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Jan. 11, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:38
Ep. 52 - The Intellectual Republicans Will Get Hillary Elected

David Brooks rips "Satanic" Cruz, the Golden Globes, and the worst parents of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Here we are.
It's a Monday of a brand new work week.
Don't worry, we'll get through the week together.
Does the establishment even want to stop Hillary Clinton?
We'll talk about that.
Plus, the Golden Globes.
All 1,000 of them over at the Golden Globes last night.
We'll talk about it.
Ben Shapiro Show.
I am Ben Shapiro.
You tend to demonize people because you don't care about your feelings.
Okay, we begin today with the establishment Republican Party trying to determine desperately if they even want to win this election.
It's pretty clear that there is a segment of the Republican Party that would be very okay with losing to Hillary and spends most of its time demonizing other segments of the Republican Party.
And I'm not talking about the people who think that the establishment has the wrong tactics or that the base are just too hardcore.
I'm talking about people who actually seem to have a real level of discomfort With one of the crucial elements of the Republican Party that would allow the Republican Party to win.
And one of those people is David Brooks.
David Brooks we've talked about on the program before.
David Brooks is a New York Times columnist and he is the supposed conservative columnist over at the New York Times, which is to say he's not conservative.
And David Brooks was on NPR with Judy Woodruff Over the weekend, and while he was on NPR, he was asked specifically about Ted Cruz, and he proceeded to say this on your publicly funded news network, PBS.
It's just terrible.
And Cruz is somehow beginning to get some momentum in Iowa and elsewhere, and so people are either mimicking him, which Rubio's doing a little, by adopting some of the dark and satanic tones that Cruz has.
And so... What did you... Let me just... If you go to a Cruz... If you watch a Cruz speech, It's like, we've got this enemy, we've got that enemy, we're gonna stomp on this person, we're gonna crush that person, we're gonna destroy that person.
It is an ugly world in Ted Cruz's world.
And it's combative, and it's angry, and it's apocalyptic.
Well, actually, if you go to a speech from his dad, who's a pastor, evangelical, Raphael Cruz, it actually is satanic.
I watched a speech in which he said Satan was behind the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage.
So it's not... Okay, well, I withdraw the satanic, Ted Cruz.
It's metaphorical, but sometimes it's literal.
Mephistoclean maybe, but it's dark and combative and frankly harsh.
It's a harsh.
He gets some jokes in the beginning, but then it's just we have enemies.
We're in an apocalyptic situation.
We're on the edge of the abyss.
You need a tough guy to beat that back.
And that's his personality.
That is not Marco Rubio's personality.
He is a sunny optimist.
He's been running the youthful optimism campaign.
But he's beginning to prevent Cruz from getting lift off, to mimic sort of that, get a piece of that.
I personally think it's a mistake because inauthenticity almost never works.
And so if Cruz starts to go like, I mean if Rubio starts to go like Cruz, he just doesn't look like himself and that bothers me.
Okay, so what's really troublesome here is that Cruz is, in the self-congratulatory tone, Mother Jones is the most left-wing outlet there is.
Mother Jones is pretty much an openly communist outlet, and David Corn, who's the editor over there, is a Clinton flack and has been for many years.
So you've got the communist and the supposed conservative just arguing over the languages.
Are they satanic?
Is it mestaphalian?
And you can see that David Brooks is so pleased with himself that he has dropped the word mestaphalian that he can't contain himself.
I mean, he can barely just contain his glee at having used...
This multisyllable word, because those boobs, those rubes who don't understand polysyllabic English, those people will clearly not understand, but my people will understand.
And the problem that he sees with Ted Cruz is that Ted Cruz speaks in what he calls apocalyptic language.
Now we talked about this a little bit last week, and this sort of attitude has begun to infuse some of the places I actually like to read, like National Review.
We talked about the so-called rise of the doomsday conservative, and I explained how every good conservative is basically a doomsday conservative because you believe that if liberty is not fought for in this generation, it will be gone in future generations, and those future generations are not particularly far down the road.
I mean, Ronald Reagan said one generation down the road, freedom could be lost if you don't fight for it.
That's pretty apocalyptic language, isn't it?
President Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire and people on the left and the establishment right thought that was just terrible at the time.
Speaking in language of good and evil and right and wrong.
When he says that Cruz's language is this language in which here's an enemy and we're gonna crush him and here's an enemy and we're gonna crush him.
A couple of things are going on.
One is this tremendous ignorance of the other side.
It's as though he's never watched a speech by Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
Hillary Clinton spends her speeches talking in stark terms about how Republicans are going to, she said this over the weekend, put women back in the Stone Age.
Which she remembers.
I mean, she was there, so she knows how bad it was.
And when she says that they're going to put women back in the Stone Age, that's matched by Joe Biden in 2012 saying that Republicans wanted to put y'all, black people, back in chains.
That was a direct quote.
They want to put y'all back in chains.
Is that apocalyptic language?
Yeah.
Is that harsh language?
Sure.
And this brings us to the second point, which is that Brooks, number one, thinks that the left is civil, and people like Ted Cruz are not civil.
If only Ted Cruz were civil, things would be so much better.
Civility would reign.
Why does he think that?
Because he has a picture in his head as David Brooks, and so do many members of the establishment Republican Party.
They have a picture in their head of this day gone by, this golden age of politics, in which everybody got along, and they were all civil to each other, and they never insulted each other, and they never talked in terms of good and evil, and they never really felt a separation with people on the other side of the aisle.
We all had the same goal.
We all had the same utopian vision.
It was just a question as to how we got there.
There's only one problem, which is that this has never existed in the history of the country, in the history of politics.
It turns out that politics are a reflection of values, and values are what you think is good and what you think is bad.
It's what you think is right and what you think is wrong.
That's what values are.
And if politics are just another way of saying values, then of course your politics are a division between what you think is good and what you think is evil.
I think leftism as a philosophy is evil.
It's why I'm not a leftist.
I don't think that there are two ways of reaching this same utopia.
I think they have a very different idea, the left does, of what utopia looks like.
But for David Brooks, because he's lived in this sort of privileged, ensconced world for so long, he's convinced himself that all the people that he talks to, they all have the same goals that he does.
And it's clear that this is how David Brooks thinks.
Back in 2007, David Brooks wrote a piece about Barack Obama, and he said about Barack Obama this.
This is a direct quote from David Brooks, the so-called conservative at the New York Times, quote, Obama sees himself as a Burke-ian, or as an Edmund Burke, the great British philosopher who opposed the French Revolution because he said it was too radical.
Obama sees himself as a Burke-ian.
I divide people into people who talk like us and who don't talk like us.
Of recent presidents, Clinton could sort of talk like us, but Obama is definitely, you could see him as a new republic writer.
He can do the jurisprudence.
He can do the political philosophy.
He can do the politics.
I think he's more talented than anyone in my lifetime.
Right?
Why does he, why was he okay with Obama?
I mean, Obama was a far leftist.
He's always been a far leftist.
Why was he okay with Obama?
Because Obama exists in the same halls of power that David Brooks does.
And listen, I went to school where most of the people I was in class with were leftists, and they considered themselves intellectuals.
And because they were intellectuals, it was as though IQ conferred upon them a greater moral content.
It was as though being smart made you a better person.
Because I'm a religious person, I don't believe that being smart makes you a better person.
I think being a good person makes you a better person.
I think there are plenty of evil smart people, and plenty of terrific not-so-smart people.
I don't think that virtue and IQ line up.
What I do think is that if you think virtue and IQ line up, then you are making way for evil.
Because the truth is, that when virtue and IQ don't line up, and you think that they do, you're willing to allow smart people who do the wrong thing to get in through the front door.
And that's what David Brooks does.
Barack Obama talked nicely.
He had, literally, David Brooks said about Barack Obama, he would make a good president because, quote, I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant.
He had a creased pant, which is supposed to be sort of a stand-in for He's an upper-class, genteel, knowledgeable, crisp, well-spoken thought leader, right?
This was the idea from David Brooks.
He was a smart guy, the kind of guy who creases his khakis, and because he creases his khakis, we know he's not one of those hicks who wears rumpled jeans, and because of that, we know he'll be a good president.
Anybody who believes that an upper IQ crust should decide for the rest of us what is good and what is evil is actually not a conservative at all.
It runs directly counter to conservative principles to believe that if you're a member of an intellectual elite, you get to run the world for the rest of us.
And I speak as somebody who is a member of the intellectual elite, okay?
I went to Harvard Law School, and I know my IQ, and it's really high.
So the idea that smart people, and I've dealt with people who have way higher IQs than I do, by the way, and some of them were some of the worst people I have ever met in my entire life.
I went to a middle school called Walser Reed Middle School.
At the time, it was a magnet.
I think it still is.
And they had something called the IHP program, which was for highly gifted kids.
And you had to have a minimum IQ in order to get in, and that minimum IQ was at least two standard deviations Above average.
So you had to have at least a 150 IQ to get in.
They gave you a straight IQ test and you had to get at least 150 in order to get in.
And I got in, but I was not, you know, top of the spectrum.
There were people in my class who had 180s, 190s, and I predicted back then, I mean, I remember turning to my parents and saying, most of these kids are going to end up being juvenile delinquents.
Or burnouts, right?
That's what they will end up being, because I didn't connect morality with higher thought, but when I got to Harvard Law School, which was another group of very high IQ people, the first thing that the dean said, and she's now a justice on the Supreme Court, so this tells you what the intellectuals think of the rest of us, the first thing that Dean Kagan said when we got there is a big room, mahogany, it looked like something out of Harry Potter, marble busts on the walls, and she says to us, your competition is over,
You got in, you're never gonna have to worry about a job the rest of your life, and all of you people are going to rule the universe.
We have a bunch of Supreme Court justices, and we've got one-third of the Senate, and we've got half the Congress, and you're those people.
You're going to decide how the world runs, basically.
Heady stuff based on IQ, which has no correlation whatsoever with virtue, and very scary stuff.
But that's how David Brooks thinks.
And because David Brooks thinks that way, and the establishment of the Republican Party thinks that way, they're going to lose to smart people on the other side who they respect for being smart, but who have no virtue.
So they respect Hillary Clinton because she's smart, but Hillary has no virtue.
They don't respect Donald Trump because they think he's dumb.
I don't respect him either, but that's because I don't think Donald Trump has virtue.
I think that Hillary has even less virtue than Donald Trump.
I don't think Hillary has any virtue at all.
And I don't judge virtue based on her IQ, but they see Hillary and they say she's smart, so I can trust her more than I can trust Trump.
And if we're going to attack Hillary, we can't attack her on virtue.
Because remember, she's smart, so that by nature means she's virtuous.
And thus, if we're going to attack her, we have to attack her on her policies.
If we attack her on her policies, then we're attacking her smarts, and then you can attack her on her virtue.
But you can't attack her on her virtue if she's still smart, right?
You see how these two are connected?
If she's intelligent, she must be virtuous.
If she is not intelligent, then maybe she's not virtuous.
They completely neglect the idea that somebody could be both intelligent and completely non-virtuous.
It doesn't even compute.
And the way that you can see this is how the establishment of the Republican Party are now treating Donald Trump's attacks on Hillary and Bill Clinton's sex And I love the way the media treat these scandals.
The media treat these as though Bill Clinton just had a few affairs.
No, Bill Clinton allegedly raped people.
Multiple allegations of rape.
Multiple allegations of sexual assault.
Last week on the program, I read you a transcript of what Juanita Broderick said Bill Clinton did to her.
And that didn't even get into what Paula Jones said, or Eileen Wellstone, or a vast bevy of Christy Zurcher.
An enormous number of women said that Bill Clinton did to them.
Hillary Clinton was asked over the weekend about Donald Trump's attacks on her relationship with Bill, and here's what Hillary said.
Well, if he wants to engage in personal attacks from the past, that's his prerogative.
So be it.
I'm going to draw the distinctions between where I stand and where he stands when it comes to equal pay for women, raising the minimum wage, which affects Two-thirds of the women are the ones receiving the minimum wage, protecting a woman's right to make the most personal health care decisions.
That's why I'm so proud to have the endorsement of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that I'll receive today in New Hampshire, because I'm going to fight as hard as I can against any efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, something that he supports.
So there are very clear distinctions.
He can say whatever he wants to about me.
So there's the misdirect, right?
But I am not going to let him or any of the other Republicans rip away the progress that women have made.
It's been too hard fought for, and I'm going to stand up and make it clear there's a huge difference between us.
So there's the misdirect, right?
He asks her specifically about the question of Hillary's sexual assault scandals with Bill and the fact that she was the attack beacon for Bill.
I mean she was the person who created the Bimbo Eruption Squad.
She was the person who was attacking Juanita Broderick and threatening her.
She skips over that, and she goes directly to, yeah, but I'm for abortion, which of course is why the left loves her, and that's all the left cares about.
See, the left believes in virtue, too, and they also don't believe that the intellect is...
is associated with virtue.
They just believe that anybody who believes in abortion is totally cool, even if they rape people.
And this is how the feminist left believed back in the 90s is what they still believe now.
Rape is a convenient tool in their political arsenal, but it's not something in which they deeply care.
They really don't care whether a leftist politician is a rapist so long as he is okay with the woman aborting the product of that rape.
That means that he's totally cool.
So Hillary says that this is going to have no effect.
The character attacks on her have no effect.
Now, Over here in the real world, where we actually know voters, and we deal with people on a regular basis, I've talked with a lot of Democrat voters, and one thing that they don't even know is that Hillary Clinton's husband was a rapist, or an alleged rapist.
They don't know that Hillary Clinton laughed.
At an alleged rape victim.
They don't know that Hillary Clinton threatened another alleged rape victim or that she attacked the various victims of Bill Clinton's sexual abuse and harassment.
They don't know any of those things.
And it does have an effect.
Because it means that Hillary can't be some great feminist hero.
Most people still exist, thank God, in the United States in the world of virtue and not in the world of intellect.
There's people on the left who exist in the world of virtue where the virtues and the sins are flipped.
There are people on the right who believe in virtue, where there is virtue and there is evil.
Most of the people in the middle of the country don't care about intellectual status as much as they do about what we call virtue signaling when they vote.
Which is, I have to show all of my friends that I get it.
Right?
I'm proud of who I voted for.
That's why most people will wear the I Voted sticker.
That's a form of virtue signaling, right?
I'm signaling to everybody else that I voted.
I'm a better person than you because I voted.
I did my jury service.
I'm a good person because I did all of these things.
The same thing is true in any election.
In any election, there are two candidates, and whoever wins the virtue signaling election wins the election.
Whoever wins the election of the people who think how I vote is a reflection of me as a good person or not, that's who's gonna win.
That's why attacking Hillary on her Libya policy is worthless.
But demonstrating to people that Hillary is a nefarious character who covers up for her husband's rapes and actually enables them so as to achieve political power, that has some more power.
And people on the left get this, right?
I mean, Mark Halperin of Bloomberg is a journalist of the left.
He says that this is going to have an impact on the Hillary campaign.
Harold said that, you know, Hillary Clinton said that people have a right to be heard until their allegations are disproven.
And I think that in some of the most prominent cases, not only were the accusations not disproven, they were confirmed and acknowledged by President Clinton.
How's that?
So, I think, well, he acknowledged he had a relationship with Jennifer Flowers.
He paid Paula Jones off in a settlement.
And then they pretend that none of this ever happens, right?
But here's the fact.
All of this does have an impact on Hillary.
Now, the reason I harp on this is because the same thing that's driving David Brooks is also driving some of the establishment candidates.
It's not just the commentators.
So, for example, John Kasich, the Ohio governor, whose father I've heard, but it's not, I've heard that his father is a male man.
Just what I hear.
He said, quote, Look, I just don't like that stuff.
It's been around American politics throughout our history, people calling people names.
But to me, Hillary would be defeated because I believe Micah, this would be Micah Brzezinski over at MSNBC, she has no vision.
I don't want to spend my time bashing Bill Clinton.
Governor Chris Christie, the American people have made their judgment on Bill Clinton.
There's a difference between discussing Secretary Clinton's conduct and President Clinton's conduct.
Jeb Bush, quote, we ought to focus on the present and the future.
Doing what Bill did, was it appropriate?
Heck no, it wasn't.
You know, of course it wasn't.
But that's long gone.
Bill's not running for president.
Hillary Clinton is.
What do they think they're winning by leaving this massive and accurate character attack off the table?
What do they think they're winning?
They think that they're winning the intelligentsia primary.
Right?
They don't care about virtue.
Virtue doesn't matter.
They think that if they attack Hillary Clinton on her policies, the intelligentsia will say, oh, well, she must be stupid.
She must not belong in this category because she's dumb.
And then maybe we won't vote for her.
Here's the thing.
The intelligentsia does not decide who is going to be the next president of the United States.
Democrats understand this, which is why Democrats play a double game.
When they speak to the intelligentsia, like David Brooks, Barack Obama puts on the creased pant leg And he talks about Burkean literature, and he talks about John Rawls, and he talks about various philosophers.
And then when he gets out on the stump, he says that Mitt Romney specifically fired a guy so that his wife would die of cancer.
And he plays a double game.
He tells the intelligentsia what they want to hear, and then he tells the people the way that they operate.
Republicans won't play that game.
So, Donald Trump is one side or the other, right?
He can't speak the intellectual language, so he speaks the virtue language.
The only candidate out there, whoever does both, is actually Cruz, but the establishment is trying to peg him to He only does the character talk, and we don't like character talk, because after all, we know Hillary Clinton can't be bad.
She's too smart to be truly bad.
Bill Clinton can be an open rapist, but for the intelligentsia, he's not a bad guy, because he's too smart to really be a rapist.
I mean, if he were stupid, maybe he'd be a rapist, but he's too smart to really be a rapist, you know.
So that's how this is breaking down, and this is why it is imperative.
that the next Republican nominee not be afraid of making these sorts of attacks.
And this is why Trump is doing well.
Chuck Todd over on NBC News, Chuck Todd went after Trump for talking about this.
And Trump really didn't back down.
But here's Chuck Todd and NBC News doing the intelligentsia routine.
You really shouldn't talk about Hillary's sexual assault cover ups for Bill.
She was saying he has tendencies toward being sexist.
Talking about who?
You?
Talking about me.
And I said, wait a minute.
She's married to an abuser, a woman who claimed rape, and all sorts of things.
I mean, horrible things.
You read the books.
You do know, though, if you bring it up, people are going to bring up yours.
It's OK.
I mean, your first divorce was ugly.
Number one, it's fine.
All over the tabloids.
You know what?
I wasn't the President of the United States, and I wasn't dealing in the Oval Office, all right?
A big difference.
President.
And my first wife thinks I'm great.
And my second wife might and I have a great marriage.
I mean, I have a great marriage.
So I mean, it's fine.
I'm not saying don't bring anything up with me.
But when she says that I had to bring it up.
And he's right.
He does bring it up, and he does have to bring it up.
And people shouldn't be put off from making these character attacks.
And this idea of this halcyon past in which these things didn't exist ever, and the politicians were all mice to each other and everybody was civil.
Okay, let me read you a quote from John Adams about Alexander Hamilton.
Okay, this is John Adams about Alexander Hamilton shortly after Alexander Hamilton died, right, in a duel.
This is the time when everybody would have said, too soon, too soon.
Here's what John Adams said about Alexander Hamilton.
This is within a couple of years of Alexander Hamilton dying in a duel with Aaron Burr.
He said that Hamilton suffered from, quote, a superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off, and that the same vapors produced his lies and slanders by which he totally destroyed his party forever and finally lost his life in the field of honor.
Okay, he's saying that he was too horny.
There weren't enough prostitutes to provide oral sex for him.
That's what he was saying there, right?
And this is back in the early 1800s.
So let's put aside the whole everybody is genteel and wonderful because it just isn't true.
It just isn't true by any stretch of the imagination.
Okay, let's do a quick election roundup, and then I want to get to some cultural stuff.
So election roundup right now in the polls.
Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are basically within margin of error in both.
In Iowa, Trump is way ahead in New Hampshire.
I think right now that the expectations of Trump winning Iowa have basically been tamped down a little bit.
And what that means is that even if he loses Iowa, he's not going to go away.
And he could still win New Hampshire if he loses Iowa, so long as Cruz wins Iowa, Trump finishes second, and Rubio or somebody else finishes third.
If Rubio finishes fourth or fifth, Trump will run away with New Hampshire.
Now, if I'm still making the odds, the more I think about it, the more I think that Rubio still is the nominee, just because of the way that the primaries break down.
One of the really nefarious things about how the Republican primaries break down is that all of the red states, basically, are proportional representation states.
So if Ted Cruz wins 50% and Marco Rubio wins 20%, Cruz gets 50% of the delegates, Rubio gets 20.
Go to California, a blue state, and California has as many delegates as Texas, probably more delegates than Texas, and California, if Cruz wins 49 and Rubio wins 51, Rubio takes all of the delegates.
So that's obviously a built-in advantage for the establishment person.
But if Rubio starts to fall apart, Which could happen if he loses a bunch of early primaries, then this could turn into a two-way race between Trump and Cruz, which is why Trump and Cruz are going after each other.
So the latest is that Trump and Cruz are going after each other.
Cruz is really interesting.
You would think that he would tack to the right further than he's tacked on immigration.
He really hasn't.
He was asked over the weekend about how he would do deportation policy, and he sort of avoided answering the question.
Here's what Senator Cruz had to say about deportations over the weekend.
Deportations are ineffective until you secure the border.
Why?
Because right now when we deport someone, often they come back in two, three days.
It's like if a boat is sinking, you gotta patch the hole first.
If you just start bailing and you never fix the hole, it doesn't work.
And he's right about that, but he also went on to say he wouldn't have a deportation squad or a deportation force.
Trump says that he will.
But what's interesting is that Trump must be really worried at this point, because Trump is, instead of attacking crews, Over his immigration policy and saying that he's too wimpy on immigration, which is what you would expect.
Instead of that, Donald Trump is still hitting Ted Cruz over his supposed ineligibility for the presidency.
So here's Donald Trump over the weekend going after Cruz's eligibility yet again.
So the question is, is Ted Cruz, is he a natural born citizen?
If he were lucky enough to win, which I don't think he's going to, but if he were lucky enough to win, and he's your candidate, he's going to be sued by the Democrats.
They've already said they are going to be suing him on the definition, and it's right here, on the definition, is he natural born?
And a lot of people think that means you have to be born on the land, not born in Canada.
And he was born in Canada.
So, Professor Lawrence Tribe is the expert.
He says you got a lot of problems there.
Let's see what happens.
I mean, but...
There is a doubt.
We can't have a doubt.
We can win this election.
We can win it fast.
And I say this as a friend of the party and as a friend of Ted.
He's got to go in and get a declaratory judgment.
He's got to get a ruling to determine if he wins.
Can he run?
Is he allowed to run?
Is he allowed to serve?
Does that make sense to anybody?
Well, I believe Trump because old Liam Neeson on his back right there is nodding along with him.
And if you go back and you subscribe and you watch the tape, you'll know exactly the guy that I'm talking about.
But in any case, Trump is going after his eligibility.
So this battle has turned into, it's really fascinating, this battle has basically turned into Trump versus Cruz.
The name Trump comes up and they avoid the conversation.
candidates battling it out with each other and taking shots at Trump.
So Jeb was taking shots at Trump in his wildly ineffective way.
He said that whenever Trump calls in, he's really doing it from his bathroom or some such nonsense here is low energy, Jeb.
The name Trump comes up and they avoid the conversation.
And he does garner a lot of press.
I just envisioned him in Trump Tower on the 54th floor or whatever in his beautiful apartment.
And he'll call to Fox and Friends and then Morning Joe and the morning CNN.
And he's sitting there with a great bathrobe and nice slippers and he's...
And he just, he opines, he consumes the space.
He has extraordinary ability to get a lot of press coverage.
He probably has more press coverage than all the other candidates including the Democrats combined.
And by the way, that is true, but it's interesting that Jeb thinks he's going to win points among any of Trump's voters by attacking Trump.
It's not going to happen.
But Jeb and Christie and Ruby are now battling it out.
For the establishment side of the aisle.
So Chris Christie is now running ads against Marco Rubio.
And Marco Rubio is... Actually, Rubio is pushing to the right.
So Rubio is both pushing against the other establishment candidates, and he's pushing against Cruz.
So Rubio was asked about Obama's policies on gun control over the weekend, and here's what the senator from Florida had to say about Obama's gun control policies.
Where has the president called proposals for taking away guns?
He has not done that.
Well, his proposal for everything is to infringe on the Second Amendment.
There was a terrorist attack in San Bernardino before even the facts are known.
He immediately jumps and says, we need gun control.
But take away our guns?
This is what he always resorts to.
Well, if he could, he would.
Obviously, he knows he's constrained by the Second Amendment, so what he tries to do is chip away at it every chance he gets.
So you can see he hasn't called for that.
And he wants this debate to be about George, if he could, he would.
And let me tell you what he's trying to do.
He is trying to keep guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens by continuing to put new restrictions on our gun rights.
Let me give you an example.
He says he wants... Barack Obama says he wants this debate to be about fact and truth.
Good.
Let's have it about fact and truth.
Here's the fact and here's the truth.
None of the attacks that he is talking about, none of these horrifying tragedies that have occurred that he cites as the rationale for these new measures that he's taking, not a single one of them would have been prevented by anything he's proposing.
And the reason why is because killers and criminals do not care what the gun laws are.
They are not going to go to someone that conducts background checks.
Okay, Rubio is completely right.
I want to point something out here.
Rubio is a very right-wing candidate.
There's a lot of talk about Rubio being establishment.
He is.
So this is absurd.
The only people that are going to follow this law are law-abiding people.
This is nothing but an effort from the left to continue to chip away at the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans.
Okay, Rubio is completely right.
I want to point something out here.
Rubio is a very right-wing candidate.
There's a lot of talk about Rubio being establishment.
He is.
The establishment likes him because they like him on immigration.
The fact is, the grassroots should consider this election cycle a massive success simply by dint of the fact that Marco Rubio is now considered the establishment guy.
Right?
The fact that Marco Rubio is so much further to the right than John McCain or than Mitt Romney, it's almost astonishing.
So the fact that Marco Rubio, he has a 94% rating for most of the various conservative groups.
The area where he's not good is immigration.
Everything else, the guy is very, very conservative, much more so than his two establishment predecessors.
So that's a victory for the grassroots side of the Republican Party.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about culture.
Last night was the Golden Globes.
And the Golden Globes is the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which is basically a bunch of bloggers from Bulgaria who have votes, and nobody knows who they are, and nobody knows why we care about them, but they hand out these statues with Golden Globes, and a bunch of people, a bunch of actresses with Golden Globes show up to try and receive more Golden Globes, and so the Kardashian sisters show up, etc.
And before we get to that, I just want to point out one thing.
The people in Hollywood are even more disconnected than the Republican establishment.
The people in Hollywood are so disconnected that they think it's cool for us, in the middle of what is a continuing economic malaise, for them to down apparently 7,500 glasses of champagne and then curse out the rest of the American public.
I think if you had to pick one person who sort of signifies what Hollywood is all about, that person is probably Sean Penn.
Sean Penn has spent his entire life in Hollywood.
Here, of course, is Sean Penn shaking hands with El Chapo.
El Chapo is a drug kingpin in Mexico who's responsible for apparently hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.
He escaped prison.
So Sean Penn was sent down there by Rolling Stone.
And I guess they had a hookup through a Mexican actress.
And he went down there to interview El Chapo.
And in this interview, El Chapo had final editorial control, so El Chapo got to read it and then edit the interview.
And Sean Penn, I guess he's lonely for his good friend Hugo Chavez, who's moldering in the grave, that big bloated body of his, moldering in the grave at this point.
So he needs a new drug.
He needs a new kingpin, disgusting human being.
So he goes down and interviews El Chapo.
And he considers himself a hero for doing this.
Last night at the Golden Globes, all the people who are friends with Sean Penn showed up to the Golden Globes to give themselves pieces of meaningless metal with their names on them so that they can feel special about themselves.
And there's something about the Golden Globes that is particularly off putting.
But the one thing that was kind of great was Ricky Gervais.
Ricky Gervais hates Hollywood as much as I do.
He's not from Hollywood, he's from Britain, and so he really despises everything Hollywood is about, and he just goes and he roasts them.
So I want to play this one brief clip of Ricky Gervais because it's really entertaining.
Here's Ricky Gervais going on, doing what no one hath done.
Going off on Caitlyn Jenner, which you're not allowed to do in Hollywood.
And you can see, he's drunk as a skunk.
I mean, I think he went through six or seven beers in the course of the broadcast last night.
But as I say, I'm gonna be nice tonight.
I've changed.
Not as much as Bruce Jenner, obviously.
Now Caitlyn Jenner, of course.
What a year she's had.
She became a role model for trans people everywhere, showing great bravery in breaking down barriers and destroying stereotypes.
She didn't do a lot for women drivers, but... You can't have everything, can you?
And you can see everybody's laughing except Queen Latifah, who is very offended that anybody has made a joke about Caitlyn Jenner killing a person in a car crash, which is what happened, by the way.
And Ricky Gervais did a lot of that last night.
He made fun of the equal pay for equal work routine, too.
He said Jennifer Lawrence, you know, after she came out in favor of women should be paid the same as men, people all over the world marched In favor of the idea that $52 million for a 25-year-old actress per year was not enough money.
They were very upset.
And then he made a joke about how he thinks women and men should be paid the same.
He's being paid the same as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were last year.
It's not his fault that they decided they should be two of them last year.
That was their decision to take the pay.
Which, by the way, is actually true, right?
You get to take whatever pay you want in the country.
And so, good job by Gervais.
The part that was really gross about the Golden Globes, however, was not Gervais, right?
People making fun of Hollywood is the fun of this.
Right?
This is what Bob Hope used to do when he hosted the Oscars, was mock all the other people, including himself, in Hollywood.
And then there's the self-aggrandizing side of Hollywood, and that is Amy Schumer and Jennifer Lawrence.
Jennifer Lawrence has become such a disappointment, just as a human being.
I know a lot of people who were big J-Law fans and thought that she was kind of the young, up-and-coming, honest, cool girl, and it turns out that she's just another Hollywood feminist who hates Jesus and dislikes Christianity because mommy and daddy were Christian, and she's very disappointed by all that.
And here she is standing next to the vulgarian Amy Schumer, who is a Cupid-faced vulgarian Amy Schumer, who is famous mostly for being borderline funny and borderline fat.
This is her shtick, right?
She's borderline funny and she's borderline fat.
And I can say that because she's the one who made a big deal out of her fatness.
If you go back about 20 episodes in the Ben Shapiro show, we did a very long segment on Amy Schumer's naked photo with Annie Leibowitz.
Where she decided to go in and basically dress herself down and sit like a manatee and drink a cup of coffee and then tweeted out that she was stunning and brave.
To which I have to say, by the way, that our definitions of bravery are constantly changing.
I mean, Jason Collins was brave for coming out of the closet and making millions of dollars while doing so.
Amy Schumer is brave for getting naked.
It seems to me that if a guy is going to call himself brave, like really call himself brave, he ought to take some sort of personal risk on behalf of others.
Like fight in Afghanistan and get wounded, right?
You can call yourself brave if you do that.
You pose naked and you get all sorts of plaudits from the media that's not brave.
Anyway, here is J-Law with Amy Schumer.
And Amy Schumer does what she does best, which is she says dirty words.
And because she's semi-cute, a cute girl saying dirty words is Sarah Silverman has found a career duff make in Hollywood.
Here we go.
I'm J-Law.
And I am a shoe.
I mean, you can't just give yourself a celeb nickname.
It has to come naturally.
Okay.
Like, what do people usually call you?
Usually they just call me...
And you can't see it because it's bleeped there, but she calls herself the C-word.
What a delight she is.
And this is how Hollywood sees itself, right?
And these kind of jokes were replete throughout the night.
Jonah Hill did something where he dropped the F-bomb a bunch of times.
They know they're on national TV.
They just don't care.
They're better than you, right?
Again, for the left, intellect equals virtue.
Fame also equals virtue.
If you're famous, you are virtuous just because you're famous, right?
If you're a big earner in Hollywood, not Not in the actual real world, but in Hollywood, and that means that you're virtuous.
If you're famous, then you're virtuous, because we've seen you on screen, and that makes you a better person.
Okay, I know we're late on this, but things I like and things I hate.
We'll do this one quickly.
Okay, things I like.
My wife and I have been plowing through Blacklist, and we enjoy that show.
It is a fun show.
It's James Spader being James Spader all of the time.
It's 50 minutes of James Spader.
That's the show.
So you're either into it or you're not into it.
I think James Bader is hilarious, and so when I watch that show, it's him walking around being hilarious and shooting people.
That is basically Blacklist in a nutshell, and it's twisty-turny, and it's got plot, and it's pulp, and it's fun.
So if you want to watch a show that's not for the kiddies because it's kind of graphic, not in terms of sex, but in terms of violence, Then you should take a look at Blacklist.
It is a fun watch.
Also, we just started the new season of Sherlock, but it's not a season, it's like a mini-movie.
And they set it back in the late 19th century, and so that's a lot of fun also.
So if you're just on Netflix or Amazon, and you're checking things out, check those out.
Okay, a couple of things that I hate.
So there was a big deal over Donald Trump's rally this weekend.
When this lady stood up at his rally, and she's a Muslim lady, and she was wearing a Jewish star.
And she was wearing a Jewish star not because she loves the Jews, haha, no.
No, she was wearing a Jewish star because she is the new Jew, you see?
She's just like, this is Nazi Germany, and Muslims are being treated just like the new Juden, and therefore, they're going to show up at Donald Trump rallies because Donald Trump is the new Hitler.
So here is this Muslim lady talking about how she was kicked out of a rally on CNN.
She's a heroine now.
I mean, did one person really say, you have a bomb, you have a bomb?
Yeah, one guy was saying, Get out!
Do you have a bomb?
Do you have a bomb?
And I said, No, do you have a bomb?
So no, they were saying ugly, ugly things.
One guy was saying, God is great.
I'm like, Yeah, God is great.
And one guy said, Esau loves you, which is the Arabic word for Jesus.
And I said, Yeah, I know.
And Jesus loves you too.
So it's the thing is that people They don't even know what they're saying.
They just get riled up in the hate mongering, and they don't even know what they're saying.
So I basically feel sorry for them.
They just don't know what they're missing.
They don't know what they're missing.
Okay, so she's sitting there, wearing a button that was put on Jews before they were shipped into gas chambers, children to be gassed, and then their bodies cremated.
And people who are criticizing her don't know what they're saying.
Now, it's silly to say you're a carrying bomb, you're a carrying bomb.
No, she's not.
You're an idiot is more like it.
Or you're a moral dolt is more like it.
I mean, that just is vile.
I mean, as somebody whose entire extended family was murdered in the Holocaust, this is insulting.
It's deeply insulting, especially because Muslims in the Middle East are trying to perpetrate a new Holocaust, so I'm not going to sit here and have Muslims call themselves the new Jews, while the current Muslims try to kill the current Jews.
Especially as 10 million Muslims apparently are about to enter Europe, and as the entire Western Civilization- Like, we're Nazi Germany.
Really, we're Nazi Germany.
We're so much Nazi Germany that over the weekend, on Thursday, there was a Muslim guy in Philadelphia who walked up to a cop car and shot the cop point-blank And the only reason that I can think of that the cop was not killed, and the guy was shooting him from about four feet away, the only reason I can possibly think of why the cop was not killed in this act is that this Muslim must have been in another life of stormtrooper because he's that bad a shot.
He got off 14 shots, only three hit the cop, and they hit him in the arm.
He's still in critical condition.
The guy said, I did this on behalf of Islam.
He said, I did this in the name of Islam.
The mayor of Philadelphia came out and said, this has nothing to do with Islam.
The federal government needs to crack down on guns.
Right?
That's just like the Nazis treating the Jews.
Like, it's just the same thing.
Because I remember back during the Holocaust era, I remember reading about cases in which Jews randomly murdered passers-by and cops and authorities, and everybody went, no, can't be Judaism.
I remember it was just the same.
It was just the same.
So, there's something that I hate.
Okay, here's another thing that I hate.
We've seen a spate of these various videos of idiot parents who have now decided that they want to use their children for virtue signaling and use them as props.
And usually it's their small children who- it's usually- it's almost always boys.
It's always young boys, and the young boy wants to buy a Barbie doll.
And so dad goes in the car, and he takes a selfie video of himself talking about what a good guy he is because he got his young boy a Barbie doll.
Because I'm not an intolerant homophobe, and if my kid ends up being gay, well, so be it!
That sounds great!
And they turn into Tony the Tiger, and it's- and It's always ridiculous because the kid's like four or five.
Kids want to buy lots of crap when they're little.
Doesn't mean your kid's gay just because he wants to buy a Barbie doll.
And you're reinforcing the idea that you're pre-approving homosexuality in a kid.
It's just, it's ridiculous.
But it's even worse in this particular case.
So, in this particular case that I'm about to show you, it's another set of garbage parents from whom their child should be taken away.
And these garbage parents decide that an eight-year-old kid And he's an eight-year-old boy.
Okay, when you're eight, you don't have any hormones.
Okay, when you're eight, the hormones have not hit.
You're not in puberty yet.
Season Willward.
Okay, the name says it all.
Season.
Season Willward is a mother from Port Charlotte, Florida.
And she arranged for her eight-year-old son, Ethan, to meet with a local makeup artist, Joey Kilmeyer, for a drag-style makeup makeover and selfie, so Ethan can, quote-unquote, explore and discover himself.
Willward then told- This is the kid.
This is the kid.
So I make the kid up like a drag queen.
Two things here that are utterly horrifying.
One is, number one, that you are greenlighting your kid's sexual confusion.
When you're eight years old, sexual confusion is not difficult.
And in fact, until you are fully mature, sexual confusion is not difficult.
This is why you are seeing elevated rates of homosexual experimentation among young people.
Because it turns out that young people are not always clear about their sexuality when they're young.
Which is why it's important for civilization to channel amorphous sexuality into productive sexual use.
Okay, that's number one.
Number two, if you were to just see a picture of this eight-year-old kid, just the headshot, right?
The goal of this is to sexualize the kid.
Is there any doubt about this, that this is a pedophile's dream?
That a male pedophile is looking at this somewhere and getting off on it?
Is there any doubt that you're sexualizing an eight-year-old kid?
Male, female, you dress the kid up like this, you're sexualizing the kid.
And when it's cross-dressing, you're for sure sexualizing the kid.
There's no doubt about it.
And Wilbert told the Daily Beast, Ethan has always been interested in makeup.
Really always?
Like from the time he was two?
And that one of his favorite makeup tutorials are drag style taught by a gay man who dresses in drag himself.
Why, it's almost as though parents aren't monitoring what their kids are watching.
So Wilbert deemed it essential to set up a meeting between Kilmeyer and her young son so he could explore this drag style look.
Kilmeyer was so touched by Wilbert's support for his son's interest in makeup that he posted a picture of him and Ethan in drag makeup on Facebook.
So the adult who was doing the makeup needed to post the pictures because he felt so moved.
Okay, let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the kid really felt the need to explore and mommy and daddy made the stupid and foolhardy decision that they were going to indulge every fantasy of a child, which is the definition of bad parenting.
Okay, parenting is about not indulging your child's every whim or fantasy.
It's about setting boundaries for children because children are little... they're...
They're not fully developed brain-wise, they're not smart, and they're not virtuous.
That's why you have to wait until they get smart, and you have to train them to be virtuous.
This is why civilization is good.
Okay, but let's assume that the parents made the right decision, and they wanted the kid to do the makeup.
Is there a rationale for posting all this online?
Is there a rationale for putting it on YouTube?
Is there a rationale for doing an interview with Daily Beast?
This is going to live forever.
This kid is going to live forever with the kid.
You just basically enshrined your kid's sexual confusion from the time that he's eight forever.
And you want to know the hypocrisy of the left?
The left thinks that Honey Boo Boo is disgusting and terrible, right?
For exploiting these crazy moms, these crazy pageant moms who dress up their eight-year-old girls like this?
Do it to a boy?
You're a leftist hero, immediately.
So there's something that I hate, and parents really ought to do a decent job of parenting.
Okay, I know we're extra long, but there's one final thing that I hate that I have to show, and this is, this Texas teen feminist has decided that she is going to set the internet aflame.
Why?
With her body hair.
So we have pictures, unfortunately.
of this Texas teen's body hair.
And she is trying to show you that body hair is sexy.
And apparently, I just have to say to you folks, just because you say something sexy, it ain't sexy.
Okay, just you saying things are sexy doesn't make them sexy.
Turns out that you have every right to not shave your legs or your stomach or whatever you're doing here.
You have every right to do that.
You have every right to look like Zach Galifianakis in a thong.
You have whatever right to do whatever you want to do.
It's a free country.
You don't have the right to expect that I am going to find you sexy.
I have my own standards of what I find sexy.
This does not fit, but this is setting the internet aflame, because anytime you do something stupid and ridiculous now, it sets the internet aflame, because you're brave.
You're brave.
You're super brave, because you did something really hideous.
It's just... Don't be surprised.
Just gonna say, don't be surprised when you have trouble attracting dudes.
I love this, what this girl said.
She says, Again, you choose to do this, you find a guy who's into it, more power to you.
But the idea that we all have to give in to your definition of sexy is beyond crazy towns.
Reality always wins in the end.
And the reality is that we all have very different perceptions of what is attractive.
And call me crazy, But I really want to end the show so that you don't have to look at this image anymore.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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