Appearing on Fox & Friends Friday morning, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro was asked about the budget deal that was passed in the middle of the night on Thursday, as well as Bette Midler’s comment suggesting that the neighbor of Rand Paul who attacked him should be summoned to do the job again.
After playing clips of Rand Paul denouncing the bill that was passed, host Steve Doocy mentioned Midler’s tweet, then asked Shapiro, “What do you think of that?”
Shapiro responded:
Class act. First of all, has Bette Midler been relevant since “Beaches” in 1988, when I was four? I’m not sure while she’s still around and talking about things and why we care. I guess she was in “Hello, Dolly” or something.
Rand Paul, just on the substance, is exactly correct. The fact is that Republicans spent years railing against the Obama deficits and Democratic deficits, now they have power again, and they just spent an enormous sum of money, and I understand they wanted to remove sequestration on the military, but they touted that same sequestration as a big win in 2011. I was there; I remember it; so do you. And so the idea that we have to blow out the budget with a Republican majority in both Houses, just demonstrates once again that in the end, the American people are really inconsistent about spending. On the one hand, they say they want cuts to spending; on the other hand, the minute anyone proposes a specific cut to spending, the American people start to get very upset about it, and both parties tend to buckle to that rather than educating the public.
Host Pete Hegseth asked, “What are the implications of this? … When it comes to debt and deficits, what is this going to mean?”
Shapiro answered:
It’s just going to mean a continuation of deficits out until the end of time. We’re going to be looking at thirty trillion dollar deficits in the near future. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that nobody wants to talk about the real drivers of the debt, and that’s not military spending at all. The real driver of the debt is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. That represents about 60% of the American federal budget. The American military budget is somewhere between eighteen and twenty percent. So the idea that if we raise the military spending, that this is somehow the great driver of the deficit, is not true. I just don’t understand why Republicans can’t make that case. Let’s have our military spending, and let’s talk about restructuring some of the real issues in the economy. Social Security’s been in the red since 2010; I’m not going to see any of the money I’m putting into Social Security.
Host Ainsley Earhardt asked about the texts between FBI agents and lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in which they trashed the pro-life movement; Page saying, “I truly hate these people.”
They’re a classy couple. If you couldn’t tell from their earlier text messages, they really ought to be on the cover of GQ; these are the leading figures in American public life. The only question that really matters in the end, for Page and Strzok, the only reason we even care about them, is to what extent their political biases ended up making a difference in terms of their bias in the investigation into Hillary Clinton and the investigation into supposed Trump/Russia collusion, of which there’s no evidence to this point. We’ll have to see what the rest of the investigation shows; this is why we have a House Intelligence Committee; this is why we have a House Oversight Committee; but it obviously isn’t good when you have FBI agents who have this sort of obvious political bias texting with one another about how much they hate particular segments of the America population.
Doocy said it was a good thing the Inspector General of the Department of Justice was involved, as he was the reason Page and Strzok weren’t on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team and Andrew McCabe was no longer at the FBI. Doocy noted the animus for the president among those figures.
Shapiro responded:
The level of bureaucratic incompetence and corruption, the level of political bias inside of our intelligence agencies, there’s a reason the American people don’t trust these agencies, and it’s not just because President Trump has been railing against the; it’s because these agencies acted in non-trustworthy ways during the last election cycle with regard to Hillary Clinton, and the American people are seeing that with each and every breaking story. So it’s a good thing that there are some folks who are attempting to ferret this stuff out, but there is going to have to be a cleansing process that takes place, whether it’s by President Trump or whether it’s by members of the DOJ and the FBI themselves. Something has to be done to restore the trust of the American people here.
Hegseth asked about a couple of DACA recipients who said that if a deal wasn’t reached on DACA, if they weren’t allowed to stay illegally, they would self-deport. Earhardt asked, “Do they want to stay or go?”
Shapiro prompted laughter among the hosts, replying, “I’m sort of confused by the strategy here.” He continued, “I guess they’re trying to blackmail people who want to deport them with the threat that they will self-deport, which doesn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense. The real answer is that they’re trying to blackmail Democrats; they’re trying to suggest to Democrats that Democrats don’t care enough about DACA recipients. So watching the internecine warfare between potential DACA recipients and Dreamers and the Democratic Party that claims to speak for them is sort of amusing.”
Video below: