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C-SPAN-2 on Saturday, August 7 at 1:00 pm and Sunday, August 8 at 9:30 pm
Book: Can America Survive? by Ben Stein & Phil Demuth
Speaker: Ben Stein – Audience: Young America's Foundation – 8/1/04
Description: Ben Stein talks about the book he co-authored with Phil Demuth, "Can America Survive?," at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Mr. Stein argues that Hollywood, environmentalists, and the news media are equally as threatening as terrorists with their "anti-American" views. The book includes examples of these attacks as well as what the authors view as solutions to these problems. After the discussion, Mr. Stein answers questions from the audience. This event is hosted by the Young America's Foundation.
Author Bio: Ben Stein is a television commentator and the host of game show, Win Ben Stein's Money. He worked as a speechwriter during the Nixon and Ford administrations and a teacher of media studies at American University in Washington, DC. He is also a co-author of "Yes, You Can time with Market!" with Phil Demuth.
Publisher: New Beginnings Press P.O. Box 5100 Carlsbad, California 92018
Usually I begin my speeches with a joke or two, but I will just tell you one that occurs to me. I have one million jokes, but most of them an unsuitable for young children like you, but one joke that occurred to me was when John Kerry saluted as he gave the acceptance speech and said "John Kerry reporting for duty." I thought to myself the last time he reported for duty as commander-in-chief was Jane Fonda. So I don't know how much we want to have him as our commander-in-chief because I'm not sure he ever changed his mind about Jane Fonda. It would be awfully nice if he did.
I keep thinking he's really not a bad fellow, in many regards he's a brave guy, he went to Yale which we have to like him for and he is obviously a talented guy, an incredible sense of style, especially on his head. But I keep thinking that he became famous, not because he won the silver star, because my father-in-law won the silver star in Vietnam, he was a career army officer, and he won many other medals there. He did not throw them away. He did not ever become famous except for what I've written about him in The Spectator. The reason Mr. Kerry became famous, was because he came back and trashed all the people he had served with in Vietnam and called them war criminals and baby killers and rapists and mass murderers.
And I understand the ethos of those times (most of the people in this room or not alive in those times), but that was the zeitgeist of those times was to trash America and to say terrible things about America. But for God's sake it's been 34 years, the charges were totally bogus at the time he made them, they're totally bogus now. Why can't he apologize to the brave men and women he served with in Vietnam and say I'm sorry, I did it as a publicity stunt, it worked and now I'm the candidate for president and now I'd like to say I'm sorry. I mean we all make mistakes and I've made a huge, huge number in my life, but I would have liked to have seen Senator Kerry began his acceptance speech by saying here are a couple of mistakes I've made, I know I've been talking a lot about mistakes and George Bush made, but I'd like to talk about mistakes I've made, I should not have slandered the brave fighting men and women of the United States during the Vietnam War, they were doing the best they could in a difficult situation and I honor them then and now. [Much applause.]
But as I say, I think he is in many ways a fine fellow, I wish my wife had a billion dollars but anyway my wife's never had plastic surgery, so I have that on him. People keep asking me what do I think about the fact that all the celebrities and the stars are on the liberal side during this election and in every election, I can't remember a time when they weren't on the side of the left wing during the elections. And I keep saying 'You know Ben Affleck and Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn are not to me stars, in this sense that stars mean people you admire and want to imitate and want your children to grow up grow up like.' I don't want my child to grow up like Sean Penn. I don't want my child to grow up like Ben Affleck. I want my child to grow up like the real stars, the men and women who wear the uniform, who are walking down the streets or riding in Bradley fighting vehicles in Ramadi or Fallujah or outside various small towns and hamlets in Afghanistan and fighting the war on terror. Those people to me are the real stars. They do not make $20 million for reading lines in front of a camera. They do not have houses with Olympic size swimming pools on top of a mountain in Los Angeles, other villas and chalets in Aspen and in the Hamptons in Long Island. But they are the ones without whom life in America could not go on. They are the real stars.
And I'll say something else about those real stars because this is not a partisan event, this is not a Republican rally, this is a rally for conservative thoughts. And one of the conservative thoughts that I have is that this country could not be conserved without the men and women in the armed forces. We could not live without them. We could live forever without Hollywood. If we just ran reruns of all the great sitcoms from the fifties and sixties and early seventies, we'd have plenty to be on TV for ever. If they just ran Fernwood Tonight, they'd have plenty to be on TV for ever. But we could not last a day without the armed forces of this country. And it is a very serious moral offense against those people than we are not paying them more money. If a man or woman goes off to fight in Afghanistan or Bosnia or Iraq, he or she should not have to be worrying that his family or her family back home at Fort Stewart or for any of the forts, there are one million forts in this country, or any of the bases were Camp Pendleton is having to worry about how to pay the kids dental bills or how to pay the car insurance.
These men and women are risking their lives; we owe them to pay them more than a starvation wage. If this country can afford the enormous, lavish wealth that is on display in every day's real estate section of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, we can afford to pay the people who fight for us a living wage. It is really a moral offense that we don't pay. This isn't a Democratic thing or a Republican thing, it's just a moral thing. If you're risking your life for America, America owes it to you that you shouldn't have to worry about money while you're also having to worry about having your head blown off. That's basic. [Applause.]
And I think we have a certain duty also to the families of the people who are fighting in the Iraq and Afghanistan and other places where we are fighting terror. I look at my life, and I have an upper-middle-class life, but other people in this country have a life that's a very similar to mine. I have a great life; I have a wife I adore; a son as lazy as any human being has ever been except when it comes to sports or his attire, but I adore him. We live in a house with two wonderful dogs, three good cats and one bad cat, we live in peace, we can worship as we please, we can say what we want and we can walk the streets in safety, we can work wherever we want, buy whatever we want, when we sleep we sleep in peace, when we wake up its to the sound of birds not to the sound of machine-gun fire or the secret police knocking on our door, and all of this, every bit of it, is thanks to our soldiers, our Marines, our navy, our Air Force, our Coast Guard, and, very importantly, to the wives and children who keep the home fires burning while our soldiers are away protecting my family and 140 million other Americans families. They don't just protect Republicans, they don't just protect Democrats, they protect everyone, they protect Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, they protect white, black, yellow, brown, everyone in between. They protect gays and straights, rich and poor and middle-class, and they could not do it without the Army wives, the Marine wives, the Navy wives, the Air Force wives or husbands who go to sleep night after night, tired and lonely, wake up tired and lonely and yet go through the day with a smile on their faces. They feed the kids, they put up with the teenager's surliness, the bills that never stop piling up, the desperate hours when the plumbing breaks and there's no husband around to fix it, then more desperate hours after the kids have gone to bed, the dishes have been done, the bills have been paid in the wives realize, or the husbands if the wives are deployed, that they'll be sleeping alone again for the two hundredth night in a row.
We owe these people a lot, even more than money can pay them. They keep up the fight to keep the family whole even when they feel a lot of dread, every time they turn on the news, every time they switch on the computer, worst of all every time the doorbell rings. Every one of these events, which to us might mean a baseball score or a stock report or a weather forecast or a FedEx Van, might mean to them that the man or woman they love, the man or woman they have married for better or for worse is now parted from them for ever. These brave people, the wives and the husbands of people deployed in the war on terror, will never be on the cover of People, they will never be on the cover of Us, they will never be on tabloid shows on TV about movie stars, but they are the power and the strength that keep America going. Without them we are nothing, they are the glue that holds America together stronger than Hollywood, stronger than TV's talking heads, stronger than Al Qaeda. We owe them, we have to remember them in our thoughts and prayers every single minute. They deserve all the honor and love this nation can give. They have my prayers in the my wife's and I hope they have you were prayers every single day of the week. [Applause]
Before I get into the meat, so to speak, of Phil Demuth's and the my book, I want to say something else. I am so alarmed about some things I have been getting over the Internet about the truth Stalinism of some of the extremists on the left. One of the worst things and the most frightening things that I have seen come across my computer was an e-mail about a group that is suing a church in a southern state because the pastor of that church gave a sermon comparing Bush and Kerry in their views on moral issues and pointing out that as far as he could tell Bush's views were more closely linked to the church's views on the various issues. And these miserable miscreants on the left are suing this church to try to get their tax exemption taken away on the grounds that they have violated the separation of church and state. I don't even believe that there exists as a cause of action. I think that it will be thrown out on what's called a demur, because I think there's a failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted. But the idea that these people are so Stalinist in their way of thinking that they will go to court to prevent anyone even in a church from stating a view which does not strictly coincide with the liberal left wing point of view is terrifying. It's a very scary, scary thing. It's very similar to lawsuits that have been brought against Fox News and a complaint brought to the Federal Trade Commission, for which I used to work, saying that 'Fair and Balanced' is misleading advertising. By the way I worked for the Federal Trade Commission as I said and I can tell you that it will take about 30 years for that complaint to work its way through the Trade Commission.
The idea is: Here's Fox, this one little entity, desperately trying to counteract the endless barrage of left wing slant from all the other networks, except, of course, when I am on CBS, then it's fair and balanced on CBS. Also when I'm on CBS it's my own commentary which I do on Sunday morning. But anyway, you should think to yourself 'Gosh, the left has Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, ABC, NBC, most of a CBS, The New York Times, the news hole in The Wall Street Journal, The L[os]A[ngeles] Times, and here's poor little Fox trying to make a little bit of a difference in giving the news stream without the left-leaning slant, and how does the left react to it?' They sue it. They sue it. They can't just have free and open competition. They are so afraid of honest competition, a little teeny mouse of dissent as Winston Churchill said about the people who were complaining about Hitler, that they cannot even tolerate that little teeny mouse of dissent.
You know I am not the world's greatest fan of George Bush. I like him, I campaigned for him in 2000. I think he's made some serious mistakes, but when I compare the people who are against him on the other side in their efforts to shut down free speech, it absolutely terrified me, it makes my blood run cold.
But I certainly do love the way Bush is for life, life is the single biggest issue facing America, maybe even bigger than terrorism, the fight for right to life and God bless Mr. Bush for standing up to them. [Applause]
Now... this will probably get me and expelled from the Screen Actors Guild. Now I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my book. The book publishing business is such that it hardly pays to write a book anymore, but, at least at my level. But I won't talk about it because I believe the points that Phil Demuth and I made in this book are fairly important. Phil Demuth, by the way, his my very, very dear friend, extremely, extremely indispensable dear friend. He and I got to be friends because his brother Chris is the head of the American Enterprise Institute, where my father, bless his soul, worked for many years. [Interstitial material about Ben Stein's father and Phil Demuth]
I think the motivation for this book came to me one day as I was driving down Sunset Boulevard and I was listening to Al Gore. I heard him, this was in 2000, and he was speaking to a group of African American voters in the Los Angeles and he was telling them they should be hysterically upset about the racism in America and all the white oppression of African Americans in current day America, and that even though it might not seen as if there was any racism, even if the laws weren't oppressing them, even if there wasn't any open a racism, there was still so much racism and it was so deeply ingrained in the society that it was even more sinister than the Ku Klux Klan, and even worse than the worst days of the White Citizens Council. And I thought 'You creep, you miserable creep, we've made all this progress purchased at the price of so many human lives, so much suffering to make this a truly open, multi-racial, open, prosperous democracy available to everybody, and you're trying to whip up people's paranoia just to get a few votes for you were miserable hide.' And I thought that I'd just like to tell the story of what America really is like in very, very brief form, just how precious and valuable the US is. We wanted to write a primer about why it is worthwhile to fight for America. Why it is worthwhile to pay taxes to support the protection of America. What is it about America that is so unique and ultra-special? Why are so many good people risking their lives for America? So we started to write this and we have basically two goals in this book. One, in a very condensed way, to say what's right with America and how well America works. And a second is to try to analyze why the Left, and not every body on the left, most of the people who are Democrats in this country are wonderful, fine, normal, perfectly great people, better in many respects than I am, but... (probably better in every respect, they certainly eats less than I do). But some of them are just as my mother would have said he in Yiddish, farbisine, which means chewing on the carpet with rage, and we wanted to talk about why God has been so good to America, they are so angry at America. First goal was to talk about how great America was; second goal was to try to analyze why the left, or some few free fringe nut cases on the left like Al Gore, are so angry at America.
We started with the premise that this is the shining city on the hill as Ronald Reagan said, the ultimate in human experience, the greatest even in man's history. A country built on the greatness of the ordinary man and woman and what they can do if their shackles are removed. This is the place where people come from all over the planet to realize their dreams. This is where you have the most freedom, the most prosperity, the most protection of the laws. Now our critics, the Al Gores, the Susan Sarandons, the Sean Penns, say this is a fascist, repressive state. And we have a lot of quotes in this book, "Can America Survive," by multimillionaires in Hollywood, by Ivy League professors who hate America and we wanted to show how wrong they were. So we started with the US economy, because of course we hear a lot of complaints from Senator Edwards that this is a country of two Americas, one poor and starving and groveling and suffering terribly, and One of the few rich exploiting class, who all happen, of course, to be Republicans, and that that rich exploiting class is endlessly grinding its heel into the necks of the poor. So we wanted to give a few statistics about how prosperous America is, and I do urge you to have a look at this part of the book, it is astonishing how prosperous America is. We start with this fact: 70% of Americans own their own homes. In America there are more cars than there are drivers. Per capita consumption in the United States, which was already quite high, has tripled since the end of World War II. It has almost doubled since the mid-sixties and it has more than doubled since the fifties when we all thought we were very prosperous.
Poverty in America, it's never good to be poor, but poverty is based on a wildly mistaken set of classifications that were created in the Johnson era, all of you are too young to remember Lyndon Johnson, but he created something called The War on Poverty, whose basic idea was to shovel a whole bunch of money into people who were classified as poor to make them vote Democrat. His comments, which were taken from people around him, about how he was going to do that are so racist and sickening, if you read them it would make your skin crawl. Poverty in America is never a good thing, but, to give you an idea of what we call poverty, 46% of the poverty households in America owned their own homes. The average poverty households in America has three bedrooms, 1½ baths, a garage and a patio or porch. Most have air-conditioning. Almost every family classified as poverty stricken in America has a car. More than 90% have color TVs. The average person classified as being poor in the United States lives better than 80% of the world's population does now.
Again, any poor people are too many, but we have to realize that when we are talking about poor in America today, we are talking about what would have been before World War II considered solidly middle-class, even prosperously middle-class and for the rest of the world would be considered rich. Most people who are poor in America do not stay poor for long, they usually only stay in this state of poverty for less than six months, and most of them are middle-
class within a year and a very large number of them are in the upper 20% within the decade. And if you can take out people whose own behavior leads to their poverty, such as people who are drug addicts or alcoholics, or people who habitually have child after child without being married and without having anyone to support them, there are almost no people in this country who on a long-term basis who are involuntarily poor. This is an interesting statistic. It isn't
true that this is two Americas. There is a very successful, prosperous America, that is most people in this country, and then there is a small, much tinier population, that is poor, and of that the ones that are genuinely poor, that are staying poor, is a minuscule. As I say, any is too many, but let's not buy
this John Edwards nonsense that this is two Americas with an exploiting class and an underclass under it. This is a country whose prosperity, even in the face of extremely fierce global competition, is growing all the time.
Next, the critics of America talk about US imperialism. And I love, love, love some of the quotes. Phil Demuth, my wonderful co-author, got a number of
these quotes and a couple of them are so rich I'd like to read them to you because they really show the dementia that has overtaken a large part of this
country, especially Hollywood. Here's a quote from Susan Sarandon... who's actually quite a good actress: "Let us find a way to resist fundamentalism that leads to violence. Fundamentalism of all kinds, in Al Qaeda and within our government. Our fundamentalism is business, the unfettered spread of our economic interests throughout the globe. Our resistance to this war [that meant the war on terror] should be our resistance to profit at the cost of human life." Then Woody Harrelson, that famous expert on racism and imperialism: "This is a racist and imperialist war. The war mongers who stole the White House,
you call them hawks but I would never disparage such a fine bird, have hijacked in the nation's grief and turned it into perpetual war on any non-white
country they choose to describe as terrorist." Then another quote from someone named Mike Tabibi, I have no idea who he is, "While the end of the Saddam régime means they return to long denied freedoms for all Iraqis, it may also mean a temporary rollback of some hard-won freedoms for millions of Iraqi women.
While Saddam's régime brutalized women, rape, torture, even beheadings, his secular government also gave women more rights and than their counterparts in many other Islamic countries." We all know what a great humanist and humanitarian Saddam Hussein was. And then a here's one from Katha Pollit, I think he is the editor or publisher of The Nation: "My daughter goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center. She thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. I think definitely not. The flag stands for Jingoism and vengeance and war." Another Yiddish word comes to mind, mishigas, meaning crazy.
US imperialism. I think the best summary of US imperialism I've ever heard came from our Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, General Powell, who said a fine thing when the French were criticizing him about some US plan to save some country from terrorism. He said: "The US has gone forth over and over again in the 20th century to save the world from dictatorships and has lost the lives of hundreds of thousands of our young men and all we ask is a place to bury our dead. We've seized to no more territory, all we've asked as cemeteries to bury our dead." And I have to say even the man from France, I think, was shamed. But imperialism in modern-day life is often confused with globalization, that is to say moving manufacturing and service jobs to offshore places. Now is this creating poverty and slavery in the Third World as the leftists say it is? Very, very, very far from it. In the last fifty years world poverty has fallen more than in the previous five hundred. It is actually possible that in the first decades of the 21st century eradicating severe poverty throughout the world will happen. And if it does happen, it will be because of globalization. Thanks to globalization in terms of moving US capital around, and world capital, and employing people who were previously unemployable or work that incredibly low subsistence wages, the world has reached a new dawn of prosperity. We've had the green revolution which has put food production at double what it was 50 years ago. We've had astounding increases. Something like 50 years ago only 15% of the world's people had access to pure water. Now more than 75% of the world's people have access to pure water.
The education situation of young women in the Third World was miserable. Only a handful ever got any education at all. Now the great majority of them will be literate and that will enrich their lives and their families' lives enormously. We look at the kids working in Nike factories and we think oh my gosh they are so poorly paid compared with what we're paid, but compared with what they were paid before the Nike factory came, before the parts factory for General Motors or Ford or Chrysler came along, they're paid immensely more. They're incomparably better off than they were. The data about the eradication of poverty in Asia, in South America, in North Africa, is simply breathtaking. There has never been any kind of movement towards world eradication of poverty comparable to what American industry moving around the world has been able to do.
Even the biggest and best foreign aid policies, even the Marshall Plan after World War II did not accomplish what investment policies aimed at creating globalized production have done. Lower prices for us at home, dramatically, dramatically improved working conditions and living conditions throughout the world. And yes, it has come at a cost for US manufacturing employees, there's no doubt about that. And because we all benefit from the lower costs I think it is our duty to provide retraining for those people so they can move into the service economy and to better jobs without having to lose their family's prosperity in their family's lives.
Racism. Let's turn to racism for a moment because I have so many subjects I am going to run out of time. Racism. We have so many comments about racism in this book by people who have a vested interest in selling the idea that racism is a continued stain on America. And there is a racism industry in this country trying to gin up money claiming racism. I give you a few quotes. "After years of enduring America at home and watching her abroad, I am convinced that I will die in a society is racially divided as the one into which I was born more than half a century ago." That's from somebody named Randall Robinson. "Racism is a integral, permanent, indestructible component of this society." Derrick Bell, Ivy League Professor. "In white America, cultural conservatism takes the form of chronic racism, sexism and homophobia. For white America this means primarily scapegoating black people, women, gay men and lesbians." That's from Cornell West whose academic career is marked by his making rap songs among others.
"God will destroy America by the hand of Muslims." Louis Farrakhan. I have some quotes from Al Sharpton which I'm not going to read because you wouldn't believe them if I read them to you and I don't want to get accused of making them up, but I urge you to read them.
In this country when I was a child, when I was the age that you people are, there was a serious racism in America.
I grew up in Maryland just across the border here from DC. The schools were segregated. That was a disgrace. Racism, institutionalized racism, any kind of racism is a disgrace and an offense to human nature. That's all gone now. This is not a racist society anymore, this is a society in which the doors are wide open. And what people don't realize is that that opportunity was bought at tremendous cost in blood. We had a great Civil War in this country in the 19th-century, a really, really devastating, horrifying Civil War. Six hundred thousand plus man died. The great majority of them were Northerners fighting to free the slaves. Of course the war started first to set the Union back together, but it quickly became a war to free the slaves. There's never been a time in whole human history when the one race went to war to free another race. This is the only time it's ever happened and it happened in America. That was one hundred years ago, a hundred and forty years ago. Now a lot of time passed, and there was a lot of brutality and repression of African-Americans after that war, a lot of really, really serious, nasty segregation.
But now times have changed completely. The revolution in America since Brown versus Board of Education has been as big a revolution as ever has been in a free society. Now black people, brown people, yellow people, everyone has the doors wide open. I'll give you just a few bits of data about what's happened to African-Americans. And by the way you can apply this to Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, Asian Americans, everybody.
But for black households the number earning more than $50,000 a year jumped eighty one percent between 1980 and 2000. It used to be when I was a child almost every black woman you saw working was a domestic servant. Now only one percent of black women work as domestic servants. Blacks are one of the most important,powerful blocks in Congress. They're incredibly high up in the executive branch of the US government. There is a very wonderful African-American Supreme Court Justice. They lead the giant corporations like Merrill Lynch and American Express, and the one who leads Merrill Lynch has done unbelievably capable work. The American dream is wide open now.
People try to whip up feelings of paranoia among African Americans, among Latinos. The truth is the exact opposite. America has become the dream of the multiracial, open society that Martin Luther King dreamed.
I am an enormous fan of Martin Luther King. At least some part of almost every day I listen to Martin Luther King's speeches.
He is an inspiration to me and he always has been for as long as I was conscious of him and even in the many years since he's been dead.
He dreamed a dream where Americans would be judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin. It's happened now.
But there are people like Al Gore that try to make believe that it hasn't happened and that we're still living in a racist America.
There will always be paranoid people who will blame their problems on somebody else and Al Gore is their champion.
And again, this is not a political speech because Al Gore is not running for anything, thank God. [Applause]
We turned to sexism.
I have some incredible quotes in here about sexism which Phil Demuth gathered. You would think premiering people even like our friend Mr. Kerry talked the other day at the convention that women were still kept as farm animals in America. It's an amazing situation. And by the way, when I was a child I think women were very seriously mistreated and repressed in America and we soon came to the realization though, after the civil rights struggle, that women were smarter than men and now we know that 55% of the college freshman class in this country is female. 50% of the entering class in law schools and medical schools is female. When I started at Yale in 1966, at Yale Law school, there were only three or four women in the class in the professors would make it a point to call on the women and to tease them and hector them and nag them until they cried. That was a ritual at the beginning of class. In Yale! This wasn't that some school on the moon, this was Yale. Nowadays women are running every thing at the Law School. Heads of huge corporations like Xerox and Hewlett-Packard are women. Women comprise the single largest caucus outside the political parties in the U.S. Congress. There are 73 women in the U.S. Congress. Women's wages adjusted for the fact that women leave the labor force and accrue less seniority than men are almost identical to the wages of men. This idea that women are a repressed group, that's also nonsense. This is taking too long. I'll just go to one or two more things.
Environmentalism. If you heard Kerry talk about it or if you heard the Democrats or left-wingers amongst the Democrats talk about it, you would think that the Republicans were flushing their toilets right into the rivers of America without any sewage treatment whatsoever just for the fun of seeing the rivers and lakes of America be ruined. This is nonsense. A Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, started the environmental movement as a modern movement in America. Americans owe him. The biggest mover in the environmental movement in the postwar period was my old boss, Mr. Nixon, who was an enormous fan of the environment and worked tirelessly to protect the environment, created the Environmental Protection Administration, created the Council on Environmental Quality. This was done by Republicans. Republicans are conservatives, conservatives are conservatives, they want to conserve the beauty of this country. You know we've seen very great danger created by the environmentalists. There was a woman named Rachel Carson, she actually grew up in Silver Spring. She wrote a book called Silent Spring about how bad DDT was, about how it was killing all the birds. It turned out not to be true, but she got DDT banned. As a result, millions and millions of babies in the Third World have died of malaria and other diseases they would not have gotten if DDT and still been in use. Environmentalism is a wonderful movement in moderation and used in the context of a free society, but let's not forget that environmentalism or any movement that tells people how they have to behave for some abstract good is dangerous. The most ardent environmentalist of the 20th century was Adolf Hitler, a strict vegetarian, a strict, strict, strict anti-smoker, strictly committed to defending and protecting the forests of the Reich. Dangerous guy. Environmentalists are not all wonderful, sweet, nice guys. We have to remember that people who order you were round and tell you that you are not allowed to do things in order to protect this goal they have, but you may not be able to see, those are dangerous people. Freedom is the real goal. Environmentalism is a great goal, but Freedom is the real goal.
By the way, this reminds me of a joke. I can't stop myself. OK, here's the joke. Why did adult Hitler stopped drinking gin? Because it made him mean. Anyway, you guys don't drink gin so you don't know the joke. When you start drinking gin, e-mail me and let me know you got the joke.
Let's talk a little bit about Republicans. To hear the left-winger's talk about it you'd think the Republican Party of guys in top hats, riding around and limousines, running over poor people. They're the Mr. Burnses of this world. If Mr. Burns on The Simpsons was allowed to show a political affiliation, he would unequivocally be a Republican. But in fact, the Republicans are the party of the little people nowadays. The average donation in the last election cycle for the Republicans was less than $30 per donation. The Democrats are the ones who get huge donations from the trial lawyers, from the teachers union, from Hollywood. Of all the donations over $1 million in the last election cycle, there are only roughly 100, the Democrats got 93 of them. The party of the rich today is the party of the Democrats. That's not a bad thing, that's fine if they want to get their money from the rich people, but to pretend that a party which has a billionaire's husband as its candidate and a multimillionaire trial lawyer as its vice presidential candidate and is getting most of its money from very rich people in Hollywood and very rich people in finance on the East Coast, is the party of the people is a joke. It's kind of a sad joke.
Now where does all this anger at America come from. Well first of all it comes from people who are frustrated. There are an awful lot of people in this country or more unhappy than the people in this room. We're happy bunch, I can see looking at your face, you're happy. By the way, this is why I became a Republican. When I was a young guy, most of my neighbors were Democrats. And they all looked miserably unhappy all of the time. And then I had a wonderful neighbor named David Skull who was about the same age as my father, almost the exactly same age, and he was an active Republican in Montgomery County, Maryland. And he used to take me and his son and his daughter to Republican functions and all those people looked happy. So we started with the idea that there are a lot of unhappy people out there in the world and it's like what Bob Dylan said: "There are a lot of people who have knives and forks and they don't have anything on their plate, so they've got to cut something." So these angry people don't just wake up in the morning and say, hey, I feel angry, I don't make as much money as I'd like, I'm not as famous as I'd like, or is there are other people out there who are doing better than I am. What they say is 'Its Bush's fault. It's Powell's fault. It's Cheney's fault. It's Halliburton's fault. It's always got to be somebody else's fault, so they've fixed on the idea that it's the Republican's fault, and their anger gets directed to them. The Republicans tend not to be as angry. They don't have to fixate their anger on anyone else because they're just not that angry. It's a very, very scary idea to me to have a political party in charge that's based on anger. But, I know that there have been some Democrats who are not angry at all like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they've been great people as well.
Hollywood, which is a major, major repository of left-wing anger towards America, a very special case. I've worked in Hollywood now for 28 years. Hollywood has been very, very good to me, extremely good to me. Hollywood has taken a middle-class person and made him in the upper middle-class person. Everyday I swim back and forth in my swimming pool, I am extremely grateful for Hollywood and I love Hollywood. I really do, I truly love Hollywood every minute I'm on the set I'm really happy. But the powers at the high levels in Hollywood are a nutty bunch. They are privileged and powerful and they have incomes you could scarcely even imagine, there incomes are just breathtaking. But they want to believe they are artists, and they want to feel that they are starving artists in the garret, in some Bohemian part of Paris, and they are the workers' vanguard, struggling at the barricades. They can't because they are so rich, but they want to pretend that they can.
I'll give you a great example, one of my favorite, favorite examples. I live part of the week in Malibu and it's a very modest house, but it does have a very good view. And I get the Malibu Times. And a few months ago there was an article in the Malibu Times about and environmentalists rally, and there were six people who were the sponsors of this rally, and they were all complaining about an ordinary American with his SUV and RV and his Cadillac and his Buick and his Mercury were wrecking the world, using up too much fossil fuel. Well I knew every one of those six people fairly well and everyone of them has a private jet. How much you'll do you think a private jet uses? Two of those people have yachts of at least 200 feet. How much you'll do you think a 200 ft. yacht uses? Do those people need to have them? Of course not. They can just fly on an airplane like I do and everybody else does, a commercial flight, but no, they have to have the private plane. A private plane uses 200 times as much fuel per person as a regular commercial plane, but they have to have them. They don't like to think of themselves as rich plutocrats, they like to think of themselves as revolutionaries. It's fun to be a revolutionary! I was a revolutionary when I was at Yale, demonstrating, running around, pretending I was a radical, then going back to the Yale dining room and needing of tablecloths and shine with the Yale monogram on it. That's fun! And that's what Hollywood people are like, pretend to revolutionaries who have a lot of fun.
Next powerful source of anger on the part of the people I think hate America more than they should, a lot more than they should, you shouldn't hate America at all, is envy. There are a lot of people in Hollywood, New York, Georgetown, other cities in this country who don't have much peace of mind. In their minds there is a Ku Klux Klan out there in America that's always ready to come get them, there's the racist militias are already to come get them. It's all nonsense. The heartland of America is the friendliest place in America.
My former next-door neighbor when I was a child was a very fine, very, very amusing fellow, and excellent musician too, named Carl Bernstein who became quite a noted reporter. Carl used to tell me that his favorite thing after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Watergate coverage going to speak out in America because he met so many nice people. The ordinary American is the kindest, sweetest man or woman in the world. I see this everywhere. I spent a large part of the summers in north Idaho. It's supposed to be the center of fascist, oppression. It's got the nicest people in the whole world, there is no place nicer northern Idaho. But in Hollywood and the New York there's fear that those people are the Ku Klux Klan waiting to get them. And that fear manifests itself in criticism of America. Big, big thing, this fear of middle America cannot be over estimated. You really have to talk to people on the coasts to realize how angry and fearful they are.
Next thing: Pharisaism. In the Bible, the Pharisees were a group who believed they were morally superior to other people because they lived more cheaply and abstinently than other people. Nonsense. People do not get to be morally superior because they have a four-cylinder car. I challenge you to look in either Testament of the Bible and find a word about gas consumption of a car or miles per gallon. And yet we actually have people saying it is ungodly and irreligious and the sacrilegious to drive and eight cylinder car. In the same applies in their political views. Unless you are able driving, used book owning, toward a shell or rimless glasses wearing person who wears hand-me-down clothes and doesn't bathe too often, you are not a morally superior person. Pharisaism was very, very seriously castigated by Jesus Christ in the New Testament and I think it deserves some castigation now. You see an awful lot of it, especially at university campuses. Very scary when people think their morally superior because they have less than you do. Because it means they're jealous and they want to take away what you have. You know I'm going to have to got this even more.
Alright, what's the crux of the matter? The crux of the matter is this: all this criticism of America has been going on for a long time and it's gotten more and more intense. A psychological phenomenon is happening. We were attacked on September 11, 2001 by Muslim terrorists. Instead of directing our range against them as we should, we have taken the cowards way out in many, many circumstances, and directed our rage against our own President we know won't hurt us. We can say anything we want about George Bush, he's not going to take us up to an apartment and chop our heads off. So we criticize him and make believe he's the villain. The real villains are out there wanting to kill us, as many of us as they can, subjugate us, humiliate us, torture us. We don't take them on if we're in the radical left, instead we take on George Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and say that they're the villains. They're not. The terrorists are the villains. We're the good guys. We've got to get it straight. If we don't get it straight we're in real, serious trouble. If we keep thinking that the people who lead this country are the bad guys and that George Bush is the enemy, we're never going to make any progress in the war on terror. That's why we wrote the book. Refocus what's important: we're the good guys. Yes, a few people were mistreated at Abu Ghraib prison. And any is too many. Saddam Hussein gassed 300,000 of his own people and killed them. Which is the bad guy? Yes! Yes! America has polluted some rivers in this country and were busily trying to clean them up. The bad guys kill innocent people they pick up walking down the street or journalists who have been sent for an interview and chop their heads off while they're still living, while they're still pleading for mercy. Which is the bad guy? We, it's true, have made mistakes in the by mistake bombed places during war is which shouldn't have been bombed. They purposely killed 3000 people who were just working in their offices on a bright, sunny morning on September 11th. Who is the bad guy? We've got to remember, we are the good guys in this struggle. United we can defeat any enemy. This is a great, powerful nation. It is armed with the best weapons, it is armed with the moral certainty of some very, very fine people. But there's the media, there's academics, there's Hollywood, there's some parts of the left wing politically trying to tell us we should doubt ourselves, then we are the real villains and we should be angry at ourselves, shouldn't fight them, should be instead fight George Bush. Very serious mistake. I don't think that Kerry would be a terrible President. I'm not part of the group that thinks the world will end if he becomes President. I think he'll do as good a job as he is capable of doing. But, I think what we've got to concentrate on is the country itself. The country itself is the greatest thing that's ever happened in human history. A confluence of great events came about to create this blessed shrine to the best in humanity called the United States of America. Now we have some of the worst enemies we've ever faced trying to destroy us. Let's not help them out. Let's learn how great America is, let's read books about American history, let's read the editorial-page of The Wall Street Journal, let's read The Spectator, let's read the magazine of The American Enterprise Institute, American Enterprise, let's read The National Review, let's realize that this country is the greatest engine for human achievement and human dignity there's ever been in the world and let's support it.
The big names are against us. The big, famous, Oscar-winning names are against us. The big names in the newspaper world and the big names in the media world are against us. It's just not a great large group of us who have in our hearts that America is the shining city on the hill worth preserving at any cost. I happened to believe that Mr. Kerry is among that group who does believe that America is worth preserving at any cost, I think Mr. Bush is even more so. But let's make sure that we're in that group. God did shed his grace on this country. If anyone drives around this country, sees the goodness and kindness of the American spirit, sees the kind and goodness of strangers to strangers, if anyone like me who's 59 years old could see the progress that's been made in this country in terms of human decency in the last 50 years, you would have no doubt that God has shed his grace on this country. But God requires on us to help him do this work. That's when God wants to save America, he doesn't send down flaming chariots, he doesn't have a burning bush on every corner, he has us who believe that he shed his grace on the to do his work.
I am reminded, and I will close with this, that we should be remembering what great Republicans have said, we should also be remembering what a great American Democrats said when he was sworn and in 1961 he said "We ask God to do these various great things for America that are incredibly important. We have no guarantee of any reward except a good conscience, but we have to remember, as we do this work, that we ask God to help us and the God answers back to us here on Earth. God's work is your work." Thank you very much for listening to me. [Applause]
Host: Mr. Stein will be allowed to take a few questions. We have microphone set up at both sides of the room. If you do want to ask a question please state your name in the school you're from and perhaps the area you are living in now, currently.
Stein: OK, let's have a few questions. OK, you cannot leave without asking some questions. So somebody ask a question. It's inconceivable that a group this large would not have questions. You're being shy because I'm so much older and fatter than you.
Questioner: [some question about reverse racism]
Stein: Affirmative-action is unequivocally reverse racism and generally speaking I don't support it.
I do feel that the situation for African-Americans in particular was so bleak for so long and they were mistreated for so long, that we have to devote
a lot of national attention to trying to give them the maximum of opportunities. I generally am opposed to affirmative-action, though, I think it's a
very bad idea to categorize people on the basis of race. By the way, I'm a huge fan of rap music. Some of it is wildly, wildly too dirty. Wildly too
dirty. I mean really wildly too dirty. [Laughter]
And some of it is way too violent. But I notice there's no affirmative action in the music business and black people have done unbelievably well there.
There's no affirmative-action and that's the business, contrary to what some racists might think,that's a business that requires a lot of brainpower to
write those lyrics.
There's no affirmative action in the acting business and acting is a lot harder than you think.
It's really hard to memorize long speeches and do them while moving around and taking various poses.
There's no affirmative action there.
I think people do better when they are challenged and they rely on their own abilities rather then government handouts.
Questioner: [some question about pro-life]
Stein: I think that the single best thing for the pro-life movement is to not try to have a law that forces people to do any particular thing, but just
to tell people, if a baby is not a human being, what is it? If a baby in the womb is not a human being, what is it? It's not Jell-O. It's not applesauce.
What is it? It's a living being creature very, very much the same as a baby right after birth. And once people start thinking about that, I think it is
very hard for them to have abortions. Now I want to say that I know there are some circumstances where women will literally die if they give birth. And
there are very few, but I know there are some. And I do think there should be allowances made for those situations. It's a very, very tough call, but I
think the overwhelming majority of abortions should not take place, and I have to say that once you start down that path, that a human being is a human being is a human being, you also start realizing you have to have more compassion for the old, more compassion for the ill, more compassion for the mentally disabled, especially more compassion for the old. I say that emphatically because I am becoming one of them so quickly. I have a father-in-law who is my hero. He lives in a small town in Arkansas. He is an incredibly fine man. He won the Silver Star in two wars and he is now in his eighties.
And there are so many World War II veterans in the same situation. And I call him almost every day, in fact he's told me I'm making a pest of myself
calling him so much, but I think those of you who have grandparents that age you can take a step towards pro-life right now by paying attention to those people, by showing them your love for them, by calling them, sending them letters. Pro-life does not just have to be closing down abortion mills,
although it is a big, big thing to do, although always within the context of the law, but... the... a... no, I mean that but, but the a, but, I do mean
that, but the a, but the a, but the a valuable, valuable active Joe showing old people that you care about them is extremely meaningful and it is a form
of pro-life. Sir.Questioner: John Stewart from the University of Kansas. We have a problem in the Republican Party with conservative-moderate splits. We just recently elected a Democratic governor where I think nearly 65% of the state is Republican and we have problems in the third Congressional District trying to unseat a liberal Democrat and basically I'm just wondering want, as college students, can we do to help men the party, help mend conservatives in the moderates.
Stein: I think what you mostly have to do is what I often do and what my friend Phil and I often do. I often come to Phil and I say to him 'Phil, I'm
so disgusted with Rumsfeld I can't stand it. He is not enlarging the military, he's not paying the people in the military enough.' And my friend Phil
says 'Yeah, but think who would be Secretary of Defense if the Democrats won.' Think how much worse he or she would be.
And I think that we Republicans have to realize that whatever divides us is nowhere near as big as what unites us.
And I don't say this just about Republicans, this is not a party gathering, this is an ideological gathering, we have to remember that what unites
us in terms of our beliefs in human liberty in terms of right to life is far, far greater than what divides us. And I agree that's a hard thing to do.
There are a lot of Republicans who are very angry at other Republicans.
That's fine, but I think back up, take the longer view, realize which side you're on in the big issues.
Thank you. Do you know what famous great president was from Kansas? Probably the greatest. [inaudible from the audience]
I think he was born there but he grew up in Kansas. Right. Eisenhower right eye has my son, by the way the other day, I think I have to pay am $100
to make him take a walk with me to walk the dogs, and I said 'Tommy, let's try to do something educational. Can you tell me the presidents who were
president since I was born?' So he says 'No.' And I said 'So just try.' So he says 'Robert E. Lee.' So I say 'Tommy, Robert E. Lee was not President
of the United States.' So he thinks for a minute and he says 'Abraham Lincoln.' Just an aside. You Sir.
Questioner: I wonder if you seen Michael Moore's new movie?
Stein: You know I have not seen it. I'll tell you what: we have two dogs and four cats in our house. I have to clean up their droppings every day.
So I see enough manure every day. [laughter, followed by applause] OK, you Sir, young Sir over there.
Questioner my name is Tim [inaudible] from the University of Southern Indiana. I'm sure you were talking about the Hollywood elite.
You have worked in Hollywood and you describe this fear they have of middle America.
Well I was just wondering if the Hollywood elite's have any realinteraction with middle America and if they do what kind of interaction is it?
Maybe you could also say what kind of interaction you've had with middle America.
Stein: They don't have much interaction with America. First of all, most of the people who are powers that be in Hollywood grew up in either New York
or Los Angeles.
There are some exceptions but most did. And that's fairly removed from middle America.
I think they're interaction has mostly to do with publicity tours or press tours. They don't have much interaction with them. The people I meet in
Hollywood who did grow up in Heartland America are generally conservatives and Republicans, and there are a fair number of them, but they are never,
or almost never, the famous ones. There almost always the ones who are the makeup artists or the lighting people or the gaffers or the Teamsters.
But they're interaction with America is slender. There's a great saying, Hollywood is like high school with money. And in high school you have to be
an ultra-conformist. I mean you can't really take any positions that don't conform or else you will not be part of the cool set and you won't be
asked to eat with the cool people more go to the cool parties. At least that was how it was when I was in high school. It may be all different now.
And Hollywood is like that. If you take a position outside the cool position, you don't get invited to the cool parties. I don't care very much
about it for myself because my wife and my dogs are my world so I don't really care about much of the world besides that. But Hollywood people do
not want to be ostracized. They want to be on the inside. They don't want to lose their social position and they especially don't want to lose
their work position.
My agent said to me a few years ago during the Bush campaign, she said 'You know you're out their campaigning for Bush and you could lose your whole
career over that.' And I said 'I am absolutely certain I will not.' And even if I did freedom of speech is everything to me. If I have to lose my
career to prove that I have freedom of speech I will do it. But I haven't. And people in Hollywood, by the way, tolerate me as a kind of crazed
eccentric. Although more and more of them I meet are getting to be Republicans. It's growing like a weed. It is growing slowly, but it is growing.
Now my interaction with the middle-Americas, now I grew up in Maryland. At the time I grew up there it was not just a part of Washington, DC, like
it is now, it was a fairly southern place. When we would play war games everybody wanted to be a Rebel. But it was also a very segregated, racist
place, so that wasn't good. Most of my interaction with middle America comes from the time that I spent in north Idaho. And I spend as much time as
I can there, I'm looking to buy a house there, I love it a lot. People are so nice. I'll give you an example of why I love north Idaho so much. One
of the first times I went there, about 12 years ago, I was driving up to a place called Priests Lake which is probably as beautiful a spot as there
is on this planet. And it was snowing and I wanted to pull off to take a picture of the snow falling on a beautiful field. And I pulled over, my
son was in the car, and a man pulled up behind me in a pickup truck. Oh, he's probably from some Nazi militia, he's going to murder me. And instead
he came over to me and he said 'Is there anything wrong with your car? I noticed you pulled over.' And I said 'No, I'm fine.' And he said 'OK, well
have a good day,' and drove off. That wouldn't happen in Los Angeles. If you stopped your car people would honk at you and call you a son of a bitch
for obstructing traffic. I love that about north Idaho. I was up in Santa Cruz, California, which is a big Hippie center, but it is a wonderful place.
And one morning my car wouldn't start and the guy who's parked next to me, who's from Alaska, he was driving down from Alaska, just said 'Well I'll
fix it for you.' And he did fix it and I tried to give him one hundred dollars. He wouldn't take it. I mean, that's America. America is just so greate.
I have a really strong feeling in my heart about America because I am a Jew.
And I know the history of the Jews which was that they were chased, murdered, tortured, butchered all over the world.
And then came America and we were treated like human beings and allowed to have our dignity.
God bless America! God bless America! It has given, not just Jews, everybody so much dignity.
There's never been anything like it in the world.
It is my obsession to love and be grateful to this country. [Applause]
[Question-and-answer period]
Stein: Madame, young Madame.
Questioner: I'm Caroline Lewis from Texas. My question was: what would be your suggestion for the best approach to spread the pro American
position you were talking about in your book on the college campuses, to getting people to be more excited about being patriotic and loving
their country, and not blaming Bush.
Stein: You have to do it one person at a time, one soul at a time, talk about it sincerely and talk about the progress that's been made.
How old are you?
Questioner: [inaudible]
Stein: OK, so you're very, very young. How old are your mother and father?
Questioner: I don't know.
Stein: You don't know how old your mother and father are?
Questioner: My dad is [inaudible] fifty.
Stein: I always think that a way to begin is to say 'Look here, when my dad was in school, the schools were segregated,
or when my mom was in school the schools were segregated. Look at the progress we've made in this country.' Or you might
say, I don't know what your grandparents situation was, but let's just take hypothetically that they were on a farm and
the they were poor and they couldn't afford to buy this or that and look, we can afford to buy anything we want. And look
at the way we live in this country compared to the way people live anywhere else in the world, and we're trying to export
that prosperity to everyone in the world. And I think just by making examples, cases and examples, that it gets done and
it gets done by people seeing how sincerely you mean it. And I think a sincere heart can change minds. Thank you. OK.
Last question, sir.
Questioner: My name is Timothy Gottlieb from San Jose, California...
Stein: Yes sir, I know what well.
Questioner: I just wonder what your position is on how to deal with radical Islam, the movement in the United States and their
planned to use our laws and freedoms against us to take control of the government?
Stein: Well I don't know if they plan to take control of the government... by the way, I was shocked at Barrack Obama's speech
at the Democratic Convention when he said we have to stand up against Arab families being rounded up. No Arab families have been
rounded up. What's he talking about? That's just pure baiting trying to get the Arab-American vote.
That hasn't happened, that's just a myth.
But, anyway, I think we just have to enforce the laws against terrorism strictly and we have to not be ashamed to stand up for the
Patriot Act and for the acts that are trying to keep a lid on terrorism.
You know it's interesting, I'll use this to talk about the Patriot Act.
We've had so much criticism from the left of the Patriot Act because supposedly it allows the government to look into your library records.
Well first of all, nobody goes to the library anymore, in the first place.
But second...
I wish they did by the way because libraries are incredibly great places, libraries are really among the greatest inventions
of mankind and people should go to them more... but... well libraries are not just great but super great places and librarians
are among the greatest people in the country... but... they are, they're wonderful, I used to have a girlfriend who was a
librarians and I loved her so much... but, anyway... she's still a librarian, but she doesn't speak to me because I married
my wife instead of her... but, anyway...
but the Patriot Act does no more than give law enforcement officials in the area of terrorism the same rights that they had, powers
that they had in organized crime and drug smuggling. Doesn't do anything more than that and nobody's library records have been looked
up, nobody's book buying records have been looked up.
The Patriot Act is a very limited, carefully tailored act and its being used as a catchword for fascism and a Big Brotherism and its
just nonsense.
But I don't think we want to disregard the fact that we have a lot of dangerous people out there who for some reason have come here
taking advantage of the great way of life we have here and yet are very hostile to that way life.
They're dangerous and when they break the law they have to be strictly prosecuted and cries that it is racism just have to be ignored.
It's not racism, it's protecting the society.
I would actually take one more question from somebody. I'll take two more, because then I have to sign books and then I have to get to
the train station.
Madame... I'll choose you because you're on the right.
Questioner: My name is Demarest Thompson, I am an intern at Texas Right-to-Life...
Stein: Excellent.
Questioner: Could you please tell us what your position on stem cell research is?
Stein: I wish I could, but I don't know the subject well enough to give you an intelligent answer, but my own feelings is that whatever
Wanda Franz likes, I like. She's the head of Right-to-Life and I find her to be a very reasonable and thoughtful woman.
Just ask her. Whatever she says is fine with me. Now, over here, young Madame.
Questioner: Hi, I'm Caitlin Mc[inaudible] from St. Mary's College in Maryland. I was wondering, growing up in Montgomery County I'm sure
you understand that there's quite a lot of liberals there and, basically, in order to win Maryland as a state all you need is three counties,
Baltimore, Montgomery and Prince Georges, all Democrat, so how do you suggest, the rest of the State being Republican, we take it back?
Stein: I think the Eastern Shore should secede... [Applause] and become Eastern Maryland, the 51st state. I'm actually an enormous fan of
the Eastern Shore, it's one of my favorite places in the whole world. If it weren't for the humidity, I would live here right now.
But I don't know what you do, I mean, if the Democrats have the votes, they get the state, it's that simple.
The day will come when all these non-white voters will realize that the Democrats have been selling them a bill of goods,
they've been taking their votes in giving them absolutely nothing in return except being patronized and indulging paranoia.
They will realize that they are fully capable of having a much better life with a freer, more conservative society. [Applause]
Ben Stein Speech to Young Americans Foundation – 8/1/04
p. 24 of 24
Texas Right to Life
Statewide Builders of a Pro-Life TexasEmilio Gonzales, R.E. Thompson, Honoring Demarest Thompson.
Emilio Gonzales, Michele Thrash, Honoring Alexis Paige. Emilio Gonzales, Henry Bludau ...
www.texasrighttolife.com/donations_in_memory_honor.php
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