All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 19, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
25:35
Ep. 10 - The Left Destroys Comic Books and Also Everything

Ben discusses the left’s war on everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
One of the most depressing features of being an American today lies in the fact that the left has declared total war on every facet of our shared culture.
You know, when you went out with your friends, you went out with your family, it used to be that you could at least, if you disagreed about politics, you could at least talk movies or sports or something.
But now, the left has taken over everything and they've polarized everything.
There's nothing for us to talk about together anymore.
It isn't enough for them to produce movies with Steve Carell and Julianne Moore and Ellen Page about lesbian Black house painters seeking legal protection for a conveyance of property.
Now they've even taken over the comic books and they've hijacked them.
And this really irritates me because as a fan of comic books, these are some of the most iconic characters in American history.
They're not creating new ones, they're just taking the old ones and perverting them.
Which is a real disgrace to what the comic books are.
The latest run of Captain America is a great example.
It features the newest Cap, Sam Wilson, taking on the Sons of the Serpent.
So who are the Sons of the Serpent?
They're an evil group of Tea Party types.
They're Minutemen, basically.
And they're intent on stopping illegal immigration.
The writer is a guy named Nick Spencer.
He's an ardent opponent of Donald Trump, and he slathered the comic with his dislike for conservatives.
The Sons of the Serpent amass at the border to stop these poor, bewildered, illegal immigrants.
And that's when the Sons of the Serpent leader, he announces, "I am the Supreme Serpent.
"By invading this sovereign land, "you defy the laws of God, nature, "and the United States Constitution.
"Therefore, I hereby apprehend you "by the power vested in me, "by the aforementioned God, nature, et cetera, et cetera." Whereupon one of the illegal immigrants cries, Please, whoever you are, we don't want any trouble.
But the Supreme Serpent will have none of it.
He continues, quote, So basically, the son of the Serpent is Donald Trump.
"You come here for employment that is rightfully ours, "and if denied it, you seek welfare paid by our tax dollars." So basically, the son of the serpent is Donald Trump.
Well thankfully, Captain America then shows up to shut down Donald Trump and the Minutemen wannabes, shouting, "If you're done threatening a bunch of unarmed folks, "mostly women and children, I'd pack up the pickup "and head home if I were you gentlemen." This is Captain America now.
Captain America is Barack Obama and Luis Gutierrez all rolled up into one.
And he's not the only one.
Superman, obviously.
If there were three iconic American characters, superhero characters, it would be Superman and Batman and Captain America.
The left's going after all three of them.
Superman.
You remember, he used to be a friend to the cops.
He tried to help out the authorities who stop crime.
Well, not anymore.
In the latest run of Superman Action Comics 42, the temporarily powerless Man of Steel hands up on the wrong side of the police.
The police are a group of faceless fascists looking to shut down any discussion.
There's actually a scene in which one of the protesters, it's supposed to be like Ferguson, one of the protesters walks up to the police and says, we just want to talk.
And the police threaten to hit them with a stun grenade, which is when Superman arrives to take on the riot squad.
This follows on the incredibly overrated Grant Morrison, seriously overrated comic book writer, making Superman a black president of the United States back in Action Comics number 9 in 2012, just in time for the elections.
And then there's Batman number 44.
This came out just a couple of months ago, in which the caped crusader stumbles on the body of a slain black teenager.
And you see a picture of him, and the teenager was shot by a cop while wearing a hoodie.
He looks exactly like Trayvon Martin.
The writer, his name is Scott Snyder, and he also writes the Flash series, says, "Of course you want Batman to beat this officer up and be like, 'How could you?'" So how did this black teenager end up in a confrontation with the police in the first place?
By the way, he's unarmed, of course, and the cops shoot him because he's a racist.
So how did the black teenager end up in trouble?
He went to the Penguin for a loan because the evil, evil banks wouldn't give him a loan based on his lack of credit history.
He needed a loan to keep his father's corner business going.
For some reason, all of this in the end is Bruce Wayne's fault.
Why?
Because Bruce Wayne was gentrifying the area.
And as we all know, gentrification is the worst thing that can ever happen to black people.
Better that their property should be worth nothing than that white people should come in and try and buy it up and actually give them property worth something.
Writer Brian Nazarello, who is also overrated, he explains, this thing is such a ripple, the way lives are affected by gentrification.
If you have no money, you have no voice.
So Batman is now Bernie Sanders, and Superman is now Hillary Clinton, and Captain America is now Barack Obama and Julian Castro.
Culture is one of the few areas of American life where we actually can speak with each other still.
We don't have a lot in common, the left and the right, but we like our movies and our TV shows and our comic books.
Entertainment's entertainment, but not for the left.
The left will never leave a stone unturned when it comes to politicization, when it comes to polarization.
When they finally figure out that they can break all the cultural ties, when we have nothing left to tie us together, that's when they call for growth of government.
That's when they want more and more government.
And in the process, going after comic books, they're indoctrinating yet another generation into leftist nonsense.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Isn't it a damn racist?
Tend to demonize people because they don't care about your feelings.
So folks, Joe Biden is supposed to make his big decision today and maybe tomorrow as to whether he's going to run for president of the United States.
Should he run, it's not really going to affect the race that much as it would have maybe a week ago.
Biden takes votes away from Hillary Clinton.
He takes no votes away from Bernie Sanders.
Sanders has been gaining in the polls in New Hampshire and Iowa ever since the debate because Democrats, particularly young Democrats, are deeply in need Of a wacko socialist loon bag who's 97 years old.
They love him.
They want him.
And so if Joe Biden jumps in, he'll actually help Bernie Sanders by taking votes away from Hillary Clinton.
Biden has really taken his time.
I mean, he's Biden his time.
He's taking a long time to figure out whether he wants to run for president or not.
I think I understand why.
And it's not just for political reasons.
I think I'm pretty sure what happened is that Hillary Clinton at one point actually just put him in the Oval Office and told him to pee in the corner.
So he's been doing that for the last three years.
And eventually he might figure out it's a prank and then run for president.
But the media want the horse race.
At the same time, Hillary Clinton really doesn't want him in the race.
It'll be interesting to see if he jumps in.
I think he will.
I think he'll jump in.
I think it'll be a fake horse race.
Hillary will end up winning the nomination.
I don't see Biden as a major threat to Hillary Clinton, especially given the media's complete faux interest in this email story.
When you're seeing all of these questions being asked to Hillary Clinton about her emails and the corruption attendant to her emails, don't believe a word of it, folks.
This is what the media do.
What the media do, they know their timing.
It's a year and a half before the election.
So what the media do is they do all this stuff now, and they get it out of the way, and then in six months, when these questions are asked again, when people are actually paying attention, as opposed to right now, Then they say, oh, well, we asked and answered.
We're already past that.
We settled that months ago.
And then they move on with their lives.
So as Joe Biden jumps in the race, we'll talk about how that shapes development.
But I want to start today by talking About the media's coverage and the Obama administration's response to what's happening in Israel, where Jews are being stabbed on a daily basis.
There was an attack on a bus stop in Israel over the weekend, a gun attack on a bus stop in Israel, a Palestinian holding a gun attack, I should say, on a bus stop in Israel.
One person killed, nine other people wounded.
And the media headlines were exactly what you would think they were.
We talked about this a little bit last week.
The headlines coming from CNN were things like, violence escalates in Middle East, as though there's just some guy named violence and he's running around killing people.
As opposed to their Palestinians burning crap and stabbing people and shooting people and trying to kill babies, which would make probably for a better headline, but wouldn't jive with what the media are trying to say about this particular conflict.
All you have to know about what the media are trying to say about this particular conflict, look at MSNBC, which is a great example of a leftist news network.
I was actually invited on Al Jazeera last week via Twitter and I I tweeted back that I'm not interested in appearing on a propaganda outlet, and then I really should have tweeted back, I've restricted myself to only two propaganda outlets for Hamas, MSNBC and CNN.
But in any case, MSNBC is really a terrible news outlet.
They have a reporter whose name is Ayman Moyeldin, and he's gotten himself in trouble before because he's so pro-Palestinian terrorist.
Well, on MSNBC the other day, you're about to see a segment where Ayman Mohaldin got himself in serious trouble because, well... Maybe we should just watch it.
It looked from where I was standing, at least, to be a young man.
Did not look to be, you know, particularly armed.
And again, that was confirmed by the fact that the police ultimately removed his clothes.
They didn't find any explosive devices on him.
I was trying to keep an eye to see if they were taking anything off of his body.
Perhaps if they took a gun, if there was a gun that was visible.
There was no gun that was visible.
And at one point, we can clearly see from where we were lying, from where we were standing, where his body was lying, both of his hands were open and both of his hands did not have a knife.
Now that was after he survived to the body.
So it's very possible-- - Yeah, Eamon.
As a matter of fact, you know, and this is important because you're covering this story live and you're seeing it once and you're actually witnessing it, not knowing what you're seeing until you actually process it.
But in the video that we have, that you have, that is, as you say, I mean I don't think anybody else has this video, we can clearly see the man in camouflage t-shirt and pants with what appears to be, at least in his right hand, a knife.
Awkward.
Awkward, right?
I mean, it's a split screen.
You can see the picture right there.
There's a knife, and here is an unarmed... You don't know what's in his other hand.
It could be a trigger.
He could have something on his chest.
You don't know.
But the MSNBC reporter who has come out in favor of Hamas before in multiple reports, at least given them extremely favorable coverage, He's standing there with the split screen.
And this really is a case of, who are you going to believe?
This guy or your own eyes?
Because look at the picture.
The guy has a knife in his hand.
He's saying, no, no, he was unarmed.
No knife.
It's just like with George Zimmerman, right?
Trayvon Martin was completely unarmed.
It wasn't that he was beating George Zimmerman's head against the ground.
Michael Brown, he never went for the gun, right?
It's always the same story.
The facts don't matter.
In this particular case, it's particularly egregious because here you actually have a picture of the guy with the knife.
But that wasn't the worst thing that happened on MSNBC the other day in their crusade against Israel.
The worst thing that happened on MSNBC the other day was this graphic that MSNBC put up.
So let's explain what this graphic is.
So this graphic right here, it says, Palestinian loss of land, 1946 to present.
And folks, if you don't have the video, this is why you should purchase the podcast video.
But, I'll describe it for you.
On the left hand side, you have what appears to be the entire land of Israel.
All of it.
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, all of it.
is green.
It's all owned by the Arabs in 1946, right?
And then it goes to UN Plan 1947, and suddenly half the land is carved away, and it's made yellow because it's been given to Israel, but Jerusalem is still solidly in green territory.
And then you have 1949 to 1967, right?
Which is after the Israeli War of Independence, after it was attacked by all of its neighbors, and now it looks like the land is shrinking, And presumably, if you would carry this graphic forward, you get to 1967, all of this would turn yellow, the Sinai would turn yellow.
Okay, so there's a couple of problems with this particular map.
First of all, this right here on the left-hand side, right, this map of Palestine in 1946 is completely inaccurate.
Why is it completely inaccurate?
It says Palestinian land.
First of all, there were no Palestinians.
Zero.
None.
Zero zip zilch.
If you look at every media account from 1946, the only people described as Palestinian are Jews.
Seriously.
The Jerusalem Post used to be called the Palestine Post because it was called Palestine when it was under Ottoman and British mandate rule ever since 70 CE.
When the Romans decided that to shame the Jews, they would name the land after the Philistines, who were the Jews' historic enemies from Tanakh, which is from the Bible, from the Old Testament.
You remember this, right?
And if you read the Prophets, you read Samuel, you remember that the Jews are constantly fighting with the Philistines, so the Romans as a way to slap at the Jews said, we're gonna take away the name of the land, we'll call it Palestine, after the Philistines, your historic enemies.
Well, At this point in time, in 1946, there is no independent Palestine.
Okay?
Palestine is a mandate territory.
It's owned by the British.
It was not Arab land, and there were no Palestinians.
Palestinians as a nation do not exist.
Okay?
Every Palestinian is an Egyptian or Jordanian.
Or a Syrian, or a Lebanese.
Okay, the idea of an independent Palestinian nation is a total creation of the last 70 years or so.
But, they're saying it's Palestinian land.
Again, even if you believe that the Palestinian nation somehow exists even though they have no independent language, no independent culture, and no shared history beyond the last 50 years, even if you believe all that, this was not Palestinian land, this was British Mandate land.
Right, then right here it says UN Plan 1947.
Israel accepted the UN Plan.
Okay, before this, before this, the British Mandate, When they decided in 1921 that they were going to move ahead with the creation of a Jewish state in so-called Palestine, Palestine, people should understand, was not just Israel, it was also Jordan.
Okay?
In 1921, they were going to give both Jordan and Israel to the Jews.
Then, they sliced off Jordan, they called it Transjordan, and they handed that to the Arabs.
And then they said, okay, we'll hand what's left of Israel, we'll hand that to the Jews.
And then they decided, okay, well, we're not even going to do that.
We're going to carve off half of Israel.
In fact, most historic portions of Israel, right?
Everything that you read in the Bible about Israel basically happens in this area, right?
The green area here.
It happens in Judea and Samaria.
When people say the West Bank, understand, the West Bank is the heart of historic Israel, right?
That's where Jerusalem is.
It's where Shechem is.
It's where Bethlehem is, right?
All of the historic incidents in the Bible take place inside this green area.
And the British carved that off with the help of the UN, handed it over to the Arabs.
The Arabs refused to even take that.
Israel took it.
What's amazing about this is that they even ran this in the first place, because it's obviously a Palestinian propaganda tool.
This map never existed.
This map is fake.
It doesn't exist.
It's not real.
And eventually, MSNBC had to apologize for it.
And in the process of apologizing, they said, we will make sure to be on the lookout for propaganda from both sides.
From both sides.
Because if you're watching MSNBC, are you noticing propaganda from both sides, or are you noticing that there's a reporter on national television saying that a guy with a knife doesn't have a knife and is unarmed, and that there's a map that doesn't exist, but magically takes place in unicorn land of history?
It is incredible, but they take their cues how they take their cues, and they're taking their cues at this point.
I mean, I've seriously been thinking about this a lot lately, folks, and that is, okay, last year there was the Gaza War, and it was, the media coverage was truly awful.
I mean, truly awful.
Every time Israel would strike a terrorist center, it was, it was Israel bombs civilian center.
Every time a rocket flies into the center of civilian Israel, it was resistance by Hamas.
Cycle of violence continues.
And I was on CNN, and I said on CNN that if Hamas could have created a news network, it would look exactly like CNN.
It's even worse now.
It's actually worse now, because what you're watching in Israel is Palestinians stabbing civilian Jews, running cars into crowds of civilian Jews, shooting civilian Jews for no reason at all.
And the Jews, I mean there hasn't even been a military response.
Israel has upped military presence in some Palestinian areas and they're building a fence in East Jerusalem now to stop Arabs from crossing over from East Jerusalem to West Jerusalem in the Old City to kill Jews.
And the media is still covering this as though it's a cycle of violence.
And the reason is because President Obama is now out of the closet.
The Obama administration, they're out of the closet.
Last year on Fox News, I said that this was a borderline anti-Semitic administration, a borderline Jew-hating administration.
I think the borderline is pretty much gone at this point.
When you're telling the Iranians they can have a nuclear weapon, and when you are trying to incentivize with $400 million Palestinian terrorism, I think that we can safely say this is no longer borderline.
Here's a perfect example of this.
President Obama speaking about what should happen in Israel.
By the way, worth noting, what set a lot of this off?
The Palestinian president, who is a dictator, Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 11th year of a four-year term.
Mahmoud Abbas He came out several weeks ago, and he said that the Jews were going up on the Temple Mount, which, by the way, is the holiest site in Judaism.
Yes, Jews are allowed to go on the Temple Mount.
And he said they're making it filthy with their filthy feet.
That was his quote, their filthy feet.
And then he suggested that the Jews were going up there to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque, even though the only people on the Temple Mount destroying historic antiquities are the Palestinians, which they've been doing For literally decades, digging up areas of the Temple Mount and destroying the antiquities that are there in the first place to try and remove any trace of Jewish history from the area.
So, Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas, they've been incentivizing this.
In East Jerusalem, after a knife attack the other day, the East Jerusalem Arabs were handing out candies to their kids when a Jew was stabbed nearly to death in Jerusalem.
Well, President Obama was asked about all of this, and here was President Obama's response.
We also believe that it's important for both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israeli elected officials and President Abbas and other people in positions of power to try to tamp down rhetoric that may feed violence or anger or misunderstanding and try to
You know, get all people in Israel and in the West Bank to recognize that this kind of random violence isn't going to result in anything other than more hardship.
What a deeply immoral, evil man the President of the United States is.
I mean, truly.
Because there are a couple things there that jump out at you.
First of all, again, President Obama likes to bring out the word random at odd times.
Isn't it odd how he brings out the word random?
It's always when it's super not random, right?
When Jews get shot in a French deli.
Right?
When a terrorist specifically goes to a kosher supermarket to shoot Jews, that was a random attack.
Right?
That was a random attack.
And now, when Palestinians are killing Israeli civilians, that also is random.
It's amazing how these random things just keep happening.
And the victims all happen to be non-random.
I mean, where I come from, the definition of the word random is that it's actually random.
I don't know about you, but typically when something is random, that means if I were just to say random killings are happening, you would assume, okay, no correlation with race or religion or age, right?
There wouldn't be any connecting threads.
It's not random.
Second of all, tamp down the rhetoric from both sides.
From both sides.
So one side says, literally, we played the tape of this last week, one side has preachers on their television stations holding up knives and saying, stab the Jews.
And the other side says, we hope that you don't stab us and it would be really good if you would stop telling people to stab us.
But the rhetoric should be tamped down from both sides.
By the way, you want to know the difference between the two sides?
There was a Jew About a week and a half ago, who stabbed some Palestinians.
The Israeli government immediately launched into an investigation and is looking to arrest the Jew and put him in jail for the rest of his life.
When Palestinians stab people, stab Jews, they're handing out candies in the streets and renaming streets after them.
But both sides have to tamp down the rhetoric.
And the reason I say that's evil, and I say the president is evil for saying this, is because when you draw no distinction between good and evil, when you treat them as moral equivalents, you are siding with evil.
You're not siding with good, you're siding with evil.
Indifference in the face of evil is, in effect, evil.
And this is not coming from ignorance.
The President of the United States knows better, but his worldview is so perverse that the Jews always have to be the bad guys and the Palestinians always have to be the good guys.
Now, before we run out of time here, I do want to talk briefly about the firefight that has now broken out between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush in the Republican presidential race of 2016.
Donald Trump is slapping at Bush for a good strategic reason, which is everybody dislikes Jeb Bush.
I mean, seriously, Jeb Bush is such a sad sack, and nobody's into him, and he's got so much money, and no one cares, and he's still riding at 5-6% in the polls after all of this.
So Donald Trump figures, okay, if I can attack any of the candidates, who's perceived as the establishment guy?
Well, Jeb Bush.
Okay, I can attack him any which way I choose.
Now look, I'm fine with you attacking Jeb Bush when it's fair, but I'm intellectually honest enough to recognize when it's not fair.
Here is Donald Trump attacking Jeb Bush, really by attacking George W. Bush.
Jeb has been saying, my brother kept the United States safe.
Trump said, no, no, no, your brother was responsible for the collapse of the World Trade Centers in 2001.
And this is really a kind of ludicrous attack, I've been sort of chortling and thrilled over the whole Trump phenomenon because I think that it's just funny and entertaining and, as I've mentioned, I've turned into the Joker and want to see piles of money burn and I want to run after cars and try and bite the fender even if I know I can't get anything out of it.
I just have to chase the car.
The bloom is coming off the roads here.
Here is Donald Trump making what can best be described as an ass of himself on national television talking about George W. Bush.
When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.
Hold on, you can't blame George Bush for that.
He was president, okay?
Don't blame him or don't blame him, but he was president.
The World Trade Center came down during his reign.
Okay, this is so ridiculous on so many levels.
First of all, if this is the new standard, that the President of the United States is responsible for everything in the world that happens under his tenure, then FDR is responsible for Pearl Harbor, and presumably Abraham Lincoln is responsible for the Civil War solely, because he was the President of the United States at that time.
The fact is that you're gonna hear a lot of myths pushed out by the left about 9-11 and World Trade Center and what happened there.
And one of the myths that you hear is that George W. Bush was given explicit notice that Al-Qaeda wanted to strike in the United States using airplanes.
They wanted to hit a tower.
No, that's not true.
Okay, what the actual memo said is Al-Qaeda determined to hit inside United States, which had only been true for a decade.
And also that they wanted to use airplanes.
What people assumed is that by using airplanes, they meant hijack airplanes just like every other terrorist group in history.
9-11 was an unprecedented use of airplanes as missiles.
So there was that.
And there's no evidence that Bush even saw this particular memo that it ever came across his desk.
But in any case, Jeb Bush is attacked by Donald Trump, and Jeb then responds, and he says that Trump is a loudmouth and that he has doubts about Trump being President of the United States.
Meanwhile, the left is just sitting on the side, laughing its ass off over this whole thing, as they should be.
Donald Trump—this is what's beginning to bother me about the Trump of it.
I'm fine with Donald Trump attacking any of the candidates he wants to attack.
But Donald Trump is now campaigning as Bernie Sanders.
He's seriously campaigning as Bernie Sanders.
These are talking points straight from the Bernie Sanders playbook.
And not only is that one from the Bernie Sanders playbook, Donald Trump was asked about eminent domain.
Eminent domain, for people who don't know, eminent domain is where the government seizes property for public use, right?
They want to build a highway and they need your house to build that highway, they need to knock it down and build a highway, so they have to pay you.
Under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the government is not allowed to take private property for public use without just compensation.
Now traditionally what that has meant is private property has to be taken but only for public use.
Meaning that they can only do it, knock it down, build a park or a highway or some other sort of public thoroughfare.
Not that the government can seize the property and sell it to your neighbor because your neighbor's richer and will pay more property tax.
But that's been actually, the Supreme Court in the Kelo decision about 10 years ago, reinterpreted that provision to mean that the government can actually do that.
The government can come to my house, seize it, pay me what it thinks is fair, And then turn around and hand that property to my next door neighbor so long as he uses it to build a hotel.
Well, Donald Trump has made an enormous amount of money off this violation of rights in the United States.
And here's Donald Trump being asked about eminent domain. - You had your hotel, and you wanted to build a parking lot, and some woman had her house.
She saved me a fortune.
I guess the question is, why do you need to take her house for a parking lot?
Because I have a hotel, and in order to expand the hotel and add 2,000 rooms, I would have had to take her thing.
Now, the 2,000 rooms would have provided about 2,500 jobs.
Ultimately, offered a lot of money.
She didn't take it.
I didn't build the job.
I didn't do it.
Saved me a lot of money because Atlantic City, you know, I had the good sense to leave seven years ago.
I got very lucky.
Yeah, I think that would have been a good eminent domain because you would have provided thousands of jobs.
And this is a woman that couldn't have cared less about her house.
All she wanted was money.
Okay, first of all, Donald, if all she wanted was money, you have plenty of it.
Presumably there was a price tag to the house, she just didn't want to give it to you.
But the idea that you can knock down people's houses, and that she saved him a lot of money because the government took that, and then this is the guy who's saying that he's going to fight crony capitalism, that he's going to fight government insider nonsense, that he's going to fight against the corporatism of the left.
He and Bernie Sanders are actually on the same page on a lot of this stuff.
You know, I understand Trump fans, why you like Trump.
You feel that he's honest, you feel that he's not full of it.
Okay, but Donald Trump is not a solid conservative in any sense of the word.
And I think that we have to at least be honest about who Donald Trump is going into this election cycle.
And I would highly recommend that you take a look at some of the other candidates who are speaking truth to power, whether it's Ben Carson or Ted Cruz.
You know, the ones who are not stumping in favor of the government seizing old ladies' properties so they can build a parking lot and then not even build the parking lot, which is exactly what he just said.
Right there.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
▲
Export Selection