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Nov. 7, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:28
A Good Man With A Gun | Ep. 412
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Fallout from the Texas shooting Democrats are out over their skis again, plus some new information on the identity of the shooter and the man who took him down, a real American hero.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, so many things to talk about today, and I am looking forward to things I like today because there's some fun things I like.
In fact, it's so much fun that I actually didn't want to do the show today.
I just wanted to be on Twitter, hashtagging accurate movie summaries.
But we'll get to that in a little while, because some of these are really funny.
But before we get to any of that, and I really do want to talk at length about the hero who shot the Texas Massacre guy, the evil shooter who walked into a church and murdered 26 people, including somewhere between 12 and 14 children.
The guy who shot him is an amazing story and really gives the lie to a lot of democratic talking points.
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Okay, so.
We begin today with the update on all the information that you need to know about this awful shooting in Texas.
So, we now know, we now know, that the reason this man had guns, the reason this piece of human debris had guns, is because the government screwed it up.
So whenever you hear people talking about why the government needs more regulations, just remember this was a government screw-up in the first place.
This man was legally forbidden from owning or buying guns.
He was legally forbidden from doing so.
That's not stopping people like Ted Lieu, Democratic congressman from California, from legitimately walking out on a moment of silence for the victims in Congress.
He walked out on it in order to quote-unquote draw attention to gun control.
It's really just grandstanding.
I went after him on Twitter for it.
I asked him if he made a habit of walking out on funerals so that he could go to soup kitchens, or does he wait until after the funeral in order to do the things that he thinks are worthwhile?
Well, he wasn't, you know, happy to hear that.
Instead, he said that he was standing up for everyone because we need more gun control.
And this, of course, has been the consistent call from everyone on the left.
Gun control, gun control, gun control.
The government failed here.
Here is what we now know, according to Mediaite, okay?
We have our answer.
In a statement released by the Air Force today, a spokesperson confirmed that the shooter, his criminal convictions did not make their way into the federal database.
According to the Texas Tribune, the Air Force has launched a review of how the service handled the criminal records of former Airman Devin P. Kelly following his 2012 domestic violence conviction.
Kelly was convicted by a general court-martial on two charges of domestic assault against his wife and stepson under Article 128 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
He served 12 months in confinement at the Naval Consolidated Brig Miramar in California before being released with a bad conduct discharge in 2014.
He was busted down to E1.
Federal law prohibited him from buying or possessing firearms after this conviction.
He had a gun anyway.
Why did he have a gun anyway?
Because initial information indicates his domestic violence offense was not entered into the National Criminal Information Center database by the Holloman Air Force Base Office of Special Investigations.
Okay, so this is the fault of the Air Force that did not enter the information into the computer.
We've seen situations like this before.
I believe that it was, I think it was the Charleston shooter, who also was forbidden from buying guns, and there was a screw-up in the background check.
Just saying there ought to be background checks doesn't make the background checks actually happen.
And now, we know that there were tons of red flags about this, again, human piece of crap.
Here are some of the things we now know about this guy.
And again, this is why it's so foolish to suggest that the best way to weed out mass shooters is by confiscating guns from hundreds of millions of Americans.
Instead, we ought to be looking for red flags, because almost invariably, the only exception I can think of, actually, is the Las Vegas shooter.
Every one of these guys has a bunch of red flags in their history.
So here are just some of the red flags for this shooter in Texas.
in Sutherland Springs.
Number one, he tried to date underage girls, and I mean really underage.
According to the New York Post, when he was 18, he tried dating a 13-year-old and later reportedly suggested she live with him and his wife as a topless maid, and that 13-year-old suggested that Kelly essentially stalked her.
His court-martial for domestic violence was not just him hitting his wife or hitting his stepson.
He cracked the skull of his infant stepson multiple times, okay, on purpose, according to court records.
He assaulted his then wife.
She divorced him, he remarried.
He was arrested for animal cruelty a few years back.
He was arrested at a Colorado Springs RV park for punching a dog, throwing it, and dragging it.
He was given probation after an hour-long standoff with police resulted in his arrest.
So you beat the living crap out of a dog, and then you beat the living crap out of your infant stepson.
And not only don't you end up in jail for life for these offenses, you then can buy a gun because the government screws it up.
So there are a bunch of problems here.
The first problem I would suggest is why are you out on the street after you beat the living crap out of a dog?
Why are you out on the street after you fracture repeatedly an infant's stepson's skull?
He should be in jail for attempted murder, presumably.
Instead, he's out on the street.
Not only that, the government fails to report his criminal activities so that the laws that are on the books don't work, right?
You saw actual people like David Frum saying yesterday, I think we should bar all mentally ill people and people with criminal convictions for domestic violence from owning guns.
Good idea, David.
That's been part of federal law for the last 20 years.
It's already been part of it.
It doesn't help if the government can't enforce.
This is the problem with how the government, how people on the left like to think about gun control.
The government is big and inefficient.
It lets things slip through the cracks.
Whether you're talking 9-11, the JFK assassination, or this shooting, they let things slip through the cracks they should have known about.
And then later, we say, well, if we just passed a few more laws, that would fix it.
Making a big and inefficient government bigger and more inefficient is not the way to stop these things.
The only way to stop these things is to either give the government fewer things to do and make them better at it, or, presumably, to allow armed citizens to walk around with guns.
And this is where we get to the final thing here.
This guy was threatening his mother-in-law.
So his mother-in-law went to the church.
This was apparently sort of a family dispute.
He was on the outs with his wife.
They were still married, but they were strange.
And his mother-in-law attended the church.
He went there and shot up the church.
He was able to buy four guns in the past four years.
And the authorities are now saying pretty clearly that this guy should never have been allowed to buy a gun.
Here is a Texas official talking about how this church shooting was motivated by domestic violence considerations. - There was a domestic situation going on within this family.
The suspect's mother-in-law attended this church We know that he had made threatening text from him.
And we can't go into details about that domestic situation that is continuing to be vetted and thoroughly investigated.
But we want to get that out there that this was not racially motivated.
It wasn't over religious beliefs.
There was a domestic situation going on within the family and the in-laws.
We can confirm that the suspect did not have a license to carry.
And we also find out from this official's name is Martin, sorry, Freeman Martin, the San Antonio region director for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
He also adds that there is no way this person should have been able to obtain a gun.
Here's what he had to say.
We can confirm that the suspect did not have a license to carry.
The suspect did have a non-commissioned, unarmed private security license similar to a security guard at a concert type situation.
Private security background checks, including fingerprints and criminal history checks with the Texas Crime Information Center and National Crime Information Center databases were checked and he was clear. - Sure.
Okay, so this, again, is a government failure, and we're told that the solution here is government.
I'll tell you, sometimes there's just not a solution.
This is something that the left will say about terrorist attacks, and I think there is some truth to it.
I think there are measures that we can take to minimize the possibility.
But when you are talking about crazy people who obtain guns in violation of law already, passing more laws is not going to stop that from occurring.
And in fact, the people on the left, Elizabeth Warren, for example, Elizabeth Warren was out there tweeting about the NRA this whole week.
The NRA, the NRA is paying people off.
First of all, the NRA is not paying people off.
There are millions of people who are members of the NRA because they believe that they're best shot at defending their lives.
And this is what the founders believed, too, was owning a firearm.
John Adams talked about the fact that everyone in Massachusetts was mandated, mandated by law in colonial times, to own a gun for purposes of being part of the state militia, protecting their lives and their liberty.
This has always been part of the American creed, and I think it's a very good part of the American creed.
Elizabeth Warren, however, says the NRA is responsible.
You see a bunch of people on the left saying things like, the NRA just doesn't care if there are terrorist attacks.
The NRA doesn't care if there are mass shootings.
The NRA is behind these things.
It benefits the NRA somehow for there to be mass shootings.
Well, here is the lie for that.
This gives the lie to that.
The guy who shot and presumably killed this shooter, this mass shooter.
The mass shooter was shot, I guess, three times.
Twice he was wounded.
And the man who wounded him was this man right here, Stephen Williford.
So, Stephen Williford is a lifelong NRA member.
Stephen Williford is an NRA instructor.
And here is Stephen Williford.
Stephen Williford represents everything that the left hates about American gun ownership.
But here they have to pay homage to him because he actually saved lives.
I mean, this guy could have gone with his gun and shot up many more places if Stephen Williford hadn't hopped in.
I mean, this is an amazing thing that happened in Texas that wouldn't happen nearly anyplace else.
There were two separate people who came running to the situation, carrying guns, and then chased this guy down with their truck, knowing that not only was he armed and dangerous, he just murdered dozens of people.
Every time I heard a shot, I was thinking that was a sign to someone else.
One of the heroes of the story, Stephen Williford, and how it came about that he shot this evil piece of garbage on Stephen Crowder's show.
Every time I heard a shot, I was thinking that was a sign to someone else.
Right.
That shot was a sign that he was shooting at another person.
Every time I heard a shot fire.
And I didn't have time to put shoes on.
All he had for a shot for me is my head because I was behind the truck and using it for cover.
Okay.
And we exchanged fire and he hit the neighbor's car's windshield.
He hit the neighbor's house.
And he got into the vehicle and I fired at him again.
And he fired two more shots through his side, well actually he fired two shots through his side window first.
And I noticed the two distinct pistol shots coming through the sides of the window.
And I fired my AR-15 again and it took the window down, it fell.
Okay.
And I took another shot.
And at this point I'm shooting where his head would be.
Okay, and he ended up actually shooting and wounding the guy twice, once in the leg and once in the body.
He was using his own rifle, the rifle that the left wants to ban, the AR-15.
He was using his rifle to take down this guy.
This guy obtained his guns illegally.
Again, for the ninth time, this guy obtained his guns illegally.
What would have happened if he had the guns and Stephen Willefer did not have the guns and was not an NRA instructor?
I was scared to death.
Again, this is the type of American that there are so many on the hardcore left who really dislike this guy.
He's a bitter clinger who clings to God and religion and guns, obviously.
Exactly the kind of person that Barack Obama didn't like in 2008.
Here he is explaining why he's no hero and talking about God in a way that makes the left very, very uncomfortable.
I was scared to death.
I was.
I was scared for me and I was scared for every one of them.
And I was scared for my own family that just lived less than a block away.
I'm no hero.
I am not.
I think my God, my Lord, protected me and gave me The skills to do what needed to be done.
And I just wish I could have gotten there faster.
I didn't know.
For all of the people on the left who've been saying thoughts and prayers are meaningless and that none of this matters, this is what thoughts and prayers are for.
Thoughts and prayers are for stealing people like Stephen Williford.
Thoughts and prayers, it's a religious belief that you have to cultivate your skills in order so that you can defend others.
This man says he's not a hero.
He is a hero.
He says he was scared.
But being scared is what makes him a hero, right?
I mean, he was scared.
He ran out there barefoot, loading his gun while he was running toward the sound of the fire.
And he was not the only person who did this, by the way.
He wasn't the only guy.
But the fact that, you know, he's a deeply religious person, obviously.
The fact that the left does not... I'm seeing a lot of folks on the left today, and, you know, it's not everyone on the left, obviously, but I think that I'm seeing a lot of folks on the left today who are disparaging the thoughts and prayers stuff.
And they're also suggesting, how could you be religious?
This is such a, it's such a, honestly, teenage take on religion.
How could you be religious when people in a church just got shot and killed?
The problem of theodicy, the problem of how does evil exist in a world where God has providence?
How does that work?
This has been something that religious thinkers have been thinking about for legitimately thousands of years.
This is nothing new.
And religious people have come to the conclusion there are certain things that we just don't understand about God's action.
That doesn't mean that God doesn't have a plan, and it also doesn't mean that I don't have a duty.
And it's that duty, that godly duty that drove Stephen Williford.
He is a hero.
He did own a gun.
He needed to own the gun.
He was a member of the NRA.
He was an NRA instructor.
I keep hearing the NRA is behind these shootings, the NRA likes these shootings.
Name for me now how many members of the NRA have been responsible for mass shootings.
The answer is zero.
The whole purpose of the NRA is to arm people like Stephen Williford, not to arm people like this piece of crap who shot up the church.
And again, the law barred that guy from owning a gun.
What the left wants is for the law to also bar Stephen Williford from owning a gun.
How would that have gone, exactly?
I want to give some time to the other hero in this situation, a guy named Johnny Langerdorf, and talk about a misconception of my own in a second.
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Okay, so the other hero of this story is a guy named Johnny Langerdorf.
So what happened is that Stephen Willefer charged out of his house after being told by his daughter there was some shooting going on at the church.
He charged out of his house barefoot.
Uh, with his gun, trying to load his magazine as he went, pulled it out of his gun safe because he keeps it safe like most gun owners do.
He charged out and he started shooting.
The shooter jumped in his car, I think it was a truck, and began driving away.
And Williford flagged down Johnny Langerdorf and jumped in Langerdorf's car and they started chasing the guy.
Remember, these are civilians chasing a bad guy.
I can promise you, in Los Angeles, when there's a bad guy, civilians don't chase the bad guy.
They wait for the cops to come.
In Texas, okay, I've lived my entire life in LA.
The same thing is true in Cambridge, where I lived for three years.
In Texas, when there's a bad guy, people understand that they may be the only, the last dividing line between that bad guy and bad thing happening, and bad things happening, and so they hop in their car and they follow.
It's one of my favorite things.
There's a movie called Hell or High Water, which is kind of a fun movie, and it's one of my favorite things in that film, is that there's a bank robbery, and Everyone at the bank pulls out a gun, and then they all begin chasing down the bank robbers.
It's one of my favorite things in the film.
And that was true to life, because that's exactly what happened in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
Here is Johnny Langerdorf talking a little bit, and I believe this is his wife, talking with Anderson Cooper about whether he would have done this again if he knew that the guy was armed and dangerous.
It's not surprising at all.
He's a great guy, great man.
He's very courageous and super humble about the whole situation, and that's just awesome.
It doesn't surprise me at all.
That's just the way he is?
Yes.
Johnny, knowing what you know now, I mean, would you do the same thing over again?
I would do it a hundred times over, sir.
Okay, so, you know, one of the things that I was gonna say about misconceptions, look at this guy.
I mean, he's got a neck tattoo, he doesn't look like he's necessarily, you know, going to the Ivy League colleges, and it's very easy for those of us who live on the coast to look at somebody like Johnny Langerdorf, neck tattoo, and say, oh, what a hick.
What a hick.
This is the kind of guy, you know, not everyone with a neck tattoo is Johnny Langerdorf, but not everyone without a neck tattoo is Johnny Langerdorf either.
And the fact is this guy is the guy who is on the spot and he did the right thing.
Don't judge a book by its cover.
And that's a good lesson to people like me who sometimes make judgments based on things like this as well.
Heroism comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes, but it does share a belief system.
And that belief system is that when someone has to stand between the evil and the innocent, you're the person who has to stand up and do something.
Okay, and we can treat government like it's God, we can pretend that government is capable of protecting us against all evils, it's just not true.
It is just not the case that government can protect us against all evils, and that's why an armed populace is very often necessary to stop this stuff.
You know, the Washington Post put out an article yesterday with the headline, one thing mass shooters have in common, they're men with guns.
Well, yes, in a mass shooting situation you would assume they have guns.
And you would assume that criminals are typically men.
But there's something they neglect.
In a mass shooting situation, the person who typically stops the mass shooting is also a man with a gun.
Whether it's a police officer or whether it is a civilian, as in this case, and it is much more likely that an NRA member is going to stop a mass shooting than that an NRA member is going to perpetrate a mass shooting, despite what the left would have you say.
Well the media, of course, don't care about any of this.
The media don't want to hear any of this.
The media simply want to talk gun control.
And if you don't believe in media bias, let me show you this clip of President Trump in South Korea.
So he's in South Korea now, and he was asked by an NBC News reporter, I guess he's still in Japan, he's heading South Korea today, but he's asked by an NBC News reporter about the situation in Texas.
Specifically, she asks whether he would apply his extreme vetting standards to gun control.
And here is Trump's response, which is correct.
I guess he was in South Korea after all.
You've talked about wanting to put extreme vetting on people trying to come into the United States.
But I wonder if you would consider extreme vetting for people trying to buy a gun.
Well, you know, you're bringing up a situation that probably shouldn't be discussed too much right now.
But it's OK if you feel that that's an appropriate question, even though we're the heart of South Korea.
If you did what you're suggesting, there would have been no difference three days ago, and you might not have had that very brave person who happened to have a gun or a rifle in his truck go out and shoot him and hit him and neutralize him.
And I can only say this, if he didn't have a gun, instead of having 26 dead, he would have had hundreds more dead.
And are you considering any kind of gun control policy going forward?
Can you look at the city with the strongest gun laws in our nation is Chicago.
And Chicago is a disaster.
If this man didn't have a gun or a rifle, You'd be talking about a much worse situation in the great state of Texas.
Okay, Trump is of course right, and this is why so many people on the right like Trump, is because, you know, at least Trump is and Hillary actually applies here.
Because if you imagine Hillary Clinton in this situation, she's pushing for widespread gun confiscations in all likelihood.
She's praised Australia's gun buyback program and confiscation program.
She's praised Canada's gun laws.
Hillary Clinton would be saying something very, very different.
And then Donald Trump is saying right here, and what Trump is saying is basically correct.
But the point I want to make is this NBC News reporter.
I mean, if you look at her face throughout this particular question, the scorn she has not only for President Trump, but for people who are gun owners, for gun ownership, for the right to keep and bear arms, which the founders thought was so valuable, it is emanating from her.
The difference between owning a gun and entering the country is I have a right to own a gun to protect my life and my family's life.
I do not have a right to become a citizen of the United States.
Extreme vetting is necessary for people coming into the country because they don't have a right to enter the United States because we have to protect ourselves.
That same decision to protect ourselves undergirds our ability to own a gun and use a gun in our own self-defense.
Okay, it is the exact same reason.
The reason you have extreme vetting with regard to people entering the country is the reason why you don't have extreme vetting for American citizens who have not committed a crime and want to own a gun to protect themselves.
That doesn't mean no vetting.
Of course no one wants to have criminals with guns.
Of course no one wants to have mentally ill people with guns.
And Ted Cruz makes a really good point here.
Ted Cruz is specifically asked about people who are violating the law by owning guns, and here's what Senator Cruz has to say.
This should have been stopped beforehand.
Under federal law, it was illegal for this individual to purchase a firearm.
He had a conviction for a crime that's punishable by more than a year in prison, and he had a conviction for multiple domestic violence crimes.
Both of those, it's already ineligible.
But, several things happened.
Number one, the Air Force, the Obama administration, didn't report those convictions to the NCIS database.
That's an endemic problem.
It's a problem with the federal government.
It's a problem with the states.
And so, when he went in to buy the guns, they ran the background check.
And they didn't find it because it wasn't in the database.
Okay, and Cruz here is exactly right, of course.
Now, a lot of people have been saying, well, you know, if we just had gun confiscations like Australia, then the number of mass shootings would go down.
The problem is this.
Mass shootings are so statistically uncommon.
I'm not saying they're uncommon in the sense, like, colloquially, they never happen.
But they're statistically uncommon as compared to other types of murder, and so there is no good comp in terms of looking at a system where, okay, there's a massive gun confiscation and the number of mass shootings went down.
It may have gone down from three to zero.
It wasn't like Australia had mass shootings every five minutes.
Australia had very few mass shootings, and now they have no mass shootings.
But, their murder rate actually declined at a lower rate than the U.S.
murder rate over the same period since their gun confiscation.
The U.S.' 's murder rate declined faster, even though more people were purchasing guns, not fewer people.
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Okay, so the media response on this, of course, has been egregious.
As I have mentioned, you saw the NBC response.
Don Lemon, whose show I enjoy appearing on, he said that we should stop with the thoughts and prayers.
No more thoughts and prayers.
And this transitions us into another topic about thought and prayer that I want to discuss in just a second.
Here's Lemon on thoughts and prayers.
Thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers.
Don't get me wrong.
Prayers are important.
They really are.
But can we just be honest for a moment?
And this isn't about religion.
It's not about politics.
Democrats do it too.
President Obama has responded similarly in other shootings.
And it's not about religion.
As I said, I'm not anti-thoughts and prayers by any means.
I grew up in a very, the very religious Deep South.
A Baptist who went to a Catholic school where we prayed at least four times a day, plus mass on Fridays and church on Sundays, sometimes twice.
So spare me the anti-religion tweets.
You can keep them.
I won't even read them.
I don't care.
These God-fearing Christians were in church.
They were already praying.
Thoughts and prayers did not stop an oversight from the justice system which enabled a guy who attacked his stepson and assaulted his wife from getting a gun.
Thoughts and prayers didn't stop a troubled person from buying assault-grade weapons that took the lives of 26 people in an instant.
Okay, so we can stop it there.
Again, this is not what thoughts and prayers are designed to do.
Prayer is not always designed to get you what you want.
If people prayed and they got what they want, God would be a gumball machine.
That's not what religious people believe.
I assume that Don prays.
I mean, he says he does, but I'm not sure what he Expect from God.
Again, the problem of the Odyssey has been one that religion has taken up time and time again.
When it comes to human evil, the idea here is that human beings have free will and we can pray that those human beings don't use that free will in the worst possible ways.
We can pray that God protects us, but God sometimes says no.
I have a difficult time praying.
I pray three times a day.
one of the tragedies of human life is we don't understand God's plan.
But let me talk for a minute about what prayer actually does.
So I'm going to be completely sincere here.
I have a difficult time praying.
I pray three times a day.
It's not something that I particularly enjoy doing because in Judaism, prayer can be relatively formulaic.
When I say relatively, I mean very formulaic.
You say the same prayer three times a day.
The idea is that it's supposed to be almost like a mantra.
It's supposed to provide you a leaping off point to actually think about God and think about your relationship with Him.
But prayer can be very difficult unless you're actually just sitting there concentrating on what the purpose of prayer is.
So, I've really done a lot of thinking myself, for myself, about what I think prayer does, particularly prayer in the aftermath of tragedy.
I think that prayer does really three things.
I think prayer does three things.
First, It reminds us that while it is our job to strive to prevent evil from succeeding each day, God's plan is not ours, right?
Half of prayer is about recognizing that your plan is not God's.
You are not God, right?
The point of prayer is for you to say to God, I understand that you are the creator of the universe and you are beyond my logic.
I don't understand.
I mean, the ineffability of God is a sacred notion in virtually all major religions.
The idea that you are not in control of the universe and The suggestion that you can prevent all bad things from happening with prayer, that's not what prayer is for.
That's why religious people get upset when they hear things like what Don Lemon is saying, because he's misconstruing what prayer is for.
No one who believes in prayer believes that prayer is going to prevent a Justice Department oversight.
No one believes that that's what prayer is designed to do.
One of the things prayer is designed to do is remind us not to be utopian, not to believe that we can stop every tragedy from happening, not to believe that there's any power in the universe that is capable of implementing Our will, specifically, and making it the rule for everyone.
Prayer is designed to do the reverse.
It's designed to remind us not to be utopians in what Karl Popper would call a sort of utopian negative model that would help us run roughshod over the rights of other people.
Because, remember, half of what Don Lemon is saying here about we need to change the law, every law is an imposition on somebody.
So whose rights are you imposing on?
Prayer reminds us that you don't actually get to do that.
All the time, right?
That utopia is not something that you can aim for while violating the rights of others because God in the end is the actual judge, right?
When somebody dies, Jews say, Baruch Dayan Emet, right?
Baruch Dayan Emet.
So that's what Jews say.
What that means is blessed is the true judge, meaning that I don't get to make the call as to whether something that just happened is according to God's plan.
Only God can make that call and I may not understand it and I can mourn it.
I mean, we cry at funerals.
We're not crying because we question God's justice.
We're crying because it's sad, right?
We may not understand.
In the same way that children cry when their parents are trying to implement justice and the kids don't understand.
We don't understand.
There's no way for us to understand.
That's what faith is.
Okay, prayer also helps us see the value in other human beings and convey that we understand that value to other human beings.
You know, we're atheists, we're irreligious people, see prayer as nothing but empty verbiage.
It doesn't accomplish anything.
How many people have been bettered by communities that pray?
Right?
Prayer takes place in communal settings, not just individual prayer.
I think that individual prayer is valuable, but Judaism believes, and I believe so does Christianity, that communal prayer is more valuable than individual prayer.
That individual prayer is useful, but you're supposed to get together in a community.
Because the idea is that that community draws other people in.
How many bad people, how many would-be shooters, have been converted by going to places like churches and praying with others?
A lot.
How many evil people have been drawn into the nexus of a community that prays and sees the value of other individuals before God?
That has prevented bad action.
You never see it.
You never see it because you only see the bad stuff.
Remember with the Charleston, South Carolina shooter?
There was a report that came out shortly afterward, I'll have to look it up, where this piece of garbage white supremacist who murdered a bunch of people in the church, he said he had trouble pulling the trigger because when he went in there, there were all these black people who were really nice to him and were praying with him.
He was evil enough that he was able to overcome that drop.
There are a lot of people who aren't.
There are a lot of people who are turned away from dark paths by communities that pray together and value one another.
Prayer is valuable in a communal setting.
But neither of these things has to do with what the left believes.
The left believes the only thing that is actually impactful in the world is not Our communities reaching out to each other, those soft kind of touches, that stuff doesn't work.
They don't believe that us accepting a godly justice is a worthwhile thing.
We should fight against that.
We should be like Ahab, fighting against God, trying to stab through the pasteboard mask of Moby Dick.
That's what we should be doing every day.
And there's something to the notion of struggling with God.
I mean, Judaism believes that, you know, that struggle is ongoing.
But the idea in the end is that God is right and you're wrong, right?
But in any case, that's not an excuse for inaction when action is called for.
But here is the problem, right?
Prayer, obviously, is supposed to motivate you to go out and do better things.
It's supposed to motivate you to do better.
It's supposed to be fuel in your gas tank.
But the left assumes that if I disagree with the direction you're steering the car, I don't have fuel in the gas tank.
That prayer didn't put fuel in my gas tank.
Prayer was useless because I don't agree that you ought to be aiming the car at gun control.
Well, I don't believe you should be aiming the car at gun control because I don't think that the additional laws that you've been proposing are useful.
By the way, I have said when I think an additional law might be useful or at least called for after Las Vegas.
I said that I would not vote against a law that prevented the sale of bump stocks.
So it's not like I'm against ever- I'm in favor of better enforcement against people who have been mentally ill and have been in mental hospitals owning weapons.
Cruz pointed out, and he's right, that there were like 40,000 people who illegally owned guns in the United States and 44 of them were prosecuted.
There was 40,000 people who tried to illegally buy guns and Obama prosecuted 40 of them.
And we need to implement the laws that we already have on the books.
We don't need new laws.
But that doesn't mean that my prayers are ineffective.
It means that I'm not praying for the same thing that you are, or the action to which I have devoted myself is not the action you choose.
But your suggestion that my prayer is not accepted by you, I'm not praying to you and I don't care what you think of my prayer.
When I pray, I'm talking to God, not to you, because you're not God and neither is government.
You know, this brings up a sort of broader conversation about the role of religion in public life.
I want to get to that in just one second because there's a big controversy that's now broken out.
Over a Hillsong pastor and abortion.
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Okay, so this brings up a broader critique of the role of religions.
So it's really funny.
The left says prayers are good, but only if they are directed in our direction.
Now, what people who are conservative believe, conservative religious people, is that the direction for the prayer is basically toward God, which means that you actually have to look at what God's agenda is in particular circumstances.
God is not just something out there that is non-discoverable.
The Bible is pretty clear about this.
In Deuteronomy, Moses specifically says, It is not in heaven where you can't understand it.
It's down here.
God, the whole purpose of having a revelation is that you understand things.
Now, not everyone has to believe in revelation.
You don't have to believe in revelation, right?
You can be skeptical of revelation.
But if you say you believe in revelation, at the very least you should be adherent to the revelation.
And if you say you're a Bible-believing person, you should at least believe in the Bible.
In the same way that if you believe in global warming, you should at least believe in global warming.
Whatever you're going to believe in, believe in it.
Otherwise, you're a liar.
Well, Hillsong, there's a megachurch pastor.
I don't know Hillsong particularly well, but there's a guy named Carl Lentz, apparently, who's quite popular and dresses in very odd fashion.
And he was on The View wearing glasses that he apparently got from a Forever 21.
And a medallion that I don't know what it represents, but he looks kind of like Marky Mark from 1991.
In any case, Carl Lentz is a very popular pastor.
Maybe he's great, I don't know.
But what he said here was not great, right, on The View.
So he's on The View, and he is asked about abortion, saying abortion is sinful.
And here is his answer.
This is where religion does fail.
Religion doesn't fail just because you don't support gun control.
Religion does fail if your Bible says abortion is bad, and then you give this answer.
And it makes our church special.
So it's not a sin in your church to have an abortion?
That's the kind of conversation we would have.
Finding out your story, where you're from, what you believe.
Work through it.
Yeah, I mean, God's the judge.
People have to live to their own convictions.
And I think if I have to tell you...
That's such a broad question.
To me, I'm going higher.
I want to sit with somebody and say, where do you believe?
So it's not an open and shut case with you.
Some people would say it is.
I think, to me, I'm trying to teach people who Jesus is first, find out their story.
Before I start picking and choosing what I think is sin in your life, I'd like to know your name.
Nonsense.
Nonsense.
Sin is still sin.
That doesn't mean that you have to be mean to people who have sinned.
The whole purpose of talking to people is to find out their story.
But we have to start from a certain basic premise.
Yes, abortion is a sin.
Of course abortion is a sin.
And soft-pedaling it for the left is not going to win you adherents or converts.
Soft-pedaling bad, you know, evil is not going to... Soft-pedaling sin is not going to draw more people to you.
It's going to alienate more people from religion because that's what gets people to believe in this I'm spiritual but not religious nonsense.
Okay, whoop-dee-doo, you believe in the force.
Congratulations.
I mean, can you move objects with your mind?
I don't really care if you're spiritual but not religious.
The question is what standards you uphold.
One of the purposes of religion is to uphold a higher standard, because God has demands of you, not just you making demands of God.
This guy got a lot of flack for it, as well he should.
Alicia Krauss on Daily Wire went after him.
She's invited him to come into the Daily Wire offices.
I'm sure we would all like to chat with him and find out whether he actually believes abortion is a sin or not.
Okay.
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Okay, so I'm going to go directly to things I like and things I hate today, I think.
So, things I like.
There is a book that I read, very quick read, by a guy named Alan Jacobs.
It's a bestseller now called How to Think.
And it is sort of a short-form review, essentially, of ways that we are biased and how best to conquer those biases.
I love reading these kinds of books, right?
I've recommended Daniel Kahneman's book before.
I've recommended the book Flow and the book Drive.
I've recommended a lot of books about how it is that we have cognitive biases, and this book is about that, but it's also about why we shouldn't despair of our ability to overcome these challenges to bias.
The book, again, is How to Think by Alan Jacobs.
It's like 150 pages, very slim, very easy to read, very conversational.
Go ahead and check it out.
It's a fun read.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, just for fun today, John Podhortz and I like to go back and forth on movies.
John is the editor over at Commentary Magazine.
And so, not related to that, I decided that I was going to start a hashtag called Accurate Movie Summaries.
Kind of taking a lead from the famous accurate movie summary about The Wizard of Oz, which is three friends gather to kill witch, then band together to kill again.
Or, Young Girl Kills Witch, then bands together with three friends to kill again, which is the summary of Wizard of Oz.
So, the hashtag, accurate movie summaries, was trending on Twitter, and I do love some of these, so I have to read you some of them.
Noseless guy has a unhealthy obsession with a teenage boy.
That would be Harry Potter.
Young boy who sees ghost talks to a ghost.
Fair.
That's the entire summary of the Sixth Sense.
For those who have seen Life, skip the next 15 seconds, or who have not seen it because it's a spoiler.
A space octopus kills some astronauts and all of humanity, but more importantly, the astronauts.
This one I love.
This is Ratatouille.
Rodent cooks dinner.
Critics wowed.
Fair.
This one I did about It's a Wonderful Life.
Man bankrupts bank in subprime mortgage scheme, is bailed out by well-meaning but economically ignorant friends.
Cheating woman, sleeps with homeless guy on ship, ends up losing jewelry.
That's Titanic.
Old man grows beard, convinces little girl he's Santa Claus, which is Miracle on 34th Street.
This one is Mrs. Doubtfire, it's pretty great.
Cross-dressing unemployed man disguises himself to stalk his estranged family.
Family eventually takes him back in.
This one I think is my favorite.
See if you can guess the movie.
Man gets stuck on an island after plane crash.
Wife moves on with another man.
Man moves on with volleyball.
Cast away.
And then, of course, this one.
Self-righteous juror cudgels more sober-minded colleagues into releasing a patricidal murderer.
That, of course, is twelve angry men.
I also... There are a bunch of them.
This one is pretty great.
You've heard this one before, I'm sure.
Teenager destroys military installation at the behest of an elderly religious zealot with the aid of a wanted criminal, killing millions of active military service members.
Star Wars.
That is indeed.
I will say I like this one too.
This one is a little harder.
A professor prevents Hitler from opening a historic Jewish artifact that would have killed Hitler and ended World War II.
That's Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Because think about it for a second, guys.
Think about it.
If he just lets Hitler get the actual Lost Ark, and Hitler opens that sucker, then Hitler dies at the end of Indiana Jones.
The whole thing is a giant misdirect, right?
He's chasing the Ark, chasing the Ark, chasing the Ark, and then it turns out the Ark is his friend.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So, there are a lot of things that are out there to hate today, but I choose John Kerry.
John Kerry, John Kerry!
Former Secretary of State, and he says that it's Donald Trump's fault that North Korea is seeking a nuclear weapon.
I was just out water sporting in my yacht, John Kerry.
Go.
I think what the president needs to do is make sure that he's not feeding into North Korea's fear of regime change or of a unilateral attack or otherwise.
And I think the rhetoric to date has, frankly, stepped over the line with respect to the messages that are being sent.
It's given North Korea a reason to say, hey, we need a bomb, because if we don't have a bomb, we're going to, you know, Not be able to protect ourselves, and they'll come after us.
Okay, so, no.
Okay, the idea that you're mean to North Korea, and so that's why they're developing a bomb.
They started developing the bomb under the auspices of the Clinton administration, which signed a North Korean framework in 1994 and said the problem was ended.
They continue it through the Bush administration.
They accelerate it under the Obama administration.
Say, wouldn't it have been nice if there had been a Secretary of State who could have done something about that?
I'm just trying to think of a secret— Oh, wait.
He was Secretary of State, wasn't he?
My bad.
Also, I do have—you know, I'm going to be mean to John Kerry now, but he deserves it after slandering our troops in Vietnam and spending his entire career being awful at everything.
The man's face is at a stage of full structural collapse.
It's like a mudslide in the Hollywood Hills at this point.
At a certain point, you do too much Botox, and you start to look like Lurch.
I mean, pretty amazing.
Okay.
In any case, deconstructing the culture, we'll do for five seconds here.
First, I do want to mention that there's a new report from the New Yorker about Harvey Weinstein and how he was attempting to cover up his sexual assault and sexual harassment.
Ronan Farrow released a blockbuster expose.
Multiple women have accused him, Weinstein, of rape.
And now, apparently, Weinstein had these extensive efforts to silence people.
He hired private investigators and ex-spies to suppress allegations.
They hired Kroll, one of the world's largest corporate intel companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run by former officers of Mossad, and they used false identities to meet with Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her.
He directed efforts to kill accusation stories from the New York Times and New York Magazine, and he used his lawyer, David Boies, to lead his effort to prevent the New York Times from doing any of these reports.
David Boies, as you remember, was an attorney who represented Gore in the Bush-Gore presidential election saga.
He had agents posing as advocates for women.
He had front companies to cover his operations.
He hired investigative journalists to interview and collect information from the accusers.
So he's actually hiring the chief content officer from the National Enquirer.
This is pretty horrific stuff.
And it demonstrates, again, how Hollywood is able to manipulate the news from behind the scenes and even manipulate some D.C. players.
Okay, so should we save the rest of deconstructing the culture for next week?
Are we out of time?
We're out of time, so we'll have to save some Deconstructing Culture for next week.
I was going to do Post Malone, but we'll have to save that for next week.
And remind me, and we'll do it next week as well.
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest news.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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