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Oct. 19, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:57
Culture Wars Matter, Political Wars Don’t | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 398
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President Trump gets into hot water over a call with a soldier's widow.
Plus, we're going to talk about him at the Heritage Foundation and some actual big news that people aren't talking about.
Like, the biggest news of the year that people aren't talking about.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So the theme of today's show is that the culture wars are obviously more important to Americans than actual news because there's some actual huge news today.
In fact, there are three pieces of actual very, very large news today, and I'm going to talk about all three of those in just a second.
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Okay, so everybody wants to talk today about President Trump making this phone call to this widow and why this is a huge news story and whether President Trump has no sympathy for widows of war heroes and all of that.
And we'll get to that in just a second.
But I'd like to suggest that one of the reasons the media are focusing on that is because there were three very big stories that came out back to back to back yesterday, all of them good for Trump, all of them very bad for the left.
The first story is the story with regard to ISIS.
So, we now know that U.S.-backed forces have now taken Raqqa.
Okay, Raqqa is ISIS's last urban stronghold.
It was the place that was the headquarters for ISIS in Syria, and U.S.-backed forces say they have now taken it, and they've cleared the entire place, and basically ISIS has been Restricted to this small portion of area in the Euphrates River Valley.
One of the things that you should know about ISIS, and we've played their propaganda videos in the past, is that one of the ways that they have drawn such attraction to so many people is by claiming they have broad territorial holdings.
So if you actually look back at the ISIS propaganda videos, they would say things like, we have territory that is greater than all of the United Kingdom.
You know, UK's a pretty small country, but still.
They would claim that their territorial holdings were justification.
They show that Allah was on their side.
Well, now their territory has basically been shrunk to the size of a dime.
And that is thanks to the bravery of America's troops and American allies.
This is not all President Trump.
Some of this was President Obama.
A lot of these operations were started under President Obama.
President Trump did free up the military to use different rules of engagement, which certainly helped.
He took the shackles off the military that existed.
ISIS was in retreat.
before Obama took office that has only accelerated under President Trump, according to the New York Times, right?
I'm sure on page A24.
American-backed forces said on Tuesday that they had seized the northern Syrian city of Raqqa from the Islamic State, a major blow to the militant group, which had long used the city as the de facto capital of its self-declared caliphate.
Celebrations erupted in Raqqa, where residents had lived under the repressive rule of militants who beheaded people for offenses as minor as smoking.
Fighters could be seen cheering and firing celebratory gunfire in the streets, according to residents reached by phone and text message.
U.S.
CENTCOM stopped short of declaring victory, saying more than 90% of Raqqa was in SDF control.
That'd be the Syrian Democratic Forces.
That's an American-backed militia made up of Kurds and Arabs.
Colonel Ryan Dillon, spokesman for the U.S.
military in Baghdad, said Tuesday Raqqa was on the verge of being liberated, said there were still pockets of the city controlled by ISIS, but ISIS is absolutely in retreat, and now basically ISIS is a cleanup operation.
At its height, in 2014, ISIS controlled both Mosul and Raqqa, and now they control neither of them.
And that is a testament, again, to the bravery of America's armed forces, as well as our allies, and is a tribute to the Trump administration.
I guarantee you that if Barack Obama had been in office when all of this happened, this would be front-page news in every paper in the United States, because it is a major thing.
It is a major thing.
Okay, it's pretty incredible what we were able to do in a pretty short period of time here since ISIS really gained prominence and credibility in 2013-2014.
So, good for American troops.
That is big story number one.
Big story number two.
Yesterday, The FBI posted a document revealing that James Comey, former FBI director, had drafted a letter in July 2016 not recommending charges against Hillary Clinton.
Okay, as you know, as you know, that was way before he was supposed to interview Hillary Clinton.
That was way before he had all the information.
And so this demonstrates that the fix was basically in here, that James Comey knew that he wasn't going to indict Hillary Clinton, and he was drafting documents to that effect literally weeks and months before he bothered to do all the rest of his research.
FBI official, this is according to The Hill, FBI official James Rybecki in mid-May requested in an unclassified email that officials, quote, send any comments on this statement so we may roll it into a master doc for discussion with the director at a future date.
Two months later, Comey would make his announcement criticizing Clinton, but that was two months after he had already written his ruling in the case, demonstrating once again that something deeply corrupt was going on here.
James Comey has a lot of questions he's going to need to answer on that particular matter.
So that is story number two, and that one, again, does not help the left wing, does not help the Democratic Party, and it doesn't help the media, which have proclaimed from the beginning that Hillary was innocent, innocent, innocent, innocent.
Okay.
Story number three.
This one is the most stunning story.
It really is quite amazing.
OK, the story is basically that you remember there was this story that Trump kept bringing up on the campaign trail.
It was a rip from Peter Schweitzer, the guy who wrote Clinton Cash.
Very, very good researcher.
He has his own nonprofit based down in Florida in which he investigates.
It's basically an investigative journalism center.
But Schweitzer had uncovered this story about how Rosatom, which is the Russian nuclear agency, had gained control of one-fifth of America's uranium supply, and they had also given massive donations to the Clinton Foundation.
And it was cleared by the State Department when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
And President Trump used to talk about this on the campaign trail all the time.
Hillary Clinton denied there was any wrongdoing.
She said that the State Department, that part of the State Department was not under her charge.
She never knew about it and all the rest.
And there were claims that the Russians never did anything illegal anyway, so who cares?
Right?
Nothing illegal was being done, or at least if it was being done, nobody had any knowledge.
Well, that turns out to be a lie.
So, according to the New York Post today, the Obama administration knew Russia had used bribery, kickbacks, and extortion to get a stake in the U.S.
atomic energy industry, but cut deals giving Moscow control of a large chunk of the U.S.
uranium supply anyway, according to a report on Tuesday.
This is from The Hill.
The FBI used a confidential U.S.
witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather records, make secret recordings, and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed the Kremlin had compromised an American uranium trucking company.
Executives at the company Transport Logistics International kicked back about $2 million to the Russians in exchange for lucrative no-bid contracts, a scheme that violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
The Feds also learned That Russian nuclear officials had gotten millions of dollars into the U.S.
designed to benefit the Clinton Foundation at the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government committee that signed off on the deals, sources told The Hill.
The racketeering operation was conducted, quote, with the consent of higher-level officials in Russia who shared the proceeds from the kickbacks an agent later stated in an affidavit.
The DOJ, under Attorney General Eric Holder, did not bring charges in the case prior to the deals being cut.
At the time, Obama and the Clinton State Department were trying to quote-unquote, reset relations between the two nuclear rivals.
The first deal was wrapped up in October 2010, when the State Department and the Committee on Foreign Investment agreed to sell part of Uranium One, a Toronto-based mining giant, with operations in Wyoming, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa, and elsewhere, to Rosatom, which is the Russian nuclear company, giving Russia control over about 20% of the American uranium supply.
Her spokesman said that she was not involved.
Hillary's spokesman said she was not involved in this.
And, of course, the Obama administration said there was nothing wrong with the deal anyway.
Except, of course, for how there was something wrong with the deal and the Obama administration knew it.
So now here's what we know about the Obama DOJ.
We always knew that Eric Holder was corrupt.
We always knew the Obama DOJ was corrupt.
But now we know that Loretta Lynch at the DOJ had no intention of indicting Hillary Clinton for misuse of classified material.
That we know that.
Now we know her predecessor, Eric Holder, was basically signing off on deals that were designed to benefit the Clinton Foundation at the same time that the DOJ knew that Russia was attempting to wield influence in a corrupt manner, violating the law in the United States.
Pretty amazing stuff.
And pretty devastating stuff if you're a Democrat.
Which is why Democrats today should be thankful that that's not the headline.
One of the reasons that's not the headline, of course, is because the media don't want these to be the headlines.
They don't want ISIS's defeat in Raqqa to be the headline.
They don't want James Comey's memo to be the headline.
They don't want the FBI knowing that the Russians were attempting corruption being the headline.
They don't want any of this to be the headline.
What they want to be the headline is that Trump is a bad guy.
And fortunately for them, President Trump has a bad habit of opening his mouth at the wrong time.
Right?
The news cycle for him is actually pretty good this week.
But he made the mistake on Monday of giving a press conference in which, as I talked about yesterday, he has a tendency to go out over his skis.
And the president of the United States came out and he said that he likes to call all the soldiers.
And then he suggested not only that he liked to call all the soldiers, but that prior presidents like President Obama and President Bush did not like to call all the soldiers.
I want to tell you about this controversy and where I think it stands and what actually is going on here, because I think it's overblown, at least based on the evidence we've seen so far.
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Okay, so the controversy began a couple of days ago when President Trump, again, always a guy who has a tendency to speak out of turn, suggested that prior presidents had not always a guy who has a tendency to speak out of turn, suggested that prior presidents had not done enough to Here's what Trump had to say at a press conference a couple of days ago.
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 he says he likes to call when he's able to do it, but other presidents haven't always called.
And this, of course, drove a huge firestorm, because the suggestion seemed to be that Trump was saying he is better at calling the families of slain soldiers than other presidents have been, which is not true.
There is no evidence to this effect.
This created a huge controversy.
As I said yesterday, the response of the media was not, Trump is saying evidenceless things.
The response of the media was Trump doesn't care about the soldiers himself.
The media couldn't just restrict themselves to the narrative that Trump was speaking off the top of his head again and saying terrible things again.
Instead, they had to go to Trump is the one who really doesn't care about the troops.
And then, conveniently, conveniently, President Trump, the reason he was talking about this is because he was asked about some soldiers who were killed in Niger during one of his missions, and he hadn't tweeted in 12 days about it, and had apparently not called these people yet, but he was going to call them.
So, all this happens, and then he calls the family of one of the slain soldiers.
The slain soldier was Sergeant LeDavid Thompson.
LeDavid Johnson, sorry.
And LeDavid Johnson was killed in Niger two weeks ago.
He leaves behind a wife, two children.
His wife is pregnant with their third.
They've been married for a long time.
Obviously, a very handsome, young hero of the country, clearly.
And so Trump then calls up the widow.
So yesterday, Trump calls up the widow.
And according to the—not according to the widow.
According to a congresswoman named Frederica Wilson, Trump was very rude to her.
He was just terrible to her.
Here's Frederica Wilson talking about this.
It's very convenient, the narrative, right?
So the narrative was Trump said that other people didn't care enough about the troops.
The media said Trump doesn't care enough about the troops.
And within 48 hours, we have a national controversy over whether Trump was cruel to a widow, right?
Kind of convenient how all that worked out.
So here is Frederica Wilson making that claim.
The president said he knew what he was signing up for.
You've heard that?
Yeah, he said that.
You know, to me, that is something that you can say in a conversation.
But you shouldn't say that to a grieving widow.
And everyone knows when you go to war, you could possibly not come back alive.
But you don't remind a grieving widow of that.
That's so insensitive.
So insensitive.
He should not have said that, and he shouldn't have said it.
Okay, so here is the—so Trump responds to all of this by saying, So it is now some hours later.
He tweeted that about five hours ago.
He has yet to provide the proof that he talked about.
I hope that he will, because here is the reality, okay?
If Trump called up this grieving widow and all he said was, I guess he knew what he signed up for, that's pretty terrible.
Okay, we have to acknowledge that that is pretty terrible.
There are two ways to read the comment, however, and here is where the vagueness gets me.
Okay, there are two ways to read that comment.
If you call up the family of a slain police officer, firefighter, soldier, and you say to them, well, you know, they died.
I guess they knew what they signed up for.
It's pretty heartless.
First of all, number one, most soldiers don't go into battle thinking they're going to die.
The ratio, as someone on Twitter was saying this, and I think this is correct, the ratio of American soldiers who served in Iraq versus American soldiers who died in Iraq is 1 to 5,000.
So that means that the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of soldiers who serve, of service members who serve, are not expecting to die in the line of fire.
They know there's that possibility.
But it's not like they're signing up to die.
They're certainly not signing up even to experience the tremendous risk of death.
The same is true for cops.
The same is true for firefighters.
So to suggest this is what they signed up for is really pretty callous.
What they signed up for is to defend the country, not to die.
If they have to die, they will.
But that is not the idea, right?
The idea is they're signing up to defend the country.
I think that virtually all soldiers that I've spoken to agree with the basic General Patton presumption, which is that the idea is not to die for your country, it's to make the other fellow die for his.
So that would be pretty insensitive.
That's one way of reading it.
The other way of reading it is You know, your husband was a deeply brave man, and he sacrificed himself in the line of duty.
That's what brave people do.
That's what he signed up for.
He signed up because he was a brave guy.
That's another way of reading it.
That's what Matt Lewis over at the Daily Beast has suggested, and that is a plausible read.
We don't know because we weren't there in the conversation.
Now, is it entirely possible that Trump said something out of bounds and said something nasty or unconsciously cruel?
Sure, that's always a possibility, but we just don't know.
And we have to take into account the biases of the actors.
So a lot of people are saying, well, Trump isn't credible on these issues because Trump constantly says he doesn't do things wrong and he's constantly fibbing about it.
There's truth to that.
It is also true that Frederica Wilson is a radical left Democrat who has been saying for months that Donald Trump is crazy and that he should be impeached.
I mean, she's literally been saying he should be impeached for months.
So we're supposed to take her word at face value?
This is the same woman who suggested that George Zimmerman should have been locked up without evidence in the Trayvon Martin case.
She said that he should have gone to jail, he should have been in prison, and then she said he should be put in prison for his own safety.
All right, so Frederica Wilson is not exactly the most credible source.
Now, the follow-up on this is that the mother of the widow, Myesha Johnson's mother, sorry if I pronounced this correctly, I think it's Myesha Johnson's mother, her mother came out and said that the conversation basically went down the same way that Frederica Wilson said.
She told the Washington Post on Wednesday she was in the car during the call from the White House and quote, President Trump did disrespect my son and my daughter and also me and my husband.
She said, asked whether Wilson's account of the conversation between Trump and the family was accurate.
She replied, yes.
Now, I would like to hear from the, I'd like to hear from the daughter, from this woman's daughter.
I'd like to hear from the wife.
The White House apparently has no interest in revealing the contents of the conversation.
A White House official released a statement saying, the president's conversations with the families of American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice are private.
Well, then Trump probably shouldn't have tweeted about how he had proof of it.
So, here is the point.
The point is that everyone likes to jump to conclusions based on lack of evidence.
If you're just gonna stack up the evidence at this point, did Trump say something rude or not in a call to a widow, the evidence would have to be on the side of yes.
Is it dispositive?
No, of course it's not dispositive.
We just don't know at this point because we don't have a recording of the call, we don't have text of the call, we haven't even heard from the widow herself.
We've heard from her mother, and we have heard from the, and we have heard from Sorry.
And we have also heard from Frederica Wilson.
So those are the sources that we have heard from at this point.
And that does not necessarily mean that Frederica Wilson is a good source.
So we should always take this sort of stuff with a little bit of a grain of salt.
And I think that we ought to wait for all of the evidence to come out.
It also demonstrates that President Trump really needs to stop stepping on every landmine.
Not every landmine is worth stepping on.
I hate these sorts of fights.
I mean, really.
This is the third time, second, third time that President Trump has gotten into it with the Gold Star family.
It's just a waste of time.
It's a waste of space.
There's no reason to do this.
It's completely fruitless.
We should have left it behind.
Unfortunately, the culture wars are what Americans are interested in, however.
We have major policy issues on the table.
We have Obamacare.
We have tax reform.
We have so many things that need to be done, and yet we are consumed with cultural issues every day because it's easy to run to a side.
It's very easy to run to a side and declare your virtuousness or the other guy's evil.
That's what's happening on a consistent basis.
So President Trump spoke at Heritage Foundation yesterday, and in speaking at Heritage Foundation, he spent an awful lot of time talking about these cultural issues, because Trump knows better than anyone else that he was elected on the basis of culture, not on the basis of policy.
All of the talk about Trump being a typical Republican president on policy, that's not actually why he was elected.
He was not elected as a Republican on policy.
He was elected because he likes fighting culture wars, and there are a lot of people who are angry at the prevailing state of American culture.
So, over at the Heritage Foundation, he dropped some Republican conservative red meat.
He started off by saying that freedom is a gift from God, not from government.
The most important truth our founders understood was this.
Freedom is not a gift from government.
Freedom is a gift from God.
Okay, so I love that.
You know, it's a great line, but that's not why people voted for Trump either.
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Okay, so, President Trump and Heritage Foundation dropped a bunch of lines that were really more campaign lines than anything else.
Here's President Trump saying that he's going to bring Merry Christmas back.
You're gonna be saying Merry Christmas again, okay?
You're gonna say Merry Christmas.
You know?
You go to the stores, and they have the red walls, and they have the snow, and they even have the sleigh, and the whole thing.
They don't have Merry Christmas.
They don't have Merry Christmas.
I want them to say, Merry Christmas, everybody.
Happy New Year, happy holidays, but I want Merry Christmas.
Okay, so if this is a major issue to you, then this is why you voted for Trump.
Okay, so the reason that this works for Trump is because, is it kind of dumb?
Yeah, we were all saying Merry Christmas anyway.
It's good that the president wants to say Merry Christmas.
Christmas is a national holiday.
All of that is worthwhile.
As an Orthodox Jew, I can say that I say Merry Christmas to Christians all the time on Christmas.
The idea that you shouldn't is ridiculous.
However, the idea that this is a thing that Trump is going to accomplish for us, that saying Merry Christmas is now going to be in vogue again because Trump is president, I think it's dumb, but it is one of the reasons why Trump won, is because people feel inundated by the culture of the left.
They feel inundated by the culture of the left on a consistent basis.
Constantly, and I think for good reason.
And so Trump likes to focus on this, right?
This is the great misnomer about Trump.
Trump was not elected to get Republican policy done.
He was elected because we wanted a talk show host as President of the United States who's going to talk about these issues and shift these issues, which is why I see so many conservatives who are so excited about Trump talking about kneeling in the NFL and think Trump won some sort of great victory by taking down the ratings for the NFL.
Because the culture war matters.
The culture war does matter.
I just think the culture war should be won in the culture as opposed to being won in the political sphere.
Maybe that's a little bit too high-minded of me, but I'm more interested in the President of the United States actually promulgating good policy than I am in him telling people they can say Merry Christmas again.
I think we can do both, by the way.
I don't think it's irrelevant.
I don't think the President can't say this stuff, but this is the... if...
Suffice it to say, I think, for a lot of Republican voters, if Trump gets nothing done but he says this kind of stuff, they would rather that than that he not say this kind of stuff but get a bunch of things done.
Trump continued along these lines.
He says that people are trying to destroy Columbus statues.
We believe we should preserve our history, not tear it down.
Now they're even trying to destroy statues of Christopher Columbus.
What's next?
Has to be stopped.
It's heritage.
Okay, so again, the idea that the Christopher Columbus statues are coming down.
I've protested that too.
I think it's idiotic.
He's correct about this.
Again, this is all culture war type stuff.
More culture war type stuff.
He says the American flag should be treated with respect.
Again, I agree with all of these basic principles that he's stating right now.
The only point that I'm making is this seems to be a tremendous focus for Trump for a reason, and that is that we're not getting anything done legislatively.
We believe that our great American flag Should be treated with reverence and respect, and that young Americans should be taught to love our country, honor our anthem, and proudly recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Okay, so, again, agreed with all of this, but this is the real reason why Trump won, and this is why we're going to just keep devolving into culture wars and not paying attention to the news.
Some of that's on the media.
The media don't want to pay attention to the news.
It's more fun to talk about culture wars.
Some of that is on President Trump, who was elected to talk culture wars and not really to engage with policy.
So when the Trump administration says, why aren't you guys talking about Raqqa?
They're right.
But it would help if President Trump didn't feel the need to engage in a culture war every five minutes, obscuring his other accomplishments.
Now, Democrats have responded to all of this by suggesting, of course, that it's all Republicans' fault, that the reason we have these culture wars, it's all Republicans' fault.
So, Joe Biden came out yesterday, former vice president, and said that the demise of rhetoric in America began with Newt Gingrich.
We saw the beginning of the demise of the nature of the discourse when the Gingrich Revolution started to occur.
When on the floor of the United States Senate, a senator would refer to a sitting president as Bubba.
When someone, forget Democrat-Republican, when someone would yell at a State of the Union liar.
The destruction of these norms and it's generating chaos.
Really?
That was the destruction of the norms?
It wasn't like Teddy Kennedy heading over to the Soviet Union in 1984 and talking with the Soviet Union about how he could help them undermine Ronald Reagan?
It wasn't like Jimmy Carter in 1980 talking pretty openly about how much he despised Ronald Reagan?
Like, that's when the order went away?
It wasn't like the 1960s when people were rioting in the streets?
It really began with Newt Gingrich?
Really?
And Joe Biden doesn't really have a leg to stand on here when it comes to the civility and rhetoric routine.
Here is Joe Biden circa 2012 talking about putting y'all back in chains.
Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing.
Romney wants to let the, he said in the first hundred days, he's going to let the big banks once again write their own rules.
Unchain Wall Street.
They're going to put you all back in chains.
I was talking to a black audience when he said that, but Joe Biden gets to stand around talking about how he is just the halcyon of civility.
And then you wonder why Republicans are so mad that they want to engage in this culture war, because Democrats also want to engage in the culture war.
So instead of having useful policy discussions, we'll engage in culture wars and nothing will get done.
Speaking of nothing getting done, healthcare policy is stalled out again.
So one of the big questions is whether President Trump is going to cut subsidies to all of the Obamacare exchanges.
He should, okay?
Congress has not approved any of the subsidies for the Obamacare exchanges and for the insurance companies.
He should use that as a lever to make Congress change the law and free up those insurance companies to open up the insurance markets, right?
Then you won't need the subsidies if you actually free them up to sell plans at the prices that they ought to be sold.
But that only died today.
The last 48 hours were basically a whirlwind of stupidity.
First, Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray came up with a bargain that Chuck Schumer liked, where they would continue to fund the Obamacare subsidies.
Here's Chuck Schumer praising that.
I want to salute both Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray for working hard on a bipartisan solution.
We think it's a good solution and it got broad support when Patty and I talked about it at the caucus at lunch today.
First, it stabilizes the system.
Two years of cost sharing provides real stability to the system, and we want to make sure that happens.
We want to work in the long term to reduce premiums and increase coverage.
Our Republican colleagues seem to be in the opposite place on the long term.
But I think there's a growing consensus that in the short term we need stability in the markets.
So we've achieved stability.
If this agreement becomes law, we've also put in some very significant anti-sabotage provisions.
The president had been sabotaging this bill, and the agreement would undo much of that sabotage.
Okay, so he's super happy about this, and then Trump goes out and he says that he likes the Alexander Murray deal, too.
He says that they're going to abide by it for a couple of years.
Here's him yesterday.
Lamar has been working very, very hard with The Democratic, his colleagues on the other side and Patty Murray is one of them in particular.
And they're coming up and they're fairly close to a short term solution.
The solution will be for about a year or two years.
And it'll get us over this intermediate hump because we have, as you probably know, we have either have the votes or we're very close to having.
So Trump was ready to go.
The Senate was ready to go.
The person who stopped it was that cuck Paul Ryan.
Paul Ryan said, we're not going to pass this through the House as well as he should.
So that thing lives and dies inside of 48 hours.
But we're not talking policy, right?
We're two-thirds of the way through the show and we're not talking policy because the culture wars are more important than policy in the minds of most Americans.
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So I'm very eager to get to things I like and things I hate today because I have some some special things I like and things that I hate that I want to talk about So let's start with some things that I like so we begin today someone tweeted at me What is the thing that the most popular opinion you hold an opinion that lots of other people hold that you are most embarrassed of?
This opinion is that Chris Farley is hilarious.
I, for some reason, think Chris Farley is just the funniest thing that ever was, and his death is a tragedy.
This movie that I'm about to praise, when I showed this to my parents, they looked at me like I was a crazy person.
My sisters also think this movie is really funny.
My dad thinks I'm a moron for liking this movie.
The movie, of course, is Tommy Boy with David Spade and Chris Farley.
I cannot stop laughing at this movie.
I think it is just hysterically funny, and I think Chris Farley and David Spade play off each other beautifully.
Here, of course, is the preview for that great comedic classic Tommy Boy.
Holy shnikes. - Cheese.
Is that for me?
No, son, that's for me.
Yeah!
Yeah!
You know, a lot of people go to college for seven years.
I know.
They're called doctors.
There's always has been, always will be a family firm.
Oh, son of a... Someday my son will run it.
Luke, I am your father, lad.
Aw, I've interrupted happy time.
That's my name!
Yeah, that's your new office now.
Whoa!
Do we really want to put the future of the company in Tommy's hands?
Promise me you'll look after Tommy boy here till he gets his feet wet.
Sure, and thanks for choosing me.
Hey Tommy, this is not a vacation for me.
I'm out here against my will so the least you can do is pretend to work.
Ugh, I can actually hear you getting fatter.
All right, it's sale time, so remember, we don't take no for an answer.
No.
Okey-dokey.
I'm gonna pass.
Gotcha, thanks.
Oh!
Son of a... That's gonna leave a mark.
Okay, so the preview does not do justice to the hilarity of this film.
There are a couple scenes that are really...
Really great.
There's one scene in particular where he's doing a sales job and explaining and using the metaphor of a car crash.
It's pretty spectacular.
So if you are in the mood for dumb humor, much better than dumb and dumber, go get Tommy Boy.
Okay, other things that I like.
I could not resist this.
So this was a series of tweets that came out yesterday, which is just hysterical, showing how dumb white supremacists are.
So we have to show the series of tweets.
They're really spectacular.
Do we have those?
So, Ivan Throne, at Dark Triad Man, he said, This is called art.
This is the legacy and heritage of the West.
This is what the men of the West fight, sacrifice, and die for.
This is victory.
Hashtag Davis Volt.
Okay, and it's a statue, if you can't see it, it's a statue of a very smoking hot woman, hair blowing in the wind, and a dress blowing backwards, clinging to her body.
And this is what we fight for.
Okay, and the next thing that happens is that somebody tweets, Is there an example of a female sculptor who committed herself to the same level of detail that a male does with a woman?
And I've been thrown tweets back, none that come to mind.
That sculpture is an act of worship before heaven, and it shows.
And then they're informed by Pliny the Elder, quote, the sculptor is a Chinese woman, you dork-ass losers.
And here's a picture of the sculpture and the sculptor.
So it was a Chinese woman who made that tribute to the West.
Again, showing that culture is significantly more important, culture and art significantly more important than the color of your skin or the place of your birth.
So all of the moron white supremacists who think that great art can only be created by white men, no.
No, so I just, I loved that.
I thought it was so great.
I could not resist showing that to you.
Okay, so we're going to break here.
On the other side, I still have some epic things I hate, including Sarah Silverman.
We're going to talk about that, plus Anita Hill.
Lots of stuff still to talk about.
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Okay, time for some things that I hate.
So let's do that.
So we begin with CNN.
So, this hashtag MeToo has been going around.
I talked about it yesterday.
And what I was suggesting is that I'm not against women telling their stories of sexual harassment or sexual assault.
I think it's important that they do so.
But I think it's significantly more useful if you are going to come out and give me evidence.
Right?
Because it's hard for me to side with you without evidence.
Of even who you're accusing, because there are cases we know, public cases, right?
UVA, Lena Dunham, on racial matters, Bennett, Michael Bennett, the Seattle Seahawks defensive end, right?
There's all sorts of cases where people make accusations that turn out not to be true, and this idea that we owe them our credibility at the beginning, our credulousness at the very beginning, I don't think is right.
I don't think that's correct.
I think that we owe people the respect of hearing their stories, But the problem with vague stories that don't actually name names is that it's difficult for us to determine who the bad guys are and how to fight the bad guys.
I mean, beyond, that's a horrible thing that you just told me about.
I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about that.
I have no intention of engaging in similar activity.
So, what would you like from me?
And that's always the question, right?
The question is, what can we do from here?
I mean, when we're talking about these, the Harvey Weinstein scandal, when we're talking about, when we're talking about there's this, what's the name of the gymnast?
There's this famous gymnast who just came out a little while ago, Michaela Maroney, sorry, who just came out and said that the doctor on the U.S.
women's team had molested her for years, right?
That's a case where we can see the person who did it, and we can say that person belongs in jail.
This is why I suggested that stars need to come out and they need to name names, because they can afford the legal fees if somebody sues them for slander.
They can go to court.
If you're an up-and-comer, you don't have any money, their sexual harassment Statutes of limitations, I think it's a year in many states where you have time to actually file a sexual harassment claim.
If you're beyond that, then you could get sued, presumably for slander.
At least that's what I've been told by a reporter over at the Wall Street Journal.
You know, I understand all those concerns, but if you want us to fight individual bad guys, we have to know who the individual bad guys are.
And this is sort of like saying, fight Nazism.
And you're like, well, I don't like Nazis.
Nazis are evil, and Nazism is bad.
And they say, well, you're not fighting hard enough.
And it's like, well, what do you want me to do?
You actually have to, like, show me a Nazi, and then we can determine the best way to fight that Nazi.
So, here's the reason that this is a problem.
So, CNN ran a story today in which they had on Anita Hill to talk about Harvey Weinstein.
This is a bugaboo of mine.
It drives me up a wall when the media, HBO just did a miniseries about Anita Hill, do this whole routine like Anita Hill unquestionably was telling the truth.
Anita Hill was clearly telling the truth about being sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas.
There are a number of facts that call into question her account of exactly what happened with Clarence Thomas.
Okay, the fact is that Anita Hill was, was...
I mean, she was not found credible by a huge percentage of the American population for a variety of reasons, including the fact that she insisted on speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee in confidence, not publicly, right?
And not with her name attached.
Well, if she made a specific accusation, wouldn't Thomas know who she was anyway?
So that really means that she was making accusations that were so vague they presumably could have come from anybody, right?
This is what Thomas Sowell says.
He says, think about it.
The accusations referred to things that were supposed to have happened when only two people were present.
If the accusations were true, Clarence Thomas would automatically know who originated them.
Anita Hill's request for anonymity made sense only if the charges were false.
Hill admitted under oath that although she previously denied being told something by a Democratic staffer, she actually was.
There are a dozen women who came out in support of Clarence Thomas contradicting Anita Hill.
Hill made numerous phone calls to Clarence Thomas long after she stopped working for him.
She followed him from job to job even though she worked for the federal government where there's tremendous job security.
A witness who said that she was told details about the supposed sexual harassment while the two were living in Washington didn't even live in Washington at the time.
So there were serious credibility problems with Anita Hill.
Nonetheless, here is CNN today, quote, Anita Hill on Harvey Weinstein.
We have to ask, how far have we come to equality?
And they're using Anita Hill as sort of the talking point.
It says, the Harvey Weinstein scandal suggests workplace conditions have not improved nearly enough for women in the 26 years since then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused of workplace sexual harassment.
His accuser, Anita Hill, told CNN's New Day on Wednesday.
So number one, Anita Hill's credibility has been in question for years.
Number two, it's kind of weird, don't you think, that CNN never runs a story saying, The Harvey Weinstein scandal suggests workplace conditions have not improved nearly enough for women since Kathleen Willey accused the President of the United States of groping her in the Oval Office.
You never hear from Kathleen Willey.
You never hear from Juanita Broderick.
You never hear from Paula Jones.
You never hear from a variety of women.
A variety of women.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, Sarah Silverman has a new series.
It's called I Love You, America.
Now, Sarah Silverman bugs me for a variety of reasons.
I'm not a fan of the cutesy use of the C word.
never proved it in court, never even filed a case.
So there's that.
Okay.
Other things that I hate.
So Sarah Silverman has a new series.
It's called I Love You, America.
Now, Sarah Silverman bugs me for a variety of reasons.
I'm not a fan of the cutesy use of the C word.
You know, she does like a little child's voice and then she curses like a sailor.
I don't find that particularly amusing.
She's also a hardcore leftist who really looks down on red state America and Republicans in any area of American life.
I mean, she campaigned for Bernie Sanders.
So of course, she's the perfect person that Hollywood and Netflix are going to trot out to, I think it's Hulu actually, is going to trot out to unite Americans.
I can't think of a more unifying figure than Sarah Silverman.
So here's Sarah Silverman's trailer for I Love You America.
I love you, America From sea to shining sea From the east coast to the west And whatever's in between I love you, America The old red, white, and blue I love you America and everyone in you.
Wow!
I love you men.
I love you women.
I love straights and I love gays.
I love all the Americans from places far away.
I love you if you're Haitian or Korean or Irish.
I love that you're Mexican and I love that you're from Africa, Canada, Libya.
North Carolina.
Wait a minute, what am I doing?
I'm listing kinds of people?
I'm categorizing human beings and putting them into little individual boxes.
I mean, whether I mean it or not, I'm part of the problem.
I love you, mailman person.
I love you, bus driver.
OK, so I mean, you can see this is not funny at all.
But beyond that, the idea that she's the Great Unifier was belied by the first episode of this awful show.
She went to Louisiana, and she basically found a family of fat people to talk to, and to mock.
And she tried to make it seem like, oh, and then at the end of the day, we decided we loved each other.
So, a couple of things about this particular family.
This particular family is pro-same-sex marriage.
This is the litmus test in Hollywood.
If you're anti-same-sex marriage, you are Satan.
You are Satan.
So, this family was convenient.
They happen to be pro-same-sex marriage, or at least okay with it.
That is the litmus test in Hollywood.
But they did vote for Donald Trump, and you can see, I mean, the whole show is designed, it's supposed to be about how much he loves people.
The whole show is designed to show how she's basically like Steve Irwin in the wild interviewing a crocodile.
So here's a clip from it.
Have you ever met a Jew before?
By what?
A Jewish person.
Who's that?
That's a good question.
It's like a religion, but I'm not... I don't really follow it.
I have met a Jew before.
Did they have the little hats?
The only thing I know, the Jews wear the little hats.
Yarmulkes?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm from the bayou.
The bayou.
The bayou.
What do I sound like to you?
Well, you know...
I didn't know Jewish people growing up because I'm from New Hampshire, but then I moved to York, and I was like, oh my god.
They got a lot.
They got a lot of Jews in New York.
You guys, tell me about Shem, the scientific guy.
Yeah, except for like, okay, so if you never met a Jew, you never met a Jew.
Big deal.
I'm significantly more Jewish than Sarah Silverman.
Like a lot more Jewish than Sarah Silverman.
Sarah Silverman in terms of my practice.
And believe me, I've dealt with many more people from Louisiana than Sarah Silverman ever has.
I'm in Tennessee today, right?
I go all around the country.
I talk to people all across the spectrum, all around the country.
And the idea that, you know, that everyone who doesn't live in her social milieu is kind of a hick, and then, but we're all the same underneath.
Well, no, we have some pretty different values.
And I think that what Sarah Silverman needs to learn is not that we're all humans underneath.
If you don't get that by now, you're dumb.
What you really need to learn is that if you have differing political viewpoints with somebody, if you have different religious viewpoints from somebody, like, that significantly differ, that maybe that's okay.
And I don't think that Sarah Silverman needs to go out to Louisiana and find people with no teeth in order to do that, right?
I think that she needs to go into Hollywood and talk to the conservatives that she won't deal with, that her ex-husband Jimmy Kimmel says he doesn't want to have a conversation with, and maybe have a conversation with them, and maybe have a discussion.
Like, maybe she's wrong about some things.
Has that ever occurred to her?
Or is this basically just gonna be, I do me, and you do you, and we all love each other?
And what do we have in common?
That we're human.
Okay, that is the most boring unity crap.
It's so boring.
If we don't have a common vision for the country, if we don't have any values in common, then yeah, we're still human, and we have that in common, I suppose.
But, that doesn't really go very far, and that's sort of why the show is bound to fail.
Plus, it looks absolutely boring and terrible.
Okay, so I was going to do a little bit of Bible talk, but I think that we have run out of time, so I may save that for tomorrow.
I'm speaking at University of Tennessee in Knoxville tonight.
My speech is going to be somewhat different than the speeches that I normally give, so I'm looking forward to trotting out something new.
Ooh, interesting, fascinating, or boring.
Who knows?
It could be terrible.
In any case, I will see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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