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Nov. 17, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
32:56
Ep. 27 - What the Left Gets Wrong about Islam and Evil

Description: Ben explains why the left doesn’t understand evil -- and how they’re making it more common both in the Middle East and the West. He also chats about Charlie Sheen’s HIV diagnosis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome, welcome to Tuesday's episode.
We have a lot to talk about, as always, here on The Ben Shapiro Show.
We're going to talk about the nature of evil, we're going to talk about the nature of Islam, and we are going to talk about the perverse nature of Charlie Sheen.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
Okay, so we start today with the fact that the Obama administration clearly has no idea about the nature of evil.
They have this kind of bizarre notion of what evil is, and this is true for the entire American left and the international left, actually.
They believe that evil is just something that's kind of out there.
There's this Bond villain somewhere who just wants to commit grievous harm to innocent people.
They sit around all day just thinking about How they can chortle over grievous harm to innocent people.
It's the idea that evil is not banal.
It's nothing that applies to ordinary human beings.
It's nothing that you or I could fall into.
It's something that normal people could fall into.
Normal people, all people, are basically good.
People are generally wonderful.
They want what's best for their family and for the society around them.
They never want to hurt innocents of another religion or religious predilection.
No, most people are good.
It's just that evil is something that's sort of out of bounds.
It's just sort of out there.
And today's emissary of this stupid thought is John Kerry, the emissary of most stupid thoughts, the Secretary of State, the lurch-looking former Winter Soldier testifier.
He was over in Paris and he talked about what he thought drove the Paris attacks that happened last Friday.
It wasn't Islam.
Was it radical Islam?
It was something different.
It was something that he liked to call evil, but what does that evil look like?
Let's let John Kerry describe it.
They rape and torture and pillage and call it the will of God.
They are, in fact, psychopathic monsters.
And there is nothing, nothing civilized about them.
So this is not a case of one civilization pitted against another.
This is a battle between civilization itself and barbarism.
between civilization and medieval and modern fascism, both at the same time.
And that is why every single nation-state in the region and around the world is opposed to Daesh.
And so the violence, the terror, the senseless murder of 132 people, and injuring of hundreds more, including four Americans, this is an assault not just on France, But coming on the heels of brutal attacks in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, it is an assault on our collective sense of reason and purpose.
Okay, we can cut this idiot off.
What Kerry says there, notice how, I do love how he says, recent attacks in Lebanon and Iraq and elsewhere.
Elsewhere would be Israel, folks.
Elsewhere would be Israel where they've been experiencing stabbing attacks every single day in Jerusalem and throughout Israel.
But we can't mention Israel because that, of course, the Jews don't get to count as part of Western civilization.
There are a couple of strains in what Kerry's saying here that are actually deeply troubling.
First of all, he contradicts himself.
He says this isn't a battle between civilizations, and then he immediately goes on to say it's a battle between medieval fascism and our civilization, which is a description of a civilization.
I mean, ISIS is a functioning state.
ISIS collects taxes.
ISIS has a healthcare system, believe it or not.
ISIS has a system of criminal law.
They have people who inspect restaurants, according to people who have been researching this.
They have restaurant inspectors.
I mean, this is...
This is a fully functional civilization.
It's a brutal, barbaric, primitive civilization, but it is a civilization.
But the language that I want to focus on here is this language of psychopathic monsters and their assault on reason.
The idea being that all human beings of every sort, we all have a common humanity.
Obama said this on Friday as well.
This was just an attack on all of humanity.
It wasn't an attack on On any particular subset of humanity, it was all of humanity.
It's as though there are these monsters who live in the closet.
There are these monsters who live in the closet, and if you open up that closet, then the monsters pop out.
It's the same reason that people on the left get very upset if you ever compare anything to Hitler, because Hitler was out of the realm of humankind.
The Nazis were out of the realm of humankind, so we can never use comparisons or analogies.
Because to do so would actually suggest that Hitler was a human being and that his followers were human beings who were capable of evil.
And that most human beings, in fact, are capable of evil given the right circumstances.
Virtually all human beings, given the right circumstances, are capable of evil.
And that's why we actually have to have clashes of civilizations and battles of ideologies and philosophies.
Because certain philosophies drive more evil than other philosophies.
But according to John Kerry, evil is very easy to take care of.
All you have to do is spot the psychopathic monsters, and all you have to do is take out the people who are privy to this assault on reason.
And you see this repeated throughout the left-wing press.
Trevor Noah, who is the most unfunny person ever to be on Comedy Central.
I mean, he should not be on a channel that has comedy in its name.
He's the replacement for Jon Stewart, and he's Jon Stewart without the funny faces or even an iota of the talent.
Here's Trevor Noah last night talking about France and using exactly the same language as President Obama and John Kerry.
It's not an attack on the West by people who oppose the West.
No, it's an attack on humanity itself.
Here's Trevor Noah.
We're all afraid.
We replace that fear with anger a lot of the time.
But I think What we should try to choose to do is not focus on the perpetrators, because every attack, whether it's Paris, Beirut, Kenya, seems less about a specific group and more about an attack on humanity itself.
What in the world is he talking about?
What in the world is he talking about?
Every attack is an attack on humanity itself.
It's less about the perpetrators.
Hmm, what do these have in common?
Kenya and Lebanon and what just happened in Paris.
What do they have in common?
I mean, I can't imagine.
The only thing they have in common is that they killed humans.
If this is what pops to mind, you maybe have an IQ low enough to be a member of Trevor Noah's audience because this is really, really stupid stuff.
And what's amazing is how self-righteous the left is about this kind of stuff.
They refuse to label the ideology that drives terrorism what it is.
They refuse to say radical Islam, which we'll get to in a moment.
They refuse in any way to label this a clash of civilizations, because that would be giving ISIS what it wants.
We'll get to that argument in a moment.
But what they will do is they'll self-righteously proclaim that they're against the enemies of humanity, as though this grants them any sort of special status, as though they're real heroes for being against the enemies of humanity.
As though this is a sequel to The Avengers and there are a bunch of aliens coming from outer space and all we have to do is just fight those aliens and everything will be all better.
They're not human beings the people we're fighting.
They're completely othered.
What's amazing about folks on the left is you hear them use this language all the time with regard to gays and blacks and Jews and Hispanics and every other subgroup.
You can't other people.
You can't have outsider groups.
You don't want to other people and make them feel not accepted.
So what's the first thing they do?
Whoever they deem evil is now othered.
They're no longer part of humanity.
Right?
We can't acknowledge that they are motivated by evil ideology.
We can't even discuss what truly motivates evil, which I want to discuss in a second.
No, we have to feel good about ourselves by just saying, they're evil.
And then we don't have to investigate what it is that drives them.
We don't have to take them seriously.
All we have to do is put them in this little box labeled monsters and then that grants us the ability to go about our daily business without having to worry about what actually generates monsters like this.
What creates these monsters?
They don't come from nowhere.
They're not just born sociopaths.
The number of sociopaths in human society is unbelievably low.
By percentage.
The number of people that the Ted Bundy killers, those kind of people, are extraordinarily rare in human society.
But to hear the left talk about it, those people are... Every evil person is a sociopath.
Every evil person is a Bond villain who has a shark pit filled with sharks that they can dump their enemies into, and they just chortle and glee whenever a child is hurt.
They're the kind of people who torture dogs for fun, right?
This is what you get from Hollywood, by the way.
Every villain in a Hollywood movie is one of these people.
Every villain in a Hollywood movie is not somebody who's a misguided ideologue, for example.
Every person in a Hollywood movie who is a bad guy, all of the bad guys, are people who tortured puppies as children, all of them.
And maybe they tortured puppies as kids 'cause their dad was mean to them, but they all were sociopaths and they were driven to sociopathy from the time they were young.
And that's how you know you're not evil because you weren't tortured and driven to sociopathy And you can hear this sort of language coming not just from Trevor Noah, but from the guy who's always destroying things, John Oliver.
John Oliver, if you ever read headlines about John Oliver online, the left worships at the altar of John Oliver.
He is the heir apparent to John Stewart in terms of leftist worship cliques, and he And he's constantly destroying things.
He'll say something mean about Republicans, and then there'll be a headline, John Oliver destroys Republicans.
Actually, we're still here.
He didn't destroy us.
We're still here.
Well, the other day, he destroyed ISIS.
And here's John Oliver destroying ISIS.
And as you'll note, he doesn't have much to say about ISIS itself.
This is really telling audio and video, and you should subscribe so you can see John Oliver do this, but here's John Oliver from HBO talking about what happened in France.
After the many necessary and appropriate moments of silence, I'd like to offer you a moment of premium cable profanity.
So, here is where things stand.
First, as of now, we know this attack was carried out by gigantic f***ing a**holes.
Unconscionable, flaming a**holes.
Possibly, possibly working with other f***ing a**holes.
Definitely working in service of an ideology of pure a**holery.
Second, and this goes almost without saying, f*** these arseholes.
F*** them, if I may say, sideways.
And third, third, it is important to remember, nothing about what these arseholes are trying to do is going to work.
France is going to endure, and I'll tell you why.
If you're in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good f***ing luck.
Because go ahead, go ahead, bring your bankrupt ideology.
They'll bring Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, fine wine, Galois cigarettes, Camus, camembert, Madeleines, macarons, Marcel Proust, and the f***ing croquembouche!
The croquembouche!
Okay, let's pause it for a second here.
I mean, and he goes on like this for a while.
This is what the left actually believes.
This is what the left actually believes.
Right?
The people who did this, they have no ideology, nothing drives them, they're just effing a-holes.
Right?
As he puts it.
Right?
They're just, they're just, they're like the guy who scratches your car and then doesn't leave a note.
Basically.
They just do that writ large, right?
They just kill people for fun and they do it, but don't worry, don't worry, because they're unreasonable, because they're monsters, it should be easy to defeat them.
After all, defeating monsters is easy.
You know why?
Because monsters are imaginary.
They don't really exist.
But defeating monsters is easy.
In fact, you can defeat them just with a croquembouche.
There's no element here where he says, what we need is actual military force to use against these evil people who just slaughtered 129 French people.
No, what he says is, don't worry, the fact that France has SART means that they will win.
Okay, this is President Obama's language that he always uses about the arc of history and being on the wrong side of history versus being on the right side of history, as though superior cultures always win.
Superior cultures don't always win.
And superior cultures, by the way, don't even generate superior morality.
The fact is that the most superior culture in early 20th century global sphere was Germany, right?
I mean, the most developed culture on planet Earth was Germany, pre-staging the rise of the Nazis.
The idea that they have Camembert cheese And that therefore they are going to beat ISIS is so nonsensical.
But the self-righteousness that you can see just reeking off of him, just rolling off of John Oliver in waves, because he's cursing at ISIS.
And now they're getting it.
Now they're getting it strong.
It's not the bombs or the shootings that'll do it.
It's not us marching troops into the middle of Raqqa to take these bastards out.
No, what's really gonna do it is that the French produce little sugar balls in a mound, and then they wrap solidified sugar crystals around it.
That's what's totally gonna make it happen, right?
This is what happens when you buy into an ideology that says that evil doesn't really exist, it's just something that's sort of out there.
Because anybody who's rational enough to enjoy Camus, they can't let these people win, are you kidding?
Just by the bankruptcy of their own evil, they'll fall apart.
And part of this, by the way, is also This myth of evil, the way that people tend to think of evil, unfortunately.
They tend to think of evil as... If you think of every Bond movie, right?
Every James Bond movie, because they use sort of the archetype of pure evil in the Bond movies all the time.
Particularly lately, when you don't even know what the Bond villains are actually fighting, right?
You don't even know what their plan is.
I saw Clavin said this on his podcast the other day, and he's wrong about everything except this.
No, on this one, Clavin is exactly right.
The Bond villains lately have no plan.
They have no plot.
Right, you know they're evil because they sit in shadowy rooms with shadows on their faces and at the end of really long conference tables.
And you know that they're evil also because eventually there will be a scene, invariably, in which Bond is caught and he's tortured for fun.
They don't actually need anything from him.
They don't just shoot him in the head because that would end the series.
Instead, they take, as in Casino Royale, they take some sort of weight and hit him in the balls with it.
And this is what evil looks like.
And invariably in these scenes, somebody then explains the full plot of what they're about to do to Bond so he can thwart it.
Because evil people are arrogant, and evil people are stupid, and evil people are emotional, and eventually they just defeat themselves.
Bond is actually irrelevant to the proceedings because sooner or later these people would defeat themselves because evil defeats itself.
This is the comforting myth of pure evil.
I want to talk about, for a moment, what exactly does motivate human evil.
Because the myth of pure evil is really damaging because it means that we're supposed to pretend that Syrian Muslim refugees coming in from the Middle East, none of them are evil because we know they're not unreasonable like these people.
We know they're not effing a-holes, or at least we don't have proof they're effing a-holes, right?
They don't appear to be psychopaths.
They don't appear to be monsters.
They don't wear like funny shaped heads and odd teeth.
So obviously, if we bring them in, they shouldn't be any threat to us at all because they don't fit into the archetype of pure evil.
Therefore, we should bring all of them in.
Okay, what actually motivates human evil?
So, there's a really good book called Evil Inside Human Violence and Cruelty.
It's by a psychologist and his name is Roy Baumeister.
I believe he teaches it at Columbia.
And Baumeister is the author of several books on, or of human nature.
And he talks about what actually drives evil.
And he names a couple of different factors.
And you'll spot the fact that what he says drives evil action is possible for pretty much anybody.
It's possible for pretty much anybody.
And in fact, what drives evil action is actually being forwarded by the West right now.
What we're watching, not just in terms of what's happening in the Middle East, but domestically here in the United States and in Europe, the rise of evil is actually happening because the aspects of human personality that lead to evil are actually being exacerbated by the American and European left that insists that evil is just something out there, vague, doesn't exist.
Psychopathic.
So what actually drives evil?
So he gives a couple of different factors.
There are basically three that he says drives evil.
He says that greed and lust and ambition and all these things, they can drive evil, but typically people don't think of themselves as greedy or lustful or ambitious.
Typically, if somebody is super greedy, they don't tend to think of, "I'm going to exploit this guy because I'm greedy." The sort of Hans character from the first Die Hard movie is not your typical evil guy, the guy who just kills people for money.
That's also, it tends to be an exaggeration.
Most people, that's what makes him an amusing villain in the film, most people who are evil tend to think of themselves as emissaries of some higher philosophy.
The Nazis thought of themselves as emissaries of a higher philosophy, so did the communists.
In other words, powerful ideology drives people to do evil things because they believe that in pursuit of the fulfillment of that ideology, It is perfectly worthwhile to use means that are nasty and evil.
Right?
If you gotta shoot all the Jews to get to Nazi utopia, you do it.
Right?
Because you're driven by ideology.
If you have to murder a bunch of Christians and atheists inside a theater in France in order to achieve Islamic utopia, you do it.
Ideology can blind people to their own evil.
Right?
This is point number one that leads to evil.
And the left refuses to see that.
Which of course enables evil because a lot of people are coming over who have a very different ideology.
Hillary Clinton today said it's just insane for anybody to discriminate on the basis of religion with regard to the people who come into the United States.
Forget religion for a second.
How about discriminating on the basis of philosophy?
How about discriminating on the basis of ideology?
You know, back in the 1950s, if we knew that there were 100,000 people who were gonna come in, who were coming straight from the Soviet Union, and they weren't just expatriates from the Soviet Union trying to escape, they were people who were full-fledged communists, we might think twice before allowing all those people into the United States.
They have a different philosophy of life.
Syrian Muslims have a different philosophy of life.
Polls show these are not people who are engaged with Western values.
These are not people who are ready to integrate.
Forget even the terrorist problems.
Ideology matters.
And when that ideology, as happens to be true with Islam and a vast bulk of Islam, not the majority maybe, maybe, maybe the majority, but at least a big minority, radical Islam tends to predominate inside Islam.
This idea that Islamic radicalism is just a few guys, every poll disproves this.
It is not true.
It is not true.
Look at polls of Syrian Muslims and you will see people who believe that people who convert away from Islam should be killed, for example.
This is not a philosophy that works well in a free and open country like the United States or in Western civilization.
So, that's factor number one that leads to evil and the left refuses to see it because that would actually force them to look at the philosophies of the people they're fighting.
Factor number two that leads to human evil, according to Baumeister, is unjustified self-esteem.
So the left has told us that bullies, people who are bad, people who do aggressive and terrible things, these are all people with low self-esteem, right?
The bully at school, the one who's beating up all the other kids, it was because of low self-esteem.
This is nonsense.
It's hogwash.
Studies tend to show the opposite.
People who bully others, people who mistreat others, are people who suffer from high self-esteem.
They suffer from high self-esteem, and then the self-esteem is unjustified.
Meaning that if you think you're hot stuff, and it turns out that you're hot stuff, Typically, you're not going to end up beating people up.
If, however, you think that you're hot stuff, and it turns out that you're a loser, and everybody is constantly telling you how you're a loser, then that discrepancy between your picture of yourself and everybody else's picture of you, that gap tends to be filled with violence.
So, think, for example, of the person who you know who feels like they're really, and you remember this in your own life, you feel like you have a really great skill set with regard to a particular job.
And somebody comes to you and they say, "No, you're really terrible at that." Now, if you're self-confident enough, you know you're good at it, it doesn't bother you.
But if you are in the least insecure, then the person saying that can lead you to become very upset.
So here's what Baumeister writes.
He says, "Those who harbor inflated self-esteem will be likely to encounter a relatively large number of what he calls ego threats, and hence be prone to hostile, aggressive, or violent responses.
It is conceited people who will be the bullies.
People who think they're better than they really are will be the dangerous ones." So what does President Obama do?
What do the left do in the United States and abroad?
They say we need to boost the self-esteem of Muslims.
Right?
NASA said this.
We need to teach Islam, all the people in the Islamic world, about the arithmetic history of Islam.
Demonstrating once and for all that Islam is a great world of religion.
And then it turns out when they meet with the reality that there are no iPhones in Islam.
That the culture of Islam did not create iPhones.
The culture of Islam did not create airplanes.
The culture of Islam didn't create cars.
The culture of Islam didn't create... It hasn't created anything for the last 500 years.
And there are more books published in a single year than have been published now by Western civilization that have been published in the entire history of Islam.
The fact that that is the case means that there's this ego gap.
And so you have to constantly slap out at the people who are creating this sort of ego gap.
So that's point number two.
And we're actually making it worse.
We're actually making it worse by flattering people who have not earned the flattering, right, in order to raise their self-esteem.
They don't need higher self-esteem.
You need to earn your self-esteem.
Okay, third point that leads to evil behavior, according to Baumeister, is the microaggression mentality.
If you're hypersensitive.
So Baumeister says, quote, hypersensitive people who often think their pride is being assaulted are potentially dangerous.
Even when a neutral observer would conclude no serious provocation occurred, it is still important to recognize that, in the perpetrator's own view, he or she was merely responding to an attack.
So in other words, if we create a society where every comment about radical Islam is supposed to be taken as a comment about Islam generally, and we all have to be really sensitive about it, we're now ingraining in the Islamic world that anytime anyone says anything about radical Islam, they're now deserving of violence.
Anytime anyone draws a picture of Muhammad, because we're so sensitive about it, it's an insult to them, and thus they're gonna go on a rampage and riot and kill people.
Right?
The West is making this worse by not recognizing what evil is.
Which is very convenient for them, and it's always convenient for them.
So how do they justify all this?
Well, Chris Matthews on MSNBC, he's on Hardball, and he says it's a mistake, a huge mistake, to call terrorists Islamic because it's just giving them what they want.
Why does Rubio want to have this as a clash of civilizations?
I thought that was what ISIS wanted, what Al-Qaeda wants, to have the Islamic world fight with the Western world.
Why would he want what they want?
To see the world in a religious struggle.
Why say Islamic?
Why don't we say terrorists?
Why does he want Obama and Hillary Clinton to swallow those words?
What is that about, Howard?
Well, I think it's about... Okay, so you can cut it off there because it's not really important.
But what he's saying, Matthews, is something you've heard from the left a lot, which is what ISIS wants is a clash of civilizations.
Well, ISIS has got it.
I don't understand this leftist notion that what ISIS desperately wants is for us to bomb the living crap out of them.
They're dying for it.
What they really want is for us to invade full-scale and kill all of them.
That's their desperate wish.
What they really want is for us to nuke them.
What are we talking about here?
Second of all, I don't make my decisions on a daily basis based on what ISIS wants.
I've heard this argument with regard to Syrian refugees today.
People saying, what ISIS really wants is for the West to reject Syrian refugees because that way it looks like the West is anti-Muslim.
I don't care what ISIS wants.
Why should you care what ISIS wants?
I care what's good for Western civilization.
It is not good for Western civilization to take in millions of Muslims who have had no education in Western civilization at all.
And it's been bad for Western civilization for years, as we're now seeing in Europe.
Where you basically have two societies that have been created, the secular European society and the Islamic society, all in Europe at the same time.
But this sort of stuff is what the left has been pushing.
Because they believe that evil is something out there, because they believe it's just psychopaths, they've been saying today that it's just terrible that anybody would want to put restrictions on Muslims coming into the West.
They say that the gravest fear that they have is Islamophobia.
It's Islamophobia that we should all be worried about.
They wrote this in the Washington Post today.
It was written in the New York Magazine today by Jonathan Chait, who wrote an incredibly stupid piece called The Return of Islamophobia.
Just idiotic, the idea that it's not Islamophobic to recognize the actual threat from people who abide by doctrines that are not compatible with the West.
That is not Islamophobia.
Okay, there are lots of doctrines that don't comply with the doctrines of the West.
It's not specific to Islam.
It's true for a lot of doctrines.
And failing to recognize that is incredibly dumb.
But because the left doesn't believe ideology drives evil, The left believes that evil is just something that's randomly out there.
It's just sort of generated randomly, and if it is generated by anything, it's generated by the West, then they overlook all of this, and so you get tweets like this from Hillary Clinton.
We've seen a lot of hateful rhetoric from the GOP, but the idea that we turn away refugees because of religion is a new low.
And we're not turning refugees away because of religion.
Because the fact is, and by the way, the idea that Hillary is against discrimination on the basis of religion is laughable.
Hillary Clinton is the one who said that Christians in the United States would have to change their religion so that they could cater gay weddings.
Hillary Clinton said that.
So this idea that she's in favor of religious freedom, and that's really what this is all about, is idiotic.
I do have to mention in passing here, the reason why the left, everybody wonders, why is the left so in love with Islam, but they hate Christianity so much?
The answer is because Islam didn't create the West, and the left hates the West, and so anything that created the West, namely Judaism and Christianity, is outcast.
Islam is just an ideological Representation of third-worldism.
It's an ideological representation of poverty, which is why it's grown so much.
Ted Cruz got this basically right.
He said that, you know, President Obama, the reason he's shying away from talk about Islam and American leadership against ISIS is because President Obama basically doesn't like America, and he doesn't like the West.
Here's Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas.
I understand the radical that is President Obama.
You know, Barack Obama was four years ahead of me at Harvard Law School.
And I have described President Obama as the perfect Harvard Law School president.
And I don't mean that as a compliment.
My wife jokes that eventually they're going to revoke my law degree.
But the reason is as follows.
Every view of the Obama administration is orthodox wisdom in the Harvard Law School faculty lounge.
And the view of the elite academy, and Hugh, you know the elite academy very, very well.
The view of the elite academy is that America's leadership in the world is fundamentally illegitimate, that it is the product of oppression and hegemony.
It is a remnant of an evil imperialism.
That is what manifested in Obama saying, we should lead from behind.
He believes the world is better off when America recedes from the world and doesn't lead because our leadership is illegitimate.
And if you look at what President Obama has done for seven years, along with Hillary Clinton, It has been to abandon our friends and allies, whether the UK, whether Canada, whether Israel.
And he goes on like this, and this is exactly right.
This is true.
So evil exists in the form of Republican ideology and also in the form of psychopathy, and they're both the same.
If you just wrap them up in a ball, psychopaths are Republicans, Republicans are psychopaths.
This is why Hillary Clinton has said that her enemies are the Republicans, right?
It all is part of a piece.
Okay, so I mentioned that I would have to talk briefly about Charlie Sheen here, and I would be remiss if I did not.
Charlie Sheen was on the Today Show, and he announced that he was HIV positive.
The reason he said he was HIV positive publicly is because he was being blackmailed to the tune of millions of dollars.
I want to play a little bit of this interview.
Pay less attention to Charlie Sheen.
Pay more attention to Matt Lauer, because this is kind of telling.
I'm here to admit that I am, in fact, HIV positive.
And I have to put a stop to this onslaught, this barrage of...
Of attacks and of subtruths and very harmful and mercurial stories that are about threatening the health of so many others, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
I want to talk about those in a second.
How many people have you told about this?
I've told enough that I trusted to be How long have you known about this?
situation that I'm in today.
People you thought you could trust at the time?
Absolutely.
Absolutely, yeah.
How long have you known about this?
When were you diagnosed?
Roughly four years ago.
Yeah.
It started with what I thought based on this series of cluster headaches and insane migraines and sweating the bed completely drenched two, three nights in a row that I was emergency hospitalized.
I thought I had a brain tumor.
I thought it was over.
After a battery of tests and spinal taps, all that crap, they walked in the room and said, boom, here's what's going on.
It's a hard Um, three letters to absorb, you know?
It's a turning point in one's life.
Okay, and Matt Lauer goes on like this.
The interview's about eight minutes long, and it just continues on like this.
The reason I want to point to Matt Lauer here is very simple.
What we do in the media, and it is pretty sick, is everybody becomes a victim.
Everybody becomes a victim.
Okay, Charlie Sheen here is portrayed as somebody who's a victim, right?
How many people did you tell, and who did you think that you could trust?
And how hard was it when you found out that you had HIV?
Now, this is an aspect of political correctness that really does kill people.
It actually kills people, and it killed, it's killed Thousands of people in the United States over the last 40 years.
And that is since the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, the media have been trying to convince people that it's just sort of randomly hitting folks.
That it's not behaviorally connected in any way, because leftism is all about severing the connection between behavior and consequence.
So if we were to recognize that certain behaviors are more likely to lead to you obtaining AIDS than other behaviors, that would be re-establishing a connection the left wishes to sever.
How is it that... I mean, I've looked at the media coverage today.
And there was a very funny headline that I saw earlier today where it said the world will reluctantly accept Charlie Sheen as victim hero of AIDS.
And this is pretty much right.
The media coverage has been essentially laudatory of Charlie Sheen.
We feel bad for him.
It's so terrible what happened to him.
That's all fine.
You can feel bad for Charlie Sheen.
Wouldn't this be what they like to call on the left a teachable moment?
As in Charlie Sheen.
There are a couple things we know about Charlie Sheen, right?
We know that Charlie Sheen was not averse to doing drugs, and we know that Charlie Sheen basically put his genitals in any possible hole that would take them, right?
These are the things that we know about Charlie Sheen.
And we also know that both of these activities are highly linked to HIV and AIDS, right?
We know that promiscuous sex and drug use, intravenous drug use, these Transmit AIDS.
And I promise you, Charlie Sheen did not get AIDS from a blood transfusion.
There's the occasional person who gets AIDS from a blood transfusion.
The risk of that is incredibly low.
For 30 years we've been doing this routine.
Since the beginning of the 80s.
They said that AIDS could affect anyone.
It wasn't just a gay disease.
It wasn't just something that happened to homosexuals.
It's something that could affect anyone at any time.
I personally know I don't have AIDS.
You know how I know I don't have AIDS?
And I will never have AIDS except through blood transfusion?
Because I've only had sex with one person in my entire life, and that is my wife.
She's only had sex with one person, and that is me, and I've never used intravenous drugs.
Ever.
So, that's a pretty good way of avoiding AIDS.
This would be a good teachable moment to teach teenagers, right, that Charlie Sheen's behavior is the sort of thing that leads to rises in disease.
And we now have STDs.
Drudge is headlining today that STDs are now at record highs in the United States.
Why?
Because we have a campaign in the United States to minimize the effects of these diseases, which is good, But then we also have a campaign to minimize the behavior that leads to the disease, meaning we're not gonna even acknowledge that certain behavior is more closely linked to disease, in the same way that we refuse to acknowledge that transgenderism is a mental illness, which leads to more dead transgender people, people suffering from gender dysphoria, in the same way that we refuse to acknowledge that there are health risks that attend to certain aspects of American life,
Because things that the left likes, namely promiscuous sex and drug use, I mean, these are things the left is not averse to, these things must be protected at all costs, even the cost of human life.
So, as the media continues to make a martyr out of Charlie Sheen, who is, by all available accounts, and by the way, this guy probably had sex with a lot of people without telling them he had HIV.
I mean this is why there's lawsuits on the way for Charlie Sheen, major lawsuits, maybe criminal prosecution on the way for Charlie Sheen if he transmitted HIV AIDS to somebody without them being informed beforehand they were having sex with somebody who had HIV AIDS.
The fact that Charlie Sheen is now being turned into a sort of health martyr in the same way that Magic Johnson was turned into a health martyr with regard to AIDS.
And by the way, Magic Johnson was turned into a health martyr with regard to AIDS originally because Magic Johnson was straight, and so the poster boy for AIDS had to be a straight guy.
It couldn't be a gay guy who was sleeping around in bathhouses, which was significantly more common in terms of people who acquired AIDS back in the 1980s and 1990s.
The left has to redefine fact away from fact in order to achieve desired ends.
And that is true whether we're talking the evils of radical Islam or whether we're talking about the spread of AIDS.
It is a serious issue and I wish the media took it more seriously because As I'm fond of saying, facts don't care about your feelings.
And no matter how we treat Charlie Sheen in the aftermath of this, nothing will de-link the acquisition of STDs from promiscuous sex.
End of story.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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