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Nov. 2, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
32:59
Ep. 18 - The RNC Debate Fiasco

Ben discusses the disaster at the RNC, and the emerging God-complex of self-made-socialist Bill Gates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We've got a huge show coming up for you here today.
President Obama is reaching out to the criminal population, the next Democratic population.
Paul Ryan says that he's not going to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood.
And, of course, it appears that the left despises Dr. Ben Carson.
We'll give you the latest iteration on that.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
You tend to demonize people because they don't care about your feelings.
Alrighty, so the big story today is that the Republican candidates have decided they're no longer going to allow the Republican National Committee to control how the debates are run, which makes perfect sense.
If you watched the Ben Shapiro show last week, if you're a subscriber or listen to it, if you listen to the podcast, you'll know that the debate, the CNBC debate, was an absolute, utter, complete disaster area.
It was just bad in pretty much every way.
It gave Republicans the opportunity to bash the media, But the fact that this was set up by the RNC is ridiculous.
I mean, MSNBC wouldn't have set it up any differently than CNBC did.
Well, today, all 15 Republican candidates who are remaining in the race, I guess all the way down to George Pataki, they got together over the weekend, and they decided that they were going to come up with a new set of standards with regard to how these debates were run.
So they came up with a letter and they sent it to all of the media outlets saying that they would need to know answers to a bunch of questions if they were going to do the debate on these various networks.
They told the New York Times that they had a list of demands for participation.
That list includes opening and closing statements of 30 seconds or longer, similar substantive questions for each candidate, just meaning that you can't ask one candidate what's his favorite color, and then ask Carly Fiorina for a full exposition on the origin and activities of ISIS.
None of these stupid lightning rounds where they ask people, what's your favorite ice cream?
Go.
Or what is your secret service name going to be?
And Rand Paul says, it's going to be called Justice Never Sleeps, and I live in America because it's great and there's a flying eagle.
And also, approval of graphics during the debate.
They want to approve all the graphics during the debate.
Most importantly, the campaign said that they did not want to negotiate directly.
They wanted to negotiate directly, rather, with the networks.
They didn't want the RNC playing middleman.
And the RNC basically said, there's nothing we can do about this.
As I suggested last week, this is exactly what the Republicans should do.
Republican candidates don't need the RNC appealing to the various networks.
See, all of these players in this situation They have different agendas.
So the Republican candidates want to be seen in a positive light by as many people as humanly possible.
The RNC's agenda is to get seen by as many people as possible, generally, so people send donations.
Not even positively versus negatively.
They just want to be seen.
If you see them, you're more likely to send them a donation.
And finally, the networks want as many eyeballs on them as possible, and they want as many advertiser dollars as possible.
Well, that suggests that the networks will push a very controversial debate, because more people will watch.
It suggests that the RNC desperately wants all of this to be televised on national TV, on a major network, with all of the power of promotion behind it, so that people will send donations to the RNC.
And it suggests that if you're a Republican candidate, you really don't want to be part of any of this.
Because the truth is that if you have the RNC and the networks, deciding how this is going to go, then there's a good shot the moderators are not going to be your friends, or at least they're not going to ask you substantive and decent questions.
So the RNC and the Republican candidates are structurally at odds with each other.
Now, the television networks say that they're going to fight back against the Republican candidates.
They're not going to give in to the Republican candidates.
The Republican candidates should just—I mean, Donald Trump could do this single-handedly.
They should just say, we're gonna do the debate at this place with these moderators, there'll be a camera there, you guys are free to comment, you're free to cover it, just like any other event.
Right?
Donald Trump didn't announce on MSNBC or on Fox News, he announced, and everybody covered it, and people ran it live.
There's no reason that all the networks couldn't do that, and that would probably be the best solution for the Republicans, especially because the networks are deeply afraid that if this thing were to be streamed online, without any sort of coverage by the networks, they lose out.
They're already losing numbers.
They don't have numbers enough they can afford to waste the opportunity to cover some sort of big debate event that's heavily publicized by the various candidates.
And there's plenty of money for them to publicize it.
Even if they just bought advertising time on local affiliates, that would probably cost less than what they're actually spending to put up these debates in the first place.
So the media is really, really mad about this.
Members of the media, they say it's just awful that Republicans are acting this way.
It's terrible.
They should suck it up.
Why are they whining all the time?
This morning, I do a morning show here in Los Angeles with a guy from the left.
His name is Brian Whitman.
And Brian was saying, I just don't understand these Republicans.
They're moving further and further outside of mainstream America, which is idiotic, considering that none of the moderators are members of mainstream America.
All of the moderators are members of upper West Side elites in New York, or they're members of the glitterati in Los Angeles.
They have nothing in common with the vast majority of Americans.
But he kept pushing this notion that it's because Republicans are extreme.
And it's not because Republicans are extreme.
It's because it's time for Republicans to stop being stupid.
See, here's the thing about the notion of media objectivity.
Whenever members of the media say that they are objective, it takes two to tango.
If Republicans every time media members said they were objective said, no, you're not.
No, you're not.
Then Democrats couldn't get away with it.
George Stephanopoulos, for 10 years, 15 years, sat there after leaving the Clinton administration, pretending to be an objective news reporter.
He was in the war room.
He was the chief of staff to President Clinton, and he's there pretending to be an objective reporter.
And no one, not a single Republican, for 15 years, said to him on live national television, George, maybe you're asking me these questions because you're a leftist hack who worked for Bill Clinton.
And it took for people to notice his relationship with the Clinton Global Initiative for any of this to blow up, but it shouldn't have.
I mean, it's like saying that Karl Rove is an objective news reporter.
No, he's not.
He wouldn't last 30 seconds before someone said that to him in some sort of moderated setting.
The fact that people consider the mainstream media to be objective is the fault of Republicans.
Because Republicans have a collective action problem.
There are Republicans like me who would go on TV and say that anybody's biased, because they are.
And then you have people like John McCain.
And John McCain will go on and humor the questions and pretend that these journalists are objective.
And so if you're a network, who would you rather have on, me or John McCain?
The answer is, you'd rather have it on John McCain, even if I get better ratings.
Because John McCain is not going to rip you to shreds.
Whereas I'll go on CNN and I'll say that if Hamas could invent a news network, it would look like you.
Which I actually said to Allison Camerata on CNN, and it was a little while before they had me on again.
They don't have to worry about that if you're John McCain.
It's time for all Republicans to start calling out the media for what they are.
Because it's Republicans who are granting Democrats in the media this patina of objectivity.
Now meanwhile, I don't know if you saw this story, apparently Bill Gates, the richest man on earth, literally the richest man on earth, came out for socialism today.
He did an interview in the Atlantic and he talked about how socialism was a grand and wonderful thing.
This did not cause him to give up 50 of his 100 billion dollars or cause him to start handing out his money on street corners, but he says that socialism is a wonderful thing.
It is amazing how many people who are experts in one field are complete idiots in another.
This is the beauty of capitalism, folks.
It can take otherwise useless people like Bill Gates and make them multi-gajillionaires because they actually invent products that we like to use.
Because obviously Bill Gates has no clue how the world works, but we can still make a useful person of him and make a very wealthy person of him.
Here is what Bill Gates said over the weekend.
And I think it is amazing how many one-percenters, people who are at the very top of the spending spectrum, are people who are willing to come out in favor of socialism and redistribution of wealth.
Here's what Bill Gates said.
He said, quote, There's no fortune to be made in green energy.
Even if you have a new energy source that costs the same as today's and emits no carbon dioxide, it will be uncertain compared with what's tried and true and already operating at unbelievable scale and has gotten through all the regulatory problems.
Without a substantial carbon tax, there's no incentive for innovators or plant buyers to switch.
And what he's saying here is that we need to use government regulation in order to cram down green energy on people.
We can't just let the market take care of it even though the market always goes for the most efficient energy source.
No, we have to let government cram down on people.
And I think that it's worthwhile just taking a minute to explain why this is wrong in the environmental setting and then why it's wrong generally.
Because there are too many people who are buying into the Bernie Sanders notions.
I'm sure people who are watching or listening You have friends, family members, you shouldn't have friends, but family members who believe in Bernie Sanders.
If you have a friend who believes in Bernie Sanders, you shouldn't be friends with this person, because this person, number one, is not intelligent, and number two, believes in something that's actually tremendously evil, because Bernie Sanders has, of course, stood up for Fidel Castro, among others.
But there is this concept out there.
That only government can make the environment better.
Which is idiotic, because after all, the worst polluting country in the world right now is China, which is no shortage of government.
Now, what people normally use to talk about why the environment is better is they talk about CAFE standards.
This would be the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.
That the government has increased the standard for production of cars, they have to produce more fuel-efficient cars.
What people forget is the reason the government had to do that in the first place is because government subsidized gas and oil.
Government made it cheap so that people would buy cars in the first place.
And then, because gas was cheap, they had to create another program to mandate that the car manufacturers not take advantage of the cheap gas, but they make really fuel-efficient gas.
Now, there's a very easy way to solve the problem of non-fuel efficiency, and that is let gas go to its normal price.
If gas is at its normal price, then scarcity means the prices go up, and then people will want more fuel-efficient cars to save money.
But according to Bill Gates, this is just no good.
And Bill Gates wants a carbon tax.
He wants to tax everything out of existence.
Andrew Klavan, I thought, had an amazing point on his podcast the other day.
I mean, you know Andrew, he's a dunderhead on a lot of things, but on this he was exactly right.
And that is that Drew said, he was talking about this, he was really wonderful.
And if you haven't listened to Drew's podcast, Seriously, it's a fantastic podcast, folks.
You should click out of this when you're done, and you should tune on over to Drew's podcast, which I download every day and enjoy immensely.
It's really a lot of fun.
It's about as different from a show from this one as you could get.
This one's very topical and newsy, and Drew's is much more philosophical, but it's very deep.
And one of the things he said is he said that if you watch the movie Avatar, and you see all of the beautiful lights and the swirly things and the flying creatures and all that, we have that.
It's called oil, right?
That's what makes things go, right?
Oil makes all of these magical things happen.
Bill Gates wants to wipe oil out in order to make the environment better, which is just foolishness of the highest order.
Again, considering that people would prefer to live not in massive poverty.
And then Bill Gates continued.
He said, since World War II, U.S.
government R&D research and development has defined the state of the art in almost every area.
Okay, the idea that U.S.
government R&D has defined the standard in every area is just beyond absurd.
R&D in the government sector has really lagged in most areas, is the truth.
I mean, if you look at, aside from the development of military technology, all of the good developments in computer technology are taking place in the private sector, not on behalf of the government.
He says the private sector is in general inept.
This is Bill Gates talking, the guy who invented Microsoft.
Right?
The private sector is, in general, inept.
This $100 billion Bill Gates.
The climate problem has to be solved in the rich countries.
China and the U.S.
and Europe have to solve carbon dioxide emissions, and when they do, hopefully they'll make it cheap enough for everyone else.
Well, I have another solution that Bill Gates might like, and that is we could all just become poor again.
We could be extremely poor, and we could die at 30, and we could have no carbon-based fuels, and life could suck dramatically, but at least the world wouldn't be getting warmer.
It is amazing, though, that a guy who has made his entire fortune off of capitalism hates capitalism this much.
But it really isn't rare.
See, here's the thing that people have to understand about some of the richest people in the world.
Because they look at this.
They look at Bill Gates and they say, how could somebody like Bill Gates hate capitalism, right?
How is that even possible?
The answer is, because Bill Gates thinks he is smarter than you.
Bill Gates thinks he is smarter than everybody.
And as most people who think they are smarter than everybody believe, they should run things.
Bill Gates believes he should run everything.
He believes that he should basically be dictator of Earth.
He's not the first person to believe this.
Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb and the...
The modern movie camera, among other things.
Thomas Edison, he actually said back in 1911, he said, quote, a lawyer cannot draw a law covering the complicated conditions of modern industry.
What is wanted is some person familiar with the selling and buying, the technical as well as the financial end of all industries, to devise some generic scheme that business can work on.
So Thomas Edison, who made all of his money in the private sector, Thomas Edison wanted the government to take over the economy and then he wanted to run it.
And Bill Gates is the same way.
When you have the arrogance that's sometimes necessary in order to succeed in a capitalistic enterprise, when you're the person who goes out and you build, you tend to believe everybody else is a moron, and because everybody else is a moron, you should control them.
So the free market that made you rich is actually stupid because you don't control the free market.
Because other people besides you were successful in the free market.
And that's what's amazing about Bill Gates, and I think that it's important to point out.
This is why disproportionately wealthy people in the United States are in favor of big government.
They're not in favor of big government just because they're hypocrites, although they are.
People who are very wealthy in the United States, virtually all of the highest-earning counties in the United States voted for Barack Obama.
That's because they think they're better than everyone else, and they think that Obama is one of them.
That's how this works.
They think that they are the experts in the industry, and the basis of leftism is the idea that geniuses run the bureaucracy.
And if you think that you're so much smarter than everybody else, if you have nothing but scorn for everybody who doesn't appreciate a really solid Maureen Dowd column, if you're the person who really just, you can't get enough of Woody Allen films, like the really pretentious Woody Allen films, and the people who don't get those pretentious Woody Allen films, those are the dunderheads that you need to control, yeah, you've made a lot of money.
But voting Democrat serves two purposes.
One, you get to apologize for being rich.
And two, you also get to demonstrate to everybody how much smarter than everybody you are because you have devised programs for making the world better.
And if only everybody would listen to you, the world would be a much better place.
Which brings us to the level of scorn that exists in public for so many Republicans.
I really believe that the people who consider themselves intellectuals believe in leftist agendas because they wish they were the ones in control.
Every person wishes that they were the king.
The difference is that most people understand they'll never be king.
But when you're a really, really rich person, and you live in some of these areas with a bunch of other rich people, you tend to begin to think that, yeah, you actually could be king.
You could control the government.
You could hijack the democratic process.
And you develop a scorn for everybody who disagrees with you.
And that scorn is really endemic on the left.
This is why when I'm, you know, I'm a pretty smart fella, just in terms of raw data.
And when I talk with people on the left, it's not coming from a place of intellectual scorn.
It usually comes from a place of moral scorn.
I don't like their moral system.
But it's not because I think, oh, I must be that much smarter than this guy.
But people on the left, whenever they talk to someone on the right, they're all stupid.
Right?
If you talk to someone who's intelligent on the left, the reason right-wingers are right-wing is because they're ignorant bigots and they're stupid.
They're just dumb.
If they weren't so dumb, everything would have worked out just great.
Well, one of these characters is Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous atheist at this point.
He's the author of a book called The Selfish Gene.
Which is what made him famous.
He's an evolutionary biologist and his belief is that evolutionary biology demonstrates in full living color that God doesn't exist.
Because after all, if there's a system that perpetuates itself and it evolves toward what we were, there's no need for a God to explain anything.
It's the selfish gene that explains everything.
There are a couple of problems with his theory.
One of which is that the gene has no emotions and isn't selfish, right?
The question is how did the environment develop so that the gene that wants to self-perpetuate Actually develops in the way that it did.
I mean, it doesn't answer the question as to how did this entire system get here in the first place.
You can believe in evolution as I do.
I'm a big fan of the theory of evolution as a general rule, although I believe in macroevolution, not microevolution.
Punctuated equilibrium is what it's called.
The idea that, and this is backed by the fossil record, that Darwin sort of posited that evolution took place on a continuous scale, that evolution was slow and steady wins the race, and that's really not what the fossil record shows.
It shows that there are things like the Cambrian explosion where there are certain periods of time in which all of a sudden a burst of new activity appears on the evolutionary scale, and we don't really know why there wasn't that great a variance in the environment, and so the theory of punctuated equilibrium is that basically every Several tens of thousands of years, every few millennia, there was a big burst of evolution, and the question is why that happens.
Richard Dawkins, however, he's very upset with Dr. Ben Carson.
Because Dr. Ben Carson, who continues to do well in the polls in the Republican race, Dr. Carson said that he believes in creationism, which is not, by the way, incompatible with evolution.
I'm also creationist in the sense that I believe that God created all of this stuff.
But I believe he used the mechanism of evolution to do that.
Richard Dawkins, however, says he's very, very upset with Dr. Ben Carson.
Ben Carson, the famous neurosurgeon from Johns Hopkins, he must be an idiot because he doesn't believe what Richard Dawkins believes.
Here's Richard Dawkins sneering at Dr. Carson.
Ben Carson teaches medicine at Yale, and he says, he's a creationist, he thinks that God created the world, and he says, you're going to tell me that the complexity of the human brain, and he's a brain surgeon, came out of a soup full of chemicals and such?
Well, I'm going to tell him that, but not suddenly.
It took a very, very long time, but by gradual stages.
That's what these people don't understand.
They think it all happened suddenly.
Well, if you think that, of course you don't believe it, obviously.
It shouldn't happen suddenly.
But if it happens gradually, each stage just gives way to the next stage and the next stage and the next stage, and each stage is only a tiny bit different from the one before, then you could start understanding it.
You've just told me that all the Republican candidates except one say they don't believe in evolution.
I mean, that's a disgrace.
But for a senior, a very eminent, distinguished doctor, as he is, to say that, it's even worse.
Because, of course, evolution is the bedrock of biology.
And biology is the bedrock of medicine, and so for a distinguished doctor to not understand, I have to use the word understand, he clearly doesn't understand the fundamental theorem of his own subject.
That is a terrible indictment.
Okay, so the idea is that Ben Carson can't be president or Ben Carson can't be a smart guy or he can't understand the theory of evolution if he has questions about the theory of evolution posited by Richard Dawkins.
Now, here's the problem again, folks.
Creationism and evolution are not in conflict.
You can believe that God created all of this stuff and that he directed evolution toward a certain purpose.
Because it doesn't really explain why it is that genetics had to evolve in a certain way.
Why couldn't it have evolved in a different way?
When Richard Dawkins can explain why it is that the universe was even created in a certain way, like Stephen Jay Gould, who's obviously another eminent scientist, he says that the question of religion is why, and the question of science is how.
And I think that, in large measure, this is basically true.
And when it comes to evolution, the question is why.
Why did it have to evolve this way?
Why did it work this way?
Why was the system designed this way?
But for Richard Dawkins, anybody who believes in God is an idiot.
And this is the general belief among people of the left, the more kind of vulgar version of Richard Dawkins, a guy who considers himself very bright, but actually is not.
He's the formerly funny jester dwarf known as Bill Maher.
And here is Bill Maher talking about the same thing and saying that the real problem with humanity is that only religious people are having babies.
Now here's something people won't like to hear.
It's the wrong people procreating.
religious people.
Okay, well he's a nasty piece of work And the fact is, I mean, first of all, you have his audience of laughing hyenas who will laugh at anything.
I mean, anything that Bill Maher says.
He's like Jon Stewart.
If you take away his live audience, he's got nothing.
But beyond that, when Bill Maher says that only nasty people are procreating, only religious people are procreating, first of all, religious at what?
I mean, the reality of the situation is that China is not famed for its religiosity, but there are 2 billion people in China.
The fact is that in places where people are having seven or eight babies, these aren't usually actually Christian areas.
I mean, very often you're talking about places that have, in some areas of the world, pagan religion.
But there's nothing wrong with having lots of babies is the other point.
You know, there's this fundamental notion on the left that the reason that the left doesn't succeed is because the right out procreates them.
Well, first of all, you guys are endowed with the same capability.
If you want to have babies, go ahead and try it.
The problem is that you won't because you don't believe there's a downside It's kind of the atheistic sneering leftism of Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, and that downside is you don't believe in the value of your own civilization.
Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins, they don't believe enough in the value of their own civilization to even stand up and say that their civilization is worth protecting and fighting for, worth procreating for, and worth promulgating.
Because the fact is that if you are an atheist, and this is the big problem for atheism for humanity, and this is not to say there can't be individual good atheists or that the case for atheism can't be strong.
I don't believe it, but I think there could be a strong case made for atheism.
The point is that on a societal level, an atheistic society is doomed to failure because an atheistic society does not give you a reason to live.
And any society that does not give you a reason to live, doesn't give you a purpose to live, a goal to living, is bound to fail.
And this is true of the left in the United States, it's true for Richard Dawkins, it's true for Bill Maher.
Bill Maher's the best example because he, unlike Richard Dawkins, who at least finds his purpose in science, Bill Maher honestly just finds his purpose in being a Bulgarian.
And you can see the despair that kind of reeks off of him just watching the tape.
This is not a happy human being.
Being atheist, being a far-left atheist, and atheism and leftism tend to merge pretty quickly, because if you believe government, or really you, ought to be God, then God can't be God.
When these two things merge, you've created a very unhappy society, and that society has to uphold itself by sneering.
It's important to sneer at others, because if you're not happy, unhappy people are the most vicious people you will ever meet.
The thing with people in your life, people who are unhappy people, they spend all of their day sniping at other folks.
Just talking about how other people have it hard, or they're the worst, or they're stupid, or they're terrible.
They spend all their time talking about everybody else.
Why?
Because they're miserable.
And the fact is, That that unhappiness is endemic to the left.
These people who become very wealthy and then believe it was all them and has nothing to do with God and they're smarter than everybody else and they can sneer at other people.
Not only can they sneer, not only should they sneer, they're morally obligated to sneer like Richard Dawkins.
They must sneer.
It is now a personality trait.
If you are somebody who is an atheistic leftist, Sneering almost becomes a part of you.
It's imperative that you sneer.
Because if you don't sneer, then you have to look in the face the fact that how do you justify your life?
For a lot of these folks, they justify their life with a superiority complex, the way that Bill Maher justifies his life with a superiority complex to the other people on his panel, to religious people across the world.
But the fact is, these folks are bound to lose.
They are bound to lose.
And not just because of procreation, but because they don't even know for what they stand other than hatred of the other, which is hilariously enough.
Now, meanwhile, I want to get into a little bit of hard politics here.
President Obama is doing his best to push forward criminality in the United States.
This has become a theme.
If you listen to the show on any regular basis, I talk about the fact that the left in the last few months has really started to push for more criminality.
This is what the Black Lives Matter movement is.
More criminality.
The cops are bad.
Criminals are good.
We must have some sort of criminal justice reform.
We have to let more people out of prison.
We have to change the drug laws and let more people out of prison.
By the way, if you're going to make a case for changing the drug laws to let people out of prison, make the case that drugs don't damage people.
But you can't make the case that people should be let out of prison because drug offenders are less likely to reenact their crimes than other offenders.
It's not true.
Drug dealers are more likely than other people to go back to drug dealing.
So if you don't like drug dealing, then lowering sentences is not a solution to drug dealing.
The President of the United States is now pushing for what he calls criminal justice reform.
What he really means is that law-abiding folks should subsidize non-law-abiding folks.
Here's the President of the United States in his weekly address Talking about what he wants to do about criminality here in the United States, even as crime rates begin to rise.
And then I'll tell you what his actual agenda here is, and it ain't helping people who are criminals only.
I'll tell you what it actually is.
Here's the President of the United States.
I believe we can disrupt the pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails.
I believe we can address the disparities in the application of criminal justice from arrest rates to sentencing to incarceration.
And I believe we can help those who have served their time and earned a second chance get the support they need to become productive members of society.
Okay, so the President of the United States lays out a few ideas there.
First of all, he says that we can disrupt the pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails.
Okay, this pipeline doesn't exist.
Seriously.
Because we could just skip the schools and go directly to the jails if there were just this pipeline and we desperately wanted to staff our jails.
There's also no connection between the level of funding of a school and the success of a school.
There really is no connection.
The main connection between failure in school and going to jail is not having a father in the home.
But Obama will never talk about this because one of the left's agenda items is destroying the nuclear family.
Because the nuclear family is an obstacle to government dominance.
See, if I only care most, and I do, I only care most about my wife and my child, if I care more about my wife and my child than I do about other people, I'm less likely to willingly hand over my money to you to spend on some random stranger or on yourself.
I prefer to give my money to my wife and my kid, because I care about them more than you, because they're better than you, because I love them.
So, and that's true for everybody.
I mean, everybody feels this way about their family.
This is why the left has to destroy nuclear family.
Karl Marx was very clear about this in the Communist Manifesto.
He says the nuclear family is the chief obstacle to the dominance of the proletariat.
So anyway, President Obama says we can disrupt the pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails.
And then he says, we can address disparities in the application of criminal justice.
Notice he doesn't give any actual stats.
Whenever you hear a statistic, folks, in which people say black people do more jail time than white people, you need to ask, what was the crime they committed and what was their criminal history?
Because the fact is that depending on the crime, sometimes black people do less time in jail than white people.
So this idea that there is some vast, overwhelming conspiracy to put black people in jail is ridiculous.
Also, it turns out there's a really, really easy way to stay out of jail, and that is don't commit crimes.
Unless you're willing to suggest that of the 2.2 million people who are currently in American prisons, 500,000, 600,000 of them are just innocent and they were railroaded into this stuff.
It's a very difficult case to make.
The president, however, is pushing this nonsense about Well, he wants something that he announced today.
It's called the Ban the Box program.
Ban the Box.
What is Ban the Box?
Well, when you apply for a government position, there's a checkbox.
And the checkbox is, do you have a criminal history?
Seems like something reasonable to ask somebody.
You know, did you kill your wife?
We'd like to know before you get this government-funded job teaching in preschool.
It seems relevant.
Did you commit white-collar fraud?
It seems like it might be a fair thing to ask Bernie Madoff before we give him a job at the Federal Elections Commission.
We would actually want to know these things before we hire you at the Fed.
We want to know whether you had a Ponzi scheme.
These are things that would be relevant as a general rule.
Obama wants to ban the box.
He wants to take it completely off of all of the federal applications, or at least delay it until it's too late in the process to do anything about it.
Setting the legal record so that if the convict doesn't get hired, then they can sue the government for discrimination on the basis of past criminal conduct.
That's where this is going to go.
Hillary Clinton has endorsed this.
Bernie Sanders, the Democrat from Loon Bag Town, has endorsed this.
Governor O'Malley has endorsed this.
Former Maryland Governor O'Malley, who looks like he's always wandering around the stage in a daze.
They've all endorsed this idea.
That the government should become the chief hiring mechanism for former criminals.
Obama wants to ban this box from public housing, so you can't ask people if they're criminals before we pay for your apartment.
We can't ask if you're a drug dealer and maybe you're going to use it as a drug den before we just rent you the apartment.
This is all amazing stuff.
President Obama also wants to increase public programs for these people.
The idea is, and this is something you've seen in the movies, you saw it, for example, in Ant-Man, actually, they show this, right?
Somebody gets out of jail for a crime, and now they can't get a job anywhere, and so they're forced to go back to a life of crime.
This has a long history in Hollywood, this argument.
Going all the way back to, I was a fugitive from a chain gang, a guy is wrongly convicted, he ends up on a chain gang, he gets out, makes something of his life, well, he actually escapes, makes something of his life, And at the very end of the movie, he has to go on the run because he's uncovered as a criminal.
And then he goes back to being a criminal because that's all he can do.
And they ask him, what does he do to live?
And he says, I steal.
Right?
The idea being that after you're a convict, you can never escape the life of a convict because everybody knows that you're a convict.
And there's no question that being a convict is harder than not being a convict.
Which is why, folks, you should bring your child up not to be a criminal, and then they won't be a convict.
But this idea that criminals don't go back to crime, that if you got rid of all of these conditions, that criminals would just become law-abiding citizens is absolute horse nonsense.
It's just not true.
The fact is, the recidivism rate for all criminals is well above two-thirds within the first three years.
We're not talking about people who are working ten years, and then they decide they can't make it in the world.
We're talking about people within the first year or two.
Who have been criminals, and it's all they know how to be.
They get out, and they're criminals again.
So the question is, why is President Obama doing all of this, particularly since we know that crime rates are rising in a huge number of American cities?
It's up in L.A., it's up in New York, it's up in Chicago, it's up in Milwaukee, it's up in Detroit, which is almost impossible since everyone in Detroit has basically been murdered already, but it's up anyway in Detroit.
I mean, literally, crime is up all across the nation.
So why is Obama doing this?
Well, one of the reasons Obama is doing this is because he wants to lock up what he considers to be the ethnic minority vote, because he thinks that ethnic minorities are more interested in letting criminals out of prison.
Which, if it's true, is very sad, considering that ethnic minorities are largely victimized by other ethnic minority criminals.
Blacks are victimizing other black communities.
That's why you have high crime rates in the black community.
The best thing for those communities would be less criminals, not more criminals.
But there's another reason.
There's another reason.
Obama wants to let as many criminals out of prison as possible and reintegrate them into American life and have them not go back to jail and to work for the government, which is basically an unemployment check.
He wants to do all of this because how many people are released from jail every year in the United States?
How many are released?
Not in jail.
How many people are released every single year from jail in the United States?
The answer is 650,000 people every single year are released in the United States from prison.
How many of those people are of age?
Almost all of them, right?
Not a lot of those people are juvie offenders, so you're talking about 650,000 people all above the voting age.
They can all vote.
And, not shockingly, President Obama has indeed called for felons to vote.
He wants felons to vote.
He wants a constitutional amendment that would allow felons or a piece of legislation.
He says if you've served your time, you should be allowed to vote.
How amazing.
How amazing that is.
He wants everybody who's been a criminal, who's leeched off the system and victimized others, those people should be able to vote if they've served their time.
And coincidentally, he wants to make sure that more people get out of prison.
He wants to coincidentally ensure that less people are prosecuted.
President Obama is happy to have a criminal class victimizing the law-abiding so long as they vote for him.
And it's an amazing thing.
He wants to do that with your tax dollars.
It's almost impossible to be too cynical for the Democrats.
The idea that they're idealists, that they're trying to help people.
That's true for many people who are sort of your common everyday Democrats.
They think they're helping people.
But when we're talking about the elites, whether it is Bill Gates, or whether we're talking about Richard Dawkins, whether we're talking about Barack Obama, they're ideologues, but they're cynical ideologues.
And what that means, they're willing to exploit whatever is in front of them in order to achieve their utopian ends.
And for President Obama, those utopian ends include an ever-encroaching move Toward a socialistic United States.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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