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March 20, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:10
The Left's Great Social Media Scam | Ep. 499
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Well, hello there and welcome.
We have many things to discuss today, among them Facebook under fire, Democrats attacking a children's book for no reason at all, and will technology kill us all?
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so I'm going to do this.
I never do this, but I'm going to take just one moment to vent, because let me tell you, the last 24 hours, they've been garbaggio.
Now, listen, I'm perfectly well happy to be here in Pennsylvania.
I'm speaking at Susquehanna University tonight.
There's supposed to be protesters.
People are very upset that I'm coming.
Yadda yadda, that's how it always goes.
But last night, I had to fly into Atlanta.
I know, first world problems.
I get in there, they're in the middle of a tornado warning, and then I have to stop at a hotel that, let's just say, was not five star.
It's the kind of hotel where you wake up at two o'clock in the morning and you really haven't gone to sleep and you're just feeling like garbage and you need some water because there's no water in the room because the last time anybody cleaned the room was three years ago and so you saunter on over to that that special vending machine just down the hall you know You know, right past those three doors that people have been slamming the entire night.
And you know that the guy next door has been listening to a Jim—watching a Jim Carrey movie because you can hear through the paper-thin walls.
Anyway, you saunter on over to that vending machine and you say, you know what, I'll get myself some water and really chill out.
And then you get to the vending machine and you realize the only options are Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Mellow Yellow.
And you think to yourself, did I somehow stumble into a portal?
And then, of course, we have the technological problems of today's shows.
But don't worry.
We have so many things to get to.
Actual real news, not just me banging and moaning about the situation.
Let's just say that the high life is not always what it's cracked up to be.
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All right, so.
The folks on the ropes over the past 24 hours have not just been world travelers, you know, crossing the country.
It's also been the folks over at Facebook.
So right now, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the use of personal data from 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica violated a consent decree that the tech company signed with the agency in 2011, according to Bloomberg.
So, if you recall, all the way back to yesterday's show, there was a report in the UK Guardian suggesting that the folks at Cambridge Analytica, which was the data analysis firm, the data gathering firm for the Trump campaign, that they had illicitly gathered 50 million Facebook users.
Now, there's nothing illegal about what they did, apparently.
What they did is they gathered a bunch of data from Facebook users who had taken a personality quiz, and then they'd use those personality quiz, they'd obtain that data, they'd cross-reference that personality quiz data.
with supposed politics, and this was a work of heart-rending genius, right?
This is what won Trump the election.
It didn't win Trump the election, by the way.
Trump won the election because Hillary was an unbelievably crappy candidate, and Trump campaigned in the right places, okay?
It wasn't because there were a bunch of people at Cambridge Analytica hacking your Facebook data or anything like this.
This is just nonsense.
If you've played Farmville on Facebook, they're gathering your information.
If you shop online, they're gathering your information.
You ever wonder how it is that the ads on your Google are tailored to you, right?
You just bought something from Amazon, and voila, there's another ad from Amazon.
That's because everybody online is always gathering information about you to make sure that they can sell you things.
That's how online works.
There's nothing terrible that happened so far as I can see yet.
Maybe there will be new evidence of something quite terrible.
But the left is going crazy because, again, they're trying to set up a particular narrative here.
So a spokesman for the FTC is saying, quote, we are aware of the issues that have been raised but cannot comment on whether we are investigating.
We take any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously, as we did in 2012 in a privacy case involving Google.
Facebook said Tuesday it had received a letter from the FTC with questions, but had not been informed of a formal probe.
If these were all found to be violations, if it turns out that Facebook had been willfully violating its own consent decree, it would cost them $40,000 per violation.
If you were talking about tens of millions of violations, then you're talking about presumably billions and billions of dollars in violations.
It would basically bankrupt the company if this ended up being a serious issue.
But it really isn't.
These weekend reports allege that Facebook users allegedly, willingly provided their data to a psychology quiz app, and then the people who made that quiz app passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica without the user's knowledge, constituting a potential violation.
Whatever.
That is not a big deal.
I'm sorry.
I'm not going to pretend that I think that it's a huge deal if firms that are gathering data on you market that data to other firms.
This is how online works again.
People who are ignorant about how online works, The reason that you are seeing all those ads is because people put cookies on your browser.
This is all ridiculous.
Shares of Facebook fell 5% Tuesday after skidding as much as 8% on Monday.
And now, apparently, Mark Zuckerberg's having a meeting, but he's not going.
So Facebook's bureau, their staff, is having a meeting.
The chief executive of Facebook, according to The Guardian, Mark Zuckerberg, has remained silent over the more than 48 hours since the Observer revealed the harvesting of 50 million users' personal data Even as his company is buffeted by mounting calls for investigation and regulation, falling stock prices, and a social media campaign to delete Facebook, Facebook shares slid 7% on Monday following the news, knocking $36 billion off the company's valuation as investors worried about the consequences of the revelations, according to the U.K.
Guardian.
Zuckerberg owns 16% of the company, and he personally saw his fortune fall $5.5 billion to $69 billion.
Oh, poor baby.
The embattled social media company announced on Monday it would engage in a digital forensics firm to conduct an audit of Cambridge Analytica to determine whether the firm or not still has copies of the data in question.
Does this sound like anything awful happened?
Well, we'll let you be the judge.
Here's the deal.
For years, all we heard after 2012 is that one of the reasons that Mitt Romney lost is because the data operation for the GOP sucked.
I was there.
I remember.
This was the talking point.
The talking point is that Mitt Romney did not have the necessary data operation in order to ensure that everything was going to go okay.
Okay?
And then, and Barack Obama's data team, by the way, was praised as these wonderful, world-breaking geniuses.
In fact, flashback to 2012, Maxine Waters, another world-breaking genius, she was talking back in 2012 about how Barack Obama had done it, and she said he gathered data on everyone via Facebook.
Wow!
Put in place.
An organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life.
That's going to be very, very powerful and whoever... In terms of the organizing for America that he's now shifting to become a 501c4.
That's right.
That's right.
And that database will have information about everything on every individual in ways that it's never been done before.
And whoever runs for president on the Democratic ticket have to deal with that.
And yet no one found that creepy.
How magical.
It's amazing.
It's like when Democrats were engaging in micro-targeting and giant swaths of data gathering, everybody just looked the other way.
Wow!
I can't believe it.
In fact, one of the publications that looked the other way, not only looked the other way, but praised the Obama campaign was, you guessed it, the UK Guardian.
In 2012, they reported that President Obama's re-election team was, quote, building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.
I mean, that sounds exactly like what Trump's team was doing.
Oh my goodness!
That must have been nefarious then.
But no, it was about the Guardian talking about the world-breaking genius of the Obama team.
Again, building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never before achieved.
According to the Guardian, Obama's new database would be gathered by individual volunteers who'd log on to Obama's re-election site using their Facebook credentials, consciously or otherwise.
Again, the entire claim here is that the Trump campaign gathered data on people who weren't consciously aware that their data was being gathered.
Here's the Guardian in 2012, quote, consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page, home location, date of birth, interests, and crucially, network of friends, directly into the central Obama database.
Facebook had no problem with any of this.
But they do now.
There's a reason for this.
The former Obama Director of Integration and Media Analytics said, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to, quote, suck out the whole social graph.
Facebook, quote, was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
And then this woman added, quote, they came to the office in the days following the election recruiting and were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
Not so with Trump.
Of course, as soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm.
None of this is surprising, because it's all part of a larger and greater agenda.
That larger and greater agenda, as I suggested yesterday, is that Democrats think that Trump should not have won.
In order to prevent future Trumps from winning, they're going to prevent conservatives from getting out their message.
They're going to prevent data mining by Republicans, but they will allow it for Democrats.
They're going to prevent conservative websites like The Daily Wire from distributing our material.
They'll build algorithms to prevent that distribution.
They will at the same time benefit a bunch of left-wing organizations that are doing exactly the same kind of journalism that we are, just on the other side.
Democrats have been using the Trump election as a way to browbeat social media companies that were supposed to be open sources into censoring conservatives.
That's what this is all about.
That's the agenda here.
The agenda here, and it's been clear for months, the agenda here is the Democrats who have been claiming with no evidence whatsoever that it was social media manipulation that won Trump the election and therefore Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter, these all have to be regulated, these all have to be brought to heel.
is specifically designed to cause the heads of those firms, who by the way are all horrified that Trump won, right?
Zuckerberg is horrified and Jack Dorsey at Twitter is horrified, the heads of Google, Eric Schultz, he was part of the Obama team, all the people at Google were horrified, right?
Nobody at any of these companies wanted Trump to win and they don't want any part of being blamed for Trump winning, so they are using this as an impetus to basically censor conservatives.
This is the next step.
So a year and a half ago, there was a lot of talk about Facebook algorithms preventing conservative topics And Zuckerberg met with a bunch of conservatives, including my friend Glenn Beck, and he met with, I believe, Tucker Carlson, a bunch of people, to talk about shifting his algorithm.
And, according to Wired, that was all an attempt to sort of buy off the press, prevent conservatives from whining about it too much.
Well, now, they don't care whether conservatives whine about it.
They've just decided they're going to cater to Democrats by essentially shutting down all these mechanisms for conservatives.
Senate Democrats have trotted out a bunch of pathetic Russian-created memes on Facebook viewed by a handful of human beings, right, as an excuse for Hillary Clinton's loss.
They've suggested that this is why Hillary Clinton lost.
Those things—we showed them on the show.
They're pathetic.
They were seen by five people.
They spent—the Russians in the entire election cycle on Facebook spent something like $100,000 on Facebook.
Now, honest to goodness, small companies spend tens of thousands of dollars a month marketing on Facebook.
That was a giant nothing burger.
But the Democrats are claiming it's a something burger because, of course, they want to use that as an excuse to club all of these social media companies into submission.
They also claimed without evidence that fake news had swamped Facebook.
We've heard nothing about Nothing but fake news for two years now?
Oh, Trump only won because of fake news.
Because people were reading headlines that weren't real.
We've had article after article about this.
The problem of fake news.
What the Democrats mean by fake news is news that is slanted to the right.
Right?
Commentary that is slanted to the right.
Interpreted to the right.
They don't like that stuff.
Not just stuff that's outright false.
Nobody likes the stuff that's outright false.
But instead of just banning the stuff that's outright false, Mark Zuckerberg has gone further.
Mark Zuckerberg has decided that he is going to cleanse his network of all stuff that would remotely be construed as conservative.
In February, Wired Magazine ran a cover story specifically dealing with Facebook's role in the election of 2016 and their subsequent attempts to fix the problem.
After the election, Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, met with Barack Obama after the election, when Obama was no longer the president.
He met with Barack Obama.
I'll tell you in one second what exactly he said to Barack Obama, because it's stunning, and it shows that what I am saying about this quasi-conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory.
This is all out in the open.
I'll explain in just a second.
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Okay, so what exactly did Zuckerberg meet with Obama about?
Here is what Zuckerberg met with Obama about.
Okay, you ready?
After the election, Zuckerberg met with Obama in an attempt to convince Obama he was serious about stopping the misuse of the platform.
By misuse, supposedly this meant fake news and Russian intervention.
Really what it meant is that Obama and the rest of the left were suggesting that Republicans had gotten good at social media.
Because guess what?
We have.
And we at Daily Wire are very good at social media.
We have a social media team.
We have people who work on Facebook every single day.
And Facebook decided they wanted to quash everybody.
This is their goal.
In February, Zuckerberg said he wanted to rejigger the algorithms on his platform to benefit content that Facebook deems trustworthy, informative, and local.
Here's the translation.
Trustworthy, informative, and local.
That means Democrat, Democrat, and Democrat.
Wired celebrated, quote, you can't make the world more open and connected if you're breaking it apart.
So what was the result of Facebook's algorithmic news change?
Conservatives have been absolutely destroyed.
A study from the Western Journal found conservative sites have lost an average of 14% of all their Facebook traffic.
Leftist sites, on average, saw a minor increase.
And this even held true for major publications.
Not stuff like the Daily Wire, but two of the New York newspapers, right?
The New York Daily News saw a bump, right?
It's a left-wing outlet.
They saw a bump of nearly 25% in Facebook traffic.
The New York Post, they dropped 12%.
That is the goal here.
That's the entire goal.
This isn't really in any serious way about anything except for forcing social media platforms to move to the left and social media wanting to demonstrate just how wonderful they are by moving to the left in order to head off Democrats and make themselves feel better about the fact that Trump was elected president.
That's all this is.
There's a reason that Twitter has suspended alt-right racists but continues to promote Louis Farrakhan.
There's a reason that YouTube is being sued by Prager University for demonetizing all of its videos.
There's a reason that Google used automatic fact-checking on right-wing sites like this one we discussed on the show, but did no such thing for left-wing sites.
This is a radical reshifting in social media.
The reason I used Facebook, the reason I used Google, the reason I used YouTube, the reason I used Twitter, is because these are open sources.
Because the whole goal here is that these were neutral arbiters.
These were not people who were going to interpose themselves between you and the news you wanted to see.
I'm getting emails every single day from users over at Facebook who are saying that we used to show up in their newsfeed and now we no longer do, and they want to know how to fix it.
We have a video, by the way, over at YouTube and Facebook, where you can see how to fix your newsfeed so that you're actually getting our headlines again.
But the goal here is very obvious.
There's a reason Democrats are going to continue focusing on nonsense stories like the Cambridge Analytica story.
It's all about creating a cloud cover, creating a base of fire to suppress conservatives.
That's all this is.
It's a suppression effect.
It's a suppression attempt against conservatives on all of these major social media outlets and...
And here's going to be the final solution on all of this.
The end solution here is going to be either regulation of these companies or beginning new companies.
I think beginning new companies is probably going to happen in relatively short order.
I've heard rumors to that effect from some pretty major folks that there will be rivals to YouTube, there will be rivals to Facebook, that these companies, in their attempt to shut down free and open exchange of ideas, in their attempt to prevent views that they don't like from being disseminated, they're driving away a huge percentage of their audience.
And this is really important stuff, because so many people get their news from Facebook.
Right now, it's like well over 50% of the people in the United States get their news from Facebook.
While Facebook is censoring us, but not censoring the New York Times, you're only getting one element of the news.
You're only getting one element of the news.
And that's really a scary thing.
They shouldn't be policing how you receive information.
This is the same thing they're doing on campuses, by the way.
When they say that I shouldn't speak, deplatforming is their way of preventing dissent.
They can't debate us.
They don't want to have conversations.
So instead, they just say, well, you must be cheating somehow.
You're doing something so nefarious that we can't even let you anywhere close to the free and open exchange of ideas.
Get out of here.
This is scary stuff.
It should be scary stuff, at least, for Americans who are worried about leftist overreach.
Because, come on, I mean, this is just, it's just bad stuff.
OK, now speaking of leftist overreach in general, leftist nastiness, So yesterday, we played an interview that I did with Charlotte Pence.
Charlotte Pence is the charming 24-year-old daughter of the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence.
And Charlotte had a new book that came out.
And her new book was about her bunny.
It was called Marlon Bundo's Day in the Life of the Vice President.
Very innocent.
Very nice book.
I read it to my 4-year-old daughter.
It's very charming.
It's apolitical.
Charlotte is not a political player.
Her sister is not really a political player.
Her brother is not a political player.
You know, Mike Pence is political.
That doesn't mean that his kids are political.
That doesn't stop the left.
So John Oliver, who has apparently decided to make a living out of being an insufferable douchebag, he came out on HBO and not only ripped Pence, he then launched a rival children's book against Charlotte Pence's children's book about a bunny.
Because this is how nasty so many of the folks on the left have become.
Now, while in many ways, Pence is like any other Trump employee, ethically compromised, creeped the... out by Jared, and subjected to all sorts of unwanted physical contact, Pence is, constitutionally, the only official in the White House that Trump can't fire.
The first tell-all book to come out of the current White House is hopping into bookstores, Marlon Bundo, the pet rabbit of Vice President Mike Pence there.
We also wrote a book about Mike Pence's rabbit that has also been published.
In fact, Well, his is out tomorrow.
Ours is released...
Right now!
Okay, and the book that they created was A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, and this book is a book about a gay bunny who's being victimized by a creature called Stinkbug who's supposed to be drawn like Mike Pence, because of course Mike Pence hates gay people.
Again, I'm waiting for the evidence that Mike Pence hates gay people, but people on the left just keep suggesting it over and over, so I suppose it must be true.
Now what's even worse is that John Oliver then sicked all of his friends onto Charlotte Pence's Amazon page.
So her Amazon page got spammed with nasty reviews.
So, not from people who had actually bought her book, but from all of the people who were buying John Oliver's books.
They all went over there, they spammed her site with a bunch of one-star reviews on a nice, friendly, apolitical children's book.
This is the charming left.
They have to attack Mike Pence's daughter's children's book.
Now, what's amazing about this is that Chelsea Clinton wrote a children's book also.
The right basically left it alone.
Okay, her children's book was an openly political book.
It was called She Persisted.
It wasn't a book about, like, an animal in the White House and here's what the Vice President does all day.
It was a book about how Hillary Clinton persisted and women persist and girl power and all this kind of stuff, right?
That was political.
The right basically left it alone because, hey, it's Chelsea Clinton.
Should we really make a big deal out of it?
Okay, the left could not even leave alone a book about a bunny.
They couldn't even leave alone a book about a bunny because so much of the left's Viewpoint is now consumed with the idea that if you disagree with them, that you are a bad person.
That you are a terrible, awful, no good, very bad person.
So, I'm supposed to speak at Susquehanna College tonight.
And one of the things that I want to talk about is exactly this.
This tendency on the part of people on the left to attribute nasty motivations to people on the right.
We've seen it throughout the gun debate, by the way.
We've seen it over and over throughout the gun debate, actually.
But it's not just with regard to the gun debate.
I mean, we'll show you one clip with regard to the gun debate.
So here's David Hogg, who's become, again, just Insufferable.
He's one of these Parkland students.
Obviously, again, for the one millionth time, I feel terrible that he witnessed tragedy.
But here he is talking about politicians being the—this is his words—the bitches of the NRA.
What if our politicians weren't the b**ch of the NRA?
It doesn't make sense that I have to wait until I'm 21 to get a handgun, but I can get this weapon at 18.
I don't know.
We didn't address it as president.
But I think you know why?
Because you're afraid of the NRA, right?
What if we all voted and said this is not okay?
It was an incredibly exciting election night.
In a district, there never should have been a question that the Republicans should have won.
They're sending a Democrat from the heart of Trump country.
Okay, so now David Hogg is openly stumping for Democrats, and the way he's doing that is by claiming that everybody who disagrees with them is a bitch of the NRA.
This sort of talk is not good for the country.
It doesn't allow us to have conversations with one another.
There's an open letter written by a student at Susquehanna to me.
I'm talking about my speech tonight.
And it's just, again, astonishingly stupid.
Here's what this guy writes.
He's a student over at Susquehanna College, and he's doing this at Susquehanna University, and he's doing the same thing.
His name is Nolan Nightingale.
And in just a second, I'm going to read you what Nolan Nightingale has to say about me arriving at Susquehanna, because obviously I'm a bad guy because we disagree.
And I will show you that this is how he feels.
And again, this is terrible for the country first.
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Okay, so...
Here is the letter from this student over at Susquehanna University, warning the rest of the campus.
It's an open letter to me, personally, so I will respond personally.
Here's what he says.
Dear Mr. Shapiro, I am a student at Susquehanna University, and a proud one at that.
If that name sounds familiar to you, it's because you are scheduled to speak here on March 20th of this year.
You are invited by the Young Republicans Club, a young group of people who are by all means reasonable and relatively nice.
I have grown up around Republicans all my life.
My parents, whom I love very much, are Republicans.
There's nothing wrong with level-headed Republicans.
A large amount of the people coming to see you speak are not level-headed Republicans.
The people I'm about to describe should be the kind of scum that gets you riled up when you hear that they dare to claim to belong to the same group as you.
Of course, you do not denounce these people, at least publicly, because they are your bread and butter.
Okay, so already he's indicting me for denouncing a group of people he hasn't described yet.
Who are these nefarious folks who are showing up to my speeches, supposedly?
These evil, cruel people I refuse to denounce?
He describes them.
Your fan base are people who have sent death threats to the faculty of my school simply because we ran out of tickets for them to see you.
Are they?
Because if so, they should stop being awful people.
Don't send death threats to faculty because you can't see one of my shows.
But I don't have any evidence of this, and I have a fairly solid belief that this kid doesn't have a lot of evidence of this either.
Like, has he actually tracked down the people who wrote these nasty notes?
Does he even have access to those notes?
Your fan base are the people that are making my friends lock themselves in their rooms on the day that you're here for fear of their lives.
Really?
My fan base?
Because I'm fairly certain that the death threats have been all issued against me, which is why I have to travel with a large security team and why they are now going to spend a bunch of money to bring police officers out there.
That ain't my fans.
That's the folks over in Antifa or at Susquehanna Rising, which is one of these groups that has claimed that they want to try to shut down the event.
By the way, my full expectation is that these are fair weather protesters.
It's really cold outside.
It's snowing.
So if they show up, more power to them.
What?
And then he says, your fan base are the same people who went through this campus last year scrolling F-free world.
F is a slur for gay people.
On the sidewalk and drawing swastikas on everything they see.
Those aren't my fans!
What in the world?
Like, where are you getting this?
Did they write Shapiro and then a swastika?
Like, are you an idiot?
I wear a yarmulke.
I'm an Orthodox Jew.
I was the leading victim of anti-Semitism on the right in all of Jewish journalism in 2016 from the alt-right.
What the hell are you talking about?
And I refuse to condemn these people?
Again, the whole goal of this article is to make it seem like I am a nefarious fellow because he can't actually find anything nefarious that I've done.
Instead, what he likes to do is claim that I am responsible for a bunch of people who I've openly denounced for years.
And then he says, I find the last one almost comically hypocritical, given the fact that you are a man of Jewish faith.
What, I don't condemn people who draw swastikas?
What, are you insane?
But hey, how many fans of Milo Yiannopoulos do you think are also big fans of any gay people they meet in real life?
I'm not going to talk about Milo and his fans.
I've been criticizing Milo for two years.
What the hell?
Then he says, this is not to say you are responsible for the actions of your fans.
Right, I'm not.
And also, if they do bad things, I think they're jack, jack wagons.
Says, this is not even to say that these people represent all of your fans.
Hell, my little brother is a huge fan of yours.
He's far from those monsters I just described.
This is, however, to call attention to the fact that if those people are the ones supporting the belief that you espouse, maybe it's time to reevaluate those beliefs.
Okay, no, that's not how this works.
Okay, just because there are a bunch of people who may be fans of mine and may be jerks does not mean that my belief system is wrong.
It means that they're jerks.
There are lots of jerks on all sides of the aisle.
Okay, I would promise you the people who are rioting across the country in places like Ferguson and Baltimore are fans of Barack Obama's policies.
Does that mean that Obama's policies are necessarily wrong?
Of course not!
In fact, when a Bernie Sanders supporter shot up a congressional baseball game, I was the first one out there saying, this is not Bernie Sanders' fault.
Why is it Bernie Sanders' fault that there's a nutjob who follows his ideas?
If the implementation of your ideas causes death, if the implementation of your ideas causes tyranny, then we can talk about whether your ideas are wrong.
But just because some people who agree with you happen to be bad human beings doesn't mean that you are responsible for their evil or that you're a bad human being.
This is just a nasty form of guilt by association that the left is associated with.
And this is what they're doing.
And this is what folks on the left are doing increasingly.
Like, John Oliver attacking Charlotte Pence.
Why?
Because she happens to be related to the Vice President of the United States.
David Hogg suggesting that anyone who's a member of the NRA is in favor of child death.
Like, even when I was on CNN on Sunday with Brian Stelter, there was one point where Stelter said to me, you know, is it really a—I was saying you're biased, right?
CNN is biased against gun rights.
And he said, is it really a sin that we want to stop gun violence?
The implication being that if you're in favor of gun rights, you don't want to stop gun violence.
And I said, like, what are you talking about?
What in the world are you talking about?
But again, this is just another demonstration of the radicalism that has overtaken so much of the Democratic Party.
Character attacks are first on the list of things to do, rather than last on the list of tactics to use.
Democratic radicalism has really gotten extreme.
Again, these are the same people who are endorsing Keith Ellison, who's endorsing Louis Farrakhan.
And the same people claiming that my fans are the problem are out there pretending that the heads of the Women's March can hang out with Louis Farrakhan, no problem, and that Keith Ellison, who has nearly made the head of the DNC, is not a problem either.
Speaking of Keith Ellison, by the way, he is a career-long anti-Semite with longtime associations with the Nation of Islam's anti-Semite extraordinaire Louis Farrakhan, while on Monday, he penned an article at Medium complaining about the media's coverage of connections between top Democrats and Farrakhan.
Ellison's article didn't take responsibility for association with and defense of Farrakhan.
Instead, he suggested that people like me were attempting to drive a rift between the Jewish and black communities, which is just — like, you endorsed an open anti-Semite because you said that he's for black rights, and then you accuse me of driving a rift between black people and Jewish people?
But this is the game, and this is the game that the left is consistently playing.
It's quite insane.
All right, Ellison says stuff like this.
He says, over the last few weeks, some political opponents have been pushing the narrative that I am somehow connected to a man named Louis Farrakhan.
It's not true.
Really?
It's not true?
Here's CNN on Keith Ellison's associations.
A CNN K-file review of Ellison's past writings and public statements during the late 1980s through the 1990s reveal his decade-long involvement in the Nation of Islam and his repeated defense of Farrakhan and other radical black leaders against accusations of antisemitism in columns and statements to the press.
That's CNN.
It ain't me.
Keith Ellison defended Kwame Ture, that would be Stokely Carmichael, in 1990, after Carmichael made a speech stating, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That
Farrakhan said on his own show that he met Ellison in Farrakhan's hotel room in December 2016, along with Representative Andre Carson.
But that's not hateful.
What's hateful is to point this out.
It really is an astonishing thing, and this shows the radicalism of Democrats.
And it also demonstrates why they have to make character attacks, because if they're forced to defend their character on this kind of stuff, they're going to fail every single time.
OK, so before we go any further, And I do want to talk about a bevy of issues, including the youth suicide rate skyrocketing over the last decade.
I want to talk about Uber's magic self-driving cars.
But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Wondery.
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Listen to Safe for Work on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this one right now, or head to wondery.fm slash Shapiro.
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Go over and subscribe and listen to Safe for Work on Apple Podcasts.
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Okay, so.
A couple of other topics that I think are worthwhile discussing.
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Okay.
So in other news, the CDC is issuing a stunning report about youth suicide.
And it does say something about where we stand as a country.
I According to the Centers for Disease Control, youth suicide is in the middle of a precipitous, really frightening, skyrocketing rate.
In suicide.
Between 2006 and 2016, suicides by white kids between 10 and 17 jumped 70%.
Seven-zero.
Black kids are less likely than white kids to kill themselves.
This is true generally.
Black folks are less likely to commit suicide than white folks.
But their suicide rate actually jumped even more.
It jumped 77%.
The Blaze points out that CNN reported last year the suicide rate among girls between the ages of 15 and 19 rose to a 40-year high in 2015.
And it's not just young people.
Tom Simon is a CDC report author, and he said, quote, We know that overall in the U.S.
we're seeing increases in suicide rates across all age groups.
As of 2016, suicide levels were at 30-year highs.
So what the hell is going on, right?
We have material prosperity.
So there are a bunch of theories about why the suicide rate has been skyrocketing.
Theory number one is that the suicide rate has been rising because the economy was bad in 2007-2008.
The evidence for that is really not there, because what you would have expected is that the suicide rate would mirror the economic decline in 2007-2008.
It would go like this.
It would actually be reversed, right?
The economy would go like this.
The suicide rate would go like this.
And then, as the economy started to rise, the suicide rate would start going down.
That's not what happened at all.
The suicide rate has continued to rise.
Then there are people who blame the rise of suicide on drugs, particularly opioids.
But according to a study from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, drinking, smoking, and drug use may be at the lowest level seen in decades among teenagers.
So it's actually going down.
So what exactly is happening?
I think that the solution is not something that a lot of folks on the left are going to like, but I think that it's pretty obvious.
If you look at polls on human happiness, if you look at polls on people finding meaning in their lives, I mean like cosmic meaning in their lives, it is highly correlative with religious practice.
So according to the Atlantic, right, not a right-wing source, they cited a study in psychological science.
It said this, quote, The researchers found that this factor of religiosity mediated the relationship between a country's wealth and the perceived meaning in its citizens' lives, meaning that it was the presence of religion that largely accounted for the gap between money and meaning.
People in the West largely find meaning in materialism.
This is true for people on the left and the right.
Marxists say that all human meaning can be found in rectifying income inequality.
A lot of folks on these sort of libertarian rights suggest that material wealth and prevalence of human freedoms provide people meaning.
That has not held true throughout human history.
So, this study analyzed a bunch of other factors.
Education, fertility rates, individualism, social support, to see if they could explain the findings.
In the end, only one factor mattered.
It was religion.
In other words, people need meaning and purpose in life.
Our focus on materialism, on both sides, is not going to fill this gap that's been left by God.
When God died, so did a piece of us.
This isn't a problem that can be cured by redistributing Xboxes.
There's a problem with the human soul.
Now this doesn't mean you have to head on over to the church and then you have to become a deeply religious member of an organized religious sect.
It does mean you have to put aside spiritual but not religious.
Spiritual doesn't come with action points.
People need action points.
And people are notoriously bad at defining their own meaning.
I know there's been this moral relativistic streak that is characterized post-enlightenment thought in the West.
That there's good and there's bad, but it's really up to you.
And this is the line from City Slickers.
In City Slickers, Billy Crystal's going through a midlife crisis, and he goes out with his friends Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby all the way out to the desert.
And when he gets out to the desert, he meets up with Curly, and Curly is played by Jack Palance, and Jack Palance gives him the meaning of life.
He says the meaning of life is one thing, and then he dies before he can say what the one thing is.
What is the one thing?
And Palance basically says, well, that's for you to find out.
Well, except that human beings are really bad at this.
Human beings are not good at finding out what their meaning is.
Human beings need to be told that they have a special meaning in the universe, a special place before God, that they are made in God's image, they have intense value, and that even the mundane things they do in life have a deeper, lasting impact beyond themselves.
People do need that.
And it's really weird to me that so many people on the left deny this.
I understand they think that religion has been an obstacle to human growth, which I don't see the evidence for.
I know that they believe that religion has been an obstacle to scientific development, which, again, has not been true, historically speaking.
There are times when religion has been an obstacle, but overall religion has actually been a spur for most of human history, at least in the West.
That said, I explain all of this in my upcoming book, actually.
That said, there's a lack of meaning that has grown in American society, and I think it's coming to a head right now.
Now, speaking of lack of meaning and devastating events, today there was another school shooting, this time at Maryland High School.
And this one was actually rather instructive, because a resource officer fired at the high school shooter who was fatally shot.
So three individuals, including the shooter, were shot.
According to a local reporter, Peggy Fox, Sheriff Tim Cameron confirmed that a shooting occurred this morning in a hallway by a Great Mills student who was eventually engaged by an armed resource officer.
The shooter reportedly fired at a female student and another student was hit.
An armed school resource officer then engaged the shooter with a firearm.
So this is what should have happened at Parkland.
Instead, it happened in Maryland and prevented further death.
This does give the lie to the idea that a good guy with a gun cannot stop a bad guy with a gun.
So, good for the school resource officer for doing the right thing.
Again, disproving the argument that guns are inherently bad.
Now, speaking of technologies that have been blamed as inherently bad, while they're not inherently bad, there's a lot of hubbub in the last couple of days.
Over this autonomous Uber.
So here is the story.
Apparently there's a woman who was killed because she was basically she's a homeless woman in Arizona and she jumped in front of a car.
The car was an autonomous driving Uber.
And now this has created all sorts of problems for Uber.
There's been a lot of talk about pulling these autonomous Ubers off the market that somehow this is going to make the roads safer.
OK, here's the story, though.
Here's the rest of the story.
According to the Daily Mail, the female driver who was in control of a self-driving Uber when it hit and killed a homeless woman in Arizona is a convicted felon who claims the victim stepped out in front of his car suddenly, giving her no time to try to avoid her.
Rafaela Vasquez was responsible for the vehicle when it struck Elaine Herzberg, 49, on Sunday night in Tempe, Arizona.
She previously spent four years in prison for armed robbery and falsifying documents was hired by Uber anyway.
On Sunday night, the car was in self-driving mode when it struck Herzberg.
Vasquez was supposed to act as a safety driver and take control of the vehicle if anything went wrong.
She told police that Herzberg, who'd spent time in prison for drug offenses, stepped out in front of her with a bicycle carrying multiple shopping bags, and she had no time to brake before it hit her.
She was traveling at 40 miles per hour at the time, well within the 45 mile per hour speed limit.
She insisted she was alert, but nothing could have been done to stop the crash.
The police basically agreed.
Her story was supported by footage of the cameras fitted at the front and back of the Volvo SUV.
The reason that I'm bringing up this story is because there's a lot of alarmism about the machines are going to kill us all.
There's been a lot of talk about we're all going to die because of the rise of the machines and all this sort of nonsense.
This is not going to be true.
There were 40,000 of them.
Automobile deaths last year.
Virtually all of them were due to human error.
Machines are better at this stuff than human beings are now.
I know there's been a lot of talk about truck drivers going to go out of business, and so many people won't be able to drive anymore, and what are we going to do?
But all this really is, in essence, is Ludditism.
What happened to this lady is terrible, but it sounds like it would have happened whether it was a human driver or an automated driver.
Again, machines are very good at these types of things, and the roads will be a lot safer when there are more machines on them rather than more human beings, because people are notoriously bad at driving.
They just suck at it.
Plus, we're texting anyway, so better that we should be texting while not driving than that we should be texting and driving at the same time.
And now it's time for me to do some things I like and some things that I hate.
So, a quick thing I like.
So, this movie I had a chance to watch a couple of days ago.
There's no doubt after watching this movie that Margot Robbie should have won Best Actress over Frances McDormand, who I thought was overrated in three billboards.
The movie was I, Tonya.
It's quite good.
It's quite a good film.
It's quite an effective film.
And Margot Robbie really can act.
It's always sort of a shock when a woman who I believe started off as a model ends up being a very good actress, but she's actually a terrific actress.
So here she is in I, Tonya.
The haters always say, Tonya, tell the truth.
There's no such thing as truth.
Everyone has their own truth.
I was the best figure skater in the world at one point in time.
You call that a clean skate?
Stop talking to her.
That girl is your enemy.
Who's that?
Jeff was my first date ever.
And my mom came.
You need to see a wholesome American man.
Okay, so the film is actually quite good.
It's really effective.
They tried to turn it into a critique of American life and how viewers treat ice skating.
They want all these women not to have real lives and all the rest of this sort of stuff.
The real story is Tanya Harding had a horrible mother and also had a horrible ex-husband.
And her ex-husband, according to the movie, at least planned the hit on Nancy Kerrigan, basically himself, along with an idiot friend of his.
It's hard to watch, but it is entertaining.
It feels like Goodfellas.
I mean, that's sort of the feel of the movie, even though the two movies have nothing else.
in common, except for a very, very good soundtrack.
There's a bunch of great songs on the soundtrack to I, Tonya.
So well worth checking out.
Much better than The Shape of Water.
I'm going to have to do a full critique of Shape of Water tomorrow because I watched it once, I thought it sucked, and I was on the plane yesterday, and I thought, maybe I'll try this again and see if I really think it sucks.
I mean, just one best picture, maybe I got this all wrong.
I was wrong.
The movie is so bad, I wanted to walk off the plane.
It is that bad a movie.
It is, in my opinion, one of the five worst movies I have ever seen in my entire life.
I will do a full critique of it tomorrow because it's just absolute hogwash, garbage, yucko, bleh.
Great art direction, and the script is written by an angry SJW 10-year-old in crayon.
It's just garbage.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so Jim Carrey, who has lost his mind or whatever was left of it, he also has decided that he's going to go into portrait painting.
So he painted this portrait of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
And here's what it looks like.
Yeah, obviously he loves Sarah Huckabee Sanders very clearly.
So he said, quote, this is the portrait of a so-called Christian whose only purpose in life is to lie for the wicked.
Monstrous.
Just wonderful answer.
I'm sure that Jim Carrey himself is a wonderful Christian and a great tribute to people of religion everywhere.
You know, the nastiness that's inherent in this is pretty obvious.
This kind of art is fairly typical, but again, it's all about the people you disagree with politically must be bad human beings.
If he wants to say that she's bad because she lies for the president, I guess that's his prerogative, and he could then make a case for why that is the case.
I don't think it's good to lie for the president, either.
But I get the feeling that whether or not Sarah Huckabee Sanders were telling untruths on behalf of the president, he would have said the same thing about Dana Perino, because this is just what the left has become.
It's all about character attacks and maligning other people's character, as opposed to actually standing up for an agenda.
OK, we will be back here tomorrow.
Tomorrow, we are going to be broadcasting from Washington, D.C., in a very special place.
I will tell you about it when we get there.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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