Ben Shapiro previews the upcoming Clinton-Trump debate, exposing Clinton's vulnerabilities regarding her email server lies and Benghazi allegations while contrasting her with Bernie Sanders' radical rhetoric. He critiques Corey Lewandowski's alleged assault on Michelle Fields and analyzes Marco Rubio's failure to consolidate the GOP against Trump. Addressing broader themes, Shapiro defines fascism as rule by a leader who attacks dissenters, rejects conspiracy theories via Occam's razor, and distinguishes liberalism from leftism, arguing that social justice prioritizes outcome fairness over individual rights. Ultimately, he asserts that political correctness undermines quality in media and that security, not politics, is the only solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're going to talk about what makes Hillary such a weak candidate.
Really, actually quite susceptible to Donald Trump.
Plus, a friend of mine gets knocked around by a campaign manager for Donald Trump.
We'll talk about that too.
Plus, the mailbag.
So, lots and lots of stuff to talk about.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show. - Tend to demonize people who don't care about your feelings. - Okay, so here we are.
And before we begin, we have to say thank you to our new sponsors over at Reagan.com.
So, you know that everybody wants your information all the time.
You have corporations, they want your information, they want to grab your emails and use them to market to you.
More nefariously, you want the government that wants your emails so that they can keep track of you for whatever purposes.
Barack Obama wants to today.
Well, there's a way you can protect yourself from that.
You need to go to Reagan.com.
Reaganprivacy.com is where you go if you want to get two free months of the service.
Reagan.com.
You get an email address.
It's your name at Reagan.com.
And that's your private email address.
It protects all of your email.
You also get to kind of slap all of your lefty friends in the face every time you send an email because there's Ronald Reagan's name and they hate Reagan's.
So you need to go to Ronald Reagan.
ReaganPrivacy.com is the name of the website.
ReaganPrivacy.com.
Secure your personal private email address.
And as I say, get two free bonus months when you sign up right now at ReaganPrivacy.com.
We couldn't be more excited to be working with them.
Okay, so, we will get to all things Trump in a little while, but, you know, I do think that it's important once in a while not to talk about Donald Trump, because Donald Trump has dominated the podcast, he's dominated the news for so long, that it's easy to get sucked up into the maw of the all-Trump-all-the-time stuff.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had another one of their idiotic debates last night.
And it is an idiotic debate because they don't really disagree on anything, they just sort of pretend they disagree on lots of stuff.
So, Hillary Clinton had a lot of really bad moments.
Let's start off with the guy who's opposing her and why he's so popular.
Bernie Sanders.
So, Bernie Sanders last night, this is a debate on Univision.
Univision?
Univision?
Bernie says that he's so tough, he's so rough, he's going to go to war with Goldman Sachs.
There is nobody in the United States Congress who has taken on the Koch brothers who want to destroy Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and virtually every federal program passed since the 1930s more than Bernie Sanders.
And I am proud that the gentleman who is head of Goldman Sachs, now he didn't give me $225,000 for speaking fees.
There's nothing that says courage quite like standing up in front of a hall filled with people who are thrilled with you all the time and having the two leading Democrats in America praise you as the bravest woman on the face of the earth.
I mean, nothing says courage truly like that.
But this is how extreme the Democrats have become, right?
And all of these little narratives are designed to make Republicans look bad, of course.
Oh, it's so terrible, a family that wasn't reunited.
Because somebody got deported.
It's their choice to stay here.
If they want to be reunited, they can go with the guy who got deported.
I mean, they can do that.
Or the guy could apply legally and get in that way.
But, you know, again, the point here is that the Democrats have moved very far to the left.
But I really want to get to a second point here, and that is Hillary Clinton is so weak.
Bernie Sanders is better at this than she is, which is an amazing thing to say, since Bernie Sanders is a crazy old loon bag who screams at the moon.
And he's better at this than she is.
Legitimately better at this than she is.
So, for example, Hillary Clinton was asked about her emails by Jorge Ramos, why she had all of her emails stored on a private server so that she could hide them from people, and here was her answer.
unidentified
So it seems that you issued one set of rules for yourself and a different set of rules for the rest of the State Department.
Who specifically gave you permission to operate your email system as you did?
Was it President Barack Obama?
And would you drop out of the race if you get indicted?
This is what separates us from them, Republicans from Democrats, or used to before the advent of Donald Trump, is when people gave us BS nonsense like this, we used to stand up and say, no, this is BS nonsense.
We'll get to Trump in a minute.
But here's Hillary Clinton, and this is a lie, okay?
When she says, I never sent anything that was classified at the time.
Right, because that's not how classification works.
Classification only works retroactively.
When she wrote something from her head, of course it wasn't marked classified, because that's not how things work.
She wrote an email.
Then later it's classified when they decide whether or not it ought to be released to the public.
Until such time, it's supposed to be kept on public...
Government-owned servers so that it can't be hacked.
That's the purpose of classification.
The entire purpose of classification is to prevent the public from seeing things.
That is the point.
The reason you use a government email address is that the public doesn't see things.
Hillary put all of her stuff on a private email address, on a private email server, and then she got hacked.
Maybe.
And so everybody ended up seeing it anyway.
But she's bad at this.
I mean, I don't know who watches this and says, yeah, I trust that lady.
She seems really with it.
And if that weren't enough, last night Hillary was asked about a Benghazi victim's mother, who said that Hillary Clinton told her after the Benghazi victims were shipped back in their caskets.
However, some of the families claim that you lied to them.
Here's Pat Smith, the Mother Information Officer.
filmmakers, that that was the real people behind the attack.
Hillary Clinton then says that the Benghazi victim's mother lied.
So let's be straight about this.
Hillary lied to the mother of a Benghazi victim, and then she lied about lying to the mother of a Benghazi victim.
So eventually you hit infinite regress.
Here's Hillary Clinton.
unidentified
However, some of the families claim that you lied to them.
Here's Pat Smith, the moderate formation officer, Sean Smith.
Let's listen.
Hillary and Obama and Panetta and Biden and Susan Rice all told me it was a video.
And they knew it was not the video.
And they said that they would call me and let me know what the outcome was.
You know, look, I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi.
And I certainly can't even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son.
But she's wrong.
She's absolutely wrong.
I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named, the President, the Vice President, Susan Rice, we were scrambling to get information that was changing literally by the hour.
And when we had information, we made it public, but then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it.
So, I testified for 11 hours.
unidentified
Anybody who watched that and listened to it, Okay, this is so sickening, and people cheering for her.
You know, Karen, I'm going to follow my friend Senator Sanders' model here.
If I'm so fortunate enough to be the Democratic nominee, there will be a lot of time to talk about him.
I was the first one to call him out.
I called him out when he was calling Mexicans rapists, when he was engaging in rhetoric that I found deeply offensive.
I said, basta, and I am pleased that Others are also joining in making clear that his
Rhetoric, his demagoguery, his trafficking in prejudice and paranoia has no place in our political system, especially from somebody running for president who couldn't decide whether or not to disavow the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke.
And if Trump looks her direct in the eye and says, you compromise national security, you're a criminal.
Nothing that she says back to him is going to be as hard hitting as that.
She's really vulnerable with blue collar white voters, which that's Trump's entire base.
The reason that Trump is doing well right now is because he's getting all these 5 million dispossessed white voters out to the polls and he's saying to them, I'm your guy, right?
I'm going to defend you against The changes in demographics, I'm gonna change, I'm gonna defend you against immigration and free trade.
I'm your man.
Bernie Sanders beat her in Michigan because he did the same thing.
The New York Times reported Mrs. Clinton lost badly in Michigan among independents, showed continued weakness with working class white Democrats.
Okay, that's Trump's crowd.
Hillary, by the way, is also weak outside the South.
If you look at the electoral map, Sanders is winning big time outside of the South.
She's winning all the states South of the Mason-Dixon line, which are minority heavy, but all of those states are red states.
So if Trump does what Romney did, and he carries those states, he has a better shot to beat her up north than he would to beat maybe any other Democratic candidate.
And finally, the more you see of Hillary, the less you like her.
I mean, it's really hard to watch her.
She's calculated, and she's conniving, and she comes off as highly political.
Trump is conniving too, but he's actually bad at it.
And it actually serves his interest that he's bad at it.
Because he's really bad at... Trump is not good at politics.
Everybody's acting like he's a genius at politics.
He's not.
Trump is just getting away with it because he's so awkward.
He's Chance the Gardener.
People are mistaking awkwardness and silly for genius.
What Trump does is he'll switch his positions in the middle of a sentence and people go, wow, look at him triangulate.
I'm not even sure Donald Trump knows what a triangle is.
Forget about triangulation.
I'm not sure he knows it has three sides.
But because he's awkward at it, we think he's honest.
It's easier to find Forrest Gump to be honest than it is to think that he's really outsmarting you.
So people tend to give Trump the benefit of the honesty doubt, whereas Hillary is widely seen to be super, super corrupt.
So that debate last night showed once again, Hillary is really weak.
She's losing the hearts and minds, she really is, to, again, a man Who was last mentioned, I believe, in Chapter 3 of Genesis.
And she's losing to him specifically because she's a bad candidate, not because he's any great shakes.
Okay, meanwhile, on the other side of the Almajor controversy today, because Michelle Fields, who's a friend of mine and a reporter for Breitbart News, about a night and a half ago, this was the night that Trump won his big victories in Michigan and Mississippi, She went to report on the rally for Breitbart News.
And according to her account, Trump was going through the crowd.
He was talking to members of the press.
And she says, "When he approached me, Trump, I asked him his view on an aspect of affirmative action.
Trump acknowledged the question, but before he could answer, I was jolted backwards.
Someone had grabbed me tightly by the arm and yanked me down.
I almost fell to the ground, but was able to maintain my balance.
Nonetheless, I was shaken.
The Washington Post's Ben Terris immediately remarked that it was Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who aggressively tried to pull me to the ground.
I quickly turned around and saw Lewandowski and Trump exiting the building together.
No apology, no explanation for why he did this.
And I talked to Michelle at length last night.
She reiterated this account to me.
And she released today a picture of the bruises on her arm.
So she was clearly grabbed.
You can see the finger imprints on her arm.
Michelle is not a big gal.
Michelle is a very slight person.
And Corey Lewandowski, who's Trump's campaign manager, grabbed her and tried to fling her, basically, according to the Washington Post.
It's not just one account.
It's now two major media accounts.
And Lewandowski has a history of this sort of thing.
After the first Fox News debate, for example, when Megyn Kelly grilled Trump, you remember this, this is when Trump said she was bleeding out of her wherever, Lewandowski wrote a note to Fox News saying that Megyn Kelly had, quote, a rough couple of days after that last debate.
I would hate to have her go through that again.
Fox News then released a statement explaining, Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so.
We can't give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees.
Right?
So this is nothing shocking.
This is nothing new.
So how did the Trump campaign respond to this?
How did the Trump campaign respond to all of this?
The Trump campaign responded to all of this by simply denying that it ever happened.
So it doesn't matter that she testified to it, basically.
It doesn't matter.
I talked to her last night.
I told her she should go file a police report, which she should.
I told her that she ought to lawyer up, which she should.
Here is what the Trump campaign says through their new spokesperson, Hope Hicks, quote, And the accusation, which has only been made in the media and never addressed directly with the campaign, is entirely false.
First of all, I should mention, there's a Daily Beast report, and the Daily Beast report said, openly, that what happened is that a Trump person went to Matt Boyle, who's another reporter at Breitbart, and said, we're sorry that happened, sort of.
It's awkward that that happened.
We didn't know she worked for Breitbart.
In other words, if she was a reporter for any other outlet, we're allowed to physically manhandle her.
Which is disgusting and horrifying, okay?
This is America.
You don't get to physically manhandle people because you disagree with them.
This is one of my big bugaboos, folks.
I didn't like it at Cal State LA, I didn't like it when Zoe Turd did it, and I don't like it when Donald Trump does it.
Or his campaign managers.
And by the way, Donald Trump is the guy who was making fun of Ted Cruz when Ted Cruz fired his communications director because his communications director retweeted a false video about Marco Rubio.
He said that showed that Ted Cruz was corrupt.
Donald Trump not only is not firing Lewandowski, Corey Lewandowski, who performed battery on a reporter and was witnessed doing this.
They now released this statement.
Here it is.
The accusation, which has only been made in the media and never addressed directly with the campaign, is entirely false.
As one of dozens of individuals present as Mr. Trump exited the press conference, I did not witness any encounter.
In addition to our staff, which had no knowledge of said situation, not a single camera or reporter of more than 100 in attendance captured the alleged incident.
This individual has never met Corey, Nor had the only reporter that supposedly identified him.
This is apparently not true.
Apparently Lewandowski was known to this Washington Post reporter.
"There are often large crowds aggressively seeking access to Mr. Trump, and our staff would never do anything to harm another individual, while at the same time understanding that Mr. Trump and his personal space should never be invaded.
This person claims she does not want to be part of the news and only report it.
However, if that was the case, any concerns, however unfounded they may be, should have been voiced directly first and not via Twitter, especially since no other outlet or reporter witnessed or questioned anything that transpired that evening.
We leave to others whether this is part of a larger pattern of exaggerating incidents, but on multiple occasions, she has become part of the news story as opposed to reporting it.
Recall she also claimed to have been beaten by a New York City police officer with a baton, and that's referring to a 2011 story.
There is a picture, in fact, of her being pushed over by New York City police officers.
Also, false.
Other major media reported it.
The Washington Post, as stated, backed up her story and, in fact, were the original sources of the fact that it was Corey Lewandowski who pulled Michelle Fields to the ground.
So this is the Trump campaign, and this is, you know, one of the disquieting things about the Trump campaign.
I wanna show you a tweet that I received about this, about all of this, the Trump worship tweet, after I tweeted about this.
It says, don't you forget it.
Attacking real Donald Trump ruined all these men, and it's Ted Cruz, me, and Glenn Beck.
And then it's a picture of Trump superimposed over a massive crowd, and it's a meme, and it says, when somebody attacks Trump, they are attacking we the people.
This is scary stuff.
I've spoken on this program, I talked about the movie Spotlight, and I've spoken on this program at length about the fact that when you have allegiance to an individual or to an institution, and that overcomes your allegiance to rights and decency, you end up in the camp of evil.
Okay, when somebody attacks Trump, that doesn't mean they're attacking the people.
That means they're attacking Trump.
And when you attack Corey Lewandowski, that doesn't mean you're attacking the people.
This is a dictatorial mindset.
Attacking the Fuhrer is not attacking the people.
Attacking Mussolini was not attacking the Italian people.
It's something dictators like to say.
Hugo Chavez liked to say it.
He liked to say, I am the people.
Donald Trump is not the people, and neither is any other individual.
That's nonsense, and it's scary.
And it ends up justifying violence against folks.
I do want to take a break here.
Speaking of allegiance to individuals that are scary, there's so many people who have allegiance to President Obama and his massive centralized government.
And that government does want your emails, it does want your data, and they do want to make sure they're keeping tabs on you.
That's why you should go to reaganprivacy.com and get yourself an email address, yournameatreagan.com.
This will take care of your privacy, they shield all your emails, they make sure that That it's never distributed for corporations who want to do marketing.
It's never distributed to the government.
And if you go to reaganprivacy.com, you get two free months right now.
It's reaganprivacy.com.
Again, it's kind of cool because your email address ends with reagan.com, which is kind of awesome because obviously you get to show all of your lefty friends who you really believe in.
You believe in the philosophy, not the man, you believe in the philosophy of Ronald Reagan.
So go to reaganprivacy.com and let them know that we sent you.
Okay, so, back to this Trump guy attacking a reporter.
So, this sort of mass movement that's built up around Trump is something that I find very disquieting.
I've been very clear about how disquieting I find all of this.
And I do, I find it really troubling.
Beyond the fact that I find it troubling, there's a pattern inside the Trump campaign of basically being okay with this sort of violence.
This is something that Andrew Klavan has talked about at length on his show.
By the way, and I do want to mention by way of just passing here, Breitbart News, which is Michelle Field's employer, called on Trump To apologize, on his campaign manager to apologize.
This is utterly insufficient.
They should be calling on Donald Trump to fire his campaign manager.
Anything less is absurd.
And if she was assaulted, she should be filing a lawsuit against Corey Lewandowski, and if appropriate, against the Trump campaign.
This is ridiculous.
Any media outlet worth its salt would be calling for a firing right now.
Okay?
The only reason not to is because you have another agenda.
This is inappropriate.
All right, so Trump is okay with violence.
This is why I'm connecting this incident to Trump.
Trump, now he's calling her a liar outright.
He's saying she lied, even though she tweeted a picture of her bruises.
So I guess she gave them to herself is the idea here.
So Trump, as we've said routinely, he's okay with violence at his protests.
He said, of one rally protester, he said, maybe he should have been roughed up.
He said that a couple months ago.
He said of another one, I love the old days.
You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this?
They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks.
That's the kind of language that Donald Trump uses.
And so, should it be a big surprise when people get roughed up at Donald Trump protests?
Should it be?
Like, for example, here's a piece of video.
Here's a protester getting sucker punched at a Trump rally.
And I'll assume that people are cheering some of the lines that Trump is saying.
But obviously, knocking out protestors as they walk out is disgusting, okay?
The knockout game is disgusting, and this is disgusting.
This is disgusting.
And when it's become a stump part of Trump's speech, that protesters should be roughed up, there's become a big cheer line for him.
Listen, there's no one who's harder on the left than I am.
It's amazing.
You go anti-Trump and suddenly you're a lefty, you're a lefty cuckservative is what they call you.
And let me explain something to you folks.
Trump is not a right-winger.
He's not conservative.
And there's nothing conservative about roughing up the other side.
There's nothing conservative about that.
Civilization was designed to prevent people from committing acts of violence on each other for disagreements.
That's what civilization is.
This is uncivilized.
It's anti-civilization.
Okay.
Now, the media continue to sort of defend Trump.
This should be leading the news everywhere.
It hasn't been.
Apparently Michelle is supposed to go on ABC tonight.
Hopefully that happens.
I'll be on Megyn Kelly's program tonight talking about this.
I would like to see a real media groundswell here saying that this is inappropriate and that Trump ought to fire his guy.
There's really no excuse not to.
Now, I understand.
We're only a few days away from Tuesday, and right now all the Trump backers are just saying, let's get through till Tuesday, let's get through till Tuesday.
Let me say this.
One of the things that troubles me so much about this whole situation is I think Trump is going to be the nominee.
I think Trump is going to win.
I think Trump is going to win because I think that Marco Rubio doesn't have the courage of his convictions.
He's not courageous enough to step out of the race, and that's what needs to happen.
Not because of Florida, but because of Ohio, where he's got about 10%, because of Illinois, where he's got 10 to 15%, because of Missouri, where he has 10 to 15%, because of North Carolina, where he has 10 to 15%.
If Florida were happening before all of these other states, I would say, okay, Marco, stay in, take your shot.
It's not.
It's happening the same day.
The problem is, any vote to Rubio is being sucked away from Ted Cruz.
There are no Rubio voters who are also Donald Trump voters.
Zero.
So they're all going, they're being sucked away from Ted Cruz.
That is the margin of error in these states.
That is the margin of victory for Trump in these states.
If Trump wins Florida, but he loses Missouri and Ohio and North Carolina, if he loses Illinois as well, then Trump, there's no way he's gonna win the nomination if that's the case.
But Rubio's preventing that.
So here is Marco Rubio.
Rubio, yesterday he said, no, I'm not dropping out.
Not only that, whoever wins Florida is gonna be the nominee's clip 13, I believe.
unidentified
But I need your help.
I believe with all my heart that the winner of the Florida primary next Tuesday will be the nominee of the Republican Party.
And so you are given an incredible task.
You are given an incredible task a week from now.
And I need your help.
I need your vote.
And I want you to know, as difficult as things may seem, I want you to know what history is going to say about us if we do what needs to be done.
Okay, so he says that the person who wins Florida is going to win, and he says it's going to be him.
It's not going to be him.
There's not a poll that shows him, really, even in spitting distance of Trump.
And I'll tell you why it's not going to be him.
I'll tell you why this all floundered.
So a lot of people, a lot of people, who have been saying, That this is just absurd.
A lot of people have been saying that the reason that Rubio floundered here is because he attacked Trump.
OK, that's ignoring the fact that Rubio had already finished fifth in New Hampshire at the time when he started going on the offensive against Donald Trump.
And he'd already finished not well in South Carolina.
He'd finished like a second, but he was basically tied with Cruz way back of Trump.
It wasn't the attacks that did it.
It's the fact that Rubio keeps backing down from the attack.
So here is Marco Rubio being asked about whether he should have attacked Donald Trump.
And I think it's indicative of how bad I think Hillary Clinton would be, or Bernie Sanders, to even contemplate that.
But let me say, because I can't vote for them.
You think they're a con artist, though?
I mean, that's the thing.
No, I think Bernie Sanders is a socialist, which he admits.
And I think Hillary Clinton is unqualified to be President of the United States because of the way she handled her email server and because of the way she treated the families of the victims of Benghazi.
Well, I don't believe.
Look, the bottom line is I don't want him to be our nominee.
The fact that you're even asking me the question tells you why this is a problem.
If anyone else, if John Kasich was where Donald Trump is now, if Jeb Bush is where Donald Trump is now, nobody would be asking that question.
The race would be over.
unidentified
By the way, I was just going to say, would you be out of the race if this were John Kasich and not... And that's the point.
The point is that no matter what I say today about supporting or not supporting the nominee, there's a significant percentage of Republicans that are not going to vote for Donald Trump.
And that is why he will get destroyed in the general election.
Well, at least he won't be as bad as Hillary Clinton.
That's pretty weak tea after you've said all the things that you've said about him.
Okay, so can there be a unification behind Cruz?
Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight The pollster, Nate Silver, he came out and he said, if this had been a one-on-one Cruz vs. Trump matchup from the beginning, Cruz would have been walking away with the delegates already.
So, Rubio staying in has prevented that consolidation.
Cruz is begging people, please unite behind me.
Please, let's do this thing.
unidentified
If you don't believe Donald Trump is the best nominee for Republicans, if you recognize, as 65 to 75 to 70% of Republicans do, that Donald loses to Hillary in the general, Then I would encourage Republicans, even if you were supporting another candidate, to come, join Carly, join the millions of conservatives who are coming together unifying behind our campaign.
If Jeb Bush had any self-awareness, he would endorse Donald Trump.
If he really wants to stop Trump, he has to endorse Donald Trump.
Jeb Bush is the touch of the leper.
Okay, Jeb Bush should be attempting to bear hug Donald Trump at this point.
Here's the problem with Cruz.
Cruz, for all of the talk, and I've talked about this, about how he looks dishonest, it's just an unfortunate part of his face, how he does his hair, just, he looks dishonest.
He's too honest.
So here's what Ted Cruz said about Donald Trump voters, what he thinks about Donald Trump voters the other night.
unidentified
Donald does well with voters who have relatively low information, who are not that engaged, and who are angry, and they see him as an angry voice.
Where we're beating him is when voters get more engaged and they get more informed.
When they inform themselves, they realize his record.
He's what they're angry at.
He is the corruption.
And if you want someone to stand up to Washington, The only one who has been doing so in this race is me.
The problem is when you say all Trump's voters are low-information voters, that's going to be used against you by Trump, obviously.
All the people who back me, he insults you, he says you're terrible, and thus, you should back me.
Okay, so it looks pretty ugly for Tuesday.
We'll have to see how tonight's debate goes.
People are saying they should be kinder and gentler.
I think precisely the opposite.
Ted Cruz should lead off this debate by calling on Donald Trump to fire Corey Lewandowski.
He should say that Donald Trump is a sexist for doubting what this woman says that has been backed up by verified testimony, essentially, from another reporter.
This is not just a he-said-she-said.
This is a he-said-she-said-he-said, because there's another guy who verified this.
There are bruises to prove it.
He should say, listen, I fired my own communications director.
I fired my own communications director for tweeting out a false video about Marco Rubio.
You're defending your campaign manager for physically assaulting a reporter?
What kind of disgusting human being are you?
What kind of thug are you?
You go to your rallies and you tell people to rough up protesters.
He should be just that dismissive of Donald Trump because that's who Trump is.
Trump acts like a thug when he's protected by Vast piles of cash and security at all times, but he's happy to threaten other people.
It's really quite distasteful.
Okay, some things I like, some things I hate, and then a little bit of mailbag.
So, a couple of things that I like.
I believe that I've mentioned this movie before.
Have I ever talked about The Lives of Others?
So I'm not sure I've ever talked about The Lives of Others.
Okay, Lives of Others is my favorite movie.
This is a great movie.
This is a I think one best foreign film in 2005, and this film is about the East German Stasi and the main character is an East German Stasi guy who's tasked to listen in on this dissident artist who may or may not.
Be smuggling information to the West about how terrible the Communist regime is.
And over the course of time, as he spies on this guy, he becomes convinced that the guy is actually right, and he ends up protecting the guy.
It's a beautiful film.
It's just a great film.
Do we have a little bit of the trailer?
I know it's in a foreign language, but I'll explain what's going on, folks.
Now, one thing I do want to point out is it's not just sometimes Folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem.
Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues who sometimes aren't listening to the other side.
And that's a problem, too.
I was just talking to a friend of mine about this.
I've heard some college campuses where they don't want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative, or they don't want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African or they don't want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African Americans, or And I've got to tell you, I don't agree with that either.
Okay, this movie looks like a dog turd piled on top of a horse turd piled on top of an elephant turd and wrapped in Donald Trump's hair.
That's what this movie looks like.
It's just the worst thing that ever was.
And of course, this is what happens when you put your message above your film.
You want to see what it looks like when the film is the message.
Look at the lives of others.
If you want to look at something that happens when you decide political correctness has to trump comedy, And look at this, and they couldn't even do it right here.
They're all pissed off because the black lady in this thing is the ignorant one, right?
If they'd really been politically correct, then she would have been the smartest one, right?
She would have been the genius scientist, and it would have been like Kristen Wiig, who is actually the idiot who works for the New York subway station.
So this is the whole thing just looks like.
It looks awful, awful, awful, awful in every way it's possible for it to be awful.
Something that looks even more awful is this trailer for a new movie called Confirmation.
Kerry Washington, who just only does lefty ridiculous projects now, they've decided to make a biopic about Anita Hill.
For people who don't remember, Anita Hill was the lady who said that Clarence Thomas once said to her when she was working with him, she didn't complain about it at the time or file a complaint or anything, she said that he had made a joke about a pubic hair on a Coke can.
Her grand victimization is a guy made a joke about a pubic hair on her Coke can.
Okay, as someone who works in an office with women, there are lots of jokes that get made all the time.
All the time.
Lindsay can confirm.
There are lots of jokes, most of them made by Lindsay, that are completely inappropriate at all times.
You know what?
Get over it.
But this was happening at the exact same time it was coming out that Bill Clinton had allegedly raped people and sexually assaulted people.
We still don't have a movie of the Juanita Broderick story.
We still don't have a movie of the Paula Jones story.
We still don't have a movie of the Kathleen Willey story, but we do have a movie about how Clarence Thomas was evil, evil, evil, evil, because he once made a joke about a Coke can, a full two-hour epic with Kerry Washington.
Take a look.
She's such a hero.
Is it true?
unidentified
Is the story true?
During the fall of 1982, Judge Thomas began to use work situations to discuss sex.
The left, which again, there's little to no evidence that any of this ever happened.
But Anita Hill is considered a grand hero because she talked about Clarence Thomas making inappropriate jokes at work.
He clearly, clearly was hitting on her.
Oh, how terrible.
By the way, the president who was running at that time was raping people.
Like, raping them.
And his wife now is running for president.
So this is coming out while his wife, who covered up for his rapes, is running for president.
And there's no movie about that, but there's a movie about Clarence Thomas.
Got it.
Typical Hollywood.
Okay.
Time for a little bit of mailbag.
So, again, folks, as always, I apologize if you're not in the mailbag this week.
Hundreds and hundreds.
Lindsey can attest.
She goes through them, and I'm sure you've received... I hope that you're going to receive responses from her when she finds the time.
It's stacking up.
It's like 1,200 emails at this point.
We get literally 100 emails a day about the podcast, and probably more.
Lindsay says more.
She's signaling to me that she does enormous amounts of work.
I believe her, I think.
But the mailbag is chock full, so if we don't have a chance to get to you, I'm sorry about that.
We definitely do our best.
Okay.
Ezra writes, Hey Ben, love the show.
I was debating a liberal friend of mine and he said some of the poorest states in the country are red states like Mississippi and Kansas.
I didn't have a good answer.
So why aren't those states prospering when being run by conservatives?
The answer is because a lot of red states are states that are agricultural in nature.
Agricultural states are less wealthy than states that have big cities where information technology rules, where there's a lot of corporate investment.
A lot of those areas have been historically impoverished.
Because industry was not located in the South until really after World War II.
That's when all the industries started to move down South.
And they were governed by Democrats until the last five minutes.
So if you look at the number of Republican governors in most of these states and Republican senators, the vast majority of Southern states only started electing Republican governors in the last 20 to 25 years.
So you have to give Republicans a little bit of a chance to fix all the damage wrought by Democrats over the previous 130 years.
Okay, Jonathan writes, I continue seeing election results marked as called when only 60% of the votes are accounted for.
Why does this happen?
And the answer is because people project, usually when they call it they have to be pretty certain, they project based on the counties that have come in.
So they look at the historic voting numbers and if the 60% of counties that came in are all big cities, for example, and the person who's right-wing won the big cities, they'll probably call it because the rural areas tend to be more right-wing than the cities.
So that's how they calculate those sorts of things.
Yes, I like Settlers of Catan.
I also like chess.
I'm not very good at it.
My friends and I frequently play Settlers of Catan.
You strike me as someone who might enjoy this type of game.
Yes, I like Settlers of Catan.
I also like chess.
I'm not very good at it.
I'm working on it, but my father-in-law likes to play and really enjoys beating me.
And so there's that, so I have to get better at it so that he won't.
Um, and, uh, and I also enjoy, uh, I used to play bridge with my dad.
My dad and I used to be bridge partners, and we used to play bridge like little old ladies.
My dad's actually really, really good at it.
Uh, I never got to the point where I was great at it.
Okay, Kenan writes, what is fascism?
Could you clear up on your radio show exactly what fascism is?
Europeans and Jews understand what it is better than anyone.
I don't think mainstream America today has really pinpointed exactly what fascism means.
Okay, so there are a bunch of different types of fascism, but fascism essentially means that there is a group of people embodied by a great leader, the great leader gives orders, and then the government crams down on everybody else what this great leader wants.
It's not democracy because the great leader is the one who's in charge, and attacks on him are considered attacks on the people.
You may have seen this from earlier in the podcast.
Fascism, the actual word fascism, comes from an Italian word called fascisti.
Fascisti means a bundle of sticks.
The implication was a bundle of sticks is stronger than any single stick.
Tie this all up together.
It's coined by Mussolini.
Mussolini was the original fascist.
People like to make fun of him as sort of the clown fascist.
But Mussolini was actually a much more important historical figure than he's given credit for.
And he was the guy who kind of led to the rise of fascism all across the world.
The idea was government was ineffective, you need an effective leader to come in and get the trains to run on time.
And this was always the line about fascism.
So, when someone says to you, we need a great leader to overrule the legislature, overrule the will of the people, and just get things done.
That is the essence of fascism, is that he takes the government gun and he points it at all the people with whom he disagrees, because we have to get things done.
Okay, Tony writes with a conspiracy theory.
He says, with you being directly involved with political giants and the biggest news outlets, do you have any conspiracy theories that you believe in?
No, I don't believe in any of the major conspiracy theories.
I think that there are times when people coordinate, for sure.
But typically, in order for conspiracy theories to work, you have to assume everybody is smart, and most people are not.
You have to assume that everybody is capable, most people are not.
You know, like the JFK conspiracy theories assume some sort of genius conspiracy to plant it all on Lee Harvey Oswald, and the 9-11 conspiracy theories assume that tons of people throughout the government knew this was going to happen and then let it happen, or that they planted bombs themselves and nobody noticed.
This is all...
Ridiculous and far-fetched.
Occam's razor suggests that the the simplest suggestion is without further evidence, but in the absence of further evidence, the simplest suggestion is probably the most correct.
I don't believe conspiracy theories because they're rarely simple.
They're almost always not simple.
But the reason people like conspiracy theories is that it gives people a feeling of order in a disordered universe because it's uncomfortable to come to terms with the fact that life is chaotic and lots of stuff happens.
So instead, you just say, well, it's a conspiracy.
It was all meant to happen, right?
When you don't believe in God, it becomes easy to believe in conspiracy theories.
If you believe in God, you believe that this is all kind of God's conspiracy theory, right?
Like God is in control of everything.
If you don't believe in God, then it must be the Jews or it's the...
The various unnamed entities, the Bilderbergs or whatever you want to say it is.
Okay, Will writes, how much does government currently have to do with college prices?
The answer is a lot.
When you subsidize loans and you give those loans to people for very cheap, people are going to raise prices.
If there's lots of demand, the supply is limited, the prices go up.
Basic supply and demand.
Lots of demand by students, lots of money flying around, people are going to raise their prices.
Because you still have to make sure that you can pay people enough to teach all of these classes.
Prices go up.
The ability to charge these prices goes up.
Well, Free College is obviously crazy, writes Will.
Do you think some form of government interference as far as price capping could be beneficial to the average American?
No, I think it's a major mistake.
I think that once you price cap all of these things, how are you going to draw the best professors exactly?
Any attempt at pricing and wage controls by the government is doomed to failure because eventually you end up screwing one subset of the population that you actually need in order for the market to go forward.
By the way, if you want to major in an engineering major in college and you get in, you're not going to have trouble finding a private loan.
Hell, I'll give you a private loan.
You want to major in engineering at UCLA and then go and work at an engineering firm?
I'll give you a loan myself if you pledge to give me a certain percentage interest that's high enough that I'm willing to deprive myself of the money.
Okay, Evan writes, What is your position on capital punishment?
I am pro-capital punishment in theory.
The way that it's applied in the United States is ridiculous.
It's uneven, not in terms of race, but just in terms of people waiting for 10 years in line, and it takes forever, and you're keeping them alive anyway.
But capital punishment I'm very much in favor of.
In the wake of the despicable terrorist attacks in Haifa and Tel Aviv, do you think a solution will ever arise in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians?
No, there will never be a solution.
There will only be security.
And this is what Israel has begun to realize.
There won't be a solution, there will just be security, and Israel will have to repeatedly go in and clean out terrorists until the end of time.
There's no such thing as utopia, because people who are dedicated to your demise are dedicated to killing you.
And finally from Evan, have you and your wife decided on a name yet for your future son?
Yep, but you don't know it.
A liberal is somebody who actually believes in liberty, right?
A few times on your show you corrected yourself by making a distinction between someone who is liberal and someone who is leftist.
Could you please clarify the difference?
A liberal is somebody who actually believes in liberty.
A classical liberal in Europe was actually a conservative.
A leftist is somebody who believes that fairness is the only value.
It's the only thing that matters.
Fairness of outcome is the only thing on the planet that matters.
They're willing to subsume and destroy individual rights in order to achieve that equality of outcome.
That's what leftism is all about.
Liberalism is about the idea that you have individual rights.
The left in the United States used to try and bridge that gap.
Very difficult gap to bridge.
Now they don't even pretend.
That's why you get Bernie Sanders.
Okay, Dan writes, I wanted to ask you if you can recommend a good book or website to learn more about the Israel and Palestine situation.
There's a really good book, an easy one called Myths and Facts about Israel by a guy named Mitchell Bard.
You can get it on Amazon for like seven bucks.
It's good.
Nolan writes, I wanted to ask about your opinion on social justice and social justice warriors.
Social justice, as I've said many times, you can check my speeches, I've said this routinely.
Social justice is in direct opposition to individual justice.
There is no such thing as social justice.
Social justice suggests that OJ Simpson should have been let off because he was black.
As you can see, this is the opposite of individual justice because he should have gone to get the lethal injection.
He should have gotten death penalty.
Whenever you say that something that is individually just is not just because it's not just for the society, what you're really saying is individual justice doesn't matter.
Group justice is in direct opposition to individual justice.
There are certain things that don't need a modifier.
Justice does not need a modifier.
Justice does not need you to add social in front of it, because once you do that, you've already confined justice to something that it's not.
Justice for groups is not justice for individuals.
Justice for individuals may not be justice for groups, but the bottom line is individual justice is the only thing we can control, and we should all be held responsible for our own actions, not for the actions of broad groups that include us.
Okay, so tonight's the big debate.
When we come back on Monday, it will be one day before the apocalypse.
As Andrew Klavan is fond of saying, make sure that you don't destroy the country while we're gone.
We will be back on Monday.
I don't trust you.
So if we come back on Monday and the world is destroyed, I promise, we will still be here talking about it.