Sen. Kamala Harris does her big town hall, Howard Schultz preps his presidential run, and Democrats talk up Marxism. Ben Shapiro breaks it all down and explains why she's being attacked by the left for being a former prosecutor, and why it's no surprise that she's a leftist. He also talks about how she got her start as a prosecutor and why she thinks truant parents should be required to pay for their kids to go to school, even though she didn't have the money to do so when she was a state attorney general in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was illegal to teach truant children in public schools in the United States. Ben Shapiro is the host of the Ben Shapiro Show on the Fox Business Network. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Times and the Financial Post, and is a frequent guest on Fox News and CNN. His work has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, CBS, NPR, and the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He's also a frequent contributor on NPR and NPR. and is considered a leading voice in the anti-war and anti-Marxist wing of the Democratic Party by many prominent academics and journalists. If you don't think that we are sitting on a house of cards, you're living with your head in the sand, but since you're listening to my podcast that probably means that you're smarter than the average American...but since you are smarter than average American, than you realize... or you're not listening to the news. . Happy listening! -Ben Shapiro's new book: The Big Little Thing? Subscribe to my new podcast: and more! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices and other great listening options! Download my free stock tip: iTunes and trading deals! I'm giving away $5 or $10 off your first month and get 20% off my entire annual membership plan when you shop at my store becomes a member of my VIP membership starting next month! FREE Mentioned in my newsletter: bit.ly/sponsor meayler.ee/thebigredigrahamrahamrahambigredeemer.ee Want me to sponsor my new book deal? I'll be giving you an ad-free version of my book review on my next book out in paperback and hard copy of my new issue?
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00:01:35.000All right, so it is obvious that the radical Democratic base has now taken over the entire party because there are no centrists left who are running for president in 2020 in the Democratic Party.
00:01:45.000It's amazing to watch as members of the media label random members of the Democratic coalition centrists.
00:01:51.000So they've been making the claim that Kamala Harris, the senator from California, is the new centrist.
00:01:55.000She's a centrist voice as opposed to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
00:01:59.000Now, the reason that they are saying that is because she had a history as a prosecutor.
00:02:03.000So that means that, naturally, she is more centrist than a lot of the other Democratic members of the coalition.
00:02:12.000And she served as a prosecutor because she felt that would be a gateway to higher office.
00:02:15.000But the reality is that Kamala Harris is every bit the radical of Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders, or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, or anybody else you think is the face of the radical Democratic Party.
00:02:26.000Now, she's getting hit from the left today.
00:02:28.000And the reason she's being hit from the left is, again, because of that prosecutorial career.
00:02:32.000There's a clip going around of her speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
00:02:38.000And it's a clip of her back when she was Attorney General of the state of California, talking about how she used to prosecute the parents of kids who were truant.
00:03:16.000Let's work in tandem around our collective objective and goal, which is to get those kids in school.
00:03:21.000Well, the internet was going nuts over this last night because the suggestion is that Kamala Harris was going after parents of kids who were truant.
00:03:27.000And really what you require is a social worker in these cases.
00:03:32.000It's kind of fascinating to watch as the left resonates to Kamala Harris despite her record in this particular area.
00:03:39.000It is also important to note that when she says something should be tantamount to a crime, you as Attorney General do not get to decide what is and is not a crime.
00:03:46.000You do not get to decide that everything you don't like is now enforceable by the police.
00:03:51.000If you do, that makes you a centralized government control tyrant.
00:03:55.000And Kamala Harris does have those tendencies.
00:03:57.000But all of that is being pushed to the side by the fact that Kamala Harris is an intersectional candidate.
00:04:03.000And that means that she must be a great, great candidate, even if she's spouting the same nonsense that all the other Democratic candidates are spouting ad nauseum.
00:04:12.000So last night she did a town hall on CNN and it was just a wonderful example of CNN, again, playing host to a propaganda piece on behalf of a Democrat.
00:04:24.000So she's in front of a group of people, probably, you know, 400, 500 people maybe.
00:04:28.000And I love that CNN was like, she did this in Des Moines, Iowa, and CNN was touting this online, like, wow, look at the crowd Kamala Harris can draw.
00:04:37.000Not to be self-centered here for a second.
00:04:40.000I have not spoken to a crowd smaller than 500 people in probably three years.
00:04:44.000And I'm not a senator from California.
00:04:46.000So it's pretty amazing that people are now touting this as an example of her ability to get people out there.
00:04:52.000I mean, CNN's broadcasting this thing live.
00:04:53.000You think CNN is going to be interested in hosting an event that has a bunch of empty seats in the background?
00:04:58.000In any case, she was asked a bunch of questions about policy, and she proved just how radical she is.
00:05:02.000So she was specifically asked about private health care insurance.
00:05:05.000So she is a proponent of Medicare for All, the Bernie Sanders plan that would cost $32 trillion over 10 years, it would double the size of the federal government, and it would also destroy the private sector.
00:05:16.000Now, there are a lot of folks who say, well, you know, Medicare for All wouldn't destroy the private sector because health insurance would still continue to exist in the private sector.
00:05:24.000But, according to Kamala Harris, she actually wants it to destroy private sector medical insurance.
00:05:30.000She believes that everybody should be thrown onto government care.
00:05:33.000That you shouldn't be able to buy private sector health insurance.
00:05:37.000Because once the taxpayer is footing the bill for Medicare, Number one, there's not going to be a ton of money left over to pay for private health care insurance.
00:05:44.000Two, most people are going to be getting their health care insurance through the government of the United States.
00:05:49.000And three, if you have private health insurers competing with the federal government, that's not good for the federal government, because the federal government is then going to have its care rejected.
00:05:58.000This is the great hole in a lot of these systems.
00:05:59.000You can have supplemental health insurance in a lot of nationalized health care countries.
00:06:04.000For example, in Canada, you can get supplemental health insurance, although it took a while for them to allow even that.
00:06:10.000In Israel now, you can finally get supplemental health insurance.
00:06:12.000In Australia, most people have private supplemental health care insurance.
00:06:16.000Medicare for All in Australia is really just for basic care.
00:06:18.000But for full proponents of Medicare for All, people who believe that the government should cover all costs, it's going to come down to rationing.
00:06:25.000And it's going to come down to banning private healthcare insurance.
00:06:27.000Because remember, let's say that there's a private healthcare insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield or something, and that private healthcare insurer can offer doctors a better reimbursement rate than Medicare.
00:06:37.000Well, who do you think the doctors are going to look to In order to get patients.
00:06:43.000Or are they going to look to the private healthcare insurers?
00:06:45.000That's why many countries have outright banned private healthcare insurance.
00:06:48.000They don't want to compete with the private sector.
00:06:51.000They want to crowd the private sector out.
00:06:52.000So Kamala Harris was asked specifically about this and she came down full scale on the side of nationalization of the healthcare system and full scale destruction of private health insurance.
00:07:01.000Here is Kamala Harris doing just that.
00:07:03.000I believe the solution, and I actually feel very strongly about this, is that we need to have Medicare for All.
00:07:08.000And you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require.
00:07:16.000Who of us has not had that situation where you've got to wait for approval and the doctor says, well, I don't know if your insurance company is going to cover this?
00:07:27.000So in other words, 95% of people in the United States have health care from their insurance company via their employer.
00:07:34.000If you like your doctor, you will not be able to keep your doctor.
00:07:36.000If you like your plan, you will not be able to keep your plan.
00:07:38.000She wants to take all of those things directly from you.
00:07:40.000I mean, this is a massive segment of the United States economy.
00:07:44.000If you think that you're going to remove legitimately like a trillion dollars from American industry with no questions asked, and that people are going to be supremely happy when you take away their health plan, Then think again.
00:07:56.000Obamacare is a piece of crap legislation, but the thing about Obamacare is that Obamacare was purportedly about trying to help people in the individual market.
00:08:04.000If you had your health insurance program through your employer, Obamacare theoretically did not touch it.
00:09:05.000She said the idea is everyone gets access to medical care.
00:09:08.000Okay, and then she said, let's just get rid of it.
00:09:11.000So there's no, let's just be done with it.
00:09:13.000Well, I'm glad that she can summarily dismiss 25% of the American economy right off the top.
00:09:18.000And by the way, the part of the economy that also happens to generate all of the medical innovation, that also happens to generate all of the profit incentive for doctors to go into the industry in the first place.
00:09:28.000Democrats are incredibly extreme on this stuff.
00:09:30.000All Trump should do for the next two years if Kamala Harris is indeed the Democratic nominee is play the clip of her over and over and over again saying she's going to take away her health care program.
00:09:39.000She's going to take away her health insurance.
00:09:41.000Let's see how the elderly feel about that.
00:09:43.000Let's see how you feel about that when she says she's taking away health insurance for your child so that you can work with a government bureaucrat.
00:09:48.000I also love the suggestion by Kamala Harris there that the solution to all of your paperwork ills is the federal government.
00:10:38.000Okay, so she then went on and she specifically said, you know what we should do?
00:10:44.000We should force legislators to look at autopsy photos.
00:10:46.000And this is the ugliest part of American politics right now.
00:10:50.000The idea that if you disagree with Kamala Harris about her gun proposals, it's because you just don't care about the children.
00:10:56.000If only you cared about the children, then you would agree with her.
00:10:59.000That all semi-automatic weapons in the United States, when she says assault rifles, she means semi-automatic weapons, that all semi-automatic weapons in the United States ought to be banned or confiscated outright.
00:11:08.000You are talking about hundreds of millions of weapons in the United States.
00:11:11.000And she suggests that if I oppose her stupid policy, then that's because I don't care about dead kids.
00:11:28.000I think that somebody should have required, and this is going to sound very harsh, I think somebody should have required all those members of Congress to go in a room, in a locked room, no press, no one, nobody else, and look at the autopsy photographs of those babies.
00:11:56.000If she wants that to be the case, then how about this?
00:11:58.000How about every Democrat in the United States Congress has to look at a picture of an aborted baby at 22 weeks, and then they can vote their conscience on free choice.
00:12:06.000Then they can vote their conscience on whether it's okay to slaughter babies in the womb.
00:12:10.000But people on the left would say, well, you know, that's an emotional appeal.
00:12:13.000Well, that's exactly what Kamala Harris is doing there with regard to slaughtered kids in classrooms.
00:12:18.000The suggestion that I'm supposed to give up my rifle because something bad happened to kids not perpetrated by me.
00:12:26.000By somebody I would have attempted to stop if I'd been there with my gun.
00:12:29.000We'll get to more of the extremism of Kamala Harris in just a second.
00:12:31.000First, let's talk about life insurance.
00:12:34.000So, I know it's uncomfortable to talk about the fact that we're all going to plot at some point, but because we know that, we also know that we need life insurance.
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00:13:35.000Kamala Harris making the case that we should ban all assault rifles in the country.
00:13:38.000So far, we're going to ban private health insurance, and we're going to ban all semi-automatic weapons in the United States.
00:13:45.000But that's not all from Kamala Harris.
00:13:47.000She also continues by saying that we should basically ban all private vehicles in the United States.
00:13:52.000She said she backs the Green New Deal.
00:13:54.000This is the new, fresh thing among Democrats, is the Green New Deal.
00:13:59.000Now, as you'll recall, the Green New Deal is this purported piece of legislation that would radically shift the nature of the American economy.
00:14:06.000The idea is that within a decade, we would be completely carbon fuel free.
00:14:31.000The Green New Deal, according to PJ Media Analysis, would cost $49 trillion in the first 10 years.
00:14:38.000That's an amazing, amazing statement, but it doesn't matter.
00:14:41.000The entire left has decided to resonate around all of this.
00:14:45.000The Green New Deal would include a federal jobs program.
00:14:47.000It would include getting rid, basically, of all private cars.
00:14:52.000And here is Kamala Harris supporting it.
00:14:54.000We've been hearing more about a Green New Deal to fight climate change.
00:14:58.000You have yet to fully endorse or reject it.
00:15:01.000Will you fully endorse the Green New Deal tonight?
00:15:04.000I support a Green New Deal and I will tell you why.
00:15:09.000Climate change is an existential threat to us and we have got to deal with the reality of it.
00:15:16.000All children need to be able to breathe clean air and drink clean water.
00:15:19.000We've got to have a commitment to a policy that will allow that to happen for ourselves and our children and our grandchildren and right now we don't.
00:15:26.000That Green New Deal that she is endorsing right there requires cutting the United States military in half, ending 87% of U.S.
00:15:45.000So, so far, ban guns, ban private health care, and ban cars.
00:15:50.000But at least we know she's a moderate.
00:15:53.000That's the really important thing, is at least we know that Kamala Harris is a big moderate, according to members of the Democratic Party.
00:15:59.000Then, finally, Harris got to her prosecutorial record.
00:16:02.000So as we say, she's pandering to the left.
00:16:04.000She's just as left as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
00:16:06.000And she was asked specifically about her prosecutorial record.
00:16:09.000And this is where she's going to have a little bit of trouble with the radical left inside her own party.
00:16:12.000I compare my record to any prosecutor, any elected prosecutor in this country, in terms of the work that I have done to reform the criminal justice system.
00:16:20.000I am a daughter of parents who met when they were active in the civil rights movement.
00:16:25.000Nobody had to teach me about the disparities in the criminal justice system.
00:16:32.000I made a conscious decision to become a prosecutor because I understood if we're going to reform systems, yes there is going to be the power that we have on the outside and also we need to have people on the inside where the decisions are being made.
00:16:46.000By the way, the question she was asked was why she did not support a bill requiring her office to investigate fatal shootings involving police officers.
00:16:52.000And her answer was, I'm black and that's why I became a prosecutor.
00:16:56.000Okay, so she's gonna get flack from the left and from the right on her prosecutorial record.
00:17:00.000The good news is that the flack from the left is only gonna last so long.
00:17:03.000As the media focus on the question, which is to say, not long at all.
00:17:07.000They're instead going to focus on the radical leftist policy she takes on, for example, border security.
00:17:12.000So she was asked last night about her position on a border wall, and she said something so radical that most Democrats, I would think, disagree with it, which is that she will not be in favor of a border wall under any circumstances, even if it means guaranteeing the legal status of so-called dreamers who are already in the United States.
00:17:34.000And if we want to talk about that, let's do that.
00:17:36.000And let's talk about what really accomplishes border security, which is let's upgrade the technology.
00:17:42.000Let's look at the fact that the folks who are working on border security on the ground know that they need upgraded infrastructure around things like drones and they need cameras.
00:17:51.000So yes, I'm all for increased border security where we need it.
00:18:31.000They say, Interviews with more than 30 black voters and political leaders in early primary states like South Carolina and her home state, California, show that Ms.
00:18:39.000She'll have to persuade black activists skeptical of her record as a prosecutor, overcome sexism and a bias on the part of some voters that a female candidate cannot be President Trump, and work to gain broader support from black men, who generally express more wariness about Ms.
00:18:52.000Harris in interviews than black women.
00:18:54.000She would also need to win over left-leaning young black voters, some of whom were ultimately disenchanted by Mr. Obama's presidency and may value political ideology more than racial solidarity.
00:19:03.000So she does have some problems in this race.
00:19:06.000The good news is she may be able to pander her way out of it.
00:19:08.000So the way she's going to pander her way out of it is by invoking stupidities like mansplaining.
00:19:12.000She's going to explain that everyone who opposes her is just a sexist.
00:19:15.000So she was asked about mansplaining last night in a typical left-wing question.
00:19:20.000Here is the charisma-free Kamala Harris.
00:19:22.000Given what occurred in 2016 and the current political climate, that a male nominee will have a better chance this time around than a female nominee.
00:19:33.000Would you please respond to this so that this man has a response ready the next time a man tries to mansplain why a man would make a better nominee?
00:19:42.000The people who vote, the people who live in this country are smarter than that.
00:19:45.000They're going to make decisions based on who they believe is the best leader.
00:19:48.000They're going to make decisions based on who they believe is speaking truth.
00:19:52.000Who is doing it in a way that gives people dignity.
00:19:54.000Doing it in a way that elevates public discourse as opposed to bringing us to the lowest common denominator and base instincts.
00:20:00.000That's how the voters are going to vote.
00:20:02.000And that is going to be the basis upon who will win.
00:20:04.000You know that the question is really hard-hitting when the candidate stands up and applauds the question.
00:20:10.000I love guys who ask women about mansplaining.
00:20:12.000That guy, that's a real man's man right there.
00:20:14.000That guy who asked her about mansplaining.
00:22:45.000There's nothing particularly exciting about Kamala Harris, and the media trying to manufacture excitement for her is pretty astonishing, honestly, because she is not an exciting candidate.
00:22:56.000When you watch her, if you're on the left, you watch her and you go, wow, she is just, she blows me away, or does she feel a lot more like sort of a typical politician than something brand new and exciting?
00:23:08.000You know, Donald Trump, if you've got a stage with Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, it looks a lot more like the stage of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than it looks like Donald Trump versus Barack Obama, for example.
00:23:18.000She's just not nearly as talented a politician as Barack Obama was.
00:23:28.000She ran in a very safe state in California.
00:23:31.000She was given her first lift in politics by a married man she was dating.
00:23:37.000She's had a pretty easy ride to the position that she now occupies.
00:23:41.000There's nothing about her that makes people stand up and cheer, really.
00:23:44.000I mean, they're told they should cheer by the media.
00:23:46.000They're told that they should cheer because we need a black female president, as opposed to just a black male president, we now need a black female president.
00:23:52.000But, if you are progressive, are you more excited by her, or are you more excited by the full-on Marxism of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders?
00:24:00.000If you are a millennial, are you really excited by Kamala Harris?
00:24:03.000Does she strike you as somebody who is gonna make you get out there and pound on doors?
00:24:10.000And I think that she's also going to get Republicans out there to vote en masse.
00:24:14.000I mean, she is saying openly that she is going to destroy the entire private health care system in the United States.
00:24:21.000Now, when Elizabeth Warren says it, I guess that lefties get excited.
00:24:24.000But when Kamala Harris says it, it just feels like she's a government bureaucrat who spends her entire life being a government bureaucrat and doesn't know what she's talking about.
00:25:09.000So, last night, he was doing a book event, and it was a town hall event, and some guy got up and started yelling at Howard Schultz about not running for president.
00:25:17.000Please don't run for president, you're gonna keep Trump in the Oval Office.
00:25:21.000I am seriously considering running for president as a centrist independent.
00:25:27.000And I wanted to clarify the word independent, which I view merely as a designation on the ballot.
00:25:34.000Don't help elect Trump, you egotistical billionaire!
00:25:41.000Okay, so I love that people are really upset about this.
00:25:44.000It's not just that random guy in the audience.
00:25:45.000I mean, frankly, I don't understand what Cory Booker is doing out there in the audience shouting at him.
00:27:32.000But here's what Michelle Goldberg writes.
00:27:33.000I mean, do they even have editors over at the New York Times anymore?
00:27:36.000She says, he could end up helping get Donald Trump reelected.
00:27:40.000Schultz appears to share the conviction, endemic among American elites, that the country hungers for a candidate who is socially liberal but fiscally conservative.
00:27:47.000After all, if you're rich, you probably know a lot of people like this.
00:27:50.000I'm socially liberal, fiscally conservative centrist, who would love to vote for a rational Democrat and get Trump out of the White House.
00:27:55.000A chief executive of a major bank who wanted to remain anonymous recently told Politico, lamenting Michael Bloomberg's poor odds in a Democratic primary.
00:28:02.000But this frustrated executive's politics aren't widely shared by people who haven't been to Davos.
00:28:07.000In a 2017 study, the political scientist Lee Druttman plotted the 2016 electorate along two axes, one dealing with social issues and identity, the other with economics and trade.
00:28:17.000Only 3.8% of voters fell into the socially liberal, economically conservative quadrant.
00:28:23.000So then, here's the question, what is Michelle Goldberg so scared of?
00:28:57.000says she says bloomberg's research underscores the folly of schultz's trial balloon on monday bloomberg who is contemplating a 2020 run as a democrat put out a statement that seemed aimed at schultz though it didn't mention him by name in 2020 the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-trump vote and end up re-electing the president wrote bloomberg that's a risk i refuse to run in 2016 and we can't afford to run it now by flirting with such a risk schultz is demonstrating a level of megalomaniacal recklessness that is itself disqualifying
00:29:24.000So the fact that Schultz thinks maybe I should run or raise because there's a bunch of people who don't like either party, that's megalomaniacal now.
00:29:33.000Either no one's going to vote for him, so why are you worried?
00:29:35.000Or everyone's going to vote for him, so maybe he should run.
00:29:38.000But Michelle Goldberg and many in the Democratic Party want it both ways.
00:29:41.000They know they're too radical for the American people, and it freaks them out that somebody might be running a third-party candidacy that could damage a beloved candidate like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders.
00:29:52.000Okay, in just a second, I want to get to more of Howard Schultz's program and why Democrats should feel threatened by it.
00:29:58.000First, let's talk about the coffee you had this morning.
00:30:03.000Morning coffee is an American institution, which is why when it comes to starting my day, I reach for the most American coffee on the market.
00:30:42.000These are not the PC folks who are going to be ensuring that their coffee shops turn into bathroom stop for randos.
00:30:50.000These are folks who actually just want to make good coffee and bring it to your door and then give some money to vets and first responder causes.
00:30:56.000BlackRifleCoffee.com slash Ben and get their roast to order coffee club to make sure that everything is arriving at your door on a regular basis.
00:31:03.000BlackRifleCoffee.com Okay, I want to get to more of Howard Schultz and democratic radicalism in just a second.
00:31:10.000But first, you're going to have to go subscribe over at dailywire.com.
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00:32:01.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:32:04.000So Democrats are in a full scale state of panic over Howard Schultz, and he's actually building out a team.
00:32:15.000He has now hired ex-Obama aide Bill Burton as a communications advisor.
00:32:18.000As the former Starbucks CEO, Mull's running for president in 2020, he's adding people on both the right and the left to his campaign.
00:32:26.000Burton is looking to bring on other public relations representatives in order to promote Schultz's story of being raised in Brooklyn, New York to becoming a prominent executive in the business industry.
00:32:35.000The addition of Burton could potentially boost Schultz's elite PR team, which already includes Steve Schmidt, who used to be a vice chairman at Edelman and managed John McCain's presidential campaign.
00:32:44.000So this could be a true quote-unquote centrist campaign.
00:32:47.000Now, what's fascinating is that the left feels that they have not adequately served their base.
00:32:51.000You're not seeing a lot of people who are Trump fans who are deeply worried about Howard Schultz's campaign, about Schultz playing spoiler.
00:33:33.000Again, the solution would be not to be radical, crazy people.
00:33:36.000But they can't do that because it turns out they're radical, crazy people, so they're not going to do that.
00:33:41.000So, Howard Schultz, if you look at what he's been saying, a lot of it is true.
00:33:45.000And a lot of it, I think, appeals to people in the center.
00:33:47.000So, for example, he was specifically asked about Democratic health care plans.
00:33:50.000Now, you already saw earlier in the program, Senator Kamala Harris talking about how she wants to do away with all private health insurance in the United States of America.
00:34:46.000And when I say affordable, universal, and quality, I mean that if you want the best in choice, you're going to have to have a free market system.
00:34:52.000Now, the best system that is available, if you're going to look just at the efficacy of a healthcare system, is probably Switzerland's system.
00:34:57.000There you have what is essentially a massive individual mandate where you are forced to pay for health insurance yourself from your own pocket to a certain percentage of your income, and then the government may supplement the rest if you can't actually afford health care insurance.
00:35:10.000But it's still largely private, meaning there are private health care services in Switzerland.
00:35:15.000In France, most of the hospitals are still private.
00:35:19.000It's just there's heavy government subsidization of private care.
00:35:22.000When Kamala Harris talks about a full takeover of the government industry, She's talking about something that looks more like the UK or Canada, and that is a radical shift from what we have in the United States.
00:35:32.000By the way, the French healthcare system, which looks a lot more like the United States' healthcare system, actually, than it looks like Canada or the UK.
00:35:38.000Even the French healthcare system right now is experiencing massive shortages of doctors in the very near future, because it turns out that when government pays reimbursement rates, those reimbursement rates are not high enough to keep doctors in the industry.
00:35:50.000In other words, when it comes to healthcare policy, if you actually want the best, what you need is a free market.
00:35:55.000If you want universality, you need some sort of safety net.
00:35:58.000In the United States, we have Medicaid, we have Medicare.
00:36:01.000These are safety nets that exist on the governmental level.
00:36:03.000I would prefer that most of the social safety net be devolved to the local level, and that communities be responsible for picking up the slack for people who are members of those communities, as opposed to these massive federal programs.
00:36:15.000But, Nobody in the United States is really very much in favor of the abolition of everyone's health insurance programs.
00:36:21.000When Schultz says, we can't afford this, when Schultz says it's gonna bankrupt the country, he's exactly right about that.
00:36:28.000And the fact is, again, the United States' health problems, health problems in the United States don't match up to Norway.
00:36:34.000Like, the people in the United States are not the same as the people in Norway.
00:36:37.000You can't compare the two, in terms of health problems, in terms of diversity, in terms of age, in terms of income, it's just not comparable.
00:36:44.000But I love that Democrats have this one-size-fits-all solution that most Americans don't like.
00:36:48.000So Schultz is more moderate on this, and it's a reason why Democrats feel threatened by him.
00:36:52.000And then there's Howard Schultz on the debt.
00:36:53.000So here is Schultz talking about a problem that no one wants to talk about, the fact that we have $21 trillion in debt in the United States economy right now.
00:37:01.000I think the greatest threat domestically to the country is this $21 trillion debt hanging over the cloud of America and future generations.
00:37:10.000And the fact that interest rates are going up, we're going to be paying close to over $400 billion in interest expense, which I think is the number one or number two issue in terms of federal expense to the country.
00:37:22.000The only way we're going to get out of that is we've got to grow the economy, in my view, 4% or greater, and then we have to go after entitlements.
00:37:39.000You know, honestly, if Howard Schultz runs as an independent on this platform, It's doubtful a lot of Republicans are going to break with Trump just because Trump is such a polarizing figure.
00:37:49.000You either love him or you hate him at this point.
00:37:50.000But are there middle-of-the-road Democrats who will break for Howard Schultz?
00:37:53.000I think there are and I think that's why these people are scared to death of him.
00:37:56.000I think they are scared to death that Michael Bloomberg or Howard Schultz runs and that Howard Schultz wins 15-20% of the vote.
00:38:15.000When Howard Schultz blasts both parties, he is not wrong.
00:38:17.000Here is Schultz blasting both parties the other day.
00:38:21.000Both parties are consistently not doing what's necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged every single day in revenge politics.
00:38:32.000Well, we are sitting today with approximately $21.5 trillion of debt, which is a reckless example not only of Republicans, but of Democrats as well.
00:38:45.000as a reckless failure of their constitutional responsibility.
00:38:59.000It means they're going to keep doubling down on radicalism and then hope that Howard Schultz withdraws out of the goodness of his heart and that the American people reject him simply because they hate Trump so much.
00:39:07.000So Jamel Bouie, another leftist on the New York Times editorial, Which is just what they need.
00:39:11.000They need another member of the leftist cadre over at the New York Times.
00:39:16.000They must never hire an actual conservative.
00:39:19.000There's still, by the way, not a single person of whom I am aware who is on the editorial board or who writes columns for the Washington Post, for the New York Times, for Time Magazine, for any of these places, who plans on voting for Trump in 2020.
00:39:33.000Not one, which is amazing, because half the country is going to vote for Trump.
00:39:36.000But Jamal Bowie was recently hired over at the New York Times, and he has an article today about how Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, and Sanders are the future of the United States and how they represent the history of the United States.
00:39:47.000Now, they may in fact be the future of the United States if the future of the United States is suicide, but the case that America's history is deeply intertwined with radical redistributionism is simply nonsense.
00:39:58.000Nonetheless, Democrats are going to continue to make this case.
00:40:01.000They feel like Trump's unpopularity is a window for them to push as hard left as they want to push.
00:40:07.000He says, "An old but still potent critique "has reemerged in American politics, "one that holds concentrated wealth "and perhaps American capitalism itself "as inimical to the democratic society we want to build.
00:40:17.000"The basic idea holds that holds capitalism as, at best, "an uneasy partner with our democratic values.
00:40:24.000At worst, it erodes them completely, undermining the social and material basis of Republican citizenship as envisioned by the American revolutionaries.
00:40:31.000Since the start of the new year, this thinking has become especially prominent.
00:40:34.000And then he quotes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren.
00:40:50.000If you read Alexis de Tocqueville, if you read Thomas Jefferson, if you read The Founding Fathers, one of the things that they were hoping to escape in Europe was this idea of an aristocratic wealth system in which the centralized government passed on favors to a select few.
00:41:04.000But a free market system where people can freely alienate their labor and trade goods and services for other goods and services, that was something all the founders were in favor of.
00:41:13.000Now, the United States was also uniquely blessed.
00:41:17.000The United States was uniquely blessed with an extraordinary level of middle-class development, specifically because we lived on a relatively uncultivated continent with lots of free land for everybody, so it wasn't that hard to go out there, stake your claim, and suddenly you were a middle-class farmer.
00:41:32.000But the idea that the solution was for government to forcibly redistribute wealth, that was something that the founders never contemplated and set up a government to prevent.
00:41:41.000Yet Jamal Bowie makes the case that America has always been in favor of such redistributionism.
00:41:46.000Shall we say the evidence is rather scanty of this?
00:41:52.000He says, most Americans tend not to think of these egalitarian, even anti-capitalist sentiments as part of the nation's intellectual heritage.
00:41:59.000But Warren, Ocasio-Cortez, and similarly situated politicians like Bernie Sanders are drawing on influential currents in American political history.
00:42:06.000First of all, I should Note that here he is ripping off Joseph Ellis's new book about the Founding Fathers, which has some serious problems.
00:42:14.000I've recommended it on the show, but it's got some serious selective reading problems.
00:42:18.000is that some of those stretch back to the founding era.
00:42:20.000Despite his own status as a wealthy slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson was wary of extreme disparities of wealth and thought it was incompatible with Republican political ideals.
00:42:28.000Commenting on the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind in Europe, he described his position in a famous letter to James Madison in 1785.
00:42:39.000Whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right.
00:42:46.000The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on.
00:42:50.000If, for the encouragement of industry, we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment must be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.
00:42:58.000Okay, what he's specifically talking about there is the idea that rich people are going to have control of all the land, and poor people won't be able to work on the land.
00:43:05.000Well, that's written into American law.
00:43:07.000There's something called adverse possession in American law, in which if I buy a huge tract of land, and I don't do anything with it for 20 years, and you, without my knowledge, go and cultivate a piece of that land and turn it into your family farm, you actually now have possession of it under American law.
00:43:22.000Well, he's certainly not talking about the forcible extraction of wealth from people.
00:43:28.000The key part of that phrase, when Jefferson is writing, is whenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor.
00:43:56.000Jamal Bowie skips from here, from misrepresentation of Jefferson, forward to Eugene Debs, an actual socialist in the early 20th century, and then suggests that socialism is written into the American compact.
00:44:08.000You may miss some folks, like in between, and around, and like in the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, and like all of American history, you may have missed there.
00:44:16.000But I guess if you quote Eugene Debs, who is legitimately a socialist, then I suppose that we're on solid ground now.
00:44:24.000Jamel Bowie concludes, by the end of the 20th centuries, the insights of the New Deal period had been smothered by corporate power and its political allies with predictable consequences.
00:44:32.000We live with a narrow politics where democratic deliberation rarely touches the fundamental questions of power and ownership.
00:44:38.000That's weird because it seems to me that every five seconds we're discussing how much wealth to expropriate from people who have already paid their taxes.
00:44:45.000He says, as Americans across the political spectrum gear up to try to deny President Trump a second term in office, All of this may seem divisive, a distraction from the emergency at hand.
00:46:07.000A line of cars stretching off into the horizon for people showing up to pay homage to an Air Force veteran with no family who is buried after fears that no one would actually attend his funeral.
00:46:21.000There's so many good people in this country.
00:46:23.000And the fact that some people in politics want to polarize us from one another so we can attack each other's wealth or attack each other by identity, group.
00:46:33.000People showing up to the funeral of a person who they didn't even know.
00:46:36.000You know, the highest form of charity, it says in Jewish thought, is going to somebody's funeral because it's charity that can never be reciprocated, obviously.
00:46:44.000The fact that Americans still understand that they owe something to veterans with whom they are not related.
00:47:04.000If you are a lesbian or a gay person, there is no reason that you should buy into the propaganda that suggests that men can become women and women can become men.
00:47:11.000And yet, if you are a lesbian or a gay person who believes in biological sex, you will be ostracized just the same way any conservative would be.
00:47:18.000So, for example, there was a Well, in order for that to make any sense, sex has to be in a non-changeable category.
00:47:25.000lawyer and spokeswoman for Women's Liberation Front spoke against the so-called Equality Act, denouncing the transgender and gender identity movement as anti-woman and anti-lesbian in particular, which makes perfect sense.
00:47:35.000I mean, if you are a lesbian, presumably you prefer members of your same sex.
00:47:38.000Well, in order for that to make any sense, sex has to be in a non-changeable category.
00:47:45.000I mean, we have seen weird situations like this.
00:47:48.000My My sister used to teach at a college, and she told me that there was a situation in which a man who identified as queer, meaning that he was not straight, and a woman who identified as transgender and queer.
00:48:08.000But apparently, if you are in the lesbian or gay community, you must be forced to abide by dictates that actually make your own view of sexual orientation and sex relatively obsolete.
00:48:20.000Here are some members of a panel at Heritage Foundation talking about this.
00:48:24.000I got kicked off of the Baltimore mayor's LGBTQ commission as the only lesbian, simply for stating biological facts.
00:48:34.000After a month's long witch hunt, I was found guilty of violence.
00:48:40.000Using male pronouns to talk about a convicted male rapist who identifies as transgender and prefers female pronouns.
00:48:50.000It doesn't matter that he sexually assaulted two women in a women's prison after being transferred there on account of his gender identity.
00:48:59.000Oh no, it is far more criminal for me to call a male rapist he than it is for him to rape.
00:49:06.000Okay, and that's Julia Beck, who is a lesbian, talking about this.
00:49:10.000But that is the world in which we now live, and it's a pretty ugly world.
00:49:13.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:49:18.000So it now appears that there is no plan in Afghanistan.
00:49:20.000President Trump is about to sign a new peace deal, apparently, with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
00:49:25.000Now, there was a case we made that originally, when we invaded Afghanistan, the entire goal was just to destroy the Taliban and then prop somebody else up and leave.
00:49:33.000We tried that, and apparently that has failed.
00:49:35.000I've talked to many people who have served in the military in Afghanistan, people who have been in positions of power in Afghanistan, And what they say is that unless you are willing to cross the border and do the heavy lifting of going after terrorists in Pakistan, unless you're willing to tick off the Pakistani government, the Taliban was always going to end up retaking Afghanistan.
00:49:52.000Now the question is whether the United States is going to hastily withdraw from Afghanistan and turn the country back over to the Taliban.
00:49:57.000Just as in Syria, there seems to be a real desire for America to withdraw.
00:50:01.000The fact is that if America does withdraw, the Taliban will take over again.
00:50:04.000It will once again become a safe harbor for terrorists.
00:50:07.000We'll ignore it for 10 years and then there will be a terrorist attack.
00:50:09.000The entire reason we went into Afghanistan again was because of 9-11.
00:50:12.000This was the good war, supposedly, according to Barack Obama.
00:50:15.000Even that good war is now being undermined by the idea that the United States has to pull out as fast as possible.
00:50:24.000Well, according to the New York Times, a hasty American withdrawal would erode the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan government, raising the risk that the Taliban could recapture control of the country.
00:50:33.000Short of that, it could consign Afghanistan to a protracted bloody civil war.
00:50:37.000Here's the thing about American foreign policy.
00:50:50.000Because once you get in that chair and information comes across your desk, you now have to make difficult decisions.
00:50:55.000It's easy to campaign on the isolationism that is popular among Americans.
00:50:59.000It is much harder to govern from that popular isolationism when you want to keep America safe.
00:51:05.000All of which suggests the American people should get real about their own foreign policy.
00:51:08.000If you want to be safe, that means that we are going to have to be in places that are uncomfortable.
00:51:12.000If, however, you are willing to take the sacrifice of Americans at home being in more danger, then you can be a little bit more isolationist than you might otherwise necessarily be.
00:51:22.000But let's be straight about the choices that are being made.
00:51:24.000Let's not fib and say we can have everything, a fully isolationist foreign policy, and a less dangerous world.