The Ben Shapiro Show - The Seductiveness Of Power | Ep. 594

00:00:00.000 The New York Times' newest editorial hire has a controversial history, a woman writes about why she wishes she had aborted her Down syndrome child, and Barack Obama stabs Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez directly between the shoulder blades.

00:00:11.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:12.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:19.000 Oh, we have so much to get to today.

00:00:20.000 Really, a lot of news and analysis.

00:00:22.000 All the things you've come to know and love here on the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:25.000 I would be remiss if I did not note that we do have a couple of events coming up in just a couple of weeks now in Dallas and Phoenix.

00:00:30.000 If you have not yet bought your tickets, now is the time to do so.

00:00:32.000 We're running out of tickets quite quickly.

00:00:34.000 Dallas and Phoenix again.

00:00:35.000 That's happening in a couple of weeks.

00:00:36.000 Go to dailywire.com slash events for all the information on that.

00:00:40.000 Also,

00:00:40.000 If you are just in a mood to enjoy life a little more than you are currently enjoying life, well, I have an excellent thing for you, and that thing is Wink.

00:00:47.000 It's hard to believe, but even I occasionally need to unwind, and when I unwind, sometimes I like to take a drink of water.

00:00:55.000 But you, you need wine, and the fact is, you should go check out Wink, because Wink has the best wines.

00:00:59.000 Not only do they have the best wines, they also ensure

00:01:02.000 That your wine is actually tailored to your palate.

00:01:05.000 Wink makes it easy to discover great wines because Wink's wine experts select wines matched to your taste, personalized for you, shipped directly to your door, and starting at just 13 bucks a bottle.

00:01:12.000 Folks at the office love Wink wine.

00:01:13.000 We've had taste tests at the office before.

00:01:15.000 Let's just say not a lot gets done the rest of that day.

00:01:17.000 But you can go check it out right now at wink.com.

00:01:20.000 You take their palate profile quiz.

00:01:21.000 They ask you questions like, how do you take your coffee?

00:01:23.000 How do you feel about blueberries?

00:01:25.000 And then Wink sends wines curated to your taste.

00:01:27.000 The more wines you rate, the more personalized your monthly selections.

00:01:30.000 Each month, there are new delicious wines like the insanely popular Summer Water Rosé.

00:01:33.000 No membership fees.

00:01:34.000 Skip any month.

00:01:35.000 Cancel any time.

00:01:36.000 Discover great wine today.

00:01:37.000 Go to trywink.com slash ben.

00:01:39.000 That's t-r-y-w-i-n-c dot com slash ben.

00:01:43.000 You get 20 bucks off your first shipment.

00:01:44.000 That's trywink.com slash ben for 20 bucks.

00:01:47.000 Okay, so, in breaking news, the New York Times has decided that they are going to hire a woman named Sarah Zhang to join their editorial board.

00:01:58.000 Now, why is this relevant to your life?

00:02:00.000 The reason this is relevant to your life is because Zhang previously wrote for a publication called The Verge and authored The Internet of Garbage, which is a book about online harassment and free speech.

00:02:09.000 The problem for Sarah Zhang is that people actually went through her old tweets, and some of the things that she has tweeted in the past are not particularly great.

00:02:15.000 She has tweeted things like this, quote,

00:02:17.000 Dumbass effing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants. 0.64

00:02:22.000 This is back in 2014, so...

00:02:24.000 Not supremely long ago, but a few years ago.

00:02:27.000 Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins? 1.00

00:02:34.000 Hashtag cancel white people. 0.55

00:02:36.000 Oh man, it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men. 0.70

00:02:41.000 I dare you to get on Wikipedia and play things white people can definitely take credit for.

00:02:44.000 It's really hard.

00:02:45.000 This is Sarah Zhang, the New New York Times editorial board author.

00:02:49.000 White men are BS. 0.90

00:02:50.000 No one cares about women. 1.00

00:02:51.000 You can threaten anyone on the internet except cops.

00:02:54.000 I just realized, these are all old tweets of hers, and she was hired.

00:02:56.000 I'm sure the New York Times, if they didn't do a background check on the person they hired over at the New York Times, then they were entirely remiss.

00:03:02.000 They say, I just realized why I can't stand watching Breaking Bad or Battlestar Galactica.

00:03:06.000 The premise of both is just white people being miserable. 0.65

00:03:09.000 And she also tweeted, white people have stopped breeding. 0.56

00:03:11.000 You'll all go extinct soon.

00:03:12.000 This was my plan all along.

00:03:14.000 So she seems like a real delight, this Sarah Zhang person.

00:03:18.000 I have been told that she is basically one of the more brilliant people out there and that these tweets are not indicative of her prior work, which I'm willing to hear.

00:03:28.000 But by the rules of the left, this person should now be excised from polite society because that's how the rules work on the left, right?

00:03:33.000 The way that this works is that if they unearth an old tweet, if somebody unearths an old tweet that nobody likes, then we finish your career.

00:03:39.000 We yell at you and we scream at you until you stop being able to write for a major publication like the New York Times.

00:03:44.000 Now, should she apologize for those tweets?

00:03:47.000 I think probably that is merited.

00:03:48.000 Is it indicative of the mentality of the New York Times they think it is appropriate to hire somebody like this?

00:03:53.000 It is indicative of that mentality because the fact is that if anybody who is white wrote this about anybody of any other race, Sarah Chung is Asian, if somebody who's white wrote this about a black

00:04:02.000 We're good to go.

00:04:24.000 The way this works on Twitter is that if we find something we don't like about you in your past, then we absolutely destroy your career.

00:04:31.000 Again, it is indicative of the New York Times' belief system that they are pretty much fine with going after, with their columnist saying stuff like this.

00:04:40.000 Because again, if this were anybody on the other side of the aisle, you can bet money.

00:04:44.000 That it would not go as easy

00:05:01.000 Probably don't either, but if you do wish to subscribe, then maybe you want to give that a second thought.

00:05:05.000 That is your prerogative as well.

00:05:07.000 But it is, again, telling that the same folks on the left who suggest that you are out of the realm of polite discourse, so long as they deem it so, are perfectly willing to welcome into the realm of polite discourse people like Sarah Zhang, who I assume is not even remotely as bad as people like Al Sharpton, who has been legitimately a race-baiting

00:05:25.000 Peace out.

00:05:35.000 I was talking with a friend of mine earlier today who happens to be on the left.

00:05:40.000 She's a liberal and she also happens to be black and also happens to be a lesbian.

00:05:44.000 So she checks off a lot of the intersectional boxes that a lot of folks on the left really seem to care a lot about.

00:05:49.000 We were talking about intersectional politics and she was contending that America is basically run on intersectional politics.

00:05:55.000 That identity politics, politics where we care about your race, your sex, your ethnicity, your orientation.

00:06:02.000 That these politics have always driven the United States.

00:06:04.000 And what I was arguing is one of the problems that we're seeing right now is that if you look at the history of the United States in terms of how intersectional politics has worked, you know, race politics, identity politics, it is fair to say that racial and identity politics have declined markedly since, for example, the 1960s.

00:06:20.000 But if you were to create a scale of 1 to 100 of identity politics, what you would probably say is that at the very beginning of the Republic,

00:06:27.000 Identity politics?

00:06:28.000 It was at 100 because there were actually black slaves and people arguing that black people ought to be slaves.

00:06:33.000 It's about as racist as it could possibly be.

00:06:35.000 Then after the Civil War, it drops to about a 70 on the scale of 100 because black people are no longer slaves, but we are going to suggest that they are inferior if you are the dominant American society. 0.99

00:06:44.000 And you're going to excise Asians, and you're going to excise Latinos, and all the rest of it. 1.00

00:06:47.000 And then, over the course of the next hundred years, it drops to perhaps 60, all the way up to the end of Jim Crow, and then it plummets precipitously to the point that when I was growing up, and I'm 34 years old, when I was growing up, the worst thing you could call somebody in America was not a racial slur, it was a racist.

00:07:02.000 If you want to destroy somebody's life, if you want to make them feel awful, you call them a racist.

00:07:06.000 Racist became the slur du jour because everybody understood that racism was a bad.

00:07:11.000 Like the idea of talking to people my age and saying to them that certain people are genetically inferior because of the color of their skin, it doesn't even compute.

00:07:17.000 It doesn't make any sense to people who are below the age of 40 in the United States because we've grown up in the post-Jim Crow era and we find all of that stuff abhorrent.

00:07:25.000 So intersectionality took a nosedive.

00:07:27.000 But now, intersectionality is recovering because the argument the left has made is that America was historically based on the notion of white supremacy.

00:07:35.000 It was historically based on racism from white people.

00:07:38.000 And now, intersectional groups must have their revenge.

00:07:41.000 Now we have to have a reverse identity politics where whatever you say about white people is totally okay.

00:07:45.000 We never had our chance in the sun.

00:07:47.000 Racism can only come from dominant groups.

00:07:49.000 It can't come from put-upon minority groups.

00:07:51.000 This is an argument that's made by a lot of folks on the left.

00:07:54.000 A really serious argument made by a lot of folks on the left, that if you see Sarah Zhang, an Asian, saying racist things about white people, it's not actually racist, because Sarah Zhang is an Asian, and Asians have historically been put upon in the United States, even though Asian households have the highest household earning capacity of any households in the United States.

00:08:11.000 White Americans, for example, earn 76 cents on every dollar that Asians earn in the United States if you just average out the salaries, but the intersectional idea goes that if you're Asian, you're a member of a minority group, therefore, if you are racist toward a white person, it's not actual racism.

00:08:24.000 And white people are saying, wait a second, racism is racism.

00:08:27.000 Now listen, I understand that virtually all politics is reactionary.

00:08:31.000 I understand that we all react to one another and that there's a desire for turnabout as fair play.

00:08:36.000 But if you want to get to a society that actually means something, then we all ought to be stomping against this sort of bigotry, no matter the source.

00:08:44.000 The problem is that folks on the left have decided that white bigotry is bad, which is true, but they've decided that non-white bigotry is totally okay because it is non-white bigotry, therefore it is not bigotry because non-white people cannot be bigots. 0.84

00:08:56.000 That's a very bad thing and it's contributing to a sense of destruction in America's politics in a pretty significant way.

00:09:03.000 The intersectional politics that have dominated our proceedings over the last few years are really quite disgusting.

00:09:10.000 Now speaking of disgusting, I want to talk about a piece over at the UK Daily Mail because I think it is again indicative of a mentality on the left.

00:09:17.000 So we're going to talk about a couple of ideas today about where the left is going.

00:09:21.000 So the left is moving in a couple of different directions.

00:09:23.000 So, direction number one, the left is moving, is in this intersectional direction where race matters more than anything else, and certain races are more valuable than other races, and we can determine whether your opinion is good or decent or valuable or worth listening to based on the color of your skin or the formation of your bone structure.

00:09:40.000 We can tell all of that just by looking at you, whether we ought to give you a listen or not.

00:09:43.000 That's point number one in the left's new agenda.

00:09:45.000 Point number two in the left's new agenda is that all moral standards are subservient to your suffering.

00:09:51.000 That we ought to give you leeway because you've had a hard life.

00:09:55.000 This has been part of leftist trope since forever, basically.

00:09:58.000 I mean, even if you go back and you listen to West Side Story, the song G Officer Krupke is based on mocking this trope.

00:10:04.000 That people who are juvenile delinquents are only juvenile delinquents because they've been put upon.

00:10:08.000 In reality, people are juvenile delinquents very often because they make a choice that is a really bad choice and decide to be bad people.

00:10:15.000 Well, the left has decided they're going to double down on the idea that you're allowed to do bad things so long as those bad things make you feel good.

00:10:22.000 That's what this article is in the UK Daily Mail.

00:10:24.000 It's an article by a woman named Julianne Ralph.

00:10:26.000 She's a 69-year-old mother of a 47-year-old son.

00:10:28.000 His name is Stephen.

00:10:30.000 There's only one problem.

00:10:31.000 Stephen has Down Syndrome.

00:10:32.000 And that means that Jillian wishes that she had killed him before he was born.

00:10:36.000 I'm not joking.

00:10:37.000 It's an actual, like, eight-page article in the UK Daily Mail.

00:10:40.000 The piece is basically this heartbreaking, extraordinarily lengthy description of how hard it is to deal with a Down Syndrome child.

00:10:48.000 Jillian's care for her son is obviously heroic.

00:10:51.000 This Jillian Ralph person, right, she's taking care of her son, who is severely Down Syndrome, and, and...

00:10:56.000 You know, can't take care of himself, can't wipe himself.

00:10:58.000 He's now 47 years old and all the rest.

00:11:00.000 But here is what Ralph says.

00:11:01.000 She says,

00:11:13.000 I'm now 69 and Roy is 70, Roy's her husband, and we'll celebrate our golden wedding anniversary next month.

00:11:19.000 Perhaps you'll expect me to say that over time I grew to accept my son's disability.

00:11:22.000 That now, looking back on that day 47 years later, none of us could imagine life without him.

00:11:27.000 And that I'm grateful I was never given the option to abort.

00:11:29.000 However, you'd be wrong.

00:11:30.000 Because while I do love my son and am fiercely protective of him, I know our lives would have been happier and far less complicated if he had never been born.

00:11:37.000 I do wish I'd had an abortion.

00:11:38.000 I wish it every day.

00:11:39.000 If he had not been born, I'd probably have gone on to have another baby.

00:11:41.000 We would have had a normal family life, and Andrew would have had the comfort rather than the responsibility of a sibling after we're gone.

00:11:47.000 Instead, Steven, who struggles to speak and function in the modern world, has brought a great deal of stress and heartache into our lives, and this is why I want to speak in support of the 92% of women who choose to abort their babies after discovering they have Down syndrome.

00:11:59.000 Okay, so the second point in the Democratic platform, first point is intersectionality.

00:12:03.000 Second point is this idea that subjective pain allows you to perform objectively sinful activities.

00:12:09.000 We'll talk about that in just a second.

00:12:10.000 First, let's talk about your impending doom.

00:12:12.000 Okay, you're gonna die someday.

00:12:14.000 It may not be that far away.

00:12:16.000 I mean, I'm not gonna hint at it.

00:12:17.000 I'm not gonna hint that I know the precise day upon which you will plot.

00:12:20.000 I may or may not know that, but when you do plot, the one thing that you're gonna wish you had done is get life insurance.

00:12:25.000 And that's why you shouldn't have wasted your time.

00:12:26.000 You should have gone over to Policy Genius right now.

00:12:29.000 Besides, life insurance rates are the lowest they've now been in 20 years.

00:12:32.000 The best time to buy is now, and the best place to buy life insurance is policygenius.com.

00:12:35.000 Policygenius is the easy way to compare life insurance online.

00:12:38.000 In just 5 minutes, you can compare quotes from the top insurers to find the best policy for you.

00:12:42.000 And when you compare quotes, you save money.

00:12:44.000 It is indeed that simple.

00:12:45.000 Policygenius has helped over 4 million people shop for insurance.

00:12:48.000 They've placed over $20 billion in coverage.

00:12:50.000 And they don't just make life insurance easy.

00:12:51.000 They also compare disability insurance, and renter's insurance, and health insurance.

00:12:55.000 If you care about it, they can cover it for you.

00:12:57.000 So if you've been putting off getting life insurance, there's no reason to do it anymore.

00:13:00.000 Go to policygenius.com.

00:13:01.000 Get quotes.

00:13:02.000 Apply in minutes.

00:13:02.000 It is that easy.

00:13:03.000 You can do it right now.

00:13:04.000 And you should, because again, the rates are their lowest in 20 years.

00:13:07.000 Policygenius.com.

00:13:08.000 It is the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.

00:13:11.000 Go check it out right now.

00:13:12.000 Policygenius.com.

00:13:14.000 Don't leave your family without any cash, should you plot.

00:13:15.000 Policygenius.com.

00:13:17.000 Go check it out.

00:13:18.000 Okay, so point one in the Democratic platform, intersectionality.

00:13:21.000 Point two, subjective

00:13:24.000 So, if you're somebody who's had to suffer with having to deal with a Down syndrome child, you should go out there and you should talk openly about the fact that you wish you'd killed that person before birth.

00:13:34.000 Now, never mind that's deeply immoral.

00:13:36.000 Never mind that having children is always a sacrifice.

00:13:40.000 In my case, it's also a joy because I, thank God, have two healthy children, even though, you know, there are hard times, including, you know, we've had to have open-heart surgery on our daughter.

00:13:49.000 That doesn't mean that pain is a good excuse for obliterating another human life.

00:13:54.000 How many people who are 60 years old have an 80 year old parent who is suffering in the throes of dementia?

00:14:01.000 Does that mean that it's moral to stick a pin in their arm?

00:14:03.000 Stick a needle in their arm and just put them down?

00:14:05.000 Like a dog?

00:14:07.000 Does it mean that it's okay?

00:14:08.000 When somebody is causing you insane amounts of pain, is it okay to go murder them?

00:14:11.000 When that person is causing you grief and pain and difficulty, is it okay for you to actually go and kill that person?

00:14:15.000 Of course the answer is no, but in the democratic agenda, it really is that our level of sympathy is supposed to trump objective morality and the value of human life.

00:14:25.000 So that's prong number two in the democratic platform.

00:14:27.000 All of this is is peculiarly self-centered.

00:14:30.000 That if you're a particular race, you get to be as vengeful as you want about another race, so long as you're not white. 0.94

00:14:34.000 And that if you are suffering from anything in your life, you get to obliterate that thing, so long as Democrats say it's okay for you to obliterate that thing.

00:14:41.000 And that brings us to the third prong of the Democratic platform, and that is the economic plan.

00:14:46.000 The economic plan, of course, is Democratic Socialism.

00:14:48.000 So let's talk about Democratic Socialism.

00:14:50.000 Obviously, this is rising inside the Democratic Party.

00:14:52.000 There's this great battle going on right now inside the Democratic Party for the future of that party.

00:14:59.000 They're sort of the gradualists, and then there are the extremists.

00:15:01.000 The gradualists are people like Barack Obama, believe it or not, and Hillary Clinton.

00:15:05.000 People who believe that you can't go full-scale socialist without alienating the American people and disrupting the system.

00:15:10.000 So you have to take it one step at a time.

00:15:11.000 We'll move toward more and more socialism, more and more restributionism, in short order.

00:15:16.000 And then there are the people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

00:15:20.000 I'm getting better at her name, guys.

00:15:21.000 I'm saying it right now.

00:15:22.000 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who says, let's go full-scale socialism right now.

00:15:25.000 This is the Bernie Sanders plan.

00:15:26.000 Let's go full-scale socialism right now.

00:15:28.000 Well, Barack Obama is now sounding off on the 2018 elections in a really interesting way.

00:15:33.000 So here is what the former president has to say.

00:15:36.000 He announced on Wednesday the first wave of Democratic candidates that he is endorsing for November.

00:15:41.000 In a series of tweets, he listed candidates in more than a dozen states that he is backing in 2018.

00:15:44.000 He wrote,

00:15:54.000 I'm confident that together, we'll strengthen the country we love by restoring opportunity, repairing our alliances, and standing in the world, and upholding our fundamental commitment to justice, fairness, responsibility, and the rule of law.

00:16:06.000 But first, they need our vote.

00:16:07.000 So who exactly did he endorse?

00:16:09.000 Well, he endorsed Gavin Newsom in California, who is, to put it kindly, a poop tornado.

00:16:14.000 Jared Palos in Colorado, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, J.B.

00:16:17.000 Pritzker in Illinois, and Richard Cordray in Ohio.

00:16:20.000 He also endorsed a bunch of people in the House, but he did not endorse Beto O'Rourke in Texas, for example.

00:16:25.000 He also did not endorse Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

00:16:28.000 Now, the reason that he didn't endorse Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is because he doesn't want to endorse the most radical candidates he can find.

00:16:34.000 He doesn't want to give that side of the party impetus running up to the 2020 election.

00:16:38.000 Obama's a smart enough politician to know that if Democrats want to win in 2020, they have to present a candidate who is not seen as too extreme by the American people.

00:16:46.000 The Democratic Party, however, is running full scale toward embrace of democratic socialism.

00:16:50.000 So, obviously, they've decided to make their face Ms.

00:16:52.000 Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who, by the way, it's really bizarre that she's being treated as this rising star in the Democratic Party.

00:16:59.000 She ousted Joe Crowley, who is a Democrat in her district and was this sort of well-known 10-term Democrat in New York.

00:17:07.000 The district is 50% Latino or 50% Hispanic.

00:17:10.000 She is also Hispanic.

00:17:12.000 Joe Crowley is not Hispanic.

00:17:13.000 She won with a grand sum total of 17,000 votes in this primary.

00:17:17.000 So she won 17,000 votes in a primary.

00:17:19.000 It's like as many votes as I would get in a CPAC straw poll.

00:17:21.000 Okay, she won that.

00:17:22.000 She won 17,000 votes in this primary.

00:17:26.000 And this makes her the new face of the Democratic Party because she's 29 years old and because she's kind of pretty and because she has a certain level of charisma and enthusiasm even though she doesn't know what the hell she's talking about.

00:17:36.000 But the problem is that the democratic platform of democratic socialism is too extreme for the American people as well it should be.

00:17:42.000 But now it's being treated as mainstream.

00:17:43.000 And so there's a bevy of articles over the past several weeks about democratic socialism, its rise, why this is the future of the Democratic Party.

00:17:50.000 And there's a lot of talk in 2016 about how Trumpism was taking over the Republican Party.

00:17:54.000 And there were a lot of attempts to say what Trumpism was.

00:17:57.000 Was Trumpism about

00:17:58.000 Protection of trade.

00:18:00.000 Was Trumpism about subsidies to blue-collar white areas?

00:18:03.000 Was Trumpism about protectionism and closing the border?

00:18:06.000 It turns out that Trumpism was basically just about Trump, right?

00:18:08.000 Trumpism was about people liked that President Trump is a puncher, people like the President Trump is aggressive.

00:18:13.000 There's a wide variety of perspectives about his policies, but there's not a lot of variety about people in the Republican Party liking Trump personally, which is why he has such diehard loyalty among his base.

00:18:26.000 But for the Democrats, there really is an ideological takeover of this party that has happened since 2010.

00:18:31.000 The Republican Party has not moved in ideology since 2010, which is why Trump is now implementing policies that would be exactly the same in a Rubio administration, or a Cruz administration, or even a Jeb Bush administration, except for maybe on immigration.

00:18:42.000 But when it comes to the Democratic Party, their actual policies have moved hardcore to the left.

00:18:47.000 This is what Obama is recognizing, is that the Democratic Party has moved to the left.

00:18:50.000 So again, their new three prongs are intersectionality, complete subjectivism when it comes to personal activity, even activity that affects others, and finally, and most importantly, an embrace of democratic socialism.

00:19:02.000 And this embrace of democratic socialism is the one that's going to absolutely destroy them.

00:19:05.000 Intersectionality alienates the middle of the country.

00:19:07.000 It alienates white voters.

00:19:09.000 The subjectivity alienates religious voters, and democratic socialism alienates anyone with half a brain.

00:19:16.000 Because democratic socialism does not, in fact, work.

00:19:18.000 Now, in a second, I want to go through some of the myths that surround democratic socialism, because there's this new kind of narrative that's being put out by a bunch of folks on the left, that democratic socialism is different than socialism, that we ought to take it very seriously, that if you look at the United States, what really is missing is this sense of redistributionist justice, this social justice that we need to bring about.

00:19:39.000 We need to rectify income inequality by moving toward a more equitably distributed resource base.

00:19:46.000 That's what we really need?

00:19:47.000 But that's not really what Democratic Socialism is about.

00:19:50.000 What Democratic Socialism is about is a complete takeover of the economy.

00:19:53.000 So, let's jump into seven myths, okay?

00:19:55.000 There are seven myths about Democratic Socialism that are purveyed by these advocates of the new Democratic Party platform.

00:20:01.000 You know, the Ocasio-Cortezes and the Bernie Sanders.

00:20:04.000 So first, they claim that Democratic Socialism is not the same as Socialism.

00:20:08.000 That is not accurate.

00:20:10.000 So democratic socialism is the idea that it's going to be socialism, but we're going to vote for it, and therefore it's not really socialism.

00:20:18.000 Well, that's not what socialism means.

00:20:19.000 Socialism is just about the idea, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, as ensured by nationalization and centralization of government resources and nationalization of industry.

00:20:31.000 Socialist programs redistribute.

00:20:33.000 Socialist economies abolish private property and nationalize industry in order to redistribute.

00:20:36.000 It's important to differentiate these two things.

00:20:39.000 So, for example, if you have a socialist welfare policy that takes money from some and gives to others, that is a socialist welfare policy.

00:20:46.000 It does not mean you live in a socialist country.

00:20:48.000 The United States is a capitalist country with socialist programs, right?

00:20:52.000 So Medicare is a socialist program of redistribution.

00:20:54.000 Social Security is a socialist program of redistribution.

00:20:57.000 We lie about it and we say that it's you putting the money in and getting it back out, but it's actually a socialist redistribution program.

00:21:02.000 Socialist redistribution programs are socialist.

00:21:05.000 It doesn't make the entire country a socialist country.

00:21:08.000 It makes it a capitalist country with a solid welfare base.

00:21:11.000 Which is still not ideal, but we have to be clear about what we are talking about.

00:21:14.000 Nationalized healthcare is socialized medicine, but Canada is not a socialist country.

00:21:19.000 Canada is in fact a capitalist country with socialized medicine.

00:21:22.000 It's an important distinction, we need to be clear about that.

00:21:24.000 And when democratic socialists say that democratic socialism is different from socialism,

00:21:29.000 Not really.

00:21:30.000 They need to be clear about what they're saying.

00:21:31.000 Myth number two is that democratic socialism is not, in fact, use of force.

00:21:35.000 So democratic socialists claim that they aren't for overthrowing democracy.

00:21:38.000 They want industry to just be run by the people.

00:21:40.000 So factories should be run by the workers. 0.97

00:21:43.000 And industries should be run by the employees.

00:21:45.000 How are you going to do that, though?

00:21:46.000 Well, what you're going to do is you're going to go out and you're going to vote for the government to take over those industries and basically regulate them into the dust.

00:21:52.000 Okay, that is, in fact, use of force.

00:21:54.000 Just because you voted for the use of force doesn't mean that the use of force is not being applied.

00:21:58.000 If Colton and I decide that we want to rob somebody else in this room until we vote on it, then, yeah, you.

00:22:03.000 If we decide that we're going to rob this young lady right here, then that's still theft, right?

00:22:09.000 Even if we vote on it, that's use of force and that's theft, because I assume she's not going to willingly give me her wallet, and she shouldn't, because it's not my money.

00:22:16.000 Okay, so, the idea that democratic socialism is not force is, of course, very silly,

00:22:21.000 And socialism always tends to degrade into force because what happens if the people don't want socialism?

00:22:25.000 What happens if the people vote against democratic socialism?

00:22:28.000 What happens if they vote against industrialization, nationalization of industry, and quote-unquote democratization of industry?

00:22:35.000 What if they vote against that stuff?

00:22:37.000 Well, if they vote against that stuff, then it must be because they are emissaries of the evil capitalist system that bred them, and so we must gulag them.

00:22:43.000 We must send them out for re-education to the gulags, or we must liquidate the dissenters.

00:22:48.000 Third myth that is pervaded by these pushers of democratic socialism is that socialism is fairer.

00:22:54.000 They say socialism is more fair.

00:22:56.000 Yeah, I'm going to talk about that in just a second.

00:22:58.000 First, let's talk about your tooth health.

00:23:01.000 Okay, the reality is that you don't brush your teeth twice a day and you don't spend the requisite amount of time on your teeth.

00:23:05.000 And then you go in and your dentist asks you about all this stuff and you lie to your dentist because everybody lies to their dentist.

00:23:09.000 But there's no reason for you to lie to your dentist.

00:23:11.000 Instead, just go get the Quip electric toothbrush.

00:23:13.000 Quip is the new electric toothbrush that packs just the right amount of vibration into a slimmer design at a fraction of the cost of bulkier traditional electric brushes.

00:23:20.000 And because the thing that cleans your mouth should also be clean, Quip's subscription includes

00:23:35.000 A dentist refresh schedule where you get a fresh brush head every three months for just five bucks, including free shipping worldwide.

00:23:42.000 I've got Quip.

00:23:43.000 It is fantastic.

00:23:44.000 I like not having to think about when to replace the brush head and the Quip toothbrush travels really easily, which is why I'm so angry at myself that I forgot my Quip electric toothbrush at home on this particular junket.

00:23:55.000 Quip starts at just $25, and if you go to getquip.com slash Shapiro right now, you'll get your first refill pack free with a Quip electric toothbrush.

00:24:02.000 Again, first refill pack free at getquip.com slash Shapiro.

00:24:05.000 That's G-E-T-Q-U-I-P dot com slash Shapiro. 0.80

00:24:08.000 Go check it out.

00:24:09.000 You're not going to want to leave your Quip electric toothbrush behind.

00:24:11.000 Go check it out.

00:24:12.000 Getquip.com slash Shapiro for that special discount and deal.

00:24:16.000 Okay, so...

00:24:18.000 The third claim that is made by advocates of democratic socialism is that socialism is fairer.

00:24:24.000 Socialism is not fairer.

00:24:26.000 It is deeply unfair.

00:24:27.000 Fairness rests on the basic idea that you get what you deserve.

00:24:30.000 This is why, it's really fascinating, there are all these social science studies that demonstrate that people will go out of their way, they will harm themselves in order to punish people who they feel are cheating.

00:24:39.000 So if you play, there are all these really interesting studies where

00:24:43.000 They'll put a group of people in the room and you have a choice as to whether you want to sacrifice some of your own money to punish somebody else in the room or whether you want to keep your own money or whether you want to grab somebody else's money.

00:24:53.000 And people who grab other people's money

00:24:55.000 Are immediately hit with people who will spend their own money in order to punish those people.

00:24:58.000 Human beings have an innate sense that it is wrong to take other people's money without proper justification and without any right to that money.

00:25:06.000 Socialism seeks to destroy consequences for actions.

00:25:09.000 Charity is based on the idea that we ought to help people in need.

00:25:12.000 Socialism is based on the principle that need creates additional rights.

00:25:15.000 This is a very, very different thing.

00:25:17.000 Charity is about my capacity to give.

00:25:20.000 What about my obligation to give?

00:25:21.000 Socialism is about the idea that if I am poor, I now have additional rights that I did not have when I was not poor.

00:25:28.000 Simply by virtue of becoming poor, I now have the ability to steal your wallet.

00:25:31.000 So when I wasn't poor, if I stole your wallet, you would have said that I was a criminal.

00:25:34.000 But now that I am poor and I steal your wallet, well, that's just socialism.

00:25:37.000 That's deeply, deeply immoral stuff.

00:25:40.000 A fourth claim that democratic socialists make is that socialism was not present in the USSR or Venezuela or Cuba.

00:25:46.000 This is what we call the no true Scotsman fallacy.

00:25:48.000 Anything that is bad isn't something that you did.

00:25:51.000 Any communist country that ends in murderous tyranny isn't actually communism or Marxism.

00:25:59.000 Those are just misapplications of the rule.

00:26:01.000 We've never actually tried real Marxism.

00:26:03.000 If we tried real Marxism, you'd actually probably like it.

00:26:06.000 This is an argument that losers make with regard to dating.

00:26:11.000 Where a girl says, I don't want to date you because I've seen how you date other people. 1.00

00:26:13.000 You're like, right, but you haven't tried it yet.

00:26:15.000 If you tried it, then it would just be, it would be completely different.

00:26:18.000 Your life would be so much better if you dated me.

00:26:20.000 Even though you saw how like I used to...

00:26:22.000 I used to dine and ditch on my prior girlfriend.

00:26:26.000 That wasn't the real me.

00:26:28.000 Once you get to know the real me, you'll understand that I pay for the best dinners in town.

00:26:32.000 If you believe that guy, you're an idiot.

00:26:33.000 And if you believe socialists who say that USSR, Venezuela, and Cuba are not socialists, you are also, similarly, an idiot.

00:26:39.000 And the fact is that all of these countries are stated Marxist countries, they all ended the same way, because when you take socialism to its ultimate extreme, which is nationalization of all industry, and shutdowns of private industry, through use of government force, you end up in a pretty awful place, pretty quickly.

00:26:53.000 Which brings us to the fifth claim that democratic socialists make.

00:26:56.000 And this is the claim that they are using most often right now.

00:27:00.000 That is the claim that socialism is what makes Nordic countries awesome.

00:27:03.000 So what they will say, you'll hear Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren all say that when they say socialism, what they really mean is Norway.

00:27:10.000 They don't mean Venezuela, they mean Norway.

00:27:12.000 They don't mean Cuba, they mean Denmark.

00:27:14.000 There are a few problems with this.

00:27:16.000 The big problem is that, again, they are conflating socialist redistribution programs with socialist economies.

00:27:22.000 Denmark has socialist redistribution programs.

00:27:25.000 We have to assess whether those are successful on their own merits.

00:27:27.000 Denmark is not a socialist economy.

00:27:29.000 Denmark is a freer economy than the United States.

00:27:31.000 It has higher tax rates, that's the redistributionist part, but in terms of business regulation, in terms of capacity to attract foreign investment with free markets,

00:27:40.000 Denmark is significantly more free than the United States.

00:27:43.000 In fact, in 2015, Denmark's Prime Minister explained, quote,

00:27:56.000 This is exactly right.

00:27:57.000 The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing source, this is their ranking of economic freedom.

00:28:01.000 Switzerland, right, ranks 4th.

00:28:03.000 Denmark, 12th.

00:28:04.000 Sweden, 15th.

00:28:05.000 The Netherlands, 17th.

00:28:06.000 The United States, the evil, rapacious, capitalist United States, ranks 18th in economic freedom according to the Heritage Foundation.

00:28:12.000 Norway, that socialist hotbed, ranks 23rd.

00:28:16.000 What made all of these countries wealthy, by the way, is the fact that they are capitalist and that they were more capitalist in the past.

00:28:22.000 Capitalism makes countries wealthy.

00:28:24.000 Socialism simply takes all that wealth and redistributes it, shutting down industry in the process.

00:28:29.000 And here's the proof that all of these countries were doing well long before they had socialism.

00:28:34.000 The proof is that, by statistics, this is the case.

00:28:37.000 Number one, by statistics, this is the case.

00:28:39.000 Number two, if you take all these people from Denmark, from Norway, from Sweden, and you actually transplant them to the United States, they have higher incomes in the United States than they do in all of these other places.

00:28:47.000 They actually earn more, and they do better economically.

00:28:49.000 So the idea that socialism is what creates awesomeness in these cultures is not right.

00:28:53.000 Okay, culture created awesomeness in these cultures and then socialism was a follow-on that has actually tamped down the economy in these various countries.

00:29:00.000 When you take that culture and you transplant it to a free country like the United States where tax rates are lower, then all these cultures thrive in the United States as well.

00:29:08.000 Now, Nordic countries do have high levels of social services because they charge exorbitant taxes.

00:29:12.000 Denmark has a 60.3% tax rate plus a 25% national sales tax.

00:29:16.000 Which is why everything costs an arm and a leg in Denmark.

00:29:18.000 Between 2007 and 2015, not surprisingly, Denmark experienced a 5.5% decline in real GDP.

00:29:26.000 Which is comparable to the decline in growth in Spain, which essentially went bankrupt during the same period.

00:29:32.000 The natural result was the election of a center-right coalition in Denmark.

00:29:35.000 Sweden, another supposed socialist paradise, grew because of capitalism.

00:29:39.000 According to an economic scholar named Nima Zananjanji, who is from Norway, between 1870 and 1936, Sweden enjoyed the highest growth rate in the industrialized world.

00:29:47.000 Between 1936 and 2008, the growth rate dropped to 13th out of 28 industrialized nations.

00:29:52.000 Between 1975 and the mid-1990s, Sweden dropped from being the 4th richest nation in the world to the 13th richest nation in the world.

00:29:58.000 And that is a direct result of restrictions on the economy and redistributionist programs.

00:30:02.000 Norway, which is the left favorite country these days, they moved on from Denmark and Sweden because both of those places have elected right-wing governments now.

00:30:09.000 Norway is propped up by an enormous, enormous oil find off their coast.

00:30:15.000 And even their nationalized oil companies, which are now used to prop up their social welfare programs, those companies run along private lines in that the government basically is a major stockholder in these companies.

00:30:26.000 But it's not just government appointees who run the companies.

00:30:29.000 It's people who are supposed to run these along profit lines.

00:30:31.000 The government is not actually allowed to intervene in policy in serious ways in the Norwegian oil industry.

00:30:37.000 It's also worth noting that in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the top 10% of wealth owners hold between 65 and 69% of all wealth in those countries.

00:30:43.000 That's actually not that much lower than in the United States.

00:30:50.000 All of these countries were significantly more robust economically before they started with their socialist nonsense.

00:30:57.000 And the idea that high life expectancy in Scandinavia is an outgrowth of socialism is not true.

00:31:02.000 In 1960, Norway had the highest life expectancy in the OECD, followed by Sweden, Iceland, and Denmark.

00:31:08.000 By 2005, the gap between Scandinavian countries and the UK and the US had actually shrunk considerably.

00:31:13.000 That's after the implementation of socialism in a lot of these countries.

00:31:17.000 Also worth noting, you can't just take the socialist programs of Norway, which may work for a country of 5.3 million people, and apply them to the United States, where there is not the same level of cultural cohesion, cultural homogeneity, and a history of exactly that sort of cohesion and homogeneity.

00:31:33.000 The population of LA County alone is double the population of Norway.

00:31:36.000 You can't just take a program that works for five people and apply it to five million and expect it to work exactly the same way.

00:31:41.000 Okay, in just a second, I'm going to get to the last couple of myths about democratic socialism being pushed by the left.

00:31:46.000 But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

00:31:49.000 For $9.99 a month, you can get a subscription to Daily Wire.

00:31:52.000 When you do, you get the rest of this show live, the rest of Andrew Klavan's show live, the rest of Michael Moll's show live.

00:31:55.000 You get to be part of our mailbag, which we are doing tomorrow, so get your questions in right now.

00:31:59.000 Go check it out.

00:32:00.000 Also, we have a Sunday special coming up, so if you subscribe on YouTube or iTunes, then you get to see me talk to David Mamet and all the other people who we've had Sunday specials with.

00:32:10.000 A lot of really great episodes over there.

00:32:13.000 And for $99, you get the entire package, the whole shebang, plus our fabled, famous, leftist, tears, hot or cold Tumblr, which you will enjoy, I think, beyond all moral bounds, you will enjoy that Tumblr.

00:32:24.000 So go check that out right now.

00:32:25.000 Again, subscribe to YouTube, iTunes, leave us a review.

00:32:27.000 We are the largest, fastest-growing conservative podcast in the nation.

00:32:35.000 Okay, final two myths about democratic socialism.

00:32:37.000 So, we are also hearing that democratic socialism is the solution when it comes to the medical industry.

00:32:42.000 What we really need is to nationalize our healthcare system.

00:32:44.000 Now, let's be clear.

00:32:46.000 There are lots of different government schemes with regard to medicine.

00:32:49.000 America's scheme does kind of suck. 1.00

00:32:51.000 Okay, because it is not a free market system.

00:32:52.000 The great lie about America's medical system is that it is free market.

00:32:55.000 It is not.

00:32:56.000 It is the most heavily regulated area of American life.

00:32:58.000 The profit margins for insurance companies in the health insurance industry are like 2%.

00:33:02.000 They're not that high.

00:33:03.000 And one of the reasons that the health insurance system sucks in the United States is because of employer-based insurance programs, which were crammed down by the government in the 1950s.

00:33:11.000 Basically, in the 1950s, we had wage controls.

00:33:14.000 And in order to edge around those wage controls to give people raises, companies started paying for their employees' health insurance.

00:33:20.000 But there's no reason that your health insurance should be tied to your job.

00:33:23.000 Really, you should just be paying for your health insurance yourself.

00:33:25.000 That's what happens in Switzerland, which is probably the world's most successful healthcare system.

00:33:29.000 The way that Switzerland works is that you are mandated, just like Obamacare, you are mandated on an individual level to buy your health insurance, but there's no employer-based insurance in Switzerland.

00:33:37.000 Plus,

00:33:38.000 They penalize you pretty heavily if you don't buy health insurance.

00:33:40.000 If you don't buy health insurance and then you get sick, and then you go in for care, then they will force you not only to pay a surcharge of like 50% on your health insurance bill, they will also back charge you for all the health insurance you should have been paying for the last several years.

00:33:53.000 Switzerland has a very, very robust program in force to force people to buy their own health insurance.

00:34:00.000 It is also worth noting that all of these other countries that supposedly have wonderful health care systems have their drawbacks as well.

00:34:07.000 Canada, of course, has very long wait lines.

00:34:09.000 The same thing is true in the UK.

00:34:11.000 In Australia, a large percentage of the population buy supplemental health insurance on the private market.

00:34:15.000 So it's not just a matter of a universal health care system in Australia.

00:34:18.000 And they are facing some significant financial issues because of the aging of the population.

00:34:23.000 When people talk socialized medicine as the be-all end-all, they're also forgetting that virtually all medical advances in the industrialized world are coming out of the United States.

00:34:30.000 The U.S.

00:34:31.000 is responsible for 44% of all new molecular entities, which would be the drugs that you actually take, and that those numbers would be a lot higher if not for government regulation from the FDA.

00:34:41.000 We also drive medical innovation in other countries.

00:34:42.000 The truth is that the American healthcare market, where people are able to charge what these drugs are worth, actually subsidizes the rest of the world.

00:34:48.000 So,

00:34:49.000 When Canada collectively bargains with a drug company to provide them a certain number of drugs, they're able to do that because the United States is paying a higher price.

00:34:57.000 Because we are paying a higher price in the private market for all of that.

00:35:01.000 So, they're exploiting, all these drug companies are basically exploiting the private market, and then making deals on the back end with all these socialized medicine systems.

00:35:08.000 If the United States went socialized medicine, the prices would skyrocket for everyone on drugs, because nobody would be subsidizing this stuff anymore.

00:35:15.000 Also, it is still true.

00:35:15.000 If you've got the money, America is the best place to be for medicine.

00:35:18.000 If you've got the cash, then America is still the best place to be.

00:35:21.000 It would be even more like that if we would deregulate the system.

00:35:23.000 Okay, final lie.

00:35:24.000 Final lie that democratic socialists tell is that capitalism is a giant failure.

00:35:28.000 This is the dumbest argument of all.

00:35:30.000 Capitalism is the most dramatic success in the history of the world.

00:35:32.000 People living on a dollar a day or less

00:35:35.000 That fell from about 27% of the global population in 1970, all the way down to 5.4% in 2006.

00:35:38.000 That's an 80% decline.

00:35:38.000 Poverty worldwide included 94% of the world's population in 1820.

00:35:41.000 In 2011, it was down to 17%.

00:35:41.000 Mortality rates for kids under the age of 5 declined by nearly half between 1990 and 2013.

00:35:45.000 Virtually no American lives in poverty by global standards.

00:36:01.000 So the third plank of the democratic platform, which is this economic democratic socialism, it's a giant fail.

00:36:07.000 It's a giant fail on every score.

00:36:08.000 And the fact that it's even being considered by the Democrats demonstrates how far left they have moved right now.

00:36:14.000 Now, in just a second, I want to talk about the latest with regard to President Trump and witch hunts and Paul Manafort and all the rest.

00:36:22.000 There's a lot to talk about there, but final note when it comes to the Democrats' kind of socialist platform here.

00:36:29.000 The final note is that the only thing that will allow Americans to vote for a platform this radical, an intersectionality-based, subjective morality-based, democratic socialism-based platform, is if the Republican Party just sucks at things.

00:36:42.000 Really.

00:36:43.000 We have such a great story to tell.

00:36:44.000 Conservatism has a great story to tell.

00:36:46.000 A story about individual human freedom.

00:36:48.000 About individual rights.

00:36:49.000 Inalienable rights.

00:36:50.000 About the right to life.

00:36:51.000 About the value of life.

00:36:53.000 About the value of serious morality that has consequences for your daily life.

00:36:58.000 About the idea of hard work and achievement and meritocracy.

00:37:01.000 If we blow that opportunity and hand it over to these idiots, if we blow that opportunity and hand it over to this radical program, that's a referendum on our inability to sell the greatest, honestly, the greatest system that has ever been devised by God or man.

00:37:15.000 I mean, it's really an impressive failure on the part of conservatives if they can't sell this stuff.

00:37:19.000 Okay, speaking of which...

00:37:21.000 The president of the United States is once again going after Jeff Sessions.

00:37:25.000 So on Wednesday, he called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to end the special counsel inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

00:37:31.000 He issued an unambiguous directive on Twitter to shut down an investigation that even now is scrutinizing his tweets for evidence of obstruction.

00:37:37.000 So the left immediately has jumped to, this means that Trump is actually obstructing.

00:37:40.000 This is clearly obstruction.

00:37:42.000 Well, it's actually not clearly obstruction.

00:37:45.000 The reason I can say it's not clearly obstruction is because, in fact, he didn't fire Robert Mueller.

00:37:49.000 He has the power to fire Robert Mueller.

00:37:51.000 He has the power, more importantly, has the power to fire Sessions, the power to fire Rosenstein.

00:37:56.000 He can do whatever he wants.

00:37:56.000 He's the head of the executive branch.

00:37:57.000 He didn't fire him, so this is indeed Trump mouthing off.

00:38:00.000 With that said, is it smart for Trump to mouth off on this sort of stuff?

00:38:03.000 No, it's not particularly smart of the president to mouth off on this kind of stuff.

00:38:07.000 Like, for example, the president didn't just mouth off about the Mueller investigation, he also mouthed off about the Manafort trial.

00:38:13.000 So Paul Manafort is his former campaign manager, ran the campaign for something like four months.

00:38:17.000 I actually believe that Trump didn't really know who he was, because he was sort of an RNC insider who was appointed by the RNC to help Trump run his campaign, and then he was out as soon as bad stories started to break about Paul Manafort.

00:38:28.000 Well, Manafort is now on trial for fraud, and Trump tweeted out that even Alphonse Capone was not treated with the sort of disdain with which they are treating Paul Manafort.

00:38:37.000 Why is the president defending Paul Manafort?

00:38:38.000 The Manafort trial has nothing to do with Russian collusion.

00:38:41.000 The Manafort trial has nothing to do with the 2016 election.

00:38:44.000 All of the charges being brought against Paul Manafort pre-exist the election cycle of 2016.

00:38:49.000 Why the president wants to jump in here with both feet is absolutely beyond me.

00:38:53.000 It doesn't make any sense, except I think he's just so angry at Mueller right now that he is willing to basically rip on anything Team Mueller does, which isn't a particularly good look.

00:39:02.000 I'll also say, in Paul Manafort's defense, the prosecution has focused apparently an awful lot on the clothing that he bought with alleged Russian money.

00:39:11.000 So, I mean, here's what the prosecution has presented evidence that Paul Manafort spent

00:39:17.000 $15,000 on a jacket made of ostrich.

00:39:21.000 I am not kidding.

00:39:22.000 He's like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

00:39:24.000 He's got a vest made of real gorilla chest.

00:39:27.000 He's got a $15,000 ostrich jacket.

00:39:29.000 He also has a $9,500 ostrich vest.

00:39:31.000 And I think most importantly, he has an $18,500 python jacket.

00:39:37.000 I think that there is a solid case to be made that we should exonerate him based on his wardrobe choices.

00:39:43.000 I think that if you can't use Russian money to buy a $19,000 python jacket, this is no longer America.

00:39:50.000 Listen, America, this is America.

00:39:54.000 In America, you get to buy a $19,000 python jacket if you want to buy a $19,000 python jacket.

00:39:58.000 Actually, this is kind of funny.

00:39:59.000 So, the judge in the Manafort trial actually scolded the lawyers for bringing all this stuff up.

00:40:05.000 Judge Ellis, he said, the government doesn't want to prosecute someone because they wear nice clothes, do they?

00:40:09.000 Let's move on.

00:40:09.000 That's enough.

00:40:10.000 So I kind of appreciate the judge for doing all that, and I agree.

00:40:13.000 Again, if I decide to go out and I decide to make a jacket out of gopher heads, that is my prerogative. 0.84

00:40:19.000 And if it cost me $19,000 in Putin's money, that's my prerogative too, man.

00:40:23.000 Come on.

00:40:23.000 This is still America.

00:40:24.000 Now, here's the problem with all of this, obviously, for President Trump.

00:40:28.000 The more President Trump focuses in on the Mueller investigation, the less we are talking about all of the great messages that conservatism has to provide.

00:40:34.000 The less we are talking about the failures of the democratic program.

00:40:37.000 The less we are talking about socialism versus capitalism.

00:40:40.000 The less we are talking about inalienable rights versus government interventionism.

00:40:44.000 If you're not talking about those things, then you are failing to paint the left for what they are.

00:40:48.000 If you're talking instead about Robert Mueller is the worst, and Paul Manafort's innocent, it's just a distraction from the program that Republicans can sell right now, a great economy based on increase in capitalistic principles, reduction of regulation, and tax cuts.

00:41:01.000 It's a pretty good sales pitch.

00:41:03.000 But the Republicans aren't making it right now at all, and that is deeply problematic in a number of ways.

00:41:09.000 If President Trump wants to have a Republican Congress, he even cares about that, then it is incumbent on him to start talking about the issues that matter in a way that actually gets people jazzed up for the election and isn't just self-serving narcissism, you know, navel-gazing.

00:41:23.000 Okay, so let's do a couple of things I like, and then we'll do a couple of things that I hate.

00:41:28.000 While I was on the plane, I finally watched the movie Steve Jobs.

00:41:31.000 Danny Boyle was the director, and I would say this is a thing I am lukewarm on.

00:41:35.000 I wouldn't say this is a thing that I like.

00:41:37.000 I will say Michael Fassbender is probably my favorite actor working today, or at least one of the top three.

00:41:42.000 It's like Christian Bale, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Fassbender, I think, maybe?

00:41:45.000 For me?

00:41:46.000 Not necessarily in that order, probably Day-Lewis, Bale, and then Fassbender.

00:41:49.000 In any case, Michael Fassbender stars as Steve Jobs.

00:41:51.000 Doesn't look anything like Steve Jobs, but he's a great actor, so he's able to pull it off.

00:41:56.000 That's what I like about the film, is that Fassbender's performance is really terrific.

00:41:59.000 The things I don't like about the film are that the score is egregiously bad.

00:42:02.000 I mean, the score is just hysterical and overwrought in every conceivable way.

00:42:06.000 And the script is written by Aaron Sorkin, which means that every character is Aaron Sorkin.

00:42:10.000 So when Kate Winslet is acting in this film, it's Aaron Sorkin with a wig.

00:42:14.000 What do you do?

00:42:14.000 You're not an engineer.

00:42:39.000 You're not a designer.

00:42:40.000 You can't put a hammer to a nail.

00:42:43.000 I built the circuit board.

00:42:44.000 The graphical interface was stolen!

00:42:47.000 So how come, ten times in a day, I read Steve Jobs as a genius?

00:42:53.000 What do you do?

00:42:55.000 Musicians play their instruments.

00:42:58.000 I play the orchestra.

00:43:04.000 You see how this reminds you of a friendly face?

00:43:06.000 So the entire movie is built basically around three set pieces, where Fassbender plays Jobs at sort of the launch of the original Mac, which is a failure, and then the launch of Next, which is also a failure, and then the launch of the iMac, which was a success in 1998.

00:43:22.000 So it's kind of interesting.

00:43:26.000 Worth checking out, so go check that out right now.

00:43:28.000 Okay, now let's do a few things that I hate.

00:43:31.000 Let's do it.

00:43:36.000 Okay, so Vox.com has an article today about a Pew survey which has found that Americans say they pray more than any other wealthy nation.

00:43:43.000 55% of Americans report that they pray at least once daily, six percentage points higher than the international average.

00:43:48.000 Well, that may not seem like a big gap on its own.

00:43:50.000 America is an extreme statistical outlier when it comes to countries with at least a $30,000 per person GDP.

00:43:56.000 So in this category, the global average hovers around 40%.

00:43:58.000 So in Canada, for example,

00:44:00.000 Only 25% of people pray daily.

00:44:02.000 That number is 22% in Europe, 18% in Australia, and 6% in Great Britain.

00:44:07.000 In other words, with great wealth comes less religiosity.

00:44:10.000 In the United States, we're still a relatively religious country, and 55% of Americans report praying at least once daily.

00:44:16.000 Vox.com, of course, thinks this is because we're stupid and backwards, and we're a bunch of bitter clingers who cling to our God and our guns.

00:44:21.000 I think this is because America is freaking amazing.

00:44:24.000 Because it really is.

00:44:25.000 You know, one of the things that you learn when you study the Bible is that people don't stop worshipping God when bad things happen to them.

00:44:31.000 This is one of the great lies of atheism, is that the reason people fall away from God is bad stuff happens to them and they look around at the universe and they say, why would a child suffer?

00:44:38.000 There must be no God.

00:44:39.000 That's not the real reason, really, why people stop being religious and worshipping God and praying.

00:44:43.000 The real reason people stop worshipping God and praying is because they look around, things are pretty good, what do I need God for?

00:44:50.000 People get fat and happy, and they think that they did it themselves, and then they feel like God is superfluous.

00:44:55.000 Why do I need to thank God for anything?

00:44:56.000 What am I praying for?

00:44:57.000 Everything is pretty great, and it was created by a bunch of scientists who don't believe in God, so what the hell do I need this whole God thing for?

00:45:03.000 The reason that religiosity is important, particularly in an industrialized, civilized society, is because that is what ties us to basic fundamental principles.

00:45:10.000 And those basic fundamental principles are, in fact, the lines of thought that undergird Western civilization.

00:45:16.000 You would not have that iPhone in your hand were it not for the Bible. 1.00

00:45:19.000 You would not have that iPhone in your hand were it not for Greek reason combined with a biblical sense of morality because capitalism is based on certain principles.

00:45:27.000 Those principles include inalienable rights in you.

00:45:30.000 You have inalienable value.

00:45:31.000 You are worth something.

00:45:32.000 Your labor is worth something.

00:45:34.000 You as an individual are made in God's image and you are more important than any collective that is put together in order to crush your rights on behalf of some sort of communal priority.

00:45:45.000 All of that is rooted in a certain fundamental biblical morality that is based, again, on the most important sentence, I think, in human history.

00:45:52.000 The most important sentence in human history is not, in my opinion, treat thy neighbor as thyself, or love thy neighbor as thyself.

00:45:58.000 It is not, do not unto others what you would have not have them do unto you.

00:46:01.000 I think the most important sentence in human history is that man was made in God's image.

00:46:05.000 That is the most, in, in, in, male and female, he created them.

00:46:08.000 That, that image from Genesis is the most important

00:46:12.000 Verse in the history of humanity and it is the beginning of all wisdom and the beginning of all human rights So I'm deeply grateful that America is is still the most religious country. 0.74

00:46:21.000 It's the reason why we are the world leader Everybody else can basically climb on our backs because the reality is that this country with our backwardness and our religion and our church going Has been driving the global economy for NIA for well over a century for well over a century.

00:46:35.000 Okay other things that I hate today, so

00:46:38.000 The media are still in full-scale weeping mode for themselves.

00:46:42.000 So Jim Acosta is still going on national TV whining about the fact that he went to a Trump rally and people yelled at him.

00:46:47.000 Is it good that people yelled at him at a Trump rally?

00:46:49.000 No, it's not.

00:46:50.000 I said yesterday, I think it's more like a sporting event to people than it really is.

00:46:53.000 Like, I wish I... I would... I hate Jim Acosta.

00:46:56.000 The way you can tell this is when the cameras go off, they immediately go up and they want to take pictures with Jim Acosta, right?

00:47:00.000 They treat Jim Acosta as though he's the rival sports star on another team.

00:47:04.000 So they sort of treat like LeBron James or Laker now.

00:47:07.000 Celtics fans treat LeBron James the way that Trump fans treat Jim Acosta, basically.

00:47:11.000 That LeBron probably comes to the Boston Garden, or whatever they call it now, and he plays, and everybody boos him, and they say that he's a traitor, and they say he's terrible, and then after the game, they are clamoring for an autograph.

00:47:22.000 If you go to Trump rallies, that's actually the way that Acosta is sort of treated.

00:47:25.000 People yell at him, they scream at him, it's fun.

00:47:27.000 It's fun to say that CNN sucks, because CNN does, in many cases, suck.

00:47:30.000 And then, Jim Acosta, and then they go up and they take pictures with Acosta.

00:47:35.000 Well, Acosta is still complaining about this, suggesting that we're not in America anymore.

00:47:38.000 By the way, he came out this morning and attacked Sean Hannity and said that Sean Hannity is a terrible human.

00:47:43.000 So it's okay to attack other members of the media, it's just not okay for anybody to attack Jim Acosta.

00:47:48.000 Here is Jim Acosta talking about his horrifying experiences.

00:47:52.000 I mean, brutal, brutal, terrible.

00:47:54.000 This isn't America anymore.

00:47:55.000 It's just like back in the Soviet Union where they'd stack you up. 0.78

00:47:58.000 At the bottom of the KGB building, where the floors were slanted to catch all the blood, and then they'd shoot you.

00:48:03.000 It's exactly like that, except that Jim Acosta got his hair messed up a little bit.

00:48:07.000 Not by anybody throwing anything at him, but just because he was so frustrated.

00:48:10.000 So here's Jim Acosta.

00:48:11.000 Honestly, it felt like we weren't in America anymore.

00:48:14.000 I don't know how to put it any more plainly than that.

00:48:19.000 Americans should not be treating their fellow Americans in this way.

00:48:22.000 I agree.

00:48:23.000 Talk to Maxine Waters.

00:48:24.000 Talk to members of Antifa.

00:48:27.000 Talk to all of these other folks on the left who have been willing to do this for a very long time.

00:48:32.000 But apparently you are special, Jim Acosta, and so it didn't happen until it happened to you, right?

00:48:38.000 Until it happened to you, it was no big deal.

00:48:39.000 It's just like, it's amazing.

00:48:40.000 The media only discovered that the alt-right were a bunch of jackasses when the alt-right started attacking people on the left, right?

00:48:46.000 The alt-right started attacking Julia Jaffe, for example, and suddenly the alt-right was a thing.

00:48:50.000 I took months of alt-right abuse, but that was totally okay because I was on the right, obviously.

00:48:54.000 The media's selective coverage is one of the reasons why people don't trust the media at all.

00:48:59.000 You see the same thing from ABC's Sunny Hostin, who's over on The View.

00:49:02.000 She says that President Trump's attacks on the press are like the acts of a dictator.

00:49:07.000 Their jobs are to report the facts, and I think that's one of the reasons why this president has started this war against the media, because he doesn't like that the truth is being reported.

00:49:18.000 And I think that means that as journalists, you have to continue to do so.

00:49:24.000 These are the acts, in my opinion, of a dictator.

00:49:27.000 Dictators attack the press routinely.

00:49:30.000 Okay, yeah, it's just like a dictator, except that when dictators attack the press, they then go and shoot members of the press.

00:49:35.000 Like, Vladimir Putin actually just goes and kills people.

00:49:37.000 So, it's just like that, except for he says a lot of dumb stuff on Twitter.

00:49:40.000 So, exactly the same.

00:49:42.000 Pretty much exactly the same.

00:49:43.000 Okay, well, we will be back here tomorrow, with the mailbag.

00:49:45.000 So, if you have your questions, you need to subscribe now, and then ask those questions, and you'll have a better chance of me answering those questions and making your life just infinitely better.

00:49:52.000 Go check it out right now at dailywire.com.

00:49:54.000 We'll see you here tomorrow.

00:49:55.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:49:55.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:50:00.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal.

00:50:03.000 Executive producer Jeremy Boring.

00:50:05.000 Senior producer Jonathan Hay.

00:50:06.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

00:50:08.000 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:50:10.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro.

00:50:12.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

00:50:14.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:50:15.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

00:50:18.000 Copyright Ford Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 02, 2018

The Seductiveness Of Power | Ep. 594

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript