All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 5, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:25
The Moral Preening Never Ends | Ep. 395
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hillary Clinton says you are complicit in murder if you disagree with her on gun control policy.
Jimmy Kimmel is back for more, and it appears the Secretary of State called the President of the United States an effing moron at some point in the recent past.
Yes, all of these things are really happening.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The inevitable decline into stupid continues and we will cover all of it.
The Rex Tillerson thing is pretty amazing.
I mean, he actually... There's a report from NBC News that suggested that he had called the president a moron back during the summer, and instead of him just sort of brushing it off, he decided to do a full-fledged press conference, and we have a clip of that, and we'll show it to you a little bit later, because it's pretty amazing.
Plus, Jimmy Kimmel just couldn't leave well enough alone.
He decided to go back on the air last night and double down on the, you're mean and cruel if you disagree with me on gun control.
So we'll go through all of that, but first I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Helix Sleep.
So, lately I have not been getting a lot of sleep.
Why?
Well, the last couple of nights it's because I'm on the road.
Guess what I'm not sleeping on when I'm on the road?
My Helix Sleep mattress.
Helix Sleep is the best mattress there is in the world.
HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
You take their simple two to three minute sleep quiz, And they build you a custom mattress that will be the best thing you have ever slept on.
For couples, they can even personalize each side of the mattress.
Everybody from GQ to Cosmo to the New York Times, they're all saying that Helix is fantastic because it is.
And it's a no-risk proposition.
So you go on, you fill out their algorithm, they send you the mattress in the mail, you unwrap the box and it inflates right in front of you because it's foam, and then you sleep on it.
It's great.
You can try it for 100 nights.
If you don't like it, they'll come, they'll pick it up, they'll refund you the money.
So no risk.
HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
Right now, you get $50 toward your custom mattress.
That's again, HelixSleep.com slash Ben. $50 toward your custom mattress.
And that is HelixSleep.com slash Ben for $50 off your order.
Okay, so a lot going on in the world.
We begin today with more fallout from Las Vegas.
So President Trump, yesterday, he did sort of what he likes to do when he's asked a question that he doesn't know the answer to, which is he says, I'll think about it.
So yesterday the media asked him about gun control, and here was Trump's answer.
We have a tragedy we're going to do and what happened in Las Vegas is in many ways a miracle.
The police department has done such an incredible job and we'll be talking about gun laws as time goes by.
Okay, so the very end of it is what people are focused on.
The left is focusing on where he said that what happened in Vegas was a miracle.
Of course, he's only talking about the law enforcement response.
He's not talking about the shooting itself.
People taking him out of context here are ridiculous.
Clearly, he's not talking about Americans being murdered being a miracle.
But it's that last part where he says, we'll talk about gun control as time goes by, that has a lot of people on the left very hopeful.
Now, is Trump actually going to pursue that?
No.
He's not going to pursue any of that.
That's Trump's go-to when he doesn't know what to say or he just wants to say something to leave the media with something to think about.
But the reality is that Republicans are not pushing gun control right now because no gun control measure that I can think of or that anyone on the left can think of would have stopped what just happened in Las Vegas.
Why?
Because it was unprecedented.
Because it was unthinkable.
And because the guy bought all of his guns legally, or at least the ones he used legally, apparently.
And because he passed all federal background checks, had no symptoms of mental illness.
From what we know, that's what makes this whole thing so mind-boggling, this whole deal.
So one of the things the left's been doing, as I discussed yesterday at length with Jimmy Kimmel, is they have been jumping on their high horse and suggesting that if you disagree with them about gun policy, it's because you're bad.
Now, in order to do that, very often what the left likes to do is trot out people who have been victims of gun violence, people who are shot.
And they say, well, these people know better than anyone.
As you know, I'm not a fan of this procedure, this technique.
I don't think that you being shot makes you an expert on gun policy any more than I think you being sick makes you an expert on health policy, or you paying taxes makes you an expert on tax policy, right?
You actually have to study issues in order to have expertise on them.
But one of the things I find really fascinating is that if you are a gunshot victim and you disagree with the left, they just pretend you don't exist.
So Steve Scalise is probably the most famous gunshot victim in the country at this point.
Steve Scalise, of course, the Louisiana congressperson, Who was shot by a crazed Bernie Sanders supporter in the congressional baseball shooting just a few months back.
And Steve Scalise was asked specifically about Las Vegas and the Second Amendment and here was his answer.
Inevitably questions about the Second Amendment are raised by what happened in Las Vegas.
It happens almost immediately.
Have you, your experience of your own and what you saw in Las Vegas, has it changed how you feel about any of that?
I think it's fortified it because, first of all, you've got to recognize that when there's a tragedy like this, the first thing we should be thinking about is praying for the people who were injured and doing whatever we can to help them, to help law enforcement.
We shouldn't first be thinking of promoting our political agenda.
Okay, but he's not allowed to say that.
Steve Scalise doesn't exist.
Watch as he disappears from the media, even though, again, he's the most famous gunshot victim in the country right now.
Why?
Because he still has principles, and he has good reason for this, okay?
If there hadn't been armed guards there at the congressional baseball shooting, he'd probably be dead now.
The fact is that it was arms that stopped that monster, that bad human being.
And it's arms that stopped the guy in Las Vegas.
If the police don't approach the room, the guy doesn't shoot himself.
He just continues firing down into the crowd.
Again, the evidence that gun control would solve any of the problems that you saw in Las Vegas is really weak or non-existent.
Leila Bresco.
She's a statistician and former writer at FiveThirtyEight and she has a Washington Post column today that I think is really worthwhile talking about how before she started researching gun deaths, gun control policy used to frustrate her and she used to be anti-NRA and she used to think that shrinking magazine sizes and all of this would actually help with gun deaths and mass shootings.
And then she did the research and she found that that isn't true.
Here's what she wrote, quote, And then she talks about Australia's
She says that Britain and Australia didn't prove much what America's policy should be.
She said neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun-related crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans.
She says, as I said yesterday, mass shootings were too rare in Australia.
for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress.
And she goes through all of the gun measures that have been suggested, and she points out that the next largest set of gun deaths after suicide, number one is suicide, this is all stuff I said yesterday, number one cause of gun death in the United States is suicide, number two are young men aged 15 to 34 killed in homicide, very often in gang violence.
But the left never wants to talk about that because that would suggest different policies, including jailing people from gangs who commit violent acts for longer periods of time in order to tamp down crime.
I mean, it's really funny.
The same left that says we need to let people out of jail is saying we should put gun owners in jail.
So the people who actually commit crimes with guns we should let out.
The people who just own a gun we should throw in.
This seems to be the logic of some people on the left.
And that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one, right?
The idea is that if you buy a type of gun the left doesn't like, you should go to jail.
But if you are in jail, we have an overpopulation in prison problem.
We have a school to, we have a streets to jail pipeline.
It's just foolish.
Okay, so we should release all those people, but we should put out law-abiding people who want to buy a gun that you don't want them to have in jail.
None of this makes sense.
None of it is effective.
But, again, none of this has to do with policy for the left.
The left thinks that it's going to win on emotional lines, because very often it does, right?
On healthcare policy, the left does win along emotional lines.
On gun control, it doesn't.
The reason is too many Americans own guns.
Too many people are familiar with how guns work.
There are hundreds of millions of guns in the United States of America.
And the implication that everyone who is somehow a gun owner is part of this evil is just absurd to people.
That's not stopping the Democrats though.
So Hillary Clinton yesterday, she came out and she said, Republicans are complicit in Vegas.
Do you feel like they're complicit, the GOP, the NRA, and the gun epidemic we're seeing in America?
Of course they are.
Of course they are.
You know, the Brady Bill actually kept two million guns out of the hands of people who weren't supposed to have them.
If we had gone forward with the background check capacity that we should have had, And that it was up-to-date.
My gosh, we computerize everything and we can't computerize that?
Dylan Roof was never supposed to get that gun that he used to kill people at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston because he had a pre-existing arrest that should have disqualified him.
But the system, you know, is deliberately kept all creaky and slow.
This is beyond absurd.
This is evil.
This is nothing but pure, unadulterated greed motivated by people who want to sell as many guns as they can to engage in a falsity of fear and rhetoric about why everybody has to have guns.
Okay, what absolute nonsense.
What absolute nonsense.
So everybody who wants to be able to buy guns legally, these are the people who are the problem, and people are deliberately keeping the system leaky.
Because here's the background on Dylann Roof, just so you have the factual background.
According to the New York Times.
Despite having previously admitted to drug possession, Dylann Roof was allowed to buy a .45 caliber handgun because of mistakes by FBI agents, a failure by local prosecutors to respond to a bureau request for more information about his case, and a weakness in federal gun laws.
So what happened?
Apparently, the authorities' inability to prevent Roof from obtaining the weapon highlighted the continuing background check system problem.
Democrats were in charge of the government for a huge percentage of the time, right?
Barack Obama was president when all of this happened.
He could help facilitate this.
Okay, do you think that Republicans don't want to eliminate human error?
Democrats were in charge of the government for a huge percentage of the time, right?
Barack Obama was president when all of this happened.
He could help facilitate this.
It's his FBI, right?
But somehow this is Republicans' fault, right?
They're evil.
They're evil.
They want people to shoot people so that they can sell more guns.
If you really believe that, you don't know any gun owners and you don't know any Republicans.
The Democrats, though, are starting to really, I think, reveal what they think about gun owners and what they think about guns, which is refreshing.
I mean, I like when there's a little bit of honesty in this process.
And in just a minute, I'm going to show you what Democrats have been saying about what sorts of guns they want to ban.
It's pretty amazing.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Blue Apron.
So Blue Apron is the number one fresh ingredient recipe delivery service in the country.
Their goal is to make home cooking accessible to everyone.
Cooking together builds stronger family bonds, makes sure that you eat healthier, and in many cases, it's less expensive than going to a restaurant.
Because right now, you can spend under 10 bucks per person for delicious meals.
Here's some of the meals that they are now serving, okay?
It sounds pretty great.
Cheesy chicken, black bean enchiladas with salsa verde, maple gravy smothered pork chops.
I haven't had pork, I've heard it's good.
Stewed collard greens and sweet potatoes, spiced cauliflower and pepper with jasmine rice and cilantro yogurt sauce.
I mean, this is gourmet kind of stuff.
And you can cook it yourself when they send you the fresh ingredients.
Again, for less than $10 per person per meal, they deliver these seasonal recipes, and you can choose from a variety of new recipes every single week, or you can let their culinary team surprise you.
They don't repeat a recipe within a year, so you will never get bored.
So that's pretty awesome.
Each meal comes with a step-by-step easy to follow recipe card, pre-portioned ingredients.
It can be prepared in 40 minutes or less.
Or less.
So go and check it out right now.
And when you do, when you go to blueaprons.com slash Shapiro, you get $30 off your first meal with free shipping.
$30 off your first meal with free shipping by going to blueaprons.com slash Shapiro.
You will love how good it feels and tastes to create these amazing home-cooked meals.
A lot of folks in the office are subscribers to Blue Apron for a reason.
Blueaprons.com slash Shapiro.
It is indeed a better way to cook.
Use that slash Shapiro so that they know that we sent you and also so you get the $30 off your first meal with free shipping.
Okay, so there's Hillary Clinton doing the moral posturing and the moral posturing is designed to undergird a program of gun seizures.
How could this have been prevented?
Is there a law?
Congressman Himes ultimately said yes he'd be for a ban on semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15.
How about you?
Well, absolutely.
I mean, let's just be clear that the pace of these epic mass shootings, ten or more people being killed, doubled after the assault weapons ban expired.
That's not a coincidence.
I think we also have to look at these aftermarket modifications that allows you Fairly to turn a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon.
But Willie, I also don't think we can be caught in this trap.
I think the gun lobby wants you, in the wake of one of these mass shootings, to only talk about the policy changes that would have affected the shooting that happened the day before.
We have to get back to the evergreen changes.
things like universal background checks that frankly probably would have stopped many of the other murders around the country that happened on Sunday before the shooting started in Las Vegas. - Okay, so number one, so again, that is not true.
Many of the guns that are used in crime, I believe the majority of guns that are used in crime, are not obtained legally.
The idea that in mass shootings, the people are not going through federal background checks is not true.
This shooter did go through a federal background check.
I believe that the shooter in the Pulse nightclub shooting went through a federal background check.
So the idea that all of these measures would have stopped any of this is not true.
But notice what he glosses over there.
And that is that he says he supports a ban on semi-automatic rifles.
Okay, understand that's pretty much every rifle in the country.
Pretty much every rifle in the country is a semi-automatic rifle, because again, a semi-automatic just means you pull the trigger once, and one round is fire.
That's all a semi-automatic means.
AR, people think it stands for assault rifle, of course it does not.
Okay, AR-15 is one of the most popular sporting rifles in the country.
You ban that, you're talking about either having to confiscate literally tens of millions of these guns from law-abiding Americans, Or preventing them from buying those guns on the market right now with federally licensed firearms dealers and background checks and the whole deal.
Democrats are starting to come out of the closet as to what they want here and Americans aren't going to like it.
It's so funny, the Democrats, after a mass shooting, they always think, ooh, now the tide of public opinion is with us.
The tide of public opinion is with the idea that we're all together in this and we hate mass shooters and we want them to die and they're evil people.
We're all on that, but we're not all together on the policies that you prescribe, because the policies you prescribe are very much contra traditional American concepts about freedom and liberty and gun ownership.
It's not just Chris Murphy who's trying to make hay off of this.
You also have people like Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts arguing that the founders didn't want people to be able to purchase guns.
When the Second Amendment was written in order to maintain a well-regulated militia, they did not have in mind that people could purchase guns indiscriminately, go up into the top of buildings and rain down this death on 59 people, hundreds of other people.
Again, the founders did believe that you should be able to own weapons that you could use in the militia, right?
That meant a military-grade weapon.
We're not even talking about people owning military-grade weapons.
As I said yesterday, the difference between a civilian AR and a military AR is extraordinarily significant, right?
A civilian AR is a semi-automatic, a fully militarized AR, right?
An M16 or an M4.
Now, these guns have the capacity for burst fire or fully automatic, so there is a big difference.
But again, all this really is, is the left attempting to use emotion in place of real policy.
So, you know, Jimmy Kimmel was back last night, and Jimmy Kimmel is not backing down off of his, I am holier than you are, I care more about people who died, therefore you must agree with me.
Here's what he had to say last night to critics like me, who said that his gun monologue last night was factually incorrect.
I'm not going to get deep into it again tonight.
I said what I had to say last night, but I do want to say something to these nuts who spent most of the day today on television and online attacking those of us who think we need to do something about the fact that 59 innocent people were killed.
Can you pause there for one second?
Okay, so first of all, we didn't spend yesterday attacking people who think that something has to be done.
We attacked you for attacking Americans and saying that Americans are basically a bunch of dunder-headed, cruel jackasses if they don't agree with you on policy.
I mean, if you actually want to propose a policy, we can talk about the policy.
What I said in the minutes after the shooting is, how about we get all the information on the shooting and then we talk policy?
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Now, I'm not saying we should never talk policy.
I'm saying we should talk policy once the information is in.
Why is this a difficult concept?
You know, evidence.
Information.
But again, Kimmel is strawmanning here.
He's basically suggesting that all of us who criticized him were really, we just don't want to do anything and that's why we're criticizing him.
No, I'm criticizing you because what you're saying is factually incorrect and then you're implying that those of us who want evidence to back our policies are somehow cruel and nasty.
Okay, he continues.
Talking about it because it's too soon.
Well, maybe it's too soon for you because deep down inside you know, in your heart, you know you bear some responsibility for the fact that almost anyone can get any weapon they want.
Now you want to cover yourself until the storm of outrage passes.
You can go back to your dirty business as usual, but It's not too soon for us, because we're Americans, and last time I checked, the First Amendment is at least as important as the Second Amendment, so... Jimmy, I mean seriously, this is egregious stuff.
I hope you're a better person than this, but this is really egregious stuff.
If I didn't think you were a better person than this, I'd tell you to go to hell, because that's ridiculous, okay?
For you to suggest, go back to your dirty business?
What's my dirty business?
The same business as yours, okay?
Exercising my First Amendment rights to talk about policy and politics.
The idea that it's a dirty business if we disagree with you.
I'm not selling guns.
That's not what I do.
I've never sold a gun.
I own two of them.
I've never sold a gun.
I'm not in the gun sales business.
And it's not a dirty business for people to be in the gun sales business selling methods of self-defense to Americans who want to defend themselves and their country.
That's just insane.
But the suggestion that I bear responsibility for Vegas?
The only person who bears responsibility for Vegas is the guy who's pulling the trigger on a bunch of people who are innocent standing below.
If we're going to do that routine now, if we're going to suggest that we bear responsibility for our public policy choices with regard to gun control, then I would suggest that Jimmy Kimmel bears responsibility for every dead baby that he backs through Planned Parenthood.
There's a significantly greater connection between that.
Planned Parenthood's sole goal is to kill babies.
The goal of selling rifles is not to kill innocent people.
But I don't do that, right?
I'm not saying that Jimmy Kimmel is responsible for every dead baby in the country.
Because that's absurd.
Abortionists are responsible for that.
I think he's wrong on policy.
I think he's probably good-hearted.
For Jimmy Kimmel to suggest that everybody who disagrees with him, again, is just so disgusting.
For him to suggest that I have some sort of blood guilt on my soul and that's why I don't want to talk about this?
I've been talking about it all week, dude.
I've made my bones talking about gun control and the case for and against.
I know a lot more about it than Jimmy Kimmel does.
And for Jimmy Kimmel to suggest that anyone who wants to talk about it who's not named Jimmy Kimmel is somehow motivated by their dirty business, their greed.
I promise you, Jimmy Kimmel makes a hell of a lot more money than I do.
Jimmy Kimmel's making a lot of money off a lot of leftists who think that he is just the bee's knees because he does this kind of stuff.
So if we're going to talk about who's making more money off political pandering, Jimmy, I don't think that's a business you want to get into.
Yeah, but it's not just Kimmel.
Even more objective journalists like Chuck Todd are suggesting that, you know, it's just a fear of talking about gun control that's led to this impasse.
Folks, there's no doubt about what the Second Amendment does say.
But at what point does a person's right to bear arms start infringing on his neighbor's right to live safely and freely?
And if you've ever caught yourself checking the exits while at a concert hall, or a school assembly, or a movie, just in case, you probably already are ready to have that conversation.
You would think our leaders should be able to have it, too.
Well, again, I think there's actually a pretty easy answer to, when does my neighbor's right to bear arms impinge on my ability to live freely?
And it's when he starts shooting at me.
That's a pretty simple answer.
That's like saying, when does your neighbor's right to own a sword impinge on your right not to be chopped?
Well, when he starts trying to chop me.
Again, I think there are arguments to be made about what sorts of, you know, machine guns have been banned in the United States since 1986.
I think that's reasonable.
But, you know, for this suggestion that we have not been having the conversation we have, it's just the left is angry because they've been losing, because they don't have any evidence to support their positions.
And again, it's just infused the entire culture.
You can't even watch sports anymore without this routine.
Rachel Nichols on ESPN.
Again, ESPN should be staying out of this.
But we remember back in 2012 when Bob Costas was doing halftime reports on the NFL and he decided to inject his own politics.
Now we've got Rachel Nichols doing this on gun control.
Officials say this is the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S.
history.
A phrase I guess they're getting used to because it was only 14 months ago they were saying that about the shooting in Orlando.
The Orlando shooting claimed more lives than Virginia Tech.
Now this one claims more lives than what happened in Orlando.
I don't know how we're going to solve the debate about guns in this country.
I just know that while we're all arguing, the body counts keep going up.
Oh, so we have to stop arguing.
You know, we have to stop arguing, is what she's saying.
And the only way to stop arguing is for us to agree with her.
I do love that the talking points for Chuck Todd and Rachel Nichols are nearly identical with regard to these mass shootings.
As I said yesterday, using mass shootings as your gauge of gun control policy is actually a foolish idea because they are not representative of the broader whole.
I'm not the only one saying that.
FiveThirtyEight says that, okay?
Nate Silver's site says that.
Nate Silver is no right-winger on guns.
And then, of course, you have the greatest of all political commentators of the left, Keith Olbermann.
So, he attacked me on Twitter this morning.
I had said yesterday who made Jimmy Kimmel the moral arbiter.
And Keith Olderman tweeted, Any other questions, kid?
So, a few things.
Number one, is the suggestion that every single person in the United States who owns a gun and believes in gun rights is part of a death cult?
Because I think that, again, death cults could be more properly attributed to people who think that Planned Parenthood is doing wonderful work in killing babies.
But I actually did have some questions for Keith Olbermann that I tweeted back at him.
Questions like, if you are so good at your job, why have you been fired from your last 3,297 jobs?
Also, Was it his expertise in shouting things like en fuego that gave him the god-like ability to see into other people's souls?
Was it that?
And also, where'd he get his glasses?
Because those are actually kind of nice.
And then also, is he just okay?
Is he okay?
Because he doesn't seem okay, Keith Olbermann.
But this is the entire moral Equation the left wants to set up, and I just find it despicable.
I find it gross.
Okay, so I'm gonna talk about Puerto Rico and the Secretary of State apparently calling the president a moron.
Before I get to any of that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at My Patriot Supply.
So, if you feel like it's, uh, like things are chaotic, if you feel like there are threats from foreign places, if you feel like you look at North Korea and it's threatening, and you look Across the sea and there are foreign threats and there are natural disasters.
And you figure, you know what might be a good idea?
Having some food in the house in case things go bad.
Well, that's why you need to spend $99 and get 102 servings of breakfast, lunches, and dinners from My Patriot Supply.
This is their survival food supply for just $99.
And right now you can order it at 888-803-1413, 888-803-1413, or online at preparewithbens.com.
Again, just $99 for 102 servings of breakfast, lunches, and dinners.
So your family is going to be fed for a month, right?
Because that means that if something goes wrong, you don't have to rely on the government.
You don't have to rely on the grocery store being stocked.
You're going to be the smart one for spending that $99, putting the food in the back of the closet, forgetting about it until you need it.
And then, if you need it, you break into it, and you're good to go.
888-803-1413 or preparewithben.com.
Preparewithben.com.
Every government agency, by the way, says that you should have these kind of food supplies on hand.
You should.
Again, it's preparewithben.com.
Okay, so.
Meanwhile, in other crazy news, there was an NBC News report this morning that the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, back during the summer, said that President Trump was an effing moron.
I don't know why this is newsworthy.
Really.
I mean, I assume that there are people at this company, right, at Daily Wire, who behind my back call me an effing moron.
Mathis, I'm not going to name names.
I assume that there are people, Austin, I'm not going to name names, who call me that.
And that's fine because I'm the boss.
The boss is always considered an effing moron by the people who work for him.
There is nothing new under the sun.
It seems to me the best response to this could have been and should have been really like this is what we're talking about we just had a mass shooting like four days ago and Puerto Rico is half underwater and you're and we're going to talk about like whether the Secretary of State one time said that the boss was an effing moron.
I think that's really it but But because President Trump is an egomaniac and because everybody has to pay personal homage to him, Rex Tillerson was forced to go out and do a press conference that got extraordinarily awkward when he was asked, did you in fact call the president an effing moron?
Can you address the main headline of this story that you called the president a moron?
And if not, where do you think these reports are coming from?
I'm not going to deal with petty stuff like that.
I mean, this is what I don't understand about Washington.
Again, you know, I'm not from this place.
But the places I come from, we don't deal with that kind of petty nonsense.
And it is intended to know nothing but divide people.
And I'm just not going to be part of this effort to divide this administration.
Well, that's not a no.
So that's awkward.
And it'll be entertaining to see President Trump's response.
He obviously has been all over Tillerson this week, over the North Korea stuff.
Tillerson's going to go.
It's just a question of when.
It appears, by the way, that the Trump administration is going to do something good and pull out of the Iran deal.
That is the latest news.
I will bring you updates on that as they unfold, if it unfolds during the show.
If not, then we'll cover it over at Daily Wire, obviously.
But that would be good news.
That would also be over the objections of Tillerson, who's become a rather marginal figure inside his own State Department.
So all of this is quite fascinating.
Is it a dumb story?
Yes.
Is it kind of funny that the Secretary of State called a press conference just to not say that he didn't call the President of the United States a moron?
Yeah, I'm gonna go with that's not great 40 MAGA MAGA MAGA chess.
That's not, that didn't seem particularly brilliant to me.
Okay, in other news that was not particularly brilliant.
So President Trump goes to Puerto Rico.
And he says some stuff.
Now, all he had to do going to Puerto Rico was basically go there and look somber for the cameras, because it is a somber thing, and help hand out supplies.
Do exactly what he did in Texas, right?
In Texas, he did it right.
He did it exactly correctly.
No criticism.
In Puerto Rico, for some reason, it was like Trump just decided that he wanted to have some fun.
And so before he even gets there, First, he says to Puerto Rico, I hate to tell you this, but you've thrown our budget out of whack, which is a very weird comment in the middle of a hurricane relief effort.
Here's Trump saying that.
Mick Mulvaney is here, right there, and Mick is in charge of a thing called budget.
Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you've thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we've spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that's fine.
We've saved a lot of lives.
Oh, well, you know, there it is.
They've thrown the budget out of whack.
How terrible.
So people are like, uh, what?
And then Trump today said, don't worry, we're going to settle Puerto Rico's debt problem.
They're not going to have to pay their debts.
People on Wall Street are going to get hurt.
So what happened to the Puerto Rican bond market?
Because everyone figured they're not getting paid back now.
So just good stuff from President Trump there.
I can't imagine what Tillerson had to say about it.
And then Trump did something that's even worse in terms of PR.
Here is President Trump going out there and throwing paper towels into the crowd like Kobe Bryant swishing jumpers.
If you can't see this, he is literally standing there and taking paper towels.
There are people right in front of him who are just asking for paper towels.
And there he is trying to flip them into the crowd, like shooting them into the crowd like a child.
I mean, he's gonna go out there with, like, a paper towel cannon, like he's at a baseball game.
And everybody's looking at him incredulously, like, really?
This is what we're gonna do now?
And here he is, just throwing things into the crowd.
He's like, you get paper towels, and you get paper towels, and you get paper towels!
So, I think that this is absurd.
It's not a good image.
I mean, for a guy who's made his career based on image, this is not a good image.
You don't want to look flip about hurricane relief.
Like, if you were at a blood bank, you wouldn't start taking bags of blood and flinging them around the blood bank.
It is kind of hilarious, I have to admit.
I laughed when I saw that.
But you can always count on the left to turn something that is an imagistic win for them into an imagistic loss.
So instead of them just saying, Inappropriate for President Trump to be so flip about hurricane relief and that picture's really not great.
You know you want the president to be taking this seriously.
Instead, you have Democrats completely going off the rails and suggesting the most absurd thing.
So here is the council speaker for New York City saying that Trump was treating people like animals in Puerto Rico.
This president needs to be called out for his lack of seriousness to this humanitarian crisis, and this visit today was an utter disgrace and an insult to the Puerto Rican people.
To be throwing and lobbing paper towels at us as if we were animals, you know, is really making light of a situation that is very severe.
Throwing a test as if we were animals?
That wasn't what I got.
I got that Trump is, well, to use Rex Tillerson's word in these sorts of situations, a moron.
I think this was stupid.
I don't think it's malicious.
He's like, well, these people are animals.
It's like I'm feeding the monkeys at the zoo.
I really don't think that that's what's going through Trump's head.
Again, the left can't contain itself.
The mayor of San Juan, who has been in a hate-hate relationship with Trump for the last few days.
Trump went to Puerto Rico, was nice to her, and then she was nice to him for a minute, and then he left, and then she started ripping him again.
Here she is ripping the paper towel stuff.
This was a PR 17 minute meeting.
There was no exchange with anybody with none of the mayors.
And in fact, this terrible and abominable view of him throwing paper towels and throwing provisions at people.
It's really it does not.
Okay, so over the top.
So again, if Obama did this, I'd be all over him.
You would be too.
Let's be real about this.
We'd say he was being flip about it.
But this, it's not, it's not, this is not America.
This is not the beacon of democracy.
Like, come on.
Like, everybody just Take it down.
Take it down a level.
Take it down a level.
And it was the same thing.
The media has been just overplaying its hand on everything.
They can't just call it out to the extent to which it's wrong.
They have to go over overboard by, you know, by leagues.
So, yesterday, here was Trump praising the low death count in Puerto Rico.
Now, that is something that, I mean, it is worth noting that Puerto Rico's had, I think, about 40 deaths, something in that neighborhood, which is supremely awful.
When people were comparing the Haitian crisis to Puerto Rico, however, it is worth noting that the Haiti earthquake That happened, I think it was 2010, that the Haiti earthquake ended up with the death of something like 100,000 people, the Haiti earthquake.
I don't want to look up the actual number of dead in the Haiti earthquake, but it was way higher than this.
And here was Trump basically saying that.
The casualty figures, by the way, from Puerto Rico, where I'm looking it up, apparently it's anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 deaths in Haiti.
In Puerto Rico, we are talking in the dozens.
And that is largely due to a, you know, The federal government, or at least in part due to the government's ability to bring aid in timely fashion.
In any case, here is Trump basically saying that, and then the media goes nuts anyway.
But I'm just very, very proud of the fact that, you know, if you look at just one statistic, 16 deaths.
That's a lot of deaths.
Far too many deaths.
But 16.
If you look at Katrina, they had in the thousands.
And this was a storm the likes of which nobody has ever seen.
And, you know, we had FEMA here before the storm even came.
They were on the island during the storm.
And they were on the island before the first storm.
You got hit by two hurricanes.
So, uh, we're very proud of the job we've done.
Very, very proud.
And now we'll have to try and get them back.
The power is slowly getting on and the roads are open.
The runways are open.
So, these people that you've met today, all of the different people, first responders, these are incredible people.
Okay, so, that seems relatively unobjectionable to me.
Didn't stop CNN's Chris Chilesa from going off on Trump.
The clip you played, Brooke, is pretty damning, I think.
Using death counts as a talking point for how successful he's been in making a joke about how this is going to run over the budget.
But there's so much in that.
There's 13 minutes of video and audio there.
He talks about how the weather is usually so great in Puerto Rico.
There's video of him throwing food out like he's a dime store Santa Claus to people.
Even for Donald Trump, who is a breaker of political convention, who has, I think, defined the presidency downward in many ways... Okay, everybody just calm down.
Everybody just calm down.
Are people getting what they need in Puerto Rico?
If the answer is yes, everybody should be quiet.
If the answer is no, then we should all be all over the administration.
Okay?
And as far as the image stuff goes, yeah, Trump sucks at some of this stuff.
Okay!
Okay.
I mean, I really don't know what to say beyond that.
Okay, so I do want to get to some stuff I like and stuff I hate and a little bit of Bible talk, but before I do any of that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Texture.com.
So, as you know, I'm an information addict.
That means that I read and read and read and read.
And some of the stuff I love to read is all the stuff from the magazines.
Well, if you get a subscription to a magazine, these magazines off the rack will cost you five, six bucks.
Right now, over at Texture, you're getting for access to 200 magazines.
You get a 14-day free trial.
Right now, you get a 14-day free trial, and it's normally $9.99 a month.
So, first of all, great deal in the first place.
$9.99 a month, and you get digital access to over 200 magazines.
But right now, if you sign up at texture.com slash Ben, you get a 14-day free trial.
You can look back in their archives.
It's entirely digital, and they have all of the magazines that you'd want to read, everything Everything from Entertainment Weekly, to Sports Illustrated, to National Geographic, to Reader's Digest.
Again, just for a subscription to one of these magazines, it probably costs you as much as the entire Texture subscription.
Excuse me.
So go over and check it out right now at texture.com slash Ben again 14 day free trial at texture.com slash Ben go and check it out that lets them know that we sent you as well terrific service I use it my wife uses it we really enjoy it okay so Time for some quick things I like and then some things I hate and then we'll do Bible talk.
So first things I like and then we'll break.
So things I like.
Today, the thing that I like is a very long thing I like.
So Mathis knows because we traveled last week together that the TSA has some new rules.
And one of those rules is that you have to take books out of your book bag sometimes.
And so they picked exactly the right day for this because I wanted to look super pretentious and awful.
And so the only book that I had in my backpack that day was indeed Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.
So I'm midway through War and Peace.
It is extraordinarily long.
A lot of people like the peace parts better than they like the war parts.
I will admit that I like Anna Karenina better than I like War and Peace so far.
Maybe I will change my opinion as it goes on.
But Tolstoy is a very lucid writer and a very easy to read writer, so anybody who says Tolstoy is difficult.
No, there are other Russian writers who are much more difficult than Tolstoy.
The new translation is quite lively and quite good.
The one that I recommend is by Richard Piviar and Larissa Velikonsky.
That's the one that I'm in the middle of right now.
And it is lively, it is fun to read, and the nice thing is that it's written in these serialized chapters, so you can read it three pages at a time.
It'll take you the rest of your life, but you can read it that amount at a time.
And it is indeed a good book, so it has not been overblown that this is a great book, because it is.
Other things that I like.
So yesterday, I was at the California State Legislature, and the Republicans in the legislature had invited me to speak on a panel about hate speech and the Constitution.
So I'm going to look at what the panel was actually called.
It was actually called, Combating Hate While Protecting the Constitution.
Okay, so you would assume that this would have something to do with how to fight hate groups, but half of this was about stuff that happened on campus, like at Berkeley, where I was speaking.
So they were conflating two issues.
They were conflating the problem with actual white supremacist groups and the violence that's going on campus, the implication being that a bunch of hate groups, so-called hate groups, are showing up on campus, or white supremacist groups.
I like to be specific, because when people say hate groups, sometimes it's like Southern Poverty Law Center hate group, which just means conservative.
So they were conflating white supremacists and like any conservative who shows up on campus and Antifa beats the crap out of people.
So the Republicans wanted to have me come and speak.
They wanted to have me on a panel.
The Democrats in the state legislature would not allow this.
They had 11 witnesses.
These witnesses included people like Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley, who spoke about the First Amendment and is quite pro-First Amendment, obviously.
They had a senior investigative researcher from the ADL.
They had a five-person panel that was basically an intersectional festival of victimhood, where people talked about how much they were victimized by hate crimes in California, which is fine, except then there was a lot of talk about intersectionality and the level of political discourse and why the relevance of your identity group is relevant to the credibility with which you speak, which I think is a bunch of nonsense.
And then finally, they had a bunch of people, including Andrew Greenwood, who was the chief of police at Berkeley.
So they ended up having, as I say, 11 people on these panels, but they couldn't make any time for me on any of the panels, despite the Republican request.
Now, listen, I'm not a victim.
That's fine.
I don't care.
They relegated me to the public comment portion of this.
So the public comment portion of the hearing, you get two minutes and two minutes only.
So I'm going to play that for you, but if you want to actually watch it, you're going to have to subscribe.
So for $9.99 a month, you too can get a subscription to dailywire.com.
You can go check it out right now.
You get the rest of today's show live.
You get the Ben Shapiro show live every day, video version.
You get live and later you can download the entire video version without ads you get the michael knowles show live you get the andrew clavin show live you get all of them on video you get to be part of our mailbags you get to correspond with us which is awesome and if you get the annual subscription for 99 a year then you get the leftist tears hot or cold tumblr the world famous tumblr that all seek but few have achieved
you can get that with an annual subscription so go over to dailywire.com right now and check it out and by the way it helps us with with making sure we can get the podcast done every day and continue to bring you great content so that is always very helpful to us so please subscribe if you haven't done it yet or if you just want to listen later then download it itunes soundcloud subscribe at youtube and then you can you can listen later we always appreciate you leaving a review as well We are the largest, fastest growing podcast, conservative podcast in the nation.
OK, so as I say, over at the California legislature yesterday, I was given 120 seconds.
So everybody else was given 10 minutes, 15 minutes, Chemerinsky was given half an hour.
I was given two minutes in public comment, which, you know, they just open it up and whoever is there can talk.
So here is a little bit of tape of what I said.
I sort of reamed out the Democrats on the panel.
Your job, obviously, here at the legislature is to ensure that our freedom of expression is maintained, that our First Amendment rights are maintained.
And what that means first and foremost, in my experiences on college campuses, is that the heckler's veto must be stopped.
I was at Cal State Los Angeles in February 2016, and there was almost a riot there, and the police were not allowed to do their jobs, and students were physically assaulted in the crowd.
It is the job of this legislature to ensure that police can do their jobs.
And when they do do their jobs, and they're allowed to do that at places like UC Berkeley, everything goes fine.
And I'd like to make a point here about UC Berkeley.
The reason it cost $600,000 to bring me to UC Berkeley was not because of me.
Okay, everybody keeps suggesting that it was because I was coming.
I'm so controversial and so terrible.
I came exactly one year before and it cost this many dollars.
It cost zero dollars for security at UC Berkeley.
The reason it cost $600,000 at UC Berkeley is because Antifa and violent groups had decided that Berkeley was their domain and they were going to be able to run roughshod over law enforcement there.
And this does bring up one final point that I want to make in the long period of time that I have to discuss.
And that is the problem with a legislative body such as yours trying to draw lines specifically about what hate speech constitutes.
Because the fact is that one of the reasons groups like Antifa show up is not because they know who I am.
It's because they have been told by people that I am promulgating hate speech, which is utterly false and utterly untrue.
There are people who say vile things and with whom I disagree.
Among them, people like Milo Giannopoulos, who sent me a picture of a black baby on the day of my child's birth because I wasn't sufficiently standing up for the white population, supposedly.
But that does not mean that the legislature gets to decide what hate speech is.
I've been labeled a promulgator of hate speech when I was the number one target of hate speech, according to the ADL, among the journalistic community in 2016.
So let me suggest...
That as a legislature, your chief job is to ensure that my taxpayer dollars in this state go toward making sure that people like me and people with whom I disagree get to speak in places like college campuses, and not toward regulating what speech you find good and what speech you find bad, because it's a really dangerous business, and there's speech I don't like, there's speech you don't like, but if we can't agree that there is a difference between speech and violence, we're not going to be able to have a free state, let alone a free country.
Thanks.
Okay, so, I agree with me.
Good job, me.
So, there it was.
The Sacramento Bee had an entire editorial today about how dumb the Democrats were for barring me from speaking, essentially, until public comment, and then me getting up there and smacking them.
So, well done, Democrats, as always, undercutting your own points on free speech.
Okay, so, time for a couple of quick things that I hate.
Okay, so quick thing that I hate, number one.
So there's a pro-life GOP congressperson whose name is Tim Murphy.
He's a Republican congressperson.
He is a pro-life guy.
And apparently, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he asked his mistress to get an abortion.
So he's been representing Pennsylvania's 16th congressional district since 2003.
He admitted to having an extramarital affair last month.
His old lover is accusing him of being hypocritical in his pro-life beliefs.
Apparently, the Republican congressman's ex-mistress texted Quote, you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options.
And then Murphy said, I get what you say about my March for Life messages.
I've never written them.
Staff does them.
I read them and winced.
I told staff, don't write anymore.
I will.
Okay, so he does not deny having asked his mistress for an abortion.
Um, gross.
There are a couple things that are gross about this.
One, well, many things, okay?
Number one, mistresses.
Bad idea, gentlemen, okay?
Makes you immoral.
Do not do this.
Number two, asking your mistress for an abortion.
You're a piece of garbage.
Don't impregnate your mistress.
Don't ask her for an abortion.
It's not the baby's fault.
Your baby's fault.
You're a piece of garbage and want to protect your political career.
So, hypocrisy is bad.
The media spin on this, that a pro-life person asking for an abortion is somehow significantly morally worse than a pro-choice person asking for an abortion.
So hypocrisy is bad.
But I would rather that somebody actually be pushing the right standard and not living up to it than that somebody be pushing the wrong standard and living up to that wrong standard.
This is one of my pet peeves.
I really don't like this stuff.
When there are Republicans who fall short of a moral standard that they've pushed...
The people seem to be much more angry that they upheld the moral standard than that they broke the standard.
So I'm angry at Tim Murphy because he didn't uphold the standard.
I'm not angry at Tim Murphy for saying the right things about abortion.
I'm angry at Tim Murphy for doing the wrong things with his mistress and with regard to abortion.
I'm angry at his sin.
I'm not angry at the standard that he was pushing in Congress that is the correct standard.
I don't want to fall into this trap of the easiest way in politics to avoid being a hypocrite is to have no standards.
Right, that's true.
The easiest way to avoid being a hypocrite in politics is to have no standards.
If you're Bill Clinton and you have no standards about abortion or sexual promiscuity, then it's very easy to get away with crap.
I don't like that.
Because I think standards are important.
So I think that we should relegate our criticism of Tim Murphy to being a piece of crap, not to Tim Murphy, his standard on being pro-life.
I think that's silly.
Okay, final thing that I hate.
This is the last thing I hate you're getting for a week and a half, so treasure this.
Take it near to your heart.
Michelle Obama, for some reason, has decided to emerge from the woodwork again to talk about how America's racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.
This is 2008 Michelle Obama, not 2015 Michelle Obama, who was popular.
I don't, you know, I don't like this version of Michelle Obama.
Neither did Americans in 2008.
Physically, there's a difference in color, in the tone.
Wow.
Because one side, all men, all white.
On the other side, some women, some people of color.
And people look down at that and go, yeah, yeah, that looks good.
That looks right.
We're probably getting a lot done.
We're doing it right.
I look at that and I go, no wonder.
No wonder we struggle.
No wonder people don't trust politics.
We're not even noticing what these rooms look like.
This idea that, you know, on the Republicans, they're all gray and white.
That's the color palette.
On the other side of the room, there are yellows and blues and whites and greens, and there's a difference on the one because the left is just so much better at doing things because, you know, they actively have more people who are people of color.
Again, if you're judging somebody's merit or their viewpoint based on their color, this makes you a racist by definition.
So, just because you happen to be a black person saying that doesn't make you a non-racist.
That's silly.
Okay, quick Bible talk.
So, This week, the reason I'm taking off time and taking my vacation at the same time, because I would have to take the days off anyway, is because this week we celebrate Sukkot.
Sukkot is a celebration in the Jewish calendar of the...
Wanderings in the wilderness, essentially.
We used to live in basically booths.
And what Sukkot is supposed to represent, we actually go outside and we eat in essentially a shack that we set up.
It's three sides, or two and a half sides at minimum, but three sides usually, that are sort of made, it's almost like a tarp draped over some poles, and then you have some palm fronds on top.
That's sort of the typical way the Sukkot are done.
Sukkah is just the booth.
And It's supposed to remind us of our time in the desert and how fragile everything was and the idea that the entire world is basically that Sukkah, right?
Your entire material life is that Sukkah.
We decorate it, we make it beautiful, but in the end it can be blown away quickly just like that.
And we have to remember that there is a deeper meaning to everything that we do.
There's a whole wider world outside the Sukkah.
Our attempts to create a permanent life for ourselves in this world are Essentially in vain.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, doesn't mean that you shouldn't pursue a better life and a more beautiful life for yourself, but you have to understand that there is a world beyond this one, a meaning beyond this one, and that investing solely in the material is a mistake.
Okay, there's a bunch of beautiful commandments that have to do with Sukkot.
One of them is waiving what's called the lulav and the esrog.
So the lulav and esrog, you may have seen videos of Orthodox Jews doing this.
It talks about it in the New Testament when they talk about the festival with the fronds.
Okay, that's what they're talking about.
What you're waving is you're waving a palm frond that's basically tied up so it looks like a stick almost.
And then on one side you have myrtle and on the other side you have willow and then you hold also together with this an esrog which is basically a citron.
It looks like a lemon.
It's a big lemon.
It's a different fruit but it looks like a lemon.
In any case, what are these supposed to represent?
So, according to Jewish philosophy, the lulav represents people who study the Bible but don't do good deeds.
Or don't follow the commandments.
The Hadass, which is the myrtle, represents people who do good deeds but do not study.
And the Arava, which is the willow, represents people who don't study and also don't do good deeds.
It has no smell and no taste is the idea, so that represents people who don't study and don't do good deeds.
And then the Etro, the actual fruit, represents people who study and they also do the commandments.
So, and you hold them all together and you shake them before God, right?
This is what you do.
You actually take them and you shake them in the middle of sort of, we do some celebrating and you shake it in the middle during prayers.
What's the point here?
The point here is that in Jewish philosophy, you need all of these elements to have a nation.
It's not enough to have just people who are the righteous people, the people who both study and do good deeds and fulfill the commandments.
You need people who don't do either.
You need people who study and don't do the good deeds.
You need all of these people together.
The Jewish people and people generally are composed of all sorts of these people, and we have to recognize that our inherent value to God doesn't necessarily lie Only in what we are individually, but what we are collectively, and that is people who care about one another, people who try to help one another, and people who recognize each other's weaknesses and still recognize that we're brothers and sisters.
I've talked a lot about unity this week, because in the aftermath of something like Vegas, it's easy for us to fragment, and it's tragic that we fragment.
If we are going to come back together, we need to recognize that it takes all types in the United States in order to make a country, and we have to move toward the notion that we're friends and not enemies, or the country is going to fall apart, and it shouldn't.
Okay, so with that message, I leave you for a week and a half.
I will be back a week from Monday.
Please, as I said last time, no Disneyland if everybody keeps ruining things.
So please, get it together, everyone, and stay safe out there.
Care for your families, and I'll see you in a week and a half after my vacation.
My well-earned, if I may say it, vacation.
We'll see you after a week and a half.
Love to everyone, and we'll see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
▲
Export Selection