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Oct. 13, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show

22:26

Ep. 8 - David Brooks Hates Conservatives

Ben discusses the conservatism of the conservative who encouraged Barack Obama to run for the White House because of the crease of his trousers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	In world history, the Jewish people, they've never had it better than they've had for the last couple of decades.
	The rise of Israel as a strong international power made it possible for Jews to feel safer all over the world, and the fall of the Soviet Union freed millions of Jews to leave that communist cesspool.
	It's been an era of tolerance and goodwill toward Jews throughout the United States.
	Guilt over the Holocaust stopped the Europeans from allowing their inherent and innate anti-Semitism from rising to the surface.
	All of that is now over, thanks to the international left.
	In the last couple of weeks, Palestinian Arabs have embarked on a well-calibrated and thoroughgoing stabbing spree throughout Israel just over the last 24 hours.
	There are three people killed in shootings and stabbings in Israel.
	The stabbing spree follows hard on the Palestinian Authority dictator, Mahmoud Abbas, explaining to the United Nations that Palestinians no longer felt bound by the Oslo Accords.
	As if they ever felt bound by the Oslo Accords.
	They just took the guns and then turned them on the Jews as soon as possible.
	Well, the same week that Abbas did that, Politico reported that President Obama had rejected pleas from members of his own party to oppose Palestinian statehood as part of any Iran nuclear deal.
	Meanwhile, the Iranians know they've found their patsy in Barack Obama, and they are loving it.
	It's like McDonald's.
	They've rejected any more negotiations with the West, and they tested long-range ballistic missiles this week, and they're funneling troops into Russian-run Syria.
	With Russia's blessing, Hezbollah terrorists, sponsored by Iran, are pouring into Syria, too, putting Israel on the defensive on its northern border.
	It's already on its defensive on its eastern border, as well as the southern border with Gaza.
	The sudden turn against Israel globally, not super surprising.
	It's the result of the rise of the most powerful philosophical force of the recent past, Western self-loathing.
	Western self-loathing, it springs from this general philosophy that anybody who's successful, nations, individuals, you must have become successful because you exploited downtrodden peoples.
	So America, in this particular view, is successful because we were means of the slaves and the Native Americans.
	European nations were successful because they invaded Africa and India.
	Israel, by extension.
	Israel is successful because it stole its land from those innocent Palestinian Arabs at the behest of the evil West, and then utilized the Palestinian Arabs for some reason or other that no one seems to be able to explain.
	All of this, of course, is garbage.
	America is successful because it embraced capitalism and Judeo-Christian moral values, both of which value the individual above the collective.
	Individualism breeds success.
	Collectivism breeds misery.
	America's actually successful in spite of its mistreatment of slaves, and Chinese, and Hispanics, and Native Americans, and women.
	It's not because of slavery that America's rich.
	After all, nations throughout history have exploited people of all sorts.
	In fact, Arab nations still continue to engage in slavery.
	They haven't seen tremendous success because of it.
	America has become more successful, not less successful, as it became more tolerant.
	The same holds true of European nations, who would have been better off not to exploit the people they conquered, but actually just treat them as trading partners.
	You know, Lenin said that capitalism was the final stage of imperialism.
	Imperialism, rather, was the final stage of capitalism.
	That capitalism ended its growth, and therefore you have to invade other countries.
	This is nonsense.
	It's been known as economic nonsense for years.
	The truth is that imperialism, conquering other nations, is necessary for non-capitalistic, non-free countries.
	That's why Vladimir Putin and ISIS and the Chinese government, they're all aggressively seeking territorial expansion and exploitation of subject peoples.
	Their philosophies have failed, and now they have to use power to maintain their growth.
	But that's not going to stop leftist Westerners from self-loathing.
	And it doesn't stop leftists from believing that the West is bad and hating Israel specifically because of it.
	So, for example, President Obama's spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright, yesterday we talked about him.
	He spoke over the weekend at the Million Man March on the National Mall.
	Which was really kind of like the barely 1,000-man march.
	Nobody showed up for it.
	But the protesters who did show up, they cheered, and Wright then explained his theology of Jesus, drawn directly from nothing remotely approaching the Bible.
	He said that Jesus was a Palestinian, which makes no sense since Palestine, the name of it wasn't even given until 70 A.D.
	by the Romans as an insult to the Jews.
	Jeremiah Wright said that the Palestinian people had the Europeans come and take their country, even though they didn't have a country.
	He said the youth in Ferguson, Missouri and the youth in Palestine have united together to remind us that the dots need to be connected.
	And he says there's an apartheid wall that was built twice the size of the Berlin Wall in height, keeping Palestinians off of illegally occupied territories.
	Actually, the security wall was built only after the Palestinians crossed over into Israeli territory to kill Jews.
	And all of this, of course, is crap.
	Jesus was a Jew.
	Palestinians originally referred to Jews.
	If you look back in 1920s newspapers, when it said Palestinians, it always meant Jews.
	Arab Muslims only arrived in Israel six centuries after Jesus died and was resurrected, if you're a Christian.
	And modern Palestinian Arabs are not even descendants of those original Palestinian Arabs.
	But obviously, Jeremiah writes, thinking it had an impact on President Obama.
	The linkage.
	That you hear Jeremiah Wright make between Palestinians exploited and black people being exploited.
	President Obama wrote exactly about this in Dreams from My Father.
	Here's what Obama wrote, and it sounds a lot like Jeremiah Wright.
	He wrote, quote, I know, I have seen the desperation and disorder of the powerless, how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi, and how easily they slip into violence and despair.
	I know the response of the powerful to this disorder.
	Alternating, as it does, between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its prescribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force and more sophisticated military hardware is inadequate to the task.
	When you sift through that Melvillian endless sentence, what he's basically saying is that all suffering springs from inequality, and all inequality springs from exploitation.
	So if Palestinians are suffering, that's because Israel is at fault.
	Israel must pay the price.
	The supposed exploiter must be cut down to size, even if it means Palestinian Arabs stabbing Jewish kids in the head.
	In this particular view, Israeli self-defense is part of a cycle of violence, started by Israel, of course.
	Self-defense does not exist in a world where you are the exploiter.
	There's no such thing as self-defense.
	You're just defending evil people, even if you're the evil person.
	The problem is this.
	Western self-loathing now dominates not just the United States, but Europe.
	And Westerners welcome unscreened Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East in the name of equality, even as the rates of Jew-targeting attacks have risen dramatically in recent years.
	And it's even crept its way into Israel, where the leftist post-Zionist movement now says that there's guilt, blood guilt, on the Jewish state for its foundation.
	Because it's easy to quote-unquote other the Jews, Western leftists don't feel any qualms siding with Arab murderers, they can brush off Jewish kids getting stabbed while riding bikes, or people being shot while riding a bus, because all these kids were beneficiaries of Western colonialism.
	So Jews shouldn't really be seeking sympathy from Western leftists.
	After all, the same leftists who are now condemning Dr. Ben Carson for stating the obvious, Jews could have used some guns against the Nazis, well, these are the same leftists today who say that Jews should be disarmed again against today's Nazis.
	Not a big surprise.
	Jews are looking for love in all the wrong places if they're looking to the left.
	I'm Ben Shapiro and this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Isn't it that racism beyond political?
	Tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings?
	Okay, so before we get into today's topic, which is the continuing attempt by Democrats to turn Republicans into your kooky uncle, I want to talk briefly about some breaking news that happened this Apparently, a new report says, surprise, surprise, as we all knew, it was the Russians who shot down that Malaysian airliner.
	Remember, there was a Malaysian airliner that took The U.S.' 's response has been that they don't really care what happened.
	The U.S.
	Embassy actually tweeted out earlier, we should put less focus on who's responsible for this atrocity.
	We should just worry about the feelings of the victims, which makes zero sense at all.
	But it does when you're bending over both forwards and backwards, depending on your preference.
	For the Obama administration toward Russia, that's precisely what they're doing.
	In fact, President Obama is fully delusional when it comes to Russia at this point.
	I mean, he has taken off into cloud cuckoo land.
	He is totally insane.
	He's living in a world of complete fairytale nonsense.
	President Obama on Sunday, he was asked specifically by Steve Kroft at CBS News, is Vladimir Putin challenging you?
	Here's what President Obama said, and I mean, this is just full-on delusional.
	You said a year ago that the United States, America leads, we're the indispensable nation.
	Mr. Putin seems to be challenging that leadership.
	In what way?
	Let's think about this.
	Well, he's moved troops into Syria, for one.
	He's got people on the ground.
	Two, the Russians are conducting military operations in the Middle East for the first time since World War II, bombing the people that we are supporting.
	So that's leading, Steve?
	Let me ask you this question.
	When I came into office, Ukraine was governed by a corrupt Ruler who was a stooge of Mr. Putin.
	Syria was Russia's only ally in the region.
	And today, rather than being able to count on their support and maintain the base they had in Syria, which they've had for a long time, Mr. Putin now is devoting his own troops, his own military, just to barely hold together by a thread His sole ally.
	He's challenging your leadership, Mr. President.
	He's challenging your leadership.
	Steve, I gotta tell you, if you think that running your economy into the ground and having to send troops in in order to prop up your only ally is leadership, then we've got a different definition of leadership.
	Well, actually, that is precisely Barack Obama's definition of leadership.
	He's run America's economy into the ground, and he's had to send troops into places like Libya to prop up allies that don't exist anymore.
	And that's also true in Syria, where he's had to send money to people who don't even exist, who spent $500 million paying five people to fight the Russian-backed Assad.
	This is all nonsense and insanity.
	The reason I point this out and start with this is because I want you to remember this as a backdrop to what we're about to hear, which is that the real problem with America is not that guy.
	The real problem for America is not that, dude.
	The real problem for America is the Republican Party.
	Always and forever, the Republican Party is the biggest problem for America, for the world, their disaster area.
	And for that perspective, we go today to David Brooks.
	David Brooks.
	It just has to be said.
	David Brooks, he's the supposed conservative at the New York Times.
	You've heard him on places like the Michael Medved Show.
	I'm friends with Michael.
	David Brooks is not a conservative, and how he's been considered a conservative columnist at the New York Times is absolutely beyond me.
	Remember, David Brooks is the guy who said, back in 2005, he sat down with then-Senator Obama, and he said that he looked at the crease in Barack Obama's pants, which I can only assume is not a euphemism.
	But he looked at the crease in Barack Obama's pants, and that's when he realized that Barack Obama would not just be a good president, he would be a great president.
	David Brooks then proceeded to write a column in 2006 called Run, Barack, Run.
	Run, Barack—this is the conservative columnist for The New York Times.
	Well, today he has a piece that is the most egregious hit piece on conservatives that I've maybe ever read from somebody who at least purports to be conservative.
	You're used to it from the left, but this sort of Hypocritical, vitriolic nonsense you're not really used to hearing from people supposedly on the right.
	And it's worth going through in detail because if you want to understand the rifts that are happening in the Republican Party over in Congress, if you want to understand the rifts that are happening in the conservative movement over Donald Trump or Ben Carson, if you want to understand why Republicans are so all fired mad all the time, They're mad at people like David Brooks, and they should be mad at people like David Brooks.
	Here's what David Brooks writes today in the New York Times.
	He says, "The House Republican caucus is close to ungovernable these days.
	How did this situation come about?
	This was not just the work of the Freedom Caucus or Ted Cruz or one month's activity.
	The Republican Party's capacity for effective self-governance degraded slowly over the course of a long chain of rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions, and philosophical betrayals." So far I'm reading this and I'm thinking, okay, this is sort of true.
	I mean, the conservative base was betrayed by Republican leadership that seems to want to compromise at every available turn with people who want to destroy the fundamental bases of Western civilization, right?
	So far I'm with him, but that's not what he's saying.
	What he says is that the party abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism.
	So you'd be much better off if we just stuck with the strategy of surrendering at every turn to Democrats and calling it incrementalism.
	If Democrats take 10 steps forward and Republicans push slightly back and then allow Democrats to take another 10 steps forward, that is incrementalism, according to David Brooks.
	He says, Republicans came to see themselves as insurgents and revolutionaries, and every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.
	Well, that's a lie.
	Not every revolution tends toward anarchy and ends up devouring its own.
	I seem to remember one, like, here in this country that didn't do that, because it was based on conservative principles.
	But here's where David Brooks goes off the rails.
	And this is, I think—it's so important for folks to understand the two sides of the divide in the Republican Party.
	Here's David Brooks and what he thinks conservatism is.
	Remember, this is a guy who endorsed Obama in 2006, two years before Obama was even running, really.
	He says this, All of these things are nice.
	All of these things are wonderful.
	All of these things also assume a precondition of decency.
	incremental change, a preference for reform rather than revolution, a respect for hierarchy, precedence, balance, and order, and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured, and responsible.
	Okay, all of these things are nice.
	All of these things are wonderful.
	All of these things also assume a precondition of decency.
	When you're fighting against people who wish to destroy everything that is good, then none of these things apply.
	Right?
	I like incrementalism, for example.
	It's great.
	Incrementalism is a wonderful idea so long as you are incrementally changing a system that is already good.
	If a system has been corrupted, you don't want incremental change.
	You want wholesale change.
	The Soviet Union did not need incremental change.
	It needed to be overthrown.
	The Chinese communist system does not need incremental change.
	We've been trying that for 40 years and we turned them into a world power.
	When he says conservatism, it stands for intellectual humility.
	First of all, David Brooks preaching intellectual humility is like O.J.
	Simpson preaching pacifism.
	But conservatism stands for intellectual humility.
	The reason conservatism likes intellectual humility is the idea that people in power, if they're not humble, if they have no intellectual humility, they'll do whatever they want.
	And they'll run roughshod completely, completely over the rights of the American people.
	But conservatism does not stand for intellectual humility other than the idea that human beings are capable of both good and bad.
	Human beings are capable of sin.
	That's why we need checks and balances.
	It doesn't stand for the principle you're supposed to be intellectually humble before morons.
	People get Moses wrong.
	Moses, according to Judaism, was the most humble man who ever lived.
	Moses full-on knew his qualities.
	Moses wasn't ignorant.
	Moses was humble in the face of God.
	There's a difference between being humble in the face of God and being humble in the face of Barack Obama, as much as leftists would like to say they're the same thing.
	And you have David Brooks continuing, he says that they prefer reform rather than revolution, they respect hierarchy.
	Okay, conservatives respect hierarchy so long as that hierarchy protects rights.
	But the revolutionaries of the American Revolution were not particularly fond of a hierarchy that enshrined King George, for example.
	But again, remember, everything that David Brooks is saying, none of this actually has to do with principles of liberty and limited government.
	According to David Brooks, conservatism has nothing to do with liberty and limited government, and the people who fight for liberty and limited government are not conservative unless they use his tactics of incrementalism and kindness and politeness.
	He says, conservatives of this disposition can be dull, but they know how to nurture and run institutions.
	I seem to remember a time when George W. Bush was president and we had a Republican Congress and things went very poorly.
	He says, "They also see the nation," this is really the key.
	David Brooks says, "Conservatives see the nation as one organic whole.
	Citizens may fall into different classes and political factions, but they're still joined by chains of affection that command ultimate loyalty and love." Okay, conservatives do see a community that is tied together.
	In terms of normative, okay, we aspire to a community that's tied together, but we don't assume it.
	We don't assume that that community exists in the absence of all evidence.
	We don't pretend the community exists when there's no evidence to back that up.
	We don't pretend.
	I have nothing in common with Barack Obama ideologically or in terms of where I want the future of the country to go.
	There are no ties that bind me to him.
	He's my president because that's the system we have.
	We have no ties that bind us together.
	When it comes to hardcore leftists, don't pretend there's a common thread holding my ideology to theirs that we both want what's best for the country.
	We don't.
	I want what's best for the country.
	They want what's worst for the country.
	Otherwise, I wouldn't be fighting them.
	This nonsense that we live in a country where everybody simply gets along politically and it's just a matter of compromise, he's talking about an era that no longer exists.
	But because he's talking about that era, and because he doesn't believe crisis is ever possible, he says anybody who looks at today's political situation as though it's a crisis is a nutjob.
	And so he says, Today's Republicans, like Newt Gingrich and Ben Carson and Rush Limbaugh, they're always saying that civilization is on the brink of collapse, every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic, comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.
	Hey, first of all, not every comparison to Nazi Germany is worthwhile or decent.
	However, if you never use Nazi Germany as a backdrop to what you're talking about, if you never acknowledge the possibility of tyranny rising, tyranny becomes inevitable.
	I promise you, the people who are most shocked by the rise of Nazi Germany were the people who ended up in the ovens.
	The fact is, That the people who are always the victims of tyranny are the people who don't see it coming.
	And it's not because they're morally decadent, there's something wrong with them, it's because if you assume the best, likely the worst is going to happen to you at some point.
	By the way, when he says every setback like the passage of Obamacare becomes the ruination of the republic, Obamacare was a large step toward the ruination of the republic.
	Obamacare says the government can force you to buy anything the government wants to force you to buy.
	So long as it's for your own good.
	How that's not the ruination of the principles underlying the Republic is beyond me, but this goes on and on.
	David Brooks whining about conservatives and saying that they just don't understand politics.
	If only they understood politics.
	If only they understood the need for compromise.
	The Republicans are the big problem.
	And this has become the media's meme as well.
	The media is going after everybody on the right side of the aisle because everybody on the right side of the aisle is a crisis thinker.
	They're a crisis thinker.
	So, for example, Ben Carson has been raked over the coals because Ben Carson says exactly what I'm saying here.
	He says that the Second Amendment was designed to allow citizens to fight for their rights.
	Here is Dr. Ben Carson, who, by the way, I'm falling in love with more and more as a candidate.
	I may not endorse him, but he's certainly saying a lot of the right things that none of the other candidates are saying.
	Much more than Trump, by the way.
	Here is Dr. Ben Carson.
	This is a book about the Constitution and the Second Amendment as part of it.
	And it's there for the reasons that I stated in the book.
	Specifically, in case of an invasion by a foreign power, the people will be able to aid the military.
	And also, if we have a time when we have the wrong people in office and they want to dominate the people, the people will be able to defend themselves.
	As Daniel Webster eloquently said, "The people of America will never suffer under tyranny "because they are armed." - And this is exactly right, of course, but this makes him crazy.
	So you have a whole group of people out there saying, to even express this argument is just ridiculous.
	Because we'll never go tyrannical.
	If the founders thought that, they wouldn't have said that.
	And the founders knew tyranny since they fought tyranny.
	And by the way, what the founders considered tyranny, we now consider basic state government here in the state of California.
	I mean, seriously, the tax rates the founders were fighting against under King George were significantly lower than the tax rates that most Americans are currently paying to the federal and state government.
	So the idea that the founders were on any level okay with the argument that tyranny would never happen in America is ignorance of American history.
	But this really is the problem inside the Republican Party and in our republic as a whole.
	Do the American people take seriously the threat of their rights being removed from them?
	We're the richest, most powerful nation in history.
	We have all sorts of things at our disposal.
	We have great iPhones, and we have terrific computers, and we have nice cars produced in other countries, and we have all sorts of wonderful things in everyday life.
	Nice houses.
	We have all these wonderful things.
	And you hear this sort of complacent mentality that's set in among Americans, right and left.
	Don't worry.
	We're America.
	We're great, and we'll always be great.
	And the question I have to ask is, why?
	What makes us great?
	Why will we always be great?
	When Barack Obama says, we're the greatest country in the world and we'll always be the greatest country in the world, even as he takes a sledgehammer to all the foundational principles upon which America stands, you have to wonder, what's he talking about?
	Is he just ethnocentric?
	Is he a racist?
	Does he believe that being born in America makes you a better quality human being to build a better quality country than being born elsewhere?
	Because if not, what is he even saying?
	And Republicans, same question.
	If you're somebody like David Brooks and you believe everything's gonna be okay just because it's gonna be okay, that we all have common bonds in the absence of any common bonds...
	You're gonna be the one who's most taken by surprise when the government comes for you.
	Because the fact is that we do have an ideological battle on our hands.
	We are at a tipping point, because America is always at a tipping point.
	And for all these folks, I never cite Ronald Reagan, but for all these folks who worship at the altar of Ronald Reagan to ignore the fact that Reagan is the one who said that freedom is always one generation away from extinction, demonstrates their willingness to blind themselves in the face of real and true threats to American rights and American liberty.

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