Ben Shapiro talks about why the left has no sense of humor, and why the right has a whole lot of it. He also talks about John Bolton and why he thinks the right is funnier than the left right now.
00:00:52.080We will analyze the budget and the state of conservative policy alongside Howie Carr, author of What Really Happened, How Donald J. Trump Saved America from Hillary Clinton.
00:01:19.180I'm going to be in New York for the next week or so.
00:01:21.960I'll be giving a speech at Yeshiva University tonight, and then I'll be giving a speech at Ithaca College on Thursday.
00:01:28.300The main takeaway from this, of course, is that if you don't write a book, then people will invite you to speak.
00:01:34.820If you don't use words at all, then people will assume you're good at using words and come give a talk.
00:01:39.940We're going to be talking tonight about why the left is so humorless, why the right is so funny right now, and the left has absolutely no sense of humor.
00:01:47.460And then the speech on Thursday will be titled, Give Me That Old Time Religion, America's Christian Foundation.
00:01:52.620So, two related topics in this beautiful comedy of our lives.
00:01:57.980But, you know, if you're around, maybe I'll see you around the streets of New York.
00:02:01.320A good place to check would be all of the cigar bars.
00:02:05.220I want to thank our friends at National Review, by the way.
00:02:07.220National Review is very kindly hosting me.
00:02:09.900I was going to do my podcast from just the streets of New York, just kind of walking around, looking at the sky, you know, tattered clothing.
00:02:17.620But they've been very warm, and they've taken me in.
00:10:09.600Well, I don't think he still would have been working the phones, you know, at 6.30 on election night if he hadn't thought he was going to win.
00:10:17.260The night before the election, election eve, I was in Manchester broadcasting from my affiliate up there.
00:10:23.400And then we went over to the rally that he had.
00:10:27.800And that's where he pulled the letters out from—the letter from Bill Belichick, the coach of the New England Patriots, endorsing him.
00:10:33.740And, of course, he'd been endorsed earlier, more or less, by Tom Brady, the quarterback.
00:10:41.000And, you know, but after he left Manchester that night, he flew to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
00:10:47.440And he had a rally at 12.30 in the morning in Election Day in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
00:10:53.900And that's why I laughed when I saw Michael Wolff's book earlier this year, saying, oh, he didn't really think he was going to win.
00:11:39.200There were 6,000 people did same-day registration on Election Day.
00:11:44.300And he lost the state by 3,000 votes, and Kelly Ayotte, the Republican senator, lost her Senate seat by 1,000 votes.
00:11:52.300And according to New Hampshire law, you have six months after you vote as a same-day registrant to transfer your driver's license.
00:12:02.540And they—the Secretary of State's office in New Hampshire did a study, and of the 6,000 people who took ballots under the same-day registration law, only 1,000 of them re-registered.
00:12:17.940That means that, you know, he—the election probably was stolen from him, and it was definitely stolen from Kelly Ayotte.
00:12:24.100And he's—he's very disturbed about that, and he—he keeps—every time I've talked to him since the election, he's—he's brought up New Hampshire.
00:12:32.300And I'll bet he—you know, I'll bet he's still thinking about it.
00:12:36.000That's so interesting, because from the Michael Wolff book, you say, oh, he doesn't care, he was just joking, he didn't really want to win.
00:12:41.740But when you talk to people who know the guy, who have spoken to him about it, he's tracking everything.
00:13:37.340But I think the problem, Michael, is that when I was coming up in the mainstream media, what you did was you started out, you know, whether you were in TV or newspapers, which I was in both, you started out at like a regional newspaper or a regional TV station.
00:13:54.440And you worked your way up to a major market.
00:13:56.680But now, as I—as I said in the—as I said in what really happened, the way you move up now is you're a Democrat operative.
00:14:04.720And that's—most of these people that are—that are, you know, you see on the cable news shows have never been reporters.
00:14:39.360He was a—he was a spokesman for Tom Harkin, one of the—the stolen valor senator from—from Iowa who claimed he was a combat pilot in Vietnam.
00:14:49.780He was a pilot, but just on cargo planes.
00:14:53.080I mean, these—these people, you know, I guess Tim Russert and Chris Matthews started the trend.
00:14:59.920You know, they were—they were both aides to Democrat politicians, Matthews to Tip O'Neill, the speaker, and—and Russert to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
00:15:08.580But that's—that's the way you move up.
00:15:10.480And they're also—they're always—then all of them are so married into it, I could just go on for an hour just talking about all the people who were married in.
00:18:54.720He tried to bring it back, and he was the one guy.
00:18:57.520Or Oliver Cromwell, you know, the new model army.
00:19:00.920It was a, you know, he seemed to be a game changer until he wasn't a game changer.
00:19:05.340I don't know how it's going to play out.
00:19:07.000I certainly hope he gets another four years because, you know, that's, he needs that to, you know, to even begin to drain the deep, the swamp and the deep state.
00:19:38.820I really hope they pick up, pick this up, that Howie Carr has endorsed the Democrat nominee Elizabeth Focahontas-Liawatha-Warren for president.
00:19:47.980Howie Carr, thank you so much for being here.
00:22:09.800The William F. Buckley Jr. program at Yale is hosting the Disinvitation Dinner.
00:22:15.200They do this dinner every year where they take some speaker who's been disinvited from a college campus and they give him a speech to give.
00:23:37.880In the past, we know that Donald Trump has called for budgets that will end the Tiger program, grants for transportation projects from the Obama stimulus.
00:23:46.000That will end ARPA-E, an Obama-era energy research agency.
00:23:51.780That ends the CDBG, which is an urban slush fund.
00:23:55.540The CBGB, I don't know, the ABCDEFG, all of these agencies, all of this constant funding.
00:29:33.000And I am reminded of the Heritage Foundation, which shows that Donald Trump has completed two-thirds of its agenda and says he's completing it at a faster rate than even Ronald Reagan did.
00:29:44.700Now you might say Ronald Reagan had a Democrat Congress.
00:30:06.68091% to 93% of mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is negative.
00:30:11.700There are federal bureaucracies and activists within the Democratic Party who are trying to undermine this president who have been trying to delegitimize this president from day one.
00:30:41.460I'm still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because as we talked about with Howie, things are a lot better than they would have been.
00:30:47.440And they're a lot better than any other Republican who somehow miraculously would have been elected.
00:30:52.100They're better probably than we would have seen there.
00:31:36.360There is an international community that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world,
00:31:44.300and that's the United States, when it suits our interests and when we can get others to go along.
00:31:51.040The secretariat building in New York has 38 stories.
00:31:53.940If you lost 10 stories today, it would make a bit of difference.
00:31:58.680The United States makes the U.N. work when it wants it to work.
00:32:02.420And that is exactly the way it should be because the only question, the only question for the United States is what's in our national interest.
00:32:10.200And if you don't like that, I'm sorry, but that is the fact.
00:32:25.540There is no such thing as the United Nations.
00:32:27.880There is no such of all of us coming together and holding hands.
00:32:30.940There is one moral leader in this entire world, and that's the United States of America.
00:32:35.560The most moral, the most generous, the most prosperous, the freest country in the history of the world.
00:32:40.680And then there are a lot of other people, and they don't all play by our rules.
00:32:43.960And it's not like they're all happy-go-lucky and trying to help out one another.
00:32:47.480They're all bombing each other and trying to do horrible things.
00:32:50.160The United States can exert moral leadership when it serves our interests.
00:32:54.540People on the right, the left is trying to gin up anger on the right against John Bolton.
00:32:59.980And mark my words, it is people on the left who are doing this.
00:33:03.140The Vox.com ran an article why conservatives are very angry about John Bolton.
00:33:08.520Washington Post is feeding these sort of things.
00:33:10.600When was the last time you knew what conservatives wanted, Vox?
00:33:13.900What made you the spokesman for conservatives in America?
00:33:17.440What they're trying to do is paint him as a neocon, a neoconservative, you know, those guys who want to spread democracy abroad, and they get a little too abstract and all of those things.
00:33:26.900Because he worked for George W. Bush, and his administration was largely neoconservative, interested in spreading democracy abroad, Wilsonian in its foreign outlook.
00:33:39.400He's not interested in spreading democracy abroad as a good, above all other goods, a good in itself.
00:33:45.640He's interested, as he just said, as he said about the United Nations, in the strategic interests of the United States.
00:33:52.360What serves our interest, that's what we will do.
00:33:55.060And coincidentally, it will be good for the rest of the world.
00:33:58.480It's a caricature to call him a neoconservative.
00:34:01.520I must say, a little bit of disclosure, I am friends with the Bolton family, but I've admired the guy before.
00:34:07.560We were friends, and I really like them personally.
00:34:11.060I got to meet him in D.C. one time years and years ago, and he's one of the smartest people I've met in Washington.
00:34:17.440You can ask him to talk about, I don't know, Afghanistan, and he'll just monologue.
00:34:22.080He'll just go, he's so supremely knowledgeable.
00:34:25.380You will not find anyone in D.C. who says that he isn't knowledgeable.
00:34:28.620By the way, at the U.N., he had a lot of accomplishments.
00:34:30.400There's this caricature that he's never seen a country he doesn't want to bomb because he suggests that preemptive war is not a terrible idea, which obviously it isn't.