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April 5, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:09
What Was MLK’s Legacy? | Ep. 511
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Leftists and conservatives battle over MLK's legacy, EPA Chief Scott Pruitt is in hot water, and a Comedy Central comedian says you are having too many children.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, so yesterday marked the anniversary, 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.
And we'll be talking about that in just a few minutes.
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All right, so yesterday marks, as you say, the 49th, 50th anniversary of the—we're preparing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, and there's a big fight underway over Martin Luther King Jr.' 's legacy.
I have a great book by Brad Meltzer that I read to my child about Martin Luther King Jr.
and what Martin Luther King Jr.
did for the United States and what he did for the black community inside the United States.
It's one of my daughter's favorite books.
She's growing up with it because I think that it is important for all children to know about the legacy of Dr. King.
Well, one of the things that we tend to do in modern politics is instead of remembering people for the things that they are actually remembered for, we go back and we look again.
We do a revisionist history.
We go back and we look again at all the things they did in their life.
And then we say, well, this is really what we should be remembering.
So, for example, George Washington, father of our country, a great general, first president.
That's what we remember him for.
But revisionist historians will go back and they will look at George Washington.
They will say, well, he was a slave owner.
We should talk about that because that's really his legacy.
His real legacy is that he was a slave owner.
Same thing's happening with Thomas Jefferson.
His legacy is the Declaration of Independence and his involvement with the Constitutional Convention.
He has a phenomenal, phenomenal legacy.
He was the third president of the United States.
But now there are calls to remove his monument specifically because parts of his legacy This sort of logic has applied to everything.
You see it even with Abraham Lincoln, where there's now an attempt going on to go back and recast Abraham Lincoln as a rabid racist, because in some of his writings he speaks in racist fashion, even though he was the great emancipator who ended slavery in the United States through the Civil War and through the Emancipation Proclamation.
Well, Martin Luther King obviously doesn't have anything quite that checkered, slave owning or racism in his past.
He does have some things in his past that we have conveniently overlooked, obviously.
He was personally kind of a shambles in terms of his treatment of women, for example.
But what we really remember Dr. King for and why we celebrate Dr. King, and I'm, you know, I'm blessed that I share my birthday with Dr. King's day, right?
Martin Luther King Day is January 15th.
That's my birthday.
And I've always had a special fondness for that fact.
But Dr. King, What we really remember him for is his message, which was not Malcolm X's message.
So to understand Martin Luther King's message, you have to do it in contrast to Malcolm X prior to his conversion to actual Islam and his call for peace, before he was assassinated by the folks over at the Nation of Islam, to which Democrats still pay homage, which is just an incredible thing, right?
The people who assassinated Malcolm X are still going around claiming they didn't assassinate Malcolm X, and then heads of the Democratic Party are meeting with their leaders, like Louis Farrakhan.
Should show you something about the state of today's modern politics, but Malcolm X's message was black militancy.
His message was black separatism.
At least in his early days, when you read the autobiography of Malcolm X. And then later, he realized maybe we should look for a more conciliatory message.
Spike Lee's movie covers some of this ground.
Martin Luther King's message was very different.
His message was We all have to come together around universal human rights that apply to black people as well as white people, that the calls of the Founding Fathers apply to black people as well as white people, like Booker T. Washington or like Frederick Douglass.
The call from Martin Luther King was, Fully within the American tradition.
America has certain rights, inalienable rights, and these extend to black people.
And to prevent black people from exercising these rights is an act of terrorism, an act of evil, an act of tyranny.
This was his basic message.
And that message of racial reconciliation was why we honor Dr. King.
If he had been a racial separatist like Malcolm X, we would not be honoring Dr. King.
We would be talking about whether his legacy has helped contribute to the constant racial tensions in the country.
The reason that Martin Luther King is considered such a great figure is because of the racial reconciliation.
So, I mean, we'll play it because it is one of the great speeches in American history.
This was his speech, the I Have a Dream speech from the Washington Mall.
Here was Dr. King in his most famous iteration.
I have a dream.
But one day, this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
Because he spoke in these terms, it was obvious that Martin Luther King was bound to be an American hero.
Obviously, his assassination was one of the great tragedies in American history, because right on the verge of a civil rights movement that was to essentially bear his imprimatur, he was killed.
It's just a horrifying, horrifying story.
In any case, President Trump tried to pay homage to Dr. Martin Luther King on the 50th anniversary of his assassination, and he spoke about that.
He posted this on his Twitter yesterday.
This, of course, caused a lot of consternation.
Fifty years ago, Dr. King was cruelly taken from this world by an assassin's bullet.
But the promise he fought for could never be taken away.
His words, his deeds, they live on forever.
And the cause for which he gave his life only gained strength and force and power with the passage of time.
On this cherished day, we honor the memory of Reverend King, and we rededicate ourselves to a glorious future Okay, now so many people were upset about this, right?
A lot of people were very upset about President Trump putting this out because folks on the left think that President Trump is a racist and they're unhappy with a lot of the racially Conflagration is things that Trump has said in the past, going all the way back to Charlottesville.
The fact is, though, that what Trump is actually saying, right, separate the message from the man who's saying it, what he's saying here is the great American perception of Martin Luther King.
So in the mood of revisionist history, what is absolutely happening right now is that the left is going back and they're looking at Martin Luther King's entire legacy.
And again, Martin Luther King was economically a socialist.
Martin Luther King was somebody Who did not really understand economics particularly well.
Martin Luther King was somebody who was focused in on the supposed labor struggles of unions across the country.
And so the left, broadly, has tried to take the great attachment we have to Martin Luther King and extend it to these other causes.
So, for example, there's a piece today by Leonard Pitts Jr., who is a syndicated columnist that's in the Miami Herald, where he talks about Where he talks about Martin Luther King and he talks about the assassination.
He says, fear purchased the gun, delusion loaded it, ignorance adjusted the sight, intolerance pulled the trigger.
50 years ago, those forces killed the man they have sought ever since to kill the memory.
Now, you know, again, I agree with what killed the man, right?
But that was an individual assassin in a country that was still replete with racism.
We're now 50 years down the road.
The idea that we've spent 50 years burying Martin Luther King's memory is a bit insulting to all of the history of the United States subsequent to his assassination.
But here is what Leonard Pitts says.
And this, again, I think is the attempt to recapture the legacy of Martin Luther King and put him in the radical camp so that there can be a call today for more radicalism in politics, particularly on the racial side.
He says, quote, Okay, that's obviously meant to be a caricature and a straw man.
Obviously, it's not true.
We should be teaching about Jim Crow.
We should teach about slavery.
We should teach about the legacy of those things.
not to talk and impolite to even recall.
Then Martin Luther King organized a boycott, led some marches and gave a speech about a dream.
And ever since, equality has reigned.
Okay, that's obviously meant to be a caricature and a straw man.
Obviously, it's not true.
We should be teaching about Jim Crow.
We should teach about slavery.
We should teach about the legacy of those things.
We should teach about the entire civil rights movement, including the Civil Rights Act, including Dwight Eisenhower sending federal troops down into the South in the mid-50s, including President Truman integrating the military.
We should talk about the long struggle for justice in this country for black folks.
We should talk about Martin Luther King, and we should talk about Malcolm X. It was a complex time with a lot of complex figures.
We should talk about all those things.
But there is no question that racism, since Martin Luther King's assassination, has depleted incredibly rapidly, to the lowest point in certainly American history, as of maybe seven or eight years ago, before Barack Obama was elected.
And then Barack Obama started, I believe, using intersectional politics as a substitute for unifying policy.
But Leonard Pitt says, Again, this is the point that folks on the left want to make.
They want to say that Martin Luther King's legacy was a failure, essentially.
That Martin Luther King did not succeed.
It wasn't that he was Moses who goes up to the top of the mountain and sees the promised land and then perishes.
It was that Martin Luther King dreamt of a promised land that we have never reached, that we are still wandering in the wilderness somewhere out here, and that Martin Luther King's legacy is basically that he says a bunch of things that we have failed to take him up on.
Pitt says it's an offensive myth because it reduces King to an anodyne figure harmless enough to be embraced by conservatives who conveniently forget that while he was here, they stood against everything he stood for.
First of all, that's not true.
More Republicans than Democrats vote on a percentage basis in the Congress, voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats.
Southern Democrats were the ones who were standing in the way of Martin Luther King during the Selma marches and attempting to bludgeon him, and they were imprisoning him.
It was not Republicans, okay?
That was Democrats.
So the idea that it was a bunch of conservatives who were standing in the way of Martin Luther King is not historically accurate.
It was conservatives, in many cases, who were standing with Dr. King.
There were liberals, no question, who stood with Martin Luther King, and there were conservatives who stood with Martin Luther King.
And to pretend otherwise, that is offensive, and that is a rewriting of history.
But Pitts continues.
The forces that killed him used this myth to kill our memory of the provocative, radical, progressive prophet and preacher that he was.
So successful have they been that Glenn Beck, with a straight face, claimed the mantle of king a few years ago.
So successful that some people are indignant when it is pointed out to them that Colin Kaepernick is actually following King's example.
So successful that King's youngest child, Bernice, recently tweeted how someone told her that her father didn't offend people.
Well, I mean, maybe his youngest child knows Martin Luther King's legacy better than, like, Leonard Pitts, I might suggest.
And using Colin Kaepernick as someone akin to Martin Luther King, that's an insult to Martin Luther King's legacy.
Martin Luther King actually knew of what he taught.
Martin Luther King actually had a program for change.
Colin Kaepernick was looking for publicity, and he got publicity.
I'm not saying that he doesn't have a good heart for what he thinks he is doing, but Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the anthem is something that Martin Luther King never would have done because Martin Luther King understood that he was standing with America's legacy, not against America's legacy.
That the darkness in America's history was an obstacle that was thrown in the way of founding ideology.
That it was not part and parcel, rooted in our DNA, as Barack Obama was fond of saying.
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Okay, so, to continue on with the leftist revisionist history about why America celebrates Martin Luther King.
The revisionist history here is not that Martin Luther King was... They're not lying about some of the revisionist history, right?
When I say revisionist history, I don't mean that they are that they are fibbing about what Martin Luther King did.
I'm saying they're fibbing about why Martin Luther King was a popular figure, right?
Why Martin Luther King has a day of his own in the United States.
So Leonard Pitts, again, writing the syndicated column about the real legacy of Martin Luther King, he says, All of this is foolishness, but the foolishness exists because we allow it to, because we fail to vote like we could, teach, organize, and agitate like we should.
So 50 years after King was killed, police can still get away with murder.
People working full-time jobs still can't feed themselves.
We still take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.
Our children are still ground up by unnecessary war.
African Americans are still last hired, first fired, still disproportionately poor, sick, undereducated, and killed.
Well, there's a lot to unpack there, but not every disparity, as we will see, and we'll talk about in just a second, is due to discrimination in the United States.
But Leonard Pitts is saying that because there is still disparity, that obviously is a symptom of the same root cause that Martin Luther King was fighting, namely deep American racism.
And then, of course, Leonard Pitts drops what he considers his ultimate rhetorical H-bomb, Also, Jeff Sessions is Attorney General and Donald Trump President.
To call Jeff Sessions a racist is really absurd.
Jeff Sessions prosecuted members of the KKK.
And Donald Trump as President, that is a direct response.
I don't think that Trump has been great on race.
I really don't.
If I haven't made that clear in the past.
To say that Donald Trump is a cause of racism rather than an effect of an intersectional politics that has now generated a blowback on the other side of the aisle, I think would be wildly inaccurate.
It's not evidence of deep-seated American racism.
It's evidence that Americans are willing to get tribal if they think the other side of the political aisle gets tribal as well.
Leonard Pitts concludes, And he says that we have lingered in the valley for too long.
Again, this is what the left is trying to do.
good.
So those of us who believe in social justice, not as abstract possibility, but as critical necessity, must reclaim the lost memory of King and defend it with adamantine will from those who would smother it in myth, not just because it inspires, but also because it impels.
And he says that we have lingered in the valley for too long.
Again, this is what the left is trying to do.
They're trying to say that King's vision was never accomplished.
And the right is saying large swaths of King's vision were accomplished, which is why we celebrate him.
Imagine in 1969, if you'd said that white kids across the United States would be celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, that would be seen as a great step toward the ending of racism in America, It would be good evidence that racism in America has waned.
The left doesn't see it like that because they want to promulgate the myth that America is a deeply racist place.
So now I want to read you an article by Jesse Jackson.
So Jesse Jackson was at the assassination of Martin Luther King.
He was one of the folks who was there.
And he obviously has become a demagogic and terrible race leader.
Not only has he engaged in racism of his own, not only has he engaged in anti-Semitism, not only is he personally a mess, not only is he corrupt beyond measure, but he is still proclaiming that every problem that happens in the United States is a reflection of racism.
So this is the question.
Is Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy a failure or is it a success?
Folks on the left say it's a failure because America failed Dr. Martin Luther King.
So here is what Jesse Jackson writes in the New York Times today.
As the nation prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we should dwell not merely on how Dr. King died, but also on how he lived.
He mobilized mass action to win a public accommodations bill and the right to vote.
He led the Montgomery bus boycott and navigated police terror in Birmingham.
He got us over the bloodstained bridge in Selma and survived the rocks and bottles and hatred in Chicago.
He globalized our struggle to end the war in Vietnam.
How he lived is why he died.
This again is Jesse Jackson.
By the way, he was wrong about that.
The war in Vietnam was not a bad war.
That was the right war.
to vote, to focus his work on economic justice, anti-militarism, and human rights, the system pushed back hard.
In the last months of his life, he was attacked by the government, the press, former allies, and the military-industrial complex.
Even black Democrats turned their backs on him when he challenged the party's support for the war in Vietnam.
By the way, he was wrong about that.
The war in Vietnam was not a bad war.
That was the right war.
It was just fought in absolutely the wrong way.
And smothering everything that Dr. King did in genius and wonder is I think also a disservice to the fact that a lot of the stuff he said was controversial, right?
And the Vietnam War is one of those things.
It says, A growing number of Americans had a negative view of Dr. King in the final years of his life.
According to public opinion polls, a man of peace, he died violently.
A man of love, he died hated by many.
America loathes marchers but loves martyrs.
The bullet in Memphis made Dr. King a martyr for the ages.
We owe it to Dr. King and to our children and grandchildren to commemorate the man in full, a radical, ecumenical, anti-war, pro-immigrant, and scholarly champion of the poor who spent much more time marching and going to jail for liberation and justice than he ever spent dreaming about it.
And then he talks about, you know, all of the various things that Martin Luther King marched for, some of which I think were wonderful, many of which were incredible, and some of which were socialist.
I mean, some of which were not so great.
The point here is, what is America now?
50 years.
Let's do a quick retrospective.
Where is America now?
The answer is, some of the disparities in America have not been removed.
But legal disparities, legal discrimination, is not a thing in the United States.
And I'm talking about laws that discriminate between blacks and whites in the United States.
These are illegal in the United States.
They're barred by federal law.
They should have been barred by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, is the truth, in 1871, 1869.
in 1871, 1869.
But in any case, it took 100 years for that legacy to be realized to pretend that Martin Luther King is a failure in order to promote a radical race agenda that suggests that all disparity in the United States is due to discrimination, is to do a disservice to Dr. King's memory, and more importantly, to do a disservice to the United States that has embraced his memory.
So here's a better article on the legacy of Martin Luther King.
This one is from Jason Reilly, another columnist.
He's a black guy who writes for the Wall Street Journal.
He's on the editorial board there.
There he says, He says, He says, says, He says, He says, says, He says, In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley ordered police to shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters.
In Washington, so many fires were set you couldn't see the U.S.
Capitol because of all the smoke.
General William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S.
forces in Vietnam and happened to be in Washington at the time, said the unrest had left the nation's capital looking worse than Saigon did at the height of the Tet Offensive.
President LBJ responded by convening a meeting of the nation's most prominent black activists, and the invite list is instructive.
It included A. Philip Randolph, who led the fight to desegregate the military, Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, Roy Wilkins, leader of the NAACP, and Bayard Rustin, a top advisor to King, who had helped organize the seminal 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, and the 1963 march on Washington.
It almost goes without saying that the leading civil rights organizations today can no longer count people of that caliber in their ranks, which may be the clearest indication yet that the movement is over and that the right side prevailed.
If black Americans were still faced with legitimate threats to civil rights, such as legal discrimination or voter disenfranchisement, we would see true successors to the King-era luminary step forward, not the pretenders in place today who have turned a movement into an industry, if not a racket.
And just second on reading the rest of what Jason Reilly has to say, because I think this is truer to Why America celebrates Martin Luther King than anything the left is saying about Martin Luther King today attempting to rally Martin Luther King's support base and popularity in favor of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris agenda.
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Okay, so as I say, Jason Reilly of the Wall Street Journal has, I think, the best piece on Martin Luther King's legacy and where we stand today.
The left has tried to see MLK's legacy and say that he was actually a failure because America failed him.
In reality, America did not fail Dr. Martin Luther King.
America has done its best to live up to his legacy.
Okay, so here, that doesn't mean that there's no racism in the United States.
It does mean that to pretend that there has not been unbelievable progress and that racism is a fringe element in the United States right now is to ignore reality.
So Jason Riley says, would expand in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, which suggests that the disparities that continue today aren't being driven by racism, notwithstanding claims to the contrary from liberals and their allies in the media.
It also suggests that attitudes toward marriage, education, work, and the rule of law play a much larger role than the left wants to acknowledge.
More marches won't address out-of-wedlock childbearing.
More sit-ins won't lower black crime rates or narrow the school achievement gap.
Even electing and appointing more black officials, which has been a major priority for civil rights leaders over the past half century, can't compensate for these cultural deficiencies.
Black mayors, police chiefs, and school superintendents have been commonplace since the 1970s, including in major cities with large black populations.
Racially gerrymandered voting districts have ensured the election of blacks to Congress.
Even the election of a black president twice failed to close the divide in many key measures.
Black-white differences in poverty, homeownership, and incomes all grew wider under President Obama.
Discussion of anti-social behavior in poor black communities, let alone the possibility that it plays a significant role in racial inequality, has become another casualty of the post-60s era, writes Jason Riley, a black columnist over at the Wall Street Journal.
King and other black leaders at the time spoke openly about the need for more responsible behavior in poor black communities.
After remarking on a disproportionately high inner-city crime rate, King told a black congregation in St.
St. Louis, quote, we've got to do something about our moral standards.
He added, quote, we know there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too.
We can't on keep blaming the white man.
There are things we must do for ourselves.
King's successors mostly ignore this advice, preferring instead to keep the onus on whites.
Where King tried to instill in young people the importance of personal responsibility and self-determination, notwithstanding racial barriers, his counterparts today spend more time making excuses for counterproductive behavior and dismissing criticism of it as racist.
Activists who long ago abandoned King's colorblind standard, which was the basis for the landmark civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s, tell Black youths today that they are victims first and foremost.
A generation of Blacks who have more opportunity than any previous generation are being taught that America offers them little more than trigger-happy cops, bigoted teachers, and biased employers.
It's not only incorrect, but as King and a previous generation of Black leaders understood, it's also unhelpful.
The reason that I read all of this from Jason Riley is because this is the important part of Dr. King's legacy.
The important part is the part that we know.
It is the part that we know.
It doesn't mean we shouldn't study the rest of Dr. King's life and analyze how he brilliantly used the power of media and brilliantly used the power of social demonstration in order to push his agenda.
We should do all of these things.
I'm all for a more well-rounded, nuanced picture of history.
But if we're going to say, what do we celebrate about Dr. Martin Luther King, it is a colorblind standard that the left today is in the midst of rejecting.
Rejecting wholesale.
The intersectional ideology of the left fully rejects all of this.
The intersectional ideology of the left fully suggests that you cannot have a colorblind society.
That Dr. Martin Luther King was in fact wrong.
That Dr. Martin Luther King was incorrect in his assessment of his dream.
His dream itself was a problem.
And I present as evidence to you an article by a professor named Kimberly Crenshaw.
She's executive director of the African American Policy Forum and a professor of law at Columbia University.
She is also the inventor of the concept of intersectionality.
And in the column that she wrote for the Washington Post, I think it was a couple of years ago, she explained that intersectionality isn't only supposed to be a way of describing different experiences based on group identity.
It's not just supposed to be that Democrats are saying, yeah, black people have one kind of experience and white people have another kind of experience.
Instead, intersectionality, which is what the Democratic Party pushes, is supposed to be a way of promoting a leftist political agenda.
She writes in the Washington Post, quote, Intersectionality was my attempt to make feminism, anti-racist activism, and anti-discrimination law do what I thought they should.
Highlight the multiple avenues through which racial and gender oppression were experienced so that the problems would be easier to discuss and understand.
So what does she mean by this?
She means that the legacy of America is racist and that there is no way to overcome that.
White privilege means we can never overcome this.
Even if every white person in America were to acknowledge quote-unquote white privilege and suggest that the system is built for them, They would still not have anything to say, because even then, there are certain racist bones in the white body that cannot be overcome.
There are literally colleges that are teaching kids that if they say, I am colorblind, this is an element of racism.
If you say, I don't judge people based on color, this is a microaggression.
I am not kidding.
This is something that is said at universities across the land.
That is a direct rejection of Dr. King's dream.
So what is the left doing?
They're saying, well, really, Dr. King's dream wasn't the colorblind society.
That was just a bunch of sloganeering for the cameras.
What his dream really was, was racial separatism and competing interest groups.
His real dream was the Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that would overcome race with redistributionism.
He's really a class warrior rather than a warrior in favor of racial integration.
This is not why America celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King.
And to pretend otherwise is, I think, a bit of nasty revisionist history that has some pretty serious consequences for the future of the country.
Okay, well meanwhile...
Speaking of political polarization pushed by the left, you can see that the left is not interested in the sort of integration, in the sort of peaceful talking that Martin Luther King was attempting to push.
One of the people who is supposedly a successor to Reverend King, Reverend Dr. King, is Al Sharpton.
This is just, it just demonstrates the fall off in the level of political discourse and the level of It's just insane.
Al Sharpton is a race hustler.
Al Sharpton has made himself a fortune by blackmailing companies, by calling them racist.
Al Sharpton is a guy who has twice helped initiate violence against Jews.
Al Sharpton is just the scum of the earth.
He's the scum of the earth, Al Sharpton.
And yet here he is talking about Martin Luther King and talking about how Donald Trump has made racial intolerance vogue again, despite the fact that Al Sharpton Okay, Al Sharpton is the worst of the worst.
called Jews white interlopers in Harlem and suggested that diamond merchants in New York were responsible for killing black children.
Al Sharpton is the worst of the worst.
And here he is talking about how Trump has made racial intolerance in vogue again.
I think what people really don't understand for those of us that grew up in the King movement and the generation after King is that we mark the 50th anniversary with the challenges that we have a president that has made this kind of racial divide and intolerance become vogue again.
Because when you look at what Donald Trump is doing around pet questions of people of color, Mexicans, blacks, Muslim, he has reintroduced what Dr. King's life was again.
Taking us back.
Taking us really back.
Okay, so again, here's the problem.
I'm not fond of a lot of Trump's rhetoric.
I was very critical of President Trump's response to Charlottesville, which I thought was egregious.
During the election cycle, I thought that his response to questions about the KKK was just awful.
I think President Trump has a nasty habit of saying things that are really inflammatory about race, and that is not a good thing.
But to suggest that Trump is the one who is responsible for the racial uptick, the uptick in racial animosity in the country, is not supported by data.
It's just not.
If you look at moods about race in the United States, they were at an all-time high by the time George W. Bush left office.
And then, if you look at mood about race with regard to divides between the races, it jumped as soon as Obama took office, and it continued to grow while the president was in office.
Right, and now Trump has taken office and it hasn't narrowed.
And that's not a shock, because again, when one side embraces the idea that the colorblind dream is no longer a dream, but a nightmare, then you end up with a racially polarized society.
This sort of polarization, unfortunately, has broken out across the spectrum.
It's not just with regard to race.
For example, it's so bad that even normal politicians are being attacked as inhuman just because we disagree with them.
Ted Cruz, I'm friendly with Senator Cruz, and Senator Cruz is a senator from Texas, He was campaigning in Texas.
The left is celebrating this, and this just demonstrates how far our politics have gone.
This woman walks up to Ted Cruz and asks him if he is actually a human being.
It's really quite amazing.
I have a woman over 50 who, as of February 7th, has seven active pre-existing conditions.
I'm not counting being female and a survivor of abuse.
I purchased my individual policy on the health insurance exchange.
If you force me into a high-risk pool, you will either bankrupt me or kill me.
I take this threat of medical aggression personally and seriously, and I can assure you I'm not the only Texan who does.
My question is, will you pledge to submit to a DNA test to prove that you're human?
Well ma'am, thank you for that.
One of the great things about our democratic system is that we can treat each other with respect and civility.
And that's a great response by Senator Cruz.
You can stop it there.
But that question, will you take a DNA test to prove that you're human?
In an era of political polarization, let's just note that this is not coming just from Donald Trump or just from one side.
It's not good when it does come from Trump.
I've ripped it when it comes from Trump.
But it's coming from both sides, and it precedes President Trump's presidency by a long way.
Speaking of that political polarization, in just a second, I'm going to get to the worst political polarization of the day.
And I want to talk a little bit about the scandals, supposed scandals, surrounding EPA Chief Scott Pruitt.
I wanna say thank you to our sponsors over at Chappaquiddick.
So, as I have said before, they're sponsoring us to talk about Chappaquiddick on this program.
It would not matter.
I would still be talking about Chappaquiddick on this program.
You must go see Chappaquiddick.
It is in theaters tomorrow.
You have a moral obligation, my listeners, to go see Chappaquiddick.
The reason for this is because it took 50 years, five zero years, to make a movie about a sitting senator of the United States, the scion of the most famous family in the history of American politics, Who literally left a woman to drown in negligent, homicidal fashion.
Left her not even to drown, but to die suffocating in an air bubble that was still present at the top of her car.
All he had to do was walk 50 feet, pick up a phone, and call the cops.
Instead, afraid of the blowback, he left her to die at the bottom of a river.
And this movie actually handles the issue.
But it handles the issue with grace.
So the movie does not Suggest, for example, that Ted Kennedy was having an affair with Mary Jo Kepekny because there's not the evidence to prove that.
It doesn't suggest that she was pregnant because there's not the evidence to prove it.
They stick to the actual facts of the case when they make Chappaquiddick.
It's also a really nuanced, well-rounded picture of who Ted Kennedy was.
So it's not...
A right-wing hit job, but it is also not an ode to Ted Kennedy by any stretch of the imagination.
The man comes off pretty horribly, as well he should when you leave a woman to die at the bottom of a river.
Chapel Critic, the movie, is out tomorrow.
Go check it out, please.
It's well-acted.
Jason Clarke, Kate Mara, Ed Helms, Jim Gaffigan, Bruce Stern, terrific cast.
You're not going to want to miss this untold story of how one of the most covered up crimes in American history saved the career of a senator in Massachusetts.
Chapel Critic in theaters everywhere April 6th.
get the true legacy of Ted Kennedy by going and seeing it.
All right, so I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the political polarization between right and left and some insane comments from a Hollywood director in just a second, but you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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All right.
Now, speaking of political polarization, Joss Whedon is a director.
He has not made a good movie in a little while.
I know that everybody loves The Avengers.
I'm not, I'm not a huge fan.
In any case, Joss Whedon tweeted this out yesterday.
Just shows you where Hollywood's head is at.
Quote, Donald Trump is killing this country.
Some of it quickly, some slowly, but he spoils and destroys everything he touches.
He emboldens monsters, wielding guns, governmental power, or just smug doublespeak.
Or Russia.
My hate and sadness are exhausting.
Die, Don.
Just quietly die.
OK, so I assume the Secret Service will be paying a visit to Joss Whedon's house because that is not mentally healthy activity.
But it is amazing how Trump's assent has really driven the left out of their ever-loving mind.
I mean, it really is an incredible thing.
And again, it demonstrates that I think a lot of this was lurking under the surface.
I think there's a crisis of meaning that's happened in this country.
I think the civil rights movement was the culmination of a great American moral move.
Toward decency.
And I think that there's a solid case to be made that since about 19, 1980, 1984, the United States has been heading in directly the wrong direction morally.
And it's been in a continual downward spiral punctuated by bursts of bursts of light every so often immediately after 9-11, for example.
But the level of political polarization in our society has grown to such tremendous extremes that I'm not sure that Unity is even possible.
Martin Luther King's dream wasn't just of multiracial unity in the United States.
It was of American unity toward a common goal.
And we may have disagreed on some of those goals, particularly in economics, but we certainly didn't disagree on the goals of a common society in which we share certain inalienable rights.
I think that has gone by the wayside because everybody views their political opponent as evil.
I don't think Joss Whedon is evil.
I think Joss Whedon is stupid.
I think Joss Whedon is consumed with his hatred for people on the other side of the aisle.
And this is just the latest evidence of that.
Okay.
Meanwhile, speaking of what looks to be kind of scandal that is being ginned up, Scott Pruitt is the head of the EPA.
He's been doing a very effective job over at the EPA getting rid of burdensome environmental regulations.
The left really despises Scott Pruitt in a major way.
And Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who's the press secretary, was grilled about Scott Pruitt.
The left is calling for him to be fired because of what they're calling sweetheart deals.
I will explain to you why these charges are at the very least overblown until we have all of the evidence.
Here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders being grilled by the press on Pruitt, the head of the EPA.
My question to you, though, has to do with another sweetheart deal.
That's the $50 a night payment that the EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt paid to a lobbyist that did business with the EPA.
As you know, Sarah, the President promised to drain the swamp.
His behavior, his actions seemed very swamp-like.
Why is the President okay with this?
The President's not.
We're reviewing the situation.
We have had a chance to have a deeper dive on it.
We'll let you know the outcomes of that, but we're currently reviewing that here at the White House.
Does the President have confidence in the EPA Administrator at this point?
The President thinks that he's done a good job, particularly on the deregulation front, but again, we take this seriously and we're looking into it.
We'll let you know when we finish.
Okay, so, you know, this is about all she can say at this point because not all the information has come out.
Apparently the White House is somewhat unhappy with Pruitt because of all these supposed scandals that are in the making.
One of those scandals is that he supposedly ended around the process to give a couple of his employees pay raises.
And Scott Pruitt...
I said he didn't know about those pay raises until yesterday and he changed it.
Suffice it to say that a lot of this is being somewhat overblown.
Molly Hemingway has a very good piece over at the Federalist talking about all the various things that Scott Pruitt was supposedly supposed to have done wrong here.
It is, shall we say, rather unclear that anything wrong actually happened here.
So he rented a room and he was approved for the room by an 18-year career ethics person at the EPA.
So, no evidence of wrongdoing yet.
And then, apparently, Pruitt supposedly bypassed the White House to get raises for a couple of his top aides who came to D.C.
from Oklahoma, and he didn't get White House approval.
He says that he didn't even know about it, so maybe that's true.
And then, apparently, he flew first class because of security threats, which would not be a shock.
I fly first class sometimes because of security threats.
All of this is supposed to be a rip on Scott Pruitt.
Let's just say, let's wait for the evidence.
Scott Pruitt is one of the top members of the administration on the left's hit list, and there's a reason that he is being targeted.
Okay, so, in just a second, I want to get to some things I like and some things that I hate.
In fact, you know what?
Let's just jump right into it.
So, time for some things I like and time for some things that I hate.
So, things I like.
In honor of Martin Luther King's, the assassination of Dr. King, I want to talk a little bit about Uncle Tom's Cabin.
So this is a classic novel.
People have taken it in all the wrong ways in their interpretation of it over the last century.
They've suggested that even the term Uncle Tom has become a term of derision about black people who are supposedly too conciliatory with white people.
Larry Elder has been called an Uncle Tom.
Jason Reilly, who I read earlier, has been called an Uncle Tom.
Clarence Thomas has been called an Uncle Tom.
If you read the book, the point of Uncle Tom's character is that he is a Christ-like figure.
The whole point is that he suffers so that he can help other Black folks be free.
And then he suffers to bring people together.
That is the entire purpose of his character.
It's to better everyone around him.
When you read the book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, this book was very, very instrumental in launching the Civil War.
It was written in 1852.
It was a massive bestseller.
In the first year following its publication, it was about 300,000 copies were sold in a time when there weren't that many people in the United States.
Pretty amazing number.
And this book was The Bible of the abolitionist movement.
It was used as the Bible of the abolitionist movement.
Now, there are a bunch of folks now who criticize it because there are characters who they term a mammy or a pickaninny.
There were versions that were staged of Uncle Tom's Cabin that were much more derogatory to our black people than Uncle Tom's Cabin actually is.
But to fail to recognize what Uncle Tom's Cabin did in its time as a movement for black freedom, that it made an unquestioning moral statement that slavery was a grand and great evil perpetrated by evil folks.
And that the way to cure yourself of that evil was by freeing your slaves and ending slavery itself.
That was the message of the book.
And so, read the book, you know, have your own opinion on it for sure, but recognize that in the historical time and place that it was written, it was an abolitionist statement of grand design and it had a massive impact on the minds of literally millions of people across the United States.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Alrighty, so, Couple of things that are pretty amazing that we need to talk about.
So, first thing that we need to talk about is this comedian.
So there's a woman, a female comedian, who I'd never heard of until she started tweeting this.
Her name is Nikki Glaser.
And she tweeted something out that she surely thought was clever and snarky at Donald Trump and his ex-wife.
So the couple was recently divorced, but they appeared at the White House Easter egg hunt with their five kids, and Nikki Glaser responded like this, quote, Don Jr.
and his wife have five kids, all caps five.
No one should be having five kids.
Why are people still allowed to have five kids?
President Trump is the fascist, not the left.
The left actually tweeting out things like, why are people still allowed to have five kids?
That's totally fine.
Not a problem.
After being called out on it, of course, Nikki Glaser deleted.
But there are a bunch of folks on the left who actually think this.
I'm talking about Amanda Marcotte.
Amanda Marcotte's a feminist author, and she wrote, quote, I'm trying to remember which family she's talking about.
There's a fellow who tweeted at Jill Filipovich, another feminist.
Joe Filipovich had tweeted, quote, having children is one of the worst things you can do for the planet.
Have one less and conserve resources.
Feminist authors really doing their best to make themselves popular.
And Patrick Madrid, who is a Catholic radio host, he tweeted out, "Dear Jill Filipovich, my wife and I have 11 healthy, happy, and successful children.
Which one of them is one of the worst things for the planet?" And this prompted Amanda Marcotte to tweet, "Imagine if some woman was like, here are my 11 cats.
Would we think her sane?
Praise her generosity?
Nope.
We would be disturbed." Well, number one, children are not cats, no matter how much feminists wish they would be.
That cat is not a child.
Okay, that's just you.
If you have 11 cats, you're a loser.
If you have 11 children...
Decent shot.
You're a pretty decent life success.
You're living in a religious community.
I know the rabbi who taught me for my bar mitzvah had 15 children.
Virtually all of his 15 children had 15 children.
So he had literally hundreds of grandchildren and ticked off the left to no end.
But here's one of the things that's amazing.
So there seems to be this feeling among folks in leftist feminist circles that if a woman chooses to have lots of kids, she's undermining her own happiness.
They see this picture in their head of a woman out on the prairie with a bunch of little urchins plucking at her garments, and she's there taking the cloth diapers and washing them in the scrubbing bin.
That's what she does every day.
That's not the actual truth.
You know what polls show?
It's kind of an amazing thing.
What polls actually show is that large families aren't just fine, they're awesome.
The Survey of Marital Generosity found that parents of large families are actually happier than parents of small families.
Isn't that amazing finding?
So what they found is either don't have any kids at all or have lots of kids.
Don't have like one kid.
Have like four kids.
Which is what we intend on doing.
We intend on having at least four children and just to tick off the feminist I may make it five.
And again, my wife is fine with that.
She's more feminist than any of these feminists.
As I have said, you may know, she is a doctor.
So my wife is perfectly fine with working.
She likes working.
And she's also intent on having lots of kids, which is a wonderful thing.
But the left despises the creation of new children because they feel that children enslave women to their reproductive organs.
The reality of the situation is that children are the greatest thing on planet Earth.
They are amazing.
And women being able to have children is like a superpower.
It's a superpower.
You generate another human being out of your body and then you feed it with your body and then the baby grows up into a giant human.
That's like an amazing, amazing thing.
And for all of these feminists to be taking the thing that is most unique about the female body, right?
Which is the ability to produce children.
To take that and to cast that out as something bad seems to be profoundly anti-feminine.
And something seems to be profoundly anti-female.
Having lots of kids is just fine, okay?
If you can take care of your kids and I'm not taking care of your kids, go for it, right?
This is my feeling about kids.
If you can afford your kids, have as many as you want.
Okay, other stupid things that the left has been doing.
It's pretty amazing.
The creator of Will & Grace, which is the most overrated show in the history of television.
It never was a top 10 show.
It was never a massive rating success, but it was boosted by the critics because it was about gay folks.
Well, the creator of Will & Grace is now going to stick it to Vice President Mike Pence by donating John Oliver's mean-spirited gay bunny book to Indiana schools.
So John Oliver wrote this book that was supposed to rip Mike Pence's daughter, right?
Rip Mike Pence's daughter.
Charlotte wrote a children's book about their bunny.
All right, which is called Marlon Bundo.
That's the name of the punny and they wrote a book about that.
John Oliver then wrote a book about a gay bunny to try and slap at Pence.
So naturally the creator of Will and Grace is now going to send the book about the gay bunny to Indiana schools because that's just what children need to be reading about is about bunnies with particular sexual proclivities.
It's just amazing how insane the left is that they feel like school children need to be reading about homosexual animals.
That's really the thing that kids need to be not reading, writing, arithmetic, you know, Decent social values.
What they really need to be learning about is where gay bunnies like to put their penises.
Like, I'm just, I'm so confused by all of this.
But, you know, I guess that's the way the left is thinking now.
Go back to Martin Luther King leftists, please.
Look at what he did to unify the country and worry that maybe you're not using the same tactics.
Okay, so.
We will be back here tomorrow, and we have many things to discuss tomorrow.
Some breaking news on Stormy Daniels' lawyer.
We also are going to give you some news about the Mueller investigation.
But we will see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Mathis Glover.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
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