All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 23, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
35:12
Ep. 29 - Why Obama Doesn't Want You To 'Overreact' to Islamic Terror

Ben talks about his trip to Mizzou, why Democrats want to shift the conversation from radical Islam to Islamophobia -- plus, why college students want to ban yoga! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So here we are.
We're back.
It's Monday.
I did survive Mizzou, clearly.
We'll talk about that.
We will also talk about President Obama and his quest to keep us from overreacting to the threat of radical Islamic terror.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
You tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
All right, so here we are.
It is a Monday, and of course, President Obama continues to whine about overreactions by the West to radical Islamic terror.
And now we have this whole narrative about how Republicans are deeply Islamophobic.
We're all Islamophobic.
And of course, the chief offender is Donald Trump.
Last Friday, if you weren't around, Donald Trump was asked by a reporter at NBC if he supported the idea of a Muslim registry or a Muslim database for people living inside the United States.
He apparently thought that they were talking about new people entering the United States.
Of course, we do have such databases.
They're called visa systems.
And he said, yeah, we should have such a database.
And everybody took it like he wanted to make Muslims wear crescents in the streets and such.
There was no evidence that he actually wanted to do any of this, but Trump didn't openly repudiate this, even though it wasn't his idea in the first place.
And so obviously he's an Islamophobe.
And this is the routine that the Democrats are now going to play.
The Democrats play this routine where they suggest that ISIS is basically weak, that it's on the edge, that we can destroy ISIS.
So what are you so worried about with all this Islamic stuff?
It really is just that you're a bunch of goobers.
You're really just a bunch of backward idiots from the sticks.
John Kerry, the Secretary of State, he's most famous for having a face that looks like lurch and an IQ that rivals some of the more upper echelon vegetables.
John Kerry, he said that ISIS will be defeated.
This comes shortly after last week's John Kerry, the administration, they've realized that this is bad rhetoric.
So now they're saying ISIS will definitely be defeated.
that instead we would just degrade them, or that it would be too much to assume that they were gonna be defeated in the near term.
John Kerry, the administration, they've realized that this is bad rhetoric.
So now they're saying ISIS will definitely be defeated.
Here is John Kerry, the Secretary of State. - I believe ISIS is gonna be defeated.
ISIS is not 10 feet tall.
I have absolute confidence that as we increase what we are doing today, as there is more focus.
I'm just in Abu Dhabi now.
We've just had serious meetings here.
I'm about to meet with the Saudi Arabians.
There is a very clear focus by everybody.
There is a united front, and I am absolutely convinced that Daesh will be defeated, and there will be increased steps taken in order to do so.
Okay.
So John Kerry, first of all, just a quick note about John Kerry as a human.
Less and less of his face moves every time you see him.
It is actually incredible.
He started off looking more like Larch.
Now he actually just looks like the Easter Island heads.
He's just, he's got this stone face and for those who aren't watching his mouth moves and even less of his mouth moves every time so eventually he'll just be reduced to guttural grunt that emanate from his chest and throat.
But another note worth making here, when he says Daesh, he's talking about Daesh, okay?
Daesh is the is the Arabic name for ISIS.
What's so stupid about this is that he's saying Daesh supposedly so Muslims know what he's talking about.
He's speaking in English.
Right, so he drops an Arabic word in the middle of an English sentence, and suddenly this is supposed to make the Muslim population all over the Middle East understand him, because he's a very stupid man.
So he says, we're going to defeat them.
They're not 10 feet tall.
We can beat them.
This, of course, is a far cry from last week when President Obama said, we're overreacting.
It might take a little while to beat them.
Eventually, we'll destroy them, but it's not going to be done overnight.
So John Kerry is saying that.
President Obama is saying the same thing.
President Obama says, don't worry folks, ISIS will be destroyed.
And I love the passive language there.
It's not we will destroy ISIS.
It's ISIS will be destroyed, right?
It'll just magically, by happenstance, an asteroid will come from outer space, and it'll hit ISIS, and it'll miss the rest of Earth, and it'll totally take them out, but do no damage anywhere else.
Here's President Obama talking about how ISIS will be destroyed.
He gets out his soothsayer outfit and his crystal ball, And then he proceeds to gaze into it like a swami.
Here is President Obama.
Destroying ISIL is not only a realistic goal, we're going to get it done and we're going to pursue it with every aspect of American power and with all the coalition partners that we've assembled.
It's going to get done.
It's gonna get done with all the coalition partners.
He's already ruled out heavy use of ground troops, of course, even though his own people say without ground troops nothing happens against ISIS.
Dianne Feinstein, who's an ally of President Obama's, senator from California, even she says our approach is insufficient.
Jimmy Carter!
Okay, Jimmy Carter came out and said President Obama had acted too late on ISIS.
When you're condemned as a pacifist by Jimmy Carter, you may have gone a little bit far in one direction.
Here's Dianne Feinstein, the senator from California, saying that our approach is insufficient with regard to ISIS.
I don't think the approach is sufficient to the job.
I think there are general principles, and there are general principles in terms of the administration strategy, too.
But I'm concerned that we don't have the time, and we don't have years.
We need to be aggressive now, because ISIL is a quasi-state.
ISIL has 30,000 fighters.
It's got a civil infrastructure.
It's got funding.
It's spreading in other countries.
And it's a big, big problem.
And now what you see, I think, in other places is a competition developing from other terrorist organizations.
But ISIL is something apart.
It's enormously strong, and it has to be dealt with.
Okay, so this is amazing.
Dianne Feinstein is on President Obama's side of the caucus.
She's a hardcore Democrat.
And here she is saying President Obama is too weak on ISIS.
When she says they have 30,000 fighters, you know how many fighters ISIS started off with?
How many fighters did they enter Iraq with ISIS?
Any ideas?
Any guesses?
How many fighters did they have?
They had 5,000 fighters when they entered Iraq in the first place, which is like one section of Dodger Stadium, right?
It's not even like half of Dodger Stadium or one of the decks.
It's like one section of Dodger Stadium is like 5,000 people.
So with that many people, they took over like half of Iraq.
Now they have 30,000, so they've multiplied times six.
They've multiplied 300% since all of this happened, or rather 500%, right? 600%.
Since all of this happened.
And the President of the United States, here's what President Obama says.
This is the fantasy land in which President Obama now lives.
There are people like Jimmy Carter and Dianne Feinstein saying that President Obama is too weak on ISIS.
And here's Obama's response.
He was speaking in Kuala Lumpur, which is in Malaysia.
And he said, we do not succumb to fear.
The most powerful tool we have to fight ISIL is to say that we're not afraid, to not elevate them, to somehow buy into their fantasy that they're doing something important.
He said, there are a bunch of killers with good social media, right?
And he said that they can't beat us on the battlefield, so they try to terrorize us into being afraid.
He says, I think it's absolutely vital for every country, every leader to send a signal, the viciousness of a handful of killers does not stop the world from doing vital business.
What was the vital business he was talking about?
He was talking about meeting about climate change in Paris.
So clearly what's going to defeat ISIS is if we get together and we talk about climate change in Paris.
So here he is saying it's really not a big threat at all.
Now, you wonder why it is that the President of the United States has to minimize the threat.
Why exactly does the President of the United States have to minimize the threat?
And all of his allies minimize the threat as well.
Eleanor Clift, who writes for Time Magazine, Eleanor Clift, she was minimizing it on the Sunday shows.
She says, we really shouldn't take ISIS that seriously.
After all, our real biggest foe isn't ISIS.
Our biggest foe is, you guessed it, climate change.
Here's Eleanor Clift.
Well, he's basically saying that the drought in Syria contributed to some of the rebellions there.
But I think his larger point is that the existential threat we face is not from terrorism, it's from climate change.
And he's right about that.
Okay, so this is the insane idea, right?
The insane idea is that terror is nothing to be feared.
First of all, when President Obama says our best weapon against ISIS is not fearing them, okay, this is like when, and then people on the left, they say, yeah, no, it's totally true.
It's like when FDR said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Well, it turned out we also had to fear the arsenal of the Germans and the Japanese.
It turned out there were a few other things that we had to fear in the world.
It turns out our best tool against ISIL is not our capacity to light candles and stand in city streets, Or go to rock concerts?
I honestly think George W. Bush did a real disservice after 9-11.
When people said, what can we do?
And President Bush said, all you have to do is just go about your daily lives.
The biggest thing you can do to say no to the terrorists is to go about your daily lives.
That was a mistake.
He should have said, OK, here are the sacrifices that we can make, because we were all itching to do it.
Here are the sacrifices that we can make in order to fight ISIS.
Right?
We're going to have to ramp up our military infrastructure.
So if we have to raise taxes to do that, then we're going to do that.
Or we're going to have to do X, Y, and Z.
to civil liberties in order to make this happen.
Make the case for what we have to do.
Instead, I think the reason Americans turned against the Bush administration is because they told us we didn't have to sacrifice anything, and it wasn't true.
Because, in the end, we did have to make certain sacrifices.
We did have to blow up the deficit.
We did have to allow these morons from Homeland Security to ransack our crap at the airport.
Which is useless, but President Obama, you know, he does sort of the same thing here, which is it's not a big threat.
And so the question is why they do this.
Why are they talking about climate change?
Why try to minimize the threat of ISIS?
Why try to minimize the threat of radical Islam?
And the answer is because, as I've said multiple times on the program already, when it comes to the left, their chief goal in politics is to ensure that you, the American people, we all think the biggest threat to the West is not ISIS, it's not China, it's not Russia, it's not anything foreign, it's the American right.
The American right is the biggest threat to America.
The American right is what can destroy America from within.
And so this is why you see Chuck Todd over on NBC, and he says that the GOP is the big threat to America because of their Islamophobia.
You know, only in a crazy world would you think that in the weeks after 129 people were murdered in Paris, and a bunch of people were murdered in Mali, and a bunch of people were murdered in Israel, have been murdered in Israel for weeks and weeks at a time, including three American citizens in the last five weeks, that the real threat to America is Islamophobia, is our great fear of Islam.
Here is Chuck Todd making exactly that case.
And while President Obama's response to the Paris attacks was roundly criticized for being a bit tone-deaf and dispassionate, the Republican presidential candidates have been playing on the politics of fear in an extraordinary way.
I'm playing on the politics of fear in an extraordinary way.
And specifically, he's not the only one saying this.
Charles Blow, who is a lying race baiter over at New York Times, and I say that because he once accused the police at his son's university of racially profiling his son.
Only one problem, the police officer turned out to be black.
Charles Blow wrote a column today that was called, Anti-Muslim is Anti-American.
Anti-Muslim is anti-American.
First of all, I don't know anyone, anyone, who actually believes that you should be discriminatory against individual westernized Muslims.
I think we all agree.
Everybody agrees.
Individual westernized Muslims, if you're anti those people, that's un-American.
I agree.
But, if you're anti the sorts of people who are shooting up theaters in Paris, that seems to me quite American.
If you are concerned that perhaps Islamic values are in conflict with Western values, that doesn't seem to me to be Un-American?
That seems to me to be perfectly pro-American.
In fact, it's un-American to suggest that America doesn't have its own discrete set of values that can be in conflict with any other values.
Or the idea that America's values mean that we have to let in everybody of every other value system and treat it as though those value systems are equal.
That's un-American.
American exceptionalism is based on the idea there's something unique about the United States, there's something unique that the West has to offer for all of us, and that's going to exclude some people.
And it's going to exclude some ideologies.
That doesn't mean every Muslim has to be excluded.
It doesn't mean that we have to make practice of Islam illegal.
That would be un-American.
What it does mean is that there are certain things about radical Islam and certain aspects of radical Islam, which doesn't just mean terrorists.
That means an ideology that are profoundly un-American.
The basic idea of equality between the sexes, if Islam is in conflict with that, that's un-American.
I think even secularists would agree with me.
There are certain things about radical Islam that are not in consonance with basic American values, and that's okay.
That just means that you shouldn't be here.
I mean, the fact is that there are certain American values that come first, and there are people of every religion who can embrace these universal values.
You can fit your lifestyle and your religion within this broad rubric of American values, but if you can't, If your religion doesn't allow you to do that, it's not Islamophobic to say, maybe your religion doesn't allow you to do that, if your religion doesn't allow you to do that.
And not all forms of Islam are created equal.
Not all Muslims are created equal.
What seems weird to me is that the left's insistence that all Muslims are the same, all forms of Islam are the same, all forms of religion are the same, all forms of ideology and philosophy are the same, that means that nothing has any meaning.
Nothing has any meaning, which is of course what the left truly believes.
They're nihilists.
And they believe the only thing that has meaning are the material circumstances in which you find yourself.
And President Obama is playing the same game.
He has to make it that the right in America is the true threat to America.
So President Obama says, we're not at war with Islam.
We're at war with the people who are at war with Islam.
Namely, we're at war with the Republicans, right?
Here's President Obama on this.
Their assertion, which is absolutely false, That we must absolutely reject that we are somehow at war with an entire religion.
The United States could never be at war with any religion because America is made up of multiple religions.
That is the stupidest argument you could possibly make.
I mean, truly, in the pantheon of arguments, this is a whopper of stupidity.
I mean, for him to say we could never be at war with any religion, really?
Could we never be at war with any religion?
Because we sort of were with regard to, for example, Shintoism.
I mean, during World War II, the religion of Shinto declared the emperor the god.
He was the god-king, right, of Japan.
And we went to war with Shintoism.
Not only did we go to war with Shintoism, when we went to war with Shintoism, we disestablished the emperor.
When we came into Japan, MacArthur forced the emperor to get on the radio and disavow his presence as a god on Earth.
We have done this before.
Okay, the idea that we're never at war with religion?
It depends what the religion is and what the religion does.
And that's not to say we should be at war with all of Islam, but we are certainly at war with a great bulk of Muslims who believe in a version of Islam that is completely incompatible with Western values.
If you're not willing to even draw a distinction between certain philosophies, how do you expect to defend those philosophies?
And that, of course, is the point.
That, of course, is the point.
They don't want to defend these philosophies.
They don't want to defend these values.
They want to pretend that our values and our philosophies don't exist.
In fact, what they really want to just boil down Americanism to is we tolerate anything.
Anything except the right, of course, or Christianity.
Pretty much anything except for original values in the United States, the left is fine with.
Joe Biden said, what we really can't do here, what we have to be careful of, is that we can't undermine our values of openness and tolerance.
Here is Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States, sounding the same note that you've heard now from Barack Obama and John Kerry and the rest of the administration.
And the only thing ISIL can do is spread terror in hopes that we will in turn turn on ourselves.
That we will betray our ideals and take actions, actions motivated by fear, that will drive more recruits into the arms of ISIL.
That's how they win.
We win by prioritizing our security, as we've been doing, Refusing to compromise our fundamental American values.
Freedom.
Openness.
Tolerance.
That's who we are.
That's how we win.
Okay, the idea that we win by letting in vast swathes of Syrian refugees, which is what he's talking about here, without vetting them, that this is how we win, that what really pisses off ISIS, what means that ISIS will in the end be defeated, is if we're open and tolerant.
Even he doesn't believe this.
Okay, even he doesn't believe this.
The left doesn't believe this.
The left likes to preach about openness and tolerance, but the truth is, when you want to talk about people who are against American values, who are truly un-American, if you want to talk about people who are truly un-American, you have to look at the left.
As you know, folks, I spent last week flying to Mizzou.
That's why we didn't have a Thursday podcast, is because I was flying to University of Missouri to do a pretty well-received speech there.
There were 52,000 people watching it live.
It has nearly half a million views as of the time of this broadcast.
And I have to say that what I was fighting there were un-American values.
These are un-American values.
And they're in the news today, these un-American values.
There are a couple that I want to point out because these are the real values of America that Joe Biden is supposedly talking about.
When he says we can't compromise our openness and our tolerance, I don't know what he's saying.
No one wants to make Islam illegal.
No one is talking about throwing every Muslim out of the country.
Even Donald Trump wasn't talking about registering every domestic Muslim on the basis of religion.
But what he's really saying is openness and tolerance means you have to agree with us.
Here's what they actually want, okay?
And they're convincing young people of this.
If you truly want to worry about what, you know, first of all, I don't agree with this basic logic of we have to do whatever ISIS wouldn't want us to do, right?
ISIS, we're supposed to dictate our own action by trying to avoid what ISIS wants.
ISIS wants a lot of stuff.
Right, but one thing I can guarantee you ISIS doesn't want us to do is beat the living hell out of them and also prevent them from establishing enclaves in the West so that they can recruit people.
Because without Muslim enclaves in the West, they couldn't have done what they did in Paris, for example.
These people were hiding in a Muslim enclave in Paris.
Okay, the truth is that no one is calling for Muslims to be banned from Western civilization, but the idea that ISIS, what they desperately want is for Muslims to be banned from Western civilization is so nonsensical.
But to get back to Mizzou, There are a couple of things that the folks on these campuses are really pushing for, and they truly are un-American.
One of them is something that Hillary Clinton pushed today.
So Hillary Clinton tweeted this out.
She tweeted out, quote, Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.
Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.
First of all, the utter irony of Hillary Clinton talking about hearing and believing and supporting survivors of sexual assault I mean, that in and of itself, the irony is just stunning, right?
I mean, Juanita Broderick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Hillary Clinton personally targeted all of these women, right?
Hillary Clinton, we have her on tape laughing about the rape of a 12-year-old girl because she was defending the guy who was accused of the rape, and she laughed about it on tape, right?
Hillary Clinton did all of that.
But the point here is actually not that.
The point here is, she says, every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be believed.
How do I know that you're a survivor of sexual assault without evidence?
This is not to rip on people who have been raped, God forbid.
If there's evidence of rape, we should castrate the guy or kill him.
And you should have been able to carry a gun in the first place so you could shoot him.
But...
Two basic principles of American civilization, fundamental Western principles.
Innocence under law until there's actual proof, right?
In this one, Hillary Clinton is fighting.
There's certain crimes for which the left never has to prove the crime.
If they call you a racist without evidence, that's just a crime in and of itself, we should believe you.
When it comes to sexual assault, if you just make the accusation, we're supposed to believe you without evidence.
Okay, that's actually a fundamentally un-American idea.
We're supposed to believe you once you show us the evidence.
We're not supposed to just agree that what you say is true and then throw somebody in prison based on hearsay.
This is why rape cases are so hard to prosecute.
It's the tragedy of rape cases that they're so hard to prosecute in many cases because it turns into a he-said-she-said scenario sometimes.
But by the same standard, it would be a lot worse if anytime anybody accused anybody of anything, there were no evidence, we just tossed you into jail.
But Hillary Clinton is actually stumping for that because politically speaking, it is advantageous for her to suggest to women that they are being regularly raped and that there are people ignoring them on the basis of this.
And we know, we know that there have been an increasing number of high-profile fake rapes that have happened across the United States.
University of Virginia, there was an accusation by a girl in Rolling Stone front cover story that she had been gang raped at a frat house.
No evidence to back it up, didn't matter.
There was a massive scandal and it turned out that the frat was basically shut down for a long time.
Only later it turned out it was all nonsense.
Mattress Girl over at Columbia University, she was running around saying that she had been raped.
That was nonsense.
We know the Duke La Crosse case.
There was a woman claiming that she'd been raped.
Crystal Mangum turned out that she was lying.
Right?
So the point here is that when it comes to the left and un-American, you know, they can talk about undermining American ideals by not being welcoming of Syrian refugees, but the left is creating its own anti-America.
And its own anti-America is a place where anything they deem to be a crime, regardless of evidence, is something that has to be punished by the authorities, which is the nature of fascism.
When there's no evidence that needs to be presented, that's the nature of fascism.
And you want to talk about more about the nature of fascism, listen to this poll.
This is a poll that came out from Pew Research today.
This is an amazing poll.
Okay?
Here's the poll.
40% of millennials okay with limiting speech offensive to minorities.
40% of people in the United States aged 18 to 34.
40% think government should be able to prevent people from saying things that are offensive to minority groups.
In other words, you should be prosecuted or you should be sued for saying things that are offensive to minority groups.
24% of baby boomers believe this.
12% of members of the so-called silent generation, those people 70 to 87, believe this.
35% of Democrats, 35%, right, more than one in three Democrats believe the government should prosecute you if you make statements offensive to minorities.
And this also breaks down along racial lines.
For non-whites in America, nearly 40% say you should be able to prosecute someone for saying something offensive to me.
And here's what's amazing about all of this, is that of all those subgroups, millennials win.
Ethnic minorities.
Men versus women.
When it comes to one subgroup, the highest percentage of whom think it's okay to prosecute folks, it's people 18 to 34.
People 18 to 34 think it is fully okay to prosecute people based on what they say.
Based on what they say.
Is that un-American?
That seems to me significantly more un-American than oppressive, than so-called non-openness and non-tolerance that are being preached by Joe Biden.
It's a stunning thing.
It truly is.
And that's how it is at these college campuses now, to the point where, there's an incredible story over at the university, which university is this?
It's the University of Ottawa in Canada.
University of Ottawa in Canada.
Everything that happens in Canada eventually comes here.
University of Ottawa in Canada.
has now banned yoga classes.
They banned yoga classes at University of Ottawa in Canada.
Why?
According to the UK Independent, yoga has become the latest victim of political correctness on university campuses after a free class was cancelled because of complaints that the lessons were an unacceptable quote-unquote cultural appropriation of a non-Western practice.
Jennifer Sharpe is the yoga practitioner.
She's been offering free weekly sessions to students.
She says she was shocked to receive an abrupt message telling her the classes were suspended.
She said, I've been in touch to prepare for the new semester's classes when out of nowhere I received an email telling me there were some issues in terms of a formal complaint.
The decision was made by the university's independent student body, the Ottawa Student Federation.
They said, while yoga is really a great idea and accessible and great for students, there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice.
Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced and which cultures those practices are being taken from.
In other words, it started off in Asian culture and Indian culture, yoga.
And therefore, people in Canada can't practice yoga.
It's cultural appropriation.
We will shut you down.
We will shut you down.
These seem to me greater assaults on freedom than me saying that we might want to check your background and your philosophy before you come into the country.
But again, if you don't believe free speech and innocence until guilt, until proof of guilt, if you don't believe these are Western values, then what do you care who enters the country?
What do you care who comes in?
What do you care what their values are?
By the way, if we're going to talk about cultural appropriation, let me just suggest that if this is the new standard, that anything that is quote-unquote culturally appropriated, that anytime there's cultural appropriation, we have to ban it.
So, okay, all you non-white folks out there, all you non-Jewish folks out there, I'd like for you to give up the polio vaccine, computers, your phones, electricity, Running water, right?
All of these things were created by Europeans or Jews.
So I think that you should probably give up all those things as cultural appropriation.
They're very holy to us who actually like Western civilization.
And anytime you use them, you are stealing what was rightfully ours and pretending that you're us.
So I think that you should really go back to what you were doing before.
But this is the standard that the left is creating.
The reason is because in the end, the left wants to tear down the fundamental pillars of Western civilization, fundamental pillars including freedom of speech, fundamental pillars including innocence until proof of guilt.
And so, if openness and tolerance include people coming in who hate those other values, then openness and tolerance are not American values.
Openness and tolerance have their limits.
They do.
We wouldn't have tolerated Nazism in the United States in the middle of World War II, and we didn't.
We didn't tolerate communism as a general rule during the Cold War in the United States.
That's because there were values worth protecting.
The Obama administration believes there are no values worth protecting.
The only value worth protecting is their stranglehold on power to make a better world.
And so that's their goal here.
Their goal is to say that radical Islam... Radical Islam doesn't allow them to gain power.
Radical Islam takes power away from them by giving power to people who actually believe we have a civilization worth preserving and defending.
They believe there is no civilization worth preserving and defending.
There is just a civilization rooted in racism and xenophobia that has to be torn away so that we can have a more equal world.
And if you believe that, if you believe that, then why in the world would you be against ISIS?
That's ISIS's goal too.
ISIS shares this goal with the left, right?
I said last week, ISIS's goal is the left's goal.
Destroy Western civilization.
They wanna replace it with something different, but the left wants to destroy Western civilization and rip it out by the root in order so they can create this more equal world for themselves.
ISIS wants to take Western civilization, rip it out by the root because they consider it inherently immoral, and that's where they find common cause here.
So the left will misdirect us to climate change, and ISIS will misdirect us to Islamophobia, And the fact is, there's only one set of values here worth defending, and it's not fighting climate change, and it certainly isn't radical Islam.
Okay, I want to conclude with this.
I don't know how many of you watch SNL.
SNL has just gotten worse and worse in pretty much every way.
SNL... People keep saying there was a time when SNL was funny.
It must have predated when I was alive, because...
As long as I can remember, SNL has been deeply unfunny.
And you would figure you have a full week to come up with these sketches, and you always hear how it's so difficult to come up with these sketches.
I suppose it is, if you steadfastly avoid any criticism of the left.
But I want to show you again how entertainment molds how we think, because SNL is a perfect example of this.
Saturday Night Live has become an absolute tool of the left.
It has been for years.
Going all the way back to Chevy Chase, who, you know, did this routine where he played off Gerald Ford, probably the most athletic president in American history, who's an All-American linebacker for Michigan.
They played him off as a dundering idiot who used to bump into things.
This was the idea of Gerald Ford.
And he may have lost the election because of it.
Well, the new SNL parody, they did a parody last night about Ben Carson.
And look how stupid they make Ben Carson look.
Now, think about this.
If they'd done this routine with regard to Barack Obama, trying to make him look this dumb, everybody would have said racist, but it's Ben Carson, so it's all right.
You've said we should carefully screen everyone coming into this country.
Do you have a plan that would separate Muslims from Christian refugees?
Well, we did not think Islamists would be simple.
First, we'd say, you can't come into this country until I see you eat bacon while singing a Christmas carol.
And first of all, it's a terrible impression.
First of all, Steven Crowder does a better impression of Ben Carson than this guy does.
It's just an awful impression.
But beyond that, the idea is to make it ridiculous, the idea that we can in any way screen people for philosophy or ideology.
I have an idea.
You don't get to study.
You come in and we give you a basic philosophical test.
We give you a basic philosophical test.
Things like, should the government execute or jail people for homosexuality?
We start with that one.
And then we move on to things like, should women be able to drive?
Right, we just test you right off the boat, fresh off the boat, we test you with this.
And if you fail this test, if you don't get a- and it's not- this is not a 90% test, this is a 100% test, right?
It's all very simple questions, and if you get any of the answers wrong, you don't get to come.
Because you don't share our ideology.
Right?
And you don't share a philosophy.
Wouldn't that be a good place to start?
Wouldn't that be a good place to start?
But this is, but of course not.
We have to make fun of all these folks.
And then what I thought was even worse about SNL, they did this Adele parody.
And as I've said last week, I think that Adele is wildly overrated.
I think Skyfall is a good song.
I think that she is famous because she is fat and she sings very close to the microphone.
And the way that it works in the pop world now is that you can be an iconic lady star if you're not too hot.
Beyonce gets away with it because she's a feminist, because she's a stripper feminist.
But Adele is a big icon now because she's slightly overweight.
I mean, she's not massive or anything.
She's slightly overweight.
And also because she sings incredibly close to the microphone and breathes heavily into it.
So you can hear every flaw in her voice, which for some reason is supposed to be cool or sexy or something.
As opposed to actually being a skilled singer with training, which would actually take skill and training.
Anyway, they did this parody with Adele.
And the important thing about this parody is not the Adele part.
It's everything that comes before.
Here is Saturday Night Live on Saturday night, obviously.
All right, guys.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I am so thankful to have you all here today.
I am thankful that I only burned the turkey a little bit.
I'm sorry, gang.
You know, I am thankful that our governor is not going to let those refugees in here.
Oh, my.
You know, I heard the refugees are all ISIS in disguise.
Oh, yeah.
That's true.
I actually saw an ISIS in the A&P today when I was picking up the yams.
No, you didn't, Aunt Kathy.
That was an Asian woman.
You know what?
I have a question for you.
Why is it that your friends keep antagonizing the police?
Why would you ask my boyfriend that?
Black Eye, obviously.
Excuse me?
She's a guest hair.
Hello?
Okay, so the deal is then they all start singing "Hello," right?
And this unifies them because they all love Adele, right?
So they all love Adele.
But the part before is the part I want to talk about, right?
Because the idea is, the whole thing is, oh, they're having this big fight over Thanksgiving.
Notice the depiction of the people who are supposed to be right-wing here versus the depiction of the people who are supposed to be left-wing here.
It's a relatively subtle thing, because you're just waiting for them to get to the punchline.
But there are internal punchlines there.
The internal punchlines are, you know, the guy saying that every member of the Syrian refugee community is ISIS, and then the crazy fat lady in the video saying that she saw ISIS in the grocery aisle, which is supposed to be mockery of anybody who has any fears about terrorism whatsoever.
Then you have the tolerant, wonderful liberal there, No, oh my god, they want us to keep the refugees, oh my god.
And the black guy there, who's being victimized by the white woman, who's saying, why are all your people, right?
Everybody who's right-wing in this video is supposed to be a brutal, backward, redneck jackass, right?
And the two leftists, they're a charming interracial couple who just can't believe all this intolerance that's going around.
And then the idea is that Adele civilizes them.
First of all, there's so much wrong ideologically, even with the comedy, because there's supposed to be truth in comedy.
It's not funny if it's not true a little bit.
There's supposed to be truth in comedy, so the idea that Adele unifies any of us, that we all unify around the culture, is absolute horsepucky.
If that's all that's keeping us together as a country, if Adele is all that's keeping us together as a country, we're toast gang.
I mean, seriously, we are finished, turn out the lights, goodnight.
But again, it's the depiction of right versus left in that Thanksgiving fight.
This is how you can tell that all the writers' rooms are stacked with people who are radically left.
Because the premise was supposed to be people fighting— I'll bet— This is how it went down in the writers' room.
Right?
There was one guy, and he's like, okay, we're gonna do a bit on Adele.
Because Adele was the guest star.
We're gonna do a bit on Adele, and how Adele's a unifying force.
Somebody goes, you know what'll be awesome?
This is right before Thanksgiving.
We'll just have people fighting over food, and fighting about politics, and then Adele will come in, and everybody sings Adele.
Right?
That was the entire pitch.
That was the logline for this particular sketch.
But when they sat down to write it, it was actually impossible for them.
Philosophically impossible for them.
to in any way write a line that shows an actual political controversy from left to right.
They couldn't do it.
There could be no depiction as anything on the left being anything but saintly, and anything on the right being anything but absolute stupidity, ridiculousness.
This is how the leftists twist the culture.
And again, it really does come down to this.
The comedy, I guess that it is true because it's sad, And that is, maybe this is all we have become now.
Maybe all we do have in common is Adele, or football, or the turkey.
I know that on my Thanksgiving, when we do Thanksgiving in my family, we have to invite extended family.
And when we invite extended family, a lot of them are leftists.
And so it always starts off with people, you know, kind of arguing about politics, and then somebody says, okay, let's talk football or sports or something.
If that's all that's holding the country together because we don't have any founding values in common, we're done.
Which brings us back to, you know, the main message that President Obama and his team are trying to push, which is, that is the only thing we have in common.
The only thing we have in common is that we like Adele, and that we watch football, and that we have these cultural touchstones that we share, but Any attempt to discriminate between values is Islamophobia or bigotry.
If you believe that, you truly are an American.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
▲
Export Selection