Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Oct. 26, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show

21:39

Ep. 14 - Don't Kill Baby Hitler

Ben discusses Benghazi, Ben Carson, and why it’s wrong to go back in time and kill baby Hitler - but loads of fun to kill him as an adult! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Well, happy Monday, everyone, and no.
	If you have a flux capacitor and a DeLorean, you shouldn't go back in time and kill baby Hitler.
	The reason that we're even discussing baby Hitler, of course, is because last Friday, Twitter went up in flames after the New York Times Magazine posted the results of an online poll.
	It was, Dear Reader, could you kill a baby Hitler?
	The answers from the readers, 42% said yes, 30% said no, 28% said they were unsure.
	Note, I'm not sure who bothers to take the time to vote unsure in an internet poll.
	That's somebody with way too much time on their hands.
	This alternative history has been considered many times in fiction and it usually ends badly.
	So I figured that I would tell you there are two reasons you should not go back in time and kill baby Hitler if you actually end up with Doc Brown in the passenger seat.
	Number one, you are not God.
	The fun of counterfactuals is this perfect hindsight of history.
	We all know that Hitler became an emissary of tremendous evil, and so we think that if we killed him when he was a baby, all of that would have been prevented.
	That, by the way, is exactly the logic behind the eugenic abortion movement backed by some leftist readers of the book Freakonomics.
	The babies are going to be criminals anyway, so you may as well just abort them before they're born.
	In fact, I really don't understand why only 42% of leftists would have killed baby Hitler.
	100% of them would have killed fetus Hitler.
	You just kill him as an unborn baby and then you really don't have to worry about it.
	But here's the thing.
	Babies can actually be shaped and changed.
	If baby Hitler had been adopted by a Jewish family as a kid, does anyone really believe that his life would have turned out exactly the same way?
	Now, maybe if you think he was a sociopath, you think that he was, but there really isn't a lot of evidence that Hitler was a sociopath.
	He was a utopian leftist with socially Darwinistic views on race, popular among a lot of other leftists of the time.
	Instead of going back in time and killing baby Hitler, how about taking him away from his family and placing him with a childless Jewish family?
	Or instead, just directing him to the literature of Adam Smith or Edmund Burke rather than Karl Marx?
	Reason number two.
	It wasn't just Hitler.
	Hitler ably channeled German antisemitism toward building a powerful movement culminating in the Holocaust, but he certainly didn't invent German Jew-hatred.
	It's not as if Hitler had been hit in the head by a bullet in World War I. The Germans and the Jews would have gotten along famously forevermore.
	Germany was replete with Jew-hatred for decades, centuries before Hitler.
	His ideas found fertile ground not just in Germany, but in European countries that participated wholesale in the slaughter of the Jews.
	By the way, if you want to know about European anti-Semitism, just listen to Andrew Klavan's podcast a few days ago.
	Hitler boggles the mind because of the mechanization of the mass murder of the Jews, but people tend to forget millions of Jews, just as many Jews, were killed outside the killing center by what were called Einsatzgruppen, who are killing squads engaging in mass shootings.
	Foreigners often participated in the killings, including 100,000 Ukrainians who joined forces with the Nazis, for example.
	Hitler wasn't alone.
	Killing him as a baby wouldn't have ended the threat in any real way.
	So, there's your answer.
	You shouldn't go back in time and kill baby Hitler.
	Now, adult Hitler is a totally different story.
	If you have a shot and you find a time machine, take it immediately.
	Take him out.
	For that matter, go ahead and knock off Stalin and Mao and Yasser Arafat while you're at it.
	But as long as you're not busy killing baby Hitler, there are a few other things that you should do right now to make the world a less Jew-hating place.
	Unless, that is, you're too busy theorizing about killing Hitler to bother canceling your subscription to the New York Times Magazine, which backs all of Israel's genocidal enemies, the modern Nazis, to the hilt.
	I'm Ben Shapiro and this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	You tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
	Well folks, it is a brand new week and that means it's time for a whole new week of Hillary Clinton lying about things.
	Every time her face opens, lies come out, and last week was no exception.
	We really didn't get a chance last week to talk about Hillary at the Benghazi hearings.
	We talked about it briefly last Thursday, but then, of course, we didn't have the show on Friday, and so here we are on Monday.
	We haven't had a full explanation of what Hillary did and what she lied about.
	She told a bunch of lies during the hearing.
	She said, for example, that she had been totally transparent with her emails.
	That, of course, was not true.
	She blamed Chris Stevens for his own death.
	She suggested that he knew the risks and that he felt comfortable in Benghazi.
	If you feel comfortable somewhere, you don't send 600 messages to your superiors asking for more security.
	She also suggested that she was not using former Clinton hack Sidney Blumenthal as a sort of advisor, that wasn't true.
	She told lie after lie after lie, and of course the biggest lie is that she didn't know that a YouTube video wasn't involved with the Benghazi attacks.
	She knew that night, she emailed Chelsea Clinton that night, that the YouTube video had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks.
	She reiterated it to the authorities in Libya, as well as the Egyptian Prime Minister.
	So, she's a liar.
	That's not stopping any of the Democrats from defending her.
	Elijah Cummings, who is a representative from, I believe, Georgia, and he is a disaster area when it comes to pushing the leftist message.
	Elijah Cummings is the new kind of Hillary defender on this committee, and he was on some of the Sunday shows because people were still talking about this committee.
	And Elijah Cummings said that they were just there, the Democrats were just there, defending the truth.
	Here's what it sounded like.
	From the very beginning, Chuck, I said we were looking for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
	And in many instances, we found ourselves having to not defend Secretary Clinton, but to make sure that the record was complete.
	And I'm glad that the public had an opportunity to see all of that.
	And I mean, when you look at what we were asking about, they were the things that went to Benghazi, the things that we were supposed to be dealing with from the very beginning.
	And when the families came in, many of them with tears in their eyes, they asked us to only do three things.
	One, they asked us to make sure that we made sure that this did not happen again.
	They wanted us to look for the facts, more facts than we already had.
	And they asked us for one final thing.
	They asked us to make sure that we did not turn this into a political football.
	OK, so let's stop it right there.
	So they asked for a few things, and one of them was not to turn Benghazi into a political football.
	Elijah Cummings has spent his entire life turning things into political footballs.
	And the idea that he wasn't defending Hillary Clinton outright, if you watched any of the hearings, Last Thursday.
	That's all he did.
	That's all he did.
	The Democrats didn't ask a single substantive question for 11 hours.
	It was 11 hours of saying that the whole thing was partisan and mean and nasty and Hillary Clinton was a victim.
	Now, if you watch Elijah Cummings, if you watch the Democrats, what you're consistently hearing from them with regard to Benghazi is, we take this seriously.
	Last Thursday, Hillary Clinton had her pre-planned righteous indignation moment in which she suggested, I've lost more sleep than any of you over Chris Stevens.
	Now, I'm going to play a clip here, and I want to ask you, does this sound like someone who lost sleep over the death of Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi?
	Does this sound like someone who deeply cared about the murdered Americans in Benghazi?
	After her 11-hour hearing, Hillary Clinton went directly to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC.
	Rachel Maddow is about the friendliest face that she could possibly find.
	She and Chris Hayes are actually the same person.
	They just separate for purposes of their shows.
	And Hillary Clinton is sitting across from Rachel Maddow, and Rachel Maddow proceeds to ask her what she did after the hearings.
	And Rachel Maddow's question, which I believe we have it, Rachel Maddow's question is so ridiculous.
	She says, I've never even seen someone testify for 11 hours.
	I've never heard anything like it.
	That's incredible.
	You testifying for 11 hours.
	Folks, the people in Benghazi were under actual direct murder assault for seven hours.
	Okay, if we're gonna talk a scale of human heroism and decency, I'm gonna go with seven hours under fire from terrorists over 11 hours of sitting on a flower-embroidered cushion in an air-conditioned room anytime.
	But here was Hillary Clinton's answer, and I think that it really does speak to who Hillary Clinton is and how much she cares about the people who are dead and the safety of our diplomats.
	This is really telling.
	What does a person do after 11 hours of testimony?
	You're the only human being I know of on earth who's done 11 straight hours.
	What did you do after?
	Well, I had my whole team come over to my house and we sat around eating Indian food and drinking wine and beer.
	That's what we did.
	It was great.
	And was it like, let's just talk about TV, let's not talk about what just happened?
	Yeah, we were all talking about sports, TV shows.
	It was great.
	And this is a woman who cares deeply, obviously, about what happened in Benghazi.
	This is someone who takes very seriously her obligations to come clean.
	So she lies repeatedly, and then she chortles on national TV about, yeah, she went and she ate Indian food, and she had wine, and she partied.
	And this is becoming a common theme with the Democrats.
	We talked briefly last week about the fact that Democrats, the same night that some of these Benghazi hearings were going on, Democrats had a party in the House, and they had a string quartet in to celebrate the Iran deal.
	These are supposed to be the people who take our national security so seriously.
	Hillary's the serious candidate.
	She's the serious one.
	Bernie Sanders isn't serious.
	Hillary's serious.
	She's experienced.
	She's serious.
	She has gravitas.
	And here she is joking on national TV about what she did right after.
	What did she do?
	She went and she partied.
	She went and she partied.
	Which, by the way, is basically no different than what she did the night of Benghazi.
	She went specifically home in the middle of the attack.
	She didn't stay at the State Department.
	She didn't head over to the White House Situation Room.
	She went home, and according to her, she laughed about this.
	She was alone the rest of the night.
	She didn't talk with the Secretary of Defense.
	She didn't talk with the head of the CIA.
	She talked with no one.
	This is the woman who we are supposed to believe cared deeply.
	And the reason I'm focusing on this is because Republicans have this idiotic tendency to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt on this sort of stuff.
	So Hillary was incompetent.
	So she made mistakes.
	So she had the wrong idea.
	But we don't have the capacity to ask whether she cared or not.
	That would be mean.
	That would be cruel.
	I typically, as both a Republican and a Jew, I typically don't care about people's motives.
	I'm not big on motivation.
	I think that your action matters much more than your motive.
	But apparently the American people disagree with me because this is the only reason Barack Obama was elected.
	They feel that he had good motivations even though he stinks at his job.
	So if we're now in the business of assessing motives based on the only evidence in front of us, I submit that tape right there of Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow as Exhibit A in the case that Hillary Clinton does not give one good damn about what happened to Chris Stevens other than how it affected her political career.
	But, you know, the media will defend her, and they'll say that she still is somebody who we should respect and treat with utmost respect with regard to all of this.
	It really is kind of sickening.
	Now, speaking of Hillary Clinton not really caring, Hillary Clinton also made a boo-boo on the VA scandal.
	She was asked about the Veterans Administration scandal.
	The fact is that Veterans Affairs has been basically—the hospitals are poorly run, and that means that veterans are waiting for months at a time.
	Months.
	To get in and see their doctors.
	Some of them are dying online.
	Hillary Clinton poo-pooed the entire scandal.
	And amazingly, the media decided that they weren't going to focus on it.
	Here's what Hillary had to say about the VA scandal.
	Satisfied with their treatment.
	Much more so than people in the regular system.
	It's exactly right.
	Now nobody would believe that from the coverage that you see and the constant berating of the VA that comes from the Republicans in part in pursuit of this ideological agenda.
	But in part because there has been real scandal.
	But it's not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.
	Oh, it hasn't been that widespread.
	Hundreds of thousands of veterans waiting in line, not that widespread.
	Now imagine if Donald Trump for a second had said the VA scandal wasn't that bad.
	Imagine if he said that.
	Can you imagine the outrage?
	Can you imagine the uproar?
	The media have decided that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States, as we knew they would.
	And thus, it doesn't matter what she says from here on in.
	She can lie in front of congressional committees.
	She can lie and then joke about how she has Indian food and wine with all of her buddies and plans the next steps in her political campaign.
	It will make no difference whatsoever.
	Now, meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Donald Trump It's been an interesting weekend for Donald Trump because there are two things happening.
	One is that Donald Trump has successfully driven Jeb Bush out of the Republican race.
	Jeb hasn't dropped out yet, but it's a matter of time now.
	And on the other hand, he's actually having his milkshake drinking, drunk, by Ben Carson.
	Ben Carson is now ahead by double digits.
	In some of the polls in Iowa, latest poll today from Monmouth came out.
	He's at 32, Trump is at 18.
	So Carson is at 32, Trump is at 18.
	Carson said something I want to analyze in a little while, and it's the reason why I think Carson is gaining in popularity.
	But first, I want to talk about Jeb Bush and his imploding candidacy for a second.
	If you look at the odds makers, when this Republican race first started, Jeb Bush was the guy who they said was going to be the nominee.
	This was the conventional establishment wisdom, is that Jeb Bush was going to be the nominee.
	And you can tell that Jeb Bush is about five seconds away from dropping out.
	Here is Jeb Bush over the weekend, suggesting that he has lots of better things to do than run for president.
	Seriously, here's Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida.
	This election is about how we're going to fight to get nothing done.
	I don't want anything, I don't want any part of it.
	I don't want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives.
	That is not my motivation.
	I got a lot of really cool things that I could do other than sit around being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them.
	That is a joke.
	Elect Trump if you want that.
	That dude is done.
	That dude is toast.
	And you can put that in the refrigerator.
	It's over, gang.
	He is done, done, done.
	And you can tell he's angry now because he's the only Bush who won't be elected president.
	Barbara now has a better shot.
	And the fact that Jeb is so upset is because Donald Trump drove him out of the race.
	Donald Trump drove him out of the race with two things.
	A correct labeling of the flaws of the Jeb Bush candidacy, and the fact that he has more name recognition than Jeb.
	The only reason Jeb going in had any strength is because of the name recognition that attaches to him.
	Trump took away the name recognition advantage and then pointed out, quite correctly, that Jeb is a milquetoast.
	This is the first time I've seen Jeb passionate on the campaign trail the entire time.
	He's more passionate bashing Trump right here than he was defending his wife in the second Republican presidential debate.
	I mean, that one moment in that debate, just by way of digression.
	If you're going to go after somebody for attacking your wife, you actually have to do it.
	That exchange was so bizarre, where Jeb turns to Trump and he says, you're attacking my wife.
	I want you to apologize.
	And Trump looks at him and goes, nah.
	And Jeb goes, OK.
	And they start to move on.
	At that very moment, you knew that Jeb was basically done.
	Trump, however, despite having knocked Jeb out of the race, he's actually now watching his milkshake Being drunk by Ben Carson.
	And there's a reason for that, and it's because Ben Carson is speaking a language that people understand.
	Donald Trump is speaking two languages that people understand, but they're in conflict with each other.
	So Donald Trump says one thing, and then a minute later, he says something completely different.
	Carson is actually consistent, and he's using analogies and language that people understand, and he's saying controversial things that are absolutely supportable.
	I'm starting to fall in love with Ben Carson, not because I think that Ben Carson is going to be President of the United States or ought to get the nomination, but because Ben Carson says stuff like this.
	Ben Carson was asked over the weekend about his position on abortion, his pro-life position.
	And in the course of his answer, he started comparing the abolitionists of slavery to the pro-life movement.
	And the media is all over him for this today.
	I could not love this more.
	Here's Ben Carson talking about the pro-life movement.
	Think about this.
	During slavery, and I know that's one of those words you're not supposed to say, but I'm saying it.
	During slavery, a lot of the slave owners thought that they had the right to do whatever they wanted to that slave.
	Anything that they chose to do.
	And, you know, what if the abolitionist had said, you know, I don't believe in slavery.
	I think it's wrong.
	But you guys do whatever you want to do.
	Where would we be?
	I love it.
	I love it so much.
	Ben Carson has these moments.
	He has these moments.
	He, like Trump, has these moments.
	He can either be a 0 or he can be a 10.
	Here, he's a 10.
	This is as good as it gets for Ben Carson.
	He will not say anything during this campaign that is better than what he just said here, for a couple of reasons.
	One, he is absolutely 100% factually correct in what he just said.
	Slavery is based on the idea that you can devalue another human being for your own benefit.
	That's what slavery is about.
	He's not a human because I don't want him to be a human.
	Therefore, I can force him to work in my field and whip him whenever I choose and sell his children.
	Abortion is based on the exact same logic.
	If it's convenient for me, then that baby isn't a baby.
	Now that baby is a ball of tissue.
	And I don't care what pictures you show me.
	I don't care what science says.
	That unborn child isn't a child because it's inconvenient for it to be a child.
	And Ben Carson, by the way, he doesn't give the historical context, but the truth is that what Ben Carson says, the sort of safe, legal, and rare position that he's critiquing right there, which is held by many of his fellow Republicans, that I personally am pro-life, but that doesn't mean that I would, for example, push for a constitutional amendment to protect life, leave it as a state's rights issue or a populist issue.
	That was the position of one of the major candidates During the Civil War, just prior to the Civil War, that was the Stephen A. Douglas position, right?
	Lincoln ran against Douglas.
	The famous Lincoln-Douglas debates were not presidential debates, they were Senate debates.
	And one of the issues that they talked about specifically was, what would you do about the issue of slavery expanding across the United States?
	Lincoln's position was that the federal government should basically get rid of slavery.
	And the position of Douglas was that states should decide on their own whether slavery should be allowed or not.
	Now, Douglas was actually personally anti-slavery.
	But he argued for popular sovereignty.
	This was the phrase he used.
	Popular sovereignty with regard to deciding it.
	And if Douglass had had his way, there wouldn't have been a Civil War, maybe.
	And at the very least, at the very least, slavery would have lasted a much longer time in the United States.
	When it comes to abortion, Ben Carson is exactly right.
	And because Ben Carson is black, and there's no way around this, Ben Carson is black, so he can say slavery.
	This is what's going on here.
	Right?
	I can say Holocaust.
	Ben Carson can say slavery.
	This is the way that our stupid politics works now.
	I can also make the same argument that Ben Carson has made, and I've made it before, but if you're a black guy and you say slavery, people take it more seriously, and you have the ability to ride out the storm.
	This is why Ben Carson is popular, because he says stuff like this, and he should be popular for saying stuff like this, because this is grand, and Americans should hear this on a regular basis, and I wish to God that some of the other Republican candidates would say similar stuff.
	Ben Carson is a more surrogate candidate than Hillary Clinton.
	Ben Carson was asked over the weekend about whether he would do Saturday Night Live.
	And Donald Trump is doing Saturday Night Live.
	And he was asked about this.
	And Ben Carson said this when he was asked about doing Saturday Night Live.
	How about being guest host on Saturday Night Live?
	Does that interest you?
	No.
	Why not?
	Because I think the presidency of the United States is a very serious thing.
	And I don't even want to begin to put it in the light of comedy.
	Okay, that's why this guy has a serious shot at the nomination.
	A better shot than Donald Trump, I think, at this point.
	I really do.
	I don't think that his poll numbers are going to drop precipitously.
	I think that Ben Carson is demonstrating a seriousness of purpose that could play very well here.
	It could really play very well.
	And it deserves to play well.
	Because, honest to God, our politics have become such a joke now.
	They really have.
	I mean, this is why people are laughing at Hillary and Trump.
	Hillary is on Saturday Night Live and the President of the United States, the President of the United States, is taking pictures of himself with a selfie stick and doing interviews with the woman most famous for bathing in Froot Loops and milk in an actual bathtub.
	He did that with a YouTube star named GloZell.
	Ben Carson, what he says right there, would that all of our politicians had that sort of dignity?
	Would that all of our politicians said these sorts of things with this sort of strength and this sort of calm?
	I think Ben Carson is actually starting to look like a really formidable candidate.
	And I have disagreements with him on foreign policy, and I want to know more about his foreign policy.
	He's made some comments about foreign policy that concern me.
	He said in one of the debates that he wouldn't have invaded Afghanistan, and then he backed off of that.
	I still have concerns about his foreign policy, although I believe he is using John Bolton apparently as an advisor.
	But the fact is this.
	If Ben Carson continues to say stuff like this, this is stuff that gets across to the American people.
	And I do think there's something to be said for the idea that there's a seriousness in politics that we all ought to take seriously rather than joking about Indian food.
	Or talking about Megyn Kelly's period.
	There are more important things in life than the next headline.
	And I think that Ben Carson understands that.
	And so, this is not an endorsement of Ben Carson.
	There are a lot of serious candidates in the race.
	Ted Cruz is a very serious candidate.
	For what it's worth, I think Marco Rubio is a half-serious candidate.
	I don't think he's a fully serious candidate.
	I think he's a half-serious candidate.
	But in order for the Republican Party to win, Ben Carson is going to get through to more people than a lot of the other Republican candidates.
	We need more Ben Carson in the party, and we need less Jeb Bush in the party.
	And I think that we're going to get it if we keep pushing for it.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.

▲