All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 25, 2015 - The Ben Shapiro Show
38:50
Ep. 31 - How to Talk To Your Leftist Relatives on Thanksgiving

Ben tells you how to deal with your leftist relatives on Turkey Day, plus President Obama says the dumbest thing ever said by a human. And Ben does a brand new segment: Things I Hate! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Here we are.
It's the day before Thanksgiving.
I want to give all of you a little bit of Thanksgiving Day advice.
We'll get to that.
We'll also get to the latest in the Middle East, plus a brand new segment that I'm ripping off from Andrew Klavan.
I'll tell you what that is.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
You tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings.
OK, so tomorrow is Thanksgiving.
And on Thanksgiving, it's the day that we all get together with relatives that we despise because we have blood relations with them.
And they come over and they annoy us.
And typically, the people who come over for Thanksgiving who are annoying, it's never right-wingers.
Because right-wingers are perfectly happy.
To talk about movies and music and sports and religion.
They're perfectly happy to talk about the things that we sort of culturally share.
It's always the leftist in the room who needs to feel some sense of moral superiority who brings up politics.
I've never yet been in a family situation with members of my extended family who are on the left where I'm the one who brings up politics.
I never do it.
I happen to be in a career field in which everybody thinks that they're an expert, so most people want to talk politics with me when I'm out in public.
It's like being a musician where everybody thinks they're a musician and so they want to talk music with you or you're an actor, you're in Hollywood.
Everybody has written a script that they buried in their sock drawer and then went to wait tables over a coffee bean.
And there's certain professions where everybody wants to talk to you.
Like if you're an engineer, you never have to deal with this.
It has never happened to you where you've walked into a dinner party and somebody was like buttonholing you about engineering.
It just has never happened and it never will happen.
But if you're in politics, it happens a lot.
And if you're right-wing and you're political at all, it will happen at your family dinner.
So, a couple of pieces of advice for your Thanksgiving tomorrow.
First piece of advice.
Here's how to deal with the leftist who comes over to your house and wants to talk politics on Thanksgiving.
Don't invite them.
Like, seriously, I know everybody acts like you have to invite—why?
Why?
It's an accident of birth, it's an accident of genetics, just because that person happens to be your nephew.
The kid's a little schmuck, I mean, you don't want him there, so just tell him you don't want him there, and tell his parents that if he's gonna come, You just keep it on the down low about his politics.
You're happy to talk about anything else.
We'll talk football.
But if he's going to be a jerk, then don't invite them.
And you'll have a much better time.
Because it turns out that you're supposed to be with people you're thankful for, not people who you wish would suddenly be dropped into the middle of Syria.
You really don't want to clutter your life with folks that you don't like.
One of the most liberating phrases in all of the English language is this three-word phrase.
I don't care.
And it's true.
I mean, there are just too many people in life you shouldn't care about.
This is one of the things that I taught.
I'm proud I taught my wife a few things.
My wife has taught me many things.
But one of the things that I taught my wife, and I think women tend to fall into this trap more than men, which is you have to be nice to everybody.
No, you don't.
You have to be polite to everybody, but you don't have to be nice to everybody.
Because the truth is, nice means I'm going to go out of my way for you.
Nice means that I'm going to invite you into my home so that you can be a jerk to me.
No, actually, that's not real.
I remember that after my wife and I got engaged, she had a friend who lived in the same co-op living facility in which she lived, and they'd become sort of friendly because this girl was really needy and she had no friends.
And so my wife, being a nice person, decided that she'd be friends with this person.
And this person was really needy and really obnoxious.
And right after we got engaged, my wife sent a mass text to all her friends, you know, I'm engaged.
And this girl wrote back, how dare you?
And what she meant by how dare you was, why are you telling everybody at once, why didn't you tell me specifically?
And my wife was really upset about it, and my fiancé was really upset about it, and I said to her, you should just write back, I'm done with you.
Right?
Like, enough!
There's no time for you.
My life is too full.
There's only a certain number of breaths you get to take on this planet, and wasting breath on people you don't like is just a complete waste of time.
If she did that, it's made her life that much better.
And the truth is that when you have kids, this is particularly true.
General rule once you have kids.
Anybody whose means your children should not be part of your life.
Anyone.
Okay, I'm talking friends, I'm talking family.
Once they cross your kids once, done.
Done.
If they don't treat your kids well, you don't need those people in your life.
If they try to manipulate your kids, you don't need them in your life.
Then the same is true of politics.
If they insist on coming over to your house and waxing philosophic over the writings of Howard Zinn, just don't do it.
Thanksgiving is a nice day.
It's a day you should be enjoying.
It's not time you should have to spend rebutting all the stupid, idiotic talking points they got from Vox.com or in a Barack Obama email.
The number one question I always get from people, because I'm good in debate, is, how do you debate folks on the left?
And the first answer I always give is, why are you debating them in the first place?
You need to figure out why you're involved in the conversation in the first place.
If you can't answer that, you shouldn't be having the conversation.
That's true on Facebook, that's true on Twitter, and it's true in your daily life.
Now, if you can't avoid it, if it's your mom, right, and you have to invite your mom over because otherwise she's going to be lonely in the old age home or something, and you've got to invite her over and she just starts being a jerk, and then what you should do, obviously, is try and swivel the conversation elsewhere.
And if it really does come down to a basic conversation about policy, you can have a basic conversation about policy, but the minute anybody says racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, accuses you of Islamophobia, the conversation is over, and you should either swivel the topic, or they should get out.
Or, preferably, again, my favorite solution, don't come over at all.
You're not needed.
No one asked you here.
Eat your tofurkey in your mom's basement while watching pornography online and crying to yourself about your lack of turkey.
Right?
I mean, that can be their Thanksgiving.
It doesn't have to be yours.
So those are my brief Thanksgiving Day tips, and that's particularly true on a day when the left really hates Thanksgiving.
I mean, every year we have this routine about how the settlers, the pilgrims, were really terrible people, and they came over and they exploited the Native Americans.
This is the same routine we now have On Columbus Day, right, Columbus Day is about European colonialism coming to the Western Hemisphere.
Let me tell you something, folks.
All the people who are sitting around bitching about Western society and Western civilization coming to America, they can go live in a place where there is no Western civilization.
There are time machines.
There are time machines.
They're called airplanes.
All you have to do is fly to primitive parts of the planet and live there.
And it turns out they suck.
There's a reason you want to live here with your iPhone and with your computer and with your electricity and with your running water and with your toilet, right?
There's a reason that your lifespan is approximately 80 years here in the West, where in some parts of the world it's like 35 years.
And it turns out you wouldn't want to go back to living in a time where the indigenous peoples of America were your rulers.
If you could have chosen to live now, after several hundred years of development in the West, including colonialism and colonization, Or you could live back in primitive, more innocent times.
You'd be a fool to live back in primitive, more innocent times, because innocent times usually involved cannibalism, and not knowing how to write, and not having any sort of sanitation of any type, and not knowing how a wheel was used.
I mean, it actually is true.
Steven Crowder has a very funny video today about this.
It's true, when the pilgrims got here.
Not only was there no written language.
There wasn't.
There was no written language for Native Americans up until the 19th century.
And that was because one of the Native Americans worked with Westerners to develop the written language.
Sequoia is his name.
That's why, you know, the sequoia trees are named after sequoia.
Sequoia is the one who invented written language for many Native American dialects.
Okay, in the year 1800 AD, right?
And there's been human writing for a lot longer than that, right?
I mean, the Bible was written a thousand BC.
So this is a...
We're now 1818.
There's still no writing over here.
They also didn't have the wheel.
There was no wheel, okay?
In 1400, in 1600, there was no wheel.
The Native Americans did not know how to use a wheel or what a wheel was for, which is hard on the back, let's be frank.
So, you know, Thanksgiving is a great day.
It's a great thing.
The untold part of Thanksgiving that people generally don't know, it's becoming a little more well-known because Rush Limbaugh's talked about it.
But the part of Thanksgiving that people don't know is, of course, that Thanksgiving is an anti-communist holiday, too, because people act like when the settlers got here, they didn't know how to farm, as though no one in England had ever farmed before, right?
Like, the Dutch and the British, none of them knew how to farm, right?
They just, they sat around and the food just descended from them in parcels, like on Lost.
No, it turns out that they knew how to farm, it's just when they came to the United States, and then America, when they came to the New World, They decided that they weren't going to farm in the traditional manner where everybody had their own little field.
Instead, they were going to have a commune, right?
Everybody was going to share the work in common.
Everybody was going to share the product in common.
And just like every other communist system ever, this thing fell apart within two years, right?
People just started being lazy, and they wouldn't work, and they wouldn't do their job.
That's why they were starving.
And a huge percentage of them started.
There wasn't any food.
And so the Native Americans came around, and they said, okay, well, we'll give you some seed corn.
And it's not that they taught them how to farm.
They just said, here's some food.
Also, you guys are idiots.
And the pilgrims said, oh, you know what?
This is kind of dumb.
They got rid of the communist system, and they went back to private ownership of property.
And because they did that, there was not a need for another charitable Thanksgiving.
At that point, they actually were able to grow their own food and survive, and that's why it became a successful Settlement.
So there's your there's a little bit of Thanksgiving background for you.
Okay, on to the politics of the day.
So President Obama met with Francois Hollande yesterday, the president of France, and President Obama talked a little bit about what was going on in the world.
He said, in what has now become one of the most overused lines in American politics, we are all French now.
Here's President Obama talking with Francois Hollande.
Nous sommes tous français.
It was a show of solidarity, as President Obama declared, we are all French, embraced French President Francois Hollande, and then vowed to crush ISIS.
It cannot be tolerated, it must be destroyed, and we must do it together.
Okay, he said that we're all French now.
He also said that we're all French now comes from, you know, originally we're talking, it comes from JFK going to Berlin in the middle of the blockade of Berlin during his presidency and saying, Ich bin ein Berliner, right?
I am also a Berliner, which...
Oddly, also means he's a sausage.
That was one of the jokes at the time, is that a Berliner was a sausage, but people understood what he meant.
So now everybody does this thing where we're all French.
And Obama also said in this press conference something really bizarre.
He also said that France, they're doing a wonderful job of getting over the terrorist attacks, because they're showing the world that they're not afraid.
They're going out in places, and they're shopping again, and they're having mass gatherings.
And I thought to myself, this is such a bizarre notion.
How the left thinks you actually defeat terror is so weird.
Like, Bush did the same thing, by the way.
He always used to say, we can't let the terrorists win.
Go shopping.
And I thought to myself, wait a second.
Like, if we don't go shopping, the terrorists think that they won?
Like, do the terrorists really care if I don't go out on Black Friday?
If I don't go to a ball game?
Do the terrorists go, ha ha ha ha ha!
These men, they have not gone to the Dutcher game!
No, the terrorists don't.
They want me to convert to Islam or die.
That's their basic goal.
If I don't do one of these two things, they have not achieved their goal.
Right, so me not going to a Dodger game is not actually that high on their list of priorities.
And we've heard this from Bush, we heard from Obama now.
Go out, gather in public places.
First of all, at the same time that Obama is praising the French for going out and gathering in public places, his State Department yesterday issued a worldwide travel advisory telling Americans not to go gather in public places, in places like France.
So there's that, which is weird.
But beyond that, it's so funny, they'll say things like, if we compromise our open values, then we will lose.
Okay, during World War II, we actually rationed things.
There were actual rations.
You weren't allowed to buy things.
During World War II, you were rationed on your fabric, you were rationed on your coffee, you were rationed on your chocolate, right?
We actually interned people of Japanese descent.
Did that mean that the Japanese ended up winning?
No, the Japanese got crushed, right?
And so did the Germans.
So the idea that winning the war is living your life as normal is just, it's a weird idea and it's a very, it's just moral preening is really what it is.
President Obama went on to say, and this was the most, every day President Obama says the stupidest thing that has ever been said.
Like every new day brings a new stupid thing that is stupider than anything that has come before.
There is an episode of Family Ties in which Michael J. Fox playing Alex P. Keaton, he says, you know, every day I wake up and I think, how could I possibly get any smarter?
And then I wake up the next morning and I think, how could I have possibly been so stupid?
Well, President Obama is basically the same way, except everything that he says is dumber than it was the day before.
He said the stupidest thing I have ever heard, I think, a human being say, which is saying I've heard a lot of stupid crap.
Here is President Obama saying what would be a rebuke to ISIS terrorists.
And next week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the Global Climate Conference.
What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.
What are we talking about?
What?
Sorry, there are no words for this stupidity.
So what a powerful rebuke it will be to the Muslims who want to kill us when a bunch of global bureaucrats get together in a mahogany paneled room and stand around the thermostat.
Well, what a rebuke that will be.
ISIS will really quake in its boots then.
I mean, they'll look at us and they'll say, wow, those guys, they're talking about crippling their own economies in order to spend the next hundred years lowering the global climate by one degree Celsius.
Wow!
I can't believe we thought we could take these guys on.
That's the idea?
That's the terrible rebuke to ISIS?
A powerful rebuke to the... I can think of a better powerful rebuke.
The powerful rebuke would be all these guys in a room saying, okay, we're gonna bomb the smithereens out of them.
You know what a powerful rebuke would be?
A hellfire missile hitting them between the eyes.
That's a powerful rebuke.
I'm pretty sure a powerful rebuke is not... Guys, we really need to sign this Kyoto Protocol routine, you know?
Like, what we really need to do is make sure that everybody on Earth doesn't use their air conditioning too much.
Because let's be real, let's be real.
that is going to cause more hurricanes.
And what?
Ah!
I mean, it's just that it's as though, honest to God, it's as though the president of the United States is a child, and he thinks that he, along with all of his friends, are going to get together and play Barbies, and this is a rebuke to the terrorists.
They're going to get the Barbie dollhouse, and they're going to bring out Barbie and Skipper with their little car, and they're going to drive it around.
They're going to go, see, we showed you.
You showed them what?
You showed them what?
That you can get together in a room and talk?
They knew that already.
And by the way, you talking about climate change, they don't care.
You think that they care about you talking about climate change?
You have got to be kidding me.
But Obama is just, he is now in total disconnect from reality.
I mean, we have now reached the point of complete and total disconnect from reality.
And the disconnect continued.
President Obama says, you know what would really mean that we lost is if we don't uphold our ideals.
What are those ideals?
We'll let the feckless, idiotic president of the United States explain.
There have been times in our history, in moments of fear, When we have failed to uphold our highest ideals, and it has been to our lasting regret, we must uphold our ideals now.
Each of us, all of us, must show that America is strengthened by people of every faith and every background.
Again, so we weaken our ideals unless we are strengthened by people of every faith and every background.
Every background?
How about ISIS?
Let's start with an easy one.
How about ISIS?
Are we strengthened by more people with ISIS?
Every faith?
Every background?
Are we strengthened by more people with ISIS?
Very simple question.
At what point does this nonsense finally stop?
Because if you truly believe that America is strengthened by people of every philosophy and every ideology, that means America is meaningless.
It means America is totally meaningless and there's nothing worth preserving.
We may as well just welcome ISIS in.
I mean, that's what they want anyway.
Why don't we just let them all in?
Well, just forget Syrian Muslim refugees.
We'll just give tickets to the United States, to ISIS, because after all, we are all strengthened by our common diversity.
We're strengthened by the fact that we don't have a common ideology.
The only thing that holds us together is that we have nothing in common.
Just utter tripe and nonsense from President Obama, but all of this is cover for actual cowardice, because the truth is...
As I mentioned yesterday, there really is only one country on planet Earth, there really is, that has an interest in wiping out ISIS, and that's the United States.
We have the power and the interest to wipe out ISIS.
All of the regional, all of the various regional countries have no interest in wiping out ISIS.
Turkey doesn't want to wipe out ISIS because ISIS is Sunni.
If they wipe out ISIS, then presumably the Shia will take over that area because Assad is waiting.
Bashar Assad has no interest in wiping out ISIS because he's using ISIS As a cover to destroy the Free Syrian Army who are his real enemies.
Iran has no interest in wiping out ISIS because they get to play good guys playing ISIS.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all Sunni.
They're afraid that if they wipe out ISIS that presumably the Shia will take over.
Plus they have ISIS presence in their own countries.
The Russians have no interest in wiping out ISIS.
Again, they're using ISIS as cover to bomb the Free Syrian Army on behalf of Bashar Assad.
And they're using it as cover in order to provoke a conflagration with Turkey, which is what you saw yesterday.
This conflagration with Turkey, which as I mentioned yesterday, is designed by the Russians in order to peel Turkey off from NATO.
Putin has for a very long time, the dictator of Russia, for a long time he's wanted to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was constructed in the aftermath of World War II in order to fight the Soviet Union, He wants to take that apart.
He figures the easiest way to take that apart is to attack one of the country members of NATO and then have the rest of NATO go, oh, well, we can't do anything about that.
And then he's now set the predicate, which is NATO is not always going to respond to aggression against one of its member states.
So nobody has an interest in doing anything about ISIS except us.
And Obama won't do it, because he thinks that the polls don't support the idea of a long-term occupation.
This is why what's always so interesting to me is when we hear that President Obama is a brave and decent leader.
We hear that he really is willing to stand up in the face of what?
True leadership here would be, like, I'll tell you who was actually a leader, at least when it came to this.
George W. Bush did a very unpopular surge in Iraq.
It was unpopular at the time that it happened.
He knew it had to happen, so he did it.
It pacified Iraq and led to what would have been victory if Obama hadn't purposefully lost that war.
That's actual leadership and courage.
Obama has none of that.
Instead, he's going to sit aside and he's just going to moan.
So President Obama talked about what the Russians are doing.
And it's as though, I mean, I've said before, President Obama is basically a commenter at Salon.com or Huffington Post.
He's not even a columnist.
He's not of that quality.
He's just a commenter who sits in the comment sections.
Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its airspace.
about the ongoing problem with the Russian operation.
And he's not wrong, but he's also the president of the United States.
So he may have some power to do some stuff about it, but he won't.
So here's President Obama.
Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its airspace.
I think it's very important right now for us to make sure that both the Russians and the Turks are talking to each other, find out exactly what happened, and take measures to discourage any kind of escalation. - Yeah.
Okay, so he says they have to discourage all the escalation.
Well, what the President neglects to mention there is the fact that Russia was bombing there in the first place is a direct affront to the United States, because the fact is the only reason they were bombing up near the Turkish border, there's no ISIS by the Turkish border.
The only people by the Turkish border are the Free Syrian Army, the people we armed.
Right, the other day when the Russian helicopter got shut down, it was shot down with U.S.
weapons.
It was a U.S.
weapon that hit a Russian helicopter.
And he's sitting there pretending that this has nothing to do with us, that we were completely unrelated to any of this.
It is kind of amazing.
The Republicans on the other side, they're doing a slightly better job of responding to this.
Marco Rubio, senator from Florida, he says that the U.S.
should respond to this assault on Turkey, and we should defend Turkey because otherwise NATO is done.
He's basically right.
Here's Marco Rubio.
It's important for us to be very clear that we will respond and defend Turkey if they come under assault from the Russians.
Otherwise, the entire NATO alliance comes into question.
And that is exactly right.
I mean, the problem, of course, is that now, President Obama, thanks to his ridiculous, terrible leadership, Turkey, which once used to be an allied member of NATO, Turkey's now a radical Islamist country.
President Erdogan over there is an actual Islamist.
He funnels money to terrorists.
He backs terrorists in the Gaza Strip.
He's been Okay, so I want to move now to a little bit of domestic politics.
terrorist groups all around the world.
And so we now have no good options.
This is what happens when you don't lead.
When you don't lead, you end up with no good options, no options you like.
You're now trapped.
Putin has outplayed Obama, and it's pretty clear on all scores that he has outplayed President Obama.
Okay, so I want to move now to a little bit of domestic politics.
I saw a good idea today, but it demonstrates the racial gap in the country.
There's a good idea, and it was proposed by a group of black U.S.
lawmakers and other prominent figures on Tuesday.
They called on the Feds to declare a national holiday to mark what they called Abolition Day, which is the official end to the nation's use of slavery.
It would happen on December 6th.
That's the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment banning slavery and involuntary servitude.
And Judge James Wynn, who's a member of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, he said, I totally agree with this idea.
moment in black history.
He said, "It isn't often we can look to a specific date and say an evil institution ended that day." I totally agree with this idea.
I mean, the idea of having a day celebrating the end of slavery in the United States, I think, would be a wonderful thing.
I really do.
Now, the problem comes in when you realize what the actual drive of the organizers for this is.
The organizers say that it's in response to racial injustices and conflicts still facing the country.
Right?
So they don't want Abolition Day to just be a celebration of the fact that Western civilization, unlike every other civilization on planet Earth, actually ended slavery itself.
We didn't impose an end to slavery on anyone else.
We did it ourselves.
Western civilization rooted out slavery at the time.
Again, slavery was not illegal in Saudi Arabia until 1962.
In living memory, there was still slavery in Saudi Arabia, and there still is slavery in many Islamic countries.
That's not a civilization that has done away with slavery.
In Judeo-Christian culture, we did it away with slavery a long time ago, and we've been moving toward doing away with slavery since, really, the Constitution banned importation of slaves.
Jefferson, who was a slave owner, signed an act in 1807 that banned the importation of slaves.
The idea of celebrating a Western civilization for doing such a moral and grand thing, and hundreds of thousands of people died to achieve this, and this is also true for Britain, which ended the slave trade in Africa and policed the high seas trying to shut down the slave trade in the name of Christendom.
You know, all of that would be something worth celebrating, but we can't do that, of course, without proclaiming that the injustices of slavery basically still live on in us, and we're still suffering from all of this.
The latest iteration of all of this is what's happening Over in Chicago, there's this terrible shooting tape that happened in Chicago.
There's a guy named Laquan McDonald, is I guess his name.
And Laquan McDonald is a 17-year-old.
And this happened, I think, back in November of last year, so it's been a year.
And Laquan McDonald, there was a call By somebody at McDonald's, I believe, and the police were called because he was waving around a knife.
They knew he had a knife, and he was acting crazy.
It turns out that he was on PCP, which is angel dust, which is a drug that makes you essentially invulnerable to pain.
It dulls your pain receptors.
And so they called the cops on him, and what the cops said is that he approached them with a knife.
And for a year, no tape is released.
For a year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel basically blocks the tape from being released.
He says it's inappropriate to release the tape at this time, and there are calls for the tape to be released because there's suspicion that, in fact, the kid was shot not really for a good reason.
Rahm Emanuel shut down the release of the tape.
It was about a week before his re-election campaign.
So he shut down the release of the tape because he was in a very hot and heavy battle with his political opponent, who I believe was another Democrat in the city of Chicago.
And if the tape had been released, he probably loses.
Here's what the tape ended up looking like when they released it.
And this, of course, has been used as evidence that America is always, always a vast racist infrastructure of terror.
So here in the middle of the screen, you can see Laquan McDonald.
He's kind of jogging down the street, and there's already a cop car there, and he's getting kind of close to the cop car.
He's got something in his hand.
You can see a glinting in his hand, and it could be a knife.
He's kind of walking away from the cops, and then you see one of the cops shoot him, and then you see all the puffs of smoke because the cop shoots him about 16 times and empties the clip into him.
And apparently one of the other cops, who was there at the time, Was telling him to stop shooting, and he wanted to reload his clip.
It looks sort of like a panic shoot, right?
It looks sort of like he's within distance, right?
I mean, he's relatively close to the cop car.
It looks like maybe that cop got scared and decided that he was afraid the guy was gonna turn and charge him with a knife or something, and I'm gonna put him down right now.
The problem, of course, is that he's walking away from the cops when this happens.
So this tape comes out now.
And the police had gone into McDonald's, and they had confiscated McDonald's.
McDonald's had some surveillance tape of the kid, and the police apparently confiscated that as well, which was sort of suspicious.
And that police officer is now about to undergo first-degree murder charges for this, which, based on what we're looking at, looks at least justified.
It may be an overcharge.
First-degree murder may be an overcharge, but at least looks like, at the very least, manslaughter and an unjustified kill.
Because in this particular case, it doesn't look like the guy is charging the police officer.
So naturally, everybody says this is racism.
Everybody says that it's all just absolute racism.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, now under fire, he says that he's just trying to keep Chicago from boiling over.
The mayor of Chicago, who of course was President Obama's leading political lackey, he can get away with this sort of thing because he's a Democrat.
Here's Rahm Emanuel, the guy who hid the tape for a year.
The incident, the actions, and the video will be debated and discussed in the days ahead.
Appropriate.
But we as a city of Chicago, all of us, also have to make an important judgment about ourselves and our city as we go forward.
Will we, in my view, rise to this moment that this incident demands of all of us in this city?
And my view is, this episode, can be a moment of understanding and learning.
Will we use it, and the question before all of us, will we use this episode in this moment to build bridges that bring us together as a city, or will we allow it to become a way that erects barriers that tear us apart as a city?
Okay, so he's saying that we can either build a bridge or we can build a wall here.
I have no idea how this one is going to go.
Of course, this will not be used as a bridge, because the fact is that the bridge would have to be based on the idea that, first of all, maybe this wasn't racism.
Did that ever occur to people, that when cops shoot people, that it isn't always racism?
Is it possible that the guy just perceived a threat that wasn't there, and it's unjustified, and he should go to jail, but it's not because of the color of the kid's skin?
It's because he had received a call that the kid was on PCP, impervious to pain, essentially, and that the kid's walking around carrying a knife, not obeying cop orders.
They're yelling at him in that tape to get down on the ground.
He's not doing it.
That's not justifying his activity, but is it possible it has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with just a bad cop doing a bad job?
Or the same thing with regard to Walter Scott in South Carolina, where a black guy was running away from the cop and the cop shot him.
Is it possible that it's just because the cop is a jerk, the cop's a bad guy, or the cop made a bad decision?
Does it always have to be racism?
Well, you know, here's Rahm Emanuel, and his incompetence is part of what's leading to all of the unrest, because after all, if he had released this tape immediately, right, if it didn't take a year, if this tape had come out immediately and he had said, we need to get to the bottom of each and every case, But instead what it looks like is it looks like a white infrastructure led by Rahm Emanuel is attempting to cover up a bad kill of a black kid, right?
So political corruption now looks like racism.
Right?
Cops who do what cops do, which is basically to cover for fellow officers, that now looks like racism as opposed to typical sort of cop activity, which may or may not be good given the circumstances.
Right?
Everything is now construed as racism.
So you say, should we build bridges or are we going to build walls?
Well, last night we saw on Fox News, it's going to be walls, right?
This happened on Megyn Kelly's show last night.
Listen, you're going to have guys like this, you know, they want to instigate, they want to create a... What is he instigating, Bernie?
I'm sorry, I got interrupted.
Richard, look at him.
This cop out there accused of doing nothing wrong, trying to keep the peace.
This guy is having a silent protest with his police officer.
This is his First Amendment right.
He gets right in the face and stares him down?
This cop hasn't done anything wrong.
That is his First Amendment right, Megan.
To get in a cop's face and stare him down?
This is his First Amendment right.
I don't understand.
You think that's fine?
You have no problem with this?
This is his first and right, the biggest problem here... It's not a question of what his constitutional rights are, it's a question of what's appropriate.
And I see nothing wrong with this.
I think what is inappropriate is this prosecutor took 13 months to prosecute this individual when this police officer had 18 different complaints against him from citizens of Chicago.
And no one here, as far as I can tell, is defending that officer.
The question is whether it speaks to a greater narrative, as some allege, and this moment here.
So there are two questions here.
One is, is the shoot bad?
And everybody agrees the shoot's bad.
I've yet to meet somebody who doesn't agree the shoot's bad.
And the second is, what's the reaction to all this?
And the reaction to all of this is more behavior like this.
And, you know, Richard Fowler is there, and I've debated Richard Fowler before.
Richard Fowler is there saying that, you know, the kid is doing nothing wrong.
It's his First Amendment right.
That's true.
But let's just be clear about something.
A culture in which you disobey cops, in which you think that cops are out to get you, is not a culture that is likely to end with less violence between you and the cops.
So this kid isn't acting violently toward the cop, but the fact is he's being incredibly confrontational toward the cop, and there are people who are watching this sort of stuff, and they're thinking, okay, we have to stand up to every white cop.
Every white cop now has to be stood up to, and it is now point of honor, especially among teenage boys.
Every teenage boy, black, white, green, we're all like this.
Every teenage boy believes in the the quote the quote-unquote point of honor right there is an honor culture among teenage boys and that is if confronted i will i will have to stand up to you because you're an authority figure and if instead of respecting authority figures because you because they're trying to keep you safe you stand up to them because you think that they're racist and that's something that's being pushed by the entire infrastructure based on occasional Terrible situations like what just happened in Chicago.
That's how you get people shutting down the causeway, which is what happened in Chicago yesterday.
That's how you get riots in Ferguson.
And none of that ends with less violence between white officers and black folks.
Okay, so I've decided I'm gonna start ripping off Klavan.
I love Klavan's show.
I really enjoy—don't let him hear that—but I really enjoy Clavin's show.
And I think that I enjoy his literate references at the end of the shows where he does his stuff-I-like routine.
I've bought a lot of the books he's recommended.
I really enjoy them.
But it was—so I thought I would do stuff-I-like also.
But then Lindsay reminded me that I'm me and Clavin's Clavin, so I really should do what she suggests.
I should do stuff I hate.
Stuff I hate.
So, we will, we'll do stuff I hate.
At the end of every show, we'll have a little segment where we talk about stuff that I personally despise and I can't stand and I think that you should avoid at all costs.
So, a quick Thanksgiving note, number one on my list of things that I hate, anything having to do with Howard Zinn needs to immediately be canned.
I'd use a different word, but I don't like cursing.
So, it immediately needs to be canned.
Howard Zinn writes history, a people's history of the United States.
It's recommended by the Geniuses who wrote Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
It's just, they are constantly referencing Howard Zinn and there's a people's history of the United States on their shelf and they're constantly talking about how America's terrible and that's what a people's history of the United States is.
It's all about how the United States is founded in racism and slavery.
The people's history part of it is supposed to be, here's the perspective of American history from the victims.
Okay.
If we're going to do that routine, then there has never been any progress in the history of humanity.
Because it turns out that virtually all movements, good, bad, all movements, have some victims.
Right?
The Civil Rights Movement had victims.
These people may have deserved it, but the Civil Rights Movement had victims.
Right?
Bull Connor lost his job eventually.
George Wallace lost his presidential career.
Right?
But you don't write it from his perspective because it's a moral thing, the civil rights movement.
Well, it turns out Western civilization, the United States, is essentially a moral place, and writing from the perspective of, here are all the people who are dispossessed and therefore all of American history is terrible and false and horrible, it's not a nuanced attempt to say, here are the costs and here are the benefits.
That is acceptable.
What it is, is instead, here are all the costs and none of the benefits.
That's Howard Zinn, and that's how you end up with an entire generation of idiot children who think that America is a terrible, horrible place.
Other things that I hate.
Here's a second thing that I hate.
It's a heaping dose for Thanksgiving.
So we've talked about Adele on this program before.
I don't hate Adele.
I think that Skyfall is a good song.
I think Hello is a mediocre song.
But what I do hate is when there is an artist who is okay, an artist who is somewhat talented, and then all of a sudden it's Jesus.
Right?
All of a sudden, everybody on planet Earth has decided that this artist is just the greatest person who has ever lived, they descended from the clouds, and they have come to bequeath us their talent.
And this is what has happened with Adele, right?
And it's happened for two reasons.
One is because she has, some of her songs are tuneful, and the other reason is because she's overweight.
If Adele looked like all the other pop stars, then people would not be so obsessed with Adele.
It's the same thing that sort of happened to, uh, what was the name of that, that...
That girl who sang the song all about how being overweight was okay.
Megan Trainor.
Yeah, Megan Trainor.
So it's the same thing with Megan Trainor, right?
She has some talent, but all of her songs sound the same, and she's really famous because she's fat, right?
I mean, if she were skinny, then there's a new thing on the left that says we have to stop all body shaming.
Body shaming is terrible.
Okay, I agree.
We shouldn't make people feel bad about how they look.
However, there is also a thing called reality.
Men will be more attracted to you if you're in shape.
Okay, let's just get real.
It turns out that men are attracted to attractive women, and that's just the way that it is.
And women can fight against that standard and say it's sexist and say it's terrible, and men will continue having sex with the most attractive women.
That's just how reality is.
In any case, there's something that... Among the things that I hate, along with Adele, is Jimmy Fallon.
Jimmy Fallon...
is an absolute, he's just, he's an asshat.
I mean, there's no other way to put it.
He's just, he has what we, what some of us colloquially call a douche face.
And what I mean by that is that there are certain people where you just look at their face and you feel like they need to be punched.
And Jimmy Fallon, I'm not calling for actual violence against Jimmy Fallon.
That's a joke, sort of.
And Jimmy Fallon is, he's just one of these guys who, I don't know how he ever got ahead because every time he does a comedy bit, Jimmy Fallon, he can't help but break.
It's not cute.
He does it for every single skit.
Every skit he has ever done, he breaks.
It's like the old Johnny Carson shows where Carol Burnett couldn't hold it in and just started laughing.
But Jimmy Fallon thinks everything on earth is so funny that he has to break in every single skit.
This is the combination of things that I hate together in one video.
Here's Adele and Jimmy Fallon, and they're gonna do this.
This thing has gotten millions of hits.
It happened overnight, and it's already gotten millions of hits.
It's Adele singing Hello.
with her band and Jimmy Fallon, and they're all playing children's instruments.
Okay, this is so twee, it's just...
See, here, we'll play a little bit of it, and then I'll explain once and for all why this-- why all tape of this should be taken out to a desert and nuked.
Hello.
It's me.
I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet.
To go over everything.
They say that time's supposed to heal ya.
I ain't done much healing.
Hello?
Can you hear me?
Okay, so we can stop this, alright.
So Jimmy Fallon, for those who can't see, Jimmy Fallon is literally sitting there with like the wooden block that you had when you were in third grade and it was instrument time.
And he's hitting it, not on beat by the way, he's like trying so hard to hit it on the correct rhythm.
And then there's the whole band, there's the guy with the ukulele in the back, and you see the guy with the, I don't even know, what is the instrument the guy's playing with the, it's the mouth piano.
He's got these, he's blowing into it and he's got the little keyboard there.
And you've got the guy with the kid's xylophone.
And oh, isn't it cute?
Oh, isn't it charming?
Okay, so the reason that I despise this is because there is this tendency now that everything becomes cuter and more charming and more wonderful when you do it like a simple person.
Like, these people presumably are all skilled musicians.
They're capable of playing actual instruments, right?
But they're not, and so it's cute.
They're playing a little kid's xylophone, and it's cute, and it's nice.
Well, for me, I prefer to see skill.
Like, if Adele were to sing this song, this mediocre song, if she were to sing this with a full orchestra, it wouldn't get as many hits.
But this is cute, and it's twee, and it's charming, because all of these people are dumbing down for the audience so that even you can play this on a xylophone.
Okay.
The even you can do this, to me, is a bad measure of art.
In fact, it's the worst measure of art.
It's what I say about modern art.
If even I can do it, it's crap.
Right?
That's the way that it works.
If I read a book, and even I can do it, but not me, because I'm an actual professional writer, like, if even I could do it, and I'm an illiterate, then it's not a good book, right?
And the same thing holds true of this sort of stuff, right?
It's not cool just because you can play a children...
My two-year-old can do this, right?
If my two-year-old can do it, she's allowed to do it and be cute because she's two, and she's mine.
But if your two-year-old does it, it's mildly annoying, and if adults do it, it's super annoying.
So here they all are, you know, rocking out to these children's instruments...
And once again, it's the dumbing down of art.
It's the idea that art is somehow better if it's more simple, if it's more simplistic.
And it's just not something that I particularly buy.
So there you are.
Stuff I hate.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.
▲
Export Selection