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Oct. 3, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:41
Evil in Vegas | Ep. 393
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All right, we're going to tell you everything that you need to know about the Las Vegas massacre that occurred late last night.
We're going to give you all the informational background, all the political hot takes, and why we should wait for all the information to come out.
Plus, we'll talk about Puerto Rico and the fallout therefrom.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Horrifying act of evil last night, about 10 p.m. in Las Vegas.
A shooter opens fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, overlooking a giant 22,000-person country music concert that was happening.
The shooter ends up murdering almost 60 people.
The number continues to rise and has injured well over 500 people.
So it's the worst massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history.
Of course, this is leading to all sorts of political hot takes without any information.
I want to discuss a bunch of things, a bunch of angles on this particular incident.
I'm going to give you all the information.
I'm going to explain the hot takes that are being presented.
And I also want to talk about the problem of evil, and what exactly, how we break down evil, how do we fight evil, how is it possible to stop situations like this, or can situations like this, attacks on soft targets by people who heretofore had had really no criminal background, can we stop those things, or is it possible to stop those things?
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Okay, so here is the quick background on what exactly happened last night.
First, I can show you this video.
There's a lot of video that has been emerging from the incident because obviously in a crowd of 22,000 people at a concert, there are a lot of folks who are filming the concert, and then shots ring out, and it sounds like an automatic weapon.
It sounds like someone is firing a machine gun from about 300 yards, about three football fields away from the Mandalay Bay, and you can see it looming up there in the skyline, and people just being mowed down.
in this concert.
I mean, just unbelievably horrifying.
I'm going to take a look at the show.
It's a war zone right in the middle of one of America's largest and most prosperous cities.
And I mean, just overwhelming, the hospitals.
Right now, if you can, you should go out and you should give blood.
We have a list over at dailywire.com of ways that you can help with this situation so you don't feel helpless.
Obviously, pray for the world, pray for the country, and pray for the victims.
Just horrifying all the way around.
Here was President Trump's press conference this morning at which he spoke about what had just happened.
My fellow Americans, We are joined together today in sadness, shock, and grief.
Last night, a gunman opened fire on a large crowd at a country music concert in Las Vegas, Nevada.
He brutally murdered more than 50 people and wounded hundreds more.
I want to thank the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and all of the first responders for their courageous efforts and for helping to save the lives of so many.
The speed with which they acted is miraculous and prevented further loss of life.
To have found the shooter so quickly after the first shots were fired Is something for which we will always be thankful and grateful.
It shows what true professionalism is all about.
So President Trump ordered the flags around the United States to be flown at half-staff in honor of the victims.
It is the worst massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history.
Here's what we know about the shooter.
He's 64 years old.
His name is Steven Paddock from Mesquite, Nevada.
There's no motive as of yet.
People, you know, whenever these sorts of things happen, everybody in the news industry immediately goes to social media and begins trying to uncover all of the facts about the guy.
None of that has come out so far.
Apparently, according to Corey Rose over at the local news, he was known to local police, but They don't really have a criminal history.
There have been reports that he lived in a retirement home, but this remains unconfirmed at this time.
The police have checked out his girlfriend, a woman named Mary Lou Danley.
They've said that she had nothing to do with it at this point.
They're now saying that he used a fully automatic weapon, and upon searching the suspect's home, officers found several weapons.
I'll explain to you what the law is regarding fully automatic weapons in the United States.
Suffice it to say, federal law has forbid the sale of fully automatic rifles in the United States since 1986.
So the idea that this was, you know, some guy just went down to the local gun shop and bought a gun, if this was indeed a fully automatic weapon, that is not correct.
And you can hear on that tape, it sounds like a fully automatic weapon, right?
The difference between a fully auto and a semi-auto, for people who are not familiar with guns, is that a semi-auto, you'd hear burst fire.
And usually those bursts are three bullets.
So, in that case, you hear a continuous rat-a-tatting of a machine gun like you would in a war movie.
That's what a fully automatic weapon sounds like.
There is a modification that you can make to some semi-automatic weapons that can ruin the gun.
It can also, if you do it right, then it can apparently make it fully automatic.
Or, there's also a modification that you can make that allows you to fire using the recoil from the semi-automatic Rifle basically you hold your finger in one place and then there's a Stock that you a gun stock that you put on the gun that bounces back and so they it sort of rattles Against your shoulder and that allows it to sort of act like a fully automatic weapon But we don't have evidence that that's what was happening as of yet according to Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo The motive remains unclear but is not suspected to be terrorism.
This is all according to Amanda Prestigiacomo over at Daily Wire.
He said, at this point we believe it was a local individual.
He resides here locally.
I'm not at liberty to give you his place of residence yet because it's an ongoing investigation.
We don't know what his belief system was at the time.
Right now we believe he's the sole aggressor at this point.
The scene is static.
Do not believe rumors that ISIS is putting out claiming credit for this.
ISIS does this sometimes.
ISIS has claimed credit for crimes it did not commit because it wants to make it appear as though it's an act of terrorism.
Now, it may come out later that it was an act of radical Islamic terror, but we have no evidence of that so far, so please do not spread rumors of that.
If you're going to talk about it, say there's no evidence so far, because there is no evidence of it so far.
So, again, the girlfriend was reportedly traveling with him, but they are suggesting that she has nothing to do with it at this point.
She was apparently found outside the country, and Paddock reportedly used her ID to get into the hotel.
He was found dead by officers in a hotel room on the 32nd floor.
Apparently, when they blew open the door, he killed himself.
The suspect's brother gave a TV interview in which he said that there were no warning signs and said that he just snapped.
We're going to continue updating you and providing you that information as the show goes on live.
Also, go over to Daily Wire for real-time updates.
So, those are all the facts.
That's what we know.
Okay?
Those are all the things that we know.
That's pretty much it.
I mean, like, I'm not aware of anything else that we know.
Based on that slim coterie of fact, people are immediately drawing the conclusions they want to draw.
And this is one of the big problems in modern politics, is that people are immediately—they have preset conclusions that they want to get to, such as gun control good, gun control useful.
And they immediately take this and they just shove the square peg into the round hole of gun control, even if there's no real evidence at this point that gun control would have made this any better.
So Stephen Garkowski over at the Washington Free Beacon, he has a very good rundown over at Washington Free Beacon talking about exactly what exactly the gun laws are that are on the books at this point.
And as he says, the gun laws with regard to machine guns are and have been quite strict for a long time.
So since 1986, that is the case.
Since 1986, it has been illegal in the United States to buy a fully automatic long gun.
Fully automatic firearms.
This is Gutowski talking.
This is fully automatic firearms that were registered under the National Firearms Act before 1986, were grandfathered in, and are still illegal.
However, in order to obtain a legal fully automatic firearm, you must apply to the ATF, pay a $200 tax, and register with the ATF.
The ATF has a registry of every legally owned fully automatic firearm and informs local law enforcement of all who own them in their jurisdiction.
Fingerprints and photographs are required to be submitted along with a registration application.
In practice, There are several hundred thousand legally registered fully automatic firearms in the United States, but they are very hard to obtain.
And beyond the registration process, which can take up to nine months to complete, the price of fully automatic firearms is extremely high.
The low end of fully automatic firearms is around five figures per gun.
He says he's seen fully automatic firearms in the $300,000 range.
The reason this is relevant is because what you'll hear is that they're unregulated.
This is untrue.
That is a gun myth.
Now, there are a bunch of people who are putting aside any semblance of reality.
In fact, in order to promulgate this political agenda, Hillary Clinton is one of those.
So Barack Obama does the right thing.
He tweets out, basically, that this is just horrifying.
Hillary Clinton, however, can't stop herself.
So she tweets out, she starts in this way.
Las Vegas, we are grieving with you.
The victims, those who lost loved ones, the responders, and all affected by this cold-blooded massacre.
And then she continues along these lines.
She says, the crowd fled at the sound of gunshots.
It took her legitimately five minutes to go political with this.
She says the crowd fled at the sound of gunshots.
Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.
So within minutes, she's already politicizing this and blaming the NRA without any evidence the NRA had anything to do with this.
There was no silencer on the gun, obviously and apparently.
She continued along these lines as well, but this was the main thrust of it.
So she's blaming the NRA.
For all of this.
And that is just unacceptable.
First of all, it's irrelevant.
He wasn't using a silencer.
It's stupid because that's not how silencers work.
The idea that the silencer would have prevented people from hearing that, all a silencer does is it prevents damage to the ears of the person who's firing the gun.
Silencers do not silence guns.
They reduce the volume, of course, but it doesn't sound like it doesn't die hard.
Like, if you watch Die Hard, if you watch any of these older movies where somebody puts a silencer on a pistol and then they fire it, and it sounds basically like an envelope opening, right?
It just sort of sounds like, right?
That's not what a gun sounds like when fired with a silencer.
I fired a gun with a silencer.
It sounds like a jackhammer.
It's very, very loud.
Beyond that, the reason that this shooter presumably didn't use a silencer is because silencers can overheat and prevent the firing mechanism from working properly.
This guy knew what he was doing.
He apparently had multiple firing positions inside his suite in the Mandalay Bay and was firing down into the crowd.
So Hillary doesn't know what she's talking about.
It's irrelevant.
It's ignorant.
And it's doing something else which I find really atrocious, and that is doing the same routine I blamed Piers Morgan for back after Sandy Hook, standing on the evils of this situation and the horrors of this situation in order to make a political point and suggesting that people who disagree with her about things like silencers don't care enough about the people who were just shot.
First of all, I would just suggest this is a country music concert.
I would bet you the majority of the people in that crowd are not in favor of Hillary Clinton-type gun regulations.
Even the people who are in the crowd, even the victims, I'm sure.
I don't want to speak for people who are dead or people who are shot, so I shouldn't say that.
But I will say that a lot of people at a country music concert, that's a crowd that's more likely to be pro-gun than other crowds.
Hillary Clinton can't even speak on behalf of those people.
With accuracy.
Okay, I want to talk in a second about a couple of other reasons it's inappropriate to immediately jump to legislative proposals without evidence in just a second.
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So as I say, people on the left immediately jumped to political positioning and Elizabeth Warren did the routine.
We have to do something now, something now to stop it.
So I'll talk in a second about what could be done to stop these sorts of things, if anything.
But she's not the only one.
Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, tweeted out something quite disgusting.
He tweeted out, Dern tootin', great shootin', cool dudes certain he's Second Amendment right, hell yeah.
And he spells rights R-A-H-T-S, because it's supposed to be in a southern accent.
Every country has its psychopaths.
In US, they have guns.
Okay, well, in Britain they've been murdering people, you know, they've had multiple terror attacks, including in Manchester, using weapons and bombs and, you know, this idea that it's only in the United States we have to worry about this stuff is just not true.
But Richard Dawkins could use a little bit of God, because apparently he lost his tact and his decency when he lost his God.
There are a few problems with jumping to conclusions here.
Again, we still do not know the shooter's motive.
This happened last night.
We still have no inkling of the shooter's motive.
How the shooter acquired his weapons, we still don't know.
So suggesting laws that we don't know would stop this guy from acquiring the weapon in the first place is always troublesome.
Now, to be intellectually honest, I want to say, You can propose a good law that doesn't necessarily deal with this specific situation, right?
It's not like every law has to deal with the specific situation at hand, if it reduces the probability of a situation like this, or if it doesn't even have to do with this situation, but it's going to make things safer generally, right?
You can pass a seatbelt law that has nothing to do with a mass shooting, the seatbelt law can still be good, but it's dishonest to suggest that using a situation like this to push a law that wouldn't have stopped a situation like this, the two things are related because they're not.
If you use this to push a child safety law about cribs, that's obviously unrelated.
Well, if you use this incident to pass a law or push a law or push a policy that has nothing to do with this particular shooting, again, unrelated is unrelated.
And then there's a final point, and this is something that we all fall into, whether on the right and on the left.
When something bad happens, we immediately jump to what could the government have done?
What should the government have done?
Making policy in the heat of passion is not a good way to make policy.
It's why we don't have a democracy, it's why we have a republic.
It was to shield policymaking from the passions of the public.
It was to shield policymaking from the problems inherent in getting very emotional and passionate about situations.
You know, the fact is that policy is best made when we're at a bit of a remove.
Injecting emotional accusations into the process does not make things better, it just makes things more polarized.
We saw this after Barack Obama would push gun control after every mass shooting, and people would say, wait a second, are you implying I don't care when people get shot just because we disagree?
All it does is make people, we're unified in how evil this is.
We're Americans, we're brothers and sisters.
Polarizing the electorate on the basis of a policy and suggesting that people who disagree with you don't care about shootings like this is really nasty.
What I say about this is, now is a good time to shut up about policy.
It's actually a really good time to contemplate the nature of human evil, to gather all the information and stay silent.
There'll be plenty of time to talk policy in, I'm not even telling you wait six months, I'm telling you wait 48 hours.
Wait 24 hours.
There'll be plenty of time to talk policy when all of the details are out and then we can have a real good debate about What are the costs and benefits of policies?
Because, as I say, you could pass a policy tomorrow, it would violate the Second Amendment, but you could try to pass a policy banning all guns in the United States.
But that has costs, and it has benefits, and it has risks, and it has rewards.
But we have to discuss those rationally, without suggesting that people who disagree somehow don't care when bad things happen to good people.
Pictures from this whole thing are horrifying, and I want to talk a little bit about the nature of evil, because there's one word that I've steadfastly attempted to avoid when discussing issues like that, and that is the word tragedy.
You'll see a lot of people today use the word tragedy.
I don't use the word tragedy in relation to acts of human evil.
A tragedy is what happened in Puerto Rico.
A tragedy is a natural disaster that happens, an unavoidable incident, a cancer that hits somebody and they die of illness.
That's a tragedy.
It's not a tragedy when somebody evil does an evil thing.
That's an act of evil.
That's an act of evil.
And this person bears full responsibility for that.
This person will burn in hell for what they did today.
And it's just horrifying in every way.
So let's talk about evil.
You know, I think that it's very easy when horrible things happen for us to say evil is something other.
Evil is something alien.
Evil is something that's not us.
It's just something that's far away from us.
And we have to discuss in situations like this, what is the exact type of evil that we're talking about?
Because there are actually several types of evil.
Evil is not just one big amorphous thing.
Evil is a descriptor of act.
If you're talking about acts, then it is a big amorphous thing, right?
An act to kill a child is evil.
But when we're talking about evil people, or evil belief systems, we have to distinguish what makes a person evil, or a belief system evil, other than just the act.
Because, again, there are many types of things that drive people to do those evil things.
That's what we're talking about now, the evil motivation.
And how we make policy is largely dependent on what kind of evil motivation we're talking about here.
So there's a guy named Roy Baumeister.
Roy Baumeister is a psychologist and he's also a terrific writer.
He has an entire book called Evil Inside Human Violence and Cruelty.
I've quoted it in some of my college speeches.
And he breaks down evil into basically four forms of evil.
And I think it's important to talk about these four forms of evil and determine if what we saw last night was one of these four forms or was it something else.
So here are the four forms of evil that Baumeister talks about.
The first form of evil is what he calls instrumental evil, instrumentality.
This is the idea that you have an object in mind and you don't care what means are used in order to gain that end.
You want money, you don't care that it's not your money, you go to the bank, you rob it, you shoot somebody.
That is instrumental evil.
Right?
This is suicide bombers who think that they are doing some greater good by killing a bunch of children in a pizzeria.
That's instrumental evil.
The ends justify the means.
And that's one we all have to be careful with, because we all have a tendency to fall for that, right?
That's an easy human one to fall into.
And when you wonder why good people become evil, that's an easy one to fall into, to say, my ends are so important, it doesn't matter if I treat another human being as a means.
The second form of evil that Baumeister talks about, or the second motive for evil, is what he calls threatened egotism.
He says that violence isn't perpetrated by those with low self-esteem, but those with relatively high self-esteem, or self-esteem that was threatened.
Here's what he said, he said, quote, This is the danger inherent in what we call microaggressions culture, right?
The idea that you're being insulted and therefore you have the right to lash out at somebody.
That's the kind of evil we also have to watch out for in ourselves.
This is the danger inherent in what we call microaggressions culture, right?
The idea that you're being insulted and therefore you have the right to lash out at somebody.
That's the kind of evil we also have to watch out for in ourselves.
And I would suggest that we have to be careful when we talk politics because of this.
We have to stop feeling offended when we disagree politically.
We have to stop attributing evil motives to people who disagree with us because then we're more likely to become evil ourselves.
The third form of evil is idealism.
This is really just a subset of instrumentality.
This is the people who believe that communism justifies the murder of 100 million people because we're creating utopia.
The closer we try to hew to utopia, the further we move away from human freedom and justify violence.
And finally, there's sadism.
Sadism is the least common type of evil.
It's the one that we tend to attribute evil acts to the most, but it's actually the least common type.
Sadism is the idea that you enjoy violence, right?
You're just a kid who tortured puppies, and now you go out and you murder human beings.
This is very, very uncommon.
His theory is that it would be more common except for guilt.
That we all have guilt, and so if we do something bad, we feel bad about it.
Once that guilt is removed, then we have a tendency to engage in further evil.
Now the reason I'm breaking down these types of evil is because when we make policy, we have to determine what sort of evil we're fighting.
Several of these types of evil are actually only fightable.
They're only combatable through moral education.
Right?
So ends justify the means thinking.
That is only combatable through moral education.
We can have laws on the books that stop people from committing violence, but that's not going to help you if people are willing to break those laws in order to achieve a higher end.
Moral education is the only way that you can prevent that.
That's not something that can be done at the governmental level.
It has to be done at the individual level, at the community level, at the school level.
That's something that we all have a part in helping to prevent.
Well, how about threatened egotism, the motive that springs from threatened egotism?
Well, there, I think that it's important, again, moral education has to take a hand here.
We all have to acknowledge that political disagreements do not involve a blight on your identity.
Idealism, same thing.
Your ideals do not justify violence.
This is a moral education issue.
Sadism is one where, you know, and if this looks like a sadistic crime, which it may well be, or if this is a crime of mental illness, that's the one where we can talk public policy.
Because the problem is with all the other three you're talking about, everyone is susceptible to it.
Everyone is susceptible to instrumental evil.
Everyone is susceptible to idealistic evil.
Everyone is susceptible to threatened egotism evil.
So if you promulgate a regulation targeting any of those three things, or any of those three types of people, you're going to take away rights from everyone.
The only types of people that we can profile are sadists and mentally ill people.
Those are the only types of people that we can profile.
This is why you see the great discrepancy between how the left describes stuff like this, talking about the instruments of evil, the guns, and the right talks about how do we actually stop people from committing these acts.
They're two completely separate conversations.
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Okay, so the reason that I discuss evil is because I think this is what conservatives tend to do.
We tend to say, okay, how do we stop people like this evil piece of garbage who shot 500 people in Las Vegas last night?
How do we stop people like that from doing what they do?
How do we separate those people from guns?
And the left says, if everybody is susceptible to being bad, then nobody should have a gun.
Well, the reality is that the vast majority of people who are susceptible to being bad are not people who do this.
And I still agree with the basic argument that the only way to stop a guy with a gun is a guy with a gun.
And in this particular case it was law enforcement because this was a planned terror attack that was occurring from a vantage point high up where only law enforcement could do something about it.
But there have been a number of situations where people with guns have stopped people with guns.
That is certainly the case.
All the arguments for the Second Amendment don't stop applying just because somebody misused the Second Amendment or obtained their gun illegally.
We don't even know how this guy obtained his gun in the first place.
Again, there'll be lots of time to discuss the policy implications of all this tomorrow.
All I would suggest for everybody is that we focus in on how we cleanse our own hearts of the tendency to do evil things, how we look at the world, and that we think a little bit more about the fact that we're all brothers and sisters in this fight against evil people, and we really need to focus together on how we can make our country a better place across the board without Tearing each other apart over simple political disagreements.
Because I see that happening too much and I find it really inappropriate and quite disgusting.
Okay.
So, in other news, the President of the United States is in hot water over everything that's happening in Puerto Rico.
So, there's been a bit of a controversy over whether what's happening in Puerto Rico is really Trump administration failure, or if it's the media blowing it out of proportion.
This is one of the problems with the country where we've all lost trust, right?
The media, we feel, is a partisan hit factory, and that's exactly right.
On the other hand, we look at the Trump administration, we can't say we trust these people to tell us the truth about what's going on in Puerto Rico.
After all, they have a stake in the game, the same way that any administration would have a stake in the game.
So I'm gonna give you some information.
I'm not an expert about hurricane preparedness or hurricane I'm not an expert on this.
I assume you're not either.
So I'm going to allow a couple of different experts to talk about this because I think that it's important to get the most objective view that we can because all that I'm hearing from one side is that Trump is Hitler and he's not doing the right thing.
He's letting people starve because they're brown and all this.
And on the other side that Trump is the greatest relief president that ever lived and everything that he's done is pitch perfect and all of this is an unfair hit job.
So here is an article from Bloomberg.com, courtesy of a guy named Tobin Harshaw, and he interviewed a retired Navy captain named Jimi Hendrix.
So Jimi Hendrix is Jerry Hendrix, not the guitarist.
He's a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, and he served for decades both on the high seas and in high-level staff jobs, including with the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policies Irregular Warfare Quadrennial Defense Review.
He has degrees from Purdue Harvard, the Naval Postgrad School, and a Ph.D. from King's College in London.
And here's what he said.
What he suggested is that the Trump administration is actually doing a pretty good job.
He says, he doesn't think the criticism has been fair.
He says, there is a fair amount of anticipatory action that is not being recognized.
Amphibious ships, including the light amphibious carriers Kyrsaj and Wasp, and the amphibious landing ship Dock Oak Hill, were at sea and dispatched to Puerto Rico ahead of the hurricane's impact.
These are large ships that have large flight decks to land and dispatch heavy-lift CH-53 helicopters to and from disaster sites.
They also have big well decks, exposed surfaces, that are lower than the fore and aft of the ship, from which large landing craft can be dispatched to shore, carrying over 150 tons of water, food, and supplies on each trip.
You're seeing a lot of rumors online about problems distributing the supplies throughout the country because of unionized truck businesses or impassibility of the roads.
That has nothing to do with Trump.
These are actually the ideal platforms, he says, for relief operations owing to their range of assets.
The ships, due to their designs to support marine amphibious landings in war zones, also have hospitals aboard.
And he says that there is a broad misunderstanding of the USS Comfort's mission.
This is a hospital ship that was sent.
It was kind of held up and then sent later.
She's not an emergency response ship, but a hospital ship.
She was built to accompany a large military force into war zones.
And says it's revelatory of where the U.S.
group mind is now that when the American public thinks about the ships like Comfort and Mercy, they automatically think of them as part of a civilian emergency response force, rather than quietly considering the type of potential conflict That's one perspective.
The other perspective is coming courtesy of the Washington Post.
I can tell you when I think of these ships, I internally shudder at the thought of the type of conflict they were intended to support.
He says that basically there are ways that the Trump administration could be doing better, but they're not doing badly at all.
So that's one perspective.
The other perspective is coming courtesy of the Washington Post.
So the Washington Post suggests that the Trump administration has not sent enough people.
They compare the U.S. response.
response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico with the U.S.
response under Barack Obama of the Haitian earthquake in January 2010.
So a couple of differences.
The Haitian earthquake in January 2010 ended up killing something like 100,000 people.
Literally hundreds of thousands of people died.
We don't have a body count on Puerto Rico, so we don't know how bad the damage is in comparison to Haiti.
But here's what they say.
Eight days after Hurricane Maria ripped across neighboring Puerto Rico, just 4,400 service members were participating in federal operations to assist the devastated island, an Army general told reporters on Thursday.
In addition, about 1,000 Coast Guard members were aiding the efforts.
Forty U.S.
military helicopters were helping deliver food and water to 3.4 million residents of the U.S.
territory, along with 10 Coast Guard helicopters.
And then there were a bunch of people who helped out in Haiti.
Again, I don't have the expertise, so I'm just going to present you with the facts without making a hard and fast judgment.
They say within two days of Haiti's earthquake, the Pentagon had 8,000 American troops en route.
Within two weeks, 33 military ships and 22,000 troops had arrived.
More than 300 military helicopters buzzed overhead, delivering millions of pounds of food and water.
So they're suggesting that basically this is a fraction of what was done with Haiti.
Again, I don't have the expertise, so I'm just going to present you with the facts without making a hard and fast judgment.
Suffice it to say, I'm seeing credible people on both sides of the aisle, some saying that all of this is basically going as planned, And some people saying that this is obviously not sufficient.
So before you start believing all the rumors that everything is a disaster area, I don't think that that is, I don't think all the information is on one side.
Here's a video that's been released from the U.S.
Coast Guard showing what the Coast Guard is doing to try and do cleanup in Puerto Rico.
And this is Ismael Rosado of the U.S.
Coast Guard Special Agent.
Expected some damage, but not to the extent that we experienced yesterday, that we witnessed yesterday.
People lost everything in their houses say Everything everything they just the only thing they had in there.
It seems like whatever they they were wearing that was what's left Looking at the homes and seeing where the water line was pretty much chest level for me It was definitely It was definitely a challenge to keep it together when we started distributing the supplies throughout the community.
I was sad.
I was sad looking at the conditions that the people... So I mean obviously you can see that there is work that's being done on the ground and you wouldn't see a lot of these videos except for the fact that a lot of these branches of the military actually have their own PR wings.
This has been contrasted with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz.
She is a very, very left-wing mayor of San Juan.
She apparently has supported particular terrorist groups in the past that are left-wing in terms of her rhetoric.
And she went on national TV to rip President Trump.
And, of course, the media ate it up.
Well, maybe from where she's standing, it's a good news story.
When you're drinking from a creek, it's not a good news story.
When you don't have food for a baby, it's not a good news story.
When you have to pull people down from their buildings, because, you know, I'm sorry, but that really upsets me and frustrates me.
You know, I would ask her to come down here and visit the towns and then make a statement like that, which, frankly, it is an irresponsible statement.
And it contrasts with the statements of support that I have been getting since yesterday when I got that call from the White House.
Damn it, this is not a good news story.
This is a people are dying story.
This is a life or death story.
There's a truckload of stuff that cannot be taken to people's story.
Okay, so the media, of course, eats this up and suggests that she is exactly right, this is going to be Trump's Katrina, and the media is alacrity to cover this thing.
And their apparent unwillingness to talk to other people on the ground is quite striking here.
There's some problems with this particular mayor, who seems like she has a lot of time for TV, and not as much time to actually do the things she's supposed to do.
So she admitted in a press conference that she had not met with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
She was invited to do so, and she didn't even bother to do it.
People from my administration, people from my administration have been to the Koi.
Yes.
But she has not, apparently.
So while she's ripping Trump up and down, she has not visited the FEMA headquarters.
She was also apparently wearing, at one point she had a shirt made up that said, help us, we are dying.
So she had time to make a custom t-shirt that she could wear on TV.
But her management of the crisis has not been great.
To say the least.
There's always this sort of blame game that goes on, by the way, between local authorities and the federal authorities.
Remember after Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin, who's largely responsible for the tragedy in New Orleans, who had told people to stay in town, made it a voluntary evacuation instead of a mandatory evacuation.
He blamed the federal government.
The media ate that up.
The governor, Kathleen Blanco, she blamed the feds.
And of course, the media ate that up.
It's funny, when all the locals were saying that Obama wasn't doing enough during the Louisiana flooding a few years ago, then the media wasn't quite so... they weren't hustling quite so much to get those people on TV.
And I'm going to show you the other side.
I'm going to show you the people who are saying this mayor is basically speaking inaccurately, shall we say.
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Okay, so, the media's been granting a lot of credibility to this San Juan mayor, who apparently is not doing the world's greatest job, but here is the Puerto Rico governor saying, the feds are answering our calls, like we want more stuff, but they're doing what they can do.
You know, there was a good article that aired this morning... It's the FEMA chief.
It's okay, we can play the FEMA chief, that's fine.
Brock Long from FEMA.
...Mayor Otero out of Guayanabo, if I'm not pronouncing that correct, is basically saying, look, there's been excellent communication with not only the governor, but also FEMA, and the way that we're trying to tackle this.
You know, we can choose to look at what the mayor spouts off, or what other people spout off, but we can also choose to see what's actually being done.
And that's what I would ask.
Okay, and the Puerto Rican governor has also said that the feds are answering.
So, Trump responds to all of this, and he's very angry.
And you can see why he's mad, because the media, of course, have jumped on this with both feet.
So, for example, Saturday Night Live called Trump a cheap cracker, really.
This is what they said, because Trump responded to the San Jose mayor By insulting the San Juan mayor because he insulted the San Juan mayor.
Why don't we do his response first?
So here are his tweets about the San Juan mayor.
So he responded to the San Juan mayor by saying the mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.
OK, again, I think that the president of the United States has the right to say the mayor of San Juan.
I understand why she's emotional, but she's incorrect about the about the way that we're treating this.
We are treating this with the highest level of seriousness, which is why all of the experts say that we're doing what we can do.
It's why the governor says this.
It's why the other mayors say this.
Instead to go after her and say she's nasty to Trump, he's making it more personal even than it was.
That's not the way to unify or to move above the debate.
Do I blame him for this?
This is Trump.
I mean, what would you expect?
He feels like he was maligned, and he's going to hit back against that.
And I don't think that he's completely wrong to do so.
He continues along these lines, and he tweets, such poor leadership ability by the mayor of San Juan and others in Puerto Rico who are not able to get their workers to help.
Again, here is where he starts to veer off.
So as always, Trump starts from a point that is 80% correct, and he moves into points that are now 10% correct.
Right.
Who are these others in Puerto Rico who are not able to get their workers to help?
Can he call them out?
Can we know?
If we're going to play the blame game now, let's find out who specifically is impeding the progress here.
Don't just put it on the people in Puerto Rico.
And then he continues along these lines.
He says, they want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.
10,000 federal workers now on island doing a fantastic job.
Okay, again, who are these people who want everything to be done for them now?
And it sounds like he's accusing all of these people of laziness.
Like, what is the point of this?
What is the point of this?
He could just say, the San Juan mayor is wrong.
I'm insulted by the implication that I'm not taking this seriously.
Of course I am.
Maybe she's politically motivated to say this stuff because I see no other reason for her to say this other than political motivation.
Right, that I think would find, 90% appropriate.
Him going after all of the people of Puerto Rico, apparently, or a large swath of the people of Puerto Rico, that seems insane that they want everything done for them.
Again, if you're not gonna name names, then this is just bad policy.
But he's very angry at the media because the media used this as an opportunity to slam Trump himself.
So here's Bernie Sanders talking about how it is unspeakable to attack the mayor of a city that has been underwater.
Speaking from his fancy golf club, playing golf with his billionaire friends, attacking the mayor of San Juan, who is struggling to bring electricity to the island, food to the island, water to the island, gas to the island, that is just, it is unspeakable, and I don't know what world Trump Okay, so I like that it's unspeakable for Trump to say the mayor's not doing his job, but it's not unspeakable for the mayor to say Trump's not doing his job.
That much, I don't blame on Trump.
I do blame Trump for going beyond that and starting to rip broad swaths of the Puerto Rican public or governing structure.
I also blame Trump for this.
This image is just not smart.
If Obama did this, we'd be ripping him up and down.
If Obama had gone out and played golf in the middle of a hurricane relief effort and then dedicated the golf tournament to the victims of the hurricane relief, I have a feeling that everybody would have been on his case, and I think rightly so.
No, it's just an image, okay?
So apparently, he got up, and he actually, so if you can't see the image, it's him at this golf tournament, and here is what he said.
He said, on behalf of all of the people in Texas, and all of the people of, if you look today and you see what's happening, how horrible it is, but we really have it under great control, Puerto Rico, and the people of Florida who have suffered over this last short period of time with hurricanes, I wanna just remember them, and we're gonna dedicate this trophy to all of those people that went through so much that we love, a part of our great state, really a part of our great nation.
He says, I'll tell you what, I've been watching this thing from the beginning, and I have to say, our Team USA, wow, did you play well.
I can guarantee you the people in Puerto Rico do not give two craps about this golfing event.
Okay, and I don't think victims in Texas or Florida are deeply honored by the president presenting the president's cup to the victims of a hurricane.
Like, unless it actually has potable water in it, I have a feeling they're not super interested in it.
So that's just bad politics.
Trump better than anybody should know about the imagery here, and it's really dumb.
Does that justify the media's response?
No.
The media's response is super over the top.
So here's SNL yesterday ripping into President Trump, calling him a cheap cracker.
It's hurricane relief.
These people need help.
You just did this for white people twice.
Do the same thing.
Go tell Melania to put on her flood heels, get some bottled water, some food, pack up some extra Atlanta Falcons Super Bowl t-shirts, and write them a check with our money, you cheap cracker.
Okay, so first of all, calling the president a cheap cracker, imagine if somebody had said something similarly inflammatory about Barack Obama referring to him by race.
You know, would that be okay?
And by the way, it's an easy comedic technique to use shocking words and then expect people to laugh, but it's really kind of gross.
So, no wonder Trump is mad, and Trump has a right to be mad.
Again, there's not a lot of evidence, or at least there's mixed evidence, that this Puerto Rican effort is being handled badly, and to suggest that he is a quote-unquote cheap cracker is pretty incredible, and Trump has every right to be upset about all of that.
For sure.
The media are really over the top here.
So, I want to talk about football fallout and then some things I like and some things I hate.
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it, we are by far the largest and fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
So it's fallen into the background now, but I do want to point out that President Trump has won his debate with the NFL, at least insofar as the NFL backing down and the players deciding they no longer want at least insofar as the NFL backing down and the players deciding they no longer So I don't feel like it's too serious a day to spend time on tremendous amounts of time on frivolities like this foolishness.
But I do think that it is worthwhile pointing out that the NFL players did back down.
So there were some 80-odd players who knelt last Sunday.
This Sunday, it was like 11 or 12.
It was a much lower number, maybe 20 at the upper end.
The players decided that it was not worth alienating their audiences, and that's because Trump threw a spotlight on them, and the players were stupid enough to all kneel, and then the audience said, nope, not into it, and the players all stood up again.
So good for the audiences for saying it's wrong to kneel.
I suppose good for Trump for saying that it's wrong to kneel, because I agree with him that it's wrong to kneel.
I'm not glad about the way that he went about it.
But again, I think it's clever of Trump politically to have done this.
And I'll show you, Marshawn Lynch is a running back for the Oakland Raiders.
He's also kind of a crazy person.
And Marshawn Lynch showed up at his game yesterday wearing a shirt that says, Everybody vs. Trump.
Right?
And so there he is.
You can see the picture of him wearing the shirt that says, Everybody vs. Trump.
And President Trump thanks you for your 2020 donation, Marshawn.
I mean, nothing is going to make Trump look better than a bunch of jerk football players who make millions of dollars a year and want to kneel for the anthem saying that they are against Trump.
It makes Trump a very happy man every time they do this.
And what's amazing is the Democrats are so stupid that they're jumping right into this.
They've decided they're going to jump on every landmine.
Every landmine must be stepped upon multiple times until it explodes.
Kamala Harris, the senator from California, unfortunately my own senator over here in California, she says that no one should feel threatened or bullied by President Trump.
Again, I don't disagree that President Trump shouldn't have been bullying the NFL to suspend players.
But I think the Democrats are making a very stupid political move by trying to own this one.
Let's speak the truth that when Americans demand recognition that their lives matter or kneel to call attention to justice that that is an expression of free speech protected by our Constitution and should not be threatened or bullied.
Okay, I may agree with the general point that she's making, but the Democrats wanting to own this thing?
Not particularly smart.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, quick things that I like.
So, there's a book that I read over the weekend.
It was recommended to me by a new friend, who we are doing a Facebook Live with either today or tomorrow.
We did film it earlier, but we're going to put it up a little later.
That is Professor Edward Fazer, who wrote Five Proofs of God's Existence.
He recommended to me a book on free will that I read over the weekend.
It's very short, it's about 85 pages, but it really is quite concise and good.
It's called Free, Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will by a guy named Alfred Mele.
And it is quite good, it's easily readable, and it debunks a lot of these scientific arguments on behalf of the notion that neuroscience shows that you have no free will, and that basically you're just a machine, a self-replicating machine.
That's not the case, and this book shows that science has not proved it.
The single most important factor for the development of society is your feeling of capacity to better yourself and better the society in which you live.
If we didn't feel that way, progress would stop short, people would get depressed, we'd have a serious problem.
I think that's one of the problems with our society as it currently is constituted.
Check out this book to find out why science has overstepped its boundaries in making some of its more ridiculous claims about the nature of your capacity to choose.
Again, the book is free.
Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will.
Good book.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, I ripped SNL earlier.
I want to compliment SNL for a very funny bit that they did.
They did a bit for a new type of genes that they are calling Levi's Woke.
Here is the bit.
It's pretty funny.
My jeans tell me I'm a man.
My jeans tell me I'm a woman.
They tell me I'm relaxed.
That I'm skinny.
A child.
Yo, you don't know me, jeans.
I'm not a style.
I'm not a size.
That's not me.
I am not a child.
I'm me.
I'm unique.
I'm woke.
Woke, woke.
I'm woke.
So, why aren't my jeans?
Now they are.
Introducing Levi Wokes.
Sizeless, style neutral, gender non-conforming denim for a generation that defies labels.
Levi's heard that if you're not woke, it's bad.
So we made these.
Defining someone by their style?
That's offensive.
That's why Levi wokes have no style.
What's my size?
Why don't you try asking me about my accomplishments?
My wokes are size me.
They fit everybody.
Because they fit nobody.
So what colors do they come in?
Colors?
I'm triggered.
This color.
Can you label this color?
That is the color grab.
They not brown, but they not not brown.
It's a handful of colors, none of which are dominant.
Just like our country.
Oh, wait.
Woke.
Laptop pockets.
Pockets sold separately.
Yo, who says I have hands?
You getting this yet?
The jeans are woke.
Woke!
Do they come in men's and women's?
Nah.
Do they come in person?
What do you think?
That's why wokes got unified.
180 degrees of gender non-conformity.
See, when SNL actually decides to be politics neutral and go after both sides, it's so funny.
This is really good, okay?
Because the whole woke thing is so stupid.
And of course, trying to apply it to basic elements of everyday life demonstrates how stupid it is.
Okay, so there we go.
A thing from SNL that I like.
Congratulations, SNL.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So here we go.
Okay, so I was going to do this on Friday, but I must show it to you now.
This is, of course, the pause pod.
So somebody decided that it was imperative to actually invent something called the pause pod, in which you are supposed to sit and pause and reflect.
I guess you carry it around with you.
Okay, it's a dude getting into a tent, and there's like an actual part of the tent that folds out to hold your legs.
It says, take a nap anywhere.
And then it's just some creepy dude in the middle of a park getting out of a tent, like a homeless guy near the L.A. River.
Just awesome.
So somebody invented a tent, and then they called it the pause pod.
And apparently it's like well insulated, and also you can stick your legs out so that somebody can trip over you, apparently.
You know, Peter Thiel suggests that the pace of innovation in our society has dramatically slowed.
I would think that this is pretty good proof of that.
My son has a pause pod.
It's like a little, it's a little tent that we got him for like $10.
And he likes to prop it up and sit in it.
I guess it's his pause pod now.
He does not stick his legs out of it because he's not a moron like these adults who decide that in a public place, he's a year and a half and he's not stupid enough to do this.
And they've decided that they need to stick their legs out into the public thoroughfare.
As I suggested to Mathis, this just seems like ripe for robbery, right?
I mean, can you just imagine?
Somebody goes to sleep in public in a tent, you just open up the tent, grab their stuff and run, and meanwhile their legs are tangled up in the lengthening part of the pause pod.
Or, if you really want to get violence about it, I suppose you could just chainsaw off their legs and they really can't chase you.
But, you know, there's no reason to get violent about it.
You can also just push over the tent and laugh.
That's probably what I would do.
So if you ever see someone with a pause pod, just know that that person is not a success in life.
Okay.
Other thing that I hate, so...
The other thing that I hate today is that John Kasich somehow thinks he's still relevant.
The Ohio governor who basically assured that Donald Trump won the nomination by staying in the race far too long.
A man who I have said before looks like he went through the washing machine like a receipt in your pocket and then was uncrumpled.
He now says that maybe he won't support the Republicans and he'll make an independent run because that's just what we need, America, is John Kasich making an independent run.
Oh, God, no.
Please, God, not John Kasich.
Yes, John Kasich.
If the party can't be fixed, Jake, then I'm not going to be able to support the party.
Period.
Well, okay, if the party is fixed by people like John Kasich, it ain't fixed.
Okay, I think there are serious problems in the party.
I do not think that this man is the one to fix the problems in the party, considering that he was too selfish to get out of the race and let somebody else compete.
This dummy stayed in long enough that it was impossible for anybody else to win the nomination, and here he is talking about how he's not a factor in ruining the party.
This is a guy who expanded Medicaid in his state in accordance with Obamacare.
Blech.
Okay, go away.
Good riddance.
Get out, John.
No one likes you.
Okay, so, we'll be back here tomorrow.
The rest of the week, we are broadcasting from abroad.
In the next two days, we are broadcasting from Sacramento, and then I'm gone for a week and a half.
Treasure these next two days.
Treasure our time together.
Because it really is precious.
And please, seriously, everybody pray today for the state of the country.
Pray today for the world.
And let's pray that the evil that is growing, it seems, all over the planet and in so many hearts and minds should be checked by a more benevolent God.
Let's pray for that.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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