On today's show, Ben Shapiro is joined by Michael Knowles to discuss the Democratic Debates, and why he thinks there's something special about Sen. Kamala Harris. Plus, why Joe Biden is not a plagiarist and why Sen. Tulsi Gabbard is actually good at it. Plus, what's going on with Bernie Sanders and his campaign? And who's going to win the 2020 Democratic primary election, and which of the other candidates is going to beat Trump in the primary election? And why did Joe Biden fail so badly in the first Democratic debate that he was booed off the stage? And what does that have to do with Joe Biden and Sen. Joe Biden? And why does it matter that Joe Biden failed so badly that he's not even a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination? The answer to these questions and more is pretty simple: it's because he's a crock of shit, and it's not because he doesn't know how to be a politician, which is why he's actually not a bad one at it at all. Ben and Michael discuss why he should be a good one, and what he should do about it, and how he should go about trying to get into the race to be the next president. And how he can turn it all around, and win in 2020 and what to do if he s not a good enough candidate, and if he doesn t have a serious shot at it, why he s a bad enough shot at winning the nomination, then what s going to do it? and why it s not good enough, then he s gonna be a bad shot at being a good shot at the nomination. and so much more. The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special is a special. Subscribe to the show with Ben Shapiro! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our new podcast, and leave us a rating and review our podcast recommendations. Thanks for listening to the Ben Shapiro show! Subscribe and review Ben Shapiro s Sunday Special! and we'll send you're listening to The Ben's Sunday special on his podcast, Ben's Unfiltered Podcasts: The Best of the Week! Ben's Best of Ben Shapiro, featuring Ben Shapiro and Michael's Uncut, the Uncut Podcasts, featuring the best of the Left's Best Podcasts.
00:01:21.000When you realize it's all a dark, psychic force and that Marianne Williamson is the most sane person on that stage, then they all start to make sense.
00:01:29.000Because, you know, I'm mostly joking about Marianne Williamson, but she actually had, I think it was three of the most accurate sentences in that debate, the most recent debate.
00:01:41.000The first one is that wonkiness is not going to decide the Democratic nominee.
00:01:46.000Nobody cares about the bean counting of how many zillions of dollars of our money they're going to spend on X, Y, and Z social program.
00:01:54.000The second one is about the dark psychic force because it actually is the case that politics at bottom is cultural and even below that is theological.
00:02:03.000There actually is a spiritual component to politics.
00:02:06.000It's not all just adding up numbers on a spreadsheet.
00:02:08.000And then the third statement that I think she made correctly is that if Democrats don't change their strategy, Trump is going to win.
00:02:15.000I mean, looking around that stage, which of those candidates is possibly going to beat Trump?
00:02:21.000I mean, I pointed out that Marianne Williamson, everybody's sort of making fun of the whole Marianne Williamson phenomenon, but she's talking at a different level than the other Democrats.
00:02:27.000And she's actually making what is a more honest appeal for a lot of Democrats than the other Democrats are.
00:02:32.000The Democrats are fighting with each other over, is it Medicare for all or Medicare for anyone who wants it or whatever?
00:02:37.000And she's talking about, no, there's deep, rough waters in this country, and we have to investigate that and get to the heart of it.
00:02:43.000She's speaking to spirit in a way that Obama did in 2008, actually.
00:02:46.000No one cared about Obama on policy in 2008.
00:02:47.000It was about the hope and the feel and the zeitgeist.
00:02:50.000And she's doing a lot more of that than any of the other candidates.
00:02:54.000I think there is something happening with her.
00:02:56.000She's not gonna be the nominee, but I think that anybody who's able to tap into even a remote amount of what she's doing, it could create something fascinating.
00:07:01.000The second shrillest candidate in this race is Cory Booker, who ostensibly is a man.
00:07:06.000So I think they both have to fix something about their candidacies.
00:07:09.000Kamala needs to embrace her actual life story, and Elizabeth needs to change Just the tactics of campaigning, just the tone in which he's speaking.
00:07:19.000If they don't change those two things, it's hard for me to believe that any of those candidates are going to beat President Trump.
00:07:25.000He has legitimate vulnerabilities, but I just don't think they're rising to the occasion.
00:07:29.000So you're foreclosing Biden as the nominee already?
00:07:31.000You think that Biden isn't going to be the nominee?
00:07:33.000I think, I mean, look, if you look at the polls today, Joe Biden is the nominee, right?
00:08:05.000The only reason he got to be vice president is because Barack Obama hated Hillary Clinton so much, he couldn't stomach the thought of her being his vice president.
00:08:22.000I think he has basically one piece of legislation that he can own that was pretty good legislation.
00:08:27.000That's the 1994 crime bill, and it's the one thing he's running so fast.
00:08:31.000If you look at those debate stages, there's a Joe Biden-shaped hole in the wall.
00:08:34.000He's running away from his record that fast.
00:08:36.000So considering all of that, the more that he's in the limelight, the more he's bungling his own record, the more he's bungling even the words coming out of his mouth.
00:08:44.000It's hard to see how his poll numbers ever stay the same or go up.
00:08:47.000It just seems like, as you said, quite rightly, I think his first day is his best day.
00:08:51.000And I think he just keeps steadily sliding down.
00:08:54.000And the question is, can one of the other candidates jump up and beat him before the nomination is decided?
00:08:59.000The other reason that you have gained notoriety is, of course, because you once occupied the same august space as Alexander Ocasio-Cortez on the East Coast.
00:09:07.000She, of course, is a woman from the heart of the Bronx, as we know from her self-described biography.
00:10:08.000After college I went down and lived in the city.
00:10:09.000So I'm actually pretty sure I've spent much more time in my life in the congressional district in Queens and the Bronx that AOC currently represents.
00:10:26.000I just, I don't have that real, that inauthentic authenticity that AOC has.
00:10:30.000Well, I mean, we can always hope that you can breed that into yourself, and one day you, too, can be a thought leader in the Democratic Party.
00:10:36.000I mean, you've already written the book on it, so why not?
00:10:39.000I mean, you know, I think I've written the definitive work on reasons to vote for Democrats, and yet Tom Perez says that AOC is the future of the Democratic Party.
00:10:46.000It's like, give me a little look, man.
00:10:48.000Give me, you know, finally embrace some of the intellectual future of the left.
00:10:53.000So since you are not the thought leader of the Democratic Party, but apparently AOC is, let's talk for a second about the Squad, led by the illustrious, brilliant, world-breaking AOC.
00:11:02.000So the Democratic Party has embraced the Squad, which is just an act of complete imbecility, but what do you make of their rise?
00:11:10.000Why exactly are they so popular among Democrats right now?
00:11:14.000Mencken described democracy as the theory that the people deserve to get what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard.
00:11:21.000And I think that's what you're seeing with the rise of the squad.
00:11:24.000For years, decades and decades, the left has been embracing this.
00:11:29.000Awful, petty politics of personal destruction.
00:11:32.000The political is the personal was one of the mottos in the 1960s.
00:11:35.000Impugning everybody's motives, accusing everyone of racism and sexism and this-ism, embracing identity politics, so what matters is not our ideas, what matters is just our skin color or our genitalia or whatever.
00:11:48.000And the Frankenstein's monster of this political experiment is the Squad.
00:11:54.000And so now you're seeing this turn on Nancy Pelosi.
00:11:57.000Now you're seeing this turn on the Clintons.
00:13:56.000You're seeing the total inversion of the sort of politics that a self-governing republic So we saw this sort of battle breaking out between Nancy Pelosi and the Squad.
00:14:29.000And this created a lot of political problems for the president in the short term.
00:14:32.000He said certain things that just weren't true.
00:14:34.000He said things that had people calling him racist.
00:14:37.000All that was unpleasant to deal with during that time.
00:14:41.000However, I actually think the cumulative effect of that was pretty helpful to the president, at least in so much as It rallied support behind the squad.
00:14:52.000So within a week or two, you see Nancy Pelosi hosting AOC in her office.
00:16:07.000I want them to be the face of the Democratic Party.
00:16:09.000And that looks like that's what's happening.
00:16:11.000How did you grow up to be a conservative?
00:16:14.000I understand that you're still very young and that there's still time.
00:16:17.000You may end up being a transgender liberal by the time this is all over, but where did you start?
00:16:21.000I'll only become a transgender liberal if I ever want to run for office because I think it's the only way I'd be electorally viable at this point.
00:16:28.000I more or less came out of the womb with parted hair, smoking a cigar, campaigning for Republicans.
00:16:34.000One of the first statements I ever learned as a kid from my grandfather was, read my lips, no new taxes, which was the line from George H.W.
00:16:45.000No, he loved Bush and he told me this.
00:16:48.000He taught me how to sing, it's a grand old flag, I was singing it around like two years old.
00:16:52.0001996, it was the election of Bob Dole against Bill Clinton.
00:16:57.000I was campaigning around my first grade classroom for Bob Dole.
00:17:01.000I was the only person in this country excited about Bob Dole, including Bob Dole, because he was a war hero and Clinton was a degenerate draft dodger.
00:17:54.000I was doing terrible movies that are on channel 7000 at three o'clock in the morning.
00:17:58.000And, you know, I think both of those things are pretty related.
00:18:03.000You know, Ronald Reagan said that a politician has to be an actor.
00:18:07.000And in the negative sense of this, it's because they're both vain, ridiculous sort of endeavors that are selfish and self-centered.
00:18:19.000But when they're done right, I actually think it's for the opposite reason.
00:18:22.000I think politics and acting are similar because both have to be concerned with truth.
00:18:28.000Acting is living truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
00:18:31.000Politics, hopefully if you're a good politician, you're concerned with pursuing some kind of political truth, ultimately a cultural or even religious truth.
00:18:48.000And if you hate people, you are going to be a terrible politician because you spend all your time at spaghetti dinners at the VFW Hall or at the Lions Club or something.
00:18:58.000If you don't like them, There are many other ways to make a buck or to get your name in the newspaper.
00:19:04.000And so I think it's why, you know, especially for Republicans, you see a lot of actors who are politicians.
00:19:09.000And then among Democrats, you see a lot of politicians who are actors.
00:19:26.000I know there are a lot of people who are watching or listening to this, and they're thinking, this Michael Mowles guy doesn't seem so exorable to me.
00:19:31.000So why, Ben, are you constantly ripping on Michael Mowles?
00:19:33.000For those who don't know the story of how you put out a blank book that sold 200,000 copies for no reason at all, and about which I'm supremely better, then maybe you ought to explain what exactly happened.
00:19:45.000What inspired you to write a blank book?
00:20:15.000And so the book has 250 or so Blank pages, about 10 chapters, all the different areas of policy and politics that would be the reason to vote for Democrats.
00:20:59.000As you've written all these books, all with words in them.
00:21:03.000You see the stack of blank pages, and some of your books, best-selling books, New York Times bestsellers, and then this book sells all these copies, and you say, Knowles, I'm furious, I hate this, this is the worst thing, and then you gave me your literary agent.
00:21:38.000So why do you think President Trump does that?
00:21:41.000And do you think there's benefit to it?
00:21:42.000You want to actually have something to say.
00:21:44.000You want to actually Affect a message while you're trolling.
00:21:50.000And I think that's the key here, because some of these guys who have just been provocateurs have gone down pretty bad intellectual pathways, political pathways, and they just wash up and they're nothing.
00:22:01.000So I think the advantage to trolling, I mean even that word, it's such a 2019 word, what we're really talking about is the advantage to a little humor in politics, to a little levity in politics.
00:22:52.000He said a sick society needs to talk about politics.
00:22:54.000If you don't talk about politics, the sickness could get worse.
00:22:58.000But if all you're talking about is politics, Then you've lost the point of the society in the first place.
00:23:04.000The reason we have politics is so that we can engage in culture, so that we can worship God as we want to worship God, so that we can have relationships with our family and our communities and our civil society and those free associations that make America what it is.
00:23:19.000A society that can't laugh a little bit at its politics, that can't take itself lightly, doesn't have that.
00:23:24.000Chesterton said, the angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.
00:23:29.000It's not that they take themselves unseriously, it's not that they make a joke of themselves, but they can take themselves lightly.
00:23:35.000And if we can't do that in politics, the future doesn't look so bright.
00:23:39.000Okay, so let's talk about your brand of conservatism.
00:23:41.000So, there's a lot of debate inside conservative circles over what exactly conservatism means.
00:23:45.000You're obviously the younger generation, and there's an open debate as to what kind of government we need.
00:23:50.000Government involvement, what kind of culture we need.
00:23:52.000There's a battle between conservatives and libertarians.
00:23:54.000If you had to sort of sum up your view of conservatism, what would it look like?
00:23:57.000I would agree with a lot of conservative thinkers, going back to, say, Edmund Burke, who I think is the founder of kind of the modern era of conservative thought.
00:24:05.000I think conservatism is in many ways an inclination more than an ideology.
00:24:13.000I think we try to shun doctrines and dogmas and manifestos with five bullet points on them and say this is the sum total of politics.
00:24:22.000I think the conservative knows that's never going to sum up the whole world.
00:24:27.000I can't boil down my entire experience of reality, my desires, what I wish for the country, the consecration with which I view my country, the loyalty, the filial piety that I feel for the United States.
00:24:41.000I can't boil that down into one, two, or three bullet points.
00:24:44.000I think a lot of it comes out of a love for the tradition.
00:24:49.000You have some people in this country who love America for all her warts, for all her problems, for all the tragedies of history, who say, I want America to move into the future by pulling on the best of her tradition, by living up to the best of her ideals.
00:25:17.000I think the Betsy Ross flag is racist.
00:25:20.000I think Jefferson and Washington, I think they're racist and terrible.
00:25:25.000I think that's a major divide, and I think there is a broad space for the conservatives, who actually want to conserve America, to speak.
00:25:32.000We've had this long debate in conservative circles over which brand of conservatism gets to claim the true mantle.
00:25:42.000There are the neoconservatives, they've kind of fallen out of favor, the libertarians, the religious right, the traditionalists, the Trumpian populists, all of those.
00:25:52.000It seems to me that it's wonderful about conservatism that there's that intellectual diversity, that there's a debate that's constantly going on there.
00:26:01.000Maybe I favor a little bit more of the traditional side.
00:26:04.000Maybe you favor a little bit more of the libertarian side.
00:26:07.000Maybe some people are more religious right or neocon or whatever.
00:26:11.000But we're able to engage in all of that with a common love of country and a common seriousness of purpose.
00:26:17.000That is radically different from the left, which no longer has any intellectual diversity.
00:26:21.000They used to have the blue dog, sort of socially conservative Democrats.
00:26:26.000Now they just have one idea, which is progressivism.
00:26:30.000And you are seeing progressivism speed up.
00:26:33.000Every single day, it speeds up even further, to the point that now we're calling for open borders.
00:26:39.000We're calling to dismantle American sovereignty.
00:26:43.000And we're disrespecting even the American flag, which is a symbol of the country.
00:26:47.000This is one of the things I fear, I think, is that the reactionary nature of our politics is driving this a little bit on both sides.
00:26:53.000So obviously you've seen it from the left.
00:26:54.000You've seen a reaction to President Trump.
00:26:56.000The left thought they were never going to lose an election after Barack Obama was president.
00:26:59.000They immediately lose the first presidential election after Obama is president.
00:27:03.000And they're so stunned by it that they move into anti-Trump territory.
00:27:06.000Anything Trump says must be bad, even if it's the most anodyne, normal, Typical American politics when it's apple pie and motherhood and the American flag They've decided they're against it because they're reacting to Trump and then you've seen on the right a similar tendency Which is we have to oppose the left no matter what they are doing and even if it means embracing some of our worst Instincts and I think this is where I'm more worried about the conservative movement than you seem to be and that is that I'm concerned that in the in the correct attempt to stop the left
00:27:36.000There's a willingness to embrace bedfellows that are really alienating for future generations as well as morally problematic.
00:27:45.000In other words, the tent can become so broad that you end up including people in the tent who probably shouldn't be in the tent simply to oppose the other side.
00:27:52.000Well, I agree we should kick out all the bigots.
00:27:54.000I don't think anybody disagrees about that.
00:27:56.000But I don't really think that the right has embraced bigots, at least not in anything approaching the mainstream.
00:28:04.000I mean, I guess these days they're calling Steven Crowder a bigot because he says that men can't be women.
00:28:07.000They're trying to kick him off of YouTube.
00:28:09.000But I mean the real bigots, the racial politics guys, Richard Spencer.
00:28:13.000I mean, Richard Spencer is practically a creation of the left-wing media and the mainstream media.
00:28:19.000He, I don't know, five years ago he had a hundred people show up to his conference.
00:28:23.000A year ago he had about the same number of people show up to his conference.
00:28:26.000I don't see the mainstreaming of that guy.
00:28:28.000Mike, I guess what I'm saying is that there's a bit of a politics of convenience going on.
00:28:32.000So, for example, for years I was informed that Russia was a geopolitical foe of the United States.
00:28:37.000The minute that President Trump declares that Russia is not in fact a geopolitical foe of the United States, at least publicly, you know, in terms of his actual actions, he's treated Russia certainly as a geopolitical foe of the United States.
00:28:47.000There's been a whole brand of the Republican Party that's come out and basically become quasi-pro-Putin.
00:28:56.000I mean, I see your point on the Russia thing, but it's also, I mean, this is why I oppose rigid ideology or trying to, you know, boil conservatism, capital C, trademark, down to five or so bullet points.
00:29:08.000Is because it is true, Russia was our number one geopolitical adversary for a whole century.
00:29:13.000I mean, we fought a Cold War against them.
00:29:17.000And even during the Cold War, you saw regularly, we would play off Russia against China and China against Russia.
00:29:24.000And obviously, today that's more important than ever.
00:29:26.000So I think for a lot of conservatives, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the fall of Soviet communism, you look around and you say, you know, Russia is awful.
00:29:34.000I mean, Vladimir Putin is a terrible, terrible man.
00:29:38.000But the bigger threat comes from China.
00:29:40.000China is violating WTO treaties, they're illegally subsidizing, they're stealing aluminum, they're stealing our property, they're spying on us, they're aggressing on some of our interests.
00:29:49.000And so we say, you know, if we put our focus, if we take our focus away maybe from certain interests in the Middle East, even Pulling away maybe from aspects that Russia wants to intervene in.
00:30:02.000Does it mean you totally, you know, cozy up to longtime foes like Vladimir Putin?
00:30:08.000No, but it's a reordering of priorities because the circumstances of politics have changed.
00:30:12.000Okay, so let's talk for a second about this debate that's broken out.
00:30:14.000So you talk about sort of the Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk side of the conservative movement, maybe Patrick Deneen.
00:30:22.000There's this side of the conservative movement that suggests that conservatism is really about honor for tradition and for the past.
00:30:29.000Well, and I would say, importantly, about veneration.
00:30:33.000The idea that we have very little in the United States that binds us together, especially now as we discourage assimilation, even as we increase immigration.
00:30:48.000And we no longer venerate the symbols that we once venerated.
00:30:52.000The flag, the Fourth of July, fireworks and hot dogs and hamburgers.
00:30:57.000We don't have that shared love of country, and no country that I've ever seen in the history of the world can survive without some sense of the sacred.
00:31:06.000Now, of course, because nature abhors a vacuum, you're getting new sacred things.
00:31:11.000You know, I mean, we've replaced what would be maybe the Christian liturgical calendar with the secular leftist liturgical calendar.
00:31:18.000So you've got in February, you've got Black History Month to celebrate not all black people, Clarence Thomas, I don't think he's being celebrated.
00:31:26.000It's to celebrate a particular view of black oppression in the United States.
00:31:38.000We're now celebrating the queen of all sins.
00:31:41.000We're celebrating the deadliest sin of all.
00:31:44.000I think what we would all agree on is there is that aspect of government and of politics and of living together as a nation.
00:31:53.000And therefore, I think what the question becomes between, say, the traditionalists and the libertarians is, what is going to be sacred in the country?
00:32:03.000Or can we try to persevere without anything being sacred?
00:32:06.000Well, this is why I ask about the role of government, because I think that we largely agree on The sacred nature of many of the nationally binding forces.
00:32:16.000I actually just wrote a book with words in it all about the sacred nature of history and how that has to be balanced with a limited government in the absence of a virtuous people.
00:32:25.000You can't have liberalism in the first instance.
00:32:28.000We're starting to see a sort of root and branch approach to liberalism, however, that I'm not sure is sustainable.
00:32:34.000And I'm wondering where you're coming down on the side.
00:32:35.000Because on the one hand, you have folks who are basically saying that liberalism itself, this is the Patrick Deneen case openly, is that liberalism itself has failed, that it carries within it the seeds, Lockean liberalism carries within it the seeds of atomized individualism.
00:32:50.000And that leads to the destruction of the society at large.
00:32:53.000You don't have any binding forces, specifically because you have a liberty-rights-driven society.
00:32:59.000And then, on the other side, you have people saying, well, so what is the alternative that you're suggesting, like government imposing virtue from above?
00:33:05.000So where do you come down, and what do you think the role of government is in that fight?
00:33:07.000Well, much as Buckley did in the 20th century, maybe, I propose a fusion, or at least a view that I think proposes that it's not, those two ideas are not as far apart as they may seem.
00:33:45.000You have a widespread epidemic of depression, anxiety, stress, suicidality, up 70% even among teenagers in recent years.
00:33:54.000This is a major social problem, the breakdown of institutions and the breakdown of love of country.
00:34:00.000Now, the role of government comes in, and I think the libertarian side has not fully grappled with this.
00:34:07.000Because I agree with John Adams that the Constitution is built for a moral and religious people, and it's not fit for the governance of anyone else.
00:34:31.000But if you want to be a free people and you want to govern yourself, you need to have that discipline yourself.
00:34:37.000Increasingly, we have seen this go away and you've seen increasing libertinism.
00:34:41.000You can view this in virtually any social phenomenon that we're looking around at in 2019, where we can't even agree on the definition of what a man is.
00:34:58.000The role of the government comes in here because the way that you become a virtuous person, the way that you learn your morals, the way that you practice the habit of virtue is through education.
00:35:08.000I mean, that's what the word education means.
00:35:10.000It's how you learn to behave and form your mind and form your body.
00:35:13.000And in the United States, broadly, Education is a matter of government.
00:35:18.000There is no kind of education that isn't coercive.
00:35:22.000Would that we could all have private education and your parents are directing it, but that just isn't the case and so what we need to ask ourselves is What do we want the government teaching our kids?
00:35:35.000I mean, that is, it might not be a legitimate role of the government, but it certainly has been the role of the government for at least 100 years.
00:35:41.000And in that time, you've seen the ability to even read the Bible in school, forget prayer in school, even to read the Bible in school.
00:35:49.000The Bible is the bedrock of our civilization.
00:35:52.000If you haven't read the Bible, you can't understand any of the rest of it.
00:35:56.000And if government is going to run education, and they're not going to even expose children to that bedrock, to their own civilization, you're going to look down the road in 20 or 30 years and you're going to see a completely unrecognizable society.
00:36:10.000You've been going around giving speeches at colleges, getting shot with fake bleach, and really enjoying yourself out there.
00:36:16.000There's an interesting sort of debate that's broken out about what the future of colleges should be.
00:36:21.000You seem to be hopeful and, I think, optimistic about what colleges should be.
00:36:27.000I think they should be circumscribed in their authority.
00:36:29.000I think that colleges should basically go back to either being trade schools or to not existing.
00:36:35.000Because the fact is that they have lost the thread.
00:36:37.000They don't have the capacity or the willingness to teach Western civilization anymore.
00:36:40.000If we're going to have those colleges, well, they can exist, but they should be privately funded because the state is no longer going to do any of that.
00:36:46.000What's your view on what should happen with colleges?
00:36:48.000I'll tell you, I was more hopeful before I started my college tour than now that I've finished it and weirdos are shooting strange liquids that I don't even want to know what's in them at me.
00:36:58.000What I'm most disappointed in in the colleges is not the students.
00:40:06.000I think there are probably five universities in this country that are salvageable and good in doing the business of educating future American leaders.
00:40:26.000You don't need everybody to study the Aeneid that way.
00:40:30.000I mean, it would be nice, but you actually don't need it.
00:40:33.000I would save those handful of colleges, I would defund all of the others, and I would find some new method of education that is more tailored to the individual students so they don't need to take out a quarter million dollars in debt to not learn anything. - Well, one of the things that you've spoken a lot about is the failures of the universities one of the things that you've spoken a lot about is the failures Talk about context with regard to President Trump, but this is particularly true in the field of history where the universities seem to be teaching that everybody from history ought to be evaluated by the values that we currently hold.
00:41:01.000Thus, you are a better person than Thomas Jefferson because Thomas Jefferson held slaves.
00:41:05.000While you do not hold slaves, you are a better person than John Adams because John Adams condemned various forms of sin that he saw, whereas you think that those forms of sin are okay because they're consensual.
00:41:14.000You know, that seems to be the generalized feeling among folks in history departments all over the country.
00:41:20.000You spend an inordinate amount of time talking about A lot of historical figures.
00:41:25.000One of the historical figures that you've gotten the most flack for for defending is Christopher Columbus.
00:41:29.000Maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of the mythology surrounding Christopher Columbus and why you feel he's being not given a fair shake.
00:42:07.000Now, you can oppose Western exploration of the Americas.
00:42:10.000I mean, I guess that's what they're really talking about.
00:42:12.000But Christopher Columbus wasn't Adolf Hitler.
00:42:15.000They say that he had a particular hatred of the Native Americans.
00:42:19.000In reality, he was often defending Native Americans against the harsh punishment sought by the Spaniards, by his fellow travelers.
00:42:28.000And even Bartolome de las Casas, a Columbus biographer, the great defender of Natives in the New World, Constantly talked about how he was defending the natives.
00:42:36.000Christopher Columbus adopted a Native American son.
00:42:41.000Say whatever you want about his time as the governor of the Indies, I don't think he had a particular vile, vicious, bigoted hatred of Native Americans if he's going to adopt one from his dead comrade and raise him as his own son.
00:43:13.000And now you are seeing schools in California paying $600,000 to paint over a Washington mural at Notre Dame University, where I gave a speech defending Columbus.
00:43:22.000They have a beautiful, priceless mural of Columbus that actually shows the history of him, which nobody knows.
00:43:29.000This systematic, you know, multifaceted mural.
00:43:33.000They're putting a drape over it so that nobody is offended.
00:44:53.000And if we want grace from our descendants, maybe we should give a little bit of grace to our antecedents, you know?
00:45:00.000I think, generally, with the study of history and with the way we look at our country, I think that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and many, many people in this country think that we're flying.
00:45:09.000So, we were talking about college experiences.
00:45:11.000Obviously, I'm an Ivy Leaguer, you're an Ivy Leaguer.
00:45:13.000What was your Ivy League experience like?
00:45:15.000I went to Yale basically just before it all collapsed.
00:45:19.000They start renaming colleges, students shrieking at their professors, which happened later on, 2014, 2015.
00:45:27.000I feel like I was the last guy to sort of leap off the Titanic as the thing is going down.
00:46:58.000And I was working on a campaign in New York for my friend Nan Hayworth.
00:47:03.000And she was running a challenger campaign against the incumbent John Hall.
00:47:07.000John Hall had been in this rock band in the 70s called Orleans, and they did the songs like, Still the one that blah blah blah, and they did, you know, they did one, Dance with me, I want to be your partner, can't you see?
00:47:19.000So I started this... Classics of the genre.
00:48:11.000I thought, wow, there's really something here, especially in new media.
00:48:14.000This is an opportunity for conservatives to affect the culture more broadly, but even political races in a way that we hadn't been able to before, because the gatekeepers of the mainstream media kept us out.
00:48:25.000So from there, I hopped on a few other campaigns.
00:48:27.000I was part of the draft campaign for Mitch Daniels to get him to run in 2012, did a few commercials with Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is Too Damn High party.
00:48:36.000We were doing all these same kinds of strategies.
00:50:36.000I think we should criticize Trump a lot.
00:50:38.000I think it helps his presidency when we criticize Trump.
00:50:41.000I think it pulls him away from some of his worst inclinations.
00:50:44.000Sometimes it makes more precise his views on policy, or at least it explains maybe what conservatives Have thought in our longer conservative tradition because President Trump isn't terribly ideological.
00:50:57.000It's one of the things that helps him in his presidency.
00:50:59.000But then what we need to do is occasionally articulate more of the broad philosophical basis for some of the things that he's doing.
00:51:39.000I thought that was a waste of political capital.
00:51:42.000Some people in his camp thought that that was a great idea that was going to appeal more broadly to Americans.
00:51:48.000Okay, it's neither here nor there for me.
00:51:51.000The question for him, looking forward to 2020, saying everything's been pretty good, the economy's going pretty well, record low unemployment, relative peace abroad.
00:52:41.000The promise was a big, beautiful wall.
00:52:43.000The president has gotten some pretty good news on this front in just the past couple of weeks.
00:52:48.000So in 2016, he campaigned more or less on two things, the wall and judges.
00:52:54.000You remember how important the legacy of Antonin Scalia and all the Supreme Court justices were going to be for the 2016 election.
00:53:03.000He just got a favorable decision from the Supreme Court, 5-4 decision, thanks to those two justices that he appointed, that opened up about $2.5 billion worth of Pentagon funding for him to build the wall, so he could build 100 miles of border wall.
00:53:38.000But he's got to keep up the pressure on that.
00:53:40.000If he doesn't show a I think he's going to lose a lot of credibility, even among those of us who want to support him.
00:53:49.000Now, one thing that you haven't mentioned anywhere in this sort of analysis of Trump is, of course, Trump the man.
00:53:54.000And in 2016, I was deeply concerned about a number of things about Trump.
00:53:58.000One of those things was conservative policy.
00:54:00.000He's delivered on a lot of those fronts, although obviously on spending, he's blown it out because no one cares about spending apparently enough to actually stop it.
00:54:06.000But I'm not going to talk about policy with regard to Trump because the fact is that what makes Trump a polarizing figure is not in fact his policy, it is his character.
00:54:13.000And one of the things that I was always worried about was that he was going to poison the well with suburban women, he was going to poison the well with young people.
00:54:21.000So the question going forward, and I want to get your take on this, is How much has his character affected the future hopes of the Republican Party?
00:54:29.000Because there are growing demographics in this country who look at the Republican Party and see President Trump and see his tweets.
00:54:35.000And what can President Trump do, if anything, to mitigate that?
00:54:38.000Because I think you can run on all the good policy you want.
00:54:40.000If the American people are forced to do a referendum on Trump's character, I mean, they were able to escape that by instead having a referendum on Hillary in 2016.
00:54:48.000But let's say the Democrats run a default candidate like Joe Biden, and he's basically just a piece of wood.
00:54:54.000And they put up this piece of wood and they said, and look at this horrible man, Trump.
00:54:57.000What can Trump do or what should he do to mitigate the fact that the president does what the president, Trump says what he says.
00:55:04.000A lot of crap comes out of that mouth.
00:55:06.000You know, I think there are two questions that this brings up.
00:56:18.000And so, in terms of the perception, they're going to call every Republican, every conservative, everybody slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton a bigot.
00:57:09.000He was a saint on the right, even many people on the left talked about what a great guy Reagan was, one of the most popular presidents in American history.
00:57:16.000Because his administration was effective at bringing about economic growth, bringing about mourning in America, making Americans feel good about their country again, making Americans love their country again at a time when people didn't feel so great about America, gave us a quarter century of that kind of reputation and that legacy from Reagan.
00:57:37.000There are a lot of parallels to today.
00:57:39.000I mean, there is a great malaise in America.
00:57:42.000There's an epidemic of despair going on in America.
00:57:45.000You have the average life expectancy actually decreasing because of suicides and drug addiction.
00:57:49.000People just don't feel very, very good.
00:57:52.000If President Trump, hopefully after eight years, is able to make the economy boom, fix our border crisis, make our country more of a stable country again, make Americans love their country again, not protest the American flag, but actually revere the American flag.
00:58:09.000If he can do that, if he can bring about a sort of mourning in America, I think all the tweets are going to fall away and people are going to look fondly on this period and that's going to bode very well for either the Republican Party or more importantly conservative ideas for the near future and then in 25 years we'll have to fight it all again.
00:58:28.000So one of the things that's been very troubling for people on the conservative side of the aisle who would like to see President Trump Be victorious, get done a lot of conservative things, is the fact that he seems to step on himself an awful lot.
00:58:39.000There are a lot of situations where he is so obsessed, it seems, with the trolling.
00:58:44.000He's so obsessed with tweaking people that he goes out of his way to tweak people.
00:58:49.000And we all have friends who are like this, but it can lose you a job and it can also make sure that you're a lot more unpopular than you need to be.
00:58:55.000And so putting aside, you know, the question of his personal feelings about race, which I think, you know, for a lot of folks remains an open question, The question of efficacy, of efficiency, in how he presents himself, how do you think he's doing on that?
00:59:10.000Because there do seem to be two schools of thought on this.
00:59:13.000One is, he's got the base, the base already loves him, they're never going to leave him, and then there's a bunch of people in the middle of the country, and they look at his tweets, and they're off-putting, and he's putting himself behind the eight ball by continuing to do what he does.
00:59:22.000And then there's the sort of more pro-Trump view, which is, this is all strategy, or maybe he's revving up the base and there aren't that many people in the middle.
00:59:30.000Where do you fall on that particular debate?
00:59:31.000I think he's good at show business, which actually takes in a lot of those different opinions.
00:59:36.000I don't know that he's sitting there plotting out every single thing that's going to happen.
00:59:40.000I think he just knows how to deliver a line.
00:59:43.000He knows how to make people react to him in a certain way.
01:00:01.000So, a different kind of politician, a Mitt Romney-style politician, might focus on economic issues, might downplay cultural issues, immigration, things like that.
01:00:53.000I mean, he sort of gives you a window with all the misspellings and all the strange capitalizations and all of the gossip and even sometimes all of the cruelty to members of the staff.
01:01:04.000And what you get as a result of that, out of totally provocative statements and actions, is you get a left wing that today is calling to decriminalize border crossings.
01:01:17.000A left wing that is protesting the American flag.
01:01:20.000At a broad level, we're not talking about one or two players in one or two sports, we're talking about a broad movement here.
01:01:25.000You're getting people to disrespect the United States, to refer to the 4th of July parade as a fascist endeavor.
01:01:33.000You're getting a not insignificant portion of this country to compare the United States to Nazi Germany because AOC and the Squad are referring to immigration detention centers as concentration camps, comparing it to Auschwitz or Dachau or something like that.
01:01:51.000This means that even if President Trump's approval rating is low.
01:01:54.000I mean, in 2016, we had two candidates with very low approval ratings.
01:01:58.000Even if his is low, he's running against people who are actually disrespecting the American flag of the 4th of July.
01:02:05.000They might as well campaign against apple pie and the country itself.
01:02:09.000And I think it puts him in a good position.
01:03:12.000Obviously, 13-year-old boys go through a lot of things.
01:03:15.000But intellectually, at least, I was convinced that religion was childish.
01:03:19.000This was at the time of the rise of the so-called New Atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and your buddy Sam Harris, and all those guys.
01:03:26.000And it was just very popular at the time.
01:03:29.000Looking back on it now, I think that their arguments are perfectly tailored to 13-year-olds.
01:03:34.000But I was a 13-year-old, and so, at the time, I was taken with them.
01:03:38.000And I went along with what is probably a very popular atheism for about 10 years.
01:03:43.000Then I noticed something when I got to college.
01:04:29.000Just apparently accidentally as I'm walking across the quad.
01:04:33.000And I gave it a read and I thought, you know, this is pretty smart.
01:04:35.000And I became fairly convinced that God exists.
01:04:38.000And it was only after all of those intellectual arguments had taken hold, after I had appealed to my own intellectual pride and hubris, That the sense of the religious started to set in.
01:07:04.000So other religious question that comes up a lot, and this is not just for Catholics, obviously this is true for evangelical Protestants, Orthodox Jews as well, is the dealing of religious people with President Trump.
01:07:15.000So the religious people are sort of conflicted on this.
01:07:18.000So on the one hand, President Trump has given them a lot of their priorities.
01:07:21.000And when they look at the choice between, okay, man who we think lacks character, but is not going to attack religion, and folks who may have more personal character, but also are going to spend their days attacking religion or calling us bad Christians for not...
01:07:34.000Applying their sense of social values, that choice is pretty easy.
01:07:38.000But one of the things that I think that a lot of religious folks have fallen into is an inability to deal with the cognitive dissonance.
01:07:43.000So it's turned into President Trump is the be-all end-all.
01:07:46.000We will defend him no matter what he says because political warfare is political warfare.
01:07:50.000And my great fear for religious folks is that, just the same as for conservatives generally, you undermine your own credibility when you refuse to call out sin, so long as the sinner happens to be promoting your particular viewpoint.
01:08:01.000How should religious people be dealing with this dichotomy in President Trump?
01:08:03.000Well, as always, they should do it honestly.
01:08:06.000But I think Trump, in some ways, gets a little bit too bad a rap.
01:08:10.000And it's not because he's this morally perfect person, but it's because he just gets a really, really bad rap.
01:08:17.000If I'm judging the integrity of my president, one of the key features that I'm going to look at is if he keeps his promises, if he keeps his campaign promises.
01:08:26.000There have been a lot of studies on this.
01:08:27.000The Heritage Foundation famously did one.
01:08:30.000He's been pretty good on the promises.
01:08:31.000He's enacted a conservative agenda at a pretty fast rate.
01:08:34.000They said in the early days, faster than Ronald Reagan.
01:08:58.000I said, wait a second, you're not supposed to do what you said that you're going to do.
01:09:01.000Even when it comes down to trying to open up talks with North Korea, even it comes down to things that you might not like, like trade tariffs.
01:09:10.000He's actually followed through on a lot of what he's saying.
01:09:12.000I think that does speak to a certain kind of character.
01:09:15.000Now, is he a thrice-married, lapsed Presbyterian?
01:09:17.000Yeah, he might be, but who am I comparing him to when I'm looking at politicians?
01:09:23.000If I could be ruled by an angel, I would vote for the angel, but politicians generally are pretty sordid and corrupt people, and those who seek the presidency are often the most sordid and the most corrupt, so I don't see any Conflict.
01:09:35.000For me, I sleep easy every single night.
01:09:38.000I don't pretend that Donald Trump is, you know, a living saint or an angel, but I'm really pleased with what he's done.
01:09:44.000And I think he's actually, in the office, demonstrated considerable character.
01:09:47.000Okay, so in just a second, I'm going to ask you how we convince young people, because the polls among young people are particularly awful for Republicans.
01:09:53.000We're moving in the wrong direction in terms of religion for young people.
01:09:55.000So what is the first step toward winning young people back?