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Feb. 24, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
25:54
Ep. 259 - Do You Get Extra Credit For Experiencing Tragedy?
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So, you've read the headlines today.
A brand spanking new study has found that doing away with traditional marriage laws has supposedly reduced suicide rates among gay teenagers by a whopping 14% in states that have embraced same-sex marriage.
Here are just some of the glowing headlines.
PBS NewsHour.
Same-sex marriage laws linked to fewer youth suicide attempts, new study says.
Washington Post.
Legalizing same-sex marriage was associated with fewer youth suicide attempts, new study finds.
The Guardian.
Drop-in teenage suicide attempts linked to legalization of same-sex marriage.
USA Today.
Study.
Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage was legalized.
These headlines, which are just a tiny sampling of the blanket media coverage this study has received, The study printed in JAMA Pediatrics concludes that same-sex marriage policies would be associated with more than 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide every year.
There's only one problem.
The study, printed in JAMA Pediatrics, concludes that same-sex marriage policies, quote, "would be associated with more than 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide every year." There's only one problem.
The study really does not prove that.
The study shows a basic correlation between loosening same-sex marriage law and suicide rate, but it does not show that same-sex marriage policies reduced adolescent suicide attempts, as the study's conclusions state.
In fact, the study itself acknowledges, quote, our analysis does not allow us to understand the mechanisms through which implementation of same-sex marriage policies reduced adolescent suicide attempts.
In other words, they say they know same-sex marriage policies impacted suicide attempts, but they have no idea how.
Well then.
They also failed to rule out some of the most basic confounds for any sociological study like this.
Socioeconomic status of the students themselves.
Is it possible the students are committing suicide at a lower rate because their parents are making more money, for example?
Is it possible that socioeconomic status also has an outsized impact on particular groups?
Or, how about the social acceptance of gays and lesbians, without the legislative question?
The study admits openly they couldn't check either of those confounds out.
They said, quote, We also could not control for unmeasured individual-level characteristics, including socioeconomic status, or for unmeasured state characteristics that may change over time, such as religious affiliation or acceptance of religious minorities and sexual minorities.
Also, the study fails to explain why non-LGBT students would see their suicide rates decline in states that approve same-sex marriage.
How exactly is that supposed to work?
Some straight kid doesn't kill himself because same-sex marriage just got approved?
The research data shows variability in suicide rates in states over time as well.
Why would the suicide rate drop precipitously between 2005 and 2007 among states that only legalized same-sex marriage in 2013 or 2014?
The study doesn't explain.
The study also averages out state data rather than showing a serious trend common to all states.
That means a serious decline in suicide rate in Hawaii could wash out an increase in suicide rates in Delaware.
Look at the charts.
They're pretty messy.
And there's a reason for that.
The study says, quote, the analyses on the association between implementation of same-sex marriage policies and adolescent suicide attempts among those identifying as sexual minorities should be interpreted with caution, giving the limited data availability on sexual orientation.
Yet their conclusions are bold.
They say, quote, So much for caution. So much for caution.
Here's the bottom line.
The study shows correlation, not causation.
It openly ignores basic data that would be necessary in order to rule out confounding factors.
It also averages data in order to draw conclusions that truly are state-specific.
The study acknowledges its limitations, then draws extraordinarily strong conclusions.
And, of course, the media runs with us.
This is how cautious science becomes utterly uncautious conventional wisdom.
Maybe same-sex marriage lowers suicide rates.
Maybe it doesn't.
This study doesn't prove it one way or another, but don't let the media tell you that.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, lots to get to today.
We're going to talk a little bit about CPAC, or as Kellyanne Conway puts it, TPAC.
She says, now Trump Political Action Conference.
We'll get to that in just a second.
Plus, we have the mailbag today.
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Okay, so let's begin with what's going on at CPAC, aside from somebody apparently killing themselves and Richard Spencer being thrown out of the proceedings.
So CPAC is always kind of a zoo.
I've been to CPAC a bunch of times.
It's always a lot of fun.
This year, it should be particularly fun because it's Trump-ier, right?
It's Trump-ier zero.
So that means that everybody is very excited, as well they should be.
There's a Republican president.
There's a Republican House.
There's a Republican Senate.
There should be a lot of talk about policy.
There should be a lot of talk about conservatism.
It is called, after all, the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Except that Kellyanne Conway just showed up there, like a few minutes ago, and apparently she said, she's making her first public appearance in weeks, she said that, I think by tomorrow this will be TPAC.
She was asked, how has Trump affected the conservative movement?
She said, I think by tomorrow this will be TPAC, meaning the Trump Political Action Conference, and then she added that conservatism was, quote, sclerotic and dusty.
Sclerotic and dusty.
So, let's start with that.
No conservative political action conference should probably be advertising from one of its lead speakers that the founding ideology and founding idea upon which it's based is sclerotic and dusty.
The hero worship for Trump is obviously over the top.
I've been saying this for a long time.
Call him when he's... Praise him when he's right.
Celebrate him when he's right.
Put on the MAGA hat when he's right.
When he's wrong, say that he's wrong.
But your philosophy should be what guides you, not your adherence to Trumpism.
And I'm getting a lot of flack this morning because I made the same point about Tucker Carlson.
So Tucker Carlson over at Fox News Whose show is really very entertaining because he basically has on some idiot from the left every so often and then he hammers them into the ground and it's really entertaining stuff and he does the Tucker Carlson patented bemused face kind of while he's on split screen and he's really good at it and he's a very talented host and he's obviously getting huge ratings.
One of the things that the Tucker Carlson says in this Atlantic interview is that he has no set ideology.
I mean, it's important to note about Tucker that when he started out early on as the Atlantic Reports, on CNN's Crossfire, he was basically a mainline partisan conservative.
And then after he left CNN in 2005, he went libertarian, and now he's going full populist.
And so Carlson was asked about this.
Here's what he said.
He said, I'm not much of an economic conservative.
I'm not conservative at all on foreign policy.
And then he said, so he was asked, well, why did you shift all your positions?
He says, if your politics don't change when circumstances do, you're an idiot, you're a reactionary.
And he says, my views are not super interesting.
I have a feeling that some of Tucker's views I'm sure shifted because the political ground map changed because of Trumpism, because of this nationalist populism.
This idea that you're a reactionary if you stick to your principles, but you're not a reactionary if you shift them in reaction to events is definitionally wrong.
Reactionary means that you're reacting to events by shifting your principles and your philosophies.
Now listen, Tucker can do whatever he wants, but it is dangerous for the movement as a whole to simply shift its philosophy based around whatever Trump wants that day or whatever events happen that day.
That's not a philosophy that's worth upholding.
That's not a set of values that's worth upholding.
And so I think that we ought to be careful, before we fall into the idolatrous trap of turning CPAC into TPAC, of recognizing that Trump is only important insofar as he advances conservative principles.
When he breaks from those conservative principles, he shouldn't be celebrating TPAC, right?
If TPAC and CPAC are the same thing, then let's just call it CPAC.
And if TPAC is something different than CPAC, then maybe that ought to be called out a little bit.
So that's a preliminary note on CPAC.
It looks like it's gonna be a fantastic event.
Looks like a lot of fun stuff is gonna be happening there, despite a lot of the confusion that surrounded it because of everything that happened with Milo.
Apparently, Richard Spencer showed up and he was immediately tossed out.
That is a good idea.
And it's very funny.
A lot of people have been talking this morning about the idea that if you don't let certain people speak at your event, this is called no platforming.
No, no platforming is when there is a state group That would be no platforming.
It's also no platforming if you have a group that is dedicated to free speech, like say a university that says in its mission statement that we're dedicated to free speech and they're banning certain people.
That would be no platforming.
It's not no platforming for a conservative group to not have Bernie Sanders as the keynote speaker.
In fact, it's the opposite of no platforming.
Okay, no platforming is- if you think that no platforming means that you have a right to sit in my chair and take over my show, for example, or you have a right to take over CPAC's main stage, or you have a right to take over a historically black university and you're David Duke, Right?
You don't have a right to do that.
It doesn't mean that once you're invited, you should be tossed out.
If somebody invites you, then that is no platforming to disinvite them.
But it is really, really, really silly to make the contention that you have a right to someone else's distribution mechanism for your message.
That's actually the Fairness Doctrine, right?
That's something the conservatives oppose.
The left has been saying for years that talk radio should be hit with the Fairness Doctrine because it's all right-wingers.
And the right has been saying, no, these are all private companies.
They should be allowed to say and do what they want.
You can't hold both ideas in your mind at once because they don't mesh.
Okay, so no platforming is a bad thing if you actually define it the way it's supposed to be defined.
If you define no platforming as everybody should be allowed to take over any stage that they want at any time, that's just silly.
That's just silly.
And it's actually indicative of your opinion on violation of rights.
You're okay with violating rights so long as somebody's saying something that you want them to say.
Okay.
All of that said, the big issue of the day is actually not happening at CPAC.
Around the country, CPAC is not.
It doesn't really make a blip around the country.
What does make a blip is all these town hall uprisings.
So there's a lot of talk about paid protesters supposedly going into town hall meetings and ripping on Republican Congress people, trying to intimidate them into leaving Obamacare in place.
Among the people pushing these things is Michael Moore.
Here's Michael Moore talking about the wonders of these town hall protests.
You can see, just watching the footage there, that nobody's being paid.
They are there because they love this country, and they're coming out.
And you know what?
You're just seeing, really, the first week of these town halls.
Well, that's what's crazy to me.
I mean, when you look at, you know, we were going back and looking at footage.
We're talking about this today.
The big town hall thing was August in 2009, because that was the August recess, and that's when those town halls happened, people getting yelled at, and there was a bill that was about to be passed, and the mobilization.
This is only a month in.
Right, so this is way... No, no, this makes the Tea Party look like preschool.
I mean, seriously.
That's silly.
I mean, I love the left claiming the Tea Party was bad, but what's happening now is good.
Listen, everybody has the right to protest, but the fact that the media continually downgrade, and I know that there was a reporter from Politico, I think, who was downgrading the Tea Party, claiming that was all fake, but this is all real.
No, no.
Now, I will say it's a mistake for right-wingers to immediately assume that all of this is fake, that it's all astroturfed.
There's this tendency on both sides to do this.
That the Tea Party was AstroTurfed by the Koch Brothers, and that all these protests are AstroTurfed by other groups.
If there's evidence of that, then show me the evidence of that.
Let's not just throw out the idea that it's all AstroTurfed without a lot of evidence of that.
I haven't seen tons of evidence of that.
I've seen some evidence that some people are AstroTurfed, but the idea that everybody in all of these rooms is AstroTurfed, I don't think that's right.
It's difficult to mobilize that many people on the basis of paying them five bucks an hour.
Sean Spicer basically said this, though.
He came out and he said a lot of this is just manufactured.
I think there's a hybrid there.
I think some people are clearly upset.
But there is a bit of professional protest or manufactured base in there.
But obviously there are people that are upset.
But I also think that when you look at some of these districts and some of these things, it is not a representation of a member's district or an incident.
It is a loud group, small group of people disrupting something, in many cases, for media attention.
No offense.
It's just, I think that necessarily, just because they're loud, doesn't necessarily mean that there are many.
And I think in a lot of cases, that's what you're seeing.
And there's truth to some of that.
Just because a group is very loud doesn't mean there are a lot of them.
The alt-right is very loud, it doesn't mean they're a huge, huge force.
But it's a political mistake for spokespeople for presidents to go out there and say that when you can see a protest on TV, it's all fake, it's all astroturfed, it makes it look like a denial of reality.
I said that, by the way, way back when, okay?
Robert Gibbs was the press secretary under Barack Obama, and here's what he said about town hall protests directed against President Obama's Obamacare.
Is it your contention, is it the White House contention, that the anger that some members of Congress are experiencing at town hall meetings, especially over health care reform, is manufactured?
I think some of it is, yes.
In fact, I think you've had groups today, conservatives for patients' rights, that have bragged about organizing and manufacturing that anger.
Okay, so again, it was bad when Gibbs says it, I'm not a big fan.
When Spicer says it, just politically speaking, it's not smart.
And it's especially not smart because it plays directly into the hands of the protesters.
So, for example, here's one woman who comes out at one of these town hall events and she says, look, I'm not a paid protester, I'm here just to talk to you.
Thank you, Senator Cotton, for being here today.
First of all, I'm Mary Story from Fayetteville, and I am not a paid protester.
Mary, can I address that point that you just made?
I don't really care if anybody here is paid or not.
You're all Arkansans, and I'm glad to hear from you.
I know there's been some talk about that in the media.
Some politicians have said that.
I just want to say thank you to everyone for coming out tonight, whether you agree with me or disagree with me.
This is part of what our country is all about.
Okay, so, you know, good response here by Senator Cotton.
Much better response than the response you got from Sean Spicer.
But it does put people in an awkward position when you say, everybody here is paid, and somebody gets up and says, I'm not paid.
So, these town hall events, I want to talk a little bit more about them and what they're doing.
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Okay, so...
Back to these town hall events.
So these town hall events have basically become a way for the left to put sympathetic faces on TV to talk about how terrible it would be if they repeal Obamacare.
So here's an example of this.
A woman gets up and she's asking Tom Cotton about her husband and I just want to play this because I think that it's indicative of what exactly the media are trying to do and the sort of narratives that come into play here.
We're going Medicare my way!
Not your way.
My way.
I've got a husband dying and we can't afford it.
Let me tell you something.
If you can get us better coverage than this, go for it.
Let me tell you what we have.
Plus a lot of benefits that we need.
We have $29 per month for my husband.
Can you beat that? - Good.
Can you?
With all the congestive heart fares and open heart surgeries and his... We're trying.
$29 per month.
And he's a hard worker.
tried $29 per month and he's a hard worker.
Now, $39 for me.
Okay, so the reason that I play this is because I think this is what the media are looking for.
What they're looking for is exactly this.
They're looking for a woman to get up there and say, my husband's dying, keep Obamacare.
And, obviously, your heart goes out to the woman whose husband has a serious health problem.
Obviously.
Obviously.
But to pretend that she has extra moral authority because she's experiencing tragedy, it's just not true.
And it's something the left likes to play, but only selectively.
So, after 9-11, they said that the widows of 9-11, the Jersey Girls, as they called them, they said that they had Impeccable moral authority, because they had spouses who died on 9-11, therefore they should be making policy for the whole country.
And you heard this from Maureen Dowd, when, I think it was Code Pink, when Cindy Sheehan, who had a son who died in Iraq, when she started talking, Maureen Dowd immediately said that she had absolute moral authority, not just moral authority, God-like moral authority to determine what policy should be and what policy would be.
But when it comes to Pat Smith, I mean, Michelle Malkin makes this point, and she's right.
When it comes to Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, who was killed in Benghazi, she comes out and says, my son was killed in Benghazi, and that's a problem, and the entire media ignores her.
Where'd the moral authority go?
It's just gone.
Zoop!
Out.
Right?
No more moral authority.
It's been debunked.
And the reason for that is because the left likes to use tragedy as a club with which to beat its enemies, but it will not allow there to be a common rule about tragedy.
You know why?
Because tragedy can't be a common rule.
Because the vast majority of people in life have experienced some form of tragedy or another.
And it doesn't make them experts on the topic.
It doesn't mean that they should actually create the policy.
In fact, there's a good case to be made that if you've experienced tragedy on a particular score, you should be the person who's least likely to make the policy.
The logic being that if you're a doctor and your son comes into the waiting room with a cancerous tumor, you shouldn't be the one to operate on him.
You're too close to the situation.
Your empathy is skewing how you're actually going to treat the situation.
It's why we all take doctor's advice rather than researching it on our own and then just determining that we're going to do X, Y, or Z. Like, we do our own research, but then we combine that empathy with actual expertise and expert advice.
There's a guy named Professor Paul Bloom at Yale University.
He's written an entire book on the fact that empathy makes for bad policy.
He says, emotional empathy is a different matter when it comes to guiding our moral judgments and political decisions.
Recent research in neuroscience and psychology shows that empathy makes us biased, tribal, and often cruel.
Why?
Because if you have empathy for this lady right here, maybe you're being cruel to the millions of people who are forced to buy health insurance that they can't afford, or forced off of health insurance that they could afford.
And this is what Bernie Sanders said the other day.
He says, you know, what good is it to have the right to buy health care if you can't afford it?
And the answer is, number one, it is the market system that makes health care affordable.
But number two, it's a lot worse to me to have a system where you can afford health care and you're not allowed to get it because of Bernie Sanders.
That seems worse to me.
What Professor Bloom says is, empathy is activated when you think about a specific individual, the so-called identifiable victim effect, but it fails to take broader considerations into account.
Which is why people will give tons of money when they see a wounded baby sealed during a hurricane, but they won't give any money to hundreds of thousands of people being slaughtered in Syria, because one is an identifiable victim, and the other is not an identifiable victim.
The point being here that when you form policy for millions of people, for millions of people, then it is imperative that you put your empathy to the side so that you can make a good policy.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't be empathetic.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't feel for this lady.
But this idea that the left keeps trotting out victims, and then we're supposed to make policy based on the fact that certain policies have certain effect, but the statistical impact is either small or is balanced out by other factors, That's really a bad way to make policy, but this is what the left is trotting out.
In clip 16, we get this from another woman.
She does the same sort of thing.
My family has been in the Ozarks since the 1800s.
We are historically a Republican family.
We're a farming family.
We're an NRA family.
We're an Army family.
Aside from inheriting their patriotism and their work ethic, I unfortunately inherited an incurable genetic connective tissue disorder.
I qualify for Medicare, but unfortunately it's useless for me, since only two of my doctors, who are the only doctors in over a 500-mile radius who are familiar with my condition, accept Medicare.
Without the coverage for pre-existing conditions, I will die.
Will you commit to replacements in the same way that you have committed to the repeal?
Thank you, Karen.
Obviously, the zoo, and she gets a standing ovation for the question.
Not even for the answer, right?
Just for the question.
And again, the idea is that her suffering confers a certain level of value to her opinion.
Again, you have to feel awful for this person.
You have to feel terrible for this person.
And I promise you that if she started a charity fund, people would raise tons of money for her because, again, that identifiable victim effect means that our empathy for her means that we would help her out.
But shifting, crafting a broad public policy around one person and their suffering and their tragedy is just not, it's just not good public policy.
It just isn't.
It just isn't.
So it's also worthwhile noting, by the way, that all these Republicans have already said that they want pre-existing conditions to be covered, which is something with which I disagree, because that doesn't actually look like insurance anymore.
But, you know, that's because I'm talking about broad public policy, not about having to win re-election when you've got these sort of sympathetic stories being trotted out on a routine basis.
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You ever been to Mexico?
Looks just like this.
Same land, same sky.
Everybody wants to be here.
You ever wonder about that?
Over 1,500 in the last six weeks.
That's just on my land.
That's just the ones I've counted.
We ain't got no problems at all to hear the politician tell it.
I get it.
Times are hard in our community.
We all want a magical cure to our problems.
Found another dead kid on my land.
Third one this year.
Coyotes do pretty much as they please.
Did you hear about that mess up in Phoenix?
A whole family slaughtered by the cartels.
What am I supposed to do, Ed?
It's not my job to enforce federal law.
Then whose job is it?
Hell, ain't nobody gonna help us down here.
Not Uncle Sam, nobody.
We ain't nothing but a nuisance to them.
Except when it comes time to write the check.
Maybe it's time we helped ourselves.
If you hurt my family...
You should have told that boy to shoot me on sight.
Hello!
Hello!
Don't!
I was trying to avoid the O.K.
you'll kick around.
Why you didn't?
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