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Nov. 9, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:49
Are We All Members Of Cults? | Ep. 414
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On the one-year anniversary of President Trump's election, the left loses its mind even more than usual.
The Republicans are still struggling to pass tax cuts, and I want to talk about why bad things happen to good people.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
So what prompted me to think why bad things happen to people is I'm sick as a dog and I'm a good person.
Why, God, why?
But really, I am kind of sick, so bear with me today, even though my voice is lower and more manly than usual.
I appreciate you sticking with me.
So, before we jump into the leftists going absolutely insane yesterday on the one-year anniversary of President Trump winning the presidency, First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Wink.
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Okay, so.
I could not help but laugh, despite my personal discomfort.
I could not help but laugh yesterday, hysterically, as a bunch of people on the left went out into the streets of New York and decided to aimlessly scream at the sky.
No, I am not kidding.
It was the one-year anniversary of President Trump winning.
If you want to see my reaction to President Trump winning, all you have to do is go to YouTube and Google Shapiro laughing for two minutes, because that's exactly what happened.
We covered it on election night.
And Bill Little, a friend of ours, he said, President Trump, and it struck me for just a moment how ridiculous and hilarious that is and also that Hillary had lost.
And I just started laughing and I couldn't stop laughing for a fully two minutes.
It's pretty great.
But that is not how everyone reacted.
A bunch of folks on the left were heartbroken.
They're still heartbroken and they've lost their minds.
So yesterday in New York City, people gathered to scream at the sky.
Okay, now, these are probably the same people who say thoughts and prayers are useless, right?
Same people who say, you shouldn't say thoughts and prayers when something bad happens.
Now they're gathering to scream at a sky where there is no God, presumably.
And I could not help it, but laugh hysterically at this.
That lady trying out for the Met Opera.
But I do love it.
You're going to get together and scream at the sky.
Yeah, that's going to win.
That's going to make you guys win.
Now, it is true that the anger of the left is going to drive them to the polls more often.
I mean, that's sort of what you saw in Virginia.
But if they think that this is an attractive feature, that they're going to win elections because they scream at the sky, then I think not.
But for the left...
They believe that their anger is its own justification.
So there are a couple of columns that I want to talk about today that demonstrate just how far gone the left is when it comes to policy and politics.
Now, it is possible that the Republicans can be bad enough at this to blow whatever advantages they have.
It seems like that's what they're in the business of doing.
We'll talk about what they're doing with their tax plan in just a second.
And we'll also talk about President Trump in just a second and the divide inside the conservative movement.
But on the left, they've completely lost their minds.
And so they feel that the only path back to power is twofold.
One, they have to be as angry as possible.
And two, they have to re-embrace identity politics.
These are precisely the things that brought them Trump.
It is their anger and their identity politics that caused the backlash that brought President Trump.
So maybe there's a backlash to the backlash.
That's quite possible, right?
That there was a backlash to the left's identity, politics, and rage, and that was brought about in the form of the Tea Party, and President Trump was the culmination of that.
It is also possible that there's a backlash to that backlash that's building right now.
Whatever it is, it ain't good for the country.
Two columns in particular I want to talk about today, both from the horrific New York Times.
So the New York Times, as Andrew Klaven calls it, a former newspaper, their op-ed page is filled with joy the last 48 hours.
My personal favorite column is from a woman named Lindy West, who writes on feminism and popular culture, which already makes you want to run through a wall so hard that it leaves a U-shaped hole in the wall, like a cartoon.
But here is what she says in the pages of the New York Times, and it's called Brave Enough to be Angry.
Really, this is what it's called.
Brave enough to be angry, which is like... I didn't realize it takes bravery to be pissed.
I really didn't realize this.
I like when you just take two emotions.
How about angry enough to be brave?
How about sad enough to be happy?
Such nonsense.
In any case, here's what the column says, and it's pretty amazing.
It says...
Last month, an Access Hollywood correspondent asked the actress Uma Thurman to comment on abusive power in Hollywood, presumably in light of the sexual assault allegations against the producer Harvey Weinstein.
Speaking slowly and deliberately through gritted teeth, Thurman responded, quote, I don't have a tidy soundbite for you because I've learned I am not a child.
And I've learned that when I've spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself.
So I've been waiting to feel less angry.
When I'm ready, I'll say what I have to say.
Thurman is seething like we all have been seething in our various states of breaking open or, as Thurman chooses, waiting.
We are seething in how long we've been ignored.
Seething for the ones who were punished long ago for telling the truth.
Seething for being told all our lives we have no right to seethe.
Has this woman ever met a woman?
Has she met, like, a girl?
Like, girls get angry.
My wife gets mad.
My mom gets mad.
My sisters get mad.
My three-year-old daughter definitely gets mad.
I was unaware that women are not allowed to be angry.
Women are definitely not allowed to be angry.
It doesn't mean that they're attractive when they're angry, because men aren't attractive when they're angry either.
In fact, people generally are not particularly attractive when they're angry, but... You're seething at how long you've been ignored?
Lady, you're writing in the pages of the New York Times!
Being ignored?
Okay.
So she continues along these lines.
God, the writing is so bad.
I don't know who edits over at the New York Times.
the tempestuous depths of hashtag MeToo.
God, the writing is so bad.
I don't know who edits over at the New York Times.
They should be fired immediately.
But a profound understanding of the ways that female anger is received and weaponized against women.
And now she's gonna go explain all the ways that women's anger is not taken seriously.
But does she cite sexual assault or rape?
Like women who have claimed they were raped or sexually assaulted and are angry about it and people told them to sit down and shut up?
No, she doesn't cite any of that because that's never happened.
Okay, no one says to women who say they were raped, why are you so mad?
You mad, bro?
No one says that to a woman who was raped.
You can't name anyone who says that to a woman who was raped.
So, what are the examples of female anger we've been ignoring?
Get ready for this.
From Lindy West.
Again, this is just indicative of the left's belief that anger is its own justification.
Quote, in the past few months alone, we've seen Carmen Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan in Puerto Rico, pilloried by the far right for criticizing Donald Trump's anemic response to Hurricane Maria.
We are dying here, Cruz told the news media.
I am mad as hell.
And the Florida congresswoman, Frederica Wilson, deluged with abuse after she characterized Trump's call to a military widow, Maisha Johnson, as insensitive, as an insult.
Both Cruz and Wilson were directly targeted by the president on Twitter, then incessantly memed and regurgitated and redigested and re-memed by his obedient online horde.
It's like the Huns out there.
Okay, first of all, the cases she just cited are not cases of sexual assault or abuse.
It's a very good thing.
In one, the mayor of San Juan went out there and had shirts printed that said, we are dying.
So she could go on national television and rip into Trump.
No one would have paid attention to her otherwise.
And Frederica Wilson went out there and talked out of school about a conversation that really was between a military widow and the president of the United States.
And apparently, you know, may have misinterpreted Trump's comments.
So all of this is, we were saying, why are these women angry?
Not because they were raped or sexually abused, but because they were getting political.
We were more angry at what they were doing than their anger.
But the examples continue.
She gives the example of Julie Briskman, who's a government contractor who supposedly lost her job after a photo of her flipping off the presidential motorcade went viral.
She wasn't fired because she flipped off the motorcade.
She was fired because she made that her profile photo on Facebook and Twitter and works for a government contractor.
That's why she was fired.
And then here are some other examples of women who have been disrespected and their anger ignored.
This is just female identity politics at its best.
That if women are angry, we don't have to ask why they're angry, or if the anger is justified, we just have to get out of their way and honor their anger.
I don't honor anyone's anger.
Really, I don't think anger is something to be honored.
Not to quote Clavin too much today, but Clavin used a phrase I really like, he says, anger is the devil's cocaine, and I think that's pretty much correct.
Okay, here's what it actually, so here are the other examples of female anger that we have been ignoring.
Solange.
Yes, really.
Solange Knowles.
Okay, we weren't ignoring her anger.
She was beating the crap out of Jay-Z in an elevator.
Right?
I mean, that's what was happening there.
Britney Spears.
I don't recall when we were angry at her anger.
I just remember her getting, like, wildly out of control and attempting to beat on a paparazzi.
Shania O'Connor.
The Dixie Chicks.
Rosie O'Donnell.
What does any of this have to do with sexual assault or us disrespecting their anger?
Okay, and then it says, we don't even have to be angry to be called angry.
Accusations of being an angry black woman chased Michelle Obama throughout her tenure at the White House.
Well, I mean, to be fair, in 2008, she did say that she was not proud of the country until it nominated her husband.
That seems kind of angry to me.
And if you watched any of her speeches in 2008, they were kind of angry.
Later, she became kind of a model first lady.
But at the beginning, she had a very different persona.
It was very much like Hillary Clinton in her early years in the White House, and then shifting in her later years to be sort of more soft and cuddly.
And then she finishes, "The decades-long smearing of Hillary Clinton as an unhinged shrew culminated one year ago when, despite maintaining a preternatural calm throughout the most brutal campaign in living memory, she lost the election to masculinity's apoplectic id." Okay, so, the smearing of Hillary Clinton as an unhinged shrew is not really a smearing, she's an unhinged shrew.
There have been actual reports of Hillary Clinton throwing lamps at her husband.
Hillary Clinton apparently was not nice to Secret Service members.
Hillary Clinton went out and complained about a vast right-wing conspiracy when her husband committed perjury while sexually harassing the help.
Hillary Clinton, in this campaign, there's tape of her shouting into camera, why am I not up by 50 points?
We all remember when she did a speech calling half the population deplorables.
Hillary Clinton is not a model of preternatural calm.
You have to be crazy to think this.
And then she says, this is my favorite line, Right, because you're a disapproving scold.
I mean, like, isn't that the definition?
You're scolding me and you're disapproving.
But what's the alternative?
To approve?
I do not approve.
Right, because you're disapproving scold.
I mean, like, isn't that the definition?
You're scolding me and you're disapproving.
Like, what am I missing here?
And then she says, "Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all the subtler invisible cuts that undermine us daily, we are not even allowed to be angry about it.
Close your eyes and think of America." It's like America raping you, right?
I'm going to explain a little more on how stupid this is.
This is one of the worst columns I've ever read in the New York Times.
And then it was rivaled this morning by one from our good friend, I believe it's Charles Blow, writing this.
The aptly named Charles Blow, writing at the New York Times.
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Okay, so Lindy West, again, this is endemic to the feminist left, this belief that anger is the driving force and they have a reason to be angry.
It's just a little bit of a reason to She says that women are expected to weather sexual violence.
Who expects women to weather sexual violence?
Like really, who is it that says, yeah, women are getting raped, big deal.
The only person I can think of is somebody like maybe Gay Talese, the columnist who came out in defense of Kevin Spacey.
But who is saying that intimate partner violence is okay?
Or workplace discrimination?
The expectation of free domestic labor, I don't even know what that means.
Like, I expect my mother, I expect my wife to actually help with the chores.
Um, I help with the chores too.
Like, this is part of being an adult.
Like, I understand Lindy West doesn't want to wash her underwear, but tough.
It's just insane.
And finally, she says, we are expected to agree and we comply with the paternal admonition that it is irresponsible and hyper emotional to request one female president after 241 years of male ones.
Because that would be tokenism, anti-democratic and dangerous, as though generations of white male politicians haven't proven themselves utterly disinterested in caring for the needs of communities to which they do not belong.
Okay, so now she's saying that we're a sexist if we don't think that you should elect a woman based on her sex, which is sexist, by the way.
And then she says, No.
We just think Hillary was a crappy candidate.
I was perfectly willing to vote for, you know, Elizabeth Dole.
And I'd be perfectly willing to vote for Nikki Haley.
I'd be perfectly willing to vote for a bevy of women.
the ground that even a concerted, sincere, large-scale search for one would be a long shot and any resulting candidate a compromise.
No, we just think Hillary was a crappy candidate.
I was perfectly willing to vote for, you know, Elizabeth Dole, and I'd be perfectly willing to vote for Nikki Haley.
I'd be perfectly willing to vote for a bevy of women, but not Hillary Clinton.
So I love this.
This is the very end of her column.
She says, Well, actually, your column is basically teaching the world that feminists are ugly and ridiculous.
Well, actually, your column is basically teaching the world that feminists are ugly and ridiculous.
And she said, I did not want to be ugly and ridiculous.
Fail.
I wanted to be cool and desired by men, even as a teenager.
By the way, I'm not speaking physical ugliness.
I'm talking about ugly attitude.
I wanted to be cool and desired by men, because even as a teenager, I knew implicitly that pandering for male approval was a woman's most effective currency.
It was my best shot at success, or at least safety.
And I wasn't sophisticated enough to see that success and safety bestowed conditionally aren't success and safety at all.
What she's saying here is that I should be as much of a turd as I possibly want to be, and everyone should make way for me.
Well, maybe the reason that you're off-putting is because you're off-putting.
Is that possible?
Is it possible the reason that you haven't been as successful as you want to be is not because of sexism, it's because you're a nasty shrew?
Okay, because this column reads like a nasty shrew.
Okay, you call yourself a disapproving scold, that's what this column is.
You imply that all white men are out to harm women.
You imply that all conservatives don't care about women.
You imply that we are using the superstructure of power in order to keep you down.
I don't care about keeping Lindy West down, I don't even know who Lindy West is.
I don't spend my time thinking about Lindy West except when she writes in the pages of the New York Times and accuses people like me of being sexist for no reason, and then suggests I want to tamp down her anger.
Listen, Lindy.
Be as angry as you want to be.
I hope you're angrier.
I hope you continue to grow angrier, because the angrier you are, and the louder you yell, the more off-putting you are, and the more people see your agenda for what it is, which is baseless rage.
You're living in the freest country in the history of the world for women.
By far.
And you're sitting here complaining that you're being somehow downtrodden by men in the pages of the New York Times.
She says, it took me two decades to become brave enough to be angry.
Feminism is the collective manifestation of female anger.
Well, if that's what it is, no wonder so many people are rejecting it.
Because any movement that is a culmination of collective anger is not going to be a good movement.
And by the way, I've said that about movements both left and right.
I think that's what the alt-right is based on, is based on an unrooted, unevidenced anger.
Okay, so that is one perspective that the left is taking a year after Trump.
They're doubling down on the anger.
But that's not the only way they're doubling down.
So, Charles Blow, as I say, has a piece at the New York Times in which he says it's very important for the left to re-embrace identity politics.
He's very happy about what happened in Virginia.
He's suggesting that what happened in Virginia is a resuscitation of the Obama coalition.
Now, this is factually not true.
What happened in Virginia is a lot of college-educated white people went out and voted against Donald Trump.
In Northern Virginia, particularly.
Ed Gillespie actually won more of the black vote in Virginia than Donald Trump won.
Ed Gillespie won less of the college-educated white vote in Virginia than Donald Trump won.
Okay, so the fact is that when Charles Blow says that identity politics is the identity politics coalition of the left, you know, blacks and Hispanics and gays and young people, that this coalition is what's going to drive the left to victory, he's ignoring the fact that's not actually what drove them to victory in Virginia.
Widespread disapproval for the Republican Party and Trump drove them to victory in Virginia.
But here's what Blow has to say, he says, Tuesday night's election results were a major shot in the arm for the anti-Donald Trump resistance and a major slap in the face for all the Democrats who caterwalled last November about how the party had focused too much on courting women and minorities and ignored angry white men.
Okay, well, Democrats weren't just caterwalling last November about that.
They should have been caterwalling for years.
Obama lost the House, he lost the Senate, he lost the governor's houses, he lost state legislatures across the country.
And he did that on the basis of identity politics.
The reason that they won in Virginia was not because of identity politics.
The reason they won in Virginia was actually because there was a lot of resistance to Trump personally that crossed a lot of these boundaries.
But according to Blow, it's because of identity politics.
So he says, objecting to identity politics is just a guise for objecting to politics for and about people who are not white.
So when I say I don't like identity politics of white people or non-white people, when I say that we shouldn't have the politics of solidarity based on race, apparently I'm still standing up for white people.
This is basically the argument you hear very frequently on college campuses with regards to so-called white privilege.
Right?
That if you refuse to acknowledge white privilege, and you say instead people should be judged as individuals, this is you reinforcing white privilege after all.
Because the standards of society are standards that benefit white people.
So Blow is saying the same thing.
He's saying if you say no identity politics, what you're really saying is only identity politics for white people.
That's asinine, but here's what he says.
He says, he's quoting feminist author Lori Penny in Salon, which is always a good hint something crappy is about to happen.
happen.
All politics are identity politics, especially the politics of the far right.
They're about this idea of white identity, this idea of male identity that feels so under attack at the moment.
When people attack identity politics, they're attacking politics that prioritizes or even includes women, people of color, queer people.
No, that's not right.
When I attack identity politics, I'm suggesting that there are ideas that ought to unite us beyond the boundaries of our group identity.
And that holds true for white people and black people.
That holds true for Hispanic people and Jewish people.
I think ethnic identity is meaningless.
But Charles Blow thinks that if I say that, that's just me upholding white privilege, and so what we really need to do if you're Democrats is double down on the intersectionality politics.
He says, He's such a terrible writer.
about how we must reject identity politics left a lasting bad taste in my mouth.
He's such a terrible writer.
I will confess that I'm still smarting over the implication of those conversations, in part because as a black man in America, I have seen the corpse flower that can grow from that seed.
So if you reject identity politics, apparently you won't hurt black people.
He says, "I'm always reminded of when the Republican Party False statement number one, Black people had started to vote for Democrats in large numbers by the 1930s because of FDR.
racist who hated black people.
It was called the Southern Strategy and it wasn't that long ago.
And black people who have never forgotten that betrayal now vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
There are about seven false statements in this particular paragraph.
False statement number one, black people had started to vote for Democrats in large numbers by the 1930s because of FDR.
Number two, the idea that the Republicans pursued the so-called Southern Strategy and this is what won them the South is just not true.
The Republican Party only dominated the South in the 1990s.
It remained all Democratic areas, in Congress particularly, throughout the 70s, 60s, and 80s.
It was only in the 90s that Republicans started to make inroads.
In other words, young people in the South moved Republican because industry had come into the South, not because of race issues.
Not because of race issues.
If race issues played a role, it was a pretty minor one.
I have a full thing debunking this.
Here's a full video I've done debunking this that we're going to be releasing pretty soon about the so-called Southern Strategy.
Also worth noting, Democrats were pandering along racial lines at the time.
George Wallace in 1968 was running as a Democrat, right?
And then he moved independent.
It was Democrats who were standing in the doorways of schools to prevent integration.
It was not Republicans doing that.
And the idea that in the 70s the party switched is just not true either.
Because if that were true, you would expect to see all these Democratic politicians in the South turn Republican.
None of them did except Strom Thurmond.
There are literally dozens and dozens and dozens of governors and senators.
They all remain Democrats.
So this is just not true.
Then he says, So in other words, he's saying, abandoned white voters who voted for Trump, they're all racist.
He says, In other words, the identity politics of black folks and Hispanic folks is better than the identity politics of white folks, and so the Democratic Party should turn away from the white vote.
voters who voted for Trump, they're all racist.
He says, I wrote in January, the Enlightenment must never bow to the Inquisition, and I hold fast to that position.
In other words, the identity politics of black folks and Hispanic folks is better than the identity politics of white folks, and so the Democratic Party should turn away from the white vote.
He says, for me, there is no middle.
If you are supporting Donald Trump, you're supporting Trumpism and all that goes with it.
That means you are supporting a modus operandi that attacks people of color on every term but keeps white supremacists safe.
You are supporting Trump's demeaning of women.
You are supporting his bullying.
You are supporting his corruption.
You are supporting his pathological lying.
You want to know how Democrats could blow it in 2018 by listening to Charles Blow?
Really.
Because what he's suggesting is that every Trump voter is a deplorable.
Every single one.
They didn't vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils.
They didn't vote for Trump because they wanted some policy wins.
They voted for him because they all silently approve of all of the bad things that Trump does.
I don't think that's true.
I don't think that's correct.
And I think if Democrats want to ignore the 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump in this last election cycle by writing them off, good luck winning elections.
Good luck winning elections.
He finishes by saying, So he says, inclusive identity politics is good, meaning identity politics not for white people, but for everyone else, that's good.
White identity politics is bad.
Now notice how the term anger is used here.
And conversely, inclusive identity politics isn't a poison.
White supremacy and the panic induced when that supremacy is threatened is the poison.
So he says inclusive identity politics is good, meaning identity politics not for white people, but for everyone else, that's good.
White identity politics is bad.
Now notice how the term anger is used here.
I'm going to explain in just a second how the term anger has morphed between these two columns that I've just read you and why it's demonstrative of the fact that for the Democrats, everything is a tool, everything is a means toward victory.
but they're actually undercutting their own agenda.
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Okay, so, Charles Blow's final comment here, that you shouldn't play to the identity politics of angry white men.
You know, this is why you see the reactionary politics happening from both sides.
On the one side, you see Charles Blow saying, Black people have a right to be angry.
Hispanic people have a right to be angry.
You have Lindy West.
Females have a right to be angry.
And anyone who denies the right to be angry, anyone who even suggests that maybe the anger isn't justified, those are all the bad guys.
And then they turn around and say, you know who the real angry people are?
They're the people on the right.
They're all the white people, the angry white people.
And then you know what that does?
A lot of angry people on the right, they say, yeah, you know what?
Screw it.
As long as we're gonna play this game.
As long as we're going to play this game, then we'll play this game.
This is how you end up with a reactionary politics that makes the entire country worse, regardless of who wins elections.
I don't think this will help Democrats win elections, by the way.
I don't think screaming at the sky, I don't think being angry at the patriarchy, I don't think being angry at the Constitution, or being angry at the vast bulk of Americans, who happen to be white, by the way.
69-70% of Americans are still white.
I do not think that this is smart politics by the Democrats.
But this is what they're going for anyway.
This is what they're going for anyway.
And meanwhile, the Democrats are attacking each other.
So despite their victories in Virginia, there are still some systemic obstacles Democrats have to overcome, including the fact that a lot of the districts that they won the other night are districts that were Hillary districts to begin with.
They're going to have to flip a few Trump districts in order for them to actually take the House.
So I would say right now that if you have to bet, you bet on the Democrats taking the House, but it's not an easy bet.
It's a bit of a stretch bet.
The Democrats are attacking each other, however.
Bernie Sanders and Donna Brazile are going full-on, full-bore against Hillary Clinton.
This is what the Democrats have to do, but there are a lot of Democrats who are pushing back against it.
Here's Sanders praising Donna Brazile, former head of the DNC, who has been ripping Hillary up and down.
Look, Donna Brazile showed an enormous amount of courage in describing the truth as she saw it when she came into the leadership of the DNC.
I don't know.
I don't think there's any sane human being who doesn't believe that my campaign was taking on the entire establishment, including the DNC.
But Anderson, to be very honest with you, my job, our job, is to go forward So one of the things I think that's happening inside the Democratic Party, aside from the internecine battles, is I think that you actually have a battle of cults.
I think you have a battle of cults.
Brazil said it herself.
She said that the Clinton campaign was basically like a cult.
But I think it's more than that, right?
Here's Donna Brazile saying that last night.
It was a cult.
I felt like it was a cult.
You could not penetrate them.
I mean, look, I'm a grassroots organizer.
I know street politics better than I know sweet politics.
I know how to touch people where they live, work, play, and pray.
But I cannot help a candidate, Joe, if I don't have the resources, if I cannot spend the resources that the party is raising.
Okay, so she was describing the Clinton campaign as a cult.
There's also the Bernie Sanders cult, and then there's still the Barack Obama cult.
So Charles Blow is a member of the Obama cult, right?
Lindy West is a member of the Hillary cult, and Bernie Sanders is a member of the Bernie Sanders cult.
So all of these various groups are battling with each other for supremacy inside the Democratic Party.
The only thing that unites them is opposition to President Trump, which is why President Trump needs to do a better job, because you can unify under the banner of opposing something like President Trump.
But these cults are exactly what have led the Democratic Party to its own demise, right?
What's created this is the Democratic Party let Obama have his way with the DNC, he ran up huge debt, he killed the party down ballot, and so they lost seats all across the country.
Then, they turned over the party to the cult of Hillary, who proceeded to destroy the party even further, right?
She helped shore them up financially, but she lost them the presidency to the worst Republican presidential candidate of my lifetime, President Trump.
And now, The Bernie Sanders cult is trying to take over, and they're gonna throw out the non-believers.
These cult fights are not good for parties.
The reason that I bring this up is because I think that, on the right, there's a tendency to get into cult politics, too.
And this is something that I really have objected to for a couple of years now.
I have always said, the point of politicians is not to worship them.
They are people in a job with a job to do.
If they're not doing the job, you criticize them.
If they are doing the job, you praise them.
I've said this before, the presidency is a glorified DMV job.
Being the president means that you have a job, a constitutional-oriented duty.
You're supposed to fulfill those obligations.
That's all.
We're not supposed to worship you.
We're not supposed to pretend you're some great God-like figure.
We're not supposed to say that everything you do is right.
But there's a tendency on all sides, I think, to fall into this cult-like behavior.
And if Republicans imitate the cult-like behavior of Democrats toward Obama or toward Hillary or toward Sanders, they're gonna pay the exact same price.
You're seeing that happen with President Trump, that there's a feeling inside Republican halls of power that if you ever criticize Trump, or if you don't praise him sufficiently, even if you keep your mouth shut on Trump, Then somehow you're undermining the great idol that is Trump.
And so you're seeing figures like Paul Ryan feeling the necessity to go out there and pay lip service to Trump, even when it may not be particularly beneficial to do so.
So here's Paul Ryan, who's trying to pass a tax cut into law right now.
We'll talk about that tax cut and why it's a problem in just a second.
But here is Ryan saying that the Bush era is over.
We're now living in Trump world.
Do you have to make a choice as Republicans, either you're going to side with President Bush and his policies, 43, of more free trade and maybe some type of immigration compromise, or do you have to go with Donald Trump?
Is it going to be a choice for Republicans, Bush or Trump?
We already made that choice.
We're with Trump.
We already made that choice.
That's a choice we made at the beginning of the year.
That's a choice we made during the campaign, which is we merged our agendas.
We ran on a joint agenda with Donald Trump.
We got together with Donald Trump when he was president-elect Trump and walked through what is it we want to accomplish in the next year.
This idea that we chose between Bush and Trump?
No, you didn't, okay?
You're there to implement a set of policy positions.
You don't have to choose Trump.
You don't have to choose Bush.
You can think both of them are crappy, right?
You can do all of these things.
But what you do have to do is have an agenda.
As I say, the cult-like politics of the Democrats with regard to Barack Obama really hurt them down ballot.
The cult-like politics of Hillary really hurt them.
Cult-like politics with regard to Trump will hurt them too, because if you are treating a president like he's a cult leader, Then you are going to ignore warning signs that would allow you to pull the car away from the ditch.
Typically, if you're going to define a cult, typically the traditional way to define a cult is that it has three features.
It's exclusive, it's secretive, it's authoritarian.
So exclusive means that you're the only one with the truth.
Everyone who doesn't have the truth is sort of damned to hell, right?
And there's certainly this aspect here, right?
This is what Trump said about Ed Gillespie.
Basically, Trump said to Gillespie, I'm the way, the truth, and the life, and if you don't follow me, you got nothing.
He didn't embrace me strong enough, and that's why you lost.
Secretive means there's some sort of secret to it, like everyone inside the Trump group, you know, people who are ardently pro-Trump.
I'm not talking about everyone who voted for Trump, of course.
I'm talking about people like Bill Mitchell, right, people who worship the ground Trump walks on.
For those people, there is a secret decoder ring where everything Trump does is genius.
And finally, authoritarianism, this sort of unquestioning obedience of the leader.
When you do this with a party leader, you end up ignoring bad signs.
And you end up getting into useless wars.
You know, Steve Bannon is one of the chief architects of this sort of cult of Trump.
And Bannon is going around leading wars against members of his own party who are trying to pass Trump's agenda right now because it's more important to uphold the glory of the leader than it is to actually pass legislation that Trump says he wants to pass.
Here is Trump saying that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, ought to resign.
Again, I'm not a Mitch McConnell fan.
I've been bashing McConnell for years.
But the idea that McConnell has to resign because of what exactly?
Bannon can't say.
He just wants a scalp so that he can go back to Trump and say, listen, I got a scalp.
I tell you, Sean, I'm to the point that I think Mitch McConnell, to really bring unity to the Republican Party and get things done, I think Mitch McConnell ought to tender his resignation.
What he ought to do is offer to resign as soon as taxes are done.
We can't do it in the middle of taxes, but I think Mitch McConnell tomorrow should tender his resignation and say, hey, after we get taxes done, I will step aside and we'll have a re-vote on Majority Leader.
Because I got to tell you, there needs to be a sense of urgency in the Senate.
You know, over the last week, they're now going to work six days a week.
They're talking about canceling Thanksgiving.
They passed the budget.
They're starting to move on federal judges.
But that's all because, quite frankly, we put the spotlight on Mitch McConnell and said that this guy is just not supporting the president.
Okay, that of course is utterly untrue, okay?
It's not that Steve Bannon put the spotlight on McConnell.
Everybody has been putting pressure on McConnell for years.
But what this comes down to is, does Trump want his agenda passed, or does he not want his agenda passed, or is it all just posturing?
If it's all just posturing, that's very – it's an Obama way to govern, right?
And it's an Obama way to destroy your own party further down the ballot.
Okay, I want to talk about some things I like, things I hate, and the big idea today.
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Okay, so...
As far as tax reform goes, the Republicans do need to pass tax reform, but not because it's going to win them any great credit from the American people.
They have to pass it because otherwise they've literally done nothing this year.
And there are a bunch of problems with the current tax plan that's being tried out by the Senate.
Senate Republicans are already watering this thing down.
They're revisiting key provisions in the GOP House proposal, including eliminating property tax deductions.
As well as state income tax deductions.
Everybody in California just gets jacked.
Increasing the size of child care credits.
Offering more help to small businesses, according to the LA Times.
And having corporate tax cuts phase in or expire, according to those familiar with the negotiations.
So in other words, this will not be a massive tax cut.
It will be a temporary tax cut with some tax increases.
Also that they can say they passed something.
I'd rather that they pass nothing than they pass a bad bill.
I haven't seen the final Senate bill, but it's not great.
They're not talking about increasing individual tax brackets.
This is not what I voted for the Republican Party for.
And this is not what I voted for the Republican Party for, but unfortunately, It's all become a game of which leader do you follow, as opposed to which policy do you espouse.
I don't see Trump really espousing low-tax policies in a coherent way.
I don't see Brian doing it, and I don't see any of the Republicans doing it.
And that's incredibly frustrating to me, somebody who actually cares about the policy much more than I care about the personal infighting.
Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things I hate, and the big idea.
So, things I like, you know, well, first we have to go to break.
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All righty, so time for anything I like.
So I could not help but laugh hysterically yesterday over this.
So USA Today ran a video in which they were explaining what weapon had been used in the Texas shooting, in the Texas church shooting.
It was a Ruger AR-556.
And here is, I need to show you some of this video because it's, there's some parts of it that are quite insane.
This is what we know about the Ruger AR-556.
Base model, buttstock, rear sight, front sight, handguard, 30 round magazine.
Trigger.
Okay, so they're teaching you what the parts of a gun are.
AR-15 style rifles have many aftermarket options, some common, some rare.
This is possible modifications.
100 round drum magazine.
Underbarrel 12 gauge shotgun.
Trigger crank.
Chainsaw bayonet.
And this is the, pause it there.
This is the one that got the internet going.
Chainsaw bayonet.
I don't know anyone who's ever attached a chainsaw bayonet to your rifle.
First of all, you set that sucker running, it's gonna throw off your shootin'.
Also, when's the last time you had to chop down a tree to shoot at a bear?
Like, you're in the middle of a forest and you're like, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr That doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense.
I mean, I guess it's perfect for Gears of War, or it's great for if you're on The Walking Dead and you need to saw through somebody's head or something, but chainsaw bayonet.
So obviously this spurred a lot of imitators.
Really ridiculous.
So people started making other possible modifications to tell USA Today about.
So here are some of them.
They're really funny.
Here is one with a miniature AR-15 attachment with an even smaller AR-15 attachment under that.
So it's a modification of a modification.
This one, I think, is very powerful.
This, of course, is the nuclear weapon bayonet.
So underneath the gun, you can actually see there's a nuclear bomb, which is, I think, very useful.
This one is a picture of the USA Today executive gun editor.
And it's a picture of a guy who has a gun that has pasted on it like a hood ornament and a jackknife with a knife, a fork, and a spoon and a flashlight and keys.
Pretty amazing.
Love it.
This one is millennials have now ruined guns too.
And there's a picture of the AR-15 with the selfie, the selfie stick attached to it as a modification.
And then, of course, the famous lightsaber AR modification that goes underneath the gun.
Very, just spectacular.
And this, of course, was, one of my friends put this one together.
This is the most deadly modification that you can put on an AR-15.
It's the AR-15 with the Chuck Norris modification up top.
They just released the Chuck Norris.
But really, guys, just, Like, don't talk about guns anymore.
Like, if you don't know what you're talking about, please don't talk about guns.
And yes, it turns out there are many possible modifications.
Presumably you could put a tank on the bottom of your AR-15.
But that does not actually mean that it's something that people use, and nobody actually... USA Today had to issue a tweet clarifying they weren't saying a chaingun, a chainsaw...
Gun was used in Texas.
By the way, we're just saying it's a possible modification, not that the shooter actually used a chainsaw bayonet in the church.
Thanks for the clarification, USA Today.
Well done.
No wonder no one trusts you when it comes to gun stuff if you legitimately put out a video that shows a chainsaw bayonet as a possible modification to an AR.
Everyone who's ripping on the AR, just quick note, the guy who shot the bad guy was using an AR when he did it.
Okay.
Time for a quick thing that I hate.
So, a thing that I hate today.
There's an article from The Guardian, and you see these kind of articles all the time.
It says, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett are wealthier than poorest half of the United States.
Institute for Policy Studies, lefty center, warns of a moral crisis and says Trump tax change proposals will exacerbate disparities.
Okay, I hate this line of attack.
I think it's really stupid.
The idea that Somebody is wealthy so you are poor is not true.
If that were true, capitalism would not have made lives better for the poorest people around the world radically better.
Half the world has been lifted out of desperate poverty over the last 30 years thanks to the rise of free trade and capitalism.
This idea that the economy is a zero-sum game belies truth.
It is just not true.
So what if Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are sitting on $250 billion of fortune.
Who cares?
You know how many people work for those people?
You know how many people are made rich by those people?
Tons of people.
An economist and co-author of the report, he says, How about more prosperity for everyone?
If you want to redistribute all the income, we could do that, I suppose, by killing the rich and just handing out their money to the poor.
Gets rid of a lot of the income inequality.
Also, it makes everyone's life a lot worse.
I hate this idea that wealth disparity means poverty.
That's just not true.
If I'm making $100,000 a year and you're making $1,000,000 a year, we have a bigger wealth disparity than if I'm making $10,000 a year and you're making $5,000 a year, right?
We have a $900,000 disparity as opposed to a $5,000 disparity.
Which one would you prefer?
If you answer the latter, I would say that you're a bad person.
Really, if you'd say that you prefer to make $5,000 a year just so I make $10,000, that shows that you're a jealous punk, not that you actually care about your living standard.
Okay, time for the big idea.
So on Thursdays, we talk about the big idea.
There's a lot of talk this week about thoughts and prayers, and so I thought that I would talk very briefly about the problem of theodicy.
Okay, so theodicy is the problem of how can God be omnipotent and good, and yet bad things happen in the world.
And it seems like every time something bad happens in the world, the left says, how could a good God allow this?
This is why I don't believe in religion, as though religion had never contemplated this question.
Despite the fact that every major religious thinker ever has contemplated this question.
Seriously, all of them.
The idea that God is benevolent and good is based on the idea that God is purely actual, right?
That everything that exists is due to God, because God is the purely actual.
Basically, in the Aristotelian model anyway, the idea here is the Aristotle-Aquinas-Maimonides model of God.
Basically, the idea here is that everything in life has aspects that are either actual or potential, right?
If you have a candle on your desk, and it's made of wax, and you melt it, Okay, it had the potential to be a melted pool of wax before, but something actual had to act upon the wax in order to melt it, right?
A fire had to act upon the wax, which was actual, in order to melt it into a pool of wax so it wasn't in candle form.
This is true for all things in the universe, according to Aristotelian thought, except for if there is something that can actualize, if there's something that has no potential, right?
It just is the purely actual.
What it is is actuality, right?
Its essence is the actual.
Well, the idea in Aristotle's notion of good is that what the good is, what makes something good, is that it is fitted to its purpose.
So if something is good that is fitted to its purpose, then God, being purely actual, is fitted to God's purpose because His purpose is the actuality.
God's purpose is Him.
In other words, and so the idea here is that God is purely actual.
So this leads to the question, okay, so let's say God is purely good.
According to whose standard?
So is he good according to human moral standards?
So clearly this is something with which people struggle, right?
In the Bible, Abraham struggles with God, and he questions God, and he asks why God is doing certain things.
And at a certain point, God says, you know, I can't explain this to you.
This is supposedly what Moses asked God when Moses says, show me your face.
And God says, you can't see my face and live.
The idea there is that Moses is asking why bad things happen to good people and vice versa, and God is saying, you can't know the answer.
So the Jewish answer to theodicy, why bad things happen to good people, is twofold.
One is with regard to human action, and one is with regard to nature.
So the answer with regard to human action is, it is not God's responsibility if I decide to do something terrible today.
That's my responsibility.
The reason God created us as creative beings Is that we have free will and we can choose to do differently.
If that's the case, then God, by nature, has to restrict his own dominance over the universe so that I can have free will and act out freely.
That means I'm responsible for my own evil.
That's why human evil exists, so that there's the potential for human good, so that we can discover our purpose and fulfill it.
As far as the notion of other evils like cancer, like a child with cancer, Judaism basically does what a lot of other religions do and says, listen, anyone who presumes to give you an answer on this is full of it.
There are no good answers, right?
You just don't—we don't understand.
We don't understand, right?
Maimonides actually says that it's forbidden to ask those sorts of questions to the extent that there's no good answer to them.
Augustine says that evil doesn't really exist, right?
Augustine's take on evil is that evil doesn't exist, it is just the absence of good.
The idea being that if the good is fulfilled potential, then if potential is not entirely fulfilled, that is an evil.
So it's a diminishment.
The so-called privation theory, right?
It's privation of the good is what evil is.
Evil doesn't exist as an independent entity.
So when you see somebody who's blind, the evil of their blindness is that it is not a fulfillment of sight, right?
It's a lack of something.
So God limits himself in the universe so he can have free will, and that allows for lack of something to make good into evil, essentially.
There are many, many theories on theodicy, but the idea that I want to promote today is that theodicy is a serious question with which we should deal, but atheism has no problem with theodicy.
I don't even understand how an atheist can ask about whether God is good or evil, or whether a situation is good or evil, because all that exists in scientific materialist land is evolutionary biology.
There's nothing good or evil about evolutionary biology.
There's just scientific fact.
So why are you asking about the moral contents of things happening in the universe?
Why are you asking about the moral contents of even human action?
You don't ask, if a dog eats a snail, you don't ask about why the dog ate the snail.
You don't say, why is the dog so evil?
Moral components only enter into the picture when you are talking about the moral possibilities of a universe constructed by a God who is bound by the dictates of his own morality.
That's the only time that you even have these discussions.
So you've been asking the theodicy question is presupposing an orderly moral universe that you can ask God about.
Okay, so we will be back here tomorrow with more and the mailbag.
Hopefully I'll feel a little bit better and sound less like garbage, but we'll find out.
If not, you'll bear through it just like I am.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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