Ben Shapiro talks First Amendment boobs, Hugh Hefner, tax reform, and what we should take away from the death of a great man. Plus, Ben explains why he doesn t care if you don t like the fact that he was a "Young Pervert." Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of the conservative podcast The Weekly Standard. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and is one of the most influential men in conservative politics. He's a frequent contributor to conservative publications such as The Daily Wire and National Review, and is a frequent guest on conservative talk shows such as Fox News and NPR. Ben is also the author of the book Trumponomics and has been featured on CNN, NPR, CBS, and the Atlantic, among other media outlets. His latest book, is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and VaynerSpeakers. if you search for it, you'll find it. If you don't already own an Amazon Prime membership, you can get 20% off your first month with discount code: PMPODCAST at linktr.ee/PMPODC and use discount code "UPLEVEL" at checkout. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Thanks also for supporting the podcast! at bit.ly/TheBenShapiroShow to help spread the word of the podcast. . The opinions expressed in this episode are those of the show are our own by clicking here and we'll get 10% off their first order of a bottle of wine and a discount of $20 or two bottles of wine at $99 or $99, and they'll get a discount on their first month's worth of wine, too! Thanks again for listening to the show? Thank you for listening thank you for supporting this episode! - Ben Shapiro in advance notice of this episode of The Daily Mail's newest issue of The FiveThirty Fifty Shades of Grey? and all future episodes in the future episodes will be coming soon! and much more! Subscribe to The Sixteenth Hour Podcasts next week's episode will be out on Tuesday, November 6th, 2019 on November 7th, 7/9/19th, 2020 at 7/19
00:00:30.000The New York Times ran a 3,300-word obituary about a guy who's mostly famous for putting boobs in a magazine, which is pretty incredible.
00:00:37.000He lived the life of a Saudi oil chic, but occasionally published John Updike and Norman Mailer, and therefore, I guess, his entire life was just roses and nothing but.
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00:02:07.000I mean, this is why Hugh Hefner is a cultural figure, because we have to pretend that Hugh Hefner was a forward-thinking genius of the culture instead of basically a purveyor of pornography.
00:02:16.000Now, none of this is to say that he doesn't have a First Amendment right to push his pornography.
00:02:20.000I mean, he did have a First Amendment right to push his pornography, although
00:02:23.000I think there actually is a fairly decent argument under the First Amendment that the First Amendment was not supposed to cover obscenity.
00:02:29.000Like, I don't think that John Adams and James Madison were sitting around in 1789 thinking to themselves, you know what we really need to protect?
00:02:37.000That's what we need to protect, right?
00:02:39.000What Robert Bork argues in his book talking about the First Amendment is that the First Amendment was essentially enshrined to protect political speech.
00:03:33.000He never changed and that's why it was so ridiculous watching him try to live the life of a 30-year-old swinging bachelor when he was 91 and somebody had to milk his prostate for him.
00:04:12.000Hugh Hefner, who created Playboy Magazine and spun it into a media and entertainment industry giant, all the while, as its very public avatar, squiring attractive young women and sometimes marrying them well into his 80s, died on Wednesday at his home, the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles.
00:04:27.000Hey, let's imagine for a second that Donald Trump, God forbid, had died before he became President of the United States.
00:04:35.000His obituary would read very much like this from the New York Times.
00:04:37.000Right, Donald Trump, a man famous for squaring around young women and sometimes marrying them.
00:04:42.000But now, the New York Times doesn't like Donald Trump because Donald Trump's a political figure, right, on the right, and therefore he's an evil, vile man with women.
00:05:08.000He liberated us from the constraints of our own sexual puritanism.
00:05:13.000First of all, the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of the 1960s generation feeling that they are the first to discover that it feels good when you put a penis in a vagina is just incredible to me.
00:05:23.000Like, I'm sorry, people have known this since forever.
00:05:26.000This is how evolution built humans and animals.
00:05:30.000And treating it as though there was some sort of grand movement forward, because Hugh Hefner put boobs that men like in magazines, and then slapped a John Updike article between the boobs.
00:05:39.000Like, this was always the joke about Playboy, right?
00:05:41.000He'd put these kind of highfalutin essays in the middle of money shots of 18-year-old girls, and then it was like, ooh, isn't he a sophisticate?
00:05:50.000Wouldn't he have been more of a sophisticate if he just, I don't know, published John Updike?
00:05:54.000Like, maybe the only way he thought he could get people to read Updike was to put it between the boobs, but I'm pretty sure that the main point of Playboy was the boobs and not the John Updike, and he was just trying to facilitate his own fame and reputation for being a sophisticate by publishing highfalutin essays.
00:06:09.000There's no difference between Playboy and Hustler Magazine except for the essays and this bizarre cultural impression that Hugh Hefner was somehow a force for tremendous good while Larry Flint is just a smut purveyor.
00:06:19.000Anyway, here's what the New York Times continues to write.
00:06:22.000You know, before I get to it, I want to say that you want to watch how America has evolved.
00:06:48.000Okay, like women always had that power because men have lizard brain and we like naked women.
00:06:53.000I mean, like, I don't understand why this is like a very difficult concept.
00:06:57.000And then it turned into, no, he's a cultural hero because he empowered women.
00:07:02.000Okay, only, really, if you think that it is empowering to women to publish nude photos of them, maybe the woman wants it, but as a general, that's the, it may be empowering to that individual woman in that sense, I suppose, but is it empowering to women all over the United States that men are looking at lots of pictures of naked women?
00:07:19.000If you think that's the case, I would recommend you talk to a man one time, like this many times.
00:07:24.000And if you do, you will recognize that men who watch pornography are not on the side, typically, of being more empowered toward women.
00:07:32.000And it's just not the way that this works.
00:07:34.000Men who have respect for women don't tend to revel in pornography.
00:07:39.000Because, again, there is something at odds with seeing something as a human being and seeing someone as an actual object worthy of genuine affection, love, and respect.
00:07:47.000Anyway, the endless obituary continues.
00:07:50.000Hefner, the man, and the playboy, the brand, were inseparable.
00:07:53.000Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American prickishness and wider social intolerance.
00:07:59.000Both were derided over the years as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic.
00:08:04.000All of those criticisms are true, but Mr. Heffner was a stunning success from the moment he emerged in the early 1950s.
00:08:41.000Okay, so he was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane, and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production.
00:08:46.000He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie.
00:08:49.000It starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.
00:08:55.000Well, that doesn't mean that you have to liken his life to a romantic movie, right?
00:08:58.000He was a rich guy who got a bunch of women to disrobe in front of him, who didn't have any affection for him, and who were occupying his... Do you really think all these hot, young 21-year-olds were, like, that hot on the 80-year-old creep?
00:09:11.000He couldn't even sell his house because he insisted that he be allowed to live in the house, and nobody wanted to live in the house with him.
00:09:16.000He tried to sell his house in LA, like, a couple of years ago, and no one was willing to buy it, because one of his preconditions is that he would be still wandering around the house, and nobody wanted that guy wandering around the house in his bathrobe.
00:09:26.000Plus, I mean, what would it do to the home price if he blacklighted the place?
00:09:30.000It says, the first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.
00:10:02.000Yeah, that's what made his life empty and meaningless.
00:10:04.000It wasn't the endless sex with a random bevy of women.
00:10:07.000And the uselessness of his own... And the uselessness of his own perspective.
00:10:11.000No, it was... What really ruined him is that he didn't have sex until he was 22.
00:10:15.000I'm sure that ruined his life, just as it made meaningless the lives of Thomas Aquinas, just as it made meaningless the life of Jesus, right?
00:10:57.000This idea that the promulgation by the media of the idea that he was living a lifestyle that is something that should be emulated is truly amazing, and it's truly amazing from the same newspaper, by the way, that will talk routinely about toxic masculinity.
00:11:08.000But it'll talk routinely about, is James Bond sexist?
00:11:14.000I mean, a week ago, everybody in the media was saying that Clay Travis was just a boor for saying on national television that he believed in two things, the First Amendment and boobs.
00:11:22.000That was basically Hugh Hefner's slogan, and now it's a 3,300-word obit.
00:12:51.000Now, none of this should be taken, again, as the idea that the government should be banning pornography or that the government should be involved in the process of doing this.
00:12:59.000The point I'm making is that the cultural celebration of vulgarization of the culture, the idea that this was somehow a broadening of the public mind, that society was made better by this,
00:13:08.000Not all exercise of rights are useful.
00:13:11.000Doesn't mean they should be bailed, right?
00:13:13.000What I said a couple of days ago with regard to, for example, kneeling for the National Anthem, is that do you have a right to do that?
00:13:18.000Of course you have a right to do that, right?
00:13:20.000Your employer can do something about it, but you have a right under the First Amendment to not be punished by government for doing that.
00:13:25.000Every right contains the possibility of misusing the right or using it in a way that's dumb or counterproductive.
00:13:31.000The First Amendment may contain the right to publish nude photos of women, but to glorify it, to say that this is some sort of cultural step forward for women, is just ridiculous.
00:13:40.000You could have a feminist movement without women posing nude.
00:13:43.000This has always been my critique of third wave feminism.
00:13:46.000First wave feminism said, men are acting like pigs, they're barring us from the workplace, we should be able to get the jobs that we want, and we should be treated on equal par with men.
00:14:20.000Again, I think the government is really bad at promulgating this sort of thing, but I am in favor of social standards that actually instill virtue.
00:14:27.000This is why I'm in favor of people going to church.
00:14:29.000Well, I'm in favor of you instilling virtue in your children.
00:14:39.000In fact, Aristotle connected virtue with happiness.
00:14:42.000The definition of happiness was living in accordance with virtue, which meant living in accordance with your purpose.
00:14:47.000Unless you think your purpose on this earth is to masturbate as much as humanly possible, Hugh Hefner was not a man driving you toward virtue.
00:14:54.000He was not a man who was helping to instill virtue.
00:14:56.000So, you know, this thing goes on and on and on.
00:14:59.000It says, The Playboy philosophy advocated freedom of speech in all of its aspects, for which Mr. Heffner won civil liberties awards.
00:15:06.000He supported progressive social causes and lost some sponsors by inviting black guests to his televised parties at a time when much of the nation still had Jim Crow laws.
00:15:13.000Again, Leonard Bernstein invited black people to his parties too, but he didn't have naked women running around there.
00:15:18.000The idea that it was necessary to use sex as a lever in order to break open the hidebound stupidities of things like Jim Crow, the hidebound evil of things like Jim Crow, I just don't think is true.
00:15:30.000And you know who would have agreed with me?
00:15:32.000People like Martin Luther King, who was a preacher.
00:15:36.000I seriously object to the idea that Hugh Hefner is somebody who ought to be emulated or whose life we ought to celebrate, particularly when the central point of his life was not civil rights stuff.
00:15:46.000The central point of his life was that he wanted people to be able to get nudie magazines.
00:16:21.000I think you can fight for good things without utilizing bad methods and without embracing bad things.
00:16:27.000I think you can fight for civil rights without embracing the idea that men should treat women like disposable objects and when they age out of their beauty, then you just throw them by the side of the road, which is Hugh Hefner's entire ideology.
00:16:44.000I'm sad for him that I think that he wasted his life.
00:16:47.000I'm not gonna make any bones about that.
00:16:48.000I do think that he wasted his life because I think he obviously is a very bright guy who could have done a lot more to make the world a better place than promulgate the idea that promiscuity was virtue.
00:17:01.000But when you see somebody who does good things and does bad things, you just wish they had done a lot more good things and a lot fewer bad things.
00:17:05.000But I want to talk a little bit about the next step for Republicans on Capitol Hill.
00:17:09.000So Republicans on Capitol Hill have now moved on from health care.
00:18:14.000The reason it's kind of dumb is because the people who are paying the vast majority of federal taxes in the United States are the people who make the most money.
00:18:19.000So when we say we're going to raise taxes on the rich but lower it for everyone else, it's kind of hard to lower taxes for people who are actually getting net benefits from the government.
00:18:28.000In the United States, 2011, as of the Congressional Budget Office, the highest quintile, people who make above $235,000 a year in the United States, were paying, on average, to the federal government, nearly $58,000 in taxes per year.
00:18:40.000The fourth quintile, people making above $84,000 a year,
00:18:44.000They're paying about $14,800 to the federal government.
00:18:48.000The third quintile, about $50,000 a year, they were paying $7,400 to the federal government.
00:18:52.000The second quintile, above $30,000 a year, they're paying $3,200 to the federal government.
00:18:56.000And the lowest quintile, above $15,500 but lower than $30,000, were paying $500 to the federal government.
00:19:04.000A lot of these quintiles receive net benefits back from the federal government in the form of disability, in the form of food stamps, in the form of welfare, in the form of state-sponsored benefits.
00:19:15.000There are a lot of benefits that go back to these various quintiles.
00:19:17.000When you factor in how much money people are receiving back from the federal government in checks, in actual transfer payments, what you find out is that the richest 20% of Americans are paying virtually all in net federal revenue to the government.
00:19:32.000According to Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, the richest 20% of Americans by income aren't just paying a share of federal taxes that would be considered fair,
00:19:40.000They are shouldering almost 100% of the entire federal tax burden of transfer payments and all other non-financed government spending.
00:19:47.000So the idea that you're raising taxes on the rich because the rich aren't paying their fair share, it's just not factually true, but this is an unpopular thing.
00:19:55.000Whenever Republicans try to pass a tax cut because they say it'll spur economic growth, we'll talk about deficits in a second, whenever Republicans say that they want to pass a tax cut because it'll spur economic growth, people on the left go, they just want to cut taxes for their rich, their crony rich friends.
00:20:10.000It's very difficult to cut taxes on people who are not paying a lot of taxes in the first place.
00:20:14.000And if you want to spur economic growth, I have never worked for somebody who only makes $50,000 a year.
00:20:20.000The people you work for are typically the people in the top quintile.
00:20:23.000And by the way, those people are not stagnant.
00:20:25.000People go into the top quintile, people fall out of the top quintile.
00:20:28.000The idea that there's a 1% screwing the bottom 99% is just not factually true.
00:20:32.000The number of people who are in the 1% 10 years ago who are now in the 1% is really low.
00:20:37.000People move up and down in terms of income all throughout their life.
00:20:39.000When you're 20 years old, you're probably in the bottom three quintiles.
00:20:43.000By the time you're 40, you're probably in the upper two.
00:20:46.000You're the same person where you're a bad person when you're 40 and you're a good person when you're 20.
00:20:50.000So this idea that it's this group of people who are screwing people to get into the top 1%, for example, it's just not true.
00:20:55.000And if you want economic growth, you're naturally going to have to cut taxes for the people who are capable of investing money.
00:21:01.000The people who are actually capable of consumption, because those are the people who are paying the taxes.
00:21:05.000But nobody's willing to say that because that's unpopular.
00:21:07.000So instead, they say things like, we're going to cut taxes for the middle class and raise them on the wealthy, right?
00:21:11.000The people who actually pay the vast bulk of taxes.
00:21:13.000So that is what Trump is saying today, which is a betrayal of his conservative base.
00:21:18.000But it's not really a betrayal of what he was saying.
00:21:20.000And this was the problem with Trump all the way through, is that Trump, throughout his campaign, was sending mixed messages.
00:21:25.000I'll never raise taxes on the rich, but I might raise taxes on the rich, guys.
00:21:29.000And you see this, you know, even from his own administration, this pretty consistent message.
00:21:33.000So you'll see Ted Cruz, for example, talking about how we need a tax cut desperately.
00:21:38.000Here's Senator Cruz from Texas making exactly this point.
00:21:42.000If you want to see Reagan-era economic growth, if you want to see booming GDP, small businesses growing, you've got to have Reagan-style tax cuts.
00:22:58.000So, again, it's going to be very hard to show that a tax cut is revenue-neutral in general unless you show some spending offsets or unless—so that means we need 60 votes in the Senate.
00:23:08.000So that's not the easiest thing in the world.
00:23:11.000I'm going to talk about deficits in just a second and what the Republican and conservative perspective should be on tax cuts versus deficits.
00:23:16.000It's really a two-sided argument and I'll discuss both sides and you can sort of make up your own mind on that.
00:23:21.000But first, I want to say thank you to our friends over at Skillshare.
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00:23:38.000That's not how the job market works right now.
00:23:40.000The way the job market works is that you have to be constantly expanding your skill set.
00:23:43.000You have to get better at things that you don't know anything about.
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00:24:02.000Right now, I'm taking a Skillshare class on social media marketing, which is something we do a lot here at The Daily Wire.
00:24:08.000It gives you great background, and most of these classes are like 45 minutes, so you're learning a new skill in just 45 minutes.
00:24:30.000Once you've started, it really is addictive learning these things.
00:24:33.000Skillshare.com slash Shapiro to redeem that free month and use that promo code Shapiro, Skillshare slash Shapiro, in order to let them know that we sent you.
00:24:41.000Okay, so, this brings up a second question with regard to taxes.
00:24:46.000The Republicans have been split on ever since really the days of Paul Volcker, who was the Treasury Secretary, or the Fed Reserve Chairman, rather, under President Reagan.
00:24:54.000And that is, do you want to expand the deficit
00:25:07.000And the reason it's a good rate, this shows you, by the way, that doing nothing is actually really good for the economy, as a general rule.
00:25:15.000Radical change to the economy doesn't harm the economy.
00:25:17.000One of the reasons the economy stagnated during President Obama's recovery, yet the weakest post-war recovery in American history, the reason for that is because there was so much uncertainty about how exactly businesses were going to be able to operate.
00:25:28.000Was he going to issue a new regulation tomorrow?
00:25:32.000Businesses have faith that Trump isn't going to do anything to dramatically harm the economy, and so they're now spending money that they were not spending before, and that is creating new jobs, they're investing, and they're growing, right?
00:25:45.000As somebody who pays an enormous amount of taxes to the government every year, I would personally be hiring more people if I didn't have to pay those taxes.
00:25:53.000Trump, by the way, is wavering on some of this.
00:25:55.000He now says he wants a 20% corporate tax rate after saying he wanted a 15% tax rate the entire election cycle.
00:26:02.000The real question is if you're going to pass tax cuts and you're not going to focus at all on entitlement reform, you're just going to continue blowing out the deficit in the short term.
00:26:09.000Now the argument is that you're going to expand the pie too.
00:26:12.000The government increases in its capacity to bring in tax revenue as the economy increases.
00:26:17.000So this is the idea of static versus dynamic modeling.
00:26:20.000Static modeling says that the economy is a given size.
00:26:23.000If you take a higher tax rate, that means that the government's going to take more of that money.
00:26:53.000But in the long run, what is really going to heal the economy of the United States is not tax cuts so much as it is entitlement reform, which is Paul Ryan's thing.
00:27:00.000And that's the thing that Trump won't touch.
00:27:02.000That's the thing that Trump won't touch.
00:27:12.000What is going to bankrupt this country is not a Bush tax cut.
00:27:15.000It is not a war in Iraq or Afghanistan.
00:27:17.000What will bankrupt the country is this looming time bomb of the amount of money that we owe to people who are going to be on Medicare in the very near future, on Social Security in the very near future.
00:27:27.000The only way those people are going to make their money is if we either increase taxes radically, borrow radically, which we can't do forever, or inflate the dollar.
00:29:30.000It's the greatest holder of liquid that ever you have seen, and you'll treasure it forever until you die, and you put your ashes in it and put it on the mantle, and then you'll just be encapsulated in there.
00:29:39.000I mean, you don't have to do that part, but...
00:31:07.000And what's weird is that you can have the situation where Trump is really necessary to push this thing forward and he's not doing what he needs to do, but everybody is afraid enough of crossing him that they're just going to continue paying him homage, which doesn't create an incentive for him to actually do the right thing.
00:31:22.000I mean, I've never seen a person become as uncomfortable in his own skin as Paul Ryan over the last year.
00:31:28.000There's something desperately funny about watching videos of Paul Ryan trying to push policy into the absolute void that is our current political discussion.
00:31:35.000Like, in the middle of the NFL debate earlier this week, Paul Ryan just tweeted out a video of himself talking about tax reform and how he's pushing for a better way.
00:31:44.000And it was like, it really was like Kevin Bacon in Animal House.
00:31:47.000And everybody behind him is just screaming and beating each other with gloves.
00:32:27.000Yeah, I don't think Paul Ryan's super happy with the leadership, but he knows that if he crosses President Trump, then Trump starts slapping Ryan instead of slapping McConnell.
00:32:35.000It's turned into basically a Three Stooges routine, where Trump knocks Ryan on the head and Ryan pokes, takes his fingers and pokes McConnell in the eyes.
00:32:43.000And that's basically why nothing's getting done, because we're all laughing at slapstick.
00:32:47.000Here's Ryan bashing McConnell yesterday on Sean's show.
00:32:50.000Of course I'd like to see them do majority votes on these things.
00:33:02.000Doesn't he have in charge of the rules?
00:33:03.000No, but I don't think there's enough Republicans to vote for that.
00:33:05.000Because they worry that when liberals take over government, liberals will ram through liberalism.
00:33:12.000Okay, so, and then he pulls out a chart, actually, and he shows a chart of how many bills the House has passed, and how many bills the Senate has passed, and of course the Senate's passed nothing, so he's slapping McConnell for that.
00:33:21.000And basically, it's a signal to Trump, please don't slap me.
00:34:01.000And instead, it's funny because where he should be herding cats instead,
00:34:06.000It's just him running after the latest squirrel, and the Republicans using that as an excuse to bolt.
00:34:10.000And look, some of this isn't Trump's fault.
00:34:13.000Like, it's not Trump's fault that the Senate can't get together.
00:34:15.000But it is a missed opportunity, and that's Trump's fault.
00:34:18.000So it's not Trump's fault that McCain and Susan Collins and Rand Paul can't get on the same page.
00:34:22.000Of course they can't get on the same page, but it certainly doesn't help when the President of the United States' final healthcare push is that Colin Kaepernick's a jerk.
00:34:29.000His last healthcare push, if you recall, a few months ago, his final healthcare push there was, Jeff Sessions is a jerk.
00:34:35.000So, like, if he would focus a little bit, that would be really, really helpful.
00:34:39.000And I don't see an incentive for him to focus, so long as Republicans keep saying how great he is, and Trump threatens them that if they don't work with him, he's just gonna walk across the street to his good friends Nancy and Chuck.
00:34:51.000I'm not sure that the fear of Trump is particularly justified.
00:34:54.000What I mean by this is that people are not voting, like people, as I said yesterday, if you slap Trump openly, then people get mad at you.
00:35:03.000If you say as a politician that I think Trump's doing a crappy job, then people get angry at you in the Republican Party because they think you're being disloyal to a guy they all voted for.
00:35:12.000And that's why I don't think that it's incumbent on Paul Ryan to say, I think Trump's doing a crappy job.
00:35:16.000But I think that when he's asked about it, he should say, I think President Trump has the right principles in mind, but I would love to see him really push that to the American public more.
00:35:26.000Try and prompt him in the right direction.
00:35:28.000That he can do, and that's not being done.
00:35:30.000The reason that I think that can be done is because you actually saw that happen in Alabama, right?
00:35:34.000Trump actually endorsed the candidate who lost, and the Tea Party people, who have been really driving this movement since 2010, pushed Roy Moore instead, and they went right over Trump's head.
00:35:45.000And Roy Moore wasn't seen as an enemy of Trump.
00:35:47.000So long as he said that he liked Trump, everything was fine.
00:35:49.000So I think so long as you say that you don't hate Trump, then you can actually make the case for conservative principles.
00:35:55.000I'm not sure that the fear of Trump is justified.
00:35:57.000If Trump brings the hammer to you, you're inherently finished.
00:36:00.000I think that you have to do one very specific thing, and that is go after Trump personally, and then people get mad at you.
00:36:05.000But if you say you think Trump needs to do a better job, I don't think that people are going to get particularly happy with you.
00:36:10.000Plus, the idea that Trump is somebody who is going to do anything beyond just fulminating on Twitter is, I think, a little bit exaggerated.
00:36:17.000The deep truth about Trump is that Trump doesn't actually like getting into conflict where he's personally responsible.
00:37:20.000The only person that he's legitimately fired in his administration was James Comey.
00:37:24.000He tried to pawn that off on Rod Rosenstein.
00:37:26.000Right, so he actually doesn't like firing people.
00:37:29.000So, you know, I think that you can push Trump without him spewing all over you, except maybe a little bit on Twitter.
00:37:35.000And I think the Republicans should prod him in the right direction, because if they don't, then it's just going to be squirrel chasing from here for the rest of the presidency.
00:37:44.000Meanwhile, while I talk about the dysfunction on the right, the dysfunction on the left is just increasing at an equal or greater pace.
00:37:50.000Whatever the poop storm that is that has begun on the right, it is twice that on the left.
00:37:55.000The language that is being used, the polarizing language that really alienates Americans on these issues being used by the left, being embraced by Democrats, is truly astonishing.
00:38:04.000So Spike Lee, who is obviously somebody who is considered by the left a civil rights hero and a civil rights leader,
00:38:10.000The filmmaker, he is using a sort of polarizing language that is not going to benefit Democrats.
00:38:15.000It really doubles down on the identity politics that Democrats have embraced.
00:38:19.000It's not going to be good for Democrats, and it's not good for the country.
00:38:22.000They're taking the opportunity of, they don't like Trump, to go as radical as they possibly can, which I think is so stupid.
00:38:28.000I mean, if Trump makes a mistake, why don't you just call him on the mistake?
00:38:30.000This is what I've been saying to people on the left forever.
00:38:34.000If you think Trump's making a mistake, why don't you just say, here's the mistake you're making and here's why it's bad, instead of, it's the end of the world, the sky is falling, we're all gonna die, he's a racist, the KKK will be outside my house in the morning.
00:38:45.000Like, you're not doing anyone any favors by always turning that knob to 11.
00:38:49.000Here's Spike Lee turning the knob past 11, actually turning the knob off the stereo.
00:38:56.000It's like the owners, or the plantation owners, and the guys playing a league,
00:39:02.000You know, they're on the plantation and you can't say anything.
00:39:06.000And so, the thing is really escalating.
00:39:09.000Okay, so he compares the NFL owners to members of a plant- plantation owners.
00:39:14.000Those guys make millions of dollars a year, and they are paid to play a sport.
00:39:17.000It is not like a plantation, and it's deeply insulting to people who lived in slavery, and some who still live in slavery, to suggest that people in the NFL are like plantation owners.
00:39:27.000Every business, if the NFL decided tomorrow that they actually wanted to make the players stand up, or they would suspend them or fine them, they'd be well within their rights to do that.
00:40:00.000But that's not the equivalent of living on a plantation.
00:40:03.000Steph Curry is doing some of this polarizing language too.
00:40:06.000So he was talking about the Sports Illustrated cover we mentioned yesterday.
00:40:08.000Sports Illustrated is trying to take the tactic of the kneeling isn't about the anthem and it's not about the flag and it's not even about police brutality.
00:41:32.000Again, that overreach is not smart politics.
00:41:35.000Michelle Obama engaged in some very not smart identity politics yesterday.
00:41:39.000Here she is saying that any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against women generally.
00:41:45.000She told this audience at this conference in Boston, here's just one piece of it, quote, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice.
00:41:56.000What does it mean for us as women that we look at these two candidates as women?
00:42:00.000And many of us said, that guy, he's better for me.
00:42:23.000But the left has to engage in this identity politics.
00:42:25.000You really think you're going to win back the white women who voted majority for Trump by saying that they didn't understand what it was like to be a woman and so they didn't vote for Hillary Clinton?
00:42:33.000Is that really the direction that you want to go, leftists?
00:42:35.000Is that really the pitch you want to make?
00:42:37.000So when I say there's dysfunction on the left, this is the dysfunction on the left.
00:42:40.000The dysfunction on the right is that they can't get their act together, they don't have any centralizing principle, and so they're fragmenting in every possible direction and unable to get anything done.
00:42:47.000The fragmentation on the left is less a fragmentation than a movement toward a more unpopular politics that makes the country worse in the nature of identity politics.
00:42:55.000I'm frankly, I'm shocked that Michelle Obama came out and said that because I think that she's smarter than that.
00:43:59.000It's a World War II movie in which it's basically a band of American soldiers trying to make it out from behind enemy lines in, I think it's in Belgium, and back across to American lines.
00:44:10.000And the main character is a guy who carries around the Book of Mormon with him.
00:44:14.000And it's actually quite a moving film.
00:44:17.000Sort of about the role of religion in imbuing virtue, and the role of heroism, and also the role of redemption.
00:44:25.000You've made mistakes, you've done things that are wrong, and what can you do to redeem yourself?
00:44:33.000Supreme Allied Headquarters reported American combat troops taken prisoner, then famously executed by their German captors near the Belgian town of Malmedy.
00:44:45.000An unknown number of Germans are making a push towards this little town.
00:44:47.000They're shooting prisoners who are behind enemy lines.
00:44:49.000They've punched through all along here.
00:45:02.000So if you're a Prime member, then you can watch that for free.
00:45:04.000I don't know if it's on Netflix, but it is well worth watching.
00:45:07.000And again, I like movies that take seriously the contentions of religion, even if you don't believe in all the particular doctrines of a particular faith.
00:45:15.000One of my pet peeves about a lot of atheists is they do this routine where they'll say things like, if you're a religious person, how do you, you know, do religious people even know?
00:45:22.000Like, how can there be a God if bad things happen in the world?
00:46:01.000The thing that I hate about it is the scorn that it shows for Mormonism as a faith by mocking its central beliefs.
00:46:08.000Let's be straight about religion in general, organized religion in general.
00:46:12.000Most religions make miraculous claims.
00:46:14.000Now, I think some of those miraculous claims are more ludicrous than others, but virtually every major religion makes claims about miracles, and at a certain point you're going to have to take a leap of faith.
00:46:24.000Mocking those leaps of faith to me is just sneering at somebody else without recognizing your own vulnerability on these issues.
00:46:34.000There's also something to me that's a little bit off-putting about targeting Mormons, who are legitimately like the nicest people in America.
00:46:40.000I said last night at the beginning of my speech that this is the only state in the union where I'm the least clean-cut guy in the state.
00:46:44.000I mean, Mormons, the Mormons that I know, the Mormons in general that I know are the nicest, cleanest-cut people with wonderful families, and ripping on the Mormons is like hitting a puppy.
00:47:09.000Book of Mormon came out, and the people in the Mormon church, they said they were actually happy about it, because it gave them an opportunity to actually hand out more copies of the Book of Mormon and recruit.
00:47:54.000People who have gone abroad trying to help people.
00:47:57.000And these kids who are out helping people.
00:47:59.000How many 17, 18 year old kids do you know who are spending a couple of years of their life going out and helping random people who are in dire poverty?
00:48:06.000And they're being celebrated by their families, these beautiful families, who are saying to them, congratulations on doing something good for the world.
00:48:13.000I mean, it's the opposite of Hugh Hefner.
00:48:14.000Congratulations on doing something good for the world.
00:48:16.000These are the people who you're going to mock?
00:48:18.000These are the people who you're going to say are the problem?
00:48:20.000So here's the number from the Book of Mormon.
00:48:22.000Again, doing the very easy thing of mocking somebody's ludicrous religious beliefs, which, again, I can do the same thing about scientific materialism.
00:48:29.000Scientific materialism is based on premises that cannot uphold the central contentions of scientific materialism.
00:48:34.000Under scientific materialism, you cannot argue for truth, you cannot argue for reason, you cannot argue for logic, you can't even argue for the scientific method by the tenets of scientific materialism.
00:50:33.000But when he says things like, I believe that the Lord God created the universe, I believe that Jesus died for my sins, I believe that the ancient Jews sailed on boats to America, and then the audience laughs, the idea is that all of these beliefs are equally stupid, and all of these beliefs are equally ignorant, and what this guy is doing, he's just doing because he's a naive fool.
00:50:52.000That's the idea, is that religious people are naive fools who believe they can make the world a better place with their belief in this giant spaghetti monster in the sky.
00:50:58.000That is super dismissive of what religious people have done, what religious people have built, and what religious people actually believe.
00:51:05.000If you think that religious people have never thought about the ridiculousness of some of the things that we believe, and the leaps of faith that we have to make, you've never talked to a religious person.
00:51:13.000And we're not just all fools who go around thinking to ourselves, well, you know, every word of the Bible is not only literally true, but I don't see why anyone can't believe it.
00:51:42.000That's what it means to be a religious person.
00:51:44.000And it seems to me that if you're going to do a musical about religious people, it should look a lot more like the movie Silence from Martin Scorsese and a lot less like the Book of Mormon.