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Aug. 18, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:58
Real Terror, Fake News | Ep. 365
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A major terrorist attack in Barcelona, the president reacts, the media overreacts, and we talk about nothing but Confederate statues all the time forever.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show.
Very busy Newsweek.
Honestly, I'm just glad that it's Friday.
But before we get to any of the things that I just mentioned, first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Blinkist.
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Okay, so lots to get to.
I'll Obviously, the biggest story of the day is not what the media are saying is the biggest story of the day.
The media want to focus on Confederate monuments, statues that have been up for 50 years or 20 years or 150 years.
But the real issue yesterday is that there was a major terrorist attack in Barcelona.
For people who missed it, this was a major ISIS-planned cell, apparently.
According to CNN, the perpetrators of the terror attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils originally planned to use explosive devices to wreak greater devastation, but were apparently thwarted because their materials detonated prematurely, police said Friday.
A house in Alcanar, south of Barcelona, was destroyed in a blast on Wednesday night, hours before one attacker mowed down dozens of people in the heart of Barcelona, killing 13.
A group of five attackers then drove into pedestrians in the town of Cambrils, killing one in the early hours of Friday.
Catalan police chief Jose Luis Trapero told reporters explosives were found in the Alcanar property and the police are working on the hypothesis that these attacks were being prepared in that house.
The revelations pointed to an alarming conclusion that authorities knew nothing of an advanced plot to mount a spectacular terror attack until an accidental explosion at the perpetrator's base.
And despite the eye-catching setback, the terrorist cells still managed to carry out two further improvised attacks without impediment.
So four people have been arrested, one of them in Alcanar 3 in Ripoll, Three were Moroccan citizens, another was Spanish.
They ranged in age from 21 to 34.
None was on the radar for terrorism.
All were apparently Muslim.
Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy labeled the Barcelona attack jihadi terrorism, which is a perfect description.
Rajoy's government has declared three days of mourning across Spain.
The ISIS media wing has said that the Barcelona attackers were soldiers of ISIS, but stopped short of saying That they took responsibility for the attack, probably because it was a botched attack.
So naturally, this would demand a unified response from the West, right?
This would be the time when you expect the West to renew its determination to stamp out ISIS, to signal solidarity.
And President Trump actually tried to do that initially.
President Trump initially goes on Twitter, and he says that he is going to stand with the people of Barcelona, the people of Spain, and we all have to stand together.
And then he tweets out, He tweets out, This is the problem with Trump's run-on mouth.
This is the problem with a brain that has no filter.
What he just did is he polarized the response.
So instead of everybody being unified, ISIS bad, let's kill them all.
Instead, in this tweet, he endorses fictitious history, He endorses a fictitious history that includes a war crime and he slanders General Pershing.
Because what is he exactly talking about?
What Trump is actually talking about here is a legend wherein supposedly General Pershing, Trump has told this story before, he said that Pershing was a rough guy and during the moral rebellion in the Philippines from 1899 to 1913, Pershing served as governor between 1909 and 1913.
Pershing quote caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage Okay, so that didn't actually happen.
and he took 50 men and dipped 50 bullets in pig's blood.
You heard about that?
He took 50 bullets and dipped them in pig's blood.
He had his men load up their rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people.
And the 50th person, he said, you go back to your people, and you tell them what happened.
Okay, so that didn't actually happen.
Now, to be fair to President Trump, General Pershing apparently at one diplomatic meeting Apparently the Moros were very, very upset with pork.
And apparently there were reports that there were members of the American Counterterrorism Unit who had taken terrorists and wrapped them in pigskins and buried them, or buried them with pigs.
So, what this did is it allowed the media to escape the broader issue, which is radical Islamic terror, and the media, of course, did this.
The media were looking for an excuse not to talk about jihadi terror so they could stay on Trump, so they could stay on what happened in Charlottesville instead of swiveling To cover what is a significantly more deadly terror attack in Spain.
This is not to make light of what happened in Charlottesville at all, but just in pure numbers terms, what happened in Spain is a significantly more serious terror attack than what happened in Charlottesville.
But the media spent all day yesterday continuing to talk about Charlottesville and talking about this tweet, which is what they wanted to do.
In fact, Wolf Blitzer Those shared tactics.
made some of the stupidest comments I've ever seen on CNN.
Here is Wolf Blitzer as this was unfolding, trying to suggest that maybe, just maybe, what happened in Barcelona was a copycat attack or something because of Charlottesville?
What now? - Those shared tactics that should be alarming. - Yeah, and there will be questions about copycats There will be questions if what happened in Barcelona was at all, at all, a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, even though there may be different characters, different political ambitions.
Uh, they use the same, uh, the same killing device, a vehicle going at high speed into a group, a large group of pedestrians.
And as the local police are saying, at least one person is now dead.
The media will do anything in order to avoid talking about the spate of jihadi terror.
And it has been truck terror, right?
We've had that in Nice.
We had that in Berlin with the attack on the Christmas market in Berlin.
In Jerusalem, we've had this multiple times.
People using trucks as ramming vehicles in order to murder people.
But Wolf Blitzer's first instinct is to try and connect this back to Charlottesville, because the media would like to continue talking about Charlottesville.
And that's just asinine, okay?
The general, the general perishing comments from Trump are stupid, they're a waste of time, they're a waste of effort, they undermine our ability to get along with some of our Muslim allies.
You know, none of this is good.
But to suggest that it has anything to do with Charlottesville, or that that's the main issue here, Trump, the one thing you can say about Trump, and he certainly has done this, he has unleashed the military against ISIS.
The one-third of all territory taken against ISIS over the last seven, eight years has been during the Trump administration.
Trump has utterly untied the hands of the military in the fight against ISIS, and it's been actually creating some significant results.
To focus in on Trump's stupid tweet or to focus in on Charlottesville in the aftermath of this attack just demonstrates where the media want to put their attention.
It's obvious where the media wants to put their attention.
It's amazing.
If you think about what happened in Charlottesville, there should be a spate of propositions that everyone of good heart and good mind can agree on.
These are very basic propositions.
Neo-Nazis, bad.
White supremacism, bad.
Alt-right, white nationalism, bad.
Right?
All those things bad.
Communism, bad.
Anarchism, bad.
Violence at non-violent rallies, bad.
Right?
All these things I think we should all be able to agree on.
These are not difficult.
And yet somehow, we've turned this into a polarized political debate.
I think that if you would just describe the things I just said, I think you'd get 95% of Americans to agree on those things.
Communism bad does not seem particularly controversial to me.
Antifa, starting violence at particular rallies all across the country.
A bad thing.
That's not whataboutism, that's just a fact.
Whataboutism would suggest that I'm saying that it's okay for the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to do what they did.
I'm not saying that at all.
In fact, I've been probably the harshest or one of the harshest condemners of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the alt-right overall.
White supremacism, bad.
I think that 95% of Americans agree with that general proposition.
And yet somehow this has turned into a polarized political debate.
And it's turned into a polarized political debate because all of the actors want it to be a polarized political debate.
The left want to proclaim that there are a bunch of people out there who are racist because American society is racist.
Trump wants to claim that the entire left wants America to be called racist so that he can fight back against this, right?
Steve Bannon said this clearly, okay?
This is not conjecture.
Steve Bannon said this in an interview at the New York Times.
Please, let the left continue to engage in identity politics, and that's only going to help us.
Let them talk about tearing down Confederate statues.
That's only going to help us.
The left thinks it's winning the Confederate statue argument.
The right thinks it's winning the Confederate statue argument.
Trump thinks he's winning the Confederate statue argument.
And meanwhile, the broad agreement that most of us have on these issues is gone.
The broad agreement is gone.
Even on Confederate statues, I think there's broad agreement that people in New York don't have a lot to say about Confederate statues in South Carolina, and if the elected mayor of Charlottesville decides that he wants to remove a Robert E. Lee statue, he's an elected mayor, that's his responsibility, he can do that.
I may disagree with the decision, but I really don't have a lot to say in that particular decision.
I believe in localism, particularly when it comes to cultural historical issues like this one.
I think there's broad agreement on all of this, but you can see that there's an attempt to polarize the country.
The left wants people to believe that America is a deeply racist place, and so what they're attempting to say is that anyone who wants to keep The Confederate statues up must be a racist.
I was on CNN last night with Don Lemon and a couple of other folks, including Keith Boykin, who's a Democratic strategist.
And Keith Boykin openly said anyone who wants to keep the statues up of Confederate memorials is a racist or is a white supremacist.
Don Lemon verged on that and I actually called him out on it.
I questioned him on it and he backed off of it.
But this is one of the things that's really nasty.
And then on the Trump side you have a bunch of people like Pat Buchanan who are out there almost overtly declaring support for white supremacism because they think they have to do that in order to fight the left or because they actually believe it.
And we'll get to all of this in just a second.
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Okay, so.
Speaking of leftist overreaction again, the left always has to overstep.
It's so funny, whenever the left does something bad, like whenever there's a leftist who shoots up a bunch of congresspeople and it's out of the news in three days because the media don't want to talk about it anymore, then what they do is they accuse the right of overreach.
Oh, the right's overreaching.
Oh, the right is speaking too much about this.
In Barcelona attacks, you'll have President Trump say something about perishing, and all of the media coverage will be about the perishing comments, not about the actual terror attack.
Well, the left is really, they are the kings and queens of overreaction.
I mean, they really are amazing at this.
So, for example, New York's subway system.
Again, I don't know what any of this has to do with what just happened in Charlottesville, but there are a bunch of tiles in the New York subway system that look kind of like a Confederate flag.
They look kind of like a Confederate flag.
This is what they look like.
And there's a debate over what this was supposed to be.
One side says that there was a New York Times editor who's from the South, and so when they built this particular subway station, They put the symbol in there as an homage to the person who was from the New York Times.
The MTA says it's not about a confederate flag at all.
It was supposed to be the crossroads of the world.
Whatever it is, it kind of looks like a confederate flag.
Now, is Richard Spencer, like, marching around there in a torchlight parade?
Are we gonna get Chris Cantwell rallying down there for the frickin' subway tiles?
Like, the biggest problem in New York right now is that the subway system sucks, okay?
They've been running late, a lot of the subways are broken, it smells like urine all the time, and now they're worried about, what is this?
There's got to be about 25 tiles.
I mean, it's about 25 tiles in a subway station.
And this is what they're deeply concerned about, is getting rid of these subway tiles.
Again, the overreaction is astonishing.
The overreach by the left is astonishing.
You're seeing it to the extreme.
A Democratic lawmaker from Missouri, she actually posted on her Facebook page that she hoped that Trump would die.
Right?
It's pretty amazing.
So there's this Yeah, this lady posted to Facebook that she hoped that Trump would be assassinated, right?
So this guy said, damn now, I'll probably get a visit from the Secret Service.
He said, I wonder what my cousin is thinking now.
He's on Trump's Secret Service detail.
He'd have to sign up for six years.
He did his first four with Obama and has two to go with this idiot.
But what I believe, posted earlier, I believe will happen sooner, not later.
And Maria Chappelle Nadal, who is a state legislator in Missouri, she posted back, no, I will.
I hope Trump is assassinated.
I hope Trump is assassinated.
Now, should she lose her job over that?
Yes, she should.
Okay, you should lose your job over that when you are an elected official and you hope for the assassination of your political opponents, then you should lose your job over that.
Imagine if the situation reversed and it had been some Republican legislator saying that about Obama.
How fast would his job be gone?
Almost immediately.
Well, no.
It seems to me that this is a pretty important thing to be talking about.
The leftist embrace of violence.
It's very frustrated.
It was in response to the concerns that I'm hearing from residents of St. Louis.
I've deleted it, and it should have been deleted, but there is something way more important we should be talking about.
Well, no, it seems to me that this is a pretty important thing to be talking about.
The leftist embrace of violence, the leftist overreaction and embrace of violence is a dangerous thing.
It's an actual dangerous thing.
Michael Eric Dyson, who is on the news all the time, professor, I believe, at Georgetown, and Michael Eric Dyson, he comes out and he openly endorses Antifa, which is a violent far-left group that has engaged in violence against normal citizens in places ranging from Sacramento to Seattle to Portland.
Here's Michael Eric Dyson saying Antifa is wonderful now.
The people that we claim, Black Lives Matter, the Antifa movement and so on, Mr. Miller says again that there was violence there but the problem is to equate the violence in reaction against bigotry with the bigotry itself is to misunderstand the fact that when you go to cancer treatment the radiation is tough treatment but it is meant to remove the cancer.
So what he fails to understand and what the president especially fails to understand is that you are complicit with the worst currents of bigotry in this country when you try to draw a false equivalence between secessionists and racists and confederate defenders and bigots and neo-nazis and African-American and white people and others who have defended the right of this nation to really seek a path Okay, I get it.
So what he says there is so wrong.
When he says the way to fight cancer is with radiation?
Okay, I agree that the alt-right is a cancer.
I agree that white supremacism is a cancer.
But it's not a cancer that's going to require surgery.
It's not a cancer that kills the patient.
It really isn't.
I mean, it's a very minute group of people who are awful and evil, but you don't actually get to act in violence against them.
Saying they're a cancer in sort of a generic, they're a harm to the body politic sense, that's true, but if you're saying they're deadly, that's not true, okay?
If you're saying that they are actually out there killing people, then you'll have to point me to the ones who are actually out there killing people, and then I would say, let's let the police kill them.
You need Antifa out there beating the crap out of them with clubs and sticks.
And this is a problem because if you have, I mean I've been talking about this all week, if you have a violent movement on the left that's being justified by the mainstream left in response to the alt-right, and the alt-right is not actually acting violently at these rallies, then you got a problem on your hands.
Okay, and if the alt-right is acting violently, that's why we have police in this country.
We don't need groups of armed people going around beating each other up.
It's not good for the country, but the left is embracing all of this, and it's really amazing how the left's overreach is actually making Trump appear better.
The left's overreach, again, they're so stupid, the people on the far left, that they don't understand that if they would just tell the truth about what happened this week, they would win.
Instead, they have to go 10 degrees further than that.
They have to go exponential in a situation that requires a solid and a proportionate response.
The covers from The Economist and The New Yorker are not going to be helpful to the left cause either.
So The New Yorker has a cover of Trump on a boat blowing into the sail and the sail looks like a Ku Klux Klan hat and The Economist has a cover of Trump shouting into a KKK hood That looks like a loudspeaker.
This sort of thing is just going to lead a lot of Trump supporters to think that he's being unfairly maligned since Trump did in fact actually condemn the KKK.
I mean that's one of the things he actually did do during his Tuesday crazy press conference.
He did a lot of other things that I thought were terrible, but he did say that he condemns the KKK.
So for them to use the KKK hood as sort of the symbol of what he's doing, I understand it's art, but it's also art that is not geared toward helping the conversation particularly much.
The left is doing the same thing on this Confederate statue issue.
So as I mentioned, there's this attempt by the left to suggest now that we must talk about Confederate statues because Richard Spencer and the alt-right and the Unite the Right rally decided to rally around Robert E. Lee statues, So now we're going to have a big, broad, national conversation about Confederate statues.
And Donald Trump said that we ought to think about whether there's a limiting principle, basically.
We ought to think whether the people who want to get rid of the Lee statues also want to get rid of the Washington statues.
And people on the left went, no, that's crazy.
That's not true.
Keith Boykin said that to me last night on CNN.
He says, no, I think that there's a distinction between Lee statues and Washington statues.
I fully agree, by the way, but CNN's Angela Rye did not, and I called her out last night on CNN for saying this.
She was fully on board with the idea that Washington and Jefferson statues have to come down.
American history is not all glorious, and even though I love John to death, I couldn't disagree more about George Washington.
George Washington was a slave owner, and we need to call slave owners out for what they are.
Whether we think they were protecting American freedom or not, he wasn't protecting my freedom.
I wasn't someone who my ancestors weren't deemed human beings to him.
And so to me, I don't care if it's a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue or a Robert E. Lee statue, they all need to come down.
There is a way that we can recognize and appreciate- Angela, you've got a problem here.
I'm not feeding into white supremacy.
I'm calling out white supremacy for what it is.
And sometimes what it is, John, are blind spots.
Sometimes what it is is not acknowledging that this country was built upon a very violent past that resulted in death and the raping and the killing of my ancestors.
So I'm not going to, I'm not going to allow us to say that it's okay for a Robert E. Lee, but not a George Washington.
We need to call it what it is.
So Trump said that and Trump was right.
Okay.
There is a portion of the hard left that wants all of those statues to come down.
Al Sharpton, an absolute disgusting race-baiting anti-Semite, he said the same thing yesterday about the Jefferson Memorial, like Al Sharpton gets to be the judge of bad symbolism.
Al Sharpton was involved in incitement of riots in 1991 in Crown Heights ending with the murder of an Orthodox Jew.
He was involved in the Freddy's Fashion Mart debacle later that decade in which a bunch of people were killed after somebody set fire to a store that Al Sharpton was railing about.
That guy had attended an Al Sharpton rally where he was railing about White interlopers in the inner city.
Al Sharpton, nonetheless, here he is saying that Thomas Jefferson, he says that we should blow up the Jefferson Memorial.
I mean, this is crazy.
This is not some kind of removed discussion from us.
Our families were victims of this.
Certainly it ought to be removed.
So therefore everybody associated with slavery in terms of any public monument to them.
When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds, you're asking me to subsidize the insult of my family.
Then I repeat Thomas Jefferson had slaves.
And I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who has had that kind of background.
Okay, so there he is.
Again, the left's overreach here is actually driving people into the arms of the right, into the arms of people who I think are pretty gross, like Pat Buchanan.
Pat Buchanan has been a quasi-closeted white supremacist for a long time.
He's been an anti-Semite for a long time.
In 2005, he suggested the West should never have gone to war with Hitler.
In 2006, he wrote the foreword to a book by an actual white supremacist named Sam Francis.
His magazine, The American Conservative, he co-founded with a guy named Taki Theodorakopoulos, who called himself a soi-disant anti-Semite.
William F. Buckley said that Buchanan's views were anti-Semitic.
Well today, Buchanan has a full-on column, basically the mirror image of what you saw from Angela Rye there on CNN.
Right, the mirror image.
So, Angela Rice says that Washington can't be distinguished from Lee, and then Pat Buchanan says the same thing.
He says Washington can't be distinguished from Lee, and that's why we should leave the Lee statues up, because white supremacism is actually not a horrible thing.
White supremacism is not an actual horrible thing.
So, let me give you a portion from this column, because I think that it demonstrates The way that the radical left and the radical right, you know, Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative right, and not all paleoconservatives are Buchananites, but Buchanan's wing of the Republican Party, how they have a common view of American history that are just Basically the photo negatives of one another.
So Angela Rice says it's a white supremacist history so it's bad, and Buchanan says it's a white supremacist history so it's good.
This is actually from his column today, his syndicated column.
Another term applied to the Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville is that they are white supremacists, a mortal sin to modernity.
But here we encounter an even greater problem.
Looking back over the history of a Western civilization, which we call great, were not the explorers who came out of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and England all white supremacists?
They conquered, in the name of the mother countries, all the land they discovered, imposed their rules upon indigenous peoples, and vanquished and eradicated the native-born who stood in their way.
He's saying all this is good because Western civilization spread, but it did so in the name of white supremacy.
There's only one problem.
That's not true.
Okay, if you recall a little bit about your history books, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and England were all at war with one another for several hundred years here.
So all the white people were fighting each other too.
So this idea that they had this kind of common white supremacist attitude is not really true.
And even if they were white supremacists in the sense that they thought they were superior, you know, white man's burden, Rudyard Kipling, imperialists, even if they thought that, you know, even if they believed that the white man's burden had to do with white skin, That would be them mistaking the spread of Western Civilization for the spread of their own race.
That would be a mistake on their part.
That would be attributing the quality of the spread of Western Civilization to the color of skin, which makes no historic sense.
There were white people in Europe going thousands of years back before Western Civilization was ever a thing.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, there were white people all over Europe who had nothing to do with Western Civilization and who were barbarians.
Before Rome came to Britain, Britain was white.
It didn't matter.
It was a bunch of barbarians.
I mean, so this idea that it's not culture, but it's skin color is really weird.
Also, how do you separate the skin color?
The Caucasus are full of people from various ethnicities, and a lot of them are not living lifestyles or have not lived historically lifestyles that were embedded with Western culture.
That's been true for a long time.
But here is Pat Buchanan.
They believed European man had a right to rule the world.
Beginning in the 16th century, Western imperialists ruled much of what was called the civilized world.
Was not the British Empire one of the great civilizing forces in history, a manifestation of British racial superiority?
And then he says, nor is a belief in the superiority of one's race, religion, tribe, and culture unique to the West.
What is unique, what is an experiment without precedent, is what we are about today.
We have condemned and renounced the scarlet sins of the men who made America, and embraced diversity, inclusivity, and equality.
Our new America is the land where all races, tribes, creeds, and cultures congregate.
All are treated equally, and all move ever closer to an equality of results through the regular redistribution of opportunity, wealth, and power.
We are going to become the first universal nation.
All men are created equal is an ideological statement.
Where is the scientific or historic proof for it?
Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?
So notice the conflation that Buchanan makes here.
All men are created equal.
It was an ideological statement.
It's also something that the Founders considered self-evident.
What it meant was, man is made in God's image and has inalienable rights.
That's the next phrase of the Declaration.
The Founders did not mean that all people have equal qualities.
That, of course, is not true.
But they meant that all human beings are capable of achieving freedom.
They didn't mean culture doesn't matter.
The Founders obviously didn't believe that.
But they did believe, and that's what the principle that was enshrined in the Declaration says, that all human beings are created with equal value in God's eyes, and that means that they have equal rights in the eyes of the government, or they should have equal rights in the eyes of the government.
But Buchanan conflates that argument with the argument that the left makes, which is that all people ought to have equal outcome.
And then he says, a pox on both your houses, basically.
White people built civilization, and if white people begin to fade, then civilization will begin to fade as well.
Okay, so he is basically taking the flip side of the racist argument made by Angela Rye, which is that America is based in racism, and that's why it's evil, and it's inherently in the DNA, and Buchanan says racism is in our DNA, and therefore it's basically good.
Okay, that is really not good stuff.
That is really not good stuff, and this is how you see the polarization.
taking place.
It's a real negative.
Now there is some breaking news that I want to talk about.
Apparently Steve Bannon is out.
This is what Drudge is now reporting.
Steve Bannon is out at the White House.
So my former boss over at Breitbart News.
I have a lot of thoughts on this.
Many, many thoughts.
I'll discuss all of them in just a second.
But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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Steve Bannon being out at the White House.
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All right.
So Steve Bannon is out at the White House.
This is the news, the breaking news from the Drudge Report.
And Drudge should know because, you know, Drudge is very tapped into the administration.
So here is the question.
What led to this, and why now, and what's it going to mean?
Why now is because Steve blew himself up.
So in the last few months, Bannon has been marginalized by people ranging from Jared and Ivanka to General John Kelly.
Kelly obviously didn't like Bannon, thought Bannon was a nefarious force in the White House.
In the last week, Bannon has been the guy at Trump's elbow, kind of urging him to not disassociate from the alt-right and to engage with the alt-right over Charlottesville.
And then he came out and he did a really kind of incredible interview with a magazine called the American Prospect, a lefty magazine called the American Prospect, in which he ripped on Trump's North Korean policy, talked about globalists like Gary Cohn, what he calls globalists like Gary Cohn, ripped him by name, and also suggested that he was going to get rid of all of his enemies in the State Department, undermine our foreign policy,
It was a really bad interview, and it put Trump in a very awkward position.
A lot of people have been calling for Bannon's ouster because of his closeness to the alt-right.
I've said for a year that Bannon's closeness to the alt-right never should have been brought into the campaign.
I mean, I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post August 18th, I think literally one year ago today, saying exactly this, that this is a problem for Trump.
So Trump is getting rid of him, probably because Kelly wants to get rid of him, not necessarily because Trump cares.
Trump also thinks he's a leaker.
Trump thinks that Bannon talks to the media a lot, which is true.
But the fact that Bannon is gone could lead to a new and kind of shocking division inside the conservative movement.
Remember, Bannon is only really well-liked among a particular alt-right populist faction.
The people like him in sort of the populist arena.
He's seen as sort of the go-to guy, just as Jeff Sessions was seen as that at AG.
But Bannon has Breitbart at his disposal.
Breitbart, while I was there and before I left, turned into Trump Pravda.
They turned into an outlet that did nothing but cheerlead Trump, and that was under Bannon's auspices, because Bannon was working with Trump at the time, sort of behind the scenes, and then obviously became one of his campaign strategists, his chief campaign strategist.
Well, now Bannon is gone, and so he's gonna go back to Breitbart, and he sort of paved the way for what he's gonna do next.
He's got two paths here now that he's out.
Path number one is that Bannon could theoretically kind of play it safe, keep it close to the vest, go back to Breitbart, keep quiet.
That's not Bannon's thing.
Bannon is a war guy all the time.
He likes to shout about war.
He talks about military analogies all the time.
He's not nearly as brilliant as people think he is because he gives off that impression, but he's a smart guy.
I'm not saying he's stupid, but he's not quite the 4D chess guy that everybody thinks he is.
He's a very instinctive knee-jerk knife fighter.
So my understanding is that he will probably go back to Breitbart, and from his perch at Breitbart, he will launch attacks on all the quote-unquote globalists inside the administration.
That once you go back to the administration, and you, and you, once you go back to Breitbart, and you decide to rip on Trump, this could really open a rift.
So, remember, Bannon also has the support of the single biggest owners to the Republican Party, the Mercer family over in Florida.
They gave a lot of money to Trump.
They gave a lot of data to Trump.
Their firm, Cambridge Analytica, was Trump's data operation.
And it's unclear right now if this is sort of an amicable parting of ways or whether this is an open war.
If it's an open war, things are about to get very, very interesting because you could see a situation where Trump and Bannon go right at each other, where Bannon decides to use Breitbart as his club to beat the living crap out of Trump, uses Rebecca Mercer and the Mercer family as his sort of money bags to do all of those things, starts to lash Trump from outside as having lost the support of his base, and tears down Trump the same way that Breitbart builds him up.
You could easily see that situation occurring.
But Breitbart itself is in a bit of a pickle because so many of their supporters are Trump supporters.
So what happens if Breitbart decides to go to war with Trump over any of this stuff?
If Breitbart decides to go to war, do they lose readership?
And does Bannon even care?
I'm not sure Bannon cares.
So we're about to enter a very interesting period now where a lot of Trump's base may turn on him for getting rid of Bannon right after a lot of Trump's base felt very enchanted with him after what he had to say about Charlottesville, at least the Bannon base.
So it's going to be fascinating to watch.
That's all I can say.
We'll have to see how this proceeds.
My gut instinct tells me that Steve Bannon is not going to take this lying down.
That's not Steve's style.
Steve is a very transactional fellow, so if he thinks that he will get better results by not attacking Trump, then he'll stay outside and sort of cheerlead for Trump in sort of the way Corey Lewandowski has after being ousted by Trump.
But if he thinks that he is going to make a career of his own now, that he's famous enough that he can make a career of his own, he can go into talk radio, he can write books, he can He can run for office himself with the help of the alt-right.
He can lead a populist revolution from the outside because Trump has abandoned his base.
Then you could see an open war begin between Trump and one of the guys who was supposedly the intellectual in the Trumpism movement.
Really fascinating development.
Okay, so we'll do quick thing I like, quick thing I hate, and then we'll get to the mailbag, because we have a full mailbag today.
So, things that I like.
So, I have to admit that I laughed a little bit when I saw this.
Chris Cantwell is a really disgusting white supremacist who was at this white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and just talking about what a violent guy he was, over and over to Vice News, how he was preparing himself for violence, he wanted violence, he liked violence, he thought the violence was good.
Here was Chris Cantwell to Vice News, just a few days ago.
You can remember Dylan Rose's name.
You can remember Tim McVeigh's name.
We were asking whether white people were capable of violence.
I didn't say capable.
Of course we're capable.
I'm carrying a pistol.
I go to the gym all the time.
I'm trying to make myself more capable of violence.
You say and then he would go on to talk about how he was looking for the violence.
Sometimes the violence would be good.
He said in a radio interview that he was going there seeking violence.
And then there's a warrant put out for his arrest.
And here's a tape of him after the warrant is put out for his arrest.
I contacted the local police.
I called the Charlottesville Police Department.
And I asked them, I said, I have been told that there's a warrant out for my arrest.
And they said that they wouldn't confirm it, but that I could find this out if I, excuse me, That I could find this out if I wanted to go to a local magistrate or something like that.
But with everything that's happening, I don't think it's wise for me to be, you know, going anywhere.
This is a state of emergency.
There's the tough guy crying into camera over an arrest warrant being put out for him.
This guy is an open white supremacist, says that Trump sold his daughter to a Jew.
One of the guys who was chanting, Jews will not replace us.
Really just a stellar fellow.
Who had openly talked about engaging in violence and now he's crying openly on camera.
Does this seem like an emotionally stable human being to you?
I mean, put everything else aside, this guy needs help.
I mean, I actually feel a little bit bad for him in the sense that I think that- I don't feel bad for him because he's a bad person, but I feel bad for him just as a human being that this guy obviously is emotionally and mentally unstable.
And the guy truly needs some help.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate and then we'll get to the mailbag.
Okay, so today's thing I hate comes courtesy of Mark Stein.
So I usually like a lot of what Mark Stein has to say.
I think he's a really, really talented columnist.
His book on Broadway is terrific.
He was on with Tucker Carlson, and he started ripping on the tech industry.
You know, how a lot of these tech companies had pulled service from some users, and Stein suggests that the government needs to get involved.
I don't see why if the United States government thinks in 1918, no not 1918, I think it was about ten years before that, in 1909 whenever it was, that standard oil had gotten too big.
If standard oil was too big in 19...
Yeah.
What is Google now?
And there's a difference.
The oil companies, or MGM when they both made movies and owned cinemas, they're basically in the movie business.
Standard Oil is in the oil business.
Google is in the thought business.
When you have someone who is actually in control of ideas, who knows the data of just about all 7 billion people on the planet, and it is enforcing an ideological straitjacket, that is far more disturbing than if a Standard Oil or MGM are enforcing ideological straitjackets.
I actually think we're moving into a very dark era where YouTube and Facebook and Twitter will bounce more and more people off their monopolies and that will lead to more violence.
Okay, so I agree with Stein that a lot of these technological firms are engaging in some real nasty kind of thought policing.
I agree with all that, but his idea that the government should get involved... I am on the side of the government should not be involved in any of this stuff.
That if you don't like it, you can go build your own server.
The idea that the government is going to start regulating these things means that the government is now going to have to take some sort of ownership of these.
This is the problem that I have with... This is why I'm more of a libertarian in some of this than I am a conservative.
I don't think the government should be involved in regulating how private companies do business.
I think that's a dangerous, dangerous principle.
And once you start doing it, it's hard to stop it.
Okay, so let's jump right into the mailbag.
So, Ian says, Ben, recently there have been advancements in science in relation to gene editing, and the future possibility of being able to safely edit people's genes seems to be getting closer and closer.
From a religious perspective, do you believe this to be morally correct?
I understand we are creations of God, but in examples of curing diseases and such, is it just for us to change ourselves from the way he has made us?
So here is a distinction, well here's a logical distinction that you can take or leave.
Let me put it this way.
If I had a child who was going to be, and let's say the process of gene editing did not involve abortion in any way, it was just editing a gene so you're just fixing a problem.
So let's say that my daughter had a development where she had a hole in her heart.
It's fixed.
She's fine.
She'll be great for the rest of her life.
She'll live 120 years.
No problem.
She's as good as new.
But let's say that I had the capacity to cut that out of her gene, you know, before she had to go through an open-heart surgery.
Would I have done that?
You bet your ass I would have done that.
Same thing is true for the Tay-Sachs gene.
The same thing is true for BRCA, the To cure diseases or prevent diseases seems to me a proper use of gene editing.
And I think that's true for blindness.
I think that's true for disability.
I think that, you know, to prevent people from suffering with conditions I think is perfectly valid and normal.
To enhance, however, I think you start to get into Dicey territory.
This idea that you're going to enhance certain people's intelligence, or you're going to enhance their muscle power, or you're going to change the color of their eyes or their hair.
I think now you're starting to play with dangerous stuff, because once you do that...
And then you could see a situation where people are engineering human beings to be a particular way.
And we feel that we are God and we can control how human beings should be from the time that they are created.
You could see a very dangerous situation for a couple of reasons.
One, you could see a situation where people just decide they don't want a particular type of human being so we're just going to breed it out of the population.
You could also see a situation where the people who are very wealthy can afford gene editing and their kids are perfect and you can see a situation where poor people cannot.
I don't think it's quite as easy as don't get involved in gene editing at all.
Yes, I do.
masturbates the the divide in society um i think that these are very very morally fraud issues but i don't think it's quite as easy as don't get involved in gene editing at all uh gabriel says hey ben greetings from brazil do you think the sharp increase in nihilism and self-hatred in the west has a direct correlation to our rejection of religion as nietzsche predicted yes i do i think that the rejection of of faith in favor of science has led to the destruction of both faith and science i
I discussed this last week in The Big Idea, but the idea that we are free human beings capable of making decisions, the idea that we have free will and change our minds, the idea that we have moral responsibility for our actions, all of these things are products of faith, not products of science, and science has actually undermined a lot of these claims, leading to a deterministic universe that forces you into a sort of existential nihilism, and that's very dangerous for society.
Nicholas says, Dear Ben, today I got into an argument with an atheist friend of mine who believes that telling your kids that living a sinful life will lead you to hell is child abuse and will scar your kids for life.
I'm not an extremely religious person, but I believe in my Christian values.
How do I explain the morality of teaching kids about sin?
Well, I mean, I think the fact is that teaching children that certain behavior is going to lead to an unhappy life, both here and in the hereafter, is not child abuse.
It's actually a valid warning.
Number one, if you're a person of faith, you don't believe that this is a conjecture.
You believe that this is a fact, right?
Faith believes that the idea of heaven or punishment in the afterlife or comeuppance in the afterlife is a real thing, so it's not like you're lying to your kid.
This isn't Santa Claus or Easter or the Easter Bunny, right?
This is actually something different.
This is you telling what you perceive to be a truth to your children, so that's not child abuse.
Second of all, I think that you can make the case against sin in almost secular terms very often by simply saying that things that are sinful lead you down a road that sullies you as a human being and makes your life more unhappy.
There tends to be an extraordinarily high crossover between the things that God says are a sin in the Judeo-Christian system and things that end with nasty results to you in this life as well.
I think that God set out a system that has created the greatest civilization in the history of mankind.
I don't think that's a coincidence.
Trey says, Hey Ben, what is your Myers-Briggs type?
I can't remember.
What is Myers-Briggs?
Is this the introvert thing?
I'll have to look it up real fast.
Oh, yeah, yeah, the free personality test.
You know, I did it at one point and I cannot remember For the life of me, which one, which type I am.
I have to look up the types and I probably remember.
So I believe that there are, let's see.
So I know I was an extrovert.
I know that in terms of sensing versus intuition, I think I was sensing versus intuition.
I believe that when it came to making decisions, I was thinking versus feeling.
And when it came to judging versus perceiving, I believe that I was judging.
So I was either an ESTJ or an ENTJ, I believe.
So that's...
For whatever that's worth.
That's what I think I was, anyway.
I can't remember, to be frank with you.
Okay.
Joy says, Do practicing Jews still believe that there is a Messiah, and why is there a difference between Jews today and Jews of the Old Testament?
Thanks, love your show.
So, yes, practicing Jews believe that there will be a Messiah, and when he comes, he will pursue certain functions.
He will reestablish a temple on the Temple Mount.
He will be responsible for the ingathering of exiles.
He will establish peace in Israel.
This is according to Maimonides.
He has basically a very simple set of tasks.
He's not some sort of superhuman figure.
He's not a god come back to earth or anything like that.
And as far as the difference between Jews today and Jews of the Old Testament, so Jews of the Old Testament were living, you know, in... I mean, the traditional Orthodox answer is there's not a huge difference, but the truth is that there's been development In Judaism, through the Oral Torah, through the Talmud, the rabbinic law has obviously developed a fair bit since the Old Testament, so there's a lot of stuff that Jews do today that's not explicit in the Old Testament, but we feel is implicit in the Old Testament.
And so Moses may not recognize some of the practices that we pursue today in Judaism, but the idea in the Talmud, and it explicitly says this in the Talmud, is that Moses would come back and he'd be happy that he doesn't recognize that because he set up a system of lawmaking and law-giving, and we've developed that system.
Sort of the same way that the founders might come back and look at America and say, wow, I don't really understand a lot of this, but they'd be happy with the system that they created.
Luke says, what do you think of the idea that automation will one day take over so many jobs that a universal basic income might be necessary?
So, as I've said before, I think that it's possible in the future that automation may do that, but I think that we are a long way from that.
Right now employment is nearly full.
Every time there is an uptick in technology, there's a similar uptick in jobs of another type.
I know that everyone always thinks that we've reached the end of the industrial road.
People thought that in 1850 with the Industrial Revolution, which is why they were breaking machines.
But I don't think that we've come close to that yet.
Yeah, actually, after law school, I considered whether or not to join JAG.
One of the reasons that I didn't join JAG at the time was because, as an Orthodox Jew, it's a little bit difficult to be in the military.
It's not to say the military wouldn't accommodate it, but there are conflicts, religious conflicts, in terms of holidays off and Sabbath off and all this.
that conflict a little bit.
There are a lot of Jews who do serve in the military.
There are Orthodox Jews who do serve in the military, and good for them.
There's a group, actually, that I support called JFAM that provides support to Jews who are in the military so that they can do all of these things and serve in the military.
Let's see.
Jim says, Hey, Ben, I would like to know your thoughts on the new intentional walk rule in baseball.
I always believed that having to actually throw the pitches would mess with the pitcher's rhythm and therefore add a readjustment dynamic when facing the next batter.
What are your thoughts?
So I think the rule is stupid.
This idea that you just signal and then somebody goes to first base as opposed to throwing the four pitches.
I've actually seen games where there's a man on third and they're intentionally walking somebody because there's a man on second and third and they want to set up a force.
And the pitcher throws it away and the run scores.
So I think that this is a dumb rule.
I don't think the problem with baseball is the speed of the game.
I think the problem is the speed of life now, and so a lot of people don't get it.
But I was at Dodger Stadium two nights ago and the place was packed.
I mean, it was just, it was packed to the gills.
Every seat was filled.
There's still a lot of interest in baseball.
It still draws millions and millions and millions of people to the ballpark every year.
The one rule I do like is I do like this rule.
The 30-second rule for pitches, I think, is good.
And I think they should also have rules about how many times batters can step out of the batter's box and adjust their gloves and all this stuff.
The pitchers have a rule.
I think the batter should have a rule, too.
Once you're in the batter's box, you get to step out like once during an at-bat, but you don't get to step out between every pitch.
Jackson says, "Hey Benz, you believe the Earth was formed over six figurative days or you believe it was formed in six literal 24 hour days?" So, Gerald Schroeder is a scientist who's written a book called God, Science, and the Big Bang, I think it's called, in which he discusses this.
One of the problems with the literalist version of it was created in six 24 hour periods is that the sun was not created on the first day.
The sun was not there.
And so the idea that a day in the Torah at the beginning means the same thing as a day now is is kind of an odd contention.
Gerald Trurd does something really interesting.
He talks about the The wavelength of, I believe it's the wavelength of background radiation in the universe, and he talks about how as the universe expands, the wavelength of the background radiation gets longer, and so in fact, the number of waves in a 24-hour day of background radiation actually equates to the number of waves that would have been millions of years before the Big Bang occurred.
It's kind of interesting.
I may be explaining it poorly.
You should go read the book.
I don't even know what this means.
Or why this is in the mailbag.
Or what is going on right now.
They're all animals?
Is there another answer I'm supposed to be giving here?
There's got to be a meme thing that I'm just not getting.
Anyway, we've reached the end of the week.
Steve Bannon is out.
We'll have a lot to talk about on Monday, that is for sure.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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