All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 11, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:04
The Berkeley Hurricane | Ep. 380
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
It's September 11th, so we commemorate 9-11.
We also talk about Hillary Clinton, who just can't let go.
Plus, I'm headed to Berkeley, and apparently it's just like a hurricane or something.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so I'm ready to give you the update on Berkeley because it is hilarious.
Hilarious, let me tell you.
And I will tell you all of the things about that.
I'll also give you some notes on 9-11.
Plus, I want to talk about Hillary Clinton's in an interview, Steve Bannon's in an interview, so a lot to get to today.
But before we do any of that, first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at MyPatriotSupply.
Let's say that you were watching TV, and you saw that there were some natural disasters on the TV, and you thought to yourself, hmm, I wonder what those people would do if they were stuck in their house without access to, let's say, a grocery store or electricity.
What would they do?
The answer is, if they had my Patriot Supply, they'd be in good shape.
You would be too.
Okay, anywhere you live in the country, there are natural disasters that can hit you.
There's also the possibility, of course, that Kim Jong-un decides to fire a nuclear-tipped missile at the west coast of the United States.
In which case, you would be wise to have something in your house that you can eat so that you don't have to wander outside and be turned into a frog human.
So, that is why it is necessary to go over to MyPatriotSupply right now and get some supplies.
Okay, get their survival food supply for just $99.
It includes 102 servings of breakfast, lunch, and dinner for less than a dollar per serving.
Order now at 888-803-1413.
That's 888-803-1413.
Or online at preparewithben.com.
That's preparewithben.com.
My Patriots apply.
They believe in old-fashioned values, and you can join me in their mission to build a more prepared and self-reliant country. 888-803-1413. 888-803-1413.
Preparewithben.com.
That's preparewithben.com.
Again, for 99 bucks, you're making sure your family is safe.
This seems like a no-brainer to me.
Preparewithben.com.
You look at the disasters right now, there's no question you should be prepared.
Preparewithben.com.
Okay, so, here is the update on Berkeley.
So, at Berkeley, okay, Berkeley has decided that I am a real threat.
Okay, this is a headline from the LA Times.
Quote, Berkeley braces for right-wing talk show host Ben Shapiro's visit.
Braces for it.
Like it's a hurricane.
Like, oh my god, I'm coming and I'm talking on Thursday.
What are they ever going to do?
Now, the reason they're really upset is because Antifa has threatened violence.
Over the weekend we saw Antifa rioting in Portland again, this time attacking police officers.
I can safely say it's all my fault.
I guess.
Or something.
Okay, the fact is that Berkeley is, I would say, going above and beyond in terms of its security.
They already said we couldn't bring a thousand people.
Because they're afraid people are going to go on the upper deck of the stadium and start throwing chairs down on people, which is just totally insane.
Then they've apparently created a security perimeter.
They're creating a hard security perimeter.
When I go on Thursday, that means that they're going to have police cordons basically around six buildings.
They've shut down the buildings completely, so people have to have classes in other buildings.
Listen, this is not my fault, folks.
This is not something I wanted.
I just would like to be able to go there and talk about the things that I talk about.
And I was unaware that I was such a controversial figure.
I mean, I sort of knew, but I didn't realize it was to this extent.
But it's really because of Berkeley.
But don't worry, it's really because of me.
According to the LA Times, it's because Berkeley is bracing for me.
They're not bracing for Antifa's reaction to a conservative visiting.
No, they're bracing for me.
If only I didn't descend with my 130 mile per hour winds on Berkeley, then they wouldn't have to worry about this so much.
Berkeley is also freaking out because they've also suggested that they want to provide counseling for students who are hurt by my words.
Seriously, this is what they're actually saying.
They want counseling.
So, according to Newsweek, okay, ahead of a talk from conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at UC Berkeley, a letter has been sent by the university to students, faculty, and staff stating that counseling services will be made available to those who, quote, feel threatened or harassed Hey, I'll agree with this much.
but we are deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individual sense of safety and belonging.
I'll agree with this much.
If you feel so insulted by my speech that you feel that your safety has been assaulted, you definitely need mental help.
If you really feel that way, then you can certainly use some counseling.
Because you're a sad sack, pathetic piece of crap.
Like, seriously, if this is what you worry about all day, is that I'm gonna come to your university, and I'm gonna say, ooh, conservative things?
No, God forbid!
No!
And you need counseling?
Then, let me suggest that you actually do need counseling.
I do love what the left does here.
They so overstep their boundaries, it's insane.
Antifa is suggesting that I am a white supremacist now.
Which is hysterically funny.
Refused fascism says I'm a fascist thug and a white supremacist.
Which is really amusing considering I was literally the number one recipient of hatred from the alt-right on Twitter last year according to the Anti-Defamation League.
So, that's pretty awesome.
Refused fascism issued a statement declaring campuses must become fascist-free zones.
How?
Through fascism, of course!
We have to make sure that no one can get on campus.
That's how you make sure it's a fascist-free zone, by establishing your own fascist zone.
That's obviously the way that you have to do this.
You know, we're all prepped.
We're ready to go.
We are coming.
It should be interesting.
The ticket's sold out in 45 minutes.
We're still trying to figure out how to deal with the situation, the eventuality, where a bunch of Antifa members come in the stadium, into the venue, and then get up and leave, and leave a bunch of empty seats.
Can people come in after that?
We're working that out with Young America's Foundation, so you can contact them at youngamericasfoundation at yaf.org.
But we are coming, and I will say that I think this whole thing is wildly overblown, and I'm not sure whether to be flattered or insulted.
It's pretty incredible, actually.
Okay.
In other news, obviously, it's a pretty somber anniversary.
Today's the 16th anniversary of 9-11.
Amazing how fast time moves.
I remember that, you know, everybody has their where-were-you-when-9-11-happened story.
For me, I was, let's see, 17 years old, and my dad and I were actually supposed to go golfing that morning, and we dropped off my sisters at school, and as we pulled into the parking lot, One of the security guards came running out and said that planes had hit the World Trade Centers and they had collapsed.
And we rushed inside the school.
And I remember that the school, which is an Orthodox Jewish day school, had told all the students there was going to be extra security.
They did not, in fact, have extra security.
My father and I standing there with golf clubs were actually the extra security.
So that was not probably planned.
But I have a horrific, horrific day and everybody remembers the images.
It still gives you a pit in your stomach.
If you're not old enough to remember, if you're one of my younger listeners, then you should go back and watch the tape because it's important to know what happened in our country on September 11th, 2001.
And it's important to remember because there are certain lessons that we learned after 9-11 that I think we've sort of been in the process of unlearning.
All of history tends to be a process of learning lessons and then forgetting them as fast as possible so that you can repeat the history again.
So I want to go through a couple of lessons I think that it is worth remembering from 9-11 so that we don't repeat 9-11 again, even though I think that, you know, that's... the chances that there will be another major terrorist attack sometime in the next 10 years I think are pretty high.
And I don't just mean truck-style attacks from ISIS.
I mean like an actual spectacular attack that takes out thousands of people.
And I'm not saying that, obviously, I'm saying that with tremendous hope that I'm wrong.
But it seems to me that the more we go down this road of forgetting what we learned on 9-11, the more we're getting closer to that.
Number one, global retreat is not a strategy.
If you remember the Clinton era, you remember that Clinton's basic foreign policy strategy was retreat from the world, except when you did sort of these pinprick strikes in particular areas.
Sometimes we'd intervene on humanitarian grounds, but we never intervened with regard to preserving our own security.
We never took preemptive strikes to preserve our own security.
And Bin Laden noticed.
In 1998, he bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, that sovereign American territory, and the United States basically did nothing.
When Bin Laden bombed the USS Cole, the United States did basically nothing.
And Bin Laden, I mean this is in his writings, said he thought that we were a paper tiger at that point.
It was only because of George W. Bush, really.
George W. Bush gets a very bad historical rap, but if you talk to the people at Al-Qaeda, from Al-Qaeda, they openly acknowledge that they were not expecting the kind of response they received from George W. Bush.
They prepared a second wave of attacks, and because Bush was so aggressive, it finished that.
So, James Mitchell, who is the man who questioned al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is the planner of 9-11, KSM said, quote, According to Mitchell, KSM explained that if the U.S.
cowboy George Bush would announce that he wanted us dead or alive and then invade Afghanistan to hunt us down.
According to Mitchell, KSM explained that if the US had treated 9/11 like a law enforcement matter, he would have had time to launch a second wave of attacks.
But now it seems like we are very reticent about preemptive attacks.
It seems like we are reticent about looking at the threats that face us.
We're fighting ISIS now, which is great, but what about the next threat?
What about Iran?
What about Hezbollah?
That doesn't mean that we have to take out the regime and Iran doesn't mean we have to go to war with them, but the fact is that unless we are willing to consider measures to stamp out terrorist groups across the planet, we are setting ourselves up for a fall.
Okay, second lesson that we should have learned on 9-11.
Money and friendliness do not buy off Islamists.
There's this weird idea from both the Ron Paul right and from the Barack Obama left that if we just give enough money, if we just show the Muslim world that we are caring and wonderful, that we will be left alone by terrorists.
This is absolute nonsense.
This is not an argument, by the way, for being mean to Muslims worldwide.
It's not an argument for not having relationships with countries like Saudi Arabia, where we have an actual intelligence relationship.
It is an argument suggesting that if we think that's enough, if we think that being friendly, that being a human right to proactive, that this is going to be enough to prevent terrorism, we are wildly mistaken and stupid.
The fact is, for a decade, the Clinton administration reached out to the Palestinian government, for example, with cash, with concessions from the Israelis.
And you remember the tape, you do.
You remember the tape on 9-11 of Palestinians handing out candy in the streets to their children as the towers fell.
We were pretty humanitarian toward the Muslim world in the 1990s.
We saved a bunch of Bosnian and Croatian Muslims in former Yugoslavia.
We prevented the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein.
We gave tons of money and foreign aid to various Muslim countries around the world in an attempt to prevent humanitarian catastrophes.
We sacrificed American soldiers in far-off places like Somalia just because we didn't want to see the disaster of Muslims dying for no reason.
We did all of these things and that obviously was not enough to turn off the terrorists.
This is not to say we shouldn't have done any of those things.
What it is to say is that if you think that that in and of itself is going to buy off terrorists, you are sadly mistaken.
The Obama administration took to heart this idea.
That's why they backed the so-called Arab Spring.
Oh, if we back democracy in Muslim places, then certainly these people will turn out to be pro-America, not the way that it works.
Okay, third lesson we should have learned on 9-11.
This is one I think President Trump did take to heart.
That is immigration matters.
Okay, immigration matters.
Fifteen out of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi.
All of them were here on visas.
All of them were here on visas.
One was on a student visa, the other were here on travel visas or business visas, and virtually all of them, I believe, overstayed their visas.
Not student visas, but other visas.
President Trump has focused laser-like on a couple of different areas of immigration.
He's focused on deportation of people who cross the border illegally, on the southern border illegally.
He's focused on building a border wall.
He's focused on travel bans from seven specific Muslim countries.
But what he has not focused on so much is how we deport people who are overstaying their visas illegally.
Half of all illegal immigration in the country, 40 to 50 percent, is people who are overstaying their visas illegally.
We let them in the country and then we let them wander around and we don't check up on them.
The fact is that the government ought to be deeply concerned about people who are entering the country from Islamist rich areas of the world.
No question.
But we also should be careful about the people who are already here.
We should be checking up on them.
That's something that I hope the Sessions DOJ does.
And the fourth point that we recognized on 9-11 that we need to recap here is that major terrorist attacks do require sponsor states.
If you look at terror in Western Europe and the United States, what you will see is that there's a giant spike, obviously, in terror deaths in 2001.
There were a few more terror deaths in 2002.
And then you see a pretty big gap in terms of terror against Americans and Western Europeans from about 2003, 2002, 2003, all the way until about 2010, 2011.
What happened during that period?
2003, all the way until about 2010, 2011.
What happened during that period?
Well, the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq.
Everybody hates the invasion of Iraq.
The fact is, major terrorist attacks were forestalled because we were fighting terrorists over there and we weren't fighting them over here.
The minute that ISIS began to regain territory, that gave them the capacity to sponsor terror attacks all over the world in a way they had not been able to before.
Al Qaeda required a terror safe haven in Afghanistan.
It's one of the reasons why I think President Trump is correct not to give up on the war in Afghanistan.
I think that simply surrendering it back to the Taliban is a recipe for another state-sponsored terrorist attack.
This is why the Iran deal is so devastating.
You have a major wealthy power in Iran that is willing to sponsor terror groups all over the planet.
State sponsors of terror can do things that simple terrorist groups cannot.
You're always going to have what they call lone wolf terrorism or small cell terrorism.
That's not quite the same thing as these major spectacular terrorist attacks killing hundreds of people.
That requires a base like ISIS to train people, provide them services, provide them guns, provide them ammo, provide them bombs, provide them all the things that they need.
Finally, Final point on 9-11, and then I'll move on to Hillary Clinton here.
America has real enemies.
We're so busy in the United States tearing each other apart.
We're the freest, most wealthy power in the history of the world.
And that means that we tend to look at each other and say, well, look, Al Qaeda isn't really a threat to us.
ISIS isn't a threat to us.
It's not an existential threat anyway.
Obama used to say this all the time.
He used to say that this isn't an existential threat.
It's not just the government's job to protect you from existential threats.
It is also the government's job to protect you from being murdered in your bed.
It doesn't have to be an existential threat for it to be an existential threat for you.
9-11 was not an existential threat to the United States.
It was an existential threat to the 3,000 Americans who were murdered on 9-11.
It is the government's job to protect us from those things.
You know, when people say things like, well, how many soldiers died in order to protect us from the next one, number one, we don't know how many people were saved by that.
We don't know the counterfactual.
And number two, it is very different to use our military, people who have volunteered for our military, go to fight the bad guys.
That's why they join up.
And it is sort of a slander on their patriotism to suggest they join the military just for the benefits, but they don't join up in order to fight the bad guys.
The vast majority of people I've talked to in the military, they joined up to fight the bad guys.
And so long as the government is deploying them properly, then they are more than happy to go and kill the bad guys.
It's their job.
It's what they're here to do.
Okay, so before I go any further, I'm going to talk about Hillary and Steve Bannon's interview on 60 Minutes that's getting a lot of play.
Before I do any of that, first, I want to ask you, have you taken any of your extra money and started investing in real estate?
This is something you absolutely should be doing.
I always talk about diversification of assets.
I always talk about you should have some money in gold and silver, you should have some money in the stock market, and you should certainly be looking And some other investments that can have a high upside.
That can have a high upside gain.
Because that's how you're going to make your real money.
You take some of your money, you invest it in slow growth stocks, you take some in bonds, you put some in gold, and then you take some and you put it in some sort of high net worth, high ROI possibilities.
And that is what RealtyShares is for.
It's not an offering of securities.
Private investments are highly illiquid and risky and are not suitable for all investors.
Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Securities offer to accredited investors through North Capital private securities member FINRA S-I-P-C.
But, right now, if you have $5,000 and you qualify, then you can invest in real estate.
You don't have to take $100,000 and plunk it down on an apartment building.
You can diversify this way.
You don't have to be a billionaire in order to get in on the real estate market.
That's R-E-A-L-T-Y shares dot com.
Again, here's the way that it works.
You go over to their website, they have a bunch of investments that they have vetted and looked at, and then they allow you the capacity to invest in $5,000 increments in these particular properties.
It's free to sign up and browse the investments.
Getting set up takes just a few minutes, then you can manage and invest straight from your phone or computer through their simple, secure online process.
All it takes is five grand to make an investment.
There are no hidden fees.
If you make $200,000 a year, you may qualify.
Again, find out at realtyshares.com slash Ben.
That's realtyshares.com.
And right now, they have a special offer just for my listeners.
Go today to realty shares.com slash Ben for $100 toward your first investment.
Again, that's realty shares.com slash Ben for $100 toward your first investment.
That's R-E-A-L-T-Y shares.com slash Ben for $100 toward your first investment.
That's realty shares.com slash Ben.
That also lets them know that we sent you.
Okay, so in less solemn political news, Hillary Clinton did one of her first big interviews on her new book, What Happened?
And the answer is you did, Hillary.
A lot of people saying Trump happened.
Hillary happened to Hillary.
Hey, this is one thing I did get right during the election cycle.
I asked myself during the election cycle, is this thing a referendum on Trump or is this thing a referendum on Hillary Clinton?
And I said over and over and over again, this is a referendum on Hillary Clinton.
It is not a referendum on Trump.
Hillary Clinton is the third term for Obama.
You looked at her poll numbers, she was bouncing around between 39 and 50 percent.
Trump was very stable at between 41 and 44 percent.
That meant Hillary could lose to him, but she could lose to him, right?
It wouldn't be him winning, it would be her losing, and that's actually what happened.
Well now, Hillary is doing the rounds, and it is amazing.
I mean, the reason that she lost is the reason why she's doing the rounds.
John McCain didn't write a book after he lost.
Mitt Romney didn't write a book after he lost.
John Kerry didn't really write a book after he lost.
All these people sort of disappeared.
They sort of went away.
They went away because they knew that they were doing more damage to their party by sticking around than they would by just disappearing.
Hillary is sticking around because she cannot get over the fact that she lost.
She has to wake up in the morning and look at the mirror and say to herself, what in the hell just happened here?
And that's, of course, the name of her book.
So she does this interview and she starts off by saying she's not going to run for office again.
Like, yeah, we know you lost.
Is your political career over?
Yes.
As an active politician, it's over.
You will never be a candidate for office?
No.
I am done with being a candidate, but I am not done with politics because I literally believe that our country's future is at stake.
You represent.
Okay, so she says that she's not going to run for office again in any case.
That is not a giant shock that she's not going to run for office because, again, she lost.
Then she admits that she hadn't drafted a concession speech.
This shows you why Donald Trump won and it shows why Republicans can continue to win no matter how incompetent they are.
Democrats are so confident that the world is just going to fall into their laps that they don't even seem to be making an effort.
Hillary was a good example of this.
Here she is explaining that she hadn't even drafted a concession speech.
You know, I just kind of went in the bedroom, laid down on the bed, just thought, okay, I just have to wait this out.
But then, midnight, I decided, well, you know, looks like it's not going to work.
I had not drafted a concession speech.
I've been working on a victory speech.
Our best days are still ahead of us.
And her concession speech sounded like a victory speech, right?
I mean, if you remember it.
But she never thought that she was going to lose.
And then what becomes clear is that she has never given up on her line.
Her line is that everyone who voted against her was a white nationalist supremacist piece of garbage.
This is her line, and this is what Democrats still believe.
So long as Democrats believe this, they're going to lose.
The fact is, a lot of people who did not vote for her, people like me, right, a lot of us, We're just appalled by the alt-right.
A lot of us were appalled by white supremacism.
A lot of people who voted for Donald Trump are appalled by white supremacism.
They just didn't like her.
But Hillary continues to double down on this line.
And it's one of the reasons why there is this backlash that has been soft toward the alt-right.
Because the more that Hillary Clinton says that everybody's a white supremacist, the more that people say, well, I'm not a white supremacist.
Maybe those actual white supremacists over there aren't white supremacists either.
Here's Hillary Clinton doubling down on the deplorables line.
You remember, she had a speech in the middle of the campaign in which she suggested that everyone who is supporting Donald Trump was a deplorable white supremacist.
She read a bunch of headlines from Breitbart, she talked about the alt-right, and then she linked everybody on the right with the alt-right, and everybody on the right picked up on that, and they said, well, I'm not a deplorable, and if she's gonna call me a deplorable, then I'll call myself a deplorable.
And she still doesn't understand that was a galvanizing moment for the opposition to her.
Why do you think that word deplorable had been circulating in your mind?
Well, I thought Trump was behaving in a deplorable manner.
I thought a lot of his appeals to voters were deplorable.
I thought his behavior, as we saw on the Access Hollywood tape, was deplorable.
And there were a large number of people who didn't care.
It did not matter to them.
Okay, maybe it mattered to them, then they looked at you and they said, well, I'm not voting for that lady.
That seems to me more likely.
But again, she can't get over herself.
She still thinks she was wildly popular, except for the sneaking Nazis, right?
Those thieving, sneaking Nazis and Russians.
It was the new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
And they decided, the Ribbentrop Pact, and they put together this alliance against Hillary Clinton personally.
And then she continues along these lines, right?
She still can't get over it.
She says that Trump's inauguration speech was a cry from the white nationalist gut.
So there I was, on the platform, you know, feeling like an out-of-body experience, and then his speech, which was a cry from the white nationalist gut.
Okay, it was not a speech that was a cry from the white nationalist gut.
His speech, his inauguration speech, was, I thought, quite well written.
I thought it was very dark, but I thought that it was effective.
I don't think it was about white nationalism so much as it was about the idea that America had fallen on hard times and now Trump was going to raise us up again, right?
Trump was going to be the guy who dragged us out of that crevasse.
The reason all of this matters, the reason Hillary Clinton still matters is because her spirit still infuses the Democratic Party.
Her cackling spirit still infuses the Democratic Party.
They don't understand why they lost.
They think that they are just going to kind of sweep into victory again on the basis of confusion.
And I don't think that that's right.
And you can see that what's happened here is we now have reactionaries on both sides.
So Hillary Clinton is a reactionary of the left.
She thinks that everybody on the right is a white nationalist.
Then you have reactionaries on the right who, people like Steve Bannon I think, Who have turned to Hillary Clinton and said, OK, well, if you're going to react that way, then I'm going to look at the alt-right and I'm not going to consider these people the worst things in the world.
I'm going to make room for them.
You know, maybe they'll come out in the wash eventually.
I'm going to talk about Steve Bannon's 60 Minutes interview in a minute.
I don't think Steve is a white nationalist by any means.
I mean, I know Steve pretty well.
I was on a phone call with him for basically two hours a day for two years of my life.
So I know Steve pretty well.
But I do think that Steve fell into a trap that a lot of the right is falling into.
But again, the left is pushing the right into this trap, and the right should be careful not to fall into it.
Another example of this.
It's not just Hillary Clinton who believes this.
Stephen Colbert.
He was on his show the other night, and he actually gave a Nazi salute, because his suggestion was that Donald Trump and Steve Bannon were actual Nazis, and then he throws up a Nazi salute.
After the Charlottesville situation, that's what I told General Kelly.
I was the only guy that came out and tried to defend him.
I was the only guy that said, he's talking about something, taking it up to a higher level.
Yeah, he's definitely taking it to a higher level.
I'd say his support is about, uh, about up there.
Right around here.
And, or over here.
Somewhere up there.
Okay, so there he is giving the Nazi salute as though Bannon and Trump are Nazis, and then the right goes, well, if you're gonna call them Nazis, I mean, then everybody's a Nazi.
Nazism must not exist.
This is the mistake the left makes, and it's really stupid.
It's really stupid, but the right has to be careful not to fall into the same mistake.
Now, I want to talk about Bannon because I think that Bannon's interview on 60 Minutes was less important for who Bannon is, and it was more important for what Bannon hopes to represent, and why the Trump movement is, I think, irrevocably split, and I don't think it's likely to cohere.
I'm gonna explain why in just a second.
For that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and become a subscriber.
For $9.99 a month, you can become a subscriber over at dailywire.com.
That means you get the rest of my show live, you get Andrew Klavan's show live, which starts at 10.30 Pacific Time.
You get Michael Knowles' show live, which starts at 12.30 Pacific Time.
All of them great shows.
You get to watch them live, on video, because this isn't just an audio show.
Plus, you also get to be part of all of our mailbag, and when we post the shows later, then you get to watch them without ads.
If you want to get all of those, plus the ad, the website without any ads at all, and if you want to get this magnificent Tumblr, then all you have to do is spend $99 a year, just get the annual subscription, you can pay more than that for the monthly, get the annual, and then you will be guaranteed to get all of those things, plus this fantastic Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr.
Everyone envies this Tumblr.
I won't say names like Steven Crowder, but everyone envies these particular mugs.
They say they are the greatest mugs that have ever been created.
I can vouch for that.
Although I have not tried every mug, I can tell you that in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, when someone chose not this mug, it ended very poorly for him.
So, this is the kind of Tumblr that you should use.
So, $99 gets you the annual subscription, or go over later to iTunes or SoundCloud.
Please go over to YouTube, by the way, and subscribe to the Daily Wire channel as well.
That allows us to continue bringing you content, and it allows you to see as much of the content as humanly possible.
As soon as humanly possible over at YouTube, so go check that out.
We are the largest conservative podcast in the nation.
Okay, so last night, former White House chief strategist and former campaign chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was on 60 Minutes.
Now, as I say, I know Steve pretty well.
I'm not a fan of Steve Bannon's.
I think, personally, he is not a nice guy or a good person, but Steve's an interesting figure.
He's for sure an interesting figure.
And Steve's appearance on 60 Minutes is less interesting for who he is and for what he was in the Trump administration than for what he represents, which is a sort of attempt to meld the id of the Trump With the superego of the Trump.
It's an attempt to create a Trump movement.
The biggest problem with Trump so far and the biggest problem with Trump overall is that Trump actually is just an empty vessel.
Trump does not have an ideology.
Trump does not have a philosophy.
It's why he's happy to make deals with Democrats.
He's a quote-unquote pragmatic dealmaker.
Just a guy who will go out and make deals with anyone.
And you see people like Steve trying to give him A patina of intellectual coherence.
As though there's an actual philosophy behind what Trump does rather than a series of impulses.
This doesn't mean all his impulses are bad, President Trump.
It just means that trying to create a philosophy around Trump is sort of like trying to tack water to the wall.
It's just not going to work.
You know, Trump does not have any substance to him that you can actually tack to the wall.
And you can see Bannon's difficulty in doing this.
So, first, I want to say that, you know, all of the media's attention on Bannon is wildly overblown in an attempt by the media to pretend that Trump isn't president.
That's really what's going on here with Steve, okay?
Steve joined the campaign.
He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the key figure in the Trump campaign.
Trump was always the key figure in the Trump campaign.
I think he was able to impose a little bit of discipline on Trump during the campaign and did a good job with that in a way that some other people couldn't.
He was kind of the Trump whisperer for a little while.
But the fact is that Bannon himself was never particularly important either to the Trump campaign or to the Trump administration.
By the end of the administration, by the end of his time in the administration, he'd basically been marginalized to a small office where he had a whiteboard full of Trump's promises that hadn't been kept.
Where he would obsessively read the newspapers and the internet and then call, presumably, Matthew Boyle over at Breitbart to talk about it.
The fact is, Steve was not a major figure by the end of the Trump administration, his time in the Trump administration.
He'd been marginalized.
Every report says this.
He did not leave because he was so vital.
In fact, he was so non-vital that his slot still has not been filled.
They literally made up a position for him, gave him the position.
And then didn't fill the position when he was gone.
He also happens to be the money connection for Trump.
He's very much connected to the Mercers, who are a very wealthy family down in Florida, who funded Trump and are funding a Trump super PAC.
The reason that Bannon is sort of important as a general mood is because now Bannon is saying that he's going to attempt to lead a bunch of primaries against sitting Republican senators who don't back Trump.
Now, the only reason that he can get away with this is because of this split inside the mentality with regard to Trump.
One, people really like Trump and they want to back Trump.
Two, Trump doesn't really have an agenda.
So even people who voted with Trump on key issues like Jeff Flake in Arizona, right?
Jeff Flake could be primaried.
Why?
Because he said nasty things about Trump.
And then you see people on the Democrat side who didn't vote with Trump, like Heidi Heitkamp.
And you're not seeing a lot of talk from the Republicans about how they're going to take down Heitkamp.
Trump just went out and praised her.
So it's very incoherent.
It's very discombobulated.
The reason I say that Bannon is not such an important figure and that the media are making him an important figure is because the media do not want to... It's another way for the media not to accept that Trump is president.
Right?
Trump isn't president.
Bannon's president.
Right?
Trump isn't president.
John Kelly's president.
Trump isn't president.
Reince Priebus is president.
Some people on the right used to do this with Obama.
Some of us on the right used to do this, oh it's really Valerie Jarrett whispering into his ear.
It's really Rahm Emanuel whispering into his ear.
The left did it with Karl Rove.
Karl Rove is whispering into Bush's ear.
The fact is, the president is the president.
He's the one who makes the calls.
It was Trump who decided that he did not trust Bannon enough.
It was Trump who marginalized Bannon.
This is why Bannon giving this excuse, you're about to hear Bannon give an excuse for why he's no longer at the White House and it just doesn't fly.
Here he says, he was not cut out to be a staffer.
To be this strong a defender, why aren't you there?
Why, and would the President of the United States, who you applaud so loudly, have allowed you to leave if he didn't want you out?
No, it's the exact opposite.
I was a staffer.
Look, I'm not cut out to be a staffer.
No, your title was not staffer.
Your title was chief strategist.
You are a staffer.
I was a federal government employee.
There's certain things you can't do.
I cannot take the fight to who we have to take the fight to when I'm an advisor to the president as a federal government employee.
You can't do it.
Okay, that's not really why he left, okay?
He's already achieved the height of his power.
You have to understand something about Steve personally to understand why he's not super an important figure, and that is that Steve basically lucked into every job that he's held for the last 10 years.
He sort of latched on to various figures.
He latched on to Michelle Bachmann, and then he latched on to Dick Morris, and then he latched on to Sarah Palin, and then he latched on to Andrew Breitbart.
He was there when Andrew died.
That allowed him to get his foot in the door in terms of using editorial at Breitbart to push for Trump, and then he latched on to Trump, and Trump won.
Bannon is not a force in his own right.
He's not a mover and shaker.
Bannon is more of a barnacle on whatever powerful figure he happens to follow.
But here's the part that I want to talk about Bannon.
Why am I wasting the time?
If I really think he's not that important, why am I wasting the time on him?
I do think that he is important as a window into the mentality of what some members of the media are trying to do with Trump or Trump supporters.
And that is they're trying to fuse the id with the superego.
In the Freudian analysis, your personality is made up of three parts, okay?
This is basic Freud.
Your id, which is your series of instincts, right?
You want to have sex.
You want to eat steak, right?
Your id is driving you to do these emotional things.
Then there's your superego.
Your superego is the Apollonian part of you in the sort of Nietzschean construct.
It's the part of your brain that says, I will use rationality and logic to check the id and make deals with the id.
That's the superego.
And then there's the ego that militates between them.
Then there's the ego that decides, okay, that's you.
The ego is you, and the ego is what decides, am I going to follow the id, or am I going to follow the superego?
A little too basic, but that's sort of the breakdown.
So, what's happened with Trumpville is that Trump is largely driven by his id.
There's been an attempt to intellectualize Trump.
There was something called the Journal of American Greatness, which attempts to intellectualize Trump.
There are some intellectuals, like Victor Davis Hanson, who have tried to create a philosophy around Trump.
Bannon sort of tried to create a philosophy around Trump.
But Bannon is posing himself as the ego of Trumpism.
That he is going to do the hard work of trying to bring together the philosophical strain of Trumpism and the id of Trump.
And so, in order to do that, sometimes he has to be the id and sometimes he has to be the superego.
He thinks this is what Breitbart's going to be.
He thinks this is what all of these candidates that he's going to use to primary all of these other Republican figures are going to be.
The new movement is going to be a merger.
It's going to be a philosophy of Trumpism that Trump may not at all times believe, but the soul of Trump, the fighting soul of Trump, this is sort of what he wants to create.
Beautiful vision!
Except that Trump will not be bound by a philosophy.
Trump is militantly anti-philosophy.
Trump is militantly anti-ideology.
He doesn't like any of these things.
Any boundaries on him make him angry.
Trump is unbridled id in politics.
So, you'll see Bannon trying to do this, right?
It was almost a dichotomous interview of 60 Minutes, and you see this from a lot of Trump supporters, that half the time it's, Trump's the id, fight, fight, fight!
And then half the time it's, well, he's playing 4D chess.
It's not really that he's not fighting, it's not knee-jerk, it's not angry, he's just, he's playing super sophisticated chess.
And I've suggested all along that most of what he does cannot be explained by strategy.
It's more explained by the id.
You're going to see Bannon do this routine here, and I think that it's telling.
So here is Bannon going after Charlie Rose with regard to Ryan and McConnell.
So he says, we're going to go after Paul Ryan.
We're going to go after Mitch McConnell.
This is the id part of the Trump world.
The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election.
That's a brutal fact we have to face.
The Republican establishment wants to nullify the 2016 election.
It's trying to nullify the 2016 election.
Absolutely.
Okay, so it's Ryan and McConnell trying to nullify the 2016 election.
We have to fight them at every turn.
Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, right?
This is the id part of it.
First of all, from what I've seen, Paul Ryan is not trying to nullify the effects of the 2016 election.
He's been basically walking around with his lips puckered to Trump's ass since the election started.
Or at least since the election was completed.
So the idea that Ryan and McConnell are desperately trying to undermine Trump, I don't think that's right.
I think that Bannon is mad because their agenda is not his agenda, and sometimes Trump seemed to follow their agenda.
But the idea here is that Trump is the id and Bannon is the id too.
He's the fighter in the trenches, don't you understand?
And then, at the same time, you'll see Bannon say things like, You know, I wish that Trump had used more strategy when it came to, for example, DACA.
Bannon openly said that he opposed Trump getting rid of DACA, actually, which is an amazing thing.
Breitbart, I was there, okay?
Breitbart was the most anti-DACA outlet that was present in American politics.
I'm worried about losing the House now because of DACA.
And my fear is that with this six months Downrange.
If we have another huge... If this goes all the way down to its logical conclusion in February and March, it will be a civil war inside the Republican Party that will be every bit as vitriolic as 2013.
Okay, that's his fear?
His fear is the civil war, but he just said he wanted a civil war, right?
He just said one second ago, I want a civil war with Ryan and with McConnell, but my great fear is a civil war that will bleed down into 2018 over DACA.
So which is it?
Is he the id or is he the superego?
And the answer is these two things cannot coexist.
Because again, they don't exist in a single person.
The id, the superego, they don't exist in movements.
They don't exist in movements.
The movement either has to be driven by the id or it has to be driven by the superego or the two have to work hand in hand.
But you cannot have a movement that is split between id and superego and the id pays no attention to the superego and the superego pays no attention to the id unless the central figure is Trump.
Right?
Unless Trump is the ego.
Bannon cannot be Trump's ego.
Bannon cannot be the guy who stands there and militates between the id and the superego.
If Trump is the id, and Paul Ryan is the superego, Bannon cannot be the ego, because Bannon's not that important.
And herein lies the problem for Bannon and for the movement generally, for Trumpism.
Trump is not a guy who is pulling from the id sometimes and from the superego sometimes.
He is pulling only from the id.
The id is this administration.
The superego doesn't even exist.
Again, you as a person have all three of these qualities.
A movement can only have all three of these qualities, its superego and ego, if the ego is the guy at the center of it.
Ronald Reagan could be the ego.
He could militate between the rabid part of his base and the superego, highly intellectualized portion of his base.
George W. Bush could do that because he was more of a judgment guy.
Trump is not a judgment guy.
And Bannon can't be that for him.
And Bannon trying to be the ego inevitably is going to put him at odds with Trump.
He's going to try his best not to do that.
But that's what it's going to be.
Or he's just going to have to give in to Trump's id, right?
Or he's just going to have to give in to Trump's id and surrender the superego part of this entire argument.
And that'll be fascinating.
And remember, for all this talk about how much power Bannon and Breitbart wield in these election cycles, I mean, I was there when they tried to basically primary Paul Ryan with Paul Nalin and Nalin got killed by 70 points.
So, you know, the only race I'm aware Breitbart had any impact in at all, which, again, I think Breitbart, when I was working there, was a very powerful site and did some good things, but, and I think they still do some good things, but I think that the idea that Breitbart had a market impact on election cycles outside of, you know, Trump, which is a huge one, obviously, and the primaries, which were enormous, and Dave Brat, I think, is a mistake.
The idea that they're going to go around primarying all these candidates and be successful in that, I think that's probably a little bit much.
Okay, so again, you can sort of see this split between the id and the superego when you look at people like, for example, Jeanine Pirro and Jim Jordan.
So Jeanine Pirro is definitely a representative of the Trumpian id, and she is obviously on Fox News, Chelsea has a radio show, and here she was talking about how Trump making a deal with Democrats last week was a great, great, great thing, right?
This is the id portion of the movement.
The establishment is out to get Donald Trump.
They say nice things because they don't want to really be outed.
But when I saw Donald Trump this week decide that he was going to cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, certainly, you know, not people that I admire for sure, but I can't blame him.
And I said, good for him.
Not only is he going to shake up the establishment, he's going to change the paradigm.
You know, good for him, good for him.
Why?
Why good for him?
Because I can't blame him.
These are the words that you hear out of people's mouths when they're defending the Trumpian id.
I can't blame him.
He doesn't deserve blame.
Sort of like you're dealing with a small child or a dog.
I can't blame him.
Sure, he bit me, but I mean, I did smell like bacon.
This notion is not really... it doesn't indicate the strength of a movement.
Again, it indicates that this split... Trump, because he's such an id-driven candidate, he has opened up this gap between id and superego in the movement that I'm not sure can be rectified again unless there's a new leader of the movement, which may come along sometime in the future, but until then we're just gonna have to suffer through the split.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
I'm in the middle of this book that is really fantastically written.
I really am enjoying it.
Edward Fieser, the book is The Last Superstition, A Refutation of the New Atheism.
So he takes on Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, and he talks about how a lot of the arguments in favor of atheism are basically Taking arguments made by Aristotle and Plato and Thomas Aquinas and dumbing them down and then refuting the dumbed down.
Creating a straw man and then burning it.
And this is a much more sophisticated defense of the Aristotelian defense of God.
The first cause, the unmoved mover.
It's It's really quite fascinating.
It makes a very rational case for the notion of an unmoved mover in the universe and explains why that is not easily refuted simply by saying, well, why can't there be a mover of the unmoved mover?
The whole book is about why that's not true.
And it's quite good.
It's colorfully written.
And rare for a philosophy book, it's really readable and lucid.
I mentioned this the last couple weeks when I've been talking a lot of philosophy.
There's a lot of philosophy that is really poorly written.
I mean, try to read a page of Kant.
It's written in gobbledygook.
It's almost impossible to understand.
Aristotle and Plato are actually pretty readable.
John Locke is pretty readable.
But a lot of philosophers are really not readable, and they read like garbage, and that is not the case with Edward Fieser.
The book is The Last Superstition, A Refutation of the New Atheism, and I think it has a lot of important insights and interesting things to say.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, Betsy DeVos, as I mentioned, the Secretary of Education last week, she came out and she got rid of the, what they call, Dear Colleague letter, put out by the Obama administration in 2011, and this was a letter that basically said that colleges were no longer allowed to kick over Sexual harassment, sexual abuse allegations to the police.
Instead, they had to create up these kangaroo courts.
She says this is nonsense, and she's exactly right.
Any perceived offense can become a full-blown Title IX investigation.
But if everything is harassment, then nothing is.
Punishing speech protected by the First Amendment trivializes actual harassment.
It teaches students the wrong lesson about the importance of free speech in our democracy.
Harassment codes which trample speech rights derail the primary mission of a school to pursue truth.
Good for her.
Okay, what she is saying here is exactly right, and I understand that there are a lot of people who are wary that schools are going to quash allegations of sexual harassment.
Well, that's why we have a police force.
I'm sorry to say that we can't do any better than that.
We can't.
We can't do any better than, if something bad happens, you have to go report it to the authorities, and the authorities have to have some sort of evidentiary showing in order to prosecute people.
Otherwise, this turns very quickly into Stalinist show trials.
And that's not just accusations of... Even if something bad happened, if you don't have evidence to prove that it happened, we're a country where innocence is still required before we call somebody guilty.
Okay, time for one more.
You know, let's do one more thing that I like.
This is really funny.
So Michael Moore demanded that Mar-a-Lago be used as a hurricane shelter.
He said, has he opened up Mar-a-Lago as a shelter yet?
56,000 likes.
Okay, and then Donald Trump Jr.
shellacked him because Donald Trump Jr.
pointed out, um, dude, we're actually in the hurricane zone.
We had to evacuate it.
So it's amazing how the left will jump on any talking point that's anti-Trump in order to push against him without looking at, you know, actual logic or fact.
Okay, time for some things I hate.
Let's do it.
Alrighty, so, uh, a couple of things that I hate.
First of all, uh, the media have been making complete fools of themselves.
They go out in the middle of the hurricane, and they stand out there, like, getting blown over by wind.
And I understand that this is, like, amusing to all of us.
I understand that we are all sort of hoping that, that eventually Chris Cuomo will be standing out there, and then he'll just go flying a hundred feet.
Not that he'll get hurt, but that he'll, like, go flying a hundred feet and go, Disappear into the waves for just a second before a helicopter picks him up.
For the same reason we watch the Wallendas try to walk across the Grand Canyon, i.e.
you want to be there in case they fall, you sort of want to watch the coverage of these hurricanes.
Here is some moron getting out of his car and then trying to demonstrate how strong the winds are in Hurricane Irma.
And there this idiot goes.
He's just standing there, trying to stand up to the tidal force of this hurricane.
And he's full-on pushing against the hurricane.
And you gotta admit, when you watch this, you're sort of hoping that he just sort of goes sailing off the screen.
Because when people do stupid things, then you sort of hope that they pay a particular penalty.
Not a harsh physical penalty.
You wouldn't want anything terrible to happen to the guy.
But I would like to see him get knocked on his butt a little bit, because it is ridiculous.
Like, don't be a moron, people.
Please, please.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So President Trump was praising the Coast Guard.
And he was talking about what a great job they did.
Wonderful.
I wish that President Trump, his first instincts were not always to deal with things in terms of fame and fortune, but that's just how he deals with stuff.
Here's President Trump praising the Coast Guard.
If you talk about branding, no brand has improved more than the United States Coast Guard.
No.
Improved its brand?
Was the Coast Guard having serious branding problems?
Were they being boycotted?
I'm just wondering how that worked.
Was it like Philip Morris?
They were putting out commercials for children and then they were banned by the federal government?
Mr. President, please get the marketing side of yourself under control.
It's not a big thing.
Like really, this is a small ask.
But can you please stop seeing things in terms of how you see them?
I understand that Trump thinks of himself as a brander, because he is.
He's one of the world's greatest—he is, I think, probably the greatest brander in history.
I mean, the guy branded himself to the presidency of the United States, but the Coast Guard really did not need to improve its brand.
Like, let's just cut that out, if we can.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow.
I'll give you the update on Berkeley.
We'll talk about Antifa.
Antifa went nuts in Portland yesterday.
They attacked a bunch of cops.
Obviously my fault.
And we'll bring you the latest on the political situation, as we always do.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
▲
Export Selection