All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 11, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
41:32
Is It The Media’s Job To Scare People? | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 359
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Is the media deliberately scaring people about North Korea?
Are Republicans really willing to cancel the 2020 election?
And we're about to have on the famous, infamous, most important guy in America today, James Damore, the Google Memo guy, in just a second.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, we're all waiting with bated breath to talk to James DeMorche.
He's sitting right here on the Skype, so we're going to be talking to him momentarily.
We just want to jump right into it because I know that our audience has been waiting with bated breath ever since I announced this morning on Twitter that we would be having on the author of the Google Memo, the infamous Google Memo, the most important document since the Magna Carta, James Damore, is joining us right now.
He, of course, was a senior engineer at Google until he made the mistake of penning an eminently correct scientific treatise on the differences between men and women and why that may contribute in part to discrepancies in terms of the levels of employment and wages at Google between women and men.
And then, of course, Google found out about his wrong think, and he was fired.
James, thanks so much for joining the program.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Okay, so let me just jump right in here.
And I want to ask you to start.
You've alleged that there's actually some illegal activity going on at Google, because that's why, presumably, they should be in trouble for firing you, because it's an at-will state.
California's an at-will state.
Anybody can be fired for any reason.
But, according to the National Labor Relations Board, you cannot be fired if you're whistleblowing.
So, So what is the purported illegal activity that's going on at Google that you are attempting to expose?
So part of it is that They treat people differently in the hiring process depending on what their race or gender is.
And some teams will preferentially choose certain groups.
Okay, so you've also said that they have these sort of super secret diversity sessions in which they discuss all of this.
Can you take us inside one of those?
What does that look like from the inside?
It's just a group of all these people talking about the benefits of diversity and how much they love diversity and all the sexism and racism that happens and how we have to try to fix that.
Okay, we know that Google has spent some 265 million dollars apparently trying to increase their diversity ratios, and this of course has been a wild fail.
Well, I've read your memo at least three times now because I just want to make sure I'm not crazy.
Because if you watch the media coverage of your memo, it is not in any way related to the actual content of the memo.
The media has made a bunch of different claims about the memo.
They've said that you were saying in the memo that women are biologically unfit for tech.
That was a chyron on CNN.
Were you making the claim, James Damore?
Google Memo Guy, were you making the claim that women are biologically unfit for the tech industry?
No, I was just trying to explain why we see a disparity in the population of people that are interested in working in tech.
And you can see that right there.
I mean, I'm quoting your memo back to you here, but it says, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways so that these differences are just.
I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women, women differ in part due to biological causes.
This has been translated by the left into you are saying that women ought not work in tech or they're unqualified for tech.
You weren't even saying when you have an entire section of your memo Promoting the idea that there should be more women in tech, and you offered a bunch of ways that you think that the tech community could be made more welcoming to women.
So are you in favor of more women in tech?
Yeah, I mean, I like women, right?
And if we're in general just trying to get more people interested in tech, then that would be one way to do it.
So I want to talk to you a little bit about something that the YouTube CEO, a woman named Susan Wojcicki, that she wrote this morning over at Forbes.
She wrote a piece at Forbes about the horrors of your memo, and how they'd obviously emotionally crippled her young daughter, who apparently came up to her and said, Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?
Now, it seems to me that that was not exactly the claim you were making.
Is it true there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?
What's your response to the YouTube CEO?
Well, I mean, to me, at least, it felt a lot like what Piers Morgan was trying to do to you on his show by taking a little kid out and saying, oh, aren't you sorry for him?
Right?
I mean, they're just trying to guilt me.
So I do want to ask you about what the political representation is like inside Google, because there was a poll, sort of an informal poll, that came out this morning.
Uh, that said that 56% of people who were responding to this online poll who are working at Google said that they were against your firing.
Um, number one, you know, are there a lot of people inside Google who have been expressing support for you?
Yeah.
Since I've wrote it, there have been many people that privately messaged me and said, yeah, I support you.
I agree.
This is a real problem.
Do you think that Google is biasing their search results in the way they do business toward the left?
Do you think that how they're treating you is reflective of how they do business as a company?
I don't know about biasing search results, but they may definitely be biasing who they do business with.
Okay, so, and inside the company itself, do you think that there is an obvious political preference for, you know, folks on the left?
You know, if you had written a memo about how Black Lives Matter was the cause of the day, and that really mattered more than anything else.
I mean, there are all these sort of internal Google chats, apparently, that you're a part of, these Google message boards.
Have you ever seen stuff like that?
Politically oriented material toward the left, and has that ever been a problem for anyone?
Yeah, so you can openly shame white people or all men, and we do this in our company-wide meetings.
So, yeah, there's definitely a bias towards certain movements.
We had a whole TGIF that was for the Black Lives Matter movement.
And can you give me some example?
I mean, you say you have company-wide meetings where people are shamed.
What does that sound like?
Can you give me an example of some stuff that people have said?
So one example was just that someone wrote a question, and then it had something to do with gender.
She was a woman.
And out of 300 votes, 50 of them were downvoted.
And she was complaining about how she didn't feel included at Google because she got one-sixth of them downvotes.
And there were many other just random examples.
Okay, so, with all of this said, number one, I think you have a lot of broad public support, obviously, but what do you think this says about the left's views of science?
Because there's an article in Slate, for example, today saying science is bad now.
We've now found that science is bad.
Susan, watch Kiki as I say, she said at the very end of her screed, she said that these are questions that shouldn't even be asked.
This is a direct quote from her piece at Forbes today.
For example, for instance, what if we replace the word women in the memo with another group?
What if the memo said that biological differences amongst black, hispanic, or LGBTQ employees explain their underrepresentation in tech and leadership roles?
Would some people still be discussing the merit of the memo's arguments or would there be a universal call for swift action against its author?
What do you make of the left essentially saying that questions can never be asked about topics where the answer may not favor what the left wishes it to say?
They're at least just putting their ideology before truth in these cases.
And she's just trying to guilt me by association with Nazis or something.
And when one group is just trying to guilt you and call you names, and the other is actually using evidence and science, you really know which side is actually seeking truth.
And this, I think, is one of the points that is why this story has captured the imagination is because the memo itself is really moderate in tone and tenor.
Even people like Kirsten Powers, who are on the left, have said they really don't see what the big problem here is or why people are going nuts over it.
And yet you step out of line at a company like Google.
And the reason people are freaked out about this is obviously Google is a super powerful company, but this happens inside Hollywood all the time.
This happens inside journalistic institutions all the time, obviously.
So, James Damore, Google Memo guy, what comes next for you?
I've offered you off the air, I offered you a columnist gig to write about STEM issues, particularly with regard to differences between men and women and social science data and all of this, but I assume that you have job offers that are coming in from a wide variety of sources.
What comes next for you now that Google is no longer in your future?
Yeah, I'm still evaluating all my options.
It's been a really busy past few days.
And I've heard also that you were offered a position by WikiLeaks.
I would urge you not to take that.
I think that is probably a bad career move, but it's up to you.
You're a free man.
So, well, thank you for writing this memo, because I think obviously when more truth is promulgated, it's a better country.
And please keep us updated as far as your own lawsuit.
Is that actually going to happen, or is that just a possibility at this point, a lawsuit against Google?
Yeah, it's a possibility.
I'm definitely pursuing it, though.
Okay, so keep us updated on that, and obviously we are rooting for you as far as the whistleblowing aspect of this, and please keep writing true things even though there's pretty tremendous blowback.
Thanks so much for joining the show, I really appreciate it.
Alright, thanks.
Thanks.
That's James Damore.
He's the senior engineer at Google who penned that diversity memo regarding why Google should change its practices if it wants to attract more women, actually.
And he got shellacked for it by the left and fired from Google for that.
James Damore, senior engineer at Google.
Thanks so much.
In other news, I want to talk about what's going on with North Korea because obviously this continues to unfold.
Let's start with Brian Williams.
So Brian Williams, who should not be a member of the media after repeatedly lying about his own past over and over and over.
Brian Williams was on MSNBC last night where he is still respected because it's MSNBC.
And Brian Williams said that the reason that the media are covering North Korea in such insane terms is because it is their job to scare people.
Now, before we get to Brian Williams on this, I do want to say that I think that a lot of this is overblown.
North Korea has been pursuing nuclear weapons for a long time.
They've had nuclear weapons for a long time.
Obviously, it's not good if an ICBM is capable of reaching the United States, but mutually assured destruction is still a thing, and Kim Jong-un or his successors They would be fools, absolute fools, if they were to try and attack the United States.
We would wipe them off the face of the earth in no time flat.
I mean, legitimately.
If they fired a nuke at us, they would be toast.
Their country would be a sea of glass within moments.
I mean, this is not even talking about the USSR, right?
The fact is that even if their missile hit here, it would do, you know, awful, awful damage.
That would be terrible.
But we would survive it, and then we would nuke the living crap out of them, and that would be the end of that.
So, mutually assured destruction is still a thing.
South Korea, it's a little bit It's a little bit more tenuous because North Korea has been pursuing violent incidents against South Korea for years and years and years and years.
They sank a South Korean ship a few years back.
They killed a member of the North Korean leader's family with VX gas at nerve gas at an airport.
So if you're South Korea, mutually assured destruction actually doesn't do the trick for you because you always have to fear that there's going to be a conventional war under the umbrella of the mutually assured destruction with the North Koreans.
But, for the United States, are we deeply worried that they're going to destroy us?
No, we're not deeply worried they're going to destroy us.
I'm not losing a lot of sleep over the possibility that LA is going to be destroyed, even though we are under the umbrella of the North Korean nuclear missile.
I'm really, like, really, I think that a lot of this is hyped to the extreme.
But Brian Williams says that the media have a duty to hype this to the extreme.
Our job tonight actually is to scare people to death on this subject so the talk isn't as free as it is about a preemptive or surgical military strike.
Okay, why is it their job to scare people to death?
And this is the problem with the media.
The media sees it as their job to push you into a certain position.
They see it as their job to evoke a certain emotional response in you.
And it's something that we ought to keep in mind when we look at media coverage of world events.
For many members of the media, it is not just about covering the events that are important to you.
It is about trying to cover the events so as to evoke an emotional response in a particular way.
Another example of this today on an unrelated topic.
So there's a poll that lefties are passing around from the Washington Post that says 52% Okay, so you're getting a lot of think pieces from the left. so you're getting a lot of think pieces from the
Speaking of the media, though, pushing people to an emotional response, it's important to know how they got this particular result.
This was a push poll by the Washington Post.
First, it asked respondents if voter fraud was real.
Then it asked them...
If they thought that it occurred, and if Trump won the popular vote, and then finally it asked them, if Trump said that it occurred, would they be in favor of postponing the election?
So are these good results?
No, they're not good results.
But is it true that more than half of Republicans would be fine with postponing the 2020 election?
I highly, highly doubt it.
Also important to recognize that these sort of push polls exist from both sides.
You know, in 2016, there was a poll from WPA Research that found that two-thirds of Democrats would take an unconstitutional third Obama term Over Hillary Clinton.
A poll on November 14 from The Economist found that 39% of Democrats wish the Constitution would be changed to that purpose.
So, a couple of lessons from these things.
First lesson is, most people only like the rules if they benefit them.
They only like the elections every four years if their guy's not in power.
But, the more important thing is that the media attempt to gain a particular headline and very often They are attempting to get to that headline via the questions they ask.
And you can see it even, look, in the interviews that I do, obviously when I ask a question, I'm expecting a particular response from people.
When I talk to James Damore, I'm questioning him in a way that I think is important, but obviously the responses that he gives are ones that I'm looking for, right?
I mean, I'm not questioning him as a feminist would, who's looking for a different response from James Damore.
You know, that's the way the media works, and so you should always take that into account When you look at the coverage of North Korea.
So the media yesterday was going nuts over Trump's apparently provocative threats.
Fire and the fury, the fury and the fire, the power, the glory, the fury, fire, power, glory, huge emissaries, bands of evil, right?
They were going nuts over Trump's over to the top language.
But the reality is, does any of that make a huge difference in all of this?
Not really.
Okay, General James Mattis came out, Mad Dog Mattis came out yesterday, and what he said was, quote, The United States and our allies have the demonstrated capabilities and unquestionable commitment to defend ourselves from an attack.
Kim Jong-un should take heed of the UN Security Council's unified voice and statements from governments the world over who agree the DPRK, that's Democratic People's Republic of Korea, poses a threat to global security and stability.
The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The DPRK should cease any considerations of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.
That's pretty harsh language from Mattis, but I don't see the media losing their minds over that.
Back, I think it was last year or a couple of years ago, Barack Obama threatened to destroy North Korea.
So the media obviously are attempting to evoke fear in Americans.
That Trump's precipitous nature will lead to a nuclear exchange.
That's not what's going to happen here.
It's not what's going to happen here.
And North Korea is basically, they understand that they're in a rhetorical pissing match now with Trump.
And so there's a statement released by the North Korean military in which they basically called Trump a load of nonsense.
They said that his threat was a quote-unquote load of nonsense.
And they called him a guy bereft of reason.
So you basically have Trump and the leader of North Korea in a Twitter fight, but is this going to devolve into nuclear war?
I really don't think so.
And here's the fact, okay?
The fact is that people who are living really under the threat of North Korea are happy that the United States is taking a pretty militant position on all of this.
Guam, which was a nation that was threatened by North Korea in response to Trump's threat, the governor of Guam, he likes Trump.
I mean, here he is praising Trump.
So do you think that the president's remarks are getting to the heart of the problem, no longer strategic patience, and does that play to solving this problem in the big picture?
As far as I'm concerned, as an American citizen, I want a president that says that if any nation such as North Korea attacks Guam, attacks Honolulu, attacks the West Coast, that they will be met with hell and fury.
What I'm concerned about is if a US senator says initiate an attack and causing a war and remembering that there are there in the Mariana Islands, this is American sovereign style.
This is 600 mile archipelago of islands similar to Hawaii, where there are over 200,000 American citizens.
Right.
So it's important that as we make decisions, that those folks that are in a position of leadership, that they understand to that war is the last Right.
option because not only will tens of thousands american military forces and dependents uh be affected uh by a regional war right but because the western pacific has american soil in it then a couple hundred thousand americans uh could get caught uh in the crosshairs so i think it's important to be very strong right at the same time be calm and i think everybody is on board with this i
I don't think Trump is precipitously into launching nuclear war, but a lot of this is the Democrats playing politics with all of this.
A lot of this is the Democrats attempting to play politics with national security and basically suggest that Trump is a madman who is going to get us into a nuclear war.
An MSCBC military analyst essentially said this.
He said if Trump ordered a nuclear launch, Mattis would defy it because obviously Trump is crazy.
This would be clip four.
What if he orders a nuclear strike?
I mean, my understanding from General Hayden in public comments is that that's a pretty quick timeframe between the command.
Yeah, but I'll tell you.
You think Mattis would defy an order?
Yeah, I think he would.
Don't forget the people who are down.
He'd say, I'm not going to, I'm not doing it.
Okay.
So this is the narrative the media is creating is that Trump is a nutcase and he's going to order a nuclear launch for no apparent reason.
Again, I've seen no evidence of this on the international scale from President Trump, this sort of precipitous action.
Even on domestic policy, Trump will fire off a tweet, but the actions that he's taking are really not particularly precipitous.
The only precipitous action that you can say that Trump has really taken was his transgender ban in the military tweets, and even those are not being implemented by the Pentagon because there was no follow-up.
So, you know, the business of American government does not work quite as smoothly as people think.
Now there's this sort of Old Cold War mentality that we're five seconds away from launching nuclear war I don't think that's right And I do think that the media are attempting to twist you into knots make you feel really uncomfortable make you feel like we're a second away from being obliterated You know we also don't know what nuclear we all we also know military options are on the table I mean, we don't.
I've been saying this now for weeks, okay?
I don't know as much as the Department of Defense knows about what military options are on the table to take out the Kim regime.
But I promise you that the last thing that anyone wants, including President Trump, is a nuclear exchange.
As President Trump said during the campaign, there's nothing like nuclear.
Nothing like it.
It's just the biggest and the hugest.
Do you remember when he said that?
He actually said that during a debate, which is pretty incredible.
So, all of that said, Don't be deeply worried.
Don't worry so much.
Everything will be okay.
You know, worry in the sense that we should come up with a solution to North Korea, but don't worry that we're five seconds away from a nuclear exchange.
We're not.
Okay, so, before I go any further, I want to talk about Trump's conflict with Mitch McConnell.
I also really want to get to some things I like, things I hate, and the big idea.
Today, I really want to get to the big idea because I think there's some important stuff here.
There is a bit of a conflict breaking out now between President Trump and Mitch McConnell, and that's not because Trump and McConnell disagree on policy as much as it is because Trump doesn't like when people insult him.
And this is my biggest problem with Trump attacking McConnell.
If you want to attack McConnell on policy, I'm totally fine with that.
McConnell has not been an effective Senate Majority Leader thus far, clearly.
If you're just attacking McConnell because you're mad at him, then that's a whole different story.
You know, it seems that he's attacking McConnell because he's mad at him, not on policy.
If you're really mad at McConnell on policy, he wouldn't be backing Luther Strange in Alabama, who's sort of a moderate Republican who backs McConnell's play, over a couple of other candidates like Roy Moore in Alabama.
So, what this really says to me is that Trump is still being driven by personal animus for particular political figures, not being driven by policy considerations, which is a problem, right?
I want to see the policy, I don't care about the personal animus.
I don't care about Trump's personal issues.
I don't care that Trump likes McConnell.
That makes no difference to me.
It makes a difference to me whether we get the policies that I would like to see.
And that's what should make a difference to you.
You shouldn't be upset if Trump is mad at McConnell or McConnell's upset at Trump.
Who cares?
It isn't a soap opera.
You should be much more upset if you're not getting the policies that were promised to you.
So Trump was ripping McConnell on Twitter.
It all started because McConnell stated at some Rotary Club meeting that Trump had excessive expectations of what the Senate could do.
The storyline is that we haven't done much is because In part, the President and others have set these early timelines about things need to be done by a certain point.
Now, our new President has, of course, not been in this line of work before.
And I think had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process.
And so, part of the reason I think people feel like we're underperforming is because Okay, so McConnell is not totally wrong on this.
unrelated to the reality of the complexity of legislating may not have been fully understood.
And of course, our political adversaries would love to say that anytime.
Okay, so McConnell is not totally wrong on this.
I mean, the fact is that President Trump doesn't understand how the vagaries of the Senate work, and so he's upset with it.
Trump, but Trump is right when he says this to McConnell.
So here he tweets back at McConnell, and he tweets, Senator Mitch McConnell said I had excessive expectations, but I don't think so.
After seven years of hearing repeal and replace, why not done?
Fair question.
Trump should ask himself that because he wasn't particularly active, as we pointed out at the time, in pushing this thing beyond the last couple of weeks and didn't understand the policy.
But, you know, that's not a wrong demand.
I would hope that Trump's personal animus for Mitch McConnell turns into him actually demanding policies that I like from Mitch McConnell and McConnell caving.
That's what I would like to see.
But as even Laura Ingraham is noting, you know, it's hard for Trump to be ripping McConnell at the same time he's providing McConnell with more senators who agree with McConnell.
President Trump came out and endorsed Luther Strange in that Alabama special election for Jeff Sessions' seat.
Now, Luther Strange was appointed, so he's the incumbent for the time being.
But there's all these other people running, including Mo Brooks and Judge Roy Moore is running.
And so they're probably going to have to have a runoff because no one will get a majority.
But Donald Trump came out and endorsed the incumbent, more of an establishment, Uh, guy, Luther Strange, and that is very interesting because that's Mitch McConnell's favorite pick.
Right, and if Lord Enron is acknowledging this, this is obviously true.
So, if Trump is going to go after members of the Republican Party, let's do it on the basis of policy.
What I don't want, and what I sort of see happening, which is not particularly encouraging to me, is that President Trump is mad at leaders of the Republican Party, and you could easily see Chuck Schumer making an overture to him after the 2018 election, and Trump swiveling left in order to work with people who are praising him more fulsomely.
And gaining praise from the New York Times in the process.
That's the scary part of all of this in terms of policy.
Okay, I want to get to things I like and things I hate in The Big Idea, but before we do all that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
We bring you the greatest of content.
Okay, $9.99 a month means that not only do you get to see this most watched and this most listened to news and politics podcast in the country according to iTunes, we're still number two to Oprah, people.
We're still number two to Oprah.
Oprah Delenda asked.
She must be defeated.
So go and leave a review and subscribe.
But not only do you get our show when you subscribe for $9.99 a month over at dailywire.com, you also get Andrew Klavan's show, which is surging up the iTunes charts.
You get Michael Knowles' show live.
You get the whole thing live.
You get to be part of their mailbag.
You get to be part of my mailbag.
We're doing that tomorrow.
So you get all of that.
And if you get an annual subscription, you get this.
The very finest of tumblers.
Left as tears.
Hot or cold.
The Tumblr, incomparable, indescribable, until you hold it in your hands.
You will never be able to understand the glories of it.
And all it will cost you is $99 annual membership, which comes along with all the other great things I just told you about.
Again, if you just want to listen later, go over to iTunes or SoundCloud, leave us a review.
We definitely appreciate it.
We are the top news and politics podcast in America.
Okay, so let's do some things I like and some things I hate and the big ideas.
So Thursdays are our Big Idea Day here at the Ben Shapiro Show.
So let's first start with things I like.
So, you know, we're talking about communism and I thought that it would be worthwhile to recommend a book about North Korea in case you are interested in what North Korea is actually like today.
The book is by Andrei Lankov and it's called The Real North Korea Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia.
And it's a fascinating book because it doesn't try to paint An excessively dark picture of North Korea while not ignoring the problems in North Korea.
Basically it says that it is a stunted rump state that is run in the most horrific dictatorial way and that manifests more in the everyday lives of North Koreans than it even does in sort of our horror imaginations of gulags and people being shot en masse.
That's less what's happening than just the gradual degradation of a great people.
And the real North Korea, Andrei Lankov, fully worth reading.
I think a fair and honest, relatively objective look at what North Korea is like today.
It is a stain on the global, on the so-called global community that doesn't really exist.
It's a stain on the UN, certainly, that North Korea has continued to terrorize its people for more than half a century at this point, just as it's a stain on the international community that Cuba continues to be a dictatorial backwater.
It's really It's really quite horrifying.
If there were a way to get rid of the Kim regime, I'm all for it.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, this exchange is making the rounds on the interwebs.
It is an amazing exchange.
James Franco, the actor, was talking with this Princeton professor, and the issue of abortion came up.
Now, this Princeton professor, her name is Elliot Michelson.
And she is discussing her support for early-stage abortion and why she believes nothing morally bad happens when it occurs.
And even James Franco is sitting there going, what you're saying makes no sense to me.
Okay?
And James Franco, I cannot imagine, is pro-life.
But even he is looking at her and going, this doesn't make sense what you are saying.
Namely, because what the left says with regard to abortion doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of moral sense.
Here's a bit of the exchange.
In some of my work, I defend a liberal position about early abortion.
So I defend the view that there's nothing morally bad about early abortion.
So a lot of people think, well, it's permissible to have an abortion, but something bad happens when the fetus dies.
And I think if a fetus hasn't ever been conscious, it hasn't ever had any experiences, and we abort it at that stage, that actually nothing morally bad happens.
And this view might seem unattractive, because it might seem that it dictates a cold attitude towards all early fetuses.
But what I think is that actually, among early fetuses, There are two very different kinds of beings.
So, James, when you were an early fetus, and Elliot, when you were an early fetus, all of us, I think that we already did have moral status then.
But we had moral status in virtue of our futures, in virtue of the fact that we were the beginning stages of persons.
But some early fetuses will die in early in pregnancy, either due to abortion or miscarriage.
And in my view, that's a very different kind of entity.
That's something that doesn't have a future as a person, and it doesn't have moral status.
Okay, and James Franco goes, can't you only judge that in hindsight?
When James Frankel is wrecking you on abortion, and you're a professor at Princeton, you should lose your job.
Okay, like that is the worst argument in favor of early stage abortion I've ever heard.
The left, when they make the argument for early stage abortion, what they say is that this is not a fully formed human life.
Like, that's actually an argument, okay?
That it has not reached the stage of life at which we care.
It's not a good argument, right?
It's not an argument I agree with, because potential life is still potential life.
And the question as to what level of potential life is necessary in order for you not to be able to kill it, that's a pretty dicey question morally.
Because they're children who are born with disabilities.
You get to kill them because they don't have a lot of potential to grow into full human beings, or fully functional human beings.
This is why the abortion argument doesn't work.
But the argument she's making is so nonsensical that James Frankel absolutely wrecks her unconsciously.
Without even thinking about it, he says, if a woman decides to have an abortion with an early fetus, just that act or that intention negates the moral status of that early fetus, just because if she goes out and has an abortion, it's pretty certain it's not going to become a person.
And this professor just struggles and struggles and struggles and struggles as well as she should.
Again, this lady, this lady, was a, she's a member of the, of the, she has a philosophy, a PhD in philosophy from MIT, a bachelor's from Harvard.
Her father was a member of the Princeton Philosophy Department faculty.
She's part of the Princeton Philosophy Department faculty.
And she teaches courses called Designing Life, The Ethics of Creation and Its Control, and Morality in the Face of Moral Ignorance.
Okay, this lady should not be able to teach a course called Morality in the Face of Moral Ignorance when James Franco, again, James Franco, a guy who looks like he maybe has seven brain cells that he can rub together, is wrecking her unconsciously on abortion.
Like when even James Franco's going, uh, this doesn't make a lot of sense to me because it makes no sense.
Wow.
Wow.
So well done, Princeton.
Hiring only the best.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so the first thing that I hate, Skip Bayless, who has made a living saying inane things on sports channels for a long time.
He used to be on ESPN, now he's on Fox Sports 1, I believe.
And he says that Colin Kaepernick not getting a job is a full-on disgrace.
Black players should boycott games in the NFL if Colin Kaepernick, a terrible quarterback, does not get a job.
It's an easy cop-out to say it's because of the flag, and it's not because the subject that he is protesting makes you uncomfortable.
But you know what, Joe?
Guess what they used to do, Skip?
The NFL used to charge the military to have the servicemen walk out on the field.
Terrible.
It wasn't until the whistle got uncovered that they were charging that they gave the money back.
So they really love the military, but if you want to walk on our field... I'm going to say one last thing.
If the black players would unite, And say we will not play game one this year.
I promise you it would have impact if we get something done.
Oh yeah.
Oh absolutely.
Of course it would be.
Skip one hundred percent.
Earth shattering.
Just earth shattering.
It'll be unbelievable.
It'll be huge.
It'll be incredible.
No.
Okay?
No.
That's not correct.
Okay?
The fact is all that will happen is that people will stop actually going to games because people will assume that we are now going to use the NFL as a cram down for leftist politics.
Viewership dropped relatively dramatically last year.
Thanks in large part to Colin Kaepernick and other players protesting the national anthem.
You do this for Colin Kaepernick and you reinvigorate this particular debate.
I promise you the NFL is going to lose ratings as well it should because when I watch sports I don't want to hear about how America is racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic.
I just want to watch sports, particularly when a lot of the best players in the sport are black.
I mean, just enough is enough.
But there is a leftist pandering element that has really gone over the top.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So Bernie Sanders cut a commercial, and this just demonstrates how far left the left wing has moved.
Bernie Sanders cut a commercial about Medicare for All.
Look who he is using as a sort of moral guidepost in discussing Medicare for All.
Number two.
Bernie Sanders is the only one who's been advocating for single-payer.
Single-payer insurance, Medicare for All, the kind that Canadians have, the kind that civilized democracy on the planet has out.
What that would do is free people up to have more mobility in terms of changing jobs, in terms of not worrying about illness, putting them into bankruptcy, and all those types of situations that we're in now.
And the only way to do that is through a single-payer system.
Congratulations!
Thank you.
I just want to say as an election year... Win Butler!
Singer, Arcade Fire.
We're talking about celebrity stuff, not politics.
Congratulations on your MVP!
Are we now at the point where the country does need to think about some sort of single-payer system?
With my limited knowledge... Warren Buffett.
Okay, so it's like this group of deplorables who have decided that single-payer is just grand and great.
Do any of these people actually use single-payer?
Of course not.
All of these people are extraordinarily wealthy.
All of them pay for their own insurance.
All of them have top-notch insurance.
Single-payer health care, this idea of Medicare for all.
Okay, there have been studies that have been done that show that on 16 out of 40 health measurements, Medicare provides less than two-thirds of the people on Medicare with satisfactory results on 16 out of 40 measures.
Medicare is wildly expensive.
It has blown out the budget of the federal government to a tremendous extent.
It's gonna continue to blow out the budget to a tremendous extent.
Doctors are overburdened.
They're not taking a lot of Medicare patients.
They won't take new Medicare patients.
Even the idea that you're going to purchase supplementary insurance, that's only going to last if there are doctors who take the supplementary insurance plus the Medicare, and a lot of doctors are saying, I'm not even going to work in the Medicare system because the reimbursement rates are too low.
So, no, none of this makes any sense, but it just demonstrates the coalition of the far left is growing, but it's still reliant on these tentpoles of insanity, people like Bernie Sanders.
So now I want to talk about the big idea.
I want to talk about this last week a little bit, and we ran out of time on it, but there's this idea that you see sometimes discussed in philosophical circles, Athens versus Jerusalem.
The idea that Western civilization is built on these twin poles, Athens and Jerusalem.
Athens being the idea of Greek reason, people like Plato and Aristotle and Socrates.
Morons.
Sorry.
Princess Bride.
And then the other poll would be Jerusalem, that poll being the idea of faith.
So faith and reason are the twin pillars of American society.
What you're watching right now in action, and it's really fascinating, is that if one of those polls falls, both of the polls fall.
Okay, if reason falls, then religion can't last on its own, and if religion falls, then reason can't last on its own.
We now live in a secular society where Jerusalem has largely fallen, where people have decided that faith in a creator who cares about you, cares what you do morally, and has created a rational system capable of our interpretation because we're human beings made in his image.
As that pole has fallen in esteem in American circles, in secular circles, then science is the next thing to fall.
Because without the idea of a rational universe, and a rational creator, and a rationally articulable system, and a people who are capable of grasping huge swaths of that system, You end up with people basically saying that science should no longer be a thing.
So Slate has an article out today talking about how science is bad, right?
Science is actively bad because it creates this idea that science is going to govern all of us and that there are objective standards of right and wrong, or more importantly, objective standards of true and false.
Science can't tell you right and wrong, but science should be able to tell you true and false in scientific terms.
The left is saying, science can't even do that anymore.
Science can't even do that, because we live in a universe where cause and effect aren't really things, they're just things that we perceive to be.
That science is all about the idea of hypotheses being verified, but those hypotheses depend on the ideas that come out of biased brains, and so there's no way to really get to a scientific truth.
And so you're seeing the left do this because the left is looking at science and they're saying science is coming up with results that we don't like, so science itself should be undermined.
Without the faith in a rational creator and a rational universe capable of our penetration, it's very difficult to make the case that science ought to be the gold standard in terms of how we live.
Beyond that, Religion creates the notion of free will and personal responsibility.
How do you build a society along those lines, on scientific lines, if you don't believe in any of those things?
The tragedy of Western civilization is that if you look back at Aristotle, Aristotle and Plato were attempting to grasp at the infinite, right?
When they talk about Plato's cave, this idea that That we are all sitting in a cave and we see shadows on the wall, but there's something out there that we can't fully grasp, but we can sort of grasp the shadows, but we're grasping in darkness.
You know, that idea brought to fruition by Aristotle in the idea of the forms.
There's a reason that religion, when Aristotle's work was rediscovered in the late first millennium, it was taken in by a lot of Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas and merged with religion.
In Judaism, Maimonides tried to do the same thing, looked at Aristotle and saw a religious thinker, a secular but religious thinker, a rational thinker who's attempting to reach out to the idea of the infinite.
What is it about the universe that allows us to grasp it in so much of its complexity but not grasp its purposes?
Why is that there?
Right?
This is the big question that animates all of human life and all of human reason and the striving.
And the religious community takes that question and they say, okay, here's our answer to the why, but science is going to have to tell you the what.
We're going to have to use reason to grasp God, but it's important to grasp God.
Why?
Because God is involved in your life, cares about you, wants you to succeed, wants you to make good decisions.
God is offering you a directionality to history.
Right?
The idea of a messianic future that we can all move toward.
Right, that's something that Judeo-Christian religion very strongly believes in, and free will, right?
We are not determined by the stars, which was sort of an ancient idea, that the stars determine our fate.
We are determined by our own capacity to make decisions in the world.
You combine that with the power of human reason, and you end up creating the most glorious civilization in the history of mankind.
But, over time, science ate religion, and now, a sort of bizarre spiritualism is eating science.
Because people still have the desire to grasp out at the infinite, and they're looking at science and saying, you're not getting me there.
So basically, the Enlightenment comes out of these twin poles.
The Enlightenment comes out of the idea that there's a faith-based universe out there.
That we can attempt to grasp using Aristotelian reason and using science.
And this results in the idea of natural rights, right?
Natural rights is a God-based system.
We can create a rational, reasonable, freedom-based system, but only if we believe that there is a God who made us in His image.
These were the twin poles of the Enlightenment.
And then science says, you know what?
Let's apply the standards of science to religion.
Okay, religion is unverifiable.
Therefore, we can't say anything about it.
And then science gets even more, uh, science gets even more provocative.
Science says, not only can't we prove religion, religion is false.
Right?
The Richard Dawkins School of Thought.
Science can prove religion false.
And by proving religion false, by proving that it's just a figment of your imagination, we can move into a better world.
Right?
Where man is king.
Except that the next thing that happened is that science ate the idea that man is king.
Because the more you move into the scientific world, the more you realize that human beings are just another animal with a bunch of brain functions.
And that, you know, in the E.O.
Wilson view of sociobiology, that all of our actions are not free-willed.
Right?
We can't will our own actions.
Everything is predetermined.
So why should there be punishment?
Why should there be societies?
Why are moral standards better?
Why shouldn't I do whatever is hedonistically pleasurable to me?
Why shouldn't I be the Marquis de Sade?
So science, as it progressed, ate the foundations of science itself.
And that's what we're seeing.
We're seeing the oboros, the snake that eats its own tail.
That's what's happening with science right now, because once you disconnect science from faith in a rational universe with a rational creator who cares about us, then you lose, number one, the impetus to actually seek out the universe.
Number two, You lose the faith that there is a rational universe to be comprehended.
And number three, you lose the free will that would drive you to do all of these things.
That's why you need both Athens and Jerusalem.
And they seem mutually exclusive, and they do battle with each other for primacy and the upper hand.
But if you lose either one of those, if you lose science, then religion just becomes, you know, grasping at shadows.
Religion just becomes faith based in nothing.
And if you lose religion, then science just becomes a group of animals seeking to build huts of sticks.
With no meaning and no drive toward a better society.
And you have to answer the question as to why a more moral society is necessary when morality has no meaning, better has no meaning, and society has no meaning outside of just a bunch of animals living in a similar space.
So this is why you need both Athens and Jerusalem.
This is why reason and faith must hold hands even though they disagree all the time and slap at each other with their free hands.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with the mailbag.
It's Thursday, right?
Yes, okay.
So we'll be back here tomorrow with the mailbag.
Remember, we are the number two podcast on iTunes.
If you help us out with subscriptions and reviews and listening to the show, then we will overtake Oprah.
We will.
I have faith.
We will overtake Oprah.
And you won't get a car.
And you won't get a car.
And no one will get a car.
Get yourself a damn car.
Okay?
I don't have to get you a car.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
▲
Export Selection