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Feb. 16, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:23
Repeal the 2nd Amendment? | Ep. 477
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The media ask whether it's time to repeal the Second Amendment.
Democrats say the NRA is responsible for the Florida school shooting.
And Republicans shoot down a bunch of immigration proposals.
We'll talk about all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Now, obviously, the tragedy of the Parkland school shooting is still on everyone's mind.
And every time there's a massive shooting like this, whether it's Las Vegas or whether it is Sandy Hook, we now go into a predictable cycle of outrage, where folks say things that are ridiculous, they impute motives to other people that are ridiculous, and then those people fire back, and it becomes highly irritating.
Well, we're going to talk a little bit about some of those arguments today.
Jimmy Kimmel, of course, jumped into the phrase, so we'll have to deconstruct what he says.
I'll stop deconstructing Jimmy Kimmel on politics when he stops talking about politics on a late night show.
We are also going to be jumping into a column that was written by Brett Stevens a year ago, but is now being passed around the Internet again about repealing the Second Amendment.
We'll get to all of that.
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So the fallout from the shooting a couple of days ago continues as well it should.
And again, it's the circular argument that has become highly irritating to everybody involved in which people on the left screen do something.
People on the right say, well, what would you have us do?
And then people on the left say, well, if you're even asking that question, it means you don't want to do something.
That seems like the cycle of logic that is applied here.
So Jimmy Kimmel, of course, is the leader in being the sort of emotional The emotional avatar for the left.
So he goes on his show last night and he of course talks about the shooting and pushes hard for gun control with his usual caveats and freak outs about the NRA.
Another senseless shooting, this time at a high school in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman, a former student, opened fire yesterday.
Again, 17 lives have been lost, more than a dozen people are hospitalized.
Tell your buddies in Congress, tell Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio, all the family men who care so much about their communities, that what we need are laws, real laws, that do everything possible to keep assault rifles out of the hands of people who are going to shoot our kids.
Go on TV and tell them to do that.
Okay, go tell people what to do, and what we need laws, and what are these laws going to be, and the Congress works for us, they don't work for the NRA.
This is one of the things that he was pushing, the idea that the NRA was responsible.
We'll get to that in a minute.
Again, all of this is just designed to make you believe that Jimmy Kimmel has a plan.
Jimmy Kimmel doesn't have a plan.
People on the left don't have a plan.
And if they do have a plan, it really is to confiscate guns.
Now, the minute that you say that about people on the left, they get very upset.
No, no, no.
We just want reasonable gun legislation.
But then they can never name what the reasonable gun legislation is, because if they were to ban assault rifles, the reality is the vast majority of killings that are done with guns in the United States are not with assault rifles.
Assault rifles are responsible for less murders in the United States than hands or knives.
When people on the left say, well, what if we would just do better background checks?
We have full background checks in the state of California, and that has not stopped the Isla Vista shooting.
It did not stop the San Bernardino shooting.
Again, the problem with these targeted gun laws is that what people on the left really want, if they were honest about it, they would say this.
Piers Morgan, when I was on with him in 2013, he refused to say it, but then he finally came out and he was honest about it.
What they really want is a UK-style government seizure of vast amounts of guns.
That is not going to happen in the United States.
They tried it in Australia.
They tried a gun buyback program.
Only one-third of all the guns were turned in in Australia.
They still have a murder rate in Australia with guns.
People are still—they still have gun buybacks.
It is illegal to own a gun in Australia, and yet people still own guns.
Two-thirds of the people who owned it before still own it.
In the United States, if you were to grandfather in all of the guns that still are there, there are 300 million guns in the United States.
So that would not actually solve the problem you're talking about, because a lot of the guns that are in the hands of people who are going to commit school shootings in the future are already in those hands.
So you'd actually have to go around conferences getting guns.
Good luck trying to take guns away from 42% of the American public who say, 42% of households say that there's a gun in the house.
There's a gun in my house.
The government would have to come to my house and take it from me.
I'm not going to offer it back in a government buyback.
And neither is anybody else who owns a gun.
Those programs are wildly unsuccessful.
So what the left really is talking about is full-scale gun confiscation.
And you see that at the school vigil.
There's a vigil at the school.
And this chant broke out, no more guns.
No more guns!
Now, I don't know what that's supposed to mean, no more guns.
Are you going to take away the ones that people already have?
Are you going to take away from law-abiding citizens?
And then CNN, the rest of the media, they spend an awful lot of time bringing on victims of shootings to talk about what gun policy should be.
So, CNN featured a grieving mother.
I'm never in favor of this, by the way.
I think that it's always a mistake to have grieving people talk about policy because I don't think that your grief is relevant to the policy considerations at issue.
You do not have added legitimacy.
It's a form of emotional identity politics.
You do not have added legitimacy on a topic because as a blank, right, this is what Steven Pinker suggests as identity politics, as a white man, as a black woman, as a grieving mother.
As soon as you say that a grieving mother has more moral legitimacy to speak on gun control than somebody who's studied the issue all their life, then you are throwing away reason in favor of emotion.
In any case, here's this mother, and obviously you have nothing but sympathy for the mom, and that's why CNN is putting her on the air.
President Trump, you say, what can you do?
You can stop the guns from getting into these children's hands!
Put metal detectors at every entrance to the schools!
What can you do?
You can do a lot!
This is not fair to our families that our children go to school and have to get killed!
I just spent the last two hours Putting the burial arrangements for my daughter's funeral!
Who's 14?
President Trump, please do something!
Yeah, obviously, it's horrifying to watch.
I mean, it's just terrible to watch this grieving mother.
But when she's screaming at Trump to do something, what—the question is what Trump is supposed to do.
The president of the United States doesn't have unilateral authority to seize guns in the United States.
The president of the United States does not have unilateral authority to put even metal detectors, which is, by the way, a proposal I agree with, on school grounds.
I think that security should be upped at all schools, as I said yesterday.
Having armed guards at every school is not a—I fail to understand why this is even remotely controversial.
But the reason that CNN—the bigger question is not about the mom.
I understand where the mom is coming from.
Everyone with a heart understands where the mom is coming from.
The question is, why is CNN spending airtime on this?
And the reason that CNN is spending airtime on this is because CNN wants to manipulate viewers into responding emotionally to an issue that actually requires thought and reason, as opposed to an issue that requires emotional response.
You notice that CNN never does this, by the way, with victims of terror attacks.
CNN will never go to victims of terror attacks after there is an Islamic terror attack, for example.
And they won't have the victim of the terror attacks family go on TV and say, we need a travel ban.
And CNN will never do that because that doesn't agree with CNN's agenda.
The point here is that it's exploitative for the media to put grieving people on television simply in order to make a certain political point.
It's something I object to generally, it's something I object to on a specific level, and I think that it's something that really needs to stop.
And again, they were doing this with students as well.
CNN put a student on TV to talk about why this is somehow on Rick Scott, rather than MSNBC doing this.
You know, again, it's a flu of emotion.
It's anger, it's fear, it's confusion, it's grief.
And I've just been trying to channel those all together into some sort of mad inspiration.
I'm trying to get the message out that it is important to grieve, but it's also important to make sure the bad guys feel this in the polls, and make sure everybody knows that their votes count on this.
It's my astute belief that the blood of those 17 people is on Rick Scott's hands.
OK, so somehow it's not Rich Scott, it's Rick Scott.
It's somehow the blood of people who died in Parklands on Rick Scott's hands.
Why is it on Rick Scott's hands when a nutcase—who apparently the police were called to the house 39 times.
This is the new report.
The police had gone to this guy's house 39 times, and there was no involuntary commitment of this person, who apparently when he was a child was even put in a facility for violent juveniles.
Obviously, the system failed here.
But what that has to do with gun control is a little bit beyond me.
Now, folks on the left, if they're really honest, they will say what they really mean.
What they really mean is they want to confiscate all the guns.
So let's talk about that in just a second, whether or not all the guns should be confiscated.
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OK, so there are some folks today who are being a little bit more honest about what it would take to really get to the gun-free utopia they want.
And that, of course, is repeal of the Second Amendment.
So Barry White, a reporter, a staff writer over at The New York Times, who was ripped earlier this week.
We talked about her.
She was ripped earlier this week for being supposedly too conservative, for saying that immigrants get the job done After she—and she tweeted that about the daughter of immigrants rather than immigrants themselves, and she was ripped up and down by members of The New York Times staff.
Well, she tweeted out, repeal the Second Amendment.
And then she tweeted out a column that was written by Bret Stephens a year ago, in October of 2017, a few months ago, in October 2017, after the Las Vegas shooting, I believe.
And that column was titled, Repeal the Second Amendment.
So, let's go through that column, because it's about as good an argument as you will hear for repealing the Second Amendment, and it is not a very good argument at that.
So, Bret Stephens starts off that column by deriding what he calls the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.
So why exactly would conservatives support a private right to own weapons for the protection of life and liberty?
After all, Stephens says, quote, from a law and order standpoint, more guns mean more murder.
Now, this actually is not true.
More guns in certain places mean more murder.
More guns in Vermont do not mean more murder.
More guns in rural Texas do not necessarily mean more murder.
Stevens cites a study in the American Journal of Public Health from 2013 to show that "States with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides." But there's only one problem with the study.
This examines the statistics on a state level, which doesn't make any sense, given that virtually all murder in the United States takes place not in rural areas of states, but in the big cities.
And in those big cities, there are very harsh gun laws.
In the big cities, that's where nearly all murder in the United States takes place, in big cities.
So there's very little link, actually, between state law and state homicide rate, as Eugene Volokh of The Washington Post pointed out.
Beyond that, that same study that he's citing that says that states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicide, there's one problem with the study.
The single largest variable when it comes to murder rate is not actually gun ownership in these various states.
The single largest rate, which the study tries to bury, the single largest problem is that the highest correlation is between the number of black people in a particular state and the number of homicides.
This is not a racist point, okay?
People are not murdering other people because they are black.
That's obviously a stupid notion.
But if you're going to look at what is statistically relevant, and you're going to look at factors that are statistically relevant, the number of black people in a state are more statistically relevant than the number of guns in a state.
This is according to the study, quote, for each one standard deviation increase in proportion of household gun ownership, firearm homicide rate increased by 12.9%.
For each one standard deviation increase in population of black population in proportion of black population, firearm homicide rate increased by 82.8%.
The study tried to bury that data by not showing it in the actual text of the study.
So if you love that study so much, then you should recognize that there are variables that have significantly more impact than gun ownership rate.
And that has to do, and we can talk about why there's a higher homicide rate in the black community than there is in the white community.
A lot of it has to do with under-policing the black community that has been a matter of systemic discrimination since the 1800s, where white communities basically said that black communities fend for yourselves, and that's been inculcated in particular areas of the culture.
But that's not the point.
The point that I'm making is that if you are going to suggest that gun ownership is highly correlative with gun death, then you have to look at other factors that are highly correlative with gun death and see that these statistics are not nearly as significant as you think they are.
Stevens continues by stating, quote, from a personal safety standpoint, more guns means less safety.
He then cites the fact that more people are killed every year in accidental firearm death than in self-defense shooting situations.
But that's not a proper statistic either.
Because the times that people use a gun in self-defense far exceed the number of times you actually shoot somebody to death in self-defense.
The goal of having a gun in your home is so that you can pull it out.
I mean, I know there's a woman around the corner, and she was at home, and there's a guy who tried to break into her house.
She went and got the shotgun from the back room.
Well, rather, she screamed.
The guy ran away.
The police came.
They told her, what you should do next time that happens is, do you have a gun in the house?
She said, yes.
They said, go get your pump-action shotgun and then cock the shotgun.
Right?
Give it a ch-ch-ch.
Do that near the door and the guy will run.
You won't have a problem.
Now, that would not show up in any of the statistics that are being measured by the CDC.
It would not show up as a use of a gun in self-defense, because you didn't actually point it at somebody, you didn't actually shoot somebody, you didn't actually wound somebody.
But this sort of stuff happens all the time.
And there's a widely varying set of statistics on how often people use guns in self-defense this way.
According to the National Self-Defense Survey extrapolations, People use firearms in self-defense millions of times a year.
That may be too high.
Brian Doherty at Reason has an exhaustive analysis of whether it's hundreds of thousands of times a year or millions of times a year, but it's certainly not 268 justifiable homicide by firearms.
That is not the full measure of the number of times people actually use guns in self-defense in the United States.
So Stephen then moves on to deriding the philosophy of gun ownership.
He says that the idea that we can protect liberty by having guns in the United States, that we can protect from foreign threat by having guns in the United States, is a quaint idea.
Well, I wonder if it's such a quaint idea after Afghanistan, after Vietnam.
The fact is that small arms gun ownership and guerrilla warfare have been successful at thwarting some of the greatest powers in the history of humanity—the United States in Afghanistan and Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan, for example.
Those have been thwarted by IEDs and small guns.
These are not being thwarted by necessarily top-level military weaponry.
Finally, he goes on and he says that the idea that an armed citizenry is the ultimate check on the ambitions and encroachment of government power is silly.
And then he says, well, look at the Whiskey Rebellion.
That wasn't a check on government power, except that it sort of was.
The Whiskey Rebellion, which happened in the late 1790s, it was directed at an internal whiskey tax placed by the federal government.
There were a bunch of people who grew corn for whiskey, and they were very upset that the whiskey tax was affecting them, and there was an armed revolt.
And it was put down with violence.
A couple of people were hung in it.
And so he says, well, that showed that there was a failure of armed insurrection.
Except for the fact, of course, that President John Adams may have lost the presidency in 1800 based on that, and that President Thomas Jefferson then immediately went about revoking the whiskey tax.
So it obviously had a pretty significant In fact, you can even look at today.
There's a big hubbub over Cliven Bundy.
You remember this.
There's nearly an armed standoff with the federal government over Cliven Bundy's territory, where Cliven Bundy wanted to feed his cattle on land that he historically grazed cattle on, and the Environmental Protection Association, the EPA agency, rather, they came in and they said that this was terrible, that he couldn't be grazing his cattle on this area, and they tried to fine him, then they tried to seize his farm.
And Clive and Bundy refused to go along with the arrest, and a bunch of people showed up and refused to go along with the arrest as well.
Well, there was just a jury nullification that happened, and Clive and Bundy went free.
The Bundy family went free.
And now there's been a major political push in the United States to get the EPA out of the business of regulating so much land.
So, yes, armed insurrection is not always worthwhile.
Sometimes it's terrible.
The Civil War was a terrible, terrible thing.
But the idea that having lots of people with guns does not somehow check the ambitions of the federal government is obviously nonsensical.
The reason that we're not really talking in serious terms about full-scale gun confiscation is because you try that crap in Texas, it ain't gonna go well.
Stevens then turns to the active shooter phenomenon.
He says that such situations are extremely rare in the rest of the world, which is true.
It is also true that they are extremely rare here in the United States as well.
So John Lott's website, the Crime Prevention Research Center, he goes through the annual death rate from mass public shootings comparing the European countries to U.S.
and Canada, and he did it on a per capita basis.
So one of the things that happens is that the United States is compared to Britain, for example.
You say, oh, there are lots more shootings here than there are in Britain.
Right, we're a much larger country than Britain.
When you actually look at the death rate per million people from mass public shootings from 2009 through 2015, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, the number one country was Norway because they had that horrible Andres Breivik shooting.
And then it's Serbia, France, Macedonia, Albania, Slovakia, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium, Czech Republic, and then the United States.
How about frequency?
Forget about the number of dead.
How about frequency of mass public shootings?
So if you look at the frequency of mass public shootings from January 2009 to December 2015 per million people in order, it's Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, France, and then the United States.
The average incident rate for 28 EU countries is 0.0602, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.0257 to 0.09477.
The U.S.
rate is 0.078 higher than the EU rate, but the U.S.
and average for EU countries are not statistically different.
In other words, we're having about the same number of mass shootings as are happening in other countries, and we have significantly more guns.
So this idea that everything lines up is just not statistically correct.
Again, the case for full-scale gun confiscation is particularly weak, especially in a country where you have, as I say, some 300 million guns and 100 million gun owners.
Finally, he says that leftists are losing the gun control debate when they lie about the facts, which is true, and that they should stop talking about quote-unquote common-sense gun control and they should just repeal the Second Amendment.
He says gun ownership shouldn't be outlawed.
It doesn't need a blanket constitutional protection either.
It never occurs to Stevens that the fundamental argument in favor of Owning a gun is protection of life, which is the fundamental right that you have in a state of nature according to both the Founding Fathers and John Locke, and that the reason you have a gun is to protect your own life and protect your own liberty.
And a state powerful enough to confiscate weaponry on a grand scale is a state powerful enough to end your rights as well.
Other rights, not just your First Amendment rights.
Stevens finishes by saying, But that's not true at all.
The true foundation of American exceptionalism is the idea that we built a system on unchanging human nature.
Human nature has not changed.
And the idea of handing a complete monopoly on gun ownership over to the federal government is a scary one, or should be a scary one, to anyone who loves liberty.
Okay, when we continue here in just a second, I want to talk about the NRA because the left is going nuts over the NRA.
So let's talk about that.
Okay, let's begin with Nancy Pelosi.
So Nancy Pelosi, of course, has decided that the NRA is fully corrupt and that they are the ones deciding America's character.
Here is the House Minority Leader.
Whose political survival in this body is more important than the survival of our children, for example?
Most recently, yesterday, Sandy Hook.
For example, or on the streets of our cities.
Who of us in here is more important?
Whose political survival is more important than that?
Nobody's.
Nobody's.
So we have to be bold, we have to go forward, and we cannot let the National Rifle Association and its many, however they get their money, and that's another subject, to decide what the character of America is.
This sort of kabuki theater in which Democrats participate is quite gross.
They did control the Congress with 60 votes in the Senate, as well as a majority in the House and the presidency from 2009 to 2011.
And here is the grand total number of major gun legislation pieces they passed.
Zero.
Okay?
The answer is zero.
This is what Democrats always do.
They don't want to touch these issues because they think they're political winners.
Instead, they wish them to fester.
If Democrats really thought that gun confiscation were a thing, they could have moved in favor of it in 2010, in 2009, in 2008.
They didn't do any of those things.
Instead, they sat around and waited for Republicans to take office again.
And then they rail against the Republicans supposedly being in the pay of the NRA.
They did the same thing with illegal immigration.
We'll get to that in a little while.
Democrats have been saying that illegal immigration, DACA, deeply important things, they didn't do anything on illegal immigration while they had control.
And now that Republicans have control, they're railing against Republicans.
This is the game they play.
But I want to go to a core view that she's talking about here, and it was repeated across the media, that the NRA is in control of our politics.
That the reason that we haven't had a vast gun confiscation or new gun laws passed is because of the evils of the NRA, which is paying people off.
MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle said the same thing.
She suggested that it's just because Republicans are being paid off by the NRA.
President Trump tweeted his prayers, adding, no child, teacher, or anyone else should ever feel unsafe in an American school.
Well, the NRA spent more than $21 million supporting President Trump in his 2016 election, almost $10 million in ads and other pro-Trump material, and $12 million attacking Hillary Clinton.
The thoughts and prayers are with the victims.
The dollars and cents are another story.
Yeah, so the idea, again, is that the NRA is responsible for everything bad happening in Congress because they've been paying people off.
Jimmy Kimmel said the same thing last night.
He had said that the NRA had Congress's balls in a money clip, which is just absurd.
Last night, he said, somewhere along the line, these guys forgot they work for us, not the NRA, us.
And this time, we're not going to allow you to bow your head in prayer for two weeks until you get it all clear and you move on to the next thing.
We're going to make sure you do something this time.
Well, no you're not, because the vast majority of the public is not in favor of the do-something mentality.
The vast majority of the public is in favor of perhaps some measures that would do something here, but you have to name the measures.
But let's discuss the underlying claim.
Rob Reiner did the same thing.
He said, "There are 21 million reasons why Donald Trump refuses to protect our children from being slaughtered by guns.
The NRA has deep pockets, but we will show them that our hearts and our pockets are deeper than theirs." Our hearts, right?
The NRA is heartless because it says that law-abiding citizens should own guns.
You think the NRA is in favor of these school shootings?
You think the NRA wants these things to happen?
You think the NRA is indifferent to all of this?
When we last had a major shooting, which was after that church shooting in Texas, The guy who put down the shooter was an NRA member.
The media conveniently ignored all that.
He was an NRA instructor.
Because in their crusade to make it seem that the NRA wants to get guns in the hands of bad people, they ignored the fact that the NRA ensures that good people can have their hands on guns.
But this money point is so stupid.
That Donald Trump is only pro-NRA because the NRA spent some $21 million on the Trump election cycle.
You know how much money was spent in that election cycle?
Like a billion dollars was spent in that election cycle.
They did the same thing.
Stephanie Ruhle did the same thing, by the way, with Rob Portman in Ohio.
She said that in the last 30 years, Rob Portman received some $3 million from the NRA.
Rob Portman, in his last senatorial race, spent $30 million.
So the amount of money he's received from the NRA is not 10% of what he spent on one election cycle.
And this is true across the board.
So how much money does the NRA actually spend?
First of all, the NRA spent approximately $13 million on all candidates between 1998 and 2016.
$13 million.
That is according to PolitiFact.
That is not according to me.
That's PolitiFact, the left's favorite fact checker.
The NRA spend money on outside expenditures.
This would be their own PACs.
Spending money on ads in the amount of $144.3 million plus another $45.9 million on lobbying, which is a grand total of $203.2 million on political activities over 18 years, or approximately $22.6 million per two-year election cycle.
The NRA does spend a lot more during presidential election cycles.
According to Open Secrets, the NRA spent some $54 million in 2016 on politics.
That would be on issue ads across the country, that would be on lobbying, that would be on organizing, all the rest.
So, that sounds like a lot of money, right?
$54.4 million in 2016 on politics.
And they really are the entirety of the gun lobby.
The so-called gun lobby is basically the NRA.
There are a few other organizations, like the Gun Owners of America, but those are much smaller organizations.
So let's look at some other segments of politics and where money gets spent.
So, according to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, how much did labor unions spend in 2016 alone?
They spent $1.713 billion, billion dollars, on political activities and lobbying for 2016 alone.
So, the NRA spent $50 million, and the labor unions spent $1.713 billion, billion.
Okay, that means that they spent like 3% of what the labor unions spent.
That's an insane number.
But it doesn't matter.
They're going to continue to proclaim that the NRA is the most powerful force in politics.
It's also interesting.
The unions spend this much money.
You never hear about the idea that these Democrats are being paid off.
By the unions.
That the unions are paying off Democrats in corrupt fashion.
And there's a lot more evidence of that than there is that the Republicans are being paid off by the NRA.
The Republicans are being elected by the NRA to presumably be pro-gun.
But they were pro-gun before the NRA was there.
If the NRA disappeared overnight, there'd be five million gun owners who joined another gun organization, and that gun organization would be lobbying.
When it comes to the unions, it's a different story.
Unions are very often in the business of giving money directly to candidates and then sitting there and actually making deals with the candidates for their union members, which seems a lot more corrupt to me.
How about the abortion industry?
Between 2012 and 2016, Planned Parenthood spent $34 million on outside spending, according to Open Secrets.
2012 and 2016, Planned Parenthood spent $34 million on outside spending, according to Open Secrets.
Emily's List, another abortion group, spent $33.2 million in 2016 alone.
So the abortion lobby was spending about as much as the gun lobby.
But you never hear that Planned Parenthood is paying off the Democrats.
You never hear the EMILY list is paying off the Democrats.
Groups spend a lot of money.
But the notion that the NRA is disproportionately buying politicians, it's just not factually true.
Which brings us to a deeper question.
Do these outside groups actually buy politicians, or are they simply backing politicians who already support their agenda?
You have to show the politician who switched his position from anti-gun to pro-gun after the NRA jumped in.
Donald Trump knew that the American public, and particularly Republican primary voters, were not going to stand for an anti-gun position.
He didn't shift for the NRA money.
But it's always easy to have this ridiculous theory that there's someone out there, some evil, nefarious force, who's spreading money in the back room.
And that's why gun control hasn't prospered.
The reason gun control has not prospered in the United States is because it's deeply unpopular when you come down to the specifics.
That is why.
It's not because of NRA money.
The NRA is popular because people don't want large-scale gun control.
It's not that people don't want large-scale gun control because the NRA has lots of money.
Folks, for all the talk about gun control and a piece of breaking news from the Wall Street Journal, the FBI has now said it mistakenly didn't investigate a credible and specific tip about the teenager charged with storming into the Florida high school and killing 17 people.
In a statement, the FBI said it received a call on a tip line from a person close to the shooter.
The caller provided information on, quote, his gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting.
The information should have been assessed as a potential threat to life.
It was not forwarded for investigation to the FBI's Miami field office, and no further investigation was conducted.
So, well done, FBI, for all the talk about how the government is necessary in order to remove guns from 300 million—300 million guns in American society, remove guns from 100 million people across the country.
The FBI can't even track down one damn lead that says everything you need to know about the guy who went in and shot up a school.
You want to talk about government malfeasance and government incompetence?
Start there.
You want to talk about helping to solve this problem?
Start with the government actually following its own rules.
Start with the government actually doing what it's supposed to do.
The government sucks at everything and they prove it once again.
And the idea that I'm going to hand over my gun to this government and they're going to protect me?
You have got to be kidding me.
Okay, in just a second, we're going to talk about immigration proposals that happened yesterday, plus the president doing some serious King David-ing in a little while.
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All righty, so I just want to give you the brief update on what happens on immigration.
So March 5th is when DACA is supposed to expire.
DACA, that is when supposedly deportations begin for people who have not registered through the DACA system, or when deportations could begin for even those who have registered with the government through the DACA system.
That's not actually going to happen.
In all reality, not much is going to change on March 5th, except that people will not be given new work permits, essentially, in the United States if they are illegal immigrants.
There were four bills that were brought up yesterday in the Senate.
All of them died.
They were all dead on arrival because Democrats are not willing to compromise on these issues.
So, here are the bills.
There was the John McCain-Chris Coons bill that was touted as a moderate reform measure.
It never made it out of debate.
That basically was a proposal to give permanent residence to recipients of DACA immigration program in return for $110 million annual grant for increased border security.
It specifically excluded any funding for construction of a wall on the southern border.
That one did not make it out of committee.
Second proposal was Pat Toomey's proposal from Pennsylvania, Republican.
He proposed that the U.S.
cut off funding for sanctuary cities and sanctuary states like California until those cities and states agreed to share current information with federal immigration authorities, according to Emily Zanotti over at Daily Wire.
Fifty-four senators voted to put that bill to a full Senate vote, but Toomey couldn't get any bipartisan support and it died in debate.
And then there were two more proposals that actually came up for a formal vote.
The final two proposals were dueling agreements on DACA and the border wall.
One was from the White House, and one were from Senators Mike Rounds, Republican from South Dakota, and Senator Angus King, independent from me, but he's really a Democrat.
He caucuses with the Democrats.
The bill traded a path to citizenship for DACA recipients for border enforcement and even $25 billion for southern border security construction projects, but included a conditional amnesty for DACA parents.
And it was popular among members of both parties, but 54 senators only voted for the bill because Trump came out and said that he was not in favor of the bill.
Listen, that is dramatically to the left of where Barack Obama was.
to take part in the group's negotiations.
So here is Ted Cruz yesterday ripping into the rounds bill, suggesting that it was simply too weak.
So you don't even like the president's four pillars.
Listen, that is dramatically to the left of where Barack Obama was.
Barack Obama in DACA, which was executive amnesty.
It was illegal.
It was unconstitutional.
DACA covered 690,000 people.
Why on earth are Republicans trying to more than double, nearly triple that from 690?
Because it's a more accurate number.
But it's a more accurate number.
You know, tell that to the steel workers.
Tell that to the truck drivers.
Tell that to the American people.
We promised we wouldn't do amnesty.
So basically Trump turned against a lot of his own proposal after his base didn't like it, which is fully predictable.
The White House bill was presented by Chuck Grassley.
That bill included a path to citizenship for DACA recipients conditioned on $25 billion in financial support for a border wall.
Grassley's bill did make it to the floor, but even Republicans were reticent to vote for the deal, and it failed 39 to 60.
So that means that nothing has gone forward here.
Democrats did not vote with Republicans in order to pass the 60-vote threshold.
They were given a vote, and they voted against both of those proposals.
So, yes, a lot of Republicans voted against Trump's proposal.
Democrats should have universally voted for those proposals if they thought that it was going to stand.
The rounds bill got a vote.
It got 54 votes, in fact.
But the Democrats were not willing to allow it to go to a full vote, right?
There was a filibuster that was in place, so they needed 60.
So, well done, Democrats, not compromising once again.
Trump did blame the Democrats for this, of course.
But his leadership on this was less than stellar, shall we say?
But he did prove, by the way, that Democrats were not fully—it doesn't really matter, because Democrats had nothing to lose here anyway.
Democrats were always willing to let Trump go all the way down the line and then reinstate DACA informally.
They're fine with that.
They want to make Republicans look both heartless and incompetent, and they will succeed, probably, in that task.
OK, time for a quick Trump investigation update, or Trump scandal update.
So, a couple of stories out today.
One, Stormy Daniels, the porn star who says that she had sex with Trump, she says that she kept the dress that she had.
on when she was being nailed by Trump, and so she still has all of his DNA on it.
I didn't know this was a thing, by the way.
Like, apparently Monica Lewinsky did this, and now Stormy Daniels did this.
Is it a thing that if you have sex with a famous dude that you get to—that you keep the clothing?
Very weird thing.
I've never heard of anything like this, except apparently it seems to be happening a lot.
That is one story.
Other story is that apparently the National Enquirer spent $150,000 on a story about Trump having an affair with a Playboy playmate.
This is while he was married to Melania, who is being cucked so often it makes your head She was cheating on her repeatedly, of course.
Not a shock.
And apparently the National Enquirer, because the editor over there is friends with Trump, bought the story and then buried the story, which of course is not shocking either.
The woman's name is McDougal?
Catherine McDougal, I believe?
And Karen McDougal.
So Karen McDougal is a playboy playmate.
She had an affair with Trump.
And she has a long series of contemporaneous diary notes that suggest that this was happening.
Of course, the White House says this didn't happen.
That's not true.
Of course, it probably did happen.
A lot of King David-ing going on.
A lot of people out there in religious land saying, well, he's just like King David.
No, he's not just like King David.
The whole point of King David is that he repented.
There is no repentance here.
Yuck.
OK, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then the mailbag.
So, things I like.
So this was Valentine's Day week.
So it was Valentine's week.
So here is what many people consider to be the most romantic theme in the history of modern music.
This, of course, is Sergey Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
Paganini's Rhapsody
Paganini's Rhapsody OK, so there it is.
You most frequently hear of this because of the movie Somewhere in Time, which starred Christopher Reeve back in 1980.
It was a big hit at the time.
So it's worth listening to the whole piece.
It's actually a really great piece.
The rhapsody on the theme of Paganini.
The romantic theme is only about two and a half minutes of that.
OK, time for a couple of quick things that I hate.
So, number one, University of Minnesota.
I'm supposed to speak there week after next, and they have apparently exiled me to a building off campus for safety reasons.
It's like a 400, 500-seater as opposed to the 1500-seater that was requested.
They are having a simultaneous event on the main campus at University of Minnesota, sponsored by the Women's Center, about anti-racism in the era of Trump.
Because I was apparently a Trump supporter and a racist.
I am neither, of course.
So that was weird.
But they're having that in the middle of the campus.
So apparently, no safety concerns when lefties are holding a counter-event to my event, but serious safety concerns when I hold my event, which means I have to be exiled.
Once again, demonstrating the heckler's veto in full effect.
Speaking of the heckler's veto, my friend Steven Crowder apparently has now been banned from DePaul University.
So just like I've been banned, he and I have both been banned from DePaul University.
He was supposed to do an event there.
And they've preemptively banned him.
They've said that his comedy videos are obviously intended to demean and insult, which, if you've ever seen Stephen's show, is true, because he's a comedian.
Name a comedian who did not demean and insult, and I will name you a not-very-funny comedian.
So, Stephen's been banned from DePaul University.
So, congratulations to Stephen on joining the list of those of us who can no longer travel to that great university.
Okay, final thing that I hate.
So, LeBron James went after President Trump yesterday and said that President Trump doesn't give a bleep about the people.
This prompted Laura Ingraham to go on a Diatribe against LeBron James.
Here's what LeBron James had to say.
Ron, you called the president a bum.
Yeah, straight up.
How do you describe the climate for an athlete with a platform nowadays that want to talk about what's happening in our world?
Well, the climate is hot.
The number one job in America, the point of person, is someone who doesn't understand the people.
And really don't give a f*** about the people.
When I was growing up, there were like three jobs that you looked for inspiration or you felt like these were the people that can give me life.
It was the President of the United States.
It was whoever was the best in sports.
And then it was like the greatest musician at the time.
You never thought you can be them, but you can grab inspiration from.
I feel like I can be, you know, if it was a neighborhood African-American cop and he was cool as hell coming around, you know, I feel like I could be him.
It's easy to be him.
Yeah, I could be him.
But I never felt I could be the President of the United States, but I grabbed inspiration from that.
And this time right now, with the President of the United States, it's at a bad time.
And while we cannot change What comes out of that man's mouth.
We can continue to alert the people that watch us, that listen to us, as this is not the way.
Now listen, LeBron has every ability to speak out about these things and he's obviously got a big platform and people listen to what he says.
I don't think it makes him a political expert by any stretch of the imagination.
When he points out that the president has not done a good job of connecting with a lot of people in the United States, this is obviously true during the election cycle, it was true after the election cycle.
So there's some truth to this.
I'm not As a general rule, in favor of people who have not spent a fair bit of time studying politics, speaking with authority about politics, I will say that what LeBron is saying here, there's an element of truth to what LeBron is saying here with regard to the president's capacity to reach out to people.
He needs to do a better job of reaching out to people.
It would help if people would also reach out to the president.
Meaning, if LeBron reached out to Trump and said, you know, I want to start a dialogue with you, I think that would be more useful than him sitting there and griping about Trump, per se.
Although, listen, he has every right to do it.
Okay, time for some mailbag stuff.
Okay, you know what?
One more final thing that I hate.
I would urge everybody to go back a couple of days ago.
I did a long monologue about Black Panther, which I have not seen yet.
I'm looking forward to seeing it this weekend, I hope, if I have time.
And then I want to give you my honest opinion about it.
The entire monologue was critiquing the media's response to Black Panther, because the media was basically suggesting this was the end of the world, right?
This was the most important thing that has ever happened to the black community, according to members of the New York Times.
There were two separate major op-eds in the New York Times about the importance of Black Panther as a cultural moment and all of this.
That's what I was ripping.
It's being taken out of context in Kathy Newman.
Kathy Newman was, of course, the person who interviewed Jordan Peterson and just kept retwisting what Jordan Peterson was saying.
It's being Kathy Newman.
Go back and watch the original monologue.
You'll see exactly what I meant.
What I was talking about specifically was that I don't believe that people should get deeply excited about Racial solidarity issues.
I think racial solidarity is a mistake, whatever the race.
I think that religious solidarity is one thing.
Philosophical solidarity is one thing.
But racial solidarity is generally a tribal affiliation that I'm not fond of.
And the media portraying this as a major, massive cultural moment, I thought was wildly overblown, as I said a couple of days ago.
That was the main point of that, so go back and watch it if you don't believe me.
Okay, time for some mailbag entries.
David says, Hi, Ben.
I listened to your analysis of the school shooting yesterday.
I agree with your insights.
Are you aware of any objective studies on causation of mass shootings that study societal factors in addition to gun laws?
For example, single parent homes, violence in movies and video games, social media, secular culture, etc.
Mental health is often cited as well.
If there has been a significant deterioration in mental health and what is driving that, I'd be interested in your perspectives, too.
Well, I don't think there's been a significant deterioration in mental health by statistics, although more Americans are now on antidepressants than at any time in American history by a fairly significant margin.
The problem is that whenever you look at these shootings and then there are studies about the shootings, the sample size is simply too small.
There are not enough mass shootings for you to gather any sort of trend line other than a rough trend line.
So what we can see is that a huge number of these mass shootings involve people who are deeply mentally ill and about whom there were red flags.
So, if there is an increase in school shootings, I'm not sure that you can attribute that to greater rise in the number of people who are mentally ill in the United States, but you may be able to say that where we should be looking if we want to stop school shootings is among people who are severely mentally ill, who are schizophrenic—for example, violent schizophrenics, because not all schizophrenics are violent—and people who have evidenced threats against neighbors, people who have acted oddly.
In other words, look for red flags.
The question is, what's the goal of the study?
If the goal of the study is to suggest measures by which we stop mass shootings, then we ought to be looking at what best fits the trend line as opposed to broad societal trends.
Because let's say that it were single motherhood, for example.
Single motherhood does correlate highly with general crime, but it doesn't correlate as highly with mass shootings, for example.
Well, the way that you keep your competitive lead is through a purist approach to free trade.
newspaper that showed how historically all countries have utilized some form of trade protectionism, including the U.S. at its early stages.
My question is, if all countries do this, and in particular since China is doing this, how can we realistically keep our competitive lead if we and only we insist on a purist approach to free trade?
Well, the way that you keep your competitive lead is through a purist approach to free trade.
It means that all the inputs in your industry are cheaper.
So let's say, for example, that we put no tariffs on anything, but China tariffs the crap out of our products.
They are taxing their own citizens.
And let's say they tax their own citizens to dump all of that money into steel, undercutting our domestic steel industry, which is kind of what's happening.
Okay, let's say that they do that.
So now steel is cheaper on the American market.
So that means that American auto manufacturers are using that steel to make products cheaper than they will be able to make those products in China.
In other words, protectionism is almost universally linked with subsidies to a particular industry.
Subsidies to a particular industry mean taking from one potential industry and giving to another potential industry.
It means you're taking, China is taking money from an industry that would thrive on free trade and is instead giving that money to an industry that does not thrive on free trade, namely the steel industry, for example.
Well, that's not good for China.
Maybe good for China's steel industry.
It's not good for China's overall economy.
What is better for an overall economy is to take cheap inputs and use that to make the most competitive products and then out-compete people despite tariffing.
By the way, if you tariff your own country, if you raise tariffs to a high level, that does not make your country stronger.
It makes your country weaker.
Take this to its logical extreme.
If you tariffed everything at 100% in the United States, meaning that everything you buy had to come from the United States, we would all be significantly poorer because we'd all have to spend a lot more money on products we are used to getting for cheap.
That would not forward competition.
It would not forward style of life.
It would not make your life better.
What are your barometers for measuring cultural shifts?
I do think conservatives are gaining ground in U.S.
culture.
You can see it particularly on issues like abortion.
And I think a lot of that is because of the fragmentation of media.
The fact that the media is no longer controlled top-down.
The fact that there are literally hundreds of thousands and millions of people who engage with the show every single day.
We have like a million people who engage with this show every day.
And there's no gatekeeper.
Right?
If you want to watch the show, you watch the show.
It's not that there's somebody who had to green-light me over at a network.
That demonstrates, I think, the cultural shift, and it's happening in entertainment terms as well.
Fewer people going out to see the media-approved movies, more people staying home and watching what they want to watch, taking movies that weren't hits and making them hits on the back end.
It's really fascinating to watch.
Well, I'm not sure it's a matter of the government diversifying.
I think the American people might be better served by more parties.
Unfortunately, the system tends to favor a two-party binary system.
Now, the thing in favor of a two-party binary system is it creates a certain level of stability.
Usually in multi-party systems, those are usually linked with parliamentary systems where you need a majority to govern.
The minute there's not a majority to govern, no coalition to govern, then everything falls apart.
You have to have a new election.
This creates tremendous instability in these systems, and it means that it's very hard to get anything done.
Yeah, there's a fair bit of gridlock, particularly around dismantling social programs, for example, because there's so many particular interests represented.
So, there are costs and benefits, is what I would say there.
Panagiotis, is that how it's pronounced?
Hi, Ben, I'm a high school student in Canada, and most of my political education is colored by a certain point of view.
Could you explain to me what a right-wing dictator would look like?
Is there credence to the idea that Hitler was a right-winger?
Okay, so, in order to explain what a right-wing dictator would look like, you have to distinguish between the right-wing in Europe and the right-wing in the United States.
Conservatism in the United States, it is impossible for there to be a conservative dictator in the United States because conservatism is essentially classical liberalism, meaning small government is baked into the cake.
You could theoretically have a dictator who said, I'm not going to control everything.
A right-wing dictator would look like a minimalist king, maybe.
And somebody who says, go about your daily business and I'm just here to make sure that you don't kill each other.
That's what a conservative dictator would look like.
But it's very difficult to think of that actually happening because typically in monarchies, the idea of a small government monarchy is extraordinarily rare.
In fact, I can't name a single instance in which that has happened.
Usually when people say right-wing dictator, they really mean people who are anti-communist.
So Hitler was considered anti-communist and he was right-wing when you compared him to the left in Germany.
The left in Germany was communist.
But Hitler's policies were fully in favor of national health care.
His policies were fully in favor of gun confiscations.
I think that the basic gap between how politics works in Europe and how politics works in the United States, there's a serious lack of classical liberalism in Europe.
American conservatism is based on classical liberalism.
So what's defined as right-wing in Europe is basically anything that's anti-communist, even if those people are, in some parts of their program, socialist.
So, by American standards, Hitler was not a conservative.
By German standards, Hitler was a right-winger, and he allied with right-wingers in his government.
So, in politics—I can name a lot of people in politics because I was always into history—it was usually historical figures.
It was usually John Adams or Winston Churchill.
Or Abraham Lincoln.
Growing up, I didn't have sports posters on my wall.
I had a giant poster of Abraham Lincoln on my wall at home.
I had a poster with all the presidents on my wall at home.
Those were the things that I always found inspiration in, were ideas and people who represented those ideas.
Moses, obviously, if you're a Jew.
I never found tremendous inspiration from cultural figures.
There are people who I found inspiring just at an artistic level.
So I still find Roger Federer, for example, inspiring at an artistic level.
Just somebody who is the best at what he's done, he's the best ever at what he's done.
That's an inspiring thing.
I find William Beethoven is inspiring in the sense that he is the pinnacle of human achievement.
These things are inspiring, but not in terms of I get my moral code or my moral ideas from those folks.
Let's see.
Well, the question is not the amount of money that you are handing to people who are on food stamps.
Suppose I was talking to someone and said that SNAP or WIC, which are programs to support women and infant children, is a small cost for the taxpayer that isn't worth touching.
And if we want to lower the amount of money we spend on it, we're evil people who don't care about the poor, etc.
Well, the question is not the amount of money that you are handing to people who are on food stamps.
The question is, do those food stamps enervate a population?
One of the reasons to have work requirements for all of this is to create an incentive scheme whereby you are getting people off of food stamps.
The goal of food stamps should be not just to feed people, it should be to get people off of food stamps.
The goal of welfare should be to get people off of welfare.
In other words, make a plan and the system should be responsive to the plan that you make so that it's not a permanent handout, it is in fact a hands up if you're going to have these programs at all.
This is why I think private charity is much better because If you are face-to-face with someone and you say, I want some of your money, it's a lot easier for that person to say, well, why do you deserve my money?
And then you actually have to come up with a plan for success.
If you have a nameless, faceless system that hands you a check every month, very often that is going to actually create an incentive for you not to have a plan, because that check is just going to be there no matter what.
Ooh.
From the 90s and 2000s is a little too narrow for me, because I don't think there have been a lot of great comedies in the 90s and 2000s.
Best comedy films ever?
I mean, Tootsie definitely has to be on the list, and that was like 1984, maybe?
1983?
Liar Liar, I think, is really funny.
Tommy Boy is my guilty pleasure.
I don't think there have been a lot of great comedies in the 90s and 2000s.
Best comedy films ever.
I mean, Tootsie definitely has to be on the list, and that was like 1984, maybe, 1983.
Liar Liar, I think, is really funny.
Tommy Boy is my guilty pleasure.
I think that movie is insanely funny.
I'm not a fan of a lot of the modern comedies, actually.
Airplane is a great comedy, obviously.
There are some that are less funny than they are.
Groundhog Day is not the super funniest movie, but it's a very good movie.
One of my favorite comedies growing up was The Court Jester, which comes from the 1950s because it's all just cleverness and wordplay.
Zoolander, if we're going to modern comedy, Zoolander is really funny, but again, it's stupid funny.
Meet the Parents, stupid funny.
Those are probably the ones that come immediately to mind, but I actually tend to favor older comedies over newer comedies, and some that are kind of obscure.
There's one called Ruggles of Red Gap with Charles, what's his name now?
Man, I'm losing my mind.
Ruggles of—I'm going to look it up, because otherwise I'm going to go absolutely insane.
Ruggles of Red Gap is with Charles Lawton, and that is from 1935, and that's a really good movie.
Ben says, Dear Ben, My name is James Tyler, and I've had the pleasure of becoming a first-time dad.
My wife and I love our daughter very much.
I'm wondering at what age it's okay to start introducing your children to political ideals.
I don't think it's even a matter of teaching your kid about tax rates.
I think it's a matter of teaching your kids about values.
moot point is everybody would become Republican.
At what age is it appropriate to start teaching your daughter moral views of politics?
At what age do you talk to your children about it?
I don't think it's even a matter of teaching your kid about tax rates.
I think it's a matter of teaching your kids about values.
People ask, how did I get so conservative at such a young age?
And what I usually say is that I grew up with a certain set of values that are innately Personal responsibility.
You have to clean up your room.
You're responsible for your actions.
You have to work hard.
If you do work hard, then good things will come to you.
If you don't work hard, then bad things will probably happen to you.
That decisions have consequences.
That what you do is up to you.
That you are an individual.
They're not beholden to any group that wants to make a... You have to be moral, regardless of what other people in your class are doing.
These are values, and I'm sure your wife would probably agree these are values that actually have to be inculcated, essentially, from the time the kids are born.
Those actually have political ramifications.
The separation between politics and values is the death of civilization.
Matt says, Ben, I recently heard a friend of mine who is majoring in English education talking about how one of her classes was teaching about how there is no proper English and that it is racist and oppressive to correct grammar and pronunciation, specifically of black students speaking in Ebonics.
What do you say to someone who claims that any language is proper as long as it gets the point across?
That's stupid.
That's what I say to that.
There is proper use of language, just like there's proper use of mathematics.
Mathematics is a language.
Those rules can change over time.
There are ways of communicating that do not involve proper English.
That is still a form of communication.
But this is like the folks who say there's no such thing as good art and bad art.
Yes, there are things such as good art and bad art.
And there are elements of sentences, like verbs, nouns, and adjectives.
And if you use them interchangeably, your sentence makes no sense.
So even folks who believe that Ebonics is Sort of traditional English, their equivalent.
Even those people would acknowledge that there are certain ways that words are used in sentences, that if you use them in different ways, the sentence would make no sense.
Well, there are other rules as well, and those rules include how to spell words, they include how to pronounce words, they include how sentences are constructed and paragraphs are constructed.
There is a better English and there is a worse English.
And there are different forms of English.
But if you want to proclaim that all forms of English are equivalent, that's really, really dumb.
I mean, Yiddish is not the same as English.
Ebonics is not the same as English.
If it is used in a... Either it is a...
Different form of English that is not as proper in the sense of actually abiding by the normal rules of English, or it is a separate language entirely, which is what some Ebonics advocates suggest.
It's a little bit hard to tell, honestly, because some of the people who are making the allegations are his political opponents.
One of the people testifying against him is Yair Lapid, a guy who could become prime minister if Netanyahu is ousted.
Also, it seems that So I think I read an article on this the other day on the air about the corruption allegations.
It seems that all of the things that he was supposedly promising in return never materialized.
It's hard to say there was bribery when nothing materialized on the other end.
I am of the Viennese, the Austrian school of thought when it comes to monetary policy.
I am of the Viennese, the Austrian school of thought when it comes to monetary policy.
I don't believe that the Federal Reserve is a necessary component to a functioning banking system.
And George says, Hi Ben.
Would you be able to clarify whether Ronald Reagan was as successful economically as those on the right claim he was?
I have a friend who claims Reagan's economic policies tank the economy.
Is this true?
No, Reagan's economic policies led to the largest peacetime growth in American history.
The growth of the 1990s was largely an after effect of the growth of the 1980s, and you can see that because you can see how the economy was contracting up until about 1983 when it turned around.
Okay, final one.
This is a tough one.
Okay, Ben says, I have a question regarding homosexuality.
I struggle with unwanted same-sex attraction, but I am still attracted to the opposite sex.
What I really want for my life is to have a wife and children, but I feared this would get in my way one day.
What advice can you give me for this?
And I'm curious to ask, how do people of the Jewish faith and community handle homosexuality and people who have unwanted same-sex attraction?
Well, I mean, the way that we handle unwanted same-sex attraction would be the same way that you handle unwanted sexual attraction to people who are not your wife, meaning that attraction is something that we all have to struggle with.
Attraction to things that we can't have or that we maybe morally oppose, that's something that we all struggle with on a real basis.
That doesn't mean all those struggles are equivalent, obviously.
If you have same-sex attraction, that's not equivalent in kind to me having struggles with being attracted to women who are not my wife, for example, as every man Does, right?
Every single man is built for polygamy, and every single man who is moral aims toward monogamy.
But the idea here is that behavior and attraction are two separate things, and I'm not going to make light of the struggles that somebody has with attraction.
Do I think that homosexuality is necessarily entirely genetic?
No.
Do I think some of it's environmental?
Probably.
Do I think that it's a reality?
Of course it's a reality.
How you choose to deal with it, obviously, is your individual choice in a free country.
But if you want to have a wife and you want to have kids, then I would recommend that you keep away from situations in which you would be tempted to act on attraction.
Again, the same advice that I give to men who don't want to have an affair.
Stay away from situations where you'd be tempted to act on an attraction.
Stay away from things that attract you if it's something that bothers you and if that's the way that you want to live your life.
Okay, so we'll be back here on Monday with much, much more.
I am sure.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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