♪♪
-Last year, Vice President Mike Pence
[ Poignant tune plays ] made an exciting announcement.
-The time has come to establish
the United States Space Force.
[ Crickets chirping ]
-The audience was clearly too...
excited to clap,
eagerly awaiting a detailed, scientific explanation
of what a space force is.
-The space force. Incredible.
A powerful new rocket and gleaming new spaceships.
-Spa-a-a-a-a-ce!
Fo-o-o-o-o-o-rce!
-Yes!
We're going to have incredible,
powerful, gleaming rockets
and not blow our space money, like Europe,
on boring things like saving the planet.
It's nice to have leaders who recognize
their most American duty.
-Turning science fiction into science fact.
-Science fiction, a.k.a. the only type of science
the administration should be supporting,
was also the basis for the most glorious weapons program
in U.S. history, conceived during the Cold War...
-What if free people could live secure
in the knowledge that we could intercept
and destroy strategic ballistic missiles?
[ Zap! ] -...the Strategic Defense Initiative,
which soon became known by the name of a popular movie.
-♪ What a feelin'
-No, not that movie!
-The Strategic Defense Initiative
has been labeled Star Wars.
[ "Star Wars" theme plays ]
-But even beyond Star Wars,
Reagan was transforming before our eyes,
from cold warrior
to Jedi warrior!
-Mm! Powerful you have become, Ronnie.
[ Zap! ] -This was one of his concerns.
-What if all of us in the world discovered
that we were threatened from another planet?
-Reagan knew of what he spoke.
As a young man,
he was on the cutting edge of defense research.
-The spy ring has designs
on the greatest war weapon ever invented.
-And so began Reagan's lifelong love affair
with fictitious weaponry.
-I want my MTV. -But, by the early '80s,
outer space seemed like old news.
Who could help Reagan make space sexy again?
-I'm Congressman Newt Gingrich,
the Republican cochairman
of the Congressional Space Caucus.
[ Sultry music plays ] -In no time,
Pentagon bureaucrats were happily drawing up budgets
for Reagan's ambitious new program.
-And it's gonna cost you something extra:
10,000, all in advance.
-10,000?!
-Actually, 10,000 turned out to be a low ball,
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ] but this was a time
when there was no stopping technological innovation!
-Introducing Auto Cup by Ronco, the amazing no-spill cup.
Get a buttoneer,
the only automatic button fastener.
-But, now, there's the egg scrambler.
It scrambles an egg while it's still in the shell.
-But wait. There's more!
-With government funding in place,
defense contractors were soon hard at work
developing ultra-futuristic weapons systems
beyond Americans' wildest imaginations.
Unless they had ever played "Pong."
[ Adventure music climbs ]
And the Strategic Defense Initiative
was only getting more innovative.
-The heart of SDI Phase I
will undoubtedly be Brilliant Pebbles.
-Suck it, Bamm-Bamm.
-Bam, bam, bam!
-President Trump learned a great deal from the past,
[ "Battle Hymn of the Republic" plays ] but how does he plan to pay
for this amazing new chapter of science fiction?
By cutting how much the government spends
on actu science
and act space research.
If our country can only afford science or science fiction,
we're much better off with science fiction.
Science fiction is fun!
But science is so complicated, even our smartest politicians
have a hard time understanding it.
-We keep hearing the warmest year on record.
You know what this is?
It's a snowball.
-Polar bears, because it's warmer,
actually are living better than they were before.
-How do you explain climate change
before man ever had a carbon footprint?
How do you explain that? -The statement that you
just made is blatantly false.
-If that scientist wants people to understand his explanations,
he should try making his science more interesting.
-There are variations
in the Earth's orbital elements.
We shouldn't waste money on actual science
when science fiction is more fun and easier to comprehend.
President Reagan's Star Wars
was an excellent example for today's leaders,
a geniu program, with only one single flaw:
It didn't work.
-Oh, shut up!
[ Suspenseful chord strikes ] [ Cheering and applause ]