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Oct. 18, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:46
The Best Women's Rights Argument EVER, Debunked | Ep. 397
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Well, hello there.
We're gonna talk about abortion and sex in Hollywood and lots of things having to do with Trump and dead soldiers and all sorts of stupid things also.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
A little behind the scenes there.
Every time we open this show, I have to look to a different camera, and I am very awkward at it.
So if you can't see the show, that's what you're missing out on, folks.
Okay, so before we get to any of these things, so somebody on the left this morning on Twitter presented the greatest pro-abortion argument of all time.
And then I refuted it, and then he blocked me.
So I will explain to you why this was not, in fact, the greatest pro-abortion argument of all time, and why it is that people think it was.
We'll also talk a little bit more about the Me Too hashtag that is going around, all these women posting on social media about how they've been sexually harassed in the past, which is fine and dandy, but I do have a couple of questions that I think need to be answered if we're going to actually do something practical with all that information.
Plus, President Trump goes after President Obama for not caring about dead troops or something, which is just awesome.
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Okay, so we begin today with an argument that was going around Twitter this morning.
I woke up and there was a tweet storm that was going around.
It has now been liked almost 19,000 times and retweeted 9,000 times.
It's a big tweet, right?
Especially from a guy who no one's ever heard of.
This guy's name is Patrick Tomlinson.
I would tell you how many followers he has except that he blocked me.
So, Patrick Tomlinson is apparently the author of something called the Ark Trilogy.
He's a sci-fi author, calls himself a comic.
I'm going to read you his nasty little tweetstorm, and then I'm going to explain why it is so appealing on the surface to pro-choicers, and then I'm going to explain why it makes no sense.
So, here is his argument in favor of abortion.
And it just drips with condescension and disdain.
Anyone who disagrees with him is a fool and a liar.
I'm so sick of that attitude.
I really am.
If I haven't made that clear with regard to Jimmy Kimmel, I'm gonna make it clear now with regard to Patrick Tomlinson.
Here's what he tweeted, quote, Whenever abortion comes up, I have a question I've been asking for 10 years now of the Life Begins at Conception crowd.
In 10 years, no one has ever answered it honestly.
Ooh.
Then he says, it's a simple scenario with two outcomes.
Wow, I mean, just the brilliance this guy must carry in his head.
It's just mind boggling.
He says, no one ever wants to pick one because the correct answer destroys their argument.
There is a correct answer, which is why the pro-life crowd hates the question.
Here it is.
Are you ready?
So good.
You're in a fertility clinic.
Why isn't important?
The fire alarm goes off.
You run for the exit.
As you run down the hallway, you hear a child screaming from behind a door.
You throw open the door and find a five-year-old child crying for help.
Exciting, no?
They're in one corner of the room.
In the other corner—there, by the way, spelled T-H-E-Y apostrophe R-E.
genius writer knows.
They're in one corner of the room.
In the other corner, you spot a frozen container labeled 1,000 viable human embryos.
The smoke is rising.
You start to choke.
You know you can grab one or the other, but not both, before you succumb to smoke inhalation and die, saving no one.
Dun, dun, dun, dun.
Do you A, save the child, or B, save the thousand embryos?
There is no C.
C means you all die.
Dun, dun, dun.
He says, He says, He says, Not morally.
Not ethically.
Not biologically.
This question absolutely eviscerates their argument, and their refusal to answer confirms that they know it to be true.
No one, anywhere, actually believes an embryo is equivalent to a child.
That person does not exist.
They are lying to you.
They are lying to you to try and evoke an emotional response, a paternal response using false equivalency.
No one believes life begins at conception.
No one believes embryos are babies or children.
Those who claim to are trying to manipulate you so they can control women.
Don't let them.
Use this question to call them out.
Reveal them for what they are.
Demand they answer your question.
And when they don't, slap that big ol' scarlet P of the patriarchy on them.
The end.
Wow.
Mind.
Just amazing.
I mean, just the utter genius of this guy.
If I had thought of this example, if I had thought of this hypothetical, stupid question, like, I don't know, 10 years ago, totally would have changed my worldview.
I would have voted for Hillary Clinton, and I'd be wearing a sticker with a pussy hat on it.
Okay, so, let's put aside the fact that this guy's obviously a douchebag.
The commenters on the Twitter thread are properly puzzled.
The reason they're properly puzzled is because he is correct that your moral intuition suggests that you save the five-year-old child and not the box marked 1,000 viable embryos.
Here is why this does not prove the point he thinks that it proves.
There are many reasons why this does not even come close to proving the point he thinks it proves.
He thinks this proves that human embryos aren't life.
He thinks that this proves that we are all liars when we say that human embryos are human life.
He says that this proves that human embryos are not babies.
He says that this proves that we are all liars.
Okay, so here is why this is not true in any sense.
So, here are four reasons.
First, moral instinct does not always mean you thought things through.
So, we have lots of moral instincts.
Those moral instincts may be good, they may be right, they may be wrong.
That does not provide a moral logic.
Okay, just because you have a moral feeling does not mean that the logic is well thought out.
So, for example, here's another famous thought experiment.
I love thought experiments.
I think they're fun, so that's why I'm focusing on this because I think that it's good for you to get better at thought experiments, and it's fun for me to go through them.
So, here's another famous thought experiment.
This, of course, is the trolley problem.
Everyone knows of the trolley car problem.
This is where You are standing on a railroad track, a trolley car track, and the track is right at the fork, okay?
You're standing right at the fork.
It goes to the right, and it goes to the left.
On the left, there is Nell, who is tied to the track, and on the right, there are five people who are tied to the track, okay?
Do you pull the switch and switch the trolley car from the one that is going to kill the five people to the one that is just going to kill Nell?
Most people say yes.
Right?
Okay, pretty easy answer, right?
This is a utilitarian answer.
We will save the five instead of saving the one.
Okay, now here is the more famous trolley car question.
You are now standing on a bridge over the trolley car track, and on the track is tied Nell and five other people.
So there's six people tied to the trolley car track.
You're standing above on a bridge, and up next to you is standing Michael Moore.
Okay, some big fatso.
Now, if you take Michael Moore and you push him over the side of the bridge, And the trolley car is stopped by the weight of his grease against the skids.
Do you throw Michael Moore over the top of the bridge?
Most people say no.
Most people say there's a moral difference between me throwing a switch and me pushing somebody physically off a bridge to their doom.
That's a moral intuition, but can you justify it?
The answer is probably not.
And what this demonstrates is that most people's moral intuition is not necessarily a thought through logic.
And let's give another example, okay?
We can give all sorts of these thought experiments, proving that the moral intuition goes the other way.
So, for example, let's say that instead of a five-year-old and a box of 1,000 random viable embryos, it was a box of two embryos, and they were your children.
Right?
You are infertile, and your wife is infertile, but somehow, through a miracle, they've created two embryos that are your children, your only possibility of having children, and they are viable, so we know that they will implant and be fine, right?
That's the premise of his question.
So, do you save the embryos, or do you save the five-year-old, the random five-year-old?
A lot of people would say save the embryos now, because they're your children.
That's a moral intuition.
Does it make it right?
I assume Tomlinson would say no.
That just because you had a moral feeling one way or another doesn't mean that the feeling is justified.
And let's make it even easier.
Okay, let's say that you have your five-year-old, right?
It's your child, and it's a five-year-old now, right?
It's my daughter, and she's three and a half years old.
And in the next room, there are a hundred screaming adults.
And I can only save one.
Right?
Who do I save?
My three-and-a-half-year-old or the hundred screaming adults?
Most parents would say they would save their three-and-a-half-year-old.
Does that make that a moral choice?
Okay, this is the premise of every 24 episode ever.
Right?
It's always Kim Bauer, that idiot, getting captured, and then Jack has to decide whether to save the entire city of Los Angeles or his dumbass daughter.
It's the premise to every ticking bomb thriller.
It's Spider-Man, right?
Mary Jane is falling off, and Spider-Man has to save Mary Jane, or he can save the bus full of screaming children.
Which does he choose?
And naturally, the producers allow him to get away with saving both, but his tendency is to save Mary Jane, right?
Does that make it immoral?
Is that a moral decision, or is it just a moral impetus?
So just because you feel like you want to save the five-year-old, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're correct.
Okay, second point on this stupid hypothetical.
It doesn't actually reveal the value of embryonic life.
So, we can agree with Tomlinson that you should save the five-year-olds rather than the box of embryos on a moral level, and still, that would not admit that embryonic life is meaningless.
It would just mean that you care more about the five-year-old life than you care about the embryonic life.
Whether they're viable or not.
In fact, we can imagine a counter scenario where you care more about the embryonic life than the five-year-old.
So let's take a sci-fi scenario, since Tomlinson is a sci-fi writer.
Let's take the sort of Battlestar Galactica scenario, okay?
The fate of humanity rests on this one box full of 1,000 embryos that have males and females in them.
And now there's a fire on your spaceship, and you can save a screaming five-year-old, the only child, or, right, it's just you and the five-year-old.
There are no other people alive, right?
That's the end of the human story.
You can save those 1,000 embryos, and you can ensure that they are born from artificial wombs, and they will live and create a new human species, or you can save this one five-year-old, and you can both die alone in the middle of space.
Which do you do?
Right, so again, every sci-fi movie ever says you save the box of embryos.
Does that mean that the five-year-old is no longer a human life?
Right, because what he's doing is he's creating a false binary and then saying whichever one you choose, the other one's not a human life.
I've just given you a bunch of false binaries and then said, whichever one you choose is still a human life.
So clearly that isn't true.
I want to give you the rest of the argument in just a second, but first...
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Next point on this idiotic argument that the left thinks destroys all of the various arguments in favor of the pro-life movement.
Most pro-lifers already acknowledge that an already born human life takes priority over a not yet born human life.
How do we know this?
Because the vast majority, the vast majority of religions, in fact all that I know of including Catholic doctrine, say that if you have to choose between the life of the mother and the life of the unborn child, you choose the life of the mother.
This is, in Catholic doctrine, to give a perfect example from Catholic doctrine, because Catholics are the most strict on this, the doctrine is, let's say that you're a woman and you have uterine cancer, and chemo and surgery are the only way to prevent you from dying from this uterine cancer, and the side effect of the chemo is that it's going to kill the embryo.
Are you allowed to get the chemo?
Catholic doctrine says absolutely, and the doctor didn't do anything wrong.
Why?
Because we value the life of the mother, and you are not actively killing the child, you are passively killing the child.
It's a secondary effect of the chemo that you're trying to do to save a life.
The same exact premise applies in this particular hypothetical that Tomlinson puts forward.
And finally, the hypothetical isn't reality.
Okay, this is the part that's the stupidest.
I'm not even arguing with the hypothetical now.
The hypothetical is saying, five-year-old child versus embryos, choose.
When women get abortions, they don't have a choice between five-year-old child and the embryo.
They are just choosing to kill the embryo.
An abortion doctor doesn't have a five-year-old child with a gun to their head in the next room and says, well, I saved that five-year-old.
I'm going to kill this baby now.
Instead, the doctor just says, would you like to kill the baby?
And the woman says yes, and they're done.
So it doesn't hold in any way.
But this is what the left likes to do.
They pose false hypotheticals that don't actually prove their point.
And then they say, if you answer me, you've proved my point.
Well, I answered him.
I'd save the five-year-old.
It still didn't prove his point, for all the reasons that I just said.
So I said all this on Twitter.
Then he basically accused me of being gay and blocked me.
So, well done, Patrick Tomlinson.
You've demonstrated fully how genius you are.
No one could give you a straight answer.
You are just an epic intellect.
I'm stunned by the fact that no one has Taken taking your genius at face value.
Okay, so in other news There's this this hashtag that's going around on social media me too And there are people that I know members my family have posted on this hashtag me too about being sexually harassed at work Sexual harassment is awful sexual harassment is evil.
It's why I am supremely careful around women I do not I think that, you know, touching at the office is inappropriate.
I think that, you know, the only person of the opposite sex that you should be touching other than a handshake is your spouse.
This is my view of the matter as a general matter.
And it's funny, because the same people who will claim sexual harassment and yell sexual harassment say that I'm a prude for saying stuff like this.
I'm a prude for saying that you shouldn't touch other people at the office.
Ooh, prude!
But then if you touch somebody else at the office, then they say, well, that could be sexual harassment.
Okay, you can't have it both ways.
You can't rip on Mike Pence for being super careful at the office and then suggest that Mike Pence is sexually harassing a woman if he touches her on the shoulder.
You can't say that Joe Biden is doing just fine every time he gives some random lady a shoulder rub, but Mike Pence is totally wrong every time he says he's not going to touch anybody but his wife.
One of the problems that I have with the Me Too thing is this.
There are a lot of people who are hashtagging Me Too and telling their stories of sexual harassment and sexual assault.
We need to have some standards.
The reason I say this is not because I don't think it's valuable when women talk about their experiences.
It's fine for women to talk about their experiences.
It's good.
And I think men should be very aware of the fact that women are not going to like it always when they go in for a hug, or when they give them a kiss on a cheek, or when they give them a shoulder rub, or any of this kind of stuff, right?
Men should be aware of all of these things and be supremely careful, as I suggest.
However, one of the things that I have a problem with is the supposed heroism of all of these actresses who are now coming out and claiming that they were sexually assaulted, but will not name their accuser.
So Reese Witherspoon came out, and she's a huge star, right, one of Hollywood's biggest stars.
She says that she was sexually assaulted in 16.
She says that, this is what she said during her speech at L Women in Hollywood.
She said, quote, This has been a really hard week for women in Hollywood, for women all over the world, and a lot of situations and a lot of industries are forced to remember and relive a lot of ugly truths.
I've had my own experiences that come back to me very vividly, and I find it hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings I've been having about anxiety, honest...
Honestly, the guilt for not speaking up earlier says I feel true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger at the agents and producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment.
And I wish I could tell you that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly it wasn't.
I've had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault and I don't speak about them very often.
Here's the problem.
We have to have some lines here.
We have to know what it is that it is worth people losing their jobs and their careers over, and what it is that is inappropriate.
And if people are not told where the line is, how do you expect them to abide by the line?
So you can use my line.
My line is you don't get to touch a woman at the office without her permission ever.
And if you do that, then you are in serious trouble, right?
That is sexual harassment.
You're doing it without consent.
However, that is not what modern leftist society has said on sex, right?
Modern leftist society has said for decades on sex that sexual looseness at the office is actually a good thing.
Maybe the woman would like... I mean, let's not pretend that romances have not started at the office because a huge number of people are currently living together who met at the office and started going out and The way that human touch works is not always a guy with a checklist coming up and saying, I need you to check every one of these boxes, right?
When somebody makes a move, it's very easy to do this in the abstract, but when somebody makes a move, very often it is not a move where somebody says, is it okay right now if I kiss you?
Is it okay if I touch your shoulder?
Okay, that's generally not how it happens as far as I'm aware.
And I'll appeal to the female in the room and make her quite awkward now.
Jess, do you believe that this is the way that it works in human relationships?
That guys typically ask girls before they kiss them, can I kiss you or hold your hand?
Or, have you had experiences where a guy has just made a move on you and it hasn't been the end of the world?
Right, it's 50-50, and this is sort of the problem, right?
Is that there's no hard lines with regard to this stuff, and there are times when a guy will make a move on a girl and the girl is totally fine with it, and there are times when a guy will make a move on a girl and she's totally not fine with it.
And because there's no hard line on this stuff, it's hard to know for a lot of guys where exactly to draw the line.
Now we can say, as I would say, that the guy should ask consent always before kissing, right?
When I first kissed my wife, that's actually what I did.
I said, do you mind if I kiss you now?
Which is not the most romantic thing to do, but that's how I operate.
But that is not always how human relationships work.
And so I'm seeing a lot of stories online, in these Me Too circles, that don't actually draw the hard line.
Like, would you report a guy for he's drunk at a party and he tries to kiss you?
Would you report a guy to HR for that?
Is that worth a guy losing his job?
Some women would say yes, some women would say no.
We need to have some hard lines in society and figure out where the line is actually drawn.
Apparently the line isn't even drawn at actual sexual assault in Hollywood.
These women, America Ferreira says that she was sexually assaulted at the age of nine.
She says, first time I can remember being sexually assaulted, I was nine years old.
I told no one and lived with the shame and guilt, thinking all along that I, a nine year old child, was somehow responsible for the actions of a grown man.
I had to see this man on a daily basis for years to come.
He would smile at me, wave, and I would hurry past him, my blood running cold, my guts carrying the burden of what only he and I knew, that he expected me to shut my mouth and smile back.
Right now, Alyssa Milano is saying some of the same stuff.
America Ferrer is a big girl now, okay?
Like, I understand when you're nine years old not speaking out about that.
I get it.
I understand the pressure.
I understand the horror.
I can never fully understand because I wasn't in that position, but I get where she's coming from.
Now she's an adult.
That guy is still preying on young children, presumably.
Why doesn't she say his name?
So in Hollywood, they won't even say the names.
Okay, this is the same problem I have with the institutional racism argument.
Is there racism in American society?
Yes.
I need a specific name and a specific example so I can fight it with you.
I need a specific instance with a specific name so I can fight it with you or decide whether you are just being oversensitive with regards to the Me Too stuff.
I want to be on your side.
I want to say, let's put this rapist in jail.
I want to say, let's put this sexual harasser in jail or allow you to sue him.
But I don't think that we have any hard standards with regards to this stuff.
Like, I was talking to my wife about this last night.
My wife is a very beautiful woman, and she's been hit on a lot in her life.
As a doctor, she gets hit on a lot.
She experiences stuff I'm sure male doctors don't, where patients will hit on her on a pretty regular basis.
The example that she gave is she was working at the Veterans Administration, and one guy said to her, this is like an older guy, probably 60 years old, said to her something like, your eyes are so blue and so deep, they're like the ocean.
And she was like, should I have been insulted by that, or should I have been sort of complimented by that?
I chose to be sort of complimented by it, but I could see being insulted by it, and that's sort of right, right?
The problem with a lot of this sort of stuff is, it's I know it when I see it.
Now I think there are some obvious hard lines that are pretty clear, and this is why I'm very frustrated with these actresses who are now big stars and who are leaving predators in positions of power by not naming names.
There is no statute of limitations to child molestation.
But the fact that that is not what's happening is a problem.
And again, I think that we're all on the same side.
I think that when we are vague about these things, it actually creates false divisions that don't exist.
I think all good-hearted people want to see men who sexually harassed called out.
I think that we need hard standards of what sexual harassment constitutes, what sexual assault constitutes.
And it can't just be that something bothered me 10 years ago, I said nothing about it, I come out today, I give a vague reference to being sexually harassed at work, and then we're all supposed to just say, well, that's society.
Yes, men should be careful.
Yes, men should know, as I say, hold by my standard.
I like my standard the best.
But since as a society we have not decided to abide by my standard, apparently, since we've decided that it's prudish to abide by Mike Pence's standard.
Then I don't know what standard we are supposed to abide by.
And I would like for all... This is not a critique.
This is all of us coming together and creating a formal societal standard where we know what's good and what's bad so that we can target the bad guys.
I don't see why that's too much to ask.
That's not anti the Me Too campaign.
That is saying when you say Me Too, how about you say who did it and what it was so that we can determine whether it was something bad enough that the person should lose their job, lose their career, lose their livelihood and go to jail.
Is that unreasonable?
If we're going to accuse people of crimes, maybe we should accuse people of crimes.
Okay, so before I go any further along these lines, I also want to talk about some stuff that President Trump said.
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Okay, so, Again, final word on the Me Too thing, just to reiterate.
I think it's good that women are calling out sexual harassment in the workplace.
I think in order for us to fight sexual harassment in the workplace, two things have to happen.
I think Me Too does one thing, but it doesn't do the other.
Me Too makes men aware that they need to be careful around women, as well they should, but what it does not do is it allows us, it does not allow us to actually target the guys who have already done bad stuff and should have known better.
In order for that to happen, you have to name names, and you have to name scenarios, and we need to know what constitutes the line that was crossed.
I can't help feeling that some of this is politicized.
Again, I mentioned Joe Biden.
Look at those pictures of Joe Biden being really awkward around women, okay?
And let me ask, how many Democrats are willing to say that Joe Biden should not run for president or should not have been a senator or should not have been VP?
I mean, for goodness sake.
The right decided it was fine for Trump to be president, and the left decided it was fine for Clinton to be president, and both of them have some pretty nasty histories with regard to this sort of stuff.
Okay, so, I also want to talk today about the Trump versus Bannon war, supposedly, over establishment versus non-establishment.
I don't think that really exists.
Before I get to that, I want to talk a little bit about a comment that President Trump made that is getting all sorts of play today.
So yesterday, President Trump did a press conference, and at this press conference, he did what he is fond of doing.
He said something off the cuff that is pretty dumb.
He was trying to demonstrate that he really loves the troops.
Now, President Trump is the kind of fellow who likes to say that everything that he does is unprecedented, right?
If he went to the bathroom, he didn't just have a bowel movement, he had the greatest bowel movement in history.
No one has ever had a better bowel movement, people.
It is the greatest, no one, no one.
Genghis Khan had never, no one, okay?
Andre the Giant has never had a bowel movement of this magnitude.
It was huge, huge, right?
So this is just how everything is phrased for President Trump.
He's the only one who has ever done anything.
Every hurricane is unprecedented.
Every attack is unprecedented.
Everything he does is the greatest, the best, the brightest, the most incredible, the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the worst, the most horrible.
He only speaks in superlatives.
It's something I've critiqued before.
Well, because of that, he gets himself into some hot water.
So yesterday he was talking about how he calls the families of fallen troops And just by the wayside, he says, and I'm basically the only guy who's ever done that sort of thing.
Here's President Trump saying exactly that.
This is him saying that President Obama did not call the troops.
Clip eight.
The traditional way, if you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn't make calls.
A lot of them didn't make calls.
I like to call when it's appropriate, when I think I'm able to do it.
Okay, so a lot of them didn't make calls.
I'm the only one who makes calls.
That's the implication.
And then the White House defended by saying, well, it's true that not all parents of troops were called.
That's really not what Trump is saying.
Can we all see what the implication is, what Trump is saying there?
And now the White House, because everything that Trump says has to be doubled down upon, it's really, it's kind of gross.
So now the White House is saying, Again, the easiest thing to say here is President Trump misspoke.
Of course, other presidents called the families of fallen troops.
I think people who are on Obama's team are right to be angry about this because that is something that Obama apparently did do.
But it's also the sort of thing where because the media is going to jump on it, a lot of people on the right are going to claim that it's unfair.
The media always has to overstep.
Instead of making the critique that I just made, that Trump always speaks like this, he speaks in superlatives, that puts him in a position of saying things that are not true, and frankly, disingenuous.
Instead of just saying that, instead they have to go completely overboard.
Trump's a scum, Trump's a cockroach, Trump's the worst guy in the world.
CNN's Faux Mud did exactly that last night.
Boy, it's a tough day for the President.
How about for the families who accepted a child or a father or spouse home in a casket?
It's not a tough day for them?
This guy has the empathy of a cockroach.
From the day after his inauguration, when he showed up at my agency, my former agency, the CIA, in front of the Wall of Fallen Heroes, and spoke about the size of his inauguration, fast-forwarding now, what is it, nine months, and he can't figure out his responsibility, not only as the Commander-in-Chief, But as the Consular-in-Chief is to tell those families, it's not about me.
It's not about Donald Trump.
It's about 330 million Americans saying thank you for having someone in your family.
This sort of talk is not helpful to the other side.
So I mean, I don't give advice to people who are on the Democratic left.
But let me give you a little piece of advice here.
It is not helpful to the American experiment for you to suggest that Trump has no sympathy for the fallen soldiers.
What you can say is that Trump is overstepping.
What you can say is that Trump lied about President Obama.
What you can say is that Trump is mean, and when he says that about President Obama, it is wrong for him to impute that sort of motivation to President Obama.
But to go to, he has no empathy at all for the fallen troops, is you now overstepping in the other direction.
And this is, every controversy is now this.
Trump says something wrong, the left oversteps way too far in the other direction, the right oversteps way too far in the opposite direction, and nobody actually ends up in the place where the truth is, right?
The truth is Trump said something that is wrong and false and nasty, and instead of just saying this is wrong and false and nasty, people immediately go to, well, he hates the troops.
Like, really?
That's where you want to go?
That's the place that you want to go?
I don't see why people would do that at all.
And it's because of that reactionary tendency in politics that President Trump won, really.
Like, people say, how could he win in spite of saying things like this?
It's not in spite of saying things like this.
It's because he said things like this.
And the right inherently believes that there are a lot of people on the left who don't care enough about fallen troops because it's always easy to impute bad motivations to the other side.
And then the left immediately claims that Trump doesn't care about the fallen troops, and the right says, well, screw you!
This is how the game was played.
And I'll show you the proof.
So here is President Trump yesterday.
This is the part about why Trump won.
So President Trump won because he was running against Hillary Clinton.
End of story.
Hillary Clinton won the presidency for Donald Trump.
There's a hilarious piece by Gover Newsweek saying, here's how we could still make Hillary Clinton president.
Or I think the actual title was, here's how Hillary Clinton can still enter the Oval Office.
And I tweeted, She can wrap herself in a box and mail herself there.
I mean, that's the only way that she's gonna get in.
But in any case, Trump says, and he's correct, that Hillary, who's been very supportive of these people kneeling for the national anthem in the NFL, that's why she lost.
When you take a knee, well, that's why she lost the election.
I mean, honestly, it's that thinking that is the reason she lost the election.
When you go down and take a knee or any other way.
You're sitting, essentially, for our great national anthem.
You're disrespecting our flag, and you're disrespecting our country.
Okay, so he's right about this, and this is why Hillary Clinton is not the president today.
It's this reactionary stuff, right?
Hillary Clinton feels like she has to react to Trump, so she sides with the NFL players, and then Trump smacks her.
This is why Trump is president and Hillary Clinton is not, and this is why he begged her, basically, yesterday.
This is actually kind of funny.
He begged her to run again yesterday.
Oh, I hope Hillary runs.
Is she going to run?
I hope.
Hillary, please run again.
Go ahead.
Okay, that is certainly what he desperately hopes.
Okay, so, let's talk a little bit about the other sort of controversy that broke out around President Trump yesterday.
This is the one that's making all the headlines.
The reason I didn't start the show with this is because I think it's really overblown.
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Okay, so, yesterday, the war broke out between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump.
Now, the reason I make light of this is because I don't actually think Steve Bannon is a particularly important figure.
Steve Bannon is a proxy for the money of Robert and Rebecca Mercer.
Right?
That's all.
Okay?
Steve Bannon is their political guru.
The Mercers spend a lot of money on politics.
They spent a lot of money on Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in the last election cycle, and so they are funding some of the people that Bannon says that they should fund.
Now, what Bannon is smart about is he's not going to pick—I don't think he's going to make the mistake anymore of picking primary challengers who are bad candidates or who don't already have momentum or who wouldn't win anyway, in other words.
I think that Trump is going to pick winners.
Uh, and I think, I mean, Bannon is going to pick winners and then he's going to claim that he is responsible for their victory.
That's basically what happened in Alabama.
So Bannon went down to Alabama, he campaigned for Roy Moore over Luther Strange in the Republican primary down there.
Roy Moore is going to win anyway.
Roy Moore is one of the most famous people in Alabama politics.
I knew his name long before he was running for Senate.
In fact, if we want to be specific about this, Breitbart, I believe, backed the guy who finished third in the original primary.
They backed a congressperson who finished behind both Luther Strange and Roy Moore in that primary down in Alabama in the first round.
And then they backed Roy Moore and supposedly it was Breitbart that drove him to victory or Bannon that drove him to victory.
I don't think that's right.
I think Bannon is smart enough to jump on a bandwagon that's already moving forward.
So, Bannon is trying to claim that he is now leading the populist movement.
He's leading the Trumpist movement.
And Trump is not leading the Trumpist movement.
Only Steve Bannon can.
Now, again, do I like Steve Bannon?
No.
I think he's a jerk.
Do I think that Steve Bannon is capable of doing something like leading a movement?
I don't.
Steve Bannon, from what I know of him, and I've said this openly, is a guy who basically has glommed on to power for as long as I've known of him.
He glommed on to Sarah Palin, he glommed on to Sean Hannity, he glommed on to Dick Morris, he glommed on to Michelle Bachman, he glommed on to Andrew Breitbart, and then he glommed on to Trump.
The idea that Bannon is the engine of a movement rather than a barnacle on the movement, I don't think is actually fair.
But what I do actually appreciate about what Steve Bannon is doing is I think a lot of the people who he's actually backing are good people and better than some of the incumbent senators that he's running against.
So Bannon is trying to pose himself as this leader of a movement, which I don't actually think is true.
Here is him talking about the supposed populist revolt that is in the works.
This populist, nationalist, conservative revolt that's going on, That drove Donald Trump to victory.
That drove Judge Moore to victory.
That will drive 15 candidates to victory in 2018.
Okay, so this idea, he said a lot of words in a row there, and the words have no relationship to one another.
Populist, nationalist, conservative, what does that even mean?
What does that even mean?
Like, I assume he said he would back Ted Cruz, Andre Moore, and Mike Lee.
They have very different views of politics, those three.
The idea that these are all part of a populist revolt is not true.
Basically, here's what's happened in American politics since 2010.
There's been a vast backlash against Obama and the Obama movement, not based on race, not even based on excess spending, but based on a generalized anger at the way that politics has been done.
People feel like they're cut out of the loop.
The Tea Party movement started long before Steve Bannon was even involved at Breitbart.
Breitbart wasn't even around in 2010 when the Tea Party movement really started.
Big government was.
Big Hollywood was.
But Breitbart.com only got started as one cohesive website in 2012.
I know, I was there.
The idea that Breitbart is the moving force behind the populist nationalist movement.
There is no populist nationalist movement.
There's a bunch of people who are Tea Partiers and who are now voting for a set of disparate candidates.
The way that this has morphed, thanks to Trump, is that Trump was just the latest masthead on the ship that has had many mastheads, right?
Ted Cruz was on the masthead originally.
Then he was at the prowl of the ship in 2012, I remember, because, over Breitbart.
I was backing Ted Cruz over David Dewhurst in the Texas state primary for the Senate seat.
You know, it's had other faces too.
This Tea Party sort of insurgency.
The idea that Bannon is the head of that or that Trump is the driving force in the ship is not true.
Trump was just the temporary prow of the ship.
Bannon is not a temporary prow of the ship.
Whoever is the prow is the prow.
Bannon's just a guy who's picking some people and directing mercenary money toward them.
Which is fine, but I think it's easy to overestimate the lengths to which people are going to exaggerate this conflict, the so-called establishment versus anti-establishment conflict.
These terms have no meaning that I can spot.
Except for a feeling, and I'll explain that feeling in just a second.
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So the Bannon Trump thing broke out into the open yesterday because the idea is that Bannon is on one side primarying people and Trump is on the other side opposing the primaries.
No.
Nonsense.
Nonsense.
Bannon has a particular idea of, and just like a lot of us do, by the way, I'm sort of on Bannon's side of this argument, Bannon has a particular idea of who are candidates who are worth backing in primaries, and Mitch McConnell has a separate idea of which candidates are worth backing in primaries.
And Mitch McConnell would have backed David Dewhurst in Texas instead of Ted Cruz.
Presumably he would have backed whoever was not Rand Paul in that primary.
But, you know, there are differing opinions on basically who should be the senator, but that's more an attitudinal thing rather than a positional thing.
It's more of an attitude rather than a position.
The idea that Mitch McConnell is the quote-unquote establishment and Steve Bannon is not the establishment, you have to show me where they differ on policy.
And where do they actually differ on policy?
I know it's kind of a hard question and a surprising one.
Because when you think of Steve Bannon, you think, oh, he must really disagree with Mitch McConnell on policy.
Does he?
He encouraged President Trump not to get rid of DACA in the first place.
Did he differ from Mitch McConnell on that?
He and Mitch McConnell were on the same page on health care.
So did they differ on that?
They're on the same page on taxes, basically.
Do they differ on that?
Except that Bannon is more left.
Bannon wants to increase taxes on high earners.
Do they disagree on foreign policy?
They may, but that really isn't the purview of Congress.
They don't disagree on funding the military.
So where exactly do they disagree?
This is why I say it's more attitude than it is anything else, which is why Trump is president and Ted Cruz isn't, right?
It's more about the attitude that best channels the conservative anger, best channels the anger on the right, than it is about a set of populist nationalist ideas or any of this kind of nonsense.
And what this now comes down to is the varying personalities.
Now you may have noticed That I really dislike the politics of personalities.
I think the personality matters, I do.
I think character matters.
But I dislike this idea that you back Trump because Trump has an attitude, but you don't back Mitch McConnell because Mitch McConnell doesn't have the right attitude.
Here's the question.
Who's best at pushing the conservative agenda?
Some people will say Trump.
I would say, what's the evidence?
Some people would say McConnell.
I would say, what's the evidence?
Some people would say Ted Cruz.
I'd say there's more evidence for that than either, but that's the real question.
Who's best at pushing the ideas that you want pushed rather than who is the guy who most apes the style that you think is fun to watch?
Who's the guy who punches and yells versus who's the guy who's quiet and talks like a turtle?
Who cares?
I don't think that matters all that much unless it has an impact as to the efficacy of pushing a particular point of view.
The way this is broken down, therefore, is you have Steve Bannon, who's very loud and says a lot of stuff and pretends he's Darth Vader, and Mitch McConnell, who is a turtle.
And then in the middle, you have Donald Trump, who has sort of attitudinal affinity to Steve Bannon, but who knows that Mitch McConnell is the guy who actually has to get his agenda done.
And that's really how this is breaking down.
So here is Donald Trump saying, listen, we're not getting anything done, but I'm not going to blame me.
And it's because Trump feels like nothing's getting done that he's tempted to blame McConnell.
But we're not getting the job done.
And I'm not going to blame myself, I'll be honest.
They are not getting the job done.
We've had healthcare approved and then you had a surprise vote by John McCain.
We've had other things happen and they're not getting the job done.
Right, so he's not going to blame himself.
So who is he blaming?
Blames McConnell.
And then he would go on to say that he knows how Steve Bannon feels about primarying people.
Again, it really isn't about Bannon.
It's really about Mercer money.
But there is a danger, right?
So this is the game.
I'm analyzing the game here.
So here is Trump saying that he knows how Bannon feels about about primarying people.
I know how he feels.
It depends on who you're talking about.
There are some Republicans, frankly, that should be ashamed of themselves.
But most of them, I'll tell you what, I know the Republican senators.
Most of them are really, really great people that want to work hard and they want to do a great thing for the American public.
But you had a few people that really disappointed us.
Okay, so there is Trump basically saying he sympathizes with Bannon, but then Mitch McConnell is whispering in Trump's ear going, um, President Trump, if you lose the majority because we primary a bunch of people who are going to win general elections, then you're not going to be able to do anything.
If you lose the House in 2018, they'll impeach you.
So that is, so that's what McConnell did.
They did a, they did a lovey-dovey sort of press conference yesterday between McConnell and Trump.
Attitudinally, the two guys couldn't be more different.
But Trump needs McConnell, and McConnell needs Trump.
And so that's how this shakes out.
And that's why you have Trump saying that he likes McConnell, right?
So this is Trump's new shtick, is that he likes McConnell, even though he clearly hates him.
My relationship with this gentleman is outstanding, has been outstanding.
We are working very hard to get the tax cuts.
We will continue to work hard to get the health care completed.
Okay, so again, the reason that I'm bringing this up is because I think that the media narrative is not true.
The media narrative is it's establishment versus anti-establishment, O'Connell versus Bannon.
That's not really what's happening here.
What's happening here is that Steve Bannon wants to be perceived as the head of a movement that he is not the head of.
He's going to pick some candidates like Chris McDaniel in Mississippi, who came very close to knocking off Thad Cochran in Mississippi, and then he will back him, McDaniels would probably win anyway.
And then he will proclaim himself leader of the movement.
And then after that, you will see there's a lot of repercussions.
Is this a slap against McConnell?
It's not really a slap against McConnell.
This has been part of something that's been going on for a very long time.
It's been about a base feeling that McConnell does not fight hard enough.
So we must have more senators who fight harder.
But it's not about populist nationalism or any ideological conflict or any of that.
It's a little more messy than that.
It's about attitude rather than policy.
Okay.
Quick time for things I like and then things I hate.
So, a quick thing that I like.
There's a book that I'm in the middle of right now that I'm really enjoying by Thomas West.
It's called The Political Theory of the American Founding.
It is heavy reading, okay?
It's not easy reading.
But it is about the idea that Aristotelian ancient thought informed the founder's view of America.
This is a pretty abstruse debate in conservative circles, which is did founding philosophy break with ancient thought from Aristotle about what man was created for, or does it jibe with that?
Is the natural rights theories of the founders Are they disconnected from the idea of Aristotle that human beings have a purpose that we can discern?
Or is it connected deeply to that?
In other words, are rights connected to duties?
That's really what it's about.
So Thomas West is pointing out that the founders truly believed in duties, they just didn't believe that it was the government's job to impose those duties on other people.
I agree with Thomas West's general premise here.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate because we're running short on time.
The quick thing that I hate is that Jane Fonda is back and better than ever.
Or worse than ever is the case, maybe.
Jane Fonda, if you recall all the way back to the 1960s and 70s, she went over to Vietnam and she posed on a North Vietnamese gun that was actually aiming at American planes.
And then she proclaimed herself a patriot.
She says she has no regrets about any of that.
And then she says that she is not proud of how America is today.
Infamous photograph of you with the anti-aircraft weapon.
I wonder if Still, inside you, there's a sense of regret about that.
I don't regret going to Vietnam.
The United States was bombing the dikes of North Vietnam, earthen dikes, in the Red River Delta.
If the dikes had given way, according to Henry Kissinger, somewhere around two million people could have died of famine and drowning.
And we were bombing, and it wasn't being talked about.
And I thought, well, I'm a celebrity.
Maybe if I go, and I bring back evidence, And it did stop two months after I got back, so I'm proud that I went.
It changed my life.
All for the good.
Let me ask you a simple question.
Are you proud of America today?
No!
Okay, so I think that you want to know why, again, we don't have to continuously do why is Trump president, but this is why Trump is president, okay?
The reason that President Trump is president is because you have a woman who posed alongside people who are attempting to murder American soldiers, and she's saying that she's not proud of America today.
If you have to choose between Jane Fonda and Donald Trump, people are going to choose Donald Trump.
It's that simple.
Okay.
We'll be back here tomorrow with more breakdown of the day's news and politics.
We'll be in Tennessee.
I'm giving a speech at University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
I believe it's sold out already.
If it's not, you can go over and check it out over at the YAF website and they can give you some ticket information.
You may be able to buy a scalp ticket.
I've seen a few of those on sale.
In any case, I look forward to seeing all of you there and seeing you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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