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Oct. 20, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
22:20
Ep. 11 - What If Luke Skywalker is Evil?

Ben looks at the new trailer for JJ Abrams’s upcoming film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Monday, Planned Parenthood unleashed the greatest tweet in the history of the world.
Here's what it said.
It said, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
It's a quote from Gloria Steinem.
But what it actually said was, if cis men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
They actually added in the cis in little parentheses, even though that's not the original Gloria Steinem quote.
What does that mean, cis?
Well, for those of you who are unaware of your own gender biases, and you're not a crazy person, the prefix cis has been crafted out of absolute horse manure.
And now, it's a shortening of another horse manure world called cisgender.
Cisgender is a longer term that supposedly means, according to dictionary definition, it means somebody whose biological sex is in line with the sex they think they are.
Or as we used to call it, not being an insane person.
This is what being cis means.
If you are cis, then I'm cis because I'm a man who thinks I'm a man.
But if you're cisgender, this kind of cis prefix is this made-up, schloppity-schlop crap that is designed to suggest that there are perfectly rational and sane people.
Who have a sex that is different from their biological sex.
So Planned Parenthood has to go out of its way to say that cis men, cis men are the only types of men who can't have babies.
This is what they are trying to say.
The whole thing is just ridiculous all the way through.
Well, what's crazy about all of this, what's craziest, I think, of all, with regard to this cis stuff, is they're basically suggesting that a man who thinks he's a woman is a woman, But a woman who thinks that she's a man is a man.
But only women can talk about abortion.
So...
If you're a woman who thinks she's a man, and you're therefore a man, but you can't get pregnant, can you talk about abortion?
Or if you're a woman and you think that you're a man, and you can get pregnant, so you're a pregnant man, can you talk about abortion anymore?
It's all so confusing, and this is the problem for the left and people like Planned Parenthood.
The entire basis of Planned Parenthood is that women and men are inherently different.
So inherently different that only women can talk about women's issues, and men can never talk about women's issues.
And then along comes the transgender movement, and the transgender movement says, male, female, these are just gender stereotypes that are foisted upon us by a sexist, horrible society.
Well, as you can see, these two things are in pretty significant conflict, right?
If men are men and women are women, and so men can't talk about women things, What do you do with a woman who thinks she's a man or a man who thinks that he is a woman?
And the answer for the left is you just sort of ignore it.
And you come up with dramatically incoherent tweets like the one that Planned Parenthood just did.
None of this makes any sense, of course, but the left doesn't make any sense.
The only thing that matters is that regular men, you know, like white, straight men, those guys can't talk about lady stuff.
But men who think they're women can.
And women who think they're men can.
So, for purposes of abortion, from now on here on The Ben Shapiro Show, I am no longer a cis man when I discuss abortion.
I'm actually a man who thinks he's a woman, and thus I can discuss abortion.
After all, works with the logic of the stupid crap that is cisnormative and cisgender and all the rest of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show. - Isn't it a damn racist beyond that? - Tend to demonize people 'cause they don't care about your feelings.
Alrighty, so here we are, and we are now entering the Halloween season, and this is the official pumpkin of the Daily Wire.
And I can't say that I made it In fact, our producer Jonathan made it, which suggests that we need to give him more things to do in his off hours, because a lot of work went into this particular pumpkin.
I'm also very sad because our other producer, Mathis, is somebody who has declared himself a sobriety believer with regard to Star Wars.
So he doesn't want to know anything with regards to the upcoming Star Wars movie, which means, of course, I have to talk about the new Star Wars movie in his presence and destroy his life.
That's the purpose of this particular little spiel.
I want to talk about the new Star Wars trailer just because everybody else is, so I have to give my take, and I have to make Mathis suffer in the process, and since he works for us and we pay his salary, there's really nothing he can do.
He just sort of has to take it.
So here is the new Star Wars trailer, and then I want to talk about why I think it's effective, and then I want to get into another piece of entertainment that actually has more ramifications for everyday life.
But let's start with the Star Wars trailer, because hey, we don't do anything fun on The Ben Shapiro Show ever, so we might as well do something fun now.
So let's do it.
Who are you?
I'm no one.
I'm no one.
I was raised to do one thing.
I've got nothing to fight for.
Nothing will stand in our way.
I will finish what you started. - Where would you start it?
There are stories about what happened.
It's true.
All of it.
The dark side.
The Jedi.
They're real.
The Force.
It's calling to you.
Just let it in.
Okay, so that's enough of ruining Mathis' life here.
Um, except that I'm now going to ruin it even further by discussing what we just saw.
So, the trailer itself, obviously, this trailer is better than anything that has been nominated for an Academy Award since Lord of the Rings 1.
I mean, seriously, because everything that Hollywood produces now is basically garbage except for tentpole films like this one.
And the trailer's great, especially with all the nostalgia.
I mean, you have the AT-AT walker at the beginning, and you've got Harrison Ford showing up, and Princess Leia showing up, and now I'm totally going to ruin Mathis' life.
Well, Mathis, leave for a minute, and then just out of sympathy for you, you can take off for a minute.
If you actually want to go, I'm going to let you go right now.
Like, seriously, you can go out.
He's got in.
Okay, fine.
So, all the rest of you guys, you understand.
Okay, my theory of this trailer and of the poster is that Kylo Ren, who's the guy, not Kylie Ren, who's a member of the Kardashian family, Kylo Ren, who is the Darth Vader-looking Human, who is standing over the melted mask of Darth Vader, is in fact Luke Skywalker.
The reason I say this is because if you look at the poster for the new Star Wars film, all the characters are on it, including Han Solo, including Princess Leia, but Luke is nowhere to be found.
But there in the background, large as life, is Kylo Ren.
I'm gonna go with Luke has been seduced by the dark side, which of course ruins the original trilogy because the original trilogy is all about Luke Skywalker saving his father from the dark side and restoring dignity to him as a human being when he finds it in himself to stand up to the emperor.
And to have Luke blow that would obviously be a pretty wild betrayal of the original trilogy.
By the way, I just have to say this about the end of the original trilogy.
Everything that George Lucas did after the original trilogy is just like, nobody ever said no to him.
Nobody ever said no to him.
And so he decided to go back and ruin the original trilogy when he added stupid crap like, for example, when he did the remastering of Return of the Jedi.
At the very end, you all remember the end of Return of the Jedi?
At the end of Return of the Jedi, remember, Darth Vader, he's dead and they've burned his body.
And James Earl Jones, it turns out, was somehow a really deformed-looking white guy.
And at the very end, you remember that the magical figures of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader show up, right?
And Luke sees them.
And you remember that the original Darth Vader looks like an old guy, like the guy who's at the end of the movie.
Well, because he'd done Episodes I, II, and III, abominations that they are, George Lucas decided to replace old Darth Vader with Hayden Christensen.
And if you're Alec Guinness, if you are Obi-Wan Kenobi, you gotta be thinking to yourself, this so blows.
In the afterlife, I still look like Alec Guinness.
When I was young, I looked like Ewan McGregor.
I don't get to look like Ewan McGregor in the afterlife.
I'm stuck with Alec Guinness' body.
And here, this old jerk, who blew up an entire planet and killed all the Ewoks, this guy, who's like a genocidal dictator, this guy gets to go back to looking like Hayden Christensen.
Really not fair of the Force.
Totally.
He's thinking, I should have joined the dark side.
I would have gotten to be, like, sexy and good-looking.
Again, after I died, but apparently not.
Okay, so that's my take on the new Star Wars trailer.
I hope that it lives up to expectations.
I don't think it will.
Because I think that J.J.
Abrams... This is a constant argument I have with Jeremy, who is the managing editor of Daily Wire.
He is a big J.J.
Abrams fan.
I think that J.J.
Abrams is a glorified B-director.
But we will have to find out.
Okay, there's another movie I want to talk about that's been getting some press but not an enormous amount of press.
You've seen the advertisements for it all over the place.
And this is this movie that they're now featuring over at Netflix.
It's called Beasts of No Nation.
And it starts Idris Elba, who some people have said might be the next James Bond.
He's a black guy, so that's been controversial for some people.
For me, I really don't care.
Here is the trailer for Beasts of No Nation.
I want to talk about this movie because it really is indicative, I think, of where we have gone as a civilization.
and I'll explain why after we watch just a little bit of this trailer.
What is this thing doing here?
What is this thing doing here?
What are you doing here?
Who is responsible for this thing?
Now what are they calling you?
I saved your life.
Go!
All of you that have seen your family killed, you now have something that stands for you.
It has put the weapons of this war back in your hands.
Okay, we can pause it.
So here's the basic premise of this movie, and it is a very, very effective film.
The basic premise of this movie is that Idris Elba is sort of a revolutionary colonel, captain, and he is leading a group of child soldiers in what is a civil war in what appears to be Ghana or Nigeria.
They don't really specify the country.
And there's three forces in the film.
There's the government force, there's a rebel force, and then there's this group which is sort of stuck in between fighting both of them.
And it's all about Idris Elba as the commander and this little kid, Agu, who's the child soldier, and it really is quite brutal and horrific.
I mean, there's a scene where Agu is initiated into This child army by having a machete a guy to death and it's very graphic and it's very brutal.
And there's a scene where Idris Elba, who's this kind of charismatic revolutionary leader, molests the lead character who's the kid.
And it really is pretty, it's gritty and it's gruesome and it's really terrible, but it's very evocative of what exactly it's like in nations like this.
And it seems, you know, I wouldn't know, but it seems about as realistic as it's possible to be on screen with the formation of child armies.
The reason I talk about this is because there's one scene in this movie that's- and it's not even a scene, it's really a shot.
It's very telling.
And that is, at the very beginning of the movie, there's sort of this UN-monitored outpost where this kid is living before the whole thing crumbles and falls apart.
And at a certain point, the UN pulls out because the government forces are on the move, and this kid's family is killed.
Well, there's a scene later in the film where the kid is now part of the child army, and he's in a truck, and he's holding what appears to be an AK-47, and they're driving down the road.
And as they're driving down the road, there's a van coming the other way.
And it's a van that is marked UN.
It's a UN van, a United Nations van.
And in the van are a bunch of white folks, right?
The only white folks in the entire movie are in this van.
And they're driving in the van, and they're staring out the window, and he stares at them, and they stare at him.
And then the van just kind of moves on, and that's the end of that particular scene.
And the point is, what are these people doing to help?
And the answer is, they're not doing anything to help, of course.
They're just observing, right?
They're UN observers.
They don't do anything.
And the reason that this, I think, is important is we have to combine that with an article that was in the Washington Post today by a guy named Michael Garrison.
Michael Garrison is a former Bush administration official.
He used to write speeches for George W. Bush.
And he's talking about American Christianity and the obligations of American Christians to the rest of the world.
And he's talking specifically about the refugee crisis.
He says, American Christianity has its own self-examination to conduct.
The largest humanitarian disaster of our time, involving 4 million Syrian refugees and 7.6 million internally displaced, has mainly befallen Muslims.
The response?
Charitable giving by Americans to international causes has gone down for two consecutive years.
Some Republican presidential candidates seem indifferent to the plight of refugees, and even some evangelical leaders have joined them.
And he continues, To respond to the AIDS crisis, American Christians had to overcome a belief that the disease was deserved.
To respond to the Syrian refugee crisis, Christians must overcome their discomfort with Islam and their belief that conflict among Muslims is none of their concern.
Is Christian faith merely a cover for tribalism, or will it demonstrate its essence in service to refugees of another faith who did nothing to deserve their faith?
The idea being that American Christians, in order to be super Christian, we have to, and I'm a Jew, but Judeo-Christian people have to take in all of these Muslim refugees.
And that's the way to solve their problems, is to take in all of these Muslim refugees.
Now, as somebody who's been an ardent advocate of the idea that Muslim countries should take in their own refugees, and that it is not the responsibility of the West to take in every refugee from every part of the world without regard to culture, without regard to upbringing, without regard to values, I find this problematic and offensive.
And I want to contrast this with the Beasts of No Nation mentality.
Early in the 20th century, at the end of the 19th century, there was a serious belief in most parts of Western civilization that Western civilization had a duty to actually spread itself.
That promulgating Western civilization was actually something that was good, something that was worthwhile.
And then, thanks to Marxism, the idea became that imperialism, colonialism, this was not a good, hard adventure.
All it really was was a way of exploiting the natives.
So, for example, Henry Stanley, who was one of the original explorers of Africa.
He went there and explored Africa specifically because he felt that the Arab slave trade against black folks was something that could be overthrown if there was Christian influence in Africa.
Because Africa at the time was rife with cannibalism and barbarity, and the Arabs who had come down from Northern Africa had come to enslave a lot of the black folks and carry them off in chains.
More people were enslaved by Arabs in the Middle East than were ever enslaved by Americans in the pre-Civil War and Civil War period.
People don't realize this or care about it because obviously white people are the only people who have ever done anything bad.
And whenever we talk about, you know, Western colonialism and imperialism, people immediately go to the racism of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden.
You know, it's the white man's burden to spread civilization among the black savages and all the rest of this, which of course is racist because civilization has nothing to do with race.
It has everything to do with values.
The problem is that in fighting that racist tendency, Western civilization went to the point where we don't feel we have anything to promulgate to the world.
We have nothing left to promulgate to the world.
And so we now have this sort of dual idea.
On the one hand, we're not allowed to go into areas like you see in this movie.
It would be imperialist for us to go into those areas, impose order.
Install somebody who's capable of imposing order.
It would be imperialist for us to actually put people on the ground to try and nation-build, for example, or keep people there for long periods of time to nation-build, as Western civilization frequently did in the 19th and 20th centuries, with its attendant barbarity, but also attendant progress.
That would be terrible and barbaric and horrible.
There'd be no way to achieve it, and it would just be an example of Western racism and imperialism and colonialism quashing the Native spirit.
You're seeing some of the Native spirit right there, and it ain't good.
I mean, there are certain areas of the world where the Native spirit is just not good, and that has nothing to do with race, again.
There are plenty of white places where the Native spirit ain't good.
Just take a look at the Kind of poorer culture in Appalachia, if you don't believe that.
So on the one hand, we're not allowed to move Western civilization forward in parts of the world that have cultures that are barbaric and primitive.
And on the other side, we're supposed to now, as sort of repentance, To spread Western civilization, we're not allowed to go forward.
We have to go backward.
To spread Western civilization, we're supposed to take in refugees from non-Western civilizations into our own civilization, and then not assimilate them, not expect that they take in any American or Western values, but simply bring them in and give them stuff.
Which again is a Marxist idea that if you give people stuff that magically solves the problem, of course this is untrue.
It's just not true.
And so you have people saying that Westerners, Europeans, Americans, American Christians have responsibility for taking in Muslims without trying to determine what exactly their ideology is, what their political philosophy is, what their belief system is.
They're only there basically as a piggy bank.
American Christianity is supposed to be a piggy bank apparently for people like Michael Gerson.
And if you say, look, we're happy to take in people who want to imbibe Western culture and participate in Western culture.
We're happy to take in Muslims if they're willing to leave behind radical Islam and all of its attendant ideas.
They're willing to leave behind the barbaric tribalism that predominates in the Middle East.
If you say that, you're a racist and you're terrible, but if you don't take them in, you're also racist and terrible.
So you have to ruin your own civilization.
You have to bring in a bunch of people from different cultures who have no interest in your culture, but interest in your welfare checks.
You have to bring those people in.
And what you get in the end is basically what you're seeing in Europe right now.
A Europe that is completely weak, has no sense of self, no sense of center, believes that it is solely responsible for all the ills on Earth because of its history of colonialism and imperialism, and then, as a way to atone, is taking in huge numbers of refugees that are destroying the essence of Western liberalism.
And you're seeing this in France.
And now you're seeing the backlash from the European communities.
Sweden is now having a massive far-right movement specifically directed at quashing immigration.
You're seeing the same thing in places like Denmark.
You're seeing the same thing in places like France.
You're seeing it all over the place.
And this is what happens when a civilization loses its sense of purpose.
If you lose your sense of purpose, you're unwilling to spread your civilization.
If you lose your sense of purpose, you're not even willing to spread your civilization within your own borders.
And this is what truly upsets me about the kind of complaints of the left.
It truly makes me upset when I look at the complaints of the left with regard to beasts of no nation.
Because, yes, evil, horrible things are happening all over the world.
But if the only solution is for the West to imbibe, take in all of this horrible, all of this evil, And to facilitate it with our tax dollars?
And to facilitate it without regard to assimilation?
Then how is that stopping this sort of thing?
It's making it easier.
It's making it easier.
In fact, one of the scenes in Beasts of No Nation is really interesting.
There's a scene where the dictator, the new dictator of the country, his name is Dada Goodblood, right?
He's supposed to meet with Idris Elba, and he keeps Idris Elba waiting.
Why?
Because there are a bunch of people who have come from the UN and from the West in order to give him money.
And they're coming to give him money because they don't want to spread their civilization But they want to stop the conflict.
Never mind that this guy's been responsible for genocide.
I mean, there are scenes in this movie in which Idris Elba, who is the commander under this guy's rule, is going into cities and literally wiping the cities out.
We're talking men, women, children, the whole deal.
And here are the Westerners with their bundle of cash.
And I'm not sure that the movie means to indict Westernism, except in the sense that it says they're not doing enough, presumably if they gave more cash.
But at no point does the movie suggest, well, maybe some outside solutions would be a good thing.
Maybe some Western civilization here would be a good thing.
And I object to the newfangled idea that Western civilization is supposed to not be a converting force.
It's instead supposed to be a retreating force, giving away its wealth to people who don't embrace the basic ideals of Western civilization.
And that's how we can truly show that we're good-hearted.
I'm not interested in showing that Western civilization is good-hearted.
I know that we're good-hearted.
I'm interested in spreading the tenets of Western civilization that have made people more prosperous and happy all over the world wherever they're tried.
If we don't find an aggressive sense of self here in the West, if we don't find an aggressive sense of self-worth with regard to Western civilization, I promise you there will be more countries that look like beasts of no nation and far less that look like the United States of America.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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