All Episodes
Previous Next
May 31, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:40
Ep. 126 - America Breaks Into Insane Gorilla Warfare

Of Harambe the gorilla, the Libertarian Party convention, and what Trump gets right (and wrong) about the media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Facebook and Twitter and Microsoft have now decided to comply with the European Union's desire to crack down on terrorist communications.
They vowed to proactively shut down so-called hate speech.
Here's the report.
There's a need to ensure such activity by internet users is expeditiously reviewed by online intermediaries and social media platforms upon receipt of a valid notification in an appropriate time frame, the companies and the European Commission said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
Twitter's head of public policy for Europe, Karen White, said we remain committed to letting the tweets flow.
However, there is a clear distinction between freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate.
Now, first things first.
These are private companies.
They have the right to decide in the marketplace what sort of speech they wish to provide a forum.
That said, they don't have a right to commit fraud.
They can't tell people that they're for free speech and then reverse themselves by following certain politically correct rules about speech.
The distinction between, quote, freedom of expression and conduct that incites violence and hate is not as clear as White wants to make it.
For example, a French Jewish group sued Facebook, Twitter, and Google and did so after notifying them about hate speech that they said promoted racism, homophobia, or anti-Semitism.
And this begs two questions.
First, who sets the standard of what promotes racism, homophobia, or antisemitism?
Second, does all such speech actually constitute a threat to anyone?
The use of the term hate speech tends to gloss over these very serious questions.
Monica Bickert, who runs global policy management at Facebook, she said, There's no place for hate speech on Facebook, but is it hate speech to cite Leviticus 18.22 about homosexuality?
Is it hate speech to say that Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by the cops in Ferguson, was a thug?
According to the left, probably.
Is it hate speech to say that men can't become women and women can't become men?
Well, probably, according to the left.
More importantly, just because you don't like particular speech, that doesn't make the speech dangerous.
There's a lot of speech people deem hateful that doesn't cross the line between being offensive and incitement to violence.
White conflates conduct that incites violence and hate.
That's too broad.
Lots of speech incites hate, but not very much speech actually incites violence.
There's a difference between Donald Trump saying Muslims provide a unique risk to national security and ISIS giving specific orders to murder Jews.
The left's utter confidence in its own ability to distinguish between quote-unquote rightful speech and inappropriate speech for purposes of censorship should scare everybody.
Listen, I've been targeted routinely by anti-Semitic speech in recent months.
I have never called for Twitter to ban those who practice such speech.
Not only don't I even block them, I generally follow Andrew Breitbart's old strategy of retweeting all the people who do this so the world can see them in their full glory.
It's one thing for online outlets to police actual law-breaking activity.
It's another for them to pretend to represent free speech while they just curb speech they don't like.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
We have returned, and as usual, every time we come back, the world is a little bit crazier.
It's like the verse from Deuteronomy.
You go to bed at night wishing it were the morning, and you wake up in the morning wishing it were night again.
Well, we thought that it was going to be crazy when we left, and now it's so crazy that Donald Trump is answering questions about gorillas.
Yes, Donald Trump is answering questions about apes.
Not because there's an uprising and not because it's Planet of the Apes and we're going to be beating our hands on the shores because the Statue of Liberty is half buried in sand.
No, he's answering questions about gorillas because the latest gorilla story that really must be told, the latest in gorilla warfare you might say, Is over Harambee the Gorilla.
I don't know how to pronounce it.
Harambee?
Harambee?
Okay, so Harambee the Gorilla.
Why don't we start with the actual tape of it?
This is clip two.
So here's the tape of Harambee the Gorilla and what happens.
So a four-year-old boy, I've heard reports three, I've heard reports four, doesn't matter, small kid, falls into this enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Now I went to the zoo yesterday with my wife and purposefully tossed my kid in there, she was being bad, but I didn't actually do it, but in any case, at the Cincinnati Zoo, apparently, this mother lost track of her kid for five seconds.
Anybody who's had a toddler knows there's always a moment, literally once a day at least, where you look around and you go, oh, where did the kid go?
Right?
There's always that moment where you look away for five seconds, you glance down at your phone because somebody's calling, and you look around and the kid is basically, and the kid is by the stove turning on the flame, putting their face in it.
Every single day, there's something like this.
Doesn't matter how much- I'm a real heli- like a real helicopter parent.
Doesn't matter how much of a helicopter parent you are, kids are made for getting in trouble.
So, this mother turns her back on the kid for one second, and the kid is gone.
Where'd the kid go?
The kid fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Which is funny, but not really, because it's kind of scary.
So the kid falls down, and it's apparently a 15-foot drop, and just proving that kids are bouncy, the kid doesn't get hurt.
But the kid falls down into this moat, and Harambe the gorilla decides to intervene.
And so this 450-pound gorilla Runs over to the kid.
Now I'm going to show you the tape of what this looks like.
People keep saying it's really super graphic.
It isn't super graphic.
I mean, this tape doesn't extend to the part where they actually do what they do to the gorilla, which I'll tell you in a second.
But the gorilla goes over, and this is the tape that's making the rounds, and people are up in arms about it.
So here's what it looked like when Harambee, 17-year-old, 450-pound gorilla, goes to this four-year-old, maybe 40-pound kid.
So you can't see the kid.
The gorilla's standing in the corner of the enclosure.
The kid's actually behind the gorilla.
And now the gorilla moves and you're about to see the kid.
You can hear people screaming.
They're freaking out.
Okay, there's the kid.
And...
There's the gorilla dragging the kid.
I mean, that's scary stuff.
I mean, that is a tiny kid and that is a giant gorilla.
And then the gorilla's standing there again.
And it looks like the gorilla's standing there holding the hand of the kid.
The foot of the kid, more accurately, will hold the kid's foot.
And, um, turns the kid around, and they'll see if they can pick it up to the kid's feet.
And, uh, everybody's sort of standing there, and they're waiting until it happens.
When he's picking the kid up to the kid's feet, the kid stands up, and, um... And there it goes again.
You can't see what happens past that so people just waiting to subscribe so you can see what we're talking about this is one where the visual kind of is necessary so They end up- what ends up happening is that they end up shooting and killing the gorilla.
Because the gorilla is agitated, they don't know what the gorilla is going to do, and so they shoot and they kill the gorilla.
So, number one, it's a very sad story.
I mean, the gorilla- it's not the gorilla's fault.
I mean, the gorilla is just sitting there in its own habitat, and suddenly there's a kid there and people are yelling at it.
It's a dumb animal.
I mean, it's just- it's- You don't expect a dumb animal to know what to do with the kid.
It doesn't look like he wants to hurt the kid.
If he wants to hurt the kid, I mean, he's a 450-pound gorilla who can break a coconut with one hand, so... But, that said, you don't have a choice.
I mean, once the kid is in the enclosure and the gorilla is now next to the kid, if you hit the gorilla with a trank, then the gorilla goes nuts and kills the kid.
Maybe.
If you don't do anything, then the gorilla's standing around, and even if the gorilla doesn't mean to, the gorilla could just hold the kid underwater for a minute and kill the kid.
I've seen what could happen.
I've seen a gorilla take a green coconut that you can't even open with a sledgehammer.
I've seen him take it and squish it like a marshmallow.
Columbus Zoo, a different zoo in the Ohio area.
Jack Hanna, who, of course, is famous for kind of his crocodile hunter quasi routine, he was on CNN.
He said, of course you have to shoot the gorilla.
You have no choice but to kill the gorilla.
I've seen what could happen.
I've seen a gorilla take a green coconut that you can't even open with a sledgehammer.
I've seen him take it and squish it like a marshmallow, just like a marshmallow.
All he had to do was grab that child with one hand to do so much damage, like fatality, for example, in a split second.
You don't know.
For example, if that was my kid, like those visitors, what if that was their child in there?
What would they think?
Okay, and that's exactly right.
The zoo director held a press conference, too.
Lots of people were saying, well, why was- how did this kid even get in there?
Was it an unsafe enclosure?
Okay, I can tell you, anyone who's been to the zoo knows that no enclosure is entirely safe.
It's designed to keep the animals from jumping out.
It's not designed to prevent humans from jumping in, because you have to be able to see the animals.
So unless you're going to build, like, giant glass screens around all of the cages, the reality is that you're going to be in situations where you're in close proximity with the animals.
I know you were in crisis mode at the time.
Looking back, would you make the same decision again?
at the L.A. Zoo, we were by the hippo cage, would not have been difficult for a kid to climb up and fall into the hippo cage.
Yes.
Not difficult at all.
And hippos are much more dangerous generally than silverback gorillas.
So the director of the zoo comes out and he's talking about this and here's what he had to say.
Now that you've got time to review what happens, looking back, I know you were in crisis mode at the time.
Looking back, would you make the same decision again?
Yes.
Looking back, we would make the same decision.
I know that after it is over and the child is safe, it's easy like a Monday morning quarterback to look at it and say, wow, wow, wow, don't we need to do this differently?
The people that say that, A, don't understand primate biology and silverback gorillas and the danger the child was in, and B, we're not there at an important time to make important decisions.
We stand by our decision and we make the same call today.
Okay, so that's exactly right.
Okay, so there have been a bunch of reactions to this.
First of all, this dominated the news over the weekend.
Just dominated it.
It was the only thing anyone was talking about.
Because it's a bizarre story, but more because there's a whole group of people who feel morally righteous about, oh, they shouldn't have shot the gorilla.
Katie Cuoco from Big Bang Theory, who obviously is an expert on treatment of gorillas.
She- she sounded off.
She said it's terrible they shot the gorilla.
Bunch of celebrities.
That's awful they shot- they definitely shouldn't have shot the gorilla.
Okay, anthropologists.
I'm sure that you know everything there is to know about gorilla treatment.
I'm gonna go with the people who spend their lives actually working with the gorillas.
By the way, you know who's the unhappiest person in the world about shooting that gorilla?
The zoo director!
Right, I mean, the zoo director, first of all, these things are endangered species.
He probably knew, he probably knew something, probably got to know the gorilla, so this is not like, all these people from afar going, oh, they're brutal, they shot the gorilla.
Shut up.
Shut up.
But beyond that, there's this tendency for people to have inordinate sympathy for animals that they don't have for human beings.
So the same people who are saying that this mother should be prosecuted for her kid falling into the enclosure, these are the same people who if the mother had just decided to kill the kid, you know, at nine months in the womb, they would be like, okay, no problem.
That's cool.
That's totally fine.
The worship of animals in our society is just another evidence that our practice of religion has gone downhill.
The notion that man is made in God's image, but animals aren't, Right?
This sort of notion, religious notion, that separates man from the animals.
Once you wipe that away, people start looking at, okay, well, maybe the gorilla's more important than the kid.
I mean, after all, is that kid gonna grow up to cure cancer?
Is that kid gonna grow up to be anything special?
Well, if he doesn't, then look at that animal bringing so much enjoyment to people, and more than that, he has every right to live on the planet.
There's a whole wing of the far-left environmentalist movement called the Deep Greens, who really believe that man should be wiped off the planet in order to make room for all the Edenic animals that Kill and eat each other, right?
But this is... There's a growing sentiment inside American society.
Very easy moral test for people.
If your dog and a random human were both drowning in a river, which one do you save?
A huge percentage of Americans now say they'd save the dog.
Now, there's certain people I wouldn't save because I know they're evil.
But if it's just a random person, of course you save the person!
It's not even a question you save the person.
In this case, who do you save?
The gorilla or the four-year-old?
Of course you save the four-year-old.
This is not even a question.
But we've become such an amoral society that we equate the four-year-old kid with the gorilla.
In fact, we actually treat the four-year-old with less value than we treat the gorilla, because the gorilla's endangered.
There are lots of people on Earth, but there aren't that many silverback gorillas.
So scarcity means morality.
There's less gorillas, therefore it's more important.
This is truly immoral behavior.
An animal is not a human being.
And if you fail to recognize that, you end up by treating human beings as animals.
That's all that ends up happening.
Human beings end up treated just like any other animal, which is bad news altogether.
But people are going nuts over this.
The hashtag justice for Harambee trended.
I don't know what justice looks like.
What do they want?
Electrocute somebody?
Justice for Harambee?
What insanity?
There's a makeshift visual?
Okay, there are 250 people who were injured in an airstrike in Syria over the weekend.
This got 30 times more coverage than the airstrike in Syria that injured 250 people.
Because it's easy to look at that tape and go, oh, the gorilla's cute.
The gorilla's not doing anything wrong.
That's sad.
I'm sure there were a lot of cute kids who died in that airstrike, but nobody seems to care about that.
I'm sorry to say, Harambee just isn't that important.
It's sad, but on the scale of tragedy in the world, this one ranks at about a three.
Okay, maybe.
I think that's on the upper end, this one ranking at about a three.
This is not a massive tragedy that people should be getting super upset.
Neither was Cecil the Lion.
And somebody goes and hunts and kills a lion that got out of the... they went into the... the Zimbabwean enclosure.
Forget about the fact that the Zimbabwean dictator has destroyed the country, and that the life expectancy in Zimbabwe is cut in half.
That doesn't matter, but somebody killed a lion.
Ooh, okay.
This sort of anthropomorphic worship of animals.
All these people who watch The Lion King and then they think lions are their friends.
Or they watch Tarzan and then they watch this and they go, oh my god, they just killed Rosie O'Donnell's character in Tarzan.
Like, I'm sorry, this just isn't this important in the broad scheme of things, and if you do think that this was that important, then it's because you have a skewed sense of priorities.
Then there's a bunch of people who are blaming the zoo.
You know, you got Piers Morgan, whose IQ is slightly lower than that of Harambee, tweeting out, R.I.P. Harambee, a magnificent gorilla dies because a zoo failed to make its barrier safe.
First of all, the zoo hasn't had anybody fall into it since this was created in 1978.
The place is examined every single year, more than once, by the USDA and the National Zoo.
So it met all the safety standards.
It turns out the kids can get into pretty much anywhere.
And so this is it.
That's it.
Then there are the people who say they should have pranked the gorillas.
We say this is dumb.
And finally, there are the people who blame the mother.
And this includes people like Piers Morgan, taking their eye off the ball.
No child should ever be able to crawl into a gorilla compound.
Ricky Gervais.
He says it seems some gorillas make better parents than some people.
Highly doubtful, since gorillas are actually known, if I'm not mistaken, for killing the stepchildren of their mates.
So, probably not.
But, he says some gorillas make better parents.
Listen, as a helicopter parent, I look at this and I go, oh my god, this parent is terrible.
And then I think for five seconds about what I told you before, about the you turn your back thing with kids.
There's not a babysitter alive, there's not a person alive who's babysitting a small toddler.
Kids run around.
If you have more than one to watch, it's very difficult.
It's very difficult, and apparently you shouldn't have more than one to watch at the zoo.
So sometimes, and this is an important point, sometimes there's no one to blame when bad things happen.
Sometimes bad things just happen.
In this case, thank god the kid wasn't killed, the kid wasn't really hurt.
But sometimes the world is just a bad place and bad things just happen.
And it doesn't have to be anybody's fault.
It doesn't mean something terrible.
Anybody did anything terrible.
But people are constantly looking because they can't accept that the universe is unfair.
They are constantly looking for somebody to blame.
In this case, there really is nobody to blame.
And the people who value the apes over the humans is just beyond me.
Okay, but no story would be complete in this day and age.
No story would be complete without Donald Trump sounding off on it.
So we now have the presidential candidate for the Republicans answering questions about gorillas.
The irony here, of course, is that National Review's Kevin Williamson labeled his original article about Donald Trump declaring witless ape rides escalator.
So now Donald Trump is talking about gorillas.
I have to say that Donald Trump, this probably is the highlight of the presidential season so far, is Donald Trump being asked about gorillas.
Somebody asked a question on CNN, they said, would Donald Trump, it was a headline for this clip, said, would Donald Trump have killed gorilla?
The answer is no, the gorilla would have killed Donald Trump.
I mean, put him in a cage match, that sucker ain't close.
But here's Donald Trump.
Talking about the gorilla.
And to be fair, this is... I mean, if we're really gonna go along with the Jungle Book analogies, this is King Louie.
The orange... The orange talking about... Talking about... Talking about the gorillas.
Okay, here we go.
There were moments with the gorilla, the way he held that child, it was almost like a mother holding a baby.
Looked so beautiful and calm.
And there were moments where... Looked pretty dangerous.
I don't think they had a choice.
I mean, probably they didn't have a choice.
You have a child, a young child is at stake.
Okay, so what he's saying is right, but just hearing Donald Trump do the play-by-play is kind of amusing.
There's no way around it.
He's like a sports announcer, and then, look at that gorilla, he's holding his hand, and then BOOM!
He's gone!
So what he's saying is right, but just hearing Donald Trump do the play-by-play is kind of amusing.
Okay.
There's no way around it.
He's like a sports announcer.
And then look at that gorilla.
He's holding his hand.
And then boom, he's gone.
Okay.
All right.
So Donald Trump continues to dominate the headlines.
And this is what Trump knows that Hillary Clinton does in head.
Hillary Clinton... So Donald Trump did a press conference, which we'll get to in just a few minutes here.
Donald Trump did a press conference, and he talked about veterans, and giving money to veterans, and he talked about gorillas, and he talked about various things.
Hillary Clinton has not done a press conference in, I think, four months?
It's been 160 days?
Something like that?
That's why Trump is in the headlines and Hillary isn't, because he'll do press conferences, he'll line ring the press conferences, but he'll do them.
Trump understands the media, and we'll get back to that in just a second.
First, we need to take a moment, we need to pay homage to the supposed third party that was going to rise in this election cycle, and that is the Libertarian Party.
So, there's been a lot of talk about third parties, because nobody likes Trump and nobody likes Hillary, so maybe there will be a third party.
So, Bill Kristol He announced over the weekend that this Thursday he's going to announce a third-party candidate who's very serious.
And he said that Trump is very upset about it.
He tweeted out, I'm traveling, so hadn't realized I'd so upset real Donald Trump.
I'm sorry the mere mention of an independent candidate has so unnerved him.
And then Ben Carson, who's a Trump campaign surrogate, the worst campaign surrogate in history, he came out and he said there definitely should not be a third-party candidate because it'll just destroy the Republican Party.
America right now is like a cruise ship that is about to go off in Niagara Falls with tremendous carnage and death.
What you have to do first is recognize the problem, stop the ship, turn it around, and then move in the other direction.
I'm hoping that whoever that third party candidate is will just stop for a moment and think about what the implications are.
Of allowing Hillary Clinton or someone like her to get in there and they get two to four Supreme Court picks and completely change the nature of this country and destroy the prospects for their children and their grandchildren to have the same opportunities that they had.
Okay, so, there it is.
Um, and, uh, by the way, if you're wondering why in this particular tape Steve Doocy looks really young, that's because his son Peter Doocy is sitting there on Fox and Friends.
But, Ben Carr's saying, well, America's kinda like, it's kinda like a ship, and, um, it's a ship that's, it's like a poop ship.
Like, one of those places where the septic system broke, and the poop is flowing out of the various toilets, and it's turned over, it's almost over, but the captain of the ship has, has bailed out on the ship, and it's turning over completely.
And I think that all we can do right now is just say that America is beautiful.
Okay, so Ben Carson says we shouldn't have a third party.
Alright, so we shouldn't have a third party, according to Ben Carson.
His case becomes somewhat stronger when you actually look at what happened at the Libertarian Party Convention.
So, the Libertarian Party is...
I consider myself, when it comes to government, largely libertarian, because I think that the government is terrible at everything, and I think that every time the government expands, personal freedom contracts.
Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party is, it appears, almost entirely comprised of insane, nutbag, loonbag, crazy people.
So, here is a clip.
This guy is running for the chair of the Libertarian Party.
And here is how he decided to make his case to the libertarians that he ought to be the head of the libertarian party.
And, folks, this is what I'm telling you again.
You need to subscribe so you can see the visuals here.
I will try to narrate as this happens.
But this guy, he does something unique.
His name is James Lark, and he does something to talk.
He does something unique, and we'll just watch it.
Go ahead and start it.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
Okay, James Lark is a large, red-bearded man.
He's wearing a black suit and a yellow tie.
And now, he's dancing around on stage, clapping.
And this is gonna go pretty much where you think it is, in your worst nightmares, in your worst imaginations.
And they've flashed to the crowd, and it looks like a bunch of people who literally spend all day eating Cheetos and playing Dungeons & Dragons.
And here's this guy, dancing around.
This is his case!
This is his case for being chair of the Libertarian Party.
And there go the suspenders and there goes the towel.
And... Oh, yes, Lindsey.
Oh, yes, Lindsey!
Oh, yes, Lindsey!
And now people are reacting in the crowd, covering their eyes.
There goes his shirt.
And this guy has larger breast excesses than at least half of the Hollywood leading ladies.
He also has an Iron Cross tattoo on his shoulder.
And at this point, his pants are gone as well.
He's taken off his pants.
They are gone.
And he is wearing a thong.
And it is horrifying in every way possible.
So this is what a non-major party looks like.
And somebody just ran by and put money in his thong.
So, I don't know if he's making the case for that's how the government ought to raise money, but if so, we'll be broke pretty quickly.
That is horrifying.
So this is what happens at the Libertarian Party Convention.
Clearly, this is a party to be reckoned with.
People that we should take super seriously.
And my friend Larry Elder did a debate between the various Libertarian Party candidates, and it just demonstrates what the Libertarian Party is, that because such a bunch of purists, and I'm, listen, I'm ideologically pure, as people know I tend to be a purist, but I voted for Mitt Romney.
I voted for John McCain, even though I don't like them.
Okay?
Because I believe that sometimes half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.
I get that argument.
I believe in that argument as a general rule.
The Libertarian Party doesn't believe that.
They're purists.
What's odd about them is they just nominated Gary Johnson, who's actually a relatively large government guy.
He expanded the budget in New Mexico when he was governor.
He's somebody who is pro-choice.
He's somebody who believes in the In the government forcing bakers to participate in same-sex weddings and such, that's their new nominee.
But they had a debate.
Larry Elder, who's a libertarian, he did the debate.
He moderated the debate.
And this just shows how out of touch they are.
They're asking questions about the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Last I checked, it is now 2016.
I was born 20 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Nonetheless, this was a major topic of contention at the Libertarian Party Convention.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended discrimination in both the private sector and the public sector.
Senator Barry Goldwater voted against it for libertarian reasons.
He did not feel it was the government's job to tell a private business owner what to do.
Senator Al Gore Sr.
voted against it because he opposed integration.
If you had been in the Senate, how would you have voted?
I would have voted for it.
And he gets booed.
Okay.
No elaboration?
Nope.
You still have more time?
Okay.
Mr. Peterson.
Can you repeat the question one more time?
It was kind of whiny.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended discrimination in both the private sector and the public sector.
Senator Barry Goldwater voted against it for libertarian reasons, feeling that it wasn't the government's job to tell a private owner what to do.
Senator Al Gore Sr.
voted against it because he imposed racial integration.
How would you have voted had you been in the Senate?
Wait, you just... Sorry?
You're asking whether or not I would have signed the civil rights legislation in 1964.
1964, yes.
Yes, I would have signed.
Okay, if everyone seems confused, that's because every single person on this stage... We can pause it.
I mean, if you're wondering why the Libertarians aren't able to pick up any steam, yeah.
Number one, these are the sorts of questions that are taken seriously at the debates, and number two, everybody on the stage is apparently high.
Gary Johnson, who's a big pot advocate, and has smoked pot publicly, Gary Johnson is obviously... Wait, so you're asking a question I just answered a second ago?
Sorry, dude, I just kind of drifted off there.
Oh, I'm still here?
Oh, okay.
Yes, yes.
That guy's the nominee, by the way.
The other people on the stage include John McAfee, who invented McAfee antivirus, and who I believe was a suspect in a murder, I think.
So it's a group of oddballs.
Okay, so in any case, by the way, the answer on the 64 Civil Rights Act, if you want to give, there are multiple answers.
I say that the Civil Rights Act of 64 does go too far in terms of restricting private sector behavior.
They don't have any right to tell somebody in the private sector what they do with their business.
If somebody is a terrible, discriminatory, racist jackass, then we ought to start a business across the street from them and run them out of business.
It's not the government's job to tell me who I can and cannot participate in business with, okay?
Okay, that's my answer to that.
As far as would I have signed it in 64?
My answer is probably, yeah, I would have signed it in 64, but then I would have looked to repeal the sections that have to do with the private sector.
Right, because it's more important to get rid of what the government is doing wrong, and then we can minimize government later.
That would be the proper answer to that.
Okay, so, but that's not the end of the questions that make libertarians look insane.
Larry then asks them about driver's licenses.
Here we go.
Should someone have to have a government-issued license to drive a car?
Hell no!
Yeah!
People are cheering.
Dr. Feldman.
A car is like a gun or anything else.
As long as you're using it right and not using it to hurt other people, you should have a right to use it.
A license and a permit is just another way to get some money and inconvenience to people.
Nice tie from this dude.
He apparently got his tie over at the fireworks store.
But okay, so these are the questions that get asked at Libertarian Debate.
When was the last time, Lindsey Mathis, when was the last time you guys sat around considering, should we have driver's licenses or not?
In the pantheon of issues important to you in America, should we have driver's licenses or not?
Not really high-ranking.
Not something I think super important.
Now, On principle, I may basically agree with the idea that driver's licenses don't really accomplish all that much because the fact is there are plenty of incompetent drivers on the road.
They're still killing people.
A lot of them don't have insurance.
We live in Southern California.
There are tons of people without insurance driving around.
There's nothing you can do about it.
But this is not high on the priority list, right?
This is not a high priority.
Okay, and then, if you thought that was too high priority for you, not high priority enough for you, here is something that's really high priority.
Would you have engaged in World Wars I and II?
I love Larry, but I almost couldn't wait until he got to the War of the Roses.
What would your position have been on the War of the Roses?
Would you have been for the Lancasters, or would you have been for the Yorks?
Like, where do you stand on that one?
But here are the candidates being asked about World Wars I and II.
Was it wrong for America to have intervened and fought in World War I?
Was it wrong for America to have intervened and fought in World War II?
It was wrong to intervene in World War I because the sinking of Lusitania, actually they found out that there were munitions.
So they were violating the law by sneaking munitions in past the embargo.
But after we are attacked in World War II, we have every right to defend ourselves.
But we would have never gotten involved in World War II if we would have stayed the hell out of World War I.
Standing out of World War I isolationism.
There were a lot of bright people and I'm sure if they could find a way not to get into war, they would have done it.
I don't have the egotism to try to say that I have a better idea to what I've done at that time.
It was a horrible situation, and I don't know whether anything could have been done differently.
Could you repeat the question, please?
Was it wrong for America to have intervened and fought in World War I?
Was it wrong for America to have intervened and fought in World War II?
Well, in World War II, I mean, our entire Pacific fleet was destroyed.
We certainly have the right to defend ourselves.
What would have happened had we not gotten into the war?
In World War I, a far more complex affair and way beyond my time.
I'm sorry, I do not have the information to answer.
This is a fabulous debate.
You can see why this is such a major party.
Yes, by the way, John McAfee ended up moving to Belize after he spent a lifetime basically doing hard drugs.
Then he found McAfee antivirus and he blew all of his money and ended up in Belize and now he's back running for the Libertarian Party.
Very exciting.
Gary Johnson, the guy in the center who doesn't know what question is being asked, that guy ended up with the Libertarian nomination.
On the second ballot yesterday, so all very, very exciting stuff at the Libertarian Convention.
And this demonstrates, gang, why ideological purity, while a nice thing, is not the be-all, end-all.
It turns out that you actually have to answer questions that are relevant to the last, I don't know...
80 years of American politics?
We can make a cutoff date.
You know, like, the last 80 years I think would be a nice place to be.
You know, asking about whether we would have gotten into war with the Kaiser, it seems, what we would have done with the Hun, that seems a little bit odd to me.
But, you know, that's how it goes.
So, yes, the Libertarian Party as the legit third party candidacy, not so much.
Okay, meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to stump the press.
I will say this, if there's one thing I like about Donald Trump, and I've said many things I do not like about Donald Trump, but if there's one thing I like about Donald Trump is that he's always on attack against the press all the time.
And they deserve it, because, for example, Katie Couric, the former NBC News anchor, she made a documentary about guns, it was a very anti-gun documentary, and there was part of the documentary where she inserted a break in the documentary, she's having a conversation with people, she inserted a false pause to make it look like they didn't know the answer to her question.
to make them look stupid.
This came out and now she's out apologizing for it.
Her documentary has now been pulled from Epix, which is one of these online channels.
Here's Karek apologizing.
If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?
So then they're going to play the audio showing how this actually worked.
Right?
So the audio was basically right away.
She asked the question, they answered the question, and now she's apologized.
Okay, fine.
So that's Katie Couric.
She was a respected member of the media.
She's a liar.
Brian Williams over the weekend.
It was Memorial Day over the weekend, and President Obama gave what I thought was one of the most egregious speeches in American history.
In Hiroshima, he basically made the case that us dropping the bomb in Hiroshima was immoral, that the only way to stop violence in the future is with moral relativism, which is precisely the opposite of the truth.
If you want to ensure another nuclear attack, all you have to do is keep promoting the idea that all cultures are worthy, all cultures are decent, because they aren't.
But in any case, Brian Williams, serial fabulist Brian Williams, he's on MSNBC now because it's impossible to lose your job in the media.
And Brian Williams is asked about Hiroshima and here is his explanation of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is, and that is still the threat that people worry about, that this material will fall into the wrong hands.
If people have found the U.S.
to be preachy in the years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the use of nuclear weapons, it's because we're the only nation to have used them in anger.
Sometimes I am amazed that the world has been without these weapons all the years since But it is a point of great pride by the people who've seen to it.
Okay, fine.
But we used it in anger.
Okay, we didn't use it in anger.
It was a considered decision to end World War II.
It did end World War II.
It probably saved a million American lives who would have had to storm the beaches of Japan.
But we're the bad guys because we use it.
So the media lie all the time.
What this leads to is Donald Trump smacking the media.
So Donald Trump, this is the thing that I like about Donald Trump.
Donald Trump makes a habit of smacking the media.
This is clip 26.
Donald Trump is doing a press conference today about the veterans.
So I'm going to tell you one thing I like about Donald Trump, that he smacks the media, and then I'm going to tell you it also sort of carries the seeds of one of the things I don't like about Donald Trump.
So here is Donald Trump.
I think you've set a new bar today for being contentious with the press corps, kind of calling us losers to our faces and all that.
Is this... No, not all of you, just many of you.
All right, fine.
Enough of us.
Is this what... Not you, David.
Is this what it's going to be like covering you if you're president?
Yeah, it is.
We're going to have this kind of confrontation in the press room?
Yeah, it is going to be like this, David.
If the press writes false stories, Like they did with this, because half of you were amazed that I raised all of this money.
If the press writes false stories like they did where I wanted to keep a low profile, I didn't want the credit for raising all this money for the vets.
I wasn't looking for the credit.
And by the way, more money is coming in.
I wasn't looking for the credit.
But I had no choice but to do this, because the press was saying I didn't raise any money for them.
Not only did I raise it, much of it was given a long time ago.
And there is a vetting process, and I think you understand that.
But when I raise almost $6 million — and probably, in the end, we'll raise more than $6 million, because more is going to come in and is coming in — but when I raise $5.6 million as of today, more is coming in.
And I — and this is going to phenomenal groups, and I have many of these people vetting The people that are getting the money and working hard, and then we have to read probably libelous stories, or certainly close, in the newspapers, and the people know the stories are false?
I'm going to continue to attack the press.
Look, I find the press to be extremely dishonest.
I find the political press to be unbelievably dishonest.
I will say that.
Okay, and then he calls one of them, ABC's Tom Llamas, he calls him a scum, a sleazebag?
He calls him a sleazy guy, he's a sleazebag.
Okay, so, I like the idea that he's gonna attack the press.
Here is my, and I've said before, I was attacking the press long before Donald Trump was attacking the press.
I've been saying for 10 years, 15 years, that the idea that anybody should be allowing George Stephanopoulos to get through a full interview without saying to him at the outset, George, you were in Hillary Clinton's war room.
You have no credibility on this issue.
Is ridiculous, okay?
But Trump is doing what I've said.
So he's taking my tactic.
He's attacking the press.
Here's the thing I don't like about Donald Trump.
He's a liar.
So Donald Trump is taking their tower of lies and he's tearing it down.
Great, great.
He's doing a full King Kong.
He's tearing down the tower of lies.
Spectacular.
Then he stands in the rubble of the lies and then he lies, right?
So in this particular case, this happens to be one of the rare cases, one of the only cases that I know of where the media is actually honest.
So what happened is that Donald Trump, you remember this, Donald Trump skipped the Fox News debate where Megyn Kelly was moderating, and he did his I'm-gonna-raise-money-for-the-veterans routine, mainly because he didn't want to go up against Megyn Kelly and the other candidates.
So he does his I'm-gonna-raise-money-for-the-veterans routine, and then he says that night, we've raised six million dollars for the veterans, and I myself have signed a check for a million dollars to veterans groups.
And he says this back in January.
And that's the last you hear of it.
But he keeps saying, yeah, I've raised so much money for the veterans, I love the veterans, I raised so much money for them, I signed a million-dollar check.
So, Washington Post has a reporter named David Fahrenthold.
And David Fahrenthold investigated, and what he found is that there were zero veterans groups that had said that Trump had given them a million dollars.
So, did he actually do it?
Last week.
Last week.
Okay, remember now what the date is, okay?
The date today is May 31st.
Okay, we're almost in June.
So it's almost been six months since Trump said this.
Last week, Donald Trump signed a million-dollar check to a veterans group, after these reports ran.
And then he turns around and calls the media dishonest.
Then he calls the media dishonest.
I agree the media is dishonest.
But in this case, he was dishonest.
So this is the thing I love about Trump and also the thing I hate.
Trump has a habit of picking the right opponents and then doing all the bad things his opponents do while tearing them down.
This is the part that I dislike about Trump.
And meanwhile, the Republican Party is getting behind Donald Trump foursquare.
They're getting behind him foursquare.
And tactically, glad he attacks the media, but he's obviously somebody who doesn't tell the truth.
Doesn't matter, the Republican Party's gonna get behind him anyway.
I mean, I heard a radio host this morning, who shall remain nameless, playing this clip of Trump and going, it's true, the political press is dishonest.
And then...
Not mentioning any of the context that I just gave you.
So I'm honest enough to tell you, the political press is dishonest.
That doesn't mean they're wrong and lying all the time.
Sometimes Trump is wrong and lying also.
In any case, Mitch McConnell.
So remember that, do you remember that time?
It was, I'm old enough to remember this.
I'm old enough to remember a time when Donald Trump was not an establishment guy, right?
Where he was anti-establishment.
He was gonna change the way politics worked.
Donald Trump was going to go in there.
He was a living rebuke.
He was a human middle finger to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
He was a human middle finger to the Mitt Romneys of the party.
Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, he's now coming out and he's saying, no, no, we can't have a third party.
A third party would just be completely disrespectful and terrible.
We can't do it.
So you have endorsed Donald Trump.
Yeah.
And you're saying, does that mean you approve of all that he's done?
Well, let me put it this way.
We know what we get with Hillary Clinton.
Four more years, just like the last eight.
We know the average American is about $3,000 a year worse off now than they were when President Obama came to office.
The country is yearning for a change.
And my view is four more years, like the last eight, is not good for the country.
He won the nomination fair and square.
He went out there and competed like everybody else.
He got the most votes.
And I think it's disrespectful of the Republican electorate to say, I'm smarter than you are, and I'm not going to support your choice.
So what have you said to Paul Ryan in regards to that, then?
He still has not endorsed Donald Trump.
Well, you know, Paul has his own view of this.
My view is that Republican primary voters have spoken.
I know what we get with Hillary Clinton.
And I'd rather take my chances on somebody new, who I think, particularly with regard to the Supreme Court, is going to appoint people that I think would be better for the country.
Okay, so that's all wonderful, except for the fact that he's now embracing everything that Trump is.
So, put that quote in the back of your mind, right?
Trump is gonna do all these great things, Hillary's awful, Obama's awful, now listen to McConnell here, okay?
So McConnell is going to explain, he's asked by Hugh Hewitt, Is Trump going to change the nature of the Republican Party?
Here's Mitch McConnell's answer.
Well, whether he has or not, he's not going to change the Republican Party.
You know, we've had nominees before who were not deeply into Republican politics and philosophy.
Think of Eisenhower, for example.
But Trump is not going to change the institution.
He's not going to change the basic philosophy of the party.
And I'm comfortable voting for him because on the big things that I think have the greatest impact on the future of the country, at the top of the list is the Supreme Court.
I think he'll be just fine.
Okay, so there it is.
Okay, you can't have it both ways.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't say that Donald Trump isn't gonna shape the party and then say, I like Donald Trump, I'm getting behind him, foursquare, everything he does is hunky-dory with me.
You can't have it both ways.
This is the problem.
And for all those people who say that Mitch McConnell isn't gonna make deals with Trump, he seems pretty sanguine about Donald Trump, doesn't he?
For all the people who say that Trump isn't going to cut deals with McConnell, McConnell seems kind of okay with all this, doesn't he?
So again, all Trump is is just a giant human inkblot.
He's a Rorschach test.
And so you can have people, so you have Mitch McConnell saying Trump won't change the GOP, and literally at the exact same time, on TV, you've got Rudy Giuliani saying Trump is a demonstration that our politics can change, he will change the GOP.
And without denigrating them in any way, I think He's a real hope for us that our politics can finally change.
You and I both know Donald really well, and we know he's a dealmaker.
And I know that somehow people think that means compromising your principles.
I think that means accomplishing your principles.
I think that means if I believe in lower taxes, maybe I can't get all the lower taxes I want.
If I believe in less regulations.
Maybe I can't get rid of all the regulations, but I sure as heck can get rid of most of them.
And if I believe in defeating the Ayatollah, it don't well happen.
Okay, so he says there that Trump is the hope that politics can change.
You've got Newt Gingrich saying that there will be Trump-Americans.
They're not Republicans.
They're not Democrats.
They're Trump-Americans.
And then we've got Mitch McConnell saying the party isn't going to change.
So here is Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich both vying for Donald Trump's VP slot.
Here's Newt Gingrich explaining that there will be Trump-Americans all over the world.
Trump-Americans.
It'll all be Trump.
It'll all be Trump.
It's like Gloria Swanson at the end of Sunset Boulevard.
And blazing lights everywhere, it'll be Trump.
Look, I believe, and you heard it here for the first time, so you can keep this and play it later on the air.
Just as there were once Reagan Democrats, I think there are going to be Trump Americans.
And they're not going to be people who rush in and decide they're Republican the next day.
But they're going to say, look, to make America great again, I'm going to be for Donald Trump.
They're going to be in all 50 states.
They're going to be in places you never expected.
And I think we're going to have a new map, as I said.
Replace red and blue because it's the old order.
Replace red and blue.
It's the old order.
It's the Trump order now.
They'll be in places you never expected.
You'll open your baking closet and boom!
There's a Trump supporter.
You get up in the morning and out from the bed creeps a stubby orange hand and it's a Trump supporter.
Okay, so.
So, you can't have it both ways, gang.
Either Trump's going to transform the party, or he's not.
If he's not, he's going to keep people like Mitch McConnell in power, because that's what Trump does.
If he is going to transform the party, he's going to transform it into Trumpism, not into conservatism.
Either way, we don't have a particularly good solution to any of our problems.
All that said, the good news for Donald Trump is that Hillary Clinton is worse at everything in every possible way it is possible to be terrible.
She is just a smoking garbage heap of a campaign.
I mean, she's the wreckage of the Death Star.
She's just glowing bits of nothing floating off into space.
She's awful.
Here's what she said today.
This is a legit quote from Hillary Clinton.
She said, she encountered people on rope lines who tell her quote, I really admire you.
I really like you.
I just don't know if I can vote for a woman to be president.
These are things no one has ever said in the history of humanity.
At a rope line, at her own event, people are going there just to tell her, I can't vote for you because of that vagina lady.
Really, that's happening.
By the way, Dianne Feinstein, who's a top Hillary ally.
She gave what I thought was the funniest comment of the weekend.
She was asked about Hillary Clinton's server, and Dianne Feinstein, who is the not- California has two senators, the stupidest woman in the history of American politics, Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein, she of the lifely size.
And Dianne Feinstein, she of the lifely size, was on, I think it was ABC News, and she's asked about Hillary's email server.
Listen to this answer, it's amazing.
I think questions are asked and answers are sometimes taken out of context.
Hillary Clinton broke no law.
I read all 42 pages of the report.
The conclusion of the report does not say that.
What it says is that the department does not handle these electronic platform operations well and needs to do better.
Hillary herself has said, yes, I made a mistake.
If I had a chance to do it over again, I'd do it differently.
I mean, what do people want?
I say enough is enough.
Let's get to the major problems facing this nation.
But Mrs. Clinton has said that it was widely known that she was using her personal email.
But, if you look at this report, it says that when State Department staffers expressed concerns about the arrangement, their supervisor, quote, instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary's personal email system again.
That sure sounds like somebody trying to hide something.
Oh, wait a second.
I don't believe she was trying to hide anything.
I've known Hillary for a quarter of a century.
Let me tell you what I do think.
I think this is a woman who wants a little bit of a private life.
She wants to be able to communicate with husband, with daughter, with friends.
Okay, so that's Hillary's defender, is that Hillary wants a little bit of a private life so she can coordinate with Bill.
What, when she doesn't have to be home so the Energizer can come over and nail Bill?
What?
Yeah, this is Hillary's Defender.
Yeah, Hillary's got troubles, gang.
Hillary has some serious troubles.
Okay, time for something I like and then something I don't like.
So, a book that I just finished over the weekend is called Who Needs the Fed by John Tammany.
This is from Encounter Books.
They have a whole series of really good, kind of shorter books that have come out now about economics.
And basically, it breaks down what exactly the Federal Reserve does and whether it's worthwhile.
And he makes a case which I don't really agree with him.
He makes the case that basically the stock market boom and the real estate boom are not due to Fed policy.
He says that that was basically due to governmental regulation.
And he makes the case that we don't need the Fed anymore.
You may have noticed a pattern on my economics reading.
George Gilder makes the same case.
The Federal Reserve, in my opinion, Is in a highly overrated institute.
It doesn't accomplish any of the goals that it was set out to accomplish in the first place.
At least, it doesn't accomplish anything that couldn't be accomplished equally in the private sector.
Up to and including Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation stuff.
You know, if you go to the bank, you have $500,000 in the bank, the bank goes bust.
The feds reimburse you up to $250,000.
You should be able to buy insurance for that through your bank, right?
You shouldn't have to... We don't have that in any other area of life.
Why do you need it from the federal government here?
I mean, I have car insurance.
I buy it every – I have home insurance.
So in any case, it's an interesting book, and it's a quick read, so you should take a look at that.
Okay, Things That I Hate.
So there's this Democrat named Barbara Norton, and she's in the Louisiana State Legislature.
The Louisiana State Legislature took up a bill recently that would get students to recite a portion of the Declaration of Independence in schools.
Barbara Norton got up, and here's what she had to say about the Declaration of Independence.
All men are not created equal.
Thank you.
When I think back in 1776, July the 4th, African Americans were slaves.
And for you to, and for you bring a bill to request that our children will recite the Declaration I think it's a little bit unfair to us to ask those children to recite something that's not the truth.
You don't think that all men are created equal?
Let me finish.
And for you to ask our children to repeat the declaration stating that all men are free, I think that's unfair.
Okay, it's unfair.
In 1776, Dr. King was not even born.
Okay, we can stop it there, okay?
In 1776, Dr. King was not even born.
Yes, this is factually true.
Also true, the Declaration of Independence was written as a highly aspirational document.
The founders originally had a provision that would have abolished slavery in the Declaration of Independence, or at least condemned the British Empire for importing slavery into the colonies.
The South bucked at that.
If you wanted to have a free, independent country, you needed to have consensus so that you would actually not have a divided country at the very outset, which is why slavery was sort of taken off the table in the Declaration of Independence, but started to be phased out by the Constitution of the United States.
This idea that the Declaration of Independence, this is like saying that great things that happen in the Bible, right?
In the Bible, there's talk of slavery.
There is.
There's talk of slavery.
You capture people in war.
Do you keep them as slaves?
Do you not keep them as slaves?
There's a lot of talk in the Bible about this sort of thing.
This is like saying that when it says, let my people go, a phrase that Dr. King was fond of using, right?
That the Bible counted in slavery, therefore we can't use it.
Dr. King, by the way, fond of quoting the Declaration of Independence.
Right?
Fond of quoting the Declaration of Independence and saying that this was the, the Halcyon cry.
This was the, this was what America was all about.
We weren't living up to our founding ideals.
Unfortunately, I think there's a tendency on the left to say that because American history was imperfect in their ugly areas of American history, that means American founding principles are ingrained and wrong and therefore we have to overthrow the entire system as a whole.
That's scary stuff when you're talking about the creation of the greatest country in the history of mankind on the best ideals ever thought up by man.
Or God, by the way.
This is frightening stuff.
And it comes out of historical ignorance, because the fact is, again, the Declaration of Independence was specifically phrased in the way that it was, because the idea was that it was supposed to provide for the future freedom of all human beings, not even humans relegated to the United States.
Human beings everywhere.
Okay, we'll be back tomorrow to talk a little bit more about that and other topics.
Hopefully the guerrilla warfare will have died down by that point and we can talk about other things aside from Harambee, but I'm sure there'll be plenty to talk about.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
▲
Export Selection