouldn't be doing my job because I want Europe to pay.

00:04:24.000 I'm not elected by Europeans. 1.00

00:04:27.000 I'm elected by Americans.

00:04:30.000 And by American taxpayers, frankly.

00:04:32.000 I wouldn't say they're thrilled.

00:04:34.000 Because they've had many, many years where they didn't have to pay.

00:04:37.000 So now they're gonna have to pay.

00:04:39.000 And if that makes me unpopular in those countries, that's okay.

00:04:42.000 But we're doing tremendous service to those countries, and they should at least respect us.

00:04:46.000 And I love when President Trump then continued, and he said, and if I were running for office in any of those European countries, I'd win, which is just spectacular, Trump.

00:04:53.000 I mean, that is top shelf, Trump.

00:04:55.000 And of course, he's right about all of this. 0.99

00:04:56.000 And it is really stupid to suggest that we need the approval of the Europeans to run our own foreign policy. 0.94

00:05:02.000 Mitt Romney had written in his foolish editorial in the Washington Post that the Europeans had far more confidence in our foreign policy under President Obama than President Trump. 0.97

00:05:10.000 Right, because their priorities were President Obama's priorities, whereas American priorities are President Trump's priorities.

00:05:16.000 This is a winning point for the president.

00:05:18.000 This is the reason that he was elected.

00:05:19.000 It's specifically because people felt that President Obama had not done a good job of representing American interests at home and abroad, and President Trump was going to at least put American interests first, right?

00:05:28.000 I mean, this was one of his campaign slogans.

00:05:30.000 So that was really good.

00:05:31.000 Then, President Trump got to his actual policy.

00:05:33.000 Now, I wish that there were a link between President Trump's rhetoric about putting America first and his actual policy, because I think that his policy is in many cases wrong, and I think that his view of the world is in many cases wrong.

00:05:44.000 So, I appreciate the attitude, which is that America's interests are paramount.

00:05:48.000 I don't necessarily think it links up with his policy, however.

00:05:50.000 So, President Trump was trying to justify his policy in Syria.

00:05:53.000 Now, Suffice it to say, there is a complex case that can be made for his policy in Syria.

00:05:58.000 There is an editorial that I read recently that was from an actual member of the Obama administration praising President Trump's decision to pull out of Syria, suggesting that it would sort of thrust regional responsibility onto the Turks, onto the Russians, onto the Syrians, that no solution was going to be reached with regard to northern Syria or Kurdistan without Turkish buy-in, so trying to lock the Turks out would be a mistake.

00:06:19.000 Suffice it to say, I think that logic is wrong.

00:06:21.000 I think that the Turkish government right now, run by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is one of the worst governments in the world.

00:06:27.000 It's really a truly awful government. 0.99

00:06:29.000 Erdogan is a dictatorial, autocratic thug. 0.99

00:06:32.000 He's ripped every pretense of democracy away from his nation. 1.00

00:06:36.000 And trying to pretend that Turkish interests are American interests are foolish. 0.99

00:06:39.000 Trying to pretend Russian interests in the area are American interests, that's foolish too. 0.95

00:06:42.000 Trying to pretend that the Syrians have any interest in either wiping out ISIS or in establishing any sort of stability that doesn't make them a proxy of Iran, that's foolhardy as well. 0.65

00:06:51.000 But President Trump tries to justify his policy in Syria.

00:06:54.000 I will say this about President Trump.

00:06:57.000 President Trump does have a gift for aphorism.

00:06:58.000 There's no question that the man has a real gift for being able to encapsulate his ideas in very short and convincing sentences.

00:07:06.000 But I don't think that this is an actual policy, what he's about to say about Syria.

00:07:09.000 Syria was lost long ago. 0.73

00:07:12.000 It was lost long ago.

00:07:14.000 And besides that, I don't know what, we're talking about sand and death.

00:07:18.000 That's what we're talking about.

00:07:19.000 We're not talking about, you know, vast wealth.

00:07:21.000 We're talking about sand and death.

00:07:23.000 Okay, so I'm not sure whether, if there were vast wealth there, that would really change our calculus very much.

00:07:28.000 The reason we are in Syria, presumably, is to fight ISIS.

00:07:31.000 He's not wrong. 0.53

00:07:31.000 Syria is a tinderbox. 0.53

00:07:33.000 Syria is a lot of sand and a lot of death. 1.00

00:07:35.000 But that doesn't mean that death can't be exported to other places.

00:07:38.000 That's the reason we were there in the first place.

00:07:40.000 That's the reason we were in Iraq in the first place.

00:07:42.000 So when President Trump says that Syria was lost long ago, that's true. 1.00

00:07:45.000 The Obama administration made certain that Syria's regime would not be toppled.

00:07:50.000 That was the case since 2011, 2012, 2013.

00:07:54.000 But when President Trump sort of ignores the ongoing American responsibility to both our Kurdish allies and to citizens around the world, American citizens, who ought to and have right to be concerned about the continued rise of ISIS in northeastern Syria, That is a point of ignorance.

00:08:10.000 So, again, I like President Trump's America First perspective.

00:08:14.000 I don't necessarily think that it translates into a solid policy.

00:08:17.000 That became particularly true when President Trump talked about issues of history.

00:08:21.000 So, you don't need to be a historical scholar to achieve the right answer on foreign policy, but sometimes it helps.

00:08:29.000 It means that you are less gullible, it means you are less likely to fall for a self-flattering version of history pushed by revisionist historians.

00:08:37.000 The Russians are the leading revisionist historians on planet Earth right now. 0.94

00:08:40.000 Every intervention in which they've ever engaged was apparently justified.

00:08:43.000 Vladimir Putin sounds like he was whispering into President Trump's ear when President Trump talked yesterday about the situation in Afghanistan.

00:08:50.000 He basically suggested that he was interested in pulling out from Afghanistan.

00:08:54.000 And then he made a very weird move.

00:08:56.000 He started talking about why the Russians need to be involved in Afghanistan.

00:09:00.000 And he defended the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

00:09:04.000 Now, I don't know why he would do that.

00:09:08.000 I will admit that I would listen to a Drunk History podcast with President Trump doing history, because this does not bear any relationship with reality, what he's about to say.

00:09:17.000 And the fact that you have a Republican president who's now praising the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which, lest we forget, happened under Jimmy Carter and led directly to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Why a Republican president would now be praising the policies of Leonid Brezhnev, that's beyond me.

00:09:32.000 But here is President Trump defending the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, I guess to defend the idea that we should thrust responsibility for Afghanistan on the Russians, maybe?

00:09:41.000 Something like that?

00:09:42.000 The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. 0.63

00:09:49.000 They were right to be there.

00:09:51.000 The problem is it was a tough fight.

00:09:54.000 And literally, they went bankrupt.

00:09:55.000 They went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union.

00:10:00.000 You know, a lot of these places you're reading about now are no longer part of Russia because of Afghanistan.

00:10:08.000 Okay, that is, I'm not sure there's a thing there that's true.

00:10:11.000 So, number one, Russia did not go into Afghanistan because of terrorism.

00:10:15.000 Okay, the rise of radical Islamic terrorism in Afghanistan and today, well, post-date, The Russian leaving of Afghanistan and the American leaving of Afghanistan, right?

00:10:24.000 The rise of Osama Bin Laden happened in the aftermath of the Mujahideen driving the Russians out of Afghanistan in the first place. 0.83

00:10:31.000 The reason that Afghanistan was invaded by the Russians is because the Russians couped the legitimate government of Afghanistan and put in place a communist government of Afghanistan, which was then attempted.

00:10:39.000 There was an attempted rebellion in Afghanistan and the Russians, at the behest of their communist puppet government, went in and occupied the country.

00:10:47.000 That's the reason the Russians were in Afghanistan. 0.99

00:10:49.000 This notion that the Russians went in there because of terrorism, their right to be there, is an almost insane one. 0.96

00:10:53.000 It's just patently historically illiterate.

00:10:55.000 It is not true in the slightest.

00:10:57.000 And when the president says that Afghanistan drove the Soviets bankrupt, it damaged the Soviet Capacity to war mostly damaged them in terms of public relations.

00:11:06.000 It meant that all of the fringe nations on the edges of the Soviet Union looked at the Russians and they said, well, you don't really have the capacity to keep us here.

00:11:13.000 So if we feel like leaving, we're just going to leave.

00:11:15.000 But to say that Afghanistan is what drove the Soviets bankrupt, no, communism drove the Soviets bankrupt.

00:11:19.000 Afghanistan was just a symptom of the Soviet bankruptcy that had already taken place. 0.73

00:11:24.000 Now, why does any of this matter?

00:11:25.000 I'll explain in just a second.

00:11:26.000 Why isn't it just President Trump nailing off?

00:11:28.000 I'll explain in just one second.

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00:12:49.000 Okay, so President Trump sounds off about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

00:12:51.000 So why exactly does any of that matter?

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00:13:04.000 Okay, so President Trump sounds off about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

00:13:07.000 So why exactly does any of that matter?

00:13:09.000 Because he is using that as backdrop to why it wouldn't be bad for the Russians to go back into Afghanistan. 0.89

00:13:13.000 Okay, that's not great.

00:13:15.000 The Russians, when they went into Afghanistan, the reason the United States opposed that is because there was a theory that emboldening the Russian sphere of influence, broadening the Russian sphere of influence, would be bad for the United States.

00:13:26.000 Providing them more material resources, providing them more territorial control, allowing them to expand their base of resources would be a bad idea.

00:13:33.000 And this is right.

00:13:34.000 This is Ronald Reagan's policy, suggesting that the Russians were right to be in Afghanistan. 0.99

00:13:38.000 It sort of leads to the logic that the Russians are right to be in Ukraine, that they'd be right to be in Kazakhstan, that they'd be right to be in Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania. 0.63

00:13:48.000 The fact is that President Trump's historical knowledge is not up to par on this particular issue, and that informs a foreign policy that seems ignorant in particular areas.

00:13:58.000 Now again, you don't have to be a student of history, you don't have to know a lot about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to know that it's probably a bad idea to let Vladimir Putin expand his territorial base around the world.

00:14:08.000 That it's probably a bad idea, if it was a bad idea for President Obama to give Syria over to Putin, it's a bad idea to give Afghanistan over to Putin. 0.62

00:14:16.000 This would all be a bad move.

00:14:18.000 But it certainly helps when you're not botching history to this extent.

00:14:22.000 That wasn't the extent of the bad Trump in this press conference.

00:14:25.000 President Trump also went after General James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, who just left.

00:14:31.000 Now, I will say, I think the media royally miscovered the Mattis situation.

00:14:34.000 They made it seem like James Mattis was leaving specifically over Syria, that he was very angry that President Trump was pulling over Syria.

00:14:40.000 Apparently, there have been tensions between the two for quite a while.

00:14:43.000 Apparently, Mattis Was very close with the then Chief of Staff John Kelly, and the two of them were sort of a clique inside the White House that was opposed to the Secretary of State, that was opposed to the National Security Advisor, that was opposed to Jared Kushner's office, that was opposed to other members of the Cabinet.

00:14:59.000 With all of that said, When Mattis left, President Trump's best move would have been to just say, well, thank you for your service, General.

00:15:04.000 I'll see you later.

00:15:05.000 And if Mattis has a couple of parting shots on the way out, well, that's the way it goes.

00:15:09.000 Nobody really cares.

00:15:10.000 Everybody moves on with their life.

00:15:11.000 Instead, President Trump has never been a man to take anything lying down.

00:15:15.000 And so here is President Trump slamming James Mattis after Mattis's exit from the White House.

00:15:21.000 General Mattis thanked me profusely for getting him $700 billion.

00:15:25.000 He couldn't believe it.

00:15:26.000 General Mattis thanked me even more the following year when I got him $716 billion.

00:15:31.000 He couldn't believe it.

00:15:33.000 Because our military was depleted.

00:15:35.000 But General Mattis was so thrilled.

00:15:38.000 But what's he done for me?

00:15:39.000 How has he done in Afghanistan?

00:15:41.000 Not too good.

00:15:43.000 Not too good.

00:15:44.000 I'm not happy with what he's done in Afghanistan.

00:15:46.000 And I shouldn't be happy.

00:15:48.000 He's slamming his own Secretary of Defense, whom he didn't fire, who resigned.

00:15:51.000 Again, not a good look.

00:15:52.000 If President Trump picked the best people, why exactly is he slamming the guy that he picked and one of his most popular cabinet members from the moment that he was named to the time that he left?

00:16:01.000 President Trump has a habit of fighting back, but you gotta pick your spots.

00:16:04.000 You really do have to pick your spots.

00:16:06.000 That was not, in fact, the funniest thing that President Trump said about the military in the middle of this particular press conference.

00:16:12.000 President Trump also decided that he would go off on his own military experience, which is never a bright move for the president.

00:16:18.000 Here's the president saying that he thinks that he would have been a good general.

00:16:23.000 Based on... Here he is.

00:16:27.000 It's the craziest thing I've ever seen.

00:16:28.000 I think I would have been a good general, but who knows?

00:16:34.000 Well, I mean, who knows?

00:16:35.000 Okay, look, here's the thing.

00:16:37.000 When President Trump is like this, when President Trump does this sort of thing, it does raise the question as to how much his personality is impacting his policy decisions.

00:16:47.000 Whether it's personal animus that is driving his decision-making on Syria or on Afghanistan, whether it's his personal like for Kim Jong-un that is driving his policy on Kim Jong-un, what's the separation between personality and policy?

00:16:59.000 And the answer for Trump is, I think, not much.

00:17:00.000 I think that personality does drive his policy in many ways, and that means that he is reacting to circumstances around him, sometimes for bad, but sometimes for good.

00:17:08.000 And this brings us to some good Trump.

00:17:10.000 So, President Trump, I do not think, is doing the wrong thing when it comes to this government shutdown over the wall.

00:17:15.000 I don't think that President Trump should be blamed for the fact that Democrats are not willing to give him the money that he needs to install some sort of physical barrier on the southern border to prevent mass immigration from south of the border illegally into the United States.

00:17:29.000 It doesn't seem like a lot to ask.

00:17:30.000 Let's just be real about this.

00:17:32.000 We have a $22 trillion deficit in this country.

00:17:34.000 The Democrats pretending to be fiscally responsible is a joke. 0.98

00:17:37.000 It is ridiculous. 1.00

00:17:38.000 It is silly. 0.99

00:17:38.000 It is not real. 0.99

00:17:40.000 They have spending priorities that include funding Sesame Street, but not the actual border wall on the southern border that will protect people from being murdered inside the United States by, you know, whatever number of criminal illegal aliens actually cross.

00:17:53.000 President Trump is not wrong to do any of this.

00:17:55.000 So when President Trump speaks out about it, his stubbornness is an asset.

00:17:59.000 So stubbornness, as we all know from people that we know, from our parents, from our friends, when your friend is stubborn in your defense, it's really good.

00:18:07.000 When your friend is stubborn being a dummy, that's really bad. 0.98

00:18:10.000 Well, President Trump is stubborn both ways, and so we've seen him, earlier in the show, be a little bit foolish with regard to, more than a little bit foolish, with regard to Soviet policy, or with regard to Syria, or with regard to General James Mattis. 0.98

00:18:21.000 But, when it comes to him being stubborn on the wall, this is where the stubbornness can be utilized in a good way. 0.94

00:18:26.000 This is where the fact that Trump has this real stubborn streak can pay off for conservatives.

00:18:30.000 So here's President Trump explaining to Nancy Pelosi that, listen, The Vatican has a wall.

00:18:35.000 Like, you guys are whining about walls.

00:18:37.000 Walls work.

00:18:38.000 Here's President Trump explaining, and he's of course exactly right.

00:18:41.000 When they say the wall's immoral, well then, you better gotta do something about the Vatican, because the Vatican has the biggest wall of them all.

00:18:49.000 Uh, the wall is immoral.

00:18:53.000 Look at all of the countries that have walls.

00:18:56.000 And they work 100%.

00:18:57.000 It's never gonna change.

00:19:00.000 A wall is a wall.

00:19:01.000 Okay, and he's exactly right about this.

00:19:02.000 And this is a point where his stubbornness is an actual asset.

00:19:05.000 This is why he really should give a national address.

00:19:07.000 President Trump should call a primetime national address on as many networks as will give him the airspace.

00:19:12.000 And he should say, here is why we need a wall.

00:19:14.000 Here are the names of the people who have been killed because we don't have a wall.

00:19:17.000 Here are the costs to our country because we don't have a wall.

00:19:19.000 Right?

00:19:19.000 This would be a time for President Trump to use that bully pulpit and really get out there in front of the American people.

00:19:25.000 And President Trump makes a pretty good point here, which is the courts gave President Obama tremendous power to ignore the law when it came to allowing illegal immigrants to stay. 0.59

00:19:33.000 Imagine if we applied that kind of power to me.

00:19:35.000 I haven't tried to seize that kind of power, but apparently the left was fine with presidents having that kind of power in the first place.

00:19:42.000 If President Obama is allowed to do what he did on DACA, then I'm allowed to do whatever I want to do on things that You know, probably a president, as he said, probably a president doesn't have the right to do.

00:19:56.000 Okay, and Trump is exactly right about this too, which is Democrats are very comfortable with executive power so long as the executive power is being used on their side.

00:20:04.000 I think that President Trump's case for the government shutdown is not a bad one.

00:20:07.000 His case for standing up for the wall is actually quite a good one, but he needs to make it more forcefully than just going on Twitter.

00:20:14.000 And that means going to rallies.

00:20:15.000 It means speaking out loud.

00:20:17.000 Because now, people are actually not going to get paid.

00:20:20.000 Starting basically on Friday, people are not going to be getting their paychecks.

00:20:22.000 Now, do I think that the government shutdown is the end of the world?

00:20:24.000 No, I've never thought that the government shutdown is the end of the world.

00:20:28.000 I've never thought that it's going to be the zombie apocalypse because a certain percentage of non-essential employees will not be paid for a couple of weeks.

00:20:35.000 I don't think that's the end of the world.

00:20:36.000 I don't think most Americans really feel it.

00:20:38.000 I mean, you're still getting your mail, you're still getting your social security checks, you're still getting your Medicare coverage, right?

00:20:42.000 You're still getting all the things that the federal government is there to provide, at least so far as the left social service network is concerned.

00:20:50.000 So I don't think there's a huge panic area, but it's a good point of leverage for President Trump.

00:20:55.000 What's amazing, though, is the media coverage.

00:20:56.000 So remember, When Ted Cruz was quote-unquote responsible for shutting down the government in 2013, for not giving Obama funding for Obamacare, the media put it all on Cruz.

00:21:05.000 It was not Obama's fault.

00:21:06.000 It was Cruz's fault.

00:21:07.000 So it was Congress's fault for not giving the president what he wanted, and thus forcing a shutdown.

00:21:12.000 Now, when it's Congress not giving the president what he wants, and thus forcing a shutdown, it's President Trump's fault.

00:21:17.000 Look at the sort of media, glowing, glowing media coverage that Nancy Pelosi has been receiving for saying that she will not budge an inch on the wall.

00:21:24.000 Here she was being interviewed on Good Morning America about the wall.

00:21:28.000 And she says, listen, we're not going to give a dime for the wall.

00:21:30.000 Are you willing to come up and give him some of this money for the wall?

00:21:33.000 Because apparently that's the sticking point.

00:21:35.000 No, nothing for the wall.

00:21:36.000 We're talking about border security.

00:21:38.000 Nothing for the wall, but that means it's a knock-starter.

00:21:41.000 But we can go through this back and forth.

00:21:43.000 No.

00:21:44.000 How many more times can we say no?

00:21:46.000 Nothing for the wall.

00:21:47.000 Okay, so where is the questioner saying, okay, so you're willing to allow people to go without paychecks?

00:21:51.000 Right, ask Nancy Pelosi the same questions you're asking President Trump, and make her answer whether she's willing to allow people to go without paychecks, to let national parks shut down, simply to not fund a border wall that will keep Americans safe. 0.68

00:22:03.000 It's pretty incredible.

00:22:04.000 It really is.

00:22:05.000 In a second, I'm going to show you how the media continue to play defense for the Democrats, even in a situation where they would never do anything similar for Republicans.

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00:23:42.000 Okay, so...

00:23:43.000 The media continue to play defensive for Democrats.

00:23:46.000 Take for example this clip.

00:23:47.000 Nancy Pelosi's daughter.

00:23:49.000 And she was on MSNBC, and she was talking about, or CNN rather, and she was talking about her mother.

00:23:56.000 Listen to what she says about her mom, and then listen to the reaction of the anchors.

00:23:59.000 What are your feelings about this person who you know quite well becoming Speaker of the House for a second time?

00:24:05.000 She'll cut your head off and you won't even know you're bleeding. 1.00

00:24:08.000 That's all you need to know about her. 0.75

00:24:11.000 No one ever won betting against Nancy Pelosi.

00:24:13.000 She's persevered.

00:24:16.000 She'll cut your head off and you'll never know that you're bleeding. 1.00

00:24:19.000 She'll disembowel you and you'll never know your spleen is missing. 1.00

00:24:22.000 She'll cannibalize you and you'll never know that you're missing your small intestine. 1.00

00:24:26.000 And everybody's laughing. 0.91

00:24:27.000 Look at the anchors.

00:24:29.000 Now, imagine for just a second that somebody had a hat on Eric Trump Jr.

00:24:33.000 or Eric Trump.

00:24:35.000 And Eric Trump had been asked about Donald Trump. 0.97

00:24:36.000 And he said, you know, my dad, he can cut your head off and you'll never know you're bleeding.

00:24:41.000 Would that ever stop being a meme?

00:24:43.000 Would the anchors have reacted with laughter?

00:24:46.000 Or would they have reacted with shock and outrage? 0.97

00:24:48.000 That sort of violent language, cutting off people's heads. 0.75

00:24:51.000 What is he, ISIS? 0.97

00:24:52.000 What is he?

00:24:52.000 I mean, remember how nuts they went when President Trump just tweeted out a crazy meme of himself leveling a WWE clip.

00:25:01.000 He tweeted out a meme of himself leveling a wrestler who had a CNN logo for a head.

00:25:06.000 You remember this?

00:25:07.000 And it was the biggest deal in the world?

00:25:08.000 Nancy Pelosi's daughter goes on national television and says her mom cuts people's heads off and you won't even know you're bleeding.

00:25:13.000 Nothing.

00:25:14.000 What about all that violent rhetoric talk?

00:25:15.000 Where'd it go?

00:25:16.000 We're in the middle of a government shutdown.

00:25:17.000 Wouldn't it be better if you actually had a Speaker of the House willing to come together and compromise?

00:25:21.000 No, let's all laugh about it together.

00:25:23.000 That's the way the media operate these days.

00:25:25.000 Well, meanwhile, with all this happening, internecine warfare has basically broken out in both parties.

00:25:31.000 There's internecine warfare, obviously, inside the Republican Party between the so-called never-Trump wing of the Republican Party And President Trump and people who voted for him and plan on voting for him in 2020, President Trump leads the charge in this direction.

00:25:44.000 Now, as I've said before, I think that when people say never Trump, they are using the category too broadly.

00:25:50.000 I think there's a category misapplication here.

00:25:53.000 So there are people who didn't vote for President Trump in 2016.

00:25:55.000 Those people break down into a couple of different groups.

00:25:57.000 There are the people who didn't vote for President Trump in 2016, and they think that everything that President Trump does, both good and bad, is actually bad for the country.

00:26:06.000 Because the better President Trump does, the worse it is for the country, because Trump himself is bad.

00:26:10.000 Into this category would fall Max Boot, Bill Kristol, Jennifer Rubin.

00:26:14.000 Everything Trump does is bad, whether it is good or whether it is bad.

00:26:17.000 If it's bad, it's bad.

00:26:18.000 And if it's good, it's bad, because it helps Trump.

00:26:20.000 That is perspective number one from the Never Trump category.

00:26:23.000 Perspective number two.

00:26:24.000 Never Trump was a category of people, a group of people, who said we're not going to vote for Trump in 2016 based on the available evidence at hand because we think that he lacks character and we don't know he's going to be conservative.

00:26:34.000 And we will judge him based on his evolution and his actions on a day-to-day basis.

00:26:40.000 This would be people like me.

00:26:40.000 I didn't vote for President Trump in 2016.

00:26:43.000 But I evaluate him on the basis of, is he doing something good or is he doing something bad?

00:26:47.000 Just like we did on today's show.

00:26:48.000 We've been utterly consistent since 2015.

00:26:50.000 There's good Trump.

00:26:51.000 There's bad Trump.

00:26:52.000 They exist in the same human, right?

00:26:54.000 All of this is true.

00:26:54.000 So that's category number two.

00:26:56.000 So when you're talking about the people who overall say that everything Trump does is bad.

00:27:01.000 So I think that we should actually have three categories of people with regard to Trump.

00:27:05.000 They're the always Trumpers.

00:27:07.000 Everything Trump does is good no matter what.

00:27:09.000 Doesn't matter, right?

00:27:11.000 Him making comments about Megyn Kelly's Bleeding, wherever.

00:27:15.000 That's good, because Trump said it, right?

00:27:16.000 Those are the always-Trumpers.

00:27:17.000 It's like the Bill Mitchell crowd.

00:27:19.000 And there are the never-Trumpers.

00:27:20.000 Everything Trump says is bad, even if he's moving the embassy to Jerusalem and helping to destroy ISIS.

00:27:24.000 All that's bad, because it helps Trump.

00:27:26.000 And then there are the sometimes-Trumpers who say, OK, here's what he's doing that's good, and here's what he's doing that's bad.

00:27:30.000 I think the vast majority of people fall into the sometimes-Trump category.

00:27:33.000 Whether or not they vote for Trump or not in 2020, they at least acknowledge what he's doing that's good and what he's acknowledging that's bad.

00:27:40.000 Okay, so President Trump is taking on a group of people who I think are rightly being called Never Trumpers, meaning that Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, a group of people who feel the constant necessity to deride pretty much everything that the President does with the belief that President Trump's successes contribute to the unsuccess of the country.

00:28:00.000 I think this is the subtle message of Mitt Romney's op-ed yesterday in the Washington Post.

00:28:05.000 He acknowledges that President Trump has done good things on conservative policy, but then he basically says, all of that good is undone, and not only undone, made bad almost, by President Trump's character, because President Trump, as a man of little character, Everything that he does that's good, that re-enshrines that man in office, is a bad thing.

00:28:22.000 That was sort of Mitt Romney's take in the Washington Post.

00:28:24.000 Well, Trump went after Romney, and I don't think that this was completely inappropriate.

00:28:28.000 Here was President Trump yesterday going after the senator from Utah.

00:28:31.000 I was surprised at Mitt Romney, but I just hope he's going to be a team player, and if he's a team player, that'll be great.

00:28:38.000 I will say this.

00:28:40.000 If he fought really hard against President Obama, like he does against me, he would have won the election.

00:28:49.000 Does that make sense to you?

00:28:51.000 If he fought the way he fights me, I'm telling you, he would have won the election.

00:28:55.000 Okay, that is the common feeling among a lot of Republicans about Mitt Romney, which is why when Romney sits on the sidelines and snipes at President Trump about his character without any real solution to it, people wonder, okay, so what exactly are you suggesting, Senator Romney?

00:29:09.000 Same thing with Jeff Flake, right?

00:29:10.000 Jeff Flake has made a big thing out of his disdain for President Trump's character.

00:29:15.000 Now, again, I'm not somebody who's been kind to President Trump's character.

00:29:19.000 I challenge you to find anywhere in the last four years in which I've said that I think that President Trump is a man of moral fiber and character.

00:29:25.000 I don't think that President Trump is, frankly.

00:29:29.000 But that doesn't mean that he can't have good policy.

00:29:31.000 It doesn't mean that I can't like a lot of his policies.

00:29:33.000 So when Trump goes after Flake, right, when Trump goes after Flake, because Flake has made sort of the leading point of the spear his argument that Trump is a man of no character, and then Trump says that Flake is going to wind up on CNN, Again, there's a grain of truth to this.

00:29:46.000 The internecine warfare that's happening is right now in the Republican Party, not between the sometimes Trumpers and the always Trumpers or the sometimes Trumpers and the never Trumpers, but between the always Trumpers and the never Trumpers.

00:29:57.000 And here's Trump going after Jeff Flake, that senator from Arizona.

00:30:02.000 Wonderful guy.

00:30:03.000 I never even met him and he's hitting me.

00:30:05.000 He was gonna tell people how to win in 2020 because 2016 can't... He wrote a book about it.

00:30:10.000 Didn't work out too well, that book.

00:30:12.000 Because we won in 2016 because we didn't want to wait till 2020.

00:30:16.000 So Jeff Flake is now selling real estate or whatever he's doing.

00:30:22.000 He'll probably go to work for CNN.

00:30:24.000 That's my prediction.

00:30:25.000 The pretty brutal stuff there from President Trump.

00:30:27.000 But again, this is why I think the international warfare inside the Republican Party should stop being so much about personality and start being a little bit more about policy and ideas.

00:30:37.000 This is why I think the interesting conversations are being had Inside the sometimes Trump category, because sometimes Trump really means that Trump doesn't matter, right?

00:30:45.000 Sometimes Trump means that we're holding Trump to the same standard we hold any other politician, which is, does he do good stuff or does he do bad stuff?

00:30:52.000 If you are loyal to President Trump through and through, and he can't do anything that would alienate you in any way, then you're doing politics wrong.

00:30:58.000 And if you are a never-Trumper in the sense that everything that President Trump does is inherently bad, then I would suggest you are also doing politics wrong, because viewing politics and policy through the lens of one particular man Okay, so in a second, I want to get to the Democratic chaos that's been breaking out, because it's not just chaos on one side of the aisle.

00:31:18.000 The internecine warfare in the Democratic Party is going to get really bad really quickly.

00:31:21.000 But first, you're going to have to go over and subscribe.

00:31:23.000 For $9.99 a month, you can subscribe over at Daily Wire.

00:31:25.000 We have all sorts of goodies when you do subscribe.

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00:31:28.000 Tonight, we have our next episode of Daily Wire backstage.

00:31:31.000 Andrew Klaven, the Excrable Michael Moles, Elisha Krauss, Daily Wire God King Jeremy Boring, I, we will all be here to ring in the new year, and of course answer all of your questions.

00:31:38.000 As always, only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, so make sure to subscribe today.

00:31:42.000 I mean, I'm spending two additional hours here today with you, answering your questions, watching my colleagues smoke and infect my lungs with horrific ash.

00:31:51.000 As I suffer through a cold just for you, the least you can do is subscribe.

00:31:55.000 And for $99 a year, you get that, you get the rest of my show live, the rest of Clavin's show live, the rest of Nolza's show live, the rest of Matt Walsh's show live.

00:32:01.000 You get all sorts of goodies.

00:32:03.000 And for that $99 a year, you get this.

00:32:05.000 The very greatest in leftist tears, hot or cold tumblers.

00:32:07.000 Now, I'm slightly less sick today than I was yesterday.

00:32:10.000 Why?

00:32:10.000 Because yesterday, I sipped from this tumbler.

00:32:14.000 I mean, maybe that's why.

00:32:15.000 I will suggest that's why for purposes of selling the tumbler, but All I'll say is that I went on vacation, didn't have the tumbler, got sick.

00:32:22.000 Came back, started drinking from the tumbler, started to get well again.

00:32:26.000 It's possible that if your father were shot in a cave in ancient Israel, and your father were bleeding from that wound, and you found this tumbler in the cave, and you poured water from the tumbler on the wound, and your father were shown Connery, that the wound might heal.

00:32:47.000 That's all that I'm saying to you.

00:32:48.000 I'm not saying that the cup's the Holy Grail or anything, but I don't know.

00:32:51.000 I mean, do you know what the Holy Grail looked like?

00:32:54.000 You don't, do you?

00:32:55.000 I know you don't.

00:32:55.000 Okay, in any case, go check us out over at YouTube or iTunes.

00:32:58.000 Please subscribe over there.

00:32:59.000 We have a lot of great Sunday specials coming up.

00:33:01.000 You're going to want to be privy to those as well.

00:33:02.000 We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:33:05.000 Okay, so it's not just internecine warfare on the Republican side of the aisle.

00:33:14.000 And again, I think the internecine warfare on the Republican side of the aisle is actually less divisive inside the Republican Party than the internecine warfare on the Democratic side of the aisle.

00:33:24.000 I think the Republicans have basically come to a pretty solid consensus about President Trump.

00:33:29.000 Overall, they like him.

00:33:31.000 Overall, they like his policies.

00:33:33.000 They may disdain some of the things that he does or says.

00:33:35.000 They may have qualms about his character.

00:33:37.000 But overall, the guy does have like a 90% approval rating inside the Republican Party.

00:33:41.000 The same is not true inside the Democratic Party.

00:33:44.000 And so they are deciding on which angle to take.

00:33:46.000 And right now, they don't have an angle.

00:33:48.000 Right now, they are just beating each other's brains in.

00:33:50.000 It's pretty astonishing, actually.

00:33:51.000 So this is evident in everything from their congressional policy.

00:33:56.000 to the presidential race of 2020.

00:33:59.000 So take, for example, congressional policy.

00:34:02.000 It's very easy.

00:34:03.000 It's really easy to talk about how you would run the government until you actually run the government.

00:34:09.000 This is one of the great ironies of how party politics works in our era.

00:34:13.000 So Alexis de Tocqueville is the author of Democracy in America, the great classic on how America's constitutional system was set up.

00:34:20.000 He's a Frenchman who toured the United States in the 1820s and then went and wrote Probably the great tome in history about the United States.

00:34:29.000 He talks specifically in Democracy in America about times in which parties are great and times in which parties are small.

00:34:35.000 And what he says is that when a country is in crisis, then parties are great, meaning that they have broad, overarching ideas that they're going to bring revolutionary change.

00:34:43.000 And when times are pretty good, when times are not chaotic, then parties are small, meaning that they fight about personality and they fight over small details.

00:34:50.000 And they seem petty.

00:34:52.000 That suggests to me that while we all think that we're in a crisis, what we're really in is in a pretty good time in American history.

00:34:57.000 Because the parties seem to be pretty small and they're fighting about pretty small things.

00:35:00.000 They like to pretend that they're fighting about big ideas and big things.

00:35:03.000 When it comes right down to it, the warfare inside the parties, inside the Democratic Party, inside the Republican Party, they're over relatively trivial differences.

00:35:11.000 I'll take for example the Democratic battle that is now broken out Over PAYGO budget rules.

00:35:16.000 So for those who don't remember PAYGO budget rules, basically the rule of PAYGO is that you're not allowed to pass a bill that adds to the budget deficit without a method for rectifying the budget deficit.

00:35:28.000 So if you pass an additional spending bill, then you also have to pass an additional tax bill.

00:35:31.000 Well, Nancy Pelosi, believe it or not, in the House, is trying to push new pay-go rules. 1.00

00:35:35.000 Now, you say to yourself, why would Nancy Pelosi want to do that?

00:35:38.000 Nancy Pelosi is not fiscally responsible.

00:35:40.000 Why would she want to rein in spending by requiring taxation to pay for that spending? 0.99

00:35:45.000 Don't Democrats just want to blow out the deficit?

00:35:47.000 The answer is, yes, Democrats don't care about spending.

00:35:50.000 What this pay-go rule is actually designed to do is to centralize power in the hands of committee chairmen, in the hands of a centralized elite at the top of the Democratic Party, and also, it's meant to prevent further tax cuts.

00:36:01.000 That's what PAYGO is designed to do.

00:36:03.000 Basically, historically, Democrats have opposed PAYGO because they want to blow out the spending, and Republicans have opposed PAYGO because they want to lower the taxes.

00:36:10.000 Well, Nancy Pelosi wants to put PAYGO back in place because she wants to make sure that Democrats can't propose crazy spending programs without her approval, essentially. 1.00

00:36:19.000 And this has led to a revolt from inside her own caucus.

00:36:22.000 So, according to the Huffington Post, A small group of progressive lawmakers are trying to derail a fiscally conservative proposal put forward by the incoming House Democratic leadership, one that could potentially block votes on ambitious policy proposals like Medicare for All unless it's completely paid for.

00:36:37.000 The pay-as-you-go rules, commonly known as PAYGO, would require Congress to offset any increased spending with equal cuts or revenue increases elsewhere.

00:36:44.000 The provision is contained in a larger package of rules for the incoming 116th Congress.

00:36:49.000 The fact that Democrats are using their newfound power to stress fiscal responsibility is baffling to some progressives.

00:36:54.000 Fiscal responsibility was hardly mentioned in the 2018 elections, whereas big legislative ideas were popular with voters.

00:37:01.000 If leadership waives PAYGO rules, it would allow Free College, Medicare for All, to come up for a vote on the House floor and for the House to pass it, but that legislation would still not be able to become law unless both chambers of Congress voted to exempt it from statutory PAYGO, a restriction enshrined in law that leadership alone cannot change.

00:37:16.000 There's already a statutory PAYGO rule that exists.

00:37:19.000 All this does is it prevents a lot of these bills from coming to the floor in the first place.

00:37:23.000 It allows for more leadership control, which is why you're seeing people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trying to vote against PAYGO and stop Nancy Pelosi from centralizing authority inside her own party. 0.98

00:37:33.000 But the warfare that's broken out inside the Democratic Party about priorities is really a question of whether priorities should be pie in the sky policy or whether it should be governing.

00:37:43.000 Nancy Pelosi is a lot more practical as a lawmaker than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even if they have the same overall policy. 1.00

00:37:50.000 This division is going to keep coming up over and over and over.

00:37:54.000 And that division is breaking out on the presidential level in 2020 in the battle between Bernie Sanders and Beto O'Rourke.

00:38:00.000 Bernie Sanders supporters are ripping into Beto O'Rourke supporters right now.

00:38:03.000 There's a real battle going on online between Bernie, who's a socialist, and Beto, who's kind of a quasi-socialist.

00:38:08.000 Why?

00:38:08.000 Well, because Beto O'Rourke is a more responsible version of Bernie Sanders, meaning that Beto O'Rourke has said that he likes capitalism.

00:38:15.000 Beto O'Rourke doesn't believe that we should raise the tax rates, presumably to 60% across the board, the way that Bernie Sanders does.

00:38:21.000 And Beto supporters are being ripped by Bernie supporters as insufficiently doctrinaire, insufficiently committed to the Marxist cause.

00:38:30.000 Jonathan Chait has an interesting piece over at New York Magazine talking specifically about this.

00:38:35.000 He says, "The first skirmish of the 2020 Democratic primary, a wave of attacks on Beto O'Rourke by supporters of Bernie Sanders took almost everybody by surprise.

00:38:43.000 On the outside, it looks like one of those inscrutable personality-driven online spats that characterized the Twitter era, but the feud is neither petty, nor personal, nor irrational.

00:38:51.000 It's the first shot in a war that may well continue for the next year and a half.

00:38:55.000 He says the Sanders partisans who are attacking O'Rourke are not representative of Sanders voters as a whole.

00:38:59.000 Sanders attracts the intense support of a small left-wing intellectual vanguard who see American politics in fundamentally different terms than most Democrats do.

00:39:07.000 The primary struggle in American politics as they see it is not between liberalism and conservatism, But between socialism and capitalism.

00:39:14.000 Sanders labels himself a socialist.

00:39:15.000 He frames his rhetoric in Marxian class terms.

00:39:18.000 Beto O'Rourke does not.

00:39:19.000 And that means that the Beto supporters and the Bernie supporters are really going to war with one another.

00:39:23.000 Now, this is going to take a lot of different forms, but one of the forms it's going to take is Beto supporters coming after Bernie for Bernie's personal foibles.

00:39:31.000 Bernie Sanders made a big mistake yesterday.

00:39:33.000 There was a story that broke in Politico about how more than two dozen women and men who worked on Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign are now seeking a meeting with Sanders to discuss the issue of sexual violence and harassment on the 2016 campaign for the purpose of planning to mitigate the issue in 2020.

00:39:49.000 Bernie Sanders was asked about it yesterday.

00:39:51.000 He said he didn't know anything about it at the time.

00:39:53.000 He was a little busy, which is a bad answer.

00:39:55.000 He should have just said, I didn't know anything about it.

00:39:57.000 We'll get to the bottom of it.

00:39:59.000 Things are going to get rough inside the Democratic Party.

00:40:01.000 It is easy to be the non-governing party.

00:40:03.000 It is much more difficult to be the actual governing party, and that's what Democrats are about to learn in both the House and they're about to learn in the 2020 Democratic primaries as well.

00:40:12.000 Okay, meanwhile, I have to tell you the craziest Twitter story I have seen, like, ever.

00:40:17.000 Okay, so, my business partner, Jeremy Boring, It's really spectacular.

00:40:22.000 He was suspended from Twitter today.

00:40:25.000 Why was he suspended from Twitter?

00:40:26.000 Because someone wrote a tweet about a recipe for Brussels sprouts, and then Jeremy tweeted, quote, even better, coat with melted butter, salt, pepper, paprika, and a dash of Worcestershire, sear in cast iron in bacon grease for 30 seconds or until brown, then throw them away and burn your face off with the hot pan, because even that would be better than Brussels sprouts.

00:40:47.000 And he made a joke about how Brussels sprouts suck.

00:40:49.000 Twitter suspended him. 0.98

00:40:51.000 I am not kidding you.

00:40:52.000 Twitter sent him a 12-hour suspension.

00:40:54.000 Why?

00:40:55.000 Because they said that he had violated their rules against promoting or encouraging suicide and self-harm.

00:41:01.000 They said you may not promote or encourage suicide or self-harm.

00:41:04.000 When you receive reports that a person is threatening suicide or self-harm, we may take a number of steps to assist them, such as reaching out to that person and providing resources, such as contact information.

00:41:14.000 For our mental health partners, if you are having thoughts of self-harm, suicide, or depression, we encourage you to please reach out to someone and request help. 0.58

00:41:22.000 So, Jeremy made a joke about brussel sprouts being so terrible that you'd be better off throwing away the brussel sprouts and burning off your face with a frying pan.

00:41:30.000 And Twitter suggested that he was recommending suicide or self-harm because of the wide spate of people across the United States who have been burning off their own faces with frying pans after throwing away their brussel sprouts.

00:41:44.000 This is patently insane stuff.

00:41:46.000 Ellen Barkin, the actress from Animal Kingdom, by the way, she is still on Twitter and has not been suspended despite calling for Louis C.K. 0.99

00:41:53.000 to be raped and shot.

00:41:55.000 That's totally okay, but Jeremy makes a joke about Brussels sprouts and vegetables and Twitter suspends him. 0.99

00:42:00.000 Why did any of this happen?

00:42:01.000 Why is any of this happening?

00:42:02.000 The reason that all of this is happening in the first place is because all of our social media monitors are of the left.

00:42:09.000 The social media monitors, here's how, here's the way it works and it works this way in terms of boycotts and it works this way in terms of Twitter suspensions or Facebook suspensions.

00:42:16.000 There's a small group of motivated leftists.

00:42:19.000 Here is what they do.

00:42:20.000 What they do is they monitor accounts like mine, or like Jeremy's, or like yours, and then they find something that they can take some fringe offense at, and they send it in to the arbiters, the powers that be.

00:42:32.000 And then they know that the powers that be are already predisposed not to like me, or like Jeremy, or like you, and then the powers that be give the benefit of the doubt to the person complaining, and they suspend you.

00:42:43.000 That's the way this works.

00:42:43.000 On Twitter, that's the way that it works.

00:42:45.000 On Facebook, as well.

00:42:47.000 It's really ugly stuff.

00:42:48.000 It's the way that it works with boycotts, too.

00:42:50.000 You know, we've seen boycotts in the past against Laura Ingraham, and we've seen it against Tucker Carlson, on the basis of really, really weak sauce.

00:42:57.000 Why?

00:42:57.000 Because what's happening is there's small groups, people like Media Matters or Sleeping Giants, and they have a list of, like, 20 activists, and they send out an email to those 20 activists, and they say, today, we want you to target X advertiser, or we want you to target Twitter, or we want you to target Facebook, or we want you to send an email or a phone call to customer service at these places complaining about such and such a person.

00:43:17.000 And those companies, because they don't want to be bothered, respond by either dropping their advertising or suspending people or destroying their social media influence or destroying their reach.

00:43:26.000 In other words, we live in a society that takes certain things for granted.

00:43:30.000 One of the things that we take for granted is that we don't want to bother each other.

00:43:33.000 But because we all take for granted living in a society together with a social fabric where we're supposed to not bother each other, because we all take that for granted, We assume that if somebody actually is complaining, if somebody actually is making trouble, if somebody actually is the squeaky wheel, they deserve the grace.

00:43:49.000 We're making a baseline assumption of honesty and decency in our political lives, which is that nobody wants to be bothered, and you're a nice person, so you don't actually want to bother me.

00:43:58.000 But the left does not believe like this.

00:44:00.000 The left believes that if they can make a little bit of fuss, they can make the world a better place by cleansing the world with fire, by purifying the world with fire.

00:44:07.000 And so a Brussels sprouts joke is a good excuse to get rid of my business partner on Twitter.

00:44:12.000 A joke by Louis C.K.

00:44:14.000 about the Parkland survivors.

00:44:16.000 That's a reason to destroy Louis C.K.

00:44:18.000 Not his personal behavior.

00:44:20.000 His joke about the Parkland kids.

00:44:22.000 That destroying people on social media has become a pastime for this small group of motivated people.

00:44:26.000 Now, here's the dirty little secret.

00:44:29.000 No one cares what these people have to say.

00:44:31.000 Advertisers need to understand this.

00:44:33.000 Undoubtedly, there will be calls to boycott at some point, me or anybody else, There will be no boycott.

00:44:39.000 Boycotts don't materialize like that.

00:44:41.000 Hey, Chick-fil-A, there were calls to boycott it.

00:44:42.000 You know what happened to Chick-fil-A?

00:44:43.000 It made more money because no one cared.

00:44:46.000 But people have to stop being so scared of this small group of motivated people and understand that those motivated people have bad intent and are not actually trying to police decency.

00:44:54.000 They're actually just trying to ram through their political point of view on the back of everybody else's apathy.

00:45:00.000 That's what's happening in social media and that's what's happening in the advertising sphere as well.

00:45:05.000 Okay, time for a couple of things I like and then a couple of things that I hate.

00:45:08.000 So...

00:45:09.000 Things that I like.

00:45:09.000 So, over the break I had a chance to read, I hadn't read any of this before, but it was recommended by Andrew Clavin, the Hornblower series by C.S.

00:45:18.000 Forrester, and it really is a lot of fun.

00:45:20.000 There are all these stories about a guy who starts off as a midshipman in the British Navy fighting during the Napoleonic Wars, and they're easy reads.

00:45:29.000 They're written, I think, in the 1930s, and they really read easily.

00:45:32.000 They have not aged at all.

00:45:34.000 And they're great for kids.

00:45:35.000 I think great for teenagers.

00:45:37.000 So go check out the Hornblower series.

00:45:38.000 I know they made a BBC series based on the Hornblower series.

00:45:41.000 I think it's pretty good.

00:45:42.000 But the books themselves are really good.

00:45:43.000 Ernest Hemingway was a big fan of them.

00:45:45.000 A lot of great writers have looked to them as kind of models of adventure literature.

00:45:48.000 Go check them out.

00:45:49.000 The Hornblower series.

00:45:50.000 This one is Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, which is the first in the series.

00:45:53.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.

00:46:00.000 Okay, so a couple of things that I hate today.

00:46:02.000 This is an amazing, amazing story.

00:46:03.000 So, there's a story from NPR about why millions of kids can't read.

00:46:08.000 And here is what they say. 0.98

00:46:09.000 They say that a bunch of teachers were basically taught the stupidest possible way of teaching your kids to read. 0.99

00:46:14.000 So, I'm lucky. 0.99

00:46:15.000 I have really smart kids.

00:46:16.000 My daughter is not five yet, and she is reading.

00:46:20.000 She can read long words.

00:46:22.000 She's a smart kid.

00:46:23.000 But that's also because my dad, particularly, was very instrumental in teaching her how to read.

00:46:28.000 We worked with her.

00:46:29.000 She knows how to sound out words.

00:46:31.000 The way that you typically teach kids to read is they have a couple of words.

00:46:35.000 For those who have small kids, they know this already.

00:46:36.000 But there are some words that they can identify on sight that, you know, as soon as they've identified it a few times over, and then they can now identify that word just by looking at the word.

00:46:45.000 And then there are a lot of words that they can sound out.

00:46:47.000 And you have to understand, this is the real breakthrough for kids, is understanding that every letter has a different sound and that the combination of those letters makes a different sound.

00:46:55.000 This is the way that you teach kids to read. 0.97

00:46:57.000 But social scientists were idiots, and so they decided that that's not really how kids learn to read. 0.99

00:47:01.000 Instead, the way that kids learn to read was by guessing at meaning. 1.00

00:47:07.000 I'm not kidding here.

00:47:07.000 This is what NPR says.

00:47:09.000 According to this one teacher named Harper, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 32% of 4th graders and 24% of 8th graders are not reading at a basic level.

00:47:23.000 Fewer than 40% are proficient or advanced.

00:47:26.000 And here is what they say.

00:47:29.000 They say that a director of literacy over at a school in eastern Pennsylvania was assigned to find out why this was.

00:47:37.000 The person's name was Kim Harper.

00:47:38.000 Harper attended a professional development day at one of the district's lowest performing elementary schools.

00:47:43.000 The teachers were talking about how students should attack words in a story.

00:47:46.000 When a child came to a word she didn't know, the teacher would tell her to look at the picture and guess.

00:47:50.000 The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page.

00:47:54.000 So if a kid came to the word horse and said house, the teacher would say that's wrong.

00:47:58.000 But Harper recalls if the kid said pony, it would be right because pony and horse mean the same thing.

00:48:03.000 Harper was shocked because pony and horse don't mean the same thing.

00:48:06.000 And what does a kid do when there aren't any pictures like, you know, in most books?

00:48:10.000 This advice to a beginning reader is based on an influential theory about reading.

00:48:13.000 It basically says people use things like context and visual clues to read words.

00:48:17.000 The theory assumes learning to read is a natural process, and with enough exposure to text, kids will figure out how words work.

00:48:22.000 But scientists from around the world have done thousands of studies on how people learn to read.

00:48:26.000 They've concluded that theory is wrong.

00:48:29.000 One big takeaway from that research is that reading is not natural.

00:48:31.000 We are not wired to read from birth, which is obvious to anyone who has kids.

00:48:34.000 They legitimately... There's a certain point where their brains have developed enough where now they can read, but before that, they have no clue how to read.

00:48:40.000 Even skilled readers rely on decoding.

00:48:43.000 People become skilled readers by learning that a written text is a code for speech sounds.

00:48:47.000 And yet, this ill-conceived contextual guessing approach to word recognition is enshrined in materials and handbooks used by teachers, wrote Louisa Mote, a prominent reading expert, in a 2017 article.

00:48:57.000 The contextual guessing approach is what a lot of teachers in Bethlehem have learned in their teacher prep programs.

00:49:02.000 So in other words, this is the problem with these top-down school programs, you know, that are pushed by people who have no actual relationship with kids or parents.

00:49:10.000 They can buy into any dumb theory of how kids are taught and then use those theories on your kids and you won't know about it until your kid can't read at age seven. 0.70

00:49:18.000 Hey, it's insane. 0.97

00:49:19.000 Like, you would know.

00:49:20.000 If you actually sat and tried to teach your kid to read, you would know that this theory is nonsense from word go.

00:49:26.000 But in these schools, you can get away with theorizing and writing master's dissertations in education on why kids don't need to learn to sound out words.

00:49:34.000 They can just identify the picture.

00:49:36.000 And this is supposed to teach them to read, and you can get away with it, because real-world experience in academia do not have to have any commonality.

00:49:44.000 It's really astonishing.

00:49:45.000 And this sort of social science nonsense has permeated every aspect of our lives, from questions about gender, where the science is very clear that there are differences between men and women, to questions about IQ, where people are now saying that IQ is not a good test of intelligence.

00:49:59.000 No, IQ isn't a perfect test of intelligence, but IQ does actually measure some general level of intelligence, particularly in areas like fluidity and how quickly you grasp concepts.

00:50:10.000 It doesn't have a 100% crossover with success in life IQ.

00:50:14.000 As I've said before, I went to a highly gifted program in middle school.

00:50:17.000 I got in, there was a cutoff at a certain IQ point.

00:50:21.000 I was above that IQ point, but I wasn't like leaps and bounds above that cutoff point.

00:50:25.000 There were kids who were leaps and bounds above.

00:50:27.000 Some of them are in jail.

00:50:28.000 Some of them are gym teachers at community colleges.

00:50:31.000 IQ does not always correlate with success, but then there's a group of people who basically just decided to throw out IQ as a measure, because why should we bother with IQ as a measure at all?

00:50:39.000 Let's just come up with some bad social science and pretend it doesn't exist.

00:50:44.000 The bottom line is this.

00:50:46.000 Common sense generally tends to merge with the social science.

00:50:50.000 And if the social science and common sense do not tend to merge, your first instinct should be to question the social science, not to question the common sense.

00:50:59.000 Really?

00:51:00.000 That does not mean that social science can't overturn common sense.

00:51:04.000 Sometimes common sense is wrong.

00:51:07.000 Over history, there have been common sense notions about human beings and the nature of people that have been completely wrong.

00:51:12.000 And social science sometimes has been helped to overcome it.

00:51:15.000 More often, social science has actually been used to reinforce The wrong approaches.

00:51:20.000 So I'm thinking, for example, on issues like race, where there is a common-sense approach that suggested that racial differences mattered an awful lot.

00:51:27.000 That common-sense approach was wrong.

00:51:29.000 The social science of the time actually didn't cut against it.

00:51:32.000 It cut in favor of the wrong approach to common sense.

00:51:35.000 It took people of moral fiber to cut against all of that.

00:51:39.000 But, in general, as a general rule, if a social science study is teaching something that you know to be false, then your first instinct should be to question whether the social science— I'm not talking about, like, science science, like, you know, mathematical measurements or something.

00:51:52.000 I'm talking about the science of what you know to be true about human nature. 0.68

00:51:56.000 If it turns out that the social science is suggesting something that sounds ridiculous, it's probably because that thing is ridiculous.

00:52:01.000 And that's true whether you're talking about reading, or whether you're talking about gender, or anything else where human beings have had good experience with human nature for quite a long time.

00:52:09.000 For quite a long time.

00:52:09.000 OK, we'll be back here tomorrow to talk about all these and more issues.

00:52:13.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:52:14.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:52:19.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.

00:52:25.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:52:29.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:52:31.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

00:52:32.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:52:34.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - January 03, 2019

Chaos Theory | Ep. 687

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