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Sept. 25, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:59
Trump vs. The NFL | Ep. 388
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When I left on Wednesday, I told you not to make everything more stupid or no one would be going to Disneyland.
No Disneyland for anyone!
No Disneyland, you understand me?
I'm turning this car right around.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Dammit, people.
Every time I sign off the internet, every time I finish the podcast, I think to myself, the world can't get any dumber.
And then the next time I come on, I think, things were so much smarter the last time I was doing a podcast.
And that's what happened over the weekend.
We are going to get into all things NFL related, and bend the knee, and kneel, and knights of knee, and all of it.
We'll get to all of those things.
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Okay, so, as I say, everyone's a moron.
That is the quick summary of today's episode, so we can skip the rest of the show.
Okay, so, the stupidity begins with the NFL.
Everybody's trying to blame Trump for the advent of the stupidity.
Now, Trump has his own brand of silliness that he has injected in here, and I actually don't think it's politically silly.
I think it's bad for the country, but I think it's politically smart.
But we need to start off with a simple fact.
The NFL politicized itself years ago.
This idea that Trump politicized the NFL is sheer nonsense.
It's just not true.
The NFL made a conscious decision to allow politics on the field.
They've done this for years.
In 2014, you recall after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, the St.
Louis Rams came out on the field and did the infamous hands-up-don't-shoot pose as they were coming out of the tunnel onto the field.
Big deal at the time.
Did they get fined?
They did not get fined.
It was nothing from the NFL.
The NFL was fine with it.
No problem.
Okay, then in 2016, Colin Kaepernick decided that he was going to kneel down for the National Anthem during a preseason game.
Did the NFL fine him?
No, they did nothing.
But what did the NFL do?
They threatened the Dallas Cowboys with fines if they wore police decals in the regular season on their helmets after there was that shooting of police officers by a Black Lives Matter-associated radical in 2016.
So here's the headline.
If you had the decal on your helmet, they would not allow you to wear the decal on your helmet.
Same year, if you wanted to wear cleats that paid homage to victims of 9-11, the NFL said you were not allowed to do this.
Some players did it anyway, and then the NFL ended up waiving the fine.
But if you wore even special breast cancer gear, then the NFL threatened to fine you.
If you did an end zone dance that was too provocative, the NFL fined you.
So the NFL cracked down on everything except for leftist political expression.
Everything except for leftist political expression.
I assume that, you know, the response would be, well, they didn't crack down on Tim Tebow, except that Tim Tebow kneeling to do his own private prayer is not really a political presentation.
Kneeling for the national anthem pretty clearly is.
So, the NFL had politicized itself long ago.
And then President Trump decided to step in.
So let's be clear about something.
There was a consensus until the middle of last week, until Wednesday of last week, when last we left our story.
There was a consensus in the United States.
Kneeling for the National Anthem is a stupid thing to do.
It is an unpatriotic thing to do.
This was the general American consensus.
Now, there were some people who said, well, it's still patriotic to kneel for the Anthem because you're really trying to say that the Anthem isn't being fulfilled in the way that it was meant to be fulfilled.
Okay, you made the statement about the Anthem.
The Anthem is one of the few unifying features of American life.
The American flag, the National Anthem, these are unifying features of American life, and to kneel for the Anthem suggests that you are anti-American.
Okay, it does.
There are plenty of ways to protest against police brutality or systemic racism if these are things that you feel the necessity to do.
Listen, I think that you're wrong.
I think that you are operating on faulty assumptions.
According to the Washington Post, there have been 761 police shootings this year.
Nine of them, nine of them, were of an unarmed black person.
And of those nine, not all nine were cases in which the person was just sitting around doing nothing.
In many cases, there are serious questions about confrontations with the police.
So the idea that cops are going around shooting people is in and of itself ridiculous, that they're going around shooting people based on race.
Not a lot of evidence to support that.
That said, if you want to protest, there are plenty of ways to protest.
Making the specific statement that you're going to bow down during the national anthem on national TV, it's a statement.
It's a political statement and it says that America is inherently steeped in racism, founded in racism, and inescapably tied to racism.
Okay, that's what that says.
So Americans didn't like that.
If you look at the polls, Americans didn't like this, and it was actually hurting the NFL's ratings.
The NFL had a trio of serious PR problems before the middle of last week.
The NFL had the CTE scandal.
You know, the fact that if you get hit in the head many times, then you are likely to end up, or it's possible that you end up with brain damage.
They could end with early death.
CTE is a brain disease in which you get plaque in your brain, essentially, and that comes from too many hits to the head.
So that was one thing the NFL had to deal with.
The NFL also had to deal with a serious spate of domestic violence incidents where a bunch of their players were knocking around women.
And the NFL, you recall this with Ray Rice, the NFL didn't know what to do.
They sort of said that they were going to do something, then they didn't do anything, and then they did something again.
So that was the second thing.
And then they had the Kaepernick thing.
All of this was contributing to a drop in ratings for the NFL.
And in fact, J.D.
Powers did a poll, and it showed that for whatever number of people were not watching the NFL anymore who had watched before, 26% of those people said that their number one reason for turning off the NFL was the National Anthem protests.
They didn't like the politicization of sport.
Which makes sense.
We have to have a water cooler culture.
We have to have something in common.
We don't have politics in common.
We don't have church in common.
We don't even have entertainment in common.
But sports seemed like a pretty easy one, right?
Bunch of people run around after a ball.
How do you screw that up?
Well, we found a way to screw it up.
So, the NFL was facing all of these problems.
There was a consensus.
The consensus was, people like Colin Kaepernick, dolts, doing stupid things, not good for the country.
But should Colin Kaepernick be fired because of that?
Probably not.
Most people didn't really feel like it was necessary to call for a firing.
Didn't really feel like it was important to call for a firing, or if the owners wanted to fire on their own recognizance, that's their problem.
I mean, right, it's a private business.
If they want to fire Kaepernick, they can fire Kaepernick.
That's their call.
What it is not is the government's job to get involved.
The government should not be involved in this.
Now, the reason those of us on the right thought this is because we don't like when the government or government actors sound off on these issues generally.
How would we feel if President Obama had said about Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla, that it's a good thing that Mozilla fired him.
After all, the guy was for traditional marriage.
I mean, that's pretty discriminatory.
We would have all been fighting mad.
We would have said, what business is it of the President of the United States to make noises about that?
Imagine for a second the counterfactual.
Let's say Tim Tebow gets down on a knee, but he doesn't just get down on a knee to pray.
He gets down on a knee because he is overtly protesting the abortion culture in the United States.
And let's say that Barack Obama is the president and he comes out and he says, that's inappropriate.
Sports is sports.
Cut that stuff out.
I hope Tim Tebow gets fired.
Somebody needs to fire Tim Tebow.
Let's boycott the NFL until Tim Tebow is fired.
We all would have said, wait a second.
Is that the job of the president?
Like, it's our job to decide whether or not we want to watch a game.
It's the owner's job to decide whether or not somebody gets fired.
So this was the consensus.
Stupid politics are stupid.
And also, it's the owner's job and the patron's job to decide whether they want to watch something or fire somebody.
This was the consensus.
It was pretty well settled.
You weren't seeing a significant increase in the number of NFL players who were kneeling for the anthem.
It was basically Colin Kaepernick, and now it's not even Kaepernick because the guy doesn't have a job because he's a crappy quarterback.
So, that is the lead-up.
Then along comes President Trump.
Now, I'm not sure that what President Trump did last week was politically designed.
I'm not sure that he meant to start this firefight.
I think that Trump likes to say things to audiences where they clap, right?
I think that that's really as deep as it goes for President Trump.
But the effect of what President Trump does is that President Trump, whether he likes it or not, basically, no matter what he says, it's going to be taken the same way that reverse psychology is taken with my three-year-old.
So the way that I get my three-year-old No, you're not big enough to eat all that food.
You can't eat all that food.
No way.
Well, no matter what Trump says, the left responds like three-year-olds.
eat all that food.
No way.
And then she goes, yes, I can.
I'm a big girl.
And then she eats all her food, right?
Well, no matter what Trump says, the left responds like three-year-olds.
So whatever Trump says, they immediately respond with, you say we shouldn't kneel for the anthem?
Not only will we kneel for the anthem, we'll stretch during the anthem.
Not only will we kneel for the anthem, we'll poop on the field.
That's what we'll do, just to show you, because Trump, huh?
Huh?
Okay, so Trump leads all this off with statements that really are divisive and not useful.
Okay, so here's the part of what Trump says that's useful.
What he says that's useful is, kneeling for the national anthem is stupid.
Agree!
Everyone agrees.
But that's not enough.
Trump goes further.
He gets back into his full-on WWE TV persona, and he decides that he's going to call for people to be fired.
Right?
He's gonna go, you're fired!
He's even gonna bring out his old slogan, because he's not getting anything done legislatively, and everybody's sort of disappointed in him, and people are sort of frustrated.
So he's gonna bring back an applause line in Alabama, because whenever he gets in front of a crowd, this is what he does.
Trump is a consummate performer.
It's what he does for a living.
He's not president for a living.
He's a performer for a living who happens to be president.
That's how he got here.
He didn't get here through great legislative leisure domain.
That's not how he got here.
I'm going to play the tape of Trump and explain what happens next in just a second.
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Okay, so.
President Trump.
So, President Trump goes to Alabama.
And it's a rally.
And he decides that it's time to drop some red meat.
So here's President Trump dropping the red meat.
Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now.
Out.
He's fired.
He's fired!
More roaring, yeah!
Okay, so, the him condemning, the players who kneel, I'm fine with that.
I've been doing it for years now.
I think most people in the United States have been doing it for years.
He is the President of the United States.
He is not a Breitbart commenter.
He is not the local drunk at your pub.
Okay, he's the President of the United States.
And now it's time for the President to be the President.
Perfectly fine for him to say.
People should not kneel for the national anthem.
It destroys a feeling of unity that America is built upon.
We all strive to do better.
Not okay for the President of the United States to say, the owners should move to fire people.
And that's not where Trump stops.
So Trump goes to Twitter, and he unleashes a full-on Hurricane-5 level tweet storm.
So here's what he tweets.
If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL or other leagues, he or she should not be allowed to disrespect.
Our great American flag, or country, and should stand for the national anthem.
If not, you're fired!
Find something else to do.
Okay, so, here is the problem.
There are a couple of words here to start that are a problem.
One, allowed.
All right, go back to that first tweet for a second.
Allowed.
Okay, so, in that first tweet, should not be allowed.
By whom?
By whom?
Okay, the NFL gets to make its own rules.
If they decide they want to let these dolts be dolts, that's their problem.
But this aloud coming from the President of the United States carries the patina of government action.
Trump probably doesn't mean that.
Okay, Trump doesn't even have the power to get a healthcare bill passed, but this is not the kind of stuff that the President of the United States should be saying.
And then when he says that they should be fired, again, I ask you, if the situation were reversed, take off your partisan hat for a moment.
If he had said, no one should be allowed to kneel against our great American law, Roe v. Wade, if not, you're fired, how would you feel about that?
And if you say you'd feel fine about that, you're lying.
Okay, and here is President Trump continuing along these lines, and then he tweets, Roger Goodell of NFL just put out a statement trying to justify the total disrespect certain players show to our country.
Tell them to stand.
Okay, like, look, this part I don't have a problem with, okay?
Roger Goodell.
You know, again, private industry, I don't think the President of the United States should be saying this.
I agree with the general sentiment.
Again, there's a difference between when I say it or you say it, and the President says it because he has a different role in the American Republic.
This is not something the President should be doing.
Okay.
Then he continues.
Again, he just can't let this thing go because he thinks he's got a winner here.
And he does.
Okay, here's the irony.
The irony is that Trump does have a winner here.
So Trump says, So now he's openly calling for people to boycott a particular business until they suspend or fire someone.
Imagine if Barack Obama said, everyone should stop patronizing Chick-fil-A until the owner of the business is moved out of power.
Would that be okay?
The answer is no.
And then he says, NFL attendance and ratings are way down.
Boring games, yes, but many stay away because they love our country.
Leagues should back U.S.
Again, it's just more and more of the same.
He feels like he's a terrier with a bone and now he's not gonna let it go.
And he continues along these lines, it just never ends.
Great solidarity for our national anthem and for our country.
Standing with locked arms is good.
Kneeling is not acceptable.
Bad ratings.
I don't know if that was translated into North Korean and then into Korean and then back into English, but in any case, When he says here, you know, I actually, here's what I suggested.
I said, listen, if you want to show solidarity with the people who are kneeling but you disagree with them, then put your hand on their shoulder or something.
And then say after the game, I disagree with him, but it's his right to say what he wants to say, and that's America.
Trump, I think, is sort of trying to say the same thing there, but okay.
Then he says, courageous patriots have fought and died for a great American flag.
We must honor and respect it.
Make America great again!
And then the choir starts singing.
Okay, so I agree.
I agree with all of this.
I agree with all of this.
But, again, he's the president.
I'm a talk show host.
Okay, there's a difference.
Is that the finale of his great rant?
I think that's the finale of his great rant.
Then, that's not all.
He sends his Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, to go out and comment on this too.
Again, why is the Okay, as a conservative, I want the government less involved in telling private businesses what to do.
Even if I disagree with what a business is doing, there are plenty of businesses that I think are full of schmucks.
That doesn't mean that as the President of the United States I get to tell them what to do.
So again, Two things can be true at once.
You should not kneel for the anthem.
It makes you an a-hole.
Two, as the President of the United States, you should not go around telling other businesses to fire people based on political predilection.
This makes you malfeasant in your duty.
So here is Steve Mnuchin, a guy most famous recently for using taxpayers' dollars so he can take his wife on their honeymoon or something.
Here's Steve Mnuchin explaining why Trump is right to Jake Tapper on CNN.
The NFL has all different types of rules.
You can't have stickers on your helmet.
You have to have your uniforms tucked in.
What the president is saying and I think the owner should meet and they should vote on a rule.
This is about respect.
For our military, this is about respect for our first responders.
This is not about Republicans or Democrats.
Players have the right for free speech off the field.
On the field, this is about respect for lots of people.
And I don't understand why there's rules that when the Dallas Cowboys wanted to put stickers on their helmets out of respect for people there, they couldn't do it.
Okay, I agree with all the things that he's saying right now.
Why is the Treasury Secretary of the United States commenting on this?
Why?
Okay, we complained when Barack Obama and his government got involved in trying to regulate the name of the Washington Redskins, and we said, why are you talking about this?
Go do your stupid job, you stupid!
Okay, and now everybody's talking about it.
Okay, so why is this really happening?
It's because Trump's actually doing something quite clever.
Okay, whether he means to or not, what he's doing right now is quite clever.
What he is doing is he is saying, I am on the side I right here, I'm on the side of the national anthem and the flag.
I love it.
It's great.
And then he knows.
The Democrats are going to respond like three-year-old children.
They're going to say, yeah?
Well, you like the flag?
You like the anthem?
Well, screw you!
I hate the anthem!
I hate the flag!
And that's exactly what Democrats do.
Okay, naturally, this is exactly where Democrats go because they just can't help themselves.
So, here's a former Maryland Democratic representative saying that all NFL players should kneel in response to Trump.
She said, Sunday, I hope every NFL player takes a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick against the white supremacist who squats in our White House.
So what happens?
A lot of the NFL players do.
They decide that they hate Trump so much they're going to kneel for the anthem.
So, here's what the left sees and here's what the right sees.
Because we now live in completely different bubbles, right?
We don't have conversations with each other.
We don't talk with each other.
We don't try to understand each other.
So here's what the left sees.
The left sees a bunch of people kneeling to protest a President of the United States making statements that are beyond his ken.
The President should not be commenting on this, so let's all kneel in solidarity to show that we don't like what the President said.
Here's what the rest of America sees.
They see a bunch of people kneeling during the national anthem that people have fought and died to protect.
They see a bunch of people disrespecting the flag that a bunch of people have fought and died to respect.
So, what the left did is they took an unpopular protest movement, a protest movement that no one on the left was seriously backing, and then they made it their rallying cry.
This is what we're going to rally around now, is this unpopular stupid thing.
And Trump's standing over here going, I love the flag.
It's great.
Look at all those people kneeling.
It's not about me.
They hate the flag.
They hate the National Anthem.
So the real debate here is not even had.
The real debate is whether it's appropriate to kneel for the flag.
Half the people kneeling about the flag and National Anthem are doing it specifically to piss off Trump.
If you think you're pissing off Trump, you're wrong.
Trump is winning because of this.
You think you can win back Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by kneeling during the national anthem?
Are you out of your mind?
But the Democrats think they're going to win with their base.
Trump thinks he's going to win with his base.
And they're both sort of right.
They're both sort of right.
So what breaks down?
The only thing that breaks down is our capacity to speak with one another.
Americans are the ones who get hurt.
We just want to watch our football and drink a beer and be left alone.
That's all.
It's all we ask.
Is it so much?
I've been saying this about sports for years.
I was saying this when the NFL was trotting out Beyonce to do a Black Lives Matter routine during halftime.
Or Katy Perry, who's a very political person, right?
I've been saying this for a long time.
Let me watch my sports and leave me alone.
And they won't do it.
And now Trump has just taken it to the next level.
He's just taken it to the logical next step.
And now everybody's mad.
Okay, and now we have nothing to talk about.
The ratings for the NFL are going to tank because the NFL is going to defend its players.
People are going to get mad.
They don't want to watch the players kneel for the anthem.
They think it's unpatriotic because it is.
Now, there are people who say it's not unpatriotic for two reasons.
One is, when you kneel for the anthem, then you're really kneeling because you respect the anthem, right?
It's because you respect the anthem so much and we're not living up to it.
This, I think, is a poor argument.
This runs in the same category as people who say that burning the flag is showing the highest form of respect to the flag.
Because we're burning the flag to show the flag doesn't live up to what we think it should live up to.
That's not really what kneeling for the anthem shows.
The other thing is a little more understandable.
That is, it's not unpatriotic to kneel because we're not kneeling because we don't like the anthem or the flag.
We're kneeling because we want to show Trump that he can't tell people not to kneel.
Again, stupid, but not unpatriotic.
What a lot of people in the middle of the country see is people kneeling during the anthem.
Here is what people see, and you're going to see what you want to see, right?
Here's what you're going to see.
Leshawn McCoy, right, who is a running back for the Buffalo Bills, this is what he was doing during the national anthem.
I'm not even kneeling, stretching.
Okay, that's a garbage thing to do.
I don't care what reason you're doing that for, stretching during the National Anthem is a garbage thing to do.
It's not even kneeling, right?
Kneeling is bad enough, but stretching is really just you being a garbage person.
So, President Trump thanks Leshawn McCoy for his campaign donation 2020.
Because I promise you, this helps Trump.
This helps Trump.
And then it becomes a big thing, right?
You've got National Anthem singers who are kneeling.
You had one do it at the Seahawks-Titans game, right?
So you've got the Color Guard out there.
And then the Color Guard is out.
These are men and women serving in our American military standing there for the flag.
And the National Anthem singer is kneeling in front of the people who are willing to spend their lives and their lifeblood protecting that flag and this National Anthem.
them.
It's gross.
So after singing, they kneel Well, because we have to show that kneeling is important.
Kneeling is not important.
Again, you want to show solidarity with the players.
Don't kneel.
Just hold hands with them while they kneel.
Right?
If you're going to lock arms, locking arms.
As Trump himself said, and I think he's right, locking arms, fine.
Right?
We're all part of the same country.
As Lincoln said, we must be friends, not enemies.
We must be brothers, not enemies.
Okay, here's another national anthem singer kneeling.
Again, this is Detroit and Atlanta.
Okay, so there are a lot of places where people were booed, right?
The Patriots, for example, were booed.
A bunch of them kneeled, and the crowd booed them, which I think is totally appropriate.
You can hear them booing the players, right?
This is what Trump has done, and this is what the left fell right into.
Trump said, if you kneel, you're unpatriotic, and you should be fired.
And a bunch of people said on the left, OK, fine, then we'll all kneel.
So what are you doing?
You're alienating your own audience.
Here's a montage of all the players around the NFL kneeling.
OK, you can see this is the Cleveland Browns, who knelt and then just kept kneeling throughout the game because they stink.
Here's Leshawn McCoy, and here's the Jaguars.
Right, there's the Atlanta Falcons.
Okay, so now I'm going to show you how this breaks down because of what Trump did.
Instead of this being a debate about kneeling, about police brutality, it's turned into a debate about the national anthem itself and about Trump.
Trump has taken what was a tiny protest movement and turned it huge, and in the process polarized the country in a politically intelligent way, but in a way that's not very good for the country.
I'm going to get to the hero of last night, the hero of yesterday, and some of the villains.
Okay, so we'll get to that in just a second.
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So, the big hero of yesterday when all was said and done was not any of the players who were kneeling.
It was one player on the Pittsburgh Steelers.
His name is Alejandro Villanueva.
He did three tours, I believe, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is a West Point graduate.
He's an offensive tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The entire Pittsburgh Steelers team decided that it was necessary not to come out for the national anthem over all of this stupidity.
And the entire Pittsburgh Steelers team stayed in the locker room, except for Villanueva, who served in the line of duty in order to protect this national anthem and protect this flag.
And here is some video of Villanueva standing for the anthem.
So Chicago Bears, they came out and they all linked arms.
It didn't deal.
So Chicago Bears, they came out and they all linked arms.
They didn't kneel.
The only player on the Steelers who came out was this guy.
Because he served in the military.
His jersey, his jersey sales, no one's ever heard of him.
His jersey sales immediately skyrocketed to number six.
That's good.
He is the hero of the day.
And if you are an NFL fan, I recommend that you go online right now and buy a Villanueva jersey.
Let's send it all the way to number one.
I'd like to see that be the number one selling jersey.
Not Tom Brady, not Aaron Rodgers.
This nearly anonymous offensive tackle who served in our military and stood up for the national anthem and the flag.
Let's do that.
So go over to your online, wherever you get your jerseys online.
And go find Villanueva's jersey and buy one.
Because I think that...
The more Americans wear the Villanova jersey, the better off we are.
The better off we are.
Obviously, you know, this guy is the hero of the day.
And this is the new debate, right?
Trump got what he wanted.
He got what he wanted.
He wanted us to be saying that the heroes of the day are the people who stood for the anthem and the people who weren't Neil.
Because that's what we felt before.
But now a lot more people are Neil-ing because they don't like Trump.
And you can see the virtue-signaling stupidity of the left here.
I mean, it really is astonishing.
Alyssa Milano, right, the actress.
She took a picture of her kid kneeling.
Because there's nothing better than politicizing your own child.
I know, it's just wonderful.
I really object to this.
As I say, I have two kids under four.
I keep them separate from politics.
I don't even put pictures online of them.
People who are willing to use their kids for this kind of stuff, I really don't like it.
Alyssa Milano tweeted, Okay, so, what does Alyssa Milano object to?
Does she object to President Trump saying that people who kneel for the anthem are SOBs?
Is that what she objects to?
Or does she object to the President of the United States saying they should be fired?
If the latter, Then what I would like to know from Melissa Milano is does she stand up for the rights of people to speak at Berkeley?
Does she stand up for the rights of people to work at Mozilla Firefox?
Does she stand up for the rights of people to continue working at their bakery if they don't wish to service a same-sex wedding?
Like, how much freedom in the workplace is Melissa Milano for, or is this just, you know, virtue signaling?
I think we all know the answer.
Stevie Wonder did the same routine.
Stevie Wonder got down on one knee as well, so it's become a big cultural thing now.
Tonight, I'm taking a knee for America.
Wow.
Kind of.
There's a risky business there.
Wow.
So emotional.
But that's just one knee.
I'm taking both knees.
I have a Monica Lewinsky joke here, I won't tell.
But in any case, the idea that this is somehow doing some sort of great service to the United States, for the United States.
If you're praying for America, that's one thing.
That's normally what we mean when we kneel.
But this idea that we all have to take a knee for America, that our solidarity is protesting the anthem.
So American solidarity now is protesting the things that we stand for.
That's weird.
My favorite one of these, by the way, was this surgeon whose name is Eugene Gu, MD, and he says, I'm an Asian American doctor and today I take the knee to fight white supremacy.
This currently has 117,000 likes on Twitter.
Eugene Gu is a surgeon-scientist hoping to cure heart and kidney diseases in babies.
He's blocked by President Trump.
He's the president of Ganogen Inc.
and Stanford and Duke Med School alum.
Let me just say that if we're talking about institutional racism, I'm gonna go with Eugene Gu does not really get to talk about that so much.
Hey, Eugene Gu, as I say, went to Stanford and Duke Medical School.
And let's be clear about this.
5% of the American population is Asian.
20% of med school graduates are Asian, last I checked.
So if we're talking about institutional racism, I think they keep picking poor examples.
So all of this redounds to Trump's benefit.
This is the amazing thing, right?
If you're a Trump fan, then you like all this.
If you're a big Trump fan, you like all this.
Not because you care, not because of what it does to the country.
I think it's terrible for the country.
But if you think that Trump needs political support, the best way to earn political support is to play this game that they like to call kind of political sumo wrestling.
So sumo wrestling is about you get the person in the circle with you, and then you throw them out of the circle.
Right, you get your enemy in the circle with you, and then you throw them out of the circle.
So, what that means politically is you get everybody to agree to a certain proposition, and then you take your enemy and you throw them out of the circle.
They don't believe in that proposition.
Most people in America like the anthem.
Most people in America like the flag.
If you get your enemy somehow to make the idiotic mistake of somehow saying, I hate the flag, I hate the anthem, you have won.
And that's what Trump inadvertently did because the left is so damn stupid.
I mean, so unbelievably stupid.
Like, light years of stupid.
Basically, the left does something dumb with the anthem, Trump does something dumber with regard to the anthem, and then the left does something even dumber.
We are now in an endless vortex of stupid.
It's a black hole of stupid and eventually we'll emerge on the other side and Mitt Romney will have been elected in 2012.
When we merge on the other side of that wormhole.
That's how dumb everything is.
It didn't end there, by the way.
Trump is now in a fight with members of the NBA as well.
So Steph Curry said that he wasn't going to go to the White House to meet Trump.
Okay, as I've said before, I think players have a right to do this.
I think Tim Thomas did that, the goalie for the Boston Bruins.
He did that with Obama because he's a pro-life guy and Obama's pro-choice.
I think that's perfectly acceptable.
Steph Curry said he didn't want to meet Trump.
So Trump, instead of accepting that with good grace or just moving on and saying, you know, that's too bad, I really would have liked to meet him, You know, just being gentlemanly.
Instead, Trump does what he always does, which is, you can't quit.
You're fired!
Right?
He tweets out, going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team.
Steph Curry is hesitating.
Therefore, invitation is withdrawn.
He wasn't hesitating.
He said he wasn't going to come.
So again, that's the same thing that Trump did with his economic and jobs advisory council.
You remember this.
After Charlottesville, all of them quit.
And he said, you can't quit.
I've disbanded your council.
So Curry immediately responded by taking the high road.
He said, this is beneath the president.
It's kind of surreal to be honest.
I don't know why he feels the need to target certain individuals rather than others.
I have an idea of why.
It's just kind of beneath a leader of a country to go that route.
It's not what leaders do.
So the left loves this battle.
LeBron James also sounds it off because we definitely needed The King to sound off on all of this.
I mean, our lives would not be complete without LeBron James' political commentary.
Here he is.
I'm just a little frustrated, man, just because this guy that we've put in charge has tried to divide us once again.
And obviously, we all know what happened with Charlottesville and the divide that caused.
And now it's even hitting more home for me now even more because he's now using sports as the platform to try to divide us.
Right, okay, so, you know, I love again that LeBron James had no problem with Colin Kaepernick dividing us, or President Obama dividing us, but Trump is the one who's dividing us.
And this is the point, okay?
We are now living, Dwight Eisenhower talked about the idea of this military-industrial complex.
We're gonna get into wars that were stupid, because we have this military-industrial complex that has an interest in building up our armaments and then using them.
So we'll get into wars that are dumb.
This is what Eisenhower said in his farewell address in 1961.
Okay, well, when it comes to political cultural entertainment, we have a political entertainment wing.
A political entertainment complex that has an interest in culture wars.
Stupid culture wars.
Culture wars that don't benefit anyone except the politicians and the cultural figures.
That's it.
They don't benefit Americans.
They don't help the country.
They don't tie us closer together.
They divide us.
Right, now we're supposed to choose sports.
Like, if you love America, you're supposed to choose NASCAR.
And if you hate Trump, you're supposed to choose the NFL and the NBA.
This is the game that we're gonna play now.
The only people who benefit from this are cultural figures who get to feel very special about themselves, and feel like they are culturally and politically important, and political figures like President Trump who get to make hay off of this.
Now, the left is okay with this because the left dominates the culture.
This is a point Ross Douthat has made over at the New York Times.
He says the left, we've never had a greater dichotomy between politics and culture.
The right is dominating politics and the left is dominating the culture, and that's because they act off of each other.
Politics is people reacting to culture, and culture is people reacting to politics.
But they also are clutched in this love embrace, right, where Trump loves this.
It's great for him politically.
And the left loves this culturally because it's great for them culturally.
They get to complain about America and talk about how terrible it is and talk about Trump and win some adherents and fans and double down with their own base.
Everyone wins with their base, the middle of the country, everybody who just wants a better country where we can live together and respect each other's opinions.
We all hate each other and we think that we're jerks now.
Like, it's made everything significantly worse, this political entertainment complex.
As I tweeted yesterday, politics and entertainment Copulated, and now they both have syphilitic brain disease.
Politics has become infused with entertainment-oriented stupidity, and entertainment has become oriented with politically-oriented stupidity, and that means that both are worse off.
Both are worse off.
Meanwhile, we ignore the actual policy problems.
So I'm going to talk about the policy problems in just one second.
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All righty, so while all of this is going on, and this just goes to show you that entertainment has overcome politics entirely, President Trump tweets this.
Okay, so he had that giant tweetstorm about the NFL.
That's what everyone's paying attention to today, because, let's be frank, it's more fun and entertaining to talk about that.
So, here is President Trump tweeting about North Korea yesterday.
Okay, here is what he tweeted.
Last heard, just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at UN.
If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won't be around much longer!
Exclamation point.
So the President of the United States is threatening nuclear war and calling the dictator of North Korea Little Rocket Man.
Now, so he's adding a, he's like, it's like Little Marco and Rocket Man.
So that's exciting.
This happens and the blowback is zero.
Why?
Because we've been inured to this.
But we've not been inured to the cultural wars, so we pay more attention to the cultural wars than, you know, the possibility of a nuclear conflagration with another country, so that's exciting.
Meanwhile, on policy, everything proceeds apace, right?
What's amazing about this, as you recall, that when I last, we left our story, I was talking about Jimmy Kimmel and healthcare, you remember that?
Like, a year ago?
Like, four days ago?
You remember that?
Well, this was supposed to be the healthcare push, right?
Donald Trump was going to ram through the Cassidy Graham healthcare bill, We're finally going to repeal at least parts of Obamacare.
We're going to leave the vast majority of it in place, but we're going to make some significant substantive changes to it.
Trump's closing pitch was, the NFL is stupid and full of sons of bitches, right?
That was his closing pitch, which is just great.
You remember his closing pitch on healthcare last time was, my attorney general is terrible.
So his closing pitch needs a little bit of work, and we're not paying any attention to the healthcare stuff.
Meanwhile, it's unclear whether the health care bill is going to pass.
So why doesn't the president focus on rounding up the votes for that?
Because he is enjoying the limelight.
Because again, he's a performer.
He's not a politician.
So here's Rand Paul saying he's not going to vote for the Graham-Cassidy bill.
I think what it sets up is a perpetual food fight over the formula.
What if Democrats win?
They're going to try to claw back that money from Republican states and give it to Democrat states.
This is a bad idea.
It's not repeal.
However, all that being said, if they narrow the focus to the things we all agree on, expanding health savings accounts, giving governors more freedom through waivers, Okay, so here he is.
This is Rand Paul's schtick, by the way.
He's always too pure to vote for things.
control entitlement spending?
Sure, I'd be for that.
But I'm just not for this block granting concept because to me that is an affirmative right that I've agreed to keep Obamacare. - Okay, so here he is.
This is Rand Paul's shtick, by the way.
He's always too pure to vote for things.
You know, again, I like Rand Paul a lot on a lot of things, But in this case, if this is the best that we're going to do, this is the best that we're going to do.
I mean, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee are saying they're going to try and extract concessions in order to vote on this thing, which I think is the proper stance.
That's what Rand Paul should be saying if he wanted to make a better piece of legislation.
But he's not the only one.
So remember, Republicans only have 52 votes in the Senate.
They lose three and the sucker's done.
McCain is already saying he probably won't vote for it.
So that means they can only lose two more.
Rand Paul is another one.
So that means any vote lost, any one vote lost in the Senate and this latest Graham-Cassidy You know, Obamacare fix or Obamacare change goes down in flames.
Susan Collins is also saying that she probably won't vote for it.
So this thing is, you know, it's right on the brink.
This is where the president's weight could be useful.
Jake, it's very difficult for me to envision a scenario where I would end up voting for this bill.
Okay, so again, this is where Trump really should be putting his efforts right now.
That is not where he's putting his efforts, obviously.
Okay, time for some quick things I like, and then a thing I hate, and then please, when we break, don't ruin things more, guys.
It's just, there's only so much more we can ruin.
Okay, time for some things I like.
Edward Fieser, I recommended one of his books the other day.
That was The Last Superstition.
He has a brand new book that just came out called Five Proofs of the Existence of God.
It's about Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz.
And it talks about the logical proofs for God that have been put forward over history and that really have not been well debunked by the secular theistic movement.
And it is not the usual cosmological argument that you hear.
Usually what you hear when it comes to the cosmological argument is, everything has a creator, therefore God.
Right?
If everything has a creator, therefore God.
And then that usually leads people like Sam Harris, the atheist.
I'm going to be on his podcast, that should be fun.
It leads people like Sam Harris to say, well, if everything has a creator, who created God?
That's not what these arguments actually say, okay?
That's not what the argument is.
And if you want the fully fleshed out argument in readable prose, Five Proofs of the Existence of God by Edward Fieser is quite a good book.
I had an opportunity to speak with Professor Fieser a little bit yesterday and clarify some of my own questions about the arguments that he was making in the book.
I think that it is well worthwhile.
Do I think that these are dispositive?
Do I think that Do I think that they absolutely prove that God exists?
Do I think it's possible to argue?
I think it's possible to argue with them.
But I think that they are a good logical presentation of what an argument in favor of God looks like that isn't based simply on revelation.
So, yeah, I think that that's a worthwhile thing.
So again, five proofs of the existence of God from Edward Fieser.
Okay, other things that I like.
I love that Nancy Pelosi, who is the least hip person in the world, Although she may have had a hip replacement, I don't know, so maybe she got more hip recently.
But in any case, Nancy Pelosi is very unhip, and she doesn't know who Colin Kaepernick is, or what football is, or why she's here, or what's going on in the room around her.
Here she was yesterday trying to pronounce Colin Kaepernick's name.
He should see this as an opportunity.
Somebody, Colin Kaepernick, doing what he did, says this flag enables me to do this.
Colin Kaepernick.
So, well done, Nancy Pelosi, demonstrating how cool you are.
Okay, finally, time for a thing I hate.
The answer is everything.
Okay, but besides everything, here's a specific thing that I hate.
So, according to the Washington Free Beacon, late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have coordinated behind the scenes for months to oppose Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare.
Kimmel, whose son was born with a congenital heart disease, has been an outspoken critic of the Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare because he believes the most recent Republican efforts to replace Obamacare don't protect people with pre-existing conditions like his son, according to the Daily Beast.
So he's done a bunch of monologues this week.
He did some after I left the air.
If you want to see my monologue about Kimmel's monologue, go back to last Wednesday's episode.
I did a very long explanation of what Kimmel was saying and why he's wrong and why it's not right to stand on your child's health condition in order to promote your views of health care.
In any case, it turns out that Schumer and Kimmel were speaking.
Schumer encouraged Kimmel to speak out in opposition to Graham and Cassidy's bill when it became apparent Republicans would try to pass it.
So in other words, does Kimmel know anything about the bill?
Did he make an independent study?
No, he's a Democrat, so he talked to Chuck Schumer.
He doesn't like anything that touches Obamacare.
There would be no Republican program Jimmy Kimmel would back.
End of story.
That's the whole thing.
So long as that is the case, that's all that matters.
So long as that's the case, that is the only thing that matters, right?
Is that he was never going to back anything Republicans had to propose, so it was a political put-up job.
And I think that means something, because if you're going to make an emotional appeal, then we should know if you were planning to use the emotional appeal in order to promulgate your politics because you were talking with partisans on one side.
You didn't come to your own conclusions, you just talked to Chuck Schumer and had him give you some talking points.
Alright, so, we'll be back here tomorrow.
In the meantime, as I say...
Everything's getting ruined.
Just stop it.
Take a break.
Go out for ice cream.
Enjoy your family.
Enjoy your kids.
Enjoy your neighbors.
We still live in the greatest country on the face of the Earth.
And if we would look into each other's faces once in a while, instead of trying to see into the blackness of each other's souls, the darkness of each other's souls, then perhaps we'd all be a little bit better off.
I'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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