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April 24, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

20:21

Ep. 289 - When The Left Says Science, They Mean ‘Shut Up’

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	The Democrats have now spent two generations explaining that the true threat to free speech resides on the religious right, those fascistic John Lithgow from Footloose types who just can't wait to smash their Bibles in the faces of those who only want to read their lesbian pornography magazines.
	In reality, there is only one side of the American political debate fully committed to destroying the First Amendment, the left.
	On Thursday, former head of the Democratic National Committee and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean tweeted this, quote, hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment.
	Uh, no.
	This is ignorance of the highest order.
	Of course, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment.
	There are only a few categories of speech that aren't protected by the First Amendment.
	So-called fighting words, specific and deliberate calls to violence, child pornography, defamation.
	But there is no category of hate speech here for a simple reason.
	What you deem hate speech may be political speech you just don't like.
	In Canada, for example, the law has forced commentators like Mark Stein into court for criticizing Islam.
	This is a violation of freedom, and the First Amendment doesn't contemplate it.
	Using hate speech as a rubric for political speech you don't like is tyranny of thought.
	Dean's tweet came in response to a tweet from Stephen Greenhouse of the New York Times regarding Berkeley cancelling a speech from commentator Ann Coulter.
	Free speech defenders don't forget.
	Ann Coulter once said, My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.
	This may be dumb speech.
	It may be a bad joke.
	It may be offensive and nasty and terrible.
	It is also protected, as anyone with a modicum of First Amendment understanding knows.
	But the Democrats have long wanted to gut the First Amendment.
	They want to prohibit political spending from their opponents.
	They want to prohibit people from using biologically correct pronouns to describe transgender people.
	They want to ban hate speech.
	They hate the First Amendment because they see its protections as incompatible with the collective good.
	The collective good protecting non-offensive speech only.
	This is why we have a Constitution.
	It's why we have a First Amendment.
	And it's why Democrats certainly can't be trusted with protecting either of them.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Okay, so we have a lot to get to today.
	You should subscribe right now over at Daily Wire, because if you subscribe right now at Daily Wire, then you can be part of the mailbag.
	We will be doing live mailbag questions today on this special Friday edition of the Ben Shapiro Show.
	I don't know if I get to call it a special Friday edition, given the fact that I took two days off this week.
	But in any case, we will, and pretend that we're giving you some sort of favor.
	But I want to talk at length today about a video that's going around on Facebook that has made all sorts of waves.
	And this is this video of Neil deGrasse Tyson.
	He calls it the most important video that he has ever done.
	And this video is about 4 minutes and 30 seconds.
	We're going to watch the whole thing, but we're going to break it up and we're going to talk about it.
	The thing has 17 million views on Facebook as of now.
	It's probably approaching 18 now.
	It's all about science and the value of science.
	And I want to explain why I think Neil deGrasse Tyson is doing it so damaging and what exactly the left is doing with language like this.
	So here's Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about the most important video he has ever done.
	How did America rise up from a backwoods country to be one of the greatest nations the world has ever known?
	We pioneered industries.
	And all this required the greatest innovations in science and technology in the world.
	And so, science is a fundamental part of the country that we are.
	Pause it there for one second.
	So, here's what is interesting about what he's saying here.
	Number one, science does not define whether a nation is good or bad.
	Nazi Germany was actually pretty scientifically literate until they started banning Jews for Jewish science.
	They, I mean, they developed the V2 rocket, they developed all sorts of, they had several Nobel Prize winners, people who actually couldn't accept the Nobel Prize in science because the Germans didn't want them to.
	Science does not mean morality, but it is important to note one of the reasons that the United States has always been so scientifically advanced is because the United States was always a limited government place that didn't seek to suck resources out of the pocket of private industry and redistribute it.
	Redistributive nations have trouble with scientific patents.
	The United States does not.
	We've always been the world leader, or at least for the last century and a half, we've been the world leader in scientific patents.
	And that's also because there's a spirit of freedom that exists in the United States that does not exist in big government places elsewhere.
	DeGrasse Tyson won't talk about why it is that the United States is so scientifically advanced, he just sort of assumes it.
	He sort of assumes we're really scientifically advanced, but then he doesn't discuss why that is, because he's a big government guy who thinks there should be more social redistributionism, ignoring the fact that it is the lack of social redistributionism, it is the fact that there's a huge amount of private industry in the United States that has helped push science forward.
	He continues.
	But in this, the 21st century, when it comes time to make decisions about science, it seems to me people have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not.
	What is reliable, what is not reliable.
	What should you believe, what should you not believe.
	And when you have people who don't know much about science, standing in denial of it, and rising to power, That is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy.
	Let us demand that educators around America teach evolution not as fact, but as theory.
	Increasing number of parents showing skepticism about vaccinations.
	Voters have approved a ban on GMOs.
	Call climate change unproven science.
	Pause it there for a second.
	Okay, so here is the problem with some of what he is saying here.
	So, I agree that there are a lot of people who don't know what is true and what is not.
	I've spoken about this in a political sense.
	I speak about this with regard to facts all the time.
	You notice that he never talks about science that the left doesn't like, right?
	So he never talks about the science of abortion, right?
	He never talks about the science of child development.
	He never talks about the science regarding transgenderism and people who literally have the fantasy that people with chromosomes that say X and Y and are fully male can be female if we just give them hormone treatment and a few breast implants, right?
	He never talks about that.
	He always talks about climate change or evolution.
	But here is part of the problem.
	Neil deGrasse Tyson, just like a lot of people who's expert in his field, And I know there are people who have questioned his expertise, but he knows more science than I do, so he's more expert than I am, so I'm not going to go into that, but I will say this.
	Neil deGrasse Tyson is a guy who has posited that there ought to be a country called Rationalia, where people who agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson get to vote on rational bases alone.
	What he's really calling for here is a scientific oligarchy.
	He's not calling for a democracy.
	He's not worried about an informed democracy.
	He wants to be able to cram down his point of view on everybody else.
	So, take for example what Pence is saying here.
	Now, what Pence is saying here is that there should be, it's not forbidden for creationism to be taught in local schools.
	We shouldn't be saying that evolution is the only way to think about things.
	Godless evolution is the only way to think about things.
	I may disagree with Mike Pence.
	In fact, when it comes to the teaching of science and the teaching of creationism, I don't think they're incompatible, but I also am not sure that creationism should be taught in science class because I don't think it's a scientifically provable hypothesis.
	That being said, it is not my job to say to the American people that you on a local level cannot vote for how to raise your children.
	Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks that you should be able, he should be able, to tell you what your kids should learn and not learn.
	He's not worried about an informed democracy.
	Again, when Mike Pence says, let us demand that educators around America teach evolution, not as fact but as theory, what he's really saying is, let's stop using the federal government to cram down our version of what we think is true on local communities.
	I may believe in evolution the same way that DeGrasse Tyson does.
	But Pence is not wrong in the sense that it is a scientific theory, just as all theories are scientific theories.
	This has a lot of evidence to back it.
	It's a theory that is certainly not evidence-less, but the idea that schools should teach evolution exclusively in science and leave creationism for Bible class, I may agree with it.
	In a consenting democracy, people get to vote for what they want, and they may be informed about Neil deGrasse Tyson's opinions on evolution, and they can still deny it.
	Okay, even if they don't like what he's saying, they still have the right to deny it and they have the right to raise their children as they see fit on this score without reference to Neil deGrasse Tyson's opinions.
	Again, consent.
	He may not like it because he thinks that consent actually requires the children not learn, but it's that same consent that allows us to have a free country that allows for all the sorts of economic and scientific development that have occurred over time.
	Then he continues.
	That's not the country I remember growing up in.
	Not that we didn't have challenges.
	I'm old enough to remember the 60s and the 70s.
	We had a hot war and a cold war, the Civil Rights Movement, and all this was going on.
	But I don't remember any time where people were standing in denial of what science was.
	Stop it there for a second.
	So, number one, that is not true.
	There have always been people who have stood in denial to what science is.
	Again, transgenderism and abortion.
	He never mentions them.
	In the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich was considered, this professor from Stanford, was considered the breaking wave of science.
	And anyone who said there was not going to be mass starvation across the planet thanks to scarcity of resources, those people were considered, quote, denialists, right?
	They were denialists who didn't understand the catastrophe that was going to spring upon Earth's environment.
	It didn't happen.
	Not only did it not happen, resources got more plentiful, humans got smarter in how we were going to apply those resources, and now we have 7 billion people on the planet when 40 years ago we had half that.
	So the idea that we are going to... that, you know, science today is stopped.
	Like, science today is what it is, and in the 60s and 70s, you know, we were more respectful of science.
	I don't think we were more respectful of science in the 60s and 70s.
	I think that's nonsense.
	I don't see any evidence to support that whatsoever.
	I mean, there are people who are hippie flower children in the 60s and 70s.
	There are still hippie flower children today.
	There are people who deny scientific issues then.
	There are people who deny scientific issues today.
	That's just the way things are.
	But what he's trying to paint is this picture of science is going like this, and then Trump gets elected, and boom!
	Science hits the floor.
	Science is going like this.
	Obama was a scientific guy and then boom!
	Science just takes a plummet off the cliff.
	That is not accurate.
	It's just not accurate.
	And then he gets into his real point.
	And his real point is to conflate his political views about global warming with scientific evidence about global warming.
	And this is what the left wants to do here.
	This is why they call people denialists if they don't agree with their political solutions.
	So we're going to go through in a second what the science actually says about global warming.
	According to the IPCC, which is the left source.
	I mean, this is the source that they like the most.
	It's also probably the most credible source when it comes to climate science.
	In any case, here's what he has to say.
	And you can see him conflating his ideology with scientific fact here.
	The thing about science is that it is an entire exercise in finding what is true.
	Hypothesis, you test it, I get a result.
	A rival of mine double checks it, because they think I might be wrong.
	They perform an even better experiment than I did and they find out, hey, this experiment matches.
	Oh my gosh, we're onto something here.
	And out of this rises a new emergent truth.
	It does it better than anything else we have ever come up with as human beings.
	Stop it here.
	The amount of, the amount of ire in his voice, you know, people who are denying scientific truth, is there anyone out there who's denying the scientific basis for science?
	Is there anybody who, like, who's the actual anti-science person?
	They may disagree with the conclusion that you're drawing, but who's out there going, hypothesis being tested, bad?
	That's just terrible.
	But again, this is all designed to kind of raise your emotional needle, raise the emotional temperature, so then when he gets to his climate change point, you go, yeah, climate change!
	That's the thing that's super important and we should listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson's solutions.
	This is science.
	It's not something to toy with.
	It's not something to say, I choose not to believe equals MC squared.
	You don't have that option.
	When you have an established scientific emergent truth, it is true whether or not you believe in it.
	And the sooner you understand that, the faster we can get on with the political conversations about how to solve the problems that face us.
	Let's stop there for one second.
	Okay, so, there's one line there that I do take issue with.
	He says, this is science, it's not something to toy with, it's not something to say, I choose not to believe in EMC squared, E equals MC squared, you don't have that option.
	Well, frankly, you do have that option.
	It just makes you stupid.
	Right?
	And this is the case that he should be making.
	He should be making the case, not that you don't have that option, because that sounds fascistic.
	You do have that option.
	He should be making the convincing case as to why the science he is citing is important and true.
	And he should be putting that out there, as opposed to just railing against the wind about how there's all these people who don't like science.
	And here is the thing.
	Again, he says that, you know, that emergent truths are the most important thing.
	This is science.
	It's not something to toy with.
	You don't get to have an opinion that conflicts with science.
	Again, Half of the left's scientific opinions are false on transgenderism, on abortion.
	Those are the two most obvious cases.
	But even with regard to global warming.
	So, let's talk about what the established scientific consensus says.
	So, it is true.
	The established scientific consensus says that the Earth is warming.
	The established scientific consensus also says that human activity has been a large contributor to global warming.
	There's sort of deviation as to how much of global warming people attribute.
	Some people say 10%, some people say 30, some people say 50, but there's no question that there is some amount of human activity that has had an impact on the warming trend on the globe thanks to the greenhouse gas effect.
	The question is how large that effect is, and the question is what we are going to do about that.
	Okay, now all of that that I have just said is not denying the reality of global warming or human activity involving global warming, but he's not going to like what I say next.
	So Oren Kass, who's a columnist over at Foreign Policy Magazine, at the Manhattan Institute, he's written about this, and what he says is that the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from the UN, consistently project real but manageable costs over the next century.
	He says, quote, on scientific questions, the gold standard summary is the assessment report created every few years by thousands of scientists under the auspices of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
	By averaging widely varying projections and assuming no aggressive efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they estimate an increase of three to four degrees Celsius, which is five to seven degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2026.
	Okay?
	In a hundred years.
	The associated rise in sea levels over the course of the 21st century, according to the IPCC, is 0.6 meters, which is about two feet.
	Even stipulating that adaptations will displace hundreds of millions of people, that displacement will not happen all at once.
	Spread over decades, such a disruption would look little different from the status quo.
	And this is the point.
	This is the part where the alarmism that you're seeing in this video, this sort of alarm that science is being overridden, that people are ignoring science in favor of other things.
	Again, it's just not.
	The tone and tenor is so desperate in this video, and it's not really called for.
	So there are lots of solutions that people have proposed.
	The ones that he proposes are basically vast government regulations, international regulations that aren't going to be particularly effective, that destroy vast swaths of the global economy right now.
	Now, one of the things I presume that he would oppose is additional fracking, even though natural gas is significantly friendlier for greenhouse gas emissions, for carbon emissions, than, for example, coal.
	Coal is really not great for carbon emissions.
	Natural gas is much better.
	But I assume that he wouldn't be in favor of natural gas.
	He wants massive government subsidies for failed green energy projects.
	He wants massive tariffs and taxes on carbon emissions.
	Right?
	All of these things may not even be necessary, and again, we have to discuss whether they would do anything, and that's where there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty.
	So to pretend that science has now suggested a solution, or that science is very specific about the problem, is just not totally accurate.
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	Okay, so, back to this video.
	Here is finally what Neil deGrasse Tyson suggests about what his solutions would be on this global warming stuff.
	So once you understand that humans are warming the planet, you can then have a political conversation about that.
	You can say, well, are there carbon credits?
	Do we do this?
	Do we put a tariff?
	Do we fund?
	Do we subsidize?
	Those have political answers.
	And every minute, one is in denial.
	You are delaying the political solution that should have been established years ago.
	As a voter, as a citizen, scientific issues will come before you.
	And isn't it worth it to say, all right, let me at least become scientifically literate so that I can think about these issues and act intelligently upon them?
	Recognize what science is and allow it to be what it can and should be in the service of civilization.
	And what I love about this is that you see all these beautiful pictures of the American cities at night.
	You see the electricity throughout the American cities.
	What he doesn't say is that his solutions on global warming would likely shut down some of those cities.
	You see some of the electricity go out.
	It's this idea that the left likes to put out there that they are just pro-science and you are just anti-science if you disagree with their solutions.
	That's the problem.
	I can agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson on evolution.
	I can agree with Neil deGrasse Tyson That the world is warming and that human activity has something to do with that.
	I don't have to agree on the solutions that he proposes, but if I don't agree on the solutions that he proposes, I assume he'll call me a denialist because obviously if I knew science, then I would agree with him.
	Okay, so I want to talk about President Trump and healthcare shape-up.
	What exactly is happening there?
	Does it look like that's going to be revived on taxes?
	What's happening there as well?
	Plus, Sarah Palin and Ted Nugent go to the White House.
	How big a deal is it?
	And we'll do the mailbag, but you have to go over to DailyWire.com for all of that.
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