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March 23, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:57
McMaster’s Boltin’, Bolton’s Master | Ep. 502
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Republicans sending mixed signals on the budget, John Bolton joins the Trump administration, and we do a tour of the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
So much to get to today.
A lot of news is breaking.
The National Security Advisor, General McMaster, H.R.
McMaster, is out.
John Bolton, the former ambassador to the U.N.
under the Bush administration, is in.
The budget is in complete flux.
We'll talk a little about guns.
And we have the Mailbag Plus, a special interview with a special guest a little bit later in the program in the Things I Like segment.
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Okay, so we begin today with the latest on the budget.
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OK, so we begin today with the latest on the budget.
So the budget has passed in the Senate.
The budget passed in the Senate by a vote of 65 to 32.
It passed overwhelmingly in the House by 252 to 174, something like that.
There are a lot of Republicans who are very unhappy with this budget.
I am among those Republicans unhappy with this budget.
I called it yesterday on the program a crap sandwich.
That's because every omnibus is by definition a crap sandwich.
It's why it's an omnibus.
The whole purpose of an omnibus is to put a bunch of stuff you like in there with a bunch of stuff you don't, and then say to folks, if you don't vote for this bill, you're voting against all the good things, right?
You're voting down all the goodies.
Yesterday we went through how the bill doesn't cover anything for the border wall essentially.
How it doesn't do anything about DACA.
How the bill continues to ensure that Planned Parenthood gets funded.
It doesn't remove any of the Obamacare regulations.
There's a bunch to really dislike about the bill.
What's there to like about the bill is that there is a push In the bill for greater military funding, which, of course, is necessary after the Obama years in which we slashed our military pretty dramatically.
So that is good.
But now confusion is broken out.
So there are a bunch of Republicans who, of course, are very upset about this.
Ted Cruz is very upset about this.
Mike Lee was very upset about it.
Rand Paul was quite upset about it.
The usual suspects in the Senate who you'd rely upon to be upset about a budget-busting $1.3 trillion bill.
Those people were very upset about it, predictably enough.
But they weren't able to stop it in the Senate, and it rolls through with 65 votes, a almost veto-proof majority.
So Trump immediately comes out and says maybe he will veto it.
What's weird about this, of course, is that that's not what he'd been saying a day before.
So here's what he tweeted today.
I am considering a veto of the omnibus spending bill based on the fact that the 800,000 plus DACA recipients have not been totally abandoned by the Democrats, not even mentioned in bill.
And the border wall, which is desperately needed for our national defense, is not fully funded.
So a few things about this tweet.
Number one, it's fascinating that he's saying that he wants to veto the omnibus spending bill based on the fact that DACA isn't taken care of.
That DACA wasn't solved.
So, several times—three separate times—there was an attempt to make a deal during this bill negotiation with regard to DACA.
And what the Trump administration offered was—and what Paul Ryan offered—was three years of continuation of DACA.
People could still sign up as DREAMers for DACA.
Three years of continuation of DACA, but not final status negotiations on the people who are actually here.
You know, it's not a pathway to citizenship for them.
They just get to stay here for three more years for three years of wall funding.
And the Democrats turned that one down flat.
They instead suggested that they wanted full legalization of 1.8 million illegal immigrants.
Well, Trump had already basically offered that, right?
Like, a few weeks ago, he offered $25 billion in wall funding, plus end-to-chain migration and a few other goodies in exchange for legalizing 1.8 million DREAMers.
They weren't able to come to an agreement, and now Trump is saying the Democrats walked away from the table.
There is some truth to that.
But he has a Republican majority, so why isn't the border wall just being funded?
Why isn't the border wall just being funded?
If the border wall funding were in there, there's no question it passes the House.
Trump's able to stump up enough support that he gets that through.
And it's weird to me that Republicans aren't passing it.
It's also weird to me that Trump is now threatening to veto, considering that 24 hours ago he was saying the reverse.
Here's what Trump tweeted yesterday.
Quote, got $1.6 billion to start wall on southern border.
Rest will be forthcoming.
Most importantly, got $700 billion to rebuild our military.
$716 billion next year.
Most ever.
Had to waste money on dumb giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.
Couple things.
One, military pay increase already went into effect, I think, a couple months ago.
But beyond that, this is a very pro-omnibus package tweet.
This is Trump saying, I like the omnibus package.
We even got a little bit of wall funding.
Well, number one, Mexico ain't paying for the wall, gang.
And this is going to be up to Trump and the Republicans to do it.
But it's fascinating to see how Trump flipped on this on his own bill, right, within 24 hours.
Literally yesterday, Mick Mulvaney, his head of Office of Management and Budget, he came out and he said, listen, Trump isn't going to veto this.
We may not like the bill very much, but Trump isn't going to veto it.
So here's what Mulvaney had to say.
Let's cut right to the chase.
Is the President going to sign the bill?
The answer is yes.
Why?
Because it funds his priorities.
We've talked for the last, I don't know, three, four, five, six months about trying to get the President's priorities funded, and this omnibus bill does that.
So all things considered, when we look at the bill, we have to weigh what we asked for and what we had to give away to give it.
Is it perfect?
No.
Is it exactly what we asked for in the budget?
No.
Were we ever going to get that?
No, that's not how the process works.
It's a weird strategy, which suggests it's not strategic.
Why is it a weird strategy?
Because if you were going to threaten to veto something, wouldn't you do it before the Republicans vote for it?
So you get your entire party on record voting for a bill you then threatened to veto.
What?
Like, how is that even logical?
How does that make any sort of political sense?
Now, if Trump actually did veto it, it would be a sign that maybe Trump actually wants to get involved in the policymaking process, but it also means that it's very difficult for anybody to know what he's going to do.
Trump always says that he wants to be unpredictable with regard to his enemies.
Well, you can't be unpredictable with regard to your allies.
Put aside the fact that he's right that the bill's bad.
The question is, why didn't he say this a week ago?
Why didn't three days ago he go to Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and say, listen, I don't like this bill.
I'm going to veto it if you pass it.
So to make some changes.
Why didn't he throw his weight on the side of the House Freedom Caucus?
And how is it helpful for him to jump in late when opinion turns against the bill and then take the legs out from underneath his own party?
If you're Paul Ryan, you're Mitch McConnell, and you're sitting around going, listen, we went to the White House, we updated them every step on this negotiation, and they said fine, and now they're killing us?
How do you trust the president to have your back if the president doesn't have your back?
It is a serious problem for Republicans in Congress.
Now, again, that's a separate issue from whether Trump is right about the bill.
The bill sucks.
He's right today.
He was wrong yesterday.
The bill is not good.
The bill should not have passed.
The bill should have been pared down.
Republicans need to do better.
And this is what the Freedom Caucus is there for in the House.
They do a great job trying to push back against some of these spending priorities and then hopefully get a few concessions on the way.
One other note about the budget before we move on.
Everybody's always worried about the amount of spending in the budget.
Oh, $1.3 trillion and $150 billion increase in non-defense discretionary spending and all the rest.
That is not what's bankrupting the country.
Hey, the non-defense discretionary spending is bad.
I hate it.
It's my tax dollars, and I am paying an awful lot of money to the federal government in taxes.
But that is not actually what is creating our deficits.
What is creating our deficits are Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
Those are the things that are driving our deficits.
These structural entitlement programs we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on, trillions of dollars.
It's literally two-thirds of the federal budget.
That stuff is not even discretionary, right?
That's written into law.
It's mandatory spending.
When there's a government shutdown, people still get their social security checks.
So, that's what needs to be restructured.
So, if it were the case that we're trading this omnibus package in favor of an entitlement reform, like Paul Ryan says, listen, I just want entitlement reform.
We'll pass this budget so we don't have to spend our political capital here, but entitlement reform's next on the docket, I'd make that trade in a heartbeat.
That is not the trade that's being made.
The reason people are upset is because they feel like Republicans promised for years and years and years that they care about the spending, and it's pretty obvious that Republicans do not, in fact, care deeply about the spending.
Okay, so in other big administration news, the National Security Advisor, H.R.
McMaster, is out.
This has been rumored for legitimately half a year.
One of the things that was really funny is that last week, Trump tweeted out that H.R.
McMaster was completely secure in his job.
He also tweeted out that one of his lawyers, a guy named John Dowd, was completely secure in his job, and then that guy left.
The media had reported both of them were on the outs.
Trump, of course, says, fake news.
It turns out that was not fake news, because when Trump says fake news, it's only fake news like 40% of the time.
Well, the guy who's replacing H.R.
McMaster, McMaster was sort of a foreign policy establishment guy.
He's somebody who believes in sort of realpolitik, balance of power.
He tended to be relatively, kind of weirdly interventionist in certain areas and non-interventionist in others.
He had kind of a squishy view of the Iran deal.
John Bolton's views are extraordinarily clear.
John Bolton is the person who I'd wanted for Secretary of State.
I think he'd be better in that role than his NSA, but I'm happy to have him inside the administration.
Bolton, of course, was ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush.
He is not a neocon.
People have said that he's a neocon.
He is not.
To define neocon, there are really two definitions of neocon.
Definition number one is the historical definition, which is somebody who was a lefty during the 1960s and then realized the errors of their ways.
They were, in the popular phrase, mugged by reality and became more conservative.
It was a specific movement of very heavily Jewish people in the 1960s, like Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell, who's not Jewish, but was a member.
These were the neocons in the 1970s, the people who had shifted over to the other side.
Bolton was always a conservative.
So, by that definition, he's not a neocon.
The other definition that's used is about people like Paul Wolfowitz, who are very into nation-building, the idea that we're supposed to go into Iraq, knock over Saddam, and then stay there and build up the nation.
That was actually not something that Bolton suggested doing.
He said we had to get rid of Saddam because Saddam was funding terrorism and pursuing weapons of mass destruction, according to every intelligence agency on Earth.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't have turned the country back over to the Iraqis as soon as humanly possible, instead of sticking around and pouring hundreds of thousands of more troops So, he's been called a nation-building neocon for a while, and that's not true.
He wasn't in favor of the Arab Spring, for example.
He's not averse to leaving American allies, who happen to be dictators, in power.
He was in favor of leaving Hosni Mubarak in power in Egypt.
So, he is not a democracy-first neocon in that sense.
So, people are mischaracterizing the situation.
Democrats, of course, are going nuts over this.
Chris Matthews, I don't know what to say!
That John Bolton!
Look at that mustache!
Look at that John Bolton!
Rump up my hair, suit's all wrinkled.
I just roll in here and I do a show.
John Bolton, that guy even has a mustache, though.
I said to my wife, Kathleen, do you even like mustaches?
She said, no.
MSNBC Hardball, go!
John Bolton, Mr. Hawke, because he promised the working men and women of those states that voted for him, the gritty factory workers and other people who didn't like these wars because their kids do all the fighting and getting killed and losing their legs and everything else.
He said to them, no more stupid wars.
Now he brings in the godfather of stupid wars, John Bolton.
Anyway, the Congressman has been with us.
Thank you so much, Eric Swalwell of California.
He's a godfather of stupid wars, John Bolton.
It was John Bolton's fault.
John Bolton was like undersecretary of state for nearest affairs or something like at the time.
So again, the idea that John Bolton was the architect of the Iraq war is just not true.
It is not true.
He was in favor of a broader Syrian intervention.
I want to go through John Bolton's record a little bit.
And in a minute, I'm going to go through his record in rather fulsome fashion.
We'll discuss what his actual views are and how they will impact the administration, whether we should be worried about him.
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Okay, so what exactly is John Bolton's actual record?
So, here's an editorial that he wrote in 2012 about the situation in Syria.
What he said was, as hostilities in Syria roll on unabated, the civilian casualties rise because of combat operations in urban areas and execution-style killings.
In response, calls for U.S.
military intervention of one sort or another continue to aid the opposition increase, while the Obama administration dithers over whether to continue relying on the U.N.
Security Council and former U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan.
But what are America's interests at stake, and what is the best way to protect them?
Although it is easy to concentrate on the stomach-churning television images, we should operate on the basis of strategy, not emotion.
That doesn't mean doing nothing, but neither does it mean knee-jerk reactions instead of careful analysis.
He says that regime change in Syria is prima facie in America's best interest, as well as the interests of Israel and our Arab friends in the region, who see nothing but danger for themselves if Iran's hegemonic ambitions unfold successfully.
He says there's no reason to coddle Assad.
He says that we should have supported the Syrian opposition.
He says the possibility of getting rid of Assad is now more remote, given the widespread infiltration of the anti-Assad forces by al-Qaeda and other terrorists.
In truth, we don't know enough about the opposition's political or military leadership to predict who would prevail in the immediate aftermath of Assad's overthrow.
This is John Bolton writing about Syria in 2012.
In such circumstances, the risk of a radical Islamist replacing Assad is considerably higher than it would have been if we had moved to Al-Sham years ago.
A relatively orderly exit by Assad is one thing.
A disorderly, indeed chaotic exit is quite another, especially given the risk that Syria's chemical and biological weapons assets, and maybe even nuclear assets, might fall into the hands of people even worse than Assad.
And then he talks about the humanitarian considerations, and he says without substantial on-the-ground troop presence, we cannot prevent all of that brutality and evil.
So, he sort of evaluates the whole situation.
And he says, his bottom line is, Obama's not up to the job in Syria.
The greatest risk of American involvement is that his administration and Iran might find common ground in the Middle East chess game.
Iran would allow Assad to fall, losing its pawn, and in exchange Obama would agree to do even less than he's doing now to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program.
So he says we should cut Syria off from its major supporters.
Here's his actual program.
Cut Syria off from its major supporters.
Russia should be told in no uncertain terms it can forget about sustained good relations with the United States as long as it continues to back Assad.
We should resume full-scale, indeed accelerated, efforts to construct limited missile defense systems designed by George W. Bush to protect America's territory against Russia and other rogue states.
He says we should announce our withdrawal from the New START arms control treaty.
And then we should tell Iran that our patience with their decade-long ploy of using diplomacy to gain time to advance their nuclear weapons program has ended.
Tehran should face a stark choice, and we can leave to their imagination what will happen if they fail immediately to dismantle all aspects of their existing nuclear effort.
And we should also reverse the fantasy that despite its repeated violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that Iran is entitled to a peaceful nuclear program.
And then he says, finally, in Syria itself, we should do now what we have begun to do 10 years ago.
Find Syrian rebel leaders who are truly secular and who oppose radical Islam.
will disavow al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and other terrorist groups, and who will reject Russian and Iranian hegemony over their country.
We'll need some reason to believe the opposition can prevail against Assad.
So this is not a guy who's saying, let's go in and knock over Assad willy-nilly, right?
This is a guy who's actually taking into account the situation on the ground in Syria and taking a pretty anti-Russian perspective, right?
For all the people on the left who are claiming that Trump is enthralled to the Russians, John Bolton certainly is not enthralled to the Russians.
In fact, I have the evidence that John Bolton is not enthralled to the Russians.
Here's what John Bolton had to say about Russian sanctions just a few months ago.
This is in December 2016.
Russians have walked all over the Obama administration for eight years.
It's really been a pathetic performance.
So what this last burst of activity has to do is hard to say.
I do think it's intended to try and box the Trump administration in.
I think it will fail.
This is simply an executive order.
If President Trump decides to reverse it, it's easy enough to do.
If you make them feel pain and others feel pain, then the possibility of deterring future conduct like this increases.
That's what we need to do.
Okay, so obviously John Bolton is not a pansy for Russia, right?
And this is a guy who's very, very harsh on Russia.
He's also very harsh on Iran.
He's very harsh on Syria.
Now, people have said that he's a warmonger.
What's hilarious about this is that he's been in favor of a lot of the same wars Democrats were in favor of, right?
Libya was actually Hillary Clinton's war.
Now, what he said, what Bolton said about Libya, is that we should oust Gaddafi.
I think that he was wrong about that.
He had said this back in 2011, I believe, that we should kill Muammar Gaddafi.
It was in March 2011.
He said that there was a risk of terrorist takeover.
He says, one of the things the administration should be doing is identifying pro-American, pro-Western leaders in the opposition and assisting them.
I don't see any evidence they're doing that now.
But this is a rare case of a Gaddafi on the one hand and the unknown on the other.
I'd pick the unknown.
Obviously, that was wrong.
You shouldn't pick the unknown.
You should pick what you know, unfortunately.
You know, again, the idea that Bolton is some sort of wild cowboy who's out there stumping for war in all cases is not correct.
Here's what Bolton had to say about the Iran deal.
So Trump's entire national security team now, right?
He's got Mike Pompeo over at SAIT.
You know, he's got Bolton as NSA.
All of them are anti-Iran deal, which is a good thing because the Iran deal is a debacle and a disaster.
Here's Bolton just a few years ago talking about the stupidity and evils of the Iran deal.
But let's be clear what America's interest is.
This deal was a strategic debacle.
Not only is it bad for the United States in the big picture, the terms of the deal are bad.
You can't hold them to the terms of a deal that are as amorphous and unclear and subject to multiple interpretations as this deal is.
thing that we can do to try and get back on the right track is to say the deal is over.
I am confident Iran was violating it before the ink was dry.
They're doing it still today.
And you know, unless you're content to have Iran on an unimpeded path to deliverable nuclear weapons, this deal has to be scrapped.
There's no question that he's a hawk, but he's also not a neocon in the sense of nation-building.
Bolton has defended the war in Iraq.
Here's what he said years ago, I believe it was 2009, talking about the war in Iraq and why it was justified.
Were we right to go to war?
I don't think there's any question that the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was the correct decision.
I think you have to look at what happened in Iraq through the prism of two separate questions: Was the initial decision correct and was what happened subsequently the way we wanted it to be?
The answer to the first question, to me, despite the events of the six years after the invasion, is still unquestionably yes.
The regime itself, Saddam Hussein, his Ba'ath party, were threats to peace and security in the region and the larger world.
Okay, so a lot of people on the left are very upset about that because it's become conventional wisdom to say that the Iraq War was wrong.
Based on the evidence that we had at the time, the Iraq War was not wrong.
The pursuit of how we did the Iraq War was wrong.
Wrong, and members of the Bush administration have acknowledged as much.
Again, you can only go to war based on the evidence that you have in front of you.
Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, every Democrat, Nancy Pelosi, all of them supported the Iraq war because the evidence that was put in front of them was very different from the evidence that was later gathered.
Now, the real reason that people are upset about Bolton in the NSA position is because they're afraid that he's such a hawk, he'll go to Trump, he'll talk a bunch of hawkery into Trump's ear, and suddenly we'll be at war.
And the reason they're saying this is because Bolton has been particularly harsh on North Korea.
So he just wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on February 28, 2018, so not even a month ago, in which he talked about the legal case for striking North Korea first.
He talked about preemption, and what he said is this, He's not actually making the case for a preemptive strike.
He's not actually making the case for a preemptive strike.
He is saying that it is legal.
He's saying this is how we should think about the threat of nuclear warheads delivered by ballistic missiles.
In 1837, Britain unleashed preemptive fire and fury against a wooden steamboat.
It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current necessity posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons by striking first.
Now, do I think Bolton's gonna walk into that office and say to Trump, let's attack North Korea?
I do not.
I don't think that's who Bolton is.
I've met John Bolton several times.
I do not think that Ambassador Bolton will now, NSA Bolton, is a guy who is going to pander to Trump's worst instincts in terms of hitting buttons that fire missiles.
I think that he knows he's now part of an administration where the guy at the top is not Supremely stable with regard to the use of force, for example.
And I think that knowing that he is going to be pretty careful about what he says to the president.
The good news is the president trusts Bolton.
The president trusts Pompeo.
The president trusts Mattis.
And three of them, I think, make a much better team than H.R.
McMaster, Rex Tillerson, and Mattis.
I mean, there's no question that's a better team overall in terms of a conservative foreign policy, a Bushian but non-neoconservative foreign policy, which I think is more realistic, but not paleoconservative.
Trump campaign is a paleocon.
He is not a paleocon, and his team proves it.
Okay, so, I want to get to guns, I want to get to a little bit on foreign policy, and then I want to get to the mailbag.
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OK, so I just want to do a quick note here on guns, and then I want to get to the mailbags.
I would like to have some real time to explore the mailbag with you today.
So first, on guns, Time magazine has put up a new cover.
Its new cover is all the kids who are anti-gun from Parkland.
Um, and that is not what the cover looks like.
Um, it, oh, that is what the cover looks like.
There we go.
So, uh, the, it's, the only kids who get to make the time cover are the kids who hate guns, right?
It's David Hogg, and Emma Gonzalez, and Cameron Kasky, and all of them posing in very dramatic fashion, and then it says, enough, across the front.
Now, I don't know why one of them's not wearing shoes.
That's weird.
But besides that, I'm just wondering why it is that only a certain number of these kids get on the cover.
Kyle Cashew, who we've talked about on the show before, and who I've mentored a little bit, there's no reason why he shouldn't be on the cover there.
He's a student there, he's been extraordinarily vocal, and he's been much more useful in the gun debate than any of these kids.
Kyle's actually been going around meeting with legislators to talk about the Stop Gun Violence Act.
He's been working on that with legislators.
These kids are just going on TV and jabbering to Ellen.
I understand they experienced tragedy.
They're entitled to their perspective.
But the only perspective the media wants you to hear is their perspective.
And the perspective of people like David Hogg, I'm sorry, his perspective on guns is just not that valuable.
He doesn't have anything to say that has any merit to it.
Here's an interview that was done with him yesterday.
It is not good, okay?
This is David Hogg jabbering on about the NRA.
They're pathetic f***ers that want to keep killing our children.
They could have blood from children spattered all over their faces and they wouldn't take action.
Because they'll still see those dollar signs.
It just makes me think what sick f***ers are out there that want to continue to sell more guns, murder more children, and honestly just get re-elected.
What type of person are you when you want to see more f***ing money than children's lives?
I mean, it's just disgusting.
He's been repeating this crap over and over and over.
It's disgusting what he's saying.
It's ridiculous.
But these are the people that the media choose to focus on, which is, of course, that makes perfect sense because these are the people pushing the media's agenda.
OK, so now I want to do something special today.
And I think we may change the format of the show in order to do this.
I want to do the mailbag earlier today so that all of our friends who watch over at Facebook Live and watch YouTube Live, that they can check this out right now by watching the mailbag.
If you want to subscribe, by the way, you can be part of the mailbag.
So if you want to subscribe right now, then you get your questions answered.
We will answer your questions live early on the show today.
So let's just jump right in.
John says, What's up, Benjamin Madud?
I'm a high school student competing in a homeschool Christian debate league.
Our Lincoln-Douglas resolution is nationalism ought to be valued above globalism.
Well, sure.
I think there are two arguments in favor of nationalism.
And then there's a bad argument that people use for nationalism.
So here are the two good arguments in favor of nationalism.
The first one is that nationalism isn't nationalism, it's patriotism.
What you are defending about the United States, why America is a great place, is because America has a special creed, and that creed ought to be defended.
So I'll defend American nationalism, but I'm not as interested in the nationalism of nations that have crappy founding principles.
I don't really care about their nationalism, because why would I find that particularly convincing?
Our founding principles are good.
Their founding principles suck.
Therefore, America's nationalism is a good thing, because a stronger America and the world is a better thing for the world and for the citizens of the United States.
Okay, that's argument number one, is that the principles upon which a country is founded should be the basis for nationalism, which means patriotism over nationalism.
Right?
Not globalism, not nationalism, patriotism.
Okay, the second argument is one that was made in the Federalist Papers that we talked about a few weeks back, and that is that there is a natural drive for people to feel a kinship with the people that they occupy a country with.
That people do feel, you know, for better or worse, they do feel ethnic kinship, they do feel familial kinship, they do feel cultural kinship, they do feel that if you share a religion with somebody, these are all things that you share, and nationalism helps congeal all of that into a fighting force on behalf of tribe.
This can devolve really quickly into a romantic nationalism that's really nasty and terrible.
I'm not in favor of that romantic nationalism.
That's why I don't buy into the sort of ethno-nationalism you hear from the alt-right.
It's why I have a hard time with some of the far-right movements in Europe that say, we're nationalists, but we can't explain to you why we're nationalists.
We just know that France has to be defended, but we have no central principles upon which France is based that we're trying to defend.
But I think the way to defend nationalism is to say, That the nation-state is a useful tool in the promulgation of good ideas.
It's also a useful tool in the promulgation of really bad ideas.
So, the case for nationalism is good nationalism, nationalism on behalf of countries that have good ideas, as, like, I don't care about Saudi Arabian nationalism, per se.
I care a lot about American nationalism.
I care much more about British nationalism, for example, because it connects to an Anglo-American heritage.
And the same, I care about French nationalism a lot more than I care about Libyan nationalism, for example.
And that's not me being Racist or ethnocentric.
It's the opposite.
It's me saying that you and your friends look alike and you want a nation.
That's not a good enough reason for you to have a nation.
It's more important that you actually have some centralizing principles.
Globalism, by contrast, basically says that we should treat all of these perspectives as equal and we should never privilege our own perspective over that of anyone else.
If I had to rank these things in order of usefulness, importance, and worth, I would say patriotism, nationalism, globalism.
OK, Anne says, most of my reading these days is done via audiobooks.
Is there any chance you will read your upcoming books?
Thanks, Anne.
So I was asked to do my last novel, but because it was a novel, I felt like it would be weird for me to do it because I can't act at all.
Maybe my next nonfiction book.
So maybe the book that I'm writing right now on the history of Western philosophy, I'll read that one, I think.
Avi Nash says, hey, Ben.
Is there one classical composer that you absolutely hate?
Well, there are some that I think just are tedious as all get out.
There are some people like Bruckner.
I think that Bruckner is just bleh.
I'm not a fan.
There are some modern classical composers who I am not a fan of.
You know, obviously Cage, Philip Glass.
These are people who I don't really like very much.
But as far as older classical composers, There are a lot of people who are very fond of Mahler.
I just find that it's sections of beauty enmeshed in long swaths of boring.
Wagner needed an editor with an axe because he has these incredible moments of uplift, but every opera is 18 hours long and filled with fat people singing at each other.
So I'm not a huge Wagner fan.
Yeah, I do rank them differently.
Obviously, I like the list is fun to listen to, but I don't find him particularly deep.
But I'm very much with like if I have to name the top four, it's the same as everybody else's, presumably.
And it's not in this order necessarily.
It's Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Mozart.
Right.
Beyond that, Mendelssohn is great.
There's some Sansons that's great.
Bartok is great.
The ones who suck, you really haven't heard of.
Right.
The ones who get replayed on radio over and over are usually the ones who are who are pretty good.
Nathaniel says, Well, I spent my entire career enmeshed in stats and statistics and reading.
Well, I spent my entire career enmeshed in stats and statistics and reading.
Earlier this week, for example, I did a 15-minute segment, maybe a 20-minute segment, on one specific study that was cited in high profile by the New York Times.
I spent a lot of time reading those studies because I want to know them, right?
If I don't have the data right, I'm happy to be reappraised for this.
Like, for example, in some of the speeches in the last couple of years, I mistakenly said the transgender suicide rate was 45%.
What I meant to say, and this is just a slip of the tongue, I actually knew this, was that the transgender suicide attempt rate was 45%.
Obviously, the suicide rate's not 45%, or in five years, everybody would be dead, right?
That's not how it works.
When people correct me on stats, I'm happy to be corrected on them.
The UCLA, the conversation I had with the guy at Susquehanna, he was quoting from the same study that I had already cited because I'd read that study.
I knew the study.
He cited some other studies.
I've studied a lot on this particular issue because it's so controversial.
And again, I'm always happy to look at new studies in order to make my arguments better or stronger or change them.
Right, or maybe shift my perspective on things.
I try to follow the data as much as possible when it comes to political arguments.
One more, and then we'll have to do a Facebook sign-off.
So, Lori says, hi Ben, what are your thoughts on the personal usefulness of social media, especially among children and teenagers?
Do you think there's any aspect truly worthwhile, even if people are permitted to do what they like legally online?
When will you let your children use social media sites like Facebook or Instagram?
Many thanks for your good fight, Lori.
I'm not sure I'm ever going to let my kids use Facebook, honestly.
I think that Instagram, same thing.
Twitter I use as a news following thing.
Kids will want to use social media, but I have real doubts whether it's good for kids to use social media.
I think that the best case scenario is that they feel some sort of vague kinship with people they go to school with.
And the worst case scenario is that they get bullied mercilessly and receive a bunch of bad messages on social media.
So I don't plan on letting my daughter get a Facebook account.
I just don't.
Speaking of which, time for a Facebook sign-off.
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So Robert asks, what is my least favorite historical myth?
We're continuing with the mailbag here.
Robert asks, what is my least favorite historical myth?
Well, I think that leftist revisionist history about America's founding is probably my least favorite historical myth.
They've created an entire mythical history of America in which America is a garbage place filled with racism and inherently unchangeable, right?
It's built into our DNA, as Barack Obama liked to say.
Some of the other myths that I dislike, I'd have to go back and investigate some of the ancient myths.
They are fun to read.
I mean, if you go back and read Greek mythology, it is fun to read.
I'm not sure there's a whole lot of moral value in those myths because it's pagan.
And one of the problems with a lot of the pagan myths is that they are supposed to reinforce the chaotic nature of the world.
The reason that paganism was paganism and it's not completely illogical is because people looked at the world.
They said this is a chaotic place.
It must reflect the fact that there is chaos in Rome beyond that is manipulating the chaos that is happening here.
This is where Judeo-Christianity changes everything.
Judaism changes everything by saying, no, there is a master plan to all of this.
And all the stuff that looks like chaos to you may not actually be chaos in the eyes of the person, not meaning human being, but in the eyes of the being who designed the system.
Daniel says, what are your biggest qualms with anarcho-capitalism?
My biggest qualms with anarcho-capitalism really are just lack of understanding about how law enforcement needs to work, for example.
So, the argument for anarcho-capitalism is that you'll just have roving bands of people who hire each other for protection, and everything will go fine.
I think you do need a basic gridlock of—a basic framework, rather, of laws that guarantee, for example, possession of private property and be protected by a police force that is applicable to everybody, because otherwise private property is not a central concept.
You know, all the bases of capitalism require somebody to protect those bases.
Blake says, hey, Ben, do you think a conservative can become governor here in California?
Maybe.
I'm actually not completely... I don't think it's completely impossible.
I think it's difficult, obviously.
But I think that you have to have a conservative who actually runs on crime.
You can't have a conservative running on education like Schwarzenegger or like my friend Tom Del Beccaro.
You can't have people... Tom hasn't actually run for governor.
Who was it who ran for governor?
The other, goodness gracious, I told him over and over, Anil Kashkari, when Anil Kashkari ran for governor here in California, I kept telling him, why are you not running on crime?
He said, no, I want to run on education.
I said, then you will lose and lose really badly, which indeed he did.
I think that it is, maybe that would have happened anyway, but the only time Republicans win in blue areas is when they talk about crime.
Rudy Giuliani, Richard Reardon here in Los Angeles.
That's when you get a Republican winning, is when they talk about crime and quality of life issues.
Let's see.
Lori, well, let's see.
Did Lori's question—OK, Neil.
He says, Here in Ireland, the student visa to USA and a wee overstay is seen as a rite of passage.
Many Irish go on to become undocumented, illegal workers in the U.S.
who maintain a strong passion and love for life out there.
Ovary Paddy's Week, our Keogh Siach Prime Minister was visiting and proposing solutions to this, with one scheme being put forward as the new scheme would see new visa benefits and protections for Americans in Ireland, in return for them doing something similar for the undocumented Irish in the United States.
Having lived and worked in both countries, there's a lot of Yanks who are eager to come across the Atlantic.
How would you feel about a nation-by-nation solution to illegal immigration, as well as the above in particular?
I mean, I'm in favor of a person-by-person solution to illegal immigration, not even a nation-by-nation one.
I'm not sure that we should be doing foreign exchange programs with Ireland, but I do think that if there's somebody who wants to come over here and they're an asset to the United States, I'm not sure that Ireland should have to give up anything for that.
I think that, you know, if people want to go work in Ireland, they should be able to go work in Ireland, they should get a work visa, and if they want to work here, they should come here and get a work visa.
I really don't think immigration is all that difficult an issue.
I think people make it more complicated than necessary because they're afraid of objective standards that they think are going to end up with some sort of racial or ethnic disparity.
Isaac says hi Ben!
Well, Isaac, I'll say this.
And over the past couple of years, I've developed a great interest in politics, mainly the Constitution.
This has given me a chance to write some constitutional opinion pieces for my local paper.
I know this is how you got started.
I want to know if you had advice on how I should try to get my articles published elsewhere.
Thanks for your conservative stand.
I'm a huge fan of Isaac.
Well, Isaac, I'll say this.
You know, when I was 17 and I was writing a syndicated column, one of the things that was happening, one of the reasons that my column was picked up is because it wasn't just my opinions.
It was also me doing reportage from college campuses.
So if you actually want people to take your opinion seriously, first you have to offer something that no one else can offer.
Not your opinion, but something new.
So, either you've uncovered a fact, or you have reported on something that people haven't known before.
And when you do that, then people actually start to take your opinion a lot more seriously because you're bringing information they haven't heard.
This creates a bond of trust between you and the reader, and now they actually want to hear what you think about the issues that you've brought to the forefront.
So, you have a phone, as my mentor Andrew Breitbart said, your phone is a camera, that means you're a reporter now.
Logan says, Hey, Ben, I was wondering what your stance on military intervention is.
Do you take the more libertarian isolationist stance or do you believe that as leader of the free world, we have a moral obligation to involve ourselves in conflicts we have otherwise no business in?
Thanks for the awesome content, Logan.
So I think that number one.
We generally should not get involved in conflicts in which America has no interest.
That said, if we can stop a humanitarian crisis from occurring with very little sacrifice of American blood and treasure, then that may be worth considering, simply because we may end up winning allies in that place.
We may end up making that country into a better country.
I'm not in favor of us being there for long periods of time and nation building, but I think that Muddling through is the basic principle of American foreign policy.
It really is.
And what that means is that you have to take every situation as it comes and calculate it based on a risk-reward assessment.
I don't think that it's one size fits all.
I don't think it's like, it meets minimum standards, now we're going to get involved.
I think you have to look instead at what it costs, you have to look at how much money, how much blood we're going to have to spend, how many soldiers we're going to have to send over there.
What the outcomes are going to be?
Case-by-case basis is necessary, which is why I was in favor of the Iraq invasion, but not in favor of the intervention in Libya to overthrow Qaddafi, for example.
OK, final question.
Daniel says, hey, Ben, love the show.
I'm trying to find tickets for the Trump-Biden brawl.
I was listening to you and your bestie, Nolzi, talk about all those shootings and bombings.
There's a lot of talk about how it's mostly white young males shooting schools, churches, or bombing.
I do not think it's terrorism.
It obviously must be ideologically motivated to be terrorism.
But why do you think all these young white males are doing this?
Shout out from Alaska.
We're freezing for no reason.
P.S., we own a lot of guns up here.
No school shootings.
Well, I think that a lot of young males are involved in violence, period.
Right?
It's just different kinds of violence.
Young males are the most violent cohort in the United States.
It's true across the world.
This has always been true for all of world history.
I think that a lot of young white males are doing this right now because there's a tremendous lack of meaning that's said in American society.
And also, there are not enough parents in the home to provide that meaning.
I think that's the really simplistic solution.
OK, so a couple more questions.
A couple more questions.
So Elise says, why is it that almost all people of the same occupation, example teachers, all seem to have the same politics?
Well, the answer there is that there actually is a teacher's guild.
And in order for you to be a member of the teacher's guild in many states, you actually have to be a member of the union.
The union is a leftist union, because you are a state employee.
I think one of the reasons teachers tend to swing to the left is because state employees tend to swing to the left, because when you work for the state, you happen to think the state is your friend.
This is something Ludwig von Mises argued in his pamphlet slash book, Bureaucracy, which is worth a read.
Another question says, "If you had to make a new dollar bill, who would you choose to put on that dollar bill?" Wow, great question.
Well, Reagan's not on a dollar bill, so I think that you'd have to talk about putting Reagan on a dollar bill, obviously.
Other choices would include Calvin Coolidge.
I actually was not averse to putting Harriet Tubman on a dollar bill.
I think that's actually a cool idea.
I'm not sure that she shouldn't replace anybody who's currently on a dollar bill.
I'm not a big fan of wiping away history in order to add new history.
But I do think that if we're going to create a new dollar bill, Harriet Tubman was a serious badass.
I mean, Harriet Tubman was just awesome.
And better we should put Harriet Tubman on a dollar bill than we should, you know, find a, you know, do kind of affirmative action for women and find somebody who wasn't as badass as Harriet Tubman.
She's pretty awesome.
Okay.
Time for some things I like and some things I hate.
So...
First, the actual thing I like today is a book called The End of Europe by Jamie Kerchick.
Jamie is a columnist, I believe, for Daily Beast.
And this book, The End of Europe, is about—he traveled around Europe and he looked at sort of the rise of right-wing nationalism in contrast to the collapse of the multicultural ethos in Europe.
The book is really worth reading.
It's a really fascinating look at dictators, demagogues, and the coming dark age.
It's very pessimistic about the state of Europe.
I tend to agree with the book.
You should definitely go pick up a copy.
James, a really, really good writer and a very solid thinker.
Go check it out.
James Kirchick's The End of Europe.
OK, so other things that I like.
So yesterday, Glenn Beck came over to the studio, which was a blast.
And we just decided to sit down to an impromptu interview and just talk about stuff that was on Glenn's mind.
So just for like 10 minutes, we just sat and talked about artificial intelligence and just fun stuff.
So here is me talking with Glenn yesterday.
So this is a thing I like.
All right, so here we are and I have the pleasure of sitting next to Glenn Beck, one of the iconic figures in the conservative thought movement and a mentor of mine and somebody who I've been listening to since I was literally a child.
I have to tell you, thank you for that.
I was flying in and we were talking about coming in to see you and I thought, Every time Ben says he's a fan of mine, it feels so weird, because I'm such a fan of yours.
Oh, that's sweet of you.
They informed me that I was going to be doing the show with you, and I'm like, no!
No, no, no.
It's like AI talking to an ant.
No, no thank you.
Well, you know, let's talk about AI, because I know that you've been very into it.
I mean, we were talking a little bit before we started about sort of the big problems facing humanity, because I think one of the things that we have in common when we've talked and we're friends is that we actually enjoy talking about the big ideas more than we enjoy talking about the people fighting it, the top of the iceberg.
It's much more interesting talking about the deeper issues that are going to be shaping us.
And one of the things you were mentioning that I don't know anything about is the problems of incipient AI.
I mean, I know enough to know that I'm not supremely concerned about self-driving cars, but the stuff you're talking about is a lot deeper than that.
Yeah.
The problem is, and when you talk about the future, people think you're talking about robots and the Terminator and everything else.
You shouldn't fear that.
You should fear the goals of the programmers and the goals of the program itself.
AI is what we have now.
In maybe 10 years, we'll have AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, which right now, you know, Watson can play chess or he can do Jeopardy, but it can't do everything.
Okay.
So it's focused on one goal and it goes very deep.
Right.
Artificial general intelligence is more like the human brain where you can do a lot of different things and you're an expert on a lot of different things.
Does that have creative capacity, AGI?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
And then from that point, it goes from AGI to ASI, and that's more of Skynet than...
That's described as intelligence that's so far beyond human abilities that the human will be a fly on a plate in a kitchen.
It may know that's food, but it has no concept of the kitchen or anything else.
So so we're the fly.
A.S.I.
is us in the kitchen.
So, I mean, what what what exactly should we be fearing about about that beyond, obviously, the global war?
But but aside from that, we're in now a period where China has begun a an A.G.I.
Manhattan Project, if you will.
And Russia is starting to do it.
We're not.
And I don't know.
I've talked to a lot of people in Silicon Valley.
I don't know if the government should be involved, the government shouldn't be involved.
I don't know exactly what we should be doing, but we don't want to be second.
As Putin says, whoever gets it will rule the world.
And that's true.
Whoever gets to AGI first, So do you think that when it comes to the development of AGI that we're going to be talking about more sort of a human-machine merger?
We're going to be talking about memory implants and brain, intellectual implants and all this sort of thing?
By 2030 you'll start to have implants, the singularity of merging.
Man and machine.
You know, you're already seeing bionics that, you know, they say in about three years, the bionics will be able to just think and it will be attached to your thinking.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
Ray Kurzweil says that by 2030, all disease, all disease will be wiped out through nanobot technology, etc, etc.
So we're experiencing this great explosion of Freedom of Life that we can't even imagine but we're not having the conversations that I think are really important Because they're too uncomfortable.
They're uncomfortable for Because the labels all have to be dropped for instance Right now we're looking at unemployment rate.
We're saying it's great.
It's 4% But the people who are working on on AI and AGI are saying wait We should be going for 100% unemployment.
Right.
It's all leisure time.
Right, all leisure time.
Which then says, well, where do people find meaning?
How are we going to be giving people money?
It leads to the min-cum kind of conversation, which I'm not a supporter of the min-cum, but we have to start having the conversation because those who are shaping the world of tomorrow are having those conversations.
And this raises a second question, which really is the primary question, which is, what are human beings and what are we here to do?
And that's a crisis of meaning that's been taking place in the West for a really long time.
What is life?
If you read Ray Kurzweil and many others, he believes by 2030 to 2050, that you will not be able, the Turing test is just a few years away, and when a computer says, "Don't turn me off, I'm lonely," is it life?
We can't agree on the life inside of a woman.
Right.
That's why you have to fear the goals of this, because it's now being taught what life is by us.
It's being taught what life is.
It's being taught what hate speech is.
It's fascinating.
The ADL just started an algorithm that they just announced and they said, we've started an algorithm that 76% of the time will find and identify hate speech.
Well, wait, hold it.
What is hate speech?
How are you defining it?
What do you mean?
And they said, in a very short period of time, we believe this algorithm will be able to identify hate speech 100% of the time.
When you teach AI, especially AGI, it's focused on one goal and it doesn't ever stop.
And if it's defining hate speech and you're Prager University, you'll be screwed.
You'll be screwed.
And again, I think that what that returns to is something that's deeper that's going on.
These are questions about how we're going to apply our own morality and our own virtue.
But that raises the main question, which is what is morality and what is virtue and what exactly should we be pursuing?
And you're seeing that Jordan Peterson is great.
I mean, you're a leader in this.
I mean, I am thrilled at the conversations we're having.
I disagree with with Pinker a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think Jordan Peterson is great.
I mean, you're a leader in this.
I mean, I am thrilled at the conversations we're having.
I disagree with with Pinker a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I think he's I think he's so he's beyond an atheist.
Right.
He is really… He's militant about it.
Yeah.
Militant anti-religion.
And so some of his books are a little hard to read because you're like, I got it.
I got it.
Exactly.
But we have to have the conversations and you are a prime example of this.
Colleges are now teaching about safe zones.
We have to understand there's a difference between feeling uncomfortable and unsafe.
Right.
You know what I mean?
Right, exactly.
That's why Pinker is getting labeled alt-right, and the guy taught at Harvard.
I mean, I took a class with him and Dershowitz when I was at Harvard Law, and both of those guys are now being labeled right-wing.
They were wild leftists when I was there, and they're still wild leftists.
I mean, Steven Pinker is not a right-winger.
He's just somebody who actually cares about actual neuroscientific fact, and he's being labeled this way.
Postmodernism.
But the nice thing is that the left's move to the radical left, their radicalization, has meant that there is this sort of new consensus that is arising that we have to get back to some of these central values.
The big question is going to be, how far back do we go?
Meaning that Steven Pinker sort of wants to turn back the clock to 1785 in terms of Enlightenment thought and says that this sort of thought is the future, right?
to the general principles of the American Enlightenment, for example.
He sort of ignores Rousseau.
But if you go back to that strain of the Enlightenment, then we're great.
And you see the same thing in Jordan Goldberg's new book.
He sort of uses those same people as the examples of the people who we should be looking back to.
And I think there's actually an interesting debate.
Jordan and I both say, well, if you're looking for meaning, you can't start with the Enlightenment.
No.
You have to actually go back further than the Enlightenment and look back to the roots of what caused the Enlightenment to arise in the first place.
Yes.
And that debate I think is going to be, it's a second order debate but I think in some ways it's a deeper debate that's going to be had.
If you don't do that you end up with a French Revolution.
Right.
This is essentially my argument.
I mean this is my big problem with Pinker's book is it's 500 pages on the Enlightenment and there's not, I mean I checked the index, there's not one mention of the French Revolution in a 500 page book about the Enlightenment.
And what's amazing is...
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine were fooled by that.
Right.
They were fooled by it because it's what we're going through right now at the very beginning.
It looks the same.
And all the way to, I have people telling me, what's wrong with nationalism?
I'm proud of my country.
Right.
No, no, no.
That's not nationalism.
Right, that's patriotism.
Right.
But there's that subtle, at the very beginning, there's that subtle shift.
And then before you know it, you're at the guillotine or you're in Philadelphia.
Right, exactly.
This is exactly right.
I mean, there is a butterfly effect to philosophy, and if there are these minor differences end up having major variations, they cause tsunamis in world history based on the difference between American-style exceptionalism and Fick-style German romantic nationalism.
And one leads to the Nazis, and one leads to the people fighting the Nazis.
And so it's a fascinating debate.
It's one that's going to have to be had again, because there was a certain consensus that had been built up to the 1950s that the American Enlightenment was the way to go, that these values had been ensconced in our lives, and now that consensus seems to have completely disappeared, and so these fights are breaking out again.
The good news is that the fight is allowing the re-education of a lot of folks.
Not like communist-style re-education, but like the re-inculcation of values that are important and necessary.
I remember 20 years ago reading Marx and just thinking I mean, this is crazy.
And And thinking, this is only cool because everybody says it's not cool, it's not good, you shouldn't read it.
And I thought, someday, maybe Jefferson, who's a real thinker, you know, Jefferson and Adams and Madison, someday they'll become cool again.
I think we're at the beginning of that.
I think that's right.
I think the American founding is becoming cool again, and I think that the battle is going to be rejoined because we're going to keep repeating the mistakes of the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment until we get it right.
So maybe this time we actually get it right.
In a post-God world, that's the only battle that could be had.
We're just going to keep repeating it until things either go ultimately wrong or ultimately right.
Shocked and happy to see.
I think a lot of it is happening in the one place I wouldn't expect and that's California.
Yeah.
You know, Texas not having this debate.
You know, they're solid on, you know, pretty much what they will have it.
That's right.
After California moves to Texas and all the property values collapse here and there's nobody left.
But they'll have it once they destroy Texas.
But they're not having that deep debate.
Here, there's a crisis, and people are starting to have that conversation.
Yeah, well, crisis definitely generates some interesting ideas and debates that need to be had.
Well, Glenn, thanks so much for stopping by.
And it's always great to see you.
Thank you.
So it's a blast to have Glenn in studio.
So obviously we've had some pretty big guests recently.
We had Speaker Ryan this week.
We have Glenn this week.
Next week I believe Senator Cruz is going to be coming on and Thomas Sowell is coming on.
So it's been fun to do some of these interviews.
I like putting them in things I like segments so we can do all the news analysis first and then folks can get a little bit of different perspective and conversation a little bit later in the show.
So I like your feedback on that by the way.
Email me at bshapiro at Daily Wire and tell me if you've been enjoying the interviews or if you think they suck, but I'm really enjoying them.
I think they're fun.
Okay, so time for a very quick thing I hate and then we'll break for the weekend because it's Friday.
No, I will not sing that.
Okay, so, time for some things I hate.
Alrighty, so, thing that I hate number one, a guy is now facing jail time for making an offensive joke in Britain.
What was his offensive joke?
His pug does a Nazi salute, like his dog does a Nazi salute.
He's now facing jail time for it, this weirdo.
Most of the fact is, I know why I made the joke.
You know why I made the joke.
Everybody knows why I made the joke, what my intent was and also the context that was provided.
And what we've learned today is that doesn't matter.
It's really scary for comedians.
All comedians out there need to beware now.
If they make a joke, Their context and intent apparently don't matter and it's a case of no, you don't get to decide what you mean, we decide what you mean.
Because that's literally what happened today.
See if it takes me going to jail for a year to show everyone how ridiculous and overreaching hate speech laws are where a YouTube comedian, just an internet shitposter like myself can go to prison Okay, so here's what he actually did, right?
What he's saying here is actually right.
in the country to realize, holy, these laws need changed.
They're overreaching, they're authoritarian, they're clearly being used to control the public discourse.
Okay, so here's what he actually did, right?
Now, so what he's saying here is actually right.
The guy's an idiot.
So what he actually did was he taught his dog to do the Nazi salute every time he said stuff like Sieg Heil and gas the Jews.
Okay, so he may be like a P.O.S., right?
He may be like a bad guy, but welcome to the Western world where you're allowed to say nasty things so long as you don't actually do anything nasty.
I'm defending this as an Orthodox Jew.
Not the activity, but the right to participate in this sort of activity.
If we can't agree on that, then freedom disappears pretty quickly.
Okay, one final thing that I hate, and then we will break for the weekend.
President Trump did an interview with Charlie Kirk, Charlie, of course, the head of TPUSA, which is a terrific organization.
Charlie's a really great guy.
And Charlie asked President Trump about bias against conservatives on college campuses, and Trump gives an answer that is pretty inane.
What advice do you have for young patriots and conservatives on campus that support your agenda that are being ridiculed and silenced because of administrators that are clamping down on free speech?
So, Sean, it's a great question.
I think the numbers are actually much different than people think.
I think we have a lot of support.
If they have one campus or two campuses and we know what they are, it gets all the publicity.
We have campuses where you have a vast majority of people that are perhaps like many of the people in this room.
You could call it conservative, you call it whatever you want.
Okay, so Trump basically saying it's not a big deal what's happening on the campuses, which is not the answer that Charlie was looking for, nor is it correct.
Now, no one is claiming that campuses everywhere are shutting down conservative speakers.
I speak on a lot of campuses all the time.
Do they put restrictions they wouldn't put on a lefty speaker?
Sure.
But I've never claimed that every campus I go to is a hotbed of disaster waiting to happen.
In fact, I always think it's ridiculous I even have to bring security to go speak on campuses.
I will say that there is a well an overwhelming bias in the administrations of universities across the country and in the faculty against Republican positions and polls show this.
So Trump is just wrong about this.
I think Trump read the question wrong when Charlie asked him what students should do when they're under assault on campus.
I think Trump read that as Everybody on campus loves me, because everybody loves me.
Which is, of course, silly, because if you take polls of college students, that is not the case, and conservatives on campus, who I talk to every single day, are having a tough time dealing with the political bias on campus.
Okay, we'll be back here on Monday, and I'm sure there'll be more news breaking, because there always is.
Don't ruin things over the weekend, just have a nice, relaxed weekend.
We'll be back here on Monday to ruin your life again, at that point.
I'm Ben Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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